 And welcome, Marcus. Great to be here. So you heard about Marcus's biography just a moment ago. You are now officially, I think, Europe's youngest unicorn founder. And I think you're really the classic, classic start-up story, right? So dropped out of university at 19 to found a company and then made it a success. But I guess it probably didn't feel like that in the beginning. Tell me about that kind of early space. Did you always know that this was going to be a business that would work? Or was there a moment of doubt and your family kind of saying you're crazy? And how did that go? Sure. We definitely had all of that. So when I was 19, I was certain I want to start the company. I was certain they needed to be in the tech industry because I believe that that's where you can have the biggest impact. But of course, having no experience, no funding, really no connections or network, and actually quite limited tech skills, then it wasn't really the best thoughts of success. So when I was trying to convince my parents to give me the first couple of thousand euros to get going, it took me many, many weeks to actually convince them to do it. And I think still six months in, they were very skeptical that they're going to lose all that big loan that they gave me. But I think now looking back, it was a good investment for them. So this started really as a kind of a fleet management company. And then you kind of expanded into doing sort of private hire vehicles. I mean, tell me about what was the moment at which you decided what the direction of the company really would be? Sure. So we have always been taking the customer approach. So we're always looking at it from the point of view or of the passenger, that they need to go from point A to B. And how do we make that as fast and reliable and convenient as possible? But we realized in the early days that actually it was very hard for us to offer a great service for riders without actually having cars on the platform. And we realized that the easiest way to get cars on the platform is not just to go directly to drivers, but rather first contact the taxi companies. And still, five years ago, they were all using old school dispatching software. So you still had to call them, they were using radios. And our pitch was very simple, that we're bringing them to the digital age. And then on top of that, they were getting some customers from the app. But five years ago, they didn't really even care about the app. They were just thinking, how do we replace the radio? So things have really evolved a lot in the last couple of years. So it was a kind of gradual process. And now everything happens through the app. Yes, exactly. So we only used to have the taxi companies using the dispatching software for the first couple of years. But eventually, they realized that it makes no sense to keep up a call center. And it's a lot more efficient for people just to book from an app directly. So now, Marcus, you've set yourself a huge challenge because you're going up against one of the biggest tech companies around at the moment, Uber. How are you expecting to compete with them head to head? So we've been actually in competition all the five years that we've operated as a company. So we used to have a lot of competition in Tallinn. A lot of small startups actually started doing a similar platform to ours. And after a couple of years, we managed to build the best one for passengers, and we won. And then, of course, Uber came to most of our markets, and now we've been competing with them for about four years. So we've always been used to heavy competition. But what we see is the most important is that if you manage to localize, you manage to build the best product for the customers, then that platform is going to win out, regardless of how much capital the other one has. So what's the secret source of competing? Is it the way you look after the drivers? Is it kind of making sure that you have these negotiations with local regulators? I mean, how do you do it? So TechSify is now in about 30 countries, so all the way from France to Estonia to Finland to Nigeria and South Africa. And each country is very different. So I think the biggest advantage we have is localization. So in some of the markets, for example, we take cash and we have integrated local carrier billing so you can pay with your phone bill. In other cases, we've built local safety features, which are really relevant in South Africa, for example. And in some markets, especially most in Europe, it's very, very critical that you're the best platform for drivers. Because typically, there's very high regulation. It's hard for new drivers to join. And unless you take really good care of them, they make the best earnings with you and you give them perks and go treatment, they're just going to leave. So really, this localization is key. Yeah. And looking after drivers, I mean, obviously, the whole gig economy thing has become a big issue of these workers that they self-employed. Where do you stand on that debate? Well, overall, it's clear that drivers want flexibility. When we look at an average driver we have on the platform and we have about 500,000 of them, then they work typically about 15 hours a week. So they don't actually want to be classified as employees and therefore have exclusivity that they would need to only drive with us and they would have set fixed schedules and so on. But they actually value that they can use multiple platforms and drive whenever they want to. So we're very much supporting that kind of independence. OK, so very definitely self-employed. But what kind of perks then do you give them to convince them to stay with you and drive more for you than, say, Uber? So we've got to be honest. The main things drivers care about is their earnings. So you can do all kinds of cool stuff around it, but at the end of the day, what they care about is how much they pocket at the end of the month. So that's what we're primarily focused on. But on top of that, we see that there's other ways how we can help them. So giving them fuel discounts, for example, making it easier for them to get the car or get the phone or whatever is needed in that local market. So all around really making sure the drivers have the best experience with us. Yeah. But does it really come to you said it comes down to the earnings in the end? So I think you sort of undercut some of the other. I mean, in terms of the percentage of drivers' earnings that you take, that is consistently lower than most of your competition. Exactly. So in some cases, we even take about half the level that our competition does. And why that's even possible is because from the start, we've been a very lean company. We started with just a couple of thousand euros from my parents. We, for the first couple of years, had just a team of 10 to 20 people. So we've always been used to being very lean, being in a high competition state, automating as much as we can. And that has been a very different approach to everybody else in the industry who have been raising billions for years. And now, actually, when we look at what's the state today, then that benefit of us going through those hard times is actually a big advantage for us. So we're able to undercut them, and there's not much they can actually do about it. Yeah, so you were charging sort of about 15% and others would charge about 30. So that's what it comes down to. That makes a massive difference for the driver. I mean, at the end of the day, we see the nice thing is that actually, especially in Europe, customers are increasingly valuing that as well. So if they see that the driver makes a good income, you have more drivers on the platform and they're actually happy, then increasingly, more and more consumers are realizing that it makes sense to use that platform and rather not use the one where drivers are increasingly protesting. But okay, so you say you started lean. This was kind of your, but are you gonna be able to stay lean? I mean, you've raised a lot of money recently. Is there now not a temptation to kind of go crazy, spend that very quickly? How are you gonna keep to your style of management? So we're overall about 700 people now as a company. So it seems huge compared to what we were even just two years ago. But when we actually look at the scale of the business, we're doing about the billion dollars worth of rides on the platform. And given that we're doing such big volume, then actually the head count is quite small. So when we compare to our, let's say, US friends, for example, I mean, they're multiple times bigger in their head count relative to the business size. So we're still able to keep up that lean operation, localize and at the end of the day, that results in a better platform for drivers and drivers as well. And what's it been like with the new investors on board? I mean, you've raised, most famously, Diddy Chuching has invested. Obviously they're kind of known as the Uber killer because they invest in companies that are going head to head with Uber. And by the way, they quite often win. So it's probably a good investor to have in your portfolio. So far, not the single loss. Yeah. But I'm just wondering, does it change anything? I mean, do they require you to do things differently? Does that, has that kind of impacted on you on a practical level? No, actually, from day one, we've been very clear with investors that we actually value the independence. So whether we look at Diddy who invested a few years ago or now Daimler this year, there are big strategic investors with a strategic goal in mind, but they see that actually the best odds for us to win are if we stay local, we stay independent. And actually the management team has full freedom in what they do and where they expand to. So they don't put any pressure on you to do things differently? Nothing. So it's fully up to us to where do we go and how we operate. Yeah. And tell me another thing about scaling so fast. I mean, this is a kind of thing that it's a common problem for founders. Nice problem to have if you have a lot of money and you're able to hire people quickly, but how do you manage to scale so fast? And is hiring one of your most crucial problems that your daily headache, as it were? Sure, I think that's the same problem for most European companies that start to scale. Just two years ago, we were under 100 people. Now, two years later, we're 700. So you can imagine it's not that easy to find 600 great people, especially if you're hiring them in mainly in talent. I mean, we don't have a massive talent pool there and not many big tech companies before us. So I think it really boils down to, in most cases, to having a great recruitment team. And in our case, we made a really great focus just to, we decided we're going to focus on recruitment when we were about 30 people. And now we have, I believe, one of the best recruitment teams in Europe. So we have about five people in the recruitment team and we're bringing in 30, 40 new people a month. Yeah, so these five people are working extremely hard. Is there a secret? Because when we were talking backstage just a moment ago, you were saying software developers are still a nightmare to hire. Is there any secret? Where do you find them? Do you have relationships with universities? Or what do you do? I think that you just got to do everything nowadays to get the engineers. Not the single company has an easy time hiring them. So you just got to do whatever it takes. Yeah, and the salaries, are they creeping upwards in terms of what you have to offer people? Sure, I think with the global world, you have global competition for talent as well. So the salary levels are not very different whether you look at Ukraine, Estonia, or London now. So there's some differences, but it's a lot less than it was five years ago. So tell me a little bit about other plans. I mean, one of the big focuses that you've had is pushing into African cities. And this is an area that a lot of European startups have been kind of brave enough to go into. How are you finding that? You're in places like Nairobi and Lagos, which seem quite challenging in terms of understanding the local regulatory environment and also the traffic. Sure, so overall, we're already the biggest European ride hailing platform. And again, we're in 30 countries. We've been doing that for five years. We have millions of passengers using us every week. But it's very clear that ride hailing is not going to be the one solution that's going to solve all transportation problems because it just doesn't make sense to move a person a couple of kilometers using a two-ton vehicle. So what we already started doing earlier this year in Africa was to invest in motorcycle taxis. So in most of the cases, the passenger is anyway traveling alone. So instead of us sending a big car to pick them up, we actually see most people would rather prefer a motorcycle, which you can move a lot faster in. It's much more economical. And we saw massive success with that already this year. And that increasingly led us to think that we should try something like that in Europe. So when we finally saw that there's a great vehicle type of electric scooters coming, which we're actually waiting for for a long time, then we were one of the first ones to get into that and actually the first ride hailing company globally, which even launched scooters on the same platform. So increasingly, you can now get the scooters and cars in European cities from us. And where are the scooters live now? I know there's a big trial or pilot or actually it's maybe even running normally in Paris. Where else can we ride these scooters? Sure, so we started in Paris a couple of months ago. It's going really, really well, even better than what we expected. And now we're just in the final preparations to roll out in other European cities where we operate as well. Unfortunately, when you look outside, the weather isn't the best. So we're probably going to wait a couple more months before you can see them in most cities. So maybe in the spring? Yeah. So what have you learned from the Paris experience? I mean, are you going to be able to do this better than companies like Bird and Lime who've run into trouble again? Sure, we're actually very confident in our ability to scale this faster than others for a couple of reasons. So one is that overall, we already have millions of people who already use us every day to get to wherever they want to go. And having the same app to offer you multiple choices of transport is a lot easier. So we see that about 40% of all our scooter rides are done by our existing ride-hailing customers. So we don't need to waste any funds or resources on acquiring new customers, but we can actually just launch more products to the users we already have. And another big advantage is that we have data from millions of rides. So we actually know where to place the scooters in a more optimal way than anybody else. So increasingly, we see that from a customer point of view, it's great to have one app to solve all your transport problems. And of course, we can't forget the cities. So European regulators are very strict on what kind of transportation they allow in cities. And thus being the leading European ride-hailing player, we already have been working with them for years. So we see they're actually very much favorable to us to operate the scooter service as well. And we have a good track record of doing whatever the city needs us to do. But European regulators are very different. Different cities have taken very different approaches to scooters. So they're not allowed in London. On the other hand, in Paris, people have been the city authorities have embraced this. How do you negotiate that? How do you convince the city that the scooters will be a good idea? Well, the good thing is that we don't need to do it much. Most cities are actually very welcoming to micro-mobility. They all realize that having more and more cars on the streets is just going to make life worse for everybody. More traffic, more congestion. It's just not going to get people to where they need to go fast enough. So they're very welcoming of bike-sharing programs and score-sharing as long as it's regulated in a decent way. And you don't have them just lying on the streets and they're not safe. So as long as you operate within those frames, they're very welcoming. So those are the two problems that regulators want you to meet. They don't want to have all these scooters piling up somewhere as a becoming kind of problem waste. And then secondly is the safety. Exactly. So mainly on the parking side, there's a lot of things we can do to essentially convince customers what they're the best places where to leave a scooter. And on the other hand, safety is a function of many things, but one of those is the vehicles themselves. Another one is making sure everybody actually is above a certain age limit if that's required and so on. Does it actually require quite a lot of policing, though? I mean, just to meet those safety standards. I'm wondering whether that's this kind of expense that companies need to think about. You need to have someone who's verifying, say, age. It's not a trivial thing to do. Sure. So there's definitely a lot you need to invest in safety to make sure that it works well. But given that we've already been operating with hundreds of thousands of drivers, hundreds of millions of rides, then we're pretty confident we can manage that on the scooter side as well. So it's now just a matter of scaling from one city to multiple. So what about London? Are you able to say anything? And I think this is one that you've had your sights on. But it's a very tough negotiation. And transport for London is taking the issue very seriously and scrutinizing everything to the nth degree. I'm just wondering whether you can give me some insight on how you deal with a regulator that's decided to take such a tough approach. Sure. So actually, we've seen this in many European cities that have taken a very defensive position on everything related to ride-hailing, setting up more and more rules for the operators. And in some ways, I completely get it. And then we're working with all of them to comply. But I think increasingly, this is a problem for competition. Because the higher are the barriers to entry, the harder it is for new operators to enter the market. And still, in many European cities, there's a monopoly. You all know who it is. And they don't have any competition. So we see that oftentimes regulators, by actually trying to make things better, are actually making it very hard for a new competition to come up. Is that kind of the argument that you use with them, that they really need to be thinking about the competition element and the local champion? That's kind of how you would position yourself as being the local player? No, exactly. I mean, we are the local players. So in many ways, we're just trying to explain to them that a lot of the problems that you're trying to regulate would actually be solved if you just allowed more competition to enter. So for example, when you look at how drivers are treated, if you only have a monopoly in a city, of course, they're going to push their pricing power and drivers in many of these cities make below minimum wage. But how do you actually solve it? Like, are you going to start increasingly regulating the operators? Or maybe it would make more sense to allow some competition there. And actually, that would force up the driver income because actually, platforms will start to compete for them. And that's what we've already done in dozens of cities. So it's very easy for us to show that just let us in and then we'll make the city a bit better. And then, as I understand it, the experience in Africa has been almost the opposite in the sense that in Europe, you have a lot of regulation, a lot of suspicion about whether these will be safe enough. Whereas when you've gone into Africa, there is often really no regulation in, say, the motorcycle taxi business. That's been a sort of black market. And you've come in to actually try to create some safety regulation around it. Exactly. So in that sense, you don't have the regulatory problems, but then you have different problems. And especially safety is the main one of those. So what we have done in South Africa is that because the police is so unreliable, you might call them and it takes them 30 minutes or more to show up. Then just people are very increasingly worried about safety. So what we need to do is partner with local private security, for example, and use that as an alternative. So this is just one of the examples of what we need to do, or having SOS buttons in the applications for both drivers and riders. So it's a very different market with different problems to solve. So what do these private security guards do? This is if you have a problem, if you've kind of been... So if you're a driver and somebody starts to steal your car, then you can actually press a button and armed security will show up a bit quicker than police would. OK. And so that's another benefit for the drivers, I guess, to know that they have this kind of support network. Exactly. So it's just one of these examples of localization. So you can't expect to solve all problems sitting in Silicon Valley. So what are your future plans? You're now in 60 cities, but you're planning to scale to how many eventually? I mean, what do you have planned for the next few years? So actually, in terms of countries, we don't plan to have too many. Now we're looking forward in the next one or two years. We're already in 30, and that might grow to 35 or up to 40. But it's more about getting to more cities. So in the next year, we're planning to open up close to 100 cities. And those are all coming from the countries we're already in. So just in Poland, we plan to take, for example, about 25 cities and so on. So increasingly bringing these mobility solutions to more and more cities that are smaller as well. And when you go into a city where you go in with the ride hailing and the scooters as a rule, or will it be very different? So these are two very different products from many perspectives. Just when you look at the weather, for example, scooters are probably not the best to use in Helsinki, six months of the year. But ride hailing, on the other hand, is great to all year around. And you need to keep in mind what's the local transportation infrastructure and so on. So overall, ride hailing, we see, is a bit more universal. And scooters is more limited. And what's your kind of vision for how urban transport in the future, will it really be that we will, car ownership, will disappear entirely in due course? So that's one of the reasons Daimler invested in us as well. So being one of the leading OEMs in the world, they are very much afraid that in 10 years, people will buy a lot less cars than they do now. And they see us already being the leading European player in this future of transportation. They want to be a part of that. But we've got to be honest, this is not going to happen very quickly. Autonomous cars are seriously overhyped. And looking at the next couple of years, they're not going to have any massive impact yet. So we just can't wait and believe that those problems are going to be solved in a few years. But we need to find solutions. How do we solve those problems today? And scooters is one of the examples that they're already here. You can literally just start to operate them in a week or two in a city. So we just can't wait five years before autonomy gets here. Well, I think we're out of time. So thank you, Marcus, for sharing your future vision. And congratulations on all the fundraising. And we'll look forward to seeing what Taxify gets up to next. Will you have to change the name once you're focusing more on scooters rather than taxes? So we actually launched scooters under a new brand of Bolt. And increasingly, we see that as these are very different businesses, we also need to brand them differently so people would get what are they actually going for. Yeah. OK, so maybe a whole bunch of sub-brands then. So increasingly, as we move from just moving people in cars to covering all sorts of urban mobility, then we need to keep that in mind. Yeah, sounds great. We'll look forward to seeing more. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.