Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light: fear is not a strategy

When Jonathan Sanders pitched Light to investors, the reaction was unanimous: rebuilding ERP would take a decade and a hundred million dollars. He did it in two years, with AI at the core. Today Light powers AI unicorns including Lovable and Legora, and Jonathan joins Hg director Soren Holt to explain how. The conversation goes well beyond automation. It's a builder's account of a first-principles redesign.
Jonathan and Soren cover the move from template-based OCR to context-aware agents, why eighty percent of AI's value comes from doing things that were previously impossible rather than making old tasks faster, and how Light's customers now sweep entire transaction populations during audits rather than sampling. Jonathan walks through Light's hackathon programme with CFOs, the operating model behind a remote engineering organisation, and the shift from finance as operator to finance as orchestrator. The line that lands hardest: "Fear is not a strategy." An essential listen for any finance leader thinking about what 2030 actually looks like.