Venture Capitalist's take on Investments (Ft. Ventech)

The tech ecosystem is very varied. You have fintech, adtech, healthtech, etc. The list goes on. And today I want to know something, which is what makes some of the entrepreneurs so special that VCs invest in them and contribute. This is the reason why I have Audrey Susson. She is the general partner at Ventec. It's a global VC firm for early-stage ventures with over 200+ investments and 80+ exits. Audrey is also the co-founder of AFI Ventures, which is another seed funding VC firm helping impact-driven startups. Audrey has also taken part in several movements such as StartHer and Sista for impact investments. So Audrey, thank you. Thank you for joining me today. So, Autrey, I know that within Adventech today you have within your portfolio companies several verticals. Let's say you have— you specialize in HR tech, retail tech. There are several successful companies within your portfolio. What have you observed in these entrepreneurs from coming from these successful ventures? I read this article of yours which was quite interesting to me, very intriguing. You mentioned some of the traits.

So yeah, what I learned during these 13 years investing in companies is that you could succeed with many different personalities as an entrepreneur. So I don't think you should, like, as a potential entrepreneur or a candidate for being an entrepreneur, you shouldn't get demotivated by looking at all the entrepreneurs you see you see on TV and saying, oh, I'm not like them, so I should stop. I think there is a company for any entrepreneur. And actually, as you said, Ventec has been investing for more than 25 years, investing in a few hundreds of companies, 110 over the last 15 years. And when I'm thinking about the most successful entrepreneurs, they don't look like each other, actually. You have kind of various types of entrepreneurs and I can get a bit into the details of these types of entrepreneurs. But again, you should find your own version of entrepreneurship as an entrepreneur and not copy paste, I would say, what you see. And basically it's the same for VCs. I'm saying that because myself, I'm also always looking for, you know, a better version of myself and who I could get inspired by. And of course there are many great VCs in the US especially that are very well known. And yeah, there are some who are, you know, very shy and some who are very outgoing. So some who are very analytic, some who are very driven by the market size. And yeah, actually very different from one from each other as well. So getting back to the entrepreneurs, yeah, maybe when we watch TV and when we think about entrepreneurs, very often we think about someone who has an idea. A great idea and someone who anticipates about the market shifts and someone who is very visionary, basically. So it's very often what we think of. And of course, there are entrepreneurs like that. And yeah, I can think of a few in our portfolio company, but basically these are not the only ones. And you know very well Xavier, for example, and Emilien from Additive. Yeah, both of them have been following Additive for 10 years now. The company is 10 years old. I've been investing from the very beginning. Great company in the tech industry. Well, I couldn't really say that they were visionary in the sense that the market changed so much during the last 10 years. It had been, I mean, the advertising technology market has been shifting so many times during these 10 years that it would have been impossible to, you know, know in advance what could have happened. And yeah, I think when you think about Xavier and Emilien, they are great at execution, they are very agile, they are great at reactivity. But I wouldn't say that when they pitched me 10 years ago, they were thinking about what the company is now. Actually, I could tell you in another podcast what it was about, but it was very different. And that's fine. I mean, I'm not looking for entrepreneurs that in 100% of the case, they can identify what would be the future. That's not what I'm investing in. I'm also investing in people who can very quickly adapt. And especially depending on the different market, the different sector, you would need different types of entrepreneurs. And in the tech market, which is shifting every time, I think it's much more important to get someone very agile, very reactive than someone who foresees the future because The negative point of being able to be a great visionary is that very often you don't want to stop your idea. You don't want to stop executing the idea that you envision. And sometimes you're just too early in the process. And okay, the vision is good, but you thought about this vision maybe 5 years too early. And even if the vision was good, you can't execute it. So sometimes being a great visionary If you're not able to, you know, also be driven and agile and be driven by the market shifts and be agile with the market, then you can't execute. But the counterexample is Believe, great company from the Ventec portfolio. We invested a bit more than 10 years ago, company which is really distributing music artists to streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, and co. So one of the major in the music industry company, which actually was in the news today because there has been a takeover on this company valuing the company for more than €1.5 billion. So we invested in this company more than 10 years ago. It was doing less than €2 million revenue. So you see, long, long road and In this very specific case, the founder and CEO of Believe, Denis Ladegaire, he had a vision. Basically, the vision was, I think the CD will disappear. You don't need any hardware to listen to music and the whole music industry will be digitalized. And 10 years ago when he was pitching this vision, it was a time when, you know, you could have stores, full stores, which were only selling CDs like Virgin on the Champs-Élysées. It was like 3 floors of selling CDs. So it was really totally innovative to say CDs will disappear. And actually it happened. And it was great because he had this vision, but he also shifted the business model of Believe every time that the market— because when you don't go from all is about hardware to listen to music to it's pure digital. Of course, to get to the consumer shift, you have to go through different versions, I think, of the new markets. So if you think about the digitalization of the music industry, if you remember well, at some point we were buying online CDs on iTunes for like €2 a title. It seems like a long time ago, but I'm sure you remember this time where we were buying €1 or €2 to listen to one music, one song, basically to buy one digital song on iTunes and listen to it. So it was a bit an in-between, an in-between the pure CD and the existing model that we know today, which is unlimited subscription to get to unlimited access of every music you could think of, like Spotify and so on. But to get to the current market, you had to go through this in-between, which was not part of the vision of the CEO, but it was on the road. So he had to adapt to this vision. So yeah, sorry, I'm a bit getting into every direction, but I want to illustrate with examples, examples of CEOs that I met, some were great at finding these visions and some others who actually totally missed the vision. If I'm making jokes on Xavier and Emilien, they totally missed the, I mean, what they pitched to me didn't appear, but that's fine because they were great again at executing in these market shifts.

Indeed. I remember that Emilio had actually shown me one of his presentations, several presentations actually. And I saw how he pivoted to different models, how they pivoted to different models. And I think, yeah, because you actually tackled my question very well because my second question was about market anticipation. What is the role of market anticipation in the success of a venture? And I think it's not just market anticipation, but also considering pivoting. When needed.

Yeah, constantly pivoting. Yeah, I think that's a great expression because entrepreneurship is all about constantly pivoting. You have opportunities down the road that you need to take. And I think a good entrepreneur is both strategist and tactic. So of course, the strategy is all about long-term vision. And the tactic is all about short-term wins. And to get to this long-term vision, you need to get these short-term wins. So you can't just avoid the tactic and concentrate only on the strategy. So it's very important to be on the two sides or to be, you don't have to do everything by yourself. I mean, in every of your questions, you ask about the traits of the founder, but I think you need to think about the traits of the founding teams and the founding teams needs to be complete. enough and complementary enough to actually have some people that are more focusing on the long-term vision, some others that are more focusing on the short-term execution. It's very hard for a founder to do everything at the same time. But what as VCs we are looking for is really a complete team of complementary founders with these different traits. And getting back to this momentum, this timing, I mean, you never really know when the vision will get real or not. So in the meantime, you need to react and really execute according to the current momentum, the current timing. I mean, we can discuss also about this time to market, but again, so many times founders had great ideas. I myself, I invested In a company, I remember a competitor of Deliveroo, but I didn't know Deliveroo at the time when I invested. A French company that was actually delivering food, last-minute food. But yeah, I mean, Deliveroo just launched, I mean, the same time I invested in the French company. So the idea was good, the market was great, but the execution was bad. Deliveroo also invested so much that it was very hard to compete with very small local players against them. So yeah, I mean, having the good idea doesn't make the success at all.

Indeed, indeed. I can see that.

And if I had to choose, basically, if I had to choose between, you know, a founder who executes very well on a bad idea, or a founder who doesn't know how to execute on a great idea, I prefer the first one.

Ah, okay, good to know. Yeah, these are the insider notes that I really want to tap on. You know, today I have gone through a lot of myths, and I would like to tackle those myths with you around early-stage entrepreneurs or ventures, let's say. You know, they face a lot of challenges such as lack of traction, you know, and building a minimum viable product. Sometimes they have problems related to valuation discrepancies when they do not have significant revenue to show. Sometimes there's a problem with founder market fit or product development market timing, which is something you already tackled. So if we were to look at founder market fit, let's say for example, how important do you think this factor is when you evaluate?

Founder market fit? Yeah, well, sometimes it's reassuring to meet with founders who come from the industry, who have the expertise, and they tell you, I've already seen it. By the way, it was the case of Denis Laduguerrie from Believe. He was coming from this music industry and from the inside, he was able to disrupt it. But it's very rare actually. Usually disruptors, they don't come from the industry. It's very complex. When you are a specialist of a specific sector to be able to disrupt this sector because you embrace it so much, you've learned so much about it, you know all the rules that the rules becomes to you the new normal. And you don't want to revolutionize these rules because it's your rules basically. While I've seen founders that are, were very much more, were much more comfortable at disrupting the sectors while not coming from this sector at all. For example, StickyAds founders, they came from the telco industry and they've been executing a great company in the real-time bidding advertising in the video space. And yeah, they didn't come from the the advertising industry. And that's fun because at the end, they sold the company to a telco company. So they were back to their sector again. Back to the sector. So there was a link, there was a link in the end, but you know, it was very hard to see the link between their background and the new company they wanted to launch when they pitched to us the first time. So I'm not sure that you absolutely need to come from the— of course it's reassuring. It creates a great equity story to say, yeah, I've, you know, I've lived the issue, I've lived the challenge, I've lived the problem. And that's why I've been looking for a solution. I couldn't find a solution. So I decided to build my own solution. It's an equity story that we hear many times. And yeah, it is reassuring that sometimes having a fresh view on a sector you don't know at all, and by being having this fresh view and this distance with the rules of the sector, you actually, you can actually be much better at disrupting it. So I'm not sure this is the only way to be a great entrepreneur.

Yeah.

And anyway, you can find another equity story, you know, even if you don't come from the sector, you can say that, that's something I recommend for new entrepreneurs. When you come to VCs and you launch your seed stage, for example, you come and just by saying, you know, I've made 100 calls with potential clients, with 100 calls with prospects, 100 calls with people from the industry. And that's what I discovered from this. I mean, that's enough for us. Of course, you need to explain a bit who are these 100 calls from.

Right.

could, but it's also a way to discover the industry and, and being able to challenge it.

Yeah, I can truly connect the dots. I mean, we're kind of— what I'm going to say is not primarily based on what we were talking about, but you remember we had this conversation earlier and you were telling me about the VC space, you know, how within your own company you have young people, how they could be disrupting some of the things, you know, not thinking the same way. So I think at the end of the day, it's about Just giving someone a chance who's an outsider. Maybe they can have an idea which is different from what is the existing, the status quo within an industry.

Yeah, I would go even further. Sometimes being new to a job or being new to a market, a sector, gives you really the tools to be able to see another potential future. So indeed, I think what we discussed together is that at Ventech, we are 6 partners investing in companies. And among the 6 partners, there are very young partners, or very young, I don't know, but in their 30s and some who are much more experienced in their 60s. And yeah, indeed, it's very often fun to challenge a bit the points of view of the younger and the youngest and the most experienced, because you need both for being a good VC. You need to have seen, have the experience and have seen many things which succeeded or which didn't, and to kind of take the lessons of these examples that happened in the past. But at the same time, sometimes if you've seen too much, you would say, oh, this, I've already seen it many times. never worked, so it will never work. But no, sometimes it was just not the moment, the right moment or the right timing. And so indeed it didn't work in the past, but maybe it didn't work also for 40 times, but for 40 different reasons. And then today it's the right moment, or today you can do it with the right execution and it works. So indeed you need to be a bit new as well, to be able to embrace ideas from the past that are coming back now, but with the right angle.

Totally, totally. And in terms of importance of timing, you've briefly mentioned that, but how would you assess timing when you consider a market opportunity for a new startup? I think I saw it somewhere when you mentioned that you gave a chance to a company that was proving the value of programmatic advertising. when it was not the case. I'm unable to recollect the name, but yeah, some of the examples from your experience.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the company you mentioned is TikiAds that I already mentioned in the real-time bidding advertising space applied to video. And indeed, when we invested in the company, they were still an agency and they were still executing campaigns, advertising campaigns with no real-time bidding at all. Yeah. Just with what we call orders. And yeah, they were at the very early stage of this shift in the market. The shift was already kind of foreseeable in the US, but much less in Europe. And everything was about, okay, will it, you know, shift to Europe? And at the same time, we invested in this company, which was a pure player in the advertising space. We were already an investor in a company called Webédia. It's one of the main publishers in Europe, publisher behind Allociné, jeuxvideo.com, 750g, and so on. And actually they were selling advertising as a business model. So it's a media company. So selling advertising was their main business model. And so before investing in this Sticky Ads company, we asked Webedia, what do you think about the shift to real-time bidding? Do you think it will be very soon in the market and so on? Webedia, by being within the industry, they were pushing away this innovation. I mean, it was not good for them in a way. When it appeared, they had to change totally their business model. They had to get equipped in technology, they had to change their operations and so on. So as it was a company which was already doing, I don't know, tens of millions of euros, you know, they, maybe they had this lack of agility or maybe, yeah, it was not a given for them that the market would shift that way. Especially in their specific vertical, which was premium. And they were thinking, okay, real-time bidding will appear, but not for premium media, only for, you know, the mass media. And actually it happened. So you see in this example, again, people from the industry, they couldn't believe that the innovation would disrupt the market. And still we decided to invest in the company because we thought, okay, Maybe it's not for the premium media, but the market is enough for the non-premium. But yeah, we didn't really know, you know, but yeah, we still decided to invest thinking, okay, maybe they are a bit in advance, maybe it will take time. But in the meantime, they have this other business model, which is the agency, which is less interesting for VCs, less scalable, and also less innovative. But it was a good way for us to get reassured by the fact that, okay, if the disruption was too slow, they were able to still, you know, get a viable company and compensate a bit the length of innovation.

Many factors play a role here. I see. Moving on to your point, something that you mentioned, you know, sometimes they say they made 100 calls. I connected with the network effect that you were talking about. in our previous conversation. Have you observed the network effect in any of your portfolio companies when they've been unable to prove traction for their product or service? And how does network, the network effect prove scalability?

Yeah, I love network effects. It's one of my favorite topics. And when there is network effects in a company, I mean, you can be sure that I will have a deep look at the company and try to invest. So especially I have one in my portfolio, it's called Reveal. Reveal is a company which is enabling partnership managers to basically get additional sales, get additional leads from the partners. So basically the pitch is easy. You already have outbound sales where you have a CRM tool to cold call.

Right.

New people. You also have inbound marketing, which is about doing marketing campaigns or great websites to get inbound coming to your platform. And they invented the nearbound channel, which is a new acquisition channel which comes from the partnerships. And so the business model is really kind of a huge professional social network where as a partner, You would onboard on the platform, invite other partners, meaning companies that are in the same market than yourself, that are selling complementary products, but that you are not competing against. So you would invite these partners onboard, and then the platform will connect the CRMs and tell you when there is an opportunity to collaborate. So basically, it could be telling you, you know, you have these prospects in your CRM, which is already a client of the other partner. So it's a good signal. Or you could also ask for help that could tell you the opposite, like, you know, none of your partners is connected with specific prospect which is very advanced in your pipeline. So maybe it's a mistake to spend time with this prospect because there is low chance of conversion as no one of your partners were able to convert this guy. So it gives you many insights on your sales process and how to improve it or how to score your pipeline and so on. And this is all about virality and all about network effects because Yeah. Again, the very beginning is onboarding on the platform, inviting partners, and then these partners will invite other partners and get insight. And the fact that there are many partners on the platform gives you all the insights that you need to be better, more performing, and to get a better return on investment. So basically, the more influential the partners are that are on the platform, the better the company is. And this network effect, at the very beginning when I invested in the company, was not monetized. So it was a platform, people were just joining the platform and the company Reveal was giving insights to the members of the platform. But to launch this network effect, the company didn't want to monetize the solution because the most important was to get the big players, the big partners. That would be very influential and give a lot of data to the solution and enable the company to get a more insightful product and better ROI for its customers. So basically, for a long time, maybe a year and a half after my investment, the company was not monetizing. So it was all about the only KPIs in the company was number of members. Of the network and number of viral members from the network. So number of invitations, yeah, KPIs like that, which were kind of, you know, very bottom of the funnel. And it's only a year and a half after that we decided to, first of all, that we had the time to build features that were able to get monetized, but also that the network effect was strong enough to start the monetization because the network had a value that it couldn't have before this 1 year and a half. So yeah, it's very interesting because in the end, this network effect is also a way to acquire customers for very low money because again, they onboard themselves automatically through word of mouth and invitation from their peers. And it's much more efficient than, you know, having sales calling these guys and telling them, yeah, yeah, you should try the platform. I mean, it's much easier for them to have their partners calling them and telling them, I'm already on the platform, so let's onboard. So it's very interesting, this network effect. And it leads to companies that we call product-led growth companies, which are companies that by themselves sell the product without the need of salespeople to to sell because the product by itself gets sold automatically. So I'm always looking for this type of mechanism in a company. That's rare because virality is not in every business model. And sometimes it's linked to no revenue for long. So, you know, you have to find an in-between because I mean, I couldn't, I don't have a fund size which could have enabled me to wait for 10 years before the first euro in, you know, because then it would have been investing a lot of money while waiting for the revenue to come. So I couldn't have afforded that. But this in-between was, I think, quite interesting. They had to wait, but not too much. Before being able to monetize.

Yeah, I think these kind of platforms, account-based platforms, thrive on actually having more and more people joining the platforms. So it's certainly okay to have this KPI set for, uh, for a year or so. Uh, I actually use Reveal and I can totally see the benefits of this platform. Um, it's literally like once they onboard us, let's say Addictive, Addictive will do the job and onboard other, you know, partners that we potentially want help with. So as you correctly mentioned, your customer is doing the job. So it's more like word of mouth. Would you say it's like more of word of mouth marketing?

Yeah, virality rather than word of mouth because you do much more than words. You actually invite your partners. So you act actually, you would not only tell them come to the platform, you would push them an email saying, Here is the button to connect. So I think it's much, it's even more than word of mouth. And the issue of word of mouth is you can't really measure, you can't really tell where it comes from, why, and so on. While product-led growth and this type of network effect, you can very easily measure how many invitations you made, how many people from the invitation came and converted into customers or not. That's great that you're using Reveal. I didn't know that.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, it was Emilia who pitched that idea and it's great. The platform is great and I don't think they have a lot of competitors. They have competitors per se in Europe I've not heard of. There's one Crossbeam, which is in the US, but Reveal is also GDPR compliant and yeah, I think it's a wonderful platform, especially helping B2B players. enhance their, um, their database and customer base.

Yeah, that's exactly the point.

Amazing. Uh, so I want to pivot a bit to, uh, women VC and the tech ecosystem. I mean, you— I recently read this report, it was, uh, Women in Venture Capital. I read that there are about 16% GPs in Europe today. Um, you're one of them. Uh, so Yeah, how important do you think a company, especially if you were to talk about the VC space, the company's gender diversity score is? Why is it so important?

Now there are many studies which shows that the more diversity in a company, the best the performances are. So I think it has not to be, you don't have to convince anymore on that. I think it's not only about gender diversity, it has to be any diversity. It brings a lot around the table. Again, I was thinking at the very beginning of this call, I was speaking about the complementary needed in a team. It's all about that, basically. The more diversity you see in the team, the more complementary the team will be. And then it's a lot of challenge in terms of you know, being open-minded enough to understand the other point of view or the other angle. But this diversity brings a lot on the table. I mean, that's what we have at Ventec. I already described that we have this diversity in terms of age, with partners being younger than others, but we also are 42% of women in the partnership. And we also have a great diversity in terms of culture. As there are 3 nationalities represented in the partnership and actually 5 in the whole team. And same thing, nationality, culture brings a lot of different angles, points of view around the table to make a complete decision.

Have you observed within Ventech changes in investment decisions made due to diversity? You've been in the space for over 10 years. You mentioned 42%, which is great. Do you think there is like also a relationship between gender diversity and the impact on investment decisions? Do you have more women on board?

Because, yeah. The impact on decision-making is strong in the sense that, again, our decisions, they are taken with much broader view on a specific challenge, question, problem, or I don't know what, then the results can be different or not. But I think I will give an easy example. As investors, we often have the question about reinvesting in existing portfolio companies and about taking the opportunity or not to exit investment portfolio companies. So as an example, Again, I've been an investor for 10 years in Addictive. And around during this past 10 years, I had the opportunity to sell my shares in Addictive, but I decided for many reasons to keep in this company because I thought that I could get more money by waiting a bit more, basically. And this main decision about, you know, taking the opportunity as soon as it's possible or waiting a bit to find a better opportunity. This one, very often the gender diversity leads to different conclusions. So very often in our team, I'm not saying it's always the case, but in our team, very often, Women are much more opportunistic, meaning saying, okay, there is the opportunity now, maybe there won't be the opportunity later, so let's take it now. So we usually would prefer to sell the company when it's possible, even if there is a potential better exit a few years down the road. While the men in the partnerships, they would favor very often a better potential outcome. So I don't know why, and honestly, I've been working on that for very long in my career because already 12 years ago, I was part of organizations to highlight the women in the tech industry and try to push for more women as entrepreneurs. So I've been wondering a lot, okay, why that? Is it women themselves that, you know, have that in their DNA, some specificities? Is it that the society is pushing you to react like that because you are a woman and because for a long time it has been like that? I don't know. I'm not a scientist. But yeah, I can see that we, yeah, we don't react the same way, but also it's not because you are 2 women that you feel And think exactly the same way neither. So we are all different and maybe, um, yeah, maybe we have our kind of bias and it's great to be different around the table so that we have all the bias around the table in a way. And, uh, yeah, we can decide having the, the, the, the 360 degrees angle of everything, which is possible and interesting to know before taking the decision.

Oh, interesting. And on this note, when you have conversations, you know, investment conversations, how often do you focus on the diversity score of the portfolio companies or to-be portfolio companies? How much do you focus on that?

Unfortunately, there is not enough diversity in the tech ecosystem so that we can focus on that because if we would only invest in diverse teams, I'm afraid that we would we would have much less leads than we have today and much less potential investments. So we decided to be reactive instead of— sorry, to be— how can I say? To be— instead of limiting our investment to great diversity score in our companies, We decided to push any companies that come to us, even with a bad diversity score, to increase their diversity score. So we think it's much better because it enables us to work on a much larger scope and also have an impact on the market and on the potential great startups that are missing a bit of performance because of this lack of diversity. So it's more about us pushing our founders, pushing our C-level teams to get more diverse. And of course, you can't also get into the totally different vision, which would be, oh, any women you should hire because it would be diversity. Oh no, of course you can't work like that. So you need to find the right person. And if it brings diversity to the team, we think it's a plus. But I mean, I'm totally against what you call, what you call, you know, in French we say, how my God, how do you say that again? When you proactively Uh, put ratios on the table so that there are, well, there are more women in the team.

Quotas, more like quotas, you know.

Quotas, exactly. Quotas, ratios, exactly. You got it. So I hate that because you push people to maybe hire the, the, the wrong, the wrong persons. And, and also you, you push the women who have been hired not to trust themselves because they know they are here because of the And and not for for other reasons. So discrimination positive—that's what I was looking for—the positive discrimination. Yeah, very—I'm mostly against that because I think yeah it provides it leads to negative impacts, negative consequences on both the company and the women. So. I think it's, you, you, you, you, you don't, you, you can't push, uh, whatever, whatever the price. So you, you, you should have this openness mindset. And I think more than a diversity score, what I'm looking for when I'm investing in the team is this open-mindedness. So basically the fact that, okay, maybe they have not found yet the right person to bring diversity to the team, but at least they are open enough. to recognize a great opportunity if the opportunity comes to them or to look for this diversity opportunity in a way.

Beautiful. I read this article recently from New York Times. It was about how companies are changing this approach and are, instead of saying diversity and inclusion, are talking about community and belongingness. So this way you remove, as you mentioned, positive discrimination from the picture and you're focusing more on the community aspect. and making the common denominator the purpose that the community wants to achieve rather than, oh, our common denominator is we are women, 42% women, 52%, that kind of thing. My one last question is about at Vintech, you say that vision, disruption, and execution are the 3 traits that you've observed in the entrepreneurs that are within your portfolio companies. How do you see these 3 traits interacting in the lifecycle of a venture through its inception to scalability to exit?

Yeah, I think you need a bit of the 3 of them at any time, to be honest. It's true that at the very beginning, as you don't have anything to execute because it's the very beginning, it's all about ideation. So the vision is key, but still in the way you are trying to find this vision and that you are trying to you know, fine-tune this vision, you need a good execution and a good disruption in a way, because you need to have methodology to say, okay, this idea is good, but maybe, I don't know, it's a very competitive market, or it's a long-term, longer-term vision than this other one. So I want to favor the idea number 2. So I think even at the very beginning, at the very early stage of the company, when It's all about fine-tuning the value proposition, finding the first prospects, or defining the ICP. You need to get a bit of vision, a bit of disruption, a bit of execution. And of course, the more and more you advance in the company, the more and more mature the company is. Well, you are already on the track to achieve your vision, but so you would say, okay, execution becomes key. But at the same time, we said it earlier, you have to keep being agile because even if the vision is here, the market is shifting and maybe it has, you have to change or shift a bit your vision so that it adapts more to the market shifts. So even when the company is more mature, it's important that you keep being very visionary and sometimes, you know, totally shift the main goal of the company to another vision because you realize that actually your first vision won't realize. And so you need to get to another one. You can't get stuck to a former one, which wasn't true. So really, I think during the whole whole process of building your company, you need the 3 of them. And disruption, disruption, it's also a bit about disruption in your execution. So finding the shortcuts, finding the way to execute without using too much money, but it's also in the vision itself. So if it's a vision that everyone has, then it's a vision which has no value. If it's a disruptive vision, then it can become much more interesting, but it has a lower chance to be true if you're the only one to believe in it. So I think disruption is also an interesting element because you have, again, all over the journey to keep being disruptive in the way you execute or in the way you think about your market vision.

Amazing. I think you've beautifully explained how the 3 aspects have an interplay throughout the lifecycle stage of an entrepreneur. I think for everybody, you know, who has limited beliefs about the success of their ventures, be it how they evaluate them, lack of traction, you know, the product-market fit, I think you should watch this episode and have a refresh. Everything is possible. You just need to break those biases. So thanks a lot, Audrey, for your time.

Thank you, Abhi.

It was great chatting with you.

Yeah, very great. Thank you very much. I wish you the best for this relatively new podcast, and I hope you will have a lot of success.

So glad to have you. Literally so glad.

Thank you very much, Abhi.