The following interview is a conversation we had with Edouard Gouin, Co-Founder & CEO at Convelio, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $44 Million Raised to Power the Future of Art Logistics
Edouard Gouin
Pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Brett
To kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and maybe a bit more about your background?
Edouard Gouin
First of all, as you mentioned, I’m Edward, half French, half Swiss. I grew up in Switzerland. I essentially studied economics before working for company called Rocket Internet, which is infamously known in the US for copycating quite a lot of business models and bringing them near the nearport in South Asia, which is why I spent quite some time, why I met my Co-Founder, Climax, with whom I started another business before Convelio. And then we stumbled upon the problem of final shipping, which we’re still in today.
Brett
Mentioning Rocket Internet here on a podcast that’s based in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley, that’s a bold move. I feel like it’s a very hated company. I don’t think as much, but I feel like ten years ago, that was like the rival or the enemy of Silicon Valley, which I can understand.
Edouard Gouin
So it was a good training, execution wise, it was a very good training. But, yeah, I mean, obviously, quite a lot of controversies around rocket.
Brett
Yeah, I have a bunch of friends who work there, and they went on to build companies, and they’ve been very successful. They all talk about. It was a crazy learning experience, I think, is how they describe it. So for you, what was that like? Is there like a key takeaway or anything that you really learned from that experience?
Edouard Gouin
Well, there are many, but question if I summarize that in a couple of mean, I think there is the classic execution, eat, strategy for breakfast kind of thing, because obviously rocket was not inventing new business models. So they were taking new business models, bringing them in other geographies. And the only thing they were kind of really focused on was execution. And that’s when you realize how important that is, right? You can have the best idea, whatever. But if you’re not able to execute it properly, then it’s never going to fly. The other thing I also learned, though, is that sometimes if you get people that are only driven by just building their own thing and not really driven by actually what they’re launching, that may also be kind of counterproductive. Right.
Edouard Gouin
So you need to make sure that whatever you build is not only kind of for the money, you need to really believe in what you’re doing. You need to have very strong purpose. And so I think kind of one good learning is execution. The other good learning as well. Let’s say maybe a business positive is you also need to make sure whatever you get something, that there is strong purpose in it. Yeah.
Brett
If I had to summarize my friends who work there, I would describe them, or a lot of them, as mercenary entrepreneurs. They’re not very mission driven. They’re not obsessed with the problem. They kind of looked at business opportunities in a spreadsheet and said, yes, this is a problem that we can solve. We can get rich, we can build a big company. That seems to be like the typical profile, but that could just be a stereotype as well.
Edouard Gouin
I think it’s, to a certain extent, it is quite accurate. Then you have still some exceptions. Right? Like, if you look at the guys of Hellofresh of Zalando, I think they went much beyond just execution and being mercenaries, they really managed to create purpose driven companies. So I think for some of the companies, that’s definitely true. I think for some others, they still managed to kind of really adapt some american business models to the local markets and really manage to also, let’s say, assemble a team behind them. Yeah, I think you have a bit of everything. I still believe, though, they perform exceptionally, that really also made rocket quite a success back in the day.
Brett
Now, a few other questions we’d like to ask, and the goal here is really to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one, what Founder do you admire the most, and what do you admire about them?
Edouard Gouin
It’s a good question. When you sent me that PowerPoint, I was like, okay, let’s try to think about a Founder I really admire. I think the first answer was like, my mom, which is a bit weird as answer. I mean, I lost my brother 14 years ago, and after his death, she created a foundation raising friends for child cancer. And kind of turning grief into something very positive was, I think, I mean, it’s still something I quite admire. But I think beyond that, if I look at really kind of more of a startup Founder. There is a guy in France with the Founder of a company called Alan, which is health insurance company in France.
Edouard Gouin
It’s not only very difficult to get into Tabala to create essentially the first licensed health insurer in France since the past six years, and creating a culture of super high empowerment with very focused teams and so on. And the more we go into our own entrepreneurial journey with Clemont, the more I believe projects can be very powerful and we can talk about that later and the role of empowerment and how that becomes increasingly important as the team gets bigger. But yeah, I think I would probably say that it’s that guy.
Brett
I lost my brother four years ago, sounds like I went through something maybe similar to what you’ve gone through. How do you deal with grief like that? And how did something like that change you as a person? Because I know for me, it completely changed me and I’m a totally different person today than I was four years ago. So how did that change you?
Edouard Gouin
Well, I think it changes your whole being. Essentially, my brother was sick for a couple of years. Right. So you essentially, as a teenager, you kind of jump a couple of years, become an adult much quicker. That was, let’s say, pretty performance. I think what it really created, ultimately is learning what to value and family is everything, close friends are everything, your kids are everything, and kind of really deciding what you want to spend your time on. And that includes your work life. Do you want to spend your life working at a corporate or do you want to build your own thing and really trying to drive an impact? I think these are some of the key things I learned. I think another thing over the years is also kind of your resistance to facing difficult situation.
Edouard Gouin
I don’t know if you face something similar, but when you’ve been through something very difficult in your life, you can be losing a close one. It can be anything, can be sickness, it can be whatever. But I think your tolerance for pain is a lot higher, which as an entrepreneur is actually pretty useful. Like, if you have to take tough decision, kind of going beyond the initial emotional stress of having to take a tough decision, becoming much easier because your benchmark has changed. Right? Like you’ve been through quite a lot of suffering previously in your life. And I think that really impacts that benchmark, allows you to take maybe, let’s say, more difficult decision. That’s what I would say. I don’t know what you think.
Brett
Yeah, that’s exactly how I’ve described it to people. It’s not necessarily a good thing. But it’s like my pain threshold is so high now that when it comes to the normal day to day pain that exists for running a startup or trying to grow a business, to me, some of that stuff just seems like a joke. Now, where I face these problems, especially shortly after his death, I would face these problems with the business and be like, what are we all wasting our time for? None of this shit matters at the end of the day. So it gave me a very unique perspective. And I think overall, it’s hard to say there’s positives, but that was one of those positives. It’s like you don’t take things as seriously, or at least I don’t take things as seriously as I used to.
Edouard Gouin
Couldn’t agree more.
Brett
Let’s switch gears now and let’s talk about books. So there’s an author here in the US called Ryan Holiday, or named Ryan Holiday, and he calls him quake books. So for him, a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core. It really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind for you?
Edouard Gouin
It’s a good question. I mean, I’m an avid reader, but I read quite a lot of business books and so on, but I read more for my own pleasure. So I would say one that has really changed me as a person. I wouldn’t say that. I think there is one recently that I’m reading which I thought was super good, which is called empowered by Marty Kagen. So about empowerment in product tech teams and so on. I think it’s a really interesting approach, especially coming from. I mean, I used to work in consultancy in the past, and with kind of a very much v cycle approach to product and tech, which honestly, initially we kind of had. And so we’re moving towards more kind of agile approach, more empowered.
Edouard Gouin
And I think there is a lot of things to be learned for nontechnical founders in reading that book. And I would say that recently is probably the one that has influenced me the most.
Brett
If you’re looking for pleasure from a book, what would be like a go to book or what’s an example of a book that you read, let’s say, on a recent vacation?
Edouard Gouin
I love historical, know I quite like Ken Follett, which I mean pretty standard, very known kind of author, but I love the historical part of it. Another one which is quite good is Brendan Sanderson more kind of Sci-Fi weirdly, somehow historical, which are quite nice and I would say this would be my kind of like two books that I would bring to my hard list.
Brett
Nice. Let’s switch gears here and let’s dive deeper into the company. So how we like to begin this part of the interview is, let’s talk about the problem. So what problem do you solve?
Edouard Gouin
I mean, let me take that in a slightly differently. Right. We solve a frustration. I think that’s the way I would explain it. Right. We are in a market which is just starting its digitization. So the art market as a whole has been fairly traditional. I mean, East Europe is traditional, as a matter of fact. And as demographics are changing, there is kind of more e commerce being brought into that market and so on. That’s kind of one part of the equation. And within that change come also different expectations from buyers. And so people expect to be able to buy online, to have kind of online shipping and kind of things. Right. And when we arrived that market with Clemont, my Co-Founder, what we realized was that, well, it’s impossible to display an API, like a shipping API on an art ecommerce platform.
Edouard Gouin
And the reason for it is, was that it was impossible to get instant shipping rates. Everything was very manual. Getting answer to get a shipping rate was like 48 hours most of the time was super expensive because that’s a market which is fairly, I mean, which is not super competitive. Right. So they were not really forced into kind of competing on price, and were fairly limited to geographical reach. Right. So we kind of identified problems and we’re like, wow, it’s pretty weird that no one ever built some kind of a FedEx for the art market. Like a one stop shop where you can get instant shipping rates, like competitive with false Copenhagen. Yeah, that’s how we got into it.
Brett
And I see you started the company in 2017. How did you uncover this problem? Did you just have a bunch of Picassos and you were struggling to figure out how to ship them to your home? Or where was it?
Edouard Gouin
I wish I did. No, I mean, it’s quite a picture story. So when we left Rocket Internet, we started to build a first business together, which we crashed. And after that, I started to build a marketplace that was selling design item. And while I was kind of creating that platform, the deal with Clemont was like, well, I start to build that stuff up. If that works, maybe he joins me in a year. And in the meantime, he went to work for a marketplace selling antiques. And so he had a lot of problems shipping antiques across the world. And a lot of problems shipping design attempts across the world simply because they like bulky, fragile, invaluable. And that means you need to find someone to pick it up, you need someone to pack it, they need someone to ship it. And if you.
Edouard Gouin
The only kind of go to guys that could help us were find out shipping companies that were super expensive. And so the more we kind of had to deal with this issue repeatedly. I mean, I remember talking about it every morning at f 3D in the morning be like, wow, this is a nightmare, 3d. No one ever thought about this. And after a while the situation was so strong. We’re like, maybe we should just call up a couple of people and understand if that’s really an issue for other people. And so we called quite a lot of antique dealers, fine art galleries, furniture manufacturers, and trying to really kind of frame is there some kind of opportunity there? And everybody essentially told us, yeah, it’s crazy expensive, it’s eating up a margins, no one’s doing anything about this, and so on.
Edouard Gouin
So that’s how we got into it.
Brett
And is it entirely b to b or is there a b to c angle here as well, or approach here as well?
Edouard Gouin
There is a little bit of a b, two c approach, but it’s farming B2B. I mean, the thing is, we sell our services to galleries, which then offer that service to collectors. Sometimes we have collectors coming in direct. So they used to work with us, they know us, they like us, and then they go through us, even if they buy at a gallery we don’t work with. So that happens. But I would say it’s probably like less than 5%. I would say 95% are either galleries, auction houses, museums, art organizations, art advisory firms, inter designers, I mean, you name it, kind of like the whole scope of the commercial side of the arts and design market.
Brett
You’re talking here about physical art, but isn’t physical art dead? I thought NFT has replaced everything.
Edouard Gouin
That’s a good one. I mean, that’s one perspective that we can take. Thinking, well, NFT is going to replace arts. I actually believe that it’s making the size of the art market significantly bigger. The way you consume NFTs or digital art is quite different from the way you enjoy kind of physical art. And I think there is quite a lot of beauty in having a nice painting on the wall or a very nice culture. And kind of the emotion makes you feel also if you look at historical pieces of art standing in front of, I don’t know, whatever, but chili or whatever, painting will make you feel something because it’s been created like 200 years ago. And I think this kind of feeling will never really disappear.
Edouard Gouin
So I think, as a matter of fact, it’s just making nfts are making the whole market, art market significantly more visible. And that kind of also what happened, like what we saw during COVID which was super interesting, a lot of people that bought nfts then were brought into some platforms that were selling only nfts but also art. And that brought a lot of new buyers into the art market. So I think through Covid, partly through nfts, but primarily through Covid, people were actually kind of browsing online and started to buy online. And so we had a lot of new buyers coming into the market.
Edouard Gouin
I remember one data was pretty interesting from one of our client that was like, well, as a matter of fact, whenever we opened an online auction, 40% of the buyers are new buyers because they had just no idea we even existed. Or it was so simple to actually bid online and so on. That’s what, long story short, I think both kind of the NFT trend and what happened during COVID has actually driven quite a lot of new people to the market. So I think it’s still quite a laven kicking.
Brett
Yeah, I feel bad for some of those people who bought into those know, I asked that question jokingly because I think what was that like two years ago? That was all over the media. That’s all everyone talking about, right? It was like the jpegs are here, nfts are here, physical arts dead. But I think if you look at the numbers, that doesn’t look too good for a lot of people who bought into that dream, at least right now.
Edouard Gouin
Yeah, maybe not right now. I mean, I certainly think it’s a trend that’s meant to stay and stick around and so on. I think the digital profile we all have now is made for nfts, and I think there will always be a market for it and I think it’s going to continue to grow. I just think that the physical art market is still really strong. And the way it appeals to people and the way you feel when you’re looking at a painting or a sculpture and so on will never be exactly the same as for an NFT. But that’s my personal opinion. But future will tell.
Brett
Now, let’s imagine ten years in the future. The company ipos, you’re worth billions of dollars. You can buy any art you want in the world. What would be like the number one piece of art that you’d want to buy from, or maybe like the number one artist that you would hope to buy art from someday. Wow.
Edouard Gouin
There are a lot of them. Let me think about it. Well, recently, an artist I saw I really like was what show Shibuya is doing. They just had an exhibition at Uni London. Like really interesting, kind of like taking the front page of the New York Times and kind of painting on top of it, using kind of colors about recent events. So it was that cover of the New York Times kind of painting in kind of shades of orange that was echoing to all the fires that happened in Hawaii and Greece and so on, which I thought was really powerful. So I would tend to say that this is one that I really like. There is another gallery in Paris which is really cool called Gallery Bayar, and they have a couple of really nice artists which are more, let’s say, figurative.
Edouard Gouin
And so they’ve done thing with a guy called Thierry Carre with really cool paintings. They’ve done things like they did thing with another artist called Joanne Marianne, who’s also really cool. What else can I tell you? Well, I think these are kind of like the thing that come into my mind. I mean, but there are many, I kind of track every day, so it’s a bit hard just to pinpoint a show. If I had billions, I would just build an entire collection of a lot of people that actually admire me.
Brett
All right, I’m going to check back in ten years and come swing by Geneva and I hope to see a big palace full of all the art you’ve acquired.
Edouard Gouin
Actually, for an american one, Kehinde Wiley is really cool. Kehinde Wiley is the artist that did the portray of, like, I think it’s green with some leafs in the back.
Brett
Yep, I know what you’re talking.
Edouard Gouin
Really, really cool artist.
Brett
Nice. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Who stands to be disrupted yet based on your success and as you guys go into the market, what’s that status quo and who is being disrupted?
Edouard Gouin
Well, increments are being disrupted. Right? Final shipping has been around forever. And I guess one of our oldest competitors was moving the artworks of Mario Antoinette like the wife of Louis XVI. And so they’ve been around for a really long time. They’ve been doing the same thing the same way for a really long time. And I think what we coming and changing is the way essentially they operate. Right? So we bringing technology into a market that didn’t really have any. And whether it’s generating quotes really quickly through algorithms, whether it’s reducing human error through a lot of automation, whether it’s even just bringing things as basic as end to end tracking, which didn’t exist before we arrived on the market. These are all things that I always say kind of elevating the final shipping market as a whole.
Edouard Gouin
And so the idea for us in some way kind of create the blueprint of the modern final shipper, right? So we are bringing the level of the final shipping industry up today’s demand, right? But also the idea is for us to anticipate those of tomorrow. And what that means is right now the market is going through digital transformation. What are kind of some of the easy tools that an auction house or gallery can use to generate shipping prices in the future? Will this product be exactly the same? Likely not. I think the market is moving towards what I call more an apisation of the market. Right. So there will be significantly more ecommerce in the future, or at least kind of the kind of fulfillment process after you buy an artwork will be significantly more digitized.
Edouard Gouin
And so that’s kind of what we changing significantly. And the incubants, I mean, we are challenging the incubants from that perspective in the sense that if you want to be able to still be able to operate tomorrow, you need to make sure that you adapt to the collector’s expectation of today and of tomorrow. And I think that’s why it’s super interesting, again, that demographic shift which is happening between kind of like the older generation exiting the market and kind of the new one coming in that grew up in the knifehold, in the hands, like ordering stuff on Amazon and so on. And so their expectation will be significantly different. And there is definitive shift that needs to be made, which hopefully we are, let’s say, creating. Right?
Brett
And I could be wrong here. This is my outsider view. I don’t know too much about the space. But when I think about the world of fine art, I imagine a very close knit community or group that’s resistant to change and probably not open to outsiders coming in to try to change and disrupt things. Is that an accurate view of the space? And if that’s accurate, what did you do to break into that market and capture the attention of that market and get people to be open to trying a different solution?
Edouard Gouin
Interesting, as in any market, you have some people that are resisting change. I think more so in the art market, which tends to be more conservative, primarily because buyers tend to be like from, let’s say older generations and so on. But in general, at least since COVID we really sing a shift. People want to change, people want to go more digital. Every large art organization we talk to, we’re thinking about how to offer a better experience to their clients and so on. Right. So I think from that perspective, we really see that people want to change. And I think kind of like the, let’s say, conservatism that you used to see in the market is actually kind of exiting to a certain set. It’s difficult. And we actually did that progressively. We did not go straight to the art market.
Edouard Gouin
I think it would have been, honestly, it would have been impossible for us to work with some of the names, which are essentially household names we work with today. And the only way for us to be able to do that is kind of do that progressively. Right. So when we started, we primarily targeted antique dealers in London, in the flea markets, in Paris, in Parma, in Italy, where you have these very large kind of antique shows. And then we saw these guys kind of started ordering with us. At some point we got contacted by first dibs in the US. Guys would be great if we could work together. So we started to work with them. And actually some collectors we’re working for recommended us to a couple of really large auction houses. They cannot name, but they are not so many.
Edouard Gouin
And so at some point twelve, these auction houses started to reach out to us and be like, well, we’ve heard you’re doing great work for antique things. We have also, I mean, we sell, actually, the vast majority of what we sell is below, let’s say, $100,000. It’s something, it looks like it would manage. How about we do a couple of trials? And so we planning to work a bit with these auction houses. And as we got, let’s say, accustomed to their expectations, we also started to adapt our services, which is primarily something we’ve been doing for the past two and three years, like kind of splitting the offering, having one which is a historical one, targeting, let’s say, artworks, anti guidance design, furniture below one hundred k and kind of going in the expectation above that threshold.
Edouard Gouin
And so we’ve really done that kind of progressively talking to our clients, understanding what were the expectations, modifying our processes, modifying the suppliers we work with, making sure that we cater exactly to what they were expecting of us. And so right now, we get to a level where we can essentially transport any kind of artwork. But we really did that progressively. I mean, if I’m being honest, in the first six months of the life of the company, if an item was more than 20,000, we would really think twice before shipping it. We’re like, wow, that’s actually pretty fragile. If we do that, the company is going to die. And we had no funding in the beginning, so we’re like, okay, well, do we take the risk? We not take the risk. And then nothing.
Edouard Gouin
Kind of progressively, we got a lot more confident, we got the confidence from our clients. So, yeah, very progressive, step by step, client focused approach over the past six years brought us where we are.
Brett
What’s the most expensive piece that you’ve shipped so far?
Edouard Gouin
I mean, we acquired a company that ships some really expensive stuff, so I’m not going to count them in, but they’ve done, like, crazy hundreds of millions kind of paintings. So that’s kind of that level. I think with Convelio as an entity, the one I’m thinking of, which is probably the most expensive one, is $30 million. So as an entity for Convoy, is this one for the company we acquired in London? It’s insane in terms of value.
Brett
And what are you doing as a $30 million piece of art is being shipped? Are you just sitting there, like, refreshing your screen, hoping that everything goes according to plan? What’s that like for you behind the scenes?
Edouard Gouin
No, actually, I won’t say it’s stress free because we still need to be really careful about what you’re doing. But we have very strong processes by now. We automated a lot of things. Kind of all the things that can go wrong are really limited to the minimal, and we have a very well trained team. So, as a matter of fact, if it’s a 30 million painting, for sure, my Co-Founder came on with, obviously, all of the operations will be kind of really making sure that everything goes smoothly. But the way we’re going to pick up the item and create it, everything is really calculated beforehand. We know exactly what we’re doing, we know exactly who we’re working. We know exactly where the merchandise is.
Edouard Gouin
Obviously, you have what we call tarmac assistance, as well as you bring the artwork into the plane and so on. I won’t say I’m not stressed sometimes that happens, but I think in the really vast majority of cases, we’ve been doing that now for quite a long time. So I would say it’s pretty smooth. That’s what I would say.
Brett
Let’s talk about the acquisition. Can you tell us more about.
Edouard Gouin
So, yeah, we did our first acquisition this year. We closed that back in March. We acquired a company based in the UK that does really kind of premium final shipping. And that was driven by a couple of elements. The first one is that the final shipping market in London is fairly consolidated. Our model historically has been that we work with a couple of companies that do, let’s say, pickup of the artwork, other that do the creating, and let’s say, relatively divided to make sure that we can really kind of pick the best guys for the creating and so on and so on. But in the UK, it’s so consolidated that actually a lot of the fine art shippers do everything themselves. They pick up, they create the ship. And so a lot of our former suppliers at some point were competing with us.
Edouard Gouin
And so we’re like, well, if we really want to grow that market, which is one of the largest markets in the world, we need twelve operations on the ground. And so we kind of scouted around and we started to work with that company called conwether. And they honestly, from an operational perspective, was so mind blown. We’re like, well, we have to continue to work with them. And so kind of progressively over the. I mean, we’ve worked with them in total for, I think, a year and a half before we acquired them. And we’ve really been able to see them at work. And now for us and for our presence in London, it’s really also changing the perception from a market perspective. So people really understand kind of that 100 million painting or whatever, it’s 100 million painting. We can ship this kind of stuff.
Edouard Gouin
We have all the assets, all the security, all the processes also at a different level from what we had before. So there is still quite a difference between shipping a $30 million painting and 100 million dollar painting. And they’re kind of helping us, bridging that gap. So it’s great. I mean, they’re bringing together also 30 years of experience. So that was permanently the reason why we decided to acquire them.
Brett
What was the most difficult part of that process? And that could be the process of acquiring the company or the integration after you acquired them, what was like the most difficult period of time for you or some of the specific challenges that you faced when you did the acquisition.
Edouard Gouin
I mean, integration is always the most difficult. I mean, I’ve rarely heard integration going super smoothly. And, I mean, for us, honestly, it’s still like a relatively small acquisition. It’s a small team. But I think whether you look at processes pretty okay, because we have fairly similar processes, but the way you kind of communicate between the teams, probably because we have different IT systems, they have kind of legacy IT systems, so we need to transfer them to our system. And if that doesn’t work, then maybe we need to find kind of alternative solution for a certain period of time before we’re able to really kind of move everyone to the same system. I think integrations are always a lot more difficult than just negotiating a deal and signing it, because then you have to kind of fix all these teething issues.
Edouard Gouin
But, yeah, we’re going to the bottom of it now, which is great, but it’s always difficult. And I think the only advice I could say is make sure there’s just one person in charge of kind of coordinating that whole thing, which is something we did. So now we have one person in charge of doing a great job in the UK, kind of really making sure that whatever teething issue is being brought up, getting prioritized, and we tackle it, and then we really kind of go one by one. Yes, but for sure, integration.
Brett
Yeah, I think if anyone says integration is easy, they’re either delusional or full of shit, or maybe both. But I don’t think anyone can truthfully say that an integration was flawless. No headaches. Exactly as planned. I don’t think that really exists.
Edouard Gouin
Yeah, same. I think it’s the most. And honestly, again, it’s a fairly small team, but I imagine we’re talking about it with my Co-Founder not so long ago. We’re like, imagine cool companies with tens of thousands of people that are merging together and all the things that you have to do that must be a nightmare to manage. But we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet.
Brett
I just listened to, like, a four hour podcast on LVMH and how do you say his last name?
Edouard Gouin
Arnold Arno Bernardo. Listen to the same one. The required one.
Brett
Yes, exactly.
Edouard Gouin
Very good one. Very good one.
Brett
So good. But yeah, those types of acquisitions he’s doing, it’s such an insane story. I can’t even imagine operating at that scale. The pain of the complexity. There is just a completely different universe and different level.
Edouard Gouin
Yeah, completely. And even though I think in decades, if I remember well, the podcast. We still try to keep relatively independent companies from one another and so on, but it’s still honestly super impressive. Like what they build is mind blowing, honestly.
Brett
Yeah, it’s fascinating in terms of growth and just the scale you’re operating at today. Are there any numbers that you can share?
Edouard Gouin
Well, we don’t share much numbers just because of competition, honestly. But what I can tell you is over the first five years, we grew at an average of more than 100% year on year. So that’s been going pretty fast. I think over the past twelve months or so, we purposefully kind of slowed down. Also, the whole market changed quite a lot. So we raised our series B in March last year, essentially before all the sheet went down and the whole kind of change in microeconomic environment and so on. So what we realized was like, okay, well, we need to be very careful about the way we spend that money because we got really lucky. We have all of that cash now. We need to make sure that it’s spend wisely. So what we did was, okay, let’s grow not as fast.
Edouard Gouin
Let’s just really try to optimize the operations that we have. Let’s try to automate as much as possible, and then we’ll start to accelerate again. And so we kind of arriving to that stage where we’re like, okay, now I think we can start to accelerate again. But yeah, essentially kind of 100% plus growth over the past five years that went down to 50% plus, and now we hope that it’s going to go back again plus 50% plus 60% also next year.
Brett
If you were starting the company again today from scratch, based on everything you’ve learned so far, what would be the number one piece of advice that you give to yourself?
Edouard Gouin
Well, ask yourself whether or not you need a raise. Raising is something especially, let’s say, maybe five, six years ago that was quite fantasized. Well, it’s pretty quick that you can tell your friend you have investors and you have a board and blah, blah. And I think there are definitely some businesses that need to have investors. If you’re building your SaaS, people are saying you need up to three years to really have a SaaS that kind of like finding product market fit that’s good enough that people really want to buy it, and so on. I think in a business like us, which is significantly more transactional, I think you can leave without investors for an extended period of time, up to the point where we’re like, okay, now if you really want to go fast, you start to really go fast. Right?
Edouard Gouin
In the end, we raised fairly early. So nine months after we raised, we started. And I think now kind of looking at, I do a bit of enjoy investing and so on. What I tend to say is if you want to optimize for valuation, if you want to optimize for ownership, it’s like you have a lot of ways to kind of raise debt, especially like in Europe, you can raise carbon debt and so on, and you can kind of use that and push the company as fast as possible, as long as possible to make sure that you optimize for valuation and therefore for ownership down the line. So I think that would be probably one kind of when you start, and the second one is recruiting, but we can talk about that as well.
Brett
Do you wish you had waited longer then? Longer than that? Nine months now?
Edouard Gouin
In hindsight, yeah, in hindsight, I think so. I think we should have waited longer. I don’t think we invested very wisely. The initial money that we received. I think we could have done that differentially. I think it’s also linked to experience. That was the first company were creating that was kind of really working. And so you kind of try stuff and you make mistakes, and, I mean, you also raise money to make mistakes, but I think you typically would make less mistakes if you less cash constraints. Right. So it would force you to really deeply understand what your clients are expecting you on and kind of really delivering only these few things and being a bit smarter about the way you spend money.
Edouard Gouin
And I think kind of in hindsight now, if I were to start again, I would wait much longer and really kind of focus on the client needs, iterate really quickly, shorten iteration cycle and so on up to the point where I’m like, okay, now I feel ready. I can really kind of go fast and really start to invest and so on.
Brett
Now we are almost up on time, so we’ll just do one final question here. Let’s zoom out. Three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building here? What’s it going to look like three to five years from today?
Edouard Gouin
Very good question. So our mission is to move out forward. Move out forward means moving, and in that case, shipping. But it’s also about kind of moving the arts industry forward. And so we see that twofold. Right. Like on the shipping side, there is definitely a lot of opportunities for us to continue to expand geographically. So we are in Paris, we’re in London with New York. Hong Kong is another big ad hub where we’re starting to operate from right now. But there are also kind of many other hubs where we can do things.
Edouard Gouin
And I think from that perspective, it’s up to us to kind of decide at some point do we want to continue on the model which we have, which is essentially primary asset light, but in the UK, or do we want to actually start to invest a lot more into assets? And I think assets are in certain instances, like I mentioned earlier in the UK, it can make sense in certain instances. And I think we’re likely to do a bit more there on the other side and kind of looking more at distribution. The way we distribute our products is through platform. So you go on our platform, you put like pickup, address, whatever, and you do shipping quote. And we started to also offer an API.
Edouard Gouin
And I think if we look at the way the art market is moving towards more ecommerce, towards more digitization, I think we will continue to develop significantly more product on the software side that allows us to distribute our shipping services significantly more efficiently. So, yeah, kind of these two axis, kind of consolidating the geographical coverage that we have, and on the other side is developing more and more product to make sure that we can distribute our services more effectively.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision here. I love the approach that you’re taking, and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. We are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are just listening in and want to follow along with your journey, we’re. Should they go?
Edouard Gouin
I have an Instagram account. It’s my name, Edward. Written the french way. Edouard Gouin. And yeah, that’s. If there is one place where they can find me, it’s probably here on LinkedIn.
Brett
Awesome. Edward, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. This has been a lot of fun.
Edouard Gouin
Likewise. Same for me. Thank you very much.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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