Ferdi Reynolds: 0:03

If your software platform can help deliver 30% energy savings to a factory that is consuming vast and vast, vast amounts of, of, you know, increasingly clean, but still fairly dirty power, that is an enormous and outsized impact for, for software to have. I think everything that we do in the, in the space of industry 4.0, is delivering a very important impact. And quite a lot of that impact is, is, is often related to sustainability

Tom Raftery: 0:32

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on sustainability and supply chains, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone and welcome to episode four of the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and I'm excited to be here with you today, sharing the latest insights and trends in sustainability in supply chain. Before we kick off today's show, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of this show's amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping this podcast going and I'm really grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like minded individuals who are passionate about sustainability and supply chains. Supporting this podcast is easy and affordable, with options starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee, and your support will make a huge difference in keeping this podcast going strong. To become a supporter, you simply click on the support link in the show notes of this or any episode, or go to tinyurl. com slash S S C pod. Now, without further ado, I'd like to introduce my special guest today, Ferdi. Ferdi, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Ferdi Reynolds: 1:55

Thanks very much, Tom. Pleasure to be here. Yes, very happy to. My name's Ferdi Reynolds. I'm a principal at a VC firm in London called, SuperSeed. We're primarily an investor in B2B technologies, always software. And one of our main areas of focus is . Industry 4.0, this broad, slightly nebulous category that we all know and love. And we're gonna, we're gonna talk about some of that today, I hope.

Tom Raftery: 2:18

Okay. And why Industry 4.0

Ferdi Reynolds: 2:24

Why Industry 4.0? It's a great question. For us, it's very obvious that there's an enormous opportunity. Industry is still, perplexingly, pretty, pretty slow to adopt new technologies. I think, you know, there's, there's, there's a fantastic opportunity in front of us as participants in the sort of entrepreneurial ecosystem, to start delivering some very meaningful change to the way that businesses produce stuff and move it around the world. There are these, you know, fairly sexy reports from consultancies like pwc, outlining exactly how big this opportunity is. And PWCs estimate is that there's a sort of 15 trillion, dollar opportunity that's, that's what we could contribute to global GDP by 2030, which is, you know, more than the current output, more than the current output of China and India combined right. And that's, that's assuming that we as entrepreneurs and as investors and indeed as, as businesses adopting the technologies that we, that we create. That's the opportunity that AI can, can really deliver on. And I think we should unpack that a little bit, but I'll, I'll let you steer us in the right direction.

Tom Raftery: 3:29

Thank you. Thank you. And how are you helping people in this space?

Ferdi Reynolds: 3:38

Really good question. We, we, we invest at the very earliest stages of a businesses development. So, pre-seed and, and seed stage businesses, with entrepreneurs trying very, very hard to innovate in and disrupt, a space. Typically, these entrepreneurs, especially those who are focusing on, you know, problems in industry. They come from a fairly techie background, a fairly sciencey background, and as a result, they are missing certain components of, of, of what it takes to be a, a really, really strong and successful entrepreneur. What we try to do, based on our experience of, of having built businesses ourselves. And indeed, you know, investing in a, in a range, in a range of other people's businesses is instill some of those early best practices, particularly with regard to, to the commercial function of the business and try and inject some of that sort of entrepreneurial aggression that seems so present in the States. And as you know, as a result, they have such a booming ecosystem of entrepreneurs and I think that we have you know, every opportunity to, to, to build a, a competing ecosystem here in Europe. So what we really tried to do is work with founders very closely to help 'em understand how to articulate their value proposition to companies, to potential customers in such a way that it's a no brainer for those big old companies to adopt these innovative, disruptive technologies. So it's all about sales really.

Tom Raftery: 5:00

Okay, and this is the Sustainable Supply chain podcast. So what has this got to do with that?

Ferdi Reynolds: 5:08

Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a fair, it's a fair question. I think Industry 4.0 and innovating in this space in general is like intrinsically intertwined with questions about sustainability. I think they are inextricably intertwined. like, when we think about what it means to deliver ROI to a really big business, especially one that is manufacturing things. If your software platform can help deliver 30% energy savings to a factory that is, you know, consuming vast and vast, vast amounts of, of, you know, increasingly clean, but still fairly dirty power, that is an enormous and outsized impact for, for, for software to have. I think everything that we do in the, in the space of industry 4.0, is delivering a very important impact. And quite a lot of that impact is, is, is often related to sustainability. Not, not necessarily just from commercial perspective as in building a sustainable business that will continue to operate and grow, but also making, making manufacturing practices a little bit cleaner and more efficient.

Tom Raftery: 6:12

Yeah, I mean, I, I, I get that personally, my philosophy or my, my thinking on this is by making an organization, by making a factory, for example, more efficient, you're de facto making it more sustainable because the same factory is using less resources for the same output. And so, you know, it's having a lower impact, so...

Ferdi Reynolds: 6:37

Precise precisely that. And we, we think about, we think about that through the lens of resource efficiency, right? Doing more with less. And, we as a fund are about to go through the, the joyous process of of, of opening up a raise again, opening up the raise for our third fund. And in this climate, we have to think very carefully about how we articulate the way that we think about impact, the way that we think about sustainability. And there is a new regulation in the EU called SFDR. The UK will, will, of course, have its own very, very differentiated version of it, which I suspect will in fact be identical. And we, you know, you have to, you have to meet certain criteria in order to be attractive to certain classes of of, of investors. And there is no mention of the word efficiency anywhere, in the entire, in the entire, the entire documentation. And it does, does make you scratch your head a little bit and, and think about whether people drafting these documents really understand where the material issues are. But it doesn't matter 'cause'cause we certainly know

Tom Raftery: 7:40

Okay. And. I mean, I've been doing this podcast, well, not this podcast, I, I, the, the digital supply chain podcast for, you know, 380 episodes or so. And now this one for three or four episodes or so, going back to 2019 and talking about Industry 4.0. And it was, you know, back in 2019, 2020, it was all the new hotness and everyone was doing it and no one seems to be doing it, or are they, you know, what stage are we at? Because there was so much hype about it in, in, you know, 20 2018, 2019, 2020, and you don't hear nearly as much about it now

Ferdi Reynolds: 8:20

There's still, it's great. It's, it's such a, it's such a great space.'cause there's so much, there's so much hype from, from glossy consultancy reports, right?, like, as far as McKinsey knows, the entire world is running on AI . It's just the, the, the tangible reality is a, is a little bit different. And I think You know, we, we spend, we spend our whole time talking to very bright technical minds who have lived inside a problem, inside a big manufacturing business, typically as sort of automotive manufacturer or an OEM of, of something super sexy and complicated. And they are so frustrated that most of those plants are still running on Excel. It's sort of unfathomable how much of the world relies on Excel . And there is, there is as a result, this enormous opportunity to layer in all sorts of, of, of, of really easy, like value additive technologies that have fairly light touch. And that those, those are sort of, you know, now being, now being made much, much more real by, as a result of sort of LLMs and how easy it is to create AI driven technologies. But just think, just thinking about some of the, some of the stuff that we've seen over the last, I don't know, six to 12 months, the innovation is alive and well. Right? Entrepreneurs are still really, really keen to disrupt ridiculously archaic practices inside large businesses. But there does seem to be a bit of a disconnect between what's being , what's being generated by, by, by intrepid entrepreneurs and what's being adopted by, is it fair to call them laggard businesses? It probably is at this point. So yeah, I don't know. We've seen some very cool stuff in particular, you know, there, there are some value propositions in Industry 4.0 that I've been excited about now for for about, you know, a year and a half, two years. There is this slightly nebulous idea, ephemeral, but people are really latching onto it of a fully automated factory, right? And the modern, the modern factory is, is admittedly comprised of, of hundreds of different bits of technology, all of which have, you know, all of which are emitting and ingesting tons and tons of data. And typically there is, you know, there, there are one or two humans in the loop. In fact, in most cases there are very many humans in the loop and there's quite a lot of siloed knowledge inside those people. And as those skilled workers get older and start retiring and leave leaving those positions, it leaves this massive vulnerability inside a factory where there's a huge knowledge gap and kind of hard to fill that gap. So there are some on, there's some really cool entrepreneurs at the moment looking at how do we, how do we connect the dots between all these disparate pieces of technology and actually just have a sort of central nervous system that is using AI to run factories at the most optimal levels of efficiency, and productivity. And that for me is a super exciting value prop. I've seen like five or six companies that have been working away at this for a while now, and, well, it's, it's pretty clear that that's gonna be, make a massive difference.

Tom Raftery: 11:12

So are we talking some kind of Neuralink brain implant that sucks the knowledge outta people's heads or ? How does it work?

Ferdi Reynolds: 11:19

Well, I think that's, that's, maybe, that's maybe one, one step too Sci-Fi. But it, the, but the , the more, the more realistic, I think the more realistic approach is all of these machines are spitting out a load of data and they are telling you what various inputs or what various variables are having on the productivity that the output that that machine is generating. There's a, there's a business, I dunno whether I should use its name, but whatever, it's a free plug for them. It was called Leon X when we reviewed them, which was focusing on this exact value proposition, but very specifically in the space of MDF manufacturing, so chipboard wood manufacturing. And it would look at a series of variables. I think it was over a thousand that it would consider. But some of them would be the temperature of the glue, the viscosity of the glue, the moisture of the chip of the wood that's going into the, that's going into the machine. It would consider all of these various data points. And AI is very good at taking hundreds and hundreds of variables and coming up with a singular output. And so these guys with their sexy piece of software would understand. Okay, given all of this corpus of information, how does this machine need to be performing right now to produce the best quality of MDF that I can, with the lowest energy output or with the lowest energy consumption? That, that, to me is just, that is so much cooler than a Neuralink brain implant because , it's just really, really cool tech.

Tom Raftery: 12:40

Nice. Nice. And I mean, you, you referenced the EU versus the US in terms of entrepreneurism. How do we stack up in terms of industry 4.0? Because it's not really a term that's used outside the EU. It's, it's, I, I, I've heard a couple of people in Australia refer to it, a couple of people in Asia, not so many in the US they tend to call it in the US they tend to call it industrial iot rather than industry 4.0.

Ferdi Reynolds: 13:10

Yeah, I mean, I think Industry 4.0 is probably a, is probably a broader category than, than anything necessarily pertaining to IOTs. I think there is a lot, you know, industry 4.0 relies very heavily on something that bridges the gap between the physical world and the, the digital world, right? So physical versus versus data and IOTs are a very good bridge for that. So I suspect that's, that's where some of that comes from. How do we perform versus the states? Honestly, I I, I don't have a, I don't have a great sense for that. I think, you know, c clearly my Eurocentric view is very biased and, I am very aware that we have not just a higher degree, but a higher number of technical, of technical researchers and, and, and talent in the EU. There are more software developers. There are more researchers. We have some of the best technical schools in the world, in Europe. And so there is, you know, there is a large body of would be entrepreneurs, potential entrepreneurs who have just been sitting in industry, observing systems that are broken and, and have a huge appetite to change them. The, the disquieting thing for me, Tom, is that people are already starting to use the term industry 5.0 . As far as far as I'm aware, we haven't quite, we haven't quite sold 4.0. It's like when somebody talks about World War Four, it's like, well, , hang on. There's a step in between. But yeah, I think the opportunity in Europe is, is, is big enough that you can build billion, $10 billion businesses shouldn't really use the word dollar, I guess if I'm talking about Euro 10 billion Euro businesses, just by, just by capturing some of the value that exists in Europe alone. So, you know, I'm, I'm sure that, I'm sure there is a focus on, on innovating in industry outside but clearly the opportunity here is still massive.

Tom Raftery: 14:48

And, there should also be more opportunity here because there's more manufacturing here. I mean, manufacturing in the US kind of left in the eighties and nineties and went to Asia, whereas we kept quite a bit of our manufacturing here in Europe, so

Ferdi Reynolds: 15:07

Yeah, no, there's, I mean, Katie, the manufacturing in Europe is, is is still very, it's still a, a huge, a hugely affluent and hugely, you know, important, industry, like, hugely important part of the way that Europe makes its money, right? And we have a particularly advanced manufacturing, you know, ecosystem, right? We're making very, very clever stuff. And you look at, you look at Siemens and, and, and Bosch as wonderful examples of, of businesses that are making clever tech and exporting that globally. And of course they, and they themselves represent a huge opportunity and, and, you know. Some of , some of the entrepreneurs who've been selling into Siemens and Bosch will tell you, tell you horror stories about exactly how sophisticated some of their manufac manufacturing practices are at the moment. But, certainly not, certainly not in my interest to slander those guys. They're, you know, they're, they're, they're real pioneers, clearly.

Tom Raftery: 15:54

And what are some of the big opportunities in Industry 4.0 that, you know, some of your, clients, do you call'em clients, your client companies, uh,

Ferdi Reynolds: 16:05

Yeah, we'd call them portfolio companies, our darling portfolio.

Tom Raftery: 16:08

makes more sense. So what are some of the big opportunities that your portfolio companies are seeing or tackling?

Ferdi Reynolds: 16:15

So, yeah, I, really good question. And there's, there's a bit of a range. So we, we invest broadly in sort of three, three spaces. We like to think of it as make, move and, and then sort of manage. It's not a perfect moniker because, because there's a lot of overlap between those, between those three areas. But make and move I think is sort of very obvious industry 4.0, sort of categories. And if you think about converting raw material, feeding it up through a value chain until it looks a bit more like a product and then putting it on something that takes it somewhere else and eventually somebody buys that thing. At every step of that process, there are enormous, enormous inefficiencies. So whether it's, you know, whether it's looking at that raw material and how it's converted into something that is more producty. We have a business in our portfolio called AI Build, which is, which is, a sort of toolpath automation software for large scale additive manufacturing. So rather than just sort of 3D printing a key ring and giving it to mum for Christmas, you can print the part that goes onto a new Boeing plane, using a 3D printer because the toolpath has been, has been defined by very clever tech that incorporates the, the sort of fragility of the material.

Tom Raftery: 17:23

Boeing might not be the best example to use

Ferdi Reynolds: 17:26

Not today. Not today, but I may, maybe we'll say Airbus, although I do know that Boeing, Boeing and AI build have a particularly happy relationship. So I won't, I won't, yeah, I, I think I have to have to mention them. And then we have other businesses that are a little further along the value chain. I mean, look at, a business in our portfolio called Thing Tracks, which it, it does exactly as I was describing earlier, sort of leverages IOTs and other devices and other data outputs from inside a factory. Crunches all of that using very complicated machine learning algorithms that I couldn't begin to explain and then provides a sort of holistic management level dashboard view so that people operating 30 factory sites can immediately understand. Okay, there are the inefficiencies in my organization. This is exactly what I need to do to, to address them. And I think, Thing Tracks might be, might be a, might be a good bet for one of those businesses delivering on the vision of, a fully autonomous factory. And then there's all the movement piece, right? Once you've got the product made, there's, there's this, there's this question about how you move it around the world and, and, you know, we've we've had a couple of investments, in fact, in the sort of supply chain space. One of which is focused very, you know, very particularly on freight and how to optimize the movement of a, a 20 foot container, a 40 foot container around the world. And we have business and we, we had a, we had an investment in a supply chain business called Galvis, which we actually exited last year, which was sort of using, demand forecasting platform. So understanding demand from, from a sort of end customer's perspective and feeding that back through the supply chain to make more informed manufacturing decisions. And then there's, you know, I mean, I feel slightly disloyal, not mentioning, not mentioning the, the plethora of other companies that are in our portfolio that are relevant to this space, but the TLDR Tom is, there's a lot of innovation and we've invested in a lot of it

Tom Raftery: 19:12

Okay. Okay, and what's your what's your kind of criteria for selecting companies to invest in?

Ferdi Reynolds: 19:23

So, so the broad criteria are like, unruly levels of ambition within the founders , a global opportunity, a technologically viable product and typically when we invest, that product is already built or a version of it is already built. But honestly the most important thing is for us is, is always the perception of value within the customers that they're trying to reach. And a lot of firms in our space, a lot of venture capital firms go through long and, and deep technical due diligences to, to understand the viability of a product from, from a tech perspective. And that is super important. And we, we, of course, have to have a, a, a really good sense for that. But actually for us, the diligence that we lean on much more, much more heavily is com we call it commercial due diligence. And the way that we test that is by acting as the sort of business development function for a, for a business for a week or two weeks before we've invested and we test the appetite, the pull from the market. So much of startup is about like push, right? Founders pushing their vision onto other people, onto investors, onto new employees, onto customers, and that's great, but that push is only really useful if there's a really strong pull from the other side. And so we test a lot with, with firms, like some of the ones that I've mentioned with Bosch and Siemens, but also with automotive manufacturers, with, with any sort of customer cohort that we can, we try to analyze before we invest. Whether there is a, a significant opportunity and whether, whether customers really care about the innovation that entrepreneurs are, are delivering. It's almost always the case that they do, which is good.

Tom Raftery: 21:33

Okay, cool. Nice. And what about some technologies? Are there any interesting technologies that you've come across? I know 2023 was the, the big year, the big breakout year for AI, particularly large language models. Blockchain was a big one a few years ago. You hear very little about it now, you know, is, is that, you know, dead is, or is that just chugging away in the background doing, doing its thing? Are there any other technologies that you've seen that you know, are really interesting and can make a big impact?

Ferdi Reynolds: 22:03

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't wanna sound too much like a, too much like a hipster, but I think we were investing in AI before it was cool. So we've been, you know, we've been, we've been at this for quite a long time and, and, and, and welcome to the party everyone. But, no, I mean, yes. So I think last year for me, we, we made an investment in a technology that I think is, is truly disruptive. And I think people who are exposed to the investment ecosystem, especially at the seed stage, will probably know of this. It's called federated learning. And we made an investment into a business after about a year and a half's research into the space. We, we picked our, we picked our winner. It's a business called Octa Pipe. And, or Octa Pipe is, is how the founder would like me to say it, but there is AI in the middle, crucially. And what it basically does is, is rather than, rather than taking a load of data from the edge, into a centralized compute environment, so into the cloud, and then computing there, and then sending new models to devices. Or sending new, new learnings to devices. It essentially is able to distribute model parameters to the edge. So to devices that are functioning at the edge. Which means that you'll have an enormous saving of data transmission if you, you know, if you are, if you're operating a sort of population of 30,000 devices at the edge, collecting data from all of them, bringing that to the cloud, processing it, and then playing around with that data. Sending it back to the edge. That is an enormous compute cost. And there's also an enormous data, data transmission cost. With federated learning, both of those costs are sort of reduced by a hundred to a thousand times in some cases. So enormously impactful, ROI for for people operating large populations of devices. And as we start to think about, you know, what does it mean to operate large populations of devices? It's no long IOTs are no longer just, you know, kind of little key rings and low leverage tools that are used by consumers. Like Tesla is, is operating fleets of almost fully autonomous vehicles. And those vehicles are collecting thousands and thousands and thousands of data points that, you know, sort of every millisecond. It's actually quite a bad example 'cause quite a lot of Tesla's compute happens on, on, on board, but there are, there are lots of examples of large fleets of, of devices, of pieces of tech where there's a load of data being ingested and it just doesn't make commercial sense for that to be shipped back to the cloud. So, that's one technology. We did, we did make, we have an investment in a blockchain business, which is a sort of, I mean the blockchain, the blockchain element is . is is almost incidental. It's not really anything to do with value proposition, but it helps deliver the value proposition more efficiently. It's a, it's a, an infrastructural FinTech. So probably not hugely relevant for conversation on this podcast. But I think one of the things I've observed in my time in, in my time in the space is that, you know, there's, there's always, there's always a trend. There's always a zeitgeist. People are always excited about, about the next, ostensibly, the next coolest thing, I think what it's very easy to do in, in our world is lose sight of what really matters, which is focusing on value. Focus on outcome. Focus on output. Who's gonna buy this thing and why are they're gonna buy it? And if there's no very clear ROI for for a technology, then it won't be adopted. And, and, and that's the lens that we view everything through. We don't really care about the means, right? We just care about the end. Don't care how you get there, just deliver that benefit.

Tom Raftery: 25:18

Okay. And is the benefit a cash benefit, or is it an impact benefit or is it a mix or what, what, what's your criteria there for determining success?

Ferdi Reynolds: 25:27

So I think, you know, we, we can be super explicit about this. It is always better if it is cash plus, right? It's always better if the, if the benefit is cash plus impact. In almost all cases there will be a direct impact as a result of a cash saving. So, you know, cash kind of is impact. Of course like through, through our lens. And, and it is of course our primary responsibility, you know, our, our investors would be happy to hear me say like, we, we have to care about, about, businesses that are, lucrative and, and deliver returns to us. so of course we have a slightly cynical cash cash lens. But it is important to note that cash almost always translates to impact of some version and, and think tracks the business I mentioned earlier. Sure. It's, it's. it's an incredibly efficient business in the sense that its margins are pretty healthy, but it does also deliver, you know, in some cases 30 upwards of 30% energy savings to the plants where it's operating. And that is, that is truly, truly astounding for, for factories that are sort of, of mul, multi-site factory, factory based businesses. So yeah, I think cash kind of equals impacts and, and, you know, if, if you unlock one, you typically tend to unlock another.

Tom Raftery: 26:39

Okay. How do you work with founders? I mean, you, you mentioned they're very often very techy, very bright, very kind of sciencey or engineery. Not necessarily very businessy. So talk to me a little bit about how that works.

Ferdi Reynolds: 26:57

Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. It's a really interesting dynamic. It is, it is one of my, you know, enormous privileges in life to spend the majority of my time exposed to the brightest minds in Europe, like . It is just so, so wonderful to sort of work out new problems through the lens of incredibly intelligent people's eyes. How do we work with these people? The interesting phenomenon is that they're almost always incredibly good at pitching. So when they talk to us about a problem and their proposed solution to that problem, they articulate both of those visions, both of those ideas incredibly clearly because they understand them both. You know, to, to a sort of slightly unfathomable depth. And it means that they're really, really good at selling too. When they get in front of the right person, they can articulate exactly why it matters that that person should adopt their technology very, very clearly. What they're typically not great at, or could use some help at is reaching the right people. Identifying the right people in fact is, is a is a step before which, which is actually fairly, fairly difficult to do if you don't have any experience with it. And then reaching them. And that really is the sort of. And that's the mechanical piece of sales, right? That is the, that is the processy part of sales that a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs just don't have any exposure to, in particular technical, technical entrepreneurs. So, so we work very closely with them to try and build from the very earliest stages, best practices inside their business around what it means to ha what it means to reach the right customer. And, you know, I think in almost all you know, sort of venture capital firms, there'll be this slightly singular, one track minded focus on ICP ideal customer profile. And it's in incredibly important to be assiduous about defining that ideal customer profile early and then focusing on it ruthlessly. Not deviating from that, from that customer profile at all. Because that's how you build these businesses that, you know, grow very steadily, very reliably. The revenue starts to compound. It becomes very exciting if you're an investor in one of those businesses when things start taking off. But it really does require a lot of focus. So we work very closely with them on, on that piece. But actually, you know, all founders, even the very best founders, accelerate faster with the right support. And we try very carefully to layer on case by case, you know, examples of the right support at the right time. We do a lot of work, uh, you know, in our capacity as, as board directors and, and, and try, try and help through the sort of, the governance lens. It's, it's super important that we can have an impact in that way. We make constant introductions to our network of, of wouldbe customers. We try and bring in the right personnel at the right time to really accelerate sales. We have a sort of helicopter finance function, which just, it just removes all of these sort of operational stresses from, from the founder's desk so that they can focus on the thing that they are disproportionately good at, which is, you know, disrupting a space that they know a lot about. And, and sort of leave the rest up to us

Tom Raftery: 29:54

And if I am, let's say, an engineer working in a factory somewhere, and I've got this great idea for saving my organization ton of money, ton of energy, whatever it is, reducing their emissions. And I think it's something that would scale out beyond the factory that I'm working in, into other industries or into similar industries, what's the next steps to making that into something that you would be interested in investing in?

Ferdi Reynolds: 30:28

Yeah, it's a really good question. You sound like a very, very attractive and compelling entrepreneur at that point. That sounds, that sounds like you've done, you've done most of the legwork. No, it's, it's, look, I mean, we have, we invest in pre-revenue businesses, right? So, so, you know, even, even at the stage where you've got, it's probably one step further on than an idea on a napkin. If the idea on a, if the idea's on a deck, then we probably would, we probably would consider investing. No, I think, look, the, the, the difficult thing with innovation in this space is that it's, it's fairly difficult to leave, to leave a job. And have sort of zero funding for your business, and then build an early version of a technology that's gonna disrupt something as, you know, something really meaningful in this, in this space, in, in, in industry. It takes generally quite a lot of R&D and quite a lot of capital to get to a technology that is, that is sort of ROI generative, or in some way, in some way useful. But I think what is super important is thinking very carefully about the constituent parts of an investible business, there probably should be a version of a product, an MVP minimum, mini minimum viable product. There should be a you know, a co-founder. It's almost always the case that co you know, sort of multiple founders, usually two, are more investible than than individuals on their own. And, you know, you, you articulated it pretty clearly then you being really, really specific about the problem that you've been living inside, that you've experienced, that, you know, intimately and having a hunch that this problem exists elsewhere. And probably trying to bottom out exactly how, painfully other other businesses are experiencing that problem. Always focus on the size of the opportunity. Make sure that that's super, super clear in the deck. And then once you've done that, you, you, you just find me on LinkedIn and, ping me a message and we'll talk. But yeah, I think it's, it, it's a, it's a super exciting time to be, to be in Europe, to be looking at, you know, the opportunities in, in front of technical entrepreneurs. And it's also super interesting time for us to be investing in those entrepreneurs.

Tom Raftery: 32:24

Nice. Nice. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Ferdi. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Ferdi Reynolds: 32:38

No, I think, I think we, I think we covered, covered most of the points that I was keen to discuss. I think just to, just to really spell out, you know, sort of in conclusion what, what we're hoping to achieve, the, the opportunity in front of entrepreneurs in front of, you know, and entrepreneurs in Europe at the moment is, is is enormous, not just in industry 4.0, but actually sort of more, more broadly. And the technical talent that we have in Europe is in like, enormous and, and incredibly impressive. And it is you know, it is, it is an opportunity that we are focusing on to try and bring some of the entrepreneurial spirit and, and salesy focus that our cousins across the pond exhibit, you know, to an almost ugly extent, so that we can start delivering on, on the promise of our, of our technical schools and our, and our, you know, highly sophisticated manufacturing environments. So I guess, you know, TLDR. Technical entrepreneurs, the opportunity is yours. You know, there is everything to play for and we would very much like to help you capture it. So yeah, I think it's, it's a really exciting time to be European.

Tom Raftery: 33:45

Nice. Nice. Great. Ferdi. That's been really interesting. If people would like to know more about your self or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today? Where would you have me direct them?

Ferdi Reynolds: 33:56

Sure, our, our website is probably a really good starting point for anyone keen to learn more about the firm, and that's www. God, I can't believe we still have to say that. superseed.com. superseed, all spelled pretty regularly. If people want to get in touch with me, I'm on LinkedIn as Ferdinand Reynolds but you can also reach me on my email address, which is ferdi, F E R D I, at superseed.com.

Tom Raftery: 34:20

Great Ferdi. That's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Ferdi Reynolds: 34:25

Thanks so much for your time, Tom. Great to chat.

Tom Raftery: 34:28

Okay, thank you all for tuning in to this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.