Malta's headline corporate tax rate is 5%. What's less advertised is that expat operators coming in from Dubai or Singapore often access that rate while the Maltese founders competing in the same market don't.

In this episode, Sean Bianco and Jean-Michel Azzopardi break down what the Malta business environment actually looks like from the inside: the government VC fund that's easier to access once you're already established, why angel investors on the island operate closer to vulture capital than venture capital, and how Malta is the only other destination that follows the Dubai model - a minister who sits down with entrepreneurs and asks what he needs to fix.

Sean Bianco is the founder of GainChanger, a Malta-based growth agency he scaled from a two-person rat office to 50 people in two years. Jean-Michel Azzopardi is a blockchain architect and founder of a 380-member CEO network in crypto, iGaming, and fintech.

If you're assessing Malta as a base for an established business, this is the clearest picture of the trade-offs you'll find.

Michał Suski built Surfer SEO from a side project in 2017 to $13M ARR — bootstrapped, without VC money, with under $1M in total marketing spend. By 2025, the company had been flat on revenue for two years, was carrying debt from a co-founder buyout, and sold to Positive Group in a SaaS market where multiples had dropped sharply from their 2021 peak. This is his first public conversation on the acquisition.

In this episode, Michał walks through the internal dynamics that forced the sale: the co-founder disagreement that split the founding team, the debt the remaining partners took on to buy him out, and why they were eventually looking for an acquirer rather than a VC round. He breaks down what preparing a company for sale actually involves when you've run on gentleman agreements and have two aircraft on the balance sheet, why the due diligence process took over a year, and how you structure a deal that works for five founders who each have a different idea of what the company is worth.

He also covers what he would have done differently — specifically, why selling three years earlier at the growth peak would have returned far more per share, and why they didn't. Michał Suski is one of the most recognised figures in the SEO software space, with Surfer used by 150,000 active users across 12,000 paying customers. This is not a success story told from a stage. It's a working account of what bootstrapped exits actually look like when circumstances force your hand.

35% of the internet is blocking AI crawlers right now — most of it by accident, through default CDN settings that site owners never touched.

Stephen Burns is the Web Intelligence Lead at Common Crawl Foundation, the nonprofit that crawls 2.3 billion pages per month and provides the training data used by GPT, Claude, Llama, and most major LLMs. He covers harmonic centrality - the algorithm that determines which sites get crawled and end up in AI training sets - and why it operates completely differently from Google's PageRank. Sites with JavaScript-heavy builds, slow load times, or CDN defaults that block AI bots may not exist as far as LLMs are concerned.

This episode also covers the EU AI Act's August disclosure deadline, which will require AI companies to publish the top 1,000 domains they trained on - giving SEOs a new way to verify AI visibility for the first time.

Common Crawl has been cited in over 10,000 academic research papers and its data underpins over 80% of the training tokens in GPT-3. Burns works at the intersection of web-scale data and search infrastructure - this is the part of the pipeline that most SEOs have never had access to before.