The E-Commerce Entrepreneur: How To Build A $100M Empire From Scratch - Eliott Jabès

0:02The biggest problem for us in e-commerce was the access to inventory. Elliot Jabes, he's the co-founder of e-commerce retail platform Stockly. Stockly solves stock issues instantly so customers can enjoy a seamless shopping experience. He's a Forbes 30 under 30 lister and wants to make Stockly the central exchange for e-commerce inventory worldwide. Where did this idea come from? A lot of iterations. Maybe it's more like the mentality of focus, of course, on your own project, but also keep an open mind. I tend to forget the success as soon as it happens. And this brings me to a very important point.

0:35What is the hardest moment that you have gone through to date?

0:42Elliot, I'm very interested in how the life and the lifestyle of an entrepreneur looked like before becoming an entrepreneur. So describe to me that period of your life. I think the key point of that journey is when I met Oscar, my co-founder. It was during my first year of study just after what you have A-levels in the UK. The equivalent we have in France is the baccalaureate. So after that, I met Oscar in prepa in my first year of equivalent of university in France. And yeah, we got along super well. We were like study buddies for a couple of years after we did different schools. At the end of my studies, I worked for a year.

1:25For a few months, I was a software developer in a retail startup. which was cool. I learned a lot about coding and a lot of very technical engineering boring stuff but I enjoyed it a lot. And then for almost a year I did internal consulting in a big cosmetic French group. And yeah, when I graduated I didn't picture myself really joining an already structured company. I really wanted to start from scratch because I thought it was the best way to learn. Also it was and I want to pretend I started from the bottom. I was in a super favorable position because I was living with my mother. I didn't have any wife and kids.

2:10It was super easy for me to start. I was not taking so much risk. So I called Oscar. I told him, okay, let's start something. I have a few ideas. I pitched him two, three ideas. We decided to go on one of them and that's how we started. This is interesting because one of my previous guests he had a similar understanding of entrepreneurship, right? So he didn't go to university. In your case, you didn't want to go and work for a big company. But you both had the same reason because you thought that the best way of learning was, you know, just, you know, do your own thing and enter the real workforce.

2:48And in that case, you know, venturing something on your own. So I find that incredibly interesting. Let's deep dive into your corporate experience. So you've worked as a consultant for a firm prior to starting your own business. How did that help you to become an entrepreneur? It was very interesting because I had the chance in this experience, which was a bit less than a year. It was like really an end of studies job. and I had the chance to do four or five different projects inside the company. Each of them were lasting one to three months. I did a few months with the VP of HR. I did a few months with the VP of strategy.

3:37I did a few months with the VP of finance. And so it allowed me to bring value at my humble level, especially back at the time, trying to help on some projects that were a bit strategic for the company. But also it helped me to really understand how such a big group is structured. It was a few hundred employees, which is already like an average big company. And it allowed me really to understand the different parts, business units of the company and give me like kind of a big picture of how it worked. Do you think if you didn't have that work experience, you would have been able to build your company?

4:19If you can do a lot of stuff. With all humility, I don't think this was a key step to starting my journey just after that. I think it was a very nice experience, but I don't see it as a necessary step that helped me start it. It was very helpful. I keep, but I think even today, I keep trying to nourish myself with a lot of contact with external companies. I try to angel invest in a few companies to keep an eye on what goes around and how other people do. I have a lot of friends who started companies as well. I speak to them almost every day to have some, you know, feedback about how they do stuff, about the problems that they encounter.

5:08Maybe I have the same and we try to discuss. So to me, it's part of all of this. Maybe it's more like the mentality of focus, of course, on your own project, but also keep an open mind and try to understand how other companies work, how the other companies are structured to keep an open mind and keep learning, not only with your own journey. Learn also from the journey of the others. I think so it's more part of this whole mentality. Let's talk about your company, Stockley. Elevator, please. me. Yes, so Stockly is a technology company that allows retailers, e-commerce websites, to sell products that they don't have in stock by relying on the inventory of other e-commerce websites of the network.

5:54So typically you want to buy a pair of Adidas shoes size 44 on elcorteingles.com if they don't have your size anymore thanks to Stockly you're still going to see the product as available on elcortelingles.com as if it was in stock you're going to purchase the product on elcortelingles and pay the same price with the same delivery time etc but in reality the order will be dispatched to another retailer of the network that will ship it directly to you in white label and in that way everybody is happy because as a customer you could find the product very easily and both retailers will share the margin on the sales.

6:36I'm not too familiar with what are the stock levels generally in consumer products, but what I know is that during COVID, this was a big issue because most of the supply chains were heavily impacted. Is this the case right now? Like, are people going to your website because they cannot find that Nike issue on Nike's website? Yes, so Stockly is really connected to the retailers, but in the back end. The consumer never go to our website. They go to the website of El Corte Inglés or Nike and they directly see that the product is available and Stockly act invisibly behind the scenes. And we connect these retailers like that behind the scenes.

7:15And so when you buy the product, you didn't even see that it was out of stock before Stockly interacted with the website. And to reply to the question more precisely, Of course, during COVID, there was a lot of challenges and the stock levels can vary a lot. In the end, I think that the reason why our product is used by hundreds of retailers is not depending on the stock levels. Even though it can, of course, influence, there may be some peaks during COVID. There were some big problems about logistics. So it was a big challenge to overcome for all the retailers and for us. Sometimes you had some very low stock levels.

7:57Sometimes you have also very high stock level because some products were not selling anymore at all. It was the case, for example, for cosmetics or beauty products. As everyone was at home, nobody was putting up some makeup and they were using more Snapchat or Instagram filter than makeup. So, of course, there are challenges like that. For us, the reason why our product, I think, is used by all these retailers is because it's very hard to be competitive in e-commerce if you just rely on your own inventory. Yeah. Like to be competitive on e-commerce, you have to have a very large catalog and a very deep catalog as well.

8:28And you don't have infinite money, so you cannot buy everything, put it in a very infinitely big warehouse and sell everything to your customers. So if you want to compete with Amazon, for example, which has hundreds of millions of references on their website, you have to open up to the inventory also of other players. And that's what Stockly allows. We're connected to the inventory of everyone and we make this information available for any retailer who wants to pick stock from other retailers. walk me through the end user journey. So for example, myself, I go to, you said El Cortingles and El Cortingles is a, let's say, a big retailer in Spain for those who don't know.

9:03So I go into their e-commerce website and I like this pair of shoes, but those pair of shoes are not available. So what happens in the backend that is, I mean, I'm imagining it needs to be super automated and super fast because we live in a world where the customer doesn't want to wait, right? So you lose me in a matter of seconds. So what is it happening there in the back that pushes things super quickly, between your network. Yeah, it already happened before you arrive on a product page. How it works technically is that we're connected with all the... So on each stock transaction, there are two parties involved.

9:34There is two B2B parties involved. There is the demandor and the supplier. The demandor and the example is El Corte Inglés, the website where you are going to buy the product. The supplier is the other website that has the product in stock. It may be another multi-brand retailer or it may be directly Adidas, the brand which connected its stock on Stocklit. In real time, we always know all our suppliers, what products do they have in their inventory, at which price, and we associate to each item what we call a shipping contract, meaning, okay, we know that they can ship to this country, this country, this country, at this price, with this number of days for the delivery, with this maximum number of days for returns and all the operational parameters you can imagine.

10:14On the other side, on the demand side, we scan as well in real time the catalog of all the demanders, the marketplace that use our service. And each time we see that there is a product that we can push from the supply, we push it and we update our offers like that all the time. So when you connect on the website, we already made the job to fulfill the out-of-stock or potentially add the new products on the marketplace. Where did this idea come from? A lot of iteration. Before we started Stockly, actually, maybe that's really my first experience we didn't talk about earlier. But before we started Stockly, I told you I went to Oscar, I told him, okay, I have a few ideas.

10:51And the one we selected was to create a price comparison website for shoes. This was the first company we built, actually. We did that for a year. And after we coded a little price comparison website with our little hands, had a few thousands of visitors, etc. It was nice, but for many reasons, we didn't believe in the business model for the longer term. So we pivoted 10 times, tested many, many different products. And that's our way of exploring e-commerce, trying to learn very fast how e-commerce works, try to speak with all the possible shop owners everywhere in France and around. And that led us step by step to understanding that the biggest problem for us in e-commerce was the access to inventory.

11:33And we saw that everything has become a commodity. Like to build your own e-commerce website, it's super easy now with Shopify or whatever technology there is. Payment is a commodity. Logistics is a commodity. Even acquisition of traffic, like with the Google ads, Facebook ads, has become a commodity. And the only thing that has not become a commodity yet is the inventory. So that's what we wanted to do. I think that's a great take on entrepreneurship in general. Because when you launch a business, you're super excited. You have this idea that is backed by tons of research. And it's your baby, right?

12:06I mean, it's your idea. You're super excited. You're emotional also to an extent about it. But then when you deploy your business, you put it in the market, The market starts like, you know, punching you with lots of information from competitors, from the consumers, you know, change your price, you know, target these customer segments, so on and so forth. And then when you look at your product or your, let's say, your company today, it looks so different to how it started, right? Like they look like very distant cousins, you know, like, you know, very distant family relatives. What would be your main lesson learned in terms of these changes?

12:38So because at the same time, while your company is changing, right, you can get so much information that if you're onboarding all of this information, your company can become an spaghetti. You stand for nothing. So how do you filter which information is important for you to structure your company? Yeah, I think so. When we started Stocklit, it was six years ago after we started with this first project and then pivoted a lot. how it worked for us is you're right, there was a lot of information coming from a lot of sources but there's also another syndrome that may be a bit different because maybe I suppose that's what you can see when you open a physical place like this.

13:19You have customers coming, advertising suppliers for the food and you can have a lot of signals for us, it's the desert like you create a website, you don't exist, you don't exist. Nobody gives a fuck about you when you go to see a retailer and say, guys, work with me on my price comparison website. Who the fuck are you? Just get out of here. Like nobody really cares about what you do. And that's the hard part. But that's a very good part because I think it's way easier this way. And I admire a lot when you can navigate through all these signals because for us, we didn't have so much signals. And the more signals and the more reaction we provoke on the market, the more we can see that we have an interest and an impact on the potential clients we will work with.

14:06So that's really how it went. Nobody cared about what we were doing. We pivoted a little bit. Okay, we provoked a bit of interest. And then pivot by pivot, we were just generating more and more interest. And that's how we finished arriving on the bigger problem that we could find on this space from our perspective. And since then, we just stand on this line. We understood that it was a huge problem and we never changed the business model system. I find this super interesting because for us, it's the opposite. It wasn't and still is not the case that we have the lack of feedback. In fact, we have way too much feedback.

14:47And in the very beginning, we immediately onboarded the feedback and we've implemented it. But then a few days later, a few weeks later, a month, you get a completely different type of feedback. And where do you go from there? Because at least myself, I'm in the consumer industry, right? you cannot satisfy everyone. And that's something that for me, it was hard to accept and to embed in my business mindset because I was trying to please everyone, you know, from my employees to my customers. And at some point, you can't. You cannot satisfy everyone. How does your company generate revenues? We generate revenues between the selling price from the supplier and the selling price from the demandor.

15:25In Stockley, there are two parties involved, the marketplace that will sell the product and the supplier that will ship the product on their behalf. The supplier lists a certain price to Stockly. Stockly will sell the product to the demander and generate a margin between the two. I mean, it's at the expense of the margins of both. Yeah, which is cool is that they don't really see us as a cost because the supplier just tells us, okay, I'm ready to sell this product at this price. On the demand side, they're saying, okay, I'm ready to buy the product at this price. If for me, it's a match, I will do the sale.

15:59Otherwise, I wouldn't have pushed the product in the first place. So it's like, you know, stock exchange. When you buy a share, I don't know, Shopify share on Revolut or wherever, if you buy some share sometimes, you don't know who sold you the stock. You're just buying the product. So it's exactly the same for Stockly. And then we take a cut in the middle. I was super curious when I was going through your company values, and there was one that drew my attention. I think you call it inbox zero, right? Explain it to me. Yeah, so we have a lot of very important work values, and I think we're very proud of the way we're efficient in terms of work processes at Stockly, and one key element of that is Inbox Zero.

16:50The general idea of Inbox Zero, I didn't invent it. Inbox Zero is a very wide work principle, but I think we implement it well at Stockly. it's a personal organization thing that says you have once a day the obligation to be at zero in your email inbox. For us it applies to emails and also our Notion notification. Notion is the internal software we use for all internal communication all the projects, all the documentation. Everything is stored in Notion and it's the way we work internally. And for both your Notion inbox and your email inbox you have to be at zero every day. It doesn't mean zero unread mails.

17:33Everything must be archived. So you must handle all your emails at least once a day and you must have really an empty inbox once a day. This is super important for several reasons. First, because it prevents any decision from being blocked by the organization because sometimes you're waiting for the reply for someone in the company and it's lagging for two weeks just because they're not checking their emails or they forgot or it's just in the middle of 50 other emails and they forgot about it. For us, it's not possible. With this work principle, it's not possible because until you're at zero, you still have some work to do to just unstack all the emails you may have, all the notifications you may have.

18:13The second thing is that it builds a lot of trust inside the company because you know that when you need the help of someone or you need the intervention of someone else to unblock you on a project or just give you an answer on something, it will be handled within 24 working hours. How do you regulate this? So let's say I'm not following this policy. So what happens? People will notice and they will gently tell you, hey, please up on this thread. I'm generating you a second notification because you didn't reply on here. Please reply. So it will appear because it will block a project and when there will be a miss.

18:53And if you do several miss, if you have several misses over a certain period, then at some point your manager will come and say, hey, be careful, this is a very important work principle. And at some point, if you just don't manage to fit with the work principle, I suppose at some point you won't fit with the organization. And how do you go about resistancy, right? So some people, you know, within a workforce within the company, they're always resistant to policies, to values. Yeah. So what do you do? By being super transparent about it. I think two things is first defining very strong hiring values we created our own concept or we call it the stand score stand stands for smart, tenacious ambitious and nice and it's the way that we evaluate the candidates so we have a very precise hiring process etc but this is the overall way we try to analyze the candidates and so at every step of the process and with this way of seeing the candidates, we try to see if they will fit with our way of working, with our values, and they meet within the process maybe 10 or 15 different people from the company, around 10 on average.

20:07And so 10 different people from the company have an interaction with the candidate so they can say if they can see the person fit work-wise in the company or not. The second thing is that we communicate super openly with the candidates and also publicly about our work values the way we do, as I'm doing now, Also, we started posting on social media every week, even if we don't have a big reach. But at least when the candidates search for the company, they find this public information and they see how we work. They see our work values. They see the efficiency values that we have. And if they don't feel like they want to be part of the organization, at least they know in advance.

20:46I think this is great because a lot of people think that the success of a company is purely related on how good the idea is, right? So, and how groundbreaking the idea is. And in my opinion, in most cases, it really comes down to the execution. So, I mean, you have all these values, all these policies that you're looking at from various different angles. And I'm pretty sure that that is a big part of why you guys are successful right now. How many people are right now employed by Stockly? Around 100. Around 100. So you need to make sure that 100 people follow these policies. Yeah, but you know at Amazon, there are thousands and thousands and thousands, and they also have very strict policies and ways of working.

21:25So I'm not sure the number is very challenging. Of course, the more people you have, the more precise your process and scalable have to be. But we try to be structured as if we were 10 times bigger than what we actually are. that's something that I think makes us strong because we're building something super robust and a very robust organization at the same time we need to be careful on not being slowed down too much by you know always being too square and not and sometimes you have to accept also to do some quick and dirty stuff which is not our best strength but we need to force ourselves also to do quick and dirty sometimes.

22:13Yeah, I think that's super important because there are benefits of being a startup, right? You're lightweight, you're agile. Decision-making is super quick, right? When you're a bigger company, there's so many different approval processes that sometimes, you know, decisions need to be made in a timely manner. And if you lose that time frame, you might be losing momentum for whatever it is. On the other way around, if you don't have a structure or an infrastructure in place that allows you not only to scale, but to work within an order, I think is when things can become like super, super loose.

22:44So for us was a key part of finding our sweet spot was understanding what are the areas where we still want to have a startup mindset and what are the areas where we do need to have these more corporate, solid, structured and scalable infrastructure. So I don't know if you identified some business units, but for us, it was a combination of, For example, marketing needed to be, you know, more startup-y, you know, consumer-oriented base, like, let's see how people like, let's test a lot. Finance was the opposite. No way for open discussions, right? It needed to be rigid, you know, cash flow was tight also.

23:23So that was our sweet spot.

23:28And this brings me, speaking about finance, to a very important point when it comes to building a company, which is fundraising. A lot of people don't start a business because they don't have the right capital. And that happens to a lot of people. It was also my case. But also a lot of people don't know that fundraising is possible and what are the different options that you have to fundraise. In your case, how did you navigate this process? Yeah, so I was educated about fundraising quite early on the journey of building Stockly. also maybe because we were lucky we met interesting people that opened our minds and also because i think we always were in the and still are i'm still now in the mentality of trying to find expertise i try to speak with people that have legitimacy and then try to like develop my knowledge very fast so yeah for fundraising for me it was like that i tried to to educate myself quite early on the journey.

24:32And in the end, we raised super early with Stugly. Because as you say, once you know that it's something that's possible, in particular for early stage companies, it's, I think, at least in the past five, ten years, it's always been quite easy, not easy, but it's always been quite accessible to find funding until maybe one million euros. It's something that you can find very fast to have in the tech industry. I'm speaking, of course, all industries are different but when you're building a tech company you can find your first million euro of capital with a certain method if you apply it correctly if you and if you're building something that makes a tiny bit of sense it's not super complex so we decided to do it very early in the in the adventure after a few months of stockly when we saw that we had a really good traction on our product.

25:28We decided to do a first round, mostly with business angels. And then after, we did other fundraising rounds along the way when we wanted to accelerate and we thought we had it was the right moment. Let's make a real life example, right? So you're saying fundraising up to a million euros is sort of easy for a tech startup. Let's say I want to launch a tech startup and I have my idea, okay? what do I do? There are two things. First is the preparation and then the execution of how you will do your round. The preparation, you need two aspects of it. The first one is all the documentation you need to prepare.

26:05It can be super light. You will do a deck, a little business estimation of how you will expand the money you want to raise, even to know how much money you want to raise. So there's a bit of work of preparation of where do you want to go, what do you want to do a round, how much do you want to raise and what you will do with this capital. Second part of the preparation is who do you want to meet? So you have to do a list of 100, 200 business angels or small funds that you want to meet that can fit your expectations, your business. For that, you can speak with your friends who did it before. You can speak with known, very famous, well-known investors.

26:41Check online the funds that invested in companies in your ecosystem. Online, you can find everything. Check online the business angels that are the most active in your region and in your industry for the past years and you do a list like a prospection list and then after after that it's exactly like a b2b a sales process you just try to like it's a pipeline you know you have 200 names in the beginning and you try to have a good conversion from step one to step two to step three so step one you try to hunt them and have a first call with them if you can find an intro it's best then you do a first call then you try to convert convert and then after you have a commitment from them saying, okay, you seem to be building a good thing.

27:23I'm going to invest a 50K, 100K, 10K, 5K in your company. So yeah, it's really like a sales process. And sorry, one last key factor I think that's quite important is that normally, if you're good in your fundraising process, each meeting, especially in early stage when you're dealing with business angels or small investors in terms of amount invested, each meeting should bring you other meetings. Like if you do 20 meetings and no one introduces you in these 20 meetings to their friends because they say, oh, this guy is smart, I'm going to introduce him to my friend. If no one does that in your first 20 meetings, that's a really bad signal.

28:00And maybe you should go back to the preparation phase before doing the next meetings. How much money have you raised using this methodology? So far, we've raised around 20 million euros in capital and we raised also some, We had equity funding and also we contracted some debt with banks as well and public debt in France. This is all the sexy side of being an entrepreneur, right? The glittery part, especially that we see in different content providers like, I don't know, the likes of social medias like Instagram or, you know, movies and TV shows in Netflix and Amazon. You know, you raise, you know, so many millions and it seems to be easy.

28:41But people don't really talk about the hard moments of an entrepreneur. so what is the hardest moment that you have gone through to date I think the beginning was super super hard and it's the beginning is very hard because at least in my humble experience nobody gave a shit about what we were doing, you had to change we had to change the approach every few months and a lot of uncertainty because we were spending 80 hours per week trying to build something and we had no idea if it would pay off at some point and for maybe a year and a half two years like that you have really really no certainty even now I hope that we will still grow etc but I consider that we're still at the very beginning of the journey and we keep fighting etc but yeah the maybe first 18 months was very difficult mentally because you're in you don't know and here is the moment where you have to show that you're tenacious and you know I told you the stand the values of recruitment of Stockley and this is I think a value that we share it's the tenacity what you call the hard work before and the fact that it's not a magic recipe it's a lot of hard work and that goes before I agree a lot on that on tenacity on resilience on the fact that you never give up and I think that that's the most important value to have so yeah I think the beginning was was the hardest and after that Of course, there were some episodes in the company that were harder to leave.

30:11Sometimes there is a few months where it's super intense and then you feel a bit overwhelmed. It happened to me in 2020. I had a few months where I was super, super tired, super down. And it was very hard to manage because a lot of things happened at the same time. Also, personally, it was a moment where I was going through something difficult. So, yeah, it can happen at any time. The key, I think, is to accept that you may have some ups and downs. Nobody's a robot and even the best, I suppose, that even the best entrepreneurs in the world have their ups and downs. I think you have to accept that and then to keep being tenacious to pass the storm when it happens.

30:54There's a, I don't know if it's a quote, but it's something that the founder of Alibaba, which is the equivalent of Amazon in Asia, that he says that when you're an entrepreneur, you need to think that today is horrible. It looks very ugly. Tomorrow is even worse. It's disgusting. But the day after, my friend, the day after is beautiful. What I have seen in my life, in the people that are successful, and a lot of these people are also part of this podcast, of this show, is that persistency and consistency are the critical success factors. So that is really what is going to bring you success. More than money, more than connections, more than luck.

31:46That persistency.

31:51Elliot, what is your relationship with failure? I think the very definition of failure is something that is super personal. Everyone sees it differently. Some people will say that it's the best way to learn how to get up on your feet and then do it better the next time. On my side, I think that I have the opposite problem. I'm very bad at celebrating success. okay I'm never happy with what I'm doing I'm never happy with the how fast things are going with the how far how good the things are I work on it and my team at Stugly helps me a lot actually helped me personally humanly improve a lot on that because when you gather with nice people and spark people that are also very good entrepreneurs in a sense they help me improve a lot on that.

32:55But I think I have the other way. I consider almost everything as a failure. So I'm not afraid of it because I know that we will have a lot of failure along the way. Sometimes we work for six months on something, on a project or a new partnership with a retailer or something and then it turns out very bad or with a big brand with which we put a lot of effort to convince a big brand to work with us and then it's completely counterproductive. So it happens all the time. For me, it's forgotten as soon as it happened. Of course, we try to learn and not to reproduce the bad things. But the problem I have actually is most the opposite.

33:31It's also I tend to forget the success as soon as it happened. When we have a success to celebrate or a victory, I pass super fast to the next step. I say, okay, let's not celebrate. Let's go fetch the next one. So I try to balance the two. But I think we should never be afraid of failure. And it's something that's completely part of the everyday life, especially when you build a business. Let's talk about your co-founder. I'm super interested in the relationships in between co-founders because I think that if you have a great relationship, that can set you up on your company for success. And at the same time, if you don't have a great relationship with your co-founder, that can really impact the performance of the business.

34:18In your case, your co-founder was a friend or an acquaintance, a study buddy before you started your business. And it is often said, especially in my culture in Spain, that you don't mix business with pleasure. So what is your experience in this department? Yeah. First of all, I am aligned 100 % with what you say. I think that the startup failures, the first reason, obviously, it's the lack of capital. when you don't have any money anymore. If you're not profitable, you end up crashing. The second reason, from my knowledge, is that co-founders don't get along and end up splitting. And that's the second most common reason of failing companies.

35:01So it's super, super important. It's one of the relationships in the world that I cherish the most, my relationship with Oscar. First, because I love him deeply. He's one of the smartest guys I know on earth. He has incredible values. He's incredibly transparent and we trust each other a lot. We've known each other for 13 years. So we really built a very strong relationship. Even when we started, it was not about pleasure, about friendship, going out, partying, etc. It always was about an intellectual fit. And we really met that way. the way we met is that we had physics, you say physics teacher, you know science teacher, I was in the first year of university, I was a very bad student because it was too hard for me and Oscar was not doing anything and was the first of the class the best student in class and so the teacher took the two of us apart and said hey you guys you don't know each other yet the year has been only started for a month but you're going to do extra work together because you're too lazy and you're too dumb.

36:16He didn't say it that way, but basically that was the message. And so we started doing like extra homework together on the impulsion of this teacher. And the fit was really amazing. And for the year and a half that followed, we worked, we spent all our time of study together. And it was really more about the interaction. And of course, we built on that an amazing relationship. I told you earlier when I arrived here that he's not my twin brother like your co-founder, but he's like my wife, you know, he's my business wife. And I really cherish the relationship I have with him. But it was not based on, you know, pure friendship.

36:54It was really, our friendship started on this intellectual fit rather than the opposite. Let's talk about Forbes. You've been in Forbes 30 under 30 list, which for some, this can be something important, an accomplishment, a validation. And for some others, and this is a repeated question that I'd like to ask our guests. For some others, it's not as relevant and both are equally valid answers. There's no right or wrong. And I want to know how being in the list, what does that mean to you? Is it important? It was more important to my mother than to me, to be honest

37:38honestly I wasn't very attached to it but at the same time I don't want to lack humility I know it's an amazing recognition and so yeah I was happy in a sense because it was really good for the image of the company it was really good for the candidates that were you know applying to stock listing oh the founders are under 30 it's great We had some media coverage, etc. So it was a really cool experience. I'm not super attached to it because, first of all, I estimate that the success so far of Stockley, even though I think we're still, I hope we're still at the beginning of the journey, is not due to me.

38:18It's due to the whole team. You know, I'm one element of the team. I was here at the beginning. I'm the head of the whole organization. Okay, but in the end, I'm a point within the whole organization. And this recognition being on me, I tried from the very beginning to share it with all the team also to share it with my co-founder because I was referred by random people to be under 30 but I immediately included Oscar in this as well so yeah I was not really attached to it people at the office even were saying man please smile what the fuck I've just been under 30 it's the dream of everyone you should be happy etc but yeah I think that in the end that just how it works in my mind.

39:03So I was not super excited, but at the same time, I feel like it's a great recognition. So I was very grateful to Forbes for the nomination. You're a person that, from what I can gather, you don't like to celebrate a lot success. Would you define yourself as successful? Honestly, no, not at all. But I think you understood that maybe one of my deepest problems, not because I'm successful and I should consider myself as successful, but more because, yeah, whatever I do, I always try to find the next step. And sometimes when I do my introspection and when I speak with close friends about this, I'm realizing that even if I was, I don't know, a Jack Ma that you mentioned earlier, even if I was as successful as Jack Ma, I would consider that I would have done nothing really, or at least that I could even go further.

40:00So I don't know if it's because I'm overconfident in my capacity to do anything or if it's just because that's the way my brain works. I'm just trying to look forward. So no, I don't consider myself successful business-wise. I mean, I consider that we're still very small. We still have a lot of road to do. Of course, I will try to do as well as Jack Ma. And if I do so, I will try to consider myself successful. Hopefully along the way, I work on this problem I have. But yeah, it's hard. Where I see myself as successful is more on my human values and relationships.

40:41I think I'm a healthy person. I have healthy relationships with people around me. I'm very happy with the education I had from my parents, with the values that they gave me. and the way I can see the world thanks to the way they showed me what's important and what's not. And in this way, I think I'm successful. Way more than the business or the money in my bank account. What is your overall definition of success? I think the definition of success is meeting what you aspire meets the reality. Like, I aspire to build a very big business that helps a lot of retailers in Europe, why not in the world, that helps the economy to thrive, employ a lot of people for me, but also our clients, like Stockley, but also our clients, our business partners, etc.

41:45And all of this in very good human values, in very good work ethics. So that's my aspiration. to build something that have all this impact and that have a positive impact on many people's life. So yeah, I think I will be successful the day that I can see this at a certain level that I suppose my brain would be overwhelmed by that. Thank you very much, Eliane, for coming. You are a great example of transformation and innovation. And these are attributes that a lot of people talk these days, but very few people embody them. And I think you're a great example of this too. So thank you very much. Thank you.

42:24Thank you so much.