#106 Automation and Data...Spreadsheets on Steroids w/ Henrique Cruz (Rows.com)

Sascha: 00:00:09

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation podcast

Sascha: 00:00:13

with the automation guys.

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Here at the Process in Automation podcast,

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Arno and myself are covering a lot on all things low code, no code, workflow, process

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mining, AI agency.

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I really, really a lot.

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So pretty much all things process and automation and everything which is around

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that.

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So. And of course, today, again, won't be

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different as we have another great interview episode planned in today's world.

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So we know most businesses are running on data.

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Good automations require good data, and AI is depending hugely on data.

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So, yeah, business leaders need to work with data in a meaningful way.

Sascha: 00:00:55

But the reality often is that people are stuck with spreadsheet over spreadsheets and more

Sascha: 00:01:02

spreadsheets to run the business.

Sascha: 00:01:03

And I get the people who love excel and all

Sascha: 00:01:07

these things.

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It is there, it's available on everyone's

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machine, ready to be used.

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But is it scalable and is it a great

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foundation for our business processes and for our businesses going forward?

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So, yeah, we know there is a better way, in fact, many better ways, I think.

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And today we will find out more about data.

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So slightly different angle to our topics.

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Usually we come from sort of workflow, task management, and of course, we love data, need

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data.

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Yeah, today we approach it slightly from a

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different angle.

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So without further ado, it is with great

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pleasure to welcome our next guest.

Sascha: 00:01:44

Yeah, he works at the company, Rose, and as

Sascha: 00:01:47

head of gross.

Sascha: 00:01:48

And yeah, with that, welcome, Henrik.

Sascha: 00:01:51

Welcome to the podcast.

Henrique: 00:01:52

Thank you, Sacha.

Henrique: 00:01:53

Thank you, Arno, for having me.

Sascha: 00:01:55

Yeah, Henrik, we are very excited to hear your insights today, more about data and

Sascha: 00:02:01

of course, learn more about roles.

Sascha: 00:02:03

And to kick off, can you please share with our

Sascha: 00:02:06

listeners a bit about yourself and what you do at Rose and how it all started?

Henrique: 00:02:13

Yeah, of course, I lead our growth team at Rose.

Henrique: 00:02:17

So Rose is rose.com dot.

Henrique: 00:02:19

We're a modern spreadsheet.

Henrique: 00:02:20

And I think it really started with the idea that even though we have all of these other

Henrique: 00:02:26

tools and all of these SaaS tools, workflow tools, et cetera, at the end of the day, the

Henrique: 00:02:30

business language that a billion people know are spreadsheets.

Henrique: 00:02:34

And so our whole workplace tools are being transformed.

Henrique: 00:02:39

First moving to the cloud collaboration, now AI tools connecting to other tools.

Henrique: 00:02:44

And we feel that the spreadsheet is probably one of the last software tools where the

Henrique: 00:02:50

market leader is 40 years old.

Henrique: 00:02:52

And we think that there's a very important

Henrique: 00:02:55

piece as into why this is the right time to build a new spreadsheet.

Henrique: 00:02:57

And so that's what we've been building for the past few years, for me, in growth is really

Henrique: 00:03:02

around talking with customers, around marketing, about building the onboarding

Henrique: 00:03:06

experience, about everything that surrounds our data platforms as well.

Henrique: 00:03:10

And that's kind of what I do on the day to day.

Sascha: 00:03:12

Yeah, brilliant. Yeah. So Arnold myself, we have lots of experience, over 20

Sascha: 00:03:19

years of experience.

Sascha: 00:03:20

We're nearly as old as the spreadsheet

Sascha: 00:03:23

provider you were talking about.

Sascha: 00:03:25

So we have worked with numerous vendors, of

Sascha: 00:03:28

course, to deliver all these sort of data projects, automation projects, local projects.

Sascha: 00:03:34

So where do you see then? Sort of.

Sascha: 00:03:37

There's obviously a lot of tools out there.

Sascha: 00:03:39

So where do you see the competitive edge for

Sascha: 00:03:41

rose in the market?

Henrique: 00:03:43

Yeah, it's really two things.

Henrique: 00:03:46

One of them is Rose is a spreadsheet connected

Henrique: 00:03:49

to the other tools that you use.

Henrique: 00:03:51

So if you're a marketer, roles is connected to

Henrique: 00:03:53

TikTok, to Facebook ads, to Google Analytics, if you're in operation, disconnected to your

Henrique: 00:03:58

postgres or MySQL database, or if you're an it or you're a developer, you can connect it to

Henrique: 00:04:04

your own internal APIs.

Henrique: 00:04:05

So this is a really big value proposition.

Henrique: 00:04:07

The data comes with a spreadsheet.

Henrique: 00:04:09

You don't need to code, you can import your

Henrique: 00:04:10

data, you can analyze it there.

Henrique: 00:04:12

This is a big part of how you can make the

Henrique: 00:04:14

spreadsheet part of your workflow and not have to code VBA, look for add ons or anything like

Henrique: 00:04:19

that.

Henrique: 00:04:19

Then of course there's an AI layer.

Henrique: 00:04:21

But I will actually skip this.

Henrique: 00:04:23

The other big value proposition is the sharing

Henrique: 00:04:26

component.

Henrique: 00:04:27

So what we see is that spreadsheets weren't

Henrique: 00:04:29

built to be shared.

Henrique: 00:04:30

That's why when you create a chart, it's like

Henrique: 00:04:32

this rectangle on top of your data.

Henrique: 00:04:34

That's why if you share it on mobile, it's not

Henrique: 00:04:36

responsive at all.

Henrique: 00:04:37

It just wasn't built to be a tool for people

Henrique: 00:04:39

to share it.

Henrique: 00:04:40

But at the end of the day, a lot of the things

Henrique: 00:04:41

that people do on spreadsheets are going to end up in a PowerPoint or in a report or

Henrique: 00:04:46

something that you share with the client.

Henrique: 00:04:47

And so our spreadsheet is kind of beautiful by

Henrique: 00:04:50

default.

Henrique: 00:04:50

So when you create a spreadsheet, you add

Henrique: 00:04:53

elements to a page so that it's composable already, like a dashboard.

Henrique: 00:04:57

When you share your link to your spreadsheet, it is mobile responsive by default.

Henrique: 00:05:01

You can add things like date pickers and buttons to make it interactive.

Henrique: 00:05:05

And so you can go from a spreadsheet into a dashboard in one click.

Henrique: 00:05:09

And so these two things, the data layer and the sharing layer are really the biggest

Henrique: 00:05:14

drivers of what makes rose special.

Sascha: 00:05:17

Yeah, so sorry, maybe before arno, you jump in.

Sascha: 00:05:22

What kind of sort of target market do you see for rose right now?

Henrique: 00:05:28

Number one, target marketing people, growth people in companies.

Henrique: 00:05:32

So people who already spend a lot of time in spreadsheets and do analysis on marketing

Henrique: 00:05:37

channels, growth channels, faith marketing campaigns, etcetera.

Henrique: 00:05:40

We have then a second group of users that we call them ops.

Henrique: 00:05:44

So people who, for example, connect roles with zapier or connect roles with makeup connectors

Henrique: 00:05:51

to build workflows on the spreadsheet and then lever other integrations to do kind of

Henrique: 00:05:56

continue the automations.

Henrique: 00:05:58

And one of our most popular data connectors is

Henrique: 00:06:01

actually HTTP.

Henrique: 00:06:02

So people connecting directly to their back

Henrique: 00:06:04

offices, connecting directly to their APIs.

Henrique: 00:06:07

And so that's kind of a second group and then

Henrique: 00:06:10

the third group are just people who use it for day to day spreadsheet things to be build

Henrique: 00:06:14

their stock portfolio analysis and track the price of bitcoin.

Henrique: 00:06:18

It can be to use our chrome extension to scrape leads from LinkedIn and add it into a

Henrique: 00:06:23

spreadsheet.

Henrique: 00:06:24

We call it everyday tasks for spreadsheets.

Sascha: 00:06:27

Awesome.

Arno: 00:06:29

Yeah, it looks like you've covered quite a few high level use cases there anyways,

Arno: 00:06:34

because my next question was about the use case for this, and of course I think there's

Arno: 00:06:39

unlimited use cases for spreadsheets out there.

Arno: 00:06:42

And it sounds that this is quite an interesting product in the way you can

Arno: 00:06:46

categorize, I guess, the Personas of the people that uses it.

Arno: 00:06:50

So my question really is just obviously you guys see a lot of use cases out there for

Arno: 00:06:57

spreadsheets.

Arno: 00:06:57

It's probably quite hard to identify something

Arno: 00:06:59

that stands out, but I'm going to try my luck.

Arno: 00:07:03

What have you seen that somebody's built using

Arno: 00:07:05

rose that stands out and you think, wow, that's actually quite incredible.

Arno: 00:07:09

This is not just a spreadsheet and a bit of workflow and HTTP request.

Arno: 00:07:16

This is really quite a nice way and a creative way to build something that actually makes a

Arno: 00:07:23

difference and makes a big impact in a business.

Henrique: 00:07:25

Yeah, I'll tell you a traditional type of use case and then a very creative one

Henrique: 00:07:31

that maybe it's the one where we say, look, I'm not sure you're supposed to use roles for

Henrique: 00:07:35

this.

Henrique: 00:07:36

So the first one, one of our really breakout

Henrique: 00:07:38

features is called embeds.

Henrique: 00:07:40

So you imagine you do an analysis and you take

Henrique: 00:07:42

a chart from Rose and you put it in another tool, and people use it often with a wiki

Henrique: 00:07:48

called notion.com, which is a new, like a very modern wiki.

Henrique: 00:07:52

So a very typical case, we have, for example, very big retail operations who are doing their

Henrique: 00:07:58

paid marketing reports in rows.

Henrique: 00:07:59

And then they take the charts and they write a

Henrique: 00:08:02

document in notion and they embed the charts.

Henrique: 00:08:04

And then the data refreshes every day, for

Henrique: 00:08:07

example.

Henrique: 00:08:07

And then the charts also automatically

Henrique: 00:08:09

refresh.

Henrique: 00:08:10

This is kind of a bread and butter type of use

Henrique: 00:08:12

case.

Henrique: 00:08:12

You come in, import your Google Ads, Facebook

Henrique: 00:08:15

ads, TikTok ads, analyze the data, embed it into an ocean document.

Henrique: 00:08:20

A very creative use case that we have.

Henrique: 00:08:22

We actually have a customer in South Africa

Henrique: 00:08:25

who is a manufacturing firm that uses rows to manage all of the operations.

Henrique: 00:08:29

So using get put and post, they connect to their warehouse system to know the inventory

Henrique: 00:08:34

of the different parts, they connect to their like, purchase for their software to add new

Henrique: 00:08:40

purchase orders.

Henrique: 00:08:41

And all of it is done through spreadsheets.

Henrique: 00:08:43

So you can see there's like a view environment where someone comes in, wants to check the

Henrique: 00:08:48

inventory, wants to create a purchase order with a few different items, clicks a few

Henrique: 00:08:52

buttons, talks with the API to update the inventory, talks with the API to generate, to

Henrique: 00:08:57

generate the purchase order, send it to production.

Henrique: 00:08:59

And it's a very steroid use case for spreadsheets.

Henrique: 00:09:03

And this is where we see the frontier between spreadsheets and building internal tools or

Henrique: 00:09:08

software for teams.

Henrique: 00:09:09

So I would say that 80, 90% of the people are

Henrique: 00:09:12

building these analysis, these reports, lists of leads, etcetera.

Henrique: 00:09:16

And then there's a small minority who are really doing millions of executions on the

Henrique: 00:09:20

spreadsheet, connecting to their APIs, really building a large scale tooling on top of the

Henrique: 00:09:25

spreadsheet.

Henrique: 00:09:26

Okay.

Sascha: 00:09:27

Oh wow, that's brilliant.

Sascha: 00:09:29

So it really becomes like another layer,

Sascha: 00:09:32

application layer.

Henrique: 00:09:34

Yeah. We have another interesting use case is we have now a native integration

Henrique: 00:09:39

with OpenAI.

Henrique: 00:09:40

So you can think of like a wrapper for chat

Henrique: 00:09:42

GPT, but into spreadsheet formulas like equal sentiment analysis, equal extract text, equal

Henrique: 00:09:49

client fact.

Henrique: 00:09:50

And we see a lot of people building workhorse

Henrique: 00:09:52

for this.

Henrique: 00:09:52

So a common one, we have a, a quite large e

Henrique: 00:09:55

commerce website that whenever there's a new customer support ticket through Make.com or Z,

Henrique: 00:10:02

it adds a new road to Rose, which then runs a classification model with OpenAI and equal

Henrique: 00:10:08

classifies, underscore OpenAI formula to tag it into different tiers of what the customer

Henrique: 00:10:15

ticket is about, to then generate reports of how many tickets am I getting per week, how

Henrique: 00:10:19

are they being tagged, what are people talking about?

Henrique: 00:10:22

And then share this with the customer support team and the.

Sascha: 00:10:27

Okay, all right.

Arno: 00:10:29

I guess a very pragmatic way to do things and get it done right.

Arno: 00:10:35

And it's quite interesting.

Arno: 00:10:36

I guess the add in that you can plug in OpenAI

Arno: 00:10:40

as well have sort of real time analysis on sentiment, which is good.

Arno: 00:10:46

It sounds like something that's very easy to get started with.

Arno: 00:10:51

So I can imagine from a use case perspective, people will dive in and just solve practical

Arno: 00:10:57

problems, like you said, not just creating spreadsheets to capture date and the usual way

Arno: 00:11:04

of doing it.

Arno: 00:11:04

But it sounds like the power is also in the

Arno: 00:11:07

fact that you can share.

Arno: 00:11:08

You could do a lot of analysis, which is

Arno: 00:11:11

great.

Arno: 00:11:11

I like the fact that there's, there's a

Arno: 00:11:14

company that actually runs the operations on it.

Arno: 00:11:17

That's quite a scary thought.

Arno: 00:11:18

If you say that and you use excel perhaps in

Arno: 00:11:21

the same sentence and.

Sascha: 00:11:24

They are still out there as well.

Henrique: 00:11:25

So I think it's just at the end of it speaks to the simplicity of rows and

Henrique: 00:11:32

columns interface and how people understand how to put data in, how to read data from

Henrique: 00:11:38

that.

Henrique: 00:11:38

I think we've all been learning that for

Henrique: 00:11:40

decades and I think people just default to it.

Henrique: 00:11:43

Usually all of these reporting tools and one

Henrique: 00:11:45

of their most popular features is always the X Fortis CSV option.

Arno: 00:11:49

Yes.

Henrique: 00:11:50

People want to have a flexible, simple way of looking at the data and creating

Henrique: 00:11:53

a chart here and filtering it and changing the format.

Henrique: 00:11:56

And no tool is really accustomed to exactly what you want.

Henrique: 00:12:00

Changing specific color type and a spreadsheet just adapts to that for simple use cases.

Arno: 00:12:07

Yeah.

Sascha: 00:12:07

It becomes this layer, isn't it, this other layer to connect to all your different

Sascha: 00:12:11

platforms, because that's what lots of businesses use.

Sascha: 00:12:14

Indeed.

Sascha: 00:12:15

They use zero here, they use a slack there and

Sascha: 00:12:19

then to bring it all together in one usable interface or data driven interface.

Sascha: 00:12:25

That's quite exciting.

Henrique: 00:12:28

We don't want to replace VI tools, but we know that there's an in between for you

Henrique: 00:12:33

want to look at some data, do some one off analysis, and something that maybe you need a

Henrique: 00:12:37

data team to work on, or the opposite, you receive a report or a dashboard and you want

Henrique: 00:12:42

to download the data to keep working on it.

Henrique: 00:12:44

And you need an interface to do that.

Henrique: 00:12:47

Yeah, it's kind of this in between layer.

Sascha: 00:12:49

Awesome.

Sascha: 00:12:50

So, yeah, you mentioned earlier, so you might

Sascha: 00:12:53

not want to talk about AI, so maybe that was just for this area or so.

Sascha: 00:12:57

But do you see how, do you see sort of the future of rose?

Sascha: 00:13:01

And I'm sure there is, there's more AI in it.

Henrique: 00:13:05

Yeah. What I meant was I think the major two value propositions are the data and

Henrique: 00:13:09

the sharing.

Henrique: 00:13:10

AI is a big, big component of rose, actually,

Henrique: 00:13:13

our story is that it took us five years to get to 50,000 users.

Henrique: 00:13:18

And then we launched an AI agent called an AI analyst.

Henrique: 00:13:21

And now in less than one year, we went from 50,000 to a million users on top of the AI

Henrique: 00:13:27

feature.

Henrique: 00:13:28

And so basically what we've built is an AI

Henrique: 00:13:30

agent where any table that you have enrolls, you can talk with it, it gives you insights,

Henrique: 00:13:35

prepares to give the tables.

Henrique: 00:13:36

You can ask specific questions about your

Henrique: 00:13:38

data.

Henrique: 00:13:38

And this really took off on social media,

Henrique: 00:13:40

people building videos on YouTube, on how to use it.

Henrique: 00:13:44

We have traffic, thousands of people every day trying the product because of this.

Henrique: 00:13:48

But what I meant is this is a natural extension, I think, of where software is now,

Henrique: 00:13:53

these new LLMs, and every month or every two months you see a relevant update that changes

Henrique: 00:13:59

a bit how the features that you can build.

Henrique: 00:14:01

And I think it's a little bit like being

Henrique: 00:14:04

working on the web and on the Internet in the late nineties.

Henrique: 00:14:07

It is inevitable that this is happening.

Henrique: 00:14:09

It's inevitable that every tool will become a

Henrique: 00:14:11

little bit of an AI tool.

Henrique: 00:14:13

For us, it's really been transformative

Henrique: 00:14:15

because a spreadsheet is a very manual process, analyzing a spreadsheet, create a

Henrique: 00:14:20

table with this, filter the data through that.

Henrique: 00:14:23

What is the campaign with most clicks?

Henrique: 00:14:25

What channels are working better? And this is exactly the type of problem that a

Henrique: 00:14:31

hybrid LLM plus computation engine can solve together.

Henrique: 00:14:35

So this is what we're doing.

Arno: 00:14:38

Yeah. On my mind, that actually sounds like a very interesting use case right there,

Arno: 00:14:43

to be able to ask spreadsheet questions about your sales data without actually going in and

Arno: 00:14:49

analyzing it yourself.

Arno: 00:14:50

So that sounds pretty powerful.

Henrique: 00:14:52

Actually, a lot of the work we've been doing over the last year has been fine

Henrique: 00:14:56

tuning that experience, helping people ask questions, what type of questions, how do they

Henrique: 00:15:01

like? And so we're doing a big AI release in a

Henrique: 00:15:04

month, I think, and just keep pushing.

Sascha: 00:15:08

You have to do a few tests and test runs as well for our community.

Henrique: 00:15:13

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Sascha: 00:15:15

Interesting.

Arno: 00:15:16

So I've got a sort of a next question, really.

Arno: 00:15:20

And this, this is more to do with using Rose and, you know, kind of like with a wider

Arno: 00:15:27

digital experience, slash I suppose a bit of soft transformation as well, because I can

Arno: 00:15:34

imagine something like Rose is a really, really good tool, very pragmatic to get

Arno: 00:15:38

started, connect things up and, you know, looking our sort of world we live in,

Arno: 00:15:45

especially myself and Sascha, we talk a lot about automation.

Arno: 00:15:48

What's the best way to automate something.

Arno: 00:15:51

Is it a workflow tool?

Arno: 00:15:52

Is it a case management tool? Is it an RPA bot?

Arno: 00:15:58

So for me, this is something new.

Arno: 00:16:00

I had a quick look at the product.

Arno: 00:16:03

It's add ins, the ability to start processes based on data.

Arno: 00:16:07

So for people that want to get started with, with this tool, what is sort of your advice?

Arno: 00:16:16

Where do you get started? What is the sort of things you need to look

Arno: 00:16:19

out for? What's fit for Rose?

Arno: 00:16:21

And perhaps something that you might think, well, that's like a conventional workflow that

Arno: 00:16:27

needs to be a workflow that needs to be done in a workflow tool.

Arno: 00:16:32

How do you get started?

Henrique: 00:16:34

I think the way that I would think about it is if the job that you're looking to

Henrique: 00:16:39

automate requires a lot of points to point connections, if it's a multi step process,

Henrique: 00:16:45

like I receive an invoice on my email address, I need to download it, and then I need to add

Henrique: 00:16:50

it to a spreadsheet to extract the code to put it on SAP.

Henrique: 00:16:54

It's not really the type of workflow that a spreadsheet will help much.

Henrique: 00:16:57

Or if it is only a two point connection.

Henrique: 00:17:01

When something happens here, I want something

Henrique: 00:17:03

else to happen here, then I think there are better tools to solve the job where we really

Henrique: 00:17:07

excel is thinking from.

Henrique: 00:17:10

What do I use spreadsheets for today?

Henrique: 00:17:13

Where does that data come in? How do I transform that data in a spreadsheet

Henrique: 00:17:17

and where does it cope? And seeing, is there automation potential

Henrique: 00:17:20

here? Typically what we see is the data normally

Henrique: 00:17:24

comes from a third party tool.

Henrique: 00:17:26

Maybe I need to extract data from my database,

Henrique: 00:17:28

or I need to get data from Facebook, or I need to get data from an API.

Henrique: 00:17:32

So this is a point where you can automate through a tool like us, or the data comes from

Henrique: 00:17:36

the web.

Henrique: 00:17:37

Like I extract a lot of leads from LinkedIn

Henrique: 00:17:39

sales navigator, or I take tables from whatever source I parked on the web.

Henrique: 00:17:44

So here, our chrome extension can help.

Henrique: 00:17:46

So where does the data come from then?

Henrique: 00:17:48

What type of manipulation do I do in the data? Is it variants, data science, things that

Henrique: 00:17:53

require python writing shifts, then maybe this is not the right environment, a spreadsheet?

Henrique: 00:17:58

Or do I do a lot of adding new columns, filtering data, pivot table sorting, so that

Henrique: 00:18:03

sort of operations? And then how do I want to share the data?

Henrique: 00:18:07

Is this something that only lives in my local environment?

Henrique: 00:18:09

Do I then need to share it with my boss or my suppliers or my team?

Henrique: 00:18:13

And if so, do I need to build a report out of it or an analysis?

Henrique: 00:18:17

And if so, like if these two or three things are true, you need data from an external

Henrique: 00:18:21

system.

Henrique: 00:18:21

You play around with the data and need to

Henrique: 00:18:23

analyze it, and you need to share it, then I think the tool light growth is just really

Henrique: 00:18:27

powerful, democratic for any business person.

Henrique: 00:18:31

If not, I think there are better tools out

Henrique: 00:18:33

there to build complex workflows or build databases or build robots.

Sascha: 00:18:38

Yeah, you mentioned make there earlier.

Sascha: 00:18:39

I think that could be the orchestration layer for two leg rose, isn't it?

Henrique: 00:18:45

Exactly.

Henrique: 00:18:47

We have hundreds of customers that use make,

Henrique: 00:18:49

connected with Rosencrantz, act as a beautiful orchestration part.

Henrique: 00:18:53

Very complex, putting all these things together, and then the data ends in a new row,

Henrique: 00:18:57

in the spreadsheet, in rows.

Henrique: 00:18:59

Then you take it from there.

Sascha: 00:19:01

Nice. So, Henrik, we have a bit of a tradition here on the podcast.

Sascha: 00:19:07

We and our listeners like to get to know our guests a bit more.

Sascha: 00:19:11

So more than just sort of technical and business side.

Sascha: 00:19:15

So that's why we like to ask a few quick questions.

Sascha: 00:19:18

So maybe you're up for it.

Sascha: 00:19:22

Not a lot of weird questions.

Sascha: 00:19:24

I promised.

Sascha: 00:19:26

So, yeah, who is your idol and why?

Henrique: 00:19:29

I grew up watching and playing basketball.

Henrique: 00:19:32

So maybe this is going to be a little bit of a biased answer, but if you've watched Netflix,

Henrique: 00:19:38

the last 10th documentary, I think it's hard not to idolize a bit.

Henrique: 00:19:42

Michael Jordan, if you grew up in the nineties like me, and playing basketball and looking at

Henrique: 00:19:46

that competitive spirit and how he approached the game a lot.

Henrique: 00:19:51

So I think that would be one for sure.

Henrique: 00:19:53

The mindset of someone like Michael Jordan

Henrique: 00:19:56

wanted to excel, wanting to win, that's something that I cannot emulate, but I can

Henrique: 00:20:01

certainly look up to that.

Henrique: 00:20:04

And then I think building the spreadsheet in

Henrique: 00:20:06

Rose, honestly, I've been doing this for about six years.

Henrique: 00:20:10

I've began to love to read about the early computing era and the early web era.

Henrique: 00:20:16

And so people like LMK, Douglas Engelbart, I think they are now more and more bigger

Henrique: 00:20:21

influences to me, just because thinking about how do people use software, how do you use

Henrique: 00:20:26

them to create better tools, how do you use them to be more productive, is a lot of the

Henrique: 00:20:30

things that we think about, and I think these were some of the few people that started doing

Henrique: 00:20:34

this, started thinking about it, doing demos, etcetera.

Henrique: 00:20:37

So I think like two spectrums, one in the computing space and one in the sports space,

Henrique: 00:20:42

that I look up to a lot.

Henrique: 00:20:43

Yeah.

Arno: 00:20:45

And I guess my next question is about reading.

Arno: 00:20:49

And I presume I sort of know the answer to this one, but we'll see.

Arno: 00:20:54

Imagine you can get all the contents and knowledge of a book instantly.

Arno: 00:20:57

Or books.

Arno: 00:20:58

Which book or books would you choose?

Henrique: 00:21:01

Well, I think a cheat question is I would put all of the tokens that chatgpt was

Henrique: 00:21:07

trained on into a PDF and I would memorize that book.

Henrique: 00:21:10

That would be, I think, very helpful book.

Henrique: 00:21:15

I think that would be my go to answer books

Henrique: 00:21:18

that I go to often.

Henrique: 00:21:20

Again, I like books on this early age of the

Henrique: 00:21:24

web.

Henrique: 00:21:25

So things like founders at work from Jessica

Henrique: 00:21:28

Livingston, the YC founder with program.

Henrique: 00:21:32

There are a lot of good stories there.

Henrique: 00:21:33

A lot of marketing campaigns that we've run at wrote, were inspired in some of those chapters

Henrique: 00:21:38

or elad's gills like high growth handbook.

Henrique: 00:21:43

Very practical things for today.

Henrique: 00:21:44

Today in those two books, I would like to always have a short memory on, if not then all

Henrique: 00:21:51

of the tokens of chess.

Henrique: 00:21:52

GPT I think I could do pretty well with that,

Henrique: 00:21:55

maybe.

Arno: 00:21:55

I think people will agree with you on the chat.

Arno: 00:21:57

GPT one.

Henrique: 00:21:58

Yeah, yeah.

Sascha: 00:22:00

So yeah.

Sascha: 00:22:01

What's the best advice you have ever received?

Henrique: 00:22:05

When I talk about this with other people of where we are now, I always come back

Henrique: 00:22:09

to, I'm not sure if it's an advice, but I come back to an interview that was done with Mark

Henrique: 00:22:14

Andreessen shortly after their IPO.

Henrique: 00:22:17

And they like tour the offices of Netscape and

Henrique: 00:22:20

they asked for and they asked American Bryson, who was maybe 24 or 35 at the time.

Henrique: 00:22:24

So what's the secret? What's the secret of Netscape?

Henrique: 00:22:27

And his answer was, the secret is that we're in an exploding market.

Henrique: 00:22:32

And this really stuck back the first time that I heard that.

Henrique: 00:22:36

I keep going back to this and sharing this with people because I think it's really a

Henrique: 00:22:40

strong piece of advice in a way, which is, I think the best thing you can do is build

Henrique: 00:22:45

something that people want in an exploding market.

Henrique: 00:22:48

This is the fastest way to accelerate your career, accelerate the company that you're

Henrique: 00:22:53

building.

Henrique: 00:22:54

I think maybe a hard playbook to follow, but I

Henrique: 00:22:57

think it's come back to this often.

Sascha: 00:23:00

Yeah, yeah.

Sascha: 00:23:01

This is of course why by everyone.

Sascha: 00:23:03

Even if it's not, maybe it makes sense for all software companies or for all companies to

Sascha: 00:23:08

jump on AI, or maybe it's absolutely the right thing at the right time for them.

Sascha: 00:23:13

Or maybe not.

Sascha: 00:23:13

But really everyone is jumping on it and I'm

Sascha: 00:23:15

sure they, they will be more successful because of that.

Sascha: 00:23:18

And everyone who's not putting AI on everything and you start using it properly,

Sascha: 00:23:24

they will not be successful.

Henrique: 00:23:25

That's knowing in which problem should I adapt it to.

Henrique: 00:23:30

This is a big part, but clearly this is not going anywhere.

Henrique: 00:23:34

I think just because the capabilities that exist today, if used correctly, would already,

Henrique: 00:23:40

I don't know, increase two, three, 4% of the world's gdp.

Henrique: 00:23:43

I don't know.

Henrique: 00:23:44

But just the models that we have today, if we

Henrique: 00:23:46

apply them well, we could already be doing a lot more, even without thinking about AGI or

Henrique: 00:23:50

multimodal or.

Arno: 00:23:54

So the final question to you is, if you could be an Olympic athlete, what sport would

Arno: 00:23:58

you choose?

Henrique: 00:24:00

Well, the first one would be basketball, I think.

Henrique: 00:24:03

Just because I like it so much.

Henrique: 00:24:05

I think a second would be maybe something

Henrique: 00:24:07

like, even though I don't do it and I've never done it, maybe something like the Catalan or a

Henrique: 00:24:12

marathon, because you have to be hyper resilient, like if you're in a marathon, I

Henrique: 00:24:17

guess, like, very resilient all of these hours at the speed.

Henrique: 00:24:20

And I guess the Catalon is being able to do a lot of different things and a lot of different

Henrique: 00:24:25

things well.

Henrique: 00:24:26

And I think this translates, especially in

Henrique: 00:24:28

building a company like you.

Henrique: 00:24:29

One day you're talking to a customer and then

Henrique: 00:24:31

you're writing a stack or you're talking with your engineering team.

Henrique: 00:24:34

If you have the Olympian mindset of being able to do ten sports at the world level, then I

Henrique: 00:24:39

think you're probably fine.

Sascha: 00:24:42

Yeah, I think some people look at it, it's a bit unfair.

Sascha: 00:24:45

You're doing the catalog and then you only get one medal, and then you do the swimming and

Sascha: 00:24:51

you get like, eight medals.

Sascha: 00:24:54

So it's a bit tough.

Henrique: 00:24:56

I think there's an episode with.

Henrique: 00:24:58

I think it's Chris Frock and Jerry Seinfeld in

Henrique: 00:25:01

a show that they do.

Henrique: 00:25:02

And I think Chris Frock says something like,

Henrique: 00:25:04

whenever I see a kid playing, doing skateboarding, I know that this kid, and they

Henrique: 00:25:10

do it competitively, I know that this kid is going to be alright in life because playing

Henrique: 00:25:14

skateboards is a lot about, you know, you will fall, you know, you will get hurt, and then

Henrique: 00:25:19

you get up and you go and you do it again, knowing that you will fall again.

Henrique: 00:25:22

So I think skating is now an Olympia sport, so maybe, like, that would actually be a better

Henrique: 00:25:26

pick.

Arno: 00:25:28

Yeah.

Sascha: 00:25:29

Awesome. Yeah, it was.

Sascha: 00:25:32

That was sort of the round of questions.

Sascha: 00:25:34

Yeah.

Sascha: 00:25:35

It was a great pleasure to have you on the

Sascha: 00:25:36

podcast today.

Sascha: 00:25:37

So I'm sure our listeners would like to get in

Sascha: 00:25:40

touch with you after that episode.

Sascha: 00:25:42

What would be the best way for them to reach

Sascha: 00:25:45

you?

Henrique: 00:25:47

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and Twitter, so if you do Enrique Rose, I hope

Henrique: 00:25:52

I'm one of the first hits.

Henrique: 00:25:54

If you're more curious about Rose or want to

Henrique: 00:25:56

learn more about what we're doing, I'm enrique.com.

Henrique: 00:26:00

so that is rows.com and pretty easy to find.

Sascha: 00:26:06

Yeah, perfect.

Sascha: 00:26:06

I will put that anyway into the show notes so

Sascha: 00:26:09

that the listeners and wherever we share it, they will be able to get in touch.

Sascha: 00:26:14

As this is easy as possible.

Sascha: 00:26:15

We put the website link as well.

Sascha: 00:26:18

If you have some other things you like me to share, then please share them.

Sascha: 00:26:22

Yeah, we are coming to the end of this episode.

Sascha: 00:26:25

Thank you, Henrik for joining us today.

Sascha: 00:26:28

And yeah, we will be back with another episode

Sascha: 00:26:30

very soon.

Sascha: 00:26:31

And until then, let's automate it.