# Monday.com's Agentic Pivot and SaaS Valuation Reset

**Podcast:** The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
**Published:** 2026-03-02

## Transcript

Some days I feel like I was ran over by a truck, hit by a plane, and barbecued, and it's just 11 a.m.
What the market is saying to me is the company is worth zero.
Okay, fine.
Now I need to build.
You know, screw it.
I'm going to go all in.
I'm going to go all in.
It's the biggest vivid moment for us in the history of the company.
Nobody will want to buy software.
They're not doing the majority of the work for them.
We're changing everything, basically.
The time of software, how much companies are going to spend on software, is going to be 100x for what it is today.
The SaaSpocalypse is real and no one has felt it more.
Monday.com.
With close to $1.3 billion in revenue, they're valued today at just $3.9 billion in the public markets, one of the hardest hit.
Today, we sit down with Aaron Zinman to answer one question.
In a world of agents, will Monday become a valueless database, or does it have a future in an agent economy?
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Aran, it is so good to have you on the show, dude.
I have been wanting to do this one for a while, so thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Harry.
It's great to be here again.
By the way, if anyone is listening, you should be watching because Iran looks younger than he did last time.
It's extraordinary the volume that your hair has today, dude.
But I wanted to start.
You're like, this is not how I expected the show to go.
Clearly, we are lacking incredible discipline in our research.
I wanted to start on communication, actually, because we see stock price respectfully in the dumps, but actual kind of fundamentals.
maybe a different.
So what is the stock market not seeing that you think they should be seeing?
Yeah, so first of all, I want to acknowledge it's kind of a crazy period.
I think for all of us, especially us funders going through this massive change in the market.
So it's definitely not easy.
It feels like a roller coaster almost every day.
Some days are extremely difficult, but it's definitely quite a journey.
I think fundamentally we need to distinguish between What happens in businesses, which is one thing, and the sentiment change that happened, I would say, in the last year and a half, but more precisely in the last six months, which, from my perspective, felt very aggressive, very powerful.
On one hand, if you look at the earning calls and how business operate, everything is kind of normal.
Some companies have even exceeded expectations, and businesses are working great.
But at the same time...
The sentiment has shifted drastically, like I've never seen before, at least from my perspective.
And the negativity that now it's being attached to software companies.
And it seems like every day there's a new doomsday scenario, a new tweet.
So the sentiment definitely changed.
By the way, there's a lot of truth to that and a lot of things I do understand from the investor perspective.
So I'm not dismissing it.
But definitely we need to distinguish between the operation of businesses and the sentiment change that happened in the market.
i think a realization that the public markets and a lot of people are having is wow if we see agentic evolution in the way that we think it will happen and proliferate then there are core systems potentially like a monday like a sales force which bluntly are never used again and just turn into databases if anything which agents crawl on top of why does monday not become a layer that gets extracted away yeah so first of all i think there's like uh five Doomsday scenarios I'm familiar with.
So that's one of them.
I'll just take you back a little bit in time.
But first of all, it was everything about people will Vibe code their own apps.
That was one of them.
Another option for Doomsday scenario was that some players like Entropic or OpenAI or Gemini will capture all the value from enterprise software.
I think that's another scenario people are talking about.
And the third one is maybe what you refer to as a platform becoming essentially system of records and then other companies capturing the entire value that those companies offer so i don't mind going through each one of them if you want i can address each one of them I love the way I suggested one of them and you're like, well, actually, here's three more.
Well, I can come up with additional three ones if you want.
No, dude, I would love to.
Let's start on the one that's actually, you know, you mentioned at the beginning, vibe coding.
It was a journalist, actually.
I can't remember what American channel it was, CNN, CNBC, or one of the acronyms that, you know, American has, where she vibe coded her own Monday in a couple of hours or whatever.
Why will people not vibe code their own Monday?
So first of all, from my personal perspective, I was after a long day of work.
I was about to go to sleep.
Suddenly, I got a lot of messages on my phone saying that we were broadcasted live on CNBC.
And, you know, from all the software in the world, that journalist picked Monday to show that you can VibeCoded software.
Obviously, she could pick any software on the planet.
But initially, I said, you know, it's a compliment.
Monday is a beautiful software.
So I felt it was a compliment.
She's done it to Monday.
She could have done it for Salesforce or ServiceNow, or she could even create a search engine or a social network at the same time.
So again, it's a matter of perspective, I guess.
Going back to the Vibe coding theory in general, look, first of all, I have to say Vibe coding is amazing.
I've been coding all my life since I was a kid, and seeing this amazing technology become real is unbelievable.
But I think there's a big difference between Vibe coding a user interface and building an actual software.
that works across the organization with all the depth and functionality that built into that.
There's a big difference.
I've been coding all my life and I know how relatively easy it is to create an interface and how hard it is to build the software.
So I think there's a big difference and I think some people might get confused by that.
I completely understand that on the enterprise end, but on the consumer and SMB end, for that journalist, for an investor in a fund, does it not just cannibalize your consumer and SMB business?
Yeah, look, I've said each one of those theories, I think it has some truth to that, but I think it's marginal.
I think it's a very small impact, if any.
Going back to the topic itself, I think people underestimate how hard it is to maintain software over time.
I think it's very easy to create the first.
increment of a software, but to change it, adopt it over time, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of dedication to do that.
And at the end of the day, from my perspective, businesses have a core business operation they need to focus on.
If you think about a software today, it's a very small expense for most companies.
Having a dedicated person or a team vibe coding some apps is a huge cost.
So I think at the end of the day, vibe coding is amazing technology, but I don't think it's going to disrupt.
software companies i'll give you another point of data which i think is relevant you can see amazing vcs like yourself and other people in the industry and amazing founders building companies if you could vibe code you know any company in any startup no company will have value not in history and not today and still people invest billions into new companies new startups entrepreneurs build new startups you know i've read amazing news about ramp raising at 30 billion uh harvey legora companies you talked about you know you can argue you can vibe code them as well but still the smartest people but you couldn't actually and so when you actually look at like a lagora or harvey they are trained on a huge amount of legal data which they have gained in the last two years from doing what they do and so you couldn't vibe code with the same quality output that you could if you would have vibe code monday as a consumer Actually, I don't think so, because at the end of the day, those companies, it's true that over time they accumulate data and information, but I can argue you can probably get the vast majority of the value even without that specific training.
So I think at the end of the day, you could argue you can Vibe code any company.
What I'm trying to say basically is that as much as I think the technology is awesome, we have our own Vibe coding capability within the product.
From all the theories of how software is going to be disrupted, this is my least favorite one.
I don't think it's going to happen.
And I think, you know, most investors that I speak with and people within the industry don't think that's what's actually behind what's impacting stocks and software companies today.
Again, it can marginally have some impact, but I don't think that's the majority of what we've seen in the market.
I completely agree with you on enterprise.
The idea that enterprises will is wonderful.
Sadly, enterprises don't work like that.
Otherwise, I would be much richer if their buying decisions were so much quicker.
The second one you mentioned was that we're going to see OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, kind of the model companies move into the application layer.
We've seen Anthropic do co-work.
We've seen Anthropic do legal.
Fuck Dario.
He just killed my crowd strike over the weekend.
Thanks, Dario.
Cheers.
Why are they not going to?
move into the application layer so much more aggressively?
Yeah.
So again, I think there's obviously some truth to that and they might capture some of the value, but people overestimate how much they're going to capture.
I want to take you back in history.
I'm old enough to remember when Amazon built AWS and everybody back then said that Amazon is going to capture all enterprise software value because before that, The hardest part about building a company was actually getting the servers up and running, the website working, storage, having like 24-7 availability.
That was the hard part.
That was the heavy lifting.
I remember how people got excited when you got a website online.
And when AWS came out and it was so easy now to build a website, everybody said Amazon is going to capture all the enterprise value because it's just so close to the value they offer.
What really happened is the exact opposite.
we saw a boom of companies building on top of Amazon and software was growing exponentially.
Because at the end of the day, I'm not saying Entropic or OpenAI are not capable of building enterprise software.
I'm saying the opportunity they have as being the infrastructure of the LLMs of the future is so massive.
And going after enterprise offering is a whole different business to build.
Because at the end of the day, when you sell to companies, it's a different sales process.
It's a different mechanism.
Nobody is going to buy software for the entire organization based on purely PLG play.
The way they're going to adopt, they want to be handheld, especially if you want to use the software across the organization.
So I'm not saying people will not use Entropic and OpenAI.
For sure they will.
But I don't think they're going to capture all the enterprise value because they have a much bigger opportunity ahead of them.
And it's not their focus.
And no company on earth, where they are or without, can do everything.
I don't believe in one player being the...
one software to run everything in the organization or at all.
So I don't see this plays out.
I think that's probably the weakest one.
I totally agree with you.
When you look at Anthropic moving into security, it's a very weak argument to suggest that replaces CrowdStrike or Palo Alto networks.
I completely align with you on that, actually.
The third one is a tough one, I think, which is how you embrace an agentic future and does it make you a database and not an interaction platform as well.
How do you take that one?
So it's a tough one because it's true.
That's why it's tough.
I believe with that with all my heart.
Basically, the way I look at it is that if you think about it very broadly, software, as we know, it hasn't changed for 25 years, even before the web.
I was building software for DOS, you know, without interface.
Same thing.
You would build a database.
You will create dashboards and analytics on top of it.
You might have some automations and workflows, but essentially the value.
Same from day one.
And it's true that interfaces changed.
People initially built for desktop application on Windows.
It moved to the cloud.
So there was a major benefit because it became real time.
Everybody was seeing the same thing at the same time.
Mobile came into our life.
But if you judge by value, basically the same for 25 years.
And if you think about it, it doesn't matter if you build a CRM software, IT software, work management software, 90% of the work.
was done outside of the tool.
So, you know, if you're a salesperson, you would make the call outside of the CRM, you build the deck outside the CRM, you will prepare for the call outside the CRM.
Eventually, yes, you will track the data into a CRM and your VP of sales will be able to see what's going on.
Same goes for IT, same goes for Monday.
You would track your workflows and projects and you will do everything within Monday, but the work itself was done outside of the tool.
So if you think about it, software was...
extremely beneficial.
I cannot imagine the world before software because we take so many things for granted, like everything is centralized, real time, one place, everything is tracked.
So we might take it for granted, but it was a major step.
Going back to your question, AI changed everything because now with AI, I think we flipped the equation.
I think AI can potentially do 70, 80% of the work and not 10, 20% like it used to be.
before ai was brought into our lives and i think that changes everything in what companies need to do for their customers what customers expect from software it will only grow over time nobody will want to buy software they're not doing the majority of the work for them because otherwise you're just buying legacy software if it's true and and then it does become a database where is their value in that well i think i think this is um in my opinion where investors in the public market get it wrong you know if you judge but by what software is doing today you're right you know if we don't change eventually we'll become a database and nobody will buy monday to track their work because you will buy software from other vendors that fulfill that promise but that's not the way it's going to be played out we're changing everything basically you know going back to what i've said that i think some of the investors or the public market You know, I totally understand the way it reacted because I think what the public market is saying, essentially, we understand that the value is changing and software will be different going forward, but we don't know who will be able to change.
And I get it because it's hard.
Change is extremely hard, especially for an existing company.
And the public market is saying we don't know which company will be able to change.
There's so many parameters to that.
And we're out until we get that confidence.
But if I take a step back, I think that You know, software going forward, the TAM of software, how much companies are going to spend on software is going to be 100x for what it is today.
Software going forward will be much more valuable going forward.
Software TAM is going to grow exponentially.
And if you combine this with the fact that companies are going to change and going to capture this value, I think the opportunity in the software market today is like we've never seen before in our lives.
We see enterprise spend on technology at 8% to 12%.
It's a varying range on a number of different verticals and kind of variables.
What do you think that will be in 2030?
Look, I can give you an example from Monday.
You know, I've checked it myself.
So I think a company like Monday, let's say we have like $1 billion in expenses.
A company like Monday will probably spend 60%, 70% of the budget on headcount and then 7%, 8% on software.
But if we can flip the equation.
and scale businesses not on headcount going forward you know every ceo will be gladly increasing the expense on software because it's going to be marginal compared to the headcount growth that you plan for your business going forward and i think this will play out more and more into the future as ai become more dominant companies will spend much more software and much less on headcount going forward because they'll just become more efficient and they'll gladly spend that Can I ask you, though, your Analyst Day presentation showed 20% year-on-year headcount growth in 26.
Yeah.
Is that not completely paradoxical to what you just said about more spend on technology, agentic usage and organization efficiency, when we're increasing headcount by 20%?
Yeah.
No, I agree.
And I think we need to differentiate between the transition and where we're going.
So for us, actually, we brought it down a little bit.
In the last article, we said it's going to be mid-teens.
And I think there's also potential, you know, we might even take it lower.
I don't know.
We'll see.
But I don't want to, you know, press the brakes violently.
I think we need to do this responsibly because there's a transition period.
But if you look at the horizon, you know.
Can I push you?
Why not?
I mean it in a nice way, dude.
The stock's in the dumps.
I just had Seb from Klarna on.
We said we'd be honest.
You're Israeli.
I'm British and old.
I mean, it's fine.
I just had Seb on from Klarna.
I mean, dude, he's in the dumps too.
Poor chap.
I love Seb.
But he's like, we were at 7,000.
We're now at 3,000.
By 2030, we're going to be at 2,000.
I mean, I think in a couple of years, there's only going to be Seb at Klarna.
Why are we not being more aggressive?
Fuck it.
Now's the time.
Look, first of all, you know, it's discussions we have in the leadership team and maybe we'll make other decisions.
But I don't think that's the point.
I don't think that, you know, if we reduce ad count dramatically, it will change, you know, investor perception about Monday.
I just don't think that's the essence of what we've seen in the market.
Going back to what I've said, I think investors don't know which company is going to change.
And, you know, we just had the earning call two weeks ago.
You know, a lot of fun, you know, obviously I'm being sarcastic.
You know, going back to investors and I've talked with, you know, all of our major investors, everybody's saying the same thing.
Eventually what they want to see is businesses' revenue accelerate.
And I totally get it because I think what people are saying is this, there's huge demand for AI products and people want to buy AI.
And we're going to have a few years now that companies are going to look for AI solutions.
Given that we're going to see infinite demand for AI products, there shouldn't be a demand problem.
So you need to show us or prove to us that you can supply that demand to your customers and new customers.
And because of that, we want to see acceleration of revenue going forward.
And they're right.
I think that's the best way to prove it.
Because if there's infinite demand and you're able to capture that, no reason for your business next to accelerate.
And I think that's our role.
This is exactly what we need to do and prove.
to ourselves and to our investors going forward, that we are able to accelerate the business and we are able to capture that AID man that exists now in the market.
And this is, you know, Roy and I's responsibility going forward.
I get you, but like everyone is cutting headcount.
To still increase it by mid-teens is still a lot.
Is it just like you need the people?
I still don't understand.
Yeah, so the way I look at this is this.
I'm not arguing that companies need to become more efficient.
So I'm not dismissing it.
we will become more efficient.
I'll give you some examples of things we're already doing.
First of all, we had a team of about 100 SDRs, and we're now doing it with agents.
100% is being done with agents.
We move those SDRs to do outbound.
All of our support is being done with AI.
All of our developers is using Cloud Code and Cursor.
I don't think there's any company that's pushing AI efficiency more than we do.
We want to be at the forefront of that.
And we're pushing that with all cylinders and we are becoming more efficient.
I just want to drill down on that because that's super interesting for me, nerdily.
When we look at the sales team utilization of AI, when you say we've replaced SDRs, but then you said they're moving to Alban, how are you using AI specifically in the sales team to make the sales team more efficient?
So basically a customer today that goes into Monday when they leave their details on the website, let's say they leave a contact sales form.
The way we used to do it before AI was that.
We had a team that will call back those customers to qualify them to check the opportunity and basically qualify them and help them schedule a meeting with the account executive on our team.
So this is all done by AI today.
So I'll give you some stats.
It used to take, on average, 24 hours to get back to a customer.
Now it takes three minutes.
We used to miss a lot of the calls.
People would not answer the calls.
Now everything went up.
Conversion rate went up.
People answering the call went up.
Opportunity to book went up.
So all parameters went up.
AI speaks all languages, available 24-7.
So quite an amazing transition.
You said support also impacted.
I'm really intrigued.
Do you use an external provider for customer support or have you built your own?
I interviewed, you know, Ariel Kern from Navan, Jack from Airwallex, and they built their own.
How did you think about that?
So when it comes to the SDR part, we've done it our own.
We built our own solution.
And support, we use some third party, but a lot we do our own as well.
I think you still need to highly customize tools today in order to properly enjoy them.
Things are moving so fast that we just felt building our own is probably the right path to take at this point.
Have you seen a shift in the Ang team building with Cursor to ClawCode?
I've seen some of it.
I think right now it's a sense of flavor, but essentially we're in a transition period and definitely we see increasing output for engineers.
I think part of it is that you find new bottlenecks that are not attached to writing code.
I think there is, on one hand, we see increasing personal productivity.
But again, this new bottlenecks, you find each time you increase one of those productivities.
And we're on a journey to increase more and more the output of our R&D team.
Sabu Klan has said 3,000 today, and they would be 2,000 by 2030.
How many do you have today?
And how many people do you think you'll have in 2030?
So today we have about 3,000 people.
And going to be when?
2030.
2030.
Wow.
My gut feeling is probably we're not going to grow substantially.
But look, I think efficiency is important.
But I think what's even more important is the opportunity that we have.
I think this is where people are missing the point, from my perspective.
Because it's true that we can focus 100% on efficiency.
Reduce headcount, reduce expenses.
But going back to my point, this is the biggest opportunity.
in software ever in our lifetime.
The biggest opportunity that we ever had as a company and as an industry, okay?
This is, it's like the beginning of the most amazing journey for all of us.
So what I want to do is to capture as much as I can out of this opportunity because it's out there and we can do it.
And I think this is where people are getting it wrong.
Like, you know, on one hand, I see people excited about private companies because they build tools in the AI era that kind of capture the what I've referred to as doing the work.
But I'll tell you a secret.
Public companies will do it as well.
We're going to do it.
We are already doing that.
The challenge I have is like bolt-on AI strategies, which I'm not delineating between public or private.
I'm delineating between scale companies and non-scale companies or AI native companies.
And I think the bolt-on AI strategy, sorry, I'm being blunt, could be a you, it could be an air table, it could be a you name.
that ilk era of company versus an AI native built from the ground up with AI is just very different in how you build, integrate, and adopt or approach AI as a kind of fundamental platform, no?
A hundred percent.
And we were the victims of this as well.
I'll share a little bit of our journey.
So going back a year and a half ago, or even two years, you know, when Sam Altman wrote that famous tweet, this is ChatGPT, you can play with it.
I remember that tweet.
You know, I'll give you the kind of the relationship that we had with AI.
So initially, you know, I was excited.
I'm excited about every new technology.
I'm also a person who likes to try things in my own hands.
And we played with it and it was amazing.
But we didn't get it, to be honest.
Like, I think most of us didn't get it.
Maybe some of us got it.
And, you know, initially also the investors, they didn't know what it means.
And we heard from investors, you know, it's cool, there's hype around it, but we don't know.
But something changed about, I would say, a year ago.
I don't know what it was, to be honest.
It's not like one tweet that I've seen or one product.
I feel it was combining many data points, but I think it was a collective understanding that things are changing and things are changing forever.
And this is where you started to see the change in the market sentiment.
And I felt like a light bulb moment at that point.
And before that, we've done a lot of things.
It's not that we didn't do things, but we built some AI features.
sprinkled some ai dust on top of our product so essentially we didn't know what to build so we built a way for people to build formulas using ai we built ai blocks ai columns but essentially it was sugar coating our product because the value haven't changed how do we solve the problem of seeds aaron Like, you know, we've lived and, you know, I'm showing my age, obviously, but we've lived in a seat based SaaS economy where we sell seats.
And that's fantastic when headcount scale as they always have done and people renew.
But in a world where headcount is reducing, where efficiency is increasing and we're moving away from seats, what do we do when our core pricing dynamic goes away?
So going back to the transition, like I said, initially it was the.
AI dust that we sprinkle in the product.
But then we realized, you know, what I've said is that the value we need to give to our customers, not just us, every software is completely different.
So what we've done internally is to rethink what we are doing as a company.
What's the value we try to provide to our customers with Monday work management platform and also with CRM and service and rethink our whole product.
Part of it is pricing.
Like you said, that's going to change dramatically.
Our go-to market is going to change.
Our homepage is going to change.
The ads are going to change.
The most important part, what our product is giving to the value it gives to our customers is now going through the biggest transformation since we launched the company back in 2013.
It's the biggest vivid moment for us in the history of the company.
Can I push you on the pricing?
It's going to change.
What does it change to?
Well, eventually, I think it's going to be more consumption and then entirely consumption going forward.
So I think there's also be a transition, but now it's going to be hybrid and eventually it's going to be 100% consumption.
How do you feel navigating that transition?
First of all, maybe I'll just explain the transition that we're doing just to make it more concrete.
So basically, companies want to adopt AI.
And they're going to adopt vertical tools to do that, like the SDR example I gave you, maybe another example for support, for legal.
There's a lot of vertical solutions people are going to adopt.
But I think this is big room for horizontal plays.
And this is exactly what we're going to do with Monday.
So basically, we want to be a place.
that orchestrate between agents and humans.
Because at the end of the day, you know, maybe in the far future, agents will do 100% of the work.
I don't think it's going to happen, but maybe it will happen to some extent.
But we're going to have a huge transition period where humans and agents need to work together.
And we want to make Monday the default place for people to build agents and to collaborate between agents and people.
So essentially, you build agents on the top of Monday, those agents will output tables, docs.
files.
People will go over it to build their own agents.
And essentially, we want to become the default place to do horizontal agents across the company.
Do you think you're best placed to do that, though?
Everyone wants to do that.
And probably want to do that.
ChatGPT want to do that.
Going back to that one, actually, they do want to do that.
And that's right in their wheelhouse.
But why are we best placed to do it?
So first of all, I don't think that ChatGPT or Gemini on Tropic are going to do it because going back to the second theory that we discussed, Of course, people are buying a Tropic, Claude, they're buying ChatGPT, but it's not a tool where you work with another thousand people and share information.
It's a personal tool that people use.
There's a big difference between selling a tool that can be used personally and building a tool for people to collaborate with agents.
It's a very different product.
But if you look at OpenClaw and what Peter's done and what he's doing joining the team at OpenAI, and then you look at their movement into enterprise and Anthropics focus on enterprise, again, critics would push back and say that's just not true.
Yeah, I'll explain again.
I think, you know, a company today that want to adopt AI, they have no idea what they need to do.
No idea.
It's a new technology.
You know, I think we live in an echo chamber of tech.
But the world out there is very different.
And I think essentially companies will want to buy AI.
They will do whatever they need in order to buy AI capability because it's going to be a competitive market.
And if they won't do it, they won't survive.
But you know, I think that's where ChatGPT's brand wins.
Fundamentally, the brand of ChatGPT is so strong that they are signing enterprise contracts with a velocity we haven't seen before because of that brand.
Anthropica are too.
But again, I go back and as a Monday holder, do we not need to jack the shit out of our enterprise brand?
Because otherwise they are going to eat the momentum on the enterprise side.
So I think we need to differentiate what enterprise contract means.
OK, so the fact that ChetGPT or Gemini or Entropic are selling a contract that a thousand people, let's say within Monday can use Entropic, it's great.
But that's not the product I'm talking about.
It's like comparing Microsoft Office with Monday.
It's not the same thing.
There's tools that people use individually, which is great.
Personal productivity tools, building agents.
But then there's the actual work.
It's like claiming that there's no need for SDR software because you bought Entropic.
It's a different problem to solve.
So I think the problem of solving how people and agents are working together in one workspace is a very different product.
It's a very different problem.
I think companies will want guidance on how to do that.
They're going to need help.
setting up agents, figuring out what they can automate with agents and what they can replace in terms of headcount.
And this is not by buying off-the-shelf product that is a generic product.
You will need a product that can help you collaborate with humans and agents if it's a very different product compared to just buying a license to LLM.
And I think eventually, if you look at Entropic, OpenAI, and Gemini, they have a much bigger opportunity they want to chase.
They want to be the backbone.
of the LLM industry.
They want to capture as much as they can in terms of that market share.
And I get it.
It's a huge opportunity.
Again, going back to my AWS comparison, there are the infrastructure, but there's going to be a lot of products built on top of that.
I think, if anything, we're going to see an excess of software being built on top of the LLMs, not less, exponentially more, because the opportunity is so massive and the TAM is so huge.
And going back to Monday, we're going all in for that.
We're changing the product.
the value proposition, how people use the product, how people onboard, and what people should expect from the product.
If you haven't built an agent on Monday, you're not using the product properly.
And that's a major shift.
The boards, the dashboards are going to be more in the background and the agents more in the forefront.
And it's a huge change.
It's a scary change.
But I believe in that with all my heart, because I think the opportunity is massive.
We're at 0.001% done of where the word is going.
Do you think we overestimate the speed of adoption for enterprise AI usage?
Or do you think actually we're at a tipping point and it will tip much faster than we think?
I think technology is moving fast.
I think organizations are going to take more time.
You know, what is AI adoption?
There's so much nuance to that.
There's so many things.
Look, at the end of the day, I think what people are confusing is, you know, AI can get super smart.
And we've seen it growing exponentially.
But no matter how smart you are, if you don't have contacts, You cannot perform your job.
Even the most intelligent person on earth cannot do their job if they are not aware of the context.
And if you think about any company, even Monday itself, 90% of the context is not documented anywhere.
Nobody knows it.
It's something that kind of floats in the air.
What's the idea?
What's the strategy?
Who's doing what?
What's next month?
What's next year?
How are we going to do it?
Why are we doing what we're doing?
What's the thought process behind it?
So I think we're going to see a transition period before all that.
information and knowledge and intelligence is going to be documented, which might happen in the future, I think we have a huge transition period of people working with agents.
I think you can see some small companies and, you know, I've been following Jason Lamkin and what he's doing on his own team.
You know, I'm a big fan of Jason.
You know the joke I say with Jason is the best venture fund of the last decade.
was Jason Lemkin's unresponded inbox.
Because every great founder sent him an email being like, please invest.
And he just didn't get back to them.
I always joke with Jason that we have like a one-sided relationship where I listen to every word he says and he's my mentor, but he's not aware of it.
I do a show with him every week and he is my mentor and he is aware of it.
He's so into it.
It's insane.
I know.
But look, at the end of the day, you know, a small team like Jason's team and Jason is very forward-leaning.
can replace everything they do with AI.
But for an existing company in business, it's going to be more of a transition over many years.
And we need to remember that most economy, you know, 95% of economy is not software companies.
It's actual businesses.
So going back to my point, we're going to see a transition period of companies adopting AI, AI working with humans.
humans collaborate with agents.
It's a massive opportunity.
And I don't think OpenAI and Tropic or Gemini are going to go for that because it's such a different sales process, enterprise sales, top down, different tool use.
And we're going to go all in for that opportunity because our advantage is that we are the best platform for people working together across the organization.
So we're going to take that part of business and add the agents on top of it and change the value and what people do with the product.
And I believe it's going to be massive going forward.
If we shift a little from enterprise down to kind of, it can still be, but more SMB and consumer.
One thing that Monday has done unbelievably well, and we spoke about it last time, was the customer acquisition machine you've built on SEO, content, YouTube.
It's been phenomenally successful.
How do you think about critics who say that customer acquisition engine is completely changing in a world of GEO or LLM discovery in a changing content world?
How does customer acquisition channels, funnels change?
I think going back to my original opening where I said that there's the sentiment change, but businesses are unaffected.
So we were affected by one thing, which is Google introducing AI mode in the search results.
So Google used to be a significant acquisition channel for us.
And definitely it took a hit in terms of people clicking on sponsored links because people see the AI answers.
When you said how much of it hit, I'm sorry, I'm really naive here, like a 10%, a 30%, a 50% broad strokes?
It was about 10% of our acquisition in terms of new AR.
But again, Google is very transactional.
So people usually when they're searching for something, they're willing to buy at this point because the intent is very high.
So we lost some of the more transactional deals, more SMB oriented.
And we shifted that budget to other channels, but they're kind of longer sales cycles.
So we definitely took a hit because of that.
But apart from that, we have 70 other channels that we acquire customers from.
And we didn't see any impact on other channels.
So it was a significant impact.
But from my perspective, it's isolated to that.
Can I ask a hard one?
If we are the work platform between agents and humans, and we have this grand future and it's the most exciting time ever, why have you not bought any of your own shares back?
Well, we are.
We announced a buyback program of $870 million, and we said we're going to spend it over the next two, three years.
We've already done some buyback in Q4.
If we're going to see opportunities, we're going to buy back our shares.
And definitely there's opportunities right now.
So we are looking into that, and we do have a buyback program.
What about you personally, dude?
We saw ServiceNow CEO spend $3 million, and that was revealed to be less than his car collection, which was a rather annoying title for an article, I have to admit.
I saw it and I felt sorry for him.
I was also really intrigued to see the cars, which they didn't show.
Why not buy it back personally?
Yeah, so first of all, I'm on a 10B5 program, so basically I have to, six months in advance, make a six-month plan ahead.
So I'm not saying I won't when the plans open up.
I might buy more shares personally.
Again, it's something I need to decide with my wife.
You know, it's not a personal decision for me, but definitely it's opportunity.
But I can share another thing is that not myself or my partner Roy or the rest of the leadership team is selling shares.
In my 10B5, I have, you know, a number I'm not willing to go below in terms of selling shares.
And I can say the price now is much, much lower than that number.
So I'm not selling any shares personally.
You know, since the IPO, I still hold.
probably 80 something percent of my share so i sold less than 20 14 years in this journey so i don't think i need to prove more that i have like all my skin is in the game you know i'm 100 in i believe in the future of the company you know as i said it's one of the biggest opportunity that we ever had as a company can i ask you from a like personal perspective or leadership perspective when you have a challenging period like this What do you know now about how to galvanize a team when a stock price is so impacted?
And of course, people look at it every day and look at their net worths.
Look, it's been a roller coaster.
It's been hard, you know, emotionally, everything in the last few months.
I can share that, you know, it's still fresh, but, you know, the last earnings call, the stock went down to $70.
You know, obviously when the stock is going down and I've seen all the earnings calls before Monday and after Monday, I felt like no matter what companies are going to announce, the stock is going to go down 20%.
So I was not optimistic.
I was not sure what's pricing and what's not, but it is what it is.
I get it.
The sentiment is so negative.
How do you feel going in when you know that you're going to get pummeled?
Are you like, fuck it?
You know what?
There's nothing I can do.
Are you like, oh God, I'm dreading this.
Oh no.
look i didn't know what to expect and and overall i'm trying not to make the stock price to manage you know my decision making process but i look at it it's it's you cannot ignore it like it has a psychological impact for sure and definitely it's not easy or fun when you go up and talk with analysts and investors and you know nobody's happy Again, I don't think we're unique because ServiceNow is down 50%.
Salesforce is down 60%.
It's not helpful.
So I understand there's things I can control.
There's things I cannot control.
I cannot control the negative sentiment in the market.
What I can control is what can we do about it?
So I'm trying to focus on the things I can control.
Going back to the earning call on Monday, the stock went down.
Obviously, you know, lost some sleep over it.
I woke up 3 a.m.
thinking about it.
Tuesday, woke up 2 a.m., didn't fall back asleep.
But, you know, when I woke up Wednesday and the stock was 70 and I had a feeling of relief, you know, to be honest, because I said, OK, 70 represent, let's say, 3.7 market cap.
We had like, I don't remember the exact number, but roughly, let's say, 1.5 billion in the bank cash.
No debt.
So the enterprise value is 2 billion.
We have like, again, I don't want to disclose specific numbers.
Let's say over 1.3 billion of ARR.
So it's like 1.5 multiple.
So I felt like, okay, like what the market is saying to me is like, again, air quotes, like the company is worth zero.
Okay, fine.
Now I need to build.
I need to prove.
And suddenly I felt, you know, relieved because I'll do everything needed.
in order to make the company successful.
It can't get any worse.
Yeah, the stock can go down, but I feel this is like the lowest sentiment that software companies ever had.
So yeah, it can get lower, but to be honest, it's pretty low right now.
I love you and we get on well.
Again, the French analyst goes, you know, because I obviously am a Monday holder.
He's like, dude, the thing about Monday, I thought there was a flaw.
I was wrong.
I'm not saying it cannot go down.
Obviously, every day there's a new tweet and all the stock is going down 7%.
I cannot control it.
But what I feel now, you know, screw it.
I'm going to go all in.
I'm going to go all in, both Roy and myself and the management team.
This is the biggest opportunity.
There's only upside to where we're at.
We're going to take the risks.
We're going to go all in and do whatever is necessary to win.
I'm extremely motivated for that.
Do you think private competitors have an advantage on you?
that you don't have because you're public if you look at stripe and ad yen i think stripe have an inherent advantage in being private that ad yen don't have because they're public in what they can do how aggressive they can be how they approach product you name it do you think that's the case here i think the opposite the opposite if you kind of relate to what i've said i feel like i was kicked in the head so many times by now that okay i get it and i feel when you're private You know, you can try and ignore what's going on and even say, you know, everything is OK.
But for me, I get it.
And I don't blame the investors.
I think investors are super sophisticated.
It's an amazing market.
When the investors are saying, I got the message.
I got the message.
And they're right.
They don't know who's going to be successful.
But I think this is where they get it wrong, because basically, I think what I'm trying to say, Harry, throughout our conversation is, are you playing defense?
Or are you playing offense?
And I think every day I go on Twitter and I read what people are saying and everybody is publishing an article.
You know, this company has more robust system of records.
This company has a moat.
This company is enterprise.
Who cares?
Who cares?
What are you arguing?
Who's going to change last?
Who have more time?
I'm saying the opposite.
This is the biggest opportunity.
Everybody has to change.
Everybody has to change.
The faster you change, the better.
And I think some companies will not be able to change because, I don't know, the founders are not there because it's hard, because the DNA is not there, because it's a 100,000 people company, because they're not sure where they're going, because they don't have a culture of execution.
My confidence comes from the culture we built, the fact we always were great at execution, the fact that once we make a decision, we're going to go all in.
We have everything needed.
We have the cash, we have the talent, we have the execution.
We know what we need to build.
That gives me a lot of confidence, the people in the company and our mission.
So, you know, if you're playing defense, good for you.
I feel for us, it's an opportunity to play offense and do whatever we need in order to win.
And this gives me a lot of confidence because I'm building the future.
Can I ask you, you said that you have a billion and a half and it's, you know, 3.7 or whatever it was.
There comes a time when actually...
It's just too low.
It's mispriced.
And at that point, again, I have many public market friends now.
They are going, I want to take it private.
This makes no sense anymore.
It is strategically wrong.
Would you like to take it private?
No, I don't see a reason.
No.
Look, I think at the end of the day, you can be private, you can be public.
The question is, do you need to raise more money?
And we don't.
We generate 27% of free cash flow.
We don't need to raise more money.
We have everything we need going forward.
If anything, we'll become more efficient.
I see the retention rate highest ever, gross retention highest ever.
We're still acquiring a lot of customers.
So I'm very confident about the business.
And I think this is where people don't understand that the businesses are working good.
And things might change, but, you know, nothing is more sticky than a SaaS product.
So I definitely, I'm not worried about, you know, operationally.
And we are changing, you know, as we speak.
So we don't need to raise more money.
No reason to go private.
And we can stay public.
You said about a billion and a half in cash.
What a wonderful luxury that is also that not many have.
What would you like to buy that you haven't bought?
From an M&A perspective, why are we not being more aggressive?
Yeah, so look, we are looking into companies and we also met a few that we were close to acquiring.
But look, at the end of the day, this is not how we're going to win.
If I need to bet the whole company future on an acquisition of a startup, I'm not doing my job as a CEO.
The problem now with private companies is that we have the opposite.
valuations between private and public.
If money is valued at 3.7, every startup in the private market with 5 million of ARR is now being valued at 2 billion.
So yeah, I can buy it with partially cash, but I'll need to use my stock as well.
So I don't have a lot of opportunity buying a few billions worth of private company.
It's not going to play out.
And again, I feel we have everything we need in order to execute.
So I think it's a cycle.
It's a cycle for public companies.
It's also going to be a cycle for private companies.
Now there's a lot of money in the private companies, in private investors.
But, you know, it's a cycle.
At some point, the investor is going to see the same company 20 times a month.
And LPs is not going to pour a lot of money.
And I get it.
I've been in cycles before.
Are you in CEO groups, WhatsApp groups?
Not WhatsApp group, but I have a few CEOs I consult with.
Yeah.
What do they say?
Are you guys all just going, what the fuck together?
Not really.
You know, the problem with other CEOs is people don't expose their emotions too much.
I'll say that.
But I think people feel resilient.
I think we give each other confidence.
I think some CEOs are, I wouldn't say ignoring the problem, but don't understand the magnitude of what needs to change.
And I think some are more kind of advanced in how they think about it and understand the magnitude of what needs to be changed.
Again, my confidence is coming from doing and changing.
That gives me a lot of confidence going forward.
So I don't need anybody to kind of pat my back.
And I got Troy, my partner and the rest of the leadership team.
And we feel very confident on where we're going.
From like a marriage and from a personal perspective, it is fucking hard what you're going through.
I don't think a lot of people like quite realize the emotional and personal toll that it takes.
Getting on a show like this with me, even after everything that you go through is intense.
And I remember Seb from Klarna saying he does shows, interviews.
And he did one that was so hard and they just shit on him, shit on him, shit on him.
And he got in his car and he played Queen under pressure.
And he just like sang full pitch under pressure.
And like he always thinks to that moment.
Like from a personal perspective, what are the things that get you through the really hard times?
So first of all, I want to acknowledge it's hard.
It's hard.
And, you know, I told somebody, someone the other day that some days...
I feel like I was ran over by a truck, hit by a plane, and barbecued, and it's just 11 a.m., you know?
So definitely there's days like that.
But I must say that I feel very good now, and I feel we're doing the right things.
I'll say two things that really help me.
So one is the people in the company.
That's something that's very significant to me because, you know, once we tell them what we're doing and focus on doing an execution, I could see in their highs, like although it's scary and we're changing a lot of things and we're taking big bets, I can tell in their highs that they're excited.
They appreciate we don't ignore the problems, that we don't say everything is okay.
We are changing.
We are adapting for the future.
And people are working incredibly hard.
They're dedicated from the bottom of their hearts.
And that gives me a lot of confidence.
And the second thing, and I don't want to get too emotional, is my family, my wife.
My kids, super significant.
I feel I have like a network or support.
At the end of the day, what I really care about, you asked me about my personal wealth.
I don't care.
I just want the company to be successful.
I feel immense sense of responsibility for the future of the company, for the employees, for the investors, for everybody that's part of that ride.
And I want to do whatever it takes to capture this opportunity.
And I want to play offense.
I think that's the point.
At the end of the day, I think there's so much noise.
Just listening to the noise is the wrong thing to do as a leader and as a CEO.
Noise is Twitter, another article, even public market.
I want to focus on the essence.
For me, the essence is very simple.
It's the biggest opportunity of our lifetime in terms of software.
We need to change and we are changing.
And because of that, I'm confident we're doing the right things.
This is what is in my control.
I will do whatever is necessary.
So this is the essence and this is what we're doing.
gives me a lot of confidence going forward.
There's a kind of content creator, influencer, whatever.
I'm quite into these kind of inspirational speakers.
It's got Alex Formosi.
And he says, you know, whenever I'm going through a hard time, I think, you know, the harder the challenge, the greater the story that comes out of it.
And this is the story that you will one day tell your kids.
Yeah, I'll tell you how I look at it.
I got the front seat in probably one of the most exciting period in human history, the birth of intelligence.
And I can navigate this ship and it's amazing.
It's such a great opportunity.
I think everything is life.
Is it a glass half full or half empty?
I can look at it and say, oh, you know, like I was on a path and everything was great and we built this great company and so on.
But the way I look at this today is maybe this is our biggest opportunity as a company.
Maybe we waited for that moment.
And if we did the right things.
we can re-accelerate the company and even grow much larger than what we could have become as a company.
So I hold into that and that gives me a lot of confidence.
And if you ask me today how I feel, I feel great because as I told you, we hit the bottom or maybe close to the bottom.
And from here, we can only grow and focus on execution.
This is exactly what we do.
You said about kind of, this is a time for offensive.
Before we do a quick fire, if I would ask you like, what's your most batshit crazy offensive move?
that I'm sure is totally unrealistic, but you would like to do.
So like for me, I look at it as a load of companies like you, Duo, and a load of others where I'm like, crazily mispriced assets.
Let's roll up and buy in a really aggressive, I want to raise $100 billion and do this.
It's a batshit crazy offensive idea.
What would you say is yours?
So basically our strategy is twofold.
One, In terms of our horizontal platform, we're going all in, agents and humans working together.
We're shifting the product 100%, the pricing, the go-to-market, the product.
We have two vertical offerings, the CRM and service.
For that, we're building those products from scratch, being 100% agentic.
So basically going full in on that opportunity.
The way I look at it today, service dominated by ServiceNow, CRM dominated by Salesforce is open market today.
I believe in their ability to change, but they need to prove it.
I want to go all in.
I think we made this choice to go for CRM and service back in the days where we have crazy competition.
Now I feel the play field is leveled and there's opportunity.
We have one big horizontal bet, two vertical bets with service and CRM, and we're going all in on all three.
I'm very confident about that.
So I think it's a big bet and we'll do whatever is necessary to capture that opportunity.
Who's a harder competitor, HubSpot or Salesforce?
Again, the question is, who's going to be able to change?
That's the most important factor for me, because at the end of the day, it's not what they built, but how can they change?
Going back to my point about public market, I think this is where companies are mispriced.
Everybody's priced now on the downside.
Again, it's because of lack of information, not because the market is not sophisticated enough, because you don't know.
You don't know who's going to be able to change, but I'm confident what will change.
There's a lot of questions.
How?
And there's a lot of risks to it, but we're going to change.
And the question is, who else is going to change?
And who else is going to change successfully and responsibly?
Who do you think will change more effectively, HubSpot or Salesforce?
Being a bigger company is harder because it's hard to move humans.
That's the hardest part.
I think people think enterprise is a benefit.
Maybe SMBs is better because SMBs are more open to adopting new technologies.
When you play defense, some of those things might look as disadvantages.
Sell into SMBs.
or being a small company.
If you play offense, those disadvantages might become advantage because those customers might be sooner to adopt technology and will buy those products before enterprise will buy.
So I don't know, to be honest, and it's for them to prove.
You know, I will never underestimate each one of those companies because they've built incredible things.
I think in general, I think investors underestimate incumbents' ability to change.
their willingness to change, their motivation to change.
You know, private companies are great, but, you know, those companies reach where they're reached because of multiple things and they're very successful companies.
And I think the cycle is going to shift once, you know, like fungus after the rain, you're going to see another public company change and accelerate, another one accelerate, and then investors are going to say, hmm, it happens.
So let's rethink who else is going to change over time and valuations will go up.
What do you people say that the babies are being thrown out with the bathwater?
Very strange analogy, but it's kind of what they say for the public market today.
Other than Monday, what is the biggest baby being thrown out with the bathwater?
I don't know.
I think most of them.
It's not like, again, I'm not an investor, so I don't have my own list.
I think it's been a bloodbath, so it's really hard to take.
It totally has been.
Listen, I want to do a quick fire round, dude.
So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts.
What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
Did you think that you maybe don't or what didn't you that you now do?
What's been the biggest mindset change?
Well, obviously AI.
Like, you know, a year ago, I'll be honest, I didn't understand.
I don't think I was the only one, but I didn't understand the magnitude of the change.
But today I understand that software is fundamentally changed forever.
So that's something I didn't understand, but now I totally get it.
It's obvious to me that the future is going to be very different for software.
What criticism about you stings because it's partly true?
about myself yeah i think one thing that i think we can do better is to tell a story in a better way i think roy myself would not even though we do great marketing for our product i don't think we tell the story good enough for the company and and definitely that's something that i feel we can improve because i often feel like uh you know if people knew what i knew they will be much more confident in monday and where we're going and i feel it's my responsibility to do a better job telling our story and our strategy.
OpenAI at 500 or Anthropic at 380, which one would you rather be an investor in?
First of all, I think we all need a little bit of humility.
What I've heard in the last years is this.
Microsoft is the most amazing companies.
Microsoft is finished.
Google is finished.
Google is the best company on earth.
OpenAI is the most amazing company.
OpenAI is finished by Anthropic.
And this is like three months cycles.
So I feel it's like 1998, and we say, you know, Yahoo and Netscape are going to suck all the value from the internet revolution, and we know nothing.
So I feel we're in the beginning of an exponent.
It's really hard to say who's going to win, who's going to lose.
It's a horse race.
I think we're probably missing 90% of the picture of how it's going to play out.
So I'm not an investor.
I'm making bets on Monday, not on other companies.
Definitely, I feel...
and tropic have a little bit more momentum right now they can change and it will change i'm sure the trouble is when you don't know we don't know and no one knows yeah and what the trouble then is it's a flight to safety and a flight to cash and that's the problem i think we're going to see now which is like no one knows and so no one wants to play the game i've had enough of casino roulette in the public market like i'm selling and i'm just going to cash and that is what you're seeing everyone do a movement to cash yeah Warren did it brilliantly with Berkshire six months ago.
That's a problem for us, though, because we need that cash in Monday.
Yeah, but look, it's a cycle.
What happens in the cycle is that over time, you see consistency and you gain confidence.
And then you see companies accelerate, you gain confidence.
Nothing I will say will change perception.
Time and execution will change perception.
And this is our responsibility as CEOs.
And this is what I'm planning to do.
Over time, it will change.
It's a cycle.
I've been through so many cycles so far.
Is this the hottest one or is this like every other one?
Look, everybody enjoyed the 2021 cycle with COVID, right?
But it was also a cycle.
I remember when our stock went up to 400 after we IPO'd.
One of our investors told me something, Ken Fox from Thrive.
He told me something which was brilliant.
He told me, isn't it great that the stock is going up without the revenue going up?
And I said, what?
What are you talking about?
And he said, yeah.
Everything you gained is through sentiment change, nothing you've done.
And it really resonated with me.
I said, okay, I need to distinguish between what we do as a company and our growth and the market sentiment.
And if you don't praise yourself when the stock is high, you won't be impacted because when the stock is down.
If you don't attach your personal success and personal ability to lead a company with the sentiment.
And you need to focus on the business performance.
That was his point.
And it really resonated.
And I didn't celebrate when it went up to 400 because I knew it was temporary at the end of the day.
It's a cycle.
So everybody enjoys when the cycle is up.
But also now when the cycle is down, I need to focus on the business metrics, the revenue, the retention, the things we are doing.
That's the important part.
Not be carried away by the cycle itself.
Totally agree with you.
I'm 100%.
Very difficult to do.
And that's where I like the experienced CEO that you are in terms of having seen many before.
I think it's actually where younger CEOs struggle, where it's the first cycle and the depths are so low and the highs are so high when it's the first time you've done it.
But ultimate one, which other CEO do you most respect and admire?
When you look across the board at your counterparts, which one do you like them?
Yeah, so of course, and again, it's a personal friendship, but I really love Avishai from Wix and Near.
You know, we're close friends.
So obviously, I ask them a lot of questions.
But we also have other CEOs that I talk with.
And again, it's hard for me to pick like a name because I don't know them personally.
So, you know, when you pick somebody, you take their entire personality with it.
So it's really hard for me to pick.
But look, the amount of information that I acquire through podcasts.
blog posts videos i probably acquire like five six hour content a day you know i walk to work i walk back i do the dishes i have uh you know my kids are saying what do you have the uh air pods in your ear all the time because um i just feel we need to learn like crazy i try to get as much information as i can and i think i learned a lot from different people perspective also I love the show you guys are doing, the four of you, the three of you, sorry.
So I listened to that.
You know, I think now you need to be learning as much as you can.
So that's the mode I operate in.
I'm adding in a penultimate one.
What's your biggest marriage advice when you go through a really tough time as well?
It's very difficult for you.
It puts a strain on that.
What's the biggest marriage advice?
Advise me.
Well, first of all, I've been with my wife for...
23 years now.
So we basically grew up together.
But I'll tell you one thing.
So my wife has been nothing but amazing throughout this journey.
And specifically, I would say the last six, eight months.
It's not like she doesn't care.
She knows what I'm going through.
But the amount of support I get is unbelievable.
So one advice I would say, and this is actually from my therapist.
So she gave it to me because I told her what I told you now about my wife.
So she told me, say it to her.
When you meet her this evening, say to her what you said to me.
I said, right.
I mean, I have to because I feel it, but I haven't said it to her.
So, you know, communication, sharing how you feel, the good, the bad, talking about it.
It's the best advice I can give with my wife and also with partners at work.
So I feel the more you open, the more vulnerable you are, the more you share, the more intimacy you create and the better relationship you create with other people.
It's very un-English of you.
We tend to not share much.
I know, I know.
Yeah, we're very uncomfortable.
We normally call each other kind of Mr.
And then surname.
It's like Mr.
And Mrs.
Stebbings.
Yeah.
Final one, dude.
What are you most excited for in the next 10 years?
Like my mother's got MS.
I'm super freaking excited for advancements in MS treatment because of AI and everything that we're seeing with longevity.
What are you most excited for?
This is probably the biggest change since the invention of computers.
I'm lucky to be part of that.
And I'm excited to see how this plays out.
I think if you ignore the negativity that's attached to that, it's pretty exciting.
I mean, it's quite a period to be alive.
It's pretty amazing.
When you think about civilization and how I actually thought...
1800 years, it really remained relatively flat, feudal systems, farming-based economies.
When you look at the last 200 years, I know it's a large amount of years now, but proportionally, it's not at all, actually.
God, I'm so grateful we're living in this time.
How freaking epic is this?
Amazing.
Humans didn't shower in hot water like 80 years ago.
And now, if you don't have hot water in your bath, when you...
before you go to sleep, it's like it's ruining your day.
So it's like we get used to good things so easily.
I think, you know, specifically with AI, we're going to get used to getting the best treatment, best doctors.
Everything is going to be instant.
Each one of us is going to have the most amazing personal assistant.
Our life is going to be amazing.
And of course, we're going to complain.
Of course, we're going to look at the things that don't work.
But I think going forward, probably the value and the quality of life is significantly going to go up going forward.
Dude, as I said, I so appreciate you taking the time.
I so appreciate you putting up with the harder questions.
You've been fantastic.
So thank you so much, man.
Thank you, Harry.
Thanks for having me.
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