Hollandse Nieuwe

It's like, oh, okay.

Now, I knew that this digital experience was amazing, but I also knew that there was this transition from SMS to messengers because I had seen the KPN data figures and KPN was saying, hey, we've seen this collapse in our SMS numbers and it's because of this new thing called WhatsApp.

And

WhatsApp was gonna, it was just, it was like a wildfire through Europe because Europe was charging a fortune to kids for the SMS.

I always keep in mind, it's just the word logic.

I mean, where's the logic of this deal, right? Why is it KPNs? That's what you want to have, sort of logic combination and something that adds value for customers and gets KPN closer to customers to add more value, to be more part of their daily problems and daily strategy.

The exit returns are relevant, but not the number one focus of the company.

And they want to see commercial revenues for KPN because of a proposition or because of the commercial partnership.

So last year we were at 20 million plus in revenues and this year...

Welcome back everyone to the European VC Podcast.

Today we are talking about KPN ventures.

Most corporate venture funds die quietly.

we should push record and like pick a topic and make it fair

Call out to one of my old bosses He's not old the like the length of time between when we worked and now is a long time bosses Morgan Reed who I've been trying to respond to him and it's not been going through I can only assume it's something to do with my carrier KPN you suck Anyway Morgan sent in a suggestion and said that we should talk about difficult customers and or bosses and how you did slash should handle them.

And out of an abundance of caution, because Morgan is quote unquote important in this world, I suppose.

I don't know.

And before that, I was the CISO at Avast, an antivirus company that you may know.

And before that, I was the CISO at a telco called KPN Telecom.

So I'm just a security nerd who was kind of hellbent on trying to do something about the vulnerability problems that we had as a CISO.

And that's why we started Aisle.

Okay, well, I can just tell you, like, these are obviously places to test your stuff where you have a code base and there's a sort of litmus test by having a maintainer actually provably agree with you that, you know, you basically have... an unbiased observer who's telling you if it's legit or not, you know, who definitely has skin in the game.

So those are good things.

But the thing is, I should tell you that from a very personal perspective, when I was CISO at KPN, I was convinced that the world would end because of a Tomcat vulnerability, you know, that nobody had... to try to resolve and that this is really kind of the problem of our times.

It's that KXED comic.

They just want to have connectivity.

So if you have a mobile phone, of course, you look, hey, I'm connected to EE or something like that, or I'm connected to KPN, Telefonica, take a name.

You see it in an IoT device or the devices we are focusing on.

You never see it.

Sono Bahal is an executive career coach, a career strategist, and the founder of Supercharge.

She spent nearly two decades as an HR director at companies including GE, PwC, and KPN, and and working across 10 industries and three continents and holds an MBA from INSEAD where she has also served as the official interviewer for MBA applicants.

She's been named a LinkedIn top voice.

Her podcast, How I Got Hired has been named to the top career podcast guide for four years running and her YouTube channel has earned a silver play button.