A language CEO, 20 years in, now building his own AI

[00:00:00] Sean Hopwood: There was a client that we’ve been using for our day interpreting app. Most people prefer the human interpretation, but there’s a few that actually want that AI interpretation, and we were already working on it. And so the client wanted to find an AI service to do this. And our development team, they’re so smart. So they hooked up the AI service. We tested it. I mean, it was for like, you know, this is for an insurance company. They needed all these conversations for clients and claims and arbitrations, examination under oath and stuff like that. We hooked up the AI service for them within. They canceled with us on a Friday, and we had the developers work on it the entire weekend. And then Monday we had it ready, and we contacted them like, “Oh yeah, we have AI service. It’s ready right here.” Then like three hours later, they emailed back and they said, “Oh yeah, this looks pretty good.” And they came back to us as a client, so we got them back. And that was like one of the, the greatest things because it’s like, it’s the perfect example of like adaptation. You know, it’s the perfect example of, you know, don’t just sit there and just lay rest on your laurels and say, “Okay. Oh gosh, we just lost them,” you know. Make an adjustment, find out what the client wants, and give them what they want

[00:01:03] Georg Ell: Welcome to In Other Words, the CEO-to-CEO edition. I’m Georg Ell, CEO of Phrase. In this series, we aim to have honest conversations with fellow CEOs and founders about the decisions they’re making, the challenges they’re facing, and what they’re learning along the way. My guest today is Sean Hopwood, founder and CEO of Day Translations. Sean started his company in 2007, right before the global financial crisis, and has spent nearly 20 years building it into a global Language Services Operation. With over 10,000 linguists, offices in 3 continents, clients in healthcare, legal, government agencies, all without a single dollar of outside investment. Sean and I operate in the same industry from different angles. He runs the human side, and I run the technology side. Though that might be an oversimplification too, we’ll get into that. We’re both watching AI rewrite the rules in real time, and I’m very passionate about, you know, what it means and takes to run a company and the impact of AI and all that. So, I’d love to get your take on some of those things as we go through. But Sean, it’s great to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

[00:02:02] Sean Hopwood: I’m happy to be here, and thank you for the introduction. And yes, I definitely am very involved with a lot of human things, and I’ve been watching your company and actually using your service for a while. And I’m very into the technological part as well.

[00:02:15] Georg Ell: Maybe before we get into it. And one thing I should say, I have a bunch of questions for you, but if at any point you want to throw one back at me, we’ll roll with that. So, we’ll make it two way. But maybe we start with something personal because you are quite special in that you speak a whole bunch of different languages. You grew up in a small town in Florida. Your father, if I’m right, was Lithuanian. Your mother was an English teacher and Francophile. You’re learning Spanish at 8, and you speak 7 languages.

[00:02:42] Sean Hopwood: That is correct.

[00:02:43] Georg Ell: And you named your company after your grandfather, who is an ex-Marine.

[00:02:47] Sean Hopwood: Yes. His name was Francis Joseph Day. Yeah. He was a Marine. He was a really hardworking person. He taught me so much. You know, I can get into all that if you’d like.

[00:02:57] Georg Ell: Yeah, do. Please. I think it’s just great to hear the back. Do you know what? People often say to me, like, when you’re not a CEO, you don’t have a lot of access to CEOs and you’re sort of, sales, right? Like, we guard our time. And yet one of the privileges of being a CEO is the chance to meet others. And so, I think actually just opening up a bit, like your story, would be awesome.

[00:03:17] Sean Hopwood: Oh, yes, I would love to. And I would actually love to speak to more CEOs myself. I’ve had a lot of people tell me, you know, “you need to make more friends with CEOs”. Because sometimes you think you’re crazy, like you’re so demanding on some things or you want something to be so perfect. And then people who don’t have their own company or don’t have those same goals, they don’t understand it. And you feel like, oh, am I crazy? But then you speak to the CEOs, and they have the same issues. They have the same problems that you have. And my grandfather, he wasn’t a CEO, but he was like an executive at Kodak, they own the picture company, the camera company. My whole family is from upstate New York, from Albany and Rochester. And so, my mom, my brother, my uncle, my grandfather, they’re all from there. But yes, on my father’s side, I’m Lithuanian. So, yeah, I’m like Lithuanian, and their side is like German and English and Scottish and stuff like that. So, yeah, it’s a little bit of a mix. But yeah, my grandfather, when I was little, he took me to a computer programming school. I’m more of, like, a creative person. I’m more of, you know, I like to play sports. I like to be outside. But he took me to, like, a computer programming school in Massachusetts when I was little. He took me to a space academy. He took me to learn how to, you know, go camping, all these different things I learned. So, he was professional. And so, yeah, I named my company after him. And it’s a really easy name to say too ‘Day’. So, I thought it would, you know, kill two birds with one stone. It has a lot of meaning for me. And plus, it’s simple, you know, and then you can use, you know, a lot of imagery around it, you know, the sun, the sun rays, daytime, you know, it’s something that gives people a good feeling. So, it worked out pretty well.

[00:05:07] Georg Ell: He sounds like someone that instilled a real sense of learning and curiosity, which probably goes really well with languages, right? And you learned all those languages at home?

[00:05:17] Sean Hopwood: Well, I believe in formal learning – learning formally. I did start – I mean, my grandfather actually only speaks English. My father, he speaks a few languages. But for me, for myself, I do believe in formal education. It makes a difference for me. I mean, I did start learning Spanish on my own. I started learning when I was 8 years old. I lived in a Hispanic neighborhood and, you know, there were a lot of people from Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico and stuff like that. I caught on, and I started learning there. But I mean, as soon as I got to middle school, which is in the United States around the 7th, 8th grade, I started actually taking formal classes. And I have a lot of these language books here. You know, I have this Chinese dictionary right now that I just read the dictionary instead of reading books, I read the dictionary. I have this Japanese book here. So, I believe in formally learning it. I don’t know. For me, I take classes with actual teachers. I don’t do things like Duolingo or anything like that. I mean, I have the app, but you know, I like to interact with people. I love people. So, you know, that’s the way I’ve learned. And so, I started learning, you know, English. I do speak 7 languages, but I speak a little bit of a lot more, you know, like, a little bit of Portuguese, a little bit of Hindi, a little bit of Turkish, a little bit of Korean, Japanese, but, I mean, nothing where I could be fluent. But with those 7 languages, I took formal classes. You know, I went to college. I took these classes in high school. I did postgraduate studies here in the University of Tampa for German. So, yeah, I believe in learning formally. I respect teachers a lot because my mom’s a teacher.

[00:07:01] Georg Ell: I’ve often heard in business, “It’s not what you do. It’s how you make people feel that they’ll remember.” And I think with that ability to even just say a few words in lots of languages, you can really change how people feel. And that’s kind of a beautiful thing. You founded the business in 2007. The timing, maybe, turned out to be—well, was it brutal with the financial crisis then occurring? Like, what did that first year teach you? And are there any memories of that that you carry forward to today?

[00:07:30] Sean Hopwood: It’s actually a really interesting lesson because, to think about it, it’s a lesson in ignorance. And maybe it’s good to be ignorant because I didn’t know, you know, and now I know a lot of things. You know, I was 27 when I started the company, and I wasn’t really watching the news. I didn’t own a house, so I didn’t know there was a housing crisis. I lived in an apartment with my friend. I didn’t even have a computer when I started the company. I used my friend’s computer to write the website, or I went to the computer lab at my university, and I just did it there. I never bought a computer until I had the company for, like, almost 2 years, and I got my first computer. It’s a really interesting lesson. Kind of, like, in hindsight, it teaches me something. Don’t pay attention, really, don’t pay attention to these things as much as other people do, you know. Focus on yourself. Focus on yourself. You know, my will is above everything else. And so, I didn’t know there was a financial crisis. I was just getting a lot of clients. I was going door-to-door, you know, and I was making the website, you know, optimizing it for search engines and everything like that. And it was just me. So, we were making a lot. And then as the website grew, you know, we did that. I never bought a house. My first house I actually bought like 7 years ago. And so, I never really thought about those things. And I’m sorry if I’m talking too much, but I was actually doing an MBA, Master’s in Business Administration. And just because I thought it was important. But all the people that were doing it with me owned their own homes. They were always talking about the, you know, financial crisis and stuff like that. And I really wasn’t paying attention. I would go play soccer. I would go work on my company. I’d go to the gym. So, I guess the lesson is focus.

[00:09:15] Georg Ell: There’s a few things there. I mean, I worked at Tesla for a little while, and we used to hire people from outside the automotive industry precisely because we wanted them not to come with, like, preconceived ideas. And I think naivety can be very powerful. I remember asking someone early on, “Is this how we do things around here?” And the reply was, “There is no how we do things around here. We’re literally inventing everything,” which is pretty empowering. But I also think we’re now of an age where we’ve been through a few crises. And it’s quite interesting seeing younger folks go through their first crisis, because I think when it’s your first crisis, you often sort of think the world’s going to end. And by the time you’ve been through 3 or 4, there’s a kind of stoicism, like, to your point, around Day – the sun will rise tomorrow. This too shall pass. That stoicism can be quite important, along with the soccer playing or whatever it is that you do as a person, to just take the stress out of your system as well.

[00:10:09] Sean Hopwood: And I’m sorry for calling it soccer. It doesn’t even sound normal coming from your accent.

[00:10:16] Georg Ell: That’s localization. I should have said football. So, you got through that almost because you didn’t know what you were doing, and therefore you didn’t let anything hold you back. But you also haven’t followed the obvious path, which is sometimes, you know, you scale as a founder, and then you take outside capital in one form or another. It might be debt, might be private equity or venture, and you use that outside capital to scale. So, was this more of the same? Was this like, I just didn’t know, so I didn’t ask? Or was it deliberate, like, staying independent to the plan? Is there a point of view on outside capital? Good or bad?

[00:10:47] Sean Hopwood: A little bit of ignorance, but I didn’t feel really that I needed it, and my point of view on outside capital is I couldn’t imagine just, like, giving away the decision-making. I mean, I just feel like if I do that, first of all, I have all these ideas. I have all these ideas for growth. And then, people are going to control the decisions I make? I don’t really want to do that. Plus, the way I started my company is I just did work, and then I saved the money up, and I used that bootstrapping and I used that money to grow the company, and it didn’t seem like anything that was really necessary. I mean, I saved the money up, and I was able to, you know, use other services, you know, stuff like Phrase or, you know, all the CAT tools that you use. I was just able to subscribe to those services and grow the company. And so, I just didn’t see any need to get outside capital. I do need to be a little bit more corporate-minded because I’m more of a language lover. And that’s been my goal for the past few years is to be more corporate-minded, more revenue- and money-oriented and profit-oriented. And we have been doing that, and it’s been paying a lot of dividends.

[00:11:53] Georg Ell: I’m curious about that. So, as a company grows from that startup in the proverbial garage or someone’s bedroom to its first office, I had a little bit of this experience myself. I haven’t founded a business, but when I was at Yammer, there were 80 people in San Francisco. Myself and a couple of others started the office in London, and we met in a pub. That was our first meeting then, in a co-working space where we rented desks by the hour, then by the day, then by the week. And then we got our first office, and we upgraded that one into the next office. And you kind of go from, like, 3 people to 10 to 15 to 25 to 80. We grew to 88 people in a year and a half. We had really rapid growth. And then I’ve worked in, like, other companies. And one thing I know is that everybody at every stage looks back with nostalgia to the stage before. And remembers it as better than it really was, and often as better than things are today. And I’m just curious, when you talk about that change of focus towards a more commercial mindset, one of the things I’ve had to talk a lot to my teams about is a commercial mindset is not a bad thing. It’s not a dirty word. It’s actually how society in our system, capitalism, measures the value that we create. And it’s a game. We’re playing it, and these are the rules of the game. And actually, if we play it well, we play with honesty, we play with good ethics, we produce high-quality work, then we get to win that game. So, don’t see it as bad. I’m just curious, have you ever seen that dynamic? You had to have that discussion with people at any point?

[00:13:21] Sean Hopwood: It’s actually kind of, like, a leadership style. I mean, you have to use words that, you know, you can say the same thing, like, you know, we’re revenue-oriented, and some people could say, like, “Oh, you care about money so much.” But when people see your intent and when you’ve been working with people so long, and you’re able to deliver the message to them in a way that is more, you know, palatable to them, in a way that they understand, it’s good. Like, I speak a lot of languages, but I consider my ability to speak in English or my ability to persuade people another language. I mean, you know, it’s all another language. So, yeah, I mean, and it’s also good to be honest and upfront. It makes sense to say, “Yeah, we are looking to make profit. We’re looking to make revenue.” And you’re clear with your employees, like, yes, and we also want to help you grow within the company. We’ll be giving you raises. The more profit we make, the more raises, the more bonuses we’ll give you, stuff like that. And so, we really want our team to be more sales-oriented and more profit-oriented. And that definitely means providing better service, providing better translations and interpreting and stuff like that. So, it’s a holistic thing. But yeah, I mean, you know, those people that grow up saying, “Oh, I don’t like rich people and all that.” I don’t want to really associate with those types of people. You know? Their mindset’s off, you know. Yeah, rich people can be great people. They can be very honest people, very philanthropic people, and you’re not bad because you have a lot of money. You’re not bad because you’re making good revenue. You know, there’s no correlation between the two.

[00:14:55] Georg Ell: Lots of wealthy people, some very wealthy people, and there’s the same normal distribution of beauty and ugliness, regardless, in my experience. It’s interesting. There are sort of some national characteristics around, you know, how people talk and think about wealth and success. It’s quite interesting to balance. But you’ve won awards. You’ve won awards. Best CEO for Diversity, Best CEO for Women in the Workplace, Company in the Top 5% of Culture amongst similarly-sized organizations, as it says here. What are some of the ways that you found to be really effective to be deliberate about culture rather than it happening by accident, and then to maintain it through the years, and the growth, and the ups and the downs?

[00:15:36] Sean Hopwood: I’m not sure I’m so deliberate about it. Number one, the nature of our industry, it’s going to be diverse because you have to have people who speak a lot of languages. But it’s also the nature of my life. You know, I just naturally gravitate towards people who are skilled, who are, you know, cosmopolitan, who are, you know, worldly, have a global mindset, and it just ends up being that way. You know, I hire women because, you know, these are the best, most qualified people. I hire these people from all around, you know, from every country because they’re the most qualified. And I guess I do have the ability to make it work because of the way I’ve lived my life. When I was in college, I actually spent every single day in the library, and all the people in the library that I spent time with, they were from, you know, every country. I had friends from, like, you know, Algeria, Pakistan, India, you know, Russia, all these different places. And we would just sit at the library, and we would talk. That’s how it was in high school, too. I just have this really deep desire to learn another language and learn people’s cultures. And when I make new friends, they hang out with me. They said, “Being with you feels like I’m traveling.” And so, you know, that has reflected in my company. You know, I just hire people who are, you know, quality, diverse people, women, anyone who I think is the best. And it just turns out really well. And people feel very inspired. They like to work with people, and they like to feel that they’re being appreciated for their qualities. And it’s worked out really well for us. And it’s something I want to continue doing, just, you know, hiring really good people. And I’m really happy to get the awards, too, you know, it’s really helpful.

[00:17:12] Georg Ell: I can’t remember who said it to me first, but it stuck with me. “You are who you hang out with and what you read.” And I found that quite profound. Like, when I’ve had times in my life where I’ve just been around really inspiring people, I feel like it’s raised me up. And seeking those people out is actually one of the best pieces of career advice that I would say. Like, if you think about taking your job, they will say to people,

‘You know, think about who you’re going to be working with as much as pay, title, all those other things. It just actually matters less.” Careers are long. 20-ish, no, 15-ish years into my career, someone I really respect said to me, “How long do you think you’re going to work for?” And I said, “Oh, you know, till I’m 65 or whatever.” And he said, “Okay, so you’re a third of the way through your career, not even halfway.” And it was such a realization for me. I was like, “Oh, okay, I don’t need to rush for this next thing. I just need to go where I’m learning the most.” We talked a lot about people and the importance of that. And it shines through when you talk. And if we think about who you hang out with and what you read, you talked about the library, the books on your shelf. You know, we’re learning actually something deep about you and your appreciation for humanity and culture and so on. An interesting, like, stepping-off point into the AI side of things. First of all, tell us a bit about where you’re at. Like, are you deep in it? Are you playing? Are you figuring it out? How would you rate yourself and orient the audience around, you know, your perspective? And then I think it’d be fascinating to talk about, like, where it’s going and the intersection of AI and humanity. And I’m sure AI is going to take us in some interesting places.

I’m really into technology. I’m deep into AI and deep into just NLP – natural linguistic programming, neuro- linguistic. I’m into all those things. And I’ve been into them for a while, maybe 10, 12 years. We’ve been studying this you know, I’ve been studying these things. I study it for myself, even for image creation. I used to work with a lot of things, like Hugging Face and all these different types of technology for image creation. I love technology. My whole house is hooked up with automations for the vacuum, for the lawnmower, sprinklers, it’s all automated. You know, when I walk out, it just all turns on, you know, the air conditioner changes, all that. I’m really into technology. But I do understand. I consider it just a tool. I consider it a tool for us to use, from what I’ve observed from our clients and from the things that people request. It’s not a huge part of what our clients want. But, you know, it depends on the sector. You know, if it’s some kind of software, or some kind of really repetitive text, you know, a lot of clients will really prefer that, but for a lot of things we get, they really want the human aspect. So, I think, you know, the human aspect is going to be there for a really long time. If, you know, technology advances to that level, there’s going to be a lot of other things that we need to do. Of course, there’s a lot of people who are into, you know, AI checking and, you know, quality checking of, you know, AI models and stuff. And that’s a job. Or, you know, of course, people managing all the data farms and all the servers. Those are a lot of things that people need to do. But AI is affecting every industry. Some things, you know, I don’t like. Whenever I’m trying to listen to a song, or I go on Spotify or YouTube, and then they keep trying to recommend some AI song to me. I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it sounds. And then, even when you see a document that was written with AI or sometimes a translation that was written with AI, it’s just obvious. And I don’t like the way it sounds. But, yeah, I am very adaptive to technology. Tampa is where I live, it’s the central command of the military of the United States. And I went to a conference. And there was a lot of stuff. The number one thing there was about drones, like, drones was huge. And also the technology and AI technology that goes into the drones. And there was also a lot of stuff around, you know, linguistics and translation. And so, yeah, we have made our own LLM at our company. This is because, you know, we’ve had a lot of clients asking for something like this, a language model and a translation model that can work, you know, with or without Internet, that can work with many languages, you know, all these different things. So, this is something that, you know, we have created, and it’s working already. And we do a lot of things. We do AI translation, AI interpreting, yeah, but it’s always an option. You know, I always look at what are the options? You know, if someone requests something, you know, we do it. If someone starts asking me, you know, anything, anything to do, you know, anything that’s a little bit within our industry, even outside of our industry. People start saying that they want to buy shoes from us. We’ll say, “Okay. Well, I must start making shoes for you.” You know, I’m an entrepreneur.

[00:22:03] Georg Ell: We are launching some new things here, and we have one salesperson who came to myself and some colleagues just the other day, and he’d basically gone to a customer realized they had a need and came back to us and said, “I want to sell this thing to this customer.” And it’s not a thing we currently do or sell. You know, actually, we were able to deliver it, which is pretty amazing. But having that entrepreneurial mindset, people don’t just look at what’s currently on the list of options, but, you know, pick none of the above. It’s going another way. That’s really precious.

[00:22:37] Sean Hopwood: The interesting thing is it’s in our minds. I mean, you’re a leader, you’re a CEO, you understand these things, but, like, getting everyone else on that page, like, you know, if you have an employee, and like some guy, you know, is Billy, whatever his name is. And you’re saying, Billy, you know, he calls you, and he says, “This client asked us, you know, if we sell shoes, and I said no.” You know, it’s hard to kind of say, “Hey. No, we want to make money. If the client asks for shoes, just let me know. We’ll figure out a way to make them, and we’ll give them.” You know, that’s just a weird example. But the point I’m making is like, we do these things, and you have to, like instill that entrepreneurial mindset into them. And, you know, the best thing to do is actually hire that from the beginning in the interview process. While you’re interviewing people, you have to hire entrepreneurial people, not just like try to force and push someone to be something they’re not. It’s possible, but it’s much easier to hire someone with that mindset.

[00:23:31] Georg Ell: Particularly, in this day and age where the pace of change is so rapid, there are people that are more wired to be comfortable with change and the people that are less wired for that. And I do believe people can change. We’re not all sort of set in stone at all, but there has to be a will, you know, they do have to want to change, obviously. Now, some of that again is on us as leaders to show them the why and show them what the journey could look like and what’s in it for them and so on, but it’s a two-way process, isn’t it? And the pace of change now is so fast. Like, one of the things I think is true, even—I mean, my company’s 240 people or thereabouts, so we’re not big, but we’re not small given how fast things move. Just making sure everyone’s aware of what’s going on is actually a challenge. It’s really critical. It’s one I think AI can help us with because, actually, the agents can crawl around everything that’s going on and bring things to our attention that we wouldn’t otherwise discover. But even that requires a change in the way that people work because they have to do more work in the open and less in, like, private channels that the agents can’t see. And there’s sort of lots of little cultural adjustments we’re making in real time.

[00:24:40] Sean Hopwood: I have Slack hooked up to my ChatGPT, and I ask it to summarize my Slack. And then you can actually ask it to answer everybody individually. And I’m like, wow, you can just answer everyone.

[00:24:50] Georg Ell: Tell me whether personal or at work, your, like, coolest recent AI experiences or things you’ve hooked up.

[00:24:59] Sean Hopwood: There was a client that we’ve been using for our Day Interpreting app. So, we do interpretation for hospitals, law firms, insurance companies, all that stuff. For some reason, most of our clients prefer the human interpretation, as most people know what you mean. Most people prefer the human interpretation, but there’s a few that actually want that AI interpretation. And we were already working on it. And so, the client said they wanted to kind of, like, they wanted to close out. They wanted to find, you know, an AI service to do this. Our development team—we have like 12 developers, and they’re amazing. They’re so smart. They hooked up the AI service. We tested it. I mean, it was for, like, you know, it was for an insurance company. They needed, like, all these conversations for clients and claims and arbitrations, examinations under oath and stuff like that. We hooked up the AI service for them. They canceled with us on a Friday, and we had the developers work on it the entire weekend. And then, Monday, we had it ready, and we contacted them like, “Oh yeah, we have AI service. It’s ready right here.” I was worried they wouldn’t email back. Then, like, 3 hours later, they emailed back, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, this looks pretty good.” And they came back to us as a client. So, we got them back. And that was like one of the greatest things. ‘Cause, like, it’s the perfect example of, like, adaptation, you know. It’s the perfect example of, you know, don’t just sit there and just lay the rest on your laurels and say, “Okay. Oh gosh, we just lost them.” You know, make an adjustment, find out what the client wants and give them what they want. And so, you know, and this is what I try to teach people. It’s never over. It’s never over. You always have to, you know, keep trying. You have to give the client what they want. If the client says they want an AI service, make it for them. You know, just don’t sit laid back and do nothing. So, yeah, that was something I was pretty excited about.

[00:26:47] Georg Ell: Actually impressive on lots of levels. You have a team there that’s prepared to push through the weekend, commit their time, drop whatever plans they had and hustle. They care about the customer. They care about you. They follow you. And then they deliver something of value immediately visible to the customer. And the customer trusts you enough to come straight back. It’s a cool story.

[00:27:07] Sean Hopwood: It’s why it’s so great to talk to a CEO. You get it. You give me that feedback that I want. You get it. It’s really nice. Someone else might say, “Oh, cool.” And just let it go. But you understand how much effort, how much social equity I have with my employees, that they would do that for me. You get it. So, thank you.

[00:27:28] Georg Ell: It’s the years that go into building up that kind of capital. And I think it’s pretty special, actually. I think there’s something also quite magical about being a founder and not just a CEO. And I think that’s one of the things. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Silicon Valley, the TV show.

[00:27:47] Sean Hopwood: I’ve seen clips, not the whole thing. I’m more of, like, a football watcher. I watch EPL.

[00:27:52] Georg Ell: Oh, fair enough. Fair enough. English Premier League.

[00:27:54] Sean Hopwood: Yes.

[00:27:56] Sean Hopwood: Oh, okay, there we go. When you said football, I thought NFL, but you know, EPL, all right.

[00:28:00] Sean Hopwood: Oh, I’m trying to localize you. You’re trying to localize me.

[00:28:03] Georg Ell: Yeah, we’re in a localization double mirror, doom loop. There’s this hilarious kind of episode in there where they bring in a professional CEO and he, like, totally screws it up, basically. And I thought this is so embarrassing because the whole series is just a send-up of everything out of Silicon Valley. And it is brilliant. It’s really funny. Like, no one comes out of it looking great. But I thought, “Shoot! That’s me. That’s my character they’ve put in there, and now he’s an idiot.”

[00:28:30] Sean Hopwood: Yeah, because you’re trying to understand, you’re trying to come into that situation. It’s hard. It’s hard to be a CEO, to walk into a company like that. You know, I couldn’t imagine. You know, I’ve had people on LinkedIn contact me to do that. And first of all, there’s no way I could do it. I mean, I’m running this company, but, like, I don’t know. Like, if someone asked me to come into, like, an insurance company, I don’t know how I would do that. So, I commend you for that for sure.

[00:28:51] Georg Ell: AI—a powerful tool, clearly a new revenue line as well, and probably more as-yet unforeseen revenue lines. Is there anything about it that you don’t like, or that kind of scares you? Are we losing a human touch somewhere along the line? Or are we amplifying ourselves? Or both, and it depends?

[00:29:14] Sean Hopwood: Well, you know, I try not to be too doom and gloom. But I mean, I could give you an example. But you know, I don’t like the fact that, you know, there’s a lot of things, of course, the music. I don’t like the AI music. I don’t like it. There are some singers I like. You know, I love this singer in the United States called Morgan Wallen. You know, I don’t know if any, but I like him. I like a lot of music. But they try to make a lot of songs, you know, copying his voice and everything. And the whole idea that your persona could actually be copied and repeated, you know, you could watch this video, and you could, like, copy me. You could copy my face. You could train a model on the way I talk, the way I act, and I could be copied, you know. I’m not sure how well, but that’s the thing that I don’t like, you know, and a lot of people do. They avoid that. I mean, whenever I do job interviews with people now, sometimes they don’t want to be on video because they know their video could be captured. So, I mean, yeah, the whole idea that, you know, we as humans, we’d like to consider ourselves very unique and very special. And I definitely believe we are, but just the idea that humans can be copied is one of the things that I really don’t like, not just our look and our face, but like our persona, the way we would email someone, the way we would talk on the phone, those things can be copied a little bit. And then also, with the computer chips that will go in people’s brains, like, what are they going to do? Are they going to be able to, you know, change your personality? Because they say they can cure, you know, some mental diseases, some depression, things that could actually cure paralysis, which are all good things, but also, is it going to, you know, you’re going to have the whole internet in your head? And if so, you know, are we just all going to be mirrors talking to each other with the whole internet in our heads without any uniqueness? That’s really, you know, philosophical, but that’s the thing I don’t like.

[00:31:08] Georg Ell: I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid. I still do. And in a funny way, I think it has been helpful now because so much of what I read about as a kid and still do is now seeming increasingly less like science fiction and more plausible. So, you talk about chips in people’s heads. I mean, 5 years ago, that would have seemed outlandish, but actually it’s happening today, right? And, like, last week blew my mind. Like, I think it was on a Monday, we had Meta release Muse. We had Google DeepMind release AlphaGenome. And we had OpenAI and some other mathematicians all sort of arguing about which of them solved the Navier-Stokes equation first. But what struck me about the OpenAI thing was they had this model, apparently next-generation, not yet released beyond Astra, with a swarm of 10,000 agents working together for 88 hours to solve it. And all I could think about was that, you know, it was probably 100 agents a year ago, 10,000 this year. It might be a million or 10 million next year of the next models. And the implication is hard to wrap your mind around. And I am optimistic in the sense that I think there’s a sort of Jevons Paradox thing here, which is that as it gets cheaper to solve problems that were too expensive to solve before, and now you can, so you do. And then more work gets created, and, like, AI is a general accelerant for the economy at large, and more jobs get created because of that, and more companies get created because of that. But I think what’s hard is you can believe that in general, but as to the specifics, like what’s it really going to look like? And it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say. But I do think we’re all going to have robots in our homes in the next 3 to 5 years.

[00:32:52] Sean Hopwood: I have a robot vacuum, and I’m okay with this.

[00:32:55] Georg Ell: Which one do you have? The Matic?

[00:32:56] Sean Hopwood: Tuya. Tuya is a Chinese one. I had the Roomba, but I’d change it. But yeah, I mean, we just got to keep moving forward, I think. I mean, moving forward. And for me, specifically, after work, I like to spend as much time in nature as I can. I live in a beautiful place where I can be at the beach in like 20 minutes or 15 minutes, I can be in the beach. I can be in, like, a natural spring in like 30 minutes. So, yeah, I like to go snorkeling and all that type of stuff. And I think, you know, I don’t know if we were meant to be just this inundated with technology. So, I like to spend as much time in nature as I can.

[00:33:34] Georg Ell: I am with you. You’ve got to touch grass sometimes.

[00:33:37] Sean Hopwood: You’ve got beautiful trees in your background.

[00:33:40] Georg Ell: Yeah, thank you. No, it’s important. So, maybe just a last question for you, Sean, about Day, but if you were starting it all over again, is there anything you’d do differently?

[00:33:52] Sean Hopwood: Yeah. For sure. Definitely. I think everyone would love to have a time machine. I would adopt a lot of things quicker. You know, we’re like a middle-sized company. I think if we had adopted CAT tools earlier, you know, we would be larger. I actually recently hired an executive from a large bank in the United States that has a lot of experience with corporate stuff, which I don’t. And she has helped us so much. So, I would have done that sooner, you know, hired more people who worked in corporate instead of just trying to continue to bootstrap everything myself and do that, you know, because it’s hard to do by myself. So, I would have adapted to these tools earlier. I would have hired more, you know, corporate-minded people instead of just language lovers. And I think that would have made a big difference. But see, that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m adopting a lot of AI now, and I did that. So, I’m glad I’m doing it now because 10 years from now, I will be glad I did this. So, yeah, that’s definitely, I mean, I will never say I have no regrets, and I did everything perfectly. No, there’s a lot I would have changed.

[00:34:51] Georg Ell:  Across leaders I’ve spoken to, and even just people in general, I think more often than not, people say, I wish I’d done X sooner rather than I wish I’d done X later. It’s probably 9 to 1, the ratio of whatever X is. Hire someone, fire someone, change the strategy, you know, pick up the phone, whatever it was, I wish I’d done it sooner. It’s quite good life advice and business advice that I think, yeah, thank you. Great note for us to wrap on as well.

[00:35:23] Sean Hopwood: Definitely. I’ve really enjoyed this.

[00:35:25] Georg Ell: Yeah, likewise, Sean. Thank you. I’ve enjoyed this one.

[00:35:28] Sean Hopwood: I enjoyed it very much too. Thank you so much.

[00:35:30] Georg Ell: That’s it for this CEO edition of In Other Words. I’m Georg Ell, CEO of Phrase, and I want to thank Sean Hopwood for joining me today. If this conversation made you think about how your business communicates across markets and languages, we’d love to continue the discussion. Head to phrase.com to find out more. For more CEO-to-CEO conversations on leadership, growth, and what it takes to scale globally, subscribe to In Other Words on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for joining. See you next time.