Alastair Paterson - Founder of Digital Shadows

Full transcript: Alastair Paterson on London Real

0:28 Behind the innovation, locally filmed, locally sourced. Silicon Real. It’s about the people. Cool, cool. Here we go.

0:41 This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Brian Rose. I host London Real, which is a similar format. We get three people in a room, try to figure a few things out. We’ve had Tim Ferriss on.

0:56 We’ve had George Galloway, Max Keiser, Bruce Parry from the BBC series Tribe. It’s a lot of fun. Check that out if you’d like. But today we’re here to talk about tech. My co-host is entrepreneur Colin Pyle who runs the online language school Lingos.

1:09 You’ve got the new coffee company coming up, Crew Cafe, coming up. Your Kickstarter is kicking ass, literally, isn’t it? 92%. Yeah. So hopefully by the time this airs it’ll be 100%.

1:20 It’ll be 100% and that’s what, 15,000? Yeah, just 15,000. 15. That’s no joke. Yeah, it’s pre-orders, you know.

1:26 It’s great. We got you know, proof of concept, people want it, and bu biodegradable pod. We saw a big, big spark when I made that update. So that’s great. That’s big.

1:34 I was watching this espresso ad recently with a, with the, what’s his name, your boy Clooney. And he was like, yeah, he’s down in the things and picking the beans. It’s really sustainable, and I was like, yeah, what about this aluminum thing that the coffee comes in? So you guys are going to own it? Yeah, the aluminum things.

1:49 They put 10 billion of those in landfills a year. It’s, I don’t mean to, like, pitch this, but that’s pretty bad for the environment. So by m we’ve got an espresso now. So to talk, yeah, there we go. There we go.

2:01 Awesome, dude. All right, fantastic. That’s good to hear. On to the show. Our guest today is Mr Alastair Paterson, who is the founder of Digital Shadows, which offers a cyber monitoring service that secures companies’ digital footprints, which is also their potentially sensitive information that’s posted online.

2:18 You also protect companies from, and individuals from, cyber attacks. I’m sure you do a bunch of other stuff as well. Earlier this year you were selected as part of the London’s Fintech Innovation Lab, which is sponsored by Accenture, which is one of our partners, one of our early supporters that we’re big fans of the show, and so, you know, big shout out to those guys. Now you guys have a global footprint, tier one clients all over the world. You’re driving around in Rolls-Royces?

2:41 No, I’m just kidding. Alastair, welcome to Silicon Real. Thanks to be here. It’s a great story. We talk a lot about incubators and accelerators here.

2:49 We’ve had, you know, a bunch of people in, and we always ask, you know, are they effective? Are they good, are they bad? And I just wanted to find out what it was like being part of the Fintech Innovation Lab. We had, who do we have on here from there? It was like four or five months ago.

3:03 We had the guy that runs F yeah s, and he was saying how they were selecting the companies, and I think they’re going to start incubating, kind of, first quarter next year, and they’re going to have a big pitch day, I think, in May. Yeah. So I think up till now they’ve been going after, there’s just been a whole lot of them. And now, for January up till sort of May, I think they sort of really incubate. I’m sure you could, you could give us a little bit more insight.

3:27 I think they are in Level 39, and they’re working with all the banks, te and CTO and stuff like that, and they’re going to produce some great stuff. We’re watching them. But what were you like, pre-Innovation Lab? What was it like being there at Level 39 and how did it go for you guys? Sure.

3:40 I’d say we had a great experience there. So you know, pre-pre-39, we’ve been going for about a year and a half, and we had a bunch of Innovation Awards. We had some traction, but fundamentally we were still struggling to get into a lot of the big institutions. So the great thing about the Fintech Lab was this was the banks coming to us and saying, hey, we think what you’re doing is interesting and innovative. Come and work with us.

4:02 So suddenly the doors swing open. You go in, you get access to these guys. You can try out the technology, and it really, I think, we learned more in the three months of the Fintech Lab than previous year, in terms of feedback, changing our product, getting the product-market fit. So off the back of the lab, we ran, we ran four trials. Three of those turned into commercial contracts after the lab, so that really transformed our business.

4:24 We raised money off the back of it. With those reference points, you can go and get a lot more, lot more clients, and continue to build the company. So it’s hugely important for us. I think, you know, the great thing about the Fintech Lab is it’s really engaging you with the clients. It isn’t just a, I think there’s a bunch of accelerators out there that you go in and you get lots of advice and mentoring, you know, and that’s great, and some people really want that, but I think for us, you know, we’d had, frankly, enough sort of mentoring and advice and competitions we’ve been part of, and the key thing was getting the client exposure.

4:57 So to get that through the Fintech Lab with the biggest banks in the world was fantastic. Were those your clients that you said you got three commercial contracts? Were those bank clients? Yeah, tier one banks. So you know, we’ve added to that since then.

5:09 It’s just, you know, that was probably the single most important thing we did as a company was getting on that lab. But, you know, at the same time there’s a bunch of other factors that came into play. The Level 39 complex is pretty fantastic as well. Just by being there, you gain credibility, you meet good people, and we liked it so much we stayed. So, you know, good place to be out there is I mean, you’re right in the middle of Canary Wharf, which is where all the banks are.

5:33 I went out there about 5 months ago. It’s, you know, it’s a cool office, it’s a great complex. You’d think in this interconnected cyber world we have, it wouldn’t matter where you are, but does it really make a difference when you’re literally footsteps away and cups of coffee away from all the banks and the big management consultant firms and everything? Ah, for us it does. It really does.

5:50 I think if you’re, if you’re building a, you know, a dot-com, you can get away with whatever offices you like, wherever you like. It really doesn’t matter. Unless you know, I guess, benefits from being near investors and things like that. But fundamentally, you can pretty much run a dot-com anywhere in the world, but the, you know, the key thing with us is it’s face-to-face B2B sales to the, to these large institutions, and if you’re if you’re sat miles away they’re not going to come and visit you.

6:15 In our case we’ve actually got nicer offices in some of the banks that we work with, which is quite amazing for a startup. So, you know, it’s just great. And I don’t think you can emphasize enough, like, how hard it is to get a meeting at a bank and then to get the next meeting, and then to get it pushed. It’s just, did you try before you entered the Innovation Lab? We were working with one of the banks, and we were just kicking off a trial with another one, but that took us, you know, about a year of knocking on the door.

6:40 You know, if you can get in the door, you’re almost certainly not talking to the right guy, so he’s got to put you in touch with the right guy and you go for another meeting, and so you need a sort of jungle guide through these big organizations. They say, sort of the sales cycle of pitching to a big institution is, you know, one to three years, kind of thing, right? Which is just insane from a startup perspective. It’s like, I only have cash flow to last me 3 months, let alone 3 years to close this account.

7:07 So, so yeah, no, that’s great, that’s great stuff. Were they open to what you were doing, or were there certain people, you know, the banks, that were just there for FaceTime, or these type of people really listening, or cuz ultimately, well, maybe not you with the Cyber stuff, but some of these guys are threats to their business model, right? I think yeah, it’s interesting. We went in worrying a little bit about that. Were they just doing it for PR purposes and they wanted to look good?

7:31 And I think we were really pleasantly surprised at how seriously they took it. So obviously they, you know, they do get some PR out of it, and I’m sure they, you know, they like that. But they really did. They did their best to put us in touch with the right people in the bank, and if what we were pitching still wasn’t interesting, you know, they’re not just going to give you a leg up just because it’s part of the program. You still got to do something useful for them.

7:54 But they were very receptive, and okay, yeah, from our point of view we’re just trying to help them, and we’re not disrupting their day-to-day business. We’re trying to support it and keep them secure and their data secure, but from what I saw on the program they were pretty receptive to even the more disruptive companies in there. So yeah, I think very pleasantly surprised with how it went. Do you wish it had gone longer or you know, for another 3 months of making contacts and connections, or was it, are you glad to kind of move on after that three months?

8:22 I think, you know, you enter any incubator, any competition, you’ve got to think about the amount of time you’ve got to put in, and as a startup is, we all know, the amount of time you’ve got is one of your critical, critical things. You know, it’s a really precious commodity, and you can’t fritter it away and I think there’s a big time commitment to being part of any accelerator or program. We got to the end of the three months, and we got what we needed from it, which was we understood the value prop we understood where we fit in, where our differentiators were, and we’d shown that it, that the tech works, and from then on, we had the contacts.

8:54 And the great thing for us about the security industry is everyone talks. It’s got a small community. If you’re good and you’re known for being good, then word gets around, and actually they support and share information between the banks to some extent, and that’s increasing over time. So getting, you know, a good tick in the box from a few of the banks really helps with the other banks for us. So I think it was the right time for us to come off the program, start a raise, some money, and just go for it on our own, must be tough, cuz it’s nice and warm in the nest, leave the womb.

9:26 Yeah, yeah, it must be kind of tricky, cuz you have to kind of make a break right after that. Yeah, pretty much. Just a quick I know a lot of the incubators, and specifically the fintech, is get out to clients and then get feedback. I’m just curious how much did your business model change or pivot during that process, or did it pretty much stay the same we did. We shifted it a little bit.

9:48 So we came in, you know, I think when you set up a company, you go out and you’re trying out lots of different ideas, and you end up chasing lots of different things down. I’ve heard it called, sort of, squirrel mode, when you’re just sort of looking around for the next opportunity, and you’re trying out lots of different things. So when we went into the Innovation Lab, we had, I guess, five propositions. We were hoping to get that down to one. Based on the feedback from the banks and actually the feedback we got was, actually, all five are interesting, and here’s two that are really interesting, and so we’re now focused on those two right now.

10:21 So those two are, so firstly, data loss detection, so working out what information the banks are leaking out that leaves them, you know, either vulnerable to attack or it’s actually leaking customer data or confidential information. And the second area is what we call actionable attack intelligence. So that’s really letting the banks know who’s coming to attack them, when that’s going to happen, and which tools they’re going to use in the attack basically giving them that forewarning, so they can put the right measures in place and defend themselves.

10:50 So those were the two sort of top-top level, you know, offerings that we ended up with off the back of the program and we’re just adding a third one around brand protection. But those are the three we’re going into 2014 with Okay, well, that was my next question. Is, we always ask, you know, what have you guys done and what are you going to do, and what makes you guys different, and why you think you’ll win in this space? So you kind of describe your products, which are very different products.

11:12 It’s like this latent print that they might leave out there that they don’t want out there, and then guarding them from attack by the anonymous of the world. But tell us about you guys, as far as you know, what you’ve done, what you plan to do, and what makes you different CU, it must be a competitive space. Yeah, I mean it is. There’s a lot of Bly in the threat intelligence side. There’s a lot of money going in, particularly in the US, and it’s something we’re very conscious of, you know, we think there’s two to three years that this market’s maturing in, and there’s a bit of a land grab going on.

11:40 Obviously, if you’re positioning well with a tier one banks, you’re in pretty good shape, and the pleasing thing for us is we’ve come through a bunch of bake-offs now, so they’ve actually run us against all the other products and services and it seems that our coverage, particularly in foreign languages and things like that, is superior, and the rate that we, the timeliness of and usefulness of the alerts we provide, is better than the rest out there at the moment. We’re releasing a big new portal in February. It’s going to be a very exciting moment for us.

12:09 It’s effectively Digital Shadows 2. That’s coming out, so we’re going to give our clients access to that so they’ll get access to all of the intelligence we’ve got in the system. It comes with an API, so our clients can connect to that, plug it into their systems. It’s really scaling up, the architecture as well, so we can add hundreds of clients onto the platform. So really, that’s our sort of next step.

12:33 Can’t be complacent. There’s a lot more going on in this space, but it’s an exciting time for us, and what makes you guys different? What’s your added edge? Is it your background, or, you know, what makes you win over, like, a Silicon Valley startup, besides your access to the companies? Yeah, I mean, I think where we’ve ended up in terms of the product, it’s, I just say we have greater coverage.

12:53 We have greater timeliness, and the quality of what we’re producing is higher, but in terms of the conditions that allow us to get there, I think our team is really exceptional. So we’ve got a bunch of very experienced people who’ve worked in data analytics and cyber security. That combination of skill sets is pretty rare. We’ve got it in spades. Combine that with being in London at this time, it’s a great time to be here.

13:16 We’ve got all the big banks around us. There’s a lot of decision makers in the financial sector, so it made a lot of sense for us to focus in that area. We’ve got a pretty good competitive advantage from even just geography. I think the timing is just perfect for us as well. And the whole thing with cyber security is, you know, the landscape is changing all of the time.

13:35 It really favors the startups, because they’re more agile. They can get in, they can change and shift and adapt. It’s a really rapidly moving landscape. And that’s something that’s really helped us. You know, you say banks, and I wouldn’t have thought it would have been bank specific.

13:49 I thought it would have been like all companies that have issues. Why is it banks more than anything? I mean, are they more at risk, or are they more proactive, or why? It is all sectors, and we’re planning to go for, you know, a whole bunch of other areas after the financial sector. We chose to start with the financial sector, because number one, they come under attack pretty much more than anyone else.

14:08 Okay. Number two. Who’s number two? Out of curiosity. Oh, interesting.

14:12 So I mean, oil and gas, utilities, pharmaceutical and biotech, the defense companies, and, you know, even government. And why do the banks come under attack more than anyone? I mean There, other people would say some of those other sectors maybe get attacked just as much, but yeah, the banks get attacked a lot. I guess number of reasons. So there’s, they hold a lot of data, lot of customer data, for example, which is valuable and can be sold on.

14:39 They have had a pretty bad press over the last few years in particular, so there’s people who are motivated to attack them just for that reason. Some of the overseas, people who don’t like the West. I think the banks embody the West to some extent, so and the financial system in general. And also, you know, it’s a very competitive space. There’s, you know, things like trading algorithms, research reports, they’re all quite valuable to a number of people, so getting access to those and getting competitive advantage is important for more advanced operators.

15:11 You know, I understand the fact that of having a digital footprint, like on Facebook like, if there’s a picture of, what was it, Michael Phelps was smoking some weed on Facebook, and then, and then you know, he took a lot of heat from that, so I could see how you’d want to get rid of that footprint. But I don’t obviously see how, say, Barclays would want to get rid of something in their digital footprint, but can you give me an example of something you might scrub up, or this leakage makes me nervous? Could just a little more specific?

15:35 You know, even in a general example. I mean, we think so, social media, mobile, cloud. These are all great things that companies should be adopting and saying yes to, and getting competitive advantage, and so should individuals. So we’re right on with that. I think the problem isn’t so much, you know, a photo or something else going up on your Facebook wall necessarily.

15:55 It’s more, so for example, sensitive documents that accidentally leak out through the supply chain for example. So we, you know, we’ve seen instances where people have accidentally uploaded sensitive material into folders that get indexed by Google, like a Google Drive, by accident, for example. So suddenly, so it’s human error. It’s a lot of the, yeah, a lot of the time it’s human error. And so it’s, you know, it’s not malicious.

16:18 It’s just accidentally something’s got out there, and we found, I mean, one of the biggest examples from the last few months was a cache of 3,000 of the documents, 3,000 documents, for one of the banks. It’s a UK bank. The bank included the ATM security specification, and that had just leaked out onto the internet through accident. In fact, and we were able to get to it before it had gone anywhere, thankfully. So it’s, you know, these things are accessible, you know, even for someone with a Google search, but if you’ve got more sophisticated tools, then there’s a lot you can find.

16:47 The other sort of things we see are leaks that, help the hackers break in. So if, when the hackers are now planning their attacks, they’re becoming far more sophisticated than they ever were before, and amount a already targeted sophisticated attack, you have to research the target in a lot of detail, just like casing a bank before you break in. You’re casing the joint. I’ve ever done that. It’s exactly that.

17:09 So it’s called, it’s called reconnaissance, or hostile reconnaissance. This pH, but it’s exactly that. It’s casing the joint. And that’s now about 90% of the time that the bad guys spend in the attack, or the operation, is identifying the weak points, and that can be through usernames and passwords, or the software that the banks are running, the configuration, their systems. All of this is really valuable data to the guys trying to break in.

17:32 So if you can get rid of that and you can minimize that, then you make yourself a hard-to-target. Is that something, you know, say that document got out there, that collection of 3,000 documents, and you identify that it’s out there and you go to remove it, can you really scrub that data forever? Or there’s so many different networks that are replicating things, not to mention Google itself, where you can never actually eradicate that? Yeah, it can be very difficult.

17:55 It really depends where it is. Going to say maybe that’s a whole other K. We’ll get to that later. Oh, great, but yeah, I know there’s, you’re right, you have to take a sort of case-by-case approach. And quite often, particularly with the banks, they would rather deal with the cleanup than leave it to us.

18:14 We can work in a whole bunch of different, flexible ways. They have departments that worry about this sort of thing, and actually by trying to remove content, you can make it worse in some situations. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the term the Streisand effect, where Barbra Streisand tried to remove some content from the internet. It became a far bigger story than it ever was originally, because she tried to remove it, and so you can actually have the opposite effect by trying to take something down.

18:37 But on the most part this is, you know, illegal material that’s been confidential material that’s accidentally got out and hasn’t spread anywhere, and it’s not a, it’s no one trying to spread that message. It’s just something that’s accidentally got out and needs to be cleaned up. And it can be, but you’re right, there’s always a risk that there’s a copy somewhere. You have to keep, keep an eye out. I find this field really fascinating I don’t know.

19:00 It just seems like there’s so much potential. There’s so much business there. You know, if you get it right. But it also struck me as a business that people might, might not know they need. Like, you might have to pitch these institutions and let them know, like, the Y2K, like, this is a big problem you’re going to have unless you get on board now.

19:16 But, like, they might not even know. Is that tricky when you go to pitch people, or do you just pitch them by saying, look, what I found, interesting point? So we have to be quite. We thought quite hard about how we approach this, and for us we only ever go and look on behalf of a client if they’ve asked us to do so. So we’ll say, hey, we can go and have a look for you and show you some examples.

19:38 But we won’t just go and do it without, there, well, would you be liable not to report if you sound, found certain things for financial institutions? Is there? Yeah, I mean, ultimately what we’re finding is public data. It’s fundamentally open on the internet. But yeah, you’re right, there’s been one or two instances where we found something so, so sensitive, just by accident, because it’s come up as part of something else we’re doing that we have independently contacted that institution, and there’s a case like that in court at the moment.

20:05 But it’s, why is it in court? As there was, there was actually an employee of a bank that was actually selling information online. Okay, which is pretty, because it’s like, if you, if it’s like a crime, if you come upon that crime and you don’t report it, now you’re complicit in some way in that crime, potentially, with some of these things. Yeah, there’s a whole raft of legal issues we had to take account of as part of this on the whole, because we’re dealing with public data, it becomes a lot easier from a security and a legal point of view.

20:33 We’re really just pointing out things that are on the internet, and that’s a bit different from us going after anything, you know, holding confidential material from behind closed doors, or anything more sophisticated, and otherwise just pitching businesses that they need the service, or do they all know? At this point it’s interesting. So one of the reasons we picked the banks was they’re actually very, they’re very good in terms of their security. They’re pretty mature.

20:55 They’re aware of these issues. One, there are other industries I could talk about that are probably less, less mature, less aware of the problem, and that we think we’d have a harder time convincing. But we actually started out working with not-for-profits. Actually, human rights organization was our first client. So we do work in, you know, a whole bunch of areas and languages, and things like that.

21:18 It’s interesting. I think it does affect everyone to some extent. And it’s really, we just made a commercial decision to focus on the financial sector first. Why don’t some of these big banks just have it in house? Cuz some of, you know, like HSBC or Barclays, huge institutions, do they not have these massive sort of IT guys and CTO that should be taking care of this rather than outsourcing it?

21:42 Yeah, they do have, in some cases they have people already worrying about this. On the whole, they’re using quite manual processes to go and manually search for things or write sort of one-off reports. What we have is this continuous monitoring platform. Okay, so it’s, we supply at scale. What they can do is a bit of a one-off operation.

22:03 So absolutely, they, some of them have good coverage, some of them have less good coverage, bit of a range. I think on the whole, they are, they’re pretty good relative to any other sector. And do they is it a subscription-type model, so they pay you monthly to have access to your platform? Yeah, exactly. It’s a monthly fee.

22:19 In return for that we supply alerts, and we supply reports, and we have analysts available when they call up if they’ve got a particular issue they want to resolve. We can go and look at that, so for a small company, say 100 people, that maybe doesn’t have the budget of a huge bank, is it the same sort of price, or is it just access, or does it, does it vary in price depending on sort of the amount of data I guess that you’re, we vary it by the size of the company, basically. So based on number of employees, and the service level that they want.

22:51 But yeah, I think the smallest we’ve ever done is around 400 people. Below that, it doesn’t really make so much sense at the moment, because your footprints like to be smaller. You can probably look at that yourself, and you probably couldn’t afford a service to do it. Okay, so good to know All right, time to get real here. We’re going to hit you with some hard questions about your business model.

23:09 They’re not that hard, but I, I mentioned the NSA earlier, and it’s, it’s strange, because six months ago no one was talking about the NSA, and maybe you were, and it’s just weird, because now we think there is a digital shadow of everything out there, you know, potentially that could get leaked by the US government. And is that something that goes on your mind, or something you have to, advise institutions on? When, in fact, the thing you’re trying the most to let not happen is happening in a weird way.

23:35 And you don’t have to answer this question, but you know you must come up with this a lot. I mean, people must ask you, you know, if a certain government has copies of everything, how can you eradicate them elsewhere? I guess, I guess it’s, you know, what are you, what are you trying to protect in from who to some extent. With that, so regardless of whatever the NSA is doing, you still want to stop the bad guys in terms of the organised criminals. You know, and other nation states potentially getting access to your systems or, you know, and if you’re leaking that data publicly, that’s always going to be a bad thing anyway.

24:10 So for us, the, I guess, the whole NSA stuff in the news hasn’t really altered the message or the business case for why you’d consider Digital Shadows. I think the interesting thing for me about that, I mean, there’s it’s obviously sparking a really important debate in our society about, you know, to what extent you want the state to monitor communications, and there’s obviously a privacy trade-off versus security in that, that we’ve got to have the debate about, is it, you know, in a healthy democracy, and work out where we want to sit, but the thing that struck me was that, despite, you know, there’s all of this talk about the monitoring going on by the government, but I don’t think people necessarily think enough about what they’re just publishing openly on the open internet anyway, and they’re giving to these huge institutions like Google, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and the, of the you know, the social media cohort and the cloud services and so on.

25:03 So, you know, we’re all self-publishing this data if you went back 20 years and people were starting to worry about, you know, you being able to be tracked or being able to put, you know, I don’t know, the government putting cameras in our televisions, or something like that. Well, you know, if you’ve bought a PlayStation or an Xbox recently, you’ve done just that. Effectively, you put a camera and a microphone in your own home voluntarily, and you’re probably carrying a tracking device, which is your smartphone.

25:27 So it’s you know, it’s these things that we’ve voluntarily done that I think is actually the more interesting thing. And how we protect and regulate that data from everyone is a really important issue that we’ve got to sort out but it’s, I guess, the interesting thing for Digital Shadows is the amount that’s just public is vast and that’s, you know, I think one of the things we want to do is raise a bit of awareness about this, so people are a little bit more savvy about what they’re leaking out on the internet, and what that allows people to do. And it certainly, it’s one of the things that led us to set up the company, or certainly worried me initially, was seeing the future generations growing up and leaving these huge digital footprints behind them everywhere they go, pretty much from birth, which really wasn’t the case for our generation at all.

26:12 I think I’m quite glad Facebook was invented after I was at university. Probably, I had a discussion on London Real where it was like everyone’s going to have such a bad digital footprint in 15 years, they’re going to hire the person with the least worst, you know, digital. Oh, you only smoke weed three times, then you can take your cuz, this guy done this, this, this. But I don’t know if that’s going to be the case. I don’t know.

26:31 I mean, I think every everyone’s got to be allowed a bit of a private life. You’ve got to be doing, you know, I don’t think everyone’s got pictures of themselves they’re probably a bit embarrassed about at some point, and whatever. So I don’t, can’t see that’s going to be such a huge part of future employment, but who knows? You know, and I think it’s something we’ve got to bear in mind. But yeah, it was my co-founder James Chapel, who’s, you know, a lot of the brains behind the operation at Digital Shadows, who started thinking more from the company’s point of view, what does this all mean, and all this data in aggregate?

27:00 And when, when you look at supply chains as well, if you’re a company, one of the banks we work with has 17,000 suppliers. You will have access to their data and those suppliers have suppliers, and those suppliers have suppliers. So, you know, if you follow this down, and all these guys are using cloud services, they’re using mobile devices, they’re on social media. Suddenly, the footprint of the whole organization is enormous and that’s where we spotted the gap.

27:24 Yeah, I had a guest on recently, and he was, I mean, Edward Snowden actually worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. He actually didn’t work directly for the CIA, so you know, you think about all the people, and then the other people, and the people that have access to the information, and you know, how many phone calls is it from some triad to get the information from some contractor of the NSA? That’s a whole other story do you encrypt your emails? Do you use the Tor browser?

27:45 Are you aware of your own personal security? Yeah, I mean we use a whole bunch of measures, and we’re pretty aware about this stuff. And that said, I think it’s you know, you’ve also got to get out there and engage with all the tools at your disposal. So yeah, you know, I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, all the rest of it. So it’s having some sort of balance.

28:02 I think if you try to live in a, you know, in a complete box and isolate yourself from all of this stuff, you’re missing out on a lot. So I believe the right way forward is to try and adopt these technologies, but put the right, you know, measures in place and be as secure as you can be while still gaining all the benefits. And I think it’s really important we realize there’s no silver bullet, and in terms of security so you’re still pretty much always vulnerable to some extent, really, depending on how aggressive and how resourced your adversary is So I think you’ve just got to be proportionate and sensible about how you approach security.

28:37 Colin, what am I missing? Yeah, just, I guess, some advice for the individual. You know, you talk a lot about de corporates are sort of 400 and up, but yet kind of the idea stemmed from, you know, protecting from birth to till you get older. So how does a normal person protect a little bit of some of their digital shadow? Yeah, good, good question.

28:57 I think the, a lot of it’s just about being aware of what you’re publishing and what’s public and what’s not, and it’s certainly a lot of the social networks, by default, used to have everything as public as possible, because the more we shared the better it was for them. You know, we’re the product, and our data is the product, right? So I think that, you know, one of the first things to do is review all the privacy settings that you’ve got on there work out what you want to be out in the open or not.

29:22 Be aware. I think every time you put something on the internet you should assume, even with a privacy setting, that it might, it might become public. So if your, you know, Facebook decides to change the terms and conditions, suddenly something that was hidden is now public. And being particularly careful with your personal data, so you know, things like your address, date of birth, things that could be used in identity theft or to harm you, if you’re, you know, a significant figure in some way.

29:47 I think advising your family members is important as well, if you’re a parent, and keeping an eye on what your kids are posting online is pretty key. And what about keeping your stuff on, like, I keep almost all my stuff on Dropbox. Is that a terrible thing to do? They’ve got better. They’ve got better, certainly.

30:03 I think I’ve not been looking at them particularly recently, but they used to have a public folder that was there, and there was a lot of stuff that used to end up in that, that really shouldn’t have been there. Okay. But these days, I think that’s off by default, and you have to enable it. They’ve also got a two-factor authentication option, which allows you to be quite a bit more secure using it. That means that someone’s got to have, you know, I don’t know if you’ve seen the sort of tokens you can get that come up with a code that you got to type in for banks and stuff, but you can get apps that do that now, or text messages, and it’s a pretty good, secure way of logging into things, stopping someone else logging into your account.

30:38 It’s not foolproof, and there’s still ways people can get at the data, but it’s pretty good. What’s next for you guys? I mean, like you said, you’re you’re a great timing. You’re in the center of fintech innovation here in London, so it’s a great way to get in the front door with a lot of these global banks. What do you guys looking to do?

30:52 Do you need to be in more cities ultimately? Do you need to hire staff? Are you going to try to raise a series A or something like that? What’s, yeah, I mean, we got VC funding a couple of months ago, which is great. So we’re growing the team.

31:04 We’re certainly expanding as quickly as we can, and big part of that has to be international for us. In particular, the US is a huge market. We’re looking to open up a small office over there next year, where New York. Okay. It’s, you know, where most of the most of the cents so Mayor Bloomberg in New York, before he left office, said that London was more competition to New York than Silicon Valley I don’t know if I believed him right away, but is there any truth to that?

31:28 I think that was a really interesting comment. I think it’s really helped to put London on the map, and I think it depends on your perspective. So what has London got that other places don’t? I think, yeah, the financial sector is a big part of it, right? So on our desk, on our, you know, front doorstep, there we’ve got access to these, these huge banks that you just don’t have if you’re based in the Valley, or you’re based, you know, in any other part of Europe or the rest of the world, really.

31:54 It’s only really London and New York that have that concentration of the financial sector. So to set up a company like ours, New York is probably the only other place we could have had the same level of access, I think. So I think, you know, there’s a lot of other stuff going for London, though. It’s, you know, a great place. I think the support at seed stage is pretty incredible in London right now.

32:14 So you’ve got the whole SEIS, EIS benefits that the government have put in, the tax breaks. So we took SEIS. You’ve got the Technology Strategy Board putting a few grants in. We’ve had a grant from them, which was great. There’s also, do you have to pay that back, or do you have to get a matching grant from the board?

32:32 Match funding. Pixel pin, got that. Yeah, Brian was talking about that. Yeah, we’ve had actually now two different grants from them. They’re both match funding, and yeah, okay, there’s a bit of an admin overhead, frankly, in administering that grant, but it’s absolutely free money ultimately, and it’s made a really big difference to us.

32:48 It’s allowed us to scale up. It makes it easier to raise other funding if you can say you’ve already got this grant. How much did you get out of the grants? VI first time was 96,000. The second time was 250K.

32:59 So that’s checkbooks, man. I know, it’s great. Heard of them. Brian was saying, with, like, 10, 100 grand grants a month. One of them gives the TSB, I think it’s quarter, but, I wrong quarter, okay, but still, that’s pretty big numbers to get a quarter million, so you had to match that quarter million?

33:18 Yeah, so essentially you’re getting 500K. And what do you do with all that money? Is it development? Cuz that seems like a lot of money. They lay it on the bed.

33:28 How are you getting your clients? It’s like The Crystal Maze in our office. No, it’s, you said you heard better offices in the banks, but no, we’re not spending Bas on that. It’s basically people. It’s people, HR.

33:40 Yeah, it’s devel. We’ve got a great development team, and there’s that, and then there’s some key analysts we’ve got, and a few other key hires. Okay. So that, in the venture capital we’ve raised, goes towards all of that. And then yeah, future expansion next year into New York.

33:54 We’re looking at other verticals, growing the team. The other thing, partnerships. So we’re talking to a number of really big global SIs, Telos, and defense companies, and looking at, you know, that that’s a really great way to scale, because they can be out there integrating our platform with their own. So we’re expecting to pick one or two of those in the new year and really focus on them. Because there’s, I think one of the mistakes we made when we set up the company was, in the first sort of six months, we went and talked to a lot of these big companies, thinking that we could use them as a route to market, and we learned the hard way that unless you’ve got your own traction and your own sales, they’ll take meetings, but those meetings will just lead to other meetings, which will lead to other meetings, and as I said earlier, time is your precious commodity so you end up spinning a load of wheels in meetings and never getting anywhere, because they want to see you successful first.

34:44 Yeah, you’ve got to bring them to work, fundamentally, before they’re going to really bother partnering with you. So, because they want to see a product first. Yeah, yeah, you know, they’ve got things to sell already. You’ve got to, you know, you’ve got to demonstrate that traction first. What’s an SI?

34:57 Sorry, systems integrator. Okay, and what’s an example of some SIs? Someone like an IBM, an Accenture, you know, these, these big guys. Okay, all right, good enough. What’s your employee count right now and what was your last fund raise, if you can tell us roughly?

35:11 Yeah, so, so employee count is currently 12. We’ve got three more hopefully starting in the new year, and a bunch more we’re going to add. As I said, we’ve been pretty lucky with the sort of grants we had. We had a small angel investment as well. We took a pretty, I think, a record-breaking round from Passion Capital for them.

35:31 Won’t disclose the exact amount, but that’s just a precursor to a larger round next year. Okay. So you will have one more round. We’re expecting sort of third, fourth quarter next year. There’s already substantial interest, particularly from us, and big, like, as in 5 million plus, big, as in like that sort of area, real infrastructure building type stuff.

35:50 Yeah, it’s, it’s there’s a bit of a land grab, I think, over the next few years in this area, and we want to be part of that, and would that come from a big VC, or, you know, banks are putting so much money now, in sort of, in, you know, venture stuff within the banks. You see Barclays here, and stuff like that. Would they ever sort of go in with you guys and say, here’s 5 million, go nuts? They do do that, right? But I think, and that is an option.

36:16 We’re looking at a few different options. There’s obviously, there’s a whole bunch of VCs that are playing money into cyber security at the moment, and we’ve had a lot of interest there as well. I think, you know, we’d love to do the whole thing in the UK, and I think I’ve said it to you: UK is great for the seed stage. I think the gap, and where the focus has to be next, is on that, that next stage. So, great, got your seed funding, now what?

36:39 And at the moment you’ve got to look overseas, pretty much. We just had Halo in here last week. I mean, they’ve obviously raised a nice chunk of money and shown the way forward, where you can, you know, raise the 25-30 million, you know, to take it to the next level. We saw Rster do their kind of their IPO and raised about 20 million pounds recently, so we’re seeing it happen You know, you said that comment by Bloomberg was kind of nice to hear, and I was wondering if, if you weren’t in the cyber security business, you know, what would you be doing in London, as far as tech, if you had to do something else?

37:08 And what do you, what’s your opinion of the London scene right now? What does it feel like from where you are? It’s, yeah, good question. I think it’s interesting. I’ve sort of landed up in the security space, but I’m not really a security guy by background, and I think there’s a whole load of really interesting things going on, and if there’s, you know, if I ended up doing something after Digital Shadows, it will probably be in a slightly different area, I suspect, and I think it’s just great, even in the time since we set up the company, what’s happened in London is incredible.

37:35 You’re just seeing this huge convergence of startups, and I think originally there’s a lot of press and attention around just the dots and the sort of fashion and music, you know, industry and startups like that, and the whole sort of shortage, skinny jeans. No offense. No, I don’t wear skinny jeans, but we are in shortage, and, you know, and that’s, you know, that’s pretty appealing. It sort of put London on the map a little bit, but actually there’s a whole load of other interesting stuff going on now as well, and you see these sort of B2B firms coming up.

38:04 There’s a whole bunch out there. You’ve got, you know, the likes of Huddle, obviously, but Aunu, Data Sift, you know, Growth Intelligence, bunch of others. And it’s, you know, these are pretty serious B2B companies, as well as what’s going on in the more consumer-facing space. So I think, I think you’ve got you’ve got all sorts of things in London now to aim at, and, you know, who knows? I’m maybe I’ll put my jeans on next time and head over the other way, skinny jeans.

38:28 And it’s the, and these companies you mentioned they’re not the obvious, like, fintech play. They’re much more nuanced ideas about data, including you guys, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean that’s one of the hot spaces right now. I’m sure it’ll be a bit different in five years.

38:42 But I, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of very bright, bright techies in London doing great stuff. I think the other encouraging thing is seeing people come from all over the world to set up in London. There’s a great company, fintech company Open Gamma, who is, you know, US, got the founder, it’s from us originally, and they’ve set up in London because they believe it was better. Yeah, we got him on in January. Great.

39:03 So, so you know, great example, they’ve come to London because it’s, it’s the best place. We work with, you know, we’ve come across some other startups you’ve come over from Spain, from Greece, from Italy, France as well, to set up in London. It’s pretty, pretty great sign for the scene, I think, and is this space, you know, crowded? Do you think, in a certain perspective, I mean, do you see some people coming here with too many startups? You know, too many ideas, too many incubations, that kind of thing?

39:28 Is there a rush into this space? I, I guess, I think to some extent there’s, there’s a little bit there. Could be too many. I think there’s a couple of different questions there. So on the incubator and accelerator scheme, it seems almost like, for any major company now, there’s a bit of a, a bit of a fashion accessory, having an accelerator and I think, you know, there’s almost too many, and I kind of worry a little bit about how many are going to add enough value.

39:50 The great thing about the Fintech Lab, as I said, was the access to clients. If you’re just sort of, you’re getting a load of advice from some mentors who may not have done startups before, because frankly there’s not that many to go around in London, then maybe you could, you could be wasting your time. I don’t know. So I guess as a startup you’ve got to look very closely at what you’re going to get out of the program before you sign up. I think in terms of the numbers of startups, the more the better, frankly.

40:11 You’re going to have a bunch that fail, but you’ll have a bunch that succeed. I think the crowdfunding is interesting. Is it so disruptive, and I have seen a few there where I think, you know, the valuation’s been pretty, pretty tasty for a company that hasn’t had any revenue yet. But, you know, and ultimately I think maybe there’ll be a fair few of those that don’t, don’t go anywhere, and that might affect how many people put money in, in three years’ time or four years’ time, but it’s got to be a good thing, right?

40:35 And the VC community could do with a bit of a shake-up in the UK. So good to see it, see it happening. Yeah, VCs are definitely feeling it, you know, and well we’ve talked about it a few times here, where you can, you can really start companies on, on obviously much smaller amounts of money, and John Bradford from Techar was talking about that. So yeah, yeah, it makes it an interesting place where, in that they’re in right now, and I’m sure they’re really looking not to, not to get, you know, miss out on that, on that whole piece.

41:01 Yeah, even, you know, like Fetty was talking, you know, about just how there’s so many so much money in that angel area, and often it’s tough for, sort of, to find the real gems and you have to, sort of, maybe kiss a lot of frogs, because there’s, as you say, so many companies starting and so much money fighting for the good ones, right? Yeah, so it’s tough. Al, I’m going to ask you a question we ask everyone here, and this is, this, if you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old self and give a little bit of advice.

41:28 It could have to do with what you’re doing now or not. You know, what would you, would you tell him? You know, you have an engineering background, don’t you? Yeah, yeah, I guess I started on the techie side, and few things happened. I ended up more on the business end of it, but, what would I say?

41:43 I’d say, you know, enjoy it. It’ll work out. Enjoy the journey. Have a good time. I think, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s been a great, great few years.

41:54 Hopefully, hopefully, some more exciting ones to come. We hear that a lot. Yeah, just, everything’s going to be okay. We hear that a lot. and on that same note, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received, you know, either in Digital Shadows or before that?

42:06 Interesting question. I wish I’d sort of thought about this before it came. That’s right. Or, you know, or good business advice that you’ve gotten over the last year? Yeah, I, so a couple of people have said this, and originally it was actually someone, one of my old boss at my old firm, but it was really he was really saying the key is focus, and absolutely, whatever you’re doing, retain your focus on being the best you can be at the thing you’re, you know, you’re, you’re doing, you know, your business is focused on, and absolutely that’s been the key for us.

42:38 There’s so many things you can go and chase and try and do, and you’ll do them okay. But the key for us has been really narrowing down what we do, get that key value prop, and then nail it, and don’t get distracted by everything else. So focus would be my bit of advice. That’s good. And now, now you’ve been through this process, and I was wondering what advice you’d have for, you know, that younger entrepreneur, or the 20-year-old that’s listening to this, or maybe someone who, three years ago, you know, was like you, hadn’t decided to go down this venture that you’re in?

43:03 What advice do you give to them, or someone that’s about to start the Fintech Innovation Lab. You know, what do you tell them as far as what they should do or look out for? I think the, staying, keeping awareness up in general of what’s going on in the scene, what are the trends, what’s going to happen over the next few years, and, you know, and then taking a bit of a gamble. I think doing that at the right time of life is important. So for me, you know, everyone goes, oh, what a risk, you’re leaving a, you know, secure job and you’re going to do a startup.

43:31 But I didn’t really see it as a risk. I mean, I sort of realized, like, I could go and get another job again. It wasn’t going to be the end of me. And, okay, I didn’t, we didn’t pay ourselves, James or I, for six months, and we lived off, you know, beans and noodles and all that sort of good stuff, and even then we were on, you know, pretty, pretty minimal rations. But fundamentally we could still both go and get jobs if this hadn’t worked out, so I don’t, I think you’ve got a lot less to lose than you think you do, and you build this up in your head.

43:58 Obviously it gets a bit more tricky when you’ve got family and kids to support, and that sort of thing. So I think, do it, do it soon, do it early. You know, be aware, it might well fail. Have a bit of a backup plan. There’s nothing wrong in having, again, failing, and I think I’m quite driven by not wanting to regret things.

44:13 So I think if I’d got older and not done it, I’d have thought, I wonder, I wonder what if. Whereas, you know, I think if you plow in and try everything, then you know, what’s the worst it can happen I think for the Fintech Lab, it’s, you just got to get involved, going wholeheartedly, and don’t just sort of put one person on it from your company and half-heartedly go to some meetings. Just go all in. You just got to make the most of that opportunity. It’s a huge opportunity, because you must have seen some companies successful and not successful inside the Fintech Innovation Lab, and, like, because they’re probably going to listen to this.

44:44 You know, what would you tell those, you know, those companies that are about to start the process, you know, next quarter? I think, I think what worked for us was we put our entire team into Level 39, and we had everyone basically focus. We put, we had a few client commitments and we kept those going, but we stopped everything else we were doing, and for three months we just focused on the Fintech Lab, and if you can make that commitment, I think you get huge amount of value out.

45:05 I think the companies that did less well, perhaps, were ones that were based out elsewhere and sort of rotated people in and out for meetings and things like that. So I think you just got to go for it. If you’re in there, you literally went all in. Absolutely. Texas hold ’em.

45:20 What did I, what did I miss Colin? We can talk a lot about, yeah, there’s so much here. I’m just, quick question, because we could go on and on, but where is digital, you know, Digital Shadows, is it getting worse? Not your company, I mean, I mean, your company’s obviously getting it better, but the problem, you know, the Google Glass and all this sort of stuff, is this going to be a problem that you just can’t solve? You, it’s just a thing that you just have to accept?

45:48 No, that’s a great point you raised. I think, so we basically made a bet about three years ago, and we, James and I, were talking about the company, that the effect of social media, cloud and mobile on the enterprise was going to be a much bigger digital footprint, and fortunately the gamble paid off, and that has been the case. I think what’s going to happen over the next few years is going to be far more sharing. Actually, there’s not a reduction in the amount of information going out there.

46:14 It is only increasing, and you’re right There are things like the wearables. In particular, Google Glass presents quite an interesting challenge. Just to explain that a little bit, there was a TV programme recently that went out, and it focused on one of the banks and actually there was video footage inside the bank, and it included a lot of their, you know, in the background, a lot of their security methods and their access passes and things like that, and a security researcher ended up posting a blog with his analysis of their whole security system off the back of that video.

46:45 And they, you know, they had no idea this was going to happen. And if you think about Google Glass, we suddenly got a whole load of cameras recording all this, this material potentially in organisations, but everywhere else. Where is that information going? How is it secured? Where is it?

47:00 You know, if it’s being stored overseas in a cloud facility, who’s got access to that? You know, there’s all kinds of interesting questions about, you know, the more data you store, and the more you aggregate, the more that can get online. And I think the whole internet of things thing is interesting as well. So suddenly all these other devices are now connected to the internet and posting things online. This, you know, I saw a guy the other day whose house is connected to Twitter, and it’ll tell him when someone comes in, or the lights to turn on, and things like that, through Twitter, it tweets at them.

47:29 Yeah, it’s a bit mad, but you know, this sort of stuff’s all, you know, all coming. And you think about the wearables, you know, all your medical statistics, your blood pressure. You know, I saw some wearable, you know, wired-up socks the other day that’ll tell you about, you know, the condition of your feet. So, you know, this, this is going to be a big revolution over the next 5, 10 years, and all that data is going somewhere. Do you want that to be public?

47:56 There’s a whole load of risk around that, to so I think, yeah, fundamentally digital shadows of companies and individuals will grow, and we’re going to have to think very carefully what we do to secure them. Yeah, we were talking to ARM the other day, just, and you know, their information, of things, is their thing. And, yeah, just insane where that’s going to go the next 5, 10 years and you’re right. The data that’s going to be out there of us is essentially everything.

48:21 Yeah, and it’s, I just don’t. It almost becomes a hurdle that is just, you can’t get over. Yeah, right? So you just kind of accept defeat. But even now, like, every single, I think, jet engine and every single commercial airliner is like an internet of things and is constantly sending signals about every single piece of it, about what’s going on, before flight, after flight, everything.

48:41 Now, now imagine that everywhere. Yeah. I was wondering, will sovereign governments be clients of yours in the future? Yeah, interesting one I think, you know, on the whole L, they have pretty good capabilities for this sort of thing, I would imagine, or think they do, or at least think they do. I think we all say take the ethical and moral side of this pretty, pretty seriously.

49:01 So you know, we’re pretty careful about which governments we would ever want to engage with. And right now that isn’t our focus. And my second part of that question: are sovereign governments some of your worst enemies? Are they attacking? I bet they are.

49:14 Well, I think certainly, from a cyber security point of view, you know, I think we all know there’s a lot of, you know, state-backed attacks underway in industrial espionage. And that’s, I think, it’s one of the challenges for the, you know, the century ahead is how that all plays out, and how everyone plays nicely, and how that, you know, who owns the internet? How’s that regulated? How, you know, and if you think about any future conflict, it’s going to have a cybercity element to it now.

49:43 So it’s certainly going to be interesting to see how regulation and law is defined around this space That’s pretty fast-moving area. Trying to think, who’s your biggest threat? Is it Anonymous, or is it China? Like, if you’re like a big banker, you don’t have to answer that. Sure.

49:58 But the US is tapping Merkel’s phone. You know what I mean? Where’s her digital footprint? She didn’t know where it was. Hey, it gets interesting.

50:03 And now you have companies like Google claiming that they’re going to cut off the NSA from getting their data. Is that lip service to us as consumers, is that really happening? Is that possible? I know. All I see is Alastair’s got dollar signs.

50:15 I need to hire more people. But because there’s just, so I mean, like, your business could grow, you know, 10, 100 thousand fold, you know, with all this stuff happening. Well, we’ll see. You know, we’ve been pretty fortunate so far, but I think it is quite exciting, what’s coming up. Yeah, I think the point about the large internet companies, I think they can make quite a big difference.

50:36 I think they are taking this pretty seriously, and I think it’ll come down to what happens with the legislation, ultimately, is to, is to, what, how the state behaves in relation to these companies, how do people get in touch with you? How do they contact you if they want to take a look at their own Digital Shadow? Yeah, sure. So, inquiries at digitalshadows.com, or check out the website, or Digital Shadows on Twitter. Fantastic.

50:58 Did I miss anything? I mean, obviously we can talk about this all night. Yeah, no, I think it’s good. My Digital Shadow is all over the place. Is it?

51:04 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I have to think about mine, and, you know we had a guy named Arjin Cus. He’s actually the partner of Annie Machon, who was a former MI5 agent, and he was here talking about security recently, and he was just saying, you know, when he’s on Gmail or Facebook, he doesn’t worry about his internet security, because he’s declaring that, I’m on there and I’m sharing you my information. But he said otherwise, I’m on PGP encryption. I’m on the Tor browser, and he said a few things.

51:27 He’s like, if you think you have nothing to hide, then you must lead a very boring life. Yeah, he said that. And then he also just said, you know, you just don’t know who is gonna get access to that information, and he also said, by encrypting, you’re making it actually harder for, say, the NSA to look at other people that are encrypting. So you know, they do crypto parties and everything. They really want to get people to take another look at this stuff.

51:47 So yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s important. I’m going to start PGP and crypto. I said that I will, on my emails. Yeah, I’m going to do it just to do it.

51:54 So anyways, thanks so much for coming. It was really, love to see how you guys are working out. It’s cool to see, you know, that the Fintech Innovation Lab is working, cuz you know, a lot of, like, these multinational corporations are going to come in and do an accelerator. We’re going to see more over the next three years, but, you know, they bring their own market, but they don’t necessarily bring 10 or 15 different companies, and so I’m always really critical to see who’s doing the right job.

52:16 So, it’ll be interesting to see what, what happens with these companies next year. Yeah, we’re going to talk to them in the New Year, hope yeah, first and second quarter next year. So cool. Anything else going on? We got the great, great looking website silicon.com yeah, check it out.

52:28 It looks fantastic, and yeah, we’re going to start trying to get some guest bloggers and and sort of try to get that part of the website going and looking for help. We need some help so I’m running out of time, and you’re out of time, and yeah, we need someone. Just go help us out with you know, backend stuff, even just getting creative, booking guests, looking for partnership. So it’s a lot of fun, so hit us up. Twitter at Silicon Real, or hello silicon.com.

52:51 You like that? I learned that from the sector. Yeah, no more info. You know, you guys can keep with inquiries. So that’s all good.

52:59 We’re back, you know, next year with a bunch of new guests. You know, we’ve got our third season starting next year. Third season got picked up. We got some good guests before the end of the year coming up. I think it’s pretty exciting.

53:09 Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, a few. So, but then, yeah, 2014 we got picked up again. Yeah, no, it’s great. It’s all good. So if you enjoyed listening to us on iTunes, we’re on a YouTube channel, Silicon Real.

53:18 You can see all our beautiful faces. come check out our website, etc. As we say, it’s about the people. It’s great hearing these stories. Alastair, thanks for coming on.

53:25 I wish you guys all the luck. I think you guys are going to be big in 5 years. Thanks. guys, all right, take care. Cheers.

53:32 He was in the back of a taxi, and with Peter Stringfellow. he went in the back of the taxi, so he was driving the taxi. Now, people don’t know who Peter Stringfellow was, who, aren from London? Could you give it a description? What is he, you, youner of London?

53:47 Yeah, he runs some nightclubs, strip clubs, and things like that. That’s it. So Russell would come out with something like I Peach dream fell in the back of me cab, and I didn’t know whether it was his, his mom’s daughter or his, his girlfriend, something like