00:44:53 · Martino Cadoni
[00:44:53] S0: Yeah. Only from a financial perspective, then the business model is quite different. Right? And and I will say credit to fintech. I will say as a CFO, as financial operations, I think in term of complexity, sophistication, nothing beats financial service and payments. The complexity there is huge. And it also comes from the regulations and all the constraints you have. Right? Imagine if you are a bank or a fintech, the volume of transactions is in the order of millions every day. And if something goes wrong, you are in big trouble with, you know, regulators and stuff. Right? So I think from a financial operations, I I would say a fintech and financial services is more complex. But what is more complex in AI is really the uncertainty about the business model. Right? Like like, for example, think about billing. Right? Now there is a big debate in the industry, and nobody has an answer yet. What's the best billing revenue model in AI? Is it the traditional subscription per seat model. People is now try... Yeah. Starting to think maybe it's not the best for the high era. Then you have usage based billing, which a lot of companies, including us, are adopting. And then now it's like people shifting towards outcome based billing. Right? Can you base... Can you bill based out of an outcome? Right? So this uncertainty in the business model makes very difficult also to forecast because how can I forecast my revenue in the next five years if we don't even know in the industry how everyone is gonna bill the customers? If it's per seat, per outcome, per u... Yeah. User based. So there is a lot of variables coming into play. Right? The second one is, like, the CapEx. Right? As you said, the big LLMs are spending billions and billions in in development and training these models. Here, there is a very fascinating debate going on in the industry. Some people say, you know, those companies... Those three companies are playing a different game. And, you know, they have so much funding, and they're gonna lead, like, that technological advancement. And then all the others will have proprietary models and and specialize on something rather than having horizontal models. Others, very nonconsensus investors, they think, hey.
00:47:55 · Martino Cadoni, Guillaume Moubeche
Maybe we are too early in the industry so that something very severe is gonna happen at some point, and then there's gonna be a reset like we had in the dot com bubble. Right? I hope it's not the case, but I've told... Yeah. I've spoken to some investors who think that could be the case. Right? [00:48:20] S1: What do you think it's like... What do you think it's the biggest difference between like the dot com bubble and what we're leaving now? [00:48:30] S0: I think, I mean, personally, I see now the impacts on the ways of working and on the business models seems to be much more clearly defined. They also... The ability of AI to be applicable to substantially everything in much faster way. I mean, I think it's clear. AI is here. It's here to stay. It's clear. It can make a huge impact on productivity. While in the .com, obviously, was... The fragmentation of things that were popping up was, I think, a less of a clear use case. But, again, I was maybe too young to compare because, yeah, back then to have a proper comparison of the two. But when it comes to AI, I'm very convinced. I mean, this is is here to stay as there is not a bubble from a technological point of view. If there is a bubble from a valuation point of view, that's a different story. But I think that technology is real, and the technology is you have to stay. Right? And and I think those companies, you know, and DeepL as well, like, the charge and disrupting those industry from within, it is something which will have a lasting impact. And I don't see what what whatever can stop this. Right?
00:48:30 · Martino Cadoni, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:48:30] S0: I think, I mean, personally, I see now the impacts on the ways of working and on the business models seems to be much more clearly defined. They also... The ability of AI to be applicable to substantially everything in much faster way. I mean, I think it's clear. AI is here. It's here to stay. It's clear. It can make a huge impact on productivity. While in the .com, obviously, was... The fragmentation of things that were popping up was, I think, a less of a clear use case. But, again, I was maybe too young to compare because, yeah, back then to have a proper comparison of the two. But when it comes to AI, I'm very convinced. I mean, this is is here to stay as there is not a bubble from a technological point of view. If there is a bubble from a valuation point of view, that's a different story. But I think that technology is real, and the technology is you have to stay. Right? And and I think those companies, you know, and DeepL as well, like, the charge and disrupting those industry from within, it is something which will have a lasting impact. And I don't see what what whatever can stop this. Right? [00:50:06] S1: And what do you think are, like, the the biggest threats to to depot?
00:50:06 · Guillaume Moubeche, Martino Cadoni
[00:50:06] S1: And what do you think are, like, the the biggest threats to to depot? [00:50:13] S0: Well, obviously, it's a extremely competitive environment. Right? And I think everyone playing in AI knows this. Right? I don't think anyone is safe. Right? I mean, we hear a lot about all the fantastic work, for example, the legal AI companies are doing. And then every other week, though, the general models are issuing, like, legal features. And it feels that whatever you do, you have one of those big three, four that can easily replicate you. I think... So it's being extremely focused, keeping calm. And... But, again, I think one big mistake we should avoid in general is trying to be suffering too much from this FOMO and go out and trying to build too many things. Because as you said, this is very expensive, and the capital is is... It is limited. It doesn't feel it's limited, but it is. So I think you need to be focused on real problems that the customer has and be the best at solving the specific problem and having a solution we... Which has a lot of business context very embedded in the critical workflows so that then you can truly make a difference, and you can be defensible. Because if you are a solution which is easy to switch, then that's where trouble comes. Right? And I think that's where a lot of companies will will need to be very smart on how they build the the solutions, right, around the problem of the customers.
00:52:09 · Guillaume Moubeche, Martino Cadoni
[00:52:09] S1: Yeah. I agree. And I know we are almost like out of time, so I think this is gonna be my Yeah. My final question. If you look at at your career so far, like, what are the things that you would have done differently and also why? [00:52:26] S0: I think, to be honest, I truly love private markets and building and scaling companies. I think going back, I would have switched to private market earlier in my career. Right? I spent, what, eleven years in public companies before switching to the private dark side. I I think going back, I would have definitely maybe moved... I don't know. After five, six years in public companies, I think it was enough. I I should have switched to start ups and scale ups earlier in my career. That's definitely... And I think that's... One is my personality really fits private markets. I love building things and experimenting and building and breaking, rebuilding. And I think it's... This is more a private market start up type of thing. While in public companies, you have a lot of, you know, constraints and limitation of what you can do or cannot do. So I think I would have enjoyed if I'd switched to private companies earlier in my career, so I could have unleashed myself a bit earlier with this type of things. [00:53:45] S1: Okay. And what what do you think are like the the the constraints in public markets that that people are not usually aware of, but that you you not... You don't like particularly like?
00:53:58 · Martino Cadoni
[00:53:58] S0: Yeah. Obviously, you are... It's all around the quarterly reporting. So everything is optimized a bit for the short term, which means you don't have much time to think about medium and longer term. And and and, obviously, in a public company, you have less room to experiment things because there are much stricter rules in the way you report things, you present things. Right? I mean, when you are in private markets, if I wanna report to the investors in a totally different way, it could be even an app. Right? Now I could do an app on Cloud, send the link to my investors that they can play with it. As a public CFO, you cannot do that. Right? It's not like you cannot test the water, do AB testing. You need to play very safe because, obviously, there are a lot of regulations you need to comply with. In private markets, you can really experiment and try to change the status quo in a way that in public companies, you cannot do it. In fact, if it's true, as I read yesterday that, you know, there is appetite from SEC to to kill the quarterly reporting requirements. If this is done right, I think it would be a fantastic move so that the public companies can focus more on a medium and long term strategy rather than optimizing quarterly results. Because I think a lot of company had made the mistakes just to please the public markets to avoid investing for the long term because of the public pressure. Right? Only a few companies like Amazon and and Apple had the courage, both of their strength to say, I'm not gonna issue dividend. I don't care. I wanna invest for the long time. I'm gonna redeploy the cash for for innovation and technology. They were able to do it. But a lot of companies, they were doing a lot of buybacks or issuing dividends just to please the short term, but these were billions that could have been used to innovate. I mean, that's what happened in banking. Right? Yeah. Revolut is doing a fantastic job and a big fan of them. And one of the reason they are winning so big is that the traditional banks, they have wasted so many billions in buybacks and dividends in the last twenty years. All billions they could have been used to innovate and disrupt their own business model. They have no debt because they've been very focused on the short term. And now companies like Nubank, Revolut, they are eating their market share like crazy.