75 – The SaaS Apocalypse: Why AI Broke the Software Business Model

The SaaS multiples run was long, but it had to come to an end. Or Had it? Navigation: Intro Setting The Scene The Roots — This Didn’t Happen Overnight The Structural Thesis — Why This Isn’t Just A Sell-Off The Private Market Fallout The Bull Case — Is The Market Wrong? Separating The Wheat From The Chaff — Who Survives? Wrap-Up & Key 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 Introduction Nuno Goncalves PedroWelcome to Episode 75 of Tech DECIPHERED, the SaaS Apocalypse: Why AI Breaks or has Broken or Broke the Software Business Model. In today’s episode, we will talk about what’s been going on in SaaS. SaaS, also known as Software as a Service, as a sector, has just had its worst month since the 2008 financial crisis. Give or take, around 1 trillion in software stock market cap has evaporated this year, and it was triggered in many ways by the rise of a lot of the things we’re seeing, in particular, agentic AI. We’ll talk about it later.One of the key triggers seems to have been the launch of Claude or Claude Cowork. There’s a lot of fears that the model that is taken as SaaS to be the darling of investors, both VCs, private equity funds, and also retail investors, has now evaporated. The sweetheart industry no longer works. Bertrand, what happened to SaaS? What’s happening? Bertrand SchmittSetting The SceneWe are in the middle of what some are calling the SaaSpocalypse. I think that was a coined term early this year. It’s pretty bad. We are recording that March 13th. Definitely January, February of this year, 2026, were really terrible. There is no question about it. Strangely enough, since the start of the war with Iran, there has been a small rebound, so we will see how it goes. But also to give some context, we are still not worse than what happened in 2022. We are still in a better place so far. I would say the difference, there is clearly a focus in terms of SaaS versus tech in general for that down term. Nuno Goncalves PedroWe’ve seen obviously a lot of things happening, right? A lot of announcements. The iShares expanded Tech-Software ETF down 25% year-to-date. Everyone seems to be running into panic, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs. Basically, Jefferies, I think, as you said, originally termed this the SaaSpocalypse. But definitely, it seems like everyone’s trying to sell stock and saying, “Hey, SaaS is going to die.” We’ve seen a lot of interesting elements to this, we’ll talk about it later, around AI eats software. Software eats the world. AI now eats software. I guess AI eats the world.But the reality is, we’ll discuss it later in the episode, it might be just a lot of stuff that’s reacting to what’s actually happening in the market, that there was a couple of misses in terms of numbers, that the growth of some of the key SaaS players that are driving a lot of the public stock wasn’t that great recently. That adding to some launches like we mentioned, the Claude Cowork launch, et cetera, has led people to say, “Hey, maybe some entire spaces of SaaS don’t make much sense going forward.” Bertrand SchmittActually, I don’t know if you noticed, but I think it was yesterday, it was announced that the CEO of Adobe just resigned. I was shocked how bad they managed the transition to AI. I guess it’s one of the first victims of what has been happening. From my perspective, and I will go deeper, but there is a bit of an overreaction. Claude is amazing as a tool, but the launch of Claude Cowork, a few plugins decimating the market, I think that’s an overreaction in the sense that many of these SaaS companies will be able to actually benefit from AI as well. Or some of the new AI tools really, really depend on the existence of an underlying SaaS layer that’s controlling some processes, some data. So I think we have to be careful about the extremes.At the same time, what is true, the growth rate has been going down for SaaS. If you look in the 2021 to these days, we move maybe from 30-11%, 12% average growth rate. It’s a dramatic difference in growth rate, and you cannot keep the same valuation when your growth rate has been divided by three. I mean, that’s just not possible.I think that there might be some overreaction about what company like Claude can truly achieve. At the same time, the reality is there that while SaaS companies are usually relatively strong companies, the growth rate has diminished, and as a result, so should the valuation.The Roots — This Didn’t Happen OvernightBut maybe we can move deeper about what happened the past 2 years about SaaS. Nuno Goncalves PedroIndeed. Some things going back as much as 2024 when Salesforce had its worst trading day. By then, in 2 decades, and went down by 20% on a rare revenue miss. So some early people, a lot of analysts, see this as an early warning of what was to come. Late last year, a huge shift as the different labs of a bunch of different players started launching agentic solutions, which in some ways started eating into a lot of the functionality, not just of vertical SaaS, but also of horizontal SaaS. As a distinction for some of our listeners who are not familiar with that distinction, vertical SaaS is normally SaaS that’s very specific to a specific industry or sub-industry or specific arena, whereas horizontal SaaS is normally SaaS that doesn’t require much adaptation to work across industries. A good example of that might be HR management systems.But basically, because of some of the early developments in those labs and a lot of the solutions that we started seeing around agentic tools, the market started being less positive on SaaS players and trying to readjust it. Those are the historic moments, 2024, 2025. Then all of a sudden, we see the growth rates of SaaS companies coming down, because obviously this doesn’t only have manifestations in the public equity markets. This has manifestations in clients.People, at this moment in time, we’ll talk about it later, are reconsidering their options. They’re like, “Why should I have a SaaS tool? Should I buy it from another player? Should I have a more holistic solution or an integration with Claude, for example? Should I develop in-house?” We’ll talk at length on what’s in customers’ minds, but customers started changing their views and stop buying some solutions that were out there from the large players that are public equities today. Bertrand SchmittYeah, it’s clear that there has been also just overall industry-wide tendency to try to cut on the SaaS subscriptions. Maybe there was too much interest buying too many software solutions, not rationalizing enough, not being careful about the spend. It makes sense that this has hurt overall SaaS growth rate. At the same time, there has been a transfer from IT spending from SaaS tools to AI, so we create a smaller budget for buying SaaS software.But going back, when you look at the change in revenue multiples, it’s crazy. In 2021, we were close to 20X EV, enterprise value to revenues. Now we are talking about 6-7X entering 2026, and we will see later on it does crunch even more. Right now, we are at 4X revenues. So from 20 to 6 to 4, and that’s the lowest in terms of multiples since 2016. That’s 10 years ago. P/E multiple for what multiples also comprise from close to 40 to close to 20.Talking about Adobe, Adobe trades at 5-year average of 30X, now at 12X. No wonder the CEO resigned. I don’t want to be mean, but I think it’s clear some CEO were very strong leading their companies into a SaaS paradigm, but were not as strong leading their company to a new AI paradigm. I think the markets are going to be brutal. If you are good at showing that you can transition to AI, you’re an important piece of the puzzle for AI, that’s one thing. But if the markets believe your products have not kept up, then it’s truly big trouble.I mean, they are not the only one. Intuit 34% decline in a month. Atlassian, minus 35 in a week. ServiceNow also down a third. They are not the only one, but definitely companies have to show some proof of either the lack of vulnerability in an AI world or their capacity to really move strong to a brand-new AI world. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Structural Thesis — Why This Isn’t Just A Sell-OffWhat are the structural issues? Why wasn’t this just a sell-off? Why is this structurally a problem? The first thing is really around monetization and business model. SaaS 1.0 or 2.0, however we want to call it, was based on seat-based licensing. Seat-based licensing was the notion that with more employees and more users on the platform, there would be more revenue for the SaaS company. Very simple, very clear, very lucrative.Now, obviously, AI agents don’t occupy seats. An agent can do the work of 10 people, can do the work of 20 people, 30 people, 100 people, whatever it is. Therefore, if I’m a company, and I’m using agents, and not necessarily a human user, I’m not going to buy 10 licenses for the work of 10. I have one license, and it’s used by an agent that basically has access to that tool. That’s the first issue. The first issue is that the seat-based pricing, assuming humans, assuming a certain degree of productivity, et cetera, all of a sudden is under stress. Bertrand SchmittMaybe to highlight some point, not every SaaS company was focused on per-seat pricing. Me, when I led App Annie, we didn’t have a per-seat licensing or pricing at all, so we were focused on value-based pricing. But that’s true that around us, we have seen that quite a lot of your typical SaaS business was run on a per-seat pricing. Anytime there is a market downturn, you pay a dear price for your per-seat pricing. On top of it, these days, as you said, we have AI. In an AI world, the per-seat pricing model breaks down. Nuno Goncalves PedroIndeed. Now people are asking for other kinds of pricing schema, right? Either flat pricing based on certain usage patterns or, for example, outcome-based pricing. So depending on the outcome of what I’m trying to achieve, is it a booking of a sales call, is it something else? Whatever it is, I pay for that. But I do not pay for seats because that doesn’t work anymore.There have been a lot of movements around these licensing agreements and these basic elements. Some have actually now tried to create agentic licensing agreements. It’s like, “Okay, I have licensing agreements now for your agents, not for your end users.” It used to be end user licensing agreements. It’s now agentic licensing agreements. Obviously, there’s a shift.Part of the shift is, I believe people want to be in a measurement scale that is different. They don’t want just to pay for a seat. They want to pay for either specific outcomes that are very clearly measurable or have flat fees across the board on a variety of things. I think we’ll see the emergence of a couple of these business models and these monetization models more significantly. I do think we’re still to see some innovation around some of these monetization models, which will occur over the next probably few years as people are getting used to it. Okay, now it makes more sense for me to pay by this rather than by that.Again, because it’s a disruption, we’re still getting and nailing down what effectively the new monetization models and business models will look like for some of these players, but it still will be served as a service. We’ll come back to that later as well. Agents can do a lot of stuff and whatever, but it’s like agents and AI are software. AI is software, whatever you want to call it. AI is software at its base and its profound meaning and what it does, et cetera. Bertrand SchmittSeat-based pricing, usage-based pricing, yes, it’s too simple. Yes, it has its flaw. But at the same time, when the industry started, it made a lot of sense. That’s easy to manage, easy to control, at least from the SaaS company perspective. But definitely now that the industry is maturing, I can see that rise and the benefit and value of moving to an outcome-based pricing or to a value-based pricing. What I like with that also, it’s more truly win-win for both sides, for the SaaS companies as well as for the customer of the SaaS company. If you are more win-win, more aligned, I think it’s a better situation, more frictionless. I think it would be a big change.Another interesting piece of the puzzle, obviously, of all the changes we’re seeing is that one of the best assumptions in SaaS was you have 80% to 90% gross margin. If you are below 80%, there were serious questions coming your way in terms of what’s wrong with your business model as a SaaS business. Below 80% was blinking yellow light, below 70, blinking red lights. But now, it’s very different because AI-native companies, you’re expecting more a 50-60% gross margin.Obviously, if you’re SaaS companies, you better move fast to more AI-native tools and services. That will impact your margin. When you decrease so much your margins, of course, it will impact your valuation. There is no other way around that. You cannot value the same way a 90% gross margin business and a 50% gross margin business. That’s simply not reasonable. I think that one is part of the change and part of a different way to value companies. It’s very reasonable. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe first two structural issues is, one, obviously the per-seat pricing piece is potentially dying or at least becoming less pervasive in the market, added to these emerging pricing and monetization models that we just discussed, value-based, outcome-based, some usage-based pricing, some hybrid models that are also out there with some base subscriptions and then other kinds of things and tiers on top of it, either usage or outcome-based.The third big structural shift that we are seeing is, and I already alluded to it earlier, this notion of build-versus-buy. In the past, I think the market went fully into buy. In some ways, even beyond the, “I will buy one” solution that solves all the problems, we went into best in class. We went to unbundled buying: I’ll buy the best solutions for what I need in my corporation and enterprise needs.Now we’re getting a shift back into building: I’ll build my own stuff. I think a lot of it is relating to two things. One, there’s coding agents out there like Claude Code, Codex from OpenAI, and a bunch of other coding agents that have emerged. There’s a lot of solutions out there, like we mentioned already, Claude Cowork, that really managed to have agentic solutions into workflows that are deeply embedded into some of the enterprises.At the end of the day, I think there’s a lot more of this notion of, I have all my data in-house. I want to really leverage all the data I have. I don’t want to just use a third-party solution that has generic data. I want to use my data set, I want to use my stuff, and I want to basically fit that into ongoing improvements in terms of workflow.The other piece, I think, what’s happening with IT departments in some large corporations that’s leading to this build mindset rather than this buy mindset is also the notion of maybe we have too many people. How do we really express our productivity if we don’t have solutions that are at the core of our processes? If we have solutions at the core of the processes that we develop ourselves or that we develop in partnership with integrators, et cetera, but using some of these new AI platforms, we also have more visibility on the people that we can let go.Now, I know this is quite negative, but I think this has also been leading to all the layoffs that we’ve been seeing across industries recently, where people are like, “Well, I can just extract productivity.” We’ve seen some of those very visible ones. We were talking about Amazon and what’s happening at Amazon with the layoffs recently. A significant amount of layoffs recently announced.Then some other issues on the other side where apparently the junior engineers that were still working on stuff using Claude and other tools that they were using internally started breaking platforms and breaking systems. Anyway, definitely there’s a lot of that going into this build mindset. I want to have control. I want to make sure I understand where the productivity enhancements are, and that will give me more visibility on the people that I need to keep and the people that I need to let go. Bertrand SchmittI’m not so convinced about this part of the puzzle. I think that for many, AI is a convenient demand, but I’m more thinking that some companies, Amazon included, Microsoft, truly, truly over-hired in 2020, 2021. Yes, they scaled back a bit, 2022, 2023. But I don’t think they ever scaled back to what was reasonable given their needs. So it’s quite convenient to say, “No, it’s not management mistake of efficiency, it’s something new AI, and we have to adjust to that.”What I believe is true, however, is that you cannot fund both at the same time in the sense of you cannot finance an over-bloated workforce, and two, significant extremely large AI investment. At some point, these companies were faced with a choice, and they took a reasonable decision on this to be more efficient with their workforce.But personally, I think that actually the ability to do so much more with AI will make more companies think more about their teams and building things because when suddenly your engineers can be way more efficient, can build way more, the value increases. So you could argue that there is an opportunity for companies to deliver more, and as a result, I can see if you’re a good engineer, then there will be opportunities to build more value, potentially across more companies.So we might see a shift where you have more growth in software-related jobs outside the core top 10 bigger software companies, but growing more widely across your typical S&P 500 and even SMBs who could never afford to really deliver value with typical software engineering. But now suddenly, software engineering equipped with AI can be more dramatic in terms of value for them. Nuno Goncalves PedroI agree this is a scapegoat. I agreed that there’s a lot of posturing as well. If someone can lay off a significant percentage of their… It’s almost like the percentage of people you can lay off becomes your new pattern as a CEO, your new, “Basically, I’m saying right now to the market, I can cut…” I mean, Block, I think, cut off 40% of their workforce.At this point in time, seems a bit dehumanized. I think the tech companies are the worst cases, in particular because AI also does disrupt them a lot in their own processes internally. But it feels to me right now, it’s a little bit this one-upmanship of, “Okay, I can lay off more people than you can, kind of thing.” It’s precisely all the fears that a lot of people have around AI. It’s like you’re dehumanizing work. It’s like at the end of the day, people are still needed to work, et cetera. Bertrand SchmittBut I think Block might be one of these companies that completely over-hired over the past few years and never took the pill to reoptimize the business. Nuno Goncalves PedroI think we mentioned it at a previous episode that there was an estimate at some point in time that… For example, even Google had more than double the number of engineers they needed at any given point in time. So obviously, they did hoard engineering resources in other capacities. But at this point in time, it feels a little bit like up to you since being a software engineer right now is a kiss of death kind of thing. Which is weird because at the same time, we are seeing tremendous reallocation of capital overall in the industry towards infrastructure and platforms, where hyperscalers are at 660-690 billion in infrastructure CapEx for this year alone, and 75% of that being AI, where we are seeing a lot of movements around how do I budget accordingly if I’m a corporation.To your point, I think you made that point earlier, Bertrand, how if I’m the CIO of a company, do I allocate my resources more clearly, in particular, if I’m taking into account that I need to spend more money on AI and AI tooling and AI platforms. Obviously, at the end of the day, the CFOs are still there, and the CFOs are basically saying, “Hey, guys, we went into an unbundled world. We had all these agreements with all these people. I want more concentration.” At the same time, the CEO is telling me we need AI, “So whatever it is, you guys tell me what it is, but we can’t increase our budget for this stuff. We need to decrease it, and there needs to be AI in it.” Obviously, there’s a lot of reallocation also at a micro level within the corporate world. Bertrand SchmittYes, you cannot say it will be more built versus buy. At the same time, we are going to need less engineers to do the build. You see what I mean? Even with AI helping you, building which still cost you more, require more software engineering than just a buy decision. For me, what’s interesting is that not so many of these stories can be true at the same time. You require a next workforce, but at the same time, you’re going to rebuild your whole software stack from zero just because of the AI God that you just brought in from cloud. This is not reasonable, simply not reasonable. Nuno Goncalves PedroI think the thesis is that your top engineer is I think, in particular, the more senior engineers, can now do the job of 10. Therefore, what I am switching in terms of cost, I’m not saying I’m agreeing with the thesis, but the thesis is that. What I’m reallocating in terms of budget is, I’m reallocating towards spend at infrastructure platform level, on tokens, et cetera. That’s basically, I think, the thesis of what we’re seeing happening right now. Bertrand SchmittYes, but if you were just, quote, unquote, buying software, you’re not building software. You didn’t need software engineering to just buy software. Your software engineer that becomes as valuable as 10, yeah, but you had zero if you were just buying software. You see what I mean? Nuno Goncalves PedroNo, IT departments have always had engineers, the larger corporations. Yeah, for sure. Bertrand SchmittIt’s a very different game if you are moving from buying to building. It’s my point, I guess. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt is. Just to be clear, Bertrand, this whole build-versus-buy, the build is going to be done with a lot of use of outsourcing and a lot of use of service providers and a lot of use of integrators, et cetera. This whole bullshit of build-versus-buy, in effect, it’s a misnomer because at the same time, you’re going to have to hire, to your point, you’re going to have to hire companies, et cetera, to help you do this. It’s not magically that you can do it off the existing IT departments that you have. Bertrand SchmittExactly. The question will also be, is your first priority of business to rebuild Salesforce from scratch so that it better fits your internal need as a corporation because you have rebuilt from scratch with AI? I don’t think so. That for me is total overhyped bullshit. Klarna was big on that, this is total BS, quite frankly. Not only it didn’t work, but it makes zero business sense. Zero business sense. You’re not going to rebuild a CRM just for the fun of it while your software engineering could be focused on your core value proposition as a business. If you’re a company just starting, you have processes from scratch, you still don’t have solution, yeah, maybe you could consider that.But even then, is it really your priority versus building your core value proposition? For me, that’s a big question. But what I would expect, however, is that this overall trend mindset and stuff is going to keep the pressure on two software companies in terms of reducing tiers of cost, in terms of delivering more value, in terms of being more aligned to the business, and in terms of overall growth rates that are simply not the same as they used to be. Nuno Goncalves PedroBefore maybe we move to another topic, I think it’s clear, we’ll come back to that later, that there are a lot of overblown elements in this. You can never disregard a couple of very, very core elements. A lot of these software companies have very deep tooling into significant enterprise customers. You can’t just rebuild it from scratch yourself to your point. Not only does it make sense, but you can’t. It would take you years to do it. Good luck to you.Secondly, they have also distribution. They are pervasive in the market. They have sales forces. They have people that are selling out there. They have go-to-market teams. Again, we’ll talk about that in maybe one of our penultimate sections today. But maybe to move forward, we talked a lot about the public equity markets and how there’s been a reckoning by institutional and retail investors, et cetera.The Private Market FalloutBut also there’s been a private market fallout. The first one is very obvious to understand. Private equity firms loaded themselves with SaaS. Some even went after roll-up strategies in SaaS, like bringing a bunch of companies together and trying to attack a market and really getting a significant part of that. Software accounts for roughly 25% of the private credit market, which is incredible. Just that’s private credit alone, significant again. They’re loaded with a bunch of companies that have nowhere to go. They can’t IPO, nobody else is interested in buying them unless it’s for a huge write-off or write-down. That’s the first problem right now that we’re seeing in this fallout, which is the private equity market itself. Not only the buyout market, but also we saw a lot of growth funds loading themselves with private equity stock, with a rather SaaS stock, private SaaS stock.Right now, there’s nowhere for that to go. They’re stuck between rock and a hard place with a lot of solutions that are not growing at the rates they were growing before, with a public market that’s not really interesting right now to IPO in, because as we were mentioning earlier, the multiples have gone downhill dramatically, so it’s not interesting. Basically, it’s a chicken-and-egg issue. I would love to sell this now, but I can’t because I have awful market. I can’t IPO it either, so what do I do with all these assets? That’s the first issue here. Bertrand SchmittIt’s clear that you have to be pretty delusional to think that what’s happening in the software public markets is not impacting the private markets. We don’t know why it will be in six months. In six months, it could keep getting worse in the public markets. Six months, at some point, maybe there is a recognition it went too far in terms of adjustment. It’s always tough. But at the same time, you have to be prudent. For sure, what it means is that if I’m a private equity investor in a SaaS business, you have to be a very, very, very special SaaS company to get more financing these days at good terms.Sometimes it’s a very simple math. If you fundraise at 20X, even 10X, how do you go to get to another round of financing if now your multiples are at 4X? That simply makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Or you need to have grown into your valuation enough that it’s not crazy anymore. If you raise at 20X, and now you’re in 4X multiple, then you need to have grown 5X in your revenues so that you simply stay at the same valuation, or maybe you have to accept a different valuation. But again, quite frankly, the tough part would be convincing investors that it make any sense to put money in a SaaS business. Nuno Goncalves PedroJust to rub it in, just to make it even worse, the secondary market, which was a great market for exits or partial liquidations, et cetera, is demanding now huge discounts. There’s no way I’m going to buy into a stock if it’s not growing at the same pace. I’m like, “I’m sorry.” I will buy your stock at a significant discount. In some cases, it might be what would be a lesser price per share than your last round or your last two rounds. Not just, I want a discount on what you think you’re worth, but it’s like, I want a discount on your last round.Because there’s liquidity issues also in some parts of the market, we were talking just about the private equity firms, some of these deals will go through. If all of this wasn’t quite enough, we have what’s happening in venture capital, which is very close to my heart, of course, because that’s where I play. If you come to me, it’s like I’m a SaaS player immediately off the game. I’m like, “Really? You’re a SaaS, tell me more.” I was just talking to a player recently, SaaS play, there was nothing around AI in their pitch.It’s not just because you have AI in your pitch that I’m going to give you money, clear, but if you’re doing a SaaS play and there’s no AI in your pitch, I’m like, “Am I missing something?” If it looks very classic, I’m like, “Oh.” There’s been a huge, huge reduction in confidence in the VC space in investing in SaaS. There’s a tremendous hyper focus on AI, and in AI investing, AI apps, platforms, infrastructure by most VC firms at this moment in time. And so at this point in time, if you’re a non-AI SaaS player trying to raise money, where’s your AI play? I think that’s the question you’re going to get. It’s going to be very difficult to raise, very difficult to raise. Bertrand SchmittI agree with you. Myself, I saw that SaaS startups with absolutely no AI in their deck, and I was so shocked. I was like, “Guys, where are you living? Are you living in a parallel universe? Are you living under a rock? What’s going on?” Then they are like, “Yeah, but we’re preparing something like that, I come back and prepare.”But even then, as you say, it’s not just leaving AI in your deck. It’s what are your proof points? What have you delivered? How do you make sure that it’s truly differentiator? And how does it make sense versus a pure AI native companies? How are you going to find the new cloud tools that are going to get out in a few weeks and more or ChatGPT or whatever? You have to have a very different proof point. There is nothing new in the past. It’s how are you going to survive against Google? How are you going to survive against Salesforce? How are you going to survive against Microsoft? So nothing is new.Software universe is changing. There’s always that big guys that can destroy you in a matter of weeks. So the question is more, how are you going to be smart enough not to be killed too easily and to find your way in a space that’s probably moving faster than ever? That is probably the difference is that it’s weeks after weeks, you have big change. I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen in that space before because I’ve seen there, I’ve seen that, and it’s moving faster than ever. But it’s nothing new that there is this big company potentially destroying your business. You have to be smart.I feel in some ways, maybe it’s the 2020s, but people stopped being smart, quite frankly. They just raised easy at very large valuation and think that you just do something sometimes pretty basic in terms of software development and that’s good enough. Your GTM is traditional, and you think you made it, and you deserve some investment. I think you must have seen some of this. I have seen a lot of this. In some ways, it’s good. The market is becoming more discerning. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Bull Case — Is The Market Wrong?But is the market wrong? Maybe shifting to that, at least my perspective is it’s wrong. It’s not fully wrong, but it’s wrong. There’s a right sizing of multiples, but maybe 4X is not the right multiple either. This whole 20X on actuals and 40X on forward stuff didn’t make any sense. There is an argumentation to say that the market is oversold. All the banks have come forward. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Jeffries, Morgan Stanley. Everyone’s come forward and said there’s been definitely, Bank of America, whatever, there’s been an overselling of stock, a dramatic overselling of stock. There’s been a panic that wasn’t warranted. The price has gone down too dramatically for some of these key players.I think part of it, in some ways, is what we were alluding to earlier, the fact that some of these players have built really important stacks that are fitting their customers in a significant on core processes. You can’t just rip it off and put something new. Magically, it will work. It will be around building things around it rather than building things that replace it. Will there be over the long term potential disruption of some of these players around CRM and other solutions? For sure, we’ll see it.But definitely, some of the existing players, public companies that are large, are here to stay, and they themselves will buy into these markets. They’ll acquire positions into other service providers into toolmakers, into other platforms that allow them to be fully AI-enabled and to make their platforms more AI-enabled. I do think there was a huge amount of overselling. The second thing we already alluded to as well as go-to-market. If I’m selling something to someone, there’s a salesperson involved or there are a couple of salespeople involved, they’re not going anywhere. So in some ways, that relationship building with CIOs, with their teams, with procurement teams, all of that is still there.And a lot of the large SaaS players have been doing this for decades. So they have the surface of attack and go-to-market that will take a long time to build for even some of these startups that are disrupting, so to speak, the market. My view is there has been too much panic and the modes of the large players that are already public, in some cases, haven’t been considered at all. Bertrand SchmittThere’s definitely some truth in that. Another piece of the puzzle is that if SaaS is not growing as fast as it used to be, it’s still growing. Many companies are still very good cash generation machines. Many of these companies are moving to AI full speed, improving their tools, changing how you can search their data, how you can leverage their data. They are very close to the data, so they know best how to deliver value on this data. They can integrate existing AI tools. There are a lot of ways for them to capture part of the value that native AI companies are claiming they will get. I think it’s definitely going to, and we’ll talk more later on. I think there will be a question around how do you differentiate the best SaaS companies from the worst SaaS companies in that context.But maybe I just felt we moved a bit quickly on one big event that’s shaping the software industry, it’s the current crash in private credit. Do you have some thoughts about that? Because what’s happening there is pretty crazy, to be frank. Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, we’ve seen a lot of these players like KKR and Apollo getting slaughtered. Basically, Blue Owl, TPG, Ares, KKR all fell double this in one day on private credit exposure fears. Overall, Apollo has fell 7% as the date of as we were recording BlackRock, 5%. These guys were walking on water and all of a sudden, there was like, “What happened?” And what happened was private credit exposure. A lot of the concerns in the market is private credit is super sexy, and for those who don’t understand what it means is I’m giving credit to a private company in exchange for something, either warrants in the company or revenue sharing in the future, or I’ll get your revenues in advance from you, or I’ll take, whatever it is. There’s over exposure.There’s this potential logic that all these guys are scaling, all the companies that they give private credit to are scaling. And now there are concerns that there might be some dramatic credit in the market, that some of these companies are actually going to die, they’re going to implode, or they’re not going to really fulfill their covenants in their private credit agreements. Bertrand SchmittIt was hidden in plain sight, but that some of these private credit funds at 25, 35% exposure to software, IT, and SaaS, so a huge chunk in an industry where you bet on the long term revenues and cash flow to pay back your loans, while at the same time there is a discovery that this business may be at risk in the next three, five years or even one year because of AI.I think that was the first big chink in the armor that suddenly the creditworthiness of these companies might not have been evaluated properly. But two, it looks like there is also fraud that has been happening. I was reading stories how three, four people, accounting companies, were valuing and estimating loans for hundreds of SaaS business. Good luck, this is crazy. It looks like there is another layer to that story. Nuno Goncalves PedroWhen there are industries building a lot of wealth or apparent wealth that’s coming a little bit from out of nowhere, the likelihood that there’s fraud and things that were not properly done is, it sadly increases dramatically or exponentially. I think we’re seeing just maybe the first effects of that. Bertrand SchmittI was reading, for instance, that one of these big funds was no haircut across the portfolio, ever seen value that was 100%, whatever. One quarter after that, one of their clients going out of business and they lost everything. In three months, you move from no haircut to 100% haircut, decent enough part of your portfolio. This is crazy for a credit business. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s ostrich syndrome. You just put your head under the ground, and you’re like, “Hey, whatever.” I don’t know. Bertrand SchmittYeah, it’s zero mark-to-market in an industry that should be relatively conservative. This is private credit. This is not VC, this is not startup, this is not equity, this is credit, so pretty scary. Another piece was like, some of them were supposedly senior on the debt, but they were not so senior after all, this is insane. You claim seniority, but you don’t have it.My point, I think what’s happening in private credit is maybe it all started with that what’s going on, a lot of software exposure. It’s risky because of AI, but the more investor dig into it, that’s when they started to realize that maybe there is more than just that software issue. I guess, all of this is going to be an issue for software business because if suddenly you cannot get loans anymore or the loans you add, you have to pay them back or when it’s time to pay them off, you cannot renew the loan. There is nobody else to turn yourself to get another loan to replace it. That’s not going to be fun and that’s going to impact your growth rates. That could potentially also even be worse than that, be dramatic for your own business survival. Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe now switching back to the positive part for the bull case. We think the market’s wrong, not fully, but wrong. The other side is still things move on. We’ve also had the same issues in credits in several industries in the past when markets imploded and credit came back. In some cases, it took a while. In other cases, it came back relatively quickly. One great analogy on making a bull case on why all of this stock that was sold was oversold, there’s too much stock being sold on SaaS and at prices that don’t make any sense is an analogy, precisely, for example, with retail. Amazon was going to destroy everyone their mother in 2010, and it did not. It was going to destroy Walmart. Walmart passed the $1 trillion market cap. Bertrand SchmittNot too bad. Nuno Goncalves PedroSo what happened? They adapted. They had huge advantages. They had huge advantages in terms of their customer base, presence, relationship with their suppliers, with the offerings they had, et cetera. They had huge advantages of economies of scale, and they leverage those advantages. And those advantages ultimately materialized in tremendous increase in revenue, tremendous increase in market capital as well.Amazon has done really well as well. It’s not like Amazon didn’t do well. Again, I think this notion, people sometimes have this difficulty in separating the notion of disruption from the notion of replacement. Disruption doesn’t mean necessarily full replacement. You can disrupt industries, disrupt players in that industry, and still those players will exist 10, 20 years later, and they’ll be much bigger because they adapted. The ones that don’t adapt may be killed.But the disruption doesn’t necessarily mean replacement or killing. It means just that effectively the rules of the game, the business model, which we already talked about, monetization models, the way that capital flows in that industry, et cetera, all of that shifts. It doesn’t mean that necessarily the existing players are not going to exist tomorrow. In some cases, they will exist and they’ll be even stronger tomorrow. Bertrand SchmittI think what’s happening is truly a disruption of the SaaS business model, of the SaaS valuations, of the SaaS analysis, because now you need a new prism to analyze it. What are the markets doing in the meantime? They are just dumping it, waiting for, “Okay, how do we look at it in a different way? Who are going to be the winners and the losers?” For now, we don’t care, they’re all losers. But I think that the next piece of the puzzle for us in this episode, but for the market is, how are we going to separate the wheat from the chaff? Who is going to survive? Who is going to more than just survive? Who is going to thrive in that new industry. Nuno Goncalves PedroThere I feel the ones that survive, there’s a couple of obvious ones we can go into. Two that immediately come to my mind are data infrastructure, the Snowflakes, Databricks of the world, because this is the underpinning of everything that’s happening around AI. I don’t see the data infrastructure fundamentally shifting right now. It might in the future, but right now I don’t see it fundamentally shift. Those guys have, if anything, tailwinds rather than headwinds.Then the other one that’s very obvious to me is cybersecurity, where I think AI is very additive to it rather than just necessarily replacing everything that exists. In some ways, that already been used for a while, certainly by the top players. Definitely, those are two immediate categories and areas that come to mind that have maybe more headwinds and tailwinds where really AI is adding rather than subtracting to it. Bertrand SchmittNo, I totally agree with you concerning data infrastructure, cybersecurity. You could argue if you take cybersecurity, that with the rise of AI attacks, with AI making it easier than ever to generate attacks, you better build up your security. Nuno Goncalves PedroWith AI? No, but you have to have AI on your side defending as well. The only way to defend AI is AI. Bertrand SchmittThat’s my point. Your cybersecurity vendors will become AI-enabled, will leverage AI at scale in order to defend you, else they won’t be able to defend you, just quite frankly. Nuno Goncalves PedroCorrect. Bertrand SchmittThat’s part of the game. Data infrastructure, no questions. Again, I don’t think you want to redo your infrastructure with brand-new tools, brand-new stuff is the current tools are working great and doing the job. Maybe another piece of the puzzle is that vertical SaaS, domain-specific tools, healthcare, manufacturing, if you have proprietary data, regulatory modes, it will be much harder for AI to disrupt quickly. If you are not disrupted quickly, you have more time to readjust your business model, to adjust your business model, to leverage AI to improve your business model.Again, of course, some companies, we have seen with Adobe, for instance, have not proven great skills at adjusting to AI. Not everyone is going to get out as a winner. I think some categories have better chance to actually not just survive, but potentially thrive. Another piece are systems of record. If you are holding proprietary non-scrapable data that AI needs to function, that you have deep switching costs protecting you, you are not going to disappear right away. I think you will probably survive. If you are smart enough, you might be able to even adjust and leverage AI.But I can see some might just stick to their revenues and hold companies hostage and might not innovate a lot. I guess we’ll do well on the short run, but on the medium to long I would definitely more worried. Nuno Goncalves PedroOne point I would like to make is at the end of the day, there’s more than that. The algorithmic methodologies you should use for specific industries, for specific verticals, for specific use cases could vary. We’re still very early in a lot of the application of some of these AI methodologies. We’re not early in the development of the research around them. They’ve been around for decades, but the application of them is still relatively early. I think that’s one of the advantages why vertical SaaS companies and vertical SaaS solutions right now might have an advantage, because the domain in which you’re operating, even algorithmically, is actually different, and you need to really right purpose it for those environments and for those domains.For me, that’s an important point to make. It’s not just any vertical SaaS. I think vertical SaaS, where there’s algorithmic distinctiveness, definitely has a shot at it. Other might not. We just saw a lot of discussions around legal tech and how legal tech got slaughtered with the launch of Claude Cowork, for example. Definitely, it will depend a little bit on the verticals. Bertrand SchmittTake the legal side. There has been some interesting decision recently where basically, if you use AI for legal advice, then this data, this discussion is not privileged. You are at big risk of discovery. There is a lot of issues that if you are working with real lawyers, will not be there. Your data is not discoverable, your discussion stay private, so it cannot be used against you. I think companies have to be very careful and very worried about how some of these tools are being used because it’s creating new risk. Some of these tools are not going to get privileged in the coming few months, I don’t think so.You could argue most of these companies in the first place claim a right to access your data and leverage it. I think that even in legal, it would be interesting to see how it evolved. AI will be able to claim some privilege at some point? Maybe, I don’t know. But on the short run, I can imagine how the legal profession, for instance, will not let it happen too quickly, and how you have to be very careful. It’s great to move fast, but you have to be careful with what is it that you are getting into. Nuno Goncalves PedroLet me guess, the last company you’re going to say or the last type of companies that you’re going to say are like the survive, thrive are AI-first or AI-native companies. Is that correct? Bertrand SchmittYeah, I guess. Yes. They are going to be less disrupted by AI, given that they’re already AI native. Nuno Goncalves PedroThey are AI. Bertrand SchmittWe are going into another territory. Even if you are AI-native, are you going to still get killed by Claude because you don’t have enough technology or ChatGPT because you don’t have enough technology? You are just that basic rapper around another AI tools. Here my perspective and what I share more and more with some entrepreneurs is you have to be careful if you are just an AI native company, but ultimately you are a very AI light in the sense that, yes, you are a native, but you are just reusing other LLMs and stuff, and you have not built any proprietary tech or moat with your data or in your industry. That’s going to be trouble. That’s going to be trouble.I’m not sure the market discriminated well enough at this stage, but I think there will be quickly some premium around, have you built a real technology mode? Are you really in such a situation that you are not going to get killed by a Claude or ChatGPT in a few weeks? I think there will be some discrimination that’s going to happen. Ai native won’t be enough to save you, basically. Nuno Goncalves PedroI think there’s one thing. One is what you’re saying. Is there fundamental technology differentiation and/or product differentiation that will sustain itself as a moat? The second thing is, even if it’s an AI app at a higher level, the reality is the guys that are in the market today, the OpenAIs, the Googles, the Anthropics, etc., they’re not going to address all use cases. There are places where some use cases will still exist. We saw that in the mobile app economy.In some of these use cases, you’d be like, why hasn’t, for example, Apple addressed the need for this kind of solution, whatever, and maybe it took them a decade to do it. Then, when they did it, they almost killed the market. But you have some of these AI apps that I think will still be in the market that will emerge and will address use cases that for some time, for some reason, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., won’t go after. To Bertrand’s point, and I think importantly, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re writing on a very specific use case, and there’s seemingly a high likelihood that any of these players are going to address at some point, you’re not in a sustainable place. You’re not going to be around very long. Bertrand SchmittOr you have to take that initial leadership position and transform it into a deeper technology mode, a business mode. You have to leverage that first mover advantage, maybe, to something deeper than that, something more defensible. Maybe you pivot also in term of industry. You started in industry A, but you realize industry B is really the good one. You have to really optimize your way and not take anything for granted. Nuno Goncalves PedroBertrand, do you remember when it’s like every release of iOS and whatever, we were like, what industry is Apple going to kill now? What are they integrating? There was a period of time where it was literally like every big release, every major release, the yearly one, you’d be like, what industry are they going to kill now? Bertrand SchmittTotally. Totally. I think the same is happening. Definitely, we say AI, but I think some players have been smart enough to zigzag around that onslaught from Apple, from Google. But some will stay put. We think it’s not going to happen to them. Yes, they got into trouble pretty quickly. I think also what we have seen is that a lot of value could be from players who are simply more neutral and independent vis-à-vis a platform. If you need someone in the middle, your three or four mobile platform, or now your three or four LLMs or AI platforms, there might be value you can extract because companies are not… That’s another piece of the puzzle.You don’t want to just depend on Claude. You don’t know in three months, ChatGPT has a better model. You will want to make sure that whatever you are running can adjust to a change of LLM providers, for instance, or tool providers. I think, for instance, one position could be that mutual player, the one gives you the ability to adjust quickly to different technical AI development. We will see. But I think there are different strategies you can go through to make sure you end up not being killed, and that will require smart entrepreneurs. Nuno Goncalves PedroSeparating The Wheat From The Chaff — Who Survives?We talked about who survives, who doesn’t survive. Let me start with one. Or where I think will be categories that will be incredibly under attack, so a lot of players, I think, will disappear or will become very, very small. One obvious for me is anything that relates to the small, medium business markets, so very SMB-focused SaaS, a lot of regional SaaS stuff that has emerged, copycatting in certain markets because the larger players didn’t want to expand in some of those markets.I think a lot of that stuff gets just replaced because a lot of the SMB markets are price sensitive. A lot of these markets are also best effort-driven. It’s like it doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to do the basic stuff. Therefore, I see that market as a market that’s going to get, in all honesty, over the next 3-5 years, slaughtered. It’s not going to be rapid death, but some of them are just going to be totally replaced. Bertrand SchmittI agree with you. If you don’t have a big enough moat, if it’s very shallow, if your clients are moving quickly, you can easily switch based on a small price difference. That’s definitely trouble. Nuno Goncalves PedroI’ll let an anecdote just so people I don’t understand. Because people say, but these regional SaaS solutions normally because of their specificities to the markets and stuff like that, whatever. I literally drafted the other day an agreement, a semi-agreement relating to Portuguese law on Claude in Portuguese, from Portugal, not Brazil and Portuguese. It drafted an agreement from scratch based on my prompting, and it took into account specificities of the Portuguese legal system and taxation. Guys, it’s like, this is a freaking consumer tool. Localization of what? The tax regime and whatever? Who gives a shit? It’s like, again, I think that’s the market that definitely will get a pretty significant beating. Bertrand SchmittAnother market for me, we talk about Adobe, but content creation tools. Here, I think there is a dramatic shift in how you use them. Before you use another Photoshop to replace something in a picture, change a slightly picture stuff. Now, you just say, hey, remove this guy from the picture. Hey, replace. Hey, create that picture from scratch. I have five photo IDs, put these guys in context, put them in your meeting room, and go for it. This is such transformational versus how you used to work before that I think some of this industry is getting destroyed.There will be simply no point of using these tools anymore because something else is just 10X better. That is not even a question. You could argue there is still a niche of professionals doing stuff in an always because it guarantees a bit more higher quality or this or that. Sure. But overall, this is getting disrupted big time and the much bigger business might be totally new and totally AI native. Nuno Goncalves PedroI will do a parochial comment. We have two investments in the content creation space, one more on the marketing side and the other one more on the hardcore content creation side. They’re both AI from inception, so they’re both AI native. One of them is called LetsEnhance, the other one is called blaze.ai. I feel it’s true that there’s going to be a lot of replacement of some of the content creation tools in certain markets like consumer and prosumer, driven by the Nano Bananas of the world and all that stuff.But on the top end and in enterprise and all that stuff, we feel that AI native content creation tools are there to be. It’s actually one of the areas of what I would call use cases or AI apps/platforms where I feel being AI native will give you an advantage. Just being a cross-cut play around the market being Anthropic or OpenAI, whatever, actually won’t solve the problem for some of the markets that need to be served in. Bertrand SchmittMakes sense. I agree with you. Maybe more quickly, some point solutions, relatively high risk. If you have a single function tool, then could be easily replaced potentially by an AI agent. We already talk about it. If you are too SMB-focused, that’s not the best segment of the market, typically. Maybe you can have a single test to check if that company is at risk. If you were to replace that tool, can a $20 a month AI agent do this task? If switch it cost are low, then maybe that’s not a good business opportunity. Maybe you should not invest, or you should sell the stock.Again, maybe you have to focus more on regulated niches, hardware dependent, critical private data, solutions where there is already outcome or value-based pricing in place. You have to put some rules and analysis to help you understand, is this business at risk of significant disruption or not? Not all business are the same. As an investor, that might mean that there would be some good opportunities. SaaS businesses that are going to emerge even stronger right now are at a cheap discount. Nuno Goncalves PedroAbsolutely. I think at the end of the day, certain basic workflow tools that are out there to simplify CRM, some very basic ERP modules, anything that’s very, very simple in terms of if this then that, all those tools are also going to be slaughtered relatively soon, sadly. If you’re in that space, maybe time, as Bertrand was saying earlier, to pivot, to go after some fundamental differentiation, or to do something else. You want to conclude, Bertrand? Bertrand SchmittConclusionSure. I guess we could see that from a trade perspective, from an investor perspective. I think it’s creating quite genuinely some opportunities. Some stocks are in the bargain, some of those are value traps, so you better get your investment skills in order. PE, private credit, definitely a lot of risk, not just from AI, I think from basic fraud as well.Secondary market, as you just say, it’s not an easy one. It’s a canary in the coal mine. I think you will agree, but this is before getting between AI native versus everything else these days, especially if you are more early stage. A more established business, it’s a different thing. But right now, just starting a regular SaaS company, that’s a tough one. From an investor perspective, you need to pivot as fast as you can from seed-based pricing, hybrid, outcome-based, value-based pricing. You have to do the move quickly. You don’t want to be pushed when it’s too late.Build-versus-buy is real, and that will only accelerate as coding agents mature. Vertical specialization, proprietary data are strong moat. They were before as well, so it’s nothing new. But I think the importance of having a true moat is more critical than ever. Lots of companies have received investment with not enough moat, and that’s the one getting destroyed in the private and public market. If you have strong matrix, there is a question of when is a good time to exit? I don’t know if the relations will ever come back. I think it truly depends as well on your business, a strategic fit with acquisition opportunities.Anecdotally, I have seen some businesses who look at exit opportunities and now are finding attractive options. It’s not all that dark, I would say. Maybe to answer to the question, do we have a SaaS apocalypse? Yes and no. Some companies are going to end badly, some companies are going to emerge stronger. I think that’s it for today. Thank you, Nino. Nuno Goncalves PedroThank you, Bertrand.

Who dares to make predictions in the current landscape? We do!  Our Predictions are back. Will our track-record continue on a high or will we be fundamentally wrong? Listen in to our Predictions for 2026 Navigation: Intro What will 2026 be all about? AI, AI and … more AI The big Hardware movements Of Start-ups and VCs Regulatory & Geopolitical Headwinds… and the Wars Fintech, Crypto and Frontier Tech 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 Schmitt Introduction Welcome to Tech Deciphered Episode 74. That would be an episode about some predictions about 2026. What will be 2026 all about? I guess this year is probably starting with a bang. We saw the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX. We saw an acquisition from Grok by NVIDIA. What’s your take about what would be the big themes in 2026? I guess it would be for sure about AI and space. Nuno Goncalves Pedro What will 2026 be all about? Yeah. I predict a year that will be a little bit more of a year of reckoning in some way. There will be a lot of things that I think we’ll start seeing through. The fact that we are in the midst of an amazing transformational era for technology, the use of AI, but at the same time, obviously, a ridiculous bubble that is going alongside it as we’ve discussed in previous episodes. I think that we’ll start seeing some early reckonings of that, companies that might start failing, floundering, maybe a couple of frauds along the way, etc. I’ll tell you what I will not make many predictions about today, which is geopolitics. Geopolitics, I will not make predictions at all. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen to the world this year in 2026? I don’t dare making any predictions on that. Back to things where I would make predictions. I think on AI, we’ll have a little bit of reckoning. We’ll talk about it a little bit more in detail during this episode. Interesting elements around the hardware and physical space. Physical space, we just dedicated a full episode to it. We won’t go into a lot of details on that, but definitely on the hardware side, we’ll talk a little bit more about it. The VC landscape is going through an incredible transformation. We’ll talk about it today as well and some of our predictions for this year. What will happen to the asset class? It seems to be transforming itself dramatically. Obviously, that has a very direct impact on startups, so we’ll talk about that as well. And then to close a little bit the chapter on this, we will address some regulatory and geopolitical, let’s call it, headwinds without making maybe too many complex predictions. We shall see. Maybe by that time of the episode, we will be making some predictions. You guys should stay and listen to us, and maybe we will actually make some predictions about the geopolitical transformations that we will see this year in the world. Then last but not the least, we’ll talk about fintech, crypto, frontier tech, and a couple of other areas before concluding the episode. A classic predictions’ episode. We normally have a pretty good track record on some of these, but right now, the world is going a bit interesting, not to say insane. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, and going back to some news, Groq technically was not acquired, but, practically, it’s as if it got acquired. I’m talking about Groq, G-R-O-Q. The AI semiconductor company focused on inference AI, and it was late December. It was a way to end the year. This year, we started again with an acquisition of xAI by its sister company, SpaceX. I guess that’s where we are starting. AI, AI and … more AI We are going to start on AI. That’s definitely the big stuff. Everything these days, I guess, is about AI or has to have some connection with AI, or it doesn’t matter. I think every company in the world has seen that. You have to have the absolute minimum on AI strategy. You better execute on this strategy and show results, I would say. For the companies that were not AI native, you truly have to have a way to transform yourself. I guess at some point, the stretch might be too much, and it’s not really reasonable. Then you maybe better stay on what you are doing, especially if you’re in tech, you better be moving faster to AI. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to highlight, and I think throughout the episode, you’ll see that there’re obviously a lot of implications that would manifest themselves into capital markets. I mean, we’ll specifically talk about VCs and startups later on. But the fact that everything needs to be AI, the fact that there’s so much innovation happening right now, in my opinion, and this is maybe the first pre-topic to AI, is we’ll see a tremendous increase in M&A activity this year across the board. I mean, we’ve seen already some big acquihires we mentioned in some of our previous episodes, but we’ll see a lot more activity on M&A this year. Normally, that’s a precursor to the opening of capital markets. I predict also that there will be a reopening of the IPO market that never really reopened last year, to be honest. M&A, a lot more, reopening of the IPO market. Normally, it happens in the second or third quarter of the year. That’s what my M&A friends tell me. First quarter of year, everyone’s figuring out stuff. Then last quarter of the year, things should be more or less closed. Maybe the third quarter is the big quarter. We shall see. But definitely, as a precursor to our conversation today, I think we’ll see a lot of M&A, and we’ll see reopening of the IPO mark. Bertrand Schmitt I guess last year was not as big as you could expect on M&A given the tariff situation announced in April and May. I mean, it became quite tough to do IPO in such market conditions. Definitely, we can hope for something dramatically different in 2026. I guess talking about public markets and IPO, I guess the big one everyone is waiting for is SpaceX. SpaceX getting even more interesting with its xAI acquisition. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Do you think that because of the acquisition, it’s more likely that it will happen this year, or because of the acquisition, it’s less likely that it will happen this year? Bertrand Schmitt That’s a good question. My guess is the acquisition of xAI is all about xAI needing more financing and cheaper financing. This acquisition is a pathway to that. SpaceX being a much bigger company, a company that is also making much more revenues. I could bet that there is higher probability that, actually, SpaceX will go public in order to finance itself. At the same time, will it have enough time to prepare itself for the IPO given this acquisition just happened? Can they do that in 6 months? I mean, if anyone can do it, I guess it’s Elon Musk. It’s a strategy to present an even more attractive company with an even more interesting story, a story of vertical integration from AI to space. I guess the story as it’s presented itself right now, it’s one about having your AI data centers in space. Because in space, you have much better solar energy production with solar panels. You have a perfect cooling situation because you are in space. Thanks to Starlink, you have the mean to communicate between the satellites and with Earth itself. I think if someone can pull up a story like AI data center in space, I guess Elon Musk can. There is, of course, a lot of questions about is it practical? Is it economical? Yes. I certainly agree. I’m not clear on the mass, and can you make it work? Again, I mean, Elon Musk single-handedly, with SpaceX, managed to transform the space market on its head. I mean, they are the biggest satellite launching company in the world. They have the most satellites in the world. I mean, I’m not sure I would bet against him, and I guess I would probably believe that he could pull up something. Time frames, different story. The 2-3 years data center in space for AI as cheap as on Earth, I have more trouble with that one. I mean, it’s a usual suspect with Elon Musk. You promise something unachievable in a few years, but, ultimately, you still manage to reach it in 5 or 10. Again, I would not bet against the strategy. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. I’ve talked to a couple of space experts, people that have launched rockets, and have worked JPL, NASA, and a couple of other places, etc. For what it’s worth, their feedback is, “No way in hell, and we’re decades away.” We’ll see. I mean, to your point, Elon has pulled very dramatic stuff. Not as fast as he normally says he’s going to pull it, but within a time span that we all see it. Difficult to bet against him. In terms of actually the prediction, maybe to respond to the prediction as well, will SpaceX IPO? I’m going to make a prediction that has a very high likelihood of missing the mark, but I think Tesla’s going to buy and merge them both into it. It’s going to become a public company through Tesla. That’s my hypothesis. Bertrand Schmitt No. That’s supposed to be it. That’s how you solve that. Nuno Goncalves Pedro And Elon controls the whole universe. X, xAI, Tesla, SpaceX, all under one umbrella beautifully run. And SolarCity is well in there, of course, so wonderful. Bertrand Schmitt That’s possible. Certainly, you are not the only one thinking Tesla will acquire or merge with SpaceX. To remind everyone, Tesla is around 1.3, 1.5 trillion market cap. Depending on the day, SpaceX seems to be valued at similar range, 1.2, 1.3 trillion. It looks like it’s the most valued private company at this stage. These are companies of similar size, so that’s one piece of the puzzle. When you think about the combined company, we could be talking about a 3 trillion entity. Playing right here with the biggest companies in the marketplace today. Nuno Goncalves Pedro With a couple of tweets from Elon, it will rapidly get to 4 to 5 trillion. Bertrand Schmitt That’s so tricky. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. On AI and back to AI, one thing I think that we’re about to see is this will probably be the year of agentic AI. Obviously, we predict a lot of growth on that side of the fence, in particular on the enterprise B2B side. We see a lot of opportunities coming through. From our perspective, at least at Chamaeleon, we generally believe that there’s going to be a lot of movements on agentic AI. It’s also going to be probably the year of the first big fails of agentic AI that will be newsworthy. There will be some elements about that loop and how it gets closed that will happen. I think we might see some scandals already. We’re already seeing the social network of bots talking to bots. We will see other scandals going on this year even in the consumer space and in the bot to bot space, which we now can talk about or in the AI agent to AI agent space. My prediction is we will see some move forwards. There’ll be some dramatic funding rounds along the way. We’ll see a couple of really cool things out of the gates coming out that are really impressive, but we’ll also see the first big misses of the technology stack. I don’t think we’ll go fully mainstream yet this year, so it’s probably maybe something more for 2027 along the way. That would be my prediction again. I think enterprise will lead the way. We’ll definitely see a lot of stuff on consumer as well that is cool. Then we’ll all have our own personal assistance in our hands, basically, literally in our phones. Bertrand Schmitt Going back to agentic AI, we also started the year with some pretty dramatic move. I mean, the launch of Clawdbot, renamed OpenClaw. I mean, this stuff took fire in like a week or 2. It was coded by just one person who actually didn’t even code the product but used AI to build the product, 100% used AI, proposing some new ways also to leverage AI to do coding. He has a pretty unique approach. It’s not vibe coding. I would say it’s a better way to do that. Then the surprising evolution with the launch of a social network for AI agents, Moltbook. I mean, this stuff, probably there is some fake in it. But at the same time, I think it’s quite impressive because it’s the first time we see truly 100,000 plus agents communicating directly to each other. Yeah. I mean, that’s the first time we see surfacing the possibility of some sort of hive mind on the Internet. It’s pretty surprising. Right now, all of this is a hack done in a few days. By end of year, by 2 years, 3 years, we might discover that, actually, the best approach to AI might not be the AI assistant like we are doing today, but a combination of hundreds of thousands of AI working closely together. We might be witnessing the first sign of new intelligence in a way. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Things like this social network might either be Skynet, the beginning of Skynet. They might be the beginning of Her, or they might just be a fad and nothing really happens. It’s just interesting to see what these agents are doing. Bertrand Schmitt Totally. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Obviously, there are real and clear and present dangers of some of the integrations of AI we’re seeing in the market. Interesting enough, and I’ll ask you for your prediction a bit, Bertrand. I think we’ll probably see the first big mishap of AI being used in some infrastructural decision in the age of AI. I mean, we’ve seen AI issues in the past and software issues in the past. We talked in previous episodes about that as well. Mishaps of software that have led to people dying. But I think probably the first big mishap will happen this year as well. Very public mishap of the use of AI and serve its interactions with infrastructure or something that’s very platform related, etc, that will have big impact that everyone will notice. That’s my prediction for the year as well. We’ll have the first big oops moment, as I would call it, for AI in this new age of full on AI. Bertrand Schmitt I would say first some perspective. I think today, people are not using AI directly for life and death decision, at least not that I’m aware. We’re not going to let AI fly a plane, for instance, tomorrow so you can be, reassured. At the same time, given there is such a race to AI, there definitely might be some mistakes. We were talking about the social network for AI agents, Moltbook. Apparently, all the keys used to secure the AI were shared by mistake because it was not properly locked down. We can see that indirectly, mistakes will be made for sure. Two, it’s highly probable that some people will trust AI too much to do some stuff, and this stuff might not work and might have some grave consequence. Hopefully, there is not so much of this. Hopefully, it’s mostly AI used for the good. But you’re right. I mean, at some point, the more we use the technology, the more there would be issue. I mean, it’s highly probable. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That will lead me to another prediction, which is, and we’ll talk about more of it later, but it probably will lead to the first significant movement in terms of regulatory environment certainly in the US at some point if it happens in the US in particular, where there will be some movement that will be like, “Hey, you guys can’t do this anymore.” Because this will probably emerge from mismanaged interfaces. From systems having access to stuff that they shouldn’t have access to in the first place. Talking a little bit more about what’s happening in AI. You’ve already mentioned some of the issues that relate actually to security and cybersecurity. We keep talking about AI. We keep talking about all these infrastructure pieces and platforms that are being built. I think we’ll have a lot more incidents like the one you just mentioned where things will be shared that shouldn’t have been shared, where people will break systems and get into it, etc. Let’s see where that takes us, which is a little bit ironic because, obviously, with AI, the promise is that cybersecurity becomes more robust as well because there’re agents working on our behalf on the cybersecurity side. There’s also agents working on the other side. Bertrand Schmitt It’s a constant race. It’s the attackers, defenders. Each time you have new technology, you have a new race to who is going to attack or defend the best. Each new wave of technology, it’s an opportunity to challenge the status quo. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The attackers have been winning, and I feel they’ll continue winning in 2026. I think it’s going to still be a year of attack. We’ll see more and more breaches, more and more stuff that will happen. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t know if they will win. I mean, it’s normal that they win once in a while. For sure, some infrastructure is not updated as it should. Some stuff are not managed as it should, so there will always be breaches. I don’t know if things are dramatically going to change because, again, everyone who cares who is going to update his infrastructure with AI for defense. There is no question that you have no choice. We will see. That I don’t know. For sure, AI will be used to attack directly with AI. Maybe you’re able to do bigger, larger scale attack. Or thanks to AI, you are simply able to create new type of attacks more easily. AI can be used behind the scene as a way to prepare and organise new type of attacks, even if it’s not used directly live in the battle. Nuno Goncalves Pedro One topic that we’ll come back to later is the geopolitics of everything, but maybe more broadly. On the geopolitics of AI, it’s very clear that we have an arms race going on. Obviously, the US on the one hand, China on the other hand is the two extremes, putting tremendous amount of capital into data centers just at the base of that infrastructure. Chipset development, chipset access, a huge theme in terms of the export restrictions, etc, that are being forced by the US. I think it will continue. From a European standpoint, obviously, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, to be very honest. Let’s see what happens on that side of the fence. My view of the world is that certainly from a US and China perspective, we’re going to see a lot more movements in 2026, like big movements. The Chinese movements we always see in delay.  It takes us a couple of months, sometimes even more than that to understand exactly what’s going on. I think we’re going to see some huge moves this year in terms of the States, the United States of America, and China really pouring capital into the creation of the next big winners around AI. I think the US is obviously more visible. We see a lot of these companies. We’ve just discussed xAI and its acquisition by SpaceX or merger. I don’t know what they’re calling it exactly. Effectively, on the China side, the movements I think are already very big. As I said, it will take a while to figure out exactly what those moves are. One thing that I propose is that at some point, China will have very little dependency on chipsets from the US. I’m not sure it’s going to happen this year, but I think the writing is on the wall. Irrespective of any other geopolitical issues that is coming to the fore at this moment in time. That’s one of the key areas or in arenas of fight. Bertrand Schmitt It makes sense. If you are China, you will look at what happened. You would think that you cannot just depend on the largest of one country. It makes rational sense, the same way it makes rational sense for the US to limit exports to China because there is value to delay some peer pressure that could use these technologies for good but also for bad. If you were an ally of the US, that would be one thing. But when you are not an ally of the US, that certainly should be a different perspective. Maybe one last point concerning agents, I think there will be a lot that will revolve around coding. We can see OpenAI with Codex. We can see Cloud with code. There was, of course, [inaudible 00:18:28] that was trying to be big on agentic coding. I think agentic coding was one of the big transformation in 2025 and is going to get bigger in 2026. I think for a lot of people who do coding, there was a radical transformation in terms of what you can achieve, what you can do, how much you can trust AI to help you code. I start to think we might see this year, the replacement of not just one AI replace one coder, but one AI replace a full team because of the new ability to manage that at scale. Coding might be a common activity where you are going to think about outcomes, think about objective, think about how you organise, but not really coding by itself anymore. A big change, like you used to code, directly your hand on the stuff, but step by step, everyone is going to become a manager of agent. I think in one year, we saw enough transformation to think that in the coming year, the transformation can be even more dramatic. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The big Hardware movements Now switching gears to hardware. Obviously, a lot of movements in 2025 and over the last few years. One piece of thesis that we’ve had long-standing at Chamaeleon is that we will see the emergence of AI devices. Some of them have been tremendous failures as we discussed in the past. I predict that we’ll have a couple of really interesting full stack AI devices in the market this year. Why does that matter? Because, as many of you know, obviously, there’s compute that can happen in data centers and cloud infrastructure all over the world, but also there’s compute that can happen at the edges. The more you can move to the edges and the more you can create devices that actually allow you to have user experiences that are very distinctive at the edge, the more powerful some of these devices might become. I predict Apple will not be the first to launch anything on this. I predict probably OpenAI, after the acquisition of IO, will maybe not launch something this year, but will announce something this year. I’ll step back on that prediction. They’ll announce something this year, but maybe not launch. But we’ll start seeing some devices that have some interesting value in the market, probably devices that are AI devices, but they are very focused on very specific user flows, and so very much adequate to specific activities. I won’t make a prediction on that, but I think areas that would make sense for that to happen would be obviously around fitness, health, et cetera, et cetera, where we already have the ascendancy of products like Oura Ring and others out there. Definitely, that’s one area that might have quite a lot of developments. I think AI-first devices, devices that are very focused on compute at the edges, providing user flows that are AI-enabled to end users, we’ll see a lot more of that and a lot more activity this year. Again, I don’t think Apple will be necessarily ahead of the game. Again, maybe OpenAI will give us something to at least think about and look forward to. Bertrand Schmitt First, I’m not sure it will be that transformational because if it’s not in your phone, in your pocket, there is only so much you can do with it, and there is only so much computing power you will have. I’m doubtful it would be really impactful this year. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I feel we’ve been discussing this shift of paradigm in input and output. For me, some of these devices could lead to that shift. Because, again, a mobile phone is not a great long-term paradigm for the usage that we have because it’s really constrained by the screen. The screen is really what takes most of the battery life away. If we didn’t have that screen, what could we do? If we have the block that is as big as a mobile phone, and it didn’t have a screen, it was just compute, that’s a mini computer, a microcomputer. Bertrand Schmitt That’s a fair point, but I don’t see that transformation this year. That’s really more my point. I can see that you can have AI-enabled smart glasses, and it’s clear there is a race to AI-enabled smart glasses. My point is more to go beyond the gadget, it would take quite a while. It would need to have cameras. It would need to analyse what you see. It would need to hear what you hear. Again, it might come, but then at some point, it would be okay, what do you do with it? We have the example of the movie Her. That’s showing Her what it could be. There are definitely possibilities. It’s clear that if you take the big VR headset like the Apple Vision Pro, there is a failure from that perspective in the sense that I think it’s a great, amazing device. The big problem is that it’s doing way more that makes sense. I think there will be a clearer separation between your smart AR glasses that has to be light, that has to be always unconnected, and that’s primarily there to help you make sense of the world around you. The true VR headset that doesn’t really require much in terms of AI, and it’s just there to immerse you in a different world. For this, we know, unfortunately, in some ways, that there is not a lot of demand for it. Maybe there is little demand because you are too hidden in your own world. The technology is not working well enough yet. There are a lot of reasons. But I think Apple trying to do both at the same time, AR and VR, with the Vision Pro, was a pretty grave structural mistake. I think we would see a clearer line of separation between the two. There is bigger market opportunity for AR glasses. That, I certainly agree. There is opportunity to connect that to a computing device. As you talk about, your glasses are your screen, your phone becomes something in your pocket connected to your glasses. Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, Apple has their way of doing things. From the perspective of what you said, they normally really plan their devices. Even if it’s a big shift in terms of a new area, like they tried with the Vision Pro, and we criticised them for launching it as a device that should have been more of a dev device that they really launched as a full-on device, but that’s their playbook, classically. I think Apple needs to change how they put products out and how they experiment with those products, et cetera. I think they have enough money to be doing everything all the time and figuring it out. If they don’t want to put it out, then they need to do a lot more hell of testing internally with their silos, but they should be playing across all these arenas, VR, AR, everything. They just should put devices out that are either ready for prime time, or they should call it something else. They should call it like this is a dev device or whatever it is. Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. My complaint is more that it was marketed as a consumer device when it was not. It was a true developer device. Two, they tried to mix the two at once, and it made no sense. No one is going to walk in their home or in the street with their Vision Pro on their head. You have to be deranged, quite frankly, to have use cases like this. I think that for me is a crazy mistake from a company like Apple that prides itself in pure UI, pure user interface, very well-designed device for one specific use case, not mixing the two use cases. We still don’t have Macs with a touchscreen, you know?  We still don’t have an iPad with a good OS that makes use of this great hardware. For some strange reason, they decided to mix everything in the Vision Pro with a device that weighs a ton on your head and is so uncomfortable. That’s why, for me, I’m like, “Guys, what is wrong? Why did you let this team run crazy?” I hope at some point, Apple will go back to the drawing board. My understanding is that that’s what they are doing. They are going to have two devices, one smart glasses, an evolution of the Vision Pro, just focus on VR. They might actually abandon the concept of the pure VR-oriented headset. Because, from a market size perspective, it might not be big enough for Apple, quite frankly. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I read on all of the above, and people at this point was like, “Why are then players like Samsung and others not doing it. LG, et cetera?” Because those players historically have not invented new categories. They’re amazing at catching up once the category is invented, and then they scale the hell out of it, and that’s what these companies have been exceptional at. I wouldn’t see a dramatic innovation, I think, in terms of devices coming from any of the big ones on that side of the fence. Not to disrespect them in any way, but I think that’s not been their playbook ever. Again, if the origination doesn’t come from a start-up or from an Apple, I don’t see those guys going after it. My bet is that we’ll see some start-up activity and, again, hopefully, some announcement from IO now within the OpenAI world. Bertrand Schmitt I would slightly disagree with you. I see where you are coming from. But take the Samsung Galaxy Note, that sudden much bigger headphone that no one was doing that was launched by Samsung, at some point, it forced Apple to launch an iPhone Max. Let’s look at the Z Fold that Samsung launched 7 years ago, copied by everyone. Now Samsung launching a trifold. Apple has still not launched their foldable phone. I think there is a mix, actually, of sometimes- Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, that’s not a proper new category. It’s still a mobile phone. It just happens to have a screen that folds in half. Bertrand Schmitt The iPhone was still a mobile phone, you could argue.  Nuno Goncalves Pedro No. I think the iPhone was…  I could actually agree with you on that point. Maybe Apple is not as innovative in that case. I think what Steve Jobs was exceptionally good at in terms of his ability as this master product manager was to be an exceptional curator of user flows and user experiences, and creating incredible experiences from devices based on that. That was his secret sauce. Could you say, “Wasn’t all of this stuff already around?” It was. You just put it all together very neatly and very nicely. But if you’re talking about significant shifts in how a category is done, the iPhone was a significant shift in how the category was done. The Fold is still an interesting device. I actually have a Fold right now in front of me. The 7 that you highly recommended to me that we both got, the Z Fold 7. I think they do amazing devices. I don’t think they normally are the most innovative players. Then, when they come to innovation, it comes from technology edges. Obviously, they have Samsung Display, there’s a bunch of other things. They had the ability to do foldable screens in-house themselves. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t disagree with you. I think there is an interesting situation where some companies have some strengths, another one has some strengths. My worry with Apple is that this was not demonstrated with the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro was a hot pot of technologies barely integrated together, with use cases absolutely not well-defined and certainly not something that makes sense for most of us. There is a question of has Apple lost it? While Samsung actually keeps doing their own stuff, that, yes, might be more minor improvements, but at least they are doing it. Because it looks like Apple is missing the train on even the minor improvements. By the way, you might not be aware, but Samsung launched its Vision Pro competitor. Interestingly enough, it might be a better product in some ways, being much lighter and much more comfortable. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We should play around with that and report back to our listeners. Of Start-ups and VCs Moving to venture capital and the startup ecosystem and what’s happening there, I think it is very much a bifurcated environment, and it’s bifurcated for both VCs and for startups. If you’re a startup in the AI space, and you have the hottest team since sliced bread, and you can create FOMO at the speed of light, you can raise ridiculous rounds. Five hundred million at the $3 billion, or $4 billion, or $5 billion valuation, and you still haven’t really even started. First round, you can raise 500 million. That’s back to the whole discussion on Bubble and where are we, et cetera. Some of these companies might actually become huge, some of them might not. But definitely, we are seeing really the haves and have-nots on the startup ecosystem with incredible teams raising a lot of money very, very early on or mid-stage if they’ve already existed for a while, and then the rest not being able to raise. We see a lot of non-necessarily AI sectors, some of the areas of SaaS that don’t necessarily have AI in it, or fintech, or the consumer space that are really, really struggling. If you don’t have an AI story for your startup right now, it’s extremely difficult to raise money unless your numbers are just the best numbers ever. That’s, I think, the first part of the element of bifurcation that we’re seeing today. The second element of bifurcation that we’re seeing today in terms of fundraising is for VCs themselves, and really propelled by the large VC firms raising more and more capital in recent orbits, announcing 15 billion across funds raised. Lightspeed, I think, had made an announcement a couple of weeks ago as well. They’ve raised a bunch of money as well. The big guys are all raising a lot of money. At some point in time, the question some of you might ask is, “These VCs are redeploying more and more money if they have a couple of billion for a VC fund. How does that look like? Is that still VC?” My perspective, I’ve shared before in some of our previous episodes, is that that’s no longer venture capital. At that point in time, we’re talking about something else. Private equity hedge funds, if you want to call them, maybe funds that are really driven by growth investment or late-stage investment. If you have a couple of billion under management, you’re not going to make your returns by writing a $3 million check in a series seed and leading that round.  That has implications for everyone in the ecosystem. It has implications for smaller funds that obviously have a lot more difficulty in raising capital. It’s difficult to differentiate. Last but not least, also for startups that really continue searching for that capital that is out there. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, runs Speedrun, which is a great program for companies around consumer in particular. Initially, it was a lot for gaming. But at some point in time, Andreessen Horowitz could decide that they don’t want to invest more in you. They just put money from Speedrun, which is obviously a very small check compared to the very large checks they could write mid to late stage and that will have an effect on you as a startup. What happens at that point in time if Andreessen Horowitz is not backing you up in later stages? More than that, what happens if I can’t get these big funds interested in me? Are the small funds still valuable to me? Punchline, my view is yes. Obviously, we’re a smaller fund, so there’s parochial interest in what I’m saying. Small funds can still create a ton of value for you, also in terms of credibility, ability to accompany you in those first stages of investment, and the ability to bring other larger investors later down the road as well. There’s definitely a big movement happening in terms of the fundraising for VC funds, which we shouldn’t neglect, which is the big guys are raising a lot more capital and are therefore emptying the market to smaller funds that are having more and more difficult raising at this point in time. We had discussed that there would be a need for concentration in the industry, that micro funds would need to concentrate, and we didn’t have the space for so many micro funds as we had around. But the way it’s happening is extremely dramatic at this moment in time. I think it will continue through 2026. Bertrand Schmitt Remember a few years ago, with the rise of AI, there was more and more of the question about, “What’s the point of SaaS at this stage?” Because SaaS was around for 15 years. Basically, how do you come up with something new that was not already tested, validated by the market? How do you bring something new? We say this was reinforced to the power of 10. If your product is not clearly built from the ground up for a new use case enabled by AI, anyone could then might have built your product 5, 10 years ago, and therefore, why now has no clear answer, and it’s a big problem. I’m still surprised myself to still see some entrepreneurs where you talk to them about AI because you don’t see them in the deck, and they explain to you, “It’s not yet there,” and you’re like, “What’s wrong with you guys?” Fine. Do whatever you want. Do a small business and whatever, but don’t think you can come up pitch and raise without an AI story. The second category is people who come with an AI story, but you can feel very quickly, I guess you saw that many times, Nuno, where just a story layered on top with little credibility. It’s not better. It’s not enough to just have a story. Your business needs to be radically built differently or radically proposing some brand-new use cases that were impossible to solve 5 years ago. Nuno Goncalves Pedro To stack up on that, absolutely in agreement. If you’re just adding to the story, and it’s an afterthought, and you’re just trying to make the story somehow gel, once you go into one or two layers of due diligence, your investors will very quickly realise that you’re not really AI-first or dramatically AI-enabled or whatever. It’s just you’re sort of stacking something on top of another thesis. It needs to make sense from the product onwards. It’s not just, let’s just put it together with chewing gum, and magically, people will give you money. It was true also if we remember the good old crypto blockchain days, where everyone’s investing in crypto. A lot of stories that didn’t make much sense. In that sense, it’s not very different. I would go one step further. I think in the world of the VC winter that we’re a little bit in, where it’s more and more difficult if you’re a smaller fund to raise your fund at this moment in time, there’s a lot of sources of distinctiveness still talked about, like proprietary networks, access to deal flow, fast track record, all that stuff that really, really matters. But our bet continues at Chamaeleon continues being that you need to be AI-first as a VC fund yourself. You need to have core advantages in using not only readily-available AI tools or third-party available AI tools, data sources, technology stacks, but actually building your own stack over time, which is what we did with Mantis at Chamaeleon. Again, just to reinforce that, I think we’re at the beginning of that stage. We, Chamaeleon, are ahead of the game, but we think that the rest of the market will have to move towards that as well. Still, to be honest, very surprising to me to see that many significant large players are doing very little still around some of these spaces. They have data scientists. They’re running some tools. They’re running some analysis and all that stuff, but it’s still, again, back to the point I was making for startups, all glued up with chewing gum. It doesn’t all come together nicely, which it does need to from a platform standpoint. Bertrand Schmitt It’s quite surprising. I agree with you that some VC funds might think that they can do business as usual in that brand-new world. It’s difficult to believe. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe moving a little bit toward the capital formation piece. We already discussed the M&A space really accelerating. We’ve also discussed the IPO market and some predictions on that. Secondaries, there’s obviously a lot of liquidity coming from secondaries from mid to late stage. I think it will continue throughout the rest of 2026. A lot of activity in buying, selling in secondaries as some asset managers are becoming more distressed, as some very high net worth individuals and family offices are becoming more distressed as well, at the same time, where there’s a lot of opportunities to potentially arbitrage around some investments. I believe a lot of money will be made and lost this year by decisions made this year, just to be very, very clear in terms of equity, purchases, et cetera. Exciting year ahead of us. Definitely a very, very interesting market ahead of us. Secondaries, M&A, growth, and late-stage investing, also, early-stage investing will continue just for those that were wondering. Last but not least, the public markets, the IPO market as well. Bertrand Schmitt One of the big questions for the IPO market would be, will SpaceX go public? Would it be good for the startup ecosystem? Because suddenly that they go public, it would be to raise money. If they raise money, will there be any money left for anybody else? That would be an interesting test of the market. For sure, it would be proof that market are risk on financing a new IPO like this one. Or as you said, maybe there is no IPO, and it’s a merger with Tesla. Time will tell. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Regulatory & Geopolitical Headwinds… and the Wars Moving maybe to our topic of regulation and geopolitical headwinds, as we’re seeing … definitely not tailwinds. The Google antitrust verdict and, obviously, the remedies are expected to come forward now, and a lot of people are saying, “There are some risks of structural separation.” What do you think? Is it cool, but nothing will happen in the end dramatically? Alphabet or Google? I’m not sure, actually. It’s Google LLC. I think that’s the case. It’s The United States versus Google LLC. Bertrand Schmitt I’m not sure. Personally, I’m not a big fan. I think there needs to be a better way to manage some anticompetitive behavior. I’m not a big fan. There was this temptation to do that for Microsoft 25 years ago. Look at what happened. No one needed to buy Microsoft to leave space for others. I see the same with Google, and I guess they are happy to not be the number 1 in AI today, but to have an open AI in front of them. Even if they are doing a great job, by the way, to move forward and go faster and faster. Personally, quite impressed now with some of what they have released. Gemini 3 is doing great from my perspective. I’m not a big fan of this. I think to be clear, it’s important that bigger companies don’t behave anticompetitively, but at the same time, we need to find the right approach where it’s not about breaking these companies, and it’s also not about forbidding them to do acquisitions. Because then you end up with what NVIDIA just did with a $20 billion acquihire IP licensing type of acquisition, because they didn’t want to have the uncertainties. They didn’t want to wait 1–2 years in order to acquire the people and the technology, so they organised it in a different way. But I don’t like that. I think they should be able to acquire companies without facing so much uncertainty. To be clear, it’s not new. Uncertainty when you are Google, NVIDIA, or others, it happens. It has happened for a decade plus, 2 decades. I think there needs to be, for sure, some safety valves. At the same time, we want an efficient capital market. An efficient capital market need companies that can acquire other companies. If you don’t do that efficiently, it will be worse for the entrepreneurs, it will be worse for the investors, it will be worse for everybody. I think we have not reached a good equilibrium from my perspective. We need more efficient acquisition process. And at the same time, we need to also enforce faster anticompetitive behavior. Because what you talk about concerning Google, this is a case that was what? That is 10 years old. You see what I mean? This is way too long. If you’re a startup, you are dead by then. It’s like the story of Netscape facing Microsoft. They were dead long after the fact. I think we need a different approach. I’m not sure the best answer. I’m not sure we’ll get a better approach. There are probably too many vested interest. My hope is that it will get better with this current administration because, certainly, the past administration was very anti acquisition and efficient markets. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ve talked about the European Union AI Act a bunch of times, so I don’t want to spend too many cycles on that. The only effect that I would say is we are seeing in very slow motion the splitting of the Internet. I once had Tim Berners-Lee, by the way, shouting at me that we were going to break the Internet when we were applying for the .mobi top-level domain. I was part of that consortium that eventually did get the .mobi top-level domain, and I had him shouting at us. But, apparently, this is going to split the Internet, Tim. So in case you’re listening. Because it will create all these different rules. If your data is relating to consumers there, then it’s treated in a different way, and The US is… Well, obviously, we have the case of California with its own rules and laws. I don’t know. I feel we’re having a moment of siloing that goes beyond economic and geopolitical siloing. It will also apply to the digital world, and we’ll start having different landscapes around it. We’ll see how this affects global expansion of services, for example, around AI, particularly for consumer, but I don’t foresee anything dramatically positive. Recently, we had the whole deal around TikTok finally having a solution for their US problem where there’s now a US conglomerate magically that owns it. The conglomerate doesn’t magically own it, they just straight up own it for the US. But it was driven by many of these concerns around data ownership. Where’s the data? Where is it based? I think a lot of other concerns that have to do with the geopolitics of China, obviously, being the basis of ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, that still is a significant owner, by the way, in TikTok in US. Then also the interest in the economics of making money out of something as powerful as TikTok, to be honest, in The US. Just to be clear, I don’t think this was all about the best interests of consumers. It was also about money. Just follow the money. Bertrand Schmitt There are for sure, some powerful interest at play. But let’s be clear. I think one is data, as you rightfully said, but the other one is algorithm. It’s not as if China is authorising any competitor on its territory. They have blocked access to most of the Internet platforms from the US, either finding new rules or just trade blocking them. So I don’t think it’s fair competition. You don’t want some of that data in China about the US or European consumer. Three, it’s about the algorithm. If suddenly, you are a foreign power, and you can as we know in China, you better follow what’s required of you from the Chinese Communist Party. You cannot take a chance with influencing other stuff like elections in other countries. It’s fair from the US perspective. One could even argue it’s fair from a Chinese perspective to want that. I think the only one in the middle who doesn’t really know what they want is Europe because on one side, they want to benefit from American platforms, on the other end, they want to have some controls. On the other end, they don’t create the environment for startups to flourish. So in that weird situation where they have to accept some control by the big US providers and either provider of underlying infrastructure or provider of consumer business facing services. Then they try to regulate them. But I think they are misunderstanding the power relationship, and I think some of this regulation would get some blowback, at least by the current administration. Just, I believe, this morning, there was some news around X being under a criminal investigation in France. This is not going to end well for the French startup and VC ecosystem. This is not going to end well for France and Europe when you depend so much from your American friends. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Regulation will be weaponised. Regulation constraints around exports, all of this will be weaponised geopolitically, and the bigger guys will normally win. I think that’s normally what we’ve seen. Just on TikTok just to… And you guys, if you’re listening to us, just see if you see a pattern here, but obviously, 19.9% still owned by ByteDance of the TikTok entity in the US. It was initially said that 80% of the TikTok entity is owned by non-Chinese investors. Initially, people were saying US investors, and then they changed it to non-Chinese because MGX, I think, has 15% of it. MGX is based in the UAE, connected obviously to Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. Silver Lake is in there, I think, with 15% as well. Oracle as well with 15%. Those three are the big bucket owners together, 45%. Silver Lake having collaborated with MGX before, and I’m sure a lot of connectivity there. Then you still see a pattern in this in terms of shareholders. If you don’t, then just Google it. Dell Family Office, Vastmir Strategic Investments, which is owned by billionaire Jeff Yass, Alpha Wave Partners, obviously involved with a bunch of things like SpaceX and Klarna, Virgoli, Revolution, which is Steve Case’s, a former founder of AOL, is also in there. Meritway, which is managed by partners, I think, of Dragonair. Vinova from General Atlantic, an affiliate of General Atlantic. Also, NJJ Capital, which I believe is Xavier Nil, the French billionaire that founded Iliad. Mostly American, I think, if the math is correct. 80% non-Chinese, which was what mattered, I think, in many cases. But do see if you saw a pattern in most of those investors. I won’t say anything more than that. Maybe moving to other topics, maybe just to finalise on regulation and geopolitics. In geopolitics, we should talk about wars if we predict anything. Not that we are nasty and one want to be negative, but what the hell is going on? Will we have ending to the wars we already have ongoing or not? But before that, the struggles on the App Stores, I think, will continue both for Apple and for Google Play Store. The writing’s on the wall, the EU keeps pushing it dramatically and Apple keeps just doing stuff. I’m on the board of an App Store company. Apple just creates all these things that basically make you not really… It doesn’t work. You can’t provision then an App Store on Apple devices. On iPhones, et cetera. We’ll see how that will continue going, but I feel the writing’s on the wall. Both Apple and Google will have to open up a bit more of their platforms. I’m not sure it will have a huge impact in the medium to long term, but definitely we need to see more openness in access to apps as given by the two big platform owners, Apple and Google, out there. Bertrand Schmitt Let’s be clear. Google is way more open than Apple. We both have Android devices. You can install alternative app stores. It’s a different ballgame by very far. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Google does other nasty stuff. It’s public. You can check which board I’m a part of. You can see what that company has done towards Google over time. But to your point, yes. It is true that Google has been more open than Apple, but Google has done their own things. Just to be very clear, so I’ll just leave that caveat bracketed there for people to think about it and maybe read a little bit about it as well. Bertrand Schmitt I can say that, me, from my perspective, that path of total control that Apple has been going through on all their devices, that includes macOS, pushed me to, over the past 2, 3 years, to completely live and abandon the Apple ecosystem. I just couldn’t accept that level of control, that golden handcuff approach of the Apple ecosystem, each their own obviously, they are golden, their handcuffs, but they are still handcuffs. Personally, that pushed me way more to Linux, Android, Windows, back to Windows after all these years. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I want to pick my devices. I want to pick what I install on them, and I don’t want to be controlled like this by just one entity for all my tech devices. For me, at some point, it was just not acceptable anymore. It’s still very warm, very golden handcuffs, but for me, they were just handcuffs at this stage. Yes, what they are doing with the App Store is very typical of that mindset. I think it’s quite sad because I think it started with good intention in some ways. “We need a new computing paradigm, we need to make things smoother and safer,” but it has really become a way to control your clients. For me, it has reached a point where it’s just way too much. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s obviously the great power comes great responsibility that uncle Ben told Spider-Man or Peter Parker. But there’s also with great power comes shitload of money, and control. So it’s like, “Yeah. Should we open the server? Do we want to delay opening it up?” “Yeah.” Anyway, it is what it is. Maybe let’s end on the more difficult note of the episode, which is going to be around wars. What’s our prediction? Will we have an end to the Gaza situation with Israel? Will we have an end to Ukraine and, obviously, Russia? What will happen in Iran? Those are the three big, big conflicts right now. Then, obviously, if we want to add just bonus points, what’s going to happen to Greenland, and what’s going to happen to Taiwan, and what’s going to happen to Venezuela? Let’s throw the whole basket in there. We’ve never had like… Let’s talk about all these territories and all these countries. At some point in time, I’m saying this in a light manner, but it’s obviously more tragic than it should be light, and people are dying, and there’s a lot of implications of all of that that is happening right now. Do you have any predictions, Bertrand, for this year? Bertrand Schmitt No. It’s tough to predict on an individual basis. I think on a more bigger picture basis is on one side, obviously, the rise of China on one side. You have also the rise of other countries like India, while very indirectly connected to some of these conflicts are still part of the game, buying oil from Russia, for instance. At the same time, I think overall, the US is more clear about with the sheriff in town. I think it’s good because in some ways, you cannot pay for the goods, you cannot have such a massive advantage versus nearly every other country on earth and just not be clear about who is the boss in some ways. As a result, what are the rules of the game and how it should be played? The US is not alone, obviously, you have China, you have Russia, you have India, you have Europe. You have different other countries. But at some point, it’s not good when countries are not rational and are not clear. I think I prefer the current situation where things are more clear and where you have to assume responsibilities about what you are doing. It’s time to be rational again about how the world behave. Yes, the concept of power and balance of power. I think there has been that dream, maybe mostly coming from Europe, about the end of history. I think that’s simply not the case. It’s not the end of history. It’s still about the balance of power. It has always been about the balance of power. If you are dumb enough to think it was not about that anymore, I just have a bridge to nowhere to sell you. I don’t have specific prediction, but I think it’s clear there is a new sheriff in town. There is a new doctrine about the Western Hemisphere that has been in some ways resurrected on the [inaudible 00:51:35] train, and I think we’ll see more of it. I think at this point, the biggest question is for the Europeans. What do they want to do? Because right now, their position of being a dwarf militarily while being a pretty big giant economically, I don’t think it works. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I agreed on everything that you said. I do have predictions. I’ll stick a flag on the ground just with my predictions. Bertrand Schmitt Good luck. Nuno Goncalves Pedro They are mostly positive. I do think we’ll see an end or, for the most, end to the two big conflicts, the one in Gaza and the one in Ukraine. I think Ukraine will end up in readjustment of territory and splitting between Russia and the Ukraine, but the end of hostilities, I think that we will see an end to the conflict in Gaza also with a readjustment on what that will mean for the Palestinian territories and the Palestinians in general. That I’m not sure, but I feel that there will be an end to those two big conflicts. Iran, I have no clue. I will not put a stick on the ground that I have no clue. There are so many things that could go wrong there. I’ve been reading some really interesting thoughts about even some aggressive thoughts that this might be the time to really change regimes in Iran and for the US to have a bit more of an aggressive stance. I really don’t have a perspective. Obviously, there’s a lot at stake there. Then, if we talk about the other parts, Greenland, I will not opine too much on. Maybe we’re done for now. Maybe there’ll be some other concessions to the US that weren’t already there in the ’50s. Taiwan, I won’t bet either. I’m sad to say I think it might happen at some point in time, but I’m not sure when and what would drive it. Last but not the least, Venezuela is my only really negative prediction. I feel it will continue to be a significant dictatorship as it was before managed enough by other people with the difference now that it has a tax to be paid to the US in the form of oil of some sort, etcetera, and maybe gas, maybe other things as well that it didn’t have before. That’s probably my most negative prediction for the coming year on the geopolitical side. Bertrand Schmitt Without going into detail, I would mostly agree with what you shared. At least that makes sense. But as we know, it’s not always what makes sense, but what might happen. I can tell you 100% I would not have guessed this operation against Maduro. This was so well done, well executed, and shocking at the same time that it’s… I think it shows that it’s hard to guess some of this stuff because there are certainly some new ways to wage limited war, for instance. So it’s certainly interesting, and we certainly need to get used to pretty bombastic statements. But for Venezuela, I don’t think it can be worse than what it was before. I’m probably more optimistic that gradually it can get better. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to put perspective on why we’re not making predictions on some of these elements, I think this is a funny story, but I was in Madeira. Actually, first time I was in Madeira, although I’m originally from Portugal. I’ve never been to the islands. Obviously, as you guys know, or some of you might know, there’s a lot of connection between Madeira and Venezuela. There’s a lot of immigration from Madeira Islands to Venezuela. One of my Uber or Bolt drivers there in Madeira was Venezuelan. Was born in Venezuela, but Portuguese descent, et cetera. He was telling me this was still last year. Late last year. Because I told him I lived in US, et cetera, and he was like, “Oh, hopefully, Trump will get Maduro out of there.” In my mind, I was like, “Dude.” No disrespect to the gentleman, but it’s like, “Okay. Mike, your perspective on geopolitics is maybe a little bit exaggerated.” And a couple of days later, we know what happened. When geopolitical decisions are better predicted by some probably very astute Uber drivers, you’re like, “Maybe I shouldn’t make a bet. I have no clue what’s going to happen, no clue what’s going to happen in Greenland, et cetera.” Anyway, a couple of predictions on that element. Bertrand Schmitt That’s why it’s so right. You have to be careful with the prediction, but it doesn’t remove the fact that I think nations and companies that have to play a global game have to understand in some ways what is the game, what are the powers in place, what could happen potentially, but also be realistic. Not be about wish and dreams, but more about, what’s the power relationship? Who has the money? Who has the means? Who has the capacity to do this or that? Because if you start that way, at least the scope of what’s possible, what’s reasonable is more and more clear more quickly. Some stuff like happened with Maduro, I would never have predicted, but for sure, if there’s one country that can do this sort of stuff, it’s the US. I’m not sure anyone has a technology and the means in terms of support infrastructure to do something like this. It’s tough to predict what will happen a year from now for any specific country, but I think that even trying to get a better understanding about the forces in play and their capacity and understanding and accepting that at some point, it’s all about real politic and relationship of power, the more your eyes would be wide open about what’s possible versus simple, wishful thinking. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Fintech, Crypto and Frontier Tech Moving maybe to our last section around fintech, crypto, and frontier tech. For me, just two very quick predictions, views of the world. I think on the frontier tech side, I won’t make a prediction. I will just tell you all to go and listen to our episodes, the one on infrastructure, which is immediately prior to this one, and the episodes that we’ve had around a couple of other topics including AI, what’s the future of your children, because I think they illustrate a lot of the points that we’re seeing and manifesting themselves over the next year and over the next 2 or 3 years as well beyond that. I feel those tomes are complete in and out of themselves, so you can just go and listen to them. Then my second comment is on crypto. I feel crypto has become of the essence, particularly under the current administration in the US, very favored. Obviously, we are now in a world where crypto is just part of the economic system, and I think we’ll see more and more of that emerging, and in some ways, crypto is becoming mainstream. Question is what blockchains will be the blockchains of the future? Obviously, there’s a bunch of bets put out there. We, ourselves, as Chamaeleon, have one investment in one of the significant bets in the space. But besides that, who’s going to win or not, we feel that we’re past the crypto winter. It’s now mainstream days, and we’ll see a lot more activity in there. Bertrand Schmitt I must say with crypto, I’m a bit confused. As you say, we are past the crypto winter. There is much less uncertainty in regulations and stuff. I guess how crypto and Bitcoin in specific have evolved over the past 12 months has been a bit weird to me, I must say. It’s not clear from my perspective what’s happening right now. I guess, who knows? But we are at the price point at the lowest since November 2024, so since Trump become president, basically. It’s pretty surprising given that it should have removed the uncertainty in the market a lot. Provided clear regulations, let’s risk for the players in the market. I’m not clear personally about what’s happening. It seems that there has been probably way too much leverage and some players lost a lot. But it will be interesting to follow. In terms of tokenisation of assets, we will see what’s going. I’m I’m quite hopeful things are opening up from a regulatory perspective. But there is also the question with crypto about which part is too much. Do we need these thousands of crypto projects? Do we need hundreds of them? Do we need a dozen? Or do we even just need Bitcoin? For me, that one is a big question, and I don’t think I have a clear answer personally, except that I’m relatively a big believer in Bitcoin. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed. Conclusion So it’s time to conclude today’s episode. In summary, we’re predicting a very positive 2026 with tremendous and continuous innovation around AI, albeit in this really very, very frothy bubble. Tremendous amount of new applications and tools out there driven a lot by agentic AI. We see a movement more and more to sovereign AI and global computational and infrastructure races. So no change there, but, obviously, this will drive a lot of innovation. It will drive a lot of capital moving into these ecosystems. Some interesting changes on hardware, couple of points of disagreement between Bertrand and I on how much we will see this year or not. Maybe less excitement from Bertrand, more excitement for me on AI driven devices and their advent in 2026. Maybe I’m ahead of schedule in some ways. Around venture capital and startup ecosystem, the haves and the have-nots will continue throughout the year. Very difficult markets for both VC fundraising and startup fundraising. On the startup side, either you’re AI or, well, tough luck. Even if you’re AI, you might not raise, and on the VC side, either you’re a mega fund or it’s tough. The silver lining is we do see that there’s some movement around, actually, AI enabled VCs that now is becoming du jour and will move forward accordingly. A lot of positive movements around the IPO market and M&A, and then on the regulatory and geopolitical side, just go and listen to the episode. A lot of thoughts around it and a lot of dramatic nuances that are worthwhile listening to. Thank you so much for listening to us. Thank you, Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt Thank you, Nuno.

Infrastructure was passé…uncool. Difficult to get dollars from Private Equity and Growth funds, and almost impossible to get a VC fund interested. Now?! Now, it’s cool. Infrastructure seems to be having a Renaissance, a full on Rebirth, not just fueled by commercial interests (e.g. advent of AI), but also by industrial policy and geopolitical considerations. In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we explore what’s cool in the infrastructure spaces, including mega trends in semiconductors, energy, networking & connectivity, manufacturing Navigation: Intro We’re back to building things Why now: the 5 forces behind the renaissance Semiconductors: compute is the new oil Networking & connectivity: digital highways get rebuilt Energy: rebuilding the power stack (not just renewables) Manufacturing: the return of “atoms + bits” Wrap: what it means for startups, incumbents, and investors 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 Gonçalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 73 of Tech Deciphered, Infrastructure, the Rebirth or Renaissance. Infrastructure was passé, it wasn’t cool, but all of a sudden now everyone’s talking about network, talking about compute and semiconductors, talking about logistics, talking about energy. What gives? What’s happened? It was impossible in the past to get any funds, venture capital, even, to be honest, some private equity funds or growth funds interested in some of these areas, but now all of a sudden everyone thinks it’s cool. The infrastructure seems to be having a renaissance, a full-on rebirth. In this episode, we will explore in which cool ways the infrastructure spaces are moving and what’s leading to it. We will deep dive into the forces that are leading us to this. We will deep dive into semiconductors, networking and connectivity, energy, manufacturing, and then we’ll wrap up. Bertrand, so infrastructure is cool now. Bertrand Schmitt We’re back to building things Yes. I thought software was going to eat the world. I cannot believe it was then, maybe even 15 years ago, from Andreessen, that quote about software eating the world. I guess it’s an eternal balance. Sometimes you go ahead of yourself, you build a lot of software stack, and at some point, you need the hardware to run this software stack, and there is only so much the bits can do in a world of atoms. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Obviously, we’ve gone through some of this before. I think what we’re going through right now is AI is eating the world, and because AI is eating the world, it’s driving a lot of this infrastructure building that we need. We don’t have enough energy to be consumed by all these big data centers and hyperscalers. We need to be innovative around network as well because of the consumption in terms of network bandwidth that is linked to that consumption as well. In some ways, it’s not software eating the world, AI is eating the world. Because AI is eating the world, we need to rethink everything around infrastructure and infrastructure becoming cool again. Bertrand Schmitt There is something deeper in this. It’s that the past 10, even 15 years were all about SaaS before AI. SaaS, interestingly enough, was very energy-efficient. When I say SaaS, I mean cloud computing at large. What I mean by energy-efficient is that actually cloud computing help make energy use more efficient because instead of companies having their own separate data centers in many locations, sometimes poorly run from an industrial perspective, replace their own privately run data center with data center run by the super scalers, the hyperscalers of the world. These data centers were run much better in terms of how you manage the coolings, the energy efficiency, the rack density, all of this stuff. Actually, the cloud revolution didn’t increase the use of electricity. The cloud revolution was actually a replacement from your private data center to the hyperscaler data center, which was energy efficient. That’s why we didn’t, even if we are always talking about that growth of cloud computing, we were never feeling the pinch in term of electricity. As you say, we say it all changed because with AI, it was not a simple “Replacement” of locally run infrastructure to a hyperscaler run infrastructure. It was truly adding on top of an existing infrastructure, a new computing infrastructure in a way out of nowhere. Not just any computing infrastructure, an energy infrastructure that was really, really voracious in term of energy use. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro There was one other effect. Obviously, we’ve discussed before, we are in a bubble. We won’t go too much into that today. But the previous big bubble in tech, which is in the late ’90s, there was a lot of infrastructure built. We thought the internet was going to take over back then. It didn’t take over immediately, but there was a lot of network connectivity, bandwidth built back in the day. Companies imploded because of that as well, or had to restructure and go in their chapter 11. A lot of the big telco companies had their own issues back then, etc., but a lot of infrastructure was built back then for this advent of the internet, which would then take a long time to come. In some ways, to your point, there was a lot of latent supply that was built that was around that for a while wasn’t used, but then it was. Now it’s been used, and now we need new stuff. That’s why I feel now we’re having the new moment of infrastructure, new moment of moving forward, aligned a little bit with what you just said around cloud computing and the advent of SaaS, but also around the fact that we had a lot of buildup back in the late ’90s, early ’90s, which we’re now still reaping the benefits on in today’s world. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, that’s actually a great point because what was built in the late ’90s, there was a lot of fibre that was built. Laying out the fibre either across countries, inside countries. This fibre, interestingly enough, you could just change the computing on both sides of the fibre, the routing, the modems, and upgrade the capacity of the fibre. But the fibre was the same in between. The big investment, CapEx investment, was really lying down that fibre, but then you could really upgrade easily. Even if both ends of the fibre were either using very old infrastructure from the ’90s or were actually dark and not being put to use, step by step, it was being put to use, equipment was replaced, and step by step, you could keep using more and more of this fibre. It was a very interesting development, as you say, because it could be expanded over the years, where if we talk about GPUs, use for AI, GPUs, the interesting part is actually it’s totally the opposite. After a few years, it’s useless. Some like Google, will argue that they can depreciate over 5, 6 years, even some GPUs. But at the end of the day, the difference in perf and energy efficiency of the GPUs means that if you are energy constrained, you just want to replace the old one even as young as three-year-old. You have to look at Nvidia increasing spec, generation after generation. It’s pretty insane. It’s usually at least 3X year over year in term of performance. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro At this moment in time, it’s very clear that it’s happening. Why now: the 5 forces behind the renaissance Maybe let’s deep dive into why it’s happening now. What are the key forces around this? We’ve identified, I think, five forces that are particularly vital that lead to the world we’re in right now. One we’ve already talked about, which is AI, the demand shock and everything that’s happened because of AI. Data centers drive power demand, drive grid upgrades, drive innovative ways of getting energy, drive chips, drive networking, drive cooling, drive manufacturing, drive all the things that we’re going to talk in just a bit. One second element that we could probably highlight in terms of the forces that are behind this is obviously where we are in terms of cost curves around technology. Obviously, a lot of things are becoming much cheaper. The simulation of physical behaviours has become a lot more cheap, which in itself, this becomes almost a vicious cycle in of itself, then drives the adoption of more and more AI and stuff. But anyway, the simulation is becoming more and more accessible, so you can do a lot of simulation with digital twins and other things off the real world before you go into the real world. Robotics itself is becoming, obviously, cheaper. Hardware, a lot of the hardware is becoming cheaper. Computer has become cheaper as well. Obviously, there’s a lot of cost curves that have aligned that, and that’s maybe the second force that I would highlight. Obviously, funds are catching up. We’ll leave that a little bit to the end. We’ll do a wrap-up and talk a little bit about the implications to investors. But there’s a lot of capital out there, some capital related to industrial policy, other capital related to private initiative, private equity, growth funds, even venture capital, to be honest, and a few other elements on that. That would be a third force that I would highlight. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Interestingly enough, in terms of capital use, and we’ll talk more about this, but some firms, if we are talking about energy investment, it was very difficult to invest if you are not investing in green energy. Now I think more and more firms and banks are willing to invest or support different type of energy infrastructure, not just, “Green energy.” That’s an interesting development because at some point it became near impossible to invest more in gas development, in oil development in the US or in most Western countries. At least in the US, this is dramatically changing the framework. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Maybe to add the two last forces that I think we see behind the renaissance of what’s happening in infrastructure. They go hand in hand. One is the geopolitics of the world right now. Obviously, the world was global flat, and now it’s becoming increasingly siloed, so people are playing it to their own interests. There’s a lot of replication of infrastructure as well because people want to be autonomous, and they want to drive their own ability to serve end consumers, businesses, etc., in terms of data centers and everything else. That ability has led to things like, for example, chips shortage. The fact that there are semiconductors, there are shortages across the board, like memory shortages, where everything is packed up until 2027 of 2028. A lot of the memory that was being produced is already spoken for, which is shocking. There’s obviously generation of supply chain fragilities, obviously, some of it because of policies, for example, in the US with tariffs, etc, security of energy, etc. Then the last force directly linked to the geopolitics is the opposite of it, which is the policy as an accelerant, so to speak, as something that is accelerating development, where because of those silos, individual countries, as part their industrial policy, then want to put capital behind their local ecosystems, their local companies, so that their local companies and their local systems are for sure the winners, or at least, at the very least, serve their own local markets. I think that’s true of a lot of the things we’re seeing, for example, in the US with the Chips Act, for semiconductors, with IGA, IRA, and other elements of what we’ve seen in terms of practices, policies that have been implemented even in Europe, China, and other parts of the world. Bertrand Schmitt Talking about chips shortages, it’s pretty insane what has been happening with memory. Just the past few weeks, I have seen a close to 3X increase in price in memory prices in a matter of weeks. Apparently, it started with a huge order from OpenAI. Apparently, they have tried to corner the memory market. Interestingly enough, it has flat-footed the entire industry, and that includes Google, that includes Microsoft. There are rumours of their teams now having moved to South Korea, so they are closer to the action in terms of memory factories and memory decision-making. There are rumours of execs who got fired because they didn’t prepare for this type of eventuality or didn’t lock in some of the supply chain because that memory was initially for AI, but obviously, it impacts everything because factories making memories, you have to plan years in advance to build memories. You cannot open new lines of manufacturing like this. All factories that are going to open, we know when they are going to open because they’ve been built up for years. There is no extra capacity suddenly. At the very best, you can change a bit your line of production from one type of memory to another type. But that’s probably about it. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Just to be clear, all these transformations we’re seeing isn’t to say just hardware is back, right? It’s not just hardware. There’s physicality. The buildings are coming back, right? It’s full stack. Software is here. That’s why everything is happening. Policy is here. Finance is here. It’s a little bit like the name of the movie, right? Everything everywhere all at once. Everything’s happening. It was in some ways driven by the upper stacks, by the app layers, by the platform layers. But now we need new infrastructure. We need more infrastructure. We need it very, very quickly. We need it today. We’re already lacking in it. Semiconductors: compute is the new oil Maybe that’s a good segue into the first piece of the whole infrastructure thing that’s driving now the most valuable company in the world, NVIDIA, which is semiconductors. Semiconductors are driving compute. Semis are the foundation of infrastructure as a compute. Everyone needs it for every thing, for every activity, not just for compute, but even for sensors, for actuators, everything else. That’s the beginning of it all. Semiconductor is one of the key pieces around the infrastructure stack that’s being built at scale at this moment in time. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. What’s interesting is that if we look at the market gap of Semis versus software as a service, cloud companies, there has been a widening gap the past year. I forgot the exact numbers, but we were talking about plus 20, 25% for Semis in term of market gap and minus 5, minus 10 for SaaS companies. That’s another trend that’s happening. Why is this happening? One, because semiconductors are core to the AI build-up, you cannot go around without them. But two, it’s also raising a lot of questions about the durability of the SaaS, a software-as-a-service business model. Because if suddenly we have better AI, and that’s all everyone is talking about to justify the investment in AI, that it keeps getting better, and it keeps improving, and it’s going to replace your engineers, your software engineers. Then maybe all of this moat that software companies built up over the years or decades, sometimes, might unravel under the pressure of newly coded, newly built, cheaper alternatives built from the ground up with AI support. It’s not just that, yes, semiconductors are doing great. It’s also as a result of that AI underlying trend that software is doing worse right now. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro At the end of the day, this foundational piece of infrastructure, semiconductor, is obviously getting manifest to many things, fabrication, manufacturing, packaging, materials, equipment. Everything’s being driven, ASML, etc. There are all these different players around the world that are having skyrocket valuations now, it’s because they’re all part of the value chain. Just to be very, very clear, there’s two elements of this that I think are very important for us to remember at this point in time. One, it’s the entire value chains are being shifted. It’s not just the chips that basically lead to computing in the strict sense of it. It’s like chips, for example, that drive, for example, network switching. We’re going to talk about networking a bit, but you need chips to drive better network switching. That’s getting revolutionised as well. For example, we have an investment in that space, a company called the eridu.ai, and they’re revolutionising one of the pieces around that stack. Second part of the puzzle, so obviously, besides the holistic view of the world that’s changing in terms of value change, the second piece of the puzzle is, as we discussed before, there’s industrial policy. We already mentioned the CHIPS Act, which is something, for example, that has been done in the US, which I think is 52 billion in incentives across a variety of things, grants, loans, and other mechanisms to incentivise players to scale capacity quick and to scale capacity locally in the US. One of the effects of that now is obviously we had the TSMC, US expansion with a factory here in the US. We have other levels of expansion going on with Intel, Samsung, and others that are happening as we speak. Again, it’s this two by two. It’s market forces that drive the need for fundamental shifts in the value chain. On the other industrial policy and actual money put forward by states, by governments, by entities that want to revolutionise their own local markets. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. When you talk about networking, it makes me think about what NVIDIA did more than six years ago when they acquired Mellanox. At the time, it was largest acquisition for NVIDIA in 2019, and it was networking for the data center. Not networking across data center, but inside the data center, and basically making sure that your GPUs, the different computers, can talk as fast as possible between each of them. I think that’s one piece of the puzzle that a lot of companies are missing, by the way, about NVIDIA is that they are truly providing full systems. They are not just providing a GPU. Some of their competitors are just providing GPUs. But NVIDIA can provide you the full rack. Now, they move to liquid-cool computing as well. They design their systems with liquid cooling in mind. They have a very different approach in the industry. It’s a systematic system-level approach to how do you optimize your data center. Quite frankly, that’s a bit hard to beat. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro For those listening, you’d be like, this is all very different. Semiconductors, networking, energy, manufacturing, this is all different. Then all of a sudden, as Bertrand is saying, well, there are some players that are acting across the stack. Then you see in the same sentence, you’re talking about nuclear power in Microsoft or nuclear power in Google, and you’re like, what happened? Why are these guys in the same sentence? It’s like they’re tech companies. Why are they talking about energy? It’s the nature of that. These ecosystems need to go hand in hand. The value chains are very deep. For you to actually reap the benefits of more and more, for example, semiconductor availability, you have to have better and better networking connectivity, and you have to have more and more energy at lower and lower costs, and all of that. All these things are intrinsically linked. That’s why you see all these big tech companies working across stack, NVIDIA being a great example of that in trying to create truly a systems approach to the world, as Bertrand was mentioning. Networking & connectivity: digital highways get rebuilt On the networking and connectivity side, as we said, we had a lot of fibre that was put down, etc, but there’s still more build-out needs to be done. 5G in terms of its densification is still happening. We’re now starting to talk, obviously, about 6G. I’m not sure most telcos are very happy about that because they just have been doing all this CapEx and all this deployment into 5G, and now people already started talking about 6G and what’s next. Obviously, data center interconnect is quite important, and all the hubbing that needs to happen around data centers is very, very important. We are seeing a lot movements around connectivity that are particularly important. Network gear and the emergence of players like Broadcom in terms of the semiconductor side of the fence, obviously, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and others that are very much present in this space. As I said, we made an investment on the semiconductor side of networking as well, realizing that there’s still a lot of bottlenecks happening there. But obviously, the networking and connectivity stack still needs to be built at all levels within the data centers, outside of the data centers in terms of last mile, across the board in terms of fibre. We’re seeing a lot of movements still around the space. It’s what connects everything. At the end of the day, if there’s too much latency in these systems, if the bandwidths are not high enough, then we’re going to have huge bottlenecks that are going to be put at the table by a networking providers. Obviously, that doesn’t help anyone. If there’s a button like anywhere, it doesn’t work. All of this doesn’t work. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Interestingly enough, I know we said for this episode, we not talk too much about space, but when you talk about 6G, it make me think about, of course, Starlink. That’s really your last mile delivery that’s being built as well. It’s a massive investment. We’re talking about thousands of satellites that are interconnected between each other through laser system. This is changing dramatically how companies can operate, how individuals can operate. For companies, you can have great connectivity from anywhere in the world. For military, it’s the same. For individuals, suddenly, you won’t have dead space, wide zones. This is also a part of changing how we could do things. It’s quite important even in the development of AI because, yes, you can have AI at the edge, but that interconnect to the rest of the system is quite critical. Having that availability of a network link, high-quality network link from anywhere is a great combo. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Then you start seeing regions of the world that want to differentiate to attract digital nomads by saying, “We have submarine cables that come and hub through us, and therefore, our connectivity is amazing.” I was just in Madeira, and they were talking about that in Portugal. One of the islands of Portugal. We have some Marine cables. You have great connectivity. We’re getting into that discussion where people are like, I don’t care. I mean, I don’t know. I assume I have decent connectivity. People actually care about decent connectivity. This discussion is not just happening at corporate level, at enterprise level? Etc. Even consumers, even people that want to work remotely or be based somewhere else in the world. It’s like, This is important Where is there a great connectivity for me so that I can have access to the services I need? Etc. Everyone becomes aware of everything. We had a cloud flare mishap more recently that the CEO had to jump online and explain deeply, technically and deeply, what happened. Because we’re in their heads. If Cloudflare goes down, there’s a lot of websites that don’t work. All of this, I think, is now becoming du jour rather than just an afterthought. Maybe we’ll think about that in the future. Bertrand Schmitt Totally. I think your life is being changed for network connectivity, so life of individuals, companies. I mean, everything. Look at airlines and ships and cruise ships. Now is the advent of satellite connectivity. It’s dramatically changing our experience. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Indeed. Energy: rebuilding the power stack (not just renewables) Moving maybe to energy. We’ve talked about energy quite a bit in the past. Maybe we start with the one that we didn’t talk as much, although we did mention it, which was, let’s call it the fossil infrastructure, what’s happening around there. Everyone was saying, it’s all going to be renewables and green. We’ve had a shift of power, geopolitics. Honestly, I the writing was on the wall that we needed a lot more energy creation. It wasn’t either or. We needed other sources to be as efficient as possible. Obviously, we see a lot of work happening around there that many would have thought, Well, all this infrastructure doesn’t matter anymore. Now we’re seeing LNG terminals, pipelines, petrochemical capacity being pushed up, a lot of stuff happening around markets in terms of export, and not only around export, but also around overall distribution and increases and improvements so that there’s less leakage, distribution of energy, etc. In some ways, people say, it’s controversial, but it’s like we don’t have enough energy to spare. We’re already behind, so we need as much as we can. We need to figure out the way to really extract as much as we can from even natural resources, which In many people’s mind, it’s almost like blasphemous to talk about, but it is where we are. Obviously, there’s a lot of renaissance also happening on the fossil infrastructure basis, so to speak. Bertrand Schmitt Personally, I’m ecstatic that there is a renaissance going regarding what is called fossil infrastructure. Oil and gas, it’s critical to humanity well-being. You never had growth of countries without energy growth and nothing else can come close. Nuclear could come close, but it takes decades to deploy. I think it’s great. It’s great for developed economies so that they do better, they can expand faster. It’s great for third-world countries who have no realistic other choice. I really don’t know what happened the past 10, 15 years and why this was suddenly blasphemous. But I’m glad that, strangely, thanks to AI, we are back to a more rational mindset about energy and making sure we get efficient energy where we can. Obviously, nuclear is getting a second act. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I know you would be. We’ve been talking about for a long time, and you’ve been talking about it in particular for a very long time. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, definitely. It’s been one area of interest of mine for 25 years. I don’t know. I’ve been shocked about what happened in Europe, that willingness destruction of energy infrastructure, especially in Germany. Just a few months ago, they keep destroying on live TV some nuclear station in perfect working condition and replacing them with coal. I’m not sure there is a better definition of insanity at this stage. It looks like it’s only the Germans going that hardcore for some reason, but at least the French have stopped their program of decommissioning. America, it seems to be doing the same, so it’s great. On top of it, there are new generations that could be put to use. The Chinese are building up a very large nuclear reactor program, more than 100 reactors in construction for the next 10 years. I think everybody has to catch up because at some point, this is the most efficient energy solution. Especially if you don’t build crazy constraints around the construction of these nuclear reactors. If we are rational about permits, about energy, about safety, there are great things we could be doing with nuclear. That might be one of the only solution if we want to be competitive, because when energy prices go down like crazy, like in China, they will do once they have reach delivery of their significant build-up of nuclear reactors, we better be ready to have similar options from a cost perspective. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro From the outside, at the very least, nuclear seems to be probably in the energy one of the areas that’s more being innovated at this moment in time. You have startups in the space, you have a lot really money going into it, not just your classic industrial development. That’s very exciting. Moving maybe to the carbonization and what’s happening. The CCUS, and for those who don’t know what it is, carbon capture, utilization, and storage. There’s a lot of stuff happening around that space. That’s the area that deals with the ability to capture CO₂ emissions from industrial sources and/or the atmosphere and preventing their release. There’s a lot of things happening in that space. There’s also a lot of things happening around hydrogen and geothermal and really creating the ability to storage or to store, rather, energy that then can be put back into the grids at the right time. There’s a lot of interesting pieces happening around this. There’s some startup movement in the space. It’s been a long time coming, the reuse of a lot of these industrial sources. Not sure it’s as much on the news as nuclear, and oil and gas, but certainly there’s a lot of exciting things happening there. Bertrand Schmitt I’m a bit more dubious here, but I think geothermal makes sense if it’s available at reasonable price. I don’t think hydrogen technology has proven its value. Concerning carbon capture, I’m not sure how much it’s really going to provide in terms of energy needs, but why not? Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Fuels niche, again, from the outside, we’re not energy experts, but certainly, there are movements in the space. We’ll see what’s happening. One area where there’s definitely a lot of movement is this notion of grid and storage. On the one hand, that transmission needs to be built out. It needs to be better. We’ve had issues of blackouts in the US. We’ve had issues of blackouts all around the world, almost. Portugal as well, for a significant part of the time. The ability to work around transmission lines, transformers, substations, the modernization of some of this infrastructure, and the move forward of it is pretty critical. But at the other end, there’s the edge. Then, on the edge, you have the ability to store. We should have, better mechanisms to store energy that are less leaky in terms of energy storage. Obviously, there’s a lot of movement around that. Some of it driven just by commercial stuff, like Tesla a lot with their storage stuff, etc. Some of it really driven at scale by energy players that have the interest that, for example, some of the storage starts happening closer to the consumption as well. But there’s a lot of exciting things happening in that space, and that is a transformative space. In some ways, the bottleneck of energy is also around transmission and then ultimately the access to energy by homes, by businesses, by industries, etc. Bertrand Schmitt I would say some of the blackout are truly man-made. If I pick on California, for instance. That’s the logical conclusion of the regulatory system in place in California. On one side, you limit price that energy supplier can sell. The utility company can sell, too. On the other side, you force them to decommission the most energy-efficient and least expensive energy source. That means you cap the revenues, you make the cost increase. What is the result? The result is you cannot invest anymore to support a grid and to support transmission. That’s 100% obvious. That’s what happened, at least in many places. The solution is stop crazy regulations that makes no economic sense whatsoever. Then, strangely enough, you can invest again in transmission, in maintenance, and all I love this stuff. Maybe another piece, if we pick in California, if you authorize building construction in areas where fires are easy, that’s also a very costly to support from utility perspective, because then you are creating more risk. You are forced buy the state to connect these new constructions to the grid. You have more maintenance. If it fails, you can create fire. If you create fire, you have to pay billions of fees. I just want to highlight that some of this is not a technological issue, is not per se an investment issue, but it’s simply the result of very bad regulations. I hope that some will learn, and some change will be made so that utilities can do their job better. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Then last, but not the least, on the energy side, energy is becoming more and more digitally defined in some ways. It’s like the analogy to networks that they’ve become more, and more software defined, where you have, at the edge is things like smart meters. There’s a lot of things you can do around the key elements of the business model, like dynamic pricing and other elements. Demand response, one of the areas that I invested in, I invest in a company called Omconnect that’s now merged with what used to be Google Nest. Where to deploy that ability to do demand response and also pass it to consumers so that consumers can reduce their consumption at times where is the least price effective or the less green or the less good for the energy companies to produce energy. We have other things that are happening, which are interesting. Obviously, we have a lot more electric vehicles in cars, etc. These are also elements of storage. They don’t look like elements of storage, but the car has electricity in it once you charge it. Once it’s charged, what do you do with it? Could you do something else? Like the whole reverse charging piece that we also see now today in mobile devices and other edge devices, so to speak. That also changes the architecture of what we’re seeing around the space. With AI, there’s a lot of elements that change around the value chain. The ability to do forecasting, the ability to have, for example, virtual power plans because of just designated storage out there, etc. Interesting times happening. Not sure all utilities around the world, all energy providers around the world are innovating at the same pace and in the same way. But certainly just looking at the industry and talking to a lot of players that are CEOs of some of these companies. That are leading innovation for some of these companies, there’s definitely a lot more happening now in the last few years than maybe over the last few decades. Very exciting times. Bertrand Schmitt I think there are two interesting points in what you say. Talking about EVs, for instance, a Cybertruck is able to send electricity back to your home if your home is able to receive electricity from that source. Usually, you have some changes to make to the meter system, to your panel. That’s one great way to potentially use your car battery. Another piece of the puzzle is that, strangely enough, most strangely enough, there has been a big push to EV, but at the same time, there has not been a push to provide more electricity. But if you replace cars that use gasoline by electric vehicles that use electricity, you need to deliver more electricity. It doesn’t require a PhD to get that. But, strangely enough, nothing was done. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Apparently, it does. Bertrand Schmitt I remember that study in France where they say that, if people were all to switch to EV, we will need 10 more nuclear reactors just on the way from Paris to Nice to the Côte d’Azur, the French Rivière, in order to provide electricity to the cars going there during the summer vacation. But I mean, guess what? No nuclear plant is being built along the way. Good luck charging your vehicles. I think that’s another limit that has been happening to the grid is more electric vehicles that require charging when the related infrastructure has not been upgraded to support more. Actually, it has quite the opposite. In many cases, we had situation of nuclear reactors closing down, so other facilities closing down. Obviously, the end result is an increase in price of electricity, at least in some states and countries that have not sold that fully out. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Manufacturing: the return of “atoms + bits” Moving to manufacturing and what’s happening around manufacturing, manufacturing technology. There’s maybe the case to be made that manufacturing is getting replatformed, right? It’s getting redefined. Some of it is very obvious, and it’s already been ongoing for a couple of decades, which is the advent of and more and more either robotic augmented factories or just fully roboticized factories, where there’s very little presence of human beings. There’s elements of that. There’s the element of software definition on top of it, like simulation. A lot of automation is going on. A lot of AI has been applied to some lines in terms of vision, safety. We have an investment in a company called Sauter Analytics that is very focused on that from the perspective of employees and when they’re still humans in the loop, so to speak, and the ability to really figure out when people are at risk and other elements of what’s happening occurring from that. But there’s more than that. There’s a little bit of a renaissance in and of itself. Factories are, initially, if we go back a couple of decades ago, factories were, and manufacturing was very much defined from the setup. Now it’s difficult to innovate, it’s difficult to shift the line, it’s difficult to change how things are done in the line. With the advent of new factories that have less legacy, that have more flexible systems, not only in terms of software, but also in terms of hardware and robotics, it allows us to, for example, change and shift lines much more easily to different functions, which will hopefully, over time, not only reduce dramatically the cost of production. But also increase dramatically the yield, it increases dramatically the production itself. A lot of cool stuff happening in that space. Bertrand Schmitt It’s exciting to see that. One thing this current administration in the US has been betting on is not just hoping for construction renaissance. Especially on the factory side, up of factories, but their mindset was two things. One, should I force more companies to build locally because it would be cheaper? Two, increase output and supply of energy so that running factories here in the US would be cheaper than anywhere else. Maybe not cheaper than China, but certainly we get is cheaper than Europe. But three, it’s also the belief that thanks to AI, we will be able to have more efficient factories. There is always that question, do Americans to still keep making clothes, for instance, in factories. That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, but this move to China, this move to Bangladesh, this move to different places. That’s not the goal. But it can make sense that indeed there is ability, thanks to robots and AI, to have more automated factories, and these factories could be run more efficiently, and as a result, it would be priced-competitive, even if run in the US. When you want to think about it, that has been, for instance, the South Korean playbook. More automated factories, robotics, all of this, because that was the only way to compete against China, which has a near infinite or used to have a near infinite supply of cheaper labour. I think that all of this combined can make a lot of sense. In a way, it’s probably creating a perfect storm. Maybe another piece of the puzzle this administration has been working on pretty hard is simplifying all the permitting process. Because a big chunk of the problem is that if your permitting is very complex, very expensive, what take two years to build become four years, five years, 10 years. The investment mass is not the same in that situation. I think that’s a very important part of the puzzle. It’s use this opportunity to reduce regulatory state, make sure that things are more efficient. Also, things are less at risk of bribery and fraud because all these regulations, there might be ways around. I think it’s quite critical to really be careful about this. Maybe last piece of the puzzle is the way accounting works. There are new rules now in 2026 in the US where you can fully depreciate your CapEx much faster than before. That’s a big win for manufacturing in the US. Suddenly, you can depreciate much faster some of your CapEx investment in manufacturing. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Just going back to a point you made and then moving it forward, even China, with being now probably the country in the world with the highest rate of innovation and take up of industrial robots. Because of demographic issues a little bit what led Japan the first place to be one of the real big innovators around robots in general. The fact that demographics, you’re having an aging population, less and less children. How are you going to replace all these people? Moving that into big winners, who becomes a big winner in a space where manufacturing is fundamentally changing? Obviously, there’s the big four of robots, which is ABB, FANUC, KUKA, and Yaskawa. Epson, I think, is now in there, although it’s not considered one of the big four. Kawasaki, Denso, Universal Robots. There’s a really big robotics, industrial robotic companies in the space from different origins, FANUC and Yaskawa, and Epson from Japan, KUKA from Germany, ABB from Switzerland, Sweden. A lot of now emerging companies from China, and what’s happening in that space is quite interesting. On the other hand, also, other winners will include players that will be integrators that will build some of the rest of the infrastructure that goes into manufacturing, the Siemens of the world, the Schneider’s, the Rockwell’s that will lead to fundamental industrial automation. Some big winners in there that whose names are well known, so probably not a huge amount of surprises there. There’s movements. As I said, we’re still going to see the big Chinese players emerging in the world. There are startups that are innovating around a lot of the edges that are significant in this space. We’ll see if this is a space that will just be continued to be dominated by the big foreign robotics and by a couple of others and by the big integrators or not. Bertrand Schmitt I think you are right to remind about China because China has been moving very fast in robotics. Some Chinese companies are world-class in their use of robotics. You have this strange mix of some older industries where robotics might not be so much put to use and typically state-owned, versus some private companies, typically some tech companies that are reconverting into hardware in some situation. That went all in terms of robotics use and their demonstrations, an example of what’s happening in China. Definitely, the Chinese are not resting. Everyone smart enough is playing that game from the Americans, the Chinese, Japanese, the South Koreans. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Exciting things are manufacturing, and maybe to bring it all together, what does it mean for all the big players out there? If we talk with startups and talk about startups, we didn’t mention a ton of startups today, right? Maybe incumbent wind across the board. But on a more serious note, we did mention a few. For example, in nuclear energy, there’s a lot of startups that have been, some of them, incredibly well-funded at this moment in time. Wrap: what it means for startups, incumbents, and investors There might be some big disruptions that will come out of startups, for example, in that space. On the chipset side, we talked about the big gorillas, the NVIDIAs, AMDs, Intel, etc., of the world. But we didn’t quite talk about the fact that there’s a lot of innovation, again, happening on the edges with new players going after very large niches, be it in networking and switching. Be it in compute and other areas that will need different, more specialized solutions. Potentially in terms of compute or in terms of semiconductor deployments. I think there’s still some opportunities there, maybe not to be the winner takes all thing, but certainly around a lot of very significant niches that might grow very fast. Manufacturing, we mentioned the same. Some of the incumbents seem to be in the driving seat. We’ll see what happens if some startups will come in and take some of the momentum there, probably less likely. There are spaces where the value chains are very tightly built around the OEMs and then the suppliers overall, classically the tier one suppliers across value chains. Maybe there is some startup investment play. We certainly have played in the couple of the spaces. I mentioned already some of them today, but this is maybe where the incumbents have it all to lose. It’s more for them to lose rather than for the startups to win just because of the scale of what needs to be done and what needs to be deployed. Bertrand Schmitt I know. That’s interesting point. I think some players in energy production, for instance, are moving very fast and behaving not only like startups. Usually, it’s independent energy suppliers who are not kept by too much regulations that get moved faster. Utility companies, as we just discussed, have more constraints. I would like to say that if you take semiconductor space, there has been quite a lot of startup activities way more than usual, and there have been some incredible success. Just a few weeks ago, Rock got more or less acquired. Now, you have to play games. It’s not an outright acquisition, but $20 billion for an IP licensing agreement that’s close to an acquisition. That’s an incredible success for a company. Started maybe 10 years ago. You have another Cerebras, one of the competitor valued, I believe, quite a lot in similar range. I think there is definitely some activity. It’s definitely a different game compared to your software startup in terms of investment. But as we have seen with AI in general, the need for investment might be larger these days. Yes, it might be either traditional players if they can move fast enough, to be frank, because some of them, when you have decades of being run as a slow-moving company, it’s hard to change things. At the same time, it looks like VCs are getting bigger. Wall Street is getting more ready to finance some of these companies. I think there will be opportunities for startups, but definitely different types of startups in terms of profile. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Exactly. From an investor standpoint, I think on the VC side, at least our core belief is that it’s more niche. It’s more around big niches that need to be fundamentally disrupted or solutions that require fundamental interoperability and integration where the incumbents have no motivation to do it. Things that are a little bit more either packaging on the semiconductor side or other elements of actual interoperability. Even at the software layer side that feeds into infrastructure. If you’re a growth investor, a private equity investor, there’s other plays that are available to you. A lot of these projects need to be funded and need to be scaled. Now we’re seeing projects being funded even for a very large, we mentioned it in one of the previous episodes, for a very large tech companies. When Meta, for example, is going to the market to get funding for data centers, etc. There’s projects to be funded there because just the quantum and scale of some of these projects, either because of financial interest for specifically the tech companies or for other reasons, but they need to be funded by the market. There’s other place right now, certainly if you’re a larger private equity growth investor, and you want to come into the market and do projects. Even public-private financing is now available for a lot of things. Definitely, there’s a lot of things emanating that require a lot of funding, even for large-scale projects. Which means the advent of some of these projects and where realization is hopefully more of a given than in other circumstances, because there’s actual commercial capital behind it and private capital behind it to fuel it as well, not just industrial policy and money from governments. Bertrand Schmitt There was this quite incredible stat. I guess everyone heard about that incredible growth in GDP in Q3 in the US at 4.4%. Apparently, half of that growth, so around 2.2% point, has been coming from AI and related infrastructure investment. That’s pretty massive. Half of your GDP growth coming from something that was not there three years ago or there, but not at this intensity of investment. That’s the numbers we are talking about. I’m hearing that there is a good chance that in 2026, we’re talking about five, even potentially 6% GDP growth. Again, half of it potentially coming from AI and all the related infrastructure growth that’s coming with AI. As a conclusion for this episode on infrastructure, as we just said, it’s not just AI, it’s a whole stack, and it’s manufacturing in general as well. Definitely in the US, in China, there is a lot going on. As we have seen, computing needs connectivity, networks, need power, energy and grid, and all of this needs production capacity and manufacturing. Manufacturing can benefit from AI as well. That way the loop is fully going back on itself. Infrastructure is the next big thing. It’s an opportunity, probably more for incumbents, but certainly, as usual, with such big growth opportunities for startups as well. Thank you, Nuno. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Thank you, Bertrand.

IWhat is our children’s future? What skills should they be developing? How should schools be adapting? What will the fully functioning citizens and workers of the future look like? A look into the landscape of the next 15 years, the future of work with human and AI interactions, the transformation of education, the safety and privacy landscapes, and a parental playbook. Navigation: Intro The Landscape: 2026–2040 The Future of Work: Human + AI The Transformation of Education The Ethics, Safety, and Privacy Landscape The Parental Playbook: Actionable Strategies 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 SchmittIntroduction Welcome to Episode 72 of Tech Deciphered, about our children’s future. What is our children’s future? What skills should they be developing? How should school be adapting to AI? What would be the functioning citizens and workers of the future look like, especially in the context of the AI revolution? Nuno, what’s your take? Maybe we start with the landscape. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Landscape: 2026–2040 Let’s first frame it. What do people think is going to happen? Firstly, that there’s going to be a dramatic increase in productivity, and because of that dramatic increase in productivity, there are a lot of numbers that show that there’s going to be… AI will enable some labour productivity growth of 0.1 to 0.6% through 2040, which would be a figure that would be potentially rising even more depending on use of other technologies beyond generative AI, as much as 0.5 to 3.4% points annually, which would be ridiculous in terms of productivity enhancement. To be clear, we haven’t seen it yet. But if there are those dramatic increases in productivity expected by the market, then there will be job displacement. There will be people losing their jobs. There will be people that will need to be reskilled, and there will be a big shift that is similar to what happens when there’s a significant industrial revolution, like the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century into the 20th century. Other numbers quoted would say that 30% of US jobs could be automated by 2030, which is a silly number, 30%, and that another 60% would see tremendously being altered. A lot of their tasks would be altered for those jobs. There’s also views that this is obviously fundamentally a global phenomenon, that as much as 9% of jobs could be lost to AI by 2030. I think question mark if this is a net number or a gross number, so it might be 9% our loss, but then maybe there’re other jobs that will emerge. It’s very clear that the landscape we have ahead of us is if there are any significant increases in productivity, there will be job displacement. There will be job shifting. There will be the need for reskilling. Therefore, I think on the downside, you would say there’s going to be job losses. We’ll have to reevaluate whether people should still work in general 5 days a week or not. Will we actually work in 10, 20, 30 years? I think that’s the doomsday scenario and what happens on that side of the fence. I think on the positive side, there’s also a discussion around there’ll be new jobs that emerge. There’ll be new jobs that maybe we don’t understand today, new job descriptions that actually don’t even exist yet that will emerge out this brave new world of AI. Bertrand SchmittYeah. I mean, let’s not forget how we get to a growing economy. I mean, there’s a measurement of a growing economy is GDP growth. Typically, you can simplify in two elements. One is the growth of the labour force, two, the rise of the productivity of that labour force, and that’s about it. Either you grow the economy by increasing the number of people, which in most of the Western world is not really happening, or you increase productivity. I think that we should not forget that growth of productivity is a backbone of growth for our economies, and that has been what has enabled the rise in prosperity across countries. I always take that as a win, personally. That growth in productivity has happened over the past decades through all the technological revolutions, from more efficient factories to oil and gas to computers, to network computers, to internet, to mobile and all the improvement in science, usually on the back of technological improvement. Personally, I welcome any rise in improvement we can get in productivity because there is at this stage simply no other choice for a growing world in terms of growing prosperity. In terms of change, we can already have a look at the past. There are so many jobs today you could not imagine they would exist 30 years ago. Take the rise of the influencer, for instance, who could have imagined that 30 years ago. Take the rise of the small mom-and-pop e-commerce owner, who could have imagined that. Of course, all the rise of IT as a profession. I mean, how few of us were there 30 years ago compared to today. I mean, this is what it was 30 years ago. I think there is a lot of change that already happened. I think as a society, we need to welcome that. If we go back even longer, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, let’s not forget, if I take a city like Paris, we used to have tens of thousands of people transporting water manually. Before we have running water in every home, we used to have boats going to the North Pole or to the northern region to bring back ice and basically pushing ice all the way to the Western world because we didn’t have fridges at the time. I think that when we look back in time about all the jobs that got displaced, I would say, Thank you. Thank you because these were not such easy jobs. Change is coming, but change is part of the human equation, at least. Industrial revolution, the past 250 years, it’s thanks to that that we have some improvement in living conditions everywhere. AI is changing stuff, but change is a constant, and we need to adapt and adjust. At least on my side, I’m glad that AI will be able to displace some jobs that were not so interesting to do in the first place in many situations. Maybe not dangerous like in the past because we are talking about replacing white job collars, but at least repetitive jobs are definitely going to be on the chopping block. Nuno Goncalves PedroWhat happens in terms of shift? We were talking about some numbers earlier. The World Economic Forum also has some numbers that predicts that there is a gross job creation rate of 14% from 2025 to 2030 and a displacement rate of 8%, so I guess they’re being optimistic, so a net growth in employment. I think that optimism relates to this thesis that, for example, efficiency, in particular in production and industrial environments, et cetera, might reduce labour there while increasing the demand for labour elsewhere because there is a natural lower cost base. If there’s more automation in production, therefore there’s more disposable income for people to do other things and to focus more on their side activities. Maybe, as I said before, not work 5 days a week, but maybe work four or three or whatever it is. What are the jobs of the future? What are the jobs that we see increasing in the future? Obviously, there’re a lot of jobs that relate to the technology side, that relate obviously to AI, that’s a little bit self-serving, and everything that relates to information technology, computer science, computer technology, computer engineering, et cetera. More broadly in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, that might actually be more needed. Because there is a broadening of all of these elements of contact with digital, with AI over time also with robots and robotics, that those jobs will increase. There’s a thesis that actually other jobs that are a little bit more related to agriculture, education, et cetera, might not see a dramatic impact, that will still need for, I guess, teachers and the need for people working in farms, et cetera. I think this assumes that probably the AI revolution will come much before the fundamental evolution that will come from robotics afterwards. Then there’s obviously this discussion around declining roles. Anything that’s fundamentally routine, like data entry, clinical roles, paralegals, for example, routine manufacturing, anything that’s very repetitive in nature will be taken away. I have the personal thesis that there are jobs that are actually very blue-collar jobs, like HVAC installation, maintenance, et cetera, plumbing, that will be still done by humans for a very long time because there are actually, they appear to be repetitive, but they’re actually complex, and they require manual labour that cannot be easily, I think, right now done by robots and replacements of humans. Actually, I think there’re blue-collar roles that will be on the increase rather than on decrease that will demand a premium, because obviously, they are apprenticeship roles, certification roles, and that will demand a premium. Maybe we’re at the two ends. There’s an end that is very technologically driven of jobs that will need to necessarily increase, and there’s at the other end, jobs that are very menial but necessarily need to be done by humans, and therefore will also command a premium on the other end. Bertrand SchmittI think what you say make a lot of sense. If you think about AI as a stack, my guess is that for the foreseeable future, on the whole stack, and when I say stack, I mean from basic energy production because we need a lot of energy for AI, maybe to going up to all the computing infrastructure, to AI models, to AI training, to robotics. All this stack, we see an increase in expertise in workers and everything. Even if a lot of this work will benefit from AI improvement, the boom is so large that it will bring a lot of demand for anyone working on any part of the stack. Some of it is definitely blue-collar. When you have to build a data centre or energy power station, this requires a lot of blue-collar work. I would say, personally, I’m absolutely not a believer of the 3 or 4 days a week work week. I don’t believe a single second in that socialist paradise. If you want to call it that way. I think that’s not going to change. I would say today we can already see that breaking. I mean, if you take Europe, most European countries have a big issue with pension. The question is more to increase how long you are going to work because financially speaking, the equation is not there. Personally, I don’t think AI would change any of that. I agree with you in terms of some jobs from electricians to gas piping and stuff. There will still be demand and robots are not going to help soon on this job. There will be a big divergence between and all those that can be automated, done by AI and robots and becoming cheaper and cheaper and stuff that requires a lot of human work, manual work. I don’t know if it will become more expensive, but definitely, proportionally, in comparison, we look so expensive that you will have second thoughts about doing that investment to add this, to add that. I can see that when you have your own home, so many costs, some cost our product. You buy this new product, you add it to your home. It can be a water heater or something, built in a factory, relatively cheap. You see the installation cost, the maintenance cost. It’s many times the cost of the product itself. Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe it’s a good time to put a caveat into our conversation. I mean, there’s a… Roy Amara was a futurist who came up with the Amara’s Law. We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and overestimate the effect in the long run. I prefer my own law, which is, we tend to overestimate the speed at which we get to a technological revolution and underestimate its impact. I think it’s a little bit like that. I think everyone now is like, “Oh, my God, we’re going to be having the AI overlords taking over us, and AGI is going to happen pretty quickly,” and all of that. I mean, AGI will probably happen at some point. We’re not really sure when. I don’t think anyone can tell you. I mean, there’re obviously a lot of ranges going on. Back to your point, for example, on the shift of the work week and how we work. I mean, just to be very clear, we didn’t use to have 5 days a week and 2 days a weekend. If we go back to religions, there was definitely Sabbath back in the day, and there was one day off, the day of the Lord and the day of God. Then we went to 2 days of weekend. I remember going to Korea back in 2005, and I think Korea shifted officially to 5 days a week, working week and 2 days weekend for some of the larger business, et cetera, in 2004. Actually, it took another whatever years for it to be pervasive in society. This is South Korea, so this is a developed market. We might be at some point moving to 4 days a week. Maybe France was ahead of the game. I know Bertrand doesn’t like this, the 35-hour week. Maybe we will have another shift in what defines the working week versus not. What defines what people need to do in terms of efficiency and how they work and all of that. I think it’s probably just going to take longer than we think. I think there’re some countries already doing it. I was reading maybe Finland was already thinking about moving to 4 days a week. There’re a couple of countries already working on it. Certainly, there’re companies already doing it as well. Bertrand SchmittYeah, I don’t know. I’m just looking at the financial equation of most countries. The disaster is so big in Western Europe, in the US. So much debt is out that needs to get paid that I don’t think any country today, unless there is a complete reversal of the finance, will be able to make a big change. You could argue maybe if we are in such a situation, it might be because we went too far in benefits, in vacation, in work days versus weekends. I’m not saying we should roll back, but I feel that at this stage, the proof is in the pudding. The finance of most developed countries are broken, so I don’t see a change coming up. Potentially, the other way around, people leaving to work more, unfortunately. We will see. My point is that AI will have to be so transformational for the productivity for countries, and countries will have to go back to finding their ways in terms of financial discipline to reach a level where we can truly profit from that. I think from my perspective, we have time to think about it in 10, 20 years. Right now, it’s BS at this stage of this discussion. Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, there’s a dependency, Bertrand, which is there needs to be dramatic increases in productivity that need to happen that create an expansion of economy. Once that expansion is captured by, let’s say, government or let’s say by the state, it needs to be willingly fed back into society, which is not a given. There’re some governments who are going to be like, “No, you need to work for a living.” Tough luck. There’re no handouts, there’s nothing. There’s going to be other governments that will be pressured as well. I mean, even in a more socialist Europe, so to speak. There’re now a lot of pressures from very far-right, even extreme positions on what people need to do for a living and how much should the state actually intervene in terms of minimum salaries, et cetera, and social security. To your point, the economies are not doing well in and of themselves. Anyway, there would need to be tremendous expansion of economy and willingness by the state to give back to its citizens, which is also not a given. Bertrand SchmittAnd good financial discipline as well. Before we reach all these three. Reaping the benefits in a tremendous way, way above trend line, good financial discipline, and then some willingness to send back. I mean, we can talk about a dream. I think that some of this discussion was, in some ways, to have a discussion so early about this. It’s like, let’s start to talk about the benefits of the aeroplane industries in 1915 or 1910, a few years after the Wright brothers flight, and let’s make a decision based on what the world will be in 30 years from now when we reap this benefit. This is just not reasonable. This is not reasonable thinking. I remember seeing companies from OpenAI and others trying to push this narrative. It was just political agenda. It was nothing else. It was, “Let’s try to make look like AI so nice and great in the future, so you don’t complain on the short term about what’s happening.” I don’t think this is a good discussion to have for now. Let’s be realistic. Nuno Goncalves PedroJust for the sake of sharing it with our listeners, apparently there’re a couple of countries that have moved towards something a bit lower than 5 days a week. Belgium, I think, has legislated the ability for you to compress your work week into 4 days, where you could do 10 hours for 4 days, so 40 hours. UAE has some policy for government workers, 4.5 days. Iceland has some stuff around 35 to 36 hours, which is France has had that 35 hour thing. Lithuania for parents. Then just trials, it’s all over the shop. United Kingdom, my own Portugal, of course, Germany, Brazil, and South Africa, and a bunch of other countries, so interesting. There’s stuff going on. Bertrand SchmittFor sure. I mean, France managed to bankrupt itself playing the 75 hours work week since what, 2000 or something. I mean, yeah, it’s a choice of financial suicide, I would say. Nuno Goncalves PedroWonderful. The Future of Work: Human + AI Maybe moving a little bit towards the future of work and the coexistence of work of human and AI, I think the thesis that exists a little bit in the market is that the more positive thesis that leads to net employment growth and net employment creation, as we were saying, there’s shifting of professions, they’re rescaling, and there’s the new professions that will emerge, is the notion that human will need to continue working alongside with machine. I’m talking about robots, I’m also talking about software. Basically software can’t just always run on its own, and therefore, software serves as a layer of augmentation, that humans become augmented by AI, and therefore, they can be a lot more productive, and we can be a lot more productive. All of that would actually lead to a world where the efficiencies and the economic creation are incredible. We’ll have an unparalleled industrial evolution in our hands through AI. That’s one way of looking at it. We certainly at Chameleon, that’s how we think through AI and the AI layers that we’re creating with Mantis, which is our in-house platform at Chameleon, is that it’s augmenting us. Obviously, the human is still running the show at the end, making the toughest decisions, the more significant impact with entrepreneurs that we back, et cetera. AI augments us, but we run the show. Bertrand SchmittI totally agree with that perspective that first AI will bring a new approach, a human plus AI. Here in that situation, you really have two situations. Are you a knowledgeable user? Do you know your field well? Are you an expert? Are you an IT expert? Are you a medical doctor? Do you find your best way to optimise your work with AI? Are you knowledgeable enough to understand and challenge AI when you see weird output? You have to be knowledgeable in your field, but also knowledgeable in how to handle AI, because even experts might say, “Whatever AI says.” My guess is that will be the users that will benefit most from AI. Novice, I think, are in a bit tougher situation because if you use AI without truly understanding it, it’s like laying foundations on sand. Your stuff might crumble down the way, and you will have no clue what’s happening. Hopefully, you don’t put anyone in physical danger, but that’s more worrisome to me. I think some people will talk about the rise of vibe coding, for instance. I’ve seen AI so useful to improve coding in so many ways, but personally, I don’t think vibe coding is helpful. I mean, beyond doing a quick prototype or some stuff, but to put some serious foundation, I think it’s near useless if you have a pure vibe coding approach, obviously to each their own. I think the other piece of the puzzle, it’s not just to look at human plus AI. I think definitely there will be the other side as well, which is pure AI. Pure AI replacement. I think we start to see that with autonomous cars. We are close to be there. Here we’ll be in situation of maybe there is some remote control by some humans, maybe there is local control. We are talking about a huge scale replacement of some human activities. I think in some situation, let’s talk about work farms, for instance. That’s quite a special term, but basically is to describe work that is very repetitive in nature, requires a lot of humans. Today, if you do a loan approval, if you do an insurance claim analysis, you have hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are doing this job in Europe, in the US, or remotely outsourced to other countries like India. I think some of these jobs are fully at risk to be replaced. Would it be 100% replacement? Probably not. But a 9:1, 10:1 replacement? I think it’s definitely possible because these jobs have been designed, by the way, to be repetitive, to follow some very clear set of rules, to improve the rules, to remove any doubt if you are not sure. I think some of these jobs will be transformed significantly. I think we see two sides. People will become more efficient controlling an AI, being able to do the job of two people at once. On the other side, we see people who have much less control about their life, basically, and whose job will simply disappear. Nuno Goncalves PedroTwo points I would like to make. The first point is we’re talking about a state of AI that we got here, and we mentioned this in previous episodes of Tech Deciphered, through brute force, dramatically increased data availability, a lot of compute, lower network latencies, and all of that that has led us to where we are today. But it’s brute force. The key thing here is brute force. Therefore, when AI acts really well, it acts well through brute force, through seeing a bunch of things that have happened before. For example, in the case of coding, it might still outperform many humans in coding in many different scenarios, but it might miss hedge cases. It might actually not be as perfect and as great as one of these developers that has been doing it for decades who has this intuition and is a 10X developer. In some ways, I think what got us here is not maybe what’s going to get us to the next level of productivity as well, which is the unsupervised learning piece, the actually no learning piece, where you go into the world and figure stuff out. That world is emerging now, but it’s still not there in terms of AI algorithms and what’s happening. Again, a lot of what we’re seeing today is the outcome of the brute force movement that we’ve had over the last decade, decade and a half. The second point I’d like to make is to your point, Bertrand, you were going really well through, okay, if you’re a super experienced subject-matter expert, the way you can use AI is like, wow! Right? I mean, you are much more efficient, right? I was asked to do a presentation recently. When I do things in public, I don’t like to do it. If it’s a keynote, because I like to use my package stuff, there’s like six, seven presentations that I have prepackaged, and I can adapt around that. But if it’s a totally new thing, I don’t like to do it as a keynote because it requires a lot of preparation. Therefore, I’m like, I prefer to do a fire set chat or a panel or whatever. I got asked to do something, a little bit what is taking us to this topic today around what’s happening to our children and all of that is like, “God! I need to develop this from scratch.” The honest truth is if you have domain expertise around many areas, you can do it very quickly with the aid of different tools in AI. Anything from Gemini, even with Nana Banana, to ChatGPT and other tools that are out there for you and framing, how would you do that? But the problem then exists with people that are just at the beginning of their careers, people that have very little expertise and experience, and people that are maybe coming out of college where their knowledge is mostly theoretical. What happens to those people? Even in computer engineering, even in computer science, even in software development, how do those people get to the next level? I think that’s one of the interesting conversations to be had. What happens to the recent graduate or the recent undergrad? How do those people get the expertise they need to go to the next level? Can they just be replaced by AI agents today? What’s their role in terms of the workforce, and how do they fit into that workforce? Bertrand SchmittNo, I mean, that’s definitely the biggest question. I think that a lot of positions, if you are really knowledgeable, good at your job, if you are that 10X developer, I don’t think your job is at risk. Overall, you always have some exceptions, some companies going through tough times, but I don’t think it’s an issue. On the other end, that’s for sure, the recent new graduates will face some more trouble to learn on their own, start their career, and go to that 10X productivity level. But at the same time, let’s also not kid ourselves. If we take software development, this is a profession that increase in number of graduates tremendously over the past 30 years. I don’t think everyone basically has the talent to really make it. Now that you have AI, for sure, the bar to justify why you should be there, why you should join this company is getting higher and higher. Being just okay won’t be enough to get you a career in IT. You will need to show that you are great or potential to be great. That might make things tough for some jobs. At the same time, I certainly believe there will be new opportunities that were not there before. People will have to definitely adjust to that new reality, learn and understand what’s going on, what are the options, and also try to be very early on, very confident at using AI as much as they can because for sure, companies are going to only hire workers that have shown their capacity to work well with AI. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy belief is that it generates new opportunities for recent undergrads, et cetera, of building their own microbusinesses or nano businesses. To your point, maybe getting jobs because they’ll be forced to move faster within their jobs and do less menial and repetitive activities and be more focused on actual dramatic intellectual activities immediately from the get go, which is not a bad thing. Their acceleration into knowledge will be even faster. I don’t know. It feels to me maybe there’s a positivity to it. Obviously, if you’ve stayed in a big school, et cetera, that there will be some positivity coming out of that. The Transformation of Education Maybe this is a good segue to education. How does education change to adapt to a new world where AI is a given? It’s not like I can check if you’re faking it on your homework or if you’re doing a remote examination or whatever, if you’re using or not tools, it’s like you’re going to use these tools. What happens in that case, and how does education need to shift in this brave new world of AI augmentation and AI enhancements to students? Bertrand SchmittYes, I agree with you. There will be new opportunities. I think people need to be adaptable. What used to be an absolute perfect career choice might not be anymore. You need to learn what changes are happening in the industry, and you need to adjust to that, especially if you’re a new graduate. Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe we’ll talk a little bit about education, Bertrand, and how education would fundamentally shift. I think one of the things that’s been really discussed is what are the core skills that need to be developed? What are the core skills that will be important in the future? I think critical thinking is probably most important than ever. The ability to actually assimilate information and discern which information is correct or incorrect and which information can lead you to a conclusion or not, for example, I think is more important than ever. The ability to assimilate a bunch of pieces of information, make a decision or have an insight or foresight out of that information is very, very critical. The ability to be analytical around how you look at information and to really distinguish what’s fact from what’s opinion, I think is probably quite important. Maybe moving away more and more from memorisation from just cramming information into your brain like we used to do it in college, you have to know every single algorithm for whatever. It’s like, “Who gives a shit? I can just go and search it.” There’s these shifts that are not simple because I think education, in particular in the last century, has maybe been too focused on knowing more and more knowledge, on learning this knowledge. Now it’s more about learning how to process the knowledge rather than learning how to apprehend it. Because the apprehension doesn’t matter as much because you can have this information at any point in time. The information is available to you at the touch of a finger or voice or whatever. But the ability to then use the information to do something with it is not. That’s maybe where you start distinguishing the different level degrees of education and how things are taught. Bertrand SchmittHonestly, what you just say or describe could apply of the changes we went through the past 30 years. Just using internet search has for sure tremendously changed how you can do any knowledge worker job. Suddenly you have the internet at your fingertips. You can search about any topics. You have direct access to a Wikipedia or something equivalent in any field. I think some of this, we already went through it, and I hope we learned the consequence of these changes. I would say what is new is the way AI itself is working, because when you use AI, you realise that it can utter to you complete bullshit in a very self-assured way of explaining something. It’s a bit more scary than it used to be, because in the past, that algorithm trying to present you the most relevant stuff based on some algorithm was not trying to present you the truth. It’s a list of links. Maybe it was more the number one link versus number 100. But ultimately, it’s for you to make your own opinion. Now you have some chatbot that’s going to tell you that for sure this is the way you should do it. Then you check more, and you realise, no, it’s totally wrong. It’s definitely a slight change in how you have to apprehend this brave new world. Also, this AI tool, the big change, especially with generative AI, is the ability for them to give you the impression they can do the job at hand by themselves when usually they cannot. Nuno Goncalves PedroIndeed. There’s definitely a lot of things happening right now that need to fundamentally shift. Honestly, I think in the education system the problem is the education system is barely adapted to the digital world. Even today, if you studied at a top school like Stanford, et cetera, there’s stuff you can do online, there’s more and more tools online. But the teaching process has been very centred on syllabus, the teachers, later on the professors, and everything that’s around it. In class presence, there’s been minor adaptations. People sometimes allow to use their laptops in the classroom, et cetera, or their mobile phones. But it’s been done the other way around. It’s like the tools came later, and they got fed into the process. Now I think there needs to be readjustments. If we did this ground up from a digital first or a mobile first perspective and an AI first perspective, how would we do it? That changes how teachers and professors should interact with the classrooms, with the role of the classroom, the role of the class itself, the role of homework. A lot of people have been debating that. What do you want out of homework? It’s just that people cram information and whatever, or do you want people to show critical thinking in a specific different manner, or some people even go one step further. It’s like, there should be no homework. People should just show up in class and homework should move to the class in some ways. Then what happens outside of the class? What are people doing at home? Are they learning tools? Are they learning something else? Are they learning to be productive in responding to teachers? But obviously, AI augmented in doing so. I mean, still very unclear what this looks like. We’re still halfway through the revolution, as we said earlier. The revolution is still in motion. It’s not realised yet. Bertrand SchmittI would quite separate higher education, university and beyond, versus lower education, teenager, kids. Because I think the core up to the point you are a teenager or so, I think the school system should still be there to guide you, discovering and learning and being with your peers. I think what is new is that, again, at some point, AI could potentially do your job, do your homework. We faced similar situation in the past with the rise of Wikipedia, online encyclopedias and the stuff. But this is quite dramatically different. Then someone could write your essays, could answer your maths work. I can see some changes where you talk about homework, it’s going to be classwork instead. No work at home because no one can trust that you did it yourself anymore going forward, but you will have to do it in the classroom, maybe spend more time at school so that we can verify that you really did your job. I think there is real value to make sure that you can still think by yourself. The same way with the rise of calculators 40 years ago, I think it was the right thing to do to say, “You know what? You still need to learn the basics of doing calculations by hand.” Yes, I remember myself a kid thinking, “What the hell? I have a calculator. It’s working very well.” But it was still very useful because you can think in your head, you can solve complex problems in your head, you can check some output that it’s right or wrong if it’s coming from a calculator. There was a real value to still learn the basics. At the same point, it was also right to say, “You know what? Once you know the basics, yes, for sure, the calculator will take over because we’re at the point.” I think that was the right balance that was put in place with the rise of calculators. We need something similar with AI. You need to be able to write by yourself, to do stuff by yourself. At some point, you have to say, “Yeah, you know what? That long essays that we asked you to do for the sake of doing long essays? What’s the point?” At some point, yeah, that would be a true question. For higher education, I think personally, it’s totally ripe for full disruption. You talk about the traditional system trying to adapt. I think we start to be at the stage where “It should be the other way around.” It should be we should be restarted from the ground up because we simply have different tools, different ways. I think at this stage, many companies if you take, [inaudible 00:33:01] for instance, started to recruit people after high school. They say, “You know what? Don’t waste your time in universities. Don’t spend crazy shitload of money to pay for an education that’s more or less worthless.” Because it used to be a way to filter people. You go to good school, you have a stamp that say, “This guy is good enough, knows how to think.” But is it so true anymore? I mean, now that universities have increased the enrolment so many times over, and your university degree doesn’t prove much in terms of your intelligence or your capacity to work hard, quite frankly. If the universities are losing the value of their stamp and keep costing more and more and more, I think it’s a fair question to say, “Okay, maybe this is not needed anymore.” Maybe now companies can directly find the best talents out there, train them themselves, make sure that ultimately it’s a win-win situation. If kids don’t have to have big loans anymore, companies don’t have to pay them as much, and everyone is winning. I think we have reached a point of no return in terms of value of university degrees, quite frankly. Of course, there are some exceptions. Some universities have incredible programs, incredible degrees. But as a whole, I think we are reaching a point of no return. Too expensive, not enough value in the degree, not a filter anymore. Ultimately, I think there is a case to be made for companies to go back directly to the source and to high school. Nuno Goncalves PedroI’m still not ready to eliminate and just say higher education doesn’t have a role. I agree with the notion that it’s continuous education role that needs to be filled in a very different way. Going back to K-12, I think the learning of things is pretty vital that you learn, for example, how to write, that you learn cursive and all these things is important. I think the role of the teacher, and maybe actually even later on of the professors in higher education, is to teach people the critical information they need to know for the area they’re in. Basic math, advanced math, the big thinkers in philosophy, whatever is that you’re studying, and then actually teach the students how to use the tools that they need, in particular, K-12, so that they more rapidly apprehend knowledge, that they more rapidly can do exercises, that they more rapidly do things. I think we’ve had a static view on what you need to learn for a while. That’s, for example, in the US, where you have AP classes, like advanced placement classes, where you could be doing math and you could be doing AP math. You’re like, dude. In some ways, I think the role of the teacher and the interaction with the students needs to go beyond just the apprehension of knowledge. It also has to have apprehension of knowledge, but it needs to go to the apprehension of tools. Then the application of, as we discussed before, critical thinking, analytical thinking, creative thinking. We haven’t talked about creativity for all, but obviously the creativity that you need to have around certain problems and the induction of that into the process is critical. It’s particular in young kids and how they’re developing their learning skills and then actually accelerate learning. In that way, what I’m saying, I’m not sure I’m willing to say higher education is dead. I do think this mass production of higher education that we have, in particular in the US. That’s incredibly costly. A lot of people in Europe probably don’t see how costly higher education is because we’re educated in Europe, they paid some fee. A lot of the higher education in Europe is still, to a certain extent, subsidised or done by the state. There is high degree of subsidisation in it, so it’s not really as expensive as you’d see in the US. But someone spending 200-300K to go to a top school in the US to study for four years for an undergrad, that doesn’t make sense. For tuition alone, we’re talking about tuition alone. How does that work? Why is it so expensive? Even if I’m a Stanford or a Harvard or a University of Pennsylvania or whatever, whatever, Ivy League school, if I’m any of those, to command that premium, I don’t think makes much sense. To your point, maybe it is about thinking through higher education in a different way. Technical schools also make sense. Your ability to learn and learn and continue to education also makes sense. You can be certified. There are certifications all around that also makes sense. I do think there’s still a case for higher education, but it needs to be done in a different mould, and obviously the cost needs to be reassessed. Because it doesn’t make sense for you to be in debt that dramatically as you are today in the US. Bertrand SchmittI mean, for me, that’s where I’m starting when I’m saying it’s broken. You cannot justify this amount of money except in a very rare and stratified job opportunities. That means for a lot of people, the value of this equation will be negative. It’s like some new, indented class of people who owe a lot of money and have no way to get rid of this loan. Sorry. There are some ways, like join the government Task Force, work for the government, that at some point you will be forgiven your loans. Some people are going to just go after government jobs just for that reason, which is quite sad, frankly. I think we need a different approach. Education can be done, has to be done cheaper, should be done differently. Maybe it’s just regular on the job training, maybe it is on the side, long by night type of approach. I think there are different ways to think about. Also, it can be very practical. I don’t know you, but there are a lot of classes that are not really practical or not very tailored to the path you have chosen. Don’t get me wrong, there is always value to see all the stuff, to get a sense of the world around you. But this has a cost. If it was for free, different story. But nothing is free. I mean, your parents might think it’s free, but at the end of the day, it’s their taxes paying for all of this. The reality is that it’s not free. It’s costing a lot of money at the end of the day. I think we absolutely need to do a better job here. I think internet and now AI makes this a possibility. I don’t know you, but personally, I’ve learned so much through online classes, YouTube videos, and the like, that it never cease to amaze me how much you can learn, thanks to the internet, and keep up to date in so many ways on some topics. Quite frankly, there are some topics that there is not a single university that can teach you what’s going on because we’re talking about stuff that is so precise, so focused that no one is building a degree around that. There is no way. Nuno Goncalves PedroI think that makes sense. Maybe bring it back to core skills. We’ve talked about a couple of core skills, but maybe just to structure it a little bit for you, our listener. I think there’s a big belief that critical thinking will be more important than ever. We already talked a little bit about that. I think there’s a belief that analytical thinking, the ability to, again, distinguish fact from opinion, ability to distinguish elements from different data sources and make sure that you see what those elements actually are in a relatively analytical manner. Actually the ability to extract data in some ways. Active learning, proactive learning and learning strategies. I mean, the ability to proactively learn, proactively search, be curious and search for knowledge. Complex problem-solving, we also talked a little bit about it. That goes hand in hand normally with critical thinking and analysis. Creativity, we also talked about. I think originality, initiative, I think will be very important for a long time. I’m not saying AI at some point won’t be able to emulate genuine creativity. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that, but for the time being, it has tremendous difficulty doing so. Bertrand SchmittBut you can use AI in creative endeavours. Nuno Goncalves PedroOf course, no doubt. Bertrand SchmittYou can do stuff you will be unable to do, create music, create videos, create stuff that will be very difficult. I see that as an evolution of tools. It’s like now cameras are so cheap to create world-class quality videos, for instance. That if you’re a student, you want to learn cinema, you can do it truly on the cheap. But now that’s the next level. You don’t even need actors, you don’t even need the real camera. You can start to make movies. It’s amazing as a learning tool, as a creative tool. It’s for sure a new art form in a way that we have seen expanding on YouTube and other places, and the same for creating new images, new music. I think that AI can be actually a tool for expression and for creativity, even in its current form. Nuno Goncalves PedroAbsolutely. A couple of other skills that people would say maybe are soft skills, but I think are incredibly powerful and very distinctive from machines. Empathy, the ability to figure out how the other person’s feeling and why they’re feeling like that. Adaptability, openness, the flexibility, the ability to drop something and go a different route, to maybe be intellectually honest and recognise this is the wrong way and the wrong angle. Last but not the least, I think on the positive side, tech literacy. I mean, a lot of people are, oh, we don’t need to be tech literate. Actually, I think this is a moment in time where you need to be more tech literate than ever. It’s almost a given. It’s almost like table stakes, that you are at some tech literacy. What matters less? I think memorisation and just the cramming of information and using your brain as a library just for the sake of it, I think probably will matter less and less. If you are a subject or a class that’s just solely focused on cramming your information, I feel that’s probably the wrong way to go. I saw some analysis that the management of people is less and less important. I actually disagree with that. I think in the interim, because of what we were discussing earlier, that subject-matter experts at the top end can do a lot of stuff by themselves and therefore maybe need to less… They have less people working for them because they become a little bit more like superpowered individual contributors. But I feel that’s a blip rather than what’s going to happen over time. I think collaboration is going to be a key element of what needs to be done in the future. Still, I don’t see that changing, and therefore, management needs to be embedded in it. What other skills should disappear or what other skills are less important to be developed, I guess? Bertrand SchmittWorld learning, I’ve never, ever been a fan. I think that one for sure. But at the same time, I want to make sure that we still need to learn about history or geography. What we don’t want to learn is that stupid word learning. I still remember as a teenager having to learn the list of all the 100 French departments. I mean, who cared? I didn’t care about knowing the biggest cities of each French department. It was useless to me. But at the same time, geography in general, history in general, there is a lot to learn from the past from the current world. I think we need to find that right balance. The details, the long list might not be that necessary. At the same time, the long arc of history, our world where it is today, I think there is a lot of value. I think you talk about analysing data. I think this one is critical because the world is generating more and more data. We need to benefit from it. There is no way we can benefit from it if we don’t understand how data is produced, what data means. If we don’t understand the base of statistical analysis. I think some of this is definitely critical. But for stuff, we have to do less. It’s beyond world learning. I don’t know, honestly. I don’t think the core should change so much. But the tools we use to learn the core, yes, probably should definitely improve. Nuno Goncalves PedroOne final debate, maybe just to close, I think this chapter on education and skill building and all of that. There’s been a lot of discussion around specialisation versus generalisation, specialists versus generalists. I think for a very long time, the world has gone into a route that basically frames specialisation as a great thing. I think both of us have lived in Silicon Valley. I still do, but we both lived in Silicon Valley for a significant period of time. The centre of the universe in terms of specialisation, you get more and more specialised. I think we’re going into a world that becomes a little bit different. It becomes a little bit like what Amazon calls athletes, right? The T-Pi-shaped people get the most value, where you’re brought on top, you’re a very strong generalist on top, and you have a lot of great soft skills around management and empathy and all that stuff. Then you might have one or two subject matter expertise areas. Could be like business development and sales or corporate development and business development or product management and something else. I think those are the winners of the future. The young winners of the future are going to be more and more T-pi-shaped, if I had to make a guess. Specialisation matters, but maybe not as much as it matters today. It matters from the perspective that you still have to have spikes in certain areas of focus. But I’m not sure that you get more and more specialised in the area you’re in. I’m not sure that’s necessarily how humans create most value in their arena of deployment and development. Professionally, and therefore, I’m not sure education should be more and more specialised just for the sake of it. What do you think? Bertrand SchmittI think that that’s a great point. I would say I could see an argument for both. I think there is always some value in being truly an expert on a topic so that you can keep digging around, keep developing the field. You cannot develop a field without people focused on developing a field. I think that one is there to stay. At the same time, I can see how in many situations, combining knowledge of multiple fields can bring tremendous value. I think it’s very clear as well. I think it’s a balance. We still need some experts. At the same time, there is value to be quite horizontal in terms of knowledge. I think what is still very valuable is the ability to drill through whenever you need. I think that we say it’s actually much easier than before. That for me is a big difference. I can see how now you can drill through on topics that would have been very complex to go into. You will have to read a lot of books, watch a lot of videos, potentially do a new education before you grasp much about a topic. Well, now, thanks to AI, you can drill very quickly on topic of interest to you. I think that can be very valuable. Again, if you just do that blindly, that’s calling for trouble. But if you have some knowledge in the area, if you know how to deal with AI, at least today’s AI and its constraints, I think there is real value you can deliver thanks to an ability to drill through when you don’t. For me, personally, one thing I’ve seen is some people who are generalists have lost this ability. They have lost this ability to drill through on a topic, become expert on some topic very quickly. I think you need that. If you’re a VC, you need to analyse opportunity, you need to discover a new space very quickly. We say, I think some stuff can move much quicker than before. I’m always careful now when I see some pure generalists, because one thing I notice is that they don’t know how to do much anything any more. That’s a risk. We have example of very, very, very successful people. Take an Elon Musk, take a Steve Jobs. They have this ability to drill through to the very end of any topic, and that’s a real skill. Sometimes I see people, you should trust the people below. They know better on this and that, and you should not question experts and stuff. Hey, guys, how is it that they managed to build such successful companies? Is their ability to drill through and challenge hardcore experts. Yes, they will bring top people in the field, but they have an ability to learn quickly a new space and to drill through on some very technical topics and challenge people the right way. Challenge, don’t smart me. Not the, I don’t care, just do it in 10 days. No, going smartly, showing people those options, learning enough in the field to be dangerous. I think that’s a very, very important skill to have. Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe switching to the dark side and talking a little bit about the bad stuff. I think a lot of people have these questions. There’s been a lot of debate around ChatGPT. I think there’s still a couple of court cases going on, a suicide case that I recently a bit privy to of a young man that killed himself, and OpenAI and ChatGPT as a tool currently really under the magnifying glass for, are people getting confused about AI and AI looks so similar to us, et cetera. The Ethics, Safety, and Privacy Landscape Maybe let’s talk about the ethics and safety and privacy landscape a little bit and what’s happening. Sadly, AI will also create the advent of a world that has still a lot of biases at scale. I mean, let’s not forget the AI is using data and data has biases. The models that are being trained on this data will have also biases that we’re seeing with AI, the ability to do things that are fake, deep fakes in video and pictures, et cetera. How do we, as a society, start dealing with that? How do we, as a society, start dealing with all the attacks that are going on? On the privacy side, the ability for these models and for these tools that we have today to actually have memory of the conversations we’ve had with them already and have context on what we said before and be able to act on that on us, and how is that information being farmed and that data being farmed? How is it being used? For what purposes is it being used? As I said, the dark side of our conversation today. I think we’ve been pretty positive until now. But in this world, I think things are going to get worse before they get better. Obviously, there’s a lot of money being thrown at rapid evolution of these tools. I don’t see moratoriums coming anytime soon or bans on tools coming anytime soon. The world will need to adapt very, very quickly. As we’ve talked in previous episodes, regulation takes a long time to adapt, except Europe, which obviously regulates maybe way too fast on technology and maybe not really on use cases and user flows. But how do we deal with this world that is clearly becoming more complex? Bertrand SchmittI mean, on the European topic, I believe Europe should focus on building versus trying to sensor and to control and to regulate. But going back to your point, I think there are some, I mean, very tough use case when you see about voice cloning, for instance. Grandparents believing that their kids are calling them, have been kidnapped when there is nothing to it, and they’re being extorted. AI generating deepfakes that enable sextortion, that stuff. I mean, it’s horrible stuff, obviously. I’m not for regulation here, to be frank. I think that we should for sure prosecute to the full extent of the law. The law has already a lot of tools to deal with this type of situation. But I can see some value to try to prevent that in some tools. If you are great at building tools to generate a fake voice, maybe you should make sure that you are not helping scammers. If you can generate easily images, you might want to make sure that you cannot easily generate tools that can be used for creating deep fakes and sex extortion. I think there are things that should be done by some providers to limit such terrible use cases. At the same time, the genie is out. There is also that part around, okay, the world will need to adapt. But yeah, you cannot trust everything that is done. What could have looked like horrible might not be true. You need to think twice about some of this, what you see, what you hear. We need to adjust how we live, how we work, but also how we prevent that. New tools, I believe, will appear. We will learn maybe to be less trustful on some stuff, but that is what it is. Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe to follow up on that, I fully agree with everything you just said. We need to have these tools that will create boundary conditions around it as well. I think tech will need to fight tech in some ways, or we’ll need to find flaws in tech, but I think a lot of money needs to be put in it as well. I think my shout-out here, if people are listening to us, are entrepreneurs, et cetera, I think that’s an area that needs more and more investment, an area that needs more and more tooling platforms that are helpful to this. It’s interesting because that’s a little bit like how OpenAI was born. OpenAI was born to be a positive AI platform into the future. Then all of a sudden we’re like, “Can we have tools to control ChatGPT and all these things that are out there now?” How things have changed, I guess. But we definitely need to have, I think, a much more significant investment into these toolings and platforms than we do have today. Otherwise, I don’t see things evolving much better. There’s going to be more and more of this. There’s going to be more and more deep fakes, more and more, lack of contextualisation. There’s countries now that allow you to get married with not a human. It’s like you can get married to an algorithm or a robot or whatever. It’s like, what the hell? What’s happening now? It’s crazy. Hopefully, we’ll have more and more boundary conditions. Bertrand SchmittYeah, I think it will be a boom for cybersecurity. No question here. Tools to make sure that is there a better trust system or detecting the fake. It’s not going to be easy, but it has been the game in cybersecurity for a long time. You have some new Internet tools, some new Internet products. You need to find a difference against it and the constant war between the attackers and the defender. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Parental Playbook: Actionable Strategies Maybe last but not the least in today’s episode, the parent playbook I’m a parent, what should I do I’ll actually let you start first. Bertrand, I’m parent-alike, but I am, sadly, not a parent, so I’ll let you start first, and then I’ll share some of my perspectives as well as a parent-like figure. Bertrand SchmittYeah, as a parent to an 8-year, I would say so far, no real difference than before. She will do some homework on an iPad. But beyond that, I cannot say I’ve seen at this stage so much difference. I think it will come up later when you have different type of homeworks when the kids start to be able to use computers on their own. What I’ve seen, however, is some interesting use cases. When my daughter is not sure about the spelling, she simply asks, Siri. “Hey, Siri, how do you spell this or this or that?” I didn’t teach her that. All of this came on her own. She’s using Siri for a few stuff for work, and I’m quite surprised in a very smart, useful way. It’s like, that’s great. She doesn’t need to ask me. She can ask by herself. She’s more autonomous. Why not? It’s a very efficient way for her to work and learn about the world. I probably feel sad when she asks Siri if she’s her friend. That does not feel right to me. But I would say so far, so good. I’ve seen only AI as a useful tool and with absolutely very limited risk. At the same time, for sure, we don’t let our kid close to any social media or the like. I think some of this stuff is for sure dangerous. I think as a parent, you have to be very careful before authorising any social media. I guess at some point you have no choice, but I think you have to be very careful, very gradual, and putting a lot of controls and safety mechanism I mean, you talk about kids committing suicide. It’s horrible. As a parent, I don’t think you can have a bigger worry than that. Suddenly your kids going crazy because someone bullied them online, because someone tried to extort them online. This person online could be someone in the same school or some scammer on the other side of the world. This is very scary. I think we need to have a lot of control on our kids’ digital life as well as being there for them on a lot of topics and keep drilling into them how a lot of this stuff online is not true, is fake, is not important, and being careful, yes, to raise them, to be critical of stuff, and to share as much as possible with our parents. I think We have to be very careful. But I would say some of the most dangerous stuff so far, I don’t think it’s really coming from AI. It’s a lot more social media in general, I would say, but definitely AI is adding another layer of risk. Nuno Goncalves PedroFrom my perspective, having helped raise three kids, having been a parent-like role today, what I would say is I would highlight against the skills that I was talking about before, and I would work on developing those skills. Skills that relate to curiosity, to analytical behaviours at the same time as being creative, allowing for both, allowing for the left brain, right brain, allowing for the discipline and structure that comes with analytical thinking to go hand in hand with doing things in a very, very different way and experimenting and failing and doing things and repeating them again. All the skills that I mentioned before, focusing on those skills. I was very fortunate to have a parental unit. My father and my mother were together all their lives: my father, sadly, passing away 5 years ago that were very, very different, my mother, more of a hacker in mindset. Someone was very curious, medical doctor, allowing me to experiment and to be curious about things around me and not simplifying interactions with me, saying it as it was with a language that was used for that particular purpose, allowing me to interact with her friends, who were obviously adults. And then on the other side, I have my father, someone who was more disciplined, someone who was more ethical, I think that becomes more important. The ability to be ethical, the ability to have moral standing. I’m Catholic. There is a religious and more overlay to how I do things. Having the ability to portray that and pass that to the next generation and sharing with them what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable, I think is pretty critical and even more critical than it was before. The ability to be structured, to say and to do what you say, not just actually say a bunch of stuff and not do it. So, I think those things don’t go out of use, but I would really spend a lot more focus on the ability to do critical thinking, analytical thinking, having creative ideas, obviously, creating a little bit of a hacker mindset, how to cut corners to get to something is actually really more and more important. The second part is with all of this, the overlay of growth mindset. I feel having a more flexible mindset rather than a fixed mindset. What I mean by that is not praising your kids or your grandchildren for being very intelligent or very beautiful, which are fixed things, they’re static things, but praising them for the effort they put into something, for the learning that they put into something, for the process, raising the process rather than just necessarily the outcome. I feel that’s more important than it ever was. I think growth mindset is critical in the world that we are in today. Then obviously, last but not the least, the ability to It creates some ground rules around this connection, around the offline world, around socialising without having your phone around you, be it not having your phone at the table when you’re having a meal or having specific times of the day where there is no plugged in, there’s no mobile phone, there’s no whatever. The ability to have families, I think, interact in an environment where the mobile phone is not there. There is no technology necessarily there. The hikes in nature, the interactions with other people in sports, et cetera, et cetera, not esports, but sports. All those, I feel, should be greatly emphasised going forward because that, I think, is what will create these humans that we want to be successful, that would want to bring us into the future in a positive manner. Bertrand SchmittI think that’s very good point. I certainly love the growth mindset. I also think that you have to find a balance between respect for authorities, your parents, for instance, versus at the same time questioning enough authorities, Because not all authorities might have your best interest at heart. I guess your parents usually have. But beyond your parents, I think that’s a really big question. From teachers to the government, they might not all have your best interest at heart. You have to be- Nuno Goncalves PedroTo influencers. Bertrand SchmittTo influencers, for sure. Nuno Goncalves PedroTo influencers, definitely not. Bertrand SchmittNot even a question. But yeah, you have to find the right balance because there is a lot of evil masquerading as a figure of authority or abusing their figure of authority. So, that part, I think, is quite critical. As you say, that limit on the digital self. Digital self is part of your future and part of how you grow and learn and be a successful person in your life. But at the same time, you have to find the right balance. You have to be careful about red or blue pill that you’re going to take, I guess. My personal take is that I think it’s a balance you have to control. You cannot be oblivious to new technologies. You have to learn them. You have to be You have to be comfortable with them. You have to understand them and their limits. At the same time, be careful going all the way. Be careful losing yourself. The real world is important and critical. Nuno Goncalves PedroConclusion In conclusion, our children’s future is, we still believe, bright. A lot of shifting will happen. A lot of job displacement, reskilling will be needed, but new jobs will emerge. We’re positive. We are optimistic about the future that our children will have. In the words of the great passed Whitney Houston, “We believe that children are our future, and they should be taught well, and that they will lead the way.” Thank you, Bertrand. Bertrand SchmittThank you, Nuno.  

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.