 Thank you very much, and it's a real pleasure to be with you here at Slush today. This is my fourth Slush actually, so I'm very happy to be able to be back here in person. And I'm excited to share with you today some of our learnings that relate to international expansion. And when we're talking about international expansion, I'll be referring to both expansion across countries in Europe, but also referring to expansion from Europe to the US. I'll just start off by introducing index briefly. So index, we're a venture capital firm that was founded in Europe 25 years ago, and today we are duly headquartered between London and San Francisco, so half the team is based in the US and half the team is based here in Europe. And we're investing across three funds, from seed, venture to growth. So essentially partnering with founders anywhere from first check into the company all the way up until pre-IPO. And we've been really fortunate to be investors in many Nordic companies, including, for example, Supercell coming here out of Finland. At index, we have also been fortunate to work with many companies that have expanded across Europe and more than 40 companies that have expanded successfully from Europe to the US, and nine of which have since gone on to become publicly listed companies. And by partnering with companies and really following their journey from the planning of expansion to then the launching and ultimately the scale-up phase of the expansion, we've come to realize some of the opportunities that expansion presents, but also become mindful of some of the potential pitfalls that exist when thinking through structuring your expansion. And so I'm excited to chat through some of this with you here today. As I mentioned, index, we are duly headquartered between London and San Francisco. And as a reflection of this, roughly half of our investments are also between Europe and the US. And so just a snapshot of some of our existing portfolio and some of our previous portfolio that is split roughly 50-50. And many of the learnings that I'll talk to you about today have really come from our experiences with working with some of these companies, among many others. So let's dive in. As you start thinking about international expansion, what are the key factors that ultimately are shaping your decisions when it comes to international expansion? So there are six factors that we have identified as critical before actually launching. The first one is market size. How big is the opportunity in dollar terms? And and this will be important and we'll touch on this later as it will also help feed into a lot of the decision-making around at what point should we go to that new market? Or which member of the team should be first on the ground in that new market as we're opening it up? Should it be the CEO, the founder? Should it be a local GM that we hire? These are all critical considerations early on. The second one is localization. So by that, I mean, do you need extensive product or go-to-market localization, for example? We'll touch on this. Does it require particular regulatory requirements on the product side? Or will go-to-market require inside or field sales? And how do we structure it accordingly? The third factor is competitors. How strong is the competitive dynamic in the new market that you're going into? And depending on what the competitive environment looks like, that might have different repercussions for how to think about product differentiation, bigger budgets, how to think about whether there are any lab-grab decisions to be made, for example. So these are all things to have top of mind before going. The fourth one is familiarity. How well do you actually know the market? Do we already have early inbound leads in the market? Do we already have customers there? Fifth one is regulation. And it's particularly important for some sectors, such as healthcare, for example. And it differs quite a lot by countries. Do you require certain licenses to operate there? How difficult would it be to acquire those? And how does that impact the timing of the expansion? Lastly, as an initial factor to consider is capital. Do you have sufficient human capital, but also financial capital to be able to pursue the expansion? And what does it actually take to be able to tackle all the requirements as you're expanding? At Index, when companies are thinking about expansion, we often get asked, you know, what are some of the common challenges that companies have come across as they're thinking about expansion? Because expansion can be presenting a wealth of opportunities and there's new market to go after, but there are also some challenges that we think it could be helpful to just be mindful of beforehand. And so I'll walk through some of this and we'll touch on this a bit more in the presentation, too. The first one is hiring. When you're not familiar with the new market, it can be difficult to figure out which are the right talent pools to tap into. How should we think about hiring local leadership for this new market? The second one is culture. And this one is interesting, I think, because it really spans across any sector and is relevant to any organization. How do we keep culture aligned between offices, particularly when maybe there are key time zone differences between the different offices? How do we keep that aligned and also alive between the two? The third one is brand. And this is interesting because you can have a really powerful brand or a brand name in your home market. But then you have to also think through how does this brand resonate in another market? Will we have the same cut through effect in a new market with this brand? Will we potentially have to have a different name in another market? How do we think about that? It's important to consider because in some instances you might want to have the look and feel of a local product. Acquisitions. This can be interesting and sometimes when expansions happen through acquisitions, is there a cultural misfit through the acquisition? Things to be mindful of. Timing. It's a key one and we'll chat about this quite a bit. At what point does it make sense to do so in the scale-up phase of a company? Is it happening too slowly or too quickly? And what's the impact on the organization as a whole? Lastly, as a common challenge, I want to touch on the matrix organization. And by matrix organization I mean what should be a central versus a local factor to consider? Should marketing budget come from the central or should it come from the local office? What should actually be central? What should be local? And who do those that are working in local offices ultimately report to? Do they report locally? Do they report centrally? These are all matrix questions that come up and it's important to be mindful of as a potential challenge but certainly one that is overcomable. Touching a little bit about timing. So I guess we can simplify it into four different sequences of international expansion and number two and number three is what we see most often and I'll spend more time on these two. The first one is global from day one. And this is usually applicable to companies that have a lot of self-serve distribution or distributions through the app store like gaming companies, for example. The second one is companies that start off with European expansion and then might go on after that to also do say US expansion or a rest of world expansion. And a few companies in our portfolio as examples of that are Deliveroo or Livy who have started off by doing European expansion and focused on that and then some afterwards have also gone on to do other expansion such as Revolute going to the US. As a third there's US expansion that happens quite immediately from the get go and we'll talk soon about why that is because it comes down to this market opportunity that we touched on as an early consideration. And then the first focus is US expansion and then sequentially might come back to do more European wide rollout. The last one is around expansion to China or to Asia and it's something that we don't see as frequently particularly not in the early stages of scale up for a lot of European tech companies. So I'll focus a bit more on number two and number three here. So when thinking about European expansion, the main thing that comes up that we chat to companies about and often get asked about is just what are the factors that are central versus local that we should consider? And on the right here just identified the difference between some companies that are in the index portfolio of just how differently it can be structured even though they've all done European expansion of some sort. Some that are highly localized models like Livy or Allen. They're operating in the insurance or in the healthcare spaces where there's a lot of different local regulation requiring just local teams to be present on the ground. A lot of local decision making needs to be made. But then on the other hand, you also have companies that are perhaps more centralized in their structure and are able to be set up in that way just by the nature of the business model or the product that they're selling. And so these can really be structured differently. And when we're thinking about factors to consider on the product side, this can be a marketplace model. What are the supply or demand side considerations for this particular product? Are there any operational constraints in this market that we're going into? And so as a result might need to be much more of a local decision making. On the go-to-market localization, a lot of questions can be what kind of sales structure should we have? Inside sales, field sales, what are the target segments that we need to be focused on? Is the sales cycle or the process different in this market just by the nature of how things work here? What does marketing or growth need to look like given the competitive environment that we're seeing in this local market versus where our home market is? And how do we need to think about customer support in that context? I also want to touch a bit on just cultural fit and accessibility. As we're thinking about which countries to go into, how should we think about the travel time to the target country and just the simple accessibility? And also just something like cultural similarities and differences between the target country and the home country. And how does that, if at all impact hiring decisions? How does it impact just how operations are run more broadly? So these are questions that we often chat with founders about when thinking about sequencing European expansion and making decisions around how to structure those decisions and those organizations throughout that journey. I want to spend a bit of time on expanding to the U.S. So in September of last year, we released a handbook which is based on research of over 300 companies that have successfully expanded from Europe to the U.S. And this included surveys, a lot of deep dive interviews and case studies with companies. And we really compiled a handbook which is available freely on our web page for companies to really help think through how based on the type of company that I am running as a founder should I best think about setting up my organization in the U.S. And at what time in my journey should I be doing so? And I'll be touching a little bit about this. And I think the reason why it's now more important than ever is because Europe is creating more and more U.S. winners. And it's not short of successful examples of companies that have expanded from Europe to the U.S. And if anything I think this slide is just so telling of the momentum that Europe has now in that thinking about the pre-2010s, there were really just a handful of European tech companies that have been successful with expansion to the U.S. But when we're thinking about the last few years, there's been quite a meaningful increase in the number of companies that have gone on to also be successful in the U.S. such as Spotify, Unity, both Nordic companies or ADIEN, Supercell of course and among many others. And of course there are several that haven't even exited yet and so they're still on their journey. So now there's never arguably been a better time to be a European founder because there's such an opportunity to not only scale in Europe but then also to go on and scale in the U.S. And what our research has led us to be able to identify is that companies can really be archetyped into four different categories and four different organizational templates if you will. And I'll walk through what each of these means and it can be a helpful guideline for how to think about how should we expand to the U.S. and when should we do so. And the four archetypes that we've identified are telescope, compass, pendulum and anchor. So what does this mean when you're discovering your archetype? By telescope we've defined this as companies that have a focus on the U.S. and this is a global lens in Europe. So these are usually companies that I mentioned earlier that might have self-serve distribution channels or are available on the App Store for global distribution from the get-go such as gaming companies like King but also other companies that are self-serve like type form pipe drive. These would categorize as telescope. The second one is compass. What we mean by compass is in Europe, but they're sold in the US. And so going back to that initial consideration that I mentioned early on about factoring in market size early on, in the instance of Compass, it's usually that the US market represents north of 50% of the total addressable market. And so organization and leadership will quite early on pivot to the US. That's where the majority of the opportunity is. In Europe, that have been classified as Compasses might be Calibra or UiPath or Algolia, for example. The third one is pendulum. And what we mean by that is companies that are distributed and they have distributed customers, distributed organization. The US market is roughly 30 to 50% of the overall opportunity. And organization ultimately becomes quite distributed between the two. And an example of that might be Spotify. The last one is Anchor. And it's really tethered like an anchor in Europe. So the center of gravity remains in Europe. And the organization and the leadership team remains in Europe. But there might be local leadership teams that are in the US. And the US TAM is roughly, say, 15 to 30% of the overall opportunity. And examples of that might be Wise or Farfetch. And what's interesting is the typical timing for US expansion will usually differ depending on archetype. And it really comes down to, again, a lot of the market opportunity that each of these might have. If you're thinking about a Compass where the majority, nor the 50% of the market opportunity in the US, it makes sense to go there quite early. So companies that we've classified as Compasses will go there, perhaps already at Series A. Companies like Telescope or Pendulum, it might be more at the Series B stage. And then lastly, in Anchor, what we've tended to see as the majority of the opportunity is anchored in Europe. And there's a 15 to 30% opportunity in the US. It might be closer to Series C. I'll just switch back here. And before diving into where in the US we should think about, I also just want to highlight a little bit which member of the team might be part of the early expansion journey to the US. And what we've typically seen is that, for example, for a Compass where it happens early on, usually the founder moves over to the US, or at least somebody from the early leadership team in the whole market will move over to really help set up first feet on the ground in the new market and be a leader there, set up the culture and make sure that organization also becomes equally set up in the US. But what we've seen with some of the other models is that it might not be as obvious that also the founder will move early on. And what I'd recommend you all to do, as I mentioned, this resource is available for free on our webpage. You can go in and look through and figure out, based on your business model, customer segments, and the structure of your current organization, figure out which archetype would we fit into. And so how should I, in light of that, think about setting up the US organization? So please do go in and use that resource, and it's available for free with an app as well. What's interesting is that when setting up in the US, there's been some change recently about where to set up. So if we're thinking about 2008 to 2014, roughly, it was split pretty equally between New York and the Bay Area, roughly 37% each across the two, and then slightly smaller in Boston. But actually, recently, what we're seeing is that more and more companies are starting operations in New York versus the Bay Area. And of course, there are different considerations to weigh up, customer locations, the sector, the time zone difference, talent accessibility, talent pools, personal networks. All this will feed into the decision making. But it's an interesting trend we've noticed where actually it's not the default to set up in the Bay Area, but actually we're noticing more and more companies do so in New York. Again, as we chatted about, founders don't always have to move to the US. While it's essential for Compass, for some of the other archetypes, it doesn't have to be. And some it's not even necessary, whether anchor or telescope. That said, there might be other types of leaders that should be present as you're setting up your operations in the US. So if we're thinking about a pendulum, while it might not be the founder or CEO, but could be, it could also be a local GM or a president, for example. For an anchor, similarly, can be a local GM or a president. And lastly, for telescope, it's usually more functional leads. So for example, might have customer support or might have business development rather than the actual founding team or the CEO. I want to just double click a little bit about some of the common challenges that we touched on earlier, that are top of mind sometimes for founders as thinking about expansion to the US. And usually what can happen is that it can be difficult to assess and hire US candidates. And that might be for a different reason. So for example, just compensation. And this is, it's an interesting one because it's changing a lot. And we've seen a lot of change in the last few years, but even just a few years ago, compensation tended to be very different between Europe and the US in that US talent is far more focused on equity. You need to pay to play and they will do a lot of due diligence, which is getting much better in Europe and it's catching up with the US, but hasn't been on par with the US historically. And also US talent tends to be much more aware of compensation benchmarks and just the vocabulary around stock options more broadly. So these are all things to think about when thinking about compensating talent in the US. There's also just a question of perception. So I'll touch on this. I think it's an interesting quote, which as a European company going to the US, it may be that candidates are naturally a little neutral or even slightly say suspicious of your European companies. They might not have been to the city that the company has been founded in. They're less aware of it. They're perhaps less aware of their investor base. And so these are all things to just think about as you're navigating, transitioning to a completely different continent and a different market. Culture tends to be the second biggest challenge for European founders that are following your US expansion. And of course, operating across two continents makes everything harder. Time zone differences, cultural differences, different expectations from teams. And you'll need to really think through the people strategy. How do we make all hands available? How do we think about staffing? What kind of documentation do we need in order to be able to make this seamless? How do we think about engagement and onboarding? How do we set up our video conferencing just to make that transition as smooth as possible? And there's some interesting quotes here that I'll let you guys look through. But one in particular, I think is really interesting, which is just pay careful attention to how your meeting room is set up. Everything from the positioning of cameras to microphone screens and furniture and how people are sitting. All that can really impact how how closely you almost feel like you're being there in person and small sort of tactical things to think about as you're trying to make that cultural familiarity as close as possible. One thing I do want to mention is that even though for each of these archetypes, there may be different members of the team that go to the US and sometimes the founder or founders will and sometimes they won't. What has tended to be a pattern is that R&D had count remains predominantly in Europe and actually only 18 percent of startups that have expanded to the US have any developers in the US. And as you'll see, it tends to be much later on in the journey that perhaps the R&D scales up in the US. And what I think this shows is just really what an exciting time it is to be starting companies in Europe. There's such strong engineering and tech talent here. And as we've seen from having done the synthesis of over 300 companies, so many of the tech talent tends to stay in Europe. And so it's really such an exciting opportunity to be starting companies in Europe at the moment. As I mentioned, this guide on expanding to the US destination USA is available for free on our web page. It's a digital handbook. We also have our expansion plan app, which is available. And lastly, there's an online quick guide just to help you figure out which archetype does your company fit into. And as a result, at what time should we think about expansion? How should we think about the organizational setup for US expansion? And also, who of the team should be part of that initial journey? So I do encourage you all to go in and take a look and please use this freely. So with that, what I do hope that you take with you today is that Europe is such an exciting time to be a founder. We're seeing more and more European companies be successful with their US expansion or even just more broadly with their expansions across Europe and more and more strong tech talent that's really coming out of Europe. And so there's a wealth of opportunity out there to expand. And hopefully some of these learnings have just made you a little bit mindful about some of the considerations or just challenges to be on top of before you start your expansion journey to help set you up for success when doing so. Thank you.