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Ventures from the Valley brings you inside the rooms where billion-dollar decisions get made. Hosted by R136 Ventures, each episode features candid conversations with the founders, operators, and investors shaping the future of technology; from AI infrastructure to global fintech to the companies redefining how we build.
Hello ladies and gentlemen, friends of R136 Ventures. Uh this is Victor Arloski and your podcast Ventures from the Valley. Uh I have an exciting founder and uh personal friend today. Uh Daniel Depold. Uh he's a late 20s already 3x founder with over $300 million in collective company value. He's Cambridge ML masters graduate an angel in over 60 invest startups since 2020. So quite like new to the uh angel's uh venture business. and he has already raised seven unicorns which is astonishing over 10% hit rate. I think it's like the best in the industry I have seen so far. Uh he has also um had his first TED talk at the age 20 and uh he describes himself as a math nerd. So um and he's a founder of EWR which we will speak about today. Daniel welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. Um, two quick corrections. I just turned uh 31 this year. Um, so I'm sadly no longer in my late 20ies and uh um what was the other one? Yeah, I did an MST in Cambridge and I believe there are people with with definitely better track record, right? And keep in mind I think unicorn hit rates is a the best metric in the end is your return, right? relatively speaking. um you it's it's easy to invest in uh in in companies at a 500 million valuation and then they go to unicorn but I'm quite happy that as a preede investor like I'm mostly coming true investing the return is also not I know about you but you're totally right I do so yeah so let's start let's kick in with questions um so um uh you do not identify yourself as an investor although I war is the investment firm It's uh like an incubator kind of incubator we will speak about. So if you are not an investor then who you are how would you describe yourself apart from that you are a computer n yeah they all intertwine right like so so we definitely do some things incubators do but I think we also do a lot of things incubators do not right um which is for example investing in teams that already have a million ARR right like that an incubator would not do this anymore and then we do some of the things an accelerator would do which is helping people raise a 20 million dollar round or you know helping people hire their first 10 founding team members but then we also do some of the things that VC does um and some of the things an angel investor does and it's just we we just try to build EVO from first principles um and therefore we don't like to be um put in any of these boxes and actually our philosophy at EVO is a little bit different to um to the philosophy most investors have and this is why I personally don't see myself as an investor but as a builder. I see my job as someone who needs to build a magnet, something so extraordinarily useful that the best people come to me in a world of the 1970s when you know the choir started and like Kleiner started and whatnot. Um, where these opportunities were a little bit more scattered and hard to find. Um, it it was incredibly important to just be a master at selection. I believe that today if you look at some of the founders we've backed at EVO, one of the examples is Martin Vasovski whom you know really well as well, right? The the challenge is not to understand whether Martin is is is a great founder. It's it's actually quite easy to see this founder. I mean it is easy to understand that he is a great founder. I would have a question to you later. uh how would you understand that this uh 22 years old uh uh dropout from the college uh is is a great founder with Martin Varowski I don't think there will be any question right exactly and I want to answer the the Eric Steinberger question in a second um but before that to quickly finish my point yeah what what we built at E was something so valuable that Martin says guys like I want to do this with you right And uh in in in this round uh we yeah I think it was a really good stake and uh I sent Martin a lot of talent right and I can do this because we've built infrastructure um that allows us uh to do in my opinion a 20 times better job than any ordinary recruiter right and uh that is relevant I also believe by now I I'm not sure about this and please don't quote me on this right this will be online, but from my subjective belief based on the research I've done, I think we're the out of all of the super early stage um initiatives that exist, the one that raises you most money, like last time last year it was $4 million on average for fellow. This year, I'm pretty sure it's going to be between 7 and 12 million. Like looking at first applications already on average. Yeah, like median probably average might be a a little bit more right even. We have just one founder. He joined us last year in June and now he raised on a 273 million post money valuation, not even a year after, right? So, and and he's obviously raised a couple dozen million. So, it's like he's still filling the rest of the round, but the lead investor term sheet is already signed. So, um we we're looking for people, you know, who do these breakout things very early and we also try to give them an unfair advantage they can't get anywhere else, right? That's why we only work with 35 founders and by the time speaking I'm on boarding two more people so that actually we're 10 people who've built 100 million plus company. Um, so you know, like you you're working with 10 people at Eore plus 15 others that I can explain in a sec what they do, but that that have built a company valued between hundred million and $10 billion, right? And the so it's three founders per 100 million plus founders at EVA, right? So we have a lot of time to give people a massive unfair advantage. And that's why I don't describe myself as an investor. I want to build something where the best people come to us um simply because it's objectively the most valuable and not subjectively just a cool thing and we seem to have a good brand. The value needs to be there and we're measuring this value and we translate them into OKRs and we drive our companies by means of pushing those OKRs on a weekly basis and run it like a venture and legally the money comes from the balance sheet. So we are legally a venture not a fund which is very interesting. So, uh, this this regarding your first question, regarding your second on, you know, Eric, um, I knew Eric, I think two or three years prior to him starting this company, right? And I've I've built a nonprofit that supported a lot of young founders and I've spent a lot of time with and and there's just a couple of people, you know, they're absolutely extraordinary. And this is another thing I believe in investing. Most interviews are to me the worst data retrieval technique out of pretty much any data retrieval technique that that is out there in order to evaluate whether someone is a good founder. Right? So in an interview you're biased, I'm biased. The the founder tells me exactly what I want to hear. um I tell the you know like the founder something they already think in terms of second and third order consequence and and it's it's just a massively biased you know like exercise and I just don't believe it's a great thing to evaluate whether someone is good on the other hand ref call calling or empirical data following a person for a couple of years is is a completely different thing right and like Eric didn't uh didn't ask me to invest he asked me to be his co-founder And uh I said this is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. And I evaluated this opportunity by means of investing my own time, not by means because money is abundant, right? It's so easy to put some money here and there like don't think about it. Yeah. Go ahead.
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Um just um I want to like a little bit like discipline myself. Um and it's like amazing to speak to you on so many various subjects but let's start with something what I didn't expect. So our mutual friend Baravski has decided to start his new venture and I hope you can say what the venture is with eore. So he's a famously known like repeated repeated founder who built multi-billion dollars companies already. So he does not need any incubation right. I mean he has a playbook already, right? he does not need to be trained. So, what does it what did attract him in particular with the war? How did he make a decision? And I'm sure that you didn't like stress test Martin, right? You didn't think like too much interviewing him or whether you need to get Martin on board or not like with his new venture. So, what was his view? Why he decided that I war is a right um change to his playbook? because to the best of my knowledge he has never been to any kind of uh well incubation program uh before right so what was his mind why he has chosen yeah be because we are not an incubation program right like as I said earlier we neither incubation nor a program like we evore we run a fellowship and uh it's obviously a massive honor um to have Martin as a fellow um he is the most successful fellow we ever accepted did um no doubt and probably it was more an exercise of him accepting us rather than us accepting him. Right? So what what do we do at EVO? There's three things that every founder needs. Money, talent, distribution, right? And what we do is we build infrastructure like a talent community, a customer community, an investor community that allows people to realize amounts of serendipity with those communities that um you know are typically impossible for others to do. Um so when Martin WhatsApped me that he's building a new thing, I got really excited and I just wanted to help out, right? So I I used the tech we've built to identify right people and I just kept sending him talent um his way right and he he got intrigued and at one point obviously he he always told me and he I think he thinks of us more as like an a super angel than anything else right like that's literally what he told me he said Daniel like an angel needs to do two things like they need to be clever and they need to be helpful right and those are the two things we want to be at Eore we want to be clever and we want to helpful and we we have zero ego. We have not a fixed program. We don't run a program. We we basically just built this infrastructure that allows people like Martin to build these incredible company. Martin is not the first unicorn founder who started with Eore. Like Ricky Nox before who's built Tan Bank, which is worth over a billion and had a couple other like, you know, nine figure exits. He's also um with Eore, right? And the the reason he's working with us is for this for the very same things. Right? So what we think about it was just every year we reinvent what the fellowship is. Every year we say okay build measure learn build measure learn. Last year Martin would have never gone with us and we ask ourselves why. We've lost some great people that we made offers to. And then we say okay why did they not do it? Okay understood. Let's try to build the reason of why they would do it. And to me it was one of the biggest highlights this year when Martin said yes because I was like yes we're building the right stuff it's useful and that just made me really happy. Amazing. Amazing. So ch you are like challenging yourself always uh to uh get like the best of the best out of this builder world. So let's go to this other end of the spectrum. So um you have a whatever 22 years old dropout and u I know a few people who are applying now to your work whom I referred to you and uh I know the process a bit because I'm like um helping them uh with like advising them and these are nice folks. Uh so some of them already had like five interviews and uh waiting for the sixth one I think. So um let's start personally with you. So while evating a founder so how do you like reconcile like quantitive signals with your like gut feeling uh instinct uh so and you are always thinking about non-normal founder right I mean what is non-normality for yourself especially yeah yeah yeah it's very hard to define right and I think non-normal means something else depending on what you try to build right if you To me, founder selection is more like multi-dimensional cluster analysis. So when someone builds a social media network or a SAS platform or a logistics platform or an AI lab, those are four completely different things. And the kind of not normal you want for those four different things varies, right? It's like the there is no single perfect founder persona. I'm pretty sure that Mark Zuckerberg is not made for certain business models. um he's pretty much an absolute killer in the business model he's chosen and maybe some other adjacent one as well right but I would argue that there's some other kind of businesses like building a an e-commerce business for example I think you wouldn't have enjoyed that and I think like that that would have not turned into the same outcome right so this is this is how I look at at at non-normality I first try to define of like oh what what are they trying to do and then I try to work backward wards from there, right? And say, okay, like what are the key of unique advantages you really need to be outstanding there, right? Because you need to be somewhat unreasonable. I don't know if you know that Bernard Shaw quote that says, you know, like it's only the unreasonable man that can lead to progress, right? And the the reason for that is if you just do what is reasonable, nothing will ever change, right? Like the only way to do it is to you do what others would never expect you to do. And all of these big companies like Facebook, Google, they were so obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious in the beginning, right? Like you you needed to look really really deep and just believe in people doing crazy things. So the way we work at EVO is the following. We have a clear thesis of where the world goes. And that thesis entails on the future of SAS, the future of AI labs. Um, and we write this down and we deeply think about it logically and then when we work with someone they either need to convince us that our thesis is wrong and if they can convince us which the you know the Google founders I'm sure would have done that or Mark Zuckerberg then then we're like yeah we've learned something new nice let's like let's update the thesis and back those people but they need to convince us and the second part is we convince them that what they're trying to do is not that clever based on the thesis and then they work on something that's going to work out and then it's going to work out too. But either it's us convincing them or them convincing us, right? And that is how we find those non-normal kind of things. It's a it it's it's the best way we came up with, right? Like I'm not saying it's perfect and it's like the best thing out there, but it's it's the best thing we could come up with at evil. So just a challenging question to you. Uh so imagine there is like an amazing person I don't know uh like extraordinary in math extraordinary in science and extraordinary character and you like your gut feeling is saying oh my gosh I never seen such a man or such a woman right I mean it's just amazing what this person is all about and then he start like he starts pitching you he starts pitching you and then you recognize that thesises are wrong right that I mean this is like wow person doing something not uh something what you would not put into your thesis would you put money into this person we would we would but it depends on whether they're open to ideulating with us because we recognize that thesis and ideas incredibly important however it is not at the stage we're investing in it's all about the founder Right? Like many of the big companies, Slack and so on have pivoted and we are investing at a time where you can still do that. If you're series A investor, that strategy doesn't work and you shouldn't back founders just for the sake of them being great founders. But if you're doing what we do, we sometimes come in, people don't even have the idea yet, nor do they have a team and we're like, here's half a million dollars, let's do something, right? And even Yeah. Like that's totally fine, right? like and we have other people that do 100 million sorry a millionaire AR like we didn't do 100 million but we would do a million and we're like hey this is cool too we believe this will work let's do it we just acknowledge that the further you are ahead the harder it is to change um and secondly um we see it as our job to make sure that the eventual outcome is great and since we're not an ordinary investor we have the time to work with people for so long until there is something great in order to succeed I believe there's a shortage of good ideas and not a shortage of good founders. I don't know when it changed, but I think somewhere between the la like in the last five to 10 years or so probably we we have too many great people going into venture right now because of the abundance of capital and there's too little trillion dollar ideas that really are in these massive markets that are absolutely gamechanging. So we see it as our job to not only find those capable people of which there is an abundance but also give them the trillion dollar opportunities by means of us understanding what they are right and at this point talking I would say I would say we have a better understanding than many but we definitely don't have the best understanding and if we would talk again in a year my goal is that we in the top three globally in terms of like this understanding of what can make it right because that is an incredibly tough exercise, but it it works. Like I always see that it works when you look at Sequoia, right? Like they their seed fund is 200 million. Like their share of seeds, I don't know what it is. I I would guess below 1%. In terms of capital invested, but then their share of like their share of wallet for for billion dollar companies is 10%. And then for NASDAQ, 50 billion is is 30%. This is extraordinary. So they're definitely managing to either create these self-fulfilling prophecies or to select for them and my gut feeling is they're doing somewhat of both. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. I mean speaking about SEO I believe I mean uh for me like I'm also in venture I mean also like trying to compete and building up my own stuff uh in R136. Uh so obviously uh winning uh is a big thing right and sourcing sourcing and winning of five pillars right uh so um important to be like the first one right the first one uh whom the founder is coming to right I mean if you're the first one in in in the funnel right then you select and then if you I mean obviously you may select like you may have like uh false negative false positive as well right so you may not select something what is outstanding but if you're smart enough you always like uh bet on something good right so uh from that perspective so how you built your own kind of uh u sourcing and winning strategy I mean you are relatively small right squir is 35 what sorry 50 years 50 years business right every founder knows what is right and obviously it's a natural choice so if you are an ambitious founder you will first knock for and then if says no, you go then and choose someone else. So how do you solve this this issue? I mean how how do you hunt for those who have no clue of what your war is? And frankly like I learned about your word like a year ago and by the way I was like amazed like when I was to your virtual event uh I just uh saw like 400 names like venture capital firms who were listening to the pitches. It's it was more than um um I believe more than uh y combinator and u you gathered this crowd. So that's another question how you gather this crowd but let's switch to how you win how you make sure that founder in Philippines who uh like is a magic 001% of population uh talent uh knows about the war what you do for that yeah I have a very boring answer I'm afraid the answer is we hustle a lot you know like my magic power is not that I've been a mathematician my my superpowers. I've been a housekeeper for half a year and I've made beds and cleaned mirrors and cleaned toilets 10 hours a day, six days a week and I'm not afraid from just hustling every single day and doing repetitive boring stuff, right? And our answer to sourcing is let's do everything. Let's look at every single channel available. SEO, content marketing, social media, LinkedIn X, communitydriven marketing, referral, word of mouth, meta platforming, and do it all. Every single channel that is a let's do it all and let's do our best, right? And uh and that requires a lot of resources and I think we are incredibly effective as a small team. We we are 25 people um so we are quite a lot, right? of those 25 people with the two hires I'm making right now, 10 of them have built 100 million plus company, right? Like these people are full-time. Like a a founder who has built a company as valuable and is full-time can probably do the work of five people. So I would literally say like the way people work and that's why in three years we've gotten to 40,000 applicants and we're expecting a 100,000 this year because we do everything we can and we just put in the leg work, right? And if that means doing two LinkedIn posts a a week and then on top of this reminding people for nominations like once a day and and and whatn not we need to do that is just leg work. We do it. We We hustle like the founders, we invest in hustle. And I believe a lot of them appreciate it. Like we're always there like whether it's 4:00 a.m. in the morning or like whichever time it is always reachable and always ready to support um because we are founders ourselves and we are building EVO as a company alongside the founders that are building their companies. We track OKRs, we use AI, we automate and we can share experiences with them. We co-built and we don't do governance. We don't take boards like we if you've seen the names at the grand pitch. You've seen that there and founders fund. They're all there. If these guys take a board, what do we have to add? They know their [ __ ] right? Like we are more like the co-founder in the beginning and that is my part on we we're not Sequoia and we will never be and we'd be stupid if we were to compete with Sequoia because we the co-founder in the beginning, right? And like all we want to do is to be like as useful of a co-founder as we could be. And we don't do that by being full-time with those ventures. We do that by building out this founder infrastructure, money, talent, distribution. Because that's what a co-founder would do. They would hire. They would bring in the next customers and they would fundra. And if we can shorten these timelines and amplify the results just as meaningful as a co-founder can then we have we have a seat on the table and even a Martin says I want to have you as part of this right. Um no matter how competitive the round is and and that is really our job at EVO and that is how we do it. Um so that answers the first part of your question. You have to remind me about the second part. I kind of forgot monologizing. Well no worries no worries. So the second uh part was the other end of the story. Uh so uh how do you same answer? Okay. Same answer. Do everything. Do everything. Okay. I I sat down prior to the grand pitch 3 days fully blocked and you plus everyone else. I sent a personalized message. Yes. No AI. I got it. No like chat GPT or Clude 4.6 OPUS. Um no mass mailing. I just sit down and I write something so that that you see, hey, I care because I do care. Like, Evo is probably going to be the most extraordinary thing I'll ever build. I I I care so much about EVO. And other people need to feel this. And they won't feel it if I if if the actions I take symbolize that I don't care. So, I just sit down and do the hard work. And most successful founders, they don't do it anymore. They have an assistant doing it. And I do it personally because that's that's my job. I I need to make these founders I invest in successful. And therefore, you need to be there. You need to you need to be there. And without you, it's not the same thing, right? And if I don't message you personally, you won't because you you're like, okay, like Daniel doesn't care, so I don't care. Right? So this is same answer in the end. So um uh I believe that we come to the very important topic on how you built and sustain this uh amazing team. So you mentioned that almost 40% of war full-time people have personally built companies worth of 100 million or more like from 100 million to 10 billion. So uh uh obviously um uh I mean this community is growing. I mean it has to grow right because uh you have more and more startups and you have to be very personal like onetoone with those startups. So uh first question and that let me start and then uh pose on that uh is how do you how do you u convince people to come and serve full-time and these people have plenty of interests and may do a lot on their own. So why they join a war instead of maybe building their own stuff? So what's the reason for that? And what's the kind of what's the pitch? Give me a pitch. Yeah. So yeah, why? And then maybe the pitch after. Um so there there's this guy and I learned I wasn't the first one. I I think the first one who actually came around with this I wasn't aware of him. I just got recently introduced to him as Sten from Plura Platform and he he has this article saying that he hires the unhirable, right? And that's that's what we do to I I thought it was my idea. Turns out it was idea before I had it. And we we both seem to have had that idea independently though. But I later on in time and that idea is first of all there's nothing more fulfilling like once you've built an incredible company to work with people who change the world and come up with underwater flywheels and nuclear test reactors and like the most transformative tech on the planet and and give something back to them, right? And say, "Hey, like I can shorten your timeline to unicorn by two, three, four years." This is this is deeply fulfilling, right? And that's the other part at EVO. We have insane trust among each other and we we have really a low ego. Typically with those organizations, you have a bunch of alphas running around. They all want to have a say of how things work. And we at EVO, we have an incredible harmony. So we we just deeply deeply respect each other and we spend a lot of time with each other before we actually on board people like to date it never happened that I met a person and within the next three months they joined the war. It's typically a year, two, three, four years or so of us working together after which we then decide okay let's let's do something here right and then secondly what's the pitch the pitch is a the pitch is the return right like what what we do in the ew core right now is uh the the last the last time I've seen it it might have changed now because like and we we do counts and saves right so if you do count clas and saves in in valuation boost right now with an 195% irr. So the return is is incredibly good. Um and this of course also includes when we right now we are incubating a a large mathematical model and that is a proper incubation right like we had the idea we look for the team and then we also take extra shares right and that gets put into the return um and that in the end all together really makes a makes a massive difference but what we want to do with you is we want to create a trillion dollar company that sounds incredibly weird right I know how ridiculous this sounds but I No, we have a shop. You mean you mean I war has to become a $1 trillion company, right? Not that what you what you just find and raise like a company which is one trillion but yourself. No, no, no. like we ourselves and uh and Burkshshire Heatherway made it to a trillion and we believe that there will be a new kind of Burkshai Heatherway in the future and we believe we can you know like we can build something like this and this is not a a story that appeals to any of the founders we back but it it really appeals to someone joining us full-time and I honestly believe we have a shot at it as wild as it sounds we have a plan and we are calculating with average you know like unicorn decaacorn centicorn trillion dollar rates in the market empirical data. Um, it's a it's a 30 40 year vision. It will it will not happen tomorrow. It will not happen in 10 years. But it is possible. And by then there will be plenty of trillion dollar companies. By by then there will probably be 70 80 or so of this, right? So we will not we will yeah like I think it's a it's a good extrapolation um mathematically speaking. So by that time but we want to be one of the 100 most valuable companies globally. That's a I think and I think that is attainable um with the strategy we've got and I think that intrigues people who've built a 10 billion dollar company, right? Um and the more you've worked with us, I think the the stronger the the belief gets and uh I can't sadly go into all of the details of how we do it and what our plan is here. But uh we've got a good plan, a plan at least intriguing enough for top people to say, "Yes, I commit to doing this for the rest of my life full-time." You you answered the second question I had pitch. You already pitched me, Victor. Let's go and build a $1 trillion company. That's a pitch. Okay, let's try, right? Like I I wouldn't ever tell anyone, oh, it's guaranteed. We're for sure going to end like this is nothing is guaranteed in this world. Exactly. Exactly. But I believe you have a shot. Yeah. And if you want to do that with me, join. Thank you, sir. Thank you. So I I'm not sure if I deserve that yet, but I will uh definitely one day will will hope to like be like think of myself. Yeah, I'm I'm there to to apply for your fellowship. Thank you. So uh yeah, it is difficult. Uh so my ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch challenge here is that um I mean people say that you can build like $1 billion company now being like one person uh and uh a friend of mine built uh base 44 uh a former founder of uh company we backed uh uh and uh I mean it was like three men's show and he sold this company for like whatever like $80 million. So I mean now it's possible right but not in your business. So you are war is a people a business of people right so and it's extremely difficult to scale yeah so um are you afraid of like losing the quality at scale because that's what is usually happening with businesses that uh scale on people because I mean at the end of the day you could not hire anymore uh like you have now a few hundred uh amazing people but uh 200 and first will not be as amazing as the first 100 Right. Just because you run out of amazing people, I mean that is easily imaginable. So what do you think of that? I mean Yeah. Yeah. So so we believe we can be around 25 people uh going to a billion and we believe we can be less than 30 going to 10 billion. And from there on it gets a little bit vague and hard to plan, right? And I don't like to plan too much into the future. I'm a mathematician with appreciation for case theory and high sensitivity to initial conditions, right? So um but we have reason to believe that we can do it with very few people and the the the way of scale we have chosen is not to to to go like and and fund a thousand founders a year like this is it's not possible with this strategy right but the the funny thing about venture is it is extraordinarily heavy tailed extraordinarily right if you look at the distribution of wealth globally in terms of people is already heavy tailed if you look at the distribution of company value it's massively more heavy tailed right like the height of the tails is is just incredible right so if you are there are seven companies in Fortune 500 which is like half of Fortune 500 right S&P 500 exactly I mean works yeah yeah and the the big question here is what is your level of prediction right like how how well can you actually find those right and to me looking at Sequoia having 33% of NASDAQ it gives me a lot of hope and it makes me believe that by building the biggest magnet on the planet of saying we objectively speaking we built the best value prop a value prop so incredibly high that no matter if you're going to build a oneperson unicorn you're going to do it with us not because of the money no one needs money anymore right like because of the talent money distribution equation and the personal development and whatn not in the network and like all the other things and and God knows what else we can do right like in in in a year or two as I said earlier every year we reinvent the fellowship. So if we build something so extraordinarily valuable that everyone just comes to us no matter whether they actually want a raise or not like not for the money but just because they they want us on board like a an institutional co-founder then it would work whether we're able in achieving that I can't tell you I'm I I'm trying every day but that's our thesis right so we don't want to we don't want to scale to a thousand founders we probably always going to stick to 30 to 50 a Okay. Okay. Okay. So, you can still make it with like relatively small team. That's that's that's good. That's my goal. That's my goal. Yeah. It's it's never certain as you know, but given all of the automation and AI, right? Like I I I really do believe so. I've just sent out a a a kind of case study to my founders associate and and the last couple of times when I hired new founders associates, they they always like asked about the process even though I had it somewhere in the email, right? And this time I thought h let me create a quick graph and and put it online, right? And it took me 3 minutes to uh prompt a good graph with clude code um in HTML, right? And uh and it's a beautiful graph. even animated and like it it like has grayed out the other areas and says you are here in the process and these are the next ones and it's hyper visual and it looks very beautiful and easy and simple to understand and then putting it on cloudflare on our files files.e.com evo.com was another 10 seconds, one more prompt and bam, it's up there and I have it ready. Right? So, so doing this these days and that's just uploading a graph and communicating, right? Like is is just so incredibly easy and I just believe that a lot of the stuff we do for founders for example rebranding previously you had to work with an agency and you had to put in leg work and so on. Now our CMO, incredible person. He built My Musli, which was like the number one food brand in Germany for like five consecutive years. They outranked Milka and he scaled it to close to a thousand people, right? And then he sold the brand um to Katias and then he um built a deep tech company and he's just probably I don't know if there's a better person in branding in Europe than him. Like to me personally, subjectively, he's the best. and he can just do a full rebranding with a fellow in 30 minutes and that you know like that that's he can do that with all of our fellows that we accept in the year just him he couldn't do that last year but now he can and he can design all of the graphs with nano banana and I think in next year he can probably do it in 10 minutes right so I really don't believe we need to scale in people we need to scale in quality and I really hope that maybe in a year or two We will even have on board like a Centon founder or someone like who's like literally built something extraordinary and and just works with those founders powered by AI helping them to build trillion dollar companies at one point. That would be my dream. Yeah. Yeah. I just just drafted a post uh yesterday uh not yet there but it will some come come soon. Um uh imagining like uh I mean this world with robotics uh and uh like all full of AI agents and people say that there is nothing to do and they will lose jobs and I just counted like on like so many uh fantastic uh topics which has barely been uh explored like uh uh physics and math like energy uh human brain longevity I mean everything what you think of like is the right thing to work upon is unsolved yet, right? And we are barely scratching the surface of this unknowns and people say that they will they will lose a job and they will have nothing to do. I mean that's that looks weird when you have so many things which yet not being managed properly and u yeah and uh well if you think like uh what you do now like posting like accounting records is the only thing you can do just uh change your mind and start exploring uh the world of physics or the world of neuroscience and you will uh discover something really amazing there and probably will change your life and life of others but yeah that that's Exactly to your point. Um look uh I wanted also to b bounce on you uh from like technical insights. Uh you are uh absolutely great mind uh and uh you are um deep in research and email uh and AI. So uh what would you think of like current AI stage? Uh like what is a real disruption uh versus what is uh uh not not so and uh like uh not from investment perspectives but from real world applications what do you think will uh come true and what is fake or we should not expect it in the near near term? Yeah. Yeah. Great question. Um I mean there's a if you look at the value chain of AI right we we we could start as early with like ultraviolet lithography what like ASML does right and then move ourselves to like uh TSMC and then Nvidia and then like the foundation models and the hyperscalers and like the the then the the kind of application layers like cursor and so on, right? And then we can classify them into um kind of vertical re rappers and horizontal rappers and so on, right? Like if you look at that value chain, I believe every single part will eventually be disrupted. Someone is going to come up with a better like thing than like ultraviolet lithography. I just don't know when and I don't find it incredibly plausible that it will happen next year. And secondly, it's it's going to be one company, right? like and there's going to be a new standout company then doing this and and and that's that right but uh then if you look at the um the same thing probably for TSMC and Nvidia there might be one more maybe two more that make it to like something similar and uh I personally just don't believe in my ability to like figure out how exactly that works and like the the deep you know like quantum physics probably behind this and but then when it comes to something more predictable that I can actually say something useful about is the foundation model part and the application layer part. Right? First of all, LLMs are wildly inefficient. If you want to calculate what 2 plus two is like using 175 trillion parameters is like is a a little bit wild and uh you know like and at the same time the way they work the way AI works in general I do AI now since 12 years right and and training an AI like a neural net on a million pictures of a cat in order to understand what a cat is is not how the human brain works right like the like answering 2 plus 2= 4 takes an LM around 0.4 four watt and uh watts, right? And then uh the human brain runs on 20 watts in total, right? So this is like this is just ridiculously far apart. So I think we will see more and more efficient foundation models and we we will see disruption there. Something I'm incubating myself right now is to just look at the on how pure math functions. It has a different structure than linguistically um a sentence and the way you define what a token is, the way you define how to structure the tensor, the way you build the prediction algorithm, um which function you use, right? Which distribution assumptions you make, all of these things like every single assumptions of how an LLM is built today can be rethought and done more efficiently in math, right? And there's some cool ones um out there like axiom math or harmonic or um more flaps right like they do incredible stuff but there's so much more to be done in pure math LLMs right there is there are LLMs for robotic movement roa AI is an incredible example of this so I I think there will be more of these foundation models built for specific cases like robotic movement specifically I also believe there will be disruption in in the existing ones. There will be a much more efficient open AI at one point and I don't think it's open AAI building it themselves the way they currently run. And uh one of the things I'm looking at right now is a completely new signal processing approach that is actually so much more efficient in doing like what Open AI does right now. And I find that I find it plausible that that thing disrupts entire AI. I you know like I don't know if it's actually going to do that and the the likelihood is by by far lower than 50% but it might right and like there will be these kind of disruption stories all on the foundation side that I find incredible and then on the application layer side it's actually really straightforward if you ask me there are a couple of companies let's look at Salando selling clothes or like Sapos in the US right that actually benefit a lot from AI they can do more efficient matchmaking the the way their back end is structured actually benefits quite a lot from AI. But then there are certain SAS companies and ERPs and whatnot that the way their system is built almost I can almost certainly tell you for some of those business models that they will be disrupted by an AI native company. So literally they will buy or they will they will buy massively right that's another way of uh approaching it. They they will try to, but I'm I'm much more I'm more pessimistic about like the whole acquisition story because in an AI first world where capital is completely abandoned like you you'd have to be stupid to sell that early, right? Like if you're really really aggressive um a highly ambitious founder, right? So I think these guys will will struggle and they will do all of the things in the playbook to prevent you from like succeeding right by owning the distribution and whatnot. But I I think most of them will be disrupted by AI native players. One one of my friend uh one of my friends who is also a former like long ago uh employee one of the early employees of at Oracle like beginning of 90s and he's an old man now. Wow. He's and he's repeated founder. uh he jokes saying that the universe will pull uh down faster than Oracle will lose its market share. So
I think there's definitely there's definitely they do and I think there's definitely some business models that I would not bet against. Right? I'm just saying there's a subset of certain SAS kind of companies that are valued between a billion and 100 billion and for those I'm highly certain they will be disrupted. I'm not saying it's all of them and uh not like Microsoft for example also is not on the on this list right like there's a couple of like global platform players with very unique positions and like value chains um and distribution power as you say that will very likely not be entirely disrupted right so Oracle also wouldn't be on my list and neither would be Google um but there are certain ones and uh for example Salesforce I'm not so sure to be honest and uh I I think Salesforce is going to have a harder time this is I this this is my personal opinion here like like a frontier now for AI anyway I mean this sales and marketing stuff. Look I have a last question uh to you and uh thank you for this amazing conversation and a lot of deep insights uh I personally always value this uh discussion because I learn a lot. So if you ask me why I'm doing it to grab an hour of your time and talk because otherwise it's too crowded, you are too busy. Uh I'm doing something as well. So it's like always good to deep dive. Um isn't isn't that sad, right? Like if you think about it, it's it's true, right? like and I think a lot in terms of usefulness, but sometimes I ask myself, Victor, how great would it be to sit at your place in Barcelona and just drink a beer together and how much fun would we have, right? And how much deeper might have the conversation been if I don't think about like, oh, what does the audience want to hear, right? Like, so sometimes I'm I'm a little bit regretful about about this development, but you're absolutely right. It's a great way to connect, right? Um, but I just just wanted to point this out and I I would say productivity has a some sort of end to end, right? And I would love to see you in San Francisco or Barcelona or wherever for like a real personal conversation without anyone listening. We will we will soon see each other in Maui and we will definitely speak uh hopefully a lot. Yes. So one advice, a short uh advice to a young uh ambitious founder, what uh would it be? Um don't go to uni. Don't work for like big tech or big consultancy. It's the best time in the world to build. If you are looking for a positive outcome first of all in terms of fulfillment I think the freedom of entrepreneurship if you handle it well and study stoic literature uh can be one of the most beautiful things on earth and secondly financially I have a calculation online actually I call it the mathematics of venture of the probability of you trying over a 30 40 year career so if you're young and you have 40 years ahead of yourself and you are ready to keep trying, the chances of you having a breakout financial success that is bigger than any other career you could possibly have are close to 99%. You just need the stamina and the adaptability to do this. So if anyone I assume people who listen to this are interested in in building and venture, right? Like if if if you struggle to to say when should I start, the time is now. The earlier the better and it's mathematically provable that this is the optimal choice. Absolutely true. Can't agree more. So, uh this was Daniel uh co-founder at Eore, one of amazing founders who is now 31 uh and he has gone already through uh three successful startups and building a $1 trillion company which I'm sure is going to come true. Um thank you Daniel. And it was Victor Adlosski, Ventures from the Valley. Uh listen and uh subscribe to our um episodes and we will continue doing amazing uh stuff with people like Daniel. Thank you. Thank you, Victor. It was a pleasure. Really enjoyed the convo.