Full transcript: Alex Stephany on London Real
1:21 I want to welcome everyone watching us now live on YouTube. It’s good Friday and we’re still here to entertain you with a fabulous story. So let’s get going. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. My guest today is Alex Stephany, who’s the CEO of JustPark, the world’s largest website for shared parking with over a million customers, almost a million.
1:48 There you go. You guys are backed by Index Ventures and the VC arm of BMW. You also just completed the largest ever equity crowdfunding round in 2015, £3.7 million, which is the legal EU max from over 2,900 investors. Alex, you were educated at Oxford University. You’re a mentor at TechStars and you just wrote a book called The Business of Sharing.
2:08 I was at your launch party. It was fabulous. Welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you very much for having me, Brian. It’s very awesome to be here, it’s a pleasure.
2:15 You know, every time we start talking, we just keep talking, because when I’m making a short video of you, like at your launch party or like we did just now, there’s just so many things to talk about because you’re in the middle of the sharing economy, and you just wrote a really detailed book about the sharing economy as well, and we also have a bunch of other things to talk about, like the big crowdfunding campaign. I don’t know where to start, but I’m just going to jump in. I was reading your book and it’s really good and it’s really packed.
2:40 You said 80,000 words is what it ended up being, is that right? Which is a healthy book. But it starts off, you’re in San Francisco, you’re getting a ride at Lyft, and the guy starts talking to you. He knows you’re a Brit, and it’s just a real dive into the sharing economy and what it means and how it’s going to change everything. I bet most people watching us have used Airbnb or used Uber, but I don’t think we really understand, like, a lot of the ramifications of the sharing economy.
3:04 With JustPark, like, the more I now mention you and the company, so many of my friends have used JustPark, and so it’s really strange in that sense is, I don’t think I’ve ever been touched by a company and then found out that everyone’s actually using it. So I don’t know where to start, but what, where should we start? You know, well, I got an Uber here today and I had a similar experience. This doesn’t happen every hour, every day, for a minute, but I was talking to the guy and he said what do you do and I said I should run a company called JustPark, and then he kind of leapt out of his seat and said hey, I downloaded that app this morning.
3:37 I was like, really, are you serious? Yeah. So we had a little chat about that. And that was a kind of nice sharing economy story in itself. So this guy was an aspiring actor and he was able to have the flexibility to go to auditions by being self-employed and becoming this sort of micro-entrepreneur as an Uber driver, and he wouldn’t have been able to do that.
3:57 You know, 5 years ago he would have had to go to minicab company and probably had much worse working conditions and very fixed hours and he would have had to crawl his way up, and it wouldn’t have been meritocratic. But he was there making cash and you know, it wasn’t his dream to be an Uber driver, but it was his dream to become a famous actor, and that was allowing him to achieve that, right? So it’s not just a business model. It really changes people’s lives and changes the choices they can make just by being able to share in a real frictionless way.
4:24 Right, absolutely. I mean, I don’t like business books. It’s a bit of a confession, you know. It’s something that I feel I should like because I work in the business world, but so, so rarely will I buy and enjoy a business book, and so when Macmillan came to me and said, hey, do you want to write a business book? My instinctive answer was, not really I think the world has enough business books.
4:46 But then I thought more about it, and I realized that this was kind of the anti-business book, because the sharing economy is really a human economy. This is economy in which people are getting goods and services not from multinationals or from governments, but from usually just ordinary people. And so that I felt was a story that needed to be told. And the other thing that I feel I’ve been able to bring to this story is what it’s like to actually work inside this industry.
5:11 So nothing has really ever been written on this subject more than, you know, a blog here or there by someone running a sharing economy company. And so that’s been great because I can use my own network to interview people like co-founders of Airbnb or Zipcar or VCs like Fred Wilson in New York or Alfred at Squa. And I can also, I kind of have an inside view, I guess, on the challenges of working in this economy and growing a business within this new economy as well.
5:39 Let’s hear about your story quickly. You used to be a lawyer at a major firm here in London, and at some point you decided to stopped doing that, and then you got, you know, and you’re now the CEO of JustPark. Can you just tell me a little bit about that transition? Okay, well, I was a really bad lawyer. That’s probably the first place to start.
5:53 First time I heard that. Yeah, and, which is, yeah, now I like, let’s get an in-house lawyer because should not be doing law for JustPark. I was a pretty average lawyer, but I could see that I had skills that other people in this corporate law firm didn’t have, and I felt like I was in the wrong job. After, you know, two or three weeks I thought I can kind of do this at a push, but it’s not really playing to my strengths. So I was really working out how I can get myself out of that law firm.
6:19 And I think the whole time I just was thinking I wanted, I wanted to basically be forced to find a new direction. And so after the two years had expired, which was the initial contract, the vast majority of people in my cohort at that law firm got taken on and got placed into departments and began to you move up the profession. And so on. And this was 2009, and it sort of deep financial crisis, deep pessimism about the global economy, and they said, hey Alex, we’re not going to make you an offer.
6:48 So kind of shake hands and good luck type thing, which was upsetting and felt like a bit of a trauma at the time, but I think subconsciously it was what I wanted really from this second week in. Because I, you know, I wasn’t the guy giving up the evenings and weekends to do work. I was the guy who was sort of like fleshing out business plans and chatting till 6 in the morning about, you know, a new business we could launch with friends and stuff like that.
7:11 So my heart totally wasn’t in it. Okay, so you always kind of wanted to branch out a bit? I always wanted to branch out, and I wasn’t sure what exactly it was, and I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to work in tech. I just knew that I wanted to be, uh, master of my own destiny really, and I knew that I wasn’t motivated to do stuff for other people. I need to.
7:32 I’m incredibly motivated. That motivation comes from within. It doesn’t come from other people telling me to do stuff. Right, that’s good to recognise that about yourself. I’m kind of the same way, if someone tells me to do something, I initially want to say no, but if I can get myself to do it, I can do things that most people would never, you know, bother doing.
7:49 Exactly. And so I knew that I needed that kind of structure, but I had no idea what sector it would be in or what kind of job I would end up doing. And then a couple of, about a year or two after I left this corporate law firm, I was broke, and so I didn’t, I was super late to get a smartphone, but I finally got a smartphone, and it was Galaxy S1, an Android, and I went from this really crappy, uh, probably Nokia to this Samsung, and it was like, you know, sort of Pulp Fiction, where they open the suitcase, it’s like gold.
8:22 It was a bit like that. When I turned on this phone, I just realised, wow, this going to change everything about how we consume goods and services. This is economic opportunity of a scale that you is almost, you know, incomparable with anything that’s kind of gone on before in as regards technological change. You know, I want to learn about this, and I want to be part of this, and I want to help people get goods and services and improve their lives using this amazing piece of technology.
8:51 So that was really the catalyst, and then I went to a whole bunch of networking events, and one of them was a thing called Launch48, which is run by UCL. You start a company over the course of a weekend. I met Anthony, who started Park in my house, which then became JustPark, and we were then only a couple of people, and I’ve been CEO for two and a half years now. Two and a half years, and where are you now? For people that don’t understand what JustPark is, can you just break it down quite simply?
9:16 I guess it should be obvious, but so, very short history lesson. The business started as park at my house, and Anthony had this idea. He was in San Francisco, he was looking for parking around a giant stadium, and he saw these drivers and he was just thinking, this is ridiculous, like, I want to park there, they would want my money, but I can’t park there. Why can’t I park there? Surely there should be some website that just matches up their supply with my demand.
9:40 It sounds like something a six-year-old would be saying while mommy and daddy are looking around for a place, be like, why don’t we park in their house? And you’d be like, shut up, I’m trying to find a place. It’s like it’s almost like so obvious but so not obvious, that this capacity, I think, just, I mean, the six-year-old thing, I think that’s a perfect analogy, because it just goes to show how we get older, and then we kind of get a little bit less creative, because society says, oh, you can’t do that.
10:04 So he, you know, he being an adult, then was like, oh I’m not actually just going to park there. If you’d been a six-year-old you probably would have just parked there, but he thought, okay, I’m not going to park there, but I am going to come back home. I have my very serious job waiting for me at Deloitte, a big accountancy firm. And then I’m going to think about maybe quitting my job and building this website. So it was really just this one idea.
10:24 He was a young guy, I think it was 23, Anthony, when he started this, and he hadn’t really had any experience at all of business. He was very interested in technology, his dad’s a software engineer, but he didn’t know anything about business, and he got this idea out there, and it’s really just an idea, and it got massive initial traction, and now today there are 177,000 families in the UK making money from their driveway. They list the space, and people come and go, and the money just dropped into their bank account.
10:54 Incredibly easy. But then what we did is we had all this demand, so at that point we had to say, maybe 4,500,000 drivers booking these driveways, and of course these people are also in need of other types of parking in centre of cities where you don’t have driveways. So we’d build up, say, in London, this kind of donut, all these driveways, but then in Zone One you don’t have driveways, so we needed to really fill in this gap. So then we started working with car parks and hotels, and became JustPark, and they now are kind of the jam in the donut.
11:23 Okay, gotcha. So it started off just the excess capacity of people’s houses, and now you’ve sourced new new capacity. So it started off as this peer-to-peer marketplace, and it’s still a very large peer-to-peer marketplace. What we’ve done is really put a sort of B2C layer on top of this. Okay, wow, fascinating, and is London your major market?
11:42 How does it differ now you go from different countries? What does it look like in the States? Tell me what is your, so London’s our biggest city globally, but the platform is able to be used by anyone in the world, so it gets used all over the world as a result. The US is our second biggest market, and we don’t really market or promote the service there at all. We’ve never had an employee in the US, but it’s really gratifying that it is getting used.
12:04 And so, for example, in Boston last year there was about $40,000 going back into people’s pockets, which is kind of a small sum, but then when you add up all of these cities from around the world, it gets to become quite a big long tail. And the interesting question for us strategically is, yes, we can see that this is a service that people love and get value from, but how should we allocate our resources between cities that are already on that curve and cities that are, you know, really just seeing some sort of initial initial sort of action? Right.
12:31 It’s tricky to know, like, whether you should put people in the city if that’s going to help or, or hurt your resources, that kind of thing. Just going back to the sharing economy really quick, what are some of the big takeaways from this book that might not be obvious from people who’ve, you know, used Airbnb as a, as a, as a seller or as a buyer or have done some sharing things? Like, what is, what are some things that are really going to, because it’s going to rattle the business model of everyone, the fact that this exists in the future?
12:55 What are some of the things that we should kind of keep an eye out for, whether you work in a corporation or just as a, as a consumer of things that are going to change? So let me just explain the structure of the book, real brief. So basically it’s split into chapters that relate to all the different stakeholders in the sharing economy. So there’s a chapter called consumers which is about how consumers deriving value from the sharing economy. There’s a chapter called corporates, which is about how corporates are responding.
13:20 There’s one on regulation called governments, and so on. There’s one on investors as well, so there’s six different chapters they’ll look at these different weighs into the sharing economy, and it’s really reflective of the fact that this is a very, very collaborative economy that is bringing different value to very different sorts of people, and also very different challenges to different sorts of people. So it’s written such that people can just dive into the book.
13:43 So say you are a corporate and you’re interested in how corporates are going to be challenged and need to engage with these new companies, then you just head straight to the corporate section. So for example, you mentioned, you mentioned that point, and what I talk about there is the different ways that big multinational incumbent companies are responding to what is essentially a competitive threat, and there are some sectors that are responding really positively. So for example, the automotive sector is embracing a lot of these new sharing models.
14:12 Okay, BMW. I mean, BMW, yeah, they invested in 2011 in us. They have also a service called DriveNow, which is basically car sharing, premium car sharing. They have a venture capital fund, which is to do with mobility services. This is an example of a business that realises they just can’t keep doing this same old thing forever.
14:30 Patterns of consumption are changing, and they’re not going to be, they can’t have a huge business just based on selling cars. So what they need to do is they need to sell access to these cars. They need to sell mobility services, and they really need to totally reconceive what they are as a business. But then also there are sectors that really aren’t innovating in the same way. So for example, if you look at the accommodation sector, hotels have done very, very little to tap into the new demand for a that sites like Airbnb are really ignited.
15:02 So I think that’s a shame, and I think that’s rather shortsighted on their part. The majority of energy from the big hotel groups has really gone into lobbying against the threat, right, as they see it, of sites like Airbnb. But actually, if I were CEO of Hilton, I’d be saying, hang on a sec, is there a demand clearly for this new type of accommodation? Why don’t I, in say New York City, put together a curated marketplace called Hilton Homes, help facilitate it?
15:27 Right, and there’s going to be some beautiful luxurious homes, and they can be serviced from a nearby Hilton hotel, and instead of selling one bedroom to a businessman for a couple of nights, maybe he’s going to take a whole Hilton home, and he’s going to spend 10 $15,000 taking his family to New York City, and he’s going to have a different type of experience. So I think that, yeah, I, I think some of these businesses are responding positively, some less so. And in that chapter I talk about all the different ways that they are responding.
15:55 There’s sort of four different strategies, but yeah, right, go read the book to find out. Yeah, no, that’s good. And and taxis are another similar piece. I mean, you see in London the black cabs, you know, protest Uber, and in most cities they are, you know, holding fast and holding to these licences, and I mean, I, I love black cabs. It’s something I fell in love with London when I first came here 12, 13 years ago, and I thought it was like my private limousine, and everyone loves a black cabbie, etc., but at the same time, you know, when it’s 1:00 in the morning, 5 years ago, and these guys are driving past you because they want to go home, you’re like Wait a second, this is, you know, this isn’t fair.
16:28 This isn’t a free market, and so at the same time you’re like, okay, we need to move forward and we need to really have a supply and demand marketplace. So yeah, it’s interesting to see. And then there’s the innovator’s dilemma. I used to work in banking. You know, we didn’t want electronic trading to happen because it was going to make me obsolete, and so you, you almost fight it without thinking about fighting it.
16:46 You just ignore it as long as you can, until one day you either capitulate or get taken over. Well, I mean, I think this is one of the really challenging things about the sharing economy. It’s generally very, very good for consumers, but it can be really bad for some of the service providers. So black cabs is an obvious example. I’ve lived in a few different places, but I’m very much born and bred Londoner, and for me, you know, as with you, a non-Londoner, black cabs is still, you know, so synonymous with London, and I used to get black cabs the whole time when I was coming home late from work, and it was just be sort of almost like my daily route home, and I really loved it.
17:20 Like, they have this sort of low-level grumpiness, almost. It’s so invigorating. You get out of a cab and you know, I’ve had amazing conversations with black cab drivers, and like, as a bunch, they’re hardworking, honest, like a great bunch of people. I think they have added so much to the fabric of London, and yet they’re really expensive and they don’t provide people with value for money, and the skills they have, like knowing every single backstreet and taking the knowledge, are kind of ancient skills, and in 10 years’ time they’re going to be like, you know, wood carving or, you know, knitting or stuff like that.
17:53 You know, these are like homely and acquainted skills. And so one of the challenges of the sharing economy for the people, people working in some of these incumbent industries, is, you know, how are they going to adapt? And whereas it’s great for us that we can get an Uber home for six quid or something like that when it would have cost 16 quid in a black cab, actually there’s a lot of people who are going to be really hit by these new structural changes.
18:13 They may be too old, they’re too inflexible, they’re too low-skill to move across these new platforms. Yeah, no, no, definitely, and that’s something that’s going to see how that shakes out. You know, because, like you said, it’s, it’s fascinating how these skills that they had. I mean, the is an amazing thing. If you’re not from London, these cabbies sometimes will spend between 2 and 4 years memorising the streets.
18:34 They’ve done studies on their brain, and they actually link through, like, a cerebral cortex piece, the two hemispheres of the brain, when they’ve done, like, these CT scans. So they actually change their physiology by memorising all this stuff. But you know, that’s just not necessary anymore, and so it’s going to be hard, you know, to watch this happen. But again, it’s a market. You know, it is a market, and ultimately this is about efficiency.
18:57 Yeah, so the economy is adding value because it’s finding these efficiencies on both sides of the marketplace, and that’s why really this is just the start of a huge, huge trend. Because strip it down and this is a lean way of consuming and providing services. You know, a good example of that is, say, P2P finance. If you look at a business like Lending Club, it’s now IPO’d recently. It’s lending around $300 million a month in America, right, America.
19:24 I think, I think NASDAQ, NYC, anyway, so US flotation, French CEO but headquartered in San Francisco, and so they’re lending about $300 million a month, which is tiny. Macroeconomic, this is a drop in the ocean of, you know, credit around the world. But it’s growing very quickly, and it’s going to continue to grow because it’s ultimately just a more efficient model. So if you look at a bank, they have an operational expense ratio of something like 5 to 7%, whereas these guys are doing it sub 2%, and getting lower as they scale that technology.
19:56 And so in some senses this is just a maths game. You know, it’s the same with JustPark. If you look at the peer-to-peer inventory, that is way cheaper. It’s about half the price of parking on street, just because there’s so much less demand for it. Right, and so again it’s just a maths game of actually this is just more efficient, and a lot of companies like Lending Club or JustPark or all of these companies in the sharing economy are finding efficiencies, so it’s inevitable at those kind of ratios.
20:23 I mean, I think it is, which is why you see so much money going into the sector, billions and billions of dollars. The question is, are these sharing economy businesses going to be really big, or are they going to be colossal? And I think that’s really all up for grabs. If you look at the macro drivers, they are here to stay, and they are putting people on this, they’re keeping these companies on this trajectory, and things like the adoption of social media, increasing smartphone penetration, population growth, urbanisation, all of these macro factors that are making sharing economy companies viable, really only going to continue.
20:57 Right. Fast forward 20 years, what is the world going to look like, as it’s so much more shared? Are we going to walk outside, and will there be, will there be no cars on the streets? Will it all be on demand? Will every piece of excess inventory being shared will be someone in our house when we’re at work?
21:13 I mean, like, what I know, you can’t predict the future, but what are some of the things that’ll be like, totally, oh my gosh, it’s now all been made efficient all of a sudden? Like, okay. So it would be absolutely second nature to get a good or service from another person. So you will no longer think of that as a quirky or unusual thing that will just be part of your daily routine. If you were to buy something from eBay you would still think from a person on eBay rather than a shop, which is about 25% of their revenue.
21:43 You would still think of yourself as doing something a little unusual or eccentric that would just become the norm, for the reason that I just really talked about, the efficiency of these models and these marketplaces, which is really the core of the sharing economy, is just going to get bigger and more powerful, and again this comes down to efficiency. And so you look at the growth of the marketplace, really ancient invention. I don’t know if he ever played Civilization.
22:08 So Civilization is like the geekiest game ever, and I’m just going off, I’m going off on a massive tangent, BR, because we’ve got an hour. So the geeks out there will know that there is a computer game called Civilization for kids that didn’t kind of go out too much, like me. And when you’re, Civilization is growing, you get various inventions, and one of those inventions is a marketplace, and this is this sort of primitive thing, and people come together in the centre of your little town, and it creates commerce.
22:38 It’s great. And so this is a really, really ancient concept, and then these marketplaces got bigger and bigger over time, and that was great too, because you could have more supply and more demand, and that created efficiencies. So Europe, for example, the biggest marketplace is Kraków in Poland, and for hundreds of years people would go there, converge there, for miles around. That was great, lots of people, and you could, on a river near agricultural lands, it’s in a big city.
23:05 Yeah, there’s a river there, Vistula, so you can converge, and and that’s great, and you know, you head out, you head there with a little pocket of coins, and you want to buy a cow. That’s great, cuz you’re going to be 80 people selling cows, and you can find the right cow, and then the internet came along and said, actually, you can have uncapped supply and demand. You know, screw like this Kraków marketplace that’s 400 m across or whatever it is. You can have billions of people in this marketplace, in this online marketplace, and so that is the ultimate.
23:37 This is the ultimate underlying phenomenon, that as people become more and more connected, these marketplaces are just going to be absorbing and eating into all the incumbent industries, because they are so much more efficient. Right. So yeah, that’s a taste of the future. I also think, you know, there’s going to be some sharing economy losers as well, that’s for sure. So particularly on labour marketplaces, it’s a really challenging place to be.
24:04 You this is somewhat touching on the black cab market. They have to re-educate themselves and find new pieces. Yeah, I mean, part of the efficiencies is that you pay as a consumer as little as possible for the services. So like in Kraków you’re paying as little as possible for the cow that you want. On a labour marketplace you’re paying as little as possible for someone to clean your house or do dry cleaning, or whatever it is.
24:26 It’s great for you as a consumer, but it’s pretty challenging if you as a service provider, cleaning or whatever, doing dry cleaning, are charging the very, very low rate. Right. It hopefully makes up, I, I talk to every single Uber driver that I sit with, and I always ask them, and they’re always happy because they’re doing more work, but that’s, that’s in that sector. That might not be across other sectors, cuz they make up in volume. Yeah, and I, I think they are generally very happy now.
24:51 The question even with something like Uber is what regulation is going to stop Uber as a platform exerting disproportionate control over the participants on its marketplace, so even now if Uber wants to slash prices in a city, it slashes prices. Yeah, and you as a driver just have to deal with that. Yeah, if Uber brings in a policy or has a policy which says, you know, if you’re ill you don’t get paid. Well, this is the reality. If you’re ill, you don’t get paid.
25:18 Okay, if your car breaks down, you don’t get paid. That’s the reality. So life can be quite tough on these sharing economy marketplaces, and it’s slightly Darwinian really. You know, the strongest will survive. And that’s just entrepreneurship really, because what it’s doing is it’s creating kind of mass entrepreneurship.
25:35 Yeah, yeah. It reminds me a bit of like the recession when it hit in America. You know, everybody was upset and they had to find new jobs, but in America they’re very good at cutting workforces and getting rid of, you know, people that aren’t performing, and they re-educate themselves, and now it’s recovered as an economy much faster than a lot of the European economies that say have employment contracts, and they’re much more about a socialist mindframe.
25:58 So it’s, I guess, it is all about finding the efficiency and finding as a person what you should be doing. Maybe it’s not in these old service sectors. I don’t know. It’s a little harsh too. Yeah, let me ask you about fundraising, because this is one of the fascinating parts of your story.
26:12 You JustPark got funding from Index Ventures last year, is that right? 2014. Yeah, Index huge company. We have one of our partners here talking about taking JustPark public. You know, I would say it’s the marquee VC firm in London.
26:24 One of the, right, I mean, if you get funding from Index, you know, Sal Klein, you’re in the know, you’re with a lot of other great companies that have also been funded by them. There are a lot of companies that would be their dream, and then they would go on continue building their company. You decided to go tap the crowdfunding market, and I wanted to know why you did it. Was it difficult for Index to even entertain that idea? You really are trailblazing in this sense, because usually people do that the other way around, or at least that’s what the public thinks.
26:54 We think of Kickstarter to start a movie or something, and we don’t really understand crowdfunding, but you did it after the fact. Can you just break down that whole that whole thought process? Sure. Okay, so it started off as a kind of plan B. I was working from home one night and I was thinking, okay, we’re having all these conversations with all of these VCs, but as everyone knows, VCs can kind of string out conversations.
27:16 They find out more, but, you know, having interest and having nice meetings and this kind of thing with VCs is very different to getting to the point where they write your cheque, right? And so hard enough running a company, let alone fund while you’re running the company, let alone being let on, yeah, and writing books. Don’t forget that, and writing a book. Yeah. And so I was working from home thinking, well, maybe, what, you know, what if they’re just leading us on a kind of merry dance and these deals just don’t come together?
27:42 Well, we need a backup. So maybe we should look into crowdfunding, because we could see that lots of companies were doing it. I knew that JustPark was solving a common problem. It was well understood. It had a pretty significant user base then, of about 4,500,000 people, so I was thinking, okay, let’s look into this as a backup plan.
28:02 How are we going to work out if this is a viable backup plan or not to raising money from a VC? Why don’t we just ask them? So I remember emailing Anthony, no, I picked up the phone. I was like, hey, why don’t we just ask our customers if they want to do equity crowdfunding and work out if it’s a backup option or not? So he said, okay, that sounds like a pretty sensible idea.
28:27 Let’s do it tomorrow. So I got to work tomorrow and I drafted an email which basically said we might be doing equity crowdfunding. This isn’t an offer to subscribe for shares in the event, blah blah blah, and it had some sort of pretty former lawyer, former lawyer, hopefully not breaking too many financial regulations. So we got this email out and it linked to a Google form, and it’s incredibly simple. It was just, you know, what’s your name?
28:52 How much would you be interested in investing? You know, subject to, you know, full terms of the deal, blah blah blah. We didn’t know what to expect. I had very low expectations personally, and we got it out and the response was just unbelievable. So we had hundreds and hundreds of emails back.
29:08 We had hundreds of small pledges, and those pledges cumulatively added up to more than half a million pounds from 5% of our user base. Okay, so you only pulled 5% of user base, just as a test? And we thought, wow, that’s crazy. Let’s repeat the test. So we repeated the test on a different 5% on a totally randomised additional sample, and saw an almost identical result.
29:31 Wow. So then we’re thinking, this is seriously exciting. There is a genuinely large appetite to own some of the business and share in our success from our customers. That’s awesome, and if we can make that happen, then I think that would not only be great for them, but I think it’ll be great for the company. And so it turned out actually that we did get an offer from Index, and then at that point we were thinking, well, how on earth, we’ve got these two options.
30:01 They’re both super attractive. Can we have our cake and eat it? Can we make both types of investment work? And so we basically worked out how to structure this, and to cut a long story short, it was really essentially a whip around. We didn’t want to have the double dilution of issuing a whole bunch of new shares to the crowd and a whole bunch of new shares to Index.
30:20 We didn’t really need the money. So we thought maybe we can issue new shares to the crowd and get Index allocation from existing shareholders, so essentially we did a whip around, and we went to BMW and we went to an angel investor, and Anthony as well agreed to sell a few shares, and we were able to kind of grab together enough shares to get Index into the business. Okay, so the new shares were for the equity, for the crowd, and then the Index bought previously existing shares.
30:51 Exactly. And that’s called a whip around, or is it whip around? I’m saying, like, a whip around is, you know, when you’re doing a whipping around for cash. This really English expression, like, brown is like, hey everyone, you know, chuck something in. And so that was really what it was like.
31:03 It’s, say, hey guys, we’re all shareholders. Everyone really wants to work with Index. And the guy that we’re working with at Index, and is now on our board, is Robin Klein, who is just an awesome guy, and has an amazing track record of working with tech companies, and he really, it was, it was obviously the case we wanted to involve them in the business, and they’ve been great so far. So to allow that to happen, we had to say, hey guys, they need some shares, you got some shares.
31:29 Can we work something out here? And everyone is really amenable to that, and so yeah, we’re able to pull together this really interesting sort of hybrid of crowd plus VC. Right, well, congratulations on that. A lot of CEOs would have just said one or the other. I mean, again, that’s really almost thinking outside the box, of look at those driveways, we should park in them.
31:46 Because, you know, a lot of people would have, by definition, said, oh, Index is in and then we won’t do this. So, you know, that was big right there. Now talk to me about this crowdfunding round. Why choose Crowdcube? There’s different platforms in London or in the UK.
32:00 Did it affect the fact that you couldn’t do equity crowdfunding in the US, and then how did you get so many people and how did you break all these records? So there are a couple of major platforms in the UK. One is Crowdcube, the other is Seedrs. Had Jein here. Both, both excellent businesses.
32:18 So really tough decision. So ultimately just a tough decision and a commercial one. But yeah, I think, as I said, I think they’re both great businesses, and there’s a ton of other equity crowdfunding platforms that are emerging too. So I think AngelList are now in Europe as well, but what’s the question? How, how did it, we, yeah.
32:38 So you chose the platform, Crowdcube, you chose, and then did you know, it was going to be that big? is there anything you did to facilitate the size of it, or you said it was 370% over subscribe and we did a quick video. What was that process like? So we were confident based on that test that I mentioned, but you never know until you know. With crowdfunding, one thing about people is, and we’re doing this now with our premium service, you can ask them if they’ll pay for it, which is completely non-correlated to whether they will.
33:06 Right, exactly. And this is ultimately, you know, Monopoly money for them. Like, I will invest £500, or will you. And then a couple of weeks before we went live, we realised that we wouldn’t probably be eligible for EIS tax relief, which for people who aren’t familiar with this relief, it’s a really, really powerful capital gains and income tax relief available for investors in certain qualifying companies in the UK. Yeah, and it’s a major, major reason why people invest in these companies on crowdfunding platforms, because almost all of them will have EIS or SEIS, which is an even better tax relief, right?
33:43 So when we didn’t have this EIS tax relief, we suddenly became not only one of the biggest attempted crowdfundings in history, but to my knowledge I think the only one that hasn’t been able to promote this fundraising with these tax reliefs. Wow, then you would get it because of the Index investment, or because of the size we couldn’t get it for a boring technical reason around the rules and the fact that we’re operating in a sort of property space. Okay, so you went ahead anyways?
34:08 We went ahead anyways, somewhat nervous because this was really breaking your ground, right? And on that front it was breaking your ground in a scary way, because we just didn’t know what the demand would be for investments in a company that didn’t have this tax relief. But you know, it, why, why did it explode? And I think we had the existing user base, so it was, you know, it makes a huge impact, so we emailed a third of our user base, and in the first hour when it went live originally we had an investment every 23 seconds of a third of our user base.
34:46 So you have a really kind of a touchy-feely product. I mean, people are like, it’s my driveway and you guys are helping me get this income that I didn’t know I would have, and like, you guys are almost like a Robin Hood of an industry. I’m just saying you must, your, your customers must have a real bond with you. I just feel it from your business model. Yeah, I mean, we had a lot of people getting in touch saying, hey, I’m someone earning money from JustPark, can you withhold my earnings and convert it into shares?
35:15 Wow, which, you technically, it just didn’t make sense. We just had to say, look, no, no, but feel free to withdraw it and go to the website and invest. And so yeah, and there is a huge affinity I think for the brand, drivers, because this is solving this big pain point of parking and taking a lot of stress out of their lives and also saving the money, and then on the property owners, because they’re essentially doing next to nothing and just having this new revenue stream.
35:39 They sync it to their bank account when they sign up, and then drivers come and go and the money just pops in, so it’s really really effortless compared to a lot of the other sharing economy platforms. Genely is a dole, so one of the co-founders of Yelp said JustPark is like Airbnb without washing sheets, and it’s kind of like that. I mean, people, Airbnb is a fantastic business and people are doing great on it, but it is a lot of work. Okay, you know, driving on Lyft or being a TaskRabbit, you a lot of work, but JustPark is kind of no work, so you hit the limit, 2,900 people, you hit the EU maximum, which is 5 million EUR the equivalent.
36:16 And boom, was there anything that you learned in retrospect, anything you would do differently, or anything that surprised you about that whole process? I think we, I, I think we did a decent job. We’re very organised, but you can always be more organised. So in terms of anticipating questions, I think you can always do more work on that and make sure that you sort of populate the crowdfunding platform with stock answers. Okay.
36:42 And so we could have sort of seeded some of these answers, which were, are questions that were ultimately pretty predictable FAQs, and that kind of thing. Yeah. So we could have probably had an FAQ-specific FAQ site, but I don’t think anyone really anticipated the volume of interest we had. If you go to the average fundraise on one of these platforms, there will be five or six forum threads, and that’s great, and it’s just people picking up some kind of salient points.
37:09 Yeah, it’s helpful for us. I think we have now something like 87 forum threads, and for the three weeks that the round was live, it was my job really to monitor all of these forum threads, and some are just a few posts, others might be, you know, 12 pages of posts. Right. And so just a lot of communication to manage, with a lot of different stakeholders. You’ve got thousands of people investing in the company.
37:31 You’ve got this big posh VC who have their own, you know, concerns inevitably around how this is going to come off. You have the corporate investor, who is, you know, an innovative brand but also quite a traditional company in many ways, again, like, you could argue a lot more to lose than gain from something like this. You have an angel investor and you have employees, you have management team. So your next book should be called, so you want to be a CEO, right?
37:58 And so how long did the whole process take you? We were live on the platform for about 3 weeks. Okay. But then there were months of preparation. Okay, all right.
38:07 And what is, I love to ask this question, what ultimately, what is crowdfunding, or what was it in your stake? Is it marketing? You know, is it selling shares to your customers? Is it, you know, is it, you know, a guarantee that people will continue to use your services in the future? I mean, like, if you had to put your finger on what you’ve just accomplished here, like, where is all the goodwill, or how would you describe this?
38:30 I mean, I think it’s elements of all of these things. Ultimately what it is is engagement with people, and that is something that is so, so hard to achieve in this increasingly media fast-paced saturated world of ours. There’s so many freaking companies wanting your attention, demanding your time, demanding your money, all of these things. If you are a shareholder in one of them, a small one, a private one, one that is still in some ways an underdog even though it’s a decent-size company now, you will back up that company, you’ll fight for that company, and you’ll use that company.
39:10 And so it becomes a kind of USP really for the business. And what is really exciting for us at JustPark is how having thousands of investors is just going to enable us to tell this story time and again. And there will be people in the pub telling their friends, there’ll be people in having dinner parties talking about this new company they invested in. Yeah, evangelists, evangelists thinking about us when they need parking. Right.
39:35 And that is ultimately why we’re doing this, because we think it sounds really cliche, but we think we are stronger together when we’re able to bring our shareholders into the business, and a material number of them. Now, so you know, almost 3,000 people if you factor in their friends, their family. This is a substantial network. We’re building engagement, that is the greatest word, because I think that’s all any company really wants. And you could even argue that the market cap of a company is the measure of their engagement.
40:04 You know, whether it’s Google or Apple or Airbnb, all these have a massive amount of engagement. You know, one of our mutual friends, Nick Brisbourne at Forward Partners, I saw him a couple weeks ago, and he said, Brian, he said, emotion. He’s like, you need to find out what the emotion is in the product. And I never thought of it that way, whether it’s anger because I can’t get this and I want this, you know, some type of a pain point, or whether it’s, you know, I have a big smile on my face because I just got back from Airbnb, or I just got a direct deposit because my driveway was used while I was at work today, or, you know, all these things.
40:35 Like, if you find the emotion point, then that’s where I mean, absolutely. During the fundraising we did two investor events at our offices, and again we didn’t really know what to expect because we hadn’t done this before. But they sold out, and we had the first one, we saw numbers, not a little bit more cautiously. We had 30 or 40 people. The next one we probably had 60 or 70 people.
40:58 You giving up their evening to come to our office and meet the team and discuss the business. These aren’t people that work in parking, or, you know, these are just normal people from all kinds of backgrounds, and it was this fascinating cross-section of British society, and there was one time where there was a guy running a 15 billion pound private equity fund talking to a guy who worked for the council as a refuse collector. You know, people that would never come into contact ordinarily, but we’re actually there because they were excited by this, fundamentally, what we’re doing, like solving this big problem in cities.
41:37 And that’s just really really cool to see, this kind of fascinating and big alliance of all kinds of different people. That’s incredible engagement. All right, talk to me about corporate culture. I know you recently had a retreat and I want to ask about how you’ve developed the corporate culture in JustPark. It’s something that we talk a lot about on the show but I haven’t really dived that deep into it.
41:55 It’s something I’m thinking about with you, you know, and Silicon Real. What kind of culture we want, because I mean, that ultimately, you could argue, is defines the success or failure of a company. You know, YC, Y Combinator, they always say that that third hire is the biggest, or the second hire is the biggest. I know the Airbnb guys, the three founders, they didn’t make their first hire for like six months, and it was a crucial component. And then as you build that team, you have to make sure that everyone’s still on the same page.
42:20 So tell me about culture at JustPark. Yeah, well, it’s culture with any fast-growing company, I think, is particularly challenging just because there are more and more people coming into the business more and more quickly. Now we’ve grown from about five people a year and a half ago to 33 people today, and I’ll probably be 60 people, potentially 70 people by the end of the year. Wow. So this, this big question here: how do you keep people on the same page?
42:46 How do you create a state of affairs where the people that are already in the business feel, feel excited by the people coming to the business, and feel that these people are on the same page as them, and that the people coming into the business understand the business they’re coming into and feel excited by it? And similarly, even though they’re not that kind of founding team, they’re not the first 10 on the ground. You know, Peter Thiel says, you one of the questions he asks founders is, you know, why would the 50th person join your company?
43:16 And I think a big part of that is making sure that the culture is right. And so incredibly important for many different things, you know, employee hiring. You’ve got to hire the right people who will fit in. They need to understand what we’re about and how we approach work, because that ultimately is, for me, that’s what culture is. It’s a way of approaching work and a way of approaching your colleagues.
43:38 It’s sort of nothing more than that. There’s a good definition by Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. He says culture is a shared way of doing something with a passion, and it’s really important that everyone understands what that is, and for me that’s actually the difference between startup culture and big kind of corporate culture. So, a relative of mine works for a huge financial services business, and in their lobby there are these sort of generic terms that, I think, one of them is respect, you know, and I think people just walk past them and just say, well, that’s kind of meaningless.
44:10 That’s just a bland vanilla value that doesn’t really connect with anything that I do. It’s just too abstract. But culture in a startup, and certainly JustPark, is really about how you do things. And we make sure that people understand how you do things, and the more that people understand how to do things and approach their work in life, the less kind of boring corporate rules you need, again, because people are on the same page. So what we really are doing right now is we’ve established a set of core values, and for example one of them is getting s*** done.
44:40 Another of them is eat, sleep, park, which is really about this sort of ongoing obsession with solving parking. There’s about 10 or 15 of them, and we are, from these core values, establishing a much more succinct cultural identity. And it’s really important that we have this now bedded down and understood within the company, because if we don’t have it there when we’re 30-something people, we’re not going to make a good transition to this sort of 60, 70 person company.
45:08 It’s a really difficult stage in a company’s life. Yeah, this is one of those times where things go wrong. It’s, yeah, and it’s, it’s the time which people say, you know, or could say, hoping I’m confident going happen. You know, it’s not like the good old days when it was just, you know, us, 15. It’s become this big company and there’s all this process, and it’s not fun anymore.
45:27 And so we’re always thinking about ways to counteract that. And you know, an easy way is just making it an awesome place to work. So we have a chef, for example, that cooks a free lunch every day, and breakfast on one day and tea on another day. We have massages. We just do these quarterly retreats, which are a huge part of the culture of the business as well.
45:46 So four times a year we go out of London to a beautiful place. The next one is in a foreign country for the first time, and we spent a few days together. It’s really intense, working on strategy for the next quarter, thinking about how the previous quarter went, and also just having fun. It’s a large sociable element, and now I think it feels like people are really working with their friends, and what’s really, really gratifying for me is when people talk about how excited they are to come back into work on the weekend, and I know that their working week is as, or as much, fun as the rest of their week, and that’s for me, that’s incredible.
46:23 That’s the most motivating thing. If I can have a group of people working at JustPark who are fulfilled in their working lives, then, a, they’re going to propel the success of the company, but, b, just as an end itself. I mean, I fundamentally have responsibility to these people, to not only make sure that we can pay them at the end of every month, but also make sure they’re happy and challenged and fulfilled in their working lives. How do you relax? I mean, you’re writing a book, the last year, year or 18 months, 18 months, 18 months, you’re doing equity crowdfunding, you’re keeping the Index guys happy, keeping the Beamer guys happy, you’re trying to keep the company culture growing, and you’re scaling at a massive rate.
46:58 You seem pretty calm. How do you keep it all together? Bit of yoga. We also have yoga classes, so do that once a week, with some colleagues, and play guitar. But yeah, I think it is, you know, a challenge.
47:15 I, what the job that I’m doing now is a pretty stressful job to be honest, but for me that’s part of the fun of it. I wouldn’t want to be doing a job that wasn’t stressful. It’s a bit of a paradox, but I like, I like the adrenaline, and I like the difficulty of being CEO of a startup company. It throws up, you know, a million different challenges, you know, every quarter, and working our way through these things and getting stronger and bigger and succeeding as a result is just incredible fun.
47:47 Right, now, the future. I mean, it’s funny because you run into different types. Some guys are like, I’m going to build this thing until it drops, like, you know, Bezos-type atmosphere. Some people are like, look, in the future I might do something else when this gets built in five years. Da da da da da.
48:00 You know, do you have one thought or the other? I mean, could this be a part of your career? You know, how do you look at this at this business? For us, it’s really about solving this big problem. Okay, so we see parking as a major global problem, a major urban problem, and if you think that now the majority of the world’s population live in cities, by 2050 about 75% of the world’s population live in cities.
48:24 We need to start solving these major urban problems. Why is it such a big urban problem? Largely because parking contributes massively to traffic and pollution. So the research says that anywhere between 10 and even 30% of all the traffic and pollution in city centers is caused by people circling for parking. They get to their destination and they just drive around because they don’t have space.
48:47 The fundamental difference in our model is actually that people go straight to a space that’s allocated. So though people perceive us as being different primarily just because it’s a different type of inventory. It’s driveways hotels and churches and this kind of thing. For me the biggest difference is it’s entirely different, a more efficient journey. Straight from A to B.
49:07 So that’s really what we all focus on. I don’t really look to the next step if we can spend a period of our lives solving this huge problem in cities, then that’s a fantastic use over a few years. And so we’re really just focused on that. And as I was saying to you just before, that we started recording, you know, this isn’t a, as, as startup, people in JustPark, we’re not primarily motivated by money. We had been motivated by money, I would have probably tried to stay corporate law, and other people in the company would have been doing a bunch of other different things.
49:42 It’s really about leaving the world a little bit better than we found it, and if we can solve a major urban problem, then that would be great. Right. No, I mean, it’s funny, because money doesn’t keep you working on the weekends and keep you through those hard times, and you know, it’s the passion that gets entrepreneurs through the hard times, and there are plenty of them. So I want to hear a few final things here about, you know, how you hire and all those things, but briefly, we were talking earlier about recent ski trip we were at, and there were some Yanks in the room, and we had some Americans and Brits and all that stuff, and then we hit on this concept of culture in Britain versus culture in America.
50:17 So this is Silicon Real, so let’s get real. What is it? And also it’s something that comes up a lot on this show, because we’re talking about entrepreneurialism, and so we always look at tech, and then by definition we do look to the Valley. Some people in London say don’t look at the Valley, don’t compare yourself to the Valley. That’s fine, but ultimately you have to look at someone who is doing it very well, and then you, then of course the American and British aspects, they, they get put under a microscope.
50:42 Now you’re born and bred in London, right? Yeah. What do you see different in the American mentality in entrepreneurship and will that change? Will that change with people in Britain? What you read on it?
50:53 So yeah, it is different. It might be getting less different, but it is very different. How’s it different? I think Americans, by and large, especially American entrepreneurs, have a level of confidence that British entrepreneurs don’t have, is also that’s related to a lack of fearing fear of failure. Okay, so it’s often said that American entrepreneurs don’t fear failure as much as European or UK based entrepreneurs, and obviously that’s closely related to confidence, right?
51:22 Because it’s to do with the fact that you can have a failure and it’s not going to knock your confidence, and you know you can get up and do it all again, and you’re not going to be the laughing stock of your friends and family, and so on. And so I think I mean, it was great. I love being an American spending time there, and it was great that there are a good contingent of Americans on this ski trip, because I think that they bring a vitality and a confidence that’s really, really refreshing, and I think us Brits could do a lot more to sort of absorb that confidence, that optimism.
51:53 We have every reason to be confident and optimistic about the UK and London tech scene. I think another interesting question is, like, speculating why is this the case? And I know perhaps the answer is that America is, you know, the world superpower now and Britain is not. And I think probably when Britain was the world superpower there was more of this confidence, and people were saying, okay, we’re going to totally reconceive how we build bridges or mine coal, or I’m going to start a huge business and I’m going to, you know, take over the world, like literally, often in many cases.
52:24 But I think nowadays we’ve become a little bit too introspective and a little bit too lacking confidence, which is a real shame, because I think it’s holding back hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of entrepreneurs in the country, and we need that more than ever. We need these people to actually take some risks and back themselves and start businesses and employ people, and so on. There’s that expression in America that says, go west, young man, and I think just, what, go west, young man, that’s four words, but it says so much, because in typical America, if you would go west there was an abundance of capital in the form of land that no one was using, and if you wanted to work you could work that land, get your goods to market, in a place like America, and you could prosper.
53:07 And back, like you said, in the Industrial Revolution, or before that, Britain, you know, you could go to the, you know, you could go to the Dutch Indies. You know, you could go here, you could build this, you could go take over this, and there was probably that spirit where it was endless, it was limitless, and all you needed to do was hit the seas, which Britain owned. And so in a weird way that was the kind of go west of the day, but I agree these days I don’t know, if it seems like maybe it is this kind of non-abundance mentality.
53:32 Maybe it’s kind of like we only had this island left, and the Americans, are they doing that? But I agree it seems like there’s that mentality of maybe it’s not out there to be optimistic, but we have so many resources in this town. I mean, London is just, it’s just amazing. Chief among them is the diversity, so there’s now this sort of reverse trend that London is this astonishing magnet for talent and entrepreneurship and ideas and ambition, but a lot of that ambition is people who aren’t born in the UK, and that’s great, and again that sort of is a parallel with America as well, because America is a sort of, you know, an immigrant-fuelled success story, the greatest economic success story in history, and a country built by immigrants, and that’s why it’s so important that the UK government continues to encourage immigration, and to allow Britain to, well, welcome the most ambitious and talented people from wherever they are in the world, as you know.
54:31 Equally, should America, it’s a little sadder in America’s situation, given that this is a country built by immigrants, and also of course it’s so much bigger, there is so much space there, so that the sort of tide is turned, or that this isn’t even a totally clean-cut argument, but I mean, that’s why I love London ultimately, because it’s there. 200 languages spoken in the city. You can find people from all over the world, from all kinds of backgrounds, religion, races, ethnicity, and that’s what I think brings us a lot of energy, and now British people need to really just be inspired by the confidence and optimism of the people arriving in these shores.
55:07 Yeah, when I hear there is anti-immigration sentiment, I never hear it from anybody I know in London, and when I hear it, I almost think it can’t be true, because the power of the ecosystem in this city is us being in such proximity. If you talk to any startup person, the startup company happened because they were in a room with probably one or two other people, and this idea happened. It didn’t happen online or anything like that, and so it’s this close proximity of all these different kinds of ideas and different kinds of, like you said, nationalities and immigrants, and all that stuff that creates these amazing effects.
55:38 So it’s like, that’s, like you said, one of our greatest resources. I mean, to bring this back to company culture, one of the things that I spoke about on the retreat just a couple of days ago is diversity, and it’s so important that at JustPark we continue to create and put in place as diverse a team as possible. And that is all kinds of diversity, every imaginable diversity, from gender to sexuality, to nationality, to ethnicity, and so on. And that’s not because it’s a sort of politically correct thing to do, right, at all.
56:13 It’s simply because I think that is the basis of the strongest and most coherent team, and that when you have that diversity of viewpoint and sentiment, I think it’s a case of one plus one equals three, or you know, one plus one to, to 30 equals 100. And so now we have a really diverse team already. It’s really international, that gives us all kinds of insight on how the service might transplant to other different markets, and that’s only going to increase in this coming year.
56:39 So I mean, it’s really exciting that we have people talking about, you know, growing up on the other side of the world and talking about parking in different countries and different markets, and everyone is sort of coming together in London, probably the greatest city in the world, to solve this problem in London, and ultimately, you know, where they’re from. Yeah, the diversity question is fascinating, and if you’re listening, you should probably look at your board of directors and look at your founding team. And it’s a little bit more in the news lately, because, you know, the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit, and in, in, in Silicon Valley and this charges, but it’d be great if you looked around and thought how diverse is your board, or is your founding setup, and is that keeping you from doing better, just from a pure optimisation standpoint?
57:19 So it’s a very important point you raise, and it’s one that’s easy to look past. Yeah, I think, I mean, particular challenge with tech is attracting more women. Yeah, so there are very few female developers. That’s just a fact, and so I think schools and universities and the private sector need to do more to encourage more women to enter tech, because that’s ultimately in the interest of the industry, to obviously have access to, you know, fully, to the talents of 50% of the population.
57:47 And it’s really important that tech doesn’t just become a sort of male-dominated industry, like finance has largely become. And I think there are many people who have argued there was a link between the sort of testosterone- male-dominated culture in financial institutions and the crunch, because ultimately there was too much risk-taking and too many egos, and there wasn’t, I guess, the diversity and the balance that having a better-matched balance between the genders would have brought. So yeah, I could see that, being, working in that industry.
58:24 Yeah, I mean, for sure, and we’ve talked to this before. I mean, a lot of people that have been on in that chair have said, you know, get a woman founder, get a woman on your board, get this different perspective that you just would not have thought about, and whether or not it’s PC, or even whether or not it’s your customer base, just have someone from a different background, different nationality, different, you know. I mean, Steve Jobs was the original creator of the dream team, you know, for the original Macintosh.
58:48 It was like, let’s get an opera singer, and let’s get, like, this and the completely diversified groups of people, you know, and see what they can create. So great point, Alex. Always ask people a few questions at the end. I’m going to hit you with these. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Alex and give that young man a bit of advice besides telling him not to go into law, what would you tell him?
59:08 Wow, I would probably tell him that technology is the place you will end up working, and go explore this sector and meet people, and just do everything that I ended up doing just earlier. To be honest, I think that, I don’t know how things have changed, but I left university in 2004, and when I look back there was such a limited careers advisory service, so you basically were told, okay, if you’re studying a humanity subject, you’re probably going to do law or consulting, or that kind of thing. You know, there was just a few different career paths And so yeah, I would have said, look, actually you don’t need to do one of these really generic things.
1:00:00 You can carve your own way through life and join a small business. Yeah, I think I probably would have said that you don’t need to be, you don’t need to do the thing that people expect you to do. Right, best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal? Some really good advice from the guy that ran the litigation department at Clifford Chance, which was just a two-word piece of advice that was one of the things that really stayed with me. And this guy’s motto was “impress everyone”, and I thought that’s just really nice, because it’s not just about impressing important people, it’s also about impressing and making a good impression with everyone that you come into contact with, because that will enrich your life and their life.
1:00:50 And you know, maybe that’s impressing the office cleaner, because one of these days you’re going to be CEO and you’re going to really need to know where something is, and you’re going to need that person to come in and it makes their life better and your life better. And always trying to do the best by people, I think I, I kind of got by that. And, uh, he’s had an obviously phenomenally impressive career, and I think that if you can take that openness and that generosity of spirit to everyone, people will ultimately perceive you more positively.
1:01:21 So yeah, and it’s a great it’s a great way to run a company as well, because that person is, you know, is going to potentially use your product or equity crowdfund you, or, you know, because you touch everyone in what you’re doing. You know, it really is about engagement, you know, with your employees and your culture and everything. So, ably. Last part of that question to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us. These are hard questions, they, but these are the best.
1:01:44 Everybody loves these so much. To the 20-year-old that’s listening around the world, could be in China, in Brazil, in Russia, a BRICS economy, or in America, somewhere who wants to do what you do. You know, who wants to be in the sharing economy or in the technology industry? What do you tell them to do? Just get in touch with people.
1:02:01 So one of the lovely things about tech is that people are by and large very friendly, and this is something that I think we can become quite kind of complacent about. Working in technology, but compared to, I don’t know, you know, real estate or finance or some of these more kind of old-fashioned industries, where people are just generically, you know, what’s in it for me? People in technology are happy to help people, and probably the only reason why people won’t give you time is because they just don’t have any time.
1:02:30 But speak to people, email them, follow them on Twitter, try and message them on LinkedIn, ask to go for a coffee with them. You know, tell them that you will turn up at their office whenever they want, and could they have 15 minutes with them? You know, show some passion. I think people can be a bit, people can be shy. But actually, to come back to the sort of British-American point, you know, people should be confident, and they should get in touch with people and go for it.
1:02:59 And I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised. Fantastic advice, and I totally agree. The amount of giving and sharing in this tech industry is amazing, and London I think is even more, I had this theory, since we haven’t really had a PayPal effect or anything, there’s not really the haves and have-nots, you know, everyone’s still kind of around the same, is, is going to be big. And so everyone is just super helpful, and everybody wants London to succeed, the UK to succeed, and so super helpful.
1:03:27 It’s funny when you talk to people that come from the property industry or the finance industry or something, you know, people when they introduce each other, they’re like, well, what are you going to do for me? And in tech it’s like, here you go, here you go, here you go. We want to help, we want to help, and it’s a breath of fresh air. It’s kind of sharing in a way, right? So yeah, I totally agree.
1:03:44 Just get in touch. The book is The Business of Sharing. It’s a fantastic read, really interesting. I think you used narrative, which is just so powerful, you know. It’s your stories, it’s you doing these things, some really powerful people in here.
1:03:56 You know, you should just, you know, just be an author. Maybe you’re done. How do people get a hold of this? What’s the best way? Amazon, Amazon, The Business of Sharing.
1:04:04 Okay, fantastic. Uh, JustPark, they can go and they can use your site. I guess there’s an app. What’s the best way for them to get involved with you? Download the app or JustPark.com.
1:04:11 Okay, all right, fantastic. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can see us here as the two hardest-working men in showbiz on a good Friday, Passover. We’re getting it done, which is amazing. You can see us on our YouTube channel for our beautiful faces. If you’re watching us on YouTube, please subscribe, leave us some comments, tell me what you think.
1:04:29 Always looking for new guest suggestions. It’s hellosilicon.com, and yeah, it’s been amazing meeting you. We’ve been talking back and forth for a few weeks, and so I’m really glad we sat down and got it all on tape, because it’s a great story. I’m sure there’s more to come, and I wish you all the best. Alex, thank you very much, Brian.
1:04:51 Okay, take care for having you, cheers, bye. This week on Silicon Real we have Saranga Chandratoake, partner at Balderton Capital. If you want to make an impact, then one of the smartest, easiest, most efficient ways of doing that is to start the company. Increasingly we are all going to have to be entrepreneurial. Forget a job for life.
1:05:15 People don’t have a job for a decade, or even a job for five years. These days you have to have such passionate belief in the thing you’re doing in order to be a really effective entrepreneur. An IPO is not a goal or an exit. An IPO is simply another step. The entrepreneurial challenge is knowing when to change and when not to.
1:05:32 Silicon Real presents Saranga Chandratoake, Balderton Capital. Seek to perfect your game in every level, in every way.
