This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host Stina Heikkila.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript that has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Hello, everyone. So, we are back in conversation for the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. And today with me there is my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hi, everyone.

Simone Cicero:
And we have a very special guest from the US, Boston, Adrien Nussenbaum. I hope I pronounced your surname the right way?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Perfetto.

Simone Cicero:
Great.

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Wonderful. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Adrien is the co-founder and the US CEO… Right, Adrien?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Yes, correct.

Simone Cicero:
…of a French company that has been making rounds lately. The company is called Mirakl. And it’s a company that provides essentially marketplace solutions for platformizing businesses. So, first of all, Adrien, I would like to ask you to give our listeners a bit of context, not much, but describing I would say your company that most of our listeners know. But maybe the moment that your company is living through and also the context we’re talking about. The fact that you just received this massive investment round that made the company a unicorn. Also, what customers are you working on? What kind of interesting cases are you seeing emerging? And why — at the end of the day — you see so much traction for the work that you guys are doing?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
So, first of all, thank you for having me! I’m very happy to be spending a bit of time with you talking about platforms and marketplaces. As you mentioned, Mirakl is originally a French company. We like to call ourselves an international company, because when you grow up in Europe, you immediately want to conquer the world, because you know that the world is vast. So, we have over the last eight years built this technology company, which provides, as you mentioned, a platform which allows B2B and B2C organizations to launch and grow an enterprise marketplace at scale. We created this company really because from the beginning, with my co-founder, we were convinced that platforms were the future of business. And we recognize the critical value that some strategies could deliver to both traditional businesses who needed to transform and evolve their business model. But also, digital natives who wanted to emerge and differentiate themselves in the markets that they were going after. So, we are really, I would say, platform pioneers. That’s how we call our clients and we’re very convinced of the power of the platform model and the platform economy.

As you said, we just closed a $300 million round, a series D round, which valued the company above $1.5 billion dollars, which is definitely an exciting moment in terms of our growth. I think it’s really exciting in two ways. First of all — it’s three ways — it’s a great recognition of the work done by our teams. It is a recognition of the vision behind the company and the power of platforms. And this journey for the last nine years has been not always easy, and it’s still hard to convince organizations of the need to change. And lastly, it’s a recognition of the success of our customers and their vision. And I think to your question about, maybe I’ll just end on that, but to give you a sense of some of the companies we support and the type of business models we enable, I will just mention three companies that just went live recently. And you’ll see the broad spectrum and how the platform economy really applies to every industry. One of them is 3M. So, everyone knows 3M. It’s one of the largest manufacturers in the world and has a lot of products that go from famous post-it notes to personal safety equipment. And recently 3M just went live, the first marketplace within the whole 3M company, which is launched in the United States, within the personal safety division.

And the strategy with 3M is really to think about: how can they invent a B2B go-to-market? So, it’s reinventing a go-to-market strategy to focus on their SMB [Small-Medium Business] customers and provide those customers with a 3M branded online experience from then to buy products. But to do that as a platform, meaning 3M is not the seller themselves but 3M is inviting 3M distributors and partners within their ecosystem to be the sellers on this marketplace. So, it’s an exciting journey. And at the same time, really, the same week almost AB InBev the not less famous brewer known for brands like Corona or a Budweiser announced through their Z-Tech division, the launch of a marketplace starting in Mexico, where AB InBev is creating an online commerce destination for all their small business clients, mostly local convenience stores who are looking for more and more digital experience. And the similar way to 3M, AB InBev is leveraging their local distributors to be the sellers on this platform, and ultimately, provide services to, and products to, those local “tiendas” like they call them. So, little bodega, little convenience stores. So, that’s also a very exciting adventure that is starting with a global company.

And maybe just to conclude, and then I’ll close. But at the same time, we went live with a very historic, iconic retailer in Europe, called “Maison du Monde”, which basically means house of the world, or in Italian, Casa del Mundo, or that’s probably Spanish. And this is basically a retailer which has grown by curating a selection of furniture, home furniture products from all over the world. And they decided to launch a marketplace to really deepen their assortment. And their result is amazing because within one month, the marketplace is now added 13% of top line. So, it’s quite exceptional. And you can see through those, these are just some of the 350 plus clients who work with Mirakl. But you can see through those examples that there’s no limits. And I think it’s great that your podcast is called “Boundaryless Conversations”, because I would say and will end at that the platform revolution is also boundaryless.

Stina Heikkila:
Wow. Yeah, that’s super interesting. I want to jump in and maybe zoom in a bit on, you know, gave some really interesting examples. But if you can zoom in a bit on how do they arrive to make this leap, and like, what is the kind of journey and the right timing and pace to turn your business into a platform or to create a marketplace? And when we had a preparation conversation, you mentioned you need to sort of “earn your right” to represent the ecosystem. So, can you talk a little bit about these aspects?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Yeah. So, the right starting point, when visioning transforming into a platform, evolving into a platform business is fundamentally customer-centric. And it always starts, it’s always related to the customer. The way you open your eyes to those needs from the customer, there’s basically two categories. It can be defensive, or it can be offensive. And we work with organizations who find themselves in both situations. And so if we look at it, there is a change, fundamental change, which is happening in the world for the past 20 years, which is called digital. And digital has been, at the same time, very radical revolutionary change. But it has also been, in a way, a slow, invisible kind of change in some ways. Radical because it spurred the creation of a lot of new devices, of new behaviors. But slow also because it took time for businesses to accept eCommerce as something that was not a competition to what they were already doing. It took time for organization to accept eCommerce or digital as a channel that they should look into for their sales and distribution. So, there is always this paradox and change between the radicality of aspects of change, and sometimes the slower pace at which it is embraced by organizations.

And so, if we go back to that change, we fundamentally see that the customers of today are radically different from who they were 2010 and even 10 years ago. Today, we live, our kids, our parents, we all live in a world where we have basically broken three barriers — three boundaries if I stay in the theme of the podcast. We have broken the boundary of access information in the sense that when we are interested in buying something, if we are researching a product, there is no areas of darkness anymore. We can find everything we want. We can self-educate ourselves much more than we could before. The second boundary we’ve broken is the time and space limit boundary. Remember the world where if you wanted a tennis racket, your limit was, is there a sporting goods store within walking distance, subway distance, or driving distance? Today, if I want specifically a Roger Federer’s tennis racket that he used there, I can find it somewhere and it can be shipped and delivered to me within a reasonable timeframe.

And the third boundary, which has been broken is t the fact that we are in a world that has the ability to very rapidly connect, and interconnect. So, a great way to illustrate that is you think of Airbnb. What was the world before Airbnb if you wanted to rent your house, if you wanted to find a house for the weekend? We now have this thing where it’s natural for anyone to be able to list their product or service on the platform within a matter of minutes. So, having broken those three boundaries: time-space, information, and connectivity has resulted in drastically transforming customers. And so to go back to your question, the platform revolution that companies start when they engage and work with us starts by the customer. And sometimes it’s defensive. Meaning, that it can be driven by oh, our customers are shopping somewhere else, because someone has more, better than we have. And before digital, it was hard for the customers to know that this was available. But now it’s easier. What can we do to react to that and defend ourselves? Platform.

And sometimes, it’s much more offensive, which is in a positive way, not in the offensive, negative sounding of the word. But it’s how can we be on the offense? And this is where your question about “earning the right” comes up. Because being on the offense means: “you know what? I have the right to engage my ecosystem into broader relationships, more exchanges, and — to be concrete — people love me because I sell tires, but do I have the right to sell other car parts to those people? Do they trust me enough? Have I proven to my supplier ecosystem that I can be a great channel go-to-market, that others can trust me to come in and use me as a way to distribute their products? Yes. Have I invested enough in my eCommerce infrastructure to demonstrate that I can provide safe, secured, reliable online experiences, and make those available to other third parties?” Because if you have a crappy website or no website, if your payment is not secured, you can’t claim to become a platform. Because people are going to say if I come and sell my products to customers on your platform, how do I know that I will get paid? How do I know that these are real customers?

If your search, your overall online experiences is bad quality and people come to you to… you know, we work with fashion apparel companies who have marketplaces where they invite other brands to come and sell… but if they’re not able to tell them, your products are going to be well presented with nice pictures, consistent pictures, nice text, nice description, if they tell them “Oh, you know what? Your product will be on a bad eBay page.” You can’t claim the right to invite those friends. So, really, earning the right is a combination of mindsets: are you willing to invest in this platform strategy to continue to grow demand, to invest in building — investing in your ecosystem of partners? Are you willing to, you know, as you made the investments in your digital strategy to provide a qualitative environment to support this platform? And the last one, which is key, is the partnership mindset. And it’s fundamental. In a platform business, you need to rethink competition. You need to rethink the way you saw the world before where everything was very siloed, very delineated. In a platform world, it’s much more about partnering. It’s much more about complimenting your strength.

And people talk a lot about how to fight Amazon, how to compete with Amazon. And there’s a lot of people who believe that the right way is to do that on the legal regulation point. I’m not here to talk about that. I think that first, if companies are able to unite themselves more, to provide better, broader experiences to their customers, to their partners, and grow their ecosystem, they have a chance of fighting better against Amazon. And so that’s kind of the combination of the drivers, the “earn the right”, the mindset. I know it’s a long answer.

Simone Cicero:
Man, that was a great answer, not to just long. It was very interesting. And we’ve been chatting in the background with Stina, with so many considerations. I think one thing that you made me — well, so many things — but I would say, the first thing is: this is not just a technological problem, it’s also cultural, in terms of organizational culture. But also, to some extent, it’s a social conversation that you’re talking about. Because when you say, for example, “we broke this boundary of information”, which I found fascinating. So, the question is also: how do you resonate with these customers that now are immersed in much more broader conversations on the state of the planet, for example, or the politics, or the social context that is around commerce, essentially? I’m curious to know if, you who seem to do so well on the technological conversation, as a company, you also had to engage with these cultural and social conversations?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
I mean, there are two dimensions to that: there is what we do, us as a company. And frankly, I don’t think — I mean, I would love to tell you about how we offset our carbon footprint by planting trees — but I don’t think it’s the specific topic for today. I think what’s interesting is how, via the platform strategies that our technology and our teams of experts allow our customers to deploy, what impact can our customers have on the world? And so for example, no later than a few days ago, Madewell, for those who don’t know, Madewell, it’s a sister brand of J.Crew. It’s a very nice brand that really grew up in the US and it has very nice design and selection. And just recently, they announced that they were officially joining the 15% pledge.

And so for those who don’t know, the 15% pledge is an initiative that was created by Aurora James, which basically, ambitions that by end of 2021, at least 15% of the brands that Madewell works with will be black-owned brands. And so this means, of course more design collaboration with black artists and brands, but also more black makers within an initiative which is called Hometown Heroes. And more black owned businesses in our “Labels We Love” program. And so the Labels We Love program is the marketplace that Madewell is running for the last couple of years. So, typically this is an example where, by having this mindset and this technology and strategy that allows you to go beyond your own little world and open up your ecosystem through this platform strategy, a brand like Madewell is able to have a contribution to society and in a way that’s really having an impact.

We have customers who we work with big retailers like Kroger, for example. It’s 130 something billion grocer in the US. It’s actually the biggest retailer in America in sales done on the US soil. And amongst different aspects of their marketplace, Kroger is also using this platform as a way to partner with organic brands, sustainable products, who are benefiting from a visibility that they could not get in a non-platform world. So, these are consumer-centric impacts, which I think are worth mentioning. But I also think that in the B2B space, today, if you think of our business, 50% is B2C, so consumer-related platforms, and 50% of B2B, business to business-related platform.

But we also have examples where some of our customers are launching platforms, which is allowing their customers to connect with local distributors that have less carbon footprint and that are more towards supporting local or regional organizations, and help them defend themselves against the big digital giants that tend to level everything. So, I’ll stop there. But that’s kind of our view of the initiatives that indirectly, we are very proud to support.

Simone Cicero:
It seems that talking about this idea that customers, at the end of the day, are driving such a transformation, also because you said that these normally comes from the outside. It’s actually something that organizations need to do to stay in tune with the times, I would say. So, the question would be, do you see that this can possibly move into the organizational side? So, do you see, for example — I know you guys have done a lot of work into B2B, for example and also B2B marketplaces that tackle problems in procurement or in other key processes — so my question will be: do you see these marketplaces, the software that you guys are developing, even including more and more other organizational aspects? Or maybe you can just give us a peek into what are the other processes that your software covers now, and how you plan to go with the new directions that you see coming?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Yeah. The way we look at the roadmap, as a technology company, is fundamentally split into two big buckets. One is the, in a way, centered on ourselves. And the other one is open to the outside world. On the part, which is Mirakl-centric, our ambition since we launched this company has always been to support the most platform models as possible. And that means, for example, when we started to grow our activity with B2B companies, there’s a lot of different processes; invoicing, payment, different order lines, management, different — sometimes you have five decimals, pricing. So, I won’t get into the specifics, but a lot of our investments have been done into this, and this is a true differentiator that makes Mirakl stand out when you really look into the details. How do you fully support business cases that are specific to industries?

So, a lot of our roadmap is anchored around the specific needs of specific industries — you mentioned procurement — you know, building integrations with a punchout systems to — One of our largest customers, they are hospitality chains like Coperama and Acccor and they are really reinventing the way they let their hotel managers buy what they need for the hotels in a much more “platform way”. Which is much more modern than the traditional procurement system. So, really, that’s kind of the internal facing which is — and it’s driven by — there is not just one platform model, there are multiple platform models, and what does the technology to do to support that?

The aspect which is open to the outside, is really a core pillar of our strategy: it’s how ourselves as a company, we operate as a platform. And not in a technology sense like everyone is a technology platform, but as a business model or as a mindset. So, this is why we launched a year and a half ago, our program called Mirakl Connect. Mirakl Connect is a true ecosystem. So, it’s a platform where we are bringing together, on this platform, all the companies who are launching their marketplaces and platforms with Mirakl, combined with all the potential suppliers, sellers, merchants, providers, who are interested in partnering with those marketplaces. And finally, the other technology companies who are developing solutions that support specifically platform businesses, whether it’s around supply chain, around payment, around pricing strategy. So, really, Mirakl Connect is, if you think of it in a simple way from a platform operator standpoint, from the view of the Mirakl clients, I can find easy rapidly the best partners to sell on my platform.

And I can find rapidly, easily the best technology partners to make my platform even better. And for the technology partners, I have access to a network of fast-growing platforms that can benefit from my tools. And from the seller standpoint, reseller, and supplier standpoint, I have access to a centralized large channel for me to diversify and develop my go-to-market. So, that is really how we are articulating it.. and if you think of what I was saying at the beginning is we ourselves waited to have “earned the right” to become a platform. Because the reason why Mirakl Connect is successful and growing so fast today is because when we opened it, we were able to tell the people which we wanted to invite on our platform: “look, look at all the clients we have. They’re growing, they’re stable, look at how the sellers, the partners who are selling on those platforms are able to use our tools to sell rapidly efficiently. And look at the technology we’ve built, the APIs, the microservices, which is allowing partners to integrate rapidly”. So, it goes back to what I was saying, we’ve “earned the right” to become a platform operator ourselves.

Simone Cicero:
Right. I mean, we were talking about this in the background with Stina. And I think we were curious, for example, of your insights around data or using AI to reinforce your network effects in this context. And I think it’s a nice way to connect to another topic that we wanted to discuss with you, which is this emerging API economy that we are witnessing with companies like Stripe or Twilio doing really well. And essentially, my question will be: in a world, in a market that is about these kind of network effects built around aggregating suppliers — and also API’s for many of these vertical processes like finance or communication with customers like Twilio could be — what is left for the retail brands to play in this industry? Or in general for incumbents, you know, because I’m not sure you just talk with retailers.

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Yeah. We talk with retailers, with brands, CPG, manufacturers, distributors, procurement organization, services companies, travel and hospitality — like we said, the platform revolution will not be selective in the sense of what industry it impacts. It will impact and it is impacting every single industry. So, I think there’s a lot of stuff in what you just said. I think companies like Twilio, Stripe, they’re different companies, but they are demonstrations of this notion that I was touching upon in the beginning, this notion of interconnectedness. We live in a world where you first and foremost need to think about what are the connections you can create and how you can create them instead of trying to just go solo. And it’s funny because, during the — This is an anecdote, but during the fundraising, every time I would get on a call with a new investor, there was someone at some point would say, “Oh, so Mirakl, you are a little bit like the Twilio of marketplaces.” And investors love to do those parallels. I was polite, so I said, “Yes. I mean, there’s a lot of similarities, although we do a completely different business”.

But to go back to your point on retailers, I think that we need to differentiate the technology side of things like headless, microservices, API-first, which seems to have an impact, which is deconstructing large monolith technology systems, basically. We’re moving away from the all-in-one back to kind of pieces or best of breed components type of faith in technology. So, we need to differentiate the technology side from the consumer experience side. And I think that you can’t take away what the incumbents, like you referred to them have built-in terms of customer engagement, brand equity, respectability, trust, all these things that are constituents of the earning the right to be a platform. And yes, the world is tough for incumbents. I think it’s a 70% of Fortune 500 companies won’t be Fortune 500 companies in 10 years or something like that and there’s different statistics. The main danger for these companies is not outside, it’s inside. It’s not leveraging the fact that they’ve earned the right to play.

And when you look at companies who died today faster, I mean, there’s a bigger pace than before because of digital. These are companies who have ignored external signals. But they’ve also ignored internal pressures to change. They’ve been afraid of creating channel conflicts. They’ve been afraid of — Sometimes they’ve had capital financing structures, which has put them in a situation where they could not invest in growth, but they had to repay interest on debts and stuff like that. But they are iconic companies that have disappeared. And I don’t want to name some there, because we all know some of them. And most of the time, it’s been the same pattern, which is taking too much time to react internally, and not changing the way they operate in terms of bringing agility in their technology developments, changing their business models opening up to their ecosystem. So, it’s always the same pattern. But I do believe that brand equity, that a lot of these incumbents have remained an amazing asset. And we see it in the numbers. 80% of Mirakl customers are incumbents. 20% are digital natives. The marketplaces powered by Mirakl have grown by 110% in 2020, in terms of growth. So, these revenues are revenues that those companies have been able to conquer by transforming themselves and being courageous.

Simone Cicero:
It seems very interesting, because it seems like you know, I was getting to this idea that okay, there is no space anymore for you as an organization, as an incumbent. But then you make the point that if they decide to really engage you with these transformations, they are positioned to stay in their ecosystem. So — [crosstalk]

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Just maybe — I’m sorry to interrupt — but I would actually say that they have even more chances than before to transform. Because if you take a retail company, before digital, how could you transform yourself, open more stores, open bigger stores, open, smaller stores, bring different products? But now, with digital, if you want to transform yourself as a retail company, you can do things that you could have never done before. You can become a service company, you can become an experience company, you can sell products that would have never been able to sell because they were too big, too heavy, too… So, in a way, the digital world and the platform economy allows you, gives you much more chances to transform than before.

Simone Cicero:
Right. That’s it. And so basically, we are saying, in an era where we’re going to have millions of platforms, then incumbent organizations are also made of people that can open stores where needed. They can do all the things that normally digital platforms don’t do. So, or I’m not just talking about opening a store. But essentially, I’m talking about executing these complex processes that power society. So, it’s not everything is about booking a room. So, I think I got your point. So, Stina, I think also wanted to add something around “earning this right”, in order to be part of the — sustain the system.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. I mean, when listening to this last part that just came to my mind the conversation we had with Bill Fisher from IMD, about how some more successful incumbents, they are cannibalizing their own profits in order to stay relevant. And I think that was a well way to put it instead of being too scared of spending the capital that maybe you accumulate, you spend it to keep learning. And that leads into the question I had is more maybe on, we talked a bit about the technology side of your ecosystem with Mirakl Connect. I was also curious to know what are the type of services that you provide to the ecosystem beyond the technological aspects. We talked about in our methodology about the “learning engine” of the platform. So, how do you allow people to get better, but not only to have better technology, but also learning from each other in many regards?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
There’s a lot of elements to your question. I would say there are three areas. One is a pure Mirakl-led initiative. Which is we have massively invested in a team of platform experts. Today, this team will be at the end of 2021, 110 people who are people who worked at Amazon, at Google, at Airbnb, Alibaba. And so they bring this platform expertise to our clients to help them in the early phases of their journey to make sure that they launch successfully. The second aspect is a sense of belonging and recognizing the courage and the vision of our clients. Which is why we created a club, which is called the Platform Pioneers. And so every single client of Mirakl is a platform pioneer. And as such, there is a lot of organized events for them to share together their successes, their failures, their learnings as platform pioneers, kind of old united into this fight against Amazon. And the third one is a technological aspect. And you mentioned AI, you mentioned data. With Mirakl Connect, we are at the center of an ecosystem and we are leveraging the data obviously in a completely approved and shared way with our customers and partners. But we are trying to leverage this data to accelerate decision, to inform strategies on pricing, assortment, vendor selection. So, really, outside of our pure technology, these are really the three pillars of how we go beyond just being a technology company.

Stina Heikkila:
Cool. And I also wanted to have a small follow up question. Since this year has been quite peculiar, for many reasons, but specifically because of the drive to digital and online. Have you catered for that? Have you done any special — you know, I’m sure you have. This is maybe sort of a self-answering question — But what have you done to support your club in these times of pandemic?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
As you asked the question I was thinking about your question around impact. And it makes me think that there are two clubs. There is the club of Mirakl Platform Pioneers and Partners. And there is the broader club, which is the communities and this the world in which we live. And I could not, as we somehow head towards the end of this great conversation, I could not forget to mention the platform that Mirakl launched in March 2020 at the onset of this dramatic health crisis. We got a call from the French government, who was alerting us on the massive scarcity of PPE products, masks, channels, gels, and stuff like that, and how difficult it was for health care workers and essential workers to get access to those products.

And the French government asked us if we could come up with a solution. And in 48 hours, we put a team of 12 people. In record, together we launched in 48 hours, a platform, a marketplace called “Stop COVID-19”, where we combined the Mirakl marketplace solution with Magento, Adobe Magento, one of our partners, eCommerce engine, and some payment partners, Webhelp and Limonetik. And we launched a platform, which within days successfully allowed thousands of organizations to get access to critical products. We had a team who sourced hundreds and then thousands of vendors from all over the world. And so this marketplace, which unfortunately is still live and running today, has allowed the transaction of more than hundreds of millions of masks, and millions of gallons of gel. So, thanks for asking the question, because I realized I forgot to mention this. And it’s not every day as an entrepreneur and as a team that you have the opportunity to not only demonstrate the reality of the model, of the platform model of your vision, but also have a true impact.

Simone Cicero:
I guess many of them have been looking into online for sure. So, I guess that also was part of your contribution. So, to close this great conversation, I would like to ask you a final reflection, maybe essentially asking you to picture yourself in five years from now. So, I really want to pick your brain into more foresight here. So, essentially, what do you see happening in this short mid-term future? How do you see these technological transformations and social and cultural ones express themself into the context that you guys are working in?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
Wow. That’s a super easy question to finish the conversation. Though, I think there are many, many different ways to answer your question. For me, what’s interesting with the platform revolution, it’s the way it is impacting the value chains, and the role and position of companies in those value chains. And I think that’s the most interesting because when you look at organizations, everything they do is always defined by how they view themselves in the value chain. So, if you’re a manufacturer, you are at the beginning of the value chain. So, you don’t really traditionally operate thinking about the people or the companies that are all the way at the end of the value chain. Your sales, your marketing is mostly centered around the next person in your value chain; your distributors, your resellers, your — And similarly, if you’re a distributor, you’re in between buyers and manufacturers. So, you see yourself from where you are within your value chain. And this has created inertia over the years.

And what digital is allowing to do and we go back to the boundaryless, breaking those boundaries. Digital is now allowing organizations to be at different positions in the value chain. Because instead of being linear, those value chains are becoming more circular. And you can interface with everyone in your value chain, unlike what you could do before. And for me, this is really the most interesting change to apprehend. Because if organizations are able to understand that, they now start to ask themselves different questions. In specific markets, do I want to be directly in contact with the end-users? In others, do I want to be going with my partners? In others, do I want to be going — partnering with other service to complement my products? You now live in a world where through platforms, everything is possible. You can be everything in the value chain. You don’t necessarily need to be or efficiently can be. But knowing that this is possible, is for me one of the most interesting, strategic change ahead of us. Because it’s going to lead organizations and companies who talk to them to really rethink boundaries, limits, and really go beyond the world. For me, it’s as fundamental as when we discovered that the world was round and not flat.

Simone Cicero:
Well, you capture so well, the inflection point that we seem to believe in that many levels. But for sure, at the technological,and organizational level. So, I think you express this very well. Also, I want to thank you for this really great conversation. Because it was also, I think, a celebration of entrepreneurship to some extent when you end on this note, telling you can be anything in a value chain. I think this is really an exciting call for our listeners that plan to become entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs like you, I think, it seems that you have been thinking about this a lot. And I see that this is the trait of the entrepreneur. So, thanks very much. This was an exciting conversation. I think very inspiring. Anything else that you want to add for our listeners, maybe reaching out to you, where to explore your work?

Adrien Nussenbaum:
No. I mean, I’m very — I enjoyed the conversation. I think we are living in a very exciting time. I think we should not be afraid. Platforms and digital are offering us possibilities to accelerate innovation, to accelerate change. And we only have one life. So, if we can live our life being in action and movement, it’s more exciting than waiting for the end.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah. Thanks very much. Thanks for this call for change. Stina, do you want to add something?

Stina Heikkila:
Maybe just that I’m really excited to hear because I think that is what our hope is, all of us, you know, that these new models that can scale so quickly and so widely, if you can scale that with a social impact or environmental impact even. That’s a very powerful promise that we all can probably build some hope around in the coming decade.

Simone Cicero:
Thanks very much, and thanks to our listeners, and we’ll catch up soon.