Founder’s Mindset, Solid Systems, AI

Intro: The Strategically Thought-Out Masterpiece Welcome everyone to the second podcast of Inside Auto in Innovation. Um, today I have a very special guest which I'm I'm very excited about because we worked for quite some time together. Um, and but we never really got the time to to get to know ourselves. Um, and basically um I spent a little time on researching who is Henrik. First of all, welcome. Thank you, Henrik. Nice to meet you, Henrik Feld. Um, I spent a little time to research on you to how to make an introduction to Henrik Felt. Um, I invited you, let's make it with a little story. I invited you last week on the podcast and I said, I make a podcast for geniuses and people who innovate. Um, and you seemed very flattered for me uh to me. And, um, then I started looking more and more into your story and into your journey. And basically it strengthened my hypothesis because what I read is like the classics is like you're a serial entrepreneur and we can get into that. Um but you also have quite some experiences in open source and there is some things that you did um in the past especially F. Um and there's also um there is also consulting things that happened um which looked to me very like like your whole journey to me looks like a strategically thought out masterpiece because if you look into it it's like uh it looks like you used the open source ecosystem to your advantage also with your ventures and and your consultancy work um also of course to gain the required experience with your ventures uh for example with QuTO um and it looks like the next ventures which then was uh GI as far as I understand and now minimist it looks like you tackle the more and more and the more complex and bigger problems and that's where we're here now um and first of all I wanted to start with basically two questions one of which is like did I get that straight or how how did it turn out I mean life turns out to be different than expected usually Yeah, definitely. I wouldn't say that it's been a a straight line and uh you give me much more credit than than what was intentional in in the choosing of my career path. Um but it is true that I do love building things both open source uh especially like a while ago but also companies and sort of it um makes me very happy when I see people use my my code, my software, my products. So I think that that sort of the gist of feeling what you build used and people appreciate it. That has always been driving me in some way or form. Um so I did start with open source quite

Starting as a Self-Taught Engineer & Open Source Contributions early. Um so originally I'm self-taught engineer. Um I started working as a consultant at 16 when I had taught myself enough to be uh to use it in anger. Yeah. uh moved away from home, started consulting. Um and then I did that for for a little while. Um but then I also realized it would be nice to get an education. So I applied for some unis. Uh studied in in London at Imperial College and um then moved back to Stockholm, studied a bit there. Uh but ultimately while academia is very interesting in in many ways um I think that my heart is with the doing rather than the thinking but if you can uh have both at the same time that's optimal. So that's why I want to build things that haven't been built before if I can. Okay, that sounds so amazing. I read

How Do You Start Consulting at 16? this that you started consulting with 16\. Maybe talk a little bit about this. How how did you get the skills to consult someone and what exactly did you start? Well, it was uh like I wasn't really the consulting adviser but more like a consultant in programming. So, I taught myself how to first build websites and then build uh enterprise systems. Sort of started on the Microsoft tech stack when they released .NET 1.0. Um I was in classic ASP and I realized that they called it ASP.NET. that. So yeah, I'll go there. It turned out it was completely different framework. Everything was different and you needed this thing called a license for for Visual Studio. Very different from the very different PHP thing uh ASP classic but uh I persisted and uh that's what I started in. So I was a C\# engineer for about seven years or so before moving predominantly into F. Um and this was also like my way of doing that was doing open source. So I was active in the castle project and then later I was doing a web server called Suave and uh I have my own testing framework there called Xeto and and some logging and a loggery. Yes, true. Um and they have also been sort of helping me at work. So anytime that I've been sort of thinking if I can apply open source to my job and vice versa contribute back with open source everyone gains. Yes. And that's how many of these frameworks came to pass. I also discovered sort of the hard way that it is really hard to especially in a niche niche language like F make a living. So I did a lot of open source but then the developer population to sort of finance that full-time wasn't quite there. Um, not to mention that it can be hard with a giant in the room, Microsoft sort of stealing the air a little bit. Um, if you compare to other open source languages like Python, Ruby for example, Alexir and so on. Okay. When did you start to learn about coding yourself? It was quite early. Um, I think I was like 11, 12 thereabouts. I went to the city library and I found these toms, you know, learn yourself C\# in 24 hours, but it was like this this thick. It would have taken you just a month to read it all. And you know, they had these uh lines of code written out, no no interactivity and like nothing online and a little bit. Um I was uh like I would consumer patterns and practices from Microsoft like they had this enterprise uh I was fascinated by the enterprise of the building of the large software and building it correctly. Yes, that's what I feel when we work together. It's like building things correctly. That's what I that's the vibe I got. It's like you're not just because nowadays we live in this startup MVP world. Everybody builds an MVP and and VIP code it over the weekend and VIP code it over the weekend. Um but um especially also the last time where we talked a bit about architecture. It's like you have a very precise understanding of how to build a very robust scalable high performant system that really really really works. That was like my niche. That's what I sned into. Yeah. Uh so when I started open source, I was fascinated by an open-source clone of um Hibernate and all the enterprise stuff around. So aspectoriented programming, object relational mapping and um also IOC and version of control and dependency injection and how to make software components come together on a sort of software architectural level just in one single service and then I parttook in this open source um but fornet that cloned a lot of that functionality and then like um specifically the transaction aspectoriented programming framework. So for those who don't know, aspects are like attributes you add onto methods that then change their behavior. So if you wanted um a business process to be atomic, either succeed or fail, then you can add an aspect saying this is in a transaction and then that will be ambiently true for all of the things interacting with the database or queuing systems and it will wrap all of these steps that you perform in um a two-phase commit transaction, a distributed transaction. That was the idea. So this aspect oriented framework was to make correctness transparent to the programmer. They would basically slap on transactional and everything would be perfect or that was the idea. Okay. I I I heard some sentence from you

The Philosophy of Code: How a System Deals with Real-World Events which which is like a back end or a system has to deal with the real world events. Mhm. Um, and there is it's like I I have the feeling when I when I hear these things or when I when I read these things, it's like there is some philosophy to finding the truth or or or interacting with the truth. How how would you go about because um for me the philosophy is very interesting behind it. What drives you there? What is the interesting part? Well, it's a bit of a dictator, right? It's a paradox that to find the truth uh of the real world events that are also almost by definition unspecified. Yes. How do you know exactly how the workflow works? uh how the processes are. Businesses there are made up by humans into one big organism basically and then what you can do as an engineer is that you can observe you can prod and query right but you sometimes you can change but often it's all about trying to understand asking the right questions and modeling it correctly. So like for minimus we're building the future of recommerce with agents. Now what does that even mean? Right? Yeah, exactly. We talked a lot about it. Yeah. Um and to an extent that is finding the processes that people can benefit from automating uh from having AI help them with. And then in order to know how to automate something we have to look at what people are doing and that is then the real world events or events in this case that we were talking was um eventing as in uh finding the business events of the system and then codifying how those interact with processes. Yeah. You talked about minimist. That's your current venture. Precisely. Precisely. Um, a series of at least three or four that you have done in the past. Um, how was the journey up to the part to start with minimist and how did it start and what is the current

The Entrepreneurial Journey: Lessons from Previous Startups challenge? I mean, what is the what is the big challenge? You're tell tackling the bigger and bigger problems here, right? Yeah. Um, maybe I start a bit with a journey. Yes. Uh so I've had a few startups um three before minimist and so this is the fourth if you don't count the consulting. Uh so it was like touchcreens in malls to help people find their way. That was something I did over a summer with uh some people who funded it when I was in college. Uh then there was quit which was um automated bookkeeping. Then there was COSIC which is still actually running uh to an extent which is um something called a marketing mix model. Uh so that went much more into AI and um what we do is that we look at spend of marketing channels. So you spend on TV, you spend on Facebook and then uh you have this mix and you have this revenue in the end. Uh but you don't know how much each channel contributed to the revenue. So you need to uh decorrelate and sort of disambiguate which channel gave you the revenue in the end. So attribute which channel gave you the revenue and it gets harder and harder with GDPR I guess. Yeah. Well technically if you use stats like COIC does statistics then it's easier right because you don't have personal but if you go the the the classic route with the pixels and tracking everything that's then you have no chance anymore. um you can get parts of it and you can you can measure like a few campaigns against each other but it's really hard to get like total attribution especially if you have brand building exercises like you you broadcast your band on t brand on TV and then you try and understand does that trickle down to actually increasing the performance of lowfunnel marketing so that's what is about um but through each of these steps like or each of these companies I'd say I made my fair share of mistakes right um initially It was primarily around like I had no idea what I was doing. I was in college so they my co-founders weren't committed and we had no contracts and like everything was just yolo. Uh in the second time then I spent five years we were three employees for most of that time. uh I funded it myself by part consulting and then um we kind of didn't succeed because we didn't have external funding so it became a bit diluted and we might have chosen a little bit too advanced tech for some processes uh we also didn't have the the right people um like we didn't have any UX people UI people uh but that was due to lack of funding so I learned a lesson that If you want to build a startup, especially if you want to build an enterprise startup tackling a wide problem like accounting, you have to you have to have the budget to do so. So with COIC, I went in and I immediately applied for funding. Um and it's a venture capital funded company with uh also investors uh high investors. Uh it's a it uh um it went quite well and um we do have customers. Um it hasn't scaled in the way that we hoped because there was this funding crash during um 2023 that sort of completely erased valuations. Now it's better again but not at the same level. Um so I think I I learned on primarily ironically how to do marketing and sales. Yes. Because I wasn't doing enough. I was iterating closely and this is something I learned from previous starters iterating closely with customers on their problems. Um but we weren't really broadcasting who we were. We weren't liking podcasts or uh writing enough on LinkedIn which meant people didn't know about us. So we had a hard time selling easily. it was like long sales cycles and so on and and we didn't have very driven salespeople. So, um I learned a lot about how not to do marketing and sales during my marketing startups. Um but also how to do it of course and I'm now trying to apply those uh lessons to minimist. Yeah. So, minimist was started because um

The Unlikely Founding Story of minimist after doing a battle of consulting and um um yeah working for for a financial services company uh briefly as an architect. I um decided that I wanted to sort of do a world tour and just um be a digital nomad as in someone traveling the world and working at the same time. Uh so I came to Vienna first and choice. Yeah. Right. Yes. The best capital of the world for quality of life. Right. That's what they say. That's what they say. Exactly. Yes. That's what some data says. Yeah. As someone living in Stockholm, I may have a fish to fry about that. But um I met Stefan um again. He used to live in Stockholm on Spotify and uh we stayed together for a bit. Originally planned to be two weeks. Um I had booked that I was going to Morocco to do some kite surfing and uh um two days before there was an earthquake and Marrakesh uh had obviously serious issues from this uh people died and so on and I didn't feel that I could travel there and disrupt their work saving people of course uh so it got cancelled and then I booked the next trip with um another engineer I was working with this time to Israel which then had a war two days before I was leaving. Okay. So, I remained in Vienna and during this time, me and Stefan obviously talked a lot and and Stefan um had this very strong idea about the consumerf facing marketplace uh minimist uh which was based on circles and and so on. And um at some point around November, we went to um um web what's it called? Uh the big uh Portuguese uh web summit. We summit. Yes. Yeah. In Lisbon. And uh we also decided to to build a prototype but this time focusing instead on B2B. So then I became um co-founder with him in in the company Minimist where we were building a B2B software for chains uh for secondhand stores to quickly digitize inventory and sell it online. Okay, that's very cool. You said there was the earthquake, there was the war. It was it like meant to be or is there a function of life that you cannot influence? Possibly. Yeah. I It's all in my opinion random. I don't believe in higher deities. So, um but it turned out well. Yeah. Here we are and we have a a company that is gaining traction and that actually has a nice offer. Yes. And we're six people and it's moving forward. It is moving forward. Yes. That's amazing. And you're also now using more you can see more and more videos and content about minimists and people start to get to know minimists. So you applied your lessons because it's basically what my next question was like if you compare Henrik 16 years old first consultancy to

Reflection: Henrik at 16 vs. Henrik Today today's Henrik. Yeah. How how did he change? What what what is the reflection about it? Well, I think I became a better person. Okay. Um, you know, when you're young, you you have all these traits that that sort of gets worn off over time. Sort of you're on a you're a rock on a beach and and the water it moves you with all the other rocks and you become better at things including the human condition. Um, so that's one. Then also I would say um like obviously building startups and doing all the mistakes. When you're 16 you don't have uh any idea how many mistakes you're going to do. So you do them all and then then you learn the hard way. So I've done a lot of that. Yeah. and quite successfully because you're always very humble also on the on the of course you mentioned your last startup coh it's quite successful from what I checked so well it depends on what you compare with I would say yeah um I think if you compare to the best companies in the world it's not successful at all okay you know um if you compare to just work just being an employee and I'm air quoting here um then it is something that came out of my me and my co-founders minds that was built from scratch that had customers uh and and that became something it brought it brought value to people so from that sense very successful right but there are levels right and and uh I think company building is one of those things that is extremely multifaceted And I've also come to the realization that when it comes to PR, for example, I'm probably not the guy. I know it's needed. Um, and I'm super happy that that we have Anna as a co-founder here at Minimist and Stefan who are extremely extroverted letting me then focus on tech because in cos I was both CTO and CEO and it was this constant conflict of trying to do the right thing and always feeling like you're not enough. Understood. And sometimes I still feel that, but at least it's more localized now. And maybe I can um make things more effective around me to make myself enough time. Do you consider yourself an introvert? No, I'm not. Okay. I thought so. Yeah. But but I'm I'm not much of a sort of going public and uh flaunting myself. That's a that's a very negatively connotated word. Not my intention. But I do like to be judged by what I know. Like I like the sort of idea of quality and that if I do something good that is what should judge me. And then it's sort of hard for me to I guess talk in a way that appeals to I don't know. It just has never worked out for me in that that sense you know. But it makes that's my experience with you makes me you come across very humble and you do a lots of amazing stuff. So thank you. That's that's cool. Um I'm very interested in also this aspect um of I I see you as a guy who

The Secret to Productivity: Focusing on the Important, Not the Urgent gets things done continuously. What is the recipe? What is the secret source? What is the if we thinking about how to organize things to get things finished, get things done? Productivity. I see there is a lots of efforts from your co-founders and colleagues to protect your time because I think they know um what is your main skill and where is your time best at use um but what are other things that uh people out there could learn from you and say okay this was key for me to get more things done get more productive well I'll I'll be standing again on the shoulder of giants um I've read my way to many of these things um as a sea level what you want to do is the important things and almost never the only urgent things but not important. And then if you can consistently do the important things then you your company will be really well off in the long run because you will have given direction and strategy to the people working with you and then you will collaborate to make that happen. Um so if you constantly prioritize by that then you're in a better position to start with. But obviously also in a small startup you're a Swiss army knife and then you have to do everything and then it becomes very hard to prioritize. Uh you both have to maintain existing customers and fix bugs but also think towards the future and strategy. So it's constantly moving between these and then also saying no to a lot of things. Uh this is not something I should be doing or this is not our current focus or this is good enough. Yeah. So from someone who sort of came from a very technical side of what is the the perfect enterprise system that always computes the right thing never halts and never goes outside of specification. Um coming into startups it's very different because you need to be computing in some way um outputting things that are good enough but not perfect and that's been a hard lesson for me to learn. Yeah. I mean that's easier said than done. Yeah, it that's the point because prioritization on paper is nice, but if you're super busy in the short term with the short-term stuff, as you said, Mhm. the more smaller the startup, the more you have to do it. The bigger the more time you can shift between people who can do it better. And uh when you're building product, it's uh also hard to prioritize. When you get customers and they sign, they shift from looking at the important things to looking at the urgent things because um they want the product to be perfect now because they're paying for it. Um and then when you're asking people on the street, what would you like? They can often be convincing that they want something that they don't actually want to pay for. And then uh internally you also have this priority list of what you need to build the next sort of generation of the system uh the architectural the technical depth um stuff like that and then you have to prioritize all of these at the same time. Easier said than done. Um and you have to figure out for the customers what are the important things again um even if they are not urgent because that is what your company will grow with. And of course you have to do the urgent things if they are urgent by stopping the workflow in some fashion or they are so bad that it stops the customers from retaining over time and trying to find precisely the answers to these questions. That's the hard part. Yeah, that's also something that I've I I have a little journey the last 10 15 years with agile software development versus you have this planning approaches. Um and I always say it starts with the technology. If the code is not able to continuously deliver stuff, how would you be able to work really in a agile way? What is your take on on this? Because it's somehow intertwined, isn't it? Oh, um yeah, for sure. Like if you can

The Link Between Technology, Agility, and Product Development Flow if you can release more often, more frequent, uh you can do smaller iterations, you have more chances to change and you have more chances to try alternatives that might work. There is a really good book uh called the product development flow. Uh I have to look up the uh the author. It's a blue book, yellow text, big letters. And it goes through like chapter by chapter looking at one mathematical approach after the other of how you can see work in a technical system like an engineering organization as a queuing system in some fashion. How do you hedgework? How do you prioritize things that are uncertain? How do you think about lead time and cycle time? So, so it's quite a lot of nonlinear math in that mathematics. Yeah. In the queueing theories. Yeah, that was uh actually one of the latter books I read. One of the some of the first books have been sort of the Goldra theory of constraints or lean by Vulmac or uh like um what's it called? Um the antifragility literature. Yes. um by Nicholas Taleb and um Visa, the rise of the Kodic organization, all highlighting different ways that you can collaborate to reach your goals and how uh distributed decision- making can be made effective and and then also looking into um in terms of lean maybe the value streams and how you can have this drum beat of delivery going into CI of course um cascading to every person working in this value stream uh up all the way to some product specification at the start and how it is your job as a company to continuously improve the throughput of this value stream. So those are some mental tools and books that have helped me very much uh when thinking about it. So one nugget I take for everyone is like read. Yeah. How do you take the time to read? Yeah, that's hard as well. uh but I see it as my job to read or I see it as my job to go outside of just the urgent uh doing the important things. So if I believe that these books will give important knowledge to me uh and therefore the company then I can take the time without feeling guilty. I think that's what's stopping most people. They feel guilty they're not working on the urgent things. Yes. They're only working on the important things. Where do you think does that come from? I don't know. Lithuanian work ethic maybe. Okay. Or or maybe people have grown accustomed to um being these cogs in the machine where they always have to do the same function constantly. Everyone most people who start companies have have already been employees and they they know that it's a grind kind of. Um so maybe they're used to it. Um you also hear it constantly that if you just stick to it long and hard enough then you're going to succeed which is not necessarily true. Um there is some truth to it obviously that maybe you do find the gold over the next boulder that you blast through and then sometimes um you just have to find a much better strategy and then maybe with much less effort you can reach the gold because I'm asking because I'm very interested in the also the emotional components of being a founder or working something to be successful or wherever you want to go with your life because I see people I'm also just an observer um and I see people um basically controlled by their own emotions sometimes very unconsciously um not seeing their own patterns um I'm not judging it's like sometimes is is also the good way um but you mentioned a lot of things like where you prioritize not the urgent but the important so you need this kind of reflection or you you need this kind of perspective to see okay here is my feeling holding me back I'm going to change is and I see this as a hard part where lots of people struggle. Yeah, that that can be true. Like finding when to take a step back and reflect is probably part of that part of the hard. Yeah. But I'm super emotional in some ways. Okay. Like I I feel very strongly about minimist building the company up and making it happen. I feel very strongly about collaboration and um not like hiding information for from each other and um I feel strongly about knowing a strategy, knowing what the objective is, what is the policy by which you want to reach it, what are the steps, the action plan to reach it, uh what is our unfair advantage and constantly having that in mind uh when you when you execute. And then um sometimes like people I work with or customers they force you into a mindset of scarcity where you become stressed and you make globally irrational decisions where you prioritize things that are pushed on to you. Um and to an extent that's um that's a good thing that I I don't agree to that. um I don't maybe follow every such push. Uh so there is the these five

Personality in Leadership: The Power of Being "Disagreeable" personality traits and and one of them is agreeableness. Yeah. Is empathy another one? Agreeablen you're talking about big five personality push. Yeah. Um empathy is in agreeableness. No. Uh no you have you have agreeableness is compassion and politeness. Basically speaking agreeableness is like Yeah. But agreeableness is is when you say no. Like I just said no to empathy being in agreeableness. So I'm disagreeable. So I'm a a pretty disagreeable person from that particular trait but I still have empathy. So I think that's a good combination. There is two subtraits. I quite looked quite into the big five. Okay. And that's exactly also with me. It has two subtraits which can be against each other. Like you have the empathy, you feel the other people. Um but the other part is um if you politeness right and I'm like I've analyzed a lot about me and other people and also we do the personality tests. I'm quite not polite but I'm I'm very very low in polite like second two 2% something very very small. So I would like to talk everyone to their faces. Pardon me. Yes. It's I think that's just the biological part but we can learn and this but the second part is like the empathy. So it's like the gas and the brakes. Okay. I want to be rude maybe but at the same time I don't want to hurt your feelings. Okay. And I had to realize this to figure out why I'm struggling to be direct and clear. And especially I think in leadership you need to be direct and clear. Being kind of rude naturally helps you at least with clarity. Sometimes you come across maybe not that likable but still if you have the empathy in place yeah you see where they're coming from. It's a learning curve. And I think that I also heard this quote that you should see the problem not the person or you should attack the problem not the person. Yes. And if you if you do that then you can be disagreeable about the problems but not against the persons. Yes. Uh, but you also said that as a leader like um I'd love to hear more about your background. I guess it's a little bit of a um sub quest here, but like how did you come to this position? How did I come to this position position? Um, pretty much I was in the corporate world. I studied computer science back in the days. Um, that's around 15 years ago or something. And then I started in the corporate world and I was very naive and very young and I was like hey it was basically one of the bigger companies in in Austria in sports betting Novatic it's a big gaming um um gaming corporation and there were so many coincidences I was like first I was coding for the university and then later I came into this project management position um and then it was about the mobile sports betting and before that I was coding in this crossplatform there was still the Blackberry Android and and iOS and there were the first approaches. Yeah, something like that. C\# developer as well. C\#. Yes. Um and then I came into this company and I was like where is the mobile betting? And it's like we're in Austria. We always couple years behind on the innovation curve behind Germany and maybe Germany is behind the US and maybe China is we we see how it plays out. Let's see how it plays out. And I was like where is the mobile sports betting? And then I found it and I was like, I want to do stuff like that. And it was broken. It didn't work. It was like the registration didn't really work. The live betting didn't really work. And I I figured my way out. And of course, it exploded kind of. Okay. Which was not a function of me. It was a function of the market because everybody had their phones out and I already saw it. Um, and you saw an opportunity. The smart people made it work. I just tried to push the topic. Um and during that time I had I always say like the only boss who really was a leader when I was in the in the corporate world he he trusted me and he said okay that's the vision you just if you need something I trust you do it and yeah it it worked by itself um but I was very with an unconvent unconventional approach like I got angry a lot I was not very reflected so I pushed through and the numbers were good but not everything was good of course right you Steve Jobs at your work site. That's uh no that's a huge over over statement but um and then it got me thinking I was always about the innovation because I saw the mobile I saw I saw then the AI trends and I saw the machine learning. I was never the expert but I collected lots of dots and that was always the the golden thread innovation. what what is uh that's also why we're here like I'm inviting the innovators for the podcast because I want to know how are you thinking I couldn't figure it out with the video call now I'm sit you down here and we figure out how is your mind working right um because I'm always interested in that and I found my niche now we do the consulting for for funding applications about innovation so I have the luxury to see people like you every day um and uh would you say that that during all these calls you can synthesize some of these gold gold particles of what innovation actually is. But it's um first of all I mean there is the the the definition of how the funding application wanted to be written. So that's quite the boring thing but um there is an aspect of novelty that's for sure. Um there is mostly in this world I'm living an an aspect of technology but it also has to be useful. Mhm. Um and what I see often in the scientific world is like there is novelty. Um but sometimes it's not it's not a product. It doesn't create value. And we are the masters of this in in Austria. We are we are in in for example in quantum computing. We are like leading but there is no startups. There's no spin-offs. I mean there is one big quantum industries as far as I know. Okay. Um but they are we have to look into what the details where they are but it's like there is a culture of um complaining about that there is not much startups going on in Austria. Okay. Um on the other hand we are very good um with the with the basic science. Um so there has to be an aspect of that there is a lot of support for the startups like obviously for minimist in this case it's growing nowadays it's We're getting a lot of um people very engaged when we talk to them about what we're doing and so it feels very encouraging here in Austria. Yes, it it's getting better and better and better. Mhm. It's it's really it's really a growing ecosystem. I think there is not enough investor money. I think there is um quite the challenges to to get it because it's like a function of um how can you invest how much taxes do you have to pay of of how how now we have the flex go which is a good which is a good development but it's not enough in my opinion it could be could be more steps but I mean we're we're immediately doing a cross European company in minimist and we're really immediately seeing then that there are different jurisdictions out there So yes, um everything is complicated like hiring people across the European Union and tax law and uh the the formalia as well. What what do you have to have on the website in order to sell and so on. Um it's almost like every market you enter, you need like a big buffer of money. So but the markets aren't big in comparison to other markets. Like if you were going into China, you'd have a hu homogeneous market. The same in the US, maybe the same in Brazil. like these huge countries where you make it in one local place and then it can cascade out. So I mean there is the EU inc maybe happening uh which could be super beneficial hopefully. I also see it as as like I'm a Swede obviously uh coming uh to Austria and and there are different ways of doing the legal work and running a company that shouldn't have to be uh it should be unified in my opinion. We are a common market, right? I I absolutely agree. I mean that was also the big idea of the European Union. Make it central, make it make it one um and make it simple and useful. It is a big market. Um if you look at the numbers, it's it's a very big market. Um but we could do much better in in making it easier for startups. Yeah. For for for founders.

The EU's AI Act & The Global AI Race Um also like the AI act and and data compliance laws. What do you think about that? That's very interesting topic, right? Uh because on one hand side it is kind of bad if AI becomes super intelligent AGI and then kills everyone. Obviously, we can agree on that. Yes. Uh on the other hand, um if you it's it's also a race to the bottom globally because globally there are no laws around this and there can't be because of all the jurisdictions. and then maybe people who have the funding then they're going to do what gets them profit and not necessarily think about the effects. So in that sense globally maybe the EU act uh the AI act in the EU plays a role to make those companies think twice because like you said the EU is a a big market so they want to sell their products here. On the other hand it's opaque. We're talking about developing an alien intelligence more or less or it feels that way when you interact with it in my opinion and then how do you really know what it thinks? um transparent AI or or interpretable AI has gone gotten a very long way in the last couple of years. There are fantastic papers being written by anthropic and the open AI team and um there is super interesting to read. But it also shows how much these um these foundational models can do and how little we can control them in the end cuz we have like this uh thin fine-tuning pass at the end of everything. Um but it can equally be disrupted by um fine-tuning one more time for a specific use case and suddenly you remove some of the human reinforcement uh learning that kept the model in check. for example. Um, so in that sense, it's good to have some guidelines to go by, but we're also in an AI race where we're up against the US, where we're up against China and the European Union doesn't have, except Mistro, large AI companies that are competitive. maybe um 11 Labs 11 Labs um but they're not really a foundational models model they do speech so why is that and and to part sure regulation but I think a much bigger part is the lack of funding it's much

The Funding Gap: Why Europe Struggles to Compete with the US harder to raise money in the European Union uh when you raise money in the European Union you do it for more classical startups for S startups you have to start small more or less us um hire and and grow as you go. Um whilst in the sort of more let's throw money at the problem attitude that we have across the pond. It can be that okay you hire a team you got five six engineers to start with now you try the idea and see if it works because then you can build it out and then you have an entry point to the market. Here it's like at every step of the way you have to show proof points that it works. Yes. And while I mean showing proof points all along the way is is a trade-off where you trade more time to build a startup um versus losing less capital, right? But capital is something that people made up. It's all in our minds and it's something that is potentially infinite um and we choose to constrain ourselves by it. Money is not real or what's the point? Yeah. Like money is a societal agreement about value of something which AI will shake up in a way, right? Yeah. Because I mean if the robot is uh doing the field work and everything like our time exchange for work will be very different like you see engineering companies not hiring juniors anymore. So where will the seniors come from if we don't hire juniors? Yeah, for example, but also if if you replace people with uh capital in the form of AI, um then people won't have jobs and then we have to find alternative solutions. So yeah, and we see the crazy things like Meta hiring one guy for I don't know what like NBA 250 million or something. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. What is your thought on that? Well, it's like it's crazy. It's like the NBA games where they hire superstars for millions and millions of dollars. Um, so there is logic to it. It reduces the search friction for meta because they can say we offer you more more or less infinite money and here come work for us. They only need a team of I don't know x number of people. So it's very limited in in the number of people that they are looking for and the population is huge. So they're throwing away all the um arguments against going to them that are monetary at least and then they're saying we want the best of course. So I I don't have many opinions on that. It's their money. They can do what they want with it. Um when it comes to innovation in the European Union, I think u it's great that there are government grants. That is uh one of the reasons we actually are in Austria. Um and um that can that can help companies get started. So that's actually a great thing. The question then becomes how do we go from just getting started to growth and scale up and how does the European Union European Union manage that and and compete internationally on that level. I mean I see this topic of course I see see a lots of things. Um I always tell everyone who wants to become a new customer and we do the funding consulting. Um always do investor and try to make money and do the grants like all the three things at the same time. Um because it's getting harder to get every like and you also need each of these parts together. Like if you have more money you can even get the funding. Sometimes it's a precondition to have money to get the funding and it's easier to get an investor if you have the funding and vice versa. So absolutely um I see that um and I see the European Union here. I mean in Austria it takes uh if you do the application it takes around um 3 to four months until you have a feedback on it but if you go up to the European level it takes even way longer. there are and it's so competitive. It's um so that's a road that that not not many startups should go and it's so much effort like um just an example we worked with someone and they got uh uh they got declined and and the document that gave the reason why it's declined was 17 pages with scientific citations. So you can imagine how much you have to put into like effort into the application to even apply. Yeah. But it was a very good it is on the other hand it's very very good feedback like you have very good data points that you can put as a feedback and improve but that's also search friction right you're they want to they want to search for the startups that in the end have the impact they want the objectives that they want so maybe impact uh climate impact or they want societal impact or they want x y zed and um they do it via science or via review and and checking boxes. Um if you look at VCs they have a funding hypothesis and they say that we will fund startups that are in this vertical where we have experience and then you come um into a different kind of metric system where you have latent expertise or latent knowledge guiding their decisions where knowledge that cannot be explicitly and precisely articulated might um have a very large effect on the decision itself. that comes from experience of those people who have previously worked in the industries and then instead you have a plethora of different VCs with different hypothesis. Yeah, actually one of these is you talked about the big five personality. One of this is like what are the personalities of the founders? What is the team?

Analyzing the "Big Five" Personality Traits of Founders How do you see this topic? I' I've thought about this a lot like what is the combination of the personalities? How do you set the team? There is no objective metric. There is no system to measure it. Um, how how do you go about this? How would do you make a decision on this one? Well, I think when it comes to the founding team, it's very important that they they can complement each other and they can agree with each other's differences. And if those two happen, then you're in a good place. Complimenting skills. Yeah. Or personalities. like um we we do have different um personalities that are also culturally influenced. Stefan comes from New Zealand um where just the way of talking is that you you can talk over each other. You joke uh um a lot more. Maybe you're a bit rougher with the language, but you mean it in a funny jokingly way. whilst in Sweden uh it's more about taking turns and even taking a little space in between answering back a question or a statement from the other person. Um and then we are both extroverts. Anna is more introvert which means also differences in communicating uh the thinking before saying versus the thinking as saying which is more Stefan um and they can complement but they have to be managed as well in the sense that if you don't think about them they can become detrimental to collaboration. Yeah. You have to see your differences and and leave room for the people who who think through what they say before they say it instead of thinking us saying it. Nothing is better or worse. It is just different. Yeah. And the the cultures are different. Like we have New Zealand, uh, Austrian and Swedish here in the founding team which is very sort of different cultures I would say. But it also is amazing, right? It's like to see this it's this kind of diversity. You can learn from each other. That's quite quite the experience. I think so. like I'm fairly happy with with the way we are. Um there are rooms for improvement like always. Um and startups are pressure cookers of stress. Yeah. So trying to to figure out everything at the same time. It's almost uh superhuman and and uh I think that's why so many startups do fail. So hopefully we will prevail and succeed where others do fail. But no one knows. Time will tell. Yeah, I mean that's also something that's maybe a gold nugget. It's like there if you do a startup there will be pressure and we talked about the personality is like I heard from the psychological point of view is like under pressure your real like your measured big five your biology of your personality basically takes over. There is actually some science behind um what is the entrepreneurs's personality best fit. Okay. Like high in openness because you need new ideas and you get basically dopamine if you get a new situation because a person low in openness um shies away from the new situation. But high in openness that one I'm I'm definitely high on massive. Yes. For sure. Yes. It's uh almost painful not to be able to think through new ideas. Yes. And then uh I think the extraversion, the higher the extroversion, the more dopamine you get from also from interacting with people obviously. Yeah. So I when we were fundraising the first time, then me and Stefan were out. We're mingling and I like maybe a bit more towards a deep talk like we're doing. Yeah. Stefan is a machine though. He can go and he can talk and he can talk to different people over and over again in one evening. And that's really truly a super skill when you're fundraising. So yes, when I was you have to take to so many people. Yeah, I was tired at like midnight. I was like, I'm gonna go home. And he's like, yeah, I have a cold. I'm losing my voice. But there is a party down by the channel. I'm going to go there and see who I found. And it turned out that we actually got one investor from him attending that party. So actually the the the textbook definition is you get energy from interaction with other people or you drain energy like you get energy when you're alone. Yeah. So he's definitely more extroverted than me. Definitely more than me. Yeah. He's probably the most extroverted person I know. Yeah. Which is a super skill. Yes. When you say fundraising events, if I do events, fundraising, startup events, blah blah blah, I'm I need a break. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Uh what more do we have? So we have um conscientiousness. Yeah, you're also high on this. Uh yeah, it can can be right but it can also hurt you massively. Like in Fit 2 I was super conscientious with building the product and the code. Yes, to an extent it was an accounting system so maybe not a bad thing. Um but I was taking it to an extreme and that was a bad thing. So you were working too much. Yeah, I was working like I was trying to polish it too much when the problem was no marketing, no sales and no no PMF. Understood. Understood. And then I was like, yeah, what if I make the product better? To an extent, I was right in the sense that uh building an accounting system is a wide thing. You have to tick all the boxes. You have to have um finance vouchers. You have to have transactions maybe uh outlays or expenses. You have to have end of year accounting uh closing the accounts, closing the books and so on and so on and so on. So you have to tick all the boxes and then you can call yourself an accounting system. Um but I think I dove a bit too deep in in some aspects of it. I built like an our own stream processing framework for example own framework. Yeah. Based on milhe wheel from Google which was super interesting at the time. Yeah. For me. So you made the experience that it can also hinder you. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Like these people are very detail oriented. They very orderly. Everything is very um like the socks in the closet. still but now we're now also we're seeing a different market dynamic. Before like I don't know 40 years ago you could be very conscientious when it came to programming but then it became easier and easier. We got the Ruby and Rails, we got the .NET, we got all the frameworks that would help you build quickly still quicker than before and now we have coding with AI and then suddenly the AI are kind of sloppy but you get something out. Yes. So it's in my opinion the opposite of conscientiousness like you just want the product out and then you can test it. I think that can be a very good strategy when it comes to building startups. Absolutely. Because you get the you get fast immediate feedback from from if you want conscientiousness to be a positive thing we can say at least you're conscientious about getting customer feedback. Yes. But it's like I think it's always a super useful tool to Yeah. to reflect and figure out what is your strength. It is um so and the one I was talking about was agreeableness or amicability. Yes. Kindness, helpfulness and willingness to cooperate. Um and I was primarily saying that I have an easy time to say no uh to something that when I think it's wrong, easy to an easy time. Yeah, it's easy for me to to say this is incorrect, you know, and disagreeing. If someone says it's A and I say no, it's B. Uh, but I want to like I strive to be better in kindness and and and like empathy with people. Um, did you ever work alone completely on a project? I've done it. Um, I've worked a lot alone. Uh, open source was a lot alone. Uh, you do get people sort of um hit and drive kind of pull request sometimes, but a lot of it is alone. But you enjoy more working with a team. Yeah, I do. Yeah, it's much more fun. Also, it moves a lot faster. Yes. And and you do get more feedback on your ideas and then you can think through them quicker and try more things. So, a lot of upsides. Let's pivot maybe a little bit on the the big vision of minimist. Yeah. Like I see there is a lots of impact drive from your side and also from your co-founders. Um what is the big big vision? How do you envision it in the future? What's your Well, we want to make secondhand the default choice. So, we want you to instead of going to H\&M or some online shops or a store, you search Minimist for the items that you're looking for and we can direct you to our partner secondhand stores that have those items. And it's going to be like shopping online for new items only that you don't you you get to reuse and therefore you don't have to produce more. To an extent, of course, you still need an influx of new things, but people massively overconume new items when they don't need them. So items that other people can enjoy and we want to enable that. Yes. And then in the long run, even longer run, um who says the mode that you will doing the shopping in? Maybe you will have your personal agent, your assistant shopping for you, knowing your colors, your eye color, your what you fit in, your skin color, um what you prefer, your style, and it'll automatically search that way uh for you, bid for you. It will have its own wallet that you've

The Grand Vision: Making Second-Hand the Default Choice delegated to it and it will be interacting maybe primarily with other agents from the sellers where it can negotiate a price that fits your budget and their ability to offer it and that's where minimists want to be. We want to be the market maker in that transaction. Okay. So, so in both directions like I want to also sell stuff become the store. I could also be a private person who wants to sell my stuff and then yeah have a little is this the focus or are you focusing on I'm focusing on on B2C not at the moment and um that is primarily because in order to build up a a company that works with secondhand you need supply. Uh our um our partners our customers they have that supply and we can help them to sell it. So that's our focus and I think it

The Future is AI Agents: How We'll Shop Tomorrow it makes a lot of strategy sense to to build where you're standing and where you're seeing product market fit and this is where we're seeing it right now. So that's what we're focusing on. What will be the biggest challenge to come to the AI agent situation um determinism maybe or the lack thereof the fact that they're probabilistic in nature. So it's a bit random how they actually act in the end. Especially for a guy who wants to build a reliable always working systems that must conscientiousness is like nagging me like OCD. How can you do anything? No, but like again what is the real world event, right? And in the end humans will want to consume. There are no facts about what you fit best in. There are opinions and the agents are some level now where they can help you form that opinion or maybe propagate your opinion onto the sellers and negotiate on your behalf. So it is already not a a mathematical process uh doing the shopping. So there is no need to try and make it one. What we do want to make mathematical in the sense that it's deterministic of course is the actual transactions and the accounting and all of these things that just have to work. It should be taking a stance way behind the actual interaction with the customer because the customer interaction is what we care about, what the seller cares about, what the customer obviously goes there for. Everything should just work on a tech basis. So I see this as a a great opportunity to make tech finally take a backstage to the human interactions while maintaining all the positive sides of tech like strong analytics, automatic accounting, automatic inventory management and so on. Yeah. I mean in the end it's like again a human judging with his opinion if the agent is doing what feels right. So it even this is not deterministic. Yeah. And and I mean that's why what why OpenAI fine tunes to be super human pleasing and and be saying all the right things to the human and put all the smileies in because it feels better to read it when it's like people prefer Pepsi over Coke in blind test because it's sweeter initially when you take a small sip, right? It's the same with AI output. So I see it's going to be an amazingly challenging but also very interesting future. I hope so. Yeah, without challenges, where would the fun be, right? Yeah, for a conscientious person has to be. Well, Henrik, I think it was a pleasure. Likewise. Thank you so much to give us a glimpse of an insight into your brain and into your life. It was amazing.