#171 Nick de la Forge, Planet A

0:04Hi, and welcome back to the European VC, the go to podcast for everything European VC. If you love the show, share it with your friends and join our newsletter at eu.vc. Today, we're happy to welcome Nick, co-founder and general partner of Planet A, a leading European green tech fund looking to invest into scalable, sustainable innovation. Before following the calling of building Planet A, Nick worked in different roles at leading firms at European tech startups and funds. His own company is ScaleWonder and he has a long-ranging track record as an angel investor in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. If you enjoy our content, do support us by hitting the follow button, giving us a review and following the European VC on LinkedIn.

1:00Nick, welcome to the European VC. It's nice to welcome you here after we met in person during the UBC's amazing event during Web Summit last year. Jokes aside, nice to see you. How's everything today? It was indeed amazing. Thanks a lot for the invitation again. Everything is fantastic. Slowly but surely getting out of winter. That is slowly, right? And I have another person in Berlin today who was showing me how much snow you've got right now. Are you in Berlin or Hamburg? I'm in Milan right now. Oh, really? You can't complain that it's slowly towards winter. No, obviously, here it is slowly.

1:36In part of it, isn't it? Yeah, that's true. It's just stuck. Nick, first things first. Give us a quick intro. Who's Nick? How did Nick end up being at Planet A doing venture, Impact Investing Venture? Happily. I come back to Impact Investing in a second as you said nick i was born and raised in frankfurt in germany had always the privilege and honor to be traveling quite good at an early age spent a year in brazil when i was 15 then only knew that i was really into tech so i went to become an engineer i studied just for engineering and while still being at university for better or for words i fell into the entire 3.0 space everything around centralization data financial systems identities just against supply chains and so on and i also started to invest in my my very slim student budget in 2015 into into that space and that kind of spiraled in a positive way out of control it's like dozens of angel investments over the past eight years in the beginning in that space and then also started to branch out into other spaces and that has been like 50 of what i've been doing not time wise but where i focus my energy and the rest of my energy i focus on other things i was for a very short time with the fund as a visiting analyst in Berlin, then went into a portfolio company of that fund and then started to build my own company, which was basically a boutique consultancy where we helped deep tech startups, again, especially in Web3, to solve their crucial growth questions.

2:59So we introduced them to investors, helped them find connections into the industry, up the miving and so on. And throughout all the time, I slowly but surely started to become more aware of the challenges that we currently have, and especially that we're currently simply running without inventing rights per hour against the wall. The wall is partially called climate change, but in a bigger sense, planetary boundaries. And I think that's also the direct transition into what we do with Planet A. Can I just ask you out of curiosity, because it's uncommon, at least I haven't heard this story a lot, where people at still university stage of their life start investing very small tickets, right?

3:34I think it's getting a bit more common now, but could you share some more just backstory there? Because I find it quite interesting that that's part of your story in DaVenture. I honestly, like I didn't have anybody that showed me how it was supposed to be done. So Web3 in 2015, like there is, of course, bigger OGs, people that have been doing that for a longer time. But still, 2015 was relatively early. And somebody just told me about Bitcoin in the beginning. I was super interested in it and then bought some Bitcoin at, I don't know, 100 something euro and dollars. And then I started to dig much deeper into the entire paradigm behind the Web3.

4:09And I've never been big into social media. I've had Instagram before a month or so, never really been active on any of the other formats because I believe that it is also highly corruptive and partially toxic to personality and how we lead discussions. And so I was really amazed by the promises that Web3 offer around having a more decentralized rep and where the value accruciating is not with the big companies we all know, but where this is more happening in a decentralized version where the way where you also have more anonymity and that was something i was simply amazed of and then started to participate in in actual communities i think back then there was more geeky communities than greedy communities in a sense and so this is this is something that i was in and then simply had the possibility to say hey okay i'm not able to invest 25 000 in as an angel ticket but i can simply chip in into a private sale or into started off with ICOs, then I can simply chip in a couple of hundred euros or dollars.

5:07And that's then got more and more than allowed me to continuously about taking private sales and simply give that flexibility on that level. But in the end, I also over time grew more and more cautious that Web3 is not the silver bullet to solve everything. Electroorganization might make sense for some cases, but for a lot of the post-use cases, it might not be the best tool we have. And I also think that Web3 is still very Web3 focused. And wireless is beautiful. And I think fantastic way for investors to play in the ecosystem. There was a growing consciousness that I'm part of the very privileged global north, as well as other very privileged subgroups.

5:44And that I felt like contributing my time and energy into other things that I felt like were at least as pressing. I'd love to ask you, Nick, because this isn't what you're focused on now at Planet A, which is mobility and energy. So I'd love to ask you, with a background in Web3, how come you're not thinking that much about refi? Oh, I'm thinking a lot about refi. Okay. I've looked into maybe, yeah, I would have to lie, maybe 30 companies or so of refi. I would just say I've seen the majority of the companies that are in refi space, and I think it's very ambitious. I, at the same time, think that many of the major hurdles are not predominantly solved by integrating the element of blockchain in the end.

6:30A lot of the more serious companies, not all, but a lot of them, they also have a strong focus on raising through equity because they believe that a brief slide for all the listeners that do not know what that is, it's regenerative finance, and a lot of the projects somehow focus on carbon markets. And if you look at carbon markets, what was really helpful to me is to understand the buyer's perspective. The seller's perspective is clear. There is entrepreneurs, may that be product developers or tech entrepreneurs that want to sell carbon credits, high-quality carbon credits. The buyer side looks very different.

7:00It's somebody sitting in a purchasing agreement at an automotive OEM that has absolutely no incentive to take a big risk. This is the equivalent of nobody ever that fired for buying IBM. The same is true for carbon credits. Like you have no upside in taking a very ambitious decision while the downside is huge. You have potentially a fraudulent carbon credit. You have a reputation of costs and you have to bring up the resources to buy new credits. So people are super, super cautious. And I think Rep3 is, in many circles, still not considered to be a haven of trust. Wait, what? I'm not entirely sure how much to the advantage it is to the brief by companies that Rep3 is more or less prominent in their value proposition.

7:45I understand it from a technological point of view, but I think from the pure, like, how can we bring this to market, you can't dispute about it. Yeah, very interesting. Just a question on that, because there are funds that are very heavily exposed to refi. Is it your judgment that that is quite some exposure to have to a subsector that's not very developed yet? Or would you say, no, no, there's definitely room for a fund that focuses heavily on this space? Absolutely. I think there is space, of course. I think it's very early and I think it's fantastic what these funds are doing. And I think the entire ecosystem is so close and not in a negative way that it's closed off, but how close all the different players collaborate with each other, I think is just fantastic.

8:27I think nowadays I wear more the Planet A hat than I obviously know my way around in Web 3, and therefore I now want to invest into refi, but I have to put it into the absolute benchmark towards, I don't know, supercritical geofem energy or finding a new way to produce green methanol. And this is where I see where the capital efficiency, if you will, is simply a tiny bit bigger in these fields than in refi, especially because I think it's a different paradigm and you're playing different ecosystems. So I think it's fantastic that they are there and I really hope that ReFi is going to grow bigger.

8:59It was a conscious decision. And I mean, I've been looking at a lot of projects and continuously am, but haven't been super active in that field just yet. Very interesting. Okay, so that was us already derailing the conversation, but I thought it was very interesting to hear. Let's get back to the thesis behind Planet A and the origin story and everything around that because now we've heard your story. tell us about origin story of planet-e. Happy new. So in around 2019, I started to, without a clear inflection point in the sense that I saw something or stood somewhere that made me rethink my life, I started to grow more conscious about how detrimental the current changes are to our entire ecosystem.

9:40And there was one slide in particular that was published by McKinsey, I think, that showed basically the world map and the outcome of a four degree hotter world. Of course, it's a model, but somehow modeling what the implications are, which is very dark red belt around the equator and then two yellow belts on top and on the bottom of the red belt, reaching up to around Berlin in the north. And then the rest is grayed out. And basically the red belt, it's a lot of land in between. It's covering basically most of India, the entirety of Central Africa, the entirety of Central America and so. and this is where humans and any other animal simply can't live anymore it's impossible because it's too hard the yellow belts are deserted areas where you have more or less conditions like the sahara not all year but where it's really really hard for any animal and living being to survive and below and above that is somehow where you're able to live and the implications of what that means they honestly threw me into a very very deep hole of terrible anxiety because not only of the loss of human life and biodiversity that this implicates, but also because of the social implications behind that.

10:53If now a couple of billion people start to move north and southbound, I have a pretty good gut feeling of what would happen if people were knocking onto the Chinese borders, onto the Russian borders, and to imagine the societal shift that would happen within Europe. I mean, we nearly broke the system in 2015 with a mere handful of refugees compared to that, that we're entering Europe and to see what would happen with our society with millions potentially billions of refugees trying to come to Europe is horrifying to me like this is not a society I want to live in the right extreme tendency towards right-wing politics that I believe we would see and so at the same time I realized that I am part of a couple of super privileged groups and then thought okay somehow there's maybe more to do than continue to be in Rep3 and no judgment about Rep3 but this was a pure decision for myself that I wanted to do something else.

11:47And then I started to try to understand what can I do because I didn't have a groundbreaking idea of how to build better batteries or better, more efficient solar panels. And I started to talk to a lot of entrepreneurs across Europe and they very quickly explained that there is a lot of funding for software-based companies, but the moment that we touch hardware, basically most existing VCs simply wouldn't touch it for reasons because they either made their experiences in the first green tech bubble in the 2008, 2009, or because they believe that hardware returns are not competitive with software returns for scalability and so on, all good reasons.

12:21But on the other hand, there is, in my opinion, the real conviction that there is no alternative to also funding hardware. Because if we don't do that, then we live in an unlivenable planet. And that's obviously not an option. So I started to gain clarity that there might be need for an additional investor. And so I came up with the idea of plan A because there is no plan B and started to spare around how this could be done. it initially i wanted to set this up as a purely democratized venture capital fund so coming from my old haywell rep 3 i wanted to tokenize it rise up to 8 million and being 27 and having some clarity and that would be heavy for me to raise capital from institutional a piece while i knew the web 3 crowd and that seems like a proper way forward but i continue to have conversations with a lot of other people and then faith brought me to meet free job free job previously built gymlo which is one of the website building kids like wix or squarespace and pretty much three years ago that was and we after 45 minutes found out that we were both working on the same idea with the same name so we had playday.com and playday.adventures and so we decided okay this is this seems to be too good to be true let's do it together that's what we did i drove to hamburg two days later to meet him and christian and tobias two of the other nowadays co-founders who just decided to work on this as well and that was the basically the starting point for planet and then it grew quite a bit so we spent the first year in trying to understand how should a theory of change look like what is the change that we want planet a to have on the world and from the beginning we were quite lucid about like we initially targeted a fund volume for 100 billion and quite 100 million is of course a lot of money it's nothing in the worldwide size of the invested capital so we knew okay we can only be successful if we have somehow systemic impact in the sense that we are able to create something that others be worthy to recreate so that they basically start to copy us.

14:09And what we believe from day one is what got us into the position that we're in today is that we've been pedantic in paying attention towards financial KPI and absolutely ignorant in considering anything else, while the true costs of our behavior are at the brink of catching us. And what I mean by that is not only climate change. I mean, climate change is the obvious elephant in the room, but there is other elephants and they are equally sized. Biodiversity loss, for example, is something that if we don't address that, there is no agriculture to make carbon neutral. If we pollute our ground and seawater and rivers more, there is no more water to be fed to plants and so on.

14:50Like our plant, unfortunately, is very complex and everything's interconnected. And there was a Swedish scientist called Oxström, and he came up with the concept of the planetary boundaries. those nine planetary boundaries in total and we already have it overstepped a couple of them and we thought okay our theory of change would be to take these planetary boundaries into account and not only do that on the gut feeling and basically try to put a piece of innovation onto gradient from light green to dark green but to be very confident about it and imagine a future and be able to say okay if that technology grows to a certain market share and the market share grows to a certain extent and there is this many people on the planet would that be part of the future so basically to backwards engineer does the future include a certain piece of technology and i think the obvious way of like looking at fossil fuels it's clear that that doesn't scale it's obvious like if with everything that we know today it's clear that when you put the math down that it doesn't really add up so we thought we need a concept to make the math add up and we decided to work with something called life cycle assessments that's not something we've developed or innovated life cycle assessments and short LCAs have been one of the gold standards for impact measurement for quite some time and the life cycle assessment is assessing the life cycle so it's a very holistic overview of all materialistic and energetic inputs that are needed to create a certain product so more pragmatic you take into account everything like energy and all the raw materials that are needed to create a product or service and you consider that over the entire life cycle so from sourcing of said raw materials to transportation emissions to the production emissions to the use space to the end of life so how can a product then be recycled into reciting a system and when you do that you have a complete overview you know how much energy has been spent how much c2 has been emitted how much water has been used how much race has been created and so on in the entire process and what we then did is we compare that with the status quo so for example i could look at my phone and i would then be able to say okay this phone is this much better or worse compared to the status quo this phone was now a piece of innovation and that allows us to make a very scientific statement about how much better was a certain product or services compared with what we have nick might i ask you something it's a bit of a geeky question but you know i'm an industrial engineer as well and when i was in university we already studied lcas right it's not as you said you guys didn't make it up it's been around for quite a long time why do you think you know because you're doing something different you know there's not a lot of vcs out there thinking like that why do you think that is so to be very honest with you and it's not a negative comment it's not like it's it's groundbreaking like leading edge whatever kind of understanding of an issue it's just hasn't been applied yet I love the question.

17:39Our core, the people and entities that now invested into Planet A, they believe a couple of core assumptions that we communicated. And I think the most important one is, we believe that there is going to be a correlation between the most successful companies in an economical sense of the 21st century will also be the ones that have the biggest positive impact. it might not be a one-to-one correlation but there is going to be a very clear correlation and this is now for the first time the statement that i believe is true the statement wouldn't have been true 20 years ago for the next decade and this is something that fundamentally changed i think now is the right timing and i think that's one part of the story that to have a sustainable company or to be able to build sustainable products is something that is worth your time and money you can look into studies by bcg and the red economic forum for example which also backed that by saying stable or green products are less likely to be hit by regulation are able to charge green premium are able to attract better talent and retain it and so on that's i think one part of it and the other part of it is simply that it is a luxury because we have these scientists in house so this is not something that sits outside of our own worlds and I think we had the privilege of never having to cut back on anything else because we set plan A up with that thesis.

19:00So as a fund, your business model is very limited, right? You have your 2 % management free, I have the exact same. And with that, we have to cover everything else. And I think if you're a generalist, we see that has been doing some things for a certain time and has set up operations in a certain way. And then suddenly you're saying, okay, we now have a position of team members that we have to have. it means giving up on something else that they grew accustomed to and we never had to do that because we set a up initially from day one with that in mind so we had to give up on something else which was our own salaries as management and we made that work because we believe it's important and i think that there is also a clear tendency that a lot of other impact funds or green tech funds do something comparable there is more luckily more and more scientists that come in and maybe to not draw the circle to what I said initially, in a best case scenario, being able to have such a quantitative read on the actual impact, this gives us a better alpha.

19:52This is what I and we believe. And we hope that if Plan A turns out to not only be an impact, successful or positive, but also financially a positive fund, that other funds will say, okay, obviously they've been doing something right. And we have to include science and impact more into our decision-making processes. And that's what I meant by systemic impact. I think that would be the definition of we were successful. Could I ask you a question on that definition of being successful? Because I had that conversation earlier today with someone actually associated to the World Economic Forum about VC funds focus on impact versus financial returns.

20:31And what she asked me was, do you see any funds kind of not only measuring both, but also in a way promising both, meaning that they are allowed to not just go for financial success first. And then we also go for impact, maybe even going for an impact investment that you know is maybe not as good financially as it would be. But there is an offset by the impact, positive impact from this investment. How have you thought about that? Have you heard LPs think about that? Because I said to her, I think that the majority of VC funds in the end make a financial investment and they need to promise their LPs that it's always financial returns.

21:11And then, of course, it's also impact. And impact is up there, but it's primarily driven by the financial. Let me return the question. Do you think that there is a product market bar and impact fund in the sense that they promise impact over financial return? I think that there is with certain LPs, but I also imagine that it's incredibly difficult. And that's what I said to her as well. I think it's incredibly difficult for a pension fund as an example, because if I'm putting money in my pension fund and I'm telling them I want a green portfolio, are they allowed to then say, Andreas allowed us to pick impact returns above financial returns?

21:49Probably not. They would only have the mandate to focus on green impact investments, but still financial returns first. So in that sense, I imagine that there is a cap to the size of a fund. If you don't say clearly and bluntly, it's a financial returns first. And then we also measure impact. And impact is incredibly important to us. And we're going for two gigatons of savings over the course of the fund life and all those things, which are all absolutely amazing, but it's not the core driver of the investment strategy. I'm asking you because I'm sure you've had millions of these conversations.

22:21I only have them close to a summit for the web or something like that. I agree with you. I think there is a product market fit, but only for a very small group of investors of LPs. I believe that it doesn't apply or that most LP investment frameworks don't apply to that. And I think in the truest manner of don't hate the player, hate the game, we have to work with that. And we have to find business models and innovation that delivers both. And I think that's the quick and dirty answer to it. We have thought about it a lot. And we also have been working a lot on how we can correlate our carry with the actual impact that we create, which is in our case, even a bit more complex than for other purely climatic funds, because we don't only have a single KPI of greenhouse gases, but also like liters of water saved or tons of waste prevented and how you then transfer one dimension into the other.

23:16So it gets really tricky really quickly, but I think we found a good setup. But in the end, I believe that whatever we do, it must. I don't think concessionary investment is a way forward to everybody that wants to dig deeper into it. I can really recommend the book by the founding partner of Arc Turn Ventures, Mark Rand, I think is his name. He wrote The Case for Climate Capitalism, basically saying capitalism is what brought us here and we have capitalism and it's the only tool that has the sufficient power right now to bring us out. Of course, if we now start from scratch, we could potentially be able to think of better systems, but we don't have that.

23:53We don't have the luxury of time. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I could not agree more. It's so interesting. I come from a background of having been very socialist in my youth, and now I'm a venture fucking capitalist. And I have all my old friends saying, there goes the capitalist. It's that exact deduction that I've come to that we're not going to be able to change this planet without buying in on the premise that capitalism is the main driver between any important change in our society. Incredibly interesting. Okay, enough philosophy. Let's get into the investment strategy. Nick, tell us just overall, I remember when we met you in Lisbon, I said, so how's Fund 2 going?

24:36And then you're like, ah, it's still Fund 1. And I was like, fuck, haven't you been along? Because I thought Your brand is so well established. So tell us a bit about, you know, it's fund one, it's 160 million. You just announced the final close of it. You've managed to build something amazing. But do tell us more about the investment strategy behind it and the setup. How many people are you? Where are you based? Are you remote first? Are you hybrid? How do you function? Yeah, Billy, and thanks a lot for the kudos. Really means a lot. As every emerging fund manager can tell you, it's always been a hustle to get the ship rolling.

25:06when I initially looked into somebody painted the picture of trying to assemble an airplane midair. And that's really how it felt and also feels like you need capital to invest into companies to raise capital and kind of have a server reference. And you don't have the pleasantries, the niceties of having ICOs happening all the time that you can... So that's a bit tougher than the Web3 world. Exactly, precisely so. But now we're here. So we raised$160 million, a lot more than we initially intended, but also our strategy adapted a bit more and maybe two strategies. So we invest tickets between$500K and$4 million into pre-seed to serious A-stage companies.

25:44We invest into software and hardware, and I think this is also where our strategy kind of diverts into two pathways. So for software, we usually write the earliest checks possible. Pre-seed, seed, usually take the lead with industry-centered shareholding as a target and also try to build strong syndicates around that. and on the hardware side it's a bit different on the hardware side we come in a bit later because there might be hardware cases which are very straightforward but there's also hardware cases which are really really tricky where you have a complete technological risk of that is not going to work out and so an indicator that we're using to base or to partially base our investment decision upon is called the technology rating step basically a scale from zero to nine dissects a certain piece of innovation into the different development stages with the first one being an idea and nine being market ready and fully scaled out and five to six is being proven it works and it's out of the lab and now it's about commercializing and this is where we usually come in and that's usually companies that are somewhere between c to series a stage it's a bit more expensive because with series a we can lead but don't necessarily have to and this is also where we would usually pay slightly larger tickets we do that across europe we are currently around 15 FTEs, maybe one or two more hires, but I would say that the core team is really set up by now.

27:04And we are actually, as we are a child of Corbett, we are a completely remote team. We now have an office in Berlin that's also about people frequently use, but the culture that we've built is around remote first. For example, Lena, one of my co-founders and our head of Impact and also GP to Planet A. She sits in South Africa. She's been living there for a couple of years. She's been working for the German government And impact measurement, coincidentally, has been on the ground for quite some time. And we didn't ask her to relocate because we believe that work culture by now is in a state that should be feasible as well.

27:37Could I ask you, just you said she's head of impact and you also said she's a GP. Does that mean that you have a GP that isn't in an investing role? She's actually head of impact in terms of measuring and your whole setup around that. Am I right in saying that? Is that what you said? Your point, impact as a veto. So that's cool because oftentimes you see the GP roles being limited only to the investing partnership. That's cool. That's really cool. Interesting. We mean it. I mean, I know others mean it as well. And we also see that in other funds. For us, it was the obvious thing to do. If Impact in the end doesn't have a say in the actual investment decisions, then we have a charade.

28:16And that's not really what we want. It seems fair enough. Very cool to see you walk the walk. Let's shift into the topic of you've just announced a 160 million euro fund. Amazing. It might be dollars. It might be wrong there, but 160 million nonetheless. I am curious to hear your story because you've raised since October 21 and then did the final close just a short while back. That must have been quite a ride. Yeah, I think the tricky part was really in the beginning. So it's 160 million euros, so 170 something dollars. And I think when we first started to raise, even a bit before we started to raise, spring, summer 2021, and then we did our first closing in October 2021, we've been raising a bit longer.

29:01And that's exactly the airplane midair moment. In the beginning, we came together as a group that had developed a very strong narrative around what we believe how green tech investing should look like, but with very little to prove it. what helped us tremendously was that we're doing something called warehouse investments at a very early point so we and a couple of our very early and committed lps without the fund being in existence but simply people that said hey we want to back this idea we paid in some capital into the fund without the fund being officially registered or having had a first closing or anything and we started to invest into a couple of companies we invested into dance back then into to make our site into Traceless, into Wife Plastic, and into Narodek.

29:48So five warehousing investments to simply show our MO, our modus operandi, our deal of taste, show that we're able to get into competitive rounds, what we mean by hardware, what we mean by software, why it scales, what the value proposition behind it is, and also to have something lined up for later closers to show some initial traction on. And that was something that in hindsight worked out, but also was simply a big commitment from our end, because as a founding team, we basically mobilized a lot of the resources that we have to make this possible in the first place. And I'm sure you've heard this before on the podcast, but the difference between startup fundraising and fund fundraising is that it's so damn hard to build momentum.

30:27The run to be the last is something that you've heard many times before. So there is basically no advantage over coming in late, then coming in early. You have your 6 % equitization fee in most cases, but like if you're investing to venture than six percent is not why you do that that's near decimals at some point if you count it over 10 years so you're not really aiming to build that momentum and this is why the first close was i think the hardest part to get to a point where we were able to say okay this now has reached a significant enough size for us to execute in whatever fashion and at some point we were there for people that simply believed in us and that was an incredible moment and i think what happened then is that momentum started to grow i think we were able to prove that we are able to build a brand we from basically the get-go we had very good deal from a quantitative point of view we already saw like i think 800 companies in the first year and by now like i think last year we've seen like two and a half thousand companies or so so quite a lot and it's constantly accelerating but we were able to show any signs of that and also that we are picking some of the right companies.

31:35And then having had that first closing, I think took away a lot of the fear with our more institutional investors to basically say, no matter how this goes, you're not going to be the idiot that tried to commit to a fund that never had a first close in the first place. I think this is something that I've learned and I've also heard from peers that this is a big fear. If you're an upper rising associated NLP and suddenly the fund that you are so excited about doesn't even get to a first close, then that's really not going to give you a lot of trust with your overlords. And with that first close in the back that happened, and we were also able to invest a bit more and were able to follow on in some rounds.

32:11And then the only way to build momentum, being that, okay, at some point, fund size will be reached, is that more and more inside and then the momentum turned. And then at some point, we had to start to play around with quotas and be a bit more reluctant with considering whom we want to go on that journey with. And by now, I'm just incredibly happy for the people that we haven't bought. So a lot of institutional IPs, like an Allianz, like a Leaver, like a BMW, like a KFW, like a Vex Fund, and a couple of banks and family offices, but also really lots, a lot of super well-renowned entrepreneurs that backed us.

32:48And that was also like our thesis from the beginning that this is much more worth than the pure capital invested because these are now all people that we can propose to bring into the rounds as angel investors. These are now people that have entrepreneurial expertise to bring on board and so on. And so this all has played out. And then while we had our initial target somewhere in August, we still had a couple of very promising conversations. We had them in August, but we still had a lot of conversations of potential partners that we really wanted to have on board. And simply because they are, I think, of strategic relevance and they are simply put also players that will benefit us and that it makes sense for us to have a strong connection to.