YouSaid · the spoken record

Torsten Reil

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2024-12-11
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2024-12-11
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  1. “First of all, we don't have a large number of small teams. We have, I would say, a handful that work on particular projects. And then sometimes you rally around something and it can become a little bit bigger. That's happened over the last few months as we were working on particular projects. But what we try to do is identify areas that we know needs to exist. We put a small team on it. We try to allow people to self-select as well, obviously, so that you have a team that communicates well, that is highly performant, and then they work on the task. And they may actually move off it eventually and another team takes over. But that's worked really well for us.”

    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

  2. “This is about talent density. We do a founder off site every three months, and we make kind of decisions about how we want to run the company. And one of the decisions that we made was that we really do everything to go for talent density. And that means really taking hiring seriously, but also taking performance management seriously and making sure that only people that are housing people are at housing. And that means very often that we try to reduce the number of people overall. We found that the most performant teams are really small in the company. company. You can achieve a lot, particularly around software with three to four exceptional people. And so we'd rather have a team of four exceptional people than eight good people. It makes everything easier. It's also cheaper, by the way, even though you pay above market rate. It's cheaper to do it that way.”

    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

  3. “No, and I find them quite often two staged, and people, I always think people can tell when a question is staged. And so they're not themselves. It's easier for me to just go with the flow and kind of see where it goes.”

    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

  4. “It's interesting. I never ask questions in interviews like that. I don't have a set of questions, I just try to get into the flow.”

    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

  5. “I think it's just a feeling. The thing I always look forward is effortlessness, you know, not trying too hard, just being so kind of on top of the detail of everything that kind of the effortlessness shines through. That's the main thing I look for.”

    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

  6. “Actually, I think there are a lot of exceptional people. 350 people isn't that many. It is possible that at 3.5,000 and maybe at 10,000, you start to have to make compromises. But I'm not sure how large a company has to grow in terms of headcount. In our experience, the top performers do the work of many people. They give the company a”

    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

  7. “From the very beginning. And it transformed, I think, the company. I mean, Helsing is now a company that isn't even that large, but we try to just hire people that are exceptional and we do everything we can to get those people into the company. We hustle like crazy, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's through network. I mean, we won't give up until we get the person that we want.”

    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

  8. “I think one of the things that I didn't quite appreciate was how important hiring is. And I know everyone says that team is the most important thing and hiring should be your priority. But to really do it, to really do everything you can to get the very best people requires a different mindset and actually requires a lot of time in your calendar as well. With natural motion, we had a lot of great people, but we also eventually got, I think, into a rhythm of maybe hiring people that were just there to add headcount, to get certain things done, to accelerate the project. And the reality was that almost never happened. In fact, what happened was that if you added more people, complexity went up. The company slowed down. It became much harder to manage. We had to fix it a couple of times with quite large changes, including rifts just to get the company to work again. And when we started Helsing, we made a commitment from the beginning that that wouldn't happen to us and that we would focus on hiring and really getting the really exceptional talent.”

    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

  9. “Focus, focus. We did focus, but only up to a point at one point we said, this isn't working the way we want it to, so let's pivot to actually making games ourselves. And we were very naive about how easy it was going to be. We watched Rockstar work and we were big fans of Rockstar games. And we thought, well, we should give it a go as well and ended up making games for iPhone, which worked out very well. We got a lot of support from Apple, ended up creating CSR racing, which was one of the largest iPhone games at the time. And at that point, the company did take off. And this kind of approach to risk taking and going all in stayed with me and I think stayed with Helsing now. We are big believers of focus. I'm just doing very few things. And when things don't work, we try to adapt very quickly.”

    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

  10. “It was a long journey. Natural Motion started as a spin out of university, out of Oxford. And we were trying to create physically simulated creatures controlled by neural networks, which was a crazy idea at the time. This was the time, I think, of the Pentium processor or something. It's hard to do computationally, but it worked quite well. And we ended up using it and licensing it for visual effects and big Hollywood movies like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man. Then for big video games like GTA4, GTA 5. That worked quite well, but it only worked, I would say, okay in terms of revenues, you know, as a founder, you want to get to a hockey stick movement eventually. And that wasn't the case with the technology business. It was growing, but it was growing reasonably slowly. And I think one of the things that we did do well was that we recognized that growth wasn't as strong as we wanted to. And we took a big risk and pivoted the company to doing games ourselves. So, you know, people say focus.”

    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

  11. “When we started Helsing in march twenty twenty one, we actually put 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. There is a big wave coming towards us. It is autonomy and software in defense. And it's unstoppable. The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector. 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.”

    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