 Good morning. What a morning. What a way to start this conference, Norma. Thank you for sharing. And thank you Eklif, sorry, for the invitation to speak here and to share my story with you and among fellow speakers whom I greatly admire. I will admit two things right away. First of all, I'm standing on a stool and I hope I won't fall off, but I want you to see everyone. And the second one is that it is the first time that I've been asked to speak for almost an hour and as co-founder and CEO of a startup I am used to doing a substantial amount of public speaking, but the format that I've become comfortable with is delivering one-minute pitches. So you can imagine the struggle that it's been to prepare this speech, but it has been a positive struggle and an interesting one because leadership is something that is very dear to me. And in preparation for this speech I have thought a lot about why it's so important to me and how I have experienced leadership in my young life. For the past five years, as Rajiv mentioned, I have created and I lead a company called X-Runner Venture. And what we do is we provide low-income urban households with a modern and safe toilet system that considerably improves their lives without affecting the environment. And so without really planning to do so, I've become a leader myself on a small scale and there are many things that have shaped me before it got to that point. And so today I want to share a few of those rather personal examples with you. And I'll have a drink of water because my mouth dries up. I don't know how you did it without drinking anything. I'll be doing this. So where are you from? A simple question. A polite conversation started. An innocent inquiry to locate someone on a map and to begin to know someone. But whenever someone posed that question to me, it would send me tumbling down an identity crisis. I could not give a one word answer. Sometimes I try to keep it simple, but that would seem insincere or incomplete. Telling my whole story would feel exaggerated as well. And so sometimes I would also just lie and name an exotic place as my origin. In short, I could never give an answer that I didn't have to think twice about. I was born in Munich, Germany, the second of three children. And due to my father's job, we very soon moved away first to Vienna in Austria, then to London, and then back to Vienna where I completed my high school in my first years of university. Because of my parents' background, my brother and my sister and I grew up speaking German, English, and later, sorry, German, Spanish, and later English. And so it's a bit of a mix, but if we compare this with the life of a family of diplomats, for instance, who move around every four years all over the world, our life wasn't exactly nomadic. And yet, growing up, I never knew where I belonged. Perhaps this was due to the fact that my parents didn't really know where they belonged either. It's always a parent. My mother is from a country far away from Europe. She's from Peru in South America. Her parents have a German and British background. And so she was sent to boarding school in Britain and then studied in the US and then in Germany where she stayed with my father. My father, he's German or he was born in Germany, but his parents had settled down there as refugees after surviving two world wars and having had to flee twice. This global zigzag is present in my extended family as well, and it continues into my grandparents' generation and beyond. It was impossible for me to look to any of my family members' upbringing and find a geographical home. I wanted to put my finger on one place on a map, but I couldn't. And as a result, I often felt lost, like floating in space. This sensation of needing somewhere to belong, this desire to find some, any clue in my family that could help me figure out where I'm from, it continued throughout my adolescence and on different levels. I think many of these feelings became apparent when my own timid idea of myself came in contact with the outside world. Growing up in Austria, we were constantly told that we're foreigners, either because we were German or because we were Peruvian, regardless of whether I might want to identify as Austrian. But then we would go to Peru and we would feel totally out of place there too. One such time was when as a young teenanger, we traveled there to spend our summer holidays. We were sent to school in order to improve our Spanish and in order to become friends with our Peruvian cousins. Everything was different. Food was exotic and delicious. I recommend it, by the way, for anyone who wants to travel. Everyone seemed to be related to me. This is your uncle, this is your cousin, this is your aunt. Everything and everyone was loud. Family lunches would go on for hours and hours with adults bursting out laughing at jokes that I never understood. From my perspective, Peruvian seemed so relaxed and much less serious compared to what I was used to in elegant and rather conservative Vienna. But those very moments of noticing differences to my life in Austria confused me because it wasn't Peru my home too. I mean I had more family there than in Vienna and it was not like I was a tourist because I could speak the languages and we were included everywhere. So I began wanting to feel Peruvian too. And that meant catching up on stuff that I hadn't learned yet like being loud or adopting certain behavioral traits so as not to give away my non-Peruvianness. All of this resulted in very confusing years for me in which upon my return to Vienna I tried to be this very Latin person. Filled with experiences and adventures from Peru and probably to the amusement of my friends who did not understand what had happened to me. But then when I returned to Lima a couple of years later I was this very Austrian person in the eyes of everyone. I suddenly felt European. So much so that I would get nicknames like Heidi or have songs from the sound of music sung to me as a joke. It felt as though I could only be Peruvian in Austria and only Austrian in Peru. A similar situation of this conflict between my inner search for belonging and where others thought that I belonged happened when we lived in London as very very small children. My sister and I went to a small school and I remember not having a sense of nationalities yet let alone of their supposed connection to an identity. But I was quickly taught because Sophie my sister and I were always referred to as the German girls. That seemed strange to me. I never quite knew what that meant to be German or for that matter any nationality. It led to a rather uncomfortable situation during a commemoration of the day. We were all gathered in the assembly hall to hear the headmistress talk to us about the historic importance of that day. And as her speech went on more and more girls one more girls began in the room began turning around to where my sister and I were sitting with looks of shock and sadness on their face. It took me a while to understand that they were connecting what the headmistress talk of the Germans killed so and so many people with my sister and myself being the German girls. They must have thought that we were the personification of evil. So whenever I felt the need to be sure of where I came from I could not find the answer on a map. I could not find it in a culture and I could certainly not find it in the eyes of others because those were the most confusing and sometimes even offensive idea. I did however have one thing that I was sure of. I knew that I belonged to my family. I knew that my siblings and I were loved above all else by my parents that in their own way my mother and father always took a profound interest in each of us children as individuals and that I never felt the need to hide or feel ashamed of almost anything that was troubling me. So I knew that my emotional home was with them. And so eventually I began to see that my frustration and sometimes sorrow at not knowing what to say when asked the seemingly simple question where are you from actually also had an upside. The upside was that I learned to slip in and out of languages cultures even mentalities with an ease that I was unaware of when I was younger. It meant that while I didn't have large and loud family lunches I did have many exotic relatives who would pay us visits and tell us the most fantastic stories about their lives in other parts of the world. Whether I wanted to or not I could associate myself to many places to far away people to different ways of thinking and these were all associated with me. So rather than having roots in one single place belonging has come to mean to me to be able to connect yourself with the outside world and equally important to let the outside world connect with you. Something else that has influenced my understanding of this connectivity to the world is the history of my family. It shaped my identity not by giving me comfort in knowing who we the maidens or others were but by reminding me of the opposite of how fragile the concept of family identity can actually be. The grandparent that we were closest to growing up was my father's mother probably because she lived relatively close to Vienna. She had the wildest imagination and when she visited she would spend hours on end making stories up for and with us laughing tears at funny details she had come up with on her trip. But apart from fantasy stories I mostly remember her telling us about the years during the wars and especially the time when she had to flee from the Russian armies advance in Eastern Europe. My grandfather had had to stay back and so she had to cross the continent completely on her own with her three young daughters. As a child I did not understand what fleeing meant and so it all sounded very adventurous to me hiding from others asking strangers for food sleeping somewhere else each night. Also the first years in safety in Bavaria as a reunited family sounded fun to me raising your own poultry taking care of your vegetable garden for food the children playing in vast woods and traveling distances every day to attend the local public school. But as much as I may not have understood how terrible that experience must have been for her I did understand that my father and his sisters had had a completely different childhood than the one I was living. I understood that my father had grown up in post-war Germany and therefore like all of the survivors in relative poverty. I also grew up hearing a lot about my Russian grandfather my grandmother's husband whom I never met. He came from an aristocratic family who despite being part of Russian high society at that time decided to live on their country estate instead of glamorous St. Petersburg. Much like my grandmother he had grown up in a very wealthy home speaking several languages and he was set to inherit a large estate. The Russian Revolution however turned all of this upside down. He was separated from his family when he fought in the White Army and later fled to Europe and he would never see them again. His mother and sister died and his father was shot by the Bolsheviks as was his other sister. In Europe he managed to get a university degree. He met my grandmother and settled down with her and what would today be Poland. But then the Second World War happened and they once again had to flee. Losing everything they had built up forced to start all over in Bavaria where fortunately he was able to find a job managing the estate of distant relatives. But in the eyes of their new home they remained refugees from Russia and had it not been for their aristocratic background they would have probably been treated even more as outsiders. As a child I didn't realize the magnitude of the horrors my grandparents had been through during the wars and how hard it must have been to build a home in a somewhat foreign place. Similar to my grandmother's stories my grandfather said something intriguing and nostalgic to me and reading his memoirs was fascinating. Almost like something out of Dr. Shivago. And yet hearing all of these stories as a child planted in me the fear of suddenly losing everything. The knowledge that nothing and no one should ever be taken for granted because you never know whether a casual goodbye can mean a goodbye forever and that one should never be so foolish as to believe that one's position in society is untouchable. My grandparents stories showed me that it is entirely possible to go from being wealthy to poor in a lifetime from being a count respected in Russian society to being a refugee who does not belong. That the way your life begins is by no means a determinant of how you will live it. My mother's family was better off as Peruvian consuls in Germany they too had to flee the continent during the Second World War but they had the luxury to take a cruise ship over the Atlantic to New York and then down to Peru back to a life of privileges never feeling in need of anything. My mother's families ran successful trading companies and sugar farms in Peru. And so my mother grew up in comfort and wealth. Together with her siblings she was sent to private boarding schools abroad and to universities. So quite the contrast. It's fascinating to me to that just by knowing about my parents and their families I get a personal understanding of history. A glimpse into different worlds into lives lived completely on a complete completely different parts of the globe with different outcomes for each of them. And yet during the same historical events. I carry within me both the story of Peruvian fortune as well as the story of aristocratic refugee. I know that I am both. And I know that I am different. That I was lucky to have been born where and when I was born. To have had access to education. To have lived a life of comfort and love with my parents and siblings and with nothing but a feeling of bright futures ahead of us. But I also know. Because I carry those stories within me that I could have been brought up in a part of the world that is at war. Or in a culture that discriminates me against me on all sorts of levels. Or that I could have been born into a poor family condemned to struggling my entire life. My family's history made me see that it is almost my responsibility to be able to be aware really aware of what I have. That I must be capable of embracing the things that are given to me as a young person as well as understanding the things that happened to me throughout my life as an adult. One of the things that helped me embrace as well as understand is something that I'm grateful for and yet would never want to go back to my high school. My siblings and I all attended a so-called humanistic grammar school which is a common type of public school in German speaking countries. The idea behind the humanistic concept is to include subjects such as Latin and ancient Greek as a basis for understanding European history and culture. Alumnize of these schools are considered to be very bright and intellectually sophisticated individuals something that my parents obviously wanted us to be. But I hated that school. I felt that almost all of our teachers were frustrated with their jobs and that they were unwilling to take any interest in our young minds. I spent most of my years there feeling hugely discouraged. But there was one thing that I did love. And that was the ancient Greek classes which I think planted some sort of seed in my mind. We first had to learn an entirely new alphabet and then the grammar. And once we dominated both we could finally go about reading translating and discussing some of the famous Greek tragedies novels and philosophical essays. And as much as translating was always a very scary task for me because there are moments where you just can't make sense of a sentence. It was also a unique way of training your mind and of pushing its limits. It is very challenging having to spend time with a text going over word for word finding the translation having to find the translation that you think best reflects what the author might have wanted to say. And in doing so really understanding the thoughts expressed. I believe studying ancient Greek during my teenage years taught me how to think or more precisely taught me the power of thinking of not switching your brain to autopilot in but but instead keeping one's mind alive. Observe and filled with thoughts and most importantly with questions instead of learning to accept a predetermined world. And despite my frustration with the teachers the high school years taught me to not accept to look closely at everything to always ask questions to be guided by your very own mind and very own mind I had as you can imagine I was not very popular with my teachers and at home the dinner conversations were usually dominated by my father my brother and I arguing over everything. But apart from being a pain in the neck for some people I mostly just developed a fascination with observing and with thinking that ultimately opened a door to an inner world to an inner world shaped by curiosity and relentless in wanting to see truth. An inner world comfortable with not understanding comfortable with not yearning for simple answers comfortable with simply looking. Now wanting to see truth is a pretty strong statement because who am I to say to qualify something as being true right presumptuous of me to think that I'm able to see truth. But that's not what I mean. I see the search for truth both the rational and the spiritual one as an ongoing process as an attitude something that must start all over again every single day something that has to do with the act of always digging deeper regardless of what lies beneath and regardless of the effort that that may require. I think as children we naturally tend to be curious to dig deeper but I feel most of us somehow lose this trait become afraid of it as we turn into adults. I noticed that especially during my years at university. I studied international business administration at the University of Vienna and later at a French business school spreading my three final years over London Madrid and Paris. Frankly my decision to study business was based on the realization that I was not going to be happy studying classics and that I found the idea of living in different European capitals very appealing. That's as far as my research went and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. So as you can imagine I very soon felt totally out of place at the university. I did not understand how people why people as young as me were all about wanting to wear suits and high heels why they wanted to commute to huge office buildings and hold jobs and companies that I had no clue about. I did not know what McKinsey was a fast food chain or what M&A meant maybe something delicious like M&Ms. Suddenly everyone was focused on getting good grades for your CV and not because you particularly enjoyed your class. Nobody seemed hungry for knowledge instead everyone seemed to be racing towards somewhere and I didn't know where to. I felt like I hadn't gotten a memo. I thought wait weren't we supposed to be young adventures full of ideals and energy to make some sort of impact on our world weren't we all about not conforming to rules to society wasn't our life just beginning why were we so obsessed with plunging ourselves into supposedly safe jobs when we hadn't even failed at anything yet. I felt that instead of using the strength and yes innocence of youth to shape our own role in the world we were subjecting ourselves unquestioningly to some sort of system to a mentality where we find ourselves motivated by salaries by consuming and owning and by showing off where thoughtfulness is not reward rewarded we're looking at the ugly sides of the world is uncomfortable where our actions are conveniently disconnected from the rest of the world. A mentality that empowers cynicism and that ridicules earnest debate about issues. I was frightened by the idea that we were that we all stop thinking about uncomfortable things that we focus on how to avoid unhappy moments and look only for ones that we consider to be happy ones. Now I don't mean to say that I wanted my fellow students and myself to be depressed all the time but I notice that we were beginning to give in to a temptation of being selective with what we wanted to see and what not because seeing might lead to caring and nobody wants to burden yourself with that. I noticed that we began began to become afraid of caring too deeply about something or someone and that we began to minimize our ability to bring about change in our world. That we exchanged the desire to do something meaningful with more immediate satisfiers like good salaries, expensive accessories, fun weekend trips. And so probably due to my embarrassing ignorance about the business world but also due to my intuitive resistance to this temptation I continue to feel out of place throughout the entirety of my five university years. I stubbornly try to continue to look reality in the eyes hoping that I'd find a clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. And one of the realities that I have never stopped trying to look at as uncomfortable as it may be is poverty or rather the existence of inequality in our world. I have always found it to be unfair that just because where and when I was born I shall have a life free of existential struggles and that someone else comes to this world in a setting of hardship. That from day one in life one person has to struggle considerably more than the other. And for me it's impossible to see this in balance as something alien to me. Even if these two realities are geographically disconnected I see them as connected. In fact I myself used to feel like an emotional bridge connecting these worlds. As a young person my level of empathy was extreme. If I saw a child being beaten by a parent on the street for instance I would feel sad deeply sad for the rest of the day. I would go through the scene over and over again in my head not only imagining but feeling what the child must have felt and getting dizzy from the injustice. But even watching the news or documentaries about awful things happening in far away places could make me miserable. Whenever I saw injustice or pain I would automatically imagine what it must feel like to be in a situation like that. And I would end up spending an awful amount of time actually feeling this pain and injustice. It got to a point where I did not feel like going out to bars with friends because I thought it was disrespectful in light of all the suffering around the world. As I said my level of empathy was extreme and combined with my grandmother's imagination it was not a particularly healthy mix for me. But it was the mix that dominated my state of mind for a long time. And so of course I decided to make it the purpose of my life to free the entire world of poverty and injustice and fast. My internships in NGOs and travels through a few African countries as a student made me want to work on that continent. I applied to a traineeship position at a German microfinance bank that sent me to Tanzania and later to Madagascar. When I received the news that I had been accepted I felt extremely energized. Finally my dream of doing something meaningful in an exotic and adventurous setting was coming true. I couldn't wait to become a true globe trotter. Never staying in a place for more than a year leading a tough and eye-opening life. I believed firmly in my purpose and I thought I was invincible. And so I finally arrived in Dar es Salaam ready to hit the microfinance field. But after only a couple of days my excitement was suddenly over. Gone. Vanished. In large part that was due to the fact that I had embarked my plane with a heavy heart because I had fallen in love and I was leaving that person behind. But it was also due to the realization that I might have been enjoying the dream, the fantasy, the expectation of going out into the world more than actually doing it. And I was shocked and afraid. I felt like a rug had been pulled from underneath my feet. I had been so convinced of my purpose that I wasn't prepared for losing it within days. What had seemed like the ultimate choice of a freedom of the ultimate choice of freedom a couple of weeks before suddenly felt like having condemned myself to an eternal life as a solitary expat. The time that I spent in beautiful stunning Tanzania so everything that I thought was unquestionable within me come crumbling down. Especially the desire to help others and to be willing to take on life-changing challenges to achieve that. I suddenly did not care about any of that. All I wanted was to return to Europe and to live exactly the sort of life that I had criticized my fellow students for earlier. In spite of that I gave my job one more try in Madagascar before finally quitting and impulsively moving to Berlin to be with my loved one. That however came crumbling down too. So almost exactly a year after having embarked on my dream mission to Africa I found myself back in Europe heartbroken and with absolutely no clue as to what I wanted to do with my life professionally. It was in that context that I tumbled into ex-runner. My now business partner Jesse had been told by friends that we have in common that a Peruvian who's into social stuff was in Berlin and that we should meet up. I had been told by these friends that a Swiss person who's into sewage stuff is in Berlin and we should meet up. Neither of us felt like doing that so we didn't contact each other but as destiny or coincidence would have it we did eventually bump into each other. I told her I had just quit my job and she said that she was starting a social company called ex-runner to solve the sanitation crisis in urban slum households around the world and that they needed someone to help them out with their finances. I'm not good at finance and I did not care too much about sanitation at that point. In fact I did not care about anything anymore but mainly to avoid having nothing to do I told her I would help her out. Berlin for those of you who have been is not the kind of place that makes you feel bad for not working and I was afraid of the temptation of going months without doing anything with my life. The beginning of my time at ex-runner was strange because as I said I was emotionally drained and intellectually exhausted but with what curiosity I had left in my inner world I did find the idea of a simple solution for a complex problem intriguing and that was enough to keep me going during the first months. I focused on enjoying simple things such as the people that I was beginning to meet through ex-runner the discussions that Jesse and I would have about ex-runner or about life or just using my free time to discover Berlin and to frankly just think about myself for a change as opposed to imagining the suffering of millions around the world. For the first time I felt detached from the rest of the world. I felt like I had burned down that emotional link that I always felt I had to be in order to bridge inequality. I felt liberated by the lack of passion within me, the lack of responsibility, the lack of caring. I wasn't happy during that year but I loved for once not having any purpose. I had lost it and I felt relieved. Today six years later the idea behind ex-runner is still the same to provide a real toilet to households in urban slum settings without compromising their dignity or the environment. Back then the plan was to develop this new toilet system for Indian slums. After a while however we realized that that was not an optimal path for us to follow and in addition to that the original founder of ex-runner decided to drop out. So nine months after having joined ex-runner reluctantly but I had joined it I find myself at a point where we had to either bury the project or give it another try with a reshuffle team meaning a team consisting only of Jesse and myself. I was not ready to take on the challenge. I still felt drained and exhausted and with no intention of getting back into helping the others mentality nor of moving somewhere far away to carry out a project. I wanted to be left alone. I didn't want to bear any responsibility for a project nor worry about anything but I also had no other plan and I had started to like the independence of working in that the working in a startup gives you and I did believe in the importance of the idea. I felt we needed to give it a shot and even if it was if it meant just putting one toilet in one person's home and so sitting in the heat of a friend's apartment in New Delhi we began researching all the countries in the world that might make sense for us to try our idea out. I suggested to include Peru because I believe there was an advantage in my knowing the country speaking the language and having somewhat of a network there none of which had been the case in India and after doing some onsite research while on a family trip to Peru a couple of weeks later I felt confident that we should give it a try. Give Lima a try. Lima is the second driest capital on earth located in a desert and with millions of its inhabitants living in shanty towns in its outskirts. Between two and three million people live without running water without a toilet without proper roads or safe housing let alone schools or hospitals. All of them have to use a pit latrine to fulfill their most basic needs every single day. Apart from being unhygienic and dangerous pit latrines are not dignified. I doubt any one of us would enjoy using a pit latrine and so how come millions of people around the world and in Peru have to. And so from day one we set about implementing the idea that we had in mind to create an easy to install toilet to pick up the accumulated waste every week and to take the feces to a place where we would turn them into compost and to add an extra challenge to that we wanted to charge customers for this service. The fee charging is crucial in this concept. It is what keeps everyone involved honest. Why? It keeps customers honest because by paying they are automatically empowered to criticize to give feedback and to make all the choices on their own without feeling that they owe anything to let's say an NGO that provides this for free and it also keeps us honest towards our work because it forces us to stay focused on what our clients want and it creates pressure to really deliver on our promise of high quality or else we lose customers. I will share a short video with you now so that you get an idea of what all of this means. Think of this morning. What was the first thing you did after stretching and yawning? Most probably you went to the bathroom. Now imagine your toilet. It probably looked like this. Comfortable clean and best of all with one flush it all disappeared. Unfortunately for billions of people around the world this is something they can only dream of. This is what more than two million people in Lima, Peru have to use every single day. A simple hole in the ground that attracts insects creates an infectious environment produces terrible smells and threatens the stability of their house. A pit latrine. We install a portable dry toilet that you can put wherever you want in your home. It separates urine from feces. The feces fall into a separate container and get mixed with sodas. We come by and collect the waste every week. We recycle it into high quality compost that is used to enrich soil. A radical change that I've had in the matter of having soil and now the family bathroom. It doesn't smell, it doesn't smell at all. My child, yes. The soil already enters, it defecates on its own. Because before I didn't have to carry it, I had to grab it so that it doesn't get into the soil. It's hygienic, clean. What convinced me to have these bathrooms was the cleanliness and especially the less contamination when having a bathroom, having a toilet. There are many people, right? That really, the bathroom is how it's going to be. Change life. I would like everyone to have it, right? I already recommended it to my sister, I recommended it to some more neighbors. I know that if they try it, they won't want to let it go because it's really an opportunity and it's something very beneficial for all of us. And now, please, I'm going to baptize it. Thank you. Today we serve more than 600 households, which means that more than 3,000 individuals use these toilets. We have eliminated over 400 tons of feces that would usually be in the community and that would be toxic waste and have turned them into more than 200 tons of compost. It's been a long journey. We started from absolute scratch, literally going from door to door, asking people to try our toilet, asking people to trust complete strangers and to hand us over a bucket of proof every once in a while. If I think about it now, it sounds quite crazy, but I never thought of it that way. I remember feeling only two things. One, I wanted for at least one household to have a better toilet in their home. And two, I had nothing left to lose in my life at that point. And so that's it. There was no glamorous or deep thought behind sort of my starting X-Runner. And I think that that was actually a very powerful combination. Because I think no longer having the will to even have a purpose opened my mind and my heart to small things. It made me patient to take one step at a time. And it gave me the calmness to really listen to people. Feeling like I did not have much to lose gave me an invisible strength to do scary and difficult things. And to take on challenging roles like that of a leader. I was unaware of how much I was working in rather dangerous areas of Lima. Of how straightforward I was with people or with institutions that I wanted to have on board with us. Of how much energy and passion I was pouring into building up a great team. Slowly but steadily, the drive that I had had since I can think, the conviction of not accepting unfairness, of wanting to help others, reemerged in me. Like a plant that resurfaces after having been cut down, my purpose began to grow back. But this time stronger, freer and more authentic. I realized that I had tremendous trust in myself and my actions that was just there. I noticed that I was capable of much more than I had thought myself to be before. Especially when it came to human interaction. I realized that I could lead a team in a way that empowered, that allowed people to open up and show their happiness and fears. A way that would challenge them to reach their true potential while staying focused on our ultimate goal of providing safe and dignified sanitation. I also realized negative things like sometimes feeding trapped in what we had created. Burdened by the responsibility to deliver on our promise to our clients. And burdened by the responsibility of trying to be the best possible leader to my team. But I learned that these negative moments are a part of life and that you have to face these moments and embrace them even. The past five years have been a complete roller coaster ride for me. Both empowering and traumatizing at times. But always recharging my emotional batteries a little bit more. I faced so many challenges in this time that I can't even begin to make a list. But I know that each and every challenging moment, as hard as it was, ultimately strengthened this inner plant of mine. And that every successful moment gave this little plant a little push to grow. Now it is not my intention to commit a mistake that some of us sometimes make when talking about ourselves. We sometimes talk about our success as though we had been lucky to have it. As though we hadn't been aware that we were headed towards it. And as though we really deep down might not really deserve it. I certainly don't see it that way. I have always had the ambition to dedicate my time on earth to things that I considered important. And to want to do these things in the best possible way. To prove that point, I could have spent a considerable amount of time talking in detail about the past five years. About the ups and downs of leading a social startup that has yet to become profitable. About how unique and pioneering our work at X-Runner is. And about how much of a leader I have become in this time. But the truth is that I consider myself to have been a leader since the day I was born. Not of people necessarily, but of myself. And I consider each and every one of you to be your own leaders as well. When we hear people on stage telling their story. These stories often seem remarkable, impressive, and inspiring. And they are. But since they're told as a story, they automatically become linear. As though one thing led to the other in a very unique way. And as someone who has said where you are sitting today, I know that that can also give the impression that it will be impossible for me, the audience member, to lead a similar life or have an impact. I could tell you for instance that I have discovered surfing two years ago. That despite having come across it through an odd detour, it has become a beautiful part of my life. And I could share a number of examples of how perseverance in surfing is similar to perseverance in leadership. I could also tell you about how I love going for endless walks with my friends or just on my own. And how that has become a vital part of my spiritual health. Or I could tell you about how I've been going to therapy for the past three years and how strong that has made me. But those are things that I have discovered for myself. And they are by no means a recipe, let alone a requirement for leaders. And that's because again, I believe we all should be leaders, because we already are leaders. Whether we feel like it or not, we have to lead ourselves through life. We're kind of stuck with ourselves. I can't wake up one day and say, I don't feel like hanging out with you, Isabelle, today, I'll see you after work. That's impossible, even though I think we all would sometimes like that. Our inner world with all its emotions, fears, excitement, ambitions, expectations and disappointments, yearnings, insecurities, this bundle of you is always alive and kicking inside of each and every one of us. The ultimate choice that we have to make is whether or not we look at it, whether we acknowledge our inner world, our actual self, and build up the courage to take it by the hand and lead it through our life. And in my experience, the only way to take yourself by the hand is by being free. At the beginning of the speech, I spoke about my search for belonging, the search for my identity and how frustrated I often was that I could not find it anywhere on my map. What I learned is that as much as it may have burdened me not to have an external identity to lean on, that very lack gave me the freedom to build my own identity using my eyes, mind and heart. Whether intentionally or by intuition, my parents brought us up to have independent mind. But that meant that we also had to learn to deal with the loneliness that comes with it. The loneliness that comes with not understanding the world. The loneliness that comes when your first intents of creating something you believe in fail. I remember trying to initiate a donation campaign in high school for refugee children from the Balkan War, only to run against a totally unexpected wall of non-interest and almost sabotage. I also often tried to rally my friends around voicing some of the criticism towards our teachers and their style. But when it came to standing up for the first time, I was always left literally standing on my own. Our independence taught me to deal with the solitude that comes with knowing that the conventional path is not for you and that you are there for left without a path. All of these things, however, the loneliness of self-determination, the countless setbacks, but also my venturing into the world, discovering the humanity that connects us all, all of this has helped me cut through the jungle of the world. This has helped me cut through the jungle of conformity. To discover and never let go of again my own free will. Because at some point we realize that having no path may actually mean that you are free. That feeling lost may actually mean you are on your way to finding yourself. That not managing to fit in anywhere is not failure, but coherence with your beliefs. That when something is hard, it most probably means that you have taken charge of your own life. Yes, leadership is about owning your story, about acknowledging others' story. It is about your inner strength, about your ability to connect, about self-determination, about values and purpose. But before it becomes any of that, true leadership is the consequence of discovering, embracing and using your own free will. Thank you.