This Founder Killed a Working Product to Build a $7.2M Startup

Uh, how did we get here? You guys were just weren't ready. We didn't have our together, to be honest. Can you tell everyone what General Magic is?

An AI agent that's in your iMessage. You're a technical founder who didn't grow up in insurance. Why are you the right person to crack this industry? Hey guys.

What the industry should look like from our perspective. What we're building is quite differentiated and can't just be disrupted by some major AI lab. So, like the way that Google did in the early days. What made you trust us early?

Yeah, because of Composur. Like it really doesn't take that long. Walk me through like the actual moment when you decided to niche down to insurance. It's such an old industry and it's ripe for innovation.

What did you see in those 7 hours that felt like he was the one? 7 hours later we started shipping the our V1 to the rest of the office. There's some stuff that like I can't really talk about yet. Not yet.

Someone just came from XAI. There's an Olympic squash player. You and Jay went to McGill and UFC. If you can match the intelligence, you can Right now, I'm here in Toronto, Ontario at the General Magic HQ with CEO and co-founder Anthony.

This is my second time at the office and I love it so much. It's so cozy. Thank you. And this is the whole team.

They're locked in. Do you guys want to wave? And say hi. Hey guys.

I'm especially excited for this conversation, Anthony, because with this interview I actually known you prior. Yeah. And it's a very interesting story of how we met. Do you want to fill everyone in?

Uh, yeah. We met at uh Toronto's homecoming event for Toronto Tech Week. This was like 6 8 months ago. Yeah, it was like last summer.

And I remember I was sitting down and I looked to my left and I was like "You're that Shop app girl, right? " So, you know, that's kind of how we met initially. And then crazy, too? You're You're the first person to come up to me for the Shop app video.

Like no one has ever came up to me ever. No stranger has ever recognized me. So, I was like I felt so good. " Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it was uh I mean it went pretty viral. And I didn't know about you were a founder then. I didn't even have the chance to like ask you any questions, but then later on, I think once I started at Shopify, I went to this speed run event that you your company Yep. General Magic hosted and I was interviewing a bunch of founders and I interviewed you, too.

And that That's when I realized like everything clicked. " Yeah, I didn't know I realized that before. And so, I think it's really cool that things are coming full circle. Now Now I'm working at Composur and I find out that you guys are Composur users.

Super exciting. So, just to kind of get the ball rolling, can you tell everyone what General Magic is for anyone who doesn't know? Yeah, so General Magic uh we essentially build text message AI agents to help uh insurance brokers with servicing and intake. So, yeah.

That looks like essentially an AI agent that's in your iMessage or WhatsApp or Telegram. It kind of It helps you go through servicing requests. Helps you get a good idea of what the hell's actually happening with your insurance um in a way that, you know, doesn't take you 30 to 45 minutes and you have to call someone, right? What are the biggest misconceptions with what you're building, you think, if any?

So, some people uh still recognize us as Open Sesame. So, the our previous incarnation. Um and they still think that we do like AI hallucination detection. And so, yeah.

We have We haven't done hallucination detection in ages. Some people still know us as that. So, yeah. Wow.

Okay. Now, let's go sit down and dive even deeper. Let's do it. Let's go.

Okay, Anthony. So, you started building robots at 7, hackathons in high school, electronic health records software in university. At what point did building stop being a hobby and start feeling like the only thing you wanted to do? I think part of me just like always liked to build stuff, but I never really understood that like it could be a career path until like I was probably just in in high school.

Um I don't know. I was kind of raised on this whole like Dragon's Den, Shark Tank, like Discovery Channel, How It's Made type of um TV. And so, yeah. " Um But coming from Montreal where there aren't that many recognizable entrepreneurs, it was kind of like still to be decided whether or not it was a viable path for me.

And you studied at McGill, right? Yep. Not in Not in entrepreneurship. What did you study?

Uh yes, I I studied uh software engineering at McGill. Uh and then did a minor in entrepreneurship. Um But yeah, I I would say that a lot of what you learn in class is very different from what you learn in actually doing it. Your very first post on X described your product as the insurance policy for your AI.

And now you're literally building for the insurance industry. Was that like a coincidence or was insurance always somewhere in the back of your mind? To be honest, it's purely a coincidence. But both Jay and I were well acquainted with the whole like very legacy type of industries.

You know, I came from a uh a space in healthcare and he was in education. And so, you know, both those spaces are aren't the most um tech-forward industries um in general. And so, insurance was kind of always there as an option, but we only really took it seriously like maybe a couple months ago. Yeah.

Your first company was selling electronic health records software into the Quebec healthcare system competing against Epic Systems while finishing your degree. What did that teach you about selling to people who don't really want to buy? Cuz you mentioned you made them a lot of mistakes at Oh, yeah. starting off, yeah.

Uh oh god, that was not a fun time. I mean I was doing everything myself. Okay. Uh which I mean I have the utmost respect for any solo founders out there.

Just it's extremely difficult. Um And especially in the healthcare space when you're trying to sell to into hospitals, there's a whole like procurement process which takes forever to conclude. Um yeah, it it was not a it was not a fun time. What it did teach me though is sort of what pathways you should be taking to get into those meetings and talk to the right people.

Uh so, that still serves us pretty well today. Lots of mistakes were done there and then I'm glad that period is over. Do you remember one mistake in particular? Uh just purely like trying to do everything myself.

Okay. Um I tried I think my thought back then was I don't trust anyone else to help me do this um accomplish this goal. Uh so, I'll just do it myself. Uh which has its pros and cons, but it just didn't work out.

What Wait, so what did it teach you about kind of selling to people who don't Um on the selling part, it's just a lot of it takes time. And to be honest, you might have the best product out there, but if you don't, you know, interact with people the right way, the way they want to be interacted with, it just won't work. Okay. So, you kind of have to go through the traditional pathways.

Even doing might take a lot of time to do so. Let's go into more of the kind of the dark period. So, your post on LinkedIn announcing how a16z speed run just backed you. " People were interested, but we weren't proud of it.

There was a sense of emptiness. Yeah. What does that feel like when you're also kind of seeing that people are really excited about? I think the big thing was um we were seeing traction, but could we see a future where that traction would be sustained over time and where uh a large incumbent doesn't just copy us or make us absolutely uh obsolete in the next like couple years.

That was the bigger question to ask. " And it seems like we've been proved correct where, you know, these newer models that they're coming out are significantly more accurate than what they were last year. And we see that trend continuing over time. And so, why go after a market that's going to shrink over time, right?

It doesn't make sense. So, you think you started building at the right time? Like the I I think you kind of have to make those tough decisions where, you know, although you might be attached to the product currently building, if you don't see a path forward, you just have to like Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Do something else. Yeah. So, you entered a spiral of overbuilding and then you lost a core team member.

What does overbuilding look like from the inside when you're living it? I just uh like a lack of direction. Um usually comes from not talking to the customers enough or not understanding their pain points enough. Um and so, the result is that usually uh engineers have the tendency of just building for the sake of building.

Yeah. " But in reality, like you're you're shipping stuff that nobody's asking you to ship. Mhm. I'm sure we're just wasting time.

So generally just comes from a lack of direction or not thinking about things from first principles and not having a clear goal in mind. And so I've been hearing the first principles term thrown a lot a lot within your team. What's what's first principles mean? It's actually just keep asking why until you get to the primitives and just build from there.

Keep asking why. So yeah, just always ask why. And always kind of making sure you're aligned with your customers and making sure you're always building for them. Yeah, I mean your customers are going to be the ones that are going to buy your your product and so you want to make sure that you're building something that they want to buy.

Okay. I was having a conversation with another founder and he mentioned that at the beginning he was always asking his users what do you guys want to see more of? What do you want to And that was that wasn't a good approach because of he felt like he was just he was building all these things but it just wasn't So you have to be asking more so kind of what is the like problem and less about like asking oh what do you want to see like input from users cuz you get all this just so much input, right? Yeah, I mean it's I think it's a mix of things, right?

Like I think you can have a clear goal in mind but also break up your your time into different sections. So like the way that Google did in the early days is that they allocated I think 70% of their time on features that helped the current product. 20% of the time on features that they thought um people weren't asking for but they believed was going to help them in the long run. And then 10% on like the kind of wild stuff that like they just want to experiment.

And from that 10% they were able to create things like Google Maps and you know, things like that that nobody were was expecting but you know, actually made sense. So you kind of have to like divide your time accordingly. It's really cool. You said you went back to the whiteboard and stopped building entirely.

How long did that last and how do you resist the pressure to just keep shipping cuz everyone around you is shipping and you're like I can't stop. Like I have to keep doing it. Yeah, how long did it take for us to I'd say maybe like a month or two. Really like trying to see what was on the market, what we thought was an opportunity that we that we could target.

What we thought had legs like for the long run. And yeah, I mean we kind of all agreed like hey, we're here to to learn as much as possible in this period. We're not here to waste time. And for the pressure of shipping like who's who's imposing that pressure?

Is it like other founders? Is it your investors? Like Yeah, maybe you're you're kind of imposing on yourself too maybe. Maybe, but I would say that you're more of an you're more in a rush like finding out what's the actual problem you want to you want to tackle, right?

Shipping new features is kind of like it's downstream from that. Yeah. So yeah. So like you mentioned at the beginning you recently changed your name from Open Sesame to General Magic.

What industry So you mentioned it was like hallucinations but what kind of industries were you who were you building for? I was talking to your head of growth and he mentioned golf courses, construction. Was that what did you say? So what we used to to work on was essentially this AI action bar that would sit in the bottom middle of our customers' products.

And essentially we'd connect into all of their APIs and allow their users to query their application and for it to do anything they would want. It's pretty cool. Hard to execute on. But the bigger the biggest issue was just like you know, as you mentioned like we had people in golf course management, we had people in construction management.

Like it was kind of all over the place. And so that will really really hurt our sales cycles because it made us like less focused. And same for marketing it was kind of we were kind of all over the place. Okay.

Walk me through like the actual moment when you decided niche down to insurance. What do you remember? Yeah, I think we had gone our first enterprise customer in the insurance space and as we learned more from their use case and what they were asking we're like hey like this is actually really really interesting and the more you think about it the more you realize that you know, the world around us is built um on insurance. Like whether it's from a home or an office or a car like everyone has insurance.

And it's such an old industry and it's ripe for innovation. um you know, that's that's really interesting. Like it seems like an opportunity there. And so when we realized that we're like okay, like you know what?

Forget about the other stuff. Let's just do this. Nice. Insurance is not a sexy market.

What did you see that other people were missing? I think it just goes back to what I was saying about like it's It's time for innovation. It's time for innovation. It's insurance is often like taking taken for granted.

When it really shouldn't be. Like it's like everyone's the world, right? Like it's really important but Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And you're you're a technical founder who didn't grow up in insurance. Why are you the right person to crack this industry? I think being an outsider from an industry is like kind of useful in certain ways because if you're if you haven't grown up, you haven't spent significant amount of time in the certain industry you're not you know preconditioned to the current status quo.

Right? You can start thinking about things not from a you know, what are others in the industry doing but rather what the industry should look like from our perspective. And so it kind of isolates us from what's currently out there. How do you make sure to keep up with like the trends and how do you make sure to always know kind of what insurance brokers are up to or I mean, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter, like all it's it's you kind of have to follow the right people and obviously surround yourself with people that are in the industry.

And attend events and conferences and all that stuff. Like it's a combination of things. Is LinkedIn like the platform the medium that insurance people are on the most? It seems like it.

Yeah. Surprising amount of people are also on Facebook. So yeah, quite antiquated but it is what it is. Another exciting thing is that you guys are also using Compozio and you've used them since before we raised our seed round.

That's a real bet on a team. What made you trust us early? I think for us we we liked that Compozio had a wide range of integrations and it was really really easy to integrate. You know, I didn't have to you know, spend a week on a particular integration.

I knew that with Compozio I could do it in a a matter of of minutes sometimes. It was really really easy to do. And the the founders were really open to helping us and and support us along the way. Even through like the ups and downs like you know, they were they were they were there for us and so we like working with other startups so yeah.

You're not just using Compozio for integrations. You're using it to pull data from CRMs and enrich it with additional customer insights. Walk me through what that actually unlocks for an insurance broker and what do they see that they couldn't see before? I think usually when we engage with an insurance broker they ask us if we have like a certain integration and their expectation is that they that integration if we don't have it it's going to take you know, let's say a month to get online.

But in reality, you know, because of Compozio like it really doesn't take that long and so we get to iterate a lot a lot more quickly that way. And so you know, from one call to the next we're able to show them hey like you asked us for this integration to this CRM. Here you go. It's already there.

So yeah, keep keeps our customers satisfied. You described dealing with API documentation and and building native toolkits as a pain in the ass. How much do you think Compozio has saved you if you had to put a number on it? Oh god, I have I have zero idea if I could put a number on that.

Honestly, but I mean I've seen some of the documentation that you guys deal with. It is not pretty. So big thank you to the Compozio team because yeah, especially for like older tools it's it's horrible. What kind what kind of older tools?

I mean I don't want to say any any names but like some of these integrations are like very very old like legacy integrations and so I mean, just trying to go through the the whole documentation is is a pain in the ass, yeah. As a founder Oh wait, you said Compozio lets you ship new features faster and get iteration cycles tighter. Can you give me a specific example of a feature you shipped because of Compozio that you otherwise couldn't have? I think a big thing was that we wanted to ship workflows.

And so because of the triggers integration that the triggers feature that Compozio has we were able to essentially dictate, you know, if this happens then you know, this would trigger this webhook and then you're able to create a lot more like rich interactions with our customers. And so we had planned out for the whole workflow feature to take I think it was like almost three weeks to ship and we were able to ship that in like a matter of a week. So it was like it really helped us. Yeah.

As a founder evaluating another founder's product, what were you watching for? What would have made you walk away? I mean one, the product has to work. That's the biggest thing.

Two, I wanted to make sure that the founders uh of that product were um responsive and okay with getting feedback and you know, all that stuff. So Props to co-founders. Props. You and Jay decided to build together after 7 hours in a meeting room at NextCanada entrepreneurship program.

Yep. Most people take months to commit to a co-founder. What did you see in those 7 hours that felt like he was the one? I think it was a mix of things.

I think for one, we have very complementary personalities. So um he's better at things that than I am. Like we complement each other in different ways like either it's socially or or skill wise and so I was kind of able to to see that from the get-go. Uh we are also you know, we also kind of both come from a similar background and so we're able to relate.

We have similar similar humor and you know, I I think for a co-founder it's not just important to be good co-workers but also like you want to be able to hang out with a person and grab a beer with the person and you know, hang out, right? Yeah. And I could see myself doing that with Jay pretty quickly. Yeah.

You mentioned like if it's not like a a yes, it's a no. And for like for Jay it was like a it was like Uh it was What what kind of You said you guys have very similar like backgrounds. What what were the Um I mean both coming from a technical backgrounds, both have previous companies in more like legacy spaces. Uh both kind of interested in the same stuff.

Yeah. Um weirdly enough both of our fathers have like very similar jobs and so like it's Oh. I don't know. It uh it's a lot of it like coincidence.

Um but I guess it worked out, yeah. So you guys so you joined the program NextCanada to to Why did you join initially? So you to find a co-founder or like to No, I mean so I was still in Montreal back then and I thought that if I really want to go and accomplish my dream of of like being a successful founder like I had to go join the best program out there. Um and in Canada um we thought NextCanada was the best out there.

And so you know, applied, got in and uh yeah, we haven't looked back since. It was pretty good. Wow. And then you saw him and you guys like partnered up or how did you guys get into the room?

Like to like Yeah, I mean um I had just came so Yeah. Essentially I was looking at what he was working on. At the time it was like an an EdTech uh startup and um I was like hey like how are you dealing with AI hallucinations? And he was like oh like am I it's funny you say that cuz I'm actually dealing with that dealing with that right now.

Wow. And then and I just told him like hey like do you want to like just try to like just like brainstorm and try to figure out the solution. Yeah. And so yeah, we we got into a a um a room and kind of like walked through the problem like step by step and you know, 7 hours later we started shipping the our V1 to the rest of the office and yeah, it was a lot of fun.

And then who made who first asked to who like do you want to be my co-founder? How did that happen? I think I did. Okay.

I think I did. I mean to be fair like I wasn't the nicest person to Jay initially. I was like Were you like Like Jay, you seem like a really smart guy. Like why are we calling such a stupid problem?

I'm surprised he actually like he went ahead with things afterwards. But like yeah, yeah. was like he was like joking back with you kind of like Yeah. Okay.

And yeah, you guys have very complementary personalities. Yeah. Very technical and I know Jay's more like sales like business and then A lot more extrovert than I am. Extrovert, yeah.

And yeah, so it kind of matches. each other, yeah. Complements. That's really great.

You guys got lucky. How do you think about building trust with someone on your team over time? What does someone have to do to earn more responsibility from you? I think whenever someone joins we try to give them a lot of ownership uh for them to like prove themselves.

And if we give them big tasks and they're able to execute on those tasks quickly and and to a high level then I can feel safer in like giving them more and more tasks to do, right? Yeah. But if we give them a couple of tasks and they just don't do a good job then we'll be you know, I'll be more reluctant to trust them as a as a co-worker. Um so yeah, we have high standards here and so we want to make sure everyone's like kind of up to speed and and going full throttle.

Yeah, you definitely don't want to be like hand-holding or want to be I mean we're still so small that we have no one yeah. yeah, just hiring the most competent Are you hiring right now? Yes. Yeah, always hiring, yeah.

Always hiring. Yeah. But making sure to keep it tight and lean like that's us, yeah. Yeah, we I mean we interview quite a few people and not a lot of people like get to that to the next stage and so you know, we we try to hire slowly.

Okay. Just having How do you So when you're interviewing these people what like when do you how do you realize cuz if you haven't worked with them before like what gives it away that wow like they they have ownership like they're going to take it into their own hands. Like what's the signal there? I mean usually you want to try to see if if they have done something technically impressive in the past let's say like 3 years.

What's the biggest problem that they've solved and how they solved it and you try to go through their thought process into it. Uh that's a big thing for us. We just want to make sure like you know, in this in this era where um you know, code is so easy to write with AI tools the only thing left to do is like evaluate the judgment of the person. Mhm.

Yeah, their judgment, yeah. Critical thinking. Yeah. And what if they like pitch you like some crazy like new ideas?

Like that's yeah. Yeah, I mean that we're always open to crazy ideas as long as they it's actually makes sense to to do, right? Um But yeah, I mean we we always try to like kind of push the boundaries of like what's possible and so you know, if somebody uh gives like a crazy idea you know, a lot of people's first instinct is to say like oh no, that's impossible. Okay, like let's break that down and try to see if it actually is impossible.

Yeah. So yeah. Your conflict resolution principle is maximum communication, quick to apologize, no grudges. Yeah.

Was there ever a moment where that was genuinely hard to do where you wanted to go quiet instead? No. No, you're No, I mean we made that very clear. You're always like making yeah, making it very clear.

between like Jay and I no hard feelings. Like sometimes I'll say that what he's doing is stupid and he'll say what I'm doing is stupid. It's like That's amazing. it doesn't matter.

We're all here to do a good job Yeah. and it's not taken personally, right? Um and if we do think that we've gone maybe a bit too overboard and I'm like we'll just say like hey man, sorry if I if I got too emotional. Like that's fine.

But yeah, just communication is the is the secret to to building a good sort of cohesive culture between everyone and you know, if we say that something is not working properly or or you've done like a bad job, we're not attacking you. We're attacking like you know, the process that we've taken to accomplish the task. So we're all here to learn. We're all pretty young here and so we want we all want to do a better job.

How do you like to receive feedback? I know do you cuz I know with like when you're working at a company with people everyone's different. Mhm. How does everyone how do you or how does Jay like like to receive or who everyone else on the team receive feedback?

Like I know some people prefer like kind of there's praise sometimes and then also yeah. Cuz I know some people just if there's just critique then they're like oh, what am I doing good? You know, there's like different how do you make sure people know that they're Um So we we take people aside if we have to like talk them individually. Uh most of the time these decisions that are taken on the little technical side or on the sales side usually involve a lot of people in the team.

And so we want to kind of have like a gut check on everyone to see like hey, does this actually make sense to do and if something isn't working properly like we'll just call out call out the person quickly. Yeah. You know, if we're going to start having a a one-to-one conversation every decision that you take like it's going to take forever, Yeah. right?

We're here to like execute quickly and so it will just call out the person like hey, what you did was not good. Yeah. Do a better job. That's fine.

But if it's more of a if it's something more serious then yeah, we'll we'll take someone aside. Yeah, and if and then if you don't take them aside then they're just doing good. Yeah, just keep keep shipping like doing Yeah, and and we're happy to to praise people for doing a great job. Um but yeah.

First day of SpeedRun 2/3 of the cohort went to Stanford or MIT. Someone just came from XAI. There's an Olympic squash player. You and Jay went to McGill and UFT.

What were you thinking that first week? Uh it's how did we get here? I think it was the the resounding thought. Um I think and everyone that we that we met there was just extremely accomplished.

And uh like even though we were like some of the youngest folks in the cohort, we still did we didn't think that we were like up to the up to the up to par. Um because we just hadn't we we've never encountered people like this before. Um but as time went on and you start to meet these people and you really like talk to them and you start to realize like these are just other human beings. Um there's no need to to like to Put them on a pedestal.

Exactly. There's no need for that. And you know, if you feel like someone is really smart or like high intelligence and you know, maybe if you can't match the intelligence you can outwork them. So you kind of have to balance those things out and but yeah, initially it was kind of a oh shoot like the this is like the big leagues now.

I think the fact that you guys were the youngest people in the room is so impressive though. It was very impressive and I think that's something that you should be like proud of and also being around the smartest people is what you want to be like you want to be around Would you agree that you want to be around people that are smarter than you? 100% Yeah, for sure. Um It's It's really good you guys were able to be in that environment so early on.

Yeah, it's like steel sharpens steel. Like you want to make sure that the people that surround you are like really really talented because they'll they'll push you up. Yeah, 100%. Their bar is very high.

So you you have to like keep up kind of. So Yeah, so like us before Speedrun us after Speedrun like very very different people. Like we see things in a different way. Was there other accelerators that you wanted to apply to before or did you just apply to Speedrun and got in?

Um I mean we were looking at like Speedrun and YC I think were two big ones. What appealed to us with Speedrun is that the batch sizes were much smaller and so we had more time with the the Speedrun team. Yeah. Um I know we were just really like the guys there.

I remember you mentioned how you guys applied the first time and didn't get in. Was that right? And then and then you end up getting in. What was the time frame between those?

Uh What was that? Like 6 months apart maybe? apart. Um I don't I don't blame them for not taking us the first time around.

Like we just we didn't You guys were just weren't ready? We didn't have our together to be honest. Like And then they told you guys like to have your together and then you come back. yeah.

Um and then luckily we we got to to meet the Speedrun guys and like it all kind of worked out but yeah. What what what's not getting your together? What were you guys not We're not clear on things like Oh, okay. You know, um you need clarity on what you're doing and why you're doing certain things and the our decision-making wasn't clear.

Our reasoning for certain you know certain uh product decisions was not clear and when when you're kind of blurry on these factors like it just you feel it. Uh and then it hinders your growth. And so the second time around when we had another chance to to talk to the Speedrun guys in person we're like, "Okay, here's what we were doing. Here's what we're why we're doing it.

Here are the decisions we took, why and you know this is why we think that we'd be a good Yeah, I think building those like genuine relationships is so important, too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. 2 million Mhm.

in seed for your seed round. Yep. Was led by Radical Ventures. Speedrun participated and angels from OpenSea and Figma.

Mhm. But then you guys like raised in October. Is that right? Like you guys finished the raise in October.

And then you announced in February. Yeah. So we had gotten like our last couple of angel checks in Jan January. So that's partially why we delayed the announcement but at the same time we wanted to coordinate it with uh press and you know get everything in order before we made the announcement.

There was just no rush to do it. 2 What does that mean? 2? Like We thought that uh the capital would be enough to get us to the next step for a series A.

Okay. And we believe that the partners that we had on board would allow us to get to that you know next step uh quickly and the capital is just there for to accelerate experimentation and and sort of learnings. And you guys got onto Forbes. Just so so cool.

You someone Yeah, so connected with a guy from Forbes. Yeah, yeah, I mean that was a lot of fun. Uh was not expected but I knew yeah, pretty happy about that. Not expected Yeah, not expected but you guys like really wanted that.

That was like one of the Yeah, I mean it's it's a yeah. Cameraman came in took your photo. Yeah, the whole thing the whole thing. Very professional.

Congrats on that. I want to take a pause from the questions and I want to go into something that I did before the interview to prep. Oh god. So shout out Molly O'Shea for that.

What I did before this interview was reach out to a lot of your friends or people that we were that kind of friends that I knew as well and I asked them two questions. The first one was what's something about Anthony that most people don't see from the outside and how would you describe Anthony? Who's Anthony through your POV? Okay.

And I got a lot of great responses. Who did you talk to? You'll see. I'll tell you.

I would So I'm going to read them out to you and I'm going to ask some follow-up as well. Are you ready for that? Sure. Let's do it.

Okay. First person I reached out to was Lauren's. Oh god. Okay.

So you guys went to high school together. Shout out Lauren's. You guys went to high school together. Lauren's I'm going to quote it.

Lauren said, "Anthony is one of the most hard-working people that I know and he's an inspiration. He and his team's focus and ability to identify what matters the most is Damn. Yeah, I mean to be honest like Lauren's uh I have to hit him up after hearing this actually like I appreciate that. Uh no, Lauren's is great.

I mean a lot of the the reason why I got into the whole service space to begin with is like Lauren's was like really into it in high school and we became friends from then on and went to the same university and kind of we're always around the same circles but Yeah. You guys had hackathons together. Hackathons Yeah, yeah, I mean Yeah. Damn, that's a throwback.

Yeah. What are some signals you look out for to identify what matters most? How do you do it do it? Like what's your process?

What matters most? Yeah, how do you identify? Uh we should try to identify the like the biggest bottleneck at any given time and try to like fix that bottleneck. Um everything else is almost irrelevant at that point until you fix that bottleneck.

Okay. Okay. So bottleneck first really figuring out what that is. Yeah.

Fixing it. Next next person. Of course, Daniel. Oh.

Let's go. Shout out to Daniel. Yeah. Daniel is the best.

He was one of the first people who invested in you and Jay. Is that right? He really cuz when I was talking to him he mentioned how he really sees like people come first and he really sees like the potential of like people and their like innovation and everything and their talent and he saw that in you guys. Yep.

The first thing he said is how thoughtful yet practical Anthony is about underlying UX. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you were in charge Were you were you in charge of like some like the UX like design?

I mean I'm still I'm still in charge of like UI UX product all that stuff. the branding that's on you. Branding that's more on on Jay. Oh, UX okay.

In terms of But yeah, I mean Jay and I still have our our uh whiteboard sessions. They love brainstorming. He's just he's the best. He was also part of your recent rebrand launch video.

Yes, yes. He played a Oh my god. Yeah, Daniel was great. He uh he played one of the the the characters in our launch video and got He he came out on a I think it was a Sunday like a minus 20 minus 25° weather on his son's birthday just to film and so like honestly we can't have you know, he's just the best.

Danny shout out. Shout out. You're Yeah, that's my person you want to you want to kind of aspire to be like. 100% He also said that he's like a young Toby.

Highly technical but also quite the business mind. Do you look up to Toby? Yeah, I mean Toby's great. In what ways does he um In what ways do you aspire to be like Toby?

Well so Toby's interesting cuz like again very technical and it's funny because Jay and I kind of uh we have a similar dynamic to what Toby has with with Harley. Um but I mean he's he's recent interviews with like the David Sacks and all like very very interesting on his whole thought process. Um he is your favorite founder's favorite founder. Right?

Yeah. And high conviction, very technical, sees things before everyone else. Um I would love the opportunity to meet him one day. I'm sure you will.

100% I'm sure you will. You also mentioned Elon Musk is someone you kind of are inspired by. Like what qualities do you see in him that you kind of like and want to take? You're going to be reading his book soon, yeah?

Yeah, I mean Elon is probably uh the greatest founder of this decade for sure. I mean this century pretty close, right? Like um the fact that one person can be at the head of so many companies and Yeah. not just like doing some random kind of small-scale thing but like actually fundamentally changing the world and how we think about things.

Like not many people are able to do that. One thing though, didn't he he didn't found Tesla though, right? He he just kind of bought off Tesla. Was it like a Yeah, something like that.

Is that how Yeah. But I mean to my knowledge uh I mean Tesla wasn't doing too well before he came in. Um and so yeah, I mean I'll I'll attribute full props to to Elon for Tesla's success. Yeah.

Yeah. That's true. Yeah. And now yeah, I guess X.

He like Tesla X Boring Company Boring The Boring Boring Company. What's that? What's Uh they make machines that dig tunnels. Oh, okay.

Very cool stuff. Yeah, very powerful person. Yeah. Okay.

How How has growing up in Montreal in Canada in general taught him taught you about building at the frontier and what's possible. So, it's it's funny because a lot of like early AI came from Canada. Um we I mean I had the privilege of of meeting uh Yoshua Bengio, one of like the godfathers of AI like very early on in my career. Um he's still in Montreal and shout out to to Yoshua.

Oh, wow. Okay. Um but yeah, I mean being around these folks at an early age kind of influences you as to like, you know, this is what the future is likely to look like. Yeah.

Um and yeah, I mean I I couldn't have asked for a better city to live uh to be to be born and raised in. Yeah. Um yeah. Do you want to come back Do you Do you want to continue building in Toronto or do you like do you see yourself coming back to Montreal?

Come back. I think for the time being we're happy building in Toronto. Um Montreal's a great city. Um Harley's a huge He's also from Montreal.

Honestly. He loves Yeah. Harley has taken the mantle on on on the city and really has helped to mediate grow exponentially. And so I have the utmost respect for for Harley.

I do probably see myself like going back to to Montreal maybe when it's time to like raise a family and and that part of my life, but for the time being I'm happy in Toronto. Nice. And Asaf, cuz I know with your company you go where your customers are, right? So, it doesn't make sense to go to SF or for example New York.

I mean New York, is there a lot of like Yeah, New York is a is a big hub for insurance and so we try to go to New York every couple of weeks. Um a lot of interesting people there. I mean SF has a lot of other a lot of brokerages as well, but it's primarily a tech hub as you know. Yeah.

Toronto and New York. For the time being, yeah. For the time being, yeah. Aaron is next person.

Aaron, okay. Anthony's superpower is being able to read people. He has a sixth sense and is able to sniff out potential and intention. Wow.

He's also a jokester, super curious, incredibly competent, like gracious gracious builder learner. Yes. Gracious Is that how you say it? Gracious, yeah.

Okay. Yeah, okay. So, where does that superpower being able to read from come come from? And has it ever been wrong?

I'm sure it's been wrong before. Yeah. Uh I don't know. It's like you kind of you meet a lot of people over time and you see trends and how those people uh behave and sometimes it's like this what this person said doesn't equate to what how they behave.

Like there's something off with this person. And so I don't know if it's a sixth sense or it's just like you try to pattern match. Okay. Um but yeah, I mean it's good to like it's a good thing to have if you want to identify like potential and also like yeah, if there's any BS.

Um yeah. Yeah, that's useful for sure. What do you think? Am I like BS?

What do you think when you When you look Do Do I have the potential? I think so. I mean the the things you've done, the interviews that you've done, uh your trajectory has been like really impressive. And I think the work you're going to do at Compose is going to be quite impactful and it's going to get you to hopefully where you want to be in the future.

Sweet. Yeah. Yeah, for me cuz definitely I'm not I'm no I'm I make sure take action, not just talk. Yeah.

Yeah. Next, Cairo. Oh my god, Cairo. Cairo, the best.

Oh my god. He kicks, he said. When you look at General Magic as a company from face value, Jay Spear heads the company. He's the face you see and assume leads, but when you meet both it's very apparent how intelligent and business-driven Anthony is.

He's a silent killer. I would never underestimate Anthony. Anthony is very much the standard for what a successful founder should look like. Yeah.

Oh, Cairo. He also some more things. He He wrote a long thing. Anthony to me is both a friend and a business partner.

Him and Jay took a bet on me when I first moved to Toronto to work on the Open Sesame launch video and that partnership has carried into the launch and rebrand into General Magic. We've both grown alongside each other and have a lot of respect from for both of them. I would describe Anthony as a very fun guy, someone who likes to laugh a lot and that is supportive of his friends. He's also highly technical, logical, and driven person, someone who's down to make the tough decisions even if it means even if it means it leads to team winning.

So, that's I think that's really true. Yeah. Yeah, I I I agree with that. And it's awesome he took a bet on you.

Yeah, I mean God, Cairo is such a talented guy. Um when we were looking for a videographer for a videographer for our first video um I mean he came into our old office and he kind of exposed what it What his vision was and we were like this guy is sharp. He knows what he's talking about. And we haven't looked elsewhere for for videographer.

He's just He's the best. He's the best. So, okay, cool. That was the question I was going to say, what do you look for in someone that makes you willing to bet on them that early?

So, he was just like He was so excited. He was really I mean he did really Your launch video, the first one you did, it like it was on the A16Z speed run like best launch videos website, which was like just going to show It was. Okay, I didn't know that. I saw it, yeah.

And it was pretty much showing like how to have a good launch video and Cairo he he he made that one. We got to Was it LA or LA? He came to LA, yeah. To film our second video.

Yeah, I mean the fact that he knew his stuff, he was willing to learn quickly. Yeah. Uh he had big ideas and he was like not afraid to hustle. Like that's Let's go finish the few few more questions.

Let's stand up and do that. Okay. You're 12 to 18 months from raising a Series A. Would you say that's a good amount of Sure, let's go with that.

Let's go with that. When you look back at this period from the other side, what do you think would have been the thing that determined whether it worked? Um if we just stay focused and execute quickly. Um then I don't see why we can't achieve that.

Uh those are the two biggest things. Yeah. Right? Uh let's not get distracted and let's not, you know, do other things that don't help to contribute to the mission.

Yeah. And then you the market won't like shift anytime soon. Like what if external things you can't control happen? Like you think The insurance market is Yeah.

has been around for quite some time, so I don't have any any fear there. Yeah. Um we think that what we're building is quite differentiated and can't just be disrupted by some major AI lab. Mhm.

Yeah. At least I hope not. What are your biggest concerns with like General Magic with the industry overall? Biggest concern?

If we don't stay focused and don't execute quickly. Yeah. That's the only thing that matters. Stay focused and execute quickly.

As you think about this next year, what are you most excited about? You guys have some things exciting things coming on. There's some stuff that like I can't really talk about yet. Not yet.

Yeah, not yet. Uh but yeah, I was I was excited to stay focused and execute quickly. Yeah. For people who are building something and following the journey, what's one thing you know now that you wish you'd known when you were starting I think everyone kind of underestimates that's I mean that's that's a big thing, right?

How it might impact uh literally every part of your your life and the sacrifices you have to make. People warn you before you start, but you kind of you never take them seriously until you actually start doing it. Uh but yeah, that's that's the reality of things. Yeah.

And also there's so much advice in the world. How do you know who to listen to and how do you like do you Are you really like are you very intentional with like who you take advice from? 100%. Um if I think that person has done good work in the past, like I'll take their advice.

I also think that the best way to predict the future is by looking at the past, so I just I try to read a lot uh just purely like biographies and autobiographies. And so I think I take, you know, folks from the past as like the kind of mentors uh for different situations I've faced. Do you have any like mentors like close to you? Close to me?

I mean Daniel's a big one for sure for sure. And then in just generally like we have a bunch of like founder friends that are also going through similar things as us and they learn something and indeed they teach us some stuff and then vice versa, right? We're all in this together and so let's try to help each other out. Yeah.