Scaling from startup to £70M+ funding in 16 months with Paul Anthony, Co-founder of Primer & Colossal

0:00Welcome to Riding Unicorns. Today, we're delighted to be joined by Paul Anthony, who's the founder of Primer and Colossal, which we're very excited to learn more about today. So, Paul, Primer is a big tech company, fast growing, over 200 employees, 70 million plus dollars in funding. But you're also the founder of this exciting new venture, Colossal. So maybe you could introduce our audience to the new business. Sure. Just to be clear for Clarity, co-founder of Primer, but I'm sure we can discuss all the kind of dynamics around how the business got started. So yeah, Colossal is really about thinking about what are the primitives in the world of commerce and availing those to anybody that wants to sell digital goods online.

0:45So ordinarily, if you're a digital goods seller or a solo entrepreneur or a very, very small business, you will have a couple of options. Number one is to effectively build your own commerce stack or your own commerce solution or leverage a third-party solution. But there are lots of different third-party solutions that are custom designed for very, very specific use cases. And platforms like Shopify are incredible, but they're very, very big, very, very broad and might not meet everybody's requirements, particularly for certain segments of the digital goods market we're starting to see lots of entrepreneurs and certain entrepreneurs who don't have websites for example and really just want to send people to a fairly simplified storefront but they do want to create a very customized commerce journey for their customers and fundamentally understanding what the best customer journey is for your for your customers can be quite complex and differs tremendously business by business so that's really what colossal is all about and we're leveraging some of the most recent advancements in ai and llms to to bring a very very unique solution to market which we're excited to avail in the in the coming months

2:03Paul Anthony:it's super exciting and um paul we're yeah we're gas to have you on the show i've known you a long time we um spoke in the primer days we spoke in the colossal days um paul's an investor in our fund. We've done angel investments together as well. So lots of crossover. Paul, can you just introduce us a little bit to your career and the sort of journey up to founding Colossal? Sure. So in some ways, I really haven't had many real jobs, I guess. So my first job was when I was, I think, maybe about 21 or something, or first proper job. And I was the first employee and the first developer of a fintech startup here in the UK, which is now called DecoPay.

2:42and this was just after 2008 which is something i didn't understand anything about at the time so it's in 2009 and uh believe it or not um the the product was called and the company was called pay for later back then it was actually one of the world's first retail finance payment methods so certainly in in the uk and europe and klarna was just getting started so you know that that concept wasn't kind of and that proposition wasn't kind of fully formed and widespread at the time but believe it or not at that time if you wanted to buy like a sofa on interest-free credit uh you'd get to the end of the checkout page and then you'd literally print out a credit application form and mail it to the bank so that was a pretty big task that was put on put on my shoulders pretty sudden uh by by the ceo who was a who was a non-technical ceo and it really caused me to have to think outside the box as to how we would deliver a solution like that because unlike the world of fintech today where you have banks with you know open banking apis and it's kind of a very very api-centric world which already feels like a dated thing to say that you know at this point the banks that we would have to integrate with to enable you know some form of kind of credit check and authorization had no internet-based systems at all.

4:04So the solution to the problem was, okay, I have to build a credit scoring engine on behalf of the bank that we can then use in order to approve applications in real time. So my career progressed there pretty rapidly. I became kind of a senior engineer, and then I became CTO of the company, and I was working there for about seven years and then I followed a sales colleague to PayPal where I you know I would describe myself at that time as having a bit of a big fish in a small pond syndrome where I thought well you know I don't really know what it's really like to be in a in a technology company so I'll go to PayPal and I'll kind of I'll kind of learn what it's what it's all about I was only there for about 18 months but it did give me a lot of insight and in some ways it gave me a lot of confidence because I thought, actually, I think maybe I kind of do know what I'm doing and I should maybe give myself a bit more credit and go and start my own company.

5:06And then I started Primer. So it's actually a pretty condensed journey up to this point.

5:14Paul Anthony:So you and Gabriel founded Primer. Tell us a little bit about the initial insight that led you to build this payment orchestration tool. Yeah, so the dynamics of the kind of job that I had at PayPal, which was really on the Braintree side, it's one company, you know, obviously, but at that time, the kind of Braintree structure was still in place. And there was a very big division between Braintree and PayPal. Braintree was still very startup-ish. you know they had like you know chicago offices that had you know snack machines and ping pong and all that kind of stuff and that's not paypal so let's let's just let's just kind of say that say that much so it was an environment in which i had a lot of autonomy and a lot of space just to figure out how we can deliver the most value to to to our merchants and what that presented me with is the opportunity to meet with paypal's much much much bigger merchants and typically you know particularly during the sort of initial sales and an onboarding cycle before you know a merchant kind of makes their way to the back book where they then have dedicated account managers and all of that kind of stuff the merchant would never have spoken to anybody particularly technical and they certainly wouldn't have spoken to anybody that sought to understand what their overarching goals and objectives were as a business from from you know both from a business standpoint other than you know how much revenue are you going to generate how much tpv you're going to process but but really from a technical standpoint so one of braintree's biggest strengths um it sounds simple uh albeit i guess technically expensive was that we would constantly be meeting these merchants face to face so we'd be flying out you know sometimes i'd be doing two or three flights a week across europe and also sometimes sometimes the us to go and go and meet these merchants face-to-face because that increased the likelihood that we would close the deal.

7:19But what I would say is, okay, if we're meeting with a merchant, let's get their engineering team together. And me having an engineering and a software background, I would get all of their engineers in the room or kind of as many as I could and not even really talk about Broomtree and PayPal too much. Just say, look, describe your software architecture around payments. And really, that's where the insight came from, which is to say, it seems to me that there is a missing layer here, which I can't describe because I guess it doesn't exist. But the notion was that a merchant would need to reason about payments in a unified way.

7:59And so therefore, they would need to build what is akin to an infrastructure for payments through which they would then connect their payment service providers in aid of providing the best payment experience to their customers. So that was the fundamental insight. And it was a technical insight, which is what compelled me to start Primer in the first place, because I'm most interested by technical insights. Anything else is not particularly interesting to me, I would say.

8:33Paul Anthony:No, sure. And I mean, amazing journey. You then went on to scale super, super fast. You raised like 70 million. It was almost a half billion valuation. I think maybe within like 20 months of founding or within a couple of years of founding. Tell us about some of the more hair raising moments on that journey. Like you scaled the team super fast. Things must have been breaking at the seams. Like tell the audience about hyper growth. Yeah. So the story there is pretty crazy now that I reflect on it. So, you know, really, we started the company in January of 2020. And just, you know, within, I guess, a couple of months, a few months, COVID would hit.

9:21So we hadn't initially intended to be a remote first company. And, you know, I was in the seed camp offices in the Google campus in London. And we were sat alongside some interesting startups at the time who were going through a hyper growth phase, who probably sort of skewed our perception of what we should expect when starting a startup. You know, we were sat next to Johnny from Hopin and, you know, they achieved a multi-billion dollar valuation within 12 months or something. So our perception was skewed there a little bit, but really in a good way. And so, you know, COVID, of course, was a major turning point for us.

10:04We were only a kind of three or four person team. But I think what it did is it caused a lot of merchants to think about how they allocate their resources while also achieving their objectives to grow their business and scale to new markets and so on and so forth. So I think that really brought the payment stack conversation into focus and everything just lined up beautifully. within the first 16 months yes we had gotten to series b uh having raised from uh seed camp uh and some other pre-seed investors uh bolderton at seed stage excel at series a and iconic at series b and one of the things that it's kind of really fascinating to me about that entire journey to series b is that throughout that entire period of time myself and the product team we were really just we were really just still building our core value proposition and i think that what i realized very very very quickly was that not every startup or not every product um is intended to be a lean startup product so if you're going after large enterprise merchants who are doing billions of dollars sometimes in transaction processing volume and you say hey we want to create an underlying infrastructure and you're going to rip out your stripe integration and your adion integration and all of these other multi-billion dollar you know valuation third-party services then you need a robust infrastructure and you kind of need to you kind of need to get that part right and that takes resource and that takes capital and so you can't really compromise there in order to in order to get to that point but you know i'm sure you've heard these stories of fundraising a million times you know at pre-seed you know the very last investor we we spoke to said said yes which was which was seed camp funnily enough i'm pretty sure it was our our poorest pitch because we were just like disheveled and like tired and we were like let's just kind of get this over with and they made it really easy for us to to to then to then raise our raise our pre-seed funding but one of the things that I do reflect on quite often is that the kinds of rejections that we got from VCs at that point were based on a complete lack of market data for the particular product that we were building.

12:37So there were legacy kind of payment orchestration companies, but the real pitch to investors at that time was to say, whatever you think payment orchestration is, actually it's a it's an incomplete product and so the reason why we haven't seen payment orchestration companies reach maybe tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in in in valuation is because they may have strived to solve the broadly the right pain points but they never built the correct product and so all the way up to series b really um you know sure we had you know increasing customer data and everything um uh registrations of interest and all the all of these kinds of things but really all the way to series b it was it was it was really conviction-based conviction-based investing and the cool thing about that is it meant that only the sort of tier one slash premier vcs were interested in investing and what i reflect on there is to say, well, that's why you're who you are, because, you know, we met with lots of other investors, you know, with different, many, many different degrees of prestige, as it were.

13:54And they kind of, they sort of turned us down, you know, pretty much on a whim. But I think that in the world of payments and commerce, we need to remember that still only a very small percentage of commerce takes place online and 20 years from now we'll look back at the the entire past 20 years and we'll say really like online payments and commerce and and and you know kind of online shopping had kind of pretty much just gotten started at that point at that point in time so um really the the conviction that you know kind of caused me to to to devise the product in the first place and the conviction that caused investors to invest up to series B was really just about the notion that we're going to continue to need new infrastructure providers that will power the next generation of payments and commerce online.

14:46Paul Anthony:And I just, I know you're a product guy and I think a lot of the founders listening to this show will want to get a better understanding of how you can continue to ship really fast. You know, you mentioned you were still building the product as you're raising series B. This is a huge enterprise product. How should companies, how should founders keep that shipping velocity as you scale? Because new people join, it's disruptive to the team, to the culture. And generally it's understood that as the team scales, the output per person kind of decreases. Did you see that and how did you tackle it? i think one of the cliches of startups in and also one of the criticisms of startups is that it's it's like really it's really chaotic right and it's almost become sort of a cliche to say well like you know sort of should it be that way i i guess but but i suppose it depends on how you define how you define chaos so for as long as for as long as i was at primer i would i would tell the team and the rest of the company that you know we're not a business yet and this is to be frank this is very very different from the kind of u.s startup mentality which tends to be in my view when you've raised the funding that is you are now successful because you raised funding so even though all the way up till my my very last day where many would say we had achieved product market fair my position was always we need to always assume that we're we're wrong every single day and figure out all of the ways in which we're not building the right thing and so in order for that to be true you need to have a really really certainly a very very agile team of product folks and engineers but there needs to be a heavy a healthy degree of paranoia amongst everybody in the team that, you know, what we're building could potentially, you know, maybe we're not building the right abstractions.

16:51Maybe we're not building the right models. Maybe we're not thinking big enough. Maybe we need to go a little bit deeper because if you're not thinking this all the time, then somebody like, you know, frankly, us, a primer is going to come along and take advantage of that particular gap. so i would say that in general it's a constant reiteration of our values which is to say there is there should never come a time theoretically theoretically speaking in which we are just operating a business right we are always building a product that that never ends and so i would say it's definitely kind of kind of more more of a more more of a culture thing yeah from an engineering standpoint if that's kind of what you sort of wanted to touch on in a little bit more in a little bit more detail i think you you shouldn't be afraid to constantly reassess the structure that you've built across the product and engineering organization it's very very natural to want to keep a certain degree of of of harmony across across the team but again from from my from my standpoint until the day that we were turning a profit we weren't a real business so the way that i would describe it to the team particularly in the early days was to say you know we're right now for this period of time we're we're just kind of like we're kind of playing jazz right like it would be really really stupid of us to assume that we are right when we are so early.

18:31We just need to be prepared so that when we do derive those insights as a result of increasing visibility, that we can rapidly execute on that. And that's kind of a scary thing to do as a startup founder, because typically what I see from other startups and from other founders is you really want to be seen to know what you're doing. Right. Like everything's under control all the time. I've got a plan. We're doing that. Don't worry if we do that. It's going to be successful and so on and so forth. And so probably our environment, particularly in the early days, really wasn't for everybody because that was not the message I was sending to people.

19:18The message is we're not a real business yet. We don't necessarily know what we're doing yet. there's a big opportunity but we're we need to continually assess and figure out if we're

19:26Paul Anthony:tackling it in the right in the right way so how do you hire for people who are comfortable with that type of chaos and well what were the values and how do you hire against them well the values have definitely shifted shifted over the time over time as as they they should and the business goes through goes through various stages in its in its evolution but i think for the first i think i you know we built up a sales team and a bd team you know after we had kind of built up that initial initial product team and some other peripheral functions in the organization so i'm pretty sure i hired at least the first 30 or so people in in the company and the answer is is is first of all you just have to you have to not compromise on on the right on the right fit and there's no easy solution for that i would say i probably interviewed a good i don't maybe maybe 20 20 to 30 people for every individual that i hired and the only way to do that is your calendar you know at least for a few months my kind of just jam-packed interviews every single you know every single day i think the big thing that i impressed upon people in those in those early days was some of the points that we've already discussed with respect to the level of certainty, which in my opinion exists in absolutely any organization anyway.

20:55And I really do reflect on many of those interviews that I had with candidates in the early days, because, you know, unfortunately, some of them were let go from positions that they felt would be more stable, working at companies like PayPal and Stripe and Microsoft, who of course went through massive, mess of layoffs as well as as well as as well as everybody else and i think i tried to define what it meant to work in a startup which is to say yes there's going to be a role and there's going to be a function and broadly speaking there is a maybe a particular product area or what have you that you're that you're going to be working on but really when you join a startup it's an opportunity to you know exponentially develop your your career and what i used to say to people is that folks at Primer had grown their careers, you know, five times faster through knowledge and experience that they would have at any other organization.

21:51And I think that harking back to my early days of the kind of first employee of the company that I mentioned and becoming CTO of that company, the way that I always thought about it, not always appropriately, and I wouldn't necessarily take precisely the same approach today. But I always thought about it as anybody that I hired could potentially or should potentially be able to achieve that same career trajectory. Because the only reason why I was effectively given the opportunity to go from a junior to a senior and then CTO was because I had a lot of leeway and autonomy with which to take on more responsibility.

22:31And so I wanted to provide everybody that I was hiring with that level of with that level of opportunity and to say that you know autonomy isn't a benefit it's a it's a requirement so if you're not making the most of that autonomy then we're then we're losing that opportunity to to bring somebody on the team that that that would I love that statement autonomy is a requirement so I wanted to I mean I want to talk about the hiring process but i want to step back a step and focus on the product side because you're clearly exceptional on product so when someone does have a brainwave does challenge the status quo about what you're doing either with a new feature or new idea or reworking what you're doing already what is your process for taking that new information that new idea and actually putting it into practice?

23:30You know, I think that building a collaborative team and a group of folks that really, really understand the product landscape and the pain points and who develop a passion for solving those problems is something that I could have done a better job at earlier on. I think mostly I was focused on emphasizing to people that they're going to be able to build something big, that they're going to be able to figure out complex technical challenges in order to deliver some particular outcome. But I think one of the challenges around what we were building at Primer is that actually like payments is like really, really complicated.

24:08And so the whole point of building Primer in the first place was that, or one of the kind of reasons is that out of the many, many, many large merchants that I met at PayPal, I'd only met possibly one or two people who I felt really kind of understood anything about payments. So it was actually a really, really long journey to get folks on the team to really understand all of the complex dynamics around payments. And still then really only a small number of them really developed a rounded understanding. So yeah, I think that there were lots of kind of sort of technical challenges and approaches that we could have taken with regards to that, that always resulted in in a lot of discussion and and a lot of debate i think that the process that ultimately started working better for us and certainly works for me more today is to say okay well you know come back to us with like a like a poc or come back to us with a technical spike and then we'll actually get a feel for how uh for how for how this works and this is something that I'm a major advocate of now because how things feel is the entire point.

25:22We're building products for other human beings. So if it looks good on paper, if it technically checks out, that doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to reason about it in the right way. And so it's software, so it's not quite the same as a physical product, but you kind of have to get it in your hands and you have to kind of see it in context of of of of the rest of the product it's also kind of difficult when you're building an enterprise payments platform to have members of the team kind of dog food to the platform in the way that you expect in the way that you expect your merchants to because it's not just about building a nice payment experience it's this is something that's going to be implemented as part of an infrastructure that we had we have no possession over and so i would say that most of our most of our kind of challenges came from came came from our customers and our merchants cool we want to move on to your your new business

26:23Paul Anthony:colossal and hear about that so tell us a bit about colossal and what you are building as a team yeah so one of the things that i realized when i'd been building primer and i'd kind of been there for about three and a half or maybe around four years is that, wow, I'm like, I'm a fintech person. And I never thought of myself in that way at all. And, you know, as a point of fact, in building Primer, I never sort of saw it as just a core fintech product. I think it was more about creating creating a framework and an abstraction around an important part of an end user experience which for us is is is is payments and i think that my passion when it comes to product development really does lie in abstractions and and simplicity i think that when people can reason about something complex now you're building or you're creating a building block from which something much much greater can can can can be created which is also the reason why you know primer is the name that that i came up with for the company it's kind of like a foundational a foundational layer and so with regards to colossal it was a pretty dramatic departure from from what i've been building at from what i've been building at primer so i i also have a passion for for music and music production and one of the big reasons why i got into into that was was actually was actually around technology so you know music creation typically takes place you know on your computer and using software and various and various devices and and that does have some links to primer as well believe it or not so the the the concept for workflows or payment flows came apart came came about in part due to due to an interest that I have in modular synthesizers where you're effectively taking various musical components and literally plugging them together using using jacks so what I wanted to do is to say okay well you know I'd really love to do something in the creator creator economy you know I was very very fascinated by Patreon's journey for example and Eventbrite and and some of those other platforms that are focused on on on kind of creators and and creatives music was something that I knew a lot about and that space was something that I knew a lot about.

28:57So I wanted to see if there was something that I could potentially contribute in that area. And what I realized is that a lot of the tooling that enables music creators to sell their audio material to other music creators was, you know, the space was very, very dated and the products were very, very legacy. And the same pace of innovation that you would see in the world of kind of b2b or or you know other areas of b2c just really hadn't made their way to to to the

29:28Paul Anthony:music space so the insight that i had there was to say okay well there's a few components of this number one is discovery so right now youtube is the predominant method of of pretty much everybody discovering this this material then there is a licensing component so there are a billion ways that you can create licensing agreements for your audio material but right now they're not very transparent and that most people don't understand them which ordinarily manifests it manifests itself in news articles about a producer not getting paid and there being a big dispute and all of all of these these kinds of things and then of course the and then of course the the payments piece which is okay now i need to you know be able to kind of you know purchase this license and and feel free to feel free to use it feel free to use it on my production so that was the initial impetus behind starting colossal which was effectively just to kind of bring a new platform to this space that would kind of reinvent how monetization is done between music creators and i think the the vision has like expanded a lot over the over time and the products that have iterated your focus has changed a little bit so tell us about i mean actually you mentioned using feeling as a as a way of sort of gauging you know whether whether you're on the right tracks with a with a product how do you use feeling today with colossal as a sort of metric for gauging your customers responses and whether you've got product market fit and whether you're building the right thing i think the big thing for me is always you know that you're you you should always kind of you should always treat it even if it's an enterprise product you should always treat it as if you're building for for for for one person so while yes it is the case that when an organization or a team looks for a particular tool and service, they kind of come together as a collective and make an assessment as to whether or not this is the right product to use.

31:25But each of them individually has to have a holistic understanding of what the solution is. And so for me, as I say, a lot of it is about kind of abstraction and stepping outside the box and thinking about ways in which people can reason about something in the best possible way. And so generally speaking, one of the kind of constant threads behind pretty much everything I've done, but certainly most recently Primer and now Colossal, is to say, okay, if you take something which traditionally is really, really complex, enable people to reason about it a lot better will they do more things but basically so with regards to primer you know that manifests itself in merchants expanding to new markets through offering offering new payment options to their customers and learning new ways to optimize their payment stack and and boost boost payment success with colossal it's going to digital goods creators and digital content creators and saying you know did you know that there are all different kinds of ways in which you can create the best possible customer journey for your customers and drive insights to you that will enable you to build a better business.

32:43And what that might translate into is having a kind of, you know, a more complex customer journey with, you know, touch points leveraging third-party services that traditionally they might not have been familiar with or they might have never used before or even just introducing new concepts and new modes of of boosting of boosting product sales so you know in the world of subscriptions for example there's lots of different ways in which you can in which you can take subscriptions familiar paradigms that you'll know about we'll know about is you know it's kind of you know 10 10 pounds a month but you know if you buy for an entire year then you save 20 so like that's a that's a paradigm which which which leads to which leads to to to to boosting sales and also in the creator space there is a really interesting overlap between selling products and building community and sometimes the community is the product right and so there alone you have a fairly potentially a fairly complex customer journey right the customer goes to the storefront or they go to the to the to the product page and they they subscribe and there could be many different modes of subscription and then when the payment is made they get added to a discord server and then they get shipped something or whatever the case may be but that's a very specific customer journey for that specific customer base and so that is a that's something that's accessible to a team of maybe kind of like five people who you know, all of whom have some level of experience with building a commerce solution.

34:24But we have many, many, many millions of creators who are selling their goods online and selling their digital products online, who have, you know, to be perfectly frank, they've never even heard of the word conversion before. So they should also benefit from those kinds of journeys that would drive more product sales. And so how you abstract that on a deeper level is a really, really interesting challenge. And so what we're not going to do is give them a really, really comprehensive analytics dashboard that says, hey, take this raw data and like, you know, kind of join a whole bunch of columns and everything and figure out how you're going to build a better business.

35:06I think the notion is that we're seeing a lot more kind of headless commerce storefronts whereby these individuals, they don't have a website and they're not going to have a website, right? So now what we get to do with some of the recent advancements in AI and LLMs is there's less of a requirement to build complex analytics dashboards that would ordinarily have been required in order for you to derive unique insights. So one of our focuses is, without giving everything away, is to say, well, what we're going to do is we're going to deconstruct all of the primitives around commerce. Our end user doesn't have to think about that.

35:46They don't have to know about all of that stuff. We're going to structure the data really, really well. Then we're going to use LLMs to deliver them like real world insights that will boost their business. And those insights could be really multifaceted. You know, it could have something to do with the way that they do email marketing, the way that they leverage ads, the way that they communicate with their users. So sometimes suggestions for improving your business isn't just add a different payment method, right? It might be, hey, you know, we've seen that for your particular customer segment, if you offer this kind of variation for your products and you do this or you display customer reviews on your storefront, that it results in higher conversion.

36:34So the really interesting challenge is to take all of those KPIs around commerce success. And instead of there being a hundred of that many saying, these are just the broad things that you need to focus on. And we're going to tell you how you can improve those things over time. To get a little bit more concrete, I tend to find that this functionality is offered by merchant of record payment platforms which is kind of interesting because in in my research for certainly for the cohorts that that we're targeting the merchant of record payments piece is not the key value driver to using the platform the key value driver to using the platform is they made billing really really easy or the page is easier to looks nicer and you know hey there this this one isn't you know gum gumroad isn't integrated with discord and like i need that right so it's it's less about the core the core payments piece and so with colossal it will be more of an open platform whereby our focus is you can create the best journeys and the best storefronts for your for your customers leveraging all of the best in class tools and and therefore building something that has a higher likelihood of scaling beyond current incumbent platforms.

38:05So is that like personalized and real time? Is it a different experience for every potential buyer? It is. I mean, I hate using these kinds of analogies. It just seems kind of lame. But right now, the easiest way to think about it would be like a lovable for commerce, right? and so the real difference there being that you're not hang on paul can i just ask that lovable for commerce that's a great soundbite but what does that mean does that mean they prompt what they want it to be like or does it is it just mean that everyone's getting like a custom page created by an agent what do you actually mean yes it is a it is a prompt-based interface okay so this is reflected on the new landing page which by the time the episode goes out you'll you'll you'll you'll you'll be able to see but the notion there is again it's kind of like predominantly a prompt-based interface where you'd basically be able to say hey i am an indie micro micro sass and i want to give people access to to discord and I want to give them a promotion if they add this code, right?

39:16So that's going to build an entire commerce experience, which we host. So you don't, you know, this is for non-developers. And yes, it's instant and it's real time. So the notion here of building a Lovable for Commerce is that unlike Lovable, you're not paying us for AI, right? We're leveraging AI in order to provide you with a service offering, which you are paying us for. The service offering being you are using our commerce infrastructure to power your commerce experiences. I've spoken to lots and lots and lots of investors about AI, and I think most people would consider me to almost be like an AI hater, which would really be like a misnomer, really.

40:03it's just that i think increasingly more people understand this as well it's just that i understand that ai is a is an assistive tool it's a it's it should be treated as a library it should be treated as something as part of the as part of the the kind of offering that you want to create for your for your users is sort of like an infrastructure building block and so in that vein our users they're not necessarily going to think about it as ai is like building this it's more to say hey this is now a fairly common convention that you're going to see all over the web and we're leveraging that convention in order for you to build in order for you to build your your ideal ideal commerce journey so we've done uh i mean you're kind of slightly well you're pretty early early on in this journey and we'll be releasing the first version in a in a few months time But we've now conducted lots of comprehensive technical spikes.

40:58And also in the background with Colossal, we've already been building those commerce primitives anyway. So we're really just kind of expanding the value proposition there. And even with just advancements in the past few months, we are now able to offer an unreal commerce builder experience that I think is really going to surprise a lot of people. This is more about building a page. There will be a page, sure, right? But it's really about creating a journey, which happens both on the front end and it also happens in the back end. And I think that's a really, really unique wedge in a market that is projected to do$400 billion in revenue in 2030.

41:41And some of those sub-segments in kind of creator in digital goods, you know, such as kind of sort of courses and e-books and podcasts and a host of others have seen, you know, two to three X growth in just the past year alone. So it's really about giving individual sellers the kind of flexibility that is reserved only for developers and abstracting those concepts such that anybody can build their ideal customer journey.

42:12Paul Anthony:I think it's super exciting because you can imagine so many of these people have an idea of, well, lots don't know what they want, but some would have an idea of some of what they want, but don't know where to find it. It would end up stitching together a bunch of different tools that they spend hours and hours of days trying to find. And actually you can offer modular products out the box based on natural language intent. So I think it's going to be something that's super appealing to a lot of users out there. and can i ask a question paul sorry because i just wanted to ask about prompting as an interface because i'm sure most of the listeners use chats you see i'm sure most of them have heard of lovable maybe lots of them have used it we've got patrick from superscale coming on i think next week who is that kind of a prompting interface for creative viral marketing videos and now you know colossal has a prompting interface from your experience with products what is the psychological or customer obsession with prompting as an interface why has that become such a great way to deliver value to customers and why are you using it as a core part of your product you know interestingly enough i i don't i don't quite agree that that it is actually i think the I think the prompting interface came about, I mean, let's just be perfectly honest, it's because, you know, OpenAI, one of the first product was effectively a chatbot.