Building AI That Sells: Scaling Smarter with Luminance CEO Eleanor Lightbody
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One of the pieces of advice that I got given from one of my mentors was you're going to join a company and within the first few weeks, you're probably going to want to change so much. Get a piece of paper, write everything down that you want to change and put it in a cupboard and don't look at it for four weeks. Don't change anything for four weeks and then revisit it and you'll start to understand why some of the things you might not need to change or why they are a certain way. I didn't listen to that very well.

Welcome to Founded and Funded. I'm Madrona partner, Chris Picardo. And today I'm thrilled to be joined by Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance. Eleanor's journey is an incredible one from her early days as an account manager at cybersecurity pioneer, Darktrace, to now leading one of the most exciting companies at the forefront of AI driven legal technology.

In this episode, we dive into what it was like for Eleanor to step into the CEO role at Luminance after two prior CEOs and with the founding team still involved, and how she successfully navigated that dynamic to fundamentally change the company's growth trajectory. We'll explore how bringing in a commercially focused leader can unlock new phases of growth, what it really takes to build a successful go-to-market motion for an AI product, and how to align technical and commercial teams to scale effectively.

Plus, Eleanor shares candid lessons about the challenges of scaling an AI startup and the cultural moves that have made a real difference at Luminance. This is a must listen for anyone building an AI, scaling a company across markets, or thinking about the leadership transitions that drive major growth. Eleanor, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, thanks for having me. Of course. So to kick things off, I think it would be great to just talk a little bit about your career journey. So how do you go from a cybersecurity account manager at Darktrace to the CEO of Luminance? Yeah, I think to understand that almost it's probably worth going way back. And I was reflecting on this the other day and I grew up in a household where, so my mother is an entrepreneur. She started quite a small, she was part of quite a small business

Business that has grown massively. And I saw that growing when I was growing up. And my father's a lawyer. And so reflecting on it, looking back, I'm like, oh, matching, kind of having a mirroring entrepreneurship and working in the legal space. It feels like a given now.

But I started at Darktrace when I was fresh out of a postgrad and I chose Darktrace for a few reasons. The first one was that it had some kind of seasoned investors and it felt like they had built and grown quite established companies before. I was going to be one of a handful of people in the London office and it felt like it was an opportunity to work for a company that had

had the potential to scale very fast because what they were offering was appropriate to every single company in the world.

And I'm pretty glad that I did. I had a few options on the table, but I'm very glad that I did because I joined when the company was super small, probably 50 of us globally, if that actually. And I left just before the IPO. And recently the company was bought by Thomas Barber for over 5 billion. And so there I set up the African operations. I was the first one on the ground to

to open up that market. And then I went on to run a global division that looked at securing national critical infrastructure.

And the investors of Darktrace were so much of those at Luminance. So I got a phone call over five years ago and it was like, hey, our portfolio company is doing something really interesting. Would you like to join them? And I thought, what do you mean? No, join them. I'm like meeting the company. I had to kind of clarify that with them. And I'd actually known the founders at Luminance from afar for a while. And after speaking to them, I wasn't thinking about leaving Darktrace, but actually I

It was a very quick yes and easy yes, because the opportunity that Luminance had was absolutely massive. And so I thought you'd be crazy not to say yes to this. Yeah, no, it's so interesting. It's got to be a great phone call to get to be like, hey, do you want to go do this really fun thing at another exciting company?

But I think one quick question I wanted to ask that you mentioned, which I'm just curious about, is you said, hey, when you joined Dark Trace, it just felt like it was ready to grow really fast. What does a company feel like when it's ready to grow really fast? I know that sometimes you just get that feeling, sometimes you don't. But what resonates to you when you were like, okay, this company is just ready to go? 100%. And that's actually exactly why I joined Luminance, because I was like, they've got these foundations and they have this ability to scale.

So I think it's a combination of things. One, it's like, how big of a problem are they addressing? Are they thinking about the problem in a different way? This is kind of when I'm talking to founders, is there like deep expertise in the technical team? And do they have like a real sense of like what they're trying to deliver? So those are the key elements that I was always looking at. But fundamentally, like I think ideas change, they permeate, um,

I think any successful company experiments a lot. And so it's not necessarily about like the product today, but it's about the team today and like the way that they think about things. And then alongside that, it's like, do they have that? It's like that energy, you know, when you walk into a room and you're like, these people want to build and they want, like they are,

competitive and I feel like that there was no plan B but success and those are all the things that both Dart Trace and Lumens kind of shared yeah it's sort of like that drive that you were going to build this product because you want to win and you want to see it out in the world and fulfilling your vision and that is what's motivating you as being part of the company

100% nothing's going to stop me. Yeah, it's probably a great I mean, obviously, you've had that feeling twice, and both stops have been quite successful. So it must be a great feeling to have. And when we talk about luminance, you know, you've done something obviously a little bit different than a lot of people's journeys, which is step into the CEO job. And so, you know, maybe talk a little bit about what that experience was like, you know, the founders are still there. There have been a couple other CEOs. And so how did you think about that? How did you navigate the dynamic? What was that broader experience like?

Yeah, so when I first joined, I think it was a combination of a tiny bit of naivety, which I think is actually really good. As we grow up in businesses and get more and more experiences, I think one of the key things is to try and keep a bit of naivety because that can help you kind of take on these hugely daunting tasks that in time we slightly get a bit wary of. I was excited and I was daunted and I look back on it and it's actually quite funny. So

One of the pieces of advice that I got given from one of my mentors was, A, it's going to be really hard. I didn't think I actually knew how hard it was going to be, but I was like, okay, cool. And the second one was, look, you're going to join a company and within the first few weeks, you're probably going to want to change so much.

Get a piece of paper, write everything down that you want to change and put it in a cupboard and don't look at it for four weeks. Don't change anything for four weeks and then revisit it and you'll start to understand why some of the things you might not need to change or why they are a certain way.

I didn't listen to that very well. And I think for a good reason. And, you know, I think a fan is bringing you in, regardless of like the circumstances that are bringing you in. The most important thing to kind of set the scene is to have like very frank conversations up front. To like say, this is what I can bring. These are the things I can bring. And like, you know, for me, when I joined Luminance, we can talk about this later, but there was

So much that could be done to mold the commercial teams and to change the way that the company was thinking about how to go to market. It felt like I could sit with the founders and be like, this is what you guys are doing. This is what you should be doing. Let's do it today. And they were like, oh, wow. You know, like, OK, like having a few metrics to show like early signs of success.

can help you bring like the founders on that journey with you and I think from the outset like my piece of advice anyone going in is like know where your strengths are don't try and boil the ocean from day one and so like there are stuff on that list that actually like I wrote down I haven't changed and know where your founder's strengths are and for the first few months figure that out be very

upfront in your conversations, be very transparent, and then you'll start to build a lot of bridges. It seems like, you know, when you bring in a new CEO, obviously, one of the reasons you might do it is to is because you want a change agent, but you have to be sort of nuanced and thoughtful about how you want to go about sort of getting buy in and, you know, team wide, you know, enthusiasm about the change that you're bringing.

Yeah, exactly. Being thoughtful and mindful are really, really key things. Yeah. One thing I hear a lot from CEOs, people who've been CEOs, people who've worked with a lot of CEOs is it's kind of a job.

It's like there's no job description right around being the CEO. And it's not like, oh, here's this great training path to becoming a CEO, because it's a very different type of role than anything else in the company. Is that your experience as you sort of transitioned into the seat that maybe your expectations around sort of like what a CEO does or what people externally think a CEO does is kind of different than what they actually do?

I think everyone thinks that a CEO does something different. So I think if you were to take a general kind of survey of the market, I'm not sure that you would get census at all. So I don't think I knew what I was getting myself into. And I mean that in a very positive way. And I think a lot of CEOs, like the rate that we're growing, a lot of CEOs roles like change and they morph and they

I used to say like every month felt slightly different, but the rate of innovation and the speed of scale each week. And the key thing I think for successful CEOs are a few things. One is like being able to understand the vision, being able to understand like the 10,000 foot view, but also like to be able to parachute in and understand the problems and think about things from a first principle basis to then kind of help fix them.

The second thing and the most important, well, I, I just in my own opinion, very biased, but like, I think it's focus. I think as a CEO, you can be pulled in so many different directions. Like the teams, like all the teams kind of can benefit from having you in the conversations, but like, what are the most important things that day, that week, that month, that year, the next few years. And to try and be very regimented in that. I also think like, you know, part of my role is like being a bit of a,

the hype person for the business, you know, like going in every day, leading by example. But there are other CEOs who might not necessarily agree with that. So it really depends on the company, what's required at that given time and adapting to it. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's so interesting being able to figure out, right, like what the company needs at any given time is sort of one of the key things you have to be able to do. And, you know, I think it's probably a good time also to talk about a little bit about that in practice at Luminance, right? Because you stepped in and were able to really massively change the growth trajectory of the company. So I'm both very curious about how you did that. But also, I think it's a good time to, you know, spend 30 seconds on kind of Luminance and, you know, what it is and was and why you were so excited about then being able to

really put the company on such an incredible growth trajectory? Look, if you think about it, as we sit here right now, there will be teams in every corner of this world who will be receiving legal contracts. They'll be reviewing them. They'll be processing them and they'll be deciding what to do with them. And as that stands, it's very time consuming. It's expensive. It's prone to human error and it is costly. And so what we do at Luminance is that we automate that process end to end.

So our customers are pretty much any company of any size, whether that's someone like AMD or DHL or Hitachi, like all different industries who are using us for every single interaction that they have with their legal contract. And actually, when I joined the company,

Four years ago, Luminance was only selling to law firms and they had done a really good job. They'd sold over like a quarter of the top 100 law firms. But when I came in, I was like, this platform is so powerful and actually...

the addressable market is so much bigger than just law firms. And so one of the things that we did very quickly was we used the underlying kind of AI models and technology, and we built a whole new workflow and platform to be much more directed at in-house legal teams. And that was kind of one of the bets that really paid off because we saw that sales cycles were much faster, the time to value was much faster, and it was that, you know, that product in itself has grown its ARR 6X over the last two years.

And again, like going back to what I did very quickly when I joined Luminance was I've got a sales background. So I came in and I asked the team's,

how many first meetings have you got? How many POVs? Like we do free trials. How many free trials are you running? How many cold calls are you making? All this stuff. And there was a bit of a disconnect of what was expected from the sales teams versus like what sales teams should be delivering. And historically, you know, there had been rightly or wrongly. So the sales teams have been like ex-lawyers. And I was like, wait a second. Like we need a lot of like lawyers in the company to help build the product, help like understand.

understand the use cases, help be subject matter experts. But actually, the one area that we do not need lawyers is in selling, because selling is slightly different. And, you know, give me a graduate who's 21, and I will train them how to sell as long as they understand what we're doing. And so we changed the whole hiring process, the whole structure. We also very quickly promoted

two very young actually at the time account executives into more leadership positions into mental positions and I remember some people saying oh like they're very young they don't necessarily have enough experience and I was like give me someone who's young and hungry and I will help train them into what they need to be and they've become two of the most successful people in the business so that was one of the moves so both changing the product what kind of

adapting the product. It wasn't really changing it. It was kind of adapting it and totally changing our go-to-market for two areas that were really important to do first. I feel like you just sort of gave a very condensed masterclass, right? In both positioning your product and then figuring out how to sell it. And one of the things we were joking about, you know, in our prep call, I guess a couple of weeks ago now was, you know, people love to say, if you've got a great product and AI, it's just going to sell itself.

And, you know, I think we were both laughing because that is definitely not true. And certainly some companies have been able to figure that out. But I think for the most part, you have to map a great go-to-market strategy with a great product strategy, right? And those two sort of work together. Yeah, look, I totally agree. By the way, any company that has been able to do that, hats off to you. Kudos to you. High fives to you. I want to talk to you. Great. Amazing. But like that as a founder or as a CEO is not what necessarily you should be solving for. If that comes...

organically, brilliant, amazing. But actually, there's still some key things that might not necessarily last till the end of time. And so understanding your product and understanding distribution, of course, you've got to have innovation at the heart of it. You've got to have a really solid understanding of the problems that you're trying to address and how technology can help. But if you don't know how to go to market to it, and you don't know how to take customer feedback and

The key thing is, is that like taking the right, sorry if any of our customers are listening to you, love you all, but taking the right customer feedback and prioritizing it, again, is I think so important when you're scaling a business. Yeah, no, that's such an interesting point that you want a lot of customer feedback, but you also need to prioritize sort of the customer feedback around what moves the needle and what is really useful and interesting information, but maybe not as high on your priority list. Exactly. I think customer feedback and,

Everyone always talks about customer feedback and it's important that customer feedback is crucial. Don't get me wrong. And especially like depending on where you are in your product development cycle. So like, and as a company, if you're early on as a company, then I think we were very lucky that two very big companies early on were like, we'll become design partners with you. And so we said yes to them, but actually no to some others because we felt that the use cases that they were trying to address with our technology and what they were trying to build with our technology was,

could relate to companies around the world of all different sizes. So we're like, yeah, we're going to go with you guys. And I think so finding some early design partners can be super useful. And then obviously as you get more and more customers, the key is two things. The first one is prioritizing customer feedback. You should never, I have friends in other areas and other businesses who as time goes on, they remove themselves from the customer. And I think that

For us, it's so important to be even more ingrained with the customer because you get so much valuable information there. But again, like having a system where the feedback loops really fast and you can see if the same feedback is coming across from all of your customers. Those are the ones that you need to really focus on versus a customer saying, can I put my logo on it or can it be yellow rather than blue? And also knowing something that, again, another mentor of mine told me early on, and I didn't really get this because in sales, you're like, yeah, yeah, we can do this. Right. Yeah.

But when you're running a business, the power of no when you're talking to customers and saying, no, we're not going to do this. And there are some reasons why we're not going to do this. And most often than not, a customer's like, okay, cool, that's fine. It was just an idea. And actually, if you over-promise,

then that's when you find yourself in a bit of a kind of a rat race, like a hamster wheel of trying to always catch up. And that's not necessarily the place that you want to be in. And then you're customizing for every customer. And then you're just, then it's a problem, right? Yeah. And then the amount of like when you're upgrading, making sure the configuration is not somewhere that you necessarily want to be. And then the second thing is around, so we have like a team that focuses on customer feedback and product and

But we also then have like our blue sky thinking team because sometimes customers can identify lots of things that they want for you to kind of help them with. They might not necessarily see around the corner. They might not see like the potholes. And so our team,

We've got a team that's very much focused on what can't we do today that we might be able to do in six months' time, in a year's time. The capabilities of these models are getting better and better and better. That's no secret to anyone. They're getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So how are we building for the future? And I, metaphorically, they're like carved out into a separate room because I don't want them to get too distracted by the noise of the daily operations. And I just want them always to be thinking about innovative solutions

cool different use cases. Yeah, I was so curious to talk a little bit more about this concept that, you know, you have around, I think you call your sort of innovation team, the JetPilot team, and then you've got the core team. I know a lot of founders, right,

and CEOs are always trying to think about how do I balance innovation versus core product delivery and what are the ways to do it? And you've been successful at doing that. And how do you think about managing that on a day-to-day basis and having sort of those two different groups working in concert with each other? It's always a bit of a balancing act. But for us, one of the pillars that our whole company is based off of is innovation and speed.

I think that to be competitive in this market, you have to go very, very fast. And you can only do that if you've got a team that really understands the impact of what it means to build slowly, actually. And there are areas that you need to build slowly. Don't get me wrong, but there are areas

new kind of value adds, features, use cases, modules that you can, you just want to get out there. It's a classic like 80-20, we'll get it out there and see what the feedback is, choose a few customers to go live with and then you can iterate it on fly. And the way that we've got our teams to buy into this is that like they're the ones talking to the customers, they're the ones who are sitting, the developers will build something, they'll sit in and they'll see the impact and

And historically they were kind of siloed away and they're like, oh, well, why do we need to build fast? Like what, like, why does this matter? Let's make sure that we're getting it totally right before we push it out. And my argument always to them, and they only kind of started believing this when they saw it was you don't know what's going to really work. You actually have no idea. Like, you know, you, we might think, you know, in an isolated, in an isolation that something is going to land really nicely, but more often than not, sometimes the things that we don't, that we don't know are going to land are the ones that

people really, really like. So just get it out there. And kind of like the terrible analogy was like throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. And then like throw as much mud and see what sticks. And then you can iterate really quickly on that. And is that, are you able to earn your ability to do that because you're so close to your customers and you're able to kind of gain that trust? Because, you know, I think you said something interesting, which is, I mean, you said many interesting things, obviously, but the ageing

80-20 is okay, right? To launch some of these things and be iterative and just get new, you know, product in front of customers quickly. Did you earn your way into doing that? Is that something you did and then customers said, hey, this is great, right? Keep it coming. What's the nuance there? Because I think there's a lot of people who are like, hey, if I do launch something and it's

it is terrible then have i just blown up all of my trust or you know do people now think it's not right a great product and i think clearly you're saying like yeah you might have a couple of those things that just don't land but if you launch and you put stuff in front of customers that's the cycle to get the best product out there yeah it's it's choosing the right customers you don't do this like across all of your customer base you say right here you know x customer amd is a great example they came to us and they were like we love your ai for legal negotiation but

At the moment, I still have to review clause by clause. The AI tells me whether I should agree to it or not. It gives me language that I can use instead. But I still, like the human, have to go through and say, yes, I agree or no, I don't agree. They were like, it would be amazing if I could just click a button and it might rewrote the whole contract for me.

And we're like, okay, let's do that. And you know, the first few times that we showed it to them, it didn't get it right. And we could have easily lost their trust, but actually it's all about the framing and the positioning, which is like, if you're going to these development partners and saying, this is a fully baked solution, then like if it doesn't work or if it doesn't quite hit the mark, then of course you're going to lose trust very quickly. But it's like, no, this is something that we're working with you on. And we're going to iterate. This is the first future version of it. Let's, you know,

let's continue this dialogue then if you pick the right partners they're going to love being able to roll up their sleeves and help you with that yeah so you have like a set of customers that are basically perpetual design partners that are happy to work on you work with you on iteration knowing that you know some of it is going to be experimental and you guys will co-work on it together to land the final version of the product yeah i mean the great thing is is that most of the stuff we can do we eat our own

dog food. So we test it out ourselves first as a legal team and we think, yeah, this is going to have legs on it. And then we go to our kind of a few select customers. There were sometimes it doesn't even pass like getting past our legal team and we're like, this is a cool idea, but actually it's never going to work in reality. And so yeah, that's how we come to it. It's funny because I think obviously you're so focused on go to market, but you have tons of product insight on how to kind of map this

the two pieces of go-to-market and the product roadmap together. I think that's a hard thing sometimes, right? For purely technical or purely product-focused founders and executive teams to be able to see how those two pieces work very closely together. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it goes back to the earlier point, which is like, I think I would bought in very much for distribution and go-to-market, but like now I spend much less time thinking about that. We've got a really good repeatable machine and I kind of dig

like dip in and out of it. But now my role is very much with product and thinking about, okay, what are the next use cases? How can we, and I absolutely love that. And I was talking to actually one of the founders the other day and I was like, I'm not an AI expert, you know, and I always come up with these ideas. And he was like, your ideas, like really at a high level are great ideas. And like, and so that, you know, building that respect and that trust has been so great and kind of why we've seen so much success.

Yeah, I wanted to actually circle back to that question, which is how you think about working with technical founders, because I'd imagine, right, you still might not consider yourself to be ultra deeply technical, even though you clearly are pretty technical now on a lot of this. And I think Snowflake is the example people often use about very technical founders and very commercially minded CEOs. But it seems like it's a great working relationship that you have. And are there ways that you thought about that or culturally think about that to make it so effective? Yeah, look, I don't

I don't think either Adam or Graham who are founders will mind me saying this, the beginning part that was definitely, we had to work through a few things. I,

didn't know what I didn't know and they didn't know what they didn't know. But I think the key thing is, again, I've said this, but it's understanding where your lane is when you start off. And you're in a room, all of you, because you are super strong at something, you would hope. And so knowing what that is and then having, we always talk about leaving egos at the door. When we get together as a management team, we're pretty blunt with each other. We give content

constant feedback you know and no one's off the hook so like I get bombarded and you know the founders get bombarded and like when you when I first started I was a bit like oh wow and then you're like no this is exactly what like success looks like is that like we're constantly holding ourselves to a higher standard and we have like you know really productive sometimes heated conversations most I'm not but like and that's so so key so I think it's starting where you know your strengths are

showing a bit of success showing that you kind of appreciate each other's art and then in time you know you would hope that so the other day I was like reminiscing and um when I came in like the the

Founders didn't really know what ARR was. They weren't plugged into the monthly sales numbers and they didn't quite understand that whole world. And now the first people to text me on a monthly management call at the end of the month would be the founders. How are our numbers this month? How are the sales? What are the grades? Where did we win? And I'll be the ones asking them about new AI models. And I've got a bit of a competition where I'll be like, whenever there's a new AI model that comes out, I'll text them and be like,

am I the first one to know about this? And they're like, no, you're still not the first one. But there's this appreciation now of each other's worlds. And I love that. Yeah, it's so, so many of the things you've been saying have come back to, you know, mutually aligning the culture, right, around a company that's going in the same direction, culturally doing things the same way and has the guardrails up around what the culture is like. And, you know, it almost goes back to the same, the initial thing we were talking about around, you know,

Feeling that energy and alignment at a company that is just, hey, we are scaling, we are going, this is awesome. And it does seem like

like a root cause sort of under or root explanation under a lot of these topics is the cultural alignment that you've been able to drive and alongside obviously the founders and the team to set up kind of this version of Luminance where it is. It's always it's really fun for me to listen to, you know, stories like that, especially because I think it's unique to do it as the non-founder.

Right. And come in and say, hey, you know, maybe at this point you're effectively a quasi founder or a true founder of this version of Luminance. But it's very unique to do it that way. And at that time versus, hey, I'm going to try to start this from the beginning because I started the company from scratch.

It comes with a lot of challenges, but it also comes with so much potential. You know, the fact that you can join and you can change things and you can hopefully clearly see what needs to be improved and also what has happened that's been amazing and kind of remind people of the amazing things that they've done. Sometimes they get like lost in that and then slightly change things up to make sure you guys, you're on the right path to the next stage of growth. I love it.

No, you can tell it's I mean, it's so it's just fun talking about it. Obviously, you know, we've talked a little bit about it. But I want to ask you, is there anything that's been particularly hard? I'm sure there's lots of things. But is there anything that surprised you? We were like, wow, that is hard. Like, we've got to go figure out how to solve that that maybe wasn't on your list of things you thought were going to be hard as you scale the company.

I mean, it's all hard. But I don't know. Like if anyone tells you it's not great, but I'm very honest. But like it's so rewarding and so fun. And so like, as I said, like absolutely, like you're so immersed in it.

I think one piece of advice I would give to anyone who is thinking about stepping into this role would be, there's no such thing as work-life balance. Leave that at the door. If you think that you're going to join a company and you want to scale in, you want to be successful, it's not just you that's going to be immersed in it. It's your spouse or partner or your friends, your family. You are all in it. Whether they like it or not, you are all in it together. And that, I think, is important.

What have I found hard? You know what that I found hard? And maybe this is a bit controversial for a podcast, but I'll be very open, which is you really hope that the team that you have with you will scale with you and that they will learn and they will grow. Sometimes some people don't. And you have to kind of, as you go through that journey, manage that. And that I think is probably one of the hardest things that I have found in the past. So that was quite like a wide awakening. I don't think you...

know what it's going to feel like until you have to go through that. And then I think what is always interesting is like making sure that you're focused, you know, because you can, you can spend a week feeling like you're super productive and so busy, but actually have you really moved the needle? Have you been focused on the things that are the most important part? And the third thing that I found, I want to say hard, but like it was a

I just hadn't expected it, was we hear so much and you read so much about how hard it is or like how exciting it is and how like the teams are so important to innovation. But actually what you don't hear or I had heard less about was like how important having a story is, how important having a narrative is. And not just for like you as a company and so that everyone's aligned to it, but also like for the outside world. I think, you know, in the US marketing industry,

It is amazing. And I don't think I had appreciated like the power of it until I joined Luminance. Yeah, that's the sometimes the English major part of my brain comes out when and in another part of my life, I work with a bunch of scientists here at Madrona. And I think one of the things we talk about a lot is telling your story in simple language that people can understand.

And it doesn't matter what you do, or even if you're talking to people who are extraordinarily deep experts in your field like that, the ability to do that and modulate how you can tell your story, I think really sets apart a lot of very, very successful companies and, you know, and founders and executives, right? From people who sometimes struggle with that. But I do want to thank you for making the point around the difficulty of

knowing that some people on your team won't scale. Because sometimes you hear people talk about that from time to time. But it is one of the conversations that certainly from our investor CEO relationship perspective, right? And from I'm sure with your board members, like that's a conversation you have more, right? Then I think people generally talk about and it's an important and hard thing for everybody involved. So I think that's a, it's, it's nice that you mentioned that, right? For the broader audience that it's, it's a normal part of scaling a company.

Exactly. And like most often a lot of people do like massively surprise you for the positive and people step up and people grow and, and,

The counter to that is I really believe in giving, you know, I took on luminance when I was 29 years old. And I mean, that's maybe really old for Silicon Valley, but, you know, globally quite young. And I think it's so powerful to give opportunities to talent that might not necessarily be quite ready for it or like the traditional experience for it. You see, we've seen some of our best employees rise up the ranks and be given, you know,

tasks and responsibilities that might be slightly at the time felt like maybe too much and they have not only just like risen to the challenge but they have absolutely accelerated in it and so I have to sometimes remind myself that it's like some of the best people that I've worked with are

Given opportunities young and to keep on doing that rather than to be like, oh, no, we need to make sure that, you know, they've got 20 years of experience. Yeah, no, that is it's also so important that you say that. I think it's I think about that from time to time sitting here in Seattle. We can all name some famous Amazon, Microsoft, you know, etc. Executives.

But almost all of them were given opportunities at those companies really young and, you know, were able to scale into those jobs, right? They didn't just emerge out of nowhere. And so I think you giving people those opportunities to be able to do that is, I'm sure, massively beneficial to the company, but also just amazing for the people. And it's such a great cultural piece. Also, I really think for you as a leader, like you get to watch people just like mature, grow and thrive.

believe more in themselves. And like that is, I think, one of the funnest part of my roles. It's just like seeing someone who is a 22 year old now, you know, 26 and just like so capable and then maybe even I thought that they would get going to be. And those people are like in your network forever. I mean, we've met, I've met so many CEOs that, you know,

You're like, wow, there are hundreds of people who have worked for you, been in your organization, been given opportunities that have then gone on to do incredible things. And a lot of them can point that path all the way back to those opportunities they got or, you know, being an, you know, being a luminance right at the right time to be able to get an opportunity. And I think that's just got to be an incredible feeling. Yeah. Well.

I have a couple of quick questions to end. This has been such a fascinating discussion. And I think there's so many other topics we could have talked about, including, you know, I think we probably could have spent an hour on the topic of design partners, which I just find to be endlessly fascinating. But I wanted to talk about just a couple of quick questions to end it. And the first one is, where are we in the hype cycle? Like, what's your take of AI? What's your take? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? You know, what's real? What's noise?

Depends on any given day that you're asking me, my answer might change. Look, I think that fundamentally...

There is so much that AI can do for good and there is so much impact. And I think we've only, we have only scratched the surface, but I think where we are is historically up until today, I think people have seen kind of two X, three X productivity gains, but actually to change behaviors, you need to see like 10 X productivity change to really. And I think we're about to start seeing that and that's going to be absolutely massive. So where we are in the hype cycle, I,

everyone's got a different opinion but like do I believe that we are only starting to see the potential and we're going to see more and more potential absolutely the conversation that I think has moved on hasn't it now it's like

Now people are like, okay, cool, this is really useful. This could have a huge amount of impact. And now people are like, okay, but what are the return on investments? Like, how am I driving adoption? Why am I actually using this? And those, I think, are the really interesting places to be. What's a belief you had a year ago or last week, I don't know, about AI that you think turned out to be totally wrong? I think it goes back to almost the point I just made, which is like, I always thought that if you could do something and save

50% of time, or if you could save X amount of costs. And if you had something that was like

gave your customer 2x productivity gains in some shape, way or form, that would be enough to drive adoption and it's going to be totally ingrained. I actually think to change people's, humans' habits, it always has to be much more than 2x. And so a few years ago, I was like, oh, wow, this is not just about being more efficient or being more productive. What is the real intrinsic value? Because if you don't have value,

then you might just be like a one hit wonder. Essentially, people like use you, but then get tired of you and move on to the next thing. If you look out into the future, you know, what has you the most excited or what do you think we should all broadly be really excited about? I think today the human is still in the driving seat with AI. So the humans kind of still like putting the inputs in. It's still like most often they're not checking the outputs. I think that's going to inverse. And I think that like

the AI is going to be massively in the driving seat and the human is just going to be there to like slightly tweak and leave us in to put some guardrails up. And I'm so excited for that. From a legalist point of view, AI negotiating against AI, I think we're going to live in a world where like most legal contracts are the first pass, second pass, third pass are done by AI either side. But also beyond legal, like,

drug discovery the impact that we can have on like personal medicine the impact that we can have on curing some of the diseases that we've been trying to cure for years like that is going to be and again we've only scratched the surface there but it's going to be so so positively beneficial for society as a whole yeah that's the other part of my world so i 100 agree with you eleanor this has been so fun and we could have talked so much more about so many of these topics but i really appreciate you joining us on the podcast thank you so much for having me