Valentin Gönczy: A Vision for Accessible Renewable Energy

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My name's Leszek, and I will be talking to Valentin Gönczy about transition from traditional

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traditional careers to tech start ups and renewable energy adoption.

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Can you provide a brief overview of your career path leading up to your current role as a CPO

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and a cofounder of Cloover?

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Yeah. Sure. Thanks, thanks for being here.

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My background is pretty weird, I would say, because I actually studied law school, in Geneva and in the UK.

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Then I passed the bar in Geneva.

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I worked as a lawyer in a business law firm in in Geneva, 1 of the biggest 1 of, of Switzerland.

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And I also spent some time in a private bank doing a bit more of, compliance and banking law.

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So it was very far away from being, like, in a high growth start up.

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But in 2, 000 16, I decided to to launch my first software company. It was called Infinite.

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It was, some kind of TripAdvisor for nightlife.

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So you could, like, download the mobile app and then you could see, like, what's happening around

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you, book tickets and stuff like that.

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And we also had, another part of the business, which was, some kind of b to b SaaS for the the

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nightlife venues, so the bars, the clubs.

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They could, you know, manage their tables, sell tickets online, and so

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on. How did it work out, by the way.

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I mean, we had a great traction.

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We had more than 100 ks monthly active users on the mobile app.

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We sold more than 1, 000, 000 tickets.

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It was mostly on, in the French speaking part of Switzerland, Geneva and Lausanne, and we also expanded to Paris.

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But in 2020, COVID hit.

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And, I have to say we pulled the plug.

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And I think it was a good choice because, it's, you know, it did, it was for 2 years then that

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it was no nightlife or nothing.

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But it was a great experience for me.

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This is really where I kind of, like, learned how to to develop a bit to code.

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I I developed the the web platform myself.

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My cofounder took took, the lead on the on the mobile part, and it was, yeah, such a great experience to learn a lot.

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After Infinites in this first journey, I decided to work again in the the more, like, traditional, legal, industry.

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And then in 2000 so 2 year a bit more than 2 2 2 years ago in 2020 2, I decided I wanted to launch something else. I'm still young.

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I'm thinking I want to do, something cool again before, like, dying as a lawyer.

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So I decided I would launch, another project that I had in mind was called Iraq.

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The idea was to kind of democratize real estate investment, making it possible for everyone

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to invest in real estate from $10 in 10 minutes.

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That was the, like, the promise. Right?

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So I started working on that, building the MVP.

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We actually financed a first building with the community we had.

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But along the way, I met my founder, Jodock, which was already working on the idea of Cloover.

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And he kind of really hooked me with, like, the potential of Kruger and what we could do together.

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It was a great match in terms of, like, percent personality and skills.

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So, yeah, I decided that it very opportunistically, I decided that I liked the Clover ID and

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the Clover Vision more, and I just decided to to drop Brock to cofound Kluver.

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So I'm currently, sitting as a chief product officer at Kluver, making sure we can build a great

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product for for what we're going to do, which is to connect 1, 000, 000, 000 people to renewable energy.

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Do your lawyer background sometimes come come in handy with your work, like, at Kluber?

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Yeah. I mean, yeah. For sure. For sure.

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At Cloover, I'm I'm Gönczy tell more about what we do, but we we we have heavy regulation around us and so on.

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So it's it's quite useful to have this background.

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But also just in my day to day, I think it brought me, kind of a unique skill set of being very

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I think if you if you're a lawyer, it needs to be very, like, squared and like, you know, like

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follow the proceedings and so on.

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And it can be very boring, but if you apply these skills to something else like product development,

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it can bring you, like, a very A structured approach of things. Exactly.

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So I think I'm kind of very good at, like, just executing stuff, like, because I learned how to do that.

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Let's get into, the concept of Cloover.

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I'm really interested in that.

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I obviously researched it before.

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But, can you describe what core problem does Cloover aim to solve, and what are the primary

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services and solutions you guys offer?

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For, the core business of Cloover is to offer, embedded financing options to renewable energy installers.

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So the idea and, like, what we, like, we saw in the market is that now the mass market is coming to renewable energy, right?

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So in the 1st 20 years, in Europe, it was more like the tech savvy or the people very interested into the topic.

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And now we're seeing that it's gonna be, like, every house of, you know, Europe at some point.

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And we say it's Mars Market means this financing, right, because not not everyone will Can I borrow it?

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Yeah. 30 ks, 40 ks, 50 ks sometimes to to to buy like solar panels and the battery that comes with it.

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And in terms of financing, of course, you have your bank, right, you can go to see your bank,

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but we just realized that it was, like, not, sufficient, right?

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There is no embedded process.

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So, basically, the the the installer will tell the customer, oh, yeah.

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Please go take a loan with your bank.

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It would take 3 weeks.

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It would need to fill a lot of paperwork.

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The bank will do some, like, back and forth.

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And at the end of the day, maybe the customer will churn. Right?

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Because he will say, oh, it's too complex. I'll just drop.

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And that's brand roof which doesn't have solar panels.

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No specific, like, type of financing for that kind of ventures. I know. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

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So we decided that what was needed was to offer the installers like, yeah, embedded financing

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options directly into their sales channel.

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So the idea is that with Cloover, if you're sold by an installers, you're gonna see a customer.

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The customer doesn't want to pay cash.

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In 1 click, you can get access to a monthly payment instead of putting everything.

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So, basically, you get access to renewable energy savings from day 1 without, like, investing or risking anything.

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Where are you currently operating?

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Where where you can actually, you know, get those solar cells?

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So currently, we're in 4 different markets, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland.

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So that's sort of the 4 markets.

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But our core market is definitely Germany, which is the biggest 1, which is also the ones with

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the more, like, headwinds, I would say, with, you know, government pushing a lot for the energy transition.

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They are very dependent of the Russian gas, and they try to now also they switched off all the nuclear plants.

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So they really need to to go into that direction.

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Is it challenging? I mean, do you recall on the sort of compliance or regulatory front to operate in those different markets.

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I mean, I think, like, the, you know, the renewable energy might be regulated differently across

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different countries, even in Europe in Europe or EU.

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And, but also financing is a is a is a might be a challenge?

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III can only assume, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

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Yeah, no, definitely. I think there's 2 tricky parts on that.

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There is the first, the proper regulation, and this is more linked to the financing part of

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the business than the renewable energy.

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Because if you if you say financing, you say regulation. Right?

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And in every country, it's different.

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Of course, it's somehow harmonized in Europe, but still, you need to apply for different stuff.

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And so the idea for us is to try to be, not regulated as much as possible.

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But, of course, we have always some things we need to comply with.

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And that's a big challenge because every time we enter a market, we need to do, like, legal

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doing a legal analysis with law firms and so on.

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And then I would say the tricky part, like, related to renewable energy across market is more the, the subsidy part.

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Because every government is, like, giving you subsidies for for renewable energy, but it's completely

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different from 1 place to another 1. Right?

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Give you an an example.

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In, in Germany, it's very straightforward.

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It's like you get 0% VAT on your purchase.

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But in Sweden, for example, it's a tax deduction.

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All countries have their different, like, secret recipe, and that makes, like, very different

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very difficult to to build a product which is, like, you know, working across all lines. Mhmm.

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Can you provide an update on the, you know, current state of the of the business?

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You we've talked about a little bit about the markets, but, like, how do you consider your stage of the business?

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Meaning, do you consider you have already reached some kind of product market fit and it's now

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becoming a sort of scaling oriented company?

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How do you see that?

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Yeah. I mean, it's it's great timing that we record this podcast today because 2 days ago, we

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just announced our our seed realm.

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So we raised the perhaps. Yeah.

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We raised 114, 000, 000, in in funding, led by lower carbon capital, USBC.

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And also Can you repeat the number? It's 114. Nice. Yeah.

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But it was a a mix of debt and equity. Right?

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So we have some debt to finance the asset, and we have some equity to, you know, to to to grow.

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But it was a great achievement because we brought we brought in a USBC, right, lower carbon,

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which is the the fund, created by Chris Sakat, a famous investor.

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So it's it's a big, you know, it's a big sign to the market, and it will allow us to to grow.

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In terms of of where we stand today, I think we're not yet to the product market fit.

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I think we now see that there is something.

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We're onto something and we have traction.

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But I think we now need to, like, improve the conversion rates and, like, having maybe a more

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like a sales playbook, right, to kind of, like, being being able to scale to the next dimension,

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which is what we want to do in the next 18 months.

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But, yeah, I mean, we're also seeing that, we have more to do because basically what we offer

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now to the installers is embedded financing options.

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They're all happy to to take it. They really love it.

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But and why they love it is that the biggest player, I don't know if you know about Enpal or

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Eins Kung Fuent, these huge installers that cover a lot of installations in Germany, for example,

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but also in Europe, they play with different tools. Right?

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They have their own financing, department. They finance.

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They offer, like, a very attractive rates to the customer.

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They are very sophisticated, like, tech tools. Right?

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And but still, 85% of the installations in Germany are done by the the SMEs, right, the small

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installers, the mom and pop shop, I would say.

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And what we want to do is not only give them the financing tools to to serve those customer,

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but also the tech tools, right?

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So we were now, like, doubling down on our software to not just offer financing options, but

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also offer CRM, you know, sales tool to all these, you know, small companies that want to be

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able to compete with the biggest 1.

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So, actually, you wanna serve 2 markets in a way.

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I mean, you're really consumer centric on this front and the other front as well.

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Any who want to keep those both of us happy?

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I I think financing is a great entry to market because it's needed. Right?

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It's there is no doubt. Like, everybody wants it.

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Every installer is like, 'Yeah, for sure we're going to have more customers', right?

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Because otherwise they would not have been able to buy the assets, right?

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But then we see that, okay, now we are in the in the installer process.

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Why we should not, like, improve also their day to day process or something like that? Right?

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And how do you think how it works with the with the current state of the Gönczy, meaning rates

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are being a little bit higher than than usual?

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My first thought is that I mean, it's actually a great time to do this because you're getting

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ahead of everybody else because, like, eventually the rate is gonna probably go down.

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And that when, you know, maybe the it will boost the financing as well.

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I mean, it's gonna be cheaper.

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Everything's going to be cheaper, and probably it will the the demand will also grow as well.

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How I mean, that's that's my way of thinking, but how do you see that?

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Yeah. I mean, it's completely right.

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I think, it's probably the worst time ever to launch a financing business.

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But at the same time, I always think that it's great to build during bear market and Exactly. Exactly.

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When it you know, when there is the bull market. Right? Exactly.

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You're getting ready for the bull market. Exactly.

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And I really like that. But, yeah, you're right.

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I mean, of course, like, our financing options are more expensive for customers, so it means less conversion.

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People choose to pay cash more than, you know, 3 years ago.

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When you can when you're going to get financed your solar panel at 1%, 2%, of course you would take it. Right? So, yeah.

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I mean, and overall, I think also the solar panel and markets just took a huge hit.

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So 2023 and 2022 was a great were great years, right, because you had, like, the war in Russia.

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The cost of energy really increased a lot.

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And everybody was like, woah, I'm very afraid I'm gonna pay a lot.

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I need to to, you know, to to put solar panels on my roof.

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And basically what happens is that all installers in 2022, they were their order book was full.

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They didn't care about getting more clients.

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They were like, 'Yeah, it's nice financing.

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We don't need it.' Now we'd have, like, people lining up to pay in cash, right?

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So but now, like, market crashed, like, more than 40%, 50% in some countries.

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A lot of solar and sellers go bankrupt.

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Yeah, there is really a downturn in the industry.

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But again, I also see that as an opportunity to know, you know, to be ready when it comes back.

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Is it that the case that, like, many of those, you know, magnificent 7 companies actually was

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originated in the period of either some bubble that just burst or, like, some stagnation.

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I think that's the case. Yeah. For sure.

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I listened to a podcast about that the other day.

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It was, like, giving some examples, like, of, like, where very crazy people are back in the

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days, but they were pruned. Right?

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, can you talk a little bit about some some of the challenges that you

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are facing now that you want to solve internally? I

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mean Yeah. I mean, I think I think our biggest challenge and why we have not reached the product

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market fit yet is the this conversion rate that we get within Stellus. Yeah.

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I mentioned that because you need to understand that, I think the the CEO of those those companies,

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they understand very well, like, why financing is important, why also for them getting recurring

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revenue is important as well.

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But then there is a we have a hard time to pass this understanding to the sales rep who's on

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the field with closing customer.

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And this guy is not very sophisticated.

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He Doesn't know about financing, doesn't know how to pitch financing.

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You know, it's very important. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

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So we really struggle to reach that person, to get him educated, and then to be able to sell our product better, right?

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Because at the end of the day, we're a B2B2C approach, right?

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Without them, we're nothing, right?

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And for for us now, it's the main, like, priority to to try to to improve that.

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So maybe it's going to be, you know, like, education or incentivisation of this of the sales rep.

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But, yeah, we we really struggle to kind of make them being able to pitch a very sophisticated financing product.

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Let's talk about operations. You guys are a distributed team.

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Your team is spread across Europe.

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And I like to ask what tools, techniques, tactics work for you, you know, to to facilitate the

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remote collaboration to make it productive?

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Yeah. I mean, maybe a little bit, of course, around that is that so the company was a Swedish

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company at the beginning, right?

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So the watercolor is still in Sweden.

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And, so we that was also the first market we entered.

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We had some employees in Sweden, then we decided to enter the Dutch and the German market.

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So we have people there and there.

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And at the end of the day, we entered Switzerland because we decided to buy another startup

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that was operating in the The same area?

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Or And the German speaking RF. Okay. Yeah.

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So that was more opportunistic.

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But, yeah, at the end of the day, we just we found ourselves in, like, 4 different offices,

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people across, and, of course, all the challenges that come with it.

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I think that's I'm a big fan of remote working.

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I think, that's a very good thing that COVID brought us. Right?

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I think, you're very productive and so on.

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But I think it's also very challenging to to build a company culture around that.

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So our vision is always like communicate as much as possible and not just work.

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Because I think when you're working remotely and you do a call, you always just end up talking about the work.

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And when you see a bit of chitchatting, it just stops at the 2 minutes. Right?

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Because you're, okay, that's the the topic.

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Whereas if you were at the coffee machine, you probably would ask 5:10 minutes discussing well the weekend.

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So what we do is that we force everyone to do 111, 111 per week with everyone.

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So we're just, like, 15 minutes of chit chatting, like, how is it going and and so on, just

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to get to know each other.

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And, of course, we try to be as much as possible together.

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So we quarterly, we organize like, kind of summit in Berlin where we bring everyone everybody

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in to just, you know, you know, spend some time together. Yes. Yeah. There's that. Yes.

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Of course, I didn't mention, of course, the tools. Right?

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I think, for example, the the Huddl mode on Slack is very cool for remote team because it's

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not like you schedule a call.

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It's just like you you jump in. Right?

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And it feels like you would, like, open the door of your of your colleague. Right?

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So we also have this policy of, like, just, like, you huddle me whenever you want, and that

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kind of trying to reproduce that.

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Yeah. With that financing, it's I can assume that the team will continue to grow. Yeah.

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And in that sense, do you wanna keep some of those tactics going on?

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You want to do something more?

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I mean, the bigger the company, the harder it gets to be remote and have this culture growing like like. I said.

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I mean, I can only imagine that, like, I absolutely love this idea of having 1 on ones with, with everyone.

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When you're a 100 people or 200 people, it just, like, becomes impossible.

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And you have to sort of reinvent yourself or even, you know, the way you operate.

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But Yeah. I know. You're right.

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It's Gönczy be a challenge. Right?

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We we're now, like, a bit less than 15.

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We want to be 30 at the end of the year, and, so that's still be a good growth. Right?

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And we know that we're not going to be able to keep what what we do today. Right?

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So we will need to think about other means, other ways, yeah, maybe leveraging more on this

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summit that we're organising and

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make sure everyone in this Evercore, that seems like a really great idea.

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I mean, at least right now, you're based in Europe.

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So, like, flying over to Berlin doesn't seem like a big of a thing.

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Right? Yeah. I mean, people from Amsterdam, they can take the train.

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I also used to Yeah. Exactly.

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Night train from Zurich, so it's quite, you know, it's quite easy and I just wake up. I'm in Berlin.

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Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I I take trains to Berlin too, so it's it's easy way to get there, actually, flying. But anyway

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But, yeah, I mean, it's it's a challenge.

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We're aware of it, of course.

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And, yeah, I mean, being multiple markets as as upside for sure, but also downside.

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And, yeah, that's 1 of the big 1 really trying to to stick together.

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Also may Also on the founder level, right, we're distributed.

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My co founder Peter is in Amsterdam.

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Jarek is leading the team in Berlin and I'm in Geneva, And also, you know, just for us to stay,

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like, you know, together, spend some time is really important for us.

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Let's shift gears a bit and talk about product management and your approach to customer centric innovation.

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How does Kluber 8 identify and address the needs of its customers?

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It seems that you've got 2 kinds of customers And, I'm interested in your process, how you work with those 2 groups.

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Yeah. Yeah. I for me, it's very important to be customer centric because that's really the big

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mistake that I did in my previous company, Infinite.

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I think we were younger, and, we spent a lot of time thinking we knew what the market wanted.

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And we just discovered the hard way that it was not the case. Right?

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So when you and it was back days.

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We didn't have all the tools we have today to code rapidly. Right?

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So I would say we would spend, like, you know, 6 months in a feature just to launch it and see,

19:43 - 19:44
like, okay, nobody wants it.

19:44 - 19:48
And for me, that was really the the biggest learning ever.

19:48 - 19:51
So at Cloover, we have a very customer centric approach.

19:51 - 19:57
So how it how it works is that our our sales guy, they spend entire days with our customers.

19:57 - 20:00
So when I say customer, I mean installers here, of course.

20:00 - 20:03
Just trying to, you know, understand, like, what are their pain points?

20:03 - 20:06
How did they use the product? What what's missing?

20:06 - 20:11
And then they report to some kind of, they they can fill scorecards, scorecards.

20:11 - 20:17
And then we have, like, some some board where we see, like, recurring issues, and then we prioritize that on product development.

20:18 - 20:22
On the end customer side, it's always a bit more tricky, right, because we don't have a very

20:22 - 20:25
nice, very good, like, relationship with them.

20:25 - 20:26
We're still just a financer. Right?

20:26 - 20:29
They just pay, like, interest to us every month.

20:30 - 20:33
But then we try to leverage as much as possible data. Right?

20:33 - 20:38
So we use Google Analytics and all those tools to kind of see, okay, where did they drop?

20:38 - 20:40
What's the what's the Cloover and so on.

20:40 - 20:46
Do you speak with, any of those groups yourself or I don't because we do that mostly in Germany,

20:46 - 20:48
which is our focus market.

20:48 - 20:52
I don't speak I mean, I speak a bit of German, but probably not enough to go in front of a customer.

20:53 - 20:56
But, yeah, we try, the the account managers take care

20:56 - 21:03
of that. Can you share an example of customer feedback that significantly influenced your product development?

21:03 - 21:05
Was there any feedback like this?

21:05 - 21:09
Or Or basically, whether development or thinking about product?

21:09 - 21:14
Oh, yeah, for sure. I think 1 of the recent example we had is that we always thought we're gonna

21:14 - 21:19
deal, like, integration with CRM for the installers, meaning that we we're not gonna be pretentious

21:19 - 21:23
and say we're gonna replace HubSpot. Right? You can use HubSpot. Like, it's great.

21:23 - 21:24
Like, let's not try to do it.

21:24 - 21:27
Let's try to to integrate with the API of HubSpot.

21:28 - 21:34
And we always thought like this because we use HubSpot in a very sophisticated way at Cloover. Right?

21:34 - 21:38
We are very, like, very data driven and, like, excellence in that area.

21:38 - 21:44
And after talking to an installer and and after seeing what he was doing on HubSpot, he was

21:44 - 21:47
literally just, like, dragging and dropping, like, you know, cars on HubSpot.

21:47 - 21:51
We were like, this is probably not too complicated. Right?

21:51 - 21:55
And he was, like, he was, like, kind of struggling to we were struggling to build some integration for him.

21:56 - 22:00
And, basically, we just decided to to build a very simple CRM. Right?

22:00 - 22:04
And we end up seeing that, okay, most of them, it's enough for them. Right?

22:04 - 22:07
They don't need all the sophisticated features that HubSpot can give you, right?

22:07 - 22:09
Because they're just, like, medium sized companies.

22:10 - 22:12
You know, like, it's always already a good thing to have

22:12 - 22:17
a CRM. So CRM is a tricky thing, generally speaking.

22:18 - 22:22
Yeah. But it was something we thought we Yeah, it's impossible we go into that direction.

22:22 - 22:26
And then after seeing, you know, what was required and what was the pain point of the installer,

22:26 - 22:29
we're like, okay, this is definitely something we can do. And we did it.

22:29 - 22:30
And now we're super happy.

22:30 - 22:33
We're just using Cloover instead of having 2 softwares to use.

22:34 - 22:39
So this is typically something that if we if we didn't go to see the actual customers, like,

22:39 - 22:45
how it operates during 1 day or 2 day or 3 days, we would not have been able to, like, think about this feature.

22:45 - 22:50
And now it's 1 of the, I would say, the selling point of Kugel for some of the installers.

22:50 - 22:53
I've got 1 more question that is intriguing to me.

22:53 - 22:56
Can you talk a little bit about your financing journey?

22:56 - 23:00
So I think for us, there is 2 big challenges when it comes to funding.

23:00 - 23:05
There's the debt side because how it works, our model, we keep the asset on our balance sheet,

23:05 - 23:07
meaning we finance them, right?

23:07 - 23:09
So we finance the solar panel on our customers.

23:09 - 23:13
So we need to get this financing somewhere we're not going to use our own equity.

23:13 - 23:19
So the first challenge of Clou was getting those those credit facility. Right? Very hard. Very hard.

23:19 - 23:23
Thank Gönczy had, 1 of my cofounder had some very good connection about banks and so on.

23:23 - 23:24
And we managed to get a first facility.

23:24 - 23:26
Now we just raised the second 1 of 100, 000, 000.

23:27 - 23:32
So this is going fine, but it's very, very challenging, because it's like yeah.

23:32 - 23:36
Go see a bank and tell them you need 100, 000, 000 to finance, you know, solar panels on the roof.

23:36 - 23:41
They don't know what solar how a solar panel works, the economics, and so and so. Very challenging.

23:42 - 23:46
And that's I mean, that takes a lot of time to my co founder and CFO, Peter.

23:46 - 23:51
Then on the other side, the equity equity raise as well. Right?

23:51 - 23:55
So just to finance the growth of the company, I would say very hard as well.

23:55 - 23:59
At least the first round, the pre seed round, where, of course you have less to prove. Right?

23:59 - 24:01
We had some, we had an MVP.

24:02 - 24:03
We had like 20 customers or so.

24:03 - 24:05
Oh, nice. 20 end customers.

24:05 - 24:07
So just 1 or 2 installers.

24:07 - 24:12
So we had a little bit of traction, but still, like, very hard to to to get them on board.

24:12 - 24:16
But once you do, and that's my, like, my learning, once once you have your lead investor, then

24:16 - 24:19
all the other ones, yeah, they just want to get it. Right?

24:19 - 24:21
And all the 1 that passed, then they say, yeah.

24:21 - 24:23
Please please take my money. Right?

24:23 - 24:29
So it's very I would say, I don't really like the this this vibe of this of the the VC space,

24:29 - 24:31
right, because it's very it's all about optics. Right?

24:31 - 24:38
And I think for the 2nd round that we just closed now, it was, honestly, without any pretension or whatever.

24:38 - 24:42
It was quite easy in a sense that we had, you know, good headwinds.

24:43 - 24:50
I think we closed that in less than 1 month or 2 months, which is very short for for such, such, such fundraising.

24:51 - 24:54
But, of course, every time it's Gönczy be a challenge.

24:54 - 24:58
In 2 years, we're gonna have the series a, even more challenging, and I think it will never stop.

24:58 - 25:04
But, yeah, we are we really want to grow fast and for that we need we need we need money to

25:04 - 25:06
just, like, you know, accelerate. Yeah.

25:06 - 25:13
I mean, eventually maybe it becomes of a race and people, like, come up with the similar, products or copycats or whatever.

25:13 - 25:16
I think it's, you have to be fast. Exactly.

25:16 - 25:23
I think 1 of the so 1 of the learning from this round was that we wanted to show everyone that

25:23 - 25:26
in Europe, Cloover is the category definer. No. Right?

25:26 - 25:29
And that was what lower government said, 'Guys, we're a US fund.

25:29 - 25:30
We don't really invest in Europe.

25:30 - 25:34
Now we're doing it like Kluver is the what, so don't try.' That's kind of the message they wanted

25:34 - 25:36
to send to the other ones, right?

25:36 - 25:38
And that's the big round and so on.

25:38 - 25:43
And I think it's really important because what we're seeing now in this financing so it's going

25:43 - 25:44
to be a land grab, right?

25:44 - 25:47
It's going to be the quicker you execute, the quicker you get the market.

25:47 - 25:50
Because, of course, financing is complicated.

25:50 - 25:53
It's hard, but there is no real moat, right?

25:53 - 25:55
Everybody can finance everyone, right?

25:55 - 25:59
It's a very competitive market as well in the consumer side of the business.

25:59 - 26:04
So it's really about, you know, being fast and grab the market as a scoop as possible.

26:04 - 26:05
That's the mode, being big.

26:05 - 26:10
Exactly, execute quickly, being big, and then, you know, when you, like, reach certain points,

26:10 - 26:11
it's gonna be hard for competitors to

26:11 - 26:16
go after you. It seems that you have, you already shared a lot of lessons learned.

26:17 - 26:22
But anything else, like, you've learned over the years, recent years with with Cloover, with

26:22 - 26:27
previous ventures that, you know, was like a life changing thing.

26:27 - 26:29
You mentioned, like, talking with clients.

26:29 - 26:30
You mentioned this and that.

26:30 - 26:33
There are so many things to take away from our conversions so far.

26:33 - 26:35
Was anything else that we find critical?

26:36 - 26:43
Yeah. I think something that just comes to my mind is, like really working on having a mission

26:43 - 26:45
and a vision for the company.

26:46 - 26:49
And that's something that I thought was really, like, very theoretical.

26:49 - 26:51
Like, not like I'm very down to earth.

26:51 - 26:54
I like to execute, so I'm not into this kind of thinking.

26:54 - 26:59
But I remember, when we launched the company, we took like a week working on that.

26:59 - 27:01
Like, okay, what is the principle of Gruber?

27:01 - 27:03
What is our mission, vision?

27:03 - 27:06
We want to connect 1, 000, 000, 000 people to renewable energy. That's very powerful, right?

27:08 - 27:12
And this job that I thought was this work that I thought was not useful, it ended up being,

27:12 - 27:14
like, the biggest thing ever at Cloudera.

27:14 - 27:17
Because thanks to that, we just attract top talents.

27:17 - 27:19
We attract people that don't just want to work as a startup.

27:19 - 27:23
They want to chain they want to fix the biggest challenge of our generation.

27:23 - 27:25
They want to accomplish something big.

27:26 - 27:30
And when you, like, drive people with this kind of mindset, they just go to work every Monday

27:30 - 27:34
with a big smile because they feel like they've departed of, like, a big mission.

27:34 - 27:37
So I would say thinking bigger than you think always.

27:37 - 27:40
Like, we don't want to become a unicorn, we want to become a decacord.

27:40 - 27:45
And like, always this kind of, you know, thinking will just help, like, you know, drive all

27:45 - 27:48
your your company, like, towards your goal. I'd like

27:48 - 27:49
to end it with this thought.

27:49 - 27:51
It was really, really cool.

27:51 - 27:54
Thank you for your valuable insights, man. Thank you very much. It's cool, man. Thank you.

27:55 - 27:58
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