AIAW Podcast
AIAW Podcast
E147 - AI-driven Relationship Management - Per Clingweld
Tune in to AIAW Podcast - Episode 147 with Per Clingweld, Founding Member of Andsend, for an unscripted dive into AI-driven Relationship Management. Discover Per's unique journey and Andsend's mission as he debunks CEO misconceptions about AI and shares practical insights on running GenAI workshops. From highlights of the AI Action Summit to discussions on the rise of "one-person unicorns," and debates on leadership in the AI era—with comparisons of visionaries like Satya Nadella and Elon Musk—this episode also contemplates the future of AGI, questioning whether it heralds a dystopian nightmare or a utopian era of abundance. Join us for an engaging exploration of how technology, ethics, and innovation intersect to shape the future of business relationships.
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What system you're part of.
Speaker 2:Culture.
Speaker 1:Society. So does he have more of an engineering background or business background? Or how come a member of the 18s ABBA band started to become interesting in this kind of societal transformation projects?
Speaker 2:Well, he studied at the Stockholm School of Economics and maybe had interest before, but from what I understood, that's what got him started.
Speaker 3:But how did it get because you said you didn't really catch on in this new context when you met him that you're the A-teams guy? Yeah, that would have been funny. But in what context were you meeting them, Like when you decided to have a first acquaintance or a first call?
Speaker 2:Good question Are we live now? Yeah, we're live Good, yeah, well, it was a common acquaintance named Nils von Heine Yep. Most recently he was featured in Impact Loop, quite new kind of media outlet on impact startups. He had written a column about his Slush experience and he contrasted that to Slush like Finland Slush.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, the tech conference, Slush, which is one of the largest conferences in the world, I would say next to Web Summit, etc. In Northern Europe, northern Europe, probably, for sure, for sure. So he was there with all the tech bros hanging out and all the investors, startup entrepreneurs, and while he was there and I mean, you came from Finland this morning, right, but while he was there he also attended another event which was more conversational, so people sitting in a circle, discussing, thinking and feeling together and understanding what's going on both inside of them and in the conversation at large. Yeah, you get the point. And he was then reflecting over this, like how different these are, both like groups of driven people, but there are parts of such different norms, cultures, subcultures and systems so how you meet and how you discuss also takes very different exactly, and that became quite big.
Speaker 2:It spread like wildfire, at least in my echo chamber on linkedin and that's how I could introduce him. He said I had a chat with Nils and he said you got to speak with Amit, and then Amit had heard a fellow, a friend of mine, who is an investor, had also mentioned my name. So from different angles it's like you have to talk to Per. You have to talk to Per.
Speaker 3:So circles connect and then you catch up. But then there's a twist to this story as well, because what happened when, like you're talking there, your first time you met up? But then there's a twist to this story as well, because what happened when you're talking there the first time you met a guy? And then I think, we get to the punchline here, even.
Speaker 2:Right. So I guess we were about 20 minutes into the call and I was out running the city having a lot of things going on at the same time not optimal so I didn't really get a chance to reflect Do I recognize this guy? And then he subtly mentioned yeah, you know. I was like so what's going on in your life? What's happening? You know? Yeah, I moved to iceland with my family. That was a big change and a kind of conscious decision to break, break away from our stockholm uh life and to get closer to nature and experience something different. And then, yeah, I was like but how do, how do you get bread on the table? And it's like well, you know, I was part of 18s, the pop band. It's like 18s. That's why I recognize you. You looked familiar. But you know, the whole intro was he's a systems thinker and you guys are alike in that sense. You have the same interest. He went to the Stockholm School of Economics tech interest. So I simply didn't make that connection.
Speaker 3:But then you said something that was it, his proposal. Do you know what? This was a cool first introduction, but I've got to run now. And why don't we talk deeper on a podcast? Was that his angle, or was that?
Speaker 2:your angle. So so time was running up and he's like but I really think this was spot on, this was so interesting and I'd love to invite you to my podcast so that we can just sit down and chat deeply for an hour. I was like, yeah, Okay, that sounds good. I've never heard before a person use a podcast as a tool to get to dig deep with someone else perhaps a new acquaintance of theirs or a friend.
Speaker 3:Why is it so fun? Because we get to know people and we even build relationships with people we know in a different way, Simply by having a format allows you to talk about stuff that do you really talk about that all the time. So I fully get it, but it's interesting, right, Very so. That's the new trend. Now we're going to have podcasts in order to, instead of going to a bar. Come to my podcast.
Speaker 1:Exactly, I don't want to start your podcast I mean cool podcast in order to, instead of going to a bar, come to my podcast. Exactly, I don't want to start your podcast. I mean cool stuff. But apparently they're reuniting them in 18th now and doing some tour in us or what.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we didn't get. You know, that was towards the end of the call, but, um, yeah, apparently it's blown up in the us again. Uh, it's going in cycles. I was going in cycles, so they're. They're touring around doing concerts and gigs. Abba is going in cycles. Abba is going in cycles, so they're touring around doing concerts and gigs.
Speaker 3:Abba is going in generations. There's a new generation catching on and then off you go again.
Speaker 1:I think every generation loves Abba.
Speaker 3:Every generation loves Abba, but it's so clear that it's one generation, then they get a little bit bored and then the next comes. I think it's like that. Anyway, no proof, but this is what I think.
Speaker 1:Well, that anyway. Yeah, no proof, but this is what I think. Well, with that, um, we would love to welcome you here. Had a cling belt, is that the proper pronunciation? Or very good, very good, okay, awesome. And you're founder of and send, is that?
Speaker 2:yes, part of the founding team. So there's actually, you know, normally it's two, three people um there is eight of us Interesting Founding team, yeah cool.
Speaker 1:We're here to speak a bit about finding value from AI yeah, and perhaps in Swedish companies as well and see how that can work, and you have a lot of experience in that. So I think that is a very important topic and something that we very much care about. I think that's certainly something that I have a passion for.
Speaker 3:How do you feel about the label serial entrepreneur? Are you a serial entrepreneur?
Speaker 2:Labels are always hard, probably in some ways.
Speaker 3:yes, Because you've been dabbling with several over the years.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's hard to make sense of my career.
Speaker 3:But we're going to have a lot of fun now in the context of AI and the context of this particular startup, but also there are many interesting topics that we can unfold here. Anders.
Speaker 1:But before we go into that, perhaps you can just give a quick background about yourself. Who is really Per Klingveld and how would you describe your background?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question. Always a different answer. No, first and foremost, I'm a father of two Small kids Well, probably perhaps not that small anymore. They're turning six and eight this year, this spring Happily married to the love of my life since 2015. And both of us are, you could say, from the west coast of Sweden, from the wrong side.
Speaker 3:No, no, no, be specific now. I'm from that side as well.
Speaker 2:My wife is from Varberg, an hour south of Gothenburg, and I spent about half of my life in Ljungskile, an hour north of Gothenburg.
Speaker 3:And I grew up in Borås. Oh yeah, it rains a lot in Borås, right, yeah, yeah, but ask your wife what she thinks about people from Borås. We invade barbarism in the 80s and 90s for sure at least. Yeah, I know what she thinks about Borås.
Speaker 2:Let's not go into that rabbit hole. No, but that's me in brief. So, first and foremost, I try to optimize my life plan my life, design my life.
Speaker 3:It's probably a better word To be able to spend time and energy with my kids before they grow too old, because I can invest in a lot of things, but I never get a chance to invest in that again. That is very wise. How did you figure that out? Did you wake up at some point and took a different path, or were you on that path the whole time?
Speaker 2:I grew up in a family where five siblings and we were living off one elementary school teacher's salary for 10 years. So I think to me it was really ingrained in in in the priorities that my parents had. And you know we never went on vacations abroad, at least not in during those 10 years, and they prioritized the skiing trip every winter to get a full, full Nordic experience for the family. And then we did road trips to Sweden during the summer. So that was the benefit of my dad being a teacher that you know. Summer break happened and we could go on a road trip and my mom was a stay at home, mom was, which back then was more, you know, normatively Okay so and accepted by society. So I grew up in that environment. The family was always very important for me, so I didn't run away from something I rather Kept that part, kept that and you understood that this value actually, yeah, awesome, super cool, cool.
Speaker 1:And how did you get to before you came to Anson?
Speaker 2:what was your previous background? So, if we started university, I've been a big fan of math and physics for a long time, but also actually of arts drawing, painting, creating so these two worlds. I had a very hard time finding a university program or degrees that would match this. It might have been easier in the US you know where there's college and you can take whatever courses and classes you like, but Sweden is a very vertical engineering oriented country in that sense. But there was this program that this visionary architect from Copenhagen and a visionary engineer from Lund something Sweden had put together, and they didn't get to do it in Lund. They didn't get to do it in Copenhagen, but they got to do it at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.
Speaker 2:It's called architecture and engineering. So in six years you could do a master's both in architecture and in civil engineering, structural engineering, and I did that for three years. I got two bachelor degrees. Then I went to the US and I worked at Skanska, the real estate development, Skanska, Skanska, Skanska, State Development, Skanska, Skanska, Skanska, the real estate development division that they had just established in Boston and some other cities across the US. So I was the only Swede young trainee very naive, but I got the chance and I'm super thankful for it. But that's also been my only session in the corporate world working for a corporation Working for Skanska in Boston when the Boston office was fairly new.
Speaker 2:Well, they started off with the Brooklyn Bridge and the subway system in New York City, so they're quite trusted.
Speaker 3:Two quite large but also significant projects.
Speaker 2:And the US. They didn't have simply the type of companies that could do those projects. So Skanska came as a Swedish foundational engineering project and was like we can take this on and they could actually do it. So that was their way into the US market infrastructure projects, big, complex projects and then this was in I was going to say the wrong year, but I think it was 87 or something like this when they established themselves. Yeah, they started, or, if it was even earlier, some seven, 67, 87, whatever and then they grew from there in the US so they had the real estate development branch. So if you look at the construction industry, it's actually very, very hard to make money from construction projects. It's high risk, very low margin, typically in Sweden 0% on construction projects, in the US 2-3%. So Skanska, the real way they do business and make their profits is that they have 12% on average return on their real estate development projects where they own the project and take the risk. So that's the department I was working in and that one was new in boston.
Speaker 3:So that's the point. It was the real estate development department that was a little bit newer in boston but on the infrastructure had been a bit longer and that was so much fun.
Speaker 2:Like you know, you're thinking here in sweden. You're just like okay, the infrastructure projects, they take time building. There were hardly any skyscrapers, high-rises here in Sweden. Now there are a few because we had some visionaries doing that, which is cool. But in Boston they were building this. They were doing labs for MIT, they were doing luxury apartment buildings, they were doing PWC's new office headquarters in Northeastern US.
Speaker 2:So I got to experience basically how fast things move in the us and said, well, this is fun, I want to be in this industry. This is so cool. Why didn't anyone tell me about this when I was studying at chalmers and um? Then I was like, okay, my visa expired and I want to go back to sweden. Then I had to, so so I tried to. You know, my mentor in the US connected me to the same department in Sweden and I simply felt and this might, you know, it's a bit hard to say, it's a bit mean to say maybe, but they were like well, go work at a project site for five years and then we can talk". I was like never.
Speaker 2:So then I went back to what I've been doing alongside my studies, which is coding. I developed my first website. I took an HTML course in Uddevalla Kommune on the West Coast. They actually paid for me to take that course when I was 14, 15. So it's like a summer job that they provided. It's one of the good things with Sweden, right? So I learned to code HTML, css, even external CSS files and Photoshop elements too, and that, plus my arts interest, is what got me into web development. So it's like okay, if people aren't going to listen to me, I'm not going to sit and wait. You know, I don't know how long my life will be, so I'll go going to sit and wait. You know, I don't know how long my life will be, so I'll go back to an industry I'll do stuff where actually people listen to me. So that's where I can make a living out of it. And that was the beginning of my journey as a tech entrepreneur or enabler Web development, web development.
Speaker 1:So what did you do then? Did you start some company of some kind, started a, yeah, I mean I remember you do that.
Speaker 2:Do you start some, some company some kind or started? Uh, yeah, I mean, I remember I I was applying for summer jobs when I was 15, 16, didn't get a job. We had this, uh like local entrepreneur was remodeling our house or repainting it or whatever, and um, but that's like he doesn't have a website. You should just pitch him and I did and he paid me to build his website. So then when I turned 18, I started a limited company and I took the smartest guy in my class, who was a lot better programming than me, and on we went and is this the bubble?
Speaker 3:is this right at the bubble? And we all talk about 99, we all party like it's 99 web developers. Was it that era or is it later? Earlier is it later, you're? A little bit younger 36.
Speaker 2:yeah, yes, it's a little bit, so it was in 2007.
Speaker 3:yeah, but not that much later.
Speaker 1:No, no I'm a cool. At some point. Then you um came to, there was some kind of you know the answer, and then you had this simplified. How did that work? Can you just describe that journey a bit?
Speaker 2:more. So after my study, I mean, I spent about half my time in kind of consulting, half my career and half of my career in building tech companies leadership positions, typically Not that much on the tech side. I've been mostly on the product or business development or kind of executive side. And Zapplify was well, I guess, introduced to when I was head of business development at this agency called Prototip, this premium tech agency in Stockholm, extremely good at what they do, very focused on building an MVP and getting people across that line before you do the next step, because everyone wants to build all features at once. But they were really good at this, narrowing it down, selling by saying no, and that was a great experience. And then I got introduced to a bunch of startups that were calling this agency, we want to develop this and that, and a friend of mine then had run into these kids they were 22 then, from Lund and it's like they need someone like you, per. So I entered as COO part-time alongside my work at Prototyp. Because they were such a good employer, they realized that we should let him do what he wants to do.
Speaker 2:This is win-win, maybe Exactly, and I negotiated a bit with my wife I to do this is win-win, maybe exactly, and, um, I negotiated a bit with my wife. I told her this is a startup, it will require a lot of time, I'll you know, an energy and I'm gonna really get into this. And, uh, yeah, a few later, so I be a few. A few months later, I became ceo and the they had just brought on their first venture capital round. So this was during the hype summer of 2021. Everyone was throwing money at SaaS companies, software as a service companies and it was the same case here Like people who didn't know what they were investing in, basically. But the goal then was to build a predictive growth engine. So take the money and make this business grow and turn it into something profitable long-term. The engineering part of me loved that, of course.
Speaker 1:So a data-driven approach to see if a company will grow or not. Yep.
Speaker 2:So then the architect part of me, the design process, kicked in. Okay, how can I develop this iteratively? And then the engineering part Okay, how can I develop this iteratively? And then the engineering part Okay, let's go.
Speaker 1:Metrics systems dashboards, and on we went, and then it went further to what happened when it went to this AndSend company.
Speaker 2:So AndSend is quite recent. We're actually launching on Product Hunt on Tuesday. So if you see this and know what Product Hunt is, be ready to support us Tuesday morning. What is Product Hunt? For the ones who doesn't know, good question. Oh yeah, this is long form, right. Product hunt is the go-to place online for people who love new digital products simply new digital products, simply so, if you love to discover and experience new products and understand what's going on in terms of what's happening out there in the world, go to Product Hunt and there's, like I'll say, 15 to 50 new products launching every day.
Speaker 3:And that's the point right. Product Hunt has become a very popular place. When you're a tech startup and you want to launch a product and you want to find your channels to get visibility, Yep, Product talent is kind of part of the go-to-market strategy for a lot of tech startups right now. I would argue, one of the main channels to get recognized fast. I'd say it's like.
Speaker 2:You's like what PR used to be. You need a credibility source, or you need a Wall Street Journal, or you need TechCrunch or you need, but they're struggling with their own business, right? Many of them go into events, podcasts, you name it. So Product Hunt becomes the place where you build your story. You have to be extremely good at communicating what you do to get traction, etc. And then you can if you get some badges there, like your top of the day, top of the week. They have a credibility system. So it's not just the amount of upvotes, it's the amount of comments, the quality of the comments, the reviews you get, et cetera, et cetera. So it becomes like a credible Recommendation.
Speaker 3:It's almost like a stamp.
Speaker 1:I would argue like a stamp recommender. You can see it there. But good, okay cool.
Speaker 2:So you're asking the question.
Speaker 3:It's like we had Lovable here, we had Anton here last year and, of course, lovable is number three on this list.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly, yeah, not bad. So you were asking about Ansa. What happened there? Well, sapplify was in sales automation and we started building that based on what was possible from a technological standpoint year 2020, 2021. So the first product launched in January 2021.
Speaker 2:The crazy thing is that technology, at least to us, is obsolete. And this was quite advanced technology on how to automate part of the sales process. So the early stages, where you try to figure out who is my ideal customer and how do I find them, how do I find their contact details, how do I get a conversation started with them, and that's what Zapdify did. And so, basically, when you'd gotten a reply, the product had done its job. The challenge that was, or the thing that we saw, was that and this is where I get into Anson and the ones that really succeeded with Zapdify they got too many replies, too many conversations started and they didn't have the technology or the systems, the behavior, to take care of these conversations, so they basically lost a lot of sales. They figured out one part, but they hadn't figured out the part that comes next, and that's where we started building what's called Anson today, which is basically a unified inbox. That is extremely smart because it's AI first in the way it's built.
Speaker 1:So it's a recommender system to say these are the ones you should focus on in some way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it suggests actions and how you should prioritize them. So, both inside your network and outside your network, basically, who should I talk to? Let's rewind a bit. So you say, okay, yeah, we'll get into that Quickly though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a unified inbox, so imagine Outlook or Gmail, that kind of interface, but it combines so you see all your messages on LinkedIn direct messages, email messages, soon hopefully also WhatsApp messages, which is big in parts of the world and it unifies all that into one conversation and, based on this, it builds a context for generative AI to figure out what are they talking about and it correlates that with research it does through perplexity and it correlates it with the foundational data that you can get from the demographic data and geographic data and who this person is. And then it combines that with your agenda. So you create what's called a playbook. You say I want to invite these people to webinars, or I want to just build long-term relationships, or I want to take good care of these customers.
Speaker 2:So then it has your agenda. It knows the person and the full context of your dialogue and then it figures out what to say and when to say it and in what channel and to who and why. So all you have to do is review and send. The technology does everything for you. All you have to do is review it and send. But the brand promises we will never hit send for you. So you're responsible for the send.
Speaker 1:If you don't alternate the message message, if you don't regenerate message or tweak it, that's on you, not an and send it'd be like a sales card or something for the people don't know what, a sales card or some kind of you know background information. This is customer. This are the people. These are the it's more.
Speaker 2:It's not focused on transactional sales, it's focused on relationship driven sales, which means, I'd say, typically professional services industries, complex sales processes, where it's the trust in the dialogue and the long-term thinking in the dialogue, the value creation in the constant, the continuous dialogue that is in focus and not the transaction and then off you go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because the whole idea when you're saying you need to press send is, in one way, the antithesis of automation, marketing automation. You're talking about relationship augmentation, if I would use my own words on this, and I can see the point here, because you have, you have. You have a lot of techniques that are there that actually only fits a very product, or traditional pushy type sales, which is transactional sales, right. But if you're building longer sales cycles and you're literally nurturing something until you have, you know someone is a good relationship, maybe marketing qualified, so to speak, but then being a deal is long, long way down, way down the line. So this is then how do you not lose all those things? You got to, you have all these conversations, but you have them randomly and now you're try to have them industrialized with clear objectives, playbooks yep cool.
Speaker 1:What's the current state of ansand? Do you have a product? Is it launched? Do you have customers?
Speaker 2:yes, we started building it about a year ago with a new group of investors that came on board that were more like product focused and really believed in us in that sense, perhaps compared to the ones that came in summer of 2021 during the SaaS hype and they kind of guided us and challenged us and we built this product. And then we came to a point where capital has been so expensive so we had to make up our mind. We can't keep selling and building Z you know Zapify and maintaining that and have the capacity to also build Anson, even though those were built to kind of complement each other in the customer journey. So the team was like, well, we want to go all in for this Anson product, and that eventually led to what's called the management buyout. So the old Zapify investors are you investors are part owners in the new company, but it's a completely new company and that's what we're launching on Tuesday.
Speaker 3:How many?
Speaker 2:people are in. Now we are eight in the founding team and two of us are me and another guy are senior in go-to-market and tech and we can't really work on a founder term. So we are helping out as much as we can um me on the commercial side and him on the technology side, and then there's six people that are working full-time startup founder terms and launching on tuesday launching on tuesday yep yep launch party in the evening and you guys should come yeah, this is cool, but but and and what?
Speaker 3:what milestones did you put up for yourself to to say you were launch ready? In terms of robustness, does it work? How much beta is beta? You know how did you reason around that? You know those milestones, now we're launch ready.
Speaker 2:It's a very good question. Product hunt, launch ready is a better way to probably define it and there's two angles you can take to being product hunt launch ready, because we launched Shopify and product hunt October 2023. So the product had been around for two years when we launched on Product Hunt. So either you are, you know, kind of almost like a scale up, you're established, you have clients, you have users I think we had about two or three thousand companies using Zapify by then or having having accounts in Zapify, but then it looked quite polished and nice, etc. Etc. The approach we're taking now, which also, for example, you mentioned, lovable. They launched three times in one year and it was very scrappy on for them, and then the third time around, they did it in a very polished way, you could say.
Speaker 3:And they all did those on Product Hunt, all three Yep yep, yep, and they even rebranded during that time.
Speaker 2:right, so they went from from GPD engineer to to lovable.
Speaker 3:But isn't that even in the name? If we're not going to bring that example up, we talked with Anton on that minimum lovable product. That's an interesting topic, right, we have, we have an MVP and we can have something. But when you really want a splash to happen and and this is what happened with Lovable when they rebranded Okay, now we think we are actually closer to the Lovable product. That was the third launch.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, well, that's true. It's hard to define in answers. For us it's actually a team. You know we've been through it's been a messy journey, like it is for startups. So it's also a chance for us to kind of focus our efforts to say now we're going to launch. So it's less about okay, is the product ready for it? It's more about let's get ready for it and let's get going.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love it Cool. Well, best of luck with that. That's going to be amazing times.
Speaker 3:I think so how does a launch work? Is it a party? It shows up on the webpage. Will you do some fun with it? Are you going to have a launch party?
Speaker 2:I'm there, yeah, we're throwing a launch party for invited guests in the evening and, of course, to get into the door, you've got to show us your upvote first. I love that Combine the physical world with the launch and such, but it's a celebration. It's a chance for us to relax for a few hours because it's going to be an intense 24 hours. That's my experience from last time around, but we ended up to number second. Last time we were unlucky and Red Hat, the company who created what's it called- the Linux operating system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they're doing other stuff today. The Linux operating system yeah, and they're doing other stuff today. The Linux operating system Not such a small company. Exactly, they launched something the same day that we launched this application. So we were like grinding on. I think I was working 20 hours straight almost trying to end it, but we ended up number second. So you know, we're going to try to pull. The reason why you want to be top three is because that will give you a lot of free publicity. So, talking about the pr thing, if you're top three you get distributed and exposed in all their newsletters, their podcasts, their linkedin. So so that's the reason why you want to get top so what's?
Speaker 3:what's the strategy? To get to top three, or that's the secret sauce you don't want to share I actually already built a playbook that I shared after last launch.
Speaker 2:But you secure let's say you think you need 500 upvotes and you need X amount of reviews, x amount of comments. You need to get a certain amount of these upvotes secured so that you get them during the first one, two hours, because they don't reveal until after four hours into the day. That's when they reveal how many votes the different products have. So about one o'clock Swedish time, they will reveal that, and if you're not in the top three, top five of them, you will not get any of the organic upvotes, basically. So you've got to figure out a strategy to solve that. And if you want to know how we do that no, that's the secret sauce I'll share the playbook. Reach out to me in the dm awesome.
Speaker 3:It sounds similar to linkedin post or something I mean you have to get votes in the beginning there, but this is, this is but this is a little bit crunch time, so you need to have a strategy. Your go-to market is about upvotes to some degree. You know how do I secure those upvotes? You need to spread yourself around, Please, guys. Before one o'clock, please do help me here if you like it.
Speaker 1:I like it. I love it. Awesome and best of luck, as I said, for that, that will be exact in time. Thank, you.
Speaker 1:Cool, perhaps if we try to get more into the theme of tonight as well, which is some way trying to find value from AI, and perhaps for Swedish companies or for CEOs I know you work a lot with helping management teams as well to find value from AI and if you were to just give some kind of idea, what should CEOs management team think about how to get real value from AI? What would be your top tips? Some kind of idea, you know, what should CEOs management team think about? You know how to get real value from AI. What would be your top tips?
Speaker 2:That's a good, good question. So the reason why I started getting into this is because, you know, when capital became expensive, we had to basically start using AI more, both at Zapify and in the edtech startup I'm involved with, which is more like impact-focused. So I started using all the tools that were available and learned the craft of doing so, which led to me leading a session on stage, a panel discussion or session within the network called Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden. So a lot of CEOs, you could say, but young ones early on, below 30. And one guy was an alumni in this network Great network, by the way. You should check it out if you're a young entrepreneur and listening to this here in Sweden. He worked at a publicly listed company. Now one of these companies had been acquired. So he's like Perk, you come to my leadership team and just get them going with AI, and what he meant is get them thinking and using generative AI tools that everyone now has access to. So this was in September 2023. And that went so well.
Speaker 2:I've designed a lot of events, processes, facilitated a lot of things in the nonprofit sector and that kind of taught me this trade.
Speaker 2:So it went really well because I was showing what I've been doing. I had been training my own team so I knew kind of how to do it and I'd been an executive for a long time, so on from there, it was kind of through recommendations. I got to do between one and three half-day experience-based educations or courses or workshops with leadership teams basically, or innovation teams as a starting point for them to get across the starting line, a common starting line, because everyone is so scattered the CEO doesn't have any clue of what's going on, what's good and what's bad, what's secure and safe and what's not. So you need to create a unified understanding through experiencing this little journey together. That was the magic of it. Now, I've been doing it. I think I counted the other day it's 500 people, so mostly you know managers and above that have been through this the past one and a half years and I've been running it 25 times. And, uh, you were asking about insights, but let's dig deeper into that everyone.
Speaker 1:Please, please, uh, go ahead. How do you set up these kind of workshops, how do you take this or how do you make these courses? Um, how do you go about helping people's understand the best way forward?
Speaker 3:and just to frame that one more time, because what I take out of that, like the number one did the two profound messages that you said. Now, if I'm trying to distill it out, just get started. Number one you, you cannot sit on the sidelines. You need to experiment, you need to get blood on your shirt in order to get some feeling for it. This is number one profound message. The number one is about start educating yourself. Get into whatever ai literacy programs you know, buy your course or whatever. So that that is two main messages to any ceo that you know. Get started, muck around on yourself or, and maybe think about doing doing it together with your management team to get a common starting point. Would that be a good? Two summaries of what you said well, yeah, it's such a different.
Speaker 2:It's a good summary and to build on that, you gotta lead by example, because there's so much uncertainty here. And I think there was this report that was published by the Boston Consulting Group earlier this year not sure if you brought it up here in this podcast before, but I think it was published on January 14th or something and it was about the January 14th or something and it was about. The headline of the report was something like the effects of the Nordic inactions when it comes to generative AI adoption. And there were some very interesting numbers in there, such as Swedes using and this is not children, this is adults, working adults. I think it was about 19% of Swedes were using it on a weekly basis and they were using it on average 2.4 hours per week, something like that. And put this into context and compare that to the European average, which was 52%, and the global average, that was 61%. Okay, so we're so proud of being an innovative country and being the most amount of unicorns per capita after Silicon Valley and the happiest country to live in blah, blah, blah. So it's a hard hit to our self-image as Swedes, exactly, and this is confirmed by another interesting number in this report where they asked the leadership team, the leaders how is your company doing, how are you guys doing when it comes to generative AI? 74% said I think we're doing fine, doing quite okay. So there's this huge gap between what's actually going on among the employees and what the leadership thinks.
Speaker 2:Let's dig in. I mean, it's very interesting. I was like why is this? Why is this? And then there was a survey. I was reading Tidning Chef, like this leadership paper here in Sweden or magazine, and they had done a web survey and asked the employees okay, but what's the real problem here? And from some of those quotes the article was saying from some of these quotes, from some of these quotes, people don't Swedes don't want to be seen as a cheater, someone lazy and incompetent.
Speaker 3:I heard this this Lutheran upbringing has something to do with this. We're cheating when we're using Gen AI. Exactly exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually a guy at my one of my workshops said that that it was okay. That's interesting. I never thought about it in that way, so it goes strictly against. It's like the opposite of our definition of what's a good worker.
Speaker 3:What's good work. It's usually so flipped because it just means that we haven't figured out that we're going to work on a different abstraction level in the future.
Speaker 2:Work is work but how you do it to get 10 times more productive. It's crazy. Did you watch the AI Action Summit that was live streamed yesterday from the European Union? Let's talk about that during the news. Yeah, we'll get back to that later. We'll get back to that later.
Speaker 2:Then other data that's interesting, just to dig deep into the Swedish behavior and what's going on at Swedish companies my own experience before reading these reports, I had been surveying about half of my groups in a structured format before they attended my workshops and, from what I saw, only four out of 10 CEOs had ever used ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:So, other than what I just told you about the reports, there's this shame, there's this gap that just grows by the hour, by the day, from everything that's going on in Gen AI and the anxiety level that's growing inside of the CEO's body is just exploding. And they have been dealing with so many things the past years. You have the pandemic, you have the hyperinfl years. You have the pandemic, you have the hyperinflation, you have the wars, you have everything that's going on in the world. You have to fire people, you have to take care of your family yourself. Of course, they will go back to managing the things that's burning the most and they will not start trying to use chat GPT to figure things out because they were trying it for a Christmas drive in 2022 and it didn't work. Why would it work now?
Speaker 3:And it's so obvious also that to get innovative, you need to have slack around, you need to have the redundancy in time in order to innovate, and if your nose is not above the surface, so to speak, then you're not in the frame of mind to get to that point in the agenda.
Speaker 2:It's very human. I think, the difference compared to other countries? Why is? Average in the world 61%.
Speaker 1:It sounds extreme though I have a hard time even grasping what 61% means.
Speaker 2:I mean 61% are using it on a weekly basis. Of what type?
Speaker 1:of people, just GPTs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, generative. Ai tools For any kind of person At work, at work or any.
Speaker 2:Anything probably. That sounds very extreme, Deep, deep.
Speaker 1:I don't know, believing it, but how many I mean like.
Speaker 3:So, if you look at yourself, how many times are you using chat, gpt or publicity?
Speaker 2:Hey, it's at work.
Speaker 1:We get work. Yeah, I saw the numbers there. It's just, it sounds extreme, I must say.
Speaker 3:But the BCG I get it.
Speaker 4:We hope they are credible Guys like always with these reports, it's very important to look at the demographics of who has been surveyed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't buy that like 61% of the population, population is using no. No, but that is cool.
Speaker 4:I can agree with that, but then you need to look at this right. So is that actually small-sized companies? Is it big-sized companies? In this report you have companies up to 50 people, 17%, 51 to 250. So this is small, mid-sized companies, while the large organizations are not. So it's a great result, but we need to also address it as it is, because it is a research small, medium enterprises but I I think this doesn't put any shadow at all to the fundamentals of this conversation.
Speaker 3:So we can, we can go in and bickering about exact numbers.
Speaker 4:I think that if they did it to the large enterprises, it would be even worse.
Speaker 1:I don't really.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's my point.
Speaker 1:I think large enterprises actually have nowhere close to 61% independently of Sweden or any other country.
Speaker 3:But you can see the trend that we are lower than others.
Speaker 1:Well, I wouldn't trust that 100%, but not to this extreme, but still probably lower.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't trust that 100%, but not to this extreme, but still probably lower, yeah. But, and regardless if we're lower or not, the underlying trend is I think we can draw it back to what you're saying about the insight and all that. How much worse or better? Or you know how far off is Sweden Tricky? I think we are more. I think you're to the point that we have a self-image problem in this whole context as well, because we are very good at other things. You know we have Swish and we have digitized other stuff. So we think we are good in general on digitalization, but in this pocket I'm not so sure.
Speaker 2:I think it's also you know from my own experience as a leader and as a working professional. You want to know if I start using this today, when will I get a certain effect, like what time, energy and money is needed to get the effect that I'm looking for, if that's efficiency, for example, and you know, without reference points, like what a lot of people are looking for. You know cases and examples and ROI examples, but the thing is that those will not. Even if you had some of those sure they can be from the same industry or whatever, but it's not until you have them internally that it really makes a difference.
Speaker 2:I think that's from my experience. So what I try to do when I work with CEOs and leadership teams and the teams that are supposed to drive this internally. They can be different teams, like you know one company I'm working with now it's the head of legal that's running it Because they were the most passionate, they saw that this needs to be done and they had the mandate to run the show to do this, and they have to. I mean, they have to get a certain mass or a group of people even if that's the decision makers or if it's informal leaders across this kind of starting line.
Speaker 1:These are numbers that exactly contradict to an extreme what BCG just said. So anyway, it doesn't matter, but I think the numbers in the BCG report is not positive. Don't get hooked up in the numbers. I'm at 61%. Come on, that's weird.
Speaker 3:But let me move on, because I think now I think we're onto something here and I want to stay on this a little bit more. I want to ask one question deeper. So what are you then? Okay, I have a half a day getting started and just getting through the starting line. So what are you teaching them, or what do you think is the main topics they need to know about? Or how do you look at that? You have four hours, and what is the objective of those four hours? When is this a success and what are you then doing? What do you think is the right you know what is in your mind the right stuff to start talking about and do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the goal is return on investment, as always, but is it really, or can you really say it like that, because that might be so far down the track? So now you're overselling. So what's the real ambition when they're coming out of the room? Exactly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the question is what is the return of investment? How do you measure that? Well, so I typically take them through a journey of five different stages. And if you're going to look at emotions, I'm reading this book currently by an author named Gunnar George, great system thinker and guy that's been doing leadership development for his whole life, basically. And the title of this book is Aha, aha, wow and yes, okay. So the goal for me is to, during this half day, take them through these three aha, wow, yes, yeah, so when they walk out through the door, they should have experienced all those three. So these five modules.
Speaker 2:Then we start by what I call temperature check. Check, which means to listen in to where is everyone at currently, because everyone will be at very different levels and have different definitions of things, etc. So it's important for me as a workshop leader, educator, to understand that, but even more important for the group To see the spectrum Exactly and because they will never have had that conversation in a way. And then, once you've done that, you've got to take them through. That's a little part of the aha moment, but it's a calibration moment. Then you take the group through.
Speaker 2:Let's call it a crash course, where you focus on visuals, contrasts, so a quick education, where you take them from having read this, having read that, and you take them through a storyline, not in research, not in technology, but for example, and this is I understand you might be against this, but there's this Norwegian guy who kind of mapped the benchmarks of the gen AI models to the Mensa test, the distribution curve of Mensa test.
Speaker 2:But the beauty of that is the normal people can relate to what's going on when you show that. So you say okay. So most of the models, for example, were in IQ 90, if you look at the Mensa test. And then 01 came in, or the preview came in September. All of a sudden it jumped to 130 something. So from being dumber than the average human being in the world according to the Mensa test to being among the smartest 10% in the world, and now with O3, it's smarter than 99.9% of the people in the world. So that's kind of the things that I bring through in this crash course and it really gets them thinking.
Speaker 3:And the point is not to make it too technical, but to make it relatable.
Speaker 1:Relatable, I think, is for the whole musty, aha, yeah, but in short, it's augmenting people, right? So if you augment yourself with AI, it brings up your capabilities in some sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything. That's the thing. How will you relate to that? Because you've never experienced or seen it before. So after you've taken them through this aha moment, which that typically gives, depending on the group, I give an amount of time and everyone gets to speak their mind and I try to be provocative in that, to kind of trigger people, just like you guys are great at, you know, in a podcast like this. Then I bring them straight into a ChatGPT workshop. Why we use ChatGPT is because the native app is super simple to use and it works. You know, and I show them just the foundations of when they try to give it a task.
Speaker 2:As someone who doesn't know how to prompt, I don't go deep into prompting, but okay, you just say, hey, do this for me, and you get a certain result and now it's sure it's better today than it was two years ago when you did that, because then it didn't understand the context at all. But then, if you also give, also give it the role and the format and the receiver of this, and you describe briefly what that means, you have to exemplify. So they've tried the first one in one thread and then they run a new thread and try using the role, task and format and receiver. They will see the contrast and experience the contrast. And then I say, okay, let's go into advanced prompting, but you don't have to learn anything. We give the task to the AI. Okay, so ask me three questions that I can answer. That makes you do a better job for me.
Speaker 2:So now we move into context building and I give an example once again to show them that if I hit speech to text, little mic, I talk, it gets a lot of nuance and the nuance is exactly what it needs to build a unique context. So then they experienced the result of the answer they get based on that. So you contrast and then in 45 minutes you bring them from having no clue how to prompt or having a bad experience of it to advanced prompters and being able to use voice as an interface. And then after that you move into demos. You pick a few cool tools that works well for that audience that we're like oh shit, this is really going to change my everyday work and my process if you're a sales manager.
Speaker 3:So then you try to figure out who's my target audience and what is useful tools in their workflow.
Speaker 2:So let's say there are some skeptics after this, how do I show them how this can be used in their content? So let's say there are some skeptics after this, how do I show them how this can be used in their everyday work, not just for fun, but in actual production? And then we end with group discussions and this is where you were asking okay, what do you have at the end of this? So, if the group discussion at the end, I record them or they record them and airdrop the files to me. I transcribe them and the ceo or the CEO or the person ordering the workshop get a document. So I have a pre-prompted. It's AI generated. I tell them this, where it kind of reads from all the conversations and you get here's what everyone agreed on, here's what people are going to do tomorrow, teams, individuals, functions and it sees the overarching trends, even though they didn't talk with each other.
Speaker 3:You need a consultant management report in front of their faces in two minutes. This is proving a point on its own.
Speaker 2:Direct to implementation, right, yeah, and it's not a long document, it's like max two pages, right. But then, since they've all been through the same experience, the leaders have been in the room and they have this that they agreed on, that they talked to themselves that they would do what they would do with what they now just learned, and this is a contrast in its own If you think about a very unstructured meeting with no meeting minutes back home and now they went to training.
Speaker 3:He did a meeting session with us in 15 minutes and we get a report that is more brilliant than we ever had at home, kind of which you are going for, that contrast again of course, yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2:So that's that's what it's about. And and I talked to um, a woman named elirika spores yesterday um, she used to be the chair at the ceo of the students academy, like this board academy that educates professional board board professionals, right, and before that, she was the HR manager director at large mining companies and paper companies here in Sweden, and this is also another interesting perspective then, because we discussed she's like Per, what do you think is the leader of tomorrow? If today's leader is like the coach and then we had other leadership styles in the past she's like, I think, it's the teacher. Interesting, so me reading this book from Gunnar George and then talking to Ulrika Spås, who is so experienced as an HR director and having seen so much, and then being at this serious academy for the past few years looking at how companies are run in Sweden teachers are needed, but I agree with that, at least during a reformative period until this is comes natural to us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, in in the context of the ai divide and what we're talking about, and we need to reform society, we need to reform every single person in our organization. We need to hold their hands. This is what the teacher is doing guiding them through. That's not coaching. I mean, coaching for me is like with, you know, from instructing, teaching to coaching. It's really hard to coach when there's nothing, when it's zero there. They need to have a certain baseline for you to coach them against. So you, you need to move from coaching to teaching. Yeah, makes sense. Good summary, I think when I speak.
Speaker 2:We had this. I mean the other project that I'm very passionate about and perhaps because my kids are that age as well and I saw what impact it did to them but this app called Katalo, or Katalo in Swedish. This app called Katalo or Katalo in Swedish, it's a cartoon figure from Bamse, a Swedish cartoon. She runs a toy store. It's like a side figure. That's where the name comes from the kind entrepreneur in the village who wants to help out and kind of help the village Anyway. So Katalo is.
Speaker 2:You know we're helping teachers make data-driven decisions in the classrooms, you could say, and giving the kids an individualized learning experience. The problem or the challenge today in Sweden, when it comes to schools, one of the challenges is the teacher's education. So then Ulrika and I were brainstorming and saying, well, what if the new leader and the manager challenges is the teacher's education? So then Ulrika and I were brainstorming and saying, well, what if the new leader and the manager that's needed in Sweden? The only education for them to take to become that type of leader is the teacher bachelor?
Speaker 3:degree, which doesn't reflect what you were talking about here at all.
Speaker 2:No, but exactly this kind of thing is needed, right? So could we then make that education popular again? Could that be the revival moment of when you turn that into the main management theory course? I don't know, it's a wild thought, but sometimes in times, good path for the leaders of the future.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's more of a teacher point of view? If you were to listen to Elon Musk, I don't think he would agree, for example, no, he has a different way of managing.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, and in that sense he would say more like you should teach people in physics or computer science, basically, and that should be the main core. Do you think? What do you think? Why do you think the future of the leader should be teaching? Shouldn't they know the brand? Shouldn't they know the work? Shouldn't they know the core technology or or the physics, potentially to be able to teach to start with?
Speaker 3:It's a very good question. You should answer this, but I'm just going to reflect on what you said. I think there's vastly different leadership contexts here. Are we talking about where you are able to have a cutting edge firm and you're having the best of the best and you just run like hell? Or is the fundamental topic about an analog company that that, in its foundations, needs to reform to something that they don't know what it is?
Speaker 3:I think the same price, but okay oh no, then you need to replace all the guys in the analog company to get the elon's guys in twitter yeah, twitter, try to do that with the swedish unions. Try to do that in sweden if you want to go. If you want to have a twitter moment in scania, sure, let's do it because you're really hard, but it's probably so yeah but we'll.
Speaker 3:So there are two ways to look at this. Okay, we are here now and we are too fat and happy, so we don't realize where we are. So either we're trying to reinvent ourselves from within. I would argue that's the teaching way, that is the sort of-.
Speaker 1:But how can you teach if you're not an expert in it?
Speaker 3:But you need to Do you have the credibility?
Speaker 1:I wouldn't trust anyone that is not an expert in something.
Speaker 3:But will you sack 60,000 people in that's not what I'm saying.
Speaker 4:That's what I was saying 80% he sacked.
Speaker 1:He sacked 80%. What I'm saying and I'm repeating now is that perhaps you should have expertise in what you're doing. You should be potentially an engineer or a computer scientist, or you should be a physics engineer and you should know the craft. Unless you do that, it's hard to teach, but then you need to sack the craft. Unless you do that, it's hard to teach, but then you need to sack the leadership, but stop saying that.
Speaker 2:I like the argumentation here. And so Ulrik actually started by saying well, you know, the first type of managers that we created were specialists, the second, and then it moved from specialists into generalists, and then it moved from generalists into coaches. Now we need teachers. So specialists have already proven to not be good managers. Managers I'm not reflecting that. Okay. Leadership, leaders, Leaders can be many things, but let's talk about managers and actually managing people.
Speaker 1:The top leaders of the current companies are not experts in their field.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's what I'm saying. They're experts at managing that type of company, that industry.
Speaker 3:This is how it works in all the companies, if you look at Google or if you look at Microsoft.
Speaker 1:they are experts. They come from a background working specifically as engineers All of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the US is different from Sweden.
Speaker 1:Sure, but US companies are so much more successful than Swedish companies. Yeah, and these are the most valuable companies in the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but then you're trying. How should we do a Silicon Valley model on a Swedish company in the Swedish context?
Speaker 1:I'm just saying. You know it's something that makes some companies most valuable in the world. They have more or less engineering-based leaders.
Speaker 2:I know, I know, and it's a very different. I mean, I lived in the US, I lived in Paris, I lived in Stockholm and other parts of Sweden and I've seen all those cultures. So there's no one single truth. I'm talking about Sweden now, swedish context, swedish culture, swedish norms, and in the US, like this is the beauty. I'm not sure if you've seen these kind of visualizations of how different cultures make decisions. Have you seen that? No, there's this cultural researcher. I never remember his name, but people listening to this will be able to find it through Gen AI.
Speaker 3:What's his name? Do you remember? I know what you're talking about, but I don't know the exact paper or figure.
Speaker 2:You've talked about it before.
Speaker 3:No, I know of it and we talk about it in decision-making styles and cultures. It's so interesting.
Speaker 2:We might be able to find it here while we're talking. But what I want to get to here, just to add some context to what you're saying, anders, is that the whole timeline it takes the same amount of time to reach the result. It's just in the US you make a decision early on and then people are not motivated to execute on it. That's their style in many ways and of course then it's better if it's a specialist making the decision, because they're aligning the manager with a specialist. So you have to know your field in that sense and then you execute on it and people will not be super motivated along the way. In Sweden we take forever to make the decision forever, and in Denmark they fight over it, you know, for a while and get mad and et cetera, just to contrast things. So in Sweden it takes like 70, 80% before we make the decision, but then it's a group decision, so everyone knows what to do and is very motivated and they execute. So the same amount of time is needed to get to the result.
Speaker 1:Having worked for Daniel Eich in Spotify et cetera, I know, you know, even Swedish leaders can be very knowledgeable. Having an engineering background, still having a Swedish leadership style, that is very successful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, but I would say that he is.
Speaker 3:But let me try to put my picture on this, because we are not hitting the mark on the arguments together. I think so the challenge we have now and another having a discussion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 3:So what Daniel Eerke has? He has one domain, he has one core we are a tech company crazy about music and he has a digital native. So he has one culture, one set of values and that works in one way. Okay, so that works, by the way, for all the tech companies, because there are tech natives in different ways. They are software engineers at heart. Here we have now Scania, who is in mechanical engineering, and they are proud engineers and the whole engineering logic that you described works extremely well. As long as we talk about the hardware building trucks, they are world-class in lean, they know how to do modularized trucks, but they don't have a software engineering background.
Speaker 1:They don't have an AI engineering background, hardware engineering background, then it could right, there's no difference there. Hardware software doesn't make the difference.
Speaker 3:They are not able to translate one-to-one. I mean, what happens now is that, in my argument, when they fully grow up into an AI native company, the balancing of what type of engineers you have in terms of software, data, ai, machine learning versus mechanical, electrical, there will be a different balance of that whole company eventually. I agree with that. And then even then, even then, we get to the point where you have mechanical engineers that needs to be able to talk to software engineers. So, either way, you like it, the software engineer needs to be able to talk to software engineers. So, either way, you like it, the software engineer needs to be taught a little bit about how the hardware works and the hardware guys need to be talked a little bit, shouldn't they have still an engineering background.
Speaker 2:Then if you want to have a leader, mechanical or not, it's funny that you, if I may interpret, it's funny that you mentioned scania. Is there a specific uh purpose? I have worked there a lot. Yeah, when did you last work there?
Speaker 3:As an interim manager 2022. As a consultant, I work with them now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, patrik, Hedjung, yes, hedjung. Ai adoption yes, I do. How is it going with? Because I mean to me I'm going to post this particular episode to him. Good, because I mean so.
Speaker 3:So here's the thing I, I, I, I linked him to something today on that level okay, I know what he's working on in detail okay, so.
Speaker 2:So. So what's your take on on? You know him moving from learning and development to full go all in when it comes to ai adoption, with the whole learning and development team I don't want to talk about it here, no, okay, but it's a really hard job, right?
Speaker 3:because the core question that I ask you what should you teach or what should you build up? An?
Speaker 3:AI excellence program in Scania. What should that consist of? And then you have a starting point, which I think I fully agree with you, and then you get to a leadership. How should they lead in the context of AI, if we take this example it applies to every company, by the way and in that context, what is the skills of a general manager that don't have an engineering background and definitely don't have a software engineering background? So they might have an engineering background in some sense, but they have no understanding for how to build robust software. They have no understanding, you know, at scale you know, at scale.
Speaker 3:So then, what should you do in order? What should you, what should you do in order to help them on that journey becomes a very interesting topic so I mean, let's take the examples of scania and and spotify and let's go with with spotify.
Speaker 2:So I know a lot of people that work there. You said you work there too, right? So they? They had different development tracks for each individual. You can choose. If you want to be like a promoter, a specialist or a team leader, you could say so there's a big definition, a difference here when it comes to because what is a good leader? Is it someone really that makes both? Should the leader make both the decisions about technology and what way to go, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:But then it's micromanaging, then that's another thing, right?
Speaker 2:But for long in Sweden we have been making everything more and more efficient. So we've been expecting the leader both to make the decisions about where the company should go and the strategy and all these types of things and managing the people. And I think from my own experience it's like this internal battle. It's very hard to do both of those things very good. So the people actually leading sure, daniel Ek is a very visionary guy. People follow him as a leader and I haven't worked with him, but I guess that the people that actually lead the people inside the company in their everyday work these days is not Daniel Lieck. So there were people that were better at leading people in their everyday work.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't say better, but there are people that can cope without them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think I mean. This is, of course, a highly personal view on things, but I've been let's say that I have high ambition of being a good leader and creating a psychologically safe environment where people can be hyper productive and be happy in life at the same time. This kind of constant optimization algorithm. Businesses want to optimize for productivity and you want to optimize for happiness. So, as a leader, my job as I see it is to help them figure that out. As a leader, my job as I see it is to help them figure that out, of course, yeah, which means that my job is not then to make the wisest technological decisions. No, no, of course. So this is for me. Whenever I try to do that, I get stressed.
Speaker 1:I make bad decisions or manage people badly. I mean, that's coaching versus teaching, potentially, and you should be coached rather than teaching.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay. So let's take a step back and not call it teacher. I'm not sure what the english word is, but pedagogic, you know, being a pedagogical, being facilitator, a process leader, a process designer. And this is where I want to talk about scania, and it's not scania per se, because I don't know. You know the ins and outs of that story, but pat Patrick Hedjung was the first one who taught me what experience-based learning is. So, together with a woman named Kasper, they got the mission from the king of Sweden when he turned 50, got a foundation with a bunch of million and they started a leadership.
Speaker 2:You've heard about this course. No, it's called Values-Based Leadership. And they said okay, so the leaders of tomorrow? There's no education for leaders. Sure, there's MBAs or whatnot, but you can only learn in real life. So the people that come out of university, they're not good leaders most of them. The ones that might be good leaders are those that have been practicing the art of leadership, the craft of leadership in non-profits. And in Sweden we have a lot of non-profits. We have a lot of soccer associations, music associations, part of our culture, the folk culture of Sweden Ideella, ideella föreningar, right? So he's saying well, how can we bridge these leaders into the world of business, because we need more of them. We need more grounded people that know themselves and that lead for the right reason. So how can I create a safe environment qualified education for young leaders, if you will where they feel confident and that they have the tools to move into the world of business, be leaders and that Sweden needs this more values-based leaders.
Speaker 2:Patrik and Kasper might've been a bunch of others involved as well, but those were the ones that I ran into. They were part of designing this education and then I got a chance to attend it the first time. I was a CEO when I was 22 years old and my first time as a real leader of a company in that sense and then I also got a chance to lead the course together with a more seasoned leader in 2015. So five years later and when I saw the preparation so every weekend, there's four or five weekends in a year that you go through and you have a mentor from a large Swedish corporation typically alongside this is for young leaders and it was like experience-based in the sense that you had a group that you were reflecting with in between these weekends four weekends during a year between Thursday evening and Sunday lunch, and you had a mentor who was seasoned in your field and perhaps lived close to you so you could meet in person.
Speaker 2:And then you had these weekends, and all these weekends were a process that you were just going through, where they were using tools of co-creation, facilitation, self-realization and all these type of things. And this was the first time in my life that I experienced transformative education. People use the word transform a lot, right, but it really transformed my view on myself, the world, the people around me, what leadership is and how I can represent something that really doesn't exist. And now, today, I think over a thousand young people have been through this education, and you can tell by the way they talk about leadership.
Speaker 3:But it's interesting because now we even get to a deeper topic than learning. We get to unlearning and relearning, which is way harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but still, I want to get back a bit to the main topic here and then we should go to the news section as well, I think, because I think that's interesting as well and we shouldn't miss that. But you know, if still, if you look at the top companies today in the world, the most leading one? Can you find a single one that is not like satya nadela or sundar sundar peche or jeff bezos and others that are, you know, experts in their field? Of course, not every engineer hardware or or software is a good leader, so that's very hard to become a leader. So it's certainly not the case that just because you're an expert engineer you're a good leader, that's for sure true. But to say that you have a leader that has no experience in the field and they should run, for example, a company I see few examples of that.
Speaker 4:Again. I think to rewind this discussion for the past 30 minutes. I think there is a lot of big misconception between digital-borne companies and tech companies and FedEx or somebody else. It's almost like saying like why the Minister of Health is not a doctor?
Speaker 3:Right. So there is a truth in both of you, but I I want to go with anders here because he's on to something. But let's, let's really do the challenging act now with with, and take scone as a good example. Because here we have a company, okay, and they are truly engineering leaders. They are, but they were engineering leaders in building trucks and, more precisely, they are world-class engineering leaders in building ICE internal combustion engines. So, from the Satya Nadella perspective, they are, but they are for diesel engines. And then, from this context, they are trying to figure out where is our company going. So we have a company that really grew up in the same way, being engineering leaders, blah, blah, blah. Here Now they have the fundamental topic of okay, where is the transport ecosystem going? What positions should we take in this ecosystem? Number one, number two Okay, we're going to remove ICE I-C-E and we're going to spell it ACE instead Autonomous, connected electric. So now you're all of a sudden okay, literally. Then, okay, we need to be world engineering leaders on our cash cow, because that's going to fund us to be world-class engineering leaders in our new venture. And, by the way, I used to make it even more interesting we think it's going to be all about AI and software. So now, which engineering leader should you be at Scania and which one should you have as your deep, deep, deep knowledge? And in which way should you be T-shaped on the other two? And which person is a Satya Nadella in combustion engines, transport ecosystem, ai, software and electric and connected?
Speaker 3:I find that really hard that there's not a lot of learning going on in order to make that new pot. And what happens now with this Venn diagram is that they need to reinvent the new normal. And now what is this engineer all about? So we have a mechanical engineer that is brilliant in AI. That's a new engineering course. It doesn't exist. So that's why I think it's a lot of learning in this, and it's actually a lot of unlearning, because for work in the analog space, you need to rethink that when you build an engine in the software space. So we have the software we talk about in Scania.
Speaker 3:You know what the next generation we're talking about, the software we talk about in Scania. You know what the next generation we're talking about the software defined vehicle. That's what Elon has done right. So they have grown a company with that engineering culture, the software defined vehicle, from scratch. They now need to reinvent themselves into this space. So I think it's really, really I'm really humble to you. Know, I fully agree with your logic, but it's like okay, but how do I apply that logic to?
Speaker 1:companies that are not in that scale, of course, and that's perhaps why they're not so successful as well, and perhaps that's some learning you should do, and perhaps there is, you know, a journey you have to do. If you are at a certain state today where you're not very, you know, tech savvy and you're a more analog company, then you know you have to have a certain type of background of the leaders, but that's not to say that you know, what you really should aim for is to have something that can be successful, and then perhaps we need to make a change there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there will be many changes and I think one of the core topics is, if I just follow the logic of what I said, now there needs to be a fundamental rebalancing of engineering competence, from not only mechanical engineering but also electrical autonomous software. So this whole new pot is a new dish. We went from one tomato soup and now we're mixing in a lot of other stuff in that tomato soup.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting as hell. I would love to discuss something with you Per shortly, which is the concept of one-person unicorn. Have you heard about that?
Speaker 2:Yep yep, yep, it's a big bet going on, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. When will we have it? I'd love to discuss that and what that means for the competence you should have as a leader or if you're a single person, and what would that mean? Then that would be super fun, super fun. But let's have it as a cliffhanger and perhaps if we could go around, it's time for AI News Brought to you by AIW Podcast. Yes, so we are a bit late today because we got stuck in a deeper discussion.
Speaker 3:So fun, man. Thank you so much. I love that.
Speaker 1:That's actually one of the more deeper discussions that we had for some time, and I love it as well. Awesome, thank you for that. But in this midsection, before we get back to discussion speaking about one-person unicorns and whatnot, we would love to discuss a bit about recent news that we've heard about, and let's try to keep it short. We will fail, probably again, but let's try anyway. And is anyone interested in going first speaking about some kind of news that you've seen in recent weeks? Yeah, recent weeks, yeah yeah, you have something okay so was it.
Speaker 2:Yesterday there was this uh ai action summit. Right, yeah, let's start there. Yeah, 200 billion euros is mobilized now to kind of take the European Union into the AI era, to use a buzzword. That's, I think, a piece of news worth discussing.
Speaker 1:It is. It was my favorite. That was mine too, so let's go there. Yeah, let's focus on that.
Speaker 3:Let's focus on that, then let's focus on the AI summit because there's some other angles that happened there, but this is the main news, of course, for us in Europe.
Speaker 2:What's your take on that? Well, first of all, I think it's encouraging but also a bit, you know, lol, laughing out loud that all of a sudden the whole temperature on stage in the European Union changes. And going back to leadership, and I can't help to reflect on it, but I haven't given myself time enough to. How did this happen? Because it drastically shifted from the EU AI Act to 200 billion euros. And then, on top of that, they also talked a lot about recently how there will be this one entity for startups, so you can run a startup that has a European limited company entity, kind of like the Delaware Corp in the US, right, where it just works in all of the US instead of just in one state. So I think these two things how do they happen? What were the forces under the hoods?
Speaker 3:Because these are almost like two different parts of the scale right it's like bipolar.
Speaker 1:It's bipolar. Perhaps some people haven't heard about this. You give the context, anders. Okay, so we have Ursula.
Speaker 1:You know that we're presenting this kind of big initiative called Invest AI, saying 200 billion euros is going to be spent in coming years in trying to accelerate AI in Europe in different ways. I have a lot of different thoughts about this, but it is on a different scale that we've never seen before. But if you relate it to US, then they have the Stargate project that came out a couple of weeks ago saying $500 billion going to spend in accelerating AI in the US and then for a specific set of companies, and I have a lot of thoughts about this. But I think I'll wait before I do that and first let you think more about this. But in some sense, it's an extreme acceleration of investment in AI from Europe that we've never seen before. In 2018, we saw like $1 billion being spent in AI trying to do that. We have a rise in Europe that's investing some billions, but this is on a completely different level and that's cool, but also with some question marks around it, I think.
Speaker 3:Do we know the sort of terms of the money? Was it in six years, in five years, or you know what's the story here.
Speaker 1:I heard multiple years. I didn't hear a specific number of years, but it's not Barring, neither I don't think it's going to be in one year, that's for sure. No, that's for sure not, but over a number of years at least.
Speaker 3:And what. There are other strings in terms of what are we using those 200 billion for?
Speaker 1:Well, 20 billion was going to be spent more on gigafactories, the infrastructure for it. So they're going to build up like four gigafactories.
Speaker 3:So this is I picked up that was one big sort of bullet point what those 200 billion goes to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a gigafactory would be then on the scale of like 100,000 GPUs, which is what they said four times bigger than anything today. Elon has 200,000 already today.
Speaker 4:You haven't even started building these kind of gigafactories. Anything today, like elon has 200 000 already today, you haven't even started building these kind of gigafactories. What do you?
Speaker 1:mean, how long time would it take for eu to build a gigafactory?
Speaker 2:but it's four five years?
Speaker 2:I don't know yeah, yeah, no, um, I mean to be honest, I I I didn't read the details of of it, so I don't want to go into to that, but I think it's interesting to discuss. From what I saw, out of these 200 billion, 150 came from the industry. So the actual cash that's being invested is 50 billion, right Euros. So it's all hypothetical. So there is certain. First of all, I'm impressed that they were able to get all these logos together, right. And how do you get all those to sign off on something and say, okay, yeah, we have agreed to this 150, they have committed 150 billion. If we put in 50 billion, that's impressive. You start this a great yeah. But then then, if you go back to how the european union operates because I've been down in brussels, I've been working with, for example, crowdfunding and financing for smes in sweden.
Speaker 2:I've been part of their non-official advisory networks for this back in the days and it's very I imagine that it's like you know the United States in the early days you know you got to figure out there's so much bureaucracy in the sense around how things are done that it's when you apply for money it's still an application system that you need a consulting company to do for you as a startup. You can't afford. It's like cost of sales, right? You cannot afford to apply for this money. It just doesn't make sense. So if this is going to go to real value creation and if it's going to go to innovation, then I think you know we've got to revisit GDPR. We've got to revisit GDPR, we've got to revisit the EU AI Act because we've got to get rid of the fear. It doesn't matter how much money we have, how much people are committed, unless you get down to the fundamental behavior of the Europeans.
Speaker 1:I fully agree, well put. Yeah, bureaucracy is one big issue, for sure. I think there are more things as well, but yeah, that's certainly a number.
Speaker 3:Give us one of your two, three highlights what your path is going.
Speaker 1:I like that one, by the way. Yeah, I had to write a LinkedIn post about this as well, so you can read more details about my thinking here. But one of them is if you just take and compare Stargate to Investai and try to compare a bit the different approaches they took. So for Stargate they had like a predefined small set of companies like OpenAI and Oracle for the infrastructure, and SoftBank and then some other Microsoft is involved as well and so forth. Anyway, they had a small set of companies. They have a proven track record of being able to build like data centers and AI compute and being able to build a software application on top of them. So they have a proven track record and it's very likely that they can make use of this money in a good way. That provides value in some sense.
Speaker 1:If you then compare to the Invest AI, what they say that they want to have an inclusive version where they have many stakeholders but who in Europe would be able to do that? Who has the proven track record of being able to build a gigafactory or not only the infrastructure? Too much focus, I think, is spent on the compute. Compute is one thing, it's the architecture, it's all the engineering in there, it's the application. I would say the product, the product above that really provides value. Value that is really the hard part. And who has a proven track record of being able to build that? So if they simply say we're going to give this to a large number of startups and whatnot, okay, so how will that execution happen? Why won't it be the same as it's been in previous EU investments like Euro HPC, where they literally had big compute clusters in Sweden, in Finland, in various parts of Europe, and you couldn't give it away for free? Even if you said, as a company, you can have this compute for free, companies wouldn't use it.
Speaker 3:The cost of effort or the cognitive load to actually get to where.
Speaker 1:And bureaucracy is one thing, but that's not.
Speaker 3:I don't think it's the main thing.
Speaker 1:I think the reason is also that they don't understand the power that the current cloud providers provide. It's not just the hardware, it's the services above. That is a big thing. If you want to build a startup or as a normal company or even an enterprise, they see the value of having a cloud provider that you can have managed services on. You don't have that in your HPC Now. You have to build everything yourself, even in your HPC and even in the AI factories, and potentially I'm not sure about the gigafactories, but if they are phrased as the AI factories in Europe are, which is saying use it for innovation, but not something else, it means that you can build a model once, perhaps, but the big thing and the big cost is really the inference cost when you run it in production.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we see where the balance of pre-training and inference is going.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we see where the balance of pre-training and inference is going yeah, but still the point is that they are not having an engineering-first mindset, they are thinking more of a research-first mindset, which only gets you to a very small part, and the US is doing the opposite is, I think, much better.
Speaker 2:So I think you gotta go back to you know what are the systems. We are part of the culture. What is what is? What is the unique thing about europe? What is our competitive advantage in the world? I think you gotta start there, and our competitive advantage, as we've discussed, is not making decisions fast and being experts in the fields that we build companies in, but it perhaps lies somewhere closer to history, culture, experiences for people, places, how to design societies, welfare systems, the intercultural aspects of being able to live together with such different cultures that we have in Europe More than the US, I would argue so, at least initially. I mean Europe has become.
Speaker 1:The US was built on multicultural kind of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, from early on. But now it's American culture, but you have different food cultures, different religions and all these things. But here in Europe we still have the borders, but we have been building this European entity and let everyone still have their own cultures, which are geographically and language-wise separated. So it's not an integrated society as such, but what I wanted to get to is okay. So, given that you have that unique resource, how can you then not do what Asia is doing, or North America? What is the thing that you should do? And then, of course, you're talking about bureaucracy being a blocker here. But that respect and slowness is perhaps what enabled us to build the Europe that we have today when it comes to unique cultures and history, and not trying to commercialize everything and make everything into entertainment, but maintaining that genuine touch in a sense.
Speaker 2:But there has been struggles in. You know, if you want to innovate in this landscape, in a slow system, it's hard to innovate. I was discussing this with one of the HR director at Oriflame the other day. I was also having lunch with the head of PMO at Danderyds sjukhus, one of the largest hospitals. She had previously been at Sös and Karolinska, so the three largest hospitals in Stockholm at least Not sure if they're in Sweden. But going back to Ori Flame, then we were discussing okay, if Ori Flame is quite commercially successful, they're quite entrepreneurial because it's still being run by the two brothers who kind of founded it back in the days.
Speaker 2:But even there it's hard because you've got to manage what's going on in the world. Business models are changing, everything is changing and I dropped the thought, you know, before innovation at companies. If you look at innovation theory, which was basically my master's degree, before innovation at companies, if you look at innovation theory, which was basically my master's degree strategy and innovation theory, how do you like value creation? How do you create value in the landscape, in the economical system, the financial system, where technology is the thing unleashing value? That's what increases productivity if you look at it over time.
Speaker 2:So then there's all this innovation theory, and back in the days when I studied my master program in 2013 to 15, the studies were at the point where it's like okay, this is how you build a venture studio, this is how you build a corporate venture capital firm, this is how you build something where you can radically challenge the way that you work today. Okay, so that's all good and that's all proven. There are models how to do this. The thing is that most of those models were always separated from the pyramid. So the line what do you call it? The traditional hierarchy. The traditional hierarchy, like the production line, where you actually do what your core business is and everyone knows what to do. You have all your tasks and stuff.
Speaker 3:So you were looking at the incubator or the SEPXs of the world, exactly the challenger brand or the challenger setup.
Speaker 2:How can you re-innovate yourself? Because if you're not reinventing yourself, someone else will take that market share. That's the logic of it.
Speaker 3:So this is the story. Are we able to innovate from within, or do we all the time have to put it on the side so it doesn't drown?
Speaker 2:What we've seen now is that this, yeah, it works to some extent, but it doesn't transform organizations fast enough. So what I said to her is like, okay, she's very wise, she's been coaching me when I was CEO last time around and I was saying, but what if you? What if you? What we don't have in Sweden, we don't have entrepreneurs in residence. That's quite big in the US and even in some countries in Europe in Germany they have it, for example where you take previous founders and you hire them into a large corporation and you say here's money, here's a mandate.
Speaker 2:If you would be to rebuild this company from scratch, here's the expert, the technical specialist and the one who understands our culture all the experts Together with this entrepreneurial residence. You're going to play a game Rebuild this company from scratch. If we would do this today, how would we do it? So the capabilities of this entrepreneurial residence needs to be that they understand how to put together the systems that can scale. So HR systems, finance, marketing, sales, etc. The beauty of that is that it's just about configuration and subject matter expertise. So if you have the subject matter experts from the organization and the entrepreneurial residence who can configure it and figure it out with plug and play type of solutions.
Speaker 2:You could slowly but surely start, once things work, move people over into a fully automated system that doesn't have to deal with all the both cultural and technological implications, the data implications that you have to deal with in the encampment structure. You know all the both cultural and technological implications, the data implications that you have to deal with in the encampment structure, because it's so complex to change things that are scattered and that have been developed over time. It's like when you're building a house, it's extremely expensive to start changing things. When you get to, you know 50% done, like it increases exponentially the costs of that. I think I want to really close the topic as well about the AI action you know, 50% done Like it increases exponentially the costs of that.
Speaker 1:I think we I want to really close the topic as well about the AI action summit as well and the 200 billion but interesting topic with the entrepreneur residents.
Speaker 3:So what was the link back to how to be innovative in Sweden, Right? So?
Speaker 2:in Europe with this new startup thing that basically enables you to build a European startup entity where you can work cross-border without a problem. You can live wherever you want, do business with whoever you want and you don't have to think about the implications of it. That's what they're saying, that this will be. That should enable these companies to set up a subsidiary and play the game of. Okay, if we'd be to rebuild Heineken or Siemens today and it's not just a game, let's do it, let's see how it goes and then, as because it's so hard to change the existing systems and I think we have to think about like in the same way in Europe, that that's where you can put in the AI money about you're like in the same way in europe that that's where you can put in the ai money, why bother putting in the the big chunks of the air money into the existing incumbent? That is very, you know, against changing anyway, because that's built into the system this is what we said about.
Speaker 3:Like the quote, I'm not scared about the other incumbents, I'm scared about the new startups becomes new hyperscalers. Yeah, so what you're really saying is then 200 billion. If you have the money, you would focus on building hyperscalers in Europe. We need infrastructure, of course, but ultimately you need the infrastructure, you need engineering. But instead of having infrastructure that goes to research and incumbents, let's build real products. Let's build real hyperscalers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I wish we could not only have to kill all the big incumbents that we do have. I wish we could actually make them profitable as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that would be. I think this is less from a societal point of view. My quest into the AI divide has been what will be? Everything will be disruptive, for sure, but what will be the situation where people have the best life in terms of not getting out of a job, but rather reinventing or getting to a new job within the company, rather than standing without the job at all? So how can we do the whole thing? And then you maybe can't be done.
Speaker 2:That's, that's the scary part incumbents will die, unfortunately, and that has been going from 50 years of lifespan after, or kind of just after, the World War II, today's 15 years. So who knows what it will be tomorrow? I mean, this was all theory that the master program was based on. Right that radical innovation and disruption happens, but perhaps the new companies like Spotify and Klarna are better fit to re-adopt.
Speaker 3:But for Europe this is a very provocative thought because we have such a large industry that has been sort of becoming the industry giants of Europe, and most of them are, at least you know, if not a hundred years, more than 50 years, if you look at the automotive industry and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But just getting back to the 200 billion, how should we spend them? I mean, now they're not doing the US style, they're not giving it to a few set of companies and they are going to benefit a lot from this, of course. Now, instead of saying okay, they're going to spread it out to a large number of companies, to startups and perhaps SMEs or whatnot, and perhaps even enterprises.
Speaker 3:Reinvent themselves.
Speaker 1:And you know, actually that's one of the things I do like, even though I do not think it will have any chance of coming to the scale that the US has, because they have no proven track record. They coming to the scale as US has because they have no proven track record, they will probably end up in the same way as Euro HBC has been today. So it's a very, very risky way forward, I would say. And just speaking about the EU limited company kind of idea that you spoke about, we had Fredrik Heinze. He wrote something about this.
Speaker 1:Let me try to not paraphrase him too much, but he said something about, if I'm not mistaken, how can a company be working in Europe overall when each country has their own regulations? How is that even possible? It sounds like a good theory, but in practice, how would you ever do it? I find it strange. So I mean, for me it's awesome, it's super great that they, you know, bring ai investments to scale we've never seen before from europe. That's awesome, but execution wise, I have a really hard time believing it will bring the value that we hope for.
Speaker 3:And it goes back to everything it's going to boil down to how do you go from a very, very high-level vision and where do you then actually put your efforts in here? And this is where it gets really complicated very fast. I think I have one single take Like one of the key things that also came out to the summit was in the end of the summit they were talking about almost like a declaration that we want AI to be more open and diverse and, by the way, US and UK did not really sign off on that last statement. So I think America is very clearly focusing on being number one. That was not my main point with that. The main point I have is the argument for how we want this to play out versus how the, in my opinion, EU Act makes open source startup life harder. So the EU Act, in my opinion, is for the big players and for the incumbents and against the startups and the hyperscalers, and it's against open source.
Speaker 2:The AI Act, you mean.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if you look at trying to be compliant with the AI Act and the complication as it is, you add open source dimensions to that topic. I don't know how to do it. Almost so it's so. It's like what? What are you saying? You're talking about an open society in an ai for all, and and and, but your fundamental regulation on the same topic is opposite. Let me be, and this is and I don't mean to bash the AI Act I just don't think it's cohesive, I don't think it adds up.
Speaker 2:So there's a beauty here in all this, and I think it's about you know. Let's talk about risk management. So, as I see it, there are two risks to breaking the rules of an act like that. But let's take the example of the GDPR Act. So there's a fine, right, it's 5% of your revenues. That's the benchmark. When you look at the public sector, it's typically a lot less, because that would not make sense to fine a municipality. 5% of their revenue, yeah, 4%, yeah.
Speaker 1:Somewhere around there. So there are two AI Act is 6%, so AI Act is up to 6%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's okay, there's that risk, there's a financial risk and then there is the PR risk of being exposed, for example. That's why, you know, openai didn't want to publish Sora to the world before the presidential election, because even for them that would kind of kill them, they'd screw that up and that would kind of kill them. If they screw that up and they will never be forgiven in that sense, right? Um, but what I want to get to is for small companies that don't have revenues, that don't have a reputation, why care?
Speaker 3:I. I think it's a fair comment absolutely and for large.
Speaker 2:Sure, there's different industries, right, some industries have a lot of revenue. But if you're just a broker or if you just take a cut, that is your part of it and you don't have the money going through you, you just have the pure profit. Design your business in a way where the risk is low and go.
Speaker 3:So a fairly cynical remark here, but I can't fault it.
Speaker 1:But I'm an EU activist. I'm a cynical optimist. Yeah, it's actually easy to follow. If you are in the low-risk domain, you can basically not do anything and you won't risk that much. You should be compliant and do the documentation and whatnot, but it's not a hard thing.
Speaker 2:I think it's also say the GDPR example. Again, what you have to understand, of course, is what are the most sensitive pieces of information and how make sure that everyone in the company understands that this is hypersensitive. This is how we deal with it, so that there should be definite clarity about what type of data that we don't play with. But the rest of it you can play as much as you want, and I feel that a lot of that is lacking, but the debate is so un-nuanced. It's un-nuanced.
Speaker 3:So if you get more deeper into it I mean, now it's just a top-line argument and then fear Instead of getting down to the nitty-gritty a little bit at least, and then we can manage this. This is what you're saying anyway I think that's a good one, awesome topic.
Speaker 1:Thanks, anders thank you for bringing it up. I mean, should we bring?
Speaker 2:the.
Speaker 1:I thought it was kind of fun that Elon put a bid on OpenAI was it 93?
Speaker 3:was that 1883? That happened. It goes so fast. What was that last week as well? Oh this week, oh this week, it was even this week, right, and did you see the Twitter feed?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The scam. Altman comments.
Speaker 1:I mean it's funny. He put a bid on 97.4 billion, I think. And then Sam Altman or scam Altman or whatever Elon called him, then made a bid for 9.7 billion for Twitter.
Speaker 4:But the interesting thing is about like, it's not about the offer, because then he also said that he will retract the offer.
Speaker 1:He didn't make it formally to the board.
Speaker 4:If the board of OpenAI retract from making OpenAI a private company. The interesting thing about that is actually how OpenAI is structured. So you have this board here.
Speaker 4:So you need to understand that right.
Speaker 4:So here in the bottom is the private sector that is the OpenAI that we know that is for for-profit, is the private sector, that is the open ai that we know that is for for profit.
Speaker 4:And here up you have the border directors, who are basically directly owning the control of openai incorporated, which is the non-profit, and then that one owns open ai gplc, and then it goes all the way, which owns and controls the private part. So and Elon Musk didn't want to buy OpenAI the private part or the profit part he wants to he did an offer on the mother company, which is basically the non-profit, which is going to stop making the, which is called like OpenAI, into a for-profit company. And if you're looking at Microsoft, where they invested, they didn't invest it in the full OpenAI, they invested in the OpenAI Global LLC, which is a private company, and he said like he will retract from that offer if they maintain the same setup that they have today, which is actually to be a non-profit, and that they should work on open source, as they said at the beginning. So it's a power play rather than actually just buying things. But we are looking at it from a frog perspective once again.
Speaker 1:Now Elon had, I think, a very big point of doing this, which was not really to buy OpenAI but actually to cause other problems for OpenAI really to buy open ai but actually to cause other problems for open ai, I think you know, by putting the bid on 100 billion or 97.4, which is below market value. I think the last valuation they had it was in the range of 200 billion.
Speaker 4:But not on the non-profit, because he's giving the bid on the non-profit. That is not the actual value, the entire group of companies he wants to buy, the one that controls Everything else, and it's a very smart move.
Speaker 1:It is, it's a tree, is that?
Speaker 4:that what the value was in? No, because the nonprofit doesn't have any value, because it's a nonprofit but it owns and controls. But can you buy a non-profit? No, you can't, intentionally. But yeah, I don't know, but it's a very intricate and it's a very demonic type of uh uh move that he's making here. So I I I saw some.
Speaker 3:You know, when I was looking at it I was like this guy is so smart, but what is the reason?
Speaker 1:I mean, the reason is now that he under pays for it and they have to basically prove that they valued more than this, which is super hard for them to do, and so, yeah, he has a big reason for doing this. It was not really to buy it. It was basically to cause a lot of problems for opening.
Speaker 2:Why would you do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but he hates the progress, even though he started it or was part of starting it. The way they turned, non-profit is the profit, rather.
Speaker 3:But why would you do that? I think this is also a little bit different in culture. They're playing to win. I've heard conversations on why do we vote for Trump? He wants America to win, and I think that culture like no, we want to win over you, Over you. I don't think we talk like that in Sweden as much.
Speaker 1:But we do at some points, and that really annoys me. Do we really Do Sweden have to win in AI? Do Finland have to win in AI? Do Europe even have to win in AI? I wish we stopped speaking in those terms.
Speaker 3:No, I agree, but this is what I'm saying. This is the difference America speaks. I disagree with you.
Speaker 4:I need to fight this. I don't know if you did you listen to the to the speech of uh, what is his name? Jd Vance.
Speaker 1:Yes, I did actually yeah About AI.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and how did you like it, I loved it, you loved it. Somebody to tell you, basically, to put you in a spot, somebody that tells you, basically, we're going to govern how AI is going to be developed, we're going to govern the chips we're going to be developed, we're going to govern the chips we're going to govern and you're going to be basically great if you're going to be with me, otherwise somebody else will be with you either be with me.
Speaker 1:They want to maximize profit for US. Is that so horrible to say?
Speaker 4:And then we are sitting here and just like, okay, we will never compete with them. I don't think it's about.
Speaker 1:He wants to maximize money for US.
Speaker 4:But why wouldn't he say so, but why wouldn't we as a Europe want to have that as well, Because we have.
Speaker 1:I think we can find other values to fight for.
Speaker 2:Yes, we should fight for, but is it about we should find the one that actually finds values from AI?
Speaker 1:They can spend a huge amount of money in building foundational models, right, I agree.
Speaker 4:I just don't like to say like oh, let them win and let them regulate, and then we will do everything.
Speaker 1:I think Sweden have an amazing opportunity to be the one you know that doesn't have to spend the huge amount of nonsense money in building these foundation models, but instead like building value from using them. That would be amazing.
Speaker 3:Now it's my turn because I started this Because what I really wanted to get to is, like the interesting topic in how, in different cultures you speak differently. We talk about win-win. I argue the same as Anders what's there to win? Please win over there, as long as we can win over here. We say win-win. We talk about how can we make the pie bigger, how can we have value at us. But when I hear in a lot of these conversations on geopolitical scale and I think it's a cultural thing, it's ingrained in the culture someone needs to win and someone needs to lose, I don't necessarily agree with that cultural standpoint that someone needs to win and someone must lose. If everybody can win, that would be fantastic. But I'm used to the rhetorics is winning and losing versus win, win and value?
Speaker 1:It's to win in different ways. I mean, I don't think it's about winning. I don't think so either, but it's interesting.
Speaker 2:It's about the world. It's not about money and it's not about winning. I don't think so either, but it's interesting. It's about the world. It's not about money and it's not about winning, and I think my friend Andreas Södemark, who's the CEO at a company called Juvik, put it very well. He reflects, it, reads. The one person that I know who reads the most thinks deeply about things. I admire him for that. So kudos to you, andreas. He wrote that he thinks, or his observation is that they're trying to get the glory days back. So what happened after the second world war is that they were so dominant in the world that they could control the agenda. Everyone followed what the US did. Now they fear they don't have that position anymore and they fear losing it even more to China, for example.
Speaker 3:We had one dominant. We've had different parts of the eras. We had always one super dominant player, like in the Roman Empire. America has been that after the World War. Now we are potentially going to at least two China and America.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they have had two fundamentally different approaches. I've been to kind of volunteering trips, you know, in India, china and Africa during my youth and already back then and even more so now. China's way of doing this has been infrastructure projects. So they own half of the world through infrastructure projects, especially the poorer parts of the world, third world countries. Through infrastructure projects and talking directly to their governments. In different ways projects and talking directly to their governments in different ways the US sees their opportunity to retake the leadership position in the world.
Speaker 2:Now we're back to leadership, but this is more about dominance and who controls the world order by leveraging the fact that they own the biggest infrastructure companies and tech companies. That's why I believe, based on what Andreas wrote, I agree with that. To me, the explanation that makes most sense is that the reason why politicians and hyper-large companies in the US align is to have a chance to compete with China, because there they are the same thing, government and company, they have cloud technology and the rest of the world outside of China and they have cloud technology and the rest of the world outside of China is dependent on American cloud technology. So I think that's.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is the political game, and in this sense you can then logically follow the winning and losing or the balancing act, and you can clearly see that, well, china is doing company and government as one, and China is right now they are playing to win as well, so there are two players that are playing to win, so in this sense, interesting.
Speaker 2:Which one are we going with? Isn't that what his speech was about? Like join us or you know where's your alliance? Yeah, but it's an interesting point here.
Speaker 3:And what about us? What about Sweden? What about Europe? How do we play that game? Do play that game. Do we even want to be part of that game? What is the society we want to create?
Speaker 1:this is the question I'm asking myself back to you know, let them fight with building the best foundation model and let us be, good at it be the best
Speaker 3:of using it as we can adapt to our needs and being humans go deeper go deeper, be the best of our competitive position. What?
Speaker 1:we are coming into what that could be if anyone were to say that you know, I would follow that person forever, and then you have a, a secret leader.
Speaker 3:So it's a little bit like do you want to be the mass market leader or the niche market leader, and we can have. There's a niche play here.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't even say niche. I would say the type of country or company that actually is interested in finding value and not having the what's it called? Naiveness, or the being, what do you call it? You have the kind of megalomania of being the best all the time.
Speaker 3:No, but I think you're so onto it and let me put my words on it. Why should we play by the definition of winning according to their rule book and their criteria? Why can't europe set their own criteria for what winning means for us, what happiness means, what happiness means, what good means?
Speaker 4:that now makes sense that makes sense.
Speaker 3:We need to define that because we need to find our own identity, the whole narrative is, as he's saying choose us or choose them.
Speaker 4:But in the same time, what he says like I already determined myself, I will be the alpha, you will follow and you don't have anything to negotiate with. And rusula is saying like, no, the race is still not set. We are in the game, and that was a very powerful part from her to do on the end of the thing.
Speaker 4:Keep in mind, this is 200 000 pledge to be collected, 200 billion pledge to be connected, but then you have friends that basically wanted to put another 300 billion there. So the game is still not set and I'm not sure about. I'm with you about winning and losing, but it's about the narrative. Yes, yes, and I don't like the narrative when somebody says, like well, on this table, I eat first. Yeah, why should I actually?
Speaker 2:concur to that. Let me put just, and maybe this can help us close that because, we're having her in different.
Speaker 4:It's a mouth.
Speaker 3:Or unpack it even more. It's such a rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:The former president of Google X. His name is Mo Gdats and I don't know. He was also a deep, deep mind. He is not working at those companies anymore, but he's doing a lot of teaching, preaching whatever you want to call it, due to some life experiences that he he went through, but expert as well, exactly an expert, and he's an expert in his field. So a lot of people listen to him. He's saying that. Okay, so the winners short term will be those that fully automate and go all in on technology. Sure, they will lead in productivity, they will lead in making money, winning in that sense. But the ones that will live win in the longterm are those that dare to go for human connection. So every company has a strategic decision to make. Do you go for full-on automation or do you go for human connection? If you go for human connection, you will be more loved. If you go full automation, you will be loved by the markets. But the other part will be loved by people. And which one will win in the long run?
Speaker 3:That's an interesting argument.
Speaker 1:At least human value. I would certainly argue that that's the best thing. What do you mean with value? I mean it's different. You call it human connection. Yeah, I don't see that as being the main thing. I think as long as the humans do, in the end, have the best value possible, that's what you should aim for right, aiming for the best possible outcome for humanity. And that's not potentially that we have human having connections.
Speaker 2:But that's such a technocrat way of looking at the world. It's like the Musk world of looking at the world. There's an elite, isn't it?
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:How do you know what's best for the world? I think that lies in understanding what builds human connection.
Speaker 3:But let's expand on human connection and go into that argument from another angle Rabbit hole on the rabbit hole. On the rabbit hole, by the way, because this connects back to how do you define value? And we are coming from a system where we, ultimately, have talked about shareholder value and we have looked at a value view which is purely financial and purely shareholder value. And who are we doing this for? Are we doing it for the customers or for the shareholder? Has been the classical question. And, of course, already now we have seen that all the value metrics or the value definition needs to be broadened. So we bring in sustainability topics, other topics, we bring in the SDGs or stuff like that. So the conversation of what is value is already ongoing. And I think that then, when you say human connection, what I'm arguing for then is good, you're talking about not shareholder value, but you're talking about real customer value, and you're talking about, maybe, societal sustainability values, other values, human value, human value.
Speaker 2:That's what I was saying. Well, there's another perspective to it, and that's if you look at it. So let's take the topic of AI and generative AI and agents right that a lot of people are saying okay, we're moving into the world of agents and 2025 is going to be the year of agents, whatever that means, but vertical, specialized, generative AI co-workers or whatever Co-workers with agency.
Speaker 2:Something. Yeah, exactly so when. And now we're going back to market theory again. Now we're going back to market theory again. When the world is overflowing with AI agents and automation and technology, what will there?
Speaker 3:be a demand for Enjoyment, entertainment, Human connection. That's where this argument comes in Exactly.
Speaker 2:So how the economic theory, the market theory works in this?
Speaker 1:way right. It's not just a human connection. It can be entertainment. No, I, it's not a human connection. You can be entertainment.
Speaker 3:No, I think it's going to be deeper At some point. I'm going to be bored with something I can't talk about. Let me finish the line of thinking here and then we can talk.
Speaker 2:Thank you when it comes to market theory and the fundamentals of it. When you study business administration, it's one of the introduction courses you talk about. How do you compete in the marketplace, in the markets? There's only two ways to compete in the markets. Do you know what those are?
Speaker 3:Mass niche pricing, skimming pricing, it's called economy of scope and economy of differentiation.
Speaker 2:No economy of scope and economy of scale. Economy of scale essentially means that you compete on price yeah, mass market price. Economy of scope means that you compete on being different. Yeah, so when everyone is the same, demand is going to increase for the ones that are different, Okay, so that's where I'm going to stop there. What's that going to mean? When the world is over flooding with agents? What's going to be differentiating them?
Speaker 3:The human touch in what you do potentially, and then the summary word is human connection. But it's not where the human touch is. The human element is the authenticity of human relation, maybe.
Speaker 2:We see that already now I mean, I'm experimenting with it every day in business models, like when we went from a premium product, saas product that was packaged as also a professional service delivery, so you've got customer success included. You could charge a premium of 10x compared to what is just a piece of software. I think this is just the beginning of this that people are going to be much more willing to pay a substantial premium for talking to a real human being and talking deeply or being close to a real human being, which there's going to be money for, there's going to be available money because it's going to be released to the system.
Speaker 1:It's a scarcity problem, though, because you have a large number of AI agents to speak to, but there's a scarcity of humans, abundance of AI agents.
Speaker 3:Due to infrastructure and technology, the scarcity will be in the human relation, in the human connection, and therefore there will be a niche differentiation strategy here In humans.
Speaker 2:that's where the scarcity will be compared to the amount of agents.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if it's flooded.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but what's flooded? Yeah, yeah, but what's the point? I don't see the point really.
Speaker 2:I mean we're discussing where to build a business you know back to.
Speaker 3:Europe. What should we be good at? What should we aim for? What is our thing?
Speaker 2:We were saying that the strength of Europe is culture, tradition, et cetera, and that's what Ursula and-.
Speaker 1:I don't buy that, by the way, but okay, still.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think that we still have a shot in the game. But that's why, you know, I started off I was a bit surprised with how the shift because they'd be going on this one line. But perhaps there is this balance game that, if you can't innovate like innovation is all about combining things in a new way, but it's also about being very close to the customer and the markets at all times. So if you have a problem innovating because there's so much regulation, how are you going to build a? Then the human connection will just be a conversation. It will never turn into business. So there's this balance game where you're going to find format European entity or whatever for a startup to enable someone talking to humans really understanding and observing what they need and making a business out of it?
Speaker 1:Do you think humans are better at understanding what you need than AI.
Speaker 2:That's another topic of deep conversation.
Speaker 1:No, but I think Europe could have a. I think it would be awesome to find a differentiator, so to speak, a USP for Europe that's different from other places in the world and I think there are, and I think if we were to play the game of trustworthy AI or being the continent that potentially is valuing human values if you call it that more than others, perhaps regulation will cause that we don't have the same economical power as other people have, but we will have a more safe products and companies that we can trust more. I think that could be a very, very interesting play and something that we actually could build on, and I think people would be interested in that and know that okay, if it comes from Europe, we can trust it. That could be a really good play and I think we should do it and I think we are doing it, but not to what extreme whatsoever, so to speak.
Speaker 3:But I think, either way we are conversing about this. I think we all can agree at the end of this several rabbit holes, that we should probably not try to compete on the exact same terms and approaches as China or US.
Speaker 1:Let them fight it out and we can reap the benefits in other ways. Let them fight it out and we can reap the benefits in other ways. Let them fight it out and we can reap the benefits for Europe.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So what we compete on doesn't have to be the same thing as what we're good at, or the infrastructure part, so it's two different questions, right.
Speaker 1:I think we came to some kind of agreement there. It's amazing. It's amazing 40 minutes.
Speaker 3:But try to make sections out of this one, Goran. Good luck. I have no sections at all Okay, should we try to we?
Speaker 1:promised to go to the one person unicorn kind of topic. So let me give a quick intro and I'd love to hear what you're thinking here. So Sam Altman made this kind of bet to other people. I'm not sure who he made a bet with if it was Elon or someone but he made a bet that at some point in time, and not too far in the future, we will have a unicorn company worth a billion dollars that is created and run by a single person one person unicorn and of course, it's because AI is running the rest. So what would that mean for the future? If we believe that's the direction we're going, that we can have single people or fewer and fewer people being able to build value in companies, that provides true value in some sense? What does that mean really for what we should be educated in how we should drive our business, how we should build our business models and whatnot? What do you think about this? It's one of my favorite topics.
Speaker 2:Okay another rabbit hole, let's go.
Speaker 3:This is a three-hour episode now.
Speaker 2:No, but let me take some concrete examples to not go too fluffy. So the two companies I'm involved with right now we have Catallo in the edtech sector, kind of like an impact startup, and then we have um, sapify, that kind of turned into and send or it was. It's a separate company in a new company, but what I've seen here firsthand is this play out not necessarily with, you know, the one billion dollar company, but I think these examples might be useful for people listening and for the conversation. So at Zapify, we built this when I was CEO. In a year we built this predictive sales machinery. We'd never done that before. That was possible because the technology, the SaaS technology did a lot of the work. That kind of just worked and this is a fairly new thing, right? That type of cloud software that just works, where you don't need a huge team to manage it.
Speaker 2:However, then, when capital started becoming very expensive, we could not make a loss every month. So there was a decision to change the business model to self-service. Self-service is an attempt to drive down the costs of bringing new customers on board. What happened then is basically that the sales and marketing department disappeared. We only had customer success left the ones that take care of existing customers. So we had to start replacing. You could say we had to make an attempt at trying to create similar value and keep growing, but with a new strategy. So to this point we were able to, I would say I mean, it's not fair to compare apples and pears in that sense but we were able to maintain or grow the revenue. It didn't work out perfectly because it was a transition. Of course that's very hard to do if you don't know how to do that Moving from professional services delivery with a software to fully self-service, where people discover it, they do freemium and then they grow from there.
Speaker 2:Catalo. So we lost about 10 employees, so we were able to deliver the same value. That's the point. Catalo, it's self-funded, so it's not venture capital backed. That Subplify was. Here is the two founders that have a whole career behind them and they're extremely careful with how they use their money because they know they're doing it to schools and they're helping the society in different ways, and I highly respect that. That also means that you don't want to hire people, you don't want to increase, so you're trying to let the technology be so without bugs and so self-serving that it just works. And this is to a group that sure they can use technology teachers and schools, but they're not the tech startups, entrepreneurs in that sense running around, so it needs to be super usable.
Speaker 2:Super easy, super usable and just work and use, work, Just work right. The beauty here is that I would say that we have been able to scale the company to twice the size, twice the user base and still just being one and a half fts full-time employees. So we're seeing early indications that self-service companies enables this, as long as you don't fall into the trap of just hiring, because that's what you're supposed to do when you get venture capital. So what we're seeing now. And take a company like lovable as an example, right, and then you look at the market evaluation of cursor, which has been a lot of buzz around. So it's been the fast when it comes to revenue. No company ever in history has passed the 100 million dollar revenue mark in such a short time, 21 months from inception.
Speaker 2:Chat to pt as well. Yeahi as well, yeah, yeah, by far. Check out the graphs. It's insane. From cursor you mean Cursor. So from zero to $100 million in revenue in revenue in 21 months from since inception Interesting. So then of course, you look like a company like Lovable and you know it's a loved company right now.
Speaker 4:Right, it's stockholm's proud child.
Speaker 2:Yeah so you can love it's love hate relationship. Yes, they need to raise capital now because when do they? Huh, do they? I think so because you gotta buy. And this goes back to my you know, master program. When open AI sees how much revenue that there is in the middleware space, the application layer, they're going to move and you're already seeing it. I think they're going to move fast into that space.
Speaker 1:So these companies it's just said and done. They could have done the same for Cursor right, yeah, but wait and see why wouldn't they?
Speaker 2:It's like no, there's no copyright.
Speaker 1:The same argument. Let me give a Spotify anecdote, then. So Spotify was super scared about this as well. They were competing at Google, apple, amazon All were trying to launch the music service and they were doing it time and time again. And I remember, in 2014, apple were going to launch, you know, after iTunes and whatnot, their new Apple music service, and everyone was super scared and said you know, how can we have any chance to like a super company like Apple to compete, you know, in the music service? But we did, and it is actually not impossible for startups to compete against hyperscalers, and what hyperscalers say a number of times is they're not really afraid about the incumbents, they're really afraid about the startups that have the ability to move super fast and come up with this kind of very innovative moves. So I think there are chances for lovable and cursor to continue to proceed but, but, but.
Speaker 3:And to connect those two arguments I I agree with what you're saying, but but I also agree with.
Speaker 3:Then you need to move on that position and as you said, fast you need to be super fast now, because it's this point in time when you have laser focus on what you're doing. This is the time where you need capital to build any kind of moat, because the moat right now is not big enough. But but and this is what this is what spotify did they were actually able to do something really brilliant in you know how the streaming worked and the experience and everything like that, and they got the cash right when they needed it in order to really take what really be quite ahead of Apple in terms of market dominance and being the platform.
Speaker 1:But not only that.
Speaker 1:I think Daniel said something that Elon and everyone else is saying these days, which is that Daniel Ek had this kind of big town hall speech in 2014 to try to calm every employee down, because everyone was super scared.
Speaker 1:They're going to launch this kind of big Apple thing in a few days and they said we're going to be bankrupt in a few weeks or something. That was the scare of that moment, and Daniel came up and gave this kind of big speech that calmed everyone down in a very, very strong way and he basically said something like yeah, apple is going to launch soon. They may have a new feature, a new functionality that we haven't thought about, some kind of innovative way of delivering streaming music that we haven't thought about, but I'm not scared about that. I'm not scared about that at all because we as a company is moving much faster than Apple. We have an ability to develop and have actually more people and speed than Apple does to an extreme. So, even if they do that, we will catch up and we win in the end, and that's what they did.
Speaker 3:But I think these two are the same arguments. Why Lovable. In the situation where they are now, they have some money and they could, they could. They're making money now. So for this, for this end, they don't need more money, but exactly to do what Daniel is saying, we, we're not scared, we need to be super fast, we need to do this. I. I would argue that, yeah, it's, they are coming into a ballgame now. If this works, they need to really now continue exponentially with, you know, the same speed they've had. They need to exponentially keep it.
Speaker 2:That's where the money comes in, and I think this is where both Cursor and the likes will have a challenge the retention problem.
Speaker 1:Retention. But also it's a distribution problem, because the moats that a lot of people are speaking about with the big tech companies if Microsoft put it in. Vs Code and they just have a free service, how would they ever compete right?
Speaker 2:And that's when they lose. So they have to raise hundreds of millions so that they buy themselves the runway to be able to differentiate in a new way.
Speaker 1:Maybe, but I think it shouldn't be that hard, because that means that no startup would have a chance whatsoever. As soon as the startup comes up, either they're going to be acquired by a tech giant, which happens all the time, and that's a good exit for a lot of companies that's a good exit.
Speaker 2:yeah.
Speaker 1:And the other alternative in trying to fight a big tech giant is speed, and there's been cases, a lot of them.
Speaker 3:But can you continue the speed without by defaulting? Then you're becoming a hyperscaler rather than a startup. So your costume is a hyperscaler, a young one rather than a startup. So I think there is a costume situation here that we can have a startup costume and at some point when this is going fast, if you want to continue this trajectory now, your costume is actually a young hyperscaler in Spotify in 2012 or 2010. So when was Spotify a startup? When would we define Spotify as a startup and when would we define them as a hyperscaler? When did that?
Speaker 2:happen. Let's go back to the. I think I want to go back to the core question of how to reach a unicorn.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely a better question. Let's go back to the Lullable team, right? So they've been able to hyperscale. Let's call it at an early stage. Yes, they ran several iterations and and finally things hit the market and they took off. There are not that many people, as you know. You've been interviewing Anton back then and now, sure, there are a few more, but not that many people. And I know the guys behind Encore as well Encoredev, andre Eriksson. He was working at Spotify back in the day. He's one of the staff engineers, super smart and kind guy, and it's the same thing. They are also quite few people, but they're extremely good at what they do. Okay, so what is there anything here that says that these need to hire more people and for what? And that's where we get to the point, okay, when we're going to reach the first company with a one person show.
Speaker 3:Can you now flip the hyperscaling part?
Speaker 2:It's not in numbers of people, but it's in other ways. That's what we're getting to, that other companies as well, but I think that the US or Asia is going to win at the one-person show. Why? Because there is more normatively okay to do something on your own, that you're the star of the show and you build a little media house around yourself and there's a blueprint for it. So as long as you don't figure out how to, use agents.
Speaker 1:If you were to be able to build a one-person unicorn, would you do it?
Speaker 3:I figure out. If you were to be able to build a one person unicorn, wouldn't you do it? I'm a swede. I prioritize my family right now. Yeah, but it's. But it's interesting because it's a distinction between a one person unicorn or a five person unicorn. Even if you do a five person unicorn, it's the team, right? Yep, and that is not the one person unicorn. That is very solo, by the way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the first. This is also another question. So you talked about distribution, that's being a competitive launch. I agree it's either distribution or that you're very close to the customer you're developing for, so you understand their needs and you can observe them at all times. What are those paths you're going to choose strategically? But let's make a guess. Here Is the first billionaire, the one man show, one woman show. Is that going to be someone who builds a feature in a distribution system, so like to call an API as a product, for example, or a core, some data core that kind of manages stuff as a middle layer thing? Or is it going to be an influencer who builds a little media house around themselves? That's an interesting question and another interesting thing to gamble about, because where does the revenue lie? And sure this thing, guys, the girl that goes for distribution, you will never see them until they reach devaluation. And if they get into media, the other person you will see, they will tell the whole world about it on YouTube. Right, how I reached.
Speaker 3:What do you think? Because I can also see that the one doing the brilliant thing that gets patented and that is in every single machine, that's the unicorn feature man. I can see that happen.
Speaker 1:I mean I, like Gustav Söderström, is the CPO and CTO of Spotify. He gives a lot of talks about AI. I said something, I think, recently that was kind of interesting. He was asking what happened in the AI or AGI future. Potentially, we can see that today we work a lot with things we have to work for. We have to make a living in some way. We have a set of products and services that are either things we have to work for and we have to make a living in some way, and we have a set of products and services that are either stuff you have to do or is stuff you want to do. Want to do means entertainment, means movies and games and things we do for entertainment or stuff we want to do. And then we have stuff we must do. We must have roads, we must have food, we must have buildings and stuff. So the shift potential in the future will go from stuff we must have to stuff we want to have, and the amount of work we will spend, perhaps especially for humans, will move more and more into the stuff we want to do rather than the stuff we must do. And I think that's kind of an interesting insight and I think that, potentially, where the one-person unicorn will move to more and more, it's for things that we want to do, and then the influencer they spoke about comes more and more into play.
Speaker 1:It's not really. The unicorn won't come from a company that provides the best car in the world. Potentially that will be so cheap and easy to do and everything is automized. But the thing it really makes money from is the thing that is scarce, which is actually humans, which is actually you know. Oh, we have an awesome influencer here. Suddenly you can't copy that. You know people won't. It's like playing chess. You know you can see AI winning in chess over humans in any way and form. You still want to watch humans playing chess, and that's scarce. So I think you know that kind of movement towards stuff we want to have rather than must have is going to be the thing in the future, and I think that's what the unicorns are going to be in the future.
Speaker 3:But can we then go back to? Okay, you have explored the space. Where will the unicorn fall out? What? What different unicorns? And I'll circle back to the core question. With that as a context, as a large context, what are the competences that we should go for and what we should educate ourselves to put ourselves in a situation that, even if we don't get to the one where we should educate ourselves to put ourselves in a situation that, even if we don't get to the one unicorn company, you are clearly seeing a trend that you know what, if we have a good damn team of 10, we can do magic If we do it with tech around us. So let's expand from one to 10 or in that neighborhood. What is the competencies and leadership that we want to excel in this context, then? What do we think?
Speaker 2:I think, yeah. Well, one perspective is to say, okay, let's have a piece of software at the core and that's our product. That's more towards the distribution space. Then, if you're going to go into the more human space, you could talk about the agency of tomorrow, the consulting company of tomorrow. Okay, because that's typically where the human is, the product right. So in a consulting company, the human is. Time and material is what we mean, the human being like. Without humans, a consulting company has no product.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah okay, but a technology company has a product because it yeah, okay, but a technology company has a product because it's technology, okay. So this differentiation. So then, if okay, technology company, fine Distribution. You can innovate in many different ways. So you just got to have, if you know someone who will put your little thing in and no one will ever discover it, you charge a little bit. It's like the financial system you charge a little bit. It's like the financial system, you charge a little bit. Every time, all of a sudden, you have your first one, man, woman.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and this context is about understanding the market and the market problem, being able to see it that no one else sees and then being able, to some degree, have the engineering capacity, with a set of tools, to think this out and execute on it. Yep so then you need some engineering skills. Even if you're not an engineer, you need to still configure it, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's take Lovable as an example again. And then you say, okay, they just launched their agency program, so they have their first agency partner. I've seen this in the world of go-to-market tools before that. There are some agencies that have grown at a hyperscale rate because they were consulting by implementing a technology that is so simple that you don't need consulting to implement it, but because people are so slow at adopting there is a big business for it and people are willing to pay a premium, because it doesn't matter how good the technology is unless the people use it.
Speaker 2:So I see us moving into a new time where you know someone is smart enough you could build an agency. I'm not sure if it's an agency part. It's lovable, but you don't need to code to be able then to deliver solutions at really high speed. What if you can build agents to build stuff with lovable that gets delivered and the person who buys the service thinks it's a human thing because you were on the phone with them for five minutes? Yeah, you know. That's where I see. That's how you're able to get the human part. If you're able to do this one action, for example, as okay if you were this influencer. Instead, you do a voice recording and that creates your whole content flower. You have a thought, blah, blah, blah and then it creates your whole content flower with e-learning, with that, this and that, but using that example and now sucking out what, what's the competencies in there?
Speaker 3:I would argue, and even to the point where anton said it on, on, on on the show, what was one of his most, what was he focusing on in his leadership? So I see two major parts to something that's going to be really, really important competencies. One part is this system thinking, because whatever you're doing with all this stuff and you need to imagine not only this on a fluffy level, but you need to figure this industrialized approach out, so this fundamental skill of system thinking and understanding where this goes, and then not just hiring people, but actually, okay, fixing what we need that agent and that agent. So this is system thinking.
Speaker 3:The other one that I think is equally important, and I would argue, even if it's the one-man band or if it's a five-man band and this is Anton's words whoever understands how you create team flow, so that whole thing, we are able to not only think things up, but we are moving and executing in extreme speed. You know the team from idea to shipping goes fast. You know that's the team from idea to shipping goes fast. So that will be very interesting, that even if you're building a company full of agents as co-workers. You need to figure out how to get speed with those co-workers. Or, if you have a team of five, you need to do it. You know finding that we are gelling. So this whole thing of how we find compatibility how we find teamwork to work.
Speaker 1:That's going to be an interesting topic. That could be a good segue into at least one last topic. And then the final question and we've been talking far too long already. That's an interesting thought experiment.
Speaker 1:The question that we potentially were thinking about what does leadership really mean in the future of AI, in an AI era in some sense? I'm not sure if you heard about the Tesla Agile DNA and how they work with teams and leadership in those companies, but it's very different if you haven't heard about it than traditional companies, even very different than hyperscalers and certainly extremely different from traditional companies. But I guess you know. If you have a world of agents as well and you have then humans also in the mix, what does it mean to be a leader potentially in that kind of company? It's a general question, but do you?
Speaker 2:have any thoughts here.
Speaker 2:Something that really clicked for me was when I started. I'm extremely interested in organizational design and leadership, as we've seen when we discussed and when I was at Prototyp, this kind of tech agency, the leader there was also very passionate about leadership. His favorite book was the Advantage by Patrick Liconi. It's a behavioral, organizational scientist, psychologist, and what I experienced when I was at Prototype is that they took the agile. We're talking about speed, which is about velocity, and to be able to experience that, you need to have a process.
Speaker 2:I think that repeats itself in some way. You might not see it as process, but I think the organization needs to start seeing itself more of like a pulse, a pulsation. You need to understand. What pulses do we need to have on a daily basis, a weekly basis, monthly basis, quarterly, yearly, etc. And this is nothing new to product and tech development, right, but it's fairly new when it comes to if you build a company from scratch and are able to live and breathe this way and scale with it Because you're able to do that, then it's a repetitive structure that works in the smallest unit and fractally scales and fractally scales. I think that's the way we reach momentum. And then, you know, dads and moms come to me and they say okay, per, what should I advise my kids to study?
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's a hard question. I'm curious to hear your points of it, I think.
Speaker 3:I've said what I think, or what Elon thinks at least, but elaborate a little bit on Dandesh.
Speaker 1:No, but I believe you know I've been a teacher myself. I worked in university after I studied my PhD and I've been a teacher. I think it's a super important skill and the ability to communicate and be able to coach and be a bit able to coach other people, I think is one of the most important skills you can have. And, that said I I think it's even more important to have um, have subject matter expertise in the subject you're going to teach in um. So I would still say that the core should be either in, like physics or computer science, which will be the core of so many things going forward. And if you have that and then combine that with the ability to communicate and have leadership skills combined with that, then you'll be set for a really good future. I would say.
Speaker 3:And I would add to that, where I think I use the word system thinking, like how you think about this, I, I, even, I even take that whole point with velocity and do the things in on in the different pulses that fractally scales. Or I would do the extreme agile approach that, uh, that is done in several of elon musk companies. That is a system that is done in several of Elon Musk companies. That is a system. That is a system thinking in its core. You know what's the guy who's sort of coaching in Tesla. What's his name? Joe Justice.
Speaker 3:So, joe Justice, in my opinion, he has then fine-tuned a thinking, a thinking how should we operate and and work, what are the fundamental first principles around how we do work and how we think about work, and with a very fundamentally super disciplined view on these first principles. They used to do it and they do it extremely disciplined, so that. So then then it comes back to what Andres said with communication and all that. But I come back to you need to have that kind of machine thinking or whatever you want to call that system thinking, finding your pulse. It's leadership still, I think, yeah, but I've seen leaders who are completely human touch leaders, so they are really good at getting the team to feel happy, but their operation is chaos. We don't have it. What do you mean? Pulse meetings? What do you mean? Should we have an agenda in our meetings? There's no structure right, and then you can take the ones who sort of they've done the bureaucracy shit out of it. So they're really they're over-processed and typically processed from hell, but no principles, no guiding principles, and here we have something which is, in a sense, minimized of the fluff with the softer touch and minimized on the bureaucracy.
Speaker 3:Hardcore on principles, hardcore first principles. What's the mechanics that makes us click? And we are this we don't ever budge on. So I think then you have in the leadership context, you know, you have the human touch, you have the process, process leadership, and here you know we have some sort of principle, hardcore principle oriented, first, principles-oriented leadership. I don't know how to put it. Do you see what I mean? I think it's different. I see a ton of great leaders I'm a bad leader with people in some senses and I've met so many great leaders on that sense but they suck at the principles of doing what they should be doing.
Speaker 2:So for a long time, if you look at I used to work in the hr technology space and more specifically at nova, which is like a global top talent network, and what you could see there is what like what's the hottest thing on the block. Where do people want to go if they want to have a great career and be be looked up to, admired in a sense and I think this is interesting, I mean, when I studied my leadership course at harvard, the exceptional John Paul Rollert leadership he's one of the best thinkers in the world. I think he teaches in business ethics. This is where you get really deep into what leadership is and what's needed. The biggest thing we have to battle as humans is vanity. All of us are driven by vanity. So, with that self-consciousness, conscious, uh, discovering that and realizing that and being aware of that is one of the first principles of being a leader that you have to understand when vanity takes over, in a sense, because self-consciousness as well self-consciousness?
Speaker 2:uh, in a sense. But then, going back to the questions, what do I advise parents to come to me and ask what their kids should study. Well then, you gotta pick what's available in the university system, right, and the high school system you don't necessarily today, because it's so much available that's the question that they're asking asking
Speaker 4:that, so I could tell them go.
Speaker 2:Don't go to school, be entrepreneurs instead, right people do that yeah especially in the us.
Speaker 3:Exactly you humor the mom. She wants her, her kid, to study what do you say?
Speaker 2:in the past, you know, you would say study physics and study business administration, the combo of business school and advanced engineering degree. That was the the ultimate thing. Now I think that it's more physics and behavioral science and systems thinking, and so, instead of the business administration and the foundational courses of that, I believe that the new human sciences is like it's arts, it's the history of ideas, it's anthropology, sociology, psychology psychology.
Speaker 3:I like that idea, the old school. You know if I say that what we thought the double degree handles KOTIHO.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now it's KOTIHO, and what else I don't know, because physics it's learning about the systems of natural sciences, right, which is fundamental, I would argue still, and this is another area where the US has a competitive advantage, because there at college, everyone studies social sciences.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay. So if we go back to the question.
Speaker 2:That's what I would advise.
Speaker 1:Okay, what's the difference? When we have a world of AI, then, With a huge number of AI agents et cetera moving around, will there be a difference in leadership and what skills you should aim for then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that is the difference that needs to happen. That is not about being able to run a company from uh. You know, management is not any longer going to be about finances, because you cannot just be teaser technicality questions because gen ai can handle all the structures needed to run a company. Yeah, basically it's going to be about how good you are at coping with you other human beings and getting them to collaborate, and get them to collaborate.
Speaker 3:And reach goals. Psychology of the market, psychology of getting people working together.
Speaker 2:So, alongside the physics and let's call it behavioral sciences, I believe that everyone needs to operate in at least one other or maybe two other arenas. So learn in practice. We've got to get back to traineeship, being out there and learning, because otherwise you will never know the skill of dealing with people, building companies. So I think I think it's not enough to study the sciences. You also need to, while you're doing it, be doing stuff in the real world okay, so let me add another angle here.
Speaker 3:I agree with this line of thought. There are. Several people have been talking about the core trait, and I'm not sure which school you go to for this, but it's the whole thinking around. We need to all be fundamentally curious. So we're getting to a point now where actually, economies of scale or slow moving, everything is happening so fast. You need to be super adaptive, you need to be you know more, you need to be super humble and maybe rethink many times around, pivoting what you're doing and how you're doing things. So now we're getting to traits such as curiosity and adaptability. So where do I go to school for curiosity and adaptability? There's one argument here. One of the key topics here is to how do we work with methodic doubt, and this is ultimately being trained in scientific thinking.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's what I was thinking.
Speaker 3:So even the STEM topic. The reason we go into the STEM topics is not only because we're going to learn about this, but we need everybody to fundamentally be schooled in scientific thinking, and this is something lacking in leadership today. So I'm reading a book now by Adam Grant Think Again. He's talking about the challenge of relearning and unlearning, and then basically all these psychology studies that they've been doing and of like who succeeds in pivoting? Blah, blah, blah. And he has this. You know, we have different communication styles or we fall into different patterns. So the scientist thinker, and he has the politician who is there to persuade. He had the persecutor who wants to stand his ground, et cetera, et cetera, and the argument we all need more scientific thinking and methodic doubt in order to be willing to shed our old world model into a new world model. So then you're back to the stem again, but it's the scientific thinking that is actually quite important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or what Elon would call the first principle thinking in engineering?
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:What if we don't? I'm not sure what you mean with leadership. A lot of people use different semantics for that.
Speaker 3:I was thinking about that too. Are we talking about leadership or management, or are we confusing the two?
Speaker 1:Is it leadership in general? People management what about if we don't need that in the future? Do you think we will still need people management in the future? Define people management having a manager that you know you're having the appraisals with and is your manager so the difference between being a manager, I argue.
Speaker 3:I go to large companies. They have a lot of managers, but how many leaders do they really have? And then I take a look at leadership traits. Who are the true leaders? Stephen Jobs is famous for picking out these 10-100 people. He didn't care in what role they were sitting, what managerial position they had. So we have administration. In my opinion, what management is all about versus leadership? That's my take, my definition.
Speaker 2:And the question is will we have managers?
Speaker 1:So I think, if you take the broad definition of leadership, meaning any person and every person should aim to be a leader, because that means basically you can guide people to go in the same direction and together you can bring more value, and that's something that everyone should strive for. And then saying people, managers are the people that actually have more of an overhead kind of role, but then you have in traditional companies is kind of huge levels of managers and we don't need it in the future, I think we're going to have facilitators, not managers.
Speaker 3:I think so too. I think this is interesting. What do you mean with that?
Speaker 2:People that are and this is where STEM comes in as well, because I agree with that being able to work in a scientific way, because otherwise everything that you do is lost work. So you've got to attach it to a system, a process or something where you look at how can we?
Speaker 3:improve this.
Speaker 2:How do we improve this over time? Because, that's the only way also to decouple it from yourself. So what is a facilitator? A facilitator is someone who enables a process, a flow, to happen. Basically, and it typically, like you know, when I people talk about facilitating a workshop, facilitating a process, so driving some kind of event in some way.
Speaker 2:Essentially, it's about facilitating a flow for humans that humans go through. And let's take these AI educations that I do, the AI adoption educations. What I essentially do there is I'm somewhat of an expert, but I didn't start by being an expert. The thing that I knew was how to facilitate.
Speaker 3:But can I tweak your vocabulary a little bit? Because to me, what we're also talking about is what is a lot of times called servant leadership. So, instead of having the old school way of a manager, I'm supposed to be the principal deciding and the team is the agents. The teams are doing what they're supposed to be done and the brilliance of the teams flows from the manager. Old school thinking, agile thinking we talk about servant leadership, where I'm here to facilitate you as a team, to have maximum flow, and maybe I'm helping you, guide you on other topics that are more important to us, but I'm really not there to do the job. Or I'm expecting the team to be self-improving in terms of flow, but I'm there to fix the blockers. I'm there to let you fucking do your job.
Speaker 1:Yep, still an overhead in that case. So you're?
Speaker 3:an overhead but as a servant leadership, if you read that book, those books, you're not really set, You're not the product owner.
Speaker 2:No, so why could?
Speaker 1:a facilitator or a servant leader be run by AI.
Speaker 3:I could, potentially, could, I think it could, ah, and then you get to the soft stuff I have a point.
Speaker 1:with all of these questions, I have an example.
Speaker 2:So there's this case of digital meetings. That's even hard to facilitate for a human being, and this became very obvious during the pandemic. Right, oh, shut up. Oh, he's talking now. Someone is in that room and the mic is not on.
Speaker 3:I think AI can do better there.
Speaker 2:Exactly, there's this company, a startup here in Stockholm, called Meatball. Have you tried it? No, they're using an AI facilitator for digital meetings and then it like shifts who's in focus and who should say what and it's exceptionally good, because people are bad at stopping to talk right when they're supposed to stop to talk.
Speaker 3:But I'm curious, anders, why don't you bring this whole home? Because we're going down a rabbit hole, but you're sitting on a thesis.
Speaker 1:I mean, the point is that the Tesla Agile DNA is literally getting rid of managers, and I think so too. So the only thing you have is digital self-management, meaning you basically have an app with AI that's where you do the self-management of yourself.
Speaker 1:And then you can also do peer. You can basically grade people and say who are the most important people, et cetera. That's what's happened when he came and took over Twitter. He basically asked people who do you consider the most important people in this company? Then he got a list of people that are really important not by listening to the manager, but by actually listening to the people and who they thought was most important. The second thing he did was saying who of you are interested in being an engineer. If you're not interested in an engineer, there is the door. And then 80% of the people left, more or less, and he got stuck with the most important people which could run the company?
Speaker 2:I think it's, but it's extreme, right? If you ask the people who worked at sapify when I was the ceo, I, I and what I didn't think about it. But when you said that I I said multiple times like my goal is to make this independent of me as fast as possible. Yes, exactly as this is the way I've been thinking about leadership, because it's not about me. It's about building a system that stands and scales on its own, that enables flow and zone, and what's needed then? Well, you need AI. I was saying that, okay, every individual here should have a dashboard in their phone that they could look at and make decisions on it on a daily basis. So the question is other than data. What do you need? You need a value system. What?
Speaker 2:principles are we operating based upon that, differentiate us as humans and in the way we communicate and behave. That plus data is what you need.
Speaker 3:This is what I mean with the principle in the middle. Yeah, exactly, and then you need a leader.
Speaker 2:And the leader in this case is someone who sets the vision, who says this is where we're going.
Speaker 1:I think everyone is a leader when we're going. We need a vision, yes, but I think everyone should be a leader though.
Speaker 3:The teams of the entities. What you're getting to in the sense, I think, is that the smallest unit is the team, so the team works together. We are all leaders of each other in relation to how our team functions and how it flows, but this is interesting.
Speaker 2:You have like a, let's call it a. I still think the management team, or the founding team in a way, will be there, those who control, they should be engineers as well. Yeah, what's this value system going to be? What's the technology? How does this system work? But then it doesn't necessarily need to be layers in between that and everyone who operates you don't think a founder should be a builder.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they could be, but yeah, they could be, but they got to convene in some way. I think they're going to convene to set a clear direction. You could have the whole group. Let's say you have 100 people or 10 people. You could have the whole group convene and decide on where are we going to go and why. So you're saying that that means that you don't need one person who decides. It's the flat organization, whatever you call it.
Speaker 1:I'm being a bit provocative here on reason, because I think it's fun to challenge people and I'm certainly not saying that this is a good way to do it. But if you take the Tesla Agile DNA, they have this kind of super long-term vision, basically saying we want to be a multi-planetary species or, like Tesla, we want to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. You know, super long term goal. And then everything they do in kind of decision on what they should prioritize working with is automated in how much value it provides and how much closer it comes to the goal. So every bottleneck you have will pop up to the top and say you know, this is what we need to focus on. And then they come in every day and they say Okay, here, I have an every day. Every second more or less, they update this list automatically. So you know all the time, this is what we need to spend time with and money on.
Speaker 1:And it's not the person doing that, of course, but everything is measured according to the long-term vision. So the only thing that needs to be manually designed is the super, super, as they call it, a thousand year goal. Everything else is automated. Super extreme no companies working like this except, I think, these kind of companies, and I think Elon is, of course, operating as a dictator in these companies, which is not something that you would like to work with, but still, I think you can be inspired and see that potentially, this is a bit where you're going, because everything is using ai to automate. You know how to prioritize, what to spend money on and and how to drive the work.
Speaker 3:Ultimately, if we distinguish between management as administration and leadership as leadership the other traits why wouldn't an ai system do the administration better?
Speaker 2:I have a question who is going to, so everyone needs taken care of. Are you saying, then, that it's not going to be the company's role? You know where you get paid for being productive. They're not going to be in any way at charge of taking care of you taking care in like what way? Your human needs. So um emotions, hardships you go through.
Speaker 1:So they have a number of kpis. They have one that says you're supposed to make sure that you and everyone else have fun. That's one of the kpis. So if you do something that improves the funness level of fun in a company, your rating goes up what about mental well-being?
Speaker 2:what about someone dies? What about there's an accident? What about?
Speaker 1:you're probably not going to have that fun.
Speaker 2:That's much fun, then, right no, but I think it's a too simplified view because in a complex world, you know, the thing that's going to matter, things that are going to matter more is when shit hits the fan but maybe in that type of world? You won't. Things will just redistribute automatically and you won't care about that. They will just fall out. They're a weaker link in some way.
Speaker 1:This is, of course, very extreme, but they still manage to guide and drive companies with hundreds of thousands of employees, like Tesla, in this more or less non-managerial kind of way at all.
Speaker 3:It's very strange, right, but it also could be said that Dystopian future.
Speaker 1:It not necessarily is dystopian.
Speaker 3:I think it can be very actually utopian.
Speaker 3:But I think also what should be clarified is that not everybody who has worked with Tesla has found that this works for them. So I think what we are talking about is also, then, okay for some. If you go to the extreme, it will attract a certain personality and a certain person who has a certain personality trait who actually don't think like on the softer side. If I go into the public sector, if I go into any large traditional company, I would argue there's a much broader spectrum of human individual and I think I have to do the normal disclaimer.
Speaker 1:I do not like the behavior of Elon, I do not like the behavior of Trump, so just get that out of the way.
Speaker 3:So you don't think so, but I think you can be inspired as a thought experiment and maybe looking at the pace of different companies working, indicating what happens when we increase the productivity frontier. So what we're talking about is the productivity frontier, and if you're arguing that the normal productivity is at zero and then the hyperscale is 10x, and then we can argue that this is 10x again, so if the whole society is going up in the productivity frontier, then we can get a glimpse on what is life 2030 living at the productivity frontier at the baseline where Tesla is today. Maybe it's super interesting.
Speaker 2:Thank you, for challenging my thinking. I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight.
Speaker 3:But it's about what happens when you escalate the productivity frontier right. And now we're looking at a company that is potentially 10x before the hyperscalers Potentially, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I think, yeah.
Speaker 4:It's super great fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, we should close it now 30,000 reviews.
Speaker 3:Probe woodpeck shuttle transportation long hours, long hours, stressful, no sleep remind you work hard. I mean it is, it's not for everyone I would not like to work there as well. No, I'm not sorry they are very successful.
Speaker 2:So they were saying they're going to compete on price. That's where it's, because they go all in automation a lot of good people there.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's no question that you know people that are super ambitious people in china.
Speaker 4:In china they're very, very, very, very competitive on the market. They work very hard. They don't feel like humans anymore.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've been in china that I got like an allergic reaction to the fact that a human is not seen as a human. It's just a cog in the machinery. Humans don't want to be cogs in the machinery. You want to be unique.
Speaker 1:That's why we have vanity that's the the advantage that can happen in europe then, to actually have some humanity left. I would love that to be true, but but then, then.
Speaker 3:Then it comes back to what game?
Speaker 1:are we playing? What are?
Speaker 4:we competing against what?
Speaker 3:what do we want to build as a society? Right, is this what we want?
Speaker 1:okay, this is, uh, turning out to be far too long. Let me ask you a final question, and let's try not to keep it a rabbit hole this time. We'll see how that goes. But okay, imagine we have an AGI future. Imagine a time where we have an AI that is better than an average co-worker, and perhaps even an ASI, where an AI is better than all humans combined in some way, and that can lead to two extremes.
Speaker 1:We can think of one being very dystopian and the AI is going to try to kill us all, when we have the Terminator and the Skynet is being built now by Stargate Sorry, I didn't say that and then that could be really bad and we have drones that are going to kill us all. Or it could be a utopian where we have AI curing cancer and fixing the climate crisis and we have fixed fusion energy so free energy for everyone and live in a world of abundance where goods and services are basically free for anyone to use. Where do you think we will end up when we have AGI, if we have AGI?
Speaker 2:I'm a cynical optimist, so I would say utopian world, world. And if I'd summarize what drives me in in one sentence, it's how can we leverage good, good leadership and modern technology to improve the world, the society around us? That's, that's the question that is driving my move in my, my professional life and do you also mean if I'm extrapolating what you're saying?
Speaker 3:now, the destiny is in our hands to shape it where we want this to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's about leadership. It's about good leadership and modern technology together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you've run it off there.
Speaker 3:What do you think? I like that. Sharp answer, perfect, clear ending, perfect.
Speaker 1:I like that sharp answer, perfect Clear ending, perfect Awesome. Thank you so much Per Klingveld. Great debate today, I was actually very positively surprised by all the rabbit holes that we ended up with. It's not how we're supposed to do these kind of things, but what the hell.
Speaker 4:It was so much fun.
Speaker 1:It was super fun and I hope you stay on for some more after work discussions off camera. Thank you so much for coming here. Thank you for having me, thank you.
