Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light: fear is not a strategy
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What is the core message about fear and AI for CFOs and CEOs?
This is a mindset thing, like what's the message for the CFO or the CEO of what this new technology is, right? And the message that that I would like to say is fear is not a strategy. This new this new technology is here. People who can adopt it and use it and learn it and understand it are the best suited to like win tomorrow. And I think if you're fearful of it and it's I think one thing is to be fearful, another one is to be mindful. And I think it's okay to be mindful. I think you should be mindful and say, okay, I understand it. I've experimented with it. I see here. is where we need to do something extra and here is where we can actually use it.
Welcome to Orbit, the HD podcast series where we talk to technology leaders and hear how we built some of the most successful software companies in the world. I'm Soren Holt, Director at HD, and today I'm joined by Jonathan Sanders, AI evangelist, CEO, and co-founder of the AI accounting platform Lite. When Jonathan first pitched Light to investors, the reaction was unanimous: why? Why build an ERP? It's gonna take you 10 years, cost $100 million to build. Jonathan went ahead and did it anyway, but just in two years, and today Lite powers AI unicorns like Lovable, Lagora, Center Labs. Jonathan's ambition wasn't just adding AI features to existing software. Instead he rebuilt the generator from scratch with AI at the core.
Today we'll dig into how you compete with an 800-pound gorilla like Oracle's Net Suite out of Copenhagen, not Silicon Valley, and how AI can empower finance teams to think more strategically. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining me here. Thank you, Sern, for having me. Maybe just to to start out with, could you please just give a quick intro for our listeners to w what does Light do and Absolutely.
Absolutely. So so when we started to build light, it was out of a sense of frustration of having been in two other companies that went global really quickly. And we didn't have a financial backbone infrastructure platform to help us scale. Like we could scale globally with our CRM system, with our with our product and design tooling and our CX systems, but when it came to finance, we didn't didn't have something that would enable us to scale globally. And so the mission we had when we found it Lite was okay, how can we build a financial platform that does accounting, that does compliance approvals, that does payments in one platform for a global setup. And that was the ambition we had when we when we found it light.
We wanted to build something that was easy to implement, easy to use, and a simpler overall organization lift for. Your company. And that's also the reason we named it Light. It's the opposite of heavy. And today we have the joy of powering some of the most successful globally scaling companies in the world like Lagora and Lovable that have just raised incredible amounts of funding and are serving the world across Singapore to India to Europe.
and the US. And how how did AI come into the picture? I mean, was it just by coincidence that you happened to be doing this b or setting up this business at the right point at time? Like in I guess it was twenty twenty two?
So it it was twenty twenty two and one of our earliest sort of clients that we talked to and I talked to was a company called Sana. Yeah. And they were doing some really interesting things on this new technology. And via them we actually got introduced to OpenAI and started working with them and had a relationship even before ChatGPT came out. Yeah. And so back then it was a much, much smaller organization. But you were also working with uh some of the leading people in there. So you Really got their take on it. And what that helped us form was this idea of this technology is basically like at that time was like an intern that you could deploy. And so you needed to uh help the intern understand what the intern needed to do, and you'd help to understand: okay, if the intern is doing this task, like where do I put the guardrails to like double-check the work, etc.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the core message about fear and AI for CFOs and CEOs?
0:06–4:04
2
How did Jonathan Sanders rebuild an ERP from scratch in two years?
4:04–11:24
3
Why did Light move from template‑based OCR to context‑aware AI agents?
11:24–18:00
4
How does Light’s AI enable full‑population audit instead of sampling?
18:00–24:46
5
What does “finance as orchestrator” mean and how is it implemented?
24:46–30:39
6
How does Light’s remote engineering model attract top AI talent?
30:39–37:19
7
What are the benefits of Light’s hackathon programme for CFOs?
37:19–45:05
8
How will finance teams look in 2030 according to Light’s vision?
45:05–54:51
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