Alexander Valente: I actually have a vivid memory of during COVID helping a biotech company in the US that was running COVID testing, using the software that I was working on at Atlassian as my product. And I had no idea that anyone was using it for COVID testing. And they had this like really niche request. And I was like, why do you, why does this one customer care so much about this?

Alexander Valente: And we've met with them and they're like, yeah, if we could do that, we can get this other machine to automate COVID test. And I was like, this is like the highest value thing ever.

Georgina Healy: Hello, and welcome to In the Blink of AI, where I talk to the brightest startups and innovators each week. I'm Georgie Healy, and this week I am speaking to Alex Valente.

Georgina Healy: Co founder of Redactive AI. Redactive helps enterprises manage new data threats and empower their security teams. Guys, this is an incredible episode. I do hope the producers edit out my constant cackling. Alex has been incredibly fun to speak to. He's super engaging. And a big part of this episode, I just had to dive into business building and strategy.

Georgina Healy: Alex has had a really incredible career in the biggest technology startups and scale ups. And earlier this year, him and the Reductive team were able to secure one of the biggest seed rounds in Australian history. We also chat about founder mode, who are the AI vertical people versus horizontal and powerful AI models versus actually delivering value to customers.

Georgina Healy: I know you're going to love this episode. Thanks for tuning in.

Georgina Healy: Alex, thank you for joining me today. I know there'll be so many listeners, super excited to hear about Redactum and yourself and your incredible story. But those who haven't met you, can you tell us a little bit about what redacted AI is and what role you play in the business?

Alexander Valente: Awesome. I'm, I'm Alex. I'm one of the co founders of Redactive.

Alexander Valente: Redactive helps enterprises move fast with generative AI safely. And the way we do that is by understanding the permissions associated with their data and allowing LLMs to kind of read those permissions and make sure that the right people can access the right information inside of an organization when they're using generative AI.

Georgina Healy: I still love hearing it, even though it's the third time I've asked you to do that for me. Do you mix it up every time?

Alexander Valente: I mix up very slightly every time. Every single person doesn't know this, but they're all being A B tested. Um, I've become like one big A B testing robot. And uh, depending on how much people react is pretty much how we progress the next A B test we run.

Alexander Valente: So if you ever receive an email from me, chances are we're testing some sort of new Uh, messaging and to see how, uh, so whether or not you open it or whether or not you react to it, this is kind of, I guess, the bit of the founder life, which is you're always trying to figure out what works.

Georgina Healy: So why haven't I received an email is why is my data not important to you, Alex?

Georgina Healy: If you

Alexander Valente: want me to put you on a messaging list, there's plenty of them. So

Georgina Healy: I subscribe. So we'll talk about your background shortly, but you know, this is an enterprise customer value prop. You've got a fair bit of domain experience in this space. Is it through your previous job roles that you realized this was a gap?

Georgina Healy: Like how did that come around?

Alexander Valente: Yeah, I think the way that kind of redacted got started was pretty interesting. I had worked at Atlassian for a bit of time and I'd worked on a bunch of different enterprise products. So initially I'd worked on like their data center implementation, which is their largest.

Alexander Valente: Uh, enterprise customers, their method of deployment worked on that initially. Then I worked on their cloud platform, which was trying to try and trying to drive more enterprises towards the cloud and looking at cloud and enterprise functionality there. And then I worked later on on J. S. M. On another very large enterprise feature in asset management.

Alexander Valente: So every single thing I kind of worked on it, Alassian had kind of by chance been about enterprises. And then when I worked for a growth up called immutable and then while I was immutable one day, I kind of. Was playing around with generative AI. Um, I was actually using it to see if we could write, uh, research emails, um, as like a hackathon project.

Alexander Valente: And then I was talking to Andrew, one of my co founders, and I was, and I was saying like, if the domain is massive, like there's a massive opportunity for us to kind of go out and, um, and really transform how people do their jobs. And we actually attempted to start a consulting firm. It lasted five weeks cause I'm a bad consultant and we get bored very easily.

Alexander Valente: And I think we took all of the learnings. Of that consulting firm and every conversation we had, and we were like, man, this is so clear to us that every single organization is experiencing the exact same problem. The exact same problem is I want to use generative AI, but I want my data to be inside of it, which is the way that people describe it to us initially, and I want the permissions to be right.

Alexander Valente: Everyone kept talking about, like, I don't want people to see things they shouldn't be able to see. That was always there. The kind of core problem that people were expressing to us. And we put that into a PowerPoint presentation and the rest is history. We were kind of off to the races and. We sent the PowerPoint presentation to one friend, they sent it to another person, uh, that ended up kind of on the desk at a venture firm.

Alexander Valente: They called us on the phone saying, Hey, what's going on with this, with this PowerPoint presentation we're seeing seems like a really interesting product. We were like, Oh, I didn't know we had a product. And then before you knew it, we were kind of, we started building what is today, Redactive. We called Lucas on the phone.

Alexander Valente: We said, Hey, we kind of, you know, we need to get ourselves a CTO next. And we built a prototype. We did all types of kind of things to progress the story. And then kind of productive was born and it was born a kind of out of that idea of people need to protect their data, but they need to make it. Useful and accessible.

Georgina Healy: Yeah. Adaptive. When you, when you did your raise earlier this year, it made a huge splash who we'll talk about that later. We've had some pretty incredible vertical AI founders on the show. We've had Angela from empathetic AI. That's a tax autopilot. We've had Jada from silo systems. She's a biodiversity data to manage biodiversity impact.

Georgina Healy: I'm noticing some VCs. Won't mention your names are super excited, specifically on vertical ai, how copilots and autopilots can transform workflows. For example. What's your thoughts to horizontal AI and why is that impactful and why is that important for your customers?

Alexander Valente: Yeah, great question. When we started Redactive, the product hypothesis was that we need to empower developers that are building inside of an organization to be able to build the workflows that are specific to their organization.

Alexander Valente: Our broad idea there was we don't want to force enterprises. We saw from our past experience how specific many of their workflows were and kind of what those organizations look like. And we understood like they have developers, these developers write code every day to build the workflows that they need.

Alexander Valente: They don't build low code app builders. That's not like, that wasn't the use case that we were targeting. We were targeting these specific developers inside the organization. And we wanted to, to kind of solve their problems and their problems with predominantly things like, again, data access, managing data pipelines, interfacing with enterprise data sources.

Alexander Valente: So we kind of went down that path because we saw the opportunity there. We stayed away from the vertical stuff because the honest truth was we weren't vertical kind of people. We had built tools that supported knowledge workers or tools that supported enterprise developers or tools that worked across organizations broadly rather than industry verticals.

Alexander Valente: I think like our experience naturally led us down that path. What we found is like the problems that you can solve on a horizontal layer can obviously be gigantic as well, which is really exciting. So while you might be able to solve for say a particular industry in a particular country that has particular rules.

Alexander Valente: On a horizontal layer, you're kind of solving like really, really large problems pertaining to a section of technology that is difficult for an organization in every country. How can we use AI? This is a question we got asked the other week. How can we use AI to understand our data permissions to make sure that they're correct?

Alexander Valente: Like, this is to me, I'm a substantially more exciting problem than being able to solve for a specifically specific industry vertical, because I'm The impact is so large, like you can help so many different organizations, different people to protect their data. So that's kind of, I think how we got shifted in that direction.

Alexander Valente: And I think that's why it was exciting as well for our team.

Georgina Healy: Yeah, amazing. Um, we'll get this question done up front because, you know, I know you've been asked about it a million times, you've been interviewed by Forbes, but this seed raise that you raised was astronomical, 11. 5 million. That's a lot of money for a seed round.

Georgina Healy: And it's, it made a huge. You know, huge wave on the Australian ecosystem. Did you expect that level of participation? Were you getting any indicators early on?

Alexander Valente: We got the indicators from our customers, obviously, before you get the indicators from your investors, like. We could see we can attract very large customers that have big problems and we can solve those problems for them.

Alexander Valente: I think when we saw that we were like, oh, this is a, you know, this is not a company that's that's going to kind of swing for a small prize. We're going to swing for the fences. And so you can kind of see the round represent that. And I think that that's again, that's what excites the people I think who work here.

Alexander Valente: And I think that's why it's a great place to work with us. People are not scared to swing at big prizes and tackle big problems. And because of that, we've been able to attract again, finance that's representative of, I think the, the large opportunity that we're swinging at. So I wasn't, I'm not going to say I was surprised.

Alexander Valente: I think by the time I was started dealing with the customers that we were dealing with, and I saw the level of their sophistication, I was like, Hey, we're. We're in the big leagues. I think it was commensurate with the, with the work that my team was doing.

Georgina Healy: To founders that might be listening, is that a strategy that they could take on?

Georgina Healy: Like go for the big customers or is there a risk to that? Like, well, what would you suggest?

Alexander Valente: Pretty much say the same thing to everyone, which is like, I feel like Australians are scared of putting forward a big vision and oftentimes we put forward small visions and we talk about local problems and we're scared of saying, Hey, I'm going to compete against the Americans, or I'm going to compete on a global scale.

Alexander Valente: I think, thankfully, by virtue of the team that we put together really early on at Redactive, everyone wanted to compete at a global level and no one was scared. A lot of people had startup experience and lots of people had worked at international software companies, which is always very valuable. And so.

Alexander Valente: Early on, it was like, Hey, we're going to swing at a big horizontal prize that goes across many industry verticals and across countries. And we're going to make this an international company from day one. And we want to solve this key challenge of, like, safe and responsible use of generative AI. And we want to do that via the lens of data commissions.

Alexander Valente: And we went out there to market and we said, this is how this is our vision. This is what we think. And I say to all founders now, like, you should shouldn't be scared of being opinionated and getting out there and saying exactly what you think and communicating a large vision. At the end of the day, you will swing for big prizes.

Alexander Valente: You will find things that work and things that don't work. And you will again, attract capital commensurate to the problem. You're trying to solve. You're trying to solve a small problem. You'll get less capital. And if you're trying to swing for a big problem, you're going to attract large ACVs and more capital to kind of fund that business.

Alexander Valente: Transcribed

Georgina Healy: I think you're a perfect example, Alex, of someone who is ambitious and has that almost what you notice in the American ecosystem of the way they pitch is very like unapologetic and they're going to change the world and this positive, passionate energy, but somehow I don't get tall poppy syndrome where I want to cut you down.

Georgina Healy: Like you've got a good balance of you've actually got some modesty in there as well. I don't know if that's just you or.

Alexander Valente: I think on the journey as well, like, we made a lot of mistakes, like, I've probably spoken to you about some of those, like, you know, the first time we plugged in our software infrastructure into a large enterprise installation, it was like, that was a humbling experience, you know, every, you know, we got humbled very quickly, you can go to enterprise and say, like, yeah, everything does this and this and this and this and, and then, you know, you plug your software in, it doesn't work or something goes wrong.

Alexander Valente: And then everyone's kind of looking at, you know, like. Cool. So you said it was going to work, so you better go and make it work. And before you know it, you're kind of sitting in the office at like late night and figuring that out.

Georgina Healy: Where's my manager. I need someone to tell me what to do.

Alexander Valente: I was like, Oh man, I remember like my last job.

Alexander Valente: It wasn't like, I think like we used to plug in the software and I used to just work like what's going on with this one for, for all of like the visionary, I guess. Rhetoric, the reality is also there, which is like, hey, you do need to go and back it up and you do need to put in the effort and all I can say to people is, you know, swing a big prizes, try and solve big problems and have a big impact.

Alexander Valente: But having a big impact means solving the problem. You actually do need to fundamentally solve someone's problem. You can't just do like the sometimes American style of, you know, communicating more marketing than than than reality.

Georgina Healy: We

Alexander Valente: really focus on driving customer value. That's our key metric at the end of every day of how we judge whether or not a product is.

Alexander Valente: Is valuable or functional.

Georgina Healy: I'm in a startup group chat where it's literally about podcasts we've listened to. And one of the ones that's blown up recently is on a live episode of the acquired. They had Zuckerberg on, and it is really interesting cause he's gone through like quite a rollercoaster of being in favor and out of favor and in favor and out of favor.

Georgina Healy: So it's, you know, even if you are that, you know, kind of macho personality originally, regardless of gender, you know, like you're going to be humbled at some point, you know, like something's not going to work. Like Alex, if you try and get into that metaverse, like you may get humbled.

Alexander Valente: I think it's such an interesting character because he's the type of person who has.

Alexander Valente: Uh, like swung really big initially and been super successful and was kind of a bit difficult to relate to early on. Then he kind of went into the metaverse thing. He probably got taught a pretty big lesson pretty fast in the metaverse, and I'd like, I kind of respect him for still sticking with it. Like, he, he's maybe his vision has changed and like, he's kind of trying to figure out what it looks like.

Alexander Valente: And then on the AI thing, like change the game again,

Georgina Healy: completely

Alexander Valente: changed his image. I think once he released Llama and like, he was like, Oh, this guy who everyone thought was like this. Maniac on like controlling a platform all of a sudden has released like the go to open source model And I think like pretty much I guess birthed a lot of what you know The enthusiast movement uses today is a lot of the infrastructure that that really facebook is built.

Alexander Valente: So a fascinating character

Georgina Healy: Nicholas, you and I have mad respect for this open source play and his just willingness to keep like throwing things at the wall and innovating and like, you know, just clearly he's passionate about building products, right?

Alexander Valente: Yeah, like he definitely hasn't gotten bored yet. Like, you know, it's clearly tries in every market.

Alexander Valente: And yeah, I, I think he's a super interesting character as well. He's like gone through a full personal rebrand as well. He went from being like nerdy and wearing hoodies to now he's jacked. He does MMA. He wears like, you know, he's where the gold chain.

Georgina Healy: Yes. He's got the broccoli haircut.

Alexander Valente: I can start wearing a gold chain.

Alexander Valente: I was like, listen, not yet. Maybe when I am at his level.

Georgina Healy: Next podcast, I want to see a gold chain or I'll be mad. I

Alexander Valente: think my co founders would be like, Alex, this has got to stop. Like we've got to

Georgina Healy: do enterprise now, no

Georgina Healy: gold

Georgina Healy: chains. He's out

Georgina Healy: of control. All right. When we get back to the capital question, you get this huge pool of funding.

Georgina Healy: You're now sitting on a Blunt with money. Does that change your strategy? Do you go, okay, now we got to go growth because we've got all this money now or, or is it regardless of how much we raise? This is the approach and that doesn't change.

Alexander Valente: Um, the way that we look through this kind of lens was through the lens of like product, right?

Alexander Valente: You have to make investments. Uh, as a team into products that are product market fit, because otherwise, when you push that growth engine, things just don't really work. You can send a hundred salespeople at a given market, you can have a specific pitch, you can have a product that kind of works, but unless it has proper product market fit, your return on investment just, it just won't work.

Alexander Valente: Like when we tested certain things in certain markets. We could, you could feel it like you can feel that this thing is just not hitting the product market fit how we expect it. So initially we didn't go and throw all the money at selling out our product as it was in that moment. We were like, that's not a winning plan.

Alexander Valente: That's not a responsible use of capital. Instead, we ended up investing a lot of that money into hiring good engineers that could support the product and the product iterations we wanted to make in order to get the product into a place where it did have that product market fit and we could start pushing the growth engine a little bit further down the line.

Alexander Valente: So, if you look at the organization today, it's kind of roughly 13 people, like, you know, the majority of that is engineering and the reason why is like, Redactive is a, is a, is a product that really hits a lot of developers. Is. Um, and the product needs to be super well engineered, otherwise it becomes very apparent very early on, like that it's, it does not meet the required standards of the customer.

Alexander Valente: And again, so until it's kind of was in that place where we were more comfortable, like, okay, it's meeting the needs of a customer. That's when we started going, okay, now let's start pushing the growth buttons. Let's getting, you know, an enterprise salesperson. Let's talk about marketing. How can we start pushing these, these other levers?

Alexander Valente: Because otherwise, I think you, you end up, you actually end up wasting a lot of your own time. This is another thing as well, which is like the only thing that sucks, like more than probably like spending money on a product that's not, that doesn't have a good product market fit is attempting to market it yourself as the founder and then being like, Oh my God, this is, this is, this is not the right product for this particular market.

Alexander Valente: Or I'm not, I haven't got this set up correctly. It's not meeting the customer's expectations. So making sure your product has PMF is that, that key requirement, I would say before pushing any growth engine, I wouldn't go and push a growth engine before that. That's the case. Even if, even, you know, even though I have the capital, that's broadly how we looked at it.

Alexander Valente: And that was the, that was the right bet because now our products in a much better place. And when we do hit enterprises, we can actually service them. And that's probably where we find ourselves today

Georgina Healy: on the product. Uh, maybe I have trust issues. If I had a team, the majority. Technical people. It's a technical product.

Georgina Healy: It's in security. I know you've got electrical engineering degree. You're very technical, but sometimes I wouldn't sleep at night being like, is this actually. What I hope it to be like, you're a co founder. You might have a step back from what's actually being built from a technical security perspective.

Georgina Healy: How do you know that it's the quality you want? How do you know that it's correct? It's AI, it's tech.

Alexander Valente: Like this is now where it comes down to this concept of like collaboration, like any organization. Reaches a certain size where you don't know the exact intricacies of every single person's job and you have to trust them and you have to work with them.

Alexander Valente: And a lot of people recently have been talking about founder mode and about getting involved in every single thing inside of a company and. I think getting involved is absolutely super valuable as a founder. You should be getting involved. Like, I get involved super deeply in the product. I get super, super deeply in what data we capture the strategy behind all these things.

Alexander Valente: But at the same time, you know, as a founder, your time is limited. You want to be making those investments into the places where it is what delivers the highest ROI. And I think sometimes people construe founder mode to be like, I'm going to get involved in like, you know, the intricacies of how we do billing and it's like, is that really the, the thing that you want to be opinionated about?

Alexander Valente: Or maybe you should be opinionated about like, you know, how you're tackling a particular problem space inside of a particular, you know, one of your particular products, what I ended up finding is like, You need to get involved. You need to use the product. You need to see the product live. You need to sit with a customer and watch a customer.

Alexander Valente: You need to understand what the customer wants to do with the product in the future. You need to interview customers. You need to talk to them. You need to get extremely close to these people. And you need to sit with your engineers and see and understand the constraints. Um, you know, reflecting what the customer said.

Alexander Valente: Again, that's a super cooperative thing. I don't need to know the exact intricacies of How our authentication pipeline works, although I do find it very interesting, the reality is it's really that customer response and whether that customer need is being met, that is actually the key thing that should drive a business making businesses decision making.

Alexander Valente: Because they're the people paying for the product, even at the end of the day, if it's not specifically, you know, the way that I, you know, maybe prescribed it to be if it meets the customer's need and my engineer understands the customer's need, then that I'm really happy. I'm actually much happier than if that, you know.

Alexander Valente: Delivered exactly to my specification because my specifications are important, the customer specification.

Georgina Healy: Yeah, that was a really great explainer on what founder mode actually can look like in reality versus yeah, like there are only so many hours of the day. In the Forbes article that I've mentioned already, one of your investors, Michael from Blackbird is quoted as saying.

Georgina Healy: Gen AI applications are only as useful as the data they have access to. And for most enterprise, the most valuable data is sensitive and permissioned. Do you agree with that? I've heard the case that model quality can, for the most part, be improved by just throwing large volumes of data and compute it and inherently will just get better.

Alexander Valente: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think like this is now the conversation between like, what's the difference between like a model's ability to do really interesting actions. And then how do we deliver business value? Those are two separate conversations like you can have the most powerful model in the world and it will still deliver no value to a business if it can't access the business's genuine workflows and data.

Alexander Valente: And that was broadly our hypothesis. Our hypothesis at the start of the business was models are going to improve in quality. We're not going to try and train models that are better than the models that are in market. Like, that is someone else's job. That's not ours. Our job is how do we get businesses in order to build the use cases?

Alexander Valente: That are going to deliver them value inside of their organization. How do we solve problems for that? And Tolu puts it really eloquently, which is the most valuable data to a business is that the data that is sensitive and it is permissioned. And I'll give you an example. If you're a bank and you want to start, say, building workflow automations inside of your bank, the first place you might start is, say, I don't know, loan processing, right?

Alexander Valente: You want to understand all of the loans, That a given manager of a bank branch is, is responsible for and see if any changes have happened to these loans that are, that are relevant. So you might have an agent workflow that goes through and reads all of these lines and it reads them on behalf of the bank manager.

Alexander Valente: In that workflow, you require access to the repository of information that stores those loans, and you require authentication on behalf of the bank manager. So you actually need to represent that bank manager as a, as an entity, and then you need to go and fetch all of those documents. And then you need to pass them to an application that consists, broadly speaking, of an LLM and some other things.

Alexander Valente: In order to do some additional processing, you know, in that world, you know, the really hard part, or at least the generalizable part is the data access and data pipelining part, the part that Redactive solves for, which is how do I connect to all these enterprise data and how do I do it safely and securely, you know, the part that we leave to the bank or to the, to the respective financial services institution or whatever the customer is.

Alexander Valente: Is that specific workflow? And that's really something that major enterprises are kind of building all the time. They're building these specific applications that solve problems inside of their organization. Every single kind of customer we've sat with, we're always surprised by the use cases that come out of their permissioned and sensitive data sets.

Alexander Valente: You know, it could be anything from like an HR use case to, you know, business development to loan processing investment. And like it's. So broad spectrum, but the thing that's consistent across all of them is it's their data. It's stored on their services. It's permissioned and it's very important to them.

Alexander Valente: It's very sensitive.

Georgina Healy: You've kind of answered this already, but you do make it sound easy to get those permissions and that data. I've worked at a bank before and it didn't matter who you were. Like the red tape, the hoops, like all of that. Am I missing something? Like, was, is there something special in your pitch deck that wins them over that they're like, yes, here you go.

Alexander Valente: The probably the sacred source of redacted is the fact that We actually don't store any of the raw text on our servers. We only store embeddings information. And this is now like where we're getting into like pretty, the, the, the AI part of the podcast, really what redacted is under the hood is a large organizational search index of embeddings information.

Alexander Valente: And then a bunch of metadata that we store associated with that. And essentially at query time, we go and fetch these documents live from the data source, the source of truth using the authentication token of the respective end user. And that pitch to organizations, what it says to them is like, Hey, there's no data duplication.

Alexander Valente: We're not storing your data. All we're doing is essentially mapping authentication tokens and documents to embeddings. And that is a really valuable pitch to them because they understand, well, now I don't ever have to worry about the permissions being out of sync and I don't ever have to worry about my data being stale.

Alexander Valente: And for Redactive, it's really valuable because what it means is we store really, really useful and interesting information on our end that we can provide services to our customers with. So one is data access. Exactly the kind of problem that I was explaining before. People can build applications that fetch their information, but recently we've started providing analysis on top of people's permissions.

Alexander Valente: And their embeddings to say, Hey, did you know that, you know, there's abnormalities in your permission structures pertaining to their embeddings, which has been like this super, you know, unique use case that came from one of our customers who asked us, Hey, is there anything weird in our SharePoint instance?

Alexander Valente: And it was like, Hey, this is kind of a fun hackathon to give to our devs. Like, let's go and find out if there is any abnormalities in the respective knowledge base associated with your SharePoint instance. And what we were able to find is like, hey, the permissioning on this document is abnormal relative to its semantic contents.

Alexander Valente: So these are the types of things that Redactive is able to do now because we have this. Semantic information and permissions. Um, and that's broadly speaking what happens under the hood. So it sounds really easy, but Georgie, it's like, you know, man, the, the thing's blown up, you know, we had, there was a lot of speed bumps along the way to get it into a place today where I can say it works, but yeah, we've learned a lot and the product as it is today is very unique in its structure because it is only semantics and, and, and, and.

Alexander Valente: And, uh, authentication.

Georgina Healy: Yeah, I appreciate you sharing. That's, that's incredibly interesting. And also another great use case of found a mode to get under the hood there. It's amazing when we last spoke, it was for a slightly different media. It was for an article. And, you know, it was just after you got the raise and you guys definitely had like a gold sheen and I asked you, like, what stresses you out?

Georgina Healy: And you said, you know, what really keeps you up at night is ensuring customers are successful. And that main focus on customer success and satisfaction. I already know the answer to this, but I found it really interesting. Can you, can you talk a little bit about your past history and why that customer obsession focus came about?

Alexander Valente: Yeah, I think like customer obsession was something that was drilled into the team. I think when we first started at Atlassian, like we all, we worked at Atlassian, one of the core values was like this customer obsession concept. And we used to work so closely, like on our products and make sure that they met the customer's needs and like.

Alexander Valente: Broadly speaking, that's probably the best business advice anyone would ever give you ever. And I know for a fact that management consulting firms. There is data that supports this, which is the most important thing is customer CSAT. It's whether or not a customer would recommend you to another potential customer.

Alexander Valente: So customer satisfaction is the number one indicator in a business's success. So Atlassian drilled that into us when we were product managers, and I think I try and draw that into our team. I've experienced like numerous times, I think, in my career, working with customers, seeing them both be successful and not successful and understanding, like, seeing the impact of what that means on the business where I've come to understand, like, when we things are working for the customer, they are working for the business as well.

Alexander Valente: I actually have a vivid memory of during COVID helping a biotech company in the U S that was running COVID testing using the software that I was working on at Atlassian as my product. And I had no idea that anyone was using it for COVID testing and they had this like really niche request. They were like, we need this particular field to modulate on this particular action.

Alexander Valente: And I was like, why do you, why does this one customer care so much about this? And we've met with them. And they're like, yeah, if we could do that, we can get this other machine to automate COVID test. I was like, this is like the highest value thing ever. And we were able to ship it like super easy. Now I think back on that, I was like, that customer was, was like, when we spoke to them, they were like, this CSAT was, you know, a million out of a million, like it was, they were just so unbelievably happy with the service that they'd been provided.

Alexander Valente: And I think that they have become a very big advocate for Atlassian. I see them at, whenever we go to Atlassian conferences, they present every single time now. And I think it's because Atlassian has always been providing them a great service. And we carried that, that forward into our business as well.

Alexander Valente: We were like, this is, this is the key, one of the key values that, that every single organization should have. Customer obsession is like one of those key values that organizations should have.

Georgina Healy: Yeah. Amazing. Atlassian is clearly such a, a guiding principle and great foundation. You've also worked at venture capital.

Georgina Healy: Uh, you worked at Mutable that you mentioned, another incredible Aussie success story.

Alexander Valente: Mate, commutables are awesome as

Georgina Healy: well, yeah. Yes, and then you founded Redaktiv. Now, you and I are mates, but even I get kind of intimidated when I, like, list all of that out. It's kind of, like, I, I wrote in my notes here that it's like a Daniel Day Lewis winning streak, but for tech industry roles.

Georgina Healy: Like, what's going on there? Are you carefully crafting a career narrative behind the scenes? Was this, was this part of the plan? Like, can people copy you after uni? How do they do that?

Alexander Valente: It's partially luck. It's partially like passion. And yeah, I think like probably what's missing from that is like all of the times that, you know, you know, I stuffed it and like things weren't going right.

Alexander Valente: And when I graduated uni, I think I applied for like 50 jobs and I got, I got one offer.

Georgina Healy: Wow. I got

Alexander Valente: it.

Georgina Healy: Yeah. No, it was NVC,

Alexander Valente: so. This type of stuff, like, after Atlassian, like, after uni, having, like, seeing that, it was like, you know, life could have gone really differently. Like, I probably had a bit of a weird resume, I was probably a bit of a strange candidate, and Atlassian was looking for that type of person, and they bet on me, and like, oh mate, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Alexander Valente: But if I hadn't found that opportunity, maybe my life would have gone in a different path. And so, like, even when we recruit people now at Redactive, we also try and look for people maybe who, like, Have had a bit of a different path because we, I think we all recognize like, you know, any, anything can happen in a person's career and like, sometimes just being in the right place at the right time is can, can kind of change everything like immutable was another time where it was like, that was just the right, like the right time for me.

Alexander Valente: I wanted to work for a smaller company that was faster moving. I wanted to try a different industry. I was passionate about gaming. Actually, everyone at Redactive loves gaming. That's a whole nother story.

Georgina Healy: Yeah, that's why I didn't pass the first round. They're like, I was like, no, they're like, thanks for coming.

Alexander Valente: Well, it's quite funny. So Lucas and I used to be in the same age of Empire, the group chat. So that's actually how

Georgina Healy: we need

Alexander Valente: a, we need a CTO. And it was like, who should we, who should we call? And I was like, Lucas is like a, Really senior machine learning engineer. And he's also very good at Age of Empires.

Georgina Healy: What's Age of Empires? Is that like medieval?

Alexander Valente: Yeah, it's a medieval strategy game. It's, it's very fun. Um, it's also very nerdy, but I highly, highly recommend it. If no one on the calls, you know, played it before. Check it out. Yeah,

Georgina Healy: that's the biggest tip for the day is play Asian Empires. That's

Alexander Valente: exactly right.

Georgina Healy: I'm one of those people that's like definitely strange in general. I love medieval everything. I like tick every nerd box you can imagine, read all the fantasy novels, like all of that stuff, obsessed with it. I think I missed a trick not getting into gaming when I was younger. I think that would have been my community.

Alexander Valente: Yeah. If I can get you on anything now, like gaming's tough to start now. Yes. What I recommend is, um, the Restless History podcast. Oh. And I'm also a subscriber to their club, um, which I, which I highly recommend to people.

Georgina Healy: Okay. Well, while we're at it, I listened to History Hit,

Alexander Valente: which is also on

Georgina Healy: YouTube.

Georgina Healy: Amazing. Uh, Gone Medieval, that podcast, Ken recommend, but the rest is history. I don't know. I listened to a BBC one called You're Dead to Me. That's a good one. It's history.

Alexander Valente: Yeah. Nice.

Georgina Healy: I digress. Okay. Amazing. I can't wait to get to our rapid fire round, but let me just ask one more question. Um, okay. I've got a really gossipy one, so I can't not ask.

Alexander Valente: Go for it.

Georgina Healy: One of your key investors is Atlassian Ventures.

Alexander Valente: It is.

Georgina Healy: Many, many people, myself included, would find it very thrilling to bump into Scott or Mike at an airport. Yeah. You got their phone numbers on the speed dial? Do you know them closely? Like, are you mates with them?

Alexander Valente: I don't think those guys, uh, I don't think they, they know who we are, but, but I do say, but if I saw them, I would say hello.

Alexander Valente: I've met them a couple of times at work. They were wonderful people to deal with. I'll give you some, a bit of goss, because I feel like, you know, that's what people always want. I reckon if you want to get Scott's attention, you want it to post in the cycling channel. Oh,

Georgina Healy: cycling, like bicycle cycling.

Alexander Valente: That's it. Yeah. So you could, I reckon if you DM'd him and you were like, Oh, I've got this great, I, I reckon he wouldn't reply. But I reckon if you posted a photo of yourself on a bike ride, he'd reply to that in the cycling channel. He's an avid cyclist. And Mike was always a big crypto fan and he loves novel product ideas.

Alexander Valente: So that was probably where I would say, if you, if you're looking to get his attention, that's maybe a place where you could go.

Georgina Healy: You are full of great tips. Okay. Rapid fire round. I'm going to finish with four to five questions. And you're just going to tell me the first thing that comes to your head. How does that sound?

Alexander Valente: Sounds great.

Georgina Healy: Sydney versus Melbourne startup ecosystem.

Alexander Valente: Um, like you started, that's the hardest question ever.

Georgina Healy: Who are you there?

Alexander Valente: Uh, Sydney.

Georgina Healy: Yes, that's the correct answer. Favorite consumer AI platform that you have used?

Alexander Valente: I'm an anthropic fan, so we'll go with, go with Clued.

Georgina Healy: Which part of your life would you outsource immediately to machines?

Alexander Valente: I've got a 15 minute spiel on how the washer dryer combo is the greatest invention known to man, so it's going to be clothes washing.

Georgina Healy: No, it's, like, you have a dryer in, like, an apartment, or?

Alexander Valente: Washer dryer combo, it takes something that used to be multiple steps and turns it into one step. It is amazing.

Georgina Healy: Let's chill in the dark ages, okay?

Alexander Valente: I'm telling you, washer dryer combo, unbelievable. Miele, they make a great one.

Georgina Healy: Miele washer

Georgina Healy: dryer! Writing that down. Anything you've read about yourself or redacted that's complete nonsense.

Alexander Valente: They regularly say Lucas used to work at Atlassian. He didn't. He was a consultant.

Alexander Valente: He was an AI consultant, but because Andrew and I worked at Atlassian, they just lump us all in and they're just like ex Atlassians.

Georgina Healy: Yeah. He would find that super annoying because he's like, yeah, that's great. But I also like have other things going on

Alexander Valente: because he's an AI engineer. Sometimes in print, AI engineer is read as an engineer that is digital, right?

Alexander Valente: So sometimes in print, they quote him as a real life AI engineer, which we find very funny that he's a real person. Like he's the first. Yeah. Engineer that's ever like in a in print that they have to specify as a real person. He's like made of flesh and bone.

Georgina Healy: He's real

Georgina Healy: life guys.

Alexander Valente: Yeah.

Georgina Healy: I've never actually met him and I cannot confirm or deny whether this is true or not.

Alexander Valente: Yeah, exactly. Until you see him in real life, until 3D, you can never know. Maybe he is just AI.

Georgina Healy: You just have him there for clout. He's not even real. Okay. Finally, anything you'd love to shout out to the people listening? Are you hiring? You're clearly not raising, but what would you like?

Alexander Valente: We are hiring. Yes, we are always hiring.

Alexander Valente: So if you're, if, if you're interested in working in AI and helping enterprises move fast with AI safely and responsibly, we are hiring, we're hiring engineers. The most difficult person we're trying to hire at the moment is a marketing candidate. So if you know anyone who is a. Uh, as we say, a scrappy storyteller, um, we would love to hear from them.

Alexander Valente: So please submit a resume. Uh, you can go to redactive. ai, uh, and look for the careers page. Otherwise, I just want to say to everyone, like, Hey, you know, I'm always open to helping out people in the community. Um, you can reach me on LinkedIn, shoot me a message. Hopefully, um, I can connect you to the right person or I can help you out myself.

Georgina Healy: I can definitely vouch for that. I could also vouch that you're not

Alexander Valente: AI. I'm also a real person. Yeah.

Georgina Healy: This has genuinely been so fun, Alex. We've talked about the founder mode. We've talked about the native science. We've talked about vertical, horizontal AI, having a big vision as a founder. There's so much that I think, um, other people would have loved as well.

Georgina Healy: So I really appreciate you taking the time.

Alexander Valente: No worries, Georgie. Thanks so much for having me. I had a lot of fun as well. And we hopefully can get you to our office in Melbourne where we're tuning in from right now.

Georgina Healy: You owe me merch. You owe me merch.

Alexander Valente: We've got some merch

Georgina Healy: here. Chat soon, babe.

Alexander Valente: Bye.

Georgina Healy: Thank you for listening to In the Blink of AI.

Georgina Healy: You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week's episode, and we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by day one with music by Dan Hanson and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates and I love AI news. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to GeorginaRoseHealy at gmail.

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