YouSaid · the spoken record

Torsten Reil

lines on the record: 111
first: 2024-12-11
most recent: 2024-12-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I think it should be disconcerting to all of us. I think we should think about it and think about the implications. And we should think, and I don't think this is happening enough, I think we should think about how we want this technology to work so that we can still stay safe, but we don't have to compromise on our ethical standards.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's usually not done in a way that there's some kind of sequestered field, and you work it out, and then whoever wins the conflict, obviously it tends to be related to obviously physical proximity to areas that matter, whether it's ports, certain routes, obviously, or other important landmarks. That's where battlefields tend to be located.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, yes, I think ultimately, again, you can already see the first signs in Ukraine. Some areas of the battlefield are essentially no go zones for humans because you have drones buzzing over you all the time. I think that gives us a kind of a first indication how conflict is going to evolve. It'll be impossible. And I think ethically extremely problematic to send humans into a battlefield that is facing large numbers of autonomous intelligence systems on the other side.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means that basically instead of sending one, you send five. If they're cheap enough, you can just do that. And at some point, you just over-saturate defenses of an expensive system. And it's still very cheap to do it that way. If you just think about the economics of it, you still have a really strong asymmetry. And so it'll become harder and harder unless you find a way to really counteract these systems, which is hard to send expensive tanks and artillery systems into battle, when on the other side there are strike drones that are much, much cheaper”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same thing with strike drones and tanks and artillery. A tank costs several million pounds euros. A strike drone is much, much, much cheaper, depending on how things play out. You need one or maybe two or three strike drones, even with countermeasures to actually overcome a tank. That's basically the danger. Same is true for artillery systems. They become very hard to defend. And the problem with mass, especially precise mass, is that you can solve almost every problem with saturation. So even if there were countermeasures, let's say, on the tank side,”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the ability to hit the target. It's hitting a target that itself uses electronic warfare, so it tries to jam the signal of the drone. These are some of the bigger problems right now that Ukraine is facing and that NATO will be facing in a peer conflict as well or any other country in a peer conflict. So drones themselves, if they're just remote controlled drones, eventually have the problem that they can be jammed. That's GPS jamming, so it doesn't know where it is. Or it's comms jamming, which means that the control inputs to the drone or the video feed back from the drone to the operator is jammed and therefore you can't use it. So this is the problem. I mean, there's a jamming station. The frontline every few kilometers right now. So it's almost impossible to get around jamming at the moment.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can already look at Ukraine and look at the trends there. And the trend, even at the beginning, there were some drones that were being used. Remember the TB-2s, for example, from Turkey. Over time, that's evolved towards more and more drones. Initially, it was to make up for lack of artillery munitions. Now actually, the drones themselves have such good success.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some governments are starting to understand it. I think governments at large probably haven't understood it. There is a big wave of coming towards us. And it is autonomy and software in defense. And it's unstoppable. And we're just going to be forced into that race.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have precise mass on your own side as well. You need to have the ability, however horrible that sounds to have thousands and tens of thousands of strike drones to deter.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're quite clear for everyone to see Iran is producing a large number of drones already. They've been using and working on the Shahid, for example, for a long time. They've licensed that design to Russia. Russia is now manufacturing it itself. Software is getting better over time. Russia has the Lancet, which is a capable strike drone, quite different from Mashad, which I think they've developed themselves. And the software for all of these is getting better as well. We're going to be faced either through Russia alone or through partners like Iran with adversaries that are committing to precise mass. Large number of autonomous systems that we're going to have to counter one way or the other. And you can counter them, but you can't counter them with the current systems that we have. You can't just have acquisite, exquisite systems like tanks, artillery guns that are not particularly well connected, that take a while to take a shot. You need to work basically at the speed of software. You need to interconnect all of these systems. But crucially, you need to”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to be faced with a large number of autonomous systems from our adversaries. That's going to be the focus that they're going to take. And by the way, it's quite likely that they won't have the same ethical red lines that we as democratic societies should have. So they have from a functionality point of view, I think they'll have the ability to take shortcuts that we don't want to take. We have to earn the luxury basically to be able to really care about ethics. And that means that we have to have technology leadership overall.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, probably Sabe is a friend, for example. We work very closely with them. Their shareholders in Helsing as well, really close friends. Others, I think it can fluctuate. I don't mean to suggest in just I think we all genuinely need to work together. I think we all have bigger fish to fry. And defense primes will always have a role. We don't think that they will disappear. In fact, actually, I think they will grow if we do things right. The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector. If there is a big wave coming of new technology and it's all around autonomy, software, and AI. Essentially, again, precise mass. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense as happened to the car industry. The new wave was electric software autonomy.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are many. The first thing is that you also have to have relationships with governments, with the right decision makers. You have to have a government relations team that deals with all of that. And in Helsinki's case, it's not just one country, it's several. So we're active in the UK, in France, and in Germany, just recently opened an office in Estonia, and there'll be more over time. So we have to have those relationships with various governments. You have to then think about how do you deal with lobbying from industry. So not every crime in the defense industry is yet our friend. I think we want to reach out to all of them, but not everyone sees us friends yet.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are all kinds of littler things that you could do, but what we are suggesting is that you introduce a mandatory 20% on new defense companies for defense equipment. That is the easiest way of doing it. So if you reserve of your defense equipment spend, so not the stuff on maintenance and everything else, but actually defense equipment, if you reserve 20% of that to new defense companies, which you can define, that is a shortcut to actually realigning incentives.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the system probably incentivizes the latter, but that doesn't mean that there aren't individuals actually across different forces in procurement agencies, but also in politics who really want to innovate. It does exist”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there are lots of rules and it's frustrating. But if you enter defense as a company, that is what you've signed up for. And so you'll rarely hear us complain about how slow procurement is, et cetera. Because people want to do the right thing. The procurement officials also want to do the right thing. And by the way, I think politicians do too. It's just that eventually you end up with a system that's grown over a long time where the incentives aren't quite aligned with the realities of conflict.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is an inhibitor, like many other things as well. But for the complaints that we have about procurement and everything else, a lot of these rules are also there for a reason. Are they always applied in the right way and in as timely a way as ideally would be possible? Probably not. But the rules quite often make sense.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software can, with the right simulation environment, go really far, but there will be some things that maybe you didn't expect that aren't covered in your simulation. That happens in particular when you're deployed as our drones are in Ukraine. Then the realities of conflict with all things at you that you just didn't anticipate. And so that's something that you have to test.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you do it well, which we're trying to do are extremely interlinked, and the best hardware companies, I think, are software companies and vice versa.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is and it isn't. So it is in that there are many areas where you need to have hardware experts. And we've built an amazing team that obviously deals with things like the design, the components, but also the supply chain. And that's different from software. But you can think about hardware as software as well. You can optimize a lot of parts of hardware by shifting complexity into software. And you can also test hardware in software. And so we spend a lot of time building infrastructure for the entire company around simulation platforms, for example, AI infrastructure platforms, et cetera. And some of that technology is also applicable to hardware. So we've developed our drones extremely fast and we've tested them extremely fast. And the reason we're getting to that kind of iteration speed and it is all about iteration. Just iterate, iterate, iterate, is because we can move a lot of the testing into software. And only when we get to a certain point, we move it into hardware, we test it in hardware, and then we go back into software again. So these two things.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First point of view, meaning that we can shift a lot of the complexity from hardware into software. We can simplify the hardware and we can manufacture it in much larger numbers at lower prices. And that's what we did with the HX2, which we just announced a couple of days ago.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not building a Eurofighter, but with drones, you need to think about drones differently in order for them to have the effect that you want them to have, which is basically precise mass. So you want to be able to have a large number of drones extremely precise to provide a deterrent that doesn't exist at the moment. And so for that, you need to have large numbers of drones. You need to have the ability to manufacture those drones in a way that isn't the case right now. Most drone companies right now build small numbers of quite exquisite drones. They're quite expensive, sometimes a bit of a boutique business where people really care about the hardware and the carbon and everything else. But that's not what we need. What we need is really scaled up production. And so when we looked at what's required in terms of capability, we couldn't, certainly on the Western market, we couldn't find anyone who was able to produce these large numbers. And so that's when we started to look at can we build these kinds of drones ourselves and can we think about it differently from a software”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, Helsing is a software company, as a software first company, always has been, and always will be. Almost everyone is a software engineer. That's where we've come from. That's how we hired. And we are in a large number of large contracts. For example, we're working with SAP on the Eurofighter Electronic Warfare Upgrade program. That's pure software. Our contribution and software can make a massive difference in this particular case, AI can, because we can start to read the intent of shape-shifting anti-aircraft radar systems. And so software plays a huge role. And we always said it creates a 10x multiplier in terms of capabilities. That's still the case that will always be the case. And we will always do those software programs. So software and software contracts work in defense, even though some people say it is impossible, it clearly is possible. However, there are some areas where software needs to be, it needs to have a hardware carrier. With a Eurofighter, we have a combat aircraft as a carrier, and that's great.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, I mean, Helsing was founded to support Europe and to be a European company, also to be a European lighthouse company, and a company that helps Europe protect itself. So that's always the number one thing. And if people ask, like, what is it you want to, you know, where do you want to be in five years with Helsing? What is it you want to achieve? It's very simple. We want to make Europe safer. We want to be able to point at the difference that we've made in terms of the geopolitical security of this continent. That is the goal of the company. Everything else has to follow from that. Obviously, it needs to be a company that's large enough so that it has leverage, that it can deploy a lot of equipment that can work with some of the most complex systems like the Eurofighter that we're working on. But that's all it means to an end. The goal is always to protect Europe.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think these complexities are there with any conflict, and eventually it becomes complex. And there is no right or wrong. I'm always aware that this sounds like a cop-out. And this is what I've always been afraid of, is that when you say it's complex, it sounds like a cop-out, but it isn't a cop-out. It is actually complicated and complex. And you also need to wait certain components in the way that can be arbitrary. And so every conflict, I think, has these kinds of complications. And it's our responsibility to navigate it. Again, we could just lean back and say there's export law that makes it really easy. But I think if you want to have people really engaged with these kinds of technologies and capabilities in a company, you need to go further than that. You need to build a view that goes beyond just what is quite static export law.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So the economist releases a list every year and it ranks countries according to how democratic they are with 10, I believe, being the highest one going down to zero. And so the ones at the top are easy. The ones at the bottom are also easy. And then it starts becoming more complex in the middle because you have some countries, even in the EU where in the past they haven't been kind of ranked that highly, but then governments have changed and they've ranked more highly again. So it basically becomes a moving target. And then there are also considerations around are they pods or are these some of these countries that are maybe in the gray zone part of democratic alliances that become important for democracies to survive and protect themselves, for example?”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The easiest way to look at clear and not clear is to check out the economist democracy index. That's what we used initially.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think decisions have been particularly unpopular yet. We just recently announced that we are building strike drones. We built strike drone software as well. And that is fraught with all kinds of complexities that you have to think about around the ethics side of it, both in terms of technology usage, how it's used, et cetera. And that is something that everyone contributed to the thinking around this. We managed to shine light on areas of technology development that I can't go into, sadly, that actually we probably didn't think about that much before. So the other important part is that if you have a lot of, I think, intelligent engaged people look at the ethics problem around technology usage, CONOPS, the concept of operations, you just shine a light on kind of any kind of remaining area. And so you just have much better coverage of all the questions that you have to do.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for example, that we would agree. And then there are this where it becomes a bit more complex. One of the main reasons we do these workshops is that we get everyone to contribute to the decision process, but also for everyone to build what we call this ethics muscle. Because for me, everything was kind of red lines. Everything was black and white, and it was kind of easy. The more you dive into a particular topic, the harder actually it becomes to make these calls and the more complex it becomes. And that is something that we didn't just want to decide kind of in a small group of people or some small ethics group. We wanted everyone to contribute to it. So that everyone had buy-in and understood the pros and cons. Not everyone may agree with the decisions that we eventually take, but everyone can see how we arrived at those decisions.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, even the complexity around who you sell it to is interesting because there are very obvious ones that we'll all agree on. But then they're ones in between, which are”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which countries I mean, it's a bigger topic, but the question is whether you should stop at export laws or whether you should give it more thought. And what we did from the beginning at Helsing is we made a commitment to ourselves, but also to the outside world that we would take ethics really seriously. There are two reasons for it is one of them is as a company that's based in democratic countries, we believe we have a special responsibility to think about ethics and how our technology is used and who we make it available to. Secondly, we want to be a broad church, we want to attract all kinds of different people with different political views, backgrounds, etc. And to accommodate those people, you need to give everyone in the company the commitment that we think together carefully about the pros and cons of certain decisions. Decisions always have to be made eventually by the founders, but the decision process, you can include everyone. And that's what we've done from the beginning.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure whether it's a boom or not. I think we'll see some countries increase their defense budget a little bit. We'll see others. I mentioned Poland increase it drastically, in particular the countries that are most exposed to the eastern flank, to the NATO eastern flank, are more likely to increase their defense spending. It's already happening. It's happening in Scandinavia as well. Other parts in Europe may or may not increase it as much. I think we'll have to see. I'm not sure I would call it a boom. I think it's an increase that will go into fixing a lot of things that are broken at the moment. And then some of that increase will go into new equipment spent as well, but only some of it. And of that, there'll be a proportion that will need to go urgently to what's called new defense technology. But that will only be a part.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. I mean, it's clear what he talked about. It's clear that he's made certain statements, but we'll see. We'll see what's going to happen.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I mean, it's been clear for many years now that we cannot rely on partners to secure and protect Europe, at least not over a long period of time. I think right now that's still there, but I think over time there just won't be, I think the capability even of partners and as it looks also not the willingness to do so. And quite frankly, I think as a continent as Europe, which is still rich, we should have that kind of pride. We should want to protect ourselves. We should not need to rely on others. We should be equals in a partnership. And that's what our partners want as well. And so it's natural, I think, that we need to go there anyway. We've just been so used to a different kind of situation that we just need to unlearn it now and think about security ourselves.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we've already been on that trajectory, I think, starting from 2016, where obviously similar arguments were being made. And with the Ukraine conflict defense spending has gone up, sometimes part of the general budget, sometimes as part of separate budgets, like in Germany, the 100 billion. So that's already happening. I think the need for European sovereignty has clearly become even more important. So I think we're just going to go further down on that vector. It might just be that we're going to have to go faster.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think most governments are actually committing to an increase over time. So we are at, I think, roughly probably 2% right now on average in NATO. That's quite low historically. It's been through the court world. It's been three to six percent. But if you look at Poland, Poland has gone from, I think, 2.1% or so to 4.6%, 4.7% within just a few years. So it's clearly possible whether every country is going to act at that speed remains to be seen. I think there are budget pressures everywhere. We understand them. And you have to convince a lot of people to actually re-channel so much money towards defense. It's not easy. I get that. But I think it's going to happen.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question is whether we are prepared again to think it through and commit to the next steps, which are an increase in defense spending, even if it is expensive, even if that means making sacrifices elsewhere. Because the sacrifice that otherwise we'd have to make is potentially so large, it's the right thing to do. That I'm not sure is happening at the moment.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we probably intellectually understood it, but we didn't really want to think through the consequences. Because the consequences were that we needed to start thinking about defense again, about conflict, all the suffering that comes with it, and we didn't want to think about it. We thought it might go away. And actually that happened for many years afterwards as well. And even to some extent now. And I understand it. I understand it emotionally as well. But I think it's intellectually lazy to not take this next step and think about what actually is required to protect our democracies.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We feel like it's sadly it is rational to be pessimistic at the moment. And it feels like this hasn't quite fully sunk in across our democratic societies.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the watershed moment was the annexation of Crimea in 2014 by Putin, and as importantly, the reaction or lack of reaction by European and Western governments in general. And we obviously acknowledged it and took note, but we didn't really understand the threat. And the danger, even back then that that created was that you essentially allowed someone with territorial ambitions to do more. And it felt like the clock was ticking until that was going to happen. And so when we started Helsing in March 2021, which now feels like a very different time, we actually put in one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China. So we got the Russia-Ukraine invasion right. What we got wrong was the timing because we thought it was going to happen in 2025. But in the event it happened 11 months after we put that slide together. Ever since then, we”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure about that. It does make it easier. I would say Helsing is a company that you can only co found. You need to have multiple founders.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Daniel came into the seat round. He was an investor in our seed round, the eight and a half million. And within two or three months, I think he developed so much conviction that he asked, I would like to lead you Sirius A, how much money do you need? And I said, ideally, 100 million euros. And he gave us the money through primateria who've been amazing to work with. It allowed us to do the speed thing that I just mentioned. But a couple of other things as well. It allowed us to really focus on top talent very early on. And the second thing that allowed us to do is to not go for innovation, projects in defense, for incubators and little grants here and there. But because we were quite well funded, we could go for programs of record. So the official large programs, which were hard to get and very risky, but we were well funded enough that we could just take the risk. And that worked out very well.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think you need to make a commitment early on that it is usually a transitionary, a temporary period. We wanted to do it for the first six to 12 months. So with recruitment, for example, we used a great third party, and then eventually we moved into in-house, which means...”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the pipeline of good people coming in, in order to be able to manage other people out, and so that you end up with a pool of people that are amazing. And so we wanted to shortcut that and found a third party that I wouldn't say overstaffed, but staffed very well so that we could get people in. Did a whole bunch of other things just to be fast, knowing that eventually we needed to settle at a different kind of level and not be inefficient, but be efficient and effective at the same time.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very great. And we, as the founders, like felt very early on that speed was one of the most important things. When we started, I mean, a couple of things. When we started, we wanted to be fast because we needed to be fast. We had to catch up. I mean, it felt already we started the company in 2021 that something was brewing, the geopolitical kind of tectonic plates were shifting. And we felt that we had no time to lose. The reason we raised quite a bit of money from the beginning was because we wanted to make sure that we could be fast. Speed became one of the main things for us. So everyone's aware of blitz scaling, the book. But you can summarize it quite quickly. There are sometimes situations when capital is available where it's okay to be inefficient so that you can be effective basically and very fast. And we embrace that from the beginning. We try to get recruitment up and running really quickly, which was crucial for performance culture. You need to basically always have pressure.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen actually quite a lot of people turn around, including at my previous company as well on the performance management plan. So it's not a foregone conclusion.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One cohort, so one quarter of the leaders together, and they go through all the performance ratings that they gave their people and their teams. And then the leadership team listens to it and gives feedback, not necessarily on the person, but actually to the way they rate the performance and help them calibrate it against what good looks like at Helsing, either because they've been too harsh or vice versa because they've been too lenient. And we do this religiously. It creates a culture of I think a well-calibrated performance system. And you need that because otherwise you end up with a lot of unfairness and also with not enough scrutiny, to be honest.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is something I noticed when I was mainly angel investing in startups is that eventually you get a certain number of people who are not a good fit for the company and they clog up the system. They make everything harder. They create pockets of unhappiness because they feel maybe neglected or not understood or they don't fit into the culture. And you kind of tolerate it quite often as the founder and you tolerate it up to a point where you think this doesn't feel like my company anymore. Like what happened? That happened to me at natural motion, by the way, at some point. And it's really painful for a founder. But the reality is that if you want to counteract that, you have to make performance management one of the main things that you do from the beginning. You have to commit to it early on. And that means that you have to do the performance management, but probably as importantly, you have to also do what we call performance management calibration with all the leaders. So what we do at Helsing is that every quarter we get”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't do any one-on-one work for people. I think that they're used to them, that have structured them properly, and that work with people who need guidance in their development. The people I work with are usually senior and don't need that much guidance. If I need a one-to-one with them every week, I think something's probably going wrong. I also think that there is a tendency for one-on-ones to clog up the calendar. We have a lot of them. You tend to repeat a lot of things. I used to do them religiously, by the way. I just stopped doing them. It hasn't had a negative impact.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think you need to want performance management is exhausting. You have to have difficult conversations with people. Sometimes they work out and they become better. Sometimes you decide to part ways. First of all, you have to have a mindset that this is necessary for a company.”
2024-12-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source