David Senra - Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Torsten Reil has spent his career working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, simulation and entrepreneurship. He began as a biologist studying neural networks and complex systems before founding NaturalMotion, whose technology was used in films including Lord of the Rings, Troy and Harry Potter and later in games including Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. After building and selling NaturalMotion, he eventually returned to entrepreneurship to co-found Helsing, a European defense technology company focused on artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. Reil believes warfare is undergoing a fundamental shift from humans operating expensive weapons systems toward what he calls autonomous mass: large numbers of AI-controlled machines operating together. He explains why drones are making tanks, artillery and eventually crewed fighter jets increasingly vulnerable; how AI can navigate without GPS in jammed environments; and why Helsing developed Centaur, an AI fighter pilot that has controlled a real Saab Gripen in air combat against a human-operated aircraft. That work led Helsing to begin building its own autonomous fighter jet, the CA1 Europa. The underlying strategy is to combine simpler, mass-manufacturable hardware with increasingly capable software. Reil argues that future conflicts will become battles of materiel, making manufacturing capacity as important as technological sophistication. Helsing's HX-2 strike drone was redesigned to scale from dozens of units per month to a baseline of 1,000, with the ability to surge to 3,000. He also explains Helsing's concept of distributed “resilience factories,” which allow countries to manufacture systems domestically while reducing their dependence on vulnerable centralized production facilities. Reil also describes how he runs Helsing and why he considers talent density the most important ingredient in company performance and culture. The company closely monitors recruiting, conducts quarterly performance calibration and makes an unusually large investment in finding and retaining exceptional people. He discusses Helsing's values of “whatever it takes” and “the truth is in the field,” why founders should pursue ambitions large enough to matter, and why he believes commentary has little value compared with actually building something that changes the world. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/torsten-reil Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com Deel: https://deel.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Drones, Tanks & the Future of Warfare (00:07:08) Why Torsten Founded Helsing (00:09:27) Founder Conviction & Betting on European Defense (00:19:19) Helsing's Mission: Protecting Democracies (00:23:38) Programs of Record & Winning the Eurofighter Contract (00:28:35) Building a Superhuman AI Fighter Pilot (00:36:14) Deterrence, Autonomous Weapons & the Morality of Defense (00:42:11) Mass Manufacturing, Software & the Future of Materiel (00:48:33) Airbase Vulnerability, Procurement & Scaling Strike Drones (00:52:46) Talent Density, Hiring & Performance Management (00:59:44) How Torsten Hires Exceptional People (01:05:27) Helsing's Culture: Whatever It Takes & Truth Is in the Field (01:07:38) Deploying in Ukraine & the Weight of Defense Technology (01:10:50) NaturalMotion, Gaming & Torsten's Path Into AI (01:18:33) Outsiders, First Principles & Ambitious North Stars (01:20:54) Why Commentary Is Worthless & Founders Should Build Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's start with what we were just talking about before we started recording. What are your opinion is of the future of tanks and battleships? I think that's a big change happening. You can already see it in Ukraine, obviously, where tanks are barely being used anymore. The same is true for artillery systems. If you get yourself into a tank, your survivor rate is very short. I mean, apparently the time that a Russian soldier survives now at the front is about 20 to 30 minutes. You can argue about whether that's 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 at a tank, you are one of the high priority targets for anyone on the other side. You know, those targets can be found pretty easily now 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 area of tanks is probably over. And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front 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 warfare. And those lessons have been pretty apparent, I think, in Ukraine over the past, I would say, 18 months or so. And I think people are starting to understand them now. What's killing the Russian soldiers so quickly? Is it all drones? It's drones. Yeah. 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. Wait, what's the difference between those two drones? So FPVs are basically smaller drones, quad-cop. that most of the time are controlled manually, like a remote-controlled plane. And strike drones often travel over longer distances, and like the HX2, which is our drone, quite often the AI controlled.

You had a tweet that was interesting, where maybe this can tie into the dinner that we had a few years ago, where we had this fierce argument, and I left thinking that we hated each other, and then now we've become friends. But you said something like 100,000 of your drones could prevent a land-weigh

prevent a land war in Europe? What does that mean and why? Why do you believe that? Yeah, I said this. I think maybe a year ago or so, and I got into a bit of trouble for this because apparently it was deemed to be provocative, but 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 pretty strong.

And the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with 3,000 tanks, 100,000 strike drones that are able to navigate without GPS, are they able to find their targets, obviously specifically focusing on tanks, will destroy those tanks, I think, in a matter of ours. It's very hard to defend against. If you were on the other side, you wanted to invade a country that had 100,000 of your drones, how do you do that? I think it's very difficult.

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

So what do you mean by autonomous drones, though? So it's all run by AI? It will be. Yeah, at the moment you still have, especially in Ukraine, a lot of drones are still remote control, so you have thousands of very skilled drone operators. That won't scale, though, in particular one scale to the West, then won't scale to NATO.

If you really want scaled drone usage, they have to fly autonomously. You want to have a human 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 the true mass. And it's the only way also to make it work pragmatically because we won't be able to train thousands and thousands of drone operators. We need AI to control them. Is that a solved problem yet? Or you still haven't figured out? It's reasonably solved, I would say. I think it's the, so far, has been on, first of all, making the Jones work for terminal guidance, which is basically the last two kilometers or so, and then

to create the software to coordinate them all, and now it's going to go towards almost full autonomy. Again, always with the human in the loop. I want to go back to the conversation we had a few years ago when we were having dinner at Daniel X House about essentially your proposition to me was, you know, you're just not going to be able to have humans on the battlefield anymore because it's just going to be about who can produce more material. I think we discussed this book called Freedom's Four. that I've read like twice. And essentially it's about the United States converting their, you know, industrial

and commercial, industrial power from making products that people would buy to making war materials and just mass producing more than the opposition had. Yeah. And that, you know, helped, you know, tilt the war and the balance in their favor. I thought you had a very similar perspective that that's what we would have to do. Like the winners of the future wars are just going to have to create mass produce more drones, more weapons, more everything. I think it's going to be a battle of material.

It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better. And it's going to be very hard for humans to survive in their battlefield. And again, that's already the case in Ukraine. You can't really enter the battlefield as a human

and survive for very long, whether you're in the vehicle or you're on your own. It's very hard to survive. That's going to 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 going to be even more dangerous. Those drones usually don't care about jamming anymore. For FPVs, it's because they're connected through fiber optic cables, fiberglass.

For larger drones, it's because they are already autonomous, and they don't have to worry about GPS because they have GPS-free navigation. They can detect targets and they can engage once you've allowed them to do it autonomously. Wait, explain how you get around the jamming? I don't understand that. So the problem with jamming is, it's two-fault. First of all, if you want to control your drone from afar, you need a video signal back.

And usually the Battlefleet 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 the cable, and that's what's happening right now. And the second problem is GPS jamming. Pretty much the whole front line is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receivers. So you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are,

just almost like a pilot of a plane does, or you do it with AI that tries to do the same thing. And those algorithms now are very robust. They work in daylight, at night, you know, in the snow, even with kind of defunned 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 going to 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 and defend territory,

so 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. 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 the fact that you were going to have found another company after your first sale or no? After I left Naxhomotion and Zinger, I didn't think I was going to start another company. You did or did not? I did not. Okay. I was pretty exhausted, to be honest. I'd been doing it for 15 years.

And I was kind of very low on, kind of 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. years or so 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, going about in Nicholas, especially with what we're doing in defense. It's so complex.

I mean, being a founder is already lonely, being a single 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. You have to deal with politics, with export law, and a whole bunch of other things, that it's very difficult to do it as a single founder. So when I met my two co-founders, we all independently had thought that there needed to be a new defense company in Europe. How did that conversation even start?

Back then, I invested in Nicholas's company in Munich, which was working on solving AI problems for some of their 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 recommended I meet up with Gunnbert, who at the time was at McKinsey responsible for. for aerospace and defense. And we met up in a cafe in Berlin and hit it off and within 30 minutes, we thought we should start this company together. Went to see Nicholas, who had the same feeling,

and then within a few days or so, we decided to start Helsing. And this thing 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.

you know, in terms of what we do, that we need to go into certain areas, certain territories, et cetera. 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? That was end of 20 to 2020, beginning of 20. Okay, I can't think of a more unpopular company to start at that time than a European defense tech company. Yeah, it was very unpopular. We founded the company in March 2021 and it wasn't popular in our social circles. It costs all kinds of problems with banks. Although this has got better now, obviously,

but back then it was quite unpopular. And it was hard to raise money. We didn't really cause a problem with banks. There is a risk, and some people have been debanked, who've been close to our company around the time. And I wasn't, but I know another person close to the company had difficult getting credit, difficult to getting credit because we were involved in defense.

So, and this is still the case now. I mean, it hasn't caused. completely disappeared. I think ESG requirements are still there. And back then, the defense of a country or a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking. Because it was seen as weapons and weapons are always bad. And I empathize with the kind of gut feeling on this. It's just that when you think it through, obviously, 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 specifically, specifically,

about Europe's reaction to Crimea in 2014, the invasion and the taking of Crimea, where I think all of us didn't really want to think that this was the beginning of something bigger. We all didn't want it to be true. But if you looked at what the ambitions were, it was pretty clear that something else was going to happen. And we were concerned that Europe was going to be

very dependent on other territories for its defense and on other countries. You know, the US had companies like Andrew and Palantier that were very forward-looking defense companies with a big focus on AI, cheaper hardware and abundant hardware, and the idea of mass manufacturing, but Europe had nothing. And so we felt we have to do this and we have to prove that we can build something like this, although with a slightly different flavor in Europe. And that's why we started it very difficult to raise money in 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.

money from individuals, family offices. And then we were lucky that Daniel put in 100 million euros of his own money very early on. And that allowed us to scare the company faster than otherwise. I always read about you guys. And they're like, yeah. And they got a $100 million investment from prima materia. It's like, that's his own money.

That's a high conviction bet really, really early. This is before the invasion of Ukraine. Yeah. There was a seed round first, right? Didn't you raise, like, what, eight or ten million or something like that? Yeah, I think it was eight million euros in March 21. And he was in that seat round? Yeah, he was in that seat round, too.

And then you guys had this conversation where he asked, well, how much do you need? Yeah, like three months later. So. Yeah, and your response was... Ideally, 100 million euros. How did you come up with that number? I didn't really do a specific budget for it, to be honest. But it felt about right.

It felt about right. But that's true for almost all funding rounds, isn't it? Like, it's... you kind of eyeball it because so many things change so quickly in the company. It's very hard to kind of find an exact number. But Daniel had the same level of conviction that Gilbert Nicholas and I had. And I think is a similar conviction person. It doesn't take very long.

And then the conviction is very deep. And then it makes everything easier. It made all of the conversations easier. We didn't have to really kind of struggle to come to a deal that just happened really quickly. You consider her more like another co-founder than an investor. Yeah, I think it's closer to a co-founder than an investor, because he's been with a company from the beginning. I knew Daniel before.

He knew about the idea from the beginning. It was a big commitment for him to also be publicly seen, to be investing in this kind of company. And obviously, then what happened only 11 months after we started at the company, the Ukraine war happened, and public sentiment shifted, and it is now easier. And now a lot of people are investing in defense, both in the U.S. as well as in Europe,

but at the time it was extremely unpopular. But I think this is one of the things I'd most admire about you, this idea of founder conviction. And I love that you're like, I've heard you say this before. It's like the limiting factor is not capital. It's like actually ambition. Yeah. And one thing that I've talked to a bunch of people that have been on this podcast is like, I try to encourage them. Stop selling your goddamn companies.

Yeah. It's like. Yeah, your whole thing is like it's stop selling your company for 100 million and then buying a house in Italy and becoming an investor. Yeah. Like we need more people. We have enough people in fucking finance, dude. Yeah. You need more people doing shit.

Yeah. So I completely agree. I have this theory that the reason this happens so often in Europe is partly because Europe is such a nice continent to retire in because you can buy a house in Tuscany. And you can fly there from Scandinavia. You're there in like whatever, two hours or so. And you can live an amazing life. And once a few of your friends start doing that, then it's kind of socially accepted. But it shouldn't be socially acceptable that you retire as a founder that's been successful and can start another company.

My friends that sell their companies, I say this jokingly, but a lot of truth is said in jest. and they're like, got acquired, like, sorry to hear that. Yeah, exactly. Entrepreneurship's the best game in the world. You took yourself out of the game on the fucking sidelines. Yeah. To what? Write checks?

No, I mean, it's easy for me to say, because I sold my previous company as well, and maybe too early, although I'd been doing it for a while. And as I said, for a while, I thought I wasn't going to start another company because building companies is exhausting and, you know, sometimes you need to recharge your batteries.

But once you've done it, I think people are also afraid that they might not find the right mission or even that, you know, they might find that the second company, isn't a successful as the first one. And that is a risk. You know, I thought about that too. What if the whole thing just doesn't work at all?

But, you know, I think that's a risk you have to take. I just talked to Scott Wu from Cognition. And, you know, they're throwing all kinds of crazy money at him, you know, and this is this a million people are trying to acquire him as a person or the entire company. And his whole thing is like, yeah, but this is like the biggest opportunity in my life. He's like, I couldn't live with myself. I didn't at least try.

Yeah. I'm fine failing. And then he said, I'd be salty as hell, meaning, you know, he's super competitive. But it's like, but it's like, I'm not, at least I try to be removed from the game completely at some kind of piece on somebody else's chessboard. You're just like intolerable to somebody like that. Yeah, no, totally.

For us with Helsing, it's the same thing. We made a decision probably four and a half years ago, just a few months into the company, that we're going to go full throttle and we either kind of completely crash the thing or be super successful, but we didn't want to do anything in between. And that's what we're doing right now

is that we try really to keep the foot on the gas really aggressively because we want to build a company that really matters. And we will never sell the company. I have a funny story about this. And then we're going to get back to Helsing. But Adam, the founder of Apploven, was sitting in the chair at your and now. And he tells this hilarious story. He takes the company public. It's like $28 billion or something like that. Every day, for like 200 days, a stock just goes down and down to down. And he goes, it gets down to like $3 billion. He's like, he's like, this is either like a multiple $100 billion company or it's nothing. So then he winds up borrowing, like he goes into debt by like $6 billion

and does stock buybacks. And then winds up making like $60 billion on that trade. It's like, I'm not running a fucking $3 billion company. It's like this is either a big company or nothing, but I'm not playing this little game. I think that's the only way to do it. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world,

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Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. Okay, so the identification of what was missing in Europe, right, which leads to this mission, that we need a European defense tech company, then the mission comes before the conviction or the conviction comes before the mission? The mission comes first.

And the mission is to protect our democracies. And I always say it's always a real privilege. I always feel like we talk to our new status every month and we always say to them, it is a real privilege to work in a company. At least we feel that's where the mission is so easy that we protect our democracies. That's what we're here for.

And lots of other companies, you know, have to spend time and go on an offside of retreat to come up with some kind of mission paragraph that everyone agrees on eventually. And we don't have that. 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 Ukraine. And it makes everything easier.

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. This mission is a real thing. And then the conviction, you know, comes that there need to be these kinds of companies. and that they need to be built in Europe. And one other reason why we are building Helsing is also we wanted to build a big company in Europe. We honestly looked at, you know, Spotify as a beacon, 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 it's up there with other big companies from the US and other countries.

And we wanted to build something like that too. We wanted to show that you can do this. You can do it in what is a heavily regulated area like defense. Because a lot of people find excuses why they can't build a big company. It's very often regulation, bureaucracy, not enough funding. And none of that is true. They're all excuses. You have a great line about this where I love what you just said.

The excuses is like people are way too concerned about the regulatory environment, the tax environment. It's like what's missing is actually you need aggressive founders with large ambitions. It's just aggression that's missing. Exactly. It's strategic ambition. So you have to think about what you want to be and it needs to be big and then you need to be truly aggressive. And a lot of founders, I think in Europe have lost that aggression, but it's easy to find it again. You just need to, you just need role models. Like we use Spotify as a role model. And once you have them, that, you know what that's what it looks like and everything below that is failure. It is underestimated how much of a difference aggression and ambition makes. I think it's 95% of a company's success is that. Everything else, like I said, is excuses. So regulation doesn't matter.

Yes, sure, it takes longer to start a GMBAH 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. The regulation that we are subject to and other defense companies are as well with regards to the certification, qualification of our systems, export law,

and a whole bunch of other things, dealing with confidentiality. classified information is like 100 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 a start. You just have to set the company up properly. You're probably one of the most disagreeable people that I know. Have you always been that way? You said that to me before. And I've been trying to reflect at it. I don't think I am. You just demonstrate it here. Yeah, we have more regulation. Who gives you shit? Stop making excuses. Like, it's a superpower for founders. I'm not, Obviously, you know, it's not a pejorative when I say it to you.

I just don't like when people make excuses. 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, sadly, have a continent where we don't have breakout companies because people just lack the aggression. But again, 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. Me and Daniel talked about this, this idea of how many prime movers are there in the world. You know, the people that are inventing the technology that we're all using, creating the companies, you know, power laws, all 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 $100 million, though, where did you see, like, your entrance into doing this? Which the idea is like, hey, we're going to, what you just said, it's like cheap, simple hardware, and then all the innovation comes in software? the way you thought about it? Actually, the biggest insight came, and I think it came from

Gunn-Bend, when we said we're just going to go for programs of record, which back then, as a small company, was almost impossible and was extremely risky. Explain what a program of records. So program of record 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 to 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 because

it takes so long um to get one and to qualify for one but because we had the 100 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 applied for a big program of record for the Eurofighter electronic warfare upgrade. What is that? In Germany. So this is electronic warfare capabilities are essentially around detecting radars, detecting, you know, the types of radars, in this case anti-aircraft raiders that, you know, try to take it down, detecting their intent, etc. And the situation had become, you know, more difficult for Europe because a lot of those radars have 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 recover that ability to interpret those radars. And it was a big technology jump, and we managed to win that program of record together with our partner Saab against 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 happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest

to go from founding to program off record. How much of like your previous work, like Oxford, stuff you were doing in Natural Motion, did you bring into Helsing? A lot of it was the, I think, team building and fundraising and maybe prioritization pattern recognition that I had from Natural Motion

where I, when I sold the country, company where I left the company, I was reasonably pleased with myself. I thought, you know, this all went quite well in the end. But it was only in the kind of two or three years afterwards, but I started to reflect on some of the things, you know, I'd done and how I built the company, especially when I started to angel invest. I realized I actually screwed up a lot of things at Natural Motion Better should have done better. I didn't deal with performance management the way I should have.

I definitely didn't take hiring serious enough, just the kind of general hiring of great engineers. And I also didn't think enough about how to think about 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 probably could have done a lot of things better. And so a lot of that, I think pattern recognition, we were able to use that natural motion, and particularly in the first few years. But it's also true now that Helsing is now at a point where it's kind of uncharted territory for me as well. The company is a lot bigger. I think we're about 1,300 people, much bigger than natural motion ever was.

And so 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 Daniel. And then the other part is we were lucky that we had as three founders, very three different skill sets. You know, I had already started a company and sold it. I think I knew how to fundraise. Gunbilt was very close to the various forces, to the military, also understood that the processes political processes really well.

And Nicholas's background was on the AI and engineering side, which is what we really needed to first of all win this kind of contract. 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 the problem of? There was just a feeling, I think, and particular Nicholas and Gunbert, you know, pushed that.

Gundberg, I think, had a strong conviction that this was a really worthwhile program of record for us to have. and Nicholas had an intuition as to how we could do it differently to anyone else. Where did Nicholas get that intuition? I don't know. I think it's just, I mean, he'd already been in this space with his previous company.

So he already had a feeling. What was his previous company doing? It was solving AI problems for legacy primes. And so he already had a feeling for this kind of thing. And then if you combine that with Gumbet's insight as to what programs of record worked, it was honestly became the blueprint how we approached pretty much everything now.

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 as basically our lens. Can you give me an example of that? Well, another example is 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

knowing that Europe didn't have anything like it and that we felt this is going to be a big category and that we could contribute something to it. And the reason for that was we started almost like a science experiment. We have a great chief scientist, Antoine Baud, who joined us from Meta, where he ran co-headed Facebook Eye Research.

And we set ourselves a task two years ago, so to create a superhuman fighter pilot for beyond visual range combat. So the kind of combat that's... Hold on, you've got to sell this out. Superhuman... Say that thing again? It's a superhuman fighter pilot.

Superhuman fighter pilot, but there's no pilot in there. No, it's an AI. It's a neural network. And it's for beyond visual range. So the most advanced type of air combat. It's essentially chess in the sky. You have the planes, usually it's two versus two, quite far away from each other. It's a fighter jets.

And they use radar. 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 energy of missiles that are following you. You have to have a feeling for when you can re-engage. It's extremely complex.

It almost looks like ballet. It's quite beautiful to watch, actually, when you look at a tactical views. And we've been told by pilots, active pilots, that this is the kind of last bastion of air combat. You know, nothing will ever replace the intuition that a human has in the sky to read the situation, to have a feeling for, you know,

how to engage, what types of, you know, weapons to use. And that turns out to be bullshit. You know, it actually, the AI is much more much better. And the reason is that it's able to explore the search space much more efficiently than, than, you know, a human can, because a human learns it from a textbook and, you know, in flight school, but they can't explore the search space. And so we use the same approaches, basically, as, you know, DeepMind used as well for AlphaGo and Alpha Star using reinforcement learning. And we have an extremely high performance simulator that runs 25,000 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 a neural network to be better than a active fighter pilot. We regularly fly against Eurofighter pilots, for example, or Rafael pilots or griping pilots. So are you running tests with your autonomous fighter jet against a human-powered pilot? So we used to do it in simulation only. it was only our simulation and we won. Then it was an official simulator, but of a big prime.

And then last year, we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the SAP Gripin over the Baltic Sea. I'm going to say we, our AI did and took full control of the plane in air combat against another Grip which was human controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenarios, above the Baltic Sea and proved at that point. And this, by the way, was also the point where we realized,

actually there's something bigger happening, where this actually works, and it works in the real world. And so we developed the system, we called it Centaur, and it's now able to work in swarms as well, by the way, not just two versus two. Wait, wait, swarms of fighter jets now. Yeah, so. Swarms of drones, now we've moved on.

Swarms of fighters, yeah. And it scales really well. And it's extremely powerful, and that gave us a conviction that crude manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll end up facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities. And it's not science fiction. 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 10 years ago, so like everything was always five years away.

There was always kind of the number that people used. It's about five years away, whether it's kind of a particular medical breakthrough or maybe a robotic breakthrough, that's now all shrunk. The five years usually ended up being seven to ten years, by the way, same was true, autonomous driving. It's now 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're thinking that we couldn't believe how well this worked. 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 ask, do you want to do an autonomous fighter jet?

We provide the AI, you provide the jet. It would have taken too long. So we decided to acquire an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich, our 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 going to fly for the first time next year.

And we want to show that you can really leapfrock everyone in this category. 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 as we're coming in. But you told us about this funny regulation where even though it's going to be an autonomous

fighter jet, don't you still have to have a guy in it? So eventually no. But right now, yes. Yeah, I mean, so we don't have the, I think the advantage of the Mojave Desert, for example, where you can fly those planes and be completely autonomous because if it crashes, it doesn't really matter. You know, it crashes into sand. If you, you know, crashed where we fly, you crash over built up Bavaria, which is not

ideal. So we have a human that's optionally in the plane for the first prototypes. Eventually, that's going to change, obviously. And the pilot is a safety pilot, the same way you'd have safety drivers for the early rulers of Waymo and other companies. The fact that you have this regulation at the moment and you need a person that has to change the design of what it looks like, correct? No, we found a way to accommodate it without changing the design.

It's the same system. By the way, it's another example of what we, way you can beat on the EU or Europe or in this case Germany for having regulations. But you just find a way to deal with it. And this is the way to deal with it. You just have a pilot sitting in there like this. It's in the back. Where is he?

They're in the front. Okay. So what you just described, that's very interesting. You said it's like chest 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 going to be immoral. I want to get into like the morality, the way you look at the morality. like what you're building, the way it would be a moral to send a human into the battlefield because you're going to get sworn by drones.

It's going to be a moral to send a pilot into the sky. Is it the same? Yeah, it's the same thing. There are two reasons. A, it's more powerful to use autonomous systems. They will just be superior because the AI is just smarter than humans for this use case. And secondly, as a result, it will be a moral to send someone up because you have to assume that the other side will eventually have those systems as well.

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

The underlying goal has to be that you minimize the lives lost 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 the turns of the terms is so important. And this is a very old, obviously, argument. 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 achievable for the other side. And we set up the company to deter. We never set it up, honestly, to have the systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, which is what we have right now. We'll do it, obviously, because we'll have to do it. and it needs to make a contribution.

But the idea in general is to avoid conflict altogether. And you do that by being able to deter, by having 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 want to do it in such a way that you minimize the lives lost

on your side. And again, this is where, especially right now, and it's going to get worse in the future, you need to use autonomy because you cannot send humans into tanks, you know, in fighter jets or even as infantry onto the field. That's the underlying theme. And then there's another category where you need to think about the way you deploy your software and what as a society, you know, 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 of a life and death if it is more accurate than a human? Or do we say as a society, 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 thing that worries me is that these discussions happened a lot when we started the company before the Ukrainian war. No one, in particular journalists, weren't interested in asking us about the capability. and abilities of why we were doing things, everyone always asked about 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 those 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. We have to think very carefully. about things like proliferation and a whole bunch of other things, but we have to do it out

of an inner discipline. And journalists don't ask the questions anymore, and the public doesn't either. I don't even understand the counter arguments 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. Yeah, but it is an interesting topic because we get this pushback as well, obviously, at Helsing, and we get it, we get pushback from people who say war is always bad. And of course, at some level, that makes sense. But again, if you have a situation where you are attacked, if you have a situation where there is an adversary that is building up, 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, you know, unnecessary lives on your side. And like I said, we get a lot of pushback. And it is often from well-meaning people. So it's not that, like, we hate people. who have a problem with our mission. 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. But I think there's something interesting.

It goes back to like your high conviction, the fact that you're extremely disagreeable, you're very comfortable taking a counter position, counter position, like you started this company when everybody else said, you know, it was very unpopular. Something that I asked Daniel about, and he's at, he's like, he's a German building a defense company in a country whose entire post-war identity was never again. Yeah. Like, you're also willing to cut across your cultural, like the culture expectations, too.

Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's still the case in Germany. And, you know, we're set up as a European company. We have big offices in London and Paris and a bunch of other countries as well. but our biggest is in Munich in Germany, and German society is a pacifist society. And 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, where I think Germans realize it hasn't been the end of conflict. There are now conflicts, and they're coming closer, and they might be coming even closer again. And it's very uncomfortable for a country that thought those times are over. But it's also the country now that has one of the most thriving new defense ecosystems. 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, in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from 52 billion euros last year to originally, I think, 153 billion in 2009. I think it's gone up again to over 180 billion. 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 on to new equipment spent. Okay, so we go back to materials. Your whole thing is like the winner is going to be able to produce more materials than their adversary.

So 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 software? Is that still the basic thesis? The idea is that you build hardware that is good enough and build it in such high numbers is that you eventually have economies of scale, but also the ability to overcome any adversary just through pure mass.

And the way you achieve that is that you need to be able to mass produce, you need to design to mass produce, but then crucially you need software to allow those systems to first of all be smart and be able to coordinate. But you ideally also absorb a lot of the complexity of the hardware that usually will be these exquisite systems, that legacy primes will make into your software so you can make 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 manufacturing 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 this is what we do.

And that works extremely well, but you have to think it through as one unified system. And once you do that, you can go into mass manufacturing. So the HX2 is now a mass manufactured strike drone. And we had to go through all of those learnings in July and August last year where we had to go from dozens of HX2s per month to a baseline of 1,000. And it can now search to in the small factory that we have to 3,000 a month. And it's a completely different cattle of fish to producing just a few dozen. You have to think about your supply chain completely differently. Obviously, the way you design the drone, quality control, 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, you just have much more powerful systems because you can now overcome any adversary or target by 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, many hundreds of these fighter jets. Same is true 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 build in such numbers and to have the industrial capacity and the supply chain should produce a lot. Hold on though. If we're talking about war materials, you can never predict 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 you. source some of this production to China or to America or to South America or anywhere else, correct? I wouldn't say any. I mean, with China, yes, that's true.

There's still allies that you can work with, obviously, and that we all work with. But there will be some areas, and it depends on the sensitivities of particular countries, where you want to be fully vertically integrated in that country, and you want to be having your entire supply chain in the country as well. There are other areas where you work with allies, and I think that will continue and probably even grow. And then there are other areas where you say, no, it's, we're actually, there's so many different suppliers, it doesn't really matter. We are kind of free to choose. But I feel like you would go more towards complete control. Like, not talking about what you're doing now, but in the

future, you're going to be running this company for the rest of your life. You just said, I'm not selling, right? This is my last company. This is my grand ambition. Yeah. So like, would you not want to work towards an area where, like, you have complete control over everything? Yes, but you also want to work with allies. Like there are many countries that you want to work together with and where you are stronger if you work together. There's some areas where, you know, specific countries have sensitivities around particular data, for example.

The UK, for example, it's very specific about what they're doing in maritime and understandably so where you want to be like really just national. But then there are other areas where you work with allies. And 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, you're, you know, if a country wants to, you know, buy and build our hardware, they can do it on their own territory. We put a factory there, and they can also build up their own supply chain to the point where they feel comfortable with and then buy from other.

Explain how that partnership would work. So your technology manufactured in their factories on their soil? So we can run the factory, but we make sure it's on their soil. And we find a way to work together with them to also make sure that the supply chain is as national, as domestic as it needs to be. And again, 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 on their soil so that they have more control over it. Why do you call them resilience factories? Because we design them to be not this kind of one big factory that is a very easy target for attacks. But actually, they can be distributed all over a continent or even else or even be underground, as it's the case with us, so that they are harder to hit.

You studied the Krupp family? No, I know of them, but I don't know in detail. There's a great book I'm going to send you. It's like 700 pages. I should do an episode on it for my other podcast founders, but 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.

Yeah, I mean, by the way, this problem is completely underestimated right now, coming back to fighter jets again. So we have these exquisite fighter jets, like the Eurofighter, and a bunch of others. But they all need airfields. With the exception of the Gripin, they tend to use a neat air bases to take off and land. Those air bases are obvious targets, obviously, for an attack. And so if you look at something like the CA1, our tournament spider jets,

it's designed in such a way that it can take off from any kind of makeshift airstrip, which would be a road and autobar, a motorway, a highway, etc. Essentially adapting it to where you can't bomb, you're not going to bomb all the roads. You can't bomb all of it. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. And I think there is still, I think certain governments and militaries are still in denial

what actually is going to happen in our conflict. You know, in many cases, we won't be able to take off with our crew fighter jets anymore. So how do you go about trying to explain that to them? Like, how do you just make it obvious? Do you just do product demonstrations? Yeah, I mean, it's like with everything else, you do product demonstrations, you show what the capabilities are. We've done this a lot with drones.

And then, to honestly, everyone's credit, people do get it. I mean, it's like people complain about procurement is so slow and governments are so slow. Yes, but then when they do get it, it goes very fast. Like the large structural contracts that happened really quickly with political support, with support of the procurement agency, and they went through all in record time. And now, if anything, I think that the companies are really under pressure to deliver all of this stuff really fast. So it's like we all complained about it in the past, but it's a bit of a legacy problem. I think procurement has got faster and the realization that these things have to happen is happening faster too.

And, you know, there will be big autonomous hydrogen programs in Europe as well now. Two years ago, there was nothing. Even one year ago, there was nothing, but it's now happening. Something that just came to mind where you were speaking earlier is you're talking about how the, you know, in the AI age, everything is going to happen faster. You think it's in five years, it's actually two, maybe two years, maybe maybe two months. It might even be, you know, faster than even you suspect. Like, so AI is making your products better than, better, faster than you expected. Can that also, can AI also help manufacture and increase your manufacturing faster, too?

Yeah. Because if you're saying we're going to produce a couple thousand months, I think isn't China doing like 100 million drones a year or something like that? Not really. I mean, in Ukraine, it's building, I think, two million or so a year. But those are different types of drones. Yeah, of course. They're FPVs, they're quadcopters. And again, they have their role and they work, but they're much hot.

range and they've got smaller payloads or explosives. Strike drones are much bigger. I mean, they're like this. How big is it your strike zone? So the payload, for example, the explosive is 2 to 4 kilograms or even larger. And the range that they can fly is around 100 kilometers. And so it's quite a lot more than FPVs and they're used in different ways as well. Those numbers right now, like up to 3,000 a month, are really quite high for this kind of category.

And you can scale it up even further. At the moment, honestly, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, bottleneck isn't manufacturing speed, 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. So, wait, what is the bottleneck then?

Honestly, the bottleneck right now is the big programs need to come. So the first ones are coming. We just close to a one billion framework contract in Germany, but they now need to come everywhere, and then we can crank up manufacturing accordingly. What do you mean by everywhere? In the various countries, because... In all the ways. Western countries? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There'll be some in Asia as well.

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before all of your competitors are on Apploven. And you can do that by going to apploven.com. That's apploven.com. 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 enough emphasis on talent and recruiting. What did you mean about that?

When you build a company, you obviously try to hire good people. And every founder would always say, you know, their most important thing is talent and their people and they spend so much time on recruitment. But when you actually look at it in detail, and I include us there at a natural motion previously as well, I wouldn't say it's half us, but it isn't the most important thing. And I would argue that hiring 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-performance and it feels like it's light-footed. And Helsing feels that way, I think. It feels like it's a very fast, highly-performing company that can adapt really quickly. And it is almost entirely because the talent density is so high.

So if that's your kind of thesis, and it was our thesis, then you have to think how to solve it. 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 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 allow people 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 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 probably also larger companies is 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 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 going to get the job done somehow. Maybe it's lower than they should.

Maybe they create cultural problems. They have an attitude issue, but at least eventually they 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, you know, going to be important. And the first contract we ever signed, even before we found with 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 Gumbra-Nichl and I then spent easily the first year just reviewing the KPIs easily every week to see how our recruitment worked and always injected ourselves 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 performance was important as well. And the most important thing is a quarterly performance calibration review. And what we do there is 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 doesn't sound like a three, it sounds like a four.

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. If someone is an underperformer and 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 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 the teams and which don't. I got to pull something up. Do you remember we were together, we were

racing cars in Sweden and Luca Ferrari was there? Did you spend any time with him? I didn't. I didn't know. You need to. Or I'm not telling you what to do. You should. How about this? we had this crazy lunch. And Luca is a very, I like him a lot, but he's a very strange cat in the sense that, like, I consider his, the way he runs company, almost like, Gallopacos Island of entrepreneurship, because he didn't, like, look to other entrepreneurs.

He doesn't really know much about entrepreneur history when I talked 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 remember we had these notes,

and we were just going back and forth on WhatsApp. I was like, dude, I'm just going to type all the notes of the crazy shit that you, said during this lunch because you have some very interesting ideas on talent and specifically HR. And so we had this idea. These are some notes from this. You should spend some time with them. He goes, he talks about hiring. He says, we make it a science. He's talking about what he's doing at Benning Spoons. He has a team of 50 in HR, but they're all engineers. 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 he's saying, hey, you know, we think quality X is. 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 12 months out, 24 months out, 36 months out.

And he says they actually have developed like this algorithm of 100 different signals of what they figure like it's important for talent. And he's like, we have completely- That's really cool. We treat it as an engineering process. And then he says, 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 entries, so people coming into your company, which you just described, and then Excess, 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 is just like, 100%. Like B, C, D players. He's like, no, you should have the best people in HR because it's so important.

Totally agree. And I think this kind of investment technically is so seriously. It's just, it compounds over time because you just get the best people in, it carries a different culture, and it becomes something that

it's central to being 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 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 making sure you have a great intake of people up, it's super valuable. Are one of the co-founders having to approve every hire? How do you do this? We don't have to approve every hire.

I think that's too difficult now. I think we do get involved in hiring. I'm going to argue with you, since you like to argue. Yeah. You have how many employees? 1,300. Okay, it's not too difficult. Elon approved the first, personally approved the first 3,000 hires of SpaceX.

Yeah. It's in one of the books, the biographies of us. Apparently, yeah. No, that's great. We don't do it that way. We have very good leadership that is able to make those decisions. It is true that, you know, sometimes we get pulled in, you know, for a second opinion. And it's also true that we get pulled in to interview people and sometimes to convince

them to come into the company. And then for certain roles, we do a lot of the hiring ourselves. We spend a lot of time, the founders and executive team on hiring. I want to hear more about this. Key positions, we will sometimes do end-to-end, end-to-end the hiring as founders. 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. He just really played a very big role in hiring one of our most senior executives recently, which are not 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. But if somebody's in front of you, how do you actually know if they're good or not?

So everyone, I think, has different methods. For me, 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 character. I look for. Wait, what is effortless to mean? It's like one of the things you can tell. If they don't try to impress, 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 that combined to me is effortlessness. And it doesn't, I don't think it takes that long to find it out. It takes in a conversation maybe 10 minutes or so to get a good feeling for whether a person has this kind of effortlessness or not. That's what I look for. But I don't interview software engineers, for example.

That wouldn't apply that. But I mean, you're essentially, I would imagine, involved at the most key positions that you're trying to prove for. What do you think is happening in these 10 minutes? Honestly, I haven't thought about it. I don't know. I just try to get a feeling for the person. I don't reflect on these things that much, to be honest.

I know it works for me. And the only thing that matters for me is whether it, whether the outcome is right. So I do look, obviously, at the statistics. Because if I kind of came in and I just kind of vibe the whole thing and everyone kind of ended up being crap after six months, obviously that wouldn't work. But that's not the case.

And we, you know, like all the senior positions obviously interviewed by all the founders. And so we always have a kind of second and third opinion on it. But we tend to agree on people. I think we look for similar things. Sometimes you have to go into longer interviews and people do longer interviews with us as well. Well, for me, it works better if I do short interviews and I just get a feeling for the person. Have there been examples where your initial intuition about a person has been proved wrong in Helsing in particular?

Not at Helsing, but three times in natural motion. I still know the names. And it still really annoys me why I didn't read it early enough. In all three cases, there were so good at faking the effortlessness and so good at coming up with fake facts that I didn't read through it. I heard you say something on Harry's podcast. Did you actually think there's a lot more exceptional people out there than other people believe? Especially if you have a couple thousand employees. People's character and also performance is not set in stone.

So quite often it's also a matter of in larger companies, sometimes in mind they actually even be harder for people who have a 10x potential to become a 10x person. So it's a combination of things. It's probably harder to keep just hiring 10 out of 10 people, but also harder to develop them. But it's still worth it. I mean, the power law in talent is extreme. They're very few 10 out of 10 people, but they make, I mean, it's a cliche, but we see this every day. They make a disproportionate difference to the company.

So it is worth trying to find these people. And it is worth finding a way to give them a home in a company where they can really thrive. We try to do this very, very systematically at hand. And we make for, I think, hopefully for everyone, we create a great environment where they're surrounded by amazing people. But for the 10 out of tens, we go the extra mile. How do you do this systematically? Don't want to go into too much into how we do it,

but we create an environment where they can do their best work. And we make exceptions that we wouldn't always make for everyone, because they are such big contributors to the company. And many of them now have contributed soon. so much already. It's also a feeling of gratefulness, to be honest, to have a bunch of those key employees that have made a big difference. And you can point at the successes of the company and you always know that, I mean, obviously it's all about talent because people make all of this stuff. Maybe in the future it's more AI, but at the moment it's still mainly people.

And you can point at those people that made a difference to the company. And so we, I think we all feel a lot of gratefulness as well to those top individuals, to everyone in the company, obviously, but in particular to the ones that, you know, have turned a project from really difficult to, you know, from red to green. That happens very often. And it's quite often very small teams of specific individuals that make a big difference. Based on the conversations we had, the way I would summarize your perspective on this, because you talk about this a lot, it's like talent density above everything else. Yeah. I think it's the number one thing.

It's, I feel that culture comes from talent density. It's, we had a situation, I don't know, maybe it was 18 or 24 months ago. where we had a set of values at Helsing that we came up with at some point, I think, in a workshop or so, and there were on our website, and they were fine, I think. And then we had one of our get-togethers where the whole company got together, and 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 do it completely differently.

And then, so at this get-together, there was this workshop. And I have to say I was dreading it because I didn't want to do another value session because I never liked them. And it was effortless. Like the team came up with their own values based on their experiences. And it wasn't one of those exercises where you kind of all contributed ideas. It was just kind of a mind melt and it was clear this is what it was going to be. And the top value was whatever it takes. And then everyone gave examples for why that was.

Some had just come back from the front line in Ukraine. Some had not slept for 48 hours and done a whole bunch of things that are just amazing and impressive. And so that was one that came out of it. Another one that came out of it was the truth is in the field. It doesn't matter how much you claim that your system works in tests and government tests, etc. We found out it has to work in reality and in combat. And so the truth is in the field came out of that. And I was so impressed by the team.

And I was kind of thinking, like, how do you, how did that part of the culture come about? And 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 was just that. I think just getting really good people together

that have good chemistry and when they sometimes maybe have the sparks flying, they can find a way to work together again, That's what creates culture. So you have this idea to start this European defense company. You have ideas for the products you want to 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? We knew from our team in the field. And I do, and everyone thinks differently about these things. I think, and I respect, I think, most attitudes towards it. I personally found it very difficult. I think it became a more serious company. And some of the kind of lightheartedness, you know,

was gone a little bit. Because if you build a video games company or a SaaS company, you can be quite lighthearted about things and unserious. Yes, it's a commercial business, but, you know, you can be it. It fits culturally. If you are deployed on what fundamentally is a sad thing, this kind of conflict and you contribute, it because you have to, because you can think it through from first principles, but in my opinion,

it's still sad that it happens. That makes it a serious, you know, changes the culture. And we are, I think, very aware of it. And that doesn't mean that we don't want to create the best systems. Of course, we do. And it 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. All right. So you've used the word deterrent multiple times. So that's a conversation. So that means It's the best possible outcome for housing is nothing happens. Yeah. You don't want a conflict.

And in general, obviously the reason why you build capabilities is in order to avoid conflict, not to use them in a fight. Which this goes back to this dinner we had like two years ago, this argument we were having about this, the fact that war has been 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. I mean, that's a big question. I do think it's in human nature to have at least parts of the population that want to have

conflict, that enjoy conflict, that want to, you know, increase their sphere of influence. Sometimes, you know, that it's 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 hard-wired. into a part, at least, of the population and will probably be genetic in a part of the population. In order for that not to dominate everything else, you need to make sure that the rest of the population is sufficiently protected so that it's too expensive to try and use force to take what you want. That's basically what it boils down to. And if you could eliminate the outliers,

let's say, 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 earlier 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. We mentioned 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 Alphabot. 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 two. Some of the best entrepreneurs come from gaming. What do you think it is about that? Yeah, and I think arguably Parma Lucky did too. I'm certainly very close to the gaming industry. The gaming companies are complex to build because you marry art with technology. And in many cases, especially console games back in the day today.

It's a bit different with some of the most, I would say, sophisticated IT projects that you could think of. And at the same time, they had to have artistic value as well. And you had to accommodate people from all walks of life, like, you know, very focused software engineers with, you know, artists who, you know, just try to create something beautiful. And that is not dissimilar to what happens in the defense industry, you know, maybe a little bit less artistry, although that exists as well. But we have very different people that work on very complex systems that have very different

different cultural backgrounds and still need to work together to produce something amazing in the end. I think that's one part. And maybe it's also exposure to defense through games. I don't know, a lot of games have a military theme. Maybe that's part of it as well. Do you explain the founding of your first company? What was happening right in your life right before you started that one now? I was studying in the UK and I was working on in biology.

I was working on systems on simulations that simulated neural networks. In what year? The year was 1999. You were working on simulating neural networks in 99? Yeah, using genetic algorithms. I was looking to optimize them to do something useful. Why were you interested in that to begin with? I liked complex systems.

So I had just started a PhD in complex systems in biology, and neural networks are a complex system, and specifically the ones I looked at were fully recurrent neural networks. So once that, you know, with the right way, it could start to create spontaneous cyclic activity. Is that not what you were just described on the fighter jet? Well, it has some similarity because the, so genetic algorithms have fallen out of favor as a search algorithm, and now it's almost entirely reinforcement learning,

but you could theoretically also use genetic algorithm. So there's definitely some similarity. The network architectures are different. Back then, I based my network architectures on biological, what's called central pattern generators. So CPGs, they are the neural structures that create rhythmic movement for walking, for your heartbeat, and a bunch of other things. And so I try to recreate one of these for walking 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, you know, very simple four-legged and then two-legged creatures. physics engines had just started back then with, you know, math engine and Havog and other companies. And to my surprise, it ended up working quite well. So overnight, I remember it's quite rare that you have this Eureka moments, but I had this thing set up overnight,

and those computers were very slow back then. And then the next morning, when I looked at the experiment, I literally had this two-legged creature walk over the screen fully physically simulated. You know, did a bit more research in that area and then realized this was going to work very well. and I thought it spin out a company to use these things as virtual stuntmen in movie scenes.

So if I go back to you at 99, did you have any inclination that one day you'd be a founder, an entrepreneur? No, no, not that. What did that person in 99 think that they were going to do? I thought I was going to be a scientist. I wanted to stay in science and be a biologist, and specifically do software and simulation work in biology.

That's what I wanted to do. OK. But then you have this eureka movement, and you're first thought is I'm going to start a company? It was my first thought. It took a little bit of time, but this was the time of the dot-com boom. And everyone was starting a company. 99 was an important point.

Yeah, it was still, you know, it looked like you could do that kind of thing. And it was inspiring to see lots of other people start companies. And so I started Natural Motion, and we first used it. We produced a software called Endorphin that was used in big Hollywood movies, like Lord of the Rings, Troy, Spiner Man, Harry Potter. And that was fun and great, but it didn't make much money because we only, I think we charged $15,000 per license and they ended up kind of doing all of their scenes with them. And it was clear that the real value was going to be in using that technology for games in real time. And Rockstar games were one of our customers for, you know, for the old tool in Dauphin.

And they asked us, do you have a version that runs in real time on the upcoming consoles? and we said kind of. And so then we started a long collaboration with Rockstar games, who ended up using our technology in GTA4, GTA5, redemption, 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 kind of take-off,

the kind of lift-off characteristics that I kind of was hoping for, as the founder, you always kind of obviously hoped for more of a hockey stick thing. And it felt like the kind of chess pieces, were kind of drawing in and it was going to be hard to move. So we ended up saying, like, we need to make games ourselves. And what you would now call vertically integrate. We didn't think about it that way.

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. We aquired a games team, did the first games, the iPhone came out, and then we had a string of hit games on iPhone, and then a big breakthrough. which was in a completely different area. All of our previous games have been in characters

because that was our technology. And then there was one game that I really wanted to make because it was really into cars, which was a drag racing game, so a car racing game without any steering. And that became our biggest hits, it's called CSR Racing, and it became the biggest game of all time on iPhone at the time.

And that gave us the hockey stick. Then it was lift off for the company. And then it was off and it became a completely different experience. I feel there's 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 getting Raymond Plank, right?

So when he's 90 years old, and he starts this company called Apache Corporation with $250,000 in 1954. By the time the book is published, you know, 50 years later, it's like a $30 billion company. And his insight was he was a tax planner and accountant. And some of the businesses that he was working for were these new American oil companies,

and he realized there's these huge tax incentives that were taking place in America post-World War II. At the same time, you had tax benefits if you would invest in oil discoveries because the United States were trying to incentivize domestic oil production. And at the same time, because there's so much debt after World War II, they increased the top marginal tax rate

to like 90%. And so the very wealthy people were trying to find ways to offset. And that was the original idea. 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 relatively small businesses. 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?

So I don't think it was that direct necessarily. One theme that I've always felt with everything I ended up doing is, 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 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 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 watch animals and dissect animals. I never liked that stuff.

I want to do something slightly different stuff. With gaming, I also never felt part of the gaming group and culture the same way. And as a result, I think we ended up doing quite different games. that I remember that the pricing for our games was very different to anyone else's. The pricing? Yeah, the first games that we made, we priced as low as we possibly could

because we felt that we just maximized revenues that way. And everyone else in the games industry said, no, your game needs to have a value. Like, your mobile game needs to be at least $5 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 there was so much price elasticity

that we could just go all the way down and people would spend overall, it would make much more money because we'd have much more people. So we sold our game for 99 cents, the cheapest that was possible. And then when free-to-play came, we were the first big free-to-play 3D game, and we made it free and then charged money elsewhere.

And there would have been much harder had we been part of the group. And I think a similar thing is also true for defense. It would be much harder for us to build Helsing if the fund of backgrounds had already been in defense companies. It's just much harder. It's easier to be an outsider. That maybe is a person.

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 one point in the UK and thinking, I would like to do the number one top grossing game. It was just a goal. And with Helsing, I think we all want to build a company that has impact. So I think that's similar to you. You just kind of want to have those goals. You want to have a bit of a North Star. And then, and then go for it. Okay, I love that you use the word North Star.

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 can you just expound on that? Yeah, I think commentary is entirely worthless. And it has almost, it has no positive contribution. The only thing that it does is it, I think it drags some people down,

so it has a net negative benefit. And it obviously is encouraged through, you know, the way the social platforms are, you know, incentivizing contributors. So you're incentivized if you comment, and particularly if you comment negatively, but you're not incentivized, you know, to be a creator. And I don't complain about this 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, and commentators are still overvalued because they get so much airtime. And there are many of them now, I think, even more than before. And it contributed to some of the European, I think, perceived malaise. You know, people talking themselves and each other down.

I just said this the other day again. I was just in a car with someone who is a great entrepreneur, but he himself just kept on commenting on how bad certain things are. But there's no point in commenting about it. It creates zero value. You either do something about it or you don't talk about it. But if you don't do either, then I don't think it's a good contribution. Just commenting on negative stuff is not useful.

What would your advice be to do then? Just to focus on building your company. I always think that you have a real privilege as a founder that you can make a difference. You know, depending 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.

And if you are a founder that it's very ambitious and you're in one of those fields, you can change society and not many categories of people can do that. Politicians can as well, certain times of other people can as well, sometimes even investors. But founders, I think, have the biggest lever. And that's also why you have so few founders, I think, on Twitter and and, and, and, and, and, 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.

That's the perfect place, Dan. Thanks for making the time. Cool. Thank you. 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 400 biographies of history's-graced 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. Thank you.