Everything breaks in a startup. Culture is what kicks in when it does.
Leif Abraham and Jannick Malling are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Public, the agentic brokerage putting AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio. They started in late 2019 by bringing their two former teams back together, and have since watched every market cycle twice: from launch, to the GameStop chaos of January 2021, to the AI shift they're now building on top of.
In this episode, they sit down with Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke to unpack how they actually run the company. They break down their 10 open-sourced operating principles ("Honesty kills bullshit," "Find a way," "Move fast through organised speeding"), why they treat culture as capitalistic tooling rather than fluffy values, and the moment Principle 10 drove a small engineering team to scale the trading system overnight when GameStop doubled their user base in a week, a decision that still compounds into Public's reputation for uptime today.
They also make the case for the co-CEO model most investors say never works. The trick, they argue, is that they don't share a job, only a title: Jannick lives inside product and engineering, Leif runs growth, and they only converge on the 1% of existential decisions where more perspectives actually matter. It lets them stay deep in their craft and install one C-level hire at a time instead of scaling leadership in risky staircases.
On hiring, they get pointed. Avoid the "badge hunters" who collect logos and optimise their LinkedIn, and instead find people who had to fight for their growth at companies you've never heard of. Be "truth-seeking to an uncomfortable degree" in interviews, because technical ability is table stakes, but motivation is the thing that actually predicts fit.
Plus Jannick shares how he generates 20K a month selling covered calls, why AI agents are about to compress trading strategies into a single prompt, and how the pair are betting the next decade of investing will be about resourcing individuals, not just granting them access.
00:00 Intro 02:00 What Public is: the agentic brokerage 06:00 Selling covered calls on autopilot 11:00 Access vs resources: the next 10 years of investing 16:00 Building culture from two merged teams 20:00 Principle 1: Honesty kills bullshit 27:00 Culture as the operating system, principles as the tools 33:00 The GameStop scaling story and Principle 10 39:00 Making the co-CEO model actually work 48:00 Disagreement as a feature, not a bug 53:00 Hiring: stay away from the badge hunters 1:00:00 Truth-seeking in interviews 1:05:00 Closing: problems, purpose, and health first
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