49. Mike Butcher MBE: Tech, Truth and Finding the Path

Mike Butcher (M.B.E.) is the Founder and Editor of Pathfounders. He was formerly the Editor-at-large for TechCrunch for 18 years. He has been a technology journalist since 1995.

He has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK.

He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interviewed Tony Blair, Dmitry Medvedev, Kevin Spacey, Lily Cole, Pavel Durov, Jimmy Wales, and many other tech leaders and celebrities.

Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, and Bloomberg. He has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech startup policy, as well as being a judge on The Apprentice UK.

GQ magazine named him one of the 100 Most Connected Men in the UK. He is the co-founder the non-profits Techfugees.com, TechVets.co, and Startup Coalition.
 
He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.
 

Transcript

Intro 0:00

What's it worth? Uh-uh. Uh-oh. Uh-uh. What's it worth? Uh-uh. Uh-uh.

Simon Hill 0:09

Welcome back to the Total Innovation Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Simon Hill. Today's guest is someone who has had one of the best seats in the house for the evolution of modern technology. He's seen the industry move from the early days of SaaS through cloud, mobile platforms, venture capital evolution, European startups, AI, media disruption, and all the hype cycles in between. He's a journalist, founder, commentator, convener, and in many ways one of the great connectors of the European technology ecosystem. I've known him somewhat tangentially since around 2007, when I was at Huddle and the London tech scene was still finding its feat. Back then the ecosystem was smaller, scrappier, more intimate, and still working out whether Europe could really produce globally significant technology companies. Quite a lot has changed since then. Some of it for the better, some of it perhaps less so. And that is exactly why I wanted to have this conversation. It's not just a discussion about tech journalism or startups or AI or Europe or the future of media. It's about all of those things through the eyes of someone who's watched the industry grow up, lose some of its innocence, reinvent itself, and now perhaps face faces one of its most consequential chapters yet. And now with the launch of Path Founders, he's once again building something from scratch as well. Something designed to help the ecosystem make sense of where it is going next. So today we're going to talk about tech, truth, hype, journalism, founders, your AI, and what it really means to find a path. And with that, I'm delighted to welcome Mike Butcher to the Total Innovation Podcast. Welcome, Mike. Thank you very much for having me. That was quite an introduction. We work hard, but you know, we have such esteemed guests that it's uh it's hard to distill all the all the all the great work that's gone on. Um I'm sure I'm about to dis drastically disappoint you. You shall not disappoint me, Mike. I know that you can uh you can pull on on years and years of experience and somewhere deep inside that mind of yours, you've seen and done it all. So uh um I was gonna start with, you know, most people will know you. Um, you know, if you haven't, I don't know what rock they've been under for the last uh 20 plus years. But do you want to just quickly introduce yourself?

Mike Butcher 2:27

I'm sure I'm sure lots of people don't know me at all, but um I I did pretty much go to the opening of an envelope for about uh 18 years around Europe. So uh a few people of a certain vintage know me, yeah. Uh but um I mean the exciting thing is that there's a there's a whole new wave and a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Europe, particularly, and I had a lot of fun meeting a lot of people also in the US. But uh the the short precy with me is uh uh journalist since roughly the mid-90s, um, covering with the internet industry, as it was called then, all the way through British um magazines and newspapers to uh American magazines like the Industry Standard, Long Gong, R.I.P., um, and then joining uh freelancing for the FT, The Guardian, and others, and then joining TechCrunch, which is still going, thank you, thank goodness, um, in 2000 and freelancing in 2006 and joining in 2007, and then having a big run all the way out up to midway, midway summer, roughly last year. And and now um in the last five, six months, I've launched uh my new uh media vehicle called Pathfounders.

Simon Hill 3:48

Cool, and congratulations, and we'll get onto that a little bit later. Um, I'm gonna start and focus a bit of our conversation on that sort of early tech crunchy era and you know, go back to that 2007 period when we started to cross paths, and we've got a few mutual friends um uh from those days and you know, some stories of debauchery and other things as well. But when you go back to that early SAS period of you know in London, in Europe, um, and then, but also the hype, I guess, that was flying around at that point in time. What does this, what does the moment today feel like in terms of you know what we were seeing back then? How do we draw parallels? Because I think there are some in terms of the paradigms that we're seeing right now. Um, but perhaps there's differences as well. So, you know, like casting your mind back, thinking about where we sit, how do you see you know what we can take and what we can learn perhaps from from those early days?

Mike Butcher 4:44

Yes, well, as they say, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. And I think that the parallels are there in the sense that the web 2.0 era, as they called it back then, was built around the emergence of viable open source software, viable web tools, treating the web as a platform for applications as opposed to a method of distributing HTML pages, and uh and the rise of APIs, which led to the sort of Web 2.0 boom of that era, um, and a lot of innovation, as we all know, of course, and that combined with the the launch of the iPhone and the proliferation of smartphones and the application era uh and a huge SaaS era as well, um, led all the way up to, you know, let's say just prior to pre-COVID. Um what's similar about this era, I think, is the is the is the openness that sorry the AI is kind of like a reinvention of open source. Now you can build with tools in the same way that you built with open source. There's a lot of a lot of like parallels and a lot of, you know, a lot of open source AI, let's face it. Um, and that means that you get a flowering of uh stuff, uh startups, entrepreneurs, uh just you know, people just throwing mud against the wall, see what sticks. Um, and that's very much where the the era we're in again. But of course, because generative AI is just so powerful and it's changing the nature of how software is developed, and is in it's just amazing. It's and so native AI startups, I mean, some of these kids are incredibly young actually, um, are have never known an era of anything else. So they are building natively with AI from day one, right up from when they kind of graduated from high school or whatever or university. So that's that is very interesting, very different. And I think this sort of previous, say, let's call it so 10 years or um 10 or 15 years, where we kind of went up to the point where to do startups, you still required quite a lot of heavy lift. You'd had to raise money, you had to hire a lot of people, things became quite expensive. Um you know, and then the kind of false dawn of 2021, where things went absolutely 2020, 2021, when tech went absolutely nuts. And, you know, some few people exited at that right time, and then there was a real slump. AI has now come along to sort of reinvigorate startups and entrepreneurialism. And so there's huge parallels with the sort of the early era, as you mentioned, of sort of the the 2006, seven, five, six, seven, eight era.

Simon Hill 7:44

Yeah. Do you do you think that the parallels are there in a I don't want to ask this question? I I feel like do you think it's super hypey? Like perhaps, you know, the sort of around the dot-com bubble era before it sort of figured out what it was, or do you think it's more, there's more meat and more substance to it? I'm kind of building this into a question around value that we'll get onto in a second as well. But like how how much hype is behind the hype? And I know there's a lot of words been written around all of this, and there's, you know, for everything from the sort of SAS job apocalypse to this is all you know hot air and gonna you know, not gonna make a blind bit of difference. You're covering lots of this very up close and personal, meeting the founders, seeing it. Um, what's your feeling around it?

Mike Butcher 8:28

I think actually, I mean, in a technological sense, oddly enough, it might sound odd to me saying this, but I think we've been through the hype period when people were effectively building AI wrappers. Um, and now because that obviously that that that was never going to stand up to much scrutiny, um, the real companies have started to emerge. Um, there's all obviously that the hype that we get in the snake eating its tail, where OpenAI, you know, buys NVIDIA chips and NVIDIA invests in open AI and all those similar stories. Uh, but at the startup level, they have worked out how to mix and match these AI models. Specialists train them on a specialist vertical such as lore or industrial robotics or whatever it is. And that there's real, you know, real sort of substance behind uh many of these companies. Of course, not there's there's also a lot of kind of silliness, uh, but there's also a lot of reinvention of what was SaaS into this other era. I was interviewing on my podcast um the founder of uh compliance, compliance with the why, Richard Cole, who has built a compliance-based startup. Now, that would have been a SaaS product um 10 years ago, and now it's a totally native AI company and it goes into a company and figures out all of its compliance issues and natively, agentically figures out where things are going wrong, what where where are the holes that need to be filled, etc. So there's a total reinvention of SaaS uh in that way. And it's um, but of course that's having kind of other effects, whether or not it replaces some companies or some are reinvented, or some existing companies having to completely retool themselves as fast as possible. Uh that's also happening.

Simon Hill 10:25

Yeah, I think also, and I sort of lead into a question around value. One of the one of the hypotheses that we run to or I run to around the sort of the SaaS economy of the last, what are we talking, 20 odd years now, right? It's been a while, is it's sold a better story of value than the value it often created, right? Not all of them and not not not unilaterally, but but but arguably potentially true. Both in terms of, you know, not necessarily in terms of the enterprise value, but I'm thinking about the actual value from a jobs to be done perspective, from an outcomes perspective for the businesses that were there. We're seeing these AI businesses now. I'm in Stockholm, and there's several of them that are flying through hundreds of millions of ARR at a speed that we just can't begin to imagine, yet also losing vast amounts of money that don't necessarily understand, even to quote their own leaders, you know, whether they've got product market fit yet and what the unit economics will look like in the future. And so, do you think that these businesses really understand what the value, how they're going to function in the future, right? From a from a from a business model perspective and from the value that they're truly creating? Because on the flip side, you're seeing the AI, as you said earlier, some of the snake hole stuff around having to pay you lots of money to invest, to get credits, to do other things, but also now this this last couple of weeks, seeing the labs effectively having to go into bed with the systems integrators and the consultancies because you know enterprise adoption is not where they want it to be, right? Mass market consumer adoption, arguably yes, but enterprise adoption, no. And so there's huge gray zones really in the innovation and the value creation still that's there. Is that just early journey stuff and these things all shake out? Or is it do we think that there's a a business model in there that might not work and this may shake out in a totally different way? What's your big question? What do you think?

Mike Butcher 12:20

Yes, uh, well, I mean, uh people talk in the press about the AI, sorry, sorry, the AI apocalypse or the SaaS apocalypse. But I think in the industry we're aware of something more like the token apocalypse, where companies are running ahead of themselves so fast, uh, like the roadrunner in the cartoon running off the edge of the cliff and realizing there's not enough ground underneath them, that um, you know, raising money to buy as much compute as possible is, you know, a real, real issue. And having to give it away for uh much less than it's costing you is a real issue. Um, and whether or not VC funding rounds can keep up with that growth, um, because getting compute into the system is a very, very different ball game than just adding another rack of servers as as you did in the in the old SaaS days. Uh uh that said, Um, these companies are obviously somewhere along the line figuring it out as they go, in the famous phrase of uh building a plane, throwing yourself off a cliff and building a plane on the way down, um, uh, like the lovables, as you mentioned, of the of this world. Uh a lot of a lot of VCs uh rather jealously looking for other kinds of lovables out there, as much as uh they're obviously trying to uh get to product market fit and and ARR as much as possible. Uh but you know, you take companies like um uh well um you might have to edit this bet out. Uh oh god, what is it called? What's the voice one? Um 11 Labs? Yeah. So I'll just restart that.

Intro 14:10

Yeah.

Mike Butcher 14:11

So so if you take companies like 11 Labs, I mean total product market fit, and I mean raising off the back of that. Um so as much as it is obviously expensive to to bring in compute and and to uh serve some of these applications, these they're also figuring it out very, very quickly as well. And I think you know that would that make sense, doesn't it? Because they, if they are AI native, they are getting to product market very, very quickly because they are employing AI uh from day one, from the earliest stages, and that's really, really helping their iteration process. Um but but yeah, I mean it's still very, you know, there's quite a lot of hype and fluff and you know, all the kinds of things that you get in a sort of bubble style economy like we got we have now in tech.

Simon Hill 15:03

What are you so you've covered thousands of TAP founders, you've met, you know, bags of them over the years, right? And um, and then as you mentioned earlier now, like many of the founders we're seeing, you know, and and also the founding teams around them are very young, right? You know, they're coming in and and the the skills that are being developed are, you know, it's not just the businesses that is being built in the plane as you've thrown yourself off the cliff before you hit the ground. It's like the skills are being developed real time as well, right? And for some of these skills, six months into knowing nothing about it, you know everything about it, and you can earn a footballer's salary, you know, in a in a small number of places, even though you don't really know much more than you knew before, right? That's the level of expertise that we've got. I guess, you know, do you think that there is something that sort of endures over the periods of what we've seen in all of this that's still, you know, is it the founder? Is it the idea? Does it not really matter who the founder is? And uh, you know, there are lots of founders listening to this podcast who are, you know, part of the innovation value value economy. What's your what's your perspective on this era? And does it take a different founder now than before? Or is it kind of much, much of the same? And that the core things that make a founder endure and a business endure is not much different in the AI era than it than it was, you know, two years ago or three years ago?

Mike Butcher 16:21

I I don't think it's a a function of the AI era so much as the development of the technology industry over some time now. Now, if you look at history, um Silicon Valley had uh uh has had 50, 60 more years to develop from the you know, from Fairchild semiconductors all the way up to the present day. Um in Europe, uh this really kind of got going abortively in the late 90s. Uh there was a quite a quite the nuclear winter for uh many years until um the last 15, 20 years, when we've had a sort of uh a Cretaceous period uh out of which the the dinosaurs have managed to crawl out of the of the of the uh of the water and um turned into mammals. And I think that the kind of founder that you had, say 10, 15 years ago, especially in Europe, I'm talking specifically about Europe now, is much less wet behind the ears than those days. Uh not necessarily I'm not not dissing that that era. That was a fantastic era, uh, but they had to kind of make up, make it up as they went along. What's going on now is I think you see there's so much sort of history and so much uh knowledge about how to do startups. I mean, you just go on YouTube and you can learn a lot of it yourself. Um, and you get a very, I think some very mature, um, clever, smart people coming, even if they are young, knowing how to do product market fit, um, knowing how to talk as well about what they're doing. Um, like because I mean, you and I have seen many kind of tech crush disrupt battlefields uh and similar types of pitch competitions, is that they've become very, very uh adept at actually communicating what they do. Um, and I think that the we've gone through a period, frankly, uh especially in Europe where people are sort of falling over their words and not really understanding how to actually get what they want to do what they want to do across. I've always said that 50% of being an entrepreneur is actually about communication. Um, and if you can't communicate what you're doing, because you're trying to do something brand new, effectively, um, then you're in trouble. But they this new era of entrepreneurs are very good, much better much better than the previous era communication. I mean, take someone like Alex from Wave, he's to me like just such a standout entrepreneur. Um, although he's a he's a New Zealander, but he's been in the UK for many years, an incredibly good communicator about what he's doing with Wave and Autonomous Driving, and many similar other examples. Um, and I think that's very, very interesting to watch uh that this new wave of entrepreneurs are really, really good at um telling you what they're actually doing and how and and uh you know going on that, taking you on that journey.

Simon Hill 19:21

Yeah, I think I think I agree. I think what the ecosystem is building, let's zoom in on that Europe piece and let's talk about it from a storytelling side as well. So um journalists are, you know, I guess at the core of it, you know, we're trying to we're trying to tell stories in the journalism world and trying to bring them to life in a variety of different ways. Um, I I'm gonna go down the route first of all of talking about your journalistic career and the launch of Pathfounders, right? So, what was it that you what led you to launch it? What is the what is the mission you're trying to do? What gap did you see from your entrepreneurial lens of all these things that you've learned from other entrepreneurs that you're trying to bring to market with Pathfounders?

Mike Butcher 20:02

Well, the the short story is that um, and this is public information, so I'm not saying anything new, which is that the uh the team in Europe from TechCrunch was made redundant as a result of the sale of TechCrunch uh last year. And I sort of surveyed the market and and I sat back and I thought, well, I there are some great outlets, don't get me wrong, doing great work out there. But I I think that there's a place now in the sort of maturity of the market to sit back and let's actually think about what's going on. Let's try and dig in a bit. Instead of, you know, I think we've we've all been through the hype cycle of the last 15 years, um, and and now we're going through another one, obviously. Um instead of doing it again, instead of sort of repeating, repeating yourself and expecting the same outcome, which is the way to madness, instead of doing that, come sit back and go, you know what, if it if X and Y story is happening, if these guys have raised money, if this entrepreneur's just come out the gate, if this VC has got a new fund, what can we say about that that maybe is not just the typical run-of-the-mill tech story? Um, and that's kind of what I wanted to do with Pathfounders. I'm very bootstrappy. I'm I'm quite a believer in bootstrapping, and I'm also not too naive to know that um that when you do a media company, it's kind of a different play to doing a tech company. You're doing really you're doing content, you're doing media, you're doing journalism, and slightly different thing to to doing tech startups. So I'm not about to go out and raise a billion dollars. Um, but I do want to put out put out good quality journalism, and I'm just working out the business model, that product model. Market fit, ha ha ha, uh, about what to do with that. And it's I'm still slightly in beta, shall we say, but um it's it's uh definitely coming together over the last sort of five, four or five, six months uh as I kind of dig in into the into the whole thing. And you know, broke a nice story this week about um uh VC doing a major pivot, um, local globe slash in Phoenix Court. Um had one of the biggest days of traffic I've ever had in the since I launched. Um so something something seems to be working, people seem to like it. Um, and I think that that's the kind of journalism I want to do going forward and the bringing something new to the party as opposed to probably something that you we're all pretty familiar with.

Simon Hill 22:45

Yeah, it feels like there's a bit of community building around it as well, right? And whether by you know, by being pushed or or or or by being um you know leaning into the opportunity, I think it's the perfect time as well, right? From a European perspective, all the things we spoke about in 2007 to 2026 probably didn't have this moment in time that is you know geopolitically driven in some ways, but also imperative from a European perspective, because we have a defining role, I think, to play in this next generation that that AI brings and the new world brings as well. Europe plays a very specific role, right? And one that sometimes we're criticized for, but actually I think is a super important one. That you know, I'm not saying Pathfounders is exclusively European, maybe it is, but I think the more we have someone that's giving that European voice and building that community and and reflecting what's happening around the world, but with a sort of European lens, is I think is super powerful, right? And I think, you know, so if that's the strategy, great. If it's not, or if it broadly is, and that's what you fall into, great as well. Because I think it adds it adds a huge amount.

Mike Butcher 23:52

I think that I'm going to pick up on something that you've just said, which was a European lens, but we're not uh the way that I launched Pathfounders is I didn't say this is a European title. Uh I said that we're still about tech, we're still about entrepreneurs, we're still about the investors who back those people. Uh, our strapline is code, capital, and consequences. It's not news from Europe or whatever.

Intro 24:18

Yeah.

Mike Butcher 24:19

Uh because, you know, as uh tech isn't tech is a an international global industry. So I'm not going to box myself in. Uh that said, there is, as you alluded to, geopolitical changes going on, which are really quite vast. Uh, we're all very familiar with uh the Trump administration's move to become, you know, well, he said it's on the tin, America first. And that has made other countries and other middle powers, as Mark Carney famously said, operate in a different way. That means also that we now look at the rise of AI through uh what is effectively starting to be called a sovereign AI lens, um, meaning that it's starting to become issues around national security, GDP growth. And that means that take a company like Mistral, for instance, which frankly they've probably had plenty of offers, they could almost certainly have exited to one of the big US big tech platforms um years ago, really, frankly, at this point. But somewhere along the line, their investors, and I wouldn't be surprised, the French government as well, has whispered in their ear saying, actually, guys, we'd like you to stay here and we're gonna back you to the hilt. To that end, in fact, there was a deal not very long ago where um the French government backed a deal to effectively give them a nuclear power station uh in France um uh with uh with several partners. Go and look it up if you don't believe me. And uh certainly a large swath of that power for that compute. Um, so all of the governments are looking at this. I mean, you'd be have to live under a rock not to know that it's becoming a sovereign issue. Saudi Arabia, uh the UAE are all developing their own sovereign technologies. Some of those governments are even saying that they're gonna have AI sitting on the boards of of the cabinet, uh, the cabinet office, the you know, the an AI minister, even for that, for some of them. So it's it's changing the whole nature of technology. So as much as I would quite be totally happy to sit back and just cover little startups for the rest of my days, it's all become quite geopolitical and quite um consequential to the sort of direction of the planet and the direction of of big uh of regions like Europe, continents like Europe.

Simon Hill 26:50

Um perhaps more merging in those three areas of your three C's as well, right? Code capital consequences than than maybe maybe ever before as well, right? At a national level, and I think Macron has done some super interesting stuff in France of being very present in a way that I don't see in the UK and and other European places as much from a top level perspective. Um would help if the Prime Minister was spending more of his time thinking about those things and other things right now, but let's not go there, is uh um is is is you know what are the ramifications of this, I guess, from your perspective, and also the money's the money's off the charts, right? You know, I was looking through the WhatsApp channel that you've got for the stuff that you're pushing out, and like the the volumes, if you could wind that back a couple of years from a European perspective, the argument was always the ambition's here, but the money's not. And now suddenly, and I know a lot of this money is still kind of quasi-American in in many ways, but the amounts of money being raised, we saw you know, recursive labs, who I was with one of the founders of that in the valley a few weeks ago, you know, from a Europe with a very European lens, put, you know, I think headquartered in the UK officially, raising $650 million on an idea, right? Let's be honest. It's it's you know, it's pre-revenue for some time. We've got the you know the Yan Lacoons business, you know, promising not to deliver much for a very long time, raising 2 billion or something, right? Like it's been one of those weeks in numbers that we've not seen in European tech ever. Um, you know, and that's why I asked the hype question earlier, but but also that money is, you know, that money brings a concentration in an ecosystem, and maybe it holds that talent here. And so maybe these are the foundational days of, you know, maybe you should just have a European lens, Mike. But I know, I know that the money elsewhere is much bigger as it goes. But I guess, yeah, what do you how do you feel? Like, how do you see the European cluster, the European ecosystem building out on this over the next, you know, two, three, four years from your perspective?

Mike Butcher 28:50

Well, there's two things to say. One is sure, I'm based in London and um I have a you know quite a European outlook, UK European outlook. But I think the way I like to cover tech is not to sit in a kind of vacuum. I we need to understand how uh the ecosystem and some of the startups coming out of Europe are developing as against the things that happen in the valley. And if you just talk to yourself and you just just talk to your own ecosystem, then you miss you know the bigger, bigger plays that are going on elsewhere and internationally. So you always talk about things in context, and that's why um, not to name names, but some of the media outlets I think are just a little bit myopic, and I'd rather just talk about things uh in the context of what's going on internationally and especially what's coming out of the valley. But um, the second thing is the money-raising side of things is is there because of the talent, and the talent is quite clearly there. Um, and in fact, I did a story this the other day with the with the VC who just said we've we've gone through such a you know sort of a fascinating era of the last 20 years. Um, and when they started their VC, they they had to prove to their LPs that there was going to be the startups and the talent that coming out of Europe, and that's definitely happened. It's 100% happened. Um, and that's why both the native uh money that coming out of Europe, out of London, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, wherever, is doubling down on the talent here, and also it the US VC money is also flying in as well. Um, because you have that talent. And let's also be honest, some of the AI labs in San Francisco are built by people who are essentially European to begin with, anyway. So um, so there's that. So the talent is here, the money is here, the money goes further because the talent is a little bit cheaper, shall we say, to hire. Um, and the the international uh uh impact because they're building, you know, real cutting-edge companies, uh, means that they'll effectively stay here, a lot of them. They will stay here. Um uh whether where they IPO or where they exit is a whole other story, but they will stay here because the talent's here and the money has arrived. So you're feeling more optimistic about the European ecosystem and tech scene then. Yes, I am optimistic. I'm also a journalist, by the way, but uh so I I'm not always going to be super, you know. There's a lot of strange things going on right now about London maxing and uh and saying that London's amazing. Now, listen, I get it. London is amazing. Um, I built a uh co-working space back in the day for startups, uh, because I kind of felt in the I did an office, um, and we did it in a place called Silicon Roundabouts, yes. And that was our version of London Maxing. Um, and and it is fantastic. What we did actually do was we made the property prices go up in the old street in the shortage. Um, and but they were sure there were some great startups. Um, but we also have to be aware that a lot of the money floating around is a lot of it is US, a lot of it's corporate, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon have all got AI offices in famously in King's Cross now. Uh, but those are corporate jobs, and those startups that are gonna compete with those people are are they're gonna have to raise a lot more money to hire company, you know, engineers out of those companies. Uh, so we do need to kind of keep a level head about this, frankly. Uh, but it's quite clear that um there's some great stuff going on in Europe, and uh uh and I also think it's really exciting to see totally different approaches to AI emerging out of Europe that are this stuff like this recursive intelligence approach, neurosymbolic from unlikely AI, which I think is a highly undervalued company. Um, so different approaches that don't necessarily require huge amounts of power and compute. Um, and even if they do, you know, that's be coming on stream. So I think it's a really interesting time.

Simon Hill 32:57

Yeah, it is fascinating, and I'm sure they'll all appreciate those shout-out of names as well. And there's a bag of them. I think it's also good to see these other clusters developing, right? You know, silicon um roundabout in um in London, you know, sort of 2007, 8, 9, 10, 11 onwards or so. Sweden's got its Silicon Valhalla that that, you know, where they've where there's a number of these different areas as well, and and et cetera, et cetera, right? Like these clusters now are starting to form that are actually uh and they're trying to pull talent in, right? It's interesting watching lovable recruit from the US and other places, some of the superstars that have been around, you know, US SaaS and other businesses coming and not just working remotely, but actually coming and being on the ground, right? Like taking a policy that you move to Europe, you move to Stockholm, you live here and do that work. In a, you know, in a world of remote first and everything else, I think that's quite an important economic statement that wraps around, you know, and and um uh geographic statement that wraps around the ecosystem building that needs to happen. Because I still think it's been a bit underbaked, right? We've done some great stuff, but think of many of the great founders that grew up with us in the 2007 to you know, whatever 20 era, most of them relocated to the valley, right? They're kind of and they're all around that part of the world, and they've you know, and it's been good for them, right? But there's not that many that stuck around in uh in Europe and UK. Maybe we'll see a bit more of that going forward.

Mike Butcher 34:19

I yeah, there was definitely a British invasion, I know, I remember, um, in in the valley of 20, 15 years ago. Um, and that that had definitely happened. And yeah, and I think some young developers who are getting, you know, picked up by Y Combinator. Um uh, and that's just gonna happen. That's just frankly, that's just business. Uh, it's going to happen. But the you know, there are still companies doing thinking, you know what, we're gonna be part of an ecosystem that's rapidly developing in clusters like uh King's Cross or clusters like in in Paris near uh Jan Lukun's AI company or in Stockholm uh around the whole lovable scene. So uh so that's it really interesting to see develop as well. So but obviously individuals make their choices about where they're gonna go. Exactly.

Simon Hill 35:09

I'm gonna move a little bit onto some of the sort of ethics and outlook side of this, and like a bit from a journalistic perspective, and you know, obviously drawing on all the things that you're seeing. First of all, you know, this you've got a media outlet, and you mentioned earlier, you know, why you're doing that and maybe some of the lenses and perspectives of other commentators? Given the narrative around AI, which is quite bifurcated, right? Like there's you know, super positive people and super dystopian people, and you know, the reality is going to be somewhere in between. But I'm gonna ask you first of all about journalism. Do you think that, you know, uh a very loaded question, Mike. Is independent journalism more important now because the technology itself has become so powerful? I think how much of the US stock market is is agglomerated in just a small number of firms, for example, and it's it's similar in Europe, I suspect, if we wind forward a few years' time now on some of these things as well.

Mike Butcher 36:07

Yeah, well, we it's tough times for journalism because not necessarily because of AI, although in part it is, but because the business model's sort of collapsed. The traffic uh has gone down. That's a lot of that's down to AI summaries. Uh, for instance, I saw a story the other day that said that uh uh health uh outlets, health news and health uh websites uh are kind of collapsed because the all of the AI summaries about health that appear on AI models is sucking up all the attention. Um people don't go to these kind of websites anymore. Um, you've got uh subscriptions all over the place. So people have kind of bill shock now. You know, suddenly they realize they've subscribed to 15 Substacks and they're going realize that they're all paying $10, $20 a month and it's a little bit too much. Um, so there's a little bit of problems going on there.

Simon Hill 37:02

The uh and yeah, you launched a new journalism company this year, so last year.

Mike Butcher 37:06

So yeah. Well, I mean, I'm hoping to be the uh cockroach that survives the nuclear winter. I'm sure you will. Yeah. And uh the and which is why I'm bootstrapping and building out rather and doing product market fit instead of kind of going a little bit too crazy. And um, and you know, I'm gonna be doing events. Um, we'll also be launching something called Pathfounders Network, which will be bringing sort of monetizing effectively that community that we're building out, um, especially of entrepreneurs. Um, but the uh the the issue, the wider issue, as you alluded to with media, is that it does have to require still being independent. Um, I note that, for instance, a lot of tech companies are hiring journalists to do branded content. Um uh and you know, that's all very well. I mean, I just call it marketing effectively, but for some reason, some of these people are they're saying it's still journalism. Well, I'm afraid it's not. We've seen that uh TBPN was acquired by OpenAI. Um, and I'm it is very much like a kind of foot bunch of football commentators uh suddenly being owned by, you know, the brand that sponsors Arsenal or something. Well, I mean, it's all very well, and I'm sure they're very entertaining, and they are entertaining. And to be fair to them, they've said that they're not journalists and they don't behave like journalists. But if they comment on AI, I'm afraid it's just not credible anymore. Yeah. You know, you're not credible if you're owned by open AI and you're commenting on an A OpenAI. Yes, you are very entertaining, and yes, you can bang a gong or sound a horn, but it's not, it's not journalism, it's not, and I think I'm interested, and I think a lot of other people are interested in the real truth, the objective truth. And that's you don't really get to it other than through independent journalism. So um good luck to everybody and you know, get acquired by whoever you like, but don't pretend that uh you're still doing journalism.

Simon Hill 39:05

Yeah, no, I I hear you, and that's why I think, you know, and I as I said earlier, I really think the community and the network part of this, because this one-to-many sort of a channel of, yeah, I'm gonna push it out, whether it's paid and premium or whether it's you know, whatever else it might be, um, from a business model perspective is gonna keep struggling. But the network, the community is the knowledge is all in there, right? Like, and you know, you can break stories, great, if you can, you know, if you can package them in ways that make it easier for people to understand them, great. But the more we can learn from each other as a group of people, and you know, there's plenty of those networks, but I feel like there's an independent orchestration role that actually an independent journalist can come and have real credibility in in uh in doing all of this. So good luck with it. One of the words in your code capital consequences is you know, looks at, I guess, you know, both those, that that positive and more negative aspect of uh of things. And if it doesn't, I'm gonna read into it, it does anyway. And I'm gonna talk to you about both angles of that really and start with the more negative side of what worries you most about where technology is heading at the moment, if anything.

Mike Butcher 40:11

Well, I think the obvious big worry that everybody has, um, especially if you've got kids, and I've got kids uh who my my two sons are in university, uh, is what are they going to do? Um, and where are the jobs? Um, what's what is the world of work and the economy going to look like when we've gone through this change over the next couple of years when AI is having a huge, huge impact on the workforce and on um and how the economy operates? Um and are our politicians going to help us figure it out, or are they going to be very much behind the curve and we end up with very sort of platform oligarchy where there's maybe four or five companies running everything on the planet, um, as opposed to maybe a previous era where it was possible to kind of you know break out and uh do a whole bunch of new innovative things. Uh, that's a big issue. Um, it's not necessarily the likes for a you know the likes of a humble tech journo uh to fit to fix, uh, but uh uh and my role really, I feel, is to sort of unpack, you know, the first, as they say about journalism, the first draft of history to see what's going on under the hood as we work through all of this. Uh, but it is worth thinking, you know, skating to where the puck's going to be and figuring out what we think is going to happen. For instance, are we all going to have to become a kind of a company of one? All clawed coding our company and getting AI agents to be our workforce. But is does that play out? Do people get employed that way? What happens to the some of the um average Joes who really would quite frankly like a an office job and to go home and see their family and raise a family, right? So um not everybody is an entrepreneur, right? So and so how do we play this out? So there is you know some big issues, massive issues. Um, I'm not sure that the politicians are uh you know have got everything down. You've got the approach of the US, which is very, very wild west. You've got the approach of China, which I think is very clever in the sense that they're verticalizing AI in deeply into vertical industries such as making a car better or whatever it is, uh, rather than going for super intelligence. And then unfortunately, you've got the continental Europeans who are really trying to regulate the heck out of things. Uh, and it's really unfortunately acting like quite a break uh on some of these issues. Um regulation is fine, but you know, we also do need to uh grow our economies and uh figure out what our kids are going to do in the next 25 years.

Simon Hill 43:02

So as a as a father and uh and a humble journalist who does sit across all of these things, and uh, you know, I'm gonna go with an optimist somewhere in there as well. What what are you telling your your kids on this of where and where the optimism and where the focus lies? And I guess, you know, do you tilt more to that sort of more dystopian glass half empty, or really the the big, rich, fertile land of opportunity for many people? And not everyone does have to be a builder and a founder. Um, you know, directionally, here's the things that I would be doing and thinking about as, you know, as people that do have these kids that will be coming into the workforce in the next few years.

Mike Butcher 43:40

Well, um, I have uh one of my sons is more scientifically minded, so I think he'll be okay, and the other is very sociable, and I think he'll be okay as well. Uh, because there's there's two things we know about what's going on in the future is that uh the people who are into technology and science minded are You know, helping to build the future. And it's quite clear that AI and the way that technology is affecting society is that people are leaning into things which are more human. So if you can be part of a team, if you have great social skills, if you have taste, if you have uh the ability to curate, and curation is very much part of what Pathfounders is going to be doing over the next few months and hopefully years, years to come, um those those are skills and uh ways of operating in the world which are more immune to the the effects of say roboticization or what have you. Um those that's very much the the advice that I give uh my kids. But the um uh you know we it's the the effects of the of this are still very much to play uh uh to play out. So glass half empty, glass half empty, glass half full. Undecided. It's very much, I think we all need to do a lot of thought experiments, you know, if X happens, Y happens. If if set this happens, then this happens. Uh and we do have to go, and we do have to kind of like hope that um I let me rephrase that. We can't just hope that it'll all work out. We have to figure it out as things going on. And um, you know, for instance, in on my podcast on Pathfounders Podcast in the last week or so, with this uh founder who did a company around compliance, I said to them, Does that mean all the people who work in compliance uh are now out of a job? And she said, Well, actually, no, what it does is that they do their jobs better. Yes, they might they might be not such a big department, but those people are still there. And perhaps those people who are no longer part of that company go off and do their own compliance startup or what have you. Which is why I think actually a lot of AI companies will start to become look like more like service companies, actually. Um, as you said, a lot of companies, a lot of these AI companies are building whole units to try and tell corporates and others how to actually use it and how to implement it. Um, OpenAI famously has opened a business unit to do that, uh, and also realizing that Anthropic is way ahead of it. So um, you know, there are quite clearly early signals on how all this plays out. Um we do have to really kind of keep our eyes open uh to all of those.

Simon Hill 46:36

Yeah, I think there's a lot of parallels as well. And yeah, I think I saw this week OpenAI even buying a European sort of consultancy type shop for some of that adventure as well, right? I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you a couple of more questions and I'll kind of wind you white wind us down. So I'm gonna go a little bit more human nature-y and think, you know, again, this is big picture stuff really, but what has covering technology for so long taught you about human nature?

Mike Butcher 46:59

Yes, but again, it back to the leopard, changing its spots, etc., um, there's still people in the tech industry and startups who really do want to change the world for good. And I love those kinds of entrepreneurs. And then of course there are plenty of entrepreneurs who just want to do very well. Uh, and that's the nature of the game. Um uh, but uh, you know, I think overall the whole the net positive there's been a net positive effect. Um, and so many more people have become entrepreneurs and founding teams, and there's and people talk about mafias now, right? You know, there's the you know, there used to be the Skype mafia, and now there's the Lovelmore Mafia and the Eleven Labs Mafia and the whoever else mafia. So it's really nice to see those people, especially those people who've not necessarily founders as well, but also those founding teams or those founding engineers go off and do things as well. So it's it's really uh, you know, that's I think that's a very optimistic and quite cool thing to happen. And it just shows you also how far Europe, especially, is has come to get to the point where it starts to have these kind of uh founding team mafias.

Simon Hill 48:05

Yeah, and I think to your point around Europe, we seem to come at that, and maybe this is very blinkered and maybe it's just very localized in in a couple of examples, but with somewhat of a European flavor to it. Like, you know, Anton famously on stage last year in Stockholm, as a founders pledge member, pledged to give, I think, 50% of his future earnings to charity, right? Like, you know, that there and then, and this very sort of um altruistic um benefactory type stuff and altruistic capitalist type approach, which I think I think is more European. Maybe I'm doing a disservice to others in the world, right? That we want to pile it back in, not just into the whole you know, entrepreneurial ecosystem, but into trying to do as much good with the opportunities we get, particularly when you when money comes to you so quickly, like it has done for some in this in this area of time as well.

Mike Butcher 48:57

Yeah, well, I mean, you could call it philanthropy, and there's a lot of philanthropy in the US, uh, for instance. Famously in Europe, there's there's actually not been very much philanthropy because because people have many many of the governments are quite socialized, and therefore people think the government's gonna take care of whatever it is, healthcare or et cetera, whatever. Um, so yeah, and I think it's great to see Europeans founders being more philanthropic in that sense. Uh, there's also a big debate, isn't there, as we've all witnessed, about whether or not when they do their exits, do they do their exit out of Dubai? Or some or whatever. We famously saw Nick Staronsky from Revolute uh apparently move to Dubai because he was about to save something like $26 billion when Revolute exited, and uh uh apparently we don't really know the full story, uh, moved back to London when uh and then famously suddenly got a banking license uh about a month later. Um all these worlds of strange coincidences what a what a coincidence, what a coincidence, um or as consequences as we like to say it, Path Founders. Um, so uh but you know it I think there's also a really interesting that just you know suggests quite a big debate that's going on in Europe about uh how powerful and wealthy some of these founders uh get or are or about to become um in the in the next few years and and what we how what our response will be uh to that to the kind of response to the kind of effects that's played out in the US.

Simon Hill 50:36

So I'm gonna ask you one last question, and then I've got a question to ask everybody, which I won't warn you of, but will come, and then we'll go from and then we'll close up, right? The so AI, AI, AI, AI everywhere. However, there is a lot of other great innovation that is going on that is not AI. And so, what are some of the other topics that you're seeing and covering that you think we should be talking more about? Because yes, AI grilliant, yes, AI this, but what else?

Mike Butcher 51:00

Well, um, I made the decision a few years ago in my TechCrunch era uh of covering a lot more climate because it was quite clear that we were having huge uh and experiencing huge effects from climate change. Um, some people call some people call it the climate crisis, in fact. And I wanted to see what the technology industry was doing about that. So I did lean into that subject as much as possible. Um fairly shortly, it became clear that what I was actually covering was energy. And energy is just so important. And in fact, there's some very interesting graphs out there that show how much better off a society is when energy becomes cheap. And we've seen very interesting graphs, say, for instance, that compare the China with the US, showing that China may actually be energy, totally energy independent, especially on renewables, by something like 2050. And it's going to take another 150 years for the US to become energy independent, uh, or or shall we say net zero as well. Um, and on current trajectory, probably even longer because of some of the administration's decision making. Um, and you know, in the UK, for instance, where I live, uh, the price of energy is uh just such a big issue, and it stops people doing things. Uh, it stops people having good lives, um, effectively. And uh, so energy is a big issue, I think. Of course, all of these subjects and all of these verticals do get affected by AI in the end, because AI is the way we get to more efficiency, more efficient batteries, more efficient wind turbines, more efficient sea power, for instance, or hydro. So, you know, AI is always going to be in the background. And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, in five years' time we just don't really talk about AI that much anymore, because it'll be in the way that we talked about the internet 30 years ago. We don't really talk about the internet anymore. We just talk about whatever we're doing, and we just assume it's going to fall in the background, it's have an internet component. I mean, do we talk about electricity anymore? No. So um, that's always going to be in the background. It's all gonna be always gonna be affecting. I think energy, I think healthcare is still very big, obviously being affected by ANS at the sort of research angle side of things. Well, I was I was but I'm here in Porto at a conference called Sim Conference, and I bumped into a Portuguese, sorry, that's that's apologies, an Italian entrepreneur who's developed a drug around autoimmune diseases. That's not an AI company, but I bet you it's gonna have a lot of impact. Yeah, uh, so biotech healthcare is also very interesting areas.

Simon Hill 53:44

Um, but um much in quantum at this point in time? Are you seeing that that's happening there?

Mike Butcher 53:50

Or yeah, yeah, no, thank you for uh reminding me. Yeah, and that's also happening. Uh and that, you know, the way AI affects that is is quite clear as well. But quantum is, you know, such a radically different technology in a way, and is um that very much also a huge opportunity for Europe if it gets this right. Having missed the kind of AI-based model stage, it really you can see then the Netherlands, for instance, huge um cluster developing around Eindhoven. Um, just this week uh was a a quantum tech company uh was lured to Milan, in fact, uh to Italy, with the and the Italian government actually doubling down on its quantum strategy, seeing it as its opportunity to race ahead of other European countries if it can get the chance. Uh and right again, it comes down to talent. And those universities in Europe are excellent at producing that talent. Uh so there's plenty of other things going on uh other than AI. And I mean, I also covered uh I've covered a lot of defense technology as well in the last few years, unfortunately, because of uh Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. So and I was in Ukraine a few months ago seeing some very amazing uh drone technology uh developed there. So that's also uh a fascinating era area. Uh they all get affected by AI in some ways.

Simon Hill 55:11

They all get led in. I know I tried away from it, and you kept pulling us back there again, but you're right, it's it's AI everywhere. So it's the last question, and it's been a it's been a fascinating chat. I know we could keep going going all day. Um, that I'd like to ask everybody is outside of the wonderful journalism that Pathfounders writes, and outside of everything else, there's there's often one book that's influenced someone in someone's life around the topic that we're talking about, right? It can be pretty much anything, but I get these books and then I pass them out to the listeners in a variety of different ways. So is there a Mike Butcher read that you were like, you know, I this this, whether it's early in your career or one you've read recently that you that you that comes to mind that is, I highly recommend this book?

Mike Butcher 55:51

I'll tell you what, I'll take that challenge. I've got a couple of books that I really uh you know often sort of think about. Um one is 1984 by George Orwell. Firstly, George Orwell was, I think, possibly one one of, if not the greatest writer of the 20th century. And uh his prose still to this day is just incredible. Um and also famously a great critic of of colonial powers. And uh, we saw recently with the the uh the books around um AI, uh, such as those by um, I'm gonna get this wrong, is it Karen Howe? Um about uh AI, the battle around AI, about her her um uh analogy around AI being a kind of almost like a colonial power. And Orwell wrote about colonial powers, and I think that's very interesting to to think about in in this era that we are, and famously opens with the scene of a woman uh humming the tune Made by a Machine uh in 1984. So that I often think about that book and about think about him and what he would have made of this era. And the second is going to be a little bit off-piste, perhaps for your normal watchers and listeners. Uh, it's a book called The Wrong Messiah, uh, and it's by an author called Nick Page, and it transforms you and transmits you back almost like a time machine into 33 AD when a man called Jesus Christ is wandering around Judea and Palestine as was then, and uh talking in a way and in language which even historians such as Tom Holland have recognised changed the world completely, almost like in the way that perhaps you might what happened if you sort of stumbled upon a jumbo jet in the Middle Ages, completely out of kilt to kilter with the with the world, and a critique again, also of dictatorship, uh a critique of uh power and a way of looking at the world, which I think that we've all have a lot to learn from uh when we're building things. So those are the two books I would recommend.

Simon Hill 58:16

I don't think they're that far out of kilter actually. I think they're great recommendations. And the Karen Howe book is Empire of AI, I think that you were referencing as as well. Um fantastic. And uh I put you on the spot there, but yeah, I and the second book, they all well, I think it's good to pick up old books and go back and reread them in current context. I I would advocate that for sure. But the the second one I haven't heard of, and we'll we'll pick it up and uh see if we can get them on as well. Mike, thank you very much. Um, you want to give a little shout, a little bit of publicity to where people can find you, find the site, anything else that you want them to know about any upcoming events or anything, feel free to give a good quick shout out.

Mike Butcher 58:54

Thanks very much. Yes, well, you can check us out at pathfounders.com or pathfounders.com slash subscriber. You can see where all our podcasts and our social feeds are. Um you can also, we're also pushing out content on our WhatsApp, which is a little bit more unusual for a lot of uh media outlets. And uh we'll be doing events around Europe. Um, we're doing one in London on May 26th, we're doing one in London, uh sorry, one in Hanover, one in uh Athens with the Panathenia Festival, a whole bunch of things. So check it out and uh subscribe and like, subscribe and share, as they like to say. Exactly. And uh yeah, so um and uh enjoy look out for Pathfounders Network, which we'll be launching in the next few weeks.

Simon Hill 59:35

Amazing. Listen, thank you very much. I love the WhatsApp channel, by the way. In a world of just email, email, email or social network feeds, like WhatsApp is a godsend. So thank you for doing that. It's actually become my go-to for picking up these bits of news because you made it easier for me. So thank you very much for that. Um, super interesting chat. Thank you very much for going deep on a variety of topics. Enjoy your trip and your time in Portugal. Maybe we'll catch up in London for everybody else. Thank you for listening, as always. It's been a little bit of a treasure trove, a walk through time all the way back to Judea and Jesus, it seems, in this conversation. As always, keep innovating, keep asking questions, keep looking forward and looking back at the same time. There's much we can learn whilst we pave new pathways. Uh, hit subscribe, share. We've got a very interesting episode on quantum coming up soon as well. We touched on that a little bit in uh in this discussion today. Thanks again, Mike. Thanks again, everybody. I'll speak to you all very soon.

Intro 1:00:30

What's up, worth it? Uh uh. Uh uh. Uh uh. What's up, worth it? Uh uh, uh uh.