Accelerating time to skill - Arnaud Blachon (Rise Up)
Arnaud Blachon is the co-founder and CEO of Rise Up, a specialist provider of learning software solutions that help organizations stay up-to-skill.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening. The podcast is hosted by Frank Albert Coates.
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The Guest
Pure players, if they are not delivering enough wide functionality, can't survive right now.
Arnaud Blachon is the co-founder and CEO of Rise Up, a specialist provider of learning software solutions that help organizations stay up-to-skill. With an engineering background he began his career as an application developer and in 2014, he co-founded Rise Up with his brother Guillaume, aiming to revolutionize corporate learning through blended learning solutions at the time.
They have now raised nearly 50M EUR in funding and have more than 130 employees, support 5 million active learners. This year they are transforming learning personalisation at scale with the acquisition of the adaptive learning AI specialists, Domoscio.
Company profile
Segment: Corporate learning
Business model: B2B
Geo: Global
Year started: 2014
Funding: Series B
Location: Paris, France
The view of the Garage
Rise Up has positioned themselves as a refreshing player in the European market for learning management software with their post-sales service offering as a key part of their value proposition. With the latest acquisition they are integrating further in the HR/Learning tech stack and are able to provide better targeted learning.
What do they need to go further? Here are a few key areas to look at:
Personalization
The key to engaging learners is to provide them with relevant content. Through Domoscio, Rise Up will be able to personalize content. The question is how far do they go? Will they be able to dynamically provide personalized content based on all types of learning resources and formats? Also embedded in the flow of work? The next step in personalization could be using predictive analytics on learner data to predict future learning needs. This would need a much larger volume of data outside the information provided just within an LMS system. However, with a combination of Large Language Models and external content libraries & skills matrices the building blocks are already there to guide and coach the learner towards a desired outcome.Differentiation
How do Rise Up differentiate themselves from the thousands of LMS / LXP providers on the market? With the ability to accommodate a blended learning approach, personalized / adaptive learning, learning in the flow of work and service-based approach they already propose a strong suite that fit well with small to mid-sized companies in their target group. What about skills? For now they focus on integrating with talent / skills platforms and plan to develop more around this themselves. With organizations increasingly focusing on skills as a basis for HR, talent development and learning, being the base platform for skills taxonomy, mapping and tracking can become a key differentiator when selecting a must-have solution.Integrations & partnerships
Being able to integrate with tools and platforms for content creation, talent & performance management, HR and more will be key to help organizations simplify the tool stack, ensure maximization of resources and create a cohesive learning ecosystem. Already Rise Up has a baseline of partners that integrate with their platform, but to expand to other markets and potentially bigger clients, they might need more partners that both integrate and can be resellers of their platform. Being able to propose a package of partners for organizations buying their first platforms & tools will establish Rise Up as a trusted advisor and can elevate their positioning above the LMS/LXP market.
Extracts
How to make learning count
The difference between Rise Up and the rest of the world is; we want to accelerate what we call the time to skill. On average, if you look at the last Gartner research and Josh Bersin as well, even if we are all convinced that training is key, people spend less than 25 minutes on formal learning every week.
At Rise Up, we believe that your main goal as an L&D manager is not to increase those 25 minutes because we all have a daily job we have to deliver and we can't spend multiple hours a week on it. We decided to make those 25 minutes count. Each minute needs to be impactful. And to do so, we invest in personalization in two ways.
The first one is learning in the flow of work, the capacity to embed learning pieces in applications people daily use, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Slack. And the second one is the adaptive learning experience at a micro level, which is adapted to your level.
And it's a complete game changer because instead of delivering the same training for everyone, I will deliver a customized training at a scale for each learner by starting with a positioning test and an adaptive one which is based on AI technologies to be sure that I will detect sooner your level of skills proficiency and I will give you only the content interesting once we analyze the skill gap.
COVID pushed the digital transformation
COVID completely changed the game. The first years pre Covid, it was a matter of convincing people that digital learning is the future. It won't replace everything, but it's useful even for face to face training, if it's used correctly. And the whole sales pitch, the first years was about how to convince them that they need to invest in it.
Then COVID happened and it completely changed the game because day two, you need to train people. If you don't have any solution, everything is over. You improvise Zoom meetings. But even with Zoom, if you don't have a platform to manage those report questions, pre learning, post learning, it's a mess. And after those three to four crazy months it was not a matter of anymore convincing people on digital learning solutions, but convincing them that we were the best, basically.
So it completely changed the game. It also moved from an HR decision to a general management topic, which completely changed the game in terms of how to unlock budget. Companies were convinced that investing in digital was key. It accelerated, and I think not only in the HR space, but the whole digital transformation of every department.
AI and the Domoscio acquisition
Overall, I think AI will change the game, but we are just at the beginning.
And this is where the acquisition we made with Domoscio completely changed the game because everyone started just to generate content. That was the easiest use case to think about. But 99 percent of the output is really medium quality or poor quality most of the time. And why it's because if it's based on nothing and it's just a standard question you ask, you will have a standard answer.
What changed the game with Domoscio is they completely built their algorithm, AI, based on cognitive science research first and neuroscience, which completely changed the game. Because it will not ask the AI to generate content. It will take the content provided by the company. It will guide you on how to write good questions. It will then use it to create an adaptive positioning test, which is based on each answer we have the algorithm to select what's going to be the next question we ask to the person. And it completely changed in terms of output in this case.
So it's not just recommendations. Everyone can do recommendations. You don't need AI for simple recommendations. But it's really like the adaptive learning framework behind it which, when merged with the right AI engine will deliver the right experience in the end.
The skills framework
Having the right skills framework is important because it first will permit to really align learning objectives with business objectives. So first, from a learner perspective, it's important when I follow a training to understand why I'm doing this. So if it can be related to my skills development plan, because my skills development plan is linked to my next job, I always know why I'm doing this. So I'm self motivated and I will finish my training because I understood why I'm doing this. So the skills framework overall is really key to user engagement in the end.
What we have seen at Rise Up, is we really delimited what's the Rise Up perimeter as a learning management system, as a learning platform. And we decided that most of the time we won't have our own skill repository. We believe that our job is to link training to skills, have the capacity to have a mapping for each learner like why I'm doing this. It notifies skills gaps, but then we are most of the time synchronized to applications, which are connected to every other HR application to centralize the skills repository.
So either the application Rise Up will work as a standalone solution, and we will have skills theme, questions bank related to skills and the capacity to generate a skills map for a learner related to the objective. And then we synchronize this data to the central skill repository every large corporate should have anyway, because you need it in staffing, mobility, and other HR applications connected to this.
Centralization of learning tools
It's been challenging, you're right, the past 18 months. If we go back after COVID, we had a first period which was completely crazy in how buyers were looking for solutions and were happy to multiply solutions at this time. And it went up to a certain peak where a company could have maybe five or six different tools just to manage learning.
So it was crazy in another way because they had like a mobile solution, digital learning solution, face to face solution, virtual classroom solution. It was good because they were trying things and really happy to experiment and sales cycles were shorter. Budget was here. Everyone was excited about new solutions, trying new things.
And then it's true that maybe 18 months ago, it completely changed. It completely changed. We started a new cycle, which was all right; now we have tried a lot of things, but we need to rationalize because it doesn't make sense, which means the level of required features, the perimeter you need to work in a company was different.
It was over to just sign a company for a specific modality in a small perimeter, like the RFPs were more complex. They were looking for solutions to centralize things. Which was good at Rise Up because as we started with the multi modality, we had the capacity to do this. So it was a good time for us, even if sales cycles are longer, budgets are not overextended.
They want to do less with more, basically. So first you need to have the right solution. Secondly, you need to be patient because you need to wait for the replacement of the whole pool of solutions they deployed. But it's interesting and I think it was required also because it was a total nonsense for companies to have a solution for mobile, solution for web, solution for virtual classroom.
You completely denature the goal of those solutions which are creating the best learning experience. If as a learner, I have multiple entry points and no one is centralizing what I'm doing, it's useless. So I think it's the right direction, completely makes sense. Just a matter of how to be sure that you are positioned and you can do this.
That's why also the market started to consolidate, because pure players, if they are not delivering enough wide functionality, can't survive right now.
Full transcript
FA: First, do you want to give us sort of the 30 second pitch for a Rise Up?
AB: Sure. Basically, Rise Up, we are a pure player learning solution, which means that we help companies and organizations to create online academies. And we manage 100 percent of the training activity. So not only the e learning, but also blended learning, face to face, virtual classroom. And when we started Rise Up, we used to say that there is no one modality which rules the world.
You have different modalities regarding people you train and skills you want them to develop. So we see Rise Up as a toolbox, which is there to help you to find the right modality for each learner, basically.
FA: Very nice. Uh, so let's go back then to the beginning. And if I have my history correct, you started up the company with your brother. So eager to hear about, you know, why did you start up? Why did you pick EdTech and learning and tell us a bit about that story.
AB: So right after school, engineering school, me and my brother we joined a video conferencing company. So not in the learning industry, but in 2009 when it was really harder than just one click to join a video call, whatever the software you're using, the computer you are using. It was the moment where companies and multiple vendors like Cisco, Polycom and Logitech, and it was really hard to connect all those systems together. We joined a startup who created the first SaaS platform to make them communicate, basically. So, this company has been acquired after, I think I spent five years there. From software engineer to the sales department in the end.
And when the company has been acquired with Guillaume who joined the last two years we have been moved to the innovation department of a very large corporation. And in 2013, we have been invited to represent this company at a consortium created by the French government on how to react to the new wave of massive online open courses.
At this time, the French government were really afraid by those American universities, which had the capacity to steal the best students online, basically. And they created a group of people to think about what can we do. And it was for us the first experience with the learning industry. So more on the educational side first.
And then after a few months, we decided that mixing the B2B background we had and new technologies we were discovering on the education space. Maybe we had something to do because the corporate learning was still really boring and adapted to new challenges. And we just decided to quit and start something.
I think we had, we had more, we were more interested in the entrepreneurial experience than the learning, let's say first. The learning came up as the best opportunity for us to leverage what we did in the past.
FA: So, tell me a bit about, you know, what were the learnings from this, this first phase of let's say a V1 of the product to where you are today. What's been the, yeah, the learnings and sort of the feedback also from, from clients that have made you evolve the product and the fit.
AB: It was a very long journey from the, from the first idea and the first client. I think it took us three years. To build the right product. So, and a lot of reasons for this. First, we had no experience in this industry. So we were just playing with new technologies and we had no clue at this time on how people are being trained in the corporate world, what are the real problems and, and where to, to create something of value added to make people pay for it.
So first version of the product, I think I used to say it was more like crazy engineers idea. Oh, let's completely change the game by online training, kill the traditional system and focus on the user experience. And after one year building the product, trying to demo the product, it was always the same story.
HR people, which were for us the buyer persona, used to say, fantastic learning experience, but it's not useful for me. Like, of course, it's going to be useful for learners, but I have other issues to solve. And we tried the first two years to fight against it. And try to convince buyers that they were making the wrong choice, focusing on administrators.
And the last year we said, all right, after two years, we are a bit exhausted, broke, what's next? And we had two options, find another job and just accept that we failed, we tried. It was an interesting experience, but now it's time to move on. Or, restart something, take those two years of experience, listen more to buyers, and trying to find something in the middle, which is not give up what we believe in, which was build a better user experience and customize learning at a scale.
Because the main thing, the what, what we had in mind, the real thing was we believe that the, the corporate learning issue is you bring eight people with different background, different skills in the same room, and you deliver the same training program, whatever the level of the person. Interest of the person and objective of the person.
So at this time we saw then that was the main conviction. We believed that technology can change it, can change it at the scale, because we understand that as a trainer, you can't deliver a customized experience for everyone, but that's the purpose of the technology. She should be there, not to replace the trainer, but to help the trainer to do this at the scale.
So that, that was what he had in mind, but the buyers, they were, yeah, but you don't get it, our problem, the real problems are, we don't know how to manage the whole administrative constraints around the training world. We need tools for better planification. We need tools to manage this at a scale. And once it will be solved, of course, we will, we will, we will be really happy to have your nice to have solutions.
So we said, all right, let's have a last attempt, solve their problems first, and once it will be done, we will slowly but surely make them move to what we believe is the future of learning. And it worked. It was really hard, but we completely rebuilt it from scratch, Rise Up, which was not Rise Up, by the way, the first name was UpGraduate.
It was terrible because it was complex to understand, complex to say. Which means that if you, if you believe in word of mouth, it was terrible. So, so we said, all right, let's change the name, find something which is easier to understand and say. Rise Up came here and we started from scratch and we started by both administrator oriented solutions first and learner experience on the other hand. And we signed first deal.
70 euro per month. And the first one trained, I think it trained like more than 700 people in a few months with the solution. It was incredible for us. And it led to the second one, the third one. And yeah, year number four, finally we were generating money. Every new client was bigger than the previous one and led us to build best solution for what we used to say, top of the mid market, companies between one to 5, 000 employees, that was the sweet spot for us. And the magic happened in the next years. It led to the first, A-series, with an investor who thought it was crazy that we succeeded in a so crowded market because in the same time, so a lot of companies raised and built this crazy solution about learning.
AB: And yeah, the first one led to the second one. The third one, a few years later, we started to expand outside of France, with first clients in Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands. And finally in 2022, we raised the Series B with Connected Capital to expand outside of France and accelerate in UK, Germany, and become the the next European leader long story short.
FA: story short. Yeah. Yeah, great, great journey. And also how you, how you learned from the first iterations, right? About, about the market. And maybe one question before going more into the company now and, and what, what you will do in the future. Have you seen a difference from the HR and learning teams in terms of their pain points and use cases, now from a couple of years back, how have you seen that evolve?
AB: In, in the world, let's say in the last 10 years, COVID completely changed the game. The first years pre Covid, it was a matter of convincing people that digital learning is the future. It won't replace everything, but it's useful even for face to face training, if it's used correctly. And the whole sales pitch, the first years was about how to convince them that they need to invest in it.
Then COVID happened and it completely changed the game because day two, you need to train people. If you don't have any solution, everything is over. You improvise Zoom meetings. But even with Zoom, if you don't have a platform to manage those report questions, pre learning, post learning, it's a mess. And after those three, three to four crazy months, it was a matter of not anymore convince people on digital learning solutions, but convince them that we were the best, basically.
So it completely changed the game. It also moved from an HR decision to a general management topic, which completely changed the game in terms of how to unlock budget, basically. Companies were convinced that investing in digital was key. It accelerated, and I think not only in the HR space, but the whole digital transformation of every department.
And after that, it was really just a matter of why we are the best for you.
FA: So on that, you will probably speak about your, your recent acquisition, but you know, how will you succeed? And what do you say your secret sauce is, because as you say it's a huge market. There's lots of providers in the overall learning space, right? So for a company it's hard to choose and know, you know, what's right. So what, what makes you stand out and what will make you stand out?
AB: If we come back to the initial mantra of Rise Up, personalization at a scale. Right now, every company is, I think everyone understood that investing in training is key if you want to keep people up to skill. Re skilling is key because it's too costly to just part ways with employees and hire new employees.
And as every skill is obsolete every five years, you need to have an internal system. The difference between Rise Up and the rest of the world is; we want to accelerate what we call the time to skill. On average, if you look at the last Gartner research and Josh Bersin as well, even if we are all convinced that training is key, people spend less than 25 minutes on formal learning every week.
At Rise Up, we believe that your main goal as an L&D manager is not to increase those 25 minutes because we all have a daily job we have to deliver and we can't spend multiple hours a week on it. We decided to make those 25 minutes count. Each minute needs to be impactful. And to do so, we invest in personalization in two ways.
The first one is learning in the flow of work, the capacity to embed learning pieces in applications people daily use, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Slack. And the second one is the adaptive learning experience at a micro level, which is, I will show you the piece of content, which is adapted to your level.
And it's completely game changer because instead of delivering the same training for everyone, I will deliver a customized training at a scale for each learner by starting with a positioning test and an adaptive one which is based on AI technologies to be sure that I will detect sooner your level of skills proficiency and I will give you only the content interesting once we analyze the skill gap.
So as a manager, I will decide that every project manager, for example, need to master those eight skills. Every learner will have the automatic positioning test first, and we'll have a dedicated training path adapted to their skill gap first, which means relevant content, which generates a better engagement. And content related to skills objectives first. So really impactful training.
Those are the, the real key things for Rise Up. Accelerating the time to skills for organizations by delivering tailored learning experience to align both individual learners and business requirements. That's the key message.
FA: Absolutely. And that, so goes hand in hand, right, with the acquisition that you just did. And so talking about AI. So many companies, they say they do AI, but actually it's, it's more like a ChatGPT light. So how, and it's almost like an investor question, like how, how deep is your AI integration and how do you see that for the company and for the industry as a whole going forwards.
AB: Overall, I think AI will change the game, but we are just at the beginning. And we still need to understand how, basically. I think it's really incredible that we have all those engines available as a software provider. I can completely change the whole chain, but you need to know what to ask to the AI.
And this is where the acquisition we made with Domoscio completely changed the game because everyone started just to generate content, basically. That, that was the easiest use case to think about. But 99 percent of the output is really medium quality, let's say, or poor quality most of the time. And why it's because if it's based on nothing and it's just standard question you ask, you will have a standard answer.
What changed the game with Domoscio is they completely built their algorithm, AI, based on cognitive science research first and neuroscience, which completely changed the game. Because it will ask not the AI to generate content. It will take the content provided by the company. It will guide you on how to write good questions. It will then use it to create adaptive positioning test, which is based on each answer we have algorithm to select what's going to be the next question we ask to the person. And it completely changed in terms of output in this case.
So it's not just recommendations. Everyone can do recommendations. You don't need AI for simple recommendations. But it's really like the adaptive learning framework behind it which merged with the right AI engine will deliver the right experience in the end.
FA: Absolutely. And it makes me think of another piece of the puzzle in the HR and learning stack, which is skills. How do you see the skills component and sort of skills mapping there? I know there are other companies who have sort of either acquired or developed things around skills. How do you see that as a piece of the puzzle?
AB: I think it's important and having the right skills framework is important because it first it will permit to really align learning objectives with business objectives. So first, from a learner perspective, it's important when I follow a training to understand why I'm doing this. So if it's can be related to my skills development plan, because my skills development plan is linked to my next job. I always know why I'm doing this. So I'm self motivated and I will finish my training because I understood why I'm doing this. So the skills framework overall is really key to user engagement in the end.
I think what we have seen at Rise Up, , is we really delimited what's the Rise Up perimeter as a learning management system, as a learning platform. And we decided that most of the time we will, we won't have our own skill repository. We believe that our job is to link training to skills, have the capacity to have a mapping for each learner like why I'm doing this. It notifies skills gap, but then we are most of the time synchronized to applications, which are connected to every other HR application to centralize the skills repository.
So either the application Rise Up will work as a standalone solution, and we will have skills theme, questions bank related to skills and the capacity to generate skills map for a learner related to the objective. And then we synchronize this data to the central skill repository every large corporate should have anyway, because you need it in staffing, mobility, and other HR applications connected to this.
FA: And that makes sense. That makes sense. And I like the way you say that you, you, you limit, you know, you have the scope, which is so important developing products and, and being successful. So moving a bit over and we started talking about it, challenges since you started the company.
Could you sort of name one big challenge that you had since you started the company and probably the latest iteration and how did you solve it?
AB: Think you have challenges at every step of development. The actual one we are facing, which is the one we are focusing on the past two years is how to replicate at the European scale, what we successfully did in France. As a European company, French startup, you have two options; either you go to the US which is the bigger market, and you restart there. Or you try to succeed in Europe, which is almost as complicated and even more because you have as much different culture and way of working than in that country. And if you are successful in Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, it doesn't mean that you will be successful in the UK or Germany. You have to restart from scratch almost everywhere.
And you have different rules and it's really hard to reinvest and restart from zero in all those countries. So that, that was a massive challenge for us. I'm really, really happy because we can now tell that we have more than 25 percent of revenues outside of France, which was a massive milestone for us as we continue to, to grow at a very good level overall.
Since day one, we have multinationals, which are using Rise Up, but signing multinationals in another country was a huge milestone. You have to restart a team from zero. We used to say that even if we are a software company, we are also a service company. We help companies to leverage the Rise Up technology at the best and to do so we need to have local team almost everywhere because we will guide you on how to set Rise Up correctly, how to create the right training path. Help you to understand what's going to work with your learners because the software basically is really customizable.
We can train people at Burger King, Domino's Pizza, which are in the kitchen using a mobile phone in a noisy environment. But we also have bank and insurance and the use case is completely different because they will book a meeting room for two hours, be in a quiet environment. And recipes are completely different. So when we deploy a client we really invest on how to upskill the client to understand what's going to work or not. So, which means in every country we start, we have a team of minimum 10 people with the service part included. And that's a massive challenge.
That was the biggest one the past few years at Rise Up.
FA: So essentially provide clients with a really good level of service to be able to integrate those products in a meaningful way. Right. And, if you look at the current climate right now, like how do you see that for the, I guess, from the last year until now, affecting you know, the sales cycles and clients and new prospects, how are you dealing with that?
AB: It's been challenging, you're right, the past 18 months, like, we, If we go back after COVID, we had a first period which was completely crazy in how buyers were looking for solutions and were happy to multiply solutions at this time. And it went up to a certain peak where a company could have maybe five or six different tools just to manage learning.
So it was crazy in another way because they had like a mobile solution, digital learning solution, face to face solution, virtual classroom solution. It was good because they were trying things and really happy to experiment and sales cycles were shorter. Budget was here. Everyone was excited about new solutions, trying new things.
And then it's true that like maybe 18 months ago, it completely changed. It completely changed. We started a new cycle, which was all right; now we have tried a lot of things, but we need to rationalize because it doesn't make sense, which means the level of required features, the perimeter you need to work in a company was different.
It was over to just sign a company for a specific modality in, in a small perimeter, like the RFPs were more complex. They were looking for solutions to centralize things. Which was good at Rise Up because as we started with the multi modality, we had the capacity to do this. So it was a good time for us, even if, yep, sales cycles, they are longer, budgets are not overextended.
They want to do less with more, basically. So first you need to have the right solution. Secondly, you need to be patient because you need to wait for the replacement of the whole pool of solutions they deployed. But it's interesting and I think it was required also because it was, it was a total nonsense for companies to have a solution for mobile, solution for web, solution for virtual classroom.
You completely, like, denature the goal of those solutions which are creating the best learning experience. If as a learner, I have multiple entry points and no one just centralizing what I'm doing. It's useless. So I think it's the right direction, completely makes sense. Just a matter of how to be sure that you are positioned and you can do this.
That's why also the market started to consolidate, because pure players, if they are not delivering, enough wide functionality, can't survive right now.
FA: Absolutely to our previous mergers and acquisition discussion. And so if you look forward to the next 6, 12 months, what's keeping you up at night, if not what we just talked about?
AB: First, a lot of things in terms of product. Because what has been unlocked with AI, the skill revolution, if you think about what's going to be Rise Up in two years, it will be completely different. So I'm really excited about it because. We have in mind the personalization at scale in 10 years.
And now we can do this, really, we can do this and we can do this with very good results. So I'm really excited about it. It will take some time for us to digest the Domoscio acquisition and be sure that we can leverage adaptive learning from every part of Rise Up, because I believe not only the positioning test, but I think that the AI adaptive solution will completely change the game for us. Of course we need to learn, what's working, what's not. But yeah, in terms of product, definitely we have exciting times coming.
And in terms of market for us, as we are positioned as now, let's say one of the top European challengers, it's exciting because we are in a position where we can consolidate the market. And a lot of opportunities are on the market right now. So really exciting time for us and good position to be.
FA: Okay. So we'll watch the news from your acquisitions team. No, but you're so right. You're so right. And as you talk about the, the puzzle HR learning stack, right? It's much easier for companies to have a complete solution than 10, 15 different ones. In terms of advice to other EdTech companies and startups, that are just getting off the ground, anything that you would want to share that is like, oh, this I should have known before, you know, creating startup, EdTech startup?
AB: Well, so many things, but if I have to extract one thing from the Rise Up experience it is we completely did it our way without following the classic model, rules, market study, things to do. What I can tell to people is;
there is no right way to do. There is your way and your way is going to be the right one. Don't listen to people which will tell you what to do because most of the time they don't know about it and they have no clue. And just be convinced that your way is the best one. Whatever the obstacles, choice you have to make, even if it's not read it in books, your way will be the best one.
That's it.
FA: I like that. Stand by what you believe in essentially. Yeah. And oh, just a bonus question here. So you started up this company with your brother, how do you think that shaped or changed the way that you built it and developed it and succeeded?
AB: Yeah, I think it's part of our secret sauce. I think we are lucky because I like to do things that he completely dislikes and the opposite is true, which is we are complementary. And that's really good. And that's why after 10 years, we are really still happy and excited to meet each other and work together.
So for us, it was a no brainer to start something together. And you have, you have crazy values because you, you have to trust your co founders and, well, as it's my brother, like that was logic. So for us, I think it was a very, very, very good strength.
I think that of course the company has been like tailored, uh, by that. The atmosphere, the way it works, of course, sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative, but that, that's the way it is. Once again, I think there is no right model. There is just yours, your conviction, what you believe in. And that's it. Yeah.
FA: It's a nice family story. Very nice family story. So anything else that you want to share? We're sort of coming towards the end of the podcast.
AB: No, I think we are, we are living exciting times for EdTech. And, and I'm really, I'm really excited about what's coming next.
