 Hello. So we're going to start with a presentation by Renata. And then we'll have a little talk after she gives a little presentation. So welcome, Renata. Thank you, Mika. Hello. My name is Renata. It is wonderful to be back at Slush. I've been coming to this incredible conference since 2016. And I'm going to start with a little bit of a product story. I know this doesn't look like the products you're used to. But this is myself and my baby brother Ruben celebrating Norwegian National Day. I'm half Norwegian and half Dutch. And not long after this photograph was taken, we moved to the Netherlands. Our fashion taste took a toll for the more colorful, I would say. I think that's what I still under it to wear today. Ruben and I had a pretty remarkable life growing up. Our parents separated when we were two and four years old. And so we really grew up together. We moved between our parents in different countries. We lived in Norway and the Netherlands. We moved to England, but we were always together. And in fact, we didn't just learn to speak similar languages together. We also fell in love with technology together. In this photograph, you can see us making ringtones. Ruben was an engineer. I was essentially his product manager. He is a PC. I'm a Mac. We talk to each other about everything and anything. Except we can't talk to each other about anything anymore. In fact, I was in Norway this past weekend to commemorate the 10 years since he passed away in an accident. This is a story about the magic of social connection. I was incredibly lucky to have this one person in my life that I was able to share everything with. We shared the hula hoop of life together, as you can see in this photograph. We were so incredibly close. And I actually didn't realize until I learned to live without him the last 10 years how special it was to have this connection. Some of that I could fully trust. And I've become incredibly interested since that moment in what it takes to feel close to someone, what it takes to build trust. And I've realized in that time that most people don't have one single person that they can trust and not feel judged by and confide in. In the last 10 years, we've entered the most lonely decade in human history. And I have come to believe that we face two great battles in our lifetime. The first is the climate crisis. And the second is loneliness. And I think this is a problem that we're still just waking up to. Now, the irony is that in the last decade, I have actually dedicated my life to working on social connection in various forms and shapes. The reason I started coming to Slush is I spent five years at Apple building the App Store business, connecting people all across the world. I actually ran the App Store in the Nordics for a number of years. I then went to work at Headspace, which is a leading mental health and mindfulness app. And then I spent two years at Tinder, most recently as CEO, connecting people all over the world. And yet, as of the last two years, the world is lonelier than ever. In the US, four in five young people feel lonely. In Finland, the Red Cross recently published a study to say that 61% of Finns feel lonely sometimes for all of the time. So what is going on here? Well, I found that a company called Meno earlier this year, which is dedicated to helping people master the skill of social connection because the good news is social connection, feeling close to people like I did in that hula hoop, is a skill that can be learned. And our focus is on providing personalized relationship mentoring advice. Meno is a personalized relationship mentor. That means that it will help you with any kind of relationship. Yes, romantic too, but also friendship, family, work. Maybe you were here in the audience with some colleagues. I think Nico Rosberg is here at the conference. Maybe he could have used Meno to help him make better friends with Lewis Hamilton back in the day. It is private and secure, crucially. And many people have asked me, is it like the movie Hur? Is it a fake girlfriend that is going to help me not feel lonely? No, it is quite the opposite of that. I think the best comparison that I've come up with is that Meno is more like the Remy in Ratatouille, except instead of helping you make amazing soup or pancakes, it's helping you practice the skill of social connection and amazing relationships like in a flight simulator before going out to do this in the real world. As I mentioned, we're focused on 18 to 25-year-olds right now because they really need this the most. They had their social skill development interrupted by the pandemic. I've spoken to dozens of young people in the last year who spent two years on Zoom staring at pixels when they should have been out in the playground flirting, shoving people around and learning about these things. This is where we're starting, but I do think everyone can and could use Meno. We've been in beta for a few weeks. We've been testing the app in particular in the U.S. We have a few very happy customers, and I think what's been really intriguing is that it isn't actually purely lonely people that are finding value in Meno. Here is someone called Andrew. Andrew is the king of his frat house. He's super popular, he's got loads of friends, but he didn't have the confidence to do the one thing that he wasn't recognizing about, which was to ask a girl out that was in their friendships group. He said something to me that I keep hearing, if you're my age now, anything you'll say will be everywhere at the same time, all at once. He was terrified of taking this one step, and he ended up working with Meno to ask the girl out. They went on three dates, it didn't work out, but he was so proud and so happy and so confident, and Meno has actually helped to take a very different approach to his friends ever since. We've built an amazing team with the help of our investors. The team that you see here has worked previously to build Headspace, Julingo, Tinder, the App Store business and so on, and we are deeply passionate to helping people improve their social skills. Now all of this started when someone called Andrew Ng who you may have heard of called me up about a year ago and predicted that large language models, like chatJPT, would quickly become a very powerful way to influence these types of things. So we've been working for this more than a year, and I spent a lot of my time in the last year on campuses building this with people in the real world, but I have some exciting news today. Today we're launching Meno in the first country in the world ever, Finland. I dream of a world in which there will be no more social anxiety. Our product is an anti-loneness. It is what we're experiencing here at this conference. I love coming to Slush because I have made some of my best friends. Two of my investors are Tony Fidel and one of the leaders of Spotify. I met them both here at Slush. Finland is one of the most innovative countries on the world, and I want your feedback before anyone else. So I think 30% of the attendees here are Finnish, so make a Finnish friend if you're not on the Finnish app store. Please go and download the app and let me know what you think. We want to build this with you. So thank you very much, and let's talk about Meno. Thank you. How exciting. So all the Finns out there can download this, so the rest of us have to wait, I suppose. And you are Finnish, but you're not on the Finnish app store. I'm not on the Finnish app store, so unfortunately I cannot get it. I love passion projects, passion startups driven by passion, driven by background. This is definitely one of those things. It feels like almost like your entire life is building up to this thing. And it's really going to... You giving that presentation was so nice to hear. I really want to dig into this AI versus human. We've talked about this, and I've seen you in other presentations where you don't like it when people say it's like her, the famous movie with Joaquin Phoenix, and it's really how important the human aspect is to this. And what is interesting to me is like, people don't think about human and AI together, but this is exactly what you want to do. Can you talk a little bit deeper about that, how that works and what you're thinking? Yeah. So the truth is I genuinely reached a point a year and a half ago where I had become somewhat disillusioned with, to your point, I'd spent almost 20 years in trying to use technology to build social connection, most recently at Tinder. And I simply didn't see the solutions that we had making enough of an impact. I think really all of that has changed now with the emergence of, in particular, national language processing and large language models. And the reason for that is it's really allowing us to build products that follow the way that we speak and think as human beings. And that's also the reason that I'm launching this film today. And to be clear, I want to set the expectation, we're very early stage, but we want to be able to design this for the questions that you will have, for the types of journeys that you want to take yourself on. We do not have to create this prescriptive path the way textbooks used to do it and then most apps of the last 15 years where you would take someone through lesson one learning finish, lesson two learning finish. Now there's a two minute onboarding and then you can really go into any relationship topic or goal that you have and we'll be learning from you and we'll be building for you. So it's going to be actually supporting what people really do and who they really are. So it's not like some kind of like rote thing, it's actually really human in a way you're saying. Yeah. Fantastic. But not a fake human being. Helping you with your real human relationship. You're right it to me, okay. So competition. Is there a competition for this? You hear about chat bots and all this stuff going on in the AI. There's all these personal assistants. I have as an investor I've seen so many. Yours is a very, very different approach. So do you actually see that there's competition for what you're doing? It's really interesting. So we are creating a bit of a new category in a sense. So it's part education, it's part AI, it's a whole bunch of different things. I think what we hear the most and what we see with our current test users is that people are really using it instead of three different things. One, and this is slightly controversial, I do think that something like Meno could and should replace dating apps. Dating apps currently help you meet strangers when one of the most exciting things about Gen Z, 18 to 25 year olds, is that they're mostly meeting their romantic partners and building close relationships from community and from their existing friendships. And so by working with Meno to build empathy to help you be a better friend, to help you move from a situation to a relationship and then invest in that relationship, I believe Meno will eventually replace dating apps for most people. Secondly, I think a lot of people are already using Google or chat GBT to ask for questions for relationship advice. I mean, who's ever Googled a question, use chat GBT to analyze a text message. I see lots of hands going up. There we go. And there are several challenges with that because it's not necessarily private. It's not personalized. If you Google something, it's not going to be just for you. Meno has memory. So instead of you just asking a question and it giving you an instant answer, we can also use the context of things that you've been discussing for months or maybe years if we look at the future and say, hmm, I spot a bit of a trend here. This always happens once you've been on three dates with people. Maybe we should think about that being a thing that we really work on together. And lastly, Meno drives the conversation. If you use chat GBT or if you use Google for relationship advice, then you have to be the one driving the conversation. And you know what? That can be a little bit tricky. So instead, we have what we call dynamic prompting for those more technical folks in the audience or empathy mode. And we're actually the ones asking you questions so that you can really, really express yourself. The last thing is I do also see what we're building is an antidote to the fake girlfriends, companions, and so on that we're seeing emerge. There is a product, for example, in China that has more than 500 million users. And I do worry about a world in which people will find more comfort in a fake AI boy for no girlfriend that always is exactly what you want. But I don't really think that is the healthy thing. So I'm going to put my VC head on here for a minute. How will you know when you've hit that kind of unlock moment? You go to market strategies. There's so many apps out there. There's so much noise. And how are you going to get users and when will you know that it's taking off? Do you have metrics you're looking at or what is it? It will be when I start getting messages on Twitter and on email from people that say you've changed my life. I've been very fortunate to work on a number of businesses where that's happened. In the case of Headspace, I sometimes met with cancer patients who used Headspace to take them through a very difficult time and recover. Of course, in the Tinder context, I met a number of people that met the partner of their life. But I truly believe that Mino has the potential to have a much bigger impact on way more people. So my Twitter handle is just at Renata, so dear Finns, as in when Mino changes your life, please let me know. Maybe you'll be product market fit. That's very cool. So actually it's on X, not Twitter anymore, but just having that bit here. So you're deep into the AI world and there's been a lot of discussion around the pitfalls and the dangers of it. Do you have guardrails in place? So how do you think about that? Or does that not really affect you because you're more of a narrow focus? But I suppose it does because you're dealing with real humans and their emotions. So how do you approach that? It's actually the very first thing that we deployed. So LLMs that are public do have natural guardrails built in already. However, so one of my close advisors is Megan Jones Bell. She was the Chief Science Officer at Headspace. She's a trained family therapist and she's now Clinical Director of Mental Health at Google, so she's been very deep in this work for quite some time. And so what we've designed is our own custom guardrails. So for example, in Finland, if you download the app today, if you do talk about, for example, thinking about self-harming, then we select different local organizations that we will point you towards. Over time, we're already working with different mental health professionals. For example, on college campuses as a one to also personalize the responses because if someone is in a difficult headspace, the hardest thing typically is to actually take that first step. To send that text message to a friend to say, I'm really in a dark place. I really need help. But nothing can ever replace real human beings being there for you in that moment in time. So we have guardrails. It's a critical thing to have in place and that really escalates these types of things to organizations, NGOs, et cetera, that can provide clinical care and support. So I want to touch on something in your slide deck, and we had a little discussion backstage about this. You feel that the two biggest threats to humanity, to all of us, is climate change and loneliness. And I said, well, climate change affects 100% of us, but I don't think 100% of people will be lonely. So for me, if you ask me, I say climate change and income inequality. That's what I would say the two things are. I want you to defend why I think loneliness is such a threat. I think it's one thing to exist on this planet and that is, of course, the climate crisis if this world becomes too hot or too cold for us to live, breathe. That is an existential crisis. But there's also something about being human. And I think what makes us human is that we're social animals and social creatures. There's been a 30% decline in the number of people that are in committed relationships in the last 30 years. So that's not just people getting married less. People are also not cohabitating, living in communities in the same way. One in seven people now don't have a single friend. And all these trends are staggering and nothing has made them better. They just keep on going down. And genuinely, this May Flatten Out of You Forward project in two, 300 years will all be single. We won't have children anymore. We won't have new friends. That's the end of humanity. If you follow that curve, yes. If we follow that curve. Got it. I'm going to switch gears completely here. There are a lot of founders in the audience and this is your second startup. There's a bit of a gap between the first one and this one. I'm curious what made you want to do it again. The first... I mean, I think like most founders, I never really wanted to be a founder, but I just kept on running into problems that I didn't see anyone else solving. So I just let to go and do it. The problem I wanted to solve the first time around, I created my first company exactly 10 years ago, pretty much in 2012. And at the time, it was the year when apps really started becoming mobile-first businesses. So that was the year that Tinder was launched, Uber was launched, Instagram was launched. And at the time, in Europe especially, there were very few people who were great mobile developers and designers. And so I built a company that was essentially a startup for hire where people could come and build their first product with us and then go off and rebuild that. With Meno, because frankly, you know, I've come from running a $1.7 billion organization. I had several corporate jobs. I worked with what I go to running a 10-person company where next week I'm painting walls, by the way. Monday, that's my schedule. I'm painting the walls for a new office. What made me want to do it again is I really, really believe that this is the most important problem that I can make an impact on. Like I said, for me, this and the climate crisis are the two biggest battles we face in our lifetime. I don't think I'm the right person to work on the climate. I do think I can make a difference here. And critically, the people that are behind this, so Andrew Ng, who's truly one of the leading minds in AI, so we have access to incredible science. And in addition to that, our seedband was led by Rulof Bota, who's the head of Sequoia. He contacted me not long after we founded the company, and I looked him up online before meeting. He'd been talking about this problem as well since 2012. And so there are a number of people that have seen so much between those two guys, like they have seen thousands of companies and so much in terms of technology, and the fact that we're all coming together to really try and make an impact. And this is a really hard problem. I'm basically insane to do this, as is my team. But I think we just have to try, and we have to keep trying. I really hope that many other companies will also try. We're going to need a lot of different things to come together here to actually make an impact when reversing this curve. You make it sound like it was Sequoia came in, 2023 is a brutal fundraising environment for startups. Was it as easy as that? You're just in the right place at the right time? Or even a bigger question is, is it easier the second time, you think? Or what is your kind of view on your founding the company? Like how was that process for you? I didn't raise VC capital the first time around. I think the thing... I did ask Rilof this after we closed the deal, and by the way, there are many Sequoia people here in the audience tonight. They've been amazing. It's been incredible to work with them. And I think the big thing was... I think there's a lot of excitement about AI right now. There's a lot of excitement about the technology. I think what they saw in me was that I was talking about the problems, and I have had many experiences of actually building these types of companies and making an impact through culture. So for example, when I was at Tinder, I initially ran the European business. We did some really cool stuff where we partnered with Love Island, some of these reality TV shows. We made the Tinder app the first way in which you could swipe right in order to appear on the show. And we had a million people in the UK applied to be on the show in 10 days. A million people. So I think the fact that I was so focused on the people and the problems, and I actually made this deal with Andrew, because he contacted me on October 21, where are we now? No, 22. And I said, I really want to spend some time still in the real world before we start coding. And so I spent time with incredible people, with Alcoholics Anonymous. I went to some communes. I really started studying community social connection behaviour change in the real world first. And I think most people that have been pitching are focused on the technology. And let's remember, it's been a year since OpenAI started getting us all very excited. But I'm yet to think of one single product that has made a real impact on a consumer problem. We're still very much excited about the technology phase. And that's great. I didn't think I would see another moment like this having grown up with the App Store. And it's an amazing time to be alive, but we haven't found real powerful use cases yet. And I think that's what they saw in me, and that's why they're supporting me. So what's been hard in the last year? Hiring tech. I think the hardest thing has been making decisions about who to hire, where to hire people. I think I definitely lost some time. I think we're still trying to figure out what the right models are. And to be clear, I've really come down on the, you know, what we need to be in real life. And so that meant getting a new visa, moving to the U.S., properly moving to the U.S. this Monday. So this is why on Monday we're painting walls. But I think still a lot of us have been figuring out the right way to operate. I think that's been the hardest thing, yeah. Because you're already sort of, you're actually formally moving, I think, on Monday, right, from Paris to San Francisco. You ever lived in San Francisco before? I have, in 2008. Oh, you have before, okay. So you have a little bit of a community there. So I think moving is all about the community. You have your work community. How have you found San Francisco so far? Because people hear kinds of, just a quick, like, is it as bad or is it as good? I lived in San Francisco 19 years, so I'm a little biased. But I left five years ago. I'm curious, how do you feel about it? I was terrified. I'm not sure I can relate to it. I've spent the last year living in Paris, which I adore. But I've really loved it. One, I think it's such an open welcome and community. I live next to the park and go go running. But in particular in terms of this work that we do, given that we're working on a really difficult problem and something that's very mission-driven, I think the energy, the positivity, and the can-do attitude is really unique. So I'm very excited to start my San Francisco life on Monday. Fantastic. All right, well, I hope people download it and try it, and I assume you want some feedback. Absolutely. So it's Nino and I'm at Renata on X. Thank you, Renata. Thank you, Minka. Thank you.