WEBVTT 00:00:20.807 --> 00:00:24.387 Management doesn't break because leader lack intent. 00:00:24.847 --> 00:00:30.627 It breaks because information processing consumes the capacity to actually lead. 00:00:30.827 --> 00:00:35.847 The seven person ceiling was never biological. It was architectural. 00:00:38.367 --> 00:00:45.067 Bonjour. My guest today is Adrian Ciacani, a founder and CEO of Supervised from 00:00:45.067 --> 00:00:50.607 Souk in Switzerland, and as you can already tell by the Bonjour, he's French, Swiss. 00:00:50.807 --> 00:00:52.607 Or Swiss French, Swiss French, that's right. 00:00:53.007 --> 00:00:59.967 Adrian scaled Moteco through extreme regulatory pressure to 250 million US dollar 00:00:59.967 --> 00:01:05.707 exit to Ripple, building one of Europe's leading digital asset custody platforms. 00:01:05.927 --> 00:01:10.487 But somewhere in that journey, he discovered that management itself was the 00:01:10.487 --> 00:01:12.327 bottleneck, not because people 00:01:12.327 --> 00:01:17.007 couldn't lead, but because information processing left no room to lead. 00:01:17.287 --> 00:01:21.647 Supervised is the answer. a virtual chief of staff for every manager, 00:01:22.107 --> 00:01:25.587 enabling flat organizations that move like startups. 00:01:25.887 --> 00:01:31.747 This conversation is about what really breaks at scale, why voice reveals what 00:01:31.747 --> 00:01:37.687 dashboards hide, and how AI finally makes the supermanager organization possible. 00:01:38.507 --> 00:01:39.787 Bonjour, Adrienne. 00:01:40.527 --> 00:01:41.727 Pleasure to be here, Joe. 00:01:42.447 --> 00:01:46.767 Totally my pleasure. We can say bonjour, we can say gruzzi, it's all fine. 00:01:46.767 --> 00:01:50.547 Let us dive right in at MetaCo. 00:01:50.787 --> 00:01:54.687 You scale through banks, regulators, multiple jurisdictions. 00:01:55.047 --> 00:02:01.807 What was the first moment you realized the organization itself had become the constraint? 00:02:02.027 --> 00:02:07.047 Was it like when you had to open 50 Excel sheets to find one information? 00:02:08.717 --> 00:02:12.417 I mean, the truth is, I started Medaco as a solo founder. 00:02:12.737 --> 00:02:17.417 So it was my first entrepreneurial journey. So I had no perspective over what 00:02:17.417 --> 00:02:19.597 it could become and what it was going to become. 00:02:19.777 --> 00:02:23.457 In fact, quoting a good friend of mine who is a very successful entrepreneur, 00:02:23.897 --> 00:02:28.817 he told me one day that he said, Adrian, you know, had I known how painful and 00:02:28.817 --> 00:02:32.157 complicated that entrepreneurial journey would be, I would have never started. 00:02:32.457 --> 00:02:35.777 You kind of need to be a bit ignorant to even start. 00:02:35.977 --> 00:02:39.877 And that was very true for me. And I started ignorantly, but passionate about 00:02:39.877 --> 00:02:45.357 blockchain technology, having been trading cryptos for many years, already since 2013, 00:02:46.077 --> 00:02:52.217 and realized that it was very hard actually to get into a large enterprise, 00:02:52.497 --> 00:02:57.157 a large bank, subject to regulations with high quality requirements. 00:02:57.757 --> 00:03:02.337 And so very early on, I had to start scaling the team with limited financial means. 00:03:02.537 --> 00:03:07.777 But I had this ambition as an entrepreneur to remain extremely flat and agile. 00:03:09.077 --> 00:03:13.037 Although I had that very clear vision of where the company could start scaling, 00:03:13.277 --> 00:03:16.757 adding people, adding people not just where you would expect, 00:03:16.797 --> 00:03:21.297 like in the engineering team to build faster, but adding people on the delivery 00:03:21.297 --> 00:03:27.757 team to be able to actually hit all of these requests from your clients, the communication. 00:03:27.757 --> 00:03:31.117 I think customer success people that would manage the expectations, 00:03:31.437 --> 00:03:35.277 you know, also be the professional apologizers when something doesn't go as planned. 00:03:35.937 --> 00:03:41.137 And you start creating these departments and very quickly realize that the flat 00:03:41.137 --> 00:03:42.877 structure doesn't seem to work anymore. 00:03:43.097 --> 00:03:47.657 You know, you're like the lonely CEO with 15, 20 direct reports. 00:03:47.657 --> 00:03:52.637 And you start realizing that you become a massive bottleneck and that bottleneck 00:03:52.637 --> 00:03:54.337 at some point hurts your company. 00:03:54.557 --> 00:03:58.177 And so you have to start thinking about layers. And this is, 00:03:58.337 --> 00:04:00.577 I would argue, where everything starts changing. 00:04:01.317 --> 00:04:05.377 One layer is possibly, you know, one additional layer is something you can still, 00:04:05.397 --> 00:04:12.997 you know, deal with because you're still a very successful CEO entrepreneur as an early investor. 00:04:13.217 --> 00:04:16.417 And he always told me, Adrian, you'll see when you reach 40 people, 00:04:16.777 --> 00:04:19.637 everything is going to change and you're going to suffer, my friend. 00:04:20.057 --> 00:04:23.297 And I say, oh, come on, what are you saying? You know, why would that be the case? 00:04:23.397 --> 00:04:26.557 You know, I have great colleagues, great employees, get along well, 00:04:26.917 --> 00:04:28.417 a lot of competence in the company. 00:04:28.917 --> 00:04:31.957 But, you know, so many factors happen at the same time. First one is when you 00:04:31.957 --> 00:04:36.517 need to scale, suddenly you don't have months and months to select the perfect candidate. 00:04:36.777 --> 00:04:40.437 You know, you start hiring people because you have a good gut feel or because 00:04:40.437 --> 00:04:43.377 this is the best out of the few candidates that you've interviewed. 00:04:43.817 --> 00:04:49.297 Sometimes you may sacrifice the culture and you favor the competence or the other way around. 00:04:49.917 --> 00:04:54.857 And quite quickly, you know, this actually forms a pretty inefficient mix. 00:04:54.997 --> 00:04:58.537 And exactly as you said, you know, you tend to believe that adding people will 00:04:58.537 --> 00:05:02.577 linearly scale your productivity. but it's by far a sublinear. 00:05:02.897 --> 00:05:06.417 You know, I would even argue that there is some sort of horizontal asymptote 00:05:06.417 --> 00:05:09.957 that comes quite quickly that is very, very hard to actually cross. 00:05:10.317 --> 00:05:15.117 Or simply a new atmosphere that promotes internal competition and, 00:05:15.117 --> 00:05:19.337 you know, politics in the background, it can quickly become very tricky. 00:05:19.457 --> 00:05:22.777 And so, you know, you discuss this with your board or you discuss this with 00:05:22.777 --> 00:05:25.377 experienced entrepreneurs and they will tell you, hey, yeah, 00:05:25.537 --> 00:05:27.937 you need to start putting in processes, you know. 00:05:28.597 --> 00:05:29.877 And you're like, no, I don't want 00:05:29.877 --> 00:05:32.837 processes. But yeah, you have to start putting in place. I don't know. 00:05:33.257 --> 00:05:37.757 The most basic form of a process could be to put a CRM in place for your sales 00:05:37.757 --> 00:05:42.077 team, which obviously you want to start as early as possible in making decisions and progressing. 00:05:45.197 --> 00:05:49.957 A former colleague of mine, a former boss said, Joe, if a company 00:05:50.983 --> 00:05:55.563 It surpasses two and a half thousand people. It doesn't care about. 00:05:55.803 --> 00:05:59.903 Yeah, I mean, I'll answer the second part first. I mean, the funny thing, 00:06:00.023 --> 00:06:03.563 we were the absolute experts of digital asset custody. 00:06:03.703 --> 00:06:06.463 And for those of the listeners that don't know what it means, 00:06:06.983 --> 00:06:12.503 effectively, we were the digital safe deposit for cryptocurrencies in large banking institutions. 00:06:12.503 --> 00:06:18.523 So if your bank was offering a crypto trading service, it was very likely that 00:06:18.523 --> 00:06:23.283 behind the scene, they were using my solution, my company to secure these holdings. 00:06:23.523 --> 00:06:28.803 Now, even though we were the experts in this, I can tell you that for my own 00:06:28.803 --> 00:06:33.183 private cryptocurrencies, I was the most absolute paranoid person, 00:06:33.183 --> 00:06:37.703 not believing in my own actions in managing them, despite the fact I knew all of the theory. 00:06:37.703 --> 00:06:42.523 Because it is so critical and it is so easy to make a mistake. 00:06:42.863 --> 00:06:47.423 And it also emphasizes how humans are imperfect. 00:06:47.603 --> 00:06:51.083 You might know the theory, but knowing the theory and having practiced it for 00:06:51.083 --> 00:06:55.483 many years does not immunize you against making a mistake by yourself. 00:06:55.723 --> 00:06:59.303 And this is why as you grow as a company, you will always start thinking in 00:06:59.303 --> 00:07:01.603 terms of a decentralization of risk. 00:07:02.243 --> 00:07:06.843 Even the CEO himself actually generally cannot do everything just by signing 00:07:06.843 --> 00:07:11.143 a document. It needs to be approved by a second party, perhaps by the board of directors. 00:07:12.223 --> 00:07:16.903 And this is enforced typically by the charters of the company, 00:07:17.163 --> 00:07:18.343 by the shareholder agreements. 00:07:19.043 --> 00:07:22.883 But in the context of digital assets, this is enforced cryptographically, 00:07:23.043 --> 00:07:25.743 you know, with cybersecurity infrastructure. 00:07:26.223 --> 00:07:29.363 But, you know, clearly it creates that paranoid mindset. 00:07:29.663 --> 00:07:35.963 And I will argue that, yeah, it taints the way you then see an organization. 00:07:35.963 --> 00:07:40.263 You see people which are, and I'm going to say this with all respect that is 00:07:40.263 --> 00:07:46.183 required, but people that contribute in an organization are probabilistic agents in the sense that. 00:07:47.085 --> 00:07:52.525 Generally do their best, but the output of what they produce is probabilistically 00:07:52.525 --> 00:07:55.225 good, you know, but it's also probabilistically bad, you know, 00:07:55.285 --> 00:07:56.805 sometimes it's just not what you expect. 00:07:57.165 --> 00:08:02.705 And so to get people to converge to a particular objective, to get the output 00:08:02.705 --> 00:08:09.185 that you want from your company, you need to create deterministic structure around this chaos. 00:08:09.405 --> 00:08:14.445 You need to make sure that your teams are converging to the ambition of your company. 00:08:15.005 --> 00:08:18.665 Yeah, sure. I mean, And it's a funny thing because it's not just in business, 00:08:18.865 --> 00:08:20.605 you know, it's true even in private life. 00:08:21.465 --> 00:08:27.705 How many of the people you would call friends are you actively keeping in touch 00:08:27.705 --> 00:08:31.425 with, actively in the sense that you proactively write to them, ask how they're doing, 00:08:31.885 --> 00:08:36.185 keep some room in your brain to, you know, to allocate, you know, 00:08:36.265 --> 00:08:38.545 to really have interest in what they do? 00:08:39.244 --> 00:08:43.304 Probably just a couple of people because the reality is that if you have to 00:08:43.304 --> 00:08:46.664 care about your children, about your wife, about a couple of friends, 00:08:46.764 --> 00:08:48.924 and of course, what you're doing at the work, 00:08:49.464 --> 00:08:54.564 very quickly, you reach the limits of what your brain is meant to do, 00:08:54.824 --> 00:08:58.504 which is, you know, really invest yourself in other people's ventures. 00:08:59.284 --> 00:09:03.184 And what is true in private life is very much true in the corporate life. 00:09:03.324 --> 00:09:06.764 You know, you look at the team of whichever department, whether it's engineering, 00:09:07.064 --> 00:09:10.724 sales, products, delivery, legal, et cetera. 00:09:11.564 --> 00:09:17.164 Build that team beyond six, seven, eight people, and you start having a big drama. 00:09:17.364 --> 00:09:20.524 People stop communicating, or if they communicate, it becomes very inefficient. 00:09:21.244 --> 00:09:25.124 The manager of this team has a heart about something that's happening in your 00:09:25.124 --> 00:09:27.704 team, writing information up and down again. 00:09:27.924 --> 00:09:36.044 And the truth is, if you pull managers in companies of 50 employees to 50,000 00:09:36.044 --> 00:09:39.184 employees, pretty much any size beyond the trivial amount of people, 00:09:39.484 --> 00:09:44.404 they will tell you that they spend at the very least one day a week basically 00:09:44.404 --> 00:09:46.164 just doing status collection, 00:09:46.484 --> 00:09:50.364 understanding what is happening in their team and trying to figure it out. 00:09:50.584 --> 00:09:54.784 And in companies where corporate structure has started to emerge as the dominant 00:09:54.784 --> 00:09:59.024 factor, like large companies with lots of processes, it can be that the manager 00:09:59.024 --> 00:10:04.004 is spending more than half of his time just doing that, writing information, filling up reports. 00:10:05.724 --> 00:10:08.284 Supporting the processes of the organization, et cetera. 00:10:09.104 --> 00:10:13.884 And therefore, the truth is the real dominant friction that you're facing when 00:10:13.884 --> 00:10:16.184 you want to scale a company is that one. 00:10:16.344 --> 00:10:21.004 It's information collection, information routing, satisfaction of the processes 00:10:21.004 --> 00:10:22.364 that the company has put in place. 00:10:22.664 --> 00:10:28.764 If you can automate it out, if you can say, this boring part of my job is now, 00:10:28.784 --> 00:10:32.284 let's say, automated in a way that, of course, I'm still involved, 00:10:32.284 --> 00:10:35.384 but I can delegate it to a specialized party, 00:10:36.067 --> 00:10:41.167 I'm already able to scale way past seven people, way past eight people. 00:10:41.307 --> 00:10:43.007 You know, there are companies which are good examples of this, 00:10:43.147 --> 00:10:48.787 like NVIDIA, where, you know, Jensen Huyen is well known to have many more than seven, eight reports. 00:10:49.027 --> 00:10:51.247 It can work, but you need the proper support. 00:10:51.647 --> 00:10:54.907 This support can be human-led. You know, it can be that you have a chief of 00:10:54.907 --> 00:10:59.587 staff or a personal assistant or a series of personal assistants that will help you do that. 00:11:00.687 --> 00:11:07.287 But it can now be AI-driven. And I guess this is where I supervise my company's position today. 00:11:07.867 --> 00:11:13.887 Does it mean to give every manager a virtual chief of staff? 00:11:15.167 --> 00:11:18.067 Yeah, I mean, the basics of it 00:11:18.067 --> 00:11:22.727 is actually very simple. But I'm going to illustrate it with an example. 00:11:23.707 --> 00:11:29.227 The dream of a sales team in an organization is that they can rely on a properly 00:11:29.227 --> 00:11:34.627 populated CRM. you know, a tool they use to track every deal that's currently 00:11:34.627 --> 00:11:38.027 being activated, the progress, the actions, et cetera. 00:11:38.567 --> 00:11:45.627 And in a perfect world, that CRM would have incredibly high quality information. 00:11:45.627 --> 00:11:48.887 And as a manager, you would just extract a report out of it every week, 00:11:48.987 --> 00:11:51.047 and then make your decisions. In practice. 00:11:51.848 --> 00:11:58.288 The CRM, you can ask any company, always has garbage data. So it's always outdated, 00:11:58.308 --> 00:11:59.828 sometimes by weeks or months. 00:12:00.568 --> 00:12:07.028 You can have deals that you were supposed to close like a few months ago, 00:12:07.068 --> 00:12:09.468 which are still in the CRM and actually not close at anything. 00:12:09.868 --> 00:12:14.188 And so the first step in resolving that management duty, 00:12:14.388 --> 00:12:18.408 which is indeed to understand what is happening and help drive the direction 00:12:18.408 --> 00:12:25.708 is to be able to collect and build and route that quality information in the 00:12:25.708 --> 00:12:30.748 same way you would if you were facing the person in your office or in the kitchen 00:12:30.748 --> 00:12:32.268 having a coffee with the employee, 00:12:32.508 --> 00:12:37.228 but without having to do that synchronous meeting every week that is low value added, 00:12:37.508 --> 00:12:39.608 that both sides feel is a bit of a waste of time. 00:12:40.108 --> 00:12:43.488 And how do you achieve that? Well, you create an intermediary. 00:12:43.848 --> 00:12:46.248 You add that intermediary. That intermediary could be, again, 00:12:46.448 --> 00:12:49.188 some sort of a personal assistant, but personal assistants are very expensive. 00:12:49.828 --> 00:12:54.168 Let's call it chief of staff. It's very expensive and it's hard to scale at 00:12:54.168 --> 00:12:56.248 the level of every layers of your organization. 00:12:56.548 --> 00:13:02.528 So let's call this chief of staff now an AI, an AI that actually is able to 00:13:02.528 --> 00:13:04.868 speak as voice to the organization. 00:13:05.308 --> 00:13:08.348 Now, of course, having that context is not enough. 00:13:08.728 --> 00:13:12.828 Then what you want to do with it is route it to everyone that needs it. 00:13:13.148 --> 00:13:17.128 It might be much more than your direct manager. It might be that you are the 00:13:17.128 --> 00:13:21.168 engineering team that needs to share information with the product team or the 00:13:21.168 --> 00:13:23.788 product team that needs to share information to the sales team. 00:13:24.788 --> 00:13:28.468 Potentially, it is even the CEO sharing information downstream to the employees 00:13:28.468 --> 00:13:29.708 about the company direction. 00:13:30.459 --> 00:13:36.759 And so once you've achieved that routing of information, then comes decision-making. 00:13:37.139 --> 00:13:41.539 Then comes, you know, I'm a manager. I see there is something happening. 00:13:41.539 --> 00:13:45.799 I understand because my AI is flagging to me that there is a risk or a need for my support. 00:13:46.179 --> 00:13:51.579 And then can I activate the face-to-face with my employee and the discussion and investigation? 00:13:51.879 --> 00:13:56.699 And then can I start using the tool to formalize my decision and push it downstream? 00:13:56.699 --> 00:14:03.479 By having this automation, what you're actually achieving is that you are delegating to an AI. 00:14:04.499 --> 00:14:10.719 Coming back to my example before with CRM, where the data is always incomplete 00:14:10.719 --> 00:14:15.719 and outdated, whatever policing process you put in place, that's not just true for CRM. 00:14:15.719 --> 00:14:20.339 This is true for all of the reporting you can think of, from basic Excel sheet 00:14:20.339 --> 00:14:25.779 filling to HR surveys, you know, to delivery project supervision. 00:14:26.319 --> 00:14:31.739 Data is never accurate, whichever tool you use. And that's truly because there is this friction. 00:14:32.339 --> 00:14:36.739 Everybody hates writing things on a keyboard. You've already had a very painful 00:14:36.739 --> 00:14:39.699 and long day. You've already discussed with 20 different clients. 00:14:39.899 --> 00:14:45.159 Why the hell would you take, you know, time on your dinner, which you well deserve with your wife? 00:14:46.559 --> 00:14:50.139 To report things in an Excel sheet. If you have to do it, you will do it, 00:14:50.199 --> 00:14:52.199 but you will be very minimalistic in doing so. 00:14:52.766 --> 00:14:57.306 Whereas if you actually, you know, take five minutes every day or let's say 00:14:57.306 --> 00:15:00.626 10 minutes a couple of times a week to just receive a call which has been blocked 00:15:00.626 --> 00:15:03.786 in your agenda, as if you were speaking with one of your colleagues, 00:15:04.126 --> 00:15:07.546 and you don't really have to think, you just follow the conversation and speak 00:15:07.546 --> 00:15:08.686 your mind out naturally. 00:15:09.966 --> 00:15:13.946 The results that we get with this is that a human actually, you know, 00:15:14.066 --> 00:15:19.006 humans as we are, actually enjoy the process. It releases you from that pressure 00:15:19.006 --> 00:15:23.086 of having to do something in addition to your job because you now feel it's part of your job. 00:15:23.206 --> 00:15:26.266 You can just speak your way through it. You can even do it when you're in the train or in your car. 00:15:26.666 --> 00:15:32.546 And that conversation reveals that you actually get incredibly high quality data. 00:15:32.546 --> 00:15:35.586 You get people to speak the way they would when they're facing their managers, 00:15:35.906 --> 00:15:40.486 except that they're doing this in a way that is recorded without any pressure 00:15:40.486 --> 00:15:43.206 from the manager, potentially making a mistake in what you're saying. 00:15:44.666 --> 00:15:47.726 And you're doing just once. You don't have to repeat it any time. 00:15:47.886 --> 00:15:51.806 You do it once and you know that anybody that needs this information is going to get it. 00:15:51.966 --> 00:15:56.166 That's extremely, extremely releasing, makes your life much more comfortable. 00:15:56.706 --> 00:16:00.006 And as soon as you start playing the game and it goes pretty quickly. 00:16:00.599 --> 00:16:03.779 And you can start forgetting about the rest of your reporting, 00:16:04.199 --> 00:16:09.839 well, then you see it as a way to, I think any organization should be looking 00:16:09.839 --> 00:16:12.319 to flatten its organization. 00:16:12.579 --> 00:16:19.219 I mean, since the industrial revolution, the scaling of a company has been always the same way. 00:16:19.379 --> 00:16:23.239 You need more scale, you grow vertically, you add layers of big management. 00:16:23.519 --> 00:16:26.379 And this is, as we discussed, what creates that inefficiency. 00:16:26.379 --> 00:16:30.239 You grow the distance between the people on the ground that produce content 00:16:30.239 --> 00:16:34.719 that face clients and the people making decisions and that distance creates chaos. 00:16:35.099 --> 00:16:38.719 And so you want a company that remains agile, you need to flatten it. 00:16:38.819 --> 00:16:40.899 You need to grow horizontally, not vertically. 00:16:41.399 --> 00:16:45.779 But as we discussed, this is actually pretty hard to achieve because the more 00:16:45.779 --> 00:16:50.379 you grow your team horizontally, the more it's hard for managers because they become overflowed. 00:16:50.439 --> 00:16:53.379 They don't know what to do to keep this in sync, to understand what their team 00:16:53.379 --> 00:16:57.379 is doing, where to be involved, how to satisfy all of the processes, et cetera. 00:16:57.579 --> 00:17:03.219 And so my view our view at Supervised is that the company of the future, 00:17:03.599 --> 00:17:08.619 now that AI is a thing, is a company where you actually don't need as many what 00:17:08.619 --> 00:17:14.659 the team is doing for you to best react to it in terms of identifying risks. 00:17:15.499 --> 00:17:20.219 Making quick decisions, quickly reverting to the people that need your attention. 00:17:20.579 --> 00:17:26.259 And this is only achieved if you intermediate this with a systematic process of context analysis. 00:17:26.259 --> 00:17:30.999 This virtual chief of staff that will go to your org and for every single of 00:17:30.999 --> 00:17:34.979 the hundreds of thousands of employees will capture this information, 00:17:35.579 --> 00:17:38.999 write it where it needs to go and flag the actions that are needed. 00:17:40.699 --> 00:17:44.279 You just talked about an org chart here. 00:17:44.459 --> 00:17:50.119 If managers can lead something like 30 people because AI handles the operational 00:17:50.119 --> 00:17:55.499 overhead, what happens to those organizational structures? And just a side question, 00:17:55.859 --> 00:17:58.279 are you afraid there will be more operational? 00:17:59.455 --> 00:18:02.955 I think it is important to realize what are the limits of AI. 00:18:03.275 --> 00:18:10.795 If you follow the marketing posture of the largest AI companies on the market today, 00:18:11.255 --> 00:18:18.575 you might be tempted to believe that we are about to get into a post-AGI world 00:18:18.575 --> 00:18:23.155 where AI is superior to humans in pretty much every intellectual matter. 00:18:24.355 --> 00:18:30.655 For certain things like summarizing texts and extracting certain kinds of outputs 00:18:30.655 --> 00:18:35.495 out of text, AI is pretty damn good for producing things like pictures, 00:18:35.815 --> 00:18:38.235 videos, et cetera, also pretty damn good. 00:18:38.775 --> 00:18:43.395 However, for reasoning, reasoning with a little bit of common sense. 00:18:43.975 --> 00:18:46.435 AI is still an incredible disaster. 00:18:46.675 --> 00:18:50.995 And I have to say it because you don't realize how big of a disaster it is unless 00:18:50.995 --> 00:18:55.435 you've truly played with it professionally and tried to build something. 00:18:56.015 --> 00:19:01.435 AI is not mature yet. It is extremely unstable in the way it makes decisions. 00:19:01.695 --> 00:19:06.695 And if you truly delegate the most human parts of your job, of your work, 00:19:06.875 --> 00:19:09.215 you can be facing disaster. 00:19:09.375 --> 00:19:15.115 And I'm not surprised, actually, that we start seeing statistics about the success 00:19:15.115 --> 00:19:17.495 rate of pilots in large enterprise. 00:19:17.875 --> 00:19:21.535 And they are actually not so good. You know, most pilots fail to deliver the 00:19:21.535 --> 00:19:22.975 value that they hope to deliver. 00:19:23.435 --> 00:19:27.275 The reason for this is that you have to make sure that the friction to use this 00:19:27.275 --> 00:19:31.435 tool is very low because we as humans don't like to change our habits. 00:19:31.815 --> 00:19:36.455 But we also have to, you know, give a pretty high level of confidence that the 00:19:36.455 --> 00:19:40.315 automation that you're putting in place is going to lead to the right results most of the time. 00:19:40.575 --> 00:19:44.855 Because, you know, us humans are imperfect also in nature, but, 00:19:45.035 --> 00:19:48.415 you know, it is supposed to be the job of a company, the role of a company to 00:19:48.415 --> 00:19:52.895 find the best of us, to contribute to the, you know, to the best positions in the company. 00:19:52.975 --> 00:19:57.355 So this is a bit of a personal story that I will share here. 00:19:57.475 --> 00:20:01.975 But the first thing, the good side, you know, once you've sold your company. 00:20:03.891 --> 00:20:08.871 Your credibility changes dramatically. Like even when you're not supposed to 00:20:08.871 --> 00:20:13.511 be truly expert on a specific topic, because you've succeeded at creating, 00:20:13.631 --> 00:20:15.691 growing and selling a company, you've closed the cycle, 00:20:16.191 --> 00:20:19.051 people start giving you credits for pretty much anything you say. 00:20:19.211 --> 00:20:21.991 It doesn't mean that everybody will believe you, you always face critics, 00:20:22.271 --> 00:20:27.351 but it's to a certain degree, you have even more credibility than if you had 00:20:27.351 --> 00:20:31.431 just grown substantially a company and you were just remaining as the CEO. 00:20:31.431 --> 00:20:34.491 It's almost like you've closed the full cycle. 00:20:34.731 --> 00:20:39.931 And so it means that many of the fights that you were going through before to 00:20:39.931 --> 00:20:45.351 just meet a client, you know, meet a senior person of a prospect at a prospect company, 00:20:45.951 --> 00:20:50.991 or to meet an investor, to seduce an investor into investing in your business. 00:20:51.251 --> 00:20:54.331 This is such a hard thing for first-time entrepreneurs. 00:20:54.671 --> 00:20:57.111 It doesn't mean it's impossible, you know, if I'm still here today, 00:20:57.211 --> 00:21:00.331 that it is possible. But it's very hard, very time-consuming. 00:21:01.111 --> 00:21:06.191 There is massive, you know, massive rejection. So you have to be extremely resilient 00:21:06.191 --> 00:21:09.191 because, you know, 9% out of 10 are going to reject you, you know, 00:21:09.251 --> 00:21:12.491 say no to the meeting or take a business. You have to start optimizing. 00:21:12.791 --> 00:21:15.391 You have to potentially start hiring people to help you manage what you have. 00:21:15.971 --> 00:21:22.931 You have to be thinking about taxes, about lawyers, about where you're potentially 00:21:22.931 --> 00:21:23.971 in multiple residencies. 00:21:24.031 --> 00:21:27.131 Are you going to maintain them and optimize all of this life? 00:21:27.511 --> 00:21:31.891 And, you know, I'm not going to complain. This is generally coupled with a lot 00:21:31.891 --> 00:21:34.311 of comfort that you never thought you might have. 00:21:34.551 --> 00:21:38.711 But it means you now have a company as a private life. 00:21:38.991 --> 00:21:43.371 You have to start thinking about your decisions much more seriously, 00:21:43.631 --> 00:21:45.811 not just on the business side, but also on the private side. 00:21:45.951 --> 00:21:48.631 And initially, it's a bit of a shock. 00:21:49.011 --> 00:21:55.071 And it also comes with changes in the way people interact with you. 00:21:55.251 --> 00:21:56.891 You still feel like you're this... 00:21:57.484 --> 00:22:03.624 You know, genuine and, you know, humble entrepreneur that, you know, 00:22:03.764 --> 00:22:08.024 has suffered for many years in bringing what he, you know, what he achieved, 00:22:08.164 --> 00:22:10.444 you still feel like you have everything. 00:22:11.184 --> 00:22:17.184 I understand. And also, you may have to decide what's important in your life, 00:22:17.444 --> 00:22:22.044 where you put your time, developing a personal strategy. Yeah, 00:22:22.384 --> 00:22:25.884 I think that there's a lot of questions we now leave aside. 00:22:26.064 --> 00:22:31.544 But I was wondering, when this goes out, the press release goes out a few days 00:22:31.544 --> 00:22:37.164 and people are coming, calling, emailing, there is a lot of noise. 00:22:37.164 --> 00:22:42.084 How do you filter that for the few important signals? 00:22:42.404 --> 00:22:43.984 Do you also use your AI? 00:22:46.811 --> 00:22:51.511 No, I will. At some point you have to take your duty seriously and you have 00:22:51.511 --> 00:22:52.991 to be doing that, that effort. 00:22:53.251 --> 00:22:57.491 I mean, for the exit of Medico, I'll be honest with you. 00:22:58.491 --> 00:23:01.251 This is something that I believe a lot of entrepreneurs go through. 00:23:01.251 --> 00:23:05.571 But when you have faced so many years of successes and failures, 00:23:05.771 --> 00:23:08.291 you know, very big successes and very big failures, 00:23:08.671 --> 00:23:16.531 your brain starts to filter this out and makes you a little bit of a sociopath, if I can say. 00:23:16.671 --> 00:23:21.111 You know, like you're less excited by success and you're less depressed by failure. 00:23:21.111 --> 00:23:26.091 And so to share something a bit private with you, even at the time of the exit 00:23:26.091 --> 00:23:30.971 of Medico, for a lot of people, it felt like it was a massive event in the life 00:23:30.971 --> 00:23:35.191 of their best friend or family member, which was me. But for me, it was a straight line. 00:23:35.331 --> 00:23:40.991 We're not formally raising funds today, but we are certainly happy to discuss with investors. 00:23:42.151 --> 00:23:46.531 Any professional entrepreneur will tell you that it's actually good to speak 00:23:46.531 --> 00:23:48.331 with investors when you don't need them. 00:23:48.951 --> 00:23:52.231 And very bad to speak with them when you need their help. 00:23:52.551 --> 00:23:56.271 So yeah, we don't need them, but we're certainly happy to connect, 00:23:56.491 --> 00:23:59.131 happy to discuss, present what we do and create a relation. 00:24:00.231 --> 00:24:04.111 And are you also currently looking for talented people? 00:24:04.831 --> 00:24:11.131 Oh, absolutely. This is actually something that I believe AI has a hard time resolving. 00:24:11.551 --> 00:24:14.731 It's still the hardest thing to do, finding the best people, 00:24:15.891 --> 00:24:18.891 convincing them to live their incredible career to join you. 00:24:18.891 --> 00:24:23.951 So that was Adrian Ciccani, founder and CEO of Supervised. 00:24:24.191 --> 00:24:29.091 We discussed leadership at scale, the limits of hierarchy and by voice remains 00:24:29.091 --> 00:24:31.631 the most underutilized asset management. 00:24:31.811 --> 00:24:36.151 You can find supervised at supervised.ai and Adrian on LinkedIn. 00:24:36.651 --> 00:24:39.671 We'll also link the career website for the last question. 00:24:39.851 --> 00:24:44.691 That was a conversation about signal over voice.