Interview with Julien Brun, Founder of SIMCEL

Welcome to ChainTech, the show and podcast focusing on the latest trends in supply chain, procurement, and logistics technology. My name is Max Henry from the Global Supply Chain Council, and together with my co-host and special guest, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in supply chain. From early stage to unicorns, And from cutting-edge technology to the people using it to help drive more innovative, agile, and resilient supply chains around the world. This is ChainTech. Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of ChainTech. I'm your host Max Henry from the Global Supply Chain Council. Thanks again for joining us on this new episode of the show as we continue to host and interview some of the most interesting chain tech founders in Asia and discuss the rapid rise of supply chain logistics and procurement technology across the region. As we jump into today's conversation, I want to make sure that you are again aware and informed on the new ChainTech platform that we have recently launched. And you can check it out at chaintech.net. But you can also, and also you can find our previous episode of the interviews on the chaintech.show website. So have a look, listen to all those interviews that we have done. So today I'm joined by a new guest, Julien Brun, who is a managing partner at CEL and also the founder of SimCell. Welcome, Julien. How are you?

Hey, Max. Good, good, good. Thank you. Great to be here. Very well.

All right. So let's get started. And we, you know, as you know, we always start with a little bit of background information about yourself. So take us, you know, let's start with your previous life, your childhood, I would say, and tell us where you come from and, you know, what kind of a child you were and what type of studies you had also.

Okay, so a bit of background. Yeah, I'm a French engineer, studied mostly in France, and started to work as a mechanical engineer in the automotive and aeronautics industry. So I worked in Airbus, I worked Peugeot in Europe, UK and France mostly. And I got very quickly bored of the, you know, large corporation. As a young engineer, I was finding that a bit slow. So I kind of took a step out in the humanitarian sector where I kind of landed in West Africa to handle the distribution of foods, the food donations for refugee camps. So quite a different type of environment than I was into when I was into planes and so on, but got me a little bit more grounded to the reality of supply chains and logistics. From that, I kind of really enjoyed the idea of living abroad and particularly in places where things are emerging, let's say, and I've landed by luck somehow in Vietnam in 2005, just for a few months of expatriation, a few years let's say, and I'm still there 18 years later. In the meantime, I became an entrepreneur and I've actually founded this company you mentioned called CEL, supply chain consulting and digital firm, and SimCell, which is one of the digital products we've developed. But I'm coming from, yeah, from an engineering background. I'm a kind of a geek. I'm a geeky person, very much grounded into the reality of things, and supply chain is cool enough to get yourself into more scientific side of things, but also the ground realities that don't lie at all. So this kind of environment made me excited for the last 20 years, let's say.

So when you got to Vietnam 18 years ago, did you actually found CEL right away or did you have some other working experience?

I worked as an industrial director in a factory for a few months and very quickly got into— a few people told me that there's a need for, you know, lean implementation. I was very much into lean at the beginning. So lean implementation was the first expressed need from different companies in Vietnam. So I actually went very quickly into a bit of freelancing work, which became ultimately a consulting firm. But very, you know, a few months after coming here, I kind of saw the opportunities of entrepreneurship. And Vietnam is a paradise for entrepreneurs. So I got into it very quickly.

Okay. So you've been advising clients for a number of years on supply chain and logistic optimization, you know, with a focus on Vietnam. What did you, you know, why did you start, you know, Simcell as, you know, more focused on technology?

Yeah, Vietnam came out to be the place where we started. It was a bit more easy to find technical people, developers, and so on. So technology came out quite quickly into the picture. But Vietnam was a bit of a playground. And actually, as we worked for more MNC or large companies, We very quickly ended up to work in Indonesia, in the Philippines, in Malaysia, and Thailand, and kind of regionalized very, very quickly the scope of the business. And today we're reaching to Australia. Sometimes we work in Africa again. I was pleased to come back to Nigeria a few months ago, Brazil, Chile. So it came out to be, you know, a starting point. Vietnam is still our base, but we kind of reach out into other horizons now.

So tell— let's talk about SimCell. You know, in one sentence, can you tell us what the company is doing here?

Okay, so just in a few words, before explaining what SimCell is, what I want to just remind or, you know, take a bit of a broad view of supply chain. We see supply chain as a lot of operational complexity and so on. From my experience in 2 different companies, different sectors, different countries, I came across the realization that most of the inefficiencies in supply chain are more coordination problems than actual efficiency at a local level. So flows are not really well flowing nicely together. There's this classic misalignment that reflects in a lot of business. This ended up to be a painful problem that is quite difficult to solve. So we came up with the idea of bringing up modeling to help resolve complex trade-offs, business trade-offs. Should we focus on increasing our revenue or should we focus on maximizing our profit? Trade-off profit-revenue and that kind of trade-off where kind of high-level stuff but very, very structuring for the actual supply chain itself. So modeling really was a tool that we initially started in 2010 and developed as a core expertise modeling supply chain was actually quite something we went into early and using that for simulation. Simulation helps to answer what-if questions mostly, test different scenarios, and we use simulation to actually help our clients on a consulting basis to resolve complex strategic or tactical problems. And most of our clients asked us later then to themselves use simulation to answer those what-if questions, because these what-if questions are pretty much everywhere, in every situation, every company. You always have a what-if relating to your market. What if the market collapses or boosts or whatever? And what if my supply chain gets some disruption? This what-if is becoming more and more central to business management. So we brought simulation into a SaaS solution to help answer what-if questions. In short, the beauty of it is that you can plan, you can test, analyze risks, you can test different marketing strategies to see whether you have enough capacity in supply chain to handle that. You can do a lot with simulation, and that's pretty much the heart of SimCell is Plan your business with the support of simulation, testing demand and supply scenarios. If I kind of want to summarize what SimCell is.

So right now, what kind of problem are you solving for your clients using, again, SimCell solutions?

Yeah, so SimCell is, as you would say now these days, is a digital twin. So it kind of reflects the reality of your end-to-end supply chain into a virtual model. So practically, there are applications that relate to, for example, IBP or S&OP, the classic S&OP process, which is basically trying to handle demand-supply type of trade-offs. So it's firstly used in this context supporting IBP or S&OP processes on a cycle, on a recurring basis to find out what if we do a promotion on this this SKU? What if we have a problem with this supplier? What if we have an issue with our storage capacity? So you can test what-if scenarios in the context of IBP. And practically, the outcome of a good demand-supply alignment in this context is profitability and revenue. You would trade off your capacity to fulfill demand against your capacity to make more money. But we also introduced a new dimension to the decision-making, which is kind of important to us, hopefully will be important to corporates in a later stage, is carbon. So out of this simulation, you also have the ability to monitor the carbon scenarios that reflects the operation of your business. So you bring up financial performance information and carbon information up to decision level to discuss different scenarios and define what's the next step we need to execute, the next plan we need to execute. So carbon is also bringing up a new sustainability angle to decision-making, not just money. Now we need also to bring that data to these trade-offs. Okay, so that's where we—

Okay, so there are a couple of solutions. Obviously, a number of companies are still using Excel for their S&OP and for doing some kind of simulation. Are you competing with Excel? And there are also a couple of other solutions and software tools kind of enhancing and augmenting S&OP and IBP process. So how do you compete? compare with them and what is your sweet spot against those kind of solutions?

Yeah, so it's a good point. Excel is all over the place, including in companies which are equipped with a so-called planning tool. A lot of companies have SAP APO, for example, or Anaplan or things like that. So you have those tools that are supposed to do the planning job. The reality, and I'm not judging here, is that most people, even though they have these tools implemented, they still use Excel. Why they use Excel? Because those tools are very rigid. They are very old school most of the time. Most of those planning systems are developed back in the early 2000s. So the interfaces are terribly boring, complex, very complex to use. You need months to really grasp the basic functionality of a planning tool available in the market today. And it's not very agile to the relative business. So you need Excel to do your stuff on the side. And I've seen so many cases where people plan on Excel. Once the plan is done, as much as they can, as well as they can, they will upload to the planning tool just to report the final plan that has been decided upon. So it becomes, you know, for us, the point is first to replace Excel because this Excel work is terribly time-consuming, prone to massive amount of error, and also limited to this 2-dimensional view that you have on Excel. It's not very deep. You cannot just plan the entire set of customers, products, location properly in Excel. You have to make some simplification. So it's not very satisfying. And basically we're trying first, and we're quite clear on that, we're not competing against the planning tool that companies may have. We're just bringing up this Excel gap or filling up this Excel gap that exists with much more agile and modern kind of interface and user experience. So competing is not the point here. We want to make planning a cool thing to do and not just a very painful process which— for which you need a PhD to actually master properly.

Do you have an idea of how big the market is in Asia for, you know, for such software solutions? Specifically on supply chain planning?

So it's a good question. From a global level, the market size is around $12 billion, but it's growing, it's growing 10-15% per year. So it's quite a significant domain today. Companies have moved from BI type of focus to really planning now. So it's quite a hot market. There are a limited number of competitors. But in Asia, particularly, and most of the players are European or American. So there are not that many Asian-based solutions in planning, or rather limited. So from a market size standpoint, it's difficult to say. I don't have the figures, unfortunately. But there's definitely a pull. We see it ourselves from Asia-Pacific region, a pool of really strong interest now of, you know, companies that are being somehow left alone. I've seen multinational companies that are quite well equipped in the West, but the Asian markets themselves end up to have, you know, this limited version or just left alone with Excel. So Asia is less equipped than the West, and I think the market is very, very potential here. We see the pull itself. I don't have the figures.

Okay. All right. So in Asia, obviously, so you say that it's not all about competition, but you do have competition. And in the Asian market, we see companies of obviously SAP is very, very present. HANA Plan is also operating in Southeast Asia. You have companies like OMP with more focus on the Northeast Asia market. Would you consider to be your main or key competitors Especially in the Vietnam Southeast Asia region.

Yeah. Competitors, competitors, the key players that are trying to enter the market. It's quite early. We actually partner with Kinaxis. Kinaxis is new in the Asia Pacific market. Great potential, but a bit of a first step. O9 is also doing a bit of an entry to the market, more toward the Australian market than pure Asian one, though. SAP is relatively quiet. It's kind of an underground piece of work, but I see companies leading a bit away this all SAP type of of strategy. So you see interest of bringing up modules that will be plugged in on SAP. But practically, I see more of a startup approach. Let's say explore. They're mostly exploring the market and finding their pocket of growth, mostly in Northern Asia, I would say. Those south, the South start Yeah, it is.

If you take Vietnam as an example, I mean, Vietnam obviously has been, you know, getting a lot of attention, a lot of investment has been made in Vietnam. Many manufacturing companies have, you know, moving out from China and reinvesting into new facilities into Vietnam. So obviously there's a lot of manufacturing, there's a lot of planning needs in a market like Vietnam. You know, what kind of solution Are those companies bringing their SAP rollout with them, or are they, when they come and start to ramp up their operation and manufacturing in Vietnam, are they looking for new solutions or alternatives to support their Vietnam activity?

No, it's very much a centralized decision from what I've seen, particularly in electronic sector or very specialized sector. They set up a factory here, they come with their system, and there's no way they would actually find a local solution or solution that's maybe more adapted to their need, but actually coming from local. So it's most of this question of planning, because it handles the sales part, the supply part, the cost, the finance, is rather sensitive. So it's quite centralized type of decision. For the big companies, you need to head toward the headquarters to kind of find an open door. It can be a bit more of a pilot type of trial, but most of the time this would be decided centrally.

So as a result, who do you sell to? Do you sell— are you more focused on SMEs and And mid-market companies instead of the MNCs?

Yeah, most of the big guys target companies above $1 billion or $2 billion revenues, the big guys, which left— which leaves behind a lot of big SMEs or large corporations of a few hundred millions that are typically very under-equipped. They just kind of set up a base ERP being SAP or Microsoft or something. They're just finalized or into the progress of setting up an ERP. The next question is coming toward more advanced planning stuff, but we are at the beginning of the digital transition in Vietnam. It's true also in the Philippines. So it's true in Southeast Asia. It's not that many companies are fully equipped with ERP. And without an ERP, it becomes a bit complicated to move to planning, proper planning. So we are early in the maturity process.

And obviously, I mean, for mid-market companies, it's one of the fastest growth markets for software and IT solutions. As you say, most of the big software vendors are more focused on the large MNCs, the Fortune 500 type of companies. And there are a lot of very large local companies. Obviously, in Vietnam, you have a lot, but all over Asia, and those companies are definitely unequipped or still have a very low use of IT and supply chain tools in general. So, I think it's a very interesting, very exciting market.

Exactly. We still have MNC kind of clients, but it took us years to close deals where a local business, even sizable, could be, you know, a decision, say, okay, we need it, we're going for it, let's do it. And that kind of mindset is pretty much difficult to find in headquarters of large corporates.

Okay. So you're managing, you're still managing CL and you have a number of clients. So how do you actually push SimCell solutions that you Are you trying to get those clients as consulting clients first and then offer them that IT layer with SimCell, or are you going straight to clients and just pushing IT first and then maybe you could get some consulting business out of it? But what kind of approach do you have with those companies?

Yeah, it's a good question. Actually, for us, it's 2 streams of business. The consulting part would actually create a study on optimizing inventory or a network of a particular market. Out of this, we use— on this kind of project, we use SimCell to simulate different scenarios and offer an output. And out of this, most of the time now, clients are asking to have access to this tool themselves. So we We transitioned from consulting work to a digital service. That's the, you know, the natural kind of stream, though scalability is in question. So we're also pushing on the direct sales type of approach, the SaaS approach. We're building up a pipeline of leads that we're approaching, presenting SimCell directly, explaining that we have an expertise also, but we're pushing SimCell first. So, it's a bit of a dual thing. The future will be on the direct sales. SimCell is a business, a corporate business tool. So, it will find its adventure, its story by itself. But for now, synergizing both consulting and digital to kind of offer continuity to our clients, most of the time.

So as you're pushing your IT solutions with SimCell, what kind of revenue model do you have? Are you selling subscription or how does that work? Do you take also a cut on certain transactions? Can you share with us a little bit here?

Yeah, pricing has been a big part of the thinking over the last few years. Basically, we are on a SaaS basis, so it's a subscription-based model. It costs that amount per month depending on number of users, number of factories, number of customers, number of transactions. So that's a bit of a pricing model. We don't kind of— we're trying to simplify the pricing of things. So very quickly, if you explore the market, you'll see that it's very difficult to get a pricing for such tools. We are quite straightforward and end up to be, you know, ranging the price to be quite straightforward, fixed without too much fancy options that you could, you know, kill your budget with. So practically, yeah, SaaS basis. We have a bit of an implementation time which we often charge on a project basis. But yes, SaaS implementation. And the support can come on top of it, but usually clients are independent.

You mentioned earlier, you know, the partnership that you would like to have, you know, with companies like Kinexys or Nine. And what is your take on that? I mean, you know, we talk quite a bit about this at our Gentech discussion, as you know. And from my side, I feel that there are still a lot of missed opportunities between the startups on this, you know. Obviously, there are a lot of startups in this market across Asia who could be working together, promoting and doing a lot of marketing together and engaging with a number of clients, selling complementary solutions. Do you think that this is an opportunity that you want to grow? And what kind of partners or what kind of companies will you be interested to work with in the region?

For us, obviously, you know, planning, business planning requires a bit of expertise. It's true in every part of supply chain, but here you got, you know, demand management, which involves sales and marketing stuff, promotion. It's not just about warehouse and trucks and factories. So you got an expertise on the demand side, expertise on the supply side, and it's it's difficult to find partners who have this breadth of expertise. So the idea for us is to work with 2 types of companies, consulting firms, which are kind of either on demand or supply or both, and universities. And that's a bit of a longer-term thing, but simulation is also cool to to, you know, learn and test out things without breaking things. So we're also exploring the idea of bringing up simulation business cases in SimCell into universities for students to test real-life data, real-life type of situations, experiment what is a safety stock, what is the impact of a transport price hike in your supply. All these kind of learnings is actually quite rich and missing in most of the universities. So we're also taking this angle on the longer-term influence that we take through education. In the tech partnership side, let's say it's difficult for, at least for From my experience, to connect or to synergize with the supply chain tech sector as a broad stuff, most of the tech solutions or startup solutions I see in the market are operational, are logistics-related. It's about filling a truck, it's about monitoring your deliveries, it's about, you know, operational solutions, which are cool. But I'm finding difficulty to connect pure operations, like low-level transactional stuff and more business decision-level aspects. So I'm still exploring this idea of tech partnership in supply chain tech. I still haven't found the right angle.

Okay.

Yeah, the right angle for now. Okay. For ideas.

Obviously, we'll be happy to help with what we do at Gentec. But let's go back to SimCell and maybe CEL in general. Can you maybe tell us about your team? How many employees do you have right now? And also how many engineers do you have currently helping you on SimCell? Yeah.

So we're 35 at CEL. Half of it is technical people, technical being developers. frontend, backend, the software developers. And the other side is data, and we have data engineers, data scientists that are taking care of handling these terabytes of data we are simulating every time. So it's quite heavy in computing power, in infrastructure, in server infrastructure. The SAS system is not that trivial to put online, accessible anywhere, fast, and so on. We have quite a heavy-duty team of 10, 15 engineers. And we're, you know, recruiting still. We're trying to raise— we're raising funds also in parallel. We're recruiting, trying to find talent. It used to be quite tricky to find developers a couple of years ago. COVID, it was awful. Now we start to see developers on the market that are a bit more reasonable, let's say. So we're also expanding this team because the ambition is going beyond simulation. I'll explain that later if you wish, into autonomous supply chain. And that will require some R&D work, which would involve training AI to take business decisions by themselves. So that's a forward-looking thing, but we need both data scientists and engineers and developers. But we also have our, you know, supply chain experts, which are supply chain consultants or engineers that are more on the domain side. And this dual expertise is very much fundamental to what we do. If we become a software house just with technical people, then we are mostly competing with the other software companies. We need to keep this domain and technical dual value that we're bringing and not just shift from one or the other.

Yeah, Vietnam has been, you know, again, a hotspot for software development and IT in the last few years. Obviously, the market is probably quite competitive in getting talents. As the pandemic changed, Has it changed anything? Do you now look out and hire talents outside of Vietnam and work with them remotely, for example?

Yeah, it's been quite a painful experience. COVID really pushed the software developer needs globally. So there's a lot of Vietnamese developers that came out in the global market to support freelancing. Companies in Australia, in Europe. So there's a lot of pull from outside, which brought the price, the salary of developers to the roof, sometimes to the level where I say that's more expensive than a developer, a similar developer would find in Europe. So it came out to be not very competitive for some time. After, on this 2022 lately, we see the market being a bit more reasonable, companies laying off typically, and the developers are more easy to find, are more also reasonable, more stable. So we, yeah, we came out of this hot season, which was a bit tricky to handle on our side, to be frank.

A quick question about the landscape of supply chain startups in Vietnam. There are obviously quite a number of companies who have raised funding. Some of them are, like you say, more focused on— actually, most of them are more focused on optimization and supply chain execution tools and e-commerce logistics and so on. Do you actually know them? Do you interact with them? Do you get together and exchange experience and best practice?

We have a bit of an informal catch-up under, more under the— I'm also leading French Tech Vietnam, which is a French-related development program for technology companies in the world. And practically in the supply chain tech, there are a handful of serious startups. In Vietnam. There are plenty of other things, but we know what startups are. There's a lot of things that will fail, definitely, and then there are a few gems that are quite interesting. They remain quite operational, they're very much successful. It can be an example of a warehouse open market where instead of going door-to-door, you would have a platform where all the warehouse space is made, where you can book your Wareflex. Exactly. This is cool kind of idea, works very well in Vietnam. There are more traditional TMS, WMS systems that are also locally being well developed. So it's promising, but there are not that many, you know, successful or potential startup in supply chain. Knowing that this is a domain that doesn't lie. You can, sorry, you can bullshit your way out in the marketing space. In supply chain, at some point the reality catches you up and—

Yeah.

Yeah, see what I mean? So it's not that easy to find good startups in this domain, in my experience.

So beyond Wearflex, which obviously have foreign founders, but do you actually Meet the Vietnamese founders running supply chain logistics. Have you have you met them?

Yes, a few WMS. There have been there are few few startups that are purely local where where you know founders are very keen to exchange, very keen to share also opportunities. It's not very structured. There's no process where we could we could do better there, but it's it's limited to a few. Number of people, so is it worth setting up a whole infrastructure to— or it's more of a relationship basis type of—

Okay. All right. So you've been running this business with CEL and now SimCell for a number of years. And I, you know, as an entrepreneur, I know how difficult it is to sustain the, you know, the passion and the energy over the years. So what What keeps you excited, you know, and highly motivated to run your business? And what would be, you know, today your biggest challenge as a CEO or a founder of a company?

Okay, what keeps me up? The vision. I think it took me some time to formalize what I'm heading to, and I think that's been a bit clearer over— I think COVID helped also to reflect, and I turned 40 in this period, so I also had this period of reflection. But the overall idea was to say, where am I going? And that's a big question for an entrepreneur. You can enjoy your work as an entrepreneur, you can make some decent money, but the point is the question comes up to see what's next. Why is that? And it took me some time to formulate. The idea for me is to go, to contribute to this idea of autonomous supply chain, this supply chain that will just drive itself like, like an autonomous car. You're watching out, you know where you're going, you tell your supply chain where you want to go, and the supply chain takes you there, deciding, taking those trade-off decisions internally. This is where I'm going. So what keeps me up on a daily basis is to make this digital transformation for companies, to experiment different algorithms, to test the responsiveness of clients to new tech, new approach, and to get progressively to this autonomous supply chain that I think will be the future of supply chains. So yeah, That keeps quite a deep drive to waking up in the morning and try to make things happen. That would be my first driver. Second is definitely the fact that the people I have are learning and they are really enjoying a lot because you really, we really talk about supply chain and we really understand the systemic thing, the systemic importance of supply chain. In the global economy, so there's a connection to reality and a connection to the bigger picture that is quite quite powerful. So this is probably where I find my my energy. Biggest challenge for now for now it would be talent. What's coming? Talent. Yeah, that's a classic. But I have found Some nice, a nice approach, and I think I'm quite okay with this now. What I'm struggling with is, you know, finding out whether companies will actually walk the talk in their idea of digitalization. There's been a lot of blah blah on digitalization for a couple of years after we got this Zoom stuff, got this online setup, have companies really invested in data, in using their data better? Yes and no. And I think there's a bit of a wait-and-see type of situation now, which is economic— global economy is not exciting. So I'm a bit frustrated with this wait-and-see situation, which we didn't really expect after COVID. We expected the rebound and so on, but this— Kind of intermediate middle ground stuff is painful to plan upon, to foresee what's coming, foresee who you need to hire, what contract you can expect to be signed this year, next year. That's an easy one.

Okay. Yeah, obviously, you know, the market, I mean, I think a lot of technology vendors are feeling it and we've seen, you know, a lot of decisions being delayed and the lifecycle cycle is getting long and software companies, many of them are still kind of struggling with the same issue right now in Asia.

Exactly.

So what would be your final advice to anybody who wants to start a business? I mean, you've been an entrepreneur for a number of years, you know the Vietnamese market very well, but you have a good idea of what are the challenges ahead. What would be your advice to someone who wants to get into and start a new business and, you know, ultimately?

The general picture would be, for me, it's been a game changer of formalizing my personal vision of what I want to contribute professionally in the long run. That has really been a game changer. as you said, a reason to keep up, a reason to take a big slap in my face for, you know, and keep going. Without that, you end up to be bored, you end up to do, you know, stuff that don't necessarily please you or you don't find the point. So the why question is, you know, a simple question, but that If you formalize that, it keeps you keeps you running. After it, you know, depends the amount of will you have. Other things maybe more Asian related: patience, patience. Go beyond the hype. There's a lot of hype about AI, about digitalization, about tech. Well, the reality is much. slower than that kind of claims that we see all over. So I would, you know, be also cautious on— don't over-expect the market to like your product from day one. There's a lot of resistance to change in supply chain. It's not a very innovative sector. When it works, you don't tend to say it works, I don't want to touch it. So it's not that easy to get into this part of the business. Once you get it, you can demonstrate that you add value and then you can build up. But it's not an industry that makes it that easy to come in.

And is Vietnam, yeah, Julien, is Vietnam still a good market to start a business today? I mean, obviously a lot of things have changed the past few years, lots of inflation, a lot of investment pouring in, competition on talent, cities expensive to live in. Do you still think that in 2023 Vietnam is the right place to start a business?

If your market is Vietnam, that would be a good place to start. If your market is a bit more regional, you would probably want to have a position that makes you more balanced on the market. Opportunity in Indonesia. It's a great market, in Philippines and so on. So practically Vietnam as a market is still probably the most exciting one. There are huge consumption base now that is still growing and the future of consumption, of domestic consumption is definitely there. The export market is also there, so generating Chinese investment. Or transfer at least. So this is, this is a place, the place to be if you want to be in supply chain, whether it's serving domestic or export market. That's a great place to, to start. It's not an easy one, but it's probably a place where you can iterate faster than elsewhere. People are very productive. You find talents rather quickly. You can build very, very iterative type of approach to entrepreneurship and not just expect the market to tell— to give you all your— upon your expectations. So you need to iterate. It's a place where you iterate. And to my experience, it's much easier to do that in Vietnam than it is to do it in any other market.

Okay. All right, let's finish up with some quick questions for you, as we always do in our interviews. Cats or dogs?

Dogs.

Window or aisle?

Aisle.

Any movie that you've seen recently that you're really excited about?

Oh, good question. Not much time for movies. I would mention— good question— the most—

Or show or documentary or anything you've seen.

Yeah, I've seen— I really recommend it even if you have kids— a 4K program on animals. I think it's a BBC program. program. It's amazing. It's probably the most beautiful documentary I've seen, just visually impressive. BBC World Planet stuff, you'll find it.

Okay.

Amazing.

What's your favorite lunch?

Lunch, you say?

Yeah, yeah. What's your favorite lunch you're having?

Pretty much vegetarian for lunch.

Oh, you're going vegetarian.

Okay. Not fully vegetarian, but going into vegetarian lunch is quite, quite good.

Okay. What's your most used app on your phone right now?

It would be between YouTube and Notes.

Okay, that's interesting. What's your favorite tool to build your company? Is it Slack or, you know, do you have any other tool that you always have open on your laptop?

I'm a very tooly guy, so Slack is definitely a game changer. It's been now a couple of years we're fully into that. It's really nice to keep people together. Plenty of people are remote also, so that's the bound of the company. I would mention Slack as the main one and a good VPN because we are in places where sometimes you want to hide where you are and what you're looking at.

Okay. Where would be the rest of your life in just a few words? Where do you see yourself when you get much older? I know you're an entrepreneur, so you might be working quite late, but when you are 80, you know, plus, or, you know, what do you want to do? Where do you want to be?

Well, I won't wait till 80 to retire, that's for sure. I'm counting the years, to be frank. So it's still a bit— I'm trying to— I'm giving myself 5, 10 years max. Anyways, I'll be playing music in a very natural environment, with friends by a lake. It could be anywhere. It needs to be a bit hot. So maybe in Southeast Asia, maybe somewhere else. But yeah, music, friends, nature.

Excellent. Thank you very much, Julien, for again being with us today. That was a great interview. Covered a lot of ground, lots of different questions. I hope that it was useful for the audience. listening to us. So thanks again for your time, Julien.

Thank you, Max. Pleasure. It was, you know, thank you for inviting and all the best. Talk to you soon.

Thanks again for listening to this new Chentech episode. This was, you know, again, our Chentech show inviting Julien Brun, who is the founder of Simcell and also the CEO of CL based in Vietnam. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.