The a16z Show - 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? Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Likovac. 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. Oh, wow. 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 the, 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 Y Combinator 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 basically to help start-ups hire, and it was a recruitment job for her. 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 you can go home to your parents and say, oh, you know what, I'm working as a startup. I think a few things that we see change.

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 to something. You tend to increase demand for it. But I think also 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 Songkicks 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 Skypes and the things that happened in London, suddenly there's a legitimacy that just wasn't there maybe, it's only 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? Well, I mean, I think the list is pretty long of, you know, Spotify and Skype. And, I mean, 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. Yeah. But I think in the last even, what, 18 months, I'm starting to see a lot more entrepreneurs from the last, from the Sunkey,

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 that the recycling of info yeah I think in the last year or two has 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 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 policy. in order to optimize their, like, so London is actually doing this actively right now at FinTech, in order to really, because they've both been the heart, the city has 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's probably some flavoring, but you don't say, 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 started 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 the people would have just said, you know, you just can't do this. You can't 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 Ycombinator in Silicon Valley, which we consider like one of these. 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 Wycombinator in particular is, you know, truly phenomenal job and huge fans of what they've achieved. And the way, and you actually, we don't want to compete with any of these guys head on because I think usually, you know, if you've got a team and an idea and a product, you know, 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 Waikaminate 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 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 Michelle 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 rich a 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. So privacy is super important for our startup. You can imagine that somebody who grew up in a, you know, megalopolis in a country of one billion people has a different view of privacy from someone who grew up in a former Soviet republic of two million people. And I think that that helps with the 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, and 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, 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 uh tech ecosystem that you can uh that you can serve that community alone I mean we often think of 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 megalomaniacs and turning them into computer scientists,

and we have to start with computer scientists and turn them into megalomaniacs. 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 problem. But increasingly, you know, I think as tech, as you say, seeps globally. that is a lens that people use in, 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, tech is central, but we're not tech-centric, like in London and 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 shattered 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, partners or whatever reason you kind of always get, I feel like I get my ass kicked from the level 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, So anytime we want to figure out 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 craving. Don't mince words. 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 or 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 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, has said an arbitrage play 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 CS degree, you can get, you know, a Cambridge PhD with, you know, three years post-doctoral experience in machine learning. Right, right. It's an incredibly competitive market. And that arbitrage actually, we've seen our companies execute very effectively. But what can we learn from you guys and from sort of 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 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? I think one maybe smaller thing that surprised me when I talk 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 sense of harmony here. I think government is actually quite innovative in how they help angel investors in the UK, how they help startups directly, and also how they're helping to build the scene. And when you're a very small startup, 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 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 management.

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 you know there's a lot of criticism of the government you know probably four years ago that it was cheerleading and hype and there was nothing there and you know 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 the

These aren't real companies. These are, some kick being an obvious exception. But as in the word, the criticism used to be, you know, these are all agencies and woman bands and, 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 in kind

of marketing the brand of a city and 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 Ten Downing Street, you know, and, you know, is that 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, knowing 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 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 nationally, trying to carve out, like, regions like looking 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 support. 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 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, doesn't actually... There is zoning as well. I mean, our last co-working space was converted by local council mandate into private

housing. Entry-level housing for in Primrose Hill, which is kind of... 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, it's got, 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 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, includes people with deep technology talent,

you know, kind of who actually, you know, I mean, the deep mind story actually, 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 it's a deep mind as a company start here in London by PhDs in computer science, focusing on general artificial intelligence. They, you know, 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, maybe 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 that I'm doing or I can have a different application is happening now. And I think 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 to 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, you know, 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 UCLA, 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. 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, so, US-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 try 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. 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 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 like how tech company works, why we can't do certain things, how we can't 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 and 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. Yeah, you guys would be a center and project. Talent source. We do see, we have a lot of inbound interest

from large corporates. And very often the challenge is that the reason they're approaching 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 how, I don't mean this in a patronising 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 is still the kind of open question. From everything you guys have described so far in this podcast, it sounds like, you know, 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 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 hasn't 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 kind of mentorship model that some accelerators have where you have 100 names on a website and they'll come in for 15 minutes and actually have a real partnership model where our partner.

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 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 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. that time was just 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 advice. For those people who aren't here in London right now and aren't doing business, business in Europe more broadly, why come? Why pay attention and what is that 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 for 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, 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 the main themes that 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 industries, 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 866 and Z podcast. Thanks.