Buro / Breakthrough Moments (00:00)
Hi and welcome to this episode of the Breakthrough Moments podcast. Today I have with me Jan. Jan has been into coding since, I was about to say before you could walk, but that's not quite true, but close to it. You built a lot of interesting startups and you're now a big opponent of tech sovereignty in Europe and just open source solutions that we should take more use of in the European market as well.
I won't do more of the introduction for you because you can get into that yourself, but thank you for coming out to the podcast. How are doing?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (00:32)
Yeah, thanks for having me and it's a pleasure to share insights. Absolutely.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (00:38)
Okay, so to start from one end, as I said, like, yeah, you've been doing coding almost since before you could walk. Like you said, you were doing coding since you were 10, I believe. How did you get into coding at that age and what made you interested in such a thing already then?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (00:54)
If I deconstruct a little bit, would argue that my interest for tinkering started with Lego blocks. So Legos are way to shape the world in a modular way. And so my parents bought me a computer when I was 10. It was a pocket computer, actually, but it was a programmable pocket computer at the time. I only had half a kilobyte of memory. And so...
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (01:08)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (01:23)
That gift was a surprise. I did not expect it. I did not ask for it. But it was basically the beginning of an adventure where I spent hours, nights coding, trying to figure out what I could do with this thing. One of my first programs was to build a, you know, I was 10 in school. I learned about prime numbers.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (01:43)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (01:52)
And so I built my first program to come up with prime numbers. And of course, I realized that the machine was limited in speed and capacity. So I moved on to optimizations and other things. So I was fascinated by the potential. And then, of course, that became my hobby, as a result of which I upgraded this computer from half a kilobyte to one kilobyte to 16 kilobytes, quickly to one megabyte.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (02:10)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (02:22)
But that was in the past century.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (02:22)
Mm.
Yeah. What were the types of programs that you started building when you upgraded? Because it's again, like comparable to today and like my generations, like a basic group of coders. Then I think they would just like drag themselves in the hair or be hearing like the actual memory on it. Like what were you able to build on the different levels of memory on those computers?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (02:47)
So what's interesting is that at the time personal computers were not connected to the internet by default. The internet barely existed at the time. The world wide web did not exist. And we didn't have the telecommunication layer as widespread as it is today. So universities had it. Large companies had it. But personal computers were not equipped with that. So a lot of the interest was around
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (03:09)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (03:17)
gaming, right? So you had a personal computer and you would use it to play games as well. But very quickly, my interest was on how we could actually get into what the game was able to achieve on the given machine. So I don't know if you know this thing, there was a demo scene. In other words, there was an underground network of people doing demos similar to what you had in
video games, but basically trying to show prowess. In other words, how far can you push the machine to show as many colors on screen, as many frames per second? And so I was playing with that. But very quickly, as soon as I could connect my computer to the grid in France, we had a terminal called the Minitel. And that was a state-owned mini terminal.
That was connected to the central Telecom operator. So it was a closed network within France but very successful and every French person was able to use that device like a personal computer, but it was not was a terminal and this device was Allowing people to order train tickets in the 80s in France. So very advanced in some ways prior to the emergence of the world and one of my first significant
program I did with my cousin. So we peer coded. And so not as in pair programming, but in peer coding, he wrote one part of the software and I wrote the other part. And this allowed us to create a social network on a personal computer connected to this terminal so that any French person with that terminal could connect to our personal computer and have access to an email.
a login password, course, walls, typically what you find in Facebook, right? But also games on a dumb terminal. So anyways, we did not invent anything here. The thing is, technology has been around for decades, 50, 70 years, and personal computing is 50 years old. It has taken generations of computer scientists to come up with what we have today. Now,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (05:20)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (05:43)
Mostly because telecommunication makes it possible. Mobile networks, also ADSL, fiber optics. Everyone is connected to the grid.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (05:54)
Okay, cool. Yeah. So that's really interesting how that technology was already in place in the eighties. At what point did you go on to like, because at this point, as you said, like you're recording things with your cousin and stuff, like you were doing it more so as the, like to frame it like that as a hobby. At what point did you start making it more like monetized? At what point did you start making it into a job?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (06:19)
So actually coming back to this piece of software that we wrote, my cousin and I, we sold software licenses for it. In other words, this was a commercial product. Now we did not think of ourselves as entrepreneurs. We did not think of ourselves as a startup. This concept did not exist in France or it did not exist at least in the general mindset. And so we were just coders and we found a software publisher.
that would take our code, put it on a disk, on a floppy disk, and sell it to we don't know. We don't know who. So just like books, if you're an author, you write the book, and then you find a publisher, and that publisher would publish it. So this was done that way in the past. And individual developers were very much like book authors. Now today, leap forward, we have Software as a Service.
And typically, software services delivered by a company, which is a startup, which raises money to build a platform and then delivers it over the web almost automatically and autonomously. So you don't need any more publishers to do that. But in the past, you relied on publishers for distribution. So that was the first monetization, if you wish, of my hobby. But I was still a student at the time. Then I studied computer science.
I obtained a Bachelor of Computer Science at the American University of Paris. And then after that, I became a software engineer in a proper company.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (07:55)
Yeah. Okay. But just heading back to when you started like monetizing it more so without realizing, how did the payment structure look like there? Was it some type of royalty percentage that you got back from what the publisher was selling or was it just like a license fee per sale?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (08:11)
So the software was to be installed on one machine. And so the publisher decided on a fee, one shot, for the license. And of course, we got a royalty out of that, a fraction of it.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (08:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm. Mm.
Yeah. Okay. I see. Okay. Cool. So in the later years, obviously like we've talked before, so I noticed, but you went on to found several startups, which you exited as well. Like what were the most interesting startups that you worked on and why like out of the portfolio?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (08:46)
All of them are super interesting because, once you start something, you go full time and full on. You put everything you have in terms of energy, in terms of passion. And so every adventure is typically, you know, anywhere between four and six years or seven years. That's a long time, quite intense. But each of them has a very unique spin. And in my track record,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (08:54)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (09:14)
because I did create multiple companies, I can talk about pretty much every model. So one of the models was to create a company alone without capital. In other words, it's not dissimilar to what I was before, right? To the small structure of one, two people and you monetize as you can. So that's one model which I found very interesting because I was doing everything. I was doing the coding and I was doing the selling.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (09:24)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (09:44)
and strategy, if you wish. And I didn't raise funding. So basically, I was going as fast as I could based on organic growth. And that was very interesting. And this company was sold in 2007. It was a social network, once again, but delivered as a service. At the time, it wasn't called SAS. It was called ASP. So back in 2001,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (09:55)
Mm.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (10:12)
IT departments didn't like SaaS. Why? Because they wanted to own everything inside the firewalls, inside the corporate firewall. Right? So the internet was available, but for B2C, it made sense to be outside. But for B2B, companies only wanted things to be inside the company. In fact, some companies forbid employees to go to the internet 20 years ago, right? 25 years ago.
So it has been a very slow uptake in some ways. And if we think Facebook, Facebook typically took advantage of the fact that everyone in their dorm room had access to the internet, which made Facebook what it is. So anyways, this company was the first company with no leverage, so no financing coming from VCs. And I found this company to be very structuring for me. I learned a lot.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (10:53)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (11:11)
including how to manage cash and build the entire structure, the accounting, the bets, buying technology on licenses that I couldn't build myself that was expensive. I remember buying a super expensive Adobe license for making PDFs writable. That license cost me $35,000.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (11:16)
Mm.
And what year was this?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (11:42)
2003 or 2004. And so it was a bet because my bet was that I would actually recover the cost of this license because I would sell a feature inside my product that would leverage writable PDFs. And PDF was a very universal format already for read, right? Read only. But you know, have fields in PDFs. And at the time, the only way to write into the fields
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (11:58)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (12:11)
was to have a server-side component sold by Adobe, super expensive, which is irrelevant today. People fill in forms on the web today. But in the past, it made sense to fill in the form on the PDF itself. And so that was a calculated risk. I bought this license. And very quickly, I made money more than I paid for this license on this feature.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (12:16)
Hmm.
Mm.
Okay, cool. What are some other, like I think it's an interesting subject because hearing it today, then it is absurd to pay that amount of money for like license fee for just these PDFs from Adobe. What are some other like, would say pivotal bets that you took throughout your career just building startups? Like does anything come to mind?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (12:58)
Yes. So after this company, I stayed with the acquirers for a little while. And then the iPhone came out. So the iPhone came out in 2009, approximately. And the App Store came out. And it turns out that I was coding in Objective-C on the next computer in 1991, 92. And so Objective-C is the language that you had to know in order to build apps.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (13:08)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (13:27)
And so the iPhone, of course, was fascinating as a device. And the App Store gave the promise that you could build an app which would be distributed by Apple to every iPhone owner. So I started coding apps for clients. So I built apps for third parties. I built a company which was an app studio, which later on moved its own way. And I left the company.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (13:30)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (13:52)
to build an app recommendation engine. And this is a pivotal moment because even though I was in total admiration of this platform, what Apple had built, it turned out that Apple was passive aggressive with developers who would create some sort of a shadow on their own view of the world. And so the application that
I had built, so I built it as a prototype. And then I had a co-founder, and we had VC funding. So we raised a lot of money, and we had the ambition to provide a sort of search engine for apps. So think Google Search, right? Google allows you to search the web. We wanted to build the app that allows you to find apps in the App Store to meet your needs. So it was a very tailored experience.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (14:48)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (14:50)
of discovery. And we were always pointing back to the App Store, where you would download the app and pay for the app. So it was only a layer of discovery. So again, the parallel to Google Search is realistic. Only to realize that Apple was passive aggressive, because they don't like an application to be better than the App Store search bar.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (15:10)
Even if they have the backend for it.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (15:10)
Right, and press the F.
Yes. Yes, absolutely. there is, so Apple is very straight in their approach. Actually, the more you spend time in the Apple ecosystem, the more you understand it. And Apple is very control freak. What they want is to sell the very best device with the very best experience. So it is their way. It's not your way. You're only a guest as a developer. You're not to build an empire on top of Apple. That's not.
If you succeed, good for you. But Apple decides what device they sell and what conditions. That's always been the mindset. And on the flip side, which is positive, Apple doesn't sell your data. Apple sells you a device that is more expensive so that you have the perfect experience, which is different from, say, Facebook meta, which uses your data to sell you ads, which is different from Google, which uses your data and knowledge about you to sell.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (16:11)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (16:12)
ads or ranking for links. So Apple is very interesting that way. basically, after trying to publish this application on the store and being blacklisted by them, I had to find a way to please them. And it was tricky. It took a lot of cycles. I was throwing new apps at them just to see what would stick.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (16:16)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (16:42)
And eventually we succeeded and we had a very good run. We had one app which was called Apps Fire, 13 million downloads translated in more than 10 languages, 2 million active users per day. And the application actually was very much liked and people at Apple recognized that it was a good app. But at some point, a competitor of ours went too far.
and actually stole what I call the Apple editorial.
ownership by basically making sure that their clients were ranked better on the App Store by somehow gaining the App Store. You don't do that. You don't do that because Apple decides the editorial line. We were just a layer, very technical layer, search. The other players in the field were trying to influence because if your app was featured by Apple, then you would get tons of downloads. So they wanted to find a way to put you at the very top.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (17:17)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (17:44)
we're trying to do something different. Even though we were advertising for certain apps, that was a business model, we were searching for apps that were relevant for you. So the value was for the user. And so because of this other player in the field and that player upset the monster, the monster woke up and basically swept everyone away. So they changed the rules and we had to exit. We had to pivot.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (17:55)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (18:12)
and we had to sell the company as a result.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (18:14)
You were never approached there or any like either your company or your competitors to come in house for them to build things. Like when they saw that there was some type of layer that were built and they obviously don't like it, as you say, as a third party, were they never interested in getting it in house?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (18:33)
So the answer is yes, but they did not approach us because they essentially saw us from a distance. We were based in Paris and Tel Aviv, Apple's headquarters, mostly in Silicon Valley, Cupertino. And it turns out that there's another company that was a little bit similar to ours, and they acquired that one. So they acquired it for, I don't know, 10 to $30 million. Good for them, bad for us, because...
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (18:46)
Hmm.
Hmm. Yeah.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (19:00)
You know, this is what these big tech companies do. They acquire companies when they bother them or when there is interest for them to do it in-house and internalize or accelerate on a given topic. They're always looking for good people. one thing that is very interesting is that big tech in the US does not have to declare acquisitions under $10 million. So there's a lot of companies that get acquired
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (19:15)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (19:28)
before they can become anything. Because the SEC does not force declaration under this threshold. So there are a lot of companies that get visibility because they get acquired at 100 million, a billion, large amounts. But you don't see all the other ones. They get swept away from the competitive field for good and bad reasons.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (19:52)
Interesting. you like it's an interesting subject with the tech giants like buying up or basically coming into the field to some degree, like for the startups that you've built, like you've talked about building on the US market and then in the European market and the distinctions there as of like what the actual potential is when you've been building in the European market. Have you felt that that is like an ongoing thing that the US market like
tech giants just try to take you down in different ways.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (20:23)
So there is no conspiracy. These big tech companies have, yes, absolutely. Absolutely, people can do that on their own. No, no, but there is no conspiracy, but the US is quite muscular in its approach. And so these companies have been building up as a result of efficient capital investments. And that was done.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (20:27)
No, you can talk about the experiences and then other people can make their conspiracies.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (20:50)
A long time ago, Europe is late to the game, So if you consider, say, the UK, the UK is perhaps a decade ahead of Paris or Berlin. Paris and Berlin are somewhat similar in dynamics, although Paris, as of late, has accelerated around AI, typically. But Silicon Valley is a term that was coined in 1971. So it's been, you know,
50 years that Silicon Valley is a financial marketplace that pours capital into what seems to be a good opportunity. Again, if you think Facebook, the movie Facebook is interesting because you do see that the innovation occurs in Boston and the guy is a young entrepreneur promising bright Zuckerberg is bright, of course. But then someone who knows better says move west, take our money.
and think big. Right. And so that's smart money in a way. And that smart money has been at work for generations and generations, generating billionaires who reinvest in the very same club, if you wish. And so that has created this gigantic black hole that captures most of the value. Europe is not incapable of doing that. It is quite capable and the contrary. However,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (22:04)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (22:17)
We are late to the game and Europe has a weakness, which is that we are ultra liberal in a naive way, in a post-World War II way, which is again a good thing. Right post-World War II, we had to rebuild Europe on a project that was uplifting. And so we actually let the U.S. help us organize the market. But that market was actually a nice gift to the U.S.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (22:24)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (22:46)
providers because they come in and say, here's a nice, sweet, naive market that we can tap. Now, Europeans have, course, capabilities, of course, probably as good, if not better than in the US. That's why so many Europeans are being hired by US companies. Why? Because we have a good educational system. People are well-trained intellectually. We also have a
backdrop of strong history, cultural values, and all these things are great assets. However, the consolidation occurs typically on the west coast of the US. So Europe can play the game. We are late when it comes to VC-funded cycles. So it may take another 20 to 30 years.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (23:35)
Hmm.
Okay. Interesting because this is obviously like one of the things which are working the most on nowadays. Yeah. And I think you made a really interesting point when we spoke the other day as well, which was regarding like how, how Europe as a whole is just lacking when it comes to building these tech giants. Like what do think that comes from? And do you have any good examples of like how Europe isn't quite where they should be?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (24:04)
Well, typically, again, if you just take the regulation in Europe, we do not act like the US as a construct or China as a construct. We believe in open markets in a pure and naive way. So it's quite ultra-liberal in some ways. Meanwhile, the US is leveraging protectionism techniques to protect their own markets. Now, protectionism means two things.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (24:08)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (24:29)
One which is not desirable, another one which is desirable. Protecting companies that are already established and that are near a monopoly position should not be protected.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (24:40)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (24:40)
So we should not protect established businesses. However, we should protect the weak. We should protect the very small entities that could become big in the future. And the US did that in the late 60s. They had the Small Business Act, which participated in doing that. And they also had DARPA, which financed disruption at scale by betting a lot of money on very smart, very expert
companies, regardless of their size. That's a form of protectionism, but that led to the creation of Google. That led to the creation of so many companies, tech companies, on the basis of patents or winning a competition to tackle a big challenge. So the US knows how to put money at work to generate champions. Europe, when it comes to tech, I'm talking about
digital technology mostly is not able to do that. It's able to protect its aging industries sometimes. Germany protects its car industry because it exports very good cars. That's a fact. France is very good in luxury and fashion. So every European country has their own champions. when comes to tech, it's actually
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (26:00)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (26:05)
very hard to reach maximal distribution. if you think Microsoft, Microsoft is one of the very best companies to harness distribution via partners and so on and so forth. now Microsoft and Apple and Meta and Google and Amazon AWS, they reach five, six billion humans on the planet. We don't have any
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (26:33)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (26:35)
company in Europe that is anywhere near that. If there is one big tech company which is aging right now, is one in Germany called SAP. And in B2C, we have Spotify. But Spotify is not a platform in the sense of Microsoft and Google. So Spotify is a very interesting example. In fact, would say that.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (26:49)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (27:03)
You're appealing to a Nordic audience, but also a wider audience. But Sweden is interesting because Sweden, contrary to France, is a very small market. France is an average market in terms of size. So Sweden is a small, therefore non-interesting market if you're building technology. Number one. Number two, the Swedes, they speak perfect English. So they think export.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (27:06)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (27:29)
The one ability to speak English well and the one constraint to have insignificant market share worldwide means that you've got to export by default. And the French, typically the older generation, that doesn't speak English very well because it's a big enough market and people used to be within France speaking French. Same goes with Italy or Spain, right?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (27:42)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (27:55)
So the Germanic countries, also Germany is closer to English also in terms of semantics, right? So Anglo-Saxon culture and language creates an ability for the Northern countries to transact with the UK and the US. France was basically trailing behind, also thinking that it had a medium-sized market. So it's worthwhile concentrating on the internal market. But that's a mistake.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (28:14)
Mm.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (28:24)
Europe is a collection of tiny countries that once perhaps were big in the past, centuries ago. Spain was center of the world for a while, and Portugal. But now Europe is a collection of small countries. So we need to think globally. We need to export. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Swedes do very well, is that they accept their constraint. They embrace it. And I would argue that
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (28:40)
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (28:51)
maybe with different sensibilities and different, I'm thinking Israel. Israel is like Sweden. People speak perfect English and the market locally is insignificant. So the Israelis, they export cyber technology to the rest of the world and they do super well.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (29:06)
Mm.
Hmm. I think it's especially interesting with Sweden as you bring up because it's close to me, obviously, as I'm from Norway. And as you're saying with the Anglo-Saxon countries that they have, like they've been kind of forced to go into the industry to some extent comparable to the rest of Europe. While Norway, as I'm from, like without speaking too bad of Norway, Norway has had this crutch, which is just the natural resources. So we have a, like the comparison is...
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (29:36)
Yeah, blessing.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (29:39)
Yeah, it's a blessing in that sense, but a blessing in curse. Yeah. So the difference which like some people, especially in our entrepreneurial community speak about in Norway is that Norway and Sweden were very, very similar a hundred years ago in terms of like both having the same social like philosophies around how things would build. And then Norway got the North Sea from Sweden. We found the oil. And at the same time, Sweden
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (29:41)
and a curse.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (30:07)
barely found anything. Sweden barely had any natural resources comparable to Norway. And from that point on, Sweden got almost to the same level of riches as Norway, just off the industries, which we're talking about. They actually built the country on industry, while in Norway, which kind of would have the same mission, would be forced into the same thing. I think the number, without having the specifics, is that the government's spending in Norway, comparable to Sweden,
Sweden spends 50 % of the annual budget in the government as Norway does. And there's 9 million Swedes and 5 million Norwegians. And it's just based off like their skill sets in these terms, which is just fascinating.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (30:51)
Yeah, it's fascinating and you can see, I'm sure Norway is aware of that. If you look at the Middle East that has access to natural resources, but that is not sustainable over time, they're thinking, how do we swap our production to services and of course, technology? Because in the future, technology is part of the infrastructure.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (31:12)
Hmm.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (31:18)
is fundamental to our societies nowadays. So on the one hand, we need to create the resources so that we can be fairly independent. So we need to understand it, master it and so on. We cannot just be, you know, renting the resources from the US. That's not a good position to be in. Although the markets are open, so their technology is great. But what is the amount of dependencies that we can support?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (31:28)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (31:46)
And I think Europe is in a dangerous spot because our digital sovereignty is close to zero. We almost depend fully on US technology, which is neither good for Europe nor good for the US, by the way.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (31:46)
Mm.
Hmm.
Mm.
How do you think we should go about changing that as to Europeans sitting here? because as you obviously described, like there's huge cultural differences in Europe comparable to North America, for example. Like, how do you think that like we should be able in Europe to actually go ahead and become more sovereign?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (32:22)
So there's a number of good things happening and bad things, of course. number one, so of course, Norway and Sweden and all the way to Germany, speaking English comes naturally. The good thing is that in France, in Spain, in Italy now, the new generation, your generation, speaks perfect English. Why? Because of Netflix. I remember in my generation,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (32:43)
Hmm.
Thanks
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (32:48)
France being a big enough market, they would translate the TV shows coming from the US into French. It would be dubbed. Why? Because it made sense to dub for such a large population. Meanwhile, I was born and raised in northern France near Belgium. So the French speaking side of Belgium, three miles down the road from me, they had MTV.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (32:51)
Mm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (33:16)
and TV shows from the US not dubbed. So they spoke much better English than I did at the time. So what I'm saying is that zoom forward 2024, Europe speaks much better English today. Europe is able to export. Technology is something we can export. And unfortunately, we've had a very difficult sequence. First, we had Trump.
America first. other words, Trump is saying, and he's not wrong, he's saying that Europe is not paying enough for NATO defense. It's not wrong. It's actually factually true. But he's saying, underlying, and Biden is following the same track, which is America first. The world is changing. America first against China, which means Europe is secondary.
And we cannot rely on the US forever. We are 80 years past World War II. So what is the European project? Now, America first tells Europe you have to a little bit be on your own when it comes to military. Number two, COVID, where Europe realizes that it's not able to produce masks.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (34:16)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (34:36)
which is a shock, right? We're a sophisticated construct. We cannot produce masks. We have to import them from China. Number three.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (34:41)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (34:43)
Russia attacks Ukraine at our borders. Now that actually coming back to Trump America first and NATO, poses the question, what do we do in the event that the conflict spills over to the EU specifically? Right. But I'm sorry, but Ukraine is continental Europe already. This is Europe. So what is the project? What is
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (35:00)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (35:12)
the definition of borders? What is the definition of European values, common values? What is common?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (35:17)
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (35:18)
And then there's GenAI, generative AI, where we realize that that's it. In the US, they've been able to harness billions. And there's an article by Sequoia Capital that talks about the $600 billion question when it comes to GenAI. So Europe is, again, late to the party. So these four things are actually waking people up in Brussels.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (35:34)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (35:44)
Awareness is the first thing. How do we solve our conundrum? Number one, awareness. Being very humble of where we are, or rather, where we are not. Number two, the reason why the new project I'm working on is focusing on open source is because perhaps open source is our only hope. Because open source is a way to break down dependencies and proprietary solutions.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (36:03)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (36:10)
Open source turns you into the owner of your technology versus proprietary, which turns you into a renter forever. And when you rent, you do not control the price. The price can go up at any time, or you can be thrown out of your property. So owning more or being a renter less is the recipe. So we need to look at it.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (36:24)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (36:37)
from the two angles. We need to create more ownership, and we need to minimize dependencies. So to me, that is the solution. And Europe is actually quite well calibrated for open source. In fact, most of the
I don't have the number, but a lot of the products out there, even US companies, are technologies built out of Europe. Think World Wide Web, the HTTP protocol. That's Tim Berners-Lee, a British citizen working in Switzerland. If you think, I don't know, Linux, Linus Torvald is European, right?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (36:57)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (37:15)
So Linux was called cancer by Microsoft. Steve Ballmer called Linux cancer because it was eating away at their Windows monopoly. Guess what? Microsoft Azure today is almost 100 % Linux.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (37:30)
Hmm.
Fairly biased thing to say at the time.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (37:37)
So it's interesting. Yeah, of course. And then of course, Azure was running on Windows NT, right? The one operating system that they controlled, but Windows NT is not a good piece of technology. It made a lot of money. It found its market, but it was not a good piece of technology for scalability and for being lean. And Linux provided that. And Red Hat is a company that built on top of Linux.
and also contributed to Linux, which is an open source company. And so that's a success that created a sort of contrarian approach. In fact, if you look at software in general, the two systems coexist at any given time. Proprietary solutions, closed, and open source solutions. Why? Because software and the way to build a system is very little.
very closely tied to the notion of knowledge. So knowledge allows you to build a system. And that system should be replicable in some ways. Because otherwise, we get stuck and trapped inside a system. And human beings don't like that. So it's a ping pong effect between closed and open. Of course, there are waves. And if you look at the web and the internet,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (38:40)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (39:02)
technology over the past 70 years, it's been ping pong between centralized, decentralized, closed, open, web one, web three with blockchain, and so on and so forth. this is big cycles that may take one or two decades each time, but societies and human beings really don't like to be boxed in.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (39:20)
Yeah.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (39:26)
So the two systems exist and right now, I think that Europe is boxed in. So therefore, the only hope right now is to double down on reopening through open source and owning part of our destiny.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (39:42)
What's your goal, Stenjan? Like speaking of open source and your work, like how do you want to impact this?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (39:50)
So I'm very lucky and I have no merit for the underlying asset that I'm building this company on top of. It's called Scikit-Learn. Scikit-Learn stands for Scientific Toolkit for Machine Learning. It was built from a research center in France by researchers who needed the tools to do their research in data science. So they built a sort of software library to do machine learning for them. It's really just applied math.
It's not rocket science, but almost, because it's a lot of formulas. It's a lot of math. And this technology was built over a decade or so. And now this technology has been downloaded a total of 1.5 billion times. It's crazy. Nobody knows it's French. Nobody knows it's European. Nobody knows it's coming from there. People take it for granted. It's open source. So if you break it down,
It's 80 million downloads per month, 22 % coming from the US, 25 % coming from China, 14 % coming from India, 5 % UK, 4 % Germany, 3 % France. So even France is in minority share of the usage. Why? Because the tool is universal. It is the universal screwdriver in the toolkit of data scientists.
The project and the company that I've built with co-founders were 14 co-founders. So it's significant and rare to be so many co-founders because I took the entire team from the INRIA Research Center. And so we've created this company around this team, which is a know-how. The technology belongs to the world already, and the license is open, permissive. It's a BSD3 license specifically.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (41:24)
You
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (41:40)
So that means that anyone can use the code, do anything they want with it, change it, sell it. They can do anything they want. But bottom line is everyone is using it for production and for research and for academia and for training data scientists. So this thing is what it is. We have the people who contribute a lot of code to it still. And the goal is to keep doing that. And then, of course, we also
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (42:05)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (42:09)
become the official operator of the brand. So, PsychicLearn is a brand that nobody knows except data scientists and to them it is the reference. To them, doing machine learning and tabular data, so quantitative database-like data sets, they use PsychicLearn by default. Now, we have to build a business around this.
And the inspiration is very much Red Hat, which means we build layers of services around it. And we're also building a new product, a new software product on top of it as well.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (42:39)
Mm.
Okay. Okay, cool. What is the timeline that you see that you'll be working on that and like the overall effect of like the macros, which we've talked about in Europe.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (42:54)
So this is a company that was created about a year ago. today, I'm very proud to say that we're launching the very first product called the Psychelearn certification. And so this is not a technical product per se. It's a product that certifies people to a certain level of proficiency in the technology. So this is what tech companies do.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (43:07)
Mm-hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (43:22)
This is what platform companies do when they have a product that is a platform. So Psychitlearn is a sort of platform. So we are launching a first level today. And in coming weeks, we'll be launching the expert and intermediary level as well. So we have associate, professional, expert. It's hard. I will not pass the test because I am not a data scientist. So I will fail miserably. But that's OK because the bar is high.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (43:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (43:52)
And so that's the first product where we're launching today. We have other things that we sell, and we partner with companies. There are sponsorship. There's also support services, professional services, and certification that I mentioned. And finally, the new product, which we'll see the light of day gradually. So there's the first item that is available today, and then gradually.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (44:08)
Mm-hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (44:21)
across 2025, the horizon is to be very ambitious. So there is no limit to the ambition for this company. This company aims to become the open source reference for machine learning technology for data scientists with a mission which is to continue delivering open source components to the benefit of France, Europe, the rest of the world.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (44:32)
in
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (44:48)
So that is a company with a mission, which makes us almost like a B Corp in the US. And the project is fantastic. The team is fantastic. And ideally, we'd like to aim for an IPO so that other people can acquire shares in the company down the line. Because we think that what we're producing is essential.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (44:53)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (45:16)
and in a way that is orthogonal to proprietary solutions.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (45:20)
Cool. Cool. Okay. That's really interesting. think I'll add it in the links below so that people can have a further look into it this fall because it came as a surprise to me as well that it was launch day today as we're recording it. So that's cool. One last question that we always like to ask people at the end of things here, like to make it more time relevant. Like if there was one thing now,
given like all of the things that you've been through and the challenges that you're now facing taking this out. What is like one thing that you wish to learn during the next period and figure out for yourself and your endeavors.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (45:56)
I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm very optimistic in nature. But what I'm trying to build here is something which is not typical of entrepreneurs that in order to succeed have to be optimistic, but typically statistically fail because most startups fail. So entrepreneurs try again. Sometimes they give up and come back to the...
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (46:13)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (46:21)
to being an employee somewhere in a safe company, quote unquote.
Here we have an asset that is important already. And so there is a great responsibility. So we cannot fail.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (46:33)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (46:34)
So we have to minimize risk taking while maximizing success and ambition. So it's a very, very tricky situation. But what motivates me is no longer my optimism now, is how do we break this cycle? And can we break this cycle? Because I'm not, I am optimistic in nature in what I do. That's how I wake up in the morning.
But then I can only do what I can do myself with the people around me and the team. But I cannot control what Europe does because I do not participate at that level yet. I'm an entrepreneur, so I can talk to people. But then we have our own leadership per country. We have a European construct with its own leadership. Then there are external forces. Again, we have natural allies culturally and militarily, like the US.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (47:01)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (47:30)
So, and then I would argue that, you know, we have democracy also to care for, because if we're European, then we cherish supposedly democracies. And therefore, how do we perpetuate that model? And how do we participate in that? So I really, really wish to make sure that what I do actually aligns with this greater goal. In other words,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (47:35)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (47:57)
Technology in and of itself is quite uninteresting. Because if you look at human species, we haven't evolved very much. We wake up in the morning, we eat, we do things, we work, there's labor involved. Then we sleep, then we reproduce and move on to the next generation. So technology itself is just something that helps us keep busy. But things are accelerating.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (48:15)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (48:24)
Right. And that is the issue. Right. So technology is also a factor that accelerates things and big tech is fascinating, but they are not distributing technology and the benefits of technology in a way that is reasonable. So I'm a capitalist. I believe that capital should reap the benefits of good management and value capture. But at some point.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (48:50)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (48:51)
it has to redistribute value where it's captured. Typically when Big Tech does not pay tax in Europe, that's wrong because they make a lot of money on top of European attention. Right? So how do we make sure that that's redistributed? So if they do not do it naturally, because there is a loophole between Amsterdam and Dublin, because you people specializing in optimizing that, if they do not distribute value,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (48:56)
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (49:21)
If regulation is late to the game, distributing value, then how do we participate in capturing value on our side locally and do the reverse, also distribute value globally and bring cash, bring income and revenue and taxation? So to me, it's a big equation. And I really hope we can make a dent.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (49:40)
Hmm.
Cool. Okay. Really interesting. Yeah. Well, let's make that a wrap. Like thanks a lot for coming on. It's been a pleasure having you here. Yeah. And wish you all the best of luck in your endeavors.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (49:53)
Likewise.
Thank you.
Hi and welcome to this episode of the Breakthrough Moments podcast. Today I have with me Jan. Jan has been into coding since, I was about to say before you could walk, but that's not quite true, but close to it. You built a lot of interesting startups and you're now a big opponent of tech sovereignty in Europe and just open source solutions that we should take more use of in the European market as well.
I won't do more of the introduction for you because you can get into that yourself, but thank you for coming out to the podcast. How are doing?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (00:32)
Yeah, thanks for having me and it's a pleasure to share insights. Absolutely.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (00:38)
Okay, so to start from one end, as I said, like, yeah, you've been doing coding almost since before you could walk. Like you said, you were doing coding since you were 10, I believe. How did you get into coding at that age and what made you interested in such a thing already then?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (00:54)
If I deconstruct a little bit, would argue that my interest for tinkering started with Lego blocks. So Legos are way to shape the world in a modular way. And so my parents bought me a computer when I was 10. It was a pocket computer, actually, but it was a programmable pocket computer at the time. I only had half a kilobyte of memory. And so...
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (01:08)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (01:23)
That gift was a surprise. I did not expect it. I did not ask for it. But it was basically the beginning of an adventure where I spent hours, nights coding, trying to figure out what I could do with this thing. One of my first programs was to build a, you know, I was 10 in school. I learned about prime numbers.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (01:43)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (01:52)
And so I built my first program to come up with prime numbers. And of course, I realized that the machine was limited in speed and capacity. So I moved on to optimizations and other things. So I was fascinated by the potential. And then, of course, that became my hobby, as a result of which I upgraded this computer from half a kilobyte to one kilobyte to 16 kilobytes, quickly to one megabyte.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (02:10)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (02:22)
But that was in the past century.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (02:22)
Mm.
Yeah. What were the types of programs that you started building when you upgraded? Because it's again, like comparable to today and like my generations, like a basic group of coders. Then I think they would just like drag themselves in the hair or be hearing like the actual memory on it. Like what were you able to build on the different levels of memory on those computers?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (02:47)
So what's interesting is that at the time personal computers were not connected to the internet by default. The internet barely existed at the time. The world wide web did not exist. And we didn't have the telecommunication layer as widespread as it is today. So universities had it. Large companies had it. But personal computers were not equipped with that. So a lot of the interest was around
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (03:09)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (03:17)
gaming, right? So you had a personal computer and you would use it to play games as well. But very quickly, my interest was on how we could actually get into what the game was able to achieve on the given machine. So I don't know if you know this thing, there was a demo scene. In other words, there was an underground network of people doing demos similar to what you had in
video games, but basically trying to show prowess. In other words, how far can you push the machine to show as many colors on screen, as many frames per second? And so I was playing with that. But very quickly, as soon as I could connect my computer to the grid in France, we had a terminal called the Minitel. And that was a state-owned mini terminal.
That was connected to the central Telecom operator. So it was a closed network within France but very successful and every French person was able to use that device like a personal computer, but it was not was a terminal and this device was Allowing people to order train tickets in the 80s in France. So very advanced in some ways prior to the emergence of the world and one of my first significant
program I did with my cousin. So we peer coded. And so not as in pair programming, but in peer coding, he wrote one part of the software and I wrote the other part. And this allowed us to create a social network on a personal computer connected to this terminal so that any French person with that terminal could connect to our personal computer and have access to an email.
a login password, course, walls, typically what you find in Facebook, right? But also games on a dumb terminal. So anyways, we did not invent anything here. The thing is, technology has been around for decades, 50, 70 years, and personal computing is 50 years old. It has taken generations of computer scientists to come up with what we have today. Now,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (05:20)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (05:43)
Mostly because telecommunication makes it possible. Mobile networks, also ADSL, fiber optics. Everyone is connected to the grid.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (05:54)
Okay, cool. Yeah. So that's really interesting how that technology was already in place in the eighties. At what point did you go on to like, because at this point, as you said, like you're recording things with your cousin and stuff, like you were doing it more so as the, like to frame it like that as a hobby. At what point did you start making it more like monetized? At what point did you start making it into a job?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (06:19)
So actually coming back to this piece of software that we wrote, my cousin and I, we sold software licenses for it. In other words, this was a commercial product. Now we did not think of ourselves as entrepreneurs. We did not think of ourselves as a startup. This concept did not exist in France or it did not exist at least in the general mindset. And so we were just coders and we found a software publisher.
that would take our code, put it on a disk, on a floppy disk, and sell it to we don't know. We don't know who. So just like books, if you're an author, you write the book, and then you find a publisher, and that publisher would publish it. So this was done that way in the past. And individual developers were very much like book authors. Now today, leap forward, we have Software as a Service.
And typically, software services delivered by a company, which is a startup, which raises money to build a platform and then delivers it over the web almost automatically and autonomously. So you don't need any more publishers to do that. But in the past, you relied on publishers for distribution. So that was the first monetization, if you wish, of my hobby. But I was still a student at the time. Then I studied computer science.
I obtained a Bachelor of Computer Science at the American University of Paris. And then after that, I became a software engineer in a proper company.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (07:55)
Yeah. Okay. But just heading back to when you started like monetizing it more so without realizing, how did the payment structure look like there? Was it some type of royalty percentage that you got back from what the publisher was selling or was it just like a license fee per sale?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (08:11)
So the software was to be installed on one machine. And so the publisher decided on a fee, one shot, for the license. And of course, we got a royalty out of that, a fraction of it.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (08:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm. Mm.
Yeah. Okay. I see. Okay. Cool. So in the later years, obviously like we've talked before, so I noticed, but you went on to found several startups, which you exited as well. Like what were the most interesting startups that you worked on and why like out of the portfolio?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (08:46)
All of them are super interesting because, once you start something, you go full time and full on. You put everything you have in terms of energy, in terms of passion. And so every adventure is typically, you know, anywhere between four and six years or seven years. That's a long time, quite intense. But each of them has a very unique spin. And in my track record,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (08:54)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (09:14)
because I did create multiple companies, I can talk about pretty much every model. So one of the models was to create a company alone without capital. In other words, it's not dissimilar to what I was before, right? To the small structure of one, two people and you monetize as you can. So that's one model which I found very interesting because I was doing everything. I was doing the coding and I was doing the selling.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (09:24)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (09:44)
and strategy, if you wish. And I didn't raise funding. So basically, I was going as fast as I could based on organic growth. And that was very interesting. And this company was sold in 2007. It was a social network, once again, but delivered as a service. At the time, it wasn't called SAS. It was called ASP. So back in 2001,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (09:55)
Mm.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (10:12)
IT departments didn't like SaaS. Why? Because they wanted to own everything inside the firewalls, inside the corporate firewall. Right? So the internet was available, but for B2C, it made sense to be outside. But for B2B, companies only wanted things to be inside the company. In fact, some companies forbid employees to go to the internet 20 years ago, right? 25 years ago.
So it has been a very slow uptake in some ways. And if we think Facebook, Facebook typically took advantage of the fact that everyone in their dorm room had access to the internet, which made Facebook what it is. So anyways, this company was the first company with no leverage, so no financing coming from VCs. And I found this company to be very structuring for me. I learned a lot.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (10:53)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (11:11)
including how to manage cash and build the entire structure, the accounting, the bets, buying technology on licenses that I couldn't build myself that was expensive. I remember buying a super expensive Adobe license for making PDFs writable. That license cost me $35,000.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (11:16)
Mm.
And what year was this?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (11:42)
2003 or 2004. And so it was a bet because my bet was that I would actually recover the cost of this license because I would sell a feature inside my product that would leverage writable PDFs. And PDF was a very universal format already for read, right? Read only. But you know, have fields in PDFs. And at the time, the only way to write into the fields
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (11:58)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (12:11)
was to have a server-side component sold by Adobe, super expensive, which is irrelevant today. People fill in forms on the web today. But in the past, it made sense to fill in the form on the PDF itself. And so that was a calculated risk. I bought this license. And very quickly, I made money more than I paid for this license on this feature.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (12:16)
Hmm.
Mm.
Okay, cool. What are some other, like I think it's an interesting subject because hearing it today, then it is absurd to pay that amount of money for like license fee for just these PDFs from Adobe. What are some other like, would say pivotal bets that you took throughout your career just building startups? Like does anything come to mind?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (12:58)
Yes. So after this company, I stayed with the acquirers for a little while. And then the iPhone came out. So the iPhone came out in 2009, approximately. And the App Store came out. And it turns out that I was coding in Objective-C on the next computer in 1991, 92. And so Objective-C is the language that you had to know in order to build apps.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (13:08)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (13:27)
And so the iPhone, of course, was fascinating as a device. And the App Store gave the promise that you could build an app which would be distributed by Apple to every iPhone owner. So I started coding apps for clients. So I built apps for third parties. I built a company which was an app studio, which later on moved its own way. And I left the company.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (13:30)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (13:52)
to build an app recommendation engine. And this is a pivotal moment because even though I was in total admiration of this platform, what Apple had built, it turned out that Apple was passive aggressive with developers who would create some sort of a shadow on their own view of the world. And so the application that
I had built, so I built it as a prototype. And then I had a co-founder, and we had VC funding. So we raised a lot of money, and we had the ambition to provide a sort of search engine for apps. So think Google Search, right? Google allows you to search the web. We wanted to build the app that allows you to find apps in the App Store to meet your needs. So it was a very tailored experience.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (14:48)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (14:50)
of discovery. And we were always pointing back to the App Store, where you would download the app and pay for the app. So it was only a layer of discovery. So again, the parallel to Google Search is realistic. Only to realize that Apple was passive aggressive, because they don't like an application to be better than the App Store search bar.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (15:10)
Even if they have the backend for it.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (15:10)
Right, and press the F.
Yes. Yes, absolutely. there is, so Apple is very straight in their approach. Actually, the more you spend time in the Apple ecosystem, the more you understand it. And Apple is very control freak. What they want is to sell the very best device with the very best experience. So it is their way. It's not your way. You're only a guest as a developer. You're not to build an empire on top of Apple. That's not.
If you succeed, good for you. But Apple decides what device they sell and what conditions. That's always been the mindset. And on the flip side, which is positive, Apple doesn't sell your data. Apple sells you a device that is more expensive so that you have the perfect experience, which is different from, say, Facebook meta, which uses your data to sell you ads, which is different from Google, which uses your data and knowledge about you to sell.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (16:11)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (16:12)
ads or ranking for links. So Apple is very interesting that way. basically, after trying to publish this application on the store and being blacklisted by them, I had to find a way to please them. And it was tricky. It took a lot of cycles. I was throwing new apps at them just to see what would stick.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (16:16)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (16:42)
And eventually we succeeded and we had a very good run. We had one app which was called Apps Fire, 13 million downloads translated in more than 10 languages, 2 million active users per day. And the application actually was very much liked and people at Apple recognized that it was a good app. But at some point, a competitor of ours went too far.
and actually stole what I call the Apple editorial.
ownership by basically making sure that their clients were ranked better on the App Store by somehow gaining the App Store. You don't do that. You don't do that because Apple decides the editorial line. We were just a layer, very technical layer, search. The other players in the field were trying to influence because if your app was featured by Apple, then you would get tons of downloads. So they wanted to find a way to put you at the very top.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (17:17)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (17:44)
we're trying to do something different. Even though we were advertising for certain apps, that was a business model, we were searching for apps that were relevant for you. So the value was for the user. And so because of this other player in the field and that player upset the monster, the monster woke up and basically swept everyone away. So they changed the rules and we had to exit. We had to pivot.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (17:55)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (18:12)
and we had to sell the company as a result.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (18:14)
You were never approached there or any like either your company or your competitors to come in house for them to build things. Like when they saw that there was some type of layer that were built and they obviously don't like it, as you say, as a third party, were they never interested in getting it in house?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (18:33)
So the answer is yes, but they did not approach us because they essentially saw us from a distance. We were based in Paris and Tel Aviv, Apple's headquarters, mostly in Silicon Valley, Cupertino. And it turns out that there's another company that was a little bit similar to ours, and they acquired that one. So they acquired it for, I don't know, 10 to $30 million. Good for them, bad for us, because...
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (18:46)
Hmm.
Hmm. Yeah.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (19:00)
You know, this is what these big tech companies do. They acquire companies when they bother them or when there is interest for them to do it in-house and internalize or accelerate on a given topic. They're always looking for good people. one thing that is very interesting is that big tech in the US does not have to declare acquisitions under $10 million. So there's a lot of companies that get acquired
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (19:15)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (19:28)
before they can become anything. Because the SEC does not force declaration under this threshold. So there are a lot of companies that get visibility because they get acquired at 100 million, a billion, large amounts. But you don't see all the other ones. They get swept away from the competitive field for good and bad reasons.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (19:52)
Interesting. you like it's an interesting subject with the tech giants like buying up or basically coming into the field to some degree, like for the startups that you've built, like you've talked about building on the US market and then in the European market and the distinctions there as of like what the actual potential is when you've been building in the European market. Have you felt that that is like an ongoing thing that the US market like
tech giants just try to take you down in different ways.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (20:23)
So there is no conspiracy. These big tech companies have, yes, absolutely. Absolutely, people can do that on their own. No, no, but there is no conspiracy, but the US is quite muscular in its approach. And so these companies have been building up as a result of efficient capital investments. And that was done.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (20:27)
No, you can talk about the experiences and then other people can make their conspiracies.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (20:50)
A long time ago, Europe is late to the game, So if you consider, say, the UK, the UK is perhaps a decade ahead of Paris or Berlin. Paris and Berlin are somewhat similar in dynamics, although Paris, as of late, has accelerated around AI, typically. But Silicon Valley is a term that was coined in 1971. So it's been, you know,
50 years that Silicon Valley is a financial marketplace that pours capital into what seems to be a good opportunity. Again, if you think Facebook, the movie Facebook is interesting because you do see that the innovation occurs in Boston and the guy is a young entrepreneur promising bright Zuckerberg is bright, of course. But then someone who knows better says move west, take our money.
and think big. Right. And so that's smart money in a way. And that smart money has been at work for generations and generations, generating billionaires who reinvest in the very same club, if you wish. And so that has created this gigantic black hole that captures most of the value. Europe is not incapable of doing that. It is quite capable and the contrary. However,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (22:04)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (22:17)
We are late to the game and Europe has a weakness, which is that we are ultra liberal in a naive way, in a post-World War II way, which is again a good thing. Right post-World War II, we had to rebuild Europe on a project that was uplifting. And so we actually let the U.S. help us organize the market. But that market was actually a nice gift to the U.S.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (22:24)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (22:46)
providers because they come in and say, here's a nice, sweet, naive market that we can tap. Now, Europeans have, course, capabilities, of course, probably as good, if not better than in the US. That's why so many Europeans are being hired by US companies. Why? Because we have a good educational system. People are well-trained intellectually. We also have a
backdrop of strong history, cultural values, and all these things are great assets. However, the consolidation occurs typically on the west coast of the US. So Europe can play the game. We are late when it comes to VC-funded cycles. So it may take another 20 to 30 years.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (23:35)
Hmm.
Okay. Interesting because this is obviously like one of the things which are working the most on nowadays. Yeah. And I think you made a really interesting point when we spoke the other day as well, which was regarding like how, how Europe as a whole is just lacking when it comes to building these tech giants. Like what do think that comes from? And do you have any good examples of like how Europe isn't quite where they should be?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (24:04)
Well, typically, again, if you just take the regulation in Europe, we do not act like the US as a construct or China as a construct. We believe in open markets in a pure and naive way. So it's quite ultra-liberal in some ways. Meanwhile, the US is leveraging protectionism techniques to protect their own markets. Now, protectionism means two things.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (24:08)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (24:29)
One which is not desirable, another one which is desirable. Protecting companies that are already established and that are near a monopoly position should not be protected.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (24:40)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (24:40)
So we should not protect established businesses. However, we should protect the weak. We should protect the very small entities that could become big in the future. And the US did that in the late 60s. They had the Small Business Act, which participated in doing that. And they also had DARPA, which financed disruption at scale by betting a lot of money on very smart, very expert
companies, regardless of their size. That's a form of protectionism, but that led to the creation of Google. That led to the creation of so many companies, tech companies, on the basis of patents or winning a competition to tackle a big challenge. So the US knows how to put money at work to generate champions. Europe, when it comes to tech, I'm talking about
digital technology mostly is not able to do that. It's able to protect its aging industries sometimes. Germany protects its car industry because it exports very good cars. That's a fact. France is very good in luxury and fashion. So every European country has their own champions. when comes to tech, it's actually
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (26:00)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (26:05)
very hard to reach maximal distribution. if you think Microsoft, Microsoft is one of the very best companies to harness distribution via partners and so on and so forth. now Microsoft and Apple and Meta and Google and Amazon AWS, they reach five, six billion humans on the planet. We don't have any
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (26:33)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (26:35)
company in Europe that is anywhere near that. If there is one big tech company which is aging right now, is one in Germany called SAP. And in B2C, we have Spotify. But Spotify is not a platform in the sense of Microsoft and Google. So Spotify is a very interesting example. In fact, would say that.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (26:49)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (27:03)
You're appealing to a Nordic audience, but also a wider audience. But Sweden is interesting because Sweden, contrary to France, is a very small market. France is an average market in terms of size. So Sweden is a small, therefore non-interesting market if you're building technology. Number one. Number two, the Swedes, they speak perfect English. So they think export.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (27:06)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (27:29)
The one ability to speak English well and the one constraint to have insignificant market share worldwide means that you've got to export by default. And the French, typically the older generation, that doesn't speak English very well because it's a big enough market and people used to be within France speaking French. Same goes with Italy or Spain, right?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (27:42)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (27:55)
So the Germanic countries, also Germany is closer to English also in terms of semantics, right? So Anglo-Saxon culture and language creates an ability for the Northern countries to transact with the UK and the US. France was basically trailing behind, also thinking that it had a medium-sized market. So it's worthwhile concentrating on the internal market. But that's a mistake.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (28:14)
Mm.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (28:24)
Europe is a collection of tiny countries that once perhaps were big in the past, centuries ago. Spain was center of the world for a while, and Portugal. But now Europe is a collection of small countries. So we need to think globally. We need to export. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Swedes do very well, is that they accept their constraint. They embrace it. And I would argue that
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (28:40)
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (28:51)
maybe with different sensibilities and different, I'm thinking Israel. Israel is like Sweden. People speak perfect English and the market locally is insignificant. So the Israelis, they export cyber technology to the rest of the world and they do super well.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (29:06)
Mm.
Hmm. I think it's especially interesting with Sweden as you bring up because it's close to me, obviously, as I'm from Norway. And as you're saying with the Anglo-Saxon countries that they have, like they've been kind of forced to go into the industry to some extent comparable to the rest of Europe. While Norway, as I'm from, like without speaking too bad of Norway, Norway has had this crutch, which is just the natural resources. So we have a, like the comparison is...
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (29:36)
Yeah, blessing.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (29:39)
Yeah, it's a blessing in that sense, but a blessing in curse. Yeah. So the difference which like some people, especially in our entrepreneurial community speak about in Norway is that Norway and Sweden were very, very similar a hundred years ago in terms of like both having the same social like philosophies around how things would build. And then Norway got the North Sea from Sweden. We found the oil. And at the same time, Sweden
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (29:41)
and a curse.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (30:07)
barely found anything. Sweden barely had any natural resources comparable to Norway. And from that point on, Sweden got almost to the same level of riches as Norway, just off the industries, which we're talking about. They actually built the country on industry, while in Norway, which kind of would have the same mission, would be forced into the same thing. I think the number, without having the specifics, is that the government's spending in Norway, comparable to Sweden,
Sweden spends 50 % of the annual budget in the government as Norway does. And there's 9 million Swedes and 5 million Norwegians. And it's just based off like their skill sets in these terms, which is just fascinating.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (30:51)
Yeah, it's fascinating and you can see, I'm sure Norway is aware of that. If you look at the Middle East that has access to natural resources, but that is not sustainable over time, they're thinking, how do we swap our production to services and of course, technology? Because in the future, technology is part of the infrastructure.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (31:12)
Hmm.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (31:18)
is fundamental to our societies nowadays. So on the one hand, we need to create the resources so that we can be fairly independent. So we need to understand it, master it and so on. We cannot just be, you know, renting the resources from the US. That's not a good position to be in. Although the markets are open, so their technology is great. But what is the amount of dependencies that we can support?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (31:28)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (31:46)
And I think Europe is in a dangerous spot because our digital sovereignty is close to zero. We almost depend fully on US technology, which is neither good for Europe nor good for the US, by the way.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (31:46)
Mm.
Hmm.
Mm.
How do you think we should go about changing that as to Europeans sitting here? because as you obviously described, like there's huge cultural differences in Europe comparable to North America, for example. Like, how do you think that like we should be able in Europe to actually go ahead and become more sovereign?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (32:22)
So there's a number of good things happening and bad things, of course. number one, so of course, Norway and Sweden and all the way to Germany, speaking English comes naturally. The good thing is that in France, in Spain, in Italy now, the new generation, your generation, speaks perfect English. Why? Because of Netflix. I remember in my generation,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (32:43)
Hmm.
Thanks
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (32:48)
France being a big enough market, they would translate the TV shows coming from the US into French. It would be dubbed. Why? Because it made sense to dub for such a large population. Meanwhile, I was born and raised in northern France near Belgium. So the French speaking side of Belgium, three miles down the road from me, they had MTV.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (32:51)
Mm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (33:16)
and TV shows from the US not dubbed. So they spoke much better English than I did at the time. So what I'm saying is that zoom forward 2024, Europe speaks much better English today. Europe is able to export. Technology is something we can export. And unfortunately, we've had a very difficult sequence. First, we had Trump.
America first. other words, Trump is saying, and he's not wrong, he's saying that Europe is not paying enough for NATO defense. It's not wrong. It's actually factually true. But he's saying, underlying, and Biden is following the same track, which is America first. The world is changing. America first against China, which means Europe is secondary.
And we cannot rely on the US forever. We are 80 years past World War II. So what is the European project? Now, America first tells Europe you have to a little bit be on your own when it comes to military. Number two, COVID, where Europe realizes that it's not able to produce masks.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (34:16)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (34:36)
which is a shock, right? We're a sophisticated construct. We cannot produce masks. We have to import them from China. Number three.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (34:41)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (34:43)
Russia attacks Ukraine at our borders. Now that actually coming back to Trump America first and NATO, poses the question, what do we do in the event that the conflict spills over to the EU specifically? Right. But I'm sorry, but Ukraine is continental Europe already. This is Europe. So what is the project? What is
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (35:00)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (35:12)
the definition of borders? What is the definition of European values, common values? What is common?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (35:17)
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (35:18)
And then there's GenAI, generative AI, where we realize that that's it. In the US, they've been able to harness billions. And there's an article by Sequoia Capital that talks about the $600 billion question when it comes to GenAI. So Europe is, again, late to the party. So these four things are actually waking people up in Brussels.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (35:34)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (35:44)
Awareness is the first thing. How do we solve our conundrum? Number one, awareness. Being very humble of where we are, or rather, where we are not. Number two, the reason why the new project I'm working on is focusing on open source is because perhaps open source is our only hope. Because open source is a way to break down dependencies and proprietary solutions.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (36:03)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (36:10)
Open source turns you into the owner of your technology versus proprietary, which turns you into a renter forever. And when you rent, you do not control the price. The price can go up at any time, or you can be thrown out of your property. So owning more or being a renter less is the recipe. So we need to look at it.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (36:24)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (36:37)
from the two angles. We need to create more ownership, and we need to minimize dependencies. So to me, that is the solution. And Europe is actually quite well calibrated for open source. In fact, most of the
I don't have the number, but a lot of the products out there, even US companies, are technologies built out of Europe. Think World Wide Web, the HTTP protocol. That's Tim Berners-Lee, a British citizen working in Switzerland. If you think, I don't know, Linux, Linus Torvald is European, right?
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (36:57)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (37:15)
So Linux was called cancer by Microsoft. Steve Ballmer called Linux cancer because it was eating away at their Windows monopoly. Guess what? Microsoft Azure today is almost 100 % Linux.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (37:30)
Hmm.
Fairly biased thing to say at the time.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (37:37)
So it's interesting. Yeah, of course. And then of course, Azure was running on Windows NT, right? The one operating system that they controlled, but Windows NT is not a good piece of technology. It made a lot of money. It found its market, but it was not a good piece of technology for scalability and for being lean. And Linux provided that. And Red Hat is a company that built on top of Linux.
and also contributed to Linux, which is an open source company. And so that's a success that created a sort of contrarian approach. In fact, if you look at software in general, the two systems coexist at any given time. Proprietary solutions, closed, and open source solutions. Why? Because software and the way to build a system is very little.
very closely tied to the notion of knowledge. So knowledge allows you to build a system. And that system should be replicable in some ways. Because otherwise, we get stuck and trapped inside a system. And human beings don't like that. So it's a ping pong effect between closed and open. Of course, there are waves. And if you look at the web and the internet,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (38:40)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (39:02)
technology over the past 70 years, it's been ping pong between centralized, decentralized, closed, open, web one, web three with blockchain, and so on and so forth. this is big cycles that may take one or two decades each time, but societies and human beings really don't like to be boxed in.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (39:20)
Yeah.
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (39:26)
So the two systems exist and right now, I think that Europe is boxed in. So therefore, the only hope right now is to double down on reopening through open source and owning part of our destiny.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (39:42)
What's your goal, Stenjan? Like speaking of open source and your work, like how do you want to impact this?
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (39:50)
So I'm very lucky and I have no merit for the underlying asset that I'm building this company on top of. It's called Scikit-Learn. Scikit-Learn stands for Scientific Toolkit for Machine Learning. It was built from a research center in France by researchers who needed the tools to do their research in data science. So they built a sort of software library to do machine learning for them. It's really just applied math.
It's not rocket science, but almost, because it's a lot of formulas. It's a lot of math. And this technology was built over a decade or so. And now this technology has been downloaded a total of 1.5 billion times. It's crazy. Nobody knows it's French. Nobody knows it's European. Nobody knows it's coming from there. People take it for granted. It's open source. So if you break it down,
It's 80 million downloads per month, 22 % coming from the US, 25 % coming from China, 14 % coming from India, 5 % UK, 4 % Germany, 3 % France. So even France is in minority share of the usage. Why? Because the tool is universal. It is the universal screwdriver in the toolkit of data scientists.
The project and the company that I've built with co-founders were 14 co-founders. So it's significant and rare to be so many co-founders because I took the entire team from the INRIA Research Center. And so we've created this company around this team, which is a know-how. The technology belongs to the world already, and the license is open, permissive. It's a BSD3 license specifically.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (41:24)
You
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (41:40)
So that means that anyone can use the code, do anything they want with it, change it, sell it. They can do anything they want. But bottom line is everyone is using it for production and for research and for academia and for training data scientists. So this thing is what it is. We have the people who contribute a lot of code to it still. And the goal is to keep doing that. And then, of course, we also
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (42:05)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (42:09)
become the official operator of the brand. So, PsychicLearn is a brand that nobody knows except data scientists and to them it is the reference. To them, doing machine learning and tabular data, so quantitative database-like data sets, they use PsychicLearn by default. Now, we have to build a business around this.
And the inspiration is very much Red Hat, which means we build layers of services around it. And we're also building a new product, a new software product on top of it as well.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (42:39)
Mm.
Okay. Okay, cool. What is the timeline that you see that you'll be working on that and like the overall effect of like the macros, which we've talked about in Europe.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (42:54)
So this is a company that was created about a year ago. today, I'm very proud to say that we're launching the very first product called the Psychelearn certification. And so this is not a technical product per se. It's a product that certifies people to a certain level of proficiency in the technology. So this is what tech companies do.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (43:07)
Mm-hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (43:22)
This is what platform companies do when they have a product that is a platform. So Psychitlearn is a sort of platform. So we are launching a first level today. And in coming weeks, we'll be launching the expert and intermediary level as well. So we have associate, professional, expert. It's hard. I will not pass the test because I am not a data scientist. So I will fail miserably. But that's OK because the bar is high.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (43:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (43:52)
And so that's the first product where we're launching today. We have other things that we sell, and we partner with companies. There are sponsorship. There's also support services, professional services, and certification that I mentioned. And finally, the new product, which we'll see the light of day gradually. So there's the first item that is available today, and then gradually.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (44:08)
Mm-hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (44:21)
across 2025, the horizon is to be very ambitious. So there is no limit to the ambition for this company. This company aims to become the open source reference for machine learning technology for data scientists with a mission which is to continue delivering open source components to the benefit of France, Europe, the rest of the world.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (44:32)
in
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (44:48)
So that is a company with a mission, which makes us almost like a B Corp in the US. And the project is fantastic. The team is fantastic. And ideally, we'd like to aim for an IPO so that other people can acquire shares in the company down the line. Because we think that what we're producing is essential.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (44:53)
Mm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (45:16)
and in a way that is orthogonal to proprietary solutions.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (45:20)
Cool. Cool. Okay. That's really interesting. think I'll add it in the links below so that people can have a further look into it this fall because it came as a surprise to me as well that it was launch day today as we're recording it. So that's cool. One last question that we always like to ask people at the end of things here, like to make it more time relevant. Like if there was one thing now,
given like all of the things that you've been through and the challenges that you're now facing taking this out. What is like one thing that you wish to learn during the next period and figure out for yourself and your endeavors.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (45:56)
I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm very optimistic in nature. But what I'm trying to build here is something which is not typical of entrepreneurs that in order to succeed have to be optimistic, but typically statistically fail because most startups fail. So entrepreneurs try again. Sometimes they give up and come back to the...
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (46:13)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (46:21)
to being an employee somewhere in a safe company, quote unquote.
Here we have an asset that is important already. And so there is a great responsibility. So we cannot fail.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (46:33)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (46:34)
So we have to minimize risk taking while maximizing success and ambition. So it's a very, very tricky situation. But what motivates me is no longer my optimism now, is how do we break this cycle? And can we break this cycle? Because I'm not, I am optimistic in nature in what I do. That's how I wake up in the morning.
But then I can only do what I can do myself with the people around me and the team. But I cannot control what Europe does because I do not participate at that level yet. I'm an entrepreneur, so I can talk to people. But then we have our own leadership per country. We have a European construct with its own leadership. Then there are external forces. Again, we have natural allies culturally and militarily, like the US.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (47:01)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (47:30)
So, and then I would argue that, you know, we have democracy also to care for, because if we're European, then we cherish supposedly democracies. And therefore, how do we perpetuate that model? And how do we participate in that? So I really, really wish to make sure that what I do actually aligns with this greater goal. In other words,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (47:35)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (47:57)
Technology in and of itself is quite uninteresting. Because if you look at human species, we haven't evolved very much. We wake up in the morning, we eat, we do things, we work, there's labor involved. Then we sleep, then we reproduce and move on to the next generation. So technology itself is just something that helps us keep busy. But things are accelerating.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (48:15)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (48:24)
Right. And that is the issue. Right. So technology is also a factor that accelerates things and big tech is fascinating, but they are not distributing technology and the benefits of technology in a way that is reasonable. So I'm a capitalist. I believe that capital should reap the benefits of good management and value capture. But at some point.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (48:50)
Hmm.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (48:51)
it has to redistribute value where it's captured. Typically when Big Tech does not pay tax in Europe, that's wrong because they make a lot of money on top of European attention. Right? So how do we make sure that that's redistributed? So if they do not do it naturally, because there is a loophole between Amsterdam and Dublin, because you people specializing in optimizing that, if they do not distribute value,
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (48:56)
Yeah.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (49:21)
If regulation is late to the game, distributing value, then how do we participate in capturing value on our side locally and do the reverse, also distribute value globally and bring cash, bring income and revenue and taxation? So to me, it's a big equation. And I really hope we can make a dent.
Buro / Breakthrough Moments (49:40)
Hmm.
Cool. Okay. Really interesting. Yeah. Well, let's make that a wrap. Like thanks a lot for coming on. It's been a pleasure having you here. Yeah. And wish you all the best of luck in your endeavors.
Yann Lechelle (Probabl) (49:53)
Likewise.
Thank you.
