Darren [00:00:01]:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of One of One. I’m your host, Darren Gold, CEO of the Trium Group. My guest today is Jarek Kudalovsky, founder and CEO of DeepL, the pioneering AI company serving hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. Born in Poland and raised between Poland and Germany, Jarek experienced firsthand the challenges and beauty of bridging languages and cultures. Trained as a computer scientist, he saw early on how AI could transform communication, and he spent the past eight years building DeepL into a global leader in applied AI. What makes Jarek’s story so compelling is how he’s done it. He achieved market dominance as a startup in a category that could easily have been owned by the large technology incumbents. A masterclass in strategic counter positioning. He’s evolved DeepL’s culture as it scaled, preserving its research roots while becoming a global commercial powerhouse. And now he’s leading Deep L into its second act, a courageous expansion beyond language translation into the broader world of agentic AI. Please enjoy my wonderful conversation with Jarek Kutolovsky. 

 

Jarek, it’s so good to see you. Thanks for being on the show. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for some time and really excited to be in it with you.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:01:29]:

Darren. It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

 

Darren [00:01:31]:

Yeah, it’s great to have you here. And, you know, maybe we can start with this company, DeepL, that I’ve gotten to know through our work together and a lot of the world knows. But for those that don’t really understand what DeepL is, can you bring that to life for us because you’re the founder and CEO of this important company? I’d love to. To hear that through your words.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:01:51]:

Yeah, sure. So DeepL is an applied AI research company. We actually started quite a few years ago in 2017 and have been the first one out to the market with AI based translation for language, which has been really one of the first frontiers of where AI could show its power and how it can impact the world in so many different ways. And as such, we’ve been really transforming the way that businesses can communicate both internally and externally since then. And all of that based on quite a lot of AI research work, actually.

 

Darren [00:02:30]:

Yeah. So bring to life the DeepL story through a customer. Like, what is a customer experience? How do they use your product? What do they use you for?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:02:39]:

Yeah, I mean, translation has a wide breadth of applications, but most of our customers will be either international companies which are somehow struggling with the communication inside. Let it be one of their offices being in Japan and the other one in the US and another one even in Europe. And although we kind of all assume that we’re speaking English, that’s really not the case for the majority of this world. And these employees struggle, they struggle to follow, they struggle to be part of discussions, they struggle to contribute there. And by bringing in dbel, whether that’s for written communication or whether that’s for meetings and spoken language, you can just get the best out of your employees and make sure that they can contribute to the company as you really want. And that’s what happens internally within businesses. When you think about companies that want to scale globally, that wants to enter new markets, this is sometimes pretty hard. And either you are setting up an operational field or organization in the particular country that you’re targeting, or there’s also technological means to address that problem. You can take DeepL and route more of your customer support inquiries through that, have your salesforce being equipped with DeepL to seamlessly talk to customers. And that just gives companies this breadth of possibilities of embracing the whole world as their market without really having to go through the hassle of hiring people in each and every country out there.

 

Darren [00:04:21]:

Yeah. And so you’re speaking to me, I think, from Cologne, Germany, where the company was founded and is headquartered. But you’re a global company, both in terms of your own operations, but the customer base you serve. What is the scale of the business right now? And it’s been eight years, but it’s been an eight year run of pretty wide adoption of your product and technology.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:04:42]:

Yes, we’ve been pretty successful with our approach, which really on the one hand combines cutting edge AI research, we’ve been training models, we’ve been building new model generations across this whole period of time and innovating in AI and at the same time combining that with a product that really fits these use cases of those businesses. And we have over 200,000 businesses using DeepL nowadays, as you said, across the globe. Basically Europe remaining one of the bigger markets for us. I think that’s natural given the distribution of languages over here, but also having a very strong foothold in Asia where the language barrier is there and where we can help both established markets and countries, but also emerging economies to gain place in the global economy.

 

Darren [00:05:40]:

Yeah, so we’re going to come back to DeepL for sure and your role in it, because, you know, this is a show about what it’s like to be a CEO and the art of being a great CEO. But I’d love to start a little bit with your personal story and the importance of language to you personally and how that sort of weaves into the broader kind of career journey that you’ve been on. So take us back to when you know, the beginning.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:06:07]:

Yeah, I’ve been born and grown up in Poland in Eastern Europe, but then have been spending a large part also of my young years in Germany. So basically I was roaming between those two countries and also those two languages all of the time. And I have been personally in this situation where I started school in Germany at a certain point in time without basically not knowing a world in German, which was quite an interesting experience to go through, like finding connection to my classmates, being able to participate in classes. That was not easy. And at the same time, I was always fascinated by technology. I was starting coding at maybe an age of 10 or so. The ability to just so quickly create something with software and bring something to life which was not there and have an impact on a certain scale. Like, obviously at the age of 10, whatever I was coding didn’t have really large impact. That was really incredibly interesting to me and something that I was trying to pursue then over the rest of my life. Life. And I think at some point in time, those two things probably converged in a moment where AI was coming up and both myself and the team that have been behind that have seen that. Yes, translation, and the way that we are doing translation is going to be totally transformed by AI. We’ve seen the technology coming up for that, and at the same time, we both, myself and the team, we knew what the problem was. We’ve experience it firsthand here in Germany. We’re living in a place where there’s so many languages around us. The border to France is maybe, maybe an hour away by car. And I think that gave us both the perspective on the technology and the use case at the same time.

 

Darren [00:08:05]:

Yeah. So when. When was the moment you decided to. I’m going to found a company around this big need. And.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:08:12]:

Yeah, that was in 2017, which is. Which is also exactly the moment when the first applications of neural networks, deep learning, back then, as we called it. Back then, right now, everybody has forgotten those terms and we’re just calling it AI. But back then, that was the technological academic terms that were referred to that.

 

Darren [00:08:32]:

And your education was in computer science?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:08:35]:

Yes, I’ve studied computer science. So from that perspective, I’m fully a computer scientist, I think. Yeah.

 

Darren [00:08:42]:

Yeah. So let’s go to 2017 then, and talk about what was the founding of the company like. And we’ll walk our way from 2017 to the present day. Because eight years is both a blink of an eye and a long time.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:08:57]:

Yeah, we started playing around with the technology at the very beginning. At the beginning it was a fun project and it was. And I think a lot of technological advancements really start that way. It’s just like a bunch of engineers, a bunch of researchers figuring out what you can do. And then at some point in time we started seeing that we are starting to get results which are on par or maybe better at some point in time than whatever the big tech giants have as an offering with their translation or machine translation services. And we have decided that this is a great idea to just put it out into the market. We haven’t been really thinking about monetization at this point in time. We haven’t been thinking about the market in such a maybe detailed or even sophisticated way. But we thought this is a big problem, this is a big challenge for so many people. There’s a technological leap coming up and we can participate in that. And one of the crucial observations was that in this moment of technological change, whatever systems have been built until then, their technology was not relevant anymore. So basically, whatever our competitors back then have built up over years or decades, maybe literally, they could throw that into a waste bin at some point in time. And we knew this is going to come, so we thought we’re going to just scale it very, very quickly and go out to the market. So it was a frantic year. There was a lot of sleepless nights. We did not only had to write the models, but built the whole infrastructure around them to scalably deploy AI solutions to the market. We had actually to build out data centers because in 2017, getting hold of GP and getting hold of data centers for AI was not an easy undertaking. So we kind of had to build it from scratch. And I think from there the story started taking shape. With first it being just a free product out there on the Internet, which gained quite a lot of traction in media and a lot of viral growth within our users. We have been adding self serve or like product led growth monetization models to that as the first approach. Just us being engineers and not necessarily having the required sophistication for any other business model at this point in time. That was just a natural way to go. And nevertheless knowing that at some point in time this needs to become a business oriented solution, the competition from big tech and platform owners was there. We knew we can’t compete with operating systems that are pre installed on phones and that might include translation capabilities. So we knew we got to be where the high value, high stakes use cases are. And that’s mostly in business. And this is then what we’ve been building up over the coming years, building up a commercial motion around this, building up a product that’s deeper, that’s more sophisticated, that allows businesses to do what they need in translation. And that’s usually a little bit more than just translating one sentence from one language to another.

 

Darren [00:12:28]:

Yeah, there’s a really important, I think, lesson in strategy somewhere in this story that I want to try to mine just for a moment, because here you are in 2017. Arguably you have these large incumbent players with installed operating systems. They have a lot of structural advantage and yet you were somehow able to leapfrog. You seized on a technological shift. And you know, the phenomenon that we often talk about in businesses is like Innovator’s Dilemma or Hamilton Hemmer will call counter positioning, where the interests of the incumbent providers are so entrenched and so counter to making big change that it creates an opportunity for somebody new to come into a market. And I know there are people listening, I’m sure, to this conversation, thinking about their own strategic positioning or starting a new business. What was the strategy lesson there if you were to look back in those first few years that you might want to offer?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:13:32]:

I mean, it was certainly about putting a lot of effort in the advantage that we had. And that advantage was certainly at this point in time, so importantly, the AI research that we have been doing, so making sure that we don’t lose that, putting appropriate effort on that. And then I think maybe even at the very, very beginning, I think we have to understand that this was a bold bet, especially at the beginning. That’s been a bet that has worked out. And I think there is examples of exactly those situations where you can compete against incumbents there, but it’s probably not going to work each and every time. And I think the way that we’ve chosen this area to compete with has contributed to that bet working out because we’ve chosen a play field that was not core and was not central to the incumbent strategy. If you think about Google, their main obviously product at this point in time was search and it was ads. And keeping up on the translation side probably was not top of mind for the company as a whole. So I think those bets need to be bold, but they also need to be placed into an area where there is possibility to win at least.

 

Darren [00:14:56]:

Yeah. And it’s easy obviously to look back in retrospect, but I’m curious, like how much? I mean, imagine part of it was just like, we’re strong researchers, we’ve seized on something really interesting. We’re going to give it our best bet. But were you thinking intentionally about how to make this move in a way that would actually create a really enduring business? I mean, what was the thought process amongst you and your co founders and the small team at the time?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:15:23]:

It was really about getting the product into the hands of so many people as possible. And I think the brand creation was an important part of our strategy. And part of that meant that we had a free product that was extremely strong and extremely well utilized even by our users. That has created an incredible marketing machinery for us per just pure viral word of mouth growth that obviously required investments on our side. The first investment being we had to provision the GPUs and the hardware to run that. We’ve been running millions and billions of translation overnight basically. And we had to make space for that and kind of build those scalable systems that could work with that load. And at the same time, we never over monetized in this time. We made sure that the product is just being used everywhere. And whether we are capturing that value that we’re providing to our users was a little bit of an afterthought. And I think a lot of great products have been built this way, especially at the beginning. It’s obviously a different story if you’re selling to enterprises and if you’re working with established businesses. This is not, not what you would be doing there, but this approach of capturing the market, creating a brand in this noisy market, that was definitely a competitive advantage that we aimed for.

 

Darren [00:16:57]:

Okay, so at some point it becomes obvious you’re creating a company around this. You’re the CEO and I’d love to sort of turn our conversation to your leadership because it’s not only been a journey of company building, it’s been a journey for you as a CEO. I imagine you’ve evolved and grown and I’ve seen a little bit of that in you. Talk about the early days as a CEO and if there are like distinct chapters or phases that occur to you as you in your evolution as a leader, I’d love to have you bring those to life as well.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:17:29]:

Yeah, I think like obviously I didn’t know anything about being CEO in the early days. And in the early days I think that’s fine. What you’re doing at this point in time is you’re just building and building and building and just tackling one problem after the other and trying to look at what is the next big fire that you have to extinguish. And especially with these kinds of products that are going viral, you rather in a mode of where you have to fight fires rather than strategically develop into the future. But at some point in time, I think there comes a moment in which you notice that you can’t do that much anymore on your own. And on your own does not mean that. That you’re one person, but you’re still in control of everything in some way or manner. You have a team around you, but you’re so deeply entrenched with the team that any question that’s out there, you can answer it as a CEO. And at some point in time that just doesn’t work anymore. And you start finding out that there needs to be a divide and conquer strategy of some sort and you start hiring. And I think that’s an extremely complicated moment for everyone to go through. If you haven’t done that earlier, because at once you’re looking for totally different qualities in people. You have to let go of a lot of your responsibilities and put trust in individuals that they will be driving larger parts of the organization forward on their own. And I think that’s probably like chapter number two that then starts this. Chapter number two is still though such that you have leadership, but you still have some kind of insight of what’s going on in all parts of this company. You still can maintain that feeling of being under control of your whole organization. And I think then chapter three is.

 

Darren [00:19:37]:

Sorry, before you go to chapter three, so give us a sense of your. The size, you know, how big are you in chapter two, how many employees and what is the. Where is the business in its evolution? Just so we can map to that.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:19:48]:

Yeah, yeah, I think you can probably. And that’s going to really very much depend on the individual, on how broad you can go, how big an overall scope as an individual you can handle. Therefore, I think the first part where let’s call it chapter zero or you’re in control of everything, that may go up to 30 or 40 people or something like this. I think with me it was 45. I would say this is where my first product leader has come into the company and where this has really changed. And then the second part probably goes until like 200 people, I think. And I think then on business metrics that’s going to be really different for any company. That really depends. I think I would attribute that more to the size of the organization itself. And then the second chapter, then after this is where you really starting to hire even more experienced leaders, leaders that have run potentially larger organization than the one that you’re in, who are much stronger in their respective fields than you are as a CEO. And this is the point in time where you probably have to start taking a lesson in humility because it’s not only that you cannot look into all of those areas, but you don’t have the expertise anymore. And. And you have to rely on their judgment so much more for determining what’s right and what’s wrong.

 

Darren [00:21:18]:

Yeah. Okay. And that sense you’re in that we’re calling it Chapter 0, chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 2 is what period of time for you at DeepL that’s gonna be.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:21:29]:

Around 200 people, I’d say when that really starts kicking in and when the organization becomes more sophisticated.

 

Darren [00:21:36]:

Yeah, but in terms of years, so 2017, you’re obviously in chapter zero, but what point in time do you get to that?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:21:45]:

Chapter two, I would say probably around 20, 2021.

 

Darren [00:21:53]:

Okay, okay. So keep.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:21:55]:

So the first years are still easy, but you know how an exponential curve looks like in terms of hiring, you need some time until you’ve ramped up until 100. Then the 200 people comes fast and then, then the following years come even faster. So I guess it’s around 2021.

 

Darren [00:22:13]:

Yeah. Okay, so. And where are you? What’s happened over the last four years? Bring us up to. Up to. Up to date.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:22:20]:

Yeah. And then, then I think it’s a constant up leveling of the leadership team and the organization as a whole. You start noticing that the company is growing in so many ways. You’re customers are becoming more sophisticated. So you have to be able to tackle that. The scale of everything that you’re operating on is becoming more sophisticated. The people that you had in the team until now, who have done an amazing job building the company until then start becoming tired. It starts to become too much for them in some of those areas and you have to start both hiring more and more for those first level leadership positions. But also underneath that, the middle management of the company starts becoming more and more important and the role of a CEO becomes more and more of a recruiter. Finding new people, finding the impulses and just at the sidelines to maybe defining the strategy of the company. Yeah.

 

Darren [00:23:32]:

So how’s it been for you? Like how has this journey been for you? I’m most curious to hear about your own growth and evolution. Where you’ve been challenged, where you’ve succeeded, where you are today, and what you’re like as a CEO and what you’re working on.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:23:50]:

So obviously it’s been a journey of a lot of growth. I like challenges, though. I think this is what’s driving me towards this role and that’s driving me also towards building larger company that has more impact. That always comes with a lot of interesting problems to solve and a lot of opportunities to challenge myself on. Can I do that or cannot I do that? How do I figure particular new areas out? And just to give you an example, I think one of those fields which has been most complicated for me over the course was representing the company externally, doing so in media, doing so in like podcasts, like this maybe. And that’s been something that’s never come natural to me. You can imagine myself being more of a computer engineer, scientist, but at some point in time I’ve decided the company is going to need that and this is the next chapter for my personal development and I just have to get myself acquainted with that uncomfortable situation and can work towards that, train and become the leader, the CEO that the company needs. Also, externally and frankly speaking, it’s been incredibly rewarding to be able to see some of that work come together and myself being able to tackle those challenges that I wanted to. And DeepL is also a brand that’s widely known, and given the type of the product also in the mainstream population, I would say it’s not a niche product for a small population of users. So that also means that our exposure in the market is pretty high. So I was doing quite a bit of that.

 

Darren [00:25:45]:

Yeah. So how would a person, maybe somebody at DeepL that’s been there for enough time to see you grow? How would they describe your leadership app?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:25:54]:

I put a lot of weight into being open and transparent and providing a lot of context to what we’re doing. I kind of always tend to over index on communication that’s maybe even slightly too transparent, that’s slightly too open. I was, during the course of the last years advised quite often on, we’re not disclosing this. This is not the typical practice of companies. This can stay within the leadership team or just on a need to know basis. And I’ve been pushing back on that quite a lot because I feel I want to work with people who know what we are doing together, who have the trust in myself and the leadership. And that also means being honest about things that are working well, but also honest about things that are not working well or about maybe tough decisions that we have to make. And I think that’s a core and central Part of how I want to run a company also in the future, and it doesn’t matter how big the organization becomes for this to still be important and valid, I think. Yeah.

 

Darren [00:27:09]:

And are there areas in particular where you spike as a CEO?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:27:14]:

I think obviously I’m very hard working, I guess, but that’s probably the case for all of CEOs. And I’m trying to lead by example when it comes to that quite a lot. I’m also trying to be a strong listener. As I said, at some point in time I knew I have people in the organization who know so much more than myself. So a central role for myself is to find those people and then listen to them. And I think, and I think not every CEO is like that. I think that’s probably one of my superpowers here, to take that feedback, understand it, and then make decisions based on that, but do so being really very well informed by my team.

 

Darren [00:28:02]:

Yeah. You also mentioned your role as almost Chief Talent Officer and I’m curious to hear how you spend your time around talent, what you do that might be unique and distinctive or any other kind of lessons that you’ve learned along the way in terms of. Of building a great talented organization.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:28:20]:

I think it is a lot about maintaining great relationships with people that are out there in the market. There’s plenty of talented people out there in the world and you might be meeting them with or at a point in time where there is no great position for them at the organization. It just doesn’t fit at this point in time. Or maybe they’re not at the point in time in which it really makes sense for them to switch companies and being just a good person and giving them the feeling that they’re welcome to the bell at a later point in time when this really fits and making sure that they understand how the company works and getting them excited about a company. I think that has proven worth a lot for myself. We’ve been able to bring people on board whom we have maybe talked to quite a good while ago and where this just didn’t fit at this point in time. Time. So that’s, I think, super important.

 

Darren [00:29:24]:

Yeah. So I want to talk about a couple other things and maybe just to start with your role as really the steward of the culture at DeepL. And I’d love to hear your articulation of culture, why it matters. What are the big challenges that you’ve had in shaping and continuing to push forward the culture? Cause I’m also just imagining you’ve got got your roots in deep Research, you’re a highly commercial organization, so there’s some tension there. You’re Europe, German based, but you’re global. And so I’d love to understand how you’ve thought about those tensions and how you’ve intentionally tried to cultivate and shape your culture at DeepL.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:30:10]:

Yeah, I mean, the most important thing I think is that that culture is going to change over the course of an organization’s growth. I don’t think it can stay the same. This is just effect that’s driven by the number of people that are living this culture. And our family is going to be organized in a different way than our whole society is going to be. And that’s just a function of the different scale that this needs to operate at. And then also companies go through different moments in how they’re internally working. There’s strategy shifts. There’s like, as in the example of DeepL, as you rightfully mentioned, we’ve gone from a tech only towards a tech and commercial organization. And that is a different thing. And also the external factors or the external environment in which you operate are changing from time to time. So if you take all of this, your culture will have to adapt. And I think there needs to be a core which is steady, which always stays. And this can’t be anything that you just thought up or which you have read in a book. I think that needs to be at the core of yourself as founder and CEO if you’re remaining the core of the company. And I think for me, that’s the part where we’ve talked about trust, authenticity, transparency. I think that’s incredibly important to me. And then I feel other things can change while this stays because it still in some aspect remains the same company. At least the company that is represented by the founder. When it comes to the specific cultural path that we’ve gone through as a company, I think the fact that we’ve internationalized so quickly, both in terms of our customers as well as our employees, we’ve started in Cologne in Germany, not really a tech city. We’ve been or are the biggest tech company in town and then grown to whole of Germany and then expanded across Europe and then started setting up offices in Asia and in US. I think that diversity of cultures that you bring in through people coming from different backgrounds is really what can help you shape the company in different way. And in the same way the diversity of different types of people coming into the business. Because maybe you’re evolving from tech only to tech and commercial. If you’re careful and intentional about Taking the pieces that fit the company out of all of those cultures, out of the stereotypical personalities of people being in those different functions, and pick and choose those that are great, that you love and put them into a culture, and then try to make sure that those that do not fit the company are appropriately handled, then you can evolve the culture in such a great way. And I think for us, that meant that we’ve become more ambitious, we’ve become more competitive in the market. We strive for more. We love winning and not only building. We love building, but we also love winning through building. So there’s quite a few things that have changed over time. Yeah.

 

Darren [00:33:53]:

You’re at how many employees today at DeepL?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:33:56]:

We’re roughly 1,000 people right now.

 

Darren [00:33:58]:

Yeah. So this is such an interesting question because you’re at a significant scale, thousand employees. You also have the added complexity of a lot of diversity. Right. In terms of country of origin and all of the other diversity that people bring to a culture. So I’m so curious about this question of at scale, a thousand people needing to naturally shift and evolve culture from, you know, in your words that you just articulated, a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more commercial, a little bit more competitive. How have you as CEO taken on the task of evolving a culture at that level of scale?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:34:38]:

Talking about it. Talking about it a lot. Talking about my personal journey through that, talking through my experiences, trying to explain to the employees, why am I doing this or why am I thinking like this? And I’ve spent a lot of time on town halls, AMAs, all hands breakfasts in offices, just spending time with employees, taking all questions, whether they’re easy or hard, no moderation, and just giving the right answers to those or the answers that I feel. And I think that that helps everyone go through the journey through my eyes because I usually see and notice those trends firsthand. And I see them earlier because I’m quite often the bridge between different offices, different teams, different functions. And I think equipped with this knowledge, everyone in the company can take this change a little bit easier than if they would know. Know. Why is that?

 

Darren [00:35:43]:

Yeah. So where has that worked? And where maybe more importantly, have you been stuck, challenged, still trying to figure things out?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:35:51]:

I think. I think we’ve gone through a time at some, at some moment where I was not. Not obsessed enough about giving this clarity. And we’ve seen that immediately in our engagement surveys where discourse on, are we communicating our vision? Are we communicating our values? Are we. Are we basically communicating well across the whole company? These went down. I just at some point in time didn’t notice that there’s even more that I need to do around this. So yes, this was a wake up call for me. I think this also meant that at the scale we had to both maintain the authenticity of our communication but also employ some more structured programs around that. This could not happen just organically anymore. You just wouldn’t meet enough people by chance in the corridor. Especially in a distributed organization. There needs to be a framework around that. And I think that was also kind of a bigger change for me and that required me to get convinced about that because I was always of the opinion that just natural conversations will lead to the best outcome. But that’s not the case. It’s got to be a little bit of a mix of operationalized scalable mechanisms as well as openness and transparency behind that.

 

Darren [00:37:20]:

Yeah. And can you just give some examples of those kinds of structured approaches? Because I’m with you. My bias is much more around the osmotic effect of strong leadership, clear, clear, transparent articulation of what is expected. And do agree that there needs to be some structural support. So what happened with you and where were you successful?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:37:45]:

Yes, I mean we’re running a series of those breakfasts around offices where there’s pre planned slots that are kind of arranged around my travel schedule where I’m gonna meet people within offices whenever anything kind of bigger changes in the company. We’re hosting dedicated ask me anything sessions. We’re obviously providing also materials ahead of this happening. But I really like everyone to be just there and be available for questions. And we’ve run extremely tough ones and exhausting ones. But we always tried to answer, answer even the last question that was there. And if it was not possible on air, we did it in Slack and followed up on those questions. So make sure that you’re answering really everything. So in person meetings in offices, we’re trying to facilitate those even if we are a hybrid or remote organization and at the same time do a lot of organized AMAs. I think those help a lot. Yeah.

 

Darren [00:38:51]:

I’m noticing two things I just want to test with you because I imagine people listening to this are interested in the nuance here. One is that you’re still very central. This is not outsourcing to people function to do the culture work. You’re central to the communication. And I’m also hearing you didn’t say it explicitly, but I also hear in you you’re not trying to please people, you’re trying to be honest and clear. And I Think that’s an important distinction first, am I right? And anything else you’d add to that to make this more compelling, complete?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:39:22]:

Yeah. On number one, that’s a clear yes, I want to leverage my leadership team in this to the whole leadership team. And I think the whole leadership team needs to be present in this shaping of culture. And anytime I was talking about AMAs here, I always do those with at least one leadership team member alongside myself or they do it on their own. But yes, I’m present too, and I think that’s incredibly important to me. I am the face of the company and therefore also internally, and I want everyone to understand what’s going on in my mind. On point number two, I would hope this is the case, but I cannot know for 100% whether I’m living up to this standard. I think this is something that I’m pushing myself towards all of the time, and I think that is incredibly important. I think if you want to survive through this growth journey of a company as a leader, as a CEO, you have to live by your own standards and you have to make sure that everything you’re doing is okay for you and you can go to sleep and sleep well with anything that you’ve just said on an all hand. And for that I think it’s got to be honest, otherwise it just doesn’t work.

 

Darren [00:40:47]:

Yeah. So second thing I wanted to talk about quickly is this notion of an Act 2 for companies and to understand where you are in that most companies will find themselves having a very successful Act 1. There’s still room to grow, and I imagine there is for you in translation. But then this sense of what is the next S curve? What’s our second act? And I just love to hear like, where are you in that thinking?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:41:17]:

Probably one of the toughest decision that I’ve ever made in these eight years. There is a natural tension between obviously the market that you know, the product that you know just doing pretty comfortably whatever you’ve been doing all of the time and continuing to do so. So including an inertia of an organization that is obviously very much built to do exactly this Act 1, but at the same time, I think if you want to build companies that are really impactful, you always have to think further than that. You have to maintain this excitement about what can come next and, and create the room and shape the potential for that, whether that’s in the organization or in the capital allocation that you’re doing. How much resources do you put into short term, midterm, long term, projects. But not only that, but also in your mind as a founder and as a CEO, you have to accept these things or basically challenge you to go there. And we’ve just unveiled a couple of weeks ago the fact that we have started our DeepL AI labs and that we are working with customers on the DeepL agent, which is our venture into the broader world of AI. We have been working on AI research, but always did so for a very particular and maybe kind of limited use case of language and translation. And now we’re going much broader. Technologically, that’s maybe not that big of a leap, but conceptually, if you look at the company’s mission and what we’ve been doing, that obviously expands our horizon. And there’s a lot of change management that happens with that. There is not only getting yourself comfortable with this thought as a founder, but also bringing the organization on this journey. And this is something where after I’ve made this decision that we want to go into this direction and want to build even more beyond language, I obviously had to work with my leadership team, bringing them along, work a lot with the whole company and make sure they understand the why and the what, where we’re going towards.

 

Darren [00:43:45]:

Yeah. So I know you’re still early. Let’s call this the early Chapter 0 of Act 2, but I’d love to hear any lessons from this experience. What worked? I know you described it as one of the most difficult decisions and, and what might you have done differently? And then what are the big questions that still remain for you as you think about ultimate success here?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:44:07]:

Yeah, I think we might have been even faster than we were. I think making those decisions took some time for us. And in hindsight, I would say just decide very, very quickly and go and move and allocate more resources to this that would have made things even a bit faster for us. Us. At the same time, I think there is an incredibly complicated balance that you want to strike in this moment. You want to build this, as you just called it, chapter one of the new act, independently because it’s something different than what the rest of the organization is doing, what the company is doing. So we want to give it the freedom it needs to, to blossom, to grow. And at the same time, you want to leverage whatever you’ve learned throughout this eight year journey in the rest of the company. You don’t want to start from scratch. And this balance of how you do this, which employees from the existing organization do you bring over? How do you shape the values of this new organization? How do you Help hire for that. How do you take the help of experienced people in particular smaller areas of this new venture? That is a very complex undertaking and it requires, I think, a ton of small but yet very important decisions on how you shape this.

 

Darren [00:45:40]:

Yeah. So I’d love to move out of DeepL just for a moment. Maybe we’ll return as we wrap things up and we’re getting closer just to you as an overall human being. I know you have two children. Being a father is part of your identity. There are things, despite the all consuming nature of being a founder and CEO outside of DeepL. Round out the picture of Jarek for a moment if you could.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:46:08]:

Yeah. As you said, I’m obviously a father and also a husband.

 

Darren [00:46:13]:

Yes.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:46:13]:

So. So that is an important part of myself. I think as much as I’ve grown through the company’s journey as a person and as much as I’ve learned through that, I’ve probably learned even more through the journey of being a father. I’ve learned what responsibility means and that’s very much something that you can also utilize or which is helpful for you in your career and, and as being a CEO. And I think both growth journeys bring me really towards this part of me wanting to be a trustworthy, responsible person that is there not only for my kids, but also for the company in a similar manner. And I think both parts really should shaped me quite a lot over the last years.

 

Darren [00:47:09]:

It’s a very full life, I imagine it is for many people that are leading companies. And I’m also curious how you, what you’ve done to be able to hold all of that with the kind of energy and consistency that’s required, that is.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:47:24]:

Definitely not an easy task. I will be honest about that. I think at some point in time, the, the fact that time is such a valuable resource that hits every, that hits every CEO and even more so probably a CEO that has a family. So basically every five minutes in your weekly schedule are planned through on what do you want to use those for? I have the luck that my kids are actually already starting to become a little bit older and a little bit more independent, which is great. And, and therefore I can even devote maybe a little bit more time to the company right now. I think on the other hand, if you’re doing what you’re fascinated about and if you’re really enjoying what you’re doing, and if you see a value and an impact in each and every one of those days that you’re doing, then this responsibility and this job and whatever time you invest into this. That. That is not that much of a. Of a burden anymore. That doesn’t become relaxing, maybe. But you’re ending the day being happy about what you accomplished and being happy about what the path forward is. And for somebody like myself who just seeks the fun and the challenge and is interested about what tomorrow is going to bring, I think that helps make the. This a fulfilling and rich life and one that can go on like this for. For quite a while longer.

 

Darren [00:49:03]:

Yeah. Well, speaking of time and ending the day, we’re ending your day right now and I want to be conscious of bringing us to a close and just giving you an opportunity maybe to add anything that we didn’t cover that you’d like to make sure you speak to about DeepL, about your role as CEO. Anything, you know, unique that you might be able to point to to or just to add a more finer point to something that we’ve already discussed. Is there anything that you’d want to add?

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:49:29]:

Hey, Darren, I think we’ve gone through such a broad range of questions ranging really from deep else strategical questions towards who I am. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. I feel complete in this conversation.

 

Darren [00:49:45]:

So do I. I always want to extend the invitation. It’s been delightful to be doing this and thank you for your honesty in this conversation. Who you are has really come across and I imagine that will be true for people listening. So appreciate your time and thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

 

Jarek Kudalovsky [00:50:02]:

Thank you for having me, Darren.

 

Darren [00:50:04]:

You’re very welcome. What a fascinating conversation. Jarek’s journey from a young computer scientist captivated by language to the CEO of one of the world’s most respected AI companies is an inspiring example of vision paired with humility. His openness, transparency, and deep sense of trust have shaped DeepL’s culture and powered its remarkable rise. I look forward to being with you on the next episode of one of One. And until then, I hope you live and lead with courage, wisdom, and above all, with love.