00:09:44 · Dan Lifshits, Sebastian Johnson, Ilia Drozdov
[00:09:44] S1: You don't want to go with The UK to build an enormous business. Even in The UK, they're a pretty iconic company. But I think that next time we'll talk, we definitely already would be talking about that, and it'd a more practical term. [00:09:54] S0: Amazing. And can I ask what's the big bottleneck at the moment? Right? Because it doesn't seem to be capital. You seem to be well stocked with capital. Is it talent? Is it potential, you know, acquisition companies? Is it time to integrate? What is the thing that's stopping you from getting to 20, 50, a 100,000? [00:10:10] S1: I would say hiring. [00:10:11] S2: I agree with Dan that it's hiring. And I think, you know, we're in a very lucky position that kind of as not first time founders, we purposefully decided to avoid a product market basically challenge. So the... Like, I mean, there is no need for a product market fit in our case because we are significantly improving already existing products and customers understand what they
00:10:11 · Ilia Drozdov, Dan Lifshits
[00:10:11] S2: I agree with Dan that it's hiring. And I think, you know, we're in a very lucky position that kind of as not first time founders, we purposefully decided to avoid a product market basically challenge. So the... Like, I mean, there is no need for a product market fit in our case because we are significantly improving already existing products and customers understand what they [00:10:29] S1: are buying, etcetera, etcetera. So for us kind of to execute at really fast pace, the biggest bottleneck is hiring. And I would say primarily you're talking about operators and product engineering talent. Because, like, effectively what we built is yet another quite operational tech enabled business. So meaning that all your typical kind of operators of the world, the typical Ubers and deliveries and the others, people that like operational businesses growing at high pace. And I think on the product engineering front, it's also gonna help for everyone. We're competing for the engineers a lot with labs and with other application companies. But I think what we see is that this specific type of engineer that likes to kind of take some operational process, write a few lines of code, and then see how the automation of the real world happens. So I think it's almost like we would have some engineers that were big fans in the childhood of automating some stuff. And we just see this genuine joy, almost like as a kid in a candy store when you're kinda seeing what the frontier of the applied AI looks like. And they're like, wow. I couldn't believe that it can be happened.
00:11:30 · Ilia Drozdov
[00:11:30] S2: My my question to most of the engineers kind of at the last stage of the interview process is pretty much following. Look. And if you need to decide for yourself what excites you more, whether kind of you want to be more of a scientist that is kind of, you know, thinking about particular kind of idea, particular solution, like months, if not years, and then solves a very kind of very difficult task and just get an... Get a joy from it. Or you're different kind of extreme where, again, if you you're just excited about walking on the streets, seeing basically a light in windows and people having nice dinners. And, you know, given that 25% of people live in their rental homes, particularly kind of joy and quietness during the evening, supplied to some extent by us because all the maintenance was dealt kind of automatically. There are no issues, etcetera, etcetera. Because obviously, kind of experience around rental home quite quite kind of fundamental for the for the happiness of life. And we we do input that, we hope to believe. And engineers should be kind of understanding in which camp they are because we're obviously not a frontier lab. We will not be providing tasks kind of... For you to be kind of a mathematician like person walking on the streets kind of and thinking about it twenty four seven, but we do impact lives twenty four seven, and that's kind of probably the the source of excitement for people.
00:12:49 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:12:49] S0: Now that's amazing. Right? There's there's very clear impacts. If you improve your quality of the product, there's a very real change in the experience of people living in the homes, which I think is amazing. Can we talk about the round itself? So there's a huge round, EQT growth, General Catalyst co led it. What was the round like? I mean, I feel like there's been a shift in the VC mindset towards these types of businesses across Europe more generally. It feels like there's a great opportunity for services led AI transformation companies. Yeah. Have you seen that shift compared to when you first rang... Raised your early rounds to to to today? Has that been the biggest driver in raising more money? Has it been the sort of, like, excitement in the VC ecosystem around businesses like yours? Has it been them sort of, like, watching the... You know, like, I know General Katalyst has been involved already. Has it been them watching the business and watching you operate? What was that process like? Just talk to me a bit a bit about it.
00:13:35 · Dan Lifshits
[00:13:35] S1: Yeah. It's happening. I think that AI native services becomes a bigger and bigger topic from being a forbidden word a few kind of years ago. Think to being one of the most hyped word where it can roll up is just one of the angles of how you can use tactical go to market where you're acquiring businesses rather than just growing them organically. And I think it's happening. The kind of early stage investors, I think, precedes it. All over it now, I think that the growth kind of people starting to learn it. But EQT is a pretty great example in this space because effectively they've been on their large cap and by outside doing roll ups for all of their life. So I think that they also start realizing more and more that a lot of service businesses require pretty fundamental rewire of how kind of they need to be run. And I think a lot of debate happening kind of on that front here now is like, what do the success and this transformation looks like? And I think quite often the answer that I see, to be honest, is the founder led energy and AI nativeness from day one. So I think that's what kind of is big kind of change to the traditional roll ups as you can see.
00:14:31 · Ilia Drozdov
[00:14:31] S2: I would add a little bit kind of on top here. I think we've been kind of on the journey where, like, maybe coincidentally, but we were slightly kind of ahead of the curve kind of with the idea that AI will change kind of the services industry and that the AI roll ups will be kind of a thing to grow than kind of AI native services company itself will be a thing to grow. And I think, you know, we actually want something much bigger here because not all space industries possesses kind of the long term defensibility modes as we do have. Because kind of in our market, what we effectively do through AI enablement of all the kind of operational processes, we make the transaction, the bay... Basic transaction of letting the property and then managing the property effectively scalable as you can imagine right hailing kind of companies. Right? So they made kind of at a few clicks of a button, they standardize the flow. But in our space, historically, standardization of the flow was connected to a very kind of limited customer experience because with a few buttons, you push clients to just adhere to a standard process. But with AI, having a deep granular context on the property level, on the customer level, With the same set of AI agents, you can provide a very customized output, which allows kind of in our market to make a scalable transaction and actually grow quite fast and hopefully to build the AI native end to end transactional platform for three sides, kind of tenants, landlords, and maintenance providers where human element goes into either offline operations. We... And we have a lot that actually provides us differentiability as well. It cannot be fully digital service, but also basically spend more time with clients and elevating the level of service. So kind of... Yeah. We are onto something much bigger beyond just the AI kind of native services, but let's see. Yeah. As as you said,