0:00 spk_0
Welcome to a new episode of Yahoo Fience’s opening bid Unfiltered podcast. I’m Yahoo Fence executive editor Brian Sazi, so jazzed up for my next guest. Uh, we’re gonna dive into all things. It’s just a cool topic I wanna talk about. I can do whatever I want. It’s my podcast. Frederick, uh, Gregar, Cardano Foundation CEO. Good to see you. Um, I’ve never met you before, but welcome to Yahoo Find’s headquarters. For those not familiar with Cardano Foundation, like, what, what is this?
0:26 spk_1
So the Kadano Foundation is a Swiss non for profit foundation who supports the nation state of the Kadano ecosystem, which currently has about 8 to 9 million inhabitants who have full voting and is managing a treasury of 1.5 billion ere. And what’s quite unique about it is that we don’t control the blockchain, we don’t pay for the blockchain. We support and enable the blockchain around mainly uh operation resilience. So how do you walk back a public commissioner’s blockchain if something happens, right?Uh, the second part is regulatory clarity and education. How do we get to a point that people understand the power of blockchain and not just the power of crypto? Um, and last but not least, how do we enable real mass adoption? So think about how do we get 1 billion or 2 billion people to actually get the benefits of blockchain.Even though they might not actually know what blockchain is.
1:17 spk_0
Who created thefoundation.
1:18 spk_1
So the foundation was originally created by the original founders of the Kadano ecosystem, and the the the most vocal of them, of course, today is uh Charles Hodgkinson. Yes. And then Ken Kurramazan and and a few others. And again, what’s quite unique here is that uh with many of the old Ethereum founders, you see them very engaged in the different types of non for profit foundations.And here from the start, they said, OK, we run commercial companies ourselves to generate a profit and get the product to market fit of blockchain, right? But we also need a non for profit. And that means that they’re actually not a part of the governance of the foundation, which is quite unique because the time frame in which we optimize on is different. The Kaana Foundation fights in a 10 to 20 year time frame. It’s really about the long marathon of blockchain.And where the commercial companies, of course, uh fight more about, you know, the next quarter, next month, andThat is different when you optimize, but it also makes it extremely powerful and extremely resilient.
2:20 spk_0
How did you find your way to be the CEO of this?
2:24 spk_1
Yeah, that’s a fantastic question.So, um,There’s two stories I normally tell, but you, because you’re coming from a trading floor, I’ll tell you the origination story, right? So I, I came out of the army, um, I saved up a little bit of money, but it was quite clear for me with the, the, the political situation and having been deployed that uh I needed some more education and um I needed to go away from the army. So I started on a business school and they were teaching about macroeconomics, specifically around oil and trading the contango.And you know, being a practical guy, I walked into my local bank, my family bank, and I said, I need to trade in all future. And the clerk looked at me as I was, you know, completely insane and started laughing and said, you, well no, you’re not happening, you know. And I said, I want to speak to the manager and they’re looking at this student, you know, who looked a little bit strange because, you know, just coming out of the military, you have different eyes, right? And um I said, yeah, I’m, I’m not leaving before speaking to the manager, right? And the manager said, well, you know, you do not have the qualifications, the access, and that.Well, I can cover the margin for my futures trade. So, let me in, right? And it ended escalating up uh all the way up to the executive of the local bank, right? It became very clear to me that it doesn’t matter really if you’re born in a western country, or if you’re born in a, in a non-Western country, if you’re born in the right family, there’s people who have access and has rights and the people who doesn’t.So I really sort of started thinking about what would it mean if we democratize access to capital markets. If we create equal opportunities and by that, also create distribution. So how amazing would it look like that if, you know, capital markets and finance market infrastructure was servicing all people on, on earth and not just a few.
4:11 spk_0
When didyou, when did you catch the blockchain bug?
4:13 spk_1
So that came way later, right? Um, so that was around10 years ago, um, when the Ethereum Foundation, uh, was incorporating in Switzerland and we had another amazing company who’s also still around called Bitcoin Swiss, which is a great, uh, broker, an OTC broker, right? And, uh, they, they needed to have a bank account. And it was difficult for them to get a bank account. And at that time I was building banks and robo advisors and so on, but I was not allowed to give them a corporate bank account. They could run salaries in Fiat on due to their exposure to blockchain.So I had a deeper look into it. I got really excited about Bitcoin, but it also became clear to me that they needed banking services uh like other people who’s cut away from the markets. So I helped them to get some banking services and get some, some early accounts. Um, and I got really, you know, I got really deep into the rabbit hole, um, and was really looking at this and thinking aboutYou know, when you’re used to building banks and, and, you know, brokers and exchanges, and you suddenly saw a piece of code who were able to basically settle in T 0, which back then was like, Yeah, it was unheard, right? Atomic swaps, you know, just this idea that you could, you know, exchange value at the exact same time and then basically not have counterparty risk.Um, so there’s a lot of these concepts with Bitcoin was introducing and it seems like it was working, which really got me thinking about, you know, how awesome wouldn’t it be in Traffi if we started getting some of that in and how much would that not help, you know, the investors and the people actually operating in this when we take away some of these.You know, bottlenecks, right? And um, yeah, so after that, um, you know, it became sort of a journey, right? And then I moved over to uh PWC where I built a blockchain center, an emergent tech center.
6:04 spk_0
Howdo you build a blockchain center?
6:09 spk_1
Yes, accident. Accident and timing, right? So we had something which was called an experience center. So it’s an emergent tech center, which was a concept from PWC.So we’re, you know, just north of 100 people, engineers, designers, product developers, business people, consultants.And um, you know, at that time, there was a company which still exists, which is an amazing company as well called Swiss Code. This is a Swiss bank. And they in the, in the Bitcoin run of that year, uh suddenly the Bitcoin exposure they had became material on the balance sheet.And I was already teaching about the advantage of blockchain to our in-house auditors, but they were not that interested. But if FIMA, the local regulator, suddenly say you have a material risk on the balance sheet and PWC is the auditor, it becomes interesting. So they called me, right, and said, you know, I need help, right? Can you explain to me what this is? And there is some audit principles you need to do to establish, you know, the amount and the control and stuff like that.And that did not exist for crypto because crypto is slightly different. You can’t just get an audit statement if you’re holding this in cold storage yourself, right? So how do you prove that you have control over it and so on.And basically the what we did there is what all auditors today are using in order to audit anybody with crypto exposure out there today. So banks and brokers, asset managers, they’re actually using that methodology. Uh, around the same time came this big project with Facebook Libra.
7:42 spk_0
there’s a name from the past.
7:43 spk_1
So I was also involved in in that project with PWC.And um and that was super interesting. We were actually, what many people don’t know, we were actually only 2 weeks away from giving them the full license to do this, 2 weeks. And what’s kind of funny when you kind of look back into history, um, what actually happened was uh presidential election. So if you look at the timing, the presidential election happened, new president.He decided it should be a different custodian, you know, favors has to be given out, right? There’s a little bit more to the story than that, but they changed the custodian setup.And then from the Swiss side, we basically said that we do not feel comfortable. Uh, so this was not me and PWC, right? This was this, the regulatory framework in Switzerland basically said, yeah, well then we don’t feel comfortable anymore for that setup. But it was 2 weeks away from happening. Could you imagine if that had happened back in the days, right? Yeah, it’s been billions of people being on on actually the of of a type of stablecoin, which we haven’t seen yet, right? Because the stablecoin was constructed slightly different, more like a basket currency.Than than what we see with the USTC and UCT today, right? And then I had the the opportunity also to participate in the first licensed asset managers introduction into Bitcoin exposure and Eat exposure. So we, we also did that out of my team. And then we did the uh two other banks which you’re probably familiar with, which is called Signum and Saba. SEA now called Amina, so the two first blockchain banks were also, I was a part of that as well in PWC.And we did the first Ecoin implementation with something back in the days, so it doesn’t exist anymore. It was called Falcon Private Bank. So this is the first fully regulated bank who had a full Ecoin exposure.
9:21 spk_0
How, let me, you mentioned, you mentioned staplecoins and I was just, I was just, this is top of mind because I had a great conversation with um Circle CEO Jeremy Leh on obviously they’re the main player in stablecoins. HowAre they really becoming core to the financial system?
9:39 spk_1
So I think there’s two ways you can look at this, right? There’s the first way and just purely look at the, the volume. So basically look at how many dollars is, is back in USDC and USDC-X, right?And the other way you can look at it is saying, hmm, what does the financial system actually need right now if you look at the refi system because stablecoins, even though they are becoming significant in terms of the amount of dollars which is backing this, they are still very insignificant in the grander pool of refi. And what we are seeing right now, specifically on uh both Arbitram, Carrano and others right now, I’m representing, of course, Carrano.we see that there’s a lot of use cases for uh stable coins, which is not um impacting TVL in the same way as we see today. And what I mean about it is, for instance, we have a use case in Germany right now called Msumi, where we have several 100 German mid-sized companies, you know, when I say mid-size, we’re talking about Lufthansa and we’re talking about, you know, that type of company who’s using agentic AI.Uh, for different purposes. Now, what’s happening underneath is the security layer and the collaboration layer is actually Karano. So there is a bit, uh, an identity. So the AI has an identity. So that which allows you to know that if I’m getting data from you, which is outside my, my corporate entity, right? So it’s outside data, right? I know who you are and you can prove who you are. It’s called a VC, a verified credential, right, without giving me the background information.Plus, when you have two agentic AIs who are speaking together, right, one potentially has more computing power than the other one. So one easy way of ensuring that the one with the most computing power doesn’t, you know, do a billion prompts and you know circumvent the security manners to get data it’s not supposed to have is to do a microtransaction.In a MIA compliant stablecoin.Right? And secondly, because we’re sharing data among companies, right? You want to have an incentive model, always follow the money to figure out what the incentives are, right?And these transactions is also happening in AmiA compliance stablecoin. Now, these type of transactions, if you look at the average transaction size on USDC or or Tether for instance, right, you see they’re really, really high. But now you see the next generation of need for types of settlement is coming with agentic AI because what’s really happening is an agentic AI cannot have a bank account.Right, but it can have a non-custodial wallet, right? And what we’re also seeing today is that we are delegating power to agenda AIs to do payments for us and do other things. But if something goes wrong, who’s at fault?
12:25 spk_0
Who is at fault? BecauseI, I talked to a lot of tech CEOs that are developing, Mark Benioff. I mean, he’s sitting there’re developing these AI agents. Like you were the first person I, that I’m.I’m gonna come away after this conversation like, holy shit, like these AI agents are, I mean, they’re proliferate proliferating. They’re everywhere now and like who’s thinking about the risks from these agents? We don’t hear anybody.
12:45 spk_1
But we are blockchain, right? So you don’t normally see it, right? You don’t, you know, when you think blockchain, you think crypto assets, you know, you think, you know, provenance, you think, you know, all those kind of things.But you don’t necessarily think about the security layer and the identity layer which is needed for these agents to be held accountable, but also for you to delegate a mandate to them and withdraw a mandate, right? And keep them in balance and checks, right? And I think this is the next generation of of use cases on blockchains. This is exactly it, right? And this is going to, you know, it’s our Google Maps moment from web 2. It’s actually coming right now. A lot of people say, oh, it’s a stablecoins, it’s Bitcoin, and I’m still a very large advocate of Bitcoin, right?But I do think that what we’re going to see with, uh, you know, robots and AI uh basically um using blockchains for collaboration, security and identity, right, is going to be a massive moment.
13:37 spk_0
As so plugged into agents, you know, I’ve been asking everyone this, so I want to put it to you.How impactful will agents be to global economic prosperity? You know, I talked to some folks, they’re like, Brian, 6 months from now, I mean, we’re going to get a big spike in the unemployment rate. Other folks would say, AI agents are going to be job creators. Like where do you fall?
14:00 spk_1
So I’m, I’m probably representing one of those small strands of humanity who still fights for the power of people. I truly believe that we need to find a deeper meaning for people to exist and for people to collaborate. And that’s what attracts me to blockchain and that’s what attracts me specifically to Kadano is this type of collaboration layer and this new type of social system.And I think that when we look at AI, you have two options. You either have a direction which goes towards more like a skynet, right, that you know most data lies in one common database and it creates incredible wealth and incredible benefits for medical applications and so forth. But the other one is an option of decentralization and distribution where we’ve built systems which allows us to have bespoke AI agents.Uh, and they might be extremely good at other things as well, right? But they are, they are restricted by the blockchain to do certain things, and that allows us to still have small and medium sized companies, which is actually what the financial system and all economies built on small and medium sized companies in nearly all countries around the world. But I do think in the next 10 to 15 years, you’re going to see uh companies who valued in the billions, if not even trillions, with less than 10 employees.
15:21 spk_0
Less than 10. I, I believe that. I see that where it’s going. Um, I, I think companies, these agents are really causing a lot of like executives to go back and like rethink their cost structures, especially if they’re public. And if they don’t rethink them, they’re gonna get penalized in organs.
15:37 spk_1
Completely. And we, I mean, again I’m going back to one of these agents or agent cases we have is called Mazumi or Sukozumi, we can put a link into it, right?And what it’s able to do is amazing, right? So I asked her to do a full brand analysis of the Kedao brand, including the marketing and you know, put numbers on it.And you really see how one agent, like a project management agent, delegates to 15 other agents in a G chart, right? And every time it delegates, right, there’s a digital identity which is verified in Kedao, which is ensuring that this is the right to agents, right? There’s a microtransaction and a MICA compliance stablecoin happening, right? There’s information sharing behind paywalls.Right? There’s even some of them are able to take Yahoo Finance data and take data, right? To basically build it up. And then not like you see with the models from like a chat GBT or Gemini today, right? It’s not like in 5 minutes or 1 minute even you have an answer, right? This took hours, but what you get is you get a full data dump and an Excel spreadsheet format, right, which you can then go deeper into. You get a full PowerPoint, you get a full research paper down, right? Everything is verified and you can go all the way back into the steps.And that type is just, is blowing my mind, right? Because, you know, of course, I’m willing to pay for this, right? And of course, I’m willing to also when I do interviews with new marketing agencies, uh, I will use this for them and against them, right? Because suddenly it allows me to, to suspend wider in the blockchain use cases, but also in, in what is the real impact out
17:09 spk_0
there. In this role, how, how are you, how do you grow the foundation? Like what are your mandates over the next few years?
17:17 spk_1
So, we think a lot about blockchain for good. Any new technology gets weaponized. So a lot of what we’ve been doing is trying to do use cases such as F wheat, which is a tokenized wheat down in Argentina, right? Uh, to planting a million trees and putting every single tree’s regulatory information, but also carbon footprint on the blockchain or to how to ensure the security about AI agents in, in Germany, right? So a lot of what we do is really about blockchain for good. Can we show people that blockchain is not just a weapon?But if we go in and judge what’s good and bad.You know, we’re back in the old system. So what I’m trying to really do is I’m trying to, instead of being the judge, we’re trying to ensure that we show people the possibilities of the blockchain.The other part is incentives.So when you have a blockchain who cannot just print money as in the old world, right? There’s no central bank who just prints money because there’s a lot of blockchains who do that today, right? Again, I always say follow the money and you figure out the incentives, right? But Kedao is very aligned to Bitcoin. I mean there’s an inflation guaranteed setup where, there can only be an X amount of data ever minted out there, right?And we think a lot about, so what are the incentives we need to pay for developers, for miners with us called estate pool operators, right, for the security of the blockchain, right? And what is the income of the blockchain and how do we get to an equilibrium between the income and the cost of the blockchain, because when you get to that, you have a self-sufficient and self-evolving system.At the moment we took out back in the days, 11 billion to ensure that we have enough run rate.To get to that equilibrium, but the true, like what really on top of our mind right now is how do we get more gas fee, some people call it, right? Um.So we can cover basically the incentives. And that obviously goes into some really interesting directions about, you know, layer two. You’ve seen in many other large blockchains, the layer two ecosystems are becoming much, much larger than the actual layer one, right? And there’s been some hurdles around should we force people to layer one or to layer two.You know, roll-ups, you know, we have BLS and Carrano, right? You know, Should we force people to a roll-up situation that you can bulk more things. But Carrano itself has a lot of advantages in the architecture that allows you to do things you’re not able to do on Ethereum or or sort of account-based blockchains.
19:39 spk_0
I, I think you’re the right guy to ask this. Um, 20 years from now, how does the blockchain look different?
19:46 spk_1
So, I actually believe that um first and foremost, we will probably not have a lot of podcasts like you exploring this topic because the blockchain will be a core critical infrastructure who lies beneath the systems. So from now?
20:01 spk_0
I think so,
20:02 spk_1
yeah.
20:03 spk_0
I think
20:03 spk_1
so. But your job will probably change slightly, right? Um, you might even be interviewing agents.Here or in a humanoid format,
20:12 spk_0
right.
20:14 spk_1
But yeah, no, I do think journalism has actually a very important role to play. And one of the things I always sort of try and say to journalists when I speak to journalists is how do you protect yourself? Because a lot of this high quality content you are producing is very frequently been taken out of context and used for other purposes, like uh click bait or like other things.And what we have in Kadano is we have a very good way to basically ensure that everything you do gets hashed and installed on the blockchain. So if somebody ever want to figure out what you said or your view on something, if that was really the right context, you can protect that, right? So I think a lot of what you’re going to do in the future will be protected by a blockchain, including the property right of you.Including your biomarkers, including your voice, those kind of things, and there’s to be sort of, it’ll be a human right for you to protect yourself and the content. I think you should already do that nearly in the next couple of weeks. You should explore this already because there will be only two types of journalists. There will be the ones who are protecting the content and the high value content they create.And that would be the one who don’t think about it, and they will wake up one day without a job because their brand has been taken down by some campaign using an AI or an AI agent against them because the cost of doing that is close to zero and the impact is tremendously high.
21:35 spk_0
11 more for you, um, I think you’re gonna have a lot of new followers after this airs because um you seem like a very cool guy, very energetic guy doing really cool things. Um, is there oneHas there been one secret to your success, um, that got you into this seat, just from meeting you for the first time, you seem to have done a lot of different really interesting things and maybe raised your hands numerous times to try newthings.
21:59 spk_1
Oh, so personally for me.Uh, I, I try to work with people who’s better than me. So I really try every time I can to hire people which, uh, I think is better than what I am. Either, uh, in a subject matter expertise or as a human being. And by trying to do that, I, I constantly learn. I am very rarely the smartest person in the room, in the organization I work in, but I work with people who are incredibly smart and I’m very humbled today that a lot of the people who work with me in this non for profit foundation.They don’t have to work one more day in their life. They’re working there because they believe we do have a chance to change financial systems and social systems for the better, that we have an option, an obligation to humanity to make things better, not just for the 1 or 2 people or the 10 people who run a $1 trillion company in the future, right, but for the global population of the world. Now we can’t force people to take economic opportunities, but by creating economic opportunities for everyone out there.Were situations which benefits everybody.
23:02 spk_0
Welcome toYahoo Finance. It was great to finally meet you, Frederick. I wish you, uh, much success on everything you’re working on. Let’s stay in touch. Tell Charles I said hi. We haven’t. I appreciate it.I am so psyched for my next guest. I just can’t contain myself because we’ve been trying to get this one on the calendar for a long period of time.Uh, May Abib is here. Uh, the CEO of Wrider, uh, is it dot AI or AI? I just wanna make sure I got it right.
23:29 spk_2
It’s.com. It’s.com.
23:30 spk_0
I know I’m losing track of, uh, I’m, I’m doing some of these podcasts, man. I’m losing my mind here. Um, it’s good to see you. I know we’ve been trying to do this for a while. I’ve been following your company and what you’ve been building over there for, uh, for some time. For those not familiar with Wrider, take us through what you are working on right now and what made you co-found the company.
23:49 spk_2
Yeah, well, for folks who don’t know us, uh, we are agentic solution for the enterprise. We help companies really treat AI like a digital workforce, real deep functional expertise, uh, we start in sales and marketing, but we are a horizontal solution.And the need out there, Brian, is that most AI tools, you know, say they’re easy, but they really treat business users and business teams like AI hobbyists. Real ease of use for the business means a complete solution, intuitive systems that codify business expertise.Deploys it in autonomous workflows, connected tools they use every day securely. So writer gives the enterprise, we work largely in regulated environments, a complete agent building system that’s as intuitive as any consumer app with enterprise governance baked in.Um, and uh we are 5 years old. Um, we started the company in 2020, uh, to build transformers and bring them to the enterprise, and it’s been an incredible ride ever since.
24:52 spk_0
If anyone is, is going to be able to tell me how these AI agents are changing companies, it is you. I talked to a lot of leaders that are, they talk about AI agents, and, you know, they’re, they’re nice to have, and they give their explanations, but like you’re literally deploying or helping deploy these agents inside companies, like what?Where is this all headed?
25:12 spk_2
Yeah, well, let’s, let’s start to where it’s all headed, and then we can work backwards to what folks are are doing today. I think in a year, 1 year and a half, half of the work that gets done today inside of the global 2000 will be done or at least largely augmented by a digital workforce. Uh, you know, what we tell customers is you’ve got two choices. You wanna own that workforce, or do you wanna rent that workforce? And questions ofOf IP moat, questions of AI sovereignty, uh, questions of real deep transformation that’s just not, not just giving everybody, you know, their own productivity tool. This is what executives should be wrestling with. Not everyone is actually answering those really important questions, but that’s what we build technology to support a future where we’ve got just as many AI teammates as human ones, um, and they are doing really deep important work for the company.
26:10 spk_0
Is it realistic that I, well, I’m not managing any agents yet, um, but I, everyone tells me I should be managing agents in addition to humans. Is that like, is it?Do I have to get on board here? Like, how much longer can I put this off?
26:25 spk_2
Uh, it says you’re funny. I, I, I do think, look, there are certainly vanity metrics that are already emerging, right? We ourselves track the token consumption of our own employees, but it’s because I know they’ve got the best tools in the business to actually build really impactful stuff, and it doesn’t just become yet another, you know, measuring stick.Um, you know, for my own personal life, right, in terms of like how I run the business, it’s incredible, like I don’t do one on ones anymore that don’t come without their own custom built application for that meeting, right? It’s pretty incredible. So like I’m doing a one on one with a partner leader. I mean they have built an application that is a running a set of agents that work to, you know, prepare us to do good decision making and good strategy, right, in that one on one.And so you’re gonna be able to find so many incredible um uh use cases for it. I need to make sure we don’t leave the studio here without giving you a license. No,
27:25 spk_0
I know, I’m clearly, I’m clearly behind. I’m, I’m meeting with so many leaders and like we’re out to dinner, May, and they are, we’re talking, but then they check their phone and they’re like checking like agent updates, and they have them doing all of these tasks, like, I’m, I’m just being blown away. I mean, this is an amazing time to be in technology, right?
27:44 spk_2
100%, and I will say that it’s a mindset. Who can use leverage in this way is a mindset. It can be taught, we train people how to do it.But in every era of generative AI it’s only been a small number of people who’ve become power users at our customers, and, and there is a power law here, right? We go in and we train 200 people in a large pharmaceutical, for example, you know, 5 to 10 will become power users who are, you know, obsessively checking, you know, the writer agents at dinner, right? Or like,You know, we get notes like, I couldn’t sleep. I was so busy building my app, right? We need everyone, we need first those people to work on important things that move the needle for the business, right? Not nice to have. And then we need a system that takes what they’ve built and gets it to everybody, right? That’s what writer is. It’s not everybody in the business building their own stuff. It’s you wiring up the most important workflows of the company.And making them autonomous, right? Driving that cost down and really doing new things that you couldn’t do before as a team, as a business.
28:52 spk_0
Whathappens to the traditional corporate hierarchy? I mean, you just, you’re doing one on ones now with agents, but look, I grew up and I maybe uh imagine you two, I grew up in this like traditional corporate hierarchy, like manager, manager, manager, manager, like all these different layers of managers, like, why do we need any of these folks?
29:09 spk_2
Uh, it is, it is getting disrupted. It’s getting disrupted horizontally. Let’s start there, right? There is jurisdictional job overlap that is actually the, you know, where AI transformation goes to die. If I am worried about taking over your job when I build my agent, I’m never gonna build my agent as powerfully as I could.Right, so we actually at the at the ground level have to give people utter permission to rebuild workflows, irrespective of how they’ve done it before or who has what job, right? If you don’t do that, you get a 54 human handoff process reduced down to 15 instead of 0, right? Or maybe 1. And so you absolutely need, you know, to have everybody understand we are kind of completely red.Draw, right? What the boundaries of work look like here from a horizontal perspective. And then from a from a ladder, right, these like narrow job ladders are a thing of the past. They’re dead already. Like there is no world in which these horizontal job descriptions from, you know, analyst relations to competitive analysts to campaign analysts to sales enablement, like, aren’t just gonna go away. You’re not gonna be able to become an L8, L9, L10 in.Like one function, right? Because actually, your agents can be specialists, right? What we need are generalists, and those people who are gonna be going up that ladder are folks who think about leverage really differently than everybody else, right? It is not natural, right, to give everyone in your organization, an analyst, and EA and a chief of staff, and expect them to be 10 times better. But that is what we’re doing. It’s unlimited intelligence, and there are people in the or.who will take to this, and those are the people that need to be promoted, and very different kind of people, very different kind of profile from what we see than the traditional folks who have been promoted in the enterprise, and very few CEOs in C-suite have been brave enough to call it, have been brave enough to reach into HR and say, like, it is, this is literally, I’m ringing the fire alarm. We need to rebuild this organization. We need different people in charge. No one’s doing that.
31:24 spk_0
Man, if I had, I don’t have my laptop in front of me, but if I did, I would put on my LinkedIn profile right now, like AI agent manager. But that’s maybe I need to add these different layers to my complexion. Well, first I have to use the agents, but to your point, I mean, are we, is corporate America sitting on massive, um, I guess, look, expense savings, and to use your word brave, you know, I look at what Block did, and, you know, it was a tough decision for them to, you know, lay off all those workers and lean into AI, but, but.Maybe they are brave, maybe they are taking that first attempt at showing what a, a, a reorganized workforce should look like in this age of AI.
32:02 spk_2
Well, so, this is getting interesting now. Brave does not mean layoffs, and I actually think that is lazy, not brave, um, and you want leaders who can look people in the, I almost said AI instead of I. You, you need leaders who can look people in the eye and say, look, this will most likely be a smaller company, but not by a lot, right? But I need a company.Here with all you lot, that it has 10x the footprint of the footprint we got today, and we’re gonna do it with AI, right? And it’s like, you can do it with AI, you get to stay. If you can’t do it with AI, I don’t know that there’s a place for you, right? So it’s not get rid of everybody, then build AI because by the way, you might fire the wrong people. Again, the mindset here and the profile of people that we see that are fit to lead in this.look very different than the people who made it up the corporate ladder, right, over the last few decades. So you don’t want to fire the wrong people, right? And it like is not the right tone, like it’s just a severe lack of like future manifestation if you cannot look at unlimited cheap intelligence and not see a much bigger company and a much bigger future, um, but you do have to tell people the seat they’re in today.May not be the seat they’re in tomorrow. Most certainly will not be the seat they’re in tomorrow. And that’s the bravery that’s, that’s lacking, right? I think the layoffs is easy. Everyone understands that, you know, it’s the kind of venturing into the unknown together and with a real hands-on view of what the tech can do that a few leaders are doing.
33:34 spk_0
You think there’s a wave of, of these, I guess, non-brave, horrible announcements coming. I mean, we’ve seen some from like from the tech companies, but, um, I don’t know, it just feels like we’re on the cusp of getting some just really dour.Crappy announcements, uh, and they’re all, they’re all gonna tie to AI.
33:51 spk_2
Here’s what I think is gonna happen in in the enterprise. Here’s what we are helping make happen, right? The incremental bring everybody along.Steps that folks have been taking in the Fortune 500 aren’t working fast enough. That is absolutely the case, but I don’t think, you know, the answer is going to be fire everybody and start over. I think it’s going to be basically digital teams run by these kinds of people that I’m talking about, run alongside.The traditional teams, and it’s only when you see it working at scale, not incremental, not maybe, right, not like POCs and pilots that everybody really gets motivated, right, to change, and that motivation to change um is what is what is missing. I think tech is a little bit different. I think we are going to see in, you know, a lot of big tech.Kind of these incremental 5, 10, 15% layoffs. I think mostly because, you know, everybody really grossly overhired in like COVID period to do like incredibly human manual things where a lot of that sales and marketing can now be augmented with with AI. You know, the enterprise is is different. Certainly there’s a ton of sales and marketing.Um, but, you know, we serve highly regulated industries. There are people in shop floors, there’s a lot of operations, a lot of compliance, um, and, you know, those jobs are just going to be different, um, they’re not gonna go away. How
35:18 spk_0
is, uh, how are these agents evolved this year in terms of, you know, I guess what I’m trying to think of like, what surprise have you seen on the AI agent front compared to just like 3 months ago, or even frankly, like last week, every, I don’t know, every day I’m, I’m like seeing new developments in this space.
35:36 spk_2
Yeah, it’s, it’s incredible. I mean, you know, we, we have built agents that talk to each other, right inside of a company, right, and inside of an organization, and like the intelligence that is possible.Um, is, is just incredible. Like I’m using, you know, agents that help me prep for meetings, and they’re picking up on things that my colleagues are doing, right, that I didn’t even know they were doing that are helping me, right? The agents are prompting me to do my work differently, and my prep differently based on, you know, what others are doing, and, you know, that is really cool to see, you know, the agents get smarter, and, and that’s what’s missing in the industry. No one has built that, right? This is why writer has been so successful.in the global 2000 is, you know, we’ve got 2 year olds, right, who get smarter every day by what they’re learning. That’s not LLMs today, right? Unless you’re using writers, um, and that’s what we need in organizations that are incredibly siloed, incredibly calcified, especially that this AI talent we’re talking about in the business just like is not abundant, right? And so the people who do get it, we need to like put that stuff on.Um, on auto blast, right, to get it into the hands of everybody else, and, and that has been just the, the latest, you know, turn of our model and our technology and, and the way that these agents can now network together, um, it’s pretty incredible.
36:58 spk_0
Can these large SA companies that have been pummeled by the market, can they reinvent themselves?
37:05 spk_2
Yeah, absolutely. Like the, the system of record companies, you know, your ServiceNow, your salesforces, they’re not going anywhere, um, and I think every company needs to have an agentic layer, right? Customers sometimes will like look at an interface and be like, well, I only need one interface that’s got a, you know, a chat box that says, hey Brian, good morning, how can I help you? That’s the front door ofSoftware, right? And there is going to be a ton of um differentiation under the hood and and hence a ton of products that look like that inside of your business, you know, are they all going to be, or 50 of them, are they all gonna be built on Salesforce? No, right? You’re gonna largely build your own ephemeral, highly personalized software.Experiences on Salesforce, right? Like that’s literally my one on ones that I just talked about. Everyone on one comes with an app that’s largely built on Salesforce, right? Um, because that is our source of truth for market data and our, um, our customer data or, or, or Snowflake or BigQuery, you know, the underlying data warehouses that we use inside the company, um.And that is what we are seeing. So the ability for you to add value if you are not one of those companies like that does require reinvention, right, in in SAS we’re seeing people build their own compliance agents on writer or their own project management agents on Wrider. Why? Because project management in the age of agents doing the execution looks very different than project management, right, of yesteryear and those.Interfaces have not changed enough, right, to take into account that actually it’s human supervising agentic execution that is now largely using these tools, and so if they don’t evolve fast enough, and I don’t think the systems of record are actually evolving fast enough either, um, but they’ve certainly got a mode around the data that exists there, you know, those, those companies will be in trouble, but again, you know, we are very much looking atThe TA that has not been invented, right? And that is the TA that is going to get created for all of the software, uh, to manage so much new digital labor, so much new growth as a result of this digital labor, and I ultimately, you know, these markets are going to be so muchbigger.
39:18 spk_0
Clearly you saw something in 2020 to start this business, and frankly, I think you’re one of the most accomplished people I’ve talked to.In in some time on AI and I thank you for doing this, but what did you see in 2020 that you needed to go all in with writer?
39:37 spk_2
You’ll laugh when I tell you.Writer’s model wrote a haiku.I’m not joking.
39:45 spk_0
I am laughing.
39:46 spk_2
Yeah, and I had spent the previous 6 years with my present co-founder Waseem working on machine translation.And you know, we, we built first we started with statistical machine translation models, you know, we followed it up all the way to um Transformers. A lot of people in AI, you know, started in NLP and um and when, when we built the, you know, the train of the LLM and it wrote a haiu, we were like, like WTF like where what?Um, and, you know, we were working in machine translation before, you know, we started writer to do English language, um, generation, and, you know, the rest is history. Now we, you know, are in 100+ languages again, which is great, and do, you know, people do a lot of translation with our platform, um, but, you know, the English language is the, the, the conduit to super intelligence, right? Write it to build it. That’s why the company is still writer.Um, and, and that is really cool, right? And, you know, we’ve always been very motivated by democratizing technology, uh, to equalize, um, opportunity to create a more equitable world, and there’s nothing more democratizing than this technology. Uh, it is just so, so empowering to people to do things that they couldn’t.And even think they could do before, right? The time from ideation to execution has just collapsed, and so who are you empowering? You’re empowering the most creative people in your organization, the most imaginative, the most motivated, like what CEO does not want to promote those people, right? And, and, and that is, that’s incredible, it’s gonna create a very different enterprise.Our vision is to empower these people, to help them change the way their companies work, the way their teams work, uh, and it’s going to be a hybrid human digital workforce, and I’m very excited to, to bring this tomarket.
41:43 spk_0
20 years ago, did you see yourself in the seat?
41:47 spk_2
Let’s see, 20 years ago I was still in college. No, I thought I’d be like bringing world peace, you know, Brian, but I think that I’m, I’m definitely not doing.
41:56 spk_0
Well, you are because we don’t have to talk to anybody in this era of agents. We could just talk to the agents. They don’t like kind of yell back. We can yell at them. It’s fine. It’s like all good. Yeah,
42:03 spk_2
we’ll, we’ll have AI peace mediators one day. I’d much rather have AI in charge, honestly, than human government. Um, let’s put it, let’s put it, leave it at that.
42:11 spk_0
Fair enough. Well, um, you know, as we wrap up here, May, what is yourYou know, I talked to a lot of founders, and they, everyone’s a little different, but like, what is, like, do you wanna be a public company? Is that where, you know, you’re setting up internally the structures, the teams to arrive at that big moment, and we’re gonna see you at the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange at some point?
42:33 spk_2
Yeah, look, we, we have a very unique vision and it like still shocks me that no one else is trying to do what we are trying to do, go very, very deep in helping people bring this expertise to real workflows, and yes, it’s a crowded market, but like when we think when the, the way that we show up, the way that we uh partner, the way that we build agents with the enterprise, the way we empower business users, just nobody else is in that room andYou know, I, I hate to think of a world where, you know, two LLM companies, um, you know, have inherited all the time that has been and all the time to be, especially given, you know, I think the, the lack of dignity dignity to human labor that, you know, so many of their statements and, um, you know, honestly, products,
43:19 spk_0
right? It has been worrying, it has been worrying, yeah.Where do you, you know, you know, it’s interesting in that so many of these companies have focused on the consumer and you’ve just gone all in on enterprise. Like, what was the thinking behind that?
43:33 spk_2
So our first company was in the enterprise, so, you know, I took long walks in the Presidio when we were starting writer, you know, to be or not to be prosumer, consumer, enterprise, um, and so many of the customers, um, and just the people that we knew, you know, were enterprise buyers, and so it’s so much easier to, you know, go and test, write this stuff with, and we’ve always been motivated by, you know, deep impact and folks’ lives.In the enterprise just are not that great, right? You are like clicking boxes 800 times a day across, right, 30 tabs, um, and just the sheer amount of information, uh, coming at you without that much insight or progress as a result, right? Like this is like a generation that only works more the higher up they get, right? Um, and soI, I think we can really bring a very different way of working, uh, to the enterprise, one that is much more leveraged, much higher insight, uh, and, you know, much more interesting results for, for, for, for the companies as well. And, you know, that just, that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
44:43 spk_0
Last one if you may, um, you’re sitting on a rocket ship, company’s growing, you’ve raised money, um, you’re rocking and rolling over there. How do you, how do you relax? Like what’s your, what’s your out?
44:52 spk_2
Relax. How do you spell that?
44:54 spk_0
Look, I’m not the one to share any insight and relaxation. Like that’s just not me on a human level, but maybe you have some insight and can make me a better person.
45:03 spk_2
Um, I, I do Pilates, Brian.
45:05 spk_0
OK, I do high rocks. High rocks training me. I’m big. I. Yes, yes, very
45:10 spk_2
cool. Well, you look verybuff. Oh,
45:13 spk_0
come on. Thank you. Thank you. All right, all right, we’re gonna end it there, guys. We’re in it there. Thank you, May. You’re my, uh, cool new friend. Um, I, I really, I wish you much success, uh, at Ryder. Let’s stay in touch, please. Don’t be a stranger. I’ll talk
45:24 spk_2
to you soon. I love that. Thank you so much.
45:27 spk_0
All right, that’s it for the latest episode of Opening Bid Unfiltered. Hope you enjoyed that episode because I sure as hell did. We’ll talk to you soon.
