Meet the CEO & the birth of Silent Eight

James Booth Hello, everybody. Welcome to the very first episode of Silent Eight Talks. We are very much at the birth of this new and exciting podcast. But let me set the scene of what the podcast looks like. And we've got a really special guest for the first episode. So Silent Eight Talks is a podcast where I and Silent Eight want to unravel lots of different things. So we're going to be looking at the latest trends in financial crime, in anti-money laundering, counterterrorism and sanctions. But of course, bring in that really special narrative of AI and how AI helps us fight financial crime. Now, I'm going to be interviewing lots of different guests. So if anybody's interested in being a guest on the episode, please reach out, DM me on LinkedIn. But I'm going to be talking to experts. We'll be talking about real world case studies. We'll be looking at insights, especially how cutting edge technology transforms this fight against financial crime. So whether you're an AML professional, a compliance officer, you're curious, you're a leader. This podcast is about the intersection of that technology and financial crime. Now, not only are we going to sort of give you the knowledge to stay ahead of the game, but we're going to get to know some really respected industry professionals on a much more informal basis. So I am so excited to announce that for the first episode, we're joined by Martin, the founder and the CEO of SilentApe. Martin, thank you so much for joining us for the first episode.

Martin Markiewicz Oh, thank you for having me. And before you click record, we discussed some of the names that you invite, and they'll be joining you on this podcast. Oh man, I'm really curious about hearing what they have to say. And now I can't wait to listen to this podcast moving forward.

James Booth This is what I love about the podcast, Martin. We're already recording and we're adding our disclaimers, but this is what I like is the raw content of it. So this is super fun. Martin, do we need to give, do I need to give a viewer warning explicit in case either of us, well, mainly if you say a bad word or are we going to try and keep this clean?

Martin Markiewicz We'll try to keep it clean, but I view it as a normal conversation that we usually have when we just chat. Well, Martin, I've had the pleasure of sitting with you for

James Booth a beer and listening to your story. So I am going to say viewer discretion is advised and there may be some bad language, but in the spirit of good conversation, of course. So Martin, you're one of the original founders, you're the CEO. And obviously, you know, you're in, when I talk to people about you, and I say my mind explodes by the amount of information that's in there. You're very prominent, of course, in Poland, Singapore, United Kingdom, and you know, there's a lot of work going on in the United States with Sanitator at the moment. But I want to start with you, Martin. What's a story from your early life or career that people are not going to find on LinkedIn?

Martin Markiewicz Oh, wow. So I think on LinkedIn, you'll find the outline, maybe some details you won't find.

James Booth Yeah. We want the juicy stuff. How has Martin come to be? This globally revered tech expert now, and you've set up this amazing organization that's been running now for nearly 10 years. But

Martin Markiewicz what fueled that as a youngster? So for whatever reason, when I was in high school and even earlier, when I was reading some paper magazines about business, all those Forbes-like magazines when I lived in Warsaw in Poland, I was always impressed with these people that were on covers of those magazines every month. So some guy just built a huge empire with media. The other guy built some highway system in Poland. The other guy did something else. And I was thinking, these guys are doing massive, world-changing things, at least in this world that I was in, not maybe on a global scale. But these were those entrepreneurs from Poland that were changing Poland when I was young. And they were creating all these huge companies. They were, of course, making a lot of money when they were doing that. But you could see the impact of what they were doing all around you. And I was really curious, like, are those guys really smart? They have something that I don't have, some kind of like a huge IQ edge or something like this. Or are they just normal guys like I am? And I made an assumption early on that they're normal. And if I want to do stuff like this, I can. And even if I'm not coming from, I don't know, like a wealthy privilege or well-connected family, it's like I'm coming from like a normal middle-class family and no one in my family was ever an entrepreneur. Like even if I have this, like usually a lot of those stories start with like a normal background. So it's just about me starting up and just trying to do something. And probably the chances of succeeding are pretty low. But if you do it, you know, like enough times and you learn along the way, finally, you like something can work. So that was my assumption. So what many people might not know about you,

James Booth I mean, of course, there are some articles out there that talk about your background, but you had quite a lot of involvement in our plant world in Central Europe, didn't you? Oh, yeah. So this

Martin Markiewicz was my first like a serious business before Silent 8. So I've met Michael and Julia, we were working for, because I was studying math, I didn't want to, I had to study something. In Poland, universities still are for free. So you can just, you know, like, if you just pass some exams, you can go and study computer science, math, and you don't have to pay for your degree. So that's very different compared to other places in the world. And the level of education is, is, is really high, like a lot of, if you look at the top researchers right now in AI field, look at who's who started OpenAI, Wojtek Zaremba from Poland, who's a chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki from Poland, like a lot of those top guys came from those Polish schools. So the education system that's, that's free, it's pretty high quality. When I was at this stage of my life, I have this choice, like you go and study math or you go to military. So of course, I wanted to study math, like it sounds for math was always easy. So it sounded like something that's zero effort, while going to military sounds like running around and doing a lot, a lot of effort. So and, and being stuck, in my view, at least back in the time was stuck in life for a year or two. So for me, it's an obvious choice to go and study something. And since math, I found math, the easiest thing to study, I saw I started, but to make money, I was doing computer science, I was writing software, and just trying to find some people that will buy software from me that, you know, like that I will help them solve their problems with the software all right. But I always have this challenge that I found someone, and I made a deal for like a $5,000, $2,000, $3,000. I could never reach some kind of stage, you know, like a stage that I saw those guys building those multi-billion dollar empires are able to do. Like they're really solving big problems and doing something on massive scale. So I joined this company as an employee. Michael, who's, you know, our CTO, my co-founder was recruiting me back then. Like, so he was the head of software engineering there and he was recruiting me there as a software engineer when I was still studying math. So like I've met Michael and Julia back then. And we worked at this company and when we worked there, this company went through like a massive growth phase. So it went from almost nothing to we went through an IPO. We went to a company that was listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. So when we saw that, hey, like this stuff that I read about in all those magazines just basically happened on our watch. We were a part of this. We were contributing to this. We're doing all this stuff and we can do it ourselves. The first idea that I had was not to build software, not to create AI, not to utilize any of the math that I was studying. I knew so much about it that I thought it's the worst type of business that you can be ever involved in. You're going to all these banks, you're going to all those telcos, you're listening to their problems, you're going for months of procurement, months of legal, months of security, through all this stuff that takes so much time. That's, quite frankly, not too productive. But because those organizations are large, there's a lot of red tape. And that's just what it takes. And everything's so slow. And I was thinking, it's so hard to do a business like this. So my idea, thesis back in the day was that, and this was I don't know, like 15 years ago. Yeah, something like 15 years ago. So my thesis was that back at the time, Poland as a country just joined the European Union, started growing on the back of that. And we became this place where you can outsource a lot of work too. Like there's a lot of skilled professionals and you can have a lot of work that can be done by creating some offshore centers in Poland and doing the work with cheap and skilled labor. So you could do some arbitrage and just use Poland as a resource like this if you were a large enterprise, a large corporate. But my thinking was that in the long run, it's not going to be enough. That really in the future when we have all those automated factories, robots everywhere, software running things, what's going to be a differentiator will be a cost of energy. And Poland doesn't have a very good energy mix today. Had even worse energy mix like 20-15 years ago, it was basically 100% coal-fueled power generation. And this doesn't scale easy. It's not easy to set up a new coal power plant. It's an overuse system. For years, my assumption was that it's going to be harder and harder because of all the factors. And I just thought that if we start building power plants, some renewable type of power plants, we could become this next wave of energy tycoons with my funders and really change Poland. So what we did, we set up a company like this, we settled on building for hydropower plants. And the idea was that if you build a wind turbine or solar power plants, you have this problem that for a period of time, the wind blows and you generate electricity. But for another period of time, it does not. And you don't output any electricity at all. And same thing with sun. For half of the day, you have sun, for the other half, you don't. And when you have a factory, when you have a data center, when you have something that needs to consume a lot of electricity, you need this constant inflow of electricity coming in. And back in the day, before this whole electric car and huge battery production revolution, it was really hard to imagine how would you be able to really store this energy that you generate in peaks and release it in times that you really would need it. So and with hydropower plants, my idea was that it's ideal for this type of challenges because it just produces electricity 24/7 all year. So like the river flows through your power plant, like it doesn't matter if it's a day or night, doesn't matter if it wind blows or not, you just constantly output electricity and there's a lot of electric, like a hydropower plants in Europe, if you look at them, there's a lot of them that are older than a hundred years and they've been generating electricity for a hundred year plus with little to no maintenance. So for us, it was this idea that if we would be building those, we could build this, we could build this empire, you know, and be generating electricity for the industries of the future. So it was our first business, really.

James Booth This evolution of the story is going to be crazy to everybody, Martin, because we've moved from, I mean, I don't know if you heard me laugh, but when you said you had to choose military or maths, you chose maths. I've had money laundering or anti-money laundering my job title now, my 16 years, and I hate maths with an absolute passion. And I can't stand it. And I used to be an investigator and I was constantly analysing through Excel sheets, trying to literally stop terrorism and stop money laundering. So I might've picked military in that situation, but this had actually been on the front line. But so that's saying something, isn't it? I'd rather be shot at than do maths and I'm an anti-money laundering specialist. But this is, but this is,

Martin Markiewicz so I don't like like counting stuff and doing Excel formulas and this type of part of the math. I like the part, like, of algebraic topologies or graph theory, this type of, this type of areas where you don't have to study too much, but your job really, and you don't have to output a lot of work, but your job is to sit in your chair, imagine something in multiple dimensions, figure out how it folds and how you find a solution to some puzzle. That's fun because that's, you know, like you do for me, this was the fun part. And if I would have to sit and do spreadsheets instead, I would probably go,

James Booth I mean, this is why I said to our listeners at the start, Martin, your mind is five dimensional and I can't keep up. And that's what's so fascinating about this whole story behind Silent Eight. And I'm going to come on to that, the birth of Silent Eight, but just, you know, a big shout out to Michael and of course, Julia, who are the co-founders of Silent Eight. And I'm looking forward to getting them on to have different perspectives of the life of Silent Eight. But you've got such an impressive background. And then this, the evolution of financial crime has happened. What was the driver behind that? I mean, your entrepreneurial spirit shines through, but every time I've spoken to you, Martin, your passion for stopping financial crime is clearly there as well.

Martin Markiewicz Well, this is this transition from us, like a building power plants, which turned out to be really hard. If someone had this idea right now, it's really hard to build something in a physical world. I really, right now, when I hear about guys talking like, open AI talking about Stargate or like XAI building this huge data center where they have already like a 200,000 GPUs working together that they used to train rock four. And they're like going up to make it into a million GPUs. Like a building stuff in physical world is so much harder compared to building software that this, this is one experiences that I took away for like a high level experiences that I took away from, from this venture. When we were, we built some power plants, we bought some old power plants and we knew, we knew it like just renovated them. We started building power plants in Romania. We started expanding from Poland into, into other countries in central Europe. We took this company public, we sold it, but it's a, through all this journey, like since we've built the first power plant or even during building the first power plant, we just realized it's with software, something that I never really appreciated. If you have a massive problem to solve something that's, that's really huge in the scale of your, of, of your, of your project, like with enough pizza and beer and, and just like, you know, like not sleeping over the weekend, you can really create wonders. Like you can, you can create crazy solutions to problems that are, that seem impossible to solve on a Friday. But it's really hard to replicate the same mindset, when you're building something in the physical world. So once we said, okay, that's it. Our journey with building power plants is over. We're no longer owners of the company. We started Silent Aid. And then our, and then we just used a lot of those experiences that we got in, in multiple ways. For example, one, we just said, why did we start building power plants out of Poland? Why did we do it? Why was the even company located in Warsaw? Is Warsaw or Poland have the best terrain to build power plants, hydro power plants in? And it turns out, no, like it was just this obvious choice because we are living in Warsaw. So we just said, we're going to start from a local market and expand all around the world from the local market. While in reality, when we expanded to Romania, we discovered actually like a building these things in Romania seems like a way better business than, than it is building them in Poland. Like because of how Romania is, is structured a lot of mountains, you know, like a lot of rivers and different constructions of turbines. You could use a lot of Pelton turbines instead of like Pelton turbines are basically the version that they're much smaller, they're much lighter, much less steel goes into them than for the ones that you, that you have to deploy in the, in a very flat terrain. So, so you get, so it's more effective and efficient to build hydropower plants like that but when we discovered all these things, then we translated it. Okay. So if we want to help financial institutions solve their biggest problems, where should we start from? Should we start from Warsaw again? Just because it's just because English is not my first language. I speak Polish. I live in Warsaw. Or should we look at some financial centers to start Silent 8 in and start them from there? So we decided to, to go with selecting a financial, financial center. We actually did a full table of like a scoring table. So we took New York, we took Dubai, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, all those places that seemed on paper, like a perfect starting point for Silent 8. We scored those places based on different criteria that we thought are important to make our company a success. And Singapore won the scoring contest. So during the scoring contest, I remember we were sitting in a bar with Julia and Michael. It was Friday. And during this session, when we just say, okay, it looks like Singapore makes the most sense. And don't get me wrong, like Singapore won over New York and London, but like with a slight margin. But again, as a mathematician a bit, I was just thinking odds of success are super low. If we even take a small, like right now, if we get something like a small premium here, we should take it. We should not be thinking, where do I want to live? Where do I want to go? What I want to do? Like we just have, we have to go with probability and that's probably going to be the best choice. And that's how we picked Singapore. And those criterias that we are using, they were not the ones that you can normally find in some reports. They're created by some consulting firms or something that you can find on the internet. Because our thought process was, we have to do something that would, like we have to score it in a subjective manner, like something that, that makes sense for us, not for the general public. So one example would be access to early stage venture capital. Yeah. Of course, if you look at this criteria, you would say, well, Silicon Valley probably is number one. Maybe New York would be number two, maybe London number three. Like looking at those financial centers, like probably there will be, the scoring would go like this. But back in the day, we were thinking, hey, like we're founders. We were able to, to build a company already. So we have an edge in place like Singapore when the venture capital market is just starting up. We will be those founders that already built something and have like a smaller or bigger successes, smaller or biggest failures already behind us that we can, that we'll be able to talk about. So we'll a bit stand out. It will be an actual, it will be a benefit when we stand in a much shorter line for much smaller pool of capital. We'll be set, we'll, we'll be a bit in front of this line while we, if we go to San Francisco right now and we're going to, and we're going to say like, hey, we're building some power plants somewhere in central Europe and we even took it public and, and, you know, like, and we have all these experiences, you'll be standing in this, in the same line that guys who, you know, like I didn't like build the biggest tech companies that we know. So we would actually be in a disadvantage there, even though the capital pool is much, much bigger. So this, this was, this, this, this is how we were scoring that. But also looking at even when we went to Hong Kong or we went to Tokyo, we just realized, okay, there's one thing that we learned from Wikipedia about sizes of those financial markets. And it's a different experience when we try to talk to people. Back in the day when we were starting Silent 8. So I don't know, we went to Singapore, it's very easy to talk, you know, like English is the main language. You go out, you just know some English and you can easily have a conversation with someone. Everyone's super open and things just flow. You go to a place like Tokyo, it's really hard to do the same at the same scale if you're not Japanese. So we had a lot of discoveries like this that even though if we look at just numbers objectively, some markets are better, some markets are worse for us to start. If we add this subjective spin into them, Singapore is winning. So it's a no-brainer we have to go. And when we're sitting in this restaurant, like Julia just said, OK, I just booked tickets, I'm moving to Singapore, I'll be there on Monday. So the company starts now and let's go. So we didn't...

James Booth Salae was born then. Salae was born over pizza, beer, more beer and beer in the restaurant. Go ahead.

Martin Markiewicz Yes, exactly. And Julia was already committed herself to go. And so it was not something that we discussed a lot. Like someone pulled the trigger. Like, you know, Julia, like someone made a decision and like we were just, OK, like, I guess we're doing that. Like she already had, you know, she has those tickets. Like, let's go.

James Booth I mean, as you know, I relocated to Dubai. So I had this not in the same situation, but in order to sort of take the next break in my career, I took that step to move to another jurisdiction. As you know, I spent seven years in Dubai. Actually, I don't know if you've read this, Martin, but for any of our listeners as well, there's a great book called The Culture Map by Erin Mayer. And he talks about actually how across different cultures, because you raised a really valid point, and this was the biggest learning experience I took away from living overseas. And there were loads of people now that will have seen our sort of paths in life and moving overseas and think, you know, I want to do that. I want to learn the experience. But the theory of moving overseas is great. But when you get there, you sort of have to learn how to decode how people think, lead, and get things done. So I know Kathleen that works for Silent A, Kathleen Wade, so check her out on LinkedIn, everyone. She's a super inspirational leader and got a vast experience in this space. And something that Kathleen told me recently was about siloing and breaking down these problems so that you can tackle them one by one. But when you're creating a company, you're moving overseas, and you're starting from fresh after just being through an IPO, life was quite busy for you, I imagine.

Martin Markiewicz Oh, yeah, yeah. So this was, and we were starting something from scratch. So this was another thing that we were doing and this was only three of us. It's not that we hired people from the previous company. Remember, our previous company was not a tech company. The network that we had when it comes to tech people, this network came from the place that we worked at before we started our own business. So a solid five years that we were building this hydro power plant business, we're completely outside from a tech market. And so we did not have like a fresh network access to talent, anything like that. And we landed in Singapore. And to be honest, the way that we landed in Singapore, when Julia made this call, like I'm coming, I'm going to be there on Monday. She said, I need a company name. I need a business cards. I need website. I need all this stuff because I'll be looking for customers. If I, and our goal back then was that she moved there and we gave ourselves six months. So we said that if she will be able to find someone that will be willing to work with us, like if she'll be able to kick this off and we'll be with her, me and Michael remotely, but she'll be on the ground. She'll be meeting with people. She'll be talking to people. If she can kick this off in the first six months, then we're all committed and we're all going and we're all doing it. But if she's not, it means that like you say, it was too much. It was like, we cannot pull it, we can't pull it off. And so this was, so this was this, so this was something that luckily within those first six months, like we just saw so much traction, so much interest with solving problems with technology that we just said, okay, it's a no brainer. We have to, we have to do this. We have to, we have to commit ourselves. And this is the path forward for us. And, you know, and it's been for a decade now.

James Booth Yeah. So, I mean, a couple of months ago, Martin, you appointed me as the global head of AML sanctions and counterterrorism at Silent 8 and I get to travel and speak at events and meet loads of like-minded professionals. The one question that always comes up is why are you called Silent 8? And I've always wanted to ask you this. Why did you come up with the name Silent 8? What was the thought behind it? So there was,

Martin Markiewicz well, there was some thought behind it, but nothing, I mean, I guess the real origin story is better than anything that's like a, let's say like a made up to sound, to sound good. I had basically three days to come up with a name and also like once I have it, like, so I even have less time to come up with a name of the company because I had to create a logo website and all these other things. So my main, so I just said, I'm going to find a random name with a free .com domain that will be available. I'm going to buy the first one that I'll find and that's going to be our company name. And, I knew that 8 is in Singapore. Like, it would be considered a lucky number. So, I said, maybe I can find something8.com that's free. And, we would name the company like this. So, I started looking for free domains. I found that Silent8 is free. I booked the domain. I also wanted this to not to be some made-up name that you would have to memorize, but just like two English words together so that you can pronounce them easy when you're calling up someone, when you're meeting with someone and with, you know, a .com domain. And I presented this name to Michael and Julia and they hated it. Like, they just thought it's a nonsense name. What do you mean? And my reply to them back in the day was that we're not creating a consumer brand. It's not like with Apple or Nike where their name and the logo is like worth billions of dollars and it's a part of who they are and they can never get rid of this. The chances we're going to succeed are so low that really if we fail it's not because I've found a silly naming domain and we named a company like this. If we fail it will be probably for different reasons like not finding customers, not really solving their problems, not delivering value. So that's going to be a real reason for our failure. No one's going to say I'm not working with them because their name sounds dumb and I remember specifically I said if and this is a big if we would ever solve those problems that we would have customers and we would have a good solution for their problems we would be delivering value we're not a consumer-facing company we're doing B2B we're working for enterprises we can rebrand to something that we're all going to like and since we started this was literally on day one we did not have time to do any rebranding since then so the origin story of the name is that it was something I found on day one and we just have to stick with it right now and it's not because there's some must we just don't have time to really think about what would sound better and what would make more sense looking at the journey that we took so far I just think okay let's keep silent now I like it

James Booth yeah well I I I I honestly I I so everybody viewers listeners even you've heard it here first silent eight was total coincidence because Martin found a free domain that had a cultural nod to Singapore Martin I've heard so many conspiracy theories and been in a room of AML professionals all trying to decode why it's silent eight but no none of that it's just a free domain that you've been able to come up with so that that's a good I mean that's that's the juicy story right there so you we now

Martin Markiewicz listen to but I had so many conversations over the last decade with with our guy saying like look if we put eight as a number we put it on the side looks like infinity and you know that with AI I was like focus on fucking work like it's like don't give me that like it's like we're you we're we are wasting time before discussing that let's focus on something that's that's really valuable so we never even came up with some marketing explanation of why this name makes sense and we're releasing this podcast right now so people know that at least it was honest

James Booth do we need to maybe we should maybe we should re-record that and come up with like a really cool name like you were undercover

Martin Markiewicz let's not waste time Julia was

James Booth undercover in Singapore no no it's a free domain everybody so this is the bit that I'm really now super interested in because I've been in despite my youthful look it's good moisturizer I've been in financial crime world for 16, 17 years anti-financial crime so what was it then that you thought we would build all of this success and I'm now going to get out of bed every single day and try and fight and help financial institutions fight financial crime what was the motivation behind that

Martin Markiewicz well this was this was also a long journey like I really envy guys like Elon Musk on the fact that they can come up with some mission statement like a 20 30 years earlier and just without any modification of the story stick to it and you move you know like a few decades into the future and this mission statement still makes sense like in my case it's always I'm starting somewhere and I'm just thinking incrementally I'm going to find a path to the goal and if I have and if I discover I have to move the goal I'll find a path to the new goal it's going to be a different goal different path like we're just going to be evolving so when Elon is saying like 30 years ago like oh we have to make you know like our species multi-planetary we have to move to Mars or something like this and you look at the rockets that they have today and all this tech you're just saying like yep he started on this mission he ended on this mission like you hear like I started on trying to do something with electricity and you know like and right now looking at looking at my life I'm you know we're not producing electricity we consume it a bit like I predicted that you know like the companies will consume a lot of electricity we're consuming it right now but with Silent Aid I didn't even know when we started that financial crime compliance that AML that all these things even exist I had no clue that financial institutions are doing anything about about financial crime I just I it's like the first time I walked into into a bank and I was introduced to in this in this concept and I remember I asked okay like how many of you are you actually how many of you are is there like a is there a big team and I've heard it's like three thousand people I was absolutely blown away because I heard in the in this team in total there's three thousand people but also every one of our employees in trained in financial crime prevention like how to spot a criminal how to how to spot different things we have the ways to report that they reported to us so it's really like the whole organization in theory is aware of of this thing and there's a special unit that that takes a lot of budget have a lot of resources to actually actively do something about it and like it's not that I knew that this is what we should be doing first of all I didn't know that this stuff even existed so when we started SilentAid my thinking was that probably the next like a wave of how the software will be built this was we went through this wave of mobile applications so we moved so user interfaces from the from desktop from web interfaces we back then move them into into mobile iPhone was 2007 and since then like at the time we were starting Silent Aid we all have like awesome phones and everything had an app already so my bet was that the next wave of change will come in and this will be basically machine learning artificial intelligence and yeah just just that there's going to be a lot of things that will be possible to do there are probably already possible to do that but we're not doing them but in the future we'll have way more things that we'll be able to do with artificial intelligence so we made this type of bet and the first product that we developed at Silent 8 when we were doing research really like sitting me and Michael and just doing research and building code our first product that we've built was about being able to if it would be deployed in the enterprise it would be going through a lot of unstructured data like you have in your shared drives and emails and on your desktop and all these places and will help you find relevant information like when you're looking for information so this was the enterprise search type of product that we just thought if larger enterprises have this like a problem of finding information employees have the problem of finding information information when they need it and every spreadsheet is called untitled spreadsheet and so you have this kind of type of like a mess everywhere if we can work with natural language processing part of the part of the task and be able to index this correctly make sure that in the enterprise when you're searching for different things you can only find things that you're allowed to see and do all these kind of like all these type of things we're thinking we have a universal product for for large enterprises to really unlock productivity and the and Julia was was talking to a lot of a lot of those customers we we did a lot of proof of concepts and they all worked out and we were and we were all already committed to say we're just going to be doing this type of stuff like we have a very good product and we're going to help enterprise enterprises find data but at the very beginning of this journey we came across standard chartered I think Julian met Praveen Jane he was he was at standard chartered back in a day now he's in Bank of America but he she met him at some conference and they started talking about what he's doing in standard chartered and that's how she learned about financial crime AML and all this type of work that the bank was doing and he got interested in her pitch and he saw it in a way that I have so many investigators investigating different cases part of being good at making those investigations is actually finding information so if I can make them find information better and faster I can make my process better so we got invited to pitch and to show the product to Praveen at first and then to some other guys in standard chartered but we when we were not pitching and we were asking questions when I was asking questions about okay like what do you do what's the purpose of what you do how do you do what you do I just realized that's that's a vertical that I had no idea that existed but it's so interesting because you're fighting those criminals they have all those advantages and you know like an edges on you they can move fast they can do crazy stuff they've they can they can they can dodge you left and right and you like the things that you do can be do so much better but it's just not easy to do because it's also very risky to do something you know like to do whatever yeah so to do any change so and I quickly understood that mistakes that can be made by a financial institution in this area can actually bring the whole financial institution down so yeah you don't know that you're making them at the time you're making them like this is this is something that's going to blow up in your face like five years later when something explodes when someone gets arrested they start tracing money back and suddenly your bank or your financial institutions and found is found in the middle of something really bad helping some really bad actors do something awful and and suddenly like all the because of like a one wrong decision everything that was built for like a hundred years falls apart so this immediately started to be a very interesting area for me to for to drill deeper into and then I thought it's going to be even easier to scale a company to something that would have a massive impact in the world because if we would be going only with the universal tool for finding documents and finding information and going into marketing team at the telco and sales team at some utility company and and customer success team at some healthcare and financial crime team at some bank how hard would us for our company would it be to understand what real value are we delivered to all these people to all these to all these potential customers with this one how hard would it be to explain what does it mean to a doctor to have it or what does it mean for a marketing person a different industry to have it and if we would just double down on financial crime fighting with with with those banks our message with the would be clear we would have a clear path for developing the product so so we just started like doing a lot of research and a lot of product development with this in mind let's skip everything else let's just focus on that this becomes a next like our next north star again for the third time this is it and we're just and we're just going forward for it with full force no distraction no nothing else so even if we had some pocs happening for enterprise search product and we're negotiating contracts we had to go to these customers and just say like hey guys like if we're not we're discontinuing this product like that's that was a pretty shitty thing to do like to go to people that just say like okay I used it I loved it it solves all my problems I can't see any alternative on the market okay let's sign a contract and then I'm coming in and saying like we can't do it like this is we decided to go into financial crime and this and that's you know and we're discontinuing discontinuing this product that was that was that was a pretty shitty experience yeah we made this we made this move and from this moment onwards our idea was you have this 3,000 people or 1,000 people or 10,000 people is it hard for all those bad actors still to move money around to get you know to launder money to get to do all their bad things and get benefits out of that and just from reading newspapers not being an expert it doesn't seem like it's really hard to dodge all these investigators to dodge all those defenses like don't get me wrong it's probably hard like my assumption is it's probably hard but they have a lot of money to kind of like solve this problem on the reasonable margin that they're still making a lot of money and it's still you know and it's still good for them as a business so our thinking was we can give this enterprise search some search tool to guys doing those investigations and we can boost their productivity we can make them 20 50 percent better at doing these investigations but then we were thinking this is not really solving a problem yet like how many people how many investigators would you need to have for even a dollar of dirty money would not able to go through and and be used and if you have already like a five thousand people doing investigative work like it's probably not ten thousand people it's probably more like a million people or ten million people like something crazy like that and that's where and that's where like we just we just thought okay we need to design an agent that would be doing this investigative work as an underlying technology for this agent we're going to use this enterprise search thing that we've built so this agent can actually search rather for relevant information make sense out of this but then we would just have to create this whole framework that you could use this agent to do those investigations just like a human would and that's how you're going to have a team of 10 million investigators not by hiring people but but just having this army of AI agents doing this work so this is this was this transition when we decided okay this is the vertical that we want to focus on we know that AI should be unlocking this this vertical completely and now it was a question of how do we design it in a way that it would make sense for these guys to use and it's really delivering

James Booth value yeah I want to I want to put a little bit of the I want to almost almost complete this story because what I think what's been fascinating mine is to hear how this concept of silent eight was birthed and the objectives and you rightly call out you know the the impact this has on an organization we see Netflix documentaries made about banks I'm looking at my bookshelf now in my study of all of the issues that have reared up there's one thing that I don't think is forgotten but I think it's timely to bring that up and I'll tell you a very very quick story before we move on to sort of the here and the now of Silent Eight there was a situation where some cash was being well basically laundered through a bank account and individuals had been through various bits of training and the systems had recently been through an update and long story short this cash had moved into the financial system the training that the individual had had so investment by the organization because they now treat the financial crime really seriously the technology that had been invested had found some unusual transactions and it went through the processes you're very familiar with and the output was a suspicious activity report which is what this is all about and skip on a couple of months and what actually happened that intelligence that that young person gave to their AML team that the AML team then sent on to the intelligence unit was actually the final piece of a jigsaw that brought down a human trafficking ring and so when we talk about the money and the money moving through an organisation and the reputational impact that's not questionable but this technology this solution that you've created contributes to decisions that people can make with AI with people that lands with a government officer that then contributes to arrest but not just the arrest of these criminals there was young women that were being trafficked and in some instances sexual exploitation even murder do you ever sit back and think this solution contributes to saving people's lives do you ever sit back and just take that moment to think indirectly we save lives

Martin Markiewicz I love that like I love that I've I don't have time to really sit sit back and think about that because it's almost like this constant race like when you are constantly trying to get more done either either more either more done with your current customers on on board new customers and make sure that your product is like you just make it more and more powerful like every quarter basically you have a version of the product that's way more powerful than the previous one so it's almost this like a setup where you have a sprinter when they just kind of lean forward and then you just have to start to move your legs otherwise you fall on your face like that's that's the the kind of like a tempo that I want us to have like that we're constantly running forward not just sitting sitting and just and just like you know liking what we did last year or liking what we did last quarter like I just want to make sure that because this is how I think we end up in a setup that a lot of industries including ours have where you're saying I have best in kind solution deployed and now I'm protected and I have whatever the best banks have now I have and when you look at a lot of those they were developed like 20 years ago and how like 20 years ago like iPhone was not there then like the we use Nokia phones or Blackberries maybe like it's a it's weird that this is acceptable but this is acceptable because innovation is not really like no one is really pushing hard forward because they don't have any I don't know like maybe financial incentive or something like this and leader you're just comfortably in your spot and just getting back to the business coming into you so whenever you're joining a market like this and you're a startup you're starting with nothing how can anyone trust you how can any regulator trust you how can any customer trust you the only way to to do it if you don't have this credibility coming in from decades of your product being deployed everywhere is really to work super hard there's no other way around it like if you don't have any connections if you don't have any any background nothing like this you're it's like your product speaks for you so you just have to make sure that every time you can present a better version of it and do a lot of and do a lot of effort so that every time you look at it it's actually much better okay I remember a few years ago we had this discussion when we were doing our own internal security assessment I was on some call and the question was asked what do we think would be worse for us if our source code would leak or it would be lost and I was really surprised that people don't know right away if I don't mind our source code leaking I probably like we should not say to like auditors doing all those like a security audits on us like and giving us those certificates but really if we're talking scales of disaster someone gets a hold of our code and they can work from there and they just have a solution that they can equivalent to what we have today and when we meet on the market six months from now we're in a completely different place you're already way behind like so I'm just thinking that if we're continuously innovating and we're figuring out new ways of of building those agents of making those agents more powerful more trustworthy so that they can you can put more on them and do and have and have way more value no one who's copy a snapshot of you from today have any chance competing with you so for me I love the fact that even though I don't have time to sit back and just enjoy some of some of the things that that you know like some of the good things that that because we exist are happening in the world it's it's somewhere in the back of my head that I'm not producing drugs I'm not producing alcohol I'm not producing anything that that harms people I'm actually growing a business that has this positive impact I was the same way when we were generating electricity from renewable sources and now I'm thinking the same way building AI to fight financial crime so yeah this I don't think about it much but maybe it's because if we would be doing something opposite making money out of something that would be built on people's harm then I would be thinking about

James Booth it like yeah isn't it really isn't it a really powerful thing though because it's inspiring listen to you that you're constantly trying to make money we put our customers at the heart of everything that we do and of course the victims of crime but we just pause for one moment and I encourage everybody listening to this podcast right now and all the series of podcasts and the webinars and everything that we do we save lives product innovation or it's education or it's whatever it might be this this is what we do right the common goal is the same for all of us in this now whether that's entrepreneurial or in my world the actual getting your hands dirty and investigative so I think sometimes we should all if we if we even

Martin Markiewicz take a step back from silent aid and from financial crime if we look at if we look at what progress of technology does in our lives I think that overall in the long run it's going to do a lot of good it already is doing a lot of good like we have we have we just talked about one example like from our field but it's a but in in this is not just us in this niche it's every everything around us like the fact that we can have this call right now like a separated by thousands of miles and in different time zones the you know like all these things that you can now do with chat GP with all these other technologies on your phone like this is all like we're just starting to see the start of a completely new world that and in my view this is something that we discussed recently when we've met in London over drinks with some of our customers that I think that in the next five years none of the jobs that that that we understand right now would exist anymore they might have similar names or the same names but the description of these jobs like what are we actually doing will be completely different and and and this will come to us like I really hope that we caught this wave very early one might say even too early for just like with I believe that we did this energy thing too early like if we would come in a decade later probably would make more sense and we would be able to gain much much bigger scale but I don't know in Europe like because like regulations make it hard to build anything but in many places that are deregulating right now probably building energy right now for for use for use of fueling technology will become easier and will be becoming easier and easier but we just we just we just have to think that in our industry we have it's not that we're moving against some some sort of like a trend like if with silent eight a lot of our customers were way ahead of this trend yeah and now the job is not to say hey i was ahead in 2022 well that's good for you but but three years in or five years in today's terms of technology exponentially speeding up that's like nothing like so it's cool that you were ahead three years ago but if you're not working on constantly being ahead you're going to be behind in one hour

James Booth yes crazy scary right but exciting that's exciting right actually I had a question about this because we did there's a commonality here we'll come up with lots of good ideas over beer so maybe the next podcast that we do mine when we follow up maybe we'll do that at a bar or something and really go go for it but just on that we we we talk a lot about the misconceptions around AI and AML what is a widely held business that you hear all the time around AML and AI that you strongly

Martin Markiewicz disagree with I've I one is coming up to my mind and I believed in it at the beginning and I just thought I don't know if it's true we probably have to roll a dice and check and this was that and this was the one that's AI is going to take away our jobs so I was at the very beginning I was really worried also it worried me okay so I was really worried that maybe the effect of our work won't be that you'll scale up from 10,000 investigators to 10 million investigators maybe you'll scale down to like a one human investigator and 9,999 AI investigators that you'll just cut cost and those AI agents will completely replace people that did this job before and and you know like the first deployment we did in standard chatter in what 2018 I think then 2020 or maybe 2021 we did the first deployment with HSBC a global deployment like we did a lot of those large deployments along the way so we have some customers that for some use cases are using our solution for for literally years right now so what I found like almost right away after those first deployments I was wondering what's really gonna happen in a short medium and long term and I was like what I found that what happens in the long term and because we were so much ahead of the curve so that's how that's why I I'm an optimist and I extrapolated on on the world as a whole and I'm just thinking that what's happening is that this financial crime fighting problem is not a solved problem so we're not so for all the solved problems we'll be just looking to just basically have this have the solution of the problem done but at the lower cost we just want the same solution but faster and cheaper but there's a lot of problems that we have not solved and for those we tend to say okay like we just have to put more resources into solving them but resources that we have right now are just too expensive so so in in this sense you have this you have this thing that when when suddenly you can do something when you technically could not before you start to do more of that so what I can see is that very often the teams if we look at the investigative teams of in those teams that when we started the teams was on the team was of the certain size five years later similar size of the team so like what no benefit but then I look under the hood and I look at okay you're actually doing 10 times more investigations yeah and when I look at the for the team member what their job really is their job titles their same but what are they doing they're really looking at those hard corner cases not on some things that's you know like they had to look at before so I'm just looking at this as this massive multiplier to do more in areas then problems are not solved yet and we can really do more and and get away more benefits and probably in some areas we'll just cut costs for the for those let's say like a very much solved problems like but for the ones that we don't figure it out how to solve yet and they're important we're gonna see explosion of value being created and and people have jobs just and even if the titles will be the same that this will be different jobs like more demanding and I think that we have to start thinking of ourselves even if you're a single contributor and you're doing some work you have to start training yourself in this way that's coming on yourself just to be again ahead personally so if someone is thinking like how do I do it I'm just telling everyone like drop Google start stop doing Google searches install chat GPT start paying for it install it's almost like a pain in your education install perplexity perplexity just release the comment there for their browser try it out see if it's helpful or not if it's not cancel the subscription throw it away but always use these tools even if you know that you will be faster with Google or faster with whatever way you had before try to make sure that you're native in Google in talking to those machines and making them do what you want them to do and if you use grok and if you use for example if you was if you use grok for and open a eyes chat gpd all three model for for some tasks for reasoning and you already awarded this is the this is the task for reasoning model so you already using a reasoning model because you are aware of that you're a native and you can talk in this like a can cooperate with those large language models and use the same process and see how both would you like how how different answers you'll get from both and why and how you should modify your prompt to get from both of them something that you want so instead of doing a quick check on Google and five seconds you're done like invest 15 minutes in actually train yourself and embedding in being better at using those tools and there's a minimum baseline and from there like start building agents using no code platforms like n8n and do some fun stuff with that it really does not require any background any any formal or informal background you don't have to be a software developer or anything like this software developers exist because and have good jobs because they they can speak this deterministic language that computers understand they can just write code and then computer execute it right this future like you can do the same using english so it's only like how clear are you when you're expressing yourself how to express yourself how to correctly so that this persona on the other end this ai model would understand you and do exactly what you want so even as this single contributor you should be thinking of yourself like someone who's really managing a team of ai agents so even if you don't have employees right now and in the place work think about like actually hiring ones by yourself those ai ones and trying to train them that with you they make the best team ever because i really believe that changes will come right away because it's almost like this slow start this is how all those fast progress that's exponential progress looks like if you would be like a stepping on the on this like exponential growth line if this would be a line that you're walking on you don't really feel the elevation you just you just can't just look back and it looks mostly flat but then you turn back and you and you look in front of you and this line is straight to the ceiling in your nose like this is how it it ramps up and I believe that when you see what's happening with the US and China right now when they're when they're really are at this like a war of AI progress and who's who's gonna get to AGI ASI and and best models and best solutions it's gonna come on us pretty fast and because we here live in in capitalism every company will be thinking well if I don't utilize those things my competitor will and they will take margins from the from the market so starting today we're doing this and that so it's I think that the one thing that I've mentioned to you as a misconception is it's going to take away our work so that's that that's the one that I was afraid of but it turns out not to be true like from my personal experience like live through for in silent aid but at the same at the same time if we just stay ignorant and just say like ah let's see what's going to happen then it's going to then it's going to lead to a lot of bad surprises

James Booth yeah so actually what we're here we're not we're not because that's the biggest misconception I hear AI is going to take my job but actually what I'm hearing and what I wholeheartedly agree with no it's not but we need to transfer and shift our skills and actually become better at using the technology as well so I think that takes us to like a really nice part then of like the here and the now and a little bit of a look forward it looks like and one of the drivers actually Martin for me me joining the organization was from an outside perspective it feels like Saturday of just stepping into like a new chapter so what what do you feel is different about the company today than say three or five

Martin Markiewicz years ago so I'm not a good salesperson I'm the only thing I think I do quite okay is product work so thinking about how the product should be evolving and and what it should be doing talking to our customers doing those discovery sessions with them and then really like like doing this type of work and then sitting with our with our data scientists with our research team and just trying to figure out like what how can we leverage all the tools that we have and all the stuff that we that we think we can invent how can we how can we package this into a product that can that can change what people are doing and and right now when we look at the amount of impact that we had can have on a financial crime team in a way that in a large global financial institution we got to the point that it's not that we had to be like some some sort of like a point solution for this problem and point solution for some other problem like a point for solution for adverse media or for sanctions or for or for AML or for something like this right now we're at this point that because of making all those of all those efforts and having customers that are willing to work with us on that and and helping us move forward we got to the point that we can now come in and say like we can help you transform everything that you do there and gets you you know like orders of magnitude better when it comes to outcomes without creating any new risk so we are right now coming in with this type of with this type of message so I think that moving forward we'll have this team that every time we came in somewhere like as a as a new vendor it was always you know always let's start from something small let's do sanction screening during onboarding or let's do something like let's test it out let's do something small let's let's feel it out but right now when we have it deployed in so many places when the product is right now so powerful we can be coming in and transforming everything with AI in financial crime so yeah it's build out to this to this thing and we got a lot of luck at the same time why we were doing this I know 2017 Google released attention is all you need paper you know like a transformer architecture was was was born then open AI released GPT like a lot of things happen where when we were coming in at first to to to to our customers I remember when we were when we were doing this for the first time with standard chartered I think it was with Marcus Schultz who then left to ING and now he's at K2 and when we were when we're at the whiteboard and we're discussing the design of our product and we're thinking about what can go wrong how do we explain to an auditor what like we're putting ourselves in the regulatory shoes and trying to figure out how they're going to view this and just try and just trying to design something that at this time was a was was a perfect let's say like a point solution for for one of the problems that the bank have and the one that would deliver a value like right now the scale of every the scale of everything that it's doing it's like it seems like a really like an old memory and all these things that happen along the way was just like a wind you know like just pushing us forward we're coming in and we're thinking how do we explain this stuff to a regulator for the first time if we're going to be talking to lawyers like how do we explain this math to lawyers like this was this was like a one of the challenges that we're part of really designing the product that would work so and right now everyone is aware that AI can do some crazy stuff so it's like when you're coming in to explain how your solution works and you give them a look under the hood how it's designed how how the outputs looks like how it works why it works like it like it works why did we make such and such design choices they're just not listening to science fiction I mean they know because it's deployed in so many places on so many markets so they know it's not science fiction but also from their personal experiences they know that we already live in this future when AI you know because it's not something of the movies but it's really something that you can ask for help and it will help you yeah so it's just so much easier for us to to kind of like a ride this wave we're a bit ahead of it and and but someone once told me I never surfed I never surfed but someone once told me that it's better to be a bit ahead because once this wave passes you there's no way of catching it up so in the surfing terms I'm really happy that we just get ourselves on the water when the weather was not so nice when it was not so cool but this way and we were doing our own thing but this wave came in and we just riding on this ever since yeah and I

James Booth think look we are in a just reflecting again and and it's good to sort of maybe pause again it's a moment of pause and reflection it on how far the organizations has come and now we're at a point where we've got a really good established marketing team we're doing webinars we've got the podcast we're constantly at events so if you do see me or my colleague Ben Pierre, Emma, Sia, Frank, Patrick everybody come and say hello to us and we'll we'll have a chat with you we'd love to speak to you but I guess then I've got a couple more questions mine before we wrap up what what what are you most proud of that you've achieved in with silent eight oh wow a big question right but I think again it's nice to pause and reflect that's what the podcast about pause and listening what you saw what you what you're the most proud of wait I need

Martin Markiewicz to think about this for a second so

James Booth everybody this is the first time that Martin has been speechless so we'll treasure this moment as

Martin Markiewicz you can do whatever like right now if you're listening like it's a it's a it's a break I'm not

James Booth singing a song that's what we do I'm going to see Drake on Saturday maybe I could come up with a track number yeah you know

Martin Markiewicz what like if I think I had I think I had like a weird one proud moment along along the way because most of this most of the things that I do every day it's about problems like it's always we're trying to push and and it's not going through we're trying to do something with our R&D and it's not coming together so like so on for the so I'm used to a lot of failure if you know what I mean like I'm just do something and it doesn't work and I do again and again and again once it works I don't have this like oh my god it works I just say finally well deserved let's go and you know let's go another step so I don't have this like an euphoric thing when I hear about a very good news that we made some progress something happened I'm just my my thing is like finally we've tried so hard like I've all this stuff that that you just seen me movies when just you know like a magic happens like my experience is it's never never magical it's always a lot of hard work a lot of stuff that does not work a lot of approaches that does not work a lot of things that you hope are going to give you some results and they don't it's just I have a conversation with with one of our angel investors Paul Santos they invested in a lot of like hundreds of seed state companies out of Singapore and back in the day I don't know if I can say it I asked him like what makes like if he looks at the look at the founders that he bet on and he's already doing this probably for also like over a decade I think that they have hundreds of millions of dollars under management not a billion but you know like hundreds of millions of dollars so they deployed it on those crazy ideas those crazy founders trying to do something weird when I ask him like what differentiate in his view like after all this experience the fund those founders that are making it versus those that don't because seed state investment is really tricky because you know that a lot of things that you're going to try will fail and only the small number of them will create all your returns you will have this power law type of returns curve and he told me because I was thinking maybe he will tell me something nice like that I'm smart or something like that I set the stage for him to give me a compliment and he told me the best one just don't quit so for me in this team I put ourselves on this path when a lot of those small failures needs to be made probably to get to some desired or close to desired outcome so I'm not super proud from the outcome once it's happened I don't feel this moment of pride the one moment of pride I had was I think year and a half ago when guys from Forbes in Poland reached out to me and said like oh you're doing this crazy stuff like you build this valuable company like do you want to come into our office and do an interview for Polish Forbes and we'll put your face on the cover of Polish Forbes and for me this was you know we don't do any business in Poland right we just it's like but for me was this kind of like a proud moment like holy shit I watched these guys on this on these covers like when I was young this is what made me think that normal people are actually capable of building something big and having an impact and now these guys just and I already forgot about it like it was decades ago I already forgot about it and these guys called me up and said they want me on the cover just to just so that for the same reason I watch these covers back in the day probably also they're making money so they want to sell the newspaper but but also that that they want to share this story so that it will inspire the new wave of entrepreneurs in Poland and holy shit that's so cool

James Booth yeah and of course I was

Martin Markiewicz so proud of that even though you haven't seen it no one's seen it but it's like but for you know like but for me it was this like an internal thing like wow like I'm I'm on this path that I wanted to be I just could not imagine that I would back in the day I would never draw it this way but I'm on it like so I'm doing something good

James Booth well I correct you for one thing Martin I have seen it because when I was joining the organization and I did my diligence in true financial crime professional I did I did come across and read the article and in fact what I'll do for our listeners when the podcast is actually published I'll also drop the link in the comments as well so I encourage everyone to look at it it's a really inspiring story and it's just worth as well shouting out Julia because of course Julia co-founder and CEO of Silent Lake was also named in the top 50 women leaders in the financial technology report as well so really inspiring stuff Martin sincerely and I know I asked you the question but I'm going to add two to it as well and I think the one I would add you have developed a product that I guarantee you I put my reputation on the line that has contributed to either foiling a terrorist attack saving a life stopping money being laundered unquestionably because of the organisations that we work with I think the one thing though and of course it doesn't top the first point around Forbes but a culture has been formed around Silent Eight that you've been able to get a team of people from all around the world because of course we're home workers and we spread across all four corners of the world to come on this journey this commonality of helping our customers and saving lives and I think that's so inspiring so I think then just our final thought then is where are we going where's this ship sailing so where do you see or where do you want to see Silent Eight in five ten years time

Martin Markiewicz so when we were starting I have this I have this thought that probably we have a shot of becoming a huge enterprise some you know like if one of like of the sizes of those companies that are considered some like a market leaders forever and we can really just come in and disrupt this this industry and build something that will be huge multi multi-billion dollar business and I think that we're on the path to getting there so and when I was thinking about this earlier on like when I was thinking about this I don't know like 10, 9, 8 years ago I had this thought that we have to really rush because I was thinking that what's probably going to happen is the same thing that happened when AWS started doing cloud computing they showed up out of nowhere no one knew them everyone knew Amazon but no one knew Amazon as someone who's providing IT infrastructure like yeah but at some point they gained so much momentum they created a lot of the things for the first time in such a way and later on other companies started catching up so other companies started saying like okay I like what AWS is doing I like their growth I like their revenues I like the impact they're having I like everything about about their business model let's do the same fits our agenda like so so then Google Microsoft and others that came out with their own offerings and still Oracle everyone that came out with their own offering and started to put their own spin and start going for this ever since then like a growing market of cloud computing and if you look at those like a top three top four firms like AWS seems like the only outsider there they're like a leader but they're the only outsider and they're and I thought that this is this is our fate and this is a perfect outcome for us that we're not going to be alone with doing those advanced agents in financial crime and deploying AI on the massive scale in financial crime compliance teams if there's going to be others that will see what we're doing their copy as they'll come up with with different products and but the only thing is like I want us to be the leader like it just to be the leader constantly push forward because at the end all these things I think are going to consolidate that if you're a large enterprise today and you think about I want to pick a cloud provider today like you're not you're just going to be thinking about about the about those biggest most reliable ones even though you probably have thousands of cloud computing platforms to choose from you're going to be thinking I just want to work with the best as a large enterprise I want to work with the best so what I'm with this growing market right now even if we started moving this market towards this like a growth and like a change I want us to remain on this wave and remain as a leader and just push like and just create more of this growth and be what AWS was to really like this like a cloud transformation back in the day

James Booth so we've got we've got growth on the horizon and it's really really exciting to be part of that so look Martin I can't thank you enough I was you know I've been talking about this podcast for months and I was really passionate and keen to make sure that we got you on first and then of course we'll have we'll have the other co-founders on as well so so Martin thank you so much for joining me today I can't wait to get this out there and this next bit I'm really excited to say so I've been preparing for this I've written it down and everything make sure you like and you subscribe so that when we release the podcasts you'll get a notification straight to your inbox so Martin thank you ever so much I just I

Martin Markiewicz just felt like we also became an influencer right now like this is exactly yeah if we had video we should end it with some tiktok dance or something like that yeah well maybe maybe

James Booth you could do the dancing and to be fair as well you only swore three times so but my take care thank you and I'll see everybody at the next episode take care everyone