Scaling Europe
00:45:47 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:45:47] S0: If it can be used as a tool and you need the tool, Yes. Maybe when the time is I want to ask two final questions. Yeah. More personal. [00:45:53] S1: Yes. [00:45:54] S0: What has been the lowest moment or the hardest moment where you think you've really come up against a wall and you're thinking, gosh, how are we going to get through this? And then the last question would be the flip, the positive. But I'm curious to hear, like, is the the hardest moment been in your founder journey? [00:46:13] S1: There's two moments that come to mind that are like the same underlying principle. The two times I have lost sleep in the last four... Like genuinely, I could not sleep throughout the night. May 23 when Microsoft... This is at the end of our design partnerships. Microsoft announced Copilot. I still remember the super sexy sleek marketing video that came out. When I looked at my co founder and I was like, are we totally cooked? Now I have yet to come across a person who said they use Copilot to their satisfaction in enterprise, which is not to knock Microsoft like they will do... It's too important for them to not get right, but it's not there yet. [00:46:59] S0: Yeah.
00:46:59 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:46:59] S0: Yeah. [00:46:59] S1: And the second time was when OpenAI... I think this was June 24? When OpenAI announced connectors to SharePoint and we're like, enterprise will have access to all of its documents and retrieval will work super well across all of that, and they won't have a need for any other other solution. The lesson there, by the way, Seb, is that you should focus on the things inside of your control. And particularly for an ex consultant, like, I spent a lot of time building competitive landscape maps and navel gazing around competitive dynamics in an industry to feed into a diligence report. The reality is it doesn't matter. Maybe it matters when you're much much more mature as a business in terms of what your competitive strategy and channel dynamics are. When you're our size, the only thing that matters is building stuff that people wanna wanna use. Don't worry about what other people are working on, just focus on yourself. And then, sorry, you said flip [00:48:09] S0: And then the best moment, what has been the moment where you think... Where you thought to yourself, oh my god, this is the dream. I'm doing this. I'm running my business. The customers are happy. This is an amazing moment.
00:48:09 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:48:09] S0: And then the best moment, what has been the moment where you think... Where you thought to yourself, oh my god, this is the dream. I'm doing this. I'm running my business. The customers are happy. This is an amazing moment. [00:48:19] S1: Consultants are are on the whole and I'm speaking about myself now and perhaps projecting onto others, but on the whole they're fairly risk averse Mhmm. People. And the biggest fear I had leaving to do this was that the people who told me it was a mistake were right. And that I would have to go crawling back and ask my my boss for a job again, which I would have done because I love them. I love working for them. I love my old firm. And I would gladly have done it if I needed to. But there's hubris and ego, right, associated with taking risk and I didn't want to have to go back and admit that I was wrong or that I failed. So I think the happiest moment was when we landed sort of like fifth customer that meant that we were no longer burning and that we were profitable. And this particular customer was also very very big firm that I think gave us confidence that like, look, this might not end up being like a moonshot, but I don't have to go asking people for my job back and I haven't been a failure in in taking this risk. That that was the happiest moment I think when we realized this was sustainable. [00:49:34] S0: Something was working.
00:49:34 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:49:34] S0: Something was working. [00:49:35] S1: Yeah. And by the way, if I'm being self critical as I know that your podcast also has a European lens to it and I I have I have the unique privilege of... Like I grew up in The States. I lived in California till I was 13. I moved back to Greece. My parents wanted to go back home. I'm I'm Greek American and so... And I went to university in The UK and I worked here my entire career. So I've actually... I'm blessed that I can see the differences in appetites to risk across these these people. This attitude of like taking entrepreneurial risk that doesn't work out is a failure is a uniquely European mindset and constraint friends across the pond do not have. In fact, they go so far as the other side to fetishize failure and VCs will write checks faster to founders who have failed three times than they have to one who's doing it the first time around because they realize that failure is a component to success. So if one last piece of advice I think to other entrepreneurs going is like get out of that mindset of if I mess this up. It's it's a big knock or it reflects poorly on me. I don't know how we do that as Europeans, but it's like the biggest difference between the two sides that I see, and I wish we could be more like them in that respect. [00:50:55] S0: Amazing. Well, look, thank you for taking the time and congratulations on your journeys. It's an amazing [00:50:58] S1: Thank you.