Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
00:28:34 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:28:34] S1: So so how does marketing look like, I don't know, in five years? Maybe ten years is too much, and based on what Anthropic said, like, we are at risk of not surviving. But what does what does marketing look like like in five years? [00:28:46] S0: I think very similar to, like... It's weird to me, you know, you have vertical AI companies across, like, legal, accounting, customers... Customer support. But, like, why would you not... Why would a marketer's role not change in the same way that an engineer's role? Like, a software engineer's role now. Yep. If you look at the sub... We have, you know, nearly a 100 software engineers are a bit... In our company. They are not sitting there manually writing code. They are orchestrators. They have agents that are doing all the coding for marketers are gonna sit there and, like, write a blog post and, like, it it it is is unfathomable. That future is unfathomable to me. I don't see that future existing. So marketers are gonna work with agents to build great marketing. The the emphasis there is on the word great. Yeah. Not slop. No. Like like, lizard brain thinking is like, oh, I'm gonna use AI to do my marketing. Therefore, it will be slop. I'd say slop is a skill issue. Slop is a is a function of you not know... You not knowing how to use the tool that is AI. Yep. So, yeah, like, marketers are gonna use AI to build their marketing, and they're gonna do that inside of ProFound.
00:28:46 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:28:46] S0: I think very similar to, like... It's weird to me, you know, you have vertical AI companies across, like, legal, accounting, customers... Customer support. But, like, why would you not... Why would a marketer's role not change in the same way that an engineer's role? Like, a software engineer's role now. Yep. If you look at the sub... We have, you know, nearly a 100 software engineers are a bit... In our company. They are not sitting there manually writing code. They are orchestrators. They have agents that are doing all the coding for marketers are gonna sit there and, like, write a blog post and, like, it it it is is unfathomable. That future is unfathomable to me. I don't see that future existing. So marketers are gonna work with agents to build great marketing. The the emphasis there is on the word great. Yeah. Not slop. No. Like like, lizard brain thinking is like, oh, I'm gonna use AI to do my marketing. Therefore, it will be slop. I'd say slop is a skill issue. Slop is a is a function of you not know... You not knowing how to use the tool that is AI. Yep. So, yeah, like, marketers are gonna use AI to build their marketing, and they're gonna do that inside of ProFound. [00:29:58] S1: Yeah. I I I don't know if you saw this GIF, but there is this... There is someone that watches a monkey trying to push, like, a nail. [00:30:07] S0: Yeah. [00:30:07] S1: You know? And Yeah. David Attenborough. Yeah. [00:30:09] S0: I know I know that meme. Yeah.
00:30:09 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:30:09] S0: I know I know that meme. Yeah. [00:30:10] S1: So, like, the the comparison, like, with someone actually now typing code. And I also saw recently, it was like DHH, David Heinemeier Hansen, and he had a talk at the opening in Austin for Ruby on Rails. Okay. So so he compares the the moment that we live right now with the advent of the camera. His grand grandfather was an artist, so only royalty... Only if you were, like, royalty, you could have, like, a painting of your family. But then the camera came, and everyone could have a painting, you know, of your family. Also, now, like, with with AI, like, why why would you type? Of course, it takes a couple of iterations to your point, like, not to have the slop, but you can get there with skill.
00:30:51 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:30:51] S0: Yeah. I think people need to understand, like, what we're talking about in respect to our products. Like, you need to have... Like, the first thing you do inside of ProFound is you build a... We we have a a feature called context manager. Yep. So it's like a dynamic marketing focused context manager, which acts as a cohesive layer across your entire marketing team and understands your brand tone of voice, your design systems, your do's and don'ts, governance, you know, everything that if you brought a new marketer into your team, you'd have to tell the person this. Right? So it's this layer of understanding, of comprehension. And then what they're doing as well is they're integrating, you know, external platforms, third parties, internal data systems, all together to, like, be able to build, you know, content at scale, basically. So it's like, it's not as simple as just like prompting. Like, you wanna build a marketing system with agents that can do the work. [00:31:45] S1: Yeah. And then, like, do you have, like, multiple agents that do some specific tasks?
00:31:45 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:31:45] S1: Yeah. And then, like, do you have, like, multiple agents that do some specific tasks? [00:31:48] S0: Yeah. That's right. So you'd have, like, you know, a CMO might have an agent that goes and compares visibility across every single, you know, every single competitor in your space and tells you what they've done over the last seven days and then gives you action points of things you can do. Like, we work with a large Japanese electronics brand who, like, updated. So what they found, the Japanese electronics brand, you all know them. What they found is their product display pages are being cited all the time by AI systems. So they built an agent that could dynamically update the PDPs Right. With new information as they were, like, decaying in value, basically. So as the page became less cited, it gets refreshed Right. Right. Autonomously. [00:32:34] S1: And and let's talk a little bit about, like, the last fundraising round because you raised, like, €100,000,000 series d. [00:32:41] S0: And $1.01 $80. I don't know. I've never done it in euros. [00:32:45] S1: Yeah. $180? Yeah. And and, someone told me, like, from your team that you raised that, like, on a walk, which for a European pounder, that is just unthinkable. You know, you think more like the private equity type of you create a gym, 40 pages, but you did it on a walk. Like, do you wanna tell us the story?
00:32:45 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:32:45] S1: Yeah. $180? Yeah. And and, someone told me, like, from your team that you raised that, like, on a walk, which for a European pounder, that is just unthinkable. You know, you think more like the private equity type of you create a gym, 40 pages, but you did it on a walk. Like, do you wanna tell us the story? [00:33:03] S0: Yeah. I mean, I was at Sequoia do... They do this event called Base Camp, where they invite lots of founders. They had some great speakers like Jensen Huang came, Sam Altman came, Ken Griffin from Citadel was there. So that's some really good content. And there was a break, quite a long break. And I was just walking with a NASA partner, you know, and we're talking about the business. And I was saying, like, you know, at some point, we're probably gonna think about going out and, like, building a deck and raising around. But, yeah, those guys have, like, seen the aggression and, like, how we've been building and the growth of the business. Like, our revenue numbers are exciting. And, yeah, he was like, we should, you know, let's let's do it. So we kinda did it off off market. Well, I've done the I've done the deck the deck dance before. That's a very different type of affair. [00:33:56] S1: Like, someone in the team also told me that that you preferred the cartoon style more than the Dex style. Like, do you wanna tell us about the cartoon style?