Mark Heynen On Breaking Down Barriers to Access To Fintech, Smartphones, And AI, Raising Over $400 Million Across 5 Ventures

Mark Heynen has successfully navigated the startup ecosystem several times, running the entire gamut from building, scaling, and funding companies to exiting them. His journey demonstrates the power of resilience, learning from failures, and successfully pivoting to adapt to market conditions.

Mark’s latest venture is Knapsack, and he reveals what it means to build a rocket ship in the current environment. The company has Alphabet, Ascend Venture Capital (Seattle), FiDi Ventures, and Gradient Ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Mark Heynen’s entrepreneurial success stems from learning through failures and pivoting to meet market needs.
• Focus on impactful, global challenges, even if they seem difficult or resource-intensive at first.
• Assembling the right team, empowering talent, and fostering cohesion are crucial to building successful companies.
• Achieving traction requires identifying the ideal customer profile and ensuring the product meets their needs.
• Ventures like PayJoy and Skycatch demonstrate the potential to transform established sectors using innovative technology.
• Mark’s latest startup, Knapsack, addresses AI adoption challenges by enabling secure, local data processing.
• Mark envisions distributed AI systems seamlessly integrating into workflows, boosting productivity while prioritizing privacy.

 

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About Mark Heynen:

Mark Heynen has led go-to-market in emerging markets for large and small companies, from Google’s initial push into maps in the mid-2000s to Facebook’s early mobile efforts and ultimately launching PayJoy, a Silicon Valley-based fintech in 20 countries.

Mark currently serves as VP of Business Development at the Stellar Development Foundation. His focus has been on analyzing markets, structuring transformational partnerships, hiring highly functional teams in the market, and then producing revenue quickly with great unit economics.

Mark has also raised ~$100M in early-stage VC, venture debt, and SPV debt financing across four companies he built and advised companies on fundraising.

Prior to moving to Silicon Valley in 2006, Mark split his time between India and London, founding and running his first startup, Electrobug Technologies.

As this company had clients in 18 countries and 250+ staff in India through a wholly owned subsidiary, Mark learned firsthand the challenges and opportunities of working in emerging markets and is currently an advisor for a number of startups.

Mark graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a degree in Economics and History.

Connect with Mark Heynen:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• F6S
• X

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: alrighty Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. so Today, we have a founder that has done it quite a bit of times, you know so many that he may get dizzy. It’s incredible. and they We’re going to be talking about the whole journey you know from building to scaling to financing to exiting, ah you name it. you know We’re going to be talking about you know what you learn. you know You raise, you burn all and all the money, then you pivot. We’re going to be talking to about launching in a market that maybe you know you realize that it was not the one, and then you just listen for product market fit. And then also what he’s up to nowadays you know with his latest company,

Alejandro Cremades: you know, which they’re building engineering, they’re a rocket ship, you know, and and what it looks like to build also in the current environment. But again, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation.

Alejandro Cremades: And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Mark Heynen. Welcome to the show.

Mark Heynen: Thank you for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Germany, but you came here to the US quite early. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Mark Heynen: like good Actually, we’re going to have to stop and pause. I have to make one correction. My my last name is pronounced Heinen.

Alejandro Cremades: Heinen. OK, so here, let me let me let me let me repeat that again.

Mark Heynen: Yeah, thanks.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s welcome our guest today, Mark Heinen. Welcome to the show.

Mark Heynen: Thank you for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: So so born and raised, born actually in Germany, but raised in the US. s So give us a walk through memory e lane. How is life growing up for you?

Mark Heynen: well i um moved when I was two years old with my family from Germany to the US, grew up in Connecticut, um was ah you know fortunate enough to actually have um you know a great experience in Connecticut um doing ah sports where I was really pushed to um excel early on. And I think that really helped me build some good habits later on in life.

Mark Heynen: um ah went to school at Amherst College um and did some consulting in DC after ah college and and then moved to London where I initially caught the bug of starting companies.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s talk about that. How do you get into into the whole venture world? How did that happen?

Mark Heynen: Well, it really happened almost by accident. So um I was hired by Kingfisher, which you know if you basically combine Best Buy and Home Depot and put it in Europe, that’s what Kingfisher at the time was in London, a FTSE 100 company. um I was hired as their internet guy in 1999. The chairman, Sir Jeff Mulcahy took me in the first day and asked me, I have two questions for you. What is the internet and how do I buy it?

Mark Heynen: And so I had this really interesting job of educating the senior management team on e-commerce and what e-commerce was, um did a couple of tours of Silicon Valley and met a number of the web one companies, eBay, Netscape, etc.

Mark Heynen: And as I was going through that process of educating myself, educating others, I actually realized that though there was a really interesting opportunity to start a company around price tracking online, effectively a Nielsen online. And um to do that,

Mark Heynen: initially for consumers. And so I left the company and started Electrobug, which is my first company, raised money from a VC, a Belgian VC at the time, ah raised about a million dollars, and launched a website. um And I was Very proud of this website we had built. It was beautiful. It allowed people to um effectively compare prices of electronics, um you know, sort of the um CNET of Europe at the time. ah We were super excited about it.

Mark Heynen: um The only problem was no one came to visit the website. And we had spent a lot of money putting it together. And we had really been product first rather than market first in our approach. And we had burned through all of our money. And so that gave me a hard lesson on how to actually build a company and how to prioritize um you know the order of events in building a company. um And so ultimately, we ended up um having to let go of most of the team in London and pivot the company into a completely different business, which is this Nielsen business I was mentioning where we were actually providing B2B price checking. And that was ah that basically required us finding a whole new set of ah backers, a whole new set of venture capitalists to back us, ah buying out the existing investors and launching an entirely new company that was ah quite a brutal process.

Alejandro Cremades: But eventually, the company you know went through an acquisition. you know And as they say, you know first company, first exit is is pretty amazing. So how was it like, too, going through that transaction? What was the lesson learned there around going through the full cycle as a founder?

Mark Heynen: So we were first in this space. So when I first started this concept of B2B price tracking, um you know we took the consumer price comparison engine, made it an engine for businesses to use for price tracking.

Mark Heynen: and i first walked into a retailer and introduced myself as, you know, having working for an organization, doing this work, even though we hadn’t really built a product, and ah ended up signing up that retailer on the spot and um building this company from scratch. um So we were first, other people filled in later on to um to do um similar work because they spotted this opportunity.

Mark Heynen: ah So that transaction was really, um you know, a merger of sorts with another company that ended up, um you know, was doing very similar work. And then ultimately that company ah was then acquired by another company which then went public on the ah bombbased stock exchange And so it was an interesting transaction because, you know, whenever you’re doing a, um you know, acquisition or merger with another strategic or corporate, ah you know, you obviously have an interesting dilemma where you, um you know, really need to make sure you’re spending time

Mark Heynen: on something that is going to happen. um You’re divulging a lot of information during that process. I was fortunate you know during that refinance period where we had pivoted to B2B, I had to find new investors. I found some fantastic investors and board members. One of them was Esther Dyson, who um is well known to people who have been active since the late 90s and 2000s, a really fantastic um advisor for founders, ah was able to, um with her help and Eric Bangrin and Jeff Wood and a number of the

Mark Heynen: individuals who came on board was able to navigate that process and make sure that we got to a great outcome for the investors and for the employees. um And I think you know a big piece of this was that we had let go of the team in London. We still had three people in London, but I moved to India to hire 250 people in India. And so we had a significant team to um you know effectively serve our clients in 18 countries.

Mark Heynen: And so we wanted to make sure during that transaction that the team was well taken care of and that all the stakeholders had a good outcome.

Alejandro Cremades: So after this, instead of like going at it again as a founder, you know after a tasting, you know the venture world, you decided to go more into more like the corporate side of things. you know I guess Google back then you know was not as big as we know it today. But tell us about this journey of switching gears and and going and working for somebody else.

Mark Heynen: Well, one thing I learned through that process ah with Electrobug, one thing I knew coming out of that process is that I did not know very much about how to run a technology company in the modern age. you know but I had been, it was my first time founding a company. I had learned a lot on my own, but I had seen the ascent of Google and other companies and I realized there’s a lot more to learn about operating at scale, and I wanted to learn how to operate at scale. So it was an interesting adjustment, um joining Google in 2006. One thing I found really fascinating was the team I joined, which is a business development team working on maps and content acquisition, included a lot of ex-founders. They seemed to like hiring ex-founders.

Mark Heynen: The founder of Shazam, for example, was on that team as well. A number of other people had joined from exits. And I think that created the right DNA. um And it allowed me to learn how to, first of all, recruit and evaluate people in the right way. um I think that’s something Google has a really unique skill at. And it allowed ah me to think about products at scale. I worked on Google Maps in emerging markets. ive worked on um growing Android from nothing, you know the G1 you might remember in 2008. And it really helped me figure out how to actually operate at that global scale and make long-term decisions um to basically have massive impact.

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about to um jumping to Facebook. I mean, it’s really amazing because you were able to grab two companies that were like writing you know really really fast and that have um had a tremendous impact in the in in in in the world of business. So how do you how do you switch you know from one chapter the and to the next, you know from Google to Facebook?

Mark Heynen: Well, it was actually just through ah personal relationships. You know, I have a philosophy generally that whenever you do any kind of partnerships, business development, you should be relationship first and think about the long-term implications of what you’re doing. I was working on Android. My job was to actually build out the social media category on Android. This was back when there was the G1, the iPhone had launched. People were not interested in developing on Android.

Mark Heynen: um I bought Twitter onto Android. I um you know bought Foursquare on. That was a big deal at the time. um And the white whale, the thing we were really hoping to get on was Facebook. Facebook publicly said they would, Android was vaporware and they would not want to implement on Android. I think ah already Mark Zuckerberg was making noises that they he considered Google a competitor.

Mark Heynen: And ah I may just made it my mission to get to know that team and to find out how we can actually break through this log jam. Ultimately, through a lot of negotiation, um we found a way to launch Facebook on the Nexus One in 2010. And also, well, that was in 2009. And then through that process, got to know the team. ah We got along very well, and they recruited me over, and I joined in 2010.

Mark Heynen: um And so it was a very smooth transition. It did feel very chaotic compared to Google. um You know, this was at the time a thousand person company. I was going from a ten thousand person company at Google to a thousand person company at Facebook.

Mark Heynen: um they i think the Week I joined um in May 2010, there was already a big privacy issue brewing um that many said were was threatening the existence of Facebook. And so ah it did not feel like an established company or a corporate company by any stretch of the imagination.

Alejandro Cremades: What did you learn from, um you know because obviously you are coming now from from a startup into those two like incredible companies. like What were the three biggest lessons that you took away that maybe like some patterns that you were seeing repeating that maybe now you’re looking at them and and really keeping them in mind as you’re building now again from scratch?

Mark Heynen: It’s a great question. I think the first thing is always solve a big problem. ah you know I think this is where…

Mark Heynen: Larry, Sergey, and Zuck have really been able to excel. um They’ve been able to think broadly about um what’s happening in the world and what shifts are happening and think about solving a big problem, even a problem that you don’t have resources to solve right now, and to continually go after those big problems and work at them and work at them, even if they are hard to solve to begin with.

Mark Heynen: um I think the second is ah people first. Ultimately, nothing works if you don’t have the right people on board. And being really careful about um you know how you evaluate people joining you, um betting on potential um and raw horsepower, and making sure you’re spending time optimizing those relationships, the teamwork between people. um Ultimately, if you have a functional team and you’re going after a big problem, you’re generally going to end up in a good spot.

Mark Heynen: Um, it also taught me not to worry about certain things. Um, you know, there are certain details, um, that I would obsess over in my first startup that I realized were really not that important in the grand scheme of things and not something I should really worry about. Um, so I think that was a really great learning from, uh, in terms of company building and something I took forwards.

Alejandro Cremades: So after um you know working for other companies, you decide that it’ say the time has come you know to to go at it again as a founder. So at what point does that come knocking? And it was he was ah a bunch of years already, not like five or six in saying you had your last chapter ah closed with your first company. So when did you realize, hey, maybe maybe i should I should do this entrepreneurship thing again?

Mark Heynen: I was really getting the itch. ah you know In 2012, it had been six years. um Obviously, Facebook had also grown. Facebook it was IPO-ing in 2012. A lot of things change at the time. ah And I was seeing these big shifts happen. Obviously, there’s the social mobile shift at the time, which introduced a lot of interesting opportunities.

Mark Heynen: um and It was very clear that it was a great time to be starting companies in the Bay Area specifically. um I had not had that experience. I’d started my first company in London. At the time, there was not really a culture around founders. There was weren’t the tailwinds that we were feeling in 2012. Most people in London in the early 2000s, I would share that I was starting a company. They would ask why I didn’t just go get a job, why I was putting myself through this. um And so it was actually really um ah great time ah you know two thousand and twelve

Mark Heynen: was really the time when Dropbox, Airbnb, a couple of other large companies really came together, companies that became large. um And so I ended up doing some explorations. And through those explorations, I reconnected with a bunch of people I’d known before and um found that there was a really great opportunity with Drop Talk to explore what’s possible with a new paradigm for photo sharing, more transitory photo sharing. This was actually before Snapchat.

Mark Heynen: um We ended up doing some great work. um I think, ultimately, Snapchat ended up dominating um that space. um And we pivoted into more B2B direction and ended up selling to um Dropbox. So I don’t think that was a home run. That was more of a single. um But I think it was a great experience in terms of actually getting this um my feet wet in terms of that journey.

Alejandro Cremades: So it sounds like now, you know, you have two exits under your build. You’ve experienced Facebook, Google. As they say, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, and you had it in you. why Why joining others, you know, versus saying starting again? What happened there with SkyCuts?

Mark Heynen: Yeah, I think I really enjoyed the process of um starting new and I really liked the process of actually attacking a big problem. And with SkyCatch, I met the team and I saw that they were yeah actually taking advantage of a pretty fundamental platform shift with drones actually starting to become more available and ah needed um you know exactly what I had um already been able to um do previously at Electrobug specifically, which is carve out a go-to-market strategy. And so I joined the initial team um and was able to um bring that into market. And you know I think this was a really fascinating time period. um you know If you dial back to 2013, 2014,

Mark Heynen: drones were relatively new. People didn’t quite know whether they were legal, whether they were not legal, ah what the potential for those drones were. There were American drone manufacturers that were doing quite well at the time. 3D robotics was emerging. And we realized that there was this interesting opportunity where people in construction and mining and even in agriculture had not seized the opportunity yet that was being offered them and so we ended up finding a way to scale a data business out of this. I think the really exciting part of that was um you know

Mark Heynen: when we got called by the people running the new Apple Campus Project, AC2, which is the current Apple headquarters. They had just broken ground. um They needed daily documentation of this construction project because it was effectively a $6 billion dollars construction project. And as you can imagine, if you know you’re not tracking the 5,000 people working on that project, well, you could have significant disagreements or misunderstandings.

Mark Heynen: And so that was really a highlight of that period because we were able to have a really massive impact on ah one of the most iconic construction projects um in the 2010s, really in the world. And I think that um also showed what was possible in terms of implementing a new technology into a relatively traditional industry at that time construction, very difficult industry to sell into. um And I think that was, ah you know, a really fantastic experience. um And something, you know, I’m quite proud that SkyCatch was one of the few drone companies that was able to survive.

Mark Heynen: the drone apocalypse that happened in when DJI started reducing their prices dramatically. um you know They partnered with DJI. That was another important move um that happened um during my tenure. And ultimately, they’re doing very well as a drone data company at this point.

Alejandro Cremades: So the next chapter, Pei Joy, arguably one of the biggest ones that they that you’ve done to date you know in companies that you’ve um you’ve started. Pei Joy, a company that has raised a you know at least this close to over 400 million. you know Quite a success. I’m wondering there, one of the things that the that you experienced was that initially, you guys thought that it would be the way to go to launch in the US, but you ended up doing it in Mexico. so i guess What is the company? What does the company do? Because they’re still up and running and very successfully so. And then what did you guys learn about adjusting and getting it right on product market fit?

Mark Heynen: Yeah, I started PageA with my friend Doug Rickett, who I worked with at Google, and Gib Lopez, who he had met at Stanford GSB. And Doug had experience with Pay-as-you-go solar in Africa. And the observation, the insight that drove the creation of PageA was, Pay-as-you-go is a great way for the underbanked people without credit to be able to afford hardware that they can’t normally afford if they don’t have credit. And so if you can lock a phone if someone doesn’t pay, you can actually allow them to pay weekly, biweekly, monthly for that device without having to do extensive credit checks um or have other sort of infrastructure in place. And that could be a global mechanism for people to actually start paying weekly or regularly for

Mark Heynen: devices, um even if they’re in the prepaid market, which the majority of the world is. So that was the general insight. um That was um definitely true in the U.S., the underbanked in the U.S., and we realized we could actually launch very quickly by opening up in phone stores in the Bay Area initially and then ultimately across the U.S. in the prepaid market.

Mark Heynen: And we had some early traction. I think what happened ultimately was that we saw the trajectory of that traction and we realized this is not the trajectory of a world beating company. i It was doing well. We had really happy clients. But ultimately, what we saw when we were talking to people elsewhere in the world is that they really wanted this technology in their markets. And we actually had an inbound from a potential partner in Mexico. um You know, we had, ah I had formed a partnership with a company called Brightstar, which is a US company that had a lot of connectivity in Latin America. um And ultimately,

Mark Heynen: through that partnership and through other relationships, we were able to, uh, connect with a retailer in Mexico, um, called sensel, who was very interested in launching this, uh, and was ready to actually spend a lot of time with us to do the hard work to get this compliant in Mexico. But this was the first year of the company, you know, launching in two markets in the first year of the company before we’d even raised our series a.

Mark Heynen: Uh, felt like a really big lift. Um, ultimately, um, I boarded a plane, went and spent time with sense. I’ll validate it, realized it was actually, um, you know, great opportunity. Spoke with the team. Um, you know, we weighed the pros and cons. Uh, you know, ultimately we’d said, let’s go ahead and do it.

Mark Heynen: And we launched um you really about a year and a half after first ah selling our first phone. We were actually live in Mexico and ultimately the traction we achieved there was phenomenal. um And, you know, it’s phenomenal because 80 90% of the market is prepaid. So obviously much bigger market, but also People really liked the pay as you go model. It was very differentiated from what they were used to, from the other retailers there, Coppell Electra. And I think the lesson, the overarching lesson there was don’t be afraid to follow the market, even if the market actually ends up being um in a difficult to reach area or you know ends up requiring some investment to get into that market. If you’re feeling market pull, that’s probably the most important thing to prioritize when you’re,

Mark Heynen: you know launching a product into market.

Alejandro Cremades: So you actually, um you know after this, you went to Stellar and you were then that you were there actually helping with go-to-market initiatives ah right before what you’re doing now with NAP, which we’ll talk about it in just a little bit about what you guys are doing with NAPSAC. So I want to ask you because there’s a lot of founders right now trying to figure things out, trying to figure out the go-to-market. What can you tell them about tackling effectively go-to-market as a founder?

Mark Heynen: Well, I think there is not one single playbook that works, but I think the the important thing is to actually get the management team all on the same page on a playbook that you’re going to feel will work well for your product.

Mark Heynen: um I feel there’s been a lot of work on this, ah you know, over the last decade or so where, you know, things are more known. I do think defining your ideal customer profile initially, especially in a B2B context, you know, um ultimately, most of my companies were B2B, even Payjoy, we were selling to retailers who then sold to consumers, so it was B2B to C.

Mark Heynen: um Figuring out your ideal customer profile um and actually figuring out a profile that is quite narrow to begin with and focusing entirely in on that profile and making sure you do a very good job for that initial profile will really clarify, A, what the product needs to do to get traction, and B, it’ll clarify whether that profile is providing the pull you were expecting in terms of wanting your product.

Mark Heynen: um and I do think that there are a few questions you can ask that are um and of very instructive to figure out whether you have that product market fit or not and whether this is going to work. So one great question, um which I think Sean Ellis ultimately came up with is, would you be disappointed if this product disappeared tomorrow? And if the answer is yes to that question, you have a sense that you have some level of product market fit.

Mark Heynen: I think the next thing there once you have some level product market fit is really distribution and how to actually engage with your clients. And I think that has actually changed quite a bit over the last, you know, um decade or so.

Mark Heynen: I think initially it was all about, you know, steak dinners and sass and trying to actually sell one by one slack showed product like growth can really um be another mechanism. And at this point, I actually think we’re in sort of this third phase where we’re not actually even relying on entirely on product like growth, but relying on people finding and hearing about your product through other channels, people using it, viral mechanisms, and starting to um really engage deeply with your product and realizing the product is quite essential.

Mark Heynen: and and being an advocate for that product within the organization. um And, you know, I think if you think of the growth path of Snowflake and and the large B2B companies these days, that’s what I think we’ve seen work. And ultimately, I would say with Payjoy, you know, right now we’re in um nine countries, ultimately, um you know,

Mark Heynen: We have tens of thousands of retailers using the product. Those retailers likely heard about the product from other retailers. So this isn’t ah really product-led growth in the classic sense of I’m going to tell my colleagues about this. This is this is an essential thing I need to sell phones. Therefore, I’m going to use it.

Mark Heynen: um And therefore I’m going to tell a lot of other people about it because it’s important to me that other people use it as well. And I would say that’s actually the path of crypto. You were asking about my my move into crypto. Ultimately, that’s actually a path that, um you know, a lot of those crypto projects had to traverse as well. People were building networks of people using these products because it was so exciting for them and they wanted to bring other people in. And that created a lot of organic growth, which I think is a fantastic way to grow as a technology company.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s fast forward now. Let’s talk about knapsack, which is your your latest baby. And what are what are you guys doing at knapsack?

Mark Heynen: So the idea behind knapsack is that a lot of companies in financial services and healthcare in particular are really not very comfortable sharing their data to large AI clouds. And so the typical path that, um you know, a company would have to go through and, you know, page is a FinTech. So just imagine um something they would have to go through is, you know, looking at the,

Mark Heynen: things they want to do with AI, realizing a lot of it touches on their corporate data, and then looking at how they can go about implementing those things and realizing very quickly they can either trust a new untested AI cloud where they upload all their data to that cloud.

Mark Heynen: Or they can do um you know a private cloud solution with OpenAI or with Google, which often A, involves consolidating all their data into a single cloud, which is not advantageous, and B, it involves um A lot of cost. I mean the average open AI service agreement on Azure is now a million dollars a year, and that cost is prohibitive for most people. And so really, you either can um decide to just upload your data to perplexity or others in a public crowd cloud decide it’s

Mark Heynen: doesn’t need to be private and do the cheap and cheerful solution. ah That’s actually what’s happening. 80% of people are just uploading stuff without telling anyone. Or you can decide to do something very expensive and very difficult. um And those options do not seem great for most people. ah People want to share their data. Well, people want to use AI on their data, but they don’t want to share their data. And we realized we could actually come architect a completely different ah system where you’re effectively downloading an application on your computer, syncing your data on the computer, and never sharing it with us or with anyone else and using AI locally on your computer. um And that seems to be a much more efficient and much more private way to do this. It also opened up the opportunity then for organizations or enterprises to um basically

Mark Heynen: download knapsack behind their cloud, behind their firewall, um and sync it to their data again without sharing with anyone else. So an enterprise version of this same architecture. um And that felt like where the world was going in terms of compute being on the edge, include people wanting to have a more efficient system. And so we realized that was actually a direction we wanted to build in. We started Building it out. And we realized very quickly that financial advisors in particular have this problem. um If you imagine a financial advisor, they have access to a lot of very sensitive customer information. They are actually

Mark Heynen: from a regulatory point of point of view, not allowed to upload this information to any cloud, let it open AI or any other cloud. um They really need to process quite a bit of information um in a very short period of time to help their clients. A lot of financial advisors have over 100 clients, so they need to have some level of scale. Some of them operate independently. Some of them operate within you know five or 10 um a teams of five or 10 or so. And ultimately, um they should be using AI 100 times a day, but they’re fundamentally blocked. So that that seemed to be a great starting point for um you know to my point before about understanding your ideal customer profile to begin with. That seemed to be a great place to start. And that’s what we’re doing right now. We have

Mark Heynen: an application that’s live for people to download and use on knapsack.ai. But we’re spending a lot of time with financial advisors to define automations for them and to help them use AI with their data without having to upload their data to a new cloud.

Alejandro Cremades: So if you were to go to sleep tonight, Mark, and you wake up in a world where the vision of knapsack is fully realized, what what does that world look like?

Mark Heynen: Well, That world involves people actually using AI in a much more distributed manner, in a much more personal manner. So when you ask a question, you know whether it’s on your phone or on your computer, that AI system should know your complete email history. It should know about every file on your computer. It should know about every calendar event across all of your accounts. And it should ask knowing all that context, knowing everything about you.

Mark Heynen: um It should also be able to operate without you having to ask. So that’s actually the other piece of what we’re building. We’re we’re not just requiring someone to use a chat box. ah We don’t think the chat box is the dominant or winning UI in AI. ah We are enabling automations where things will automatically happen prior to you even asking based on what’s happening in your world. So a great mainstream example of this is meeting preparation. so

Mark Heynen: you know ah I knew we were talking, knapsack automatically pushed a meeting prep brief to me an hour before our call, ah detailing, you know, the previous people you had on your podcast and you know what the nature of your pod and ah also the nature of our conversation and knew everything about my past emails. And so that’s an example of something that’s pushed at me that will end up being very impactful. And you can imagine that happening 100 times a day in different ways where, you know,

Mark Heynen: the device to tech something’s happening in your world takes action and takes action on your behalf, either independently or with you in the loop. I think initially it’s going to be with you in the loop and ends up making you a lot more productive. And so ultimately I think that is the world we’re going to face going forward is that people are going to be automating a lot of parts of their lives. um And those automations are going to feel very natural. And I think five or 10 years from now,

Mark Heynen: it’s going to be um hard to imagine them not existing.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s say I bring you back in time now. I put you into a time machine and I bring you back to the year of 2000. You know, it’s the moment where you’re thinking about starting a company of your own and venturing into the world of entrepreneurship. And let’s say you’re able to stop that younger mark on the tracks and give that younger mark there in London, one piece of advice for launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Mark Heynen: Well, I could cheat and say, I should go move to Palo Alto and meet these guys called Larry and Sergey and join them in any way I can, right? um But let let me actually give you a more direct answer. So I think the practical piece of advice is,

Mark Heynen: um first of all, make sure you’re solving a very big problem. And that was actually the challenge I had in That first company that market research, you know, being the next Nielsen was not a really big problem. It was an interesting problem and I could get immediate traction, but ultimately it wasn’t a big enough market where um I could grow into um building, you know, a large company that had true scale. And I was able to bring it to, you know, catch profitability. um And I think that was fantastic. But ultimately, that was a challenge. So I would say that’s the first thing. Make sure you’re solving a big problem. I think the second thing is be people first. um You know, think about

Mark Heynen: the people you’re bringing on board, um take your time in terms of bringing on those people, define your core values, and define what you want to prioritize amongst your team, and then make sure you’re betting on potential. And um ultimately, people will have a lot of different roles in your organization.

Mark Heynen: um I would say 80% of the challenges I had in my first company were people related, just you know people doing things that they were um ah not supposed to do or um you know acting in unpredictable ways. Obviously, I was young, didn’t know a lot about management at the time.

Mark Heynen: yeah to add to that that most of the team was in India I was in London, I was actually managing a lot of people through MSN messenger which is I guess the early equivalent of slack. um And so you can imagine, it was a very challenging experience at the time.

Mark Heynen: um I ended up actually spending you know three to six months per year in India to make sure that I really got into and solved those people issues. And I imagine I could have resolved those early on by thinking through the culture a little more.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Mark, for the people that are listening, I would love to reach out and say hi. What’s the best way for them to do so?

Mark Heynen: Yeah, so you’re welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter on Mark Hynden. You can also go to markhynden.com and you can see all my socials. um And I am also on threads and on Blue Sky on Mark Hynden. So I’m active on all of those.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. well Hey Mark, thank you so much for being on The Dealmaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Mark Heynen: Well, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

*****

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