The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:20:24 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:20:24] S0: Well, I mean, was gonna ask like, maybe you can't answer this, like, were the terms? Because his 2,000,000 would be worth quite a bit now. Right? [00:20:30] S1: Yeah. I mean, maybe I won't comment specifically on the the valuation stuff. But, I mean, you know, it's definitely been successful investment for for Cabin. And he's he's... Originally, he wasn't on the board. It was one of his, kind of lieutenants, and and now he is on the board. He's awesome. He's he's one of our biggest kind of supporters, and and he's he's been a great champion for us. [00:20:47] S0: So you... You've alluded a few times to, like, the early years being really tough. I think the line Gabe said to me the other day is the first two years were pretty dinky. NPCs were, like, not interested in you at all till Kiep came along. Yeah. Take me inside that because now that seems like a perfect story. Right? Like, the dots connect in hindsight and what a rich... Rags to riches story. [00:21:08] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:21:08] S0: Now we're here. Like, what was it in those two years that I guess gave you both confidence to keep going?
00:21:14 · John Willett
[00:21:14] S1: Oh, that's a great question. Very little in terms of concrete data points. Like there was, especially the first like year and a half, like there was like essentially external information whatsoever that would like support the idea that we should be running a company. Like all... Like no interest from clients. So that was the... That was kind of the the status at the time. What kept us going... I mean, maybe maybe, you know, back to Kevin's point, there is a first time founder, like, kind of a je sais quoi of just like, oh, this is kinda cool. Like, it is kinda fun. Like, even, like, meeting Kevin. I was like, I never really met a billionaire before, and that's pretty pretty fun. And then, like, you know, I I remember there were times where, you know, we'd go meet with like Blair Efron from Centerview. And it's like, you know, if you grow up or, you know, if you're a young investment banker, like Blair Efron, it's like basically a celebrity. And so there are all these there are all these moments that at the time being like '23, '24, 20 '5 having come from, you know, the first couple years of our career in in banking where, like, my MDs wouldn't even really, like, talk to me. Like, there was no connectivity to, like... Or senior people or or more successful people. And so there were enough sort of just moments of... That were interesting and kind of fun, I think, to to keep us going. And and there was a feeling like, hey, we're learning a lot. Like, let's let's just keep learning a lot. I think going back, it would be really hard to do that again. But at the time it kind of just felt like, I mean, I won't pretend there weren't very dark days, but I think what kept us going was just a bit of a sense of like curiosity and fun in the small stuff of starting and running a company.
00:22:46 · Vidit Agarwal, John Willett
[00:22:46] S0: So mean, obvious question is when did it start to click? Cause also at this point, there's two years, did you quit your job? Yeah, we quit our jobs. So you were full time. So you took the 2,000,000 and you were full time on roofing. [00:22:58] S1: We were full time. We were full time because you know, we could pay ourselves a salary and stuff. [00:23:01] S0: Right, of course.
00:23:02 · John Willett
[00:23:02] S1: All that felt, you know, relatively low risk, which is really lucky. So, yeah, we we quit our jobs. We were fully doing it. ChatGPT coming out November 2022 is probably the single biggest moment where previously... I mean, our... If you look at our pitch decks to... Like sales pitch decks from before that, we wouldn't even mention AI because it was not a good marketing term. It like was distracting. People associated AI with like predictive machine learning and like big data. It was like, oh, you're gonna help us do portfolio analysis. It was just, we did not really like jive with like, we were trying to build like front office workflow automation software and like linking that with AI made no sense. And there was also just a lot of... There are a lot of skeletons in the closet in investment banking in terms of previous... I don't wanna call any companies out by name, but like previous companies that had purported to do like PowerPoint automation in the pre LLM era. And I had access to like five of these when I was at Barclays and they never got used because they weren't good enough. And so there was a lot of that kind of mental block to to get over. Well, when ChatGPT came out, everyone kind of had that moment. And it still took us another year to, like, really commercialize partly because we had to get through, InfoSec and governance and all these things. But we could at least start to talk to guys like Blair and talk to guys like Peter Orzak from Lazard and get to know them and and start to ingratiate ourselves as people who are, like, really focused on this space and thinking thoughtfully about it and have raised some money and are building in it and really kind of pitching ourselves.
00:24:24 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:24:24] S0: Tell me if you if you had... Let's assume I worked at one of those companies back then, Lazard or or JPMorgan or or what have you. What was the initial opportunity? Because, again, you mentioned at the start about, like, Ligure and Javier. I know both Ligure and Javier really well. They've both been on the show. They said, like, AI changed how enterprise started looking software. Right? Mhmm. I feel I see that every day, like, across the stack, like health care, government, accounting firms, law firms, banks. I think to your point, like, ChatGPT has made a mainstream where they all seem very pro software where I don't think they had that desire pre ChatGPT in the same extent. But I'm curious what was that initial pitch or that initial opportunity that you were presenting to them? And, like, yeah, maybe you can tell us about the QLE customers and how you got them on board.
00:25:10 · John Willett
[00:25:10] S1: Yeah. A 100%. I mean, like the first real customer was was Lazard. And the pitch to them was kind of just like, hey, these models are incredible. They're going to change how you work. That change is gonna take a lot of harnessing from a technological perspective and also a lot of, like, human capital transformation. Trust us with both. Like, you know, we're gonna have an engineering team who is fully focused on taking really what was OpenAI at the time and kind of teaching it, prompting it, to do financial tasks, giving it access to all the financial market data, giving it as much context as possible on how Lazard works. So that was one. And then the second part was like literally like myself and Gabe and a couple other folks like Rachel Freeman, Alyana who were ex bankers and were like, we will just come in to Lazard every day and we will write all these custom prompts and workflows and automations and get to know your bankers super well to actually start to embed this stuff into their workflows day to day. So that was kind of the original pitch. To your point, and I'd never... I've never sold SaaS or software in the previous eras, but you're totally right that investment banks... I mean, is a perfect example of this. Like, when I came over here this year, I was not sure how European banks were gonna be procuring this stuff because there are banks in Milan and Madrid, etcetera, that like basically like missed cloud. Right? So they're like very, very kind of slow to adopt stuff. But they all now have these like agentic AI task force, and they're trying to figure this stuff out. And, you know, I think for them, it was probably more like the Claude Opus four five stuff as opposed to the chat GBT moment that that really put stuff into focus for them, but, like, they're getting there too. So to your point, like, these banks, I think, have recognized that whereas previous transformation cycles have been about cost cutting and maybe about security and and maybe about data organization internally and things around HR and human capital management, this one is about existential revenue transformation. This is about what do the next five to ten years of the industry look like. We think they're radically different.