Miniseries Business Reimagined, Episode 3 : The Startup-Corporate Connection

Welcome to Business Reimagined. Business Reimagined with another episode for this next miniseries. In Empires of Innovation, we are talking all about corporate innovation, which maybe is a, is a new topic for many or for the entrepreneurs that are listening. Maybe it's not the most relevant because you're, you're in your own bubble in the startup world, the startup scene, and you haven't even, you know, gotten into the corporate scene of things in a, in a long time. But there's a, there's a lot to discuss and today I want to, want us to talk about corporate accelerators and their role in innovation in, in enterprises. So I think first and foremost, a lot of folks that are listening probably know what an accelerator is generally. But what the heck is a corporate accelerator?

Nice. So let's dissect the, the purpose first, which is acceleration. Acceleration of what? That kind of defines what the corporate accelerator will be doing. So corporates have a few problems we talked about. One is adjusting to the changing environment, adjusting to new technologies and behaviors and trends, as well as speed in building things. The speed in building things slows down in the corporate because there are structures, there are guidances, there are gate checks, and there are different rules and regulations. A corporate, an established large company we can call the enterprise, might need to abide by either by regulation if they're publicly traded company, or by their own shareholdering structure. What happens is corporate slowdown in building new things, promoting new things, creating new business models, testing new models. And that's why the startups start eating their lunch. The disruptive innovation theory says a corporate gets too large, builds multiple products, they become expensive because they get conflated and startups start eating them at the bottom. They provide a few features very affordably. So all this large company customers start using these other smaller tools, which only solve one thing that is not comparable to what the enterprise does. Of course, we're usually generally talking about software companies, enterprise companies. However, this can be applied to hardware companies as well. Clayton Christensen's case starts with steel mills. So it doesn't matter if it's software or hardware or infrastructure. And all of a sudden the company starts realizing they're losing a few things. They don't care because they have all the big corporate base of customers. But they don't realize that technology is changing. They don't adapt and they eventually die. So corporates have multiple motivations in engaging with startups. One of them is becoming a sponsor of a corporate accelerator. So they don't run it, they just give their brand Name they give cash, usually in the form of from the PR budget or marketing budget. And another operator like us designs a corporate accelerator program with the corporate's name in search of prable or reputable demo days. So the main purpose is usually PR and marketing. Look how innovative we are, look how close we are working with startups. That is usually how it starts because building that relationship with a key performance indicator with some sort of measured impact is very difficult at the beginning. The second version, if they pass that PR phase, they start trying to figure out what they can do with startups on a deeper level, on a strategical level and they can find meaningful relationships with startups while an operator again like us, does the operation. But this is again the corporate says we are in media, let's say and we want to support media tech companies. Or we are in hardware and we want to support hardware companies. We want to see what the hardware companies are doing, we are in entertainment, we want to see what the startups in entertainment space are doing. So there is corporate synergy, potential corporate synergy. One big example I really love to give is a good example and there are not many good examples by the way, unfortunately with this model is how BB8, the famous grandchild of R2D2 in Star wars became BB8 became part of the Star wars franchise that is through a corporate accelerator program. Disney agrees with Techstars to run a corporate accelerator program in Techstars. One small toy company that's called Sparrow that does app controllable rolling ball as a toy, as a fun item to play around with your cat usually, but just to see what the reactions are. But it's a toy like you can play it on your desk, you can play it in the house. So something that you control as a small robot. And once Bob Iger sees this and they're in the middle of the designing the first Star wars re lounge after the purchase from George Lucas they sign encyclopedia size NDAs but then they tell them what they're after which is can you make this little small thing and turn it into a large moving robot like humanoid scale. And the Idea is like R2D2 is a famous character loved by millions and billions of people. The new franchise needs something like it. And there comes B8. So that that combination of I need something, I don't know what it is, let me see what's available and then I can take a look. And that that company just became a massive success after. After that, of course. So that's kind of another thing like the corporate wants to do new things has the right base of customers, right need, and is not consumption focused. It's not, I will get this and this will be mine. And nobody else will do anything with it. So they have a good collaboration in mind. Those are the others. Another version could be. My product development team is very slow. They take six months to a year to build something. I want to collaborate with startups that are doing something already in the market, but they don't have the marketing budget, they don't have the customer base, they don't have the operational scale. I will embed their product into my pipeline of products and I will offer it to my customers, which will make money. So this can come in the form of revenue sharing, this can come in the form of exclusivity agreements, this could come in the form of acquisitions. But there is potential for collaboration. Those are all things that corporates are doing. So either for PR or for strategic alignment or for like building new things fast. This is completely external stuff. Corporate and startup startups are outside the one version that we start working on four or five years ago with one of the largest companies of the world, which is Siemens, and through their fund is corporate entrepreneurship. So corporate entrepreneurship focused accelerators are a different breed. They don't want external startups. They want internal capacity to be able to look outside, to be able to figure things not from within the company, but. But knowing that the company has resources but might be missing out on something, or they might have the resources, they want to move faster. So that way the mindset of operation should be different than how the corporate usually operates. And that mindset can be instilled into the company, even though it doesn't change the whole culture. It's very specific so that the people who are curious, who are inventive, who would like to try new things, but outside the existing structures of research and development or outside the existing structures of product development, companies prefer to give them kind of an outlet. It's like a small building outside their main building that some other things are cooked. One of the big famous examples for that is Lockheed Martin. There are so many other examples. But corporates cannot innovate, usually cannot innovate radically from within if the structures are set inside the company. We talked a little about this, but if you let the people do something abnormal compared to their traditional culture, then they will learn new things because of that abnormality of operations. And then that might be valuable to bring back into the corporate. So that becomes a corporate entrepreneurship accelerator, which is something we love doing because it also Kind of gives the people the ability to learn and figure out what's happening outside, which they're usually shielded from.

That's super interesting. I didn't even realize that there was really a difference between just like a standard corporate accelerator versus an intrapreneurship focused one. So what is the exact sort of aim of most of these entrepreneurship accelerators? Like is it customer focused products and solutions or how does it really, you know, get to where it is that you come in?

Also, I think it all starts with the realization inside the company. And the realization can come from three different, I think departments. We can say one from HR, two from the R&D department and three from possibly from finance or marketing department. The one that comes from HR is interesting because most corporates who have 50 to 100 years of existence believe they have the best people inside the company. This could have been the case many years ago. When you have large brands and everybody wants to work with those large brands, it could be banks in the US it could be consultancy companies in the US like huge brands. And when you go to school, when you go to university, it kind of becomes your dream job as an employee potential that day has gone because for the high school students for example, that I teach, or for university students that I teach, I tell them one thing that's starkingly interesting. The companies they will want to work when they graduate probably does not exist at the moment. If you look into the technology, like unicorns, we don't need to go as far as like Apple's and Microsoft's and Google's, Snapchat, TikTok, even Instagram is old. Telegram and many others, gaming companies, a lot of technology, software companies, they are not even in middle school age. Most of them are not even adults, like they're less than 18 year old companies. And when you see a six year old company, 10 year old company becoming a dominant figure in the industry, becoming go to address in the industry and people in that domain, in the technology domain or in that marketing domain, the finance domain, doesn't matter, would like to work for that company instead of this 100-year-old company. There becomes a gap. And the best way to close that gap, one of the best ways to close that gap is to prove your to your potential employees that you are not a dinosaur. You're not a dying breed of a company. You are innovative, you are fun to work in, you're not super bureaucratic. Because now this whole debate about Gen Z, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, whatever's millennials, it is a Real thing. It is a real. There is a huge expectation gap between the 20 year olds and the 30 year olds. There will be even a larger expectation gap between the currently 15 year olds and in five years when they start working in companies, huge differences in expectations, real or unreal? Expected or. Those are different questions that sociologists probably will have better answers to. But the companies are realizing I need to do something with my employer branding. I can't be this beacon of trust and honor and legacy. These young people can't care less about them. So in order to bring new blood into the company that thinks differently, that thinks innovatively, that has a different reason of joining a company, entrepreneurship programs provide a good hook. Now the companies can go and say, hey wait a Second, I'm a 70 year old company but I'm still entrepreneurial. Look at all these entrepreneurs that we breeded. They are working outside of the company. They're doing something that is cool outside of our domain sometimes and come join us. Like you can still do something cool while working under the company so you get the trust and security of having a little bit of a paycheck. Also you can be entrepreneur. So this is a dream connection. So branding that I think is a huge advantage not only externally, so external people applies to the company, but also internally. Internally. A lot of these companies are full of frustrated people. They have tried to do things in the past that are new. They were probably shut down by HR or legal or finance or marketing. So they stop thinking new because they know they'll be slapped in the hand, they're not going to be supported, nothing will be done to accommodate their imagination, etc. So they start being frustrated and if they're too frustrated, they leave. And all of a sudden that comes the huge cost of losing your people that are talented. So entrepreneurship from an HR perspective is I think an underused tool to save your face internally and also be appealing to the young generation. The, the second piece of that puzzle when it comes from product development, usually it's difficult is the pace of doing things in the corporate ladder is very long, it's very small, it's hard. So when you have a lot of people with new ideas, you can't put all of them into the pipeline of development. You can't put resources to all of them. So you should have a system of filtering. A system of filtering not from the eyes of the highest paying person in the room, but from the eyes of the customers. So what makes this corporate entrepreneurship programs meaningful is instead of betting your horse on one idea that does not have a lot of market validation, but has a great technology potential, which is usually what R and D is focused on. All new technologies, they risk losing more money because if that doesn't work, it just keeps sucking resources. And nobody in their sane mind in any company would like to admit the project failed. And instead of admitting the project failed, more resources is poured to the project. Oh, we had a budget of $2 million, we burned $2 million, we don't have anything. Let's put another million. Because nobody would like to take the responsibility of putting two. Oh, we put one, let's put three. It just keeps going and going and going until the person in charge leaves. And then they decide, oh, that person it up. And then all of a sudden the project fails and this gets, gets discarded. So instead of this pipeline method or gating method, we enable the corporates to test a lot of ideas without building the technology through the eyes and needs of the customer. So we train a lot of internal people to go out and figure out real pain, real need, validated with as many people as possible so that when somebody sits in front of these new ideas, they will go, oh, this is validated, this is validated, this is validated. These other things are too far down the road. They may be important in five years, but let's focus on this three or four or five, whatever. So we give them a more robust picking tool in a way that they can decide what resources to deploy into these. And these are not rocket science tools like with the same tools we use for entrepreneurship and startups. We use it with entrepreneurship. And I think the last piece with corporate entrepreneurship is actually deciding on resource allocation. That's, that's also very important. Not just on the timing and structures, but what should to be the investment scale, how much should we put into this new idea and what are the returns and investment on this one? So a lot of this large corporates take huge benefit from understanding what happens outside. Not necessarily. And not only from the customer perspective, but also from what the competitors are doing from that customer's perspective. So it gives them a great landscape to understand competition. It gives them a great landscape of understanding pricing and finances. And so they decide much with more clarity and with more vision into the reality of things inside the field. And I find that very rewarding for a lot of the corporates we work with.

I can imagine. I mean, I'm thinking about everyone who's like a specialist having the opportunity to get out and really engage with different elements that never would have touched their regular day to day work. So that's pretty cool. I am curious though, how do you measure the success of an entrepreneurship program like that?

That's like the holy grail of what we do. It's really difficult and it's. I think we discussed this in the previous miniseries. It's also very difficult to measure the success of an accelerated program. There are fake measures, which are how many teams manage to fundraise. It's an important measure, but I think gives a fake message. Because fundraising, when you are only a product in the market, a very small product in a small market or a large market, just picking up some traction is not a success criteria. Fundraising is never a success criteria anyway. What you do with the funds may decide if you will be successful in the next five to 10 years. But success in entrepreneurship is a very hard measure. Is exit a success? Then all of a sudden all the startups that are creating impact and creating jobs and creating new, building new technologies becomes unsuccessful because they don't exit. Is revenue generation success criteria? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Is growth a success criteria? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. So it's very difficult even in the entrepreneurship space, which is there are a lot of tools, companies and accelerators, etc. In the corporate side, I think the biggest measure is are the people happy? So that's one thing. This doesn't matter as much in a startup accelerator because if the startup is not happy, it could be from multiples of things. They could be happy because they lost a teammate. They could be unhappy because they couldn't fundraise. So you have to measure if the founders are happy inside. But deep down, founders are always unhappy. So I don't take that too seriously. As a program instructor, I take written feedback a lot more like to the core. But if they say I don't like the program, it's very hard to kind of justify that. With entrepreneurship it's different because they are paid by the company to join a program. So if they think the program was not worth their time, that's a problem. So one of the first things we measure was the program worth your time because the programs we build are demanding. So you have a full time job sometimes or you are separated from your job for three to six months to work only on this, so it becomes more focused. Then all of a sudden, was that six months worth something? Worth the money? Not that we are paid, but worth taking you out from that job or adding you more work to do while you also have a job to fulfill? So we call that the net promoter score. So we really Measure that. Would you recommend this program to somebody else in your organization or as a startup? If you're measuring the startups? That is a very interesting question. It has its downsides, but if you have a high NPS program, it means the next program, the people who liked it will be your advocates in bringing new people. So that kind of builds a heritage, builds a legacy of a program. If not, if not, everybody's happy. You can still run the program, you can still test things. I'm a big fan of like trying and changing the structures and formats. We are doing it currently with one of our largest companies. It's a painful process, but it's a needed process. So it just becomes a little different mechanically. So if the people are not happy, then you should be changing something. Sometimes people don't know why they're not happy with again, there might be expectations gap. So they might be expecting something else, they might get something else. So we really take it to the heart when we start the programs, when we start announcing programs or we guide companies to start announcing their programs, we really try to specify expectations so they don't come up with something surprising and that they get disappointed. The second thing which is harder to measure is does this program avoid waste? And that's very hard to measure because it's a very short term program. We do a program for six months and if the products that were thought of by these individuals were supported, what would have happened? And because we gave them the right tools, they're no longer doing that work because they wouldn't mean anything in the market. So how many of the projects we stop before they start consuming resources is very hard to measure. You can have arbitrary figures on it, but that's our biggest win. So if we can tell startups inside the corporate, you will not waste your time when you don't have validation in the market. That might mean millions and millions of dollars with only one project. And that is hard to kind of put your finger on and kind of support or back up with data. But because it's like I didn't lose that much time in the future and what is the current value of that much time and that much resources? Very hard to measure. But that is real, that is a very real value of the programs and return on investment wise. And for also employer focused programs that we talked about, HR does a lot of measurement. It's not us usually because that's completely external. Like how many more top school graduates chose to apply to the job because of what we did. This is measurable in a way, because you can ask, why are you applying to the job? And all of a sudden you start seeing people, oh, because I've seen this news on media or I've seen this entrepreneur that came out of your company into our conference on careers. And I really want to build my company inside your. Build my startup inside your company. And that's why I'm applying. So it can be very, very straightforward to measure. And again, what is the value of one very highly intellectual, highly capable person joining one company versus another? It is a year's long. It will be in the making for years. But if this became a core function of why people choose to apply for a company, then it has value. How much? Again, very hard, because that's in the future. The value will be in the future. That person could be the VP of that company in 20 years and might add huge value to the company. And how do you measure? It's all that person had applied because this was the entrepreneurship program that remained in the company. They did not become an entrepreneur, but they become one of the most valuable employees of our organization. Very hard to measure. But we start getting anecdotal evidence of how this works and we're very happy about that.

That's cool. I think this all ties back to the conversations that we've had about culture and creating an innovative culture. And I'm really curious, you know, we touched on the diversity element of, of an innovative culture. How does diversity play a role in, you know, bringing interesting new people together from different backgrounds, different experiences? How does that play a role in these programs?

So I think it comes in, in two phases. One, if this. Corporate accelerators, when they're engaging with startups, they get diffused to what the startups think think, like in terms of pace, in terms of growth, in terms of new markets, in terms of seeing new opportunities. So there's something outside. I don't have it. I have a gated infrastructure. I open the gates, they come in. Now they kind of, they start infusing the organization with new ways of doing things for new markets, for new products, new trends. So that is a very direct interaction. It's like migration. So there's another clan there. I have my clan. And so they get, they find somebody in common, they get married. So all of a sudden they become a bigger family, a better family, more diverse family. So that's the how corporates start engaging with outside. It could be culture, it could be products, it could be trends. And understanding internally, it is even more important because when you have a lot of ideas Coming from internal people, the first thing we do is to kick them out for the same reasons when we kick them out to go out and talk to customers. We start seeing engineers, business development managers, usually not business owner, business owners usually out there in some way, but they're focused on one small segment or they only know this. And once we start throwing them out into different alleys of value creation or different alleys of problem seeking, they start seeing different industries, they start seeing different structures, and all of a sudden they start hearing from the customer in a different sector that they're not selling to, they're not business developing to. This usually happens because companies are operated in silos. So there's an engineering silo, there's a product development silo, there's a finance silo, there's a sales silo. And they don't even talk to each other because they have their job. And their job is to do exactly what they're told to do. Not to go out and figure out new things, not to go out and talk to engineers. What's working, what's not working. So there's like engineering does it, product development does it, sales. So it's just a flow. There isn't much cross breeding of ideas. There isn't much cross collaboration between departments. So. But when you throw them out where they start from the customer, they start understanding the real problems, especially engineers, they get epiphanies like, like clouds open heavens talk to them and customers tell them they have the shittiest product in the market. And that hurts because usually this happens because they're the most complex product because they're a big company now, their products are complex. They were simple products solving a simple problem, but years added on to the structure. Now they have a very complicated product doing what it does perfectly. But it's very hard for the engineers, it's very hard for anybody who's touching the product. It's very expensive. So all of a sudden they start hearing these. The product I'm working on is not really loved by the customers. And what's worse is they need something that we don't provide. And that's the, that's the trick. They want something and that's not something complicated as we thought as engineers. They really need something that is not. That's an unmet need or unsolved problem which requires a simple solution. They don't need anything complex. They need one thing that only does this. But it can do this. It can do this. It can do. So that's how the engineers work. But customers No, I don't, I really don't need that. I just need this to solve this. Nothing else matters for me except for this. And all of a sudden, oh, I can do that. I thought this thing was complex and expensive and would require a lot of time and resources. I can actually do that much faster, much quicker with much less resources and why don't I do it instead? So all of a sudden you get this engineer mind of build, build, build, build, build towards, oh, I can build this very simple thing that the customer exactly today wants and is ready to pay something. Same goes with people or who are in sales and operations or in business or they go, when they'll go to different industries, they were like, hey, I had this product I'm used to sell or business development with and there's another segment that kind of wants the same product but in a different format, in a different delivery method, in a different pricing package. I figured that out from outside of outside resources, with the time I put into the program and all of a sudden I can come back to my work and say, hey guys, there's this sector that we are tasked to sell, but there's another thing that we can actually reformat or repackage or reprice and sell it to this group. So there are a lot of learnings from outside and those learnings, when they come in, they start infusing the company culture as well with something new. We can do something new. Not exactly what we were doing something in the tangent of it, but it's something new. Same with new product open cycles. Can we do something fast to design a prototype, a mock up, an MVP to show to the customer, which is anathema to most companies because they need finished products. It takes years to finally put our brand name into that beautiful product. But the customer doesn't actually care about that that much. They want to solve their problem now, they want to fulfill their need now. And all of a sudden you add this pace mindset, a different pace, a different building structure into the mindset of the company. And if they use it well, they start changing how they function in different silos, they start cross collaborating with different functions and that becomes a real value. Still, failure is a myth. It's very difficult to provide that mindset in one to two years. But the more people you infuse with this mindset of discovery, mindset of validation, then all of a sudden you start seeing people acting differently, talking differently between each other and solving problems or fulfilling needs much faster.

That's awesome. I mean that all feeds back into it, into itself. Right. Over and over. So that's really cool, I think, you know, because we're talking about an acceleration program, we're talking about entrepreneurship, which is, you know, a different form of entrepreneurship. I think it's important to also talk about, you know, how does that traditional, the traditional ideas of where a startup or an entrepreneur comes from, how does that feed into, you know, corporate accelerator entrepreneurship programs? Like do you involve mentorship, do you involve, you know, meeting, I don't know, investors, for example. Like, how does it all relate to each other? What gets involved where?

I think this is a very important topic of collaboration, like bringing diversity of thought, bringing diversity of experience into any program, whether it's corporate programs supporting startups, corporate accelerators, supporting startups, or collaborating with startups, which is difficult already. Or rather that's intrapreneurs having a close gated environment of building new things with new methods. The more experts in doing that, you start building it to the program, the faster conversion becomes. Because this is a little bit more creating a cult, a cult of believers in a new way of doing things. And it's difficult to build a cult. You need role models and they're not inside the company usually. So what we do, I think what we do really well is there are people that have corporate experience, they have jumped off the wagon, built something interesting and valuable, sold it back to a company or sold it back to another rival, exited, and now they actually know what it's like to work in a corporate, what it's like to go out and build something outside and what it's like to come back because sometimes they even sell the products and services back to the company that we used to work with because they got frustrated from that company. They had an idea, they didn't get support, they went out, became successful, and now that product is proven and the company who used to employ them comes and buys them out. This happens a lot in the US Especially not as much in Europe. But again, it is a possibility where you see people who have outside experience of being a startup, building a startup, one or more come back to the company to infuse that culture, build new things from ground up, or to kind of carry forward what they built into a new height with more resources, more customer engagement, etc.

Etc.

So we use mentors diligently because we need people to showcase not how things are cool in the startup world because there's that's abundant, but how people with a decent corporate career have done the jump, went outside and built something interesting and came Back into the corporate. And those people are not rare, but you need a good network of people to be able to do it. And that's also a good way to find. These people are usually in universities. People that have done a bit of an academic work, have got into a career, have built something, have now exited. And they don't need to work for money. They usually prefer to become part of an academic institution because they don't need to worry about how much they're paid, but they want to give back. They have something to offer to their community. Whether it's Alma Meter or the. That's another place. So we find these people and we embed them carefully into our programs and mentorship because they are the ones who are kind of the living examples. Or here's a dude who thought there was something else to discover who had all the problems of a company or had good things and bad things about working in a company, went out and now he's back. It's like the full circle of literally the hero's journey that's tattooed on my arm. It's a hero's journey. I was there. Something called me. I went out, I suffered, I died, I recovered, resurrected. Now I'm back to kind of tell what I learned to the people. I know. We do that a lot. Mentorship is a very critical factor in corporate accelerators as well as even more important, I think corporate entrepreneurship programs. Because you need, you need to constantly whisper in their ears that there is some. There's another way, there's another way, there's another way. If somebody is working in a corporate for the past 10 years, unfortunately their DNA is corrupted. They would default to the corporate way of doing things. When you push them hard, they get scared and they, they fall to the corporate thinking. They get very risk averse, they get very cautious. They become like, they get the catatonic. They can't move when they first hear their no, it's like a like dead blow to them. So you need people to pick them up from where they, they're trying to default to and kind of bring them back to the side of the fence. And strong mentors are, are definitely an important part of, of these entrepreneurship programs.

You know, not everybody has to become an entrepreneur to experience this sort of world of innovation and startups and new ideas and new product development, stuff like that. I think that's really cool. So for anybody who's listening, find a corporate that's investing in this sort of stuff. Right. And thinking about it.

True, true.

Yeah, I think, I think there's a lot more we can learn from you and your team that's involved in the development of these entrepreneurship programs and stuff like that. But I think with the time that we have, I'm interested to know what sort of trends you expect to see in the future of corporate accelerators and entrepreneurship programs.

So this is something me and partners are constantly worried about in a way I can say worried about seriously, because AI is eating the world. I mean it's become no joke. We try to use new emerging technologies ourselves as best as as fast as other people. Where companies are reluctant to use these technologies, startups are using them. So if for us to be relevant, we need to be very practically able to use all those technologies. What I see from the the corporate entrepreneurship side is with the changes in the economic structures, whether that's slowing growth or high inflation or resource constraints, supply chain problems, unfortunately, I start seeing employment becoming more questionable. More and more companies will start cutting off people with the use of new technologies. Of course, large companies are always there to keep their structure afloat. It's the wild wild west in a way. And during the times of crisis, nobody's surprised that there are tens of thousands of people being fired from a company. Even like 10, 20, 30, 40. But like literally tens of thousands of people were fired from companies. Especially when the production era from the US changed to Far east, from China to Korea to others. So plants being closed, plants being shut downs, infrastructure is being changed. And I think that's a big, big, big headache for the economy and the people involved. That being said, I think there is going to be a new wave of this, the destruction of labor force. And it's not just going to be an easy transition from the guy who is riding a horse cart have found a way to learn how to build cars and fix cars when things change. The guy who was used to go and collect ice from the lake and sell it had to find a way to learn how to sell refrigerators. So yes, those are things that were, that took time but it were doable. But now it's going to be very difficult for people who are inside the corporation doing accounting. I mean my previous work and we'll learn how to code to detect fraud and accounting systems through the use of AI. That's going to be a much more difficult conversion of skills and talent. So I see this as the big threat in changing corporate behavior. And that's one reason why employer branding is becoming really important. So feeling or showcasing how innovative you are will become more and more important to attract new Talent to attract new people and retirement ages being postponed, retirement structures being not as lucrative or not as comforting as before. I think those are, again, these are first world problems by the way, like the third world, the opening world, don't, don't even have these problems. They have other problems to solve. But large corporates will start moving differently, acting differently, and that's going to be a destructive force in the corporate landscape. Everything will be artificial intelligence, like AIED in one point. And we don't know how this will impact the layers of complexity in corporates, but we start seeing a lot of changes already. But I don't think this is just, this is, we're just scratching the surface. Once this becomes more abundantly available and corporates start moving from being scared and not touching this to being involved and curious and then to being confirmed and to be reconstructed through the different line of thinking. Either the large ones will suffer a lot and new ones will emerge faster, or large ones will also like transition into becoming different things. With all the data sets, with all the infrastructure that's like sitting, that they're sitting on, they can actually ride the AI way much faster than startups. They have an advantage on it, but they need to feel more safe and they need to feel that this is just coming and either they ride the way or they crash under the wave. So it's a difficult time for large company executives to figure out what the heck is going. But this is not a new technology and new business, this is a new wave and they, they need to adapt. Otherwise this will be more easy, it will be more easy to disrupt a large company with AI than it was before. So I think that's a big trend and most of the companies that we're working with are aware of that trend, are trying to figure out how to employ the, the right tools and right structures and also the right culture and right, right incentives to build it into their future. So things are changing for sure.

For sure. There's a lot, there's a lot of change around the world, right. And yeah, corporates are one of the first and last to be affected in, in different ways. Right? So, so there's, there's a lot to watch there for sure. But I think it's really, really interesting to learn about, you know, some of the work that you do. I mean this is just one facet of what your team does, what you work on, on a day to day or week to week basis. And I think it's, it's really interesting to know that there are people like yourself behind some of the changes that large corporates are making that large enterprises are considering, hopefully. And there's a. There's a lot of, you know, room for the. For the average Joe to. To kind of get involved in. In this sort of stuff. So that's. That's inspiring, for sure. Yeah, it's awesome. There's a lot more for us to talk about and. And we will continue to do so related to this topic. So thank you so much for your.

Time and waiting for the next episode.

Me too. All right. Take care.

Take care. Sa.