SLUSH Endeavor Side Event: Scaling Unicorns in Emerging Markets | Transcript

SLUSH Endeavor Side Event

Periklis Vasileiadis: Hi everyone, I'm Periklis, I'm the Portfolio Director of Endeavor Greece, really happy to host for a second year a flagship event at Slush this year with many more Endeavor entrepreneurs that were originally speaking at last earlier today. Thank you all for coming here. I'm sure that the conversations will be amazing for the opening of the event. I would like for the welcome remarks to welcome on stage Mr. Andreas Stavropoulos, who is the Vice Chairman of Endeavor Greece and Partner at Threshold Ventures.

Andreas Stavropoulos: I'm so glad to be here and see everyone. I'm particularly excited because in my Endeavor hat, this is the first time we have a delegation certainly of this size and I think any size of delegation that brings together so many people from the emerging Greek ecosystem around technology and entrepreneurship. We have members of government here, we have research centers, we have members of Parliament, we have obviously entrepreneurs and founders, but we also have investors. We have big LP's in different funds. So we have a lot of the elements of what can make a successful ecosystem.

Another hat that I wear is as a member of the National Committee for Artificial Intelligence for Greece. And we're about to unveil the report on Monday. And I can tell you for the section that talks about entrepreneurship and innovation, the word ecosystem appears over and over and over again. And the reason it does is because, as all of you I'm sure know, it is such a powerful concept, a set of agents that are interacting together and all the, the, the stakeholder relationships and incentives that they share to create what in Silicon Valley, where I live and work, what we, you know, feel everyday, which is this idea of an equity economy, an economy of participation in each other's success, which is such a powerful concept, if you can get it off the ground. So the great sort of news for me is that we finally have in Greece, as exhibited and as proven here today, real commitment, at least from the government at the top level and from places like Endeavor, nonprofits, public private partnerships, investors, entrepreneurs, founders. Real commitment to try to make such an ecosystem that is already showing some of its fledgling, you know, activities to really help it flourish. And today through the conversations we're going to have today, we will see members of that ecosystem in other successful places around the world. Tell us about how they did it. And hopefully it's something we can all learn from. Take it back and make that ecosystem get to even newer heights.

Periklis Vasileiadis: I would like to invite on stage Miss Nicky Goulimis, the Co founder of Tunic Pay, Mr. Alfonso de Los Rios, Co founder of Nowports, Jack Murdock, the Co founder of Oyster and the panel will be moderated by Wiktor Schmidt, Co founder and president of Netguru and Endeavour Poland Chairman.

Wiktor Schmidt: Hey, hey everybody, Thank you so much for agreeing to have a conversation. Altogether we have 3 Endeavour entrepreneurs, Unicorn founders, some, some serial entrepreneurs, some people who've done what, 7-8 startups that you've probably all heard about. So we're going to do a quick introduction maybe, but I want to already give you a question. Think about what was the biggest pivotal moment in your career that kind of led you to where you are with the success of your organizations. And I'm thinking about things that we can actually replicate. So I don't want to you know, you want to say COVID, I'm sure, but don't, don't say something, you know, tell us something that I think we can take and possibly implement that allowed you to get to where you are today. A very successful entrepreneur. What can we learn from all of you?

Jack Mardack: It's hard to ignore the impact of the pandemic to be sure, but let me try. So I'm Jack Mardek. I'm the Co founder of Oyster, a global HR platform that makes it easy to hire people around the world. We are also AB Corp that is particularly passionate about the opportunity for meaningful global scale social impact in the form of democratizing access to knowledge work. My own journey begins with dropping out of pre Med at NYU in New York and becoming a banker. As a first career, I learned a lot. I learned how to analyze industries and companies, but ultimately I wasn't really, really satisfied by this kind of work. I wanted to create. I wanted to make things. And so I moved to Silicon Valley and had a very privileged, very lucky career involved with a number of startups, including three acquisitions and one IPO so far. So fingers crossed for Oyster very, very, very soon. So, what I would share is, you know, I didn't have a plan. I had kind of an internal operating system guiding me only in the beginning. I was looking to work for the smartest people that I could find that would have me. I made my way into marketing quite by accident, just by finding that I had a certain set of skills and a certain abilities that people were valuing in the early 2000s, which is when my career began. And then to that basic rule set, I also added wanting to work with people who had extremely high ethics. And I would absolutely list my Co founder, Tony on that list. I think he's an incredible entrepreneur, but he's also an incredibly principled and ethical human being. And so I would say in your pursuit of success, don't neglect the importance of principles and ethics.

Alfonso De los Rios: My name is Alfonso and I'm Co founder of Nowports. Basically we are a supply chain operating system for emerging markets. So we'll help, we help companies to move their cargo principally from Asia to Latin America either by ocean or air and we provide them additional services through our system. So that includes insurance, access to financing, digitizing more than 8 hours of reports per week on logistics teams, etcetera. And my story it's, it's kind of similar to Jack's story because when I was 18 years old, I was used to just making a lot of projects out of curiosity, right? So I never had a business plan on how to start boards. Right now, boards started when I was 18 years old, just coding out of college. I joined college and started doing different side projects of coding because coding was my life. Coding was everything that I knew and suddenly we had an A logistics MVP that ended up being this big company that I'm talking about where I met Max, who is my Co founder. And I think we matched really well because of both values and curiosity in an industry that no one was stepping into, right. So curiosity is a big part of what we have been building at Alberts, just touching an industry that no one thought about changing, right? Because it was an industry that used to work mainly through email, through phone calls, etcetera. And we wanted to make things easier for our customers. But that didn't start as a really well drafted plan, but just as a small product that we build out in less than a weekend, right?

Nicky Goulimis: Hi, I'm Nicky, I'm the Co founder and CEO of Tunicpay and I'm an Endeavor entrepreneur through a company I Co founded almost 10 years ago called Nova Credit. I guess, yeah, advice on the entrepreneurial journey? I feel like I really resonate with everything you've said for me. So I just started my most recent company a year ago and you know, I told investors I'm a second time entrepreneur, I know what I'm doing, blah, blah, blah. But the reality I think is it's been really reinforced to me in the last year. Like two things. One is the importance of networking and working with amazing people throughout the journey for the long run. I was surprised. You know, we always think business is very competitive, but in the fraud space, there's a lot of opportunity for collaboration as there are a lot of ways to be strategic about collaboration. And also, you know, things pan out for the long run. So my Co founder is also an Endeavor Entrepreneur in his previous business. I never thought I'd get to work with him again. But surrounding yourself with people who push you and a global community that we can learn from is something I'm super proud of. And then I guess the second thing is sort of with what you were saying, as you know, I think when I was starting my new company, I spent a lot of time sort of writing memos and analyzing things. And you can do that all day long and you can kind of get stuck in over analysis. And there's nothing around just like doing. It's extremely humiliating at times to put a really bad product out there and to know that you're going to iterate to something better. But that's much more powerful than sitting in your own head and in your ivory tower.

Wiktor Schmidt: You have given me a great kind of segway to my next question. So we're talking about the disruptive power of outliers in emerging markets, right. So you're all outliers in, in and I want to say four-ish five markets like sitting here. We have your Co founder being a part of Endeavour, Lebanon, Mexico, Greece, you're based now in the UK. I'm in Poland and we are now in Helsinki. And I want to talk about global networks. What do you think is the current position of, you know, organizations like Endeavor that can help people like yourself? But you know what, what is there now that we can use that wasn't available when you started in those kinds of global ecosystems or global networks.

Jack Mardack: I started two weeks ago, I was in Riyadh at a big conference over there on a panel called Ecosystems and entrepreneurship. So they're very, very interested in this concept of ecosystem. They're trying to diversify their economy, they're trying to stimulate something there. And that's all well and good. What I observed though is I think that the world, and it's, again, I'm sorry to reference the pandemic, but it has been such a transformative and important catalyst. And I think that the definition of ecosystem is also changing. Where I completely benefited from moving to New York and going to Silicon Valley and enjoying the benefits of that ecosystem there. I could not have had the career that I had without that. But I think that the world has changed. I think that we need to think differently about location in terms of ecosystems. It's great that we can, as entrepreneurs, be inspired and think of amazing ideas for companies from wherever we are in the world of the past, that may have come with some compromises or some blockers for people who were in certain parts of the world. And so I think that that is less true going forward, where I'm excited about new versions of ecosystems that are more virtual in nature. And that can support entrepreneurs without having to impose the necessities of a relocation on them or connecting with people in a particular location.

Wiktor Schmidt: Right. And that's obviously also the business you're in, so.

Jack Mardack: Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't hurt. Yeah. Well, I think along with the democratization of work opportunities for knowledge workers everywhere, we're also excited to see the democratization of entrepreneurship so that location agnostic entrepreneurship will be more and more common in the future. We raised all of our funds, you know, on Zoom, right. And so it is possible, you know, we're we're, we're, we're benefiting from the ecosystems in which we had historically participated and, you know, built our careers on that. But like I said, I think in the future there will be less dependency on this location oriented ecosystem in the future. More important will be other kinds of ecosystems. For example, impact investing as an ecosystem has been super, super important to be able to connect with investors and have them on our cap table who are so completely and passionately aligned with our commitment to be a positive impact as well as a significant commercial success.

Wiktor Schmidt: I want to talk more about this kind of a multiple network and this kind of additive thinking around communities. But you've, you've started your first previous business. What was it 7 years ago? Yeah, a little more than that. And now we have a new one. Like do you see this difference in what kind of resources do you have access to and how the world has changed like Jack mentioned in your new endeavor.

Nicky Goulimis: None, no. So we have chosen to not go remote as a company and we very much are in person. And I think for the stage of what we do, it's really important for us to be close to our customers, for us to be close as a team and collaborating in that sense. But we do continue to work with talent from all over the world and companies all over the world. And so certainly that's really powerful. And I think you know, many European businesses or other in different countries, you know, you always sort of push around that you need to sell to other markets and that's very true. But I also think there's more and more opportunities to cross this border dynamic. So not necessarily even selling to another market, but dealing with the boundaries between markets, whether that's, you know, cross-border financing, cross-border payments in the, you know, in my world now with fraud, the dynamics around money moving across different payment rails in a scam context. And so I think that's very true. And then, you know, as I said, I think that it's really nice to see some familiar faces in the room today. And I'm very grateful because a lot of people have helped me along the way. And I think I probably used to be a lot more transactional than I aspire to be now, So a lot of learning there.

Wiktor Schmidt: From your side, I think geopolitics also influences your business, but I want to talk a little bit. Can you talk a little bit more? You know, what kind of resources did you have when you started and what you feel is now available to founders, the communities that are part of totally.

Alfonso De los Rios: I will connect it a bit to what happens on networks of trust in Latin America, right? Because probably, as you know, Latin America, it's probably a big market, but it's super fragmented. So you have kind of like four to five big economies where the regulations, the culture, the way you hire and the way you operate as a startup changes from 1 border to the other one, right? So Mexico, it's not the same as Brazil, etcetera. And I think something that has changed after the pandemic is that connecting with those entrepreneurs that are not specifically in your circle of trust or in your location, it's way easier through networks like Endeavor, right? Like every time I, I've seen that we struggle as a company to face one regulatory issue or just one economic challenge in one country, etcetera. It's so easy to connect with other founders that we didn't have before this capability, right? We've not been in the market for many years. We started six years ago, but there's been a massive change these last six years in the startup ecosystem thanks to the ability to just reach out to other founders that you didn't know. But you can feel the trust to ask them for advice and you know you will get their best intention out of it.

Wiktor Schmidt: I want to talk also about the future, like, you know, we talked about, you know, your, your different industries. There's a lot of kind of connecting your, your, your, the, the things that you do. But my question is a little bit about what do you think is what your competitors are thinking about right now? And what's your most worried that you maybe not seeing right now? And how can they disrupt you, how you disrupted their market, you know, a few years back? What do you think the future is for your particular industries? I know it's a hard question.

Jack Mardack: I like where we are from a competitive standpoint. I'm a firm believer in Simon Sinek's infinite game philosophy, where what you want to look for is not to compete with your competitors, but to, and you know, to the exclusion of other, of other contemplations, but to be inspired by them, you know, find worthy, worthy rivals. And so we're playing our own game in the, in the infinite game sense. And I think it's worked great for us so far. But to answer your question, it's clear that we are at the beginning stages of the disruption that AI will have in just about every technological deployment into a problem. And so we are absolutely embracing that and doing our part. But I suppose if I were to think about somebody blindsiding us, it would be someone who started with that as their core, with that as the center of their technology. For us, it's, it's a bit of an adjunct super relevant. You know, our, our, one of our, one of the key aspects of our solution is contending with information complexity, which is a fantastic use case for AI. But certainly I think someone with the benefit of the work that Oyster and its closer competitors have done in the last few years could perhaps surge ahead and do something that was even more innovative and impactful. I think we have a good Moat because our thing is not pure technology. Our thing is compliance. I mean, so we've built a knowledge base and a capability around mitigation of risk from compliance factors for customers that will be harder for a pure technology play player of any stripe to to compete with, which is why I like where we are.

Alfonso De los Rios: Also from your side, yes, I think one of the main challenges we face just as a company, even though we're not a traditional player, it's true that we are not a company that started when AI agents were out there, right. And the biggest disruption that we may be facing in the next three to five years, it's probably the AIC just like the agents era in technology, right? So I think our biggest challenge is how much our infrastructure and legacy as a company can adapt to this new environment. But it's totally exciting because not only thinking about Nowports, but thinking about the whole industry we play in, there's a lot of room for improvement to bring transparency and improve communication among stakeholders. But just to give you an idea, when someone wants to move a container, they need to deal with more than 14 different parties, right? So that includes shippers, custom agents, etcetera. And AI can play a big role in that. So only our opportunity as a company is bigger. It's bigger than ever. But the challenge it's, it's big too, because we need to face a lot of companies that have less legacy and less infrastructure so they can move faster. And at the end of the day, just as a start up, I think moving fast, it's one of your biggest advantages.

Nicky Goulimis: Yeah, certainly feel the urgency to move faster. I mean, in part because, you know, in my world of fraud detection, if someone wanted to spin up an LLM wrapper and build a fraud detection model, you could do that in a day. Would it be good? No. But is it still a product? Yes. And do companies need to rely on a third party as much as they have before? Absolutely not. So I do think there's both tremendous opportunity, but tremendous competitive threat in this space. I mean, we focus on the underlying data infrastructure as well and providing that data because I would argue that the model piece by itself becomes more and more commoditized. But yeah, it feels, it feels more competitive and it also feels like the returns to some of the large incumbents. If we think about a Visa or a MasterCard in the space, in some ways it's higher because they have their own sort of proprietary data that they've built and accumulated across a huge network. And so, yeah, it's both much easier to start a business, but also I think harder to compete with big players.

Wiktor Schmidt: OK. So it's good to hear that you're, you know, we all are basically afraid of AI. That's kind of how to summarize.

Nicky Goulimis: My co-founder is like ‘We need to get to 80% of our code written by AI.’

Wiktor Schmidt: Fair enough. OK. I think we had some questions here so we can open the questions.

Question 1: This is Onic Palandjian from Group RMC. Europe versus the US is the question. So I Marg, Mario Draghi said that in the past 50 years there has been no European company. OK, listen to these numbers because these are important. That's worth it from the ground up. That's worth 100 billion, so 0 from Europe and at the same 50 years you have six companies in the US that started from zero and now we're worth more than one trillion. How can Europe bridge the gap? Or are we always going to be feeling, you know, behind, significantly behind the.

Wiktor Schmidt: US let me maybe just an expand this question because I think, you know, there's there's Europe, there's Latin America, there's US, but what's your perspective on on this on on, you know, kind of innovation coming from other parts of the world then then Silicon Valley, I guess this this, this.

Jack Mardack: It may not be purely innovation, it may be a perspective of the market. I mean, I think to, to launch as an AUS company with the US market in mind, let's say is immediately an order of magnitude or, or, or a couple different from the, the genesis of a European country that is perhaps starting with even the whole of Europe in mind. And so I, I'm not ready to concede that that innovation is purely an American phenomenon. It may be a go to market phenomenon, it may be a branding phenomenon. I think there are softer aspects to that success than pure innovation, just a speaking defense of European innovation.

Alfonso De los Rios: I want to add something here because it's something I've been thinking a lot about these past few months. So for example, when you put Latin America on the side with the US, it depends a lot on the industry, but the markets are kind of the same, right? So if you put all of Latin America together and the US side by side, the market ends up being super similar. Just as an example, logistics, the logistics market, it's twice as big as in the US. So then the question is like, why cannot there be a bigger logistics company in Latin America than in the US? And I think the one of the strongest answers are the barriers of entry, right? Because as I was talking, you have a lot of regulatory challenges. Every single country is different. And in the USI know you have regulation by the state, but it's kind of easier to launch a company just in the US than only Texas based, only California-based, etcetera. So this may sound like a joke, but I think regulation and deregulating a lot of of industries, at least in Latin America, it's a big factor that the latest example, it's in Argentina where you see where you are seeing a boom of startup these past few months just because of the deregulation of a lot of industries, right? So, I would say that that's a big factor. I'm not saying it's the only one because capital it's another one etcetera.

Nicky Goulimis: I'm torn because I think there's amazing companies being built in Europe and I think there's amazing talent and huge opportunities. And I also don't be ungrateful because I think like the venture ecosystem has changed a ton even in the last 10 years, seeing my founder frenzy opportunities that exist, but I think there's still a lot more work to be done. I think it's a real shame that companies built in Europe are not listed in Europe. I think it's a real shame that founder, you know, I see amazing founders who still struggle to raise capital and sort of asked to build a sort of, you know, crazy investment memo, which just feels inappropriate to kind of a culture of innovation. So I think there's, there's still more to be done if we want, you know, yes, we don't have the market size that the US has. And you know, there's, there's things around how easy it is to set it up and entities and regulatory barriers. But so yeah, I would like to see the work that Endeavor is doing, and I speak here for Endeavor Greece. There's a lot of work around like visas, around setting up a company, around the ability to raise capital like that needs to continue and get amplified across Europe if we want to use the incredible human capital that we have. But I think there's a lot more work to be done and I, and I guess just to personalize it, you know, my experience starting a company in the US and in Europe, you know, broadly speaking was great. But I still think I'm surrounded with too many contrasts every day of just like great founders not getting great opportunities and there being various barriers, whether mindset wise or even just regulatory around some of the innovation that exists.

Question 2: Hi, my name is Maria Hala. I'm an Angel investor. Just first of all, Congrats to each of you for what you have achieved on a macro basis or or or the geopolitical issues that goes on globally, what we'll consider as a threat for what you have achieved for your venture or probably an opportunity for the future of our venture.

Nicky Goulimis: I mean a big trend we're writing is obviously, I mean we've talked a lot about AI, so I won't repeat that. But you know, what we're able to do right now around honeypotting date and beyond I think is orders of magnitude different than what we could have done five years ago. So that's super exciting at the build level. At the market level, I think a big trend that my company relies on is the growth of real time payments. So if you look back 15 years ago, nowhere in the world had real time payments. Payments are slow, expensive, have friction, and now at this point 60 countries around the world, many of them endeavor countries, have real time payments infrastructure. And I think that's an amazing trend for what it does for financial inclusion, for economic activity, and, you know, for a faster, more interconnected world.

Alfonso De los Rios: Yeah, On my side only putting AI aside, I think one of the biggest changes or shifts that we're seeing as a company, at least compared to when we started, it's a geopolitical situation on tariffs and near-shoring slash China versus US international trade battle, right. So I would say that when we started all our pitch, all our focus and our ideal customer profiles where we help companies connect from Asia, from China to Latin America, right. And right now there's a survey that just went out from McKinsey that says that 80% of our customers or the customers in Latin America are analyzing opportunities to get out of China and centralized on other places like Taiwan, Indonesia, etcetera. I'm not saying that will happen, not at all. I think China, it's a super big economy with 80% of the exporting capacity, but I believe it's a trade that we see, right. And as a company, you need to adapt or you need to have flexibility to be able to serve your customers, not only with their current shippers in China, but under our on finding new opportunities across the world, across the globe. And probably that's a big challenge for cheap that we're doing on our ideal customer profile and the go to market.

Jack Mardack: Yeah, I would. The importance of the global money transfer infrastructure is certainly important to us. We it's it's, one of the foundations of our of our business that that has gotten easier and more cost effective in the last few years the. Another trend that's also important for us is the globalization of the workforce as companies of all sizes again cataloged, catalyzed and encouraged by the changes from the pandemic are thinking globally about their talent for the first time. That's really important.

Wiktor Schmidt: So my final question is, you know, being on the board for Endeavor in Poland and I think there's a lot of board members from other offices. You've been part of the network for, you know, a bunch of years now. Is there anything that you think that we want to say to Endeavor as what else can we do to encourage more people like yourself and then help you and then, you know, get you to help other the next generation of entrepreneurs, you know, become as successful as you've been so far?

Nicky Goulimis: I mean, I think we're all here at the behest of Endeavour Greece and you know, they're an incredible hustling team. I think you've done amazing things for Greece for connecting me to other Greek entrepreneurs. I think I sit on the board of an Endeavour Greece company, Last Direct. They're two amazing founders growing incredibly. It's a real privilege to get to see that. I think I've met some people who've become my friends over the years. I've been exposed to business opportunities and I think I'm a huge admirer of what they've done for the ecosystem in terms of, you know, some of the regulatory dynamics I was mentioning before. So I sound very sycophantic, but I honestly can't think of anything.

Alfonso De los Rios: No, totally just on my side. I would say for us, sorry, Endeavor has been one of the key partners that we have gotten on the, on our path these past few years to, to find advice, to find our network of trust, etcetera. And only in most or one of the most important events we have in the year as founders, it's the retreats that they do, the Outliers retreat, the Mexico retreat, etcetera. So those kinds of interactions are the ones that I value the most as a founder, just because sometimes you need to just discharge yourself with other people and understand their problems, explain yours and get some advice on that side.

Nicky Goulimis: Can I just add I don't think I said this emphatically but my Co founder is an Endeavor Mexico entrepreneur and his husband is also an Endeavour entrepreneur. So the Endeavour Entrepreneurs move across borders and that’s very powerful.

Jack Mardack: All that I would add to those great points is let's continue to evolve and advance the definition of what a fundable entrepreneur looks like. I think one of the consequences of the most celebrated ecosystem that we all have in our minds, the Silicon Valley, is that unfortunately the founders had a certain list of attributes. They tended to be male, they tended to be from technical backgrounds. And I think we're super excited as part of this idea that entrepreneurship itself is being democratized, that the attributes and the background and the experiences of inspiring fundable entrepreneurs continues to grow and evolve.

Wiktor Schmidt: Thank you so much. And we're right on time. So thank you so much for joining us. We're excited to have you on stage. Appreciate it.