Why Trust and Transparency Are Crucial for Businesses Large and Small (EP 02)

Trust and transparency should be foundational for any business. From global scandals and data breaches to regulatory missteps, the stakes for companies are always rising. The systems that are meant to safeguard employees, customers, and investors are being tested like never before. In this episode of the Global Tech podcast, we want to ask, what problem or problems was Confide built to solve? What makes building a speakup culture so deceptively hard? Does AI or emerging technology have a role in the future of

compliance? And to explore these questions and [music] more, we are joined by Pav Gil, a co-founder and CEO of Confied Platform. Pav, thank you so much for coming to the show. How are you doing today? >> I'm good. Thanks for having me. >> It is my complete pleasure. Okay, let's just jump right in. In an environment where corporate trust and transparency, and I mentioned this during the intro, right, are more important than ever, what is the big problem we're trying to solve with confide and why is it so important right now? >> We're just trying to consolidate all the different scattered processes uh that

exist. I mean, organizations have too many silos. You know, you have different solutions doing different things. You've got different people doing different things and communication is always challenging. um I mean even on a personal basis you know we find those uh challenging issues with our friends with our in our relationships and stuff um it's much worse in companies so you know why not just consolidate everything into a single system that brings everything together as a single source of truth so then if anything goes wrong or if

there's anything you want to check you have one place to go to see how it started who dealt with it and what happened at the end so that's what confi's actually doing >> but this is for compliance stuff Yeah. >> Yeah. Mostly operational compliance things like grievances, whistleblowing, uh AI governance, third party risk, health and safety even. Um so just bringing it all together. Uh we we're just trying to power uh organizations operational compliance. >> Okay. So those topics that you just mentioned, right, whether it's um operational compliance, all this other

stuff you just mentioned, why are those things either individually or collectively so important right now? And is it moving faster than it used to internally at these companies? Is it moving slower? Like why is this stuff so important? >> It's important because when things go wrong, that's where you get huge fines and you have reputational damage. Um and then fingerpointing tends to happen as well. [laughter] >> Yeah. You know, everyone likes to blame someone other than themselves um or something, right? Something something didn't work, something crashed, uh the

software was faulty, uh it didn't communicate with our other tool and so on, right? So having having a single tool uh single compliance stack I think that's really important. I think at the end of the day boards are starting to expect governance um to be equally as important as you know ENS right the G is coming back uh with greater strength now um so I think you know you want to have one place where you can deal with all these issues things get flagged early so you can think of it as an early risk uh

detection mechanism and a way for you to just sensibly deal with uh issues as as and when they come about and these don't have to be very serious issues, right? Is really some of them are just ticking the box. Um, if something's not working or if there's a transaction that didn't make any sense, it's flagged, it's dealt with in the health and safety aspect. You know, if a construction worker, he sees a loose cable, a loose wire, he just wants to flag that um have someone else deal with it. So being able to use

that mobile phone, take a pick of it, and just carry on with his day-to-day activities um on site, you know, we're just making things easier for everyone in the organization from top to bottom. >> What what are they doing now? And the reason why I ask is because and you you can see me thinking about this, right? Like I spent my whole career at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, these big global financial institutions. And I'm not going to say that they were doing things that were bad, but I am saying that there were plenty of opportunities where it would have been nice to have just some mechanism to be able to say, I'll give you an example. Okay, I had a

client once ask me to buy a stock from them that had gone bankrupt, but they wanted me to pay one yen for it, which is illegal. It's completely illegal. Even though it's just one yen, it's a tiny amount of in it's an immaterial amount of money. And the guy was literally like he was pushing me super hard, right? And I went to my boss and I'm like, I'm not doing this. There's no way I'm not I'm not going to violate some kind of regulation to to do this because it's my neck on the line, right? But there was no other mechanism to this. There was no system that we knew

about. There was no way to log this. There was nothing. What are companies doing now? And like how does this sort of integrated platform then fix that or where does it fit inside of all the other stuff that people are doing? Does that make sense? >> Yeah, it does. And that's also one of the reasons why we've built um conflicts of interest as a as a software. So managing these things like you mentioned, you know, being asked to invest or purchase something. Currently, it's a very manual process for companies. You know, if you want to invest in a stock, right, you got to

fill up a form, send it to your boss, he has to fire it off to his boss. Someone in the risk team at some point would approve it. But when is that approval given? What stock is it or what company is it given for? is that actually tracking the trading desk to see if there are any violations. For example, if it's in a bank. Um, so what we're doing is digitizing that whole thing. Same for gifts and entertainment, right? You need a you need a register. You want to digitize that. So where this all fits in is you're really giving an intelligence tool to companies. Uh I

wouldn't say an external intelligence tool per se, but also an internal one. So then you can see like you can make those connections. So for example, if one day you know an employee actually raised a conflicts issue, he wanted to invest in a company. The company somehow became a vendor and was mentioned in a whistleblowing case. You know, he was mentioned as a company in a whistleblowing case. You as an organization, you can put all the dots together. You can see like, wait a minute, this company was flagged before in our conflicts tool. Someone actually asked to approve an investment into it.

Now, how did they become a vendor? Oh wait, the third party risk uh software that we have actually says they were onboarded and now the same person that was asking for all these approvals is now mentioned in a whistleblowing case and now when we look at this person he's also got a grievance case two years ago against him right so we're bringing that whole intel in one place >> so you're saying that like if I'm using the confide platform at scale you I'm inside a company we're particularly thinking about having a new vendor come into our system we actually may get some notifications that says well this

company has already been flagged for conflicts of interest at other companies. Somebody was whistleblowing at this company for some other reason. May have nothing to do with you. But then it may give you second chance to say like maybe we don't want to work with these guys because they're they seem problematic. >> No, it wouldn't do that in terms of an external screen. Uh so that's what you're referring to, but it'll do it internally. So if we don't want to use companies or entities as an example, we can use employees. Go ahead. So say there's an executive you know someone someone external has raised a complaint

against him through the platform saying you know this guy has tried to bribe me um to purchase your software straight away you know the system would be able to detect by name uh and say wait this employee he was two years ago in this grievance case he had another whistle blowing against him three years ago. Uh so then you can connect the dots and you can also do that not only from an employee standpoint but like a subsidiary standpoint. Why is this particular subsidiary say in country X? Why are they always coming up in reports? Let's double click into them

and see what's going on in terms of why there's always an issue. Right? So that's where we are trying to connect all these dots because otherwise if you don't have what you have in companies currently is a lot of point solutions doing specific tasks. So they may be doing something screening some some other aspect but they're not communicating with a department that's a different department or a different software. Right? So we're just like bringing the whole ecosystem um all these functionalities and workflows into one place. So what we want to build

really is the governance homepage of a company. So when you log on you see that governance homepage uh you can then straight away uh see what's what's happening at any one point, what's happening in the whistleblowing section, what's happening in the gifts and entertainment, the third party risk section. So that's what we're actually building towards. >> So this is super interesting, right? So what you're again what you're suggesting is that like if some dude in London, I'm using London because I was in Tokyo or some dude in New York or some dude in the office in I don't know in Hong Kong was doing something sketchy and I didn't

know about it, but somebody like brought something up to me. I could then go in into my internal stuff and just go, "Oh my god, Bob is just constantly being flagged for stuff like this. Something needs to happen about this. It's all internal stuff. I get it. That's super interesting. Boy, I wish I had known that. There were plenty of people that needed to be flagged [laughter] and I wish I had known. It wasn't just in London and New York and Hong Kong by the way. I'm sure there was plenty of that going on in Tokyo too. How would you say your previous work experience has shaped like the initial vision for

Confive, right? Like when you're sitting around, you look at your your overall career and you're thinking we really need to do this, but we need to do this because I learned this thing, that thing, and the other thing when I was doing some other jobs, right? Where does where does that experience come in? And then how is the vision evolved once you started building this? >> I mean it was the whistleblowing experience that's for sure. So that was what inspired me to create the whistleblowing software. That was our flagship product. Uh I wanted to actually put my experience not only as a general counsel um but also as a

whistleblower into a product. I wanted to like you know put that into something tangible. I didn't just want to be a consultant because you know what's the what's the legacy contribution there in terms of a hard product, right? Um so that's that's why when we first launched it was with the whistleblowing software. Why we made it unique is because all the software in the market that exists on for whistleblowing they primarily just focus on receiving reports. But that's not where things go wrong. Things go wrong after that. Right? What happened when you received the reports? How did the company deal with it? How was the

communications done with the person reporting? Uh how did you conclude that case? So that's what makes us different from the whistleblowing standpoint. So that's what we launched with and um it took a lot of uh it it really took the market by storm because they never seen anything so end to end in that way. And then we had our customers actually telling us like hey you've built this great whistleblowing software can you now build something we can use every day because we don't get whistleblowing reports every day. Right. >> Right. Thankfully or at least I hope so. >> I hope so. I was going to say if they are that's a bigger that's a bigger

problem that they have. >> Yeah. So that's when I put on my general counsel compliance hat again and I spoke to a lot of these customers and that's where we started expanding the product suite to deal with daily operational issues like grievances you know that's so common in companies could be bullying harassment environmental breaches that need to be flagged um conflicts of interest management third party risk uh you know in terms of vendor due diligence for example and then AI governance I think is really going to be big because you have so many companies

starting to adopt AI solutions, right? Like all the tools, all the software, that's going to become like a norm. In fact, it already probably is. But then how are you governing that those solutions? Because there's a governance framework that you use coming up with an AI act. So that's where the AI governance tool would be very critical for companies um in managing a lot of these issues like what if the software is malfunctioning, it's hallucinating, is now racially biased in terms of what it's doing. if it's a screening uh candidate screening tool, you need to be able to have somewhere where you can

raise these issues. You can then manage them and bulletproof yourself as an organization. So, I want to talk about the grievances if you don't mind. This is something that's really interesting to me partially because [clears throat] and again tell me if my memory is wrong on this, right? But you've worked at big companies as well. At some level, even if it's not the company itself, but maybe just in the smaller department in which you work, it comes, if the leadership is good, I would say it sort of turns into a little bit of a cult. >> Do you know what I mean?

>> You know what I mean, right? >> And because of that, it makes it hard. Like I remember, like I was telling you, like this client was bullying me. They really were. They were just browbeating me into doing something that they knew. And they literally said to me, I'll tell you exactly what they said to me. Hey man, look, if you don't do this, I'm just going to call Lehman. They'll definitely do it for us, and then I'll just take all my business over to Lehman Brothers, which makes me laugh in retrospect because Leman Brothers went bankrupt and Goldman was still there. Um, but the point is that like it was really hard. So, how do you convince

people, right? Because having a tool is one thing, but then how do you work with the companies to convince people that the system itself is secure enough and that you know people won't find out who's giving out this information that they can feel safe to actually file a grievance or be a whistleblower, do this stuff and that bad things won't happen to them because there are plenty of stories in the in the news about people that did do this and just were harassed forever, right? So, how how does that help? >> I mean, there's so many ways to address that. Uh, it's kind of a loaded

question. [laughter] >> Yeah, it's but it's not it's not meant to be loaded for you. It's meant to just be like I want people to think about this in a way that like >> how can we make it easier for people because somebody who's reporting a grievance or doing some whistleblowing is really trying to do the right thing. How do you how do you build a culture internally to some of these companies where you can encourage them to use the tools in a way that's actually in the way that they were meant to be used and that the grievances actually get logged and that people feel comfortable doing it and that they feel secure enough to

do it. >> It's a conversation with uh leadership and and whoever is in control functions. I think when you tell them, you're not trying to do a cultural shift, but what you're actually trying to do is enable them or empower them to know about issues in the company first before being taken by surprise. I think that's where they realize, okay, that actually makes sense. Like what do you mean? And what we're telling them is look, you need to have something s in internally that's secure, that's safe, that's actually trusted by your employees. So they can

flag everything and not everything is a very serious big crime or some bad thing, right? Sometimes they're just disclosures like, "Oh, I walked past the um I walked past this room and the air con's leaking and I hope someone can go fix it because, you know, I there's there's a plug nearby and I don't want there to be like an explosion or electric issue." But all you're doing is just you're just flagging it, right? You may not necessarily want to drive an outcome the way you would want to drive say if you were a grievance victim of say sexual harassment. Now that becomes

personal. You want justice, you want an outcome. But it's very different ways of dealing with it, right? So I think that's where you're telling companies look u have a mechanism where simple things it could be internal audit type operational comp type risk business risk whatever just flag it put it somewhere someone can deal with it um try to minimize the blockages from middle management that happens very often in grievances and whistleblowing you know you speak to whoever your supervisor is and he tries to just shut it down and then the board or the the general

counsel or whoever they don't even know about it until that person now goes external and they are like how come I didn't know about it if I knew about it I would have done something about it right of course it's a very convenient thing to say but with confide you're now going you skip level reporting you're actually going straight to the very top level um for for all these matters and then they can down delegate so you've got that audit trail you've got that direct coms and we've built in a lot of encryption protections and to guarant to try to like protect people reporting for

example in whistleblowing we have the ability to leave a voice report, you can distort your voice as well. So yeah, so if you don't want to like type out a report, which is also an option, um you can do that. I mean, even if you type a report and you upload evidence, we scrub out the metadata from that. So there's no way to try to like track you down in the PDF or whatever you sent. Uh so it's quite sophisticated in terms of how we go towards protecting uh people raising issues. What kind of risks do companies do companies run if because this is what

I was thinking right again like I said it's kind of cultlike right so it feels like internally we can have all these arguments and all these discussions and try to solve all these problems ourselves but if somebody structurally internally who has power says yeah we're not going to deal with this there's nothing really stopping somebody from going outside what are the external risks that people run just from your experience >> uh you mean for the person that's actually going outside to report >> or for the company. In other words, like like there were so many things I'm I'm just trying to replay in my mind like

all the things that I saw and heard. I never went external to say anything to anybody. I did talk about it internally, right? And there was no systematic way to do it, but like there were big risks I think for companies if they're not managing this stuff properly internally. Yeah. >> Yeah. Especially if you're a listed company um and you're always being circled by say I say if you're successful, you've got a bunch of short sellers and hedge funds circling you all the time. Uh the last thing you want to do is have people go outside to them for example, right? Or them to sniff out that look there's some serious bad stuff

going in the com within the company. Um let's try to get hold of employees who might have information on these things. So what you don't want you want to really minimize the uh push factors from within I would say because there are and they do exist in certain markets pull factors like in the US you get a good payout for blowing the whistle right. Um, and in Malaysia, if you want to get protected as a whistleblower, the very first person you need to speak to is an enforcement agency. You can't even speak to your boss.

>> Just just legally. >> Yeah. Legally. >> Okay. So, this is really interesting. Can you talk a little bit more about this because I find this fascinating. I've lived in Asia for the past who knows 800 years, right? But you've been traveling around the world and working around the world probably more than I have, particularly in the last 10 or 15 years. How does your strategy change and the building of what you're building change if you're operating in Asia? If you're operating in Europe or if you're operating in the United States, do you know what I mean? Like this Malaysia thing is news to me, right? Like I would just tell my boss, you can't do that there. How do you deal with these little

nuances when you're trying to build a global company, but these little local nuances are just so different? >> Well, that goes down to best practice, I would say. So, that's what we have built into the product. We just promote best practices. um we tend to use the EU as a reference point because they're kind of moderated in their approaches is not so extreme. Um like in say the US or in certain parts of Asia um like the Malaysia example that I gave. Um so that I mean the whole philosophy is really to organizations because we are B2B

software company. We're selling to organizations, right? We're telling them look have something sensible and minimize external risk and exposure. give yourself the opportunity to deal with it and have that audit trail so that if you if someone within the company didn't deal with it, at least you know what happened, who it was, right? You're not like scrambling around um figuring things out when they when they blow up. Uh so I think that's kind of like the philosophy. So it doesn't matter if you're based in the US or you're based in in Malaysia or Japan or

somewhere or even in in a European country. Um the philosophy of keeping things in house for sensible risk management and case management is I think the philosophy that applies regardless of u jurisdiction regardless of industry type and company size. >> Got it. Look, I know you're not the tech guy, but I think a lot about when I use platforms, I think about is this platform easy to use? What's the user experience like? How do how do you think about that? Right. And I you you said earlier like if you don't want to type

it in, you can use voice and stuff like that. How do you build like the UX or what I would call the UX user experience so that it's easy for everybody at every place? Do you know what I mean? Because you want as many people involved as possible. How do you think about that? >> So how we've designed it is very scalable and customizable. So we don't kind of like impose upon a company. So we allow them to design it the way they want. If the company has a policy, has a specific look and feel that they want, that's easily done. It's

part of the onboarding process. If, for example, on the landing page of say the whistleblowing software, uh that they want to put the CEO's video there of him speaking about, you know, how he's his um uh wanting to promote a good speakout culture and they take things seriously, they could always do that. They could embed it. And we've made it so customizable that confide platform has a very minimal post onboarding kind of um involvement. Everything you can be done by the company themselves. Uh they could

even create their own workflows if they want their own digitized processes. So that's what we're doing. We're giving them the software infrastructure and then we are allowing them to digitize everything including the look and feel, including cultural aspects to a large extent into a software. So that's what we have actually done. We're not saying like, "No, it only has to be done in this way if you want to use this software, right?" We are not doing that at all. >> Cool. Super cool. Yeah. No, I spent a lot of time thinking about UX because I've used so many different platforms over the last 25 and 30 years. Some of

them get it really right. Some of them just like have not paid any attention at all. Right. >> Oh yeah. Yeah. For sure. Like I mean, as a tech founder myself now, just getting me to use a new tech software is is a real pain. [laughter] >> Right. Right. Right. >> I just got another one. Yeah, like there's such a big u natural maybe it's an age thing. I don't know. >> I don't think so. But [laughter] how old you are? >> I'm 42, but still have an age problem with this. [laughter] >> I I just don't want to like I mean even

things like HubSpot and everything. I know I need to be using it diligently for CRM for example. Um and then there's other tools for making your life easier like uh notion Myro and all these other products. Miro Miro is a perfect example of this. You can use it all you want. And I'm not saying anything bad about this software specifically, >> but boy, a Miro board is not like >> easy to use. >> It's just not I've used it a lot for like some, you know, for brainstorming and stuff like that. It's just not easy to use. Anyway, go ahead. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, when when my co-founder,

who's all about product and tech, he tries to like push this onto me, I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely do it." But then [laughter] I still, you know, there's such a tendency to revert just back to Gmail and just telling people what to do. Um, I'm like, yeah, I've got tech. I've got my Google calendar. It tells me when I need to have a meeting and I've got Microsoft, you know, Word and stuff. So, yeah, what more do you want? Right. [laughter] >> Oh god. I've always been an um [clears throat] an early adopter, so I

love using new technology, but I wish that some of it was designed better. And that's kind of why I always ask about this, right? Because if you're thinking about it from the beginning, one of the things that I always learned when I was designing workflows, particularly when I was at Goldman Sachs and we were redesigning a lot of the trading systems was you can't build this nonflexible workflows into your thing because the workflow may change. You don't want to have to rely on a tech team to come in and disintermediate that. You want to be flexible enough so you can, as you said, change it. And for every company with whom you're working, their flows are

going to be different. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you do that. Yeah, >> exactly. And that's exactly what we have done. So we are building towards a goal where when you're on that governance homepage of your own version of Confi platform, you could just genai a prompt if you want to create a new workflow and a new process and it will be done for you >> inside the inside the platform. >> Yeah. >> Okay. That's super cool. That's really super cool. Sorry, go ahead. I interrupted you because I was so excited about it. Go ahead. >> No, no, that's what that's exactly what the goal is. Um so again we are just

providing the tools and the infra uh the software to to execute to let you execute your programs how you want them to be. >> So that was the other thing I was going to ask you is where do you see some other places actually inside of confide as a company itself and as a platform to use artificial intelligence. In other words is there a way to give a prompt internally that says is this thing related to that other thing inside? Do you see use cases like that where AI can actually be super useful in connecting the dots? Yeah. >> Yeah. and that's already built in to a

large extent. Um, we have also built in pretty basic sounding stuff, but it's important such as being able to flag uh potentially who's that one person that's doing multiple reports, but trying to rephrase them in different ways. You know, it's like pressing the lift button, hoping the lift is going to come faster, right? So, [laughter] >> it's just not going to happen. >> It's like that cross the street button. You just keep pressing it. >> Traffic never stops. Go ahead. >> Yeah. But it's uh so that we have those kinds of analytics. We've also uh we're

also building in analytics to see if a specific person that's reporting is flagging critical issues um from a person's personal standpoint like are they suicidal? Are they um threatening to go to the police or to the regulators because then it becomes a critical response you know it's a high risk uh you need to do deal with it ASAP. Uh so we're building a lot of these kinds of intelligent aspects to it and also translation. I mean all these are like basic things but fundamentally I think where there's most value as well is

generating your final reports. So, as you've managed to a case, whatever kind of case, right, whether it's an AML case or it's a grievance or whatever, um being able to then generate the final report, whether it's to the board or it's to the person that's reporting or to laterally to your peers, your team. Um I think that's where Gen AI or or AI would be very very powerful because it just cuts everything and you can pick and choose in that journey what you want to populate in that final report. Do you think as this stuff gets easier for

companies to manage internally, right, if they have one overall system like you said that's interconnected that it then makes it easier and actually more of an incentive for the board to pay closer attention to this stuff. Do do you know what I mean? Because if it's hard, no one's going to do it. If it's like in this system and that system and this system and there's no way to connect and it's really hard to get a sense for what's going on. But if it's all unified and again if the end reporting is can be really precise because of the way artificial intelligence is used and it can be segmented because you only get does this incentivize boards actually to

be more involved and pay closer attention do you think? Yeah, for sure. I mean, even if you think about like from a board perspective, they've got so many things they're looking after, including say cyber security, right? Cyber security is a big thing for boards, but what happens when there's an instance of a breach? So, if that's flagged into the confine platform, how you dealt with the case, the threat actor, uh, for example, all the steps that were taken, did you bring in a law firm? If you brought in a law firm, you cloaked that aspect under privilege, you ring fenced yourself, uh, and protected

yourself. um and then what the outcome was. So from a board perspective, if you have got like that single homepage, that single software, if you really want to deep dive into any aspect from a board reporting standpoint, because everyone likes to report um very positively to boards. >> Sure. Right. >> We made a billion dollars, we're just going to make two billion negative. >> Yeah. Or they would say like there were just three whistleblowing cases this month. They weren't very serious. And then the bar's like, "Yeah, three sounds like a small number." Okay. But if the

board actually wants to deep dive into it, they could say like what's the what were the cases? How were they dealt with, you know, who wasn't give me a report? >> Exactly. Or they could just ask for access uh and go inside and look at it if they truly wanted to uh go to that extent. So I think as a check and balance is extremely powerful um and and even from a VC angle, right? from an investor standpoint, from a donor standpoint, before you cut the check to the NGO, the not for-p profofit, make sure they got a confide in there. Uh, same for VCs. Before you invest in a

company, make sure they've got that in there because in case anything goes wrong, you can go in to see did anyone raise an issue if they did, who dealt with it and what really happened. >> I hadn't thought about this in the startup space, but I can imagine many scenarios. I mean, look, we can see what happened in Indonesia. I don't have all the details on it, but you see what happened, I think it was called e fishery. Don't don't don't don't hold me on this. >> But again, if they had had [laughter] confine installed there or if people had been really paying attention, if the board had been paying attention, if they've been getting reports, things may have come out and like I don't know how

much money was lost in this case, but it was a ton of money. An unnecessarily large amount of money was lost in this case. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Um I just like to ask a few whimsical questions as well. Like what part of building this and running this like looks super easy from the outside, but on the inside it's just really really hard. It is. It's It's hard. I mean, I can't speak from the tech side because >> No, no, I'm just talking about the company. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. But, um, and I'm glad he's got that problem, not me. [laughter]

>> So, uh, but from my side, it's really, uh, you know, just scaling and meeting demands, right? Um, because this is not what I'm I'm a lawyer. I and I've now made that step into becoming an entrepreneur. So it's quite interesting because you know obviously having seen companies that are successful from within pretty mature ones whether they're law firms or they're large companies having personally crashed a company like wire car. [laughter] So this is what I was going to ask you. Do do you feel and I had been thinking about this actually since the first time

we talked right like >> you're not building confide by accident. You didn't just wake up one day have no like relevant life experiences and say this is the thing we need to build. But do you feel in some way like because you are a lawyer, because you know some technical founders, because you've been done had other experiences that you're kind of uniquely qualified to build this thing. >> Yeah. I mean, I would say I I wouldn't say it myself. Uh >> no, no, but you would never say it, but I asked the question, so I can say whatever I want. But do you feel like when you think about it, when you go to bed at night, you're thinking all of

these little pieces that come together make me really uniquely qualified to be able to do this thing in a way that makes sense because you can have the legal conversation with the compliance department. you understand the flow and stuff like that. You've been through a whole bunch of turmoil yourself. Everybody knows about this. It's already been widely discussed. So, combining all that stuff together kind of makes you uniquely qualified to do this. Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, I've also used the solutions that don't really work well. >> Exactly. And that's part of what I mean. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've seen the gaps and that's what I'm actually trying to fix. I'm trying to fix the compliance

gaps that exist, the software gaps that exist. And I'm also trying to tell companies that you don't need to become like a wire card, right? So that's a lot of those things are what led to founding uh the current company. >> And do you think when you go do you think the companies are still talking about this idea because they've seen big things like this blow up, right? They've seen them. And I know that when I was at Goldman, like there were definitely conversations internally, not about this specific incident, but like here are the things we don't want to have happen to us that just happened to those guys. You

think companies are still talking about this? Yeah, >> I think the problem with companies is that they they always think they're not going to become those guys. It's more like, no, that happened to them. Like obviously we're not like that. It will never happen to us. But I think that's a dangerous path to go down. I'm not saying every company will become like that, but I think you can't have that level of complacency because unless from the top down you can say you know every single problem in the company that exists all the way to the most junior employee or the tea lady, right? Um who

could be I mean the tea lady could be forced to have uh served tea or coffee that's like a executive's cousin's company, >> right? That's a conflict of interest is a vendor thing. Uh you never know, right? And he could end up uh giving a whole bunch of employees diarrhea or something. Who knows? [laughter] >> But >> that that's a real grievance. Let's be clear about it. It's a real >> that could we have like but u I think unless you have that level of confidence to know every single problem because why where I think the issue is is it's very

very difficult to get in honest information and feedback from your staff. Like that's a very challenging thing. So I always tell organizations it doesn't matter how trivial it may sound just as long as they are speaking to you they're raising it that's great because you never know how that small trivial thing one day could be the missing piece to a jigsaw that you're trying to solve like a big issue >> and this is part of building this is part of building that speak up culture right in the sense that it may what may seem trivial to you in as a piece in the

larger picture could be super non-trivial and you want people to be in a process of not just complaining all the time, but of going, "That doesn't look right to me. Somebody needs to know about it." Yeah. >> Yeah. And that's a good employee, right? He's raising uh things that are not making sense or that appear to be weird or just problematic. And you need that. And you know, that's that's just giving people an avenue to do it safely without any ramifications. >> Yeah. Look, one of my career goals was was always to never get taken out of the office in handcuffs, right?

>> Yeah. >> Um because you'd seen people that happen to people. One more thing. What's the craziest idea you still think is worth pursuing in your space? And then I'll let you go. >> The craziest idea is really AIdriven. Um, so I think people for for some reason are dating AI robots, right? They're having a relationship with them. So AI is becoming so humanoid or humanlike that maybe, you know, in say the whistleblowing space, someday that AI will be the case manager. uh because

it's faceless, it doesn't have any um any loyalties per se. You can trust that AI. So you could actually raise that case to that AI. Uh it could speak to you. It could advise you. Um and on the flip side, it could strip away the emotions and then objectively report to the company and say like look, I've spoken to I AI bot say confide bot I spoken to employee this is a serious case. Having removed all the emotive aspects of this case, these are the objective things you need to look at

facts-wise and also from a legal tech perspective, these are the regulations potentially being breached. So, I think that if we can do that, um I truly believe that's a crazy idea, but it's not at this point in 2025, nothing's crazy anymore, >> right? I was going to say it sounds [laughter] it does sound a little bit crazy, right? But the more you look at what's already taking place and the more like you know the way you use your own AI tools, the more it feels like that could be possible. I always think there's going to be a human in the loop at some level just because humans like to talk to other humans, but that could

change culturally over time too. Okay, Pavil, a co-founder and CEO of Confide Platform. Thank you so much for doing this today. This was awesome. Thanks for having me again.