Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:03:06 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:03:06] S2: Okay. You're several 100,000,000 in revenue. If you had started right out of school with your buddy, where would [00:03:12] S1: you be? Nowhere? The other thing, think we would have probably worked on a very different idea. I think it took, of course, the pleasure of having the co founder I known inside out. Then over the years, got experience of working at other companies, which helped us understand some of the dynamics here at Google, Palantir, so we understand how to build things at scale. But then the third thing, which I think was the most important, was the idea. And of course, for the years, we looked into different projects from trying to build a crypto risk analyzer during the crypto days, which was really hard, to recommendation system. But then when we stumbled on voice, we knew that A, this is a good timing where the technology is going for the shift. We can be part of that shift of that technology. And then two, this is a huge problem that the users, the world have and we can solve it. If I started something on 2021, 2022, I just don't think we would work on the same idea and probably wouldn't sustain the pain the same way we do now that we approach voice. [00:04:12] S2: Got it. Anton, Lovable, also on fire. If you started this company right out of school, what would it be like?
00:04:12 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:04:12] S2: Got it. Anton, Lovable, also on fire. If you started this company right out of school, what would it be like? [00:04:19] S0: I also think it might have not been as ambitious because, I mean, I had never done something entrepreneurial. And the biggest disadvantage being that young would have been that I wouldn't know why to hire very senior engineers and what type of great senior engineers are out there. Because they would be very scared of working for me. But I think I would have a lot of other advantages, maybe even being more naive. Already then, I think I surrounded myself by super, super smart people. So I think I could have built something very different with fast registration pace. Okay. Could have been successful. [00:04:59] S2: And I got a little bit of what you took from Palantir. You had some very interesting experiences before Lovable. Can you talk a little bit about them and what kind of you took from those that you're leveraging at Lovable? [00:05:11] S0: Yeah, sure. So if you go way back, I also studied like sciences and physics specifically. When I was, I did this long internship at CERN, where understood CERN particle physics and where they discovered a lot of the recent physics. But there's a lot of smart people there. [00:05:30] S2: Yes.
00:05:30 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika, Mati Staniszewski
[00:05:30] S2: Yes. [00:05:30] S0: And I was like, wait, they're all working on these impossible problems without any elasticity. So I'm not going to be here. I'm going to go out applying great innovation to the real world. And then I was kind of inspired to start a company when I was in university, which I'm very happy about. But I ended up doing some finance actually, unfortunately. [00:05:56] S1: Okay, it's simple. [00:05:57] S0: Which was a bit too boring for me. Okay. But fortunately I started this community Stockholm AI, and this was around when deep learning was like taking off in twenty fifteen, sixteen. And I did the foundation models of training recurrent new, like large, small language models before it was cool and met great people there. And one was the founder at Sana, so Joel, who recently sold Sana to Workday for a billion dollars. [00:06:24] S2: Yes, congratulations. [00:06:25] S0: Yes, great job by the team there. My contribution was bringing in some of those smart people that went on to grow it to what it became. And I was there for three years and it was like, oh, AI, like let's build it. We were, you all were super young, but learned super fast and it became successful. Then I joined as a co founder at a company that just got into YC, and that was in recommendation systems, specifically for e commerce. That could have been absolutely wildly successful, the company. It had a lot of things going for it. But after [00:07:01] S2: a
00:07:01 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:07:01] S2: a [00:07:01] S0: bit of momentum loss and my co founder and me being... I wanted the PO to do something more successful than I can say than e commerce. But I decided to do the most possible, ambitious thing. And all my life I've been approached by people who wanted to find a great engineer to help them realize their dreams or their ideas. That the world is full of them, like 0.5% of the world can even code, and much fewer can build a great product, like Mati and his co founder, right? So I decided, let's build something for the 99%, and not this productivity boost for developers. And that's going to be a completely new type of interface where you dream your idea of some technical AI product into existence. Yeah. And that's what we set out to build. [00:07:55] S2: Okay. So your first company, you were the founding engineer. Your next company depict, you were co founder, CTO. Now you're a CEO. Is it everything you ever hoped? [00:08:08] S0: That's a good question. I think it's quite different. What I love about it is that I get to know myself and how to surround myself with the right complementary skill sets and be challenged in all the possible ways much more than being a co founder and CTO. And like, I run the company on founder mode, I would mostly empathize with. But at this stage, I mean, there's a big shift in focusing on empowering and blocking the leaders in the company. And I mean, I like that. And it's more analytical. [00:08:50] S2: Is being a CEO what you thought like? What surprised you about it?
00:08:50 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:08:50] S2: Is being a CEO what you thought like? What surprised you about it? [00:08:54] S0: You have to do so many things. Or I mean, unless you're very disciplined about what delegate and how you delegate it, it's like there's so many, many different things thrown at you, especially as you start hyperscaling. [00:09:09] S2: Yes. How about for you? You're CEO, your first time CEO. What's harder than you thought? What's easier than you thought? What's different than you thought?
00:09:09 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:09:09] S2: Yes. How about for you? You're CEO, your first time CEO. What's harder than you thought? What's easier than you thought? What's different than you thought? [00:09:20] S1: Yeah, I think the first one is definitely you want to hire people better than yourself in all those areas that you know for the first time. In our case, things like legal or finance or building the go to market motion in sales. All of these things which I've seen results of that work but never have actually done the work. So it was a very quick learning of how do you do that so you actually understand it. You need to understand at least a little bit to then be able and assess the person that you want to bring in. So that was kind of the two things that they now repetitively try to do when we have a new area. I'm trying to first put myself in those shoes, understand the basics and then hire a person so I know that they are doing that work. And the delegation too was something that I think I hold on for too long, to do myself rather than delegate. And then actually how to delegate was an interesting piece in itself where I think you do want to give a lot of the work to other leaders that you hire, to other people that you grow, but you still want to understand the detail that's happening. And then how do you let them own it, be the leaders they want to be, but still remain in the details in the funder mode to be able to jump in when needed? That balance of how do you interact for that is a tricky thing is still, I think, a continuous learning for me.