AI ERP Innovation for Financial Executives to Disrupt Legacy Software with Franz Faerber
In this episode of Future Finance, Hosts Glenn Hopper and Paul Barnhurst sit down with Franz Faerber, Co-founder and CTO of Everest Systems, and one of the key minds behind SAP HANA. Franz shares his remarkable journey from leading SAP’s real-time database revolution to building Everest, a next-generation ERP platform designed from the ground up to embrace AI and modern business needs.
Franz Faerber is the Co-founder and CTO of Everest Systems, a next-gen AI-native ERP company. Before Everest, Franz spent over 26 years at SAP, where he served as Executive VP of Technology and was the original architect behind SAP HANA, one of the most advanced in-memory databases in the world. His work helped transform data processing and analytics for thousands of global enterprises. Now, at Everest, he is on a mission to revolutionize ERP from the ground up, embracing AI and agile development to tackle the inefficiencies of traditional systems.
In this episode, you will discover:
Why the ERP space is finally ready for disruption, and how Everest is leading that charge.
How Everest built a fully functional inventory management system in just four months without writing a single line of code.
The role of AI in accelerating ERP development, reducing costs, and enabling mass personalization.
Why Franz believes the future of ERP lies in integration, automation, and adaptability.
Franz Faerber’s insights offer a compelling vision for the future of ERP, one where AI, speed, and simplicity are no longer optional but essential. His journey from SAP HANA to Everest showcases what’s possible when innovation meets experience.
Follow Franz:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/franz-faerber/
Company - https://everest-systems.com
Join hosts Glenn and Paul as they unravel the complexities of AI in finance:
Follow Glenn:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiii
Follow Paul:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy
Follow QFlow.AI:
Website - https://bit.ly/4fYK9vY
Future Finance is sponsored by QFlow.ai, the strategic finance platform solving the toughest part of planning and analysis: B2B revenue. Align sales, marketing, and finance, speed up decision-making, and lock in accountability with QFlow.ai.
Stay tuned for a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the future of finance and what it means for businesses and individuals alike.
In Today’s Episode:
[02:18] - Meet Franz Faerber
[03:53] - The SAP HANA Revolution
[09:00] - Leaving SAP for Everest
[10:39] - Why Build a New ERP?
[18:36] - Dev & Release Cycles at Everest
[21:20] - What Sets Everest Apart
[25:48] - Leadership & Vision
[29:32] - Chess, Books & Strategy
[33:20] - Final Thoughts
Full Show Transcript:
[00:01:06] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Hello everyone! Welcome to Future Finance, where we talk about AI and technology and all the exciting things going on in our world today. I'm thrilled to be joined by my co-host, Glenn Hopper. Glenn, welcome to the show.
[00:01:48] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Great to be here.
[00:01:49] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Always fun to have you as a co-host. I miss it when I don't have you as my co-host on my other shows.
[00:01:54] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: I'm going to start just crashing your other podcasts.
[00:01:56] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Alrighty. Sounds good. Why don't you just crash them and we'll have it. The Glenn and Paul Show with a guest. So, as everybody knows, my name is Paul Barnhurst, aka The FP&A Guy. And this week we're thrilled to have with us a special guest we have with us, Franz Faerber. Franz, welcome to the show.
[00:02:15] Guest: Franz Faerber: And thanks for having me here.
[00:02:16] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, we're really excited to have you. So a little bit about his background. We're joined today by Franz. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He leads Everest's overall technology strategy, driving the architecture and product vision behind Everest's AI native ERP platform. Everest is a new tool in the marketplace that was recently launched. Prior to that, Franz spent over 30 years in enterprise software leadership. He was the executive vice president of Technology at SAP. He was the original architect and development lead of SAP Hana, the industry's most advanced in-memory database. He also served as head of SAP Hana Development, managing large global teams across Germany, India, and China. His work laid the foundation for modern real-time enterprise platforms used by thousands of global organizations. So again, Franz, super excited to have you here and get to have a few minutes of your time to chat about AI, technology, and what you're doing at Everest.
[00:03:23] Guest: Franz Faerber: Great. Thank you.
[00:03:24] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: I really want to get into Everest, but I feel like we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about Hana. Most finance leaders have heard of Hana, but maybe not the story behind it. And I really think that Hana broke down the wall between transactional systems and analytics, I think that, I mean, that's something that obviously that finance leaders still wrestle with today. So, Franz, I'd love to hear the vision that drove you and your team to tackle that problem back then. And maybe like, what lessons from that experience can still apply to leaders today trying to bring real time data into finance. And I guess maybe if you could give a little bit of background, if I'm not mistaken, Hana is a translated database. Is that the best way to describe it?
[00:04:09] Guest: Franz Faerber: Exactly. Right. It's a combination of transactional and analytic database, and you can call it translating. It came from the idea of having data in memory. At that point in time, when memory was, we didn't have so much memory in the late 28, 27. Right. 29 and there the idea is, what can you do if you have all the data in memory and which operations can you do there? We came mainly from the analytic space where we integrated into the warehousing system there in SAP, and then in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute, which is a university in Potsdam. There we had the idea and said, can we use the same technology also as a transactional database for the flagship product of SAP, which is your system. And then, you know, the idea behind that and the thinking model was behind that. Let's assume the operational costs. The cost of a database is zero because everything is in memory. Of course that's not true, but it's a nice thinking model if it's zero. What can you do with unlimited speed in such a system? And that's where we drove all these innovations out of that. One is the technology side, but especially it was also what can we do with unlimited speed in an ERP, in a transactional system, in an analytic system? And what new stuff can we build?
[00:05:27] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: And it was really a foundational shift. And is it? I know that's been around a while, but are there still thoughts in thinking today that you kind of learn from that and still apply that same approach with what you're doing at Everest, and the way that finance leaders should think about it as well?
[00:05:44] Guest: Franz Faerber: Yeah. First of all, right. It is not expensive anymore to have huge amounts of data, right? This was a story from yesterday. You can fix it. You can solve the problem. Somebody comes and says, oh, I have billions of data sets and now we have a problem to do. So. That is nonsense, right? It depends on which technology you want to use. I think that's one thing. The second is what I've learned for myself from that was mainly, you know, if you have such a technology, whatever it is a main memory. Is it whatever we do currently, on average, think that through. What does it mean? What can you do with it? If you go to the extreme and think in extremes and try to achieve at the limit of what this technology gives you? I think that's the main learning I had out of that.
[00:06:27] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: That's pretty amazing. I know I love the premise you shared of, you know, what would we do if, you know, we could be as fast as we wanted and it was all free?
[00:06:37] Guest: Franz Faerber: Exactly.
[00:06:38] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Because that's really how you push the boundaries. Is thinking outside the box.
[00:06:42] Guest: Franz Faerber: Exactly. And then the question was right. Do you need it? And in these systems, what the applications did is in order to do analytics in addition to the transactional space, they always wrote the data twice, right? Once in their analytic tables and also in their transactional tables, because otherwise you didn't get the performance. Now the point was, do I need that anymore? Right? If you have unlimited speed, you can do that all with your transactional tables and your transactional storage, which makes the application so much faster and so much simpler, right? You can throw a huge amount of code you can throw away, and you have the same kind of the same performance on transactional data structure. I think that was a big shift and made it then much, much easier to maintain the application to extend them and so on. I think that was a big shift.
[00:07:30] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, no, it definitely was. I think everybody has heard of, you know, SAP Hana. And it definitely was a shift in the way we thought. And I'm sure you've brought some of that to Everest along with other things, as you mentioned. You know, it's much easier now from a cost standpoint, right. Large data sets are not as big a concern as they were a decade ago, 15 years ago. I mean, all we have to do is look at the size of these servers and the amount of data we're using for AI. Right. It's, uh. It's amazing how far we've come.
[00:08:00] Guest: Franz Faerber: Yeah. And I think that was also a point when we said, like, what happens now? And that is one of our technologies which we are developing, right. What happens now is the data is so fast that you can rethink things which you would not have even thought about 15, 15 years ago. And that's what we call our sandboxing technology, right? If you can even do very, very complex statements against your database, even on huge amounts of data, then you can build a different system. And one thing which we did is what we call our live sandboxing, where what we are saying is we are giving every user who is logging on to the system if the user wants. We are giving the same set of huge amounts of tables privately, and then we mix in the SQL statement, the private tables, and the and the standard tables together in one big SQL statement, and the database can do that. You would never have come to that idea ten years ago and say, this can scale, right?
[00:09:00] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I'm curious. I know at the end of your time, before you started at Everest, you took a leave from SAP for about eight months before starting Everest. When you did that, did you know you were going to be starting a company? Was that kind of the plan when you took that leave, or was it just, hey, it's time for a break. Let me figure out what's next. Kind of walk through what you did during that time.
[00:09:21] Guest: Franz Faerber: Yeah, it was exactly the second one, right? I was 26 years in SAP, and I thought, you know, there's two options for myself, right? Either I retire in SAP and do all my work that was interesting enough, or I want to do something different. I want to have a change. Right. And this was absolutely the time for a change. Then I thought, I will do six months, nothing and just sit in the garden. And then really three weeks later, I came into contact with our current main investor with Sutter Hill. And then the garden leaf. The official garden leaf was over, right? Then we started to build Everest. Or it was in reality, it was a three week garden. Right? And then I left the garden.
[00:10:02] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: So the garden didn't get near the attention you originally planned?
[00:10:05] Guest: Franz Faerber: No no, no. That was not. It was great. Right? But it was just three weeks.
[00:10:11] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Well, I hope you rested well for those three weeks, because as the founder of a new ERP startup, you're not going to rest for a while.
[00:10:20] Guest: Franz Faerber: That's really true. But it's a lot of fun and it's super exciting. And I would never have learned what I learned the last five years.
[00:10:29] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Well, maybe after you have your big exit, you'll get to spend all that time in the garden.
[00:10:33] Guest: Franz Faerber: Yeah. The garden is ready. But look at the garden. What it looks like. It also needs me now, right? At some point in time.
[00:10:39] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: So I'm curious. You know, what motivated you? Obviously, you met the investor. You know, your founders. You jumped into this quite quickly after a three week break. So what motivated you and your co-founders to start Everest Systems? What was the thinking that we needed a new ERP tool in this space?
[00:10:56] Guest: Franz Faerber: Well, first of all, if you work in an ERP company for such a long time, you're sitting with your friends, with your colleagues in the coffee corner and always debating what could be better. Why is it so? Why is it not great and not great enough? And know all the things a lot of ideas are always and and of course, you know, an ERP system is not a system which normally customers love, right? If you go to to ERP users, they don't hug you and say, you are so great and you are the greatest that you built our ERP system, that's not happening, right? And then, um, after these three weeks, right. When, when we discussed with, with the investors and said, hey, maybe we build a new one from scratch. If you are really a full blood developer in the full ERP guys and you don't use this opportunity, then it's really time to retire, right? Because that's a once in a lifetime opportunity to build one of the biggest systems software systems which are out there in the world, and you have the opportunity to build it from scratch. What your guys, which you admire in SAP, did 45 or 50 years ago, can I say no? It's not possible, right? It is. There is no chance. There was no chance to say no. Of course I asked my family if they agree, but they knew if they didn't agree, I would be very unhappy. So yeah, there was no chance to say no.
[00:12:16] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Love it. And as Glenn once said, you know, you mentioned nobody loves their ERP, right? You don't generally say people's going around saying, wow, I love my ERP. As Glenn put it, there's two things that will get a CFO fired for fraud. And telling a CEO that he wants to do an ERP implementation.
[00:12:34] Guest: Franz Faerber: Exactly, exactly. And we always say also that we said already in SAP, and we also say now the CFO has never been fired to choose SAP. If you choose another ERP, you have a higher chance. And that was great when being in SAP, and it's now a little bit of a struggle when you are not in the S&P, right?
[00:12:50] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Exactly. Finance has been conservative. You select IBM, SAP, and Oracle. That's the safe pick.
[00:12:58] Guest: Franz Faerber: Yes, exactly.
[00:12:59] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: There is a whole slew of new ERPs coming into the market right now. And the interesting thing, and Paul, I want you to note, it's been like, what, 11 minutes since we started? And I'm finally just now bringing up AI. But you knew I was going to get here. Um, but I, I think about the battleships, the sap's, the oracle's, the big systems that have been around forever. And how hard it would be at a company or just a product of that size. And because of how complex the implementations are and how careful they have to be with implementing new features into those products. Now, though, you're the nimble speedboat. I know you started this before generative AI really kicked in, but I'm wondering how the rise of generative AI has influenced the way that you've built and modified Everest systems, and what kind of changes you've had since the onset and since everybody's talking about generative AI right now, and we're seeing the possibility around it.
[00:13:57] Guest: Franz Faerber: You know exactly what you said. We started in, um, in 2020, beginning in 2020, um, a little bit earlier thinking about that, there was no generative AI there. So we started without it. You know, the point is, what is the fundamental change in our direction at that point in time? We believed that it takes ten, 15, maybe 20 years to be on the level of a sap, right? Because, um, you know, looking at what they have built the last 50 years on an application, on the stack, on the functionality. That's the reason why there are not so many new ERP is there. That is changing super dramatically now with generative AI. And therefore our approach is now twofold, right? No CFO would ever go to a generated accounting system and put its head on his head on the, on, on the table and saying, I believe that the generated accounting system lets me sleep in the night. That's not working right and nobody will do that. Therefore, we said there's a base system which you manually have to develop. And then there are applications on top of that which you really can generate. Of course, even when developing an accounting system, right, AI can help you. You know, these winters and all these guys can help you to build faster, but then you really want to generate complete applications. Then you have to do it on top of the existing modules, right. Therefore, we always have a really working transactional system. And on top of this, this application can be generated. Now we believe that we can be on the same level in five years instead of 50. I think that's a big change in the way generative AI really helps us.
[00:15:37] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I mean, that's huge, from a speed to market cost everything.
[00:15:41] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: You're spot on. And I just was thinking I'm you posted recently on LinkedIn. Great software isn't about geography. It can come from anywhere in the world. But I'm thinking now with live coding, it's geography. It's faster. More people are able to do it. Um, so with what you were saying, I mean, in your opinion, considering the environment we're in now, what does it take to create great software? Uh, with all things considered that you can have people anywhere in the world doing it, people are doing it with live coding a lot more productive around it and all that.
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[00:17:23] Guest: Franz Faerber: You know, I assume when we assume that, you know, as it is, as you said, it's so easy to develop applications or software that there will be an inflation of these applications. Everybody will be able to do so, right? When you look at them, the amount of people, the sheer amount of people who can now develop, it's just a factor of, I don't know, 10 to 100 times bigger than it was five years ago. Right. And everybody everywhere can kind of generate these applications. Therefore, there will be a massive amount of applications in all areas. So the question of such a provider like VR or the other big software provider is not functionality of applications anymore or building applications. It's the ability to integrate full fledged processes and adapt them to the customer's needs. Right. We will see many more kinds of personalized applications. We will see much more need for integrations, because if you have 10,000 different applications which you have to integrate, the cost is higher than having one, one provider or vice provider as in the past, or this integration thing is a big thing. And second is that personalization is a big thing. That's what we believe is the future. It's not about application functionality anymore because that's for free.
[00:18:36] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: I'm wondering with all this, what has it done to your dev cycle and your release cycle? And very different, I would imagine, from SAP on how often you're rolling out updates. What does it look like, your typical sprints and, you know, in QA and test and release. How does all that go?
[00:18:55] Guest: Franz Faerber: Well, first of all, of course, it's kind of daily these days. But um, but we do the releases now . We deliver now in November, the first version of a really sophisticated inventory management, where I normally would say it takes three years to develop. We needed to develop it without writing a single line of code, no single line of code in four and a half months. And now we are able to deliver the first version, a complete inventory management system. Right? That's a change.
[00:19:27] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: Yeah. Wow. Wow.
[00:19:29] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: It's kind of mind blowing to think, right? Not a single line of code is four and a half months compared to three years. It's.
[00:19:35] Guest: Franz Faerber: This is a big , unbelievable change, right? For an old software dinosaur like me, this is just. Wow. This is so mind blowing, right, that you're saying, wow, is it real.
[00:19:46] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: When you're doing this? You know, we kind of skipped over it because I did want to talk about Hannah at the beginning, but we haven't really talked about Everest for your product now and your, your constantly rolling out new features and new modules. When you're going to market, what is your competitive differentiator and what is what is the feature set and everything that is going to make office of the CFO when they see they have a lot of options now they've got the old standbys, and then they've got a bunch of upstart ones and a bunch of AI first ones. What is Everest bringing to the market that's unique?
[00:20:20] Guest: Franz Faerber: Well, when you look at when you operate an ERP system or when you implement an ERP system, the software costs are normally for a little bit bigger projects, or maybe one third to one fifth of the overall cost. The main costs are integration, our implementation, our operating, the stuff and so on. And there we have a really big breakthrough with our technology, with our sandboxing technology that it's much, much easier to operate the system and you need a much smaller, smaller landscape with us. That's one of the big changes we are implementing natively, the new business models. Right. Especially subscriptions. That's a big differentiator. And then, you know, this extensibility and this possibility to build new applications also for the customers and doing the extensions and not being forced to buy and and adopt and configure all these solutions anymore. That's also a big thing. So at the end operations, new functionality and the unlimited functionality of AI.
[00:21:20] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: As you're building this out, obviously you're going to keep making it more and more robust and it's going to have more built in features. But from the beginning, since you can't do everything all at once, was there a big focus on integration with existing finance, tech stack, CRM and bill payment and other tools? Is that a big part of the rollout is people can attach other systems in the communication and passing data in between them.
[00:21:45] Guest: Franz Faerber: Of course, you cannot believe that you go to new customers and they are just using Everest, right? Bad luck. That's not the case. You have to integrate a lot. But you know what you learn when you're doing an ERP system, the core of every ERP system is accounting, right? First of all, you have to do accounting. If you are not the system of records, you are not a real ERP system. You are an extension of another system. And then you build around accounting. That's kind of what all these successful bigger systems started with accounting, or at least as a second application. When you look at workday and then you have to integrate in the first integration is one of the key topics.
[00:22:23] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: So I think about how much there's the market is clamoring for. We want, you know, we want to be able to chat with our data. We want to be able to tie in. And I thought I was actually pretty impressed. I've only had a chance to mess around with it a little bit, but, um, that, uh, NetSuite rolled out connectors with an MCP server. I thought that was a really smart way to do it because that way they can. They're almost at arm's length. I mean, they're letting it come in, but they're giving it the functionality that instead of integrating it directly into the software, they're doing that. Are you right now, are you on your roadmap or in the existing product? Are you integrating generative AI directly in, or do you think you'll take a more similar approach where it's we're going to give you the APIs and the connectors, and you can bolt on what.
[00:23:09] Guest: Franz Faerber: We're doing both, you know, the behalf of AI integrated everywhere that's here, but especially also we are using our own APIs as MCP or APIs in our generation of new applications. Right. And there we are not using just MCP. We are also really having a way, a process which we call AI specify, um, maybe ah, um, enabling ourselves, but also our customers to specify applications with the help of AI and then generating all the stuff automatically out of it. And of course, then we use all this technology. You mentioned NCP and APIs and whatever is available agent technology, everything. It's clear.
[00:23:50] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: It's amazing to talk to you, Frans, and just people who are tackling the ERP space because for the longest time it felt like nobody would touch it. Right. Too big. It's like I ain't going there. Two deep pockets from SAP and Oracle and too long of a cycle. And now we're seeing a fresh crop of people attacking it in different ways. And I know you guys are coming after it. And it's exciting because it's an area that I think has been needing innovation. What's your thoughts on that? How do you see kind of, you know, the need for innovation in this space kind of compared to the, you know, the established players.
[00:24:26] Guest: Franz Faerber: I think when we speak with customers and companies, they love our approach. They love that there is at least they have a choice now, right? That they have a choice. And saying, okay, we can, uh, we can use something fresh. They were waiting for somebody who is at least speaking a little bit the bigger guys and saying, okay, yeah, they should not fall, fall in sleep, you know, of course doing then the decision of changing the ERP is a big one. This is more than just being happy that there's a competitor out there. But you know that people are so happy about seeing something different. They are just saying, hey, it's so great that you guys are trying that, um, you know, to be honest, when we started the journey, all of my friends and colleagues said, you are totally crazy. Like, you know, look at where you are. It will take 20 years and you know, you will not survive that. Um, and, um, everybody said that, right? And, um, now we are there and we have a solid system and, um, yeah. And, customers are super happy.
[00:25:28] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Love it. And you're not the first person that I've heard say that from one of these founders, the ERP space. A lot of people are like, are you sure that's what you want to do? How about tackling this or that problem. You really want to go after the full ERP. So? So yeah, we hear that a lot. We've definitely heard that before. And you know, changing gears here a little bit. You recently shared a quote on LinkedIn that I like. And I just love to get you to elaborate a little bit on it. You said you can't build momentum if you're trying to make everyone happy. A clear vision matters more than consensus. So could you elaborate a little bit on that?
[00:26:05] Guest: Franz Faerber: Then you have a vision or a mission that you want to achieve. And then the point is not that everybody agrees to that. But if everybody would agree to that, somebody would have already done it. Right. And that's clear. You have to be controversial, especially in technology, but also in the way to go. And when I looked into our history, of course, there was a lot of discussion. Oh, should we now go broader or should we now build multiple applications. That's the sandboxing really. How fast do we have to go to AI at the end. Most people are willing to follow a vision if it's clear. If you're doing that, if you are really convinced of that, if you're heading forward. Right. What people don't want is that you by yourself don't know in which direction you want to go. If you're really convinced, if you really believe in that, if you can, that transport to the people, then people are willing to follow your path and give you credit even if they don't believe it. And therefore people don't look for somebody who is pleasing them. People want to follow a vision and want to be convinced of a vision and not, uh, not pleasing people. Nobody likes that.
[00:27:19] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I agree with you there. So one last question. Then we're going to move into our AI section and we'll surprise you a little bit there. But so I noticed you mentioned on LinkedIn all of your family plays chess, your big chess players. So what is love about chess? How did that come about that everybody in the family is big chess players.
[00:27:37] Guest: Franz Faerber: You know, my son started first. I was playing a little bit. My sons started first. And he really was deep in chess. And then of course, he convinced all my wife and then all the siblings, and he became really good and was so fascinated. And, you know, the problem is now he is not willing to play with me anymore because he says, you know, my old guy is not good enough anymore. And it is not fun, fun, fun to play. But it is really an amazing game. And, you know, people believe if you watch a game it is boring. But if you are deep in that, it is like a soccer game or a football game, right? You are so deep in and you are sweating because it's getting so exciting and you're waiting for the next move. You cannot believe that the chess game you are sweating when you watch it, right? Therefore, I really like it and I'm a super fan of it.
[00:28:24] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: It's funny you say that as someone who's watching the Vuelta a Espana, uh, professional cycling right now, that has got to be the most boring thing in the world to most people. But I get the same thing from it. I'm terrible at chess. Uh, but, uh, but I know what you're talking about. If you ride bikes, uh, you understand what they're going through on the bike racing. And if you play chess, you get it better with what they're going through on that. So I love that.
[00:28:46] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: It's funny how that works. All right. So we're going to move into our get to know you a little better section where what we did is we fed your bio your LinkedIn profile, whatever could find on the web, the questions we came up with today, and we asked it to come up with some personal kind of fun, a little bit quirky questions. So I came up with 25. I use one method. Glenn uses a different method. So my method is you can pick a number between 1 and 25, or the random number generator can pick a number between 1 and 25. It will ask you that question. So which one do you want?
[00:29:23] Guest: Franz Faerber: I would like to choose 13.
[00:29:25] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: 13. All right. I haven't even looked at these questions, so sometimes they're pretty bad. I like this one. In chess you always need an opening strategy. What's your opening strategy when you join a brand new project or company?
[00:29:41] Guest: Franz Faerber: Good question. Let me think. Let me think for a moment. First of all, I want to speak with experts in a project. That's the opening thing. I want to listen to people who really understand it. Because the first thing which I have seen from people, you throw a problem at them and they immediately want to solve it and don't want to understand it. And I think that's my opening always. I really want to understand it. And before I answer, I have to understand it. I have to speak with people. I have to look into literature. And now with AI, right. Uh, going to AI, it's really easy to learn a lot about that. And that would be my opening. Always learning first before answering.
[00:30:18] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: What that reminds me of is if you ever read, there's a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and one of the things he says is seek first to understand, then to be understood. It's kind of what you're going to write. You're showing that to be highly effective, you first need to talk to the experts and understand it before you can come up with a strategy or decide what to do next.
[00:30:39] Guest: Franz Faerber: Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:30:41] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: All right, Glenn, over to you.
[00:30:42] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: All right. So, um, first off, who, which model came up with these questions this week? They're pretty good. Sometimes. They're really good. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So all right kudos for five. Everybody's knocking it. But I like these questions.
[00:30:55] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: I change my question a little bit every time I'm sure I can go back and find them but I should record them.
[00:31:00] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: So okay so let's see. So on my approach I just take the human out of the loop completely and turn it completely over to the AI. And since AI created them, I just load them in and say, uh, and just tell it to pick a random one. So let me do that. Okay? I like this one. As someone, I read a lot more fiction than I do nonfiction, so I do. I like this question. What's your favorite non-tech book that you think has secretly made you a better technologist? So I'm guessing this would be a fiction book, or it could be nonfiction, but something that is not technically related, that is, uh, transferred into making you a better technologist. We'll go over the movie even. Maybe we can go.
[00:31:41] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Book or movie. But what's something that's non-tech that's helped you? There we go.
[00:31:45] Guest: Franz Faerber: Yeah, I think from the movie there is, um, there's a book in Germany called Homo Faber. Uh, that's also a movie. I don't know if you have seen that. That's maybe that's from a German, German author. And there, you know, what I've learned there is that things can really change your life in a way that you don't foresee, and you nevertheless have to react to that in a way which is appropriate right there. That was a story when, when, when a father had a relationship with with his, his daughter and not knowing about that and how how they dealt with that and, and then they figured out really makes me, made me think of, you know, what things can happen in your life which you cannot foresee, and how do you deal with that? And then being really robust on things, on bad things which can happen to you and saying, hey, we have to deal with those situations in the world. And that's the same in a company in the technical world, right? Especially when you start a company, there are so many different things that you don't foresee which are ugly, which are bad, which are good, which depress you. On the day you go home and say, no, I will stop the thing. No, no chance that I will continue. And the most important thing is that you deal with it. And out of the book. I think that's that's my learned out of that.
[00:33:01] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: That's great. And it reminds me of antifragile, right? Like what? You know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and gets strength from that. And then you can't. Especially in the startup space. You can't predict everything that's going to happen. You don't know what's coming down the pike. You just have to be resilient and able to deal with it and kind of roll with the punches. So that's great. Yeah. Perfect answer.
[00:33:20] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Alrighty. Well, Frans, thank you so much for carving out, you know, some time with us today. We've really enjoyed chatting with you. We wish you the best with Everest Systems. We know it's an exciting time and it's a challenging market, but people have been clamoring for a new ERP for a while now. I mean, I know people are getting really excited to see this space start to heat up and, you know, seeing what AI can do. And so love that you've tackled this, that you decided, hey, I want to do that big project. We wish you the best of luck, and we're excited to see you grow in the future and watch Everest systems grow and develop. So thanks for carving out 30 minutes for us today.
[00:34:00] Guest: Franz Faerber: Thanks for having me and thanks for the opportunity to speak with you was a real pleasure. Thank you.
[00:34:04] Host 2: Glenn Hopper: All right. Thank you Brian.
[00:34:05] Host 1: Paul Barnhurst: Thanks for listening to the Future Finance Show. And thanks to our sponsor, QFlow.ai. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review on your podcast platform of choice, and may your robot overlords be with you.