# Transcript: Connecting worlds that don’t understand each other: how to build an API

## Description

Together, we will explore the intersections of these different worlds and how they can support each other.



Who is Jakub Nešetřil?



Jakub Nešetřil built the developer startup Apiary in the famous Silicon Valley, which he sold to the giant Oracle in 2017 for several billion crowns. He led the company under Oracle’s umbrella for several years, then returned from San Francisco back to the Czech Republic and founded the Česko.Digital platform. His goal is to improve digital life in the Czech Republic in cooperation with the local IT community.

## Transcript

**[00:00:00]** 🎧🎧🎧

**[00:00:30]** 🎧🎧

**[00:01:00]** which is really nice, so if you're watching us somewhere,

**[00:01:04]** where there are interesting people around you, definitely send us a photo,

**[00:01:07]** showing how it looked where you are, or send us a message.

**[00:01:10]** We are even broadcasting into the virtual world

**[00:01:14]** of the Moravian-Silesian Innovation Center, so if you want to fly around with an avatar,

**[00:01:18]** you can join us there as well.

**[00:01:22]** The breakfast is an interactive format, so as always,

**[00:01:26]** I would ask you, if you want to ask our guest a question,

**[00:01:32]** please take your mobile phones, go to www.slajdu.com,

**[00:01:39]** enter the hashtag Brain, or if you are watching us through Red Button Edu,

**[00:01:45]** right below the broadcast there is a place where you can ask questions.

**[00:01:51]** Now I'll test you with the obligatory opening question,

**[00:01:55]** who has been to the breakfasts before, who is at Brain, or who is here for the first time,

**[00:01:59]** try to vote, I see the responses coming in,

**[00:02:03]** that most people have already been to the breakfasts,

**[00:02:08]** so definitely keep your mobile phone in hand,

**[00:02:13]** if you have any questions, don't hesitate to use it,

**[00:02:16]** and after the hour, when the lecture ends,

**[00:02:21]** I will ask Kuba those questions.

**[00:02:24]** And now to today's topic and today's guest.

**[00:02:29]** I am very happy that I managed to persuade Kuba Nešetřil.

**[00:02:36]** And it's always a bit difficult,

**[00:02:39]** because many guests prefer the question-answer format,

**[00:02:46]** the dialogue, and a lecture is a bit harder,

**[00:02:49]** you have to create something, have an idea.

**[00:02:52]** I know our speakers sometimes curse me,

**[00:02:55]** and I think it was the same with Kuba.

**[00:02:58]** Kuba is an incredibly interesting person,

**[00:03:01]** we've known each other for some time, he is a member of the Red Button community,

**[00:03:04]** and he is a successful entrepreneur,

**[00:03:07]** and also the founder of Českodigitál,

**[00:03:10]** which is a platform he will definitely talk about,

**[00:03:12]** and which just celebrated three absolutely phenomenal years

**[00:03:16]** with many successes.

**[00:03:18]** So about how worlds connect,

**[00:03:22]** what API actually is and how it's made,

**[00:03:25]** Kuba Nešetřil will tell us.

**[00:03:27]** Kuba, come join us here.

**[00:03:29]** Welcome here, thank you very much.

**[00:03:31]** Good day.

**[00:03:33]** Thanks, hi.

**[00:03:34]** Hi, hi. Thanks for the invitation.

**[00:03:36]** I'm handing you the imaginary baton, it's yours now, thanks.

**[00:03:38]** Thank you.

**[00:03:40]** I'll test if the clicking works.

**[00:03:43]** It works, great.

**[00:03:46]** So Honza stole my opening joke,

**[00:03:50]** that I really cursed him at the start,

**[00:03:53]** while preparing what I was going to tell you.

**[00:03:57]** I took a slightly different approach with today's content.

**[00:04:01]** I actually told Honza during preparation,

**[00:04:04]** that I feel there is one world where I've said a lot

**[00:04:08]** and where many people know me, that's the world of startup founders

**[00:04:12]** and tech startups.

**[00:04:15]** My startup Appiary was one of the first to manage

**[00:04:18]** to get big investments from abroad,

**[00:04:21]** to succeed globally on the world market,

**[00:04:24]** and to sell successfully.

**[00:04:26]** And I have a whole series of talks there,

**[00:04:29]** that I gave about fundraising,

**[00:04:32]** how to compete internationally,

**[00:04:35]** and I won't talk about that today.

**[00:04:37]** Or rather, if you want to ask something about it,

**[00:04:41]** but I feel I've said it so many times already,

**[00:04:44]** I didn't want to repeat it again.

**[00:04:46]** Then I have a second world, which is the world of nonprofits,

**[00:04:50]** digitalization of the state from Prague,

**[00:04:53]** generally questions around public interest and technology.

**[00:04:58]** And I feel I've said a lot about that too,

**[00:05:01]** so I'll skip that as well.

**[00:05:03]** Instead, I tried to find a main thread so far,

**[00:05:10]** and I chose the topic of connecting,

**[00:05:13]** which I feel, the more I look back on my life,

**[00:05:17]** the more it seems to me,

**[00:05:19]** that the most interesting things arise from the overlap of two different fields,

**[00:05:21]** where often you need to look at things

**[00:05:30]** from the perspective of one discipline in another discipline.

**[00:05:40]** and that it's actually the most interesting thing.

**[00:05:43]** Looking back, it seems like something that influenced me a lot.

**[00:05:47]** Today I prepared content,

**[00:05:49]** that I have never told anyone anywhere before.

**[00:05:52]** It's very personal, it will be chronological,

**[00:05:54]** it will be a bit of a journey through my life,

**[00:05:56]** but not because I want to show off here

**[00:05:59]** or celebrate my life,

**[00:06:01]** but because I want to show you a bit of the background so far,

**[00:06:04]** what influenced me and what was going through my mind,

**[00:06:08]** when I was trying to connect those worlds a bit.

**[00:06:11]** Let's start with the most personal slide,

**[00:06:14]** I have ever included in any presentation.

**[00:06:17]** This is my dad, on the right, a crazy math professor,

**[00:06:22]** whom many people who went through matfyz,

**[00:06:26]** know as a professor of mathematics and discrete mathematics,

**[00:06:30]** graph theory, but few know

**[00:06:33]** that when my dad was deciding what to study at university,

**[00:06:36]** he was choosing between mathematics and fine arts.

**[00:06:40]** And that actually most of his life

**[00:06:43]** he had huge success in polymathematics,

**[00:06:46]** but he missed and was saddened

**[00:06:49]** that he didn't become an artist.

**[00:06:52]** And then, as a successful math professor,

**[00:06:56]** he fulfilled this dream

**[00:06:58]** and started collaborating here with Professor Načeracký,

**[00:07:02]** who is an academic painter, a successful artist.

**[00:07:05]** His works hang not only in the National Gallery,

**[00:07:08]** but also in Paris, at the Pompidou Center and elsewhere.

**[00:07:11]** And they actually started looking for overlaps

**[00:07:15]** between mathematics and fine arts,

**[00:07:18]** which most people think are disciplines

**[00:07:21]** that are completely far apart.

**[00:07:23]** That mathematics is the rational,

**[00:07:26]** exact discipline where you need to think

**[00:07:29]** and turn on the rational part of the brain.

**[00:07:32]** And fine arts is the intuitive,

**[00:07:35]** emotional discipline where you need to turn off the rational part of the brain

**[00:07:38]** and let your inner self flow.

**[00:07:43]** But to them, it never seemed that way.

**[00:07:46]** On the contrary, they felt that mathematics is in many ways

**[00:07:49]** a very intuitive discipline, and even art

**[00:07:52]** can somehow be deconstructed and analyzed.

**[00:07:57]** So in the end, this is what came out of it.

**[00:08:00]** This is the book Kapitolis of Discrete Mathematics,

**[00:08:03]** which my father wrote, and most first-year students at math faculty

**[00:08:06]** know this book as part of their generation's curriculum.

**[00:08:11]** And when I prepared this lecture,

**[00:08:13]** I realized that maybe in the 18-20 year old minds

**[00:08:17]** of those young guys at the math faculty, they wonder

**[00:08:20]** if it shouldn't have been called Kapitolis of Indiscrete Mathematics

**[00:08:24]** with regard to the figurative painting

**[00:08:27]** that my father and the professor painted at Čeradský

**[00:08:30]** and then actually put on their own book.

**[00:08:33]** And when I looked back in my life at my formative sources,

**[00:08:37]** I realized that maybe it all starts there.

**[00:08:39]** It starts there, that from my parents I saw

**[00:08:42]** that the most interesting things often arise at the intersection of two disciplines

**[00:08:45]** which traditionally don't really mix,

**[00:08:49]** or where many people feel they belong to completely different worlds.

**[00:08:52]** So that was maybe my first influence.

**[00:08:58]** I wasn't an excellent child in elementary school,

**[00:09:03]** I liked math a little, but mostly because

**[00:09:08]** it was easy, so I didn't have to work hard.

**[00:09:11]** When I really started to enjoy it and felt I had hit something,

**[00:09:15]** was when I discovered this,

**[00:09:18]** and probably none of you know what it is,

**[00:09:22]** because you are young and beautiful and don't remember the 80s.

**[00:09:26]** This was the so-called programming language Karel.

**[00:09:30]** I discovered it at a young technicians' club

**[00:09:35]** in third grade of elementary school.

**[00:09:39]** There was a small robot, that's the white spot in the upper right corner,

**[00:09:43]** depending on how you see it mirrored, the white spot somewhere up there,

**[00:09:49]** that's the robot Karel, and you could tell the robot

**[00:09:53]** to go down, up, left, right, and place a brick.

**[00:09:56]** Almost everything, and at that time I realized that when I was in third grade

**[00:10:00]** at that super old computer with rubber keyboards,

**[00:10:10]** I felt like the greatest programmer I ever felt in my life,

**[00:10:16]** because for the first time in third grade I discovered something that today people call flow.

**[00:10:27]** I discovered that state when I was immersed in something and time ceased to exist

**[00:10:34]** and I emerged an hour later somewhere on the other side, feeling

**[00:10:39]** how amazing and fantastic it was, and to this day I get chills down my spine

**[00:10:44]** when I talk about it. So I feel that for the rest

**[00:10:50]** of my professional career, I was just searching for that flow, the strongest one,

**[00:10:55]** the one I experienced for the first time back in third grade.

**[00:11:00]** Many years later, already a successful startup entrepreneur,

**[00:11:07]** and consequently a manager of many people, of course,

**[00:11:11]** I realized that flow is something my mind needs

**[00:11:15]** and that maybe I didn’t become a programmer because

**[00:11:18]** I was good at programming or math,

**[00:11:22]** but because I was just looking for

**[00:11:26]** a way to calm my mind and find something where I could be immersed for hours

**[00:11:30]** focused on one single thing.

**[00:11:34]** So in the end, thanks to the Red Button network, and Daniel Paulus,

**[00:11:39]** who started teaching me yoga, after 20 years of being active,

**[00:11:44]** or 10 years after I stopped active programming,

**[00:11:47]** and became more of a manager, which is a very scattered discipline,

**[00:11:51]** without that community to focus on something for a long time,

**[00:11:55]** I actually discovered that I physiologically missed it immensely

**[00:11:59]** and that maybe I physiologically needed to become a programmer

**[00:12:03]** to find that flow.

**[00:12:07]** A few years later, this was in the 80s,

**[00:12:11]** a few years later it was 1989,

**[00:12:15]** the world changed for all of us here in Czechia, or the region still in Czechoslovakia,

**[00:12:21]** and my parents immediately, as soon as it was possible, at the beginning of 1990,

**[00:12:26]** traveled abroad with me, and I was very lucky

**[00:12:30]** to live first in West Germany and then in Canada,

**[00:12:34]** for about two years total, or a year and a half.

**[00:12:38]** I will never forget the first day when I came from communist Czechoslovakia

**[00:12:46]** to West Germany, and we just put our suitcases somewhere,

**[00:12:52]** everyone was tired from the trip, and my mom said she would go shopping.

**[00:12:57]** We sat and waited, waited 20 minutes, 30 minutes,

**[00:13:03]** an hour, an hour and a half, and mom was nowhere to be seen.

**[00:13:07]** Then she came back, her eyes wide open like this,

**[00:13:14]** and said it was completely absurd, she couldn’t shop at all,

**[00:13:20]** because until then, and now try to imagine this,

**[00:13:24]** this is not a situation you can experience in Czechia today.

**[00:13:28]** Until then, there was just one strawberry yogurt and one plain yogurt.

**[00:13:33]** And suddenly overnight, you find yourself in a situation where from the shelf looks at you

**[00:13:39]** Simply 40 varieties of strawberry yogurts, and below them 40 varieties of blueberry yogurts.

**[00:13:45]** And all of them are professionally redesigned by marketing teams,

**[00:13:48]** so that the strawberries simply shine even more and look even more beautiful,

**[00:13:52]** than they do in real life.

**[00:13:55]** And back then, that collision with reality,

**[00:13:59]** like coming from the really Eastern European Czechoslovakia,

**[00:14:04]** where the pinnacle of advertising was Mr. Vajíčko, you probably can't remember that either,

**[00:14:09]** but I hit the Western consumer world.

**[00:14:17]** And that contrast stuck with me very strongly.

**[00:14:22]** I remember exactly, as a ten-year-old boy,

**[00:14:26]** looking at it and thinking, wow, marketing is constructing for me,

**[00:14:30]** I didn’t have the words then, but it’s constructing this reality.

**[00:14:33]** It’s shaping my very perception that my world is better,

**[00:14:37]** because the packaging is more beautiful.

**[00:14:39]** The yogurt could be exactly the same as the one I had in Czechoslovakia.

**[00:14:43]** And I also understood the problem with cognitive overload,

**[00:14:50]** which I think people don’t even realize today,

**[00:14:53]** but back then the contrast was very intense in that

**[00:14:58]** advertising attacks you from all sides and as a result,

**[00:15:02]** it’s much harder to make decisions afterwards.

**[00:15:05]** Of course, influenced by the fact that there are many things,

**[00:15:10]** and that marketing is professionally prepared,

**[00:15:12]** and also because there are many more options to choose from.

**[00:15:16]** But the main thing I took away from it,

**[00:15:20]** and what I think influenced me for the rest of my life,

**[00:15:23]** was simply the fact

**[00:15:25]** that I suddenly started to be able to look at this way of living life

**[00:15:29]** from multiple perspectives.

**[00:15:31]** As a ten or eleven-year-old, I realized

**[00:15:34]** that you can live different lifestyles and that what we might consider

**[00:15:39]** normal, given, and usual, just a few hundred kilometers away

**[00:15:44]** in another country can be different.

**[00:15:48]** I think that enriched me a lot.

**[00:15:50]** I remember exactly how I returned to sixth grade

**[00:15:55]** and my classmates asked me back into their group,

**[00:16:00]** and my classmates asked me, say something in German,

**[00:16:03]** or 'abo ty umýt si z jezik,' that’s amazing.

**[00:16:05]** And I remember exactly thinking,

**[00:16:07]** but the language isn’t the important part.

**[00:16:11]** It’s hard for me to build a relationship with you,

**[00:16:14]** because I simply have an experience that you don't have

**[00:16:16]** and I can't talk about it.

**[00:16:18]** It's like a non-transferable experience

**[00:16:20]** and it actually sets me apart a bit,

**[00:16:22]** because I feel like I see some things differently.

**[00:16:27]** So that was the second big connection to the world for me.

**[00:16:31]** It was a topic for me even later on,

**[00:16:33]** and actually I might say,

**[00:16:35]** that today, thanks to that, I have a wife

**[00:16:38]** who is from New Zealand,

**[00:16:40]** and maybe because of that I also pushed

**[00:16:42]** my businesses globally,

**[00:16:45]** because I experienced life abroad,

**[00:16:48]** experienced what it's like to be a foreigner.

**[00:16:50]** Maybe I toughened up a bit

**[00:16:52]** in that shyness,

**[00:16:54]** like stepping out.

**[00:16:56]** Today, it's one of the things

**[00:16:58]** that I would really love to give my own children,

**[00:17:00]** that feeling,

**[00:17:02]** when they stand in front of a shelf

**[00:17:05]** and look at 40 yogurts and say,

**[00:17:07]** wow, I didn't have this at home.

**[00:17:09]** To give them the feeling that life is different elsewhere in the world,

**[00:17:11]** and that in this way it also gives a person

**[00:17:14]** self-reflection on

**[00:17:16]** how they themselves live in the world where they are.

**[00:17:18]** And now, another big influence

**[00:17:23]** for me was my first computer.

**[00:17:25]** When I showed you here

**[00:17:27]** the robot Karel,

**[00:17:29]** it was still on some rubber mats,

**[00:17:31]** they called those rubber keyboards

**[00:17:33]** like in the tech club,

**[00:17:35]** but of course I didn't have a computer at home.

**[00:17:37]** And so when

**[00:17:40]** in the year around 90, 91

**[00:17:43]** my parents brought home something

**[00:17:46]** and placed it in front of me like this,

**[00:17:51]** So I,

**[00:17:53]** it took me about two days,

**[00:17:55]** to get through all the manuals in English,

**[00:17:58]** which I didn't know back then,

**[00:18:00]** faster than my parents

**[00:18:02]** and since then I was the computer,

**[00:18:04]** expert in the household.

**[00:18:08]** And that was my world,

**[00:18:11]** into which I dived,

**[00:18:13]** but I remember exactly,

**[00:18:16]** the thing next to the keyboard

**[00:18:19]** on the right side,

**[00:18:21]** is called a computer mouse,

**[00:18:23]** for those of you who might not know it anymore.

**[00:18:25]** And there was a little ball underneath it

**[00:18:27]** and it moved like this on the table,

**[00:18:29]** you pressed a button,

**[00:18:31]** and today you laugh,

**[00:18:33]** because you think I'm telling you

**[00:18:35]** that everyone has trackpads.

**[00:18:37]** But back then it was a new thing,

**[00:18:39]** because back then all computers were

**[00:18:41]** PCs with keyboards,

**[00:18:43]** where Windows didn't exist yet.

**[00:18:46]** So they used MS-DOS

**[00:18:49]** and Norton Commander, which no one remembers anymore.

**[00:18:52]** And when the computer arrived,

**[00:18:54]** it came with educational software,

**[00:18:56]** that taught you how to use the mouse,

**[00:18:58]** how to move the cursor and click.

**[00:19:01]** And that's another thing,

**[00:19:04]** I'll never forget,

**[00:19:06]** because the thing looked like this.

**[00:19:10]** It was poetry embodied in a computer.

**[00:19:15]** You could make software that says,

**[00:19:19]** focus on the top left cross,

**[00:19:21]** focus on the top right cross,

**[00:19:23]** move the mouse down, move the mouse up.

**[00:19:26]** But instead, the computer came

**[00:19:29]** with software that said

**[00:19:31]** Hi, I'm the Diver, come with me to look at the fish.

**[00:19:34]** Or at a series of pigeons,

**[00:19:37]** that were sitting on the windowsill

**[00:19:39]** on some beautiful afternoon somewhere in England,

**[00:19:42]** and it told you,

**[00:19:44]** like, point at a pigeon,

**[00:19:46]** and when you pointed at me, it flew away.

**[00:19:49]** It sounds silly today,

**[00:19:52]** but when you put it in contrast with what computers were back then,

**[00:19:55]** it was a complete wall hit.

**[00:19:57]** And for me and my whole experience, what technology means.

**[00:20:00]** And since that first experience with the first computer

**[00:20:04]** I ever had, I became passionate about the Apple brand,

**[00:20:11]** and to this day I happily call myself an Apple sheep and Apple fanatic.

**[00:20:15]** And I don't mind it at all.

**[00:20:20]** But looking back after years, unraveling what deeply moved me about it,

**[00:20:22]** it was exactly that it could have been made simply, utilitarian, functional,

**[00:20:28]** but instead someone somewhere decided to make it beautiful.

**[00:20:38]** And that really struck me in some way.

**[00:20:42]** I truly had an emotional reaction to it, and I still do today.

**[00:20:48]** Many years later, when I was knowledgeable,

**[00:20:52]** I founded the Czech Club of Macintosh Computer Friends,

**[00:20:58]** led the Apple Club, and did many things through my love for Apple.

**[00:21:03]** And many years later, it was embodied for me in a slide,

**[00:21:10]** which I still consider one of the best slides on corporate culture,

**[00:21:15]** and truly a masterclass on how to position a brand.

**[00:21:21]** Steve Jobs embodied it in this slide during his presentation,

**[00:21:26]** where he said Apple is for him at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,

**[00:21:30]** or translated to Czech, liberal arts.

**[00:21:36]** These aren't just humanities or liberal studies.

**[00:21:39]** Capturing this in one image,

**[00:21:44]** I think it positioned the brand for the next 20 years,

**[00:21:49]** for me, as I say, it's a masterclass in setting corporate culture.

**[00:21:55]** Back in the early 90s, this was like a lightning bolt from a clear sky,

**[00:22:01]** because all other computers looked like this,

**[00:22:09]** both outside and inside, they were ugly, utilitarian,

**[00:22:14]** you could do something with them, but they really didn't appeal to you

**[00:22:19]** on an aesthetic, artistic, emotional level.

**[00:22:24]** Well, that's how I grew up with the Apple brand,

**[00:22:35]** which in the 90s, on the other hand, wasn't any kind of standard.

**[00:22:38]** Today it's the biggest brand in the world, and computer people are divided

**[00:22:45]** into those who love Apple and those who envy Apple,

**[00:22:49]** but back in the 90s, it was some obscure, niche brand,

**[00:22:56]** that nobody knew, with its own operating system,

**[00:22:59]** on which nothing worked at all.

**[00:23:02]** I basically grew up with the experience

**[00:23:06]** that regularly, consistently, whenever something was somewhere,

**[00:23:11]** it just didn't work on my computer.

**[00:23:13]** It worked for everyone else, just not for me.

**[00:23:16]** And on top of that, as a programmer, I suffered a lot

**[00:23:18]** because in the 90s this platform really wasn't open at all,

**[00:23:21]** so I simply couldn't program on it.

**[00:23:24]** So even though I had a computer at home,

**[00:23:26]** I had to program secretly on the side somewhere else.

**[00:23:29]** Only at the end of the 90s did I really give in

**[00:23:36]** and bought this gray plastic horror,

**[00:23:40]** which as a true Apple fanatic

**[00:23:44]** I had consistently hated until then.

**[00:23:47]** And I installed something you called Unix,

**[00:23:50]** a kind of operating system.

**[00:23:52]** Whenever you see hackers in movies hacking something

**[00:23:55]** with green letters on a black background,

**[00:23:58]** that's Unix.

**[00:24:00]** And the whole internet runs on it.

**[00:24:03]** Or nowadays it's sometimes called Linux.

**[00:24:06]** So I installed that thing there.

**[00:24:10]** I knew nothing about it at all,

**[00:24:12]** the internet still didn't really work,

**[00:24:15]** you couldn't google anything because there was no Google,

**[00:24:18]** so I just installed it.

**[00:24:21]** For about three days I couldn't even turn the computer off,

**[00:24:24]** or on, or restart it.

**[00:24:26]** And plug it back in,

**[00:24:28]** because I had no idea what I was doing.

**[00:24:30]** And then, really by trial and error,

**[00:24:34]** I managed to learn

**[00:24:36]** how to install Unix servers,

**[00:24:38]** run internet applications.

**[00:24:42]** And then those two worlds nicely connected for me,

**[00:24:46]** when Steve Jobs returned to Apple

**[00:24:48]** and actually brought a new operating system,

**[00:24:51]** which today is called macOS

**[00:24:53]** and back then it was macOS 10.

**[00:24:55]** And now the Unix system

**[00:24:57]** and the Apple system were connected together like this.

**[00:24:59]** I have this picture here just because

**[00:25:01]** you can see the green letters,

**[00:25:03]** it looks like a clear hacker

**[00:25:05]** and at the same time it’s nicely shadowed at the bottom,

**[00:25:07]** which in the nineties

**[00:25:09]** was so computationally demanding

**[00:25:11]** that the computer practically didn’t work,

**[00:25:13]** just because there was a nice, beautiful shadow

**[00:25:15]** at the bottom, which of course makes no sense,

**[00:25:17]** but it looked nice.

**[00:25:20]** These two worlds merged together for me

**[00:25:22]** and for a long time I actually lived off the fact

**[00:25:24]** that I was both an Apple expert,

**[00:25:26]** and I also understood

**[00:25:28]** the technical underpinnings beneath it.

**[00:25:32]** Well, sometime at the end of high school

**[00:25:34]** and the beginning of university,

**[00:25:36]** I started a small company,

**[00:25:38]** called Webworks, which no one even knows today,

**[00:25:40]** but precisely because

**[00:25:42]** Apple

**[00:25:44]** in the nineties was kind of

**[00:25:46]** a small subculture of excluded people,

**[00:25:49]** for whom nothing worked on computers.

**[00:25:53]** And most of them were not programmers

**[00:25:55]** and most of them were designers.

**[00:25:57]** And maybe precisely because

**[00:25:59]** there was an intersection between those technologies

**[00:26:01]** and those

**[00:26:03]** aesthetic disciplines.

**[00:26:05]** So most of my friends

**[00:26:07]** or many of my friends were designers,

**[00:26:09]** they were graphic artists, they were people

**[00:26:11]** who,

**[00:26:15]** this was basically my

**[00:26:17]** field of friends I hung out with,

**[00:26:19]** so I actually co-founded this small company with one

**[00:26:21]** designer,

**[00:26:23]** and worked loosely with a few others.

**[00:26:25]** And towards the end of the 90s,

**[00:26:27]** if you knew how to make websites

**[00:26:29]** and could do something on the internet,

**[00:26:31]** money was just growing on trees.

**[00:26:33]** It was a very wild time,

**[00:26:35]** where I, as an

**[00:26:37]** eighteen, nineteen-year-old guy,

**[00:26:39]** earned more than my dad,

**[00:26:41]** a university professor,

**[00:26:43]** and some side jobs.

**[00:26:45]** I still managed to go to school on the side.

**[00:26:47]** But

**[00:26:51]** I founded it by coincidence

**[00:26:53]** with a designer,

**[00:26:55]** with whom 20 years later I also founded my startup,

**[00:26:57]** with whom we conquered the world.

**[00:26:59]** And I think what really guided me

**[00:27:01]** was that as a programmer and technologist,

**[00:27:03]** I navigated a lot through

**[00:27:05]** the design world, so even here

**[00:27:07]** in this company we founded together,

**[00:27:09]** and as an exception,

**[00:27:11]** what we told our customers at the end of the 90s,

**[00:27:13]** at the start of making

**[00:27:15]** websites and the internet, was that the magic

**[00:27:17]** is created at the intersection between

**[00:27:19]** in collaboration.

**[00:27:21]** At the intersection between

**[00:27:23]** aesthetic perception

**[00:27:25]** and presentation and marketing,

**[00:27:27]** and just between those

**[00:27:29]** and what actually works

**[00:27:37]** physically create using those technologies.

**[00:27:39]** And we said, if you

**[00:27:41]** assign that task only to a programmer,

**[00:27:43]** they'll make something that works,

**[00:27:45]** but because they won't want to

**[00:27:47]** spend that much time and effort on it,

**[00:27:49]** it won't be

**[00:27:51]** very beautiful. If you give the same task

**[00:27:53]** to someone who is primarily a designer, it will be

**[00:27:55]** beautiful, but it won't work very well.

**[00:27:57]** And the magic happens

**[00:27:59]** when

**[00:28:01]** there is creative collaboration

**[00:28:03]** between the aesthetic side

**[00:28:05]** and the technological side.

**[00:28:07]** So.

**[00:28:09]** Those were my first beginnings.

**[00:28:11]** Then I realized

**[00:28:13]** that running a company is much more fun for me

**[00:28:15]** than going to school.

**[00:28:17]** And that I wouldn't be

**[00:28:19]** back then, yet so popularized

**[00:28:21]** the academic title

**[00:28:23]** University Dropout.

**[00:28:25]** Those Steves Jobs and Bills Gates,

**[00:28:29]** who got kicked out of school

**[00:28:31]** and instead founded startups.

**[00:28:33]** So I felt

**[00:28:35]** that I wanted to finish school,

**[00:28:37]** so I closed my company

**[00:28:39]** and ended its operation.

**[00:28:41]** Even though it was commercially very successful.

**[00:28:43]** And I committed myself

**[00:28:45]** to finishing school,

**[00:28:47]** which mentally broke me

**[00:28:49]** and it's not a famous period

**[00:28:51]** in my life.

**[00:28:53]** So let's skip that, and since

**[00:28:55]** I was freshly finally Steve's

**[00:28:59]** as a final project and degree

**[00:29:01]** I finished school,

**[00:29:03]** so I needed to change something,

**[00:29:07]** to get away,

**[00:29:09]** to take a break from all those computers

**[00:29:11]** and experience something different.

**[00:29:13]** A few friends convinced me

**[00:29:15]** to go to New Zealand

**[00:29:17]** and I said,

**[00:29:19]** that it sounded like a good idea,

**[00:29:21]** so I would go with them.

**[00:29:23]** So I bought the tickets

**[00:29:25]** and then they told me

**[00:29:27]** that they actually found out

**[00:29:29]** they didn’t have the money for it,

**[00:29:31]** here I am sometimes,

**[00:29:33]** Jesus, in 2005,

**[00:29:35]** as a fresh,

**[00:29:37]** school-exhausted,

**[00:29:39]** I landed in New Zealand,

**[00:29:43]** maybe a little

**[00:29:45]** in front of two hundred things to come,

**[00:29:47]** exactly in that style

**[00:29:49]** young and clueless,

**[00:29:51]** so here I am, still don’t know

**[00:29:53]** where I’ll sleep tonight

**[00:29:55]** and definitely don’t know

**[00:29:57]** what I’ll be doing here,

**[00:29:59]** with this kind of idea.

**[00:30:00]** that I really didn’t want to do any technology or computers,

**[00:30:03]** because I didn’t enjoy it at all and I was fed up with it.

**[00:30:07]** And I printed out, almost cliché,

**[00:30:14]** a physical resume and went door to door with it.

**[00:30:19]** I guess I imagined that the internet already existed back then

**[00:30:23]** and maybe there were some job offers online,

**[00:30:27]** but somehow I was going door to door with that paper

**[00:30:31]** and I clearly remember stepping out of the temporary hostel

**[00:30:35]** where I lived with many students because it was the cheapest option

**[00:30:39]** and the first door was a used car dealer,

**[00:30:45]** and he laughed at me, saying with my English I wouldn’t sell any car and I moved on.

**[00:30:50]** The second was some food company, and they said they weren't hiring anyone.

**[00:30:56]** And the third, I went into a place I thought was a café,

**[00:30:59]** where I might bring coffee, but it turned out to be an internet provider

**[00:31:04]** with custom Linux application development, and the secretary looked

**[00:31:10]** at the printed paper and said, wait, I'll check with the back,

**[00:31:14]** showed it to the director, and seven minutes after

**[00:31:17]** I started job hunting, I ended up as a programmer again.

**[00:31:23]** Even though I really swore it wouldn't happen.

**[00:31:27]** Then I dreamed for about a month that it was really temporary

**[00:31:31]** and transitional, and that I would finally start working at McDonald's

**[00:31:34]** or moving boxes like in the port.

**[00:31:38]** Then I found out how much I got paid at the end of the month,

**[00:31:42]** and that changed my mind.

**[00:31:46]** I found out how much my friends who worked there earned,

**[00:31:50]** and I told myself maybe I could stick with the technology.

**[00:31:54]** I lived in New Zealand for a few years,

**[00:31:57]** where I met my girlfriend, now my wife.

**[00:32:01]** I returned to the Czech Republic and started looking for work here.

**[00:32:08]** I actually never had a proper job in the Czech Republic,

**[00:32:11]** this was my first employment.

**[00:32:16]** Back then, there were huge billboards everywhere.

**[00:32:19]** That was sometime at the end of 2007.

**[00:32:23]** Big billboards all over Prague, Skype.

**[00:32:26]** Skype had just recently moved to Prague

**[00:32:29]** and was recruiting programmers to fill the entire top floor of the Anděl building.

**[00:32:35]** It was amazing and great.

**[00:32:38]** The top floor for 150 people, but they had only four employees.

**[00:32:41]** They kept apologizing that two others worked from home,

**[00:32:46]** but there were still about 140 open positions.

**[00:32:49]** I did interviews with them for a long time,

**[00:32:56]** first round, second round, and plane tickets to Estonia,

**[00:32:59]** until a startup entrepreneur, Roman Staněk, wrote to me

**[00:33:03]** that he was founding a new startup and asked if I wanted to talk about it.

**[00:33:07]** I clearly remember looking at that email on my phone

**[00:33:10]** and thinking, wow, my world just changed,

**[00:33:12]** because of course, some Skype can go to hell,

**[00:33:14]** and I'm going to do a startup.

**[00:33:16]** And back then, Roman convinced me or persuaded me

**[00:33:28]** in his vision of what he wanted to do,

**[00:33:31]** which seemed completely nonsensical to me and impossible to succeed.

**[00:33:34]** Here, from a small Czech Republic, a few crazy people,

**[00:33:37]** would beat some big American database giants.

**[00:33:41]** And he said he wanted to do something, that was his tagline,

**[00:33:45]** Flickr for BI.

**[00:33:47]** And BI is business intelligence, which isn't used much today,

**[00:33:51]** it's a term from 10-15 years ago,

**[00:33:53]** today it's called data science,

**[00:33:55]** but it's basically managing a company using data

**[00:33:58]** and looking for something in that data.

**[00:34:01]** And Flickr isn't used much today either,

**[00:34:03]** because that was also 15 years ago.

**[00:34:06]** Flickr was one of the first Web 2.0 applications,

**[00:34:10]** where the content was truly created by people,

**[00:34:14]** but it was basically a photo-sharing site.

**[00:34:18]** And what he meant was that he wanted to take the field

**[00:34:23]** of data analysis and data visualization,

**[00:34:28]** which is complicated and difficult and only professionals can do,

**[00:34:32]** and popularize it for the masses, for everyone.

**[00:34:37]** And I liked that, to make it simple.

**[00:34:41]** So I jumped on that idea

**[00:34:45]** and became his first employee,

**[00:34:48]** and built his entire Prague branch here,

**[00:34:51]** which for someone who never had a job in the Czech Republic,

**[00:34:56]** was my first job in the Czech Republic,

**[00:34:58]** after I returned from New Zealand.

**[00:35:00]** When I tried managing people,

**[00:35:02]** I had about four people under me.

**[00:35:05]** So I was really all ears.

**[00:35:08]** I started as a regular programmer,

**[00:35:11]** but my development boss quit a month after I started,

**[00:35:15]** so I ended up as the head of development

**[00:35:18]** with my big life experiences.

**[00:35:21]** But I built the Prague development team here,

**[00:35:27]** and for a while it was very interesting work.

**[00:35:30]** I am very grateful that I got to experience

**[00:35:33]** what it's like to grow a company from the very beginning,

**[00:35:36]** from a few people to several hundred.

**[00:35:39]** But at the same time, I have to say that this mission,

**[00:35:42]** that Flickr for business intelligence,

**[00:35:44]** we absolutely failed at.

**[00:35:46]** And I actually experienced for the first time in my life,

**[00:35:49]** what it’s like when you try to connect two worlds,

**[00:35:53]** when we talk about connecting,

**[00:35:55]** but you don’t understand them.

**[00:35:57]** Because I was neither an expert in data analysis,

**[00:36:00]** nor an expert on the people who were supposed to be our customers.

**[00:36:03]** If I had been, maybe I would have known,

**[00:36:06]** that our customers who buy our product,

**[00:36:12]** or for business intelligence.

**[00:36:14]** They want some paid analyst somewhere over there

**[00:36:17]** to prepare reports for them,

**[00:36:20]** which they will then show at board meetings

**[00:36:23]** or the general management board.

**[00:36:26]** But definitely the guy as the CFO

**[00:36:29]** doesn’t want to fiddle with the data and

**[00:36:32]** go through it and search.

**[00:36:35]** So one big thing

**[00:36:38]** I understood there is that when I’m looking for

**[00:36:41]** intersections between two worlds that don’t understand each other

**[00:36:44]** and connecting those two worlds, I should ideally

**[00:36:47]** understand at least one, ideally two of them, or know them somehow.

**[00:36:50]** And just connecting two worlds doesn’t mean

**[00:36:53]** that those two worlds want to be connected.

**[00:36:59]** The second thing, however, that I also learned at GoodData,

**[00:37:02]** and it wasn’t so optimistic,

**[00:37:05]** was that besides the approach of connecting things,

**[00:37:09]** there is also a management discipline that works quite well

**[00:37:12]** called divide and conquer.

**[00:37:15]** Where you pit teams against each other

**[00:37:18]** and then you become the unlimited ruler and hegemon.

**[00:37:22]** And unfortunately, there were situations in that company,

**[00:37:28]** and today I would probably guess it sooner,

**[00:37:31]** back then it took me many years to actually understand

**[00:37:35]** where it came from. And it originated at the very beginning,

**[00:37:39]** we had a strange company that didn’t have one development team,

**[00:37:42]** one software development team, but we had two teams.

**[00:37:46]** And to make matters worse, one team was in Prague

**[00:37:53]** and the second team was in Brno. And you don't need to be

**[00:37:57]** a management expert to understand that it won't work.

**[00:38:01]** So really, about the first month after I started as head of development

**[00:38:07]** here in Prague, my boss sent me to Brno on a business trip for legal matters.

**[00:38:12]** I was there for one day, talked with them, and came back.

**[00:38:16]** And the first thing he said when I got off and went to the office was,

**[00:38:19]** so what did those idiots in Brno tell you?

**[00:38:23]** So I experienced a lot of that antagonistic approach,

**[00:38:27]** which unfortunately is far from limited to just this one company.

**[00:38:33]** But what was interesting was that besides Prague and Brno,

**[00:38:37]** the two development teams were also something called in programming terminology

**[00:38:42]** front-end and back-end.

**[00:38:45]** The back-end, in data analysis, was the various databases,

**[00:38:49]** analytical tools, data storage, servers, to make everything work.

**[00:38:53]** And the front-end is about making it look nice, where the buttons will be,

**[00:38:57]** and how to present it to users so they can navigate it.

**[00:39:01]** And these are fundamentally quite different disciplines.

**[00:39:07]** There are certainly programmers who handle both disciplines at once,

**[00:39:12]** but there are definitely many programmers who focus on either

**[00:39:16]** one or the other of these two areas.

**[00:39:18]** Even the tools for them are quite different.

**[00:39:21]** And by coincidence, between the front-end and back-end

**[00:39:25]** lies something called an API in programming terminology.

**[00:39:32]** It stands for Application Programming Interface,

**[00:39:35]** which you don't need to remember.

**[00:39:37]** We can skip the 'application' part, it's not essential,

**[00:39:39]** and also skip the 'programming' part, that's not essential either,

**[00:39:42]** and the important word is 'interface'.

**[00:39:44]** Many years later, I liked to use Google's dictionary

**[00:39:49]** definition of what an interface is,

**[00:39:52]** but it's simply 'interface' translated into Czech,

**[00:39:55]** so basically where two worlds meet,

**[00:39:57]** where the two worlds have some overlap between them.

**[00:40:00]** And I experienced, and actually felt myself drawn into the big war between the Prague and Brno teams,

**[00:40:10]** the war over the API, the war over that interface.

**[00:40:14]** Something like, 'I'd be interested where the comrades in the GDR made a mistake,' that was our daily routine.

**[00:40:21]** The Brno team said the Prague team didn't know how to use it, the Prague team said the Brno team did it wrong.

**[00:40:27]** And I felt there had to be a better way.

**[00:40:32]** How to avoid this, how to lead both these estranged teams to water,

**[00:40:40]** to a common watering hole where they could coexist in harmony.

**[00:40:46]** And I thought about it so much that I actually founded my own startup,

**[00:40:51]** which focused on designing interfaces between programs.

**[00:40:58]** Interfaces between programs are everywhere today, just for context,

**[00:41:02]** in case you didn't know what an API is.

**[00:41:05]** I see some of you are looking at your phones now, so you're actually looking at an API.

**[00:41:09]** Your phone connects, when it reads emails, it's through some API,

**[00:41:14]** when you get a notification, that's through an API.

**[00:41:19]** Even the programs inside your phone, when they communicate with each other,

**[00:41:23]** they talk through APIs. It's everywhere today.

**[00:41:26]** It's simply an interface between two programs.

**[00:41:29]** And when I entered this discipline and started making tools

**[00:41:34]** for designing these interfaces, these bridges between two worlds,

**[00:41:38]** the standard way programmers thought about it, quite technocratically,

**[00:41:48]** was that we must find a standard. I just said that word.

**[00:41:53]** We must find one booster, one way to do it all,

**[00:41:57]** so it’s standardized, connected, interoperable,

**[00:42:00]** so it works together, so everything works automatically.

**[00:42:04]** And I turned this quite upside down and started saying in the programming world,

**[00:42:10]** that it’s not an interface between two programs, but between two teams of people.

**[00:42:16]** And that the API is a tool for empathy, not something that can be standardized.

**[00:42:23]** If you want the other team, the people on the other side of the barricade, to understand you,

**[00:42:31]** you have to find a common language between you.

**[00:42:35]** And that is naturally influenced by who the two groups are,

**[00:42:40]** who are trying to understand each other.

**[00:42:43]** I said it’s like if you tried in classic design,

**[00:42:48]** not programming design, to say what a standardized newspaper design should look like.

**[00:42:54]** That’s just nonsense. If it’s a newspaper for retirement homes,

**[00:42:58]** the letters will be bigger. If it’s a newspaper for,

**[00:43:03]** I was about to say, the younger generation, it’s not a newspaper but TikTok.

**[00:43:08]** But anyway, design isn’t something you can standardize,

**[00:43:13]** because it’s subjective, everyone has a different opinion,

**[00:43:18]** and it depends on who it’s made for.

**[00:43:22]** So many years later, from my slides,

**[00:43:25]** which I showed around, I wanted to say San Francisco,

**[00:43:29]** but actually the whole world, the slides said there is no golden standard,

**[00:43:33]** and API design is empathy towards users.

**[00:43:38]** And this approach to connecting programs flipped it a bit upside down,

**[00:43:43]** and we made a company

**[00:43:48]** that was truly a leader in this market,

**[00:43:52]** and a few years later my good friend Tomáš Mrkvička

**[00:43:59]** here in Prague, he said that what I was missing, to put a name on it,

**[00:44:03]** was that I had to call it API design, and when I gave it that name, API design,

**[00:44:07]** suddenly, like Microsoft said, we also do API design,

**[00:44:10]** and Google said, we also do API design, and SAP said, we also do API design,

**[00:44:15]** and it was a bit surreal that what today is called

**[00:44:20]** opinion leadership, which is like leading an opinion somewhere,

**[00:44:25]** and guiding the discussion, we managed maybe much, much more,

**[00:44:29]** than the actual commercial success of APIery, and I don't want to dispute

**[00:44:33]** the commercial success, the commercial success was definitely big, but it could have been

**[00:44:37]** maybe ten times, maybe a hundred times bigger if I had been a better salesman

**[00:44:41]** or if we had founded the company in America, I don't know, I can't judge,

**[00:44:47]** but in any case, I think the impact on the market was much bigger

**[00:44:59]** Well, a few years later, maybe a year or two later,

**[00:45:06]** I moved to San Francisco with my successful startup.

**[00:45:12]** Today, moving to America is a bit of a cliché,

**[00:45:18]** like no tech startup can be built from the Czech Republic.

**[00:45:22]** I think that's not entirely true, but I had to move there,

**[00:45:26]** because I was making tools for software developers and the most competitive market,

**[00:45:32]** the most intense competition, the biggest progress among programming teams

**[00:45:39]** is simply in Silicon Valley. So if I were making a startup focused on fashion,

**[00:45:45]** I might have moved to Paris or somewhere else.

**[00:45:49]** If I were making a startup producing some hardware, I might have moved

**[00:45:53]** to Asia, but because I was making tools for software developers,

**[00:45:58]** for programmers, I moved to Silicon Valley.

**[00:46:06]** I definitely wanted to say something insightful about this,

**[00:46:09]** but it totally slipped my mind now.

**[00:46:12]** I won't talk much about the startup world,

**[00:46:15]** I feel like I've repeated it so many times that it bores me,

**[00:46:18]** but if you have questions about how to fundraise money

**[00:46:23]** and how to deal with competition, we can talk about it later.

**[00:46:28]** I was looking for a representative image of what it's like to do a startup,

**[00:46:34]** and I rejected so many because they weren't accurate,

**[00:46:38]** until I found none, so here I have a beautiful image called "the ride",

**[00:46:43]** but "the ride" isn't really the right word.

**[00:46:46]** Then I tried to find an image of Schrödinger's cat,

**[00:46:49]** but there isn't one on the internet.

**[00:46:51]** Schrödinger's cat is a famous physics mental experiment

**[00:46:56]** from the last millennium about how some things exist

**[00:47:00]** in a quantum superposition of two states, and there is a cat in a closed box,

**[00:47:06]** which is both alive and dead at the same time.

**[00:47:09]** And whether it’s alive or dead, you’ll find out when you open the box,

**[00:47:12]** but before you open it, it’s not like it’s just lying there dead

**[00:47:16]** and you don’t know about it.

**[00:47:17]** It’s like in a parallel superposition of both states,

**[00:47:21]** which is strange and nobody understands it, and the logical brain resists it,

**[00:47:27]** but that’s exactly why this physics experiment is famous.

**[00:47:31]** And I’m talking about it because for me, a startup

**[00:47:34]** is like a quantum superposition of

**[00:47:36]** the company being half dead in parallel

**[00:47:39]** and at the same time the biggest leader in the world

**[00:47:42]** just crushing the world here.

**[00:47:45]** So that’s basically my experience of

**[00:47:47]** what it’s like to run a fast-growing startup.

**[00:47:51]** I kind of had the feeling that this crazy punk

**[00:47:56]** and wild ride was just some kind of transitional state

**[00:48:00]** at the beginning of the company and that over time there would be more money,

**[00:48:04]** more people, more employees, and we’d be more robust,

**[00:48:08]** a more established company, so it would calm down

**[00:48:12]** and stop being such a crazy hell.

**[00:48:15]** And I have to say, in six years it never calmed down.

**[00:48:19]** And even when hundreds of millions

**[00:48:22]** in invested funds were flying around, it was still

**[00:48:28]** a quantum state, one step from the grave

**[00:48:33]** and at the same time a huge success.

**[00:48:37]** One single story to illustrate this quickly

**[00:48:41]** and then I’ll move on.

**[00:48:44]** About three months before I finally sold Epiary

**[00:48:49]** for an amount that isn’t public,

**[00:48:52]** but was definitely in the billions of crowns,

**[00:48:56]** the company almost went bankrupt.

**[00:49:00]** About three months before that, I almost couldn’t find

**[00:49:03]** even bridge capital to keep the company afloat.

**[00:49:06]** This was partly because the company was growing rapidly,

**[00:49:10]** investing in development, and it was also a difficult investment period,

**[00:49:14]** like now, for example. Many startups will probably fail this year,

**[00:49:18]** because the investment climate is tough right now,

**[00:49:22]** the investment mood in the markets is at freezing point.

**[00:49:26]** Often these things aren’t just rational,

**[00:49:29]** investment decisions are often not just about that,

**[00:49:32]** whether you will get that money back,

**[00:49:35]** what you think about the world and development in the next twelve months,

**[00:49:39]** or whether the person you are negotiating with seems likable.

**[00:49:47]** So about three months before the sale, the company almost went bankrupt,

**[00:49:50]** and two months, or a month before the final signing,

**[00:49:54]** when we were already going through due diligence,

**[00:49:56]** that's when the buying company

**[00:50:00]** strips everything down, accounting and technology-wise, and they have to know and examine everything.

**[00:50:09]** So about a month before we actually sold the company, they came, and it was a situation

**[00:50:15]** where there were five of us in the company who were allowed to know about the sale,

**[00:50:19]** because it had to be kept secret due to stock exchange confidentiality to prevent speculation.

**[00:50:26]** There were five of us, and on the other side, the buyer had about 150 people analyzing it,

**[00:50:31]** so it was a somewhat asymmetrical relationship, and the teams of lawyers in New York and London

**[00:50:43]** over the last several years. Then someone came up with the idea that actually our company,

**[00:50:49]** which we originally founded in the UK and then moved to America,

**[00:50:54]** and we had applied to dissolve and remove the UK company from the commercial register,

**[00:50:59]** they said, according to their interpretation of law and contracts,

**[00:51:05]** that the transfer of intellectual property from the UK company to the US one was valid

**[00:51:10]** only going forward, not retroactively, so the first three years of development and software and everything

**[00:51:16]** in the company actually still belonged to the UK branch, which we had applied to dissolve,

**[00:51:21]** and that branch. I asked what would happen to the company's assets

**[00:51:25]** if the British dissolved it, and they said it would revert to Her Majesty the Queen.

**[00:51:32]** We had already submitted the application and it was sitting at the office.

**[00:51:35]** I started to panic and said, I don't know, on the phone,

**[00:51:39]** that there is a bomb there and please do something, for God's sake, so they don't dissolve the company.

**[00:51:46]** Literally the day after this was discovered, we got back an envelope

**[00:51:51]** from Her Majesty the Queen apologizing and saying we had applied to dissolve the company,

**[00:51:57]** and that a ten-pound banknote needed to be attached.

**[00:52:00]** We sent the dissolution request in one envelope and the ten-pound note in another,

**[00:52:05]** and they politely sent both envelopes back to us,

**[00:52:09]** asking us to put them together in one envelope and send it again.

**[00:52:13]** Then they would delete the company.

**[00:52:15]** Thanks to this, I didn't actually lose the company.

**[00:52:19]** So that's a little bit the difference between

**[00:52:23]** being one of thousands of naive startup entrepreneurs

**[00:52:27]** who sank investors' money and never got anywhere,

**[00:52:31]** and being the person sitting here telling you about

**[00:52:34]** how he made lifelong achievements and earned a lot of money,

**[00:52:37]** and then founded nonprofit organizations.

**[00:52:40]** So this is just a little cherry on top,

**[00:52:44]** like Schrödinger's cat, which is still one foot in the grave

**[00:52:51]** and the other foot a worldwide success.

**[00:52:56]** We were bought by the company Oreco.

**[00:52:59]** I really like this picture because for me it represents the vanity

**[00:53:05]** and arrogance of big corporations.

**[00:53:10]** Oreco, if you don't know them, makes databases,

**[00:53:14]** or at least used to, and that was their claim to fame.

**[00:53:18]** And databases are traditionally drawn in programmer diagrams

**[00:53:23]** as these cylinders.

**[00:53:25]** That's the server where the database runs.

**[00:53:27]** It's a cylinder.

**[00:53:29]** So in the 1980s, as a successful big corporation,

**[00:53:32]** they built a beautiful new headquarters by a pond, where the cylinders are.

**[00:53:39]** Their databases that made them famous.

**[00:53:41]** But just 20 years later, they decided they no longer make databases,

**[00:53:45]** but do cloud instead, and there are no cylinders in the cloud.

**[00:53:49]** So now in all their marketing materials,

**[00:53:52]** they paddle in the exact opposite direction,

**[00:53:55]** and cylinders are totally outdated from the eighties.

**[00:53:59]** But the buildings still stand.

**[00:54:02]** For me, it's a story about architecture needing to be timeless,

**[00:54:08]** not just a product of its time.

**[00:54:10]** And about how if you take what you're proud of today

**[00:54:14]** and build a building around it that will stand for 100 or 200 years,

**[00:54:18]** you'll regret it in 10 or 20 years.

**[00:54:22]** I came from a company with 50 employees, my own,

**[00:54:25]** to a company with 150,000 employees.

**[00:54:31]** As a vice president of advertising.

**[00:54:34]** It was like hitting a wall and connecting two worlds.

**[00:54:40]** Until then, I lived with the traditional startup idea

**[00:54:45]** that corporations are the evil of the world.

**[00:54:49]** Except if they buy you, then everything is great.

**[00:54:52]** But still, they're evil.

**[00:54:55]** And I have to say, to my own surprise,

**[00:55:01]** I actually met a lot of great and amazing

**[00:55:05]** and intelligent people there.

**[00:55:08]** And I just realized that having so many people in one company

**[00:55:12]** together is just a hell, it's hard.

**[00:55:15]** And my mental discipline to keep my sanity

**[00:55:20]** within that organization, when you're just struggling uphill for the second month in a row

**[00:55:26]** and various divisions are scheming political plots against you,

**[00:55:32]** to steamroll you.

**[00:55:35]** My way to stay sane in that context

**[00:55:40]** was always to ask myself, how would you do it,

**[00:55:43]** if you were managing 150,000 employees.

**[00:55:46]** How would you set up the processes, how would you set up the management,

**[00:55:50]** so that this wouldn't happen.

**[00:55:52]** That was always a very quick recipe for me

**[00:55:55]** to sober up and realize that the problem isn't that

**[00:55:58]** the individual people are bad or wrong.

**[00:56:02]** The problem isn't even that the organization's management is bad.

**[00:56:05]** The problem is simply that when there are ten levels of management,

**[00:56:09]** it just doesn't work. It's difficult.

**[00:56:15]** But one thing that was very interesting,

**[00:56:18]** and that I took away from Oracle,

**[00:56:21]** and was a great experience for me,

**[00:56:24]** was that our product for software developers

**[00:56:28]** actually started to be used often in larger companies

**[00:56:32]** by progressive teams, by innovative teams.

**[00:56:36]** Usually, those were the first places where APIs were deployed in companies,

**[00:56:42]** or where they started thinking about advanced forms

**[00:56:46]** like software development and interface development.

**[00:56:50]** And that was true even when I had a startup with 50 employees,

**[00:56:55]** which, true, had customers in about 180 countries worldwide.

**[00:56:59]** I think at one point we had a nice slide showing

**[00:57:02]** that Wikipedia lists 193 countries,

**[00:57:05]** and 180 of them had our customers.

**[00:57:09]** So it was like Trinidad and Tobago,

**[00:57:14]** and a few others like the Vatican were not yet our customers,

**[00:57:17]** but there were about 13 countries missing, and practically every other country in the world,

**[00:57:21]** there were at least users, if not paying API customers.

**[00:57:25]** But the moment I parked this product

**[00:57:29]** and transferred it into that big corporation,

**[00:57:32]** what changed was that I no longer talked only

**[00:57:36]** to big successful companies, but I don't know,

**[00:57:39]** our biggest customer in the startup was United Airlines,

**[00:57:43]** but suddenly I was talking to innovation teams at the World Bank

**[00:57:47]** and innovation teams at Deutsche Post

**[00:57:51]** and with large organizations,

**[00:57:55]** with a big impact.

**[00:57:59]** It was really interesting to watch there,

**[00:58:03]** how innovation spreads in those corporations,

**[00:58:07]** how small islands arise,

**[00:58:11]** positive deviances that then gradually expand

**[00:58:15]** to the entire organization.

**[00:58:17]** I might come back to that later when we discuss questions,

**[00:58:20]** but let's move away from startups,

**[00:58:22]** because I'm starting to run out of time,

**[00:58:24]** and I also want to get into another world

**[00:58:27]** that we haven't talked about yet.

**[00:58:29]** And when I was navigating San Francisco as a vice president of Oracle,

**[00:58:33]** one of the things that was very hard for me personally,

**[00:58:35]** and a big load on my psyche,

**[00:58:39]** was the incredible contrast of San Francisco,

**[00:58:43]** between being probably the place in America

**[00:58:47]** with the highest concentration of billionaires in the world,

**[00:58:51]** and the greatest wealth in the entire United States,

**[00:58:54]** and at the same time being a place with one of the largest concentrations of homelessness,

**[00:58:57]** and truly unbelievable human poverty

**[00:59:01]** on a scale unknown in Europe.

**[00:59:04]** I remember scenes like,

**[00:59:08]** sitting in my office in downtown San Francisco,

**[00:59:11]** thinking about some global plans,

**[00:59:15]** expansion, and right outside my window,

**[00:59:18]** there was a naked man dancing in the middle of the street,

**[00:59:22]** and I didn't even know if he was sane,

**[00:59:29]** and therefore didn't realize he was in the middle of the street,

**[00:59:32]** or if he had a mental disorder,

**[00:59:35]** and therefore didn't realize he was naked in the middle of the street,

**[00:59:38]** or if he was just fed up

**[00:59:41]** and decided to let himself get hit.

**[00:59:44]** That was a daily occurrence there,

**[00:59:47]** this photo isn't anything beautiful,

**[00:59:50]** but it's just a series of tents parked

**[00:59:53]** in the cubicle of that building I photographed on my way to work around the corner.

**[00:59:56]** I had a case where my friend came to visit me,

**[01:00:00]** Google was hosting her at the Hilton hotel downtown for some Edwards conference,

**[01:00:05]** and at the end of the day, when they were leaving with sandwiches from that hotel,

**[01:00:18]** So they were avoiding that homeless man who died on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.

**[01:00:25]** This is an incredible strain.

**[01:00:29]** For me personally, it was very mentally exhausting.

**[01:00:34]** If it had been something happening here in Prague,

**[01:00:39]** it would probably have pushed me to

**[01:00:43]** dedicate myself much more to fighting social service inequalities.

**[01:00:51]** But since it was in America,

**[01:00:55]** and I saw how many of these issues are really a product of that society

**[01:01:00]** and the environment, the atmosphere, how it's set up,

**[01:01:04]** the fact that we have a referendum about

**[01:01:08]** whether to dedicate a full 25% of our taxes in California

**[01:01:15]** to building low-income housing,

**[01:01:19]** and everyone rejects it,

**[01:01:21]** because 25% of our taxes is just way too much,

**[01:01:25]** and it's definitely not worth it,

**[01:01:28]** it really pushed me to

**[01:01:30]** say I had to wash my hands of it,

**[01:01:32]** to cope with it mentally.

**[01:01:34]** I said, this isn't my fault.

**[01:01:36]** I can't be blamed for it.

**[01:01:37]** I don't have the right to vote here,

**[01:01:39]** I can't participate in elections here,

**[01:01:41]** I can't change this society,

**[01:01:43]** I have to endure it,

**[01:01:45]** but I definitely want to go back.

**[01:01:50]** After all, also because

**[01:01:52]** I had two boys

**[01:01:54]** growing up in the middle of Silicon Valley,

**[01:01:57]** without knowing a word of Czech,

**[01:01:59]** speaking only English,

**[01:02:01]** and that started to bother me a lot personally.

**[01:02:05]** I felt there was a window

**[01:02:07]** that was closing on me,

**[01:02:08]** that I had to return to the Czech Republic,

**[01:02:10]** or they would grow up as Americans.

**[01:02:13]** But objectively speaking,

**[01:02:15]** the quality of life here is beautiful.

**[01:02:18]** Silicon Valley is personally incomparable to me.

**[01:02:21]** Minus the sea, of course.

**[01:02:23]** I would take the sea here too.

**[01:02:25]** That was nice.

**[01:02:26]** The beach.

**[01:02:27]** That was nice,

**[01:02:28]** but otherwise the quality of life here is completely incomparable.

**[01:02:31]** So when the business reason

**[01:02:33]** was no longer so intense

**[01:02:34]** and for me personally was over,

**[01:02:36]** and I knew I would be leaving,

**[01:02:37]** what I said anyway,

**[01:02:38]** is that I'm not the kind of person

**[01:02:39]** who can work in a corporation for decades,

**[01:02:43]** I was really looking forward to

**[01:02:47]** coming back here to the Czech Republic.

**[01:02:51]** Several things confronted me here.

**[01:02:53]** First of all,

**[01:02:55]** which was quite complicated for me,

**[01:02:59]** thanks to something called

**[01:03:03]** taxation of capital gains, basically.

**[01:03:05]** Here in the Czech Republic, we don't pay any taxes

**[01:03:07]** on stock gains,

**[01:03:09]** if you hold the stocks longer than three years, five years,

**[01:03:12]** or three years, I think.

**[01:03:14]** Which means that from my part of

**[01:03:18]** what I owned in my company,

**[01:03:20]** when I sold it,

**[01:03:21]** which was definitely not 100%, nor 50%,

**[01:03:23]** nor 30% of the company,

**[01:03:25]** when I sold it,

**[01:03:27]** I actually didn't pay a single crown in taxes.

**[01:03:29]** And that felt a bit immoral to me.

**[01:03:31]** It felt like I had now qualified

**[01:03:33]** into some category of oligarchs,

**[01:03:36]** who are too rich to pay taxes.

**[01:03:41]** So I actually decided

**[01:03:43]** that I have to voluntarily tax myself.

**[01:03:49]** Which means,

**[01:03:51]** what is now called,

**[01:03:53]** that some people in the middle become philanthropists.

**[01:03:56]** But I actually looked at it from the perspective

**[01:04:00]** of my experience from the startup world,

**[01:04:03]** when, of course, you are constantly negotiating with investors,

**[01:04:06]** who are investing in you and those investors give you money

**[01:04:09]** and expect some results in return.

**[01:04:12]** So the discussion is always about,

**[01:04:15]** how much money and how much value.

**[01:04:20]** And I actually discovered for myself

**[01:04:23]** the difficulty of what,

**[01:04:26]** in the investment world, is called capital allocation.

**[01:04:29]** Just because you have money

**[01:04:31]** and you want to give that money to someone,

**[01:04:33]** doesn't mean it's easy.

**[01:04:35]** Of course, you can just throw it on the street and say first come, first served,

**[01:04:38]** or you can take it to a person in need and say here you go.

**[01:04:41]** I don't know if you're doing it right or wrong,

**[01:04:44]** but here it is, just go.

**[01:04:47]** But the more a person feels some responsibility

**[01:04:50]** for where the money is directed

**[01:04:53]** and for the responsibility that

**[01:04:56]** they should support organizations

**[01:05:01]** that are active and well-managed,

**[01:05:04]** and that it's their responsibility to make this decision,

**[01:05:07]** the smaller and smaller I became,

**[01:05:10]** because I was looking for some statistics and tables

**[01:05:13]** and overviews of nonprofit effectiveness

**[01:05:16]** and the purposefulness of the funds spent,

**[01:05:19]** and of course, I found nothing at all.

**[01:05:22]** And from my business and startup experience,

**[01:05:25]** I didn't fully connect with this world,

**[01:05:29]** where most of their work is immeasurable

**[01:05:32]** or hard to measure and is qualitative rather than quantitative.

**[01:05:38]** So I created a kind of helpful

**[01:05:41]** mental crutch.

**[01:05:44]** I said, if I don't know which organizations

**[01:05:47]** are well-managed and do their work well,

**[01:05:50]** I'll try to find those that use technology,

**[01:05:53]** and I understand that, I can estimate

**[01:05:56]** who uses technology and who is innovative,

**[01:05:59]** and who can innovate.

**[01:06:05]** So I made this little trick for myself.

**[01:06:10]** And so I started playing with organizations I would give money to,

**[01:06:13]** who actually work well with technologies

**[01:06:16]** and I couldn't find any.

**[01:06:19]** And that seemed suspicious to me, because from my

**[01:06:22]** from my own experience with

**[01:06:25]** hundreds and hundreds of companies that used digitalization

**[01:06:28]** and the implementation of new technologies to improve

**[01:06:31]** efficiency, to improve internal processes,

**[01:06:34]** to improve customer experiences,

**[01:06:37]** I suddenly found none of that in the nonprofit sector.

**[01:06:40]** So I started wondering why,

**[01:06:43]** and everyone told me, well, because IT people are expensive

**[01:06:46]** and it's not possible, and we don't have the money to do

**[01:06:49]** any kind of innovation here.

**[01:06:52]** That seemed very contradictory to me,

**[01:06:55]** because I thought, I'm not the only crazy person in IT

**[01:07:01]** and help it, and I kind of have a latent feeling around me

**[01:07:04]** that there are a lot of people who want to do that,

**[01:07:07]** but they actually feel that the most they can do to help society

**[01:07:10]** is, I don't know, go plant trees in Šumava

**[01:07:13]** or just

**[01:07:16]** stand on the metro with some leaflet

**[01:07:20]** or help serve soup in a shelter.

**[01:07:23]** And I don't want to devalue that work,

**[01:07:26]** it's obviously important, but when we have

**[01:07:29]** a fundamental need, like digitalizing the public space,

**[01:07:33]** which would bring savings, improvements,

**[01:07:37]** greater efficiency and higher performance of those organizations,

**[01:07:41]** and they say, we can't because we don't have the funds

**[01:07:44]** to pay IT people, and those IT people are somewhere else

**[01:07:48]** planting trees in Moravia,

**[01:07:51]** it seemed to me that there is an interesting contradiction,

**[01:07:56]** that there are two worlds that don't understand each other,

**[01:08:00]** that can't communicate.

**[01:08:03]** There is the world where people mean well,

**[01:08:06]** but don't fully understand technology,

**[01:08:09]** and there is the world where people understand technology

**[01:08:12]** and would like to mean well too, but have no experience at all.

**[01:08:16]** I thought about it, thought about it, thought about it,

**[01:08:19]** until I said that the best way

**[01:08:22]** how to give something back to society, it won't be,

**[01:08:25]** that I just hand the money over to someone, but that I use it to

**[01:08:28]** create something new and besides that,

**[01:08:31]** that I put money in, I also put in myself

**[01:08:34]** and my time and my work as a value add on top of the money.

**[01:08:37]** And then finally the last thing that totally cemented it for me,

**[01:08:41]** when I realized I was reinventing the wheel again,

**[01:08:44]** was that there are organizations here that focus

**[01:08:47]** on digitizing public spaces, nonprofit organizations,

**[01:08:51]** using technology to improve our lives.

**[01:08:55]** So they are simply all around us, there are organizations

**[01:08:59]** networked into Code for All, Code for Romania,

**[01:09:02]** Code for Poland, Code for France, Slovensko Digital.

**[01:09:06]** They are basically everywhere around us,

**[01:09:09]** only in the Czech Republic we have nothing.

**[01:09:12]** And that was another shock for me, a wall I hit,

**[01:09:16]** because from my experience in Silicon Valley,

**[01:09:19]** I really knew firsthand that in the Czech Republic

**[01:09:22]** we have one of the most advanced, strongest

**[01:09:27]** developer and digital ecosystems in the world.

**[01:09:32]** We are at the global forefront when it comes to programmers

**[01:09:37]** and digital technologies.

**[01:09:40]** You only really see it when you step outside,

**[01:09:42]** from the outside these contrasts are always clearer,

**[01:09:45]** but we are Early Adopters, we have a progressive scene,

**[01:09:48]** we have lots of smart people.

**[01:09:51]** For me in Silicon Valley, a big competitive advantage

**[01:09:54]** was having my development center in Prague.

**[01:09:57]** If that development center had been in France or Italy,

**[01:10:00]** or even Poland or England, I might not have had such a successful company.

**[01:10:05]** I regularly had better, higher quality talent

**[01:10:08]** than my competitors could reach,

**[01:10:11]** because I was able to hire people in the Czech Republic.

**[01:10:18]** And besides having many programmers here

**[01:10:21]** and an advanced IT scene,

**[01:10:24]** our whole society is also very digitally advanced across the board.

**[01:10:29]** And that is reflected in many different metrics,

**[01:10:32]** which you can find, that are really solid

**[01:10:34]** and clearly indisputable about the fact

**[01:10:36]** that, for example, when mobile or watch payments were introduced,

**[01:10:42]** So we are first or second in the entire European Union

**[01:10:45]** in terms of the number of people who pay contactlessly,

**[01:10:48]** who pay with watches.

**[01:10:50]** We are at the forefront in the European Union

**[01:10:52]** in terms of the population that has online banking.

**[01:10:55]** These are the kinds of things that are gradually being introduced into society,

**[01:10:58]** and society either fights them, rejects them,

**[01:11:02]** or accepts these technological innovations.

**[01:11:05]** And our society accepts them.

**[01:11:07]** We are at the forefront of this in the European Union,

**[01:11:10]** and I found it very strange

**[01:11:13]** that we have such a progressive, digitally advanced, educated society,

**[01:11:18]** and the public space is a cash register, pencil and paper, forms.

**[01:11:29]** And it seemed to me that it’s not just a pity, that it could be done better,

**[01:11:33]** but that it’s an untapped potential.

**[01:11:35]** That it’s really something where we have great national wealth in people,

**[01:11:42]** and we don’t use it.

**[01:11:44]** We export it abroad as raw, unprocessed material,

**[01:11:48]** instead of turning it into higher added value.

**[01:11:51]** Well, that was a bit philosophical to finish.

**[01:11:54]** So I founded Českodigitál, which was an organization

**[01:11:57]** that aimed to unite not only programmers,

**[01:12:01]** but generally people from digital professions,

**[01:12:06]** programmers, designers, project managers, product managers, marketers,

**[01:12:11]** you name it.

**[01:12:12]** Simply all the people who together contribute to creating digital products,

**[01:12:16]** and to unite these volunteers and basically tell society

**[01:12:20]** that we are here ready to help society not by

**[01:12:23]** planting trees in Šumava,

**[01:12:25]** but by helping to digitalize the public space

**[01:12:29]** and helping organizations that mean well,

**[01:12:32]** but don’t know how to use technology.

**[01:12:37]** Českodigitál quickly became, within a few years of its founding,

**[01:12:42]** the largest organization of this type in Europe.

**[01:12:46]** Today, we are even worldwide, in terms of the number of volunteers,

**[01:12:49]** the member with the largest number of members in the Code for All network.

**[01:12:53]** We have this today, again an old slide, about a year and a half old,

**[01:12:56]** so today we have about five and a half thousand volunteers,

**[01:12:59]** who are gathered together in the Českodigitál network,

**[01:13:03]** which, if these people worked full-time,

**[01:13:06]** that would make us the largest Czech IT organization,

**[01:13:09]** but of course, these are volunteers.

**[01:13:11]** They have only expressed their interest in helping,

**[01:13:14]** if they consider it appropriate that what they would help with is good,

**[01:13:19]** which they decide only occasionally,

**[01:13:23]** and of course, their personal circumstances must also be favorable,

**[01:13:26]** meaning they have time, their marriage isn't falling apart,

**[01:13:30]** or their children aren't sick.

**[01:13:32]** There can be many reasons why they don't have time at the moment.

**[01:13:36]** But even so, today as an organization,

**[01:13:39]** we are the largest organization of this type.

**[01:13:41]** We have completed dozens of projects in the Czech Republic.

**[01:13:45]** We primarily work at the level of non-profit organizations,

**[01:13:49]** helping individual organizations

**[01:13:52]** with their digital strategy and digital output.

**[01:13:56]** Recently, for example, we launched a non-profit application,

**[01:13:59]** which I have already recommended to my entire family and extended friends.

**[01:14:04]** I will do the same with you, the app Preventivka,

**[01:14:07]** prepared by the non-profit organization LUNO,

**[01:14:10]** which focuses on preventive healthcare.

**[01:14:13]** You enter whether you are male or female, your age,

**[01:14:16]** and it prescribes your preventive healthcare.

**[01:14:20]** For example, to have your skin moles checked every two years,

**[01:14:23]** or to visit an eye doctor.

**[01:14:25]** It reminds you, and there is also nice gamification,

**[01:14:28]** which rewards you for taking care of yourself.

**[01:14:32]** And these things can have a huge impact.

**[01:14:36]** And impact analysis in the non-profit sector

**[01:14:40]** is a topic for another hour or two,

**[01:14:43]** so I will skip it here now,

**[01:14:45]** and I have talked about it several times before.

**[01:14:47]** But one thing that is good to realize is

**[01:14:50]** the reason why IT technologies exist,

**[01:14:53]** or why programmers are in such demand,

**[01:14:57]** and why they have the salaries they do,

**[01:15:00]** and why everyone here is so obsessed with programmers,

**[01:15:03]** is precisely because five people can develop a business system

**[01:15:10]** for your company where thirty people work,

**[01:15:13]** and the same five people can develop something used by three billion people.

**[01:15:17]** And the scaling effect of inventing and creating something,

**[01:15:21]** What is useful for many people can be dramatic.

**[01:15:25]** A nice example I like is,

**[01:15:28]** many of you probably have Whatsapp installed on your phone,

**[01:15:31]** that messenger, and when Facebook bought Whatsapp,

**[01:15:35]** it had, I think, thirty employees and about a billion users worldwide,

**[01:15:39]** or one out of every half billion people in the world.

**[01:15:42]** You just can't achieve that in many other professions.

**[01:15:46]** Maria Theresa didn't influence as many lives,

**[01:15:49]** as those thirty Whatsapp programmers did.

**[01:15:52]** True, we can debate whether it was for the better,

**[01:15:55]** but they influenced people.

**[01:15:58]** So digitalization in the non-profit sector

**[01:16:04]** or generally in the public space

**[01:16:07]** is not just a trendy, popular topic,

**[01:16:10]** but something where a handful of people,

**[01:16:13]** if they come together and sacrifice a few weekends,

**[01:16:16]** can have a breakthrough impact on the whole society.

**[01:16:19]** And I hope the projects we do at ČeskoDigital

**[01:16:22]** are trying to achieve that.

**[01:16:25]** And I think I'll wrap it up here,

**[01:16:27]** because I've already gone over time and the rest will be in questions.

**[01:16:39]** I'll sit down next to you a bit.

**[01:16:44]** I just realized, Honza,

**[01:16:46]** that the slides I said were backup

**[01:16:48]** and that I wanted to go through are still there.

**[01:16:51]** There are three. I'll really go through them quickly.

**[01:16:54]** But take it like this.

**[01:16:57]** First, you can see I've run out of patience,

**[01:16:59]** and there are no slides, just bullet points.

**[01:17:01]** And also take it as a kickoff for discussion.

**[01:17:05]** So in the Czech Republic, when I lecture,

**[01:17:08]** compared to when I lecture in America,

**[01:17:10]** traditionally there are no questions,

**[01:17:12]** that's just our national sport.

**[01:17:14]** I've even started saying I won't let you have sandwiches,

**[01:17:17]** if there are no questions.

**[01:17:19]** But take it as a tool for discussion

**[01:17:22]** and provocative remarks so you argue with me

**[01:17:26]** in the questions and comments.

**[01:17:29]** One of the things I’m starting with,

**[01:17:31]** the efficiency tool, we just talked about that,

**[01:17:34]** I'll skip that. Simply, 30 programmers

**[01:17:36]** have influenced lives more than Maria Theresa,

**[01:17:38]** or well, not Maria Theresa.

**[01:17:41]** Well, it doesn't matter. Let's skip it.

**[01:17:44]** The second thing that's on my mind

**[01:17:46]** and that I think is worth mentioning,

**[01:17:49]** is that nowadays we often confuse

**[01:17:53]** the word technology with the word innovation.

**[01:17:56]** And it actually seems to me,

**[01:17:58]** that we automatically expect,

**[01:18:01]** that if we throw technology at something,

**[01:18:03]** it will improve, which might not be true at all.

**[01:18:07]** And at the same time, we automatically assume,

**[01:18:09]** that to improve something,

**[01:18:10]** we have to fix the technology there.

**[01:18:12]** I'm speaking from my IT bubble

**[01:18:14]** and the bubble of digital transformation and digitization,

**[01:18:18]** but the more I think about this topic and talk to people,

**[01:18:20]** the more I feel,

**[01:18:23]** that what they want to say isn't digitization,

**[01:18:24]** but what they mean is innovation.

**[01:18:26]** Changing things for the better.

**[01:18:29]** And sometimes there's a little asterisk

**[01:18:32]** for the use of technology.

**[01:18:34]** But it seems to me that the dramatic digital progress

**[01:18:36]** over the last forty years and how these digital companies,

**[01:18:40]** these ones here, have revolutionized the world,

**[01:18:42]** has largely led to us mixing these two things together a lot.

**[01:18:44]** And often where we want to say innovation,

**[01:18:48]** we instead say digitization,

**[01:18:50]** and it's not about technology at all,

**[01:18:54]** but about how to change the company

**[01:18:58]** to be willing to innovate and become better.

**[01:19:00]** Because technology is maybe,

**[01:19:02]** at best, just a tool.

**[01:19:04]** So that's the second note.

**[01:19:14]** And the third one, quite fundamental,

**[01:19:16]** here again provocative.

**[01:19:20]** What we haven't even gotten to,

**[01:19:22]** is that besides ČeskoDigital,

**[01:19:24]** I also sit on the board of Prague AI,

**[01:19:26]** which is a Czech organization

**[01:19:27]** focused on supporting artificial intelligence.

**[01:19:31]** And when I said,

**[01:19:32]** that we are a very technological company

**[01:19:34]** and innovative and adopt new technologies,

**[01:19:36]** I think we are a big leader in the field of artificial intelligence.

**[01:19:38]** Or at least we should be,

**[01:19:40]** if we systematically focused on it.

**[01:19:42]** I believe this is a huge opportunity for the Czech Republic.

**[01:19:45]** And I have to say, artificial intelligence is advancing at a speed

**[01:19:49]** that even surprises me.

**[01:19:51]** And I think I'm quite a techno-optimist.

**[01:19:57]** But one of the things where...

**[01:20:00]** I see no progress or shift, and I say this optimistically looking ahead,

**[01:20:08]** is that not all professions and jobs and civilization will disappear because of AI,

**[01:20:15]** because I see no progress in the area of empathy and precisely that,

**[01:20:22]** what we've been talking about all along here, connecting two worlds,

**[01:20:25]** overlapping those worlds with each other, and it seems to me that I already see a big shift

**[01:20:31]** in AI even in creativity. That starts to make me a bit uneasy,

**[01:20:36]** AI can create beautiful images when I tell it what I want,

**[01:20:40]** AI can already program for me when I tell it what I want,

**[01:20:44]** even programmers no longer have the job security we thought they would,

**[01:20:50]** but AI still cannot connect two worlds that don't understand each other

**[01:20:55]** and find a common language, that empathy, so that's a final note

**[01:21:02]** looking ahead, that empathy is, I think, a good profession for the future.

**[01:21:08]** Alright, that's all, Honza.

**[01:21:11]** Thank you, you filled the time perfectly, which means I can now already

**[01:21:20]** invite you to the discussion, which will be, but definitely not now,

**[01:21:24]** but later at the end I'll show you when and where it will be.

**[01:21:28]** I'll take over because there are a few questions, so whoever wants to have a sandwich afterwards,

**[01:21:32]** theoretically, they can.

**[01:21:34]** How did you manage to inspire so many volunteers for Czech digital?

**[01:21:40]** I have a long history of coming up with names that no one can pronounce.

**[01:21:45]** I don't think that's the case.

**[01:21:48]** I think I hit an oil well that was already under the ground before that.

**[01:21:53]** and just waited for someone to find him.

**[01:21:55]** This was simply an accumulated need in that society

**[01:22:00]** and now specifically I mean those volunteers,

**[01:22:04]** people who really want to help, they want to make things better.

**[01:22:10]** I even feel that at Českodigitál I have the opportunity to work with people

**[01:22:15]** whom I would never attract to my commercial company or my successful startup.

**[01:22:21]** Top experts in the field, incredibly skilled people.

**[01:22:24]** Because actually, when I look at it,

**[01:22:28]** and mind you, Českodigitál is not just top experts in the field,

**[01:22:32]** Českodigitál is made up of these incredibly skilled people

**[01:22:35]** and also students at university who currently have free time

**[01:22:39]** and we can help them.

**[01:22:41]** And mixing these groups together is also really interesting

**[01:22:44]** and very beneficial, I think, for everyone.

**[01:22:47]** But actually, I often see it this way: on the job market,

**[01:22:51]** when people decide where to work and what to do,

**[01:22:55]** what they will actually dedicate their time to in life,

**[01:22:58]** there are many offers where a digitally skilled person can go work.

**[01:23:01]** And many offers that are amazingly well paid

**[01:23:05]** and money no longer motivates people that much.

**[01:23:08]** But where there is a crucial shortage

**[01:23:11]** is in the feeling that what I do has meaning.

**[01:23:14]** There aren't that many jobs like that.

**[01:23:18]** And in this, I think that work not only for the nonprofit sector,

**[01:23:21]** but generally for the public good,

**[01:23:25]** whether it's the nonprofit sector or sometimes the state,

**[01:23:28]** has a huge potential to attract incredibly skilled people,

**[01:23:31]** because people want to work on something

**[01:23:34]** that gives them meaning, that they feel is useful for something.

**[01:23:37]** Which often isn't the case in many programming jobs.

**[01:23:41]** So it's about meaning.

**[01:23:46]** A personal question from Tomáš. How does your wife manage it all?

**[01:23:51]** How did you balance personal life and company growth, life in the USA, etc.?

**[01:23:54]** Although my wife speaks English and not Czech,

**[01:23:59]** I think she lived better here in the Czech Republic than in America.

**[01:24:03]** Which is partly because we moved to America

**[01:24:07]** when we had small children. Our first was born here in the Czech Republic,

**[01:24:11]** when my startup was one year old. And the second was born in America.

**[01:24:15]** And parallel to that, I really didn't have much time.

**[01:24:24]** I worked twelve or more hours, mostly more.

**[01:24:29]** Whenever I promised to finally take a week off somewhere,

**[01:24:34]** the whole world would collapse the day before the vacation

**[01:24:38]** and everything would go wrong. It was very stressful.

**[01:24:43]** I think the worst part might not have been that I wasn't home much,

**[01:24:48]** but that when I was home, I was stressed.

**[01:24:52]** So sometimes I exaggerate. I say that for six years in that startup,

**[01:24:57]** we lived apart, and now we're getting used to each other again for six years.

**[01:25:01]** And it was already six years, so we're still together.

**[01:25:05]** I think the relationship is better than it ever was before,

**[01:25:08]** but it's true that after the startup ended, it was a journey back,

**[01:25:13]** and I consider one of my biggest professional achievements

**[01:25:18]** that our marriage survived.

**[01:25:21]** Do the boys speak Czech? Here's a question.

**[01:25:24]** The boys speak Czech. They go to a Czech public school,

**[01:25:27]** and the older one, Prokop, who moved here when he was five,

**[01:25:31]** suffers a bit from agrammatism, like with declensions and such.

**[01:25:35]** He understands it rationally, knows all the sentence patterns,

**[01:25:39]** all the declension patterns, and can deduce them correctly,

**[01:25:45]** but then he speaks like the stereotype we had

**[01:25:49]** of Sudeten Germans trying to speak Czech.

**[01:25:54]** But I think that will pass over time.

**[01:25:57]** I think if I had come a year later, it would have been too late.

**[01:26:02]** I also wanted to thank you for being so open,

**[01:26:07]** because often the media image of startups

**[01:26:11]** is different, and I know those intense years

**[01:26:19]** were unpleasant and affected health.

**[01:26:21]** That it's connected and it's something for something.

**[01:26:25]** So thanks for being able to say and share this here.

**[01:26:31]** I actually want to ask, and there are two questions.

**[01:26:37]** One from Lukáš and then from someone else.

**[01:26:40]** What is the next vision for Česko.Digital and what is your next vision?

**[01:26:43]** Because I know you have withdrawn or are withdrawing from Česko.Digital.

**[01:26:47]** And how do you see this?

**[01:26:49]** First, it's important to say that I didn't withdraw from Česko.Digital because

**[01:26:53]** I didn't trust it or felt it was doing something wrong.

**[01:26:56]** On the contrary, I'm prouder of it than I ever expected to be.

**[01:27:02]** And of course, I'm very proud of the incredible people

**[01:27:06]** who work there and what they do.

**[01:27:09]** And that makes it even harder.

**[01:27:11]** But on the other hand, from day one when I founded Česko.Digital,

**[01:27:14]** I said, I'm simply a starter.

**[01:27:16]** I'm a person who enjoys building new things.

**[01:27:18]** I'm not really the right person for operations and maintenance.

**[01:27:22]** And if I do operations and maintenance, pipes will leak everywhere,

**[01:27:27]** nothing will work, and there will just be a mess everywhere,

**[01:27:30]** because I'm simply a starter.

**[01:27:33]** So I'm really glad that Eva Pavlíková took over from me,

**[01:27:38]** who was there from day one, first as a volunteer,

**[01:27:41]** and was my right hand, and today I think

**[01:27:43]** she runs the organization better than I ever could.

**[01:27:46]** So that's great in that regard.

**[01:27:48]** But it's true, I said Česko.Digital is not a savings institute.

**[01:27:53]** Česko.Digital is an organization that must not depend on me

**[01:27:56]** and must exist without me.

**[01:27:59]** So I'm very lucky I managed to pass it on,

**[01:28:03]** and I hope it will be successful long-term.

**[01:28:06]** What will come next for me, I don't know.

**[01:28:08]** I'm in a mode where I've decided to take my kids and go abroad with them,

**[01:28:12]** and give them what I experienced myself, life abroad,

**[01:28:15]** which is true, they had it before in Silicon Valley,

**[01:28:18]** but they were too young to remember anything.

**[01:28:21]** And I want to give them exactly what I told you here.

**[01:28:24]** The ability to see things from a different perspective,

**[01:28:27]** from another angle, to experience life immersed in another culture.

**[01:28:32]** So we'll be abroad for a while,

**[01:28:36]** but it's not permanent and we will definitely come back,

**[01:28:40]** and when we return, we'll talk about it then. It'll come.

**[01:28:45]** So you actually answered the questions that were here.

**[01:28:50]** There's one that students often ask,

**[01:28:55]** where did you get the capital to start a company since you came from a top school.

**[01:29:01]** Nowhere, there was none.

**[01:29:06]** Back then, an SRO (limited company) required a mandatory basic capital of 100,000 crowns,

**[01:29:11]** which I didn't have, so we borrowed some from friends

**[01:29:16]** and parents, 50,000 crowns, because we found out

**[01:29:19]** that paying 50% of the basic capital was enough.

**[01:29:22]** And apparently it has to be paid in full later, but that probably never happened.

**[01:29:26]** It won't be like in the UK where you get a bill to pay the rest.

**[01:29:30]** Probably yes.

**[01:29:32]** You can always found an SRO with a basic capital of one crown, I think,

**[01:29:36]** or 10 thousand crowns.

**[01:29:38]** So like already 10 thousand crowns, but adjusted for inflation.

**[01:29:44]** So, well, nowhere.

**[01:29:46]** Likewise, and on a much bigger and more brutal scale,

**[01:29:49]** no money to start when I was launching Apiary,

**[01:29:52]** like that global startup.

**[01:29:55]** And it was really like I was leaving my well-paid job,

**[01:30:00]** at Gooddata with zero savings.

**[01:30:05]** I took a 30-year mortgage on a house,

**[01:30:08]** which I bought, with help from my parents

**[01:30:11]** and for that kind of buffer above the mortgage as well.

**[01:30:16]** So I got into debt for 30 years ahead,

**[01:30:20]** I didn't have a single crown saved in my account,

**[01:30:22]** and my wife was also confirming we were expecting our first child.

**[01:30:25]** And I didn't have a single crown.

**[01:30:30]** I was really in that Schrödinger's cat situation,

**[01:30:33]** half dead and half alive,

**[01:30:35]** I really had situations,

**[01:30:38]** where I was driving around venture capital investors in London

**[01:30:42]** and you always come into that building of glass and steel,

**[01:30:46]** take the elevator to the 35th floor,

**[01:30:48]** where the boardroom with about 20 chairs is,

**[01:30:51]** and you just watch through the floor-to-ceiling window

**[01:30:56]** how people live down there.

**[01:31:03]** And so I was driving around that venture capital,

**[01:31:05]** and as I was doing that, I realized

**[01:31:07]** I couldn't even afford seven pounds for the subway,

**[01:31:11]** like a metro ticket, because I didn't have it on my card.

**[01:31:14]** So I put the company card instead of my personal card,

**[01:31:16]** and that bounced too, no seven pounds there.

**[01:31:19]** So I walked to the meeting.

**[01:31:21]** I walked through the city center for an hour,

**[01:31:23]** then took the elevator to the 35th floor,

**[01:31:25]** we're conquering the world, we're the best in the world,

**[01:31:28]** like a million dollars, two million dollars,

**[01:31:30]** and I was thinking how I'll get home in the evening,

**[01:31:32]** whether I'll sleep under a bridge because I simply couldn't afford the metro.

**[01:31:38]** Probably none of us can imagine that.

**[01:31:40]** Thank you very much.

**[01:31:42]** Sorry for going over time.

**[01:31:44]** Thank you for spending this hour, hour and a half with us,

**[01:31:50]** for spending this time with us.

**[01:31:52]** Please, try to write us some feedback,

**[01:31:55]** whether it's giving us a star,

**[01:31:57]** or writing three words that somehow

**[01:32:00]** this breakfast evoked in you.

**[01:32:03]** I'll quickly go through it.

**[01:32:07]** What's important and good,

**[01:32:11]** when we listen to a story like this,

**[01:32:14]** is maybe to do some introspection,

**[01:32:16]** some reflection, just look inside yourself,

**[01:32:18]** what it gave you, took from you, what were the aha moments.

**[01:32:21]** Of course, you can do this on redbutton.edu,

**[01:32:24]** through the app, or download the form,

**[01:32:27]** which we have there for this purpose.

**[01:32:30]** If you're watching with your team, definitely have that discussion.

**[01:32:34]** We have one planned.

**[01:32:36]** That means on 20.9.6.,

**[01:32:40]** which I think is next Wednesday or Thursday.

**[01:32:45]** At five o'clock we'll open a nice glass

**[01:32:50]** and chat with an interesting group about

**[01:32:55]** how worlds connect, including Dan Franz,

**[01:32:58]** who has experience building Google communities,

**[01:33:00]** Péťa Beneš, and Ján Koštura, who connects

**[01:33:03]** two other worlds, lobož Malý Ardeira.

**[01:33:06]** I think it will be a great discussion,

**[01:33:09]** so if you want, you can definitely join us.

**[01:33:12]** I'll just remind you of the July book of the month project.

**[01:33:16]** Martin Vázquez, who was here at the last breakfast,

**[01:33:19]** recommended 'Present Like TED'.

**[01:33:24]** There’s a lot to see on EDUtéka,

**[01:33:30]** whether meetings or various other programs,

**[01:33:34]** so explore and definitely enjoy them during the holidays.

**[01:33:39]** The breakfast doesn't stop; we have no break during the holidays,

**[01:33:43]** we go non-stop, so you can look forward to

**[01:33:47]** July 21st with another interesting guest,

**[01:33:51]** who showed me poisonous lizards in his office,

**[01:33:55]** which he brought from his travels, but it won't be about lizards.

**[01:33:59]** It will be about the human brain and neurosurgery,

**[01:34:01]** and we will welcome Professor Vladimir Beneš.

**[01:34:04]** So if you're interested in where neurosurgery is headed

**[01:34:08]** and what its future is, as well as its history,

**[01:34:11]** definitely join us on July 21st,

**[01:34:14]** either here in Magenta or at any of the places we broadcast to.

**[01:34:18]** Thank you very much, thanks to you, take care, goodbye and hi.