 Hopp everyone is having a wonderful time at day two for slush. I had a really nice time last night at the dinners and the parties. I hope you guys did too. Not too much fun though. So that you still have some energy to listen to this talk with me today. So my name is Karo. I am the head of marketing at Europe's leading micromobility company, Voj Technology. You can find our electric scooters and e-bikes across 70 cities in Europe. We are Swedish company, but we do feel a bit Finnish. We've been here now since 2019. The Finnish people have taken over 7 million rides with our e-scooters. And only last year to this year, we grew with over 800% in the Finnish market. So it's actually one of our best performing ones. That's why it's extra fun for me to be here today in Helsinki to present to you guys. Did anyone ride an e-scooter to the conference today? Yeah, someone in the back. Good for you. Hope you parked it correctly outside. Nice. So for me, I remember the first time that I saw an e-scooter. It was back in 2018. My brother had bought one. One of those like crappy Xiaomi's, the first generation of e-scooters. And brought it to my apartment in Stockholm. I thought they looked a little bit ridiculous to be honest. But I was also super intrigued to try it. I tried it. I felt like the breeze and the wind in my hair when riding it. It felt awesome. And since then, I ride an e-scooter almost every day. It's because they're convenient and it's because it's fun to ride. But mostly I like e-scooters because to me they symbolize something bigger. To me they symbolize the start and the catalyst of the green revolution when it comes to transportation. And what do I mean with green revolution? Essentially saying goodbye to cars as we know them. And saying hello to cities that are actually made for us, the people that live there. With less space for cars, more space for green and convenient means of transport. And that's what we're trying to do with Voj. We want to create cities that are made for living with less noise, with less pollution, with less congestion. We want to have cities with highly integrated top-notch public transportation systems in combination with micro mobility hubs. Where you can choose whatever means of transport that you like or that you want. So since, you know, what we're doing, having that opportunity to take public transportation in combination with micro mobility is what's going to help you to experience the city on your terms. And you're going to be able to have micro mobility at your fingertips. We're also challenging the model where about half of the space of the city centers is dedicated to cars. Cars that take up almost half of the space, spitting out poisonous gas when you use them. And also standing still about 95% of the time. But micro mobility is also about democratizing mobility. Because when you use a shared service, you don't have to buy your own vehicles any longer. But at the same time, you get to experience and get access to the latest and greatest when it comes to technology. Since we launched in 2018 in Stockholm, we started with 16 e-scooters. Now, three years later, our riders have done over 90 million rides. And that requires a lot of growth. And that's something that I love doing, and that's also what I'm here to talk about. Building teams with brilliant minds to help people reclaim their right to mobility. And what do I mean with reclaiming the right to mobility? Well, essentially, everyone has a free choice to choose how they get around the city. But in order to be able to do that, you need to have those choices made available. And I heard a really nice story the other day. It's about a lady named Kath. She lives in Portsmouth, which is one of the cities where Voj operates. She told one of our operations managers there that she actually sold her car. And she replaced her car journeys with combination trips of e-scooters, Voj e-scooters and public transportation. And that's what it's all about. That's what I love doing, and that's why I'm here today. But I'm mostly here to talk about what a growth team is. How to build one, when to start building one, and how to go about it. So I hope you guys want to join me on this journey. Growth teams are usually tasked with acquiring new users, with building retention, monetization, anti-shern, etc. And they distribute through either optimizing product or finding new marketing channels. For Voj, growth used to be just adding one more scooter out in the street. So, you know, growth equals 10 more scooters in Helsinki, or it could also be launching a new city. And for some of you who are running startups here in the audience, it might mean adding one more client to your customer list, adding one more interesting product line to your verticals. And I think that way of doing growth is fine when you're a startup. But we quickly realized that if we want to create a micro mobility and a green revolution, we needed to think about growth in a smarter way. So we looked into our organization, and essentially, since we're a hyper growth startup, everyone is working with growth in some way, right? But we looked into our organization, we took the people that were working with growth the most, and we went from having a functional type organization to building cross functional teams. So we went from functional organization to a business unit setup. And I'm here to talk to you specifically about how we set up the growth business unit, which is the business unit I've been leading for the last year. And, you know, before we had the business unit, and we had like the functional setup, we had marketing working on growth on their end, we had engineering working on growth on their end, product working with growth on their end. And, you know, to be completely frank and honest with you, the communication between those teams didn't really work. And I think that's probably similar in a lot of organizations. So what I can really recommend is start looking into cross functional teams early on. And I think the benefit, really, of having these types of cross functional business units is that you can become more flexible, you can make faster decisions and get higher quality output faster. And that's imperative when you're a startup that wants to create a green revolution. But every growth team also needs a mission. And it shouldn't just be, you know, grow the business. At Voi, the growth team's job is to get people on a scooter, make them go through the onboarding, make them add their payment method and go for a first ride. Then our job is to make them come back again and again. But it's also a bit more than that because we want to make sure that our users also make the connection between their transportation habits and creating a better world. Whether it means micro mobility or public transport or the combination of the two, we want to make sure that they know that by getting to where they want in a safe, independent and, you know, convenient way, they are empowered to leave their car behind. Perhaps even forever like CAF. And that is really the key to the green revolution. And behind me here, you're actually seeing a rendering that we've created of a street here in Helsinki. And please excuse my pronunciation now. It's korkeavare, vuren, kattu, I think. Where we have reimagined and showcased what the street would look like if there was less space for a car and more space for a better infrastructure for micro mobility. Yes, a little bit bumpy on these cobblestones. But I think what we really want to showcase here is, you know, what the city could look like with more space for people and less space for cars. I know for sure that I wouldn't say no to cities that looked more like this. But back to helping our users make the connection between their transportation choices and a smart sustainable world. So to help our users make that connection, us in the growth business units covers all parts of the customer journey. Everything from like top of the funnel awareness to acquisition, onboarding, retention, monetization and anti-sharn. That allows us to talk to the users and communicate to the users throughout the full customer life cycle. And that is, I think, the key if you want to make them understand that by every choice they make they are being a part of the green revolution. And in the team then, we have a lot of different people. We have brand, we have CRM, performance marketing, we have engineering, we have product, we have analysts. So it's quite a big mix and it's really like running a mini startup and having that startup mentality can really help. And before we had a growth team, like everyone in the company had a growth mindset, I would say, like they still do, but we decided to gather the people that were working mostly with growth in the one cross-functional team. But we have grown a lot. So we've gone from 1,000 people, oh no, no, no, we've gone from one person to 1,000 people at Voi in the last three years. And that is also in the midst of a bloody pandemic, so growth has been really fast for us to say the least. But from day one, we've known that we wanted to build something huge and everyone that's been brought on to Voi has been brought on with that in mind. We're going to win it, which means that working nine to five, it's not going to cut it if you want to work at Voi and it's not what you should expect if you want to work at Voi. The people that do work in our company, like, we like to work hard because we know that we're doing something that's going to change the world forever. With that said, though, like growth shouldn't come at the expense of people's personal health, so as a manager, like it's super important to also make sure, of course, that in a hyper growth startup, you encourage your team to take the proper time off so that they can rest, come back refreshed and really kill it with lots of energy. So we expect a lot for the people that work at Voi to say the least, but something that we decided to do is also to in return make all of our employees shareholders so that we can reap the benefits of our success together, and that I think is also imperative. So talking a little bit about hiring, I think many of you can probably recognize the struggle that is hiring for a tech company today. There's so much competition out there, so I am based in Stockholm where we have the tech giants of Spotify, King, Klara, and those companies like they do attract a lot of good tech talent. However, those tech giants also have probably nicer offices, better benefits. They probably will pay your engineers a better salary, and most likely they have like a barista or whatever to see to the engineers and the marketers every coffee need. And you have to compete with that, and when you're a scrappy startup like Voi, it can be really tough. But our pitch and what we try to sell to people that come to Voi is that at Voi you will, if you join now, still be a big part of something fairly small. When you join one of the tech giants, you will be most likely a pretty small piece of something big, and that's what got me leaving Spotify for Voi. And I think it all goes back to the growth mindset. When we're hiring someone, we want to make sure that they are ready for the ride that is Voi, and I usually think about it as, you know, we're playing Champions League. This is my once in a lifetime playing the Champions League final. And when playing a Champions League final, you need to have Champions League players on your team. But what is also important to think about is, you know, you can't hire eleven Slatan Ibrahimovic. Like Slatan is amazing, we all love him, he's the best. But you can't have a team of eleven strikers. It's crucial that you hire people with different backgrounds, different experiences, but that still are like the best of what they do within their field. That's at least the way I think about it. But being the best to me doesn't necessarily mean that you have the most experience that you come from a certain university or that you have a certain degree. What I look for in people that I hire for my team is grit. You need to be ready to get your hands dirty and you need to be able to like work really hard. I also look for the right attitude. So again willingness to like get shit done. And last but not least, I look for people that are passionate about what we're doing. I look for people that want to join me on the journey to build the green revolution. And I also look for people that are smarter than myself. I ordered no other things than I do at work. I almost always feel like the stupidest person in the room, which I think is a great feeling because that means that I've hired people that know more than myself or that know other things than myself, which means that I can learn every day. It means that my team will challenge me and it also means that they will get, they will run their positions in our Champions League team and we will all get closer to winning the game. And I think if you have the above, it almost always ends up being a good hire. Another thing that I think all leaders need to think about is hiring an inclusive and diverse team. And I think this can be tricky, especially if you're in like IT or tech. It can be a bit hard. In our growth team, because we have so many different functions like we have UX designers, engineers mixed with marketers. It's kind of ended up being a quite good mix automatically. And what I really like about that is when everyone has a different perspective, you can always question each other and challenge one another. And in the end, our customer base is super diverse. And the more we represent them within our team, the better the product we're going to be able to make for them. And having diverse teams also means making better decisions and better decisions means more money for us in the end. So meet my growth team. We are a pretty diverse team. Over the past three years, we've gone from being a one woman show to now being a team of approximately 50 people. We have our HQ and Stockholm where most of our tech and data and like the scalable parts of the business it, but then we also have growth marketing managers out in our markets. We have engineers, product owners, product managers. We have a CRM team. We have a performance marketing team. We have product marketing, copywriters, UX designers, brand designers, analysts. It's a lot of different people and very different people and very diverse people. And this is key. One thing I also get asked about quite a lot is how to build a growth team and like what an inclusive team and a like integrated team and bringing people together in a post pandemic world and how to work with those types of teams. And as I mentioned, we have a central growth team in Stockholm, as well as local markets, focusing on growth. In the central team, we build the scalable parts of the business. So we build marketing automation. We build our dashboards, we build our product and we work with optimizing the scalable parts of the business, building tools, assets and such that the local markets can use. But it's been super important to us to still keep the local teams to gather local insights and be able to act quickly upon market dynamics that might change pretty fast when you're in a hyper growth startup like ours. And I think this also goes back to my previous point of having a diverse team by having people with local expertise and responsiveness. It means that we can like tailor make hyper local strategies for every market and this is really crucial for us. But boys growth team is mainly focused on our riders and grow our rider base, but we also have another type of customer at boy, which is a really important one. Can anyone guess what it is? It's the cities and the cities are in the end. The ones that are gonna give us the license to operate. So it's crucial for us in growth, even though the rider is our main customer to also have the cities in mind when we set out our strategies. I think, you know, it's pretty safe to say that changes needed when it comes to transport. Transport in Europe today stands for 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions. We at boy with our e-bikes and e-scooters are providing a carbon neutral forms of transport to replace these car trips. We've pledged that by 2030, so in nine eight years, we will be replacing one billion car trips with a more sustainable means of transport. We believe that we can do this because there's an incredible demand for service. It took us seven months to hit our first million rides. Now we're averaging approximately two million rides a week. But we also understand that our service isn't perfect and there's a lot of pain points that comes with, you know, implementing these new types of transportation networks into cities. You know, we have everything from bad parking to cluttering to inexperienced riders maybe behaving in a bad way out in the streets. And this is attention that we need to balance when we think about our growth strategies and find skillable solutions to solve them. And that's what we're doing constantly and we try to use tech to solve these issues. One example of this is, you know, that's maybe not so much for rider growth with implemented slow speed zones in the cities where we operate in pedestrian areas, for example, where you can only ride at seven kilometers per hour when you're on an e-scooter. This is something that our users hate because then you're like going super slow and everyone walking past you walks faster than you're going on the e-scooter, but it's something that the cities really want and it's something that's also going to make it better for the people that, you know, in the end don't want to ride an e-scooter when they're walking in the pedestrian areas. So we've been able to implement this and we were able to build this type of feature within the first year of launching boy. And just to give you some comparison, that's something that the car industry has not been able to do in over 100, which I think is pretty shameful to be honest, but for us, it's been something that has allowed us to grow because it has provided us with license to operate in cities where this is something that the cities are requesting. So as a growth team, we need to be aware of these challenges when we build our product in order to both provide good solutions for the city but also for the rider. So something that I wish that I'd known before starting a growth team and I would say probably my best tips start early on with looking at who in your company are kind of, you know, working with growth. Are they working in the same team? Are they working in different teams? If they're working in different teams and in different silos, remove those silos and bring those people together instead to create one cross functional exciting dynamic team that can take your startup to scale up and beyond. Find the people with the real passion to make it happen. Find the people that are passionate about your product. A growth mindset isn't something that you learn at university. It's something that you either have or you don't and find those people because quite often it ends up being them who actually make a difference. Make it a diverse team. It helps print group think it will help you make better decisions. It will help you make more money. And then last but not least read a lot. Anything not business books or if you like business books, read business books. I hate business books. I love fantasy and science fiction. So I read a lot of that, but it doesn't really matter what you read. Just read anything that's going to help you broaden the way you think the way you solve problems and help you get a broader context. And last but not least and what I wanted to end with today is what's next for the boy growth team. So you know, despite of the challenges of the global pandemic 2021 has actually been a really, really good year for boy. E-skruthers and e-bikes have provided a socially distant way of commuting when a lot of people have not been able or not wanted to travel with public transport. And I would also say that with a renewed focus on climate change people want to make more sustainable choices and we are providing a service to help them make those choices for the next year. Growth will be a huge opportunity for us from a city and a rider perspective. As you've heard today, we have a lot of different customers, the riders, the cities, the politicians, city officials and for us and growth in growth. It's going to be about finding the right efforts to facilitate for all of the above in the city. It's going to be a big challenge. But it's one that we're really excited to get into. Thank you so much.