Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the launch of Schibsted Future Report 2023. Joining us at The Mesh today is a team of speakers from all around our organization, presenting trends from the yearly outlook, Schibsted Future Report. This event is also being streamed live to all of our offices and to schibsted.com and LinkedIn, so hopefully there are many people out there watching with us today. Schibsted is a family of brands. We started out as a media company, but have grown into having leading marketplaces and a large portfolio of startups delivering digital services. Every year, we also publish Schibsted Future Report. It's a report written by our own people, who share their thoughts about ongoing trends with our tech, people, and business. That's why we're here today, having a lovely breakfast to share some of those insights with you. We have brought a number of printed reports that you can find everywhere here and also at the entrance. You can also find all of this content online, you can find all the information on where to read all about Schibsted Future Report by using this QR code on the screen. If some of you have not gotten the physical report but want it, you can also contact any of us after the event. First, to bring us up to speed on this year's report, we are lucky to have Ann Axelsson, who's the chief editor of Schibsted Future Report on stage. Hi, Ann. You are the, sort of the mother of the Schibsted Future Report. What do you feel is a bit special about this year's report? Well, you know, Marie, perhaps this one, even more than the earlier ones, is influenced by the state of the world, actually. We have a story about the energy crisis. We have one about how the, all the threats and the polarization affect us and media, and we have this photo, Ukraine theme. Also we have a lot of stories telling us that crisis and challenges can be turned into opportunities and innovation, thus today's theme. Is there anything in particular that you're very excited to see here on the stage today? Obviously, I'm really looking forward to hearing everyone. As an editor, the first story presented by Anna and Torddd has it all from an editor's perspective. It has drama, it has a history most of us can relate to. It's a success story. It's also have a very clear connection to Schibsted. Thank you, Ann. Let's get ready to start today's show. In just a few years, Formula One has transformed from being a sort of a closed world into a global phenomenon. Thanks to the Netflix series Drive to Survive and the drivers who have become big celebrities and influencers, a whole new young audience has discovered this sport. Anna Andersson has covered the sport for more than 20 years for Aftonbladet, and after experiencing a interest fall, she has now been part of bringing the success onto Schibsted's sports platform. She did this together with Tord Overå, who is the product manager at Schibsted's sports platform, and his team, who in March 2022 added this new sport to the platform for the first time in many years, Formula One. The stage is yours, Anna and Torddd. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. These guys have an almost fighter pilot mentality, and that's what separates them from mere mortals. All I ever do is pray for a safe race. I never thought that I'd be there one day watching my son. For me, it's heart attack after heart attack. Are you okay, Nico? Get behind, yeah. There's fire. There's fire. I love the danger, that adrenaline and that excitement. They have crashed! They've got into each other. I'll do anything I can to get the best result possible. I'm not worried about dying. This is Formula One. 10 teams, 20 drivers racing on five continents for more than 20 race weekends a year Every driver and every team has one goal, to become the world champion. Is it two goals? Because you have two world championship, you have the driver championship and the constructor championship. The constructor championship, that's where the big bucks is, 'cause that's where the team make their money. The drivers championship, that's the thing the drivers wants to win. That's the conflict already in the start. I have been covering Formula One for about 20 years. I've been blogging about it for about 15 years, and I would say it's the most technically advanced and innovative sports in the world. The question is: Is it just a sport? Well, it's a giant circus. It has speed. It has the fights, wheel to wheel. It's a bit dangerous. It has the sound. It has the passion in the paddock. It has the glamour. It's historical. It has been driven for more than 70 years. It's history, technology, and the future. We benefit from Formula One every time we drive or sit in a car. Buttons on the steering wheel, Formula One. Active suspension, Formula One. Carbon fiber, KERS making the cars more fuel efficient, hybrid powertrains, AI. That's all Formula One in the past. In the future, we have 100% sustainable fuel. Formula One is more popular than ever. This fall, we had 440,000 spectators in the United States, in Austin, Texas. A few days later in Mexico was almost as many spectators on the racetrack, different gender, different age groups, and different cultures. The question is why? How come? Well, to answer that question, we have to go back a bit. In 2016, Mercedes was dominating the sports. The spectators and the viewers were dropping. This man, Bernie Ecclestone, he had been in charge for the rights for Formula One for more than 40 years. He made Formula One to a global sport. He found new land in the East, he spoke well of dictators. He had some trouble with the justice, he never, ever conquered the United States. He closed the paddock. It was really hard to work 'cause you weren't allowed to use handies in the paddock, for example. The drivers were hidden behind the helmets. He wanted to make the money through closing it up and selling the rights, in 2017, something happened. He sold the rights to Formula One to an American company, Liberty Media, they had a totally different approach. They started to work with the smartest brains of Formula One. They changed the rules. They changed almost everything because they wanted to show the real Formula One, the man behind the helmet, and they wanted to take the audience into the garage, into the paddock behind those doors which have been closed for so many years. What did they do? Well, Netflix. They made this cooperation with Netflix, and for the first year, we had no Mercedes. World Champion wasn't there. Ferrari wasn't there, the team that had been a part for Formula One since the beginning in 1950s. The TV audience loved it. They got a free pass to the paddock, something that's impossible to get if you don't have very much money. The drivers got an opportunity to express their thoughts. They did that, and they started to use social media more frequently. This was a start for something new, but the playground changed again. In 2020, the world shut down. We had the pandemic. Aftonbladet downscaled the coverage of Formula One. There was no live sport at all, nothing. Where did the drivers go? Well, they started to drive esports. They started to use Twitch, and they drove against their own fans. They streamed it on Twitch and on YouTube. At the same time, we had Drive to Survive. That was the closest thing that the audience could get to live sport. When Formula One restarted in the summer, they had the old fans, the new Twitch fans, and the fans from Drive to Survive. They all went to watch the Formula One races. I would say the drivers took their helmets off, and they became influencers. In early 2021, I had a meeting with my bosses at Aftonbladet to convince them that Formula One is a sport for the future. The readers of my blog increased. I had the feeling there was a younger audience coming to the sport. They were thrilled by Formula 1: Drive to Survive and Twitch. Aftonbladet had to rethink. 2021 was the most exciting season for years. We saw the potential. In 2022, we started the podcast, we extended the blog, and we developed the live coverage platform. 2023 is coming up, and we have a lot of news coming up, and so does Formula One. They have more races than ever, three races in the United States for the first time ever. In 2026, there is a new power unit regulation, where they will have to use more electricity, and they will have to use sustainable fuel, 100% sustainable fuel. In 2030, Formula One will be carbon neutral. In my opinion, Formula One is not just a sport, it's so much more. Thank you, Anna. I am the product manager of Schibsted's sports platform, and I was given the very lucky job to actually make a product out of that magic scene Anna just described, and we've been working very closely for the last year. I learned about Formula One the last two years. She's been working in it for 20-plus years. It's been an honor to kind of. The first time I was supposed to meet Anna was a Friday, and we had to reschedule 'cause Anna was interviewing Daniel Ricciardo, and I was like starstruck through the roof. Amazing. Okay, cool, we can postpone. No worries. Let's take it on Monday. First some facts about us and the platform that we make. We make VG Live in Norway and Målservice in Sweden. It's 80% of the usage happens on mobile phones, meaning we're mobile first. We basically do desktop as a kind of side case almost. We have between 40 and 50 million weekly page views on our platform, so it's pretty massive. It's been three years since we added a sport. That was hockey in 2019, so we wanted to look for something else. How do you pick a sport? There's so many out there. First you wanna, of course, consider market size. How many fans are there? You're not really interested in how many is doing the sport. How many fans are there who spend their free time watching and following the sport? What's the fan demography like? What's their distribution? We prefer catering for younger users to stay relevant in the future, obviously, that's something to consider. Products, substitutes. What great ways are already on the market for following this sport? Take golf, for example. Amazing sport, there are some killer apps out there today to follow golf. Tough competition to go against, consider that before going in. Journalistic focus. What expertise do we already have in VG and Aftonbladet to cover these sports? We had Anna in Aftonbladet, we had the equivalent experts in VG, which, wow, that was a good bet for us. National hero or sports driven. This one is really important. Tennis is big in Norway because of Casper Ruud. Chess has Magnus Carlsen, golf has Hovland. If Ruud breaks his leg tomorrow, how big is tennis in Norway? That's something to consider before building a big product into a sport that you're going to cover for years and years. How about F1? First of all, amazing existing fan base. Historically, there's been 10 Swedish F1 drivers. Norway's unfortunately never had one, but there's amazing growth because of Formula 1: Drive to Survive now. You have this young user base coming in. This number is pretty shocking to me. Almost 63% of global F1 fans in 2021 are under 34 years old. That's esport numbers. It's insane, and that really made us keen on going in this direction because it's a lot younger than our average users are. Product substitutes. The best we kind of found was the official F1 app. It's okay. I'm not gonna call it horrible, but it's also not great. Also you're a pretty hardcore user if you download and use an F1 specific app. Maybe F1 is just one of those sports you also follow, but not your main sport. Both VG and Aftonbladet, like I mentioned, had great experts in this. Anna on stage here, one of them. Neither Norway or Sweden at the current moment have a F1 driver, yet it's huge. There's many of the individuals in the sports that are interesting to follow. We went for F1, but then we need to see what's the key needs of these F1 fans. How we researched this was basically we re-watched a bunch of old races on YouTube, like getting a bit of the historical sense. What is this? What kind of races were there? Have they changed? Drive to Survive on Netflix, of course. Watched that three times by now, I think. Interacting with F1's fans on forums and on Facebook, just talking with them, asking them questions, just following their threads and getting a sense of what fan base is this? What kind of people follow this sport? Of course, like Anna mentioned, they're huge on social media, so following both the teams and drivers on social media to get a sense of what are they saying to this fan base. What we learned is it's so much more about what's happening outside the track than on it for many of the new users at least. Okay, keep that in mind when building the product. Why are things happening on the track? This sport is very new to a lot of people, so there's a lot of stuff happening on the track during the races that is strange or confusing to new fans. Okay, we need to help explain that. Why is it happening? Why is there a break now? What's the safety car? Visual content always beats text. Instagram and video clips embeds are crucial. You need to make it visual. Text is good, but you need to combine it with visuals. Of course, simple and instant overview. When is the next race? Sometimes there's 3, 4 weeks between races. You need to give an easy way of, okay, it's that Sunday in 2 and a half week. Started testing. We joined Facebook groups, Formula One Lane, for example. Our excellent designer, Kevin, reached out and said, "Hey, anyone wanna talk to us about making a kickass F1 product?" Of course, we got a lot of response, they wanted to talk to us, do user interviews. It's so much more engaging to do user interviews with hardcore fans of a sport than just, you know, your normally recruited users. Through the research, two personas emerged. You have this new fan. You know, Anna described it, right? They're young, 15-30. They love Drive to Survive on Netflix, but they're a lot more interested in the people than the races themselves, the drivers, their family, their friends. You know, what Drive to Survive is great at covering is the individuals that risk their life at 350 km an hour. You have the senior fan. They're a bit older. They're usually interested in the actual races and the teams and the championship, and they know and understand everything. They know why there's a safety car doing certain things right now. After testing, we started building. This is our team. I think this is a picture from our, like, our dry run one week before the first race of 2022. This is the actual product we built. There's, like, a schedule where you can see all the races, all the events of each race, all the news articles that have been written by Aftonbladet or VG about F1 right now. We partnered up with the official data provider of F1, Sportradar, that gives us instant positional data of the cars. What you see there is a recording of a live race, and usually that data is 30-60 seconds before your stream. Hardcore fans love it. They can know before it happens on TV if there's a crash, who's passing each other and what's happening there. Looking ahead, we've learned a lot this season. We've gotten a lot of feedback in these Facebook groups as well. What we've learned that we wanna get even more instant video clips. We have some clips now, it's mostly highlights, but we wanna get that, like, if there's an overtake, 5 minutes after the overtake, we want the clip and we want to show it to our users. If there's a crash, if there's a safety car, we wanna show it right away. We need to keep that instant overview. User comments, we'll build a feature that enables you to send questions to Anna to explain things, for example, if it's confusing to you, and she can reply and post it in the feed of the race. Design simplification, we went a bit overboard on certain features, so we'll simplify it down certain places. There's The feed was cut into 3 pieces. We wanna simplify that into 1. There's some simplification that you just learn by being in production for a year. Push notifications might sound crazy that we didn't have it, but we didn't have it. We're web mainly, and we wanna enable that in 2023. Thank you. You can stay a little bit, Anna. I wanted to ask you a little bit. Come back. I was just curious, how did you start working with this sport, long time ago? I fell in love. My husband was at the time a handball player. He got a contract in Germany. I was working at Aftonbladet. I realized work, love, I think somehow I need to combine that. Mm. I moved with him to Germany. We are still married. Then Michael Schumacher was huge. This was in the beginning of 2000. Aftonbladet didn't have a great coverage of Formula One, so... I didn't wanna be a player's wife, so I started working, and I've done that since. Cool. This is a very man-dominated sport. Have you ever felt alone as a woman in this circus? I have not. I don't see any difference between a man and a woman. I don't think that's relevant because I've been working as a sports journalist since I was, like, 14, 15 years old. There's always been a lot of men. I don't care. Great answer. Do you see this, Formula One as a sort of hype that's going to go away, or do you think it's here to stay now? I think, since there's so many young users, I think that the hype is going to stay because it has, as I said before, it has so much from technique to the people driving it, to the danger, to the history, to the glamour and all those stories inside the paddock, the persons, all the stars. I think it's something that we can really build on. We have had it for years. Mm It was recently that the big mass, the people realized all the stories that it has. Mm ... I would say. Tordd, You said you were shocked to learn about the, how young this audience was. Mm. What surprised you most when you did this research? When you see a sport and you read that it has, you know, 200% yearly global fan base growth, you're gonna expect a young fan base. That's. It's going to be like that. It's insane numbers. I still found Yeah, the 63% of fans being 34 or younger to be shocking, 'cause I honestly never, outside esports, never heard of a sport like that. That was so cool to see. As a growing fan myself, I was like, "Okay, this sport checks all the boxes for doing a coverage for years to come." I was super eager to just jump into it. Mm. Yeah. What do you think it's a good thing to have, like, a common sports platform, within Schibsted and across brands? I think our product vision is to make an engaging or to make a platform that gives you instant overview and engaging content that broadens your sports interest. I think the word broadens your sports interest is really what we're focusing a lot on now and also how we're building our platform. It's built for VG and Aftonbladet right now, but there's no saying that we couldn't expand on that in the future. I'd be very surprised if that shared platform doesn't expand to both other Schibsted brands and maybe outside Schibsted also within the future. I think that will enable us to build new sports going into new countries that further broadens the sports interest in those countries we already are in. For me, that shared sports platform makes more sense than any to really keep going in that direction. Mm. Mm. Thank you, Anna and Tordd. Give them applause. We do that. Innovation is tough in itself, and it could be even harder to reach from within a large established corporation. As budgets are tightening in times like these, it might seem impossible. Sven Størmer Thaulow, who is the CTO in Schibsted, has experience from leading several innovation teams in... He has concluded on a set of rules that can guide anyone struggling with these matters. Take it away, Sven. Great to be here, thank you for being invited. This is, these are rules that some of you might recognize. They are very much based on my own experiences, actually, from spectacular failures to some good successes. I would like to start with the Schibsted story in a way, because Finn, as many of you know, was established in 1998. Why do I mention this? Because probably it's one of the rare examples where a company is able to take a disruptive business model to its own business and succeed with it. Because that's probably one of the hardest thing you do in a large corporation, is to succeed with disruptive business models inside of your company. That's really the dream of anyone that's working in large companies, to succeed with that, finding an unsolved problem or solving a problem in a different way, to your existing business. In Schibsted, we have actually spent quite a bit of money to teach all our managers and lots of our staff, through the course of Clayton Christensen, from Harvard, where he really distincts in 2 different types of innovations. You have the innovations that is about sustaining innovations, and you have disruptive innovations. Sustaining innovations, I think you all probably are working on that every single day. It's just really to make a product better by improving it in terms of features, so you can earn more money. It's typical trajectory of large companies. You have the disruptive innovation, which is really about how can you take an existing problem in the market and doing in a cheaper and better way and practically disrupt these large giants. For a large company, as I've said, sustaining innovation is absolutely something we do every day. Disruptive is something we try to do, many tries to do, and most of them fail. The question is: Can Schibsted repeat itself? Schibsted has been existing since 1839, and you can trust me, there are several of these examples along the way of where we have actually reinvented ourselves, but you have to do that through disruption. I think Finn is a very good example. I'm not gonna spend a lot more time on it, what I would like to take away from that journey, even though I'm not a part of it myself, is that it takes a lot of really super strong top management consistency and stamina to make that happen. From inside of a company that has an existing business model that's threatened, you're going to find shitloads of resistance. Based on, some experiences and, some, both in successes and failures, I will go through eight rules that I'd like you to... Hopefully, you can bring it on to the jobs that you do. Eight rules. The first one is set expectations right in the large company that you work in and avoid overly complex projects. I think that's probably what we are masters of in large corp, companies, is to actually make super complex projects and make them large and think that that's going to really bring forward great innovations. Who of you have been part of those kind of experiences? Yeah, some. That is definitely what, not what you're going to do. You have to do it very small. You have to do it nimble. You have to experiment. You have to set the expectations right to your sponsors that, you know, 9 out of 10 of these are going to fail. That is not very normal in a company where you do sustainable innovation. That is a very, very high failure rate. That was the rule number 1. Don't forget that. Number 2, get the right people with the right attitude. There are lots of great people in big companies, but you might not find the right attitude for these fairly high-risk experiments. Don't bring too many of the people that have been in the company for a long time into those experimental small startups. You have to have people that are a bit rebellious, that are able to move fast, you know, to ask for forgiveness, and you need people that can cope with the risk of failing, which is super hard. You also have to avoid people that have been in the company that loves processes and loves rules and regulations and policies. Those are not the kind of people you want to have in these kind of types of efforts. The third one is to mimic the startup setup as much as possible. Of course, this is difficult in a large company, but it's absolutely possible. There is a reason why there is this thing here, because I usually use the analogy of a Viking ship. Well, the Vikings didn't use these kind of steering wheels, right? You know? The point is that you take a team, you make them as autonomous as possible, take away any dependencies to the rest of the company. You put them on the ship, you kick them out of the course, out of the coast, and you say, "You go to Scotland. Try to see if you can get there." Right? If you start to make loads and loads of dependencies between that small team and the rest of the company, well, what's gonna happen? They're going to be slowed down, and they're going to have a lot of excuses of not being able to deliver. You have to try to mimic that in a way. At some point of time, and this is what has been one of the Shipsta's formulas, is that they've actually made legal entities extremely fast. They start companies right off the bat, even though with one or two people, to maybe encapsulate them into that feeling of that they are in that boat, and they are alone on the sea, and they need to get to Scotland. The fourth one is to create a special culture to be able to operate, and I would say this, and some people, I think, Anna, you said you shouldn't use this word, but I still will use it, antibody inside a monster, right? If you are working in a big company, you need to be, as I said, as a Viking ship, and you maybe want to set up like an accelerator unit. It's very fast that these people are seen as the privileged few, the ones that they are now getting to do all the fun stuff, and all the other ones are going through the grit and doing the sustainable innovation and why the hell are they getting all of this money, and why not, why not us? It can become quite toxic. If it's even disruptive to the existing business model of the company, it's going to get even worse. You have to make a resilient accelerator culture where these people can thrive, but at the same time, not be so much on the edge that you piss everyone off. You have to piss some off, but not everyone. This is a really fine balance in a big company, and if you don't do it in the right way, well, then things are either going to fail just because you don't have the, you know, the gut to do things in the aggressive way, or you become too spiky in a way, so the whole monster just spits you out. I've seen that happen. That's definitely one of the bigger failures, and probably one of the most hard things to do as a manager. You have to use governance and organizational engineering. Sounds a bit textbook-ish, but it's quite important actually, because when you set up these kind of teams, and especially in a tough macroeconomic environment as we are right now, it's very tempting to cut these projects. Andrew and myself have been working a lot about this thinking, you know. How do you actually engineer the organization? That means where are they situated in the organization, meaning in the level. How are they protected by the core business so that we don't get in a situation? I'll take this example from Telenor when I was working there, and we were working with a streaming service, a music streaming service and a video streaming service, and this is like 2007 or 2008, so very early. We were working with Schibsted on the WiMP, Play, Tidal, et cetera. We were prioritized for doing that compared to investing in a new base station at the new hospital in Trondheim. Who do you think won? The base station, right? That's core business. That was a business case. You got like NOK 20 million in revenues for that base station, you couldn't prove that you're going to earn any money on that streaming service short-term. That is the typical Innovator's Dilemma that you need to solve. It's super important that you organize it on the side of the business, try to encapsulate it, make incentives in the right way, and try to avoid that they become victims of a tough economic climate, because that always happens, especially in listed companies like Schibsted. Rule number six, this one is quite interesting because I would say that the heading is a bit misleading because it said, utilize your core business for scaling products carefully. Carefully, right? It's very tempting. I mean, what we do this with the venture companies, some of you are here today, by, you know, plugging them your into the traffic fund and Schibsted and giving you marketing, which is a very, very light way of accelerating the business of a small company through the large scale of a company like Schibsted. The big problem is when you do that with products that are not perfect in terms of product-market fit is that you step on the gas too early. You take a very small company that doesn't have a super proven product-market fit. You plug them into a distribution engine, and you give them massive amount of customers very fast. What happens with the customer if they get a product that's not really good, right? They say, "This is crap. I'm not going to use it." They churn. That chance is over. You can't do it again, right? Because then you have to rebrand and build a new service. It's super difficult, and you have to do it very carefully when you do this. If you do it at the right timing with the right product, it's extremely powerful. It's a but. 7, make sure, and I think this is something that has become better, but it's still a problem, that for these kind of smaller experiments, people are using the wrong KPIs at the wrong time. The most biggest danger in a large company is the fact that the large company is usually quite mature. What kind of KPIs do you follow up when you are mature? You follow up the revenues, you follow up the margins, the gross margins, the usual suspects of a large listed company. If you're not smart enough, you start putting on these kind of targets on smaller companies, very small companies that are in the growth phase. Then you practically strangle the growth and the drive in the company. Using the right metrics at the right time of the cycle of a product is something that is very, very important, and especially you have to watch out for when you do these kind of activities in larger, in larger companies. The eighth one is seriously consider employee ownership. Schibsted has not done that. Maybe they have, but I don't know of it so far. There are other larger companies that are doing this quite successfully. That means practically that they just put away, you know, 10%-15% of the shares of a small company to the employees there, and they spend that, not right away, all the 10%-15%, but over time, they give the employees parts of the value creation of the company. That's practically what happens when you start in a startup, right? This has to be balanced in the way to the risk and the reward of the employees. I believe personally that that's something we need to really consider when we do organic startups inside of Schibsted. On that note, those were the eight rules. I think they're quite important, based on painful learning, when you work in the big companies. I'll end off by saying a bit about how we work with innovation in Schibsted today. I think, first of all, Schibsted is an anarchistic, beautiful company with a lot of sustaining innovation in all parts of Schibsted at all times. It's like you can't have the overview. It's impossible. We even sometimes hear about companies we didn't even know about existed in the company. I mean, that's how anarchistic Schibsted sometimes is. Every day it is innovation, we have three examples how we try to structurally set up innovation and also disruptive innovation in Schibsted. One is that we have the ventures arm, we will talk about that later on, that's investing in companies that are doing interesting stuff, sometimes quite often they are a bit disruptive to our own business. If you look at particularly on the marketplaces business we have, some of the startups that we are investing in are actually challenging our large positions with our horizontal marketplaces, Finn and Blocket, and its likes. That's one area where it's extremely important for us to tap into those ideas. The second one is what we call the Nordic Accelerator unit in marketplaces where we are establishing new organic initiatives, or it can be based on acquisitions, where we scale smaller verticals within the marketplaces business and plug them sometimes into our business, the core business scaling model, or sometimes they are completely by themselves. The third one is really Schibsted Futures Lab, which is working on the longer horizon, a small team of people that are really dedicated to what's going on within technologies and see how we can either help the core business or create new business based on those technologies. Right now, they've been focusing dead on to large language models, and I guess all of you the last weeks have tested out GPT-3, right? You can see what's going on in that business. That's the end, that's the final team. This is something we take really seriously, and we really try to repeat the things that have been done in Schibsted previously by structurally setting up different ways of innovating in Schibsted. I hope this was inspiring for you if you work in other companies, and you can try to pick some of these rules and at least think about them when you see something that is derailing a bit. Thank you. Hi. Thank you so much, Sven. That was very inspiring. Yeah ... and, something that many people who work in large companies, probably, recognize. Are there any questions for Sven from the audience? We have a microphone that we can pass around if anyone wants to ask Sven anything. Ask me anything. If your brains are working a little bit slowly, this early in the morning, then you can also of course grab Sven a little bit, after. Thank you so much, Sven. Thank you. We are going on to the next part. Investing in tough times. If innovating is tough in tough times, daring to invest or to stick to your strategy as an investor can be just as hard. The instinct is often to step on the brake. Schibsted is a long-term investor with a history of riding out storms and an eye for interesting startups. Two of these startups are here today to discuss how to come strong out of a crisis, together with Schibsted's Chief Investment Officer, Andrew Kvålseth. Here to lead the conversation is Hanne Holsted, COO, Schibsted Ventures. Welcome to the stage. Shall we drag that bit out or... Okay. Thank you, Marie. Welcome to the stage, Anjali Bhatnagar, Founder and CEO of Tørn. Brynjar Ellingsen, Founder and CEO of Fixrate, and Andrew Kvålseth, our Chief Investment Officer at Schibsted. Before we start this conversation, I thought it would be good for the audience to get to know you a bit and then know who is Fixrate and who is Tørn. Why don't you start, Brynjar? Thank you. Fixrate is a marketplace for large bank deposits. It's a two-sided marketplace. On the one hand, we have the banks that are looking for deposits, they can go to us and go to our marketplace and advertise. On the other side, we have larger companies that are looking for better rates and efficiency. They can use us in order to speed up things. We are located in Steinkjer, which is the fintech capital of Norway, of course. We have around 20 employees, and we've been growing fast since we started our marketplace in 2017. Of course, rising rates has done something to our growth. Since June, we have grown our customer base with 100%. It's peaking and, that's, a fun journey to be a part of. Yes. now Tørn, Anjali. Yes. Tørn is also a two-sided marketplace. On the supply side, it's the people who are selling the, their building materials and construction materials, surplus and dead stock. On the buyer side, it's the people like me and you and also actually the small craftsman companies who are buying that surplus that is new and unused goods for a very, very reduced price. The problem that this marketplace is addressing is that in the whole retail, and especially in the building materials and construction retail, it's as much as 8% of all the product inventory, it does not get sold. Usually the practice has been that these has been stored away and then has been thrown away after some time. Actually, just considering that in Norway alone, this is it's like this industry that sells for NOK 60 billion every year, that really it's a lot of huge value, you know. It's a business problem, and it's also an environmental problem that it generates so much of waste. With Tørn, what we are doing is that we are It's not just like a regular, like, marketplace where you're just connecting supply and the demand, but we are actually facilitating the very, very seamless, like, purchase experience between these sellers. I think the compared to the traditional marketplaces, the problem here it is that this marketplace is not supporting the core business for these retailers. It's just a headache for them, this dead stock and surplus. Just want to get rid of it as easy as possible. we have developed the whole technology that how, like, you know, comparing to a Finn, that how you can actually publish all the surplus with just few clicks on the platform. We are facilitating everything through the payments and shipping and customer support through the platform. I got this idea about this marketplace exactly three years ago, and we launched in March 2020 in Norway, and we have been growing steadily since then. We also launched in Sweden in February this year, where we are growing, and now we are planning to enter a new market. Impressive. Andrew, let's hear a bit from you then. Why are we investing in Schibsted? Sven touched a bit upon it, but why are we an investor in Schibsted? Yeah. I think, I mean, Schibsted, I would say, has always had investments in its DNA, and it's a really interesting company because Sven touched on how it's one of the few companies that really disrupted itself, and he used the example of Finn. It's really been doing that, I would say, consistently and time and time again over years, as it's been transforming from a physical provider of consumer services like newspapers to a digital provider of those kind of services. It's also a bit interesting the time we find ourselves in now, because we're here in another downturn, or it seems most likely to be that. I think Schibsted has done very well in the past of actually investing through those downturns, you know, both during the dotcom crash, where they produced Finn and a lot of other great brands and businesses then, but also during the financial crisis, where they produced Lendo and others during that period of time. I think it's a company that has always invested a lot. I think Sven even mentioned there's companies and businesses floating around sometimes that people aren't even fully aware of in all sides of the company. I think that talks a little bit about the scale and breadth of that. I think what's been an important foundation of that is, one, the culture in Schibsted, that culture of innovation and investment and reinvention. Also it's, you know, become quite a platform in Norway, Sweden and now the rest of the Nordics, and a platform that helps it scale early-stage ideas and early-stage companies, and I think it's been good at using that. Would like to add that's good reasoning for why we invest and why we need to do that to secure Schibsted's future. I would also add a bit of points of why we are a good investor. I mean, we are quite an active and founder-friendly investor, I would say. I hope you agree. We are leveraging and using our brands to grow and create superior value in our assets. Among others, we use our 8.5 million users that visit us every day, several times a day, I guess, to build brand awareness, especially. We also integrate our services into our large existing portfolio, leveraging our customer base, right, to acquire fast distribution like Sven touched upon. Right now, we're in a bit of a rough spot, right, with the macro environment. The reason we're here today actually is to talk about your article in the Future Report, talking a bit about how it is to invest in those rough times. Could you give us some insights on your thoughts. Yeah. on the time we're in now? Yeah. I'll give kind of a quick fly-through, then I think it'd be good to hear from the actual companies going through this kind of thing as well. Yeah, I think that, you know, as mentioned, Schibsted's been through this cycle a couple of times, we had some discussions recently on sort of what were the things that were particularly important when we were in these periods of time, and that's how we came up with these kind of five key strategies of investing in these hard times. If I just touch on them one at a time, I'm just gonna stare there to remember the sequence. The first one was on this thinking long-term for real, that was quite interesting. I don't know if you guys have used that OpenAI chatbot that's out there now and getting some publicity, but I actually typed that statement into that this morning. I said, "What does it mean to invest long-term for real?" I typed it like that. The chatbot actually gave back a pretty coherent response, which I think aligns pretty well with the way that we think about it. It's really making sure that when you hit those tough periods of time, that you're not foregoing the long-term vision and objective of your company to just meet these short-term targets. Of course you have to survive to make it through that period of time, but it's very important that you're not making trade-offs that fundamentally make your product worse or take your company to a place that it's not supposed to go, in a sense. Especially for early-stage companies, that's so critical. There's also a quote that I like that talks about growth, and it says, you know, "Growth solves all problems, and the absence of growth is not solvable by anything but growth." I think it's a really simple statement, but it's very true, right? If you have a small company, even if you reach a 100% margin, it's not gonna get you anywhere. You have to grow, but you have to, in these times, really make sure to do that profitably. The next point that we talked about was this stick to what you know and focus where you can add value more than others. I think that's important at any time, not just in a downturn, but particularly important now to be really nailing something that others cannot nail as well as you can. I think a positive element of downturns for successful companies is it eliminates a lot of the competition which wasn't as competitive, but actually needed to be cleared out a bit for you to succeed. Then we had the revenues or vanity profits or sanity that I talked a bit about, and that was this element, you know, really focus on making sure your business can thrive. Love your founders and leaders who can adapt to changing conditions, and that's one of the key things that we see is really how do we adapt to the situations that change. Understanding that companies are built, not born, and I think these two will be able to talk much more about what that actually means and the pain that one has to go through to really build a product that's engaging. I guess it's good to hear on these elements from them, Anna, so. On the first one, Brynn, long-term. Yeah. When you started Fixrate, you started that in an environment with zero interest rates, right? Yes. Did you know that it was gonna take a long time? Did you predict? What, what were your thoughts about that now? Yeah. The market for bank deposits, it's consists of many markets. it wasn't like, oh, it's gonna be a long journey before we can start growing. we always have some areas to grow in. that really didn't matter. We knew that it would take time, especially marketplaces take time to build. we have to grow both sides of the marketplace, you can't have too many suppliers, you need to follow up with the demand and also we can turn it around, not too many, not too much demand. it's difficult, you have to navigate and to grow the marketplace in order. it's building a marketplace in itself, it's a long term project. You don't release it and you explode the next day. It takes years. It's about value proposition and developing the value proposition. It's about, yeah, pinpointing the exact pain points that you're supposed to deliver on and to reduce friction and so on. You don't really know what you're gonna do when you start, it evolves. It takes a long time, and it's. It was like that to us. I had an idea of what it's gonna look like, but it's not like that at all today. It evolves all the time, and it takes time. When we were looking for investors, we were looking for investors who were familiar with marketplaces and who knew that it would take time to develop a marketplace. Schibsted was right for us in that term because you guys had Finn and that's been up there since 1994 or something. Yeah, things it will take time. For us, it wasn't like low rates. It will take time, but we knew it would take time no matter what. Yeah. It's good to be ready and tested on the product when their interest rates suddenly explodes then, and you can see that now in their. Yeah. -results. Yeah. We can. It's... We actually passed NOK 40 billions a few weeks ago, that's kinda cool. It's kinda cool. I agree. Wouldn't you? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Anjali, when looking at Andrew's strategy, there's especially one I'm thinking about when I think about you, and that's kind of love your founders and leaders who can adapt to change. Your founder journey is kind of a story of a change and pivoting, isn't it? Can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah. Actually, like in four years, like four or five pivots, quite big ones. Before starting Tørn, I was actually running a marketplace for vintage fashion. The idea after the In that concept as well, just after two pivots, it was that, like, it would just arise from my own need actually, that we were connecting quality vintage fashion stores from all over Europe on one platform. For users that they could actually buy quality clothing that was secondhand, you know, and just get it delivered at home. Like you said, like changing is that because you just initially you have an idea, and actually this is actually I find very fascinating that everybody thinks marketplaces is very easy because it's just like it's very intuitive idea that you connect supply with demand, like, you know, in some kind of with the business model. My conclusion from that point, from that time was actually also that marketplaces really need to solve a problem that is important enough to solve, that somebody is willing to pay you to solve that problem. In that regard, like, you know, with this previous concept that I had, I realized that I was not solving an important enough problem. We were growing steadily, but I just, like, at one point, I realized that, okay, this is never going to be profitable, and was really important because otherwise I would be just chasing investors all the time. I just decided to take it down in summer 2019 and just was ready to go into a job, new job, when I just read an article in the newspaper that was about waste in the building materials industry. That gave this idea about. Just like learning from, like, you know, just say changing, adapting, it's not just about jumping from idea to idea. Like, you know, and just, like being like almost like, stupidly rigid that, oh, you have to make it work, you know. Because I have... This is what my learning has been as well, is that you need to pivot, but you need to always focus not on the new ideas, but the new problem and the extent of the problem you're solving with your idea. The return actually it wouldn't have gone this fast if I had not failed like a couple of times before with the previous idea, because by that concept, I learned that unit, you know, metric is really important. The day I realized that these stores that we were connecting to that platform, they were using, no matter how fast we were, they would use 20 minutes to create an ad for a used item. This was actually really dawned on me, and I was really cursing myself that I realized it after 2 years. Like, you know, I should have learned that much, much earlier. That this is a pain point that it would never be, like, give enough value to these stores. This is the reason that when I was starting to develop Tørn, for me is that idea is nothing. Like, okay, first of all, I need to understand how big is that problem is, and if we are going to create this marketplace, how much time these retailers would use to create an ad for every single item that is surplus or dead stock. At that point, when I realized that there exists, the structured product databases and that we can actually create a technology that would make it really easy. In our current state, we use 1 second to create a new ad for... For me, that was a real, like, you know, the idea that, okay, this might work. Still, like, since we started, we have run into 100 problems and we keep running. This is the real reason. Again, you need to prioritize which is the most important problem right now that you need to focus and solve, and how much return it would give you because we just don't need to solve a problem. When we are solving it for Norway and Sweden, it's always the focus that it has to go, like expand internationally. What would be the problem that is worth solving for all the markets? This is actually how we prioritize. Andrew Kvålseth, since that's really important for us, adaptability in founders and leaders, kinda how do we spot that when we're investing? Well, I think it depends a little bit on the stage, right? I think what you like to see is some track record in that, and that doesn't mean necessarily a track record in success. It means more a track record in trying and being in there and learning the pivots and things you learn actually from failure like she was touching on. I think that matters quite a bit. When it's really early stage and something, you know, where it's really the first thing someone is doing out of university, there's less of that track record to look at. A bit later it's good to understand what have people done before, what have they gone through, and what have they learned from that. I think the example you just gave is a really, really good one actually on that. Can I jump in with a question for them too? Yeah. I had one for both of you, that's just kind of, you know, when you think long term, do you face any pressures now in the short term that if you succumb to them, you feel it's gonna take you in the wrong direction? If so, what are those and how do you kind of resist against that and keep the focus during these harder periods? Um, well- For you, it's a bit of a better period, actually. Right now, actually so. There's always hurdles, you know. There's always decisions to navigate. We're thinking about changing the business model to develop it. We see strong growth in some areas and weak growth in others, and there's always decisions to be made. You just have to make sure that the base is solid. That's one of the. I'm looking at that vanity thing. It's revenues are vanity and profits are sanity. You could. I think they relate with the question. True. To us, it's been a long journey, 5 years, you could argue. I think it's long and it's been kind of steady, we've always kept in mind to the burn rate and don't do too much at the same time, and keep the burn rate low, so that you survive. And you try to make the runway longer. And that's a dilemma because you have to show growth. How can you grow if you don't hire people? How can you develop if you don't hire fast? It's When we navigate our startup, we think both short and long term. And I think to us that's been a good story. We can see in the market that there are some startups, they've been growing too fast maybe. Mm. They've been doing too much at the same time, trying to do both, things to overcome, problems in the short term and also trying to take up and do things that are more long term. When we plan and layer down a strategy, we think one or two years, that's it. Of course, we have a vision or we have a thought about what's going on maybe in five years. Mm. We keep it, Yeah, we don't jump too far. We try not to jump too far. That could that could kill a startup, I guess. Yeah. Oh, good. I think, yeah, what you're saying is I can really relate to also what Sven was talking about earlier, is that in this position where we are right now, we are growing on both sides of supply and demand in Norway and Sweden. It could be very easy just to just jump on the short term, like you know that, okay, if you put now a lot of marketing, we will get both sides and it'll just give us very quick revenues. This is actually what we're trying to resist, is that we don't do that before we really have a product that can support that kind of growth and that we can do it in several markets. Yeah, just like marketing too much too soon is, it's not good. This is actually where we are balancing this short-term and long-term perspective. That makes sense. I think that's been something a bit tough in the environment as well, is if you go back a year, all investors or many at early stage were just pumping in capital and pushing all the focus on more the revenue side of that revenue, our vanity profits, our sanity equations. You've also had a lot of outside pressure. It's sort of this complete change all of a sudden in the sentiment. Mm. Andrew, in these tough times, how about Schibsted? Are we gonna keep investing? What do you think about the future now as an investor? Yeah. I think that history has shown us that these can be some of the best times actually to be investing. You know, we need to make sure that we are putting capital behind the right things in these times. I think that early stage venture investments have been one of those categories that's worked really well through these periods for us, and I think we're in a position to be more long term than the average fund or average investor. I think now what we need to do is really shift our focus a lot more to how do we also help a lot the companies during this period of time and add more value than just capital into the equation like you and your team are a big part of doing. I think absolutely this is a period we think is a good time to be investing, but we need to be careful and do it in the right way. A bigger focus on our existing portfolio as well. Yes. Absolutely. without reading. Yeah. Getting more value out of companies we have as well. Good. We have to round up now. A last question for you then. Looking back, would you still invest in Tørn and Fixrate today? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's been... Investing in solid entrepreneurs is cycle independent, I would say. We're very happy with that and would do it again if we could. Great. Thank you. Thank you for the talk. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're moving into the last part of today's program, and we are going to talk about diversity. There is strong evidence that diversity leads to increased innovation power. How can we translate diversity into product development today? This is what Sumeet Singh Patpatia is working with in Schibsted. He is our first global head of diversity, inclusion, and belonging and Sumeet has broad experience from multinational companies working with innovation and transformation, and now he is working towards the goal of making Schibsted the world's best workplace when it comes to being different. Are you ready, Sumeet? You're struggling with your jacket. All right, give him a warm applause. These weren't made for people with turbans. I'll talk more about that. I'm a Sikh, and we Sikhs wear turbans, huge turbans. I didn't dare to wear my turban until I started in the Army. You probably know because in after 9/11, the major sort of newspapers and the headlines said, "Terrorists," and you saw people with turbans and beards. It wasn't exactly cool to come out with a turban. I used to wear this handkerchief or bandana, you call it. That changed to 2 weeks in the Army. I was based at the Kolsås base, just outside of Oslo. I had been there 2 weeks, and I was called to the Chief of the base. I was pretty nervous because he didn't typically meet us. When he sort of met us, we had probably done something wrong. I entered his office, second floor, in our office, our building. I met this huge guy over 2 meters tall, a dark voice, he said, "Singh, sit down." I was sweaty, I went in, sat down, he then pointed at my head, he said, "Singh, you look like a pirate with that on your head." I thought, "Wow, this is gonna be exciting chat." He continued, he said, "You know, I know you Sikhs. You Sikhs, you contributed heavily in Europe during First and Second World War, I know that you have these beautiful, huge turbans. Isn't that correct?" I said, "Yes, that's correct." He continued, "I want you to... You are the first thing people that come to our base meet," because I was a guard. "It's important that you look good, that you look representable. I want you to wear this proper, nice, beautiful turban. Is that okay?" I said, "Okay, that's okay." Then I was pretty shocked. From that day and onwards, every morning when my colleagues were checked whether they had shaved themselves or polished their shoes, I was checked whether I came with this fresh seven-meter-long turban, and if I didn't, I was sent back to my room, and I had to tie it freshly. You probably thought this story is gonna be a bad story, but it was a nice story. This is an example of diversity competence. My leader, he was an ethnic white Norwegian man, probably above 50, to put it in a stereotype. He had been curious, and he had learned something that wasn't his normal and utilized that knowledge to make me feel seen. He saw me beyond what was visible for his eyes. That's diversity competence, and that made me feel included. It gave me a sense of belonging, and I can promise you that I gained much more power, energy, and creativity at work after that day. Much that I, 15 years after, still talk warm about this workplace. The keyword is diversity competence. Diversity competence is not the same as diversity experiences. I can have a lot of diversity experiences being a brown guy with a turban and a beard in Norway, but that doesn't give me diversity competence. We are talking about innovation today, and I'll probably just repeat some of the things that have been said today since Arlo talked about it, Andrew talked about it. What do we see? These graph shows the 500 largest American companies from 1955 and 61 years onwards. What do you see? Is that 52% of these companies disappear during this lifespan. What does that mean? It means that we know that the trends, that our user behavior, our needs are changing faster than ever before. In order to stay relevant, we know that the companies need to innovate faster. I guess that these 500 companies probably innovated a lot, but it's not just about the innovation. You also need to innovate right or correctly. You have to capture the trends shifts out there. I call it the sensors. You need to have a lot of different sensors in your company to adapt to the changes happening outside, and then you'll get the product-market fit. You need to innovate in accordance with the needs, and you can't sit the similar people innovating for the similar people out there. You'll probably be one of those 52% that will die out. I am born and raised in Oslo, at Bogstad, the western part of Oslo. Where I grew up, there weren't many people like me, or actually, there's not many people like me in Norway at all. On the western part of Oslo, in our primary school, we were three people that had a different color. For those of you that listen to Norwegian music, if you listen to Karpe. Karpe in the song, "Meg det says", in Vestkantavisa, he says, "Det var Sumit og meg pluss Sadiq som flytta opp." He says that it was Sumit, me and Sadiq then moved up to Holmenkollen, and we went to the primary school there, and we were very different. I felt very Indian in that environment. You know, growing up in the sort of Indian home, at Bogstad, where we had Indian news, we had Indian dramas at Zee TV. We watched Indian Bollywood movies, Indian food, the garlic sitting tight in the walls, right? When I sort of went out every morning, I was in a totally new world, a Norwegian world. In that world, I felt very Indian, very brown. It wasn't a problem. This was just a fact. That slightly changed when I met my wife. My wife grew up at Grønland, in Oslo, which is one of the most multicultural areas of Oslo. When her friends and used to sort of hang out with me, they used to say that, you know, they sort of laughed of the way I spoke, the way I sat, where I used to eat, what I used to eat, they thought I was very sort of Norwegian or very white in the way I behaved. I think my wife had enough when we went on a trip to London, our first trip to London. After the trip, I thought that, okay, I'll do what is normal to do. I made a sort of Excel sheet with all the expenses of that tour, and I sent it to her and I sent her my account number that you can send half of the money to that account. She said, "You know what? Indian guy would never do that because Indians fight for the bill, and you splitted it, so you are a coconut. You look very Indian on the outside, but you are not an Indian. You're very Norwegian on the inside." That's where I said, "No, no, I'm not a coconut, I'm a Kinder Surprise." My diversity competence is my ability to navigate in the western part of Oslo, in the very, very typical Norwegian environment. I've been active in our Sikh temple at Alnabru as well, so I can navigate in that environment as well. That diversity competence is not visible for the eyes. It's beyond that. My diversity experience is being this, what you see, but my diversity competence is something different. This is how we also define diversity in Schibsted. Diversity is not just what we see. Diversity is much more beyond sort of the genders, the ethnicities, the abilities, the age. It's also the secondary layer. It can also be your values, what do you believe in? It can be the societal part. What cars do you drive? Who are the people you hang out with? It could be the relational part. Are you married? Do you have siblings? Do you have kids? It can be the occupational part. What kind of industries have you worked in? What kind of roles have you had? Much more. That is not visible, and it's important to look at those two dimensions because what we see, a lot of reports, McKinsey has the Diversity Matters report. A lot of research reports shows that diversity lead to innovation, productivity and more value creation. We don't necessarily see that in Norway or in the Nordics. I think the reason why is because when we increase the gender diversity also in our teams, we are still the same people being hired. We are people, we have gone to the same schools, coming from the same companies, growing up at the same areas, hanging out with the same people. We need to look beyond what we see. This is a brand, it is a map of Oslo, and the blue dots show where the people in that brand lives. What you see is this is the western part of Oslo, where I grew up, and this is the eastern part of Oslo. 33% of the population in Oslo has a multicultural background, and most of them live there. The question to be asked for this brand is: how are we reaching out to this segment? Is this a relevant segment out there? Is there a value in reaching out to this segment? If the answer is yes, I would start getting insight and do some sort of user research on this side. The best way to get that insight would probably be to get people in the organization that have grown up there or live there, and then going beyond what you see. Typically, I think my hypothesis is that we would recruit Sumeet because he has a turban and is brown and he has beard. He probably knows everything about what's happening out there. I told you, I grew up there. My friend, Örjan, he's ethnic white. He grew up there. He lives there. He has his two kids there, and he probably knows much more about the segments at this side. That's why it's important to look beyond what we see. Now, when we say that diversity is everything, we would probably say that, okay, we can relax. We don't need to do anything. I see that this slide has mixed up, I'll tell you what it says there. We know when we look at the demographics of the society, we take inspiration of that because we need to also focus when we talk about diversity, where do we start? When we look at the demographics of the Nordics, we know that every fifth person we meet in the society today has a multicultural background. Every seventh person is retired. Every second person is a female. Every fifteenth person is non-heterosexual. Every sixth person is neurodiverse, and every fifth person has different abilities. The question I want you to ask is, if this is the society, if this is the customers, how does my team look like? Do I have insight and understanding and is this insight represented in my organization? If the answer is no, then you know where to start. Why are we doing this in Schibsted? It's mainly 3 reasons. We want the best talents, we know that we are suited up or rigged up to attract the best from the certain segments. The way we write our text, job ads, the way places we post them, the way we do the recruitment processes are rigged up for certain people. We like to sort of recruit people that are similar like us. We need to change that to get the best talents among the whole population, not the best among a few groups. Secondly, we know a recent survey done in Norway came four weeks ago, showed that the young talents when they look for new jobs or new companies to work in, the first thing they look for is how your colleagues are and the social environment, including inclusive culture. That is number one before your payslip. The young talents today expect companies to take this matter seriously, because this is how the world looks like today. Secondly, we know that if we sit similar people in the room, we will get products that are relevant for the similar groups out there. To have the best products, we need to have diverse set of perspectives, head and experiences. That's why an example of this is in Finn, where Martin works. He's a software developer, and he's also he has a diversity competence. He's blind, and he's not working there because we feel sorry for him. He's working there because he's a software developer in line with everyone else. In addition, he has a diversity competence that he can see the user experience and user journey of Finn from the eyes of a blind or somebody with a reduced vision. We know that every seventeenth person we meet in the society today has reduced vision or are blind. There's probably a potential to tap into that, and I'll come back to it with an example of that. We know that different perspectives leads to more friction. We call it positive friction that we want in the room, that can potentially lead to more innovation and more fights and more sort of ideas that comes out of it. Just lastly, we like to think about this this in a sense that it's a matter of attracting talent, but there's also research showing that this is not just about attracting, but also retaining talents. Probably, even though there aren't many people with turbans and beards around there in Norway, I have friends, and they also care about me. When they are in companies and they see that this perspective isn't taken seriously, the chance for them leaving that company is higher than others. Okay. We know that exclusion is painful. Some researchers have actually looked at this, and they see that when you are excluded, that social pain has the same impact on your brain as being hit. It's very painful. I think everyone in this room or those listening to the stream can relate. We have been excluded at one point of time at least. Exclusion can be not being chosen to the football team or not being invited to the prom or a few weeks ago, some people we thought were our closest friend didn't invite us to their wedding. We know that that was painful. We know that people come to Schibsted or other companies every day, and they feel excluded. I'm not talking about sort of being harassed sorry or the bullying part there. That's sort of the worst part of it. Being excluded is not being able to bring your perspective or that you sit silent in the meeting rooms or during lunch, people talk about the same things that aren't relevant or relatable to you. Small things, that happens every day. We consciously and unconsciously exclude people all the time. In Schibsted, we say that we wanna empower people in their daily lives. We don't want to give them that pain, that is why we also focus on inclusion. First, just to show you the example of how those small things can be, this is a museum in Norway where you see sort of at the entrance this sign is there. All people that don't have a wheelchair, they go to the main entrance. People with a wheelchair, they are sent to the back with the transport. Imagine we might think, "Yeah, but it's an old building, and does it really matter?" I think that person in that wheelchair doesn't sort of make a big issue about this. Imagine if every building you enter, every day, this is the sign you get or there's something wrong. You don't wanna be a burden, but this is exclusion, and this is a small minor example that people with maybe different sort of normality than what we are used to meet, and this is painful. This is why we focus on inclusion. We know that the downside of exclusion is huge. When we are excluded, we limit ourself. We aren't creative. We don't bring the all ideas and perspectives we have. When we have inclusive traits as a leader, it's a huge value in that. If our employees see that we have inclusive traits, they will feel much more fairly treated. When that happens, that's when we also see that decision quality, team collaboration increases significantly in a team. I just want to give three examples of how we could sort of connect diversity and innovation, and some of these are the things you already spoken about. Andrew spoke about adaptability or adapt quickly to changes happening out there, that's exactly what I wanna point out there. When we see all these sort of things happenings there, we want to increase the range of diversity in our room. When we increase that range of diversity beyond what we see, that's where we have a lot of sensors to capture the changes happening out there. If we are similar people sitting in the room, we will not adapt. If we are just sitting in Oslo, in the city, we will not see the changes happening in Tromsø, maybe. We need to capture those changes. In order to make that happen, we need higher range of diversity in our companies. What I hear a lot in Schibsted and outside Schibsted, is that people say, "You know, we think too similarly, we are too alike. But where do we start? We can't recruit right now." That's where I also think that you need to challenge that. You can also start with diversity information. Get a report that said something different than what you sort of usually have to challenge what the sort of discussion. You can also assign a devil's advocate in the room to challenge the decisions to get more discussion, more fights, more debate. Example of that is IBM. They were actually, They started recruiting people with different abilities already in 1914, 80 years before the Disability Act in U.S. One of the things they did was also recruiting people with a different sort of reduced vision and people that were blind. That's sort of increasing that range of diversity also led them to make a lot of products that tapped into new markets, such as the market for people with a reduced vision and people that were blind because they had people that were blind in the company. They have actually developed a lot of products that weren't out there, such as sort of the conversion of text-to-voice or a text reader for people with a reduced vision. That's where they tapped into new market segments, and that also led them to make better user experiences for everyone else as well. Their products, they were developed much earlier than what was the sort of governmental requirements at the time. They were the early drivers of such kind of products. Today, it's sort of required by the government, but IBM was there much earlier. Then it's about desirability. My father, this is not my father, by the way, but it could be. He used to subscribe to Aftenposten when I grew up. Every morning, every afternoon, there was a paper outside our door with Aftenposten. At some point of time, he stopped that subscription, and when I joined Schibsted, I've been asking and thinking, "Why did he actually stop?" I know that that question might be relevant because I know that him and all his friends, the sort of elder, multicultural population, they sit watching the Indian news or other sort of news, and they sit and send these fake news, sort of fake article or fake news articles on WhatsApp to each other, and there they sit, and they are a lot. I wanted to know, what do we actually know about this group? Are they subscribing to Aftenposten or other products in the Schibsted family? What are they doing? Why aren't they subscribing? I don't think they are. Is it because it's expensive? Is it because the language is difficult or the text is irrelevant? Is it because it's elder multicultural population tie strongly roots to their sort of original roots when they grow older, so that's why they don't want to read the Norwegian papers. I've been asking a lot of companies about what do we know about them, and the answer I often get is that we don't know. That way is the place we should start, because we know a lot about our existing customers and we know very little about our potential new customers. This is about the desirability, is that I think when the researchers maybe go to my dad and they would ask him, "Singh, why don't you subscribe to Aftenposten? Is it because it's expensive?" I know he would say, "No, no, not expensive. I have a lot of money." Because an Indian guy would never admit that he doesn't have the money or couldn't afford anything. You need to understand the context and understand the real pain gains and jobs to be done of the people you are actually researching about. An example of that is that we see that this is a huge sort of challenge. 28% of the population in Norway and 32% of the Swedes don't read the news. They are news avoiders. In a collaboration with a Tinius Trust, we've set up IN/LAB, an organization that are actually including, involving, and addressing these news avoiders. This is from Stockholm, where we've gone to one of the groups, young multicultural people, and we've not just gone and asked them questions, we've actually invited them to our offices and trying to understand what kind of news do they actually read, what would they like to read, and understand their real pain gains and jobs to be done. Third example is we love routines. We love to sort of go the same way to work. We love to invite the same people when we have trouble. We like to call the same people when we develop strategies. We probably book the same people in our Outlook calendar week after week. After work, we also hang out with people that are similar. Surprise yourself every day. We have to break that routine if we wanna innovate. We need to first of all, we have to maybe call a new person when we develop a strategy, maybe ask advice from a new person and maybe after work, sort of make your friend circle a non bag of smarties, have different people there so that you get new perspectives and widen the range of perspectives you have access to. An e-example of that is what we've done in the news media section in Norway. We have seen that the multicultural population aren't necessarily reading our newspapers. We know that the multicultural population aren't necessarily going to the journalist schools. They don't necessarily have the editorial background. What we've done with a multicultural training program, we have said that we'll look for talents with a diversity competence or another competence that is valuable for us in Schibsted. They don't necessarily have to be journalists or don't necessarily have editorial background, we will recruit them because we think that we can train them to become good journalists. We've done that. An example of that is Usama Shahin in Bergens Tidende. He came from Syria in end of 2015. He was a dentist. He had his dentist clinic in Syria. He came to Norway, and he was recruited to Bergens Tidende. what we saw is that his access to the resource or sources out there was hugely, it was widely and really valuable for Bergens Tidende. That led him to actually get a permanent position in Bergens Tidende. By the way, on the way from Syria to Norway, he stopped by Russia and learned Russian as well. Pretty valuable in these days. It means that we have to go out of the routine when we recruit people. We have to hack the pipeline rather than pointing that there are enough people in the pipeline. We hack it, we kill that routine, and we take the burden of the pipeline on our shoulders and think in new manners. We don't want to meet or Natalie or Ann or Andrew to spend any energy. We don't want any of them to spend 25% of their energy to hide who they truly are. We want us or you to spend those 25% to make more value for Schibsted and that you can try much, much more. That's why I think that our sort of vision, long-term vision is to make Schibsted a company where everyone, no matter what you have on your head or inside your head, can bring their whole self and be you in Schibsted. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Sumeet. That was very, interesting and inspiring. Are there any question from the audience for Sumeet? Anyone? You can of course also contact him after if you want. I have one, actually. Yeah. Okay. You talk about exclusion and how it can feel very painful. What is one thing that we all can do? Everyone can do something to be more inclusive in their respective workplaces. I think the easiest thing to start with is to be curious, to ask more questions about the people around you, and not necessarily what is visible to eyes, but being curious. A simple example is the article that was written in A-magasinet in Aftenposten about the different names, rather than making that, you know, you meet different names all the time, and you might feel awkward, so you might avoid saying the name or you say it totally wrong. Instead, why don't you just say, "I don't want to misspell your name, so can you just pronounce it correctly to me?" That's just an example of curiosity, and that's the simplest thing to start with. Be curious. Ask more question. When you're in the elevator, ask people about what they do or what they're working on, or the people in the team, be curious about sort of, especially in these difficult times, what do they see? Be truly, curious. Being curious does also mean that you don't have any negativity or preassumption in that curiosity. You can't be negative and curious at the same time. You have to leave your worldview and really adapt, try to adapt the different, worldview. Thank you. Yeah, that's a good advice. Mm-hmm. Let's try to follow that. Okay, we are at the end now. I want to thank you all for coming here today and or joining us online. If you're curious about more events like this, Future Report events, then you should follow us in our digital channels and then you can get information about new events. Don't be afraid to approach one of our speakers today if you have additional questions. Thank you for joining us.