#57 - Dan Hobbs - AI Vision = Guardian Angel: How Dan Hobbs Is Rewiring Safety with AI Vision

I had to bring you this one and it's with a dear friend of mine, Dan Hobbs. Dan is the co-founder of an amazing company called Protex AI. If you haven't heard of Protex, pause this and check it out. Dan and his co-founder Kieran started almost 5 years ago because they saw firsthand how detrimental incidents are for the families, the team, and the organization. Within Protex, they bring AI to the forefront. of helping reduce incidents and improve operational performance by helping you understand what's happening on the ground to take the right measures and keep people safe. And that's using AI vision technology, which I'm sure you've all heard about it to some extent. Protex is one of those companies doing an amazing job at making sure deployments are successful and real value is captured in a human-centric way. This episode, we tried our best to try to cover the story of what an organization goes through from the beginning of identifying this need to implementing the technology to seeing extreme success. So if you're interested in this and you're interested in bringing in AI to your organization or using vision technology in a way that's human-centric, please listen to this episode. I believe you're really going to enjoy it. Dan, so good to see you, man.

Yeah, great to be here. Love it. Timing was very good. Happened to be in London.

God, look, I just messaged you yesterday. We've been talking about this for a while. I've always wanted to sit with you and talk to you, man. I love what you guys are doing. And we just literally emailed you yesterday or the day before. Luckily you're here.

Yeah.

You're flying out today?

Flying out today. Yeah. Going back to Boston this week. Doing a lot of stuff out there, but we got an office in just by Holborn. Really great team there. So I tend to spend my time between the offices.

Cool. That's awesome. I want to learn a bit about that in a while because we keep talking about the US and how complicated the US is and you've done a lot there. So it'll be cool to learn about that. But yeah, talk to us a little bit about yourself, Protex, people who are listening learn more about your background and what Protex does?

Sure. Yeah. So I'm the CEO of Protex AI. We're a computer vision company, so that's using cameras and AI together. And essentially we're a data intelligence layer for enterprise companies, for factories and warehouses to look at their safety and operations to make them more efficient, safer, and essentially create a better flow within these organizations. Started about 4 years ago or so, and we have about 80, 90 people working with some really cool enterprises, Fortune 500 across So we're now in 36 countries, I think, overall. So it's been a fun 4 years.

That's awesome, man. The team is in Dublin?

Technical HQ is actually in a place called Limerick in the west of Ireland, a small city, which when during COVID we set up there, we were like, we're going to build the biggest company out of this small town, small city. And then we realized we couldn't really hire many people there. So we still have— so our technical HQ is there. We have a great team down there, small team down there, but our HQ's in Dublin. Technical HQ's in Dublin. They'll kill me for saying that. And then we got Our US operations out of Boston and our London operations as well.

Cool. So you have a team here as well in London. Okay, that's awesome, man. So we'll hopefully see more of you here in London.

Yeah, I love it here as well. It's a good time.

Awesome. All right, so just to dig deeper into what AI vision technology really means and how it involves safety, and you mentioned operations as well, so if you can explain that a bit more, that would be helpful.

Sure, yeah. So maybe where the company came around helps to illustrate what we do. So Kiron's family member was an operations manager on a site in Ireland, and this guy got crushed by a forklift against the wall and died. Oh my God. And they thought it was a freak accident, but when they went back through the CCTV, they saw that all of the behavior patterns that were leading to that accident were actually happening all the time. So, it could have been stopped. So, that's where we were like, okay, if those patterns are there all the time, why can't people see these things? And it's because you've been on these huge sites, there's so much stuff going on, and it's really hard to spot these things, whether it be someone not using a walkway or forklifts almost hitting people. Or people not wearing the right PPE or ergonomic issues that are big problems for especially companies in the States. And all these things are happening, but it's really hard to pick it up. So what we found is solving for safety, we're able to identify these patterns and stop these things happening before they actually occurred, which sounds a bit strange, but being predictive and proactive rather than reactive on the safety side. And what we found in the last kind of 12 months is a lot of companies are saying, hey, cool, you're working with our existing infrastructure, our existing cameras. What else can we do? Past safety. And now we're moving into that operational flows, looking at asset and area utilization using cameras, which is really great, and spotting these places within these factories and warehouses where we can create efficiencies all by learning and getting visibility through cameras.

Wow. So you moved from, let's make sure we track behaviors to predict incidents before they happen, to Of course, there's a lot of ROI and cultural impact there, but companies started seeing a lot of value as well when it comes to efficiencies, how the site operates. And how was that transition? And how are you finding when you look at the product and how it started and where it's going? I'm sure the two feed into each other really well. Safety is operations, but how's that looking?

I think safer operations are more efficient operations. Overall, we've seen that our safest clients are definitely the most productive and most fluid when it comes to how they manage their facilities, but they're the same teams. which I think is cool. Safety usually reports to operations. Some report to HR, some report to legal and risk, but in general, it's the same teams and the same outcomes. So operational excellence, continuous improvement, all ties into safety as well. So that kind of trifecta within organizations is really who we try to tackle.

Yeah, it's so cool. Honestly, thinking about the power of understanding your operation through intelligent vision is just such a powerful thing that seems to— I feel like we'll be moving further and further into that being the gold standard for how you run an operation.

And there's more companies doing like Cerion do process improvement for manufacturers. Really cool company. I think computer vision is going to come into fold. What you guys are doing is cutting edge as well. So there's more technology using vision-related stuff, which I think is really cool because it's this 24/7 data source that you can tap into that's really been untouched.

Yeah. And us humans, we are always thinking, we're distracted. There are things that we're not sure you're not going to notice, but you just have this partner with you looking at what you're doing and helping you get better.

And I think the cool thing about it, vision is Videos. It's very easy to understand what's going on, which is good. You don't have to explain a dataset or look at— especially when we started the company, we wanted to do something that everybody just got. You just understood how it worked. There's just videos, you watch it, you see what's going on and say, what does this dataset mean? Same as you guys looking at it from the VR and AR side of things. You get it. You put on the headset and you understand what's going on.

Yeah. Awesome, man. So one thing that I'll jump right into, because as soon as we think of the power of this technology, Obviously, many people resist technologies and many people think, my data, and going through that aha moment to understand how it's helping you versus it monitoring you. And you've been doing this for some time. And when we talk to many customers, that's the first thing they ask themselves. And then when we see they implemented the technology and I talk to them again, they go from, oh my God, we're worried about privacy, to, oh my God, this is amazing. We're learning so much. Yeah. What can we do with this data so we can deploy training preemptively and take action preemptively? What have you learned about data privacy and that topic? And what advice would you give companies that are thinking about this and that see this as a limitation?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a question we get all the time. I think when you look at privacy, it's very core to what we do. So we do de-identification. We actually blur people out of the scenes. We're not looking at individuals whatsoever. We're looking at the collective and we say to manage by the collective, not the individual. Our whole ethos is to see the forest, not the trees.

Look at the trends, look at the behaviours rather than the individual. I think when you focus on the individual, you lose the game straight away. That's from the company side of things, is taking a step back and looking at it. This isn't a gotcha tool saying, hey, you did a really bad job here, we need to improve you individually. It's looking at it at the shift and company level. And we've seen reductions of up to 80% in risk reduced using our system. So we have really good results. Wow. And on the efficiency side, we're seeing really cool gains starting to come in too. I think how people are looking at AI in general has shifted drastically in the last 12, 18 months, even that recent. Previously, people are— and it's still there for sure. And I think they're right to think that. Is it going to take my job? Is it this Terminator system that's going to come in? And that's okay. And it's crossing the chasm. Like you said, once they start using it, it works a lot better, especially from privacy piece. Once they see it, it works a lot better. We tell companies, don't hide this software. Tell teams what you're doing. Tell sites what you're doing. One story I have, we were talking to a union. We went over to the States, and there was one of the biggest unions in America. And we sat on stage and we were like, we're going to get absolutely destroyed on stage. Destroyed. It was like my worst nightmare, just 300 union members. I was like, oh my God. And we went through what we did and we addressed all the questions. People think it's like Big Brother. And we went through what we did and a guy put up his hand and he turned out to be one of the senior guys in the union. And he said, this isn't Big Brother, this is a guardian angel looking over. And I was like, that was, like you said, that shift in understanding what it is makes people really believe that this is the future and this is something that's, that's a helping hand rather than something that's going to be a deterrent.

Yeah, that's awesome, man. That gave me goosebumps. Yeah, think about that.

Yeah. And then when he said on stage, I got a bit teary. I was like, you're so right, man. You're so right.

It's so cool. And yeah, I love how you said it. It's not about the individual. It's about always looking at the systems. It's not about blaming anyone. It's about learning as a group and getting better as a group. And something that I want to try to get into because I really want listeners to learn the depth of what you guys do. How does this look like in practice? So if maybe start off with the types of companies you typically work with, like ICP, how would you categorize the different companies that are the core personas? And then taking us through the story of how typically, how they typically would implement and the journey they go through from product, from like testing to successfully implementing it and what the results look like. You mentioned a few numbers like 80%, these are—

Yeah.

Amazing numbers to hear, but how do people get to these numbers? And just help us learn about it by contextualizing a real story.

Sure. So we always talk about we don't do pilots, we do projects. I think it's a really important way of— companies now have AI strategies. Most companies have AI strategies now of how they want to bring in the technology, but at the same time, they need vendors like us and you to assist them and help them to ease it into the company. I think that's really important. the biggest understanding that we've learned in the last while, and it's how we talk about the technology and what we do and what we sell and what we support, is we're really good technologists, but you guys are the experts at your job. We're here to support that. We're not going to come in and tell you our agenda and tell you how to do your job. They're the experts. They know their facilities way better than we ever will, which means when we come into it, we're assisting them and being more consultative rather than a case of trying to push something or shove something down their throats. I think when it comes to our particular technology, usually what we do is we start in a few sites. They'll have a plan, so they'll have a rollout plan for a year or 2, whatever it may be.

Yeah. The example of a company would be, what are your ICP companies? Oh

yeah. So our ICP, our ideal customer profile, would be Fortune 500 companies, anything over 4,000 employees with about 40+ sites. So a lot of scale.

So many sites around the world that operate and they need to understand and optimize.

Yeah, exactly. DHL would be one of our Our good clients, as well as, I can't name a lot of them, but a lot of Fortune 500s.

So, logistics, manufacturing, distribution.

Yeah, exactly. So, usually what we do is we create a baseline. So, the system turns on and you don't touch anything, and it just gets a gauge of what's going on. So, don't change any rules, don't change any corrective actions. And it's funny, they see this spike happen. They're like, oh my God, our sites are way more dangerous since bringing in ProteX. We're like, no, you're just seeing more things of what's actually going on. And that's the baseline. Create the baseline. And to be fair, we've got an awesome client success team, both in Boston and in London and Dublin. Really great team. We always get complimented on how we work with clients, and it's all them. Amazing. So basically what happens is they do that, and then we started building these things called rules. So rules are essentially instructions that you tell the cameras, things you want to pick up. So things like I mentioned, those ergonomic issues or near misses with forklifts, whatever it may be. Forklifts. Yeah. And then the system then pulls that data from the site and gives you that visibility of what's really going on, the trend analysis, what parts of the body are the most concerned when doing ergonomic lifts and things like that. So lifting boxes and dock doors. And then they bring that to the teams and say, okay, how do we want to solve this? So you look at the data, try to put in the corrective actions in, and then we've seen that risk drastically drop. How teams seem to use it a lot is they actually bring it to the fold and they'll show the videos to the teams on site. Interesting. We were on site with a client in Kentucky, and it was the first time I've been on a site where someone's almost actually died.

Wow.

And we saw it. This forklift swings around the corner. This guy's stacking a shelf, doesn't see it at all, and it almost crushes him against the shelf.

Man, forklift safety is so crazy. People don't give a fuck. The amount of times we hear that. Yeah, it's not paper cuts. Yeah, it's just people start operating and they just lose track of who's around them. And reversing forklifts, it's just such a big deal, man.

Yeah, we've seen a lot of fatalities happen off the back of it. So usually what would happen in those instances, if they happen to see it, if a safety leader or plant manager happens to see it, they'll walk up to them guy and say, hey, John, just let you know, which happened in this case when we were on site. I was like, show me what you do. So he went up and he said, hey, John, just let you know, forklift almost hit you. And he goes, yeah, but it didn't. He goes, I know it didn't, but it could have. And he didn't know the piece around it. And he said, if we had a video of that and went in and showed him it—

Makes him go, oh my God, I was this close to—

It contextualizes it for them in their own world. And when you see that, that's really what changes behavior. And that's why we've seen such a drastic change in it.

That's so powerful, man. So typically you would go into so much data where the customer sees that, wow, we're actually tracking so many things and setting up rules that allow you to contextualize that data and see it in a valuable way. And then you start seeing that sites are now using that data to— during their standups or toolbox talks or—

And the same with operations, like operations, they can understand the flow, they can understand where their choke points are, where their intersections are, where that's causing a lot of wastage and time wastage, whether it be someone has to stop at a junction every time before they leave, or looking at things like, are you using all the forklifts in the area? Are there ones that are just sitting there collecting dust? So using cameras to really get that visibility, understand what's happening, and then act on the data that you have to improve the efficiencies and the safety operations.

Yeah. It's insane the ROI that you can get from something like that when you're talking about it. One, you did several things. We understood the risks in a site, we taught people, like we had people learn through actual realistic videos that have happened around them for people that they can relate to as well. So the group is learning, and then you're understanding as a management team or a site manager the utilization of your equipment and utilization of your site. So if it's implemented correctly, it gets to like really driving insane ROI.

Yeah.

And then from there you start expanding from that. So you build that success story within a few sites, and then the organizations start to Expanding across different sites.

Exactly. Yeah. And that's where we're in. I think we're most recently in the Ivory Coast, which I think is so cool. I was like, I want to get a site visit there. But it's nice seeing the problems are the same across all these companies, which is cool. They surprise me how common issues are across the fold. And what's really great about, I think, in the world that we're in, I love chatting to our clients because they're the most awesome people. They're all people who want to do well, same as yourself.

You know this world.

We spoke beforehand offline at that conference where People just love telling stories, and they want to help, and they want to do better. It's very rare that you get to work in this world and—

They care. They really care about the human. And I feel like because the majority of them have lived through actual incidents, many of them had to have conversations with families. And when I hear their stories, it starts off from, oh, this is a job, to, oh my God, this is what can happen if we don't do our job correctly. And then it unfolds into this deep— you feel like they all have to be way closer to the human and how the human functions and the systems versus blaming people or thinking about— So, yeah, honestly, always grateful for working with that group. The more I learn about them, it makes me love my job more and more. Same. I fully relate to that, man. All right, yeah, go on.

No, I was just going to say, exactly, there's a really funny story. We were on a site and we did a nighttime site walk, And how mission-driven. It's like a family or a sports team, I always relate it, but on a massive scale, like thousands of people. And there's a really funny one where we saw, there's like a tug, which is kind of like a forklift, but there was a couple on it. They were having a date on the forklift. I was like, oh, that's so lovely. So funny. Love blossoms even in these sites as well, as much as they're just good people and very family-orientation people as well, which is great.

Yeah, it's so cool, man. And particularly in like manufacturing and logistics and like that world. Yeah, I feel like people connect a lot more and have to work with each other a lot more. When I look at construction, turnover is much higher and you don't— make you feel like it's more transactional. So it's interesting you got to this point where you started seeing people see it as their second home in a way, because they spend so much time in that space.

We see people that are like 30, 40 years in the organization. That's not uncommon for us to meet people that are like decades in a place.

That's so cool. All right. So to go back to the product, organizations prove that value, then it becomes like an operating system for the sites and they scale it across all sites. I wanted to dig into features that you have like Copilot, etc. But before we go there, you know, what are the issues that typically surface when you're going through that journey that you talked us through? What are things that are good for listeners to be aware of? that surface and sometimes act as blockers in that journey. Sure.

Yeah. I'm sure you find a lot of those similar problems we have, or your clients do. I think it's okay not to know how you're going to use it initially. You don't have to figure out everything. You kind of need to build a plane, which isn't a very safe thing, build a plane as you're flying a little bit.

It's like start, get into it and start, and then learn and improve.

I don't know if you find that as well, where clients are trying to figure out everything before they actually introduce it and adopt it.

Yeah.

So I think just get it in the door and then you figure things out. We've seen a lot of things stall because people are trying to figure out every single nook and cranny with it. That would be probably the biggest one. And then just understanding, I think if you look at, and this isn't just us, I think any, even if you're using Claude or Copilot or anything like that, if you have it as a sexy tool that just sits on the side, that you'll touch at the start, it's just cool to look at, you'll never really use it. I know there's no longevity. And that's what I mean, we don't do pilot 3D projects.

Nice. It's like, how do you actually implement it as a repeatable, sticky process versus, hey, this is a nice thing and it's just running there, then it doesn't—

It's the same with you guys. What you do is so cool, especially from the offset. So people will just be interested in it naturally. But how do you actually integrate it into your current flows is really important. But spend the time on it, get in the door, Figure it out. That's what the vendors are for, to work with them. And then you can see, okay, this is what makes sense. And then you can spread it across the network very easily.

Cool. And then IT was something that popped in my head when I was asking you this question is how big of a hurdle is IT typically when you integrate and how do you cross that? What advice would you have for people to be able to solve for that?

Do it early. I think people leave it to the end where they're like, cool, we figured it out. Now let's talk to IT and legal. And that usually takes a little bit of time. That's probably the biggest one. We've never had a blocker with IT.

Just the way we just—

Time. There was one client we worked with who had 8 different councils.

Oh my God.

I felt like I was in Star Trek or something. It was like, which council am I speaking to now? And some people, the same people are on the same council. I was like, I've seen you before. You've seen this already. I know, I'm part of this council as well. I think starting those journeys early, which I'm sure you figured out that this everyone's as well, starting that early is really important. Get them involved. I think if especially IT should be involved in AI projects to get them involved early and understand the what rather than just, hey, this is a project we want to

do. Yeah, so they're part of it and they're champions versus— They should be. Hey, I want to be a blocker here. Exactly. Cool. All right, man. The camera piece is super clear to me. And then I know some of the features that you guys deployed recently, maybe not so recent now, is AI Copilot and other AI features that help you contextualize the data and gather information. Can you tell us more about how these work and how has the adoption been?

Really good. So we have Protex Intelligence, which is our LLM system that sits over the whole platform, both from the safety and operations side of things. And I guess a really cool thing about that is it helps to cut through the noise. So for us, we have some clients who will have thousands of events a day, and they're not going to go— we don't expect them to go look at every single one. They shouldn't go look at every single one. But what Intelligence does, it's able to not only cut through noise and understand and summarize what's happening, But also give corrective actions of what they should do based on that data, which is cool. So now before they're going on site, they can check out, hey, Protecs, what do I need to focus on today? And based off all their data, we'll tell them from a safety side of things and operations side of things what they need to focus on, which is really cool because it narrows the focus on what really matters. And that's how we're using our intelligence tool rather than the case of just asking it anything just for fun. It's really focused to say, Okay, what should I focus on? What reports do I need to build? How do I— we're starting to bring agentic AI into it, which is asking it to do different tasks, like send me a report every week or whatever it is. And that's, I think, how people interact with data is going to change, especially with the companies that we work with. Yeah. I think previously it would've been very much Power BI focused, go in and look at a graph and try to decipher what's happening. But now it's just how do you ask the right questions or prompts, as they're called, to say, show me this and let the system do the work for you. That's how it's going to change.

I love how you framed it here. It's if I were to get a daily briefing with some videos attached that show me certain things that are happening as trends for me to use that within my toolbox talk in the morning. Exactly. That would be so powerful. It become part of a process that's evolving with me.

But it has to be easy.

It has to be.

That's the big thing. I think if it's any way complicated and that's on the vendor to make it easy, if it's any way complicated, it's not one you want to do it anymore. It's another system. That's where things get tricky. Has to be just like, ask question, get the data. And focus on where you need to matter, where it matters.

Yeah, absolutely, man. It's in our world, what I reflect on when I hear this is we obviously are deeply thinking about how we can use AI more, but we're putting all our attention now is in self-authoring because of how much our clients typically when they get that experience and they're like, wow, it's so much more powerful to go through a realistic 3D story on any device. How can we move all our content and then It's just so powerful now how much you can do to automate the process of building very high-quality experiences. And again, the data piece that you're doing is so powerful. What I reflect on always when I hear this is like closing the loop on learning is always exciting. It's cool that you guys are doing it through, hey guys, look at what actually happened. Here's your colleague, and I'm not without knowing who the person is, but here's someone at the site who almost died. That's like the biggest learning experience because it's close to home and you know that it could have been one of your friends. Yeah.

The same, I think, with what you guys do as well. It really contextualizes it for them because you see it in first person.

Yeah. And as long as you trigger emotions and you feel it, then it's extremely powerful. And then where is this going? So when you think of a lot is happening on the agentic side and Copilot, so now you have all this data coming in, you understand your site operations, you understand the risks, and then you can start creating workflows that help you run your operation better. If you keep going further and further into where this is going to go and how much value it's going to create in the— let's not go too long-term because technology is changing so fast. In the midterm, what comes to mind?

I was actually laughing at when Meta invested in the metaverse. Have you seen how much money they've lost? Like $80 billion. More than that. I think it's something crazy. Maybe it's $800 billion or something like that. And just how much they invested in this metaverse and these avatars, these shitty avatars that Zuckerberg made. Now it's just gone to shit. They've just invested everything into AI. But I think, you know what, there's 2 ways of looking at this. You can look at it from the speed of AI and how quickly it's going. Oh my God, this is so fun. There's lots of things happening. You have to get on, you have to adopt everything and use everything. But I think in our industry, what we really have to take into consideration is the speed and the pace of how AI is moving and the speed and the pace at which enterprises can move.

I love it.

And I think you need to find a middle ground between that. There's all this stuff's going to come online. And it can be scary for these enterprises to say, do we have to trial everything here and get a gauge of it because it's changing so quickly? It's okay to move at your own pace and to move at the rate. Companies aren't going to change overnight. That's the big thing about

it. Especially these very large companies. If you move too fast, if anything, it's going to impact them and impact you, and you're going to be too noisy.

Yeah. So move at a pace that you're really comfortable with. I think it's a big thing around it because companies— I would say get on board and get on board with different adopting things like the clouds, the ChatGPTs, Copilots and stuff is a nice entry point to it. Stuff like us and what you guys do, start trying these, bringing in these technologies. But it's okay to move at your own pace for us in a world where there's so much stuff changing. I think when people look from the outside and the outside in, they think that everything's going to be super automated in the next 3 years. I've been on plenty of sites, hundreds of sites now. I can tell you that's not going to happen overnight. Things are going to change and move towards automation and stuff, but not Not anytime soon, genuinely. If you see the Amazons of the world, only a handful of Amazon sites are actually fully automated.

Yeah, especially if you look at sites like, if you look at construction and if you look at areas that are just completely unique every time you get into them and stuff, they are going to take time. And again, behavior, when you're running that process and you have all this machinery, you can't expect things to move super fast. The industry we're serving is a slow-moving industry and they need to be slow. Yeah, that's beautifully said. I love that.

And I think one, AI can be seen as scary or it's going to change or what's the world going to look like if things go wrong. But I think a really good question to think about is what if everything goes right? If everything goes right, we're in for a good time next few years. Health's going to be better. Diseases are going to drop down. Work is going to be easier. We can focus on really what matters. We're in a faster version of the Industrial Revolution right now. That's what's happening. And look how that changed things. It didn't take away people's jobs, it just changed what people needed to do and focus on, on what mattered. And we're in this hyper version of that at the moment.

Yeah. Honestly, I'm extremely optimistic about that too. I just see all the positives and it feels strange and it feels like it can be, but I feel all of us as a species are deep down loving and caring people and it will help us just become better and better as people and how we connect and operate. I love hearing other people think about it the same way. I feel like I'm always isolated when I have that positive view.

At the same time, I always still, I still say please and thank you to Claude or ChatGPT or Copilot when I'm using it, just in case the AI overlords take over. They'll remember that. They'll be like, you're one of the good guys. You're in a good— that's what matters.

Love it, man. Okay. Jumping to the US. So you guys started off in Dublin. Now you're spending a lot of time in the US. How's that been, man? How are you feeling? How difficult has this journey been? And maybe the cultural differences that you're noticing would be cool to learn about from a technology I

think so. I moved over a year ago now to Boston and built a team out there. We've got a great team out there. So much fun. They're so much fun. They're great people. They're all like Irish Bostonians or American Italians, and they just have the best accents, which works great on the phones as well, but just good people. But I think we were very much pulled over. So about 60% of our business was in the US before we even— we had a couple of bums in seats then, like Max in New York and Amelia in North Carolina. And then we added a lot more to the team. We've about 30 people now. in the States in the last year. I think the US is a business-first country in a nice way. I think they're very transactional in a good sense when it comes to business. They know they're in a conversation. I think it's more of a dance in Europe. I think you need to sell to a European, but an American will buy from you. Again, both very different ways of interacting with the purchasing process. But I think from an adoption level, the US is probably quicker. The Europeans are more hesitant in bringing in technology and want to move a little bit slower, whereas US are a bit more bullish.

Do you feel their decision framework is similar, or would the US companies prioritize efficiency, for example, or ROI on operations versus safety, or are they pretty similar?

They're pretty similar, but I think the biggest difference is, which sounds really weird, but European headquarter companies are almost more democratic and give more power to the sites. to make decisions. US is more central-focused. They'll get buy-in from the sites, but they make decisions at the central level, which is something I didn't know. And I've experienced it a lot more since moving over. Both work in the long term, but I think from the US, probably a bit more experimental than Europe. I think workforce is very similar. We picked Boston because it's a very European city. It's super walkable, a lot of culture there, a lot of second, third-generation Europeans. There. My first weekend was St. Patrick's Day. And it was. So I thought I wouldn't have to pay for a drink. And then everyone just ended up trying to do my accent after them having 10 pints. And I was like, I'm just going to go home. But they're very multicultural people. Same with New York.

So it's been just a year ago. Yeah. It's nearly been almost a year.

Yeah. Just over a year. Yeah. I think it was my second or third weekend there.

Man, you've done a lot in a year. Good job. Well done. I hope you give yourself, as a CEO and a founder, you probably don't take— I wonder if you take a step back and appreciate how much you've done.

I have a very good friend who said, as you're climbing this mountain, make sure to appreciate the views sometimes. So I try to make a thing of doing that, both like myself and the team. Transparency is one of our values internally, and I do think we live up to it and showing board decks and stuff, but make sure we celebrate the wins when it happens.

Yeah, man. And how are you feeling, man? Like, how are you doing? How are you feeling about everything? How have you been personally running this and building this? It's difficult to be a founder as well. Generally, you're typically on the front line. You have to— the way I think about it is, it's counterintuitive, and when the team is feeling defeated, you have to be the one who's pulling them up and championing the path. And when the team is feeling super excited, you're the one who's meant to keep them rooted. And you guys have been growing super quickly, and you're dealing with industries that are pretty complex and a product that is pretty sophisticated. So how are you feeling personally?

Yeah, it's been a crazy year, in a great sense. Moving over to the States was a big shift for me. I'm not in your boat of having a wife and 2 children, so I was able to move a bit more. I remember we spoke about that. I was like, you should move to the States, dude. You're going to have a good time. And you're like, I've got a wife, 2 children. I was like, totally fair.

Totally fair. I think so. It's been pretty— it's been great for me. I've been able to bounce around. I had 92 flights last year. So a lot of flights, just slowly killing the planet myself. I've been planting a lot of trees recently to make up for it. Oh my God. But no, it's been, it's really good. We've seen a lot of growth in the company. We've seen a lot of team growth and client growth. We're seeing a lot more companies adopt on a wider scale than they ever have. And the cool thing is they're saying, what else? What's new? Rather than us trying to push the door open, they're very much pulling us into these conversations, which is cool. Yeah, personally, it's been a hectic year, but a very exciting year. Reflecting on it, I had a lot of fun. I think when I stopped during Christmas, I was like, whoa, oh my gosh. Oh my God. I didn't realize how tired I was doing all those flights and I don't know, I'm 31 now, so my back's getting more sore than it should. And I had the most 30-year-old injury. I yawned in the office and just stretched my arms out and pulled my back. Oh my God. So I need to do more yoga or something. But it's been really good. I think I'm spending a lot more time with the team across. That's why I'm here in London and we're in Dublin a lot and Boston a lot. We're opening up another office in Budapest soon, in Hungary. So that's going to be fun having more of a team out in Europe. But I think you're right from the team perspective. When you're moving at pace, which you guys are as well, it's really important to not become complacent. And with all these new systems coming out, new types of technology that people are building off, it's very easy for competitors to come in and try to take a slice of the pie. So we need to make sure we're not complacent and staying finger on the pulse. Like you said, when people get excited, I'm usually the one that excites people and I get overexcited. And Kieran, my co-founder, is great for pulling me back. Pulling you back. He's like, chill out. Like small things. Like people leave the company, I get really personally attacked. I'm like, why would they leave? It's a rocket ship. But he's really good. He's like the sounding voice in the company. He's even for— he's 20, he's in his last year of his 20s. But he's so mature and has a really good head on his shoulders for keeping things in a good place. And that's why we work kind of yin and yang when it comes to managing the company and know our strengths and know our weaknesses, which tends to work really well. But it is lonely at the top when you're a founder. Because you're dealing with everything. And it's hard to talk to people because you got to look like you're the one that is setting or steering the ship.

Yeah, man. Awesome, dude. Honestly, we're all lucky to have you and Ciarán. I haven't met Ciarán face to face, but I'm looking forward to meeting him at some point. You guys are doing amazing things. The industry needs people like you, and you're obviously doing it from a place of love and passion and care. And yeah, take care of yourself, man. Make sure you prioritize yourself. It's a long journey.

For sure.

But yeah, thank you so much for coming here, man, and looking forward to seeing you next time.

That's good. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. Thanks, bro.

Cool.

Love this. It was good.