Panel discussion

Thank you, Thijs! And up next, as Thijs revealed, we have the great panel. So, we're just gonna set up. I can start by introducing the panelists. First, we have Gerd from TradeShift, who's coming on stage now. And we have Christian from PlanDay. And we have Matthias from GoMore. We're all out of chairs. And to make sure these gentlemen are behaving themselves, we have the one and only Robert Scoble! Thanks! Should we run my slides? So, it's an honor being here. I just came from another conference, just 400 meters away, where we talked about virtual reality and augmented reality. And I wanted to give you a little taste, and let you see a pitch I got at South by Southwest from an entrepreneur, so you can see how to do it. For people who don't know me, Siri was launched in my son's bedroom. I had the first ride in Elon Musk's car. I was in the room when Pandora launched, and me and Mike Arrington were the first to talk about that, and on and on. I've launched many things in the world. And so I've gotten thousands of pitches over the years, so I'm looking forward to hearing some of the pitches here. And it's really a big honor to be here. I wanted to just give you a short taste of what's happening in my world. I now work at UploadVR, which is a media company that covers the virtual reality and augmented reality spaces. And how many people are building something for, like HoloLens or Oculus, or Rift or H2C Vive or you? There's going to be many more of you soon, because there's going to be millions of jobs in the next decade in this new world. So I just wanted to give you a little taste of what's coming. And you might know this company called Magic Leap. Magic Leap got $1.3 billion of investment without having a customer and without having a product. And that tells you that something magical is coming. And what is the magic that's coming? Hopefully it starts playing. Oh, might I have a word with you, please? I regret to report that due to unforeseen circumstances, we have not yet reached the design arrangements with Gavis and Hunt regarding Captain Solo's death. What you're seeing is you're looking through the Magic Leap optic. It puts virtual items on top of the real world. It is mind-blowing. Look at the occlusion of the virtual images on top of this tape. You can see that it's cut off properly. It's new technology that's going to create many, many new companies in the next three years. How did we get into this mess? I really don't know. There's six new technologies in these glasses that are going to come out in the next two years. One of the technologies is eye sensing. One of the companies that's competing with what you're going to see is here in Copenhagen. It's called Eye Tribe, right? And I saw them yesterday. It's mind-blowing technology. So let's take a look at that. This is EyeFluence. Look at the screen and listen to them. Turn it back up. Some electronics in our office. And I can go home when I want to. Over here is a medical application. All with your eyes? All with my eyes. So I'm doing this solely with my eyes as fast as I can look. I'm not waiting. I'm not winking. I'm just looking. And here I've got the patient. I've got some allergy record, protocols, insurance, confidential information. Current conditions, why is he here? Well, he tells me he's got a pain in his foot. Notice I'm looking at this, but there's nothing happening on the screen. But when I decide, for instance, that I want to check out his x-ray, there it is. And now I want to go back because a couple of screens ago there was some confidential information, which is here. And now it's going to take a picture of my eye. It grabs it and says, oh, who is that? It confirms it is me. And in a moment you'll see that it will give me access. I'm Jim. I'm the CEO and founder of iFluence. And there it is. I've got confidential information. When I want to, I can return home as fast as that. That's amazing. All in my eyes. That's amazing. I show you the... Go ahead. I show you this because I love dreamers like the people in this room who are showing me a new world that does not exist and a product that we don't know we need. And I'm so honored to be here with a panel of people who do this all the time, right? Can you introduce yourselves and let's start the conversation? Absolutely. Okay. So my name is Gerd Silvest. I'm co-founder of a company called TradeShift. We started in Copenhagen in 2010 with me in the technical role. These days I'm focused on our engineering efforts in China. We are a business-to-business network. We are approaching 1 million companies in the network. We bring suppliers and buyers together on the platform, which is a cloud-based one. And then we bring third parties into the mix, creating apps in financial services, procurement, logistics, any other kind of services. My name is Christian, and I'm the CEO of PlanDay. We do something fantastic as employees. Scheduling is quite boring on the sound of it, but actually if you think about it, there's billions of, or at least millions, it's actually close to a billion, people working in part-time jobs in the world. We help bring them together with the businesses in a much more flexible way, so it's become easier to schedule employees, and as employees it becomes easier to work and maximize earnings. So that's PlanDay. And I'm Matthias. I am from GoMore. I'm the CEO and one of the founders. So we are a platform for sharing of cars. Some of you might have tried GoMore. I hope you have already. We are quite popular in Denmark, and we are in a number of other countries now. And you share your cars when you drive. You go ride-sharing, or when you don't drive, you rent cars from each other on the platform. And you can also get a leasing car. Don't forget that. It's a really good offer, and you see many of them in the streets in Copenhagen already. And also, I got the lower chair. Didn't I? What? How did that happen? Why did that happen? I don't know. It's okay. I can sit here. Nice to meet you all. So tell me about how you got people to believe in a new idea, a new company. Tell me about some of the early pitches you had to do with investors and with partners. To get people to believe in your companies. Okay. So I think maybe our domain is a little bit special because it's business to business. So there's a lot of lingo. Everyone knows how complex business to business software is. So I think it helped us that before founding the company, all three of us as founders had proved ourselves a little bit in the world. We built large-scale electronic invoicing networks using open standards, peer-to-peer-based technologies, and cloud as well. And we kind of built the idea of TradeShift on top of that, connecting companies, using a cloud-based network, giving software away for free, reaching countries and market that you couldn't use and these kind of things. So I think what we had to do was convince a lot of people that the market was about to change. And we had to tell a very convincing story about how technology could bring about that change and do it very rapidly. And I think we had some examples to draw on from our past careers and past experience. Yeah. I think we did a little bit of a cliché in the beginning because, quite frankly, we knew from the beginning what we did was a little bit boring. And I think that was holding us back a little bit. Then we actually went some trips to San Francisco. And what they taught us, listen, boring is great. Investors love stuff that's boring because if you really figure out a solution to something everybody thinks is boring and hate doing and make it fun, that's when you really have something. And if you blow that up and you can show this is actually something really big in the world and all that, it's actually quite an easy thing to pitch something boring. Then it's fun. So I think when we learned that, that was the game changer for us really. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. We have had like two starts I would say with GoMore. We tried 10 years ago, a little more than 10 years ago when we were still students, making a platform for ride sharing in Denmark. And it was not a complete failure in the sense that we got some PR and we actually also got an investment from Den Blå Avis back then many years ago. But it didn't really work after all because people didn't use our platform a lot. Only a few did it. And it was not really growing. So. So in the first, we kind of gave up after the first attempt. I just kept it there as a platform until we then were able to collect people who could build a new platform like four or five years ago that then started growing organically. So actually what we ended up doing was that we made a result without money, just a small group of partners made a good platform or a better and modern platform integrated with social media and everything that suddenly had become necessary but also really an opportunity that didn't exist. Ten years ago, and then actually we had the first investors coming to us because we saw we had something that was growing and suddenly it had some traction. But then the next, I mean, we've had many struggles also attracting more funding later on where we had to not only prove that we could make people use our concept but also that it could make money and we could do it in other countries and all that. And that's actually what I'm spending a lot of my time on still, convincing people that. That we can do these things. I used to work for Rackspace and when I talked to my chairman who started the company or one of the co-founders and I talked to people like Tony Hsieh who started Zappos and I asked him, what was the mistake that you made? And I've asked many entrepreneurs about this in building their companies. And most of the time I hear about culture and that certainly came up with these two, that they said they wish they had worked on culture. Earlier. What are mistakes that you've made in building your company? Give me one example or two examples that you wish you could have gone back and had a do-over and done differently. So, okay, if I start, if I go back and look at how we made or tried to make GoMore for the first time like 10 or a little more than 10 years ago, I actually had no idea about how to create a company and also didn't really know how to be ambitious about it. I think I was a little too modest actually. I didn't dare back then to say I only wanted to work with the best people and take it very seriously what I mean with best. Then I went on, I worked with McKinsey, I saw my friends do startups and I thought, okay, these are really successful people. I can learn from that. So I think I was younger and also in many ways the market was not mature to what we were doing. But then going back and going full-time three or four years ago and just saying from now on it's serious. We only want the best people and we just keep saying that. And then we of course also think about that. That means it's not just an empty phrase. But after all, having that courage and also investing time and having fun and doing more than business together, that has really made a change for us. And I think it's a fantastic group of people we have now, 50 people, partying and working together with bright minds and creative, cultured people who can do more than business but also very good in their fields. So we take it extremely seriously now. And I wasn't really able to do that, I think, 10 years ago. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Having built a number of offices around the world now, one of the things I wish we would have done different is that we try to start up with people we just hired from the outside. And I think this is an old dilemma. What really made it work was when we blended local DNA, plant DNA, meaning we sent some of our best people out in the world and let them really work without boundaries, without us trying to top manage them. And so the local talent, to me, is definitely a formula that works. I think if you're not ready to yourself really go out into the world and put your hands on the plate out there, it's hard. And that's what we're learning. So sending out people away from Copenhagen faster, I'll recommend that, definitely. Yeah, so I think from the early days, I would say, sometimes we might have gone into situations where we had preconceived ideas about what was a good product, what was a good feature. And I think sometimes when you have a preconceived idea, you have an idea about how hard is it to make or how easy is it to make. And I think we sometimes lost opportunity by having this kind of fixed idea, something that seemed easy, maybe it was hard, maybe we should have stuck to some things, that we had started up, but we abandoned them because we had this idea that this feature or this product should be easy to make and get adoption. And I think everyone is using Eric Ries as a bible today. I think you learn some of these things the hard way, that sometimes you need to attack a problem from many different angles before you succeed. It's getting a little too loud, I can't even hear. It's Vivino guys, they're serving too much wine. It's always that way. Entrepreneurs always like to talk, they don't like to listen very much. When I talk to Uber or Snapchat, they're using a tool called Looker to run their businesses. What are some tools that you picked early on that helped you build your business and were key in building your business? Slack. Yeah, yeah, we use... Slack. I mean, they use a million tools, the developers, but I think you should ask them. We also... Yeah, we're still using Podio. I don't know if that's... Are they still around? Okay, they're still around. Okay. We have a lot of internal communication tools, but I don't think they have been game-changing for, I mean, from a business perspective as I see it, but of course they have a million tools, the developers, but I'm the business person, you know, so talk to the developers. Talk to the developers. Talk to the developers next time. Yeah, I think the thing for a startup these days is there's so many tools that's making a difference. I think at one time we counted all our tools and I think we're using 52 different SaaS systems that we pay for every month. It's subscription-based and it adds up. And to figure out do you really get value from all of these systems, that has actually been a question we have raised. We have implemented a tool called Tripfolio, which is actually just a layer you put on top that is doing, pulling out KPIs from all of these different systems, being from Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, all these tools you're using. That means all our KPIs and my complete overview of the business is now on my phone. So you can ask me anything about Plan A, almost, and from one tool I can basically tell you how we're doing. That has been amazing getting to here in that. and one over you, that's actually a game changer. Now I'm wearing the technical hat, so I'm going to single out Linus Torvalds for bringing out revolutions all the time. So I think our company was founded as completely virtual, so everything about cloud software as a service, thanks to Linux. And I think Git is also actually revolutionizing a little bit the way that we work and has been a foundation for how we could scale also across offers. I guess, for our customers, this is just invoke code and attributar. We've heard that a couple times today, basicallyarya. //to p weirdest thing. Leonard is the founder of the Tiger Shops. And we have also had some smaller investments from VCs. I don't know if it's a personal thing or it's a coincidence. I've had better experiences with business people, both in terms of big strategic partners that we work with a lot, but also these individuals in investing. I think one of the reasons in our case is that we're not the only one in the world doing what we're doing. And VCs, they dream about investing in the next Facebook. And we're going to compete to similar services in other markets. What we are proving is that we can compete well, but that's not always so appealing to the VC logic in itself. And it's appealing more to, I would say, business people or strategic investors in general. So, so far, of course, I keep a lot of dialogues with VCs. And we might also go that way again later. But so far, I would say, also, you get a lot of good experience when you work with very successful businesses. So, so far, I think that's been our better experiences. And I'm really happy with the partner team we have collected that way. Yeah, I think our A round actually went quite easy. And I think a lot of the brilliant companies that we also see here in Copenhagen is finding it easier to raise an A round. That was the same for us. I think we also completed B round where we thought that was going to be. That's easy. That was a lot harder. The amount of VCs in focusing on Copenhagen that is doing B rounds are actually quite small. Now we're approaching a C round. The truth is the amount of VCs in Europe that is giving out C rounds, if you don't have significant success in the U.S. as well, it's getting hard. So I think the learnings from that and that aspect is a key thing. I also think another thing. Don't start racing just when you need the money. It takes a long time. And once you begin to understand investors, you begin. It's a lot of a game of who did the last investment and who's new on the team and who are you having to talk to. So even if you have the greatest product and the greatest thing in the world, you might not get an investment from a specific team. So it takes time. I think that's the learning for me. It takes a lot of time and a lot of hard work to raise money. That's, I guess, something. We are expecting now. But to be honest, to begin with, I didn't think it was going to be that hard. I can definitely recognize that it takes a lot of time. And I think it's also back to preconceived notions. I think in the beginning we had a kind of pretty clear picture about who would our investors be and where in the world Silicon Valley should they be. But when we look at it now, we have a very broad, colorful selection of investors from all over the world. Russia, Japan, China. The U.S., the U.K. And I think it's actually a quite good bunch of investors that some act as partners. But I think it takes a lot of traveling, talking, and actually figuring out who are the right investors and partners for your specific company. Now that I'm being an entrepreneur and building my own company, I didn't realize this before I did it myself. That starting a company is very terrifying. You might have payroll due next Monday and you might not have the money to do that. You might have to fire your best friend. You might have to do something that really keeps you up at night. How do you deal with that terror, that fear? And how do you push through it? And how do you motivate your team to take on a big problem that you're trying to solve? So what I discovered about myself is that I think I act very much out of duty in these situations. So I've been surprised. I've been surprised many times that I'm not so emotionally affected from things that I might maybe be from other things. As soon as it's related to keeping the company alive and keeping it growing, I think I took on the task to do this. I promised some investors that I would do this well. I promised the employees also or partners that we would do this well. And therefore, honestly, I've been a little surprised that I was able to make tough decisions, also tougher decisions that I've sometimes otherwise been able to do in other. Contexts. So I think that's actually something that helps a little bit with having investors. It's like it's people you promise something. You get a lot of money in and you promise not to waste that money. And that kind of keeps me focused on actually also delivering results. What keeps me more awake than if you can put it that way is that I'm realizing that now we're quite many people, that I don't want people to be nervous. You know, if you have to make a decision, how do you make sure that it's not sending the wrong signals? And that's really hard. I should become all the time much, much better at communicating why we're doing things. So because I might do things that for me is just a good big step forward. But to everybody else, it looks like it's like a terrible crisis because I didn't explain why we did what we did. So it's really, really difficult. But I think when you're a group of people and you promise each other to do it well, that helps a little for at least having a sense of duty around it. And you get things done has been my experience, I would say, so far. That's probably one of the most difficult things, actually, as a founder. Obviously, building a company, you put a lot of emotion into it. And building a team around you for us is also giving a lot of emotions. And what you figure out after a while is sometimes even though it feels like a family, you have to put some quite tough things on that. You have to fire people. Honestly, still, when I let people go, sometimes I'm almost shaking. I find myself actually going to the bathroom, looking myself in the mirror and saying, listen, you do this because it's right for the team. You do it because it's right for the company. And you also do it because it's right for the person you're about to give this message to. It's not good to keep somebody on a team who doesn't belong to a team. So my honest trick, I go to the bathroom and talk to the mirror and remind myself, why are we doing what we're doing? And why? Why is this tough decision necessary? And if it wasn't tough, it would probably be a bad decision anyway. But it is a very difficult aspect, honestly, of having a lot of emotion, a lot of team spirit, and also sometimes having to break that up. Yeah, I think in companies like these, people are typically very passionate about what they're doing. And I think there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Like economy is, of course, one worry. But it's also about the technical architecture. It's about the organization. It's about how the teams play together and all these kind of things. And to me, it seems like the strongest asset is really the storytelling and the vision installing this kind of strong magnetic north. Because the company might be in troubled waters for long periods, or people individually may be in troubled waters, or they are not on the dream assignments. But they are shoveling shit for half a year. And I think it's typically reinforcing the storytelling, the magnetic north, the vision, that really brings people through all these kind of things and see through. Last question. How do you celebrate your successes? How do you celebrate your successes? How do you reward your team? How do you get your team to realize they did something great? So I don't think we're always so good at remembering, or I'm not remembering celebrating successes, because we're always on the way to the next thing. But we do it, of course, and we're getting better at it. But what we are doing also is that we're doing other things. We're having parties. We're having trips. Just last weekend, we had the most amazing trip on an island in Denmark with these 50 people. We bring them in from the countries, and we have lots of activities during the days together. It's social. It's simply just to meet each other. And you realize... You realize that people, they really have fun when you bring them together, because it's a really, really good group of people. So I actually think that celebrating successes can often seem a little empty, if that's the only thing you do. But if you actually bring people together and spend some more quality time together, that's actually... I'm learning that that is so valuable, and it also makes me so happy myself for the company we have. So spend time together. Celebrate things in general. Also celebrate Christmas, for that matter. That is more interesting than just... The next thousand customers or whatever it is. You know, find things that you can share in general and spend some time together. I'm really learning that it's just such a value for us. I think we try to make the dilemma of raising a company in Copenhagen to the next level our drive to success. I think the downfall is that we don't have 50 employees in Plan A that has done this before. Pretty much. None of us have tried this level we had before. And I think that is obviously a bad thing because it takes us longer to do things. On the other hand, it's also a great thing because we have this... In the entire company atmosphere, we actually got to do this. Failure is no longer in any way an option. And just even seeing step by step that things are actually moving is really how we do it. We have a special word in Plan A, a value that's called umf. And we say this is our word, this is our value. Umf is the moment when you go down. We actually used the scene from Karate Kid when he is trained, you know, when he's in the floor and he can't get up. And then he sort of gets up and do the kick. Umf is the moment he was in the floor, couldn't get up, when he finally decided to get up on one leg and kick the bad guy, right? That is to us something we mention every single day. Get umf. Because the fact is there's so many times. Every day we're down. Things fail. We don't succeed with this test or whatever. And there we have this, hey, let's umf this. And we all know that means get back up and succeed. I think that's the real measure of actually succeeding in daily life for us. So, yeah. I think one of the strongest vehicles we have for that is we, you know, every quarter we used to make a team camp, take the whole company out and celebrate. And as well plan for what's ahead of us the next. Quarter. I think that's a really strong vehicle. The last time we did that was in January. We took, you know, the whole company to Barcelona. But it's also one of the things that gets harder as you grow. I mean, we are 350 people. So now, so you need to reinvent all the time. Uh, I think a strong team culture where, where there's a lot of ownership in the team also automatically makes team celebrate stuff more. But honestly, I think it's one of the things you need to reinvent all the time. Um. I think there are some things we, uh, we also need to reinvent in, in this area. But I also think, you know. Thank you very much. It was a great panel of fire hose of information. Thank you. Awesome. Nice to meet you especially. Yeah. Okay, guys. What an amazing panel, isn't it? How.