Hi dear Livio, thanks for taking the time today. To get started right away, tell us who you are and what made you join Parashift?

I am a business management student who joined Parashift to support the business development & sales team. During my studies, I worked in the legal industry for several years. There, a considerable share of my working day was wasted on processing documents. Hence, when I heard about Parashift’s mission, I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

You have only been with us for a few days; what is your first impression, and how would you characterize the culture we have here at Parashift?

My general impression is that people at Parashift are very passionate about what they do. Further, they seem to be very open and humorous. The people I spend the most time with –the business development team– are a fairly new constellation. Accordingly, it isn’t easy to discern concrete cultural patterns there. The team is built of individuals with very diverse and interesting backgrounds, and we are having a lot of fun together. So, I can only imagine that a great culture is going to emerge within the next months.

What is your greatest weakness that, when applied in the right context, can be a great superpower?

Sometimes my thought processes tend to be a little messy. This can be annoying, but it helps develop creative solutions and see problems from a different angle.

What will be the biggest challenge you work on for the next few months and why?

The developers at Parashift have done an incredible job in building this platform. However, it won’t sell itself. Therefore, we need to develop the right structures to bring it to the market. Many things are still unknown about how this is going to develop. This makes the task much harder and much more fun, as it allows for a lot of experimentation.

What does a paradigm shift mean to you, and why did you decide to join a crazy bunch and contribute to one yourself?

To achieve fundamental change, you have to approach things differently. I think for that, you need to be a little crazy sometimes. In such a work environment, this has many advantages; your workday becomes much more exciting, and you can try a lot more things yourself.

How do you envision the next five years for Parashift?

I think that over the next five years, we will materialize large parts of our mission. That means making document extraction highly autonomous and accurate. But there are also challenges associated with growth; I hope that when we become a bigger company, we’ll not lose what makes Parashift great today. For me, that means maintaining informal relationships, short chains of command, flexibility, and openness.

In case some of our readers are looking for inspiring book or podcast recommendations… What would you recommend and why?

I find inspiration mainly in interactions with individuals rather than in books or podcasts. But I can make some general recommendations; I like all books by Yuval Harari (especially ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’) and ‘Why we Sleep’ by Matthew Walker. In terms of podcasts, I recommend Lex Fridman, especially the episodes with Stephen Kotkin (about Stalin) or Joscha Bach (about AI & Consciousness).

Oh, those are great recommendations for our readers! Thank you for taking the time to tell us more about how you see things at Parashift.