Have you ever wondered how a self-described academic underachiever can morph into a powerhouse entrepreneur? Dr. Alex Allen, co-founder of Kortical joins us to share his transformation from a laid-back student to a PhD holder and AI innovator.
His insights are a treasure trove for any budding founder, emphasising the significance of knowing your 'why' and the symbiotic relationship between consistent progress and mental well-being.
What does the future hold for AI? We uncover the prospective role of AI agents across a variety of industries and wide - reshaping how we handle tasks from travel planning to legal research.
We don't just talk shop; our chat takes a turn towards the personal challenges and growth experienced along the entrepreneurial journey. From recognising the importance of goal setting to engaging in disciplines like boxing, Alex shares how confronting fears and stepping out of one's comfort zone are critical for self-improvement. He recounts how these experiences have been instrumental in him becoming a more resilient person, both in and out of the ring.
You can connect with Dr Alex via LinkedIn or check out Kortical.
Have you ever wondered how a self-described academic underachiever can morph into a powerhouse entrepreneur? Dr. Alex Allen, co-founder of Kortical joins us to share his transformation from a laid-back student to a PhD holder and AI innovator.
His insights are a treasure trove for any budding founder, emphasising the significance of knowing your 'why' and the symbiotic relationship between consistent progress and mental well-being.
What does the future hold for AI? We uncover the prospective role of AI agents across a variety of industries and wide - reshaping how we handle tasks from travel planning to legal research.
We don't just talk shop; our chat takes a turn towards the personal challenges and growth experienced along the entrepreneurial journey. From recognising the importance of goal setting to engaging in disciplines like boxing, Alex shares how confronting fears and stepping out of one's comfort zone are critical for self-improvement. He recounts how these experiences have been instrumental in him becoming a more resilient person, both in and out of the ring.
You can connect with Dr Alex via LinkedIn or check out Kortical.
What piece of advice have you been imparting to other younger founders or people starting out over the last few years where you've learned something and you think you know? I wish I'd known this.
Speaker 2:One would be trying to ask yourself like why am I starting this business? What am I actually trying to get out of it? Like, are you trying to change the world or do you want to make money? Do you want to provide for your family and have a comfortable life? Because those take radically different paths.
Speaker 1:Alex is a chief data scientist and the co-founder of Cortical. Cortical is the automated machine learning platform for professional data scientists.
Speaker 2:I think, anything where you can see improvements in yourself or some other aspect of your life that can give you a, I think, fundamentally human psychology. If you see growth somewhere, that's an incredibly nourishing thing, a sense of being on plan and going towards a purpose, and even if you're making small progress, that's quite a powerful thing for mental health and sense of well-being. So if you're, you know, at the end of each week you're like, yes, I've got a bit closer to my goals.
Speaker 1:That's superb advice for people listening. Hey everybody, it's Greg Sheehan. Welcome to my podcast, where you will hear from a range of guests, including those from the startup world and those that have had incredibly interesting lives and some stories to tell. I would really appreciate it if you could hit the follow button and share this amongst your friends, but, as you know, time is limited, so let's get on with it and hear from our next guest. My guest today is Dr Alex Allen. Alex is a chief data scientist and the co-founder of Cortical, and we will get into that as the show goes on. Cortical is the automated machine learning platform for professional data scientists. Welcome to the show, alex. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to have you here.
Speaker 1:We were introduced by somebody that believes very strongly in you and said look, I needed to interview you. In fact, she was quite adamant that I needed to interview you. She just absolutely loves what you do and very impressed by you. I generally start these by talking a little bit about your origin before we start to get into Cortical and the story around that, but I'd love to know what sort of early upbringing you had. Were you always that kind of entrepreneurial type? Were you always a math-y kid? What's the origin story?
Speaker 2:for you. Yeah, that's a good one. I mean I think I went to. I grew up in Essex, which is just sort of east of London, so it's about a 50-minute drive from London, but it was relatively rural.
Speaker 2:I went to a comprehensive school which is like a state school, and I was like it's kind of like fairly academic, but one of those people that never really worked hard enough, if you know what I mean. I do, and I did things like computer science and business at college. And then I was looking for degrees you could do and it was like one degree in the country. It was called cybernetics and artificial intelligence. I just thought that sounds incredibly badass. I'm just gonna have to do that, as I think that was. This is in 2006, so you know this is way before AI was really kind of a big deal. But I was always a big fan of science fiction and I've always thought that you know AI is going to be like it is in the, in the movies. You know when you're talking to a robot or something like from Star Trek. So I was always keen to kind of get in on it and at first at uni I was. I struggled a little bit because I think there's a level of oversight you get at college and things which you just at uni you can just like you don't have to go to lectures. So I ended up kind of going through some personal events like my father passed away and things like that, which kind of led me to take a few months break. And then I got into kind of reading like self-help books and they range from incredibly trite to sometimes quite profound, and through all of that I kind of came up with a kind of personal philosophy around setting myself goals and targets and holding myself accountable. And then I ended up just being someone that worked really hard, which is kind of I don't know if it sounds realistic, but it turns out you can change yourself from someone that's you know, never that I could, you know self-control or self-discipline into someone that does have it. And I found, when I was able to kind of consistently apply myself and I think consistency is like the really key thing that I was doing a lot better.
Speaker 2:And my third year at uni that I won a scholarship to do a PhD in what was called data mining back then, but you'd probably call it data science or AI now. It's probably the same thing and that went well. And, yeah, I was kind of during during the course of my life I've always been obsessed with trying to start a business and did various things like from selling memory phone mattresses on e-commerce solutions to, you know, building websites for people and things like that. So, kind of towards the end of my PhD, I just started doing consulting in London. I just said, yeah, I'm an AI consultant. And then, you know, because no one was doing it and and actually I did legitimately have experience in a field that you know this is this is back in 2014, 15, there was really no one else doing it and I was able to do some cool stuff with some interesting companies, which gave me like a reasonably interesting portfolio.
Speaker 2:By the time I'd sort of graduated uni sorry, my PhD, really and then I was obsessed with trying to start a tech business and I ended up bumping into a chap was giving a giving a talk at a conference and there was this fellow at the back drinking, drinking the free wine, and I was like he's probably my guy. So me and him got chatting during the rest of the talks and it turns out he was like an ex-McKinsey. He did sort of systems optimization, but he did it just for himself and we got on really well and he was a lot older than me, like 25 years older, but we we were like, right, cool, let's start a business together. And then we kind of there was a few other people in my circle and then we, we all got together and started this, this business which was around. It sounds it was kind of like a boring application domain, but the technology was quite cool.
Speaker 2:We sort of took two days out and sort of brainstormed what we could do and we came up with the idea of but, like call centers, right, you have to go through a list of leads and and call them and they just randomly assign them to agents. Um as well, what if we could learn about what an agent might be good at in terms of demographics? So let's say you're you know, I've got a fixed scottish accent you might actually resonate better with people at the north of the country, for example, and things like time of day, like if you're calling someone who works in the city at like three in the afternoon they're probably not going to be in, but if you're calling someone that lives in the suburbs, there's a chance, there's a you know, a new parent or someone that's going to actually answer the phone. So we were like, okay, we could optimize the time of day and the right agent, then we can create something that could basically, just through allocating these leads differently, create an an uplift in sales, and we started working on the technology. Really.
Speaker 2:It was at that point I kind of bumped into really my current co-founder and that was completely random. It was like our mutual ex-partners invited us both to this bonfire night. They weren't ex-partners at the time, so it wasn't something weird like that and we just started talking about neural networks and ai stuff. And he was a. He was working at barclays doing big distributed kind of machine learning things, you know big investment banks. So, okay, cool, this guy's legit um, and I've eventually invited him to join this, this now quite large group of founders there's like five of us and then we kind of first we as we were building the technology and we were going to try. You know we got a few trials with a few call centers and it went really well.
Speaker 2:But we kind of found that the market was like a terrible one because these, these operations often run on the knife edge of profitability, so they're not really keen on dropping 50 grand a year on some untested machine learning solution which no one believed in. No one knew what ai was, no one knows what machine learning was. You'd have to start every pitch with like a 20 minute sort of educational session on. I know machine learning is going to be really big, it will really help you. And these are kind of like hard bits and sales people. They're like I don't like this, I don't know what this is, what are you even trying to sell me? We're like we'll just do it for free then. Yeah, but yeah, but you know, to do it for free we'll need to integrate into your cooling system.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't really like a nice easy path to demonstrating the technology. And so we were trying to raise some money to looking to VCs and angels and a bunch of them were saying like well, the kind of technology we built to build the machine learning itself, we'd kind of ended up. We ended up realizing that every single time we had to do one of these POCs, we had to kind of build a totally new machine learning model from scratch, because the product will be different, the demographics will be different, might be similar sort of data inputs, but realistically you're going to need maybe a totally different type of model and certainly a different set of model parameters. So we started building a kind of automated machine learning framework to kind of speed these things up. And that got to a point where it was a kind of automated machine learning framework to kind of speed these things up. And that got to a point where it was actually kind of fairly advanced and these vcs were like why are you not just selling that? Why are you trying to sell the call centers?
Speaker 2:Um, this was before something came into force called gdpr, which is the uk's kind of data legislation. I think it was originally a european thing and now it's just the uk's, but I think it's a similar thing to happen in Europe, and that basically meant you couldn't cold call people. I mean, you still get loads of cold calls now, but it's technically illegal. So isn't what you'd call an ideal market, one that's effectively being legislated out of existence? And so me and my current co-founder decided to kind of leave this. We kind of brought everyone out. It was kind of pre-revenue, so it wasn't a huge the company, it wasn't like we needed to invest millions in that and we started doing basically taking in technology, because we brought the other guys out, we had the technology. I mean me and him had built the whole thing more or less anyway, and this was 2016. And then I mean we had a few contacts and a few people we'd met.
Speaker 2:And again, this was back when, if you Googled AI consultancy London, we were the top result with basically no marketing spend, just because we were the only people saying we did it. And we ended up landing our first job, which was working with another consultancy akin to someone like Accenture it wasn't them um, to basically build the AI roadmap for one of the UK's largest banks. So it was like a huge project to build this whole massive AI roadmap. It was basically our first real job, which is, you know to, by today's standards, are like utterly insane. Um, you know really hard and you know put a lot of hours in and ultimately it was considered reasonably successful and then, you know, everything kind of sprang off the back of that. So, yeah, that was kind of the origin story. Really, I kind of veered more into the company there, but it's the two, that kind of I guess.
Speaker 1:I'm so used to giving this talk. Yeah, no, it's perfect. And so you get started and you win a bank as a customer. I mean, how would you describe what Cortical is now Like if you were standing there and you had 30 seconds to pitch what Cortical does? What does it do?
Speaker 2:We reduce the cost, risk and time of going from a data and an idea into something that lives in production in the real world. That's making you money using machine learning. That would be the very, very elevated pitch. I mean, what do we actually do? Well, we've got a platform that we've built over. The same kind of engine that I was talking about from the previous company is still the core of our product and we have a kind of mix of clients like charlotte tilbury fashion brand. They use us as really a platform that they build things on themselves. Other companies such as Deloitte. We've been heavily invested in helping them, working with them to kind of build the product as well. It's still underlined by our technology. So we kind of got a bit of a mix of self-serve and more consultancy slash kind of point solution led customers. But ultimately, yeah, we build everything on our own technology and as a result, we do things a lot faster and we can do POCs for a lot quicker.
Speaker 2:And you know we can often do some of the initial work basically for free because it's so quick for us to do. So you know, a normal data science project, like if you were to come to me and say, oh okay. So I want you to try and predict the views for my podcast. You know, going forward, depending on who you go to, that could be like a three-month bit of work to kind of come up, you know, with an exploration phase of data, a kind of data analysis phase, initial model building, and these things are all done manually and they all require kind of iteration and like experimental feedback loops, and we can because our platform kind of closes a loop on a lot of these things we can kind of do that very, very quickly. So we could probably, in like a day or two after getting the data, have some idea of how possible that is and what kind of accuracy we might get.
Speaker 2:So we've been, as a result, been able to kind of take projects where I mean the normal success rate for ai projects, isn't it, and by the success I mean taking something from someone's idea and actually turning that into production. It's like less than 10 according to gartner. We're in like the 90 region of success, and that's really because we take only take things on. We think we're going to be able to do. We are able to, because of our platform, do a bunch of the initial kind of sniffing out of. Is this viable for as part of the pre-sales process? So when we get to that kind of you know actual project, we've got confidence that we're able to deliver it.
Speaker 1:And is it a mix of a services business and a software business? Do you do consulting around the outside of this as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the mix of consulting to just SaaS has been veering in the direction of SaaS, which is good because that's more scalable, but I think ultimately we're still in a market where most companies aren't doing really anything in production with AI. Some companies are A lot have started to think about it, but a lot are still unsure as to where to get started. So consultancy is a part of helping companies through that process and we've got eight years of experience of doing that now, which is quite a lot in such a new field. So we do have a lot of value to offer there. And when we started this business, when we first came up with this idea for the platform, there was annoyingly although we didn't know about it at the time one American company called Data Robot that was already doing it.
Speaker 2:This is always one that gets there first and you know, we completely independently came up with the same idea and over the course of lifespan, google, amazon and Microsoft have all released equivalents to what we've got, which makes the sales process more challenging. Right, because these companies have already got big, longstanding relationships with these large, trusted providers and they've got all through the data security and it's like oh, you want to enable this element of Google Vertex, for example. You want to enable that. That's just. You've already got that through your data security, you've already got it through your IT ops and whatever. You just tick a few boxes and it's there, whereas we've got to say, look, no, we'll go through all that process.
Speaker 2:So us bringing that personal element. So if you go within those big players bringing that personal element, so you know, if you go with any of those big players, they're not going to give you anywhere near the level of handholding and help that you'll get. And if they are, if they, if you do pay for the consulting package, it's not going to be the founder or anyone close to that or be, you know, relatively junior person who's going to have a lot less experience than us. So that's, it's become a path for us to differentiate ourselves and to provide a kind of better quality of service. But we are seeing as more customers just realize they need things like what we're doing, that we have to do less of that, which is good, because it's harder to scale a consultancy, obviously, and keep the quality high.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because competing with the big players now in AI must be just almost impossible to take them on at their own game. So to personalise it and, as you say, be the founder who's potentially leading some of the strategic conversation, is the point of difference for you. So just give us a bit of a sense of what does the company look like now, to the extent that you're willing to share. So you started with the two of you, and then what are we? Eight years on? What is the company? Sort of shape does it have now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so after two years of starting the business we raised $1.2 million. This was from angels and then we scaled the team to like 15, 16 people and I think me and my co-founder are both really good at building their technology and building DOCs and doing their sales, which is kind of a nice mix as a starting team. But one of the things, while we're good in front of people and we're good at selling the product, that doesn't necessarily translate to being able to scale a sales team and find a product, understand product market fit and there's a whole bunch of stuff that, as a founder yourself, you probably know about the journey there. Right, it's not easy and when you get a huge wad of investment you've got some chance to test and learn and make some mistakes. But you know, ultimately the reason most businesses fail is because there's a learning curve and a runway and you've got to sort of get to that point in the learning curve while you still have some money left and we managed to do that.
Speaker 2:But we also had a huge, I wouldn't say catastrophe. But you know, when COVID hit we had about 50% of our revenue. That was, you know, we pretty much closed the deal but not signed a contract for a large set of really big projects and then, as soon as covid hit, every single business was like, yeah, no, innovation budget, we're gonna hunker down. So we ended up with a big hole in our cash flow so we had to scale the team back a little bit. Um, so we're now about 10 people, but we've kind of got to the point where we don't have a runway, we've self-sustaining on our own revenue, which is a much, much less stressful place to be, and I'd probably recommend getting to that place as soon as possible as a business owner, because you're just then able to do more experimentation. And we've now got to a place where we're much closer, closer and or have got some real evidence, I think, of product market fit, which is something we, you know, we still, we still closing deals, but it was kind of all quite eclectic and they weren't, you know, it was more, maybe, a product of the nascence of the market, rather than we found something solidly we could repeatedly win at.
Speaker 2:And I think, you know, the frustrating thing for us was we were always like three steps ahead in terms of what we wanted to build, versus someone like Microsoft, and we knew exactly what they were going to build because we were thinking well, this is obviously the next step and they would have a team of like 50 or 100 people building towards it and we could spare like one developer. So well, we had the ideas first, the execution often we can get a basic version out, but then everything they release would be already integrated into a whole suite of other products. So it just became a game of cat and mouse, which we realized is quite hard to win against a large. Even though we started first and we did for one of our clients. They asked us to do a comparison, like a test, and we actually found that our automated AI is actually better than Google's one, which is quite fun, it's very impressive and a bunch of benchmarks. We actually found that our automated ai is actually better than google's one, which is quite fun and that's very impressive benchmarks. We actually got higher accuracy. And then we went head to head with the schroeder's data fund and beat them as well. So they feel like, yeah, we're better.
Speaker 2:But the thing is, you can say all that and have the proof, but that isn't really the objection that people have. It's like, well, no one got fired for buying microsoft, you know, or IBM, as they say. So that just became a very challenging thing. So, yeah, we've kind of niched down a bit more into some of the places. We've had a lot more success.
Speaker 2:So one would be like automotive financing. So for brands like Hyundai and Kia and Volvo, try to help them understand which customers are going to renew, what car to sell them and when we should talk to them. And that's proved to work really well, and so there's a lot of interesting depth to that market that we're exploring now and it's kind of a lot easier to sell something that's kind of solving for a particular problem, rather than having a kind of platform that solves horizontally for lots of problems where you're saying, saying, yeah, we can help you do anything. You can build something to do like with Deloitte we're automating tax, charlotte Tilbury were doing product recommendation, did some stuff with BT doing predictive maintenance these are all. They don't help you in the next deal really, because there's in such a different market that it doesn't really count for much. So having momentum in a single vertical is really what we've realised is important.
Speaker 1:And you know, I know how hard it is to build a startup. Have you had moments where you've just gone this is too hard, or a moment where you've really questioned, you know, your decision to be in this type of business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think the first three years were going from zero to investment, and then you know the desperate scrambles to kind of make that work before we run out of money. Me and my co-founder were working every single day, including weekends, not taking any holidays and working till late in the evening for years, and that had a significant toll on my mental well-being yeah, luckily not so much on his, otherwise I think we'd be totally screwed. That was incredibly miserable and I kind of realized at a certain point I just needed to actually take time for myself to do other things, like go to the gym, otherwise I was just you're just not effective and you've got a certain amount of do things now like you just typically will go to the gym.
Speaker 1:You're more intentional about managing mental health exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's actually my number one priority, like I have to fit the business at number two because if I don't, then I'm not effective at all. You know that everything slips away and you're not motivated, you're not happy, especially if you're doing anything customer facing. That's not a good place to be, even on the back end stuff. If you hate your life, you're not happy, especially if you're doing anything customer facing. That's not a good place to be, even on the backend stuff. If you hate your life, you're not effective at anything you try and do. So, yeah, I've realized your mental health has to be the number one priority and that means, you know, having taken some holiday, you know stopping working at a certain time of the evening unless there's something super important that has to get over the line, and just making sure there's a few hours where I'm just able to not think about business. Yeah, and that's proved much more sustainable. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm pleased you've raised that, actually, because I was having that conversation earlier today about. You know we've got inputs to business that drive outputs but actually some of those inputs are running at a sort of 0.5x in terms of the leverage we get off them if we're tired or whatever, whereas others it might be the effectiveness of the hiring decisions we make or something are running at a 5x or a 10x because we make good decisions and we hire good people or we do things. You know we've got a higher energy level, so putting an emphasis into your mental health as the founder just feels critical, like you know, really really critical. Has there been a decision that you've made over the last eight years where you look back and you think that was a really pivotal decision and it was a decision that was really well made and it's made quite an impact on the business? Yeah, I mean what we just said.
Speaker 2:I mean prioritising mental health over anything else probably would be the one. For me, that's the number one, yeah, yeah, and I think from our point of view as a business more abstractly, I think we decided to stop going after bc money at a certain point and start to just concentrate on running a business that's not a tech, but when I say a tech business, I mean your typical kind of silicon valley that's raised loads of bc money and hope we can keep raising and hope we get enough product, enough customers, enough market dominance, and then you know, maybe we'll be billionaires or maybe we'll be broke, and that is not a good place to be, because you know VC's got 10 other companies in its portfolio and it doesn't care if you die, it just wants one of them. One of 10 need to win. So they'll be pushing you towards decisions that are not in your own best of interest, and I know a bunch of other founders that have been severely screwed through. That you know. In fact, I don't think I know anyone that's taken bc money. That's it's worked out for them. I think that's on par with, if you look at the stats, it's the you know the portfolio performance for bc would be. One does really well, a couple do okay, and the rest are wiped out. And they're really wiped out because they'll take preferential shares and things like that. So you're not going to exit with anything if you don't exit with a valuation above X.
Speaker 2:So as soon as we started trying to run a business that was self-sustaining and stood on its own legs you don't have a runway to worry about, you know you can make decisions in your own time. You're not trying to grow at all costs, at the cost of profitability or good decision making. I think that was kind of born off the back of like trying to understand the business. I think ultimately, after the first four years and all the stress and everything like that, I think me and my co-founder or co-founders we had a co-founder join after the first year and she's been amazing basically we all decided that really what we want is to be able to at some point exit the business and, you know, get some return, because it's so easy to not get anything.
Speaker 2:So many times it could have resulted in a complete wipeout and there's been so much pain and blood and sweat put into it now that it would be a tragedy if we weren't able to release any of the equity. So, instead of trying to build something that's going to compete with, necessarily looking to something that's going to be like a £100 billion valuation, it'd be nice and we're certainly not going to not do that. But the decisions you make that lead towards that are often incredibly risky and you could make a decision to go for some fraction of that which is like 10 times less risky. You know, and that's not the decision that bc would necessarily like you to make. But when you're like, okay, well, why don't we try and make this business sustainable, grow it and try and grow it in a way that's not gonna push us into crazy decisions that took a lot of stress out of the whole proceeding and allowed us to be a lot more, you know, adventurous and you know we we've started some interesting new kind of like mini businesses within the business, so like something called cortical chat that we've built, which is based on, you know, everyone.
Speaker 2:As soon as we'd sort of seen some stuff around llms before, chat gpt came out and we were all super excited.
Speaker 2:But as soon as chat gpt hit the mainstream and had the reception it did, we were like, well, obviously this is going to be a massive thing. Let's try and do something straight away. So we've got a kind of something called cortical chat, which is effectively it leverages a bunch of technology on our platform but while our platform is like a sas enterprise platform with a reasonably high ticket price, this is something where you can get it for 50 quid a month and you can have a free trial and you can just sign up with a credit card and we don't need to be involved in the sales process. So, instead of something which is fundamentally limited by your sales resource and doing a lot of outbound marketing to generate and a lot of, you know, free consulting in some cases to generate pipeline, this is something where you can do some ad spend. People can come try it out and actually potentially sign up and start paying you money without you could be in bed while that happens, which is kind of a dream it's every founder's dream.
Speaker 1:It's every founder's dream and so, interestingly so, you had the two co-founders you and your other co-founder and then you added a third one. Did that change the dynamics between you and your original co-founder? Did that make things different more?
Speaker 2:challenging easier Well, actually easier.
Speaker 2:I think it was a sister who was on maternity leave from a sort of marketing job at a big brand and she'd done a whole bunch of helping out for basically nothing.
Speaker 2:And while me and my co-founder original co-founder are not the most, things like admin and HR and things like that are not our forte necessarily.
Speaker 2:We kind of tend to leave things to the last minute. And you know, getting things like ISO 27K compliant and stuff like that is not stuff that we like doing and we didn't know anything about marketing and she'd kind of got an ops background as well, know anything about marketing and she'd kind of got an ops background as well. So having someone that's kind of like almost like the core to keeping the whole business running and able to do those kind of things yeah, she does all the iso stuff, does a lot of the sales back end like helps us apply to grants, does there's so many things that you know you should be doing but you're involved in the tech or you're just underground doing sales meetings but you might not be able to remember exactly what follow-up to do or you're too busy to do the follow-up properly. And having someone that was able to do that and do it well, was a massive relief for us really. So it was a kind of part of the puzzle that wasn't really there before, I think, so it was great.
Speaker 1:And you've had 15 years in AI, and for most of us, ai has just been sort of out of the landscape only for a few years, and so you've had lots of time in this space. You've got a PhD, you know, in data analytics, and so you know this stuff. What sort of insight do you have around where you see AI going in the next couple of years?
Speaker 2:Perhaps that might be a bit controversial or something that you, you know, you perceive, you know may play out so if I didn't have most of my net worth in this business and I was able to put bets on stocks, I would be looking for ones investing in ai agents. So what do I mean by that? Let's think of something like siri right or alexa. Now you can say alexa, play this song, but you can't say alexa. I'm thinking about getting a portugal in july. I'd like to have villa with a hot tub. Don't want to pay more than this needs to be within 50 miles of a michigan style restaurant and give me, email me 10 potential options. You know something like that.
Speaker 2:It's not like each one of those steps isn't something that can be done automatically. It's that we don't really have a reasoning engine that can take all of those requirements, turn that into a plan of attack and then solve for all of those fairly kind of nebulous demands. But really that is probably doable with today's technology, just about with things like LLMs and you know they're pretty good at integrating into. You can get an LLM to go on a website it's not seen before and figure it out. I think the next generation of lms or or maybe a new technology of that ilk, which is, you know to say, transformer based neural networks, perhaps with more of a kind of planning and reasoning side to them, we'll be able to solve for things like that. And if you think about it, that's I've just given you an example of being a travel agent, but there's so many other tasks which you might need to do for yourself, as a civilian, let's say. But in business, how many tasks are reasonably simple but actually could be fully automated with something like that? How many paralegals are just going around looking for various things in various old cases, just going around looking for various things in various old cases? Or you might have someone that's organizing events for the business or needs to get all of these various stakeholders into the same room at the same time. It's like when are you free? Or when are you free, let's find somewhere, let's book a place. Here's the budget.
Speaker 2:And I'm not saying this is necessarily replacing any particular job. It's more like aspects of certain people's jobs probably could be fully automated with that and it would be kind of the boring aspects. Usually that's kind of. I mean, an analogy might be something like co-pilot for coding. Yes, yeah, that's quite.
Speaker 2:It's not going to be designing systems anytime soon or building whole projects, but if you're I use it to kind of type complete code and it's like, oh, this has saved me like five minutes here and five minutes there. And you can ask it oh, what would you think the best way to do this would be? So you still need to have someone who knows what they're doing controlling it. But it's taking chunks out of the daily workload and you know a small number here, a small number there, and I think the same will be. That will be the same for kind of ai agents. It will be. Certain aspects of certain roles will be. You can completely leave it to the agent and it's like okay, yep, these look reasonable, let's kill these two. So, yeah, I think that's going to be the next big thing. And it will be a big thing because there'll be a kind of consumer facing element to it, but probably the real value will come from the boring backend admin stuff that will be automated as a result.
Speaker 1:And do you see those AI agents being heavily domain specific? So, for example, using the example you gave, there would be a travel one. Yeah, there would be a paralegal one. You know, is that how you see it going, or is that a limitation I'm putting on it that actually doesn't need to be there?
Speaker 2:so I mean we've been building a as part of cortical chart framework for doing this. Um again it's, you know we're at the limits of the technology as for the back end stuff like llms, but we've been doing stuff across travel. I mean, ultimately you need a framework where you can break tasks down, an llm like like chat, gpt or GPT-4. Rather, if you give it too much for any one task, it's never going to do a good job, like the more instructions you give it, the less task cohesion it has. So it's it's like you've got to be able to break the task down and have agents pass bits along to other agents, almost like a network of various more specific things. So if you make an element of a task specific enough, then GPT-4 will do a pretty good job, pretty consistently. So it's like how do you break down booking a flight or sorting out a holiday into various tasks? Well, you know, the tasks themselves might be different, but the framework to arrange those things can be a sort of layer that works across a bunch of different domains.
Speaker 1:Right and sort of changing tack slightly. I'm interested when we were talking before about some of the impact that venture capital has on founders and the inability to control your strategy, really because your capital strategy has been outsourced to somebody else, essentially, what's the scene like in the UK? A lot of the listeners of this podcast are in Australia and New Zealand. What's the scene like around founders deciding to sort of look at some more of a public market approach in the early stages? So they've gone past the angels, they've got friends and family, they've done angels, but they don't want to go down the venture path and they want to make sure they get to control their capital strategy alongside their business strategy. Is there much of an opportunity to get into public markets early in the UK? So do you mean?
Speaker 2:like listing on a stock exchange Listings. Yeah, I'm not sure it's that easy in the UK. I mean, places like Canada have a stock market for very small cap-sized companies, so we had a look about actually ipa in there many years ago and, but not, I'm not so much in the uk. I don't think I'd also say that's maybe not the best idea if you're a smaller company because there's so much more oversight needed. Yeah, the regular, you've got all the extra. Yeah, you got your quarterly things on display for everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, yeah and what about the UK startup scene generally? Like is the UK startup scene, you know, compared to where it was two or three years ago? Is it thriving, Is it sort of bouncing back or is it still struggling along a little bit?
Speaker 2:I think that it's been quite difficult. Due to the interest rate and everything like that. I think VCs and other kind of financiers have sort of pulled back a lot of investment simply because, you know, it's the economic conditions really. So it's been a lot harder to raise money and companies that were kind of relying on getting successive rounds have been kind of forced to do down rounds and things like that. So that creates a bit of a vicious circle where VCs are kind of like less scared to invest in the first place because they don't want to have a down round. So yeah, it's not been ideal. I mean, as I say, we haven't really been courting that for a while, so I wouldn't say we have a figure massively on the pulse, but that's kind of what I've heard from others who have been much more involved. It's been pretty tough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been pretty tough. Yeah, and you you also talked at the start of the show about almost a philosophy shift that went along the lines of you know, you worked out early on whether it was pre university or sort of, at the time you're at university that by working hard and by being focused, just the outcomes just changed completely. What was it that shifted for you? Because that's a big change. Most people don't make a shift like that. They're either like that or they're not. What was it that changed? Was it your father and passing away, or what was involved there?
Speaker 2:I think I was like what am I doing with my life? Do you know what I mean? I had all this opportunity and I'm kind of squandering it. And I felt so much self-loathing, if you like, about that. I was like I really don't want to be this person anymore and I would sort of write a plan at each beginning of each week. So I'm going to do this many. I use Pomodoro.
Speaker 2:So this many Pomodoro's of work on my business, this many on uni, this many on other things like fitness or like boxing or whatever, and the sense that if I didn't achieve these goals I was sort of sliding back into that person I didn't want to be, was enough of a kind of mental counterweight.
Speaker 2:I think maybe if I hadn't had such a profound negative experience, that wouldn't have been there.
Speaker 2:So it's like having getting to that point, I really hated myself for who I was in the sense of like I felt like I wasn't achieving what I could be achieving, not in, not in a more kind of general sense, but really I was letting myself down massively.
Speaker 2:And as soon as I started doing that, I started to notice a big difference. But funnily enough, you'd afford it, and so as soon as you actually start working hard things, things tend to improve quite dramatically. So I was like, getting fitter, I was doing better at uni, I was getting my more consulting stuff off the ground, and then I was like, well, if I ever stop doing this, I'm gonna go back to being that person. So it was kind of like a feedback loop of the more I progressed, the further I felt I got from that person almost, the more I could lose, the further I had to fall, the more I was more committed to not doing that, and so I could push myself further because I was even more committed to this new path, if you see what I mean. So that was the kind of mindset I had.
Speaker 1:And do you ever slip back? Is there ever a tendency to slip back to those old you know almost childhood habits and thoughts, or is it actually so hardwired in you now this change?
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, I've experimented with this and so I find if I, you know, if I don't write down like a weekly set of things, after a few weeks obviously, just, it's a lot easier to stay motivated when you've got a team and a customer and it's not, it's not really a question of self-motivation anymore, because the external world motivates you, but other stuff outside of work, gym and so forth, that that tends to slack off.
Speaker 2:And I think you do, habits do change and I think you know I'm a million miles different anyway, but improvement does stop, I think. So I found I'm just going to keep doing it. Yeah, and it's kind of like I have sort of a grand plan of what I want to do in my life and each, each week, if you like, well, I'll do a little bit towards that various aspect of it, this aspect, a sense of being on plan and going towards a purpose, and even if you're making small progress, that's quite a powerful thing for mental health and sense of wellbeing. So if you're, you know, at the end of each week you're like, yes, I've got a bit closer to my goals, I think that's pretty powerful. And like writing down a plan and achieving it is on a short-term basis is a great way to give your brain that nourishment of like yeah, I'm on the right path, I am getting closer to my goals.
Speaker 1:I mean, we naturally want to feel we've got a purpose and I think a lot of us want to build something. So by making steps to build that we can see we're building something, that we can see we're building something, it's a powerful motivator. And what would you say for you and I hate the phrase zone of genius, but let's use it what is your superpower Like? When Alex is working in this space, the business is going to be a lot better off because you're working in your superpower.
Speaker 2:What is that? Yeah, I mean for me it'd probably be being kind of good at the sales and the tech. So I mean, for me it'd probably be being kind of good at the sales and the tech. So I mean a lot of businesses struggle where you've got a sales team that don't understand the capabilities. So especially when you're doing something like where you're right at the cutting edge, where the capabilities are not well defined, so can this be solved with AI?
Speaker 1:or not.
Speaker 2:It's not an easy question to answer, but if you're trying to sell a project where, okay, we want you to automate this aspect of our business, if you can be that salesperson that also understands the capabilities, that's a pretty strong. You can really. The client can obviously tell that you know what you're talking about and you can answer any technical questions on the fly and you cannot commit your company or your team to this completely unfeasible project and, conversely, on the backend, on the engineering side, you can make decisions based on well, is this going to get us to these objectives that matter to the business? But you know, there's, I think, a tendency to overengine every engineer. I mean, I'd like to call myself an engineer to some degree, to some degree and the tendency is to just try and make everything really awesome and robust and like as in line with best practice as possible, because that's you kind of want to do what you've learned.
Speaker 2:But that isn't necessarily the best decision from a business point of view. You know, okay, if we, we don't know if this feature is going to actually be worth building, so let's build a quick version of it. Okay, that might mean we have to, like, take these shortcuts in the short term or maybe not do this thing. We should do first, but we might not need to do this at all. So sometimes developers, divorced of the business context, can go down rabbit holes and over engineer the things that you don't even need. So kind of having a foot in both camps, maybe the business sales side and the tech side. I think is is really powerful and I think that's been probably the probably the reason I'm here, to be honest, because you know you don't need to be brilliant like overarching genius to both either of those things, as long as you know enough to be dangerous at both, at both yeah, and is that the sort of thing that you would advise a founder on?
Speaker 1:is you know you need to ideally be. You don't have to be an expert at something that you it's good if you're, if you're okay or good at a couple of things like what piece of advice have you been imparting to other? You know younger founders or people starting out over the last few years where you've learned something and you think you know I wish I'd known this and so I tell lots of founders this particular piece of advice. What would that?
Speaker 2:be? Yeah, exactly, I think. I think it would probably be two things. Like one would be trying to ask yourself, like why am I starting this business? What am I actually trying to get out of it? Like yeah, actually, but being super honest with yourself, is it? Are you trying to change the world or do you want to make money? You know, do you want to provide for your family and have a comfortable life? Because those take radically different paths, you know.
Speaker 2:I think one would be the v money, one would be for God's sake, don't get VC money because you're gambling everything.
Speaker 2:And the other would be to try and if you're a hard skills person when I say hard skills I mean a techie person let's say try and put yourself out there and be in more sales and business situations and, if you can like, do that in a way where you're kind of it's just you and a client and you, you learn those skills because that it will help you appreciate. You know, whatever camp you're in, try and understand a bit more about the other camp there's lots of. I've got a friend who's 37 and he's uh, you know, always been in sales and he's he's doing like a data science and python course, and things. That's just you know. You can do these things for free. It doesn't take you very many hours and you've gone from zero to way more than zero and it's quite a good investment in time and energy and just makes you way better at appreciating what you maybe you're asking of other people when you're making a sale or, you know, creating a requirement and things like that. So, yeah, that would probably be my, my advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah and how do you inspire yourself? You, I think I saw something about you do some boxing. Is that right? You do boxing at the gym, or did.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it's a bit of a story there. So at school I was always a bit of a nerd, so I never really stuck up for myself and it was always a part of me. I didn't really like, I sort of hated it, in fact, as you probably could imagine. And I was out in um on holiday with my mates in Croatia and one thing led to another and I got started on by some fella in a bar and I didn't stand up for myself at all and I think as a result of that we ended up getting piled on by like 30 guys and I got quite badly hurt and I was like if I'd have just not backed down in that situation, I'm fairly sure that wouldn't have happened got a sort of smelt weakness, if you like. So, like what can? What's the single most hardcore way I could make myself tough? It was like right, I'm just gonna join a boxing gym and it was incredibly tough.
Speaker 2:You know, I was in the first couple of sparring sessions. I was like afraid to like hit, even hit people because I just felt so wrong. But after a year or so, doing that I was, I was completely cured of that part of me and that was actually really nice, a really nice feeling of something that's always you've hated about yourself, kind of solving that and just feeling like I'm actually not that person. I could never go back to being that person. That would not stand up for themselves. So that was awesome. And I did boxing for a bunch of years and my dad had Alzheimer's and both of his sisters had it and I'm like maybe I shouldn't be getting hit in the head so much. So I was like maybe I'll stop that. So currently I'm just going to the gym a lot. I've got ambitions to get into BJJ and some of the wrestling side of mixed martial arts you could take on Mark Zuckerberg, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I've got about 20 kilos on Zach. It'll be fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think most humans are heavier than Mark Zuckerberg. You could be some sort of big AI challenge. That would be quite funny. And do you find that? It's just a complete antidote to startup life and if you've had a bad day, you can smack the crap out of a bag, or you know? I mean because you're not sparring now, presumably because you don't want to get smacked in the head.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it certainly is. I mean any kind of I think any kind of goal outside of startup life is a great thing to have and it doesn't need to. Obviously it doesn't ever supersede your business, but, like my co-founder, for example, started doing tennis, he's now got into the advanced league and he didn't start until with you know, he's about eight years older than me and he didn't even start till we're like four years into the business and he's super competitive and it's like something where he can you know, progress and it's just a time to switch off. You know, for me at the moment it's just like I'm trying to.
Speaker 2:I always wanted to get into like great shape at the gym and then I sort of for some reason, right, I was doing this really seriously for like a year before founding the business and then my thought was like, well, we'll sell the business in like two years and I'll be like on a yacht and I'll have like a personal trainer. It's like, obviously doesn't work out like that. But it was like seven years of doing absolutely no exercise at all. And then I was like, right, you know what, I'm going to start working towards this, even though I'm still doing a business and it's like found. You know, I'm going to the gym about six times a week and you know, doing all the protein burners and so forth.
Speaker 2:So just trying to get into good shape has been my main goal. I mean the boxing side of things. I'm trying to help my cousin at the moment train for a fight and that's quite fun. But, yes, I think anything where you can see improvements in yourself or some other aspect of your life that can give you a, I think, fundamentally human psychology, if you see growth somewhere, that's an incredibly nourishing thing and it's an incredibly powerful way of protecting your mental health. So, yeah, if you can be doing anything where you want to be doing, it ideally a goal as well. If yours and you're making small progress towards it, then that can be like a lifeline of everything's getting overwhelming in the office. That towards it, then that can be like a lifeline of everything's getting overwhelming in the office.
Speaker 1:That is a really wonderful way to finish and that's superb advice for people listening and you know Mark Zuckerberg, if you are listening, you know Alex is ready for you. He is ready to fight you. He is ready to go. Bring it on, Bring this on. So, Alex, has been absolutely fantastic chatting to you today. Thank you so much for the time you've given. What I'll do is I'll make sure that I put some connections to you and to Cortical in the show notes so that if people are interested in learning more about Cortical or wanting to reach out to you personally, they can do so in the show notes and connect with you. Again, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real privilege and a real honour chatting to you today. So, yeah, thank you. Thanks so much for having me.