Wolf Ruzicka

I'm the CEO for Unlimit North America, and at the same time the global chief commercial officer.

Unlimit is the largest proprietary payment solution infrastructure in the world. We have a billion users on the system. We move money from point A to point B. And we're the plumbers behind the scenes that nobody is aware of.

This has now been 16 or 17 years. We're about 650 employees, 16 offices all over the world, highly regulated, highly licensed, and really growing like gangbusters.

The big problem is that if you want to move money across borders as a business, it is actually really, really cumbersome. And so our philosophy has always been, it should be frictionless to move money across the world. That's been our mission, to remove these kinds of barriers ourselves, putting licenses in place, putting ourselves with the regulators, and making sure that our infrastructure makes it as fast as humanly and technically possible to move money around without breaking the rules.

Correct. Yes. Banks use us. Large merchants like an Expedia or an Uber, or, you know, Circle, Revolut, they all use us.

So this is the third job in my entire life. My first job was with a company called MicroStrategy, which is now famous for its Bitcoin vault. Mike Saylor hired me. I stayed there for 10 years through the ups and downs that have been very well documented, burned out, took a sabbatical, then started my own small company and grew it over 20 years to about a thousand people. That company was entirely focused on AI. At the end of it, Victor, the CTO, and I wrote a book about AI for enterprise-level CXOs. My life changed, and among the changes was the founder of this company read it and said, I've got to get these guys into my company to turn ourselves into an authentic commerce company.

It is AI Driven, and we started writing it in the first year of the pandemic, so it probably came out a few months after ChatGPT. So you can imagine, when ChatGPT came out, we're like, our fifth chapter was about generative AI, let's quickly proofread it, because we had been working on the previous models before someone had this great idea to put a chatbot on top of it. And we didn't have to correct anything. It came out number two on the AI category, and on Amazon number one on the cloud compute category. Life has changed.

So, you know, you've heard it now many times, I'm sure, but predictions are really hard, especially when they involve the future. It's a Niels Bohr quote. And so if I said I saw it coming, I'd be lying. But there was some probability that something revolutionary might come if we just unlocked it with the right application. So the systems were in general in place, and we had been working on them for years and years and created magic. But on top of these platforms, what was missing was applications to actually attach to consumers, businesses at large, take something off the shelf to take advantage of these kinds of superpowers. So I knew some application was missing. Had I known that it would be a chatbot, I would have invented a chatbot.

There were two that really woke me up lately. The one that is now a bit aged was one of the first agents put to work by its master. It ran out of the task, and in the middle of the night, the agent figured out how to install Twilio so that it could make a phone call. And then it called its master and said, I am your agent, I finished the task, can you give me a new one? And so that was, from my perspective, one of the first times that an agent really reached into the physical world, if you know what I mean, calling the master to ask for more work. To me, that was eye-opening. I don't think it was written about enough, how groundbreaking it is. And then, of course, Mythos coming out and scaring everyone about the insecurities that we had not been aware of for decades and decades of software development. And that also was quite eye-opening and refreshing at the same time, because it shows that pointing these technologies at something is not always bad. It is also really lifesaving, in this case with vulnerabilities being detected that could have caused massive disruption if they had not been discovered before these technologies were more widely in use.

It's a fair point. Absolutely.

I'm an eternal optimist. I look at my girlfriend, Leila, she says I look at the world through pink glasses. There's no way for me not to be optimistic about this. There's enough fear-mongering out there, and I respect it, and I do engage with them. But I cannot help, having gone through, you know, I'm 56 years old, I've gone through crises, I've gone through ups, I've seen some of my startups implode and some of them thrive. And so over time you just become less scared of new things, and you lean in with an optimistic view, always knowing that there may be some risk that you need to manage along the way.

I am a baby boomer.

So right now, I sit on seven boards, I helped sell eight companies, I'm invested in three companies, I have a day job that is very demanding, and I have two kids. To me, getting out of bed really is about educating people about these technologies. That's literally how I spend my days, educating CXOs about what is an AI, what is not an AI, where do you apply AI, where don't you apply AI, and why. And so these kinds of educational sessions, even here, there was an AI conference just the other day, the number one AI conference in the world, as there are so many of them now. I sit on stage and I say some basic things, and literally people line up and go, I've never heard it explained this way, can you go deeper into it? Because I think there's a cottage industry now that has sprung up, maybe people that were NFT experts just a few years ago and now they've become AI experts, and the whole mission seems to be to confuse everyone and drown us in this noise of, here's the next silver ball, here's the next shiny thing, go chase it, go try to understand it, and by the way, if you pay me a lot of money, I can explain it to you. And so my mission is to just cut through this cottage industry and make sure that everyone understands that these are just probabilistic technologies. The best way I describe it, sorry for the long answer, is: in the beginning, Germans had quite a big impact in artificial intelligence. And as you can tell, I'm German, I still cannot shake that accent. In the beginning, Germans wanted to call it predictions based on advanced data processing. And then the American marketing genius just took over and said, people will understand what it means, let's not call it predictions based on advanced data processing, let's call it artificial intelligence. So everyone goes, oh my God, this is amazing, crazy, let me spend lots of money on it, which you don't have to. And so I just try to remind everyone, it's really just predictive technologies that feed off of data, with compute and models attached to it, three factors that make an AI, which is predictions.

They didn't invent it, but I think that they wanted to call it that. And now they're coming back. You know, Germans are always a bit slow, but once they wake up, they come back. So I think sometime in the 70s or so, in the mid-60s, that's what they called it, until the term I just mentioned completely eradicated it.

So I don't have the golden answer, obviously. I'm not the smartest person in the room, but I believe that once you get to the...

I'm very clear about that right now. No. So I think it's a lack of exposure. What we don't know, we fear. It's just so typical, right? So, stereotypically, few Americans have a passport, and therefore the rest of the world seems strange to us, and we feel more comfortable in the United States. Zero point one percent of the world's population has actually engaged with artificial intelligence. So therefore 99.9999 percent have not been exposed, and therefore, not knowing it probably leads to fear, uncertainty, doubt. And so I think one of the missions that we need to have as practitioners is to just put it into the hands of as many people as we can, using applications on top of these platforms that actually engage the users in the right way, so that they can feel empowered by them.

So, as a German, and this is another stereotype, I'm a very practical person. So I always try to go through the routines that these people go through every single day and just find ways. Think of the superpowers of a generative AI. There are two superpowers of generative AI on an enterprise level. One is large-number matching, being able to go through large amounts of data. The other one is the more practical one, really, on an enterprise. I'm an enterprise software guy, so that's my comfort zone. The second superpower is process acceleration. So when you go through an enterprise, when you talk to people, you discover processes everywhere. When you think about what a process is, it's a range of tasks that split up into various tasks that get handed to people and machines or departments to fulfill, they come back together again, and maybe in a few days, months, whatever, something comes out at the end of a process. Now you analyze the tasks, and there are certain tasks that require thinking. Let me just think about this for a second, let me just be creative about certain designs, or whatever it may be. Once I identify a task like that and I can match it with a very simple tool to say, create me, instead of me having to hand-draw in some tool five different designs for a certain user interface, why don't I have an AI generate hundreds of possible designs based on my tastes and my experience and my input, where I can then, almost like in some dating apps, say, oh, not so good, well, I couldn't have done this better myself, well, this one needs a little bit of tweaking. And suddenly I've accelerated the creative design process of a designer without having cost him or her their job. I haven't eliminated anything that is core to what they do. I've accelerated them. I've probably given them more joy, based on my experience. They suddenly see someone cooperating with them and accelerating their creative juices and allowing them to be more productive at what they do. That's exposure to AI that, in my case, literally, this is a real example, took the fear of an entire design team away, and had them actually embracing AI instead of being fearful of it.

It is hard. We don't have the systems in place, yes. And I don't know about my mission bringing joy to people. That can't be my responsibility, it would be too heavy for me. My mission is really for them to actually understand it and accept it. It's their job then to find joy in this interaction, or consciously decide, you know what, that's not for me. Just like in other revolutions, right? Not everyone became a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution. There is space for people that don't want to embrace these technologies, but I want them to make a conscious choice about this. They need to understand what it can bring and then decide that they don't want to accept this gift, or they may not see it as a gift and therefore object to it, but knowingly do it. Not out of...

Yes. Make an informed decision.

So this actually is not just in fintech. There are many regulated industries everywhere. Thank God regulations protect consumers. There's a good reason for having regulations in many places, even though some people may think some areas are over-regulated. Not the point. Fintech is being disrupted by AI left and right, no doubt, everywhere. But just like with every other conversation that I have with CXOs, CEOs, enterprises, startups, you name it: when I ask a CEO, give me 10 ideas about where you think AI may help your business, help your bottom line, help your customer satisfaction, your employee satisfaction, whatever KPIs you want to pick, typically I go through seven, eight of those where AI is not applicable and you're much better served with deterministic, older-school, but still very modern technologies. And maybe only two or three of those use cases and ideas that the typical executives have can be accelerated or improved using AI. Same thing in fintech. When you think about fintech, especially a company like Unlimit, a global, highly regulated, highly licensed company, our business is actually really deterministic. So if you think about moving money from point A to point B, maybe via C, using a certain method or rail, there are no probabilities that can positively affect this kind of money flow. They might actually cause regulators to go, well, you only send a dollar with 90% likelihood correctly to one of two places, that would be a high risk. It would kill our business. So there's a large swath in every enterprise, and especially in the fintech space, that is deterministic by design and has to stay that way. But there's a whole host of processes inside of a company like Unlimit. A global company, lots of offices, lots of employees, lots of people that we interact with and organizations we need to interact with. We're swarming with processes. And so, the short of it is that our agentic AI lead, Alan, in his job description, I simply wrote, accelerate every Unlimiter by 10x. Accelerate them by 10x so that a company like Unlimit with its 650 employees can act like a fintech with 6,500 employees. Now, think about it: in the olden days, a fintech had to show its standing and its gravitas by having tens of thousands of employees, of which we have two major ones right here in Silicon Valley. In today's world, being able to say we have 650 employees and we bring change to the world, to our customers, to commerce, as if we were a traditional 6,500-people fintech, that's quite massive. And so then you unravel that, you go into the processes, you find the tasks to accelerate, and then it's massive, it's everywhere.

So if you look at our website, we're hiring like crazy. It really is a refresh of the team base. It's not that we fire people, we're hiring like crazy, and we hire typically for architectural skills in the engineering department, like in any software. Let's say 60% of the success of the ultimate engineering effort is determined in the initial architecture phase, and that hasn't changed. We're still talking about software, so architectural skills, like building a building with the right architect that can foresee the future of your office building and make it modular so you can always keep up with it, and have the right kind of designs, or whatever it may be. Same is true in software. And so we're hiring a lot of software architects, system architects, enterprise architects, AI architects, whatever that means, machine learning architects, whatever that means. It's just a derivative of architecture. So you will see a lot of skills in demand of architects. You don't see as many engineering demands anymore, because in a company like Unlimit, and I don't want to put words into Victor's mouth, he's the CTO, but I believe that none of our engineers today is coding anymore. They have to work with Claude or some other tool, let's not promote one. And, you know, orchestrate, let's stay with Claude, orchestrate code, work with Claude, improve what Claude spits out, and educate Claude on the elegance of the software of Unlimit so that Claude can be the engineer. And really, when you then think about it, we're looking for creativity, we're looking for design thinking, we're looking for architectural thinking. And I think that is true for the rest of the economy, as more and more companies embrace AI as a fundamental tool that they need to use.

That's right. And what a great point you just made. So literally just yesterday, and I can't name the country, but we were discussing how to put a research lab into that particular country to help the region, so that Unlimit, as a global player with a global platform, can be as local as possible. Literally region-wise, not even just country-wise, but there are even regions within a country that have certain ways of doing business differently than the rest of the country. And as a global company, we have to work within these regions, so it almost feels like an octopus that we're starting to put in place.

Nice. Yes.

That's right. Oh, look at the United States, right? We're now preparing our attack in the United States. We're really looking at 50 different countries that we need to work with the regulators on, where my fingerprints have to go into some government database, my social security number and my signature will be stored in 50 different states for us to serve the country.

Very.

It is, yes. But it's not perfect. So you have to... It accelerates us for sure, but it does need the human touch. And so, talking about the layoffs that we see, the one thing I always ask myself and try to remind people of: let's pick Salesforce, and not because of anything against Salesforce, but Salesforce not long ago announced that they would lay off 7,000 of their 10,000 customer support representatives. Now, everyone whines and cries about the 7,000, but what we should ask ourselves is, what do the 3,000 have that make them irreplaceable in the age of AI? And it's human skills. It's the judgment. It is empathy. It is the way you can engage with a customer that makes a customer act very differently than with others.

Like I said, nobody can tell the future, but what I see personally is an accumulation of power centers, or culture centers. So there is a certain benefit to having, in our case, the AI team more prominently concentrated in one office, it makes a lot of sense from a cultural perspective, from a collaboration perspective, and so on. And at the same time, you see this octopus-like reach into the regions and putting smaller power centers in place in various localities. But you have to make a conscious decision of which one to pick and why, for context.

Yes. You speak my language, Josh, because there's an article on the internet that calls me the citizen of the world, because I literally lived and worked all over the world. It's one of my missions to just take the fear away from everyone about different cultures, and embedding yourself in cultures, living with people that speak a different language than you and eat things that are pretty scary to you, or may act inappropriately in our context but is very appropriate in their context. I very much value it, and I live it. Comfort zone, another wise one: every day, just try to get out of your comfort zone just a little bit, into your uncomfort zone. This is not my comfort zone, obviously, but I consciously choose to talk with Josh in front of a camera, because it's a good experience to get outside of your comfort zone and then retreat back and reflect. What just happened, what did you learn, where did I mess up, where did Josh set me up, and all the other good stuff?

My pleasure, Josh. Thank you. Absolutely.