Speaker1: Management doesn't break because leader lack intent.
Speaker1: It breaks because information processing consumes the capacity to actually lead.
Speaker1: The seven person ceiling was never biological. It was architectural.
Speaker1: Bonjour. My guest today is Adrian Ciacani, a founder and CEO of Supervised from
Speaker1: Souk in Switzerland, and as you can already tell by the Bonjour, he's French, Swiss.
Speaker1: Or Swiss French, Swiss French, that's right.
Speaker1: Adrian scaled Moteco through extreme regulatory pressure to 250 million US dollar
Speaker1: exit to Ripple, building one of Europe's leading digital asset custody platforms.
Speaker1: But somewhere in that journey, he discovered that management itself was the
Speaker1: bottleneck, not because people
Speaker1: couldn't lead, but because information processing left no room to lead.
Speaker1: Supervised is the answer. a virtual chief of staff for every manager,
Speaker1: enabling flat organizations that move like startups.
Speaker1: This conversation is about what really breaks at scale, why voice reveals what
Speaker1: dashboards hide, and how AI finally makes the supermanager organization possible.
Speaker1: Bonjour, Adrienne.
Speaker0: Pleasure to be here, Joe.
Speaker1: Totally my pleasure. We can say bonjour, we can say gruzzi, it's all fine.
Speaker1: Let us dive right in at MetaCo.
Speaker1: You scale through banks, regulators, multiple jurisdictions.
Speaker1: What was the first moment you realized the organization itself had become the constraint?
Speaker1: Was it like when you had to open 50 Excel sheets to find one information?
Speaker0: I mean, the truth is, I started Medaco as a solo founder.
Speaker0: So it was my first entrepreneurial journey. So I had no perspective over what
Speaker0: it could become and what it was going to become.
Speaker0: In fact, quoting a good friend of mine who is a very successful entrepreneur,
Speaker0: he told me one day that he said, Adrian, you know, had I known how painful and
Speaker0: complicated that entrepreneurial journey would be, I would have never started.
Speaker0: You kind of need to be a bit ignorant to even start.
Speaker0: And that was very true for me. And I started ignorantly, but passionate about
Speaker0: blockchain technology, having been trading cryptos for many years, already since 2013,
Speaker0: and realized that it was very hard actually to get into a large enterprise,
Speaker0: a large bank, subject to regulations with high quality requirements.
Speaker0: And so very early on, I had to start scaling the team with limited financial means.
Speaker0: But I had this ambition as an entrepreneur to remain extremely flat and agile.
Speaker0: Although I had that very clear vision of where the company could start scaling,
Speaker0: adding people, adding people not just where you would expect,
Speaker0: like in the engineering team to build faster, but adding people on the delivery
Speaker0: team to be able to actually hit all of these requests from your clients, the communication.
Speaker0: I think customer success people that would manage the expectations,
Speaker0: you know, also be the professional apologizers when something doesn't go as planned.
Speaker0: And you start creating these departments and very quickly realize that the flat
Speaker0: structure doesn't seem to work anymore.
Speaker0: You know, you're like the lonely CEO with 15, 20 direct reports.
Speaker0: And you start realizing that you become a massive bottleneck and that bottleneck
Speaker0: at some point hurts your company.
Speaker0: And so you have to start thinking about layers. And this is,
Speaker0: I would argue, where everything starts changing.
Speaker0: One layer is possibly, you know, one additional layer is something you can still,
Speaker0: you know, deal with because you're still a very successful CEO entrepreneur as an early investor.
Speaker0: And he always told me, Adrian, you'll see when you reach 40 people,
Speaker0: everything is going to change and you're going to suffer, my friend.
Speaker0: And I say, oh, come on, what are you saying? You know, why would that be the case?
Speaker0: You know, I have great colleagues, great employees, get along well,
Speaker0: a lot of competence in the company.
Speaker0: But, you know, so many factors happen at the same time. First one is when you
Speaker0: need to scale, suddenly you don't have months and months to select the perfect candidate.
Speaker0: You know, you start hiring people because you have a good gut feel or because
Speaker0: this is the best out of the few candidates that you've interviewed.
Speaker0: Sometimes you may sacrifice the culture and you favor the competence or the other way around.
Speaker0: And quite quickly, you know, this actually forms a pretty inefficient mix.
Speaker0: And exactly as you said, you know, you tend to believe that adding people will
Speaker0: linearly scale your productivity. but it's by far a sublinear.
Speaker0: You know, I would even argue that there is some sort of horizontal asymptote
Speaker0: that comes quite quickly that is very, very hard to actually cross.
Speaker0: Or simply a new atmosphere that promotes internal competition and,
Speaker0: you know, politics in the background, it can quickly become very tricky.
Speaker0: And so, you know, you discuss this with your board or you discuss this with
Speaker0: experienced entrepreneurs and they will tell you, hey, yeah,
Speaker0: you need to start putting in processes, you know.
Speaker0: And you're like, no, I don't want
Speaker0: processes. But yeah, you have to start putting in place. I don't know.
Speaker0: The most basic form of a process could be to put a CRM in place for your sales
Speaker0: team, which obviously you want to start as early as possible in making decisions and progressing.
Speaker1: A former colleague of mine, a former boss said, Joe, if a company
Speaker1: It surpasses two and a half thousand people. It doesn't care about.
Speaker0: Yeah, I mean, I'll answer the second part first. I mean, the funny thing,
Speaker0: we were the absolute experts of digital asset custody.
Speaker0: And for those of the listeners that don't know what it means,
Speaker0: effectively, we were the digital safe deposit for cryptocurrencies in large banking institutions.
Speaker0: So if your bank was offering a crypto trading service, it was very likely that
Speaker0: behind the scene, they were using my solution, my company to secure these holdings.
Speaker0: Now, even though we were the experts in this, I can tell you that for my own
Speaker0: private cryptocurrencies, I was the most absolute paranoid person,
Speaker0: not believing in my own actions in managing them, despite the fact I knew all of the theory.
Speaker0: Because it is so critical and it is so easy to make a mistake.
Speaker0: And it also emphasizes how humans are imperfect.
Speaker0: You might know the theory, but knowing the theory and having practiced it for
Speaker0: many years does not immunize you against making a mistake by yourself.
Speaker0: And this is why as you grow as a company, you will always start thinking in
Speaker0: terms of a decentralization of risk.
Speaker0: Even the CEO himself actually generally cannot do everything just by signing
Speaker0: a document. It needs to be approved by a second party, perhaps by the board of directors.
Speaker0: And this is enforced typically by the charters of the company,
Speaker0: by the shareholder agreements.
Speaker0: But in the context of digital assets, this is enforced cryptographically,
Speaker0: you know, with cybersecurity infrastructure.
Speaker0: But, you know, clearly it creates that paranoid mindset.
Speaker0: And I will argue that, yeah, it taints the way you then see an organization.
Speaker0: You see people which are, and I'm going to say this with all respect that is
Speaker0: required, but people that contribute in an organization are probabilistic agents in the sense that.
Speaker0: Generally do their best, but the output of what they produce is probabilistically
Speaker0: good, you know, but it's also probabilistically bad, you know,
Speaker0: sometimes it's just not what you expect.
Speaker0: And so to get people to converge to a particular objective, to get the output
Speaker0: that you want from your company, you need to create deterministic structure around this chaos.
Speaker0: You need to make sure that your teams are converging to the ambition of your company.
Speaker0: Yeah, sure. I mean, And it's a funny thing because it's not just in business,
Speaker0: you know, it's true even in private life.
Speaker0: How many of the people you would call friends are you actively keeping in touch
Speaker0: with, actively in the sense that you proactively write to them, ask how they're doing,
Speaker0: keep some room in your brain to, you know, to allocate, you know,
Speaker0: to really have interest in what they do?
Speaker0: Probably just a couple of people because the reality is that if you have to
Speaker0: care about your children, about your wife, about a couple of friends,
Speaker0: and of course, what you're doing at the work,
Speaker0: very quickly, you reach the limits of what your brain is meant to do,
Speaker0: which is, you know, really invest yourself in other people's ventures.
Speaker0: And what is true in private life is very much true in the corporate life.
Speaker0: You know, you look at the team of whichever department, whether it's engineering,
Speaker0: sales, products, delivery, legal, et cetera.
Speaker0: Build that team beyond six, seven, eight people, and you start having a big drama.
Speaker0: People stop communicating, or if they communicate, it becomes very inefficient.
Speaker0: The manager of this team has a heart about something that's happening in your
Speaker0: team, writing information up and down again.
Speaker0: And the truth is, if you pull managers in companies of 50 employees to 50,000
Speaker0: employees, pretty much any size beyond the trivial amount of people,
Speaker0: they will tell you that they spend at the very least one day a week basically
Speaker0: just doing status collection,
Speaker0: understanding what is happening in their team and trying to figure it out.
Speaker0: And in companies where corporate structure has started to emerge as the dominant
Speaker0: factor, like large companies with lots of processes, it can be that the manager
Speaker0: is spending more than half of his time just doing that, writing information, filling up reports.
Speaker0: Supporting the processes of the organization, et cetera.
Speaker0: And therefore, the truth is the real dominant friction that you're facing when
Speaker0: you want to scale a company is that one.
Speaker0: It's information collection, information routing, satisfaction of the processes
Speaker0: that the company has put in place.
Speaker0: If you can automate it out, if you can say, this boring part of my job is now,
Speaker0: let's say, automated in a way that, of course, I'm still involved,
Speaker0: but I can delegate it to a specialized party,
Speaker0: I'm already able to scale way past seven people, way past eight people.
Speaker0: You know, there are companies which are good examples of this,
Speaker0: like NVIDIA, where, you know, Jensen Huyen is well known to have many more than seven, eight reports.
Speaker0: It can work, but you need the proper support.
Speaker0: This support can be human-led. You know, it can be that you have a chief of
Speaker0: staff or a personal assistant or a series of personal assistants that will help you do that.
Speaker0: But it can now be AI-driven. And I guess this is where I supervise my company's position today.
Speaker1: Does it mean to give every manager a virtual chief of staff?
Speaker0: Yeah, I mean, the basics of it
Speaker0: is actually very simple. But I'm going to illustrate it with an example.
Speaker0: The dream of a sales team in an organization is that they can rely on a properly
Speaker0: populated CRM. you know, a tool they use to track every deal that's currently
Speaker0: being activated, the progress, the actions, et cetera.
Speaker0: And in a perfect world, that CRM would have incredibly high quality information.
Speaker0: And as a manager, you would just extract a report out of it every week,
Speaker0: and then make your decisions. In practice.
Speaker0: The CRM, you can ask any company, always has garbage data. So it's always outdated,
Speaker0: sometimes by weeks or months.
Speaker0: You can have deals that you were supposed to close like a few months ago,
Speaker0: which are still in the CRM and actually not close at anything.
Speaker0: And so the first step in resolving that management duty,
Speaker0: which is indeed to understand what is happening and help drive the direction
Speaker0: is to be able to collect and build and route that quality information in the
Speaker0: same way you would if you were facing the person in your office or in the kitchen
Speaker0: having a coffee with the employee,
Speaker0: but without having to do that synchronous meeting every week that is low value added,
Speaker0: that both sides feel is a bit of a waste of time.
Speaker0: And how do you achieve that? Well, you create an intermediary.
Speaker0: You add that intermediary. That intermediary could be, again,
Speaker0: some sort of a personal assistant, but personal assistants are very expensive.
Speaker0: Let's call it chief of staff. It's very expensive and it's hard to scale at
Speaker0: the level of every layers of your organization.
Speaker0: So let's call this chief of staff now an AI, an AI that actually is able to
Speaker0: speak as voice to the organization.
Speaker0: Now, of course, having that context is not enough.
Speaker0: Then what you want to do with it is route it to everyone that needs it.
Speaker0: It might be much more than your direct manager. It might be that you are the
Speaker0: engineering team that needs to share information with the product team or the
Speaker0: product team that needs to share information to the sales team.
Speaker0: Potentially, it is even the CEO sharing information downstream to the employees
Speaker0: about the company direction.
Speaker0: And so once you've achieved that routing of information, then comes decision-making.
Speaker0: Then comes, you know, I'm a manager. I see there is something happening.
Speaker0: I understand because my AI is flagging to me that there is a risk or a need for my support.
Speaker0: And then can I activate the face-to-face with my employee and the discussion and investigation?
Speaker0: And then can I start using the tool to formalize my decision and push it downstream?
Speaker0: By having this automation, what you're actually achieving is that you are delegating to an AI.
Speaker0: Coming back to my example before with CRM, where the data is always incomplete
Speaker0: and outdated, whatever policing process you put in place, that's not just true for CRM.
Speaker0: This is true for all of the reporting you can think of, from basic Excel sheet
Speaker0: filling to HR surveys, you know, to delivery project supervision.
Speaker0: Data is never accurate, whichever tool you use. And that's truly because there is this friction.
Speaker0: Everybody hates writing things on a keyboard. You've already had a very painful
Speaker0: and long day. You've already discussed with 20 different clients.
Speaker0: Why the hell would you take, you know, time on your dinner, which you well deserve with your wife?
Speaker0: To report things in an Excel sheet. If you have to do it, you will do it,
Speaker0: but you will be very minimalistic in doing so.
Speaker0: Whereas if you actually, you know, take five minutes every day or let's say
Speaker0: 10 minutes a couple of times a week to just receive a call which has been blocked
Speaker0: in your agenda, as if you were speaking with one of your colleagues,
Speaker0: and you don't really have to think, you just follow the conversation and speak
Speaker0: your mind out naturally.
Speaker0: The results that we get with this is that a human actually, you know,
Speaker0: humans as we are, actually enjoy the process. It releases you from that pressure
Speaker0: of having to do something in addition to your job because you now feel it's part of your job.
Speaker0: You can just speak your way through it. You can even do it when you're in the train or in your car.
Speaker0: And that conversation reveals that you actually get incredibly high quality data.
Speaker0: You get people to speak the way they would when they're facing their managers,
Speaker0: except that they're doing this in a way that is recorded without any pressure
Speaker0: from the manager, potentially making a mistake in what you're saying.
Speaker0: And you're doing just once. You don't have to repeat it any time.
Speaker0: You do it once and you know that anybody that needs this information is going to get it.
Speaker0: That's extremely, extremely releasing, makes your life much more comfortable.
Speaker0: And as soon as you start playing the game and it goes pretty quickly.
Speaker0: And you can start forgetting about the rest of your reporting,
Speaker0: well, then you see it as a way to, I think any organization should be looking
Speaker0: to flatten its organization.
Speaker0: I mean, since the industrial revolution, the scaling of a company has been always the same way.
Speaker0: You need more scale, you grow vertically, you add layers of big management.
Speaker0: And this is, as we discussed, what creates that inefficiency.
Speaker0: You grow the distance between the people on the ground that produce content
Speaker0: that face clients and the people making decisions and that distance creates chaos.
Speaker0: And so you want a company that remains agile, you need to flatten it.
Speaker0: You need to grow horizontally, not vertically.
Speaker0: But as we discussed, this is actually pretty hard to achieve because the more
Speaker0: you grow your team horizontally, the more it's hard for managers because they become overflowed.
Speaker0: They don't know what to do to keep this in sync, to understand what their team
Speaker0: is doing, where to be involved, how to satisfy all of the processes, et cetera.
Speaker0: And so my view our view at Supervised is that the company of the future,
Speaker0: now that AI is a thing, is a company where you actually don't need as many what
Speaker0: the team is doing for you to best react to it in terms of identifying risks.
Speaker0: Making quick decisions, quickly reverting to the people that need your attention.
Speaker0: And this is only achieved if you intermediate this with a systematic process of context analysis.
Speaker0: This virtual chief of staff that will go to your org and for every single of
Speaker0: the hundreds of thousands of employees will capture this information,
Speaker0: write it where it needs to go and flag the actions that are needed.
Speaker1: You just talked about an org chart here.
Speaker1: If managers can lead something like 30 people because AI handles the operational
Speaker1: overhead, what happens to those organizational structures? And just a side question,
Speaker1: are you afraid there will be more operational?
Speaker0: I think it is important to realize what are the limits of AI.
Speaker0: If you follow the marketing posture of the largest AI companies on the market today,
Speaker0: you might be tempted to believe that we are about to get into a post-AGI world
Speaker0: where AI is superior to humans in pretty much every intellectual matter.
Speaker0: For certain things like summarizing texts and extracting certain kinds of outputs
Speaker0: out of text, AI is pretty damn good for producing things like pictures,
Speaker0: videos, et cetera, also pretty damn good.
Speaker0: However, for reasoning, reasoning with a little bit of common sense.
Speaker0: AI is still an incredible disaster.
Speaker0: And I have to say it because you don't realize how big of a disaster it is unless
Speaker0: you've truly played with it professionally and tried to build something.
Speaker0: AI is not mature yet. It is extremely unstable in the way it makes decisions.
Speaker0: And if you truly delegate the most human parts of your job, of your work,
Speaker0: you can be facing disaster.
Speaker0: And I'm not surprised, actually, that we start seeing statistics about the success
Speaker0: rate of pilots in large enterprise.
Speaker0: And they are actually not so good. You know, most pilots fail to deliver the
Speaker0: value that they hope to deliver.
Speaker0: The reason for this is that you have to make sure that the friction to use this
Speaker0: tool is very low because we as humans don't like to change our habits.
Speaker0: But we also have to, you know, give a pretty high level of confidence that the
Speaker0: automation that you're putting in place is going to lead to the right results most of the time.
Speaker0: Because, you know, us humans are imperfect also in nature, but,
Speaker0: you know, it is supposed to be the job of a company, the role of a company to
Speaker0: find the best of us, to contribute to the, you know, to the best positions in the company.
Speaker0: So this is a bit of a personal story that I will share here.
Speaker0: But the first thing, the good side, you know, once you've sold your company.
Speaker0: Your credibility changes dramatically. Like even when you're not supposed to
Speaker0: be truly expert on a specific topic, because you've succeeded at creating,
Speaker0: growing and selling a company, you've closed the cycle,
Speaker0: people start giving you credits for pretty much anything you say.
Speaker0: It doesn't mean that everybody will believe you, you always face critics,
Speaker0: but it's to a certain degree, you have even more credibility than if you had
Speaker0: just grown substantially a company and you were just remaining as the CEO.
Speaker0: It's almost like you've closed the full cycle.
Speaker0: And so it means that many of the fights that you were going through before to
Speaker0: just meet a client, you know, meet a senior person of a prospect at a prospect company,
Speaker0: or to meet an investor, to seduce an investor into investing in your business.
Speaker0: This is such a hard thing for first-time entrepreneurs.
Speaker0: It doesn't mean it's impossible, you know, if I'm still here today,
Speaker0: that it is possible. But it's very hard, very time-consuming.
Speaker0: There is massive, you know, massive rejection. So you have to be extremely resilient
Speaker0: because, you know, 9% out of 10 are going to reject you, you know,
Speaker0: say no to the meeting or take a business. You have to start optimizing.
Speaker0: You have to potentially start hiring people to help you manage what you have.
Speaker0: You have to be thinking about taxes, about lawyers, about where you're potentially
Speaker0: in multiple residencies.
Speaker0: Are you going to maintain them and optimize all of this life?
Speaker0: And, you know, I'm not going to complain. This is generally coupled with a lot
Speaker0: of comfort that you never thought you might have.
Speaker0: But it means you now have a company as a private life.
Speaker0: You have to start thinking about your decisions much more seriously,
Speaker0: not just on the business side, but also on the private side.
Speaker0: And initially, it's a bit of a shock.
Speaker0: And it also comes with changes in the way people interact with you.
Speaker0: You still feel like you're this...
Speaker0: You know, genuine and, you know, humble entrepreneur that, you know,
Speaker0: has suffered for many years in bringing what he, you know, what he achieved,
Speaker0: you still feel like you have everything.
Speaker1: I understand. And also, you may have to decide what's important in your life,
Speaker1: where you put your time, developing a personal strategy. Yeah,
Speaker1: I think that there's a lot of questions we now leave aside.
Speaker1: But I was wondering, when this goes out, the press release goes out a few days
Speaker1: and people are coming, calling, emailing, there is a lot of noise.
Speaker1: How do you filter that for the few important signals?
Speaker1: Do you also use your AI?
Speaker0: No, I will. At some point you have to take your duty seriously and you have
Speaker0: to be doing that, that effort.
Speaker0: I mean, for the exit of Medico, I'll be honest with you.
Speaker0: This is something that I believe a lot of entrepreneurs go through.
Speaker0: But when you have faced so many years of successes and failures,
Speaker0: you know, very big successes and very big failures,
Speaker0: your brain starts to filter this out and makes you a little bit of a sociopath, if I can say.
Speaker0: You know, like you're less excited by success and you're less depressed by failure.
Speaker0: And so to share something a bit private with you, even at the time of the exit
Speaker0: of Medico, for a lot of people, it felt like it was a massive event in the life
Speaker0: of their best friend or family member, which was me. But for me, it was a straight line.
Speaker0: We're not formally raising funds today, but we are certainly happy to discuss with investors.
Speaker0: Any professional entrepreneur will tell you that it's actually good to speak
Speaker0: with investors when you don't need them.
Speaker0: And very bad to speak with them when you need their help.
Speaker0: So yeah, we don't need them, but we're certainly happy to connect,
Speaker0: happy to discuss, present what we do and create a relation.
Speaker1: And are you also currently looking for talented people?
Speaker0: Oh, absolutely. This is actually something that I believe AI has a hard time resolving.
Speaker0: It's still the hardest thing to do, finding the best people,
Speaker0: convincing them to live their incredible career to join you.
Speaker1: So that was Adrian Ciccani, founder and CEO of Supervised.
Speaker1: We discussed leadership at scale, the limits of hierarchy and by voice remains
Speaker1: the most underutilized asset management.
Speaker1: You can find supervised at supervised.ai and Adrian on LinkedIn.
Speaker1: We'll also link the career website for the last question.
Speaker1: That was a conversation about signal over voice.