52 – Apple Vision Pro

Can AI be a co-founder? Do you need a technical co-founder, any more? How about a business co-founder? What can AI do for you as co-founder? Will this become the “brave new world” of start-ups, small and medium businesses? For this and much more discussion, a no BS perspective on AI as a potential co-founder. Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Intro     Welcome to episode 70 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we’ll talk about AI as a co-founder. Can AI be your co-founder? Do you need a technical co-founder anymore? Or do you need a business co-founder anymore? What can AI do for you as a co-founder? Will this become the brave new world of startup and small businesses? Nuno, what’s your take on this topic? Have you started seeing that for early stage startups, the AI co-founder?   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah. We start seeing this notion of people now—”Oh, I could be a single founder.” I mean, single founders have existed for a long time. We’ll come back to a little bit the taxonomies of founding teams. But definitely, is now a little bit of a trend where people are like, “Well, I don’t need a co-founder. I’m just going to go do my own thing.” Normally, the case is made more for, “Oh, I don’t need a technical co-founder. I can vibe code and put some stuff together and go through things.”     As we go through the episode today, I think we’ll go into the details on why technical co-founders might still matter and why there are certain areas of technical founding that might not matter as much where AI can really be your co-pilot, so to speak.     The Classic Case for Co-Founders     But maybe let’s start with what is the case for co-founders? Why do you need to have a co-founder? Why can’t you just do it yourself? Historically, there’s been really sort of an angle where there’s sort of these two entities in the founding team. Right? The business founder and the technical founder.     The business founder is the person that runs business related activities. If you’re doing, for example, enterprise software, SaaS, et cetera, your business co-founder is responsible for go-to-market like hiring sales—in particular, at the beginning actually being the person who does sales, establishing partnerships, creating and managing elements that are more related to admin with the help maybe of third parties around finance, et cetera. The business founder is more the person who’s focused on the business aspects of the company, which would be go-to-market, which includes sales, channel partnerships, marketing, et cetera. Might include, as I said, the admin side, et cetera.     Then the technical co-founder is more focused on elements that are connected to the technology stack, development of the code base. If it’s just software, development of software, could be more on the product side as well, someone who’s more of a product manager, et cetera. That’s why you need those two entities. Because you need these two entities, so to speak, these two people. Because you need someone who has more knowledge of how to develop a code base, how to get it off the ground, how to develop the MVP, the minimum viable product early on.     On the other side, you need someone who figures out: how do we get this thing to market, how do we actually deploy it, how do we monetise it, how do we create partnerships if they apply. That’s why we’ve had this classic case for founding teams. Now just to be very clear, it is also true that we’ve also had single founding teams for a long time. We have companies that have been founding only for one person. But at the end of the day, the ethos has been, let’s have two co-founders, one on the technical side at least and one or more on the technical side and one or more on the business side at the very least.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s true. That’s what you have typically seen. Maybe, going back historically, maybe the most famous example of this technical co-founder plus business co-founder has been the founding team of Apple—Steve Jobs with Mr Wozniak. Steve, on the business side; Woz, as he was called, on the technical side. That has been that maybe that’s reference point for all of Silicon Valley for decades. At the same time, it has not been true for every successful company. If I take HP, for instance—if I remember well, they were both technical co-founders: Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard. If you take Microsoft, Bill Gates had, in some ways, a lesser co-founder, but both were technical. Paul Allen was technical like Bill Gates.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I would say Gates was more incredibly technical, but he became a business guy. I think that was part of the secrets of Microsoft early on. He was very business-savvy in some ways. He was very technical. Until this day, I think he’s extremely technical and extremely intelligent, but he was definitely very business-savvy.   Bertrand Schmitt He was able to wear two hats in some ways. If you think about HP, it’s probably a similar story. When we talk about the one-person founder alone by himself, the question would be, is it a technical co-founder or business co-founder or a mix of both? Someone who can do both even early on or who learned to do both pretty quickly. Probably, Bill Gates would be a good example if we assume Paul Allen was less critical.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah. I think that’s a good point, and you went back to one of the OGs like Wozniak and Jobs. I’d say Jobs was business clearly, great marketeer, et cetera. But he was also very deeply involved in product. Interestingly enough, think maybe not as involved on product early on as he became later on with NeXT and then his second coming, so to speak, to Apple. Where you get much more involved in product management and how products were deployed. But to your point, he wasn’t a technical co-founder. Clearly, that was not the role.     I think if we look at some of the great success like Google, Sergei and Larry were both very technical. I guess they brought in Eric Schmidt very early on to be the CEO. But at the end of the day, the definition of founders in Silicon Valley, maybe we’ll come back to that later, is at least you need to have technical founders early on. Then maybe the business people will come along or maybe one of the technical people will go more onto the business side. But you need to have this duality of role that you, Bertrand, we were just talking about. Someone who either becomes more business-savvy, more business side, but definitely someone who’s more on the technical side. I think that’s how the Silicon Valley has emerged over the last many decades. Right?   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. It’s interesting you brought in the story of Google with Eric Schmidt because you could argue they brought him in as a CEO, but he used to be CTO at—was it Novell? I forgot.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Novell. Yeah. I think he was CEO of Novell at some point. Yeah.   Bertrand Schmitt He was CEO at some point because I was going to say, clearly, he has also a technical background. Able to do the business side. No question. But he was also coming from the technical side.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro He was definitely technical at the beginning of his career, and he was also at PARC, Bell Labs, and a variety of other organisations. He was in software engineering at Sun Microsystems, to your point. Then he became the CEO and chairman of Novell. But he is a technical guy by background, for sure. No doubt. He has a PhD. But he was brought in to be the CEO. He was brought in to be more the business guy. I think, very honestly, Silicon Valley loves the story of actually the technical CEO. The person who has at least very product or deep product knowledge and understanding of technology, so it doesn’t get bullshitted necessarily by the rest of the engineering team, so to speak.     Now there’s notable exceptions to that. There are companies that were built very heavily on people that were incredibly business-savvy and very much on the go-to-market side. But, again, justifying why you have co-founders, why you have the technical person and the business person at the very least early on in the structure of the company.   Bertrand Schmitt If we look at more recently, of course, we have the exception of Elon Musk starting and running so many companies in parallel. Some he didn’t technically funded. He was early on investor, took over very quickly. But he’s also an interesting example of a very deeply technical person with very strong business acumen, obviously. That’s another example. Do you have examples of many successful companies just started by a very business co-person in the tech industry? Obviously, outside tech, it’s a different story. Yeah?   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Not a lot, but I feel like in the enterprise software side, there are people that have managed to be great at doing it because they are amazing at building sales teams, and amazing at then building engineering teams around them. I’m not sure I can start giving as many examples as we’ve given on the other side of people that did have a very strong technical background so to speak. I don’t know if he’s a technical guy. I do think he had the bachelor’s in electrical engineering. One guy is David Duffield. He was the guy who founded PeopleSoft and then later on founded Workday.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. I was looking for him, actually.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro David Duffield, to my knowledge, I think he has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and then MBA. But I feel when he started his companies later on, he was very much on the business side. He had gone through marketing at IBM, and did a variety of other roles that led him to create PeopleSoft in 1987. My perspective is probably that he had become more of a business guy later in his career.     But to your point, I don’t think there is a ton of examples. Jobs, I guess, maybe was a great example of that because he was very business. He wasn’t as technical. I think he always had a great product mind, but he wasn’t very technical, from what we know about Steve Jobs.   Bertrand Schmitt Of course, we have Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. I think he did it alone. No? I don’t have memories of any co-founder of Oracle. He was technical originally.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah. I’m not sure if he had a co-founder. Actually, that’s a really good question. These stories are never very well told, so one never knows. My knowledge, I don’t think he was. I do think he’s he was very sales-driven from the outset when he was doing Oracle.   Bertrand Schmitt No. Actually, he co-founded Oracle. Bob Miner and Ed Oates were the other co-founders.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro He founded Software Development Labs, right? Yes. Then they changed names at some point. They changed names a couple of times, actually, so he did co-found it. But he was more of the sales guy from what I understand. He was more the hardcore go-to-market guy, so to speak. Really impressive how he built that. I think that’s another good example of someone that was more on the business side that managed to scale a company dramatically. Really interesting.     Not a ton of examples, but probably if you guys are listening to this, and you have a lot of examples that you want to share, you share with us. Maybe there have been some certainly on the enterprise side, enterprise platforms, or Software as a Service side that have been incredibly successful. Do feel free to share with us on X or on LinkedIn.   Bertrand Schmitt Going back to AI as a co-founder, do you see AI as a potential technical co-founder or more like a business co-founder? What’s your take?   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro AI as the Technical Co-Founder     Let’s start maybe with the technical side, because I think that’s the most interesting one to debate. Could you be a business-savvy person that just uses artificial intelligence as your technical co-founder, and you don’t need anyone technical early on? There’s now a lot of discussions that people have built an MVP in a couple of weeks, raised $500,000, raised a bunch of money and went forward.     I’m not sure I’d call it an MVP, a minimum viable product, but building a proof of concept or something early on with the help of AI, I feel is eminently doable these days. With vibe coding, with all the tools that people have out there. I am still of the opinion, again, being a computer engineer by background, that at some point having technical founders on board or technical people on board very early on is pretty important. The reality is, we’ve had this discussion in one of our previous episodes, is we need to go back to the methodology of software development.     For those who are listening to us who are not very technical, for a very long time, just a very quick rehash, the world was based on this methodological approach to software development, which was called waterfall, where you would first think through design, the architecture of the system, and only later you’d code it, and then you test it, and then you deploy it. It looked like a waterfall. It looked like every stage has its own part.     Then at some point in time, I would say probably with the advent of the Internet late ’90s, we started going to a world that is definitely more going through a methodological approach that now people call broadly agile software development. Again, if you guys want to go back and listen to the different methodological approaches, we’ve had episodes on it in the past, so you can definitely Google it and search for it.     The world has gone to agile. What that means is that, with going through an agile software development where it’s a lot more iterative, where you’re deploying code a lot more iteratively, you might be under the impression that, actually you don’t need to architect systems very early on. You just need to fake it until you make it. You just need to develop a code base that you can use, and then you go and basically, it works, or it doesn’t work. I think that’s still a mistake. I think the world has gone too agile. We discussed that in one of our previous episodes as well.     Architecting the platforms and what you’re doing early on is important. I think that’s one of the key reasons why you still should have a technical co-founder, and it’s going to be very difficult for AI totally replace it. Because I think the parts of AI that you can use as, so to speak, as a technical co-founder are the parts that would be done by a relatively junior developer. If you’re not very good at asking AI for what you need in terms of code, the code you’re going to get is going to be crap. The architecture and the underpinning and everything that’s underneath it, the platforms that you’d use in terms of your cloud architecture, et cetera, will also be crap.     Basically, you can develop a proof of concept. Maybe you can even get to an MVP early on, but at some point in time, you’ll need to rewrite the whole thing. You need to get technical talent in, just to figure out, is this code base unique or not? For applications that are just software, basic apps, et cetera, potentially can get away with it early on, but at some point, you’re going to pay the cost of it—of not having had a technical co-founder, of not having had any help in terms of architecting the system early on, of not having had any senior software developer early on prompting the AI or working with the team or developing it him or herself. You’re going to pay that cost at some point in time.     Now for deep tech stuff or heavy-duty platforms, whatever, there’s no way in hell. Because that’s not something that AI can help you today fundamentally innovate on. It’s just the level of knowledge you need to have to build it. It’s intrinsically linked to a technical co-founder, so to speak. My perspective on it: it’s great to if you’re doing software, if you’re doing something that’s little bit simpler—be it consumer or enterprise software—maybe you can get away with AI as your co-founder early on. You’re going to pay the price later on, so having at least senior engineering team early on that can help you or can help you think through things is something that actually has a lot of value. I feel the more you delay it, the more you’re going to pay for it later on.     Can you raise money? I think it’s very difficult. Again, unless you figured out some angle on your go-to-market or the business side or something that allows you to have a bunch of traction, retention engagement early on because you figured out some angle, that’s great. But you definitely won’t have developed a tech mode. That’s the piece that at some point in time you’re going to have to pay for. What’s your perspective, Bertrand?   Bertrand Schmitt I think as you say, it depends on the industry. If you are in deep tech or core infrastructure, it’s quite obvious that you need someone already technical to lead that because the technical side will truly be your key differentiating factor. You need that not just to raise money, but just truly successfully execute. If the product is a bit less technical like many SaaS products are, to be frank, I guess it’s a different story.     For me, the question would be what type of non-technical funder are we talking about that can benefit from an AI co-founder? If we are talking about the business co-founder who truly has no clue about how you build stuff, I guess it won’t really work. Yes, maybe you can fake it to go to the first level of the model, raise a few $100,000s, and then find your co-founder.     I will say where it gets more interesting is if you are technical enough yourself, have a good business sense, and just don’t want to have a technical co-founder for some reason because you don’t want to share the equity, you don’t want to share the control, or you just want to have some level of control on the whole business, but you don’t have the time, you don’t have the true expertise. I think that’s where AI can be quite interesting, actually.     I must say myself, I’ve been quite impressed of how I’ve been able to use AI recently to develop tools, to develop products, to build infrastructure in the cloud. Yes, it requires me to spend some time to understand what I’m doing because I was not going to just trust blindly the AI. I spent some time discussing with it options, and I must have been quite impressed how it was coming up with a level of expertise that is actually not so easy to find. Because when you build out infrastructure and stuff, you have to think at so many levels—from security, to Linux configuration, to network, to storage, to development stack. You’ll realise that it’s actually quite rare to find anyone, even a good CTO who has truly expertise on all of this stuff. That’s where you realise that there is a lot of value if you kind of understand what you are doing, and you don’t let your AI go wild. Because it’s very clear that if you let your AI go wild, step by step, it goes wrong. It’s very clear.     From my perspective, if you are technical enough—like a product manager, for instance, who did some engineering studies, learned some computer science. I’ve not really been deep technical, but understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, have some understanding about what is state-of-art in the industry, but didn’t rise from the ranks of coding and developing or network administration, that sort of stuff. I think you might get real value from AI today as long as you are ready to control it relatively tightly.     For instance, vibe coding, I have absolutely no trust in that. I think it’s just plain crazy when you see how it’s working. But I think you can do some development where you are helpful significantly with AI. You can make the architecture decisions with AI. I think there is a lot you can do if you have some, I will say, technical flair, but not deep technical expertise.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah. I mean, it’s unavoidable that AI will take over a lot of coding right now, that people will be using AI agents to develop code for them. I think there’s Y Combinator Winter ’25 data that 25% of the startups are using 95% plus of AI-generated code bases. I think that’s a bit scary, but anyway.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s scary for me, as of today’s technology.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro It’s very scary. Yeah. Back to the point, you will pay for it at some point. There’s another unintended consequence of everything is AI-coded, so to speak, which is we often forget that companies, when they’re early, they might have a very clear vision of what they want to become and what product they’re developing. But at some point in time, they might have to, shockingly enough, pivot and go to other areas. If we think about pivoting as part of the intrinsic development of a startup through its life, that you serve intrinsic, maybe at some point you’ll need to change, in terms of what product area you’re going after, even what business you’re going after, a lot of it sometimes actually is educated by the tech stack that you’ve built in the first place.     We’ve had amazing failures in companies, notable gaming companies that failed as gaming companies that led to the creation of great companies. I won’t flag App Annie, but App Annie came out of a gaming company. Slack came out of a gaming company as well. There’s all these things that sometimes happen, and it happens because someone developed code that was really, really good on something else.     That allows you to figure out maybe we should pivot. Maybe we should go after that space instead. Maybe we have more of a platform angle here rather than an actual app angle or vice versa. We’re more in an app angle than a platform angle here. That doesn’t happen if you’re just coding stuff that serves a purpose. There’s no actual quality of code that would allow you to, at some point, go and pivot to something else. I think that’s a little bit the unintended consequence of also having such huge dependency on AI-generated code bases and potentially not having a technical co-founder just because you’re like, I don’t want to deal with technical co-founders, and it’s too complicated, et cetera.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. I mean, you could argue before AI, what were people doing if they didn’t want to have a technical co-founder or couldn’t find a technical co-founder early on? We had many situations, I guess you heard as well, about teams that are outsourcing their early development to some sweatshop far away. We thought control was talking about what’s going on. In some ways, that’s similar to AI vibe coding today. You have no clue what’s happening. You ask for change, and you get some change, and all the stuff got broken. It was available in a different format, and definitely more expensive. You had the option before, and obviously, that was not a great sign. I guess some very early investor will accept it if there is a plan to change that, basically, and make a tech transfer of some sort.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro It’s very interesting because I’m going on two different portfolio companies of mine. I’ve gone through two different at the same time two different stages. One where the two co-founders weren’t highly technical. One of the co-founders was really a product person, though, product manager, et cetera. At some point in time, they believe we want to control more of our engineering team, so they started having more and more of their engineering team in house and less of it outsourced. Very interestingly, another co-founder, actually, co-founder who’s the CEO of a company, she is a computer science background, and she can code. She’s actually going the opposite direction now. She’s like, I want to outsource more and more of my team actually, because I can control quality.     I think what’s really important is can you control the quality of what you’re getting on the other end, back to your point. If you can have visibility on what you want, you can have some ability to have oversight of the code base that’s being generated, you know it’s solid, and you know it’s very strong, and the quality of the code is strong, I mean, it doesn’t matter if you outsource it or not.     To your point, you could use AI for a lot of stuff if you’re an individual contributor or if you’re a founder, et cetera. If you don’t have that knowledge, if you don’t have that understanding, if you can’t judge the quality of a code base and the architecture that your team has put together, then maybe you should have a technical co-founder at some point in time or a very senior hire very early on to the company that can help you make those decisions.     I feel AI—as a full on technical co-founder—maybe can get away with it early on, stage-wise, and maybe pre-seed. Maybe you’re early days of figuring stuff out, but at some point, you’re going to pay the price for it. Be it at the series C stage or a series A stage, you’re going to pay for it. If you’re really, like, I’m not very technical, and I don’t need a technical person, I feel at some point you’re going to pay for it. At some point, someone’s got to ask, where’s your senior technical person. That’s keeping the trains going, either CTO, VPN, et cetera.   Bertrand Schmitt You talk about evaluating the quality of the code and everything. I mean, you could argue you could use AI for that. I’m sure AI these days is not so bad to evaluate code quality. How is it structured? How is it documented? How which standard is respecting? I think, actually, AI for this type of task is really not bad. You as a founder, that might help you understand that if you decided to use AI to build, you could use AI to review. If decided to outsource to build, you could use AI to review. By the way, if you use outsourcing these days, how are you sure that, I mean, it’s not a lot of AIs behind the scenes.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Correct. I mean, you can’t be sure unless you have, again, some technical knowledge, or you’re checking the code in some way. I think my verdict on can AI be a technical co-founder is yes early on, but not long term if you are a company that has some level of technology differentiation, be it in software or physical tech. That’s my two cents.   Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. I can see AI as a shortcut early on as actually a way to improve things early on. Because one thing I’ve seen a lot in early stage startups is that technical co-founder who is good but not great, you’re a bit worried. That’s why you are like, actually, AI might help evaluate or might help a company, might help make better decisions. Someone who was mediocre or good become much better, thanks to AI. That could be another perspective.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro AI as the Technical Co-Founder     Maybe moving to AI as the business co-founder, what do you think? Can AI be the business co-founder? You’re technical, and I just want to have a business co-founder, but I don’t want to have a business co-founder. I’m just going to use AI for it. Can you get away with it?   Bertrand Schmitt I think that’s an interesting perspective. I think it’s quite similar to the technical side. I think AI can help you a lot to improve things, make better things. For instance, designing part of the product, designing your logo, picking your colours. I think AI can help you get much better if you were a technical co-founder. Can it truly replace a more business co-founder? I’m not so sure because a business co-founder will what? We help find financing. We’ll help put in place partnership. We’ll help you close some big deals. This is stuff that you cannot really do with AI. There is some stuff, business side, that AI can help you with. That’s for sure. To help you set up a company, to help you do some legal reviews. I think there are a lot these days that AI can help. In terms of truly big value add, I’m not sure.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I have a bias. I always felt the need for a business co-founder early on wasn’t as significant as others thought. Now you, I think I identified the key issue with not having a business co-founder early on, which is, for me really fundraising. Because everything else you can definitely get there early on through help on marketing, on content, on SEO, on your sales collateral stuff, on pitch decks, or whatever. This is true not only I think of B2B SaaS, but I think it’s also true of consumer. You can be a highly technical founder and just find a lot of stuff online. Now with AI, it’s even easier. You’re really interacting in a way that’s almost like a co-founder, so to speak.     I think the problem starts if you need to raise a bunch of money. If you start having to have a discussion around raising a bunch of money, then you have to have that salesmanship of pitching your company, identifying the markets you’re playing in, being very clear on what’s your go-to market, for example, again, you’re in B2B SaaS. That, I feel, is difficult to do if you don’t have the business co-founder. Now it could be that the technical person is very good and a bit of a hustler type. I mean, often type when we talk about co-founders, we talk about the business person as the hustler and the technical person is the hacker, so it’s the hacker and the hustler. It might be that the hacker in this case might be a hustler as well, but it’s very uncommon. It’s very uncommon that the person has salesmanship. The person whose technical has salesmanship. I think that’s the only key issue that I see.     That said, you can get away in my opinion, I think you can get away with it more being a technical founder that doesn’t have a business co-founder and for longer than the other way around, than you being a business founder and not having a technical co-founder. That’s at least my bias. You can get away with it longer and deeper if you are that technical founder yourself. That’s my two cents on this area—is you have the advantage still to be the technical person.   Bertrand Schmitt I certainly agree. I think the usually, most of the moat of a company goes to the technical side. It’s not always the case, but it happens often enough. If you’re an investor, even if you’re a buyer, you will feel more comfortable when you see that in front of you, you have someone who understands the technology, who understands the pieces of the puzzle, and who you feel can deliver on it. As you say, I think there is a belief for investors that early on, do you really need that business co-founder? Because early on, for instance, maybe you are deep down just coding for two years to get your product out of the door, and you might have two years where you don’t really need that business co-founder. Could even be nearly a deadweight in some ways.     One thing I’ve seen also is a belief from some investors that I mean, as we talked during Google early days that, hey, you have the great founders, great technology. We’re just going to attack a CEO or a COO, and that will all work out. No big deal in a way. It’s easier to find that than to find the right product and the right business. Adding that later on, there is a market for that business person who wants to join a high-flying startup. I think that’s definitely how things have been working for a while in Silicon Valley. In the same direction, there has been a new approach maybe the last 10, 15 years where instead of replacing that technical co-founder, it’s been to make sure you nurture that technical co-founder. He’s becoming more business-savvy over the years, and there is no real need any more to have a business co-founder. You will have a COO, chief of staff, or whatever.     I mean, a good example, we now talk about Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, but, I mean, he clearly came from the technical side. He stayed CEO, but he had some COO who helped him on the business side of things, but were still running the show. I think that’s another good example.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah, I think the points you’re making, Bertrand, are extremely valid. Maybe two things that I would say. One piece is we have had some companies, just to be clear, where there was huge distinctiveness. You could argue it’s more on the product technical side or less, but for example, I think the stuff that Nikita Bier did at TBH before they got bought, it was very centred around growth hacking, and we’ve talked about it at a previous episode.     To my knowledge, his background is more non-technical. It’s more on the business side. There’s sometimes you do have a business founder, co-founder, et cetera, that does identify an angle that is very unique either if it’s B2B, a go-to-market angle, or if it’s on the consumer side, some growth hacks or some way to really get in front of consumers, et cetera. We don’t want to downplay the role of a business founder here, and there’s a lot of knowledge that gets attributed in terms of distinctiveness to it.     That said, I feel this is probably an area where, again, the technical founders are going to get away more with not having the business co-founder than the other way around. We already mentioned at the beginning of this episode a bunch of cases where the team that started was really technical—I mean, Google, et cetera. Having the ability later on to bring in a senior person that acts more as the grown up and adult like we could argue Google did with Eric Schmidt back in the day, like you were just mentioning Mark Zuckerberg did with Sheryl Sandberg.     I think that’s definitely something that from the perspective of the play book of a company has its scales is more widely accepted, certainly in technology. I guess, as it goes, the tech mode is probably more definitive and more important than any other piece. Probably goes without saying that there’s a little bit of bias in our comments. We are both technical by background, but we probably feel that I’m speaking for Bertrand. Don’t know if you’ll correct me in a second, but we probably feel that AI can likely be a business co-founder to a technical founder or a human technical founder longer and more successfully than the other way around. At least today, we’ll see how things evolve over the next few years.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Again, I can see AI as, if not a replacement, a booster. Can you actually create better teams faster because they are complemented by AI at very low cost? AI is there to help them make better decisions all the way. On the technical side, architecture choice, some coding, code reviews. On the business side, helping you generate better copy, better design, better logos, better this. I mean, create your photography for your website. There are so many things that now, for instance, if you’re a business co-founder, you could do your job much better. I think AI as a booster, as an enabler, that could also be a way to go.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro The beautiful thing about AI as a co-pilot thing is you obviously have immediate access to very distilled and synthesised information. Again, in the case of business best practices, that can be very powerful and very helpful. Even, again, if you do have business co-founders. Just checking on quick things. I mean, I use AI myself for my own stuff. Either it’s a social media post for Chameleon or leveraging other things. Obviously, I’ll rewrite stuff, and I’ll write it the way that I think it’s my voice. Having that at your fingertips is very powerful. In any case, the co-piloting is hugely valuable even if you decide to have a technical and a business co-founder along the way.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I can see in the past, if you are a younger start up, there are so many things, so many decisions that you have to take, and it’s very tough to find the right level of expertise. It takes time to find it. It costs usually significant money to pay for it. Well, now we say, hi. When I say now, these days, because I’ve just said two years ago, even one year ago, it was not the same quality—but now the quality you get in some of the answers you receive, if you ask the right questions, it’s getting quite impressive. I mean, the added value you can get to have a better architecture product, a more secure platform from the get go, better design. I just feel there is a lot more you can do, a higher quality you can do, thanks to AI, relatively earlier.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Investor Sentiment & Founding Team Dynamic     Maybe moving to our last piece then, which is what is the investor sentiment now in everything that’s happening with AI as co-pilot, AI as co-founder, and how does that change as we look at founding team dynamics going forward where we’ve had the two technical co-founder, the technical and business co-founders, two technical co-founders, all sorts of founding teams, how does that evolve over time?     I would say on the investor sentiment, maybe just to lay the ground on my area, at least, of focus, we spend a ton of time really looking at tech and science modes in a company. Obviously, at the top end, we look at product modes, but then we go under the hood and try and understand technologically and scientifically what are the underpinnings of the product that this company is about to deploy or has already deployed. If we can’t find anything, if we can’t find modes, if we just go under the hood and there’s no technical element to it that’s very differentiated, you’re like, I’m not sure I’m got to invest in these guys. Why would I invest in this team or in this founder if it’s a single founder company? If it’s all AI as a co-pilot on the technical side, maybe it’s a little bit of a difficult decision for us to come and invest in the company.     Now, again, we’re series Seed, series A investors, so maybe at that point in time of the development of the company, we would expect that there are some senior technical talent at the table, even if it’s not a founding talent. That’s, I think, our skew on the technical co-founder discussion where AI is the technical co-founder.     On the business co-founder thing, we do appreciate, and we do spend a lot of time looking at the company and in particular to the CEO, founder-CEO position if the person can raise money for the company. We do spend a lot of time around salesmanship. Is this person that… After we give this person money, can this person go and raise more money in 18 months or 24 months, et cetera, from other larger investors. Does this person have ability to sell?     The story of the company that they’re building. Is this person, for example, if it’s in B2B, is this person able to actually sell, sell the product and go to market? Founder led sales early on is the name of the game. If the person, again, doesn’t have that savviness, that ability to articulate the story of the company, that edginess around either marketing or sales or something else, probably will also be a pass for us.     Where do we get to? I mean, I think it would be more likely that we invest in a highly technical team that has a very low business savviness, but has something very distinctiveness and differentiated on the technical side, then we would do the opposite. We would invest in a founding team or a founding person, a company that is incredibly business-oriented, amazing hustler or whatever—but has no technology mode whatsoever, no ability to create anything in the foreseeable future. I’d say that’s probably where our biases are as a firm today. Now it doesn’t mean we won’t do the second one, but it’s just more unlikely. I think that’s how we would frame it.   Bertrand Schmitt I guess that’s also for me, what I’ve often seen is a discussion with the team, with the founder in these situations of, are you okay bringing in a technical co-founder? Are you okay bringing in an external CEO, or a CEO to manage the business side? Have you started discussion in that direction? Do you have leads? What type of people are you thinking about? I think that could be part of the discussion, depending on the stage of the venture. I must have seen that quite often, that discussion. Even if, from my perspective, I still have a preference with the founders—the technical founder, or relatively technical founder staying the CEO. Instead of bringing an external CEO, bringing more a CEO type of person.     In some ways, I prefer to see the CEO build up his game on the business side as necessary, versus the replacement like it used to be in the Google days. Personally, I’m a bigger fan of growing up a technical background CEO to stay as a CEO for the long run.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Basically, we both have similar biases, I guess. When will we have the solo founder AI thing be happening all the time? I think pretty soon. We already have solo founders as a really significant part of the business. We already have right now, I’m pretty sure, the next big company that is a solo founder using AI as a co-pilot being created. I don’t think there’s anything dramatically different from all of that. I feel that’s where we’re at this point in time. We’ve had the single founder strategy. We now have a different angle to it in terms of co-piloting. It’s just a different co-pilot. Instead of advisers or outsourcing or other mechanisms, we have AI and AI agents.   Bertrand Schmitt I think that the way it’s going, as you say, that we’re already solo founders. I think AI is just increasing the odds to have a successful solo founder. I think if you are technical enough, you can control AI and understand AI. I think it always goes back to some question. How mature is a founder? Can he grow into the job? Can he learn not just his side of the business, but the other side of the business? It’s always true that it’s tough to learn from the business side to the technical side. That is something that you will rarely learn on the job. As we said, unlike Steve Jobs demonstrated, as a more business person, you can learn becoming a good product person. You can learn to inspire and somewhat control more technical teams. That part, it’s definitely possible.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Conclusion     In conclusion, do you still need a technical or business co-founder? We think probably not. Not certainly at the early stages of the company. You probably can get away with not having a technical co-founder or business co-founder. You’ll probably pay for it earlier on, if you’re missing that technical co-founder, so the technical co-founder does seem to be more important in some ways, and more difficult to replace even by AI than a business co-founder. But it’s not fully, in any case, yet a substitute for real human judgment. Having a dynamic where you have a team, and you have a co-founder that can help you, that can support you, that can take you to the next level, that can commiserate with you when things are hard is probably still better than just going through the use of an AI co-pilot or an AI agent, so we’re almost there, but not fully there yet. Thank you, Bertrand.   Bertrand Schmitt Thank you, Nuno.

What do we travel with? How do we prefer to travel? What are our travel hacks?  If you are seasoned travel or just getting into that hamster wheel, this is the episode for you. Our thoughts, best practices and hacks on traveling. Share with us yours on LinkedIn or X. Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro INTRODUCTION Welcome to Episode 69 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today we’ll go on a slightly softer note and discuss our travel hacks and preferences. Bertrand and I often are asked, “What do you guys travel with? What do you prefer to travel with? What are your travel hacks?” And a few other questions in this world of hamster wheel travelling. Today we’ll share a bunch of our preferences. We’ll share a lot of the things we travel with, from luggage to electronics to other services and devices. We will share to the best of our knowledge, how to really do it in style, if that’s at all possible, once you’re in that hamster wheel. We’ll share some of our hacks, not only for business travelling, but also for leisure travelling. Interesting stuff. We all have our hacks. We all have our stuff going on. PREFERENCES TRAVEL Airlines, alliances, loyalty programs Maybe we start with airlines and all the things around that. Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, sure. Don’t get me started on Air France, who cancelled on me a huge quantity of miles without alerting me, without notice, just a few weeks before I was supposed to take a flight. I will try my best to never use them again. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It was that bad. Air France is out, so that’s the beginning. Let’s maybe talk about the guys who are in. I’ll give you my top airlines around the world. Obviously this depends. Depends if you have to travel through that region or if you’re travelling to that region. My favourites, I think maybe not sure if it’s in full order, but I would say Emirates, obviously, Qatar Airways. If you’re hubbing through Middle East or if you’re going to the Middle East, two amazing airlines, probably two of the best in the world. I would say maybe Emirates is my favourite now. I have to be thoughtful in how I put that forward. Qatar is also exceptional, obviously if you’re hubbing through Doha. Incredible airline as well. The Asian ones in general, we’ll leave the Chinese for a second because that’s a different ballgame all together. Let’s not say all Asian ones and obviously different ones are great. I’d say Singapore Airlines continues being systematically an exceptional airline. They’ve become very expensive, but an exceptional airline. A little bit SOP driven, only airline in the world, true story, that I complained not once or twice, but three times on the same incident, and I actually never got a response from them on an incident which is interesting. In general, service is exceptional. Their facilities at Changi Airport are exceptional. The planes are really well-kept, the food is great, very attentious, and really like them. Cathay, I haven’t flown with them in a while. They went through a bit of a slump at some point. They were my favourite for a long time. Then they went through a bit of a slump in terms of product in particular, in terms of the quality of the product, in terms of the quality of the seats, service on board, et cetera. I’ve heard positive things recently, so maybe worthwhile putting them back on my Top 5 list around the world. Then the Korean Airlines in general are pretty strong on service. Depends a little bit on the plane. I’ve had always better experiences with Korean Air than with Asiana. Maybe Korean Air gets that last Top 5 thing. Talking about the negative ones for me that I try to avoid. I try to avoid as much as possible some of the European ones. TAP Air Portugal, the Portuguese one, is actually pretty decent by European standards. British Airways depends on the format of the plane. I find their business class service and product not to be as compelling as other airlines right now. I always found the service on British Airways, you only get great service on reshares if you’re in first class. On long haul, even in business, it’s a little bit matron. It’s like, “Sit down and just stay put, and we’ll serve you, but we won’t really be particularly paying attention to you.” In some ways, TAP Air Portugal, I think they’re a little bit more thoughtful and nicer. Lufthansa is similar to British Airways. I’ve had very mixed experiences, but in general not great. The service, they got a lot of bad rap on their first class stuff. In Europe, I’m not sure there’s anyone that I’m excited about. I haven’t flown with Air France a long time. Apparently I shouldn’t. Iberia I’ve flown with and it’s okay-ish. I don’t remember any airline in Europe that I’m particularly fond of. Maybe I’m missing someone. SAS is okay, I guess in the Nordics, but not a great deal of amazing airlines in there. Then negative Chinese. Most of the Chinese airlines, I haven’t flown with them in a long time, so I obviously have to be careful in not pushing it forward. Not a huge fan of JAL and ANA in Japan. When in doubt, I would go ANA. Then in Taiwan, also not particularly excited about any of the Taiwanese airlines, but they’re not bad either, so it’s okay kind of thing. Then on the American Airlines, which I’m sure people are excited to know about, I’m really not a fan of United. Sadly, they’re on Star Alliance Bertrand Schmitt Do you remember this video on United? There was this guy being dragged out of the plane, bloodied and everything. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It sounds about right, I think. Bertrand Schmitt I think it’s just before COVID or at the beginning of COVID. I forgot. It was bad. It was so bad. Nuno Goncalves Pedro My favourite was only domestic flights with Virgin America. By the way, Virgin Atlantic, I’m going to fly again with them in a couple of months and I remember them fondly. Their upper class product was really cool back in the day. Their lounge was really cool at Heathrow. This was many years ago. Looking forward to experimenting with it again. Virgin America was really strong and then obviously they merged with Alaska. Alaska is okay. It’s good. I feel it still has a little bit of the Continental and Virgin America ethos, which is pretty good. I’d say of the big ones in the US, the only one that I think has improved quite a bit in terms of service has been Delta Air Lines, although their hub is Atlanta, which as I call it, is where you get lost in space in general. It’s a black hole, I guess. We’ll come back to airports later. American is okay-ish, but I’ve had some really bad experiences as well in American. United is the bottom for me. Southwest, I haven’t flown in a while. They’re quite expensive now, Southwest, actually. Bertrand Schmitt I think they have changed dramatically, Southwest, from what I read in terms of what you get, what is included, not included, how they work. It’s not the same. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Top 5 guys that I would make an effort to fly with: Qatar Airways, Emirates. Emirates obviously doesn’t really belong to any of the alliances, which makes it a little bit more cumbersome for points gathering and all that stuff, but I think they’re really top end. I think Singapore Airlines belongs in that group. Then just below for me, Korean Air Lines and Cathay and then the rest. There’s preferences. I have preferences as I said. If I have a chance, I’ll go Delta rather than American or United. If it’s to Europe, then I prefer a European airline to American and to United. To Asia, the same thing. I prefer an Asian airline to American and United. Delta, it depends a little bit on the plane and all that stuff. That’s my rough preferences. I’ve had my worst experiences with United. My worst experience I think probably were all with United, delayed flights issues and all that stuff, bad service. Bertrand Schmitt If I have to fly to Europe, I used to try to use Air France, but two issues again, they take away your miles. That was during COVID. Two, you run the risk to have a strike in France. That’s obviously the risk. Now I’m probably more trying to fly Delta if I go to Europe. Asia, I will try to stay away from Air China, that’s for sure. I got some memorable experience when they were so scared away I would bring down a plane by using my tablet. It was just as crazy. I would say the Taiwanese airlines, I have overall positive experience. Not great, not bad, I would say. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Which is your favourite of the two? Bertrand Schmitt Let me be careful. It’s China Airways, China Air. There is a new one, actually, a third one that started recently. I cannot say I have a big preference, a clear-cut preference between the Taiwanese airlines. Taipei Airport is quite convenient to branch from in Asia. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s EVA Air or EVA Air and China Airlines? Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, EVA Air is one of them, China Airlines, and there is a third one now that just launched. Nuno Goncalves Pedro STARLUX, is that the one? STARLUX Airlines? Bertrand Schmitt Maybe. Yes. In the US, living in Seattle, this is a hub for Alaska. We use Alaska quite a bit. I will use Delta as well, and United if no other choice. Nuno Goncalves Pedro And American? Do you have a perspective on American? Bertrand Schmitt I have never used them, actually. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Really? It’s American Airlines. Bertrand Schmitt Same for the other one we talk about, Southwest. I’ve rarely, rarely use it. I’m sure I use it once or twice, but I’m doing my best not to choose that. I feel already having three airlines to manage on points and stuff is enough. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s these guys, JetSuite, JSX, which I do use once in a while. They’re pretty good for domestic flights. Obviously they don’t fly to all airports and they fly to some funky airports. The experience is almost a private jet kind of experience. Shout out to those guys because those guys are still delivering a really nice experience for pretty good prices. Bertrand Schmitt Are you using them for LA to SF, for instance? I’ve heard they are quite good. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Correct. I think they have LAX as well. I don’t know where LAX flies to, but it’s either Burbank or SNA, which is John Wayne, Orange County. I’ve used them in Burbank. Burbank right now is not very good for where I live. Then Burbank flies, I think it’s to Oakland and maybe Fremont, if I’m not mistaken. They have some funky airports in the Bay Area, so it’s like Oakland, Fremont and then one in Napa that they give you access to. Oakland is fine. If you’re going to San Francisco in particular, you fly to Oakland. As an airport, it’s actually pretty easy. Bertrand Schmitt You have to cross the bridge, so I guess it depends on traffic. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s just you have to organise so that you’re not getting into heavy traffic. If you fly in the morning, that’s a pain in the neck, if you need to get to SF, but if you fly in the afternoon or evening, it’s normally less of a problem. If you come back in the morning, then it’s not a problem either. The experience is really, really good. I’ve flown Burbank to Oakland a couple times and it’s really a nice experience. They’re expanding all the time, so they’re in a bunch of other places around the country. I think they just expanded to New York, if I’m not mistaken, so that should be cool. I’m not sure which airports in New York, but pretty, pretty cool. Bertrand Schmitt Do you fly window or aisle? Nuno Goncalves Pedro I’m an aisle kind of guy. I was window at the beginning. I’d like to be at the window and whatever. For two reasons I like to be aisle. I think the first reason we’re all intense people. I like to get out of the plane as fast as I can, and normally the aisle in your row is the first person that goes out, so just getting out, getting the bag, putting it on the floor, getting ready to go. I’m not the guy that rushes through the cabin just to be clear. I think there’s a term for it now, but I am definitely the guy who gets ready quickly so that I can leave. If I’m flying in economy or premium economy, I’ll try to fly as much to the front of those classes as possible. If I’m flying in business class, then I would be the first seat if possible, certainly on domestic flights. Obviously on international flights, if I’m flying in premium economy or business, sometimes there’s a first class, so they are obviously the first guys to get out. I’ll fly obviously in the first row for my class. The second reason is I’m on ketogenic diet, so I need to go to the restroom very often. If it’s a 15-hour flight or a 12-hour flight or whatever, being on the aisle is obviously easier because if there’s people around you that need to jump to or whatever, they can. You jumping over people like several times during the flights is a pain in the neck for everyone involved. I pay attention to those details and I prefer just to be on the aisle, so I can just go and come back and there’s no problem. I don’t need to bother anyone or everyone on my row Bertrand Schmitt For me, it really depends on, is it a long flight or short flight, is it business or premium economy? If it’s a long flight in premium economy, I will usually pick window. I don’t want to be disturbed by someone trying to cross me, waking me up and stuff. That would be where I would be careful. If it’s business, it’s usually not an issue, so it’s different. If it’s a short flight, I don’t mind window, I don’t need to go out. If it’s a longer flight but not too long, not sleeping, then aisle usually I would take. It really depends for me. As you, I will try to go in the first rows as you can for your given class. I don’t like to stay in the back and to wait. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’re impatient people. We want to get out quickly and people are like, “What difference does it make?” Getting in, it doesn’t make a huge difference, but it could. It depends how much space is there available for you to put your bags on if you’re carrying a bunch of bags or not. We’ll talk about bags in a bit and later on, what our preferences are on that. Getting in, it depends. Depends on how much you’re carrying with yourself. Getting out, it matters because it could be a difference of 5, 10 minutes to get out on planes. If you’re all the way at the back versus you’re at the front, it could be material, in particular, if you don’t have bags that you’ve checked in, that you need to go into the conveyor belt to get in terms of baggage claim. In terms of loyalty programs, what’s your preference? Who would you run with for the different ones? For Star Alliance, for SkyTeam, who do you run with? What are the airlines that you have? Bertrand Schmitt I have a few depending on where I need to go. Star Alliance for sure. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Star Alliance here with who? With Air France? Bertrand Schmitt I used to be Air France. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Air France is SkyTeam. Bertrand Schmitt So SkyTeam, Air Delta and United for the other one. That’s the two main I would use usually. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I did a stupid thing. Air France was my SkyTeam team, British Airways was my oneworld and Lufthansa with Miles & More was my Star Alliance. I’ve now switched all of them to American ones. Delta is my SkyTeam one, United now with MilesPlus is my Star Alliance one and then American Airlines is my oneworld one. I found with the American Airlines it’s easier to have the loyalty card with them because you get the upgrade lists and all that stuff. For domestic flights, all that stuff is done automatically, so it’s easier to fly with them. Normally you get the status as well. In most cases, faster than some of the European airlines. Similar alignment on oneworld tiers and Star Alliance tiers and SkyTeam tiers. Then some of them are very, very bad. You mentioned Air France. I had the same issue as you did, which is all of a sudden my miles disappeared at Air France because they obviously don’t keep your miles for very, very long. They take away your miles, which is like robbery in my opinion. Bertrand Schmitt It’s robbery, and especially during the time around COVID, it was really disgusting to do that. The fact they do it without any notice, any warning, nothing, it’s just plain disgusting. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It was exactly the experience I had, so very, very nasty kind of stuff. At a certain point in time, I was top end, I think on the three. I was still based in Asia, but I was top tier on oneworld, Star Alliance and SkyTeam for a period of time. Honestly, it matters a lot if you have to do a lot of travel between classes like economy, premium economy, business, et cetera. If you can fly a bit more in business or if you don’t care, it matters a little bit less to have tierage with all these. I don’t optimise as much on tierage anymore, to be honest, for the different airlines. If I did, I’d probably have to do a lot more Star Alliance. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of American, a lot of oneworld, so something for me to think about, I guess. Bertrand Schmitt On this topic, I still remember a long time ago, someone who will stay unnamed, who would keep flying around late December to make sure he has enough miles and keeping his miles. So on purpose, not taking a direct flight, but flying through second, third airport to make sure that he would build enough miles, sustain the right tier. I just couldn’t believe that level of optimisation. Maybe it makes sense. The guy was smart, so no question. There was some logic behind it, but I was certainly not willing to do the trade-off to spend 10 more hours or more than necessary just to keep the right levels. Nuno Goncalves Pedro To finalise maybe on the airline side, two things. One, I optimise for the time of the flight. I normally don’t like to hub, to do stops. I prefer to go one flight somewhere and willing to pay a little bit more and fly maybe in premium economy if it’s a very long flight. Obviously if it’s like a 16-hour flight to Dubai from San Francisco or LA, obviously better to do so in premium economy than in economy. Economy is obviously a killer for these flights. Bertrand Schmitt If you have to sleep, yes. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If there’s prices that are compatible and there’s a lot of ways to hack pricing around business class travelling, it may be worthwhile. I always optimise for direct flights if I can. The big hack, and I think I’m going to regret this because a lot of people actually don’t know this, this is a hack I learned with one of my former partners in my first VC firm, this is back 2011, 2012, maybe even before that, is Round The World tickets. If you guys have never heard about this, those listening to us, you need to look into this stuff. It’s magical. It has a bunch of rules to them, but you can get Round The World tickets with oneworld and Star Alliance. SkyTeam, I’ve never done it. I don’t know if it’s possible or not. With oneworld and Star Alliance you can for sure, and you book them. Look for oneworld Round The World ticket or Star Alliance Round The World ticket. It has a minimum number of sections that you need to do. You need to go in one direction only. Think of it as you have to cross the two oceans kind of thing. You have to go Atlantic on one side and then Pacific on the other side. You can’t go back on your trip. For example, if you originate in, let’s say San Francisco, you start your trip in San Francisco and you said, “I want to go to Europe first.” Then you can go to a bunch of places, US, Europe, whatever, but then you need to move to another place, Asia, Middle East or whatever to go through the Pacific Ocean to get back to the US. You need to end in the same place that you start because it is around the world. You need to end at San Francisco, start in San Francisco. You have 12 months to do all the trips. I think it’s up to 15 flights if I’m not mistaken. I’ve never been able to optimise much beyond. I think 11 is my record, maybe. There are some people who do all sorts of funky optimisations like back and forth. They have two tickets running at the same time. I’ve never figured out how to do it. I’m sure there are people smarter than me. These tickets are actually super, super value for money. With taxes and stuff, they might go a little bit beyond that, but it’s in the 10K, 11K range for business class travelling around the world. If you get in seven flights in, if you’re going through a bunch of different countries… For example, if you’re roadshowing, if you’re going to a bunch of different funky places, it’s more than worthwhile because if you just did one trips around, that alone would be over 10K if you’re flying in business, and it’s done. Now, obviously 10K for business class is still quite expensive. It might be that you want to fly in premium economy or economy, there’s also tickets available for that. A huge hack that I found over the years. You can fly in economy, premium economy, business or first class. You get the ticket, the ticket issuer becomes the first airline that does the first flight effectively. The systems are a bit clunky, in particular the Star Alliance one. I remember super clunky, but their customer service is really good. It’s used to dealing with issues. You can change stuff, you can change flights last minute as well if you need to, et cetera. It’s really, really a great experience. Bertrand Schmitt That’s so good to know. I don’t think I ever used it, but I knew about it. Nuno Goncalves Pedro You can also use it for leisure, or a mix. You can do like oh, it’s part business, part leisure or just fully for leisure or fully for business. As I said, it’s a really great package opportunity. I don’t know if SkyTeam actually need to look into it, but definitely you can do it for oneworld and Star Alliance. Airports, lounges Let’s move on quickly to airports. My top airports in the world versus my top hated ones. I would say top loved, probably, I think Dubai DXB, Qatar, the Diu Airport’s wonderful as well. Anything else that I would highlight, Incheon, I’ve had pretty good experiences there. It’s just very far from Seoul, so if you’re not hubbing through it, if you’re actually going into town, it’s very far. That makes it a little bit more painful. What else? I would say Haneda in Japan is a wonderful airport. Narita is very far from Tokyo, so it’s a bit of a pain in the neck and not as nice as an airport as Haneda is. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. I like Haneda. It had some food options that I really like there. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe the last one I would highlight. I used to like Hong Kong International Airport a lot. It’s a bit mixed now, it’s become really big. Changi in Singapore is probably one of my favourite airport in the world, I would say. I did have great experiences. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. Changi is great. I like the Hong Kong one. I think it’s quite good. I have used the Taipei one quite a few times. It’s quite efficient as a hub, but it’s not to the level of Hong Kong or Singapore. If you take in Europe, I’m not sure I would have a big one I would recommend. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Let me say, I mean, Lisbon, I have to say, this has become a mess, like a tragedy. An airport that’s been 50 years, a discussion to build another airport, and nobody can come to a conclusion. Fifty years, right? Now it’s a mess, because obviously there’s too much traffic into Lisbon, and out of Lisbon. I’m not a fan of Heathrow. Even Terminal 5, it’s sort of messy-ish. I mean, they’ve done a decent job now, but it’s still a bit messy. It used to be worse, so I guess they’ve improved it. Frankfurt is a total mess most of the time. You have to get really lucky for it to work well. Munich’s okay. I’d say Charles de Gaulle, I’ve had some of the worst experiences in my life, so I’m not sure I like going through Charles de Gaulle. Amsterdam, I’m not a fan either. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Have you noticed that it has been getting worse for ground transportation? I used to be able to get an Uber relatively easily from any airport, and now there are a lot of airports outside the US where I’m taking taxi because it’s actually much easier, much more convenient, at least from the airport. They make it on purpose, I guess, a nightmare to use Uber from the airport. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think some of it’s related to local regulations. Some of it is just to your point, they’re making it worse. But I agree. It’s like, even Lisbon, the way that Bolt and Uber operates out of the airport in Lisbon is a mess. They’ve now created a new area for pickups only. I haven’t used that area. I don’t know if it’s better or not. But the old area they had it in was absolutely awful. Mind-boggling awful. Bertrand Schmitt Actually, LAX in the US is also bad. If you want to take an Uber, you have to walk 10 minutes. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Ten minutes if you’re lucky. If you want to get UberX up to, I think up to Black. Black and above does curbside, which could be actually slow as well because LAX is a mess of an airport. Talking about messes of airport really depends on the terminal, I guess. The international terminal is very nice, but then the ground transportation in and out is messy. It depends what time of the day, departures, arrivals. I haven’t really figured out the patterns to that airport yet. San Francisco is doable for the most. Although Terminal 3 right now in San Francisco is a total mess as well because it’s under construction at least until I think it’s 2027 or 2028. It’s going to be a while. A lot of airports that are not great, some of them in the US. I mean, Atlanta is a mess. I know they’re working on stuff, but it’s a total mess. One of the largest airports in the world by movements, I believe. Newark, I’ve had some good experiences in New York. It’s in New Jersey, I guess. Then you have these funky airports, the smaller airports that somehow managed to be better. Like John Wayne in Orange County. Long Beach Airport, which is mostly Southwest. Bertrand Schmitt I was going to say in New York, usually the issue is the traffic to get to the airport. You have to be very careful about that. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. Bertrand Schmitt Or coming from the airport. If you are taking ground transportation. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Do you have any big favourites? Any ones that you really dislike that you avoid at all costs? Bertrand Schmitt I’m not sure. I can just say that Seattle Airport that I’m using now as my base airport. We recently got two luggage lost. It was on some minor airlines. You could argue they were not lost in Seattle, but before. But that’s still not a great experience from that perspective. I must say I like the airport so far. As you say Charles de Gaulle is not so great, but sometimes I have to go there travelling to France, so no other options are there. Nuno Goncalves Pedro In Madrid, I’ve had some bad experiences. Bertrand Schmitt The mainland Chinese airport, in terms of food options are just usually not great. Yeah, that’s not why you want to use them. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I still have nightmares with Beijing Capital Terminal 3. But honestly it wasn’t a bad terminal. It’s just I guess I spent too much time there, and you have to walk a lot in and out. But yes. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, it’s a big one. You have to walk a lot. Usually the food options are quite limited. But I mean clean and modern, that part was okay. No, it’s not as if the other ones I will [inaudible 00:25:05]. To be frank, I try to go direct as much as possible. Usually I have. If I’m in an airport, it’s because I have to be there, if you see what I mean. It’s not I have to go somewhere close by. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Let’s switch to lounges. Loves and hates. Your most beloved and hated lounges, Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt Honestly, at least from my perspective, they’re all crap for food and coffee. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Is that what you want? You want just food and coffee? That’s the play? Bertrand Schmitt That’s a core part. Either I’m not so hungry or just snacks and okay, whatever. If it’s food and coffee, then usually I will pick somewhere else my food and coffee, and go to the lounge for a bit more safety, a bit more relaxation, less noise. I would say relatively whatever. I would be a bit more picky if I have really a long time to be at the lounge. That’s when I start to check, “Okay, what are my options?” If I know I have 5, 6, 7 hours to stay because some random stuff. Last time was a cancelled flight last minute and I had to pick another one. Yeah, I end up to spend 6 hours, 7 hours. That’s when you have to start to be a bit picky of which one you take. Also, some might not let you go in. Some might say, “Oh, you can only come in before the flight” or whatever. I would be a bit more picky. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I like to go early to airports. I don’t like to stress out, and I work from airports. I either do calls or work on stuff on my laptop, et cetera. Going to the lounge is really mostly to have a place where I can just hang out and work for a bit. Silence could be or not very important, but maybe not super important. Food’s probably a little bit less. It’s great to have something to eat while you’re there. To your point, most lounges are crap on food. I have a couple of notable amazing ones. Obviously lounges normally are business class or first class as people would know. There’s a couple of other options with Priority Pass that you get access to business class level lounges. My experience with Pass is very mixed. Some lounges are really good, some lounges are all but crap. On the positive side, I’d say again, the Middle Eastern airlines just are silly. Emirates business class, Qatar Airways business class. I’ve never been to the Qatar Airways first class one. I’ve been to the Emirates first class one once, and it was a bit silly because they have counters for any type of food. Like counters for desserts and ice cream, a counter for desserts and ice cream, a counter for sushi and sashimi, a counter for whatever. You can still order stuff à la carte because that’s what you do. I was in that lounge at night and I recall clearly it’s like maybe it was 20 of us in the lounge and there were like, I don’t know, five or six counters like this open, and you’re like, “Really?” There were more people working there than… Just the counters than people I guess actually eating. It’s absolutely exceptional. Singapore Airline, their business class lounges are very good. I’ve been only to their first class lounge once. Changi, it was really exceptional as well. À la carte, very nice kind of service. I would give a shout-out actually to United Airlines. I think they’ve won a bunch of awards. The United Airlines lounge at SFO for international. They’ve won a bunch of awards I think, and it’s actually pretty good by American Airlines in any way kind of lounges. It’s really, really good. Delta has a really nice lounge at the LAX, Delta Air Lines. There’s a couple of really good American Airlines’ lounges around. My last shout-out, I think on the positive side is the Concorde lounge for British Airways, which I’ve been to a few of them and that’s when you’re flying first class. Just to explain, I don’t fly first class. It just happened to be… I’m a hacker. It just happened to be that at some point in time British Airways had this promotion that if you booked a ticket, I think it was July to September, if you booked a ticket, and it was considered a full ticket in business class, you could upgrade one of the legs to first class based on availability. I ended up doing a bunch of those where there was Concorde lounges, which was I think New York at JFK. In London, Heathrow, you can go to the Concorde lounge, not the first class lounge, but the Concorde lounge. It was very nice and very fancy. I remember that fondly. Bertrand Schmitt In terms of first class lounge, I did once the Air France La Première, and I must say it was quite amazing. From the lounge to the first class in the plane, it was quite amazing experience. The food was top level. You even have a spa if you want. They bring you to the plane by a private luxury car. You get in not seeing any other passenger but people in first. I must say it was quite an amazing experience. I forgot how I ended up doing it, but price wise it was expensive, but it was not so insane versus the other option basically. That’s why I end up doing it. Nuno Goncalves Pedro American Express has a bunch of lounges, as we know, for Platinum and Centurion members around the world. I’ve been to a few of them. They’re normally pretty good. Recent issue with American Express has been that there’s always a wait list because there’s too many people I guess with Platinum cards. They’ve again increased the price of Platinum card and whatever. Then Centurion as we know is very complex as well to attain. Then on the negative side, I would say as I mentioned before, some of the Priority Pass access ones, those lounge-y things that are the commonly used ones are not great. TAP’s I think still running out of SFO, the Portuguese Airline. Still running out of SFO with this China Airlines Lounge, which is really not very good. I mean no disrespect to the people who work there, but it’s just the lounge is not very good. There’s a bunch of lounges that I feel are just a bit of a waste. Like you might as well go to the gate and wait. In some airports there are actually good food options. Maybe just go to one of the food options and have dinner there or lunch or some snack and just use it as a place to work from. Something like that. Hotels chains, AirBnB Hotel chains, Airbnb, what’s your preference, Bertrand? Loyalty cards, whatever. What do you go for? What’s your addiction? Bertrand Schmitt I would say I don’t do Airbnb too often. Once in a while, and typically for vacations, short vacation, I will say. Sometimes I use it for short vacation, few days. Usually typically I’m using hotel chains. I don’t want to bother take a chance in a lot of situations. Do I have a favourite hotel chain? I used to like Hotel W. I still remember the one in Taipei very well. It was really a nice place. But it really depends where. I’m doing Bonvoy quite often that’s probably one of the main one I’m using. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, I’m a big Bonvoy guy. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. At the end of the day it really depends on where I go, what the price are. I mean I’m not forcing myself basically. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I have one force mechanism which is Marriott Bonvoy. I was a Starwood member back in the day and I got to Lifetime Gold. I think I missed Lifetime Platinum on the Starwood terms by 1 year to be a Lifetime Platinum. I used to fly and travel a lot in particular when I was at McKinsey. When they merged with Marriott I think the merger wasn’t too bad in terms of their loyalty program, but now you need a lot more years to get to Lifetime Platinum. I think I’m 2 years out from Lifetime Platinum or something like that. But that’s the one that I have preference on. I think the largest in the world, the Marriott as a chain, and they have a lot of brands that are exceptional. I mean on the top end obviously the St. Regis of the world, the Ritz-Carltons, et cetera. But even if you go one level below, you can find some of the boutique things are actually very nice as well with Marriott like Edition. The Ws have gone one level down. I think the Edition has taken that place, more top-end boutique. Ws are now a little bit more accessible as well in terms of cost and price. Westons depends on the part of the world you’re in. I mean in Asia the Westons are very nice. Some parts of Europe they’re also very nice. Sheratons similarly, not great in the US but in other parts of the world they might be okay. They have so many brands like I’ve stated, Residence Inns. There’s so many lower end brands, longer stay brands that they have that are really, really nice. I mean, you get really big rooms for not a lot of money, and they’re exceptional. Bertrand Schmitt I think often for me, it’s a question of location. Do you get access to a real, not just like is it a good hotel? You have the facility, but is it a special location? We were in vacation this summer in Banff in Canada. We spent a few days around Lake Louise, and we went to the Fairmont because that was the only hotel authorised at Lake Louise per se. It was just amazing. It was just an amazing experience. If you don’t stay at this hotel obviously you have to stay much further away, they limit access to cars, I mean it’s a total nightmare. But if you are at the Fairmont Lake Louise it’s just a magical experience. I mean prices are insane to be clear, but you have a special experience for a few days that cannot be replicated with another hotel. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I mean we could do an episode just on hotels, so I’ll just cut to the chase. I think there’s a couple of chains that I quite like. I do like the Grand Heights of the world, the Park Heights of the world are very top end. Prices vary a lot, I mean, some of these hotels are very, very expensive. Hotels have become more expensive. Hopefully at some point it will be a step back. There’s amazing resorts as you were saying, all around the world. I have this love for Aman Resorts, A-M-A-N Resorts. They’ve become super expensive, almost unbearable. I was an Aman junkie back in the day. I’ve been to a lot of their properties. They’re very beautiful location kind of properties, but they’re super expensive now as well. But there’s great places, as we were saying, that are great value for money. I’ve stayed at places that I wouldn’t have thought of spending time on, and they’re really, really, really nice for not a lot of money, and I think location matters a lot to me, but at the end of the day also having a place where for example if I need to work from the hotel room that I can work from the hotel room. If I don’t need to, then potentially that’s less of an important thing in terms of space and desk space et cetera. But Marriott’s is really the only obsession that I have just to get my layer at least of Platinum every year if I can so that I get to that Lifetime Platinum thing at some point in time, and then I can just get it. Mandarin Oriental, huge shout-out probably of the urban hotels. They’re quite expensive in some parts of the world but of the urban hotels. Bertrand Schmitt Which one, sorry? Nuno Goncalves Pedro Mandarin Oriental. Bertrand Schmitt Ah, Mandarin Oriental, yes, amazing. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I’ve always had exceptional experiences with them but again very expensive. Bertrand Schmitt Amazing in Hong Kong. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Hong Kong. I’ve not stayed at the one in Paris, but I’ve been to the one in Paris, and it seemed exceptional as well. I’ve been to the one in Barcelona, I’ve been to a few of their other Mandarin Orientals around the world, and I’ve never had a bad experience. They’re all very, very exceptional. Very, very thoughtful in terms of how they do service, et cetera. Four Seasons, for example, I’ve had mixed experiences in different places. A lot of people love them. But anyway, that’s our addictions. Ground transportation Ground transportation. We just heard from you. Now you’re preferring taxis to Ubers and Lyfts in some parts of the world. Bertrand Schmitt If they make the Uber experience terrible, yes. I’m discovering that more and more I’m picking up especially… Where did that happen? In Hong Kong, in Paris. I end up picking up taxi versus Uber. In some location, even in the US if you have to do a 10, 15 minutes walk, sometimes I might not take the Uber or Lyft as usual. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, for in and out of the airport, I agree with you. I think Uber and Lyft every time that they’re available, in some cases Lyft is actually a better option and cheaper. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, I always check both. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. Uber is a little bit more reliable in some ways and sort of the average quality I think is a little bit higher. But agreed with you also that there’s some cases where taxi is the better option, just easier. Just get into a car and go. Not necessarily super pricey. Some taxis obviously are very, very expensive. Like taxis in the Nordics are expensive. Japan very expensive. It depends sort of the country that you’re in. Car rentals, I do mostly in the US or unless I’m on vacation, I need to go around some place, whatever. I don’t do it that often everywhere else. I try and optimise for a location where I stay in the city and then if I can walk to most of the places or just do quick Ubers, that’s great, and not rent a car. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, same as you. I rent a car if I really need to. Nice vacation trip and we’re driving quite a lot. But if it’s not that, if it’s business, typically I would just do [inaudible 00:37:04]. Nuno Goncalves Pedro In the US it’s sometimes worthwhile if you’re for example, going to an area, and you need like I don’t know. If I went to see you in Seattle, Bertrand, I won’t say where you live, but maybe to go to you, I’d get a rental because you’re not necessarily in the centre of Seattle. Then, if I want to go to Redmond to see people at Microsoft, it would be worthwhile having the rental rather than just Ubering around because that could be quite costly. Public transportation, I can’t say I’m a huge user of public transportation around the world, so apologies for that. I know there’s amazing undergrounds in many cities that work really well. I mean, London, I believe it still works extremely well, et cetera. Probably the fastest way to move around London is through the underground, through the tube, as they call it over there. Trains in some cases, obviously the Heathrow train, the Heathrow Express is a relatively fast way to get into town from Heathrow, et cetera, et cetera. There’s obviously a lot of interesting options there. I can’t say I’m the best person to probably opine on that. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I would take the subway once in a while if it’s really convenient. It could be Paris, could be London, could be Hong Kong. Tokyo actually has a good subway, but typically I will end up doing quite a bit of Uber. But really depends, am I in a rush? Is there a lot of traffic? That sort of stuff. On this topic, I don’t know you, but me, 6 years living in China, I didn’t take the bus a single time, I think. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I took it during the Olympics in Beijing because to move… There was one day or two days where… This was a whole mess for those… It is first world problems, I’m sure. But I got too many tickets for the Olympics. In Beijing at that point in time there were even an odds on the licence plates, every other day were evens and odds. I had a driver, and I had to hire his wife as well because they had another car, a tiny little car, but the other car, I think one of them was even, the other one was odd. The licence plate. They could drive me all days. But for some reason someday they couldn’t, so I had to take the underground and I had to take bus and whatever. It was actually much better than I expected to be honest. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Bertrand Schmitt The underground in Beijing or Shanghai was quite good. I didn’t take it a lot because usually it was too far away. It’s not as if it was dense. Usually you would not walk from where you want to go from the subways, that’s a problem. It could be too long, but as long as not using a rush hour, it was usually not too bad. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Global Entry / TSA Pre / Clear / Nexus Maybe last and not the least on travel preferences, any other hacks that we have, the global entries of the world and all that stuff? Bertrand Schmitt I mean, Global Entry/TSA Pre for me is critical. I would not survive without this. This is great. Getting in the US for sure. Skipping the lines. Once you have Global Entry, you get TSA Pre. Then inside the US you also skip the lines. For me, it’s quite critical. No question.  Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s life changing to have Global Entry if you’re entering the US because obviously you’re coming in an international flight. I’m a US citizen now. Even the lines for US Passports are not always neglectable. They’re faster for sure, but they’re not neglectable. Global Entry is a game-changer. I mean, you can go what I call Singapore Changi time. You can go less than a minute, and you’re past immigration. It’s incredible. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. It’s typically one minute, and now it goes even faster if you do the facial recognition. Now there is a new way to go facial with your phone, I think. I don’t think it’s available everywhere. There might be a new way to do that I just discovered. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. We’re now in the seconds, which, for those that have a very painful experience getting into the US with foreign passports and whatever. I’m sorry, I apologise in advance on our behalf. But it is what it is, sadly. TSA Pre, obviously, it’s great to get out. To get into the lines that have TSA Pre, both for international flights and also for domestic in the US. There are some airports where TSA Pre has become a mess as well. Not staffed properly. Because American Express has this thing going on where they pay for your CLEAR subscription effectively, I got CLEAR as well. This is the ultimate hack. At those airports, if the TSA Pre line is very long, I get CLEAR. Then CLEAR, you jump in the line of TSA Pre. CLEAR, if you have TSA Pre, you jump in front of the line of TSA Pre. Because they take you to the front of the line of TSA Pre. In the US Everything you pay for, it magically gets higher and higher, VIP level. CLEAR, if you have TSA Pre, they will jump you in front of the TSA Pre line. Effectively, you’re jumping in front of the TSA Pre line, so you go even faster. I have to be very honest, if there’s anyone from CLEAR that’s listening to this, you guys should be paying attention to the quality of your ground service and the staff that you have around there. I know it’s difficult to hire people and staff and all that stuff. But I’ve had at least two significant issues with CLEAR staff that are just unacceptable. It’s like just rudeness, aggressiveness that I would expect maybe from an immigration officer that is really pissed off. Not from someone that is providing a paid service. That is really a nice-to-have service at the end of the day. I’ll leave that note. It’s great to jump in front of line. I’ve had a lot of great positive experiences, but I’ve had two experiences that were very negative with CLEAR staff over the years. I think they were both at San Francisco Airport at SFO. Anyway, I don’t remember names of people. I won’t name them, but definitely very negative experiences. Bertrand Schmitt THINGS WE TRAVEL WITH Going to different topics. In terms of luggage, what do you do, Nuno, typically? Nuno Goncalves Pedro If you guys see the guy that has a bag that looks mysteriously a little bit too big to put inside the plane, that’s me. I don’t like check-in bags. I’ve only had like two lost bags, I think, or three, maybe in my life. I don’t like to check in bags, though. I’m a RIMOWA guy. I know they’re expensive, but they last a lifetime, literally. I mean, I’ve had a RIMOWA… Bertrand Schmitt Which one? Nuno Goncalves Pedro They use the Cabin Plus, which as the name indicates, it’s a little bit above the size of a cabin bag. They literally call it Cabin Plus. Basically, the way it works, it’s very simple. If you don’t have to go check in at the counter and if you go straight to the gate and if you either have tierage with the loyalty program for the airline, or you’re flying in business or first class, nobody will bug you. They won’t make you check the bag, they won’t make you weigh the bag, et cetera. They’ll just let you in. I mean, that’s the ultimate hack. They’ll just differentiate based on your tierage if you’re flying in business or above. My experience over the years is they don’t bug me. I’ll just bring in my Cabin Plus bag. I have two Cabin Plus bags from RIMOWA for reasons I can’t really explain. Then one of them I’ve had for 15 years. It’s travelled with me all over the world. Back when I was in Asia, I already had this bag. I mean, it’s a pretty incredible bag. It’s aluminium. It withstands a bunch of stuff it gets the marks on the aluminium, but I think it’s part of the passage thing. Then I normally carry a backpack. I don’t remember what’s the brands of the backpacks I’m carrying right now. I have a Troubadour, that’s my smaller backpack, which is very nice, very clean, very nice looking. Then I have another one, I forget the name, which is my bulkier one. For many years, I travelled with the TUMI backpack which is a classic. The black one backpack. Bertrand Schmitt I have the same. I used to have blue, and they exchanged for black. When you have an issue with your bags, they exchange with a new one. Nuno Goncalves Pedro RIMOWA, also I think my 15-year-old bag, the only issue I’ve had was I had one of the things that opens the bag at some point started breaking, and so I had it switched. But you pay for it of course, if you’re past warranty, which I was. But it wasn’t super expensive and it looks brand-new thing. It’s brand new except as I said with aluminium you get the dings on the aluminium, which I feel it’s part of the game. When I initially got one, I was like, “I just got this ding on my aluminium bag that I just bought and it was so expensive.” But then you get used to it, the rite of passage, et cetera. But almost all my big bags are RIMOWA. I have a big one that I rarely use. It’s only for big trips, which I forget the name of it, but it’s I think the largest bag that they have also in aluminium. Bertrand Schmitt Me actually, I must say I’ve changed quite a bit of approach. I used to be big on TUMI for the travel bag, but recently I discovered that they are adding 2 or 3 kilos versus the lightest bag you can get. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. Bertrand Schmitt Now I have the opposite approach. Which is what is the absolutely lightest bag I can get. I want the lightest for two reason: one is they start to bug you in terms of your bag weight and stuff because you are not business, you are not big on their loyalty program, you are travelling just regular, economy, or economy premium. They might bug you on economy premium. Then saving 2, 3 kilos can make a huge difference fitting their limits. Especially in Asia where it can be very little. That’s one, and two, I want to be careful. I had back issues and stuff, so now I just want the lightest bag. I mean, there will be some stuff I will bring anywhere. I’m bringing usually a lot of electronics, so my bags are heavy, so I’m trying to get the lightest possible one. What I notice is that if I want the absolute lightest bag luggage, typically it will come with no brand. I move from TUMI to Travelpro to make sure I have the lightest bag, full stop. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. I was a Samsonite guy, and then I was a TUMI guy, and I played around with a bunch of brands, and I ended up with RIMOWA. I know they’re not the lightest, but they’re also not very heavy. People always say, “Because they’re aluminium, they’re very heavy.” It’s actually not really true either. For me, the must is the four wheels. The four wheels from RIMOWA are exceptional. It’s like the Asia thing taught us, four wheels are better than two. You can put your laptop on it as well. You have your laptop on top of the bag, and you’re just moving at the speed of life through the airport, in and out. To your point, the back obviously suffers a bit if you have to put the bag up. I have to be honest, I’m normally kind if there’s something that needs to be done to the bags at some point. Not only I help other passengers, but for my own bag, I never let anyone touch my bag, including the flight attendant, because it’s so heavy. I don’t want to hurt them. I help them push the thing up and whatever to close it if it’s one of those. Bertrand Schmitt You don’t want them to notice you are way above. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. I also don’t want them I’m way above the weight, but I do want to help. Bertrand Schmitt Just in case they suddenly become nasty and stuff? Nuno Goncalves Pedro I do help. Bertrand Schmitt Like you, I would do my absolute best to always travel with cabin luggage. It’s only now when we travel as a family that sometimes for some family trips we have to have a bigger luggage. That’s usually the ones that might get lost. But yeah, by default good four wheels, something that is cabin, and a backpack that you attach to your travel cabin luggage. That’s the best combo, no question. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I have to be honest, I only started putting AirTags on my luggage—I’m a bit of a late adopter on that—a couple of years ago. I know a lot of people have been doing it for many years and having it maybe for a year and a half, 2 years, it’s more recent for me, but it’s God sent. I mean, you can serve nowhere it is. Bertrand Schmitt To do AirTags? Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, no question. Usually I try to have one in every luggage, and sometimes that helps because if you complain with a luggage issue or something, or someone tried to pick your luggage, it adds peace of mind. Let’s put it this way. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes, maybe moving to clothes and shoes, what’s your program for that? How do you travel with them? How do you pack them? I just roll my stuff in, and I normally go with two pairs of shoes if it’s a longer trip. Some all bird stuff, and some more formal shoes. One will be on the luggage, one will go on me. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s one typically, you have no other choice. For me, it really depends. Is it a business trip, vacation trip? Is it a hiking trip? Then it’s trouble. That means a bigger luggage. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I roll my stuff in. Over the years even I find a way to do that for shirts, et cetera. Then what I do is… Most of the hotels, shockingly enough, do have irons. If they don’t, you can ask for one. Normally, they will bring you one, and I’ll just iron my clothes and get everything done. Trousers, everything else, and shirts. Bertrand Schmitt Usually I try to have a shirt jacket that are supposedly iron-free up to a point I guess. I’m usually very careful. I have small pouches and stuff to put clothes in inside my luggage. Usually, I already fold them carefully. I have these travel systems to put all my stuff carefully. Usually, it’s not too bad when I take them out if they are iron-free, wrinkle-free. It can be okay without iron. As you say, every hotel will give you an iron if you call them. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I am the guy who jumps on my bag to close it. That is even more of a testament for the RIMOWAs. They’re so full of stuff. I think I travel pretty light, but sometimes some of my trips are a week. I’ve been on trips as recent as this year, that were two weeks and a half. I try to optimise. At some point I might have to do some hotel cleaning, which is the most expensive activity of all time I think. You might as well buy new clothes, to be honest. That’s how expensive a lot of the cleaning is. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, it’s very unacceptable. Now I try to be more careful and not end up with any cleaning because… Sometimes you have no choice but it just… Nuno Goncalves Pedro Sometimes there’s no choice. If you’re 2 weeks on the road, there’s nothing you can do really. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, exactly. If you are 2 weeks. But now if I’m travelling a week or 10 days, I try to see how I can optimise it. Just unreasonable. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Sleeping, what’s your game on sleeping? Bertrand Schmitt For sure, I have a sleeping mask. I will take sleeping pills, but very light ones. I’m absolutely not taking anything that is not over the counter. I’m very careful that if I have longer trips and big time zone change, I will usually take the Tylenol PM. One thing I’ve learned, don’t drink alcohol with that. Don’t take that wine of glass in the plane because that’s a really bad combo. I finally read the notice at some point and it’s a bad idea. Now I understand why I had these nightmares and stuff. Be strong and don’t drink any alcohol with that. I would do that flying and maybe one or two nights after flying if there was a big change of time. If not, I would take some even lighter ones. Nuno Goncalves Pedro My process for sleeping is, first, I don’t sleep on flights very well. I have to be extremely tired to get any sleep on a flight. Which makes sometimes the point of even being in business class a little bit moot because you’re not going to sleep. The good news of that is I arrive at the place I’m in, and I just adapt to that place immediately. I go into that time. I think red eyes can be a bit of a killer if you get in the morning at the other place. But if I get in the evening or the afternoon, it’s very doable. That first night I normally sleep very well. To your point, the second night’s normally the trickier night. In particular, if there’s big time differences and I haven’t found a magic way of dealing with it. I really don’t. I started wearing a sleeping mask very recently. Maybe 2 years ago I started wearing sleeping. I never did. It bugged me. Obviously, being a nerd, I ended up looking around for several sleeping masks, and I ended up with this sleeping mask called Manta Sleep.  I have a few of them, one at home, one that goes with me on the road. I actually may have three of them. But anyway they’re very nice. They’re a bit expensive, but they’re very nice. Then I use AirPods on my ears. At home, I use I think it’s Ozlo, O-Z-L-O, and I put some background noise for a period of time, and then I sleep. Then there’s a really good brand. I forget the name of the brand. I think they’re Finnish. They’re expensive and they don’t put any sounds. I think they’re as expensive as Ozlo, and there’s no sound on it. It’s just white noise. But they’re really good. I take them on the road with me. Those are the ones I take on the road. Ozlo are the ones I use at home. They’re called QuietOn, and they’re quite expensive, but they’re really good. They eliminate a ton of noise. The first time I used them, my alarm clock went off, and I couldn’t hear my alarm clock. That’s a little bit scary. I had to put my phone closer to me Bertrand Schmitt I’ve never used that type of stuff. What I use, however, because I try to sleep in the plane, and that’s why I need my sleeping pill in the plane. I would use my noise-canceling headset, but if I’m not in the plane I don’t put anything in my ears. I usually have no problem sleeping. My issue will be there is too much light in the room. That’s why I started to use sleeping mask, which of course you have to use in the plane, but I will use in other places if there is a risk that the room is too bright because that will wake me up. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, I started using it recently. Both things, both sleeping mask and earbuds. AirPods thing for sleeping. As I said, Ozlo and QuietOn. By the way, I have no participation, no investment in any of these companies that I’m mentioning. I just use their products, and they’re pretty cool. Bertrand Schmitt I bought the Ozlo for my wife. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It took me a while to get used to the Ozlo. It’s a bit quirky also on how it activates, in particular on the iPhone. But it’s been life-changing for me. I really do sleep better with those devices on. I don’t take pills unless I’ll indulge in the odd one NyQuil pill if I’m coming to a cold and take the leverage of that and sleep very nicely that evening. But I try to avoid pills as much as I can, and I can’t sleep on planes anyway, so I just avoid it altogether. Electronics, I used to carry a lot. I used to carry like three phones, switch phones on the road. I had different numbers for different countries I was in particular when I was in Asia. That is no longer true. I fly with one phone now, normally, unless I go to Portugal where I have my local phone as well and local numbers. I normally travel with that. As you guys probably remember, I collect phones, so I just need to select what’s the phone I’m going to take this time around. But USB-C changes for Europe have changed everything for us. We have to thank the European Commission for that because now everything’s USB-C C really. Even the iPhone. Easy to travel with that. I travel with a Fire Stick right now, an Amazon Fire Stick, also very recently just to go on watch whatever things I have and not have to log in every time, and then clear out every time and all that stuff. To stream from the room, particularly for domestic flights, to be honest. Then I have my laptop with me typically, which is a MacBook Pro. I, some point considered flying for shorter trips just with my iPad Air. I think that’s the last I have, and I somehow don’t quite do it well. I think I need to improve on that. I still have to fly with my laptop. I stopped taking my iPad Air because it’s just added to it. I do fly with my Kindle. I’m not sure which generation I have anymore, but it’s one of these basic Kindles. Then I have a bunch of plug adapters because you fly all around the world. I have two nice plug adapters per bag that I have just in case I need to switch stuff in. What else do I have? Then AirPods, I have pros just obviously got the latest version, the Pro 3s, but they haven’t arrived yet. But I had the Pro 2s. If I’m flying with an Android device, I’ll bring in one of the Android earbuds that I have, or EarPods that I have for Android. I have a setup that works for me. I’ve just travel with the same stuff all the time. If I have a rental car, I also have a setup for that. In the US, I’ve travelled with a radar detector. Radar detectors are legal in all, but I think three states in the US, so I travel with that. Not that I go over to the speed limit just to be clear. I just want to know if there’s police. Then as I said, I have the Fire Stick, I have my Fast Track which I use for California if I’m flying between places in California. I think that’s about it. Just the cables to connect devices and all that stuff to the car, et cetera. Bertrand Schmitt For me, I’m a gadget freak, so I usually travel with a lot of gadgets. I used to travel with my Galaxy Book Ultra and a Galaxy S9 tablet ultra as well, 16-inch laptop, 15-inch tablet. At some point I was feeling it’s too much, so I actually combined them both in a new Surface Pro 11. Went back to Dede with a Surface Pro. I must say this one is amazing because it’s an intel one Lunar Lake. It has huge battery life, and it truly works as a laptop or tablet all in one. It was definitely space-saving to use that. I will use typically Logitech MX Anywhere 3S travel mouse with it. That works really well as a combo. I bring my Samsung Z Fold 7 with me as a phone. One thing that I really enjoy doing now is my XREAL One Pro glasses. I don’t know if you try this augmented reality glasses, but it used to be crap. At some point it became okay. Now I must say it’s great. It’s your home cinema replacement, and it’s very amazing in the plane, in your hotel room. Now, if I want my big screen to watch a movie, TV show something and be really disconnected, it’s that plus your headset. You don’t need a headset if it’s not noisy. It has its own sound system. But if you use a headset, if you’re in a plane, for instance, it’s just amazing. For me, it’s totally game-changer. If I’m travelling, I don’t watch movies or stuff like this without using my One Pro. That’s one. I would bring the Nintendo Switch 2 now. I must say that now that they finally made a new one. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to be clear, you use the XREAL just for consuming content? Bertrand Schmitt Yes. From my perspective, it’s useless to work. At some point it becomes painful on your head, especially if you are standing straight, like walking. But if you are lounging, it’s very comfortable, or lying on the bed, it’s very comfortable. But that’s not a way to work typically. It’s pure entertainment for my use case. I don’t know how anyone will seriously work with that for 3, 4 hours, but for 30 minutes to 2 hours of movies, it’s just amazing. For me, it’s very interesting because I also have an Apple Vision Pro that I barely use, while I actually use the IZI One Pro. They finally nailed a real good use case. I think the Nintendo Switch 2 is great as a form factor. Finally, 8 inch, very thin, very light. In your backpack it’s not too much. What else? Typically, I would have an E-reader with me. Seven, 8 inch depending, in black and white of colour. What else? I just moved to Bose QuietComfort Ultra second-gen headphone. What I like with Bose versus other options is that it’s very comfortable which I care about if I’m in a long flight, and two. The box is very small. I think it’s the smallest box you can get for a decent headset. In my backpack, there is only so much space once you have your computer, your console, your One Pro and stuff. At some point space is tight. That’s very important for me. Comfort and a small case. Typically, I will also have some other earbuds, some that are close, some that are open, depending on the situation, because these ones are very small; they are just in your pocket, very convenient. I have a Technics EAH-AZ100 for the closed one, and I have some new SHOKZ that are actually very good. I’ve been very impressed that you can use for sports, or if you just don’t want to isolate yourself, the open dots one. Very good. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I’ll obviously bring some devices with me if I need that are a little bit more specialised along the way. There’s only one game that I systematically play, and it’s on mobile. I’ll bring in a nice gaming device out of the collection, and that’s the game I’ll bring with me that would have hopefully a good battery life as well. Something that’s a little bit more of a compromised device that does both good gaming, good pictures, because obviously I’m on the road, so I’d love to take pictures of what I’m doing and where I’m at, even if it’s business trip, but that becomes my all in device to a certain extent, and then the MacBook Pro is the rest of it. Then the Fire Stick adds the extension to the TV, which I think is valuable in particular if it’s domestic flights and domestic travelling in the US. I think over the years I just simplified my stack dramatically on travelling. I remember I was always stopped at ISRO and Frankfurt and whatever. They’re like, “Your backpack is like…” They had many questions about my back. Let’s just say that like, “What is this? Why are there cables here and cables there, and five devices” and whatever. I think over the years I just curated, curated, curated and got to a point where I’m like, actually, “I don’t need to travel with that much stuff.” But a lot of intriguing stuff from your side. The XREAL thing in particular, in terms of that experience, and how do you have a great content viewing experience in particular, for flights now? Because if we are thinking through a lot of airlines, even on domestic flights, you don’t have screens in some flights any more. You have to use your phone, and it’s a pain in the neck to get your laptop out, et cetera. Bertrand Schmitt I used to use a tablet for this honestly, in the past, but now I charge the movies on my phone and I watch from my phone using the One Pro. It’s just amazing. Maybe some other stuff is the power adapter. I used to bring a lot of power adapters, but I have just two-power adapter. I have a 65-watt one that is small, tiny that I would use in the plane typically. I have a bigger one, 100-watt. What’s nice with them is that they have typically three or four outputs. Two or three USB-C and one USB-A. Basically, I reduce dramatically how many adapters I need. That, for me, is very convenient. Typically, I like to have at least two because sometimes in hotel rooms and stuff location might not be great, so you have to optimise differently. Brings you some convenience. And they are lighter than before as well. That’s another thing. If you pick the right ones, it’s a big benefit, and typically, I will have a small power bank, something that I can recharge my phone from. A power bank can be convenient in some situations. This one depends more where I’m travelling.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I carry power banks on my two backpacks, so I just leave one wherever, and it’s always charged, and I just take them with me. Not huge ones, to your point. I think the only huge power bank that I have that is still TSA approved, so I could still fly with it, I think, at the limit. I forget what the limit was, but I just checked the other day because I had to fly with it, and it was at the limit, but it’s for my racing. Sometimes funky stuff happens to cars and their connection for power to my Garmin Catalyst device. I need my Garmin Catalyst device to work for a variety of reasons including, for racing. You actually have to have a front-view camera that needs to be active and recording in races for issues that may come up with stewards, et cetera, et cetera. The Catalyst needs to be working. I bring in a big ass battery pack in case, for some reason, the car’s lighter is not working because I race Spec Miatas, so the connectivity is not always great. Otherwise, I fly like you with smaller power banks that would cover me for a day. Extra charge for a day, right? Bertrand Schmitt It’s more one or two extra charge for the phone, and usually you find a way to charge it. It’s more peace of mind in that weird situation where there was an issue with your charging port, that sort of stuff. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Mobile and setup. I have to be honest, I was a Google Fi early adopter. My first number actually in the US was a Google FI number, so I chose it. Bertrand Schmitt A long time ago. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The P player of Google Fi, it was a Google Voice number, and then I got Google Fi, and the Google Fi was super useful because they used to have this package that was amazing for you to travel internationally, that you’d pay very little for roaming. At some point, they got wise about it, and they started doing this funky thing, actually not very cool, which was to say “Oh, we’re going to suspend your international access.” I’m like, “Why? I’ve been using it, I’ve been paying for it, so why can’t I use it?” They’re like, “Oh, you’re not using it nationally, so we won’t allow you to use it internationally.” They did this to a bunch of people, so I don’t use my Google Fi to be honest, much any more. AT&T now has the daily passport thing, which is expensive-ish. Bertrand Schmitt Ten dollars per device. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe it’s $10 per device or $12 now, I think it may have gone up, I’m not sure, but it’s limited to 10 days, I think. In 1 month, 10 days and after that you don’t pay more. It’s a 120-day cap thing. I think it’s now $120. Bertrand Schmitt It’s $10 per line, but I think there’s also a limit. It’s up to two line after that it’s okay. Since I started using that because it gives you unlimited data wherever you are I just stop bothering optimising. I’m just, “Okay, I’m going to pay.” Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s no point to optimise. Bertrand Schmitt It’s $10, and if it was 20 whatever, but it’s unlimited, so you just don’t care. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I keep my Portuguese number just for more honestly historic reasons. I guess fondness of it. I don’t need it either. It’s just honestly with the Daily Passport things and whatever with AT&T it’s like it’s fine, it’s easy, it’s not super cheap but as you said it’s unlimited, so it’s like you’re just running as if you’re in your own country, and it works well instead of optimising for all these different apps that you have out there that will provision eSIMs and do all these kinds of things I’m like it’s fine, I’m happy with my setup. I don’t have a VPN service. I used to get VPN through Google One, then they stopped the service. I’d used TunnelBear for many years, which was pretty good. I used a bunch of VPN services in China that I shall not name. Recently, I haven’t really used anything. I haven’t found a significant need to know to use it. I have a phone that has an embedded service, the Punkt. There’s a Punkt. MC, I think it’s the MC03, one of my phones that has an embedded, for privacy reasons, an embedded VPN service for Asia, I think it’s Japan, Germany and US. I think it’s something like that. I haven’t found a great use for it. If I’m in Europe or if I’m in the Middle East, having access to Netflix US or whatever, cool. I haven’t found huge amounts. I don’t have much time to consume content normally when I’m on the road anyway, so I haven’t found a use case for it. Bertrand Schmitt I just started to subscribe to Mullvad VPN, very, very privacy-focused VPN. For me, some security, some safety, as you say, some access back to the US. I must say there’s a new product I started using called Tailscale, and this one is more your own VPN between your own machines. It’s very, very interesting product, and this one, so it has benefit if you have computers in the cloud, if you have a home network, and you want to access from anywhere, that’s very, very convenient. Tailscale is based on WireGuard. Again, it’s not your typical VPN service. It’s more for your own VPN between your own machines. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Anyway, no VPN for me right now. Maybe I’ll adopt Mullvad as well, because Bertrand is doing that, and I trust Bertrand. Maybe not, we’ll see. Other accessories that I carry around? I don’t think I have much stuff that I carry around. Obviously, I optimise for clothes, travelling light like yourself, Bertrand, as we discussed, I’ve probably curated a little bit more my electronics setup in the last few years. Is there anything else I carry with me? I already mentioned all these funky things like the radar detector for US and whatever, which is a little bit weird. I know, guys. That’s about it. I don’t think I have much stuff. I have a little see-through bag I forgot about. I bought on Amazon at some point. That’s very nice looking, and it’s hard-to-see-through bag, so that I don’t need to get all these. I used to have to get all these little baggies and stuff, and I’d normally get them at the airports actually, to carry my liquids, and now I just have the see-through one that I bought a few, and I’m on my second one. I’m about to get my third. I think that’s the only thing. Then I have obviously one bag that carries all my electronic stuff for hygiene, like your electric toothbrush, all the stuff you need for your hygiene. Carrying another one. Bertrand Schmitt I have one hygiene bag and I have two small electronics bags. For the chargers, cables, adapters, which takes some space and weight, I must say. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Quite a bit. Bertrand Schmitt It’s definitely not neutral. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I know this is going to sound really paranoid. I started doing something, maybe, I don’t know, maybe 2, 3 years ago. I don’t know why I started carrying. Obviously, in the US, domestic flights, you can carry your real ID, driver’s licence, so you don’t need to carry passports. Some of you might know I’m a dual citizen, and so I actually carry both my passports with me now, even on domestic travelling. People are like, why? I was like, I don’t know, why not? I don’t know where I’m going next. In principle, I’m going back home. I think some of the incidents of the last few weeks in the US, travelling abroad in particular and coming back and all that stuff. I’m like, “It’s not a bad idea to carry our passports with you both.” Anyway, it served me really well at some point. This was on an international flying. I was flying around, and I was going to all these countries that the US visa waiver with.  I was doing the round the world trip. We were talking about around the world trip, and I had to go through Istanbul, and I was actually having a couple of meetings in Istanbul. I went to the immigration officer with my American passport, and he looks at the passport like, “Where’s your visa?” You can get, I think, a visa on arrival or something, but where’s your visa? The guy turns to me, he’s like, “Do you happen to have another passport?” That’s a random question. He’s like, “Yeah, I have another passport. Would this one work?” Which was my Portuguese passport, and he’s like, “Yeah, your Portuguese passport works.” I entered with my Portuguese passport into Istanbul. No visa needed, whatever. Fine. Good. Bertrand Schmitt That’s a bad surprise if you forgot to pick up the visa. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That was good. I don’t think that’s when it started. I think I’ve been doing it for a while. Even when I fly domestic, which again, I wouldn’t need my passports when I fly domestic, but I fly with my passports. Bertrand Schmitt Usually, there is some benefit because you never know if there is some urgent travel that you need to do. You want to fly directly from where you are. If you don’t have your passport with you, you are stuck potentially. I think there is value. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe it was the COVID thing. If you remember, we started having all these travel bans with COVID early on. I guess I got a bit jittery as well. I don’t know. Maybe that was the thing that started. Cool stuff. Then credit cards. I have my usual credit cards. Sometimes, if I go to countries that I spend more time in, like Portugal, I will bring some of my local cards with me. I’ll have a different wallet for that. I have these flip wallets that have a limited number of cards. You can carry like eight or something, and then you have stuff on the side, so I don’t have like a proper wallet any more. I’ll just switch. Like if I go to Portugal, I have a couple of cards that I only use for Portugal, et cetera. Otherwise, that’s it, and then most of the stuff now is on the mobile phone anyway. I do have to say, sometimes I will either print or get a printed version of my boarding pass. I guess that makes me a bit old somehow. It’s like the ads. You’re becoming like your parents. I just like to have the physical boarding pass in case. Honestly, I carry everything on my phone, so normally it’s not a big deal. Bertrand Schmitt I think that the benefit of the phone, I see the phone as a backup. That’s true. That, for instance, I have all my cards on my phone as well. In case I lose my wallet, I have my phone and vice versa. I have a Ridge wallet, like you said, something where you can put maybe eight cards in it, and that’s it. I like it because it’s the smallest wallet you can get. For me, that’s very efficient. Initially, I was like accept to have a wallet like this. It was a gap versus a traditional wallet, but it’s so much better for me. I never went back to a regular wallet. I must say. I’m not an optimiser on the credit card, but maybe I should. That’s one thing. Maybe I should optimise more. I don’t have an American Express, for instance, so I never bother. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I have an American Express, but that means that when I travel international, I have to make sure that at least I have a debit card, for example, Visa or MasterCard, because a lot of countries don’t support much American Express. Bertrand Schmitt That was my issue with American Express: Is that you cannot use it everywhere. That’s why I didn’t bother. Having a second one as backup could make some sense in case there is some whatever issue. One last piece of tech, I have a Yubico Key now. Basically, it’s in case I lose my phone. I would be truly in trouble for authentication on a lot of service. With my Yubico Key, it’s a backup, basically. I can authenticate to any service without my phone. For me, that’s an important backup when I travel. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I have a Ridge wallet as well, but I have a bunch of wallets, and the Ridge is probably the one I use the least and then the one I like the most. Probably it’s a similar format to the ones that pop up, that you have the little button that pops up the cards. It’s a Porsche design wallet, so I quite like it, and it has a little bit of space where you could put a little. Some bills if you’re in some country where you need a little bit of cash, not it doesn’t carry too many, to be very honest. I like that. That’s basically it. For a nerd, I think I’ve simplified my setup a lot. I used to travel with my own cameras and whatever for the video calls, et cetera. Now, the MacBook Pro has such a good quality camera, and then your phone is such a great quality camera. Why would I do that? I’ve simplified it greatly. Bertrand Schmitt There are questions. If you want a bit better camera, if you want a bit better mic, that’s the one from your headset. I’m the same; I’m trying to simplify. As long as the camera quality is good enough when you are travelling. It really depends. If you had to do a proper professional recording, obviously, you will travel with some other stuff, but if you don’t, I would try to keep it easy. I have a Fujifilm Camera that I use if I travel for vacation. If I have this one, it can double as an exceptional webcam, so I can do that if I want. Typically, I don’t have to mix too much of the two, and it’s usually not really that necessary. CONCLUSION I hope you had a good episode with us. Nothing was sponsored, to be clear. It’s just our personal preference over the years. Travelling in terms of airlines, airports, lounges, fidelity programs, luggage, electronics. What do we do to simplify our life? Build our home away from home when we are travelling, and I think when we travel quite a bit, it’s really nice to have one on one side or all the stuff you need to feel like at home, and at the same time what I think is nice is to try to keep some consistency. Always travel more or less with the same stuff. Make gradual change if needed, but have some routine that makes your travel easier and safer. Thank you, Nuno. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Thank you, Bertrand.

America’s AI action plan … “Winning the AI race” has just been announced. What is it all about? What are the implications? How will the rest of the world react? A deep dive into the announcement, approaches by EU and China, and overall implications of these action plans. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Context of the White House AI Summit Pillar I – Accelerating AI Innovation Pillar II – Building American AI Infrastructure Pillar III – Leading in International AI Diplomacy & Security Comparing Approaches – U.S. Action Plan vs. EU AI Act vs. China’s Strategy Implications and Synthesis Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno G. Pedro Welcome to episode 68 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will focus on America’s AI action plan, winning the AI race, which has just been announced a couple of weeks in by President Trump in the White House. Today, we’ll be discussing the pillars of this plan, from pillar I, the acceleration of AI innovation, to pillar II, building of American AI infrastructure, to pillar III, leading in international AI diplomacy and security. We’ll also further contextualise it, as well as compare the approaches between the US Action plan, and what we see from the EU and China strategy at this point in time. We’ll finalise with implications and synthesis. Bertrand, is this a watershed moment for the industry? Is this the moment we were all waiting for in terms of clarity for AI in the US? Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, that’s a great question. I must say I’m quite excited. I’m not sure I can remember anything like it since basically John F. Kennedy announcing the race to go to the moon in the early ’60s. It feels, as you say, a watershed moment because suddenly you can see that there is a grand vision, a grand plan, that AI is not just important, but critical to the future success of America. It looks like the White House is putting all the ducks in order in order to make it happen. There is, like in the ’60s with JFK, a realisation that there is an adversary, there is a competitor, and you want to beat them to that race. Except this time it’s not Russia, it’s China. A lot of similarities, I would say. Nuno G. Pedro Yeah. It seems relatively comprehensive. Obviously, we’ll deep dive into it today across a variety of elements like regulation, investments, view in relation to exports and imports and the rest of the world. So, relatively comprehensive from what we can see. Obviously, we don’t know all the details. We know from the announcement that the plan has identified 90 federal policy actions across the three pillars. Obviously, we’ll see how these come into practice over the next few months, few years. To your point, it is a defining moment. It feels a little bit like the space race of ’60s, et cetera. It’s probably warranted. We know that, obviously, AI platforms, AI services and products are changing the world as we speak. It’s pretty important to figure out what is the US response to it. Also interesting to know that we normally don’t talk about the US too much in terms of industrial policy. The US seems to have a private sector that, in and of itself, actually stands up to the game, and in particular in tech and high-tech, normally fulfils or fills the gaps that are introduced by big generational shifts in terms of technology. But in this case, there seems to be an industrial policy. This seems to set the stage for that industrial policy and how it moves forward, which, as you said, we haven’t seen in quite a long time. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. At the same time, on one side, yes, there is some level of industrial policy, but I feel quite a big part is getting the government out of the way so that private companies can truly innovate. Because America, like many other countries, have accumulated over decades regulations, you could call it over-regulations of many sectors and industries. I would say part of it is showing the way, but part of it is really a lot about just removing obstacles along the way that were posed by decades of government regulations and acknowledging that if these regulations are not removed, it could truly impede America’s chances to win the AI race. Nuno G. Pedro How did we get here? Obviously, there was an executive order in January this year, 2025, on removing barriers to American leadership in AI, the directive being the US to become the world capital of AI, so to speak. We had this announcement at the White House in late July 2025, the White House AI summit, which set the stage for this, winning the AI race, America’s AI action plan piece. That’s how we got here in the first place. Shall we jump into the pillars and get into the meat of this? Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Maybe to finish on setting the context, what was interesting with this announcement, it was not done the usual way. It was more done in the context and format of a podcast co-hosted by Olin Podcast. Some of our listeners may know that David Sachs, who used to be part of the Olin podcast, is now the AI and crypto Czar of the White House. Nuno G. Pedro Yes. It was done with much pomp and circumstance in the good old days of empire-making in some ways. Let’s jump into the first pillar, accelerating AI innovation. It feels like this pillar, there are a couple of interesting elements to it, but one of the key elements to it, I’d say the overarching element that we can see is removing onerous regulations that would hinder the development of AI. So, having a very light-touch regulatory approach and proactive support for AI development all across the board in terms of R&D, also across the elements of data that are put at the table. The plan apparently does call for the identification of rules to eliminate and even pre-empt state AI laws. Where the federal government would, in some ways, try to make sure that the state AI laws don’t come in and destroy a lot of these elements. We’ve discussed some of the stuff in the past; if our listeners remember, we talked about this, several onerous laws that were put forward in particular in California. It feels that the federal government is, in this case, sort of saying, actually we have to go in and be top down about this, and we want to remove onerous regulations across the board and make sure that they’re not put in place then by states. Bertrand Schmitt I’m very excited by all of this. Removing red tape and onerous regulations, I think, is critical to move forward, especially at such an early stage where we don’t really know where it’s going to go. As you said, California was preparing some very onerous regulations. Luckily, they were not signed into law by the governor, Gavin Newsom. But I think that was a very clear signal that states might decide to go crazy. We need to do something about it. Personally, I think it’s good to have the states being able to define some of their own regulation. But I would make an exception in the digital domain where things are pretty different across much more easily the borders. There is no border to the Internet in some ways. I think when it goes digital, it’s a much bigger issue, especially at such an early stage. If you look at startup companies, they cannot deal with a plethora of state regulations depending on which state the user is in. This would be a nightmare, to be frank. Not just regulations, but the multitude of regulations state by state. Personally, I’m pretty excited about that. The other piece of the puzzle is, of course, repealing the previous administration’s AI regulations that are just way too far-fetched, unnecessary, just going to hinder innovation. I’m very excited that this was removed, and I also believe they were a threat to free speech. Nuno G. Pedro There are elements here just to be a little bit even-handed, that we need to see how they play in action. One of them is this notion that this should not be acting as a Ministry of AI Truth, and that basically, there shouldn’t be ideological bias, so to speak. There’s been some mentions in general about preventing so-called woke AI, et cetera, et cetera, in federal use. It could go the other way as well. We know that a lot of the data out there has biases because of the way it was built. I think that part on the data side and the ideological bias side, interesting thoughts, put at the table in the plan. We’ll need to see how it pans out. I still have at least a couple of concerns on that. The second element that I feel we have to be moderately optimistic about, we’ll need to see how it pans out as well, is almost this notion of, if we eliminate almost all the key onerous regulations out there, that in some ways, self-regulation and market forces will compensate for us. We also know that that’s not been historically true in many cases. We’ll also need to see how that pans out. Obviously, just overregulating upfront, we’ve discussed it also in past episodes, like for example, the EU has done in the past, regulating upfront technologies without even understanding what the use cases are, is also not fruitful. It’s also not good. The US has had a long history of being lighter on regulatory environment, which has served it well in terms of technology advancements. In this case, we’ll need to see how the regulatory environment actually evolves. I’m also moderately optimistic on that topic, but we’ll see how it actually evolves. It could be a big issue if we start seeing some elements of exaggeration in terms of how data is collected, how it’s put through to users, et cetera, et cetera. That would, in principle, require, at some point in time, regulatory intervention. Bertrand Schmitt I think what’s interesting in terms of AI not acting as a Ministry of Truth, first, I agree with that. I don’t think it’s good. What’s interesting, they’re not forcing anyone; they’re just saying, “Hey, if us, the federal government, are going to buy some AI products, your AI product needs to be free of biases.” They are not forcing companies to change their ways, but they are saying, “Hey, if you want to sell us products, you have to sell us neutral products. As us, the federal government, you, as a client, you basically do what you want.” Nuno G. Pedro I see a lot of companies right now and a lot of entrepreneurs saying, “Hey, this is potentially an opportunity for me to start a startup because…” Good luck with that. Good luck with understanding if data and algorithms are biased or not. How do you prove that they’re neutral? In principle, the concept is absolutely sound. We’ll see how it gets executed. Worst case, as I said, maybe there will be a bunch of startups actually in that space. We’ll see how that pans out. Bertrand Schmitt I certainly prefer startups in that direction versus startups focus on censorship. Nuno G. Pedro That’s a good way to look at it. Obviously, there’s been support across the board. You’d expect people like Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, to be supportive of it. Many other CEOs have been supportive of that. No shock there. I feel preaching to the choir would be the right expression to categorise a lot of the excitement that we’ve seen from CEOs across the board. There is, in my perspective, an element of openness about the regulatory environment that would, in principle, be helpful for startups. We’ve seen the past, a couple of elements. We’ve discussed them as well in previous episodes, for example, in Healthcare, where there’s been like heavy-duty regulatory capture that really only benefits one player or a couple of players on top. So, the fact that the regulatory environment is lighter should, in principle, be beneficial for the creation of innovation and startups in the space, obviously, the larger players have huge advantages of scale, as we’ll discuss later in particular in pillar II, this notion of building of infrastructure at scale, they will have huge advantages as well. But from my perspective as an investor, as a VC, I would say that this would in principle be positive, that there is less regulatory capture by nature because we’re saying is going to be a lighter touch, regulatory intervention that would be beneficial for the creation of startups and innovation at scale. We’ll see how it actually pans out. But should, in principle, be a positive movement. Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. I think economies of scale from larger players, that’s a game. We are not going to hinder them. But what I felt was I was pretty worried around a year ago because it was clear that some actors were trying to do regulatory capture. There was a lot of talk about OpenAI behind the scene, trying to push a lot of their agenda through regulatory capture and added regulation. There was even a talk that open source AI, open weight AI will be forbidden, “for safety.” I’m actually very encouraged to see the direction it’s going. There is actually a very clear encouragement on open source and open weight AI in the AI action plan. That gets me very excited that there will be less regulatory capture. I see also there is a lot around very practical stuff in that action plan, around trying to enable and push for more AI adoption. Organise industries so that they are more focused on adopting at scale, simplifying standards of adoption. There is also stuff around training, workers that might be impacted by AI or that might be made redundant by AI. There is, of course, manufacturing. There is even talk about AI-enabled science, where there is a focus on building new data sets at scale that might benefit science. First, to be clear, it’s not just about LLMs, it’s really AI at large. It’s already bigger plans than just controlling chatbot, and what they say, it’s really all about putting in place the right infrastructure, scale, environment to push for AI in one direction. Nuno G. Pedro Yes, this is maybe a good time to move to precisely pillar II, which is the building of American AI infrastructure. Very central to the whole discussion. If I’ve read the documentation correctly, and if I’ve thought through the announcements correctly, there seems to be this notion of, in some ways, data centres, compute, power, electricity, energy, are strategic national assets. Because there are strategic national assets, they need to be treated as such. Obviously, their strategic national assets would be highways, telecom networks, et cetera. But there seems to be an emphasis in public-private efforts to expand that capacity relatively quickly. The plan calls a lot for expedited construction of data centres and semiconductor fabs. Modernising the permitting processes and really even proposing potentially having nationwide permits to bypass state-by-state approvals, which we know is a flex by the federal government, but at the same time could be useful depending on how they’re actually deployed and put at the table. A lot of discussions happen around power and power grids and all the other elements, but very central this notion of we need to build data centres and semiconductor fabs as quickly as we can, and that should be our focus. Bertrand Schmitt We need the energy infrastructure to support it. So, power transmission, power generation, I think it’s well-thought-out. We talk mostly, I would say, on the software side in that first section, but now it’s more hardware. I’m glad it’s not just about chips. It’s really building the data centres that manage supercomputers at scale. It’s providing them energy. Let’s not forget that in the US, like in many other countries except China or India, power generation has plateaued, grown very, very slowly. What we are talking about, all these new data centres that are power hungry, it’s a dramatic shift in the power generation and transmission landscape because suddenly we need way more. We don’t want it in 10, 20 years; we want it tomorrow. We cannot just keep doing the old ways, where this stuff was moving on a snail’s pace. Can’t say everybody was okay with it, but it was not so dramatically negative to the national interest. But here things need to move fast. We need this approval to set up factories to set up infrastructure. I’m glad there is a lot of expedited permitting, streamlining, removing of regulations to move fast. One thing to keep in mind, the federal government is the biggest owner of land in the US, so they have some abilities to actually use this land, sell this land, do different things with this land without any specific state approval, for instance, because it’s federal land. There are a lot of things that could be done and that they seem intent to do, actually. Nuno G. Pedro There has been some debate in the past, for example, about as we’re onshoring again, for example, semiconductor fabs, if the US workers could be competitive, et cetera. If it’s anything to go by, the early indications from the TSMC factory in Arizona and Phoenix, extremely positive. We know it’s not the ultimate cutting edge that’s there currently, but if we measure yield, and just for those who don’t know what yield is, production yield in semiconductors is the percentage of functional chips produced from a wafer compared to the total number of potential chips on that wafer. Basically it’s an efficiency metric that measures how efficient we are at getting the most chips out of a wafer. So it’s normally a good metric to analyse efficiency. We had had some public details already, and I’ve also had some conversations in private that have told us that, actually, we’ve seen yields of the Arizona factory that are in many cases superior to Taiwan factories. It seems like there is no big issue in terms of how these things are being deployed in production in the US. Actually, quite the opposite seems to be working well. Again, the case for onshoring and bringing a lot of semiconductor production back into the US, which now mostly resides around Asia, has been quite positive. A lot of these elements I feel are extremely positive towards this pillar, that just this push that we’re seeing is a push that will yield, pun intended, great results over time. Bertrand Schmitt That’s great news, Nuno, thanks for sharing. It’s quite exciting to see what is being put in place and the execution of some of these plans. From what I’ve heard, there is a very big push on all this new manufacturing put in place in the US to be as frontier as possible in terms of technology. Use AI everywhere you can, use the latest production approach, use the latest tools and technologies to make it happen. That’s very exciting because you don’t want low-end manufacturing coming to the US. That doesn’t make much sense. But the more advanced technological, the more the US worker will be able to really be a positive element of the equation. Talking about workers, there is a lot of training that is talked about in this document, in the action plan. It’s pretty good to see that they think about it at every level. Training for electricians, for HVAC technicians. There is a willingness to make sure the workforce is properly trained to be able to deliver on these investments. That means that it will be a lot of really good, solid opportunities for American workers to work on all of this. If you remember, a lot of the talk in the past about AI was how workers are going to be impacted negatively by AI and jobs will be replaced and stuff. But actually it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of jobs that are going to be created in the pace of moving America to new AI industries. That’s very exciting from that perspective. Nuno G. Pedro Indeed. Obviously, on the energy part, it would be a huge omission from us if we didn’t talk about renewable energies and their role. As we’ve seen the past, President Trump and the administration seems to be doubling down on fossil energy. I mean, there isn’t like a specific element of saying that we’re not doing renewable at all. There is a revitalization of nuclear plants, which we know has been pushed by some of the large tech players, and we’ve mentioned it in previous episodes as well. There’s a little bit of an element here of big oil comes back into the table. We’ve seen, obviously, a lot of praises from people like the Chevron CEO. The level of energy that needs to be produced. The question is, can we do it just on renewable with the current infrastructure that we have, and it seems like the answer has been historically no, and therefore it’s probably not an either/or at this moment in time. It’s more of a, “We need to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it and see how we can build energy production at scale.” As you also mentioned earlier, energy distribution is also flawed in the US in many elements. That needs to be put up to par. But definitely there’s a little bit of a tightening relationship or a renewed relationship of big oil and fossil fuels back into the fold, which was not necessarily true in the previous administration. Bertrand Schmitt I have not seen any direct reference to that in the document, but what I have seen is a prioritization of reliable energy sources as well as embracing new energy generation at the technological frontier. Talking about nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, some enhanced geothermal. I don’t think there is anything specific pro-fossil fuel, for instance, but contrary to previous administration, there is certainly nothing against. Personally it feels like the right balance. We want to move forward, and we want to pick whatever is needed in order to deliver this plan. Nuno G. Pedro Why does this matter? I mean, the building of infrastructure. It matters because it’s the underpinning of the overall innovation that we need to see in the market. If we are talking about, for example, on my side as a venture capitalist, the building of startups that will innovate, that will come into the space, that will occupy specific areas. If you have the best infrastructure in the world at your disposal, the likelihood that you will be able to innovate faster and at scale and develop real cutting edge algorithms, platforms, models, underlying infrastructure in and of itself as well is much higher. It creates an ecosystem of building that is top-notch, that is cutting edge for the world. That matters is, from the perspective of public private partnerships at this moment in time, if they are properly deployed. I think this is the central piece in some ways of what I mentioned earlier of the potential industry policy that we’re seeing from the US on AI. It will really create the underpinning, it will really create the infrastructure and the sandbox for startups to build on at scale and quickly. This matters a lot. If this is well done, we will see an ecosystem of startups that will emerge from this faster rather than slower. It does matter at scale. Bertrand Schmitt I totally agree with you. I think that we want one success for the tech companies, the small and big operating in the US, and we want the US overall national interest moving in the right direction regarding AI because the US cannot afford to be left behind, not to go to the same pace as its peer competitors like China. It’s really clear that there is some level of competition. You absolutely cannot miss it. AI would be the future of many industries, but also certainly the future of the defence industry and the future of war. You cannot be left behind that just too much risk. I’m pretty excited that I think all of this is moving us forward in the right direction and maybe one last point, there is a lot of talk that in the US if nothing is done, we are maybe just one year away from reaching max power capacity to deliver AI solution. Meaning that we might be out of electricity as soon as next year in order to add a new data centre. Doing something right now is absolutely so much mission-critical. We cannot be left behind. Let’s not forget we talk about China as a peer competitor. China increase in energy generation is just totally insane by any metric. There is no country that compare to what China is doing in terms of adding energy generation year after year. Everyone is behind China in that regard. It’s absolutely critical the US and other countries who don’t want to be left behind do something about power generation for their own citizen needs, one, directly, of course, and two, in order to stay ahead in the AI race. Nuno G. Pedro That’s maybe a great segue for pillar III, which is leading in international AI diplomacy and security, which is code for… I’m going to be facetious here. Let’s not allow China to get cutting edge ships and other things. Let’s not allow China to get an edge on us in some ways. Rightfully so, there’s a significant thinking and rethinking of export controls and where those export controls apply to not just to chips, but also to AI platforms and systems. There’s an element of discussion around diplomacy and how to coordinate with so-called allies on export controls. Netherlands, obviously very important. Japan and other countries that will be very, very important as that coalition in some ways of allies against China. That’s basically the element that is being put here. Then talking a lot about trade tools like secondary tariffs and talking about AI security at home. How do we ensure security around our systems and our infrastructure in particular and so there’s an element here where for me the takeaway is that we want to in some ways write a global play book for how the US keeps its technology out of adversaries or enemies or people that are seen as enemies or countries that are seen as enemies along the way. Also, how do we build the right AI standards for us to ensure competitive advantages honestly over the rest of the world? Bertrand Schmitt I think there is in that document a very clear-cut view of one, America needs to lead and be extremely successful in all elements of the AI value chain. Two, America wants to work with its allies to make sure they have access to some of the latest American AI products from chips to models. Three, we want to make sure that there is a blockade around China and China AI in some ways and yes, China can buy some products from the US, but it will be limited. It’s not the latest, potentially not the latest model, certainly not the latest chips. There is a willingness to block China in some international bodies and standards as China was trying to push its way in some of these bodies and try to push its own interest, unsurprisingly in some of these bodies. An acknowledgement that we need to do something about it and I believe that’s quite important. Let’s not forget that China, and we’ll talk more about it later. But China has some strong view of its own AI national policy. It’s certainly not aligned with America or its allies. Nuno G. Pedro Yes, and we’ve mentioned a couple of the countries already… Obviously, the UK, there’s Japan, Netherlands, for some of you, might be why Netherlands? We’ve also mentioned this incredible company in the past called ASML, which is a Dutch company, and they are the global leader in development and manufacturing of lithography systems, which is crucial for microchips. That’s why Netherlands matters, because of this company, ASML, which is a significant player in that market. Obviously, there’s a little bit of a thin rope for these countries, like are we aligned with the US or do we want to edge? It feels like this. For me, the stance that’s manifested by this announcement by the White House is you’re either with us or against us kind of thing. I feel there’s some undertones here of alignments, like, “Oh, they are our allies”, which means either you’re our ally or you’re not. We’ll see how that pans out. Obviously this comes after tariff negotiations and a bunch of other conversations that are happening more broadly around the relationships between these countries and the US, but definitely it feels a little bit like you’re either on our side or you’re on China’s side. It’s a little bit where we’re seeing some of these conversations lead to. Bertrand Schmitt To be frank, ally typically connects to some type of military alliance. Let’s not forget that huge underlying piece of the puzzle. I think it’s pretty fair to say that if you want a military alliance with the US in order to be able to defend yourself better against some other countries, be it China, Russia, then you are going into a military alliance with the US, and obviously we have NATO in Europe, but there are also military alliance with Korea, with Japan, with many countries around the world. I think what the US is also doing is enforcing it. “Hey guys, if you want that military alliance, and usually we know you want it, there are some economic implications. There are some policy implications in that situation. AI policy implication.” I think it’s quite reasonable to align the different pieces of the puzzle. It’s not a pick and choose, whatever you want. It’s not that there is a need for some real alignment, else it doesn’t really work any more. If you suddenly play the game on both sides for some piece of the puzzle. But you still rely on us for the military part. How does it really work? Nuno G. Pedro Yeah, maybe bringing it to one or two further elements that are pretty vital to this discussion. We’ve already talked about security and this notion of enforcing security and security around systems, around infrastructure, et cetera. But as Bertrand mentioned earlier in our conversation, basically there is also a push towards open source and open innovation and some might see that there’s almost like an element of duality in this. How can we be more secure and more siloed and more in control with a group of allies and at the same time enforce or push for open source initiatives to scale? I personally think many others would probably see it as such, see this as a geopolitical move in and of itself. In some ways what we see in the world is that China seems to be quasi-leading the way, if not leading the way on open source initiatives and there’s a little bit of a concern that if China leads the way on open source initiatives, that it will have embedded its own Trojan horses into some of these initiatives and that the US needs to take a much more proactive and aggressive perspective on it over time. We know it’s not totally true, it’s not like totally true that China has been doing all itself, but there’s definitely a lot of push by China on open source that the US seemingly wants to counter with some of the actions around this plan. Bertrand Schmitt I think you make an excellent point, Nuno. I cannot agree more. China has been playing smart. Like in a lot of markets, when you are not leading with your product, you try to go open source. That has been China approach to the AI race. I think they have been very smart doing that, and I’m glad that finally the US came to the realization that the answer is not just for me, it’s not forbidding open source or just promoting closed source, but it’s also to promote open source because some companies will absolutely want and need open source solution, some companies and governments, open source solution that they can run by themselves, control by themselves. It’s a mandatory part of the landscape, I believe, and it was the right thing to do. Nuno G. Pedro We get to compare approaches. We get to look at the US action plan versus China’s strategy, which we already talked a couple of elements of China’s strategy, and then also around European Union and the EU AI Act. These three big geopolitical masses seem to be doing their own thing. How does the EU compare to this, the AI Act? We’ve talked about it in the past, but how does it compare to it, Bertrand? Bertrand Schmitt I think it’s very interesting comparison actually, because I’m not sure we have seen a situation where the differences are that stark between US policy, EU policy, China policy. It’s a very interesting reflection of the economic, social and policy environment of each region. I’m really worried for the EU, just to be clear, I will start with that. The EU AI act seems all about regulating as much as you can. There is this saying, “The US innovates, China copy, and the EU regulate.” I’m not sure it can be closer to the truth than this situation in AI. It’s pretty bad. I think it’s going to be a real problem for startups emerging from Europe. All these regulations would be too burdensome. As usual, the bigger guys will have an advantage because they can deal more easily with complex regulations. We have seen already that many models and many solutions from OpenAI, Apple, Google and others are not available in Europe. Even some open source models, you cannot run them in Europe. I think it’s a crazy situation. It’s making very difficult to run an AI business from Europe, especially the underlying infrastructure. There’s a lot of risk of fines and stuff. Personally I’m very worried. I think they are really putting the cart before the horses in that situation. Let’s have horses first, let’s make sure they run fast and at some point let’s see what we can do. But here it’s totally the opposite. Personally I’m worried. Nuno G. Pedro In a moment where we talk a lot about European competitiveness and the ability to build startups that scale, and AI seems to be, or is this seminal moment of evolution for the world on top of it, you’re putting regulations in a lot of these markets and so if I’m a local player and if I’m a player based in any of these markets in Europe, I mean, it actually hampers me even more. It’s a dual whammy. There’s the regulatory piece where it takes away the innovation from being deployed in some cases in Europe. I’m not saying everything that is under the EU AI Act is wrong. There’re some elements around consumer protection that I think are valid, but to Bertrand’s point, putting the cart in front of the horses, so to speak, does create this dimension where it also hampers the ability for startups in Europe to scale and scale fast. In terms of access to data, in terms of access to elements that are important, and guess what? The US is seemingly taking away some of these elements and putting them in a world that allows for that innovation to actually happen. China, as we know, doesn’t have tremendous restrictions on data as long as there’s political alignment, let’s just call it that. And so if you’re a EU startup, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. Immediately at the disadvantage. To start, which is obviously not a good place to be in, knowing that you have other elements of disadvantage like ability to raise funds at scale, access to talent at scale as well, et cetera. All in all, it’s not just that the regulatory environment can have a negative effect, it also has a negative effect on fundamental innovation from the ground up. Bertrand Schmitt You are totally right and the other big piece of the puzzle, energy production, energy distribution. The EU is in a catastrophic situation, let’s not mince our words. Many countries in EU have seen degradation of the energy production, many industries have been impacted. Energy prices in general in the EU have skyrocketed, putting many industries at, let’s be frank, total catastrophic risk for their own survival in the coming years. Forget about having additional spare capacity for AI. That part is also very scary and a big part of the puzzle, as we have seen with the White House AI Action plan. It’s regulation on top of existing regulations, with on top of it a crippled energy market compared to China and now the US. Nuno G. Pedro Then there’s China. I mean, we can discuss at length what we know and what we don’t know. What we do know, it’s very clear that they want to be a world leader by 2030 with tremendous investments across the board on everything, research, education, startups, infrastructure, energy deployment and distribution, which by the way, on the energy side, they’ve been doing it for several decades. It’s not a new thing. We have large players already in the market, state-owned and tech giants like the Baidus, Alibabas, Tencents of the world. That’s the other guys, and the other guys have industrial policy, and they’re putting money behind it. I mean there’s no doubt and a lot of it is state developed, state sponsored, state funded and so you better bet that they’re going to build infrastructure themselves, and they already are, to create the underpinnings of that ecosystem. As I was reflecting earlier that the US is now trying to create, China’s been working at it for a while. Very, very interesting to see how this plan in the US will now compare in terms of speed and deployment versus China’s plans in developments at this moment in time. Bertrand Schmitt Regarding China, I think they are trying to do what’s best for their country. There is nothing to criticize from this perspective. It’s a rational plan from their perspective. As we discussed before, I mean China energy power plants and distribution plants are not new. They come at a perfect time. China is building 150 nuclear reactors for the coming decade. It’s already in motion. These are very safe force generation nuclear reactors. That will be able to underpin either additional factories’ production in general, but also of course AI. The other piece of the puzzle is that definitely China is pushing AI realize it’s critical for their leadership. It’s also very reasonable, as you say. For sure, they are not as encumbered by regulations at other places, especially like the EU. At the same time, there are sometimes regulations to protect people in China. I don’t want to be too misleading here, but of course there are some dark sides. China is clearly pushing their own agenda, their own political agenda. They want generative AI to reflect “core socialist value”. That’s certainly not flying with me. That’s not something we want to support, we want to enable, we want to even I would say accept. I hope there would be some pushback on products coming from China if they try to push this agenda and that’s really proof for me in some ways that we need a real alternative, and I’m glad the US is pushing its own more free solution. Nuno G. Pedro Yes, obviously the free flow of information that is not aligned with what it sees as a positive influence on its citizens will not be allowed. That is obviously a handicap. There’s also a handicap that we know China currently still has in terms of the production of high-end chips. I think on the other side you would be foolish to bet against China in terms of technological catch up. They will catch up, it’s just a matter of when, not if. On the data side, although there’s these elements of what we in the West would call censorship, there’s also these elements of… There’s probably a lot more easy appropriation of data in general- Bertrand Schmitt Oh, yes. Nuno G. Pedro -that can be done by private and public companies, so to serve, that’s a balance. Last but not the least on the China factor and how I think through China one very clearly on talent, a lot of the world’s talent on AI we keep saying is in the US is like sort of right. It probably was educated in the US but a lot of it is actually Chinese. The second element that we can’t forget, which obviously we won’t discuss at length today, we have talked a little bit briefly about it in previous episodes, is the geopolitical element of Taiwan, and how does China perceive Taiwan? Perhaps scarily, I was having a conversation with someone that shall go unnamed. The comment from that person was it’s not a matter again of if, it’s a matter of when, which is scary in and of itself. Hopefully, someone that’s not well-informed. Hopefully, someone that is exaggerating. We’ll see what happens again as everything that relates to China, two very different sides of a scale that somehow magically seem to mostly work, but definitely a very powerful opponent. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, definitely. To your point to double down, Chinese companies in general don’t know how to manufacture GPU to the performance that you can get from a manufacturer like NVIDIA, who you could argue nearly invented the space in the first place. They are years behind, as you say. We can expect that at some point China can potentially catch up. I think it’s important to keep as long as possible an advantage. In some ways, interestingly enough, you can see that China is playing to its strengths or trying to mitigate its weakness in very interesting ways. For instance, having in a way, a lot of access to energy, they might be able to run several generations late of GPUs because energy costs don’t matter as much in China. Actually they can go to a different path that is less energy efficient than other countries. We have seen with DeepSeek that they found a lot of innovation in going around issues with older generation GPUs, finding new ways to architecture, their software, their training, their approach to AI. In a way, sometimes if you don’t have access to everything, it forces you to some new innovation. I think that’s what we have seen in China because I mean, it’s full of smart people, talented people. Unsurprisingly, this is coming out. But in some ways it has also benefited the US and Europe because some of these new technologies and approach are things that can be applied as well here. Maybe one last point, it’s anecdotal, but I was hearing that the researcher at DeepSeek have lost their passport. They cannot leave the country anymore. I’ve heard that they might have more limited freedom than observers. They are subject to checks and to constant surveillance. Welcome to 1984. That’s really what’s happening in China. If suddenly AI is part of your critical industries and people working in AI are going to be watched, might not be allowed to leave the country anymore. It’s a sad state of affairs, to be frank. Nuno G. Pedro Maybe to segue on a more positive note, obviously necessity is the mother of all innovation and China definitely has many needs and many necessities that it will fulfil over the next few decades. We’ll see how this pans out. As I said, a very significant powerful player on the other side of the ocean and on the other side of the fence that needs to be properly addressed. Moving to bringing all of this together, the so what implications and synthesis of all of this discussion. I mean, the US is all in. I think it’s very clear it’s all in at all levels. From the private sector significantly deploying CapEx, already in acquisitive mode, to startups that are getting a ton of funding. I feel what we’re hearing is the federal government is coming in saying we’re all in as well and the US is all in, and we’re going to make this work. Right? We’re going to address the key pillars, the regulatory pillar, how we interact with the rest of the world and finally, how do we think through infrastructure? Whether you agree or disagree with a lot of the elements of the plan that have been put forward, I personally feel there was no other option. This is the way to go, right? We are at a very critical moment in terms of human innovation that, as we mentioned earlier, will have significant geopolitical effects beyond just technology. It’s not just whether consumers can use ChatGPT or not, right? It’s about fundamental geopolitical control of significant parts of the world. I feel whether we agree with all the plans or not, or whether we will agree with all the initiatives or not, whether there will be side effects or not, the federal government had to say something and they have now. Bertrand Schmitt I totally agree with you, Nuno. I think we are at a stage of global competition with China and some other countries and like during the space race or other moments in history of America, there is no choice but to compete. Not just to compete, but to out compete and win. You need to put everything on your side. I think it’s clear the past few years private competition companies in the US were all in AI. The missing inaction was the federal government. I’m glad that finally they are putting their docs in order as well. I hope that Europe will follow this new lead, new direction. I’m not so hopeful, but I don’t know where it will go. But I hope they will take a hint on this. I’m very excited for startups because it means that there will be more opportunities, more ability to compete, more access to energy in order to build the right product. Obviously it means that for investors, hopefully there will be bigger winners, bigger rewards. The last thing we want is of course, not to build global leaders, but just national leaders. I think this plan is also going to help to build global leaders. Nuno G. Pedro Yes. On the European element, I would say if there is anyone from the European Commission or involved in specific country governments in Europe, et cetera, that’s listening to us. I mean, this is the time to be brave, right? This is the time to do things that are different and fundamentally shifting the rules of engagement. Just doing what Europe has always done, and the European Union has always done, the European Commission has always done, doesn’t cut it. I think, if anything, it’s going to be negative impacting Europe. At least that’s my perspective. I think, Bertrand, I would not like to say that it’s yours as well. Bertrand Schmitt To double down on this point. I mean, we can see that in some ways Europe has kind of lost the Internet race. The biggest Internet players are in China, are in the US not so much in Europe. I’m very worried that in AI it might get. I don’t know how it can get worse, but it’s in the direction of getting worse, because this time there are layers and layers of overregulation even before the race truly started. Nuno G. Pedro What does this mean for the different kind of stakeholders that we see at the table? We’ve talked a lot about countries and regions of the world and how they need to react. My 2 cents on investors is that the bubble is here to stay. This further propagates the bubble that we’ve already mentioned we’re in. There’s not normally anything necessarily wrong with bubbles if people… If buyer beware, right? If people know that we’re in a bubble and therefore a lot of this stuff might actually just implode overnight. But I think there’s a propagation and a continuation of this bubble certainly into next year and maybe beyond that. But there are positive elements of this. There’s the element of the underpinning of the ecosystem that’s being built, as we mentioned before, that all of this infrastructure will have tremendous use by startups to take it to the next level. Therefore, if you’re an investor, this is a great time to come in and really back startups knowing that there is a fundamental shift in the nature of infrastructure and platforms that is there to stay where these startups are not going to run out of competition for the offerings they could have in terms of compute, storage, anything else that they might have a need for. There’s also the notion that potential winners might have outsized rewards. There’s also the notion that I’ve mentioned earlier that there is seemingly very little regulatory capture in at least these early announcements that we’ve seen from the White House. It’s almost the opposite light regulation and therefore a lot more push for so-called open innovation. As we know, the big players always have a capital advantage. Last but not least, the overall open source movement, which as we know also is a positive movement in terms of market competition over time. All in all, I think if you’re an investor, there’s all these elements and underpinnings that are very, very positive for the startups that you are backing, or you want to back going forward with this little or gigantic carrot at the end of the day that maybe you’ll hit the next trillion-dollar company along the way. We shall see. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t think we’re in a bubble in the bad sense of the term. Yes, we might be in a bubble in the sense of a lot of investment. It’s early on, we don’t truly know who would be the winners and the losers in 10, 20 years. But at the same time it doesn’t look like the past technology bubbles, like the Internet bubbles or the telecom bubbles. Because if you look at 25 years ago, the Internet bubble for instance, there was very little profits, very, very small players not delivering. If you look at telecom, it was all about laying down dark fibre for data that might come at some point, but right now it’s not there. Here it’s totally different. I mean we see players like OpenAI Lycanthropic moving to billions, if not tens of billions of ARR in just a few short years, like faster than we have ever seen possible before in the history of the tech industry. On the other hand, if you look at players like Microsoft, I mean they’re accelerating revenue, they are accelerating return on equity. It’s not like a bubble in the sense of a lot of money is being wasted. I’m sure money is wasted, but at the same time a lot of money is actually put to very, very good work. I’m pretty excited and positive personally about what we are going through. It’s not clear when it will slow down. It will slow down if we don’t have enough energy to train models, it will slow down if we stop innovation, and we don’t have better models, we don’t have better chips. But if we keep the spice running, in some ways, I don’t see a slowdown anytime soon, personally. Nuno G. Pedro Yeah, but it’s still a bubble. Maybe the aftermath will be different. Obviously you are right. These companies are making significant revenues, which was not the case in the ’99, ’98 to 2000 bubble. But at the same time, they’re also raising billions and billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars, at ridiculous valuations that were unheard of back then. It’s maybe at a different scale as well. There’s a significant subsidization happening on some of these numbers. I mean, you look at the unit economics of companies like OpenAI, and it’s obvious that they won’t be making money anytime soon. Yes, I feel there’s different things now that are a motive for optimism, but at the same time, I still feel we’re very much in the middle of a pretty significant bubble along the way. Bertrand Schmitt To conclude, we think that the White House AI Summit and action plan show a confident, maybe aggressive US Approach. Basically, the US is playing to win, doesn’t want to be left behind, and for sure AI will require speed and trust, and also requires significant policy shift in the US and everywhere where you want to compete and win. I would say, exciting times. We’re at a great, maybe unique time in history. Again, we might have to look back 50, 60 years ago, the start of the race to the moon, to see anything remotely comparable. Thank you, Nuno. Nuno G. Pedro Thank you, Bertrand.

Nintendo Switch, the Nokia 7110… what are the tech devices and gadgets that changed your life? How about you biggest disappointments?In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we will share ours. We look forward to hearing yours. Share on LinkedIn or via email or X Navigation: Intro (01:34) Tech That Changed Our Lives Our Worst Tech Purchases Reflection & Takeaways Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand SchmittWelcome to Tech Deciphered, episode 67. This will be a lighter episode as summer is upon us. We will discuss and talk about tech that changed our lives, as well as tech that disappointed. Some of you might know, some of you might not know, but both me and Nuno are tech nerds. We have played with tech most of our lives, always looking for the next available new piece of technology to use or collect. We are going to talk about that and maybe start on the positive side. The tech that changed our lives. Nuno Goncalves PedroI’m sure everyone has their stories. Even if you’re not a nerd, there’s going to be that piece of equipment, that mobile phone, that gaming console, that whatever, that dramatically changed you, made you more productive, or allowed you to do something that you’d never done before, et cetera. It’s always an interesting conversation to have, and it creates a lot of wonderful memories. It brings you back to places, it brings you back to that moment where you bought the device, that first time that you used it, the experiences you had, some of them maybe actually, not necessarily positive. We’ll come back to the worst tech purchases of all time. Shall I launch Austilities, Bertrand? Shall I tell my first one? Bertrand SchmittSure, Nuno, feel free. Nuno Goncalves PedroGood stuff. I’ll start with maybe the one that I’ve had the longest memory on, which is the Philips Videopac. Now, many of you will have no clue what I’m talking about. Bertrand SchmittNo idea. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Videopac. Even Bertrand, which is impressive. The Videopac was a video game console that worked with cartridges, launched obviously via Philips. I’m not sure if the one I had was actually from Philips, question mark. It was the same format and I remember it very fondly. It was really a gaming console with a little joystick. Very basic thing. The Videopac was actually launched first thing in ’83. I’m not sure when I first started using it, but I suspect I was 7 or 8 years old, so that would have been a couple of years thereafter. I remember it fondly. We got it from Andorra. If you guys know, I was born in Portugal. Andorra is this small-owned country between Spain and France, and they had no sales taxes back then, so you’d go there and buy stuff really cheaply. I think that’s what we bought when I went there with my parents. I remember it very fondly. I remember playing games on it. Strangely enough, I don’t remember any of the games I played on it, but I remember it very fondly as one of my first computer experiences and stuff. That was pretty cool. Bertrand SchmittNice. I think in France. I’m not sure this one was available. At least it doesn’t ring a bell. I think we had some Atari consoles in France. Me, actually, I didn’t start with a console. I started with a regular computer. Not the PC kind. It was an Atari computer. Actually Atari 520ST, very popular in Europe. There was also Amiga that had similar computers. It was Motorola CPU 68000 if I remember. It was my first computer. Also, could be used for gaming, of course, 3.5-inch disk, if I remember well, some colors, I would say 320 times 200 pixels. It was great. It was a start for me of understanding computers, starting to program them. I might have started before actually to program computers, but it was not a computer I own. That was the first computer I owned. That was quite amazing at the time. I remember doing quite a bit with it. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy first computer was actually the Schneider Euro PC. I’d played before with the ZX Spectrum and with an Amstrad computer. Those did not belong to me. They were not my purchases. They were not for me. They belonged to my uncle. Bertrand SchmittNot the same. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy first one that I owned was the Schneider Euro PC. It’s the first computer ever that I coded in. People probably don’t remember Schneider at all. It was a computer division. Bertrand SchmittThey do washing machines. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt was a little keyboard with the floppy drive, and then you had to connect a monitor. I had to get a monitor. Mine was color. It was really cool. It’s the first, as I said, first computer I ever coded on. I think that’s the first code I ever wrote was in basic. I played games on it. There was this volleyball game, like beach volleyball game that I remember playing on it. It was really, really, really cool. Very fond memories of it. I still have that computer somewhere back in Portugal in storage. Probably the first defining computer experience for me. Bertrand SchmittDoes it still work? Nuno Goncalves PedroThat I do not know. I’m intrigued by it. I do not know. I suspect not, but because of wear and tear, but I’m not sure. It was last time I played with it. I don’t know. Maybe it still does. Bertrand SchmittMaybe it does value as an antique, actually. You never know this kind of stuff. Nuno Goncalves PedroYes. Bertrand SchmittMy second big one was actually a handheld calculator, HP48X and then a later model, GX. The HP48 was really my entry, my start in the mobile computing world. It was amazing. For me, it Was my first computing device always in my pocket. It was in the mid-90s, I guess. It was great to do basic science, maths, physics, that sort of stuff. I also use it extensively to program in assembly language, which was not supported by HP. There was a small community of crazy people like me having fun programming in assemblies or their small handheld calculator doing stuff that was supposedly impossible to do on the calculator. The funny part is that some in our group ended up working for HP, developing the next follow on calculators for HP. Nuno Goncalves PedroThat’s very, very cool. I have done HP48GX and I remember it fondly. I used it in college quite heavily. I did do some coding on it at some point in time. Very cumbersome device to do any coding on, but it was like the top of all the freaking calculators, graphical stuff, et cetera, et cetera. It’s like an unfair advantage back then when computers weren’t around. Bertrand SchmittMaybe one more point was a great RPL, the Reverse Polish Lisp language, which was very special to this model of HP. You have to enter your calculation in a very different way compared to the calculators. I love this approach of RPL. Nuno Goncalves PedroDefinitely an amazing device. Following up maybe with a couple of PCs from my end. Two that come to mind, the Compact Deskpro 386S. It was a 386 from Intel. Super overengineered device. Expensive as hell. When Compaq was in their heyday, it was like a pretty chunky desktop. Did a lot of stuff on it. It’s where my coding evolved. A lot of desktop publishing, writing stuff, et cetera. It was a significant device for me. The other one, probably immediately thereafter was my first custom-made Tower PC. I bought a Tower, and then I had my own motherboard that I bought and my own hard drive and whatever. Making just work together was in and of itself complex. I remember that fondly as well. It’s probably the first PC where I did heavy-duty gaming, the Deskpro being more the first that I did a lot of desktop publishing in. I remember the Tower one more because of gaming actually, shockingly enough. It went with me, I think through college, if I’m not mistaken, the tower one. Those two were my next PCs that I remember very, very, very fondly. Compaq went to hell at some point in time. They merged I think with someone. Was it Gateway or something more did they merge with? Bertrand SchmittI think so. Long ago. Nuno Goncalves PedroThey did go to hell at some point. Bertrand SchmittYes. I think they got killed by the new approach pushed by Dell to make computers on demand. Actually, I was also a customer of Compaq. My first PC was a Compaq. It was a Compaq laptop, Compaq 286 SLT. It was a huge brick. I was just checking £14. That was my first IBM compatible PC. That was great. Technically it was my dad’s computer, but I was using it. Then like you, at some point I made my own tower PC. Did some PC gaming from that point as well, and other stuff, of course. When you make your first Tower, that’s a special moment because you start to realize it’s all adding components that work well together. That’s a special stage in the journey. Nuno Goncalves PedroCompaq was bought for $25 billion in 2002 by HP. They were Texas-based as well, so was Dell. I think Compaq was global PC maker for a while, and then Dell overtook it, and the rest, as you said, is history. Maybe my next one was, I bought it, I think I was on vacation in England. I had saved some money and this was in the ’90s still. I’m going back in time for my Tower PC, which was the SEGA Game Gear. I never had a Game Boy, actually. I played with other people’s Game Boys, but I wanted like a graphics thing. I know this is going to be pissing off a bunch of people. I always preferred Sonic to Super Mario, so who would have said that I would become a race car driver? I always actually preferred it. I remember it for Sonic, it was really a cool handheld console. It was color-based, whereas the first game boys were black and white. Really, really, really very, very, very cool gaming console. The battery life wasn’t great, but it was like super cool. I used to play Sonic all the time on that thing. Bertrand SchmittI might have an Atari handle at some point, but it was not a big game changer for me. I never had a Nintendo console until very recently. Me on my side, what was game changing was my first smartphone, WAP phone. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s not a smartphone. Bertrand SchmittThat’s why I’m saying the first WAP phone for me was a Nokia 7110. Ericsson also had another WAP phone at the time, just launched, but the 7110. What was special was it was a Matrix phone. You press a button, you have the stuff coming out. It was a very special. That was the start of the… In Europe, what was the WAP revolution? Accessing Internet on your mobile through that WAP protocol, which was not popular in the US or in Asia, it was really especially something popular in Europe or somewhat popular, I should say. I’m not sure everyone was using that. For me that was a big step forward. The second step was moving to the communicators through smartphone. The Nokia communicator, they are E90s and we got some Ericsson P800. These phones were for me, the first smartphones in the 2000s, up to the arrival of the iPhone, so for like 8, 9 years. Nuno Goncalves PedroI Had a 7110 as well, obviously the Matrix phone. Everyone was like, oh my God. And they didn’t do anything. It just slid down. The plastic slid down, so you had access to the keys. My first phone that I recall very fondly was actually the Philips Diga. I don’t know why I have all these Philips things on my thing. It was a very basic phone, candy bar, as they used to call it, just with a keyboard. It lasts a long time. Even the antenna broke at some point and I still kept using it. I still have it, I believe. As I may have mentioned it in the past, I actually have a collection of mobile phones. I have over 270 mobile phones. If anyone has an idea of what I should do with that collection, for profit or non-profit, do tell me. Many things have been tried in the past, including the Computer History Museum and Mountain View, but we couldn’t come to an agreement on who would pay the valuation of the phones, which is like the most shocking thing ever. I was willing to just donate it. The Diga was my first phone. I started collecting phones probably when I was a GSM association. That must have been around 2003, 2004. I have a lot of phones that I truly, truly love. The 7110, to your point, was a very iconic phone. The first little Ericsson one with color was also very iconic. Very, very small phones. We had all these amazing feature phones. The Korean started really changing everything. Samsung and LG that I got as well, like very, very thin phones, slider phones, et cetera. I remember a lot of phones very fondly. My first one that I owned myself was the Philips Diga. Bertrand SchmittI forgot which one was my first phone actually, because the Nokia 7110 was not my first mobile phone. I don’t remember. This one was very different for me because you had access to the Internet so that was the beginning of always on connection to the Internet. Me I probably average two funds a year over the past 25 years, 27 years. I’m not at your 270 fund collection and I didn’t keep most of my funds I must say either gave them or resold them. Now they are good trading policies actually for mobile, Samsung and others. I’ve been doing that mostly. For me the next big one was actually the Kindle. It was launched in the late 2000 which was around the time when I actually moved to China and getting access to foreign books was not an easy one when you were living in China. For me the E Ink device was a God given gift. It was game changing for me to be able to access all my books while I was living in China. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy next device was also first for me. It was my first proper watch that I bought. I’d bought some swatches and whatever, and I was always intrigued by my watches. Then when I was in my early 20s I bought the Bell & Ross. I think it’s vintage 126 130r a chronograph, very classic looking. Bell & Ross is then gone. Bell & Ross is a French brand that manufactures in Switzerland. They’ve since gone with squared watches but back then it was classic rounded watches. I still have this watch. I just had it serviced recently. The service was like half the cost of the original watch or something. For me, it was really cool to have it back. It was my first watch. I used it for several years. Funny story, at some point I stopped using watches and for at least 15 years. I’m probably not exaggerating, I didn’t wear a watch. My watch was my phone until quite recently where another watch changed my life. The MB&F M.A.D. editions 1s. It’s one of these relatively nice watches. You have to apply for it, it’s a raffle, whatever, and then you pay of course. I got it, and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to go back to watches.” Now I’m going back to watches. Again, have a mini collection of watches, but it’s a very recent thing, maybe within the last year going back to watches, but I remember the Bell & Ross and I still have it. It still looks beautiful very fondly because it was the first one. You could say, “Well, is that really tech?” It is tech. It is proper tech. It’s very mechanical automatic watch. I remember it very, very fondly. Bertrand SchmittI can’t say watches changed my life. Nuno Goncalves PedroSomeone told me this the other day. I know this is going to look a bit weird because women also wear watches, but it’s sort of men’s jewellery kind of thing. It’s like the watch becomes one of the few jewellery pieces that you would wear in general. Bertrand SchmittThat and glasses. I agree with that. It didn’t have a life changing effect on me. I agree. I appreciate nice watches as well. At the same time now with digital watch, it’s a fight for your wrist. At some point I had two watches, a digital one and analogue one. Nowadays, it’s a more digital watch usually. For me the next one was that amazing trifecta from Apple when they released the iPhone, then the iPad, then the new Apple TV and it really changed my digital life. I cannot say I was a big fan of the first iPhone because it was released without apps and without 3G, so I was not so interested. I could see the change in UI that was impressive in mindset, in approach. Without apps, without 3G, for me, it was just a toy. When Apple released their second iPhone, I was definitely very, very excited. The first iPad also I was very excited. Apple TV, something simple that replace the control of your TV. For me that was quite game changer in the sense that at that point I stopped watching linear TV. It was all about having access to on demand content on your TV and no more linear TV. I abandoned linear TV, cable, all of this a long, long time ago, 15 years ago. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe iPhone changed my life as well. By that time I was already collecting phones for quite a long time. More importantly, at that point in time I’d worked at the GSM association as the head of strategy, corporate and business development. I was at McKinsey and I had clients in the consumer electronics side, a large consumer electronics firm that she’ll go unnamed. When the iPhone hit, everything changed. For me, it wasn’t just that I had a device that finally was relatively capable. I think the most impressive thing of the iPhone when it came out was the browsers for me. It worked really well on Wi-Fi. The cellular wasn’t great. For me, it was extra complex. I was living in China back then. I had to get a phone. I had to figure out a way to jailbreak it because they’re selling it in the US with AT&T. I went through the whole, whole thing. That fund was definitely transformational professionally as well as I was working around a lot of topics that related to product management, product planning and the client that she’ll still go unnamed was like, “Guys, we need to now compete on smartphones and like this new thing, this new category.” It’s really a shame because I think there was a lot of diversity prior to that with feature phones. They all look very differently, they had different functionalities, et cetera. In some ways early on, maybe the smartphones had some diversity as well, but over time they’ve all become the same mono blocky thing. Along the way I missed the good old days of different formats and the BlackBerry was there and all these things were there with different formats. Bertrand SchmittThere was much more experimentation. Nuno Goncalves PedroExactly. The reason why I used to buy so many phones and get so many phones and started collecting was they were great proxies to consumer experiences on the go. They were great proxies. Like if you have this phone, this is how you’d use it and this is how you would basically interact with different services and different apps, et cetera. Obviously that became less diverse as the world really inflected to go into Android and iOS, so Apple World and then the Android empowered world. Obviously it became less interesting in some ways. Bertrand SchmittIn some ways we are going to the end of the form factor. We’re at the end game of that specific form factor. At some point you add a screen and a start button, a central button and then no more button and just a screen and from there is nowhere else to go. It was an interesting evolution. Obviously you could argue there is somewhere to go. We can see that, we talk about it, but you have foldable for instance, but going back me now I will talk on the audio side there was a big, again, some Apple launch was the Airpod. For me. What was amazing with the first Airpod is that having used so many different headsets over the years. I felt it was one of the very first one that just worked. I can take it from my pocket, put it in my ears, accept a call. I had the guarantee it will work. Before I would not be able to do that. I have a call, I have a headset, I know it won’t work if I try to accept the call and put my headset at the same time. Having started with Bluetooth headsets from maybe 2000 when at some point in time early on when the first Bluetooth standout was released, so I tried them all, and I was shocked how good Apple managed to make the experience. Another one on your side was, I forgot which model but my first Bose ENC headphone for travel definitely changed my life. When you are travelling by plane to be able to hear properly either music or movies with less outside sound. That made travelling by plane especially much more enjoyable experience. Nuno Goncalves PedroOn my end, I agree with the AirPods I think it’s just the fact that they worked was shocking. The really good audio quality for the size they had and the weight they had. I have around 270 phones. I don’t have around 270 headphones, but I probably have enough to do a museum as well of them. I have a lot of ones that I remember fondly. One of the early Bang and Olufsen ones that was super chichi, super high end in ear but with a thing around your ear before the Beats thing started becoming very popular. I remember the Beats, one of the last Beats before they were acquired by Apple. The AirPods Max were great. I have for anything like I have OnePlus phones, so I have OnePlus AirPods things. They probably have a different name for OnePlus. There’s all these different ones that I’ve had over the years that are great. I remember fondly the Master and Dynamic, one of the early ones that I got over ear ones. Beautiful looking. The Master and Dynamic are just gorgeous looking headphones shout out to the founder there. AirPods I have a lot of memories with a lot of different ones, but maybe not as striking as the ones you mentioned with the Bose and with the AirPod. Going back to the TV thing, obviously Apple TV was transformational for me, and I’ve had all these different things like Amazon, Fire TV and all these different solutions out there. But one that I was transformation for me was the Logitech review. Google TV. This was the first implementation of Google TV as an operating system thing to work on your TV and if you guys don’t remember it looked like a really wasn’t super large but a relatively mid-size setup box with a keyboard. That’s the funny thing, you had actually a keyboard, so you could write stuff on it and you could browse. Now it’s important to mention that at that time I lived in China and because I lived in China I could go to Chinese websites and watch stuff. I won’t go into more details than that. I was living in China but to be very, very clear, in some ways I could already see the future of streaming TV. It was very, very obvious because of that experience that I had. This was circa 2008, 2009, I would suspect. It was relatively early on, maybe a little bit later, maybe 2010. But anyway, but circa that time I could see that streaming was a much better experience than just linear TV because I could watch all these series whenever I wanted, all the stuff that I could watch whenever I wanted. In some ways I was seeing the future of TV back then on what we would have later on with the Hulu’s of the world, with the Netflixes, et cetera. It was funny, it’s just a bit by accident. It was a device combination with the country. It’s China and Google TV and you can browse. If you can browse, what can you watch on TV? Well, you can watch sort of whatever is available. Obviously the bandwidth wasn’t great, but it was for me a revolutionary experience about this realization. TV is going to go this way rather than stay linear. It doesn’t make sense to stay linear except for things that are time-sensitive like sports and news. Bertrand SchmittI’m not a big sports fan in terms of watching sports TV so for me, it didn’t really matter. But I agree with you, news and sports were probably the only thing that could still make somewhat sense on a linear TV. I was like you living in China, accessing Internet TV from my Apple TV. This was totally game changer. I don’t think I look ever back since that time, and I was still surprised to see so many people still using linear TV for a while until maybe what 2020, you could argue with COVID. That was when most solution when streaming and when most providers went full streaming. I felt it took a while to get there. But yeah, I couldn’t go back, that’s for sure. I remember my first Nintendo console actually was a Nintendo Switch and I remember getting it the first day of its release actually in Tokyo in Japan. I really love this device. I felt this was powerful enough for a console that was portable where before portable consoles were not so exciting for me. I was very impressed how you could use it portable connected to a TV the way you can detach Joy cons. I felt was very amazing in terms of piece of hardware and of course great, great games from Nintendo especially and others from Zelda to Mario Kart. Very impressed by the Nintendo Switch. I just got a Switch 2 and even more impressed this time. Really powerful and amazing form factor, for me, quite a game changer, especially when you travel. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy first big high-end gaming console was the PlayStation 2 and that was awesome. I mean it launched in 2000. I didn’t get one of the early ones. It’s probably a couple of years after that I got it. But definitely that was the first console that I really cherished and played a bunch of games on. That’s when it came to bear. It’s very funny. Many years before, many, many years before I went racing cars, I was already excited by car games, Gran Turismo and a variety of other games. Call of Duty and Gran Turismo are probably the two franchises which stood the test of time for me in game console. PlayStation 2 is responsible for it all. It was the first console that was like, oh this is really cool, you can do really, really cool things with this and high quality games, and it’s specialized and all that stuff. In some ways I never really went back to PC gaming, which is interesting. I started in PC game, I never went back, and I still do a little bit of mobile gaming on my phone. Marvel Continent of Champions is still my game of choice, but on the console side is sort of where I experiment with the higher end kind of games. Now being an investor in some of the guys who actually develop those games is exciting. You get to see stuff before it comes out, et cetera. But the PlayStation 2 was the genesis of the higher high-end experience in gaming for me. Bertrand SchmittThat’s interesting because me, I’ve mostly stayed to PC gaming actually on mobile. Even if I was spending so much time analysing the mobile gaming market, I was not so interested myself on the mobile gaming market. I would play a bit of very basic stuff from Candy Crush to others, but not the more advanced games because I would just go for PC gaming for advanced game or Nintendo Switch when I wanted something more simple, portable, immediately working. That’s the issue with PC gaming, it’s rarely immediately working. The last device that really impressed me from Apple was my MacBook Pro M1 when Apple released the first Apple Silicon. Very, very impressed because one it worked and that switch from intel to ARM where it’s simply working, you were not losing much in terms of power if you are emulating was just amazing. Smoothest architecture change I have ever experienced. That’s one on the technical side very impressed, but two very impressed by the performance and more importantly by the lack of noise from the fan. I mean of course it has a fan, but you don’t hear it most of the time. For me, that was the one thing I was looking for in PC, which in a mobile computer, is to have no noise when I’m using it. I was very impressed by that change of architecture. Very smooth. We’ll talk more maybe about that. Microsoft never made a smooth change of architecture, but also the fact that they managed to do something on one side very powerful and at the same time very silent. Nuno Goncalves PedroI had a lot of devices from Apple that were defining for me the MacBook Air, my first MacBook Pro back in the day with intel and those are the days with intel chips. The MacBook Pro with Silicon done by Apple was defining, redefining for me. I’ve had a couple of laptops that were really redefining to me and honestly, most of them were Apple. I agree with you that that’s probably one of the last devices I’ve had, the iMac. I’ve had a bunch of iMacs from Apple. That’s my desktop experience. I honestly love all of them. There is a generation, I forget what generation it was that was a little bit funky on the quality of the screen, but they always look great. The new iMacs have been amazing. I don’t have the old ones, but like the new iMacs, that’s my main desktop experience, and it’s still a really cool experience. Bertrand SchmittMaybe talking about quality, I had a lot of issues with my Apple laptops. Broken keyboard, broken screen, broken video card. They actually spent quite some time at the repair shop and not been a great part of my experience having Mac computers for 12, 13 years. Nuno Goncalves PedroI think I had one issue with the storage on one of the MacBook airs where I had to change storage on it. It was a little bit complicated. Then I’ve had issues on the iMacs. As I said, one of them, the screen just stopped working properly and they couldn’t really fix it. It’s really a dud. It’s just a hard drive, basically. Then one of the more recent ones has a flaw in it. I thought was related to memory. I tried everything to save it and it jumps things. Then I have my latest, one latest generation of the iMac which is doing fine thus far. Let’s see how it withstands the test of time. To your point, some issues, sometimes some of their devices and they really don’t withstand the test of time, they don’t work well over 4 or 5 years, which is, I guess they expect you to switch stuff. Maybe my next device, being from Portugal, at some point I became a lover of coffee. Interestingly enough, I don’t think I was a lover of coffee while I lived in Portugal. At some point I wanted to have a machine at my place that would give me that experience. I had a nearly espresso, I think it was from Gaggia, was done by Gaggia. Gaggia is obviously, I believe, an Italian manufacturer. That machine had a bunch of issues later on, talking about issues. At some point I just gave up on it. I gave up on just having espressos or double espressos. I was a purist back then. Then at some point I went to the Nespresso selling to the dark side route with Vertuo. It’s really a great experience, the Nespresso Vertuo experience. But I’ve sold now I have what people in Portugal would call barely coffee. It’s just shot in there. For me, having the coffee is a moment of pause. It’s where my brain stops a little bit. Historically, I used to do it after lunch, at the end of my lunch, and now I sometimes do it in the morning as well, to be honest. But my reaction to caffeine is different than many other people. Caffeine is a bit of a downer for me. I think there’s a percentage of people in the world, maybe 2, 3%, for which caffeine is a little bit a downer rather than an upper. I can have coffee at any point of the day, which is like a superpower, I guess. But, yeah, the machines are always a moment of pause for me. It’s a moment where I just collect my thoughts, slow down, and then I do enjoy the coffee. That’s the meaningful part of that tech for me. Bertrand SchmittYeah, I was a big fan of Nespresso for, I don’t know, at least easily 10 years. Also, again, especially useful when you were living in China. At some point, I just couldn’t stand it any more because the difference of quality, the coffee, the milk machine was just too big. I actually moved to a Breville coffee machine. Breville Barista Touch Impress. Since then, oh, my God, I will not touch an espresso machine again. I don’t need to go to any coffee store. I might go once in a while, but not because it’s better coffee. I have excellent coffee at home, excellent latte at home, and I’m very happy. [inaudible 00:30:16]. I had one reason to go out, which was for better coffee, but not any more. Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, I’m still looking through the startup that shows me a machine that can create that amazing coffee. I’ve seen a couple over the years that were very promising but nobody scaled. Most of them have gone under sadly, et cetera. I’m still waiting for that perfect machine. Bertrand SchmittDrive by Villa. It’s amazing. Nuno Goncalves PedroI will look into it. Maybe another kind of experience is related, maybe more to my cars. Also, late boomer, as I mentioned earlier in terms of car racing, but also late boomer in terms of becoming a car guy. I was a digital car guy, I guess before I was a physical car guy and paying attention to the car, taking care of the car. There’s a couple of elements that make that of some importance for me. For some reason I have a couple of Porsches. For some reason Porsche still has this thing where you either have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. For someone who has 270 phones, that’s kind of a problem because you are switching between both operating systems and both deployments of those on the car. At some point I had to get a hack around it, and so I started toying around. There was an early one that I had that I hated. I’ll come back to that later. But then I came around and found Autocast, and now I use Autocast devices. To be clear, Autocast doesn’t pay me at all for me to do any advertising. They mostly work. I have some quirks once in a while on some older cars with the Autocast deployment, but it allows me to just go into the car. Worst case if I’ve just switched phones, have to connect Bluetooth to it the first time and after that it just connects, and I have the experience I would have. It’s been a great life changer for me. Bertrand SchmittInteresting. I had no idea such a device existed. Actually, I would talk about the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. We talked before about how the defining hardware of smartphones didn’t change much. I was always very impressed by Samsung innovation and with the Z Fold that made me switch back. Actually at some point I was Apple, and then I was Apple and Android, and then I completely left the Apple ecosystem I don’t know, 18 months ago. But my first step was moving to the Z Fold, and I was actually quite pleased at Apple. I was like where is our innovation? But Samsung actually innovated with the Foldable category. It’s now the Z Fold 7. I’m waiting for it tomorrow. But yeah, it was for me truly game changing as a device that is a tablet that is in your pocket. I’ve been very excited and that’s been the start of the end for me of the Apple ecosystem because once I moved there I moved to a Samsung Tab Ultra. I actually even went back to the Windows world. I’ve been very impressed. My latest Windows PC is a Surface Pro 11 with intel inside, and it’s an amazing device. Finally, a combination of laptop and tablet all in one that works great. I’ve been very impressed actually, and we’ll talk more. I’ve been muted. Disappointed multiple times by the Microsoft Windows environment, but I feel they’re starting to turn the corner and be more innovative. Nuno Goncalves PedroFrom my end, I collect phones, so there’s always what are my favourite phones kind of discussion. On the fold side I do have, I think I have the Z Fold 5 if I’m not mistaken. That’s the latest one I had from Samsung on the foldable side. Flip I had a Red Magic Nubia. I’ll come back to that. I have obviously had the Razr, the RE edition of the Razr as a smartphone which is pretty cool. Motorola as a flip as well. On the foldable side I’ve tried a lot and I end up going always back to the same one. I think it’s just the format ratio is my favourite one which is the OnePlus open. I think there’s now some discussion they might launch a new version. They haven’t launched one in a couple of years, but that phone is really, really good. I’m a huge OnePlus fan. I love their phones. I think they’re really well done. They get the thin layer of adaptation well on those phones. For photos, I’m still a Samsung Galaxy Ultra guy. They have the best cameras if you want to take amazing photos. Normally that’s my go to and then for gaming because obviously I’m still play games on phones. There’s my two go tos the Asus ROG, ROG series and then to be honest my most favourite one which is the newbie Red Magic the Pro editions which have the little fan on it with colors and then cooling and add-ons and stuff. Really it’s my go to for gaming it’s really… Unfortunately the cameras are not very good but for gaming it’s really a great experience. Then last but not the least toy around a lot with phones. The nothing phones. I currently have a pre-launch edition. They just launched a proper edition for the three, but I have a pre-launch edition for the three, and I still love them. Very clean phones, very easy to use. [inaudible 00:34:56]. Great mid-tier. Probably one of the best mid-tier devices out there right now for Android. That’s my go tos on the mobile phone side. Bertrand SchmittInteresting. Me beyond the phones, beyond the computers, one gadget I really used actually a lot is my Sony Alpha S73 that I’ve been using for maybe 5 years for video calls. When I am at my desk I use this camera. It’s a great 2470 lens. It has been amazing, and they kept upgrading the firmware, improving the quality of what you can do, improving the colors. I’ve been very pleased with that Sony Alpha S73 for doing video calls, which might be overkill to be frank, but really a great device. Nuno Goncalves PedroOn the tablet side obviously I’ve had a bunch of the iPads. The first iPad was interesting, maybe not as seminal as that was for you, Bertrand. The iPad Airs I particularly like. I still have one. I use the iPad Air. I’ve tried at some point in time taking them with me on my business trips. It just doesn’t work for me. I still need to bring my MacBook Pro with me because I might need to do some actual fundamental work on stuff. I used to use it for shorter trips, and at some point I just became painful. I mostly use it to consume other content. Like a little bit like my second or third screen. It might be I’m watching TV second screen with iPad Air and then third screen on my phone. Honestly, my girlfriend doesn’t like that very much. I need to. I can’t even use my phone while I’m watching something with her. I’m like, okay, cool. Right now I’ve gone from three screens to one screen. Only one screen at a time and pay attention to my girlfriend. I’m more present than ever and. Bertrand SchmittContinuing outside of phones, computers. One device I really like now to consume content on the go specifically, it’s the Xreal One Pro which is classified weirdly as an AR device. But I truly use it to basically consume content on the go typically, but also it could be in the bedroom. It’s just a great device to watch videos mostly, could be shows, could be movies. It projects in front of you a huge screen. It’s really a great quality OLED screen. It includes audio as well. It’s really an AR glass for me. It’s really impressive. It has replaced in many situations a tablet to simply watch content. Nuno Goncalves PedroFrom my end, moving on, going back to cars, one thing that matters is taking care of your tires. Only point of contact with the road, just to remind people. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of solutions to inflate and deflate my tires and particularly to inflate tires. In particular on the go and everything’s very clunky, very big whatever. Finally, I got to more the portable side of the fence and the one I do use, again I have no payment from these guys whatsoever, but I like their solutions are the Airmoto tire inflators. I’ve used a couple of others by other brands that are similar form factors but the Airmoto is the one I keep coming back to. It doesn’t last forever, but it’s enough. I can guarantee you to inflate a tire quite significantly or to inflate all your four tires if they’re a little bit under as well. Really pretty amazing solution to inflate your tires over when you need to inflate them. If you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, at least inflate them and if it’s like for example a small leak or whatever then it will sort it out. Really, really good solution for that. Bertrand SchmittInteresting device, and it looks quite small I must say. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt is pretty small. Bertrand SchmittMy last device or category of device I talk about the Kindle but since then a few years ago I moved on to BOOX. BOOX is a Chinese manufacturer of Android E Ink device. The nice thing is that it’s full Android experience. If you want to read books magazines or just read your Twitter feed or the Internet, you can use their device. You can even read Kindle on it because the Kindle app will work. As a lover of E Ink screens, books has been a great option for me, and they have color black and white from 6 inch to 13 inch, so you have the wide gamut depending on what you are looking for. Nuno Goncalves PedroLet’s switch to the ones we did not like. Our worst tech purchases, the things we bought and there was all these incredible expectations and then, oh my God so broken. This is not great et cetera. Maybe let’s start with one that I’m pretty sure we will share which is the Apple Vision Pro. Oh my God. I had such huge expectations because of the whole marketing of Apple in over-gear. This is going to change your world. We had a full episode on it or almost a full episode on it. I won’t belate too much on it, but disappointing, right for the price point for what it is. It’s a super over-engineered device. It was over marketed as we mentioned back in the day. Bertrand SchmittCompletely overpriced. Nuno Goncalves PedroSuper, super overpriced. I mean if it had been cheaper maybe we would have been okay with it. If they’d called it a developer device, maybe it would have been okay with it. But Apple went into overview and that was it. Bertrand SchmittNo, it was completely wrong. What they did try to launch it as a regular consumer device while having a crazy price point. For me, I’m still impressed when I see people enjoying watching stuff on it. I stopped using it to watch content because it’s just so painful to wear for a long time. I don’t want to be watching some stuff on the Vision Pro and then have pain or, headache from wearing it for 45 minutes. For me, that’s a crazy part. They don’t focus on any use case, they just add every piece of technology they could think about, and if the stuff is too heavy, uncomfortable, and too expensive, too bad. No, guys, you didn’t make any clear product decisions that make a device either for media consumption or to replace your computer screen, or to do other stuff. For me, it was really a mistake. I would say real virtual reality in general has been disappointing because it’s either too complex to set up, you have to attach it to a PC, or it’s not powerful enough if you look at the meta options, or it goes too expensive, but then it requires a very powerful PC and optimized software. I have a great headset from Varjo, for instance, XR-4, which is very powerful. But I must say I like it quite a lot because, at least compared to the Apple Vision Pro, it can do useful stuff, and it is comfortable to wear for a long time. But overall, this industry is probably at a crossroads. I think there are a lot of opportunities to improve to get the technology where it’s cheap and easy to use. But at the same time, it’s a tough situation where the use cases are quite limited and now limiting the appeal in general. Nuno Goncalves PedroI had similar experiences, totally sort of second what you just said around some of these devices, the AR VR space has been like crowded with stuff that’s crappy anyway. I would say maybe one of the augmented reality spaces, I would say the Google Glass. I mean, what I did to get access to the Google Glass program, I cannot tell in public. Bertrand SchmittOh, I don’t want to know. Nuno Goncalves PedroYou don’t want to know. But in the end, when I got it, I played with it for 2 days, and I was like, is this it? Yes, I mean it was the precursor to everything we’re now getting, like the Ray Ban watches from Meta and all that stuff, and at some point it will get nailed, and for people like you and I, Bertrand, who wear glasses, it will be cool. But oh, what I did to just get access to Google Glass and then nothing. I was like so disappointing. It was very pricey. I mean, just to be clear. It’s a very difficult experience. I’m not sure I’d ever go again to do as much as I did back in the day for those kinds of devices. Bertrand SchmittNo, I understand, and that’s why, actually, for me, I’m very impressed by the Xreal One Pro AR glasses because they do one thing very well. Watching movies or TV shows in a very nice light experience. 90 grams. For me, that the first of all of this device that I can start to use regularly without creating a headache, having any pain, or requiring any crazy device to connect it to. So I’m hopeful. I think this industry is going to deliver at some point, but it’s device by device, use case by use case that it’s getting solved. Maybe another category we have both experience it’s the Microsoft Surface RT device, the first device with an ARM CPU. And that’s more than 10 years ago. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Surface RT is on my list of I hate this thing. I hate it. Yes, it’s like awful. What an awful device. It is literally like 2012. I mean, it’s an object that I can just keep there, but I never really used at scale. I mean, it’s awful. So much potential, so bad. Bertrand SchmittYes. What’s interesting is that it’s not perfect, but with Qualcomm and the launch of Windows on ARM and the relaunch of Windows on ARM in 2024, I think Microsoft finally managed to make it work. There is enough support, there is enough compatibility, there is enough of a good value proposition, long battery life, not too slow, and at a good price point that I think they finally managed to make it work in a business sense. But yes, 12 years is a long time. Nuno Goncalves PedroYes, it is. 12 years, I think to get something is bad. So that doesn’t work. Talking about stuff done with Windows. But anyway, the IBM ThinkPad, I think it was a 701C, 701C, which had the butterfly keyboard that came out seemingly amazing. I pined for that laptop, and then it was a really poor experience in terms of writing. The keyboard wasn’t great. Felt a bit clunky. It wasn’t a great keyboard. Keyboards are a lot about feel. This one didn’t make, and that was the key peel of that whole laptop. I had had a couple of Toshibas before. At some point, people forget this, but Toshiba had some of the best laptops in the world, certainly on the Windows side. But the ThinkPad 701C was a tremendous one because of the butterfly keyboard. Bertrand SchmittSo how did it work? You could open the keyboard. Nuno Goncalves PedroYes, so you’d open. It was very. The width was shorter, and when you opened it, it slid open. Bertrand SchmittIt slid open. Oh, well. Nuno Goncalves PedroYes. So it was like… I think they call it butterfly. Yeah. Bertrand SchmittOkay. Okay. I realized I didn’t know this device. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt was a really cool thing, but apparently it did not work very well, which led to it not really scaling as a solution to having a larger keyboard. So that was not good. Bertrand SchmittYes, interesting. That’s one thing I like about the Windows environment is a lot of trial and error, and as long as you’re okay with at least there is experimentation. Talking about experimentation, the Wintel Netbooks. Do you remember the netbooks? It was all the reg in some seven, eight, nine, maybe. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy God. Yes. Awful. Bertrand SchmittI don’t know. But they launched so many of them. A smaller device. 8, 9, 10, 11-inch screen, Celeron CPUs from Intel. I bought so many of them each time, believing the next one would be the right one. It was always too slow, not enough battery life, screen was not big enough. It was just a horrible experience. It was a time when PCs could be way, way, way too slow. If you don’t have the latest and fastest, you will be in trouble, and the definition of a netbook is that it was never the latest and fastest CPU. It was an honourable experience, and strangely enough, it got completely destroyed by the iPad. Because I think anyone like me would somewhat use a case like this. Ultimately, if you wanted something very light, seen with some battery life, portable, not a full computer, then you would go with the iPad with some sort of keyboard, and that was it. It got completely killed by the iPad. Nuno Goncalves PedroWell, from my end, I already said this was one of my defining devices, positively, which was the Compaq Deskpro 386S, and it was also one of the most disappointing things because I think that’s where the device that led me to finally understand the Tech life cycle. If something’s way too expensive and honestly, in 2 years’ time, you have something much better in the market, you shouldn’t buy it, right? The device that made me understand that very clearly, and I started working around then, actually, I think I started working even a little bit before then, sort of led me to not give it much value and at some point in time I was like, well, it’s just too expensive for what it was and for what I was using it. It was a little bit of a disappointment over the years. Bertrand SchmittYes, and also I had a lot of Microsoft phones over the years. One of their first Windows Pocket PC they call it, which was also called Windows Phone. It was maybe 2002. I kept buying some Windows phones once in a while, but I remember when Microsoft tried to do a relaunch around acquiring Nokia and facing the onslaught of iOS, I would have a few Microsoft Lumia phones. I still remember using one at a show, and a Microsoft exec came to me and was very glad to see me using it, and he said, you know what? It’s the first time I’m seeing a non-Microsoft employee using a Microsoft phone in the wild. He used the word in the wild. Outside of a Microsoft campus, what I didn’t tell him is that I had an iPhone and an Android phone in my pockets. That was my third phone. That was not my main phone. But yes, that was a big mistake. Microsoft was completely losing it. The fun UI was kind of okay, but you had no apps. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt was nothing. Yes. Bertrand SchmittIt was just dead on arrival. We saw apps in 2011, 12 was not okay. Nuno Goncalves PedroTalking about the tech that influenced us dramatically, and we focused this episode a lot on hardware right? Physical things. But I’d say Windows Mobile and Windows Phone in general were awful experiences. All the different HTCs that got launched, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it’s just not great experiences. They were sort of onto something. The Palm was onto something as well, early on, of what would become the smartphone category. But they totally underdelivered on the experience. Bertrand SchmittThe experience was odd, but I must say I used some of them. I had the Nokia, the Ericsson on the side, but I must say I managed to make it work. I would not complain as much. They were not the stars of the show, but they were working for some of my use cases, I would say. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt was so clunky, though. It worked. It was clunky. Bertrand SchmittIt was clunky. You had to use a Stylus, for instance. That was our approach, and definitely that’s not the right option, but I still remember using them, and it was certainly more useful than Lumia, for instance. There were more apps, more use cases. Nuno Goncalves PedroOn the mobile phone side, two notables. One, everything that I ever bought on crowdfunding, I bought three phones between Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The three were crap. Obviously, massive delays, awful phones, really disappointing. I think I should have learned better than pre-order devices, mobile phones. I did recently a similar mistake with another one. I won’t say the name, but if you guys are paying attention, you’ll remember because I mentioned it in one of the last episodes. Then on the mainstream side, I’d say the original Palm Pre. The webOS experience wasn’t good. They did rectify it, by the second one it was a great experience, but the webOS, I still think, was a great operating system. AVI still, in some ways, evolved from there, and LG has sort of carried a torch on that. But the first Palm Pre was a very disappointing device in terms of performance. The form factor was really cool, like the Peblish kind of form factor that you sort of slid it. But it was very disappointing. I had way huge expectations on it, and it didn’t really deliver. Bertrand SchmittYeah, webOS was in a lot of trouble. Another category of device was Microsoft’s early tablet PCs. Some were built with HP, and I remember using that 23 years ago. I don’t know, and this stuff was so slow. I still have a painful memory of how slow it was. That was before the netbooks, and that was these early iterations of the tablet PCs. Now it’s a great experience on Microsoft tablet PCs. I think they made huge improvements, but early on, it was just too slow, not enough battery life. I still have painful memories about that. Nuno Goncalves PedroFrom my end, I don’t know if you remember these keyboard projectors. There was a projector that would project the keyboard, and you could write on it on your phone. Or even if you had a laptop, potentially on your laptop as well. What a disappointment all of those were. I tried a few, and at just some point I gave up. Maybe today there’s a good one, I don’t know. But what a category crappy experience in general. All the ones that I tried so again, the promise of AR VR, even in terms of input, has been very, very poor. Bertrand SchmittYes. Now, keyboard projection, the issue I had when I tried was that you end up having to type on your table and typing on the table. That’s not nice, that’s not enjoyable. You want to press stuff you don’t want to tap and hit an immovable object. The concept was flawed. Once I tried, I completely lost interest because I didn’t see how it could be changed. Maybe for me, the last worst tech purchase, and this one is probably croning anything else, was when I bought an Aibo robot dog from Sony. Nuno Goncalves PedroNo, no. Bertrand SchmittI bought the first generation, and that was probably 25 years ago. My God, that was very expensive. I forgot the exact price, but at the time it was very expensive and it was so totally, utterly useless. That one was bad. Totally useless, super expensive. I mean a great tech demo for Sony if you just want to play with it an hour. But beyond that, totally useless. I keep watching that category, the robot dog category, for a while, and I see a lot of improvement going on there. But just go back to the core question of what it is useful for? We’ll see, I’m not confident there is really a market for this, but it will be interesting if, with enough improvements, it starts to provide some value. Nuno Goncalves PedroWhat are the reflections and the takeaways of all of this? What did we all learn out of this? What are the key lessons learned? I already mentioned that some of these devices had a profound influence on myself. Did Bertrand mention it? Maybe a shout-out to all our listeners? We normally don’t do the shout-outs, but this is a particularly good episode. If you guys want to comment on devices that were positively affecting you or negatively affecting you in some way, please send us a message on X or on LinkedIn, or you can use our email. When we send out the mailing list. For those who receive the mailing list, shoot out a message back to us. We’d love to hear from you. But Bertrand, what are the takeaways? What are the reflections? Bertrand SchmittYes, that’s a good point. One thing I realized, if you watch the long arc of tech history, how things have changed. I mean, when you look at the gadgets we were using when we were young and how technology has improved since then, it’s pretty amazing. I mean, from stuff that can barely have a screen, from stuff that have very little to no battery life, from stuff that is so slow that it’s barely usable, to now you have ultra powerful computers, cameras always on in your pocket with a day of battery life. I’m always impressed to have been able to witness that arc of history. That’s point number one for me. Point number two is that some companies that drive innovation, like Apple in the 2010s seem to have stopped driving innovation or gone completely wrong. If we take the Apple Vision Pro, it’s an example of a device I would have expected Microsoft to launch, but not Apple. I feel that some companies have an innovation issue. If you take Apple, for instance, there has been no innovation on the iPhone for years now. Also, Chinese manufacturers managed to innovate and provide an affordable or flippable form factor. I think innovation has changed direction. Another category we talk about, virtual reality, virtual AR glasses. This is a category that has not found its stride, that has not matured yet enough, that has not reached economies of scale. That’s always a category to watch as a result. But at the same time, you have to be prudent in that category because mistakes are easy, stuff is expensive, and marketing is still probably pushing too strongly stuff that is only ready for some specific use cases. I think everyone will be better off if we are clear and honest about which use cases benefit from such a form factor. Nuno Goncalves PedroWell, my lessons learned, I think the first one, if it’s a category-defining device or if it’s a new category that’s trying to be created, it’s going to be hit-and-miss. Actually to be very honest, it’s going to be mostly miss. The device that’s being created is actually going to be clunky, the user experience is going to be a bit flawed. There’s maybe one company in history that has had a relatively good track record, which is Apple with the iPhone, with the iPad, et cetera. But honestly, there was a gentleman called Steve Jobs who was still alive back then. We just saw with the Vision Pro that that doesn’t necessarily reflect post his death. If you’re looking for those kinds of devices, our advice is to wait. See how the iterations go, and all the ecosystems get built. In particular, I think the key issue is ecosystems, right? A lot of these things get built on ecosystems of content and software. The app ecosystem, for example, for the iPhone was defined one year later was when the App Store launched, right? That’s what sort of shifted the whole smartphone arena. In some ways I know people just want to get their latest gadget, but if you’re thinking through something that’s significant cost, and you think you’re going to use it with a very different kind of use case, and it’s category defining or new category, I would just advise you to wait because likely the odds that their first version will actually deliver are incredibly, incredibly slim. The second lesson learned for me is that it’s all marketing, right? Some companies are better at marketing than others. We’ve seen that over the years. I mean, Google historically was always poor at explaining their products in general and even their hardware than Apple. Apple was always very good at it, or at least in recent memory, since Steve went back to Apple back in the day. It’s really interesting to observe that. Like, just forget the marketing, right? I mean, wait for the device to go into the market, look at what reviews are out there, look at what people are saying about it, and then make your own decision if you want to buy the device again. In particular, if the device is relatively expensive, I’d say that’s probably the best way to go. Then third, you’re always free to buy whatever you want, right? If you have the share of wallet to buy gadgets and to play around, and you’re a nerd like me and Bertrand, just go ahead, right? But just be ready for that level of disappointment, and be ready to, at some point, have enough devices to do a museum. I’m looking forward to getting some advice from you guys out there, our listeners, on what I should do with my mobile phones. But that’s basically it. I mean, at the end of the day, just be ready to get disappointed a lot, and once in a while, you’ll find the gem, you’ll find that one device that will be like, wow, this changed my life. This changed how I use things. As we mentioned in the first part of our episode today. Bertrand SchmittThe gadget space is pretty hard because let’s say you are a small independent company or startup, and you start to make something truly innovative and useful and that works, you know you are going to get copied by Apple and Samsung very quickly when the value has been proven, and therefore how do you fight this giant? That’s a big question mark. We have seen some Chinese manufacturers who manage to fight off by being very adaptable, having very short cycles to develop products and being close to hardware manufacturing to keep costs down. But that’s a tough space when you know that if you are not successful, you die. If you are too successful, you get killed by Samsung or Apple. You have to be somewhat successful, but not too much so that you can create your own niche that will be considered too much of a niche by the big electronics giants. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s a little bit like if you’re a consumer and if it’s mainstream, it’s relatively safer to buy from a larger consumer electronics company. Well, a branded company than something you’ve never heard about or a niche one. If it’s a niche category, then you probably need to buy from a niche player. I wouldn’t risk spending a lot of money on a niche play on a mainstream category, like buying a mobile phone now from an unknown vendor wouldn’t strike my mind right now. Bertrand SchmittI agree with that. If it’s very mainstream, you want the safety of that big brand. If it’s a quirky niche, and you have very specific needs and use case, and you feel these are truly resolved by this manufacturer, yes, I’m ready to give it a shot. Nuno Goncalves PedroIn this episode of Tech Deciphered, we went through the gadgets that made our hearts warmer and the gadgets that broke our hearts variety of consumer electronics across the board. We even talked about watches, gaming consoles, and a variety of other key elements that transformed our lives positively or that, in the end, were significant disappointments. Thank you for paying attention to us, and as mentioned earlier, if you like this episode, please send us your loved objects, the ones that changed your life, the tech that changed your life. Please share with us as well all the big disappointments you’ve had. Please send it to us via X, email or LinkedIn. Thank you, Bertrand. Bertrand SchmittThank you, Nuno.  

The reckoning is here. Once a safe harbor, Big Tech has finally also gone full out on layoffs. Is this a structural shift to employment in Tech? Will the subsequent talent spillover be great for start-ups and entrepreneurship? Will it positively affect other industries? In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we will answer these and other questions in a deep discussion on the Global Tech Labor reset. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Layoffs & Restructuring Shifts in Compensation & Perks Rise of Fractional, Freelance, and Solopreneur Work Talent Spillover to Other Sectors Geography & Culture Shifts Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 66 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we’ll talk about the global labour tech reset. Tech and big tech, which seemed immune to any lay-offs, seems now to be under fire. Massive lay-offs over the last 2.5 years, a lot of discussion around the importance of having a computer science, computer engineering background, and so what seemed to be a safe haven for any graduate is now under stress.     Today, we will discuss the structural perspective on what’s happening in the market, if this is a long-term trend or not, what has led us to this, and what is next. We’ll talk about the rise of fractional freelance and solopreneur work, as well as talk about talent spillovers, and some of the usual geographical dynamics around the space. Bertrand, a huge shift in tech.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, definitely. It’s pretty big. I think it started probably around 2022, once we got some changing interest rates that have a pretty massive impact in stock prices for a lot of companies. At that time, a lot of companies decided, and usually under some pressure, that it was time to be more efficient, to generate more cash. Yes, you want to grow, but not grow at all cost. You have to go efficiently.     That’s when we started to see some share price going down and step by step, quarter after quarter. Some change in attitude with a lot of big tech and that has created some impact in term of lay-off from different parts of the business, from the sales team to the DNA, to even engineering R&D.     What is also been happening since 2022, 2023 is a change of focus. A lot of focus is being put in AI. A lot of investment in CapEx is going to AI. At some point, if you want to keep doing all this investing, investments, you might have to get some other part of the business in order to create additional savings to do all the spend you can in AI. There has been more recently a switch. It’s not about just efficiency to push all the… But generating the ability to invest in AI.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s part of a broader movement. Before we step back a little bit and go back in history, even recently, we’ve heard that there’s talks between Meta and a bunch of private equity firms like KKR, Brookfield, Apollo, and others, to actually help in financing data centers. Meta is a gigantic company, so one would assume they have cash to do all these things. Maybe they don’t.     To your point, that level of efficiency that is now needed in the market where you need to throw actual money, CapEx, into the building of infrastructure, the building of the core underpins of what you’re doing is pretty vital. But let’s go back a little bit of a second, and we’ve talked about it maybe in our early episodes.     Companies like Meta, Facebook back in the day, Google, Alphabet now, and others had a tendency, in particular in the Bay Area, to hoard engineers. They would over-hire. There was a lot of discussion that some of these players had as much as 20%-50% the engineering resources they needed, and part of that is that they didn’t want their competitors to have them, and so in some ways, we went from hoarding too much capacity to the days of COVID that in some ways illustrated that there were a lot of people that maybe were not working very hard also on the engineering side, not just on the sales, et cetera side.     That right-sizing, I think, has been a long time coming. We discussed in a past episode that there was a little bit of an adaptation, or an adaptation, rather to the market by a lot of these public companies saying, “Now that I have a mandate where there’s lay-offs happening in other industries, I can do it myself.” But this time is different, and I think the message of probably today’s episode is going to be around that. This time is different.     There are some fundamentals that have changed. Bertrand has already alluded to AI as one fundamental shift in terms of the efficiency of engineers, in particular more junior engineers. There is more behind this. There is the notion that you need less to deliver more. In tech, I would start with a platitude. I think if anything, everyone talks about AI and how AI is going to disrupt financial services, and it’s disrupting functions like marketing, and displacing people around, for example, customer service, and all of this. But a lot of people forget to talk about the most obvious industry that’s being disrupted by AI, and that industry is tech.     Tech is disrupting itself with AI because you have all these tools available, you have all these platforms that you’re deploying, and they have value for your own purposes. They become the underpinning of a more efficient workforce, in particular if you’re a tech company. A lot of people don’t talk much about that, but I think a lot of what we will talk today around lay-offs and efficiencies and all of that actually do relate to the fundamental shifts we’re seeing where the emergence with a lot of these AI tools and platforms that we’re seeing, so tech is disrupting itself at the end of the day.   Bertrand Schmitt I think AI has two effects. One is it’s so big, it’s so important, you cannot miss it as a business that you are going to reallocate resources. From your traditional product lines, your traditional development, expansion, creation of new features, and you will reallocate instead more money to AI. It can be one side, can be just CapEx, and the other side will be, of course, software that you want to develop connected to AI.     I think that was the first effects that started early on. What it means is that many companies ultimately decide to fire people who are not so AI knowledgeable and instead hire people who have more expertise in AI. I think what you are talking is a second effect of AI. Now we start to reap the rewards of the investment in AI. What we are seeing as a result is that we can do more with less.     Basically, if you’re a software company, or a tech company, you have a lot in software engineering. If you have a lot in software engineering, guess what? One of the best way to leverage AI is actually to use it to develop more efficiently, faster. The tools have gotten better and better, what we got 2 years ago was barely usable, 1 year ago start to be good. Now, I must say, it’s shockingly impressive what you get if you have tool like Visual Studio or if you use some other tools on the market that are even more focused on AI.     It’s quite shocking the quality of the code auto completions that you can get. It’s quite shocking what you can get from other tools directly like ChatGPT. It’s definitely like having a buddy that can support you, check your code, provide you some IDS, run code, help you go faster through documentation, testing. You are going to save time. The first effect might be, you know what? We can do so much more with the same workforce. Maybe we can reduce slightly the workforce, and we’ll still do more thanks to AI.     Of course, there might be a question of you might want to keep the same size of software engineering so that they deliver even way more than before and your pace of development is truly accelerating. Companies are facing multiple options here. It looks like many are choosing to be more efficient.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, there’s just… Let’s talk numbers, right? In terms of lay-offs, 2024 alone, it seems like the number was around 250K-260K, globally, people were laid off.   Bertrand Schmitt In tech.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro In tech, yeah. This is global tech lay-offs, right? In tech, 250K, 260K tech lay-offs in 2024. In the US, it varies. We have numbers that go from 95,000-150,000 tech jobs in the US alone that were laid off in 2024. We’ve had numbers that over a period of 2.5 years, 400,000 people in tech were laid off globally. These are massive numbers. This is an industry that by itself was already, in some ways, part of some efficiencies. It’s not the most inefficient industry in the world in some ways, so very significant numbers that we’re talking about.   Bertrand Schmitt It’s not just lay-off, it’s also who you are not hiring anymore. I think we found an interesting stats and the quantity of entry-level tech jobs have dropped by 50% since 2019. Before the pandemic, new graduates made up 15%, of big tech hires. Today, it’s just 7%. We’re moving from 15% to 7%. It’s pretty shocking.     Where is it coming from? We talk about general cost-cutting measures post-COVID, but for sure, there is a lot around AI and automation, and especially since that AI is replacing a lot of more entry-level jobs. It can be QA, it can be IT support, it can be some software development. It’s definitely a big change. One thing not to forget is that computer science used to be a much smaller field 10, 20, 30 years ago. It has expanded a lot.     To be frank, I don’t think the quality of the graduates has stayed high. The more you expand the pool of people working in industries, the less you have the best of the best. As a result, you could argue there is a lot of people who are not either so good or so really interested in computer science, who still end up in computer science because that was the thing other people were doing. That was a safe way to get a job after your studies. But it was not because they are incredibly excited and knowledgeable about the space. It’s not because they are excellent developers.     My guess is that when everything is great, everything is easy, that’s good. But when there is tension in term of hiring, then it’s going to be trouble for a lot of people who don’t have the interest, appetite, and quite frankly, sometimes the level of what it takes to be a software engineer, for instance, in that new age. If you are not an expert with AI tools, if you don’t know AI deeply, why would a company hire you?   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think there are three important things to highlight here. The first one, and we’ve talked about it before, is, and this might be surprising to some people who are not computer engineers or computer scientists in background that might be listening to us, but there used to be the mythical figure of the 10X developer. Being a full-time equivalent can do the job of 10 good engineers.     Those developers do exist. Shockingly enough, they do exist. I’ve met a few in my career. I’ve been lucky to have a couple of them working with us at Chamaeleon. But amazing people that can do really the job of 10 people. I think what’s happening in the industry, to your point, Bertrand, is there’s a lot more variants in the quality. You have a lot of people that are not great. If you’re not a great developer, the problem is you’re actually probably having a negative impact in the projects that are involved in and slowing them down.     I think the second factor, which is really important to highlight, is some of these roles, and not to basically downgrade what the roles are, they’re very important roles, but some of the roles around DevOps and dev tools, around QA become specialists roles, but they’re roles that are a little bit less engineering-heavy, and they actually match some of the junior developer roles, which are what I’d call breaking stone issues.     You’re trying to do hardcore integrations, convert code, clean up code, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it’s not a fundamental engineering problem that you’re trying to solve for. AI, as we know, is extremely well-equipped to solve issues around that. It’s the issues that are very repeatable, that through testing can have relatively low impact in some ways at the end of the day in terms of the code base that you’re actually maintaining.     Then the third piece, I think, is some people might say, Well, but then is computer science that and computer engineering is that? What matters? No, it’s not. Actually, there are roles in computer science and computer engineering that are becoming even more and more vital. People that have very strong architectural view of code base, of what they’re developing, people that have full on, full stack knowledge of the world, people that have very deep knowledge around legacy systems, for example, embedded system, coding, et cetera. All of those right now don’t seem to be as under threat as other types of roles.     In some ways, we even have a more significant part of the haves and have nots, which you, Bertrand, very alluded to, which is people that have very deep domain knowledge around artificial intelligence. We’re now seeing an arms race for that talent, which the joke is going on that obviously Matt is trying to hire people and paying $100 million in our issues or whatever that is. I’m not sure how much of that is true.   Bertrand Schmitt Just bonus.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just bonus. I’m not sure how much of that is actually true or not and what the rules are for, but there’s this arms race for that talent. That talent is even more valuable because, again, back to the point, it’s probably seen as more scarce right now. It has a competency that, at least at the current time, AI cannot easily replace. Again, you have to put things, again, horses for courses. That’s why I mentioned these three little pieces of items, which is we have to serve, see it’s nuanced. This is not a one-size-fits-all lay-off, mass, you’re done, thing. It really depends on the role. It depends on the seniority of the person. Depends on the competency in the area that they’re involved in.   Bertrand Schmitt In terms of AI, there are really two situations. Either your core knowledge and expertise lies in AI per se, you are a data scientist, an AI engineer. The other side is that you are really good at using AI to do your usual work. Suddenly, if you are a software developer and use all the latest AI tools, and as a result, you are 2X, 3X more efficient than before, that’s definitely a level of expertise that companies will also be interested in.     I remember reading an interesting stat that people who best benefit from all the latest AI tools to do software development were actually the most expert developers who made the switch to using these tools some time ago. They were much better leveraging AI than younger developer, for instance, with little expertise. They will benefit from AI tools, but not as much as a pro developer. In a way, the gap is getting wider between entry-level people might have started to use AI and true experts who are also experts at using AI tool. It’s a gap that has been increasing.     I wanted to share two stats I read from the latest COA 2-2025 deck. They shared during their conference. One, they were showing an interesting analysis about Microsoft employee count, where basically between in 2022-2023, the number of employees stabilized. At Microsoft, it went stable at around 230,000 people.     Then we had a peak, a strange peak around July 2024 at around 240K, 250K employees. Since then, so basically since the past 12 months, the number of employees has constantly been going down. One of the questions would be, as Microsoft, which pick employee? Microsoft, by the way, show a stat that 30% of all their code now is generated by AI, 30%. That’s pretty impressive.     Another company, a much smaller one, but quite successful one, AppLovin. Another interesting stat is that in the past 4 years, they have doubled their revenue per employee. Their revenue per employee started from 3.6 million per employee. It was not starting from a low base easy to increase. It was starting from an insane number, very high number. They managed to double that to 7.6 million revenue per employee. During that period, they actually decreased their number of employees. They went up to 1,000 people and went down as of today, to maybe 750 people.     It’s very impressive to see even smaller companies, less than a thousand employee, has managed to increase so much their revenue per employee and took the decision to decrease actively their number of employees because they could have said, “You know what?” We need to invest in more stuff, and we need to do more stuff. Let’s be careful. Let’s keep increase employee size. But no, they decided that they can do more and keep increasing the business while decreasing employees. Even a world-leading revenue per employee.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s a two-tale side at play. One is that there’s a lot more code being actually generated by AI and tools. Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, has said that at least a quarter of their companies, more than 95% their code was generated by AI, which is silly. More than 94% of the code was generated by AI.     Then the other side is then you have these rapid growth micro companies that have very few employees as startups and are scaling through the roof. We’ll come back to that a little bit later because that changes a lot of the dynamics around employment in engineering, R&D, development, et cetera. But we’re now seeing a lot of these companies that are growing super fast with very few employees. Maybe that’s an interesting segue. Then what happens to salaries? Our salary is going to go through the roof for everyone involved. Not really.     As you said, actually, there’s a lot of functions where salary growth has actually flattened. In many cases, there’s now some salary decreases around certain areas. It’s again going to be a have and have nots. If you have a certain capacity and skill set, you probably can make more and more money as an individual. But actually, across the board, what used to be the core rules, the rules that carry the organization, for example, in terms of development, it might be that there is a salary flattening over time.   Bertrand Schmitt There is that question in Silicon Valley right now about when will we see the first one employee unicorn? What’s your take on this one? When will we see that?   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think sometime soon. I’m looking forward to when we’ll see a zero employee unicorn. An agent will create some…   Bertrand Schmitt Zero employee, technically.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro A zero employee. I’m an agent. I created my own self and I created a company. I’m not sharing it with anyone, and I’m a billionaire, and I don’t need VC money. That’s going to be cool. I don’t know. I think we’re probably going to reach it at some point.     There are some of these numbers, again, just to take this with a grain of salt, because a lot of these companies that seem to be growing at the speed of light, we’ve already talked about it in previous episodes, but a lot of these companies that are growing at the speed of light are getting subsidized to grow at the speed of light. They’re getting a lot of money, for example, to bolster their infrastructure. We already discussed it today.     The fact that you might be very lean in terms of your employee count might still mean that you have a lot of costs that you’re incurring in terms of your cloud processing, compute, storage, et cetera. It’s not like you don’t need capital. You might need capital, actually, you might need a lot more capital, but basically just your team is much smaller.     We have to look at some of these numbers with a grain of salt because there’s subsidization going into this. We’ve discussed it also in the past, there’s subsidization going into to go to market. There’s a lot of land grab playbooks out there where companies raise gigantic rounds. Then they might not have a ton of employees, but at a certain point in time, they are spending a ton of money to get to wherever they are in terms of, for example, annualized recurring revenue as a metric.     Again, I would be a little bit paused on… It will happen, I’m sure, the one employee unicorn, or the one-person unicorn, founder unicorn, single founder, only person on the team unicorn. But we’ll need to look at it with a little bit of a fresh lens at that point in time.   Bertrand Schmitt As you say, if you have big needs in term of CapEx, for instance, because you are building your own training clusters, for instance, for sure, you might spend a lot on that side. As a result, yes, you might have less employees, but does it still mean you are profitable? Maybe not.     You are right that another part could be the go-to-market spend. It could be enormous, especially at times when everybody is going all in in the eye. How do you differentiate yourself? How do you make yourself visible in the middle of all this noise? It might be very hard. It might be very hard. What do you do? You go out and do some marketing spend to correct for this.     It’s not because you have smaller teams that it means that you are profitable. But my bet would be that at least if you are more focused on the software side of things, not investing too much in infrastructure, you probably are in a better spot than before in term of capacity to be profitable. But at the same time, you are right in the middle or in the beginning of a big race, so not investing enough could be a dangerous game.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Everything changes. We started talking about salaries. It changes with equity grants, bonuses in general. We had the parentheses around some of these AI roles that seem to be super overpaid at this point in time. Like a superstar rock star signing, a little bit like a football player thing. But in general, there’s a little bit of a stepping back on bonuses, a stepping back on equity grants.     The perks, there was a step back. I’m not sure that’s true anymore with the perks. There’s now a push to get people back into the office in many of the large companies. I think the concern there was a concern around culture, but also a concern around people hiding and not doing anything, of which we knew there were a mass amount of a significant percentage of people hiding and not doing much in terms of work, in particular around some of the engineering disciplines.     I think this perk thing is probably a tale of two cities kind of thing. There’s a reduction in perks in many companies, but at the same time, there’s maybe a comeback of perks in other companies so that people do go to the office. But in general, perks, I don’t know. My perspective is that tech will still be ahead of the game in terms of perks it gives to his employees, in particular if we’re talking about Silicon Valley and some of the big tech companies in the US, Silicon Valley, Seattle, et cetera. But what’s your read, Bertrand?   Bertrand Schmitt My guess is that I’m not sure perks have been going back in a big way in general on average. But what is true is that the past 2 years, there have been a lot of forcing back on place to come back to the office. In some ways, that has been used as a way to get rid of people who are not willing to relocate back closer to headquarters, not willing to go back working at the office. In a way, it was a soft lay-off. In many situations, there was also no compensation. Basically, if you are not coming back to the office, you are resigning. It’s not that you are getting fired. That was also a way to do it on the cheap, even from bigger companies.     Personally, I understand that. It’s logical to say that if you’re not willing to come back, I mean, you are resigning, basically. But I would say my exception would be depending on what was the company policy, because if you got hired with a specific reason that, “Hey, you can work from remote, and you can work wherever you want.” I mean, it’s a change policy. If there is a policy change, I don’t know if it’s totally super fair to play that game in such a way. I think it really depends on a case-by-case basis.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll see how that evolves if big tech will take away a lot of its perks, and they’ll go back to normal. If all of this is happening, what’s the positive end of the spectrum? Is there something emerging that is positive in terms of growth, in terms of different employment, and around big tech in general? We’ve already mentioned AI and some of the AI skills, people that have deep knowledge that have come, for example, from the research side, that have come from the applied maths side of the fence, which is pretty vital for AI at this point in time.     But there are other pieces that are really rising, and there’s a rise of different roles and a different working. Many would call it the fractional roles, freelance roles, solopreneur work. There, we already started seeing it a long time ago. Startups in particular needed fractional talent. Very early on, for example, the classic one is the CFO, a fractional CFO. “I’m a startup. I don’t need a full-time CFO for a long, long time. But I do need someone to keep up my books and my accounting and for me to bounce ideas of and have all the accounts in order, everything like that.”     Now we start seeing fractional CTOs and fractional Chief Marketing Officers and fractional chief revenue officers, et cetera, et cetera. All of this is emerging not only because of lay-offs, but because in particular, if you’re talking about a startup, the half life of some of these roles is pretty limited early on. You don’t need someone, first of all, to be full-time.     Secondly, you need very specific things and very specific help. You could say, “Consulting could be an obvious thing for this.” But consulting is not cheap in general because there’s overhead and there’s a bunch of other things that are being loaded into it. It’s easier to have either a fractional firm that’s a little bit like a body shopping entity or individuals that do this with part of their time.     In some ways, I think what’s cool right now with this emergence of significant lay-offs, which is obviously bad news, is a lot of this talent is in the market. They’re like, “You know what? I could actually make myself available to a variety of organisations at the same time instead of just working for one. Honestly, I could make more money working for five or six organisations.”     I have a very good friend of mine, and he started doing consulting after his last startup. At a certain point in time, he had tons of people working for him, and he built a firm, and he’s been doing it for 5 years. It’s a deep functional expertise that he had and that he built in his firm. Then at the same time, there was a very deep segment and audience that he was catering to in companies. So that can actually work for significant amounts of time. I call that a little bit the podification of work. It might start with an individual doing this as a one-off. But over time, that individual starts building a team and starts building infrastructure and starts building around a couple of things.     Again, similar to what we’ve seen, for example, with fractional CFOs, with outsourcing companies for IT and for development. We’re now seeing it across a variety of functions. I think that’s actually super exciting.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I think it’s a good thing. I think some individuals will find success in that. But given the increase in this function, of fractional CFO, CTO, CMO, I would say I’m mostly doubtful that it’s more than a temporary situation for a lot of people. I don’t see how the market can adjust to such an increase. I think the trend was up 70X on LinkedIn, so it doesn’t sound something that will still exist forever.     I think some will definitely adjust. As you say, I also know some people, some fractional CMOs who have built their own team, it’s half a dozen people. I think it’s definitely a good trend and something that can be helpful for a lot of startups because when you have to start building a new team, a new marketing team, a new financial team, that can take quite a while to have the right people in the team. In the meantime, outsourcing to people who have real expertise that should also help you build the right team internally step by step. Personally, I think it’s a great idea as a startup to leverage some of these resources.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, maybe new companies will emerge out of this. The question is really, is this a temporary piece or not I’m a little bit more on the other side. That’s why I think there are elements in terms of the stack of functional knowledge that are not temporary. Will most of these people make it? Of course not. I mean, most of the people will fail miserably. Out of this, some companies will emerge, some new companies that will be better at catering to the beginning of the life cycle of a company, so the startup phase. Others will just stay as podification. My friend’s company is a good example of that. They just stayed within a certain size, and they did very well. I’m not sure his objective is to be the next mini Accenture for whatever space he’s in.     I feel there’s a little bit of staying power and people want that, I think, freedom. They want freedom, they want autonomy, they want quality of work. They want to be able to select the projects and the teams that they want to work with and the ones that they don’t.     I think one other effect is people like you and me. We have day jobs, we do stuff. I run a VC firm, you’re in a VC firm. But then we have side things that we do. It’s natural that people have side things. Obviously, our friend, Elon Musk, is probably the one that has more side things than everyone else. He has several companies as side things. But in general, it also means that people like you and I, when we have domain knowledge on the side that we can apply to other domains that are not necessarily the domain we’re spending our time in.     For example, I don’t work extensively with corporations right now. I work with startups, and I have investors. I have limited partners that I need to cater to. But I have a bunch of knowledge around digital transformation, innovation, scale up of companies, et cetera, et cetera. How do I share that? Starting to have platforms in the market, for example, Intro is now making a bit of a splash in the market. Having some of these platforms in the market that allow you to actually be procured by other people that need your knowledge is very powerful. Some of these platforms have existed for a long time, the GLGs of the world and all of that.     But I feel there’s a new momentum here emerging around deep expertise, subject matter expertise, knowledge, and how you scale that knowledge and how you put it into the market. This is still the pre-AI phase, because once AI can create replicas of us and avatars of us, that’s going to be cool, right? I mean, it’s like…   Bertrand Schmitt I mean, that means we rent our AI by the hour.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Let’s get a Nuno avatar to do things, and I can just go and chill on the beach.   Bertrand Schmitt We can do, yes, 200, 300 hours a week, thanks to our virtual AI. So, that would be the right way to do it. That would be interesting. I start to see this happening, actually. People building chatbots based on what they have written, based on what they have been talking on podcast, building a chatbot based on that and providing access to this chatbot for a fee. It’s actually a very interesting development.     That’s also, for me, an interesting proof that it’s good that you put in writing or in audio what you are doing. Then you can build this type of AI tools. If you are just doing your job, but your sharing is not really public or in a form that is usable for a chatbot, you won’t be able to virtualise this knowledge. I think that’s for me an interesting development. You could argue writing a book is also something good from that perspective. Even if we know that writing a book is not in itself something that will bring you much money, indirectly, in addition to being a way to advertise yourself, it can be a way to start your virtual self from.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe moving to other positive effects of this mass transition in terms of workforce that’s happening in technology, is how is this talent spilling over to other areas? I mean, is it that everyone’s getting laid off in tech, and they’re without a job, and they’re unemployed, or is it that they’re finding jobs elsewhere? Our perspective, at least from what it looks, is in the market, there are some interesting migrations happening. Some of them are the adjacencies. I mean, if you look at things like healthcare, biotech, you could say, “Well, that’s tech as well.” Well, probably most people would disagree. It’s a different tech at the very, very least.     There’s obviously a lot of interesting things happening in the deep and frontier tech side of this fence, but that’s still tech at the end of the day. But a lot of the talent is really spilling over to other areas. They’re going now potentially into companies in finance, financial services. There’s been always this tension movement between FSI, financial service industry, and tech, where FSI typically paid well, at least in certain kinds of roles. That transition can happen during these times. Manufacturing, logistics, government, in some cases, we won’t go. I won’t open the Pandora’s box on that one. We’ll just stay at that level.     But obviously, there’s a lot of talent that’s now migrating to industries, defence, for example, where it might have classically not gone to. There’s a lot of tech talent, for example, going into defence. They might end up in defence tech themselves, but defence in and of itself, in terms of the tech talent that was there, was a different animal, so to speak, as an industry. Now we’re seeing a lot of these spillovers, a lot of these movements of talent, which, in my opinion, are actually very positive. Let’s bring in the love, let’s bring in the expertise of technology to other domains that might actually benefit tremendously from it.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I totally agree with you. In some ways, it’s funny because it’s reminding me what I saw 10 years ago in mobile, where a lot of people were early in mobile apps. At the beginning, early on in the 2010-2015, mobile apps were really mostly about gaming. But step by step, many people were not so keen to stay in the gaming industry. I saw many moving and switching to different industries who were very keen to have people knowledgeable in app business, app development.     I remember seeing many people jumping to the financial industry, for instance, when banks were building their mobile apps and the like. It was for me very interesting to see that switch. These people were highly sought after by these industries because they were known to have dealt with stuff very early on that were not so easy and that were important and could apply to their own business.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I do predict there’s even a more interesting spillover effect that’s probably up and coming as well, which is even founders of startups and some of us investors that might say, “You know what? I just want to go and do something else in another industry.” We discussed it in the past, what areas are less impacted by AI. There’s many industries that need so much revamping that even the effects of AI will take years, even decades to be more heartfelt.     The level of core innovation that needs to happen and the underpinning of that innovation, again, some of this talent, founders, investors, they’re more than capable to bring it to other industries. We’re not saying that we’re white knights that are going to save industries. That’s not the point. It’s like the technology toolkit, the understanding that tech skills very, very quickly or quicker than humans is something that’s valuable, we believe, for a lot of industries.   Bertrand Schmitt One thing, though, to keep in mind because sometimes I see some companies with things they can do as well as Meta or Google or others in terms of developing their own tools or product based on AI. Sometimes I’m just shocked. I’m like, “Guys, come on, let’s be realistic 2 minutes. You don’t have the capacity to pay some of the top talents like Silicon Valley can pay.” I’m talking about cash, signing bonus, salaries, stock options that we increase in value.     I would say I would just highlight that piece of the puzzle because I’ve seen again and again some industries that believe that, “Hey, I’ve hired a few guys relatively cheap from the tech industry, and now I don’t need to buy the products from the Google of the world. I can do it myself.” I mean, good luck with that. Good luck with that. You are not going to be able to compete. Find a way to use this talent in a way that is efficient and smart, but don’t think that give you the ability to compete with the big boys, because you won’t be able to compete.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro The operating models, to your point, are fundamentally different. If you just hire a few people and say, “Well, now go and do it.” It’s like, well, you’re fitting into an organisation that has specific APIs in mind, a specific value system, how things are done, how the cycles are done, you need to cater not just to individuals, but really create organisations that really are able to scale technology and actually shift how the organisation would work.     If you want a more tech-enabled organisation, you need to create an operating model that is tech-enabled, not just come here and fit in. It’s like you can’t make much work. In some ways, fully agreed, just hiring people won’t solve the problem. Making big bets into pools of talent, into new operating models, into new processes, even into new spin-out organisations is going to make a much bigger impact.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Again, at some point, it’s the very best. We stay in tech where they can get pretty insane salary compensation that no normal company will be able to afford. You won’t be able to fight meta who wants to hire the top AI engineer or top AI scientist and spending dozens of millions on some of the top talents. I mean, there’s no way you can compete there. You have to be realistic about the level of talent you can bring and, of course, making your organisation compatible with this talent. If you don’t change your ways, there is not much anyone can do. But even if you change your way, even if you do a lot of things positively, if you are not able to compete on the comp side, you have to have reasonable expectations as well.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Let’s talk maybe about some of the cultural and geographical shifts that we see happening. We’ve talked about many of them because of COVID and during COVID and post-COVID, the logic and what was happening.     A very obvious one is the remote versus return to work dynamic as two extremes: fully remote or full return to work. In some ways, big tech seems to be going back to the return to work, so the whole, you guys can be wherever you are, and you get paid. That has come crashing and burning, so to speak, very visibly and very publicly. A lot of the big tech companies saying, “You need to return to office, and you need to return to an office that you belong to. Otherwise, either we change your salary because you’re somewhere else. If you have an office for you to go into in the area that you’re in now, or you should leave.”     In some ways, there’s a momentum back. I think at least I have been a proponent that the world, maybe with everything that happened with COVID, would go more towards a hybrid model where you have hubs, where people work from the office, again, a lot more, but they get to work a bit from home.     In some cases, we’re seeing a really like, no, you return to the office, maybe you can work from a one day a week, and that’s it. There’s a little bit of a rebalancing, I think, of workforces. Obviously, smaller companies, startups still very much have very distributed teams, in some cases, almost fully liquid still and all remote. But if we’re talking about mid-size, high-growth companies, large big tech companies, it seems like we’re going full on back to the good old days. We’ll see how that pans out.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I will say on this topic, one thing I have seen and has not changed is that if you are some of the top talents around there on your topic, companies will let you do whatever you want. I know some people who are AI scientists, they are still working from home, and trust me, they are not going to get fired because the companies know that they have a good deal. The guy is there, and he can pick any job he wants if he’s out. I think it’s true of your average worker, but top talent can still impose their rules to most systems.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Let me just comment on that. I think it is true, but just for those listening, we’re talking about really top-tier talent. I was just privy to a transaction involving two parties, a larger party and a smaller startup, where the transaction didn’t go through because they were doing an acquisition of a company, the larger party, just for AI talent, and they recognised the smaller company had amazing AI talent, and still they were like, “No, you guys are going to have to come to these two hubs, and there’s no flexibility. We don’t give a shit.”     Again, we’re talking about really high top-tier talent, rock star talent. We’re not talking about the best performers. We’re talking about the the the best performers is what I would say. Then you’re allowed to do whatever you want. Then you’re prima donna, that’s fine.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, and I’m sure different companies they have different approach, but some people I have in mind are working for companies that are very well known to not have remote work policies, but they still have for some people. The other piece of the puzzle that some things I’ve heard is some companies that are mandating a return to the office, but they don’t have enough seats.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes, I’ve heard that.   Bertrand Schmitt For me, it’s just so unbelievable that you’re mandating employees to come back to the office, but you don’t have the number of seats. People basically don’t have a desk when they arrive, don’t have a parking spot, practically cannot work from the office. You have 20, 30, 40% not enough capacity in the office. For me, just this stuff blows my mind because I have no way. I simply cannot understand how an HR team, how some execs have no clue to such a level that they mandate one thing on one side, but on the other hand, they don’t have the capacity. They do both at the same time. We mandate, and then we don’t have the capacity.     I’m not sure what to take about that. It really made so little sense to me that it’s shocking. I’m talking about really big companies that have the ability to have the visibility and to rent whatever needs to be rented. It’s shocking. For me, it’s interesting. You have what he said, what he talk about. When you see the practical reality, it’s quite shocking to see the, I would say quite frankly, incompetence of some in terms of how the organisers return to the office.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Definitely a lot of incompetence. Fundamental shift, maybe switching gears a little bit is, how is work being done? Obviously, we’ve talked a lot about demographics, and now Gen Zers are fundamentally different and looking for authenticity, mission-driven work, having side gigs. They have their work-life balance as a given, and all these elements that are being pushed onto. We’ve also discussed the social issues. Are they ready socially to manage and scale to be managers, et cetera. But I think there’s a more fundamental shift happening right now, in particular, if I look at tech, which is this notion of individual contributor versus manager.     I think we went through a time where there was a lot of more and more management layers. There’s now this discussion where the structure should be flatter. There should be still managers because there needs to be orchestration, but the structures need to be flatter because there’s a lot of individual contributors at the table.   Bertrand Schmitt It’s more efficient. Too many layers destroy your capacity.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s always been more in computer engineering. This notion of small teams, highly empowered, highly capable to deliver with a thin layer of management is always, I think, what people have talked about in computer engineering as the best case scenario. I feel in some ways we’re going back to that a little bit. We are going back to the age of individual contribution, and particularly with this AI augmentation, the ability for me to do stuff myself.     I was talking to a founder the other day, and he’s an older founder, a little bit more experienced in the market. He was telling me, “I’m not sure I need a ton of junior developers. I can just go and look for stuff.” He’s the CTO, in this case, of the company. “There’s a lot of stuff I can do myself. I could just look for code, clean it up, debug it, compile it, run it. That’s fine. For basic stuff, I don’t need people.” In some ways, we’re like, this is the max manager, the CTO. In some cases, the CTO is saying, “I can be a contributor myself, and then I don’t need to be managing three or four people. I can do basic jobs myself.”     I feel there’s a little bit of flattening of engineering orgs going on. It might at some point go back to a lot of management layers, but that it feels, at least to me right now, that’s where we are in terms of the cycle.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. An interesting thing is that it goes in parallel with that new trend of AI as a manager. Not only you might have less manager for efficiency’s sake, a lot of companies realise they cannot have too many layers of management without losing their capacity to do stuff quickly, to turn around quickly. But on top of it, there is that new trend of management through AI. A lot of people say AI might be able to replace middle management. It’s also an interesting development. It might not just be about AI on the front lines of replacing the most junior jobs. There is a lot of talks about AI replacing managers.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Do you want to close down?   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, sure. Some takeaways on the topic. Definitely, there is a big shift in tech in hiring. If you want to be focused as a founder, you want to, of course, be cost-effective in hiring top talent, you should probably think about leveraging more fractional roles, talents that are not easy to hire, you cannot afford to hire full-time. You want to stay in. AI keeps improving, if not by the day, by the week, so be careful.     Stuff that you don’t believe could be done in 6 months might be doable with AI. If you are an operator, focus on a retention of your team, focus on best practices, remote, hybrid. I think that what some of the big companies are doing could be your benefit as a smaller company. Don’t think about applying the policies of the big guys because applying a different policies could be a way to get a specific advantage.     If you’re investors, I think that you probably want to think carefully about how this company is using AI, how this company is optimising resources. Are they still living like we used to do years ago? Are they full on in that brave new world, and I think it’s important to push for that.     Of course, some of this is painful when people are fired from their job, are laid off. But on the positive side, that’s usually a way to start again, to start new, to think about how you could do things differently, potentially start a new type of business as we discuss. I think everyone should think very carefully to upgrade their skills in order to better use AI, because that’s definitely the way things are going. Thank you, Nuno.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Thank you, Bertrand.  

Robotics is a field that seemingly hasn’t really delivered on its promises. Sure, plenty of robot arms and other robotic solutions in logistics and industrial spaces, but what about the rest… including, Consumer?!  Navigation: Intro (01:34) B2B Robotics Consumer Robotics Looking Ahead Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 64 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we will discuss robotics. Our new overlords are coming. Robotics is a field that seemingly hasn’t really delivered on its promise. Sure, plenty of robot arms and other robotic solutions are out there. But somehow it feels like we should be actually already controlled and dominated by our robotic overlords. Today, we will discuss B2B Robotics, their growth, adoption, industry use cases, the drivers of innovation in that space, players in that space, challenges. We will also talk about consumer robotics, talking about also robots that have gone mainstream, personal and social robots, emerging trends that are happening in the home, market dynamics. Then we’ll look ahead to the future of B2B, the future of consumer, and the societal and workforce impact, which obviously is going to be the last but not the least topic that we will address today. Let’s start with B2B. B2B Robotics. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, thank you, Nuno. It’s certainly a growing space. As you say, it might not feel like it, but at the end of the day, we already have quite a few millions robots in B2B. It’s estimated that the stock of your operational robots, industrial robots, is around 4.28 million units in 2023, which was a 10% increase year-on-year. If we look at China, and I think we talk about the fact that we are installing around 400,000 robots a year. China alone by itself has been installing 276,000 units in 2023. China is definitely a leader in that space and that might come as a surprise to some. That number, to put it into perspective, is five times higher than the second place, Japan. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think China has recognized a long time ago that because of its population composition, that they’re going to have a lack of people to produce, to be in factories, et cetera, so they actually have been adopting robots now for many, many years. I think now, you were joking with me just before we recorded this, but now that we’re having trade tariffs and all that stuff, it might make sense to have a broad discussion around why robotics in an industrial environment are key. Bertrand Schmitt Definitely. I think that actually I was surprised to hear that, when we’re making this recording on April 15, I was surprised to hear in the Trump administration, quite a lot of very positive support regarding AI and robotics. It looks like part of the plan is already acknowledging this is not like the old-school jobs that we are going to bring back. It would be a different type of jobs. There will be way more robotics than before. Obviously, more robotics is possible thanks to the latest advanced in AI. There is some consensus that, yeah, it’s not just bring back the old jobs as they were, but it would be a new type of jobs. It would be a new type of industrial revolution and acknowledgment that robotics are here to make all of this not just more efficient, but even possible. Because it’s clear that if you take the US, for instance, there is actually not so much unemployment in the US. For an industrial revolution to happen, we need to bring our new friends, the robots. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If we go through the use cases where we see robots coming in, obviously manufacturing, automotive and electronics will probably come to people’s mind. A lot of robot arms are being used there. More than serve your classic solutions, et cetera. But it’s a lot of robot arms using on specific pieces on the line, a lot of pieces of robotics that we don’t recognize necessarily as robotics, but are actually roboticized systems used, in particular on automotive, again, in consumer electronics. Basically, it has to do with the fact that there’s a tremendous lack of… One, there’s going to be, at some point, the limitation on how fast you can produce, so that’s very obvious. Two, there’s actually even lack of people that can do some of these roles. Some of it is actually high precision work. In most of these environments, there are environments where humans need to coexist with the robots that are on the line, and that has led to the creation of this movement of cobots. Robots that are able to basically interact with the environment that they’re in, obviously be very careful around safety procedures that they don’t kill a human being that is around them. There’s been a lot of innovation around that using computer vision, using sensors, and using a variety of other elements around that. That cobot segment in particular is growing quite rapidly, estimated to be 14.7 billion market by 2031. But obviously, we all recognize manufacturing, there’s robots being used, so no shocks there. One of the largest markets by far. Bertrand Schmitt Definitely. Collaborative robots are a recent phenomenon made possible thanks to better activation of motors, electric motors possible thanks to new AI, vision AI. There is a lot of the latest technologies that makes this possible versus your big, bulky, robotic arms that used to be encaged. It’s not to kill anyone. Yeah, it’s a change from bigger to smaller. I mean, we can even say step by step, and we’ll talk more about it, but more humanlike in terms of how it looks. Here we have around 113,000 professional services’ robot for transportation and logistics sold in 2023 alone. That was a big increase of 35% year-on-year. I think we have all seen how Amazon is doing with some robots in their warehouse, logistics systems. What some might not have seen is as impressive in China. If you look at the efficiency of some of these warehouse in China, it can be very impressive. I don’t think they’re holding anything back actually in China. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, definitely not. There’s a lot of amazing things happening on the logistics side. Obviously, Amazon bought one of the early granddaddies, which was Kiva Systems, which was bought by Amazon, and now it’s Amazon Robotics. There’s a lot of stuff happening on the lines, autonomous mobile robots for the transport of materials, robot extruders, mobile picking robots, automated forklifts, and a bunch of other things. It’s also an environment where I know Amazon is obviously using a lot of co-robots, and there’s a lot of people around as well still. Very interesting environment. I’d say probably Amazon has been the company on the logistics side that innovated the most, the earliest, certainly in the US. I still remember the Ocado ads where they use robots. In the UK, there’s always been a lot of this debate whether that was actually very useful, very impactful in Ocado’s operations or not. Also, retailer there. But definitely, I think we would recognize probably Amazon has been one of the players that has innovated the most in this space for a couple of decades now. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, it’s definitely I mean, that has been key for them to grow, to expand their network. As you know, I mean, Amazon has a lot of people working in their warehouse, but they were still able to manage to grow so fast while not growing proportionally the number of people working there. It’s thanks to advance in robotics. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed. One other area, obviously, of use has been in the healthcare and medical space, and particularly in high precision need environments. Surgical robots like Intuitive Surgical, their Da Vinci system, does provide the precision that you need for procedures that require minimally invasive play with high precision. Basically, things that you can’t really… The human hand actually might not be precise enough for it, even if you’re an amazing surgeon. Beyond that, medical robots have grown quite significantly. It’s grown to the thousands units, which might not seem a lot compared to the hundreds of thousands that Bertrand, you were just mentioning. But obviously this is a much more specialized space, less mainstream in some ways of robotics. A lot of these devices are incredibly expensive, and then we’ve seen a lot of innovation around that. There’s obviously the old-school players that are on the market, Johnson & Johnson’s of the world, Medtronic, that have also entered that arena, the surgical robot arena. Then there’s a bunch of other applications for robots that I would highlight. Hospitality or hospital delivery robots, so robots in hospitals that do deliveries. Rehabilitation exoskeletons, which is really, really cool. If you guys remember Aliens, the second exoskeleton that she has and stuff like that. Obviously this is for recovery for people that are rehabilitating. It supports them in their rehabilitation without having necessarily to have a human there all the time doing that. Then obviously diagnostic robots. A lot of players in this space, CMR surgical as well, Ethon, Exobionics, Cyberdine. There’s a bunch of things happening right now that are quite cool. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. If you look at rehabilitation robots, the growth was pretty amazing at more than 128%. You can call it a surge. Some of these metrics are pretty amazing. As you said in rehabilitation, for sure, if you need a human by the side all the time, it will be way more expensive, and you might not have the staff to just do that. It seems like a very, very obvious option. Going back to medical robots used for surgery, for instance, as you say, I mean, robots can do stuff that humans cannot. You can have a very small robot moving your own body in some ways, coming from places that would be impossible to operate. It also could end up being more safe. Ultimately, you decrease the need for specialized surgeons. You might need less of them, or you might simply do more with less. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Correct. Next, we go to agriculture and farming, AgTech. Actually, the name probably comes from use of robots in agriculture and drones, et cetera. We have some big numbers, basically according to our research, 20,000 units in 2023 that were used. There’s high precision agriculture that, again, requires things that are very, very precise. There’s also the base equipment that are used by humans that are being repurposed to become equipments for agricultural activities. Autonomous tractors and sprayers would be a great example of that. Milking robots, the robots that do the milking of cows, et cetera, also makes a lot of sense. Again, replacing human in an activity that probably can be more easily replaced. Then you have, obviously, the drone space with a lot of things around field scouting, the surveillance, the pieces around how to create new ecosystems around the fields. Last but not the least, obviously, we have picking robots, the robots that pick up stuff. Those robots are particularly complex. Obviously, some fruits, some vegetables, et cetera, need to be picked in a way that is more complex because they require either cutting or something like that. Its identification is pretty critical because you don’t go through the whole process of actually growing the stuff and then have the robots destroy it. But yes, and there obviously there’s a lot of players, mostly the old guys, or the guys that have been around for a while, obviously DGI on the drone side, Yamaha, a motor, John Deere, then there’s a couple of startups as well. He’s emerging in this space, Farmwise and a few others that are doing a lot of activity. I’ve looked at this space quite a lot. Just as a disclaimer, I spent a significant amount of years in a VC fund as a venture partner that was really very focused on Deep Tech, Frontier Tech, in particular, robotics. It was actually in the name of the firm. As part of that, ended up interacting with a lot of the B2B applications of it. AgTech seems like an obvious use for it because there’s searches of people. It’s been a huge debate around immigration and illegal immigration in particular. The reality is agriculture has very, very thin margins in general. It’s maybe a broader point we can make at this point in the episode, but the problem with robotics is systematically, is this a big enough issue that you should solve it with a very complex solution. Because normally, robotics, even if it’s a verticalized solution, require complex elements, not just on the hardware side with sensors and a bunch of other things, but also on the software side. I think AgTech is one of those areas where there’s been a couple of companies, there’s been one or two interesting exits with Blue River going to John Deere, et cetera. But still feels like it’s an area that we haven’t figured it out yet. Either we fully roboticized a facility or do something else, but we haven’t really figured it out yet. My theory is it’s just the margins are just too thin, and it’s too complex. It’s also a space where the owners and the people that operate the fields are actually not necessarily people that have any technical knowledge of any kind. The solutions do need to be really, really simplified to that level. Bertrand Schmitt That’s a good point. I have also seen quite a lot of startups in that space. At Red River, we invested in a startup called Robovision in Belgium. Some of what they do is definitely to serve agriculture needs. It’s not easy, as you say. First, it’s not like the car market, for instance, where you make millions and millions of cars every year, where you have a clear market and buyers are ready to buy. In agriculture, there is tractors and stuff, but the competition is very different. The volumes are not the same, and there are always, as you say, questions about how do you deal with a space that is not actually so human-friendly. It’s not a road. It has not been designed for it. It’s a field. Two, the people around are not experts, are not technical, so the smallest issue can be a problem. It’s really a big question. At the same time, I must say I’m quite and optimistic that robotics have definitely the ability to transform agriculture. If you look back, the story of agriculture is just a question of improving the methods, the tools and you increase the yield. That’s how we managed to move from 95, 99% working in agriculture and the fields to 1% today. I’m still a believer. As you say, there is a big question around immigration, especially legal immigration in the US, probably quite a lot is happening to serve agriculture needs. Given that push, that might create some new incentives in order to stay competitive. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. I mentioned Blue River before, which was a company acquired by John Deere, apparently for $284 million or so. The company raised in total $30 million, so it feels actually like a decent exit. But it’s one of the very few plays in this space that has really gone to a fruitful exit. Also, important to magnify that a lot of the AgTech stuff for example, that’s been happening in vertical farming, for example, is around robotics. It’s around almost managing vertical farming a little bit like a manufacturing facility with its own complexities, but a bit like a manufacturing facility. There we really haven’t seen a runaway winner. I mean, plenty raise a ton of money. From my knowledge, they haven’t done necessarily great. I’m not sure how roboticized they were. There’s a bunch of other companies in the market that we know well, like 1.1, et cetera. There’s definitely a lot of plays going on that depend fully on robotics around the AgTech that we see today. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. You talk about a specific type of agriculture. I mean, the ones they try to do in some convert some old factory, for instance, do it even in the cities, urban farming. I think this stuff by definition, I’m not super optimistic that the yields can work. We’ll see, obviously, maybe if you control well water space, automation, but it looks like yields are definitely a big issue in this space. At some point, size and scale matter. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It becomes a unit economics issue at the end. I was very involved in one of the plays that I mentioned before, and it is clear to me that we will get there, but to your point, there is a need for scale that needs to happen. These guys need to get big contracts. They need to get really, really big contracts in terms of what they need to put in the market. It’s also very clear to me, it’s a very difficult market for you to do stuff that goes one hop from consumer. Let me do a vertical farm and sell to supermarkets, and they’ll get fresh, produced from me and whatever. It’s very tough. There’s a lot of intermediaries in the middle, distributors, et cetera. A value chain that is much more complex than we think it is. I think if you’re someone who’s not spent a lot of time around agriculture, you think, “Oh, there’s people in the fields that produce stuff. They sell it maybe to markets or someone in the middle, and that person in the middle somehow sells it to supermarkets and whatever and what we get.” No, there’s a lot more players in the middle that get involved for all of the stuff. There’s brokers and the wholesale players, and then there’s even in retail, there’s different types of players as well. It’s like, it’s my God. Bertrand Schmitt There’s a whole communities feature market. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes, it’s an ecosystem that’s extremely, extremely complex. Maybe moving to construction, I think it’s probably an industry that, as promised a lot, that we would have construction robots replacing people. It’s a particular hazardous role. In construction, there’s accidents, people get hurt, and they might even get killed. Obviously, it’s an area where it’s high risk, high rewards. Robots, you would assume, would be great for this. Honestly, I personally have seen some interesting innovation around 3D printing, which I would argue is it robots or not? Drones for surveying and for looking at buildings and a variety of other things. We’ve had this huge promise, I think, in construction of prefab, of the ability to do prefab buildings and prefab homes and all that stuff. There’s a lot of interesting players out there, so I’m not disrespecting them necessarily, but it hasn’t really scaled. Again, we haven’t seen a player that has really won that market. We saw a player that failed miserably, which was Katerra, which wanted to use stuff like that. I’m not sure they ever got to that level. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I was going to say it’s been a decade we talk about prefab and stuff, and for some reason it has not taken off at all. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s not. I’ve seen amazing things, in particular around single-family homes and things like that. ADUs, right? Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Nuno Goncalves Pedro In particular, California with a change in less installation, et cetera, and certain markets, in particular, like LA County being super aggressive on opening up the ADU market, et cetera. Nothing dramatic. In this space, we see autonomous construction machinery, which in some ways could be used for what we were just talking about, the prefab market, robotic bricklaying, 3D printing robots, site inspection drones. I think we are seeing more and more site inspection stuff. I think we are seeing more and more stuff around 3D printing. I don’t see this industry being disrupted by construction in the next couple of years, by robots, rather, in the next couple of years. I think that will be very optimistic. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, it seems like it will take a while. Not saying it might not come, but it’s not as if we were at a tipping point at this stage. Going into retail, hospitality, we’ve seen a lot of robots that try to come to some sort of, I would say, awkward space, trying to welcome you SoftBank at some robots. Robots are acquired from a French company, actually, maybe at least a decade ago. It’s 54,000 units sold in 2023, so a pretty good increase, 30% plus. That also includes hotel delivery robots, restaurant food runners, concierge info robots. I think it’s a mix of everything, to be frank. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s a mix of things going on. Again, it’s a space that everyone’s like, “Obviously, this is going to be delivery robots and all sorts of things.” This is just going to scale very, very rapidly just if you think about the use cases. Inventory scanning, customer service, restaurant service robots, floor cleaning robots, delivery robots, all this stuff. It’s obvious. Again, we haven’t had amazing winners in this space. There’s a bunch of players, question mark on when we’re going to get them. I think some of the problematics of this, I think in closed environments, I’m very surprised that we haven’t figured out closed environments. Why are robots not able to do inventory scanning at scale? Why are robots not able to deliver food to me in a restaurant? That part seems like a problem that’s eminently solvable because floor plan is more controlled. I know there’s people, so that’s the cobot dimension to it. In some ways, the more the food delivery things, which seem to have taken off in some places, actually. Seemed like a more complex issue, but somehow I guess there’s more activity in that space. We’ll see. Bertrand Schmitt If you remember for hotels, you had these delivery robots bringing your food potentially and not much happened to be frank. I remember seeing some startups trying to do robots for universities, colleges, and the same thing. I don’t think much happened. I think in many situation, it’s an awkward space because you’re like, “Okay, so I’m delivering because people don’t want to just go downstairs and buy at the counter or just buy an automated machine that is just delivering food.” We know the machine to get your bottle of drinks, your snacks, it’s pretty straightforward. The robots providing not the last mile, but the last few feet. It’s a tough value proposition and it has so many constraints. For robots in restaurant… There is one chain that you probably know where I go once in a while, where you have these delivery robots directly to your table. It’s Haidilao. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Of course. Bertrand Schmitt I’m always impressed that the only restaurants in the US where I go, where we get served by a robot is actually a Chinese chain. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes, the hot pot guys. Bertrand Schmitt It’s a hot pot guy. They have pretty good food, actually. I’m always shocked because it’s really working. You see the robots coming up, not hurting anyone, finding their way around. You have kids in this restaurant. It’s a very kid-friendly place. You can see it’s not a replacement for human. It’s really making humans more efficient and for sure decreasing the risk of breaking something, having a plate falling off, that stuff. I think it’s a very smart use. I’m surprised why not more restaurants do that, but I think there might be a cultural issue, especially in Europe and in the US. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think there might be. In Asia, it’s probably where we’re seeing a lot of these advancements coming in. We’ll talk about some of the geopolitics around this in a bit. Moving maybe within still B2B robotics to what are the key innovations and technology movements we’re seeing. One very obvious one, which is the one is artificial intelligence and the use of machine learning, deep learning methodologies, computer vision, and a variety of other things to optimise lines, to optimise how things are done, but also to optimise in-process things and what’s happening. That is very, very obvious. There’s a lot of things happening around that space. Robots are not very useful if they don’t have some brain, if they are not doing something that is defined within the realm of some degree of operational intelligence, as I would call it. AI is critical to that. That I think is the thing we’re all afraid of. It’s when robots are actually using proper AI then they’ll come to kill us. Sorry. Bertrand Schmitt Maybe we’ll talk later about the key players, but obviously NVIDIA has been pushing very hard in the robotic space and sees that as one of their big future markets. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe moving along to something we already talked about, so co-bots, mobile and collaborative robotics in general. We’ve already talked about it. It uses a lot of the AI pieces that we were talking about, but it’s this notion that we will need to have things in this world that interact with us. There’s some cool things happening. Tesla with Optimus and Agility Robotics doing bipedal robots. We did have a bunch of… Boston Scientific was the dog ones, early on. We’re having all of these things that are on the one hand, basically interacting with humans and on the other hand, looking more like animals and humans. Becoming a little bit more anthropomorphic on the human side as well. Interesting things that are happening in that space. As we discussed, those markets are real, they’re growing fast. Certainly in the manufacturing space, we know that’s the case. I think there will be a lot of crossover technology transfer to other use cases in the more consumer-related domain where there are people and little kids running around doing stupid things, et cetera. Bertrand Schmitt Maybe to keep going on the technology, another way to make robots happen at scale is all the work done in term of digital twins and simulation. When you can build virtual replicas of your factory for testing, for optimizing, that will help you decrease downtime, that will help you be more efficient with your deployment. That has been a key part of the game in order to bring robots to the factory. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed. Last but not the least, the things that we would like to highlight, more business models that are changing robotics. A robot can be a very expensive, cost for a firm, for a company, and for a startup. There’s a lot of things happening around robotics as a service where companies can lease robots on subscription rather than just purchasing them. I’d say that’s more of a financing play, to say the very least, but there’s deeper things going on in the space with really solutions that are optimised towards outcomes-driven revenue sharing. People could say, “It’s just a business model innovation.” But there’s a lot of cool things happening around that. I think we might have some of the big manufacturing companies of the future, et cetera, merging because of these business models with a fuller stack where I have my own robots and that’s what I’m bringing to table. Making them available to you. Startups like Formic that have been quite heavily discussed about, and they are trying to really go on a usage-based fee play. It’s solely based on usage. The jury is still out if this is going to really scale, if it’s going to be at the level of mass market. But certainly, if we’re thinking about small-scale manufacturing, et cetera, I would say it’s a great business model and we’ll create a lot of innovation around it. Bertrand Schmitt I think business model innovation is quite critical. We have seen how software as a service, SaaS, has been able to transform the software industry and create basically a new dramatic wave of growth. For robotics as a service, could unleash a similar efficient model that will help scale to the next level robots, so it will be interesting to follow. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If we talk now maybe about leading companies and startups in the B2B robotics space and starting in industrial automation, industrial automation has the big boys, so ABB, FANUC, KUKA, Ishikawa, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Universal Robots, Teradyne. These guys are all super well-known. If we think about some of the big guys, they grew up with a lot of the solutions that we were talking about earlier, robot arms, but really expensive robot arms. That market is still dominated by these players, and they command significant premiums on their valuations, et cetera. Bertrand Schmitt Let’s not forget that KUKA was a German company that got acquired by a Chinese company some years ago in 2016. I think that was crazy because it was one of the Chrome J-well of the German manufacturing industry. To let it be acquired like this was probably a strategic mistake. Germany decided to make some change in how they are going to let M&A happen, depending on the country of origin of the acquirer. The acquirer was a media group, Chinese appliance manufacturer. I think that’s really a fair question because when you know that the acquisition of Chinese companies is not something so easy for Western companies, I’m not sure why we should let it work in the other way. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Very good. Logistics and warehouses. We’ve talked already about some of these examples, Amazon Robotics with the acquisition of Kiva Systems. That’s how itself got pulled in. 6 River Systems, which I believe was acquired by Ocado to make their deployments due. Locust Robotics, Grey Orange, Geek+, Boston Dynamics. A bunch of players that have been done. What’s for me interesting, it’s an area that has had a lot of acquisitions by the retailers themselves, which is not obvious. Bertrand Schmitt But not huge acquisitions usually as a result. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s not huge acquisitions, small acquisitions. Even Kiva, I remember was not a very big acquisition by Amazon. It was relatively important for them to go into that space. Anyway, I wrongfully, by the way, mentioned Scientific Boston Dynamics. Two different companies just to be clear. Boston Dynamics is the one with the anthropomorphic robots and also the dog-like robots. Boston Scientific, a total company altogether, but it is what it is. It’s a life science company. Bertrand Schmitt There are other types of AI startups, collaborative robots, universal robots, Techman, Doosan. I think for me also, the big guy we should talk about it’s really NVIDIA. NVIDIA is making the brains of many of these robots. I have a lot of platforms to develop robots. It’s just open source, a new model. Recently, it’s called Project GROOT. GROOT, G-R-O-O-T, the foundation model for humanoid robots. We will talk more about that later on, but NVIDIA is definitely pushing very, very hard in the robotic space. They want to be the brain of all the robots in your factory, in your field, the medical space. Nuno Goncalves Pedro NVIDIA platforms everywhere. Obviously, we don’t have… There’s dominating legacy operating systems for a robotics operation, but most of them are owned by the firms themselves, the ABBs of the world, et cetera. We haven’t seen a prevalent robotics operating system that would work across domains that has killed dramatically. There’s a lot of interesting things, and it wouldn’t be in the realm of impossibility for NVIDIA to go up stack, do more software platform ownership, and even into who knows operating systems. We’ll see what happens. Not out of the realm of possibility. Talking a little bit about challenges, just to put a bit of a bookend on the current conversation on B2B. We’ve talked quite a bit about geopolitics of it, et cetera. One of the issues clearly around robots are people. You can frame it as the integration of people and the integration of their skills with the use of robots. It’s complex because you have to reskill staff, not only to maintain robots, et cetera, but to work alongside robots. In some ways, we people are unpredictable. We do stupid things at times, we try to optimise because we know the shift is almost coming to an end, whatever. I don’t know. In some ways, that piece of just integrating people with robots, integrating their skills with the skills of robots, et cetera, is something that we know for a fact has been quite complex and have led to a lot of safety issues and a lot of concerns around the use of robots, even in the B2B environment. Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, it’s always easy not to say, “Okay, the robot is a danger.” Okay, sure, but we forget that many times robots are replacing work that is dangerous for human in the first place. Let’s be also careful about making sure we see the benefit of not having humans doing dangerous tasks or less dangerous tasks. A good example, actually, we don’t talk in that category, but if you think about robots for taking care of potential bombs, for instance. Now you send your guided robot to try to basically make the bomb implode. No humans, neither. I can tell you that before that, it’s not a fun job for a real human. We know that there are robots as well for nuclear facilities, for instance, that can be used. I think that, yes, we have to be careful with human safety and at the same time, let’s not forget that a lot of these robots are decreasing risks for humans, ultimately. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Second big challenge is obvious. The high cost, the narrow eye. There’s a lot of things going on with robotics as a service, but the robotics as a service, someone’s paying for the robots. There’s still high costs in the space and there’s still a little bit of an argument on how do you think through return investment. It has to be a very top-down decision architecturally on what robots you go with versus not. You can’t have a ton of trial and error in this space. I think that’s part of the issue. It’s not just that you have high cost and ROI, it’s just you can’t have a huge amount of trial and error. You have to get architectures right over time. If you made a significant mistake on your architecture, you’re going to pay for it, and it’s going to be very, very, very expensive. Next, technical limitations. Very significant challenge. Robots can’t do everything under the sun. We know that. They have limitations in how they do things, the precision they have, what are they handling. There’s a lot of complexities around this. These machines. There’s a lot of complexity around it. There’s maintenance that needs to be done, make sure that it operates with the precision that people expect from it and all of that. That’s the third area of challenge in this space. Bertrand Schmitt What’s interesting is that some of these technical holders have been solved by some of the industries. If you take EVs, for instance, we have seen the rise of the electric motor and more and more high-performance electric motors. Some of this is going back to the robotic space. You could argue that a lot of the current stage innovation in robots is half. Yes, better AI, better vision, specifically, better understanding of the environment, but I believe it’s also around motors. Motors are becoming much better at doing the job. If you want to have a smaller robot, if you want to have a human-size robot, if you want to have hands that can do something, then yes, electric motors, actuators have changed what’s possible. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That’s a little bit of the key issues that are more on the core technical business model side. Then, if we move to other areas, the robotic space we’ve already mentioned has a huge issue around interoperability and standards, with ROS, Robot Operating System being one of the most common used protocols/robot operating system thing. But honestly, the reality is there’s very little integration between systems. There’s a lot of pervasive systems out there that are dominated by the suppliers themselves and the owners of the hardware. There hasn’t been a huge focus on creating a platform that truly works across the world and across different domains as I mentioned before. Interoperability and standards are still very much an issue. Bertrand Schmitt We just need robots that talk and listen and LLMs in the middle and problem solved. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We just need robots that do everything, yes and then it doesn’t matter. Bertrand Schmitt I think we are going there. The reality is that the more you can naturally command a robot and ask it to do a task and have it indeed do this task without too much detail or at least the similar level of details to a human trained at a specific level, I think the more things will change versus having a team of programmers to program the robots and any time the stuff change on the other side, you have to reprogram the robot. That was a big part of the cost of running a robot in a factory. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Two last but not the least topics. Maybe we’ll bundle them a little bit together. The regulatory and safety, regulations that occur from market to market and how this is done, the regulatory framework by which safety is managed, and public acceptance in general, and supply chain dependence. It’s very clear that you need advanced components from all over the world. Going through a world right now where there’s all this geopolitical instability, and there’s tariffs, and there’s all this stuff, how does that work? That is a bit of a creating also encumbrance on development of B2B robotics. Bertrand Schmitt As we said, China has seen a rapid adoption of robotics and that might surprise some because thinking about China, low-cost countries and stuff. But as you said, the reality is that China is a decreasing population, especially a population that can work, makes sense to automate. They also wanted to go more high-tech type of production. China is definitely big versus Japan, Europe, and US, where definitely there have been traditional struggles of automation. But as we just said, China is probably leading at this stage. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to be clear, the US is a big robotics market. If you’re listening to us, the US has to catch up. Maybe there’s potential to be growing, but the US from what we know, had 37,587 industrial robots installed in 2023. It’s a significant market, in particular around professional service robots. Some of the leading companies in the world. It remains hopefully a player in that space. If some of the big brands we mentioned are not here, they’re in Asia, some of them are more in Europe, and now they’re owned by Chinese, as you were mentioning, Bertrandt. There’s still some stuff happening in Europe that’s significant, but I would say Asia has taken the lead in some ways across the board. China catching up now and going to the next level. Japan was one of the big, big first players a lot because of demographic pressure. South Korea has caught up as well. There’s a lot of interesting things happening in Asia in particular. Bertrand Schmitt I still remember years ago, there was really a question that your… Cheap people working in factories was a better deal in many, many situations than having robots. I remember stories about highly automated South Korean companies having trouble to compete versus actually cheap labour from China, but I think all of this has changed. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed. Shall we move to consumer robotics, which is probably what a lot of people, “When will we have this robot serving me at home?” It’s like, “Well, probably not anytime soon.” There’s good news and bad news, but probably not anytime soon. It’s growing fast. To be very honest, a lot of the home robots that we’ve had, one’s I think have been misclassified, which is the whole use of things in the kitchen, et cetera. Those things are not robots, just let’s be clear. Those things are very basic mechanical elements compared to what a robot needs to do. In the household, the big dominant player that came into the market was Rumba. They reached a ridiculous amount of smart vacuum shipments as they say in the low tens of millions around 20 million units and all that stuff and then nothing. I don’t know if there’s anything public or not, so I’m not even sure if I’m talking out of place, but I heard that they’re not so much in great shape. Bertrand Schmitt There’s how many rumours in the market that they are doing very bad? Nuno Goncalves Pedro I used it at the beginning and I really disliked it. It’s just like the experience wasn’t great. I think it’s a great experience if it’s a very contained environment, but if it’s, for example, if you have pets, it’s a mess. I just gave up on it. I tried twice and I just gave up. With the iRobot, just to be clear, a lot of people know the Rumba, but iRobot is the name of the company. Bertrand Schmitt Same for me. I tried it very early on, maybe the first-gen. It didn’t work that much, to be frank. I think that’s what has been the issue. It’s very sad because it was definitely… I think the best-selling robot in the world by unit’s shipment of any robot. I don’t think there was any robot, autonomous, shipping at similar volume than iRobot. I can say that personally, not inside the house, but outside. I just bought two robots from Navimo to do my lawn, front yard, backyard. It has been working quite well, actually. I must say I’ve been pretty happy with that because instead of having a gardener coming every two weeks to do the job, you have the garden clean every two days or every day, if you want. That has been a quite interesting solution, but obviously, you always have the question, how much is a robot? How much are you paying your gardener? How long is it taking? How long will the robot keep working? You have location issues. Usually, that’s the biggest issue with robots. You need to know where they are to know how to keep doing their job. It’s not totally problem solved, but it’s getting better. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It is getting better, but we just wish we had a vacuum cleaner for our house and a lawn mower for them whatever and it’s still not there. It’s like, surely these are the easier use cases. Then we move to the other use case, which we all want, the personal assistant, social robots, like the toy that plays with me, that interacts me, embodies Moxie. We had this… Was it Jibo? Jibo, the social robot thingy, whatever. Obviously, aibo, Sony’s aibo robotic dog, which we’ve seen a couple of iterations on. We all want that stuff. Bertrand Schmitt I bought the first one 25 years ago now. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I want that stuff. Some of us grew up watching Battlestar Galactica, the previous one, not the dark one that came after, but the original one. We all wanted those little dogs, the little dogs that were in Battlestar Galactica. I wanted the dog since I was little. I wanted that dog. I wanted the dog that does stuff for me that I don’t need to train. Bertrand Schmitt I can just tell you that my aibo was for a very long time my worst spend in tech gadgets I have ever had for at least a decade or two. I don’t know. Nuno Goncalves Pedro How much did it cost, do you remember? Bertrand Schmitt It was very expensive. It was very expensive for the time. A few thousand euros, which 25 years ago was a pretty insane amount. For something that was, ultimately at the time, truly useless. I remember playing a few weeks with it. I think that’s a big issue. How do you make it useful while keeping cost reasonable? How do you make it so that it’s not just a fad where everyone got excited because that’s a gift for Christmas everyone gets to have, but next year no one cares? Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think there are two key issues around personal assistance and social robots. I’ve seen some really beautiful solutions. Things that look like it’s a toy. You know it’s a toy, but they’re really engaging with you. The ones that look the best and are the best are obviously, as I mentioned before, in the case of B2B robotics, over-engineered. They have a bunch of sensors, there are a bunch of things going on, and that makes them expensive. It means their bill of materials, what makes up for the cost of the hardware, is actually very expensive. Therefore, you can’t sell it at a very low cost. I haven’t seen anyone at scale try to play around with robotics as a service for a consumer, where you have something, and you’re renting it out thing. That might be a play around that, but it feels to me that there has to be something around that. Because I’ve seen some solutions that are really endearing. You want to interact with a robot, et cetera. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is to your point, I think maybe, Bertrand, I’m putting words in your mouth, is the level of engagement you get from it. It’s a novelty, you interact a little bit, and then what else does this thing do for me? If it doesn’t do anything else for me, then I’m like, okay, cool. I move on. There’s no interest. It has to have one, ability to be updated, to go to the next level, to become a better solution, and two, to actually do something with me that is of tremendous value to me systematically. If not, then why would I do it? Why would I buy and consume something that’s likely to be relatively expensive for me to have in the home? Bertrand Schmitt There is always the question, you are fighting against all the stuff you can buy. You are fighting against buying a computer, buying a tablet, buying a phone, a TV. In some ways, you have the question, if the hardware side of the robot is actually not working that well, what are you left with? You are left with an Alexa where you can talk to that has some eyes. What will it do based on its eye? What action will it take that benefit from being equipped with two cameras, for instance? It can navigate your home, but what will it do by navigating your home? Next question, can it hold something? If it’s small, it won’t be able. It will have to be bigger. It will have to be heavier and balanced. Then it’s a whole different ball game. Then we go back to cost. We will talk maybe more about it. But if you look at Tesla and the robots they are working on for consumers, we are talking about the price of a car. They are talking about 20 to 30K. That might be the price so that you have a robot that indeed, practically can do things in your home. As what it takes to open something, close something, go up the stairs, go down the stairs, move some books, move some food, take a kid. It’s not an easy one. What do you do with a small size robot, like the size of a stuffy so that it’s cheap, but ultimately it’s useful? It’s not clear. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Innovation will come, I believe, but it’s not clear. I’m not sure we’re going to have Jeeves anytime soon as an anthropomorphic robot. Bertrand Schmitt Of course. I’m not saying it won’t come. I was mostly in a mindset of the next 5 years. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s a little bit of a segue. We’ve been talking about personal assistance and social robots, entertainment and educational robots are in the same logic, SoftBank’s NAO robot. Things that have been used for education. We had Sphero. Everyone probably remembers Sphero. Unfortunately, the toy space needs to be even cheaper. If it’s a social thing to be doing stuff with your children, then that’s one thing. If it’s something that’s been there just as a toy or as an entertainment to play, it needs to be even cheaper. I don’t know. It’s a space, again, I think the comments you just made, Bertrand, I’d make them my own. Very, very difficult to justify the cost unless there’s a clear beachhead in terms of the actions that the robot can do for the child or for the person that it’s interacting with. Bertrand Schmitt I think what we see in the meantime, if you take Sphero, for instance, many of them are moving to the education market. Luckily, there is a big push for STEM in schools. As a result, my impression is that they realize that, hey, most parents have no clue. It’s not as if they are going to teach robotics to their kids. If we want to do stuff that is relatively cheap while interesting, let’s make them educational. Let’s have schools buy them. Let’s have labs with our robots. My impression is that a lot of what could have been from a robot actually end up being education for a STEM education type of robot that basically belongs to the classroom or the lab. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It feels to me, it’s a little bit like, let’s move business model. Let’s not sell to consumers because they’re price sensitive, and let’s sell to educational entities, academic entities, et cetera, who are not price sensitive. I’m like, you’re moving from price sensitive to price sensitive. You’re just saying, well, but the other guys have more money because they’re an institution. I’m like, yes, they do. But you have to share these across different people, et cetera. Different wear and tear as well. Bertrand Schmitt But that’s the thing. You can share one robot for 30 kids versus 2. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I understand, but still, it is a very, very, very price-sensitive market as well. It’s very difficult to break into. If you look at the US, for example, unless you’re going to higher education, it’s going to be very difficult to crack into a lot of these schools. Very difficult. Even if you’re going to private schools, super price sensitive. I don’t know. I feel it’s an interesting pivot on business model that I have a lot of doubts will scale. Maybe last but not the least, another demographic that obviously matters tremendously is the senior demographic, elder care, and assistive robots. When we know so many people don’t have someone that can take care of them and look over them. Even in assisted living, there’s lack and shortage of employees. Even if you are living in a home or assisted living facility, having these kinds of robots is particularly critical. I know for a fact that the Japanese have tried a lot of things out there. I’m not sure if anything has scaled that we could talk about, but definitely for obvious reasons, again, around demographics, they’ve had to do it. The world is moving this way. We’re having more and more ageing population at scale. So having some elder care or assistance robots seems like a must. Again, if you have vertical solutions, in particular around assisted living, homes, et cetera. Now, one would say if you have personal assistance, personal social assistance, et cetera, that work across the board, that should take care of everyone. But as we’ve seen vertical solutions are the ones that emerge first. That’s probably where we are in the market at this stage. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. I think that’s the right way to go. First you start with very specialized robots in terms of hardware and software. That’s your only option because the cost of everything, from the chips to the mechanics, is just very expensive. You have to pick something that you can solve where people find an ROI. But I think step by step, there will be a convergence somewhere to more standard models. That’s why some are very bullish on humanoid robots, because the idea with a humanoid robot is that it can work anywhere a human can. It can do any task, at least physically, as that a human can, because it will have the same size, it will have similar hands, it has a similar balancing and walking mechanism. If a human can do some tasks there, physically, a humanoid robot can. I think there is some very strong logic. Obviously, the negative is that it’s big, it’s heavy, so it will get expensive. But at the same time, if you move from, I can do just one task for cheap, or I can do 100 tasks way more expensive, maybe that would be the right combo. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Exactly. Really finding that sweet spot then leads to great unit economics and scalability. Talking, maybe moving a little bit into the key trends that we’ve seen in the consumer robots or robotic space. Really, the advancements are trying to make these more capable, affordable, user-friendly, as we discussed. First one, again, very obvious AI and the integration within put and output mechanisms like voice and others. Bertrand Schmitt And cameras, and vision. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Cameras, vision, and all these things. These elements are particularly critical to what we’re seeing. Obviously, ability to recognize owners versus strangers, ability to generate speech back to people, to interact. I think the big part of engagement in all of that is also related to that. No surprises there. Obviously, one of the key trends that we’re seeing is all of the advancements that we’re seeing in AI and input and output. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, 100%. I’m a big fan of the input/output problem. That’s the problem we need to solve. If we cannot communicate easily with a robot, forget it. Forget it at home. Maybe we have seen in industries, factories, it’s okay, you might pay developers. But even then, I think the big scale will come when all of this become easier to communicate with and robots able to act on this. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed. The second area is obviously around sensors and mobility, which enables a lot of these things. The ability for some of these robots to move around and the ability for them to have sensors that detect the environment around them and to have actuators to actually interact with that environment. It could be something that leads to a hand moving, to something moving, to something touching someone. Good luck on that. Obviously, there are a lot of things happening in that space that are quite interesting and have led to tremendous innovations that are still being implemented in the market. In my perspective, it’s an area where we’ll need to deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver until we can have solutions to your point that are at scale, much cheaper, and then can be propelled into consumer robotics. It’s one of those things. It will ripple down the value chain to finally get to consumer robotics. Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. The same way that not everyone could get a car at first started with trains, actually, and then we went smaller and smaller. Definitely, I think some of this. Not just that, let’s not forget a lot of the robots we see today in demonstration of how agile they are and what they can do, actually are remotely operated. People have to know that in many cases, this stuff is not real in the sense of a robot being somewhat autonomous. It’s just remotely operated. I was quite shocked how many companies, Boston Dynamics, for instance, are real pro of remote operating their robot and making you believe that… They won’t lie. They would just imply that this stuff is autonomous. No, it’s not in many situations, so nothing. We are not getting there because if you don’t have the hardware that is agile and has a power to do what it’s supposed to do, of course, you are dead in the water. But I think we’re not yet fully there in the autonomy of this robot, but it’s coming. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe to highlight three more trends that we see in the space. Obviously, there’s the notion of emotional AI and AI interacting with people, reading their emotions, reading their things. It’s another field of AI that we’ve already mentioned. The aesthetics and form factors of robots are essential. In some ways, if you look more anthropomorphic, or if you look more like either pets or humans, et cetera, it’s easier to interact with them. Software designing versus more hardcore designing, friendlier design. It’s probably one of the key things that will lead to that attachment. Last but not the least, obviously, the realm of connectivity and integration with smart home facilities. Maybe as a proxy to avoid precisely the problem we were just talking about, because some of these sensors are very expensive to have in the robot itself, but could the robot use other stuff that’s already in the house? Do you have cameras in the house? Do you have a TV in the house? Do you have whatever? I can interact with that. Again, on that stuff, the more multimodal stuff beyond just connectivity, beyond me just connecting to Wi-Fi, the multi-modal stuff, I think, is probably the one that I’m the most sceptical about. If we think it’s going to take decades for us to have some of the stuff in our home working at scale, the multimodality of it is going to be even more difficult because it assumes interoperability, it assumes that the systems talk to each other, which we know doesn’t happen today. They don’t talk to each other. They’re all specific to the manufacturers, to the owners, in many cases of the hardware, as we mentioned before. Bertrand Schmitt I’m somewhat hopeful for the integration because even today, we can see you have apps to integrate, and you build up step by step, pieces by pieces, your smart home. There are standards, so there are ways. It may take time. Of course, there’s no real unifying effort. That’s true that the humanoid size robot at home is not there in 5 years, probably not 10. But at the same time, I can see that it’s coming. Maybe it’s 15 or 20 years that it’s really practical. But the tech is slowly… I would say slowly, but now it’s getting there faster, is my personal perspective. Yes, it will take time to really do useful stuff, to be cheaper so that people can afford. But at the same time, I think it’s important to share my belief that it’s getting there. Yes, we are complaining because it’s not yet there, but it’s moving in that direction. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe switching for a rapid fire on preferences and cultural factors that we see around the world. Obviously, the US, not very shockingly, has a strong preference for utility-based robots, so things that do stuff for me, like vacuum lawn mowers. Obviously, the US, we also have more space, so we have homes and fields. It’s very different than living, for example, in Tokyo. Bertrand Schmitt Less focused on emotional AI, maybe. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think we should have more emotional AI in the US. Maybe the vacuum cleaner can also talk to me. Bertrand Schmitt Maybe I can pet the vacuum cleaner. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The vacuum cleaner, yeah, come here. United States is, as you would imagine, probably one of the most utilitarian in that sense. We want robots to do stuff for us so that we can then just chill by the TV and ask the robot to pick us a beer and do stuff for us. That’s probably the best way to look at it. The opposite is a little bit, I think, Japan. Japan is more, in some ways, even embracing robots, maybe too much. We know that some funky dynamics in Japan where some robots are treated like pets and characters and whatever. By the way, if any of our AI overlords are listening to me, I love robots. I love robots, please don’t kill me. But obviously, there are a lot of things happening in Japan that have to do with ageing society, a society where human connectivity has had some challenges because of demographics, because of how cities have been built, because of cultural aspects of Japanese. In those environments, robots are really more tailored towards personal societal links, pets, characters, all that stuff. That’s maybe the most extreme opposite. Then coming a little bit to the middle, we have South Korea, which is both a mix of utility, and we also have some social interaction. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Of course, Europe will focus on data privacy and safety and will regulate its way out of robots. Nuno Goncalves Pedro No robots for us. Bertrand Schmitt No robots for Europeans. As we discussed, I think China is definitely very technologically optimist, both on the industrial side and the personal side. I remember there was in China at some point, I forgot the brand, a brand of robots for kids, educational, that was doing very, very, very well. I was very surprised, and that was years ago. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. Maybe moving to forward-looking and what’s happening in the market. A mix of what’s happening in the market that is structural and what’s happening in the market as we look forward. We’ve already looked at a lot of these partnerships, already mentioned them, not just acquisitions, but also what happened with Amazon and iRobot. The deal got scrapped in the end. As we know now, iRobot, who are the makers of Roomba, may actually falter now. We’ll see, but Amazon was very active early on, in particular in the B2B space. A couple of things also on the consumer side. We’ve seen other things happening a lot in the B2B space in terms of acquisitions. We’ve already mentioned several of these examples. Alphabet has come back into the market to do things around particularly the operating system, the stack. Obviously, they acquired a bunch of things like Open Robotics, which maintained ROS, the robot operating system, and Vicarious. They’ve done a lot of movements that are a little bit more connected to the software platform side with operating systems. NVIDIA has done a bunch of things that we’ve talked about. I know you are a big believer that NVIDIA will become one of our overlords. Bertrand, do you want to talk through some of those? Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I don’t know if I would put it this way, but of course, I welcome our new overlord if he listens to us in the future. But look, I think NVIDIA is realistic that they need to keep looking for new paths for growth, and the robotics is a perfect match for what they do. You have vision issues, you have audio issues, you have communication issues, you have mobility issues. It’s a perfect match for the NVIDIA stack. I think for them to propose solution on hardware, on software, on chips makes a lot of sense because it’s going to be a big market. Maybe we don’t talk much about that, but it’s clear if you are thinking 10, 20, 30 years from now, it’s one of these big markets that’s going to change the world. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Don’t let the fact that we didn’t start at that point… That robotics is going to be huge. Robotics is a next era of AI in some ways. I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think we’re at the level of rapid disruption that we faced in AI more on the software layer. But robotics, we will get there. There’s no doubt we will get there. It will be, again, a major seismic shift. It’s going to be one of the next big industrial revolutions or technology revolutions, if we want to call it as such. To maybe go actually as a segue into that, obviously, we could talk about partnerships, we could talk about all the money from government that’s going into a lot of these activities. But maybe looking a little bit ahead in the next 5 years, maybe even beyond that, what do we see as happening? The first piece that everyone’s particularly excited about is this convergence of AI software, so to speak, in robotics. It’s when AI comes into robots that can do things with that, that they can do manipulation of pieces, interaction with people, interaction with other objects, et cetera, in a very meaningful way. There the world just takes over. In particular in a world where the robots can then do things that they haven’t trained for, that they haven’t done any piece of supervised learning or unsupervised learning, that they can go to the next level in really framing how they interact with their environments and with the world. That’s a big deal. Once we start having that conversion, it’s accelerated. It’s also the part that concerns us. Just to be clear, this is the part that if we get to a convergence of AI and robotics super quickly, we should become a little bit more concerned about what they do because then they have physicality. They do have sort of a brain. At that point in time, we should worry a little bit more than we do today. Bertrand Schmitt Definitely. That’s why AI progress has been fast in the pure software side now. AI hardware, robots basically, are downstream of this trend. As you say, that’s true, that it’s a different story when suddenly you have a body, you are more or less independent because I guess that most robots would be designed to be really some edge computing. I would be surprised if robots are designed in a different way. Not saying they won’t be upgradable through the internet, not saying they won’t be able to look up for something on the internet for some reason, either looking for information or looking to increase capacity on the spot. But I would be shocked if anything is not designed to be fully working locally. You need to work around a network disruption, you need to work around internet disruption. I think that’s a good example. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That’s a very good point. I mean, if we’re looking at humanoid and general purpose robots, they definitely need to have most of their sensorial, their senses’ interaction with the world—be it the sensors or the actuators—controlled by the edge. I don’t see at scale how they can just be communicating and all of a sudden there’s no network. What happens, right? What state do they go to? Bertrand Schmitt It’s like smart cars. If you remember in the past, there was the idea that self-driving cars would be remote controlled. I mean, no way. It has to be fully automated. Maybe it has to go back to the human owner in some ways for some needs, but ultimately there is a need for real local autonomy. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think it’s funny that you mentioned that because we didn’t talk about self-driving cars. But for me, self-driving cars are a robot. I mean, they fall under the definition of a robot. Machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer. They’re our transporters in some ways. I do think that’s going to be one of the big ones that will be available to us maybe within a decade. Bertrand Schmitt I didn’t talk about self-driving cars as robots because they have another name, cars. But you’re right, they are 100% robots. Again as we said, you could argue actually they are at the forefront of everything. They have been at the forefront of electric motors that we need for any other type of robot. They are at the forefront of AI. The self-driving part has been the forefront of AI for 10 years, easily, way before LLM. Of course, people are willing to spend 30, 40, 50, 60K to buy their car, you have financing mechanism available for that. The whole economy is designed to help you buy and finance a car in the first place. It’s definitely the reference. It’s good we end on this in some ways, because it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. You can argue that not all, but many robots are downstream actually of the car innovation. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I feel that might become actually the first real full-on consumer robot that consumers buy and use. Bertrand Schmitt It has a specific use case. It’s not trying to do groceries or take care of the kids, or this, or this, or that. No, it’s driving people. It might be driving stuff as well, but it’s driving on the road, going from point A to point B. So it helps. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If I was an automotive OEM, original equipment manufacturer, I would be thinking through the car and how the car becomes actually the next centre of innovation because the car itself becomes its own spot. If I have that amount of intelligence so to speak, AI so to speak, linked to the car moving around, which is the most complex activity, think about all the stuff I could do inside the car. Honestly, the rocket science part is the part of the car actually moving around and doing all its things. I don’t know. I feel sometimes I have conversations with some automotive executives and people that are consultants to automotive executives, et cetera. I feel the industry is still very limited in how it thinks about self-driving cars and how that changes the world, et cetera. It really becomes key element of mobility interactions. If you don’t need to drive it, there’s a lot more space to do a bunch of other things, really. Bertrand Schmitt I think that’s the reason why Tesla has been moving so fast, so hard on Optimus, their humanoid robot. A lot of things are very similar. Yes, the use case are less clear. It’s definitely not… We already have a robot, it’s a better robot, like cars. Where it’s a car. We have better car. The use case is less obvious for humanoid robots, but at the same time it’s clear that there will be a huge innovation from the car manufacturing, the self-driving cars at least, that are going to provide downstream innovation to especially humanoid robots, but not just. You can imagine other type of robots. Xiaomi, who recently launched cars, is also into robotics. So I would expect to see more and more of this actually going forward. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe, obviously, just to name a couple of things that we do know will happen over the next few years. Obviously, B2B robotics will have a lot more applications across sectors, will go into the small and medium business arena. It goes without saying as well that we believe that the scaling in economics of robotics is going to be critical, that unit economics can only work at scale once you have materials sensors, actuators, et cetera, that are much, much, much cheaper coming into the market. The effect of robots in society and in public discourse, technology, philosophy, are looking very deeply into it. How do we interact with robots? How do they interact with society? What’s their role? What rights do they have, et cetera. Regulation and standards, evolution, so all of that. Overall, I feel there’s a lot of topics that we didn’t go in detail on, but that you guys can probably get a little bit of a feel on where we stand on them just because of the description we had earlier. Last but not the least, obviously we always talk about robots as something that is separate from us, but there’s a piece of robotics that is very focused on us and them which is obviously human augmentation. There’s obviously the discussions we already had around co-bots, collaborative robots, exoskeletons, and all is related to that. Which I think it does lead us to a brand-new world when we have the ability to complement ourselves with elements that are extraordinary to us, but then make us much more either productive or have skills that we wouldn’t otherwise have, et cetera. A lot of cool things, I think, will happen around augmentation. I think that’s more science fiction, to be very honest. The reason why I think that’s more science fiction is because these elements need to interact with us. The moment you start interacting with humans, with the humans themselves, there’s a level of complexity that you need to deal with. Not just in terms of technology, but also in terms of regulation, standards, et cetera. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t know if exoskeletons are a real robot in themselves, but at the same time I can see how it can become a huge, as we say, co-bot complement to a human. Either because you need a rehabilitation or because your work or your labour is very hard, or because simply you are too old, and that’s a big change. With an exoskeleton, suddenly you’re able to walk. Or normally, you don’t need a stick, you don’t need something else. That might help in many ways. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Let’s talk about societal impact. I mean, we’ll adapt unless the robots start killing us. I think that’s societal impact. That’s my sentence. It would be great. We will all be great unless they start killing us, then we won. Bertrand Schmitt You have seen too much of Westworld or Terminator, I guess. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. Bertrand Schmitt Or the movie iRobot, actually. Nuno Goncalves Pedro On a serious note, I think there’s a lot of complex implications of it because as robots became more and more humanoid, they become more and more… Look like us. For example, material innovation will lead us to have robots that might actually look just like us, not anytime soon, but in decades. What happens? What’s our interaction with these beings, these elements, et cetera? I do think that produces a very interesting dynamic societly. We’re already starting seeing things like that. If you want to see at complexities of society, look at Japan to see what’s happening already. But can you get married to an avatar? Can you get married to a robot? How does that work? Do they have rights? Do robots have rights? What are the rights of robots? Will we have a constitution for robots? At some point we say, actually, the robot can become citizens. How do they become citizens? All of that stuff is like a minefield. I don’t know. I feel we still have much to go, and it will really depend on the implementations that we have of robots that scale. In all honesty, in particular on the consumer side, once we have robotics on the consumer side that scale and start becoming more and more anthropomorphic. More and more like us, we will have to deal with, based on those use cases, what are the regulations we need to think about? What are the issues we’re having now with these machines as they are scaling in the market. That’s my two sense on that. Bertrand Schmitt I was wondering, we cannot do an episode on robotics without talking about the three laws of robotics from Isaac Asimov. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes, we have to talk about Isaac Asimov. Bertrand Schmitt Isaac Asimov, a famous science fiction writer, has written extensively about robots. I actually think he’s the inventor of the term robotics more than now, 80 years ago. He built some laws for robots, that robots are supposed to follow. First law is a robot must not harm a human or allow a human to be harmed through inaction. Second law, a robot must obey human orders unless his orders conflict with the first law. Third law, a robot must protect its own existence unless that protection conflicts with the first or second law. From these three laws, Asimov managed to write a lot of sci-fi explaining ultimately what it means in real-world application to follow these laws. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think we sometimes forget that. We always say, “The science and technology of people are changing the world.” I mean, in some ways that’s true. In other ways, actually, there’s other things. It’s like writers change the world, people that do movies change the world. A lot of the things we’re seeing implemented today in our tech realm in the future, both in terms of AI and in terms of robotics, for example, just to quote two very big visible spaces, we are imagined by people decades ago. 80 years ago, 70 years ago, 60 years ago. So the imagination was already there. And in some ways, we’re now implementing them, which is interesting. Bertrand Schmitt I feel sad for some people like Isaac Asimov who didn’t live long enough to see the conclusion and the execution on some of his dreams. To conclude, B2B Robotics is scaling rapidly, fuelled by labour needs, AI breakthrough, cost declines, but also geopolitics. Consumer robotics is more fragmented, but has had a breakout success in cleaning robots, with social robots on some cusp of border acceptance. I think we should keep an open mind on how robot can transform the workplace and the everyday life. It’s an exciting moment. Robots are shifting from the realm of sci-fi to practical reality, and we reshape industries and how we live. Thank you, Nuno. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Thank you, Bertrand.

The current landscape of fundraising for start-ups, companies and VC funds, as well as best practices and hacks… and how to get those investors to giving you the money. Navigation: Intro (01:34) What is the current evolution and landscape for fundraising for start-ups? What is the current evolution and landscape for fundraising for VC firms? What are the best practices – strategies, processes, tactics and hacks – for fundraising overall … for start-ups? What are the best practices – strategies, processes, tactics and hacks – for fundraising overall … for VC firms? How to get investors (VCs and LPs) to commit to giving you money? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Hello and welcome to Tech Deciphered episode 63. In this episode, we are going to talk about the evolution and the current landscape of startups and VCs fundraising. We will talk about this evolution and landscape for fundraising, both from a startup and VC sides. We are going to talk about the best practices, strategies, process, tactics, and hacks for fundraising on both sides when you are a startup or when you are a VC firm. And ultimately, we will finish on how to get investors to commit to give you money. Hi, Nuno. How are you?   Nuno Hey, Bertrand. We’ll start with the evolution and current landscape of startup fundraising. It’s been a couple of exciting years. We got to the height of it all, the bull of all bull markets, actually in 2021, post-COVID. Then we had 2022 and 2023. Very sharp correction, dramatic reduction in venture investments. ’24 was a good year. It’s a year that scaled back again, seems stabilizing. I think we’ll see what ’25 has on hold. My prediction is that it’s going to be a great year.   Bertrand Yeah, 2021 was pretty shockingly good post the start of COVID. After a sharp wait and see by end of 2020, things were going back not just to normal, but to overdrive. It’s really by the end of 2021 that the music stopped. We had to worry about inflation with interest rates going up. 2022 was definitely bad for startups and VCs alike. But as you said, 2024, we are back to a better place. I would have the same bet for 2025, as you have, Nuno.   Nuno One interesting piece is there’s something that I think changed everything in 2024, which is AI. If we didn’t have AI in 2024, I don’t think we would have had this landscape. Important to note, and we’ll talk about it later on when we talk about the landscape for actual VC fundraising, that the way that VCs work in their cycles and how they raise money, there’s always a little bit of a lag around the table. It means there’s still a lot of what we call dry powder with VC firms.     This means that VC firms have raised quite a lot of money from limited partners for 10-year funds with, for example, four-year investment periods. Therefore, they still need to deploy capital in whatever market they’re in. The fact that there were a lot of AI opportunities means that they’ve been deploying a lot towards, for example, AI place. That’s going to change as well. We’ll talk later about, again, the VC fundraising landscape, but there’s going to be a little bit of an adaptation on those two time lags around the table.     But for me, the big effect of 2024 was without a doubt, AI.   Bertrand Yeah, and it’s very interesting because when you think about it, the new AI revolution started with LLMs, with OpenAI launching ChatGPT. And this is an event that actually started end of 2022. So that AI revolution, financing, fundraising, actually started in 2023. But at that time, it was still so bad from an overall macro perspective that it was not enough to change the big trends. But at the same time, for sure in 2024, I think it had time to turn around. We’ll talk more precisely about the numbers, but it’s pretty clear that, as you say, AI has taken over.   Nuno The height of it from the numbers we have in mind shows that on a global basis, 2021 was the all-time high in terms of startup investing at 750 billion. We’ve now had a significant reduction, basically around 349 billion, if the number is around correct, but certainly as deep as that in 2023, returning basically to levels that we saw back in 2018-2020. 2024, we went back up to around 370 billion. I think this year is going to be higher as we discussed before.     One clarification I would say, a lot of people would say, Is that true across the board? Is everything being equally dispersed? Not really. We’ve seen that early stage has suffered more. Mid to late stage, in particular in 2024, had another peak. Not peak year, but had a significant amount of capital was really deployed in mid to late stage investing. Last year, backing projects that either were already on their way or projects that are around what we would consider structurally AI, and therefore that are much more capital-intensive even if they’re earlier stage.   Bertrand It’s also more going to the bigger firms, if I’m not wrong here. It’s more to the bigger firms. In terms of investment, I guess it was also more to the bigger startups, if you pick an operator AI, for instance. I guess it has been actually pretty tough. If you are not one of the top 20 VC firm, if you are not one of the top 20-50 AI startups, what we’re going to talk about might not feel the same. You can argue that the bar got much higher for VC firms as well as for startups. It’s definitely a different world versus 2021, where things were good for mostly anyone.   Nuno Basically, if we look a little bit at funding sources to startups, obviously, traditional VCs have reduced dramatically, which is not surprising as we were talking about before. Angel investors and seed funds also had a reduction. Obviously, as you could imagine, if people, very high net worth individuals are normally angel investors and microfunds normally are smaller, they obviously had the tension of reducing their pace of investment, maybe in their own new fundraising cycles themselves for new funds.     Large corporations had reached very aggressive activity back in the day in 2021, but now there’s a little bit more moderation happening to it. Then obviously, we’ve seen family offices coming more into the market in the last few years and being more aggressive around directs. How does that landscape look to you, Bertrand?   Bertrand I think it’s definitely right. Maybe another piece of the puzzle is that if you look at some US investors going to Europe, for instance, expanding internationally or to China, it went back. Many firms, if you take in China, separated from their Chinese office. If you think about investment in Europe, so many reduced, actually, their investment in Europe. So quite typical that when things are good, you try to go pretty global, you try to expand, and when things are tough, you go back to your core. I guess China is a bit different story. It’s more for geostrategic reason. But you could argue the landscape also has changed dramatically locally there.   Nuno It’s also true, obviously, of what we’ve seen in terms of the sectors. We’ve just talked about AI and deep tech in general, where it’s been booming, and it’s basically stood up. Some of the numbers would be that AI deals are 35.7% of all global VC deal value. By value, it’s incredible, which is record. But it’s not true of everything else. If we look at other sectors, for example, crypto, there was a bust and there’s no recalibration, and it’s not true across the board in terms of sectors.   Bertrand Crypto, for sure, went through a huge burst. This one, you could argue, was mostly caused, at least in the US, by the action of the regulators from the SEC and others casting a cloud on the industry. I wonder how much it will go back to a boom, actually. Right now, now that we have someone who might be the first pro-crypto president in the US. What do you think?   Nuno Well, I won’t comment on the present being pro-crypto or not. I think we might see a re-acceleration of crypto this year, in particular because there’s a lot of uncertainty geopolitically around the world, et cetera. Normally, I’d say that’s a clear tailwind for it. The regulatory environment, at least in the US, seems like it’s going to get further clarified. If it does, I think we’ll see a great year for crypto in the US.   Bertrand We have climate tech and clean energies. I guess this one, we have seen the number since the funding fell, actually, pretty significantly in 2023, 30-40% before the year before. My guess is that this is going to change very significantly for very different reasons in US and Europe. If you take the US, all this ESG stuff is going to decrease significantly for investment related to it, because definitely this is not something that’s supported by the new administration.     We can remember the drill, baby drill mantra. It’s not totally pro-climate tech or clean energy. I would expect much less investment there and actually a reallocation to more traditional energy source. But in Europe, it might be changing for very different reasons, simply because there is no money and there is a lot more actually investment that might go to defence spending. There have been a lot of talks in that direction the past few weeks. The last I was hearing actually is a willingness to dramatically change the meaning of ESG or potentially drop it all together in Europe.     Most people might know this movement started and has been extremely strong in Europe. I started hearing that, yes, there was a discovery that accelerating defence funding while keeping ESG mandate might not work.   Nuno Indeed. If we look at biotech and health tech, obviously, we know the cycles on biotech and health tech for start-ups are very different. There’s always a capital intensity, or in general, there’s a capital intensity to some of these more structural plays very early on. It’s either a binary, either this works or it doesn’t work. You get FDA approval, you don’t, or you get this, or you don’t, et cetera.     But the biotech market, which seemed to have been super hot in 2021, then really had a significant correction as far as 2023. I do anticipate that there were a little bit of signals of revival in ’24, 28.1 billion in biotech versus 21.2 billion in 2023, so there was a little bit more optimism, definitely significant growth there.     I suspect in particular, biotech, we will see a significant revival of 2025 and 2026 in terms of investments, and probably in health tech as well, if I make an educated guess out of it for reasons that have to do with the cycles that we’re currently on, and the fact that some of the deregulation movement that we saw around COVID is here to stay, and therefore, that would be, again, a great tailwind for health tech innovation.   Bertrand Let’s not forget the new movement launched by Brian Johnson, “Don’t Die”. I think it’s trailblazing a new path in that direction. Actually, I’m interested to see what all of this is going to go versus the more traditional biotech, health tech industry.   Nuno That’s almost not a health or longevity trend. It’s like someone trying to create a sect. “Don’t Die.” he defined it as a religion. I’m like, Are you kidding, man? Really?   Bertrand He totally defined it a few weeks ago as launching a new religion.   Nuno Oh, man. Okay. Cool stuff. Yeah. Great.   Bertrand In some ways, it’s not so different from many religions trying to find path beyond death, we will see.   Nuno I would frame its religion versus sect. But yes, okay. Fair enough. For those of you listening that have been reading all these articles on why Silicon Valley is becoming Christian and all these stupid dimensions around the opportunism of some people that all of a sudden have become Christian. You guys will recognize that I’ve been Christian Catholic for a while. I’ve been talking about it for a while.     But maybe switching to non-religious topics and staying with the fundraising topic. Fundraising for VC firms. It’s been an interesting world. Just to frame a little bit, VC firms need to raise money from what we call limited partners, LPs. Over time, the cycles of fundraising for VC firms are different. Funds normally are 10 years with potential extensions. Investment periods, which is the time period, again, to recall you guys that haven’t heard some of our previous episodes, investment period is the time period under which a VC firm can invest in new portfolio company. It’s where they do their basic portfolio construction.     And then investment periods can be three years, four years, five years. After that time period, the only investments that the VC firm can do is in follow-ons, so putting more capital into existing portfolio companies they already have.     Normally for VC firms, the cycles of raising are around the investment periods. If my investment period is three years, I’ll probably go back to market to raise my next fund two years into my fund because I’ll have 1–2 years to raise the fund. Yes, guys, it takes around 1-2 years to raise a fund in many cases. The landscape that we’re currently on is we hit the height of the market in ’21 and ’22.     In terms of banner years, ’22 alone, the numbers I have is for US venture firms, they raised $172 billion in that year alone. ’23 and ’24 have been really, really tough years. In 2025, the start of the year, I’d say, is quite similar. And so all the numbers that we’ve had, I have that basically for 2023, the US funds raised around 67 billion, again, versus 172, 173 billion in 2022. The money is getting more and more concentrated to the point that Bertrand made earlier.     It’s been really concentrated on the bigger firms. There’s more and more multibillion dollar funds. I can come back to that later. I feel that’s a trend that I don’t fully understand why LPs are putting capital into larger funds when we know that’s very difficult for very large funds in venture capital to return great. You have to have smaller funds, like 500 million, 600 million, seems to be the number that for a long time we’ve discussed, seems to work for venture capital, and we now have multibillion dollar VC funds, which I find a bit intriguing. But that’s what’s happening to the market. The market’s definitely tougher.     The cycles for fundraising for VC firms are definitely more linked to macroeconomic situations and portfolio allocations from big investors. We typically raise money from either institutional investor, funds of funds, multifamily offices, or we raise from single family offices or very high net-worth individuals, or we raise from corporations that are willing to be limited partners in us, or even more up stream, the classic pension plans, endowments, university endowments, et cetera, which are even more regulated. All of these players seem to have their own portfolio considerations when looking at venture capital as an asset class.   Bertrand I think to your point, Nuno, I have the impression that the VC industry has changed quite dramatically between the smaller players, early stage players, Series A, B, and the ones that, okay, we call them VC, but practically, it’s a very different animal when you are investing billions in a new run from OpenAI or XAI or SpaceX. 10, 20 years ago, when we’re talking about investing billions at 10 plus billion dollar valuation, it would only have been possible in the public markets.     In some ways, I feel that our definition of VCs, and we keep saying the industry gets bigger, but in some ways it’s probably because firms early on are not going to get their financing from the market anymore. They prefer to stay private longer, get more money from private investors, and delay their entrance to the public market. Technically, there are VCs, it’s still private companies. Could call them startups if you still want. I feel it’s just a very different animal, and some have decided to just go all the way in that new direction, versus staying in their previous lanes.   Nuno You’re objectively right, but the point I’m making is more nuanced, which is if you have a firm raising 2 billion, saying it’s a VC fund, and then they deploy 80%-90% of their fund in growth rounds that are later stage. The way they raise their money, if it’s a VC fund, is for earlier stage investments. But effectively, what the fund has become is a growth fund. If I’m an LP, I give you money for a VC fund, I’m expecting VC fund returns, which is like 2X, 2.5X, if you’ve done well. But if it became a growth fund, it might not be that.   Bertrand Oh, yeah.   Nuno There’s an added issue to this. You mentioned the case of OpenAI and the Anthropics of the world et cetera, which is in some cases, some of these later stage investments are a little bit more risk adjusted, but others are not. If you come into OpenAI at 150 billion, good luck with that. How do you 2X on that. If you come now at the next round, which we’re now discussing, maybe they’ll raise at 300 billion, 2X is 600 billion, assuming there’s no more dilution along the way.     At some point, you’re like, How does that work? Again, it’s horses for courses. But if I gave you capital, Mr. VC, and I’m an LP, the part I don’t understand, if it’s for a VC fund, I have assumptions on the VC returns, which there’s no way in hell you can get to if you have a $2 billion fund. You just can’t. It’s impossible.     I agree with you. I think there’s going to be haves and haves nots. Some firms that are going to raise more and more money. Some firms that will have more difficulty in raising money. I think it will be a case of also DPI, carry, the old benchmark model versus management fees and TVPI, so on your books numbers versus cash on cash or partners that are making their money on management fees rather than making their money on carried interest on profits. I think at some point the music is also going to stop for that.     Some LPs are going to be like, “You know what? I feel I’ve been fooled around on this.” Then the third piece is, I do think you’re going to have more and more the firms that stick to thesis, the Benchmarks of the world. I’d like to put ourselves as chameleon into that world as well, where we stick to our thesis, smaller funds, and really focusing on VC returns, and the firms that go after other asset classes that either magically do really, really well or at some point need to retrench to having different asset classes that they represent.     A little bit like Sequoia did back in the day where they said, “Look, we have an early-stage fund, and we have a growth fund.” The growth fund is for the asset class of growth funds, and the early stage fund is for early stage investing. Then, if I’m an LP, I decide whether I think these guys are really good at all these different asset classes, and I’ll give money to the funds that I want to give to and not give to the funds where I think maybe the performance won’t be as great because there’s no unfair advantage by the specific fund manager.   Bertrand But you know the game. I’m sure that some are going to say, if you want to get access to the early stage fund.   Nuno Sequoia will actually do that.   Bertrand I don’t know, but…   Nuno No, they do. They change their structure to having one fund to have one structure on top. It’s not a fund even anymore. It’s a structure on top.   Bertrand Yes.   Nuno They have all these different things, but then they created this structure a couple of years ago, which effectively looks a bit like a hedge fund on top that you put money capital into.   Bertrand Yeah. I think that would be the game for many too. If you want access to the best returner funds, you also have to invest in the other gross fund of the family or else you might lose your access to the other early stage funds that are giving potentially better return. I think there will be a gameplay to make sure you can still finance the gross fund. But I agree with you. I have trouble to think it can go to the same returns and not to pick on OpenAI because I think they still have some of the best in class product. I think their bigger issue is the cost. They are way more expensive than competitors. And their edge, their edge is decreasing.     They used to have, I don’t know, one year in advance versus everybody else, and it became six months, and it’s becoming three months, and now you are like, “Is it one month?” That’s for me the biggest question mark for a company like OpenAI. How true is the mode? And there is this fight between private source versus open source AI. That will be a discussion for another day.   Nuno At some point, LPs also have to figure out… There’s a huge premium that needs to be put in the fact that these investments are liquid. I’m giving money to a fund, and I’m seeing that money back over years. Should I just put it into public equities or just put it into some index fund, Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange?     If you do the math, at some point, you just need to step back. I think the good news for Venture Capital is that there are still great funds out there having outsized returns and really focusing on the core mission of Venture Capital investing. It’s also great news that there’s a lot of capital to follow through companies, to your point, on the trend of staying private longer without going public, but the markets need to open.     I think the good news is the M&A market seems be opening as we speak, and there’s a lot more and more activity. Just in last couple of weeks, we’ve had incredible deals, the largest deal ever that Google has ever done, which is pretty incredible around cybersecurity. The IPO market still haven’t opened. There’s a huge line of companies waiting to go public, and we keep hearing different views that maybe some of them are waiting, but they don’t have the fundamentals yet right.     The market is so backlogged that you really have to have an amazing story to go public right now otherwise, you’re going to get killed as a stock, so we’ll see. At some point, something’s got to give. Secondary markets are also much more active, but with discounts. There’s all these different dynamics that I think are affecting the fundraising environment for Venture Capital firms.   Bertrand If you’re a VC firm, you depend on LPs. LPs depend on returns from their investment in VC funds to reinvest in VC funds. If they don’t get the returns, or they don’t get the liquidity, they are not going to be able to put back the money to a new fund because they haven’t got their money back yet.     With that delay over time of exit, the lack of IPO and during the Biden administration, we had also a lack of M&A because there was a lot of restrictions put on M&A from big tech. You just talk about this Google acquisition of a cybersecurity company. What’s the biggest ever for Google? It’s more than 30 billion. It’s not sure that it could be done 6 months ago by Google.     It should be very interesting to see if there is way more acquisitions from big tech happening. This is a huge pipeline for VCs. If you stop selling to big tech, it’s big trouble, just to be clear. It would be a dramatic change, will provide more liquidity.     For IPO, it’s clear the markets are right now very uncertain. I don’t know who would be crazy enough to plan an IPO in the coming three months, to be frank. If you dare to do that, I wish you luck, but I think the next three, potentially six months, are going to be pretty uncertain. It’s definitely not a great time for IPO. I don’t know if you saw the news today, this morning, there was a discussion concerning M&A from the new administration, and they were hinting that they are not going to let any company big on DEI to do easily acquisitions.   Nuno There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market.   Bertrand The pipeline that we thought was just reopening might not be so open after all.   Nuno We’ll see. I think on M&A, I think the floodgates have opened. I think we’ll see more and more. The IPO market, I agree with you. I don’t think we see anything anytime soon, but maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’re being just pessimistic on that side. Obviously, that influences everything around the table.     The name of the game definitely is distributions. As we’re talking to limited partners, our limited partners, and you, potential limited partners for upcoming funds, the feedback is, “Do you guys have distributions on paid-in? Have you given money back to your LPs or not? What’s the vintage of your fund? How soon did you give distributions, et cetera?”     For example, for one of our funds, for the 2021 fund, we had distributions last year, 2024, and that’s magical. You see even the most institutional LPs, their eyes open up. It’s like, “You’re given distributions already? You’ve given cashback?” That’s great. To your point, cash will ultimately be king.   Bertrand Yes, now it makes sense, and congrats on doing that. For me, what’s shocking is that for LPs, it’s unexpected. At some point, it’s a real trouble if after 2, 3 years, you don’t start to some distribution. We all know it takes time, especially if you’re more early stage, but at some point, the proof is in the pudding.   Nuno Shall we talk about best practices for fundraising for startups?   Bertrand Sure. Best practices for fundraising from a startup founder perspective. I think it’s clear founders need to be strategic on how they fundraise. Let’s start with some thoughts. I would say first thing first, I’ve been surprised and troubled to see founders who sometimes truly believe in their own dreams believe that they have what it takes to do a successful fundraise.     I think in the past, it might be because they remember the old days, they remember 2021, and they don’t realize it has changed. They refuse to acknowledge it has changed. Definitely things have changed. You better be prepared.     It starts with a solid preparation, solid strategy. You want to make sure your docs are in order, your business plan, your revenue model. You have potentially a path to profitability depending on your business model. You want to be very compelling very quickly in your deck.     I think it’s always very important to start very prepared because at the end of the day, you would want to be very efficient in your fundraising. You don’t want to be running that for 9 months or 12 months. As a startup founder, you want to refocus to your business very quickly.     Another piece, obviously, is around crafting a compelling story. It’s a lot about storytelling everywhere, but especially when you are fundraising from VCs, you have to have a big vision, you have to make your employees dream. You have to make your customers dream, and you have to make your investor a dream.     That part is key. It’s not just about the numbers, but you have to have a compelling story. You have to have a unique value proposition. How are you different from others? If you are not in AI, I can tell you better have to have a good story about the why? Why now? Why your stuff is important? Why you are not doing anything related to AI?     Another piece of the puzzle is that you need to be very focused on tailoring your approach to different types of investors. You don’t talk the same way to a Seed Fund, a larger VC, a corporate VC. You really need to know your audience, tailor your pitch to your audience. Again, if you previously fundraise 2 or 3 years ago, you are probably going to talk to different types of investors who have different expectations.     Hopefully, you have help from your previous investor, from your last round to help you understand that. Again, I have seen some who take the decision not to listen. Please be careful. Listen, especially to your close investors who last invested because they should know about what it takes to get to the next level. After all, they have a dozen, two dozen of portfolio companies who are facing the same stuff as you, so they should have a pretty good view about what’s happening in the market right now for companies at your stage.   Nuno Just to highlight there, I think you’re spot on. If you’re talking to an institutional Venture Capital firm like Chameleon, my own, Red River West with Bertrands, everyone’s looking for returns. It’s all about the big vision. How is this going to become significant? What are the risks and derisks, right? That’s basically it.     If you’re talking to a corporate VC, they might be less interested in the return. They might be much more interested in the strategic value to the mothership. If you’re talking to a Toyota Ventures, they might have more value in terms of what value can we bring back to Toyota out of this. Then family offices are very driven by impact and themes and value system, and it’s probably people that have made some money.     Although they might be thinking about returns, in some cases, they might not be thinking as much about returns, more about, “I want to do something around sustainability because we came from oil.” We want to go now more towards sustainability and sustainable energies and stuff like that. Again, match the speech to the expectations in terms of returns and to the expectations of who you’re talking to. Even different VC firms have different focuses, so be prepared for that.   Bertrand Totally true. Different firms have some are very generalist. I guess at Red River West, some much less generalist and are very focused. It could be SaaS, it could be AI, it could be Space Tech, it could be hardware. You want to have a speech that’s tailored to their interest. Another piece of the puzzle, obviously, try to get warm intro, try to do some networking. At some point, you might have to do cold outreach, but warm intro goes a long way. That’s one reason it’s never a bad idea to reach out first before you need a fund.     Typically, for instance, if you are doing seed, maybe you talk to some Series A companies. That’s the time when you are ready for Series A, they already seen you, they have talked to you before, they have seen your business plan, and now you are ready for them. That’s something I’ve seen myself as an entrepreneur. Talking to a Series B investor when it’s a bit early, and ultimately, they end up with, “Hey, you know what? It’s too early for us, but let’s talk at the next round.”     It has been a great source of intro for the next round because when it’s time for the next round, they are actually ready. They know your business. They have seen you growing. There is a level of trust you have built showing not just your business plan, but a business plan 2 years ago or 18 months ago and hopefully, you have delivered on that plan. If you have delivered on that plan, it’s creating a lot of trust.     I’ve seen always doing, and we are doing typically at Red River West is comparing with what did people told us at the last round, and maybe they have been early talking to us, and how have they delivered? If they are delivered, the level of trust is incomparable versus coming cold. That for me is sometimes underrated by funders, but reaching out early and obviously delivering on your plan has a lot of impact.   Nuno Indeed. Showing systematically how you’re evolving. Leveraging the connectivity, keeping the relationship going, and then really highlighting why are you different in the market. Not just vanity metrics, really being able to go under the hood, show fundamental shifts, show that the numbers are really hitting it.     To your point, Bertrand, the most impressive thing is when someone said, “Remember when I talked to you a year and a half ago, and you told me to bug her off and raise my round? Here I am again. I’m raising again, but now I’ve done everything that I said I was going to do, and I’m actually better.” That is just incredible. In particular, if you’re a B2B company, it’s just if you’re annual recurring revenue, all of that stuff has just gone better than you said it’s going to be. That’s like magic.   Bertrand Yes, 100%. I think entrepreneurs to get that. That one, they need ambitious plan, but they need ambitious plan that they can deliver or even overdeliver. Another piece of the puzzle for me is trying to understand as an entrepreneur, what is best in class? What is top tier? What is first quartile? Because you want to understand in your industry, I don’t know if it’s B2B, SaaS or AI or this or that, you need to understand your competition in some ways.     In competition, in the sense of fundraising. Because if you are an investor, you are going to sell this company. You are going to have this matrix, and you are going to judge companies based on how they are achieving. Is this a top-quartile startup? What are their metrics? How do their metrics compare to not their direct competitors, but their peers?     Sometimes I’ve seen entrepreneurs who have trouble to get their head around. They are just focused on their own business, how hard it is to deliver. They believe that magically they can explain that, “Yes, the numbers are good, but not great, but it’s okay, we can still find financing.” No. If your number are not top quartile, it’s going to be hard. If it’s hard, it means that either you don’t get that financing or you get that financing from tier 2 or even tier 3 investors.     It’s not going to be fun. The valuation are not going to be great. There will be a lot of terms that are not great, and sometimes the run might not even close. I think you have to be very careful, very humble, and understand that it’s a marketplace where VCs are willing to fund some entrepreneurs, but they are going to pick the crop of the crop, the best of the best.     One more tip for entrepreneurs is manage the fundraising process efficiently. You want to have a well-oiled process, and you want to be quick. Target to close in three months, at least to close that term sheet. It might take you 30 days, 45 days more post-term sheet to fully close around. Don’t give yourself six months to find your lead investor and sign the deal. It’s way too long. It’s a lot of distraction, disruption in the business. Step by step, your number are going to suffer.     That would be the last piece, don’t let your numbers slip. It will be big trouble if you spend more time fundraising and step by step. The numbers you have to show degrade. Even if you manage to quickly close, it will not be good for you if your numbers are slipping because for months, you didn’t focus on running the business well.   Nuno You should listen to Bertrand because he’s probably one of the best, I think, at managing cycles. You always got it right. I invested early in App Annie, and every time he went back to market, he said, I’m going to raise this in whatever X amount of months and he delivered. Which was always shocking to me. We’ll talk about that maybe a little bit in a second on some hacks and some of the best practices to create this fear of missing out that you need to create in fundraising for sure.   Bertrand Yes. Weeks, not months.   Nuno You did it in weeks, yes, I know. I remember. I always bet against you, and I was always wrong on the subsequent rounds, so listen to him. In terms of best practices for VC fundraising, if you’re a VC fund or a Micro-Fund, and you’re thinking through, how am I going to best fundraise? Also, if you’re a startup entrepreneur, understanding a little bit how fundraising for Venture Capital firms and virtual capital funds is so different from your own fundraising.     The first thing to take into account is unlike fundraising for startups, actually getting information on the LPs you want to reach out to is not that easy. A lot of these LPs are quite hidden and healthy. Most LPs are not as outspoken as VC funds, so getting information on LPs is very complex.     There’s very few podcasts now where limited partners share around their views. As I mentioned earlier, LPs come under different forms and flavours. The more institutional ones on the top end, the endowments, the pension plans, et cetera. Below that, the multifamily offices, the Fund of Funds. Fund of Funds are funds that focus solely on investing in other funds.     Then below that, you have the single-family offices. I mean, below in terms of the degree of institutional acumen in general. There are single-family offices that operate in a full-on institutional way with very complex portfolio management, et cetera. Then you have very high net-worth individuals and so on and so forth.     The first thing that normally you would do if you’re a startup raising from a VC fund, doesn’t quite apply as well to a VC fund. The information that we would need to gather on LPs is more complex to obtain. Just creating that initial list is actually quite complex. Just creating the list of outreach and who we’re going to talk to is much more complex than it would be for a startup.     The first thing you actually need to first articulate is really what is your fund thesis? What’s compelling about you? What’s the moat? What is unique about what you’re doing?     Again, most VC funds, the complexity is that we are people-driven. We don’t have huge advantages beyond being people-driven. We at Chameleon are again, a bit unique in that because we have a platform that we develop in-house called Mantis, and that tech and AI platform does allow us to differentiate from that standpoint. Most VC firms don’t have tech, they don’t have a product. Their product is them being great at selecting deals and managing those deals and then exiting at the right time.     If you’re a VC fundraising, you have to really have that very nail down, what’s unique about you? Is it some network that you have access and unfair advantage? Is it some operating model advantage in terms of tech, if you do have any tech data? Is it some other advantage that you have in terms of the areas of focus where you have very specialized general partners, very specialized partners that are people that have 20 years of experience in that area, et cetera? That’s the first piece. What’s the moat? What’s the thesis?     The second piece is track record. This is all about the numbers. People are going to be like, “What’s your track record? What stage have you invested in these companies? What are your returns across the funds you’ve done before? If you’re a first-time fund manager, did you do any angel investing? Do you work at another fund? Do you have track record that you can show for it? Do you have some credibility where I can really understand that’s some unfair advantage in how you select deals?”     Deal selection becomes the most important piece of that discussion. Again, if you can’t show the track record, it’s tough. I know there’s been a lot of micro-funds that have been raised in the last few years. If you don’t have great numbers, good luck to you. If you’re a first-time fund manager, and you don’t have anything to bring to the table, either you’ve been a very successful entrepreneur or you have a great gamut of angel investing that you’ve done that has been really good, it’s going to be very difficult to raise at this point in time.     Thirdly, you need to tailor your approach. As I said, there’s different types of LPs. A multifamily office thinks about portfolio construction in a very different way than a single-family office. A fund of funds thinks very differently about portfolio construction than an endowment. The risk that they’re bringing to table is very different.     Try to figure out if the LPs that you’re standing in front of are adequate for you. If you’re an emerging manager, you’re doing a first or a second, or even in some cases, a third fund, understand if that LP is willing to give money to emerging managers. It might be they are not. It might be that they only give capital to fund 3s and fund 4s onwards. They were not going to give money to emerging managers. It might be that their emerging manager program is actually much smaller.     Ask questions is always my advice. Because from those questions, you’re going to get, what’s your typical capital commitment to emerging managers? Do you think through this track record over time? How do you think through that? What value do you bring to me as a VC fund in terms of standing with me through time?     If you’re trying to build a franchise play in venture capital, fund 2, fund 3, fund 4, are these the kinds of LPs that will stay with you through time and also invest in fund 2 and fund 3 if you have great returns? In some cases, they’re not. For example, corporate LPs, corporations that invest in funds, are well known for their strategies change if the CEO changes. If you have a CEO change every 3 years, they might not be in for the next fund with you.     It sounds like great money upfront. It might have a lot of strings attached, as we discussed earlier. Corporate LPs are very focused on strategic value back to their mothership. At some point, there’s a change in CEO, the stock price goes down, and you’re shit out of luck, basically. They no longer can be with you even if you have great returns. You have to think through those things.     Then maybe the things that are maybe a little bit less exciting, but just the process management, consistent updates, keep in touch, the cycles of fundraising are 1–2 years, as I said before, unlike startups, which should be like 3–6 months max. Therefore, being and updating and reporting, addressing things, being in touch, keeping those relationships over 3, 4, 5 years, sometimes is pretty essential.     Streamlining the due diligence process. If someone is really excited about you, having a data room that’s ready to go, figuring out what is in that data room, what is not. Being transparent, but not overly transparent, because honestly, you might be oversharing. There’s also compliance rules around the information you can share and not share with people that are not yet your limited partners. You have to be thoughtful and careful about that.     Then at the end, really figure out how do you get to a close. It’s a funky world because the leads, the so-called anchor LPs, the equivalent of lead investors in LP speak and VC fundraising speak is anchors, are not really a lead. It’s more of an anchor, and you might have several, not just one. Really framing and creating a timeline by which you push them to the table is much more complex than for a startup to get that lead to give them the term sheet. Doing that really well is in and of itself its own hard form.     Then over time, how do I build all these relationships long term and get them nailed so that I make sure that even though this fund of funds that I really want to have on board as an investor in my fund is not willing to come in right now, that I have a good relationship, maybe they’ll come in 2 years or 3 years or the next fund or maybe for a final close.     That’s the other thing that’s unique about VC fundraising, is our funds, we get money, we get investors in, but actually the capital calls are done over several years, but the commitments are also done over a period of time. You do what is classically called a first close with your anchor limited partners, but then you have typically around at least 12 months to do more closes or at least one more close where you get other limited partners on board. The whole notion of cash management, et cetera, is very different than that of startups.   Bertrand Definitely, it’s on this fundraising from LPs versus fundraising from VCs. It’s a very different game. Maybe another piece that, if you come from the technology side, LPs don’t always talk the language of technology. They might not understand. It’s a really big gap. It’s very different type of people and professionals.   Nuno Indeed. In some cases, they’re more involved because of portfolio management, portfolio construction. In some other ways, there’s maybe even more distance to what is the role of a VC versus what is the role of an LP. In some cases, LPs are very fundamentally allocators, and the VC is very deeply… in particular for an early stage VC, very deeply, to your point, entrenched in technology. That’s where we make our decisions, the technology, the people, et cetera.     Sometimes there’s this huge gap in terms of communication, where they’re interested in returns and risk-adjusted stuff, and we’re talking to them about why we’re amazing at due diligence, and we figure out the tech really well, and we are great at assessing entrepreneurs, and they’re like, “Cool.”   Bertrand Yes, it’s a different game. Cool and show me some numbers.   Nuno Show me some numbers, yeah, whatever.   Bertrand It makes sense. It’s really a big gap. It’s a different game.   Nuno Maybe going to closing the deal, how do we get investors to commit and close the round, Bertrand?   Bertrand At least from what I have experienced on the startup side, it’s definitely key to identify and secure a lead investor and term sheet. Because once you got this first lead investor and term sheet, then you might start to have some real competition with other investors interested to also move immediately, or they know they will lose the deal. Once you have picked one investor as a lead investor, then it’s time to go quickly over potentially allocating, of course, to your existing investors. That would have typically already been discussed, but potentially look for follow-on investors.     Again, you want to keep going quickly. You don’t want to start throwing things down. Typically, you will have talked to some potential investors who are follow-on while you are fundraising. So it should be easy to reach out, explain you have a term sheet from a lead investor and are they ready to get in. Typically, you don’t give them too long to make a decision.     That’s also where it goes back to creating some urgency, fear of missing out. I think it’s really key to move quickly because first, one thing I have experienced is that you never know what might happen next. You might have a business issue, you might have some overall industry issues, you might have some macro issues happening, and sometimes everything can freeze as a result.     You really want to move fast, not take a chance at any step of the process because you never know what might happen tomorrow. I have experienced that type of situation where sometimes in a matter of days, you see the market changing dramatically, investor expectation changing. I mean, this stuff can change fast.   Nuno An analogous for us in the venture capital world is, get that anchor LP in for that first close or those anchor LPs in for that first close. But maybe even before that—and I think the bar is similar for startups, but maybe even higher for funds—is the first question that’s going to happen is, are the previous investors, the previous LPs to your fund, coming into this fund as well?     So showing great repeatability, where you have a bunch of LPs that were in that previous fund of yours, coming now for the next fund as well is very important, the same as it would be for a startup saying, “Oh, well, I have all these investors, and they’re coming into this round as well.” But I think maybe for funds, the bar is even higher, right? Because in the case of VC firms, you know that sometimes at some point they can’t put more capital in. In LPs, there’s this expectation, if they put money in the previous fund, they should put money in this fund as well.   Bertrand Yeah, totally. I think for startups, as you say, it can be explained probably more easily. But that’s true. It’s a better sign if you can explain that your existing investors are willing to do their pro rata or even are fighting to do more than their pro rata. That’s always a good sign.     At the same time, you as a CEO, it’s good if you are able to also manage your existing investors because sometimes you might need to make space for a new one, and that new one might not leave enough space for the existing investors. You might have some tension here. Of course, you want to treat well your existing investors who believed in you when it was earlier. At the same time, you don’t want to miss that new investor. So it’s very important to, on one side, make sure your existing investors are going to follow, and at the same time, make sure that potentially they are ready to do a bit less if that could help the new financing.   Nuno Going back to tactics, the best people at fundraising across the board, I think startups and for VC funds, create this notion of fear of missing out. I’m going to use, hopefully, not too much of a politically incorrect analogy, but you’re the most beautiful girl at the dance. You’re the most beautiful girl at the dance. Everyone wants to dance with you. Creating that fear of missing out, creating that notion that I really want to do the business. I’m a limited partner. I really want to put money in this fund. Otherwise, I won’t have a chance to put in.     I think for us in the VC world, as VC funds raising, it’s more difficult than for startups. I think the world of being the nicest, most beautiful girl at the dance, being a painkiller versus a vitamin are a little bit gone. There are now a lot of offerings in the market, unless you’re maybe an LP from other regions of the world, and you have more difficulty in accessing the best funds. But still, having that notion of creating FOMO is pretty essential. For startups, it’s critical. People have to find the notion of, I should put money to these guys so that they can go to the next level and make it go forward.   Bertrand Another piece that’s important is that it’s not just FOMO for FOMO’s sake. You create FOMO in order to accelerate a round, close a round, go on with your life as a business. But also you need to be honest because if you start to be dishonest by saying you already have a term sheet when you don’t, that sort of stuff, it’s a very dangerous game. It’s, I think, bad ethics, bad practice.     Step by step, people might hear, might know, or they might even be able to read between the line because you are talking about having opportunities, but you might not have them. Sometimes, VCs are good. They will read between the lines that actually it might be bullshit. Be careful because the minute it moves from FOMO to these guys are bullshit, you lose.   Nuno Then the next step is getting it in writing. Either get the term sheet, which, as we know, is not binding except for normally confidentiality and/or exclusivity for that term sheet, for the case of startups. For VC firms and VC funds, obviously getting the agreements at the table, getting them closed so that you can then run to a first close at some point or to that next close after that time. But getting something in writing at some point is pretty critical.     Before that, obviously getting the gentleman’s or gentle lady’s agreement that someone says, “I’m in.” That’s the first way to get to that position where people are putting their reputation at the table, and that is true for both cases. Then keeping that momentum going and going and leveraging and going around for other investors, in the case if you’re a startup, or for other LPs, if you’re a VC fund, and making sure that they want to come on board and keeping that momentum going for that close that you’re trying to get to, in the case of a VC fund, for that round to be pulled together if you’re a startup.   Bertrand I think you make a good point about written commitment, because in some ways, for me, my experience has been obvious. That’s how it works and that’s how life works. Actually, a few times this was forced on us. Basically, we got the term sheet, and you’ve got 24 hours to sign it or 48 hours to sign it. That’s very clear. Of course, you can ask a bit of extension of this and that, depending on how you want to play the game and is it your favourite option or not.     But at the same time, I’ve been surprised that some entrepreneurs have been led to believe stuff, not receiving anything in writing, not having the term sheet, having people talking to them and explain to them why they can’t have the document in the coming days, weeks, but they really love the business and the company, and see the entrepreneurs believing on the dream, basically, eating the bullshit.     No, that’s not how it works. If you have spent 2, 3 weeks with an investor explaining your business, opening your data room and stuff, if they are serious about it, they should be able to move. Obviously, some markets things go slower if you pick your up, for instance. But in the US, things are going to move. If it’s not moving, it’s already a bad sign. It’s a really bad sign.   Nuno Indeed. What other hacks shall we recommend, Bertrand? I have found you have to figure out, again, the individual. There’s a lot of advice that is given sometimes around the entity. I think your VC fund, again, fundraising, it’s very easy to look at an LP as an entity. Probably the same as a startup. You’re looking at, “I’m talking to Sequoia, I’m talking whatever.” Actually, you’re talking to a lead partner somewhere or a lead originator, someone that’s really the person that’s pushing forward your case, and so figuring out the motivations of that person.     What makes that person successful? What makes that person go to the next level in their own environment, in the organization that they’re in? What motivates that person, and what style of person that is. I’ve had some archetypes of LPs shared with me. I won’t share them today because I put that person on the line for it, but there are archetypes of people.     There might be people that are a little bit more number-focused, a lot of people that may be a little bit more nerdy. There might be some people that are a little bit more relationship-focused, that they want to build really that relationship first before really even moving forward, so figuring out who the individual is, what makes this person tick, what makes this person successful or not is pretty critical in getting the deal done.   Bertrand Yeah, and making sure you are talking to the right person with the right level of authority. Sometimes if you just talk to junior people, and you don’t see the partners or senior partners, it’s a bad sign. Your stuff is not going to work. It’s important to have the junior people in the loop. But at the same time, you need to talk to the decision maker. You need to make sure they can move things forward. That’s absolutely critical.     But I would say at the end of the day, you need to really focus on the goal. The goal is to have a great business. If you have a great business, if you are good at running your process, you have a data room ready, you have picked your list of investors, you go through them, you spend the time to move quickly, you push enough of time constraints on everyone, explaining by when you want to get to your first term sheet. I think it’s quite reasonable to say it’s a matter of a few weeks, four weeks, for instance. I had a first-time sheet at one round in nine days.   Nuno Just to be clear, that doesn’t happen. If you guys are listening to this… How often does that happen? It doesn’t. As I said, Bertrand is very good at this. He was very good at this.   Bertrand Maybe, but another time, it was three weeks.   Nuno Also very fast.   Bertrand I’m not sure I did more than six weeks to close a round at App Annie. My point is, you have to have great metrics, you have to have a great team, you have to have a plan, you have to deliver on that. It’s like a project to do that fundraising. We didn’t talk about bankers, by the way. I’ve very rarely used bankers. It’s more used in Europe, but here in the US, it’s not very typical.     I think that you have to play the game well. But again, try to move fast because ultimately, that means you can go back fast to business. For me, that was always something really critical. I took a lot of great pride to make sure that it’s not because I’m running around the fundraising that I’m going to slow down the business. From that perspective, I was helped for sure by my CFO, who was really doing a great job preparing that fundraising, preparing it, managing it, and making sure as a result that the team could really focus on running the business, not just doing the fundraising.   Nuno Indeed. From our side, our analogy is banks, potentially, but normally it’s private placement agents as we call them. Normally, you need to have a broker deal, a licence, all of that. If you’re trying to raise a relatively small fund, and to be very honest, a relatively small fund in venture capital, from a perspective of private placement agent, it could be as high as 100 or 150 million, which would be already a significant fund for a venture capitalist.     I would say most of the significant large private placement agents won’t work with you. There might be some smaller boutique players that will work with you. Maybe some broker dealers are a little bit smaller that will work with you. But in our experience, it’s been very difficult to work with private placement agents and broker dealers unless you’re a very large player. Because again, these guys, if they’re raising 50 million for a private equity fund, a 50 million allocation for a private equity fund, it’s easier for them to do that than to raise 5-10 million for $100 million fund in venture capital. It’s the same work.     It’s like, if I’m going to do it, I might as well raise 50 because they’re going to be compensated, if they’re broker dealers, by a percentage of the money they raise. They’re obviously interested in raising more, not less. It’s easier for them to work with private equity funds or larger VC funds than to work with smaller VC funds or more right-sized VC funds, I may call it.   Bertrand Makes sense.   Nuno Wonderful. In conclusion, today, we went through all the key things you need to know if you’re fundraising. First, what is the current evolution of the landscape for fundraising for startups? The same for VC firms, if you’re doing a VC fund or if you want to understand how the landscape for VC funds. What are the best practices, the strategy, the processes, the tactics, everything for fundraising overall for startups.     Same thing for VC funds and VC firms. What are the best practices that VC funds need to take into account when raising their own money from limited partners? Finally, how do you get investors, both if you’re a VC and if you are a startup, to commit to giving you money? How do you close on these investors? Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you, Bertrand.   Bertrand Thank you, Nuno.  

Our analysis of the Space & Aeronautics, Defense and Homeland Security industries from key trends to investment landscape… to perhaps, more importantly, evil vs no evil? Where are we now? Navigation: Intro (01:34) Why now? Geopolitics Aerospace and Aeronautics Defense and Homeland Security Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno G. Pedro Welcome to Tech DECIPHERED. In today’s episode, Episode 62, we’re going to discuss space and aeronautics, defense and online security. We are going to talk about key trends, why now is such a wonderful time to be looking at this space not only from a startup perspective but also from an investment landscape perspective. We’ll also go into the whole evil versus no evil topic. Specifically, we will discuss why now, and the geopolitics of the industries, aerospace and aeronautics, defense and homeland security, and then we will conclude. Bertrand, why now?   Bertrand Schmitt Why now? I think this industry, this sector, space, defense, homeland security has seen not just a lot of growth and quite a few very successful companies coming out, but it’s an interesting complete turnaround, if you look at that from an entrepreneur or from a VC investor perspective. Why now? I think there has been, I would say, historically, there was a lot of scepticism, a lot of concerns by entrepreneurs, investors alike, centred around the military industrial complex.   Bertrand Schmitt We probably all remember the famous Eisenhower’s farewell address where he was sharing his distrust of that military industrial complex. And venture capital shunned these sectors also due to long sales cycle, in some cases only one client, the Department of defense for many startups, as well as ethical debates.   Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, it’s an evolving landscape. Startup came with disrupting legacy models. It’s not just a cost-plus approach. It’s a product approach. It’s agile. It’s innovation. The debate around, is it evil to is it something we must do in order to address global threats, basically coming to the forefront for investors and entrepreneurs alike.   Nuno G. Pedro It’s a supply and demand issue. It’s not just that startups are not necessarily interested in it because it always creates this issue around, is it evil? Is it good? Are we doing something good or not? I think there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of supply issue because of that angle. But it’s also a demand issue. Contracts historically with military take a long time to be hashed out. They depend on doing trials and proofs of concept.   Nuno G. Pedro I think on the other hand, it’s an industry that historically was very resilient and dominated by services. Particularly the US military want to own everything, and so, therefore, there was this notion that whoever was the provider provided it to provide it as a service for them. There are services that still need to be done today, but the industry has been largely productized, and there are a lot of products. I buy planes, I buy weaponry, I buy a bunch of different software systems that will allow me to operate, but they’re productized. I think that’s one of the big shifts that we’ve seen and why now is a good time to look at it.   Nuno G. Pedro If I’m a startup, I don’t need to go through 3, 4, 5-year cycles until I sell anything of scale. Then on the plus side, once I sell, it is at scale. There’s a lot of money in the military. We’ll talk a lot about the numbers later on, but there’s definitely a lot of money in the military complex that warrants the focus of startups.   Nuno G. Pedro The other part is venture capital firms. Venture capital firms, historically, maybe because of the whole evil versus no evil and perceived ethical issues have stayed away from it. But we have more and more active large firms in the space from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz. We ourselves have invested in companies that are around both the Homeland Security and the military complex space. So as a venture capital investor, because then the cycles to sales are better, because then startups scale faster, the economic piece of it has been solved.   Nuno G. Pedro Then, on the other side, the whole ethical issue has been really put into perspective. There’s clearly a lot of geopolitical tension right now. Defense as an industry. It’s an industry that needs to scale properly where there are geopolitical interests at scale, but you need to put money where your mouth is.   Bertrand Schmitt We will talk more about it, but I believe also we had one big example of an extremely successful company that really broke the dam in how you see these investments from an entrepreneur or investor perspective and how you can really win against these traditional companies, very entrenched companies. This is SpaceX. SpaceX really shown to everyone that, yes, you can build actually rockets. You can build better rockets. You can build cheaper rockets than everybody’s.   Bertrand Schmitt That was the poster child of, yes, there is a brand-new market opportunity that until now we thought was impossible to crack for young, talented tech entrepreneurs. Suddenly, everyone could see in some ways that the emperor was naked and that these big defense contractors were actually extremely weak.   Bertrand Schmitt From my perspective, they became weak. It was a two-way street. Also, the government makes them weak. You have only one supplier. You have only one buyer. At some point, it’s about wining and dining clients. It’s not about solving problem. At some point, it’s garnering political support, not delivering great products.   Bertrand Schmitt I think there has been a slow path to extreme mediocrity, and mediocrity might be generous term, actually. I think there is, as a reaction to that, again, SpaceX example, shows that you cannot just make things 10% better, but you might make 10x or 100x cheaper and change the whole industry.   Nuno G. Pedro I do think the example you put forward is a great example on aeronautics and aerospace. On military and online security, Palantir was at that first breakthrough. You could argue it’s still a relatively services-heavy company rather than a product, but it is a startup, it IPO-ed, etc. It’s obviously a company that has done really, really well in the industry. We now have obviously the example of Anduril in the drone space and how that’s scaling.   Nuno G. Pedro I think we have now a bunch of good examples to your point, Bertrand, as there has been an unbundling of pieces that were typically government-owned or only government pushed like NASA. With aerospace, you have this opportunity like SpaceX that just dramatically changes how things are done, where it eliminates all these inconsistencies and these inefficiencies. I think that’s been true also of the defense and military complex side and how that has scaled.   Nuno G. Pedro Maybe moving to geopolitics, it’s very clear that the US is the big player, spending a significant amount of its yearly budget on military by any admissions. Probably around 900 billion a year spent on defense in the US, which is incredible. The US GDP is 27.7 trillion as of 2023. This is a significant part of it, so obviously, the budget’s much lower. The use of military in the US and defense is a huge percentage of its not only GDP, but also its yearly budget. US is clearly leading the way, obviously. We’ll discuss other countries and where they’re at.   Nuno G. Pedro Europe doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. I think the recent discussions happening around Ukraine and what’s happening there show a little bit that not only it’s lost the plot, but it’s lost the power as well because it lost the plot.   Bertrand Schmitt I’m French. You’re Portuguese from origin. For me, it’s totally shocking why is Europe… It’s been 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it feels like the Europeans rushed to stop investing in their defense. There are some metrics in terms of German investments in defense spending, for instance, where we move from huge quantity of tanks to barely any tanks as Germany can bring into any battle. This is one example of how it moved from being a military superpower, same for France or the UK, to basically the shadows of their former self. It’s quite unbelievable.   Bertrand Schmitt For me, what’s unbelievable is that even after 3 years of Ukraine war, some Eastern European countries have changed their defense spending. But the Western European countries have not changed much their spending. All these promises about increasing military productions, being able to provide military supplies to Ukraine.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, we sold them or gave them “some weapons”, some typically older weapons, but at the end of the day, we are not even able to provide enough artillery shells, which is the bread and butter right now on the battlefield. Same with drones. Most of the parts are coming from China, on both sides of the conflict, by the way. It’s a very, very scary situation.   Bertrand Schmitt I guess we are recording that one week after JD Vance spending some time in Europe and talking at a Munich conference about European security. It’s very clear that the US is fed up from this perspective. As a result, I would expect actually a change in spending and priorities by Europeans. I guess they will buy some weapons from Europe, but also from the US. There have been some European initiatives like the JEDI initiative to stimulate faster tech adoptions. There are some efforts to change also the way stuff is procured, stuff is manufactured, and we will see what are going to buy going forward.   Nuno G. Pedro If you look at the US and you think through the numbers, 27.7 trillion GDP, we’re talking over 3% is the expenditure yearly of the GDP. If you then talk about budgets, the budget for the US is around 6 trillion. It could be high or below 6 trillion, at least the numbers I have for 2022 and 2023. That’s like 14%. Nine hundred billion is 14% of 6 point something trillion depending on how you count it.   Nuno G. Pedro It’s incredible, and that’s before you start talking about the other guys in the rest of the world like Russia and China. China is close to 300 billion in an expenditure from what we know. I’m not sure if those numbers are correct or not. It’s one of those only probably the Chinese know kind of numbers.   Bertrand Schmitt Only a very well-placed Chinese would know.   Nuno G. Pedro Only a very well-placed Chinese person would know or Chinese official. It’s second only to the US, China. They’ve been going through 29 years of consecutive growth in spending. They’re very clearly trying to catch up. Then Europe stands in the middle. Again, we have to talk about Russia where we still, again, who the hell knows their numbers? But it’s significant. Europe is between a rock and a hard place. It’s like everyone’s spending except Europe. If we looked at it as a conjoint, as a unified superpower, it’s the only superpower that really is not doing much.   Bertrand Schmitt Actually, I had similar metrics for Russia where 16% of its government spending in 2023 went to the military. Similar to the US, 16%, maybe slightly higher. But yes, the big problem is countries in Europe like Germany where we are talking about 1% of GDP. So it’s a real problem. For me, what’s really shocking is the disconnect between the talk and what they actually do.   Bertrand Schmitt When you see the Germans, or French, the UK talking strongly, condemning, attacking Russia, willing to do this and that, but then they don’t invest. They don’t follow the words with dollars on the battleground, with spending, with new lines of productions. It’s totally crazy. I don’t know in which parallel world they live. It’s very shocking, this level of disconnect between talk and reality. I don’t know how to explain at this stage, honestly. Yes, I stopped trying.   Nuno G. Pedro It’s definitely the king has gone naked. I was just watching a movie. I think it’s called Rumours. I didn’t particularly like it. I think it’s barely funny. It’s supposed to be very funny. But the way they did it, it’s not a punchline. But it’s really a G7 meeting gone wrong with the leaders of several countries and the only thing they’re focused on is writing that perfect announcement at the end. That’s the whole thing that matters during the movie. It’s like end of the world kind of movie but the only thing that matters to them is writing that thing.   Nuno G. Pedro It feels like that’s what Europe is about. It’s all about posturing. It’s about politics and politicking. It’s like, “Well, you guys…” Again, you and I are European. No power. It’s like you’re talking about stuff. You have no power. It’s like you can’t do much in the Ukraine, and then when push comes to shove, you come and say, “Well, we’re not going to do anything.” Really? It’s next to you guys. It’s a European country.   Bertrand Schmitt What’s even more shocking to me is that 35 years ago, it was clearly different. There were strong militaries on the continent beyond the US army, but not any more. Basically, all that money, they decided instead of keep investing, protecting peace, basically, said that, “You know what? Let’s stop spending there. Let’s spend this somewhere else.” You can guess, if it’s somewhere else, it was probably into retirement, into healthcare, into all of this “softer” spending. But the reality is that you cannot do that if you live on the European continent. You have to be prepared to defend your country.   Bertrand Schmitt Now all these politicians decided, “Let’s take that money. Let’s take it away, and let’s invest it into our favourite programs that are going to help us get elected.” I guess that’s really what it is all about. Politicians are staying in power and promising free lunch to their constituents in order to get elected.   Nuno G. Pedro For those right now listening who’s like, “Oh, are you guys defending war and military and whatever?” No, we’re not. We’re not defending that there should be war in the world. I’m Catholic. In my mind, the world should be at peace. The sad thing is we are human beings and therefore people will go into wars, and we have several ongoing right now. If you are a superpower, let’s say European Union, whatever you want to frame it as, if you are a country within that complex, you have to defend yourselves. It’s at your borders.   Nuno G. Pedro We are in a geopolitical state right now where, for example, with President Trump in power, it’s not clear the US will come over and do anything, all the recent comments on the war in Ukraine and Russia. So you have to control your own destiny. The point we’re making today is you have to control your own destiny. If Europe cannot control its own destiny—we’ve discussed in a previous episode, defense is one of the biggest Achilles heels of Europe—what happens next?   Bertrand Schmitt I couldn’t agree more with you. We are absolutely not for war, but we definitely believe that if you don’t want war, you need to be prepared for it. You need to show that you are strong enough to fight off a war. You don’t want to show that through weakness, you are an easy target. Because if you become an easy target, the odds of war increase dramatically. That’s probably the big point we are talking about. You can call it peace through strength potentially.   Bertrand Schmitt In a way, I think JD Vance, Trump, in some ways, doing Europe a favour by being extremely clear-cut about what they expect from the allies. First, in terms of values, and two, in terms of spending because that’s what you want. You want clarity. You want some equal partnership. Because to be frank, is it fair that the American taxpayer is paying more in order to protect Europe? Because he’s paying more, he’s spending more, he’s getting less free healthcare, less free retirement so that Europeans spend less and can afford more on the other side.   Bertrand Schmitt People always talk about this topic, “Oh, we have this great stuff in Europe, free healthcare, great retirement, all of these. Americans are crap.” Yeah, but sorry, guys, we’re paying for your security instead. For me, as an American taxpayer, I’m especially angry about this situation, to be frank.   Nuno G. Pedro I agree with everything you said. Let’s see if he does go after the military defense complex because we haven’t seen any signals that he is going after it. He is saying this and everything he’s saying is fair. Why are we paying for wars elsewhere? We’re not the policemen of the world as Americans. But at the same time, it is the biggest bucket of cuts that he can go into, and I’m not sure we’ve seen anything from him yet.   Nuno G. Pedro I think until then, I reserve that this is not just a comment on whatever. His recent comments on Ukraine and the war, etc. to be honest are not cool. We’re questioning that the Ukraine started the war and not Russia. Is that what happened?   Bertrand Schmitt I think at this stage, you have to separate a battle from war. Does a war start with the first bullet, or does a war start when you start to topple a government?   Nuno G. Pedro Man, I feel on that one, I don’t think we’re going to agree, because I feel there’s a lot of posturing right now from Elon and from President Trump, and I’m like, “Guys, let’s not try and reinvent history now and try to…” Anyway. But again, if he goes after the military complex, I agree. If he goes after the military complex and if there are significant cuts made there… Because that’s the big chunk that you need to go after. It’s that and healthcare. Otherwise, for me, it’s just posturing.   Bertrand Schmitt But to be clear, I’m not sure he wants to decrease significantly the budget. There has been a new directive a few days ago to reduce the budget of the Department of defense, 8% a year for the next 5 years, but it was not clear to me if it was to make space for new initiatives instead. I’m not 100% clear on that. I think their point was more, “We have a fixed budget. We have to project more power in the Pacific, in Asia. Europeans need to take your part of the budget because we cannot do both at the same time properly.” To your point, I don’t know if it’s more about Americans spending less versus Europeans spending more in order to bear more of the load in Europe.   Nuno G. Pedro I think there’s, definitely. I’d be shocked if there are no opportunities for improvements in defense spending by the US. I’m not defending that it needs to go to zero, or it needs to go to 1% of GDP, but it definitely, really, really very inefficient as well. Again, we hope with this innovation, and we hope with these startups supplying products, and we hope with these companies scaling supplying products that those efficiencies are captured. But my belief is there are a lot of inefficiencies still there, huge amounts, more than any other industry probably in the US.   Bertrand Schmitt I think no one questions that. That’s why, again, they launched this order to decrease the budget by 8% for the current budget going forward in order to squeeze efficiency. We are talking about 35% over 5 years, to be clear. It’s not small. The question is more, do you save in order to just cut the fat? Or do you save in order to cut the fat so that you can invest more at ease of budget in order to have more power, more military power? That’s the question.   Bertrand Schmitt I think no one question at this stage the fact that you should squeeze more of the existing military. But the question is, is it in order to absolutely reduce the budget, or is it in order to give space so that we invest in new stuff, more valuable stuff than today?   Nuno G. Pedro I think it should be both. That’s my view. It should be both. There should be a reduction in budget, and there should be a renewed focus in terms of activities and projects. That’s my view.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, that’s the question. I don’t have an opinion on this. But I agree with you. We should spend less for sure on some existing initiatives. I’m sure, like everyone in government, there is plenty of fat.   Nuno G. Pedro Now that we’ve sold off geopolitics, so Europe has to catch up. US, China leading the way. Russia is still doing their thing. We’ll see.   Bertrand Schmitt I’m hearing US has a lot of F-35 to sell, by the way.   Nuno G. Pedro Yes. Our GDP also depends on that. Maybe let’s move to something a little bit less arguable, less of a topic where I think we’re going to have major disagreements, which is aerospace and aeronautics. We’ll come back to defense and online security specifically later.   Nuno G. Pedro On aerospace and aeronautics, obviously, we’ve already talked about SpaceX, a company that really has effectively disrupted how certainly space exploration and space access has been done. We already mentioned it in previous episodes. The company is doing really well. Do you want to talk a little bit about the last fundraising exercise that they did?   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. Maybe to talk about SpaceX, let’s remember people what SpaceX is doing now. SpaceX has been building rockets, especially the latest, Falcon 9. Then, SpaceX is building an even bigger rocket with a space vehicle called Starship. In terms of products, they have launched some very innovative products like Starlink, which gives you Internet access anywhere on the globe, on the sea, but also in the air, in space.   Bertrand Schmitt This is an amazing revolution. If you have tried Starlink, it’s just plenty amazing. Their latest innovation, actually, there was an ad for it during the Super Bowl a few days ago that was announced in partnership with T-Mobile. It’s a new direct to sell initiatives. You don’t even need a Starlink dish in order to receive Starlink.   Bertrand Schmitt You can use your regular cell phone, and that’s plenty amazing. It’s starting with text, but, of course, it’s going to evolve with full data access, high speed data. It’s going to bring video, and it will work with some of the latest generation of fonts. Not every font, but most of the most recent modern fonts. The big change, it means that suddenly everywhere on earth, you are going to be able to get signal. No more dead zone. No more you’re in the middle of the ocean, too bad.   Bertrand Schmitt It’s really game changer. If you talk to people who work on cruise ships, for instance, their life was miserable. There was no Internet access when you’re at sea. You pray for Wi-Fi at the port. It’s a big game changer for a lot of people. I don’t think we fully realise the impact. Some of those stuff, for instance, if you think about where you can live now, there are so many new places that open up. Between solar energy plus Starlink, suddenly you have really new opportunities. Personally, I think they have developed an absolutely amazing product there.   Bertrand Schmitt SpaceX, in terms of fundraising, I think the last fundraise was discussed around 300 billion plus in terms of private valuation. For me, SpaceX is clearly the next trillion-dollar company. There is no question about it.   Nuno G. Pedro They’ve revolutionised SpaceX and exploration. They have all these other products here on Earth with Starlink one being one of the key ones. Obviously, they are exploring many other opportunities and projects, and we will discuss some of the opportunities I think are about to arise like Moon and Mars exploration, space stations. It’s funny as we mentioned in a previous episode that they had to bail out the Boeing vehicle, and they had to go there, or they’re about to go there. They haven’t gone yet, but they are going to have to bail out to get the astronauts back on earth.   Nuno G. Pedro In effect, a company that’s doing great. There’s obviously other companies, Blue Origin, with Jeff Bezos going after their own opportunities and really scaling. What’s been going on?   Bertrand Schmitt They just did a launch with New Glenn, the first successful launch with New Glenn just a few days ago. It’s moving in the right direction. But let’s not forget, they totally destroyed Boeing space program. As you said, the astronauts from the Boeing program were stranded, but that program is destroyed. I think, from what I’ve heard, Boeing is seriously considering cutting everything.   Bertrand Schmitt To be clear, overall, Boeing is in a fight for its survival just on the regular plane manufacturing. They completely messed up. It makes sense for them to consider abandoning this program, given how much harder it is for them in the space program. It’s quite an amazing reversal of fortune in 15 years to see Boeing from the big guy to basically disappearing.   Nuno G. Pedro Indeed. This is SpaceX that you’re saying has destroyed Boeing, et cetera. Right?   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. SpaceX. Sorry.   Nuno G. Pedro Not Blue Origin, yeah.   Bertrand Schmitt To be frank, it’s good to see a competitor, but so far, they’re so far away from SpaceX that we should talk about them as a competitor, but they are very, very far behind. What saves them is obviously the Jeff Bezos company. There’s some backing from Amazon. Amazon is actually investing and buying some capacity from Blue Origin. The European Union is also interested to buy some capacity from Blue Origin.   Bertrand Schmitt Basically, everyone who doesn’t like too much Elon Musk is trying to buy from Blue Origin, but that’s a bit sad if that’s the only saving grace. I’m not sure it would be enough.   Nuno G. Pedro On a couple of other space topics, the private space station movement, ISS, the International Space Station, is about to retire in 2030. There is obviously a lot of movement in creating a private space station. There is work being done. I think Axiom has a NASA contract to work on it.   Nuno G. Pedro They say they are going to be free flying orbital platform as early as 2028. We’ll see. Fingers crossed. There are startups going after mini stations like Vast Space. There’s a lot of work being done on that. That’s one area that is definitely exciting.   Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, I guess you missed the latest twist from Elon Musk, but he just said yesterday that he was going to push the president to retire the Space Station much sooner than expected, so in the next 2 years.   Nuno G. Pedro He’s going to build one.   Bertrand Schmitt No, he’s just saying it’s a complete waste of time. It’s useless. He’s saying, “Why are we wasting time there and money? Let’s just go to Mars.”   Nuno G. Pedro It sounds like a philosophical disagreement, basically. He doesn’t think we should have space stations at all.   Bertrand Schmitt Around Earth, I think he’s raising a lot of questions. A waste of time, energy. I think that’s a fair question. I can see personally value to learn how to live in space, to learn how to build a base on the Moon before going first to Mars. But I guess he’s thinking otherwise.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s one to keep in mind. The other piece is that Axiom, considered one of the biggest project for a private space station, is not doing great financially, apparently. It’s not clear where it’s really going, to be frank. If you have Elon Musk positioning so clear about what should be next, maybe it will remove a lot of investing capacity into private space stations.   Nuno G. Pedro Moving to Moon and Mars because that’s the segue. There is the Artemis program from NASA to go back to the Moon, and this is obviously done with private consortiums. The first one, the uncrewed test flight around the Moon was done in 2022. The next one is set for 2026. The SpaceX Starship has been selected as the lunar lander for Artemis 3, which is planned for 2027. Obviously, we definitely want to go back to the Moon. Obviously, our friend Elon wants to go to Mars as well. We’ll see.   Bertrand Schmitt Not as well. He doesn’t want to go to the Moon. He doesn’t care about the Moon.   Nuno G. Pedro He doesn’t care about the Moon, just Starship will be used potentially for the Moon as the lunar lander. Yes.   Bertrand Schmitt Exactly. He’s happy to sell service to whoever wants to buy service, but for his direction as a business, as a person, he doesn’t care.   Nuno G. Pedro He doesn’t care. Wonderful.   Bertrand Schmitt Maybe another piece on the Artemis mission. Obviously, they use some very old, very bad rocket technology to launch their space vehicles. The big question is, we just stop doing this stupid decision and instead replace that with SpaceX rocket. That’s a big question. That’s not clear right now what will happen. But I will bet that they are going to buy from SpaceX instead, their following rockets.   Nuno G. Pedro Maybe moving to the closer to us kind of space, the on Earth kind of thing. Talk a little bit about drones and uncrewed aircraft. Obviously, a lot of movements around it, only commercial, but also around military, around homeland security, around a variety of other areas. Obviously, historically, there’s been the use of large drones, the Predators and Reapers by the US military for decades, but now there’s a lot of smaller things.   Nuno G. Pedro The Ukraine war in some ways has been a lot played around commercial drones being repurposed for military purposes. There’s obviously a lot of activity around it. We have an investment in a company that has been trying to work around that space, not for effectively attack purposes, but really for reconnaissance purposes. China is also trying to capitalise on this, so there’s a lot of movement on that. What’s your take on this? Bertrand, it feels that this is going to be the golden age of drones for good and bad.   Bertrand Schmitt I would say first, I’m very, very angry at the Western regulators like the FAA in the US. I don’t think in Europe they have been so much better because thanks to the unnecessary and overly complex and overly restrictive regulations, they have basically impacted the market very negatively big time. By impacting this market, basically, they have destroyed the ability of local manufacturers to be really successful.   Bertrand Schmitt As a result, they have opened the gates for Chinese make drones like DJI to become super successful because they were not blocked in their home market by all these regulations. They were able to build a stronger base of revenues at home.   Bertrand Schmitt I’m looking forward for big change, and I’m expecting that very quickly, to be frank, that the FAA is going to dramatically change the rule around that. I see a lot of opportunities. I hope it doesn’t just all go to Chinese companies, obviously, in the US. I hope that will also stimulate a renaissance of manufacturing and drone manufacturers space in the US or Europe. Because I don’t think there is any of them of notice, except in the military, as you said, with the Predator, Reaper, and all those military drones. But on the civilian market, it has been catastrophic for Western manufacturers.   Nuno G. Pedro The other movement we’re seeing is, as we mentioned, around more commercial things. One thing is obviously flying taxis. We still don’t have self-driving cars yet, but we’re going to have flying taxis. The technology, one of the key technologies around vertical takeoff and landing, electric vertical takeoff and landing being one of the core technologies that might make sense to deliver it on. There’s been a lot of attempts at it. Lilium in Germany was one of the players around it. I think that they have ran out of cash and went insolvent late last year. Cool.   Bertrand Schmitt Unfortunately, yeah.   Nuno G. Pedro There’s Joby, which has received a lot of money. Archer Aviation and a bunch of other companies around the world. China again could have an edge because of battery production we’ll see, but there’s a lot of movements, and we all want really flying taxis and then flying cars. We don’t want cars anymore. At least for me now a guy who loves the sound of an engine, driving an electric car, I might as well get an electric plane.   Bertrand Schmitt I feel horrible because this is another example of Western regulations that have made it near impossible to develop efficiently, quickly and cheaply an eVTOL. The Chinese, actually, aviation authority was the first to certify an eVTOL. It’s so ridiculous, the situation we’re in. We have regulators who are destroying our industries. That has been happening with eVTOL as well, not just withdrawn.   Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, to be frank, I’m not so sure about the eVTOL market. We will see. I’m not so sure that electric is the best approach for aviation. It has a lot of constraint in terms of weight. For instance, you cannot go away with a lot of weight when you are flying.   Bertrand Schmitt If you take eVTOL, it’s not as efficient as a plane. You don’t have wings. It’s not an easy formula. I don’t think people should expect this stuff to take away passenger planes, for instance. But it’s really a much shorter distance type of vehicle that could be interesting, ultimately, if we manage to make the economics work and if we don’t have regulators, I’m assuming these innovators.   Nuno G. Pedro The other topic is supersonic planes because obviously we all miss the Concorde. Boom supersonic was one of the big attempts at it. It’s not looking great. I think we now have to go back and figure out, how do we get faster transfers with flights here on Earth? Not sure, but definitely the solutions we’ve had thus far are not great.   Nuno G. Pedro Again, it might be an issue of regulation because of the whole sonic booming thing and how that affects communities, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it feels like it’s an area that has quite a bit of investment that really seems to have not dramatically scaled. We all want to go faster from one continent to the other. It is something that I do feel would have huge implications for consumers and for people, if we dramatically changed how fast we can go from one place to another globally.   Bertrand Schmitt Let’s not forget that the “issue” on some issues made by supersonic planes. A lot of this was put in place by the US in order to destroy the commercial capability of the Concorde. Basically, they tried to, sadly so, destroy the Concorde program. For some reason, didn’t want that to compete against US alternative.   Bertrand Schmitt I mean, there was no US alternative up to recently. My point is that some of these regulations were artificially manufactured. If we go forward, one of the big points of the Boom supersonic plane is that actually it generates less noise. They’re actually pushing hard to change regulations that were totally unreasonable. Again, from the FAA and others, it looks like they have the support from Elon Musk because that was a few days ago. Promising to look into some of these FAA regulations, unnecessary ones.   Bertrand Schmitt I start to be a bit hopeful there that there is indeed an opportunity to build a supersonic passenger plane. It’s also much cheaper to run the boom plane versus the Concorde. They made quite a few significant changes. The cost per passenger is much, much cheaper. Lower noise in supersonic. When you go supersonic, much cheaper. We might have an economic equation that start to make sense if regulators don’t add artificial barriers.   Nuno G. Pedro Much for that. We’ll see what happens going forward. But we’re still looking for that dramatic innovation that really gets us from point A to point B around the globe faster than the current planes that we have.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s super exciting. Dividing by two the time it takes to fly somewhere else, it’s amazing.   Nuno G. Pedro It would be super exciting. It would be ridiculous. A killer of a flight, like 17 hours to Singapore, gets manageable. It’s like 8 hours or 9 hours. A flight from here to Europe in 10 hours, I live on the West Coast and so do you. Bertrand gets 5 hours, which is like, that’s an easy flight. It changes stuff dramatically. It changes everything dramatically. That’s a big deal.   Bertrand Schmitt You know what will be the next steps? The next step would be to use Starship for airborne transportation. Here, we are talking about 30, 45 minutes. Basically, it’s as fast as an intercontinental ballistic missile, so it will get much faster.   Nuno G. Pedro We just want to be “Beam me up, Scotty.” That’s what we want to say. We want to go from point A to point A immediately.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. That’s the next level.   Nuno G. Pedro Moving to defense and homeland security. Obviously, there’s a stronger and stronger crossover between homeland security and defense. I’m not sure it’s totally warranted. I’m not sure, again, that our police forces should have tanks and stuff like that. I don’t think so. But there’s definitely a lot of technology that’s cross fitting and cross-cutting across both worlds for all intents and purposes. Some of it, I think, is warranted. Some of the drone usage, I think, makes sense. Some of the elements around software.   Bertrand Schmitt Cybersecurity.   Nuno G. Pedro Exactly. Cybersecurity and other elements. We haven’t talked about software much. We’ve been talking about physical things for a bit. But obviously, on the software side, there’s obviously a lot of crossovers that should be manifested. We have an investment in the homeland security space, but it’s really more around police forces and the use of their body cams, in particular for the purpose of training.   Nuno G. Pedro We feel there’s huge amounts of things that still need to be done around that. There’s a lot of things that you wouldn’t think about that need to be done. For police forces to be better, they need to be able to use what they already have. They have body cams. Why can’t they use it for that?   Nuno G. Pedro Definitely a lot of interesting things happening, but there’s a huge crossover between international defense and homeland security, so to speak, at this stage.   Bertrand Schmitt I think there are a lot of opportunities to serve both markets with similar technologies. I think a lot of startups are focused on that. What’s also interesting is some of the big name investors who are investing in that space. In-Q-Tel (IQT) has been one of the most active investors in defense and national security startups. That’s the name that we always see, backed by the US intelligence community. But there is a lot of more traditional VCs like founder funds that are investing in the space.   Nuno G. Pedro Andreessen Horowitz, we mentioned already Founders Fund, obviously Marc, Peter. We invest a little bit as well. We have some ground rules around what do we consider to be evil, no evil and create some borderlines around our investment thesis. We do have a sort of evil versus no evil piece of analysis when we’re looking at an investment.   Nuno G. Pedro The investments that I mentioned in this episode before went through very complex analysis internally for us to really be sure that we felt that we were not breaking that rule that we have as a partnership. But obviously a lot more activity in the space in terms of investment framed as we discussed earlier by players like Anduril, like Palantir, like SpaceX.   Nuno G. Pedro I mean, SpaceX more on the aeronautics and aerospace space. But obviously, this unbundling of what government controls and dominates and does, going into a direction where the private sector can take some of those responsibilities and really innovate much faster than government and these complexes would by themselves. I think that’s the piece of the puzzle that we’ve seen.   Nuno G. Pedro We also have had some movements with the NATO Innovation Fund. We’ll see what happens with the NATO Innovation Fund. A lot of activity around it, in particular in Europe, and really deploying capital at scale into other funds, into startups, and actually even working on the accelerator side with establishing DIANA, the defense Innovation Accelerator, to connect startups with defense problems. To create this venture building, venture studio element and this open innovation construct with defense departments, et cetera, we’ll see if it bears any fruits.   Nuno G. Pedro That’s super, super exciting. Even if we don’t have huge massive shifts, but if we create this environment where startups really can engage with the defense ecosystem much more easily.   Bertrand Schmitt I mean, there has been also this partnership between SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir. Partnerships/alliance in order to better provide a new edge solution to defense and overall homeland security market. I think there is a lot of initiatives, new player working better together, as well as new funds in Europe and US. We cannot talk about defense or homeland security. We start talking about AI.   Bertrand Schmitt It’s quite clear that AI can bring a lot on the table. It might be about automated image analysis. It might help you pilot automatically your drone. It might help you automatically acquire targets. It might help you go through a lot of quantity of data all at once. I think AI can also, not just can, but is playing and should be playing an even bigger role in the US and European military and defense industry.   Nuno G. Pedro It’s definitely shifting everything. For good and bad. With AI, we will need to figure out what will happen out of it. It’s not just the physical space, the autonomous vehicle piece, the drones that self-manage. There’s a lot of stuff happening also in the sea, so underwater as well.   Nuno G. Pedro Not just the physical stuff, but also the software stuff. The software stuff is dramatic. Like planning tools, thinking through intelligence analysis, imaging, and really identifying things much faster. I think that’s a game changer. I’m still to see whether all of it will be positive or not, but it’s definitely a game changer.   Nuno G. Pedro I think it links well to this notion and this trend that we see in defense and military where a lot of the things that are now addressing military and defense needs and even homeland security to a certain extent are coming from companies that are really deploying them with dual use. Dual use strategies. These are companies that have, so to speak, a commercial side of their business and then a military side of their business. All the companies we invested in have dual use.   Nuno G. Pedro They have a commercial side where they have commercial uses for the technologies they’re developing, the things that they’re doing, et cetera, but then there are also a use for it that defense could use in effect. Really interesting how we’ve gone from companies that, again, this was a taboo area to companies now that do both commercial and defense alongside. I think that’s going to be a huge driver of tremendous innovation for overall the industry.   Bertrand Schmitt To be clear, I’m certainly not advocating some of these technologies for civilian use. Some of them are incredibly scary when you think about what could be done once you automate more, once you put more AI into it. I will say for some of this technology, I’m certainly a believer in the defense space. When you think about autonomous target acquisition, for instance, this is such a game changer. Because if you can recognise by imagery alone, video alone, a target and go there all by yourself, this is changing so much how war has been working for the past 70 years.   Bertrand Schmitt You can see something from far away, decide it’s a fair target and automatically go there with risk of detection being decreased, but also risk of manipulation. Your GPS positioning could be jammed, but if you still see your target, you still go there. Compared to laser that was usually combined with human beings in the loop, it’s also game changer. There is no human beings in the loop. You can totally imagine a swarm of military weapons that are just going in one direction and picking target after target without any human in the loop.   Bertrand Schmitt I can imagine how war is going to change at scale. That’s, to your point, around defense spending and other stuff, is certainly raising a lot of questions. Do some of the existing programs still make sense in a new type of war?   Nuno G. Pedro Just to be clear, there’s things that should absolutely not be used in commercial. One example I was thinking about is if you’re developing, for example, a highly-advanced AI methodology that deals really well with edge case scenarios, for example, loss of connectivity or dramatic weather conditions, et cetera. They have great commercial applications for sure. For self-driving cars, for many other things that are being done in the commercial world. But guess what? They also have great applications for, for example, dealing with drones in war environments.   Nuno G. Pedro I think it’s more around that logic that I’m talking about that the dual use obviously should be used thoughtfully, but in many cases, it makes a lot of sense. That you are developing very advanced technologies that should be used across both worlds.   Bertrand Schmitt It helps reduce the cost, the spend, leverage R&D. It makes a lot of sense as long as we’re careful about what we are doing at home and still protect freedom and personal privacy.   Bertrand Schmitt As you have seen, there has been a lot of change in the past 15 years in aerospace, defense, and homeland security industry. There is a convergence in technology, commercial viability, and national security. There are opportunities in dual use tech, in AI, in deep tech manufacturings, and I think startups are already at a tipping point where they start to reshape how national security is achieved, making this, I believe, in a pivotal time for investor.   Bertrand Schmitt At the end of the day, it’s not all about SaaS anymore. It’s also about what can be done through hardware and software in support of new space programs and defense programs. Thank you, Nuno.   Nuno G. Pedro Thank you, Bertrand.