Ben Wynn - Founder & CEO of DAD

Full transcript: Ben Wynn on London Real

0:16 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ben Wynn, the founder and CEO of Dad, a company on a mission to transform the way people across the world fix up their homes. Founded in 2015, you raised two million pounds in seed funding from your strategic partner HomeServe. You have a long history creating products in the technology space here in London over the past 20 years. Ben, welcome to Silicone Real.

0:38 Thank you, Ryan. It’s fantastic to be here. It’s great to have you here. I want to know, you have an impressive CV when it comes to developing tech products. You’ve been around for not quite 20 years, but for almost. Why jump into the home repair space? And we’re all dying to know, why call it dad?

0:58 Well, I call it dad because I’ve always called my dad. So there’s nothing simpler, Why home repair? Because that’s where the idea came from and so I am a technologist. I’ve messed around in technology for 20 years, but this came one day in my house when I’m trying to do a bit of DIY. I was working at SOMO, the agency business running their incubator, looking at real estate and different markets to try to put technology in and mobile and connected the world technology and see if there’s an opportunity, see if there’s a market to disrupt.

1:36 So I kind of had one eye on real estate and looking after the home and home maintenance. And it’s a Saturday and I’ve got a leaky tap and finally I’ve been pressured into getting it changed. And so I’d taken the old tap off. I’d turned the water off, taken the old tap off, put the new one on, turned the water on and water went everywhere and I’ve kind of soaked the walls and the floors and quite a few cursed words later. a proper mess. I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck so I called my dad and I FaceTimed him. I showed him what I was doing and he sort of told me to go back through the packaging and I’d found the tap washer. I hadn’t put the tap washer on and if only I’d have done that and actually it wouldn’t have caused a problem.

2:21 Which means no company. Well when I sort of mocked it up he says you know how useful was that and whilst I’d always done it I’ve always spoken to my dad about things like that whether it be you know fixing a toilet seat or a broken door handle. Whenever I don’t know, I call my dad. He’s the most practical guy I know. And is there a market for people out there that could access a dad like that? So the brand came easily. And why home repair? Because I think it’s a market that’s about time it got changed, you know, it got transformed. So I come from the technology side, not the plumbing, heating, electric side. But yeah, I just think there’s a great opportunity in it, really.

2:58 Now you said you come from the technology side, were you a bit frightened to jump into this home repair market where it’s got all sorts of, I guess I’ll call it baggage, from being in an industry for 100 years, with service sectors, with individual contractors, were you a bit worried you didn’t have the background in that and you’re jumping into something you don’t know? Not really, because before I jumped in, I took a look at the market, we looked at what the problem was, And the problem I think we’re trying to solve is communication. It’s the end-to-end communication.

3:32 And the way I think we’ll flip the market is through service. So engineering, the heating engineer, the electrician, that bit’s normally pretty good. But the wraparound service, I think, is the bit that’s missing. It’s the good old-fashioned customer service is devoid in this market. And it’s fine if you’re with a big company, if you have, you know, get your repairs and buy British gas maybe, or home serve who invested in us, but for your local and regional player, your one-man band, their services are appalling because either they really like to do it but their time is zapped and they’re actually on the job, they can’t call you back, whatever it is.

4:12 And whilst I’ve been in technology, most of my career has been in technology service marketing as a blend. So agency world is, yes, you’re using technology and building new stuff but you’re servicing clients. So you blend those three together and actually there’s a good fit for what I’ve been doing anyway. Right. Talk to me about that piece. I mean, as a consumer myself, I do feel frustrated sometimes. I feel like I don’t have enough transparency. I don’t know who to call when I do call them. It’s on their terms. I’m sure they’re not bad people, but it’s just like that expectation of service isn’t there. There’s no competitors, especially competitors in an app form like you, you’ve studied this market, is there a reason why that’s that, the way it is?

4:54 Well, the way we phrase that is something goes wrong. So let’s think of it as the home emergency, but just because that’s the kind of most dramatic thing in your mind, I think that can help with way more than that. But something goes wrong at home, what do you do? You’re going to speak to someone you don’t know, about something you don’t understand, they’ll charge you whatever they want, turn up whenever they want, it’s just a nightmare. So why is it like that?

5:15 I think it’s like that because back in the day, and the way we describe it is, at some point in history, I always say the 1960s, but maybe it was before that, everyone lived locally. So back in the day, you’d have the kind of artisans. So it would be the baker would do a really good job at that and be very specialist, as well as the cobbler and the blacksmith. And that evolved and you’ve got the local little towns and then you’re at a point where you live locally, you live somewhere near where your parents lived and you got a job a guy you probably knew, maybe doing what your father did, that kind of thing.

5:48 But the trades you used were people you knew, so the chance of them ripping you off and doing a bad job was very slim because of their entire business, the whole reputation. And then over time, people moved away from that model and moved to cities, and the moment you move away and you’re less locally connected, you don’t know the trades, what do you do? So there along comes the Yellow Pages, any form of paper-based directory, and they’re They’re great because they help you put you in touch with somebody who can help.

6:14 There’s still this idea of local networks, local reputation, but you want a step removed from it. It’s not quite the same. Then along comes the internet and you get the digital version of the other pages, which are the online directories. Lots of different variants, lots of different what I call Gen 1 businesses in the space. They may have a different business model or a different way of monetizing it, but really it’s a directory that’s listed online.

6:40 That’s worked. It’s worked absolutely fine for a certain amount of time because the customers haven’t really had the expectation that it needs to change, it’s just they’ve expected it. But I think it’s time it did. So that’s why we’ve jumped in. And you launched on Father’s Day, is that true? You started the company on Father’s Day and you launched the product a year later, is that true? And how can you ever stay to those deadlines?

7:02 We did. We did do that. We couldn’t resist really. So in fact, we even waited a few days to make sure we set the business up on Father’s Day and launch is a big word so we didn’t paint the town red, we didn’t do a big fanfare, we’re trying to do this iteratively but we did get a V1 of the app that we’re proud of in the store and get customers to come through the door on Father’s Day this year. Wow.

7:27 Yeah, 12 months from start to launch and then we’re just a few months past that. That’s impressive. What does the experience look like? If I get the app right now, I can download it on, I guess, an iOS and Android, I pull it up, what’s the experience like and are you happy with that right now? Super happy with the product, really stable, works across different platforms and it works, which is a great start. So product is good. Am I happy with it? Will I ever be happy with it? There’s a different question. So what is the experience? It’s a video calling app.

8:01 So think of it as like FaceTime. Like FaceTime. So this is not far off from when your tap breaks, water everywhere, They’re literally called that. FaceTime is perfect. You can point it there.

8:10 I think we’ve all done that in the last year. I’ve done that, or at least taken pictures to show my plumber. And so it’s like that, but now in the app form. Yep. So you get the Dada app, you punch your details in, and there’s a big call button.

8:23 You call, and you get connected to a Dada expert. So we’ve got a network of experts all across the country. They’ve got an iPad app that we’ve built for them. And it broadcasts the message out a bit like, I don’t know, ordering an Uber or something. Who’s going to take this call?

8:40 One of the experts answers it, you’re connected, you speak face to face. So instantly, we’ve transformed that market because when was the last time you spoke face to face with a plumber or an electrician? It just doesn’t happen, right? So you start to build that rapport, which helps to build trust. And their job is not just to fix things.

8:57 Primarily, it’s to help people, but it’s to do that kind of appreciative inquiry. So it’s that, tell me what’s wrong. And in an instant, you get to know If it’s someone who’s what we call a have a go hero, someone who like me is in their bathroom and they’ve got the taps off and the tools out and all they need is a little bit of advice. Right. And they’re probably a little bit stressed and they need a little bit of reassurance and turn their stopcock off, everything’s fine.

9:22 Or you get the different and for us the different is to do it for me. Someone who just is outsourced in their life, they just help me, bring me someone round to do this for me. And it doesn’t really matter either way, but you speak to the expert, they provide the advice. And their role is to take a look around that situation, around that bathroom or the living room or wherever it is, and as if they were there to capture a brief of this is how we would fix it. And then they say to the customer, in order to do this, you need to do X, Y and Z, you need parts A, B, C, what would you like to do? If you’d like, we’ll ship you some parts and tools so that you can fix it, or we can send someone round.

10:01 And then down to the customer and and see what okay the magic though Is that we can fix it so much more than we ever thought remotely? That’s the bit that we’ve been surprised by okay You know you think you need someone but about 60% the time we can get it fixed So you can fix it right there, and they pay for a minimum price on a call ten pound a call right now Okay, fixed price no time limit Yeah, so I can’t tell you how many times my water heater cuts out okay and I live on like the second floor of a walk up and then I and then the water heaters on another floor and then it’s an attic right now I’m still you know fairly mobile but I got to climb up on the thing and I got to pop into the attic and I know that over the course of a thousand times doing this one of these days it’s not gonna go right and when I get up there it says like f 61 or f 25 and when I pull out the instructions I can’t figure it out and I’m smart and I still can’t figure it out you have no I don’t know how many times I would love to have used this to just show it because I’m sure they can fix it.

11:01 What happens now is I wait, the landlord calls British Gas, somebody comes out a day later and if he has the part, I’m convinced it’s a racket. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s frustrating for me and it’s a pain point that needs fixing. Yeah, no, absolutely. So let’s put you, well, unfortunately, let’s put you back into that scenario, right? So that’s happened.

11:18 Yeah. It is just, it’s stressful, it’s frustrating, it’s just an annoyance that you don’t need. And I can’t tell you what your F16 actually is, but I’m sure the experts can. You use the app, you call at that moment, you show what make it is, what model it is, what the error code is. And what we’ve started to build, but I think it’ll take us a while to actually get there, is the data side of this.

11:41 So then they look up that error code right there and then, and can share that with you, share the online guide, tell you how to fix it. And let’s just run with that a little bit. I reckon if you just push the reset button or repressurized it, you’ll get back up and running and it’s in about 10 minutes. Yeah, interesting where you say data, because I guess you’re going to build a database over time. And you might be able to even be proactive for some of these things.

12:03 And you really, I mean, that’s fascinating data from a manufacturing standpoint, from all of these different points of view. Yeah, I mean, there’s a huge data play underneath this. It’s very human. It’s very service-based. It’s transformative in the market.

12:18 But once we start to get that volume, and we see types of issues, the way in which we fix it, we start to basically mine the information that’s in these guys’ heads. The automation that we can do for customers is huge. OK. Talking about competitive landscape, because you jumped in here, I guess, a year and change ago. Your product launched six months ago, or five months ago.

12:42 If I had a problem around here, and I’ve had many where I need something fixed, my choices are to go back to the old school model and try to find someone. And I don’t even know where to even look these days very much. Or what I’ve done in the past sometimes is I’ve called TaskRabbit. And TaskRabbit provides a lot of different services across the board, whether it’s waiting in line and wrapping packaging. We had the head of community of TaskRabbit in here, I think, two years ago for us to look unreal.

13:10 They had just come to London. It was like their 27th city outside of America. And it took them a while to get going. but now they offer that service, but I’ll be honest, I’ve had some taskers come here and get the job done, and I’ve had some taskers come here and not know what to do. I’ve actually been able to use the dad app, and it was to make some shelves in my closet here, and when the guy came over, he knew exactly what he was doing, and I didn’t worry about it at all, and he fixed it, and it was done.

13:36 He was like, he’s one of those guys, I guess like your dad, that instills you with confidence, because he knows what to do. As opposed to the TaskRabbit, they might know what to do, And so, were you concerned about them as a competitor when you see other people in the competitive space, and how does that play out? So, number one, love TaskRabbit. I think it’s brilliant, use it all the time, and I think they’ve done a fantastic job, and they seem to be scaling well, and what I understand is they’re moving closer to the home services world.

14:07 I’m scared of it, I’m worried about it, and my view is just different. So, I believe this market is only transformable If you get certain things right and trust is one of those, trust and transparency being absolutely key in a market that basically has none. So trust is a really weird thing. You can’t tell someone to trust you, you’ve got to earn it. But our focus is around home repair, it’s around DIY, it’s around skilled trades.

14:32 So what we’re really getting asked about most of the time is heating, plumbing, electrics and handyman stuff. But if you think about the more complex ones of those, you have to be a gas-safe heating engineer to come round and fix your boiler or an NIC qualified electrician to come and rewire your house. I just looked at it really crudely and said, well, we’ve got to build a brand, we’ve got to build a consumer brand, we’ve put a lot of effort into that, we chose the name Dad, it seems to resonate, which is great.

14:57 If I as a consumer trust Dad to rewire my house, there’s much more propensity that I’ll trust them to put a shelf up than if I trust someone to queue for something and they offer the the service of putting a shelf, I’m probably not going to stretch to rewiring the house because just the brand trust in it. So we’ve decided to specialize. We focus on home repair. We think that’s a big enough market. There’s eight billion spent in the UK a year on home repairs.

15:24 That’ll do for us. And let’s see. In a weird way, is TaskRabbit a good thing for you? Because people are very used to booking these things online, having strangers come to their house and do these things because that wasn’t the case a couple of years ago. Yeah.

15:37 So TaskRabbit, but a lot of businesses. So the way that we’re riding is one of instant gratification, it’s app-based services. Forget the technology, but app, web-based, you get access to a service through technology. The fact that an Uber can turn up outside your door through pushing some buttons, the fact that you can get someone to queue for you via your app is all fantastic. Equally, other advice economy businesses.

16:03 So I’d say that is an advice economy business. We’re proud of being in that space. that’s where advice economy well that’s where really crudely you’ve got a layman that connects to an expert so dad is in device economy business because as the homeowner with your f-16 problem you need to connect to someone who knows what they’re doing right as a bunch of delivering a transport like an uber with delivering food like a delivery you’re delivering advice yeah okay yeah yeah well yeah so it’s the same as a as the medical businesses so you know Babylon health and push doctor and doctor care anywhere our advice economy businesses because they connect you to a GP or a variant in the medical space and then yeah so all of those types of businesses are educating the market for us which is great and you know the way we’re riding is the fact that consumers are now used to that type of service. Okay what are the tradesmen saying? Are they suspicious of you when they sign up? I’m guessing there hasn’t really been a lot of companies in the UK doing this before so what’s happened Yeah, so we are new. We get, I would say, 90-10 positive feedback. We don’t get 100% from customers. We’ve had one three-star review and everything else has been four or five, so please do that. So that’s sort of intoxicating its own way. But from the supply side, we do get the odd naysayer. So it’s like the way I look at it because I spent a good deal

17:33 The time in the in the taxi world working with people like Addison Lee and there was always the black taxi against the private hire and now you’ve got black taxis against Uber and they don’t like change so the the odd bad review we get is quite clearly for people are going well via a video call you can’t be gas safe how can you advise people to take the covers off the boiler and rewire it and I well but we’re not doing that like we would never do that you know we’ve had customers call in with they just need help changing a light bulb and And the stat I love is our target audience, young professionals, less locally connected. Londoners right now is where we’re focused. Only 10% of them can change a light bulb, which is just a hilarious stat.

18:12 6% can bleed a radiator. They’re not practically minded. So it’s a good market to go after, right? So this guy calls in and he wants his strip bite changing. He flips the camera around on the app, shows us it, and it’s just hanging off the ceiling.

18:25 And we’re like, you don’t want to be touching that. No, we don’t go anywhere near it. Show us where your trip switches are. Isolate it, and we’ll send an electrician around straight away, because that’s a hazard. So we do get people that are kind of not embracing change.

18:43 But I would say 90% of the time we’ve had fantastic take up both for our experts, those are the guys that answer the calls, and the technicians, the people that are going around doing the jobs in people’s homes. And the stereotypes play out. So we thought it would be very word-of-mouth based. It would be the local electrician knows the plumber knows the handyman. And it turns out that’s exactly the case.

19:09 We ran one Facebook ad a few months ago. It was picked up by a guy in somewhere near Chester, not sure. And he signed up, went through the vetting process, became an expert, told his brother, who runs an electrician, runs a plumbing business. He signed up. His cousin signed up for this, this whole sort of Chester-based network of dad experts.

19:33 Because they think it’s fantastic. It helps them. The thing for them is they’re used to working with their hands. And that ties them to the local area. So they can’t work for anyone outside that area.

19:45 So they’ve got that local network. It’s great. But what we’re doing is using the knowledge in their head, not just with their hands. And I think that’s quite interesting. So you might bring a lot of efficiencies in the market.

19:57 Yeah, I mean, you said, am I scared of this market? I’m not scared of it. I think it was just huge opportunity, but the amount of wastage is just crazy. Seriously, I was talking with someone at Deliveroo the other day, or no, a restaurant. And they said, when we’re not busy, our Deliveroo business gets busy.

20:13 And it’s like almost the opposite way. So it was really interesting to hear that, like on a night where they’re Sunday night, when no one comes there, everyone’s doing takeaway. And so it was just this massive way to just really take advantage of their kitchen and their staff, and just fascinating to think about the amount of inefficiencies in the past. And again, if you’re talking about a local plumber, only limited by his drivable geography, and pretty soon, I’m sure you see in the future him giving advice to someone in Singapore.

20:43 You know, that starts to become interesting, I guess that’s what you mean by advice economy. Exactly. We are geographically constrained, so it probably wouldn’t be a UK electrician advising the Singaporean guy, because you need to know the standards, the regulation, it’s just simple things like between you and I, so you’d call it a faucet, I’d call it a tap, you’d call it a furnace, I’d call it a heater. It’s just terminology language, but then there are regulations and things that go with it. But one guy in Chester could help everybody across the UK, so a huge, huge scale difference that we can tap into.

21:19 A lot of entrepreneurs watch this show and a lot of them are kind of beginning, you know, see capital, seed stage. You’ve launched the app, you know, you’re gaining traction out there, you know, you’re I know bursting at the seams in your office space, you’re probably in the 20s as far as staff. 17. 17. Okay.

21:37 You know, you had the two million pounds of funding, I’m guessing through your moving through that to a certain extent, you know, this is an interesting time for you and I would I’d love to know what’s going on in your brain as a CEO. You’ve really nailed your branding, you know, the name data is amazing. You obviously have a design background, you really put that into place, it looks great. You know, your office has a good vibe to it and everyone seems to be on board with what you’re doing.

22:00 The next step is an interesting one. Some people call it the desert, you know, where you try to go to that time where you have to now scale bigger and become an organization where maybe you need an HR person. You’re going to go from maybe 20 to 50 people, it starts to get interesting. What are some of the things that are in your mind as far as challenges, aka opportunities? Because we don’t get to speak to someone like you all the time.

22:22 Okay, well, so let me give you my view of where we are. I think we’ve found an opportunity in a crazy-sized market that has very little direct competition right now. So it’s a race, because I’m sure there will be. I’m sure people like Itasca of it. There’s lots of other people on the periphery for this.

22:45 We’ll come closer to us. I think we have got our branding right. I think there’s lots more we can do, but I think we’ve done a good effort with our product. I’ll get back to your product question. So what have we got right?

22:58 Everything from the app downwards, I’m pleased with. What we’ve got to focus on right now is the funnel to get people in. So if this business turns out to be a B2C model, then there’s a lot of work we need to do on that funnel, on web as an acquisition channel, and how you take someone through to get in that video call. Because the video call bit is fine, and it’s great. And if you get it, and you’ve heard about it, and watch this video, and you sort of see what the value is, then fantastic.

23:29 But we’ve not done a great job of servicing the values. And there’s so much that’s rich that comes from our experts. Just naturally, we’ve got to start servicing that. So that’s definitely front of mind. Yeah, it’s hard to do that.

23:39 I remember TaskRabbit had a hard time doing it and I’m in the tech space and I’m still resistant to get the app and do that and when I tried your service, I think I even resisted some of the friction points at first, but once a video call happened, I was in. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we’ve got to obsess about that bit, but I’m confident we can do it. We’ve got the really proud of the team we’ve got and I know we can crack that as a matter but not a very long amount of time, but a matter of time before we can do that.

24:07 With that, we’ve got to focus on scaling experts and technicians. We’ve focused geographically on, not great in London, but a kind of defined southeast area that we can do probably relatively inefficiently, where we can take customers end-to-end and prove the end-to-end value of the business. We can get some stats about exactly how many times can we fix it. Right now, it’s about 60% of the time we can fix it remotely for people, so we want to get some more data from that.

24:32 And during that period, customers are going to ramp, our supply base is going to ramp, the internal team, the team in the office is going to ramp. None of that worries me at all. I’ve done that before, a couple of times before, and scaling the business to a point really comfortable with. I think it’s more like a hundred people when you get to that point where you need your internal HR and you need those processes. Who really knows?

24:56 It’s tricky. That transition I’m ready for. I don’t know if you can ever sort of get it completely right, but it’s a while away for us right now So I’m not focused on it But the only way I think any business that scaling fast can keep the rails on is through value So getting the culture right in the business and we’ve just obsessed about that from from day one. So You know, hopefully if we can get that that culture baked into the business, then that’s what will help it scale Okay funding wise are you speaking with these C’s?

25:26 Is that the next step or is home serve the kind of one that’s just going to anti up? Right now got a great partner with home surf. They’ve given us the two million. It gives us a fantastic start But it is strategic. So they also give us access to supply to a whole series of partners from you know, work where to van livery to distribution partners to parts etc. So they brand their van’s dad as well Well, we do. They’ve got the big shiny red fans for HomeServe, but we’re a completely separate business, separate brand going after a separate audience, but they’re just a very helpful partner.

26:04 Okay. At some point, though, you take away from their market. Is there a weird conflict of interest, or is it such a small percentage of the revenue that it’s not important? Certainly right now, we’re far too small for it to be an issue. I’d love to get to the point where we’re a bit of a thorn in the side. Do we want VC? I think this thing has legs. I think it’s got a global opportunity. I think it’s a race. And to do that is very capital intensive. It’s not quite your classic marketplace business. This is not on eBay where we’re kind of just brokering both sides because I think we need to curate it a little bit more on the supply side. But it’s going to be capital intensive. And does a corporate really want to do that? Right now, they’re very supportive. So let’s see where we get to. But yeah, I think approaching VC at the right point when we’re ready would be interesting. What kind of check do we need then? 20 million to scale this? 30 million? Ask me in three months, six months. But it’s a long that line, probably more later if you really want to scale this. Yeah, I don’t want more money now because we need to know what it is. I mentioned a few times we need to know you know where at cost effectively we’re going to get customers from for watch channel with what proposition. We’re testing a whole series of plans, transactional and membership and different routes to market. When we know what this is, when we know what

27:27 Really resonates, then it’s really easy. You just turn the dial on. You just plow cash in and it goes through the funnel and we’re not there yet. Right. Yeah, the membership model is very interesting as well, right?

27:38 Yeah, super excited about that. So we just launched that. We launched that last week. very sort of very beta or beta and it’s gone down great like so we’ve not even put any collateral out there we’ve just kind of tested it with some customers have been using us and what works really well for us so ten pound a call transaction or if you do need a technician to come around plumber to come around then you charge the market rate and it’s just an hourly rate we do a fixed price on the job is an hour and need these parts going to cost quite Well, when you get to the point where you need three hours work or it’s just over two hours work, then we charge five pound a month for a membership, you get unlimited calls to the service, you were always there, it’s the peace of mind sell, then we’re getting even a 40% discount on the labour. So it pays for itself, and what we’ve done there, we think it’s quite clever, it’s Amazon Prime-like, where I can’t stop buying stuff from Amazon because of Prime.

28:35 Yeah, get it to where they can’t live without it. Exactly. Right. a snag list, which is what dad’s trying to help with. Everyone has a snag list.

28:42 There’s about five in everyone’s home. And you look around and you see the snag and you think, I got 40% off that. And you started to add that value piece to this. Not only is it most convenient, it’s reliable, it’s instant access, it’s cheaper than anything else. We think we can price it at the same level as your local handyman.

29:00 So if you knew him and he could come round and he is available and he could give you good service, great, use him, why not? But the problem is you don’t know those people. So we think we can do that at scale. Yeah, this membership model, I believe it’s the future, but it’s such a nuanced model to understand and to continue to remind the customer that you are adding value, even when some months you’re not. But again, it’s that whole kind of insurance, that peace of mind, that feeling that maybe dad is there whenever I need him to help me that just keeps people around.

29:32 Like the gym membership is there even though you haven’t used it in three months, but it lets you know that you can be healthy. And it’s a real nuance, we have a membership site and we’re constantly learning about how to add value in intangible ways through that service. So I agree if you can get that right, then it’s time to call those VCs, maybe. Talk to me about Uber, because obviously there’s some interesting comparisons with yourself in Uber, but dad versus Uber, what do you see that Uber has done right, done wrong?

30:04 And it’s kind of interesting to me asking you this because you pretty much almost started Uber in 1999 in the UK. Oh, I wish, I wish. Travis stole that idea from you, but if you could just talk us about that thing back in 99 because you’re very familiar with that business model. And then talk about, you know, the comparisons between you and Uber now or where you’re going with this. All right, so, 99, 2000 is my first startup experience.

30:28 I jumped ship from Logica. I was working there at the time, so it’d be a big consultancy. And I’d learned everything I needed to know about being in a corporate. I learned loads. It was fantastic.

30:38 I learned all the things about performance reviews and employee engagement. And then I jumped ship, and I’m glad I did. And I went to a startup that was Uber, but on feature phones. So it was the same idea. It was usually phoned to order a cab.

30:55 Based in London, and this is a time where there’s no mobile internet. It’s a 9.6k upload of the mobile web. No store credit cards, no, obviously no apps, there’s no smartphones, it’s just feature phones. And we managed to build some amazing piece of tech. So we aggregated the whole London taxi market, addisonly invested into the business.

31:18 As did a few other people on the supply side. Built something that was transformative, you book by the web, you book via SMS, but you have this crazy journey where you’d say, like, you know, home to work, four or five SMSs, or your power user could do it all in one message. It was the clunkiest experience ever. But people liked it. They used it.

31:38 And the magic moment for that was using a phone. You could get a car to turn up outside your window. And it was like two minutes. It was just amazing. Ultimately, the timing was probably wrong.

31:50 Timing in terms of the market imploded and all investment got pulled. But timing, because the technology wasn’t there, it wasn’t quite right. So you had to love to say Travis stole the idea. That would be great. But that taught you an important lesson about timing.

32:04 And again, like when you had that water leak and you were able to use FaceTime, like you couldn’t have done that five years earlier. So I guess that must have caught a couple of light bulbs because you’ve kind of been there and done that at the wrong time. Yes, so I mean, that is a lesson that I learned and constantly carry with me. That’s probably why I’m so buoyant about that video. I just think the timing, all the jigsaw puzzles are there.

32:28 So we need the smartphone, We need to store credit card. We need consumers to be used to using app-based businesses, technology-powered service businesses. We need the 4G networks, the broadband ubiquity everywhere, and all of these things that just come together. That wasn’t possible two years ago. And then, so yeah, I think we’ve got the timing right.

32:50 Now it is. Comparisons to Uber. Yes, so you know what we start out, and you could say, dad, is Uber for plumbers. You could sort of go that crude analogy. I don’t think it is.

33:01 I think what’s similar to Uber is Uber has made convenient a service that was fundamentally not. So everybody hated getting a cab because there was a huge black market. It was too expensive. The guys would always say to you, you call up, where’s my taxi driver? He’s just around the corner.

33:21 He was just absolutely rife with horribleness. Pretty much the same with the industry that I’m looking at right now, to be perfectly honest. So what they’ve done is injected convenience, technology-powered service done an absolutely amazing job at it, and that’s what we’re going to do. So, in that sense, it’s very similar. The difference is, though, the ground transportation market, the taxi market, is one of the most commoditized things that’s out there. So, I don’t care who’s going to take me from A to B. I want to be safe, but I want them to turn up on time. I don’t care if they’re going to speak English or not, because I’m just working in the back of the car anyway. So, I want to make sure, actually, on the way over here. I was in a little bit and a bike drove into the back of the car. I want to be safe, but I don’t care about the driver. Any driver is sort of good enough. It’s very different for what we’re doing because you need a gas-safe qualified heating engineer.

34:14 You need a handyman that’s got loads of experience like John that did your shelves. He’s a guy of experience. You don’t just want anyone coming around to do that sort of thing. So that’s where we need to curate it a little bit. It’s not a completely open marketplace.

34:26 It can’t be entirely a gig economy business. But of course there are parallels. We’re trying to get people much more freedom, much more flexibility to work in a different way. So on our supply side, people where I think we’ll get our technicians, they’ve worked seven, eight years for a local business, for a British gas, maybe for a home-serve, and they’re desperate to run their own business. So what do they do?

34:49 They go, okay, well, I’ll print some business cards, and I’ll go and post this through letterboxes. They have no clue about marketing. They don’t know how to build a network. So what we think we can do is what Uber’s done for the driver, you just get the demand. And if you get the demand, that’s why outside Uber’s offices. When we started out, we were in King’s Cross. And just around the corner was the Uber office. I think they moved now.

35:10 But every lunchtime, there was a queue of drivers. And that was good, great for Uber. It’s kind of sad, really, because they were all coming from the black taxi fee from Madison Lee from 1990, 2000. I worked with Madison Lee for a long time. And yeah, their drivers are leaving because Uber’s got the demand.

35:28 Yeah. And so you want to do that same thing, right. I’m curious what you think of some of the other service-based companies here in the UK. Deliveroo is one I can’t get out of my head because I see their drivers everywhere. I mean, it’s great for branding alone.

35:42 Yeah, yeah. You know, I had Ben, the partner from Index in here, who was responsible for taking Just Eat public a year and a half ago. It was a great story, great valuation on the stock market. Since then, in London at least, maybe some other markets, even when I was in Barcelona, they had Deliveroo. And I used it.

36:01 Deliveroo has really become ubiquitous and gone everywhere. And you can see, I wouldn’t say how fickle the market is, but how a product can on paper look like it has everything. But it’s really missing something. And I don’t know how Just Eat is doing, but I do know Deliveroo is dominating the relatively probably high-end or medium to high-end food delivery service here in London and maybe some other cities. When you see things like that, what do you see that I don’t see?

36:26 Because you probably see the matrix in a different way. Maybe. What do I see that’s different? Only way I think I can answer that is by the experiences I’ve had. So I ordered pizzas the other day from Just Eat.

36:43 I think Just Eat put, they didn’t go far enough is the way I would describe it. So if you go back to my narrative of you’ve got the paper-based directory and then you’ve got the online directory, what Just Eat did is fine app-based, but it’s a directory. It’s an aggregator of the local restaurants and then stop. And it’s great. It’s transformative.

37:05 It’s huge. It was the most successful, the most successful IPO, it was brilliant, but it didn’t quite go far enough. It doesn’t deliver wow, as Tony Shea and Zappos would say. Exactly. We use that term around here a lot.

37:17 Are you delivering wow? Yeah. You have to think about the customer. That’s the only way to do it, I think. And I think Deliveroo have done a better job.

37:26 So we ordered the pizza from Just Eat. The app experience is fine. The product is good. It’s all great. And then, ultimately, the pizza is 45 minutes late.

37:34 Who do I complain to? Well, the same old crappy business around the corner that I could have just called. Where was the value at? The delivery is different to that. They’ve thought, I think, the way that they’re dominating is they’ve just thought about that end-to-end customer journey more.

37:48 Yeah, and they’re curating, I think, the suppliers, and they take responsibility for that journey. So they’re the first one to give you that discount, to make the phone call, to apologize, and their delivery people are really top-notch. They understand customer service. They’re nice, they say thank you. After walking up my two-floor stairs, they say thank you with a smile.

38:08 They don’t want a tip. It’s like, you know, they’ve thought about it. Again, it always comes back to that customer experience. Yeah, I think it does, yeah. I guess we can all learn a bit about that, right?

38:16 Yeah, you know, that’s what Deliveroo have done. It’s what Uber have done. It’s the businesses that are transforming things. I think that’s, because that’s, that’s how they’re transforming the market. They’ve just looked at it, and like we’re doing, I think that’s a good analogy.

38:31 There is no customer service in this industry. Well, let’s just inject it. What does that mean? You need different, different industries, but that’s all it is. I remember I was talking to Ben.

38:39 It might have been off camera, on camera, and I said something to him, and he said, you know, we were always wondering. He said, for him, it was important to get on the app, because he said, once you’re on someone’s phone as an app, he said, that’s an important kind of beachhead for real estate. I don’t know if that’s still true, but that was important for him. And he said, we were always thinking that what if Google decided to just do all this for free, and just to come in and just, you know, just regurgitate all over the market and say, oh yeah, this is free, and just kill off all these businesses that are trying to make a service out of it.

39:08 Do you ever think about that scenario for what you do? Obviously, Google bought Nest, we can get into that Connected Home recently, but do you ever worry about that kind of possibility? Yes, so I started June 2015, and I’m not sure the exact date, but maybe May, April, May, Amazon launched home services. So, you know, there you go. But I find that really interesting.

39:35 That is, what I believe Amazon are doing there is monetizing a latent demand. So they’ve got every shopper in the world, and people buy stuff from there that needs installing. So you buy a shelf, how do you put it up? So they’ve got millions and millions of customers, a latent demand for home services of different flavors. So how do they make more money out of it is where I think they’ve got to.

39:57 And they’re using the marketplace model, and they introduce people, and it’s a kind of directory. I didn’t know they did that. Yeah, and what that says about that. Well, predominantly in the US, they’re not really here in London, but. They’re now in food delivery and so is Uber, against Deliveroo, interesting enough.

40:17 But the thing for me is Amazon is all about good Christmas service, that’s what they tell you, that’s what they pride themselves on. And it’s amazing, right? You order something and it turns up either the next day or you do the same, they deliver earlier. Or earlier or something. Yeah, exactly, it’s fantastic.

40:30 I’m not convinced that a marketplace is what people want in home repair. If it’s a remodeling, if you want to put a conservatory on or go to a loft extension, you need to talk to at least three people. You need three quotes. It takes time. It’s a relationship-based thing.

40:46 It’s quoting. It’s estimating. You can’t do that without going down to the home. If you’ve got a leaky tap, why do you want to speak to three people? It makes no sense.

40:54 I just want someone to come and do it. Putting a shelf up, supporting out your water heater in your loft. You don’t need that. So I’m not convinced that unless you focus on that service and you have to focus on it, that’s why Uber’s focusing on ground transport. They’re not trying to do everything else.

41:12 Deliveroo is just about delivery. Don’t get carried away with it. And they’re doing really well by focusing, so. What if I’m Amazon and I call you up and say, Ben, I want it for 15 million. Can I buy a dad and incorporate it into Amazon?

41:24 What do you do? Take the phone call. Yeah, sure. I didn’t get, you know, a great exit. That’s fine. We’re nowhere near that right now. But that implies to me, let’s run with that scenario that actually they see what I see, which is this is a global business, a global service business, which, you know, I think that’s the opportunity we’ve got. So I’d absolutely love that one called out.

41:51 Right. But who knows what you do? And maybe it would be like the Snapchat conversation with Facebook and maybe it shows them that, you know, maybe it’s time to keep going alone. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

42:02 So, you know, love it. Would I sell two of those? Entirely dependent on what happens at the time, but it’s, yeah, that’s it. What’s your view on where we are right now in the UK when it comes to tech? Also, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of run-ins over the years with the Silicon Valley crowd, the way the Yanks do things.

42:18 What is, what do you see that America does well? What do you see that Britain does well? Both have changed so significantly since you’ve been around. 10 years ago, there wasn’t a lot to talk about in London tech. There was an odd lastminute.com, there was a few things to talk about.

42:36 But in the last two or three years, we got a billion-dollar valuation companies, not just one, but many. Feels like London’s coming to its own, although it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily made it. What’s your view? I agree London is getting more buoyant. There’s more people doing more interesting things.

42:57 Has London made it? I don’t think London will make it, and I don’t think English people will make it until they learn the lesson from the American way of being positive about it. And a lot of what I hear, what I see when I’ve been over there onto the west coast is talk, but that helps.

43:24 Talk as in, this is gonna be the greatest thing ever. Okay, right. But why beat yourself up? You know, I kind of have to fight myself this. I’m not a pessimist in any form, but you have to believe in yourself.

43:36 And the natural English way is to, oh, it probably won’t work. How are you gonna build a business? What is that? And you’re not really like that, though. No, I’m not.

43:46 It’s a cultural thing, you’re always fighting it, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you know… Just like I’m always fighting my lack of sense of style, right? It’s something you’ve got to be aware of.

43:55 And you know, I’m certainly not of the ilk of oil never work, I’m the exact opposite, but I’m not the sort of stereotypical brazen, loud, you know, American positive for no reason. So you can have stereotypes either way. I think the fact that the government are getting more excited about what’s possible, that they see the benefits of it, I think is great. Well, I actually think England is doing really well, is what it’s always done really well. It’s the very good science, very good engineering, it’s just starting to surface.

44:28 So why is England doing well? Because I think globally that’s becoming more cool, and I love that. So for me, heroes are the Teslas and the Edsons, not modern day Tesla, but the classic Teslas. The guy that sort of invents stuff, you know? Actually, out of thin air comes up with really, really cool groundbreaking things.

44:51 So when you see something like ARM, CELF, or an incredible valuation, you’re very proud of that. Yeah, hugely proud, you know? I mean, that’s a great British technology story that, well, most people didn’t really know much about, But that company was out in Cambridge, providing a huge percentage of iPhone technology blueprints in an incredible way. And that is just good, old-fashioned, great science. Yeah, deep minds around the corner.

45:17 It’s great. It’s proper engineering, proper real value add, proper technology. Cambridge, for a long time, silicon roundabout, great. I love it. I think it’s fantastic.

45:28 That’s a good example to me of good marketing. I love it, but real value coming out of the science labs in Cambridge, there’s a lot of innovation that’s just not being talked about, it’s crazy. So take on some of the attitudes of the Americans, being kind of inspired by them, and use that to kind of combat some of that Britishness in a cultural way, because when it comes to a start-up, let’s be honest, you need to have that about you, because you are really a cheerleader every day, I’m sure you have good days and bad days, everyone looks to to you and you have to be very optimistic, right?

46:02 Yeah, I mean, I was taught a long time ago, you’re always on stage. So, you know, whether you’re on camera like this, whether you are literally on stage, whether you just sat in your office on a horrible Thursday afternoon in the rain, you’re always on stage. And, you know, I think there comes a point where you can’t fake it, it has to be real, but the very moment you lose your own optimism for what it is you’re trying to do, just stop. Like, just don’t bother at this, pointless.

46:27 So you have to believe. Talk to me about Brexit. You know, when it came out, I think most of Londoners and tech people, I doubt they were for it. You know, I think a lot of them were shocked. Of course, the technology space in general is probably usually kind of more cumulative thinking.

46:44 It’s usually in their interest to have this one marketplace, et cetera. I ended up seeing a lot of VCs. I pretty much popped with most of the partners about their views, a lot of the tech CEOs. We have Jethlyn from Cedars in here like the day after. And what’s your view on it now that we’ve had a few months to process it?

47:00 And will it ultimately affect dad in any way going forward? What’s my view on it? I’m annoyed by it. I just am still in shock by it, I think. It just doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

47:17 Just because something’s not perfect, I think throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not the right approach. And what really annoys me is the way that it happened. So it was just poorly managed, badly timed. It’s politics, really, every day. Yeah, and I think we’ll be worse off for it, no matter what.

47:38 Because even if, somehow, magically, we knew what we were voting for, which we still really don’t because there’s no deal, that would have been a weird thing to vote for something, rather than vote for an ephemeral idea that no one knows where it is, even if we managed to negotiate a deal that’s successful, We stay in the single market and still close borders, if that’s what we really want to do. How is that beneficial? Because we’ll have killed ourselves for five years.

48:05 Just makes no sense to me. So will it affect that, ultimately? It entirely depends what the deal is. What I don’t like is the fact we don’t know. So everyone’s saying we need to know.

48:15 But of course, we’ve got to get the right deal. So I do know one thing. I don’t want that job. Yeah, no, that’s for sure. There’s no way I want to be in that.

48:22 You’re in the business of connecting people. That’s literally what you do, whether it’s connecting people in the service industry or connecting consumers. And you’re in an information and vice economy, so this whole concept of isolating yourself, I think in any way, is just hard for us to fathom. I’ve tried to learn something from it, but yeah, I tend to agree. We’re gonna see how that plays out.

48:46 Other companies in the UK tech space, I’m curious what you think about companies that go big on branding and marketing, The one that comes to mind is Transfer Wise. I had Tabat here on the show a couple years ago before they had their Andreessen Horowitz board seat, before they had their billion dollar valuation. But you know, they always were very aggressive going after the banks, some pretty crazy stuff, crazy ads, but I think really worked in their favor.

49:08 I think I just got something from them where they had a bus across the street from Parliament and they were letting balloons in the air and you know, they really go for the jugular when it comes to that stuff. How do you feel about that kind of marketing? Do you think they’ll ever be a place for dad do things like that? It doesn’t seem like your style. Or do you think Tabbitt’s kind of taking a lesson from an American way of doing it? Or is he just going after also such an entrenched market of banks? Do you think he has to go big?

49:35 I think he has to. Can Dad ever do that? I kind of secretly love to do that because I think it’s a really cool thing to do. Will we ever do that? You’ve got to be really confident and that is either ridiculous backing or absolutely nailed on product market fit I think before you do that. I’ve seen a few businesses, let’s not talk about them, but do that before they’ve even found, like they’ve just got going and they spend loads of money on that and to me that makes no sense. You’ve got to either have big, big pockets to do that and find your way through it whilst you’re spending and to a certain extent to take on a bank, or the banks, or the financial world, you kind of have to have that anyway.

50:22 So I don’t think what they did is wrong. I think the time that we do that wrong is you can’t support it if a product’s not good enough. But, chance be wise, product’s great. So, yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty good.

50:31 Another thing I thought I was talking about at the Yanks earlier. Does Dad ever become a product for the American market? And if so, what do you think the nuances are? And would you ever pick up and go to the Valley? Yes, yes and yes. I might have to just check in with the family. Can it work for the U.S.

50:53 Market? Absolutely. I think it can work in pretty much any market. As I say, we are nationally constrained. The challenge with the U.S. for an Englishman is to think it’s one country where really it’s 50-odd different countries that happen to all speak mostly English.

51:09 Very regional as well. Very regional. Regulation is a real challenge. The laws around how you can operate as a home service provider over there are tricky. Benefit I’ve got, again, strategic partnership, home service has been in the U.S. for 10 years I think, or maybe more.

51:24 They know a lot about that, so they give me great access. The benefit of Dad being a virtual service, so if we’re not sending someone around to the home, but you can call, we can cover, let’s say, most states very, very quickly. So yeah, I mean, my original plan said 10 markets. I meant London, and then, actually, I didn’t say New York, or LA. I sort of meant big, sprawling, maybe Chicago would be one, or Atlanta would be one, because for what we’re doing, you don’t really want, what’s it called, multi-tenant dwellings.

52:02 Downtown Manhattan, they’ve got maintenance guys for this. So there’s less of a use. We think it will be other cities, but yeah, can’t wait to get there. Okay, so you’re open to scale. It’s interesting, because I’ve had a lot of entrepreneurs on here that are no rush.

52:15 Damian Campbellman from Doudiel, no rush to go there. Lend Invest, no rush to go there. Some of them maybe are feeling this idea that they’ve gone a little bit too big with expansion maybe as of a couple of years ago and things are cooling off, maybe just focus on and own that UK market, which is big, whatever they’re going afterwards. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to go there tomorrow, I have no intention of doing this too quickly, I quite like that phrase, I’m not in a rush.

52:44 I see it as a race, but it’s the air type race, and I think if you’re too much of a hair and we went too big too quickly, having not exactly nailed on what the product is or services or what the proposition is, which is the phase I think we’re at right now, We’ve got something because customers like it, they rave about it, but we need to know a lot more about this business before we choose to go to a different market. Yeah, interesting. When you talk to a lot of your friends in tech now, how are they feeling about the market in general funding wise?

53:17 I know we’ve had things cool off in the States, I don’t know if we ever had those high valuations over here. Are people still getting funding? Is business still going on out there? Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a lot of talk about it, but I think good businesses will always get funding.

53:35 Okay, there may be a big market change, but yeah. You get different people, right? So friends, if you talk to someone who’s running a really great business, no problem at all. Talk to someone who’s got a wacky idea and they’re trying to get off the ground and they ask you for advice. I think the advice is don’t do it, it’s a crap idea.

53:54 So big valuations worry me a little bit. We’ve got far too many unicorns that are, it’s just hard. It can end up killing you, that big valuation, because no one wants to fund on the Dow rounds. It can actually hurt you sometimes, going for that big, let me tell all the kids I graduated with valuation, so a little dangerous. Let me ask you about branding, something I don’t do very often here, but you really nailed your branding.

54:19 I’ve been in your offices, you’ve got your core values, And it always looks slick, ever since I’ve seen Dad, and I know you have that kind of a knack for that background. When it comes to a startup, whether it’s a one person or a ten person operation, fifteen, you’ve been all of those things. When is it time to focus on that brand and when is it time to not? Because there’s a time where you don’t want to spend the money on a logo and you need to really be worrying about the MVP or many other things.

54:49 But then there’s a point where you’ve gone too far and you’ve got a lousy logo and you’re communicating low value by not having these things tightened up. What’s your read on that because you guys seem to have nailed that. Well so, spend no money on branding whatsoever, get it out into the market as fast as you can. Any time you spend any minute on doing a logo is just wasted time is advice I’ve had in the past. I don’t buy it, particularly for what we’re doing.

55:21 So I think we have a chance of bringing something completely new to a market. Trust is key. How do you build trust? You earn trust. Well, even if I told you I had the world’s best app and you connected to the most smart expert, if you then experienced it, to me, brand is not the logo, it’s not the name, but it’s the whole package.

55:41 And it was just clunky. I parked my car at the train station this morning, and it’s the fifth iteration of a car parking app. Great that it’s not an app, so I don’t have to use the coins and the meter, but it’s dreadful. Like, I wouldn’t even wanna name who it is, but it’s absolutely dreadful. The app doesn’t work, it keeps crashing, it’s got all sorts of weird graphics in it.

56:02 And like, I’m not gonna trust it. I use it because there’s no other choice, but it’s absolutely awful. So I think it’s an art, not a science. I think you’ve gotta get it to the point where it’s a reflection of what you’re trying to do as a business. If you’re some B2B business, there are a lot of highly successful, highly valuable businesses that I think their interfaces and their branding are just dreadful, which is different.

56:26 The consumer brand, where you’re trying to earn trust, you’ve got to get that right. Change behavior. I love the fact that you say, I think we’ve nailed it. I don’t think we’re anywhere near. It’s great.

56:36 I notice it just feels like, it feels congruent with who you are, and that’s not always what you get. you get people that dumped a lot of money in a logo and it feels like it’s not them. It feels like it’s something slick that was made to make them look different. And it’s very subtle, but I think most people can tell. Yeah, but what that is, I think, is a guy, a team, a business that hasn’t done this before and so they pay for the agency, they drop 10, 20, 50 grand or whatever and they get a third party view and they get given product values and they get given a shiny logo and a color scheme and this beautiful rebrand, and it’s not authentic.

57:17 It’s not right, it’s not from the team. I guess I’m lucky, really. I’ve worked with different people along my way. I’ve got a part of my background is in agency, and I’ve helped people do that for some time. I have people I can sit down with and say, look, I’ve got all these crazy ideas, and I just talk at them.

57:35 We do that as a team, and then you get those really annoying people that go, oh, well, what you’re trying to say is this. Like, yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to do. and we can kind of do an iteration of this is what we think the illustration style will be, and then it’s just a refinement and a tweak, so yeah, I think we’ve done okay. Well, that’s good advice. Couple more questions.

57:57 What’s your management style? I’ve been in your offices and there is a calmness there. Everyone seems to be getting their work done, although everyone doesn’t seem to be trying to look busy. Everyone just seems to be efficiently working, and that usually is a reflection of the top. How do you lead?

58:15 I think that was just because you came around, Brian. I run a business that is a reflection of what I’m like, I think. I don’t run a party house, a young hipster, silicon roundabouts, tech startup. We’re running a very serious business, we’re very focused, we are goal orientated, we spend a lot of time on thinking about where we want to get to. Right now we’ve done it over 12 months, and I’d argue that’s too long, but we do it over 12 months. This is where we’ve got to get to right back, refresh. What’s our mission statement? What are our goals over the next few months? Then we break it down into a roadmap, and we just do that.

58:56 So everyone just is super clear about what they’re doing, and most of my time internally in the business I spend on communication. It’s ironic, really, because that’s what we’re trying to use, the problem we’re trying to solve in the industry but I think the hardest thing is communication internally with 17 people now and goodness knows it would be like at 50 or 100 but that is the hard thing to do I think make sure everyone knows what’s going on and you know how to work. It is hard, it’s really hard and I think most CEOs don’t realize that you know maybe 30 or 40 percent of their message is getting communicated. This is when you’re all in close quarters and they might have heard you say that thing many times but sometimes they just don’t get it and so it’s just about over communicating over communicating and I’ve learned that I need to do that myself and I have like affirmations in the morning like I must over communicate everything I must tell everyone everything and so like I try now to give enough information to where people are like okay I don’t care anymore Brian about that deal yeah but I try to let everybody up and down the chain of command know what’s going on because I feel like they they need to know because they can probably always help a worse case the more information the They feel like they’re part of the process and yeah, I wasn’t always like that But it’s it’s it’s tricky and when you’re in startup mode, there’s always some crisis

1:00:12 There’s always a fire to put out and it’s easy to let that stuff slide I think yeah, and I think the other thing that we do that not a lot of businesses do but it’s just be super transparent So, you know, let’s tell people what’s going on more snore and it’s never gonna be always good news Just simple things like every Friday 4 o’clock we sit around around. We have a beer or whatever and we do highlights and lowlights. So, not everybody because it’d probably take far too long and we’d be far too drunk at the end of it, but what are the highlights this week? What are you proud of? What have we done? What have we shipped? And what could we have done better? And that literally is what’s normal. So, what has gone bad? Because if you don’t surface it, then it’s just festers.

1:00:53 Yeah, that’s one of the good things to do. The good that in something good that happened bad that happened and just get it all out, it’s a great way to do it. Ben always asks people that come here something towards the end, and I’m going to ask you the same question because it tells a lot about the person sometimes. But if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Ben Nguyen and give that young man a bit of advice, knowing what you’ve known now, you’ve seen so many different products, you saw the pre-smartphone Uber version, the fingertips, you’ve been through all these things now, this last experience with dad, what would you tell that 20-year-old Ben?

1:01:26 Well I studied civil engineering so at 20 I was, I think at 20, I was in the yellow vest with the white hard hat on building motorways. So I like to say that I built a motorway up in Yorkshire and I built the UK’s most notoriously bad motorway down in, or road extension down in Exeter down in Devon. in that time, I’ll take you on a real detour here, but at that time we were doing the earthworks of the road and so this is where you’ve got those massive machines that go in and horse out forests and trees and stuff like that to cut the way for the road to be laid and there’s loads of protesters, there’s people chained to trees and they’ve been digging tunnels and all this sort of stuff and you don’t build our road here and you know I’m not against sort of protecting the environment, but my job at that time as the sort of young graduate was to make sure the machines could go through. So there’s been going on for a long time and the security guard they say they’ve cleared all the tunnels and cleared all of the the trees and there’s no one there. We turn up and there’s loads of press there and there’s people chained to the trees still but they reckon that they’ve got everyone out of the tunnels so therefore we’ll just start plowing through. And the security guards tell me there’s absolutely no one in these tours whatsoever, you’re okay, you’re cleared, so I get the metal stake and we’ve got the sledgehammer and we’re banging these stakes in and the people in the

1:02:53 Trees are going, no, don’t bang these stakes in. It turns out this guy, Swampy, who was a real character at the time, this protester, was underneath there and I very nearly staked Swampy at that moment and that would have changed my career quite a bit I think. But what I, not really at that moment, but what I realised with construction is it just was far too slow, like literally crazy slow. It’s a business that’s got like 1% margin. What I wanted to do was build things and you know be proud of what I built. Build a road, build a bridge and that was gonna take me 30 years or 40 years of my career before I’d be the person doing that and I just realized I was way too slow. But then I was too slow jumping from that to whatever else I did and I’ve been entrepreneurial since I was like 14 years old and I think the advice I give myself was just get out of this now and go into something you love, don’t be afraid, I think, and it took me a long time to… For me, I had mentioned before, I was working at Logica, I was corporate because that’s what graduate advice was, and this is the grounding, and to jump to a start-up, I was like, oh, it’s just a big decision, it’s risky. I see no risk in it whatsoever right now. Sure, the thing could fail, but you can’t get another job. It’s It’s crazy, you know?

1:04:11 That mentality’s changed a lot now. On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received, it may or might, may not have come from your dad.

1:04:22 My dad’s advice, I always remember, is measure twice, cut once. So it’s very related to what we’re doing. And that was always, because he always taught me practical things. He was a, he is. Not a carpenter, but he’s very good with his hands.

1:04:38 He builds stuff outwards. building furniture and stuff like that right now in his retirement and the measure twice cut once naturally is you know you’re gonna do something we would measure it before you cut but the real thing that carries through is just just be sure before you commit be sure and you have that at the back of my mind whenever I hire people because you know it only takes an extra second to do the extra measure or the extra check or whatever and it can have real consequences so What is that? The bit I love with that is he called me up the other day and he’s He’s making a wardrobe for his bedroom and he’d forgotten to do it.

1:05:08 He’s got it wrong. No, really. It’s good to know every now and then. See what I said to you. I said, I’ll measure twice.

1:05:13 Cool. What does dad think of dad now? We don’t talk about it much. We don’t talk about it much. All he’ll say is, how’s it going?

1:05:22 Do you need any help? Because he helped us out initially. He was one of our experts, right? Yeah. That’s right.

1:05:28 He’s proud of it. I’ll tell you the other piece of advice that he always gave me. He said, never work with your hands. And that’s weird, because I’m using technology to empower people for people that do work with their hands. But I like the idea of don’t work with your hands, because what he was meaning there is he was a teacher.

1:05:44 He spent all of his career in education. And in order to top up money, he set up a handicraft business. So Windward Handicrafts was this business. And it was making all sorts of things, wooden plaques and fruit bowls and egg cups and stuff like that. You see them at all kind of craft fairs installed and things like that.

1:06:03 So I learnt to do that as a young kid. At age four he had me sanding stuff and varnishing stuff. It was a real kind of family business. My mum did the pyrography, you know, where you kind of burn into the wood and I did the sanding and the varnishing. And what he realised was teaching is great but it’s low paid, you do it as a vacation rather than as anything to get rich from. And working with his hands, he had 168 hours a week, find out about time, you could make the most beautiful stuff out of wood, but it was never gonna scale it.

1:06:33 And so his advice really was just don’t do something with your hands. Yeah, that’s a nice way of something, do something that scales, right? Last part of that question, I usually say to the 20 year old that’s listening to us, what advice do you give to them? But I’m also curious at the advice that you would give to someone who wants to be in technology startup. Because it’s interesting earlier you said we’re not running a hip shortage roundabout company.

1:07:00 You’re not gonna find any slides in Ben’s company. And I’m curious what you think of sometimes the media hype and media bias and about people wanting to go into tech startup. What do you tell that young 20-something year old that wants to be the next Travis of Uber? What are you telling? Well, so I think I’ve got two answers to that really.

1:07:25 I’m not sure I’m a fan of the hype. I love the hype in terms of build a profile and build London as a tech scene, I think that’s great. But there are far too many people that apply to us right now and we just want to do it because it’s cool. And I think there is a challenge of you want to be the next Sergei, you want to be the next Travis, and it’s like winning a lottery doing that. It’s kind of just potluck.

1:07:45 They’ve got no experience, no grounding, no net win or nothing. The advice I would give is find a business that’s scaling. I kind of did this by serendipity. I was at that startup doing Uber on feature phones. As that failed, I ended up at Overture.

1:08:03 So I got a job at Overture that was printing money, fantastic business, they’d invented paid search, they sold out to Yahoo for probably not enough money, but 2.2 billion is not too bad. What I saw there was a business that was just hyper successful, growing, scaling, and some super bright, super successful people. So what would I advise the guy that wants to get into it right now, the 20-year-old? Go and find a business like that because they attract talent, so you build your network, probably the most important thing you could do, and you see success.

1:08:38 So you don’t want to be in a failing startup because then there’s a whole world of negativity. It’s you and three others in a bedroom trying hard, but you’re not learning. So if you’re learning from success, that tells you how to do it, and that’s the blueprint you want going forward. So, who’s that? It would be a Deliveroo, it may be an Uber.

1:08:58 You don’t want a business that’s too big, I would say it’s not a Google or a Facebook, they’re past that, but you need that ramp, I think. Yeah, and then also be prepared to work fairly hard. Oh, yeah, but then that’s funny because there’s this, there is a stereotype of the younger generation won’t work hard, right, and they just expect you all want to play. And yes, you see that, but that’s just bad hiring. Like, there are people that are prepared to work hard, and if you’re not prepared to work hard, you’ll never get anywhere.

1:09:29 So, yeah, I mean, yes, I’d give that advice, but I probably wouldn’t want to speak to them in the first place if they were people that were just freeloaders. Also, I think people always see these quote-unquote overnight successes, and if you look down deeper, these companies have been putting in the time for five and seven years before they go public, or, you know, get these big valuations, and so. What I say to the people that join, So you’ve got a junior person coming to dad, and I interview everybody, I wanna make sure I know absolutely everybody in the business.

1:09:55 I mean, that will change, it will scale, but know what you’re gonna get out of this. This is a project, every job you ever do going forward is a project. It’s not a career, it’s not a lifetime thing.

1:10:09 Who knows how long dad will last? Who knows how long any job they ever get will last? But think of it as a project. Think about what you wanna get out of it. And a young 20-year-old going into a scaling business coming in to dad needs to think about what they’ll get at the end of that two year, three year, four year, five year period, whatever it is. And it’s learning at that stage. Just learn as much as you possibly can, as fast as you can.

1:10:31 Put the hard work in, sure, but come out of it knowing more. You might get a holiday, you might get some cash, you might become rich. Great, but don’t do it for that. That’s just the wrong reason. Yeah, that’s a very good point.

1:10:44 Just go in for that learning asset. Ben, it’s been great getting to know you and watching what you’re doing with dad I keep thinking when I was sitting here with this this time that you know in three years from now am I gonna be you know are you gonna be on the cover of magazines and things like that and so it’s exciting for me because I get the benefit you know with silicone real to go ahead and meet with all these CEOs and founders and it’s amazing what happens in three years and sometimes it’s not the ones you think and the other ones that make it and don’t make it and so but it’s interesting to see your platform and the thought that you’ve put in this product and I I ultimately think that thinking of that customer why also being intelligent and strategic in those things is what makes these great businesses I hope so, you know, I hope so too. So all the best to you in the future I am actually planning to give dad a call because I need this chair fixed There you go. And so we’re gonna be back to do some repeat business with you. Fantastic. If that’s okay one customer at a time, Brian As we say on silicon real it’s about the people you are one of them. Thanks so much Ben and I wish you all the best Thank you.