[00:00:28] Jay: everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by the co-founders of Pangea ai. We've got Keilian Knudsen and Prags Mugunthan. Did I do it boys? Did I get it right?

[00:00:40] Prags: You almost did it. You

got, but I dunno about.

[00:00:44] Keilian: Yeah,

Knudsen 

is a tough scanner name, Knudsen. 

[00:00:47] Jay: do the phonetics properly.

screwed myself. Anyway. Hello gentlemen. Very nice to meet you. Love your platform. Very cool. A lot to talk about. let's start here. Keilian, since I messed your name up, you can go first. where are you from? Where'd you grow up? And did that kind of have any impact on you being an entrepreneur in life?

[00:01:02] Keilian: grew up, born and raised in Switzerland. born in Geneva, grew up in the mountains. I'm a mountain boy. I've been skiing my whole life till I was 18. American mother. Norwegian father. and, I mean, I think the fact that I had this kind of multicultural upbringing went to international school, kind of gave me a worldview of, you know, all the possibilities out there.

got to travel a bunch, and then went to university in St. Andrew's in Scotland, where I met Prags's and we were roommates for. three years outta four. but, yeah, I think Switzerland and kind of being, surrounded by quite a number of entrepreneurs from Norway, but also, California, kind of gave me that, entrepreneurial bug, I would say that, kind of wanted, I wanted more and I didn't want to necessarily sit in an office and kind of do, do office work.

So I always wanted to build companies from the get go.

[00:01:58] Jay: Love that. How about you, buddy? Where'd you grow up? And,let's end in the same place with, St. Andrew's, I guess.

[00:02:04] Prags: Yeah, we met at St. Andrews, but, my, story is a little bit different. I was born in Sri Lanka, moved to Norway when I was three. Grew up,you know, up in Oslo till I was 19. And I left to St. Andrews where, you know, we, where Keilian and I met was there for four years. Then we moved out to Berlin. After a couple years, you know, working, we, that's where we, you know, built the company and now I reside in Dubai. And I think for myself, obviously the way I grew up impacted, you know, my view on entrepreneurship, especially the fact that, you know, in many ways, you know, I won the lottery to come to Norway.

So, you know, from, nor from Sri Lanka, so and so, I got all the opportunities. That I could basically have in order to become an entrepreneur, because Norway is a pretty, steady state in that way, that it gives you the opportunity from education to like, you know, support to go to the best schools and take advantage of that system. So I think that alongside, you know, meeting Keilian, you know, we had, you know, we were more, entrepreneurial than academic to put it that way.

[00:03:08] Jay: at what point did you guys realize or start to realize that, you know, number one, you wanted to work together, but that you wanted to create a business together and, Prags, but what was that process?

[00:03:21] Prags: So I guess when we met, we, you know, from the get go, we started, you know, Brainstorming ideas, you know, talking about like, you know, Keilian had a gap year. I had a gap year. So we interchange ideas on how the experiences that we had, you know, the way he saw the world, the way I saw it, and, you know, how we can potentially, you know, do something together. And then Keilian was going to an internship, in Norway and, you know, he basically spoke to the company and, you know, allowed me to tag along as well. And that is basically where we, you know, start first started working together. And that, you know, internship was also pivotal in us trying our first, venture, and which we brought back to Scotland.

And, you know, it was, I mean, Keilian can tell the story. He knows the business the best, but yeah, like, yeah, I leave the floor to him.

[00:04:06] Jay: Let's hear the, first business story. That's typically, a good place to start. What did you guys try first and what was the experience like?

[00:04:12] Keilian: Well, I think the first business was quite a strange one. I mean, an offshore, kind of sandblasting company that basically does maintenance of, steel assets, in a sustainable fashion. was very hardware intensive. And so, you know, we were basically in the workshop with the engineers figuring out this, this machinery. it was. Basically supposed to be focused on, steel assets, but we wanted to try to see if we could actually use it across, other, types of surfaces, rocks, and so on. So we ended up, building a whole business plan around how we were going to take this equipment and start cleaning buildings, which is very niche, in Scotland.

and we're transporting different rocks, different materials, in these giant machines, for a small kind of. Industrial company out of Norway. So, and that failed, dramatically. we realized that we had no idea what we were doing, but we were good salespeople. So a lot of people wanted to, you know, actually speak to us about it.

But we realized that the actual technology itself was way too abrasive for, the type of work we were, trying to do with buildings. So we had to shut that down. And then. We decided that, we had another opportunity, which was actually the kind of the building block for us to kind of go into more digital and kind of the tech world. and that was, we felt there was a great opportunity to, store memories. and stories from the elderly generation, that seemed to just be kind of passing away, but not leaving anything behind for future generations. So we wanted to capture those stories and memories. and I came from, I come from a family of storytellers. and that was kind of the foundation for us to say, why don't we build a business, sort of a digital memory bank, to capture these stories and memories of kind of all of these older people. and that's when we had to start to look for engineers because we were non-technical. Two business guys, had a bunch of ideas.

You know, we could sell stuff, get people excited, get investors, on board. but we had no idea how to actually build a digital product. and that's where we kind of, fell into, very deep and gloomy rabbit hole, that led us down, this trap, realizing that it was very hard to hire. Software engineers. And after that and losing the money and the time and the opportunity, we said, shit, it's really hard to hire, engineering talent. and that's, that was basically the kind of foundational elements of what, why we decided to build Digital Knights, to solve that own our own problem, that we had, in those early days in college.

[00:06:48] Jay: Beautiful digital. Was that the name of the company at the time?

[00:06:52] Prags: Yeah,

that's how we started.

[00:06:54] Jay: Digital Knight, like KNI like, like the or. Okay. Very cool. All right. And how did that evolve into Pangea, either of you guys?

[00:07:04] Prags: think, so for us, you know, going through that experience ourself, we just. Realize that, you know, over time that this was not a

unique experience to us, right? It's like every company, small, medium, large, has the same issue, right? It's really hard to hire the right dev team. It's a noisy market.

It's a saturated market. So we thought, hey, how, why don't we make sense of it? Right? And, and we built that this due diligence that basically analyzes and vets, the hard skills of an agency, but at the same time, the softer skills. Of a, an agency partner, which is the, their culture, you know, their recruitment stats, you know, what makes them special in their local market in order to recruit and retain talent.

Right? Once we, had this, due diligence basically built, we were able to really screen and benchmark dev agencies, and we started it as a service business. Right, and that was called Digital Nights, which then after four years of, you know, learning, you know, the ropes as a service, we felt comfortable enough.

And also we, you know, we bootstrapped the business, so we saved the money to build the platform.

[00:08:11] Jay: how did you guys survive as kind of serial entrepreneurs that are just trying thing, you know, one thing after another, right? Because I would assume a lot of people would try one of these things. They would fail and they'd go, ah, I guess. You know, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship's, not for me.

I'm gonna go work for somebody else. Number one, just how did you financially survive? And then just number two, how did you guys, how and why did you guys stick together as like the, you know, as the solution here, right? Because you could easily see like, well that partnership didn't work, where I'm gonna go try doing something by myself or go trying to work somewhere.

Like, you know, number one, how did you stay afloat? And then number two, how did you guys stay together over time 

[00:08:49] Keilian: I think,After we started, or we failed with that one company for, kind of the digital, memory bank, we both realized that we had burnt a lot of our savings, and then had to go and actually get jobs. so PRAs went back to Norway, worked in a bank. I went and worked for a clean tech company.

for a couple years, between Switzerland and North Carolina. and then, PRAs was, you know, fed up with the kind of the banking world, the corporate world. and we had kind of looked at a lot of different places, where, you know. PRAs could kind of kick off and try to start something new again.

and we had a friend living in Berlin who was like, you know, this is the place to be in terms of startups. It was cheap. it was a good place to kind of get something going. and I was getting, you know, kind of fed up with the clean tech business that I was in. So I basically said I'm out.

that was 2015 and we regrouped in Berlin in 2016, April. and Prags at the time was. You know, pretty much broke. I had some savings, left, that I basically scooped together and I was like, you know, basically let's just put this all on red and see if we figure it out. And so that was kind of what kind of led us the, that starting point for that first. Six to seven months. And I think we burnt through all of those savings in those first six to seven months. And then we basically, you know, had the, kind of the shortest timeframe of building digital nights and basically having to throw in the towel. And then we were like, oh shit. And then we were in debt, had to go and get some, you know, family and friends, loans to just get out of our situation.

And then we were like, either we're going to say. That was a big disaster once again, or we're actually going to, you know, get it together and figure out how to make money. And then at that point we started, really becoming creative with how we were going to monetize and start selling services.

So that's kind of how we got through. But it wasn't an easy one. for

sure. 

[00:10:42] Jay: Yeah, go.

[00:10:44] Prags: Yeah, no, I think, you know, I think the creativity, you know, kicks in quite heavily when you know when it is that dark right? And, you know, you know, you are liable to pay, you know, people's salary so they can go home for Christmas. And it was Christmas time and, you know, we had a really like, you know, lackluster Christmas party and I think, you know, at that point we had to get creative.

And one of the things that we saw back then is that. You know, the demand side was obviously harder to generate demand, but on the supply side, you know, everyone resonated with what we were trying to do from the agency's perspective, right? And they were like, you know, we will jump on board. And I used to have, you know, 20, 30 calls, meetings per week with. And what we, thought is that how can we incorporate, you know, as part of our vetting process, you know, a fee that people can, you know, pay to join Pangea, because then we will also know that they're serious about the due diligence. They're not just getting listed on the platform. And that's basically the, you know, how we, you know, the payment for the suppliers came into the, came into play and it became such an integral part of our business. Because, you know, now it's just like, you know, it's part of our filtering because if you don't understand our subscription, then most of the time you've never done sales and marketing before. So it really helped us also, you know, pinpoint and select the right agencies from the get-go.

[00:12:10] Jay: Yeah. No, I love the. Of kind of providing some context and color to your journey there, because obviously, you know, social media and just in general, everybody likes to kind of hear the success stories and like, oh, we're, we made it and like, we did this stuff. But it's like, okay, but you guys also had to like scrimp and save and borrow from friends and family and like, it wasn't just this easy track to like where you guys are today.

So I'm glad we, we pulled some of that stuff out. who was the first customer at Pania? How did you guys get started? So you had this idea, you're like, you know, we had this shitty time with our dev, you know, trying to find dev agencies. You spun up your own services. talk about like kind of the spin above Pangea and like getting that first customer, you know, you don't have to name by name, but like, who was it and like, how did that happen?

[00:12:49] Prags: Sure. I think, You know, the first customer also defined, you know how Keilian and I, you know, got our responsibilities in the company, right? So, like one of our, friends that were building a neobank at the time, one of the most successful Neobanks now in Europe, he basically said, Hey, we are working with this great team out in Romania. If you're thinking about, you know, pursuing this path, you know, it's kind of true and tested because we worked with them. So I sent a cold email to the founder, met up for a coffee, had no idea what he was saying in the first meeting, but I said, you know, this is what we wanna do and we may have a client for you. And then, you know, I rang up Kay, who was back, He was in the US at the time and said, Hey, we have one partner, like an agency partner that you know is, you know, cool with our commercials and willing to give this a shot. And then Keilian said, you know, that's fine. He's gonna try and get a client. And then he basically went to Switzerland, visited a coworking place, got introduced to these two young kids that basically want to build a 3D. Gardening mapping and a tools platform. And that was, that was the first customer. And you know, we did them and then we matched them. And that was, yeah, that was, basically a month between each other. And then we were like, okay, we have a first POC. Right? And it was a 70 k project, right? They ran for like five months and, you know, MVP was out, they won a couple of competitions.

So we saw, hey, this is something that we can do.

[00:14:13] Jay: well, who's the customer today? and, you know, how has it changed since that first 3D gardening, platform, which sounds very interesting, but sounds like hilariously exactly what, you know, some young founders that like, have no idea what, you know, monetizing application means. but just in curious, just curious, like what, you know, you do all this stuff, you make all these pivots along the way.

Where are you guys today for who you're targeting as your customer? And just talk about how that kind of evolved from, your first customer.

[00:14:38] Keilian: I think that first customer, very early stage kind of, you know, I would say pre-seed, at best. so that was kind of the foundation and you know, it was a lot of fake it till you make it. It's, you know, two guys, two business guys that say, you know, they're gonna. Vet some agencies on the one side and tell them who's good and who's not.

And then to tell clients like, oh, we have this fantastic vetted network of agencies. And basically it was a lot of bullshit, you know, from the get go. but then, you know, we built up progressively. what we did then was like we cast the net really wide, and we thought, oh, we're gonna do enterprise, or we're gonna do mid-market and we're gonna do scale ups and startups and we're gonna do it all.

which was very painful. and I would say, not the way to go because,we really kind of spent a lot of time and when we kind of went up the enterprise ladder being so small, we were just dragged along by these large German enterprise, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bond, Thais, and cro. All of these that, you know, they could just have meeting after meeting, and you were getting nowhere.

and for them it didn't matter, but for us it was just. You know, killing our business, killing our time, and the return on investment wasn't there. and I think where we are today, I would say that. We still very much kind of help the startup community. I would say probably 65 to 70% of our business are startups and scale ups more weighted towards the kind of the scale ups.

So seed series A plus. and then I would say kind of. the mid-market segment,is another one. So these companies that are anywhere between, you know, 500 to, to a couple thousand is where we kind of, position ourselves. So that makes up the remainder of the, kind of the 30%. but yeah,we really like the kind of the startup scale up community because it's, you know, it's who we are as kind of entrepreneurs and we kind of wanna help. Help others out there and business owners to, you know, find the best talent for the various kind of projects, and engagements that they're looking for. So we do both project based work and team augmentation. So adding bandwidth to already existing teams, but remotely, basically,

[00:16:43] Jay: Got it. Yeah, I think, I think when you're a two-sided marketplace, you almost kind of have to fake it till you make it a little bit, because you have to source the people and then the client, and you're like, you just, lightning has to strike twice for that to be the exact same time with the exact right fit and like, so there's always, and yeah, I think fake it till you make, it's a little bit of a dirty term at, you know, at this point.

It's like, it almost seems disingenuous, but I mean, you kind of have to kickstart a marketplace like that with some sort of, you know. Creative descriptions of who you have and who's available and how you're working with people and you're not gonna be dishonest, but like, you know, maybe you have conversations with a company that might be a partner.

Maybe they're not fully locked in as a partner yet, but you've had the conversations and you could at least. Say with some honesty, that, you know, that we have a good network of engineers that you can go talk to, right? So I like the fact that you guys did that, but in a way that was like, you know, within the bounds of being honest, you know, you're working towards, you know, kind of creating a network of companies and as a good way to kickstart it.

if you guys had to start over again tomorrow, same agency, same business, same customers, et cetera, what would be step one.

[00:17:53] Prags: I think,

[00:17:53] Keilian: yeah, you can go first.

[00:17:55] Prags: no, go ahead.

[00:17:57] Keilian: I mean, I think for me, one of the things that I think we really, we are good at sales. You know, we went out and kind of did a lot of manual meetings, you know, going to different events, you know, speaking with people, traveling to different places. That's all good. You know, the biz stuff. Stuff that you need to do. And I think sales is absolutely one of the most important things that you need to kind of focus on when starting a business. So I think from that perspective, we did as good as we can. We enter into a, to a one of the largest tech hubs, you have no, no contacts, you know, no one in the tech space.

So you gotta go out there and actually build relationships. So it was a tall order and a very. Steep mountain to climb. But I think one of the things we discounted massively from the get go, which I wish we would've kind of done, straight off the bat, is one, work more on personal branding, for ourselves as founders and really kind of do a lot more talking events.

Do a lot more kind of webinars, podcasts, you know, position ourselves as kind of, industry leaders. Maybe not straight off the bat, but like, you know, definitely like 12, 24 months in. I think we should have kind of started to be more visible. I, we were very much the dark nights. I mean, we were digital nights, but I would say we were the Dark Knight 'cause we were just not around. and I think marketing, right? I mean, understanding and kind of getting someone in on that kind of marketing, SEO, ads and really kind of investing into that kind of marketing engine, from the start. I mean, ads was not really something we could afford. but SEO and really kind. Getting someone on board with us that understood marketing.

We went for way too long, without really investing into marketing, which at the end of the day is kind of that scalable go to market channel to acquire new leads. and so we did a lot of the biz dev stuff, I think. Pretty well, but the marketing stuff I think was just kind of ignored because we didn't understand it was in our thing.

So we just ignored, ignored, ignored. and that didn't help us, at all. and I think just another point maybe is I think we. We hired a ton of bad people over the years. I mean, it was,it's absolutely embarrassing being in the talent space and being as bad as we were to hire our own, people. and I think we kept talking about the higher, slow fire fast, but we didn't really stick to that rule. And I think that would've been, good to have kind of set a structure, a DNA of profile of people we needed, not hire a bunch of people that we didn't need, but we thought we needed. So nice to haves, but really focus on the must-haves. and so I think we, you know, starting again. Really focusing on kind of that hiring plan and how to bring on the right people when you need them, and then fire fast. When you start to see those, those red flags,would've helped a lot for sure. I.

[00:20:47] Jay: Love that. Whats.

[00:20:50] Prags: I think, on our side there was a lot of chaos and a lot of hustle. Like we, I mean, we were young, we were 26, 25, you know, starting out. So we had a lot of energy to hustle. So it was, but it was no, system to it. There was no processes. So like a lot of the issues that we kind of started having, you know, you have technical blo bloat, right?

Like, you know, when you're building a product, but similarly in a company, you have bloating in terms of, you know, people you have. And we were, you know, at one point 45 people, because Keilian and I had no processes, you know, with the business. Were like, you know. Pricing in numbers. We, you know, we hired people to solve the problem, right? And I think now, you know, if we are to build any business, right, like it's like we will probably be ve a lot more process driven from the get go, right? Like, you know, so that there are processes in place because that's what ended up happening is that after, you know, hustling, and you know, doing a lot of stuff and hiring a lot of people, we spent three, three years. like building processes in the company, which prepared us to become a fully remote company right. As well, you know, and really take advantage of the COVID, you know, pump that basically came,

you know, our way, but then we were prepared, right? We would never have been prepared if we would've just run it as we did, you know, in the early days, right?

Not taking on the demand, but we were able to take on, you know, ample demand as a six man team back in 20 21, 20 22, because our processes were just flawless. And that is something I think, you know, but it took us three years to build it. You know, as opposed to, you know, having done that from the get go. So I think that's one of the things that I will always advise founders is like, it is great, you know, you have to do the best step part, but you know, to fully, you know, disregard any processes, you know, will, you know, will lead to a lot of bloat in the company that you need to fix eventually.

[00:22:45] Jay: Gimme, a good example of processes that you know, are you talking like, establish them? And then document them and kind of make them, you know, kind of a reproducible engine. Like gimme one of your processes that you think you didn't have, that you guys built in that three years that you know is still carrying you guys today.

[00:23:06] Prags: for example, in the early days, right, when we had actually a client on the hook, right? It was big commotion in the company, right? We had, you know, Ian with the, you know, with one of our sales guys on the call taking notes, right? Like manually. Then, you know, basically taking those notes, packing that over to the agency team that then, you know, went manually to the agencies and shared these briefs, you know, you know, with no automation.

So you had to write the email or pick up the phone and call them. So it was very much like, you know, brokerage house,

very much service orientated. Right? And at that capacity we could maybe service, four briefs. Per week. Right. And we were a lot of people right at that time. So, you know, what we did is that we automated that whole process where it takes basically the client, you know, two, three minutes to submit a brief.

And for us to process the brief, it takes maximum 15 minutes with like additional notes and to get feedback from the agencies and match them. Like our input there is 15 minutes and that should be. The input because we have all the data from the onboarding, from the due diligence, it shouldn't take much.

But back in the day, that was one of the things that really, you know, capped our growth. Right. A lot of commotion. A lot of hustle to, you know, get these two sides to meet

[00:24:26] Jay: I love that. I love that you tied capping growth too. Something as boring as documenting processes, right? I mean it's like, it's not the exciting stuff. It's not the sexy stuff. The fun stuff is the biz dev and landing sales and doing whatever. But I love that. I mean, 'cause everybody's chasing this like growth thing, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.

And like sometimes you don't even realize the things that are kind of preventing that, which is sometimes just having your. Foundational process is documented and understood by everybody and, you know, you're continually improving them and things like that, so, absolutely love that. all right, I kind to talk to you guys all day, and I'm sure I will.

We're gonna be friends after this. I have a feeling. let's end with one question. Same question for both of you guys. Take it one at a time. we can start with Keilian. what would you do, if you know you wouldn't be able to fail? So if you could do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:25:17] Keilian: That's, a very interesting question. I'll let Prags go first.

[00:25:23] Jay: Oh, there you go. See, nor people don't normally have the option to just defer. so, but I'm glad you have two of you. So, Prags, I hope you have a good answer.

[00:25:31] Prags: I think, you know, in this day and age, if we couldn't,fail, I mean, regardless, I think, you know, we are so used to failing that we would do it anyhow, but if we couldn't, you know, we'd probably do. Something in the intersection between blockchain and ai, that

will probably be where we will be at.

And we will have a venture if that's, you know, real world tokenization, you know, and in use AI to, you know, ex accelerate that growth. That's probably worth some, you know, worth, you know, exploring.

[00:25:57] Jay: Love it. Keilian, I'm gonna change yours, Keilian, make it maybe harder or easier for you. Non-business related. Non-business related. If you could do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:26:12] Keilian: I think,I would absolutely love because I know that it's, it's something that's really hard to crack and a lot of people just can't get there. But, I've started doing, you know, meditation, but it's a really tough thing to, to crack and I keep failing at it, and it just doesn't work.

But I'm starting to see the, The glimmers of what it can do and how it can kind of set me up for success. So, I would absolutely love to kind of, master meditation if I could. if I could do that right and, you know, take it all away,

[00:26:44] Jay: You can, you will. I have faith in you. I'm a big meditator. and I believe, very much. It's same thing, it's frustrating at first. It's like super frustrating. You get angry and you're like, this, why isn't this working? but eventually you kind of have like. A breakthrough. And it's awesome. all right, well, you guys are great.

I love the story, love the platform. like I said, I think we'll, probably continue our talks long after this podcast, hopefully, and stay friends. But, if people want to find more about Pangea, how do they do that? And if they wanna reach out to you guys individually,what's the best channel to do that?

[00:27:12] Prags: So they can find us on, obviously on pangea.ai. if they wanna, reach out to Keilian and I, we are best found on LinkedIn, so you can just, you know, search up our names and DM us and, you know, we, we can jump on a call. Our calendars are all also on LinkedIn and you can book a call anytime.

[00:27:29] Jay: Beautiful. All right guys. Well, hey, have a good rest of your week. If you,I'll send people your way. You got something else, pgs, are you good?

[00:27:36] Prags: No, all is good.

[00:27:37] Jay: All right. All right. Thank you guys. Have a good rest of your 

[00:27:39] Keilian: Thanks a lot, man. 

[00:27:40] Jay: appreciate you being on guys. See you. 

[00:27:42] Prags: Super. Bye. 

[00:27:42] Keilian: Take care. Thanks.

a lot. 

[00:27:43] Jay: See you guys. 

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