Demand Geniuses: Revenue-Driven B2B Marketing

Summary

In this episode, Tom Rudnai interviews Felix Danczak, exploring the transformative impact of AI on business and marketing. They discuss the impending AI revolution, the fragmentation of markets, and the evolution of buyer behavior. Felix emphasizes the need for businesses to adapt quickly to market signals and rethink their organizational structures to foster agility. The conversation also touches on the importance of cross-functional collaboration, dynamic budgeting, and the shift towards a generalist workforce in response to rapid changes in the business landscape.

Takeaways

  • AI is driving a new industrial revolution that will change business models.
  • Market fragmentation is making it harder to reach target audiences effectively.
  • Businesses must adapt quickly to changing market signals to stay competitive.
  • The traditional relationship between scale and efficiency is being disrupted by AI.
  • Cross-functional teams are essential for responding to market changes in real time.
  • Rethinking budgeting processes is crucial for adapting to market dynamics.
  • Leaders need to empower teams to make decisions at the edge of the organization.
  • The future workforce will require generalists who can think laterally and adapt to change.
  • Learning from failures is as important as celebrating successes in a fast-paced environment.
  • Understanding the impact of private equity on business is vital for future growth.

What is Demand Geniuses: Revenue-Driven B2B Marketing?

Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.

Tom Rudnai (00:01.55)
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. My guest today, I've known actually for about five years or so now at least. I know I'm probably still going to butcher his surname. Felix Dankzak. Dankzak. I get the same. In my school, I had everything from Rudini to Red Eye. So I feel your pain.

Felix Danczak (00:16.17)
Don't check. Yeah. Good enough. Good enough.

Felix Danczak (00:27.972)
the pain of having weird consonants in one's name.

Tom Rudnai (00:32.302)
Yeah, is yours Polish as well? Polish or? Okay, mine's East European as well, which the Brits struggling with. But anyway, so, yeah, as I say, I've worked with Felix now for five or six years. He most recently was the head of global marketing at Zuora. Before that, COO at Zephyr, where he was stupid enough to hire me. So this is probably gonna be the most that I've ever dismantled the credibility of a guest at the start of a podcast before.

Felix Danczak (00:34.108)
Yeah, mine's Polish. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, There you are.

Tom Rudnai (00:59.886)
and then currently kind of enjoying enjoying a well-earned sabbatical or break. What are you feeling that with Felix?

Felix Danczak (01:09.802)
I've been filling it with working really. I mean, I can't help myself. I've been doing a little bit of gardening on a true to form of gardening leave, I suppose. But predominantly, I've been thinking about how businesses grow in the next age. think, yeah, I took over the marketing organization at Zuora just over a year ago now, well, over a year ago, but just as GPT-3 was...

of jumping onto the scene really, which already sounds horribly dated. And I see there is another industrial revolution coming. And I think that sounds really preppy, sounds scary, but I really do believe it. I think there's something that's about to fundamentally shift in the way businesses are going to have to operate. I like the invention of the seed drill, changed the agrarian economies forever.

Tom Rudnai (01:39.779)
Yeah.

Felix Danczak (02:02.026)
We are still living through the repercussions of that first industrial revolution. I think we're about to see another one. I've been thinking quite hard about what that means for businesses. The rules of economics aren't going to change. Supply and demand are still in balance and so on. But how do we grow? How do we change? Just in the last three months while I've been off, we've seen everything from deep seat to manus AI. I know if you've played around with it. That pace of change is getting faster and faster.

silly to say, fast change, but it's borderline scary how fast we are moving compared to five years ago. And I think it's going to really change a lot. So I've been thinking, I've been doing a lot of thinking. It's a long way of answering that.

Tom Rudnai (02:43.736)
Somehow I knew you weren't gonna say yoga.

Felix Danczak (02:48.265)
Yeah, no, I've tried being flexible. It's not for me. Um, yeah, that's not quite my style. But yeah, you're right. We have nature for a long time. I think yeah, I think I was wondering before this podcast how I would reflect on that. I think you were like one of the one of the earliest highs we made actually, I think probably one of the fine if I say one of the finest tires we made, I'm proud of that. I'm proud of I hired you. No, not at all. No, but you can thank me later. All the same.

Tom Rudnai (02:51.191)
You

Tom Rudnai (03:09.535)
I didn't pay him for that everyone. That was a cut.

Tom Rudnai (03:16.494)
Bye bye.

Felix Danczak (03:17.489)
Yeah, and we saw all the way through Zephyr and into Z'Worah and now into Demar Genius for yourself, which is fantastic. So yeah, a lot of thinking and a lot of worrying. I think we are prepared for what's next.

Tom Rudnai (03:28.941)
Yeah.

I think people tend to fall into two camps that I see, right? Or somewhere in between, or I think on one day, either, right? You're either worried by it and scared by the change, or you're really excited by it. I know for me, that depends a lot on my mood, right? Because it is a big shift that's happening. And I think it's very human to be scared of that, even if you're the most kind of growth mindset, positive person that you can be.

Felix Danczak (03:57.905)
Yeah, I think that's true. And I certainly have days when I'm positive about it. And I think although I think I have more days when I feel slightly negative about it. But I think that's just, as you say, that's ultimately a human reaction to we're not particularly great at change, the pattern matching in our brains doesn't want change, because then we can't match it to patterns. And that's how we're built. But I do think there's something about this change that's taking place, which for me is particularly

are to handle as someone who I consider myself relatively good at handling change. I mean, I've worked in startups for over a decade now and we've seen everything from the year 2000 to 2025 that really dates me. And we've seen a lot of I remember the dial up mode, I don't even know if you know what that sounds like, but I remember that just about right.

Tom Rudnai (04:46.338)
I just did not do. I remember being on the internet and my sister shouting that she wanted to use the phone and so I had to get off.

Felix Danczak (04:53.128)
Right. think how far back that makes us sound, and actually it was only 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago now. But there's something about the change that's happening now, about how fast it's happening, that makes it very hard to comprehend. It's hard almost just to keep up with a development, let alone think about how a development might impact me or impact my business or how I'm thinking. And I think there's something specific for me about, and I'll go back to where I...

Tom Rudnai (04:57.038)
Yeah.

Felix Danczak (05:21.128)
about the concept of a new industrial revolution. It's a fundamental, I think, paradigmatic or axiomatic shift in the basis for how we build businesses. So the first industrial revolution, I mean, there are dozens of industrial revolutions, depending on how niche you want to go. But I think really fundamentally one, which was the machine industrial revolution. We haven't really had to call it anything except the industrial revolution, which was that scale.

and efficiency are in somehow intrinsically linked. If you can get really good at doing one thing and you can do it really well, then you do it bigger and bigger and bigger, you'll make more and more money, you'll do it for cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, you'll be the best game in town and then off you go. That's why we had massive wool mills, right? You know, if you could do it with a seed drill, you were better than a farmer with a hoe. And that was, and it's been true all the way up to pretty much the day, that basic paradigm that scale and efficiency is why we had things like blitz scaling as a concept. Get really big.

Don't worry about how much money you spend because when you're big, you'll make all the money. If you're the only one left standing, you can't not make money. And inherent in that, the only one left standing was because you're the biggest and therefore you're the cheapest, you have the best efficiencies of scale. I efficiencies of scale. Those two things are indelibly linked in our language. And I think what we're seeing with the beginnings of, I'll call it the AI revolution rather than the industrial revolution, just to separate the two in our minds, is a

Perhaps a different paradigm where efficiency and scale of the business itself are not indelibly linked. That perhaps the businesses that will succeed, that can be the most efficient, will not be the ones with the most number of people or doing one thing hyper-specialized and getting so good at it that everyone else goes out of business. Because of the tool kit that, and I cautioned Word.ai, because it can mean a lot of things for different people.

but the broad scope of the AI toolkit allow us to do. You can now have companies with one developer that would have had have had 100 developers. You don't need a team of, I know this is my background here, but a team of marketeers with a content team and a brand marketing team and an event management team. I think we're very closely getting towards a scenario where you need a team of one or two marketeers with a bunch of agents underneath it. I mean, the simplest example is,

Felix Danczak (07:43.387)
which you know well is, you really need to write your own content anymore? Answer, probably not. mean, the new creative writing tool from GPT, from chat AI is open AI is already frankly better than most of the writing we all do anyway, especially with little tweaking and it's only going to get better. So I think there is something, the breaking of this relationship between scale of business and scale of success and efficiency is, and that's hard to get out of that because all of our...

knowledge, everything we know, everything we think, all the models, the mental models we use for building businesses are built around this kind of circle. a chief executive officer, make decisions, you have a hierarchy, have teams of teams of teams. And we don't, but I think that's going to change because it's not going to be faster. We could get into it, but maybe that's too much detail too early on, but I think there is something crucial changing and I don't know if

because it's a paradigmatic shift. It's not a faster typewriter. It's not doing something a little bit faster, a little bit better. It's actually a fundamental change in the way we think about business. And that's hard.

Tom Rudnai (08:53.89)
Yeah, it's hard, it's scary. I think we can get into it because one of the things that I want to understand for me today is like, as a business owner and then as a marketer, as a leader, as a marketer, how do you set yourself up to this change? So a lot of that is like, how do you structure your organization? I think it's super interesting though, that point about scale and efficiency no longer necessarily go together. I've been thinking a lot about.

It's felt for a long time like we in B2B go to market are obsessed with volume, right? Because there is a direct correlation between volume and success. We've built linear go to market processes that are all built around particular conversion rates. And if any conversion rate declines, volume can be the answer to solving that. But the problem is that only goes so far.

Felix Danczak (09:43.684)
think it only goes so far and it's going less and less far because of one of the kind of separate trends to the AI trend. There's the fragmenting of markets, right? I mean, they are, are, they are, although they are connected and we can get into that. But you're absolutely right. If you've got a problem with the number of leads you have or your pipeline, however you want to construe it, the easiest answer is we'll just have more of it. Even if conversion rates are worse, if you have more of it, that will be use more deals, right?

It's a simple scale problem. And that's okay as long as the market that you're going after is uncapped. But there's no such thing as uncapped. Not anymore, not really. as markets fragment, and we'll get to why they're fragmenting in a minute because these things are linked, but as markets fragment, the number of people in your SOM, your serviceable, obtainable market, is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

service accountants, I don't know. But actually, you're no longer just servicing accountants. You're servicing accountants in the UK. Okay, but you're not really servicing all the accounts in the UK. You're servicing accounts in the UK, in the mid-market, in independent firms, who have this specific problem. And the reason that's happening, because you've suddenly just gone from a town of, I don't know how many accountants there are globally. Somebody tell us the answer in the comments. But you've gone down to probably 10,000, even by just three drop downs.

And the reason that's happening is because it's getting easier and easier to build. And there's more money to do that. Is that the number of products available for each niche are expanding and expanding. And simultaneously, the ability of those people, those target markets to talk to each other and to do product discovery independent of your marketing is getting better and better and better. I mean, it's almost a fact the university acknowledged that SAC GPT and that it's ILG are killing.

Tom Rudnai (11:34.926)
Thank

Felix Danczak (11:43.011)
search. Because at the moment, if I want to know about a product, will, I won't Google it anymore. I don't know how long I know this sounds. This sounds silly. But how long will we say, just Google it? Will it be just well, just AI? Just just just? Yeah, talk to Sam, you know, like, you know, he's missed a trick that think asked cheese could have called that back. Yeah, exactly. But you know, what happened to that search engine? But as

Tom Rudnai (11:54.872)
Yeah. Talk to Sam Holman.

That shouldn't be, that shouldn't be the sort of, yeah.

Felix Danczak (12:12.484)
markets fragment and as more and more products sprout to fill those niches because of the models that we believe will drive success, then the number of people you can speak to effectively, efficiently, gets smaller and smaller and smaller. then for me, that's when the old models, the classic PLG model, or indeed the SL, like product led growth,

Tom Rudnai (12:32.046)
Hmm.

Felix Danczak (12:42.092)
or sales like growth models really begin to fall apart from a go-to-market perspective. Sales like growth fall apart because it's too expensive, they're both too expensive, but for different reasons. Sales like growth falls apart because it eats its own tail. Sales people, you work with me, you started in the SDR team, you have a certain cost. You cost 45, 50, 60 grand a year, and then as a salesperson, you cost me exponentially more, although you made us plenty of money as well, so I'm not complaining.

A good salesperson is going to set you back total cost of business $200,000 without breaking sweat and more in the enterprise space. And that means they have to generate $600,000 just for you to break even in terms of all the rest of your costs in the business. If you can only serve a very small market, are they really going to be able to do that? And so you have to raise your prices to meet that, which means you have a smaller niche, which means it's hard to do, which means the smaller niche. And I think it ends up eating its own tail. So sales growth has an inbuilt problem.

Tom Rudnai (13:39.47)
Hmm.

Felix Danczak (13:40.26)
in a world of micro fragmentation. At the same time, product-led growth doesn't have the money. Product-led growth is predicated on what we started with. That we'll just add more volume and you'll convert enough. Product-led growth is often free and minimal. It's certainly much cheaper entry level, like pay with a credit card. Risk 500 quid, not $500,000. But the real challenge is, but if you're still only speaking to 10,000 accountants,

And how do you reach those accounts? Because they're increasingly not looking for the search volume. But that search volume is increasingly congested anyway, because there's five other people who want to do it and they've got money, which means the ads are increasingly expensive. And ad costs have spiralled in the last 10 years. Neither of these two classic models for building companies.

really work anymore, at least as kind of intrinsic, well, you pick one and go for it. But then they don't just work in the same way that we're used to thinking about.

Tom Rudnai (14:38.99)
Mm.

Tom Rudnai (14:44.174)
Yeah, and I want to get into what replaces them then. let's go back a step. So we're kind of talking about markets fragmenting here. And I want to get more into why that's happening. guess, so I have a, kind of view AI, I need to do inverted commas there, because whenever you talk to someone who works in AI about AI as if it started in 2021, they lose their mind. But the kind of the way of generative AI is coming in two phases, right? So there was the first, which was used for generic messaging, right?

What it essentially enabled people who don't understand go to market marketing sales to go and do to a fairly low standard marketing and sales. And the result was that it just demolished all of our channels of communication. It became so saturated. And what we actually saw was a return to much more traditional forms of marketing brand community awareness, things like that.

I can see that potentially happening in the next phase because what we do is we enable lots of people to go and build kind of micro technologies, relatively low standard initially, but eventually we work out the kinks and it's just very specialized bits of technology. And I guess then what that, what you're kind of saying that does is it returns the product landscape rather than just the go to market landscape to a kind of a previous era a little bit where we're gone as a giant to

operate horizontally across lots of different use cases and lots of different types of businesses because you it's so easy to build technology that you cannot sustain that giant because you are so easily disrupted. Is that is that kind of what you're saying?

Felix Danczak (16:18.498)
Yeah, I think that's about right. So I think I'd maybe structure it in kind of four steps, right? For me, discovery is no longer centralized, right? So it used to be that people went to market to look for something. They would Google it or they would go to a trade show. But now they're looking on Slack groups, they're on Reddit threads, they're discords, there's newsletters, there's WhatsApp groups for CMOs, private WhatsApp groups that there's no way

that any ad will ever get into because they're a group on WhatsApp of 50 CMOs in the valley. Yeah, we'll get there eventually, I'm sure. Or the AI chat response, and it's worth bearing in mind that every time you speak to an AI chat, it's a different response. It's never carbon copy paste. So every single response anyone ever makes will be different, let alone all these different streams. That's a thousand different paths to the same outcome, which means fragmented attention.

Tom Rudnai (16:51.158)
I'm I'm sure, by the way.

Tom Rudnai (17:03.853)
Yeah.

Felix Danczak (17:15.798)
and increasingly a fragmented base of trust. You don't have one vendor that you trust or one newspaper or one industry magazine that you trust. There is now a thousand places that you go for validation or for support in picking your next product or service or whatever it is you're after. Coupled with that, expectations are hyper-specific. The personalization that we expect in our personal lives is bleeding into our professional lives as it should do. Like we don't...

I don't expect the tools to be perfect for my use case, not just for everybody who's in my space, but I work in B2B marketing for an enterprise SaaS brand. So I want the tool to do what I want it to do, not what someone else might mostly want it to do. So that creates demand at the edge, not demand in the middle. We're come back to that concept in the middle, and it's really important. Third, the internet killed

In some ways, the internet killed mass marketing because at same time, it kind of goes back to that first point where you're fragmented. You can't reach all of your buyers with one campaign. Many of the buyers will never go on to any campaign unless you're selling butter. And don't get me wrong, TV is still a great place to sell butter. It's a really good place to drive big brand engagement with mass consumer products. It's true because everyone's watching it. But only if you're selling a commoditized product.

Tom Rudnai (18:32.012)
your time as everyone.

Felix Danczak (18:39.745)
where people are going, oh, I need to buy some butter. Oh, I remember I saw that logo, I'll buy that butter. Or I mean, the best ad campaign in the world, DFS sofas. Everybody knows what DFS, in the UK at least, everybody knows what a DFS sofa is. We've all seen those adverts at some point. The fourth point though, being is that AI is coming along, taking this hyper-personalization, taking this hyper-fragmentation of trust and attention and accelerating that shift, because it's handling more and more of the discovery and the decision-making for me. So every buyer's journey

is now ultimately a unique algorithmic path, shaped by their inputs, their contexts, and then the AI algorithms interpreting both of them. No two buyers will see the same landscape anymore. And I use this language because it's really important from a marketing perspective because we talk about the buyer journey. And I'm like, okay, what's the buyer journey and how do we shape our content and so on around that? Well, it sucks because now there is no... You can't think of your target market as a herd.

and you're kind of trying to create a funnel associated to quote unquote, the buyer journey. You've even got a thousand prospects. They've all had a thousand fundamentally different buyer journeys and you can't optimize for all of them. It's incredibly hard. So I would say the simple way thinking about it is markets are fragmented because buyers are no longer behaving in clusters. They're no longer moving in, they're moving, they're no longer moving in herds, they're moving in streams.

Tom Rudnai (19:49.154)
Mm-hmm.

Felix Danczak (20:08.328)
And they're driven by signals that we have less and less control over. Roll back 10 years, I could control SEO, help, could kind of control whether or not I was high up in the search ranking organically. I could pay for the ads so I could make sure I was at the top of the funnel there. Like I could pay to make it be at the event. I could pay to be at the trade show. So on. More and more of that is happening in places that you can't, right at least today, we can't access in a paid way. You can only be done organically.

So you can't rely on a broad brush DTM. You can't pay for success, particularly in the way that PLG often achieved, right? Pay for success. Just make sure we're the number one search result and then I want to buy our tool, not their tool. You need to send now, as marketeers, we have to see the signals that are coming in organically and respond dynamically. And that's hard. have to two new things at once. We have to see something happening, but...

for every different buyer in every different way, and it's changing all the time. And then we need to respond in the way we're talking to them in real time. So that's, we were just kind of getting to grips with the first of those two. And now we've suddenly got to be able to optimize in real time as well. Otherwise we'll probably lose out to the other company, the other competitor.

Tom Rudnai (21:20.76)
Yeah.

Tom Rudnai (21:31.015)
Talk me through it. So when you talk about responding to the signals, what are the signals? What do you mean by a signal?

Felix Danczak (21:40.81)
So let's say I'm a fan of worked examples. So just pick one, but like you can apply this in a lot of different places. But I would say a market signal might be in a B2B context. Over the last month, we've suddenly seen, how many GOM calls would you say an organization is doing a day? Let's pick a random enterprise. They've got 10 salespeople. They're 15 calls a day each. That's 150 calls, bare minimum. It's just make it to the mass CV.

suddenly in those 150 calls, we're suddenly seeing a new competitor suddenly appear. And that new competitor, and at the same time, price, suddenly started being, it used to be the fourth thing people asked, and now it's the third. And five years ago, we wouldn't have even known that was happening, because we didn't really have these gone calls to listen to. But we also really, even if we did know, we probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Okay, prices got a bit more important.

But now that's, I think, that would be a really important market signal that over the course of one month, price got more important to two buyers. And that means you need to be able to react to that in the way you position. You need to be able to say to your, if it's an SLG approach, you need to be arming your salespeople with price objection handling faster, better. From a positioning perspective, you've got to immediately ask yourself, why is price suddenly more important? Is it a macro problem?

Or is it that one of my competitors has suddenly started trying to undercut us? Now, you don't know that always, right? But you might find it out because of the signal. That's what I mean by a market signal. need to be looking at... Let's say you've got three ads running on how easy you are to use as one, how cheap you are. I don't know why you have an ad for cheapness, but I've set an example. And one on your feature set.

Tom Rudnai (23:19.223)
Yeah.

Tom Rudnai (23:31.931)
This is not your commodity, you do what you do.

Felix Danczak (23:36.19)
and they will have roughly the same conversion and then suddenly one kind of does better. Well, you need to be able to respond to that immediately. Because it's probably, is it being, where is it coming from? We don't always know. You can't know. But suddenly that feature or that price, that price ad or that use of use ad is suddenly more important than it was a month ago. And you need to be to jump on it immediately because people are moving faster than they were before. That's what I mean by, by, by a, by a thing you need to send to the market.

Tom Rudnai (24:03.309)
Yeah. Well, think, but I think marketers are always trained. We've got so far away in life from marketing fundamentals that you're trained when you hear signal, I you think intent signal, right? It's a buyer raising their hand, whether deliberately or accidentally for your product. But I think one of the interesting things is, so there's a lot more people talking about now, the fact that you can, you can fall in and out of product market fit. And I think what you're saying is that process is going to be a 10.

Felix Danczak (24:27.847)
Uh-huh.

Tom Rudnai (24:30.51)
50 is gonna constantly grow the speed with which you will fall in and out of product market fit, right? Because new competitors are gonna sprout up. So that game of whack-a-mole that you play as a marketer is suddenly just getting so much more difficult and it probably shifts where the difficult part of marketing is because actually it's keeping up with that, not optimizing a final buyer journey, because that's just gonna happen.

Felix Danczak (24:53.726)
Yeah, I think so. But I think it's also recognizing that these are parts of a broader whole. And this is where it gets really hard because we're not really talking about marketers doing marketing or salespeople doing sales. It's actually an entirely different way of thinking about how your company is changing, growing, optimizing. I might do a worked example. So let's imagine over the past three weeks, the demo requests from the streams or from marketing, sorry.

demo requests from marketing teams, external, your prospect, have gone up by 25%. But some of those requests are talking about whether or not you can automate campaign handoffs from HubSpot. And you also know that a competitor has just launched a verticalized integration with HubSpot. And you're seeing LinkedIn chatter and Reddit threads asking for, hey, are there any alternatives to this competitor?

Tom Rudnai (25:38.722)
Mm-hmm.

Felix Danczak (25:52.957)
Bearing in mind, you also have to have a market sensing system to know those three things in the first place. And not all marketing teams are set up to be monitoring what's happening on LinkedIn and Reddit threads. So we've got to, that's almost step one or step zero. The old responses or the responses that companies tend to do today are go, well, you know, we're going to ignore that. Or we don't need to worry about that because that's not our core persona. We don't do market handoff. Like we don't automate campaign handoff. That's not what we do. We do something else.

Oh, that's competitive. Oh, yeah, we're better than that. It's so easy to do that. Or you've already got a campaign running around marketing operations. So we'll see whether this succeeds. Basically, fundamentally, you don't change anything. At best, I think what might happen is you take the need for integrating with HubSpot and you put it at the back of your product roadmap queue. We're like, yeah, we need to do that.

Yeah, we should get on that on. And you speak to the product team and they go, sure. And it goes on the queue. Right. And the queue, as you and I both know, in fact, anyone who works in the industry knows, like that queue is an endless queue. It goes on forever.

Tom Rudnai (26:52.312)
Yeah.

Tom Rudnai (27:00.174)
I think we spent about a year as effort arguing over the queue and why what I wanted should be right at the front of that queue.

Felix Danczak (27:06.903)
Right, exactly. this is not even a prospect demanding it. This is you're seeing some signals that some people coming in are asking about it. So it's right at the back. But in a new world, we have to see this as a live market signal. I would say, imagine this worked example, spin up a marketing specific landing page immediately and use case content immediately about automating HubSpot handoffs. Immediately.

We need to launch a lightweight version of that integration as quickly as possible, even if it doesn't work very well. Because if you don't have it, and they do, and people are asking about it, you're going to lose that business immediately. You can't say, well, it's on the roadmap, it'll be there next year. People aren't going to accept that anymore because of the fragmentation of demand. You have to have something available now.

Tom Rudnai (27:55.266)
the other thing is, I think it's going to be really difficult to recapture lost advantages, right? So as new use cases pop up, yeah, new use case pops up, the AI decides this is the best platform for it. I think it's going to be very difficult to go and disrupt that, right?

Felix Danczak (28:02.02)
Once it's gone, once it's gone, it's gone.

Felix Danczak (28:12.548)
Yeah, because once you're known by the algorithm, the algorithm as not good at HubSpot and off whatever it is, you're going be very hard to change that. And I think that's the difference. Yep.

Tom Rudnai (28:23.054)
change.

Tom Rudnai (28:27.118)
unless that's something they build into it, right? And it might be, I guess you could say it's gonna be within the interest of Sam Altman, we'll just make him the proxy for AI at this point, to give businesses some level of control over their online perception, because that's something they can sell. It's the same reason with SEO, it incentivized them to create a structure where people can control their online presence.

Felix Danczak (28:36.739)
Yeah, yeah.

Felix Danczak (28:51.981)
I would be, and I've thought about this a lot, it would make sense. You're like, great, we can fund our work. We can fund with advertising. Of course, great. We know everything about we, it's natural language. It will feel, it won't feel like an ad. It'll feel, you know, convivial and like the, you know, like the man is talking to me. But I have some issues with it. One is that not even open AI necessarily always understand the emergent properties of how the AI is responding. It's happening in real time. They can't slot in.

what they think and they know that the one thing that is going to kill my engagement with their tool is that it starts giving me answers that don't feel relevant to me. That's why I'm using it instead of Google, right? Is that I'm like, it's giving me an answer I can trust or it's giving me an answer that feels tailored to me. If I go into the chat and go, hey, me the top 10, give me the program management solutions best for an enterprise SaaS marketing team.

I have an expectation it's going to be relevant, specific to me. If someone out there has been able to pay to have their, like maybe monday.com is paid to have their name in there first, and it doesn't feel relevant, I'm immediately going to stop trusting the response I get. And that disrupts Sam. It disrupts OpenAI's primary monetization technique at the moment, which is a direct subscription for me. And opens them up to

all sorts of competitive threat. Fuck it, I'll use Claude instead. So, I don't know.

Tom Rudnai (30:21.71)
Yeah. Well, it's going to be really interesting because I think there's a fundamental difference between the model of an OpenAI and the model of Google, which is that OpenAI is doing the job of telling you which answer to listen to, which removes the opportunity to have a couple of sponsored ones at the top, but then there's less user choice. yeah, that makes sense.

Felix Danczak (30:43.172)
Yes.

That's why the bio journey becomes unique and thus very, very hard to manage. That's all the marketer is really trying to do ultimately is manage the bio journeys. But if you've got a thousand of them, you can't really do that. Or you have to respond in a very different way. So I think that's the challenge we're currently facing. And that's why I go right back up to where we started the conversation is it's quite a scary thought because it's...

Tom Rudnai (30:48.61)
Yeah.

Felix Danczak (31:14.522)
The levers that we are trying to control are levers that we don't really understand in a way that a faster typewriter, I wrote some content and then people can search for the content. However complicated it is, SEO is very easy to get your head around. Like, okay, I have more of the keywords that link to the thing and I have some backlinks to high rated source. Like I can understand it. It's not complicated.

but trying to work out what your content might need to look like for an AI to understand it in a contextually relevant way in order to hit some number of the people who are in your prospect list who are searching for something in their own chat, but who might be using entirely different language is really hard.

Tom Rudnai (31:58.84)
Yeah, and meanwhile, you also have massive changes in the internal politics of their organization. So your understanding of your buying committee and all of those things. First of they're getting wider, but then are they going to shrink? yeah, all of that is every variable is evolving at a pace that we can't.

Felix Danczak (32:14.798)
Right, meanwhile, the thing that's really, really scary is that while all this is happening, which is hard enough, the ability to maintain a competitive moat within your own product is eroding like sand in the sea, because you can now replicate features meaningfully from anyone, anywhere in days, not weeks. Like if you start playing around with the tools like Replete out there or Lottable and so on.

Like you don't need a team of devs working around the clock for two years to build an integration to HubSpot. That queue that you were talking about stops being a queue quite quickly if you can replicate things much faster. If you come out with a brand new feature that you're really pleased about that no one else in the market has, you used to be able to pretty much live off that for some time. That's the product life cycle. Innovate, cost you some money, and then you make profit out of the back end.

can't do that. All the window for maximizing value from competitive differentiation is getting tighter and tighter and tighter. We saw that as a war. I've seen it as Zephyr. I'm sure you're seeing it Demand Genius. I'm sure anyone listening to this is seeing it. We've come out with new feature and within a few weeks or within a couple of months, someone else has it too. It stops being a differentiating feature. So your ability to tell a positive story to demand capture gets harder.

Well, your ability to generate demand by having something new and shiny is getting harder. Your industry normalizes faster and your ability to tell the story you want to tell to the people you're trying to talk to gets harder.

Tom Rudnai (33:56.472)
So.

What I want to do now, I think we've spent the last 30 minutes probably walking every listener up to the edge of the cliff. And what I want to do now is we've got 15 minutes to try and them all back from the precipice. Cause I do also have the belief that this is very exciting time, particularly from a selfish perspective, early stage startup, I am so much better placed to adapt to all of these shifts and to move quickly and agile than a lot of the bigger incumbents that I'm going to bump into along the way. But also a lot of our listeners are going to be within

Felix Danczak (34:06.423)
as a bunch of cliffs.

Felix Danczak (34:25.591)
Yes.

Tom Rudnai (34:29.058)
almost certainly large organizations than Demand Genius and up to very very large companies. I think there's two things that I want to talk about. One is how you adapt to this because it's not, I don't think there's a tactic or a strategy that solves this, right? It's about how you set up to adapt to the rate of change from a pre-people, technology standpoint. But then also as an individual, how you set yourself up to do that. So let's get into each of them first.

Felix Danczak (34:46.208)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Felix Danczak (34:57.344)
Yeah, let's walk people back to the cliff because it's scary, right? But I also think if you're a small business, this is the most exciting time for 20 years to grow a business, in my opinion. I think it's the most dynamic moment in business for a generation. that sounds, again, that sounds equally ridiculous to say, but I do believe it. The first time in 20 years, I think the playing field is being re-leveled. And 20 years ago, it was re-leveled by

Tom Rudnai (35:01.197)
Yeah.

Tom Rudnai (35:09.762)
and

Felix Danczak (35:25.292)
by a huge injection of venture capital, basically. Suddenly it was like, we'll give people loads of money to build stuff and maybe they can challenge the incumbents who've been there forever. But this time it's being releveled not by capital, because we've already got the monoliths out there, the Googles, the Meta and so on who have more money than God, but by distribution, by adaptability, right? The old incumbents, and I include Google, Meta and Co in this group, are ultimately quite slow.

They've built businesses in the old industrial model, nice big hierarchies, they've got thousands and thousands of people. The playbooks that they're running are stale. They're still thinking about PLG or SLG as like the model, the go-to model. That's how I should think. And once I picked it, that's off I go. But I think if you, and they're not listening to the market as much because they're used to a market where they can essentially generate demand rather than have to capture what is moving really quickly. So if you can build a business,

that is listening to the market in real time and is moving at the speed of the market, you will, I think, outrun anybody, however big they are. Because you can't... It's no longer, at least right now, it's not pay to play for the first time in a while. You can't, like we said, you can't pay to be in an AI search, at least right now. So that means everyone's free, everyone's open, it's an open field. And that is so exciting. At the same time, the thing that's scary, has made it cheaper.

to test faster to build and easier to learn pretty much everything. You don't need a five-year plan. All you need is a five-day feedback loop. Build something on Replete, get it out there, see what happens, put an ad out there, see what happens, and within five days, you're going to get a reasonable signal back about whether or not you've...

you're on something in PMF terms or not. And I think if you can operate on that, five day plan, not the five year plan, you're going to thrive in this chaos, not struggle at it. So I think it's...

Tom Rudnai (37:31.704)
So if I'm a leader now, what do I need to do to get towards that? It's obviously not going to be one step, but how do I need to change my org structure? What processes need to come into place? What technologies can help me cough? Demand genius cough.

Felix Danczak (37:45.385)
Right. how long is it? How long we got? Let's start with the first principle is, and for me, this is about decision making at the edge. And now that can mean that does mean something different in technology. But I mean it in terms of who in your organization is making the decisions at the coldface that will impact the customer that will appear on the website that will, you know, that that will mean that you sell or you don't sell. And typically those things tend to

The more important they are, the more they have to be centralized. Most businesses, if you're going to make a big change to your price, it's going to go through some kind of pricing committee, or it's even going to go to the CEO, or it's going to go to the CFO, or whatever it is. Positioning the same. At Zora, I ran and owned positioning, and no one was going to damn change it unless I was part of that loop. That's going to have to change. Leaders today who are by and large used to

this model of like, I'm mostly in control. Even if I do distribute autonomy to my teams on a day-to-day level, big changes are mine to make, right? You don't just change the vision of a company without turning anybody. It goes without saying, except it's going to have to stop going without saying, right? We're going to have to start allowing our teams to make changes when they see something happening in the market. Giving the trust, it's a...

We always talk about leaders often talk about, know, I give teams, I trust them, I give them total autonomy. We don't really, we let them pick this event or that event. We let them publish blogs without me reading them, but that's not autonomy. Not really. Autonomy is saying, you saw your competitors drop prices, we'll drop our prices. Why didn't you, why are you even having this conversation with me? Yo, you've already dropped them. Great. Fantastic. You saw that one of our competitors has launched a new feature.

the product team is already building it. Great. Great. It didn't need to come to me. We didn't need a committee meeting. We didn't need a decision-making process beyond the teams at the edge. So I that's kind of almost principle one. Principle two is it's going to have to be a lot more cross-functional. Inherent in what I've just said is you're going to need someone from product and someone from marketing and someone from sales, all kind of connected together to be able to make those changes happen in real time. And I think we're going to see fewer silos.

Felix Danczak (40:06.902)
Instead of marketing owning leads, sales owning pipeline, product owning the roadmap, we're going to see what I call a market pods, but you can call them any like small teams, aligned to specific segments or use cases. So, and each team, which comprises all of those functions, will own everything for that slice, whether it's discovery, positioning, execution, delivery. Like in each of these pods,

Let's go back to that example around accountants in Yorkshire who work for mid-sized firms. You might have a team just focused on those people. You'll have a go-to-market strategist thinking about what those people in Yorkshire need. it's snowy outside today. Let's change our ads to reference the local snow. I mean, like, that level. You're going to need a product or solution owner who can make meaningful changes to the roadmap in real time. You're probably going to need a sales or outbound or an outbound or an inbound motion owner, someone who's focused on...

What are we hearing in the gong course? What are we seeing in the ad changes? What do we need to enable our sales teams or marketing teams with? And then you probably need a data analyst to bring this all together. These teams typically today are all sitting really far apart. And they need to be in...

Tom Rudnai (41:15.374)
We've organized ourselves vertically, right, around particular specialist.

Felix Danczak (41:19.646)
Well, we've organized ourselves around the model of an industrial revolution where everyone was hyper specialized and got really good at doing one thing. You guys grow wool, you guys pull the wool, you guys weave the wool, you guys make jumpers. You guys do marketing, you guys do sales, you guys do product. Doesn't work anymore. We have to get tighter because people don't just want one kind of jumper anymore and want it really cheap.

What they want is a jumper that's fitted to them in the design that they want and at a price point that matches them. And if you're all siloed out, for the most part, you have to be connected.

Tom Rudnai (41:58.03)
The way we need knowledge to disseminate has changed. Previously, we wanted knowledge to disseminate vertically. You organize yourselves in these sales pods because it allows sales expertise to filter down to the bottom. Now what you want actually is product engineering expertise to filter across the sales.

Felix Danczak (42:09.373)
That's a really nice way putting it.

Felix Danczak (42:16.575)
So I think that's a really elegant way of putting it. We used to build ourselves for the dissemination of functional information, how to do marketing, whatever it was, how to do sale. Now, the information that needs to be distributed is the market information. What is my market thinking now? What are they asking for now? It's why I turn this concept market-led growth rather than product-led growth or sales-led growth or anything else.

because you're radically focused. And this goes well beyond customer centricity. This is all about what is the market saying right now? What is my prospect talking about today? And then reacting and dynamically altering to that. And so, as you said, you need a different organizational structure to fit that. We go further, by the way. I also think we need to change the way we think about budgeting, which is scary.

like very common today to think about budgeting in kind of annual cycles or quarterly cycles, well, usually an annual cycle, but deployed in a quarterly way, right? Probably going to need to, but if you don't know what's going to happen quarter by quarter or even month by month, because you're going to have to change the way you deploy your capital to meet your market where they want to be met, then you can't necessarily predict or guarantee that you're going to spend in a certain way. So,

Tom Rudnai (43:39.886)
Because as an organisation, you have to be able to expand and contract so quickly. You've got this idea we're going to drop prices massively because it's just what the market is, right? Otherwise we lose.

Felix Danczak (43:43.356)
Right, exactly. Right?

Felix Danczak (43:49.472)
market needs so we can't keep spending on those really expensive events anymore because we don't have the revenue to deliver it. Or those accountants we had in Yorkshire who were buying like hotcakes last quarter are now all stuck in their homes because, I don't know, it's snowy, these poor accountants in Yorkshire. And so they're not buying. So we should move the money somewhere else and do something different with it. We don't want to buy ads in advance anymore. Now we want to be doing events for the accountants in Tahiti.

because suddenly, because the market signal is telling us that they're buying right now. Equally, if a campaign is working, you want to pour fuel on it now, you don't want to wait till next quarter when you've got some more budget. But if a campaign isn't landing, you don't want to let it run this quarter because you kind of paid the ads and like, it's all, you've got to spend the money you've got this quarter anyway, kill it now, spend on something else. So I think we need to rethink the way we think about budgeting. We talked about enablement, but I think enablement is really important.

of giving people really meaningful control. But I think what's connected to that is what leadership does become. Leadership becomes not about making decisions, but about encouraging psychological safety, learnings and tracking outcomes. So I came up with a model, get the idea of Zawara, I call it the failure yield ratio, which I don't really care whether or not this campaign is going to succeed or fail. Right, we can't guarantee it. We can't in this market.

But the one thing we can really control is how much did we learn from it and then how much can we implement as a result? Because the problem with a lot of this iteration, any iteration, is that people don't want to change things because change might mean that they fail and failure by and large means that we lose and we don't like losing. And failure means I might lose my job. It might mean we haven't done a good one. It means I'm going to get told off. means also failure is bad. However, it's fail fast. Don't worry about failure. We're not.

Tom Rudnai (45:23.416)
Hmm.

Felix Danczak (45:42.803)
built to think that way. That's not how most people are wired. But if you start incentivizing people to fail, you get something different that happens at the back end. You say, OK, I want to know how many things we learned from this, whether or not they succeeded or failed. And I'm to give an equal score to whether or not it was a failure or a success. And that's how I'm going to incentivize you. Then you start seeing more interesting results. But as a leader, it's your job.

to give people and to get them to trust you that you really mean it. When they complete, when they spend half a million dollars on something and it just doesn't work. But as long as you will learn and you understand why and you know how you're going to change for next time, that no one's in any trouble. No one's going to get fired.

That's your job. That's the job that I do.

Tom Rudnai (46:33.838)
And it links to everything else you've mentioned, right? One part of surrendering control is that you're surrendering control of a higher and higher value decisions. You have to accept sometimes, our business will contract because we made a decision lower down. And I have to trust at the top of the organization that that decision was hopefully right. And if not, it was necessary, a decision had to be made. But it's super difficult and it leans more in with a smaller number of humans that are more empowered.

Felix Danczak (46:54.877)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Rudnai (47:02.4)
all of those little things that you have to do to get the best out of humans become ten times more applicable.

Felix Danczak (47:08.071)
Which changes how you think about hiring? Maybe you're being asked this, I certainly am by people with kids at the moment. What should my kid be thinking about doing? What should they be doing? Because the world is changing. And 15 years ago, we were all saying, your kids should learn how to code. Code's really important.

Tom Rudnai (47:28.408)
Yeah. It's a commodity now. Well, it will be soon. Yeah.

Felix Danczak (47:31.698)
Not anymore. My answer is thinking about, think laterally, become a generalist. If you can start understanding how to take, learn how data works. I don't mean like how to do data input. mean, understand data as a science, not data science, but understand what a graph means. Understand what a 2 % rise is versus a 4 % rise and why that's different. What's a standard deviation?

And should you be worrying about that here? What is your Six Sigma? Because that's important. Because if you can use those tools to analyze what the machine is telling you, you're going to be able to make data led decisions and minimize some of those risk failures that you're talking about. But I think we're going to end up with far smaller number of people. You're not going to have a marketing team of 50. You'll have a marketing team of five. You won't need a team of brand marketers. You'll need one brand marketer with five agentic AIs underneath them.

doing specific things. don't need even today, you don't need one content, you don't need five content writers. I'm sorry, I think you can get by with one. But they've got, they've got one tool writing blogs, and thinking in that way, you've got one writing this way, you got one writing that way. And frankly, there are tools that will produce videos now, right? know, Sora does it just fine. So that's changing. But the person who's in control of all those levers needs to be a different

needs to be not super specialized in being a brand marketer. They need to be able to think more broadly about understanding how and interpreting data. Qualitative and qualitative, that doesn't mean we need a bunch of scientists running our teams. But to think laterally and apply data to new problems, that's going to be crucial. And we need to start hiring for that. I think it's the rebirth of the generalist, which I'm grateful for because I am one.

Tom Rudnai (49:22.83)
I think that's fantastic because that was going to be my next question is how do you set yourself up for success in this world? I think it's also really interesting what you meant. Yeah, smaller teams with less specialist knowledge because I think a lot of what we're talking about is where the world is going. Even with where the world is, I think if you're a marketer, one thing that has struck me recently is the extent to which all of the different disciplines within marketing have become 10 times more interwoven. So having an SEO specialist isn't very useful because

content now feeds every different channel and it's serving every point in the bio journey. So just being super super expert, I had a rank content top of funnel, not that useful. You need to understand how your specialism connects to the bigger picture. I'm conscious of time, so I'm gonna, I think this has been a very like meta, pretty awesome episode. I'm gonna summarize quickly and then we'll get into some quick fire questions. So I think in terms of what we've spoken about and how people should react to it.

And correct me if I'm wrong here. think from an organisational point of view, I think there were three things, right? You have to get comfortable, surrender and control. So you delegate much, much higher value decisions further down the chain, whether that be to a human or an agent. There's a human need to get comfortable with that. The second one is the need to drive genuine cross-functional alignment. It's something we're working on at Demand Genius in terms of between marketing and sales. And I think it's super important now to operate as a revenue function.

But I think it's fair to say the next step of that is going to be encapsulating more and more kind of either side of that into product and engineering. And then the last one is changing the way that we budget and make decisions. It kind of leads to the first, guess, a little bit, but make decisions at an organisational level to operate on a much, much faster cycle that reflects the way that we need to move. And in order to excel in that world as an individual, it's about becoming a generous, it's about excelling at learning. It's funny how...

All of these things, just like a lot of, they come back to core principles, right? It's, can you build the right mindset to adapt to change and to learn and to be curious?

Felix Danczak (51:25.412)
Yeah, I think that's partially because we are at the beginning of something new.

Tom Rudnai (51:30.798)
Hmm.

Felix Danczak (51:33.58)
wasn't around in the 1780s. But I would imagine it felt a little similar to some people that they saw this. Suddenly, there was a steam engine. And that was different to everything they'd seen before. And it's probably quite hard to just build a set of rules for, now we didn't how we work out. is This is, don't worry, I built a playbook for how we how we build trains. It took a long time to work out exactly how to use these things. The steam engine happened and then we kind of went, okay, we can use it to transport.

People thought when they first steam engines, people didn't want to get on those railways because they thought they wouldn't be able to breathe at 30 miles an hour because they thought that they would be moving too fast for the air. So you have to start with principles. well, what's changed and what might then change the results? What are the second order? You can't build rules yet. We're not at a point, anyone telling you they've solved. this is how, this rule book is how to build. This rule book will solve all the problems you've got.

I think they're probably selling snake oil because we don't know. But we can set with principles and I think those principles are change resistant and think they're important.

Tom Rudnai (52:42.67)
Yeah, that's awesome. Let's leave that there. What I'm do now is get onto some quickfire questions, Felix. So one, potentially we've got the answer to this here, but for you and your career, what's been the biggest needle mover?

Felix Danczak (53:01.007)
that's an interesting question.

Tom Rudnai (53:01.902)
what scale or trait in terms of your own development and advancement.

Felix Danczak (53:08.131)
I think it's probably been the most successful, but also perhaps the one that set me back the most. So it's a double-edged sword. But I probably try and answer the question before it's been asked. I think there's pros and cons there. Anyone who knows me listening to this will be smiling. I think it's been a willingness to engage with pretty much any problem from a first principle basis.

Tom Rudnai (53:24.802)
No.

Felix Danczak (53:36.473)
So better or for worse, I think I can probably work anything out as long as I start from the first principles. And I'm willing to take risk, take and go for it, see what happens. So yeah.

Tom Rudnai (53:53.506)
Nice, second one, a lot of people are gonna be listening to this thinking, God, Felix sounds smart. I want them all to know that you can at times be an idiot. So what was the biggest fuck up in your career?

Felix Danczak (54:07.032)
My God. There are so many to choose from.

Tom Rudnai (54:10.798)
like the heart stopping moment.

You're not allowed to say hi to me before you do.

Felix Danczak (54:19.532)
Never say such a thing.

Tom Rudnai (54:20.782)
You

Felix Danczak (54:24.906)
I think it's back up. This is going to one of those moments where you have to like edit it together.

Tom Rudnai (54:31.032)
you

Felix Danczak (54:34.589)
Felix Danczak (54:41.577)
I can't talk about.

Tom Rudnai (54:43.79)
Go on.

Felix Danczak (54:44.886)
No,

Tom Rudnai (54:48.764)
That's the laws.

Felix Danczak (55:06.83)
I think the biggest career fuckup I ever made was...

not treating the two people I worked really. I set up business straight out of university. Although it was my idea, we all three were equals, and I don't think I could ever quite let go of it being mine. So when the time came for us to sell the business, not for a lot of money, but for jobs, I think I...

Tom Rudnai (55:30.478)
Mm.

Felix Danczak (55:39.982)
I didn't involve them enough in that process and that thinking process and that engagement. And I didn't treat them with the, I was 21 and 22 and for Piss and Vinegar, but I think I didn't quite understand yet that success is a team sport. It doesn't matter whether it's your idea. It doesn't matter whether, whether you're the CEO. It's all of you together. And I, I regret not treating those people with the respect that I now would have completely given them.

I think that was the biggest career fuck up for me. I learned some really valuable lessons, I'm I learned it early, but I regret it to this day.

Tom Rudnai (56:18.446)
Yeah, I think that's a super self-aware answer. I think it's something a lot of people can probably resonate with though, right? For me, I think as we scale the mind genius, I think it's very easy to forget the level of contribution, but also sacrifice that other people make. You see your own sacrifice, but even if it's a bit like, they weren't at risk of not paying their mortgage, they didn't have quite the sleepless nights that you had as a founder or CEO, they still gave up three years of, which is, of...

Felix Danczak (56:24.652)
Yeah.

Tom Rudnai (56:47.278)
their life to go and build this idea that you had with you. And yes, they got a salary. Yes, they had a bit less at risk. But that is still if all we have in this world is time, right? That's what 3 % of everything they have that they gave you.

Felix Danczak (57:01.836)
Yeah, there is a conception of business that says you can't worry too much about the people in your organization or your teams. They've made their choices, they're adults, and they can make different choices if they want to. And there's an extent to which that is true. You're not responsible for people's mistakes or people's lives. I think in some particularly late stage capitalism, I think has taken that too far. I think we are, if not responsible for them, we have a duty to make sure that we recognize the sacrifice of time from other people.

Tom Rudnai (57:09.869)
Yeah.

Felix Danczak (57:31.509)
regardless of what they're paid or that they could get a job somewhere else. They're choosing to work with you. And that should be respected, regardless of what it is they're doing. I think easy to forget that.

Tom Rudnai (57:42.51)
Yeah, no, % and to expect more than is reasonable as well. Last one is one recommendation that you have for everyone in terms of a book, a podcast, a thought leader to follow that you recommend they go and check out that you think is helpful.

Felix Danczak (58:00.092)
Podcast, it would be In Our Time, which is a BBC Radio 4 podcast for American listeners. This has been going since 1998 and every week they discuss a pretty much topic at random for 45 minutes live and it will enrich your soul. But I think it will also, you never know what you're going to learn and where you're going to find the next piece of information that will put something else into place. I think in a moment of intense change,

learning from moments of change or things that are inventions of the past and how things are put together on a principles level will be helpful. So I would put that as my podcast. As a book, would recommend rather than suggesting ones that people have probably suggested before, would suggest Our Lives in Their Portfolios by guy called Brett Christopher, which is a book about

how private equity firms are shaping the world in which we live. And private equity is getting more and more important. It's very easy to kind of see it as this shadowy other. There's like VC, very exciting. Then there's the public markets, kind of big and slow, but we can invest in those. And then there's this private equity thing and we don't understand enough about them. And I mean, certainly has a perspective in that book, our lives in their portfolios gives a sense of it. But I think it's a world that we don't understand well.

I don't think enough people understand quite what BlackRock is. I think it's worth understanding, as you're scaling. It's one of the most likely exits for any businesses of private equity, or it's going to involve private equity. And I think really understanding very early on how they operate, how they think, is helpful.

Tom Rudnai (59:41.452)
Nice, I think that's awesome. Yeah, I saw and described Black Quilt the other day to me as the biggest company that you've never heard of, which I think for a lot of people is true. You don't know what they do. It's just this shadowy presence.

Felix Danczak (59:51.5)
I think somebody wants to describe them as an octopus, not in a pleasant way.

Tom Rudnai (59:54.83)
Not in a good way.

Tom Rudnai (01:00:02.414)
Cool. Yeah, no, cool. Well, look, Felix, thank you very much. I think that was an awesome episode. I think it's nice to have one that gets a little bit away from marketing tactics, marketing strategies, what campaigns are working, what campaigns aren't, and think a little bit more meta about the direction we're heading in and how you can succeed in it. So thank you, thank you everyone for listening and yeah, see you next time.

Felix Danczak (01:00:24.054)
Thank you, too. I really enjoyed it.

See you soon. Bye bye.