# 100 - Five Years of Building - Special episode with Three Amazing Founders,

[MUSIC] Good morning and welcome to entrepreneur Relities, the podcast of the Ventual Lab of the Munich Technical University. My name is Antoine Le Boyer and I'm the managing director of the Software and AI Tum Ventual Lab. Today is a special occasion. This is our 100th episode. And to market, we have brought about three founders who've already been guest on this podcast and who've built their company from Munich over the last five years. Flora Gasker co-founded ZMAI, now a Gofftxt startup that uses the AI to make public administration more accessible and efficient. And ZMAI won last year the prestigious Tum Ventual Award. Pablo Palafox co-founded HyperAbout a White Combinator-backed Azul Tiki AI Company for Logistics, which has now expanded and which raised a 44 million Series B and has among its customers the biggest world-frieth brokers. And Kevin Berghoff co-founded Quantum Diamond, a Tum spin-out which raised 152 million, sorry, not yet, and has installed its quantum sensing system in the United States and Taiwan for the first time with nine out of the world-tabging makers already engaged. Before we discuss with them, may I say a few words on the podcast itself, I started in September 2021 at a time when we couldn't do physical lecture because of COVID. I reached out to founders VCs and Academics and much too much surprise, they accepted to join an improvement podcast. Many told me that the episode were too long, which is why now I am at the time it takes from the center of unique to go to the Garshing Campus with Public Transport. I'm very grateful to Gabriella Montero from giving us the ability to have her work for the entry in closing music. Gabriella is one of the most amazing pianists of our time, but she has also unique capability for live improvisation. So I've received many requests of amateur pianists who want to know where to find the score. Sorry, the score doesn't exist except in the mind and figures Gabriella and it's a special and unique moment. Ferdinand wanted to tell a quick story, some may remember that I interviewed on the podcast Vladimir Kiel, who is the founder of Ask Leo. Now called Leo, who raised 30 million with A16Z. Vladimir was a guest in July 2024 and he actually told me that he founded the A16, which out to him after listening to the podcast. So there must be some people in Palo Alto listening to our discussion right now. But back to our three founders, three different sectors starting from the same point, unique, two five years ago. And the topic for us today is to step back to these last five years. So Flora, Pablo, Kevin, welcome back to Entrepreneurialities. Thank you, Anton. Super excited. Thank you. Great to be back. Thank you, Holesri. Let me ask you a question, sir. How are you guys since you've last run the podcast? Are ladies first? Thank you, Anton. Actually, I am amazing. This is such a nice reunion. I remember Pablo meeting you in Gaihing, I think, very early on at the conversation. Kevin, we run into each other from time to time in the Munich ecosystem. We were in this very first explore, entrepreneur to program together. I think you were a mentor there. And it's just nice to now look back on a really cool journey, I think, in terms of personal growth, in terms of company growth, and seeing you two equally succeed. So amazing, Lee, it's really, really cool. Thank you, Anton, for bringing us together. Pablo, Kevin, what about you guys? What's been happening since you last run the podcast? When was it, Anton? Maybe a few months ago, no, no. No, no, a few months ago you'd be just be joking. I think that you, you-- I'm blind. Yeah, I think that you just did your series A, and you did a live demo of the product on the podcast. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so it's been basically, yeah, actually two years now. So basically, those two years, yeah, we raised our series A around the time we had that podcast. I truly terrible at time. We're like, these past two years have been crazy. In the last two years, we basically have built a company from three people to 120 people. And now we're serving some of the largest companies in the world, like DHL or Telefonica. So very, very excited to tell more about that story. But yeah, thanks for covering that two-year timeline, Anton. Kevin, by the way, Kevin, I have to say something to you. The story of the episode is the most widely heard episode of all the episodes. Oh, I didn't know. That's great to hear. Yeah, I think also to me, it's very exciting to be back. Probably we met once in San Francisco. So I think we also did great progress. So we are on the deep tech front and we now have shipped the first tools to ship makers in Taiwan and in the US. Just came back from three weeks in the Bay Area. So I think this is also to me very exciting last couple of years. I'm not sure where we are in five years, but very positive development that what we pitched a couple of years ago is now reality, which is if you pitch, you always aim for the best case and some things actually played out to be the best case in a row for us, which is very positive. Now, you must be aware that a lot of younger founders are looking at you as Ron Madelso, do you feel older than five years ago? Maybe I can start. So I think I see this as well, right? You're invited to all kinds of panels and you can pitch and then you have this kind of successful entrepreneur, but I think what I realized is always something is missing, right? So it looks from the outside that we have now all the capital that it takes, but then we need to compete on talent. We need to hire more people. We have issues in shipping quantum technology out of Germany to the US. So I think there's always a lack missing in entrepreneurship. So sometimes you have the funding, then you need the people, then you need the product and it's always weak to some extent. So I think the notion of they are the grown-ups entrepreneurs that are done. I think you're always building on the weakest lack. Honestly, when I look back at the golf tech sector when we started out, it was basically nonexistent. So a few people were trying to digitize the public sector in Germany, but investors weren't touching it because it's such a slow market segment. It's so hard to sell to this segment. And now there's many amazing golf tech startups, not too many, but there's great founders succeeding. We have 250 customers in Germany who are all using AI technology. And if you think about the public sector in Germany, this is really two worlds colliding. So if I look at this development, basically whole new market coming up and now being at the forefront of this and being successful at this, this makes me feel old because it feels like such a huge development. But also I have the same feeling as Pablo. It's like time flies, but so much is happening. It could also be 10 years, I don't know. But it could also be too much. For me, it's the same as for you guys. There's always a next battle. There's always something else that you're not there yet. So I think it's actually good to keep that framework as you were saying, Kevin. There's always something to fight for. There's always going to be the next challenge, the next competitor, a bigger competitor, a bigger challenge. And I think actually that's what keeps us all improving. Because to be honest, I was thinking about it the other day, if we just didn't have anyone competing against us in our markets, it would be pretty boring. You would just not innovate. You would just stop innovating. To some degree, that is what happens to monopolists. I was just casting with someone about a certain job network. I will not say which one, obviously, we can understand which one it is. But that network is not really improving per se. And this guy was complaining about how they're not innovating because it's a monopoly, right? But in a sense, I think as much as we all want to monopoly for our own businesses, it's fun to have the competitor behind you doing the next thing. They did that. Now I need to do 10x better. So I think it just keeps us all improving as a society even. I think that every startup, yours might as well have had some moments which we'll basically life and death. So can you speak about these? Because once again, a lot of these founders who look up to you guys believe that you've done everything okay without any problem. May I quickly start? So we died two times already, in a sense, as a couple of others has had many moments of dying in the sense because back in 2022, when we dropped out of my PhD at TUM, I brought Louise, one of my co-founders to Gacking and then we went to Neufallant to live together and build out of a small apartment with how your third co-founder working remotely from the US. At that time, we were building something completely different and we killed that idea and we built something else. We killed that idea. Then we got into IC. We thought we had something and he's like, "Ah, this actually doesn't work. We killed that idea." So in a sense, we've already died many times. So it's just like always reinventing yourself. I think the most important thing is to never give up if you truly want to make that happen. And for that, the most important thing is that the team remains super solid. IC says you're more likely to die out of company suicide than competition, meaning the worst thing that can happen if there's founder and misalignment. So that's the story for us. And I can't strike this enough because with pivoting, we've had kind of a similar experience. We've kind of changed topics two times by now. And the last one was actually, in the beginning, more like a gut feeling and also some data, but it's not that I mentioned that problem. It's something of the market dynamic. If sales is not working, you're like, "Hey, is it my internal process? Is it a market dynamic? What is it you're trying to find out?" But you have a gut feeling something is not working and the dynamic is not ideal. And actually with our last pivot, we had 14 months of runways. So basically, we were fine. It wasn't like we were back against the wall. We need to do something. But something was telling us, "Mmm, this might not be a winning thing. Let's try to rethink this." And I think this is something that I also now feel is a great learning and why I would invest in a second-time founder, it just takes a certain confidence to trust the SCAT feeling and to really say, okay, I'm going to make a hard decision. I'm going to let people go. I'm going to just change this whole organization and work on something different and being able to have this experience and now I'm not scared of doing it again and again like you say, Pablo, this is something that is really important and that takes a bit of confidence and experience to successfully do. And I think on all side, what we learned, it wasn't a hard pivot, but we learned that just selling those quantum sensors is not enough. So we learned from the customer that we need to provide kind of fully integrated systems. So we moved from something super scientific to actually then hiring engineers, system integrators, machine learning experts to make more sense of what these deep tech sensors can actually read out. So really, then also one of our co-phones actually left because she was more on the material science and she was excited about the material and not building, sort of say, microscopes as a fully integrated system. So I think this was also a shift where some people left where we learned that in the in the former market of just selling the basement theory, it's not enough and we really have to go deep into customer problem to be successful. So this is probably a third dimension to it. Kevin, one question specifically for you, you are a non-physicist in the world of physicists. How did you, where are your physicists before? I was not. No, I think this is a very unique setup, but I think I feel more and more comfortable in this role because what I see is that in particular a deep tech, there's a lot of non-physicist work that is needed from how do we get through the procurement process of a company such as Intel or Infinion, right? It's the technical validation is there, but then it's a lot about budgeting, it's about approval, it's about corporate politics. So I think the bigger the company gets the more the business side gets relevant. There's a lot about payment terms and cash flow, customers pay only at acceptance, we have to pre-finance the material. So it's very, very cool what we do on the physics level, but in the end I need to build a backbone that the physicists can do what they are best at is developing those quantum sensors. So it's a very interesting space. I really got into the rabbit hole, so I would say it has trained semi-quorum physicists, but I think it takes this business perspective in particular as we know as a build officer in Taiwan and in the US, in Japan, Korea. There's a lot of non-technical work that just needs to be in place to be successful. Laura, I don't think that you were training and understanding how government works and that was not your initial domain. How did you manage this transition? I think we just did what basically you recommended on to one. We just do very deeply into the reality of our customers and we just try to understand what exactly they do every day, how their processes work. We just basically set next to them and understood every tiny bit about their work to really understand what is the problem that we can solve with technology. In contrast to just going there saying, I have a nice take, I have a nice idea, please provide this. So yeah, just really spending time with them and we still do, we have a very tight network of great customers that basically hope on a call with us all the time to give feedback and to really explain also how their realities change and then we can adapt. So this is one of the biggest principles and I think you were the one who gave us this book of build measure learn. So this is basically what you do. You measure whether something works and best you measure it by looking at your customer using the software and then you continue the cycle. I believe I remember well when you're on the podcast you spoke about logistics but you've started going to other domain. Can you describe what you are doing and how again you learn about the domain? Yes. Domains. So we started building AI agents that would call drivers to see where they were which was a pain point that one of my co funders had had in his prior life as the CFO of one of the largest olive oil distributors. So we started with a very particular task and then we realized that in order to serve the enterprise, in order to serve the biggest companies in our initial niche of logistics, we would actually have to build more of a platform. So less of a point solution, more of a platform that would actually allow us to build different agents for different parts of the house. That was the biggest realization for us that in order to work with DHL or some of the largest ocean carriers, those big boats that actually moved the world, billion dollar companies that have a lot of smart engineers. We would actually have to build the infrastructure for them to build their own AI agents. That also made us realize why we're not just building AI for logistics. We're actually building AI for operationally complex businesses that have to have agents coordinating work. It's not just about building a customer support agent that just picks up a phone call and says, how can it help? And then just creates a ticket in a ticket in system. That agent in a supply chain company, that agent in a tail co that agent in a utility company, they actually have to turn around and solve the problem and to end. If Flora has a leaky boiler at her house and calls her utility, that agent should be able to help Flora get a technician dispatched to your house to fix that leaky boiler. If you can have an issue with your router with whatever tail co you use, you're expecting for that problem to be solved, not just an agent to say, I'm just going to escalate you to a human, which is really what AI has been leveraged for in the first couple years of AI agents. So now we realize we need to go to step deeper and basically serve the those operationally complex businesses. So to wrap it up into an starting supply chain, they were working with tail cos, utilities and home and auto insurance. So that's the real economy as we call it for us. There is this tendency to say that the education you get in Germany, Allah, you know, you are searching for the German perfection. So is this true? Is this a positive for founders? And basically, did you get value from your education at tomb? Who wants to start? Someone has to start. I'll start super quickly because mine was very like relatively shorter to you guys. I was there since my masters and then a couple years for the PhD. What I saw against our versus Spain is that it's a lot more practical, a lot more flexible. At least during the masters, I was able to choose what things I wanted to study, which basically allowed me to go deeper into the field of deep learning and computer vision, which was my passion. So I would say like kudos to the education system in Germany. It's at least from my perspective, a lot more flexible than what I encounter in Spain. Actually, I studied abroad in the US and I found it very practical hands on, but also, I don't know if this is going to be a popular thing to say, but also kind of easy compared to what I had to do here at tomb. And I think there's something that solving math problems and really hard equations teaches you, which is frustration and being able to just stick to something that is really difficult and a big pile of rubbish in front of you that you just have to keep digging and have to keep thinking about. And then you have to switch kind of, and I had to learn to take pragmatic and fast decisions without getting lost in data and taking too much time to get moving. And if you actually have this training of being very, very diligent and also very sticking to the challenge you want to solve, but then switch to being pragmatic and fast, I think this is where real magic evolves in founding teams. And I've been very fortunate to found a company with a trained mathematician and a computer scientist. I myself have background in information systems. So we have a tech background, but we also have a business sense. And I think it's the perfect combination. And it's great education that we have been able to get by the way for free, which is amazing and journey as well. Yeah, you took my point. So I think I can only agree to this. So my co-founder did his PhD in quantum sensing at tomb. And I think super solid education, I think whenever we have technical discussions, he's on top of everything. I think what was the kind of point that also me as a business founder added to the team is this you have to leave the building to actually understand the application. And what I found interesting is that when they did the research in quantum sensing, they never talk to any company in the field. So they spend four or five years of understanding how those sensors can be used in drug development, in cancer research, in bacteria, in battery science. And they never ever talk to any German or European company on what could you do with the sensors. So I think this is something where Europe can be better on top of education system is by actually linking what has been done on the research side to what is the economic output to actually get more of those tea tech companies. Can I stay on the point Kevin because if I remember well, not only were you able to leverage the lab, which was at tomb, but also your first test, I don't know if we need to call them customers, but the first people that tested the products were actually German depends how you phrase it. We had German companies that test the browser international ones. I think what made us pivot is then the connection to really the semiconductor industry. So we were part of this Intel Ignite program where we really understood how the semiconductor industry can use those sensors in their processes. And this happened in Germany. And there's also some semi-manufacturing in Europe and in Germany, but that was the very beginning. And Flora, same question for you, what was it to work in Germany? And Pablo, you're waiting for you because you're not in Germany right now as the last one. And Flora, what about having customers in Germany? I think right now there's so much to talk about Germany and also Europe being so restrictive with regulations compared to other other. countries and I honestly think that we have a very healthy relationship to adopting tech when it comes to the sector that we work with so I don't want the government to experiment with citizen data with my personal data as a citizen. I think it's good to be a bit careful about just applying technology but what I'm seeing is that there are young people working in the sector that really want to have a workplace that is modern and that uses technology, they use Chachibiti at home, they want to use AI in their workplace in the public sector and I think it's a great combination of knowing that there is a big need to adopt technology to stay ahead and to stay efficient. There's some applications here in Munich in order to get financial aid for housing take 18 months to be processed. This is something that the public is just not accepting anymore. Leveraging technology to become faster and more efficient but being a bit careful with the data that we are dealing with I think it's a good path and I enjoy working with the sector because every DC people want to change this frustration that the citizens of Germany are feeling with the administration. I'll blow you on the US. I know that you did your big pivoting when you were in the US but could you imagine you could have done the same thing by staying in Europe? Yeah I think what was maybe what could have been harder for us initially was raising money while in Europe. We actually did raise our first check while in Europe and to be honest we already got like a cut in valuation. The first check we got was like half of the valuation that we would have gotten if I had made that phone call from an office in San Francisco which is funny because the VC actually told me like oh yes since you were calling me from Munich I assume you were like an European company so then what are you telling me? Anyways that's the only annoying piece now that the venture space in Europe is still like lagging a little bit behind like it's less aggressive than in the US but I certainly think that there's so much potential in Europe in particular in Germany for sure in Spain we're growing a lot of the enterprises that we serve in Europe are our Spanish or friends or German and it's picking up. I think folks are like seeing that they have to get on that boat. They have to on the AI boat. I was in Munich a couple of weeks ago the Deutsche Telekom leadership presenting the work that we are doing and kind of devising and scoping some of the work that we are going to be doing together and I just saw that those folks were like give me more like I just we just want to hop on the AI wave and we need to leverage that. I mean the telecom in particular is extremely advanced but there's many other companies that are already picking up the AI pace. So I think yeah two flowers point it's let's do it with with care and being mindful of of data privacy but also let's not have like all of the AI act and regulation like stop us from going fast because we can also like lose the battle some degree if we put ourselves too many rocks on the on the way does that make sense? Partically on the AI act. The worst possible thing ever invented. And I want to add something I think there's really a lot of stuff on the line working with the public sector also means that we see people lose trust in the public administration and this is actually threatening our democracy so it's really time to act and to adopt technology and I can't strike this enough it really is an important point in time to do it. I want to say I'm different in between Europe and elsewhere. One of the thing that very often comes when we discuss with founders is the D-2 attract talent. So I like to get sent for each of you what you are doing if you are looking for talent only in Germany if you are bringing talent from elsewhere if you want people which are going to be aware who wants to start on this topic. You know I am very happy to start and I think what we have been seeing is that we can attract high profile people from across the world so we have people from the US from Asia in particular that have made a career in trip making and I think actually Germany and also Munich is a very good place because it offers a good combination of business but also then private life and leisure activities it's a very good health care system, good pension system. I think people move here from other countries because it's a good place. I think what I'm lacking is the appreciation from the governmental institutions to support this so we have had many discussions on visa and all those oftentimes cany-miguing and all those special German things that you need to get in place and from my perspective it should be way faster right like also as a society we need those people are they are highly skilled after the first month they probably have paid that much taxes that we should maybe even pay them the flight ticket to come to Munich to work here right so I think there I can't understand how it takes six months to get a visa for like a quantum physicist to come to Germany to contribute to the society but that's a battle I'm fighting with the respective institutions. I'm working on it as well Kevin. You're building like fighting that battle because it's absurd to me that our governments are not just like attracting all the talent in the world like it's it's so obvious now like how do you make it easier for these people to come here? Same with the US like now with the like the situation as well with the visas like getting treated here to come here is like why would you not want to have the smartest people in the world come to your country maybe we're getting political here but I think it's it's to everyone's that manage in in Europe to attract that talent so hopefully Kevin and Flora you guys are fighting that battle. For us it's also very easy to find talent in obviously our our Spanish origin so we we do leverage that access so we do find a lot of great engineers out of out of Spain and now we're actually actively recruiting in in Germany so definitely looking forward to to find the talent there and and hopefully we we can we can increase you know that the awareness of startups being a viable option to work at I think in Europe most people are like what the hell is a startup like like people don't even know that you can actually work at a startup and has and have a decent job like is that what do you guys are seeing as well for a gaming like are people is still afraid that they join a startup and then is going to like die next year or something like that what are you guys seeing there? Absolutely I agree I think there's like people working in our company where the family is asking what's that company what do they do? Oh they're small do you think they will exist in the future so it is a different it is a different game but I think the people who work now with us especially the ones who have joined the startup for the first time they appreciate it so much that they are close to leadership that they can make their own decisions they have so much freedom to operate and to have ideas and to see their ideas come to life that I don't think they was they will join a corporate after that again so we are creating more people who want to work for startups. Yeah and I think we we have seen a very interesting trend that senior people between 40 and 50 years old leave those big corporates that everyone knows and Finneon and size and ASMR and the likes because they are bored and it's a very nice high profile company but they want to get their hands dirty so we have those people who already have a family and then I am sometimes confused that they join us as a company but they say hey you are moving so far there's not a lot of corporate politics I can really get things done and that's very interesting to me because in our case we really have to get those fresh graduates from university and team them up with the people who work in semi-manufacturing and that's something where we even get an inflow of those very seasoned experts that want to get started all over and they are surprisingly open to such an adventure. I want to ask a quick question because the three of you I think that you know I think Flora you have German VCs whereas both Kevin Pablo have international VCs speaking of preconception is it your experience that your open VCs are not aggressive enough and ask profitability too soon from their investments? 100% like not just yeah yeah like 100% like European VCs are should probably some of them should rename themselves to a not definitely not venture capitalist. I'll say that growth venture like growth funds in Europe are more similar to the growth funds in in the US like the the profile just equates itself a little bit more at a certain point but like seed rounds and pre-seed and all that stuff there's no real pre-seed or seed in Europe just there will be exceptions obviously but what I experience was not that like I experience folks asking me for numbers when I just had an idea and then I go to someone in the US and they give me money with just an idea so there's there's that there's definitely more risk appetite in the US versus in in Europe for sure at least that's what we saw I don't know Kevin if you guys saw something different. Yeah I would agree I would agree I think what we were very lucky in the beginning to get also the support from the on Tuneima tune with like a first convertible to get started to make it a bit more than an idea and then I think what we have on a positive side in Europe is this huge ground scheme there are grounds and non-luty funding at a variety of points that you can leverage and I think this is something that European VCs that even more look at right which maybe is not helping but I think this is something as a European founder you can leverage to get some more runway to experiment and get to more than just an idea that I would your experience. I totally agree with Kevin so like I said when we started out Goughtech wasn't really interesting or attractive to investors at all so we really did need to create traction in order to show that there was a market for what we were trying to do so we also got funding from from grants non-dilutive which were really cool for us to make our first steps and then showing our first revenue and then people starting to get interested and saying, "Oh, you can actually earn money with this." I think for our business model and for our market, especially with not being as dynamic, it's very suitable how we have structured our shareholders, our investors, and probably it wouldn't be so suitable for a super aggressive year as we see fund. So I think this just strikes this very important principle again that you really have to choose your investors and the way you fund your company well in order to be fit with your business model and your market. Kevin, you've said that you've been able to leverage the work that was done in a lab which was very advanced work. Do you feel that Munich is a place where new tech actually gets created? Do you feel that you have also to go and look at what's happening in other places to get a sense for what is the leading technology? And then we'll go to Flora and Pablo. I think what was our big advantage in the beginning is that in this quantum sensing world there are maybe three leading labs globally, one is the quantum sensing chair of Dominic Bucher and Gashin and this is why we were always kind of on the highest scientific base we could start from. And this is why also there wasn't this kind of US competitor that was two years ahead that had maybe 10X more money. So we were really starting off maybe on power or even ahead of what was being done in the US. And this was like a big advantage then we were lucky to get the IP out of to quite quickly so they think the university also supported. But I think those cases exist where there is high end scientific research or actually some innovation but then you just have to keep the pace to actually be ahead of competitors that might be in other places in the world. Laura? Yes and I think keeping the pace has become even like a lot more important when it comes to AI. I think it's really different how the product lifecycle basically is so much faster and it's so unpredictable what happens with the underlying technology and whether products will be obsolete the next day. So what we basically do, I mean we give access to technology so our market segment is so far away from technology application that we provide a way for them to leverage. AI for their specific problem works really well and robustly and it does do crazy things that scares them and that are just dangerous to do in the public sector. And then we monitor what is happening with the underlying technology and we really try to always find the latest things to apply to this and at high speed with a very very capable team to move fast with a lot of things on our own. We want to add to our software so I think it's not so much about research and applying that but for us it's more about really understanding what our customers need and it would in what forum they want to have it and having this deep knowledge of our sector and then combining it with technology with tech capabilities. Pablo, you're on Silicon Valley so what do you think? Yeah, our research team is between San Francisco and Barcelona actually most of our product is developed here in San Francisco next to our CTO Luis. For us it's really important that whatever we build comes from customers so to your point Flora. We have a heavy component of being at the customer like building with them and for them so we bring a lot of those learnings back to the product. So it's less on having to have access to certain technology from the labs or from like not just like the research labs but like the. The universities sorry now it's confusing because research labs today mean something different than a few years ago right. But basically for us is is more of the connection to the customer being on site let's some like bringing the latest from a from a university lap in a sense. I have a cheesy question since we spoke about the last five years you could sense for what's going to happen to you guys and your company in the next five who wants who wants to try to answer. I honestly just I just look six months ahead in this world it's probably useless to think five years from now right now like so so much is changing so fast. You just you just got to be really close to customers like Flora was saying and get a sense of what is needed because again from one day to the other there might be a huge breakthrough in technology that changes entirely how you operate. So we we genuinely just think pretty much like 12 months ahead our business plans are are pretty much just 12 months ahead and investors are not asking us for like tell me or three three year plan like you know a lot can happen and we just stay focused on delivering today. Is very interesting I think we are maybe a bit better suited to plan because we have those kind of long sales cycles and like in semi manufacturing there's a lot of innovation but at the same time. TSMC or video don't change overnight and I think what we are trying to get to the point where this quantum sensing approach really is implemented in the facts and then at some point you might be able to say every chip that has been manufactured was tested quality control. And then we're going to be able to inspect it by our technology which is a very big claim we still have five years but that's at least on the on the long term vision and what we are aiming to build. I would actually like to answer this from a from a personal perspective I think building a company really makes you grow a lot in terms of what you're capable of doing in terms of the confidence you have in your abilities and I think we are now a team of 20 people and I've thought a lot and learn a lot about leadership and really getting ready for the next stage because I feel like I kind of want to want to grow to this 200 people company and being CEO of this company just in terms of personal development and always going out of this comfort zone and I think the company is going to grow accordingly because I just want to have this environment of personal growth and our goal is to actually ship our product to all 11,000 municipalities in Germany we now have 250 so it's still a bit of a way to go but it is so beneficial for all of them. It really makes a difference how citizens deal with the public administration in Germany that people can start working here faster that come from abroad that everyone just has an efficient and an a great experience and then trust in our democracy is going to stay and I think all of these things just just drive me a lot to make all of this change happen and I think five years 10 years let's see how long it takes to really get this thing going. And I'm coming to the classic closing questions so do you have any advice for listeners. Who wants to start? Don't be shy. Mine is a simple one you mentioned before and when build and talk to users like that that cycle like if you want to build a company it's as easy as building something people want and being super close to customers. Kevin was talking about that. Flora was talking about that as well how like just being there with your customers understanding how those municipalities want to leverage AI how those those cheap manufacturers need to review their chips. If you're not there if you forget about the customer then nothing matters and to be honest I think that's what happens to like these carpets they just forget about the customers and they just look at numbers and spreadsheets and margins and they forget about the ultimate value creation. So if you are closer customers and are building for them to make their lives easier. I think that's ultimately what helps you stay on in the game. Think and when you said don't be shy and this is my my advice trust your instincts trust your capabilities we all let how we say in in German we are all just cooking with water. I'm giving my best every day it's kind of working I think public heaven you are the same so don't be shy go out there and build your company. And maybe my combination of the two of you so I think I thought a lot about luck versus you made it happen in the end so I think leaving the university environment and going to trade fairs talking to customers is where then the luck can actually hit you or approach you right so I have this one story in in Taiwan where I randomly at a non perfect trade show. I met the former director of gsmc and he was like okay I hope you for free I made my career and this is cool and in hindsight it looks like oh luck but I probably was also 10 other shows where nothing happened and this giving your spare your self exposure to being hit by customer or by a supporter can only happen if you leave the the known environment. I can't believe thank you so much I hope to get you in for the 200 episode of virtual really. Thank you so much thank you thank you thank you. 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