AIAW Podcast
AIAW Podcast
E151 - AI Meets Product Growth - Tifenn Dano Kwan
In Episode 151 of the AIAW Podcast, we sit down with Tifenn Dano Kwan, CMO at Amplitude and former marketing leader at SAP Ariba and Dropbox, to explore the power of product-led growth, how AI is transforming digital experiences, and the role of behavioral data in shaping smarter marketing strategies. From the future of UI and onboarding to the ethical challenges of AGI, this episode is packed with insights for anyone interested in the intersection of AI, marketing, and product innovation. Tune in for a bold, forward-looking conversation with one of the tech industry's top marketing minds.
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attracting new users, new customers, potential customers and if you build a digital experience, you want them to enter your experience. The moment the users enter the experience, the product teams within your organization are taking over usually and they start building features that are designed for the people who entered the experience to engage into your experience. You can take, for example, a streaming company I don't know what was the name of your main media, spotify, spotify, but do you have Netflix Of?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:course't know what was the name of your main media Spotify but do you have Netflix? Do you have? Okay? So the first time you go into the Netflix, you see a lot of very nice, shiny videos. They all are there to entice you to actually subscribe. But before you subscribe, you're just a visitor and you came there either through word of mouth or because you saw an advertisement or any sort of smart marketing message that sent you to that specific platform. When you start clicking and saying I'm going to try the platform for a couple of days, or you start to subscribe, that's when you are starting to engage into what we call a digital experience and a product.
Anders Arpteg:Is it like the onboarding experience? Then that's correct.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:A product is something that is being built by engineers, software engineers.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:They build a product and their main goal is for you to engage and stay and be retained into their experience so that you can continue to consume whatever experience and content they built for you.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So if you stay in the Netflix application, you're going to consume videos and movies and TV shows and games and all of it, and the more they consume, the more they can make money from you and out of you, and the whole goal from there is to monetize you. What does that mean? We're hoping that at some point you're going to consume into multiple devices. So at some point they're going to say, oh, you've reached your limit of the agreed amount of devices that you're supposed to use, so we're going to ask you to spend more money with us. If you do this and then you start sharing your account with your family, they're going to identify you there and they're going to say, hey, you need to extend to family members and go and buy more, purchase more, and you tried the version with ads. So they're going to say, well, maybe you want to try a version without ads because it's more fun and you don't get interrupted. So then they monetize you, they entice you to spend more so that you become fully optimized for them.
Anders Arpteg:So that's converting from a free tier to a paid tier in some way, that's exactly right.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So when we talk about a product, it's something that is built on a digital platform. That's why we call it a product. It's because somebody built it and the marketing team. What they do is they build programs and campaigns, emails and initiatives and to entice you to either come for the first time into the platform and then stay in the platform, but they also work towards sending you back into the platform.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:We're all busy with our lives. We forget sometimes, we just get distracted. So they are here to remind you. They sent you either a text message or an email or you see maybe an advertising popping into your feed, whether you're on instagram or facebook, just to to remind you that Netflix is still there, and then you'll find yourself remembering and then, before you know it, you log in again and you use it again. That's what marketing does they send you back into that experience. So that's why it's important to see that convergence between what the product teams are doing in the product and what the marketing teams are doing. But the best companies are companies where both teams share insights about you, the user, to say, hey, it's time to send again that sort of messaging pop-up. Marketers, can you do that and when you can do it at scale with profiles of people that look alike. That's how you generate money.
Anders Arpteg:So that's the convergence of product and marketing, though Exactly If you can make those two sync up.
Henrik Göthberg:And essentially it's two feedback loops to each other. That is continuous.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Exactly.
Henrik Göthberg:And in order to have a good feedback loop, you need to share the same point of view. And if you have the challenge that, oh, we have these ideas of what the customer is and what they do, and we are following these stats, kpis, and we do something completely different, you actually have the risk of actually two things. First of all, you have competing messages for what you know, competing insights, so to speak, but ultimately you have, if I look at this from a decision point of view, what should we do or what should we invest in? You have a bro. If you have a broken feedback loop, you get to what is called functional stupidity. This is some, actually, this is alves on the spicer research. You can read out, you can go and google alves on the spicer doing extensive research of what is called academically functional stupidity, which is literally about how come very smart people in the end in large corporations. Corporations sometimes do very stupid things. You know it's because you're making a decision from your point of view, but you're missing some feedback loops.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Essentially, yeah, and you can also start becoming creepy, meaning you're sending the wrong emails and wrong information because you don't have the insights. So do you know the F name example? That's when somebody says, dear F name, happy birthday.
Henrik Göthberg:Exactly.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Right. So that's funny because this morning I was having coffee with my spouse it just happens to be her birthday today and she looked at me and say, ha, I just received a happy birthday from the banker that I don't know. And that's the point, isn't it? It's stupidity because it's not contextual, it's disingenuous Borderline creepy and it misses the basics.
Henrik Göthberg:And you can take this even further, right? So if you have a customer engagement, you're a customer and all of a sudden now you have some problem with an invoice and you are fighting with customer service over it and the issue is not results, right now you're an unhappy customer and then there is no feedback loop to marketing that you're into. We are in a dialogue here, so maybe you shouldn't spam them exactly right now, and this happens all the time.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So literally it happened to me three weeks ago. Let me tell you that story. It's crazy how it happened. Exactly, like you mentioned, an invoicing problem. So I love the brand SubZero. It's a great brand for appliances. I just happened to have had a need for repairs so I called the brand and they were super responsive. Amazing you know how quickly they booked the appointment and came and fixed and repaired it. I just had to give them a phone call at some point because we needed to really align on timing and everything. And they came, they did perfect service. They were really on point. It felt as if they really knew me, or so I thought. And that was in December. And three weeks ago I received this text message about an invoice from them. So and they say please follow this link and pay the invoice. So I was like, wow, what is this? So I clicked the link and it was an invoice for a service call. I'm like what?
Henrik Göthberg:what is this?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:And then I checked my email and they sent me the same email. So literally two minutes after that, I send them an email back and said are you really charging me for the service call that we just had? And six minutes later they just sent me an email back. It was the owner of the company. I said please ignore this automated invoicing. Oh, but they tried still, they tried but, you know it's functional stupidity it is, but it's just disconnected, disconnect, you know. Functional stupidity it is, but it's just disconnected disconnect and functional stupidity.
Henrik Göthberg:It's because it's it's not the teams that are stupid, but because we are working in a functional way with the wrong feedback loops or not sharing the same insight about not sharing disconnected systems and and you have to be so careful about the consistent experience you give to a user, especially if you're in high-end appliances, isn't it?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:and you're spending you're spending a lot of money in the first place. So, uh, those details matter and I've could. I could have really turned them down and moved away, in fact it's not so.
Henrik Göthberg:It because it gave you such a bad feeling in your stomach, even so, that in the end you lose the brand, you lose the loyalty you lose, you lose the whole thing how you feel for the brand.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's that's correct and and, in fact, facts are actually telling us that, in general, if you look at um, some some 38% of customers walk away from very bad experiences.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's a Gartner stat, and out of that stat, what the customers are telling us is that they want very tailored experiences, personal to them, and they don't want to waste time and you can have a really great experience with them. But it takes one mistake to move them away, because they have a choice right and they don't want to be bothered and maybe they have a bad day and you came at the exact wrong time and you annoyed them. So you got to be really, really careful. So this one is um is a big challenge and we all aspire as marketers to drive better personalization. Actually, product teams want you to have a very personalized experience. I'm taking the example of Netflix, because they do it so well. You're in the platform and you watch a TV series and then they try to match you with a percentage rate of the next TV show that you're most likely to see, and then they want you to give feedback on whether you like the show or not so that it can correlate your next preference.
Anders Arpteg:And, of course, using AI to optimize that kind of onboarding experience then as well.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Here we go, yes absolutely Well with that.
Anders Arpteg:We very much like to welcome you here, tiffen Danokvang.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That is correct.
Anders Arpteg:Ah, almost got it, you know, but you're a Chief Marketing Officer at Amplitude. I'm very pleased to have you here, normally from US, but now visiting us here in Stockholm, in Sweden, and very grateful to have you here on the pod. So very welcome here. Thank you for having me. Could you perhaps start to just give a quick background? Who is Stefan? How would you describe your background? How did you end up at Antitude?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So I come from France. I was born in Brittany, west coast of France, and for as long as I remember I always wanted to make it to America. That was my dream since I was a teenager. I studied law and then I went to business school and I started my career in Paris and my first job was in a BI intelligence company called micro strategy we know them you know that.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:You know that brand right, so it still exists today, which is fascinating, and I loved it from day one. I got hooked to the tech world. I had found my purpose. I loved every minute of it and I was an intern at the time and I gelled really well with uh with my boss and she hired me again to another BI uh company called Cognos.
Henrik Göthberg:You know that one too.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Yeah, absolutely. And this, um, so so I started. I worked in Paris for a few years, uh, uh, another year and a half. But I told her. I said you know, at for a few years. Another year and a half. But I told her I said you know, at some point I'm going to knock at your door and I'm going to want to go international. I really want to see the world. I don't want to be stuck in one place. And she kept her word. 18 months later, I knocked at the door and three months after that I packed my bags and went to Australia.
Henrik Göthberg:Australia. Oh, another Australian I lived in Australia in different stints in my life, in university and then working.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Isn't it an incredible, amazing life.
Henrik Göthberg:Whereabouts in Australia.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Sydney.
Henrik Göthberg:Whereabouts in Sydney.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Oh, so I studied in Neutral Bay and then moved to Bronte, bronte, nice, nice, very posh, posh and I I was surfing and motorbiking and all that kind of so I did my university, bachelor, in the university of wulangong, wow, and then I lived.
Henrik Göthberg:When I moved back, like several years later, I lived in manly and then we moved from manly up Northern Beaches to Freshwater one beach up, incredible. My two oldest boys are born in Manly Hospital that actually doesn't exist anymore. There you go.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:It was an incredible experience, Loved it until I moved to another BI company called Business Objects.
Henrik Göthberg:French company Before or after SAP.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So that was before SAP, and what happened is I was offered the opportunity to move to Singapore, which was really a great experience. I was very excited. I was told if you want to expand your career, you have to. You have to move to Singapore. And 10 months after I moved to Singapore, SAP acquired Business Objects and I was the first official Business Objects employee on paper moved to SAP paper Because I saw the opportunity. Immediately I was connected to the SAP team and I decided to go work for them, and it was a great decision, turns out, because my boss, who is American at the time he was on assignment in Singapore decided to move back to the US after a few years, talked about me and I found myself packing my bags again.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So that was a couple of years after, and in 2011, I moved to the US with SAP and, very quickly, was based in San Francisco and did various jobs based in San Francisco and did various jobs landed at SAP Ariba, which was the procurement company acquired by SAP, had a blast, completely adored the team over there, was very fortunate to work for an incredible leader called Alicia Tillman, who became the CMO of SAP and as she moved as the CMO of SAP, she asked me to take over as CMO of SAP Ariba. So I had very big shoes to fill, but that was my first experience as a CMO.
Anders Arpteg:That was in 2011?.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:No 2017. That was my first, so no 2017. 17.
Henrik Göthberg:That was my first, so you had several years in SAP clothes until you got to this CMO role. That's correct.
Anders Arpteg:Yeah, awesome. And at some point you also went to Dropbox, wasn't it? That's right.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So after two years in the role, I decided to expand. Two years in the role, I decided to expand. I wanted to explore the Silicon Valley culture and Dropbox really was born and bred in the Silicon Valley. A completely different culture, completely different company.
Anders Arpteg:In what way? How was the culture different?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:It was. You know, sap is a very I would say, enterprise, b2b, saas company Incredible company. I'm forever grateful for the experience there. But it was a very interesting culture because you have a dual culture between the US and Germany, right, dropbox is a B2C company, completely different way of thinking of organizing and their business model was different and they were really what we call the PLG business product-led growth, product-led growth. So, again, if you remember our conversation, what Dropbox does is they sell an online product, which is the plans that you have to store content, and it's built like a digital product. Most of their revenue, 95% of their revenue, is this digital product and they have a smaller portion of their business which is sales driven, enterprise driven, and at the time, they needed to expand their enterprise business. So, a little bit, you know.
Henrik Göthberg:That was your connection, that was my connection, your SAP background, that's why they were looking at that direction.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's exactly right. So I said, okay, I'm going to try this. And that was my first experience with what we call PLG product-led growth and it fundamentally changed me as a CMO and as a marketer. That's when I realized, oh wow, you can actually drive marketing like a business, you can really drive revenue top down and you can work really really closely with product and product teams. So I had this, this incredible experience, um.
Henrik Göthberg:But this topic of product-led growth. It's so interesting to discuss that in the context of tech, startup, tech, hyperscalers, where sort of if you go back, it wasn't so obvious, but now we have, you know, startup companies In Sweden. Now we have one of the new rising stars, Lovable who sort of built, sort of built an AI-driven engineering experience where, I would argue, they are completely product-led.
Henrik Göthberg:They did a product launch, they've done a very brilliant, smart way of doing that, and then they are doing the whole thing, how you get people hooked. All that, and this is one of the templates coming out of, I would argue, silicon Valley. That is really PLG masters more than anyone.
Anders Arpteg:Well, let's have that as a topic. What does really product-led growth mean? It's an awesome topic. I think we should dig a bit deeper into that soon, because not everybody has really understood the difference here. Before we go there, could you just elaborate a bit more? How did? Because not everybody has really understood the difference here. Before we go there, could?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:you just elaborate a bit more. How did you come to Amplitude? All right, so after Dropbox, I came to work for a company called Colibra.
Henrik Göthberg:They do data governance, data management?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Yes, amazing, amazing. So I worked for Christian and Felix, based in Brussels. I had a blast, really learned a lot, and the recruiter who recruited me to Calibra called me about almost two years later and said Tiffin, whatever you're doing at Calibra, we need there's a company back in San Francisco who needs the same and you're going to like it because they're really, really focused on PLG. They want to actually democratize product-led growth and build a platform to help companies build product-led growth as a business model Moving forward. I'm like huh, I'm curious. Business model moving forward. I'm like huh.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:I'm curious and they introduced me to their president, who's Danish, thomas Hansen, and they said you know, we think you're going to like him. He's European and like you and he worked also at Dropbox, so maybe the stars are going to align. And they did, and we very quickly realized that there was a great opportunity to work together. And we've worked together since then and it's been two and a half years and it's been an amazing journey okay.
Anders Arpteg:So where did it go off to amplitude and how did the colibra like role move into amplitude? I didn't really get that it.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:It was in October 2022.
Anders Arpteg:Okay, so you started off, and it's a new company, then that you started off yourself, or how did the Amplitude journey start for you?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So the recruiter literally took me out of the company.
Henrik Göthberg:Headhunting. Yes, so you got whisked away from Christian, exactly Whisked away from Christian and I love the team.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:They're amazing people. It's just the opportunity for Amplitude was too good and it was in a space that I was really passionate about how big was Amplitude at that time 600 employees. And today it's close to 800 employees. We're growing.
Anders Arpteg:Cool, awesome. Should we jump into product-led growth? We've spoken about it so much already. I think it would be nice to just close the topic a bit more. And I don't understand exactly because it's a good segue.
Henrik Göthberg:You know in before we jump into going deep on amplitude and you know what it does and all that. Let's really start with the product category in. Let's do it.
Anders Arpteg:I think it's a great idea yeah, and then later go into amplitude and see what I think it's a great idea, yeah, and then later go into Amplitude and see what they do. It's a good segue, good, okay. So please, for a non-marketing expert I'm not, but Henrik is but still for a newbie like me, try to explain. You know what does really product-led growth mean and how can you have that as a business model?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:of course, of course. So a more traditional business model is what we call sales led model. You call somebody or you go on the website, you fill in a form and somebody from the company calls you and they are sales people. So their business model is you know. They call you, say helloiffin, we saw that you visited our page. You left an inquiry about potential interest into our products and we would like to talk to you and maybe show you a demo of the products or tell you more about their functionalities. Let's meet and then you end up having a cycle of conversations with the salespeople. They start showing you a pricing model. You agree. Then you move to negotiating the terms of the contracts. Sometimes it takes a few months, depending on how big your interest is. If you are a company interested into a service, it could take up to 9, 10, 12 months. If you're an enterprise and you want to buy, let's say, a very big software platform or tool.
Henrik Göthberg:Like ERP, like complex sales, exactly Like ERP, but data warehouse, you know those kind of things.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Complex sales. When it's complex, it requires really some explanation. Then the salesperson is going to come to you and they're going to try to convince you and sometimes they even do proof of concepts and they use your own data and they're going to try to demo you what the tool is about. That's the traditional sales-led model. When you implement a product-led model, everything happens online. That's a self-service model.
Anders Arpteg:So more word-of-mouth kind of marketing. You call it that.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:No, actually, what you do is you land, you end up into the website and you have an opportunity to buy the service online without necessarily any sales interaction. It's a swipe of a credit card you are buying.
Anders Arpteg:How do they find the website then? Is it ad-driven or how do you find it?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So it can be organic or it can be paid or ad-driven. It's the same way. You could do it even for sales offerings, it's just that the mechanism to interact with you is different. One mechanism is through humans, salespeople, and it's usually more technical, more complex, like you mentioned. The other option is self-service, meaning there is not necessarily a human to talk to you. You do all of it online.
Anders Arpteg:So you take the initiative yourself and you find the place. And you find it either through organic I guess word of mouth kind of ways then or through an ad or something like that.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So you can take the initiative yourself or you can be induced into taking the initiative, which is the clever advertising. You see an advertising, you click, you can have a QR code or a URL that sends you and then you decide the price point, usually for a self-serving. A self-serve offering is usually much lower. You don't and it's less complex. You have very direct exposure to the price point, very direct exposure to the content and the features and the capabilities and the functionalities, and you can learn about it online. Then, when you are convinced that you know enough, you pick up your credit card, you enter it and you decide if you want to pay for a week, a month or a year. That's typically the times of the type of subscriptions that you do, so product led. The best example again is Netflix. You can pay for, you can use a trial version and you can pay monthly and you can decide if you go for an annual plan. That is the product-led growth example.
Henrik Göthberg:It happens online so let's, I'm going to do some examples and then we're going to discuss is this are they all product-led or not? I mean, like so netflix, okay it. This is some sort of subscription based, correct. It's digital and you're consuming it, streaming it. So I would then argue Spotify is also product-led, correct. Then I go into e-commerce Amazon, and Amazon is doing advertising and then I go in and buy stuff on their platform. Would we argue that this considered product-led?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:But here is where it gets interesting. You could have also a loyalty program. Let's say you go to Burger King and you want to buy a burger. A burger is a product, but it's a physical product. But sometimes they also send you to their website to allow you to redeem rewards. They create loyalty programs. This is also a digital product and you can sign up to a loyalty program, accumulate points and actually redeem those into physical locations or even online and get some delivery out of it. That is also a version of what we call product-led growth, because the company Burger King created a digital product which is an incentive, a rewards program which led you to actually consume and buy. You don't know it, but it really induced you to buy something. So they created that product, that digital product, to allow you to buy an actual physical product.
Anders Arpteg:Does it have to be a digital product, or can it be actually buying a burger at Burger King?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Well, typically it's usually data-driven product elements, but I think it finds its origin into the creation of digital experiences and digital products. But it can be coupled with physical offerings and physical products.
Henrik Göthberg:And can we exemplify what this could be in B2B space versus B2C, versus direct to consumer? I mean like. So I mean like because some of the streaming services, like Netflix, I would kind of put that in D2C.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:It is yes, yes Category.
Henrik Göthberg:And and then of course, you can have e-commerce approaches, even, you know, buying spare parts for your truck absolutely so you can.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:You can have absolutely some plg offerings in the b2b space. I'll give you the example of an australian company called canva. What canva does is they offer design online, design services online online so you buy a plan to use canva and design pretty much everything you want online. That's a b2b, because businesses are going to buy that capability you could argue adobe photoshop 100, like the creative, creative cloud that's, that's right. Product-led approach that's right. That's another example and I would have both.
Henrik Göthberg:They have both, yeah, they have both right, but a lot of. I wouldn't know this split between product-led and how many people have bought photoshop in a small business like I have, and of course I haven't talked to anyone, I'm just bought it on online that's it and that's the magic, and before you know it, they're monetizing you and they're asking you to come back.
Anders Arpteg:The subscription okay, I think I got it.
Henrik Göthberg:Do we last question do we connect the topic of subscription-led base models and you know when you're looking for arr as a core kpi? Is that more, or can you see correlation or causation here? I don't know how to say it, but do you think product-led is a lot of time also associated with subscription-based models, or are they actually two different animals and that you can combine them? But you don't have to no, you can.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:This is completely correlated and what's interesting is sometimes companies have dual, multiple models. They start with product-led for very simple offerings that just require.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:I mean, it's never completely simple, but let's just say, for the sake of the argument, simpler low entry products that you can buy with a swipe of a credit card, but then they have also more complex options that require sales intervention.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Yes, exactly, the magic of product led sales is, say, you start your startup, you don't have a lot of money, you want to start simple with the offering, so you go and buy online. But over time you remain loyal to the service. But your company is growing, your needs are expanding and you find yourself limited with the original self-service product-led offering you bought because now you need more and it's time for you to talk to the sales team because your requirements are more complex. So there is a direct correlation between you starting on a self-serve product-led offering and moving into an enterprise sales-led offering. So a lot of companies' business models are built this way. They want you to convert from the self-service original product offering to a more mature, more complex, more expensive plan and model, which is sales. So sales are using the self-service as a feed, as an incubator, as a source of leads and pipeline for them to generate revenue in the near future.
Henrik Göthberg:So I think it's very clear now that you can actually argue that you can identify different value pools and you can identify a part of your offering that is easy enough to understand, less complexity, that they can consume it. It leaves me. Do you have the stats? Do you have a view on breaking point between when is the complexity high enough and how do you define that? Or is that something that businesses figure out?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:The business is studying it a lot. It's called the maturity curve, like there is a maturity model for each company and you want them to mature right. You want them to come to a point where they're going to mature from a startup to a midsize company, to an enterprise. So it varies, of course, but every company has their secret sauce as to when is a good time to reach that maturity model. But it's a big one, of course.
Anders Arpteg:Tiffan. What's Amplitude? What are their product offerings?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:We help companies build better products, digital products and experiences. Digital products and experiences. So Amplitude was created by three founders who met each other when they were at MIT very deeply talented, and the reason they created the company is they were interacting with the product and engineering teams and e-commerce companies and softwares and what they realized is that they were very frustrated. They wanted to build amazing websites, amazing apps, and 95% of their products were failing. It's still relevant today. A lot of companies build apps and products and they fail and they said we need to change that. We need to really help companies, especially digital companies, digital native companies build better products. We need to equip them to go beyond the 95% failure rate that they're seeing. That was the premise, that was the objective and the mission. I think the bigger, longer term vision of Amplitude is a world where technology never leaves you frustrated. They want to remove the friction that you can see out of technology. Everybody wants to build great fancy products Spotify, netflix, all of it but quite often we continue to stay a little frustrated with technology.
Anders Arpteg:Sounds like some AI is necessary there.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Yeah, outages I won't name the big one that happened a few months ago, where blue screens appeared on all airports. You see what I'm talking about. That happens. That's technology that's failing you. Or when you receive insensitive communications from tech companies and others that just don't know your name. Or you know technology is amazing until it's not, and sometimes it can really disrupt and frustrate you. So they want to make sure that when companies build applications online, e-commerce websites, that they work well and they are really supporting customers and users instead of frustrating them.
Anders Arpteg:How do you help companies build better digital products?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's a great question. Thank you for asking it. So we have figured that when you build a website or an app, at the behind the hood of a website there is data. You can literally track the user journey and the behavior through data. You, as a person, you go. You go on the Netflix website. They can track everything that you do on the website, every click, you take, every mouse movement on a page, which page you go to, why is it that you're not consuming a very specific set of movies, or how long you stay, how long you hesitate in the choices that you're going to make. They're going to track also how often you use the tools, where you go specifically, and, based on that, they are even able to understand what you're most likely to consume next, what we call predictive analytics. All of this is data, all of these are user insights, and what Aplitude does is that they create a profile of you, the user, and they're able to record every single step you take into the platform. Now imagine you do this for every single user and you build patterns, recognition patterns, behavioral patterns. The behaviors is the routine that you have and, based on that routine, it helps product teams improve the flow of the users from page to page. It helps them understand why is it that sometimes the flow is not great. Maybe they put a button in the wrong place, maybe the visualization of the page is not great, maybe there is a bug in the system that they need to identify very quickly. This is what they do right and, at the same token, the marketing teams are capable of working hand in hand with those product teams to know the preferences of those users.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Once they know what they like, they're going to send you. Hey, you watched the first three seasons of Game of Thrones. Guess what the next season is available? The first three seasons of Game of Thrones. Guess what the next season is available? White Lotus, for example, is a very famous series coming up. If they know that you've watched religiously every single season, they're going to remind you that the next season is coming up so that they make sure that you stay on the platform. Why do they want you to stay on the platform? Because obviously, they don't want you to go to another streaming platform.
Henrik Göthberg:They want to keep you interested, that's what they do, and let's see if I follow now when we started the pod with the convergence topic. But in the end, now you have a data set or a profile of a person and you can now, of course, use that for different objectives. One objective is to get the better flow and the more seamless user experience, and the other one is and see the behavior from that angle, and the other one is to see, you know, from a marketing point of view. You know marketing objectives, sales objectives in relation to the same thing, sales objectives in relation to the same thing. So here now this is, I guess, based on that. You're working on this profile, this convergence and this. We have this data. Why don't you use it? You should use it and you see, okay, the more they can converge on the same understanding, then we can go and fix the end-to-end journey.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's exactly right.
Henrik Göthberg:Starting earlier and ending later.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's exactly right. That's. And ending later that's exactly right. That's how the best teams nowadays work. They use the same insights. They may have different roles. A product team is going to try to keep the users engaged when they're in the product, in the platform engaging and keep them really excited about the content. The marketers are going to try to activate and send them back into the platform, remind them that it's time to log in again because there's a next show that's just showing up.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:They want you to come back Exactly right. And then, if they do it at the right time, at the right moment on the right surface, they identify you and say, hey, it's time to log into your mobile app to do it, because we know you are more likely to watch movies on your mobile. They're going to be able to personalize the messaging and send you back there. And then the product team takes the relay and make sure that you stay engaged as long as possible into the platform. The more engaged you are, the more likely you're going to consume more and not go and explore other platforms and other offerings out there.
Henrik Göthberg:And you used to also position our amplitude. Okay, so amplitude will help with some of this stuff. What has been the traditional or the normal ways to think and work about these topics? We have the A-B testing approaches that we have done for many, many years. So what are the other ways that we have tried to? Oh, everybody wants a great customer journey, right? So what are the other ways?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So A-B testing, I would say, is critical. It's become almost table stakes. But you have to do experiments in the product, in the logged in version, but also outside of the product, on the web logged out version. So logged in and logged out come hand in hand together. The logged out is when you're not yet at a subscribed customer. You're just zooming and looking and exploring. But that's equally important. To experiment that part of the journey, or the logged in one is when you are already a customer, but you still need to optimize. So you got to do what we call web experimentation and you need to do product feature experimentation to do it at scale. So that's a well-known element and it needs to be routine. You A-B test and you have an ability to do it extremely quickly and AI can help you just automatically. You know, make sure that, whatever, the best version of your experiment gets immediately activated. So that's one example.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:The other one that we're doing also is surveying, surveying and providing surveys to users into the experience, to seek feedback, real-time feedback on the experience that they have. So it could be a quiz. It could be something where they detect that you spent too much time, you've been stuck on a specific page and it could be that you lost and you need guidance. So let's say we take the example of Canva. You're designing, you have subscribed a design plan with Canva and you're a marketer and you need to design, I would say, an advertisement. So you're into the design tool and you're struggling. The UI is not clear. You are stuck. The system is going to identify that you're stuck and they're going to say, hey, do you need help? Do you want anything? So there's something that comes in to you and ask you what help do you need help? Do you want anything? So there's something that comes in to you and ask you what help do you need? Are you stuck for a particular reason? And then the future of those experiences. I'm describing literally what we're trying to get every single customer of ours to do.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Moving forward is an ability to ask basically the platform some help if you need to, an ability to get some guidance directly from it. And from time to time they'll ask you if you're happy with your experience or not. So it's a simple yes or no and it could be an emoji coming out or they could ask you to rate your experience. All that kind of feedback is very important. Sometimes they also want you to tell them. The reason they want you to tell them is so that they can understand the words that you are typing, your language, and that becomes part of LLM right, the more natural language that the system is trying to learn. But the best way to do it is by using the language that you, as the user, are using on a daily basis. So imagine that in a platform.
Anders Arpteg:Moving to that topic, I mean you mentioned AI now a number of times and LLMs, etc. Perhaps you could just elaborate a bit more on you know how AI potentially can be used to understand the user behavior and the journey that they have.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Yeah, so we're doing this already with Amplitude. So our mission is to help companies build better products, and we're following a journey on AI that is very exciting. The things that we've started doing is predictive right Predictive AI. The things that we've started doing is predictive right Predictive AI. We've created things like predictive cohorts queries, where we help, you know, our users just build better or detect better predictive analytics so that they can build the next web page, the next feature. This has been done pretty well. We've recently, over the past couple of months, we launched also what we called Ask Amplitude. That's your generative AI bar. A lot of companies have been doing it. That's now really become something that we use all the time and we've seen an explosion of usage from.
Anders Arpteg:So that's a chatbot, basically in the user interface that you can interact with. You can interact.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:They give you summaries. For example, if you're working on a web page and you want to optimize a web page, you can replay the page and then they can give you a short summary of records and what the user specifically did at a point in the page.
Henrik Göthberg:So it's a bit like Amplitude has all this data and you can now converse it as a product team or as a marketing team to come up with ideas on what happened here. Really, or Correct? Is that how I should understand it? Like a diagnostic, or? And then you can put recommendations on it. Okay.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's right.
Henrik Göthberg:How do you understand this profile? This happened. How would you improve it Predictively? Maybe you should change the flow in this way.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's correct. So now we're moving towards a lot more guidance. So in the past and I call it the search economy everybody was sort of searching. It was detective work, on every app, in every website. You just need to look for yourself. Right, you do that investigative work.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:We're moving towards the answer modeling, answer economy. We want answers right now. We don't want to spend time searching anymore. It's exhausting. Searching too much it's exhausting. Searching too much is confusing. It creates friction, frustration. So the answer economy is fast approaching. That is going to become really a game changer for a lot of companies. So now you want the answer and we're very excited because the actual AI trend and the AI innovation I would say that we are following and that I'm most excited about is our amplitude agents. We are going to launch our amplitude agents very soon Most likely we're looking for Q2 as our launch Tune in, if you're interested. But this is where we are starting to develop agents. It's the next level. Instead of having a search bar where you have an ask me something, the agents are prompting you directly on recommendations. They're saying hey, tiffin or John, whatever. You're doing the following experiment right now or you're working on the page.
Anders Arpteg:Here are three things you should do to optimize this page and basically becoming proactive instead of reactive, correct, okay, right so that's the next level.
Henrik Göthberg:But but I was trying to figure out, follow you and I just want to check if I understood we're going from a search economy to an answer economy. The pathway here is like first you have the first step of amplitude world is to get the bloody data to be able to see the profile, and then you have the detective work to go from data to insight, and now from insight we want to go to action and results, and so we want to go on this sort of intelligence ladder, or whatever you want to call it, that from from. You know, first we, we did, this system, took us here, and then we as human had to fill in the rest. And now, all of a sudden, we want it. It moves faster and faster and faster. So we get to a point where actually we get decision augmentation, decision recommendation, decision support on what to actually do Correct or what to fix or what to do, and the key word is faster.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:I think that the key benefit, in my view, of AI and the way it actually augments and benefits us humans, is we do things faster and it allows us to do other things earlier. You see, if we do and complete tasks faster, or even in the future, we don't even need to do those tasks. They will be done for you. That's the goal. Then you can focus on other things and you can complete more, so you can become more productive. And I think that, at the end of the day, if you ask the Amplitude founders what their dream would be is a self-improving product world they are self-improving. You wake up and they have built themselves into something better. They found the anomalies themselves, they actually course corrected, they healed themselves, they learned themselves and you have a new version of the product when you wake up.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's the goal and that's the vision moving forward, and it's really having technology work for the humans instead of humans adapt to technology. The technology adapts to you instead of humans adapting to technology. Adapting to technology is frustrating and it's exhausting and it's creating a lot of friction and confusion. If we can flip the script and say there will be one day a world where technology adapts to you, supports you, helps you in everything that you do. A world where technology adapts to you, supports you, helps you in everything that you do, that could be world-changing for us at a human scale.
Henrik Göthberg:But I think this is a quite underlying, profound message here. If I take a broader context on AI, we have this narrative that I think is flawed oh, the AI will replace humans. Actually, what we're doing with AI, we are augmenting the operating model, we are reengineering the work of product teams and marketing teams. And why do we do that? Well, the whole productivity frontier of the world is moving faster and faster and faster, so the obsolescence comes. Moving faster and faster and faster, so the obsolescence comes.
Henrik Göthberg:Or you know, you, the way we did it, if you know 10 years ago, you know, if I look 10 years ahead, the pace that we have in relation to how we are fixing stuff, how we're doing that. That pace is probably not enough if the whole world is moving at another pace. But then that is not a replacement narrative, that is an augmentation narrative in relation to deal with speed or deal with the productivity frontier. And I think this is the underlying message I hear now, when we get to the place where the systems adapt to you, it indicates we are there, we are doing our job. Our job is to grow ARR, for-a-r-r, for instance, and now we need to think about the bigger picture, so we can't get stuck in the smaller picture all the time. That doesn't allow us to do that. So in that sense this is an augmentation story.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:It's an augmentation and I think it's going to be so if we stay positive with the outcome of it. It's going to improve our way of life, our way of living. It's going to help us prevent catastrophes. I'm thinking that one of the biggest opportunities we have is to positively help fight climate change. It's one of the biggest challenges that our society is facing and it's coming up fast, and I do believe that this is going to allow us to get better.
Anders Arpteg:It seems like we're jumping to the AGI future. We have a question about that.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So let's stay away from it.
Anders Arpteg:And before we go there, I think still, you mentioned a bit about, you know, the potential future interface, how we can have a more smooth experience and not get as annoyed with technology. I can just share. You know, when I was at Spotify, we had a vision about how the user interface should look like, which was basically a big play button, nothing else. I love that. You should just press the button and it should play exactly what you want to hear when you want to hear it.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:You should just press the button and it should play exactly what you want to hear when you want to hear it.
Anders Arpteg:I wish, as a marketer, I could say to my team just click, play and then generate miraculously pipeline for me and for the team. What do you think the future interface will be? Do you think that's a good way to phrase it? Other people are saying, like the, you take a horrible experience, which actually I think still is good. It's just was timed really poorly. Was the office um gem if you remember the mic is clip, yeah, the clippy.
Anders Arpteg:remember you're too young perhaps for that, but in the beginning of the 90s at least, they had in microsoft office the assistant, where you could ask questions, and it was basically the type of chatbots that we have today, but very poorly implemented. But still, the idea of having some kind of a butler, like a human butler, that basically understands you perfectly, knows what you like and don't like, do some tasks automatically and asks you for anything that may be hard to understand Could be a good interface.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So you know, I'm French, so I am very biased to good dining and good experiences, and the best butler is the one you don't see. That only appears when you're starting to have a need and they magically know about it before you know it yourself and they're just quietly behind, just appearing when you need it.
Henrik Göthberg:I love this metaphor. It's like the glass is getting empty. When your wine is getting empty. It doesn't get completely empty, but it's not refilled until it should be refilled. That's exactly right and I'm talking over there and, oh, my glass is full again.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:But there's a difference between fine dining and sometimes a little bit of frustrating dining. When the people come to you and say, how are you doing? Every five minutes they interrupt you. You're having a great deep conversation and they just can't help it. But come and say, how are you doing, would you like something else? And you get interrupted and you get frustrated. A great butler experience or dining is they quietly disappear behind but they magically appear when you actually need it without you prompting them. They've been trained to know exactly when to interact, but they never do it in a point where that frustrates you. That is, I think, the future. You would have things working for you behind the scenes. You don't even know it. It just doesn't need to be so in your face.
Henrik Göthberg:That's an interesting metaphor. I like that. I mean like I'm thinking about that whole thing where you know how it is truly fine dining. It's a little bit like as soon as you lift your head up and you're not talking, he's there. He can see that.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:She can see that. I would love that. I would like that experience to be as anonymous as possible. You make it personal when you need it, but anonymous most of the time, quietly, in the background. But it works and it's efficient.
Henrik Göthberg:I haven't thought about it like that. Have you thought about it like that before, Anders?
Anders Arpteg:The butler has been one of my favorite metaph, of metaphors as well. I think it's, it's cool but, but, but.
Henrik Göthberg:But the way you define what is a good butler to what is a master butler, I mean, this is, it's the one that adapts to you.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Remember that that vision, that technology adapts to you. So if I don't want you to be there in my face, you know without saying that's it.
Anders Arpteg:Yeah, that's it you've spoken a lot about, like the onboarding experience of digital products. What's the onboarding experience for amplitude? Let's, say a company now listen to this and they sound. This are thinking like this sounds amazing. I want to have this kind of experience. You know, augmenting my digital products what should they do and how is that experience?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So they need to go and visit Amplitudecom. That's the first step to get started. They should probably also listen to Spencer Skates, our fearless leader. He's generally an amazing, amazing person. He's very brilliant. You'll find him on YouTube clips. You person.
Henrik Göthberg:He's very brilliant and you find him on youtube clips.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Or you find him or you'll find him on yeah that I think this one's going to be really interesting. You could get started with that with us with our free offering. That's the starter we do and and I think you can really easily um get started with us. It's free and you can really get pretty much a great glimpse. If you're a startup, you can start for free as well. We have a scholarship program. It's a very generous program that allows you to have pretty much access to every single element of our platform for free for a year, so that's a good one. It's a really good way to experience this.
Anders Arpteg:And from a technical point of view, you sign up here on the website and I guess you should do some kind of integration into the website. You have yourself right.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Yes, you're going to have to ingest a little bit of data. There's a bit of one line of code that you can do. It's very simple, it's very, very simple. And then you get started and whether you're a product team or a marketing team, you can, you can get set up and get started.
Henrik Göthberg:Who is your, who is your ideal customer?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Oh, we have so. So we have 2,700 plus customers right now. We have many profiles. We play around multiple industries, many sizes of of companies, from very small startups to very large enterprises. I gave you a few names and they all Spotify actually is. I gave you a few names and they all Spotify actually is. So our, I would say the ideal way to start with Amplitude is to be comfortable and excited about taking a data-driven approach to your business. That's the best profile you got to lead your business with data in mind. That's a big shift, right? You don't want to guess your work. You come because data is the lifeblood of your business and digital experiences is something that you really believe is going to augment your business. So the ideal customer profile for us is the one that embraces data as a business.
Henrik Göthberg:It has nothing really to do with size. It has more to do with their mindset and their strategy.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:You are absolutely right.
Anders Arpteg:Can you elaborate a bit more on how you normally either categorize different users if you have personas that you're trying to build up or cohorts that you build and some of the classical ways like lifetime value is personas that you're trying to build up or cohorts that you build and prep. You know some of the classical ways like lifetime value is that something you're trying to estimate? Just elaborate a bit more. You know how do you try to understand the so.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So we have three key, I would say, categories of personas. We have product teams, product chief product officers, product managers, growth product people. They all consume it and they're very they were the primary original, I would say buyer of Amplitude. We have marketers, so think digital marketers, growth marketers, marketing ops, marketing analytics. All of them are interested in our solution. And then the last group is data data analyst, digital teams, data teams, it teams very involved.
Anders Arpteg:Sorry, I misspoke a bit or was unclear. I was thinking more. If you get started with Amplitude, you have it on your website and you in some way need to understand. Let's say, that a company like Lovable were to embrace your solution and you started to gather the data and in some way try to analyze the different customers that they're having and want to optimize their journey. Can you just elaborate a bit more without giving away the secret sauce? Perhaps you know what is. How do you use the data to gain insights about different? You know either lifetime value kind of estimates for the customers.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:So whether you, let's say, you're a product team or a marketing team, you are into the platform.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:You have an ability to tap into some functionalities of the platform that could be aligned to your core expertise. So say, you are a product manager, right, and your goal is to focus on the onboarding and activation of new users on the platform. You have an ability to just really focus on onboarding flows and optimize those flows. So typically we call it engagement flows. So you have acquisition, retention, engagement flows into our platform. You decide you want to optimize very specific adoption and onboarding steps and you have an ability to look into the data. You go to the profile of the user and you check very specific paths that they take at the onboarding stage of their journey. So you have an ability to interact with that type of data into the platform. You could identify it by users, by cohorts of users. You go pretty deep into that analysis and you can decide, for example, okay, I need to look at a specific sequence of adoption for the first seven days or the first 30 days. You could put some time bound on it and very specific criterion element, and then you want to make sure that you can optimize that path. How do we know, as a product manager, that they are converting? Well, they are activating, they are actually onboarding well, all the conversions that you see into the pages, the click-throughs, are working very well. You have an ability to dissect the path that they take and also the most optimal path or the least optimal path that they take, from the first day of activation all the way to the seventh day, the 14th day, all the way to beyond activation. So your job is going to be to optimize that specific engagement.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:You can use measures like weekly active users, for example. For example. That's one of the things you can do if you want to track usage. You can look at sustained product engagement how long companies come and sustain their engagement over a certain period of time. You can work on all of this. If you are a marketer and your job is to improve your CAC to LTV ratio, you can do the same exercise. You can look at which channels your users came from. You have an attribution model that is loaded into the amplitude platform. You can identify the return of those channels, estimate a lifetime value measurement and measure it against your cost of acquisitions. That gives you a CAC to LTV ratio. You can do all of this with the support of amplitude, so it depends on the things that you want to optimize for and the metrics and the use cases that you're using. Mostly, but typically, we are organizing the platform around acquisition use cases, engagement, activation, onboarding use cases, retention use cases, or what we call productivity and efficiency use cases. So all things around our eye.
Henrik Göthberg:Awesome, that's super cool. And yeah, please, yes, time is flying away.
Anders Arpteg:So, you can continue more but I have to leave in like 10 minutes, so I'd love to get a bit more into AI parts as well.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:All right.
Anders Arpteg:And you mentioned. You know you're using AI, of course, yourself to try to, you know, provide an awesome service to your customers, but we can also see AI being, you know, adapted and used across the industry for all products and services we have. Would that change, you think, how you would help customers, or how do you see AI changing the digital product in general in coming years? If you think products like chat, tbt, for example, or others are, you know, built in different ways, perhaps they need to. You know people should consider how they should change their digital products to be should change their digital products to be future safe in some way.
Henrik Göthberg:Oh, I see, if I flip it, I would. I would frame it a little bit different, but it's the same question with ai, the fundamental user experience of your customers changes all of a sudden. Now we might not even have a UI, a web page, an app in the way we think about it. So all of a sudden it's 90% conversational. So when you go into a web page, your customer digital, product-led growth is now a conversation, it's not a web page. How does that change amplitude?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:That's a, a conversation, it's not a webpage. How does that change Amplitude? That's a good one. So I was having dinner last night with some customers and prospects and one of them said the tooling we have, whether it's Amplitude or other platforms I'm thinking about Brace, since you're talking about conversations, right For him. He said I expect those and my teams to deliver what they're supposed to deliver. I expect those tools to work.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:What I want, in addition to them doing the work, is coming up with the next level of innovations, coming up with things that I don't know. So that was, to me, it was one of the most interesting comments from that dinner last night is are we generating technologies that are just delivering baseline or are we blown away? Are we advised? Are we waking up in the morning and they're going to leapfrog us? They're going to come up with brand new innovations, things that we didn't know. There should be an expectation that AI, in addition to augment our work, literally reinvent it. We wake up and they thought about something we didn't know was possible. That, to me, would be really great. I think if I have that expectation is I want to learn from AI. I don't want AI to just learn from me. I want to learn from AI. I want them to surprise me with something that didn't know existed. That, to me, would be. The next level is self-improving self-healing with the benefit of augmenting my own reality for something that I didn't know was possible paces will go but.
Henrik Göthberg:But this will be called the innovation that you need to. That, you will see, obvious is depending on what the innovation in the larger society around ui will be. So it's a very interesting to follow the times, so to speak. To follow the societal view on ux or ui will be quite the interesting journey. That's journey the next 10 years. I look forward to it. I look forward to it too.
Anders Arpteg:And if we just continue that kind of questioning and think more philosophically or more futuristic and potentially positive but you could turn it negative if you want what do you think AI will potentially change in our society If there was something it really loved? It may not be sure that it will, but if there is something that you really love AI to help out with, what would that be?
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Can I think very big and can.
Anders Arpteg:I think beyond, yeah, super big.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:I actually. Obviously there are things they can do, hopefully over the next 10, 15, 20 years. Climate change comes to mind, surgery made easier, so that we can have much more advancements in the health care environment and the way we heal people in general. But I'm thinking much further than that. To me, space exploration is the ability to completely think of the world exponentially. We are so limited by ourselves. I don't think that we'll ever be able to expand and explore the confines of our own universe without AI. I'm actually convinced that we need AI to go further than what the human mind is capable of doing, and that, to me, is the real exploration. In my view, it's the one where I think there is potentially a big gamble is, uh, when ai is going to become smarter than us. But maybe there's a reason for it, and maybe the reason is that we are exploring far beyond the confines of our own lives and our own, uh view of the, the world and the universe. I think that that, to me, is what really excites me.
Anders Arpteg:Very interesting, well put.
Henrik Göthberg:Yeah, I think it leads us to the final question.
Anders Arpteg:We usually have a final or the standard ending question, and you can imagine that AGI will happen at some point, and there are a lot of definitions of what AGI can mean, but one that I like, at least, is what sam oldman usually says, which is ai will or agi will happen when you will have an ai that is on equal level to an average co-worker now what that means is basically today, I think you know we see ai system with a huge amount of knowledge, but they're horrible in reasoning and they're really bad at acting and taking.
Anders Arpteg:You know agentic kind of actions, but they're horrible in reasoning and they're really bad at acting and taking. You know agentic kind of actions. But that will change and we will have ai system that becomes increasingly better at reasoning. We already started to see it and we are seeing also agentic capabilities improving. So imagine that happens. Who knows, in two years, five years, 50 years or something. Then you can think of two extreme outcomes. One is the dystopian kind of horrible matrix and the Terminator kind of world where the machine is trying to kill all humans. Right, it could happen, perhaps. Or it could be the other utopian, which you partly spoke about, which is the utopian future where AI had cured cancer and we've fixed climate change and perhaps we live in a world of abundance where products and services are basically free for all of us to use and we can, yeah, live in this world of abundance. What do you think will happen?
Henrik Göthberg:easy question where are you? Way on the spectrum a few years ago.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:I can't remember exactly how old I was and when it was, but I read this article from a French politician. He used to be the prime minister of France many, many years ago, I think 30, 20, 20 or 30 years ago.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:His name is Michel Rocard. Okay, I don't know if you know even him, but he wrote an article about the culture of convenience and entertainment. His hypothesis was that the world will move towards us human beings working less and being entertained more. Think of it like we are close to the week of four days. People want to work less, they want to be entertained and they want to be conveniently entertained. The standard of living have significantly improved. There's a lot of economic studies that prove that this is.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:We live in an era that has lifted poverty so much more, so much faster than any other era, and to me, a lot of things point to a culture of convenience 24-7. And people just want everything when they want it. And you know like I'm thinking, wally, have you seen that animated movie? That, to me, feels very real, a bit scary, isn't it? But something that resonates with me, whether it's because I read that article a few years ago or not, but I actually think that cultural convenience is what I see uh coming as what people want, actually more than uh working sounds amazing and actually we see some countries I think it's netherland that's actually gone down from 40-hour work weeks to 35.
Anders Arpteg:Perhaps that trend will continue. Could be good, I guess.
Henrik Göthberg:And always in that sense someone says oh, but we are not happy if we're not working, if we don't have anything to do. It's the first line of thought, but then actually we're always busy. So if you want to do and work, you can pursue that, but your passion might be your work Somewhere else. You know in reality, then I can be a pro surfer. I really want to. I don't need to make money on my pro surfing career anymore, so that's okay.
Anders Arpteg:Well, you don't need it to, perhaps in the future? There is a great book from Nick Bostrom called Deep Utopia, and he basically answers that question as well. He says there are so many people today that don't work. I mean, you have kids, you know they're still happy. You have retired people.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Ask the French. Ask the French. I can only say that because I'm French.
Henrik Göthberg:And on that bombshell, yeah.
Anders Arpteg:Thank you so much, stefan, for joining us. It was a true pleasure to have you here, and we learned a lot, so thank you so much for coming.
Tifenn Dano Kwan:Thank you very much for having me.
