Don't Build the Software Until You've Cracked This

The other point that you made me realize, well, I shouldn't go for another piece of software myself, but I should work more on making that piece of real-world data usable.

One of our core processes that we do with almost every founder is to niche down. Most people come with a really big vision and they're picturing their business in 5 years' time. I think it's so important to start with a really thin end of the wedge and start with that, that one audience type.

The internal gap I was seeing when thinking about agency work that I was purchasing, it felt like too much polish but not enough answer.

It's actually really difficult to get your first client. It's always, or nearly always, the hardest one.

I got to that session not with the intent of saying this is what I intend to sell, but rather this is a clear example that the market is ready for this now.

When someone comes to you and says, I want to hire you, Everyone says, you know, you're 40 or you're 45, if you were an entrepreneur, you'd already have started a business by now. You're not an entrepreneur. It's nonsense. And well, first of all, it's nonsense. But second of all, older people generally have an advantage over younger people because— Hi, I'm James Green, co-founder of DQ Ventures. If you're an experienced professional thinking about starting your own business, Then please listen to this before you quit. Welcome back to Founder Stories with DQ Ventures, where we talk to the founders of real businesses, as opposed to 99% of the content that you see online, which is with people who founded a business that realistically you have no chance of building, which is funded by Sequoia Capital, probably about to do an IPO for billions of dollars. It's a great story, but it's not something that most of us can relate to, unfortunately. So today we're going to talk to a founder from the DQ Ventures portfolio, Marcello, who has founded a business very much within his area of expertise. And Marcello ticks a box that we consider very important at DQ Ventures, which we call founder fit. Founder fit means, are you the right person to build this business effectively? And I can give you an example of why Marcello is the right person to build this business, because we've made a bunch of introductions for Marcello to people within our wider network. And Marcello has taken those introductions and immediately jumped into a bunch of pharmaceutical-specific jargon that I have to say I don't understand. But fortunately, the people he's talking to do understand. And this is the important thing. If you're building a business in an area that you really don't understand and know deeply, you're going to be selling to people that do, and immediately you're going to lack credibility. Marcello is the antithesis of that. He immediately has credibility. He can talk to anyone within his industry. He can open doors and he can sell. And those are some of the most important things in building your own business. So without further ado, let's hear from Marcello.

Most biotech companies focus on the science when they're building a clinical trial. But at the same time, one of the most expensive mistakes you can make is getting patient reality wrong or getting it too late. Hi, I'm Marcello. I'm the founder of Common Signups. I worked in the healthcare space, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies for the past 8 years and focus now on the moment before key decisions get locked in by using real-world patient needs, real patient language to pressure test hypotheses, to pressure test assumptions, about how a disease is actually experienced. If you are a biotech company designing a clinical trial or in the process of shaping your positioning or preparing for investors' negotiations, you can find out more at commonsignups.com.

I think most founders overestimate how easy it is to build a business, even if, even if it is in their own domain, to be honest. But there are some things that separate people that succeed from those that don't. And even within the context of Deque, we see some really strong themes. And building in your area of expertise is probably the single biggest qualifier for someone who's going to succeed or not. If you're building in an industry that you don't know intimately, there are so many unknowns. And unknown unknowns that you just don't know what's going to trip you up. Whereas what you're doing, Marcello, building in your area of expertise and what you spent your whole career in, even though there are unknowns, you know what they are and you know where the gaps are and what gaps you have to fill. So, I really want to dig into that. And then I know we talked before we started recording about you getting made redundant from your role. And I'm keen to dig into that as whether or not starting— knowing what you know now, whether you see starting a business as a good option as a backup or not even as a backup. I'd like to get your view on what you feel is actually safer, being employed or working for yourself. And I know there are risks with both, but I think there's this misconception that you're safer when you're working for a big company. But in actual fact, as long as your company's good, if you work for yourself, your boss is very unlikely to let you go because it's you. Whereas if you work for someone else, then they're gonna be thinking about themselves and their own targets. So, I'd like to talk a bit about that, and then a lot of stuff in between. And then for the benefit of the audience, Marcello is one of our more recent founders at Deque Ventures, building in the life science space. And he came to us with an idea. It was actually for a software platform, really, wasn't it, initially? With an idea, a social listening platform with a difference. And I'll let you explain what that difference is, Marcello. Why we liked it was Marcello was already an expert in the, in the area that he wanted to build in, and he was already thinking about narrowing down. And within DQ, one of our core processes that we do with almost every founder is to niche down. Most people come with a really big vision, and they're picturing their business in 5 years' time and serving all these different types of customer and types of user. And I think it's so important to start with a really thin end of the wedge and start with that one audience type that can really benefit and that you can really add value to on day one. And I think you'd already started doing that, so it made this one a very easy one for us to start working on. So welcome, thank you for agreeing to chat to us.

Thank you, James, for the intro. That was very generous, actually. And echoing a bit the context you were Laying out. Yes, it is true that it wasn't planned for me to go into this journey, so to actually start my own company around my idea. But for certain, so it wasn't new, but for certain, yes, redundancy accelerated the process and forced me to start giving it more clarity along the way. One of the things that occurred to me was at a certain point to turn to LinkedIn for, in search for co-founders. So, because I didn't want to turn necessarily to people I knew that kind of were giving me that comfort of, I mean, being known to them for my qualities, but I wanted to measure myself with a new context. So that's when Deque Deque Ventures actually popped up in my results on LinkedIn. When I started the journey together with Deque, what I found very, very interesting was, first of all, as you were saying, that Deque was able to refocus my initial idea that was indeed that of yet another software, yet another application in a realm that I knew perfectly well. So the social listening space, with the addition of generative AI as one of the key stakeholders to be listening to. So not just what patients and doctors are saying, but also what is generative AI platforms answering? What are their key answers to patients, to doctors? But then from them, I thought maybe I should not focus too much on the technology. And that was thanks to Deque's process in which you made me realize, well, actually it would make more sense to turn this into another type of proposition, business proposition. And in first place, to steer away a bit from the label social listening, or as we know, it's very fashionable at the moment generative engines optimization, so into, into something that echoed more into patient realities and possibility to access these as a support in decision-making, particularly at early stages. This is to me now a very interesting stage, particularly because I'm starting to collect the first clients' feedback, actually together with Deque. We started packaging the first case studies. Actually, we had 2 of them already approved by the first client.

Previous to what you're doing now, you worked with some big companies buying these services. Was that what led you to the idea? Was there something that they were doing that was missing that you thought, really, I really want a supplier that does this?

To me, there were 2 sets of factors. One was of internal nature and another one exactly was agency-related, so more external. types. So the internal one was the realization that patient insight matters most preclinical trials and pre-market. This is when it can still shape direction. And I realized that multiple times during my experience at Novartis, during my experience at Biogen. And I realized that inside big organizations, it often comes too late. And as a proof of that, the budgets for this type of market research sits with the commercial organization. So that is supposed to support the mark— the in-market stage, not the clinical trial one. But at the same time, for those very few occasions in which I could collaborate with the clinical development teams, I could see there was huge value for them in the— in this type of real-world data. I was providing them. The other aspect was that this type of information was landing too far from key decisions. So it was reaching teams that were managing campaigns, brand activation, events, congresses, etc. But it was really remote from the decision makers. And that was, to me, a big gap, because very frequently the answer was, yes, this is very interesting. but we don't really know what to do with this information. So this was, again, the internal gap I was seeing repeating. Externally, as you were already anticipating, when thinking about agency work that I was purchasing, it felt like too much polish, but not enough answer. So there was a huge attention to how the data were present it, making sure they could offer the buyer any possible facet to display it in a fancy way as well, using automation of dashboards and everything. But in the end, there was little adherence to what the original business question was, and therefore little support to decision. This was the other point that you made me realize, well, I shouldn't go for another software, piece of software myself, but I should work more on making that piece of real-world data usable for making decisions internally. I stopped at a certain point during our journey together to focus too much on methodology like an agency would do. So making sure I had a super robust dataset I could access.

Yeah.

Like the very first step of my company building, and instead making sure with a little data I can access to provide something meaningful, valuable, and actionable to the initial clients. That has been to me a very important shift. And this consideration came out of the interviewing process that Dee Q pushed me to conduct before delving into the the product itself. What if instead of going to big corporations where I couldn't reach the C-level, what if I could instead go to selected early biotech companies where there is good funding so that there is good budget allocation for this type of discovery? But at the same time, I could have more opportunities to talk directly to the CEOs or the chief scientific officers of the case.

Well, what do you think would have happened if you'd— if we hadn't met and you'd carried on going down the software route and got the product to where you thought it needed to be and then brought that to market? What do you think would have happened?

Uh, best case scenario, I think I, I would have got some very nice former colleague getting me the opportunity to present, to pitch this inside big organizations, maybe running a pilot for this, but it would have stopped there. I'm pretty sure.

I don't want anyone out there to think that the team here at DeeQ have got anything against software. We love software and we've been software investors for a long time. But I think the way you articulated it is perfect. And before I talk about that, We get so many applications from people who have identified a generic problem, and then the value is the software. They come to us and they say, here's a problem, and I'm going to get some AI, I'm going to solve the problem, and the AI is going to do the work. And then I always find myself saying, but the software doesn't have any value. The software is just workflows that have been digitized effectively. Where's the value? And so I think what you've articulated there is that we're not necessarily going away from software, and hopefully this becomes a product and becomes extremely automatable and scalable. But before you can start building software, you have to deliver the value, and then you work out how— okay, now we know how to deliver the value. How do we do that in a digital way, in a productized way that is less hours for money and more value for money, and then the business can scale. So, I love the fact that we've gone through that process. And we haven't been doing this that long. What month are we in now? Is it 4 or 5 or...?

Well, yeah, 5, yes, since November last year.

Yeah. So, you're kind of bang on track. I mean, you're ahead of schedule really, because we always say, We want to try and get the first paying customer within the first 4 months, and you've already delivered work for 2 customers, 3 different projects, case studies intact. You're well on your way. And like you say, now it's about how do we productize that and then turn this into a repeatable business and repeatable sales motion. One thing I wanted to ask you, that when we exchanged some notes before before talking, you said that you've been mulling this over for a while and you've been kind of working almost like an agency internally as an employee, selling your concept internally to try and get people to use it because you saw the value. And so it wasn't a massive surprise that you knew exactly what business you would build externally. What made you believe that when you couldn't sell it internally as effectively as you wanted, that you would be able to sell it as an external provider? Or what was your thought process there?

I've been working for about 15 years now into these types of setups, meaning first time into a bigger organization, that was Nestlé, early 2011. And the aim was to roll out a piece of software, actually, for social listening. The reason why I really liked it was that I could be the human in the loop in a way, so to prove value of that software because people were not— initially, people were not buying the dashboards. So initially, within Nestlé from the headquarters, it was attempted to be adopted at local level as a set of dashboards. And they were saying, yes, we have standardized metrics and so forth. People were not not buying it. In the end, I, I started acting as a, as a sort of an example, saying, I work in the business, I'm not from IT, and I can show you how I, I take out value out of it, and it helps me in my daily or weekly type of decision-making.

Yeah.

And that, of course, repeated a bit itself in, in different contexts, uh, at pharmaceutical companies, at biotechnology companies. Although I was delving more and more into the insights as opposed to the technology.

When you— I don't know what the redundancy process was, but I'm sure it's always slightly shocking and disappointing and hurtful. But when that happened, did you look for more jobs or did you already know, okay, no, this is the moment I needed, this is the kick I needed?

Yeah, no, I was very resolute, I have to say, to start something myself because with AI, Nowadays, I mean, if I'm thinking about doing invoices and taking care of all the administration parts, just to make an example here.

Yeah.

A few years ago, it would've been much more of a burden to me to think about or even to pull together a little contract or an SOW. All these administrative slash sales tasks were alleviated a lot. So, and of course, all the, all the marketing pieces around having an online presence with a website that doesn't look nice, but, but at least it's something and it's there. So all, all these bits and pieces made me think maybe, maybe I can, I can get into it without waiting to have the perfect conditions with me. And of course, redundancy sort of accelerated the problem, made it more urgent. Uh, and, uh, avoided hesitation, uh, for sure, and forced me to clarify this. And, and this is why, again, getting to, um, uh, the DQ Ventures, uh, um, partnership really helped me with, uh, forcing that clarity. But, uh, back to your point, yes, it was a fairly immediate thought I had because also because a few years earlier I, I was considering this with a couple of other colleagues But back then, in the end, I was even changing roles, so I had an even better opportunity in the corporate world. So I kind of put it aside.

Well, I like that point you made that there's never been as good a time to start your own business because of all the administrative stuff that you can get done so much easier now than in the past. Not really heard that talked about much. But you're right. And actually, I was rewatching a recording with Rob, our first portfolio company founder, and that was one of the things that he found really difficult was actually creating an invoice.

Yeah.

And he said it took him ages to create an invoice. And he's like, I didn't even know how to do it, or I didn't know anything about it. And it sounds pathetic in his own words that such a thing could be a problem. But when you've worked in the corporate, you never have to think about anything like that. It's just, it's all done. It's all taken care of.

Yeah.

I mean, you still have to do it now as an entrepreneur, but it's so much easier than it was. One question that we always tell our portfolio companies who are later in the journey to ask, and try to ask ourselves, is talking to customers who bought, or customers who bought their product or who signed up for their service, What made you nearly not buy, or what made you nearly not sign up with DQ? You came across DQ. What was it about us that made you nearly not sign up with us? Can you remember?

I was trying to understand how DQ Ventures was operating, your business model. Actually, I was looking at your videos on the website, James, with your recorded voice. So to understand more in detail what the process was. So I was doing, yes, some pre-work for sure. But once we started engaging, no, I didn't have moments in which I was asking myself, am I doing the right thing or not?

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, again, it's not because I'm talking to you in this kind of setting.

Yeah, the pressure's on. No pressure. I'm sure this will come up later on, but it'd be a good thing to ask the customers that you've landed for Common Signups, like, what was it about your service that made them almost not buy it or consider looking for alternatives?

For certain, yes.

Well, let's talk about that first client because most founders will probably find that they go through a lot of, a real high when they decide to start their company, and then they think about product and service and all that exciting stuff. People tend to kind of bat away the difficult part, which is talking to customers. And as you know, we're quite forceful about having those conversations right at the beginning. And the reason that founders then have this kind of slump is that it's actually really difficult to get your first client. It's always, or nearly always, the hardest one. You've got no case studies, you've got no testimonials. It's just you and an idea and you trying to convince someone. How did you get your first client, especially in an industry that's known for long procurement cycles and being difficult to sell to?

One of the benefits of going for smaller, early-stage biotech companies, of course, is that they were more agile. So I never engaged with a procurement team. I've always liaised directly with the CEOs in both cases. It really came out to me after, immediately after the discovery phase in which we doing interviews mostly with my former colleagues to start getting their inputs and their feedback on the initial idea. And then at a certain point, I said to myself, maybe, maybe I should go outside of my comfort zone and, and try and, and ask people in the industry. So in a very selected way, for sure. So I didn't just go for biotech, but I went for neurology. Within, within biotech startups. So that of course gave me a certain, certain possibility to be regarded as, uh, yeah, as an expert anyway. I was doing a targeted outreach to a number of CEOs in the neurology space on LinkedIn, so I was messaging them. In this case of the first client, I was genuinely interested in in getting his feedback at the beginning. He actually responded to me very nicely and we organized an intro session. I got to that session not with the intent of saying, this is what I intend to sell, but rather—

Yeah, you were bringing value.

I was carving out for him already some pieces where he could have used the data for decision-making in his upcoming trials. And I, and I could see that there was, uh, there was good, uh, engagement, uh, from his side on, on the data I was, I was showing him. So yes, it, it came out, uh, I, I have to say, not through mass outreach, going straight to a decision maker. Of course, uh, within my known space, um, of expertise, making sure I, I addressed a specific angle, not, uh, going generically on saying, uh, this is all the possible types of analysis I could conduct for you, steering away from saying social listening out in the open and trying to prove immediate relevance.

I love so much about what you just said, and there's 3 things that really stand out. And hopefully I don't forget the second 2 by talking about the first one. The first one is that if you position yourself as offering an XYZ service, The person you're presenting to just immediately thinks, am I looking for an XYZ service? So am I looking for a social listening service? Don't think anyone's talked about that. No, it's nice meeting you, but no, now's not really the time. So positioning around the value rather than a service is just such a good move. The second point is that you really went deep into your area of specialism where you could add that, where you could really nail that value. So rather than just talking about the service that you could describe your service as, you focused on the value and then you went deep into neurology and the area of neurology that you really knew. So really leveraging that expertise. And then the third point is why we started Deque in the first place. is that you approach the CEO. And my question for you is, could someone without your expertise and without your seniority have pulled that off?

This goes back to the considerations we are making for agencies in my agency's perceived gap. I would say maybe yes, but it would be It would be harder in terms of the fact this is not just analysis, but more a matter of judgment, a matter of timing. Timing is very important because the other aspect I was considering was understanding how close these companies, like my first client, were to key decisions like filing for clinical trials or about to initiate phase 1 clinical trials, just, just, just as an example. So timing is, is another very important factor. And if you are a, a, a company or, or somebody that is building a similar business without that type of background, is less likely to succeed, at least in, in, for example, in, in getting the client in, in the first place, but also— Another very important aspect is always relevance. And this is also why to me many agencies were failing in my case back at my corporate days, because they're very good technically speaking. They're very good as part of the process they conduct, but they don't necessarily have the right relevance to the industry, for example, in this case. That in my opinion comes before the software, particularly nowadays where software is so readily available to anyone. Relevance becomes more and more important. It's not about being a super robust social listening background type of person, but rather making sure that what you're selling resonates and helps. Taking that decision.

Yeah, and it was probably a bit of an unfair question because, yeah, obviously agencies can win work. But the point I really wanted our listeners to take away is when someone says that, you know, you're 40 or if you're 45, if you were an entrepreneur, you'd already have started a business by now, you're not an entrepreneur. It's nonsense. And well, first of all, it's nonsense, but second of all, Older people generally have an advantage over younger people because they've acquired that expertise.

Exactly.

And the credibility that comes with it and the ability to open the door of a CEO. Because my mates who used to be junior useless people in all sorts of companies are now CEOs of businesses with 2,000 employees. It's just what happens in life and it does make life easier.

Completely agree. I mean, experience is absolutely a key part of what I was mentioning before. Absolutely. You cannot get that with education, like compressing education at your early years. It's a matter of acquiring it through, really through experience.

Okay. Let's take a quick break and hear from one of our portfolio companies.

Most people think great leadership is about turning up and learning on the job. What I have learned through my 35 years of working in very complex environments is bringing a systems thinking approach to looking at the whole problem and the whole system. The second I would say is looking at clarity. How do we translate business vision into deliverables at every level? And the third one is commercial performance. Every business exists to make money and we have to make it a thriving business. How do we make sure we protect If you do one or the other, it doesn't quite lead to success. But time and time again, I've seen when people do all 3, it leads to a successful outcome for everyone. Hi, I'm Anoop. I work with senior leaders, executives, and C-suite leaders to solve complex problems in organizations that are scaling up. If you're scaling your business and growing beyond where you have been before, and you need a trusted advisor by your side who's been in the journey, then I'd love to work with you. And you can find me at anoopchaudhuri.com.

What do you think the biggest gap was between how you thought that this would, would work and actually what you've learned now and how you, how you're doing it now that the other people who might be thinking about starting a business might fall into the same trap? Where, what assumptions are you making that actually turned out to be, to be quite wrong?

I would say something that I learned that I also applied to my potential customer. At the beginning, I was too much concentrated on the product itself without a clear need in mind that I was fulfilling for, for a potential client. So that, that was something I was getting wrong. And, but at the same time, that was also something that led to, led me to rethink my ideal client from, again, being the classic corporation type, a corporate kind of client into the startup biotech. Why? Because they have the same approach. They concentrate so much on the science and they kind of lose track of what the needs are, actually are from patients. And it was the same for me. So I said, maybe, maybe I could bring value in the same way there, because I know what is the thinking process in that sense. So just as myself, I was too much focusing on the product and not that much on the final user. At the same time, in the same way, typically biotech companies that are starting up are really concentrated on the science almost exclusively that they, they kind of lose focus on the, on, on patients. So I always said, yeah, I could bring that lens in and help them not taking wrong decisions, or anyway, when it's too late, or bringing the right decisions when it's too late, or the right information when it's too late.

What I like about that is that it doesn't preclude or exclude doing business with these big businesses later.

Yeah.

And in fact, once you've got a few case studies under your— is it under your sleeve? I've lost my English. Up your sleeve. Under your belt. That's what I was thinking. You've got a few case studies under your belt, then it's probably much easier to go back to the bigger organizations and pitch a service rather than going in cold.

Yes. Actually, in one failed selling experience with, with a company where actually at the intro call the chief financial officer was there as well. So it was like, uh, quite a, yeah, quite a number of, uh, um, C-level team members of that startup. I didn't succeed, but, uh, they were quite structured in that, in that sense.

And they obviously were taking the idea quite seriously to put Yeah, resource in the room. When you think about Common Signups now, do you think of it still being an idea, or do you think of it being a real business?

No, I, I think, I think of it as a, as a real business for sure. The main aspect still, I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm trying to, to, to improve together with Deque, of course, is how to turn this from, from an isolated freelancing opportunity into, into something repeatable, scalable. Of course, we mentioned it before, but, but yes, the, the, the feeling I have is, uh, is of course, uh, it's, it feels more and more like a real business for sure.

And what's your, what's your kind of, uh, underlying emotion in, in yourself? You know, how do you feel in yourself? I know you're a little bit different to many of our founders because you're, you're on this full-time. You're not So you're not still in your day job. I guess that creates a stronger sense of urgency. What's your underlying emotion when you're in your day-to-day? Just how do you feel about the way things are going?

Of course, I have moments of high excitement for sure. Just to mention, like the repeated business with the first client, the referral to the second client, those are for certain. And I have to say, even linking back to the to the value that I can see is being brought. So when I see during a readout that a client is telling me, oh, you do— we're doing this competitive intelligence analysis and we brought you a set of competitors and you gave us a real-world view on an off-label competitor we were not thinking of. Or in another case, another client saying, oh, we identified a new patient segment we were not thinking about that we're going to bring to the investors in our conversations with them.

So really, that's amazing. Fantastic. I didn't understand quite the implication of when you said before what that was, but that's incredible.

These moments feel very rewarding. So Excitement for sure is, uh, is at its highest. Then of course there are those waiting times in, in between that I'm not super used to. And at the same time, I think the other, um, emotionally speaking, I, I think I should start, uh, be better at, uh, like my schedule of work, uh, like, because what, what I'm into one, uh, piece of work, I, I tend to, uh, concentrate 100% on it. And I lose focus of even the DQ tasks, for example. But even I should be, for example, thinking about my outreach selling piece. That should be part of my, like, maybe even daily journey. But if I'm focusing really into a project, But for me, it's a bit difficult to abstract and abstract myself and turn into something else, or the administrative parts. Although, of course, with AI, it's much simpler for me.

Yeah.

So, this kind of multitasking part, this is where I need to improve, and emotionally as well, kind of as a toll for me, I have to say.

Yeah.

So I just wait for all of that. Yeah. Of highs because of the excitement of the moment.

Yeah, so true. I mean, it's lonely and it is an emotional roller coaster. It's hard to switch your brain off.

Yeah.

If you could go back in time and talk to yourself at the very beginning, like the moment you were made redundant, what would you say to yourself?

I would say probably to myself, yes, this will feel destabilizing for certain, but I'm, I'm not on the wrong path. Um, so yes, the, the, the direction was already there. To, to me, that's, uh, that's the, that's the old, uh, that's the old point. Because of course, the, the first, uh, the first reaction is always, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm on the wrong I'm on the wrong path. But, uh, no, I think, I think this is, um, this is how I would, uh, I would approach it. Uh, and yes, uh, it's not a matter of misalignment, uh, really an accelerator in the end of other, other dynamics, particularly, particularly nowadays. Uh, I, I think because it's, uh, it's a moment, uh, uh, most of us, I would say, in the corporate world are going to face at a certain point.

Yeah, I think so. I think we're on the brink of a time where there's going to be a lot of people in the same position. And I think entrepreneurship probably is a very obvious option for many, many people. And in your case, like you said, what we've got to— what our focus has to be over the next 6 months or so is Turning you from a consultant that goes through the typical consultant feast and famine, you're delivering, and if you're not delivering, then suddenly you realize you've done no business development, so you need the next project. It's turning from that into a repeatable sales motion, a lot of which is automated, so that you're, you're getting leads rather than having to chase that next project as soon as the last one's delivered. But I'm excited to do that with you. One last question. Rather than saying what— talking to yourself when you started this mission, if you met someone else who was in a corporate career and thinking about starting their own journey, their own business, what would you advise them? What would be your one piece of advice?

I know I mentioned this repeatedly already, but for certain, to focus on the value. You're, you're bringing, uh, ultimately, even, uh, before the product, even before the comp— the market landscape, uh, so the potential competitors. So what's your distinction, distinctive point, really to, to focus on the value first, um, that you're, you're, you're carrying out with your business, uh, before, before anything else. That's to me the the main points. Um, and, uh, and yes, the, the other, the other thing is, uh, is, is for certain to, to search for, um, somebody else to share this with, for, for certain, uh, because, because you absolutely need a, um, a dialogue, uh, to develop your idea. Um, yeah, so that these are to me the 2 main things.

Yeah, a thought partner. And that doesn't have to be a DQ Ventures, it could be a co-founder It could be an advisor for somebody, but with the right people around you, it can be really good fun. Okay, brilliant. Marcello, thank you so much. Really enjoyed listening to you, and it's completely different to any of the other conversations that I've had. Some really telling insights. You're a very reflective person, and you clearly think really clearly. It's really interesting to hear you talk. And if you liked that interview and you'd like more of the same, Look for Founder Stories on YouTube under EQ Ventures Official, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.