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00:14:34 · James Lowe, Sam
[00:14:34] S4: Yeah. So, you know, I think when we did our a back in probably roughly March, we were at roughly 2,000,000 ARR at that time. Yeah. And so we've gone past 500,000,000 now, and so it's 250 x in that, you you know, six months or so. [00:14:47] S1: You have to be one of the fastest growing companies ever. [00:14:49] S4: Yeah. I think we're we're we're trying to get compliance approval to say whether this is the fastest growing company ever in Europe. Okay. Okay. But but but, yes, certainly, we're we're probably in that camp. [00:15:00] S1: Okay. In terms of hitting... In terms of running a business that is hitting those milestones, I mean, you mentioned 1,000,000 a day in payouts. How do you guys operate as a team building a company that fast and building a sustainable business? We talked to it was yesterday we talked to the CEO of Lemlist who are a bootstrap company and they're building, you know, an incredibly sustainable company. And we asked him, you know, what what... What's the difference there with an incredibly fast growing VC backed company and and a company that's been bootstrapped and maybe growing slower, but, you know, I guess growing more kind of sustainably. What is that kind of difference? How do you guys grapple with building a sustainable company while you're growing so quickly?
00:15:00 · Sam, James Lowe
[00:15:00] S1: Okay. In terms of hitting... In terms of running a business that is hitting those milestones, I mean, you mentioned 1,000,000 a day in payouts. How do you guys operate as a team building a company that fast and building a sustainable business? We talked to it was yesterday we talked to the CEO of Lemlist who are a bootstrap company and they're building, you know, an incredibly sustainable company. And we asked him, you know, what what... What's the difference there with an incredibly fast growing VC backed company and and a company that's been bootstrapped and maybe growing slower, but, you know, I guess growing more kind of sustainably. What is that kind of difference? How do you guys grapple with building a sustainable company while you're growing so quickly? [00:15:38] S4: Yeah. So interestingly, there are things that we didn't expect to scale so smoothly, which is mostly in the network growth. Okay. So the network is compounding almost on its own, where, you know, roughly 24% of our new users now come from referrals. And when you look at those referrals, like 32% of them were referred themselves before. And so basically, this is cascading referral that's growing in this network really, really fast. [00:15:58] S1: Yeah.
00:15:58 · James Lowe
[00:15:58] S4: So network's growing much faster and smoother than we thought. The difficulty is like, okay, now you're managing tens of thousands of experts around the world who are literally, know, in some cases like literally their whole living is dependent on some of the projects that we're working with them on. Sure. And so you have so many different types of issues, right? You have payment disputes, you have fraud, you have like operational hiccups, you have to build customer support at scale to... For all these people around the world. And we basically had to stand all of that up in the space of six months, and you know, throughout the entire period it felt like we were constantly catching up. At one point, think our Trustpilot dropped to something like 3.7 because it was just so difficult for experts, then we dragged it all the way back up to 4.5, right, just with all the improvements that we're driving with the team all across the board. And we're really lucky that, you know, we have t team members who have been building giant marketplaces, like people who have been GMs at Uber and so on and and launching new cities and stuff like this. Yeah. And so we're bringing a lot of that, you know, expertise in. And we've been doing things like round tables of experts just coming in and they join us and they tell their stories, they, you know, they tell us all the horrible things that, you know, they're experiencing on the platform, how do we change it, we demo the new parts of the platform and help them change it, and we're doing this not just The UK, but also around the world where we see experts everywhere. And so that's been super, super helpful. We're just trying to stay as close to the expert experience as possible, and and try to build it out. But it's been a bit of a crazy journey.
00:17:20 · Sam, Kosta
[00:17:20] S1: Yeah. Well done. [00:17:21] S0: Well So talk to us about the... It's been a recurring theme throughout every single appearance you've had on the show, but how is... How do you see the future of work evolving?
00:17:29 · James Lowe
[00:17:29] S4: Yeah. So I I think the big question is is, are humans gonna get replaced by AI? Right? And I think the analogy that's, we found quite useful is every time we've invented a new instrument, a new genre of music has emerged. Right? And so as humans get access to better tooling, we become more ambitious. Our sense of aesthetics, our sense of what is actually great improves as well. And as we get more ambitious, more work emerges. And so our slightly contrarian opinion is that we actually think AI is going to kill the gig economy, but it's not actually gonna kill real jobs. Mhmm. And the challenge here is that the gig economy reduces human beings to commodities. Right? They sort of go, oh, you are only here to perform this task Yeah. And this task has this cost. And when you measure people in this way, AI can do it faster and cheaper. But when you look at full time jobs, when you look at, you know, even fractional advisory jobs and all these types of things, ultimately, it's about humans, who they are, you know, the personality they have, the relationships they've built, the momentum they can generate, the unique judgment and intuition. Mhmm. And those things are incredibly difficult to replace with AI. And so, in our view, what's gonna happen is that actually the task economy gets increasingly automated, but then we can actually bring more people to do meaningful work in real full time roles. Right? And so that's also what we're trying to do as a company.
00:18:43 · Sam, James Lowe
[00:18:43] S1: I think following on from that, the conversations we've been having over the past few weeks has been a lot about I think when Anthropic released the S1, there was a little bit about the potential for like the new UBI, the new universal basic income, what that looks like. They obviously released the public benefit fund as well. And then and then SpaceX kind of did some something similar. And that opened the question of like, what is the purpose of human beings? We asked Nick Clegg about this on Wednesday, and he had a really fascinating, fascinating answer. I'd love to ask you the same. Like, what what does purpose look like in, you know, a post AGI world or whenever these companies get so big that they're able to, I guess, share the profits with, you know, a vast amount of people and therefore might not work, you know? [00:19:29] S4: Yeah. So so we don't really subscribe to the belief that there should be some kind of UBI at some point where everybody's just like taking some meager, you know, share of the profits being generated by a few giant companies. In our view, what's very likely to happen and kind of a new business model we're pioneering on our end is to help enterprises post train their open weights models. But whereas they post train and deploy these models in their company Mhmm. We split our margin in half, and we pay that as royalties back to all the employees and all the external experts [00:20:01] S1: No way.