 Hi, everyone. I want to talk about scaling a social impact company, in this case, so good to go. But first, a question here. How many of you grew up in a household where your parents would tell you to eat up what was on your plate? Most of you? Yeah. So did I. It's very reasonable advice. Unfortunately, we're not really listening. So almost 40% of all food produced in this world goes to waste. It never makes it to human consumption. Now, this is dumb for many reasons. So I'll just focus today on three of these reasons. First, there's the environmental problem here. Almost 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from food that we waste. Not from food we produce, but from the food we waste alone. Then there's the social aspect. This is a bit of a paradox here. We talk about how can we produce enough food for everyone when, in fact, we do produce enough food, and still 870 million people go to bed hungry. That doesn't make any sense. And then last, there's the financial aspect. All this food wasted has a total value of $1.2 trillion on an annual basis. I mean, the founders and startup people in the room here will go, wow, that's a pretty big time. That's like a real market that you can tap into, and that's also the approach we take and how I think about this. At least there is an opportunity here to do better. Some of you may be familiar with Project Growndown, and if not, I definitely recommend having a look at it. It's a group of researchers and very esteemed scientists who've come together and said we don't have to talk about the climate issue anymore. We get it. We know what's wrong. Instead, they focus on the solutions. What are the top things we need to do to solve climate change? And what they find is on the consumer side, the number one action we can all take as consumers is to reduce the food that we waste. It's the number one thing we can do. So driving, running too good to go here, we think about ourselves as a social impact company fighting food waste. What does it mean? A social impact company. We talk a lot about that. But for me, it means that every time we make a euro in revenue, it's because we've done something good. We've saved the meal from going to the bin. So there's real impact in that. But we are definitely not an NGO. We are a company. We've taken in investor money, a good chunk of it. We've raised 150 million euro to date. And of course, those investors reasonably expect their money back with a decent return. So we are a company. We have to deliver on market terms. I think sometimes, you know, being social impact becomes, makes you a little bit lazy and you think you're doing so well so you don't have to think about the company side. I definitely think you have to be very commercial as well to really get to scale. So I'll talk more about that. Our mission is to inspire and empower everyone to fight food waste together. And in this mission statement here, we have inspire, which is about creating awareness, opening people's eyes around the issue of food waste and why it really is a massive problem. But then the empower part is almost more important because that's really where we give people the tools to actually do something about it. And when we talk about climate change and how we solve this, I do agree a little bit with the project draw down people that we do get it now, but we need the tools. We need it to become tangible. And at the end of the day, fixing all of this is really about changing habits. So in my last company in Domondo, it was about creating this habit of fitness, making it fun enough to do fitness that you will really want to go do it. Today, it's really about creating habits around the way we treat our food, the respect we have for food, and how we work with that. The app just very simply is a marketplace for surplus food. We connect any baker, restaurant, supermarket who have food left by the end of the business day with consumers who come, they pick it up and they buy it at a discount. It's pretty simple. Now, if we look at the status of where we are right now, we're in 17 countries with the app. We have a team of roughly 1,100 people, or waste warriors, as we call them. We have on our supply side 128,000 stores, and on the demand side, 67 million users who are saving food from all of these stores. So that's what we think about as our direct impact. It's relatively tangible. We can measure it by the second. It's about three meals per second now that we help our partners save from the bin. So relatively tangible. And I think, you know, some entrepreneurs would probably be happy and say, let's run a successful marketplace and let's really keep it at that. But I think back to our mission statement here, I think there is an obligation almost to see if we can do more than just operate the marketplace. So we have what we think about as our indirect impact. This is a little bit like you can think of it as the halo effect we can have on top of our marketplace. If we can change perceptions around food, if we can use the marketplace to inspire people, to think differently about whatever leftovers you have in your fridge, to sort it better, to think about your shopping, then we can have a much bigger impact when we also have 67 million users on our platform. So I'll give an example here of how that can materialize. And that has to do with the date labeling. So just very short. There are two types of date labeling in most countries. We have use buy dates and we have best before dates. Big difference between the two. Use buy date, that's the date you actually want to respect. There's a safety hazard if you eat a product after that date. Best before really means often good after. It means you should look, smell, taste, and not waste. You should basically use your senses to figure out if you want to eat it or not. So a pretty simple thing we came across was that half of all consumers in Europe don't understand shit about this. I mean, most people will just say it's probably the same thing to be on the safe side. I'm going to throw away the product. When we learned about this, we basically decided to see if we could help do something about it. So we teamed up with some of the biggest food producers in the world, including Unilever, Danon, and Nestle. And basically partnered up with them to have them improve the labeling on their products. So we've rolled this out now in 13 countries. And something similar to this label here is now on more than a billion products out there. And really trying to educate consumers when you are sitting there at your kitchen table and you're watching the products and taking these decisions. So just one example of how we can be able to actually have more impact than the commercial side. But I want to talk a little bit about how we got here. So what you have on the chart here is really how many meals we've saved since the beginning of our founding. And you can also see here how we've launched quite a few countries along the way. And I think one of the things I love about growing companies is that it never gets boring. But one of the things that I then find tough sometimes about growing companies is that it never gets boring too. So you really have to grow with the company. And for me, it's helpful to think about it in different phases. So first phase for us was really proving the concept, figuring out is there actually a market for this? It's great that it has a good cause, but is there a real market for this or not? Then we spent, we basically said in 2017 that we had been growing way too fast. We were already at this point in 10 countries. More than you can see here, we were already in 10 countries after just a year in operation. And it was a little bit mad, making the same mistakes in all 10 countries. We didn't have a playbook. We didn't know how to open a country. We didn't know how to run it either. So really same mistakes all over. So we said end of 16, time out. We're going to slow down so that we can speed up later. Going to shut down four markets. We're going to change the entire setup from a franchise-like model to one where it's all one big company. Well, not one big company at that time. One company, I should say. And then we're going to take a full year with no new countries, but where we just really focus on the foundation. So what are the tools that we're going to need? What are the processes that we need to succeed? And how do we set the right team needed to really make this grow? So we spent more than a year on this. And at that time, that was a little bit nerve-wracking, because I think your instinct when you're in the early phases is just faster, faster, go, go, go. But sometimes I do think you have to step back a little bit and slow down so you can speed up. Then early 18, we were ready to grow again. But having global ambitions, we wanted to figure out, how do we actually open new markets? So we opened up two relatively comparable countries, Netherlands and Belgium, almost at the same time, but in two very, very different ways. And that was our A-B test to figure out, how do you successfully launch a market? So we did that and sat back a little bit and watched as those two countries developed very differently. Then we took the best learnings from both of those launches and used that to then create the playbook that we then used for the Spanish launch and for all the launches we've had since then. And this was really our expand fast phase here, where we were roughly opening a country a quarter during this period. And we had a real party with it until March 2020 when COVID hit. It may not look like much on the chart here. You can see it right below Portugal there. It may not look like much here when you look at it in the perspective now, but back then when COVID hit, the vast majority of our partners were forced to shut down and when the kitchen is closed, obviously there's no food to save either. So we lost 60% of our revenue over 10 days, which was a good educational experience as a leader. And then from there, we basically decided to try and keep everyone on the team and then raise the money we would need to succeed with that. Obviously, we couldn't get any funding from outside. So our current investors decided to chip in and help us execute on that plan. It was a fairly aggressive plan, but that also meant that five months later, we were back to where we came from and then we've been growing rapidly since then. Then about a year ago, we started this phase that we call growing efficiently and we started this because when we entered this year I think probably like many of you were quite optimistic about the future. Everything looked great, things were flying and we were out to raise capital, started that process in January. It was all going really well. Unfortunately, we didn't close anything by the end of April and during April when all the tech companies on the stock exchange really developed really poorly, of course the whole market changed as well. So we decided back in May that this journey we had started towards growing more efficiently we would have to speed that up significantly and basically we wanted to be profitable by the end of this year. So within five or six months from that time. So that's what we call independence here. It's actually worked really well for our team to talk about profitability as independence and not as profitability. I don't know if it's because we're a social impact company or not, but I think it's a lot easier to rally people around independence idea because for me that is also what profitability means. It does mean that we are independent of external investors. We'll take in money when we need it but now we actually have options. We wanted to have that optionality where we can say, you know what? We don't like these terms or we don't like this match or we're just gonna do our own thing. So really rallying the team about independence has been pretty big for us. And I think one of the reasons why I like to think about these phases and be quite strategic around them is that it really helps on the leadership side as well. Because each phase here will have different characteristics. You will have different objectives. You will also have different leadership requirements. That goes for yourself as leaders. It probably also goes for the team that you have around you. It's not to say that you change your team in every phase but I think you have to be intentional around what is it that it's gonna require from a leadership perspective to deliver on this and the profiles I have on board. Are they the right ones? Do we need to make changes? Do we need to add something and so on? So we're gonna hit profitability this year. For the first time ever, it's not a flag. We keep moving and now it's in 12 months or now it's in six months. We are actually gonna make it this month which feels really, really nice but also it leads to the very obvious question, what's next? What do you wanna do with that after? Because this was really something that has been on our minds for a while here. And when we think about the future here it's really impact at scale. Now we have a position where we can actually look at going from being a marketplace only to being a one-stop shop for our partners in particular our supermarkets who just announced the acquisition of a French company this week towards this. And we can also expand into new geographies. So just summing up a few things here for those of you who would love to make a difference as entrepreneurs. First, choose a real problem. We have enough photo filters and ad companies and shit out there. So I think if you have the drive and the talent please choose something that will leave a good mark. Just make the world a little bit better if you have the option. Start small, find the product market fit goes for all companies. But think big about your impact once you see that. And don't just think about your direct impact. Think about the indirect side too. Can you build a halo on top? And then last, don't be fooled here. Social impact is hot. But it doesn't mean that you can get lazy. You have to still deliver on all the same metrics every other company needs to deliver on. Or you definitely won't be able to raise a dime. So that's my advice. Go out there and start better companies. Thanks a lot.