 Good morning, day two of Slush. Hope you're all feeling well and welcome to Slush, John. Thank you. What's the first Slush impression like? Good. Good, good. It's good to be here. It's good to be in Helsinki. It's good to have snow and to have such a big audience. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. So usually at Slush and events like these, we talk about the new technologies, the new products, the new services that our entrepreneurs and founders are building for the next generation. But I think we're not that good as a community talking about what makes companies last, what happens after founding them and after becoming a success story. How do you make a company, an organization last for 100 years or more? And we couldn't have thought of a better person than you, John, to join us on stage to talk about this. How to make a company last for 100 years and more. So we're talking about longevity and also investing into new technology and new services to sustain and last for 100 years. Yesterday, last night when we met, you went through a bit of the history and the founding years of a lot of the companies that are part of Exor and I thought that would be a good starting point for the audience to share the same context. So maybe you can walk through a bit of when were the companies founded that you're working with every day? Well, first of all, Finland has a long history of entrepreneurialism and has companies that have been founded more than 100 years ago, which are still thriving and there are new companies like Supercell and many others who are younger companies but you also have companies like Kone and others that have been here for a long time and are very strong companies and great companies. If I look at what we are involved at Exor and we actually trace back over three centuries. So Stellantis, which is a new company in some ways as it's really been founded by the merger of FCA, Fiat-Kreiser and PSA in 2021. So it's really, we are in our third year of life. It traces back in 810 when Peugeot was founded, Fiat was founded in 1899. If you look at CNHI, which is agriculture equipment, which are similar businesses that you have here in Finland, that goes back to Jerome Case, which was an entrepreneur in Wisconsin in 1842 and Philips, which is our most recent company in which we've invested, we're the largest shareholder of Philips, is a company that traces back in 1891. So these are all companies that have been founded three centuries ago and each in its own way is still in business competing globally and creating a huge amount of innovation. Ferrari is the most recent one of them. It was created the actual sports team and I want to end with Ferrari because there's a very strong affinity between Finland and Ferrari. We were world champions the last time thanks to an incredible pilot, Kimi and Finland, as maybe not all of you know, who are not Finnish, has an incredible amount of world champions in Formula 1, but not only in motorsports in general. And that's where originally Ferrari was founded in 1929 and then it evolved in 1947. So we celebrated the 75th anniversary last year into the company because of founding. So Ferrari was really driven by motorsports and he started the company to fund his motorsports activity. But that's pretty remarkable, right? All these companies, such a history, only a fraction of businesses survived this long. What do you think is common for these organizations? What has made them last for this long? So first of all, you need to be addressing a need in large markets and you need to be able to compete within those large markets. And the reality is, if you last that long, is that within those timelines, there are many things that happen and not all the things that happen are good things. And so the resilience that those companies and those organizations need to have is ultimately key in how they sustain success. So it's not that much about how successful you are. It's about how much you overcome when you're not that successful. And those are fundamentally both driven by internal problems but equally by external problems. And the ability of the organizations, of how you overcome external and internal, and they could also happen at the same time, is what makes you sustain over time continuing to be in business. Indeed. And it's a lot about people, right? The people who have the perseverance to go through the hard times. And you've of course... It's all about people. It's all about the people. And you've had to find these great leaders and the organizations have had to find these great leaders. So what have you learned throughout these years in finding people who can go through both ups and downs? I truly believe as you do and flush is a perfect example of what people are able to do. And organizations are made of people and you really need to make sure that the very frail moment is successions and how you're able to go through these succession processes and sustain that a new group of leadership is able to be up for the challenges and the opportunities. And those are very delicate moments, which is why our strong belief is if you look at companies, if you have an alignment between the ownership, so who owns it, you have an alignment between governance and you have an alignment between leadership, that generally tends to make these transitions work. Founders, founders who operate their companies generally tend to be the free together. So they're the owners, they run the board and they run the company. So the ownership, the governance leadership is combined in one person, which makes it effective. But as it evolves, and my great-great-grandfather, the founder of Fiat, used to say that a perfect board had to be an uneven number and free was too much. And that clearly has advantages in terms of speed. And of course, you don't have much bureaucracy if there's no one. But on the other hand, as organizations evolve, as transitions evolve, you somehow need to adapt to those. And that is really a tricky moment where you need to try and keep that entrepreneurial spirit. But equally, as you scale, you need more structure. Indeed. And the reality is that you will have more people than three in your governance, in your management team and ownership. What advice would you give from your lessons learned on how to align these interests? Because there's a lot of people and they might have different kinds of interests or opinions, but you need to just get to a common ground to last, right? Well, I feel that on one hand, you need to have clarity at inception. So in some ways, if you are starting your company, you need to be clear what you want to build and watch the timeline you want to have. And then you need to align the ownership structure also with that and be very clear about how that ultimately functions. The reality is that when everything goes well, it's super easy. But the reality is that it never goes that way. So you need to anticipate some of the real foundational questions about what are your objectives? Is your ownership structure aligned with that? Is your governance in sync? And then there are difficult moments in which you also need to look at what happens in organically. Is your company, can it sustain itself just organically or does it need to make acquisitions, merge, be acquired? And those are really difficult moments where it's one decision and you need to be pretty surrounded by making sure that when you have to make those decisions, you are able to make the best possible decision for the company. And where you put the priority in that is very important. And those do happen, and they can create a lot of frictions and tensions. And if you can somehow anticipate those, it is helpful. Yeah. One thing I've learned that helps in decision-making is a clear set of values, what we as a company or ownership appreciate. Has there been a clear set of values that the family or the ownership is following that would have helped in the decision-making? So first of all, our culture is and I'm fifth generation and you can trace back before that the founder of Fiat being an entrepreneur. And we're very much ingrained in being a culture of entrepreneurial spirit with financial discipline. And we feel that that's important to have those as guardrails. We clearly are committed to building great companies, which is the purpose we have. And we have values which are really values that we feel are important because they are a way in finding the right balance. So for example, one of our values is humility and ambition. And often you could say that if you're ambitious, you're humble. Or if you're humble, you're not ambitious. The reality is you can be both and you should be both. And then it's a question of how you feel, or patience and drive. Often we say if you're patient, you don't drive. If you push too hard, you're not patient. The reality is that you could be both and you should be both. And you should be both in different circumstances. Yeah. We often say it's not either or. How to find the end. So great to hear. All right. I think we could move on to talk a little bit more about technology ventures, how to invest in new. You've recently set up a venture unit, right? And also an early stage fund under Exor to invest in new companies. What led you in starting that? So we, if I look at innovation and technology and the venture space, when I was a student in engineering, which was 25 years ago, it was a long time ago. And back then the two biggest innovations that were occurring was mobile phones, right? Mobile and internet. And Finland was a big, a big player in it with this formidable company that was Nokia, who went through a lot of transformations to really own the GSM and mobile market back then. And a lot of my friends who were students were all going in industries that were enabled by those technologies. And I was also during that period very interested and involved with what was happening. And I then ended up going and work within our family business rather than starting something new. But that excitement of that period of time definitely remained. And when mobility, a decade ago, started to be this big theme of innovation, so from cars, we went to the mobility space. And you feel today some of the pioneeristic spirits that you can trace back at the beginning of the car industry. So if you look at the end of last century, 1890 to 1910, those 20 years when a lot of things were happening. And just to give you an idea, in Italy alone, you had more or less 100 car companies that were started in those two decades, of which half of them were in Turin, which is the I come from and where Fiat was originally founded. And that was very vibrant in terms of what was happening and all the innovation. So we ended up being approached a lot in are you interested in starting a company? Do you want to do this? And so we said to ourselves, maybe it's worth well being more systematic and trying to see how we actually can understand this. The problem is that corporate ventures have historically been not performing that well. So we clearly did not want to be a corporate venture. And that's what really people were somehow approaching us, like dumb money or like the opportunity of having a market. On the other hand, if you look at venture capital as an asset class is not a great asset class in aggregate. What is really good with venture capital is the top performers in venture capital. So when you look at the distribution of returns, what you see is that if you are in the top performers, that's where you do very well. So the question is, we don't want to be a corporate venture. We don't want to be in venture capital, but what we want to be is really to be if we actually are going to do this at least in the top quartile. And so we started speaking with venture funds who were in the top quartile and just trying to see in which ways we could participate and invest alongside. And they gave us the right advice saying, why would you do that? Just give us the money. It's going to be much more simpler. And then if there are interesting things, we're happy to have like strategic conversations. And we felt that that made sense. But on the other hand, there were so many things that were coming our way. And so with our colleague of mine, Noam, we decided and one of our directors then was a venture capitalist called Mike Volpe, who's one of the leaders of index. And he felt we should really do that. And so we decided to start and we started with humility and back then we started as a seed activity, extra seeds. And since then, it has developed and we've been able to form a real organization. Some of my colleagues are here also today. And we have now been investing in different companies. Very much linked to the topics we're interested in mobility, healthcare. We've also created last year and D'Ala is here a program in Italy called Vento. And Vento has now become the largest investor in early stage in Italy and in Italian founders. And it really has two components of it, early stage investing and also a venture building activity. And we're seeing a lot of traction there. And the good news is that within what happened in the industry with a very difficult 2022, it gave us more courage. So in 23, we really decided to double down because we felt the unicity of us being an entrepreneur organization and not being a venture capital fund and neither corporate venture capital fund was really complementary to what was needed in the market. And also that founders really felt that what we were providing, not only more duration in terms of our capital, but real alignment in what they wanted to do that goes back to what we were discussing was interesting. And also finding founders that actually were interested in building companies that would last more than 100 years. Exactly. Sounds like that soul searching and research period is paying off. So congrats for that. We don't know yet. Well, at least the seeds are planted. Venture capital is a long duration. It is. But you're also in the businesses, of course, doing research and development within the organizations and the business go through changes like in the automobile industry. Electrical vehicles have become the thing of the decade, I would say. How did the businesses approach this change or these kinds of changes in general? So the good thing about change is that it forces you really to rethink what you do. And you generally have different changes. You have technology changes, internet or AI, you have market changes like customer preference change, and you have regulation changes. And somehow within the car industry, now with a bigger definition, the mobility industry, you basically had the free coming together, right? You have technology changes where electronics is a bigger part of cars. You have a customer preference change. They want different experiences within the car. And then you have a regulation change, which are regulating towards electrification, which is really at the premise of why we ended up creating Stellantis. Stellantis today has 15 brands. So the brands go from Jeep to Peugeot to Fiat to Maserati, and more recently Leap Motors in China. So that's our 15th brand. So we've actually this year announced that we are investing in one of the largest EV companies in China. So we're going to be with the founders of the company, their partner, and we will also be exporting those vehicles. So not only will compete in China, which is the largest electric vehicle market, but we also will be able to export. It is very exciting what we're seeing in Stellantis because we produce cars from a very small car like the Topolino Fiat, which is the smallest mobility device. So you don't need a license, fully electric, two places, great for. But we also have the Alfa Romeo 33, incredible sports car. And we also have Eftols with our partnership with Archer, so what is more known as flying cars. The possibilities we see in Stellantis as the mobility space grows is incredible and the scale we were able to obtain through consolidating the market is one that today we can put to use with the actual financial means and the talent and the capabilities to really capture exciting opportunities. They're new competitors and the biggest ones are Tesla in the western world and BYD in China and they both are bringing incredible knowledge, incredible capabilities and are making our industry very exciting. So today if I speak with young engineers or students of engineering where I used to study, like when I was studying coming to work for a car company was really not that exciting. And today I'd say that top of what the choices are are really to come and join us and join other car companies in the industry. So that's a big premise that if you have talented people wanting to work in an industry that there are interesting things that will happen. That's amazing. So if I'm hearing you right, you're approaching this change both through having your own teams built new technologies and hiring all sorts of new talents, but then from top down seeing what technologies and new companies are being built and then working with the portfolio. I think the interesting part is really for us that we have two sides. So we have most of what we do is involved in companies that are evolving, transforming and then we're also participating in the creation and formation of 21st century companies. By the way, one of our companies is also an investment management company that we founded this year called Lingoto. Lingoto is a Jigga factory that was created 100 years ago. So 1923 this year is a centennial and within Lingoto we have very talented investment management colleagues and within Lingoto we have also the innovation fund and the innovation fund is run by James Anderson who is a legend in investing in technology and innovation and he has also a very good team and by the way they're here with Morgan who works with him. So there's a lot of innovation that we end up doing in Exor and our related companies and we feel that going back to what you were mentioning about culture there is a cultural alignment. So the fact that we have a scale and scope which is complex and getting more complex is one that you can actually achieve in being involved in if you do have clear cultural alignment because a real risk around all of this and you all know that is if you expand too broad the risk is becoming masters of mediocrity. So you really need to be forcing yourselves and trying to really make sure that what you end up doing is really worthwhile. Great so if I'm hearing right it feels like a big part of the Exor team is also here today and to learn but also to meet. So if you're keen to meet the team do reach out. Thanks so much for traveling all the way and spending the time with us here at Slush. Thank you and have fun tonight. There's a big party here with a big big red artist. That's it. Thanks all. Thank you.