 Yes, I'm honored and very happy to introduce Thomas to you today. He is the CEO and co-founder of Vey, one of our portfolio companies, and I think one of the most ambitious deep-tech companies we're currently seeing on the European horizon. Thomas has actually launched the Amazon Echo in the US. He has then worked at the first sort of driverless car endeavor in the Silicon Valley called Zooks. Then we turned to Europe of all places three years ago to Found Vey, where we picked them up and have been on an incredible journey since. Thomas has now close to 100 people working for him and they had quarters in Berlin. And I think he's actually approaching a very pivotal moment for Europe on launching the first sort of driverless cars on European streets very, very soon. So Thomas, tell us what you do. Awesome. Welcome. I'm very excited to be here today at Slush for the first time. Great to be here with you, Jeanette. If you think that autonomous driving is still many years out, like many autonomous driving experts, I think we have some exciting news today, all of us. Because what we're doing at Vey is a different approach to autonomous driving that allows us to actually put something on the street, not in five years, but actually starting next year. So recently we announced that we'll launch the first worldwide fleet of vehicles without anybody in there on Hamburg streets, actually. So that's going to be some very exciting months and years ahead of us. And when I talk about a different approach to autonomous driving, it is that we do it differently than as we know anybody else right now is doing. And we're doing that through a different technology approach, which we call tele-driving. So tele-driving is a technology that allows a person, which we call a tele-driver, to remotely control or remotely drive, which we call tele-driving, a vehicle. So a person just sees as well or even better. So a person that has 360 degrees of vision, has a steering wheel, has brake pedals and can steer a vehicle from afar. And that's the technology that we've been developed over the last three years. And next year we're going to put this on the streets of Hamburg. And the question is, what do we do with this technology? Because technology is just there to build products that hopefully all of us really love and enjoy. And what we'll start with is a service that we call Vey Drive, which works like this. So you download the Vey app and you click a button, you get an electric vehicle within a few minutes, wherever you are. And then you, as the customer, still get behind the steering wheel. So you drive that vehicle to the airport. So maybe you want to go from slash now to the airport. Vehicle gets out here, five minutes gets here. You get behind the steering wheel. You drive to the airport. You drive exactly to the gate. And then you just get out. And another tele-driver that just finished a tele-driving task somewhere else gets back and parks the vehicle. So what that means for you as a customer is that by far, by far the most affordable, since it's a fraction of an Uber, since we don't pay anything in the middle because you're as a customer driving it, door-to-door mobility service. So you don't have to look for parking, nor do you have to go maybe through some cold streets of Helsinki to actually find a car somewhere. So that's the initial service that we're going to start launching, which many of us and I hope also many of you are very excited to have in their hands very soon. And what the exciting thing beyond just this initial service is that this technology or this service then allows to extremely bring down the costs of going from A to B in cities. And we believe it could go as far as getting close to or even below urban car ownership costs. So then you can decide, do you want to own your own car that you have to maintain, that you have to charge, that you have to clean? Or do you just, at the click of a button, get a car that can get you from A to B and that you don't have to park nor have to find to start it. So what we want to offer with this initial service is really a new way to get around and not have to rely on your cars. And that, obviously, for us as a society in cities, if you look, how many, first of all, most of the cars are not electric today, so you have a lot of pollution. But more importantly, so many cars are just standing around, not moving. 95% of the time, blocking streets. And that could be just repurposed for other purposes for us to build maybe some cafes and other things. So that's why we're really excited to, with this technology, start out and start a service next year. And then the next thing then I often get, OK, this is great. What about if I don't want to drive? We also have an answer there that, obviously, over time, we'll add services where we can teledrive you the entire way, so you don't have to drive yourself, as well as building autonomous driving technology where my background lies, which we also started doing and which we're also excited to continue doing over the next couple of years. It's actually a good key point, because I think a lot of people, and I know you get challenged on this a lot, and Thomas, the fact that people believe full autonomy is only 10 to 20 years away. So why teledriving? Isn't that just a transitory phenomenon? Like, what is your answer to that one? Yeah, we often get that. Isn't this a bridge technology? And that's an exciting question, because I really think that we really, really have a good shot on showing that there's a different way to autonomous driving. If you look at the current approaches to autonomous driving, I would characterize them in two different camps. One is the camp where you maybe have a Tesla, a Mobileye, OEMs, building autonomous driving technology for car ownership. So they can't cost that much, right? A couple of thousand euros. And then they build out the technology. Then you have other players such as Waymo, so Google, Zooks, where I was at Aurora, Cruz, and some others that say, OK, we go straight to full autonomy, right? And we can build all kinds of sensors on top of the vehicle, tens or even hundreds of thousands of euros to build that, and then put this in a robot taxi service and roll that out. Obviously, both approaches, according to experts in urban environments, is many years out, right? And hence, our different approach comes in where we say, hey, we want to launch something, not in five years, but actually next year, right? And we want to launch a service that customers love, that cities, that we talk to really like to, because a person is still in control of the vehicle in a one-to-one relation, giving comfort, right? And then taking that and scaling that, right? So at that point, there's no autonomy, right? But what tele-driving allows us to do is that then over time, we can add autonomous driving features. So if you think about the autonomous driving problem as a whole, right, it's, you can slice it down, right? Like going straight is easier than intersections. It's easier than unprotected left turns, double parked vehicles, all these very difficult maneuvers, and edge cases that hold us back from rolling out autonomous driving today, right? And tele-driving allows us to say, okay, we say, what are the easiest features? So let's say, going straight on highways, right? Or just going straight in, let's say, sub-urban areas, right? And we do these autonomously, right? And the moments we have that, we actually launch it. And then the moment you maybe get off the highway, you have a tele-driver come in to then do the rest in more difficult parts, but still with a human in the loop. And hence, we have a complete end-to-end experience for the customer that doesn't maybe even realize what is done by a human, what is done by the machine. And we really go into a hybrid model in the next decade, where a machine and the person just works very nicely together to roll out autonomous driving features. And that's what we call our tele-drive first autonomous driving rollout, that I'm very excited to have the chance to pursue here in Europe. Yeah, I think it's interesting also because I think for a user it will be quite a new feeling to be getting into a car that is actually not steered by a human. And I think you probably will be a smoother transition to that experience in the future. But I think looking at the landscape of autonomous vehicles, it seems that we have seen a lot of these pop-up in Israel and in the US. There are very few contenders in Europe. What do you think that is? Yeah, that's also a good question. So it's a bit of a hypothesis. I think a lot of the autonomous driving technology actually evolved. So we have a big cluster in the Silicon Valley. And I think a lot of the ideas how we should solve autonomous driving came out of a small group of people, which was the Stanford Lab with Sebastian Thune, also from Europe, then kind of taking that to Google, which then became Waymo. And then you had Aurora. You have Zoos. You have many other companies spun out of the idea of saying, hey, we have to put 360-degree LiDARs on top, and which is a very expensive sensor. And we have to do a robot taxing just engineered all the way, which is a big step. And the challenge with that approach is just extremely expensive. So you had this core group. A lot of money was poured into. And we haven't seen the results. At least when I joined Zoos, we were like, I was so excited because it's such a positive change for us as a society to join and say, hey, in 2020, we have autonomous driving everywhere. But obviously that hasn't realized because it's just so much harder to do that. And what happened then is a lot of capital, I believe this is all hypothesis or my thoughts, is a lot of venture capital went into these few companies, burning 10 million every week, 10 million, without knowing when to launch. And so I think a lot of capital focused on a few companies that happened now over the last, let's say, four or five years. And we didn't really have a company. And maybe also we should also talk about the venture capital funding for such companies here in Europe just didn't evolve. And hence, I believe for that reason, we didn't have that approach to autonomous driving coming out of Europe. And yeah. Yeah, but I think what I got struck by initially was really your vision for Europe. I think you could have built this in the US. You could have built this where you were. And maybe the conditions would have been a bit more favorable. I think traditionally the US has been always a little bit more ambitious and more risk-taking when it comes to funding these very, very long-term bets. I think in Europe what we see with a lot of these deep tech companies is that they usually have to find foreign capital, mainly US capital or Asian capital to fund them, which is actually a shame. Because if you look at Europe, we have such an amazing landscape of universities. A lot of the groundbreaking research actually happens in our labs. And then we have Germans like Sebastian, who end up in the US and just stay there. So you came back to Europe. And what kind of West is European patriotism rooted for? And where do you think Europe will go with this over the next 10 years? So the background of that is I'm German originally, right? And I had my first company after undergrad. I studied at the KIT in Karlsruhe. And I had my first company there. And we did that for two years. We learned a lot how to do companies and maybe what not to do. And then I decided always at that point say, OK, I want to learn how to do that, right? From a technology perspective, as well as from an entrepreneurship perspective. And I decided to go to the States, to the Valley, to actually learn from the best. And I ended up over there then six years. I only wanted to do my master's there. Then come back, but it was just a very exciting environment. And it was a fantastic experience, both actually the studies, as well as then the professional experience. But always in mind that I wanted to come back and then build something exciting and unique and new out of Europe. Because we see a lot of, and it's getting much, much better. And I just would love to encourage everyone to also think big and build new companies out of Europe. Because what we saw a lot in the past is that we take maybe models from the US, right? And then roll them out here in Europe. But I think it's extremely, extremely important to also focus and build kind of new frontier tech out of Europe to ensure that we as a continent with our values and our ethics can, you know, in the future, be on eye level with the US and China. And really that was always what motivated me to then eventually come back. And yeah, I'm excited to maybe help with a small part to achieve that. And what's at the Spark for Bay? So how this started is I left Amazon. So I did my master's in computer science and product at Stanford and then moved to Consumer Electronics for a few years at Amazon working on things that you might not know, which is the Firephone, for example. People know then the other product that I was fortunate enough to work on, which then became the Amazon Echo when we launched it. And then I really wanted to go back to mobility. And then I basically got approached by this company, which called Zooks, which nobody at the time really knew. It was kind of a stealth startup. And I just really wanted to go back to mobility where my passion is. And when I joined, it's great, right, to the company. It's great. It's a fantastic team, a great vision, building their own cars from the ground up and really rolling this out. And that's what got me hooked, right, and joined that company, which I would encourage everyone in the deep tech space to really think, why do you do that? And what do you want to achieve with that? Because that just makes it so much easier to track capital, but more importantly, to build an amazing team around you to pursue that. And that was the reason why I joined Zooks, because their vision of autonomous driving and what that meant in building a vehicle from the ground up was great. Then having been there, I realized very quickly that it's just so difficult to roll that out, right, in the sense that we're still years away, or I don't have all the insights at this point anymore, but it was very unclear how to actually do that, right? And it felt like we are building something. So if I think about product development, or lean startups, or design thinking, you really want to start building something and stop putting something out and start iterating, right? And that just felt very different in the autonomous driving space, where you say, OK, we want billions of dollars to build something that then maybe, you know, in five, six, or eight years happens. And I realized that. And then there was kind of this, in this autonomous driving context, there's a technology which is teleoperations, right? Which is similar to what we're doing, which are used for edge cases for autonomous driving companies. And I took them and thought, hey, this is such a great concept, very used differently at low speeds and just in edge cases, five kilometers per hour and say, hey, what if we take this to the next level and just launch something, right? Because in the end, it's a similar experience for the customer. Yeah, that's what we decided to do and focus on that technology as our core technology that we've now developed to start it. I love how you say just launch something, because I think having seen you since the beginning, I think your face was an extraordinary multi-dimensional complexity for a company, right? I think most companies maybe have one of these dimensions to digest and to tackle. I think you had the regulatory challenge, which is there were a couple of pointers early on. Because actually in Europe, they said there has to be a driver in control of the car at all times when we did our diligence. But it didn't say that the driver had to be in the car. So I think that was an initial kind of pointer towards regulation actually being favorable or being able to kind of digest this. But still, that regulatory environment isn't easy, especially in Europe. It's much harder here than in the US. Then you had a very wide-ranging variety of technological challenges right on the hardware side. You had to build automotive-grade hardware, which especially in Germany is something tough, right? That the Bosch's and the Continental's of this world have actually really kind of developed the skill to do that over the last centuries. And then obviously you ultimately also want to build a consumer-facing brand, right? Now looking at your journey until now, what are the kind of key learnings? And can you maybe dissect like these different dimensions a little bit for us? Yeah. It's hard actually to, like it's from the outside. It always says, you start here and now you're launching. It must be great, right? But it's actually really hard. And it was really not easy. The technology itself is definitely easier than autonomous driving. But obviously it's technology that nobody, there's no courses online. There's no regulatory framework. Every city or country we talk to, nobody thought about this. Unlike autonomous driving, for example. So as you said, right, like we really, in order to make this work, right, we have to basically have to get multiple streams in parallel to work together, right? So on the regulatory front, right? Because we didn't know, can we launch this in Germany or in Europe? What about, obviously we have a network and low latency video streaming. That is an extremely kind of big stream that we had to focus, including all the maps and a lot of data engineering that we had to build on the site. Then the automotive-grade hardware. So we had to build, we call this a teledrive station. So the job of the future, the teledriver, would work at a teledrive station. We had to build that. And then the fourth item is the consumer brand. And all these things having to work together in parallel, right? And that's just extremely challenging. So what we did is we pushed just full, like full speed everything in parallel. On the regulatory front, I think it's always important, you know, to have multiple backups. So really multiple times where it's like, okay, we're going to do this. But we also, and it's hard at that point, to do a second parallel path, right? On technology, like we had one kind of main interface we wanted to go with. And then we had a parallel path as a backup, right? On the regulatory front, we looked at over seven different jurisdictions with seven different countries and on all the different cities in Europe, but also in the US, to ensure that we have just backups, right? And that is, it's quite a challenge to do this with a relatively small team. And then not everything came, you know, like you have to push everything at the same time forward. And yeah, that's definitely complexity, right? And that's a big strain, I think, on everyone's working mind. But also in a small team, having highly complex things going on in parallel, it's not always easy to handle. And yeah, one is having kind of multiple paths and now we have not only a backup plan, but it turned out that it actually works, right? So we're launching here in Europe and then also very quickly go to the US. So it's not a backup, but it's actually now our growth story. And on the technology front, also we made some good improvements over the last a couple of months that now makes us comfortable to actually launch next year. Yeah, and I think it's obviously a team effort, but how do you find the talent here in Europe? Like what is your, what analogy would you draw to having worked in the US, having worked with very talented people there, and then kind of how do you find the talent landscape in Europe and how has that benefited Rhee? Yeah, so everything that I just described, like it's the most important thing is the team, right? Like, and it's so, I'm just so fortunate to have my colleagues, so you mentioned, we're close to 100 people now, like we were able to, you know, get on board, like really, really fantastic folks that have a great experience, actually, but also have the drive and the vision to change something. And that's just by far the most important thing, right? And so that's one, the other thing, I think that helped us a lot is very early on, we had great early backers, right? So we got introduced through La Familia to my co-founder, but then also came back from the valley and helped us on the automotive engineering side of things. We had a deep tech entrepreneur that I had like weekly meetings in the very beginning, our series A we did then with Atomico as the lead investor, where we then had Neil Was who ran Uber internationally, so really helped us on the operational side to really think about how we structure that. So I think, I know often people say like, are investors useful or like advisors for us? I can definitely say they were, and we wouldn't have, like I think I have quite like high ambitions at the same time, we all pushed each other to really think big and to yet to do all these things in this very short amount of time. So that's that to your question, how do we actually get the talent, right? It's like, they don't apply. And I don't know the exact kind of setup here of the audience, but there's like, I assume there's many founders here is, it's a lot of work, it's a lot of grind, like sit down, like source, right? Or find recruiters work with them, where are great companies to source from, right? Or source meaning that, you know, you look at LinkedIn, you look at all the employees that work at a certain company, you know, make it nice, you have a short amount of time where you say, hey, maybe you want to click on this link and then you have some cool videos in the bit of the background. So because in the beginning we were still in stealth, right? Still, we just came like recently out of stealth, so we're not, you know, we're not a Google. And I think building like the right, reach out messages, building great, like, you know, interesting slides or videos about what we're doing, but also about the culture I think is extremely important and it's just a lot of work, right? So I spent many, many, many, many hours and I still do basically on finding the right talent. And what were the biggest learnings? Because I mean, it's been quite the journey, but I think there were many, many challenges, many learnings. Do you want to talk a little bit about maybe the three core ones that you want to share with the sounders in the audience? Yeah, I think a deep tech, what's always good is to have enough cash. So it can go like different, different paths. So I often like ask, okay, should I add more money or, you know, dilute less? And I think in particular in the early days, I would always go for let's try, you know, make sure that you have enough like buffered runway to, you know, overcome challenges. That's definitely one and the other one, yeah, just really focus on an experienced team and this advisor set up very early on. If you don't know folks, just reach out, you know, to founder networks or through your investors who are the great folks to really get on board, get excited, incentivize all well. And yeah, then I think you're in a good spot. And just keep going, right? It's really, it's not easy. And there's many things being thrown your way. So I think you just have to keep on pushing and going. And one final word on the journey ahead. I'm just super excited, right, about the next year and the years to come to launch this service for us, right? We've been working super hard on that. And just, you know, having something that, you know, like drives around without any person inside and finally get that on the street. And then after that, the next year, kind of roll it out globally and get it into, you know, all the users and, you know, cities hands. It's just something extremely excited. And yeah, I'm just very fortunate that I have now this team and this opportunity to do that. And yeah, so. So in the future, we will get to this venue on Bay vehicles. Thank you, Thomas. It was really insightful. Awesome, thank you.