 Hello everyone. It's great to be here. I'm Yoko, co-founder and CEO of Ledgy. At Ledgy, we help companies manage their equity, so everything from cap tables to employee participation plans to funding rounds planning. And I co-founded Ledgy around five years ago with my two co-founders and today I want to tell you the story of how our co-founder relationships evolved over the years and a couple of lessons learned along the way. And in fact, the last time I was up so far up north on the globe was even before we started Ledgy. So I met originally my two co-founders Ben and Timo while studying physics in Zurich. And we were studying together and at some point we decided to have a break and to go on a trip, as you can see here. Personally, I am half Swiss, half Japanese, and I've always wanted to go from Japan to Switzerland without taking an airplane. So and Ben and Timo were very motivated by that as well. So we decided to go on a trip. We took the boat from Japan to Russia and took the Transylvanian Railway from Vladivostok to Moscow. And as you can imagine, we had a lot of time. And so back then when she started to read some books about startups, I think the first one was the lean startup. And we started, you know, we were back then really physics nerds, I would say. No idea about what a startup even was. And so we discovered about that concept and we found that really to be a fantastic way to, you know, have an impact on society. And it would bring so many a lot of ideas, a lot of problems we could solve on that trip. Now we came back to Zurich because we still had our masters to finish. But when we came back, it was different. We, in parallel to our studies, you can see us here studying for exams back then. In parallel to our studies, we started to work on an idea, which was not yet ledgy. But that really was the first time we transitioned from the world of physics to entrepreneurship. And back then we were in Zurich and we started to, you know, talk with our first investors, first angel investors. We got connected with other founders in the Zurich ecosystem. And we learned for the first time, what is a cap table? What are employee participation plans all about? Because we had to learn this for ourselves, for our company. And we met with other founders who actually taught us about this. And one particular founder was the founder of View Eyewear. I don't know if some of you know the company, it's a Swiss company. And this person in particular you can see in the middle picture is still a good friend today. And he's the co-founder and CEO of View. And back then he had a team of 300 people based in Switzerland and in Germany. And Peter back then, you know, showed us the way he was managing the ownership of his company. And we see together, I still remember, in Zurich. And he was showing us, well, look, it's simple. Here you can manage your cap table in this way and your employee participation plans in this way. And he basically shows us a massive Excel sheet. In his case, he had on every single line of his Excel sheet, he had one share of his company sitting on that sheet. And he was giving equity to everyone in his team, a lot of people. So you can just imagine, you know, how cumbersome, what a nightmare his setup was. It was a huge chaos. Now what we realized back then is Peter's case was a bit of, you know, an extreme case. But in fact, everywhere we talked around us, everywhere we looked around, there was just no way for startups to manage their equity. And their teams were not understanding at all what equity was all about. So back then, we decided to solve that problem. We thought, well, we would never want to have such a setup as Peter when our company gets larger. And so we thought, well, we can make a software for this. So that was the first reason. The second reason is we saw how important the topic of equity is for a startup ecosystem. Because to build strong and enduring companies, equity is absolutely key. To give ownership to the entire team is absolutely key. And so this is really the reason why back then, you know, we had a concrete problem we could build a software for. And second, we had this possibility to have an impact on entrepreneurship in Europe. So that's why we started. Now, fast forward to today, we are a team of 75 people based across London, Zurich, and Berlin. And we've just raised our Series B. Now, it has been quite a journey. And I want to quickly look back on that journey and, you know, deconstruct how this went from a co-founder team perspective. So first of all, what makes a good founding team? I still remember actually one of our very earliest angel investor, Mike. When he invested in Legi, I remember he told me whenever I look for a founding team I want to back, I look for two things. One is shared values. The second is complementary skills. I have to be honest, when he told me this back in the days, it was super abstract for me. I was like, well, that sounds great. You know, what is even a value? You know, to me, it's only like values are things that companies put on their website to kind of sound great. So very, very abstract to me. But in retrospect, and when I was actually also preparing for this talk today, this really stuck with me. And I think it's really true in retrospect. And it's not only true for founding teams, but also for as you expand the team, as you grow the team as well. So let me dive a bit into this. First of all, as I said, at the very beginning of Legi, for me, values were something very, very abstract. I was like, well, how do you even come up with values for your company? And so I want to deconstruct this a little bit for the audience here about how we actually came up with those. At the very beginning, we were a team of three. We hired our first employees and we went about it very pragmatically. We basically asked everyone what are things you really like in a company, in your work environment, but also privately. And then we assembled that and we distilled our four curve values, which are humility, aspiration, transparency and impact. Now, why do these values actually matter? I'll just give you one quick example. In 2019, we were in a situation where we had to hire engineers very quickly. We were just about to grow the team. We had just raised our seed round and really wanted you to hire first engineers. And it was really, really hard to find women engineers. We were really struggling to do that. And especially the fact was that we all cared deeply about diversity and impact. And so we absolutely wanted to have a diverse engineering team. And so actually back then our co-founder Timo and CTO came up with a bet. He basically said, well, I bet you that I will be able to, or we will be able to hire and train unexperienced people to become engineers faster than finding experienced women engineers. So we decided to take on that bet, to hire experienced people, train them, and we launched our women in web traineeship back then. And today I'm happy to say it was a huge success. Actually, Xiao, who you can see here, is still a wonderful engineer of our team today. And the interesting thing is that this had actually a snowball effect. So the fact that our engineering team was diverse at the beginning meant that more women engineers wanted to join the team later on. And in fact, as of today, we have 50% women in our engineering team, which I think is quite a rare fact in the industry and which we're quite proud of. Now, I think the key point here is that it was quite a hard decision. We were in a rush. We really had desperately needed engineers. And so we could have made that choice of simply go and hire whoever just was fitting. But I think it really helped us to be aligning in this value as a founding team and really make that hard choice, which I think really paid off in the future. But that's why it's an example of how important it is to have shared values in these tough moments. Now, a last part I want to say that I mentioned before as well is shared values is important in my opinion, not just for founding teams, but in fact, it becomes more and more important as you scale the team as well. So one thing I'm so happy that we did is that, you know, I think a year ago, roughly a year ago, summer 2021, we were a team of 15 people, one five at LG. And we had just raised our series A and we hired a lot of people. We were about to hire a lot of people because today we're 75. And I'm so happy that we did one thing. That thing was that we introduced a culture interview, a systematic culture interview for everyone we were hiring in the team. And what is that culture interview? Well, as I mentioned, we have four core values at LG. And what we do is that we actually test systematically if those four core values resonate and are a fit with whoever is interested in joining the team. I'll give you just one example. One of our values is aspiration. And a question I typically ask, and that will help you if you ever apply to LG, the question I ask is what is the thing you feel proud of in your career so far and why? And I think that really tells a lot about the person's ambition, the person's aspiration. And so it's really all about asking the questions that will reveal what the values of the person are and if those are a fit with the company. Now, the second part that you might be really keen in our co-founding team is having complementary skills. And actually, looking back at the beginning of LG, I never really thought we were complementary because we were all physicists, so it's not very diverse. But looking back, it became clear that we were actually very, very complementary. So, Ben is more the creative people person. Timo is sort of this technical genius and the bold ideas person. And people say I'm more the disciplined, focused person. So in retrospect, we have very complementary skills. And one thing that often people ask me is, well, before starting a company, how do you actually find those people, co-founders who are complementary to you, who have complementary skills to you? And my personal advice and my personal answer from my experience is that you should look back, think back in your past about people with whom you felt that your personal best when you were working with them, where you felt it's going so well, it's so much fun, it's in a flow working with those people. And go back and ask those people if they would like to join you on your journey. Because in my view, that's really the way you can notice if a team is working well together or not. So that was the case for me and that was what gave me confidence back in the days to start Legi with my two co-founders. It was really that even before Legi, we had these experiences working together. It wasn't physics, but still, we worked together that I knew that it was great and we could do this together. So that's my advice. Think about the people you used to work well with and go ask them. You might be surprised about the answer they will tell you. Now the last point I want to, the third point I want to share today is around how roles and responsibilities can evolve and change. I think the key word here is flexibility and reinventing yourself constantly. So at the very beginning of Legi, we did not have any titles. We were all co-founders. We were all coding. We were all talking to customers. And at some point we decided, well, we probably need to have titles, have our own area of expertise to really go deep and also externally, that's much better. So we decided to have our areas of focus. As you can see here, I originally was CPO, so P for product. Ben was the CO and Timo was the CTO. How did we decide this? Well, for Timo it was extremely clear. He used to code since he was a child basically. So he was a CTO very clear. Now for Ben and I, it was not as clear. And as crazy as it sounds, the reason why we decided to have these roles back in the days was that our home market was Germany. And Ben was a native German speaker. And so we thought, well, for an external facing role, that might work better. So that was the reason why we decided this. Now as we went along, I think a few months after we had these titles, we started to notice that Ben and I were doing things that were actually in the area of the rather the other person. So Ben was constantly tweaking things in the product. I was thinking about expansion, talking to investors who would tell me, well, why are you talking to me? You're not the CEO. And so we noticed, well, we might... How about we switch? And that's exactly what we did. So we basically switched our roles. That is where we are today. It works very well for us. And also I think it's because we... I think it's very personal and unique to every team, but in our case, we see ourselves more as managing partners as a real team more than a very strong hierarchical team. So that worked well for us. And I think the key here is that... The lesson learned here, I think, that would apply to everyone, in my view, is that it's super key in a startup to remain flexible and to constantly think what is actually the best for the company? What are the roles that will really allow the company to move forward in the best way? I think that mindset really helped us to make that decision at that time. And the last point as well is that as you scale the team, again, this type of mindset will... This type of flexibility and company-first mindset will help you tremendously as you grow. Because as you grow, what you do as a founder is in fact you're constantly putting yourself out of your job, right? So for example, you used to do finance because no one was doing finance, and then you hire a head of finance, and now suddenly you don't have that job anymore. So you need to reinvent yourself. So I think it's a process that you need to be prepared for and open to do. And it requires a lot of, again, team-first thinking, company-first thinking to constantly, you know, pick the areas that currently need you or let the areas that don't need you go. Now, so in conclusion, as you can see, there are many, many things that change along the journey of a company. And in my personal opinion, I think it's key to make sure you have shared values and complementary skills, not just with your co-founding team, but also with everyone who joins your company. And the last thing is to be flexible and constantly reinvent yourself. So that's all for me today. Thank you so much for listening. And at Letgy, we support startups. So if you are one of those, you can try out Letgy right here. And otherwise, I'm always super happy to help. So please reach out to me anytime. It's yourco-at-letgy.com. Thank you.