Business Models of the Future with EGYM Founder & CEO, Philipp Roesch-Schlanderer

You're listening to DeepTek Unleashed, an NGP capital podcast from the founders for the founders, the challenges and the moments of magic. Welcome to DeepTek Unleashed. I'm your host, Christian Noskeh, a partner in yet any of you capital, and if you're involved in running a DeepTek startup, this podcast is for you. Each episode we invite a leading European DeepTek founder to share their insights into a different aspect of founder life and the challenges, opportunities, and moments of magic each one brings. We began our journey looking at sales, first enterprise sales, with Peter Fankhouser from anybodies, and then selling to governments with Cyril Kabar at Charc Robotics. In the last episode we talked about team building, smarter from pedal, and how our hub building model can help European DeepTek startups compete globally. Today we're looking at the big strategic questions that are the foundation of any company, choosing a business model and how to create value for your customers and shareholders. Our guest, Philipp Rochlandera, CEO and founder of EGEM, a company bring the health and fitness industry into the digital age. The focus is on moving healthcare from repair to prevention with smart integrated strength equipment and data enabled tools which provide AI-developed personalized workouts and health metrics tracking and interconnectivity wherever their users are. This grand vision is backed up by some very healthy stats, making EGEM a true European DeepTek success story. To name just a few, EGEM is now valued at over one billion dollars. They operate in 40 countries and have over 14,000 corporate customers with over 6 million people training with them every month. It's quite impressive. They're obviously doing something right when it comes to these big strategic questions. Let's find out more. Philipp, welcome to the show. It's a great day to be here. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming. Maybe to put your own words to it for those listeners who really don't already know EGEM, maybe can you talk a bit about your background, how EGEM started the whole journey, and then we can go into details. Yeah, sure. I was born and raised in Germany. I played a lot of soccer. Then moved to the United States from my studies and there are my friends from university pulled me into the university's own gym. There was really, for me, the first time in my life, I went to a gym and I didn't quite know how to work out properly. They were all these different machines. I was then asking people, because I'm a quite curious person, I would say. I was asking people, "Hey, how do you work out properly?" Most people didn't know. I was like, "Wow, but this is quite exhausting." Many people do something random and really smart people. Then why would they do that? I basically found out that working out is basically the single most important thing one can do for their longevity. This was what I mainly had in mind that people that go to the gym want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I realized they are making up something like 0.2% of gym users and most of the people are there for their longevity goals. They still have no queue how to work out. I learned a little bit more about who is actually going to the gym and I could categorize basically three groups of people. One group are expert users. They know exactly how to work out successfully. It's roughly 10% of global gym goers. Second group are people. Also 10%, they don't know what they're doing, but they're willing to move mountains, they buy personal training services. They also have a very good chance of working out successfully. Then there's these 80% that don't know really what they're doing, but they also don't really ask the personal trainer to support them. Those are the people that do something random like I did. For example, I don't know stepping on a treadmill and press the Quick Start button, which has nothing to do with my VO2 max, has nothing to do with my training goal or doing on strength machines like three sets of 15 reps for the random training weight. Basically, the idea was then born like can't we deliver a service to every single person in the world that they can have a workout as if they had a human personal trainer next to them, but it's all done by technology. If we were able to do that, would we then be able to make a huge impact on the largest market in the world, which is healthcare? More than 50% of money spent in healthcare is spent on chronic conditions. The healthcare market is 99.9% repair business. We could literally save trillions of dollars for our society and have a happier healthier population if people would be a little bit more spending money on prevention. The idea was always, hey, let's first fix the gym product in a way that everyone can work out successfully. That's why we claim we make a gym work for everyone. Then two connected to the healthcare market. Basically, that kind of has, I think, but many deep tech founders have in common with me is that we needed to first spend like six, seven, eight years of basically just building out our software platform or hardware, and then only start kind of really more monetizing towards healthcare, which is what we do right now via employee benefits. We are kind of equipping those dreams with software and our connected hardware. Then we sell to employers via the most popular corporate benefits, for example, in Germany and in France for employee health. Employers sign up with us and then all their employees can go to every single, basically every single German Germany and France and so on. Also, growing number of gyms have our software and our connected hardware so we can help those employees not only to go to the gym, but also to really work out safely and effectively and to also report back the data. I would say I'm doing this now for 14 years, but we're still at the early innings of what we are doing because we are going to invest more into clinical studies and then that and really make an impact on healthcare side of things, but right now we're also very busy in scaling just our software connected hardware and our corporate subscription business to as many employers and employees as possible because healthy workforces, they don't only live longer and better, but they're also more productive and have less sick days. Yeah, that's so true. We talk a lot about deep tech here and you mentioned a lot of some different things connected hardware and software and so on. Can you maybe just summarize, are you juicing hardware yourself, are you just spying also shelf? There's always make or buy, right? And how deep do you want to go into this whole hardware versus how much you want to stay away? We had a lot of people talk about this in previous episodes, so just curious where you stand on this before going into the business world. Yeah, I mean, you know, five years ago, an episode of our revenues was hardware. Today it's 20% and the majority is subscription revenue, but the hardware is actually, you know, our mode. It's like how we are different to other companies that sell corporate subscriptions because this way we can really provide a solution. And one of the things that we figured early on was, okay, we have this very big vision. It's mission critical for our own smart strength machine, but we also need to have interoperability with all other providers. So we need to have like, like, you know, four of the five largest category been making the world work with our e-jump cloud for the software on their machines. And so like, one of the things that we always had to choose very carefully is what are we doing ourselves and where do we partner? And always having most important data solution in mind, we wanted to have a fully connected training floor. And there are some tactical reasons by you need to have a little bit of hardware, but you don't need all the hardware. And that was definitely like for us a very important decision, for example, to not go into cardio machines, but rather partner with everyone else. Then like, we don't produce ourselves, right? We outsource manufacturing logistics and the likes, which is develop it and sell it. But I'm always very careful in choosing when is it the time right? Also, electric components inside our equipment, for example, there's basically almost everything developed by ourselves, which is an electronics important. But so there's like all these decisions that I've constantly need to make. And basically my guiding post is basically when it's about a new product category, I need to really believe that I'm going to be the best possible product in the entire world in this. And if I believe someone else can do it, then then they should be doing it. And then too, it needs to really benefit our vision and benefit from our data cloud that we have. So basically, we need to have a right to win. And I also need to feel very confident that I'm going to be the best in the world in this. And if both criteria are not met, I rather partner. Because like if you're building something complex and also takes a lot of R&D and so on, what you really want to make sure is that you have still a lot of focus. So every company's focus, but we have an ecosystem we're developing with a very big vision. And so I think for us, it's even more critical to apply really tough decision-making on should we go into something or not. And then at the same time, it also requires a ton of operational rigor if you're operating something really complex. And we are proud as a company, despite growing super fast, that we have now just finished our seventh consecutive year of hitting our budget. And the reason why we needed that is because if you're doing something really complex, you need to basically be based on super solid grounds to then be also able to make constant braves decisions and bold moves and it's not possible if you're sitting on a like a very fluid platform and so I would say basically in this like hours where you have a lot of upfront R&D and the revenues only develop in the long run based on this differentiation and there's definitely a much more like it's a much tougher operational job I would say also then some software product is like you know three months after launch on the marketplace and you said something so important like hitting the budget let's say the stereotype Silicon Valley software investor will say oh okay you didn't have the budget wasn't high enough right like what you hit it obviously because it wasn't high enough but I think it's in a deep tech company hitting the budget and you mentioned some of those aspects the complexity need to manage to hit a budget is a few fold higher than most other companies so this is really a representation for me that you manage complexity anything you know above everything else and maybe the way I think you know the way I think about is I'm really curious about this topic because I can tell you before 2018 I always told my investors hey guys like I just absolutely don't give a shit about my budget as long as like we're 100% year and year right like I just want everyone to go as fast as possible but but they were like what I realized is that if you're sitting on this fluid platform you're not able to make like really step-function like investments because you constantly kind of patching behind all of it and you have to patch behind not because your investors want to have the budget but one of the things that I realized is it's basically impossible to build a like accountability based culture if the entire company is used to miss their numbers and their goals and that also means that every single department has basically like three or four different plans like operating so for example if our engineering department kind of doesn't really like it's never really committal about when will the new product go into serious production and our production team doesn't really consider like hey the agreement was that date and so then the production team which is always have like yeah but maybe we maybe it's gonna be lower or faster whatever so there's multiple scenarios then also marketing and product marketing doesn't feel confident we're gonna do this big launch in March because like these things come together so product marketing rather tries to market a few different things but if you are like a real accountability culture like resingle department has just one scenario and think about what efficiency that drives and and and the way I always define efficiency is the more money we can reinvest in R&D is the more money we can reinvest in the future and so we need to eliminate that slack and slack exists with underperformance because then people start building up multiple scenarios yeah I mean there are so many great things that you just said that I would love to speak longer maybe transition into the main topic for today is that business model and value creation that you choose and you already mentioned a few things but maybe you can wrap that up a little bit more with your thoughts yeah I mean like there's some basic truths about business models right recurring revenue is better than one time of course like defensibility creates margin right like these are all like logical things and and so I would say one of the like the things we are glad to have so far been able to prove is that undementally really having a true north that logically creates a lot of value versus yeah I can really make nice money here even though it's kind of doesn't make a lot of sense like because I have lots of players in it like you know also competing with me where I clearly see like this is all very short cited and I would say many of them probably have laughed about us in the past like what are these people doing with the other but but now basically we have this real differentiation because we actually really thought about you know we started basically thinking about how can people that have not been successful in the past being the future today in the future be able to work out successfully and and where will the value creation for that be and of course one of the things that like we came up with this in the gym model it's probably not possible to charge more fees to the gym if their members are more successful or the real money is saved for health insurance and so we should think about employers and houseclimbed providers and and how we can sell to them the savings they will be having from that but we also always knew that it's impossible for us to do this without the gym and so I would say many of my competitors from the marketplace maybe had like very difficult relationships the gyms because they really consider them as a necessary evil and but not really like part of the solution and for us the gym that delivers all that great value is too critical we admire the gyms in the world we won't have them to incredibly like strengths in their business and we always kind of took the high road and thought about long term versus short term and we were luckily also able to always find enough to invest the money to help us on that mission but I do fundamentally believe of course there are the truth around like you know as I before recurring revenue things and we've transitioned out like revenue based from one time to recurring but it's more like no brainers and everyone knows that I would say maybe the the more important piece for us was if we deliver a lot of value for people being more healthy and less sick how can we sell it to the people that benefit from it and then it was because the historically germhub that was sold to gyms right and that's where the music stopped and we're selling it to employers even though the gym has to first buy it and basically so I would say from business perspectives maybe that was the most important like some of the most important insights for us yeah it's so fascinating because you have the value is perceived by other people's ends of one set pay you in the end directly and it's it's a very complex stakeholder system around your around the company super fascinating and did this actually evolve so 2012 right you you found the company and then to today how did this evolve I mean you already said 100% one time to now it's only 80% hardware after the top right but you said go in today it's just 20% yeah and how do you see this is now 2080 is that the kind of right number the right balance how will it look like in five years or what does a great look like for you then no I like you know I was a description business almost doubles every year and our hardware business grows like 30% right like once we quit the gym we have we keep them as a customer we're part of this but but the tam in our corporate subscription is so much bigger that like the revenue share of hardware keep like declining as a total share of of revenue because it only grows 30% year and year but but it's like basically what we're selling to the employers right so and it's kind of like yeah I was just here but but it was always the plan like this right we like from our first pitch deck for this podcast actually quickly look it up again and our first pitch deck we said like we need to fix the gym but the big money will be made in selling into healthcare via employers and health firm providers so there was always that was always to see this and then we just kept executing towards it but we first had to really built that gym that works for having one installed with like you know a few people of strength machines then to build this API platform that integrates all the vendors in the world and we had to do this for free because otherwise they wouldn't accept us to be this platform but we knew we needed to have like the entire gym connected with everyone on board to actually go after the bigger opportunity and so yeah that that's what we had to do and luckily there were some great investors and GP included that believed in our like very big vision while like I would say at the time most investors would look at like you making fitness machines how that how I was this I would that help any at all with like health and healthcare and like subscription revenues and you know you had to go really like I think deep to understand the root cause that and I would say that's that's one of the things that really our entire DNA is based on inexperienced exercises the number one thing they need to do to get healthy is strength training and inexperienced exercises would not do strength training with like three weights or cable machines because that really is much more likely that they hurt themselves than that it helps them and so what they need to do is they need to go to the gym where you have one machine for muscle group and we can know the lot of weight in a very safe environment and for that reason we always believed that you know the only way for getting all these people into health is to gym because they will never be able to do strength training out of their home because they would need to buy so many machines to work on safe in effectively and that is really like the fundamental like belief that we have and in many ways also contrarian contrarian for you so for example during the lockdowns when we were like in a really tricky situation as the company my board asked me like hey he's connected all sweet this provider still like exploding sometimes was worth 60 billion and and shouldn't we do the same thing and as it like fundamentally we will not be able to deliver on home strength machines value to inexperienced exercises and therefore we will not be able to connect to the healthcare market and that's why we should absolutely stay away from it because we have such a big opportunity to healthcare. Yeah. For me it's one of those topics where the logic, like the instinct is actually guiding in a wrong direction, like, "Okay everybody is doing the stuff at home now, no, no." So we should sell it to home actually that would have been the wrong choice for you. So great, great story. And I think we already went a bit into this other segment here of challenges and how to overcome them, but maybe to double click on one element that you mentioned in this kind of resilience, like you described lockdown, right? There was had to be very resilient for so many reasons people were not able to go to the gym, but also there was a portion of different direction and an operationally resilience from building hardware in the first place, but also building software, managing to apply change, which is super tough. So how do you build a model that creates this operational resilience and protects your business model and protects this long term journey that you described? I would say one of the things that we have always done well is we have an extremely mission line board because, you know, like in 2020 for example when the first lockdown we had to decide how to deal with it and all our competitors chose to furlough their workforce. And I felt like this was such a bad mistake because the digital talent was like highly sought after it could have gone years and it ended up being years like two years of lockdown. So I proposed to my board we are going to still keep the revenues flat even though the gyms are closed because we will be able to find ways how to still add value to the gyms and employers. Do a reduction in force we had to let go 20% of our workforce, but for the 80% we didn't furlough them but had them really focused on how can we still add value. And basically we were mission aligned enough to not go after peloton in the time when they went towards 50 billion market gap. We had the trust that we felt like okay, if silly tells us he keeps selling on the same level as before to gyms even though they're closed. And then we just believe it and then I of course also had to deliver it with my team and we did so if we didn't have a huge press within the board members and if we didn't have a full mission alignment and where we want to go. It would have been impossible to make that decision even as like you know founder and so I do think that one of the things that that worked really well for us is fine to write investors. I lost like years ago and it also like I would say there's like a few things that always kept me alive and one was you know even during the lockdown when it could have happened that we lost everything. I had really a deep thought around did make like I've spent you know at that time 10 years on e-draming the first six years basically work every weekend and every night until 2 a.m. Like would I have regrets if now like we were failing and and and I came to the conclusion no I would not regret it because I really truly enjoyed every day working on making people healthy. And so I would say like something really tough that takes a long time which is like almost a definition of deep tech. It definitely requires to do something that you absolutely enjoy doing and that was helpful and then from the investor side I still remember like many many years ago I read a blog post from Fred Wilson ABC dot com at the time who wrote many founders make the big mistake that they changed their pitch when they. Here like negative investor feedback but my advice to those in founders which is you have pitched the wrong investors you need to find the right investors and that's for example like our unique one round was really that like finally I had to point I reached the point where we are profitable and growing fast and have no debt and I really thought who could be the best possible best in the world for us and I. I was a cat in the world's largest fitness investor and Mary tech capital is one of the best sauce and this is because we sell a subscription like sauce and and then I only send an email to my board I'm going to reach out to those two investors and I start building relationship and then those two immediately wanted to seven months later do the round and there wasn't planned that way but it was from me so beautiful to see like hey when I don't like you know. I think I just reach out to everyone and have like all these meeting all the feedback but rather take one step back and think about it will actually fit perfectly for us they immediately wanted to invest and understood what we did and was also beautiful to see like hey. Like they really understand what we're doing this is so cool and so I do think it makes a lot of sense for founders to really do a lot of research and trying to find who are actually my perfect investors who understand what what I do and who are mission aligned. All these things but but I think that was definitely very important for those founders that have still the choice and picking the investor I think that's great feedback let's assume they already picked the ones and they have to live with the ones they have do you have any maybe advice here on how they should navigate the situation where I have so long term vision I'm building this kind of sustainably I'm not cutting corners and going directly to subscription revenue and recurring and all the natural things. You said how did you also logically or emotionally or whatever tactics you used was investors explain that this is the right thing because you didn't have the data yet to back it up we couldn't say hey we will be there 100% right you had to always work with what you had what what could work for other deep tech founders to get go on this long term sustainable journey. I definitely believe don't over promise it could also mean that you have to reset expectation with existing board members and just basically you know get rid of all the old promises because it's just it's not helpful to do something that will not work right like the basis of everything is have a pl you know you can have a very big vision for the long run but you need to have very high execution confidence on the short run. And my experiences that this is like how you also impress investors there were lots of investors that like you know I had reached out to initially and they felt like that this is crazy but then I you know kept telling them how we're doing and I could see like they start to sing like you know maybe he has a point because he actually really always does what he tells me to be doing deep tech is long term so you need to build long term relationship and over promising will just make your investors in the future you have to always think about it in every round. You want to sign up one or two but if you speak to 100 you don't want to have like for the next round already you know 98 the tractors because you open something that is first completely not realistic but whenever I speak to measure I always have to I always try to think about it like let us you will not invest now but how can I make sure you you could be still considering each and the next round but. And I think the more you like at the end of the day people will do their research and everything but the have a need to have a strong conviction in you and I was always like really working hard and tell it and showing investors that. Whatever happens I just will do what I tell them to do and I always tell also my ideal situation is in your life in general I like is it like if you are able to be in a position where you. You say what you think and you do what you say you do right is like perfect you don't have to have like multiple balls in the air because you have told different stories and and and and and and and and and and and and if you just do something that makes sense you will get there I think but but but one of the things also is clear like you know I really love when Jensen one from Nvidia basically spoke about how tough it is I just like. It is it is the truth about entrepreneurship is just insanely hard for like you know when when example when I found it I thought like once we have 100 employees or then like like how how marginal will still be my impact will be great and so on and I feel it's just getting harder and harder and other it's it's very rewarding to see that division comes through and coming one more true. It's super hard and and if you want to be a founder you just need to really grind it out you need to work from date day and night it's like it's it's not a like an easy nice cv entry it's just absolutely super super hard and if you're not working super super hard I guarantee you one of your competitors will work super super hard and then you need to bet on that you're two times smarter because otherwise it doesn't work right. I don't know who said it is similar to to what you said around size like it's always this naive thinking once I'm bigger it gets easier but the reality is once it's bigger it just goes faster I guess the faster cycles and that creates additional complexity and hardship but maybe moving to one of the things that's a bit of an horizontal topic maybe what we discussed before the podcast. You mentioned that doing sing sequential when they're smaller and then parallel and they're bigger and I think we just talked about small and big and I think that maybe is a good point to talk a bit about what what do you mean with that like sequential small and parallel when you're bigger. I was just you know a friend is just founding a new company and he has also very big vision for it and and I told him that you know I really would just now do one thing and one thing only and only only once this delivers you you know I'm really an epitod and you can do number two and number three I definitely did do it. too many things in parallel in the early years. And it was incredible to see like, from patch to day, I would say in like, of course, and it's always a little bit true, but basically, I would say, you know, three, four years ago, we had more initiatives than revenues and now we have much more revenues than initiatives. And, and what it does is like, it's so incredible how you see like this escape velocity kicking in. You just do the same thing better and better and better every day. And more often, same better and better and better like your NPS is getting higher and higher and higher and because you just kind of really do this one thing super, super well. And, and I too often see companies, you know, doing too many things in parallel and then they're for not focus well enough on it. So for example, I still can't believe it, but be launched like after Germany worked well, three new countries in one year. And of course, all of them failed. If I was doing this again, right, I would basically decide to like, we will now have all my sea levels for focus on this new country to understand what is the difference to the German market. And only once this has like, period product market fit in a scaling based on certain metrics we've picked, like, in our case, it's like, like customer payback, then we know, okay, once we hit this milestone, we can go to the next country, right? And it's true for product, it's true for organizational development initiatives. It's true for new geographies. It's just true for everything. Like you're just so much better if we do one thing extremely well. Whereas a lot of things a little bit. And it's kind of interesting because there's a startup you always start with, like doing a lot of things a little bit. It's just impossible not to because that the more you can really focus on a few things and do them really, really well, the more you will see this escape velocity. And that is also so joyful to experience. I don't think there is a golden rule. So maybe an unfair question. But of course, this transition point between single focus on one or two things and then paralyzing more when you're bigger is there a way of articulating bigger, not just your business, but what is bigger is it like product market fit? Is it a number of customers revenue? Where do you see it? Sing is the most important factor year for other deep tech businesses as well? Yeah, it is super difficult. It's in every business a little bit different for us. Like the geo expansion, I can clearly measure it in customer payback because that includes like what's the margin? How quickly can we sell something? How good is the net retention at all places that roll there? Right? And so it really depends on various like specifically what you talking about, but I do think if founders are honest to themselves and like they will find out is like, is this now just kind of the way I always pray that it like is this now just pulling the exo sheet to the right or do I still need to code right? And I think every founder will know that. Point, changing a bit to the big picture of other tech companies also that have been very successful, not in what you do, but similar model, similar value creation models and AI is of course, it's a center of a lot of that. So can you talk a little bit about how AI is changing deep tech business models? How you would look at test land Apple, for example, as a successful hardware software companies in the world and what that means for your decisions today? Yeah, so I believe in the long run, the Rockstar companies will be a connect piece of hardware that basically ensures control over the experience, whatever experience it may be that may be like like going from A to B, it may be checking your emails, it may be doing a workout. And then on top of the connected people's hardware, you have a software layer where you create into our probability into all kind of other things, right? Like think of Tesla OS, think of EGEN Cloud, think of iOS, right? And then on top of that, you have a subscription layer, think of apps in the Apple store or Apple one or something, think of no Tesla like automotive, the 5% EBITDA business. And now they sell to this $30,000 car, a $15,000 full set of driving updated has 100% growth margin. Or like for us, basically, our super cheap business, right? And I believe this is the future you have. So in such cases, AI, for example, we just launched eGENEs, which is an AI workout builder, when we deliver workouts, an improvement based on the user's own data and its self learning and self developing further, what is the perfect workout for you based on all the data we know about you and your trade off decisions, right? Like it makes no sense if I tell you to work out three hours every single day, because it just don't want to do that. No, you are trade off decisions I can deliver for you the absolutely best work on in the world. And the user data that we have proprietary from our hardware, like strengths tests, for example, that no one else can have. And so I spoke the other day to invest was quite scared about like simple, you know, like SaaS models and how they will be disrupted by AI is like, oh my gosh, you have your own proprietary software. And you have a marketplace you like well, like it equips for benefiting from AI versus being disrupted by AI. And so absolutely for people that really want to go deep that also want to maybe develop their own piece of hardware, AI is just simply awesome. If you just basically wanted to quickly crank out a simple like vertical size model, look, look out for proprietary data, I would recommend. Yeah, great. Great background. Thank you so much. And normally at this point, I would, I would ask what gives what gives you energy and purpose outside of work, which you make it very challenging, as you're so like everything you describe seems to be really around like saving the world from an health perspective and giving back and so on. But still, let's let's try it. What is it that outside of maybe Egypt and the whole mission and vision that you have is giving you energy and purpose outside and how maybe also advice to other founders, which you give based on being already in such mission driven companies that you are. I'm like very much actually in this kind of the business of business business camp, but I can also be very easily in this camp because like the bigger each of Mr. better for the world. And that just gives me just like a lot of energy for sure. Definitely one of our investors is highland Europe and they are portfolio day a year ago, they had author broke, which is right now at the Harvard Business School, the most popular elective about happiness. If people haven't read from him, they should absolutely do this is fascinating. And definitely like he makes a strong point around quality of relationships, family, friends, like and how that really kind of gives you energy. And also, by the way, I want to applaud this question because I love it in the way you phrase it like what gives you energy and also what costs you energies the other side of it because I think it's a very important piece to then also like inside the business again, to delegate things that cost you energy. But for me, it's clearly, I just absolutely love my job. And in the rest of my time, I basically just focus on family and friends. Yeah. Oh, you said again, so many things that would have a click on, but we only have limited time. We'll try to stick to it here and and go to maybe the next section here of what we call the magic moments. And you described already some of them, but what what's the section is really all about like all the hard work, all the 10 years and all the weekends when they came together and you had this effect like, you know, I knew it. It's this is what I planned. This is now what happened or even smaller things when an employee sold the first subscription or so without you. Or you know, it could be really anything. I just curious what those magic moments in this eGEM journey were for you. This you can name a shoe. Yeah, there's definitely like one that really stands out. And that was actually a few years ago. But like in the United States, the fitness market is much more verticalized than in Europe. There's lots of segments that are quite big. And one segment is the YMCA. And and and my YMCA team, they wanted to create a marketing video for the YMCA segment. And they just went to one of our YMCA customers, like when you look later on our YouTube channel from eGEM at this YMCA video, you will think this is staged. But it really wasn't staged. They just showed up and asked people that were just kind of finishing using eGEM. And what what their thoughts were. And these were people that kind of explained how this has completely changed their entire life. You know, people that had like a tremor and couldn't even hold the glass anymore. Now she can pull this glass or people that like one lady just even she was so insecure. She didn't even want to leave the house anymore. And now she feels so much better meets again with friends also inside the YMCA have adopted this healthy lifestyle idea that gave him a lot of extra energy. And when I saw this video, which was absolutely staged, it was definitely for me a magic moment. And one of the very few times where I can remember that I had little tears in my eyes because it felt like, Hey, you know, we really asked like this impact that we've always been thinking about because what I think is not great like at a long discussion about this with my wife yesterday actually, I don't think it's great to be proud because it kind of distracts your focus on what was it has still not being achieved. And so I always focus on what has not been achieved because the bigger you are, also the more you have this responsibility to do this, if what you do make sense and good for the world. But that moment when I saw basically how we have literally changed the life of these people, that really was magic for me, really humbled me. I mean, I would say that founders need to find a healthy balance between celebrating the little wins along the hard journey. Otherwise, it's just a tormenting marathon that never ends. But I understand that you need to, you cannot become complacent and cannot get rid of your hunger to just get to the next level. So fully, fully with you. Any other moment that would come to mind? No, I think that's the, like there's of course lots of little things you indicated. Like, for example, I started building our enterprise sales business just in 2020 with one gentleman who will maybe, if he looks at list list, he knows exactly what I'm talking about. And then last year he was able to secure for the first time a big account himself. And there's like lots of these things that happen every day, but like it doesn't compare to like, hey, we've changed these people's lives. Yeah, it's hard to beat as expected. Okay. But maybe we can go to the next heart then really looking in the future. Thank you for sharing all those moments and background and EGM. And this is about deep tech. Deep tech is always about the future and doing something that we thought couldn't be possible a few years ago. So we'd like to ask the question this, aside from your own business and technology and EGM, what EGM is doing outside of that whole industry, what are you getting most excited about in terms of deep tech future technology in that say 10 years or so? I think that basically, you know, there were several waves in tech, like e-commerce and then also, you know, in many ways, like fast where I would say the improvements to the world were incremental. And I think that deep tech will be able to really completely change our lives and our world to a better. And so I'm, and it also will be true that basically we will have more and more investors really focusing on how can we build something really great in the long run versus like, you know, there was like for many years, I have to say probably, I was a little bit too cynical because maybe some investors didn't like hardware and so and it's kind of, I always felt like they were investing mainly driven by the greater full theory. Who is there like, is there someone else who will even pay more for this in two years? And I do think in deep tech, you will have to find investors that and you will develop investors and really do the hard work to understand an industry, a technology really, really well. And then basically, fund this through the 15, 20 years of journey, but those things will then completely change the world. And that's just super exciting. I mean, you spoke about Tesla and now that thinking about your personal robot or a SpaceX that can now bring internet to forgotten places in the world. And so on and so on, like really incredible things can happen if people are willing to make real investments into technology, into hardware, into uncertainty versus just applying software and the software layer. And I think there's so many things that will be great coming from this and I'm really excited about the future. Thank you so much, Philip. Thank you for sharing all the insights and the journey of eGEMs. It's a truly a plenty full for other deep tech founders to digest here. So thank you and grateful for for you joining. It was great fun. You've been listening to Deep Tech Unleashed, an NGP Capital podcast. To find out more about our work helping deep tech founders turn big ideas into companies that shape a better future, visit our website ngpcap.com or follow us on LinkedIn. [BLANK_AUDIO]