 Hi everybody, it's a great pleasure to be here. It's my first time in Helsinki at Slush And I have to say I feel really Honored and blessed to be here because the vibe is very much entrepreneurial It's very different from what I know from the conferences. I usually go and I feel just like a little a little Groupie being here rediscovering the joy of entrepreneurship. Not that I'm not having fun with my own company, but Seeing how it's it's grooming everywhere is very very exciting for me So today I want to talk to you about a sad news is that Konto has scaled It's it's pretty well known in Europe now. We're doing finance management finance solution for SMEs in Europe and Somehow we started five years ago and the early days of zero to one the early days of sitting on a bench Deciding everything as a small group of people that is working mostly through instinct through expertise is Somehow far gone because there is this low of gravity that is happening Happening to all of us whether we want it or not, which is called big company disease when the company grows many countries many languages hundreds of thousands of lines of codes a Lot of tickets a lot of clients entropy Becomes a reality and the human brain reacts in a very weird way We put in place processes. We start to tell people what to do So they become kind of like robots, you know and it we don't do it on purpose We just do it because that's what what we're used to because that's the way we've been managed to as Former contributor in a company. We didn't found and because we're in the builder scene It's an important one. I wanted to share with you my take on how we've been shaping the Kanto culture To avoid falling in this weird low of gravity. We will eventually all fall into But before getting there just a few words about Konto The market of Konto is 25 million SMEs. It's a huge market and SMEs is the heartbeat. It's literally the heartbeat of the economy and the sociality of the of Europe It's literally like 50% of GDP to serve of jobs. They're in some countries more SMEs an actual burst in a country Created every year. So it's a serious thing and eventually those SMEs are served by financial financial services that are Not at this take of where they should be the net promoter scores, which I'm sure you're all familiar with is negative so Hollywood call it a passionate crime you have more haters than promoters in this industry and so in 2017 With my business co-founder Alexandre we built the first company together So we leave and we know too well what it is to go through the finance admin Burden and bureaucracy and so we said, okay, let's fix it as a second company together Around the recipe for success, which is fairly simple if you look around It's what you could see at Amazon at many companies that we we use the service of a leaner product Which means when you connect to the app, you can do pretty much everything you'd like Increasing the limits of your of your cards Wiring money unlimited without having to to upload hundreds of documents to get it approved And so forth and so on to bookkeeping and anything a Faster support because when you're an entrepreneur Well, you did the admin When your partners are slipping the one you want to deal you want to make deals with Which means after 5 p.m. Which is when banks traditionally close Okay, and on weekend when you're quiet and you just want to kind of get the shit done In a quiet moment and the third piece is a fair pricing Because it's a nightmare as we all know I see some of the faces doing yes Yeah, we're all in the same boat and so we said let's do that It was common sense very intuitive and it could make a business considering the NPS that I showed before But also the size of the market, which is tremendous And so this is Kanto so we did it okay. We launched Kanto. This is the current website and We provide a product that does business account cards invoice management spend management Bookkeeping reporting think about Google workspace for finance for SMEs And we reached the slam dunk so we got the NPS at 75 Actually 76, but it's 75 plus. It's pretty high. So that's the number from last month We got 300,000 business clients in France Germany, Italy, Spain We just acquired the German company the honeymoon is perfect It's coming. It's coming. I swear We got them them how we call that them Glory glorifying metric, you know the ego metric We got the half ticket corn metric Five billion dollars valued in 2022 for our fifth anniversary. So we're on fire think about us as funders. Yeah, we made it We think we made it The team we've grown the team we've provided a lot of jobs We see which is also the company's responsibility Actually, it's the company's responsibility in the first place if you think about the second industrial revolution That's why companies became Important because they were providing jobs which provided food and home and so on. So this is what we do But then the inconvenient truth happened the same people including myself Who made it to these great metrics? Are waking up and Those are real screenshots recent ones of Customers both external so paying customers and internal customers. So anonymous Engagement survey verbatims, okay As a customer obsessed company We have become what we run away from in the first place We shut down accounts we shouldn't have we asked for dozens of documents to get a Transfer done by this German company on the top right. So it is actually blaming us for asking so many documents So the processes haven't scaled but The team is awesome. We have access to an awesome team. Okay, we have a pool of talent that is amazing keep that in mind and Everything is going okay. And so we are literally that close to become What we run away from in the first place Okay, I'm being dramatic, but it's true. It's happening to everybody We hear a lot of company actually doing series a series B series C. Do you hear a lot? Do you hear a lot of D E F or growing or being profitable? They're not so many There is a reason why because the business product market fit has been proven. What is the friction? the low of gravity that is Blocking the company to honor his destiny correctly in an agile way like it was day one okay, and The weird thing is that When it's becoming messy When it's a bit chaos We as humans and I'm cleaning myself. I'm talking about me right now. You believe me or not, but we react using the patterns we know In the the mental photo we have on how a company should be designed and how management should happen And we all do a command and control because when the metrics starts not to be good when customers starts to complain in Well, we could do it ourselves when we have very small user base So we start to do to do lease to our people and we use our resources to execute Okay, and it sounds dramatic again, but I do it and you do it without knowing it and So what do we do after we do that? We get feedback from our team which says yeah, but I'm not autonomous I'm not this and this is absolutely true So what do we do we go to the other extreme and we say okay now we're a freedom form company now, you know do whatever you want do it the way you want and But it's chaos it doesn't work even when you play soccer or basketball you need a field you need a framework Okay, so teamwork can happen. So people are aligned on the same things And so on I'm sure you know this guy. I know I love the office Michael Scott So he's the command and control guy who is pretending to be a cool guy Okay, he's pretending to be freedom form company, but it's actually controlling the guys Okay That's another extreme. Those are saying they're cool guys, but they're actually doing all the way around And now we have a neo morphu sorry. I'm 40. So I'm a matrix generation Okay, so this was a thing back in the days and so we have a blue pill red pill Decision to make Do we take the blue pill and the blue pill is okay? We just do the way we know intuitively which is command and control Okay, and we keep going and if we have bad customers, we just talk to the guy replace them Basically bad managers, okay Or do we take the red pill and say? But what if we we get it all wrong when it comes to scaling a company, you know What if there is something? Very smart people don't see so that we would call misconceptions That they think is great, but prevents them to be actually awesome including myself and what if If we look very closely to the state of the art to the people who thought about it. There are not so many They're the big usual suspect So I won't talk about Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos and others and Elon Musk I swear, but I want to talk to you about someone who is of the greed and has been instrumental in thinking differently on how to scale a company His name is Ed Katmul. He's one of the founders at Pixar Okay, he got inspired very much by a Company culture From Japan in the 60s This company's Toyota. So what are what is a car? manufacturing manufacturing player Doing with Pixar, which is basically movies will go every year to see with our kids Well, if you look closely the result because that's what matters in the end shareholder value Customer value team value. Let's look at it one movie a year 600 million euro per movie and The highest employee NPS the lowest turnover of the industry Okay, so why him and not others and if you read about him, you can Google it Don't not now wait wait when I'm done, but right after you can Google it The guy says I'm obsessed with the hidden thing. So the thing I don't see Okay, so that may bring the company down So instead of focusing on the to-do list. Hey, do this movie this do this animation do this and so on is focusing on making visual What are the the blockers? team members will encounter if they're working autonomously because Those hidden things are actually the blocking stuff for the performance of the company And so he make problems visible visible. So problems are actually printed on the walls Okay, it's not like on a slack channel, which could make sense to you And so the hidden things is what we call at Konto misconceptions or wrong ideas And if you think about it, we all encounter problems when we scale a process doesn't work anymore We have issues on the org. We launch a new feature. It doesn't meet the success Essentially a problem is a gap of performance. We expected something, but the reality is different and there is this gap Okay, but eventually this problem is a consequence of actual people again including myself thinking We do it right So another way to look at it is that a gap of problem is a gap of know-how Okay, if a meeting is not good Maybe my know-how my conception my mental conception on what is a good meeting is wrong Okay But when I do it, I'm pretty convinced, you know, I know I'm gonna be awesome and actually I'm not so those are the blind spots Those are the misconceptions. Sorry. It's early morning. I hope you had coffee. It's a bit Asking a juice of brain here, but For real this is very important for the for the next slides because the whole company culture is built on that The Konto way. This is how we call our culture is one thing Everything we do serves one purpose is to foster a deliberate practice of problem-solving But not just problem-solving. Oh, I have a customer problem. I'm gonna solve it We use I'm sure you know or you heard some of you heard the five Y's and the thief Y is What am I missing? What am I doing? Not the right way? Okay, we usually blame the machine or other teams at Konto. It's not about blaming It's about telling you your own misconceptions that are probably different than from others Is your problem? Take care of it. We're gonna help you and nobody is gonna blame at you Because for us big company disease is when people stop learning they stop moving and So you get it we took the red pill and Honestly, there is nothing harder on earth at least for me again To look at yourself in the mirror and see what you're doing wrong when you actually thought you would do it Right think about the earth is flat a few people got their head chopped For saying that or believing that until everybody accepted it's round not everybody We still have a few say they think it's flat, but for most of us And so I'm gonna show you a few examples Few examples The first misconception I had myself is that people need to be told if they're doing a great job I'm not saying we shouldn't congratulate each other for big achievements Of course we need like when you're a company you put a lot of passion and a lot of commitment You sweat you have hard moments better moments. It's important to celebrate of course But a more interesting way to think about how people Know if they're doing a good job or not It's to invest on building a really good tool that tells them Where whether their own video game is going well or not When you play video game like I do you don't want someone to tell you oh Tell me if I'm succeeding at winning the race You don't want that you want to know by yourself because autonomy is a key pillar of motivation You want to you want to live your life, you know as a contributor and so this is exactly what we do We create visual so each person at Konto know whether they're succeeding and succeeding is about quality being on time Lowering the cost You name it, but we always go back to these common denominators And so we invest a lot in building those visual management and actually we all do it I'm not from notion, but we all do it with notion So notion is pretty a pretty good starting point for that the second is that I Don't know if you read nine lies about work. It's a great book and they talk about feedback and My my my take based on experience again is that people Don't need feedback to progress I'm not saying again feedback is bad It's actually good to talk what's going on and so on it's good to have a dialogue ongoing dialogue But the hard pieces the feedback on the misconception. How can you give a feedback to someone who doesn't see? What is limiting himself or herself? To do a better job How do you want to do that? How do you do that? You don't so what what what another way to think about it? And again? I'm not saying feedback is a bad thing but a very let's say Built-in way to do it on the job Is to actually encourage Your team to do problem-solving The right way which is going back to what do I miss and here I put you an example from the team. It's a real example Recent one I think Yeah, it's August so it's it's September example And so the team its product marketing realizing in data realizing the ways they work is completely Facked up and that their own problem the manager doesn't need to know that their own life in the end Another controversial one is that data creates value We're a big fan of data at Konto we spend a lot of money actually getting the data right So we are data informed but as you do command and control you Without noticing it you you create some kind of mechanization on how data is used And so you encounter a situation in which people do a bit testing like they they're on drugs You know they need their fix of a bit testing all the time and the risk with that is that data replaces expertise and That's another issue because when you pay people very Expensively and very high and you ask them to just execute and use data without using their own know-how Well, if you're lucky they say stay and they shut your mouth their mouth But well, you kind of under use their talent and the words they leave And that's a big big issue again So another way to look at it is and here you have an example that has been done purely that data driven So we wanted to have the the cards to to offer to our clients the ability to get the pin of their card Okay to retrieve it from the app. We use the data We wanted to decrease number of tickets We implemented the feature we did not change the number of tickets And I asked the product manager, but why close your eyes and tell me what is missing? Oh, I know what is missing I could do it in five minutes You see and so this kind of People become robots very quickly with command and control and it's very dangerous because it slows down the company It creates a lot of waste a lot of free work That is unnecessary and who's paying the price the clients, of course And who's the second person who's paying the client the price the person himself or herself? Because it's frustrating to rework the same thing over and over and over The last example I want to give you is about procedures. So when you scale What do you do? Well, you're right procedures So people follow them But do they follow them Well, if you're lucky they do But if you're not lucky is they do but the company scaling so fast that the procedure doesn't make sense anymore So it's not working and this is the exact example here So what we want is not having people following being compliant. We don't want dark Vader We want Jedi's we want all the people to comply we want people that can adapt and so Again another way to look at procedures is forget about the procedures and focus on the person on the know-how not even the knowledge But the know-how how do you do? So my take here is that maybe there is a third way to look at management and how to scale how to prevent us To go in the trap of the big company disease For me at least is that people don't need to do to be told how and what they should be doing Honestly, but like a curling player, maybe it's popular in Finland. I don't know, you know curling like this weird This is for French guy. It's a very weird sport You throw a stone and the the actual skill is to clean in front of the stone And maybe that is the role of a company leader Removing the obstacles And we call that orient and support you give a direction and You support you remove you help people or you create the conditions So people can face their own misconception and be autonomous in their own Hero journey somehow and the counter way is just about this It starts with our manifesto So it's that long or manifesto is fairly short first paragraph is Incubines are energy vampires. We want to fix that Send second paragraph is oh, we actually want to fix that. Here is our mission third paragraph is how do we get there and We say it we wanted to be The finance solutions that energize SME We need to fix ourselves first. I Love these books Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and in the book You have this discussion and one guy asked but how do you do great paintings and the guy answers? Well, I become a great painter and then I paint How can we serve SME's properly? If we don't fix the way We think about scaling a company. It continues with our values They talk to our users. You see the definition is small That's for our users for us Ambition the hardest is to face misconceptions Mastery is about when you have a to-do list. You don't look at them as tasks, but as new opportunity to learn Teamwork teamwork is not a weird concept It's the ability of a team to deliver quality to each other internal clients on time and The three cannot be possible with the force No blame policy because if you start talking about your own misconception and your boss tell you I don't want to know just show me the result. That's a big issue We even have a system to a personalize those values. I won't get into details but as Our friend Daniel Cole would say he wrote a great book about it's called the culture code It's a great book and basically I can sum it up for you if you haven't read it or cultures equal or actions This is what it says And so values don't make any sense If they're not believed and operationalized every day if there is not one thing that pinch you So you remember about them We invest a lot not in telling people what they should be doing but in training them on how to look at misconception Basically, it's a training self-training. It's not mandatory and we pass them new new new pair of glasses So against they can start looking at their own job in a slightly different way It's very intense. I'm sorry. It's very quiet But we're almost there My big take here is that We're in a culture where we think Implementing is the end game But my take on The last five six years at Conto and the last ten years and an entrepreneur. It's still young is that Implementing is never going to lead you to resting Okay, it's something you nutrish permanently and you need to have the passion to build a great company And it never stops ever because the day you stop Well You become that and That's what you run away from in the first place So that's very likely why you left the company you've been working at before you decided to build your own So join me if you want to think about a third way to grow a company to scale luck to And react to the article we post and reach out I'd love to talk about that with you and thank you for your time and hosting me. Thank you You