a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Building Tech Startups in a Place Where Tech Isn’t Everything

Episode Date: December 1, 2015

The pod continues its U.K. road trip, meeting up with three startup founders -- including one startup accelerator programme -- to discuss the entrepreneurial ecosystem in London and more broadly the U.K. and Europe. Let’s be clear upfront: London is not the center of the universe when it comes to technology. But the diversity of industries and thinking in the British capital brings with it advantages when starting a tech company, say our guests on this segment of the podcast, which includes Michelle You, co-founder of Songkick; co-founder of Lifecake, and former Skype engineer Nick Babaian; and Matt Clifford, co-founder of London-based accelerator Entrepreneur First. So what does it take to build flourishing startup communities?

Welcome to the A16Z podcast here on the road in London, where today Sonal and I are sitting down with three guests to help us talk about entrepreneurial ecosystems and how the effort to build such an ecosystem is playing out here in London and more broadly the UK. To help us do that, we have Michelle Yu, a co-founder of Songkick, which is a concert discovery and ticketing company. Also joining us is Nick Babayan, who ran mobile at Skype and more recently co-founded, Lifecake, which is a photo app for parents and a company that was recently bought by Canon. And finally, Matt Clifford joins the pod, a co-founder of Entrepreneur First, which is an accelerator that has a twist on the whole thing by identifying technical talent and then funding those people before they've actually started a company.

Welcome to the podcast. So we've only been here a day or two. And even just walking down the street and talking to folks, we've noticed that there's The economy is certainly booming here in London and presumably outside London as well in the UK. But to what extent is what we're noticing on the street and even in the shops and in the way people are bustling around? What does that have to do with tech? Well, I think what's actually interesting about London is that technology is, it's probably the technology hub for Europe and for the startup scene. But it's the regional hub for a bunch of other industries, especially industries that are being changed by technology, advertising.

finance, the list is long. And I actually think that's an interesting difference about London is that technology doesn't dominate everything. And there are a lot of people when you walk out of this office who won't really care about technology for technology's sake. They really want to know what it does. And I think that's actually a healthy thing for an ecosystem to have a lot of other industries that are also powerful and important. Matt, coming out from your perspective, running entrepreneur first, how do you view that? Yeah, I mean, I think we look at these things through the lens of what do the most ambitious people in a society want to do with their lives? And I think the answer to that question actually has profound consequences for what society and

economy looks like. And clearly in Silicon Valley, the most ambitious people want to start companies. And I think historically in London, the most ambitious people have wanted to be bankers. And that's had a huge impact on the start up scene, on the technology scene, because of a lot of people who might be founders aren't. And what we're trying to do at Entrepreneur First is change that. And I think it is changing very quickly. So four years ago when we started entrepreneur first. I know this from a recent conversation with a Dean of Engineering at one of the top technical institutions in the world that's very close to here. You know, they said 65% of their computer science grads went to become bankers, went into finance. How many years ago was that?

That's four years ago. And now it's 10%. Wow. And they say that the gap, the delta, is very much driven by tech, by startups. And a little bit, I'm pleased to say by us, I think we're now one of the biggest recruiters out of that university. But that whole, we've seen the kind of focus of ambition for these people at the very start of their career is changing very much in favor of tech yeah there's been an enormous change since we started so we were one of the oldest startups in london we started in 2007 and actually we got our start at ycombinator and then transplanted over here afterwards and when we first started it was so difficult to hire for that exact reason working at a startup wasn't a thing that was done no one understood it you had to

kind of convince your parents it was a worthwhile job and we actually started a jobs fair because it was so difficult for us to hire we started silicon milk roundabout which you've now spun out as a separate company entirely and that was that was basically to help startups hire and it was a recruitment jobs for and now that's grown and exploded and it's almost too big I think now so what changed in that short I mean really relatively speaking in the arc of history that's an extremely short amount of time four years five years yeah and that you can go home to your parents and say oh you know what I work at a startup I think a few things that we see changed I mean one is a kind of obvious global effect which is the cost of starting a tech company at least in the very

early stage to keep falling and you know you reduce the cost of something you tend to increase demand for it but i think also on the on the other side i think it's you know we have some we're starting to have some role models and some success stories i mean i think son kicks a great example of that maybe the first british company to take funding from sequoia and you know kind of people increasingly look around and they do see the just eats and the kings and the skipes and the things that happened in london suddenly there's a legitimacy that just wasn't there maybe certainly five years ago i think so i'm going to say something kind of obnoxious and nick you probably should correct me about this. One of the things that I hear a lot of U.S. people say is no company

of significance has been started in Europe and London, including London, obviously. And I don't mean that in a disparaging way, but it begs two questions. One, do you need local role models to nurture a local entrepreneurial ecosystem? And two, what will it take to make that next huge hit come out of Europe? And am I wrong? Correct me, if so? And three, if you didn't mean that in a disparaging way, how did I say that? How did you mean that? No offense, but I mean, I think the list is pretty long of, you know, Spotify and Skype. And, I mean, yeah, there's a whole bunch of success stories.

I think what probably hasn't happened yet is you don't have the mafias that have followed those yet necessarily. So the mafia that sort of results from like a PayPal mafia or an eBay mafia. And also the exits that create the angel ecosystem in the same level as it happens in the States. But I think in the last, even, what, 18 months, I'm starting to see a lot more entrepreneurs from the last, from the SunKate generation, become angel investors. And the Skype mafia, I think, now is actually pretty active as investors and entrepreneurs. And that recycling of talent and capital is starting to happen. I think it's got better as well as the recycling of info. Yeah.

I think in the last year or two, it's become much more open entrepreneurs, sharing learnings with each other. I remember when we tried to do our raise it one round and we had to go to a partner meeting, I had no idea what that was. was and I had to Google it because nobody, there didn't seem to be any information out there. But there's so much more sharing. I think that's going on in London, which is great for entrepreneurs. Do you guys believe that regions develop technology and ideas differently? And if so, what is the sort of regional flavor of something that's developed here in London

or in the UK generally? And just to build on that question, one of the theses that we've put forth in the past is this notion of regulatory arbitrage that different cities can actually use, relax certain rules and policies in order to optimize their, like, so London is actually doing this actively right now at FinTech

in order to really, because they've always been the heart, the city's always been the heart of the financial services industry, so really staying relevant in the future by getting ahead of it. And is that something that you guys see playing out as well? My view is that, you know, kind of great entrepreneurs are great entrepreneurs and, you know, I think there's no,

there probably is some flavoring, but you don't see I think in a way, one of the most interesting things from our perspective is that being in an ecosystem that's not as developed allows you to challenge some of the conventional wisdom about how companies are built. For example. You know, so for example, one of the bits that I think when we start an entrepreneur first that was deeply controversial when we tried to raise money was you're talking about building teams from scratch. Everyone knows that's impossible. You know, this is crazy. We've been doing this for 40 years and it doesn't work. And basically because people didn't know that it didn't work here, we were able to try.

And now we've built 50 companies through that model. And, you know, they seem to be able to, you know, kind of raise on the same trajectory, develop products on the same trajectory, kind of get to revenue on the same trajectory as teams that, you know, kind of form organically in an environment like Silicon Valley. And I actually think we would have never got off the ground in Silicon Valley because people would have just said, you know, you just can't do this. You can do that. We know this. Wow, that's actually very counterintuitive, that notion that you guys can build teams from scratch. Totally from scratch.

Is that one of the, I mean, not to, you know, the analog that I think of is Y Combinator in Silicon Valley, which we consider like one of the greatest startup schools in terms of graduating some of the best entrepreneurs. How do you guys compare to what, and how did you compare to what they and other accelerators and incubators do, and are there any regional flavors to that as well, besides one of the beliefs you just shared? So the comparison, the way we would always differentiate is, you know, we think Y Combinator in particular, on a truly phenomenal job and huge fans of what they've achieved and the way,

and actually we don't want to compete with any of these guys head on because I think usually if you've got a team and an idea and a product, you should go to ICOMBOR, you should go to textiles, whatever. So what we're trying to say is how do you get the guy

who otherwise would go to Goldman Sachs to even think about it at all? Well, if you tell him, cool, well, there's this funding available if you have a team in an idea and well, he's just going to go to Goldman Sachs. So what we do is we say if you are exceptional technically

and incredibly ambitious, we will spend six months with you actually building, you know, from pre-company to company, which I think even like Komenade doesn't really want to do, understandably, we can actually do that in a very systematic way. And so, you know, for us, it's not a regional flavor so much as it's a response to what is the kind of market for talent here and how does it work. It sounds like what you're saying is you end up solving a problem that's specific to your location. So the issues that entrepreneurs face or maybe that they don't even know to face

because they don't know their entrepreneurs, which is very specific to London. If you grow up in the Valley, everyone does a startup. You do one by the time you're 12. It's like a known thing, whereas there's a lot more to fight up against. And similarly, I think the reason why there's so many culture-related startups in London is because that's a very London thing about fashion and, you know, media and music as well. I think there's a lot more startups in London focusing on those problems as opposed to the Valley. Yeah, I mean, if you go into the East End, well, where we're actually,

is, there's a whole bunch of entrepreneurs, but they're not necessarily technology entrepreneurs. There's a lot of fashion entrepreneurship. There's a lot of music. And I think that's just as much a part of the scene as the technology. And I think that makes it richer ground. I think what's also interesting about, you're asking about what might be different about startups in London or Europe. I think inside the startup, there's a different profile culturally. I think London is such a mixing pot as a city. And I think the startups that happen here are also mixing pot. I mean, the first four hires we made were from the Ukraine Estonia India and Hungary and even

after we acquired the next four were from Spain Turkey Greece and Spain again so much more international yeah and I think that's you know you get that starts to bear fruit when you start to look at different topics of privacy is super important for our startup you can imagine that somebody who grew up in a you know Megopolis in a country of one billion people has a different view of privacy from someone who grew up in a sort of former Soviet Republic of two million people. And I think that that helps with chemistry within a startup.

So getting some more cultural diversity due to the, not in the most generic way of like, oh, immigrants coming from everywhere, but you're actually describing the way that they've been raised and their cultural backgrounds really influencing and shaping that technology. It seems that the phase of technology that we're in, we were describing, I was talking

to some folks the other day at how there's things that come to the Europe and the UK and they're like, oh, that seems like that would make great sense in San Francisco. but honestly it doesn't make a whole lot of sense here but as technology you know and it's already gone global but as it kind of seeps into every industry and every part of our lives I wonder if you know the advantage shifts to this part of the world or other parts of the world because of that diversity so you know the United States is this island sort of and

Silicon Valley in particular is this island so do those outside influences lend themselves to building technology that really scales more broadly around the world I mean, I think for me, that's a, it's really a question about, you know, what is the nature of ambition and, you know, what markets do people in a community in an ecosystem like who do people aspire to serve? And, you know, certainly the impression outside in about Silicon Valley sometimes that it's, you know, somewhat inward looking and wants to kind of solve its own problems and there's nothing wrong with that. Whereas I think you can't do that here. You know, there isn't a big enough tech ecosystem that you can, that you can serve that community alone. I mean, we often think about it, when we compare graduates coming out of Cambridge University or Imperial here to people maybe coming out of Stanford, we always say the difference is how obvious is it to them that tech is the prism through which all these things will be solved. I mean, our joke is that, you know, Stanford has the luxury of attracting megal maniacs and turning them into computer scientists, and we have to start with computer scientists and turn them into megaminiacs. Oh, that's so funny.

But I really mean that, and I think we kind of get people coming out and say, well, it's not obvious to me that starting a startup is the right way to solve this point. problem. But increasingly, you know, I think as, you know, tech, as you say, seeps globally. That is a lens that people are using, but they're looking at a much wider set of problems, you know, fashion, music, finance, industry than perhaps they would if everything was about tech in the environment that they were in. So we're really hearing from you, which I think is interesting that, because we take it for granted where we're at, even though I think Michael and I really protest ever drinking the Kool-Aid, that you're not just so, it's tech is central, but we're not tech-centric, like, in London, in this ecosystem,

which I think is actually really important to think about in talking about, how do you guys then view Silicon Valley? I mean, I think if you're a geek, you feel like you're coming home. If you go to San Francisco, I mean, these billboards with these in-jokes about technology and the guy at the rental car place who starts talking about his startup. And, I mean, in that way, it's really exciting. sometimes it does feel like it's a town that's so dominated by technology that you wonder if any ideas really get shouted down, whereas I think in a city like London, you can get your

ideas shouted down by lots of people pretty quickly, people that don't really care about technology, and I think that's a refreshing thing to have as an entrepreneur, it's what you need. You need to be tested, and you need to have people that aren't from the technology world and aren't necessarily excited about technology, understand what the benefit you're bringing is? I mean, I think the Valley definitely establishes the benchmark for ambition. Like, any time I go there, whether it's to meet investors or for whatever, you know, partners or whatever reason,

you kind of always get, I feel like I get my ass kicked from the level of ambition there, and that can sometimes be lacking in London. Like, you know, being very bullshit about thinking big and saying you're going to be the next whatever billion-dollar company that just doesn't come naturally to British people, I think, being that kind of... The famous reserve. Yeah, exactly.

And because people are operating at such a high level, you learn a lot when you're there and you kind of realize how much you have, how much more you'd be learning more quickly if you were just around and living there and informally in conversation. So anytime we want to figure out, like, a new problem to solve or some issue we're facing, we always look to see if there's anyone in the valley that we can seek advice from, I think the flip side of that is it is, like I personally find it to be a cultural wasteland. Anytime I go over there after I'm there for two weeks, I'm crave. Going to a museum or being able to see that film that just came out or having more variety in my social life than just technology.

So I find that to be a reprieve when I'm not there. I think the other thing that is a benefit of being away from the Valley is that you kind of aren't distracted by the echo chamber. I think it's really easy to get caught up in competitiveness or feeling like you're missing out or you're not doing things the right way. And just the way my psychology operates, if I'm not there, I don't have to be constantly worrying about it. thinking about it. It feels to me when I look at our kind of portfolio companies as they develop that the valley is still very much the kind of probably global hub of people who know how to scale from like a hundred million to a billion say or maybe even below that to above that and that's not here yet. And so I would say looking outside we say it looks like it's probably

the best place in the world to scale a place in the world to scale a company. It may not any longer be the only place in the world to build the company. I think the other thing we're increasingly seeing very strongly with our companies is that the cost of engineering talent in the valley relative to here means that there is actually, as it says, an arbitrage player available of raising US money on US terms and hiring UK engineers on UK salaries because what you could, what it would cost you to get a Stanford grad straight out of, you know, a four-year CSS degree. you can get you know a Cambridge PhD with you know three years post-doctoral experience in machine learning right yeah it's an incredibly competitive

market and that arbitrage actually we've seen our companies execute very effectively but what can we learn from from you guys and from sort of what what you're describing as you know yes there's this huge ambition in Silicon Valley there's this ability to scale but clearly there's something that you guys have going on here in London in particular in Europe in general that that can we can learn from and what are some of those things that if you're a silicon valley entrepreneur you might do well to pay attention to one one maybe smaller thing that surprised me when i talked to entrepreneurs from the u.s or from france or other places that government is either seen

as irrelevant at best or the enemy at worst and i think there's a different a different sense of harmony here i think government is actually quite innovative in how they help um angel investors in the UK, how they help startups directly, and also how they're helping to build the scene. You know, when you're a very small startup, and you have questions about things like tax, you actually can pick up the phone and talk to somebody and get a real answer. And I think with the IRS and the U.S., maybe people don't pick up the phone. And I think, and in France, I think is a similar situation. I think the government doesn't have to be the enemy for a small business, for an entrepreneur.

It can actually be the opposite. One thing that I think is interesting is that there's never been a really successful case of a top-down government-mandated or government-created eco-cluster, nor has there been a completely purely successful bottoms-up community where it's just a startup set of entrepreneurs who are very entrepreneurial and trying to build an innovation cluster. So there seems to be like a happy middle where you got to meet in the middle. What factors do you think need to sort of balance or what have you guys observed here that sort of enables you to do what you need to do? or that you wish people would help get out of your way in building whatever you've built or are building. Some of the things that the government here has done are getting out of the way things

and some of them that they've done are quite active things. And I think there's a lot of criticism of the government probably four years ago that it was cheerleading and hype and there was nothing there. And probably that was true, but at the same time I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that was probably quite useful

because I do think ecosystems have to be magnets for capital and for talent and it's obviously not nothing there but as in the criticism was always these aren't real companies these are some kick being an obvious exception but um but as in the criticism used to be you know these are all agencies and woman bands and that you know is that fair or not i think what's been quite helpful is you know beating enough of a drum that actually very smart people and you know pools of capital start to look at it and that's undoubtedly being helpful so what you say beating a drum you mean basically government playing a role and kind of marketing the brand of a city in drawing that capital and talent?

I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this very strong. I mean, I think the government, the current government, the last government, both really paid attention to startups, you know, perhaps to agree that was hard to fathom as a very young startup, you know, being invited to meetings at Bokkeon Palace and 10 Downing Street, you know, and, you know, is that a useful thing? Obviously not in the scheme of things, but in terms of being the drum, I think it is useful.

Yeah, I think in bringing public attention and public spotlight onto what's happening in London and the startup, like, ecosystem here, it's probably had knock-on effects. I think when we first started, you know, no one, Silicon Roundabout wasn't a term, there wasn't a startup cluster, and now it's a well-understood thing. People talk about Tech City. You read it in the broadsheets.

I think that's been hugely influential in terms of the cultural awareness of startups, but I don't know about specific policies or kind of tax codes that have helped. I mean, I think two of the biggest discussion, conversations in Britain currently, and biggest worries are immigration policy and the cost of housing.

I think those are actually very similar to concerns that people face right now and San Francisco and Silicon Valley too. It trickles into the tech scene, and I think government has a strong role to play to make sure that we don't crush what's made London so vibrant, which is that we have such a mix of people coming here to start companies and to be part of companies and also controlling and making sure that if San Francisco is in some ways,

in some respects, a cautionary tale, make sure that we also don't become an environment where, you know, small entrepreneurs and startups get priced out and go to other cities because they can't stay here. How do they solve for that? As the government, like, municipally or even, like, nationally, trying to carve out, like, Regents likes to look around about, or Tech City, and saying, like, the rents in this area will be rent-controlled?

Or, I mean, are they actually doing things to – are they building more units? I don't think it's at that level, rightly or wrongly. I think, really, it's probably, it's more on the kind of supply side on the capital side. I mean, I think Nichols was referring to, you know, some of the tax breaks for angel investors, which undoubtedly had had a huge impact on both who and how much it's investing in the UK. But, you know, arguably that just feeds the housing bubble and, you know, it doesn't actually solve it. There is zoning as well. I mean, our last co-working space was converted by local council mandate into private housing.

Entry-level housing in Primrose Hill, which is kind of that... I mean, that's a tricky thing. My impression is that the ship sailed a long time ago on real estate in London and New York, for that matter. And even San Francisco. So, yeah, there's hard things to do at this point. Where do universities fit in this? Because, again, a big quality. We've talked about government.

We've talked about entrepreneurs in the communities. And then you have universities, which are huge hubs of talent. They're sources of talent for you directly, Matt. And for you, Michelle, in hiring. There is extraordinary talent in London and, well, really, the broader UK and Europe. And, you know, I think very often because that talent hasn't been thinking about startups or even really technology, I mean, it's not just about startups. You know, you have this effect where actually suddenly it's exciting and you can, you see a flow, you know, kind of into the ecosystem. I think the big change that we've seen is that increasingly it's people with, it includes,

people with deep technology talent, you know, kind of who actually, you know, I mean, the deep mind story actually, I think is an important story for London as an ecosystem because I think, maybe not for the first time, but in the most visible way, it showed what, you know, incredibly small, very deep technologists building something really hard could achieve in London. Help us really quickly for our audience. What was a deep mind story briefly? So deep mind is a company start here in London by, you know, by PhDs in computer science, focusing on general artificial intelligence. I think they made some pretty exciting progress on the research side,

although they never actually released a product into the market as such, and it was acquired by Google for, I think, $400 million, something in that region maybe a year ago. Now, I think that's had a number of interesting effects. The most important for us, the entrepreneur first, has been that suddenly every PhD and computer science in the country is saying, interesting. I wonder whether there's something I can do.

And actually, as a cultural shift, it's a very small number of people. We may be talking a thousand people. But those thousand people have the capacity to actually do something quite special. Yeah, I think there is, I mean, a deep history of technology and engineering kind of excellence in the UK for sure. I mean, Cambridge is a great place for that. And Swiftke, I think there's another example of PhDs who were doing research in machine learning, and they decided to apply their learnings and their academic background to a consumer product. And I think that shift in thinking, I can do more with the research.

research that I'm doing or I can have a different application is happening now. And I think that's that's kind of similar to the shift we're seeing in general of engineers and tech talent looking to start up as a place to apply their skills. So our CTO, for example, got his PhD from Leeds in artificial intelligence, worked at Google, worked at Apple, worked in the Valley. And he's now involved in the university and kind of changing the computer science program to have it be more commercially focused or training the students to be able to work as engineers rather than thinking about going on higher education or whatever other paths you might have. I do think as well, the exciting thing is as that's happened, the academics themselves

have become more engaged in that process. So I would say four years ago, maybe a reflection on ours rather than then, but we had very little engagement from academia itself, whereas this year we found we had so much engagement from really top computer science professors that we, you know, we ended up building an academic advisory board to help us both think about how do we help our startups, but also how do we help some of their PhD students think about startups. And, you know, I think if you go to Cambridge, you go to Imperial, go to UCL, we're talking about not just regional, but global kind of leaders in machine learning,

in artificial intelligence, in virtual reality, in cryptocurrencies. These are very exciting areas of, like, cutting-edge research, and those professors now want to be involved in startups. That was a very defining quality of how Silicon Valley was built. I mean, that coming to confluence of academia, government, university, the local talent, the sort of entrepreneurial spirit. Well, and also this gets to a question, and also industry. And so I wonder, you know, when you talked about parents accepting startups,

what about large companies and their acceptance of the startup community and whether that's as customers of startups or partners or even acquisition? I mean, where are you, what are you seeing these days in terms of how large companies view the ecosystem, which you guys are, you know, right in the middle of? So one of the first tech jobs that I had was at a large corporate, U.S.-based technology company, and I think the view of startups were, they were kind of an annoyance. You might take an occasional meeting from one. You might clean some ideas, but in general, you tried to avoid interacting with them.

We were recently acquired by the imaging company Canon, and I think they're particularly excited about London as a potential. hub for innovation and a lot of the scene that's happening here and being able to connect with those startups. I think what's also interesting is if you look at advertising, London is definitely the undoubted advertising center for Europe. And there's so much innovation that happens around advertising. And I think they embrace startups wholeheartedly and do really interesting trials and work with startups. They've started a few funds of their own to invest in startups at early stage. You know, in general, large companies do not partner well, especially with small

companies. But I think big advertising agencies London have proven that wrong. We're starting to see a trend where larger companies are doing a better job of partnering with startups. And there's certain things driving that one is that you don't want to be left behind, which is maybe the case for Canon, right? Or Google buying, you know, deep mind. Google's a separate thing. But I also think that there's an understanding that if you need to partner with startups, you need to sort of change your way of billing of, you know, setting up contracts, however that may be. Are you guys seeing any evidence of that, that, you know, the ICE is cracking a little bit in terms of willingness to bring you guys into the fold from a corporate perspective? Maybe not in terms

of massive companies, but because we do ticketing and we get supply from artists directly, through artist pre-sales, as well as promoters. There's a lot of kind of a cultural divide. You have to bridge around how tech company works, why we can't do certain things, how we can help in learning to speak the same language as an old industry like the music industry. So that's the kind of bigger gap that I see.

I think there's also an emerging trend in media for equity deals, big media companies based here that have huge reach but feel maybe they're not playing a part in innovation and in some of the new ways that information is being spread and using some of their reach to get equity in startups, more importantly, gleaned learnings from startups how they work

and how they interact with customers. Interesting. Matt, what are you saying on the EF side because I feel like I would think big companies want to literally use you guys as a hundred-year. Yeah, you guys would be a center and practice. We have a lot of inbound interest from large corporates and very often the challenges that the reason they're approaching is is they've got to some sort of realization of we need to be more innovative.

We're not quite sure what that means. We're not quite sure. I don't mean this in a patronizing moment. It's a hugely difficult question to answer. We're not sure how to do it. We think stops might be part of the answer. Can you help? And I think we've found with some partners, you know, very large organizations,

we actually can help and we can do some things that are real win-wins. Actually, interestingly, media companies, we've found it easier to work with than some others. But I think the stage it feels like we're out here in London is that there's a realization that more must be done and figuring out what the it is still a kind of open question. From everything you guys have described so far in this podcast, it sounds like there is this beginnings of this flywheel starting to go

where there is an ecosystem of entrepreneurs who've done it before, there's funding, but what else do you need? What can really sort of kick this thing into a higher gear? I mean, I think one thing that we see very strongly is the need for experienced entrepreneurs who've been there done that to become the kind of mentors to the next generation. And I think that has been hard in Europe because there's maybe not so many who have been there and exited. And I think maybe it's controversial. I think sometimes the word mentor gets used in a very, very broad sense with perhaps not enough regard for kind of quality of interaction, consistency of interaction. And what we've chosen to do entrepreneur first is to kind of abandon the, the kind of.

kind of mentorship model that some accelerators have where you know have a hundred names on a website and they'll come in for 15 minutes and actually have a real partnership model where our partners apart from alice and i the founders are experienced exited entrepreneurs who come in the same time every week and meet the same companies week in week out and are incentivized in the right way and you know i think four years ago it was hard to find people who would do that and increasingly we combine more and more when i speak to both our alumni and other companies in the ecosystem i find and more and more, they're getting advice from people who've been there, done that, exited, and want to really get back involved again.

And I think that's a huge, you know, kind of part of the flywheel effect. Do you guys think you actually need ex-entrepreneurs to be those mentors? Is it a credibility thing? Like, why can't it be unbundled where you can have, say, a mentor in distribution, Michelle, or a mentor for sales or a mentor for, you know, marketing? Yeah, I think it absolutely depends on the kind of advice that you need. So one of my advisors is actually friends with Nick, Mike Bartlett, who worked at Skype as well. And I sought him out as an advisor when he was still at Skype, but he's now gone on to start his own company.

And at that time, I needed to learn about how to run a product team, how to effectively ship products, and he could help me with that. But I think a lot of the problems you face as a startup are inherent to the nature of starting a company and learning how to grow business. I think the kind of advice you might get from somebody who comes from a big company might not be relevant to you. So that's kind of why that flywheel and that kind of cohort of people who've done it successfully is probably the most valuable place for that for that advice. For those people who aren't here in London right now and aren't doing business in Europe more broadly, why come? Why pay attention? And, you know, what is at stake here and what's sort of the opportunity?

I think one of the biggest things I've benefited from being in London is in having a less inward-looking kind of point of view. I think in America, I can say it because I'm American, it's really easy to just think that America is all there is because it's dominant force. It's where a lot of dominant force in culture and technology and it's easy to just think about the U.S., but when you're in London, you're forced to think about the rest of Europe as a first step and then the rest of the world,

and I think that comes more naturally to people in a place like London. I think, you know, the kind of theme, main themes that, you know, we've been talking about, I think there's extraordinary talent here. I think there's, you know, kind of access to a very broad range of industry, is, you know, kind of outside tech that are kind of crying out for tech to, you know, common play a role there. And, you know, I think you have the emergence of an ecosystem that, you know, does have a different flavor and is some actually exciting things bubbling up. Well, thank you. Thanks for joining the 860s and Z podcast.

Thanks.