Scaling Europe
00:08:02 · Matt Wilson, Sebastian Johnson
[00:08:02] S1: And we had... That there was two two guys that spoke to Jack. They did a, you know, online phone call with an AI agent. And in those phone calls, told Jack that they were interested in getting a job, but also interested in maybe founding something. And if you fast forward a couple of months, they've been... Jill... The the... Jill working for one of the accelerators identified these these people, put them in touch with the accelerator. They've been accepted onto the accelerator. They then cofounded a company together, which is now funded, and that company is actually now using Jill to hire its first employees. So No way. So it's a crazy story of of this matchmaking done by these agents that, yeah, definitely feels like we are living in the future. [00:08:50] S0: That's amazing. What a full full circle moment. Yeah. That's amazing. Can we touch a bit on Air Street Capital, you know, leading the round? Phenomenal investors in the age of AI, absolutely crushing it. I think what... Nathan, largest solo GP in the world, maybe, like, absolutely crushing it. What gave him the conviction, and and how do you feel about getting him on the cap table? What kind of... What do you think it says about the success of the business?
00:09:14 · Matt Wilson
[00:09:14] S1: Yeah. I mean, Nathan is incredibly impressive guy, as you say. He's the the largest runs a lot... Largest RGP fund in Europe. I think importantly for us, the pace of change in AI at the moment is so quick, and everything has been built on a foundation of of products and engineering in our opinion. So all of your marketing, all of your sales, all of your go to market motion, that's built on a foundation of having the best products on the market. And having the best product on the market is not something that you stand still on today. We've replatformed both agents probably every quarter since we started the business. There's like... They're totally rebuilt, torn down, and and and and built again. And you have to do that in order to to remain having the best product on the market. We consistently ask ourselves, we're founding the business today, what would we build and how would we build it? And we should probably go and do that because if we don't, somebody else will and and and will be disrupted. And so so when we think about that, that that can't just be in the team. I think that also needs to be at the board level and also needs to be the cap table. There needs to be a deep understanding of the technology and of the fundamental importance of the... Of of what's going on with AI and being really plugged into not, you know, hearing about it three to six months later and living three to six months in the past, but being there on the cutting edge. And Nathan is... For for those that those that know, has been, you know, plugged into the... To to to the veins of what's going on in AI for the last ten years prior to to to to to LLMs and continues to be investing, but also researching also broadcasting his his his his media out on really what is going on and what is the cutting edge. So having somebody like that on the cap table, on the board is is is a huge value add to the... To to us as a company.
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.