 Right. Nice to see you Nicholas. It's good to see you in Helsinki. I think it's been like three years since we last met actually in Paris. And I remember at the time you were just a couple of people just sitting in office right above us and now you're like 600 people, you're across 24 countries, work with 100,000 retailers, 30,000 brands. So it's been quite a journey, you know, in the short three years. But first of all, you know, tell us a bit more about AnchorStore, like what do you do and what product you provide? Thank you Thomas. It's great to be here with you and indeed thanks for having been with us since the early beginning of this incredible journey at AnchorStore. And so what AnchorStore is about? AnchorStore is a B2B marketplace between brands and retailers. And so what do we do as a business? So as most of marketplaces of obviously we help brands and retailers connect and transact on our marketplace but we also go beyond pure transaction. We provide a lot of services to these small businesses across Europe. And the two main services that we provide them are first logistic services. Again we are talking about small businesses so they have a lot of needs and we are active in as you said 24 countries across Europe. So it's sometimes very difficult for them to manage these logistic networks. We invest a lot in logistics for them and we also provide payment terms to our brands and retailers. Cash is king especially in current times for our small businesses active on AnchorStore and so we allow retailers to pay after 60 days when they buy products on our platform and brands are paid when the goods are delivered. So we help both sides of the platform with our payment terms. And so the mission of AnchorStore as you understand is to really enable these independent retailers to thrive. And the reason why we believe this mission is so important is you know me a little. I am a father of four kids and I don't want my kids to live in a world where we would all sit on our coach and order everything from Amazon. We are living in Europe. We know that since many centuries our European cities are great, are thriving and it's the same for all our villages. And at AnchorStore we believe that independent retailers are the blood of these cities. And so we want them to be successful and in order to be successful I think in current times they need great technology, they need great brands and they need great terms. And so that's what we are about at AnchorStore. So before we talk about AnchorStore let's talk a bit about you first and your background. So you started in consulting. It's not your first rodeo. You built a business before called a little market which you sold to Etsy. Decide to go at it again. Can you tell us a bit about your path to entrepreneurship? What did you learn from consulting? What did you decide to start AnchorStore? So it's not my first company and I started my career as a consultant. But the journey from consulting to entrepreneurship was I would say an easy one because I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I am from a family of entrepreneurs so this was really in my DNA. But where you are right is I think these are two very different worlds. And so switching from consulting to entrepreneurship I think I had to de-learn quite a few things that I had actually learned at BAME where I was working before. And maybe the two most important things that I had to de-learn is first as a consultant you tend to believe that once you have the plan, the roadmap, then it's done. I learned the hard way that actually the work is starting once you're here. And so as an entrepreneur you absolutely need to build the operating system of your company to determine how it will execute, how the communication will flow in the company and this is extremely important. Having good ideas is not enough. Execution is the key and so that's the first thing that I learned the hard way making this transition. And the second thing that I learned the hard way is when you're working for big companies in consulting like every single percent that you can gain here and there for your customers are very important and so you really try to be pixel perfect everywhere for them. But as an entrepreneur you have many opportunities everywhere and so the opposite is you need to be very focused and so I spend my days at Angkor store still today seeing opportunities everywhere that I could like optimisation that I could make everywhere but I can know this is not the most important thing I need to be focused on the most important thing and so what I learned is not being pixel perfect in the entrepreneurship world focusing on what really matters and accepting to leave a lot of things not perfect. Actually doing the work is much much harder I imagine. Exactly. So something I got is really excited about Angkor store is when you think about it you're actually providing tooling to brands and retailers to be more efficient and effectively compete against Amazon. So can you tell us a bit more about how do you think about competing with Amazon and the big tech companies and how do you view that relationship? Yes that's a great question and indeed that's my personal I think professional mission. I really want to build tools and technology to enable independent businesses. To me that's one of the most beautiful business world that the internet has created is this idea of marketplaces. A marketplace is basically allowing you to put together a lot of independent people and like give them a power that they would not have if they were on their own. So for example if you think about independent retailer in Helsinki of course it's very difficult for them to get access to the same kind of logistic services to the same kind of financing services that big companies like Amazon or all the big box retailers. But when you put all these independent retailers together and we have more than 100,000 of them on Angkor store they're actually bigger than Amazon in terms of scale and so we as a marketplace we can go to UPS we can go to DHL we can go to our financing partners and we can negotiate great deals for them and that's really something that is indeed very exciting to me. And coming back to your question of how do we like compete with Amazon actually our conviction at Angkor store about retail is that retail will polarize around two segments. One segment is really about the commodity that's where you want to go when you want to be delivered fast some cheap products that you need immediately and here Amazon is incredible very difficult to compete with and we are not playing in this field we are playing in the other segment of retail which is to us about the experience that's where you want to go when you want to have a great experience when you want to find unique and great products and this is where we want to play and this is where we believe independent retailers should play they should not compete directly with Amazon they should play on their strengths and at Angkor store we are building the operating system for them so that they can not only play on different fields but also have the same kind of logistics financing software tools that the big box retailers do have and so that's what we're all about and we believe that everything in the middle in retail will struggle and we already see this happening in a lot of industries. An example that I love is actually in the bookstore industry so bookstore we all know is really where Amazon has started and where Amazon is so strong and so for example in France in the bookstore industry Amazon is of course thriving but the independent bookstores is the other segment of this market that is thriving all the actors in the middle are struggling but independent bookstores it's a double digit growth in France so that I think exactly our vision of all retail will evolve in the coming years and why we believe that independent retail will thrive in an amazon world in the coming years. Okay great and talking about marketplaces so you started two two marketplaces and it's it's notoriously difficult to start a marketplace because you have to build demand and supply at the same time fine liquidity etc and how did you think about you're starting the marketplace and when did you think you know at that point I think I have product market fit like what were the signals? So indeed a marketplace is I agree with you very difficult to start because of this chicken and egg problem and so this is making your question all the more relevant I think you don't want to start a marketplace if you are not convinced that you are solving a really big problems for at least one size of the marketplace and so if you're not convinced that you will find very strong product market fit you should not go and so coming back to your question how did we convince ourselves that we were solving a big issue so you were mentioning I it was my second company so I when I left my first company I was looking for new opportunities and as you know I wanted to find something meaningful I wanted to build another marketplace I wanted to continue to empower independent business owners but I was like exploring several opportunities and one of my former colleague from Etsy had a lot of experience in wholesale he had spent 10 years in wholesale in Europe and he was keeping on telling me why don't we build the Etsy of wholesale I am a wholesaler I see a big opportunity here you want to build a marketplace you know marketplace is very well why don't we build this together and so I told him yeah okay let's explore this let's meet some people active in this industry today and he organized three meetings for us we made first with one procurement person in a department store one person working for a trade show and one one agent representing some brands and I remember very well these three meetings because we had like nothing to to show no no no website no platform no slides just explaining our ideas and what we believed we could change in the wholesale industry and actually after these three meetings the three people that we met they all proposed us to resign from their job to join us and so I was really like wow this I have never seen this there is apparently some big pains to be sold in this industry and that's really the difficulty when you are exploring your ideas like how do you know that you have product market fit and here I was like wow here I know because when you say to your friends your mother here is my ID like your mother telling you that your startup ID is good is not a sign of strong product market fit meeting with some people having worked in an industry for 10 years and then they want to resign to join you because they believe in the ID I think this was really key to convince us that we could build a beautiful marketplace in this industry interesting so let's let's talk about the the beginnings actually and and this is a true story so we we find this great team decide to invest one month later COVID hits and obviously you're targeting physical retailers so you know big wave of panic always think about you're shutting down the company so can you tell us a bit more about you know that defining moments in the company yes of course it was not a great time for our investors us and also most importantly our customers so indeed we I think we had launched a platform maybe three months before lockdown started in Europe and as we had product market fit we were actually growing quite fast but in one week we lost 90 percent of our business and so I indeed received at that time many many phone calls like sorry you pick the wrong industry shutting down the three months after you launch what are you going to do and I'm actually quite proud with insight in the decision that we made also with your support with the support of our investors because we I think we did two important things at that time the first thing is we were providing payment terms as I was explaining earlier on and so we had many of our retailers owning us some money and we knew that they would have to repay us this money during the lockdown so while they would be shut down and so the first decision that we made the day after the lockdown was announced is okay we postponed the payment and for us we were small company it was a big deal but I think it helped a lot create the trust between us and our community so quite proud of these decisions that we made and the other decisions that we made if we were 10 in the company when covid did but as we have we had just raised some money with you guys we had hired quite a lot and so we had 20 people that were supposed to join us during the lockdown so we lose 90 percent of our business we triple the size of the team what do we do here and so we we kept everyone and we refocused the whole company on the brand side of our marketplace so we said okay retailers are closed but let's focus on the brands they're like us they need to reinvent themselves their customers are closed so they need to think about new ways to do business and so we focus the company we build a great portfolio of brands with a lot of energy in the company during these two months and actually what happened is when shop reopened they needed to replenish their stores they were looking for new ways of working all the trade shows which they were using to they were used to go to to buy for their stores were cancelled and so actually we exploded after the the covid thanks to the choices that we had made during this period so I think it's a it's a great sign that when a crisis hits it can actually be a great time for entrepreneurs to make big moves bold moves and create big differences when everybody is doing well when there is a lot of cash everywhere it's difficult to create big differences but when everybody is afraid that's where you can make these big differences so crisis can provide great opportunities and for us of course we are not happy about what was happening to our customers but in the end it was a great opportunity for our customers yeah very timely advice now let's let's talk about scaling so you survived the crisis now you go in hyperscale and so when you scale across Europe it's you know it's it's always painful because different languages logistics payment methods you're hiring people all across Europe so how do you think about you're tackling Europe and you know did you have a kind of a european first mentality from the start yes so first the complexity of Europe is also our opportunity as a marketplace as a tool we can like abstract all this complexity especially for small businesses like having a lot of complexities actually an opportunity for tech company we can extract this complexity so we saw this as an opportunity and the reason why we decided to be european for first day one I think that there were three reasons because where you're right is like tackling the complexity of Europe day one can slow you down but we still decided that we needed to do it for three reasons the first one is we wanted to build something big and France as any other european country I think is too small to build something really significant so we wanted to be european first the second reason is I think based on our first experience as entrepreneurs with my co-founder Nico Cohen at a little market it took us three years before we went international and we saw that it was actually very difficult and very costly to make the move at that time so we wanted to do it day one and the third reason is DNA we wanted the DNA of our company to be european rather than french and and this is very important because if you start as a french company you are you hire mostly french people the language in the company is french and when you want to like expand to international talents it's it's very difficult for international talents to strive in that kind of environment so we wanted day one to hire mostly non-french people english being the primary language of the company which is not always the case unfortunately in some french company so that was also for us a DNA decision okay so now now you scale and then we're hitting we're hitting a second crisis but more on the on the macro environment this time do you have any advice on you know how do you manage crisis and how do you adjust to different macro environments so yes indeed the environment has changed quite a lot in just one year so i think the first advice and the first very important thing is to like face reality sometimes maybe it can be difficult to understand such a big change in the macro environment but i think it's very very important as an entrepreneur to very quickly face reality understand that i mean what you were seeing one year ago will not come back anytime soon so very very quickly adapt to this new reality so in this new macro environment like financing is much more difficult so you need to take this into account and so pay a lot of attention to your cash you want to make sure that you have enough cash to develop your vision so that's the basics but then as i said crisis are great and provide great opportunities to make big differences in the market our customers i think they will need us more than ever and so we need to be there for them and so i actually believe that once you have like okay i understand this new reality i have made sure i have made sure that i will survive through this then let's tackle the opportunities that this crisis will create as always crisis are enabling amazing company to be to be built and do you have any more advice for you know entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs in the room on your hard to build businesses since you've built your two successful companies so my first advice but is more an advice as a citizen rather than as an entrepreneur but i'm a firm believer that a lot of the issues that we are facing as a society like climate change like inequality is all all these issues i think will be solved by entrepreneurs so my first advice would be we need entrepreneurs to tackle very big issues like that second advice i already shared it but that's the most important one make sure that you solve big pains big issues there is nothing more sad to me than seeing a great team working really hard on a not important problem and so make sure that you solve a very big pain a very big issue and then once you have this i i think what is really important is to surround yourself with amazing talents that's what we have done from the very early days of anchor store and it has been amazing to have incredible talents around us and this is very important in the early days of the of the company and then last thing is be bold be bold you need when you are so small as a startup and you want to tackle a big issue you need to be to make both beds be very focused and be bold and what about people because so the the company actually grew pretty fast from you know a handful of people to 600 people today you had to do a lot of hiring so for more mature businesses and companies are going through a hyperscale phase do you have any advice on you know how to hire people how to manage this kind of you know change in scale so my first advice about hiring is don't hire if you don't have product market fit i think that's a big mistake that sometimes people are making but don't hire if you don't have very strong product market fit and don't hire if you don't have a clear distribution channels for your product but then if you have this indeed it can be great to accelerate your business the way we did it i think is as it was our second company we were very conscious about the need to have very clear operating guidelines for the company we wanted to make sure that the company was well structured we know how we wanted to operate we had like clear operating principles we had clear guidelines for hiring around the kind of people we were looking for so we really actually spent a lot of time at the beginning to define this to make sure that when we would go on a big hiring work we would be ready and the second thing that we did is we built a talent team very early on to make sure that we would be very professional about how we would go about hiring so that we could provide both a great experience for the candidates but also so that we could make sure that we would hire the right talents for Angkor store and do you have any specific thoughts actually about the the european tech ecosystem because you've been you know entrepreneur for for most 15 years you've seen you know different waves of companies and you know i think european tech is the most exciting place to be at the moment but do you have any observation of how it's changed over the years so indeed it has changed quite a lot in in 15 years and i think for for a tech ecosystem to thrive you need first some like financing and and for our first company overall we raised two million euros for Angkor store we raised more than 350 million euros so like financing i think no is available in europe and so we can build giants out of europe and i think that's a very important condition you need also entrepreneurs with big ambitions and i think for example as far as we were concerned for our first company as i said we started as a french company and so i think it's great also to see all the european entrepreneurs willing to build a giants day one and so this change in my set is very important and the third big change which i think is enabling this european tech ecosystem to thrive finally is the talents if you want to build a great company you need to have the talents which who have been through this journey already so they can you can learn from them and here i think we are still late compared to some other ecosystems but as more and more big european tech companies are thriving a lot of talents are actually getting the experience that the future european startup will need to scale because it's actually very difficult to scale a company to a very big number like you know to a lot of countries with a lot of employees and so experience matters a lot and so yeah i think the right talent pool is also very critical we are still i think a bit late in europe but like the change in 15 years is is incredible and very promising for the for the future and just a final question so if i'm a if i'm a marketplace entrepreneur today do you have any specific tips any specific areas i should target you know any any secrets you can share so yeah so i i i shared a few advice for entrepreneurs in general and and this of course supply to to marketplace entrepreneurs but for marketplaces specifically i would say there are two other things that are important to me the first thing is you need to understand very early on on what side of the marketplace you will be constrained will it be more difficult to get the supply or will it be more difficult to get the demand so very important to understand this very early on so that you can focus on the side that will be the most difficult to make sure that you will crack it and the second thing that is important to figure out quite early in a marketplace is about disintermediation like how do you make sure that you will not get disintermediate and so you need to also figure out this very early on in your journey as an entrepreneur in a marketplace environment to make sure that you will not only build a great marketplace but also have a good business model behind it to finance your growth great it was it was great to have you and thank you so much for sharing your insights thank you tomah bye bye okay