Full transcript: Andy Mcloughlin on London Real
0:42 To the people of the London technology startup scene. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real, it’s the same studio. We get some guys in the room, or some girls, and try to figure some things out. We just recently had astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
0:55 We’ve had Tim Ferriss in the house of the 4-Hour everything. We’ve had, you know, George Galloway in here, charming my pants off, and even Max Keiser from Russia Today talking about Bitcoin. So check that out at londonreal.tv. But today we’re here to talk tech. My co-host is entrepreneur Colin Pyle.
1:12 You’re running around London doing coffee, doing language schools. What’s going on? Yeah, busy times. Off to Italy next week, nail down three more blends for the coffee. So yeah, we’re just, we’re, we’re, yeah, we’re doing great, man.
1:22 It’s just really, really, really busy right now, but yeah, all is all is going well, and keep buying the coffee. Good high-quality problems, they say. High, yeah, sales problems are good problems. Good problems. Yeah, I always, it’s hard to remember that when you’re in the middle of it, but then you know, in retrospect, better to have too many customers than not enough.
1:37 Right? Exactly. Cool. Before we get to the show, I who is the co-founder of Huddle, which is the most comprehensive tool for managing projects and files in the cloud. Used by over 100,000 organizations, 100,000 worldwide, including Disney, diio and the UK government.
2:38 I believe over the years you guys have raised over $40 million. Yeah, about 42 million all in, I think. Okay, I think in about three funding rounds you guys are co-headquarters, have the Huddle Foundation, which provides a free software to register charities like UNICEF and Swiss Red Cross, correct? You’re also an angel investor in companies like Postmates, Buffer. I like Buffer.
3:02 Secret Escapes, Pipedrive and more. Andy, welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you, it’s great to be here. It’s awesome having you here. You know, you’re a busy guy.
3:11 You’re by Coastal, you know, you’re cruising through this neighborhood right now, and I want to know what is it like to see the building you were formerly in being torn down, right? You see Old Street Tube Station, it’s no longer as dirty as it used to be. It’s had a kind of crazy face lift. It was actually kind of pleasant walking through today. It felt weird.
3:28 It felt weird. I remember here, like, to the R area, about probably 12 years ago, and it was kind of dismal back then. I mean, and it’s unrecognizable now. It’s amazing. I mean, I, it is kind of sad to see that building torn down, because, you know, we were in there.
3:42 Skimlinks, were in there. Moo, were in there. TweetDeck, were in there. Group Spaces, were in there. Last.fm, were in there, you know, there’s a lot of kind of startup history in that building, but it was kind of a hole as well.
3:52 I mean, you know, they, I think the, the owners had basically given up doing anything to it for the last year or so. They should have, like, sold tiles from it, like they do old, like, of the Berlin Wall. Exactly. It’s it’s going to be, something called the White Collar Factory, which is going to be a 12-story building. I actually went through a tour of the buildings, and the guy was showing me everything they’re going to do, and it’ll be up in a couple years, so it’ll be towering over the roundabout.
4:13 You know, that’s cool. White Collar Factory. Yeah, that’s nothing divisive about that name whatsoever. Little cheeky. Is is part of the reason you used to be there is because you didn’t know the length of your lease, so you could get kind of short cheap leases, because you didn’t know when the building was going to get, yeah.
4:27 So we, I think Alex Hoy said that. That’s right. I think everyone that’s been in that building kind of will tell you that one of the prime reasons for being there, even more so than being right on the roundabout, which is a super cool spot, was that it was really, really cheap, like really cheap. So I remember talking to Richard about this when, after they moved out and before we were going to move in, and what he was saying was that, you know, every year they’d been told that they were going to be evicted because they were going to be pulling the building down, and for four or five years it had just gone on, and then we moved in, and like for another two years, you know, we expected, actually, we’d probably be in there forever, and then one day we get the notice saying, hey guys, you know, you’ve got to, you got to move out, and I think actually everybody in the in the building was, being evicted on the 24th of December.
5:05 So it’s like a bit of a very startup Christmas. Yeah, exactly. But you know, it was, it was amazing for us. You know, it allowed us to go from you know, probably 40 people up to, you know, we probably had, you know, almost 100 in there by the time we left, you know, really overflowing. But and it was kind of nice to see when we, when we first moved in, the kind of, you know, this kind of nent shortage Silicon Roundabout scene that was beginning to grow, and then, you know, coming back over the months after that and just seeing it explode.
5:35 What is it like to come back now and see it changed, like, even by a factor of, you know, 10? More Google campuses here now. You know, there’s so many other companies. What’s it like? Cuz you guys were there early on.
5:45 This is seven, eight years ago when you guys started? Yeah, yeah. So I talk about kind of the last day that I had a real job was November 2006. So I think, we, Ali and I both kind of started on Huddle full-time. Then we’ve been working on it for a while, and kind of, it’s, it’s, it’s almost impossible to think back what the London scene was like back then, cuz really there wasn’t a London scene.
6:03 You could probably count, you know, there were a bunch of companies building tech stuff, but there was no real community. You know, the Rlock would, would throw a few dinners, and really that was it. And so actually pretty early on, Ali and I decided, as well as doing Huddle, we’d have a side project, which was a an event called Drink Tank, which was a monthly, basically, drink-up for entrepreneurs, investors, journalists, because there wasn’t anything at the time.
6:26 Now you know, we kind of got busy with Huddle, I moved away, Ali moved to SF as well, you know, but since then, you know, see, it’s like a kind of, it’s like a Hydra. Drink Tank finish, and then like four other events popped up in its place. Yeah, now you’ve got the Drinkabout and, well, tons of them. The Milk Roundabout, you’ve got, you know, the whole scene’s kind of gone. Every night of the week you can go to like five different events, probably, if you wanted to.
6:46 Yeah. And when did you move to San Francisco? Why did you make that decision? Cuz that’s a big decision, and what’s it been like? So I moved out there in May 2010.
6:55 So it’s coming up to four years now, be four years in, in just a over a week or so, which is, which is crazy, cuz it’s gone in the blink of an eye. We moved out, or rather I moved out, because we raised our B round, earlier in 2010, from Matrix Partners, who are a US VC, from a guy called Josh Hannah. Josh is a Valley-based partner, and, you know, he quite fairly said, look, you know, given what you guys are doing, you know, you’re building kind of broad enterprise technology, you need to have a big presence in on the West Coast.
7:24 You know, I’d been going out there anyway, I kind of knew the area pretty well, you know, was pretty much young, free and single, so I was like, you know, I’ll fall on that sword. I will move to California and go and set up the US office. Alistair had, like, a kid. He had another one on the way. He was kind of KNE deep in running the UK operation, and, you know, the great thing about having two founders is that you can kind of divide and conquer like that.
7:46 What’s it been like? Lifestyle-wise, you’re an Englishman in California, you know, I’m American in London, but that’s another story. Canadian in London. We’re all, yeah, yeah, we’re all kind of out of water. What’s it like being there?
7:57 I mean, did you, must you have seen the usual typical things at first, where you’re like, okay, this is what I expected, and what was it really like? I mean, I guess I kind of, I knew the place reasonably well, because I’d been going there quite often. I mean, I always say to entrepreneurs when they’re thinking about making that big leap, you know, before you do it, spend a bunch of time there. Don’t just go out for a week once a year. You know, really try and get out there and immerse yourself.
8:17 Airbnb makes it super easy to go out there and spend a month, you know, living kind of amongst other people, other entrepreneurs that are building stuff, and just say if it’s for you, because not every company needs to be out there, you know, if you’re building, maybe e-commerce, or if you’re building fashion, or you’re building retail technology, or financial technology, or legal technology, you know, there’s nothing in San Francisco for you. But if you’re doing the kind of broader stuff, broad enterprise, broad consumer marketplaces, it’s the best place in the world to be. And I think for me, the, the, I guess the biggest change compared to London was just that in the same way as maybe LA is a kind of one-industry town, you know, people talk about working in the industry, you know, when you work in movies, that in San Francisco it feels like a one-industry town.
8:59 You know, everybody works in tech, or they’re working in industries supporting tech, and actually that’s not the truth. I mean, I think they, I read recently that only 7% of workers in San Francisco work in tech, but it certainly feels that way. You know, you’re hanging out in the Mission, or you’re hanging out in SoMa or downtown. You literally walk around and you see on buildings the logos of companies. You know, these aren’t well-known companies, but we know them because we work in the space, and they’re just everywhere.
9:22 You know, you go into a coffee shop and you bump into Esther Dyson, or you hear two guys talking about, you know, they’re going to set up some new car-sharing service. It’s called Lift, you know, and before you know it, you know, it’s raised like $100 million in funding. It’s, it’s a kind of crazy place, and I think the, that the upside is that everybody’s working in tech, and the downside is that everyone’s working in tech, so it can kind of feel a little bit navel-gazy.
9:42 And I think the mistake that I made and a mistake a lot of other people make when they first move there is they only hang out with other people who, work in tech. You know, whereas actually there’s a, you know, there’s a huge, beautiful city with a lot of diversity, a lot of cool stuff going on, and a lot of stuff that isn’t just in the Mission or in the Marina or in, or in Hayes Valley or in, SoMa. You know, there’s so many cool neighborhoods with so much great stuff to see and so much amazing food as well.
10:04 I’m moving back, maybe, now. I guess, in the last four years since you’ve been there, there’s kind of been a shift from people in the Valley coming down to the city. You know, maybe talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so I, I think that kind of almost predates when I got out, when I got there, but certainly I think if you rewound 10 years, you’d see that all the action was happening in Mountain View and in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and, you know, and anyone that’s been to these places, I mean, Palo Alto is actually quite nice.
10:28 You know, we’ve got Stanford University there. There’s a nice downtown, but generally it’s just a lot of strip malls, kind of small, affluent, very white towns. It’s kind of boring. I mean, the analogy I always draw is it’s kind of like reading, but with sunshine and palm trees. But you know, I think companies like Yelp and Twitter have really and kind of more, I guess, Dropbox have really kind of fueled companies wanting to be in San Francisco.
10:55 You know, it’s a real city. It has great neighborhoods. It has diversity. It has great bars and amazing restaurants, and like cool stuff to do. And you know, and also, you know, in San Francisco you’re 3 hours from the mountains, or for us, on the mountains, to go skiing.
11:08 You can be in wine country in 45 minutes. Wow, you weren’t tweeting wine country pictures last week or something? Yeah, yeah. I was, I was there with my girlfriend. It was, it was amazing.
11:17 We went to a, went to a winery, which I, I guess was owned by a Russian guy, because there was a lot of Russians there, and we drove in, in my friend’s VW Golf, and they had valet parking, and I swear to God, within about five minutes, about 10 Ferraris and Lamborghinis and McLarens drove in in single file, and a bunch of very, very rich Russians got out, but not tech Russians. Not tech R. I have, I have no idea what they were doing, but yeah, I don’t think it was tech escaping.
11:41 Yeah, maybe. So, you know, for people that don’t know the history of Huddle, or even where you guys are today, I was wondering if you’d give us, like, a, you know, a three-minute history of what you guys started out to do, how that’s changed and where you guys are right now? Yeah, I mean, so we started out back in 2006, and it’s kind of, it’s pretty well framed actually, but by what I was doing and what Alistair was doing, I, I worked for a consultancy.
12:05 We put in document management software and business process software into insurance companies and finance companies, very dull, very, very. That was your job before? That was my job before, and I wore a suit every day, clean shaven. Yeah, clean-shaven, yeah, like totally different from now. And, Alistair worked for an agency where he’d been trying to implement SharePoint.
12:24 He was one of the, on the kind of exact team there, and it had been a complete failure, and a very, very expensive failure. And I’d been kind of having this idea about taking the best parts of these, this kind of big, boring, dirty document management system and delivering it as SaaS. You know, the cloud term hadn’t really even been invented back then. You know, delivering it as SaaS, pricing it in a way which could go from a small, very small company to a very big business.
12:46 So I was kind of like the solution guy. Alistair was the problem guy, and that he wanted something that he could have used in his company. We, we went out for drinks one night. I was living in Tooting at the time, he was in Wandsworth. We went out in Tooting Bec, we, as you do, went out for five pints and a curry, put the worlds to right, and that was the night that Huddle was born.
13:03 And I think we knew pretty early on that what we wanted it to do, we’d come across Basecamp, which was awesome but pretty simplistic. We wanted to build on more kind of deep enterprise functionality, you know, auditing, version control, all the stuff that people don’t get excited about, but they kind of have to have, but package it up in a way which seemed sexy and friendly, and actually turn it into more of a startup thing rather than a boring enterprise company. So we started selling to agencies and brands, and then we started doing a load of government work as well.
13:30 And I think, you know, what we found was that any company who cared about security, if they care about compliance, but if they’re very collaborative, so they’re working with their partners or with their customers, or in the case of government, working with other government agencies, had all a, a really, really good fit for them. Was it difficult in the beginning with bandwidth issues and with storage issues? Cuz, you know, things were a lot more expensive to move around and store back.
13:50 Well, this is it. I mean, I feel like such an old guy now. When I talked to I talked to the startup guys, you know, we didn’t have AWS, and we didn’t have Elastic Search, and we didn’t have all the Stripe and all the stuff that people take for granted now. It’s like, back in my day we had to write everything ourselves, and they just look at me like, like I’m in my mid-30s, which, which I am. And so yeah, you know, we, we kind of had to do, had to do everything from scratch.
14:14 And what it meant was you know, the speed of development was much slower. You know, we didn’t have that in elasticity, so we had to manage our own server farms, and it’s, it’s been kind of interesting, kind of as we’ve taken the architecture of Huddle and begun to move it onto these kind of, you know, more modern, more elastic platforms, where you get greater economies of scale, where you know, where you can flick on new servers at a switch rather than having to phone your hosting centre and get them to plug in a new, a new blade server for you. Was that a big cost centre for you in the beginning, like server farms?
14:40 And it’s, it’s never been too bad, actually. I mean, the business, it’s probably more bandwidth intensive than kind of processing intensive, but, you know, for, for a like Huddle, where you’re hiring sales people, you’re hiring support people, and marketing people, the people cost is, is the greatest for us, and the life cycle of trying to sell to a government or a financial institution. I mean, we’ve had everybody in here, whether it was, you know, software development companies, for risk management, you know, out in the City, or whether it’s, you know, Digital Shadows, Alistair Patterson trying to sell you know software to the banks.
15:09 I mean, it takes time. Is that, was that frustrating in the beginning for you guys? Well, you know, we didn’t start selling to these guys straight away, and actually, even our first government customers, they kind of bought us cheaply, as a service, on credit card, and what we found was that, you know, the best fit we had was actually with the bigger guys who wanted to pay on upfront invoice. So, you know, the, I think the overall vision for what Huddle built hasn’t really changed.
15:30 It’s just, you know, we’ve kind of got a bit more grown up about how we’ve been doing it, and, you know, sold into into bigger customers, and what’s been nice as well is that with Huddle you don’t have to go and buy a, you know, 50,000-person deployment. If you’re a big company, you can start with 50 seats and then grow it as you, as you need it, which means we can get sales done quickly, and then kind of aggressively grow them after that. And has competition sprung up, like, rapidly in the last few years, when other people are able to scale really quickly, when maybe five, 10 years ago it would have been harder for them to catch up?
15:59 I think on the technology side, yeah, absolutely, but you know, when you’re talking to big companies, you know, they’re buying more than just technology. They’re buying, you know, your brand and your service and your reputation. They, you know, they’re buying the fact that you’ve got, you know, the great security in place, and a lot of this stuff is not just the tech, but it’s also the procedures and policies and, you know, all the kind of boring stuff that most entrepreneurs don’t want to do, because they just want to, they just want to build great products.
16:20 Unfortunately, if you’re building software for business, great product isn’t enough. You have to have all the other stuff. Yeah. For publicly traded companies and government, it must, that must be almost more important than anything else? Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we pride ourselves on product, we pride ourselves on technology, but, you know, when you talk to government customers, often that’s not the key buying decision for them.
16:39 It’s around reliability, it’s around trust, it’s around security and policies. And, you know, do other government departments use it? Can they talk to the CIO there? It’s a whole different ball game. When you see startups like the, the latest startup idea, whether it’s here or in Silicon Valley, and sometimes, you know, guys are, are trending to the sexy topics.
16:55 I mean, do you ever think, why isn’t anybody doing, you know, waste management or, you know, something? Cuz I mean, you kind of started off in that niche where you kind of did the unsexy part. I mean, are there industries that are being ignored because of that? You know, I think a lot of the industries, you know, which probably think are being ignored, are probably still very, very manual. I think that more and more, you know, you see companies who are, who are using technology to answer kind of difficult questions, you know, difficult questions, which previously would have been ignored.
17:22 Like you know, startups for farming, for example. You know, huge industry, which, you know, how many startup guys have ever worked a farm? So, you know, so not many of them have that experience, but, you know, there’ll be this one guy whose parents probably own a farm. You know, he studied computer science, and bang, and, you know, there’s your, there’s your farming technology entrepreneur right there. And I think, you know, with technologies like, like Rails, which make it so easy to get up and running, you know, even guys who don’t have a great deal of experience in terms of writing software can begin to build products really, really quickly.
17:50 What about security? I mean, you know, with all the Snowden revelations in the last, like, nine months or a year, you know, it’s high alert for everybody, but I’m guessing you guys were thinking about security many, many years ago, and when all that stuff came out, were you like, yeah, we got that covered, or do you have to kick things up? Well, you know, there’s almost kind of two sides of security. You’ve got, like, the, the actual security, which keeps the hackers out, but I think the biggest question in most people’s minds now are not the, not the kids in Russia trying to hack in, but the US government, who could, you know, you incite PRISM and actually ask for data.
18:18 Now, we’re lucky, you know, we, that’s, we’ve never had that. You know, we offer data centres both in Europe as well as in the US, so customers who are particularly worried about having data on US soil, you know, but that kind of came about almost by accident, but by virtue of starting here, rather than a lot of our competitors whose primary data centres are, are in the US, and so are much more vulnerable to having the US government come knocking on their door. So that’s a selling point for you, if you can hold the data outside the US?
18:41 Absolutely. Absolutely. Are there any new industries that are springing out from the fact that, that you know, that people might not want their data in the US, or they might want their own data protected from the US government? Yeah, I mean, you know, we’ve seen a few things. I think, you know, everyone loves Dropbox, right?
18:54 But, you know, Dropbox is still, a US company hosted on US soil, hosted by Amazon, and we know that Amazon have, you know, they’ve given data to the US government through PRISM. So what we’re seeing now is a lot of companies who are building, you know, allowing you to have your own private Dropbox, on your desktop, so you’re building basically your own mini cloud server with your stuff, but giving you the same kind of access and apps as Dropbox. I think the second thing is we’re seeing a lot, a lot of work going into encryption.
19:20 So you know, you might store your, your, your files on Dropbox or Box or Huddle or whatever, but then you can add an extra layer of, of encryption on top of that, where you hold the key, which means that, you know, even if someone were to come to Box or Dropbox and say, hey, you know, we want the files for this person, whatever, they gave them would just be a complete scramble. And for someone who doesn’t know any better, what is it like, the basic difference between say you and Dropbox? Cuz I think most people are familiar with Dropbox, they’ve seen it, they’ve used it.
19:45 I think there’s a couple of things. I mean, at its most basic level, you know, we don’t work with, we don’t sell an individual product, we don’t work with very small businesses. You know, we serve the mid-market and above. You know, Dropbox is just files. You can share.
19:57 You know, whereas we provide a broader range of, collaboration tools around the content. And I think it was either you or Alistair that was saying the way you’re staying ahead of the market is by simply providing a better product. I mean, are you always going back to your software and just trying to, to make the best product? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you, we have a big team of guys here in London.
20:14 You know, every two weeks they’re shipping new product that goes out. You know, that means touching new endpoints, so, you know, that meant iOS, Android. You know, in the future it means Windows mobile. It means you know, thinking about how, you know, what are the kind of latest trends that people want to use in terms of how they’re interacting with stuff, and often it means looking at how, you know, what’s going on in the consumer social software world, and kind of taking some cues from that, because I think, you know, the people talked a lot about kind of enterprise social software two or three years ago.
20:41 I think what we’re seeing now is that all enterprise software is becoming social. You know, everybody expects to see an activity stream. They expect it to be easy to, you, they want to be able to kind of, reply to people, bring them into the conversation, and, you know, and that’s something we, you know, we’ve really embraced. And where do you see you guys, you know, going in the next sort of three, four, five years as technology changes? Google Glass comes in, and, you know, as the access to information, it all becomes cloud and becomes smaller.
21:08 Yeah, I mean, I think that, our job really is to make sure the right content and information is getting to the right people at the right time, and what that means is, you know, if someone is using, you know, if Google Glass becomes, you know, a truly kind of respected enterprise piece of kit, then we’ll start writing software for that. If it means we’ve got to push, push Huddle data into SAP, because that’s what customers demand, we’ll do that as well. I mean, what we’re trying to do is be very kind of customer-led in terms of the development that we’re doing.
21:35 Is, IPOs, things that are in the future? I, you don’t want to ask, you put, you on the spot, but I know Box has talked about it. You know, they’re in the similar industry as you. Is it something that you see as an, an inevitability, or even a plus, or do you see it as a minus, when you see some of these companies that have gone that road? Yeah, well, I mean, I think every entrepreneur has the big dream of taking their company public.
21:52 You know, not every company, you know, is IPO-ready. Not every company is really IPO-worthy. I think a lot of eyebrows are raised when Box’s S-1 was filed, and came out a couple of weeks ago, you know, they, it’s a terrific company, fantastic brand, good software, you know, but they burned through $140 Million last year, you know, so they, I think, you know, they were 240 down, 100 up. It’s, yeah, a ridiculously cash-intensive business, but you compare that to someone like Workday, you know, also enterprise software, and they are far leaner, you know, their cost acquisition cost is lower.
22:25 You know, these guys are, you know, public now and trading at something like, ridiculous, like 17x revenue. That’s a good business. Wow. So, no media plans IPO, just take that cross that bridge when you come to it? Yeah, yeah.
22:36 I mean, I, you know, it’s on, it’s on our road map. We’d love to get there. I mean, who knows, you know, we might be, we might be so attractive to somebody that they they can’t keep their hands off us, and we get snapped up along the way, but, you know, our vision really is just to build a solid, scalable company, which, you know, which has all the hallmarks of a viable business. It’s funny, Col and I were talking about before you came over here, and it’s a theme that comes up all the time on the show.
22:58 Is that a lot of people, when they start learning about this industry, it’s like, oh, tech startups, have you heard about the company that flipped in two years, and three years, and then we had Simon from DFJ in here saying, you know, you’re talking seven to 10 years with a company. You’re, sorry, five and a half years in. have you ever thought about doing something else? Do you, that’s something you tell tech startup people, that, look, this is a really long haul.
23:17 Yeah, and I, I think that’s it. I think everyone, you know, has this dream that they can flip their company two years, two years in, and, you know, go and work for Facebook or Google, but, you know, those are unicorns, right? I think if you’re going to, if you’re going to do a startup, you have to do it, not because you’re in it for the, the cash short term. Obviously, you know, you, everyone wants to be rich at some point, but you have to do it because you love what you’re doing.
23:37 You know, you have to do it because you love building a company, building culture, building product, working with customers, and just doing something which, you know, might one day change the world. And hey, if you get rich off the back of it, then, then all the better. I think, you know, we’re Alistair and I, and, you know, a bunch of other entrepreneurs who have, you know, been out this for a while and made a bit of money along the way. I think we satisfy our kind of urge to get involved with other companies by doing a bit of angel investing here and there, you know, getting involved with young companies who, you know, a, they, they, you know, they need the money, but also the experience, the mentoring, you know, and just kind of having a chance to, to spend time with us is really cool, and, you know, frankly, the, and the guys that we work with, you know, speaking for myself, sure, Ali would agree though.
24:16 You know, one of the reasons we do it is because the companies are generally, we, we see them as being far more intelligent than, than we are, than you are. Now, oh yeah. How many companies, do you have investments in at the moment? I think I’ve invested in about 20 four, so quite a few, quite a few, quite few. And are they based majority in Europe, or over in or in the St. It’s about half and half, I think, so I mean, generally, I, I love companies that are based in Europe who kind of have that big ambition that they want to, to expand to the US.
24:40 But there’s a bunch of companies in the US which are founded by Brits as well, who kind of started out there too. And not just Brits, you know, other Europeans. I love, I love SaaS and cloud, infrastructure as a service. You know, people talk about, you know, software eating the world. And the kind of the analogy that I draw right now is that the it feels like we’re in a gold rush.
25:00 And it’s very similar to the gold rush in the 1800s. Now, you know, it wasn’t the guys who were out mining gold that made the money, but it was the guy selling shovels. You know, and if you, you know, if you work with infrastructure companies, you only have to look at people like Heroku. Look at, company that I invested in called Bugsnag, New Relic, GitHub. You know, these, these, these are the guys that kind of, that are powering the new web, you know, and no matter that most of their customers won’t ever become big, you know, these guys will make a lot of money on them on the way through.
25:29 You know, we’re always talking about this ecosystem in London and how it competes with the Silicon Alley and the Valley, and what London has that’s great about it and what it’s still lagging. You know, and I was just curious from you, I mean, you spent four years now, you know, with the Yanks, and you get to see their work ethic, you get to see their mentality, the way they pitch, all that, and then you come back here, obviously you’re in touch with startups here, what’s the main glaring difference you’ve seen between the two? Cuz you have a unique perspective.
25:53 So I think that the access to capital is probably still the biggest thing. And I think access not just to capital, but also access to experience. You know, the in the US there’s an incredible number of experienced product managers, product designers coming out of companies like Google and Facebook, Zynga, Yahoo, and we don’t have that in the UK. I mean, you know, we’re able to export people over, and you know, there is a small number of very good people here, but there’s nothing like the mass of talent.
26:20 You know, the angel investor network there is huge. It’s very easy for a company to raise $2 million almost, kind of overnight, whereas here it still feels like it, it can be a bit of a log. I think, you know, the the work ethic isn’t isn’t something I really buy. I think that, you know, we work just as hard here as they do there. I think we take more holidays, but, you know, the guys that I that I know here are, you know, just as hardworking as the guys that I know in the US.
26:42 Okay, I’m glad that’s on the record. Yeah, absolutely. I think anyone that that says otherwise is, well, either, you know, I wouldn’t put them into that category, or they’re, they’re blind. I think, though, that, the biggest thing, especially on the West Coast, is just the echo chamber, you know. When you’re in London, the great thing about London is that there’s so much other stuff going on, you know.
27:02 You’ve got the arts, you have music and fashion, legal, finance. It’s all here, which means, though, that you know, we’re fighting for talent against all of those other industries, whereas in the, in the US and in San Francisco, you know, it’s all about that. So, you know, the best and brightest all go into startups, and what that means is that the, the quality is generally higher. You know, there, there are more companies, and therefore, and the average quality seems, you know, just just a bit better, and what it also means that is that the awareness is better as well.
27:29 You know, I always say the biggest difference between London and San Francisco is, you know, if you go and talk to somebody about what you’re doing in London, you have to explain to them why it’s a good idea, whereas when you talk about what, about what you’re doing in San Francisco, you have to explain to it why your company is better than the three others that are doing something similar. What a great reference. You know, when, when you go and angel invest, and, you know, someone like Ivan Missour, we’ve had on the show.
27:49 I mean, do you bring, I’m guessing it’s not just the money that you bring. Is it the experience that you’ve been through at Huddle, or is it your Rolodex that you can just put people in touch with other people? Yeah, I think it’s both. I think, you know, for Ivan in particular, it was the experience of Huddle, of, you know, growing the team to, you know, into the hundreds. It was, you know, everything that we’ve gone around building out, a Salesforce, because, you know, really Ali and I knew nothing about startups beforehand.
28:11 He, he will claim this is, this is his third startup, but, you know, the other two were, you know, that we’d never built out sales and teams and marketing teams in the same way as we have done here. And, you know, we’ve kind of made, I’d say, probably almost every mistake in the book. I think we’re just lucky that we’ve made a lot more good decisions than bad decisions along the way, but we’ve made made an awful lot of very bad decisions too. And it’s not just, you know, it’s not, it wasn’t stupidity.
28:33 It was just lack of experience, and, you know, and lack of, the kind of feedback mechanism that works so well in the Valley through kind of very proactive mentoring. For Ivan, you know, he wants to talk about pricing, he wants to talk about sales hiring, he wants to talk about, scaling out a technology team, product management, looking after the road map, how do you deal with customer requests, all the stuff that you know, we’ve learned along the way and have the scars to prove. I guess, what’s the biggest sort of piece of advice you give to a guy like Ivan, for example?
29:04 I think focus on product. You know, one of the things that we, we, we didn’t do early enough was really build out the engineering team as big as it should have been, which meant that, you know, we built out a good sales organization and a good success organization, but, you know, they, we you know, we’d sell the software, they’d go to customers. Customers, of course, would have feedback and gripes and requests, and we just couldn’t service them fast enough, because we just didn’t have the capacity to build enough stuff.
29:26 And so with Ivan, him specifically, is, you know, he’s building out a really great team, but they need to kind of pump in more more engineering resource. Yeah, it’s kind of a fine line, right? You want to keep cash flow up and keep the sales team rolling, but, but on the other hand, you have to keep creating a good product. And yeah, and I think one you know, one of the things that we learned is that, you know, hiring additional salespeople, especially when there’s stuff that needs to be fixed, is kind of a short-term sticking plaster rather than kind of fixing the long-term underlying problem, which could be only something that an engineer can do.
29:55 Right. You know, you’ve had so many roles at Huddle. You’ve been the CTO, you’ve been head of product, head of marketing, you’re now the EVP of strategy. How do you, that’s, it’s an amazing made-up title. Yeah, is that the Executive Vice President of strategy?
30:06 It is. Oh, okay, all right. I, I don’t know either. It sounds important, though. It does.
30:10 I once worked for a company, and I had the role Chief Business Development Officer. That was my role. CBDO. Yeah, CBD. Yeah, anyways.
30:18 So why the role change, and how do you find, actually, do, maybe that’s a really good question? Well, well, so firstly, the title, we chose was just because it’s so vanilla and broad-brush. It lets me get involved in absolutely any conversation, you know, not only with the guys internally, but I can go and talk to VCs. I can talk to our alliance partners. I can talk to companies that we might be, you know, looking to, either acquire or, you know, looking to work with.
30:45 I can talk to, I can talk at events. I can, I can do anything. You know, Ali and I always, you know, we’ve always kind of divvied up the roles. He was CEO but looked after the business and operation side. In the very beginning, I looked after the product and technology piece, and I think, to answer your question, the reason for the change was just that, you know, I’m a pretty good all-rounder, definitely talk the talk, but, you know, as we’ve grown and as we’ve been able to hire better people, it makes sense for me to step back and bring in people who are better than me.
31:15 I think the worst thing that any entrepreneur can do is keep their arms around stuff, because then the company will never grow. Do you see that all the time? I mean, you must walk in these circles of all these, like, very successful startups. Do you see it sometimes, where you’re like, you shouldn’t be the CTO anymore, or you shouldn’t be the CEO anymore? Yeah, you do, and I think that the very, in the very successful startups, they realize, you know, when they should and when they shouldn’t be.
31:36 I mean, what’s always nice is that when you see a CEO who is, you know, who’s been able to grow with a company, you know, they start off as just, you know, your typical founder CEO, but they’ve got all the makings, you know, the composure and the smarts to go on and potentially be a public company CEO. Right, right. How do you acquire talent, because as an entrepreneur, you know, at a very early stage, it’s difficult. You may not have the cash to give them.
31:59 You may not have, you know, the billion-dollar sort of road for them to jump on board. But how did you acquire talent fast after you got your first $12 million? You were just, you had to scale fast? We did. Yeah, I mean, I think that when, when I look back, and again this kind of comes back to my point about Ivan, one of the biggest issues that we had, first of all, was that we didn’t have a really, really strong technical founder.
32:19 You know, I was the technical founder, and I’m a pretty awful, awful coder. I haven’t written a line of code in about three years now, and even, even when I was kind of more actively involved, I was still kind of crap. And what that meant was that I think the stronger the technical founder you have, the easier it is to draw in talent, so we had to really kind of just do it by hook or by crook. You know, we, we hustled, we, probably told a few fibs here and there, you know, but we got people in, and our first, actually, our first technical hire was a guy who I found on Monster.com, and he was based out in, the Czech Republic.
32:53 His name was Bohos, and Bos was interested in moving to England. he was interested in working for a startup. He was a kind of traditional software engineer, software developer, but he was cheap. He wanted to come, so, you know, we made him an offer. You know, he came over.
33:11 His English was terrible. You know, he was an incredibly strange guy, very smart, really, really lovely, but kind of odd, and in the interview, which we did over Skype, I asked him about his hobbies, and he said, well, you know, I I like computer science. If I wasn’t writing software for a living, I would do that in my spare time. I like disco dance. I like weightlift.
33:29 I like inline skate. I was like, that’s a, that’s a good set of hobbies, do them all together. I actually never saw him in his inline skates, but, and you know, he came to us. His English is pretty terrible, so we, you know, we, we put him through language school as well. He missed his mom, so his mom came out and lived with him in his one-bedroom flat, which we never asked any questions about.
33:52 And, you know, and it was great, and his, he had a very kind of weird, kind of very kind of Eastern European dress sense as well, wore some really terrible T-shirts. I think on the day that Eden Ventures came around, before we’d raised our A round, because they wanted to meet some of the team. Bos was wearing a, a T-shirt that had a, a graphic of, three sperm on it, and one of them, like, had a thought bubble that said, “Emergency, we’re in the ass.” It’s like, okay, you don’t get to talk to the investors today, both us, because we don’t have any spare T-shirts for you to wear.
34:22 Exactly. Is he still with you? He is not, I’m afraid. No. So, in the end, his, his father got sick, and he had to move back to the Czech Republic, so he actually worked for us remotely for a while, but, you know, we’ve always been big proponents of having the team together here in London, and so it didn’t, it didn’t work out, but we’re still in touch.
34:39 I spoke to him just a couple of months ago. And are there certain tests that people have to pass to get the hire from you? I mean, do they have to meet, you know, all the top people? Do they? I know Ivan was very specific about when he hires, he’s, they have to meet everyone in the team.
34:51 I mean, it’s kind of harder now, obviously, that the team is larger, but the second hire that we made, and really this was who we built technology team around, was a guy called Bob. I think Bob, his Twitter handle was always, and still is, Bob from Huddle, and so, you know, Bob is kind of Huddle engineering embodied. He’s incredibly smart. He’s a little bit of an oddball, but just an awesome guy. And in the interview, in fact, I interviewed Bob remotely, because I was at the lawyer’s office signing our first term sheet.
35:20 Bob was sitting on my desk. You know, we talked. I quizzed him on technology. We actually got, he did a technical test for us as well, and I said, you know, beyond, you know, writing code, what else are you going to do? And he, he thought, he paused, and he said, I’m going to build you a team of peers.
35:35 And, you know, God bless him, you know, six years on, or seven years on, you know, Bob is still with us, and Bob built us an amazing team of peers. And because Bob’s so technically strong and so well respected, you know, we’ve been able to build the team around him, because that’s really what you want to hear when you’re hiring someone. I’ll build you a team of peers. Like, give me, just give me a hug. Right?
35:53 If you can really trust that to someone. Right. Yeah, and, and so, you know, and B, You know, and our first CTO, Jonathan, they built the hiring process for the technology guys, which was they would, they’d meet with Bob, they’d meet with Jonathan, they’d probably meet with another engineer, and one of the QA guys, and They do a technical test, and, you know, they’d really put them through the ringer, after being, initially screened as well, and then the four guys that were involved would, would stand around and say, definitely yes, probably yes, probably no, definitely no, and unless they got four definitely yeses, they wouldn’t hire them, which meant, actually, we weren’t able to hire probably as quickly as we should have done, but we were able to hire really great people, you know, because from my time, you know, managing the engineering team, the one thing I know, that there was nothing as kind of downhearted as the engineers feeling like they’re carrying somebody, so they had to, they had to feel like every single person they’ll bring you on was even better than them.
36:46 How hard is it to find engineers at the moment in the Valley? Is it as bad as, bad as we hear? Well, you know, we don’t hire out there. I mean, we have, we’re kind of weird, and that our San Francisco office is purely commercial. Okay, sales, success, marketing, the founders, all of our engineering talent is here in London, and I guess because, you know, London is still kind of a smaller ecosystem, because we’ve got a pretty big presence, I think it’s actually getting easier over time for us to hire, you know, retention is good as well.
37:14 I think you compare that to the Valley, where it’s just so damn expensive. You know, I think you might pay £100,000, the equivalent of $100,000, for, like, a good engineer in London, you’d probably pay $180,000 for the same person, sir, in San Francisco, and the fact is, you know, they’re probably going to leave you within 18 months, because they’re going to be wooed by the next big thing. Jesus, that’s really competitive. And are you hiring now? I know you’ve got offices in DC and some other places.
37:39 Yeah, so right now we, we have London, which is, you know, really the engine room of the business. Where are you guys now in London? We are down by Oldgate, kind of Spitalfields area. Okay. We unfortunately were looking for a floor plate which is bigger than you can generally find in this area.
37:51 Okay. I think everyone was kind of sad to go, because a lot of our guys lived really close to here. Kind of that’s why it made it, bit of, coming back here today it’s like coming home again. So yeah, and then we have, a team in DC who service our Kind of US Federal customers. A team in New York kind of doing East Coast, and then the guys in San Francisco.
38:12 I just want to know, how do you, invest in all these Angel companies? I mean, you haven’t had like that liquidity event that, you know, PayPal event, where you’ve sold out. Have you managed to just, you know, monetize some things over the years? Or, yeah, you know, I, yeah, basically, that, you know, we’ve been able to, you know, take, make a bit of money. You know, I’ve had a bit of property that’s done well.
38:31 You know, some of the startups themselves have, have been able, I’ve been able to take money out of those guys as well. Okay. So it’s kind of like slow and steady, and, you know, these aren’t huge checks I’m writing. I’m not Peter Thiel who’s going in and writing a $500,000 check for a company he’s falling in love with. Okay, and what are some of your other Angel investments that you’re excited about?
38:49 So I think kind of London specifically, so I’ve recently invested in Driftrock which is, a guy called Matt Wheeler, and he came out to Forward Labs. So I think Matt was actually the first employee there. In the station, did they just move into Old Street Station? They’ve been running an event down in Old Street Station. Okay, I, I took a picture this morning.
39:05 I was like, who are these guys? And Driftrock is, online marketing tools for small companies. Really, really cool. I mean, and these guys have so much experience from their days at Forward, when they were running marketing campaigns for companies, you know, that these tools are based on what they use there. So if anybody can make this into a big business, that’ll be out there.
39:22 There’s a company called Cloud 66, which is an infrastructure-as-a-service company. They come out of Wira, a bunch of kind of former banking engineers, really, really smart guys, and, you know, I think that they, I’d imagine, at some point they’re going to move out to the US. It feels like a kind of classic, you know, West Coast, Valley, Valley infrastructure play. Beyond that, there’s a company called Woku, which is founded by a former Huddle guy that used to work for me, And they do kind of enterprise ideas management.
39:49 There is Together, which was founded by a really good friend called Socrates, and Socks was the, the co, the founder and CEO of Trusted Places, which sold to Yale, and with Together, it’s answering a very basic problem, which is how can I kind of easily and privately share, moments with my family. You know, my sister hates Facebook. She won’t put pictures of the kids on Facebook, but she’ll put them on Together so that we can kind of privately see them and share them.
40:17 I sense a theme with software companies. No hardware, no no. I have no idea how hardware works. Hardware scares me. Okay, so you keep it, keep it what you know, basically.
40:26 Yes, exactly. Do you… Are you looking for more investments? Do you actively seek them out, or, no? I’ve been tapped out for about, about three or four months now.
40:34 And I’ve kind of made a couple since then, but it’s, I’m, I’m basically out. I mean, although, if something really, really good comes along, you know, which just looks so amazing and so compelling, I might have to find a bit of money for it. Is that mentally tapped out, both? I think I think mentally, time-wise, and, and cash. What percent of your time do you spend on those companies?
40:52 Would you say not much? I mean, Huddle is still pretty much all-consuming. You know, with the, the crossover from the, the UK to the US, you know, we get, I can probably get two hours with the guys, two or three hours, depending, if you know, if I start really early and they start late. You know, I’m not a morning person. You know, if I could stay in bed till 10 a.m.
41:09 Every day, I absolutely would do, but unfortunately it means, you know, being kind of available from 7:00 a.m. Onwards. So from 7 till 10 or 11, that’s kind of UK crossover time. Then you know maybe a couple more hours with the guys that are working really late here, and then afternoon is kind of Huddle projects, and you know. So I might work from 7 till, you know, till 6:30, and then I might spend like an hour with a startup or something after that.
41:30 Okay. But, you know, a lot of these guys, you know, the reason that you invest is because they, you know, they will reach out when they need it. So I’m going to see Kieran O’Neal from Thread after this, catch up with him. But, you know, they know what they’re doing. You know, they, you know, they want some advice, they want to bounce an idea off you, but you’re not having to run their business for them.
41:45 Will you ever move back to London? Oh, that’s a really good question. I, had you asked me this a year or so ago, I would have said absolutely not, but every time I’ve come back to London in the last kind of nine months, I’ve kind of realized how much I, I miss it. But then I get back to San Francisco and it’s sunny, and I can go and sit on my deck, and it’s like, I really love it here, so I feel like I get the best of both worlds right now. I’m in London every kind of, right now, every six or seven weeks, so I get to kind of see my friends here, you know, do all the kind of cool stuff around here, you know, really kind of have that big-city vibe, and then get back to San Francisco, where I feel like I lead a a much kind of healthier, much kind of, much more kind of rigorous lifestyle, in terms of, you know, healthy eating, working out, you know, not spent, not going out till like 4 or 5:00 in the morning at weekends, because you know, when I lived here I was in my 20s, and, you know, London, such an amazing city, with so much going on, there’s always stuff, you know, always stuff up going on at night, and what happened was, you know, you end up going out late, you feel awful the next day, you don’t do anything.
42:43 And my housemate at the time, Chris, he was, he was a lawyer, you know, he was, you know, a bit more sensible than me, and him and his girlfriend would go and do really cool stuff, you know, they go to flower markets and antique markets. I was like, God damn it, I want to, I want to do that as well. So I treat San Francisco like a bit of a reboot of my life, you know, I would be healthier, I wouldn’t party as much, and, you know, I’d be very kind of heads down at work, and I would spend my weekends, you know, doing outdoorsy, interesting things like hiking and skiing and cycling as opposed to being hung over.
43:11 Yeah, that’s right. No, London has a crazy way that it spirals, you know, it’s like a negative feedback loop, because you do that, you go out, you have the cur, you have the PS, you wake up the next day, it’s raining. Anyways, exactly, so you’re like, I won’t do that, and then I’ll, yeah that, that’s it, and, and actually I have to really force myself to stay in at weekends, because it’s, it’s sunny so much. You know, there’s like 300 days of sunshine or something in San Francisco, even if it’s not that warm, it’ll be blue skies and sunshine, so you kind of want to get out and make the most of it, so sometimes I have to force myself to, like, you know, what, today I’m just going to take a day off and just kind of stay at home and watch TV, you know, catch up on Orange Is the New Black or Game of Thrones or something.
43:48 Wow. It’s quite a change. Did you want to say something? I forget now. You know, I’m going to hit you with a question that we ask everyone on the show, and we ask everyone on London Real as well, and here it is.
43:59 Andy, if you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old, and Andy McLoughlin, and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do? I would tell him to, I would tell him to, to, to stop wearing the suit and to start that company that he’s been thinking about, but you spent, what, six or seven years in the, non-start-up? Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, I was probably kind of working inside regular companies for five five, six, seven years. Okay, and it was too long there, you think?
44:25 You know, it does give you insight, and I think the, the, the challenge with going straight into startups, especially B2B startups, is that unless you’ve worked in a business, you have kind of no frame of reference for how business people buy and use stuff. You know, it’s easy to, to think that everybody who works inside companies is like us, you know, and I have to constantly remind our team that, you know, they’re not just catering to people like us, they’re also catering to bettian accounts, who doesn’t, you know, she doesn’t use software she doesn’t have an iPhone, she just wants to get her job done. Right?
44:51 Or the government, which is probably one layer removed from that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But so I think kind of, you know, getting a bit of time inside a regular company is useful, but I think that the, the worst thing that, that I, that could have happened to me or, you know, anyone else in our industry would be to, to, to never have had the, the cojones to to kind of take that step and, and do what they wanted, because, you know, the worst thing you could do is kind of turn around, you’re 50, you know, you’ve got an okay job and an okay life, but you never took that that risk, and, and, and did what you want.
45:19 On that same note, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I’ve ever received, my dad told me that you should never sell something for less than you bought it for. Pretty basic, but it’s amazing how many people don’t remember that. Buy low and sell high. Yeah, if you’re, if you’re a trader in the City, it’s not always the best thing.
45:44 But so, so what did he mean by that, and what have you taken from that? I think, you know, he, he just, he just always think about, you know, what’s your margin how are you going to make money on this? And I think in startups it’s easy to kid ourselves that, you know, we’re, it’s growing really fast, you’re in a land grab for whatever reason, and that unit economics don’t matter, but of course they do, because if your unit economics are screwed to begin with, then as you scale, they’re just going to get even worse, and to support a business like that, you know, talking about, about Box for example, requires a huge amount of money and hundreds of millions of dollars.
46:14 Now for these guys, you know, it’s such a, such a great product, and they have such great leaders that it actually might well work out, that, you know, the, the gamble and the money in will pay off in the long term, but, you know, that’s one in a million. You know, they’re a bit of a unicorn in that regard. I think as well, some great advice I got from, from Ben White, one of the Capital One, of the, the partners at Notion Capital, was that, and, you know, we talked to them when we’re doing our B round, in the end we took the money from Matrix instead, but, you know, those guys are fantastic UK investors, especially for, for SaaS and cloud, and what Ben said was that, you know, as you grow and as you kind of begin to hire more people, you know, you’re going to hire guys that are more experienced than you.
46:51 They have more gray hair than you. They have great résumés, you know, and these guys are here to enact what you want, and don’t ever feel like just because they’ve got more experience, they understand your business better than you do, cuz they don’t. Good advice. Good advice. Last part of that question is to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us around the world, you know, China, South America, anywhere.
47:08 What advice do you give to them if they want to get into, you know, technology? So what’s, what’s great now, right, is the barriers to entry, both in terms of building products and, and launching products and raising money are so much lower. You think now that, you know, having access to Heroku and AWS means that shipping a product that can scale easily is really simple. It doesn’t mean you have to spend hundreds of pounds a month on servers anymore. It means that with platforms like Twitter and Facebook, you know, you’ve got this kind of inbuilt marketing platform that you can use to kind of test ideas.
47:44 There’s, Buffer, which is one of the investments. Joel, you know, he’s like the ultimately lean startup guy, and he’s blogged very actively about their journey, about, you know, from idea to paying customer within six months, and I think everybody should read that, you know, even, you know, even if you’re, you know, you’re thinking about doing it in a different way. It just goes to show that you don’t need to over-invest, and it, of course, it helps to be out in the Bay Area, and it helps to have, you know, a big name lead, but you know, if you have a great idea and you can convince somebody to kind of start that snowball for you, it’s actually pretty easy to get in front of investors who, up until previously, it felt like it was a kind of old boys’ network, that unless you had an in, you were never, you were never going to reach them.
48:30 And does this also mean greater competition? All of a sudden, I mean, does it mean, since everyone has access to these things? Oh, of course it does. Yeah, I mean, you, I think in terms of money, it means that, you know, investors are being flirted. It means that every startup is competing with not just the guys within 10 square miles, but, you know, people from from all over the world, but, you know, frankly, as technologists, only, it can only mean that we have to build better product.
48:50 Right? The best idea rises to the top. Yeah, absolutely, and not just the best idea, the best execution as well. Right, ideas are cheap. You know, we, we talked briefly a couple episodes ago about NDAs, and, you know, not signing them.
49:01 I think we talked to Ben Southworth about it. Do people sign NDAs anymore? Yeah, people sign them, but I think everyone realizes it’s pretty academic. Okay, because I’m sure if, if my Ops guy hears this, he’d probably shoot me for saying it, but, you know, they’re not really worth the paper they’re written on, but you kind of still have to do it. You do.
49:16 Yeah. Okay, out there, and is tech a bubble? Is tech a bubble? I think it’s in a bubble, which will shrink again at some point, and I don’t think it’s going to shrink in terms of the number of people working in it. I think the EV valuations are a bit high, less so in London and Europe, but certainly in the Bay Area, where you’ve got, like, you know, two kids coming out of Stanford who are going to raise, you know, a ludicrous valuation for a company that’s probably never going to make any money, and, you know, those businesses will, in the future, be worth less, but, you know, I think that as software permeates every aspect of our lives, you know, like IoT is such a big, a big thing.
49:51 The Internet of Things is a big thing. That, you know, there is an ever-growing market for, for, for software companies. I just think that the, the crazy valuations will have to stop at some point, but, like, Amazon this morning came out, yesterday or today came out, with earnings of 20 billion they made, but they spent like 19. That’s Amazon, always do, when they’re trading at what, 545 times earnings or something like that. It’s, it’s ridiculous.
50:18 That’s like the Bezos mantra, just to throw all the money right back in the comp. I mean, they didn’t make a profit for an incredibly long time. Yeah, and it’s funny, actually, even now, you know, even on the West Coast, there is still, a huge market for people that aren’t, you know, fully invested in technology or even really understand it. we were talking to my girlfriend’s father a little while ago about what he might want for his birthday, and he didn’t know, and so Christina said to him, well, maybe we could buy you Amazon vouchers, and he’s like, you know, that I don’t read books.
50:46 Yeah, there’s still a little bit of a, still a little bit of a gap. You can buy anything. I mean, I’ve had all sorts of crap delivered, I’ve had shoelaces and deodorants. What they say now, they’re, they’re testing out, actually sending you stuff before you buy it. Well, I mean, this is a bit of a misnomer, as I understand it.
51:04 What they do is they begin to ship stuff to local distribution centers around you, so that, you know, based on buying patterns of other people, they can get stuff to you even quicker, even more quickly, by drone. By drone, that would be really cool, and same-day delivery is, is getting big in a lot of cities. Yeah, and, you know, that then, that, you know, the whole kind of marketplace in delivery thing, especially in San Francisco, is huge. You know, you’ve got.
51:25 So I was lucky to have invested in Postmates. I knew Bastian Lehmann, the CEO, is a German guy, back here in London before we, and we both moved out to SF around the same time, you know, and he didn’t really know what he was going to do, but, you know, he said he wanted to start a company, and he’s just such a go-getter that you couldn’t help but kind of invest in him, you know, and these guys have just been growing like a weed. I mean, they raised 17 or $18 million recently on, like, a great valuation.
51:49 You know, that business is launching in DC, in Brooklyn, in New York. You know, and it has the potential to be the next Uber. In fact, I think in the US now they are third, behind Uber and Lyft, in terms of number of drivers on the road. It’s just that they’re shipping packages and food rather than people. Wow, fascinating.
52:08 Yeah. I think we’re going to see the NASDAQ correct a bit, maybe 20-25%, but anyways, we’ll see what happens. Andy, our time’s up. Thanks so much for being here. It flew by as usual.
52:19 How do people get a hold of you? Are you a Twitter guy? You are a Twitter guy. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They can tweet me @bandrew.
52:25 Okay, and what about getting jobs at Huddle? Should they? Yeah, they go to our website. You know, I think we’re probably, we’ve probably got 10 or 15 open positions right now, especially, QA people. We are desperate to find software testing engineers, or, like, quality assurance, just testing, testing.
52:41 I mean, these are kind of more Kind of engineers writing code around the testing, rather than kind of dumb button clickers. Excellent, excellent. All right, if you’re if you’re, listening to us on iTunes, you can, come watch us on channel YouTube. We’re on Twitter @SiliconReal. I would like to get Driftrock in here at some point, because, it, I, I’m going to see him lat on tonight, and I will ask him in person.
53:02 Awesome, fantastic. And if you guys have any other ideas, for startups or anybody you want to see on the show, send us a tweet out at Silicon Real or hello silicon.com. This episode 43, 43. We’ve had a few people reach out, wanting to help out over the summer. Yeah, keep them coming.
53:17 We need more help, and, yeah, send us a drop, us a note. Yeah, fantastic. We’ve been Working on getting Huddle in the studio now for like 18 months. So thanks so much for being here. Well, thanks for, thanks for bearing with me.
53:28 No, it’s a fantastic story, and your whole by Coastal really puts everything in perspective, and so it’s, now, really good to have you here. As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. Andy, thanks so much. Thank you guys. Thanks, all right, take care.
53:39 For us, the decision to do a Kickstarter was about mainly about
