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Inside the mind of a successful Web3 founder with Luc Falempin, CEO of Tokeny
34 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, I spoke with Luc Falempin, CEO and Founder of Tokeny - Luc shared a huge amount of advice which he pulls from his experience of launching 2 successful companies over the last 10+ years.
We talked through Luc's journey as a serial entrepreneur, the key things he learned from his first business which helped him with Tokeny, how timing is everything when launching a startup, and how to avoid burnout. How to structure a successful organisation, how to build a successful career in Web3. What makes a good leader, Luc's advice for stepping into leadership for the first time, how to build a remote culture, what he likes bout Web3 and what he'd like to change... the list goes on!
Behind the blockchain is a series of conversations with leaders who have built successful products, teams and careers in Web3. You will get a chance to discover how successful individuals were able to accomplish their career objectives, the skills they have acquired, the mistakes and difficulties they encountered, and the advice they can offer you to help you reach your own career aspirations.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Behind the Blockchain podcast. Today, I'm joined by Luke Filompon, CEO of Tocony. Luke, welcome to the show. How are you? Very good. Hi, Jack. Thank you for having me today. Yeah, no problem at all. Thanks for joining me. So, Luke, for those who don't know who you are, could you introduce yourself a bit, please?
00:00:22
Speaker
Sure. So my name is Luc van Empen. I'm the CEO at Dokkeni. I'm a serial entrepreneur, as we say. Love it. Love it. So could you talk us through your career journey so far?
Entrepreneurial Journey and Early Inspirations
00:00:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I started a bit more than 10 years ago with the first company. Basically, I studied in the business school and then started a first company in the e-commerce industry where we were software editor as well. And we were transforming websites into multi-seller platforms into marketplaces.
00:00:58
Speaker
So basically connecting catalogs and orders and commissions and commit everything to like a big e-commerce platform. And then we sold that company and started talking in 2017. Great. So you've always been an entrepreneur, as you said. What's that been like going straight from studying straight into running your own business?
00:01:28
Speaker
I think it's great because you don't start with pre-made ideas. Basically, just try and learn. Maybe you learn the other way, but you learn fast.
00:01:42
Speaker
And it was always web companies. So it's quite easy. Everything is digital. It's fast. So you don't have all of this. In many companies, you have big AC systems and processes, et cetera. So building from scratch, it's kind of nice. So especially when you do digital business, starting fully digital, it's a plus for sure. Yeah, for sure.
00:02:08
Speaker
And what gave you the mindset, I suppose, to want to go straight from school to your own business? Is there a moment that kind of stands out for you or anything at all? I think I mostly saw all of those opportunities in the web industry and everything you could do. At the end of my study, it was the first wave of, you know, social media and the web too, basically.
00:02:37
Speaker
But it was really the early days of Twitter, that kind of things. And it was a wild race. It was obvious you couldn't make money with it and build some nice tools. I studied in Canada, so very close from the US and all of this activity. And I saw that in Europe, it was like in behind. So I was like, OK, let's go back in Europe and start something. And so it was very easy to start something. Just needed a computer and a lot of time.
00:03:06
Speaker
And so I tried and it worked.
Lessons from Business and Strategic Prioritization
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And is there anything that you learned from your first business that you were able to learn from and you kind of implemented into tokeny to help you?
00:03:25
Speaker
Yes, a lot of things. So there are a lot of mistakes we avoided when we started TokenE, but a lot of share we did other ones. I think it's mostly about with what you want to work with or you want to organize your team and your business. And mostly that we've learned that to launch a company, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint.
00:03:51
Speaker
You need to run kind of fast, but you mostly need to run for a long time. So for example, walking 80 hours a week, it doesn't work on the long run. And the main thing is to find the right priorities. It's not to always do more. So we've learned a lot of things in terms of organization, technically, and marketing, and a lot of things that we try. Sometimes it fails, sometimes it works.
00:04:20
Speaker
And then you can replicate that. In my first company, we had a huge competitor. And they had a very bad product, but they were extremely good in sales. So I think it teach me a lot of how to sell B2B software. No, that's good. And you mentioned there about making sure that you can prioritize the right things and picking the right things to work on. Do you have any advice for someone who might be
00:04:48
Speaker
maybe a little bit snowed under with so many things at the moment and having to try and prioritize. Do you have any advice or anything that really helped you be able to do that? It's difficult because when you start your company, there are a lot of things you have to do. And of course, you want to say yes to every opportunity that's next to your door. But most of those opportunities are just a lot of time.
00:05:12
Speaker
So for example, I remember we are doing all of this startup contest at the beginning.
00:05:19
Speaker
You won't only the ones where when you know the jury, you won't be nuts. Best case, you have an article somewhere. It's really a lot of time for nothing. It's better to focus on your business and your clients. Don't listen too much what people say. You should do it like this. You should do it like that. You should not do this. You should not do that. Just do something. Talk with your clients and iterate.
00:05:46
Speaker
No, that's really good advice. Yeah, because I think there is a lot of noise, I suppose, that comes from all sorts of angles, not just work-related, but I suppose even friends, family, everyone not in the work setting as well.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's really good advice. Yeah, when I set up and avail, and I've only been going, what, a year, a year or so? It's actually a year tomorrow. Thanks, almost made it to the 12 month mark. But yeah, you're right, there's so many things that you want to get involved in and you get pulled all over the place and you have this idea and then this idea and then this idea and you just have to, one thing I've definitely learned in the last, probably in the last two or three months,
00:06:31
Speaker
is actually just stick to the plan that you started with originally and just do as much of that as you possibly can and try not to get distracted by too much stuff. But it's hard not to because you really want to do all these different things and start all these different ideas and stuff. It's tricky.
00:06:48
Speaker
It's very complex because usually you have a lot of ideas because more and more you learn about your industry, your own meant, your clients, your partners, et cetera. So you have more and more opportunities and things you want to do. And you also have a lot of people like fundamentals that tell you, you should do this,
Business Direction and Daily Operations
00:07:05
Speaker
you should do that. Most of them have no clue because it didn't do what you tried to do before, especially in the early days.
00:07:13
Speaker
It's, yeah, we lost a lot of time with people who knew and didn't know anything. I have a very concrete example. My first company at the beginning, we were in B2C. Basically, we built some marketplace for ourselves where we are indexing millions of products in the fashion industry. And we are recommending use the right products depending of your profiles with
00:07:41
Speaker
with different AI actually. So it was interesting, but not to sell on nor website. We had no audience at all and we will not compete with the big websites. So of course we had to turn this into a B2C platform, a B2B platform, sorry. And we discussed with a lot of mentors and incubators, et cetera, for four years. And nobody told us that B2C was stupid. Nobody told us you don't have the money to
00:08:07
Speaker
to reach people in B2C, turn in B2B, and you will make real money. So I think for maybe the first two years, we were in B2C building our platform, trying to exploit it by ourselves. It didn't work too much. And in one month, we switched in B2B and started to make money. So yeah. That's crazy, isn't it, within, yeah, try for two years and then switch to
00:08:32
Speaker
to something else and switch to B2B. And yeah, within one month you're up and running. To know where is your value as a startup. Many projects we see, even today with TokenE, a lot of projects are contacting us to raise money with our tokens, et cetera. And they try to do everything. In my opinion, either you do a product or you do a service.
00:08:54
Speaker
But you cannot do both. It's very complex. Build a product that you exploit by yourself is very complex. So either you take some kind of product, one product, several products, and you build the processes and you sell a good service, or you build a product to people who will deliver the service. But doing both, it's very hard, especially for a small team. That's really good insight.
00:09:17
Speaker
Really good insight. So I can imagine you're a busy man, but what does a day in the life of the CEO at Tokany look like?
00:09:26
Speaker
A lot of females, a lot of girls. I think it changed a lot post-COVID because now everybody is, I mean, from day one, it's very international. We have clients inside continents. We do everything in English, et cetera. We have 16 nationalities in our small team, so very, very international.
00:09:49
Speaker
But post-COVID, it helped us actually because now everybody jump in calls very, very quickly, even large function institutions. So we spend a lot of time discussing with people in calls, obviously.
00:10:02
Speaker
And I'm trying to supervise, to follow what my team does, to make sure we focus on the right opportunities. So it's really about prioritization, opening some doors and creating the framework for my different teams to evolve and bring solutions. It's a bit of everything. I think it's...
00:10:27
Speaker
good for my profile because I'm a bit of everything as well. I don't cut too much, but I can record. I understand marketing. I understand finance. So I do a bit of everything. I'm probably not specialized in anything, but I can do a bit of everything. So I can easily work with specialists and make sure I chose the videos the most.
00:10:49
Speaker
I suppose that happens, doesn't it? When you launch your own company and it's you or with a very small team, you have to get involved in so many things that you start to learn all sorts of stuff. But when I, when I launched unveil.
00:11:03
Speaker
I didn't really know anything about websites or emails or anything like this. And I almost became my own IT support when I'd never done any of that really in my life. I'd worked at companies where they had dedicated support functions to be able to help you out with all that sort of stuff. Yeah, and it was a massive learning curve to then have to work across.
00:11:21
Speaker
all sorts of different areas and be able to be competent at it. Otherwise, you have to learn it, right? I think you have to do a bit of everything. The good news is that you can learn the basics very easily online to have an idea of
00:11:39
Speaker
the main direction and then it's better to source to someone who knows for real. With key objectives, otherwise you don't know if they deliver on it, but you cannot do everything. But to understand the basis and then to make your own idea of what you want to do, the main direction, it's very important if you want to drive your company efficiently. Yeah, for sure. Could you introduce us to Tokimi in a little bit more detail?
Tokenization and Blockchain Trends
00:12:08
Speaker
Yes, so at TokenE we help financial institutions and companies to tokenize their assets. So basically to represent their assets on the blockchain in a compliant way. So basically we are a software editor and we have a complete set of tools to issue, to manage and to transfer these assets on the blockchain. So we mostly tokenize financial products
00:12:37
Speaker
But also, we do payment systems on-chain, we do loyalty programs on-chain, that kind of things. So it's a management platform for smart contracts and for token. And our clients tokenize a bit of everything. Investment funds, debt, equities, commodities like gold and palladium and footballer image rights and a bit of everything.
00:13:05
Speaker
Is there a certain part of the industry or the more traditional Web2 industry that you see coming into the whole kind of tokenization space and moving more and more on chain?
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, so we do this since 2017, so it's quite a long time. In 2018, you had this first wave where people wanted to do STOs, like basically raising funds on the blockchain, ICOs, STOs. So it was nice, but for me, it proves that the technology could work, blockchain infrastructure, but the market was not ready for that.
00:13:41
Speaker
Then we had all of these different crypto waves and trends. Finally, NFTs, because NFTs are so old. I mean, it's like one or two years old now that everybody's talking about this. But now we see that everybody wants to tokenize everything, bring real world assets into blockchain. So you have different ways to do that. So you have more and more DeFi protocols popping up saying they do this.
00:14:11
Speaker
The problem is that if you want to bring something, an asset of chain, but on chain, you need to guarantee that there is an asset.
00:14:20
Speaker
is to guarantee that legally, if you have the tokens, you own part of the assets. And this is actually quite complicated. And you need to do it legally, meaning with a contract, not just saying, hey, yes, this is the asset, trust me. So we have to build the whole technology to do this and to make sure we can track the ownership
00:14:41
Speaker
even if you transfer the tokens. So we have a full identity system on Chain. So everybody has his own identity, can prove they are the owner. It's an anonymous identity. So on Chain, nobody knows that you are this person, but they know that you can prove that you are the owner.
00:15:01
Speaker
and you can pull your IDG ball for this token. So we can track ownership for any type of assets, especially for financial products. So everything around co-ownership of assets can now be done on-chain. No, that's great. Is there anything that you were really surprised to see move on-chain? Anything from the traditional space and now is being bought on-chain? Anything that stands out?
00:15:25
Speaker
I don't think I will be surprised by anything because I'm ready to see the crazy creativity of people in the web suite. Especially web suite is very international. I think it's one of the things I like is like, I mean, you see people from Nigeria and Pakistan and the Philippines and everywhere and Argentina doing great things. So it's amazing.
00:15:47
Speaker
especially in finance, usually finance is very closed. So it's changing step by step. It's great. So every day we see new project, new things. We will try a lot of things. We do a lot of R&D.
00:16:04
Speaker
So I think everything will be tokenized more or less seriously, but everything will be tokenized. We see internet, you know, the web too as the internet of information or to share information and blockchain the internet of value. So first you need to represent this value on chain if you really want to move it on chain. So yeah, just the entry doors of tokenization. Okay, cool.
00:16:34
Speaker
What's it really like building a startup in Web3?
Startup Challenges in Web3
00:16:39
Speaker
Because I guess people have maybe the glamorous image of being a founder, and you have maybe investment that's come from somewhere, and you're building this amazing tech product, amazing company. But what's it really like on the ground when you're in the thick of it? We didn't benefit from it too much, but I think today it's very easy to get some seed money.
00:17:02
Speaker
from blockchain networks, from big players, from anywhere. You have a lot of money on chain to start projects, and anyway, it doesn't cost too much. So this is a good thing. But except that, yeah, which is great because it's changing every day.
00:17:25
Speaker
So you discover new things every day and you can pivot your business or drive your business step by step. You can adjust because you can see the strengths, a lot of discussions, a lot of people talking. So you have a lot of noise and bullshit, but if you know what you're looking for, you can really learn fast and pilot your business because Web3 is very open, very transparent. So I think that's very interesting. Except that it's about
00:17:54
Speaker
any startup, any company, you need to try to focus on the right thing and get organized and deliver. And what's it been like because obviously you guys have been around for six years now? Almost six years. So you've seen this is your second or building through your second bear market now then? What's it been like building through a bear market compared to building through a bull? Have you noticed any difference?
00:18:22
Speaker
So we are not active too much in crypto because we do with the blockchain, but not too much crypto. We are a present real world asset and the tokens we do are not crypto. They are security tokens or the kind of things. So we are not directly impacted.
00:18:38
Speaker
However, we definitely see more traction and interest when we are in a bull market diet. And actually, it was great when we launched. We launched our first product early 2018. We started the company end of 2017, and we launched a few months later.
00:19:01
Speaker
And it was a great moment to launch. Our first contract, it was more than $100,000, paid in Bitcoin.
00:19:11
Speaker
And the product was not really ready. So you know, when everybody is suddenly rich, it's easy to sell things. So the first six months, we were paid in Bitcoins because everybody had Bitcoins and it was valuable. So that was very helpful. So for sure, you have more money or people are less scared to invest or to spend in real markets, good for startups.
00:19:37
Speaker
However, in the bull market phase, it's really hard to build things because you have too much activity. I think it's much better to launch something like right now and in a year when everybody will get super excited, you will be able to get clients.
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, is that because you've then got time to build a solid product before everyone starts kind of piling more money, more money into the space, so you're kind of set up and ready to go before that happens? Yeah, you need to be ready before the peak of activity. And when you have all of this activity, you cannot deliver a good product because you're too busy and a lot of noise, and then you change your direction every day because everything is super exciting. So, yeah.
00:20:30
Speaker
I mean, as an entrepreneur, you need to keep a cold head anyway. The timing is really important for startups, that's for sure. I mean, we knew it for Tokeni. It was our initial vision to bring their use assets and securities on chain. We knew it would take time, maybe not that long, but we knew it would take time.
00:20:51
Speaker
And now the timing is coming for us. And we are ready. We have an enterprise-grade platform. We just got our SOC 2 certification. So we have 40 people, a very well-organized team. So now we are ready to skate. So that's perfect timing. But that's the difficulty with startup. You need to wait for the right timing in the market. You can check the examples of Hubber, Airbnb, the old struggle at the beginning.
00:21:16
Speaker
until people needed to make a bit more money in 2008 with the crisis. So they started to take a side job over at Airbnb, selling the house here, the extra room, renting the extra room. And they need to wait for the right timing and be ready. And usually the bull market is a good timing for crypto startups. Yeah, and a fairly, or hopefully almost predictable timing as well, I guess.
00:21:46
Speaker
he goes, if it follows the four year cycle again, and if obviously in the next six, 12 months, things start moving again, it's relatively straightforward to predict ish.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm a strong believer of these cycles, so we'll see next year. Fingers crossed. So obviously, when you launch a startup, when you're building a product, there's obviously so much to do.
Preventing Burnout and Organizational Strategies
00:22:11
Speaker
Not just for you, but obviously for your team and every member of the team. How do you make sure that you don't get burnt out when you're working within a startup environment? Any advice on that tool?
00:22:27
Speaker
What happened to me at the beginning is that
00:22:30
Speaker
I never, you know, at the end of the day, you never feel that you're finished because you have too much things to do. So you continue, you continue, and then you barely sleep, and then you continue, and it never ends. And at some point years ago, I got really tired. I could not anymore. So I started to stop at 7 p.m., something like this. You just stop, even if you feel you're in the middle of something, and you sleep.
00:22:56
Speaker
And when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you think is your priority. All of the other stuffs are like, why I was working on that? It doesn't matter now. What matters is this one. So it's really important to force yourself to stop risking your priorities. I didn't do it too much, but I'm sure that going for a walk in the forest helps a lot as well. So it's really about getting the right balance.
00:23:25
Speaker
Your startup, your company will be your full life, a big part of your brain, but if you don't do anything else, at some point you don't see clearly what to do and what you want to do and you cannot turn forward efficiently.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really good advice. I think a lot of people kind of consumes you, right? It becomes your whole life and almost your identity as well to some degree. When you're kind of so involved in it, you don't get to do anything else outside of it. But yeah, I definitely think creating at least a little bit of headspace for yourself is a really good thing. You know, for me, because I'm over in Asia at the moment, a lot of my customers are in the UK or in Europe.
00:24:13
Speaker
You know, I have, you know, three, four hours in the morning. I march upon a call first thing with the US, and then I have maybe a three or four hour gap before everyone in Europe wakes up. So I'm able to kind of take that gap in the middle, which actually works really, really well for me, but then work into the evening, which I'm a bit of a night out. So that's, you know, that doesn't really bother me too much. It'd be interesting to see how that switches over when eventually in the next couple of years, I kind of come back to the UK.
00:24:39
Speaker
it would be interesting to see how that switches. Hopefully, I'll be more established then in this kind of stuff. You have more of a team around you and that kind of thing. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens. So what the key things that you can share with people listening and people watching, and me, the key things to keep in mind when you're trying to build a really successful organization. Any tips?
00:25:09
Speaker
Maybe I'm a control freak, but I would say organization, because if you don't get a bit organized from day one, then it's a mess. For example, if you don't create the right folders in your Google Drive, then you have 1,000 files and it's a mess. Just simple things like this. You also need to, about your finances, you need to define your business model,
00:25:38
Speaker
and to stick to it, to learn. And at some point, if it doesn't work, you pivot, but you pivot for real. I saw many, many projects, you know, trying a bit everything, but at the same time, so they don't know what works. They don't know what doesn't work. They don't really know how they make money. They just make money, pay opportunity, but they don't build a model that is scalable and replicable.
00:26:02
Speaker
So I think having your Excel spreadsheet where you define your model and you try to put your clients in this model is very important to template, to advertise everything like your contract with your clients, your purchase order, your some processes, basic processes. All of this, you can do it easily at the beginning.
00:26:26
Speaker
It doesn't mean it will never change, but at least it gives some kind of framework for everything you do. And then you save a lot of time. If you didn't work on your contract, for example, with your clients, you will discuss with clients and you don't know what you propose to them. When you already have your template,
00:26:46
Speaker
You have a clear ID, then you can iterate a bit and modify it a bit, but at least you have a clear ID. So it's really about organization at the beginning to make sure you know what you're doing. You are equipped to do your job. And once you have this, you can scale step by step.
00:27:05
Speaker
So it's always the same. You need a communication tool. You need a CRM. It's not that complicated. And now in few clicks, you get everything online for Superchip. So defining this and your basic tooling, I would say, it's great to start. And of course, having a good value proposition. I like the business model Canvas. I don't know if you're familiar with this. It's very simple. I don't think so.
00:27:36
Speaker
So everybody can search for this in Google, but it's called the Business Model Canvas. And basically, it helps you to define to whom you're selling, what's your value proposition, what could be your partners, what are your costs, what is your key activities, that kind of things. So it's basically helping you to map what's your business.
00:27:59
Speaker
and then you can step by step grow all of this. It's great to have a clear idea of what you want to do, where are your weaknesses and strengths, and then step by step progress. Great. That's really useful. I'm going to take a look at that after this. What was that called? The business
00:28:20
Speaker
Business Model Canvas. Business Model Canvas. And is that an app or is it a downloadable document that you can work through? Yeah, you can download this document. It's a big image, basically, with different squares. And you can write down your ideas. OK, brilliant. Thank you. Yeah, I'm going to check that out.
00:28:42
Speaker
So you've obviously hired people to come in to Tokany.
Hiring and Management in Web3
00:28:48
Speaker
Have you got any advice for someone who's looking to build a career within the Web3 space? Yeah, so in total, in my two businesses, two main businesses, I hired maybe 200 people, something like this. And I think you can see quickly if someone will bring value or not, because you have a lot of people who have no clue what you do.
00:29:11
Speaker
as a company and they don't ask any questions. Someone wants to work with you. Do you want this person to be dedicated for your company, to be part of the journey, to be passionate about it, to join your mission?
00:29:30
Speaker
And so if they don't ask any question, it just means they don't care and they chose for the salary. So maybe for some jobs, it's okay. But for a startup like us, I mean, we need a small team, but a small team of ninjas. We want proactive people and they're not
00:29:46
Speaker
not just executors. So in interview, when they don't ask anything, for me, they just don't care. So it's really about being passionate about what you want to do. So of course, we work for salaries, most of us, but it's normal.
00:30:08
Speaker
But if you like what you do, it's way less painful and much more interesting. So to do a career, for sure, you need to be interested in what you want to work in. For example, you do marketing. OK, but if you do marketing in cosmetics or in a web street, there's nothing to do. It's not related at all. So OK, you have some skills in marketing, but choose the right area for you and go for it.
00:30:36
Speaker
It's really about being interested in what you're doing as always. You cannot learn, you cannot grow. Yeah, I think that's really good advice, especially in the web 3D space as well. There's not that many real big companies in the space at the moment. There's a lot of startups, obviously, that are building, and I think
00:30:56
Speaker
I think, yeah, if you can find those people that are really, really passionate about the Web3 space and passionate about what they do, that even if they don't necessarily know something, they love Web3 and they'll more than happy go away and learn it in their spare time. And they've got no, they love doing it, right? So they don't mind going this way and doing that. And this video about trying as well. You know, sometimes we have people contacting us and they're like, oh yeah, I'm really interested in the blockchain technology, blah, blah, blah. Okay, do you have the wallet? Not yet.
00:31:27
Speaker
I don't know. You're not interested. Yeah, you didn't even try. So how can you know? And if you must have hired a number of managers as well into your business, and it was probably a time when you hired your first employees and kind of stepped into that leadership role for the first time. Have you got any advice if someone's moving into leadership for the very first time?
00:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's very personal because every manager has different ways to work. But what I'm saying is that as a manager, you're not supposed to find the solutions for everybody. Your team is not supposed to bring you the problems, and you're the one to find the solutions. You're supposed to define the framework for your team.
00:32:17
Speaker
That's OK. That's the goal we want, that kind of the resources we have to reach that goal in terms of human people, marketing, whatever. I mean, that's the framework, the goal we want, and that's your resources. And then you need to let them find solutions. And you need to make sure that when your team is coming to you,
00:32:40
Speaker
It's not about just complaining about their problem. It's about proposing solutions. And I think it's very important. Otherwise, it's the wrong side. Yeah, I think you're definitely right there. I think it's quite easy to fall into the trap of trying to solve every challenge for the team.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah. Where natural facts, if you can push back and push the problem back to them and ask them, you know, how would you solve this? How would you solve that? Or come back to me with maybe three solutions and I'll help you.
00:33:12
Speaker
I'll sit down with you and we can work out which is the best course of action to take, for example, is always a good one. Yeah, being able to push back and get them to come to you with an answer or a solution, I think, is a key skill to learn pretty quickly. It definitely took me a little while to learn that skill. Let me hear you eventually. Community as well, because at the beginning, you're like, I'm the boss. I need to know more than them.
00:33:41
Speaker
But not at all. Your role is not to know more than them, is to give them the right direction. That's it. And if you're solving everything for them as well, it stops that whole learning process, right? If you can get someone to come see you with a solution, such a big learning process for someone to be able to do that and then go away and work it out for themselves. So yeah, you kind of take that away from them, I guess.
00:34:05
Speaker
So apart from that side of it, were there any really big challenges that you faced or any big steep learning curves when you first got into leadership? Yeah, I think it was mostly the relationship with my co-founders, my team. How do you communicate?
00:34:30
Speaker
It's very good to praise in public to say, hey, you did great. But when you have something to say like a critic to someone, you don't do it in front of anyone. You just talk to this person. Otherwise, they take it very wrong. So a lot of small principles like this that I've learned to make sure that you communicate properly, that people don't panic.
00:34:53
Speaker
Because some people panic very quickly. They're like, oh, there's a huge issue. Everything's falling apart. And they contact their street coworkers. And they come back to you as a manager. And then you're like, what's a big problem? And actually, there's no big problem. The problem is that someone says to someone else, that says to someone else, that says to someone else. And so it created a big problem. But there's no problem. So to not panic for everything is really a skill you learn as an entrepreneur, step by step.
00:35:20
Speaker
After a few years, you know, you get used to, to be the king of the world and the, and the shit in the whole day. You receive the wrong email and boom, and then you need to remotivate yourself and sometimes you receive a great email and you're like, wow, amazing. So it's really like this. It's a roller coaster when you are an entrepreneur. But most of your employees are not like this.
00:35:48
Speaker
There are employees, and most of them are not in that mindset and not ready to get a health attack three times a day. So I need to make sure they don't panic. They come down, they get organized. When there is an issue, we know what to do. We know who can help. We know how to escalate the issue and not spread panic. So yeah.
00:36:13
Speaker
It's really about communication and making sure that they understand that nothing is too bad and the company is not going to die because someone says something bad on the internet. Yeah, for sure. I think that's a really good insight to share. And have you noticed that your management style changed from your Web 2 company to your Web 3 company at all? Is there any difference?
00:36:43
Speaker
The main difference between my two companies is that the first one was really French, Europe oriented. And the second one is very international from day one because Web3 was really international. And also e-commerce was already quite established. You had some big players, especially the payment providers. In Web3, it was
00:37:06
Speaker
the Wild West, everything we had to be built. So I think that has two main differences. But otherwise, Web2 versus Web3, I think pretty much the same. Maybe you manage your users differently when you redo something Web3 B2C.
00:37:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think users are much more volatile. They can live very quickly. You have a lot of speculators in the crypto world. So yeah, as it comes, it takes a while to live. So I think you have to be a bit careful. We saw a lot of companies in the last five, six years are growing extremely fast and going bankrupt extremely fast. So I think in the world tree need to remain extremely humble.
00:37:57
Speaker
You can get great exposure globally very quickly and then nothing. So I think it's complex. Maybe a bit less in web 2 now because a bit more established and if you don't pay your Google at once, anyway, nobody will see you. A lot of companies like this becoming extremely big and then nobody.
00:38:20
Speaker
I remember in 2008, we were in an event in San Francisco with a small booth. And in front of us, you had the small booth of Celsius. And nobody came to them for the whole two days event. Nobody came to talk with them. And I think one or two years later, they became extra big step by step. And we all know what happened to them last year. So that's where three, I think.
00:38:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's I was having a very, very similar conversation yesterday about whether you go, when you're marketing a web3 project, whether you go kind of all out, try and build up as much hype as possible, go as viral as possible to try and, you know, really scale really, really quickly, or whether you're better off to kind of grow incrementally and build really good, real good solid product, really good solid tech and kind of grow incrementally. And I guess
00:39:15
Speaker
I guess the hype kind of side of it can work if you've got a good product behind it and if people kind of stick with your brand. But I guess that doesn't necessarily give you time to build kind of really solid foundations, right? What's your view on that?
00:39:31
Speaker
I totally agree. Actually, when we started, it was the ICO waves. So we could have done our own ICO. And our first product was an ICO platform, basically an onboarding platform for investors. So we could have done one for ourselves. And I'm pretty sure we'll have raised a few millions after a few months when you launch your company. It's nice. But then we will have exploding because ICOs were very borderline.
00:39:58
Speaker
And then what do you do? And how do you make a sales business with that when it has such a bad reputation? So we resisted, we didn't do it. And we said, okay. I bet that was hard, right? Definitely. And at some point, I woke up like, no, we don't need to do it.
00:40:16
Speaker
And step by step, we accepted that our positioning was to be builders and to make an enterprise-grade software. So it would be long. It required capital. It required a great team. It took us four, five years to reach a point that we aim to reach, to have a great platform that can scale, that is secure, et cetera, et cetera.
00:40:40
Speaker
But now we are there and we are very happy that we built step by step because all of our competitors from that time disappeared or by voted or everything. So now if you look for an enterprise grade, white level platform to tokenize financial products, who else than us, it's hard to find other people. So now we're getting more and more traction.
00:41:04
Speaker
Okay, I think that's really, really useful advice. See anyone listening looking to launch their product slow and steady or kind of build the proper base first.
00:41:15
Speaker
I think it's true that you have maybe more chance than anywhere else to make a boom and suddenly to make a few millions. Maybe, I mean, probably 1% of the projects, but it's possible. But that's it. We took the other approach where we have a higher probability to succeed, but it will take more time. And I think we are right.
00:41:40
Speaker
And is that a mindset that you brought over from the Web2 space, kind of building companies as a solid foundation and then bringing that across to Web3? Yes, definitely. Because when we started in the e-commerce industry, we knew it would not be magical. We knew it would be hard work. We knew we had to build something different and strong.
00:42:03
Speaker
So yes, probably. And my first business, I worked there for almost six years as well. So I knew it would be long. I knew that the company, it's not one or two years, it's a small six to 10 years. So to reach a point that you want to reach. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So you mentioned a couple of minutes ago that one of the differences is that everyone is spread all around the world, right?
Remote Team Culture
00:42:30
Speaker
Teams are in all sorts of different countries and stuff.
00:42:33
Speaker
How do you ensure that you create a good working culture for the team being so spread apart? That's obviously, I speak to projects and companies all the time, and the whole kind of cultural aspect, I think, is really tricky. And especially now with even some Web2 companies, I suppose, with everyone going online and working from home because of the pandemic a few years ago,
00:42:56
Speaker
kind of forced companies to almost rethink what is our culture. But with Web3 being a remote first majority of the time from the very start, if you've got any advice on how you build that kind of culture whilst you're all apart and remote?
00:43:11
Speaker
I think you can definitely build great remote teams, but you still need to make sure that the culture is similar. People join the culture of the company and that this culture is developing. We are remote first.
00:43:29
Speaker
But we have like 30% of our team in Luxembourg, 30% around Barcelona, and most of the other ones around Europe. So actually, people see each other regularly.
00:43:44
Speaker
Because you can work online. And you're usually more productive remotely, to be frank. But for brainstorming sessions and to create trust between your team, they need to see each other. They need to spend time together. They need to go sometimes in an office together. For example, at Tokeni, twice a year, we take the world team and we go somewhere.
00:44:09
Speaker
And for two, three days, there is one day where we walk and we make some sensations. But it's mostly about playing together, get to know each other, doing some extra activities. So after when you work with your colleagues, you know them. And when you're not scared to ask for something, you're not like, ah, this guy's annoying me. I remember when he helped me in the kayak.
00:44:37
Speaker
But he carried me back from the pub that one night. Exactly. So I think it's very important. So regularly, like twice a month or depending on whoever it is, they can meet in offices. And twice a year we take the whole team all together. And I think it's very important. So we are organized as a remote company. But if you want, you can meet your colleagues.
00:45:02
Speaker
And online, we have a lot of tools to help us in terms of communications. So of course, we use Slack and that kind of tools. But mostly, for example, we have a small bot on Slack every Monday. It generally generates pairs of people for a coffee. So every week, you know that you need to take 10 minutes to discuss with that guy or the guy.
00:45:31
Speaker
not about work, just about getting to know each other. That's small thing, but it helps a lot. And we do a lot of apparel, like having a drink with the team online sometimes, or virtual coffees, or a lot of things like this to make sure that people discuss, are not feeling alone, and can share a bit more than just their tasks. So I think it's very important to accept that your remote first,
00:45:58
Speaker
to get organized as well in all the documentations and all of these tools needs to be accessible. We have a great onboarding process. As a newcomer, you know exactly where to find the information. All of this is very important.
00:46:16
Speaker
Yeah, I like that. The coffee morning split off sounds good. So I think when you're working remotely, you don't get the opportunity, right, to speak to colleagues that may be in other teams. If you're in the office, you might bump into them when you're making a coffee in the kitchen or whatever it might be, and you get an opportunity to actually have a conversation with other people. When working remotely, you only maybe speak to the four or five people who are working within that particular part of the project or something, for example.
00:46:45
Speaker
So yeah, I can imagine that's quite fun, to be honest, to be able to have that conversation with people you wouldn't normally get a chance to talk to. We also have a channel on Slack where it's about random things. So it's not about work, it's just about fun.
00:47:02
Speaker
And it's very important. And once a month, we have this call with the whole team where we say what happened and where we're going. And it's very important, for example, you have some developers, a bit more shy than others. So for them, it's great to see what we're doing in terms of sales, in terms of marketings, and the product vision as well to take an overview. So all of this is really important. But you need to accept that you're a remote company.
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I think it was easier to retain staff as well when everyone was in the office. Because I think when you go remotely, if you haven't built that culture within the business and build something that people really want to work within, it's very easy for them to just look online straight away and join another company that might be working remotely. Whereas when everyone was in the office, you build the relationships and you make friends with everyone in the company, right? And then you stay not just because of the job, but you stay because of the people there and
00:48:02
Speaker
I talk to people all the time and I say, well, you mentioned that you wanted to leave the role six months ago, what made you stay? And they go, well, I'm working with three or four of my closest friends now. So that was kind of keeping me there, which I suppose is something quite hard to build. If you haven't got the team meetups, as you said, the trips away, and if you haven't got those coffee things in and the opportunity for people to just chat about stuff that's not about work, I can imagine it's quite hard to keep that retention within the business. For sure.
00:48:31
Speaker
For sure. And actually, at tokenizing, we are doing that quite well because we have a low turnover.
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
00:48:40
Speaker
If you check our team, I think in average, it's almost three years in average in the company. It's great. Yeah, really good. Really good.
00:48:54
Speaker
So after you've been running your own businesses now for 10, 12 years, I think you said, if you could go back to the start and give your younger self a piece of advice, anything that particularly stands out? I would say just to myself, just go for it. Don't be scared because you know at the beginning you have a lot of hesitation.
00:49:21
Speaker
and everybody's sharing his opinion to you. And I'm French, so entrepreneurship in France is better now, but 10 years ago it was like, what are you talking about? Why do you want to start a company? You have a diploma, just go to work in a big company, and that's it. So even if you try to not listen to all of this, of course it impacts you. So you hesitate, and you go,
00:49:45
Speaker
You don't go as big as you would like to go. I think when we started TokenE, so this second business, the first one was pretty successful. So when I started TokenE, I was less scared to fail, more inclined to take risk, like let's make it big.
00:50:02
Speaker
So first one, I was more hesitant maybe, or a bit more, okay, we will see what happened with it, you know? I'm gonna do my best and we'll see. Second one was like, we can do it. It's a better business than the first one, it's a better market, more opportunities, better team, so let's target the sky and we will see what happens.
00:50:32
Speaker
No, that's great. Yeah. So just, just go for it. I think there's probably quite a few people who are maybe sat on the fence or, or, you know, people want to launch their own thing, but maybe a little bit hesitant to do so. So now I think that's really good advice. Just go for it and check everything out and see what happens. Yeah. It's normal to not have all on sales from day one. It's a, you just need to start somewhere having some kind of vision intuition and then step by step you will learn in the way. And if you are resilient and
00:51:02
Speaker
and say I used to make it. That's great. That's great. So why did you take an interest in Web3 then? So you left the last business and then you thought I'm going to join the Web3 space. What made you do that?
00:51:19
Speaker
So I was a bit familiar with Bitcoin since 2012, when I was playing online and seeing all of these opportunities and all of this from these, you know, the INET, what was that? I yield the investment programs, that kind of stuff. So it was like very shady, but it was funny. And I discovered Bitcoin like that. I was like, okay, actually, this payment system looks great. So I booked a bit of Bitcoin and
00:51:48
Speaker
I played a bit with it, but a bit passively. And in 2017, I sold my company, started to travel, started to invest, and it was the first big crypto boom. So everybody was learning a bit more, getting a bit more interested, making more money without working. So I was like, OK, I'm thinking this. And I quickly realized that
00:52:13
Speaker
Most of these early projects were not done seriously, but very successful. So if we just bring some good technology and the right vision to bring a real world asset, it's a trial and chain, it could already work. So we started there, and it was quite successful so far. That's great. And what is it that you, is there something that you really, really like about the Web3 space?
00:52:44
Speaker
I like the inclusion. Everybody can participate, can do things. I mean, literally today, if you start from nothing except your computer or even a smartphone, but yeah, computer, I would say. You speak a bit of English, you have a computer, you can make so much money in Web3. I mean, just chasing the air drops, you will make a very good moving.
00:53:12
Speaker
So yeah, it's an opportunity for new generations to change the game, I think. And we see it a few years ago. In every meeting we are going, at the end, it was always like, ah, so it's like Bitcoin.
00:53:27
Speaker
I say we don't do at all Bitcoin, but okay. So you're very typical and there's big bankers saying it's never going to work. And today is totally different because today you have new generations start to take some leads in this banks and large financial institutions. And yeah, if you just embrace this, if you're not scared about change and evolution,
00:53:53
Speaker
You can make great money, you can make great projects, great careers, thanks to Web3. In many other industries, it's super hard. I don't know if you work in metallurgy to make a difference, or aeronautics to make a difference. Good luck in Web3. You can start projects very quickly and bring value.
00:54:16
Speaker
There's so many like open source things that you can do. There's so many like bounties that you can get involved in with various different companies, even if you're not necessarily employed by those companies.
00:54:27
Speaker
projects, you can help out and you can do stuff to learn about it and really get involved, which is cool. You don't really have that in any other industry, really. And I like the freedom it brings with Web3 for everything. Even the notion of employment is totally changing. Now everybody is freelancing, basically. And you can manage your own assets, so you're not dependent on anyone.
00:54:55
Speaker
I met a lot of investors and I met individuals, etc. And many of them, at some point in their life, lost a lot of money because they put their money in private banks or to some kind of asset managers that didn't manage it properly.
00:55:14
Speaker
When you manage your assets with crypto, you can manage your assets. It doesn't mean you have to study everything, but you can really take the decisions by yourself and assume those decisions. So you can build your wells step by step. And I think that's great. You're not dependent on intermediaries.
00:55:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I think, um, as long as you, as long as you do the education behind it and learn about what you're doing, um, then you can, because if you don't, well, so you can also lose a lot of money if you try and wing it. Um, so you have to know about it. But so is, is there anything that you would like to change about the web three space? If you could.
00:55:58
Speaker
I'm not sure I will change all of their scams because they teach us a lot and it makes the whole industry progress, but I would love to reduce the bullshit you heard every day.
00:56:14
Speaker
A lot of people are commenting without any information or without checking. I'm always very surprised. Nobody is checking what's in the smart contract, but everybody is commenting the smart contract. For example, with what we do, everybody is talking about tokenization.
00:56:34
Speaker
And the people will really double click on the GitHub to see the functions of the smart contracts. I mean, it's extremely low. And you don't need to code for that smart contracts. Usually you have the function and you have a paragraph of description of what it does. So it's actually very simple, but most people are scared when it's related to technology.
00:56:57
Speaker
because they don't want to look stupid. So they're scared and they don't have a look. So you see a lot of comments and articles and even podcasts and everything with people who have no clue what they're talking about. And I think that's a bit scary. So sometimes you're like, what? But you didn't look at what he's talking about. So this noise is a bit annoying because you lose a bit of time.
00:57:28
Speaker
But scams, of course, scams are not great. But all of the hacks, et cetera, we get every week in Web3. Step by step, it helps the whole industry to become more secure, more resilient, more cautious, more organized. So step by step, it's helpful. That's a good way of looking at it, to be honest.
00:57:50
Speaker
Because yeah, I suppose those things have to happen really. So you can find out where the insecurities in the systems and stuff are to be able to fix them, right? If they didn't happen, you wouldn't know that they were there. But yeah, I just hope that...
00:58:05
Speaker
I just hope that the scams and stuff that do happen when people do lose money, I hope it just doesn't discredit the technology behind the scams and stuff before it has a chance to become more mainstream and more widely used. I think that's obviously one of the dangers behind it. But no, that's really interesting. And are there any other challenges that you've noticed that you think needs to be overcome before blockchain does become more mainstream in more traditional businesses?
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think everything around wallets and more globally identities. Who can manage your identity on the blockchain? Because today is pretty complicated. Either you have your own self to study wallets and it can be risky or you trust someone else and exchange and it can be risky as we saw it.
00:59:03
Speaker
So this account abstraction ID, or you represent yourself on the blockchain, or you prove that you're legit, or you respect some more criterias, on-chain, but not being blocked with one wallet, I think it's key. That's why actually at TokenE we developed a decentralized identity system, it's called on-chain ID.
00:59:26
Speaker
So you have an on-chain idea, you can get certifications. A trusted party saying, okay, I verified him, he's more than 18 years old and he's not from North Korea, but still remaining anonymous on-chain. And you can link one or several wallets to your identity. So you can really manage your on-chain presence without worrying too much about one wallet.
00:59:55
Speaker
And actually, you can even give allowance from one wallet to another. So you can all cover your crypto if you lose one wallet or one of your wallets compromised. So you can do a lot of things with the second abstraction.
01:00:07
Speaker
But it's still a bit complex for people to understand what is an identity, what is a non-chain identity, or to manage it properly. So we don't push this solution too much for the moment. It's part of our solution to apply compliance, but it could be a standalone product.
01:00:26
Speaker
And I think it's very because, um, what is starting to happen is that now your identity is your Coinbase identity or ENS or that kind of things. Um, so hopefully, uh, hopefully we'll keep control of identities on chain and not, uh, not like in web to where your Gmail account is your identity. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? But now I think, I think people need to learn, learn about what it actually means to have your own,
01:00:54
Speaker
on-chain identity and what it means to be able to have control of your own data and how you let it go about doing that. Because at the moment, you just give it all away and let someone else worry about it, really. So actually, when it's yours and you're controlling it yourself, there's a massive education piece that goes around with how you actually go about it, what it means, what things you need to share, what you don't.
01:01:18
Speaker
I think there's a whole kind of cultural shift that happens around that as well as we start to move more and more and more into Web3. I know quite a few people have asked me if I've heard of any projects you have, you know, a central place that they can, you know, keep wallets and use kind of one system to be able to log into multiple different places. So I'm going to send them, I'm definitely going to send them your product so they can check it out, if you don't mind.
01:01:45
Speaker
Yeah, with pleasure. It's open source. Okay, great. Great. Well, Luke, if you could sum up your advice then, obviously you've shared some brilliant insights today and some great advice. If you could share some, I guess, summarize your advice to people who are looking to follow in your footsteps. What could you say?
01:02:13
Speaker
I would say start somewhere. Do something you like. Find an area, a market that is interesting for you. Start building something. You can learn the basics in everything in marketing, in tech. You have no code solutions. You can build something by your own. And then step by step involves the right people in your project, in your vision.
01:02:43
Speaker
because you cannot build everything by yourself, you will need some help. So define your vision, start something and involve the right people and then become resilient. Don't listen too much noise around, just stick to your vision. That should be fine after a few years.
01:03:02
Speaker
That's great advice. Well, Luke, thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation today. It's been great. Really enjoyed the chat. You've shared some brilliant advice there. I'm definitely going to be watching this back and, yeah, implementing some of that advice into my own business, to be honest with you. So, yeah, thank you very much for taking the time. Thanks a lot, Jack. And, yeah, I'll catch up with you soon.