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We are Camarilla and it's an app for your closest friends, for your 15 best friends actually. So in a world where we are familiar with Facebook, WhatsApp and messaging, you can expect also that there would be something for your best friends, because those are the people who make you most happy. And if you're happy, you're able to go and live a great life. There's a little sentence that says the good life is built with good relationships. Well, we all have a support group that is called our Inner Circle, and these are 15 people on an average that we carefully selected, people who we allow to be around us and who we tell our life experiences or who we just have fun with or sometimes have comfort with. Those people are unique people. It's a group of unique friends. There's no one in the world who shares the same people in his 15 group or in his Inner Circle. And a king knew this, because a king always has a Camarilla. In Spanish you say Camarilla, but we say Camarilla. A king has his Camarilla for life. He shares his private life, his political life and everything he wants to share with his people he fully trusts. So therefore the name, you can just find it in a dictionary. My name is Constans. Two years ago I was a commercial director at Travelbird. It's an internet company, very fast growing internet company in the Netherlands. And I just became mother of my beautiful son. This is my son, Hector. And I was traveling a lot, so he's two years old now. I was traveling a lot, just became mom and maybe there are some parents in the room and you experience the same. The moment you are with your son or daughter, you just want to grasp every experience that he or she does. And you take pictures, you capture these moments. So in a time, especially in the beginning, things go really fast. This little boy turns, every day he's changing. And I was at a hotel room and I was missing my boy, but I was also missing my closest friends. And I just wanted to be home. And at that time I opened my Facebook account where I have a lot of friends. And but I couldn't find my closest friends. And I thought that was pretty odd that in this world where everything is digitalized, there's nothing there for just your comfort group or for your best friends. And I would love at that time to share a photo where I was and just send it out and my best friends to receive it. But it felt odd for me to text message them or to send a WhatsApp message and then every single one. So this idea, it was just a moment, but this idea kept in my mind. And when I was having dinners with friends, I once sometimes opportunity arise to speak out on, hey, how are you doing? What's going on with you? Why don't I see all what's happening in your life? Or why did some people ask me why did you stop sharing your private moments on Facebook? Well, it's just because the group went too big and I do share other stuff at Facebook. I still love this medium, especially for articles, especially for things that really drive me. But not for my photos in my bikini or not for my baby pictures, because I also know sometimes that 50 photos from babies from a friend that you don't really know can be a little annoying. So I didn't want to bother all my friends with all my baby pictures. So I was having dinner and there was a guy that I know and that I work with for 10 years and he dives a lot and he takes always his mother and his best friends with him to the paradises of the world. And this guy doesn't have Facebook and I just asked him like, how is your life? This and that. And he was giving me his phone and showing all his pictures. I said, that's lovely. And it's so interesting to see this and that you're doing this. And we had this conversation and he said, I asked him, do you feel the urge of sending photos or what do you do normally? And he had the same idea. He really would love to share his experiences with just a bunch of friends, a few friends. We left this conversation. People were joining in on it, but we left it and we just had, we continued with going on. So of course my job at Travel Bird, which I really loved. And a few months later I got a text message from this particular guy. His name is Chris Sade. He's a very successful entrepreneur. He's one of the former directors of BinkBank. Maybe you might know the BinkBank. And he text messaged me, he said, Constance, let's have lunch because I've got somebody who's backing up financially. I was like, what is this guy speaking of? I didn't actually really reckon what he was talking about. But of course this inspiring entrepreneur, I wanted to have lunch with him. So I went and a day later he told me, I've got it sorted out. I said, what? Well, your idea of just sharing your life with your closest friends. I said, okay, well tell me. So he spoke about the name Camarilla and he said, with one hit on the button you can share your photo. Your 15 closest friends will see this photo. But only now the response will be one on one. So nobody sees whoever is in your group and nobody sees their response. So you can actually respond like nobody is watching. This makes that you share or post because it's a place we developed, a little place where you can post your photos and people can at their time watch these photos or respond to them. So in this place you post different photos. It's really funny because the audience is different. They know you. If you are a motorcycle fanatic and you post a photo they say, hey, you bought a new motor or are you saving money to get this one? But for example, if I post a photo of when I'm at the beach and I'm enjoying, my mom says, hey, I'm proud of you, enjoy. And my best friend asks, who is that handsome guy behind me? So those kind of things make you share different stuff and make you share things that are really more private. So actually we defined it that day and we were together to really create this place to post these photos for your 15 closest friends and where the responses are for your eyes only. And we gathered a team of brilliant CTO, one of the CTOs from the Bing bank and later on founder of Brand New Day and together with some others, with a team of five and we developed a test case, a pilot. And we were piloting it on iOS and this happened in December last year. And we thought of the Netherlands as the ideal test country. If it would work here it will work everywhere. So we put it live on the beginning of December and within 24 hours it spread in over 34 countries and that was amazing. We never expect this to spread so fast. Obviously the momentum was right. People were feeling that they want to share sometimes something with one friend and sometimes something with a few friends and sometimes with the whole world or with your selected friends on social media that you know nowadays. But and we thought that we'll never be able to maybe be space for this or maybe people don't get it. But actually the people were really up for it. Media was writing on it, articles over articles over articles and it went viral under the radar because we didn't have any articles abroad yet. So seeing this there is a trend and we knew this, there is a trend to sharing life in smaller groups or sharing your interest in smaller groups. And by the end of week one we were spread in 69 countries and nowadays we're being used very actively in over 100 countries worldwide. Only on iOS, so one brand. But for the people who are interested in this, we have a lot of people who are interested well the few of you here, we have very exciting news because today around four we will put Android in beta and that will be very exciting because of course Android supports many more devices and many more brands. So not only the iPhone lovers can use Camarilla but now everyone is allowed to or has access to use it. So what's happening in this world? Well Arno LeBrun already showed us. Things are shifting, we are shifting from images to videos to VR. We're creating world life experiencing, it's much easier to share photos or to send them into particular groups, maybe a group for colleagues, maybe a group for your best friends, maybe with the whole world. It's really a market that's evolving in such many directions. But also the market is more personalized. So to tell you this little story about Camarilla, we went back to the core, to the fundamental of true friendship and you need time spent together to have true friendship. So it's actually science. So Professor Dunbar has shown that your inner circle is 15 people but this same professor also shown that you need quality time spent together otherwise your friends will be very unforgiving if you are in front of their doors and knocking, I need help. And remember how good it feels when you see your friends faces. The moment when you see a friends face who is really truly a friend, all the memories of your time spent together are flashing in your head and it will release endorphins. So therefore most of the times if you see your best friend you will probably already have a smile on your face because it's this endorphin, it's the chemistry that's working in your brain. And therefore these are the people who make you most happy and proud in life. So what we did is that we thought there is a space that we go back to the fundamentals and we go back to the core and you see also this is happening in marketing. Things are becoming much more personalized and we are only exploring how personalized things can become. We're working with bots of course where people are creating a life like experience. I think that Facebook is in such a direction that will be so interesting and imagine in your messenger that you get your following CNN and every day you use this messenger the digest of CNN will get more personalized and you will already get the stuff immediately. Well this is what they are exploring. We are not yet on this trend because we are not looking to monetize our platform yet. We have a lot of time that we can just explore to develop this product as great as possible and to continue to keep this as simple as possible but also just to keep that the people are using this platform the way we intended them to use and that's what we see nowadays. But if you imagine that once we will monetize our platform some people say yeah you will be doing this in advertisements or you will be doing this with selling data. I think we can only underestimate how the market will evolve in the coming five years. If you look back to five years from now we didn't expect that we would be talking about mobile VR or all these bots that are coming to the market. So let's just wait and let's just really discover where it will take us but we do follow the great examples of Facebook of messenger of WhatsApp. We do follow WeChat. In China everybody is already used to paying with their WeChat account in restaurants. They are ordering cinema tickets with their WeChat account. They are ordering taxis or doctor's appointments. Everything is so personalized in their stream. So I think the most important is engagement and attention and how we will evolve in providing this great attention and engagement with our users because they see their best friends in this environment. Probably you on the other hand will see how engaged you will get your audience with this more eloquent marketing tools that are coming to the market and are already there. So this is a little view on how the world's smallest social network is spreading under the radar and we will only launch officially in September but of course the test launch in the Netherlands made us really proud and Android will give us even more insight on how fast things will go and that we do in this digital world where we have so many people and so many connections that we still have these great values and that science or technology didn't change our world as much because still we do relate to some people as our best friends and the people we meet in bars etc. Only time will tell you if they will become a best friend because still you need to see each other and you need to have quality time spent together. So this is a little story for you guys to see how things are evolving in smaller groups. So thanks so much for your time and support. Thank you.