Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Akeel and joining me today is Maximiliano Neostat, CTO and Co founder of Polar Steps. If you haven't heard about it and if you're a traveller, download Polar Steps. It has over 50 million users, more than a billion images and it's really cool to track your itinerary for today. We talk about how it originated from an idea to the scale that it is now, how they do business and much, much more. So enjoy.
A couple of decades ago, one of the founders, we are 4/4 Co founders, one of them Nick, he, he's a fanatic traveller, quite an adventurous traveller. And one time he was crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat. And then he wanted his friends and family to be able to follow him and know where he was when he was in the middle of the ocean. And this was before social media, before smartphone, so there were only websites where you could see stuff, you know,
on websites. And he, he brought a satellite phone and AGPS device on his sailboat. He would get the calling from the GPS device and through the satellite phone, send a message to a several he set up here in the Netherlands. And then through some web app that he built, his location would be plotted on the map live so people were able to see where he was in the middle of the ocean at any point in time. This was 2005 or something like that. Incredible.
So yeah. And that's, you know, when dad was out there, all of his friends and family were really excited about that. It even became like kind of a bio thing within their small town in the in the east of the Netherlands. And you know, after that success, then he he always had it in the back of his head to maybe do something, build the product out of this prototype
that he built for himself. Yeah, many many years later things came together and him together with me, Kun and Jo who are the two our Co founders, we got together and started building this for for everyone, for every traveller that wants to use it. That's amazing. He came to you and the other guys and then what did you do? Did you make this kind of into a side hustle on top of your regular job or did you all decide that we're going to do this full time or? Yeah, so he so he he was working
already with job. They had a concepting company and Kun one of their Co founders also knew Job and so they they knew each other all three of them from a long time ago. And I knew Kun through the the work at hives. And yeah, at that moment we things came together. It's like different circumstances that that came together. The details are not really relevant for this conversation. And we said, yeah, let's try to
build this. And we started as a side hustle building it, you know, first on, you know, off work hours and then just working less in our normal jobs and then spending more time with polar steps. And then eventually we got our first small investment and that allowed us to really spend more and more time with it. And eventually we we went to full time dedicated to building the product and then we went live in March 2015 and that's when everything started
basically. Nice. When you went live, was it still the four of you? So I'm assuming all of you kind of full time making this into a main thing. You hadn't hired anyone yet before going live yet. So we we did hire someone, a front end engineer, to help me build the tech side of things. The other three founders are more product and design and creative. So yeah, Paco was with me. I was building the back end and the iOS app and he was building the front end and he's still with us.
He's our lead front end engineer. That's really cool that he's still there. Yeah. It's been like 25/20/15 as a release and kind of 2005 as an idea and a concept. That is incredible. Yeah. Yeah. How is it for you then building this thing and being responsible for the thing kind of on your own for a long time before that other person came in?
Yeah, yeah. It was of course a lot of fun because the thing that also gave us a lot of energy and and push to drive things forward was that we are all four of us that Co founders really fanatic travellers. We love travelling and building a travel product also that is B to C We're not building a SAS platform for you know OTAs, online travel agencies. We're just building a product that all travellers can use. That was really energizing and really exciting. So that was a lot of fun to to
build that. So yeah, that first part, that was really exciting to just be on the on the tech side of things, you know, getting my hands dirty into making this a thing out of out of thin air. Yeah. And then the growth came and then my role started to change into different type of responsibilities. But that first part was really exciting to just build something for the first time that in my career that was something that I would love to use, you know, something that I wanted to be
there that wasn't. And I was the 1 making it happen together with the team, right? So that was really exciting. I can see that like that, the idea of finding your passion outside of work and then also doing your work, which kind of fulfills that passion gets you so much energy. Probably. I'm very jealous. I feel like that. I would wish that upon everyone I know because that's like the perfect balance of work and and also play, I would think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, talk to me about this hiring process because these first few people usually is what I, I'm assuming are going to be very key with regards to productivity and also energy within the team. You're expanding kind of this circle of people that you know with someone either through your network or I just a random person as well. How was it hiring people and getting more people on board, especially for the tech side? Yeah, Yeah.
It's a good question because it's something that I always found really important when I was just part of our companies, when I was part of a team and we were expanding the team and we needed to hire someone. I, I always gave a lot of importance whenever I was part of that hiring process, not only to the tech side of things, but also to the people side of things, is, is someone that is going to enrich the dynamics of the team. And I brought that along to
product steps. And that's how I always wanted to build the, the tech team. But also in general, the company were all very aligned in that, you know, giving a lot of importance to the culture that we're building. So we do put a lot of emphasis into that.
So if you look at the hiring process today, which is not very different to how it was at the beginning, we on the tech side, of course there's a a technical interview, but then we have an interview that is only about human values, where we speak for an hour about topics rated with what does this person value? Is that enriching our values? Is it aligned with our values? And we give a lot of importance to that. And then the last step of the process. And that was also the same back then.
It's a day at, we call it a day at the office where they come and, and work on something together with the team. And that, that is how you can see how people, you know, spend their time when they're at work, right? Because you know, the, the bigger tech companies, the way they interview or they used to interview was like, OK, I'm going, we're going to drill you for five or six interviews.
We're going to bring you on site and ask a lot of questions and then you really don't see much of the person. You see a lot of their ability to answer questions and their knowledge, but not really of the person on how are they going to be in a team in a team dynamics. So even from the beginning, we would always spend a day with that person, whoever was a candidate we thought was, you know, someone with potential at the office working on a task that is related with with the
product. Before we zoom into kind of the hiring process, how big is the engineering side of things nowadays? So 10 year Fast forward, how big is engineering now? Yeah. So we have about 35 engineering people in the team. Yeah. We, we were a a smaller team a couple of years ago and since the last couple of years we started growing faster. So we have about double the size of the team in the last 12 to 18 months.
That's awesome. Yeah, Yeah. And then so you mentioned kind of a more hard skill technical interview than a one hour. Can I call it? Can I call it a culture fit or team fit kind? Of conversation team. And values conversation. And then it's actually like a day working together at the office. Yeah, it's really cool.
Yeah. If someone makes it at that stage, are they actually like through, through, or can you still see in some of the collaboration where it doesn't go well, where it doesn't make them a good hire? No, no, no, it is also a skill based interview that they at the office, right? They're not coming to have fun. So we, we also, it's actually the biggest part of the technical side of things because they work on an assignment that we give them, but then they we try to make it interactive with
the team. So it is still like, of course we are, we are excited about this person. That's why we bring them and also why we ask for their time because it is quite an investment to spend the full day at, you know, a company that you don't even know if you're going to get the job. But yeah, many of them don't make it through for either of the two reasons, either the technical side of things or the the team. What have you learned then throughout that last step?
Because for me it's it's rare that I see people do that. Like I had that here, but then it was like I had already gone through an 8 hour assessment. So then it was more so meeting the team and they would kind of do the final pass to see if there's actually something that went wrong in the other parts of the organization, in the other parts of the interview steps. But you're mentioning that this last part, it's not just let's say a final check, but it's actually a big chunk of it.
What have you learned with regards to what goes well for candidates that do well or what doesn't go well and how what is that usually? Yeah. I, I think, you know, one thing that happens very often is that at the beginning of the session when we walk them through the assessment, we say, hey, this assessment is much more than a day worth of work. So it is, it should take you more than one day to complete everything that is in here.
What we are assessing is your ability to make the right decisions at every step of the way. So whenever you make a decision, Please note it down and just explain it to us afterwards. And many times in the unsuccessful cases, what happened was that someone would either go full on, you know, making a lot of, let's say, you know, hacky decisions to build this so that it works, or someone that goes full on, on the over engineering something.
And I'm not really, you know, going back and thinking all that and, and, and and saying, hey, OK, what these people are wanting to assess of me is my ability to make the right choices given given the constraints and the and the context. And yeah, people will just go down the a rabbit hole and it's difficult for them to get out even when we have checkpoints. We had a checkpoints throughout the day to make sure that we can then get them back on track.
And that's something that some people found difficult. And that's something that we still quite haven't tackled how to help people get out of that deadlock that they get into because it happens often. It's part we also understand it's for any of us, such a thing, it would make you nervous. It's it's a high tension thing. So that, that also doesn't help in the situation.
But that is one thing that, yeah, we understood that we really need to make it clear and make sure that we are on top of people to make sure that they don't make decisions because maybe they have the the abilities and the knowledge. But because of that fright hall they go into, it's difficult to to get out once they go in that direction. Yeah, it's funny that that is the symptom that you see because I've been in many projects and I usually also see people do that
like it was. Whereas very early on in my career, it was feedback that I got where people said, OK, like you learn and you grow. And it's also here in education, especially Dutch education, it's like, yeah, you have a problem, you dive into it and you try and solve it yourself. And I feel like in product teams where there's deadlines, you're working on business outcomes, time is kind of more finite.
So if you have a lot of assumptions and you're building on top of that, then kind of this loop of feedback is not going to be there. So then once you finally come back up and you breathe and you show everything there, everyone the results, it might be wrong and that's going to cycle you don't want to get into. So the advice to me was always, if you have assumptions, just check them and validate them
with your team. If you can do 2 hours of research and you can figure out one problem, whereas you can ask a question and then it's done in 5 minutes, then definitely ask that question because we want you to be effective. Not just like it's understandable from a learning process. It's also maybe kind of an ego thing. You can probably dive into a lot of things and solve everything yourself, but it's not the most effective. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That's spot on. I think that that is one thing that happens. Like you, you feel like, OK, if I ask questions, then people will think that I don't know. And then that's why they just try to solve it themselves and then they go down those those paths. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like for teams where you're not a team but like you're a single engineer, you need that, right? Because there's no one around
you where you can ask questions. But if you have a team and then you're working together towards outcomes, it's this kind of togetherness that in the end makes a really good product. I also wonder from your perspective, this interview process, I feel like it's very much product oriented because especially for consumers, there's a lot of assumptions you need to validate with your product people, with your fellow engineers. You need to be pragmatic but also resilient towards the future.
Work with high quality, but also the right quality. Like there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. If I was building a system and I was going to go in a satellite that needs to work and that needs to work forever. So then going into that nitty gritty and making sure everything's there dotted the eyes is very different than building an app for consumers. Is that also why you've tailor made this interview for the way it is?
Yeah, absolutely. So the, the, the assignment is very close to the type of work that they would actually do if they would join us. So we do take that into account that it is one of the things that we assess as well. Like can you think with a problem mindset on and, and do you understand that pragmatic balance between, you know, this is OK if it's not a nine or A10, it can be a 7 and we will make
it a nine or A10 as we iterate. But that's really important, especially in in consumer businesses that you really just need to put things in front of users as fast as you can. The time to user value is really important and that's more important than just a stable system you you can improve on on the issues as you go. Yeah, let's talk about your role because you mentioned 10 years ago you were responsible for with another person getting the app live up and running.
Now there's 35 people in engineering. Are you still working hands on or how has your role evolved throughout the years? Yeah, it's not hands on definitely for for a while. Also some other things happen as we'll probably talk about that. That pulled me further away from from touching code. More recently.
I did get back to it a little bit on a specific project that we worked on. But yeah, most of my time in in the last five years, I've been on, on, on, let's say higher technical topics or even leadership topics more than anything else. Do you enjoy those parts as well or do you miss kind of the hands on stuff? Yeah, no, I do miss the hands on stuff, but I also do enjoy building, building the team and building their product and you know, building towards our ambition.
That's that's really rewarding. As well. Yeah, that makes sense. I saw and you and I spoke before the show as well that your role not just evolved, but also at some point you became CEO of the company. So not just tech, but also business outcomes, investments. I mean, this is just me naming a bunch of assumptions, but I'm assuming it's all of that kind of in this umbrella, at least
from a title perspective. How was that for you kind of getting responsibility of the whole thing more so than tech? Yeah, Yeah. It was quite the challenge. Of course, in a way, you know that the four founders, up until that moment, we were all running the company together. We would have weekly meetings where Kunhu was the CEO until 20/21 when I took over. We were just running the company to her. So in a way it was a natural
step. But at the same time then I had all the responsibilities that Kun was was having up until then. So it meant like bringing along an already full plate, many other things on top of it. So it was quite challenging despite being in a way natural. Yeah. But I I did manage to enjoy at least a part of it. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because that was also, I think during COVID, right, Right. When that overlapped and during COVID for travel company, it must have really sucked because
there's no travelling. Everything was in lockdown. There were no people doing vacations. I mean, a little bit here and there, but definitely not, not with the rest of social media or anything. How was that moment with regards to the company? Also, you at the helm. Yeah, yeah, I know it was.
It was super tough. And that was also why I had to step in. Part of the reasons why I couldn't took a step back, personal reasons, but also all the stress attached to running a company, a travel company through COVID times. So yeah, it was super tough. You know, when COVID started in March 2020, we had the Christmas party in December 2019. We were doing so well. Everything was going amazingly fine.
One of the other founders, Nick, we were having just a chat and he was telling me, yeah, you know, we we were talking about our plans for a CSV fundraise and all our organic growth that was, you know, tripling year over year. Everything was dark green light. And he, he told me, yeah, I mean, what can go wrong? Famous last word, Yeah.
And then that happened, right? But because we were doing so well as well as a company, not only financially but also internally, we were super strong, a small team, but still super strong. It also meant that a lot of things were much easier and then, you know, cracks didn't show, even though it was a very difficult time. So we were managing to weather the storm quite well, but of course, you know, we had big ambitions, big plans and all of
that had to be put on hold. So that was that was super tough. Yeah. The beauty for me is that like it's been put on hold, right. It's interesting that if you were to have this company in an inception and then everyone quit their job and it wasn't even live and then COVID happened, it would have been the wrong time, wrong place, and then everything would have kind of fallen and
crashed likely. But because this already was up and running and as you mentioned, you had like really good strong fundamentals, I think we just put on hold and then COVID pass and now here you are like, I didn't look up any of the statistics, but how many users are using the platform nowadays? So right now we have over 15,000,000 registered users. That's. Insane. Yeah, yeah. And how many? Because people go on the platform, they share their journeys and they usually upload
imagery, right? So 15,000,000 users do you know any how many images or like media? Yeah, it's more than a billion, I think at. This point that's that's incredible. Wow, Congrats on all your success. Honestly, that's really cool. Nowadays I see a lot of people talking about kind of this startup culture, this hustle culture that you wake up at six, you basically are the most effective version of you. What what is your opinion on kind of the startup culture and this hustle culture?
And also, how do you run the company? Yeah, I don't necessarily agree with the view that most of the startup hustle culture voices go up on LinkedIn and and and share and and talk about the 996 and all of that. You hear that a lot, you know, also from investors. We in commerce with investors, they also ask us directly, you know, at what time do people normally leave the office? And when we were hearing that question, I was thinking like. Why does that matter from? Investors.
Oh yeah. OK. Yeah, American investors, Yeah, I think you can build a generational company. So a company that can define a category without the 996 culture 996, you know, the 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM six days per for a week. I don't really believe in that. I think that just giving, you know, hiring ambitious people, hiring people with common sense and, and the intention to actually build what you're trying to build, giving them the space to do that, that is what you need to do.
And of course have a big ambition and, and, and stand behind it and have crunch time when you need to, but then also have times where things are more, more relaxed and people can just do what they should be doing, but not, not really pushing the limits constantly. It's fine to, as I said, you know, go into crunch time. So for example, right now we, we just did our summer release where we launched a few important features that are going to help travel us a lot
during the summer season. So we were quite busy for the space of, you know, 5-6 weeks. And that was OK because then we gave people, we will give people the space after this release to actually decompress and record the energy and then go back at it later on. So I do think that, of course, if you have big ambitions, you really have to be committed, especially in the leadership team. Then then it's a little bit more difficult to say, yeah, I'm from
9:00 to 5:00. That's not really the case if you are the CTO, the CEO or the head of head of growth. But for the individual contributors especially, then, then it should be definitely doable to just build a successful company where everyone is happy there. There is proper work like violence, but still everyone is very committed to succeeding in our mission. Yeah, I like that a lot. I always wonder like how much
freedom is, is too much freedom? Because from my perspective, I like product and I think I have enough empathy to put myself in the shoes of the user. Think about from a user perspective. But then if there's no umbrella and everyone does kind of freedom wise what they think is best and in the end it's just anarchy because everyone kind of goes left and right and everywhere. What? What process do you have and what process do you not have on purpose? Yeah, that's an interesting point.
And it's been one of the most, I wouldn't say challenging, but let's say interesting trajectories of the company, you know, upon we were quite a small team for a very long time. And it was, you know, it was just a team of, well, first it was just the five of us then, then it was 10. Then even when we were 2025, we all knew everything about our poke run by what we're going to do. Everyone spoke the same language in a way. But then as you start to grow, then that's not necessarily the
case anymore. And you don't want to be the one dictating everything. You want to be empowering. But like you said, you cannot just be fully empowering and let everyone do whatever they want because we do have, you know, if you just hire someone, you cannot just empower them to whatever they want because they don't have the context, they don't have the notice that we have from building this for
years and years. So we went from, you know, being just a team that speaks the same language to A-Team that now needs to empower others, but needs to do that in a way where there's a balance with also being able to share our knowledge and, and let people take from that and learn from that and use it in their own empowering directions, right? In the, in the directions where we empower them to, to go. So that's something that we're still figuring out because you
want to make yourself scalable. You are not scalable as a person. So you want to make the process scalable basically, right? And that's a difficult thing because you need to pick the moments where you have to be directed when things are going off track. You have two choices. Either you let people continue in a certain direction that you think that maybe it's not aligned with with our goal, and then they would figure out themselves when you hold them accountable to the outcomes.
Or you intervene and, and, and, and your director and say, Hey, I think maybe we should go this other direction. That's a really fine art. It's really difficult. And sometimes you have to make choices for the sake of efficiency because we don't have an infinite team that can make all the mistakes and constantly learn.
Sometimes you just have to put things in the right direction and sometimes you have to actually let people go in different directions because also sometimes you are surprised that actually your intuition was not was not right. Yeah, For me, it's really funny because I have this on a team level, and then you have this more on an organization level because you have more people, you have maybe even teams that are going in a certain direction. And for me, it would just be individuals.
And I like saying that, like, individuals can make mistakes, and especially when they're, let's say, a little bit bigger mistakes, they're not huge mistakes because those we usually prevent. But when there's a big mistake, it's also a really good learning opportunity for someone. Like, I know people that have such a high sense of responsibility and accountability.
If something fucks up and they know they were responsible, I don't have to say a thing because I know they're going to make that mistake once and then never in their career will they do it again because that's a really good learning moment. And I can see the challenge from an organizational perspective because those teams and people are just amplified. So it's really funny that it's still a balancing act even at
that level. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I and, you know, another of the common opinions in the start of the House of War is the founder mode. You know, the the Paul Graham, I don't know if you read it, the the manifesto that he put out of founder mode and all of that.
I also don't really believe in that because that's, you know, if you, you should be hiring people that are smarter than you and, and you also need to learn from them and give them the opportunity to also show you that there are different directions to things that you might be living that might not be the the right path. So the only way to be able to do that if you really empower them to go into those directions,
right. So that's, that's something that has also been a process for us as we are going and getting people with different views and giving them the space to go in different directions, then learning that actually, yeah, that that's, that's something that we should learn from. But also in in the culture, right? Because in the purest version of founder mode, then, then it's, I don't want to cite examples, but there are examples where, yeah, the founders are deciding everything.
But then what type of people are part of, of such a team? And, and how, how much can you grow and go into, into new directions or realize your ambitions if it's only the founders, the ones that are making all the decisions. So, yeah, for us, it was really about, OK, let's make sure that we hire well, that we hire people that that understand our vision and then that can take that vision to the next level.
And in that way, then, then really good collaboration gets born in a way, because you get new perspectives. You know, we've been doing this for more than a decade. So we have our, our own ideas and many times we are right, but many other times we, we're also wrong. And it's good to have that, that fresh perspective coming in and, and getting new learnings. Because with our big ambitions, the only way we're going to do that is as a team and not with
our own internal visions. Yeah, I think culture for me is super interesting. And culture, I heard someone say a colleague of mine, he's a culture is literally the way we do things around here. Like you have many words and many definitions, but in the end, it's the way we do things around here. And that can be within an organization, it can be within a team that you're talking about
team culture. And to a certain degree, when hiring, this is also a challenge we always have, and I've had in many teams, you want to align on certain values where you're like, these need to be the same and everything else. You can look for diversity, for interesting perspectives, for disagreements. And then as long as those values are there, then we know we have the same kind of fundamental baseline. We we grow from there. What are those values that you think you will not compromise on
with regards to hiring? And then what can be diverse with regards to anything else? Yeah, that's a good question. I think from the early days, we really gave a lot of importance to our company values. Like I think we were eight people when we came up with our company values and we spent a lot of time figuring those out. And the way we did that was like, OK, how do we operate? How do we work as individuals or the things that we find important as founders in those
very early days. And we came up with a set of values that are still to the day of today the ones that we have in the company, right? It was born out of not what the corporate world tells you that you should have as values. It was like, OK, what do we find important? And then what happened was that it was very easy to keep them alive because it's how the company was operating. Until then. We just continue to operate the
company in that way. And that's why today with more than 80 people in the company, this is already live by day, day-to-day, naturally without us having to do anything. Do you want me to mention also some of them? So the number one for us is dedication to craft. So we are a product first company. Everything is seen through our product and we we have from day one built a product that is very polished and and that it does what it should do and do it and it does it very well.
And, and this is something that we find important not only in our product, but also in our people and OPS processes, in our engineering culture, in our architecture. We really find it important to really be dedicated to our craft and, and build beautiful things, whatever those things may be, either an HR policy or a feature or anything in between. We really dedicate a lot of time to making it how we want it to be. Then another one is to enjoy the
ride. Of course, you, you know, one thing that I also brought along always and I try to stay close to that as, as a, as a journey continues is how things were when I was employed at other companies and I was an employee. And what did I think that I would like to, to experience in
a company ideally. And I keep those things top of mind, top of mind to make sure that in the company that I'm now building with the team, that I'm able to also create that environment for people and enjoy the ride. That value is a big part of that, you know, making sure that no matter what's happening, no matter if, if the company, it went downhill because of COVID and all the usage stopped, we're still trying to enjoy the ride and make the rest out of it.
That that's a really important thing. And that also applies to, you know, engineering, you build something and sometimes you, you're going to push it live and everything is going to break. That's OK, No stress, you're going to fix it. And in all of that process, just do your best to really enjoy it. That's that's really important to us. Be good, the good. We want to leave the world better than how we found it.
Explore us at heart, of course, we are travellers, we are curious and then we want to understand everything around us as much as we can and that's something that we find really important in everyone that works at Polar Steps. So that curiosity needs to be there always. And then the last one is that we are human, so we should be empathetic and we should understand that when things go wrong, that's for a reason and it's OK when they go wrong, we just learn from it. And one.
I really like that. Yeah, it's people have heated discussions on technical topics, on even visions for certain products. But in the end we are humans, right? We need to connect as humans 1st and then we can collaborate and be effective together. So that one always I think is a huge one for me.
It's interesting. I I was wondering throughout this product and also product development, especially to consumers, how much access do you have to your users with regards to validating assumptions or like iterating with regards to AB testing, even from an engineering perspective, do you actively speak to your users? Yes, yes, we, we, we are very close to our users in different
ways. So we have a community and support team that is answering to every single request that users make every, every e-mail that comes to our inbox is responded. So we do care a lot about that the more reactive management of of of users. Then we have a team of of use of research that is, you know, running research campaigns where we talk to our users specifically about new initiatives or or new features. We also do a lot of AB testing through experimentation.
So the the more quantitative type of learnings and that's more, yeah, just running different experiments, but but also being very metric oriented in, in everything that we do, every feature we release, we stay close to see how they how it goes. Now we are at the scale where we can actually very quickly do that. So that's another way in which we get signals from our users to see if things going well. Of course, we have NPS and other ways to to measure customer satisfaction as well.
Nice. I wonder how that factors in decision making. And I'll I'll give you an example because I recently spoke to Samuel Bake. He's Chief Product Officer of Veto IO And Veed is like this online video editing tool in the browser. It's one of I think it's the biggest one right now from a browser base. And he says everyone is kind of thinking from a user perspective when they have a new feature, they make a video and they use the tool.
So they dog food the tool a lot. And he said there's also a downside to it. And I think this especially applies in the travelling company where people are super excited about travelling. They join your company and they think they can think from a user perspective and they are to a certain degree also the user perspective. But if you have millions of users, then it's very hard to make those decisions with a smaller group. How has this led to kind of decision making?
Do people still act a lot based on their own assumptions or how do you in the end decide what is best for the user? Yeah, it's, it's a mix of everything. And that's also another of the challenges of the company. You know, we have, we have people that are very data-driven, We have people that are very intuition driven. The reality is not in one or the other.
It's somewhere in between. Sometimes you have to make intuition decisions, especially when it's more of a visionary thing, right, where you can look at the data, but the data is going to tell you about, you know, very simple indicators. But if you think about, OK, but this feature is going to bring long term user engagement, we're going to see the results. It's a very lagging indicator that we're going to see a year from now. We just have to build this and
then see what happens. And many of the initiatives that we carry are of that type. And then there you cannot be there. You just have to believe that this is going to, to bring you the results that you want to to see. And in some other cases you can just run an AB test and see, OK, if, if we offer users this, this feature or this slight variation of the feature, then you see what happens. But also it's difficult.
One of the questions we ask the product managers is, OK, you have an experiment that is performing really well, but it's really ugly. And you have another one that doesn't perform as well, but it's very beautiful. It, it, it is matching the, the user experience very well. Which one do you end up choosing as a result? And there's no right answer for that because it depends in reality, right? So and that's that's the the challenge. There, I can see that.
Yeah, that's a hard one. It really goes into that value that you talked about, which is the craft, right? In the end, I think consumer apps, almost all of them fail. Like genuinely, there's so many consumer apps out there. From an adoption standpoint, I barely download a new app anymore. It's like I am very considerate with what I use. So I know a lot of people are developing apps and the fact that this has traction and adoption I think is really, really amazing.
And then it's a matter of how do you keep up with regards to features and functionality and add on top of that to draw a comparison. Again, with VID, they are really in the video editing tool and their AI and AI hype is a big part as well. Samuel mentioned that a lot of the functionality can be kind of ephemeral. So there's something is very much hype based, making a kind of anime character out of a certain picture or a video. And then they implemented in vid, but in a few weeks it might
be obsolete as well. How's that with regards to polar steps and kind of the features and functionality that you build also, especially with AI nowadays? What is the question specifically? As in how do you, because you mentioned that you touched on a certain vision that we go towards a vision, but then there's also functionality that comes available with regards to
new technology. How in the end do you decide, OK, we're going to hop on maybe new technology because that opens up a few added functionalities or we're going to stick with this vision which is more long term and we're going to invest in that? Yeah. I think I mean in terms of new technology adoption, it has to make sense from the user journey perspective. That's how we the angle through which we make every decision on
on what we build. It's there about the hype, it's there about investor likelihood of them, you know asking us to asking us about that. Are you using this or that? Because a lot of AIS, one very clear example, but also in the past they're having other examples. For us, it's always like, OK, is this bringing more value to our users or not, whether it's short or long term. So in the case of AI, for example, you do see like every single, so open AI has done that.
Anthropic has done that. I think Gemini as well. Yeah, Gemini as well. All of them, when they bring examples of how to use AI, they give a travel example. And we believe that, yeah, there's a lot of potential there. But in in our case, what we have and that's what we just launched as part of the summer release, we have a lot of your own data you have track your trips. So we know how you travel and we are leveraging that to even recommendations for where you want to go next.
So we are now we have launched an itinerary tool that helps you plan your itinerary next time you go to Japan for three weeks. We know how you travel. So we're going to give you recommendations for Japan that are tailored to you. And we're using an LMS for that. And that's a great example of something that, yeah, it's, it's perfect because we, you know, you have written all your stories of how you like to travel and it's, you know, put our steps.
It's not a social network, it's more intimate. It's more your living room for your friends and family. So people just tell things how they are and not for the for the filtered version of Instagram. So with that, then we do know how you tell. So we can recommend you truly personalized destinations. And that's a very, very easy example of how there's a lot of value in that. If you have track your trips, you can be planning your trips with us in a much more personalized way, but we're not
going to use AI for, you know. Just enhancing your images, there's no real value in that. You can do that somewhere else. So we're going to jump on the hype of that. It has to be something that really enhances the user experience. And in that, be it AI or anything else, we're going to do it if that's the case and not otherwise. Gotcha.
Do you think the most effective AI features either in general or or in your personal environment, they still rely on the data that you have from a user perspective? Because 15 years ago we talked about, OK, you can make data-driven decisions, but a lot of companies didn't have data, they didn't capture data, so they started capturing data. Then you had big data problems. So then you have big data solutions and machine learning and everything like that.
And now with large language models, people are advocating you don't need anything, you just use a model and then you don't need data anyways. But how you're describing your solution is you're still leveraging the personalized data and then you're using that for even more personalisation. The fact that it's generating content is just a part of it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And there are a lot of ChatGPT wrappers out there, but I think there's also a lot of value potential in those, as long as you create a differentiating experience for the user. If it's just another chat bot, no, people are just going to go to ChatGPT. But if you are building something on top of that wrapper that makes the experience better, that's also a different way to differentiate yourself, of course. But yeah, in our case the data also played a very important role.
Gotcha. Yeah, you mentioned your role has evolved. First you're really hands on, then more hands off and you're missing the hands on part, but you mentioned you were hands on as one. As for one of the features that were released recently, was that this one the more AI related? Why was it this one and not any
other one? Because this is something that I, you know, when LLMS came, came out GBT, I think GBT 3.5, that's the point where I saw it. And like, OK, this is seems to be something that is really next level compared to the previous versions, which were a nice gimmick that can work for specific use cases, but not really very, very powerful. And I had it always in the back of my head like, OK, what, what,
how can we leverage that? Apollo steps and then at some point, OK, let's let's try experimenting with you know what, what is different about us, which is that we have, we know a lot about the travellers and how they travel because they have travel trips with us. And I started playing around with it like, OK, tell me what type of traveller I am with with, with my trips. And then it was so spot on.
And then we did one experiment, which was, you know, Spotify wrapped this thing well with the same thing, but for polar steps in 2024, we call it polar steps unpacked. And it would just tell you you're, you're, you're in travel in 2024. And we, we launched that and I think 300,000 users have used it. And it was so the, the reception was so positive that we said, OK, yeah. With that, we are really able to capture the essence of of how people travel.
So let's leverage that. And this was why, you know, recommending engineer is we're expanding our proposition to helping people plan their trips. This is a perfect fit. I did some experiments. It went really well. So I kind of brought this back to life in the company and try to push it forward. And that's why I was really involved because I built the prototype. So I was I stayed involved when it became a feature that the team built. I love that.
I think it's, it's really cool that you can go from an idea from experiments to kind of proof of concepts that are smaller to actually proven value for users than I kind of hate a long shot with that. How do you cultivate this kind of experimentation with regards to engineering in general? Do people get time to experiment and to try out ideas or how do you make sure people keep innovating also with regards to their skill set? Yeah, good question. There are a couple of things that we do.
Of course, we, you know, every quarter when we plan for what we're going to do the next quarter, we give every engineering team the space to, to share with us for the things that they would like to work on. And then we weigh those against everything else that needs to be done. And if there was a strong enough reason, we, we, we let people go with whatever initiative that may be. That's one way. And then also once per year, we do what we call love days, which are two days where people can
work in whatever they want. So it's kind of a hackathon, but more made more travel oriented, a little bit more fun than just a hackathon because then anyone can participate. People from anything can participate and we work on whatever project we, well, anyone can, can choose whatever they want to do. So that's, that's another way. And then some of those initiatives then end up seeing the, the day of light in the, in our users.
And that's also the fun thing about the stage where we are now because the impact of everything that we do is really big with a million users seeing that immediately when you when you ship it so. Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing the story. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. Thanks. Thanks to you as well. Awesome. If you're still listening, leave a like. If you liked the episode, let us know in the comments section what you thought.
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