Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
00:00:00 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri, Calin Fabri
[00:00:00] S0: Slop is a skill issue. Slop is a function of you not knowing how to use the tool that is AI. [00:00:07] S1: So what does marketing look like, like, five years? [00:00:09] S0: We have nearly a 100 software engineers that are... In our company. They are not sitting there manually writing code. They are orchestrators. They have agents that are doing all the coding for them. Do you think marketers are gonna sit there and write a blog post? That future is unfathomable to me. I... The marketers are gonna work with agents to build great marketing. The emphasis there is on the word great. In the future, every business on the planet will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand, products, and services. Right. Agents become the new customer. So if you're the CMO of Nike, how does Chat GPT, how does Gemini, how does Grok talk about your running sneaker? Well, we can show you what Chat GPT says about the Nike running sneaker, but what do you do about it, bro? [00:00:45] S2: This episode is brought to you by Light. Light is the AI native accounting and finance platform built for fast growing multi entity businesses and used by the likes of Legora, Lovable, and Fuse Energy among others. Scaling across multiple entities usually means an ERP nobody loves plus a Frankenstack of finance tools duct taped together. Light replaces all of it. Retire the Frankenstack. Find Light at the link in the description or visit them at light.inc. That is light.inc.
00:01:21 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:01:21] S1: Alrighty. James, good to have you. Thanks for having me. Maybe just like a short intro about myself and then about yourself because we're talk... We'll be talking, like, mostly about you now. Curious about your entrepreneurial journey. A little bit about myself. I'm Calin Fabri. I'm the host of Venture Europe, which is, like, the biggest independent media in Europe. We reach around 100,000 people monthly. And on the side, I coach, tech CEOs and help them with the fundraise for series b or series c, mostly from the side of storytelling. This is about me. Let's talk a little bit about James. James, you're the CEO of ProFound. You recently announced a €100,000,000 Series d round backed by Sequoia, Kleiner, Lightspeed, and others. And what you are doing is AI agentic for marketing. Yeah. But I guess we'll get into that and get more specific maybe with time. But maybe let's let's start, like, with with your childhood because you had this entrepreneurial instinct from the early days. From my research, I've learned that you've been selling candy, you know, in the, I don't know, primary or high school playground. Tell us about that story. [00:02:41] S0: I mean, I don't I I don't actually talk about that much. I feel like it's a very common story for people that build businesses, like large businesses. You you... If you trace back enough, I feel like it always starts quite young. Yeah. Fun fact. I actually... And I've never said this before. It wasn't actually candy. It was in high school, and it was bacon sandwiches. [00:03:01] S1: Okay.
00:03:01 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:03:01] S1: Okay. [00:03:02] S0: The the the the food at my high school sucked. And there was this cafe around the corner that if you called them, this is before Uber Eats, you'd call them and they would come and deliver bacon sandwiches. And everyone loved these bacon sandwiches. And what I could... The the the the rule, the arbitrage, you could say, was that you had to, like, leave the school premises, which you weren't allowed to do. Right. So I'd have to run out of the school premises, grab a bag of the bacon sandwiches, and then I'd come back onto the school playground and, yeah, mark those things up and, make a make a tidy profit. [00:03:34] S1: You actually... You say that this is a common story that you can trace back in most of the entrepreneurs, and also you kinda hear it for Warren Buffett. Used to sell newspaper, right, like, when he was five or six. Like, do you think there is a gene, or do you think there is something kinda inherent to people that wanna start businesses, like, at a early stage? And do you... And then, like, do you think entrepreneurship can be thought?
00:04:01 · James Cadwallader
[00:04:01] S0: I don't know if I'd say entrepreneurship can be taught per se. I think it has to be a natural interest. Like, to me, I know it sounds it sounds a bit blunt, but like making money and like trying to make money even when with... When I was selling bacon sandwiches, it was like fun. It was like an interesting thing to do. I found it attractive as my idea. I think you need to have that kind of interest. I laugh with my with my wife that, you know, if I was... If you put me on a beach, after, like, twenty four hours of relaxing, I'd be driving myself crazy. I would be, you know, I read books about founders, about business people. That, like, that's my idea of fun. So if I'm taking the day off, like I tend I tend to work. I go to the office six days a week. I tend to take Sundays off. Well, my relaxation on a Sunday will quite often be watching like a David Senra podcast or Right. You know, watching interviews with people that I admire. So I just find it naturally interesting. And I think that probably has to be true. I think it's hard if you're not naturally inclined. Because it's the the nature of starting a business or being a founder is so self starting. Like, you know, quite often, this sounds crazy, but quite often, I don't... There's nothing to do in a weird way. Like, there's no... No one's given you a list of things. You you have to figure out what to do. And it's like very... You need to have an internal nuclear reactor that can kind of drive you and make you curious and make you wanna push on things. So you have to have that drive to wanna learn, to wanna study, to wanna dig in, like, to ask questions, to challenge things. So I think it's like a very inward facing engine that has to exist. But I guess you can learn it. You can kinda teach yourself it, I suppose.
00:05:52 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:05:52] S1: I guess it kinda takes a lot of energy to learn about the things that you don't know. So every day, you have to be slightly obsessed about learning more and pushing. So it's just like a lot of push. To your point, like, no one is going to come, like, with a task list. So then you need to figure out, like, what you need to do and what are the priorities to move the business forward. [00:06:12] S0: Yeah. [00:06:13] S1: And walk us through, like, your first business, Kyra. Like, what are the things that you've learned there that you apply now at ProFound? Yeah. I mean, [00:06:22] S0: I I had businesses before Kyra. So Kyra was a marketing tech company that we started in London. Prior to that, I'd started other things, actually, outside of tech. I traded gold, and I spent time in China, like, importing products from China. And learned to speak Chinese Mandarin and kind of yeah. I was like doing things before Kyra. But when I was at 23, I met... Because I didn't go to university. So I suppose that's the... I had a... You know, the... From the age of 18 to 23, while my friends were at university, I was like trying to start businesses. And then I guess my... I got my mind open to tech. So this is in London in like 2013. Mhmm. I'd say the London tech scene still, even today, is not Silicon Valley as much as we want it to be. Like, you know, we call... We had Silicon Roundabout back then in Old Street. So I started going and hanging out around there, and I met some cofounders on Reddit. And we launched... [00:07:24] S1: Yeah. We Reddit?
00:07:24 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:07:24] S1: Yeah. We Reddit? [00:07:25] S0: Yeah. They were on, like, r slash London and... Or maybe r slash startupslondon or something. And we built a consumer app in 2013 that helped you find things to do in the city, which was this, like, social mobile local period that everyone was into back then. It was a bit of a smash hit. It went super parabolic, and we got millions of users, but we couldn't monetize it. So we basically started pivoting into like advertising and like working with brands to monetize what this consumer product that I'll spare the details, but like, we went through lots of iterations of that business and ended up with kind of like a pseudo software based agency where we connected large enterprise brands with content creators. And I worked on that until 2022. And I, yeah, I I left that business in 2022, had like a mini exit. I mean, that business was fucking hard. It sucked at times. Yeah. [00:08:31] S1: Why was it hard? [00:08:33] S0: It was just like pushing every day, pushing a heavy boulder up a steep hill. And I think like the the the biggest lesson that I took from that business is like, you know, the the market is everything. [00:08:53] S1: The market is everything.