Patrick Jørgensen: Revolutionizing Financial Management - The Rise of AI in Startups

This transcription is AI-generated and may contain errors or inaccuracies.

Leszek

My name is Leszek and I will be talking with Patrick Jørgensen about unique career journey and empowering leadership style and the connection between sports and entrepreneurship. Can you walk us through your career from software engineering to co founding scale up finance. What maybe were some key turning points that led you to this entrepreneurial path?

Patrick Jørgensen

Sure. So before, before I do that I'd like to say that I, I actually became a software engineer because I wanted to start my own company because like I have a million ideas and always had and I thought, hey, if I, if I can build software then I can build what I want to build in this world. And I wanted to build video games because you know, which software engineer doesn't. And I was dreaming of meeting my co founder during university and I just didn't so. Well, maybe I did but so far we haven't co found anything together. So. Yeah, no, I didn't find anything.

So I said okay, I'll make myself valuable and then I'll just do, you know, the track of corporate kind of acquiring skills and getting some good, you know, companies on my resume so that, you know, I learn things the right way. So I went hardcore after big names. I got Microsoft as a job. I didn't join as a software engineer, so actually I actually think I wasn't good enough for that. But I joined as a, as a consultant. So like an Azure. I became Azure consultant, like cloud consultant.

But originally it was just consultant in the Denmark office. We went through a lot of changes so I changed manager every six months. So I got to experience how horrible it is not to have a close relationship with anyone. My managers went from local after the first couple of months to remote, which meant that I literally didn't meet my second manager or third manager ever. I just, we had a remote relationship and he also had local resources and I got to feel what it's like to be deprioritized. My dream as I said, was always to co found a company. So I knew that one day I wanted to become a leader in some way.

I thought I wanted to become CEO, but at the very least I wanted to become some sort of CTO or whatever. I didn't even know the title but. But yeah, so, so that's why I joined as a consultant because I thought, hey, this is where you get like the, the mix between like hardcore tech knowledge and soft skills. And I always saw myself as a good bridge. I'm pretty good at explaining complicated things in a, in a simple manner so that I can explain anything to anyone basically. And that skill I found out as good as a CTO and as a manager over time, but worked very well for me as a consultant because it was very easy for me to explain to my customers like, okay, this is going to take time for this reason because the analogy is building this and you all know that this takes time, therefore you can understand why this takes time. Managing expectations, all that are invaluable skills that I learned in that part.

Then I joined two different companies. So I was recruited out of Microsoft into a startup where I very quickly became like one of the lead developers in the backend. I got to learn hardcore coding then because I was working alongside Microsoft mvp and he is like, I learned so much through him. He is really a technical genius. And you know, he just reviewed my pull request and said this was shit, this is terrible, this is terrible. And then I got to iterate on that.

Leszek

Learning through suffering.

Patrick Jørgensen

Yes, exactly. But he did it in a nice way. You know, he was never rude but you know, just pointing out that this was shit. So yeah, I learned so much from him. Then, then I went over to another company which was like a scale up also consultancy, had my cloud expertise and everything. And then all of a sudden I said to myself, hey, you know, I'll focus, I'll take, you know, I've been like in a rush to develop and to increase in career and whatever. And then I was like, fine, I'll just take a little bit of a chill pill and I'll just have this job and it's going to be cool, it's going to be nice, I can manage my family.

I met, had met my wife at the time. And then all of a sudden, you know, my immediate manager said like, hey, you know, I need to go on another project. We need somebody to run this project.

Can you do it? And I basically always say yes. So I was like, sure, I'll do it. And then I just got to manage that team. So I got expertise around that. So expertise around managing a team. I got like three or four extremely skilled developers that I had to be in charge, made sure they were happy and sure that we delivered expectations to customers.

This time I wasn't delivering myself, but I was delivering through others. And then finally I got a message on LinkedIn saying, Do you want to be a CTO? And I said, well, who doesn't? But so I believed it was a scam, so I didn't really want to want to answer it. And then all of a sudden a friend of mine was like, hey, what if? What if it's legit, you know, so, so I went through the interview process and spoke with the recruiter and spoke with what turned out to be my co founders who had, who had hired the recruiter to find a cto. And then I just got completely in love with the space, the idea, and, and my childhood dream of starting a company became, you know, a reality.

And although I still was in the point where I was like, hey, you know, career, let's just take a chill pill. It's like, I cannot say no to that. Like, we have to get on board. And that's how I came to become where I am.

Leszek

Nice. Thank you.

I mean, one thing that I like to follow up on is did the offer originally, the offer of the CTO role actually encompass the co founder role as well, or was it specifically crafted for you? Or you crafted it that way? How did it come about?

Patrick Jørgensen

So I think they, I mean, there was two guys was, it was their idea that they got together and then they, they put together the team around that and they said, hey, you know, we got the idea. And, and, and if you guys need to be a part of it, you guys need to be co founders. And, and at the time, I didn't really think that much of the co founder role. I was more interested in the CTO role.

Today, the tables have turned a lot. I think the co founder role actually is way more important than the CTO role that I have, and I think it has a lot of more weight to being a co founder than to being a cto generally, because you dare to do something and you dare to get on board. Um, but I think it was always in the making. And, and it was their idea of saying, you know, hey, it's, it's, we have an idea, but, you know, like, it's as much yours as it is as it is ours now. And it has to be, because otherwise we're not going to succeed if we don't have ownership across you guys. And, and you guys who are part of the founding team, or six guys in total, you guys should consider this your own, because then that's how you're going to make the best decisions. And that's also what I truly enjoyed about it.

Leszek

Nice, Nice. I also want to talk about your other aspect of your professional life, maybe not that professional. I mean, you are a professional fencer. You're a member of Danish national team fencing, if I got it correct.

Patrick Jørgensen

Yes.

Leszek

And I want to talk about that aspect of your development as an entrepreneur, as a person, and specifically, how does Experience influence your approach to entrepreneurship? Are there some specific skills or mindset from sports that have proven invaluable for building business, running business, et cetera? Sure.

Patrick Jørgensen

So one thing that's very much the same when founding a company and being an athlete is that you're in direct competition and you don't want to just make it. You want to be one of the best, and you have to want to be one of the best. Otherwise you're not in that kind of startup, you know, explosive evolution, VC scheme. So when you want to perform that way, you know, it is you against other people and you can collaborate, but in the end you're also competitors. And that is just one to one the same. You know, you take inspiration from others, you can use some of it, but in the end, it just turns out you just have to focus on your own thing. You should do what matters to you.

You should do what you believe in, and you should trust in your own idea. Of course, you should always reflect on your idea, but you should always stick to what matters in the direction you want to go. And I think that's one to one the same. The other thing is, I really realized is that in sports there is no bullshit. I mean, people try, but in the end, like, there is no bullshit, because in the end what matters is the results that you give. And I think in my professional career prior to coming to scale up, there was a lot of people who managed to talk their way out of shit, saying, hey, you know, it's not me, and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, then the finger started pointing to the person who was not complaining.

Whereas when you're in a team, then you know, the immediate results, they come into play and you go in and then you address the problem and you don't address the person. So you're saying, hey man, you know, we saw that in that game you didn't perform. I noticed this and that that could be done better. Maybe we can work on it or maybe we can analyze it together, or maybe you should be aware of it. Like, there's many spans. There's also different from personality to personality. But attacking the problem, not attacking the person, is something that is very, very easy to do in sports, but it's much harder to do in a professional life generally because people are a little bit more sensitive.

People don't necessarily like to be measured. A lot of people are like, oh, measuring is bad, and it is bad in many aspects, but finding that way of attacking the process and not attacking the person and focusing on the process and not focusing necessarily on the results, all of that are portable one to one. Because in the end, what, what gives you results, either in the sporting world or in, in the working world, is the work that you did to achieve the results. The results in itself don't give you anything. It's the work that you did that made the results. And then the results are in turn you know, the fruits of, of your hard work. But if you focus only on the results, then you don't do the work.

And if you don't do the work, you don't get the results.

Leszek

The more I think about it, the more I get a sense that actually sports psychology could be transplanted one to one to psychology of running organizations, that specific field. Because, I mean, there are specific aspects of sports psychology and I think that would help a lot. And I think many of your points actually point to that space, right, of thinking about competing, thinking about running the team the right way, having the right objectives, attacking the right things. Sorry, I can run. I could talk about it for ages and treaties and.

Patrick Jørgensen

Yeah, me too, me too. I think the best analogy, it took me years to accept and understand. But like, when I started with my first sports psychologist, I was like, hey, she said results don't matter. And I was like, cut the crap. We all, we both know that's not true. Like, I'm in the sports for results and we're all fighting for results.

Obviously results matter. But then she was like, no, because you can't control results. I mean, in the end you're competing against others. These others might have a good day and that might affect you. And will that mean that your performance was bad? No, not necessarily. You could have been at the peak of your performance, but if another person's performance was better than yours and you met that guy early in the competition, you turn out with a very bad result.

Contract performance in the opposite way. You might have had the way where people broke their legs or were sick or whatever and you find yourself in the final and your performance was shit and, and you might have gotten a good result out of bad performance, but that's just the consequence of a lot of con things that you also had no control over. So it took me years to actually accept that premise because I was like, hey, but results matter, you know, like, you cannot tell me that they don't matter. I'm goal oriented.

Like it's part of my DNA. I want results. Right, but the results matter for your daily work, you know, like the goal that you have is setting the direction of what you need to do. And that's why they matter and that's why you need to keep on remembering them. It's. It's when things become tough and you start to doubt everything. You have to remember, you know, okay, why am I doing this?

Look at the results and then building your path all the way to that so that you can focus on the immediate thing. But when you're under pressure and you start thinking about other things than what you are actually should be doing in order to achieve the results, then as I'm telling young kids, typically it's like filling up your computer. If your attention span is 100%, then if you're filling up that hundred percent with other things, then what actually gets to what you want, Right? So if you're thinking about gold medal, but thinking about gold medal doesn't give you the gold medal, actually the performance task. So you should fill up your attention span with performance and work and not fill your mental space with hey, how awesome would be if I win or what happens if I don't win, what will people think about me? All that stuff. Because in the end, you'll be using 20 or 30% of your capacity on what actually gives you what you want and 70% of capacity on just noise.

That doesn't help you in any way. So some of the secrets is really pushing the boundaries, focus all the way to, hey, I know what to do to achieve this. I need to do this and that. And then I need to do it 100% and only if I did 100%, I can see if the plan was good or the plan was bad. And if the plan was bad, I can iterate. If the plan was good, then perhaps it was just circumstances that made that I didn't get what I wanted. And I just have to be honest with myself around it, both in a positive and a negative way.

If, if I won the whole competition, my performance was bad, I need to be honest. And if I lost early, early in my performance, great. I need to be honest as well.

Leszek

Yeah, there is an element of randomness or luck, if you will, in this whole game, I guess. And as you said, it's not under control. The thing is under control. And my takeaways from this is that your execution is under control.

Patrick Jørgensen

Yours Exactly.

Leszek

And that's the key.

Patrick Jørgensen

Interesting.

Leszek

Interesting. I want to talk also about your approach to building business leading teams. In the previous conversation, you describe your style as even. You use the word anarchist. And I'd like to ask you to unpack this concept and maybe discuss some Advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

Patrick Jørgensen

Sure. So extending on what I said just before. Well, being aware that what matters to the individual contributor is having as much focus as possible on the task at hand. I believe that as a leader, what you need to do is you need to make sure that the individual has the right goal. Right. So what matters to me is not dictating what people do is ensuring that people know what needs to be done on a high level and then get those people to solve the problems themselves. So in many ways I'm not standing on top of them and saying, hey, you know, you should be coding this way or you should be using that tool, or I just heard this, do that, do this, do that.

Quite the contrary. I've seen myself as a servant to everyone. I am also responsible. So like there's, in the end, you know, there is a real hierarchy to it, but it's very important to me to break down the boundaries and saying, hey, I serve a role just like all of you. I know my role is to ensure that I cover all the noise away from you. But in the end, you guys are the ones who are the stars. You're the ones that are important.

And I'm just ensuring that you guys have the perfect setting for making the right decisions. And then it turns out that depending on the individual that you have, you have to adjust your level of control because some people respond well to having somebody that, that you can fight, fight well with and, and you know, that will, that will push you back and, and ensure that, you know, if they're getting too close to the edge that you'll pull them back and others will enjoy, you know, having a little bit more freedom and, and just having you as sparring and, and just, you know, the rubber dark technique, you know, just being that person that you, if they have questions, they can talk or you'll be asking them leading questions, helping them to get along. So I'm not trying at any point in time to dictate our mandate. I'm just trying to empower as much as possible. And in that flow, I need to ensure that people know what's important for the business because that's ultimately the jobs of the leader to determine and to ensure that the message comes across in the right way to the individual. And it might not be served in the exact same way to the individual because it means different things for each individual person.

Leszek

Frankly, I really like the work word anarchist or anarchism in this context. I much prefer it than the word empowerment or empowering. Like it's it's a distinct and it's sort of specific. It's, it's a total different narrative, if you will. So just a comment, but I'd like to talk about also Scala Finance, business as a business. And could you describe the problem that Scala Finals addresses for, for other businesses? And how, how does your business model offer a new way of managing finances?

And how do you believe can disrupt the traditional financial management?

Patrick Jørgensen

Sure. So when we started off, so the two guys who got the idea, they started off saying like, you know, one of them has a huge portfolio of companies and he's like, well, they have no clue what they're doing. And then the other guy's like, I could tell them exactly what they need to be focusing on and what's going on in their business. And that's how the idea basically started. So they were like, hey, could we turn this into a business? And so the business actually came from the idea that many companies have actually no clue what's going on with their finances. It is a pain that is brought upon them because they have to.

Money is dominating. It's like the life organ of your company. Right. So you might have an idea about changing the world, you might have an idea about creating a product, you might have an idea about doing something. But in the end you're confronted with money because money is the driver of your business, either through paying your own salary or making money for yourself, or hiring others or having hosted software or whatever. But money is everywhere. So at some point you need to manage that money.

And not everyone knows how to do that. Not everyone knows what to focus on. And ultimately many people feel like it is a black box. So what are your opportunities? Well, you could hire a cfo. The problem with hiring a CFO at an early stage company is that it's very, very expensive. Or you could, you know, ask your bookkeeper, but that bookkeeper might not really know LAPA strategy. They're bookkeepers. Yes, exactly.

So there's this gap between, hey, what happens if I don't have the money to hire a qualified cfo? Because a qualified CFO is even more expensive than just a cfo. Right. And how can I get that sparring. And this is where we thought, hey, you know, why don't we create this business that can actually solve the financial management for you? So taking away the pain of starting a company where you're confronted with money so that you can focus on the reason why you started the company, which is to change the world, build a product or whatever. So we Started off with that idea and then we said, okay, well we know we have to build software because software effectivizes everything.

And by effectivizing it, we can reduce the cost to our customers and to ourselves and thereby we can handle a lot more companies with a lot fewer people through automation. Right? So automation was definitely one of our core values and value being value driven was another. And with that we set on, on the journey to actually take away the pain of starting a company. So our customers in the beginning, they got a CFO partner that we called and that CFO partner would then act as a partnering CFO to that company. So as a fractional cfo. And we would develop the software to improve the communication between the company owner, founder, CEO, whatever, and the CFO partner in order to create this match made in heaven where the company owner can see data on himself without asking the cfo.

But if you can still get the strategic sparring from the cfo. And the CFO then produces a monthly report, helps with budget and forecasting, financial modeling, all that stuff that's important for you when you're managing your company, raising money and so on, so forth, in comes AI. So at the very beginning we knew that we wanted to do something that was at some point fully self managed, right? And I told, I sent deck to our CEO and I said like, yeah, in five to 10 years time we might even hit an AI CFO, right?

That would be, how amazing would that be? And then a couple of years ago, ChatGPT really became a thing and increasing, kind of taking over the world. And people were truly amazed about what it could do. So we were curious and we started to test out saying, hey, can we integrate this to our system so that it can produce stuff for us? You know, so hey, it's even more automation, it's better for everyone, it's cheaper for the users, cheaper for us, and it frees up our resources to focus on even more important matters. By the time with GPT3, that model didn't really work well enough. So we're like, it's not running.

And then GPT4 came along and then stuff really starts to take off. And so now we're actually on the journey of creating a fully fledged AI cfo. And so the AI CFO is then taking the truly newly founded companies like completely down to earth, have no money for a cfo, but actually give them the CFO capabilities through artificial intelligence, so that they have the ability to connect to their accounting system, which is mandated by law in many countries, get the insights that they need get a reporting being able to have, as you say in Danish, finger on the pulse of what's going on and then also make it to your next funding round. And then at some point if you outgrow the AI cfo, then you can hire a real fractional CFO with us or eventually also hire your own when you're really, really big. And the AI CFO should then be an assistant across all paths of a journey as well. Because hey, if it's empowering you, why wouldn't it empower your CFO or your fractional cfo?

Leszek

Exactly. I mean the cfo, one of the things that this person does is he's a business analyst and these tools are great for that. I mean, I'm referring to generally like things like Claude, even the ChatGPT4 is like the analysis part of it is great. I mean just those out of the box solution and like with, you know, fine tuning, making it work together with your existing product. It sounds amazing really. I have follow up to that, which is how difficult it is to actually work with clients in different locations. I mean there are, you know, ifrs, generally accepted accounting principles and things of that sort. But. But it has a lock, specifically the accounting.

But it also sort of affects the financial management, the local regulations, when it comes to finance has its own flavors. They have their own flavors. So how you deal with that and do you focus on specific markets and that use the same accounting principles or money reporting, financial performance reporting standards, or you go broadly and see how things develop? What's your strategy here, if I may ask?

Patrick Jørgensen

So we started off our company in Denmark because this is where we had, you know, most of our portfolio and we got our traction, we expanded to the uk. So we're also in the UK right now with our services and we're not done with the aicfo.

It's still on the waiting list. So something that we're incrementally building. Well, it's very important to say that the AI CFO will not do bookkeeping. Right. So artificial intelligence bookkeeping is a different kind of product than the one we're building. So we're assuming that you already have an accounting system with bookkeeping data and the bookkeeping data that can be sort.

Leszek

Of exposed to the system. Right.

Patrick Jørgensen

So we will integrate to your accounting system and through that integration we will be able to do analysis and so on and so forth. So the AI CFO is intended to actually do controlling. So it's intended to actually go in and check the quality of your Data saying hey, you know, you probably need to clean up this, this, that and, and, and whatnot. But it is, it will not do bookkeeping for you, so it will not go in and yeah, look at doing automated bookkeeping because that's just too big of a project and something that that other people are, are trying to do.

Leszek

Actually, I was not asking about bookkeeping itself. I kind of get that. It's sort of another area of expertise and it's specifically that area is really localized, but there's an overlap between what you can do with finances and the local sort of regulations. Things of like you can depreciate this and in one country you cannot do that in, in another country. And this sort of decision actually influences your, your gross margin or, or your EBITDA or whatever. So I'm trying, I was asking about those. So.

Patrick Jørgensen

Yeah, but, but so, so the LLM, so far as we have seen, we've asked it about, you know, Danish kind of regulation and it is a LLM, Right. And built in, in the United States because we're, we're base ourselves on, on, on Claude and chatgpt. Right. So it's, it's a general model with general knowledge. But actually I knew a lot about how stuff were regulated and done in Denmark and also how it was done in the uk so we have strong theories that it knows pretty much what the regulations are in the different countries. But a lot of our conversations with our customers are, you know, of course this is part of it, but it's also very, you know, fundamental, you know, stuff that is true everywhere, like hey, you know, you've spent too much on this and that this is the strategies to alleviate it and it doesn't have to be that specific necessarily for it to be valuable.

Leszek

Got it. Like Lou, gross margin is a gross margin, whether it's in U.S. uK or Denmark.

Patrick Jørgensen

Exactly.

Leszek

And the idea that it's trending in one direction and why is it so, or what's causing that. It's. I think it's international. So. But maybe we got much into detail. I was just like curious how things like this actually can be addressed.

Patrick Jørgensen

But I think, I think, I think it's an interesting point though because what we're trying to do is we're trying to leverage all the knowledge that the AI has, which basically is way sufficient to be a very competent cfo and we're trying to fit all the data and all the tooling around it in order to actually transform it into a cfo. Right. So what I'm typically the Analogy I'm typically giving the team is we're not building an AI, right? The AI is there, it's already there. We're building the AI university. We're building the university that transforms this artificial intelligence into a cfo. It already has the knowledge that it needs.

We just need to make sure that it's utilizing it correctly. We just need to make sure that it's not hallucinating. We just need to make sure that it's utilizing, that it has the right data made available to it. We just need to know that it can utilize the right tools in order to succeed. Right. And that is effectively the same thing as, as doing some sort of academy or coursework for, for another person as saying, hey, you know, we developed this tool, this is what we'll teach you how to use that tool. And through using that tool, you'll be X times more productive.

And that's basically what we're trying to do with an AI cfo. And the great thing about that is when the model will be evolving because it will, you know, then GPT5, which is remerd, and all of these new models that will come along, well, they'll just make the intelligence better, but they will not necessarily mean in any way. And that's not our goal, that we need to change the tooling and the data because that will still be the same data it needs to be doing the work on. So we're just trying to maximize, shaping and optimizing whatever model we get available. That cannot do out of the box things with your data because it's not connected out of the box. It doesn't also have the channels and tools it needs to be efficient out of the box. But that's where we come in.

So we're creating that shell and, and we're creating that kind of security that, you know, an LLM can actually be trustworthy enough for you to, to trust your finances and get really strategic and valuable insights in for you as a company.

Leszek

The main target group, if I may ask about this is my assumption is that these are actually startups, at least that's one of them, because they actually face this problem of, you know, necessity of managing finances, having it under control, but also they have scarcity of resources and they, they somehow need to tackle this ineffective way. So my guess, and you also talk about it, but I just want to like, get it out, I just want to make sure that I, that I understand it correctly, that this is the main target.

Patrick Jørgensen

Yeah, so, so our target, so our services is targeting a little Bit of a higher end than the newly founded startups that have very little resources, but they have the same problem. Right. And then we said, well this will ultimately fit perfectly into that space. Right. So we'll be able to target people. Just found a company today saying, hey, it's great. I have, I don't know, €10,000 that I got from family and friends to start a company.

I don't know what to do with it and I need to spend the money well, well maybe I should hire an AI CFO that can actually help me make good decisions so that I'm getting the maximum out of it. Maybe can also help me do some reporting so that people know what money are going for and then at some point will help me raise new capital. Right. So that's kind of like the journey we're on. But also, you know, people who have, I don't know, a lot more capital and a lot more experience but just need, you know, some more information. You know that security that, that finance is good enough. It would also fit for bigger companies who already have a finance manager.

Maybe that person is not, doesn't have the CFO title. But the, the goal is that it should basically be able to fit anyone because as it is, you know, it is a wordless kind of standard. So what's true is, is very often true. Then of course there's differences in terms of what strategic decisions and what you can do. But generally if you're working your numbers correctly, they should be telling a story and you cannot change that story that much. Right. And so the conclusions out of it are pretty much given.

And then of course the decisions based on that is an open funnel. Right. So it should be valuable for anyone. And basically the more advanced you are, the different kind of conversations you can have with your AI cfo and it's always nice to have some sort of a mentor to get help with. So we're trying to target the startup scale up segment with this and we already have a very good offering for our more of a top line startups segment and we're now targeting all the way to the bottom and saying hey, all of you can get this software product and yeah, and we just want to help people out.

Leszek

So I'm wondering if you have noticed a change in the demand for having finances under control since actually the interest rate rose and the financial and the capital for startups has actually become more scarce. For me that would be natural conclusion that like the capital more scarce, have to have more under contract control. The Runway is even more Significant, it's even shorter or you have to make sure that it's longer because the round is not coming up in a couple of months. You need a much longer Runway. Have you noticed change in the market from your customer's perspective?

Patrick Jørgensen

We have had a lot of challenges as well with the market changing and the mentality changing. So whereas before, you know, like money was hanging a little bit looser on the trees than they are today, there were a lot more risk willing people out there and funding was a little bit easier to get, which means that basically there would be more like companies to be found. But we also sensed that the conversation changed. As you said before, where before it was like, how can I maximize for my, my round and make sure that I get the biggest valuation possible. Now it's, you know, like my investors want to see me a path to profitability or they would like to ensure that my Runway is long enough and so on and so forth. So, you know, all of that. We've also hit a lot of churn because of bankruptcy in our second, unfortunately because of the market as well.

But yeah, we're in a unique position. We also were well aware of that. We can actually see the consequences of the macro directly on our customer base because they're in the most vulnerable aspect of the financial market. And our CFO partners have been having a shift in the conversations that they've had because people are more scared of running out of cash and are been made more aware of by their investors and board to ensure that they're not running out of cash too fast.

Leszek

Okay, but speaking of finances, you successfully closed a round in March, I believe. Pretty nice run. So congrats. A little bit later still, and I'd like to ask what's next? What's coming up next with Scratch Finance? You've mentioned the AI based cfo, but can you give us sort of an overview what's coming up?

Patrick Jørgensen

I mean, that is basically it, right? So we are currently based in Denmark and we're currently based in the UK and we are focusing on those two markets with our software and service kind of model where we have the full power of leveraging our customers with that. And now we want to just expand even further into the world with our AI cfo. And the money that we raise for the round is intended to get us to being able to do that. So we want to take over the entire planet, the us, all of Europe, and whatever we can with the A cfo because we truly believe that this one will truly help companies be more efficient. And focus on what matters. And that's basically our ultimate goal, is to succeed in there.

Leszek

Nice. Nice. I'd like to wrap up with a leadership question, which is what would be your most important leadership lessons that you've learned throughout your career? And how some of the. Maybe, can you refer some of the experiences that shape you, the way you lead today?

Patrick Jørgensen

So one of the most important lessons that I got, and unfortunately, I knew it before I learned the lesson, but I learned it the hard way, is that you'd much rather hire one strong guy than four weak guys. And so when it comes to, you know, money, you'd much rather pay one guy who's worth it three times the salary of one other guy, and then just hire one instead of four, because that guy will make a whole world of change and run 10 to 100 times faster than the four. Um, and I've made that unfortunate experience myself of seeing what the differences are between working with people who are truly skilled and talented, where, you know, you're kind of humbled by being in the room with them as their leader even, and the other one, where you're the smartest guy in the room and thereby you have to make sure that they are following your direct orders, because you can only micromanage as much like that much what. What truly matters is getting people who are actively better than you, especially in the things that they're doing, to do their job so that you can ensure that they're performing to the maximum of their ability. And I think that is the most important role of any leader in any place, to make sure that whoever you're leading is being the best version of themselves as possible.

Leszek

Nice. Nice. I mean, I believe. I sincerely believe in that, too. I think there's another reference to sports. I believe in some way or things that actually exist in two worlds, I think worlds, you cannot have four people that cannot play or fence and get the results.

Patrick Jørgensen

No, no, for sure. And. And I mean, I can say with, with a lot of pride that my entire team is twice or three times as smart as I am. So I'm. I'm lucky that they still trust me to some extent when I open my mouth.

Leszek

Same here. All right, Patrick, thank you very much. Thank you for sharing your insights, your wisdom, and thank you for giving us a glance into the Scala finance world. Thank you very much.

Patrick Jørgensen

Thank you. Thank you for having me. BetterTech leadership powered by Brain Hub follow Les Schick on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Better Tech Leadership newsletter.

‍