Christophe Lassuyt from Request on Building a Financial Suite for Cryptocurrencies

[00:00:00] Umar: Welcome to The Accountant Quits brought to you by Auditchain, the world’s first decentralized, continuous audit, and real-time reporting protocol. On this podcast we discuss how blockchain will impact the accounting profession and how accountants should prepare themselves for the future of work.

[00:00:17] My name’s Umar, your host, and even if some might refer to me as the accountant gone rogue, my job is to provide you with the blockchain knowledge you need, that will be relevant for the accounting industry as a whole.

[00:00:31] Welcome to Episode 23. The very nature of cryptocurrencies is that it’s peer to peer and there’s no need for an intermediary to make payments, but to streamline and facilitate the adoption of crypto payments in a compliant way, there is a need for a whole range of financial applications to be built around. One company which has been building in this space and garnering substantial industry growth for a while now is Request. Request is a payment protocol that enables you to request a payment and be paid with crypto in a compliant way, and is pioneering the era of the open financial system.

[00:01:07] One of the first financial applications built was Request Finance, an app that now helps over a thousand businesses in managing their crypto payments and financial operations, including leading blockchain projects like Sandbox, Aave, Maker Dao, Ocean Protocol, to mention just a few.

[00:01:25] Today, I have the pleasure to have Christophe Lassuyt, the co-founder at Request. The success story of Christophe, a former CFO turned entrepreneur is inspiring for all accountants out there, and it’s one of the many reasons I wanted to have Christophe on the show.

[00:01:41] In this episode, you will learn what is Request Network and the financial applications being built on top, an overview into Request Finance, and how it’s being used for salaries, expenses, and accounting, the future of invoicing with DeFi ,the new carreer opportunities with Web3 and much more. Christophe, welcome to the show and thanks for making the time to be here.

[00:02:05] Christophe: Thank you Umar, happy to be here.

[00:02:07] Umar: I always like to start the show by asking my guest. So can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you became interested with blockchain and the story that led up to founding Request?

[00:02:20] Christophe: Wow. I’ve got business business background, so I did my business school in France. There I studied strategy management and finance. My first job after school was a job as a CFO in Switzerland.

[00:02:37] First year for myself, meaning, I did not have teams, so I had to do myselfall the book keeping, audit and many different things. And after a while, basically the company grew a lot and I grew with the company too. I think there were like 3000 employees when I left. The thing is I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to be a CFO as a way to become entrepreneur.

[00:03:04] So after a while I just decided, Hey, let’s start, especially because I had an experience already in China and I had to send money from China to Europe or the other way around, and it was such a mess. Like I still have money in China by the way, but we found a solution and a solution for people who live there are foreigners.

[00:03:28] Christophe: And I wanted to avoid capital controls. And so my first company was about money transfers and we were using, Bitcoin. So it was in 2015, of course it’s not totally legal to do that. So we kind of switched and, , made our business much better. With a money transfer, comparison service, but they’re supporting money transfers in crypto using crypto.

[00:03:53] And that’s basically how I got involved in this space. So, I watched Ethereum developed, I think Vitalik and his team were talking about it even a few years before it launched. And I followed the talks from Antonopoulos for exemple. And then one of the ones that I prefered, is the one about accounting, where he says that the accounting rules have been basically, they’ve been written hundreds of years ago. We are still using them. And, we have to obey the rules, even though there are technologies that are exactly a fit for invoicing and the bookkeeping like blockchain tech. So, yeah, you guess, so that’s why we built Request Network.

[00:04:39] So let’s say you described it very well, but I’m trying to make it a bit simpler. There�s a list of payment requests. So that can be a payment request, can be an invoice, can be a salary. And because there’s this unique list that everyone can access, it can be shared between the two companies that are interacting with each other.

[00:04:58] And that’s, creating many use cases. So from a Web2 industry where everything is siloed to a Web3 industry where the technology is co-operative and Request Network basically by connecting those payment requests to the world because it’s accessible, but also to 10 blockchains and 40 cryptocurrencies.

[00:05:18] It actually makes the process of invoicing and payment very easy, which is a transition to what Request Finance is a Request finance is an app that has got more than 1000 businesses as clients after one year. And, it’s, , especially doing that invoicing and payments in 40 different cryptocurrencies with clients, such as the Sandbox, Aave, Maker, The Graph, Near Protocol.

[00:05:45] Umar: Alright. Perfect. So that’s the perfect transition to my next question. So let’s start to speak about Requests Finance then because it’s the first application being built on top of Request Network. When you say invoices can now be paid in a compliant way. What does this mean? And in what way is it noncompliant, let’s say without Request?

[00:06:06] Christophe: So there are two ways to answer the question. The first way is let’s be very tangible. Today, if you have an invoice that you need to pay, and this invoice does not choose Request Finance, what you are going to receive is a PDF with two pages. On the first page the invoice. On the second page, there is a list of addresses like Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, USDC where you can pay.

[00:06:30] If you use that, you need to make a payment manually. And the other person. So the contractor who’s receiving money is going to have to figure out where the money comes from and thats a mess, well, that’s horrible still that would be compliant. If at the end of the year, the CFO at these two companies, they declare the invoices and the payments properly.

[00:06:54] But it’s basically not what’s happening. Most of the crypto projects when they start, they don’t even have a finance person and they end up after the end of the year with non-compliant data, just they’ve made payments all over the world, but they don’t ever know to whom anymore they don’t have enough invoices.

[00:07:11] So that’s the first angle to answer your question, of course, having an invoice that you would just pay with one click and in crypto, is making life simpler and it’s making people save sometimes more than 10 hours a month just to people in the treasury or, treasury department or accountants or even CFOs. But the second way to answer the question the question is today in the web 2 industry, you have, let’s say after the end of the year, 1,200 invoices that you have paid and you have again, 12 bank statements, if I’m a nice, so 12 bank statements that are like more or less extractions, but not related to the database of invoices.

[00:07:54] Christophe: So you’ve got 2 database and you need to play a game now is a reconciliation and, to make your books compliant, you need to reconciliate well. And that’s why you pay accountants. So you pay entire salary for that. And the accountant is actually not very happy to do that because that’s very boring.

[00:08:11] So. What we do with Request Finance is that for every payment, there�s detection of the payment. For every approval of invoice., there’s detection of the approval. For every invoice, the invoice is on the blockchain and its data is encrypted, but the invoice is under the blockchain, which is very promising and even more compliant than what the authorities would like.

[00:08:37] Because on each invoice, they have the link to the payment. So that’s the second angle is the feature that we can do things even in a more compliant way than what we imagined a bit. Like you say yourself on your podcast so far, or even in your website about the fact that we in audit, we do sampling.

[00:08:58] Christophe: And doing sampling is compliant, but we cannot do exhaustive like exhaustive analysis. And that’s great because it takes just one click sometimes just a few seconds to do that. So we are heading towards this direction.

[00:09:12] Umar: Now speaking about invoicing, can you provide us with a quick walk through for someone how they would register on Request to start using Request Finance and start invoicing?

[00:09:26] Christophe: There are two ways. Either you are payer, you want to pay your contractors in digital currencies and in a compliant way, or you are a freelancer or a contractor and you want to get paid in crypto. So in the first case, what you will do is you will just go to Request.Finance, sign up and then there’s an easy onboarding step where you just copy what we call the InvoiceMe link.

[00:09:54] You send this to your contractors. They just have to fill the invoice and send the invoice to you. As a payer, you can also just receive an invoice from a contractor without creating an account and pay it, that works. The difference is that you don’t build your dashboard of invoices. So you won’t have a good overview at the end of the year.

[00:10:14] And the second case is if you are a contractor and you want to get paid in digital currencies, I mentioned, especially that it makes sense to get paid in stable coins. That’s safer. And if you want to do that, you just signup same way. And in, I think in less than 60 seconds, on average, your invoice is created.

[00:10:35] The payer is going to receive it by mail and, you know, how easy the experience is for them. even if they don’t sign up, they receive an invoice and they can just click on the invoice and pay with their MetaMask or any wallet. So that makes the client quite happy,

[00:10:53] Umar: What I found very interesting with request is that request also offers the possibility for you to bill someone in fiat and then you receive the payment in crypto.

[00:11:03] So it’s like in this case, the supplier does not even know there’s like crypto behind.

[00:11:08] Christophe: Ah, yes. So, so there are two things. There’s an invoice that you can denominate in fiat. So let�s say you are in the Netherlands so you denominate your invoice in Euro and you’ll get paid in crypto based on the exchange rate exactly at the time of the payment so that there are no discussion about the exchange rate.

[00:11:29] That that works really well, but the thing is the payer pays in crypto and you’ll receive crypto. And the second thing is what you just described is you are a contractor and you’re working at the Bank of the Netherlands. No, let’s say ING bank, because I like them. You’re working there.

[00:11:49] Your bank is never going to pay you in crypto. I mean, not never, but not this year. However, you can send them an invoice for let’s say Euro 5,000. They pay to a IBAN because when they click on pay, they will have bank details just a proper IBAN. And when they pay on this IBAN you receive crypto.

[00:12:11] They don’t know that, but that’s great because you’ll get paid in crypto by your bank in a way, and they don’t know it. Now, I really love the idea. It’s actually a feature that is quite new, that we launched a few months ago. And right now only for euro.

[00:12:26] Umar: So I bill my supplier in Euro and I can receive any crypto that I would like to?

[00:12:33] Christophe: You bill your client in Euro and you can receive any crypto that you would like to, yes, in a few weeks right now it’s not any crypto, like a few stable coins that you can receive.

[00:12:47] Umar: Wow that’s crazy. And what does the role of the REQ token play here in this whole process? What was the role of the REQ token?

[00:12:56] Christophe: Yeah, so let’s be, first go back to the context, between Requests Network, the protocol, and Request Finance, the app.

[00:13:05] And then I explain , how, when you make an invoice and a payment, REQ token has a place. Basically Request Network protocol is the payment request protocol that we talked about earlier. And, we consider it as an open source protocol. We would like ideally in 10 years that there will be hundreds of invoicing apps, payment apps, checkout systems, plugins but also invoice financing apps, and many other apps that are building, great apps on top of Request Network protocol. Request finance is one of them. Another one is for payment requests, which are not invoices or salaries. And it’s called create.request.network

[00:13:50] But here if we speak especially about Request Finance, basically every time you create an invoice, you approve or reject the invoice or you pay an invoice. There’s basically some information that gets written on the blockchain. And at the same time, there’s a small fee that is taken. And that is, taken in REQ so that is swapped in REQ and those REQ are burnt. So the REQ token, they were 1 billion tokens at the beginning. It’s a deflationary currency. So it’s not a currency that has inflation. Like most of the others is deflationary much more like, Bitcoin or Ethereum. And, the more there is adoption, the more it’s deflationary. So that’s how it works. We basically need, we would need millions of requests every day to to drive the token supply very, very low, but we’ve got time.

[00:14:48] We’ve got, decades to reach a good success. And the request balance is already on its way.

[00:14:54] Umar: All right, that’s good news. And I’ve been noting that the transaction volume of requests has grown by leaps and bounds in 2021. At the moment, who are the main types of clients making use of Request and what are the making using it for?

[00:15:09] Is it for salaries or is it freelancers billing for their services?

[00:15:15] Christophe: Salaries is a very hot topic, but it’s live only since two weeks ago, I think so. Right now there’s not so many salaries that have been paid with Request. However the clients who are using Request Finance in 2021, are Web3 leading companies.

[00:15:35] So if you look at Coingecko or CoinMarketCap, you can find 20 of them in the top 100 and you can find them in the, basically we’ve got more than 1,000. I think today 1,200. And, most of them are either those big companies that even have their own token or contractors in the equity stance.

[00:15:54] And there is a second type. So out of the 160 millions that have been transferred in 2021, most of them are Web3 companies. The biggest volumes are made by Web3 companies, of course they are wealthy. But we also have some companies, for example, in Trinidad and Tobago who are sending invoices to clients in India for like $50. And getting paid in stable coins and that’s really, really interesting because the world, as we know, it is a world where there is a real lack of financial inclusion and Trinidad and Tobago is really concerned. So basically, there is no other way for this company to get paid by the Indian company. Because for such a transfer from India to Trinidad and Tabago , it takes hundreds of dollar in fees. That’s almost impossible. So such as cases, so crypto with the power of building stuff like we did with Request Finance is actually very promising for the unbanked or the one that are financially excluded.

[00:17:01] Umar: I’d like to touch a little bit on the possibilities that DeFi offers, with respect to invoicing. How does smart contracts as a technology help to improve this process of invoicing? I mean, that’s a general question, but more, what I want to ask you is what’s the future of invoicing with DeFi tools and is Request, working on some integration with some DeFi apps out there.

[00:17:29] Christophe: So the future that I see, I can describe, but it’s probably not the one that’s going to happen or probably much more is going to happen than that.

[00:17:37] . But basically, okay. There’s the ecosystem future and the functionality, future in terms of ecosystem future today, let’s say you have a bank and it’s ING bank. I have a bank and it’s City bank and I send you a payment request from ING bank to City Bank? No, of course not because every company in this world of Web2 is working as a capitalistic competitive siloed company.

[00:18:06] So the goal is to have the clients for yourself, not to make your clients interact with a competitors client. In Web3 that is the opposite. You can have, people using an app and interacting with people using another app. So basically with Request Network, two apps or even three apps can interact with each other.

[00:18:26] So for example, I use Request Finance to send an invoice to you. you pay me with, let’s say, another app that’s called Jumia, and then I send another invoice to someone else who has got even another app and he uses it, or I use my invoice to another app again, to get financing. So that’s basically the power of this.

[00:18:51] Actually, the Web3 is about cooperation and interoperability. You can, basically the experience is centered on the user. So the user is just king. He can use different apps. He does not care what is the app that his client is using both of them, they work together because most of the crypto protocols are protocols that are open.

[00:19:13] This is becoming possible. I really believe that there’s a whole ecosystem that’s going to grow like this, and that’s going to be so much more powerful than those siloed banks and FinTech companies. So the second thing about the future, and that’s more related to the smart contract question. The fact that so right now, what we do is we connect to10 blockchains.

[00:19:37] We, they take payments for 40 different cryptocurrencies and, there’s already some of smart contract there, but it’s quite simple what we can do. Is, we can make sure that every time a payer pays an invoice, if they paid 10 days in advance, then these funds, they go to an escrow smart contract.

[00:19:56] This escrow smart contract, send the funds to tokens that are generating yield. Then after 10 days at the due date, you’ll get back to the funds. The invoices get paid automatically. And the CFO who paid the invoice initially receives the interest. So the money never sleeps. And with the power of DeFi Legos, power of smart contracts and the automation that you could not do without blockchain technology.

[00:20:25] And that’s only one example, but there’s many like these that we can do that. It’s hardto imagine, for example, okay. Last one. You can stream payements. That’s funny because we have a banking system that we’ve got for decades. You cannot imagine that we can stream payments now that we can stream payments what are going to be the first applications.

[00:20:45] So within one or two months, we’re gonna re reveal a way to stream payments. So you get an invoice and your invoice is more or less streamed because it’s continuous over the next two years. If you want and you pay in continuous way as well. And there are a few interesting use cases for that. And that’s also the power of smart contract.

[00:21:04] Umar: speaking of streaming, so I saw you entered into, I think, a partnership with Superfluid, is that correct? And that’s the whole idea, right? Of streaming payments.

[00:21:15] Christophe: The whole idea of streaming payments, we described it in our white paper in 2017. Superfluid and Sablier are two good projects about streaming payments. And we believe it makes sense to use a Superfluid as the strategic partner to power, the streams of payments for our use case in invoices, yes.

[00:21:36] Umar: Wow. Yeah I love what you said before. I mean, yeah, money literally never sleeps now. Before these would only be available to like big corporations, but now freelancers can make use of these, DeFi features. Yeah, it’s a real game changer.

[00:21:52] Christophe: Basically it’s financially inclusive now, which means, some people need to get educated very fast or they’re gonna make mistakes, but that’s also really powerful if you think in the long term for the next 10, 20 years.

[00:22:07] Umar: Sure. Completely agree with you.

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[00:23:19] Umar: And speaking of the challenges that you have right now, what are some of the biggest challenges for Request, and I’m speaking for adoption. At the moment you said a lot of the clients are like these native Web3 companies, but broadly speaking, what’s the biggest, because that’s not the only market that you’re targeting in the long term.

[00:23:41] Christophe: True. But this is the only market we are targeting right now. And so the reason is we have an app that is a very good fit for metaverse gaming, NFT, Defi, Web3 companies. And we did not conquer the whole market yet there. I mean, every time we speak with a potential client, they are amazed they know that they’re going to save a lot of time.

[00:24:09] They know they’re going to have compliant books their accountants, auditors, the authorities are going to be happy. So even the client is going to be happy to receive such an invoice. That’s simple, but you show how innovative you are. And so there’s no reason for us to really go too fast and try to conquer the Web2.

[00:24:30] One of the reasons why we may never try to conquer the Web2 industry because they’re all going to transform and transition to Web3 companies. Another reason is, another thing that could happen is that we would go there. and basically or the thing that they explained about escrow compounding interest automations are going to be available for people.

[00:24:52] They are going to interact with, but in the background, there’s going to be blockchain technology. This could happen as well. But right now, what we know for sure that for the next three months, Web3 and we’ve got to adapt to the future where, when we need to, if we need, if we do.

[00:25:09] Umar: I guess then the only challenge or barrier is regulation.

[00:25:14] Christophe: Yes and no. So actually, regulation is an excellent thing. We are really working towards more regulation. I mean, we are providing a way to do things compliantly and even more compliantly than what existed in the Web2. So regulations are figuring this out. They understand there is traceability of payments.

[00:25:35] They understand that all of those control that we have about, , terrorism, financing and stuff are actually quite a nonsense. You don’t need to do a KYC every second anymore. Like for every app that you use, that is more or less FinTech. Now you can, you just do it once and it’s gonna work perfectly. So we are actually with Web3, we are actually solving some big challenges in terms of regulations with Requests Network. And Request Finance, we are also helping in compliance. So regulations is actually quite helping, but if you think about the dark situation where crypto is forbidden, then yes. If crypto is forbidden, then we are fucked.

[00:26:15] But the thing is, I would not bet on that because, it’s been illegal in China twice a year for the last five years. And there are still many Chinese who deal with crypto and who make business with crypto, especially Chinese businesses, making business with Russian businesses in USDT.

[00:26:35] So that’s really something that governments need to think about. I don’t think we can stop this progress.

[00:26:44] I have a quick question, and I’m only asking this because I recently saw this in the news. What’s your opinion of having Tesla who wants to start accepting Dogecoins for brand merchandise?

[00:26:55] Umar: Is it still good to drive like awareness of crypto for people?

[00:27:00] Christophe: I really don’t believe in Dogecoin. I mean from an investment perspective, why not? From a business use case, I don�t believe in any of that at all, so that just fun. I mean to me that just marketing and Tesla is insisting, but yeah, that’s just funny.

[00:27:23] It makes me laugh, but I really think that Tesla made a mistake when they decided to accept Bitcoin, they accepted Bitcoin for two months, they received only 18 orders of Tesla in two months, when they sell usually 500,000 cars a year. So that’s a big, big, big failure because you don’t pay a car in Bitcoin.

[00:27:46] You don’t pay a car in Dogecoin. You don’t pay merchandise in a volatile crypto the same way you don’t pay merchandise or cars in stocks or gold. And that’s what we also figure out when we look at, basically blockchain transactions or, business transactions that happen, businesses do not use Bitcoin.

[00:28:08] They will not take such big risk on their balance sheets and they will not even if they do that in terms of investment, they will not take from their investments to buy, to buy a car or anything as. So that’s fun.

[00:28:22] Umar: Speaking about your roadmap. And I saw on your roadmap, you have an integration with QuickBooks happening.

[00:28:31] Could you speak a little bit about, or let me go a little bit back. The accounting function starts with payments, but then it follows with bookkeeping. So Request is now working on an integration with QuickBooks. How will this work in practice and what are the features that people can expect?

[00:28:50] Christophe: I’ve got a belief, I think sometime, sometimes we need to think the opposite way.

[00:28:58] Christophe: So let me explain, for example, when people say, oh, Chris, how exposed are you to crypto volatility? I’m like, oh, James, how exposed are you to fiat volatility. The same way when the people say, when do we integrate, Requests invoices into Xero or QuickBooks and like, ah, when do we integrate QuickBooks and Xero into Request?

[00:29:21] So it helps to think this way, because I really think that in the future we’re going to have a bookkeeping software that is gonna be exhaustive, and that is gonna work both for crypto and for Web2 transactions. And after a while, let’s say, 10, 20 years from now, integrating Web2 transactions to those bookkeeping software is going to feel like they’re really old times.

[00:29:51] So, the way I see it, cryptio.co that’s a very, very good company. It’s a French one doing bookkeeping and they also integrate with QuickBooks and Xero. They could be the one doing it, I wish they would. And in the meantime, yes, we’ve got clients who need integrations to QuickBooks to send their invoices over there.

[00:30:12] And it makes sense to, give this bridge. So that’s things we’re going to work on.

[00:30:24] Umar: All right. Terrific. I’ll check it out. Yeah. I also believe that in the future, yeah the whole bookkeeping process and reporting could work seamlessly like on a blockchain, but we’re not there yet.

[00:30:38] And yeah, that’s the whole idea of triple entry accounting, how that will play out in the future. Do you want to share some thoughts? How a triple entry accounting would work.

[00:30:50] Christophe: I think when you say we are not there, it’s because the market is not there yet, but the technology is ready. So we are not there because, you know, last year, the number of businesses which were involved with crypto was close to zero right, just the crypto company, what changed?

[00:31:10] It was early 2021 when Elon Musk started to become crypto evangelist, and many companies because Tesla invested in crypto, many companies started entering the game and now 2020 year has been a year of huge adoption by businesses and by institutions. That’s a new wave.

[00:31:36] For them to have the tools that they really need, it’s going to take some time. So triple entry accounting, is just a basic, I mean, if you look at it today, I’m a company, A, you are company B. I ‘ve got my books, my database, my bookkeeping software thats got its database. My Paypal that got its database with my information again, then you’ve got the same on your side and they don’t talk with each other.

[00:31:57] So with triple entry accounting what’s going to happen is you have just a common ledger. That’s the blockchain. You have a common ledger and your apps, whatever it is, is connecting to this ledger with your ID and the login let’s say, and the decentralized login, ideally, and the, and you’ll get your information, but that’s the same data source.

[00:32:18] And that’s verifiable in an exhaustive way. I think we are closed because, , that’s one of the things, one of the rare things in the Web3 industry where technology is ready, but adoption is not there yet, but for businesses too, it takes some time. And of course, it’s been there only for a few months.

[00:32:34] So it’s going to take a few years.

[00:32:36] Umar: One of the recurring themes on this podcast is to speak a little bit about career opportunities. And I think this will be my last question to you today. I want to touch on your previous experience as a CFO and how you’ve successfully transitioned to crypto. And now you’re building tools for accounting.

[00:32:55] I mean, it’s been quite a few years now. There is a shortage of skills and there are new opportunities opening up for people to enter the web3 space. Have you identified like any new opportunities for, let’s say the traditional accountant, but not necessarily, like people with accounting and finance background?

[00:33:15] Christophe: How I see, first you need to know who you are. So let�s say if you are an accountant or an auditor or a CFO or management controller, financial controller, and you get angry and frustrated every, every time there is something manual, every time, there’s something that does not make sense to you, then go to the next step.

[00:33:36] Second step you basically can understand that there’s a technology out there that is going to solve all your problems. It’s not solving them yet, which means there’s huge opportunities You can join a company, you can create a company, you can try to create an app. You can, just be a community member wherever you, you may see fit.

[00:33:59] And, you can suggest, like be a contractor for DAOs. And if you think a little bit about the future of work. You’re going to be able in a few, already now, but in a few years, going to be much more accessible, you will just work for a DAO. So there’s going to be a community. They need a skill. The skill is for example, a data analyst, building dashboards and data studio reports, treasury like just the treasury advice or building, analyzing analytics and all the things are skills that most of the people working in finance have.

[00:34:33] And they would like to use them more rather than doing manual stuff and listening to music at the same time, because that’s so, so boring. So there’s already a few opportunity like this. I know a few people who are data analyst or data scientist for the DAOs and it’s only the beginning. Okay, in 2022, you can expect to have many job openings, that are from DAOs and that fits skills of those you know, frustrated people working the Web2 industry with some skills in a, data analysis for example.

[00:35:11] Umar: I completely agree, and I can vouch for that. So I’ve recently been trying to get involved with DAOs and for people who want to get involved, you just join Discord and you just be a little bit, you take some initiatives there, you start to interact with the community members. And very soon you’ll be given like some tasks to do.

[00:35:29] It doesn’t take a lot of time. And then you just build that trust with the community members and yeah. All right, so there�s just the last question which I usually ask to my guests before they leave. Do you have a quote or a maxim that you live by?

[00:35:44] Christophe: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that’s a quote, but a mindset is, trying to not listen to advice that others gives to you.

[00:35:57] Like if I gave any advice, don’t listen to it. Try to integrate it, give yourself first self advice. And that�s basically what you need. You don�t need someone to tell you, Hey, that�s how you�re gonna make a career. You need to understand yourself. And sometimes the trigger is for someone to tell you, but just don�t listen.

[00:36:17] Think about it and give yourself your own advice.

[00:36:20] Umar: Perfect, beautiful. I love it. Before we go, if people want to reach out to you, , could you share your social media accounts where they can do so.

[00:36:30] Christophe: Ideally Twitter, Christophe Lassuyt from Request is fine.

[00:36:37] Umar: All right. Well, thanks a lot for joining in today Christophe. It was a pleasure to have you and to learn about request

[00:36:44] Christophe: Thank you Umar. Speak very soon with you. Thank you. Bye-bye.

[00:36:49] Umar: I would like to thank everyone for listening to this episode. You will find all the links of the episode, show notes and transcripts on the website of The Accountant Quits at theaccountantquits.com.

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