Torsten Reil
speaker
213 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Torsten Reil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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By contrast, there are innovation projects, which is quite often almost a parallel track to all of this, where there are smaller pots of money to prove that certain forces or nations can do innovation and defense. The problem is you may kind of get 500K from one of these projects, and you win it and you show to your VC, we've made revenues.
The jump from there to actually a program of record is huge because all of the apparatus that's required to pitch for these programs, to have, again, the government relationships, some of the lobbying that's required, compliance, again, export law, I mentioned it earlier, that isn't required for these innovation projects.
So these kind of teams have a feeling of, I've now taken the first step, now the next step is a program of record, not realizing it's a completely different kettle of fish. And again, I had to learn all of this because for me, it was natural
They need to build the teams around it. And this is where one of the problems lie. There's a scarcity of talent around go-to-market government relations, even compliance and other things, even security, to be honest, in defense. So all of these companies would be competing for a very small pool of people. It's just impossible to turn them all into primes. It's just not going to happen.
Coming back to the innovation side, you end up with something that looks like product-market fit, and you think it's great technology, you've shown it, and you can do something, maybe take a drone down or something. But I had to learn that that is just a very small part of building a prime. It's like one-eighth maybe or something. It's product-market fit. Then you have to do all the rest.
And for that, you need to build the infrastructure to build a prime, which Android has done, for example. It's a good example. We've done it too. We're certainly in the process of doing it. And there's still a ways to go. But I think that's what's underappreciated.
And it's not underappreciated with VCs that know about defense, but with, I think, VCs that are maybe as distant as I was when I was previously in the gaming industry. I think for them, they quite often don't get what it takes to actually build a large company.
100%. Most founders will say, had I known how hard this is, I would never have tried. Had you known how hard this is, would you have tried? Elting, yes. With Natural Motion, I went through some really tough times.
There's several reasons. But the main reason now is that three founders, it's easier to build a company, even when you go through really difficult times, because you have each other to rely on. You have each other as a sounding board. It sounds a bit kumbaya, but it's very important.
Well, we've been through hard moments throughout the company, but really difficult times were over the last few weeks when we had to will into existence a hardware platform, having come into it, not knowing much about it, having to do it in record time, having to think about supply chains and everything else around it. I mean, that's difficult.
And you do it while there's lots of noise in the market and all kinds of other things, and you still have to build a company. And it's time consuming. There are lots of setbacks. And it is much easier to do it if you have several shoulders rather than just one to get through all of this stuff. And there'll be more setbacks happening.
Like with every startup, you just don't know what's going to happen. And you know what it's like with a startup. That's what I experienced at Natural Motion. You're already on the floor, you've already been punched in the face several times, and then another one comes, and then another one comes, which you didn't expect.
Those are the worst, is when you're kind of already, fuck, I'm done, and it's relentless. The only thing I would say is that with Natural Motion, we got out of it eventually. Even out of, we had some situations that were very hard to get out of, we still managed to do it.
One was when we did our integration into GTA 4 with our technology Euphoria, which was an animation runtime engine. We had already optimized the hell out of it. And we had great optimization people for gaming consoles. But GTA 4 was an amazing game and really pushed the consoles to its limits.
And I felt the technology was great, but there was a point where we got a call from Rockstar saying we don't have the performance budget for your engine anymore. So you either run another 10 times faster or we can't use it. And I remember putting the phone down and thinking, we are fucked. And I was sure we were fucked because we'd already optimized everything.
This was one of those moments where a number of our engineers eventually went to Edinburgh to work directly with a team there until they somehow managed to get that performance gain. And the engine stayed in there and it was the beginning of Natural Motion proper because it was such an important game and it made everyone proud.
It's also taught me about how exceptional engineers can make crazy things happen. And I was convinced this wasn't going to work out and they made it happen. To this day, I have so much respect for great software engineers. The best software engineers, they make all of us look good. I spoke to Shaq before the show.
Yeah, so I think people complain about all kinds of things about Europe and general startup environments. I don't think that there is a lack of capital in Europe. Certainly not seed series A, sometimes even series B. You could even argue there's too much.
What's missing is, to some extent, operational knowledge, because we haven't had as many startups that became big as the US, specifically Silicon Valley has had. But I think more important is ambition. It's ambition specifically on the side of a founder, ambition combined with aggressiveness. And that aggression, that lack of aggression, that lack of ambition holds almost everyone back.
And it's still acceptable to build companies and sell them at a value of 100 million. And I understand why, because it's life-changing for everyone. But it's actually not what Europe needs. We need much bigger companies that actually create sovereignty around some of the key areas in ways that just currently don't exist.
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