Scaling Europe
00:10:37 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:10:37] S0: on this last time, but we've seen this sort of SaaS stock sell off where, like, a lot of people are saying AI is gonna disrupt and make a lot of the old enterprise softwares redundant. What's your view on that? [00:10:51] S1: I think it's BS to say it very politely, which, you know, I think it's been an absolute overreaction. I think it's been pushed by people who haven't really worked in the enterprise reality. If you think about the fact that it takes years, if not ten years plus to run a migration from an on premise to cloud system, then imagine what it looks like for an enterprise, Fortune 50, for someone on the board there to sign off on, let's move all our operations to this white coded ERP system. That's just not gonna happen. And so there is gonna be a lot of AI innovation in the enterprise stack for sure. And that's why we're building Conduct, you know, and we can talk about what that looks like in the stack. But the the core enterprise system layer is not gonna be disrupted.
00:10:51 · JP Haas, Sebastian Johnson
[00:10:51] S1: I think it's BS to say it very politely, which, you know, I think it's been an absolute overreaction. I think it's been pushed by people who haven't really worked in the enterprise reality. If you think about the fact that it takes years, if not ten years plus to run a migration from an on premise to cloud system, then imagine what it looks like for an enterprise, Fortune 50, for someone on the board there to sign off on, let's move all our operations to this white coded ERP system. That's just not gonna happen. And so there is gonna be a lot of AI innovation in the enterprise stack for sure. And that's why we're building Conduct, you know, and we can talk about what that looks like in the stack. But the the core enterprise system layer is not gonna be disrupted. [00:11:42] S0: Yeah. I completely agree. I think people who think that don't realize how deeply embedded these systems are. Right? It's not like a consumer bit of software that you can just, like, subscribe and unsubscribe to. This is, like, the full architecture of a business, which, yeah, which I think is... It's it's so embedded that it's not not something you can just disrupt from your place easily. What's it been like working with these companies, right, who are often very large, traditional, more like old school companies than, you know, lots of tech companies are selling to other tech companies. You are targeting like some of the biggest, most established brands in the world. What's it like working with these companies to try and bring new innovative technology to their stack?
00:12:24 · JP Haas
[00:12:24] S1: Look, honestly, it's been amazing. I think many of our customers get a very bad rep for being perceived as slow and especially IT departments at the heart of it are perceived to be slowing down innovation. And that's so unfair because they're just doing an impossible job. Imagine how hard it is to coordinate what, you know, thousands of business users are asking for across your hundreds of different company units, and then having to translate that into the hundreds of different systems and millions of lines of code on the other side, that's just impossible to do. And so enabling them to go towards that vision and being able to make that transition faster has been an amazing process for them. I think they also really buy into the vision of what we're building together. They all really believe that the future of an agentic enterprise is going to be this interaction between agents operating with and on top of their legacy enterprise systems, and they need access to all of the context of what's happening inside of these systems, as well as in, you know, the big buzzword, the tacit knowledge of what happens in the enterprise and what people have in their heads around how they take decisions on a day to day. And so Conduct is over time becoming more and more that platform of we're starting with what happens in the enterprise systems, what are all the deterministic processes there. But by operating these layers, we also generate and collect all of context as well, which we can then feed back to the agents to enable the eugenic enterprise future.
00:14:05 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:14:05] S0: And since we last spoke, you've obviously been on this amazing journey. Things are going well. What hasn't gone so well? What have you had to change or adjust or what have you learned that you didn't expect? [00:14:18] S1: Yeah. So it's a it's a really good question because there's so many learnings all the time and we all make mistakes all the time. I think what stands out is you really have to adjust and iterate how you're building your organization in line with your specific product go to market and customers. So when we set out to build the the business development organization at Conduct, I think we didn't really have a good idea of what it was gonna look like, what are the different roles on there. And so we we had to refine that over time to really to really nail the the sales cycle and to support our customers in the in the best possible way. [00:14:58] S0: Interesting. Okay. And let's let's touch on geographic footprint. Right? You are... You're German yourself. You're building in London. Your team's in London. You're selling a lot to Mainland Europe. You're looking at The US. What does it look like at the moment? You know, where are your customers coming from? Where do you think they're gonna come from from the future?
00:14:58 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:14:58] S0: Interesting. Okay. And let's let's touch on geographic footprint. Right? You are... You're German yourself. You're building in London. Your team's in London. You're selling a lot to Mainland Europe. You're looking at The US. What does it look like at the moment? You know, where are your customers coming from? Where do you think they're gonna come from from the future? [00:15:15] S1: Yep. We've always been a European company with a global ambition. Right? And we're we're already seeing that in our customer base. We've got customers in APAC. We've got customers in The US now. We've got customers in France, which, you know, many people say moves in more slowly than Germany, but we're seeing great velocity there as well. And so we're really global there already. And now we're expanding with a second HQ to New York as well. We've just made the first highest there. And so expect us to be a fully cross Atlantic company this year already. [00:15:51] S0: And and what what does that model look like? Are you doing, like, a full deployed engineer model? Is that sort of like a US outpost? What's the structure? [00:16:00] S1: We we treat it as a second HQ, which means it's a full setup of the founders are gonna split their time between New York and London. We're gonna have an engineering team there. We're gonna have, you know, corporations there just to support our customers in the best possible way. I mean, SAP is pushing us into their biggest accounts in The US right now, so we we need to be there. We need to support them in the best possible way.
00:16:00 · JP Haas, Sebastian Johnson
[00:16:00] S1: We we treat it as a second HQ, which means it's a full setup of the founders are gonna split their time between New York and London. We're gonna have an engineering team there. We're gonna have, you know, corporations there just to support our customers in the best possible way. I mean, SAP is pushing us into their biggest accounts in The US right now, so we we need to be there. We need to support them in the best possible way. [00:16:24] S0: That's amazing. How much additional... Like like, how impactful is having that SAP strategic relationship? Like, is... Are they introducing you to dozens of more customers? What has