Scaling Europe
00:11:05 · Sebastian Johnson, Matt Wilson
[00:11:05] S0: I mean, the man lives on the cutting edge and has done. Like, he lives and breathes this more than, like, any other investor that I know. I also wanna talk about the the recent announcement that you made for your engineers. So you've you've increased your minimum compensation package for engineers towards £360,000. [00:11:23] S1: That's right. [00:11:23] S0: And I think this is even a large increase. Think, was it nine months ago you announced you you... It was 240,000? [00:11:29] S1: That's right. [00:11:30] S0: So now you've grown even more. It's now one of the most competitive salaries in London for engineers. Why have you done this?
00:11:37 · Matt Wilson
[00:11:37] S1: Yeah. I think, you know, what we see, you know, every day in the office working with the best engineers in, you know, some of the best product engineers in the world in the team. And what we see in the markets with our own products on both the working and representing with Jack... Through Jack, some of the best engineers on the planet, as well as working with some of the most exciting companies on the planet, hiring amazing engineers, is just the disproportionate value that can be brought by the by the upper echelons of product engineers. You think about the job of engineering, it's changed so much over the last couple of years from the... There needs to be a team of people collaborating across product design, QA, DevOps to be able to ship product to say, okay. We can now collapse loads and loads of that into one person. They can move way quicker because they've not got all the the coordination overheads of working with of working with a team. What used to take weeks can now take, you know, hours. And instead of working with a team of people, these these people are now managing swarms of agents underneath them to be able to to to ship and get work done. And that means that any one individual can just be, you know, orders of magnitude more productive than they were a few years ago. And as such, the best people are, you know, levered hugely by this technology and are able to ship so much more and and are able to be so much more valuable to us as a company, but also to the market more broadly. And if you combine that with the types of products that we're building, you know, we run with with Jack and Jill, the largest agentic social network in the world. There's no other company out there that's got this many agents. Persistent, waking up every day, representing their users, and interacting with each other. We're really at the bleeding edge of what's possible. So combine the kind of productivity gains that you've gone through, how engineering's changed with how far we are at the bleeding edge and how important it is for us to be continually pushing the boundaries of what's possible. The, you know, number of people that can that can do that job, it's just it's just incredibly, incredibly small. And then, you know, for us, it it also acts as a forcing function.
00:13:48 · Matt Wilson, Sebastian Johnson
It it it forces us to make sure that we are, you know, living out what we what we say as we wanna build the most contents company in Europe. And if we don't feel amazing about paying, you know, top dollar for the staff that we bring in, particularly the engineering staff that we bring in, then, you know, there's something wrong and we're not we're not at that at that bar. [00:14:09] S0: And how do you, I guess, balance people who are coming for the highest salaries with also wanting to solve the mission? You know, there's been this sort of meme on social media about Anthropic and their interview process asking, like, you know, if the stock went to zero, would you still work for us? Sure. As a... Do you feel like there's a tension between paying too much and getting people who are just in it for the money, or do you... Yeah. How do you balance that with getting people who are also interested in the mission of the company and building something very powerful?
00:14:33 · Matt Wilson
[00:14:33] S1: I think you have to treat the interview process and getting to know people as a as as a full package. But, you know, everybody's got different financial circumstances in their life, and I don't... I'd... We... We've got people that will take, you know, a 30% cash, 70% equity with with... As part of that, we've got people that will take 5% equity, 95% cash. So we see a full spectrum. It depends entirely on individual circumstances, and we think we should not be paternalistic about that. We should... You know, if we wanted to raise more money, we could raise more money. If we wanted to raise less money and give away more equity, we could do that. So I think, you know, we we view that... Kinda wanna push this trade off onto the employees and have them manage their own personal financial circumstances rather than have that be, you know, opinionated from the company side as to what they should be. And and and then I think it also comes into the types of people that you hire and what they've done before. You know, we hire two thirds of our team are ex founders. So you're not going... You're not getting people that are incredibly mercenary. You're getting people that want to be part of something huge, want to be part of something... Of of of a winning team, and want to be part of a of of a massive mission in, you know, changing the world for for better, which which is the kind of core of how we think about Jack and Jill.
00:15:51 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:15:51] S0: And the people that you're targeting must be, as you say, like, the very best of the best. There are increasing number of American companies that are expanding, particularly into London. We've seen it with OpenAI and Anthropic and a bunch of US companies coming in, and some of these salaries are £600,000 that Anthropic is paying. Have you seen... You know, you sit in this place where you've got, imagine, access to amazing data. Are you seeing that have a knock on impact on the rest of the salaries? Has that played a role in you increasing the salaries in in your own company?
00:16:21 · Matt Wilson
[00:16:21] S1: Yeah. I I wouldn't say as as direct as as as seeing Anthropic coming and offering a salary at the... Then for... That then has caused us to then change our compensation approach. But, obviously, we are, you know, playing in a market, and we wanna make sure that we're really competitive for the best people. But the the best people have always had, you know, tons of options. Anybody in our team could go and move to The States and go and work for a company out in San Francisco and earn the wages that have been possible out there, which are higher than what Central Opics gain in London. They could go and be a founder and raise millions of dollars on on day zero of a company and and go and and, you know, plot their own path. So it's not about just one... It's not just just about the labs. It's about the kind of whole universe of other opportunities that people have got, that we've got to make sure that we are... That we're competitive with when we think about the types of people that we want to bring into the team and the type of partners that we want to bring. I think in terms of the rest of the market, there is a, at the moment, a little bit of a bifurcation that's happening in the in the market where you're seeing, you know, well funded companies and and and and, you know, this includes the American companies. Seeing the returns to talent density and then, you know, rationally thinking, okay, if people are gonna be 10 times more productive and we can be incredibly talent dense, like, we should be willing to pay more to attract the best people. And and... But at the same time, you've then got... I think that's that's a tiny fraction of the overall labor market, a tiny fraction of what's what's out there. And we work on both sides of that. So we work with a lot of the American companies that are expanding into London, helping them build out their initial teams out here. And so so we we we work with them. We benefit from them that, you know, candidates that are working with Jack are exposed to those opportunities through working with us. But we also work with a whole bunch of other companies across, you know, the kind of full spectrum of the economy, not just, you know, hot AI companies.