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Navigating Growth in a Shifting Investment Landscape
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00:00Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Daphne Leprince-Ringuet.
00:04I'm a French tech reporter for Sifted based in Paris and it's my pleasure to be your moderator today for
00:09this panel
00:10in which we're going to focus on growth, what it means in 2025, how that's different from what it meant
00:20a few years ago
00:21and how founders can navigate that change as best as they can.
00:26I'm certainly faced quite often in my job with examples of founders who feel like they've been kind of caught
00:35in the middle.
00:36By that I mean that they raised big rounds of money in 2021, 2022.
00:42It was easy to do at the time. Money was easy to find.
00:46Investors were encouraging them to grow at all costs, no matter how much cash was burnt or almost.
00:53I might be exaggerating a little bit. And then when they got to the end of their runway and they
00:58needed to raise capital again,
01:00they were faced with a completely different set of expectations.
01:03Suddenly it was all about profitability, optimizing costs and efficiencies.
01:07And VCs were not necessarily keen to put money behind them anymore unless that's what they were talking about.
01:16So today I'm joined by speakers who have first-hand on-the-ground experience of that change over the past
01:21few years.
01:22They've got very different backgrounds, which I think will make for interesting takes on the topic.
01:28Lorient, you're a partner at KKR, which you joined in 2019. Welcome.
01:32You're a member of the growth team, which means that you focus on growth equity investments in Europe.
01:39Philippe, you're the CEO of Ornicard, a French scale-up, which specializes in car insurance services and driving school services.
01:50You became CEO of the company three years ago.
01:54I did fact-check this behind just before.
01:57Three years ago.
01:58And you're successfully driving Ornicard to profitability.
02:02Well, hopefully successfully driving Ornicard to profitability.
02:05Four years after raising a pretty hefty 100 million Euro Series C that was in 2021.
02:11So welcome.
02:12And last but not least, Enou, you are the founder of the Upright Project,
02:17a company that produces data on the positive and negative impacts of companies and publishes it as open data.
02:25You launched in 2017.
02:27You're semi-bootstrapped, so you raised a small funding round a couple of years ago.
02:33You're profitable, so congratulations and welcome.
02:38I'll start with the first question to the person sitting in the investor's seat.
02:45Simply put, as an investor who's been in the business for a few years now,
02:48how have you seen investors' expectations, your expectations change between a founder raising a round in 2021-2022
02:56and a founder coming to you now in 2025?
03:01So I think when we talk about expectations, it's actually interesting to first start to think about what expectations means
03:09here.
03:09It's true that investors have been focused more on profitability,
03:14but I think it's partly the reason why, you know, that the companies start to be more profitable.
03:21It partly explains it.
03:22I think the other explanation for it is also because the market in the past three years have changed quite
03:28a bit
03:28and have been just much more difficult to grow into.
03:32So, you know, in the past three years, like a dollar invested in growth hasn't brought exactly the same amount
03:38of dollars in revenue
03:41that it did three years ago, five years ago.
03:43And I think that's something that we don't talk a lot about.
03:47And we talk a lot about investors' expectations changing, but I think actually it's investors' expectations,
03:53but it's also companies and how they're evolving in the environment that has changed.
03:57So growing today is just more costly, it's just harder, and so growing 100%, you know,
04:04you may not be able to achieve that as a startup, even if you're investing, as you said, burn at
04:09all costs,
04:10but you may not get to 100%.
04:12And so as an investor, five years ago, one metric that we typically look at is the rule of 40.
04:19So the rule of 40 is basically the sum of your growth rate, your revenue growth rate, and your profitability.
04:25The rule of 40 could be a business growing 100% and burning 60%, as well as it can be
04:31a business that's 20% profitable and growing 20%.
04:35That rule of 40 is just harder to achieve in the current environment today when you're growing 100%, just because
04:43it's more costly.
04:44And so it's been easier for companies to grow at 20%, 30% and be profitable.
04:49And as a result of which, when we say investor sentiment is changing, I think there's just a little bit
04:56of the environment as well that is driving this.
04:59So I'd like to take a step back and mention that typically as we think about it as an investor.
05:03If I see tomorrow a company that's growing 100%, burning 60%, 75%, I'd be super excited and, you know, I
05:10would definitely look at it.
05:11But more of the companies that we look at by the nature of the environment changing are going to be
05:16more profitable or break-even type of companies.
05:21Philippe, you've got the experience of a founder that came in.
05:25And so if it was three years ago, that was 2022, Ornicar had raised a year ago or so.
05:32What was kind of the state of things, your initial assessment, and what was your brief, I guess, when you
05:38came in?
05:40It's a very good question.
05:41Very funny because Lorient was the one who invested the 100 million into Ornicar and also the one who brought
05:48me into this company.
05:53As always, you never know exactly where you land.
05:55So I thought I was landing into an organization which was profitable, which had a very good run in front
06:01of it,
06:01and that KKR had done a sort of the perfect analysis before making the investment.
06:06But as always, you don't know what you don't know.
06:09And we all discovered that the situation was not as rosy as we expected,
06:15which is part of the game because clearly market conditions had changed and things were a bit more tricky at
06:21the time.
06:22And on top of that, roughly in the summer of 21 in the U.S. and landing in Europe a
06:29year later,
06:31the whole funding market had been completely transformed.
06:35So on the back of these two facts, we decided to embark on a journey which was,
06:39we are going to put this company back into black figures, meaning profitability.
06:46Ornicar is a very nice specimen because on one hand, we disrupt the market by creating a marketplace for driving
06:52schools,
06:53a bit like Uber did it for transportation.
06:56That was working well, but we had to find our profitability.
07:00That was one thing.
07:01On the other hand, it's a market which is basically a 2 billion market in France.
07:05We wanted to have more opportunities, so we decided to launch a car insurance business on the back of that.
07:12That's a 25 billion market and focusing mainly on young drivers,
07:17which is a very difficult place to be as a young lad if you want to find insurance.
07:23And we thought that Ornicar had a very good prospect to do something a bit disruptive there.
07:27So bringing one company into profitability as fast as we could and invest in another one
07:35was basically the debate that we had at the board.
07:39And then how you achieve that is basically always the same thing.
07:42You focus on top line.
07:44So top line is always better prices.
07:46We had disrupted the market in the years before by being extremely aggressive on prices.
07:51So we decided to give us a little bit of space there.
07:56And then the rest is about execution, cost management, making sure that we're doing the right things.
08:02So we cut off all our offshoots internationally.
08:06We were a little bit in Spain and Germany and things like that.
08:09We had some other offshoots in other segments of the market that we decided to stop
08:15just to have a company which was executing perfectly well on its main market
08:19and trying to find its way in this new insurance market.
08:23So this is basically what we did over the past, let's say, three years.
08:27We turned the profitability around in the summer of 23, so pretty rapidly.
08:32Then it's all about accumulating profits in order to invest into this new market.
08:39Anu, what is your reaction to this as obviously someone who has had a very different development path, I'd imagine?
08:47Initially bootstrapped, eventually raised a little bit of money.
08:50But what was growth for you from the start, I suppose, is my question.
08:56What did it look like?
08:58Yeah, great question.
09:01I didn't have like a grand master plan when I started my company that,
09:06hey, I'm going to bootstrap, here we're going to be profitable.
09:08It was not cool at all back then.
09:11For me, if I'm being fully honest, it started with the concept of freedom.
09:15I had done my sort of learning how to be an adult in the business life stuff in management consulting
09:21and run a couple of other projects in the business world.
09:23And I just wanted for once to not really pretend that I know I'm going to make money with this.
09:29So what we're doing, we're essentially like building a quantification model to measure impact.
09:35And I wanted to really go in this almost like a research dive.
09:39It was just, I'm being honest here, that there was not a big strategy behind it.
09:42It was more like wanting to go into a cave with a product and just give myself and the small
09:48team around me
09:49for some time to just figure out, can we actually build around this crazy ambitious idea of modeling the impact
09:57of everything on everything
09:58and then potentially making some money through institution investors who need this data.
10:03And I set as my target to just sell the first five cases before fundraising
10:08because I thought that's the way you start to then build a company due to a pitch deck.
10:12But it got a little bit out of hand because I realized that, hey, I actually don't need to fundraise
10:17if we're sort of good enough at just onboarding customers to the deal.
10:21So, but now like looking at it, definitely there is, to just echo what Lorian said about the rule of
10:2840,
10:28which is obviously a really good way also as a founder and not just as an investor
10:31to kind of understand if you're doing something that makes sense.
10:34There's definitely a sort of, as a founder, you need to decide what is your sort of long-term strategy
10:42toward growth and profitability.
10:44And for me, it was about, this was not about something that I want to quickly build and exit.
10:49It was about really an obsession to solve this problem and to build something that lasts.
10:54And we were, it's also industry specific.
10:56We were way too, like a really, really sort of early to the party of starting to do something so
11:01sophisticated.
11:01We're now getting the 100% growth and attraction for investors really needing this kind of data
11:07and larger and larger organizations starting to onboard something like this.
11:11So, it was also a matter of the sort of fit between what your strategy and the market evolution in
11:19a way
11:19that you need to be honest about because there are also industries where you can't just do what I did.
11:23You're late if you, in six months, you haven't shown the traction and done something big in growth.
11:31Did anything change after you raised funds at all, apart from having more cash?
11:37Yeah, that's a really good question.
11:39I think purely from a sort of founder, mental health perspective, it is, of course, nice to just have a
11:43couple of millions in the bank,
11:44even if you don't need them.
11:46It's less about this.
11:48I almost thought this, it had become like second nature to me that we need to sort of keep a
11:53very efficient operation going.
11:56Of course, we still have that ambition and we're still doing it, but it does give you a little bit
12:00of flexibility.
12:01But it also did give me a bit of an identity crisis because I still don't know if I'm in
12:05this discussion,
12:06definitely compared to Philip, I'm the bootstrapper.
12:08But then also, not necessarily our investors would look at it that way.
12:12So, it also gave me a little bit like, now I need to choose my path because it is a
12:16different path
12:17to take on institutional investors and then be a part of their investment thesis and respect that and perform well
12:23in that.
12:23versus then as a founder, you can basically do whatever you want as long as you can pay your bills
12:28and you're fine with your own sort of pace, impact, all of it, the financials.
12:36So, we've talked about profitability.
12:40I'm sure there's other elements that come into play when we're talking about growth today.
12:46Could you get on, Philip, you touched a little bit on the kind of pain points that you identified
12:50and what you implemented to kind of turn the business around, put it on the right foot?
12:56But could you tell us a little bit more, with more detail,
12:59whether it's what you're seeing in the companies you've invested in, Lorient,
13:03or what you've done yourself about operationally,
13:05what are the priorities today for companies who are growing?
13:13I think, Philip, you're best placed here.
13:15No, no, I'm sorry, not better placed than you.
13:18Obviously, growth is a tough thing to do.
13:21When I joined the company, Ornica,
13:23and this was what attracted all of us into this environment,
13:27and I'm just talking about that because I know it well,
13:30the genius of the founders had been to focus on growth
13:33and to spend all the money to create a brand and to get access to customers.
13:38They did it by being extremely aggressive on prices,
13:41but they managed to spread the brand and the market,
13:46and that becomes an asset.
13:48So then you enter into a phase where there's always a yin and a yang,
13:52so there is a time for growth and a time to look at the structure of the P&L,
13:57and then you go back into growth when you have stabilized that.
14:01Growth is first a mindset issue,
14:03so you need to have an organization which is completely focused on that.
14:08And so I have an experience in large corporates,
14:12a very different environment,
14:14so I can see the difference between a growth environment
14:16where people are completely focused on that
14:18that just want to have more market share,
14:20and other environments where it's not a natural thing to do.
14:23And this is a skill set which is very specific.
14:26You need to nurture it to make sure it's there in sufficient quantity
14:31so you can continue to grow,
14:33but you need to have also the other part of the equation,
14:36which is the P&L, completely under control.
14:39So what we try to do by mixing, I would say,
14:42a founder's attitude and my kind of attitude
14:45is to try to get the right balance between the two constantly
14:50in terms of the way we invest in the business.
14:52Obviously, you need to look for growth,
14:54you need to think differently at every market,
14:57even our own one which we seem to control.
15:00We need to look at it on a regular basis
15:02to make sure that we don't get disrupted
15:04by other people who would do it better,
15:06and also that we have the right openness
15:09to do things differently on our core business,
15:12on the new streams that we try to develop,
15:15all this in balance.
15:16It's a very difficult act,
15:18but that's the way it works.
15:20And if you look at...
15:21So I'm a child.
15:22I would say when I was your age,
15:24it was the big crisis,
15:26the tech crisis of the early 2000s,
15:29noughties.
15:31What happened there is that you had a lot of companies
15:33which had mushroomed in the late 90s.
15:37Probably 70% of them disappeared during the crisis,
15:41and those who remained were those
15:42who had really focused on bottom line
15:44and the quality of the growth prospect.
15:47And we know all the big winners of that period.
15:49They are now the massive players that we enjoy now.
15:52But this phase will be exactly the same.
15:54Those who will survive,
15:55who will look for growth,
15:57will be the winners of the next phase,
15:59and we just want to be part of that wave.
16:01It's a question of mindset.
16:03And maybe bouncing back on this,
16:05because the mindset point I think is interesting,
16:08and maybe I knew that resonates with you as well.
16:10What I'm seeing is we obviously look at companies
16:13that are a lot of, I'd say 80% of the companies
16:16that I look at have been venture-backed,
16:19and another 20% is bootstrapped.
16:22Maybe a little bit less than that, actually.
16:24And when you talk to a bootstrapped founder,
16:27and when you invest in a bootstrapped company,
16:30the mindset, and again, I'm on the outside as an investor,
16:33but I see the way entrepreneurs think about their business
16:37on a day-to-day basis is very different.
16:41And typically when we come in a bootstrapped business and invest,
16:44we will be the first investor,
16:46and we will inject capital to accelerate growth.
16:49So that's really the time for them to start burning for the first time.
16:53And we've seen that that shift is really hard.
16:57And I don't know if that was the case for you,
16:59but for us, when we've invested in really bootstrapped businesses,
17:03the mindset of the founder made it difficult for them
17:06to actually be able to burn money,
17:08even when they were trying to.
17:10And that was really interesting, right?
17:11Because that's exactly the type of founders we're looking for,
17:14because we're also more comfortable
17:16when there's a couple of millions in the bank.
17:18And so seeing that it's really more of a mindset,
17:21obviously there's a lot of operational,
17:23it's an operational mindset.
17:24It's thinking about not just growth at all costs,
17:28but thinking about ROI on everything that you do,
17:30on the R&D side, on layers and G&A, all of those things.
17:34Investment in go-to-market, think about KPIs and unit economics.
17:38So it's really being data-driven in the way you think about it.
17:41But when you've been used to managing your business for 10 years
17:44as a bootstrapped founder,
17:46you see that the shift in the company itself
17:48is just really hard to get them to start accelerating and growing.
17:53So there really is this mindset shift
17:54that we're seeing as well as an investor.
17:58Yeah, I think this is really the core of the discussion.
18:01And fully agree also on the sort of...
18:05Because as a founder, you can't really...
18:07Now we're talking about the two main things of a business,
18:09like growth and profitability.
18:11We all learn in, I don't know, business school or whatever,
18:14or high school, that this is what it all boils down to.
18:17But in the end of the day, as a founder,
18:19I think for me, it comes down to your industry,
18:23the market and the competition.
18:25Not knowing, of course, all of the details in your market,
18:28but you guys sort of, as you said, dominate the market where you're in.
18:34If there is...
18:35And for us, what we do is impact data.
18:37It's basically something that when I started the company,
18:39people were like, what?
18:41Like you couldn't think of anything more complex and difficult
18:43and mathematically sort of demanding to build.
18:46And for me, I need to be very honest.
18:48Like what is the kind of problem
18:50that is going to make me wake up every morning,
18:53give my best relentlessly?
18:55As a founder, every founder who's actually tried to build something
18:58knows that it's hard.
18:59If somebody tells you it's easy,
19:00either they haven't tried
19:01or they're in the honeymoon period or something like that.
19:04So what really like,
19:05you need to choose what really drives you.
19:07And these numbers are a reality for everyone,
19:10but it's rarely what sort of gets people up from the bed.
19:13So for me, what was really relevant was to sort of,
19:17you can't be a company that is, let's say,
19:19you gave great examples of the rule of 40 that can work.
19:22Let's say the 20 plus 20.
19:23So 20% growth, rather than sort of modest growth
19:26with 20% profitability.
19:28Okay, that's good profitability.
19:29You can't be a player like that in a market
19:31if someone else is growing at that 100% pace.
19:33You are simply just not taking the market.
19:36You are not in the game.
19:37For us, the industry is, let's just put it this way,
19:42it's really tough.
19:43The fact that we are able to grow at 100% a year
19:46is already something that,
19:48and I get no sort of joy out of my competition's pain,
19:52but this is a really sort of difficult problem to solve,
19:55and a lot of people come to it with great passion,
19:58but it's not easy to get those numbers
20:00to be what you might want them to be.
20:04So you need to also adjust it to the market,
20:06to the evolution, and to your competition,
20:07because this is something that you can't afford,
20:10even though you yourself might think you have 15 years of time
20:13to build this in a profitable manner.
20:15If the market is going somewhere else,
20:16then you're just losing, and none of this matters.
20:19But if you are, in fact, building something
20:21that you believe is going to bring you the growth you need,
20:25then you can make that decision, have that resilience,
20:27and I guess that's, in a nutshell, our story.
20:30It's interesting, because the way you're describing
20:32the mentality of the perfect growth founder, or CEO, or leader,
20:37it's in many ways quite different
20:40to the perfect early-stage founder, in some cases.
20:46So how do you, is it a transition
20:49that a person should do on their own?
20:51Is it the same person?
20:52Does it mean that the founder should get some kind of support
20:55from someone else?
20:56What is the right profile for leading a company
21:01through the transition to growth stage?
21:04Well, I guess Philippe is a perfect example.
21:07I think it's not a, every entrepreneur is different.
21:10Some entrepreneurs scale really well,
21:12and we have a thousand examples of those.
21:16And indeed, some may need coaching or help.
21:19It's not coaching, actually.
21:20It's more advisors, people who've done it, right?
21:24It's just harder to do something for the first time,
21:26scaling a business from 1 to 10 million,
21:28and from 10 to 100, and 100 to beyond.
21:31It's just very, it's a very different job.
21:33It requires very different skills.
21:35It doesn't mean that the same person can't do it,
21:37but obviously they need to have the right people
21:39surrounding them to help them get there.
21:41And that's also the job that we do as investors,
21:44is we're there to help founders scale.
21:47And in the case of Ornicard, actually,
21:50that's, you know, I'll let Philippe speak about it
21:52a little bit, because that's exactly what Philippe did.
21:54Philippe was more a more late-stage operator,
22:00more focused on, you know,
22:01more experience in profitability than growth,
22:04and the founders of Ornicard were more focused on growth.
22:08And so the combination actually works super well.
22:11You know, it's true that it's pretty difficult
22:13to find the right balance,
22:14because you tend to be either too much on one side or the other.
22:18What was surprising when I arrived at Ornicard
22:20is no one was looking at bottom line.
22:22But as a result, it was a pretty young company,
22:25so the average age was 30 years old,
22:27probably between 25 and 35.
22:29But no one had ever done profitability.
22:32So you have very smart people,
22:33but no one has done that.
22:35So when you start to say,
22:36but this is not profitability,
22:37this is not profitability,
22:38they all discover everything.
22:40So we had to change a lot of people.
22:42So we had 40% turnover,
22:46turnaround of our workforce every year for two years.
22:49So 40% two years in a row.
22:53And obviously the founders were telling me,
22:55yes, but the company is going to collapse.
22:59And so what I bring to the table is that,
23:01I say, no, nothing will collapse.
23:02I know that.
23:04Nothing ever collapses for that reason.
23:07So you can do that.
23:08You can be very aggressive.
23:09When I say aggressive,
23:10it was done in a sort of nice way.
23:12It was a natural thing.
23:13We changed the spirit of the company.
23:15We decided to be an Ironman club,
23:21swimming, cycling, running, full stop.
23:26All the rest, you leave the club.
23:29And you have many people who like to do that.
23:31So you need to identify them
23:33and then to hire the new people.
23:35We changed gradually 90% of the ex-co
23:40because people left and then new people came.
23:43And so after two years,
23:45you have only new people.
23:47And then you have a new spirit.
23:48But you keep this growth mindset
23:50still in the company with the founders
23:52because they have this real twist,
23:58accepting to take risks,
23:59which is very important to still have in the company.
24:01But this is just a mixture.
24:03This is a cooking.
24:04You're never sure you do it exactly right,
24:07a bit too much, too less, whatever.
24:09But at the end of the day,
24:11by working every day on it
24:12and by having a clear view
24:14that you recover on bottom line
24:17and then you refocus on top line,
24:20these things work.
24:22And if you have good bottom line,
24:24obviously you have independence
24:25because you have cash flow
24:26and you can think about your future
24:28in a slightly more comfortable way.
24:30So it's just, there's no recipe.
24:34There is just good,
24:36I would say good management or whatever,
24:38not all together.
24:40I like that a lot.
24:41Just to sort of echo that,
24:44I like the idea.
24:45It's not necessarily a question of founder
24:48or external CEO or anything like that,
24:50but it's the whole sort of mix of people
24:53and how you build it.
24:55One of the concrete things that I try to sort of,
24:57as a founder, you need to be very,
24:58if you don't know yourself,
24:59you are just going to ruin the company.
25:01So you need to be very sort of aware
25:03of where you are
25:04in all of this endless amount of dimensions.
25:06And I try to,
25:07one of my only sort of leadership
25:09sort of rules of thumb
25:10is that wherever I am in a dimension,
25:13I need to make sure that at least one person
25:15in this company is on the left-hand side
25:17and is on the right-hand side from me.
25:18So I am never the most something.
25:20If I'm, let's say,
25:21I have fairly high energy,
25:22I need to make sure there are people
25:24that are higher energy than me
25:25and I'm not like the hype man of the company
25:28or something like that.
25:28If I'm very mathematical, analytical,
25:31I need to make sure there's someone
25:32who's even more than that.
25:33So I don't represent any sort of trait
25:36or any source of like form of energy
25:38in the company.
25:39And I think this gives a great sort of concrete toolkit
25:43for me when I'm recruiting,
25:44especially now talking about
25:45the sort of more senior executives.
25:46Like what kind of people do I need
25:48to make sure that I'm never
25:49the most something for this company?
25:52That's also a way of making sure
25:54that the company is not like,
25:55I'm not building a little empire around myself
25:57as some kind of superior person,
25:59but I'm actually building a company
26:00that works in a functional way
26:03that's actually like fighting
26:04towards something together.
26:05So this dimension thinking has helped me a lot
26:08and has also put me in funny situations sometimes.
26:11Can you tell us more about that?
26:14Maybe just something around the energy.
26:15I'm a Finn, I'm from Finland.
26:16So if you talk this fast that I do,
26:19if you have very high energy,
26:20if you at least seem to be kind of extroverted,
26:22it's sometimes hard to find a person
26:24who is at the same time ticks some of the boxes
26:26that you just need to tick
26:27and is sort of more insane than you are.
26:31And yeah, that's been one of the challenges.
26:34Good to know.
26:35In the case of Arnigar, it was a transition.
26:37So it wasn't just a transition in terms of leadership
26:40and mentality at the level of leadership.
26:43I'm assuming it was basically a cultural shift
26:46for the whole company.
26:48Can you tell us a bit more about how you navigate that
26:51in terms of managing talent and people
26:54who maybe feel like they're suddenly told
26:56that they need to be focusing on other things
26:58when that's not what they wanted to do?
27:00How do you manage that?
27:02So one thing I did,
27:03I didn't try to look like my young colleagues.
27:06So I was clear from another generation.
27:08So I'm a boomer.
27:09So I told them two or three things
27:11which I stick to.
27:13First, we work at the office,
27:18not remotely.
27:19And when I arrived, it was 100% remote
27:22and people were coming to the office.
27:24We have a very large office
27:25in the 19th arrondissement here.
27:27But it was clearly empty.
27:29So my first day,
27:31I could see maybe 20 people out of 250.
27:34So that was the first thing.
27:35So we come back at work.
27:37So that was a bit of a difficult shift
27:39just after the COVID lockdowns
27:43and all the habits
27:44that had been taken at the time.
27:46These were not longstanding habits.
27:49They had just emerged
27:50two or three years ago.
27:51But in that generation,
27:52it was super deeply rooted already.
27:55So we did that.
27:57And I knew that it was a tiny bit spectacular.
27:59Maybe not 100% necessary to that extent,
28:02but it was a good message that was passing.
28:05That was the first thing.
28:06Second, we worked together.
28:09So we're a team spirit
28:11because all these are organizations
28:14which had been a little bit remotely organized.
28:16We are doing a lot not synchronized,
28:22so a lot of written documents
28:24and people who are not talking together,
28:26they were writing to each other.
28:28And it was asynchronical.
28:31So we said, no, we are all in the same room.
28:33We do those things.
28:34So all this was the ingredients of the cultural shift.
28:39And then I had to have an HR person
28:41which was the right one.
28:43So I took a young lady
28:46who was from that generation
28:47who had understood that this was important
28:49and was able to implement that
28:51with so many people going and coming,
28:56and necessarily we had to make sure
28:58that everything was done in the right way,
29:00that the spirit of that was understood,
29:02communication was well done.
29:04So it was super important to have the right,
29:06basically, bridge between what I was saying
29:10and I would say the general population we were managing.
29:13and that worked also very well.
29:15And the last point is I always go back
29:18to what I have seen in my professional life,
29:21teams, people, everything.
29:24You have cycles.
29:30You have a lot of elements which are in cycles,
29:35but some things are perennial.
29:37They will always be there, the right team,
29:39the right people, the right mentality,
29:40the right push, the right attitude,
29:43the right appetite to go for a success.
29:48And this is not something that is shared by everyone.
29:50So you need to find these right people,
29:52bring them together,
29:53create a narrative which works well.
29:56And you have so many good examples
29:58in all the industries of things which have worked well.
30:01So I inspire myself.
30:02So I like Apple.
30:03I like Steve Jobs.
30:05In my generation, Steve Jobs, it's a king.
30:08It's a god.
30:11We've seen him through all these different phases,
30:13so I use that a lot.
30:14And gradually, but it took some time
30:17because not everyone was in sync with me
30:21and with what I was saying
30:22because I'm older.
30:25So probably I'm wrong, they were saying.
30:29But over time, let's say, it finally worked
30:33and this is something that I'm pretty happy about.
30:37These are the sort of ingredients you have to put.
30:39And one last thing, the founders,
30:42and you know them well,
30:43two very brilliant founders in all dimensions,
30:48including the human dimension.
30:50The dimension to say,
30:51I'm not the right guy to lead during that phase.
30:54I need to pull back a bit.
30:57And one did that.
30:59And the other one said,
31:00fine, I was the CEO,
31:01but I'm not equipped to do that.
31:03Let's, you do the CEO.
31:04I'm going to do the things I like most,
31:06which I was not able to do.
31:09And so we found the right way
31:11to combine all that as well.
31:13And obviously, as an impact on the organization,
31:16having the founders in the organization
31:18still leading the message with me
31:23was pretty important
31:24to make it a relative success.
31:27We have more to grab,
31:30but so far,
31:31this combination has worked well.
31:37Great.
31:37Yeah, I think that's what I was pointing at
31:39when I was talking about
31:40who's the right profile for that
31:41and how, you know,
31:42I'm glad you talked about the potential tension,
31:45or in that case,
31:45non-tension with founders
31:47as you manage that transition.
31:49We don't have much time left,
31:50but I did want to ask as well
31:53about whether or not
31:55we're seeing a tendency to think
31:59that maybe VC funding
32:00isn't for all startups
32:01now that growth doesn't necessarily
32:03mean the same thing
32:04and doesn't entail
32:06the same amounts of funding
32:08or the same kind of mechanisms to grow.
32:11Are you noticing,
32:12perhaps I'll start with Lohian,
32:13because you're seeing
32:15many different companies,
32:17that perhaps some founders
32:18are leaning more towards bootstrapping
32:20or other alternative methods of funding?
32:25I don't want to say
32:26that not every startup
32:28can do VC financing.
32:29I think it's probably true
32:31on the reverse, though.
32:32Not every startup can bootstrap.
32:34I think to the point
32:36Anu was making earlier,
32:38if you're trying to,
32:39if you're in a super innovative space
32:41and you need to be grabbing market shares
32:43because your competitors
32:44are gaining market shares,
32:45then VC funding
32:47is probably your only option
32:50because obviously
32:51you're going to be able
32:52to grow faster,
32:53spend more in marketing
32:54and just grab market shares.
32:56And that's kind of the case study,
32:58the biggest case study
32:59I know of is Uber on that,
33:01is they couldn't have been profitable
33:03and they pushed it really far.
33:05They were unprofitable
33:05until the very end
33:06until they grabbed enough market share
33:08that they had the ability
33:11to then become profitable.
33:12And for some companies,
33:13it doesn't make sense
33:14to be profitable from the start
33:16in that regard.
33:16That could also be true
33:17for companies
33:19that need to invest a lot in R&D,
33:21so deep tech companies
33:22that actually need the funding
33:24and without it,
33:25it's just difficult to bootstrap.
33:28Companies that can bootstrap
33:30are the ones that,
33:32you know,
33:32you have your software product
33:33and you're able to put
33:35some services around it
33:37that helps you generate revenue
33:38and finance the product,
33:39for example,
33:40or just companies
33:41that have a really good market fit
33:43and, you know,
33:43don't need to, you know,
33:44are able to grow
33:45and don't need to kind of
33:47beat off competition
33:48on marketing spend.
33:49It really depends on the space
33:51and the company
33:52rather than the founder itself.
33:53I mean, if you think about insurance,
33:56which Philippe knows well,
33:57there's a natural J curve in insurance.
33:59You can't actually grow a business
34:01without investing first in it.
34:02and so starting being bootstrapped
34:05in insurance is just really hard.
34:06So I think it really depends
34:08on the space.
34:09There's no one-size-fits-all,
34:10but obviously there's been
34:13the results of investors
34:15being super pushy in 21
34:18means that some companies
34:19that could have been bootstrapped
34:20ended up being VC-funded
34:22and today I think there's
34:23people think about it
34:25two times before actually
34:27raising with a VC
34:27if they can actually bootstrap
34:28the business
34:29because, you know,
34:30there's real advantages
34:31of doing that, I think.
34:33So it's, well,
34:35if you can summarize
34:36in 10 seconds.
34:38No, I was just about to say,
34:39like, I don't think Visa's dead.
34:41I think in just
34:42from the founder
34:44peer-to-peer support bubbles
34:46where I'm present,
34:47I think it's clear
34:48that people are just
34:50looking more into the fit.
34:51They don't take it
34:52at face value.
34:52They really think about
34:53the strategy that they have.
34:54If there is a way
34:55to bring the initial cash in
34:57by being obsessed
34:58with the customer,
34:59and as Lorian said,
35:00that's not always the case
35:01but if that's possible
35:03for you,
35:04it is quite a lucrative
35:05opportunity.
35:06I think it's good
35:07for Europe,
35:07it's good for the ecosystem,
35:08it's good for the VCs as well
35:09that that is also being
35:11pursued,
35:11especially in the very beginning.
35:13Great, thanks.
35:14Well,
35:15that is all we had time
35:16for today
35:16but thank you
35:17for these great insights
35:18and please join me
35:19in giving our fantastic panelists
35:21a round of applause.
35:22Thank you.
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