20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing

Summary

Episode Summary: The Future of War and European Defense with Thorsten Ryle

In this compelling episode of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), host Harry Stebbings sits down with Thorsten Ryle, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Helsing, a pioneering European defense company focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to safeguard democracies. Released on December 11, 2024, the episode delves deep into the geopolitical landscape, the evolution of defense technology, and the strategic maneuvers necessary to maintain European sovereignty in an increasingly volatile world.

---

1. Introduction and Background

Harry Stebbings introduces Thorsten Ryle, highlighting his remarkable achievement of raising over €828 million from prominent investors such as Prima Materia, Elac, Gill, Excel, and General Catalyst. Thorsten shares insights from his previous venture, Natural Motion, a company specializing in physically simulated creatures controlled by neural networks, which found applications in major Hollywood films and blockbuster video games like GTA 4 and GTA 5.

[00:00] Thorsten Ryle:
"There is a big wave coming towards us. It is autonomy and software in defense and it's unstoppable. The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector."

---

2. Lessons from Natural Motion

Thorsten recounts the journey of Natural Motion, emphasizing the importance of adaptability. Despite technological successes, the company faced slow revenue growth, prompting a pivotal shift towards developing mobile games. This strategic pivot led to the creation of CSR Racing, one of the largest iPhone games at the time, demonstrating the value of taking calculated risks and remaining flexible in business strategies.

[04:23] Thorsten Ryle:
"We recognized that growth wasn't as strong as we wanted to and we took a big risk and pivoted the company to doing games ourselves... And this kind of approach to risk-taking and going all in stayed with me and I think stayed with Helsing."

---

3. Building a High-Talent Team

A cornerstone of Helsing’s success is its focus on hiring exceptional talent. With a current team of approximately 350 people, Thorsten emphasizes the importance of talent density, believing that a smaller team of outstanding individuals can outperform a larger team of average performers. He highlights the rigorous hiring process aimed at identifying "effortlessness" and exceptional attention to detail often within the first 30 minutes of an interview.

[08:10] Thorsten Ryle:
"I think it's just a feeling. The thing I always look for is effortlessness. You know, not trying too hard, just being so kind of on top of the detail of everything."

---

4. Performance Management and Company Culture

Thorsten discusses Helsing’s stringent performance management system, which includes quarterly calibration meetings among leaders to ensure consistent and fair performance evaluations. This approach fosters a culture of excellence and accountability, preventing underperformance from hindering the company's progress.

[09:09] Thorsten Ryle:
"We really do everything to go for talent density. That means really taking hiring seriously, but also taking performance management seriously and making sure that only people that are Helsing people are at Helsing."

---

5. Strategic Funding and Investment

Helsing’s impressive funding trajectory began with a seed round of €8.5 million, shortly followed by a substantial investment of €100 million from Daniel Ek and Prima Materia. This influx of capital enabled Helsing to accelerate its growth, invest in top-tier talent, and engage in large-scale, official government programs of record, positioning the company as a formidable player in the defense sector.

[15:22] Thorsten Ryle:
"The seed was €8.5 million. But then we were lucky to have Daniel Ek and Prima Materia invest €100 million four months later or so."

---

6. Enhancing European Defense Sovereignty

A significant portion of the conversation centers on the necessity for European defense sovereignty. Thorsten underscores the importance of Europe not relying solely on external partners for its defense needs. He articulates Helsing’s mission to bolster Europe’s self-reliance in defense technologies, advocating for increased defense spending and technological innovation to protect democratic societies.

[20:11] Thorsten Ryle:
"We cannot rely on partners to secure and protect Europe, at least not over a long period of time. We need to think about security ourselves."

---

7. The Future of Warfare: AI and Autonomous Drones

Thorsten provides a forward-looking perspective on the evolution of warfare, highlighting the growing role of artificial intelligence and autonomous drones. He warns of an impending shift towards mass deployment of inexpensive, precise strike drones by adversaries like Russia and Iran, which could overwhelm traditional, expensive defense systems such as tanks and artillery through sheer numbers and automation.

[37:20] Thorsten Ryle:
"There is a big wave coming towards us and it is autonomy and software in defense, and it's unstoppable."

To counter this threat, Helsing is developing scalable drone solutions like the HX2, which integrate sophisticated AI to enhance operational effectiveness and resilience against countermeasures like jamming.

[28:19] Thorsten Ryle:
"We have to think about drones differently... shift a lot of the complexity from hardware into software, we can simplify the hardware, and we can manufacture it in much larger numbers at lower prices."

---

8. Navigating Government Procurement and Compliance

Thorsten elaborates on the challenges Helsing faces in government procurement, including stringent compliance requirements and the slow, risk-averse nature of defense procurement processes. He advocates for reforms such as mandating a percentage of defense spending to be allocated to new defense companies to stimulate innovation and diversify the defense ecosystem.

[33:28] Thorsten Ryle:
"Introduce a mandatory 20% on new defense companies for defense equipment... that's a shortcut to actually realigning incentives."

He also emphasizes the critical need for establishing strong relationships with government decision-makers and navigating the complexities of export laws and lobbying efforts.

---

9. Strengthening European Technological Ambition

Thorsten critiques the European startup ecosystem for lacking ambition rather than capital. He argues that fostering a culture of high ambition and operational excellence among founders is essential for creating larger, more impactful companies that can drive European sovereignty in key technological areas.

[51:58] Thorsten Ryle:
"What's missing is operational knowledge because we haven't had as many startups that became big as the US... We need founders that have that ambition."

He calls for European founders to aim higher, building companies that can compete on a global scale and contribute significantly to Europe's technological independence.

---

10. Personal Insights and Leadership Philosophy

Throughout the interview, Thorsten shares personal reflections on leadership and resilience. He highlights the importance of mutual respect among co-founders, the necessity of adaptability in organizational structures, and the relentless nature of startup life. Thorsten attributes Helsing’s success to a strong, cohesive founding team and a clear, mission-driven focus.

[71:53] Thorsten Ryle:
"Respect is mutual respect. Chemistry and everything else is important as well. But if you truly respect the quality of your co-founders... you have to find their roles."

He also touches on the emotional and psychological challenges of entrepreneurship, emphasizing the value of having a supportive co-founding team to navigate through tough times.

---

11. The Role of US Capital in European Startups

Thorsten acknowledges the significant role that US capital plays in fostering European startups. While Helsing remains predominantly European in its operations and team, the strategic investment from US-based investors provided valuable insights and a growth-oriented mindset that accelerated the company’s scaling process.

[54:33] Thorsten Ryle:
"It plays an important role... exposure to US culture, but also investors is extremely useful."

---

12. Concluding Thoughts and Future Outlook

As the conversation wraps up, Thorsten reiterates the urgent need for Europe to enhance its defense capabilities through technological innovation and increased ambition among its entrepreneurs. He remains optimistic about Europe’s talent pool and the potential to build impactful defense technologies that ensure long-term sovereignty and security.

[57:10] Thorsten Ryle:
"We are falling behind, but that trend is new... we can do it over the next five to 10 years."

Thorsten’s insights paint a vivid picture of the challenges and opportunities facing European defense technology firms. His emphasis on ambition, strategic hiring, and leveraging AI and autonomy underscores Helsing’s role in shaping the future of European defense.

---

Key Takeaways

• Adaptability: The ability to pivot strategies, as demonstrated by Natural Motion’s shift to game development, is crucial for sustained growth.
• Talent Density: Hiring exceptional talent can drive superior performance and innovation within a company.
• Performance Management: Rigorous performance evaluation systems are essential to maintain high standards and accountability.
• Strategic Funding: Significant early investments can accelerate growth and enable participation in large-scale, impactful projects.
• European Sovereignty: Strengthening European defense capabilities through technological innovation is imperative for long-term security.
• Future Warfare: AI and autonomous drones will play a pivotal role in future conflicts, necessitating scalable and resilient defense solutions.
• Government Procurement: Reforming procurement processes to incentivize innovation and support new defense companies is vital.
• Ambition and Culture: Fostering a culture of high ambition and operational excellence is essential for building impactful startups in Europe.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Thorsten Ryle:
  “We have to avoid the Tesla moment for the defense sector. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense as happened to the car industry.”
  [00:00]

• Thorsten Ryle:
  “We wanted to make Europe safer. We want to be able to point at the difference that we've made in terms of the geopolitical security of this continent.”
  [27:16]

• Thorsten Ryle:
  “The best hardware companies, I think, are software companies, and vice versa.”
  [31:36]

• Thorsten Ryle:
  “Most people believe that the environment, in terms of taxation, regulation, et cetera, has a big impact on whether you can build successful startups in the country. I don't think it does.”
  [62:22]

---

This episode offers a profound exploration of the intersection between venture capital, technological innovation, and geopolitical strategy, providing invaluable insights for investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers alike. Thorsten Ryle’s visionary approach to defense technology underscores the critical role of AI and autonomy in shaping the future of warfare and European security.

Transcript

[Thorsten Ryle]

When we started Helsing in March 2021, we actually put one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China. There is a big wave coming towards us. It is autonomy and software in defense and it's unstoppable. The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defence sector. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense as happened to the car industry.

[Harry Stebbings]

Where are we in three years with Russia, Ukraine? What happens in China and Taiwan?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think it's plausible that there will be.

[Unknown]

I mean, my word, those intros have gotten good. This is Harry Stebbings and I am so excited to welcome one of the great entrepreneurs of Europe to Hot seat today, Thorsten Ryle. Thorsten is the co founder and co CEO of Hellsing, a new type of defense company providing artificial intelligence to protect our democracies. Torsten has raised over $825 million from the likes of Prima Materia, Elac, Gill, Excel and General Catalyst, to name a few. I also had wanted to make this show happen for long time. Torsten does not do podcasts and so this one meant a huge amount to me. But before we dive in, what do Henry Ford and AI have in common? Neither could change the world without automation. In the future, there will be two types of businesses. Those that have automated and those that wish they had. Uipath, the undisputed leader in automation, is taking us into the era of agentic automation. UiPath's new AI agents don't just follow rules, they think they make decisions. They work alongside the world's most powerful software, robot robots already trusted by over 10,000 businesses. If agentic automation sounds new, just think of UiPath as more growth, not more overhead platform or happier customers, happier employees platform. Whatever you want AI to do for your business, agentic automation with UiPath will make it happen. Try UiPath's new AI agents for free at uipath.com the future of automation is both agentic and robotic, so don't get left behind. And speaking of transforming your business with cutting edge technology, let's dive into another game changer. Atio. ATIO is the next generation of CRM. Setting up ATIO takes less than a minute and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all of your relationships in one place, all enriched with very valuable data. Atio also lets you build zapier style automations, gives you powerful reports and works perfectly for any go to market motion from PLG to sales led. And Atio is designed for the next era of companies like yours. And companies like yours shouldn't have to deal with inflexible one size fits all CRMs. So join industry leaders like 11 labs, replicate, modal and more to scale your startup beyond the next level. Head over to attio.com 20VC and you'll get 15% off. That's 15% off your first year at attio.com 20VC and if Attio helps you stay ahead by streamlining your relationships and operations Today I want to talk about a venture fund making waves with its unusual usual model. I'm talking about the Fundrise Innovation Fund, which is democratizing venture capital. As a public venture fund. For example, most of the AI revolution is being built and funded in the private markets. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic Databricks. These are incredible multi billion dollar companies, but they're inaccessible to 99% of investors until they go public. Well, those days are finally over. Visit fundrise.com 20VC to check out the Fundrise Innovation Fund's impressive 150 million DOL portfolio for yourself. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovation Fund's [e-mail] innovation. This is a paid sponsorship.

[Harry Stebbings]

You have now arrived at your destination.

[Unknown]

Torsten, I've wanted to do this for a long time. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Very good to see you. Thanks for having me.

[Unknown]

Now I want to start with Lessons from Natural Motion actually. So over a 15 year period you.

[Harry Stebbings]

Built the company company before selling to Zynga.

[Unknown]

And I just wanted to start with.

[Harry Stebbings]

What did you do the first time that worked and you took with you to Hellsing?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It was a long journey. Natural Motion started as a spin out of university out of Oxford and we were trying to create physically simulated creatures controlled by neural networks, which was a crazy idea at the time. This was the time I think of the Pentium processor or something. It's hard to do computationally, but it worked quite well and we ended up using it in and licensing it for visual effects and big Hollywood movies like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider man, then for big video Games like GTA 4, GTA 5 that worked quite well, but it only worked, I would say okay in terms of revenues. You know as a founder you want to get to A hockey stick movement eventually. And that wasn't the case with the technology business. It was growing, but it was growing reasonably slowly. And I think one of the things that we did do well was that we recognized that growth wasn't as strong as we wanted to and we took a big risk and pivoted the company to doing games ourselves. So you know how people say focus, focus, focus. We did focus, but only up to a point. At one point we said, this isn't working the way we wanted to, so let's pivot to actually making games ourselves. And we were very naive about how easy it was going to be. We watched Rockstar work and we were big fans of Rockstar Games and we thought, well, we should give it a go as well, and ended up making games for iPhone, which worked out very well. We got a lot of support from Apple, ended up creating CSR Racing, which was one of the largest iPhone games at the time. And at that point, the company did take off. And this kind of approach to risk taking and going all in stayed with me and I think stayed with Helsing. Now we are big believers of focus, just doing very few things. And when things don't work, we try to adapt very quickly.

[Harry Stebbings]

If that's what worked that you've taken with you to Helsing, there are things that naturally don't work and you want to discard what didn't work, that you're like, no, leaving that behind.

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think one of the things that I didn't quite appreciate was how important hiring is. And I know everyone says that team is the most important thing and hiring should be your priority. But to really do it, to really do everything you can to get the very best people, requires a different mindset and actually requires a lot of time in your calendar as well. With natural motion, we had a lot of great people, but we also eventually got, I think, into a rhythm of maybe hiring people that were just there to add headcount, to get certain things done to accelerate a project. And the reality was that almost never happened. In fact, what happened was that if you added more people, complexity went up, the company slowed down, it became much harder to manage. We had to fix it a couple of times with quite large changes, including Rifts, just to get the company to work again. And when we started Helsing, we made a commitment from the beginning that that wouldn't happen to us and that we would focus on hiring and really getting the really exceptional talent from the very beginning. And it transformed, I think, the company. I mean, Helsing is now a company that isn't even that large. But we try to just hire people that are exceptional and we do everything we can to get those people into the company. We hustle like crazy whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's through network. I mean we won't give up until we, we get the person that we want.

[Harry Stebbings]

How big is hellsing now?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It's about 350 people.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, 350 people. Exceptional people by very definition are exceptions. My point to that being, is there.

[Unknown]

Not a certain size whereby you have.

[Harry Stebbings]

To accept Good, because there are not that many exceptional people.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Actually I think there are a lot of exceptional people. 350 people isn't that many. It is possible that at three and a half thousand and maybe at 10,000 you start to have to make compromises. But I'm not sure how large a company has to grow in terms of headcount. In our experience that the top performers do the work of many people. They give the company a light footedness that otherwise wouldn't be there and the speed that otherwise wouldn't be there.

[Harry Stebbings]

How quickly do you know when someone is exceptional?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Quite often within 30 minutes of an interview. That's what I usually try to achieve.

[Harry Stebbings]

What are the clearest signs?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think it's just a feeling. The thing I always look forward is effortlessness. You know, not trying too hard, just being so kind of on top of the detail of everything. That kind of the effortlessness shines through. That's the main thing I look for.

[Harry Stebbings]

I look for unwavering imbalance.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Okay.

[Harry Stebbings]

In any area of life. I just want the spikiest point, like what did you do that was truly exceptional? And it could be a nana thing, but if you have that capability to go so all in on something, I want to know why and the mindset behind it.

[Thorsten Ryle]

It's interesting. I never ask questions in interviews like that. I don't have a set of questions. I just try to get into the flow.

[Unknown]

Really?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

And you don't find those commonalities in the questions that you ask?

[Thorsten Ryle]

No, and I find them quite often too staged. And I always think people can tell when a question is staged and so they're not themselves. It's easier for me to just go with the flow and kind of see where it goes.

[Harry Stebbings]

I heard this quote, it was actually Mark that told me this and I think it's. You've said it before. But if you have two good people, replace them with one outstanding person.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah. This is about talent density. We do a founder Offsite every three months and we make kind of decisions about how we want to run the company. And one of the decisions that we made was that we really do everything to go for talent density. And that means really taking hiring seriously, but also taking performance management seriously and making sure that only people that are helsing people are at helsing. And that means very often that we try to reduce the number of people. Overall, we found that the most performant teams are really small in the company. You can achieve a lot, particularly around software with three to four exceptional people. And so we'd rather have a team of four exceptional people than eight good people. It makes everything easier. It's also cheaper, by the way. Even though you pay above market rate, it's cheaper to do it that way.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can you just talk to me about the structure there? So you have lots of three to four people teams. We just had Nick on the show from Revolut and he spoke about running 27 bets at the same time and each team having eight to 10 people, three to four million pounds each, and then they managed that in alignment. How do you structure those small teams and then monitor performance?

[Thorsten Ryle]

First of all, we don't have a large number of small teams. We have, I would say a handful that work on particular projects and then sometimes, you know, you rally around something and it can become a little bit bigger. That's happened over the last few months as we were working on particular projects. But what we try to do is identify areas that we know needs to exist. We put a small team on it. We try to allow people to self select as well, obviously, so that you have a team that communicates well, that is highly performant and then they work on the task and they may actually move off it eventually and another team takes over. But that's worked really well for us.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you performance manage well and what have been your biggest lessons in doing that?

[Thorsten Ryle]

First of all, I think you need to want to performance manage. Performance management is exhausting. You have to have difficult conversations with people. Sometimes they work out and they become better. Sometimes you decide to part ways. First of all, you have to have a mindset that this is necessary for a company.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you need to do one on ones?

[Thorsten Ryle]

No, I don't do any one on ones work for people. I think that they're used to them, that have structured them properly and that work with people who need guidance in their development. The people I work with are usually senior and don't need that much guidance. If I need a one to one with them. Every week. I think something's probably going to. Probably going wrong. I also think that there is a tendency for one on ones to clog up the calendar. You have a lot of them, you tend to repeat a lot of things. I used to do them religiously, by the way. I just stopped doing them. It hasn't had a negative impact.

[Harry Stebbings]

So I interrupted that. So you need to want to performance manage and a lot don't because it's hard. You have to have hard conversations. What else?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, so this is something I noticed when I was mainly angel investing in startups is that eventually you get a certain number of people who are not a good fit for the company and they clog up the system and the company, they make everything harder, they create pockets of unhappiness because they feel maybe neglected or not understood or they don't fit into the culture. And you kind of tolerate it quite often as a founder and you tolerate it up to a point where you think, this doesn't feel like my company anymore. Like what happened, that happened to me at Natural Motion, by the way, at some point. And it's really painful for a founder. But the reality is that if you want to counteract that, you have to make performance management one of the main things that you do from the beginning. You have to commit to it early on and that means that you have to do the performance management. But probably as importantly, you have to also do what we call performance management calibration with all the leaders. So what we do at Helsink is that every quarter we get one cohort, so one quarter of the leaders together and they go through all the performance ratings that they gave their people and their teams and then the leadership team listens to it and gives feedback, not necessarily on the person, but actually to the way they rate the performance and help them calibrate it against what good looks like at Helsink, either because they've been too harsh or vice versa because they've been too lenient. And we do this religiously and it creates a culture of, I think a well calibrated performance system. And you need that because otherwise you end up with a lot of unfairness and also with not enough scrutiny.

[Harry Stebbings]

To be honest, when you put someone on a performance improvement plan, it does not work from there. Agree or disagree.

[Thorsten Ryle]

I've seen actually quite a lot of people turn around, including at my previous company as well, on a performance management plan. So it's not a foregone conclusion.

[Harry Stebbings]

I heard about helsing speed beforehand from a lot of your investors. What is Hellsing Speed?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Hellsing Speed is something that I nicked from Zynga. Zynga had Zynga speed and Helsing speed.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is basically incredibly creative, very creative.

[Thorsten Ryle]

And we as the founders felt very early on that speed was one of the most important things. When we started. I mean, a couple of things. When we started, we wanted to be fast because we needed to be fast. We had. We had to catch up. I mean, it felt already we started the company in 2021 that something was brewing. The geopolitical kind of tectonic plates were shifting and we felt that we had no time to lose. The reason we raised quite a bit of money from the beginning was because we wanted to make sure that we could be fast. And speed became one of the main things for us. So everyone's aware of Blitzscaling the book, but you can summarize it quite quickly. There are sometimes situations when capital is available where it's okay to be inefficient so that you can be effective Bas and very fast. And we embraced it from the beginning. We tried to get recruitment up and running really quickly, which was crucial for performance culture. You need to basically always have pressure on the pipeline of good people coming in in order to be able to manage other people out and so that you end up with a pool of people that are amazing. And so we wanted to shortcut that and found a third party that I wouldn't say overstaffed, but staffed very well so that we could get people in. Did a whole bunch of other things just to be fast, knowing that eventually we needed to settle at a different kind of level and not be inefficient, but be efficient and effective at the same time.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think a lot of founders will kid themselves that they are in this situation where blitzscaling is necessary. They need that cash. And it's okay to be inefficient in order to be effective when it's actually not the case. How do you think about when it is the case versus when it's not?

[Thorsten Ryle]

So I think you need to make a commitment early on that it is usually a transitionary, a temporary period. We wanted to do it for the first six to 12 months. So with recruitment, for example, we used a great third party and then eventually we moved into in house, which.

[Harry Stebbings]

How much did you raise for your first round?

[Thorsten Ryle]

So the seed was eight and a half million euros. But then we were lucky to have Daniel Ek and prima materia invest 100 million euros four months later or so.

[Harry Stebbings]

How on earth does that Happen. With respect, we both love Daniel and jack, but like 8 to 100 is a relatively atypical path of funding.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Well, Daniel came into the seed round. He was an investor in our seed round, the eight and a half million. And within two or three months, I think he developed so much conviction that he asked, like, I would like to lead you serious a how much, how much money do you need? And I said, ideally 100 million euros. And he gave us the money through Primo Materia, who've been amazing to work with. It allowed us to do the speed thing that I just mentioned, but a couple of other things as well. It allowed us to really focus on top talent very early on. And the second thing that allowed us to do is to not go for innovation. You know, projects in defense for incubators and, you know, little grants here and there. But because we were quite well funded, we could go for programs of record. So the official large programs, which were hard to get and very risky, but we were well funded enough that we could, we could just take the risk. And that worked out very well.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is Helsing a company that only a serial entrepreneur could found? When you look at the capital requirements.

[Thorsten Ryle]

I'm not sure about that. It does make it easier. I would say Helsing is a company that you can only co found. You need to have multiple founders.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said about the tectonic shifting plates in the geopolitical landscape that you saw that made you want to move fast. What did you see that very few other people saw in the tectonic plate shifting?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think the watershed moment was the annexation of Crimea in 2014 by Putin and as importantly, the reaction or lack of reaction by European and Western governments in general. And we obviously acknowledged it and took note, but we didn't really understand the threat and the danger even back then that that created was that you essentially allowed someone with territorial ambitions to do more. And it felt like the clock was ticking until that was going to happen. And so when we started Helsing in March 2021, which now feels like a very different time, we actually put in our. One of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China. So we got the Russia Ukraine invasion right. What we got wrong was the timing, because we thought it was going to happen in 2025, but in the event it happened 11 months after we put that slide together. Ever since then we. We feel like it's sadly, it is rational to be pessimistic at the moment, and it feels like this hasn't quite fully sunk in, you know, across our.

[Harry Stebbings]

Democratic societies in 2014, the annexation, we didn't understand or we didn't really prioritize enough. I struggle to believe we don't understand Austin.

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think we probably intellectually understood it, but we didn't really want to think through the consequences, because the consequences were that we needed to start thinking about defense again, about conflict, all the suffering that comes with it, and we didn't want to think about it. We thought it might go away. And actually that happened for many years afterwards as well, and even to some extent now. And I understand it, I understand it emotionally as well, but I think it's intellectually lazy to not take the next step and think about what actually is required to protect our democracies before we.

[Harry Stebbings]

Go into what's required, what happens from here.

[Thorsten Ryle]

The question is whether we are prepared again to think it through and commit to the next steps, which are an increase in defence spending, even if it is expensive, even if that means making sacrifices elsewhere, because the sacrifice that otherwise we'd have to make is potentially so large it's the right thing to do that I'm not sure is happening at the moment.

[Harry Stebbings]

I mean, Keir Starmer's actively said we will not have an increase in defence spending.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Well, I think most governments are actually committing to an increase over time. So we are at, I think, roughly probably 2% right now, on average. In NATO, that's quite low. Historically, it's been through the court war, it's been 3 to 6% or so. But if you look at Poland, Poland has gone From, I think, 2.1% or so to 4.6, 4.7 within just a few years. So it's clearly possible. Whether every country is going to act at that speed remains to be seen. I think there are budget pressures everywhere. We understand them and you have to convince a lot of people to actually re channel so much money towards defence. It's not easy, I get that, but I think it's going to happen.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you think the Trump administration changes the European funding requirements in this situation? Because he's actively said before, you are not pulling your weight.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, I think we've already been on that trajectory, I think starting from 2016, where obviously similar arguments were being made. And with the Ukraine conflict, defence spending has gone up, sometimes part of the general budget, sometimes as part of separate budgets, like In Germany, the 100 billion. So that's already happening. I think the need for European sovereignty has clearly become even more important. So I think we're just going to go further down on that vector. It might just be that we're going to have to go faster.

[Harry Stebbings]

The need for European sovereignty has become more important. Can you explain that to me again?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I mean, it's been clear for many years now that we cannot rely on partners to secure and protect Europe, at least not over a long period of time. I think right now that's still. That's still there, but I think over time there just won't be, I think, the capability even of partners, and as it looks, also not the willingness to do so. And quite frankly, I think as a continent, as Europe, which is still rich, we should have that kind of pride. We should want to protect ourselves. We should not need to rely on others. We should be equals in a partnership, and that's what our partners want as well. And so it's natural, I think, that we need to go there anyway. We've just been so used to a different kind of situation that we just need to unlearn it now and think about security ourselves.

[Harry Stebbings]

Will Trump pull out, out of Ukraine?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. It's clear what he talked about. It's clear that he's made certain statements, but we'll see what's going to happen.

[Harry Stebbings]

Many people think that we are on the cusp of a defense spending boom. Do you think that's actually realistic? You mentioned there the 2%, we all appreciate it needs to go higher. Is that rational? And are we at the cusp?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, I'm not sure whether it's a boom or not. I think we'll see some countries increase their defence budget a little bit. We'll see others. I mentioned Poland, increase it drastically. And particularly the countries that are most exposed to the eastern flank, to the NATO eastern flank, are more likely to increase their defence spending. It's already happening. It's happening in Scandinavia as well. Other parts of Europe may or may not increase it as much that I think we'll have to see. I'm not sure I would call it a boom. I think it's an increase that will go into fixing a lot of things that are broken at the moment. And then some of that increases will go into new equipment spent as well, but only some of it. And of that there'll be a proportion that will need to go urgently to what's called new defence technology, but that will only be a part.

[Harry Stebbings]

Who do you determine? Who you Sell to versus who?

[Thorsten Ryle]

You don't you mean which countries? Yeah, I mean, it's a bigger topic. But the question is whether you should stop at export laws or whether you should give it more thought. And what we did from the beginning at Helsing is we made a commitment to ourselves, but also to the outside world that we would take ethics really seriously. There are two reasons for it. One of them is, as a company that's based in democratic countries, we believe we have a special responsibility to think about ethics and how our technology is used and who we make it available to. Secondly, we want to attract. We want to be a broad church. We want to attract all kinds of different people with different political views, backgrounds, et cetera. And to accommodate those people, you need to give everyone in the company the commitment that we think together carefully about the pros and cons of certain decisions. Decisions always have to be made eventually by the founders, but the decision process, you can include everyone. And that's what we've done from the beginning. So we have many ethics workshops which are extremely well attended. We now have to break them up into several subgroups.

[Harry Stebbings]

What ethical elements come up that you did not expect to come up? Because there's obviously the obvious. Don't sell to bad people.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Sure. First of all, even the complexity around who do you sell it to? Is interesting because there are very obvious ones that we'll all agree on, but then there are ones in between which.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are, sorry, who do we agree on? It's like China, Iran, North Korea.

[Thorsten Ryle]

North Korea, Yeah, for example, that we would agree on. Then there are others where it becomes a bit more complex. One of the main reasons we do these workshops is that we get everyone to contribute to the decision process, but also for everyone to build what we call this ethics muscle. Because for me, everything was kind of. There were red lines, everything was black and white, and it was kind of easy. The more you dive into a particular topic, the harder actually it becomes to make these calls and the more complex it becomes. And that is something that we didn't just want to decide kind of in a small group of people or some small ethics group. We wanted everyone to contribute to it so that everyone had buy in and understood the pros and cons. Not everyone may agree with the decisions that we eventually take, but everyone can see how we arrived at those decisions.

[Harry Stebbings]

What decision did you take that was most unpopular?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I don't think decisions have been particularly unpopular yet. We just recently announced that we are building strike drones. We build strike drone software as well. And that is, you know, fraud with all kinds of complexities that you have to think about around the ethics side of it, both in terms of technology usage, how it's used, et cetera. And that is something that everyone contributed to the thinking around this. We managed to shine a light on areas of technology development that I can't go into, sadly, that actually we probably didn't think about that much before. So the other important part is that if you have a lot of, I think intelligent, engaged people look at the ethics problem around technology usage, conops the concept of operations, you just shine a light on kind of any kind of remaining area. And so you just have much better coverage of all the questions that you.

[Harry Stebbings]

Have to deal with before we go to this very important news. So you don't sell to those three. Who are the ambiguous, who's the like?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Well, the easiest way to look at clear and not clear is to check out the Economist Democracy Index.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's what we used initially, the Economist Democracy Index.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Exactly. So the Economist releases a list every year and it ranks countries according to how democratic they are, with 10, I believe, being the highest one going down to zero. And so the ones at the top are easy, the ones at the bottom are also easy. And then it starts becoming more complex in the middle because you have some countries even in the eu where in the past they haven't been kind of ranked that highly, but then governments have changed and they've ranked more highly again. So it basically becomes a moving target. And then there are also considerations around are they parts or are these some of these countries that are maybe in the gray zone, part of democratic alliances that become important for democracies to survive and protect themselves?

[Harry Stebbings]

For example, how do you think about the transients of right and wrong? And what I mean by that is like, you know, when, when Israel Terrible VII happened, it was like the world got behind Israel and now we've seen the backlash against what's happened in Gaza and one could argue that they've fought back with too much force and what was a worthy customer may become an unworthy customer.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, I think these complexities are there with any conflict and eventually it becomes complex and there is no right or wrong. I'm always aware that this sounds like a cop out. And this is what I've always been afraid of, is that when you say it's complex, it sounds like a cop out, but it isn't a cop out. It is actually complicated and complex. And you also need to weight certain components in a way that can be arbitrary. And so Every conflict, I think, has these kinds of complications, and it's our responsibility to navigate it. Again, we could just lean back and say, there's export law. That makes it really easy. But I think if you want to have people really engaged with these kinds of technologies and capabilities in a company, you need to go further than that. You need to build a view that goes beyond just what is quite static export law.

[Harry Stebbings]

Has there ever been a case where it's like, there's European sovereignty in supporting Europe and making sure that we get great provisions of amazing equipment versus actually the money's to be made elsewhere, money's to be made selling in the US in other countries. And actually you have a balance between European sovereignty and revenue optimization.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Well, yeah. I mean, Helsing was founded to support Europe and to be a European company, also to be a European lighthouse company and a company that helps Europe protect itself. So that's always the number one thing. And if kind of people ask like, what is it you want to, you know, where do you want to be in five years with Helsinki? Or what is it you want to achieve? It's very simple. We want to make Europe safer. We want to be able to point at the difference that we've made in terms of the geopolitical security of this continent. That is the goal of the company. Everything else has to follow from that. Obviously, it needs to be a company that's large enough so that it has leverage, that it can deploy a lot of equipment that can work with some of the most complex systems like the Eurofighter that we're working on. But that's all it means to an end. The goal is always to protect Europe.

[Harry Stebbings]

I do want to stay on the drones because otherwise I'm going to discuss Europe. But a little bit later on the drones. It's a massive introduction moving to hardware as well. It's a big new chapter for the company. Why did you decide that now was the right time to make this big new change? Just talk to me about that.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, I mean, Helsing is a software company. As a software first company, always has been and always will be. Almost everyone is a software engineer. That's where we've come from. That's how we hired and we are in a number of large contracts. For example, we working with Saab on the Eurofight electronic warfare upgrade program. That's pure software, our contribution. And software can make a massive difference. In this particular case, AI can, because we can start to read the intent of shape shifting, anti aircraft radar systems. And so software plays a huge role. And we always said it creates a 10x multiplier in terms of capabilities. That's still the case. That will always be the case. And we will always do those software programs. So software and software contracts work in defense. Even though some people say it is impossible, it clearly is possible. However, there are some areas where software needs to be. It needs to have a hardware carrier. With a Eurofighter, we have a combat aircraft as a carrier, and that's great. And we're not building a Eurofighter. But with drones, you need to think about drones differently in order for them to have the effect that you want them to have, which is basically precise mass. So you want to be able to have a large number of drones, extremely precise, to provide a deterrent that doesn't exist at the moment. And so for that, you need to have large numbers of drones. You need to have the ability to manufacture those drones in a way that isn't the case right now. Most drone companies right now build small numbers of quite exquisite drones. They're quite expensive. Sometimes a bit of a boutique business where people really care about the hardware and the carbon and everything else. But that's not what we need. What we need is really scaled up production. And so when we looked at what's required in terms of capability, we couldn't, certainly on the western market, we couldn't find anyone who was able to produce these large numbers. And so that's when we started to look at can we build these kinds of drones ourselves? And can we think about it differently from a software first point of view? Meaning that we can shift a lot of the complexity from hardware into software, we can simplify the hardware, and we can manufacture it in much larger numbers at lower prices. And that's what we did with the HX2, which we just announced a couple of days ago.

[Harry Stebbings]

How does the company need to change with the integration of hardware? Respectfully, you said it's a software first Company company. We're software engineers. Hardware is an entirely different ballgame.

[Thorsten Ryle]

It is and it isn't. So it is in that there are many areas where you need to have hardware experts. And we've built an amazing team that obviously deals with things like the design, the components, but also the supply chain. And that's different from software. But you can think about hardware as software as well. You can optimize a lot of parts of hardware by shifting complexity into software. And you can also test hardware in software. And so we spend a lot of time building infrastructure for the entire company around simulation platforms, for example, AI infrastructure Platforms, et cetera. And some of that technology is also applicable to hardware. So we've developed our drones extremely fast and we've tested them extremely fast. And the reason we're getting to that kind of iteration speed and it is all about iteration, just iterate, iterate, iterate, is because we can move a lot of the testing into software and only when we get to a certain point we move it into hardware, we test it in hardware and then we go back into software again. So these two things, if you do it well, which we're trying to do, are extremely interlinked. And the best hardware companies, I think, are software companies, and vice versa.

[Harry Stebbings]

What can you not test in software that has to be tested in hardware?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Software can, with the right simulation environment, go really far. But there will be some things that maybe you didn't expect that aren't covered in your simulation. That happens in particular when you're deployed is our drones are in Ukraine, then the realities of conflict will throw things at you that you just didn't anticipate. And so that's something that you have to test.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can I ask you, I spoke to someone the other day, I was looking at a defense company and they said the challenge is compliance, especially around drones, that a lot of governments cannot buy single use drones because of the single use nature of it. My question to you is to what extent does compliance become an inhibitor to government procurement?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It is an inhibitor, like many other things as well. But for all the complaints that we have about procurement and everything else, a lot of these rules are also there for a reason. Are they always applied in the right way and in as timely a way as ideally would be possible? Probably not, but the rules quite often make sense.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the craziest rule?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think there are lots of rules and it's frustrating. But if you enter defence as a company, that is what you've signed up for. And so you'll rarely hear us complain about how slow procurement is, et cetera, because people want to do the right thing. The procurement officials also want to do the right thing. And by the way, I think politicians do too. It's just that eventually you end up with a system that's grown over a long time where the incentives aren't quite aligned with the realities of conflict?

[Harry Stebbings]

Well, this is my point. Are they incentivized to innovate or are they incentivized to continue longstanding relationships with primes where there is zero risk of job loss if it goes wrong?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think the system probably incentivizes the Latter, but that doesn't mean that there aren't individuals actually across different forces in procurement agencies, but also in politics, who really want to innovate. It does exist.

[Harry Stebbings]

How could the structure of the system be changed where innovation and procurement of new innovation is encouraged, not job loss avoided?

[Thorsten Ryle]

So there are all kinds of, I think, littler things that you could do. But what we are suggesting is that you introduce a mandatory 20% on new defense companies for defense equipment. That is the easiest way of doing it. So if you reserve of your defense equipment spend. So not the stuff on maintenance and everything else, but actually defense equipment. If you reserve 20% of that to new defense companies, which you can define, that is a shortcut to actually realigning incentives.

[Harry Stebbings]

What is the current spending on new defense companies?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think it's less than 1%. It's incredibly low.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so a shift to 20%. A shift to 20% though, is just Helsing. I mean, there are not that many other defense startups.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Not at scale. No. I mean, they're smaller ones, but not at scale.

[Harry Stebbings]

We mentioned the compliance element there. What are the other hardest elements of selling into government that are not often discussed?

[Thorsten Ryle]

There are many. The first thing is that you also have to have relationships with governments with the right decision makers. You have to have a government relations team that deals with all of that. And in Helsinki's case, it's not just one country, it's several. And so we're active in the uk, in France and in Germany. Just recently opened an office in Estonia. And there'll be more over time. So we have to have those relationships with various governments. You have to then think about how do you deal with lobbying from industry. So not every prime in the defense industry is yet our friend. I think we are. We want to reach out to all of them, but not everyone sees us friends yet.

[Harry Stebbings]

Who's your friend and who's not your friend?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Well, probably Saab is a friend, for example. We work very closely with them. They're shareholders in Helsing as well, clearly. Close friends, others. I think it can fluctuate. I don't mean this in just. I think we all genuinely need to work together. I think we all have bigger fish to fry. And defense primes will always have a role. We don't think that they will disappear. In fact, actually, I think they will grow if we do things right. The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector. If there is a big wave coming of new technology and it's all around Autonomy software And AI essentially, again, precise mass. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense as happened to the car industry. The new wave was electric software and autonomy.

[Harry Stebbings]

What does that mean if it happens? Why is that such a challenge?

[Thorsten Ryle]

We're going to be faced with a large number of autonomous systems from our adversaries. That's going to be the focus that they're going to take. And by the way, it's quite likely that they, they won't have the same ethical red lines that we as democratic societies should have. So they have, from a functionality point of view, I think they'll have the ability to take shortcuts that we don't want to take. We have to earn the luxury basically to be able to really care about ethics. And that means that we have to have technology leadership overall.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do we underestimate the capabilities of Russia and Iran specifically?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're quite clear for everyone to see. Iran is producing a large number of drones already. They've been using and working on the Shahed, for example, for a long time. They've licensed that design to Russia. Russia is now manufacturing it itself. Software is getting better over time. Russia has the Lancet, which is a capable strike drone, quite, quite different from Shahad, which I think they've developed themselves. And the software for all of these is getting better as well. We're going to be faced either through Russia alone or through partners like Iran with adversaries that are committing to precise mass. Large number of autonomous systems that we're going to have to counter one way or the other. And you can counter them, but you can't counter them with the current systems that we have. You can't just have exquisite systems like tanks, artillery, guns that are not particularly well connected that take a while to take a shot. You need to work basically at the speed of software. You need to interconnect all of these systems. But crucially, you need to have precise mass on your own side as well. You need to have the ability, however horrible that sounds, to have thousands and tens of thousands of strike drones to deter.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do governments understand this?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think some governments are starting to understand it. I think governments at large probably haven't understood it. There is a big wave coming towards us and it is autonomy and software in defense, and it's unstoppable and we're just going to be forced into that race.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you say like autonomy, software and defense, can you unpack just how you See the future of warfare and conflict with AI and autonomy in mind.

[Thorsten Ryle]

We can already look at Ukraine and look at the trends there. And the trend even at the beginning there were some drones that were being used, remember the TB2s for example, from Turkey. Over time that's evolved towards more and more drones. Initially it was to make up for lack of artillery munitions. Now actually the drones themselves have such good success that more and more are being built. And I believe Ukraine is building 1 1/2 million FPV drones. The small first person, few drones a year. I think Russia is building roughly the same. So there's already a shift towards mass and reasonably precise mass. What hasn't happened yet is that those drones are scalable, but that will happen in terms of their usage. At the moment you have one operator operating one drone. It's going to happen quite quickly that that's going to change and you'll be able as a single operator to control multiple drones. And that trend I think we'll see playing out as early as next year. It's not long now because the algorithms are all coming and we know this because we have those algorithms too.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said there about drones having success. How do you measure success?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think it's the ability to hit a target. It's hitting a target that itself uses electronic warfare, so tries to jam the signal of the drone. These are some of the bigger problems right now that Ukraine is facing and that NATO will be facing in a peer conflict as well, or any other country in a peer conflict. So drones themselves, if they're just remote controlled drones, eventually have the problem that they can be jammed. That's GPS jamming. So it doesn't know where it is or it's comms jamming, which means that the control inputs to the drone or the video feed back from the drone to the operator is jammed and therefore you can't use it. So this is the problem. I mean there's a jamming station, the frontline every few kilometers right now. So it's almost impossible to get around jamming at the moment.

[Harry Stebbings]

The thing that Matt from Andurils taught me is actually the different economies of conflict. And what I mean by that is that you can send one very expensive million pound drone in and it can be shot down with a 50,000 pound missile or whatever that is. And you can continuously have this miseconomies or mismatching cost versus kind of breakdown. Yeah, how do you think about that?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It's the same thing with strike drones and tanks and artillery. A tank costs several million Pounds, Euros. A strike drone is much, much, much cheaper. Depending on how things play out. You need one or maybe two or three strike drones, even with countermeasures, to actually overcome a tank. That's basically the danger. Same is true for artillery systems. They become very hard to defend. And the problem with mass, especially precise mass, is that you can solve almost every problem with saturation. So even if there were countermeasures, let's say on the tank side, so what.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you mean you can solve every problem with saturation?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It means that basically instead of sending one, you send five. If they're cheap enough, you can just do that, and at some point you just over saturate defenses of an expensive system. And it's still very cheap to do it that way. If you just think about the economics of it, you still have a really strong asymmetry. And so it'll become harder and harder unless you find a way to really counteract these systems, which is hard to send expensive tanks and artillery systems into battle when on the other side there are strike drones that are much, much cheaper.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is the future of war contactless in terms of like human contact?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Ultimately, yes. I think ultimately, again, you can already see the first signs in Ukraine. Some areas of the battlefield are essentially no go zones for humans because you have drones buzzing over you all the time. I think that gives us kind of a first indication how conflict is going to evolve. It'll be impossible and I think ethically extremely problematic to send humans into a battlefield that is facing large numbers of autonomous intelligence systems on the other side.

[Harry Stebbings]

What is the point of a battlefield? I know that sounds like a very strange and glib statement, but if it's just an empty landmass area where you have drones flying, conflict against other artillery, what are we doing here?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, it's usually not done in a way that there's some kind of sequestered field and you work it out and then whoever wins, wins the conflict. Obviously. It tends to be related to obviously physical proximity to areas that matter, whether it's ports, certain routes, obviously, or other important landmarks. That's where battlefields tend to be located.

[Harry Stebbings]

Honestly, Thorsten, I listen to you and I'm quite scared. When you think about autonomous swarms of drones, it's pretty terrifying. Does it scare you and is it right to scare everyone?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, I think it should be disconcerting to all of us. I think we should think about it and think about the implications and we should think, and I don't think this is happening enough. I think we should think about how we want this technology to work so that we can still stay safe, but we don't have to compromise on our ethical standards.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are we seeing a change in public perception around defence spending?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think so. So if I look at polls now, I think for most countries population agrees that more needs to be spent on defence. I think when it then comes to looking at what is going to be cut, I think people probably will differ and being very concrete will make I think that kind of view a little bit harder. I think overall populations get it. Whether politicians currently have the courage to actually implement it is a different matter. I think in some countries probably that's going to happen. We talked about Poland earlier, in others it's taking longer.

[Harry Stebbings]

If I were to say, here you are, UK defence budget, this is yours and you are my new defense minister.

[Thorsten Ryle]

How would you allocate it and 20% to new defense? It sounds self serving, but it's absolutely required. If we just keep buying the same kind of equipment that we've bought before, if we don't network it, if we don't give it AI, if we don't produce precision mass, we won't be able to deter and we won't be able to defend ourselves.

[Harry Stebbings]

In the context, are primes delivering what they should be? And Matt Grimm very articulately said that they simply just take too long.

[Thorsten Ryle]

They probably do take too long. I think they're incentivized in different ways. The US is different to other countries, every country is different and the various primes are different as well. In general they're not incentivized to spend a lot of their own money on R and D. It's probably less than 5% or so. For a company like Helsinki, it's almost all of it. I mean we pre finance almost everything and that's why we raised quite a bit of money because we need to be able to spend on developments before we actually. Because first of all we have to prove that it works and we can't wait for governments to eventually get it and then fund it. And then in eight years we have a system. We need a system in eight months basically, or let's make it a year or two years.

[Harry Stebbings]

So one, we have 20% to new defence. What else?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think again procurement needs to be reformed. Everyone knows that. The reason we don't talk about it that much is because it will take a long time to do it. It needs to be obviously faster, probably less constrained and the incentives need to be aligned more again towards speed, which are not right now, which Makes it harder for the individuals there to do what's right for that particular.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do we align to speed? You're the Defense minister who will listen to this.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah. Well, first of all, I think you simplify the processes, but you also make sure that you actually set deadlines that are quite tight in terms of when do you actually produce something. And then you try to work with companies that want to work very hard and fast and you incentivize other companies that maybe have a different way of working to do the same. Primes and hardware need to work together with software to be really effective for future conflicts.

[Harry Stebbings]

What does the market composition look like in the future? Because at the moment we just have primes, basically. What does that market composition look like in the future?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think it will be similar. There will be primes and then there'll be suppliers.

[Harry Stebbings]

How many new primes will there be?

[Thorsten Ryle]

A very small number, Extremely small number.

[Harry Stebbings]

So for all those doing defense funds, building defense portfolios, is defense in itself a category or is it the classic if you want to invest in hellsing, don't do the next hellsing, just do fucking hellsing.

[Thorsten Ryle]

So I think what happened is that the VCs that really get defense and there are a number have already kind of made their bets on defense companies. There is now kind of a second or third wave of VCs that go into defense and fund technology teams, which is fine in a way. But my question to those VCs would be like, wow, what is the exit route for those companies? Who's going to buy them?

[Harry Stebbings]

You or Anduril?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, but we can't buy all of those companies. And also the question is whether we would buy them at VC valuations. I mean the exit opportunities for companies are either an ipo. For that you need to be a prime, you need to be multi domain. You have to have all of the foundation of having built software infrastructure, everything around security, physical security, cybersecurity, government relations, export law compliance and everything else. That all has to happen and then you have a shot.

[Harry Stebbings]

I thought building a customer success team was hard.

[Thorsten Ryle]

It is. Defense is so complex. Having built a games company, which I thought was pretty hard, defense is just on a different level, impossible. I think if you don't have a founder team that already has experience in some of the areas.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are the majority of VC dollars going into defense companies today going to go to zero?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think for some of the more fragmented tail, maybe not to zero, but I think they're going to go down.

[Harry Stebbings]

Where is the biggest opportunity to deploy Dollars in defence today.

[Thorsten Ryle]

I mean, I'm biased, but I think it is around those companies that have got to scale, that have programs of record and that are basically active in a conflict. The difference between a company that first of all maybe R and D contracts and has a program of record, that is already a big difference. Because getting over that hump of getting a program of record is.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why is the program of record huge? What is a program of record?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It's an official program by a government that has a certain size, rather than. I mentioned the Eurofight electronic warfare upgrade that was officially awarded. Companies pitch for it and eventually consortia pitched for it and eventually consortia won it, which is SAP, nas. In the end, those happen regularly and they tend to be quite large. They run over several years. By contrast, there are innovation projects, which quite often are almost a parallel track to all of this, where there are smaller pots of money to prove that certain forces or nations can do innovation and defense. The problem is you may get 500k from one of these projects and you win it and you show to your VC we've made revenues. The jump from there to actually program of record is huge because all of the apparatus that's required to pitch for these programs to have again the government relationships, some of the lobbying that's required compliance, again, export law, I mentioned it earlier, that isn't required for these innovation projects. So these kind of teams have a feeling I've now taken the first step. Now the next step is a program of record, not realizing it's a completely different kettle of fish. And again, I had to learn all of this because for me it was natural.

[Harry Stebbings]

For those that make the transition, what will be needed for them to make the transition successfully, they need to build.

[Thorsten Ryle]

The teams around it. And this is where one of the problems lie. There's a scarcity of talent around go to market, government relations, even compliance and other things, even security, to be honest, in defense. So all of these companies would be competing for a very small pool of people. It's just impossible to turn them all into primes. It's just not going to happen. Coming back to the innovation side, you end up with something that looks like product market fit and you think it's great technology, you've shown it and it can do something, maybe take a drone down or something. But I had to learn that that is just a very small part of building a prime. It's like 18 maybe or something is product market fit. Then you have to do all the rest. And for that you need to build the infrastructure to build a prime, which Anduril has done, for example. It's a good example. We've done it too. We're certainly in the process of doing it and still a ways to go. But I think that's what's underappreciated. And it's not underappreciated with VCs that know about defense, but with I think VCs that are maybe as distant to it as I was when I was previously in the gaming industry. I think for them they quite often don't get what it takes to actually build a large company.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think naivety is a wonderful benefit in entrepreneurship or 100%?

[Thorsten Ryle]

100%. Most founders will say, had I known how hard this is, I would never have tried.

[Harry Stebbings]

Had you known how hard this is, would you have tried?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Helsing? Yes. Yeah, with Natural Motion I went through some really tough times.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why? Helsing, yes. Natural Motion, no.

[Thorsten Ryle]

There's several reasons, but the main reason now is that three founders. It's easier to build a company even when you go through really difficult times because you have each other to rely on. You have each other as a sounding board. It sounds a bit kumbaya, but it's very important.

[Harry Stebbings]

Kaz, what's been the hardest moment where you needed them to get through it?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Well, we've been through hard moments throughout the company, but really difficult times were over the last few weeks when we had to will into existence a hardware platform. Having come into it, not knowing much about it, having to do it in record time, having to think about supply chains and everything else around it, I mean that's difficult. And you do it while there's lots of noise in the market and all kinds of other things and you still have to build a company company. And it's time consuming. There are lots of setbacks and it is much easier to do it if you have several shoulders rather than just one to get through all of this stuff. And there'll be more setbacks happening. Like with every startups, you just don't know what's going to happen. And they'll be, you know what it's like with a startup. That's what I experience at Natural Motion you're already on the floor, you've already been punched in the face several times and then another one comes and then another one comes which you didn't expect. Those are the worst is when you kind of already fuck, I'm done. And it's relentless. The only thing I would say is that with Natural Motion we got out of it eventually even out of. We had some situations that were very hard to get out of. We still managed to do it and it wasn't some kind of.

[Harry Stebbings]

Now the natural motion journey is over. Can you share one that's like an. Oh shit.

[Thorsten Ryle]

One was when we did our integration into GTA 4 with our technology Euphoria, which was an animation runtime engine. We had already optimized the hell out of it and we had great optimization people for gaming consoles. But GTA was 4 was an amazing game and really pushed the consoles to its limits. And I felt the technology was great. But there was a point where we got a call from Rockstar saying we don't have the performance budget for your engine anymore, so you either run another 10 times faster or we can't use it. And I remember putting the phone down and thinking we are fucked. And I was sure we're fucked because we'd already optimized everything. This is one of those moments where a number of our engineers eventually went to Edinburgh to work directly with a team there until they somehow managed to get that performance gain. And the engine stayed in there and it was the beginning kind of natural motion proper because it was such an important game and it made everyone proud. It's also taught me about how exceptional engineers can make crazy things happen. And I was convinced this wasn't going to work out and they made it happen. Like to this day, I have so much respect for great software engineers, the best software engineers, they make all of us look good.

[Harry Stebbings]

I spoke to Shaq before the show and he told me I had to ask a question really focused around a quote of yours, which is capital isn't the problem. Ambition is when it comes to Europe and our current state.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah. So I think people complain about all kinds of things about Europe and general startup environments. I don't think that there is a lack of capital in Europe. Certainly not seed Serious A, sometimes even Series B. You could even argue there's too much. What's missing is to some extent operational knowledge because we haven't had as many startups that became big as the US specifically Silicon Valley has had. But I think more important is ambition. It's ambition specifically on the side of a founder. Ambition combined with aggressiveness and that aggression, that lack of aggression and that lack of ambition holds almost everyone back. And it's still acceptable to build companies and sell them at a value of 100 million. And I understand why, because it's life changing for everyone. But it's actually not what Europe needs. We need much Bigger companies that actually create sovereignty around some of the key areas in ways that just currently don't exist. And for that you need to have founders that have that ambition, first time founders, or you need founders that are second time or third time founders who've already learned a lot and go back and do it one more time. Because quite often you're actually much faster the second time around for reasonably obvious reasons. That doesn't happen as often in Europe as it does in the States, from what I can tell. And I always wonder why that is. And sometimes maybe it's because Europe is a really nice place to retire in. Lots of things that you can do, have a house in Italy or whatever and not work. But that is not good. We need all of those people back to start a second or a third company.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do we change that?

[Thorsten Ryle]

The founder community needs to talk about it more. It's a mindset thing. I personally think we all have a contribution to make and a contribution to make as a society. As founders, I think we have a responsibility to actually contribute. Some of that contribution is to help Europe become sovereign and particularly around key technologies.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you fear that we are falling further and further behind?

[Thorsten Ryle]

So I think we are falling behind, but that trend is new, that already started a few years ago. And part of the reason we wanted to build Helsing was to show that you can build a company in Europe fast to scale in deep tech and just provide a shortcut. Actually, this is doable and we wanted to show that it's doable, including the fundraising. So I think Europe is falling behind, but it doesn't have to be that way. So the things that we have in Europe and particular talent, we have incredibly good talent, including on the engineering side. We hire almost exclusively from Europe at the moment. And the talent is amazing, the talent pool is amazing. People's attitudes are amazing. There's none of this 9 to 5 mentality. People really want to make a difference and they work hard and they work intensely wherever that's required. So. So I think that's a myth.

[Harry Stebbings]

What role does US capital play in this journey for European companies? You obviously took money from gc, from Eli Gill, from some big US players, I think Excel as well. What role does US cash play?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It plays an important role, I think later on, the ability for European investors to provide growth capital, that's lower than it is in the us, But I don't think that's a problem. In fact, in many ways I think that's probably a feature, not a bug, because I think exposure to US culture, but also investors is extremely useful. I was lucky to have it. Natural Motion benchmark is one of our investors with Mitch Lasky as our partner. Part of the reason why we eventually took off was also Mitch and the way he thought about how big this company could be, how I should think about portfolio, not think too small. That was extremely helpful. And so I think that injection of US mentality to European companies at the right point is extremely helpful. And the cap table, true for Helsinki as well. It's still Europe dominated. We did our seed round entirely from European investors. Then Daniel and Prima Materia came in again European. So later on we took American money, but the company is still a European company.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is there anything you think people don't see about Europe from the outside? We have a huge US audience. The US just loves to say, hey, you guys don't work. You'd love to have espressos and have work. Life balance not ambitious. Sell for 100 million. Is there anything they should know that they don't know?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think it's pretty clear that the current narrative is a caricature of Europe. There are some elements of truth in it, but they've been extremely exaggerated. In particular, over the last six to 12 months. I think if you go on X.

[Harry Stebbings]

But when you look at where Europe is today, and I try and be positive, I'm in London, I built a career in London, I built a business in London, I'm staying in London. My challenge is when you look at the German government, when you look at the French, when you look at the British, we're all just becoming further and further dependent on state subsidies, increasing public employment, and we're becoming more and more uncompetitive.

[Thorsten Ryle]

That is a trend right now. Even three and a half years ago, when we started the company, that trend was already there. The question with all of these situations is what can we do to change it? What are you doing to change it? We felt we had agency by looking at, for example, the problem of European sovereignty and specifically around defense. And we felt as founders, you have the privilege of having a massive lever which is if you can build a successful company in this space, you can actually make a difference. I'm pretty sick of people just commenting. I mean, you know this like There's a whole LinkedIn economy built around just complaining. Same is true on X and just commenting. And those comments, they're worth nothing. None of the commentary is worth anything. The only thing that that matters is if people actually do something that is start a company, build a company, is to Go into politics, start a new party, whatever it is. But the current attitude of just complaining drives me crazy.

[Harry Stebbings]

All right, okay, point taken. Come to my studio. Point fingers. No, I completely agree. I was actually at a dinner the other evening and they were talking about policy and it was kind of a rich person's dinner talking about policy. And it really pissed me off because it's like pontificating means nothing.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Exactly.

[Harry Stebbings]

And actually just build companies, invest in companies, support your founders, be founders, just do it.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, it's interesting. I also think that people over index on the environment and about having the right regulatory settings and tax and everything else around it. I actually think none of this stuff really matters that much. I think what really matters is founder quality and founder ambition. For a country to be successful, they should attract the most aggressive founders and everything else is a lot less important.

[Harry Stebbings]

I spoke to Matt Clifford before the show and he provided a great question. He said that I had to ask. Helsing is one of the first deliberate European tech sovereignty companies. Which other ones do we need? In which sectors?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Certainly companies in energy. Energy sovereignty is a huge issue. Some of that may be in convention technologies, some of it may be in future technologies like fusion. We need sovereignty ideally around semiconductors. It's going to be very hard to achieve unless there are big changes and in technology and various other areas, obviously defense is another one and a few others. I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty. But I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to 10 years.

[Harry Stebbings]

Where are we in three years with Russia, Ukraine? Has Putin invaded Lithuania, Belarus, Finland?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It is very hard to predict. We just don't know how things are going to pan out over the next few months and a couple of years. But I think we do have to take the threat to the NATO eastern flag seriously. I think we have to take it much more seriously than we are doing it right now in the UK and in Germany and other countries. I think Scandinavia, the Scandinavian countries take it a lot more seriously, as do the Baltics take it extremely seriously. And I think we should listen to them. I think the threat is extremely plausible in the next few years.

[Harry Stebbings]

You mentioned China, Taiwan earlier as the second needle moving moment in the kind of inception of hellsing. What happens in China and Taiwan Again.

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think it's plausible that there will be a conflict. I don't think it's 10 years away. If it happens, it's probably Quite a lot sooner than that. But it depends on how the next, again few months and years are going to pan out again. I think there is a danger, and it's obviously a clearly stated goal of China to reunite, as they put it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Does Trump reduce the potential for global.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Conflict, as people have stated that there was no new conflict under Trump's last administration. And so if you go by that, then it would reduce it. But there are other players obviously involved as well. We don't know what kind of capabilities are being developed in North Korea, how someone feels on a particular day, the danger that we have. And I think something that is hard to control is accidental escalation. For example, at the beginning of the Ukraine war, I think there was a danger of escalation, potentially even nuclear escalation. I think that eventually settled the situation became more readable for everyone involved.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why was there the potential for nuclear escalation?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Because we were in a new conflict that was moving extremely fast. We were in uncharted territory in terms of Western support for Ukraine, in terms of what weapons should or should not be used. What would be the reaction on the other side? It was hard to predict. And everyone was kind of feeling their way into the situation. I think those are situations that are fast moving and also where there's limited information, where things can escalate quickly, accidentally, even though neither party wants it, that is very hard to predict. These are very nonlinear events when they happen. And so that's why it's hard to predict whether a conflict is going to happen under a particular administration or not.

[Harry Stebbings]

What are you worried about that we haven't discussed or is not discussed enough.

[Thorsten Ryle]

We are not sufficiently alerted to the danger of conflict. We've lived in conflict for forever, basically, and then had a period of time where there wasn't one. And I think we. I'm worried that we don't take it seriously because we don't want to think about it. And by the way, I don't want to think about it either. It's not nice to think about conflict, but we're not taking it seriously.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's a buggy. You founded a defense company then, isn't it? I mean, no offense, I don't want to think about conflict. Well, you know, that one's on YouTube.

[Unknown]

Stay in enterprise SaaS.

[Harry Stebbings]

We're doing AI sales tools here. So, you know, final one, I just want to ask, which I always find really interesting. I hope it's okay for me to ask with natural motion. You sold. You make a little bit of money yourself. I Think mindset to finance is fascinating. How do you think about your relationship to money? Does money make you a better founder? Does money make you happy?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think money can give you security. To me that's by far the most important thing. So not having to worry about money makes a big difference in terms of how I think you lead your life in general, but also what risks you take with, let's say, your next company. In order to build a successful company you have to take risks. You know, being safe on the manual side makes it easier. I don't. It's not the only thing that you require, but it does contribute to it.

[Harry Stebbings]

What little things make you most happy. I think about this a lot and it's like an espresso in the pot.

[Thorsten Ryle]

Yeah, I was just going to self made espresso. We just bought a new espresso machine. A long walk every day makes me happy. Can't put a price on that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Listen, I'd love to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Sounds great.

[Harry Stebbings]

So what do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Most people believe that the environment, in terms of taxation, regulation, et cetera, has a big impact on whether you can build successful startups in the country. I don't think it does. It's minor compared to attracting the right founders. So I think the discussions that people have around how can we make a particular country a better place for entrepreneurs who are already there, I just don't think it makes a difference.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the single hardest element of being CEO of Helsing?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It's the fact that the company needs to shed its skin every 12 to 18 months because it's progressing at such a pace that you just have to think about the org structure again repeatedly. You have to think about whether your processes are the right ones, whether you're talking to the right people.

[Harry Stebbings]

What did you not see in org structure change that you wish you had seen?

[Thorsten Ryle]

The biggest unlock for us was to have these quarterly found off sites where we basically reflect and think about what's working and what isn't working and how do we change it? Never did that previously. And stuff just gets warmer and warmer until it's too hot.

[Harry Stebbings]

The heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What's the biggest unmade decision?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I actually, I'm not sure I agree with even with the statement. I think it's perfectly. There's this trope that, you know, any decision is better than no decision and I've never believed that. I think there's sometimes you have to make a lot of decisions as a founder all the time.

[Harry Stebbings]

Well, I think no decision is a decision.

[Thorsten Ryle]

So this is the thing. If you make conscious decision not to decide on something because you don't have the information right now that you require to make it, I think it's totally fine. And I think people should make much more use of that rather than randomly going, I'm going to go for this one. It's just one of the many things that LinkedIn screwed up. There are so many pieces of wisdom on LinkedIn that are wrong.

[Harry Stebbings]

You just go through LinkedIn every day going bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

[Thorsten Ryle]

It's just like all this work, work smart, not hard stuff, being a servant leader.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why is work smart, not hard bullshit?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Because you need to do both. Clearly you're always out competed by someone who works smart and hard. If you're a work smart, not hard.

[Harry Stebbings]

Person, why is servant leadership bullshit?

[Thorsten Ryle]

You need to lead a company and you should not be afraid to say that if you're the founder of a company. We made the decision for Helsing as well that we are a founder led company and we are all here to basically serve the company, to make the company successful. That's what we do. And the founders provide the vision and the direction and if you like it, great. If you don't like it, you have to work there.

[Harry Stebbings]

What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I used to think that you needed to make sure that there was always a degree of process when teams work together on something, including something new. I have now learned that it's possible with exceptional people. Just let them get on with the job without any standups, any predictions on deadlines, nothing. You just let them get on with the job in a fast changing environment that we had to deal with. For example, over the last few months. It is probably the most efficient way of actually making progress rather than being structured about it. And then eventually you have to move to structure. Obviously, but I probably wouldn't have thought.

[Harry Stebbings]

That two years ago see of any other company for a day. Which company would you choose?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Probably ByteDance and I would shut down TikTok immediately. It's crack cocaine for basically our societies. It is.

[Harry Stebbings]

Respectfully disagree. Social media is crack cocaine, but it's also not if you go to my social media, it's protein recipes, it's gym workouts, it's inspirational content that's made me a fitter, healthier human who doesn't drink and Has a great relationship with his mom. I proactively choose the content to be good for me, just like food is poisonous or very good for you, but.

[Thorsten Ryle]

If it is very compelling, which yours is, it becomes something that people will consume too much. I think same with food. Same with food. I think food can be dangerous too, But I think TikTok is a lot more dangerous than hamburgers. Large parts of society are wasting so much of their time on something that has been highly tuned. I mean, I'm saying this as someone who used to make games and we know what dopamine loops look like. TikTok Loop is the best and you cannot get out of it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why is it the best?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Because it has just the right combination of timing, the flick, the content that immediately comes up. It's perfectly tuned. And obviously they have all the metrics to know what content to show you. It is super addictive. It's incredibly dangerous. It also obviously becomes a potential tool for manipulation, political manipulation, whether that's happening or not. But it is extremely powerful if you wanted to use it. And then thirdly, it has the same problem as all social media. The content that works the best is the content that's the most extreme. And so we have a problem of basically radicalizing political views where just almost by definition, radical content will just work better.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you believe Twitter is better under Elon Musk?

[Thorsten Ryle]

It's very different, I think.

[Harry Stebbings]

How would you say it's different?

[Thorsten Ryle]

They're different people on there now.

[Unknown]

But before we leave you today, what do Henry Ford and AI have in common? Neither could change the world without automation. In the future, there will be two types of businesses. Those that have automated and those that wish they had. Uipath, the undisputed leader in automation, is taking us into the era of agentic automation. UiPath. New AI agents don't just follow rules, they think they make decisions. They work alongside the world's most powerful software robots, already trusted by over 10,000 businesses. If agentic automation sounds new, just think of UiPath as more growth, not more overhead platform or happier customers, happier employees platform. Whatever you want AI to do for your business, agentic automation with UiPath will make it happen. Try UiPath's new AI agents for free at uipath.com the future of automation is both agentic and robotic, so don't get left behind. And speaking of transforming your business with cutting edge technology, let's dive into another game changer, atio. ATIO is the next generation of CRM. Setting up ATIO takes less than a minute and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all of your relationships in one place, all enriched with very valuable data. ATO also lets you build zapier style automations, gives you powerful reports and works perfectly for any go to market motion from PLG to sales led. And Atio is designed for the next era of companies like yours. And companies like yours shouldn't have to deal with inflexible one size fits all CRMs. So join in industry leaders like 11 Labs, replicate modal and more to scale your startup beyond the next level. Head over to attio.com 20VC and you'll get 15 off. That's 15 off your first [e-mail] 20VC and if Atio helps you stay ahead by streamlining your relationships and operations Today I want to talk about a venture fund making waves with its unusual model. I'm talking about the Fundrise Innovation Fund, which is democratizing venture capital as a public venture fund. For example, most of the AI revolution is being built and funded in the private markets. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic Databricks. These are incredible multibillion dollar companies, but they're inaccessible to 99% of investors until they go public. Well, those days are finally over. Visit fundrise.com 20VC to check out the Fundrise Innovation Fund's impressive 150 million dollar portfolio for yourself. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovation Fund's [e-mail] innovation this is a paid sponsorship.

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think other people have left. Maybe you get a broader spectrum of views. It's hard to tell. I think the jury is out on that. But it does feel different.

[Harry Stebbings]

Would you invest in Twitter at 44 billion?

[Thorsten Ryle]

If you care about the platform that much, then you know, maybe it's the right thing to do if you have the cash available.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started Helsing?

[Thorsten Ryle]

I think we wish we had known that the Ukraine war was going to happen that quickly.

[Harry Stebbings]

What would you have done differently?

[Thorsten Ryle]

We would have focused all of our efforts on specific systems to deal with the problems in hand, which are now the ones that I talked about earlier. It's electronic warfare resistance, GPS independence, being resilient to comms jamming. And we were working on those systems, but not just we were working on other systems too and we were building a technology foundation that we're now using obviously in the company. And it's good that we have it. But had we known that this conflict was imminent, I think we would have shifted priorities and I think we could have done more right at the beginning. In the end, I think we were able to contribute, but you know, we needed to spool up all of these systems and a lot of knowledge.

[Harry Stebbings]

Thorsten, what question have I not asked or that you're never asked, should I have asked?

[Thorsten Ryle]

Well, one question I've asked myself the other day, which I don't get asked that often, is how does a founder group work together? That's equal how do you make it work? Because as a founder, almost by definition you all have to be ambitious. Everyone is different. Everyone will always have a bit of an ego as well. How do you make it work that actually it works together? And it worked well for us, naturally. But it's quite interesting to think about what are the reasons that it works?

[Harry Stebbings]

What are they?

[Thorsten Ryle]

The way I boil it down is respect is mutual respect. Chemistry and everything else is important as well. But if you truly respect the quality of your co founders and what they contribute and the job that they do and that they're 10 out of 10 people, then everyone finds their role. And the roles are shifting sometimes too, right? Like it's not like to your point of specialization earlier, it's not like one person has this role, the other one person has that role. We have our different emphases, but we tend to chip in and be involved in all kinds of things, including obviously in. In the management of the company and the scaling. We all do that together.

[Harry Stebbings]

Torsten, I am so grateful to you for putting up with my very prying questions across different industries. You've been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining me today.

[Thorsten Ryle]

No, thank you. I enjoyed it.

[Unknown]

I mean, I've wanted to make that show happen for such a long time. Torsten is one of Europe's great entrepreneurs. If you want to watch the full episode, of course you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, what do Henry Ford and AI have in common? Neither could change the world without automation. In the future, there will be two types of businesses. Those that have automated and those that wish they had. Uipath, the undisputed leader in automation, is taking us into the era of agentic automation. UiPath's new AI agents don't just follow rules. They think they make decisions. They work alongside the world's most powerful software robots, already trusted by owners over 10,000 businesses. If agentic automation sounds new, just think of UiPath as more growth, not more overhead platform or happier customers, happier employees platform. Whatever you want AI to do for your business, agentic automation with UiPath will make it happen. Try UiPath's new AI agents for free at uipath.com the future of automation is both agentic and robotic, so don't get left behind. And speaking of transforming your business with cutting edge technology, let's dive into another game changer, Atio. ATIO is the next generation of CRM. Setting up Atio takes less than a minute and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all of your relationships in one place, all enriched with very valuable data. Atio also lets you build zapier style automations, gives you powerful reports course and works perfectly for any go to market motion from PLG to sales led and Atio is designed for the next era of companies like yours. And companies like yours shouldn't have to deal with inflexible one size fits all CRMs. So join industry leaders like 11 Labs, replicate modal and More to scale your startup beyond the next level. Head over to atteo.com20 and you'll get 15% off. That's 15% off your first year at attio.com20 and if Attio helps you stay ahead by streamlining your relationships and operations Today I want to talk about a venture fund making waves with its unusual model. I'm talking about the Fundrise Innovation Fund, which is democratizing venture capital as a public venture fund. For example, most of the AI Revolution solution is being built and funded in the private markets. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic Databricks. These are incredible multi billion dollar companies, but they're inaccessible to 99% of investors until they go public. Well, those days are finally over. Visit fundrise.com 20VC to check out the Fundrise Innovation Fund's impressive $150 million portfolio for yourself. Carefully, carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovation Funds Prospectus at fundrise.com innovation. This is a paid sponsorship. As always, I so appreciate your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible 20 growth on Friday.