Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:02:08 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:02:08] S2: is Mati from ElevenLabs? [00:02:09] S1: Exactly. So I'm working across voice AI research and product deployment. We are on a mission to create a voice of technology. So, think I still would have started that with my co founder, which would have been the advantage. The disadvantage is I don't know how I would approach the first customers, how the world at the time, I didn't even know the world of entrepreneurship existed. So, I studied mathematics. When you study mathematics, the clear career paths you take is either finance or consulting. I chose finance. I joined BlackRock. And then only after BlackRock, I learned about Palantir and decided to join them where it turned out you can actually be deployed with the customer, learn about the problems, try to understand those problems and bring them back and build the product, which was the first glimpse into how to build something from scratch. But before that, that was still something further out of I didn't know how to approach. So I don't think I would be able to understand the first early dynamics of starting something in the same way. [00:03:06] S2: Okay. You're several 100,000,000 in revenue. If you had started right out of school with your buddy, where would
00:03:06 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:03:06] S2: Okay. You're several 100,000,000 in revenue. If you had started right out of school with your buddy, where would [00:03:12] S1: you be? Nowhere? The other thing, think we would have probably worked on a very different idea. I think it took, of course, the pleasure of having the co founder I known inside out. Then over the years, got experience of working at other companies, which helped us understand some of the dynamics here at Google, Palantir, so we understand how to build things at scale. But then the third thing, which I think was the most important, was the idea. And of course, for the years, we looked into different projects from trying to build a crypto risk analyzer during the crypto days, which was really hard, to recommendation system. But then when we stumbled on voice, we knew that A, this is a good timing where the technology is going for the shift. We can be part of that shift of that technology. And then two, this is a huge problem that the users, the world have and we can solve it. If I started something on 2021, 2022, I just don't think we would work on the same idea and probably wouldn't sustain the pain the same way we do now that we approach voice. [00:04:12] S2: Got it. Anton, Lovable, also on fire. If you started this company right out of school, what would it be like?
00:04:12 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:04:12] S2: Got it. Anton, Lovable, also on fire. If you started this company right out of school, what would it be like? [00:04:19] S0: I also think it might have not been as ambitious because, I mean, I had never done something entrepreneurial. And the biggest disadvantage being that young would have been that I wouldn't know why to hire very senior engineers and what type of great senior engineers are out there. Because they would be very scared of working for me. But I think I would have a lot of other advantages, maybe even being more naive. Already then, I think I surrounded myself by super, super smart people. So I think I could have built something very different with fast registration pace. Okay. Could have been successful. [00:04:59] S2: And I got a little bit of what you took from Palantir. You had some very interesting experiences before Lovable. Can you talk a little bit about them and what kind of you took from those that you're leveraging at Lovable? [00:05:11] S0: Yeah, sure. So if you go way back, I also studied like sciences and physics specifically. When I was, I did this long internship at CERN, where understood CERN particle physics and where they discovered a lot of the recent physics. But there's a lot of smart people there. [00:05:30] S2: Yes.
00:05:30 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika, Mati Staniszewski
[00:05:30] S2: Yes. [00:05:30] S0: And I was like, wait, they're all working on these impossible problems without any elasticity. So I'm not going to be here. I'm going to go out applying great innovation to the real world. And then I was kind of inspired to start a company when I was in university, which I'm very happy about. But I ended up doing some finance actually, unfortunately. [00:05:56] S1: Okay, it's simple. [00:05:57] S0: Which was a bit too boring for me. Okay. But fortunately I started this community Stockholm AI, and this was around when deep learning was like taking off in twenty fifteen, sixteen. And I did the foundation models of training recurrent new, like large, small language models before it was cool and met great people there. And one was the founder at Sana, so Joel, who recently sold Sana to Workday for a billion dollars. [00:06:24] S2: Yes, congratulations. [00:06:25] S0: Yes, great job by the team there. My contribution was bringing in some of those smart people that went on to grow it to what it became. And I was there for three years and it was like, oh, AI, like let's build it. We were, you all were super young, but learned super fast and it became successful. Then I joined as a co founder at a company that just got into YC, and that was in recommendation systems, specifically for e commerce. That could have been absolutely wildly successful, the company. It had a lot of things going for it. But after [00:07:01] S2: a
00:07:01 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:07:01] S2: a [00:07:01] S0: bit of momentum loss and my co founder and me being... I wanted the PO to do something more successful than I can say than e commerce. But I decided to do the most possible, ambitious thing. And all my life I've been approached by people who wanted to find a great engineer to help them realize their dreams or their ideas. That the world is full of them, like 0.5% of the world can even code, and much fewer can build a great product, like Mati and his co founder, right? So I decided, let's build something for the 99%, and not this productivity boost for developers. And that's going to be a completely new type of interface where you dream your idea of some technical AI product into existence. Yeah. And that's what we set out to build. [00:07:55] S2: Okay. So your first company, you were the founding engineer. Your next company depict, you were co founder, CTO. Now you're a CEO. Is it everything you ever hoped? [00:08:08] S0: That's a good question. I think it's quite different. What I love about it is that I get to know myself and how to surround myself with the right complementary skill sets and be challenged in all the possible ways much more than being a co founder and CTO. And like, I run the company on founder mode, I would mostly empathize with. But at this stage, I mean, there's a big shift in focusing on empowering and blocking the leaders in the company. And I mean, I like that. And it's more analytical. [00:08:50] S2: Is being a CEO what you thought like? What surprised you about it?
00:08:50 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:08:50] S2: Is being a CEO what you thought like? What surprised you about it? [00:08:54] S0: You have to do so many things. Or I mean, unless you're very disciplined about what delegate and how you delegate it, it's like there's so many, many different things thrown at you, especially as you start hyperscaling. [00:09:09] S2: Yes. How about for you? You're CEO, your first time CEO. What's harder than you thought? What's easier than you thought? What's different than you thought?