Bob van Luijt's Lessons from Scaling Weaviate: Startup Growth & Hiring - podcast episode cover

Bob van Luijt's Lessons from Scaling Weaviate: Startup Growth & Hiring

Feb 05, 202558 minEp. 192
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Episode description

Scaling a startup is harder than it looks. From hiring and funding to execution, most founders underestimate what it really takes to grow a business.

In this episode,Bob van Luijt, CEO & co-founder of Weaviate, shares hishard-earned lessons from building an AI-native database company that has scaled to100+ employees worldwide.


What you’ll learn in this episode:
✅ Whyyour ability to sell a vision matters more than the idea itself
✅ Howopen source can fuel startup adoption before monetization
✅ Thereal role of funding—why investment isborrowing from the future
How to structure a winning startup team (and why hiring the right mix of people is critical)
✅ Whymost founders overthink instead of just starting


If you’re a founder, startup enthusiast, or thinking about launching your own business, this episode is amust-listen! 🚀

🎧Listen now & subscribe for more deep-dive tech conversations!


Connect with Bob van Luijt:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobvanluijt

https://x.com/bobvanluijt


Full episode on YouTube ▶️

https://youtu.be/iax1qipf9Hk

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Transcript

Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akil and joining me today is Bufan Laut, CEO and Co Founder of the company. We V8, we V. 8 is an AI native database for the next generation of software and very crucial in today's infrastructure with Gen. AI. He's been there from the start and has grown this company to

over 100 people worldwide. Truly incredible and he shares many learnings throughout this journey and his experiences, everything from hiring to driving a strong vision and actually getting funding as well because that's what you need

when you're growing. So enjoy, I'm of the opinion that investing, especially when it comes to start-ups, the people who are like really good at that, who do that for a living and are very good at it because there are also people who do it for a living and we're not good at it. So the people who do this for a living and are very good, it's really, it's like it's a profession. It's like a real, you really need to know what you're doing.

Yeah, I'm not that I'm just I like a founder, I like an idea and it's like if I can help you, let's go right. So it's I've been helped in the beginning of of weave 8 and now I'm this is my way to do something back to help you know, and if you're lucky, you know, some do very well. It's kind of nice. You get an e-mail. Hey, you invested this and now it's worth that, you know, that's nice. It didn't do anything. So, but sometimes they call me or they, they, they ask me for

help and then I try to help. But you also have people. And again, I mean, it's your money, so you can do whatever you want. But the, I'm not a big fan of the you need to take my Angel check because I know how stuff works. And there's a lot of angels who are like that. Really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You absolutely don't seem like that type of guy. Well, no, I think it's, I think it's inappropriate. It's like it's a it's it's very

interesting. It's it also, you know, these people also tend, tend to always be older dudes. Yeah. You know, they had a company, they sold it when they were 55 or something. And now they will tell the younger generation how you what to do. Yes. It's all BS. OK. And your perspective, either from your own or from what you've seen in your network. What does make a great founder? A founder or an investor? Founder. So the well, that's a good question.

Well, they're the things there are things that you have an an influence on as founder and things you do not have an influence on. So let's start with the things you do not have an influence on. Yeah. That's just where you're born, when you're born. And if you're got a little bit lucky, that cannot be that cannot be underestimated that that's that's a big, big percentage. Yeah. And so then the stuff is what can you influence? So I believe that the there's a famous saying and luck favours

the prepared. So going to places, involve yourself with people, be around people where stuff is happening. Yeah. So if you see that this is nicely described in the book the rise of the creative class from rich Florida and where he he asked many questions. Well, one of the questions like, why do cities tend to work as magnets for creatives? And I would definitely see you found as a form of a creative, right, Not an artist, but they yeah, it's, it's a creative endeavour, right?

And so if you live somewhere, let's say, you know, doesn't matter if it's in some rural part of the US or, or Europe, wherever, right, it's it's better to go to one of the biggest cities, the bigger cities, because these cities, they they tend to attract similar like minded people. And then you get the hive mind. Yeah.

And in tech, the the hive minds, the main, the big hive mind is of course in the Bay Area, but you can find it in Amsterdam, You can find in New York, You can find it in Berlin. It depends on what you do and, and, but it's harder to do that if you just live somewhere, you know, remote. You can also do it online. So the hive mind also exists online, but it's it's a mixture of things. So founder does that. So he or she is involved in

those those kind of things. You need to be able to rally people around your idea that has to do a little bit personality and those kind of things. And like, I want to work with this person for this person. That's very important. If you, you can bootstrap. But if you, if you need money, then that's, that's indirectly related because people need to believe in the, in the idea and you just need to have a, you

know, you need to keep going. It's like you need to really be able to, it's a takes a long time to get there. So it's a those three things I would say you've seen a fun, but mostly it's just you. You just meet somebody, go OK, this is a nice person. I like this person. Great idea and you know, to talk about it. Nice, right? That's how it starts. Interesting, I'm wondering because I I always ideate about kind of running or studying something for myself but I never

know where to start. Like I, I feel like I am in a city where a lot of stuff happens, but for example, how to find people that are like minded kind of with this start up mindset or something that they want to create kind of the creatives that you talked about, how can I find them? Is that more the meet ups, conferences or? Yeah. I mean, so you're part of the of the of the majority, right. So 90, I mean, everybody has an

idea. Yeah. If you, if you do not have ideas, then that's kind of that you're not human. Like everybody has ideas and, and of the nine of the 100 people, 95 people just don't do anything. So they, they don't start something themselves, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that, right? So we, you work for a great

company, so that's fine. And then of the 5% that's left, 4/4 of those, they started consultancy business to tell other people how to do stuff, which is, I did that too, which now looking back is kind of I, I feel embarrassed for it. I but it's like, what did I know? But you know, people gave me money for it. So there was thank you people. And then and then that one person that's left that starts a product business. And yeah. So why does that that person do

it? I think it's also it's a little bit some, you know, why does somebody become an artist? It's not fun being an artist, especially not if you're SOP, if you're like just below the top right, that's just not fun. And but you still do it because they might love the art or that kind of stuff. In the case of founder, you might like the building or you're you have such the passion for it can come from many things can come from, you know, things that people experience in the past.

You know, if, if somebody had like a something in childhood or something that gave them that fire in the belly to go, it's often those kind of stories, OK. How was that for you? Yeah, just, you know, was not always fun at home, right. So it's OK that gives a fire what you call a fire in the belly, right. And then you just. Yeah, that then somehow structured and gets together.

You you escape. It's a form of escaping something and so and then you just keep going and going and going and going and then at some point you. It's like an airplane, right? At some point the wind, you have enough wind under the wings and then the plane goes up. Yeah, finally. Yeah, finally. Yes. But if I. Look at like what you've achieved now and I look at WE V8, it's like it's a niche. It's very specific.

And I'm not sure if from a decision perspective that's conscious because I hear an advice usually that's like, OK, look at your total market cap, see what kind of niche is in there and actually see if you can solve a a specific problem. And if it's specific and it has a lot of people that at least want to purchase whatever you're selling, then you have a good fit, right? Product market fit, yeah.

But I, I don't agree with that. So I'm, I'm, I'm looking at my phone now, not because I'm because, but coincidentally yesterday I was looking something up. So let's see if I can quickly find it because I actually don't. That was actually something I like to think of was a smart move. And that's the fact that, so we are I'm in the in the in the database market. Yeah, right. So I have it somewhere. Here is.

It total market cap, yeah. The total I, I I have it somewhere here, but the total market cap of of the database market that's growing here you So the the total data database market because of AI is expected to grow in 10 years to just South of 500 billion. OK, so if you look at the NASDAQ right, you see the biggest steel Oracle, you see elastic, you see Mongo DB and and snowflake that's in the top 100. That's already 4 just pure database infrastructure

companies. And then I'm leaving off other infrastructure companies like Datadock, etcetera. That's huge. That's a the database market is very big. So the market cap is is potentially huge. So it was it, but was it a conscious choice to venture into this specific market, a database company? Yes. OK, Yeah. How'd that choice kind of arise? Yeah. Just because I, I saw the

opportunity, I mean, it doesn't. In hindsight, it's always a little bit easier to to just to pretend that you foresaw, which of course is not true. But what is true is that the that I saw this new data type in the form of the factory embedding that a specific database system to support that didn't exist back then. So we started to build 1 and we knew machine learning was a thing and deep learning was a thing just didn't we didn't call the AI yet.

But so no, I was not. But that's the same thing. If if you look back at these early models from if you're not at the database somewhere on the model side with opening eye and anthropic and those kind of thing. Who would ever imagined that these, I mean, take it coming like data bricks. Yeah, data bricks was just was just an A, a, a spark out of out of I believe it was out of

Berkeley, I believe. Well, couple of students, what is that 1520 years ago, something they they just raced just before the end of the year, they raised another round before going public. Did you see how much money they raised, $10 billion. Wow, that's. Nice for infrastructure and databases. So no, I wouldn't say that. No, I I would disagree that the database market is is tiny. It's actually rather big. It's. Quite big.

I didn't expect that. I mean, one of the things that's holding me back from, let's say, actually executing on the ideas that I have, and this was different from what you said. I, I think I need to have a good idea. But you, your advice was actually the skill is to rally people around your idea, make them believe into your idea. Does my idea, if I start something, does it actually have to be good? Or is it more like in the execution and the flexibility of it?

I mean defined good. I don't know. It's very subjective. Yeah, I have to think it's good. Yeah, in a while or, or just take another perspective. If you need to like it, you know, if you want to, if you, you know, if you, if you like competition and if you like the statistics being against you open a restaurant. A lot of people open restaurants still though, right? So that's cool. One day, I hope I can open a restaurant one day that'll be cool.

Or like a wine bar or something. But you don't do that. That's the reason you do that is, is not to, I mean, in my case would not be to make a, you know, a ton of money. And some people can even do that and and, you know, like famous chefs and stuff. But he. Yeah. And yet it's just a business. And I'm I'm not sure you just need to like the idea. It's like, I have a great idea, let's do this and you're going to start and you might feel So what you're going to do

something else doesn't matter. But it needs to be fun. I did say it's a it's a purpose in life because you work for the other stuff a long time. Yeah. So you need to enjoy it. OK. I mean, when you say it, it sounds very simple. I must say, in my head, everything is complex, right? Finding the right idea, actually putting in the grid to get market buy in, figuring out all the things I don't know, because I think there's a lot of things I don't know right now.

And then rallying people around it and trusting them with this idea that I have to do things together. I really like collaborating, So doing it with other people would definitely help and then executing on that. And for that part, that's already for starting something and and creating something that might be valuable, right? Skating is a whole another beast, I feel like. Yeah. But I mean, so you know, you're a smart guy. I'm not that smart.

So it's a that's but that's a that's a blessing because then you just do a lot of stuff and then to encounter something like, Oh boy, and then we overcome this. What else can there be on the other side of this can be much. So, you know, you have come and think, Oh shit, now there's more. So it's like the, you know, if you if you're good at thinking about these kind of things, or if you're very deep thinker or you're very smart about these things, then that's great, good for you.

But that might be holding your back is what they say is if you see a couple of birds flying, they talk about survival of the fittest, that the mistake often is in the word fittest, that they think that's the bird that's flying up front because it's physically fit. That's actually not true. It's the bird that's in the middle because it's the bird in the front that's going to fly into, I don't know, like a windmill. First, it's the bird in the

middle. That's the bird that you know that makes it. So it's the being an entrepreneur is perfect for the the average show in the average chain. Those are because you you might have a passion, you might be a little bit T shaped in something you know, and but then it's you know, that's a that's a reason to to look at the artist. It's not the best guitar players that became famous guitar players. It's it's you know, there's something to that.

I it's hard for me to articulate, but there's something to it. It's it's like rarely the case that the great scientists also turned out to be a great entrepreneur. That's often not the case. Gotcha, Gotcha. Can you walk me through kind of this very early product phase that you had with V8? Because I, I know some people that are starting up something and I've seen different aspects, A mindset of going to the market as fast as possible and getting feedback with a very rough MVP.

Might be bugs in there, but the faster you can iterate, the faster with the feedback you can solve it. And there's another camp which has this kind of, if I put my idea out there, it's a great idea. Other people are going to see it and they're going to outpace me. So they're in more of a stealth mode, I feel like, and some people still not live. So that stealth mode can actually be a long, long time. How is that for you with regards

to going to market? Yeah. So, so first of all, there's not the, there's no one way, right. So is it so and for us, the idea, so we started as a project. Yeah. So there's a project about defector embeddings and that case they came from Glove. Is there added value in storing data based on its factory presentation rather than

something else? Yeah, which is project and that gains a little bit of moment might like just tiny bit, but people reached out to where was this give some presentation that is nice and that started to grow OK and that's a nice thing from open source. And then it became it started to more lean towards becoming a database on its own.

And then a lot of open source communities start to complain because it didn't scale up and all the basic stuff, which was good because then open source you get that feedback from open source community. And then we decided to really turn it into a full-fledged database. And the joke in building a database is always it takes you a beer and a weekend to design the API and then it takes 10 years of actually building the thing. So to build it's very hard and it depends on what you do.

So if you build a consumer facing product completely different go to market. I don't, don't, I don't know anything about that. But I'm, I work in the open source domain and, and then specifically infrastructure. And there's a certain life cycle to these types of companies, how they function, how they operate. So infrastructure works different open source than frameworks, let's say. And you become aware of those things by doing it.

And then you can plot that on histories of successful companies and you can basically say, are we showing similar patterns than those other companies? OK, so and, and open source is a beautiful way because you somehow need to overcome the problem or not the problem, but the question, how do I know if what I'm creating is valuable? Because when you create open source, there is a delta between starting and that it's a business. Yeah, that takes a couple of years because this is hard

technology to build. They just that takes a long time. So you look at other metrics than pure business metrics to say is this valuable or not. And we started in 2019 and we started selling in 2023. Yeah, so and I would say 2019 we were really looking for. So I would say the business really kicked off when we got our seed money. That was the moment and it was a year later. So I would say between halfway to 2020, took us three-year to really get to the product.

Got you. And then you look at the open source metrics to say like is this, is this taking off, yes or no? Yeah. What metrics are you looking at, like specifically adoption stars and those types of things? Yes, yeah. And there's one downside to that, because the the moment you focus on something people said, the game, the system, yeah. Of course. And that and gaming the system is not per SE a a malicious thing. So it's not that people, you know, fake something, but let me

give you an example. So everybody who signs up for our for sandboxes and there's a lot of people, they get an automated e-mail from me. And that actually says this is an automated e-mail from me. But if you respond, I'll, it's actually me responding back. That's nice. So I get a handful of emails per day, not a lot just, but a lot go out. But the small percentage show. Hey, conversion rate of one or two percent, let's say.

But at the bottom of the e-mail there's also PS that says, hey, but I'm also very active on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me. A lot of people do that. OK, so that grows faster. And but if I would change that to, I don't know, give us a star and get up, then that would grow faster. You see what I'm trying to say? Yeah, exactly. And if I would directed to X or to blue sky, that would probably grow faster. But LinkedIn is our platform of choice to communicate over.

So that's a logical thing to put there. So it's a little bit tricky, but it's also you also need to keep yourself honest. So like, how are we doing? Is this going? Is this going somewhere? Yeah. And then finding people around you who are knowledgeable about these, all the companies who did that open source, who can look at the data and say like, yeah, no, actually, this is actually good. That's not good. How that's yeah, that's great.

And you can compare it with other open source statistics and those kind of things. So it's it's not hard to do. It's just you need to put in the work and have all your dashboards ready and that kind of stuff. And then later when, when you turn, when you start to make money, the role of open source changes one more again, because now it has a top of funnel function. And that's also very important. So then this has more do with

sales and those kind of things. So it's a whole machinery that open source brings to you that you can get from the, the, the, the quantitative aspect. So if you look at our database, it takes us on average 7 days to measure start-ups of the database so that people start using the database of the whole world. OK, so we cover the world in around 7 days. Yeah. And that's all data you can use, use right for whatever you want to do. So that's how we how we do it.

And that's the role of of open source and but it it takes it takes time. Yeah, I can see that. I mean, for me, it's still fascinating that if you have something that is open source, that is part of core infrastructure, usually infrastructure needs to be resilient, needs to be reliable, and in most cases, right? If you want something that's established, you'll look at established software, sometimes not even open source.

But the fact that things can still grow in adoption shows kind of autonomy that developers have, right? If a piece of open source solves a problem they have and it's free of use, they can try it out and if they like it, that can lead to adoption in the end. That's why I feel like this part of a company, the business, I think they call it open core, where your software at your core is open source and you might have a managed solution that's kind of your core business is

gaining popularity. And I've seen companies grow where indeed they start with something open source and then they think of what can be the business aspect of this or they're starting a business and then they want to open source kind of part of their core to then find that adoption or community aspect of it. Yeah. Because so finding in infrastructure again, that's the thing that I've knowledge about the finding adoption for something completely closed is hard. Very. Hard and.

You want to have that feedback cycle going that people tell you stuff and that's open source is ideal for that. And yeah, I'm, and I'm some of the surprised that people that it sometimes it surprises people that the open source biz model works, which then in turn surprises me that they are surprised about them. Are these technical people? No, no, no, no, no. But the it's, it's, you know, it's, it came from from freemium model in the gaming industry.

And it worked tremendously well. Absolutely. And that seeped into infrastructure and that worked well. And the question is look, if you build infrastructure, you do two things or you do something better, sorry, you do something better, faster or cheaper or you do something new, OK. So those four options you have and the first 3 is very difficult to position and because business wise people rarely pay for better, faster, well and obviously cheaper that's.

Easier, but. Something new that's different. So if you do something new, you jump into it. So let me give you an example. So Jeff Bezos famously said your margin is my opportunity. By then, of course, with margin he meant marginal price, but you can also look at the differently. So disruption theory beautifully explains how new products can enter the market.

And it's because companies, they focus on top line products, not a bottom line products for obviously for obvious reasons, because that's the margin where they make the most money on. Yeah. So now something new emerges, which is very obscure. That is the fact I'm betting from a machine learning model, these companies don't care. They go like whatever, what is what is this weird thing? So new start-ups emerge, we'll focus on that. They're small, they're lean, they're one focus that is

building that kind of stuff. So they built fast. Now all of a sudden something dynamic happens in the market. e.g. AI becomes a thing. So machine learning turns into AI, as I like to say. And these big companies go like, oh boy, we're not there, we don't have anything. Oh, these start-ups do. So what do developers do? Well, you know, if I can't get it from where I used to get it, I'll just go somewhere else and get it there. Got you. That's how it works. And that's as old as that is.

That is disruption theory, right? So beautiful article by Clay Christensen in where he explains how it works, how the market dynamic works. Beautiful book and the innovator's dilemma that describes it. And it happened now, and it will happen again in the future. Got you. Yeah. How so when we're looking at a company, at some point, you go into the stage of we can go faster if we hire people, right, People that can help us execute with these paths. Our business is resilient enough

for us to actually hire people. And we don't have the scale for numbers, but we scale for growth and we grow diligently. So at some point you're going to attract talent. But for that talent, they have to decide and believe in what you're building, right? Because you're comparatively and relatively small, or at least people like start-ups, that's

what you have going for you. But compared to a bigger tech organization, things like Amazon, Google or Meta, comparatively exceptionally small, why would they choose a start up over let's say something more big and established? Because start up can fail in the end. Or how did you distinguish yourself There's? Something big can fail as well, but it's fair enough. start-ups tend to feel faster.

So, Oh, it's very simple. So I remember that the the first resume we got in from somebody at a big database company. And I'm I'm going to obscure the name of the database company because I don't want it for just for for that, because this person still works at you'll find them. And he wrote a coffee letter and the coffee letter said that was the first time in the coffee letter that somebody wrote. I believe that these factor amending are going to be the

future of data management. My current employer doesn't think this is the case. Well, so I want to work for you. Got you. It's like that's a good reason. Strong. Yes. And then you give somebody salary, I give somebody equity in the company. And if things go up, yeah, you make significantly more money than you work for an employer. Gotcha. So that's a nice deal. Simple, yeah. Are you of the belief that start-ups should always give equity then when they when they hire? Yeah, yeah.

But you don't have to. So it's like if you're a founder, you can do whatever you want, but I think it's a good idea to do that. Gotcha. Why? Why do you think it's a good idea? Because then people have skin in the game. They, they're part of the of the what you're building. Yeah, it's good part of the excitement. Gotcha. The numbers go up, then everyone's happy. Everybody's happy. If the numbers fluctuate, then go go down even worse, then people get nervous.

They get like they get, you know, they get back to the. Wall, Let's do it. Let's do. It so it's good and of course people need to live. So people need to, you know, they need to pay their mortgage, they need to, I don't know, feed them so whatever, right. So they also give them a salary. Yeah, but at the the name of the game is equity game. Gotcha. What's been your philosophy on people going to the office, working in office, or companies mandating office policies?

Again, so if you run a business, you should do whatever you think is the right thing to do. So let me let me preface by saying that because I really believe that, but I think the whole office thing is BS. So we don't have an office. We're now we just crossed 100 people, Mark, We're fully remote from San Francisco to Berlin and everything in between. And then a little bit in Japan and Australia. Incredible. Yeah, that's great.

This is great. And the Spotify recently put something on, on the wall in, in I believe they even had it on Times Square where they where they said that they're kind of stuck to, to remote work. And as a reason they say like our employees are not children, which I find very funny. And I absolutely agree with this doesn't by, by the way, not mean

that people can travel. So right now while we're recording this, my whole go to market team somewhere in the US that together go to market leadership with four people. And then they have their older teams so that maybe I don't know, 50 people there in total and they're working on go to market. So they get together, they do stuff or the database team might get together to do so. It's not that you don't get together, of course, but you're not together by default. You're remote by default.

And so the but again, you know, it's it whatever, whatever works. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I, I strongly agree that people are not children. Like we're adults, we can do our work from wherever. I feel like it's a risk management and more of a trust issue and you can more closely micromanage if you see people working and it's a very old kind

of outdated thought. Yeah. And so, I mean, so when you just pick me up, you said like I like to receive here because I think this is beautiful office. Yeah. Great. Fine, that's that's good if that that's a good reason, right. So that the thing what I think is a lesser good reason, but still, you know, if it works, it works. Is there also founders or the leadership in the company who like to see the people? It's like I'm in charge of this group of people. It's.

An opposite thinking Yes and. I think that should not be underestimated. So, and that is something that I'm not a big fan of. But again, if it works, yeah, whatever we're building a business needs to grow. If that's what works, then let's do it, yeah? Have you seen kind of your skill set also evolve with growing this business 'cause I think as you mentioned, you're 100 people

now, probably a little bit more. The business is fundamentally different than when it was just a few people and it will continue to grow, which will also mean it will continue to evolve. Do you see yourself here for the long game and how's the skill set need to involve? So, so it's definitely evolving. I enjoy it a lot. I think I do a better job now than I did when we were let's say 15 people got you. If that will stay the same.

We're 500 people. I don't I do not know, but we'll see we'll deal with that when we get there Right now we're here and then we have a lot of fun. So we'll see I. I love the the flexibility and also seeing what's current, right. If you're having fun right now, then why change? And if that does change, then you reflect and think of OK, what's next? Yeah, and it's a it's a it's, you know, you just an idea, you have a vision and you execute on it.

Again, the people are tremendously important. So you need to have a healthy mix of great people. I always group, I always think of the people in the company as three different types of people. OK. And you try to have a healthy balance. And so. Yeah. And and I enjoy doing that. What are? The types Oh. Yeah. So it's mostly it's, it's structured by age. So the, so let's start with the with the with the oldest group.

So that's 4045 plus. Those people you attract to the company because they have experience, they have an experience, they did something somewhere and you would like to tap into that experience. You want them to bring that to the to the company can be anything can be a leadership, but it could also be an amazing engineer who has seen this or that and you want that knowledge in the company yeah.

Then in the middle, that's the 30-40 range, OK this company this is needs to be their home run right. This is setting their career OK. If they are successful at your company and they're 40, then the rest of their working lives are going to be fine. Exactly. And the better they do the the finer they will be.

Then everything before that to the young people in the company, they do not have the experience, but they have something that the experience people do not have and they can tap, tap into the side Geist. So how your product evolves, how you do marketing and those kind of things comes from that group. They know what the new generation finds cool and what they want. You need that. You need to listen to them and you need to enable them to execute on it. What?

What is the ratio between the three types that you have in the organization? Or is that just arbitrary? It's. It's it's a bit arbitrary, but I think I think the middle group is the smallest. Gotcha. No, actually that's not true. The the, the, the, it's the the young group is the is the largest. And then we have the the middle group and then the old group, the experienced group is a little bit smaller. Yeah, but that's arbitrary.

So whatever you need, yeah. And for the young group, because I, I recently came off a conversation where we analyse the K hiring and especially nowadays in this tech market, when you're coming out of your educational journey, I see a lot of people have a hard time actually landing a first job, right? That might be early 20s, that might be very early in career. I think later on it gets easier because you have some form of experience, but those first jobs

are very hard. What's your take on that with regards to current day market? Yeah, it's to the. I don't know because I started my career very early and I started my own business. Yeah, very early. So I was purely by coincidence yesterday evening had dinner with some friends and somebody was talking about taking a break and I was thinking about it. I've never I've the longest break that I've taken since I'm work is 2 weeks. Yeah, it's. Not a thing.

That's so it's more like a holiday, Yeah. And not because I and I didn't mean that in with in type of vanity or anything. It was just I was like, I've actually always been working and always my own company. Yeah. And so am I. My story is that I started my first company when I was 15 and that turns into a freelance thing into a little bit bigger consultancy. And, and it's a product company, so I don't have that experience of getting out of school and

then getting a good job. That's just I don't know. What I do know is that so if we haven't. So we are a an AI company that's pretty visible in the market. We get hundreds of resumes on certain types of applications in days. Oh yeah. So that's a lot. I also know that we we don't look that much if we need to experience, we look at it. So but then often we also reach out to the market ourselves, to specific people we target, but a lot of young people that come in

that. Yeah, let me it's a great question. So I, it's the one thing that I also think is the for a lot of young people studying is the goal and that's, I think that's wrong focus. Yeah, I agree. So. If somebody comes out of school, it's like, oh, I studied whatever, then you basically then the only thing you've proven is that you know how to put in the work to get a degree. But I've done stuff at universities for students. I have to say, it's not very impressive what I see.

It's like a lot of like what? Really. Yeah, just that. Sorry. It's just, you know, maybe it's because people are young. I don't know. But I'm like, I'm like, OK, yeah. And, and but there are few people in there. They're like, oh, that's that's a talent. But then that that person is going to be fine. You know, that he's obviously like a young person, like 18. And you're like, oh, this person. Oh, this. And they start talking about you're going to be fine,

whatever you're going. To be fine, someone needs to believe in that person though, yeah. But it's like just kind of somebody says something or the way that they that they behave or that kind of stuff. So they have the rest of the other group. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's AI. It's the sad thing is that I believe that this is a question to which I do not have an answer. I don't know. I don't know. I also don't know to be honest.

I, I like that you said that like the education is not really the end goal for me. It was always a means to an end. And I shared with you, like my parents are from Turkey. I'm one of the first people in my family to like graduate university, especially in Netherlands. It's like graduate university. And I throughout that educational journey, my mom got sick and to a point where I was like, OK, I'm going to stop everything. I have three siblings. I'm just going to start working

right? Because it's a means to an end for me. The educational part is not the goal in and of its own. And then my mom said absolutely not. So I finished my educational training, but that was just so I could have a piece of paper and actually be at the starting line, right? Otherwise I felt like I would start from behind or that was kind of how I grew up. Like that was in my household. If you have the piece of paper, you'll probably do fine. So get the piece of paper. That's it.

And. Do you think that's true nowadays? Less and less because I I've met people that have had a completely different journey. So I feel like your behaviour, your mindset, your work ethic, those are going to define you. And if you have a piece of paper, that's going to be on top of that. But indeed, for some organisations, it's like a barrier of entry. If you don't have the piece of paper, it's harder to get in. Yeah, I do believe that especially in tech, it's very much community driven.

So you will stand out even without that piece of paper. Well, I mean, so the piece of paper I have, I studied music, so that might not be helpful. So I didn't go to university. I in in the Netherlands, I the the school system I went to, it's like I didn't go to the high school system that we have. Yeah. So the if you look at my just purely on my resume, like early life resume, you'll be like, Nah, but I'm fine. I'm doing great.

So it's AI like to think that that's that that does you know that it's that you can break that mold. But I do believe, though, is that he in there was this Dutch author who wrote this book about 7 characteristics that if you would have all seven of them, then the life would be easy. OK, so I, I mean the book from yours line like you know the book I'm referring to. So he talks about 7

characteristics. So I and I don't know, I don't know about, but it's like went to the highest type of education as in high school, went to university. You're male, heterosexual might parents born in the in this case specific case in the Netherlands, but the US would be US or something, right? And your parents or one of your parents went to university. I was seven. Yeah. And what he basically describes in the book is that if you miss any of those things, you have to

work your ass off to push so even. 1. Even one? Yeah. And the more, the more off, the harder you're going to get it. And so in my case, and and the reason I like these characteristics is because sometimes we talk about, for example, the men, women, dynamics in the company or people of color, those kind of things, which always seemed to me like that, that's everything. But it seemed too simple. It's not the only thing. It's not the.

Only thing and so he defined it over the seven axis and I was like oh that's interesting and so in my case, yes I'm a guy and and I'm a white heterosexual guy but didn't went to didn't go to university I my parents are not highly educated so I needed to get into that ecosystem which took a long time to get there I. See. So what was the point that I want to make with this? So when you look for a job that

plays a role. But I also like about the book is that it's, it's just an, he's an anthropologist. So he just makes his observation, but it kind of also says like so, but you can also do something. And he's very careful with that because he's aware that he has all 7 characteristics. So he's very careful about it, but the it's a reason to start to move. So that goes back to your earlier question today. But I said like, where does the fire in the belly come from?

Yeah, well, you know, if you are from a minority group or you are personal caller or you are women or you somehow miss a couple of these characteristics, that can make you pretty pissed off if you're not being treated as equal. But The thing is that gives the fire in the belly. So you work hard. So you see that a lot of these people, these entrepreneurs, they they have such a story, be it Richard Branson, be it all these. Yeah, I don't know why I think about him.

But all these people, they have a story that brought them to to where they are. And I think that's a. That's an interesting dynamic. Interesting. Something that lights a fire that makes you intrinsically motivated to work hard. I feel like I highlighted, or at least in my mind, that when I asked what makes a good founder you started with. There are things you cannot

control, right? And these 7 characteristics is basically what you were given and some stuff you can achieve, but a lot of stuff is also what you're what you're dealt with this hand, yeah. So the, but the, the the fascinating conclusion, optimistic conclusion, because you can be very. So the pessimistic conclusion is simple. There's like there's inequality and that's me. And then yeah. And I'm not part of this. So, you know, too bad for me.

That's the pessimistic feel. But I see the complete opposite. I have the up the, you know, the opposite view. So a founder somehow needs to have the fire in the belly. How do we get it there? Yeah, well, of the seven characteristics that you can't control, you miss a couple and you feel left behind or you feel not accepted. That's a good fire starter. Interesting. Interesting dynamic. Right.

So it's a catch 22. If you if somebody is born and by matter of speech, you could give this little baby a choice. They're probably gonna say I just check all seven boxes. But actually it turns out that a lot of people, newly successful people are not, if I'm not talking about, you know, inheriting money or something, old money, old money, new money. They have such a story. Interesting, interesting

dynamic. So it's a, you know, it's a makes for an interesting life, an interesting opportunities. So I see it as an optimistic thing.

I, I wonder if, and sometimes I, I've never looked at these 7 characteristics, but I've always looked at kind of hardships in life for me, people that I talk to, people that I can think of, people that stick with me. They have a certain perspective on life and usually when I really get to know them on a more personal level, I know they've gone through some shit.

It might be some family illness, it might be their upbringing, it might be something having to do with a family relationship that has given them perspective and therefore they are different in life I feel like, and that always sticks with me. It's different if you've had kind of a luxurious obviously life. Those people feel different to me if I, if I have conversations with both aspects.

That for me was always the experience of potentially trauma, potentially something significant in life that makes someone different. And that can also light a fire under your ass to start working or to start executing or to start doing something. And I'm definitely going to check out this book because I think it's interesting. Yeah. And it's like, so I agree with what you said, it's AI know a lot of these people too. So but I think the the morale of story is that that it's an

optimistic point of view. It's an opportunity, yeah, not a loss. I like that a lot. Yeah. One of the last things before we round off something you mentioned in that you think you're better fit for the company now that it's grown to 100 people compared to 15. I was wondering why that is. Why would you make a statement like that? Yeah. Well, it's just, it's a, it's a, it's a feeling. So it's like it's hard to put a number to it to to quantify it, but there.

Is a difference. Yeah, because I think the at some point I was asked my other question. What does a, what does a founder Co do? And then if you start a small company and you start the company, and in our case, company is the holding companies in the US. So then you get like the official documents and I see my name and then it says, so it says my name and it says president and chief executive officer. I didn't sign it. He was a formal document. Well, it's huge.

But it's also kind of feels weird because like, yeah, we're like four people. So just the guy king of the hill, right? And so it's the formal document and then you sign it. But let's be honest, right, It's four or five people. So I, for a long time I had on my LinkedIn just founder or Co founder and and not and, and then you just do stuff. So the anecdote that I often tell is that I, I wrote the first documentation for weave 8.

And when, when it was time to hire somebody to take that over, I was interviewing. I was interviewing somebody who I end up hiring and he's, he's still had to come. He's an amazing job. And I, we had to interview and I proudly said like I did, did you? I made the documentation and he said, yeah, I can see that. And it's hurting my eyes. It's. Horrible. And and so at some point you hire all these people that are better at everything. So for my my Co founder HN, he's the CTO.

He's a rock star at what he does and he's still CTO. And so he's amazing at that. But for me that was a little bit more ambiguous. So now you get to a point where you have all these people in place who do these kind of things. So if I now, if you now look at the organization and you just structure. So we have we have my Co founder E Chen who's who's CTO. But then we have on the go to market side, we have we have VPS of of marketing growth, sales, partnerships and business

development. We have a few bit of finance people and culture and then everything on the tech side. So you basically have all these great people that do stuff. And now, now it would now it's OK to call yourself, I think ACEO, because now all of a sudden you have this structure where somebody is then in just so the question, then it's like, So what do you do? And I was like, I don't know, I don't know. So I had to figure that out.

So I have a couple mentors that I talk to and they give me and put their feedback funny side notes. So what we said in the beginning, a lot of these smaller companies that I'm an Angel fashion that I get that question is surprising like that. I'll Sprite a number of people ask me that question. I don't know exactly. I don't know what to do it. Sounds so strange. So I started to define it and I

put it also on my website. It's like, I think, and again, you're running the business so you can do whatever you want. That's always important to preface it with, but I think you do three things and these three things are one, you need to very clearly define a vision, the North Star. And when you're smaller, you also take care of the strategies. And then if you go further, the people in your leadership team define the strategies to get to that vision. That's their job and you need to

rally people around that. The second thing you do is you need to have great people. Cannot be underestimated. 70% of companies in our stage, which is a growth stage, fail because of interpersonal issues or in which can occur in many different ways. So if you're hired too fast, you have too many people too fast. That's very tricky and can be dangerous. People. People can get along with each other, that kind of stuff. So you need to have a great people, great culture.

There's number two. Number three is you need to have enough money. So money comes in in two ways. Money comes in through revenue and money comes in through investment. And you can balance that however you want. Investment is often misunderstood because you you borrow money from the future with investment and what you do is that you can execute faster.

A simple example is if you to think about it, if you have a lemonade stand and you want to have a big lemonade stand, you need to buy a lot of lemons, a lot of sugar, a lot of glass work and that kind of stuff. You know, there's probably marked fit because people said that they like your lemonade, but you can't buy these cradles full of lemons and that kind of

stuff. So you take some money or you take money in in return for a piece of the company or you take money in the form of loan and you pay it back. So you can buy your lemons, you can buy your glass work, you can buy your sugar and you can start selling it. That's why you take it or take loan or or investment. That's why you do it so that you can be a step ahead of where you believe the market is going to be. That's the risk taking that needs to be part of your vision,

right? So you take running a business means taking risk in the role of CEO. So that goes back to the first one also often very misunderstood a risk of a risk of her CEO is not doing a good job. OK, if you're if you're not taking risk, that means that your business is stagnating. ACEO, who is concerned with cost saving and cost cutting means that he or she is trying to save dying business as CEO needs to focus on growth and making more money.

There's a beautiful talk from the old CEO of Snowflake, Frank Sloopman, where he very, very well defines it. So he's he's not to divert so much, but he gives a presentation as the at the CIO conference. So he talks to CIOs and he says I'm going to so there's like 100 CIOs in the in the room. I said, I'm going to explain to you why people like you do not report to people like me. Really. He said yes, because when when

you come in, I have one concern. He said every day I wake up with fear and fear that we're not going to grow faster. Gotcha. And you guys come in my office to tell me what I can't do. Exactly I. Don't want to talk to you, he says. I'm going to put you let make you report to the CTO or something. And it's such a good point that he's making because that goes back to the to the vision part.

So it's like you need to that's why you get the money, especially if you take to for the bold vision. Yeah, right. So in our case, infrastructure for AI, that's why you do it. That's that's the game you're playing. Gotcha. So this is and so those are the three things to focus on. And then going back to the beginning of our conversation. So we can nicely because I know you want to go to the beginning

what we said about. So in the market there's money that sits in these big containers from summer wealth funds, from pension funds, from endowment funds and a couple of other things. They slice a little piece of that 5%, which is still huge. Chunk huge. Chunk, but in, in the grand scheme of things, not and they take that little piece and you go there you go try it, go take that risk, build that team, build that business, have that vision, go. And that's a beautiful thing in

the market. And so that's in a, in A and that's what you take and it's responsibility you take as a, in this case, as a founder CEO, and I believe those three things you need to do with it. And that's what I do now. And I and as I told you, everybody I hired is better at what how I was doing that. So I was doing a shitty job of that, but somebody had to do it. So but then these experts came in. Yeah. So now I need to focus on these three things. And I think I'm good at that. So, yeah.

So that's it. Awesome. Let's let's round it off here. I have really enjoyed this conversation but you enjoyed. It as well. Yeah, of course. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. Yeah. You are very welcome and I very much enjoyed it. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. If you're still here, let us know in the comments section what you think. Like the episode if you liked it and otherwise we'll see you on the next one.

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