Hire your army, don’t rent mercenaries ⚔️ Yannik Schrade

The way I see my team really is as this small army. What we are doing every day is we are not just fighting wars, but we are training. So it's the question of do you want to have your own army or do you want to pay mercenaries? Alignment, I think, is what matters. And I think that is way more difficult to get by outsourcing. Building up knowledge, I think, will be more important and keeping that knowledge proprietary, which also relates to privacy, I think, when it comes to AI. That's why I'm strongly in favor of having your own team. You have confidence in your own taste, right? That is a fundamental ability that you need to have, which is way more important even than technical skill. This, yeah, more generalistic role that you have where you have this understanding on the products, on the architecture, technology, and on the communication side of things. And you need to unify all of those roles as the founder. Nobody else can do that for you. Nobody else can have the full picture.

This week's Millennial Master is Yannick Schrader, founder of Arseum. He's building privacy infrastructure at a time when AI is making software easier to build, easier to copy, and more exposed than most people realize. Yannick spent a lot of time thinking about what actually creates an edge now and where founders are giving too much away without noticing. In this episode, we cover why what you outsource might be your biggest risk when privacy can become part of your product and not just a constraint, and how AI is making software both easier to build and easier to break. Yannick, welcome to Millennial Masters. Where are you joining us from today?

Thanks for having me, Daniel. I do not appreciate that kind of question due to privacy concerns, Daniel. I think you should know that.

You can give us a general, at least a country location.

I'm in Europe right now.

And we'll let everybody else figure out based on your accent where you're from, where you might be right now. Well, let's get straight into it, Jannik, because you've gone from building popular apps to building privacy infrastructure. So I'm wondering whether you always thought you'd end up this deep in this sector rather than, you know, your general app building and the typical founder?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think most great paths that people take aren't linear, right? So you, it's hard to predict where you're going to end up. Initially, after I finished high school, I started studying law. So I mean, if you look at studying law and now building cryptography infrastructure, is a shift, right? For me personally, what has always been part of my life and what led me to being a founder, I would say, has been my interest in just building things and not waiting for other people to build things I would like to see in the world or in my life, but just doing it myself and constructing technology via programming. So I taught myself to program at a very early age and already did these kinds of things while I was a child. And then while studying law, I developed technology for me because I needed that while studying law. And that's how I really got deep into becoming a founder, right? Initially starting as a solo founder, building applications myself. I saw a lot of success with that, but I saw—

Tell me how you describe success with the apps. You know, people, you make it sound so easy that I've just had some apps and I had success, but you know, some people try really hard and invest a lot of money into that and don't have success with them. So what was the process? You said you built something that you wanted to bring into the world because it didn't exist, or maybe you wanted to do it better. What was the first success that you had with the apps you built?

So the first success I had was, was an app called ShiftScreen, which I developed— when was that? I think in 2020. That was during COVID So I initially developed an application because I myself was studying, I had an iPad Pro as my main working device with a keyboard case attached, right? And the issue I was facing was that I, on top of that, had an external screen and had a lot of legal work to do. So I thought it would be nice to be able to connect this device to this external screen, but Apple did not support that feature natively. And since I had the skills—

until later on.

Yes, later on they supported it, but at that time there wasn't support for that. So I just decided to figure out a way to build it myself for me to use it, right? To boost my own productivity, improve my user experience. And once I had developed that, which took a couple of months, I think 2 months, something like that, which was fine at that time because I had some additional lecture-free time due to COVID. And once I had that app developed, I published it, gave the world access to it, charged $10 or so on the Apple App Store. And then with—

so you didn't go for a subscription, you went for a one-time payment.

Yeah. I would say I went for that mainly due to me myself not appreciating subscription models. And so I don't know if that's the smartest business move to take. But I think it's not always about optimizing for that necessarily. I think there's a lot of responsibility you as a founder have as well with the technology you're building and also the behavior you're introducing into how technology is being sold and made available to people. So for me, it was never logical to charge a subscription model. That didn't make sense for that kind of application. And there is applications where it makes a lot of sense, right? If there's recurring costs for serving technology to users, of course, a subscription model can make sense, but here it was literally some software product that was built once, new users being acquired. I ended up having hundreds of thousands of paying customers, right? So I did not require a subscription model and it was just me, but I built this application, made it available to the world, and I would say it gained a high degree of virality within this productivity scene. I reached out to a couple of influencers, YouTubers, didn't pay them, just told them about this application and they really liked it.

And were you the first to create this type?

Yes. Yeah. So I was, I was the first and only one. There wasn't any competitive product out there. And there were so many people. Looking for a solution to this. And most of the time, whenever you face some issue, I would say, in some work process in your life, whatever, you can expect that there's other human beings out there that also face that issue, right? Already gives you a good understanding of market size and demand, I would say.

So your key there was fixing your own problem, and I've heard that from several other founders, fixing your own problem, being close to it. And this way having the product market fit as well.

Exactly. I think that is important for product market fit when it comes to anything user-facing is what I myself just said, right? How could you build something where you yourself would be like, okay, I would never use this kind of software, right? It has to be something like that because then you can actually build great products that also allows you to sell those products and understand the needs, the features, the friction points that need to be resolved, right? All of that. So it was very organic, I would say. How—

that was 2020, so that was a different world.

Distribution. Yes, that was, that was in 2020, and I was still studying law at that time. And within one year, it was, was used by so many people. So you asked me how I, how I would define success with this application. I would say there's, there's two aspects to that. One was seeing a map in the Apple App Store analytics platform, just seeing a map of the world where there was people currently using my application, which was just wild to see. Almost every country in this world were people using this application, which I myself at home built, and people were using it daily and we're appreciating it so much to be paying for it. And yeah, beyond that, I guess I also financially would qualify it as successful for me, which then made it easier for me to decide, okay, I'm going to stop studying law and I should maybe instead, just like everyone suggested after I finished high school, study mathematics and computer science. And so that's what I did. Yeah, but it wasn't like I was going into switching my field of study and then wanting to continue this application that I built, but I have this tendency of getting bored very easily by having to maintain something.

Most smart people do.

I appreciate that. I just get bored by having to maintain something. So I want to build, I wanted to grow, I wanted to do something bigger. Yeah, and that's how I then ended up evolving into building more deep tech than just applications. Yeah.

And I'm curious at what point with ShiftScreen, you ran into the problem that some others founders have had when if you're building on somebody else's platform and you're creating a product that has complements a feature. On their device or software, and then the company itself releases that. That exact timeline doesn't come to mind when Apple brought the screen mirroring or kind of like similar to what ShiftScreen was doing, but were you still involved at that point? What did, what, how did you react or what, where did ShiftScreen move from there and how you got into your Arkium venture?

Yeah, so I, That's an excellent point, which is true in, I think, a lot of applications that serve a big customer need, right? The higher the tendency of the platform itself to ship that feature because the need only exists because the platform you're building on does not correctly solve that issue. And we've seen that in many, many different cases on Apple platforms specifically.

Even on Substack, where this will be published, there were several notes schedulers for posts. There was one crucial feature missing, and just earlier this month, Substack released their own feature for scheduling drafts, which is free, unlike any of the other services that they were building. So now everybody has to find a way to differentiate themselves through it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that is gonna change even more drastically with access to, to LLMs. I think the whole software, software business is undergoing a fundamental shift. And especially if you look at features or replacing platforms, not just some, some base level platform. Replacing a service that someone has built on top of it, like ShiftScreen or the note-taking that you described. But me as a user, not even having to use an application because I can in almost real time have my perfect application, right? So I think there's tremendous shifts and we are currently in a big turning point phase when it comes to that. What I would say in general is that that big of a concern. Initially, it was a concern, but then I would say I personally was happy about it because at that point when Apple shipped that feature, I wasn't even actively maintaining ShiftScreen anymore because I already moved on to founding Archium. And so I did not spend any time on developing ShiftScreen any further. Still to this day, there's people buying the application every day and I have not spent any time on it for 4 years or something like that. So, um, I also never sold it simply because of this concern of Apple replacing it. Um, and so I never had this issue, but I think it's an increasing issue where there's less moat you have with a niche application you're building because the platform itself, but also competitors have a way lower barrier to entry to destroy your business model. So I think the key factor would be what is the mode of the future gonna look like? I think to a large degree it is gonna be network effects. Okay.

Yeah. So let's come back to Archium because when you built Shift screen, you kept in mind the fact that Apple could come back and release the feature. And in a way, it was inevitable, and they possibly had a big backlog anyway at that point. But what did it teach you about making something people actually want and then moving into that niche knowing what they wanted? Didn't you guide it based on what was your user need? And if you briefly explain what the platform does as well.

Yeah. So I think, I think for me it was, was guided a lot by my own, by my own needs. And I think what you need to have as a founder is you need to have, what's this guy called? Is it Rick Rubin? The guy with the taste, right? You have confidence in your own taste, right? Which also Steve Jobs had. So I think that is a fundamental ability that you need to have, which is way more important even than technical skill. This, this, yeah, more generalistic role actually that you have where you have this understanding on the product side of things, on the, on the architecture technology side of things and on the communication side of things. And you need to unify all of those roles. As the founder. Nobody else can do that for you. Nobody else can have the full picture. That is important, especially when you have a larger team and are doing something like we are doing with deep tech. Now, you're not always going to be the target audience yourself. I think that is clear. And so, however, it is really important to actually put yourself into the shoes of the party that is going to use it and try your best to be placed in those shoes. And if that means talking with, spending most of your day talking with with customers, understanding their needs, or building with the product or technology itself. I think that is important. That is what we are doing with, with Arcium as well. And I think for something like infrastructure, which we are doing, it might even be more important than with products, because with infrastructure, you are, in our case, doing cryptographic research, cryptographic engineering, which is as far away from the end user as it can get, basically, right? Even, I mean, it's, yeah, you don't have access to that.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it is as close to the transistors on the, on the processor, right? As, as you could get with software, I would say. And so the, the end user should not care about that, but these development and research processes take significant amount of resources for research and development. And so, um, there it is even more important to identify for what purpose you're actually building this technology and if it. If it serves that purpose, which in, which in, in this specific area I'm in right now means that I'm doing a fundamentally different approach, I would say, than most have taken when it comes to cryptography, privacy, these areas where if you look at the landscape and around 1.5 years ago, I acquired my largest competitor in that area and who had been around for many more years than we have. But their approach and the approach I see in general with a lot of infrastructure is you have an idea of what you want to see in the world, almost as this vision you want to force on the world. And it's just some idea you once came up with, right? And then you're building this infrastructure and applying all resources to that. And it might sound appealing to investor, but will fail in the long run because you're fundamentally building from a top-down approach. You define the top and then instead what I'm taking is I'm taking an approach where I see what users want to have, what needs they have, what applications they want to see, and then I define how does the infrastructure need to look like. What that means specifically in my case is that others have looked at different families of mathematical cryptographic protocols. In many cases, they've done their PhDs in those specific areas and then decided, okay, there has to be a big startup about this specific technology I have fallen in love with, right? Because I've spent all my life researching, which has this tendency to not work out, I would say, simply because that is the wrong direction of going about solving a problem.

So How did privacy become the thing that you thought this is worth building about? You shifted from ShiftScreen, see what I did there, to Arkeum. So what was the pain point?

Yeah, so I think the transition from ShiftScreen towards Arkeum, first of all, was boredom, right? So I was like, okay, I'm not going to maintain this. First of all, Apple is going to have an alternative, right? So it was was good while it lasted, which I had as a perception even while it was lasting. I was like, okay, this is going to stop at some point in the future. Secondly, I'm not a maintainer, so it just needs to evolve exponentially. I think in general for me it was there's so limited amount of time we spend on this earth. So I'm I would just rather try to build the biggest thing I could. And privacy is interesting because I think fundamentally it is one of the most important areas from a purely ethical standpoint to be putting resources and time into, and there's not enough resources being put into that. I mean, you're living in the UK, which—

go on, tell me.

So I think, um, another thing that I identified with, um, with privacy as a whole is again that, um, also since there is not enough players in that area and since funding-wise I would say it is not— has not been the hottest area attracting most VC funding, right?

So have you been looking for funding, particularly VC funding, for your second project.

Yeah. So, so for, for ShiftScreen, right, it was all bootstrapped. There was no expenses, but for Archeum, we have raised significant funding via two funding rounds. And that would not have been possible to develop, especially in that sort of, sort of a timeframe without external funding, since I have some of the smartest cryptographic PhDs and engineers in my team that, and they need to be paid.

I guess. Well, I wanted to ask you about that too, Yannick, because I yesterday actually, I recorded another episode with a founder in the SaaS area, and she switched between 3 different models. She worked with in-house staff, she worked with agencies, and in the end, she settled on an in-house CTO, which was then coordinating work with an outsourcing agency, which was taking the entire time of that team for the company. So what is your model and have you experimented with others? Because you can get easily burned by either of these.

Yeah. So my model is 100% in-house. And in the past, I had full-time, almost like employees. But it was only one via an agency, right? But it was effectively a full-time employee. I think, I think as a company in general, you need to, you need to think about what your mode is, what your mode is going to look like in the future. And if the team and their skillset and their knowledge about solving these issues is part of that. And the way I see my team really is as this small army. What we are doing every day is we are not just fighting wars, but we are training, right? And we are, we are this team. And so it's the question of do you want to have your own army or do you want to pay mercenaries, right? And I think there is, there is effects that you get when you are your own company and you have your own team that are more difficult to measure. But in general, I would say That holds true for countries, for any type of, regardless of its size, human organization where you can get synergistic effects by, I don't want to call it a cult, but at the end of the day, I think it describes it very well, right? A shared vision, people believing in the shared vision and working on that vision alignment, I think is what matters. And I think that is way more difficult to get. By, by outsourcing, I think also actually building up knowledge, I think will be more important and keeping that knowledge proprietary, which also relates to privacy. I think when it comes to AI, right? How can we as a company keep this information to ourselves and hence build a moat through that. So that's why I'm strongly in favor of having your own team when it comes to not actually building a super technical product and you are mainly focusing on distribution. That might be different. But then again, you have your core players within your company and you want to be able to channel this energy between your team members. I think that is one of the most important things. You can have a team of 1,000 employees and a team of 10 employees can produce higher and more quality output simply because they have this shared energy. I strongly believe that, and together with AI, that is that is escalating even more, I would say.

Tell me about that. So I'm assuming you use AI to assist in the coding process. To what extent and where does human delegation and supervision come into place?

Yeah, so I would say there's different— there's always different parts of a software stack, right? Where there's— which are security-wise and vulnerability-wise way less critical than others. When it comes to the kind of cryptographic engineering that we are doing, especially when building entirely new protocols, right? Formulating those mathematical protocols, those encryption and computation schemes and what we are doing, just that the listeners are familiar.

That's what I wanted to come back to. Give me the plainest English description of what Arkeum does.

Arkeum enables you to run computations do anything with sensitive information without ever having to share it with anyone or expose it. Yeah. And what that means is that we can take Daniel's information, Ionescu's information, and the information of every single listener and use all of that information as if everything was given to me and I had access to it, but nobody ever sees anything. We only get the results. And that is so powerful because what we can do with that is we can say, okay, let's revolutionize healthcare. Let's say all of your patient information, all of your health trackers, all of your metrics remain fully encrypted. Nobody can get access to them. They, they belong to you. While at the same time, we can get medical breakthroughs because we can train models, we can do research without ever sharing the data, without anything ever being possibly leaked. No trust assumptions required.

So you see the first serious adopters, organizations in the health sector. You mentioned that, that could be one of the areas. Who else could be an early adopter and you're targeting, uh, this at?

Yeah, we, we already have companies using us in the financial world, so using us for, um, yeah, private stablecoin payments, because by default stablecoins are fully exposed and public. On top of these decentralized public ledgers. So in our case, all of that, when utilizing, when those companies utilize our technology, they can make it secure and private and compliant, right? So that not everyone in the world sees what Daniel is spending his money on, basically, for this future financial system that is being built by different companies. So that is a big use case I see, and we see a lot of movement towards these financial instruments globally. There's also a big shift happening there. Very well strategically positioned for that. And then, as you mentioned, healthcare, I think, is one of the most interesting areas because I think there's so much potential for humanity as a whole to be gained here. I am a super strong privacy advocate, right? You call it cypherpunk, right? There's the cypherpunks.

What led to that?

Okay.

Well, how did you end up on this from building your first iPad app to mirror the screen on your computer.

Yeah. How did that happen? I think it boils down to, again, two things. The first one being wanting to build technology that actually has PMF, serves users, and noticeably improves their lives. And actually 3 things. Second one I think would be fascination with the technology itself. So the technology that I described earlier, what we are enabling, is literally one of the most powerful computational primitives you could build. You could easily see—

and what's a computational primitive? Again, we have to break it down a little bit more. Not everybody is into that.

I think you have artificial intelligence, you have quantum computing. You have encrypted computing. That is what we are building. This ability to run computer programs fully encrypted, invisible. Nobody can see anything when you're running that in some cloud service, right? The service providers can see that. Literally not a single computer in this world can see it. That is so powerful. And then combining that, right? Saying, okay, now we are doing artificial intelligence., but we are now doing that without leaking information. You can interact with that artificial intelligence without OpenAI or Claude stealing your data, improving their models, and making your job obsolete, something like that.

So is that how you look at it? Because they clearly make that disclosure that your data will be used to train the models. If ChatGPT does the same, I believe some people found that even if you open a temporary chat, that can happen. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. So, so when you, when you, when you do a temporary chat, all of your data is permanently stored, every single message you've written. And so I think it's not just them using that information to train models, which is frightening enough. And I think also, yeah, with all of the concerns regarding AI, yeah, fundamentally unethical. I think more problematic in my mind is actually your privacy being lost at a, yeah, almost incomprehensible degree. So all of the information is being stored and shared with the US government intelligence agencies, right? They can get hacked. All of the data can then get leaked to North Korea and the entire internet. So there's those fundamental security issues, um, that are being introduced by collecting and storing that data, but not just by explicitly storing the data, but simply by how those systems are set up. Without being encrypted and secure. And what it leads to—

why do you think there was this oversight on privacy on this company's behalf when they started the business? Why did they not prioritize that as well?

Yeah, I would say because privacy harms them. So they do not want to have privacy because the game that they're playing is a game where privacy is a disadvantage. So you need to figure out how you can turn privacy also from a business standpoint into an advantage. In their case, they want to collect as much data as possible. Usually you could say, and that's the reason why there has been this rise of surveillance technology and your privacy being eroded with all software you're using, which is basically if I build an application and I provide some value to you and you in turn give me revenue and someone else is building the exact same application, with the only difference that they're now tracking everything I'm doing, surveilling it, creating AI models around my behavior and all knowledge collected about me, and then utilize that to sell the data, serve me ads, or do whatever. Of course, they're going to be able to generate more revenue. And that's what caused Silicon Valley over the last 20 years to mainly evolve when it comes to products. In the direction of how can we surveil more, how can we extract more value.

Actually, that's the model that comes with getting VC money. That's how the whole point is that somebody will recoup their investment and at least 10x it. So how can you reconcile the two, your idealistic vision and the VC reality?

Yeah, so I think it is important as a founder to have strong values when building a company and wanting to actually change the world. And at the same time, it is important to be a pragmatic person. I would say the way I go about privacy technology when it comes to what you just described is figuring out a path for this technology. By it being superior and enabling a new design space for utilizing the technology as I described it with healthcare data, I think that's a good example. We can actually utilize information and data that otherwise we could not utilize.

Yes, because in health AI last year, I spent a couple of days on an AI in health conference in London and the data stored in different silos, which couldn't be accessed. Say, from having an MRI scan to even your general health file are stored in different places, different organizations, and bringing them all together is seriously challenging. So to give somebody a clear example of where your technology comes into place, it's mediating the two and allowing then an AI model to process them. Is that right?

Yes, exactly. So you can, you can, you can unify all of those previously isolated silos, bring them together without the information ever moving through anyone's hands, right? The information is literally, has mathematically been moved into a different dimension. It is an encrypted dimension where nobody has access to, and there all of that information can interact. So that's what I'm building. That's why I think it's important, okay, to figure out a revenue story. That is important. And that is how you get the VC funding. And that is also how you are successful. And I think that is fundamentally, when you look at the privacy space, this issue where it's only being seen as something very niche, political, and not as big products and big technology that actually changes how the world works. So yeah, I would say that matters a lot. Yeah.

So can I'm trying to see how else, what other areas people can think of how this technology can impact their day-to-day life. So for example, which apps or services you specifically don't use because you have privacy concerns that many people do.

Yeah. So I would say we are gonna allow this idea of unification again. And I think that is core, right? So if you look at your phone, there is very importantly data silos there as well, where I'm like, I'm using Signal, I'm using iMessages.

So you trust Apple more than Google?

I do actually. Yes, I do. There's some serious exploits. I think just yesterday there were some zero-day exploits that were published that previously only governmental intelligence agencies had access to. Now everyone has access to. So there's always, always always substantial security flaws. And we could speak for hours about how I think hardware manufacturing needs to evolve in the future and play into with cryptography and encrypted computing. But fundamentally, I think you have this issue again where you have to ask yourself, okay, there's this information on Instagram, also the chats you have there, and my image library, right? And now I'm using ChatGPT. Do I give it full access to my image library? Most people won't, right? But I think we can, again, improve that.

They would, wouldn't they? Automatically, but it doesn't mean that it uploads the pictures if you give it access to the picture library, does it?

I assume they have in their terms of service. I haven't checked, but I would assume that if you give Sam Altman full access to your picture library, he will utilize that.

I don't think Sam Altman wants to see my camera roll.

I think he wants to give it to his AI to improve.

That sounds more like something Elon would want to do with Grok.

Same, same. All of these people are same. So I think again, there's this concept of you do not have to worry about what is happening because it's not download signal and then is my content in signal. No, it is literally I can encrypt all of my things and I can have them private and I— But WhatsApp says it's encrypted.

End-to-end, even Facebook Messenger.

Yes. I think what's important to highlight here is that end-to-end encryption only literally means me sending the message from my phone to Daniel's phone is applying encryption via this insecure channel. So you cannot intercept the message, which is basically at the end of the day, almost only like a security concern, just like with HTTPS on websites, right? When this small lock appears on next to a website so that nobody can steal your credit card details. When it comes to privacy and encryption, the bigger picture is actually what is happening within the app, right? Are they doing something in the app? Doesn't matter if there's end-to-end encryption. If you intercept on the app level, and that is what's happening, and applications like Signal don't do that, but, and iMessage also, but I would not trust WhatsApp also considering that Meta AI is integrated there. So I think that is what makes the app—

In the UK, it's not available. You can't talk to it. It appears there, but if you want to use it, you can't do that.

Interesting. But I think there was, there was just recently a case where there was some leaker from WhatsApp, if I recall correctly, it was maybe months ago or one month ago where they had access to, they could basically search everyone's messages. And so the question is, is it mathematically enforced? Does the universe tell you when you try to do that? You have no chance of—

what about Telegram? You mentioned Signal. What about Telegram? We know obviously the Telegram founder has been in legal trouble for keeping a hard line on privacy and encryption.

So Telegram itself is not encrypted. Messages that are being sent are not encrypted by default. There is a toggle to activate encryption. I don't know if there's any backdoors. I don't know if part of the deal to to leave jail in France was giving a backdoor. It is literally impossible to know. So, um, I, I would not trust that platform too much as well. The value that Signal provides is it being open source, is it being accessible by anyone. So you can take it, put it on your computer, let it compile into an application, and then put it on your phone. You don't need to go to the App Store. You can change the code however you want, and there's thousands of mathematicians and cryptographers from all around the world who have looked at it, who have reviewed it. That is the strength of Signal. And what I'm just trying to say is that we are applying that to the computation itself. So it's not just the messaging channel is secure, but everything that is happening. When you talk to an AI, the AI is literally running in an encrypted way. So nobody, not the server operator, whatever, can have access to what you asked it, what it gave it back to you. It is only you. And then you can unify that with, you can enrich that with other information you have. You can actually have it grow a knowledge base for you. And that information itself, and yeah, I guess all of the value stored in that, belongs to you. And belonging to you means you as an individual, but also you as an organization, which I think will be important for strategic positioning and modes again in the future of not giving away all of your know-how to big corporations, which at the end of the day will try to just replace all of the companies using them.

That's what I want to ask. I'm assuming your take on putting personal or business information into a chat window of any of the AI models is a a big no-no. How do you do it? Do you not use AI to have a conversation about your go-to-market strategy, your marketing, maybe even a legal issue? How do you deal with it? How do you avoid this conflict? Because it kind of like needs to know that in order to give you anything useful back.

Of course. Yeah. So I think that's this great tension, right? That's the tension between convenience and not just convenience, but in the case of AI, right, actually valuable information. And then you're ending up having to restrict yourself. And that is a big issue. And so that's what we're working on, right? We're working on tackling these issues that this trade-off does not exist anymore. That is literally the logical choice for anyone to say, why would I not have it be encrypted? And what is so important from a business standpoint, and that's why I think privacy is so interesting because you're saying as a company, okay, by doing privacy, I might be catering to some specific market segment. Of course, right? Could be, okay, high security use cases, privacy use cases, right? But when it comes to the broader market and general user base, you're literally saying, I am gonna constrain myself in some regard because I think that there should be encryption and privacy. So how do you combat that? You have to combat that by being able to overcome those constraints by building great products and feature sets to then be able to say, okay, we are actually providing a strictly superior experience, and that's why it becomes the logical choice. And then you win this battle against convenience.

So Jannik, infrastructure platform under your belt and a popular app. What did you learn the hard way about building a product and then building a business? Because in the first one, it was just you. In the second one, you have a team. How did you find that evolution and what were the hard learnings?

So for me personally, I would not want to be a solo founder again. I think there's this new dimension that gets opened up by having a team, by having a founding team, right? Having multiple founders and then having this entire team, right? What I was talking about when it comes to this energy that exists within that organization that makes you more powerful. I think that is what I just realized is so powerful. What did I learn the hard way? I mean, I learned everything the hard way and I think that's what what it's all about at the end of the day. I think there's no— I think there's zero value. I've not— I mean, I've not read any books how to found a company or how to do business or whatever, right? I think fundamentally you need to learn these skills by building something. I think that's the only way you can succeed. I would argue most, most successful founders would tell you the same thing. So I think that is, um, it's so important learning, figuring it out the hard way is the correct way.

Um, I have done the same, but at the same time, when you look back, it would possibly be so much easier if you could avoid these mistakes or some mistakes.

That is true. That is true. But I think in general, I mean, you're always looking for advice, right? So when it comes to fundraising specifically. Um, I think it was very helpful when you've never fundraised before to get two great articles on Millennial Masters.

I'll make sure I pop them in the show notes.

Exactly. Go read that. Go read those articles and find yourself founders that advise you or podcast episodes by Daniel Ionescu, um, about how to fundraise. Um, I think that is, that is important, right? Hearing those lessons and, and podcasts and I think even more important, having this network of friends who are founders, um, that gives you just a more decentralized knowledge base where you have access to by building out this, this network. I think that is very important. And what I would say in general is one of my number one advices. I think that is just, just putting yourself into, I would call it high entropy positions, which then leads to outcomes you would have never expected, which in many cases for me has been also not business related, but then it turns out that I made one of the most valuable connections of my life through things. Went to conferences where I was, was like, okay, I think I don't want to fly for 14 hours, so I might skip on that conference. But then there's this one single person you meet, which is impossible to predict, right? But it's just this increased randomness and chance of, of, of meeting these people. And so you need to go out there. And look for actual high-value situations you can put yourself in. But then at the same time, I think some of the most powerful ones weren't even work-related.

I think that's an interesting thought to wrap up our conversation today, Jannik. Expand your network of support with similar founders or people in your field and/or industry who are sometimes 1, 2, 3 steps ahead of you, that they can share the knowledge and the support. And that's actually something that I've heard from multiple founders. So it's certainly a good one to keep in mind. Thank you so much for coming on Millennial Masters, sharing your story so far, and I will certainly be backing you to get more privacy baked in from day one in more products we use.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Daniel.

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