This week’s podcast is about my visit to Ant Group.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

If you’re interested in talking digital strategy and transformation for your business, contact us at TechMoat Consulting.

——-

Related articles:

• Ant Financial Is 3 Platform Business Models Combined. (Jeff’s Asia Tech Class – Daily Lesson / Update)
• Ant Financial’s Big Money is in Asset-Light Credit Tech (Jeff’s Asia Tech Class – Daily Lesson / Update)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• Payment Platforms

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• Ant Group / Ant Financial / Alipay / Alipay+

—–transcription below

Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast where we analyze the best digital businesses of the US, China and Asia. And the topic for today, three strategy lessons from my visit to Ant Group headquarters, which is in Hangzhou, China. This was part of one of the China tech tours we’ve done recently. And this was in Hangzhou. Really interesting visit. I’ve actually been thinking about this one probably more than any of the others. I’m gonna write quite a bit about this. Those of you who are subscribers, I sent out one article today. I’m gonna send out a couple more. Ant Group, Ant used to be Ant Financial, then they changed it to Ant Group, kind of Ali Pay and all of that. There’s a lot more going on there than I had realized. Like… I mean, I took a huge number of notes. I think this is probably the company I have underestimated the most. And I already thought it was pretty awesome. So we’re gonna go into that in pretty good detail over the next week or so, mostly for subscribers on email, but we’ll talk a little bit on the podcast. Anyways, that’s what we’ll talk about today. Really interesting. I’ve been thinking about this company a lot for the last couple of weeks. Okay, let’s see, anything? As mentioned, we have another tech tour coming up, which is gonna be in November. This is gonna be more focused on retail, e-commerce, what brands should do, merchants should do, CPG groups. So more focused on the retail e-commerce side than say, AI. Well, I mean, that’s relevant there, but let’s say something like search engines, which wouldn’t be as directly relevant. So that’s gonna be in November. If that’s something you’re interested in, send us a note, you can go over to techmoatconsulting.com. You’ll see the details there. We have the sort of brochure put up now. You can see what we’re planning to do. Reach out, and that’s either for individuals or for companies. So we’re gonna sort of balance that out. So either of those, give us a call. Other thing that’s going on, Techmoat Consulting, which is the boutique consulting firm. We’ve been really growing the last year. much more formalized than say in the past, doing engagements, you know, focused on digital strategy. What should a company do? What’s the winning strategy for a company look like? What are the major sources of disruption? What should you be worried about? It’s a lot about sifting out from all the digital initiatives that you have to do. What really matters in terms of winning and what is actually the big threat and what can you ignore? So if any of that’s interesting, you can go over to techmoconsulting.com. Give us a call and we can have a talk about what your company’s doing and see if there’s something that makes sense And if not, we’ll just talk about it and see if we can be helpful. Anyways, okay standard disclaimer Nothing in this podcaster in my writing or website is investment advice The numbers and information for me to any guests may be incorrect the views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate Overall investing is risky. This is not investment legal or tax advice do your own research And with that let’s get into the content So we were heading, basically we started this tour in Beijing. We went down to Hangzhou, took the train, which is actually kind of my favorite way to go between those two parts of China. Anytime you can avoid the airports between Beijing, Shanghai area, it’s pretty good idea because they tend to get delayed pretty good. And plus the trains are real nice. Really pretty comfortable. So anyways, we did that, headed down to Hangzhou. And I really have to like… We have a group that does these and like… It’s very helpful that there’s other people sort of doing the operational aspects and hotels and dinners and all that stuff because I tend to be so interested in the content and the thinking and the companies and the strategy that I forget like, look, this is a lot about having fun. So other people kind of always remind, look, we’re gonna go out in Hangzhou and have some fun. We’re gonna do hot pot. We’re gonna do Haidilao, which is really great hot pot restaurants in China. We’re gonna go out to the West Lake, which is kind of why people go to Hangzhou. So that was actually, it’s a lot of fun. Hanjo is a good place and it’s helpful that there are less obsessed people involved that sort of not terribly politely remind me. It’s not all about the content, at least not for normal people. Anyway, so down to Hanjo, fantastic. I’ve been going to Hanjo, I don’t know, 15 years. It’s gotten a lot more sort of sophisticated. It used to be sort of local. Like there were lakes and you had the little paddle boats and then there were little bars on the lake. But it was pretty low key and domestic. And now it’s like Gucci stores and luxurious Starbucks and boat tours on the lake. It’s a lot more developed. Big surprise, Chinese companies are really good at real estate. Hangzhou, sort of one of the old capitals is a place that gets a lot of development. So anyways, lots of luxury shops, you walk along the lake. It’s pretty good. And basically, if you haven’t been there, Hanjo is basically West Lake is what everyone goes to. It’s a big lake with a bunch of cool walkways on one side, and then the other side is a ring of mountains. So it’s sort of against the mountains on the Western side. But what people don’t know is on the other side of those mountains, there’s tech companies. That’s kind of where Hanjo has developed from the older town out to the new district. So once you go over there, you start seeing tech companies and that changes the dynamic. Like you know, suddenly it’s nice shopping malls and coffee shops everywhere. And you know, you’re talking about tens of thousands, really hundreds of thousands of engineers and software people. So it really looks very different. And that’s kind of my part of town, I suppose. You go out there, we buzz out there in the morning, stay in the West Lake area, which is kind of the fun place to stay. And then you take a van out in the morning, which is about 40 minutes or so, to get out to the western side on the far side of the mountains. And then suddenly there’s the major Alibaba campus. is nearby, Tsai Niao is there, there’s some gaming going on, NetEase headquarters is there, they’re like the number two gaming company of China after Tencent. There’s a bit of, there’s actually all the sort of express delivery companies of China are pretty much in this area, ST Express, I mean, it’s kind of, it all kind of comes back to Jack Ma, he happened to be from Han Alibaba was founded in Hanjo, so Hanjo has become a first tier city. And all the express delivery companies, a lot of them are there. I hate to say it’s one dude, but that is kind of why we all go to Hanjo and not say Wuhan or Suzhou or Wenzhou or something like that. It has a lot to do with that. Anyway, so you go out there, it’s beautiful, it’s green, the weather’s fantastic, people really like it. We head over to Ant. on their campus, it was pretty spectacular. Like stunningly attractive as a campus. It’s right up literally on the base of the hills. So kind of the hills, it’s sort of on a little bit of a slope. and they have built like kind of a tea farm on part of their campus. When you’re sitting on campus, you can look up to the hills and there’s tea being grown, which I think they, I assume they harvest and do something with it, I don’t know. Anyways, beautiful campus, sort of lush and green and state of the art. I’m not sure which architecture firm does the Alibaba Ant stuff. Now I put these two together, which usually like someone from Ant will correct me, say these are two separate companies. So it’s a very important point that is always emphasized. Two separate companies, Ant, Alibaba, not the same company. I kind of say they’re related, but yeah, I get corrected on that a lot actually. Anyway, so you go out there, beautiful campus, you know. really smart people, you know, thousands and thousands of engineers, it’s really fun. And most of these large tech companies will have exhibition centers where they’ll take you through and it’s got all the basic information, what they’re working on, prototypes, they’re really kind of fun. Ant has the best exhibition presentation I’ve ever seen. It is like a really, really nice museum in New York. Like, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s like walking through different zones and areas and it’s, the walls are curved and there’s a video theater. And I mean, it’s really unbelievably nice. Best one I’ve ever seen. Fortunately, I can’t really post photos from that. I’m gonna ask for permission to send out some of the photos. You gotta kinda check in on stuff like that. So those of you who are subscribers, I’ll send you a bunch of photos and hopefully some of the presentations there. I’m kinda waiting for yes, no on that. Anyways, that was kinda what we did. We went, do the exhibition hall, see museums, and then sat down with management, some executives. from a couple divisions like Alipay Plus, which I’m going to talk about a lot. Alipay Plus, very cool, very interesting strategy. And then their digital technology business, which is basically a technology services business. And this is really something I had underestimated. This is providing various tech services to lots and lots of 10,000 plus companies in China. So it’s a little bit, I mean, it’s kind of like AWS or Google Cloud or one of these, you know, a little bit, you could almost say like Microsoft, where it’s this cloud-based technology service provider that huge numbers of companies are using, but they have deep specialization in things financial, because obviously it comes out of Ant, which was Alipay. you know, in digital finance, so they’re better at that. And when you start to look at technology that’s more specific to that, you start to emphasize certain things more, like blockchain becomes more important. Security becomes a big deal. Trust, identity, verification, things like that become much more important, because you’re talking about, you know, either financial transactions with customers or business to business. So, you know, this company’s almost like a financial version. of AWS or Alibaba Cloud. And they do a whole lot of stuff. I’m gonna write a lot about that. I’m still kind of researching that. So anyways, let’s sort of go to three lessons now. Like my first sort of, this is sort of, oh, let me put my disclaimer here. This is all kind of my opinion. This is not anything anyone has said. This is nothing anti-SED, nothing. This is sort of my own personal takeaways, which means I may not be right. I may be off a bit. It’s viewing the company through my own lens and frameworks. So one disclaimer, this is nothing but my own sort of observation and not speaking for anyone myself. And two, I am looking at this through a different lens. Now, that said, if you go and look on my website, there’s a series of articles about how to think about and Alipay at the time of their almost IPO a couple years ago. And I honestly think my framework for what they were doing is better than what the IPO prospectus has. Like, I don’t know who wrote that, it’s probably investment bankers. So I described them as a series of three complimentary platforms with multiple network effects. One was a payment platform with credit added on top. One was a marketplace for digital financial products, everything mutual, and then one was a marketplace for daily life services. I argued that was really what they were building. which is not how they describe themselves at all. And I actually think I’m right. So you can go, I’ll put the link in the show notes. You can go back and listen to those, see if you think I’m right or not. Okay, so given that this is my impression of what they’re doing, and I’m still working on this, so I may alter this a bit in the next couple weeks. Okay, lesson number one, MPASS, which stands for Mobile Platform as a Service. And this is kind of like an AWS cloud-based service, which I’ll explain in a minute. For me, looking back, that was probably the key strategic decision for Ant that really played out in a couple very big ways over the last eight to 10 years. In addition to, now this would be in addition to the fact, like when we talk about Ant, we talk about Alipay. I mean, everyone talks payment. Okay, Alipay came out of Taobao T Mall because back then, 2003 in China, nobody trusted anyone. So you needed a, and there weren’t credit cards. There were bank cards, kind of. There definitely weren’t credit cards. You needed a payment mechanism that could create trust. Hence. Alipay with its escrow mechanism, you don’t release the money until the buyer gets the good and checks it, which was very important. They started out with the digital payments. Then that moved online, it became mobile. They spin out Ant from Alibaba at a certain point. That’s kind of when most people think about Ant, that’s what they think about. And then that sort of grows from there into digital finance more generally. credit scores, micro lending, all of these things, which, and that’s pretty much what I wrote about in their three platforms description. I was really talking about that. However, this other business which I was underestimating, which is the technology service business, which is B2B, the key decision point, as far as I can tell, was when they launched MPASS. So here’s how they would describe MPASS, in my opinion. they would say it’s cloud to end, cloud to edge. So it’s one sort of service hosted in the cloud that goes all the way down to various devices. That is a one-stop solution for apps, for developing them, testing them, and then operating them. So it’s kind of a cloud-based, it’s not a… operating system, but it’s not just that you’re creating apps that people can use, but people can use this to create their own developers can create their own. So it looks a lot like an innovation platform and it lets companies sort of research, test and release and operate their own apps. I mean, basically creating mobile apps and you know, depending what metrics you believe, they’re arguably number one or number two for this for China. So when you look at client lists, you know, it’s everybody. It’s the hires and all the big commercial entities. It’s Shanghai Metro, it’s banks, a lot of financial related companies obviously. Okay, so they launched this. Why would this be important? Well, why is it so important? Because this was the key step that created this other very compelling business, which is their digital technologies business. This was the step, right? And that is if they are building themselves against various technology waves, let’s call it opportunities. One big one would be digital payment. That’s just a big opportunity in the world. They’ve been riding that wave for a decade. Digital connectivity. They’re on that one too. But this would be another one which we could call the digitization of industry of China and beyond. Well, this would be. products and services built against that wave, which is very different than the products and services built against the digital payments wave, or trend line or secular trend, or however you wanna talk about it. And, you know, big surprise, this is the same approach we’ve seen over and over, is they built this capability internally for themselves. This is how they created Alipay. And then this is how they added to Alipay and managed Alipay and added many programs and added more and more. This was their internal capabilities, which they then externalized and offered as a service. We’ve seen that move over and over. But by doing this, offering their internal development platform as a service to lots of Chinese companies, they then began adding other products and services to that. And, you know, that’s really what started this digital technologies business. And they have a pretty spectacular suite of digital services, technology services they for finance, for business collaboration, for security. The number I saw was they have over 80 products now that are supported and partnered with 300 plus other companies. These could be developers and things like that, and 10,000 plus clients. So and they all have kind of, I’ll write about this to first subscribers. They have funky names like Zola’s, Morse, Mass. There’s a lot of them. They’re all kind of detailed, but I’ll go through those. Anyways, that whole side of the business, very, very important, something I had underestimated. I started, you know, halfway through this trip, I started to view them like not just as a payment company, but like a finance specialized version of AWS or Google Cloud or Alibaba Cloud. So if Ant were to go public in the near future, which I think it really could. It will be interesting to see how they’re valued. Are they valued as a payment provider? Are they valued as a digital finance marketplace? Are they valued as something kind of like an AWS or Google Cloud? Anyways, that’s kind of point number one. Very interesting. I’m going to dig in more into that. So I’m giving it sort of short shrift right now. All right. Point number two, and this is much shorter. This is, you know, lesson number two. Ant is a significant player in breakthrough technologies. In much, you know, it’s really similar to point number one, in much the way that Google Cloud and AWS are really investing lots of time, effort, money into the major technologies that they didn’t turn into products and services on their platform. Ant is doing the same thing. And I really underestimated this. So, you know, they talk about sort of breakthrough technologies they’re focusing on. Some of them are similar to what we’d see at AWS. Some of them are, you know, look to me to be much more specific to banking and finance related things, which would obviously be their strong suit. So number one would be blockchain. You know, big surprise that was, you know, one like DeFi, decentralized finance, Web 3. the big engine of the center of Web3 with all its token and craziness. But beyond just DeFi, blockchain is obviously a big deal. It’s distributed ledger technology, which big in logistics, big in finance, things like that. So, yeah, big focus on that. Lots and lots of patents in blockchain. They’ve got… last year, I think it was last year, they launched Top Node, which was sort of the number one NFT platform for China back when people kind of cared about NFTs. I never really understood NFTs. I read a lot about them. I must have listened to hundreds of podcasts on them. There’s something about when you listen to something and learn about something for a long time and you still don’t get it. Like, you know, there’s an old saying, sometimes when something doesn’t make sense, it’s because it doesn’t make sense. I just really understood him. I’ve read, I don’t, maybe it’s realer than I thought. So number one, blockchain, big surprise. Number two, IOT, internet of things. Moving things down to devices, obviously a big deal. And these don’t really have to be finance specific. I don’t think that one is, but they talk about something called Ant Chain, which is basically combining blockchain with IoT. So when they talk about cloud to edge or cloud to end solutions, they’re trying to offer something that goes all the way through there. That does become a big deal when you start talking about security and trust, which is a big deal in finance. AI, big focus and not a big surprise there. Everybody’s focused on AI this year. Cloud native, again, obviously not a surprise. They have quite a few of them. The other one that struck me as sort of interesting was privacy computing. They mention this a lot, privacy computing. I’m not totally sure what that, I mean, I assumed that was trust and security. Basically, if you’re going to do transactions, if you’re going to let people into financial networks and things like that, who do you trust? Who do you not? How do you extend trust and security down to a device in someone’s hand as opposed to, you know, a terminal in the bank branch or whatever? So I think that’s kind of interesting. I’m going to try and dig into that more. But yeah, overall. I think I had underestimated how much they are really driving technology breakthroughs and really positioning themselves on the frontiers of technology, which makes sense when you start to view them as somewhat like a Google Cloud or an AWS because you develop the technology first and then you offer it as a service so people don’t have to build it themselves within large companies. Okay, that’s number two, short one there. Lesson number three, last one. Alley Pay Plus is really the big engine of internationalization of Ant. Now I’ve given, I’ve done a couple articles and a couple podcasts on Alley Pay Plus. I think it’s really cool. I don’t think people are paying attention to it. I think I’ve probably written more about it than just about anybody. It’s a really interesting strategy and it opens up, like one of the reasons I like the digital technology services business is because I think it opens up this wide avenue of growth. Like you could see their technology services business just growing along all these new dimensions over time, which is kind of what people see with AWS and Google. So I like that. Alipay Plus I think is similar, although not quite as grand, where it opens up all these avenues for growth. beyond their traditional payment business and their sort of digital finance business. So that’s kind of why it got my attention. Plus I think it’s super cool strategy, like really clever stuff. Now, kind of what helped me understand this better than I had before I thought was talking about M-PASS. So Mobile Platform as a Service, right? That was their internal capability that they then started selling as a service to other Chinese companies. And that was sort of gave rise to the technology service business. However, which I didn’t really know, they also sort of use this MPASS to help companies outside of China create their own versions of basically Alipay. So you go to True in Thailand, or you go to, you know, look at Gcash in the Philippines or EZ Paisa in Pakistan. Now, these are all major digital wallets in these countries. But a significant number of these companies in Southeast Asia and then extending west to about Pakistan, they had some degree of collaboration or partnership with Ant years ago that they basically helped them to develop what looked a lot like Alipay, which makes sense. If you’re in the Philippines and you’re Gcash and you’re trying to build a mobile digital wallet and a payment function. you know, working with a company like Alipay, which has been on the forefront, is a great idea. So there’s, you know, I’m not sure how many, maybe 15, 20 of these sort of, I don’t know if they’re partners, just say collaborations with various international companies, which is very similar to the MPASS thing. That’s, to some degree, how that happened, and how these other, you know, now you go anywhere in Southeast Asia, there’s gonna be a mobile wallet. Whoa. There’s been sort of long-standing relationships with a lot of them. Let’s just copy Alipay. Okay, and then as Alipay has continued to develop going from basic payment to payment plus credit to payment plus credit to maybe some digital finance services like a money market fund. and now increasingly into things like mini programs, well, those companies, again, can sort of tap into that service, either copying it or purchasing it as service or whatever, and sort of stay along the development curve. Basically, just follow Alipay. That’s a good strategy. There’s another side to this I didn’t quite understand, which was… there was something that Alipay has been doing for a long time which turned out to be very important and that was they have been helping Chinese tourists go international for a long time. So you’re a Chinese tourist, you have your phone, you’ve got your Alipay, everybody does. You fly to Paris. And suddenly you have the same problems every tourist has. How do I get money? How do I pay for things? Can I access my bank account? Do I got to pay ATM fees, all of that? Well, Alipay makes that very, very easy for Chinese tourists. You can basically use Alipay to pay for stuff. and it will just charge right back to your account in China. You see this in Thailand all the time, like cafes in Chiang Mai all say, we accept Alipay and WeChat Pay. So one, you can pay for things without having to pull money or anything. That just directly ties into your account in China. Two, it gives you a good exchange rate. They’re not making money on this in any egregious way, like an ATM machine would do. They’re not charging you ridiculous fees. It’s safe. you can trust it. There’s very good security. So all those things, so as you know, literally hundreds of millions, usually it’s like 110 to 120 million Chinese tourists leave China every year and go abroad. It’s in that range. Now it’s probably 140 post-COVID. You know, there’s been all this activity and something they’ve done over the years. is really cool, which is they’ve started to do marketing and they’ve started to do promotions. So if you’re a Chinese tourist and you land in Paris, you turn it on and says welcome to Alipay, you can use our service for getting money, whatever. Also, we have a marketing promotion for you. If you would like to go to Disneyland Europe, here’s a special discount promotion just for you, or here’s a coupon, or here’s a, you know, they can start to do select marketing promotions. for those and who negotiates those deals? Well, Alipay negotiates those deals. They’re the ones who call up Disney and say, by the way, we are the largest source of tourists in France. We would like a special deal. So they can negotiate tremendous deals that probably no one else can get. And so when you land in a country as a Chinese tourist with Alipay, you get promotions specific to that country. That’s a pretty spectacular service. So. The way I look at Alipay Plus is just like Alipay has helped them create their own digital wallets over the years. Alipay Plus is helping them offer to their customers everything that Alipay does for its customers. I’m sorry. Helping those local wallets, let’s say Thai consumers that are using TrueMoney, when those tourists, when they go abroad to another country, Alipay Plus lets them. get everything that a Chinese tourist might get in Paris. It’s basically giving that cross-border payment capabilities and the cross-boarding marketing capabilities to a company like Gcash. So if you’re a South Korean consumer using Kakao Pay and you fly to Singapore, it’s the same thing the Chinese consumer would get going to Paris now. So they’re helping these companies develop that capability. So you can go to Singapore. Welcome to Singapore. By the way, we know everything about you. Here’s a special deal on Gucci bags just for you in Singapore promotion right now. Here’s a restaurant. Here’s a discount to go to, I don’t know, the beach in Singapore. That, you know, Alipay Plus is basically cross-border payment services that work between merchants and these digital wallets, starting with the core. And then on top of that, marketing services. that can also be put on top of that cross-border marketing services. And it’s that second bid where you can see how it could evolve over time. First of all, let’s say you’re a South Korean consumer and you’ve got Cacao Pay, but because Cacao Pay has signed up with Alipay Plus, when you arrive in Paris, you get the same Disneyland deal that all the Chinese tourists could get. Now that’s a really good deal because think about when… let’s say Alipay, Alipay Plus, they’re negotiating with Disney on behalf of a billion people and you get to piggyback that negotiation. So all the deals that the billion people get, you get them too. Like that’s amazing in terms of negotiating ability and purchasing power. So that ability to do promotions, fantastic. But you can see how it could go further. That like, okay, you go to Paris, you bought something at the Gucci store in Paris. you fly back to South Korea, but now there’s a cross border relationship. You can do CRM, customer relationship marketing, between the Gucci store in Paris and the person who is no longer in France, but you still have a connection with them. So you can send them communications, you can send them deals. When they come back to France, you know they’ve arrived. So you can do this sort of cross border marketing, promotions, relationship management, customization. You can see that whole marketing service. just really has a great runway to develop. That’s kind of why I think this is pretty spectacular service. Anyways, that’s the strategy. Cross border payment functionality, and then on top of that cross border marketing functionality that’s gonna evolve over time. And it’s pretty unique. I don’t know of any other company that could offer that. So that’s AlleyPay Plus. I’m gonna do a pretty significant article on that next. But it’s pretty cool stuff, and I think that’s enough for today, how am I doing on time? Yeah, that’s pretty good. Anyway, so sort of three takeaways, we’ll call this first pass thinking. Number one, MPASS, this idea of externalizing their internal technologies as services, it’s really an impressive business, with a big, big runway that starts to look a lot like AWS to some degree. Number two, they’re a more significant player in breakthrough technologies than I was aware of that made just me learning that and Number three Alipay plus that looks like their most exciting sort of internationalization vehicle right now So keep an eye on those three things and there’s going to be a lot more about this coming Shortly, I don’t have any digital concepts for today really no sort of lessons learned payment platforms very important externalization of internal capabilities, that’s a very good way to go after sort of adjacent opportunities. Fine. So there’s a little theory in there, but not as much today. I think that’s it for the content for today. Pay attention to Ant. I think this is a very important tech company that I think most people are not really aware of the scope of what they’re doing. I think it’s… remained off the radar internationally. It has been the case for a long time actually. Like five years ago, Ant was very aggressive internationally. And it was not, it somehow stays off the radar of the really important tech companies to keep a close eye on. So, you know, if you’re listening to this, well, I guess you are, you’re probably ahead of the curve in your understanding of Ant right now than pretty much everybody, as far as I can tell. I don’t know. Anyways, that’s it for me. Any fun stuff this week? Not really. I was on the road for over a month, so I was pretty tired. I kind of, six cities, I think. Stuttgart, Belgrade, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Brazos, Paris. My sort of simple takeaway from all of that is like, Budapest, which I hadn’t been to before, spectacular. And the mountains of Romania, the Transylvania area, was absolutely fantastic. I think that’s kind of my highlights. I’m gonna definitely go back to Transylvania and rent a car and tour lots of castles and stuff. But yeah, I wasn’t really aware that was so great. That was kind of my two tourism takeaways, I guess. And then it looks like I’m gonna be spending three or four months a year based in Paris. We’ll see, I changed my mind on this stuff, but I think that’s what I’m gonna be doing. So I’m looking at apartments right now. So that’s kinda fun. That’s just me playing. It’s not really, there’s no great strategy behind that. It’s just something to make life fun. Anyways, that’s it for me. I hope everyone is doing well, and I will talk to you next week. Bye bye.

——–

I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

My book series Moats and Marathons is one-of-a-kind framework for building and measuring competitive advantages in digital businesses.

This content (articles, podcasts, website info) is not investment, legal or tax advice. The information and opinions from me and any guests may be incorrect. The numbers and information may be wrong. The views expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. This is not investment advice. Investing is risky. Do your own research.