Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing

1. 0:00 – 7:08

   Drones, Tanks & the Future of Warfare

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [instrumental music] Let's start with what we were just talking about before we started recording. Uh, your-- what your opinion is of the future of tanks and battleships.

   2. TRTorsten Reil0:10

      I think there's a, um, big change happening, and you can already see it in Ukraine, obviously, where, um, you know, tanks are barely being used anymore. The same is true for artillery systems. If you, um, get yourself into a tank, your survival rate is, is, is very short. I mean, apparently the, um, uh, the, the time that a Russian soldier survives now at the front is about twenty to thirty minutes. You can argue about whether that's, you know, correct, but it's probably roughly right in terms of ballpark, and it probably gets even worse if you're in a tank. If you put yourself in a tank, you are one of the high-priority targets for, uh, anyone on the other side. You know, those targets can be found pretty easily now with, with drones. They can be destroyed very quickly with small drones or with large drones if they're a little bit further away. And so I think the era of tanks is probably over. And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide forty to fifty kilometers away from the front, uh, to, to shoot, you can still find them with drones, and you can attack them with drones, and again, they're high-priority targets. So I think we're seeing a big change right now in, uh, in, in warfare, and those lessons have been pretty apparent, I think, in Ukraine over the past, I would say eighteen months or so, and I think people are starting to understand them now.

   3. DSDavid Senra1:14

      What's killing the Russian sol-soldiers so quickly? Is it all drones?

   4. TRTorsten Reil1:17

      It's, it's drones. Yeah. It's, it's the ability, first of all, to see them with ISR drones and then secondly to strike them with either FPV drones or larger strike drones.

   5. DSDavid Senra1:26

      Wait, what's the difference between those two drones?

   6. TRTorsten Reil1:28

      So FPVs are basically, um, smaller drones, quadcopters that, um, most of the time are controlled manually like a remote-controlled plane. And strike drones often travel over longer distances, um, and like the HX-2, which is our drone, um, quite often they're AI-controlled.

   7. DSDavid Senra1:44

      You had a, a tweet that was interesting where-- and maybe this can tie into the, the dinner that we had a few years ago where we had this fierce argument, and I left thinking that we hated each other, [laughs] and then now we've become friends. But you said something like a hundred thousand of your drones could prevent a land war in Europe. What does that mean, and why? Why do you believe that?

   8. TRTorsten Reil2:04

      Yeah. I said this I think maybe a year ago or so, and I, I got into a bit of trouble for this because apparently it was deemed to be provocative, but, um, I, I still think that's the case. I think the deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border, I think is, is pretty, uh, is pretty strong. And the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with three thousand tanks, one hundred thousand strike drones that are able to navigate without GPS, that are able to find their targets, obviously specifically focusing on tanks, will destroy those tanks, I think, in a matter of hours. Uh, it's very hard to defend against.

   9. DSDavid Senra2:37

      If you were on the other side, you wanted to invade a country that had a hundred thousand of your drones, how do you do that?

   10. TRTorsten Reil2:44

       I think it's very difficult.

   11. DSDavid Senra2:45

       Okay.

   12. TRTorsten Reil2:45

       So, so, so using tanks would be extremely difficult be-because again, they'd be targets immediately. You'd probably want to not use those kinds of vehicles. You'd probably want to use autonomous systems, smaller autonomous systems, and this is basically where everything is going. So you have autonomy now, um, you know, with drones. You have autonomy coming up, um, now with, with autonomous fighter jets, and you also have it coming up now with, um, with land systems, in particular robots.

   13. DSDavid Senra3:10

       So what do you mean by autonomous drones, though? So they-- it's all run by AI?

   14. TRTorsten Reil3:14

       It will be. Yeah. At the moment, you still have a, a lot-- especially in Ukraine, a lot of drones are still remote-controlled, so you have, um, you know, thousands of very skilled drone operators. That won't scale, though, and particularly won't scale to the West and won't scale to NATO. Uh, if you, if you really want scaled drone usage, they have to fly autonomously. You want to have a human, uh, surveying them, looking at what they're doing and being on or in the loop, but the drones themselves need to be AI-controlled and autonomous. It's the only way to get to true mass, and it's the only way also to make it work pragmatically because we, we won't be able to train thousands and thousands of drone operators. We need AI to control them.

   15. DSDavid Senra3:48

       Is that a solved problem yet, or you still haven't figured out-

   16. TRTorsten Reil3:50

       It's, it's reasonably solved, I would say. I think it's the-- so the need so far has been on, first of all, making the drones work for terminal guidance, which is basically the last two kilometers or so, and then to, to, uh, create the software to coordinate them all, and now it's going to go towards almost full autonomy. Again, always with a human in the loop.

   17. DSDavid Senra4:08

       I wanna go back to the conversation we had a few years ago when we were, we were having, uh, dinner at Daniel Ek's house about-- essentially your, your proposition to me was, you know, you're just not gonna be able to have humans on the battlefield anymore because it's just gonna be about who can produce more material. Do-- I think we discussed this book called Freedom's Forge that I've read like twice, and essentially it's about the United States converting their, you know, industrial and commercial, uh, industrial power from making products that people would buy to making war materials and just mass-producing more than the opposition had.

   18. TRTorsten Reil4:41

       Yeah.

   19. DSDavid Senra4:42

       And that, you know, helped, you know, tilt the war and, uh, the balance in their fa-in their favor. I thought you had a very similar perspective, that that's what we would have to do. Like, the, the, the, the winners of the future wars are just gonna have to create, mass produce more drones, more weapons, more everything.

   20. TRTorsten Reil4:57

       I think it's gonna be a battle of materiel. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the, uh, uh, autonomous mass, as, as we call it, so the number of drones, um, that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's gonna be very hard for humans to survive in that battlefield. And again, that's already the case in Ukraine. You can't really enter the battlefield as a, as a, as a human, uh, and survi-survive for very long. Uh, whether you're in a vehicle or you're on your own, it's very hard to survive. That's gonna get worse and worse because, again, at the moment, the drones attacking you are usually remote-controlled. Once they're going to be autonomous, it's gonna be even more dangerous. Those drones usually don't care about jamming anymore. Um, for FPVs, it's because they're connected through fiber optic cables, uh, fiberglass. Um, for larger drones, it's because they are already autonomous, and they don't have to worry about GPS 'cause they have GPS free navigation. They can detect targets, and they can engage once you've allowed them to do it, uh, autonomously.

   21. DSDavid Senra5:51

       Wait, explain how you get around the jamming. I don't understand that.

   22. TRTorsten Reil5:53

       So the problem with jamming is it, it's twofold. First of all, if you, if you want to control your drone from afar, um, you need a video signal back, and usually, um, the, the battlefield is jammed, so you don't get the video signal back. So that means that the drone needs to fly autonomously, or it needs to be connected with a cable, and that's, that's what's happening right now. And the second problem is GPS jamming. Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that, um, with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a, like a pilot of a plane does, or you do it with AI that tries to do the same thing. And, and those algorithms now are very robust. They work, uh, in, in daylight, at night, uh, you know, in the snow, um, even with kind of deformed terrain, which obviously happens quite a lot with the shell impacts. So that technology already exists, so these drones are getting better and better. And at the same time, if you want to have humans on the battlefield, I think it's gonna be very difficult. And I think the trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where you know they're not going to survive. But at the same time, you still have to retake territory. You have to protect, um, and defend territory, so you need, you need robots on the ground. If you extrapolate from where we are right now, I think that's where we're going to go.

2. 7:08 – 9:27

   Why Torsten Founded Helsing

   1. DSDavid Senra7:08

      I want to go into the way you're running Helsing right now, but I think to start is like why you decided to found the company to begin with. We can give like a real quick overview. You came from gaming, right? You sold a company for half a billion dollars. You were angel investing, kind of looking for your next thing. Did you know for a fact that you were gonna found a-another company after your first sale or no?

   2. TRTorsten Reil7:30

      After I left, um, NaturalMotion and Zynga, um, I, I didn't think I was gonna start another company. I was-

   3. DSDavid Senra7:35

      You did or did not?

   4. TRTorsten Reil7:36

      I did not.

   5. DSDavid Senra7:36

      Okay.

   6. TRTorsten Reil7:37

      No. I was pretty exhausted, to be honest. Uh, I'd been doing it for fifteen years, and I was kind of very low on, uh, kind of in my, in my fuel tank. That didn't take very long to recover, about three months maybe or so, and I felt kind of the energy was back. But then it took another maybe two or three years or so, um, before I thought, "Actually, I want to start something again." And honestly, I wouldn't have done it had I not met my two co-founders, Gunther and Niklas. Especially, um, with what we're doing in defense, it's so complex. Um, I mean, being a founder is already lonely, uh, being a single, um, founder. But in defense, the companies are so complex, you have to think about so many things at the same time. You have to obviously deal with technology. Um, you have to deal with, um, politics, um, with export law and a whole bunch of other things, that it's very difficult to, to do it as a single founder. So when I met my two fu-- co-founders, um, we all independently had thought that there needed to be a new defense company in Europe.

   7. DSDavid Senra8:30

      How did that conversation even start?

   8. TRTorsten Reil8:32

      Back then, I invested in Niklas's company, uh, in, in Munich, um, which was working on solving AI problems for some of the legacy primes in Europe. And I wanted to find out more about defense because I'd invested, but I didn't know that much about it. And someone, um, recommended I, I meet up with Gunther, um, who at the time was at, at McKinsey responsible for aerospace and defense. And, and we, um, met up in a cafe in Berlin and hit it off, and within thirty minutes, we thought we should start this company together. Went to see Niklas, who had the same feeling, and then like within a few days or so, we decided, um, to, to start Helsing. And, and this, it was very high conviction, and there was never a doubt either. And it's kind of still the feeling of the company now. The company moves, I think, still very fast, and a lot of it is based on quickly settling on founder conviction, um, you know, in terms of what we do, um, that we need, need to go into certain areas, um, certain territories, et cetera.

3. 9:27 – 19:19

   Founder Conviction & Betting on European Defense

   1. DSDavid Senra9:27

      Hold on. I don't want to move on from the conviction yet because this-- The year you're having these conversations, what year is this?

   2. TRTorsten Reil9:32

      Uh, that was end of '20, 2020, beginning of '21.

   3. DSDavid Senra9:36

      Okay, I can't think of a more unpopular company to start at that time than a European defense tech company.

   4. TRTorsten Reil9:42

      Yeah, it was very unpopular. Um, we, we, we founded the company in March 2021, and, uh, it wasn't, uh, popular in our social, social circles. It caused all kinds of problems with banks, although this has got better now, uh, obviously, but back then it was quite unpopular and, and it was hard to raise money. Like we, we didn't-

   5. DSDavid Senra9:58

      Wait, wait. Caused problem with banks?

   6. TRTorsten Reil10:00

      There's a risk, and, and some people have been de-banked, uh, who've been close to our company, um, around the time. And, uh, I, I wasn't, um, but I know, um, another person close to the company, um, had difficult getting credit, difficulty getting credit because we were involved in, in defense. So, and, and this is still the case now. I mean, it's, it's, it hasn't completely disappeared. Uh, I think ESG requirements are still there, and back then, um, the defense of a country or of a democratic society was grouped for banks, um, in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking because it was seen as weapons, and weapons are always bad. And I, I empathize with the kind of gut feeling on this. It's just that when you think it through, obviously it, it doesn't make sense. And this is also why we started the company. It felt like if we don't start the company, then no one else will. We were speci-specifically worried about, um, Europe's reaction to, um, Crimea in, in, uh, 2014, uh, the invasion and the taking of Crimea, where I think we-- all of us didn't really want to think that this, uh, you know, was the beginning of something bigger. We all didn't want it to be true. But if you looked at, um, you know, what the ambitions were, it was pretty clear that something else was going to happen. And we were concerned that, you know, Europe was going to be very dependent on other territories, you know, for its defense and on other countries. And, you know, the US had companies like Anduril and Palantir that were very forward-looking defense companies with a big focus on AI, cheaper hardware, and abundant hardware, um, and the idea of mass manufacturing. But Europe had nothing. And so we felt we have to, we have to do this, and we have to prove that we can build something like this, although with a slightly different flavor, uh, in Europe. And that's why we started it. Very difficult to raise money in, uh, '21 for defense. Like no VC wanted to talk to us, and we didn't even try in the end. So we just raised money from, uh, individuals, family offices, and then we were lucky that Daniel, um, you know, put in a hundred million euros of his own money very early on, and that allowed us to, to scale the company faster than otherwise would have been possible.

   7. DSDavid Senra11:59

      Yeah, that's-- I always read about you guys, and they're like, "Yeah, and they got a hundred-million-dollar investment from Prima Materia." It's like, that's his own money.

   8. TRTorsten Reil12:06

      Yeah.

   9. DSDavid Senra12:07

      That's a high-conviction bet-

   10. TRTorsten Reil12:08

       Yeah

   11. DSDavid Senra12:08

       ...really, really early.

   12. TRTorsten Reil12:09

       Yeah.

   13. DSDavid Senra12:09

       This is before-

   14. TRTorsten Reil12:10

       Yeah

   15. DSDavid Senra12:11

       ...the invasion of, uh-

   16. TRTorsten Reil12:12

       Yeah

   17. DSDavid Senra12:12

       ...Ukraine.

   18. TRTorsten Reil12:13

       Yeah.

   19. DSDavid Senra12:13

       There, there was a seed round first, right? Didn't you guys raise like, what, 8 or 10 million or something like that?

   20. TRTorsten Reil12:18

       Yeah, I think it was 8, €8 million in, uh, in March '21.

   21. DSDavid Senra12:22

       And he was in that seed round?

   22. TRTorsten Reil12:23

       Yeah, he was in that seed round, too.

   23. DSDavid Senra12:24

       And then you guys had this conversation where he asked, "Well, how much do you need?"

   24. TRTorsten Reil12:28

       Yeah, like three months later, so, so-

   25. DSDavid Senra12:29

       Yeah, and your response was-

   26. TRTorsten Reil12:31

       Ideally €100 million.

   27. DSDavid Senra12:32

       How'd you come up with that number?

   28. TRTorsten Reil12:33

       I didn't really do a, um, specific budget for it, to be honest. [laughs]

   29. DSDavid Senra12:38

       [laughs]

   30. TRTorsten Reil12:38

       But it felt about right.
4. 19:19 – 23:38

   Helsing's Mission: Protecting Democracies

   1. DSDavid Senra19:19

      comes before the mission?

   2. TRTorsten Reil19:19

      The mission comes first.

   3. DSDavid Senra19:21

      Okay.

   4. TRTorsten Reil19:21

      Um, and, and the mission is to protect our democracies. And I always say it's, um, it's, it's always a real privilege. I always feel like we, we, we have, um... we talk to our new starters every month, and we always say to them, "You know, it, it is a real privilege to work in a company," um, at least we feel this, "where the mission is so easy, that we protect our democracies. That's what we're here for." Um, and, and lots of other companies, you know, have to spend time and go on a, an offsite or retreat to come up with some kind of mission paragraph that everyone agrees on eventually. And we don't have that. It's, it is to protect our democracies, and we can point out where we're doing this right now with, you know, what we're doing with our deployed drones, for example, in, in, in Ukraine, and it makes everything easier. Um, we obviously never expected the Ukraine war to happen that quickly, but now that we are deployed, it's, you know, it's very concrete. Um, this mission is a, is, is a real thing. And then the conviction, you know, comes that there need to be these kinds of companies and, and that they need to be built in Europe. And one other reason why we are building Helsing is also we, we wanted to build a big company in Europe. We honestly looked at, you know, uh, Spotify as a, as a, as a beacon, as a, as an example of, you know, a large company you can build that is... that has, you know, A, global ambitions, but then also actually global impact and is up there with other big companies from the US and, and other countries, and we wanted to, to build something like that too. We wanted to show that you can do this, and you can do it in what is a heavily regulated area like defense because, you know, a lot of people find excuses why they can't build a big company. Uh, it's very often regulation, bureaucracy, not enough funding, um, and none of that is true. They're all excuses.

   5. DSDavid Senra20:56

      You have a great line about this where I love what you just said. It's the excuse is like people are way too concerned about the regulatory environment, the tax environment. It's like what's missing is actually you need fa- aggressive founders with large ambitions.

   6. TRTorsten Reil21:07

      It's just aggression that's missing, exactly. It's, it's, it's, um, strategic ambitions. You have to think about what you want to be, and you... and, and it needs to be big, and then you need to be truly aggressive. And a lot of founders, I think in Europe, have, have lost that aggression, but it's easy to find it again. You, you just need to-- You just need role models. Like, we use Spotify as a role model. And, um, you know, once you have them, that, you know, that's what good looks like, and everything below that is, is, is failure. It is underestimated how much of a difference aggression and ambition makes.

   7. DSDavid Senra21:37

      Say more about that.

   8. TRTorsten Reil21:38

      I, I think it's ninety-f- five percent of a company's success is that. Everything else, like I said, is excuses. So regulation doesn't matter. Yeah, sure, it takes longer to, uh, start a GmbH in, in Germany. Who cares? Yes, you have to go to a notary. Who cares? I mean, it's like, you know, we spend a couple of days more starting the company, it's not a problem. Um, the, the regulation that we are subject to and, and other defense companies are as well, um, with regards to the certification, qualification of our systems, export law, and a whole bunch of other things, um, dealing with confidentiality, um, classified information, is like a hundred times more than what a startup has to deal with in terms of bureaucracy, and you can still deal with it. It still doesn't slow us down. You just have to set the company up properly.

   9. DSDavid Senra22:18

      You're probably one of the most disagreeable people that I know. Have you always been that way?

   10. TRTorsten Reil22:23

       Yeah, you said that to me before. [laughs]

   11. DSDavid Senra22:26

       [laughs]

   12. TRTorsten Reil22:27

       And I've been trying to reflect on it. Um, I don't think I am.

   13. DSDavid Senra22:30

       You just demonstrated here. Yeah, we have more regulation. Who gives a shit? Stop making excuses. Like, there is... it's a, it's a superpower for founders. I'm not... Uh, obviously, you know, it's not a pejorative when I say it to you.

   14. TRTorsten Reil22:39

       It's just I just don't like when people make excuses, and, and, and these things happen very quickly. You just need to have a bubble of people coming together and all reinforcing each other with these kinds of excuses, and then they have a, you know, content life. And then we, um, sadly have a continent where we don't have breakout companies because people just lack the aggression. But again, I, I am very optimistic. There are quick fixes. You just have to have a few very aggressive companies that point out that everyone else is basically mailing it in, and I think a lot of people are.

   15. DSDavid Senra23:07

       Me and Daniel talked about this, this, this idea of, like, how many prime movers are there in the world, you know, the people that are inventing the, the technology that we're all using, creating the companies, you know, power laws rule everything around us, and it's just like, it's not that many. And if you just have a handful, like, you literally can change the trajectory of an entire country, entire world, whatever the case may be. When you raised the hundred million, though, where did you see, like, your entrance into doing this? Was the idea it's like, "Hey, we're gonna..." What you just said, it's like cheap, simple hardware, and then all the innovation comes in software. Is that the way you thought about it?

5. 23:38 – 28:35

   Programs of Record & Winning the Eurofighter Contract

   1. TRTorsten Reil23:38

      Actually, the biggest insight came, and I think it came from, from Gunther when we, um, when we said we're, we're just going to go for programs of record, uh, which as a... back then as a, as a small company, um, was almost impossible and was extremely risky.

   2. DSDavid Senra23:51

      Explain what a program of record is.

   3. TRTorsten Reil23:52

      So a program of record is a, is a program that is an official government program that's in the budget, that is usually quite large, and where you ideally want to be the prime, so you have the direct relationship with the government rather than working as a subcontractor through another company, and that's extremely hard to break into. And the reason most companies didn't do it back then was because, you know, you got funding, and you needed to generate some revenues and some proof points, you know, reasonably quickly, and that's almost impossible to do with a program of record 'cause it takes so long, um, to get one, uh, and to qualify for one. But because we had the one hundred million, we thought, "Okay, well, now we can take those risks, and if the first two or three don't work that we go for, we still have enough money left." And we felt it's the only way to build a defense company reasonably quickly. And so we, we, um- Uh, uh, applied for a big program of record for the Eurofighter electronic warfare upgrade-

   4. DSDavid Senra24:40

      What is that?

   5. TRTorsten Reil24:41

      -in, in Germany. So this is electronic, uh, warfare capabilities are, um, essentially, essentially around detecting radars, um, detecting, you know, the types of radars, in this case, anti-aircraft radars that, you know, try to take you down, uh, detecting their intent, et cetera. And the situation had become, you know, more difficult, um, for, for Europe because a lot of those radars had become software-defined, which means that they basically are shape-shifting, and so the old approaches didn't really work anymore. And we came in with an AI-based approach, deep learning-based approach that kind of recovered that ability to, um, to interpret those radars. And it was a big technology jump, and we managed to win, uh, that program of record together with our partner, Saab, against, you know, a lot of other consortia. And we were the dark horse, but we ended up winning it. How big was the probability? I don't know, but there was a high probability that we'd fail. But we went for it because we thought we can afford to because we have enough money in the bank. And this, this happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest to go from founding to program of record.

   6. DSDavid Senra25:41

      How much of, like, your previous work at, like, Oxford, stuff you were doing at Na- Natural Motion did you bring into Helsing?

   7. TRTorsten Reil25:48

      A lot of it was the, um, I think team building and fundraising and maybe prioritization, um, pattern recognition that I had from Natural Motion where, um, I-- W-When I sold the company and when I left the company, I was, uh, reasonably pleased with myself. I thought, you know, this all went quite well in the end. But it was only in the, in the kind of two or three years afterwards where I started to reflect on some of the things, you know, I'd done and how I'd built the company. Especially when I started to angel invest, I realized I actually screwed up a lot of things at Natural Motion that I should have done better. I, I didn't deal with performance management the way I should have. I definitely didn't take hiring, um, uh, serious enough, just the kind of general hi-hi-hiring of great engineers. And I also didn't think enough about how to, you know, think about your, your leadership team, how you grow your leadership team, how you bring the right executives in at the right time. And it kind of worked at Natural Motion, but we could-- probably could have done a lot of things better. And, and so a lot of that, I think, pattern recognition, uh, we were able to use at Natural Motion, and particularly in the first few years. But it's also true now that, that Helsing, um, is now at a point where it's kind of uncharted territory for me as well. The, the company is a lot bigger. I think we're about one thousand three hundred people, much bigger than Natural Motion ever was. And so we, we have to now kind of think through things either from first principles or by, you know, working with people who have already built big companies like, like Daniel. And then the other part is w-we were lucky that we had as three founders very-- three different skill sets. You know, I had already started a company and, and sold it. I think I knew how to, um, fundraise. Gunther was very close to, um, to the various forces, to the military, um, also understood the, the processes, political processes really well. And Niklas' background was on the AI and engineering side, um, which is what we really needed to, to first, first, first of all win, win this kind of contract.

   8. DSDavid Senra27:37

      Yeah, this is what I'm-- That, that was the reason I asked that question. It's like, well, how the hell do you go from founding to program of record faster than anybody else? Like, how did you even know you could solve this problem of-

   9. TRTorsten Reil27:45

      It was just a feeling, I think, and, and, uh, particular Niklas and Gunther, um, you know, pushed that. I, I-- Gunther I think had a strong conviction that this was a really worthwhile program of record for us to have, and Niklas had an intuition as to how we could do it differently to anyone else.

   10. DSDavid Senra28:00

       Where did Niklas get that intuition?

   11. TRTorsten Reil28:02

       Uh, I don't know. Uh, I think it's just a-- I mean, he'd already been in this space, um, with his, with his previous company. Um, so he already had a feeling-

   12. DSDavid Senra28:10

       What was his previous company doing?

   13. TRTorsten Reil28:11

       Uh, it was solving AI problems for, um, for, for legacy primes, and so he already had a feeling for this kind of thing. And then if you combine that with, with Gunther's insight as to what programs of record worked, um, it was ki-beca- honestly became the blueprint how we approach pretty much everything now. Um, we, we, we try to find programs of record that are large, where we have a feeling that we can contribute something to it that's differentiated. That's basically

6. 28:35 – 36:14

   Building a Superhuman AI Fighter Pilot

   1. TRTorsten Reil28:35

      our lens.

   2. DSDavid Senra28:35

      Can you give me an example of that?

   3. TRTorsten Reil28:37

      Well, another example is, is, um, the autonomous fighter jet that we are building right now. It's called CA1 Europa, and we went into it and invested a lot of money into it, um, knowing that Europe didn't have anything like it, and that we felt, um, this is going to be a big category and that we could contribute something to it. And the reason for that was we started a-- almost like a science experiment. We have, we have a great, um, chief scientist, Antoine Bordes, um, who joined us from Meta where he ran, uh, um, uh, co-headed Facebook AI Research. And we set ourselves a task two years ago, so to, to create a superhuman, uh, fighter pilot, uh, for beyond visual range combat. So the kind of combat that's-

   4. DSDavid Senra29:14

      Hold on, you gotta slow this down. What? [laughs] Superhuman... Say that thing again.

   5. TRTorsten Reil29:18

      It's a superhuman fighter pilot. Um, so-

   6. DSDavid Senra29:20

      Superhuman fighter pilot-

   7. TRTorsten Reil29:21

      Yeah.

   8. DSDavid Senra29:21

      -but there's no pilot in there.

   9. TRTorsten Reil29:22

      No, it's, it's an AI.

   10. DSDavid Senra29:24

       Okay.

   11. TRTorsten Reil29:24

       So it's a, it's a neural network.

   12. DSDavid Senra29:25

       Okay.

   13. TRTorsten Reil29:25

       And, um, it's for beyond visual range, so the most advanced type of air combat. Um, it's essentially chess in the sky. You have, you know, the planes, um, usually it's two versus two, quite far away from each other. It's the fighter jets, and, and they use radar. Um, they use different types of radar. They switch the radar on, off. They use missiles, obviously. You have to go offensive, defensive. You have to try to bleed off, uh, energy of missiles that are following you. You have to have a feeling for when you can re-engage. It's, it's extremely complex. It almost looks like ballet. Uh, it's quite beautiful to watch, actually, when you look at, uh, at the tactical views. And we'd been told by pilots, active pilots, that this is the kind of last bastion of, of air combat. Um, you know, nothing will ever replace the intuition that a human has in the sky to, um, read the situation, to have a feeling for, you know, how to engage, what types of, um, you know, weapons to use, and that turns out to be bullshit. Um, you know, it, it actually-- the AI is much, much better. Um, and the reason is that it's able to explore the search space, um, much more efficiently than Then, um, you know, a human can, 'cause a human learns it from a textbook and, you know, in, in, in flight school. But, um, but they can't explore the search space. And so we use the same approaches basically as, um, you know, DeepMind used as well for AlphaGo and AlphaStar using, um, reinforcement learning. And, uh, we have a extremely high-performance simulator that runs, um, twenty-- twenty-five thousand times real-time speed, and that allows us to explore the search space with reinforcement learning much, much more efficiently. And that now means that we can train, uh, a neural network to be, you know, better than a active fighter pilot. Like we, we regularly fly against Eurofighter pilots, for example, or, or Rafael pilots or Gripen pilots.

   14. DSDavid Senra31:14

       So wait, you're running tests with your autonomous fighter jet against a human-powered, uh, pilot?

   15. TRTorsten Reil31:22

       Yeah. So, so we used to do it in simulation only. First it was only our simulation, and we won. Then it was, uh, you know, an official simulator but from a-- of a, of a, uh, you know, of a, a big prime. And then, um-- And then last year we flew, um, a real fighter jet, and we flew the, um, the, the, the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did, and took full control of the plane, um, in air combat against, uh, an-another Gripen which was human-controlled. And so we flew three, um, air combat, um, scenarios, um, above the Baltic Sea, and, and proved at that point-- And this, by the way, was also the point where we realized, actually, there's something bigger happening, where before this actually works, and it works in the real world. And, and so we developed a system, we called it Centaur, and, uh, and it's now able to work in swarms as well, by the way, not just, um, two v- versus two.

   16. DSDavid Senra32:14

       Wait, swarms of fighter jets now?

   17. TRTorsten Reil32:16

       Yeah, so-

   18. DSDavid Senra32:16

       Not swarms of drones. Now we've moved on to swarms of fighter jets.

   19. TRTorsten Reil32:19

       Swarms of fighter jets. Yeah. And, and it, it scales really well. And, um, it's extremely powerful, and that gave us the conviction that crewed, uh, manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll, you'll end up facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities. And it's not science fiction. Um, what's-- Like one observation of what's happening at the moment, not just in defense AI, but AI in general, is that things happen faster than you think. You know, back in the old days, like ten years ago or so, like everything was always five years away. That was always kind of the number that people use. It's about five years away, whether it's, um, kind of a particular medical breakthrough or maybe a robotics breakthrough. That's now all shrunk. The five years usually ended up being seven to ten years, by the way, same as to autonomous driving. It's now ex- the exact opposite. When you think something is five years away, it's actually usually now two years away. And so something has changed, and we felt that with Centaur as well. It's like we, we're thinking like we couldn't believe how well this worked. And, and still to this day, I always feel it feels a bit like science fiction. But that gave us the conviction that we needed to be in this space and to be in this space because it's so slow usually to work with primes. Like we could have partnered with a prime and asked, "Do you want to do an autonomous fighter jet? We provide the AI, you provide, um, you know, the, the jet." It would've taken too long. So, so we decided to acquire an aircraft manufacturer, um, outside Munich, about out- hour outside Munich, with its own runway, hangars, and full aircraft manufacturing capabilities, and build our own fighter jet, which is now called the CA1, and then put Centaur on it as the core technology component. And so that's gonna fly for the first time, um, next year. And, um, and, you know, we want to show that you can just really leapfrog everyone in this category.

   20. DSDavid Senra34:03

       We were having this conversation. Me, you, and Michael Dell were talking about this at Dell's house a few months ago. You told us about this acquisition, and then Michael's like, "Can we come see it?" And I was like, "I'll come with you, but I don't want you to shoot down Michael's plane [laughs] as we're, as we're coming in." But you told us about this funny regulation where even though it's gonna be an autonomous jet-- fighter jet, don't you still have to have a guy in it?

   21. TRTorsten Reil34:27

       So eventually, no. Um, but-

   22. DSDavid Senra34:28

       But right now, yes.

   23. TRTorsten Reil34:29

       Y- yeah. I mean, we, we-- so we, we don't have the, um, uh, I think the advantage of, um, the Mojave Desert, for example, where you can fly those planes and be completely autonomous because if it crashes, it doesn't really matter. It, you know, it crashes into sand. If you, you know, crash where we fly, you crash over built-up Bavaria, uh, which is not ideal. So we have a human, um, that's optionally in the plane, uh, for, um, for the first prototypes. Eventually, um, that's going to change, obviously. And, and the, the pilot is a safety pilot, the same way you'd have, um, safety drivers for, you know, the early rollouts of Waymo and, and other companies.

   24. DSDavid Senra35:05

       The fact that you have this regulation at the moment and you need a person, uh, that, that has to change the design of what it looks like, correct?

   25. TRTorsten Reil35:11

       No, no. It's-- We, we found a way to accommodate it without changing the design. It's just-- it's the same, it's the same system. And it, by the way, it's another example of, of where you can, um, you know, beat on the, uh, EU or Europe, or in this case Germany, for having regulations. Um, but you just find a way to deal with it, and this is the way to deal with it.

   26. DSDavid Senra35:30

       Oh.

   27. TRTorsten Reil35:30

       Just have a pilot sitting in there like this.

   28. DSDavid Senra35:32

       [laughs] Is he in the back? Where is he?

   29. TRTorsten Reil35:34

       No, they're in the front.

   30. DSDavid Senra35:35

       Okay. So you-- what you just described, uh, uh, that's very interesting. You said it's like chess in the sky, and then you said it was ballet. So the way you see the short-term future is the same way it's essentially gonna be immoral. I wanna get into like the, the morality, the way you look at the morality of like what you're building. The way it would be immoral to send a human into the battlefield because you're gonna get swarmed by drones-
7. 36:14 – 42:11

   Deterrence, Autonomous Weapons & the Morality of Defense

   1. DSDavid Senra36:14

      Can you explain the-- like how you view like the morality of what you're building and how you may view the other people's interpretation of, you know, essentially the banning to creating new weapons or creating new defense? Like you've thought a lot about this. I kind of just want like a what's in your mind, like a, a complete overview of like how you think about the morality of building-

   2. TRTorsten Reil36:32

      Yeah

   3. DSDavid Senra36:32

      ... the company you're building.

   4. TRTorsten Reil36:33

      The underlying Goal has to be that you minimize the lives lost, uh, in general, and ideally you get it down to zero. And the way to get lives lost down to zero is to not have any kind of conflict at all. And that's why deterrence is so important. And this is also where-- I mean, this is a very old, um, obviously argument, um, but it still comes up all the time, is that people don't understand that you have to be able to deter in order to not be a target that looks valuable or, or achievable for the other side. And we set up the company to deter. Um, we, we never set it up honestly to, to, to have the systems deployed, um, at scale, um, in Ukraine, which is what we have right now. We'll do it obviously, because we'll have to do it and, um, they, you know, it needs to make a contribution. But the idea in general is to avoid conflict altogether. And, and you do that by being able to deter, by having a, a, a, a credible posture that makes the cost calculus on the other side such that they don't want to attack because it'll be too devastating for them. And that is the first thing. If you have to go into a conflict, you wanna do it in such a way that you minimize the lives lost on, on your side. And again, this is where, especially right now, and it's gonna get worse in the future, you need to use autonomy because you cannot send humans into tanks, um, you know, in, in, in, in fighter jets, um, or even as infantry onto the, onto the field. That's the underlying theme. And then there's a- another category where you need to think about the, the, the way you deploy your software and, and what as a society, um, you know, we're, we're happy with, with the deployment of your hardware and software in terms of autonomy. So are we okay for a machine to make a decision over life and death if it is more accurate than a human? Or do we say as a society, um, "No, a machine should never make that decision"? And these are legitimate conversations. It's no easy answer because people have different values on this. And the, the thing that worries me is that the-- these discussions happened a lot, um, when we started the company before the Ukrainian War. No one, in particular journalists, weren't interested in asking us, um, you know, about the capabilities of why we were doing things. Everyone always asked about, uh, killer robots and autonomy and our red lines, and do we have a human in the loop? Which we were always happy to answer. These weren't annoying questions. They are at the core of what we think about. Now, though, no one asks these questions anymore, and I'm not quite sure why. But no journalists ever ask us questions, you know, how are we thinking about the ethical side? We do a lot of this ourselves. We have ethics workshops. We have a lot of deployment guides for our technologies. Um, we have to think very carefully about, you know, things like proliferation and a whole bunch of other things. But we have to do it out of an inner discipline. And, um, journalists don't ask the questions anymore, and the public doesn't either.

   5. DSDavid Senra39:24

      I don't even understand the, the counterarguments that you receive that's like, "No, we should not have any new technology." It's like, well, humans are violent by nature. We've had war since we've existed. Like-

   6. TRTorsten Reil39:34

      Yeah. But, but it is an int-interesting topic because I-- like w-we get this pushback as well obviously at Helsing, and we get it-- we get pushback from people who say war is always bad. Um, you know, and of course at, at, at some level that makes sense. But again, if you have a situation where you are attacked, um, if that you have a situation where there is a, an adversary that is building up, um, you know, capabilities, you need to be able to deter in order to avoid war, and then you need to be able to fight in order to then not lose lives, um, you know, unnecessary lives on your side. And like I said, we get a lot of pushback and, and it is often from well-meaning people. So it's not that like we hate people who, who have a problem with our mission. Um, I disagree with the way they look at it. I think if you think it through from first principles, you need to have this kind of deterrence. But we don't kind of dislike people. It's like very often people who just want to have peace. It's just that we want to have peace too. We just think you have to achieve it by not letting a war happen and not being inviting to a war.

   7. DSDavid Senra40:35

      But I think there's s-something interesting. It g-goes back to like your high conviction, the fact that you're extremely disagreeable, you're very comfortable taking like a counter position, like you started this company when everybody else said, you know, it was very unpopular. Uh, something that I asked Daniel about, and he said he's like he's a German building a defense company in a country whose entire post-war identity was never again.

   8. TRTorsten Reil40:55

      Yeah.

   9. DSDavid Senra40:55

      Like, you're also willing to cut across your cultural, like the culture expectations too.

   10. TRTorsten Reil41:01

       Yeah. Yeah. So-- And I think that's still the case in Germany. And, you know, we're set up as a European company. We have, uh, big offices in, in, in London and Paris and, and a bunch of other countries as well. But, um, but our biggest is, is in Munich, um, in, in, in Germany. And, and German society is a pacifist society. And it, it's taking a lot of, I think, facing reality right now, which is what's been happening in particular over the last couple of years or so, wh- wh- where I think Germans realize it, it hasn't been the end of conflict. Um, th-there are now conflicts, and they're coming closer, and they might be coming even closer again. And it's very uncomfortable for, for a country that, that thought those times are over. But it's also the country now that has one of the most thriving new defense ecosystems, um, I would say in the world now. So there is now a rethinking of some of those attitudes, and it's also the country that has, um, in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from fifty-two billion euros last year to originally, I think, a hundred and fifty-three billion in two thousand twenty-nine. I think it's gone up again, um, to over one hundred and eighty billion. And, and this is a large increase if you think about that there won't be more soldiers, most likely. So most of the money is going to go onto a new

8. 42:11 – 48:33

   Mass Manufacturing, Software & the Future of Materiel

   1. TRTorsten Reil42:11

      equipment spend.

   2. DSDavid Senra42:11

      Okay, so we go back to materials.

   3. TRTorsten Reil42:13

      Yeah.

   4. DSDavid Senra42:13

      Your whole thing is like the winner is going to be able to produce more materials than-

   5. TRTorsten Reil42:15

      Yeah

   6. DSDavid Senra42:15

      ... than their adversary.

   7. TRTorsten Reil42:16

      Yeah.

   8. DSDavid Senra42:17

      So I, I still don't think I completely understand the way you think about achieving that goal. Is the hardware that you're manufacturing has to be as simple as possible, and then you're offsetting all the innovation in, in software? Is that-- is that still the basic thesis?

   9. TRTorsten Reil42:31

      The idea is that you build hardware that is good enough, um, and build it, um, in such high numbers that you eventually have ec-economies of scale, but also the ability to overcome any- Um, you know, adversary just through pure mass. And the way you achieve that is that you, you need to be able to mass produce, you need to design to mass produce, but then crucially, you need software to, um, to allow those systems to first of all be smart and, and be able to, to coordinate. Um, but you ideally also absorb a lot of the complexity of the h- of the hardware that usually, you know, would be these ex-exquisite systems that, um, legacy primes will make into your software, so you can make the hardware simpler. That means that your sensors are simpler, and you regain a lot of the accuracy through very good AI algorithms. It might also be that your, um, your manufacturing, um, tolerances are a little bit bigger, and you regain a lot of the control and accuracy again through software that might recalibrate the system as it goes. And, and this is what we do, and that works extremely well, but you have to think it through as, as one unified system. And once you do that, you can go into mass manufacturing. So the, the HX-2 is now a mass-manufactured strike drone, and, like, we had to go through, like, all of those learnings in, in July and August last year where, um, we had to go from dozens of HX-2s per month to a baseline of one thousand, and it can now surge to, in, in the small factory that we have, to three thousand a month. And it's a completely different kettle of fish to, to producing just a few dozen. You have to think about your supply chain completely differently. Um, obviously the way you design, um, the drone, quality control, um, tracking every single step. And so you have to learn this, but once you've done this, and you're able to produce in very large volumes, um, you, you just have much more powerful systems because you can now overcome any adversary or target by, you know, having saturation attacks, for example, by sending more and more of these drones, by having them highly coordinated, and if necessary, just produce more and more of these. And drones are just one example. The same is true for fighter jets. You want to build, you know, m-many hundreds of these fighter jets. Um, same is true for, um, you know, for other systems, maritime systems. It is going to be about being able to build these things in large numbers, to design them so that they can b- built in such numbers and to have the industrial capacity and the supply chain to produce a lot.

   10. DSDavid Senra44:51

       Okay, hold, hold, hold on though. If we're talking about war materials, you can never predict the, the potential new adversary you might have in the future. That means you guys have to be completely vertically integrated. Like if I'm a country, like, or a continent, let's say we're European, it means I can't outsource some of this production to China or to America or to South America or anywhere else, correct?

   11. TRTorsten Reil45:11

       I wouldn't say any. I mean, with China, yes, that's true. Um, um, there's still allies that you can work with obviously, and that, that we all work with. Um, but there will be some areas, and it depends on the s-sensitivities of particular countries where you want to be fully vertically integrated in that, um, country, and you want to be, um, having your entire supply chain in that country as well. There are other areas where you, you work with allies and, um, I think that will continue and probably even grow. And then there are other areas where you say, um, "No, it's-- we're actually-- mm, there's so many different suppliers, it doesn't really matter. We are kind of free to choose."

   12. DSDavid Senra45:44

       But I feel like y-you would go to-- more towards complete control. Like now I'm not talking about what you're doing now, but in the future. You're gonna be running this company for the rest of your life. You just said, "I'm not selling."

   13. TRTorsten Reil45:53

       Yeah.

   14. DSDavid Senra45:53

       Right?

   15. TRTorsten Reil45:53

       Yeah.

   16. DSDavid Senra45:53

       This is my last company. This is my grand ambition.

   17. TRTorsten Reil45:56

       Yeah.

   18. DSDavid Senra45:56

       So like would you not want to work towards an area where, like you have complete control over everything?

   19. TRTorsten Reil46:02

       Yes, but, um, you also want to work with allies. Like there, there are many countries, um, that you want to work together with and where you are stronger if-- stronger if you work together. There's some areas where, um, you know, specific countries have sensitivities a-around particular data. For example, uh, the UK, for example, is very, um, specific about what they're doing in maritime, and understandably so, uh, where you want to be like really just national. But then there are other areas where, where you work with allies, and y-you need to be able to dial it up and down. So what we're doing, we have this concept of a resilience factory, where if a country wants to, you know, buy and build our, our hardware, they can do it on their own territory. We put a factory there, and they can also, um, buy-- build up their own supply chain to the point where they feel comfortable with and then buy from other countries.

   20. DSDavid Senra46:48

       Ex-explain how that partnership would work.

   21. TRTorsten Reil46:50

       So, so-

   22. DSDavid Senra46:50

       So your technology manufactured in their factories-

   23. TRTorsten Reil46:53

       Yeah

   24. DSDavid Senra46:53

       ...on their soil.

   25. TRTorsten Reil46:54

       So we can run the factory, but we make sure it's on their soil. Um, and we find a way to work together with them to also make sure that the supply chain is as, as national, as domestic as it needs to be. And again, d-the sensitivities in different countries are different. Some countries don't care at all. They just buy it from us, and we can produce wherever. Others really care that it's built, um, you know, on their soil so that they have more control over it.

   26. DSDavid Senra47:17

       Why do you call them resilience factories?

   27. TRTorsten Reil47:19

       Because we design them to be not this kind of one big factory, um, that is a, a, a very easy target for attacks. Um, but actually they can be distributed all over a continent or even elsewhere, or even be underground, as is the case with us, so that they are harder to hit.

   28. DSDavid Senra47:34

       You studied the Krupp family?

   29. TRTorsten Reil47:36

       No. I know of them, but I don't know them in detail.

   30. DSDavid Senra47:38

       Okay. There's a great book I'm gonna send you. It's like seven hundred pages. I should do an episode on it for my other podcast, Founders. But this-- they ran into this problem during World War II where the Allies just found their centralized factories and just bombed the shit out of them.
9. 48:33 – 52:46

   Airbase Vulnerability, Procurement & Scaling Strike Drones

   1. DSDavid Senra48:33

      exactly.

   2. TRTorsten Reil48:33

      Exactly.

   3. DSDavid Senra48:33

      Okay.

   4. TRTorsten Reil48:34

      Yeah. And, and, and I think there is still-- I think, I think certain governments and, and militaries are still in denial what actually is going to happen in a conflict. Um, you know, in many cases, we won't be able to take off with our crewed fighter jets anymore.

   5. DSDavid Senra48:46

      So how do you go about, like, trying to explain that to them? Like, how do you just make it obvious? Do you just do it through product demonstrations?

   6. TRTorsten Reil48:52

      Yeah, I mean, it's like with everything else, you, um, you, you, you do product demonstrations, you show what the capabilities are. We've done this a lot with drones. And then-- and, and to honestly everyone's credit, people do get it. I mean, it's not like people complain about procurement is so slow and, and governments are so slow. Yes, but then when they do get it, it goes very fast. Like the, the, the large, um, strike drone contracts that happened, happened really quickly, um, with political support, with, um, support of the procurement agency and, and they went through all in record time. And now if anything, I think that the companies, you know, are really under pressure to deliver all of this stuff really fast. So it's like we, we, we all complained about it in the past, but it's a bit of a legacy problem. I think, um, procurement has got faster and, and the realization that these things have to happen is happening faster too. And, and you know, there will be big, um, autonomous fighter jet programs in Europe as well now. Two years ago, there was nothing. Even one year ago, there was nothing, but it's now happening.

   7. DSDavid Senra49:45

      Something that just came to mind while you were speaking earlier is you're talking about how the-- you know, in the AI age, everything that you-- is gonna happen faster. You think it's in five years, it's actually two, maybe two m-- two years, maybe, maybe two months. Might even be, you know, faster than, uh, even you suspect. It's-- so AI is making your products better than-- and better, faster than you expected. Can that als- can AI also help manufacture and increase your manufacturing faster too?

   8. TRTorsten Reil50:13

      Yeah.

   9. DSDavid Senra50:13

      Because if you're saying we're gonna produce a couple thousand a month, I think-- Isn't China doing like a hundred million drones a year or something like that?

   10. TRTorsten Reil50:20

       Not really. I mean, it's-- And, and Ukraine is building, I think, two million or so a year. Um, but those are different types of drones.

   11. DSDavid Senra50:25

       Yeah, of course.

   12. TRTorsten Reil50:26

       They're, they're, they're FPVs, they're quadcopters. And again, they have their role and, and they work, but they're much shorter range and they've got smaller payloads or explosives. Strike drones are much bigger. I mean, they're, they're like this and, um, with-

   13. DSDavid Senra50:35

       How big is it, your strike zone-- strike drone?

   14. TRTorsten Reil50:37

       Um, so, so the payload, for example, the explosive is two to four kilograms, um, or even larger. And the, uh, range that it can fly is, is around a hundred kilometers. And so it's, it's quite a lot more than, than, than FPVs, and they're used in different ways as well. Those numbers right now, like up to three thousand a month, um, are, are really quite high for this kind of category, and you can scale it up even further. At the moment, honestly, the, um, the, the bottleneck isn't manufacturing speed. We, we can, we can build them really fast. There will be a point, though, in the future where you want to be even more efficient and faster, and then AI will play a role in manufacturing as well. At the moment, it's too early. It's because we're not limited at the moment.

   15. DSDavid Senra51:12

       So wait, what is the bottleneck then?

   16. TRTorsten Reil51:14

       Uh, honestly, the bottleneck right now is the big programs need to come. So the first ones are coming. Um, we just closed a one billion framework contract in, in Germany, but they now need to come everywhere, and then we can crank up manufacturing accordingly.

   17. DSDavid Senra51:26

       What do you mean by everywhere?

   18. TRTorsten Reil51:27

       In, in the various countries, because like-

   19. DSDavid Senra51:29

       In what, all the Western countries?

   20. TRTorsten Reil51:31

       Yeah.

   21. DSDavid Senra51:31

       Okay.

   22. TRTorsten Reil51:32

       Yeah. There'll be some in Asia as well.

   23. DSDavid Senra51:35

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10. 52:46 – 59:44

    Talent Density, Hiring & Performance Management

    1. DSDavid Senra52:46

       All right, I wanna get into how you think about running the company. You mentioned earlier the mistake that you made with your previous company was not putting e-enough emphasis on talent and recruiting. What did you mean by that?

    2. TRTorsten Reil52:55

       When you build a company, you obviously try to hire good people, and, and every founder will always say, you know, the most important thing is talent and the people, and they spend so much time on recruitment. But when you actually look at it in, in detail, and I include us there at, at NaturalMotion previously as well, um, it is-- I wouldn't d-- say it's half-assed, but it isn't the most important thing. And I would argue that hiring and, and finding the right individuals, number one, and then secondly, curating that group of individuals and also moving people out is the most important thing in a company. And it is the reason why a company has great culture, and it's also the reason why a company is high-performant and it feels like it's light-footed. Uh, and, and Helsing feels that way. Um, I, I think it, it feels like it's a very fast, highly performant company that, that can adapt really quickly, and it is almost entirely because the talent density is so high. So if, if that's your kind of thesis, and it was our thesis, then y-you have to think how to solve it. And, and, and the two main factors, the first one is you need to hire well. So you need to build a machine that hires well and, and, and be able to monitor how it does it. And the second one, it needs to be able to curate as well. So you need to have a machine, a system, a set of processes that ideally are very easy that, um, allow people to, to also manage people out when they don't work out. And what a lot of people don't, I think, appreciate is that these two are, are linked because it becomes much easier to move people out that are not a good fit for the company if you know your hiring pipeline is so good that that position will be filled almost immediately. Then it becomes kind of a low opportunity cost thing. What happens instead in a lot of startups and, and probably also larger companies, is that, that, that managers are hesitant to move people out of a company because, A, it's always unpleasant, so you need to hold them accountable. But B, because they maybe rightly know that it will take nine months to fill that position again. And very often the argument, and, and, and many founders will be familiar with this Very often the argument of a manager will be, "Yeah, but if I fire this person now, then we won't be able to hit our deadline because at least they're gonna get the job done somehow." Maybe a bit slower than they should. Maybe they create cultural problems, they have an attitude issue, but at least eventually they'll get the job done, and that's not good enough. So you need to always have enough pressure on the pipeline to be able to fill those positions quickly so that it becomes easier. And so what we did with Helsing at the beginning, because we knew this was, uh, you know, going to be important, the first contract we ever signed, even before we, um, founded the company, was with a third-party recruitment agency because we didn't have anything internal. We always wanted to start with pressure on the recruitment pipeline. And, uh, Robert, Niklas, and I then spent easily the first year just reviewing the KPIs easily every week, um, to see how our recruitment worked and always injected ourselves, uh, if, if it needed to be readjusted because the recruitment pipeline was so important. Building then the internal recruitment team was really important, and then building processes for how you manage, um, performance was important as well. And the most important thing is a quarterly performance calibration review. And what we do there is, um, we don't actually review the performance of all the individuals. We listen to the managers explain why they give their reports a certain rating, and then the manager is held accountable to that rating. So we ask them, you know, "Why did you give that person that kind of rating?" And then we might say, "Well, that doesn't sound like a three. That sounds like a two," or "That doesn't sound like a three, it sounds like a four." Um, and that allows us to make sure that the calibration that people have of what is good performance, what does good look like, is the same across the company. And it also means that it's hard to hide, uh, if someone is an underperformer, um, and you, you give them a low rating, the expectation is that you do something about it. You either make sure that they become better, and that's your task as a manager or if that's not possible, then you find ways to part ways. And this kind of accountability, um, I think is really useful for a company to do that because it allows you to eventually scale up and have a general view of, you know, what is the benchmark that we're looking for. And it also gives us a feeling for which managers try to protect their teams and which don't.

    3. DSDavid Senra57:06

       I got to pull something up. Do you remember, um, we were together, we were racing cars in, uh, in Sweden, and Luca Ferrari was there?

    4. TRTorsten Reil57:15

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra57:15

       Did you spend any time with him?

    6. TRTorsten Reil57:16

       I didn't, I didn't, no.

    7. DSDavid Senra57:17

       You need to. Or I'm not telling you what to do. You should. How about this? So we had this crazy lunch, and Luca is a very-- I like him a lot. He's just-- but he's a very strange cat in the sense that, like, I consider his, the way he runs company, almost like Galapagos Island of entrepreneurship because he didn't, like, look to other entrepreneurs. He doesn't really know much about entrepreneurial history when I talk to him. He doesn't really pay attention to anything. He's just like essentially like try to figure out how to run a company based on what he wanted to do, and so he's got a lot of very unique ideas. But I, I remember we had these notes, and we were just going back and forth on WhatsApp. I was like, "Dude, I'm just gonna type all the notes of the crazy shit that you said during this lunch because you have some very interesting ideas on talent and spec-specifically HR." And so he had this idea. These, these are some notes from this. You should spend some time with him. He goes-- he talks about hiring. He says, "We make it a science." He's talking about what he's doing at Bending Spoons. He has a team of fifty in HR, but they're all engineers.

    8. TRTorsten Reil58:09

       Mm-hmm.

    9. DSDavid Senra58:09

       [laughs] I've never heard of this before. And so what they do is they'll compare one, two, and three-year performance to signals from their CV. So we're-- he's saying, "Hey, you know, we think quality X is really important, but we're just guessing. So what we're gonna do is say we hire this person because of quality X. Well, what's their performance based on all the people we hire from quality X you're twelve months out, twenty-four months out, thirty-six months out?" And he says they actually have developed like this algorithm of a hundred different signals of what they figure like is important for talent. And he's like, "We have completely-

    10. TRTorsten Reil58:40

        That's really cool

    11. DSDavid Senra58:41

        ... we treat it as an engineering process." And then he says, "We cen--" Remember, he has all these different companies, and he's like, "We centralize hiring and firing." And he says talent managers are in charge of both, uh, entries, so com-- people coming into your company, which you just described, and then exits, which you also just described. And he's like, people-- his whole thing was like, you should have brilliant people in HR, that most companies treat HR as this like-

    12. TRTorsten Reil59:03

        Hundred percent

    13. DSDavid Senra59:03

        ... like B, C, D players.

    14. TRTorsten Reil59:05

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra59:05

        He's like, "No, you should have the best people in HR because it's so important."

    16. TRTorsten Reil59:08

        Totally agree. And I think th-this kind of investment taking it so seriously, it's just-- it compounds over time because you just get the best people in. It carries a different culture, and, and it becomes something that, uh, it, it will be-- it, it's central, um, to being, um, successful eventually because especially if you can keep that muscle over time when you grow as a company. It's easy to lose it over time, and we always say kind of a company like Helsing has to shed its skin almost like every nine months, and you have to rethink how you do your processes again. You have to rethink about how you grow, what kind of leadership you need. But if you can keep that kind of investment in, in making sure you have a great intake of people up, it's, it's

11. 59:44 – 1:05:27

    How Torsten Hires Exceptional People

    1. TRTorsten Reil59:44

       super valuable.

    2. DSDavid Senra59:44

       Are one of the co-founders having to approve every hire? How do you guys, how do you do this?

    3. TRTorsten Reil59:48

       We don't have to approve every hire. I think that's too difficult now. I think we, we do get involved in hiring.

    4. DSDavid Senra59:53

       How, how-- I'm gonna argue with you since you like to argue.

    5. TRTorsten Reil59:55

       Yeah.

    6. DSDavid Senra59:55

       You have how many employees?

    7. TRTorsten Reil59:57

       One thousand three hundred.

    8. DSDavid Senra59:57

       Okay, it's not too difficult.

    9. TRTorsten Reil59:58

       Yeah.

    10. DSDavid Senra59:58

        Elon approved the first-- personally approved the first three thousand hires of SpaceX.

    11. TRTorsten Reil1:00:02

        Yeah.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:00:02

        It's in one of the books, the biographies of Elon.

    13. TRTorsten Reil1:00:04

        Apparently, yeah. If-

    14. DSDavid Senra1:00:05

        Yeah

    15. TRTorsten Reil1:00:05

        ... you know, that's great. I, I, we, we don't do it that way. We have, um, very good leadership that is able to make those decisions. Um, it is true that, you know, sometimes we get pulled in, you know, for a second opinion, and it's also true that, uh, we get pulled in, um, to interview people and sometimes to convince, uh, them to come into the company. And then for certain roles, uh, we do a lot of the hiring ourselves. Like, we spend a lot of time, the, the founders and executive team, on hiring.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:00:27

        I want to hear more about this.

    17. TRTorsten Reil1:00:28

        Key positions, um, we, we will sometimes do end-to-end, uh, end-to-end the hiring, um, as, as founders. Um, we, we'll do the search. We work together with search agencies. We work together with our network because they're so important that we want to get it right, and we know that if we get the right person, it'll be transformational for the company. So Daniel also gets involved in our hiring. Um, he, uh, just, um, you know, really played a very big role in hiring one of our most senior executives recently, which worked out really well. So we all chip in. It's so important to get the right people in. It is, again, it's the most important thing.

    18. DSDavid Senra1:01:02

        But if somebody's in front of you, how do you actually know if they're good or not?

    19. TRTorsten Reil1:01:04

        So everyone, I think, has different methods. F-for, for me is I, I try to talk to them, and I try to get a feeling for the person without a standard set of questions. I just try to find whether-- out whether a person is effortless. That's the probably most important person-- uh, uh, ch-characteristic I look for.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:01:20

        Wait, what is effortless? Like-

    21. TRTorsten Reil1:01:21

        You, you-- It's like one of those things-

    22. DSDavid Senra1:01:23

        ... you just kind of-

    23. TRTorsten Reil1:01:23

        ... you can, you can tell if they, if they don't try to impress, if they-- if you get a feeling they have deep knowledge of what they're talking about, and at the same time, they're still curious and have high agency. That's kind of the combination I look for. And com-- That combined to me is effortlessness. And it doesn't-- I don't think it takes that long to, to, to, to find it out. It takes, in a conversation, maybe ten minutes or so to get a good feeling for whether a person is-- has, uh, this, this kind of effortlessness or not. That, that, that's what I look for. But I don't interview, um, software engineers, for example. I, I-- That wouldn't apply there.

    24. DSDavid Senra1:01:56

        But, I mean, you're essentially, uh, I would imagine, involved at the most key positions that you're trying to approve for. What can-- What do you think is happening in these ten minutes?

    25. TRTorsten Reil1:02:05

        Honestly, I haven't thought about it. Um, I don't know. I just, I just try to get a feeling for the person. I don't reflect on these things that much, to be honest. I, I just-- I, I, I know it works for me, and the only thing that matters for me is whether it-- whe-whe-whether the outcome is right. So I, I do look, obviously, at the statistics, 'cause if I kind of came in and I just kind of vibed the whole thing, and everyone, uh, kind of ended up being crap after six months-

    26. DSDavid Senra1:02:27

        [laughs]

    27. TRTorsten Reil1:02:28

        ... obviously, that wouldn't work. But that's not the case. Uh, we, we, um, you know, like all the senior positions are obviously interviewed by all the founders, and so we always have a kind of second and third opinion on it. But we, we tend to agree on people. I think we, we look for similar, similar things. Sometimes you have to go into longer interviews, and people do longer interviews with us as well. For me, it works better if I do short interviews, and I just get a feeling for the person.

    28. DSDavid Senra1:02:51

        Have there been examples where your initial intuition about a person has been proved wrong in, in Helsing in particular?

    29. TRTorsten Reil1:02:58

        Not at Helsing, um, but, uh, three times at NaturalMotion, and I still know the names, and it still really annoys me why I didn't read it, uh, early enough. In, in all three cases, they were so good at faking the effortlessness and, and so good at coming up with, um, fake facts that I didn't read through it.

    30. DSDavid Senra1:03:19

        I heard you say something on, uh, Harry's podcast, that you actually think there's a lot more exceptional people out there than other people believe, especially if you have a couple thousand employees.
12. 1:05:27 – 1:07:38

    Helsing's Culture: Whatever It Takes & Truth Is in the Field

    1. DSDavid Senra1:05:27

       Based on the conversations we had, the way I would summarize your perspective on this, 'cause you talk about this a lot, it's like talent density above everything else.

    2. TRTorsten Reil1:05:33

       Yeah. I think it's the number one thing. It's, it's-- I, I, I feel that culture comes from talent density. It, it's-- We had a situation, I don't know, maybe it was eighteen or twenty-four months ago or so, where we, we had a set of values, um, at, at Helsing that we came up with at some point, I think in a workshop or so, and they were on our website, and they were fine, I think. And then, um, we had one of our get-togethers where the whole company got together, and a, a bunch of people came and said, "We want to rewrite our values. We want to throw the old ones away. We know now what Helsing is about, and we want to, like, do it completely differently." And, and then, so at this get-together, there was this workshop, and I have to say I was dreading it 'cause I didn't want to do another-

    3. DSDavid Senra1:06:14

       [laughs]

    4. TRTorsten Reil1:06:14

       ... value session 'cause I never like them. And it was effortless. Like, the, the, the team came up with their own values based on their experiences, and it wasn't one of those exercises where you, where you kind of all contributed ideas. It was just kind of a mind meld, and it was clear this is what it was going to be. And, um, and, and the top value was, uh, whatever it takes. And then everyone gave examples for what-- why that was. Some had just come back, um, you know, from the frontline in Ukraine. Some had not slept for forty-eight hours, um, and, and, and done a whole bunch of things that are just, um, amazing and impressive. And so that, that, that was one that came out of it. Another one that came out of it was the truth is in the field. Like, it doesn't matter how much you claim that your system, uh, works, um, you know, in, in tests and government tests, et cetera. W-we found out it has to work in reality and in combat, and, and so the truth is in the field came out of that. And I was so impressed by the team, and I, I was kind of thinking like, how do you- How did that part of the culture come about? And i- as far as I can tell, it came about because a bunch of really good people got together, really cared about this stuff, had initiative, and thought about it, and then they came up with it. It, it, it was just that. I think just getting really good people together that have good chemistry and when they, when they sometimes maybe have the sparks flying, they can find a way to work together again. That's what

13. 1:07:38 – 1:10:50

    Deploying in Ukraine & the Weight of Defense Technology

    1. TRTorsten Reil1:07:38

       creates culture.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:07:38

       So you have this idea to start this European defense company. You have ideas for the products you wanna build. You raise money. So then you go from the idea to now your products are actually being used in Ukraine for the first time. Do you remember the first time that you found out that your product was being used there? Where were you, and then what that felt like?

    3. TRTorsten Reil1:07:58

       We knew from our team in the field, and, um, I do, and everyone thinks differently about these things, I think. Um, a-and, and I respect, I think, most attitudes towards it. I, I've personally found it very difficult. I think it became a more serious company, and, like, some of the kind of lightheartedness, uh, you know, was gone a little bit because if you, if you build a video games company or a SaaS company, uh, you can be, you can be quite light-hearted about things and, and unserious. Yes, it's a commercial business, but, um, you know, you, you can be. It, it fits culturally. If you are deployed in what fundamentally is a sad thing, um, this kind of conflict, uh, and you contribute to it because you, you have to, um, because you can think it through from first principles, but in my opinion, it's still sad that it happens. Um, that makes it a serious-- you know, changes the culture. And we are, um, I think, very aware of it, and, um, that doesn't mean that we don't want to create the best systems. Of course we do. Um, and doesn't mean that we are not super ambitious. We are, but it is serious. It's very serious. We don't take it lightly.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:09:03

       All right, so you've used the word deterrent multiple times throughout this conversation. So that means the best possible outcome for Helsing is nothing happens.

    5. TRTorsten Reil1:09:11

       Yeah, you, you don't want a conflict, and, um, you know, in general, obviously, the, the, the reason why you build capabilities is in order to avoid conflict, not to use them in a fight.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:09:23

       Which this goes back to this dinner we had, like, two years ago, this argument we were having, uh, about this, the fact that war has been, you know, constant throughout human history. So, like, what actually has to take place in your mind for that outcome to actually happen, where it's like, no, there is no more human conflict?

    7. TRTorsten Reil1:09:42

       I mean, that's a big question. Um, i-i-I do think it's in human nature to, um, have at least parts of the population that want to have conflict, that enjoy conflict, that want to, uh, you know, increase their, um, sphere of influence. Uh, sometimes, you know, that is political. Sometimes it's geographical. Sometimes you just literally want to have more land around you. I think that is partly cultural, but it's also partly hardwired into a part, at least, of the population and, and, and will probably be, um, genetic in a part of the population. In order for that not to dominate everything else, uh, you need to make sure that the rest of the population is, is sufficiently protected so that it's too expensive to try and, you know, use force to take what you want. That's basically what it boils down to. And if you could eliminate, um, you know, the outliers, let's say, who, who really are that aggressive and want to use force, then, you know, I think forever you'd have peace. It's unlikely you can eliminate it. I think it's more likely that you have to contain them. And I think that's okay, as long as you see it early enough that you have to contain them, and you, and you are able to look very prickly to them so that you-- they don't attack.

14. 1:10:50 – 1:18:33

    NaturalMotion, Gaming & Torsten's Path Into AI

    1. DSDavid Senra1:10:50

       We mentioned, um, your previous company a few times, and you said something when you guys were developing the autonomous fighter jet, that you used a very similar technique that Demis used to do AlphaGo. I just finished reading this biography of Demis. It's interesting to me that he got started-- his first introduction to AI was through video games. Yours was, too. Some of the best entrepreneurs come from gaming. What do you think it is about that?

    2. TRTorsten Reil1:11:16

       Yeah, and I think, uh, arguably, um, Palmer Luckey did, too.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:11:18

       Yeah.

    4. TRTorsten Reil1:11:19

       I mean, he's, um, certainly very cl-close to the gaming industry. Um, gaming companies are complex to build because you, you marry art with technology and in many cases, um, especially, you know, console games, you know, back in the day. Today it's a bit different with some of the most, I would say, sophisticated IT, um, projects, um, that, that you could think of, and at the same time, they had to have artistic value as well, and you had to accommodate, you know, people from all walks of life, like, um, you know, very focused software engineers with, um, you know, artists who, um, you know, just try to create something beautiful. And that is not dissimilar to what happens in, in the defense industry. Um, you know, may-may-maybe a little bit less artistry, although that exists as well. But we have very different people, um, that work on very complex systems that have very different cultural backgrounds and still need to work together to produce something amazing in the end. I, I think that's, that's one part. And maybe it's also exposure to, um, defense through games. I don't know. A lot of, a lot of games are, you know, have a, have a military, military, um, theme. Maybe that's part of it as well.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:12:22

       Explain the, the founding of your first company. Like, what was happening right in, uh, in your life right before you started that one though?

    6. TRTorsten Reil1:12:28

       I was studying in the UK and, um, I, I was working on... In biology, I was working on systems, on simulations that, um, simulated neural networks.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:12:38

       In what year?

    8. TRTorsten Reil1:12:39

       The year was 1999. [laughs]

    9. DSDavid Senra1:12:43

       So wait, you were working on simulating neural networks in '99?

    10. TRTorsten Reil1:12:45

        Yeah, using genetic algorithms. I was looking to optimize them, um, to, to do something useful.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:12:50

        Why were you interested in that to begin with?

    12. TRTorsten Reil1:12:52

        I liked complex systems, so I was-- I, I had just started a PhD in complex systems in biology, and neural networks are a complex system, and, and specifically the ones I looked at were fully recurrent neural networks, so ones that, um, you know, with the right weights could start to create spontaneous cyclic activity. So they started to-

    13. DSDavid Senra1:13:09

        Is that not what you just described on the fighter jet?

    14. TRTorsten Reil1:13:11

        Uh, well, it has some similarity because the, the So genetic algorithms have fallen out of favor as a search, um, algorithm, and now it's almost entirely, um, reinforcement learning. But you could theoretically also use, um, genetic algorithms. So there, there's definitely some similarity. The network architectures are different. Um, back then, I, I based my network architectures on, on biological, what's called central pattern generators, so CPGs. They are the, the neural structures that create, um, rhythmic movement for, um, you know, for, for, for walking, for your heartbeat and, and, and a bunch of other things. And so I tried to recreate one of these for walking, um, using genetic algorithms and a neural network, a quite simple neural network, to optimize the weights. And in order to see whether it worked, I hooked it up to physically simulated creatures, um, you know, very simple four-legged and then two-legged creatures. Uh, physics engines had just started back then with, you know, MathEngine and Havok and, and other companies. And to my surprise, it ended up working quite well. So overnight, um, I remember it's, it's quite rare that you have these eureka moments, but I had this thing set up overnight, and those computers were very slow back then. Um, and then the next morning when I looked at the experiment, I, I literally had this two-legged creature walk over the screen fully physically simulated. You know, did a bit more research, um, you know, in that area and then realized this was gonna work very well and, and thought I'd spin out a company to use these things as virtual stuntmen in, in movie scenes.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:14:37

        So if I go back to you at ninety-nine, did you have any inclination that one day you'd be a founder, an entrepreneur?

    16. TRTorsten Reil1:14:42

        No, no, not at that point.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:14:43

        What, what did-- what did that person in, in ninety-nine think that they were gonna do?

    18. TRTorsten Reil1:14:48

        I thought I was gonna be a scientist. I, I, I wanted to, um, to stay in, in science and, and be a biologist and, and specifically do, um, software and simulation work in biology. That's what I wanted to do.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:14:58

        Okay. But then you have this eureka moment, and your first thought is, "I'm gonna start a company"?

    20. TRTorsten Reil1:15:04

        It wasn't my first thought. It, it took a little bit of time, but, um, this was the [chuckles] time of the dot-com boom, and everyone wants to start a company [laughing] .

    21. DSDavid Senra1:15:11

        Ninety-nine was an important point.

    22. TRTorsten Reil1:15:12

        Yeah.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:15:12

        Okay.

    24. TRTorsten Reil1:15:12

        Yeah. It, it was still, um, you know, it, it like-- it looked like you could do that kind of thing. Um, and it was inspiring to see lots of other people start companies. And so I started NaturalMotion, and, um, we first used it, uh, you know-- We, we produced a software called Endorphin that was used in, in big Hollywood movies like Lord of the Rings, Troy, um, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, and that was fun and, and great, but, um, it didn't make much money, uh, 'cause we only-- I think we charged fifty thousand dollars per license, and they ended up kind of doing all of their scenes with them. Um, and it, it was clear that the real value was going to be in using that technology for, for games in, in real time. And, uh, RockStar Games were one of our customers for, you know, for the old tool, Endorphin, and they asked us, "Do you have a version that runs in real time on the upcoming consoles?" And, and we said, "K-kind of." And, and so then we started a long collaboration with, with RockStar Games who, who ended up using our technology in GTA IV, GTA V, Red Dead Redemption, and, and the whole range of other games. And then that company grew, and it grew faster than before, but it still didn't have the, um, the kind of takeoff, the kind of liftoff characteristics that I kind of was hoping for as a founder. You always kind of obviously hope for more of a hockey stick thing. And, and it felt like the kind of chess pieces were kind of drawing in, and it was gonna be hard to move. So, so we ended up saying like we need to make games ourselves and, and what you would now call vertically integrate. We didn't think about it that way. We, we felt like we were so inspired and learned so much from RockStar Games that we thought, "How hard can it be?" It turns out to be quite hard, but it ended up working quite well. Um, we acqui-hired a games team, um, did the first games. The iPhone came out, and then we had a string of hit games on iPhone and then a big breakthrough, um, which, which was in a completely different area. All of our previous games had been in characters 'cause that was our technology. And then there was one game that I really wanted to make 'cause I was really into cars, uh, which was a drag racing game, um, so a, a car racing game without any steering, and, and that became by far our biggest hit. It's called CSR Racing, and, um, became the biggest game of all time on iPhone at the time, and it-- that gave us the hockey stick. Then it was liftoff for the company, and then it was off, and it became a completely different experience.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:17:28

        I, I feel there's, uh, some like a theme connecting here, and I still don't have an understanding of this. So you'll see this in all these biographies that I read, right? So I'm reading one right now. It's a guy named Raymond Plank, right? So when he's ninety years old and he starts this company called Apache Corporation with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 1954. By the time the book is published, you know, fifty years later, it's like a thirty billion dollar company. And his insight was he was a tax, uh, tax planner and accountant, and some of, uh, the businesses that he was working with were these new American oil companies, and he realized there's these huge tax incentives that were taking place in America at post-World War II. At the same time, you had tax benefits if you would invest in oil discoveries because the, the United States was trying to incentivize domestic oil production. And at the same time, uh, because there's so much debt after World War II, they increased the top marginal tax rate to like ninety percent. And so the very wealthy people were trying to find ways to offset, and that was the, the original idea. Like he discovered Apache Corporation, which winds up being this massive oil and gas company because of the work that he was doing in tax planning and accounting for re-relatively

15. 1:18:33 – 1:20:54

    Outsiders, First Principles & Ambitious North Stars

    1. DSDavid Senra1:18:33

       small businesses.

    2. TRTorsten Reil1:18:33

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:18:33

       I feel there is some kind of connection between your first company and your second that I'm trying to get to. Am I just wrong on this?

    4. TRTorsten Reil1:18:40

       So I don't think it was that direct necessarily. O-o-one theme that I've always felt with everything I ended up doing is I, I think is that I ended up doing something slightly different to maybe what the mainstream was. And part of the reason is I've never felt kind of part of the group, of the peer group. Like I, I never as a biologist... And I did a lot of biology and I loved it, but I never really felt like I was like part of the bi-biology group, and that made it a little bit easier to do different things. That's why I ended up just doing software and simulation rather than go out into the field and, and watch animals and, um, dissect animals. I never liked that stuff. I wanted to do something slightly different stuff. Uh, with gaming, I also never felt part of the, the gaming group and culture the same way. And as a result, I think we ended up doing quite different games that... I remember, like our-- the pricing for our games was very different to anyone else's. We-

    5. DSDavid Senra1:19:26

       The pricing?

    6. TRTorsten Reil1:19:27

       Yeah. The, the first games that we made, we priced as low as we possibly could because we felt that, um, we, we just maximized revenues that way. And everyone else in the games industry said, "No, your game needs to have a value. Like your, your mobile game needs to be at least five dollars so that people feel it has a value." And it never made sense to me because all I wanted to do was maximize revenues, and I felt like, um, there was so much pr-price elasticity that we could just go all the way down and people would spend, uh... Overall, we would make much more money because we'd have much more people. So we, we sold our game for ninety-nine cents, the cheapest that was possible. And then when free-to-play came, we were the first big three free-to-play 3D game, and we made it free and then charged money elsewhere. And that would have been much harder had we been part of the group. And, and I think a similar thing is also true for defense. It would be much harder for us to build Helsing if the founder backgrounds had already been in defense companies. Just much harder. It's easier to be an outsider. That maybe is a parallel. But then the other thing is like, I always try to do things that are, that are different and sometimes cool. Like I wanted to... Like, I really wanted to do the number one top-grossing game in the world. I remember sitting-- like standing in the shower at, at one point in, in the UK and thinking, "I would like to do the number one top-grossing game." It was just a goal. Um, and, and, and with Helsing, I think we all b-- want to build a company that has impact. So I think that's similar, too. You just kind of want to have those goals. You want to have a bit of a North Star and then, um, and then go for it.

16. 1:20:54 – 1:23:54

    Why Commentary Is Worthless & Founders Should Build

    1. DSDavid Senra1:20:54

       Okay. I love that you use the word North Star. The-- one other-- I think probably the last thing I want to talk to you about today is I've heard you say this-- essentially this criticism of like this LinkedIn or X commentary culture, that commentary is actually relatively worthless or completely worthless. What's your opinion on this and like, can you just expound on that?

    2. TRTorsten Reil1:21:13

       Yeah, I think commentary is entirely worthless and, um, uh, it has almost-- it has no positive contribution. The only thing that it does is it, uh... I think it drags some people down. Uh, so it has a net negative, um, benefit, and it obviously is, is encouraged through, um, you know, the way the social platforms are, um, uh, you know, incentivizing contributors. So you're incentivized if you comment, and particularly if you comment negatively, um, uh, but you're not incentivized, you know, to be a creator. And I don't complain about this, um, because it is what it is and, you know, they should do what they want. But I do think that creators are still somewhat undervalued, um, and commentators are still overvalued because they get so much airtime. Um, and, and there are many of them now, I think even more than, than before. And it, it contributed to some of the European, I think, um, perceived malaise, um, you know, people talking themselves and each other down. I just had this the other day. Again, I was just in a car with someone who, who was actually a-- is, is, is a great entrepreneur, but he himself just kept on commenting on how bad certain things are. Uh, but there's no point in commenting about it. It's-- it, it, it creates zero value. You either do something about it or you don't talk about it. Um, but if you don't do, um, either, um, then, yeah, I don't think it's-- I, I, I don't think it's a good contribution. Just commenting on negative stuff is not useful.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:22:33

       What would your advice be to do then?

    4. TRTorsten Reil1:22:35

       Just to focus on building your company. I, I always think that, um, you, you have a real privilege as a founder that you can make a difference. You know, depending on, on which sector you're in, you can make big differences in the way a society works. Like arguably, all the social networks have made a massive difference, for better or for worse. All the AI companies are making a massive difference. Many health companies, I think defense companies are making a big difference too. Uh, and if you are a founder that, um, is very ambitious and you're in one of those fields, you can change society and not many categories of people can do that. Um, politicians can as well. Certain types of other people can as well, sometimes even investors. But, um, founders, I think, have the biggest lever. And if you-- That's also why you have so few founders, I think, on Twitter and, and, uh, and, and, and other social platforms because it's already very satisfying to do the stuff that you do. You don't then need to comment on how bad everything is. You just do your stuff and it has an impact.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:23:28

       That's the perfect place to end. Thanks for making the time.

    6. TRTorsten Reil1:23:30

       Cool. Thank you.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:23:31

       I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over four hundred biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders. [outro jingle]

Episode duration: 1:23:54