Uniting Cultures: Navigating Mergers in Tech Companies with Vincent Jong

Eric (00:01.614)
Hey, Vincent, good morning. Welcome to Innovators Collab. Happy to have you here. How you doing?

Vincent Jong (00:05.866)
Morning, Eric. Great to be here. Thanks. All good. The sun is shining. Ready for a good day. How are you?

Eric (00:11.35)
Yeah, I'm pretty good. Sun is shining here in Bucharest. The kids are off today. It's a holiday. So today and tomorrow, obviously, uh, when they're here, I can't get much work done, but I'm going to get them out of the house because the sun is shining. Now, where are you calling from by the way?

Vincent Jong (00:25.722)
I'm based in Barcelona. I'm not Spanish, as you might guess, but moved here about three and a half years ago. It's been one of the best decisions.

Eric (00:30.548)
Yeah

Eric (00:34.438)
Okay. I envy you. I envy the, uh, the sangria, the, uh, the tapas, the siesta, uh, the good weather and the beautiful beaches. So I'm a little bit envious right now, Vincent. That's right. Glad. Okay. See. All right. Let me give a background, a little bit of your history so the audience can get an understanding of who you are. You've been in the sales and marketing software space for about 10 years. You ran your own startup, Funnel Fox for around eight years. And after that, you led an enterprise product unit at zoom info.

Vincent Jong (00:43.106)
That's right. Don't forget paella and jamon.

Eric (01:04.058)
Currently you are the VP at Dealfront where recently you helped merge a sales driven company called EchoBot that was started in Germany with a product led company Leadfeeder out of Finland. And you also have a hotline called the product Pepper Hotline where anyone who has a question around product led growth can access the hotline for free via your newsletter and you will do your best to answer their questions.

Vincent, what are one or two of the most interesting questions you've received so far from this hotline?

Vincent Jong (01:36.29)
Cool. So we only started recently, right? But of course, questions have been coming in long before that. So let me think through some of those. I mean, in many cases, should we even be doing this? Like, hey, we're selling, just recently, we're selling to enterprise at $1 million contracts. It's like, well, maybe don't start a freemium, right? It seems.

kind of obvious, but there's so much buzz around PLG that people are not sure anymore if they should be looking at this, yes or no, which is kind of one of the things I'm trying to clarify as well, right? It's not always the thing you should do. So, that's, you know, but it's often very specific. It's like, hey, we have this specific product and this is what the customer is doing. How do we get them from this group into talking with a salesperson and things like that? So.

So nothing too exotic so far, but it's been fun to kind of open up that channel.

Eric (02:35.17)
All right, you hear that audience, nothing too exotic so far. So let's, uh, let's send some exotic questions after this interview over there to Vincent. Okay. Now, before we get into deal friend, just want to know a little bit about your, uh, your history and, uh, what was the first entrepreneurial thing you ever did? Vincent.

Vincent Jong (02:41.91)
Surprise me, yeah.

Vincent Jong (02:54.914)
So the first thing, so I'm someone who kind of, once I think something's a good idea, just start doing it, and I don't get caught up too much in research. So my first company was probably, I was 16 or 17, and it was selling stuff on the Dutch version of eBay. So game controllers, gaming controllers of like a secondary brand for Nintendo and stuff.

which was kind of like my first experience into that field after having a few little jobs as a teenager. I was kind of like, okay, I can get this. I know people want it. Let's start figuring that out. So I did that for a little while, but then quickly moved on to other things as well. But that was the first one.

Eric (03:42.638)
What was one of your favorite Nintendo games?

Vincent Jong (03:45.778)
Ooh, probably Super Smash Bros. But...

Eric (03:48.694)
Okay, you know, I never play that. Yeah, but I heard it's a great one.

Vincent Jong (03:51.89)
It is definitely. Yeah, you should try.

Eric (03:54.21)
Yeah, well I got hooked on Super Mario Kart and I remember, yeah, I remember playing it online with other people across the world. My roommate had it and we would play that almost every night for like, you know, half an hour at least. Ha ha ha.

Vincent Jong (03:57.011)
As well a good one, yeah.

Vincent Jong (04:06.442)
I spent a good amount of my life on GoldenEye as well, on the Nintendo 64. That's been a fun one as well, because that was a great one for multiplayer, right? You'd still have everyone on the same screen, so you could kind of, and you would have to be respectful not to look at other people's, you know, box, because you could basically see where they were, right? That was like a whole ethics around.

Eric (04:24.638)
Yeah, yeah. Now were you just an amateur gamer or were you pretty serious?

Vincent Jong (04:29.002)
No, well, I'm amateur in terms of performance, serious in terms of time commitment, I guess.

Eric (04:32.886)
Okay. Yeah. No, there's a little bit of, um, I guess you would say trend here. A lot of founders that I interview are people in the tech scene. They were all either like serious gamers or they spend a lot of time playing, you know, gaming. Very cool.

Vincent Jong (04:45.354)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. Counter-Strike was also one that wasn't Nintendo, but like, Counter-Strike, when it wasn't an official game yet, that was also one that I spent a fair amount of time on.

Eric (04:57.578)
Okay, okay. Also, what was the best advice either your mom or dad ever gave you?

Vincent Jong (05:06.99)
There's more things to life than just speeding it up, I think was one. I actually got it on a mug. So I guess it comes to mind because I've seen it many times in the morning when, when drinking my tea or coffee, but yeah, that's, you know, try to live in the moment. Enjoy it. I think it's cliche, but for someone like me, it's a, it's an important.

Eric (05:31.67)
Yeah, no, I think most founders, entrepreneurs are always thinking head, when to push things forward, they get an idea and it's like, go, go. And it sounds like that's you.

Vincent Jong (05:39.77)
Yeah.

Eric (05:41.959)
Alright, well speaking of that, one of your startups that you found was called PhonoFox. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Vincent Jong (05:48.194)
Sure. So Funnel Fox was, when I started Funnel Fox, I'd been in a few sales roles before that, actually, with another tech startup and also during my time as a student. And I'd seen a few things in sales that just didn't work, like the basics, right? Like I've sent emails. This was the time before you had email cadencing software, like Outreach or SalesLove. And so I would send an email and then I would have to remember that I needed to reach out to this person. And that's kind of like, that was like such a basic problem.

I was like, okay, I'm going to build something that does that automatically. So the first version of funnel Fox was what Gmail does for you nowadays. Like you sent this email three days ago. Do you want to follow up? It was literally that it was a feature, but, but that was what the first thing was. And I wanted to do something that I could just, um, build myself and try myself without, you know, requiring too big of a

dependencies on others. I'd done a few companies before that and often either like the co-founder wasn't committed enough or I struggled finding tech people. So I figured this one, I just want to get started. And when I have something, it'll be easier to find people. Right. And so that's why that was that, but it grew over it. So I ran that for eight years in the end as a solo founder, um, and built a team around it, we raised funding, um, and went international and, and so the whole roller coaster of things was in there.

And eventually it really became a much bigger thing, of course. So it was around like figuring out, kind of going against this idea that still exists today of quantity over quality, right? We were saying, well, yeah, everyone's helping you send more emails and make more calls, but how about reaching the right person at the right time with the right message and just send a few less things, right? That was the final product we were on the market with, with Funnel Fox.

Eric (07:29.623)
Right.

Vincent Jong (07:38.634)
I think in terms of timing, that might've been two years too soon. Now it seems like there's a lot of momentum for that with the changes that Google and Yahoo are announcing and so on and the whole Gen.AI push where everyone's just sending everything automatically. But yeah, that was the focus of the

Eric (07:45.87)
Yeah.

Eric (07:59.254)
Yeah, what was the biggest difference from being like a solo preneur to leading a large enterprise product for Zoom Info?

Vincent Jong (08:08.162)
So the biggest difference was kind of immediately in the first week when you come in. So if you're like the CEO of a company and the founder, then everything is your responsibility. Right? The whole board, anything that doesn't get done, you're going to have to do it or you're going to have to find someone who can do it. And if you fail, that means people lose their jobs. They might have kids. You know, like your investors are going to be angry or like disappointed. Actually, it's a better term there.

Um, and, and also it, it's failure to yourself. Right. And then, you know, when I joined zoom info and this is nothing specific to zoom info, but just, I think any big company that you join, people were all concerned about something not working out, you know, like, Oh, we do this. What if it doesn't work? And this guy's like, yeah, well, what if it doesn't work? What happens? Right. Just try the next thing. And this whole risk, nobody loses their job. Um, you know, typically, and, and like.

Eric (08:54.167)
Mmm.

Eric (09:03.81)
Yeah, yeah.

Vincent Jong (09:05.378)
The company is fine. Like we're in a good position. So let's just figure out how to make this work. Let's just try what makes most sense and continue. Right. So this, the stress level or like the risk level that I perceived there was much, much lower.

Eric (09:20.226)
Yeah, no, that hits a hundred percent because most of my life I worked for large companies, typically four or five hundred employee type companies. And I never experienced that sort of anxiety. Like you said, what if we roll this out and it doesn't work? Not until recently, about three years ago when I got into tech and I started working at startups and I had never talked to a customer, Vincent, my entire life, even though I had been in marketing, marketing director, never spoken to a customer.

Vincent Jong (09:26.403)
Mm-hmm.

Vincent Jong (09:40.119)
Mm.

Eric (09:48.502)
And it wasn't until I got into the startup space and I realized, no, we talk to customers all the time and that's something that you're going to have to do. But it was just so valuable to get that inside, get that feedback, make changes, you know, as quickly as you can and try to roll new things out that your, your top performing customers really wanted and appreciate it. And then of course, when things don't go well, you know, there was layoffs and, and I've, I've been a part of that, uh, in, in my history. So I know exactly what you mean. Now let's get into deal front.

Vincent Jong (09:55.958)
Right.

Eric (10:16.298)
Merging a sales driven company with a product led one. It sounds like that's quite the journey. Can you walk us through some of the challenges you face when combining the cultures of EchoBot and Leadfeeder? I mean, these are two different companies, but also from two different countries and how you navigated those waters to create, I guess you would say maybe a cohesive go-to-market platform.

Vincent Jong (10:16.631)
Mm-hmm.

Vincent Jong (10:37.674)
Yeah, for sure. So a bit of context, right? So EchoBot was in the sales intelligence space. So a strong German leader, for example, on company data and contact data, whereas Leadfeeder was in the web research identification space, so knowing which companies visited your website. And this was a merger of equals initiated by a growth equity fund, Great Hill Partners, that kind of thing.

thing here to go for. And the good thing of it was that it was complementary, right? So there weren't like, there wasn't a lot of competing functionality where we had to pick one or the other. We just had to make it fit together. But it was still a merger of equals. So you're always kind of looking for, you end up always compromising somehow, because you don't want to pick one over the other. Although some, and we did though, in some cases you have to, right? But that was...

We were a bit slower in making that happen because we wanted to make the right decision. We didn't want to rush into things like when, for example, a bigger company like Zoom Info would buy something, the terms are set. You just follow what Zoom Info would do to a large extent. But in this case, we had to take everything apart and put it back together. And this was also the reason why I took the role because I thought that'd be fun. So...

And it has been an experience. And even though people think, oh, Europe, it's, you know, sometimes they think that Europe is very similar, right? It's Western countries, but countries are very different, right? So Finnish culture is very different from German culture, for example. And the good thing is everyone's very open to this. So it's a fun thing. It's, it's in the end, what we position around, right? Like, like our, our expertise and the way our products are built and, and our go to market and how we help customers is all around.

understanding Europe, understanding that it's different, that if you go to market in Germany, maybe GDPR is going to be a lot more important than if you're talking with a company in Finland. Doesn't mean they don't care, but it's not the first item they might bring up, right? And so the messaging is different. And so, coming back to the question about culture, of course. So there's a lot of transparency around that. There's a lot of fun around that.

Vincent Jong (13:00.114)
Actually, the companies were as different as you could imagine. So one was on premise, the other was on cloud. And in terms of one used Google, the other used Microsoft, everything. Like.

Eric (13:12.324)
Oh man, I see some wars happening right there because there's some people that are just like anti Microsoft and the same for Google. So what were some of the things that you did to like help get people integrated and collaborating?

Vincent Jong (13:14.891)
That's right. Yeah.

Vincent Jong (13:24.222)
Right. So I think, and this was obviously assessed before this merger was ever considered, but the one thing that really made it work is that the way that people viewed each other and wanted to take care of each other and help each other was very similar in both companies. So you can be from a different country, but you still treat people with respect and you still try to have fun at work and like those little things, they were very similar. And that's why when you put people in a room, they could just figure things out together, right? And

Um, so yeah, that that's kind of, but we're working through it was in the end, just like we took, we took our, our time, not saying in, in like, we took it easy, but we took, you know, you could rush this thing in, in six months. Um, and then you'd probably have like something duct taped together and, uh, well we, you know, took a bit longer, but I think the one thing that we did succeed on is that we are one company, we have all the teams.

Like where teams need to be brought together, they are one team now. There is no, like you are Leadfeeder, you are EchoBot. Like this doesn't exist. And this is in my view, one of the hardest things to get right. You know, like sure, there are things in the product that we want to enable further so that you can do more with the combination, right? The bigger idea. But you know, you start with the team and when you have the team in the right place, then it's a lot easier to build those things.

Eric (14:48.982)
Yeah, yeah. Back a long time ago, I used to work for an airline called Continental Airlines based out of Houston, they merged with United Airlines based out of Chicago. Even though people considered that it was not necessarily an equal merger, but we were very, very both very large airlines. The branding and the name, uh, basically went with United all the way from there on, how did you guys decide which, uh, which company that you were going to focus on in terms of, you know, the branding?

Vincent Jong (15:15.414)
Right. So a lot of this was initially driven by the two former CEOs, so Sebastian and Pekka, and they work really well together as well. And both of them, you know, they share this vision of like, you know, the bigger go-to-market platform that we can be together with what we have today and the further products that will be added to that. And they both agreed that neither of the names was actually the right name for that.

So that made things a little bit easier. Right. So it's like, okay, if it's not here, then let's just come up with the right new name and let's own that together. Right. And that was kind of a natural outcome. We did notice though, that in some cases, it might make sense to keep a brand name around. So you might notice that we're still talking about Leadfeeder, but we're talking about Leadfeeder as a product, not as a company, right? So.

The market just knew Leadfeeder as web visitor identification, even though the company had already developed two other products that are now branded with a different name completely. But when people think Leadfeeder, they think, oh, identifying companies on my website, so we decided that would be a waste of brand value to throw away. So we kept that, but it's Leadfeeder by Dealfront. And Dealfront is the main brand. So it was a fun process to come up with those names.

all the fun of finding domains that still fit. But I think in the end that worked out really well and everyone likes it.

Eric (16:44.09)
Okay, now you're a bit of an outsider because you're Dutch and I think you spent some time in New York, right?

Vincent Jong (16:49.834)
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, when we went through the AngelTed accelerator there. Yeah.

Eric (16:54.09)
Okay, and then now you're working with these companies, one from Finland, the other one out of Germany, as an observer, outsider observer, what were some of the cultural differences that you saw that just maybe either surprised you or thought, okay, that's interesting?

Vincent Jong (17:09.724)
Hmm.

So...

Vincent Jong (17:17.022)
Management cultures were different. And I think that's, uh, and that's not even just culture. Like there's, um, national culture and then there's just culture, like organizational culture, I guess. Right. And, um, so there were differences there that, that we, um, you know, you learn them as you go kind of as, as with every person you start working with or, or company, like as you're, you're going through, through the work, you start realizing that there's, um, other ways of approaching things.

I'm trying to come up with a good example here to be more specific, but.

Eric (17:54.394)
Okay, well, if you think of an example, let me know. And then in terms of like Dealfront, because that's the brand that you guys went with, what was your, like the key milestones for this integration? Like what were some of the key things that you guys wanted to focus on? Let's get these things right first before we focus on doing these other things. Can you share any information with us?

Vincent Jong (18:00.042)
Mm.

Vincent Jong (18:10.755)
Hmm.

Vincent Jong (18:15.838)
Yeah, absolutely. So, so we wanted to launch the new brand and the platform proposition on 3rd of April this year, right? Um, and that's really, that was the big looming deadline that we had hanging over our heads for, for a long time, uh, or like for, for the first year, basically, because that was pretty much like the one year anniversary, roughly, of, of the merger announcement. Uh, and so what we wanted.

at the very least at that point is to announce the brand, announce the proposition, and have it be that people only need one account to use all of our products. So it might not integrate perfectly yet and so on, but at least let's be able to say that we're one platform and not just different products under the same brand. So we got a lot of that done.

But it's like we've still been working on it after April a bit as well, I have to admit. It's just a lot, right? These products at Bowdoin build over 10 years. And, you know, there's always, you know, edge cases, other things to think about, you know, unexpected things that take the attention. But that was a big milestone for us. And I think the next one is going to come at the beginning of next year, where we've been really working on...

enabling these cross product use cases, right? So, you know, being able to select an audience in one place, then knowing when they visited your website, being able to run ads on the same audience and all almost at a click of a button, right? That that's the idea. Um, and, um, you know, those things are going to become a lot easier in the coming months.

Eric (20:00.438)
Yeah. Now kind of the integration. I mean, some of the, I, some of the questions I'm wondering, like, like who decided which team was going to create, you know, the, the sales materials for deal front. I mean, was all of that decided beforehand? Like this is the team that's going to create, you know, these different, uh, these different assets, or is that something that you, you guys, okay, let's get these team collaborating and then we'll decide what, you know, what team members we're going to have in charge of, you know, whatever projects. So it just like.

considering the sales materials, for example, like who created that? What department, what company?

Vincent Jong (20:32.247)
Mm-hmm.

Vincent Jong (20:35.522)
So we were operating as one company when we did that. So we put the teams together and then started to work on that where possible. So in some cases for a while, especially until the brand launch, we kept, for example, the sales team separate still because they were still selling the original product. And there was no integrated experience. So that didn't make sense yet to merge. But where we could, so for example, in product, we merged right.

Eric (20:58.024)
Right.

Vincent Jong (21:05.302)
at the beginning when I joined because we had to set the strategy for the future. And when creating the materials for the platform, that wasn't also done by, oh, should Ecobot do this or should Leadfeeder do this? No, marketing does this. Right. And so I think we were already past that point when that consideration had to be made.

Eric (21:26.218)
Okay. Did you see any teams, um, integrate and collaborate, uh, sooner, uh, versus other departments, you know, I'm a marketer and I feel like other marketers would probably get along very well because we kind of do the same thing, but I'm just wondering if engineers from different countries, if they collaborate pretty easily or not.

Vincent Jong (21:33.525)
Oh yeah.

Vincent Jong (21:45.114)
So everyone goes on a different timeline, at least in our case, because the way that product sets the strategy and the plan, then engineering needs to get involved to see if that's even feasible and start the execution. Once that becomes a real thing, we have to start talking with product marketing and with marketing to bring this thing to market. And once we have that, we need to start involving sales and then they need to start doing their part once it goes live. Right. So...

we've seen clearly this timeline. For everyone, the transition was about six months, but depending on when they started. So that was very clear. Some teams though, integration didn't need to be as deeply right away. So we weren't suddenly gonna mix up all the engineering squads, people who had been working on the lead feeder product before would remain.

there, right? They would keep working on that. So there you're talking more about maybe reporting lines changing, but the operating squads remain the same. Yeah.

Eric (22:52.322)
Any advice for founders or companies that are looking to undertake a similar journey, you know, acquisition?

Vincent Jong (23:00.302)
Think it through. And I'm not saying that because this is a negative experience here, but it is a ton of work. It is a ton of distraction. So make sure you do it at the right time. I am not able to say yet if we did it at the right time because the market went down. I'm not sure yet if that was a good or a bad thing in the end. So like the opportunity cost has of course been less. Because you slow down when you do.

right? So the slowdown during a year that's already slower, of course, is, you know, maybe we haven't lost as much, but at the same time it makes other things harder, right? So there's more pressure there. I mean, so that's one part. I would ideally not do a merger of equals just if it's your first one. So, you know, like ideally try to have one company that, like a bigger one, acquiring a smaller one.

But this wasn't the first time we did this. So I think, but it comes with a lot more challenges. But the big thing is, and of course we are looking also at M&A ourselves right now from the combined new platform position. And it's a big decision. And I've spoken with many other companies that bought five companies and nothing came out of it.

And if that happens, then you have, you know, you've not only spent that money, but you also don't have the revenue that you thought you were going to get from it. And so it's like with any new hire or, you know, yeah, with new hires, that you can't just hire someone to solve your problem, right? So you need to validate and know exactly what you want there. And once you have high confidence, then an acquisition can be a very good way to actually, you know, either buy revenue or technology that will help.

faster.

Eric (25:00.098)
When businesses discover deal front, what are like the top one or two things that they get really excited about?

Vincent Jong (25:06.05)
So we have the two use cases that people come in on for web visit identification. It's just seeing the companies, right? So they set up the tracker script on their website. And as soon as companies start visiting their website, they start seeing the names, the logos, and they can start digging in as, oh, who actually works at this company? Can I reach out to them? So this is like a really good motion, like kind of a discovery motion for those companies.

Um, on the sales intelligence side, um, it's, you know, seeing what's actually available in my market, right? Figuring out how, how can I find the right target audience and realizing, oh, wow, there's actually thousands of companies and okay, this is my ICP. This is these are the people that I want to go after. Um, and, um, you know, being able to then put that into the systems that, that you do the work.

Eric (25:58.223)
And what are you excited about for the next 12 months for Dealfront?

Vincent Jong (26:01.122)
So I think in the next 12 months, we are slowly but steadily moving on from like merger topics towards real the growth topics. So that's the fun part, right? So these integrated use cases, some of the new ideas that we've been holding off on because we wanted to get the foundations right, but we're really keen to get into that. That's all coming like in the next year. Starting in Q1 already, there's a lot of new product announcements that will be coming out.

And I think we've been a bit more quiet this year. We wanted to get our house in order. But the next year is going to be, I think it's going to be very exciting and fun to see what that will bring.

Eric (26:43.531)
When it comes to growth here for you guys, how are you guys going to leverage your own technology to help you guys grow?

Vincent Jong (26:48.298)
Yeah, we have a project for that even right now to make sure that, you know, the best thing we can do is tell a customer, we got in touch with you by using our own technology and this is how we did it, right? And this is how we kept track of it and so on. So we really want to be able to tell that story and we're highlight where we've basically said, let's solve even all the little things. If our team can't use it, then we cannot expect a customer to use it. And we are using all our own technology, of course, but there's these little things. So we're having like bi-weekly catch ups.

be looking into this with the key stakeholders in sales, in marketing. It's like, hey, why are we not using this part? Okay. Let's figure it out. Let's solve it and then, um, make sure that we get the most out of it so that we can also tell our customers what works.

Eric (27:34.134)
Absolutely. I mean, I don't know what the average percentage is, but for every tool that I use, I probably barely use maybe 15% of its power. I mean, you know, take camera, for example, for the longest time, I didn't know you can remove a background image in Canva. And I was actually paying for another tool to do that until like somehow I just like stumbled upon it and I just felt like the biggest idiot, but it's one of those things, like if you don't communicate what your product does repeatedly, like repeatedly.

then you can't really expect your customers to figure it out on themselves.

Vincent Jong (28:03.682)
That's right. And the other part is especially in sales and marketing technology is like when someone reaches out to me, uh, by email says, Oh, we have this best LinkedIn outbounding tool. I'm like, so why didn't you use LinkedIn? Why are you reaching me by email? Right. Like, so, so that's the simple example, right. But, but like you have to show that it works if you can't use your own tool. In some cases, there's a real reason that you can, but, but in most cases it's like, well, if it was so good, then why didn't you reach me through the channel you say that, that you manage?

In our case, that's definitely what we want to.

transparent.

Eric (28:41.014)
Yeah, great, great. Okay, let's just jump into some rapid fire questions. The first one for you, Vincent, you ready? Okay, fill in the blank. The Academy Award for blank goes to Vincent.

Vincent Jong (28:45.858)
Let's do it.

Vincent Jong (28:55.742)
embarrassing situations.

Eric (28:59.598)
For example?

Vincent Jong (29:00.758)
Oh, well, because I'm a person that just typically does not before thinking, but like soon after, I tend to sometimes, you know, have some trial and error mistakes. Like, I mean, do you want to hear the example?

Eric (29:18.058)
No, that's okay. No, as we say in the States, you put your foot in your mouth. Almost. Yeah. Okay. Blank is an unusual food or drink I consume.

Vincent Jong (29:20.798)
Right.

Vincent Jong (29:35.566)
unusual. I... Ginger shots?

ginger shot. It's like pressed ginger in the morning, which is apparently good for immune, someone said. Yes, yes it is. So it kind of burns through the throat. It's great in winter. Has a bit of that wasabi vibe going, so to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric (29:43.258)
What is that? Is that just like?

Eric (29:47.834)
Oh my god.

Isn't that really strong?

Eric (29:58.79)
I... yeah, yeah. No, I used to cut raw ginger and put a little bit in my smoothies, but sometimes if I put too much, I could taste it. I'm like, oh wow, that's... yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. All right, last one here. Blank is a contest, a game or a challenge I have won in the past.

Vincent Jong (30:06.546)
Yeah, it goes into nose, right? It's like... Yeah.

Vincent Jong (30:27.586)
That brings me, I think that might be judo competition that I won. Like that I actually competed in a formal competition. This is a long time ago. Like I was a kid still at the time.

Eric (30:37.911)
Right.

Judo, that's the one that the actor Steve is at Seagal or he used to do, I think.

Vincent Jong (30:44.95)
I think he did also Jujitsu, but maybe also, yeah. But of course there's a lot of similarities in our moves. Yes.

Eric (30:48.334)
Okay, okay, okay.

Eric (30:53.93)
Where did you learn this as a kid in the Netherlands?

Vincent Jong (30:55.114)
Yeah, yeah. So it's quite common in the Netherlands to do that as a sport. So I did that on, but as I said, I was really young, like this was up until high school, you know. So, and then I wanted to be part of the cool kids. So I stopped.

Vincent Jong (31:12.306)
Yes, apparently not. That's what I figured out. Yeah, which is obviously not true, but that's what I thought at the time.

Eric (31:12.576)
So you stopped. The cool kids weren't doing judo.

Eric (31:22.298)
Yeah. Hopefully the cool kids weren't doing too many bad things, you know, but, well, very cool, very interesting. Uh, do you still practice at all? Do you keep it up at all or no? Yeah. But I think it's one of those things like riding a bicycle. It's, I feel like if you practice it a number of times, then you still know how to do some of the things, right?

Vincent Jong (31:25.151)
No.

Vincent Jong (31:31.978)
Oh no.

Vincent Jong (31:42.338)
There's some of the moves that in terms of how you'd use the body or the strength of others or like rolling when you fall or things like that. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Eric (31:53.122)
Okay. All right, all right. Vincent, thank you so much for coming on Innovators Can Laugh.

Vincent Jong (31:57.962)
Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.

Eric (32:01.334)
Yeah, my pleasure. I'm going to put links to Vincent's LinkedIn, as well as Dealfront, the website and the show notes for everybody listening. I'll be back next week interviewing another person from the tech scene here in Europe. Thank you for listening.