Why we never raised in 16 years | Tom Hanan, Webrepublic

Your clients have started asking why AI hasn't made you cheaper yet. The honest answer is not the one the vendors are selling.

In this episode of Follow the Gradient, Christian Woese sits down with Tom Hanan, co-founder and CEO of Webrepublic, the largest independent owner-managed marketing agency in Switzerland. Tom started the company in 2009 with one other person, never raised outside capital, and has grown it to around 250 people running campaigns for clients including FIFA.

This is a conversation about what actually changes when a services business meets AI, told by someone who runs the campaigns rather than the keynote. Tom is blunt about the gap between what clients expect from the technology and what it can really do, and about the second-order mess it is creating in the feeds.

We talk about:

• Why a client asking for a 30 to 40% discount "because you have AI" is, in Tom's words, absolute bogus, when Webrepublic spends a seven-figure sum a year just to deploy the technology

• What AI actually delivers in an agency: not a smaller team, but the efficiency to manage four clients where you used to manage three

• Why most corporate AI spend fails, and the "Ferrari without a driver's license" problem when culture isn't ready to change its processes

• The "AI slop" thesis: how platform incentives reward a pink elephant swimming across a lake over anything with depth, and why quality placements become the scarce asset

• What 16 years of bootstrapping cost and bought, and why every VC's five-year plan to exit would have changed the company

• The "oomph factor" hiring rule, why he wants a mix of Captain Kirk, Yoda and Indiana Jones, and why a team has to be ready for chaos

This is perspective over playbook. Tom has spent 16 years making the same set of choices, stay independent, keep the work in one place, refuse the easy discount, and the episode is about what those choices actually protect.

Our biggest takeaways, including Tom's view on where founders and clients misjudge what AI will do to their costs:

https://www.followthegradient.io/p/tom-hanan-podcast 

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Where to find Tom Hanan:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhanan/

Webrepublic: https://www.webrepublic.com

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🎙 Follow the Gradient: conversations about building a business from Europe while staying sane.

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