What we talked about
Kim Hansen is CEO and co founder of Cake Equity, a platform that helps startups manage ownership for founders, employees, investors, and advisors with clarity and less legal and spreadsheet chaos. Kim shares the personal pain that sparked Cake, signing complex shareholder contracts he did not fully understand, and later watching employees miss out on ownership because equity felt too hard, expensive, and poorly timed to implement.
Show notes
Kim Hansen signed a 50-page shareholder contract he did not understand, then spent two years trying and failing to convince a CFO and CEO to give employees ownership, only to watch those employees miss out when the company was sold. That experience became Cake Equity, and it shaped a philosophy about what equity can do when it actually works.
What we covered
- Cake Equity lets founders set up employee option plans with a single click. The engine handles vesting updates automatically, and employees log in to see their ownership stake and watch its value move as the company hits its OKRs, with valuation set at a simple 10x ARR so the math is transparent to everyone.
- The most dangerous equity mistake founders make is skipping the one-year cliff. Without it, an employee who leaves after six months walks away with options, creating what Kim calls “dead equity”, and cleaning that up with lawyers is expensive and time-consuming.
- Kim believes equity works best when it creates mini founders: team members who think about the company’s success as their own, adapt faster to market shifts, and stay committed through the long grind that most startups actually are, not the shooting-star version people read about on LinkedIn.
- On hiring, Kim argues that attitude and the ability to learn now matter ten times more than specific technical skills, because AI tools have changed what skills are even required. He looks for people who are “hungry and humble” and assesses not just where someone is, but how far they’ve come from where they started, a lens he borrows from Adam Grant’s work on hidden potential.
- Kim described a detailed personal health system he calls Creative Healthy Lifestyle, built on data from a Whoop device, a smart scale, activity tracking across surfing and mountain biking, daily self-assessments of presence and calmness, and deep blood tests, all synthesized with AI. He said he now feels “a hundred or a thousand times more intelligent” about his health than a reactive doctor visit would allow.
- On AI and software development, Kim’s approach is to resist “pumping as much information into a gigantic prompt” and instead build structured markdown files that codify every decision rule in his head, an externalized brain that steers LLMs with precision. He was emphatic that humans should not ask AI for advice or offload intelligence to it, only use it to synthesize information so they can make higher-quality decisions themselves.
About Kim
Kim Hansen is the CEO and co-founder of Cake Equity, a platform that simplifies equity management for global startups. Before Cake, he grew a tech and startup incubation agency to 60 employees, working with clients including Google, Samsung, Roche, and Fairphone.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimhansencake
- Website: http://cakeequity.com
Episode 131 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-vetted podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we’re joined by Kim Hansen, his CEO and co-founder of Cake Equity. He’s helping make equity simple and fast for global startups so they can build and motivate great teams and earn investor support.
Kim started as a software engineer, building technology for banks and startups. Then he grew a tech and startup incubation agency to 60 employees, supporting companies like Google, Samsung, Roche, and Fairphone. Along the way, he’s built a clear philosophy around sustainable entrepreneurship, health, self-awareness, and mission-driven work. Kim, welcome to the show.
Kim Hansen (00:52) Thank you so much and thank you for that introduction, Federico. I’m very excited about joining the podcast.
Federico Ramallo (00:59) I’m honored to have you here today and yeah, I think it’s important to not only share with the audience what, you know, everything that you accomplished, but also I think it’s important to be able to remind you everything that you’ve been doing because at least happened to me that I do stuff and then I kind of forget about the things that I’ve done until somebody else reminds me. So I’m trying to, you know, give that.
you know that feeling to to you
Kim Hansen (01:24) I appreciate
that. I’m not so good with compliments, so I never really know how to react. So just try and say, thank you. But it’s all, it’s who we are in the present moment. And hopefully we have some good experiences, good and bad, you know, throughout life that teaches us some things. you know, hopefully we love ourselves enough to, with the good and the bad stuff to say, I’m going to do the best I can now with the experiences I have. yeah, that’s kind of like being present in the moment is what matters a lot to me.
Federico Ramallo (01:48) Yes, I agree. The more I grow up, the more I appreciate being in the moment. So for someone that doesn’t meet you or is meeting you for the first time, can you tell us what Cake Equity is about?
Kim Hansen (02:03) Yeah.
It’s a platform built particularly for startup founders and their teams. So typically to manage the ownership that your team has, that your investor has, potentially some advisors. It gets quite complicated with the contracts, understanding the contracts and updating the vesting that happens when employees get more ownership and all of that. So we have a very simple, the easiest to use platform in the market where you can set up, for example, an option plan. So you can give ownership to your employees just with one click and then the engine just starts.
that’s…
pushing all the updates and all of that and your employees get invited and then they can see how much they’re owning. So it can handle a lot of things, but that’s one example. So you as a founder can focus on really your own customers and growing your business as much as possible. And our background in the platform will really help you drive the value of your equity to really drive the team motivation and make sure everybody has clarity on the ownership and how they can create more value in that ownership.
Federico Ramallo (03:03) Amazing, amazing. And what problem did you see in startups that want to make you start Cake Equity?
Kim Hansen (03:11) Yeah, I experienced myself how hard it was to first of all, must understand these contracts. So I got a 50 page shareholder contract and I didn’t even know what to ask the lawyer to explain these things. you know, in the end, you try and be clever and find some smart questions to ask and all of that, you know, we didn’t have any eye the time as well. So I couldn’t easily kind of get like insightful stuff and through those means. So that I felt the pain of that. In the end, I signed something I don’t really understand.
And then later you kind of understand this is actually really, really, important when it comes down to selling a business or…
through things, which I’ve tried as well. And the second thing I tried was like, was fortunate in the other company that I grew to 60 employees and helping these big companies that I got ownership in it. But I also wanted that for the employees that came after me. I was the CTO and one of the partners of the company. But I wanted that for the others. And I tried for a couple of years to convince the CFO and the CEO and they’re
no bad thoughts on their part, but it was just hard, too difficult, not the right timing, expensive, all of that. I just felt the pain and in end, lot of the employees didn’t get ownership and later we did exit that business. I was like, that’s never going to happen again. This needs to be a lot, lot, lot easier for both the founders, but also all the employees to be a part of the journey and make some hopefully good liquid outcomes.
if it goes well, all of the ones that are part of making that happen. I felt the pain and I wanted to solve that. We started in Australia and now we’re going very fast in the US and there was a clear pain problem here as well. It wasn’t solved. It was perfect for us to come in and solve it. Now we can make it a lot easier than it used to be, particularly in the US where our product resonates super well.
Federico Ramallo (05:07) That’s very interesting. mean, equity is something that it has so much, you know, hype around it and misunderstanding. And I can understand how a founder would be hesitant to give equity because feels could feel that it’s giving away control of the company, which not necessarily is the case, right? But it could be, you know, misinterpreted like that, right? There’s
different type of, I learned that there’s different type of equity, And with that, you then have the liability, you know, risks that adds to the complexity of the whole thing, right?
Kim Hansen (05:47) Absolutely.
It’s a lot of complicated decisions you have to make as a founder in the midst of raising money and hiring and firing and catching up on technology that is accelerating. You also have to deal with this. The whole shotgun is complicated. So there’s a lot of opportunities to just make that language much, much simpler. Also for a founder, you’re trying to see what is the value of this equity and which changes a lot throughout the journey of a startup.
beginning and you might have raised some money and then there’s a valuation that the investors put on your company but you’re not making any money so it’s not really worth anything and it’s not liquid at all. You can’t just sell it like so it’s like what do I say to the employees that this is worth right so you know just helping that they don’t kind of exaggerate too much but but they’re also not undervaluing it so really helping shape that that message to the team which ultimately comes through education as well and
Each team member can on their, have an, you know, with Cake, they have their own app they can log into and see what’s the value of the equity. And we have all these explainer cards that makes it really easy for your own journey to kind of understand what this is about. So that really, really helps to make it easier for the founders to, hey, let’s go solve this thing. Then the value of our company is going to go up to this. And then the employees can see through the app, that would mean I would actually have this value.
in my own personal equity. And then over time, know, like what we do at KGIS, we have kind of very transparent OKRs for the company that we’re all striving towards. And we set the valuation of the company as 10x AR to make it very simple. And that means that when the employees are, you know, hitting the goals of the OKRs, they can see the value going up directly in their own equity. And like that, gets more real and transparent.
Of course it always depends on liquidity, which is something you typically will make it easier as you become a more mature company and you’re improving yourself in the market. Then it becomes more likely that you can have an exit event that actually creates liquidity in the equity. yeah, more transparency, more education and giving the power to the employees to follow how much value they have in their equity and influence the value itself. That’s ultimately what we help a lot with.
platform.
Federico Ramallo (07:56) Right, right. And what is the impact you’ve seen on or change on people after they give, you you give people equity? What has been the impact on their work and their commitment?
Kim Hansen (08:10) Yeah, often, know, salaries is kind of helps a bit of motivation and equity is more kind of retaining your employees. So, you know, it’s easier to get that longer term commitment. But also one of the things that I believe strongly in this is just creating a lot of mini founders in your company. So people think more like founders, they adapt more to the changing landscape and market.
And they take more ownership of what they’re doing also when they have ownership in the company. So just getting that more founder mindset makes your team kind of stronger and more committed. There’s a lot of, you read out on LinkedIn and stuff. There’s of course…
companies that go really, really, really fast. But there’s a lot of out there where it’s a long journey. So it’s the ones that are persistent and keep going and can adapt along the way that will create a great business in the long term. yeah, I think there’s both space for the shooting stars and then there’s space for all the ones that are kind of grinding it out and finding their way and constantly improving the team and their ability to learn and adapt to the market.
Federico Ramallo (09:20) That’s very interesting. what are the things that founders misunderstand about equity?
Kim Hansen (09:27) Yeah, I think first and foremost just the contracts and how to communicate that. But then typically what we see is it’s hard to know how much to give at a certain stage of your company and to a certain role in your company. So a senior engineer at a seed stage, how much am I supposed to give?
advisor that is coming in and if you don’t have some good guidelines, you will give too much or too little for that stage. So we use a lot of benchmarks. So we look at what the majority of startups are doing and then you can follow those kind of guidelines, recommendations along the way and it becomes a lot easier to not go to the either or the extremes that are not really healthy for your company, especially the early days. It’s complicated to figure this out.
Yeah, and using, you know, we really believe in standard agreements and all of that. So depending on who you might get as a lawyer or advisor, they might say different things, right? So I think the more it can be kind of standards and best practices, the…
the easier it is for you to not create problems further on. some of your company needs to go to a Series A raise and that takes a lot of due diligence. And if you have everything really messy, you can screw up the Series A because the investors…
want to deal with everything is a big mess. So yeah, it’s important to have really good governance on your equity along the way. that’s, know, investors do understand the equity part. That’s their game. So the more you have that well-shorted and cleaned up, the more you’re well set up to actually make the race happen and also happen in a shorter time frame and all of that, which is really important. Every month counts when you’re in a startup and you’re racing.
You typically have a short runway, so you just like, gotta close this race now. It’s very challenging at those times.
Federico Ramallo (11:12) Right, right. And you can spend a limited amount of time of your bandwidth on dealing with equity and filling things out. But on the other hand, it’s a big risk if you do wrong. So it is important to set it up right. So it’s a set and forget kind of thing that gives you peace of mind, right?
Kim Hansen (11:24) Exactly.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s set up again. I think it becomes more and more active, but certainly it’s something you can set up easily and you know it’s running well in the background. And as you know, you use the platform more and more, you can really drive the motivation with your team. But without you having to spend a lot of time on it. So you can focus on hitting your goals and celebrating that with your team and, okay, here’s the new challenge. And you just know you have this system supporting.
that journey and the value is growing in your company and all of that and the learning. employees can, you don’t have to educate them all the time and all of that happens in the background as well. So they become more closer to the team and they become more like mini founders and like how do we make this happen together, you know.
Federico Ramallo (12:06) see.
Yeah, I I said, I forget to set the set and forget the structure so they can focus on the work, they can focus on the evaluation of the equity. Right. Yeah.
Kim Hansen (12:22) Yeah, exactly.
Free up their mind. Like there’s so much complexity and stuff. the more we can make it easier for scaling founders, the better. They have lots to think about and lots to lots of challenges. So let’s make systems that really support them.
Federico Ramallo (12:26) Right.
interesting so what is a healthy way to talk about equity with new hires
Kim Hansen (12:44) Yeah, I mean, that’s an excellent question. think…
It’s, mentioning expectations, of course, at the same time. So you’re not saying, you know, for sure there’ll be liquidity or things like that, but you’re saying we’re at this stage here. But reality is if we look at benchmarks, what’s possible out there, you could grow really, really fast, right? So really explaining that kind of startup journey, like depending on what stage you’re at, but doing a startup is like taking 10 years and compressing it into one year of like a normal business takes 10 years where you will do
that in one year. So it’s super exciting and that can be a little bit hard for employees unless they have experience with equity to kind of understand this moves really fast. And of course, there’s no guarantees on the liquidity outcome, but if we achieve these things, we can increase the opportunity for that and you can grow your value from this to this stage. So I think that very transparent language and as your team
gets more closer to how you measure things with your OKRs potentially. You’re also bringing them in more and more on the finances so they can kind of understand and how they can really grow the value of the company and how things work. I think that’s really when you have a very powerful team that are rowing in the same direction, so to speak.
Federico Ramallo (14:04) Right.
Interesting. What is one equity decision that can quietly create problems further down the road?
Kim Hansen (14:14) Yeah, I think I like normally going outside the standards if you started bending too much or you start…
give too much to one employee and you might not create a cliff.
and a proper vesting setup like that are the standards. If there’s no cliff, you and you figure out half a year after that, that person is not a fit at all. Suddenly that person is stuck maybe with a certain portion of equity and it’s kind of dead equity from you if you’re letting that person go. So like really following those standards of cliffs and vesting and all of that, I think is super, super important to avoid mistakes.
So, unless you’re very experienced, you don’t want to do this just with a spreadsheet and some random advice out there. You really want to follow the best practices so you don’t screw up. you can learn along the way and feel secure that things are taken care of. Often also if you manage it in spreadsheets and stuff, you don’t really have a proper transaction history and stuff like that. So it’s hard to know when you start screwing up. then your lawyer might have one version, you have another version, and the
accountant, your accountant has a different version and like the truth in this, right? And then you start making decisions based on not really trustworthy data. So to be sure you can really, really trust the numbers, who owns what at what stage and how much you can give to new employees and all of that. It’s absolutely critical. Else you just kind of make bad decisions and then you have to clean that up afterwards and becomes very, very costly to do that with lawyers sometimes.
Federico Ramallo (15:43) Right.
Kim Hansen (15:43) Very, very,
very time consuming.
Federico Ramallo (15:45) Yeah, becomes time consuming. And if you give equity to a person that it turns out not to be a good employee, in order to get it back, you have to buy it back, basically, right?
Kim Hansen (15:59) Yeah. So again, it depends if you have set up the standard kind of cliff, which is typically one year, you kind of have one year to figure out whether it’s the right fit or not. And if the person leaves before that one year, the person won’t have any equity in your company if you have that cliff. And then after that, you kind of earn the, okay, this person looks serious and stuff and it’s a good fit. After that year, they will get that first portion of options, then they’re going to vest the next, right?
Federico Ramallo (16:10) Right.
Kim Hansen (16:26) you can still manage the risk. You can also put milestones around it. So if you’re hitting certain targets, which you typically do for more senior people that are really closer to the numbers and being able to make some of those key goals that you have happen and then reward them accordingly. So that’s another way to manage that. So you get rewarded per success of the things that matter to the business.
Federico Ramallo (16:48) Interesting. So you were talking about that you grew up an agency to 60 people, right? What did you learn about leadership and running an agency?
Kim Hansen (17:04) So many things. I was an introvert engineer.
Federico Ramallo (17:06) Ha ha.
Kim Hansen (17:10) I I still have lots of introvertness in me, but had to get a lot of experience with talking in front of people and figure out how do you motivate people and all of that. I came from probably that very kind of mathematical, we need to solve this problem, this is the best person for that. I have this puzzle with the people to say, okay, so this person is the best for this. One of the things I learned was like, well, before I look at who’s actually the best for the job, who’s the most motivated to
know.
to take on that task. And there’s some people that just in a way have more potential than others. Typically, if they’ve had a harder journey along the way, so they had more struggles and they have that drive. So you really want to look for those people that can just accelerate more and say, well, who’s the one with the biggest motivation to solve this? Are the skills adequate enough? Okay, go ahead. And I actually think nowadays where we can get access
skills through AI more, that the attitude, your ability to adapt, your ability to learn is 10 times more important than it was 10 years ago. I think the right people can actually have very strong skills in things they didn’t even have proper education in, as long as they’re smart and learning and adapting and using these new tools. Motivation has
has just.
been always growing in me as a key, important key piece when you’re working with teams. How do you build that? you know, there’s a health component to that. There’s obviously how you treat people, that people feel validated and they feel seen in everything that they’re doing. Super, super important, right? So how you communicate with people and you recognize their efforts and their struggles. We’re all human beings, right? And that there’s a lot of beauty in that. So, but we also
Speak differently, act differently, behave differently. So there’s not one right way and the more you can kind of recognize the different types of styles that people have, that’s also something I really learned. We always kind of…
talking with our customers and presenting results and stuff when we’re working with Google and Samsung. And each person on my team had different styles and we kind of learned from each other and all of that. And I also learned, well, instead of saying that’s the best style, if someone was really good, you know, it’s more like, you know, what’s your unique style? So some might be a bit more quiet. Some might be a bit more like talking jokes and all of that. And it was more important that they found their style instead of trying to copy someone else’s. and again, so I started recognizing that.
There’s a lot of different ways to behave but actually create great results and that’s a journey I always want to improve on and continue to really recognize a lot of the kind of talent that is out there.
If we don’t have too much self-awareness, can be hard to recognize that and we think the world is the way we see it. ⁓ It’s very important. think we build diverse teams because human intelligence and creativity is evenly distributed.
Federico Ramallo (20:03) You
Kim Hansen (20:10) Often we want to look more for who’s had a long tough journey to get where they are, rather than the ones that are just, if you just compare with where they are at a certain stage, you don’t see that. But who’s actually struggled the most to get where they are? They are the ones with the biggest potential. That’s kind of some of the Adam Grant philosophy that I subscribe to as well. So looking for that kind of hidden potential, it’s one of his books, I think is key to see how we
build the best possible team and have more diverse perspectives than you would have if you just have yourself and five replicas of yourself. And I think that, so I’m talking a lot, but it’s becoming more and more important in this kind of AI world where you can kind of replicate yourself more and more. And I think we really want more diverse perspectives to create a better world.
and it also creates better teams. So this will be interesting to see how that’s going to play out. And I think I’m on my journey and hopefully as many founders out there also try and learn about their biases and their blind spots and all of that to set up really great teams that create great products that takes all types of people into consideration, not just how you look yourself. If that makes sense.
Federico Ramallo (21:17) Right, right. Yeah, amount of potential that people have, it’s something that it’s intangible. It’s hard to, if you’re not looking for it, it’s hard to see it, right? There is no hard metrics to it, I think that’s one of the issues.
Kim Hansen (21:32) Mmm.
Yeah,
you’re totally right. Like how do you measure it? Like, and often, you know, we might look at how people talk and how much they talk, right? And some people are just, they just shout a lot higher than others, you know, and then others might not actually speak in that way. And so, you know, we want to make really, we want to be smart about this, that we can understand, see all the things that we wouldn’t normally see, right? Like what do we need to do as leaders? And it’s really leaders that are going to role model the behavior that other
people will kind of follow. So, and we need to give an extra effort to make sure we see a lot of that incredible talent that is there. So I think that, yeah, the leaders have a lot of responsibility in how they behave to make sure even if they’re like often like a founder might be quite confident standing on stage and blah, blah, blah, and then listen to other people that sound like themselves, you know, but then they’re just blind to 90 % of other people that are not.
behaving like that and like who’s the quiet one in the corner that actually has great ideas, even better ideas than the very loud person over there that looks very confident.
Federico Ramallo (22:43) Right, right. the and the other thing you mentioned is about expecting people to do exactly the work the same way you would do it. You approach it. I’ve been I’ve been there and and it’s been, you know, took me a lot of time to learn about accepting other people’s point of view. Right. And when I’ve done that, when I open open up to that, then
was a big difference in commitment performance and an impact on the work.
Kim Hansen (23:13) Yeah, maybe someone felt more listened to than they weren’t normally. that is absolutely key to connect with people and get that engagement that you want from your team. They need to feel listened to and valued and seen in their impact. So we need to sometimes do an extra effort to make sure we make that happen. And then suddenly you get twice the commitment and the engagement, which ⁓ is really what it’s about.
Federico Ramallo (23:35) Brian.
And when we’re hiring people, one of the things that I do is staff augmentation. So I screen and hire people, software engineers, for different companies in the US. And one of the things that we found is candidates that don’t quite fit the requirements. 80 % they fit, but there’s a 20 % gap.
know, sometimes they know React, but now they need to learn TypeScript or they know React, but they need to learn about design, right? Whatever it is, right? So instead of, you know, reject them, what I do is I try to precisely identify the gaps and then talk with the managers that are our clients and say, we have this candidate that has
This gap, so I provide full transparency and then a ramp up plan. In six months, this person can be 100 % fulfilled all the, can close that gap, can upscale. I know I can learn it in a month. And maybe that developer can learn it in a month, maybe two months. But…
Kim Hansen (24:45) Hmm.
Federico Ramallo (24:52) but if we set six months of ramp up and then we talk with the developer, can you do it in six? Can you do it in four? Can you do it in three? Can you make a commitment to do it in three? Then what we found is two things. One is that when we offer that opportunity to the candidates, they appreciate it because instead of being rejected, they see this as an opportunity to step up and do better.
join an interesting team, right? And then they learn the skill, they upskill. And then what happens is that those folks stay the longest because they appreciate that we’re given the opportunity. They appreciate that they were able to prove themselves and the manager appreciated because instead of a ramp up of six months, we achieve it in three, right? And
Kim Hansen (25:42) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (25:43) We exceeded the expectations, right? And the manager appreciated because, you know, we usually offer discounts for that. So that way, you know, we take some risk on our side, right? Because we still pay full salary to the developers, right? But it’s great value for engineer. It’s a great opportunity for the candidate.
And we’ve seen people that we did that type of arrangement that they stayed with us for seven, eight years on the team. And of course, in that process, we also find other growth opportunities for them. So it works both ways. So it’s what you’re talking about.
Kim Hansen (26:37) I think the
absolute most important thing is to recognize talent and then make sure that the support is there. then when they see that and they get that opportunity, of course, their engagement is so much higher. Like part of me is always looking for what we call hungry and humble. The hungerness is kind of like the value of always being
available to learn and you really want that and the hungry is like you want to you want to get somewhere so like I think that’s way more important than being the most experienced in whatever skills is there the ability to to learn and the desire to learn
is absolutely critical. then when you really give people the opportunity and you bet on them and you tell them that, you know, most people will step up. especially then, as I mentioned, if you look at the history of that person to evaluate this person has come so far from this, you know, that’s the trajectory going forward. So it really makes sense to say, yes, you are here. You know, we might even have a better skilled candidate, but this person has much more potential, right? Like, and you give them that opportunity and they’re going to step up to that, you know, and they
be much more committed than the other one that, you know, I’m this and this good and you should pay me really high and they don’t really have the drive. And especially as for scaling founders, like you got to adapt to the market so far. you got to have people that can learn and, you know, it’s TypeScript now and something else in three months, right? So it’s moving so fast. So you need a team that can really, really adapt.
Federico Ramallo (28:05) Right, right. And then I’ve seen with more senior folks, not all of them. I mean, we’re probably printing all of them with a white brush, but I’ve seen some senior people that they get this diva attitude where they feel that they know everything, that they have a safe job. And they just pick and choose which responsibility to take. And when you’re trying to build something, it’s hard.
Kim Hansen (28:27) That’s very toxic.
That’s super toxic
in my opinion because that typically is a sign of, not saying for all, but it can often be a sign of a big ego that then needs to be protected. It comes about protecting the ego instead of actually just being humble. So for me, I think the most senior engineers we have at Cake, anything that they produce of code and stuff, they always want other eyes on it. Like that’s the right attitude instead of, no, no, this is perfect.
Federico Ramallo (28:37) Right.
Right.
Kim Hansen (28:54) You’re like, no, challenge this, you know, like they love that feedback and that’s so critical, you know, like getting that feedback loop and be open to that. So yeah, as little ego as possible, I think, or be aware of your ego at least so you can have, you know, so you can tell yourself, no, I want feedback, even though it feels scary. I do want feedback right now. It’s going to make me much better. Instead of it gets worse and worse because you’re trying to protect something and then you’re not open to learn.
Federico Ramallo (29:13) You
Kim Hansen (29:21) You’re putting your energy into protecting some image rather than just, you know, be vulnerable. This is who I am. Good stuff, bad stuff. Everybody has it, right? Like if I can get someone who is smarter than me to look at some of the stuff that I’m doing, that’s the greatest opportunity I have, right? And when you’re doing a startup, the market will decide what works or not, customers will pay or not, and they’re going to leave. It’s great because you can’t really pretend anything. You get that.
answer the feedback from the market. The market will decide whether you’re going to stay alive or not. So I love that.
Federico Ramallo (29:53) Right.
Kim Hansen (29:54) bigger corporations,
you can get stuck in that, you know, it takes a long time before the market decides. So you can just do a lot of smoke and mirrors and think that you’re doing good value. But the wonderful thing with a startup, which is also tough is that the market will tell you if you’re giving value or not, if customers will keep paying you for your product. So it’s a great, great way to know that you’re doing something that is of value to other people.
Federico Ramallo (30:21) Right, right. Yeah, and this becomes more important in the age of AI having a great attitude because we’re still learning how to leverage AI on these development workflows. There’s so many things that are changing and we need to put the ego aside and figure out together how to use these new tools better, right?
Kim Hansen (30:41) Absolutely, it’s definitely also something we have challenges with at Cake, right, because we actually built an incredible product, but now there’s new ways to build it and how do you do that shift where you’re still…
kind of making sure you can maintain a very advanced code base that is fully scalable and secure. And then there’s these AI tools, you can spin up stuff instantly, but it doesn’t have the proper security and all of those things. So how do you do that kind of transition? And in general, one of the ways that I see the world at least is like, growth is uncomfortable.
But we want to grow. If you don’t want to grow, don’t think you should be in a startup. You need to grow as an individual as part of the journey. It’s a wonderful opportunity for the people that want that. And growth is uncomfortable. So when we feel uncomfortableness inside, let’s say an engineer feels that inside, there’s, we need to do this AI shift. Okay, I feel uncomfortable with that inside. Now, I think the best attitude is try and look
where that uncomfortableness comes from. Are you trying to protect something because you’re scared of whether you’re going to be relevant or not? Or are you seeing some things in regards to, well, we need to maintain, like, I carry all this responsibility, need to maintain security and blah, blah, right? So there are some things you’re kind of, the uncomfortableness maybe falls a bit more on the side of you see some things that are very important to keep.
maintaining and improving and security and stuff like that. But if we can start recognizing, this part here that I feel uncomfortable, that’s actually my growth. That’s me trying to hold on to something. And this is the time where I need to just be more vulnerable and just, okay, maybe don’t defend so much because we become defensive. We can do that if we don’t have too much self-wounders. So that’s one tool, at least to try and figure out, okay, if it’s uncomfortable, that’s the right feeling.
What is it that is uncomfortable? Is it the more the correct things where we need to do things in a certain way? And where is it that it’s my own growth where I need to just accept the world is changing and figure out what’s my role in that new world?
And yeah, on the AI front, we’re going to see a lot of that is my prediction the next year and two. And I can see it around people are feeling insecure about do they have a role in a job in a year or two years? Because it feels like AI can do a lot and for like do a lot of the normal roles. I feel that myself as well that it’s possible to now.
take on a role where normally you would have to have an education, you don’t need that anymore. If you understand high level, the generalist level enough about different subjects, you suddenly become like an expert in that, or somewhat, I wouldn’t say an expert, but you can become almost as if you have experience with that field, leveraging.
the knowledge of the AI together with your intelligence. I think, yeah, the world is definitely changing really, really fast now. I don’t think anyone has the full answers on where we’re going to land on or what it’s going to look like in a couple of years. But for me, some things are clear that it is changing and we need to adapt and we need to grow with that. And definitely some of the things is the skills, way you are finding the right employees and…
and how they’re going to work, that’s changing now. So both from engineers to any type of field, marketing, sales, yes, all the typical functions you have in a startup, how you’re going to solve that, how you’re going to deliver that value is changing right now. So better buckle up, get ready and be very adaptable in the next year or two, I think.
Federico Ramallo (34:16) Right.
One of the things that I’m learning about using AI to build software products is this idea of that the engineer becomes more of a manager of the agents where the agent build the code. And we spend more time reviewing the code rather than writing code, right? And it becomes more important
for us to understand what is the expected behavior and the core design decision that we need to make. sorry. Because that way you can provide the feedback and the guidance to the agents to build it properly, right? Because…
As of now, the agents don’t quite understand abstractions, so we need to guide it and provide those architectural decisions so the agent can write the syntax, the code, the objects, whatever it is, right?
Kim Hansen (35:14) No, I 1000 % agree on that and now for me, talking about this, there’s a couple of kind of philosophies and stuff that I think are at least for me very, important in this. I truly believe that us humans have all the intelligence.
So the AI has more than knowledge. So we shouldn’t offload our intelligence to the AI. So as you’re saying, think both engineers and any type of function in a startup in a year are going to work with multiple agents, like AI agents running in the background. each person will need to have the skills of steering these agents and providing, I’d say, taste and
quality and critical thinking and like real intelligence, real empathy into the systems. So I really, what I think is important and what we’re trying to do as much as possible is kind of free up the individual human to be more human with these systems. And that being more human is being more creative, more empathetic. All of these things that are like pretended with AI. I don’t think we should offload those
ways of making decisions to AI at all. for, for if we look at just software engineering, definitely, know, the products have really accelerated in quality. So the AI agents, in my opinion, can handle more and more complex code bases, but you want to steer them so you’re not getting random assaults. And like another principle for me that probably I think the message out there is not quite right is
just this idea of just pumping as much information and data into a system and making a gigantic prompt. then like for me, it’s the complete wrong way of thinking about this. I actually think you want to really, really, really create systems that structure your prompt. So you’re guiding all the mini decisions. So basically the way I see it, every human being in a startup has like hundreds of rules and ways to make decisions in their head.
And it’s about taking those and putting that into a system, which I like plot code for that, with markdown files, where you take all your rules and you put them in so that you can fully steer the AI, the LLM, to get the results that you want. So for coding, that’s exactly what type of languages you’re using, of course, but also how do you make decisions, how are things structured? So all the context that you actually have in your head, if you get that out and you look at it,
It’s like an extended brain. You take your brain out, all these rules, and you look at what’s there, and then you’re constantly improving on that. Like that, you can steer high, high quality outputs from the LLMs. then, both when you’re just doing kind of chatting with a co-piloting with an LLM or AI, but also when you are steering an agent. So it’s fully guided on all the stuff that you kind of have in your head. So you can focus on improving those.
rules instead of trying to remember them and then codify them. So you see the outcome. What is being generated of code is that that ultimately should be better than what you can do yourself because normally you can’t remember all this stuff. But if you’re actually codifying that, you can expand how much you’re kind of guiding the outcome. so for me, that’s maybe it’s a bit abstract, complex without showing you examples of it.
Federico Ramallo (38:40) He
Kim Hansen (38:42) then you can get really high quality results. And ultimately, I’m already now with the belief that no matter how experienced and great programmer you are, if you use these systems right, then you can get a much better and much, faster, of course, output that you could do just coding yourself.
So this is where we are now and it’s going to improve. So let’s think about that. So it’s really, I think it’s critical that we think about how we build systems where we are the humans steering this stuff, that we are inputting our empathy into decisions, that we are the quality, we are the taste. We think about other people instead of just leaving that to AIs. I’m one of the principals also that we shouldn’t really
Federico Ramallo (38:59) Right.
Kim Hansen (39:25) ask for advice from an AI. I think it’s a very bad idea. We know what’s best for ourselves, right? But what we can really use AI for is to synthesize information for us so that we can make much higher quality decisions than we used to be able to do. Sometimes, of course, it’s good to…
Federico Ramallo (39:39) Right.
Kim Hansen (39:40) take an example of your health or something that you might say what are these 10 resources that I think are trust full people out there say about this particular thing and then you can get a resume to that but then ultimately you are making that decision on well for my health I think this is right you know so this is the leap forward that we can access the knowledge but we’re just expanding our own intelligence so we can do that in many fields now.
programming, to marketing, to sales, to our health, all of these things, and great results with it.
Federico Ramallo (40:12) Yes, that’s why I’ve been thinking about this idea of the core skills become much more important. And by core skills, it’s a very vague concept, but this is idea of how good is a person making the decisions, right?
because if we try to delegate those decisions to the AI agents, whatever form it is, we’re going to fail, right? Or that person’s going to fail. Now, it’s easier with agents to simulate expertise, because it’s easier to just build something or…
vibe code, something, or whatever it is. So you can pretend to have expertise because you have an agent helping you, But the agent could, right, right. So you.
Kim Hansen (40:54) Yeah, 100%. I don’t actually quite understand what’s going on, you know, like.
And it’s
just ask for advice and then, okay, this is great. I couldn’t come up with something better. It’s super confident. You’re not learning. Like that’s what they talk about, brain road and stuff like that. Just creating a dependency similar to Google Maps and you can’t figure out how to actually look at a map to get somewhere. And you’re just relying on that. a certain point, you forget that skill. This is what we have to be very careful of. And it’s so easy to just shortcut and just, I need to do more. I have all this fear inside of me because I’m
I feel behind on this AI stuff, I see people do this crazy stuff, and then all that fear-driven is just, okay, let me just take shortcuts and let me just, and I look so confident in front of others. If you don’t have much self-awareness, suddenly you can look smarter than, but you don’t actually know what’s going on, right? That’s building a house of cards, So I think it’s super cool.
We really tap into our own intelligence and unleash that. And we make sure we kind of build systems that we’re part of the learning on the key things that we want to learn, at least on the technical skills. I don’t think we should ask the AI to learn about empathy. That’s something we with ourselves and other people, not an AI system for most of the things, But that’s another kind of philosophical thought I believe strongly in.
Federico Ramallo (42:08) You
Kim Hansen (42:11) very important to preserve and improve how do we connect better with people, how do we listen to them better. That’s life really and ourselves.
Federico Ramallo (42:18) Right, right. And then the other thing is the hiring has become much more difficult because we’ve seen candidates that fake the interviews using agents or show expertise when they don’t really have it.
that has become much more difficult to detect because we’re still looking for those core skills, we’re still looking for the attitude, we’re still looking for, this person be humble enough to be humble, adaptable to kind of work the situations and guide the agents to better outcomes, right? And that has been something that I’ve been noticing recently that, you know.
Kim Hansen (42:55) Like how we hire needs to change, right?
Federico Ramallo (42:56) has been interesting.
Kim Hansen (42:58) If you can, get a whiteboard, you know, but ultimately in whatever way, I’m, when I’m part of hiring, it’s like, can I trust this person? Like, is this person honest when I ask tricky questions? Like, are they kind of vulnerable about, you know, their limitations or where they’ve learned things and, you know, are they humble in their attitude? And if I don’t feel like it, that trust that they can speak openly about these things, then it’s not a good fit for us.
Federico Ramallo (43:24) Right, right. Yeah, because how can you trust your code, you know, put your reputation of the company, everything, you know, that this person could contribute or won’t. Right. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you, changing topics a little bit. I wanted to ask you about your creative, healthy lifestyles. Can you can you tell us a little bit more about that? About what is that about?
Kim Hansen (43:49) Yeah, sure. I think I developed that philosophy over time that I guess it goes back to thinking about what a human being is and nature and all of that.
As I became a dad, watching a little kid grow up and you see, when I look at a little two year old, it’s just pure energy and curiosity and it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. And that’s who we are as human beings. We’re curious, healthy people with energy. And it’s so purely expressed in a little child. And then it seems to me like when we grow up, we put all these layers and we have to play all these roles and we might even lose contact with how we’re feeling and the
stories we have in our head and all of that, right? And we get busy into systems and the world doesn’t turn out the way we expected. And a lot of these things, disappointment comes. So I was like, well.
I kind of built Creative Health a Lifestyle as a framework, as a concept to become more of that pure curiosity and the energy, the health. Throughout the years, I’ve been fortunate to have something that probably looks like discipline. I’m quite good at doing things in a robotic way, like repeated when I want something. I can train every day that it has to be. I can eat more healthy or whatever what looks for me healthy.
Federico Ramallo (45:02) you
Kim Hansen (45:05) That has now accelerated to a completely different level with the help of using AI.
I can really create a better health for myself, be way more preventive of things happening because I can take all these things I tried in my head that are part of the Creative Healthy Lifestyle and I can now kind of put them out and program them and then apply the AI knowledge on top of that. So I can see all my data. So I track my, with Woop, I track a lot of data. have a smart scale.
I track all the activities that I’m doing when I serve and mountain bike and train all of that I try to track my own presence and calmness every day Which is like a self-assessment. I know exactly the diet I have the supplements I take you know, so it’s it’s I have blood tests So I can see what’s how my kind of like in-depth blood tests that really tell me what’s going on inside You know, so all this data together I can now get that presented in a way that I can make much higher quality decisions and
and be preventive of things. So for example, if you go to the doctor, that is not AI amplified, that person will have some notes about you and whatever they remember about you and will try and make an assessment based on that and what you’re saying. And then it’s very reactive. Is there some symptoms? So now for me, I feel maybe a hundred or a thousand times.
more intelligent than that person, even though I don’t have a medical background at all. I can come with, like, I have all my data and I have like what I consider the best advisors out there on health, their kind of opinion on my data. So I don’t, I don’t care much about like…
Federico Ramallo (46:42) ⁓ wow.
Kim Hansen (46:44) like gurus or people that are good at marketing. What are people studying things? What’s the research? can pull straight from the research and say, how do I apply that? A bit like Brian Johnson from the Blueprint and Don’t Die, that movement. I think it’s now possible to do a lot of similar things to what he’s doing for yourself in a tiny budget and even without the same amount of time that he has to do. I’m not saying that’s the perfect way or anything.
but you just have the ability to do more now with these tools and create great results. all of that is to say my creative health lifestyle went from discipline and in taking actions on my health with some knowledge and a little bit of intelligence.
to now a really proactive, in-depth intelligence on all the fields from my supplements to my diet to my training to my recovery to the steps that I take, know, to the mental level. Like I can synthesize this information to make really high quality decisions. And the results are speaking like my there some of the signals that are, you know, the pace of aging minus 0.9 and stuff.
on
that’s amazing backwards and whatever goals you have out there, you can have an impact now on your health with these tools. Of course, takes, I think, some, you got to take action on the advice. You need to be able to do that, whatever that discipline or how you set up a system for you. But then tapping into all your ideas around what health looks like to you with the right data. So you need to have access to these things and opportunity, of course. We all have different levels of opportunity. I’m very fortunate to have, you know,
I can go for walks easily in nature. And I have some skills to use the AI and stuff like that. But I think one more, everyone can start utilizing these tools to different levels to really, really accelerate their own kind creative health lifestyle, whatever that looks like. So that was long answer. ⁓
Federico Ramallo (48:40) Hahaha
Kim Hansen (48:41) It’s amazing times we live in now. feel like the Leonardo da Vinci of the modern times because I can apply intelligence to many, many fields and I can see the results, which is incredible to be living in those times. And I hope more and more people can be part of that journey as well.
Federico Ramallo (48:57) Yeah, I’ve seen what this person about Don’t Die movement has been doing. I find it very interesting. I sign up to their community. It’s very interesting now, as you mentioned, that the amount of tools that we have to analyze the data of our health and being able to go directly to the research, we can just skip.
Intermediaries, right? We don’t need to, you know, we don’t need to talk to apostles to talk to God. You know, we can talk to God directly. Right. I mean, probably that’s not a good example, but you get the idea, right? We can just, you know, ⁓ be more aware. Yeah.
Kim Hansen (49:22) Yep. Exactly.
We can make better quality decisions for ourselves without
being dependent on old school systems. So for me, a doctor is more like an access to getting the blood test that I need, you know, more than I’ll take his or her opinion, but it’s going to be a tiny signal for my data because I have way stronger data and opinions on top of that. So we still need to work in the old school systems, but we are now living in different times where there’s a different opportunity.
Federico Ramallo (49:52) Right.
Kim Hansen (50:00) I guess just to finish off on that as well.
doing all of these things, you we can strive to be more more more productive and all of that, which is really, you know, a lot of the mentor and startups. And of course we need to create a big positive impact in the world with what we’re doing. But there’s, I think, growing need for us to be more human, to be more connected with ourselves and each other. And so I guess the way I frame that for myself, what I believe in, it’s using technology and particularly AI to free myself up to be more present and human.
So it’s not to be constantly more more connected. We certainly want to leverage the technology, but ultimately how do we create that more space where we are present in the moment with ourselves or someone else where technology is not a barrier or…
really an amplifier of that. We’ve done the works, and now we have time to go for a two hour walk with someone we want to connect with it and listen to. And we have space and time for that and energy. So like the direct results I feel from using this more and more.
with my systems is that I have twice the energy. So I’m not tired at the end of the day anymore, even if it’s been a difficult startup journey day, I have way more energy. And I have, I feel I have more awareness to be able to detect the stories that are going on in my head and just pause them a little bit and say, what is actually the underlying fear that is going on there? Is that, let me just see what’s there, what my body actually needs and what’s my unmet needs in this moment. Let me look at that, not…
Federico Ramallo (51:27) Bye.
Kim Hansen (51:34) that those stories just run on itself and then create all sorts of actions on the…
basis of that. you I think you can actually create, use these systems to free up to be more self-aware and have more energy, which is wonderful. And I want to give that to the world if I can. ⁓ That might be soon. These systems, I’m thinking about starting to share it because every time I show the system, then people are asking, is that a product? Can I get it? Why do I buy it? So that’s kind of a signal that there’s something that is of value.
Federico Ramallo (51:51) That’s amazing.
Right.
Yeah, it’s kind of
put, it’s packaging it in a way that it’s more digestible for people to pursue. Yeah. I start doing intermittent fastening because of lack of energy in the evenings. And it’s amazing. And the thing is, you know, I think we’re used to having the discipline to follow processes, to follow, you know.
Kim Hansen (52:09) Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (52:24) everything we do, right? So then when you get into these systems, it’s easy to just step up a little bit more, step up a little bit more, right? And I have been doing it consistently for the last, I don’t know, eight months or so. And it’s been amazing, right? So yeah, and I haven’t gotten to getting more data about my health, but I want to do that. That’s kind of my next step, right? I want to close with this because I think it’s…
something you mentioned that it’s important. You mentioned your two-year-old son, how much energy he has, and… Nine-year-old.
Kim Hansen (52:58) She’s now nine. I have a nine-year-old daughter, but she wants to try it.
Federico Ramallo (53:05) Right.
So I think that it’s interesting how our kids motivate us to do better. And it is those kids that comes with a fresh mind, with an empty mind, without all our biases and experiences and whatnot. So it’s what gives.
humanity hopes, you know, no matter how bad the world it is, I feel that we have hope because the next generation starts fresh, right? And if it’s not the next, it’s the next one, right? I mean, we are going to eventually, you know, do better, right? And it inspired us as parents to do better, right? So I think that’s something interesting. Yeah.
Kim Hansen (53:49) Beautiful. like that. Yeah,
absolutely. I totally agree with that. And we change as people when we become parents, right? Like it becomes the purpose in life for a lot of us. That’s the most important thing, right? And we don’t want to, you know, we see them grow up so fast. We don’t want to lose any moment, right? It’s like time becomes so precious. And we want to be, I think we want to be really present in the moment more and more because of that.
Federico Ramallo (53:56) Yes.
Completely agree. We’re running out of time, Kim, but I truly appreciate you being here. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Kim Hansen (54:19) No, like, take care of there. I know it’s hard to build a startup, you know, work on your self-awareness to help yourself and know that it’s a tough journey, but you you’re doing good in the world. So keep going and make it happen.
Federico Ramallo (54:32) Thank you, thank you, I will. Thank you, Kim, for being here today.
Kim Hansen (54:35) Thank you so much. You’re
welcome. Bye.