The Exchanges

Q Can I ask a spicy question early? Why aren't Index on your cap table at all?

A The reason about Index is simple. All of the people at Index are my friends and they were already helping me. And in a way, I already knew the way they were thinking. And so for me, it was really important to bring new people, fresh ideas to the table. And it's the same, I think for everything I do at Pigment today, it's like, I'm not hiring my friends at Pigment. I'm hiring people that I don't know about that can bring things that I don't know. And in VC, something that I think is critical is to find people that can challenge you every day. And you know, if I think about people like Martin Mignot that I absolutely love or Yann or other people, well, in a way they are more friends now than anything, and I wanted people that could be really true to me.

AI assessment note: “The reason about Index is simple. All of the people at Index are my friends”

Q you know, and you find things out that you're like, actually, I had no idea about that. And so in the context that I found, I was listening to a show you did in French, which was a challenge for me. And I heard that you essentially had a back injury and that led to the founding of Pigment. How did the back injury lead to the founding of Pigment?

A Oh, yeah, very good question. Yeah, I don't tell this story very often, but it happened that I had to be in bed for one year. That was just before Pigment. I had to go through three surgeries in one row. It was the first time, I think, in my life that I could actually settle. So I was at Index Venture at the time, and that happened to me, and I had to settle and think. And so I started to think, and it was the first time I could be like, what do I want to do next? And that's what I, that's where I had time to actually say that's Now I want to be a founder. And so I took the time to really think about that, think about what I wanted to do next, what type of adventure, and more importantly, who I would like to do that with. And this is where I started to do my list of who I would like to fund the company with, and that's how I found Romain.

AI assessment note: “I had to be in bed for one year... first time, I think, in my life that I could actually settle.”

Q Can I ask a spicy question early? Why aren't Index on your cap table at all?

A The reason about Index is simple. All of the people at Index are my friends and they were already helping me. And in a way, I already knew the way they were thinking. And so for me, it was really important to bring new people, fresh ideas to the table. And it's the same, I think for everything I do at Pigment today, it's like, I'm not hiring my friends at Pigment. I'm hiring people that I don't know about that can bring things that I don't know. And in VC, something that I think is critical is to find people that can challenge you every day. And you know, if I think about people like Martin Mignot that I absolutely love or Yann or other people, well, in a way they are more friends now than anything, and I wanted people that could be really true to me.

AI assessment note: “for me, it was really important to bring new people, fresh ideas to the table”

Q What are your biggest lessons on title? People can often have egos associated. I want to be head of sales. I want to be VP of sales. What are your lessons on titles, when to give them, when not, and what it says about a candidate?

A I don't like when someone asks me for their titles. Definitely not. I really don't like that because I think no matter what is the stage of the company, a person should come not for their own ego and their own agenda, but because they want to build something great. I want someone that comes for the journey, for the mission, for saying, I'm here to have an impact at Pigment, and I know that if you hire me, it's because you want me to have an impact, and the rest doesn't matter. The titles should be reserved for very large companies. Internally, I, I do believe that being horizontal as a company is, is key for your success. The day you start having people that think about that, you are in politics, and that's what you should avoid.

AI assessment note: “The titles should be reserved for very large companies.”

Q I don't think most do know what they're looking for in the role. And I also think most are hiring for roles that they don't know what great is. Say it's a sales led founder and they don't know what a great CTO actually looks like. What's your advice for hiring execs or just talented people in roles where it's not your speciality?

A So the advice is to talk to 20 people in the field, 50 people, and ask them for what are the best questions. But guess what? Now, the thing is, even I think with AI platforms out there, you can refine so much what you are looking for as well. You can explain, you can even put profiles in there and say, I'm looking for someone like that. What traits do they have? Etc. But for me, the biggest advice is go human to human. Ask, when you're hiring your CRO, ask the 20 best CROs out there. Best CROs, again, in your category. What have they done so great? What makes them so different? That's really my number one advice to anyone. Do your rubric, do a CRO rubric, do a CMO rubric, do a CFO rubric based on questions that other people will have told you about, will have told you what to ask. And that's what I do for every single role. And I have, what I do is very, very precise. It's not only like questions that I write down. I put the question and then I put them into different parts. And then I ask my execs that are going to be part of the process. To really focus on every part, and depending on how that interview went, on what question there, then I refined. So every process is tailored to the person to say, okay, he actually failed in these two questions. She actually did super well there. What do we ask next? How do we go to the next part? Because the next part will vary. That's a lo…

AI assessment note: “So the advice is to talk to 20 people in the field”

Q Everyone in Europe says the biggest problem with Europe is that we don't have senior execs who've seen scale before. And that's what's stopping the next generation of companies scaling into really big companies. Do you think that's true?

A It's probably partially true. My full executive team pretty much is in the US. I think that there are specific jobs that we have very small pools of talents in Europe. So we were talking about marketing, PR, comms, enablement. There are several, I think, roles where unfortunately we haven't seen Scale enough, I would say, especially when you think like SaaS, BtoB, et cetera, and where clearly there is a lot we can learn from other countries still. But there are things where we have big competitive advantages too. So I think you always have to pick the best of both worlds and make sure that you know, again, going back to what we're saying about talent, where to find the biggest pool of talents for the role you're looking for.

AI assessment note: “It's probably partially true. My full executive team pretty much is in the US.”

Q I don't think most do know what they're looking for in the role. And I also think most are hiring for roles that they don't know what great is. Say it's a sales led founder and they don't know what a great CTO actually looks like. What's your advice for hiring execs or just talented people in roles where it's not your speciality?

A So the advice is to talk to 20 people in the field, 50 people, and ask them for what are the best questions. But guess what? Now, the thing is, even I think with AI platforms out there, you can refine so much what you are looking for as well. You can explain, you can even put profiles in there and say, I'm looking for someone like that. What traits do they have? Etc. But for me, the biggest advice is go human to human. Ask, when you're hiring your CRO, ask the 20 best CROs out there. Best CROs, again, in your category. What have they done so great? What makes them so different? That's really my number one advice to anyone. Do your rubric, do a CRO rubric, do a CMO rubric, do a CFO rubric based on questions that other people will have told you about, will have told you what to ask. And that's what I do for every single role. And I have, what I do is very, very precise. It's not only like questions that I write down. I put the question and then I put them into different parts. And then I ask my execs that are going to be part of the process. To really focus on every part, and depending on how that interview went, on what question there, then I refined. So every process is tailored to the person to say, okay, he actually failed in these two questions. She actually did super well there. What do we ask next? How do we go to the next part? Because the next part will vary. That's a lo…

AI assessment note: “So the advice is to talk to 20 people in the field”

Q Everyone in Europe says the biggest problem with Europe is that we don't have senior execs who've seen scale before. And that's what's stopping the next generation of companies scaling into really big companies. Do you think that's true?

A It's probably partially true. My full executive team pretty much is in the US. I think that there are specific jobs that we have very small pools of talents in Europe. So we were talking about marketing, PR, comms, enablement. There are several, I think, roles where unfortunately we haven't seen Scale enough, I would say, especially when you think like SaaS, BtoB, et cetera, and where clearly there is a lot we can learn from other countries still. But there are things where we have big competitive advantages too. So I think you always have to pick the best of both worlds and make sure that you know, again, going back to what we're saying about talent, where to find the biggest pool of talents for the role you're looking for.

AI assessment note: “It's probably partially true. My full executive team pretty much is in the US.”

Q What's your biggest advice to founders on secondaries? There's different thoughts on whether it's right, how much is right, what advice is good for different stages. How do you think about it, and how does having a little bit change your mindset?

A I think the best founders anyway out there, they are never here for the money. Money doesn't buy them anything, and they are just here to keep going, and sometimes maybe they would do secondary to actually have an amazing person Coming into the round. So it might even be something completely different, a good reason to do it. But I would say always think about what will put your mind at ease on making sure you can focus all of your time and energy on building the company. For me, it was about an apartment and some logistics to make sure I had a lot of my logistics ready to take care of my kids, build an amazing company.

AI assessment note: “always think about what will put your mind at ease on making sure you can focus”

Q Do you not want to have that thought partner where you can come home and say, ah, you know, we lost X client, and he goes, oh no, why, what happened?

A The, the only thing he knows about is things that are very serious, that are And losing a customer, of course, it's a big problem for Pigment, but is it a big problem for my life? Probably not, you know. So I always think what is critical, what is really the biggest problem at Pigment for me are always people problem when someone comes to me and tell me that, you know, they have a huge health issue or that, you know, something is going very wrong in their life or, you know, these are the things that I'm super worried about or where I have a big people problem. The rest I would say is You know, he doesn't even know I'm on the show today. Like he doesn't know anything about, about what I do. And that's our way of working. It's just that when I go home, I don't have a lot of time with him. I don't have a lot of time with the kid at all. So we optimize to be a family and to talk about what it is to be a family.

AI assessment note: “he doesn't know anything about, about what I do. And that's our way of working.”

Q you know, and you find things out that you're like, actually, I had no idea about that. And so in the context that I found, I was listening to a show you did in French, which was a challenge for me. And I heard that you essentially had a back injury and that led to the founding of Pigment. How did the back injury lead to the founding of Pigment?

A Oh, yeah, very good question. Yeah, I don't tell this story very often, but it happened that I had to be in bed for one year. That was just before Pigment. I had to go through three surgeries in one row. It was the first time, I think, in my life that I could actually settle. So I was at Index Venture at the time, and that happened to me, and I had to settle and think. And so I started to think, and it was the first time I could be like, what do I want to do next? And that's what I, that's where I had time to actually say that's Now I want to be a founder. And so I took the time to really think about that, think about what I wanted to do next, what type of adventure, and more importantly, who I would like to do that with. And this is where I started to do my list of who I would like to fund the company with, and that's how I found Romain.

AI assessment note: “I had to be in bed for one year... and I had to settle and think.”

Q When you thought about the complementary elements, that's the incredible experience of taking a company public, being this incredible technology leader. The question I have is, how do you think about when to value experiences as a positive versus when experience can actually hold you back? When a playbook no longer works in a world of AI, technology stats are changing fast and ever. When is it good versus bad?

A I would say, so first of all, having seen the movie always help. Let's be clear. When I hire my executive today, I always try to find people that have seen the movie One time, at least, uh, that, you know, I've scaled so from where I am in terms of AR to, like, multiple billion, if possible, because they will have learned things in the journey of building. So I still think that there is incredible value when you see that. You see that also with some repeat founders. You see, uh, the founder of Wiz, and you see other people. They've seen it. They are not first-time founders. And I can tell you that with Romain, he's probably my number one mentor. I learn from him every day. Every day, I avoid one mistake because of him. But the most important It's to have a value, which we have at Pigment, which is curiosity and never settle. That's what makes the difference, is to find a co-founder, if he has already seen the experience, that never settle, and always try to learn to be better, and always try to adapt. And with Romain, there is not a single day where I don't call him and ask him, how can we do better here? What can we do differently? After the show, I'm going to ask you, Ari, what can we do differently here? What did I do wrong? And that's the most important, and that's what, what makes Romain so great, is that he doesn't come With his own assumption about, I've done Criteo, I k…

AI assessment note: “That's what makes the difference... that never settle, and always try to adapt”

Q What are your biggest lessons on title? People can often have egos associated. I want to be head of sales. I want to be VP of sales. What are your lessons on titles, when to give them, when not, and what it says about a candidate?

A I don't like when someone asks me for their titles. Definitely not. I really don't like that because I think no matter what is the stage of the company, a person should come not for their own ego and their own agenda, but because they want to build something great. I want someone that comes for the journey, for the mission, for saying, I'm here to have an impact at Pigment, and I know that if you hire me, it's because you want me to have an impact, and the rest doesn't matter. The titles should be reserved for very large companies. Internally, I, I do believe that being horizontal as a company is, is key for your success. The day you start having people that think about that, you are in politics, and that's what you should avoid.

AI assessment note: “I don't like when someone asks me for their titles. Definitely not.”

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

A Probably on the way enterprises think about AI, in the sense that we saw that companies were very serious about AI day one, but I think I didn't understand to which angle they actually didn't know anything about how to be serious about AI. I understood now how much we need to actually help them Understand how to use AI for their own good. So I can give you a concrete example for Pigment. A lot of customers were telling me, um, AI is going to, uh, it's super hard to use AI in finance because AI is going to do so many mistakes and it's impossible. And then, you know, you think about that, you're like, wait a minute. Today, all of your analysts are doing hundreds of mistakes. AI is actually going to remove the part of like preparing the data. So we are, for instance, with Pigment, you know, we have our agents. So with our agents, we are removing a lot of manual tasks. And now the analyst has actually time to check more their data, to reflect on their data, to do more business partnering, to understand where to go, what is right, have more of a critical mindset. So I would say, of course, AI will perhaps never give you like the most perfect answer, but oh gosh, now you will have time to think if it's a perfect answer or not. So I would say I, you know, I really understood that a lot of companies were not thinking the right way about where AI could bring value on and how.

AI assessment note: “Probably on the way enterprises think about AI”

Q What do you think is the biggest BS element told to European founders about winning in the US?

A A lot of people say it's harder than you think, where I think it's actually easier than you think. Because I said it's hard, yes, but it's easier than in Europe. People buy faster. People buy and are very brave to have the courage to actually go in front of the leadership team and say, in order to be successful, I need the best technology. I think a lot of companies in the US are wired this way. And so they are not buying a brand. They are not thinking, oh, I'm going to buy SAP or IBM because the brand is trustworthy. They understand the power of the, the biggest technology. I can give you a fun example. Um, it was actually, so one of our largest deal at Pigment. I was at the Olympic games at the ceremony of the Olympic games. Okay. It's pouring rain. We are with customers. We are all, you remember, it was like hell. So we were there. The ceremony finishes quite late. It was probably midnight. And then like Paris was completely locked down. I had to go back home Pretty much walking, then I take the subway super far, so I'm in the subway, I'm drenched, I'm, I'm completely soaked, and I receive an email, and it's probably about one 30 in the morning, from one of the biggest tech CEOs in the Valley, ok, of the, one of the largest tech companies out there. He's like, can I call you now? Make sure. And he calls me, and it's two a.m. He says, Eleanor, I want to do the biggest rip and…

AI assessment note: “A lot of people say it's harder than you think, where I think it's actually easier”

Q Your husband must feel rather unloved. I do just want to go back to the index days in a way and just say, you saw so many founders that were great when you were working at index. How did being an investor change the type of founder that you are?

A Completely. I think I would be so different if I hadn't been at Index. Index was the best school of life for me. It's something I would advise to any founder, pretty much being a VC, because it created so many things. First of all, I think I saw what amazing looks like. I was very lucky to be close to people like Olivier at Datalog or Dylan at Figma. I learned to Peter at ADN. I learned to see how they would do, and I still learn today from them, and it gives you an edge. That nobody else on earth is capable of seeing what great looks like and what it takes. So I learned, first of all, so much from them, and then I learned what makes them so great. Yuri Milner visited me yesterday in Paris, and I was asking me, I was like, what do you think are the best founders out there? And so he gave me four things that he thinks makes the best founder. So can you guess what they are?

AI assessment note: “I think I saw what amazing looks like. I was very lucky to be close”

Q We hear of, like, A player, B player, you know, all these kind of, I don't love the letters assigned to it, but I do wonder, can you truly scale an organization to 400 A players, and in which case, where is it ok to have a B player versus it has to be an A style player?

A If you apply very strong principles, I think you can really keep the pace of A player still at that size. I think we are not at a size where we can afford actually B or C player. Second is when we don't, we have to realize that fast. Making sure that very early on you identify when someone is not an A, and then really trying to think how is that going to impact the organization. If that person becomes a manager tomorrow, you know that the team obviously that they will hire will definitely not be at the right A skill set that you are expecting for. It's about being very, very fast at managing performance. And it's also being, have the courage, the managerial courage to finger point what is wrong in the organization. At Pigment, last week with my leadership team, I went to them all and I said, we have too much politics at Pigment. How can we solve that? You find me three examples each of where we have politics. You tell me where, you tell me in which team, and we try to fix that.

AI assessment note: “I think we are not at a size where we can afford actually B or C player.”

Q How does that make you think on dilution? Founders would say, God, if you've got two prior fundraisers of cash, you're not optimizing for dilution. That's inefficient.

A I could not care less for a couple of reasons. I would say I'm not being doing this money for money, first of all. So do I care that my financial outcome is X, Y, Z? I don't care at all. Okay. I'm here to build a big company, a massive business. I want to build a company that scales for the next 30 years, and I want the best people around the table. So I will never, you know, take the best term sheet based on, on whatever is written in there, because you just want the best people on your board. You want the best people to build an engineering company. The dilution that you get today anyway. What do you know what's going to happen if one day you go public, maybe you will get priced twice as much with one bank. It doesn't matter at all. What matters though is to put in place the white governance early. So making sure, for instance, that when you create your shareholder agreement, maybe you can make sure that if one day you are public, you don't have activist investors that can actually knock at the door and get in your cap table. These are probably the thing to worry about more than you as a founder, because it could not matter less. Again, what you should only care about if you really like what you do is innovation, impact for your customers, and building something massive.

AI assessment note: “I could not care less for a couple of reasons.”

Q And then you raised like a big round after that. Yeah. What is your biggest lessons, advice, thoughts, having raised quite a lot quite early?

A I would say never me wanting to raise, first of all. So we got all of our rounds preempted by investors. I'm very lucky to have a big network of investors because of my past. So we got preempted. And the reason why we raised was always because of my co-founder who is paranoid. And I would say not because I would say thanks to him. He has seen the movie and I think he has seen that when you create a company, one of the key is to always have money to keep innovating and you never know what tomorrow looks like. So it's better to have good cash in your bank account than, than being in a very difficult position two years time, et cetera. So he always pushed me actually to have more than less. So every time we raised, we always had The money from at least the past fundraising, if not the past two fundraising, but that has always been in order to be able to see what the future will look like. So I don't really regret the large rounds or anything.

AI assessment note: “it's better to have good cash in your bank account”

Q And then you raised like a big round after that. Yeah. What is your biggest lessons, advice, thoughts, having raised quite a lot quite early?

A I would say never me wanting to raise, first of all. So we got all of our rounds preempted by investors. I'm very lucky to have a big network of investors because of my past. So we got preempted. And the reason why we raised was always because of my co-founder who is paranoid. And I would say not because I would say thanks to him. He has seen the movie and I think he has seen that when you create a company, one of the key is to always have money to keep innovating and you never know what tomorrow looks like. So it's better to have good cash in your bank account than, than being in a very difficult position two years time, et cetera. So he always pushed me actually to have more than less. So every time we raised, we always had The money from at least the past fundraising, if not the past two fundraising, but that has always been in order to be able to see what the future will look like. So I don't really regret the large rounds or anything.

AI assessment note: “better to have good cash in your bank account than, than being in a very difficult position”

Q How does that make you think on dilution? Founders would say, God, if you've got two prior fundraisers of cash, you're not optimizing for dilution. That's inefficient.

A I could not care less for a couple of reasons. I would say I'm not being doing this money for money, first of all. So do I care that my financial outcome is X, Y, Z? I don't care at all. Okay. I'm here to build a big company, a massive business. I want to build a company that scales for the next 30 years, and I want the best people around the table. So I will never, you know, take the best term sheet based on, on whatever is written in there, because you just want the best people on your board. You want the best people to build an engineering company. The dilution that you get today anyway. What do you know what's going to happen if one day you go public, maybe you will get priced twice as much with one bank. It doesn't matter at all. What matters though is to put in place the white governance early. So making sure, for instance, that when you create your shareholder agreement, maybe you can make sure that if one day you are public, you don't have activist investors that can actually knock at the door and get in your cap table. These are probably the thing to worry about more than you as a founder, because it could not matter less. Again, what you should only care about if you really like what you do is innovation, impact for your customers, and building something massive.

AI assessment note: “I could not care less for a couple of reasons.”

Q What do you think is the biggest BS element told to European founders about winning in the US?

A A lot of people say it's harder than you think, where I think it's actually easier than you think. Because I said it's hard, yes, but it's easier than in Europe. People buy faster. People buy and are very brave to have the courage to actually go in front of the leadership team and say, in order to be successful, I need the best technology. I think a lot of companies in the US are wired this way. And so they are not buying a brand. They are not thinking, oh, I'm going to buy SAP or IBM because the brand is trustworthy. They understand the power of the, the biggest technology. I can give you a fun example. Um, it was actually, so one of our largest deal at Pigment. I was at the Olympic games at the ceremony of the Olympic games. Okay. It's pouring rain. We are with customers. We are all, you remember, it was like hell. So we were there. The ceremony finishes quite late. It was probably midnight. And then like Paris was completely locked down. I had to go back home Pretty much walking, then I take the subway super far, so I'm in the subway, I'm drenched, I'm, I'm completely soaked, and I receive an email, and it's probably about one 30 in the morning, from one of the biggest tech CEOs in the Valley, ok, of the, one of the largest tech companies out there. He's like, can I call you now? Make sure. And he calls me, and it's two a.m. He says, Eleanor, I want to do the biggest rip and…

AI assessment note: “A lot of people say it's harder than you think, where I think it's actually easier”

Q Your husband must feel rather unloved. I do just want to go back to the index days in a way and just say, you saw so many founders that were great when you were working at index. How did being an investor change the type of founder that you are?

A Completely. I think I would be so different if I hadn't been at Index. Index was the best school of life for me. It's something I would advise to any founder, pretty much being a VC, because it created so many things. First of all, I think I saw what amazing looks like. I was very lucky to be close to people like Olivier at Datalog or Dylan at Figma. I learned to Peter at ADN. I learned to see how they would do, and I still learn today from them, and it gives you an edge. That nobody else on earth is capable of seeing what great looks like and what it takes. So I learned, first of all, so much from them, and then I learned what makes them so great. Yuri Milner visited me yesterday in Paris, and I was asking me, I was like, what do you think are the best founders out there? And so he gave me four things that he thinks makes the best founder. So can you guess what they are?

AI assessment note: “First of all, I think I saw what amazing looks like.”

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

A Probably on the way enterprises think about AI, in the sense that we saw that companies were very serious about AI day one, but I think I didn't understand to which angle they actually didn't know anything about how to be serious about AI. I understood now how much we need to actually help them Understand how to use AI for their own good. So I can give you a concrete example for Pigment. A lot of customers were telling me, um, AI is going to, uh, it's super hard to use AI in finance because AI is going to do so many mistakes and it's impossible. And then, you know, you think about that, you're like, wait a minute. Today, all of your analysts are doing hundreds of mistakes. AI is actually going to remove the part of like preparing the data. So we are, for instance, with Pigment, you know, we have our agents. So with our agents, we are removing a lot of manual tasks. And now the analyst has actually time to check more their data, to reflect on their data, to do more business partnering, to understand where to go, what is right, have more of a critical mindset. So I would say, of course, AI will perhaps never give you like the most perfect answer, but oh gosh, now you will have time to think if it's a perfect answer or not. So I would say I, you know, I really understood that a lot of companies were not thinking the right way about where AI could bring value on and how.

AI assessment note: “Probably on the way enterprises think about AI”

Q When you thought about the complementary elements, that's the incredible experience of taking a company public, being this incredible technology leader. The question I have is, how do you think about when to value experiences as a positive versus when experience can actually hold you back? When a playbook no longer works in a world of AI, technology stats are changing fast and ever. When is it good versus bad?

A I would say, so first of all, having seen the movie always help. Let's be clear. When I hire my executive today, I always try to find people that have seen the movie One time, at least, uh, that, you know, I've scaled so from where I am in terms of AR to, like, multiple billion, if possible, because they will have learned things in the journey of building. So I still think that there is incredible value when you see that. You see that also with some repeat founders. You see, uh, the founder of Wiz, and you see other people. They've seen it. They are not first-time founders. And I can tell you that with Romain, he's probably my number one mentor. I learn from him every day. Every day, I avoid one mistake because of him. But the most important It's to have a value, which we have at Pigment, which is curiosity and never settle. That's what makes the difference, is to find a co-founder, if he has already seen the experience, that never settle, and always try to learn to be better, and always try to adapt. And with Romain, there is not a single day where I don't call him and ask him, how can we do better here? What can we do differently? After the show, I'm going to ask you, Ari, what can we do differently here? What did I do wrong? And that's the most important, and that's what, what makes Romain so great, is that he doesn't come With his own assumption about, I've done Criteo, I k…

AI assessment note: “he doesn't come With his own assumption about, I've done Criteo, I know better.”

Q Do you not want to have that thought partner where you can come home and say, ah, you know, we lost X client, and he goes, oh no, why, what happened?

A The, the only thing he knows about is things that are very serious, that are And losing a customer, of course, it's a big problem for Pigment, but is it a big problem for my life? Probably not, you know. So I always think what is critical, what is really the biggest problem at Pigment for me are always people problem when someone comes to me and tell me that, you know, they have a huge health issue or that, you know, something is going very wrong in their life or, you know, these are the things that I'm super worried about or where I have a big people problem. The rest I would say is You know, he doesn't even know I'm on the show today. Like he doesn't know anything about, about what I do. And that's our way of working. It's just that when I go home, I don't have a lot of time with him. I don't have a lot of time with the kid at all. So we optimize to be a family and to talk about what it is to be a family.

AI assessment note: “So we optimize to be a family and to talk about what it is”

Q We hear of, like, A player, B player, you know, all these kind of, I don't love the letters assigned to it, but I do wonder, can you truly scale an organization to 400 A players, and in which case, where is it ok to have a B player versus it has to be an A style player?

A If you apply very strong principles, I think you can really keep the pace of A player still at that size. I think we are not at a size where we can afford actually B or C player. Second is when we don't, we have to realize that fast. Making sure that very early on you identify when someone is not an A, and then really trying to think how is that going to impact the organization. If that person becomes a manager tomorrow, you know that the team obviously that they will hire will definitely not be at the right A skill set that you are expecting for. It's about being very, very fast at managing performance. And it's also being, have the courage, the managerial courage to finger point what is wrong in the organization. At Pigment, last week with my leadership team, I went to them all and I said, we have too much politics at Pigment. How can we solve that? You find me three examples each of where we have politics. You tell me where, you tell me in which team, and we try to fix that.

AI assessment note: “we are not at a size where we can afford actually B or C player.”

Q What's your biggest advice to founders on secondaries? There's different thoughts on whether it's right, how much is right, what advice is good for different stages. How do you think about it, and how does having a little bit change your mindset?

A I think the best founders anyway out there, they are never here for the money. Money doesn't buy them anything, and they are just here to keep going, and sometimes maybe they would do secondary to actually have an amazing person Coming into the round. So it might even be something completely different, a good reason to do it. But I would say always think about what will put your mind at ease on making sure you can focus all of your time and energy on building the company. For me, it was about an apartment and some logistics to make sure I had a lot of my logistics ready to take care of my kids, build an amazing company.

AI assessment note: “always think about what will put your mind at ease on making sure you can focus”