Set in Mindstone: Joshua Wöhle with Jenny Fielding
Josh Wöhle founder of Mindstone, chats with Jenny Fielding, General Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 123: Set in Mindston
In episode 123 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Josh Wöhle, co-founder and CEO of Mindstone — a platform that trains companies and their employees to actually use generative AI in their day-to-day work. Josh shares how Mindstone started as a general learning platform before ChatGPT’s release exposed a much bigger opportunity: companies were spending millions on AI tools while leaving the people meant to use them almost entirely untrained. Mindstone’s vision is to become the enablement layer for the enterprise, starting adoption with executives and scaling it outward through the whole organization.
In this episode, you will hear:
Pivoting Mindstone from a general learning platform to AI-specific enablement
Engineering Rebel as an alternative to off-the-shelf AI platforms
Leading with executives before rolling AI training out to the rest of an organization
Pushing one enterprise client to switch its entire stack from Microsoft to Google
Helping Epignosis spot cross-team churn patterns through shared AI memory
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Transcript:
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Jenny: Welcome, everyone to Venture Everywhere, where today I’m very excited to have Josh, the co-founder and CEO of Mindstone. He’s going to talk about his AI learning platform that has actually evolved over the last few years.
00:00:47 Jenny: Josh actually has a fascinating background at the intersection, I’d say, of education, games, and now automation. Maybe we could start there and you can tell me a little bit about how you got into this type of work and your mission.
00:01:02 Josh: Thanks for having me. I’m a software engineer by background, so I was born in the Netherlands. About 13 years there, 10 years in Switzerland, and about 16 in London now.
00:01:12 Jenny: How did I never know you were from the Netherlands? I thought you were from the UK.
00:01:15 Josh: No, I’m Dutch. I was born in Amsterdam.
00:01:17 Jenny: I lived in Amsterdam for a year and you don’t have that Dutch speaking English accent.
00:01:22 Josh: No, I was spending a lot more time with people in the US and also my co-founders, actually. Weirdly enough, people have a hard time placing my accent, but when they do, the number one thing that comes through for some weird reason is Irish.
00:01:32 Jenny: Yeah. You have an Irish accent, a very faint Irish accent.
00:01:36 Josh: Well, that is a direct result of how much time you spend with co-founders as two of my co-founders at SuperAwesome were both Irish and somehow it stuck. I don’t know why.
00:01:46 Jenny: I love it. Tell us a little bit about the founding of SuperAwesome.
00:01:49 Josh: SuperAwesome was what? A little bit, 11 years ago, 12 years ago now. It really started mostly from Dylan, who was my co-founder and CEO, and he had had a few investments in the kids space.
00:01:59 Josh: And those investments just seemed to run into the same problems, which was that… trying to comply with the legislations of what you could actually do and how you should build software for kids was very onerous and impossible when you were a startup or a small company.
00:02:14 Josh: And so it became interesting that he saw that multiple times over. And then, we had a discussion about it. But if you built a company around trying to deal with those complexities, you’re able to get the overall price point down. It becomes cheaper for everyone, and suddenly people can actually go and do that.
00:02:30 Josh: And that was off the back of the idea that we knew that child protection online was only going to go up. So, the environment was going to be favorable. And we set out to build that platform.
00:02:41 Josh: That worked really well. I mean, it became one of the biggest kids’ technology companies in the world. We built all of the kids’ safety technology behind the apps of Pokemon Go, Disney, Lego, Hasbro, Nintendo.
00:02:53 Jenny: That was an interesting time because it wasn’t right when, say, the iPhone launched, but it was that next generation of kids who grew up with iPhones in their hands or their parents giving it to them.
00:03:05 Jenny: And so obviously, safety and wanting the kids to have rich content, not just YouTube. It was such a great time.
00:03:13 Josh: Fairly ironic, some of it in terms of just the difference between the legislative environment and where parents were at, because we had to deal with two realities. On the one hand, make sure that everyone was compliant everywhere.
00:03:25 Josh: And on the other, the number one complaint we would get was parents asking us, why are you asking us to jump through all these hoops just to let my child go and enjoy Pokemon Go?
00:03:36 Josh: It’s this weird thing where it’s like, “Well, we’re trying to keep your kids safe.” Well, I only want them to use Pokemon Go. And so they need geolocation data collections…” It’s difficult to try and please everyone in that way. But it was definitely fun undertaking.
00:03:48 Jenny: Especially when you’re dealing with parents and their children. They have a lot of opinions, I bet.
00:03:54 Jenny: What were some of the big challenges of running SuperAwesome? I mean, you guys had a great run and an amazing exit, but what were some of the tough times in those early days?
00:04:02 Jenny: You were running the startup in the UK, I believe? The startup scene was just starting to develop there. You were kind of at the forefront of it. So what was that like?
00:04:10 Josh: To be fully honest, in Europe, it felt as if you were in the startup ecosystem because London to Europe is like Silicon Valley to the rest of the US. It really feels like you’re in the center of things until you start to realize what is on the other side of the ocean.
00:04:22 Josh: It’s like, “Ah, wait. Actually.” So, it didn’t quite feel that bad to start. Now, having said that, it did not feel like we were successful for a very long time. Numbers were going up. We could show growth.
00:04:33 Josh: But I don’t think there were many moments or I know there were almost no moments where I felt like, “Oh, yeah. We made it. It’s like, it’s fine.” Up until the moment that we sold and the money was in the bank account. Even the whole exit process, it almost fell through like five different times.
00:04:48 Josh: Now, what we did really have going for us was that in approximately the same year, year and a half, you had Cambridge Analytica and the Snowden debacle and everything around privacy.
00:05:01 Josh: Suddenly, it just made privacy a thing that everyone was thinking about. Privacy and data were like high on everyone’s agenda. And although no one could agree what that meant yet at a political level, at least for kids, they were like, “Well, let’s at least agree that we need to make sure we’re protecting the kids.”
00:05:18 Josh: And it changed the environment in which we were operating. It definitely led to more conversations suddenly, finally getting to actual deals.
00:05:27 Jenny: It’s so interesting. I mean, we, as investors, rely on our founders to see the future. We don’t always see it. That was clear for you, but not everyone else.
00:05:36 Jenny: You guys saw that from the beginning of how important privacy was going to be. But it took the rest of the world to have these massive events and media coverage for everyone to wake up and be like, “Wow, this is, this is going to be a thing.”
00:05:50 Jenny: How do you think of regulatory environment in Europe versus the US when it comes to startups? You must have had to navigate multiple jurisdictions and ideologies or philosophies.
00:06:02 Josh: At a pure startup level, the UK is great. Probably on par and in some cases better at a starting level than in the US. Within an hour, you can have your company set up, your accountant’s done.
00:06:13 Josh: You have a really good early stage investment scene where everyone gets a tax break to invest in early stage startups. The very, very early stage is actually really good. It’s when you get just beyond that that it gets a bit harder.
00:06:24 Josh: Now, when you think about SuperAwesome and the regulatory environment for Europe as a whole, the rest of Europe is just night and day. I guess the difficulty of just starting your company is already preventing you from getting going in the first place.
00:06:38 Jenny: The good old notary.
00:06:41 Josh: Exactly. I made the mistake of investing in one startup in Germany. I was told I needed to fly over for a signature.
00:06:47 Josh: But actually for SuperAwesome, the fragmented regulatory environment ended up being a strength because, ironically, the fact that it was so hard to try and comply in every single country made the argument that every company individually shouldn’t be doing that themselves.
00:07:03 Josh: They should be outsourcing that to a platform that would automatically figure out where does the user come from? What legislation applies? How do I go about getting all the right consents and audit logs and all this stuff?
00:07:13 Josh: Which was what we were doing at SuperAwesome. It created the space for us to create a value proposition that otherwise would not have had as strong an appeal.
00:07:24 Jenny: Super interesting. So you have a successful exit after a long journey. You take five minutes off, it seems, and you jump into Mindstone. What was the unique insight there? How has it evolved over the years?
00:07:37 Josh: The reality was the starting point for me was I wanted to try and figure out where did I want to spend the next 20 or 30 years of my life. I’m a problem solver. I like solving problems.
00:07:46 Josh: But with SuperAwesome, we were doing a lot around kid safety advertising and I definitely didn’t want to spend my life in that space. I narrowed it down to healthcare and education. One week after thinking about healthcare I was like, maybe not. That was going to take me years before I can be useful.
00:08:00 Josh: And education, I have a really different background than most. One, because I was born in Netherlands, then in Switzerland, then came to London. Also because my parents could never agree on the schooling system, so I did six different schools before I was 13. Six different schooling systems on top of that. So not just different schools.
00:08:16 Josh: And then I am a software engineer, by background. I’m a self learner. I did my MBA entirely remotely. I had all of these different perspectives. I thought I could really add something. That was the choice of just spending time in the space.
00:08:30 Josh: There was actually a book called How We Learn by Benedict Carey. It was really all about the science of learning and how what we know about how the brain works wasn’t widely known at all.
00:08:42 Josh: And these were extremely simple things, like how the brain retains more information when exposed to a certain repetition cadence, how testing yourself or recall has a stronger effect than rereading and rereading stuff over and over again.
00:08:57 Josh: It was so interesting because it was counter to almost everything that every single student I had talked to and knew about was going about learning. And that really felt information arbitrage at the time.
00:09:08 Josh: So, okay, wait, there is something here that is demonstrably true. Like hundreds of studies, not fringe science that just… this is how the brain works. And somehow I was, what? 25, 26, 27, and had never been exposed to it.
00:09:22 Josh: There’s something to be built here. And I thought, “Okay, well, if we can build a platform that helps everyone learn faster somehow, there is clear value there. Everyone wants that.” Time back, less time studying, everything.
00:09:32 Josh: That came with a combination of the idea that the average time any skill stays relevant was falling through the floor. This was just directly linked to how fast the world is moving around us and how long any particular thing that you learn stays relevant.
00:09:46 Josh: It was almost under the time that it took to get a degree to begin with. So it was just about getting under four years. If universities are built to try and build skills to go into workforce, this is not going to last for very long if we go under.
00:10:02 Josh: And so the idea was we need to find a way around the existing education system. Initially, I was trying to work with, and then it became fairly clear that it’s never going to work by working with the system in that way. So I had to try in, at least at the start… as a starting point somewhere around.
00:10:17 Josh: And then just as we had started to build that properly and started to go to market with it, that’s when ChatGPT happened. And that really changed everything again, because it changed both what we could build. But more fundamentally, the types of skills that would actually be relevant in the future.
00:10:33 Josh: Almost everyone in the company thought I was going a bit crazy because I really went in a black hole for about six months. Part of the reason why I was so excited by it… before starting SuperAwesome, I forgot to say that I was supposed to start a Master’s in artificial intelligence at Imperial in London.
00:10:50 Josh: Initially, decided to just defer that by a year, try SuperAwesome, and then potentially go back whenever. If it was successful, not go back. So never ended up doing the master’s.
00:10:58 Josh: But so AI had always been something that I was really excited by and passionate to explore. And when it was right there, initially, I felt a little bit stupid that ChatGPT came out and was like, “How did I not see this coming so strongly?”
00:11:14 Josh: There was just a weird feeling of like, “Wait, this is way, way bigger than what people are making it up to be.” And that’s why I went into that black hole for about six months trying to figure out, “Wait, what does this mean? How can we use this?”
00:11:24 Josh: And it didn’t quite work with GPT 3.5. But then when GPT-4.0 came out, and all the experiments I’ve been running for the six months prior, it’s like, oh, well, now they were starting to actually click.
00:11:35 Josh: I remember the biggest point where suddenly everyone in the company started getting it was you could assess someone’s likely level of skill based on the questions that they would ask on a particular topic.
00:11:46 Josh: So not even the answers they would give, based on the questions they would ask. And that was really where, “Okay, wait. This can be used for learning and education in a way that nothing else we have built ever could.”
00:11:56 Jenny: Does that mean people are assessing me by the questions I ask my guests?
00:12:00 Josh: Weirdly enough.
00:12:03 Jenny: I better come up with some really good questions before I get canceled.
00:12:09 Josh: Exactly. Another six months later, it just became clear that there is no skill in the world that I can teach anyone today, or that we can teach anyone today, that will have a bigger impact than helping them use AI in their job or in their life.
00:12:22 Josh: So we just decided, you know what? Yes, we can do general. But actually, what we need to do is just go entirely focused on generative AI. And that is when everything started to click for Mindstone and started to take off.
00:12:33 Jenny: That’s great. Now you’ve ended up in a pretty interesting place. So talk about how you’re helping your customers and really all of us get up to speed.
00:12:42 Josh: Yeah, very weird as well. So very guerrilla-like to start. The first time we did this, we tried it. We said, okay, what if we just did a Zoom series and we see how many people would be willing to pay to jump on a Zoom call with me where I’m literally just talking to them about how I’m using AI and trying to explain how it works.
00:13:01 Josh: Obviously not scalable. But we had way more signups than we thought. And there was real money coming into the business. And okay, that worked. Then we tried to figure out how do we build the platform behind to deliver the same value in a way that is much more scalable?
00:13:15 Josh: Our original thought was we’re going to remove all of the live cohort based stuff in the long run. Again, software engineer by background,. I want to build products that scales. I didn’t want to go and do live sessions.
00:13:26 Josh: Very quickly, we realized that was actually not what the right version ended up being because in learning and in change management, there’s a very high value on person-to-person stuff.
00:13:39 Josh: And so the challenge actually became how can we build something that feels like it is person-to-person, while having the economic benefits of scaling a platform?
00:13:48 Josh: And that’s where we ended up in this hybrid where we do 200 people at a time. They go through a few hours of live but accompanied by a platform that then personalizes it to each individual and that platform can scale.
00:14:00 Josh: So that really worked. Started working with some organizations like EY and Pearson and some others. And then I had this one opportunity where a friend of mine had to do an exec session. It was with Hyatt and he couldn’t make it.
00:14:16 Josh: And he was asked, “Okay, who’s the one person you’d recommend to go and do it?” He recommended me. It was on two days notice. So I was in London. I said, “Okay, well, jump on a flight tomorrow. I’ll be there the day after. Deliver the session. Go and do the thing.”
00:14:27 Josh: And it was really interesting because I have never been or I had never been a teacher. And so suddenly, I’m in a room for four hours, just live walking through how executives can go and use this technology in their own job.
00:14:40 Josh: And it was interesting because it made it very clear that the problem for AI, at least as it stands today, 9 times out of 10 is it actually starts with the executives. If the executives don’t use it themselves every day in their own job, that is a direct indication that they haven’t yet understood what the technology is about.
00:14:58 Josh: Because really, the executives should be using it every day. They can make their own decision making times 10. They can abstract their own work. And they’re the ones with the highest price on that work. So they should really be using it.
00:15:11 Josh: And so it’s a really good indication. And it then drove us to this new model where now, I’ve done these sessions with Home Depot, Fortnum & Mason, Pearson, like all across the world, some of the biggest firms that we do business with.
00:15:24 Josh: At this point has become a transformation play, which is first, activate and make sure that the entire senior management is aligned on what is possible, how can they use it themselves. They lead by example.
00:15:35 Josh: Then start to work with the rest of the organization, cohort-based. Okay, how do you go and upskill 20,000 people in a way that they all have the skills and more specifically, they understand the mindset shifts required in order for AI to really be useful in their work.
00:15:52 Jenny: What I like about the cohort approach that’s really embracing the whole organization is like you’re not leaving people behind. And I think that’s the big worry in AI is that sure, some people are going to be early adopters and those people are going to get ahead.
00:16:06 Jenny: But there are many people that are just either not comfortable, not confident. They don’t have extra time. So if you build this into the workplace, we really have a chance at like educating everyone. That’s very unique.
00:16:20 Josh: It is very interesting because a lot of companies, they get themselves a bit in a twist on what it means to do training or enablement across the organization because they have an L&D budget. They’ve had that for a while. It was never really used. So the reality is no one actually counts on it being used across the organization.
00:16:35 Josh: The problem there is that at the same time, you have a technology budget that goes into AI and every executive team at the moment will say AI is number one or number two priority.
00:16:44 Josh: They will gladly spend millions on the technology and then wonder if they can spend a hundred thousand on enablement, not realizing that the millions they’ve spent on the one hand are not going to actually have an effect without the enablement.
00:17:00 Josh: I, even often say this at the start of sessions, which is if there’s still a shred of doubt in your mind that you should be easily spending a few hundred to a few thousand dollars ahead in your organization on enablement by the end of my session today, then I have clearly not been successful at showing you what the potential impact here is.
00:17:19 Josh: And I try and put it down to us. So we as an organization, we now spend close to $10,000 a month on AI cost per employee. When you start to look at that, actually the enablement makes a lot of difference in that case. When you’re already spending that on the technology, how do you make sure you’re spending that efficiently?
00:17:37 Jenny: Token maxing, baby. Hopefully those costs can come down though. You’re still a startup.
00:17:41 Josh: But it’s the superpower of the startup. We’re 15 people now. We’ll do work equivalent to 150 people.
00:17:47 Jenny: That’s awesome. Can you talk about a time where you did one of these sessions or you had a customer and they came back with a real unlock? Or you followed up with them later or something that you actually saw that was very tangible?
00:18:01 Jenny: Curious to hear those stories because we hear the other stories, which is the MIT study, 95% of the AI pilots were disappointing or whatever. That study was a while ago, like Gen 1 and who knows what the variables were. We’ve heard a lot of positive stories, but they’re not necessarily getting out. So can you talk about one?
00:18:23 Josh: Let me give you two on opposite ends of the spectrum. So one with a really big organization. In big SaaS, the big tech SaaS players are notoriously hard to unseat from a B2B sales perspective.
00:18:36 Josh: One of the sessions I did with an executive team, one week after the session, they decided to switch to Google from Microsoft because they realized that having the right models available and the right infrastructure from an AI perspective was so critical to the organization that it merited moving away from the Microsoft stack and instead going down the Google stack. They signed the contract one week after the session.
00:19:04 Jenny: And this was so that they could integrate Gemini into all their workflows?
00:19:08 Josh: This was almost a year ago now, and it’s a little bit better now. At the time, there was no question. I literally couldn’t even deliver the sessions I wanted to deliver in Copilot at the time because it was so bad at following instructions. So that was direct effect.
00:19:21 Josh: Now on the other end of the spectrum, more recent in the last four months. So we work with an organization called Epignosis. They’re one of the bigger learning management systems in the world. About 250 people in the company, high growth, scale up.
00:19:36 Josh: And they have rolled out Rebel, which is the AI operating system that we built. Similar to Cowork, but specifically built for enterprise with shared memories and stuff like that across the organization.
00:19:46 Josh: And we had two big stories there. They are slightly low price point, which means you have higher churn, high growth coming through. One of the big targets was how do you reduce churn for them as an organization?
00:19:59 Josh: And the moment they started rolling out AI, specifically Rebel, it started to correlate different data points from different teams together that the teams themselves hadn’t actually talked about.
00:20:10 Josh: So you just had one part of the organization that was using Rebel to talk about churn in one way and another part of the organization that was talking about churn in another.
00:20:18 Josh: But because Rebel ends up writing everything to shared memory, it started to spot patterns like, “Wait, there’s this team over here that… you had a similar thing. These customers are about to churn. Maybe this is the way that you can make sure that they retain.” And they instantly made progress on their churn targets.
00:20:36 Josh: The second piece there was interesting, where just before we did the rollout, one of the people in their L&D team who was behind on their OCR and they said, “There’s no way that I can go and get this done this quarter.” Two weeks after the rollout, they were way ahead on their OCR and they said,”It’s all done. I’m totally fine.”
00:20:56 Jenny: That’s a great story. How do you as a team stay up to date on the latest tools? Because there’s so much. At Everywhere, we’re using a lot of AI to build an automated VC firm in many ways.
00:21:07 Jenny: We’ve built everything from an AI portfolio manager to you name it, up and down the stack. But one issue I’d say is every day as we read about new tools, we have to figure out how to prioritize and not to get distracted. How are you guys thinking about that or dealing with that?
00:21:23 Josh: I think we’re different in that than most because we get to justify spending more time on it than others.
00:21:30 Jenny: Yes, it is your core business. But still, you can’t rip out everything that you’ve built every five days. Maybe you can do that every six weeks. But how do you find that balance?
00:21:41 Josh: Partially, this is how Rebel started. I had built my own AI operating system in order to not be held back by what everyone else had been building, including Anthropic and OpenAI.
00:21:52And when I was showing that to people, they just felt like, “Wow, why can’t we get that?” And that was the whole starting point of Rebel.
00:21:59 Josh: And this is an unfair advantage, but we have our own operating system. Every day, literally on this call, I’ve got five different agents that are rolling out different features on the operating system, because it is ours and I can just tweak it whenever I want to tweak it.
00:22:12 Josh: The other is just living in the uncomfortable zone of always pushing and trying one step further than what is possible. And the team, they love it and they hate me for it at the same time.
00:22:24 Josh: I’m a CEO who pushes code to production 20 times a day. In some cases, really great. And in some cases, it makes it really hard for everyone else to constantly try and catch up or at least stay aligned.
00:22:34 Josh: And then the last piece is we run the biggest AI community in the world. And that is a big part of how we stay up to date. We have more conversations about how AI gets used on a daily basis at work or in personal lives than I think anybody in the world. We do 30 events a month now.
00:22:48 Jenny: That’s amazing. As someone who, you know, is very focused on community and built Everywhere around the thesis of founders and operators being our engine for our fund, I’d love to just to hear a little bit more about how you guys are building the largest AI community in the world.
00:23:04 Jenny: I’m unclear that community really scales and maintains integrity and value. It’s not software. There’s people involved. But you guys have done a really good job. And so can you maybe talk about some of the things you’ve learned around building community?
00:23:20 Josh: I would both agree and disagree. It doesn’t scale like software, but you can build and scale community in a non-centralized fashion facilitated by technology. And we’re still learning every day and trying to do better.
00:23:35 Josh: But we have our own community management software that we ended up building that does simple things like every speaker that has spoken at one of our events is there. Every attendee that came to an event is there.
00:23:46 Josh: When we go to a new city, we can automatically figure out who else is likely to have been in those places to help us start this up. We have sponsor management and stuff like that. There’s loops that you can build that help keep it alive.
00:24:00 Josh: If you have speakers, well, when they have done a great job, who would they recommend would be great speakers in their region? And often good speakers know other good speakers on particular demos.
00:24:11 Josh: Same for attendees. If you enjoyed an event, who do you want to take along next time? If you give them the opportunity to show, “Hey, we have another event next month.” Those are software loops.
00:24:21 Josh: If you built the system that bakes these things in, you can scale a decentralized approach. A Mindstone event, it won’t be the same in Bristol to New York to London. They will have their own vibe, but they will have some structure. They’ll have the same types of talks.
00:24:38 Jenny: I’ve been to one of your events in New York. It was very grassroots. I loved it. It was in a room, down a dark hall and packed with people that were so excited to be there. And pizza. And I was like, “This is a throwback.” I loved it.
00:24:55 Josh: For what it’s worth, partially, that is something that came out of London, to your question earlier of what was the startup scene like in London when we started SuperAwesome. And that was one thing that was different in London – and I would say even better in London than in the US.
00:25:09 Josh: Any day of the week, you could walk out and there would be 20 different events around the city. They would all be free. You’d have pizza and beer there. There would be someone sharing something from all parts of seniority.
00:25:21 Josh: Sometimes you’d have the CTO of Facebook that would suddenly sit up there. He would go and talk through. And then, sometimes you just have a mobile engineer that’s showcasing a new app they’re about to launch. But it was totally open.
00:25:33 Jenny: I remember those days. I did one of the first events at Google campus when it opened. I knew the founders and Eze from Google. And I was at the BBC at the time and we did events there.
00:25:45 Jenny: And I remember that energy. I also remember it in New York. And I would agree with you that it happened fast and furious in London, whereas in New York, it was a little bit of a slower burn. And so you really felt that energy fast.
00:25:59 Josh: One of the bigger moments for me was the first time that I came to San Francisco for professional purposes. Because I was coming out of this kind of mindset, I was expecting I’ll land in San Francisco. There’ll be 100 events that I’ll go in.
00:26:10 Josh: And the reality was they were all private and I knew no one. So the scene is there, but there you needed to know someone to get in to know the event was there.
00:26:19 Josh: Versus in London, you could just go to meetup.com. There’d be like 20 and you just choose the one to go to. There’s no queue. No one’s going to tell you you can’t get there. That was the difference.
00:26:29 Josh: There’s also a big difference in terms of when you do free events with free pizza and beer in the US, that tends to attract different people than in Europe. You have other problems. So I understand where some of it’s coming from, but it was definitely a different vibe.
00:26:40 Jenny: This was super fun. Maybe you can wrap us up with one question I like to ask, which is what does success look like for you?
00:26:48 Josh: With Mindstone now, I genuinely think this is the biggest and most important period of change that we as a society have gone through for hundreds of years, if not more.
00:27:00 Josh: And I really do think that there is a bifurcated future here. This can lead to a dystopian future where really only a few are able to go and use the technology and just end up getting better and better and better and the rest get left behind. Or it is something that allows everyone to live a dramatically better life.
00:27:16 Josh: But it relies on at least the ability to use the technology to be understood by people in a more democratic way, so the discrepancy between people who really know how to use it and people that don’t is as small as it possibly can be.
00:27:28 Josh: The technology is actually fairly cheap to use in a way. Everyone has access to it. There’s little barrier, but knowing how to use it is still very different.
00:27:36 Josh: And so for me, success here would be, if we truly can put everyone in the world in a situation where they feel they understand what the technology does and how to make it help them in their own lives, both professionally and personally.
00:27:52 Jenny: Got it. Okay. This is the speed round. A book, newsletter, a podcast you’re enjoying? You already shared one book, but maybe share another thing that you’re excited about.
00:28:02 Josh: Beyond the Prompt from Jeremy Utley. Very good podcast.
00:28:06 Jenny: Love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?
00:28:10 Josh: Sydney.
00:28:11 Jenny: Oh! Now, that’s in my top five, too. I don’t know how to ask this one to you, but favorite productivity hack without giving me a long list. Just give me one.
00:28:24 Josh: Every day Rebel automatically drafts replies to all of my starred emails. And so I wake up and 60% of my starred emails are just open, hit, send. Open, hit, send.
00:28:37 Jenny: So good. I love it. And where can listeners find you?
00:28:41 Josh: Mindstone.com. Or if it’s me, on LinkedIn is where I post most.
00:28:46 Jenny: Okay. where are you gonna be posting all of your meetups?
00:28:48 Josh: Community.mindstone.com.
00:28:51 Jenny: All right, Josh. This was a huge pleasure. I learned a ton and I didn’t know you were Dutch. So that’s like very exciting as well. But I guess I should have noticed the name, your last name. Maybe it was a giveaway. But great to have you and lots of success with Mindstone.
00:29:07 Josh: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
00:29:10 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Joshua Wöhle in Founders Everywhere.