Fireside Chat by Tanja Rückert, CDO at Bosch & Henning Lategahn, CEO at Atlatec

Excellent, thank you. Okay, so moving safely forward, we've got one or two more keynotes for you. Actually, this next person probably flew the farthest to be here. I don't know if she's in the room. Just last week she was in India celebrating a hundred years of Bosch being in India, and the chief minister said something really beautiful about this company. He said it's not engineering or software, it's culture. I think it's really beautiful to talk about Bosch and their recent acquisition and work with Altatec, the investment in Altatec. We have the founder of Altatec, Henning, joined by the CDO at Bosch, Tanja. So let's give it up for both of them as they come up on stage. Hello, come sit over here. Good to have you. Do you have a mic? You don't have a mic. There you go. Excellent. Have a seat, or precariously lean against it. Yes, there's a lot more people when you stand over here, but they're really nice. Yeah, really nice. Okay, so here we go. Tanja, we've got a couple minutes to share a little bit about yet another great success story of an OEM or a large company working with a startup. For those who do not know this brainchild... Successfully, we got to make sure that microphone works. But actually, let's do this as a quick test. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Make sure your mic is working.

Thank you so much.

Yes, hello everybody. It's great to be here on stage with you guys. Tanja and Dan, and my name is Henning. I'm the founder of Atlatec. We're based in Karlsruhe and now part of the Robert Bosch Group.

Fantastic, Henning. You flew a long distance for this. So let's just make sure your mic is working too.

Why would Bosch even pay attention to a young, strapping startup like Altatec?

Are you guys looking forward to autonomous driving Level 4, where you don't have to do it on your own?

I look forward to it, yeah.

And if you walk around the floor here, you'll actually see another Bosch working with Webasto on roof sensor technology. That car in that corner is about that, so you can take a look at what happens when you put 25 sensors on a roof.

So let's talk about the present. I'm going to ask you a cheeky question, Tanja, forgive me for this question. I'm an entrepreneur. I love being small, nimble, agile, making decisions like this, pivoting. Why would you work with a big company like Bosch? What does that even feel like? Where have you had to compromise, and what's also been exciting for you?

Um, yeah, for us it's very exciting now to work with our new friends and colleagues at Bosch more closely than we did in the past. But having said that, it's not like we only got to know them by the acquisition. We already had the chance to work with different departments within Bosch, also as part of Startup Autobahn and some other touch points we have had in the past. Which means we had the chance to get to know the team, we had the chance to get to know the strategy to some extent, and like you said, and I'm very happy that you did mention this here, we also felt a very high degree of cultural fit. The way problems are discussed, the way things are laid out, the way people work together. And we just felt very much at home very soon, and then it naturally led to an acquisition, and we are now part of Bosch.

I know we're in Germany, so you will only answer the nice part of that question. But there was a second part: I said, what has been difficult about this? So you have to answer that. What makes it challenging for a startup to work with a big company? Because we have a lot of startups here that are eager to work with big companies. So take it positively. What's a learning aspect to this?

Yeah, being a small company, we really could make all these decisions by ourselves. We were a very small team, and we could really rapidly adapt to whatever we wanted to do in very short amount of time. And this is more difficult now, let's put it this way. There are many, many more stakeholders now within the Bosch Group with which we need to collaborate and with which we need to make sure we are in alignment, and that does eat up time in some places, and so we're not that fast anymore.

So Tanja, I'm going to let you respond to that. But more importantly now, because I also love working with large companies, I know that there's great strength in having resources, processes, systems, scalability. You know, you've got a global footprint. Talk to us a little bit about what you bring to the equation here as a large company.

Can you guys share a little bit about the role of Startup Autobahn in your collaboration and partnership?

Maybe I start. We cannot say that we are eleven years part of it, but number 11 comes back when I continue in my answer. So Bosch is two and a half years with Startup Autobahn, and we somehow we connected at several stations, but also here, and it was kind of the route or the foundation. But overall, Bosch is right now successfully working with 11 startups out of Startup Autobahn, and therefore it really inspires us in many areas of our business.

Fantastic. I want to talk about the future before I let you guys go. And I know Henning you're going to come back later and share a little bit more about Atlatec. But what's next for your partnership and individually as well? Do you want to take it first, Henning?

Yeah, um, for us it's quite clear and it's exactly like you said before. Being a small company we were fearless, and to some extent maybe clueless in some areas, building some high-tech technology in the team, but then putting that at a much larger scale is quite hard. And with large corporations, there is the experience and the knowledge of how to actually do that, and go from a small scale to much larger areas and larger scales. That's basically what's ahead of us: to take our technology that we have, continue working on this, and just putting it on a whole next level. Within Bosch I think we have all the opportunities to do so.

Excellent. And one of the beautiful things about Startup Autobahn is people are accessible and they're literally right here. Tanja is here along with the Bosch team, so make sure you grab them if you think you have a technology that might be of interest to them. Make sure you talk to them. I also mentioned 4:45 on this stage, Henning's going to come back, so if you are an OEM or you think this kind of technology could be interesting, come talk to him as well. So ladies and gentlemen, please give them a warm thank you from Startup Autobahn. Thank you guys so much, appreciate it. Thank you.