92. The Alchemist

00:47 [Lars Peter Nissen]

We talk a lot about technology and its implications for humanitarian action on this show and with good reason. Literally every aspect of the business has been transformed by information technology over the past decades. And today we can do things in real time. For example, communications, cash distributions, geospatial analysis that we could only dream of just decades ago. And when you think about how important information technology has become, it can seem right down mad that we continue to conduct a good chunk of our business on platforms that are controlled by a small number of very loosely regulated and massively powerful companies. Companies for whom we are much more of a commodity than a customer. That has profound implications for our work, in particular because we are dealing with highly vulnerable populations. That's the problem that today's guest has set out to change. Neil Smyth is the founder of Alkemio, a tech startup that seeks to provide real alternatives to commercially driven collaborative platforms. The tagline is safe spaces for collaboration. And it's a really interesting project. It's a big swing that Neil is taking. He is up against very powerful opponents and there's no telling whether he will be successful. But no matter what, just the fact that Alkemio is beginning to question the dominance of the big companies and trying to get a foothold in a very difficult business is a truly inspiring example. We have previously dealt with the issue of the dependency on tech. In episode 76, The Technophobe, Pierrick de Vidal from ICRC laid out his analysis of how our ability to operate according to the humanitarian principles is being undermined by the way we use technology. If you haven't listened to the episode yet, you should check it out once you listen to this one. If you like this episode, why don't you help us out by promoting the show? Send the link to a couple of colleagues, review us on whatever platform you're listening on, or send us an email with suggestions for episodes and comments on what we're doing. You can reach us on info at trumanitarian.org. But most importantly, enjoy the content.

Neil Smyth, welcome to Trumanitarian.

3:15 Neil Smyth

I'm delighted to be here.

3:16 Lars Peter Nissen

It's a lovely evening. We're in The Hague.

We are sitting in a co-working space called The Hague Tech. And we have a bottle of wine, actually. You claim you have two bottles of wine, so it'll be, I'm sure, a long and interesting conversation.

3:31 [Neil Smyth]

It'll be a good evening.

3:33 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Maybe for the listeners, just begin by explaining what is The Hague Tech?

3:38 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, so The Hague Tech is, as you said, a co-working space, but it's also a community of innovators combining the usual startup-type innovation companies in there, but also a good representation from public sector innovation bodies, such as Deakin Campus, that are trying to bridge the innovation from the startup world into the public sector in an effective and practical way. So it's quite a mixed community. It's a more balanced than a normal startup co-working space.

4:13 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So it's not all just about money?

4:16 [Neil Smyth]

No, no, no, no, no. Public values play very strongly here, for sure.

4:19 [Lars Peter Nissen]

And you're the co-founder of something called Alkemio. What does Alkemio do?

4:23 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, Alkemio. So first, it's a hard name. If you struggle to remember it, it's actually Esperanto for alchemy. And the idea is to be able to take the raw ingredients of society in terms of our willingness to collaborate, our talent to collaborate, and trusting each other to collaborate and make something valuable out of it. So what Alkemio is trying to do is it's trying to make it much easier to work together. We offer safe spaces for collaboration. And that is a digital platform to create succinctly online environments where you can work with each other safely and backed by an organisation that's designed to be safe and trustable. So that working to serve the purpose, serving societal values, as opposed to shareholders' profit-maximisation interests.

5:06 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So it sounds nice, but unpack that a bit for us. What does that actually mean?

5: 11 [Neil Smyth]

So Alkemio was founded from the base with the purpose to help society work better together. And the conviction is that, you know, unless we can fundamentally improve our ability to work together to address the challenges that we face, we're going to struggle. So if you're familiar with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, unless we can really make progress on SDG 17, we're going to struggle with SDGs 1 to 16. And Alkemio is...

5:37 [Lars Peter Nissen]

I'm sure all of our audience is very familiar with all of the SDGs, but just remind me number 17, what is it?

5:44 [Neil Smyth]

So 17 is basically Structures for Collaboration, Societal Structures for Collaboration. And then, you know, you can translate that more broadly into our ability to collaborate. How do we effectively trust each other in any given scenario to work better together?

5:56 [Lars Peter Nissen]

And of course, when you say structures to collaborate, I'm saying Slack and Teams and Google, Office Suite. I mean, do we really need another one?

6:06 [Neil Smyth]

No, I mean, if I'm talking about legal, I'm talking about the sort of, you know, if you like the societal norms, I'm talking about, you know, the UN, I'm talking about legal frameworks, there are societal structures to collaborate. But, you know, as what you referred to there, I call them digital tools, digital platforms, et cetera.

6:22 [Lars Peter Nissen]

But Alkemio is a digital platform.

6:24 [Neil Smyth]

Alkemio is absolutely a digital platform. Yeah. But with the mission to help society collaborate. So what makes Alkemio different? Alkemio is offering you safe spaces for collaboration. The idea is that you can create a digital space where you can define the topic you want to make change on together. And around that change, you create the people, you know, gather the people in organisations who want to make that change with you. Yes, you can create subspaces for pieces in, for, you know, subgroups inside that group. But fundamentally, the attention point is different. The attention point is that change. And around that, you have the contributors, as opposed to, you know, if you look at the Slacks of this world, there are other sort of messaging. You tend to have a lot of differences, basically communication channels beside each other. The main notion of actually what is the change has been the central point. What is the purpose you're trying to achieve? Alkemio then offers these safe spaces.

7:10 [Lars Peter Nissen]

But why is Reddit unsafe?

7:12 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, so you can have a good conversation on Reddit. And obviously, they have all obligations to moderate the content into it. But fundamentally, they are a commercial party. They are there to make profit. That is their mission. That is their purpose.

7:26 [Lars Peter Nissen]

But they offer a beautiful product. Why is it unsafe?

7:31 [Neil Smyth]

So you simply cannot know what is happening with your data in a structured way, because their business model essentially is you are the product in many ways, among those things. And who decides what algorithms or what content you're being served in terms of what, you know, to get your attention, right? Because if you're trying to maximise someone's attention, you maximise their outrage or the strong emotions, et cetera, it has the side effects, which we've seen around social cohesion and polarisation in society. So you have their drivers, essentially, which is profit maximisation, is not aligned with the wider societal benefit of actually having people work better together. And I would also argue in, if I may on that one, that, you know, it's also, you know, it's almost, you know, think of a particular situation. Say you want to, say, drive water quality in a particular refugee context, right? And how do you go about it? Do you set up a Reddit group, Slack group, WhatsApp, Facebook?

8:32 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Facebook.

8:32 [Neil Smyth]

Facebook, okay.

8:34 [Lars Peter Nissen]

I'm old school.

8:35 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, no, that's good, that's good. It's very well trodden, it's very well known, and that's a huge advantage, right? People can understand it on Facebook and access it.

8:41 [Lars Peter Nissen]

And they're already on it, so you don't have to drive them to a new channel. There's no friction.

8:47 [Neil Smyth]

Exactly. So there's a low friction element too, which makes it easy to get going. But it brings three problems, I would say, with that. One is that you're not going to be as effective as I think you could be on a platform that's designed to help you achieve change together, with best practises and knowledge and setup to help you achieve that change.

9:04 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So you provide content specifically to achieve change.

9:07 [Neil Smyth]

Absolutely.

9:07 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So it's not just a platform.

9:21 [Neil Smyth]

Oh, it's not just functionality. It's also knowledge, as well as interaction and integration of AI. So that's one, right? So it's basically trying to make you be more effective in achieving a change.

9:19 [Lars Peter Nissen]

It's a huge task, though.

9:21 [Neil Smyth]

Oh, absolutely. But the second thing that it'll bring is that, you know, you sort of right now, if you go on Facebook, with someone who's on WhatsApp, probably good. But if someone's on Reddit, you're at different silos, right? It's different groups. So you actually tend, because people tend to go into different walled gardens. And Facebook will actually protect their walled garden, right? It's not in their interest to allow you to connect to other people at another walled gardens. And the third thing, of course, you are the product if you're on Facebook, right? Yeah.

9:44 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Yeah. But the walled garden bit, Neil, aren't you just creating your own walled garden? I don't get the difference.

9:51 [Neil Smyth]

So that ties back to the organisation behind Alkemio. So yes, you know, you could see us at some point as being our own walled garden. But Alkemio is, in some sense, giving it away, right? In the sense that, you know, we are not out there to maximise our profit.

We're there to maximise our impact.

10:06 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So if I get fed up with Alkemio and I want to export all my data to Facebook, I can do that.

10:12 [Neil Smyth]

So stronger even, you can even run your own version for Alkemio. Alkemio is fully open source. You can run your own version of it. You can download all the data and content and upload it to your own version. The idea is to take away the barriers to someone sort of doing it. And of course, we hope people use the commercially hosted Alkemio service to make sure Alkemio is viable and to get the network effect kicking in. But fundamentally, our guarantee into the market is that, you know, we're fully open source. You can run it yourself. You can take all your data. Data's yours. It's not ours. There's no hidden algorithms, et cetera, et cetera, into it. And, you know, if you look at us as an organisation with the mission to help society collaborate, then, you know, our driver is to help connect across the silos. There's way too much duplication going on. People are reinventing the left, right and centre. And also, you know, and even a more, maybe a more significant unlock of value is that how do you connect in and unlock the talent of society to contribute to these challenges? Because it's simply at the heart, at the moment, very, very hard to know where you can connect into if you have a certain amount of hours and talent into it. So there's, you know, if you can get a collaboration platform in play where people trust and are willing to actually work on top of and to build on top of, then I think we can actually take all of society's ability to collaborate up a level.

11:28 Lars Peter Nissen

So tell me, how is Alkemio governed?

11:31 [Neil Smyth]

We started off life as a foundation, and that was in 2020. And after about, I guess, two years of the journey, it became very apparent that if we can achieve the goals we set out to achieve, then the actual amount of value that would be unlocked would be staggering. I mean, think of, you know, any of the massive social networks.

11:48 Lars Peter Nissen

So you expect to be very rich very soon?

11:51 [Neil Smyth]

Absolutely not. You know, and that's an explicit choice. I mean, I am actually an entrepreneur. I've had scale ups. So I've been busy with startups. So, you know, I have a luxury position. But, you know, if you're trying to achieve a massive scale change, then you also have to make it safe for everybody to come on board and support that journey. So we came to the conclusion that Alkemio could be a huge value unlock. And then how do you protect that value? If you have a lot of value, then you also have a lot of things to fight about. And I was introduced, thanks to a friend of mine, to the concept of steward ownership in, I think, early 2022. And immediately, it just resonated straight up. And it's, you know, we adopted that as a legal form and put all of that information also out into the public so people can copy our approach. But probably good for your audience to also explain a little bit what steward ownership means. So steward ownership is essentially about putting purpose before profit. And there's two key principles in there. One is that the purpose, essentially, in our case, cannot be compromised. Alkemio cannot be purchased. Yes, we can take capital in. But if anybody puts capital into Alkemio, then they do not buy any voting rights. They just get economic interests into it. And so you have a really, basically, very strong lock on the purpose. And the second is that you allow people to have an economic upside from the venture, but in a way that's capped.Which means that if someone puts, say, 100 euros in, they might have a right to, say, 350 euros back at some point in future dividends. But it's capped. Which means that if you particularly have achieved this huge, hopefully, you know, societal value unlock, that will be huge…. The value that's over after paying back those investors actually goes to the foundation above to allocate out in line with the mission of Alkemio. So it's a very different model.

13:45 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So it sounds to me like what open AI should have been.

13:49 [Neil Smyth]

Should have been. Absolutely. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. Very well put. There, essentially, that lock on value was, you know, in hindsight, quite weak. You know, we've got a structure whereby there's Alkemio holding. And then we have our own foundation above it. A community foundation with stewards. But we also have an independent foundation where we have no control over that foundation. And that foundation has a veto right against pretty much all of the significant decisions you can take as a venture, such as selling it or such as, you know, awarding big salaries to people, et cetera. And, you know, steward ownership, it's very much a growing concept, particularly in Europe. There's a very strong organisation in Germany called Purpose Economy that drives it. Denmark has historically had a very strong lead presence in this area. And Holland also has a very rapidly growing community. We are stewards, we're one of the key players in that space. And, you know, it actually, what it allows you to do is very much align the interests of all stakeholders around the venture and not just the interest of shareholders.

14:48 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So I'm sure most people listening to this are familiar with the concept of a B Corp. How is steward ownership different from a B Corp?

13:49 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah. So, you know, first, you know, all credit to B Corp. B Corp is a super movement, super development. It allows people to actually really, you know, show that they're doing the right, they're trying to do the right thing. But at B Corp, you know, fundamentally, the shareholder is still in charge, right? They have decided that, you know, doing good is actually part of their, you know, their way of maximising their shareholder value. But it can be changed, right? So in some ways, it's a temporary thing. You know, in the case of Alkemio, you know, if I turned around tomorrow and said that I wanted to, you know, together with the other steward to be able to actually, you know, sell Alkemio to say Microsoft, we simply cannot do it. We would have to convince an independent foundation with quite a large set of stakeholders behind it that, you know, this particular transaction is good for the overall mission of the foundation, which I don't think it would be. So you hired some lawyers to basically say no, if you want to pull an Elon Musk. It's not even lawyer, it's actually a fundamental, it's an approach, it's a pattern. And, you know, I said, there's some wonderful case studies out there by Purpose Economy in particular to try and inspire it. There's some very well-known companies too. I mean, ones you might think about, Carlsberg is actually steward-owned, Bosch, Odin, there's some quite well-known names out there. And, you know, in the case of Alkemio, that was the, if you like… the stewardship gave me, if you like, and the other people around Alkemio, the solution to three hard problems. One was how can you really guarantee the purpose in a way that everyone in the market, anyone interacting with you knows that this cannot be changed. Second, you still have to raise capital. We are a startup scale, we will need capital. We need, you know, I want more, always more, you want to grow faster. But thirdly, you know, how do you then also ensure that people who are contributing to that mission can do good and do well? And it's very much, it's often a false dichotomy that, you know, people actually, you know, come out of college and you want to go and work in a legal firm and earn lots of money or do you want to go work in an NGO and, you know, do lots of good. And I think that actually can be a middle ground whereby you can do a lot of good and, you know, and do well. You're not going to get rich, you're not going to buy a boat, you know, you should be able to get enough of a jump on life to buy a house and get your family raised, etc.

17:08 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Great, so we've spoken about how Alkemio is governed, how we make sure that it, once it becomes hugely successful, yeah, of course, once it becomes the next unicorn.

17:20 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But a unicorn is determined by market value, so we will always have a lower market value, but...

17:26 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Well, you'll still have the value, you just can't get it out for yourself?

17:30 [Neil Smyth]

You'll still be unlocking the value, but, you know, our mission is to help society collaborate better together. And it could be that somewhere along the journey to helping society work better together actually reduce prices, right? Because, you know, you want to make sure you have a viable business, that's absolutely critical. So you actually sustain enough capital to grow and actually have a viable enterprise. But ultimately, that whole enterprise is there to serve the purpose, not to serve shareholders.

17:52 [Lars Peter Nissen]

A collaborative unicorn.

17:54 [Neil Smyth]

You could, yeah, certainly, the value unlocked can be much, much, much bigger, just not in terms of shareholder value.

17:58 [Lars Peter Nissen]

That's all cool, but how do you get venture capitalists to invest in this?

18:03 [Neil Smyth]

It is definitely a challenge. You know, if people ask me about, so we're one year on the way now with the steward ownership. Essentially, I refused to take in any external capital until we had actually this structure in place to keep it clean. And I tend to say steward ownership is brilliant for the markets, repositioning the market. It's brilliant for your staff, people who are basically contributing towards the journey. But it's a strange beast for the venture capitalist or investor world. We have found a set of angel investors who have fairly strong trust in key people in Alkemio who are willing to say, well, listen, we think the return is still pretty decent, right, economically, and not a difference. It's not your normal investment, but we think actually it's a good structure and we're willing to support it. But to do that at scale requires someone who's willing to take a bit of a step into a different funding pattern. And that is a challenge.There's no ways of fighting about it. And we see it as part of our journey to also try to show that it is possible to do a successful steward ownership venture at scale. So it's a little bit of a harder path, but I think it's a worthwhile one.

19:08 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Neil, give me a sense of how much money is needed to do something like this. How much have you been able to raise? You don't need to give me the exact figures, but more or less.

And how much would you love to have?

19:18 [Neil Smyth]

So I'd love to have... That's a good question. So, you know, you're playing a big game, right? You're playing a game where you're trying to put a digital platform into play that is competing with some extremely well-resourced players in the marketplace. And you're not talking about changing your local neighbourhood. You're talking about changing fundamentally how society collaborates. And I'll come on to maybe what Alkemio is trying to achieve in a bit. And you don't do that with a few euros, right? If you play a big ticket game, you have to play big tickets. So, you know, I'm in a luxury position. I've had a good entrepreneurial journeys in the past. And other people around me, particularly my brother, has also had done some basically some good work and has some financial freedom from it. So between him and my brother, you know, we've put, I think, over a million by now into Alkemio. serious capital. We've also raised, not quite in that order, but not far, you know, at that sort of scale from external investors as well. We've also managed to get support from partners and subsidies along the journey as well, on sort of a good level. You know, not far off that as well. So it's a, you know, it's a serious game you're playing in and you need serious capital. And that's to bring the journey to the level as it is right now, where we believe we've sketched enough of the vision and have some good, you know, traction in the marketplace. And, you know, my biggest frustration by a country mile is that, you know, this is a 15, 16 person organisation that, you know, and I can carry a certain amount of financial risk, but, you know, I can't take it faster than this, not without, you know, being fair to my family. But this should be a 15, 16 person organisation and I need much more capital to scale to that because you're playing in a big game and people expect very good, ease of use, scalability, performance and all that. And, you know, we just, yeah, ultimately we just need to go a lot faster.

21:00 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So you and your brother threw in a million, you raised a million and you need another five, six at least?

21:06 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, and the fun part is of the steward ownership structure is that, you know, you're no longer selling in control, right? So whether you raise 1 million, 2 million or 10 million doesn't actually matter. You're essentially selling an entitlement to future dividends, not control over the venture. The control of the venture is held by stewards. So it's a very different proposition in the market.

21:26 [Lars Peter Nissen]

It's really, really interesting.

21:28 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, and then there's a lot of advantages to this structure that people maybe don't fully understand, which is that, you know, because you've separated control and economic interest so completely, you actually make the economic interests more tradable because you could actually imagine you sell that and get that right to future dividends and there's some kind of, you know, secondary market which means for people to put investment in, it actually becomes more liquid in some sense. And it's, you know, we do everything as transparent as we possibly can. Everything about our journey is up online. We love people to copy us. I'd love to, you know, inspire others to go down this path. I sometimes use the analogy that if a normal startup venture capital journey, you know, it's a 10 lane highway going off that direction, right? You've got service stops. You've got people to help you. It's, you know, everyone understands it. This is how you do it. And, you know, we were basically taking a little side path off into the woods, right? Some wonderful people who've given guidance and inspiration along the way, you know, people from your students, Christopher Gorin, people from Purpose Foundation, and, you know, some superb lawyers as well, but it's very much a non-trodden path. And that path needs to become much, much, much wider if we're really going to unlock the potential for society to innovate to address a lot of the challenges that we face.

22:42 [Lars Peter Nissen]

I hear what you're saying, Neil, that there is a risk in giving you data to a company that basically sees you as the commodity rather than the customer. I get that. But at the same time, we do that. We're not afraid. We trust them implicitly. We happily throw all our data at them. And I think the only person I've really heard, at least in a humanitarian context, formulate this as a massive problem was Pierrick Devidal from ICRC, who was on the show some months ago. And he talked about how neutrality is actually undermined and independence is undermined by us choosing tech platforms that are actively involved in one side or the other in a conflict. Microsoft helping the Ukrainian government evacuate their data to the cloud, for example.

23:36 [Neil Smyth]

So, yeah, first of all, super podcast, really enjoyed it. The phrase from that podcast that really stuck with me was how he said, essentially, we are hostage to the power of these large platforms. And I think on a micro level, where you make an individual decision, then I think it makes complete sense. You get a lot of functionality for free and you get effective access to functionality. The problem comes at the macro level, whereby, essentially, their interests ends up actually polarising society and driving society more into bubbles as opposed to bringing people together. And maybe one other point into that is that, to some level, yes, Facebook, just using them as one example, is safe or trustable for an individual consumer. But it's good to remember that your account and your profile on that platform exists at their discretion. They can turn you off. And there's a very interesting development now in the US initiative called Project Liberty by a well-known US entrepreneur, Frank McCourt. And he puts it quite eloquently, he says, you know, we've come back to feudalism, right? Where to some extent, we're the serfs who are now basically, you know, existing at the discretion of these larger platforms.

24:55 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Okay, I get the building on sand bit. I get that. But I would argue, I could argue… but wouldn't you say that the level of collaboration we have today because of these platforms is much greater than it was three decades ago? I mean, there's no comparison. And so it's a net positive. Okay, there are externalities. And yes, we get in slightly more fights than we used to. But damn, we can collaborate. And Alkemio is not as well known as these ones, right? So how are you increasing collaboration?

25:31 [Neil Smyth]

So I'll address the first part of that. And if you look at, we're certainly communicating a lot more. I would definitely say we're communicating a hell of a lot more. And whether we're actually collaborating is an open question. If you look at the existing sort of situation in America or even within Europe, we're much more polarised. Our ability to have fact-based coherent discussions, some would argue has actually gone down over the last 20 years and not up.

25:59 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Well, but you could also argue that LGBTQ plus people collaborate more. There's a lot of stories about teens uncertain about these things, finding a community online. And you could make the same argument with neo-Nazis who are finding themselves.

26:15 [Neil Smyth]

Oh yeah, any technology can be used for good or bad. And there's, without doubt, there's been huge, huge value and positive value unlocked by the digitalisation of society. However, we have to realise that in at least my conviction, to fit in modestly, is that we are now a digital society, right? We rely on digital tools more and more for interaction. But I find it quite bizarre that these are basically the foundation elements for our society right now. And they don't have our interests in there. We're basically building a house whereby someone else controls the plumbing, water supply, and actually even how the rooms are connected, right? You know, you would never do that as a sane society. We've sort of allowed that to happen. And I now start dealing with some of the consequences of it. And, you know, however powerful the digitalisation wave has been to date, that's going to become even more powerful with what's coming now with generative AI. Meaning that that technology is truly incredible and truly terrifying.

27:10 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Yeah, true that.

27:11 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, so, you know, unless we can get to a digital future whereby actually the digital foundations in which we stand upon have public interests embedded in them, I think we're heading for a very dangerous future. And that is in some lenses the fundamental mission of Alkemio. How do we enable a digital platform putting societal interests first to be the base in which we collaborate?

27:33 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Describe the community that is on Alkemio today?

27:36 [Neil Smyth]

Okay, yeah. So in the early phase of Alkemio, we had a lot of people who believed in the vision, which we were trying to achieve. And the platform I would now call a young adult. It has a lot of functionality, but there's still some rough edges to it.

27:47 [Lars Peter Nissen]

We call them pimply teenagers.

27:50 [Neil Smyth]

Something like that. Something like that. It's not a polished, suave, you know, 28 year old going off in a suit or something. But it's, you know, we have a strong, our strongest footprint right now is in the public sector in Holland, the City of The Hague, the Dutch Association of Cities, parties like that, who believe in basically the importance of actually having a digital platform to first of all, connect multiple stakeholders around a particular problem, as well as actually be able to trust the digital platform that they're standing on. So actually they can, you know, we're not being unfair in the marketplace. And we also now have a growing footprint in education. We've had a super collaboration over the last nearly year now with the Amsterdam University, Vrije Universiteit, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. And there, for example, they're looking to also again, you know, trying to protect the student's information from actually just giving away to Google or Microsoft or Miro or something like that. So this is all talking about, you know, the strategic level sort of advantages. And, but we also believe that the platform itself actually offers a, we think, a much more effective way to do collaboration because all of the interaction happens around the change you're trying to achieve and all the people exist around the change you're trying to achieve. And then we try to guide people on that journey to achieve their goals with a combination of things like discussion groups, like you get in Slack, with whiteboards, like you get in Miro, with collection of links, like maybe you get in some kind of browser saving setup. And, but all of those tools are all basically subservient or being used in the context of that wider change you're trying to achieve and then bundled up into libraries people can re-share knowledge.

29:23 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So I guess the way I truly feel about it, I think you could probably match the functionality of all of the commercial platforms.

29:32 [Neil Smyth]

With enough time and with enough resources.

29:34 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Yeah, I'm not sure you're there. I haven't really worked on Alkemio but…

29:37 [Neil Smyth]

We're trying to sketch the vision, right? I mean, people who work with us now still basically have to work a little bit harder than maybe they were in the other ones. But it also gets, I say, some much more dedicated and more guided process on the platform that you would get. Because, you know, you come back to my earlier point, you know, if you try to use your own ad hoc collection of tools to achieve change, you're having to do your own integration across those different tools, right? You might have somebody in Slack somebody in Miro, and they're on that teams and not on that teams, et cetera. And we're saying, well, here's a collective environment neutral between all of you. It's actually has all the pieces we think that's needed. Yes, of course, this piece is missing and it could be better, but fundamentally it's a different pattern. And we think that pattern is a fundamentally stronger pattern. than the current way of doing it.

30:17 [Lars Peter Nissen]

I guess it's the community that you're selling point, not the functionality, because I don't think you have the edge there yet?

30:26 [Neil Smyth]

No, I mean, we're playing table stakes in terms of being able to have whiteboards for multi-user collaboration or discussion groups. It's the different pattern of actually folk, the different attention point mixes fundamentally difference. And of course, the fact that the platform itself has a very different organizational focus.

30:41 [Lars Peter Nissen]

What does scaling look like in that world? What makes you scale? Because one thing is that you do a better functionality on the whiteboard. But is that really what scaling, what drives the scaling? I don't think so.

30:55 [Neil Smyth]

No, you mean, correct. I mean, functionality is never going to do the scaling. You know, if you want to really kickstart the network effect, whereby basically each individual person joining the network gets more value because the network gets bigger, etc. Then you want to have the call, you face the call star problem. How do you get the network effect to be big enough? In our case, that particular call starts looting, and the classic way to address that once you create a tool that people want to use, and then more people use the tool and you get the network effect. And in our case, that tool is a space. People right now are struggling to find an environment to work effectively together. They move that community onto Alkemio, they create a space, oh, and hey, there's another space over there, and there's another space over there, another space. So you basically bootstrap the overall network effect by making each individual space better for those communities, and then they get the secondary benefit where the real value unlock happens where actually network effect kicks in.

31:53 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So you get on Alkemio, you start your party. And once you started your party, you see that there's an even better party over in the corner and you join that one and you join that's the scaling.

32:19 [Neil Smyth]

Or you find the right people to help you, or you find that someone has put up with some kind of knowledge and best practice in the library that you can learn from and leverage from and, you know, so you know, there's many benefits in network effect that..

32:19 [Lars Peter Nissen]

What's your success story? What's the collaboration you're proudest of?

32:24 [Neil Smyth]

The one we probably enjoy the most, is probably the strongest way of putting it, is the collaboration last year with the university. That one came in through a bit of a side door, we weren't actually focusing on education. And someone said to, hey, I know someone who doesn't want to use Miro for the students' data, et cetera, et cetera. And the platform was probably a little bit immature for the course at that point. But very, very cooperative, you know, daring professor. And, you know, she set up 130 graduate students on the course. They worked in 20 different societal challenges, involved stakeholders in. She could set up her whole basically flow of the course with all the activities and whiteboards, et cetera. And one time as a template and go. And you know, her comment in the course was that, you know, actually this was, you know, if I'd known what this could do, I could have done a better course. The best compliment you can get. But the energy for us from that course as an organization was fantastic. Cause you had basis in really pulling what you're trying to achieve. And driven from the values that we're trying to put into the marketplace, was that you actually can trust what happens with your data on this particular digital platform.

32:23 [Lars Peter Nissen]

And what's the business model then? I mean, you managed to get some venture capitalists to invest, you've thrown some of your own money in. And does this professor then pay you? Where do you get money?

33:33 [Neil Smyth]

So in that particular case, that was basically a very low cost pilot. So you mean that's not where the money is. Fundamentally, our business model is people pay for spaces and you get a free space, certain number of users, certain amount of functionality, you get a plus base amount of users.

33:48 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Freemium.

33:49 [Neil Smyth]

Basically, freemium model. Exactly, exactly. So basically, you know, and you play this forward at scale and then actually the revenue becomes very, very, very significant. And that's basically a simple model that we have. You know, we are having to, you know, continually rethink it through, because obviously whatever we're doing, we're trying to do in the light of how do we best, you know, achieve our mission of helping society collaborate better. So, and if we find that some other model is better in the future for that, then we will adjust it.

34:17 [Lars Peter Nissen]

If you have to sort of, who are you in another industry or in another… Are you what… Wikipedia? Are you, what can I, Carlsberg? Are you, what are you?

34:30 [Neil Smyth]

That's an interesting question. What is Alkemio? So, if you look at say something like Linux.

When it came in, everybody thought that there was no competition possible in the open system market. You had IBM, you had Microsoft, it was completely locked down. They came in with a radically different model.

34:49 [Lars Peter Nissen]

And a very cute logo.

34:51 [Neil Smyth]

Very cute logo. Indeed, indeed, indeed. And, you know, essentially, you know, in their case, there was no sustainable business model around Linux. We're trying to combine that aspect in as well. But fundamentally, they disrupted the whole industry by actually having a very different… playing a different game. And I got some very good advice at the start of Alkemios journey, something I won't mention here, and his base was modeling, if you really want to make this vision fly, then you need to be much more Tim Berners-Lee than Marc Andreasson. So for people who aren't familiar with the web, Marc Andreasson was the commercial person behind Netscape and all that kind of stuff that was highly commercial, and Tim Berners-Lee was the person who basically invited the World Wide Web and ultimately was the largest source of unlock of value. And you know, essentially Tim, you know, World Wide Web took off because he essentially gave it away. And you know, you want to essentially give it away to allow it to be as easy for everyone else to adopt. And we're also trying to drive the network effect and make sure we're a sustainable business in a way where people actually still trust us as an organization. You know, our mission is to help collaboration, but collaboration is always important, but never urgent. That's my experience on it. People go, oh wonderful, a better way to do collaboration, but next year's budget to some level… Of course, there's always exceptions to that. We've been very lucky along our way. We also understand the potential of AI, particularly with LLM stuff that's come along the board last year. So we've actually over the last six months done quite a strong, pivot is maybe a strong word for it, but to integrate basically AI into our story as well, whereby we're trying to also make it possible to bring AI, use AI in a safe way. Again, that word safe, safety, safety, safety. And because you need ultimately to bring the power of this wonderful new technology into our collaborations, but in a way that's controlled and safe.

36:46 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So we have spoken about the community you're trying to build around Alkemio and the other party that you can join that makes it more attractive and all of this stuff. Does AI replace that? Or, I mean, how does AI play in there?

37:01 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah, good question. And so first, you know, I acknowledge that AI is staggering potential. I mean, it's ability to do jobs that we thought only humans can do, right? Or to summarize or write or to digest information. But it is also a Cambrian explosion right now. Right? I mean, there's so many different versions of A, B and C types of functionality coming out. And, you know, the same, if you like, game that was with the first version of the social networks is playing out there too, right? That essentially after your data, after this, to try and get their own basic competitive value to the marketplace to benefit the shareholders. And, you know, what role can Alkemio play in that world is so the question we asked ourselves. And we think we can also basically allow AI to be used safely. Or we have a concept we call virtual contributors in the platform. And a virtual contributor is essentially a safety layer around an AI service. You can create your own. We can have a Lars Peter AI and you can put all of your knowledge in there. And then I can come along with my particular space and collaboration. I can say, yeah, I want Lars Peter. I want you to, you know, I look at your profile and see what he doesn't train my data, it's backed by ACAPS so I can trust them, and has this kind of bias profile, that's the AI I want to use, and I'm going to bring it in and invite you to join my space, and you have the option to accept or not. So, you know, by that way, you sort of bring AI in a safe way. You control what AI have in your space, and also means that within my space, I could have multiple. So I could have multiple AIs going into there.

38:27 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So the backend would still be a large language model?

38:30 [Neil Smyth]

Backend, is the large language model.

38:32 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Trained on some specific data?

38:35 [Neil Smyth]

Yes, and we try to give them transparency.

38:39 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Okay. And then if I do that, if I do my Lars Peter AI, you then check me and say, oh yeah, this guy is cool enough, or he is actually a neo-Nazi in disguise. Or what do you do?

38:54 [Neil Smyth]

So yeah, so the question is what role should we play in that game? We should not be judge or jury. We should be neutral and facilitating. That's my very strong conviction. And so if you want to be the neutral facility party, then you have to rely on others essentially to give the accreditation.

39:09 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So I have to show people how I trained my specific AI and then they choose whether to pick me no matter who I am?

39:16 [Neil Smyth]

So I expect this is a market that will evolve. You think you like movie ratings, right? At some point, you know, people adopted a standardized settings of movie ratings. I expect that there will be a strong push in the marketplace to give people certifications essentially around the AI and what it does with your data.

39:30 [Lars Peter Nissen]

If I'm in a legal space and I'm not getting dragged into court for what I'm doing and saying, it's up to the users whether they like me or not?

39:39 [Neil Smyth]

Yeah. So what we're aiming for is that there is, if you like, a whole store on Alkemio whereby maybe you see 10,000, whatever number of virtual content is in there. You can maybe put a filter up, show me only ones that are accredited by the UN or something like that, or some other body that you trust. And then you say, well, I like that one for legal advice. I like that one for HR advice. I like that one for community building advice. I'm going to invite those ones into my space. And then whatever terms and conditions associated with them, I accept. And then I have those, if they allow me to use it, then at that point, those virtual contributors become just like a user or an organization, part of that community around the space.

40:05 [Lars Peter Nissen]

And so those terms could also be financial. So if you want to invite me in, it costs you so and so much.

40:17 [Neil Smyth]

That's one of the topics. Yeah. I expect so. We're trying to work that one out literally at the moment. It's a new market we're trying to create.

40:24 [Lars Peter Nissen]

An app store for AIs.

40:26 [Neil Smyth]

You could see it that way. Yeah. You know, with also quite a strong, if you like, trust and transparency set of demands around it, because, you know, everyone sees the power. But also a lot of people are afraid as well of what they can mean. So how do you allow people to safely interact with AI in a way that ultimately unlocks that power for use in collaboration? You know, it is quite frankly right now, I don't know how you use your AI. When I use AI right now, I open up a browser, another tab, another tab, another tab, and then I may be using three or four different AIs. And that's all one-on-one, me using the AI. Whereas you bring them in in this way, it becomes many-to-many, right? So you basically could have like three or four different AIs, you get them some, you know, access to data in the space, your choice, you get them some role in your space, your choice, and you say, you know, you either interact with them asking questions, maybe let's give them agency, do something on a regular basis in this space. So how do you allow those AIs to act like any other contributor into a space whereby you control what role they have, what they can access, et cetera, to unlock that power to really accelerate our collaboration?

41:23 [Lars Peter Nissen]

I like what you're doing. But you’re up against some humongous, humongous, powerful actors. I mean, do you have a snowball's chance in hell?

41:31 [Neil Smyth]

You know, I have to believe yes. You know, no one ever does an entrepreneurial journey unless they're an optimist. And, you know, the second thing is, how should I put it? You know, I sometimes say to people that even if we have a 1% chance of pulling this off, that's a chance worth taking. I mean, you know, I had the option after the entrepreneurial journey I've had to sort of relax and chill a bit, you know, I did that for a few years, giving lots of advice. But at some point, it was so obvious to me what was needed in the marketplace in terms of a digital platform serving society for collaboration, I felt the obligation to go for it. And there's a lot of people who basically also understand that need. So basically our challenge at the moment or mission at the moment is to build a community around Alkemio. Who believes this is possible? Who believes that with enough, the best talents and input and energy that we can do something that actually can be a credible alternative because we have a limited window to make the change we have to make, and we have to inspire more people that it is possible to make the change we have to make. And right now, there really is a lot of what I would call digital resignation at the moment out there that a little bit like the question you just asked me, do we have a snowball's chance in how these big companies are so powerful? But you have to come up with a different story, a different approach. And if we were coming at Alkemio from the standard startup venture approach,

the answer is an absolute resounding no, no chance in hell. Right. But with the approach we've chosen, let's do ownership. We actually have an fair competitive advantage in the marketplace, right? Because parties will put their communities and data onto Alkemio because they trust the organization. And if someone wants to copy us and also adopt the same model, but then we win too. Great. I mean, it doesn't have to be Alkemio that's the most basically the person that drives this change and puts public interest into our digital foundations. It's just that we have to get public interests into our digital foundations. So someone copies us, the better job. Fantastic. Right. Mission done.

43:42 [Lars Peter Nissen]

Neil, fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for doing this. I have only one complaint. We have two bottles of wine and we're not even through the first one.

43:50 [Neil Smyth]

And we can continue talking.

43:54 [Lars Peter Nissen]

So I wish you all of the best of luck with Alkemio. I think it's a fantastic idea and it is a very bold and brave crack at a massive, massive problem. Namely that the most powerful companies we have in the world today are basically the cat food industry. They produce a product that's not for the cat, but for the little old lady with blue hair, and that's not sustainable.

44:23 [Neil Smyth]

No. And I think we really have to make a very fundamental choice, but where, what kind of feature we want to have. Do we want to be surface operating some kind of digital feudalism where we up, you know, the, the power is elsewhere, or do we want to take back control ourselves and to basically, um also find new ways how we collaborate. I think there's a lot of top ground to be explored there. And we have a choice and we have to make that choice.

44:46 [Lars Peter Nissen]

I'm a huge fan and thank you for coming on Trumanitarian.

44:49 [Neil Smyth]

It's been an absolute, absolute pleasure to be here. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.