a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Scaling Ideas and Startups in the U.K. and Europe

Episode Date: December 4, 2015

Our final segment from the road in the U.K. features two well-known investors and entrepreneurs in the London tech world: Seedcamp co-founder Reshma Sahoni and Shakil Khan (known to all simply as Shak), the founder of CoinDesk and an early investor in Spotify where he also headed up special projects. Reshma and Shak break down the venture scene in London, and describe the particular way the best companies scale in Europe ... it's not what you are probably thinking. Finally, they brag about some European startups we should all be paying attention to. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. And we are still in London and we are lucky to have with us two of London's most interesting and dynamic entrepreneurs and investors, Reischmo Zahoni, founding partner of Seed Camp. You guys are the fund for first-time founders of choice, or that's what you want to do. I can't even say it. Close. We're trying to be, we're aiming to be kind of the choice of European founders as their first round fund in, you know,

cross. So we're extremely aggressive for Europe. We're doing about 40 investments a year. So that puts us in quite the very active kind of investor role here. Extremely aggressive. And you will, you will note from Rashma's accent that she is also from the U.S. but has been here for 14 years and is drinking tea, so maybe she is British after all. And we have with us also a man who is known by one name here in the London investing in community, Shaq, who is a long-time entrepreneur and investor and was the man at Spotify for Daniel Eck who sort of got everything done. Shack, welcome. Thank you for having me. We've had a lot of discussion about London as a tech Center, what pieces are in place and, you know, what can London become that's unique to itself

as opposed to trying to emulate Silicon Valley? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, last five years and we've been around sort of eight years is a lot of the fundamentals are there. So you've got everything from beginnings of policy to encourage investment, talent, with visas, and so forth to the universities that breed that incredible sort of talent, emerging kind of powerhouses around artificial intelligence, et cetera, to the accelerators, seed funds, more and more sort of Series A, growth investors, American capital, Chinese capital sort of coming in. So all of those pieces are there. They've been building some pretty interesting companies. We use a lot, a term around sort of derivative companies, which are great sort of, you know, standalone businesses

as such and can be quite valuable, but we haven't quite hit that sort of massive platform business yet. Right. Something original that grew up here. And, well, I think Nodal, kind of central to the ecosystem that everything else feeds through, like a Google or Facebook or, you know, Amazon and Apple. Shaq, what else is missing? I think Rishma's final point that is very, very relevant to encourage entrepreneurs that seed capital has to come from somewhere. And at the moment, when I look around, a lot of it seems to come from some family offices who seem to think tech is the cool thing to be doing, or it's coming from the savings of executives that media companies or tech companies. We haven't had those major hit after hit of multi-billion dollar

exits, whether in the private market or the public markets, such as the Google's or the Facebook. So that trickle-down effect hasn't happened, and it'll be a while till it happens. I'll give you a quick example. One of the biggest, biggest success stories that ever came out of the UK in the last 15 years was a company called. money supermarket. It was a financial comparison service. At one stage it was worth or close to a billion pounds or one and a half billion dollars. I have

never heard of Simon Nixon since apart from last week when I came across a boutique website advertising five different villas in the countryside and apparently there are Simon Nixon's homes which he rents out to make some supplementary income. That's the only time

I've heard of him in the last 12th to 15 years. Right. And he was one of the best entrepreneurs who created an exceptional company, which, if I recall correctly, without any VC financing. So if you don't have those kind of generational repeat entrepreneurs, then how do you build that kind of flywheel that Silicon Valley, or do you, that Silicon Valley can lean on, you know, whether that's in terms of angel investors or just people with it experience? I mean, I think it's a little harsh, actually, I am hearing of Simon Nixon more and more,

But I would say we're probably a decade or 15 years behind in that sense. So, you know, you do have the Skype founders who've obviously done an incredible amount with Atomico and then some, but you have Tavit who left Skype and started TransferWise, which is a portfolio company of ours. Absolutely. And, you know, I would say has a huge chance of being one of those sort of platform businesses if they'd get the next five years, right? But people have left TransferWise, and Tavit is an active angel investor. So, I mean, you know, you're getting, and that's not even just one example. I mean, there's multiple coming out of the Googles, Yahoo here, and so on.

And so King.com just exited, obviously, as well. I think they're setting up a fund. So you're getting that, but we're just sort of a decade behind, right? We're a generation or so behind. I mean, I have to say it's not, you know, London is the world's largest financial center kind of bounces back and forth between London and New York. And just speaking of New York, then, it's sort of, the same dynamic. I mean, Wall Street and the financial center here have such a huge, you know,

center of gravity. Is that part of the reason? I mean, are you still having, you know, kind of the best and the brightest head off to banking? Or is there a sense here now that technology is the place to be? I think one way after looking at the difference between the U.S. investment banks and the U.K. investment banks, I don't actually know anyone who's like, I need to get into Goldman Sachs, London. They're like, I want to become an investment banker, and I'll move to the States. What is interesting is if you look at, you have London, and then you have the British population, and then you have all the imports of people, you know, who were brought up in a different country, but then came to London.

I think that is getting bigger and bigger, Rashma being one of them, and my parents being first-generation immigrants and Nicholas and Tavit. So you're getting a lot of exceptional talent from, around Europe coming to London. But that's had its own issues in regards to visas, over the years in regards to living costs. So there's a lot of those social type of factors which has hindered people from coming over. I think the London Financial Center versus tech are two separate things apart from where FinTech is involved.

They seem like two very different industries, unlike Wall Street where a lot of investment bankers are active in investing in tech startups. We talk about at the firm Software Eating the World, and as software and tech goes into every industry, whether it be health care or fintech or agriculture for that matter, is there an advantage in the sense of like you have people from all over the world, you have different approaches? And in some ways, there's kind of, if tech hasn't seeped into all of Europe, is there a different perspective that entrepreneurs in England bring to solving problems? that might play out better in the rest of the world and in other industries? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think you do get such different perspectives

and different systems of sort of finance or government or otherwise across the board, across Europe. So I think you do get entrepreneurs that are able to sort of, you know, able to navigate that and build solutions that are more scalable. I think they're still sort of hindered by those geographic barriers and also kind of funding barriers as well.

I mean, venture capital, I think, continues to be so regional. I mean, it's a terrible thing. It just doesn't sort of unify across Europe. And so scalability is limited there for, you know, to a big reason because of that. And then talent, I mean, it's starting to move across much more easily, but you're still getting, you know, kind of a more populistic rise of kind of anti-immigration and all of that. So it's still got a lot long ways to go.

Inherently, I agree. I think, you know, there is that sort of sense of being able to solve kind of variety of problems and dealing with those problems. Are problems solved differently here and or regionally for that matter? Like, do you see a company that's coming out of Berlin saying like, oh, yeah, that's a Berlin company because I can tell from these characteristics or that's a, you know, UK company? But are problems solved differently than, say, in San Francisco or Silicon Valley? So a great question, and easy way to answer is U.S. is a huge individual market.

And there's enough room for American companies a lot of the time just to win the USA, because one, it's got population, but two, the revenue per user that you can get. Whereas you take a market like Sweden, the reason why Spotify partly has been successful was from day one, the product was built to go global. Right. The same thing with Skype, transfer-wise, a building for a global audience because the local population is far too small to be a venture-back company to have a revenue of billions and billions and billions. So you have this international mindset from day one, which companies in the States didn't necessarily have. They're now starting to think more international.

So we have that advantage because we're all exposed to far more cultural inputs than a company than the states would be. UK has probably been the last in that because out of European countries, Germany and UK are pretty big populations in their own. And I go back to a lot of the companies that were built here in the last 15 years were just market leaders in the UK. Some of our biggest online real estate companies are just UK only, right move and Zupla, two huge companies. companies have never really ventured outside the UK. You couldn't do that if you're from Estonia or if you're from Finland or if you're from Sweden. You have to go international from that way. What's the natural path? And if you're a successful company startup in the UK, do you hit the rest of Western Europe first because it's close? Do you go to Asia? Do you go to

the United States? What I mean, what I'm seeing a lot is, and it's a really, it's a big generational shift. So I think if we looked at entrepreneurs from again about five years ago or more, there was this sense of, well, if I start in London or I start in Manchester, let me go across the rest of the UK. And then, as you said, maybe France or Germany, we're seeing a completely different, completely kind of change of perspective there. Our founders are saying, let me launch immediately in London, Berlin, maybe even in New York, actually. So they're really going after urban spread rather than any kind of geographical bias. So if they're starting in England, English, which mainly happens to be, it's a, what are the main cities we can dominate?

So, I mean, those are long-term trends around population, sort of centralizing in urban areas and, you know, kind of the massive urban revolution, right? So we're not seeing such biases that we saw a generation ago. And if you see, look at the marketplace businesses, it's actually no longer about countries. Yeah. It's cities, right? Which cities work and which cities don't work. And, you know, Istanbul is many thousands.

of miles away from here and there's an entrepreneur probably go London, Istanbul, Dubai, Hong Kong, right? That doesn't mean they're looking at all of Europe or all at Asia. They're picking those cities going aggressively in there to tackle them. That way, far better position to do than the States because if you start in San Francisco, the natural thing is San Francisco, New York, Boston, Miami, Chicago, L.A., San Diego. Right. Before you come international. So there's this different startup operational cities challenge that happens and then it's just having sufficient capital to have a playbook to be able to replicate that city by city very quickly right and and are the cities you know resume what you're describing i mean i get the u.s but when you go from big city

Istanbul Hong Kong London etc are the users kind of of a same type is it is it the city that's the defining characteristic and the density and kind of urban lifestyle as opposed to the region? I would think so. I mean, when our companies are doing that kind of market research, that's a lot of what they're finding. I mean, you still have to do a lot of segmentation within those sorts of cohorts. But, you know, I think a person in Shanghai feels a lot closer to the person culturally, kind of what their day-to-day needs are to a person in New York or San Francisco or London or Berlin versus kind of maybe even the rest of China or rest of India

or so forth. Right. On the flip side, U.S. companies that come to Europe, what are they up against these days? I mean, we've been walking around here near the hotel and Google's down the street and Airbnbs somewhere nearby or relatively nearby, et cetera. But what are they up against now when they come to town and what do you see? So, you know, having seen this many times over what happens is U.S. companies, like, hey, we need to go into Europe. We need to go international. So let's put our office in London and let's send Peter or Lucy who went to Stanford and did a semester in Paris because there aren't lived there and you can go run Europe. And, you know, that person is more familiar with Europe than most

people. And sometimes what ends up happening is coming to London is actually a huge disservice because you feel like, well, if in London, you know, we can just run Paris out of there, we can run Germany, US is far similar to UK than France will ever be. So those challenges of accepting that just by being in London, you won't be able to tackle the whole of Europe. And so now what you're seeing is people going, okay, if we're going international, we need to open up in Paris,

we need to open up in London, we need to open up in Munich or Berlin straight away because the three are completely different when you're approaching it, whether it's labor laws, whether it's real estate. For us, it's what we do every day, and we don't have those worries that's equivalent to somebody from San Francisco

going to Chicago, there aren't that many nuances. But when you come from the states, go, hey, I don't even stand the company set up in, why do I have to work with a union in Paris where you don't have to do that in the UK, which is two and a half hours on the train. So it's a completely different ecosystem at a smaller level in different cities. Right. I think it's also, I mean, it's early days, but I think the last years of exits have taught both entrepreneurs and VCs here that, you know, you're capped. If you don't, if you don't have the expansion fast enough, you don't deliver that

fast enough, you're capped. And I think if you see examples of Halo, which is a brilliant service, I use it all the time, but my taxi... Halo is a version of what? Well, it's a transportation thing, I know that. It's... For black cabs, I guess, but I mean, they branched out a bit more, but, you know,

you won't know it, right, if you're listening to this podcast outside of... But Halo, it's like Uber, but it's not Uber. But it... No, because it's, it was focused solely on black cabs to begin with, right? And it never... Again, it never expanded fast enough, and my taxi got funded by a different cohort of investors and that never expanded fast enough right and then Uber just sprawled completely

in record pace obviously as we all know so I mean I think having seen some of the limitations of trying to go at it the traditional way in in Europe I think entrepreneurs and investors are waking up to the fact that you know we need to spread faster it needs much more capital and so I think it's early days whether that's successful yet or not there's just naturally a desire also if you're the British entrepreneur, a European entrepreneur, to go and win USA. And from what Roshma was saying, I'd actually say the reverse. And, you know, I used a halo on the way here, right? Because Uber was 14 minutes away.

They were going to get stuck in traffic. And they can't use the bus lanes, whereas the license taxi got me here in eight minutes and the back road, but Halo only use it here. And they've shut down in most cities they were in. Instead of them going, hey, we've done London. Let's go tackle USA. I would have done Paris, Munich. Berlin, Copenhagen, Sweden, you suddenly have a huge network.

You have a huge brand and you have a solid company. Halo is basically a London niche company funded by VCs who, if they could get an exit, would take their exit tomorrow and get out of the business because Uber has won in that space. Right. Rishma, your fund has been around for eight years. Shaq, you've been reluctantly an investor you were saying. I'm the accidental investor who never wanted to be an investor. ended up meeting Daniel Eck when he was 22 years old with an idea of Spotify and I put half of my net worth into the company before there was a product.

So what, well, what were you thinking? Exactly. As your mother might say. If I look back to it, what was I thinking? I only put half of my net worth in there. I should have put all of my net worth in there? And secondly, I shouldn't have ever done another investment after that because I'll always go back to the game.

It won't be as good as that. No, so for me, I'm not a big music fan for a start. But, you know, I got to know Daniel, and it was his sheer passion and the fact that he wasn't willing to take no for an answer. So this is 2007, 2008. CD sales are still there. Download business is huge. And here's a young individual who walks into the record labels going, hey, I have a solution for your declining revenue. And this is what I said? Give all the music away free of charge.

And I remember when he'd get physically thrown out of these buildings, and I'd go so. And he's going, well, I'll go back there tomorrow. Because eventually, they will come around to thinking the way I'm thinking. And I'd like to think, you know, we've now proven that streaming is the future. But all that came later. For me, it was an individual who I realized had such passion that he was either going to win or he was going to die. It was very binary. And when I wrote the check and it was just over $500,000, it was, okay, I may never see this again.

And I didn't look at it. What is my I-I-R-R-R or what my liquid. I didn't even know any of these words. Like, hey, it seems like a cool guy way smarter than I am. So, okay, why not do it? And so really, I'm the accidental investor. I had zero desire to be in the investment world. Wow.

In Mexico, we call that Cajonis. So I want to sort of describe what the entrepreneur that you guys work with is like. And so, Reshma, you work with early stage entrepreneurs. Are they sort of the Peter Thiel ideal where they dropped out of college and, you know, they're driven by X, Y, or Z, mean, what do entrepreneurs,

what are their characteristics here? And is it any different, honestly, than Silicon Valley. And how is entrepreneurism kind of embraced culturally or not? Good question. I think, again, it's a evolving

journey, and so our journey with entrepreneurs has been that over the last kind of near, you know, near decade. I would say when we started, there was a real lack. And I think I can say that sort of confidently being

American is a lack of commercial sense and sort of how do you get these products out to market and focus around product and usability and, you know, kind of thinking being the customer champion and how do you commercialize it? How do you monetize it? So I think there was a real kind of lack of that. It's changed dramatically for the founders we're backing today. I mean, just so much more astute. Everyone's reading the same thing. You're exposed to podcasts like this and a lot of knowledge and content like this. Also role models. So again, there's serial entrepreneurs and investors you're used to, you know, a lot more kind of, a lot more access, a lot more people to access. So I think that's been a dramatic change. Whether, whether they

are, you know, dropouts as such, I mean, I don't think we kind of look at it that way. I think there is a much more kind of that zero to one thinking and thinking very, very big and being incredibly ambitious. And having the toolkit to also execute on that ambition. So not a pure kind of let's be dreamers, but how do we execute against that? And Shaq, it's okay to be an entrepreneur. I mean, you were an entrepreneur. I was an entrepreneur because I dropped out of high school before my 16th birthday without finishing my exams.

I had another option, no other option to do this. And I realized growing up in the projects in an environment where poverty was the norm, the only way I would really be able to help myself and help my family members get out was to accumulate some sort of wealth, which I wasn't going to get in the traditional career path, whatever that would have been,

whether it had been in traditional banking or whatever, who knows what would have happened. But the country has never been as entrepreneurial as the USA has, and there's a number of social reasons and governmental reasons. One, we've got, even though people may complain, we have a pretty amazing welfare system here and a pretty amazing healthcare system here. When you know your roof is above your head

and the welfare will give you sufficient funds to feed your family and clothe yourself and you've got healthcare system, you've got education system. You don't have the same challenges an individual in many countries, including America, where if you get made redundant, your health insurance is the first thing that goes, and everything else goes with it. I know there is a welfare system, but the delta between the two is huge. And secondly, failure in Britain, and even until now, it's getting better and better, is not encouraged. And I can honestly recall being in a coffee shopper in a like cafeteria many, many years ago with my father who turned around to me and said to see that gentleman sitting over there,

he's bankrupt. It was like it was a mass murderer or a, you know, high level criminal. And now I look back at it. I would have loved to go over and had a chat with this gentleman going, hey, what was it like? What went wrong? And are you going to start your next company? And I was like, oh, wow, bankrupt. And Reshma, you've been here long enough to, I think, realize there is that stigma about failure. And I think maybe actually it's a really good point. I think the challenges we're seeing across continental Europe, you know, with those support systems falling apart, is actually engendering a move towards entrepreneurship. So we see that in Portugal. UniPplaces just has been, you know, has had a great round of funding recently.

Spain as well, Italy a little bit also, is as those systems crumble. As economic pressure kind of ratchets up. Exactly. The only road to turn to is entrepreneurship and striking out and trying to, you know, and trying to rise above that, right? Wow, that's interesting. So, I mean, in a lot of ways, policy has a huge role to play either positively or negatively. I don't know.

Do you have a view on what can be done from a policy side or what should be left well alone? Well, the safety net that everyone assumed was there, has a few cracks in it I think as has become visible and whether it was in the 2008 financial crisis people putting money in the banks or what happened in Cyprus that hey your money is safe

and you know you encourage trust the banks trust the government they'll take care of you and suddenly oh well 10% or 20% of your holdings are now being wiped out to pay for silly mistakes that were done by institutions etc etc so is it

is it policy that needs to change and I think it's a combination of everything hey it's just time right the world changes and yesterday everyone wants to be nostalgic but tomorrow is going to come and yesterday has gone past and how do we move forward how do we think what's going to happen in 20 years time and are we prepared for it in every shape form you know infrastructure is there sufficient capital is there sufficient educated individuals to fulfill the roles that required are individuals even going to be required because of machines that are going to be doing certain things it's just a journey that everyone's on and nobody's figured it out.

If they have, I'd love to meet them. And I invest in them. Right. Reshma, we're talking with Martha Lane Fox, and she was bemoaning the lack of women, entrepreneurs and the women in technology. And certainly Silicon Valley

has no answer for that as of yet. But do you have a point of view on that? And are you seeing any movement one way or another? I'm not seeing a movement probably. fast enough, I would say.

I don't talk about this topic that much. I guess it's funny. I think I read an interview with Eileen. I think she and I were, when we were young, we were just worried about being Chinese-American for her, Indian-American for me. So I didn't worry about being a woman, right? And it's an issue I've been thinking more about.

But, I mean, again, I think it's just like entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurship, is an ecosystem thing. So we don't have enough female VCs who, you know, do look at things differently, and we'll look at individuals differently. We don't have enough female entrepreneurs, female coders, all of that. I think, again, it's changing. I think as you have in the U.S., you're seeing Twitter product managers who've left,

and there's a few women who've started, you know, fund of their own. I think as you start to see talent leave here, hopefully exit, have a bit of wealth. They will start to create funds and they will become angel investors and so forth. So I think that'll help. I think, you know, role models, again, I'm a new mom, and it's hard for me to get out. I mean, literally. But I still, you know, I go out there. I have a supportive husband, and I think you need those role models.

So Martha, you know, Sherry, I lean, me, we need to play that part. Sometimes it's difficult to do so, but you've got to keep going out there and showing what you're capable of. So I agree with her that it's just, it's not enough still. But, I mean, even in our own portfolio, it's a tiny percentage that are females. female-led companies. And, Shaq, I don't want to, you know, just because you're a man, you should, doesn't mean you don't have an opinion on this. No, you know, it's a great question on his more and more about.

And I'd answer it in one way similar to what, Rishma, you know, growing up, whether it's male, female, et cetera, putting that to the side, it was, hey, I'm non-white in a white country. And unless you're non-white, you will never understand that. And secondly, to answer your question, I think you can answer it better. We're sitting in a lovely venue in London, and you've got an American Indian in London and a Pakistani heritage males sitting here. So, you know, is there diversity?

There's obviously diversity in this room. Should there be more female entrepreneurs yet? But then you need more female investors, which we're starting to get now. And that trickle-down effect will happen. I think, you know, we're going through a phase, and there's more and more encouragement. and if you look at every sector, there are some exceptional women in leadership positions, Padmasri Warrior, Indian, the individual who is CTO or Cisco now is doing a bunch of board stuff there, there's the Pepsi CEO, I think, is an Indian lady.

It's starting to happen and I think we'll see a very rapid shift. When that happens, I don't know, but some of the most exceptional PMs that I'm meeting in today's environment are not male yeah you know our infrastructure needs to change as well so um child care is is kind of impossible in the UK market in London and somehow it doesn't fall on my husband it somehow falls on me to kind of think about that right and that's a pretty big issue working hours you know your children go to school at some weird times I mean they end at three what do you do with that you know and so a lot of that infrastructure um needs to dramatically shift to make make things here Sweden, maternity leave and paternity leave, serious fundamental changes by the government,

encouragement of leadership positions. I think there's actually a requirement that the ratio has to be X number of females and X number of non-Sweeds on a border, I believe. So you're starting to see that happen. I hope it happens in England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland in every country, sooner rather than later. But that's nothing I can influence because I'm not a woman, I can support the women who are there, women like Reischma, women like Eileen and Sherry, and there's a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs, Alicia Nibarro, Robin Eckstein, and equivalent to, in the States, there's exceptional leaders such as Ellen Levi, Julia De Begovni. There's no shortage, but we need more, and it'll happen sooner or later.

I'm going to let you guys brag now, if you want, about companies or people that we should all be paying attention to that maybe we haven't, you know, found out about yet in the U.S. in our own myopic Silicon Valley way? Well, we're really excited. We've been an incredibly active investor, obviously, in fintech, but property tech as of late as well. And to Shaq's point from before, you know, we do think UK startups in that space have been limited to date. So we have a company called Property Partner, which we're extremely excited about. It's a pretty complex business. They're combining acquisition of properties with funding them through crowdfunding. And so, yeah, exactly.

Wait, so what happens to the property? Are we just all group investors in it, or do we all move in together and have a commune or something? It's pretty phenomenal. So they have a team that actually goes out there and sources properties. So they have a whole team around negotiating these properties. It's in residential space right now. So they're buying either standalone houses or blocks of flats, individual flats. And is it London regionally?

Right now, but obviously plans for expansion. And then once they get the property on, they're releasing up onto the platform. And so they just set a world record a couple of days ago. It was a block of four flats, 1.1 million pounds, sold out in two minutes and 19 seconds. So I'm investing in real estate. Is that the idea that on the crowdfunding side, I get to get a piece of real estate? From a very human point of view, myself included, it's actually the first property I own in London, house or part of it. It's just you cannot get on the property ladder. And again, if you think

about it, UK, maybe you don't understand the problem. But if you're in New York in San Francisco, in Hong Kong, you understand that by. Paris. You name any big city in the world, basically. And a lot of people have savings and you save over years and years. Every time you kind of reach a point where I'm ready to buy, either your desire has gone up or the prices have gone up or both. And so you can never get on. And so in a very human way, this allows you property by property to really spot what you want to get into and be able to come. And there's a secondary market associated with it and all of that as well. So we're extremely excited about where this can go.

That's cool. That's interesting. Yeah, I can see that playing well in San Francisco. Shack. So it's not a portfolio company in mine. It's a company out of Germany, Berlin. A company called Get Your Guide. They've just announced $50 million raised from KKR. You know, companies have had a number of pivots over the last few years.

but the execution and the speed that these founders and this team is working on with a very global vision. And anyone who's managed to attract Keith Cullen as a board member who was the CEO or the founder of booking.com and Fritz Demolopoulos who created Chunar, which is the kayak of China, onto their board who are two of the most aggressive, ruthless, execution-focused individuals based in Berlin. So we come back to that. you know are they thinking of building a company just for berlin no this team is thinking of creating a global global rand which is why you know investors in europe but now kkr who don't normally do

early stage tech have invested 50 million dollars in it so that's one to you know get your guide get your guide dot com and uh it's about travel but like it's it's travel but it's it's more i think the step after the hotel and the flights of you know you're in london how do you you you get to the London eye. How do you get, how do you remove the friction, which you manage to do in your flights and your hotels and your lift or your Uber or Halos, but then having to stand 16 minutes in the rain waiting to be told that you're at the wrong counter of X or Y and Madam two sorts. So get your guide is obviously high up there. And the other one, you know, I can't sing the praise is high enough. I believe they're a portfolio company of yours and I believe they're a

seed camp company, right? Transfer wise. Original. O-G-C-G-G-C-G. You know, transfer-wise, I can't sing the praises high enough. And, you know, had I had the chance, and I don't know whether I actually did or not, I probably didn't have any liquidity because all my investments have been my own.

And, you know, it's a myth that you always have lots of cash debt. You know, you go through cycles. I didn't have any liquidity at the time. But that aside, love what those guys are doing. Love the fact that, you know, they're non-brits that made the headquarters in UK and tackling a global problem, which is the remittance,

which it's the most needy who get ripped off by the banks. You try and send, I know, 30 bucks to Pakistan or to Philippines. Western Union want, I think, nine bucks out of that. So it's the people who don't have the money who are trying to send remittances for their loved ones or their friends, etc. who get charged the most. And transfer-wise is doing an amazing job.

And I hope this goes down as, you know, one of the biggest companies ever to come out of Europe up there with Spotify and Skype or bigger than even those companies. And I think, and carted to Andreessen, but probably earlier with IA Ventures out of New York, is having some of that American DNA on ambition, expansion, how do you fund that expansion? How do you hire talent was really crucial from the early days?

So, I mean, I do think the trajectory, of that business has changed, would be in a very different curve had it not been for some of that American capital that came in very early. Yeah, it's interesting and it's also an idea that certainly, I mean, it could have come out of the U.S., but probably not. Just, you know, for the same reason that SMS

came out of Europe too and other things like that. But it's a problem that was solved here, and it's a problem that's global. And, you know, that counts is bragging, but I can't brag about it too just because it's in our portfolio. Well, Reshma, Shaq, I want to thank you guys so much. It's been a great conversation.

I have high hopes for all of Europe now. We'll have to keep an eye out. Thank you for having us. Thanks.