The Mental Filter Every Founder Needs in 2026 | Sebastian Haas - Talon.One

Shamil Malachiyev: My guest this morning is the founder and CEO of Talon.One, a platform that powers loyalty programs, promotions, and incentive management for some of the world's biggest brands, including ones we all know well: Adidas, Sephora, KFC, Nordstrom, and Joe & The Juice. Please welcome to the studio, Sebastian Haas. Hi Sebastian.

Sebastian Haas: Thank you for having me.

Shamil Malachiyev: For our listeners, can you do a bit of an intro about the current scope and scale that you're operating at with Talon.One?

Sebastian Haas: First of all, I'm one of the two co-founders of Talon.One, so I've been on this journey for a little over 10 years now. I built this company up from the ground. My actual background is in advertising and marketing, but I never really wanted to work in that field. Coming to Berlin, seeing all of that startup ecosystem happening left and right, I decided to give it a try myself after detouring a little bit in consulting. Berlin is in general a very great hub for building startups and coming up with new ideas. And in my current role, even after 10 years, I'm doing a little bit of everything: in the weeds, in the trenches with the team, and doing some of the strategic work. But I also have to say, at the current size of the company I'm really happy that I can rely on very experienced people to work with, so I don't have to do everything myself anymore, which makes a huge difference.

Shamil Malachiyev: How many people do you currently have?

Sebastian Haas: We're slightly over 300 now, and about half of them are based in the Berlin region. It's a big global business by now.

Shamil Malachiyev: It's usually so fascinating to discover how you feel about the company when you stop knowing everyone. There are 200 people you don't know, and they're in the company, still operational. Especially coming from a startup.

Sebastian Haas: It happens to me every day now. I'm pretty much an office person, so I enjoy going to our Berlin office. Of course you bump into people that just started, and sometimes I find myself thinking: do I know this person, have we spoken, what's the background? But that's also part of the fun. You get to work with so many different people, so many experts in different fields. I love to hear their stories, their backgrounds, where they come from. It's a big melting-pot setup that we have. There are so many internationals, Berlin is obviously a very international city. By now we have 55 different nationalities in the team, so there are literally people from everywhere in the world working together.

Shamil Malachiyev: Is it hard to keep the culture in check when you have people from 55 different nationalities? Nationalities do have some innate differences between themselves, don't they?

Sebastian Haas: Obviously the cultural context, the cultural code that everyone comes with, can be very difficult to align sometimes. There is friction, without a doubt: people saying something that others think is offensive, misunderstandings that happen. But I think it always starts with the people itself. When you join a company like Talon.One, when you come to a city like Berlin, a general assumption is that you're pretty open-minded, you're respectful, and you're well aware that there are certain boundaries you might not want to overstep. So it starts with that. It literally starts with everyone taking care of each other, trying to make each other feel comfortable and respect the boundaries. When thinking about culture, it's the people respecting that everyone has a different background, and then all wanting to work together for the same purpose, on the same targets, and making it work. If you have that foundation, a lot of the rest will simply follow. It's very great to have this cultural diversity in the team, and it adds a lot of quality to working together. You can see that in the office. People bring food or sweets when they visit their home country and tell everyone about it. There are all sorts of these little things that make it a great place to work at. That's what we're really appreciating and what we're also looking for. And we try to enable this as the founders of this business as well.

Shamil Malachiyev: Did it get harder to cultivate and safeguard that culture with a lot of people working remotely? When you start up, people can see you every day and learn from your behavior: how to act, what's okay, what's not okay. But when you expand past 70 people, that starts to dilute itself. Did you feel that?

Sebastian Haas: Yeah, we feel it every day. It's hard work to maintain that. We're trying to look at culture slightly differently to how some other companies or other founders look at it. For us this is not just a set of values that we all support, because in a lot of cases values are there, everyone knows them, but a lot of people do not actually live them. It's more like something you write on the wall, but not something that becomes part of the organic culture of the team. So we didn't even want to get into that. What we're looking after is a set of principles, operating principles: how do we all want to work with each other, what do we enjoy, what do we not want to see in collaborating with each other? That's what we always fall back to, to not encounter any barriers in working together.

But it's hard work when basically over half of the team is working fully remote. Berlin is the only office we have, which is just historical. A lot of the internationalization of the team happened during COVID. There was originally a plan to open an office in the US, we had already selected the city. Then the pandemic started, and we still had to grow obviously, so we decided to hire people remotely. And even after COVID you find yourself in a situation where people are fully distributed. Where do you want to set up an office? Do you want to change your entire org just to have an office? We decided that's not our path forward, so we're trying to make the best out of both worlds.

It's actual hard work. It takes a lot of different steps: bringing people together occasionally, within regions, within the hubs that are there. We have different amounts of people in the same broader region or city, so we're trying to enable these people to come together. And I have to say, I don't have the recipe that works at 100 percent. But what works very well is this combination of enabling people to come together. For us this is, for example, a co-working space allowance for people that don't have access to our Berlin office, so they can come together, or simply get away from their home if they want the real office feeling. And on top of that, the broader activity of bringing people together for different occasions: kicking off the year together within the region with the sales team, bringing a lot of people to the same location, doing workshops that include the leadership team, so everyone has face-to-face time with different people. Even for something like a go-to-market kickoff in the US region, we would bring our CHRO, just to be part of those few days, work with the teams, have different workshops and so on. Everyone has face time, which really helps.

But there are unfortunately still situations where people feel disconnected, they feel left behind. So we're trying to also do a little bit of oversharing in meetings like our town hall, where we talk about much more than just what happens in the business. We also provide context around the global economic situation and things like that, to give everyone the same feeling of where we stand and what we're doing.

Shamil Malachiyev: I still remember Facebook trying to solve this problem. They imagined a world where we would all be wearing an Oculus Quest and just sit in a room and almost feel and see each other. It never really took off, but I guess they were trying to bring remote people closer.

Sebastian Haas: Sounds like a very weird and awkward setup to me. But I understand, because the little conversations that happen in front of the coffee machine are obviously very important, and a lot of great ideas come out of them. Unfortunately we just have to accept that we work in a reality where we cannot have this every day with everyone in the team. But we're trying not to do ridiculous things like virtual coffee chats, because I don't think that's the answer. Instead: create platforms, create opportunities, and have the team exchange. Sometimes that involves even hobbies and private life, if people are up for it, but we're not trying to force it. For us it's different theme-based Slack channels where people talk about arts and crafts and what they've been working on in their free time, maybe some side projects people do. With 300 people it's very likely that you have a subgroup for anything.

Shamil Malachiyev: Yeah, it's crazy, because I also have teams who've been working on projects together for three years and they've never seen each other. When we bring people to an offsite, it's the first time, after talking every day for the last three years. It's a strange world we're living in, because the way we grew up, it was all about everybody cramped in the same space. You see these people, they're your friends, your whole social circle. Now we're trying to facilitate that, and I don't know what it's going to look like in the future.

Coming back to Talon.One: a lot of listeners are also founders trying to analyze the current state of the world and where we're going, and you have a lot of insight on marketing and advertising, which right now is the main thing, apart from sales, that people are investing into to grow their companies. What does the current landscape look like in terms of marketing, what kind of actions are companies taking, and where does Talon.One fit into that?

Sebastian Haas: On a broader level, when I look back at the last 10 years, that has been quite a journey. When we started, businesses were still in a world where everything, and I'm overstating here, was around customer acquisition: the new customers you want to convince to buy your products or use your services. With all the economic pressure throughout the last 10 years, that has clearly shifted to a more reactivation-focused, retention-based setup. What we can see is that over the last 10 years, loyalty has become the essential part of a lot of different brands' and businesses' marketing strategy. And it makes sense: you want to make sure you keep the customers you have activated once.

That is obviously the core of our platform as well. When we started Talon.One, the idea was always to be the unified promotion, incentive and loyalty engine that can help you in any type of scenario: from simple point-based loyalty programs to more complex reward strategies that include certain loyalty tiers. You can do all of that on the same platform and connect to all of your different channels, offline and POS and all of the digital world. We're obviously in the middle of that, which is great when the general trend is in your favor. A lot of that is around loyalty nowadays, and it's still growing.

And you can see it when you look at the whole agentic discussion right now, where a lot of that is around the identity and identification of users and where that will live in the future. Everyone is slightly scared that it will be something that no longer lives under the control of a merchant, that there are some agents that will do it for you and you don't have any access to your customer base anymore. There's obviously a lot happening right now, but what this tells me is that loyalty will be more important than ever. That's our view of the marketing world.

Shamil Malachiyev: How long do you think until the moment where I can just go into a general shop, and the shop will see my face or identify me somehow and be like: okay, this is Shamil, he takes a latte, and two out of three times he buys a bagel, so make sure to offer him a bagel, he doesn't like sugar. And when the barista sees this: "Hi Shamil, a latte without sugar. Do you want a bagel? They're fresh." How far are we from having that in every interaction out there?

Sebastian Haas: From a technical standpoint, that's already there. And it's happening in some cases. You can do that, and we are doing it with some of our customers. But then again, user adoption and all of that transformation in the offline world is a slightly more complex topic, I'd say. It takes time. But it's quite fascinating, because you see a lot of these classic loyalty concepts being reworked, reconceptualized, because of more true personalization. Which is a bit funny to me, because everyone has been talking about personalization for what, the last 15 years maybe? No one fully gets there. You have some personalization, you get your coupon code for your birthday, which is considered personalization. That's pretty weak, to be honest. There's obviously much more possible.

And the technology is there. From a merchant perspective, you need to bring your systems together, your infrastructure together, to successfully make this work. In this example that you just gave: does the information about your identity actually surface at the point of sale? If you think about a fully digital world where you buy something in an online shop, it's pretty straightforward. You identify yourself because you log in, or you provide your identification data throughout the shopping process. But the point of sale in a lot of these cases is different tech, different infrastructure, so it takes a little bit longer to bridge that. We've seen good progress with some of the customers we work with in overcoming this. It comes down to the point of: do you allow the data to be exchanged? And then you can run all of these personalization scenarios that actually create an exciting customer journey and customer experience, in any channel.

Shamil Malachiyev: So I guess you're following all the political decisions made around data privacy, making sure how much you're able to use and collect data so people get the most value. It's kind of a paradox: people at the same time want all of this. They want people to know their taste, to give them what they want without having to think about it or select from 20 different options. But at the same time they're like: wait, I'm very careful about the data I want to share. Where do you keep the balance?

Sebastian Haas: Ultimately the balance is with our customers, the merchants, the businesses we work with. But it's a delicate question, yes. What we do from our side, first of all, is try to have the maximum level of trust. We're a German business, so we're sort of GDPR-native, we have all of the important InfoSec certifications and all of that. We're trying to create a very secure place for the data that we work with. But ultimately it often just comes down to the consent of the user. Is that something the user sees value in, and therefore gives consent to store your data, to use your data, for example at the point of sale, to welcome you with your preferred drink or the bagel that you're always picking? The customer has to see the value. When the customer doesn't feel like there is a lot of value, why would you opt in for something like that? You have to create this unique personal experience, and then this barrier is not that high anymore, because people want to feel part of that. When you go to your favorite coffee shop and you have that experience you just explained, that's a very positive thing. I bet you as a person would be willing to give away some of your data for having this experience.

Shamil Malachiyev: I wouldn't mind them knowing my face and what kind of jeans I like. Please, use that.

Sebastian Haas: But of course there are other scenarios where the consumer doesn't see the value, and then it becomes very difficult. Why should I opt in for a loyalty program that doesn't give me a lot of benefit? Unfortunately, a lot of these simple point-based loyalty programs still operate like that. You collect points with every transaction, and then you have a limited path of redeeming these points. Not very personalized. It doesn't take into account your preferences, your order history, or any other engagement you have with a shop or an online shop. That is something you have to consider to make these programs, and ultimately the consumer experience, successful.

Shamil Malachiyev: And why did you decide to get into marketing?

Sebastian Haas: You mean why did I decide to study marketing and then never work in the field as a proper marketeer?

Shamil Malachiyev: Exactly. All of us have to make this decision about what we want to do, and we're quite young when we make it. What was that thinking process like for you?

Sebastian Haas: For me it was a lot of coincidence. When I finished school I did not have a lot of ideas of what I could do with my life, to be honest. I considered different things, and it was a phase where I wanted to get a little bit of orientation. Back in the day my girlfriend at the time had a pretty clear career path, and she wanted to go to Berlin. I was like: maybe I just come with you, experience how Berlin is, and then maybe I can find something there. That's how I ended up in Berlin. Then I looked at different options and applied for different things at university. Consulting wasn't on the top of my head back then. I was on the path of looking into becoming a proper product designer, designing physical products. I looked at the University of Applied Arts in Berlin, where you can study this. I was super young, super naive, no experience. I went there for some info meeting, and they were like: we don't really know what you'd do here, because if you want to study this, you have to work on your portfolio, and that might take some time. Come back when you have some work experience, when you've worked on your portfolio. And I was like: I don't know if I really want to do that, I just want to get started. Then they actually suggested taking a look at a more marketing-focused but still fairly creative program they had, broader communications. I said: okay, look, I can give it a try, maybe that's something I like. So I did that, and it gave me a lot of freedom to experiment with other things left and right.

I started working as a working student in a digital marketing agency, which was a very interesting experience. That business was growing quite well at the time, and it was a small team, so even as a working student I had quite a strategic role there. I was in the middle of everything, worked together with the two founders of the agency, up to the point where they sold their business. It got acquired by a UK-based network of agencies, which by now is part of the Publicis group, I think. That was an interesting experience, and that's where I got to experience entrepreneurship.

Shamil Malachiyev: That's what I wanted to ask. At that time, working so closely with the founders, it almost showed you the other side of the world. And especially going through an acquisition: you could see the company growing, and then the company being sold, and you participated in the process. Due diligence, getting documents together, talking to the other side. It gave you a complete picture of the startup, VC, mergers and acquisitions world. What were the main lessons you learned there?

Sebastian Haas: Exactly. For me this was a lot about learning, obviously. Learning how to run a business, learning how to make decisions, how to be strategic about certain opportunities. And I stayed there even after the acquisition, for another year or so. At that time I had finished my studies already, so it was a full-time job, and I was part of the post-merger integration team, which was another very interesting experience. I had never seen this before: all of the challenges of putting together these different businesses. They acquired quite a few agencies at the time, so all of a sudden there were three different parties that needed to be merged in Germany. That added a lot of complexity.

Shamil Malachiyev: Are you allowed to talk about that experience? Everybody sees the news about mergers and acquisitions and "the company got absorbed". What is it actually like inside when that happens and you have to integrate?

Sebastian Haas: There are obviously a couple of things, but one thing it always comes down to is the cultural alignment between the different parts of the organization you're trying to put together. That was a learning for me back then as well, because it takes a lot to understand the different cultures that are coming together, see where they're aligned and where there's potential friction, and then work around that or mitigate it. Because from my learning, that's what can actually make the whole process fail. For me this was very interesting to see, not just from a business perspective. That's maybe the easier part of merging businesses: you work on a joint business case, and in this scenario there were different services provided by different entities, so you put all of that together and define a joint value proposition. But actually migrating the different companies and the people that are behind them, that's where a lot of the challenges are.

That was a great learning experience from a people-manager perspective, working with all of these different people with different interests coming together. If you imagine such a scenario, obviously everyone is slightly scared, because it means change. Everyone asks themselves: what will the future look like, what will my role be? That's important to address. A lot of it was around getting the right people in the right roles, all aligned behind the purpose. That was a big learning at that time.

Shamil Malachiyev: I feel like managing these kinds of politics is on the emotional intelligence level. With IQ you have the business, you have the problem, it's like a Rubik's Cube, you solve it as a puzzle. But then you have all of these people integrations with different aspirations. Somebody doesn't like each other, somebody tries to take too much responsibility from other departments. As a founder, throughout your journey you probably had to navigate all of those things and be like: guys, sit down, this is how it's going to get done. These are the questions where sometimes I'm lying in bed before I go to sleep thinking: what do I do about these guys? How do I get them to be friendly and work together? Did you ever get better at that? Maybe you have some life hacks for other founders thinking about this.

Sebastian Haas: A hundred percent. This is very important, even until today, for us at Talon.One building this company. My learning back then was exactly what you pointed out: different interests, different political situations all coming together, creating friction, creating conflict. From a top-level perspective you don't want that. You want everyone to join you in this journey and accomplish certain things together.

We actually turned that into one of our operating principles at Talon.One, which we refer to as no silos. This is what usually happens, and it happens organically in a growing business: you build out different domains, you have experts in these domains, they become team leads, they become directors, they become leadership at some point. And it's a natural process that people get very protective of their space. That's just what always happens. So you have to actively work against that. My understanding is, from the start you want to prevent these silos from being created. You don't want people, teams or departments operating in isolation. You want to always make sure they collaborate, that there are cross-functional, cross-organizational projects they work on, and you hold up a really high standard of alignment. For us that's one of the key components of being successful as a team.

Me and my co-founder talk a lot about how we win as a team, because that's ultimately it. We're an enterprise-focused business. We work a lot with big corporate companies, and it actually takes a lot of people to be successful in this collaboration. It's not like one salesperson is really good, reaches out to a customer, sells our product, and that's about it. There are plenty of people involved in that process. You have supporting functions: maybe a legal counsel being involved, someone from finance involved in structuring the deal together with the deal team, technical people involved to talk about integration in our case, salespeople, some people involved on the strategic account management side. And all of these people have to work together to make this a successful project. I cannot have anyone in this scenario trying to be super protective of their environment, because this is not how it works. This will become a blocker sooner or later.

From a founder perspective, what I think it takes is that you build out your sensors around detecting this sort of isolation, the political game that starts at some point, and prevent these silos from happening. Because ultimately you want to have everyone work together, come together, work as a team. And that's what creates success. That's my understanding from doing this for 10 years now at Talon.One, and at my first company before. That's why we decided to make that a part of the principles that we work with. And if you ask people working at Talon.One, it is something that everyone enjoys. It has a spillover effect on the whole company. People are just generally helpful when you have a question. You won't find anyone in our company that is like: leave me alone, that's not my business. People will try to help you, because they understand why you're doing things and what you're working for, and everyone's working for the same purpose. I realize it sounds like everything is pink and super healthy. Obviously there is friction. But that's what we look for. We're trying to detect this early, point it out, and we would have conversations with people when we feel like it's going in the wrong direction. It's work.

Shamil Malachiyev: You briefly mentioned your first company. Can you talk a little bit about RapidApe, what led to the creation of the company, and the main lessons you learned through that experience?

Sebastian Haas: For general understanding: how I work, and also how my co-founder Chris works, is we love to solve problems or challenges with technology. We're builders. We look at a problem and try to solve it with a product. That is what I have done with Talon.One, and that is what I have done before.

When I at some point left the marketing business, I joined a Berlin-based company builder and VC and did some project work in the portfolio, just to get another angle into the startup ecosystem in Berlin. A couple of these projects were on the more analytical side, trying to help optimize certain businesses, looking into how their marketing plans work. One of these companies was spending a lot of money on TV advertisements and had actually no idea what that delivered. So we started looking into that problem, looking into different approaches to measure performance. And that challenge became the idea for a product.

What I built with my first company, which was called RapidApe, was a TV monitoring and analytics suite for companies that would advertise on TV and needed more performance data than just how many people have seen your spot at this and this time. We built a system of algorithms to help you understand the actual performance. Simple things like: how many visits did you get right after airing a TV spot? How many app downloads did that generate? But also looking at other marketing channels and understanding what the impact of a TV campaign is, and providing all sorts of reports and dashboards. It included real-time monitoring, because we wanted to do this in real time. We didn't want to wait until you have a final schedule from the Nielsens of the world, so we tried to make that faster. I developed that for about three and a half years, until it got acquired by the ProSieben group here in Germany.

Shamil Malachiyev: Nice. I guess it's quite hard for companies advertising on TV to even know what to expect. You pay a lot of money, and how much revenue do you expect to get from this? It's usually a very hard question.

Sebastian Haas: And also the question: what do you optimize for? How do you understand what works and what doesn't? Obviously that was a different time. That was actually when Netflix was just starting to internationalize, so by now that priority has shifted quite drastically, I would say. But back then there was a lot of money being spent on TV advertisements. All of these startups would broker media-for-equity deals with the broadcasting networks, for example, and they wouldn't have any idea if that actually made sense. What we tried to help them with is getting this understanding of where they should optimize their performance. It came down to the level of analyzing different placements, different stations, different formats. A lot of these companies could then run A/B testing for different versions of their TV spots, and we would help them understand which version works better than others. That was pretty much me coming from a performance marketing background, having worked for this digital marketing business, and transforming that into an offline-channel optimization product.

Shamil Malachiyev: I have a lot of friends operating in Europe, building multiple startups throughout their journey. Usually when they don't see substantial growth within two or three years, they're like: I don't want to keep doing this, it starts feeling like a job. So they think: I need to sell this company fast so I can work on something new that I'm noticing out there. But selling the company is not even that easy. The lesson they learned is you can't do it yourself; you usually need a broker who understands what companies are looking for. What kind of experience was that for you?

Sebastian Haas: That wasn't something we specifically focused on, to be honest. And still, until today, I believe that you shouldn't be building a company just for an exit scenario. Because that influences a lot of things you do, and you might be on a completely wrong track. My understanding is, you want to build a great product, and at some point that journey might involve an acquisition. But you shouldn't overly optimize for that scenario. Of course you need to optimize your numbers, and it shouldn't be a horrible business, and the product needs to work, and the customers need to be happy. All of that sounds logical, but it's hard work to focus on it.

Back in the days we never really optimized for that. We wanted to build a great product, and that is exactly the same thing we decided to do with Talon.One. When I started Talon.One with my co-founder, we were like: this will probably be a 20-people business at some point, and it might become profitable, and that's great, and then let's see how far we can take it. We didn't imagine that we would get to 300 people and a global business. We completely focused on making this a great product for the customers and generating value. That's the number one priority. You don't want to build a product that is great in selling but then has a big churn problem. A lot of what we did in the early years was pretty simple: we worked on the product. We didn't focus on generating X amount of revenue in the first couple of months, launching an alpha version after three months, or anything like that. We knew it would take time, and that's what we focused on. So make it a great product. The philosophy is a little bit: if you have a great product, you can build a great company around it. And a great company will always find a buyer at some point, if that's what you're aiming for.

And looking at Talon.One: obviously this is not a family business that we will pass on to our kids. But we're not optimizing for any exit path. We're building this business for what it is. It is a good product, customers love to work with us, and we love to work with all of these exciting customers and help them with their challenges. We can see the value every day, customers can see the value every day, and everyone enjoys being part of this. That's what we have in mind.

Shamil Malachiyev: That's why I really like talking to practicing founders who stay with the company for years and years. I was talking to Aytekin Tank on the show, the founder and CEO of Jotform, which is a really large company, and he's still doing it 20 years in. He's excited and he's moving forward. Why sell, when you have a profitable business that covers all of your expenses? You don't need to worry about money, and you can unleash your creativity as much as you want going forward.

Sebastian Haas: VCs would say differently, though. You need to balance that, obviously. For us, there are lots of really great VCs involved in that journey with Talon.One, and we're all agreeing on a couple of principles here. They understand we want to make this a great business and a great product, and that this takes time. No one came in with the expectation to sell this company within three years or something. That was never the plan. But again, a lot of what we did was focusing on the product, focusing on the value that the product generates, and the rest sort of follows.

But I understand: you have to be ready for that, and you have to be willing to do this journey for a long time. If you're the type of founder that says, I'm really good in initiating these ideas, but as soon as I reach 20, 25 people, that's not my thing anymore, then that journey will look different. For us it was always the understanding: we grow into this, everyone grows into this, and we're ready to do it. As long as it's fun, there's no problem in doing it another 10 years. And if it wouldn't be fun, then we wouldn't be doing it anymore. It sounds simple, but there are of course a lot of other factors that influence it. You can build the best product; if there's no market for it, you might not do it for 10 years.

Shamil Malachiyev: You've mentioned that everybody eventually grows into things. What are the main differences between the Sebastian we see at the start, thinking "this can be a 20-people company someday", and the Sebastian we see now, with a different perspective, a different level of responsibility, ambition, and feeling of what is possible?

Sebastian Haas: The main difference is maturity, I think. Back in the days when I started my first business, I was super ambitious: trying to solve everything myself, "I know everything better, I know how it needs to be run". With experience you understand that this is not the best path forward, not what makes it efficient, not what makes it successful. Learning to let go is definitely part of that journey. For me it was understanding that I'm working with a lot of people that know different things that are important for your business way better than I do myself. That was part of the learning journey. Now I really enjoy working with all of these great minds, these great people, the great experience that comes together. I find myself in situations where people explain to me how things should be done way more than I have to explain to anyone else how we should do things, which is great.

My role has obviously moved from doing things myself into aligning everyone behind the same idea. When you have 300 people, I work a lot with our C-level, and then it's more about keeping everything aligned, prioritizing, and yes, of course, in some situations calling the shots and making the decisions. But it needs to be a healthy culture of not simply overruling everyone because you think that you know how it should be done. Instead, it needs to be getting everyone behind the idea of why you think this is the right thing to do. The why is much more important for me now than it was when I started my business. Because back then, the why was just in my head, and everyone else needed to sort of follow. And now it is more about explaining, giving the context, and getting everyone behind the idea.

Shamil Malachiyev: How is this different in practice? For example, we take you 10 years ago: you would sit in a room with some of the people on the project and you'd be like, this is how I want it to run, because I've thought it through, this is how it should look. How is it different now?

Sebastian Haas: I was much more of a control freak back then. You would just say: okay, look, I need this to be done, I can do it myself because I believe I'm the fastest in doing this. So you sit there and you work all night and you put together your spreadsheets and all of that stuff. Now it is much more like: okay, look, we believe we need to do this, because the market requires it or so. Who do we need to make this a success? Who do we need to involve? Who do we need to get behind this idea and support it? And what does it mean for the different functions, the different support functions, the different departments and the team? So it's much more of an alignment type of managerial role, of course. Although I don't see myself as being the greatest people manager, that's just what happens when you have such a growing organization.

So the difference is: listen to people, understand different perspectives. There might be more ways than just what you think is the right thing to do. And in the end, you have to take these as different puzzle pieces, put it all together, and get everyone behind this idea. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone has to agree to everything all the time. But as long as you can consciously disagree and then still commit on something, that's what you want. Not everyone needs to like every single idea.

Shamil Malachiyev: It's very interesting to me: if we take Sebastian back at the start, the control freak, you had this vision you wanted to execute, and back then you didn't have AI tools that allow you to do all of those things. You had to spend the whole night working on spreadsheets. Right now you can take Claude Opus 4.6, give it all the context, and within 20 minutes you have a really good spreadsheet with all of the data and different evaluations. You can almost work like with a team, but within your own head, with LLM systems and the agentic solutions out there. If the Sebastian back then had all of this tooling, do you think the path would have been a lot different?

Sebastian Haas: I probably wouldn't have hired anyone back then. No; I mean, yes, of course, it offers a lot that you can gain using all of these different platforms. But I strongly believe you still need to know what you're doing. So in the end, you still need experts controlling it, orchestrating things like agents for you, because otherwise it's going to be a big, big mess. I'm obviously curious to see what the future brings. But as of today, I would say you still need your engineers controlling the agents that produce the code. The good thing is they can be way more efficient, way more productive with all of these tools. But it could not be me doing all of this. Maybe that's also because of the product that we're building, because of the business that we are, because of the customers that we work with. It might be different in, let's say, a B2C startup.

Shamil Malachiyev: Over the last two, three years we've seen the largest tech companies investing billions of dollars into marketing and advertising the idea that if you're not a one-man AI company, then you're late, you're over, AGI is around the corner. And when you look at reality, people take time to get through adoption, to understand the technology, where it fits. With your observations of the industry, where are we actually with adopting all of these new LLM-powered AI agents out there? What are you noticing?

Sebastian Haas: My perspective, and that's what we're doing here at Talon.One, is we're looking for value. If you look at what AI means for a business, there's an internal perspective that's all around productivity, efficiency, doing all of these things faster, better, more. And then there's the external perspective, which is more about what goes into the product that is AI.

From a product-AI perspective: in a lot of cases where we've seen certain things pop up, certain trends, we've tried to understand: does this really add any value for our customers? And in a lot of the cases, we've come to the conclusion that it doesn't. So we decided not to just jump on the hype train and do something because it was big on TechCrunch the other day, but instead look for the real value and focus on generating value for the customers. I strongly believe that's the right perspective. Why should I implement even the simplest chatbot into the system when that ultimately can only answer three different questions and doesn't really bring any value? You won't find that in the product of Talon.One. What we're looking for is: where can we really generate value with having AI perform certain actions on the data that we have, and develop products out of that. And a lot of other companies I've seen left and right: all of a sudden, everyone has a chatbot in their UI. Okay, that's cool, and it helps maybe in some cases. And yes, of course we also do tiny little things like that. In our product documentation, you can now, with the click of a button, get a summary of certain things. That's cool, it helps you understand things, digest content easier. But in other cases it was: everyone needed to have an AI chatbot integrated into their UI just because the possibility was there and everyone does it. So we're trying to differentiate, we're trying to look at the real value that these things bring.

And it's kind of the same for the internal productivity perspective. Yes, you can do great things. I think everyone that has been working over the last year or two with any of the LLMs knows it can be a big benefit. And it can be a big distractor in a lot of things. The quality of content is not necessarily good. We've come a long way with this, so it definitely got better, I'm not ignoring this. But you still find yourself trapped in some loops of endless improvements that don't really improve anything. So you need to overcome this, you need to go around this, and in some cases it's just not where we are with AI right now, so it needs more time.

We're also trying to focus on where we can add value, in what processes we can add value when using AI. A simple example: of course we have to sign a lot of NDAs with customers and prospects. Unfortunately, not in all of the cases are we able to use our own template that we know inside out, so our legal counsels have to look at NDAs from customers. That is something where you can actually use AI. It's pretty straightforward: you use AI to flag certain things, to help you understand it. It improves speed, and even accuracy sometimes, because people make mistakes. So of course we have embedded these types of things into some of our processes. But again, we're looking for the real value. We're not just jumping at a lot of things, and we try to enable the team to use the right platforms for experimentation. That is something we do: people can experiment with certain things and then share their learnings with the team, and also share things that do not work, because that's equally important, I find. And then maybe there's a couple of things that other teams want to adopt and use for their own processes. So we're trying to build an environment that enables people using different technologies.

What I find is challenging is that these things evolve so quickly. You might bet on OpenAI this month, next month it might be Claude and Anthropic, and after that it's going to be Google and Gemini again. So it's always this sort of balancing act between using the right technology for the right setup, for the right scenario, for the right process, and not getting trapped into just waiting for the next tool to come around and provide something that is even better than what you've seen before. That's what I find is a challenge in all these different tools that you can potentially use right now.

Shamil Malachiyev: As a last question, I wanted to ask: what advice could you give to all of the founders who are looking through all of the news, reading through all of the hype? One day Claude releases something, now everybody's installing MCPs, everybody's trying to sell you MCP connectivity, and you're like: why do I need this? But at the same time there's always this worry: maybe somebody using all of those technologies is going to revolutionize the industry and take over, maybe we need to be doing something. I know that you take a very patient approach with analyzing technology. How would you advise founders to approach this, to make sure they don't move into something which will just send them off a cliff or just waste a lot of their time?

Sebastian Haas: First of all, you have to realize that we can allow ourselves to do this because we're not a SaaS platform that is aiming at the consumer or needs to always be on top of the technology game from that perspective. We are seen as part of the infrastructure, and infrastructure is a lot about performance, stability, security. So in some cases, we need to not be the first ones experimenting with something, because that might have a very negative impact on how we work with our customers. So that's a slightly different perspective on this.

But what I would really advise is: always look for value. You want to find real value in these things. And I think you need to differentiate what the value actually is. Because in some cases, it might be a good thing to jump on something and implement something because it drives marketing, and that might be value for your business. So don't get me wrong there: sometimes it makes sense to jump on a trend and do something because that has a big marketing impact that gives you leverage in the market. But in other cases, the value might be in something completely different. It might be something where you can increase your performance, something that has a more business impact, and there you might want to be more careful. So I think you need to ask yourself: what is the value that it would provide me, if using a certain technology or doing something with AI, with the help of an AI tool, with the automation that I can build? Is that something that is reliable? Is that something that is scalable? All of these questions. And again, we're on a very infrastructure-heavy side of things; that might be different for consumer-facing products, obviously.

Shamil Malachiyev: So it's not the kind of move-fast-break-things model, right?

Sebastian Haas: I don't think that would work for us, to be honest. For experimentation, it does. But we're always very careful when it comes to doing anything in production.

Shamil Malachiyev: I want to thank you so much for joining me for this episode. I think it's going to be extremely exciting for everybody who's going to be listening, to learn about your realistic view of the industry, your path, and the work you do at Talon.One. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Sebastian Haas: It was my pleasure. Bye bye.