Full transcript: Bernadine Bröcker on London Real
0:00 Brian Rose: In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed, locally sourced.
0:34 Silicon Real. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real. It’s a similar show. We get some cool people in the house. We find out what makes them tick their story. We’ve got a brilliant guy on this week named Edo Portal and he’s a movement artist. He’s this really fascinating guy from Israel who’s all about human movement and how we’ve kind of lost touch with movement. He hates the concept of the fitness industry. He thinks as humans we should be moving like 15 hours a day not like three times a week for 14 minutes or 45 minutes. So anyways it’s a great story you can check that out at LondonReal.tv but today we’re here to talk tech. Colin Pyle is missing. This is not Colin Pyle. Colin is in New York and Los Angeles. He went AWOL. I don’t know if he’s expanding his coffee universe to the US. I’m not sure.
1:30 But this is Mr. James Dawson. I’ve known James for eight years, maybe ten years. You are the head of Europe for Open Fin, which is out in Level 39 in Canary Wharf. You are also the CEO of Humble Grape, which is a wine and tech play. You You guys just raised 530,000 pounds on Cedars, the equity crowdsourcing platform.
1:50 We had Jeff Loon from Cedars in here about nine months ago. Congrats on that raise. Thank you. That’s big. Yeah.
1:57 That’s really big. Yeah. Now you have to spend it.
2:00 James Dawson: Yeah, that’s the hard part.
2:02 Brian Rose: How’s things at Open Fin and how is the wine business?
2:05 James Dawson: So firstly, just a quick explanation for everyone at what Open Fin is. It’s a brandable app store for corporates to deploy web technology, HTML5 and Silverlight and Flash, but predominantly HTML5, onto the desktop in-house and also onto people’s desktops at the client side. So if you build an app or a GUI in HTML5, the way to deploy today is using Internet Explorer or a browser, but then you’re stuck in that browser frame. If you want a native app, something that runs with 100% HTML5 compliance and it’s performant to finance requirements, then you can run in OpenFin.
2:45 Brian Rose: Awesome. That’s what we do. Okay. Cool. I like it.
2:50 Brian Rose: And wine wise, are you going to set up in shortage? What’s going on?
2:54 James Dawson: So wine wise, so we’ve raised 530,000 pounds and we have this idea where we would open up a wine bar that is also a wine shop and it’s got a big tech play and the idea is to democratize wine to people so our mantra is relax it’s only grape juice so we’ve got fantastic wines and we want to make it really easy and accessible for people to understand so our vision is to have a ground floor restaurant shop wine bar and then a basement where we’ve got a an event space and an education space and what we’d like to do is try and train somewhere between 10 and 15 underprivileged young people in Hackney as wine waiters and similiars and let them loose on London and give them a way to earn a living.
3:38 There’s a huge shortage of that.
3:39 Brian Rose: Love it, man. That’s a fantastic story. I’ve been to your tastings. They’re so much fun.
3:43 Brian Rose: Hence the name Humble Grave. It’s like it cuts through all the nonsense and he explains what a Chablis is and it’s all actually really simple, isn’t it?
3:51 James Dawson: Yeah. But the industry sometimes builds up a front.
3:53 Brian Rose: So, excellent.
3:54 Thanks so much for being here as co-host. Thank you. All right, shall we get on with the show and introduce this lady here. It’s Miss Bernadine Brooker. You are the founder and CEO of Vastari, which is an online service that allows art collectors to connect with curators without dealing with a middleman.
4:10 You guys founded in 2012. You were incubated at Microsoft Ventures or Accelerated. We’re gonna find out more about that. You just closed a round of funding in April. Your team is all women or it was all women.
4:21 We’re gonna find out about that. Bernadine, welcome to Silicon Real.
4:24 Bernadine Bröcker: Thanks for having me.
4:25 Brian Rose: Great description. Hey, I thank you.
4:27 I’m getting really good at these. I’m getting really good. I might move this into a separate business. Just my introductions. Elevator pitches.
4:33 Yeah, exactly. You know, you’re our first art tech guest. And so I’ve got so many questions for you. We always talk about the innovator’s dilemma. James and I spent years and years in finance.
4:43 And we know that they’re dragging their heels when it comes to accepting tech and getting disrupted. We talk about health care. Again, it’s going to take a lot of effort. But when I think about the art world, I think about like old dudes sending snail mail to each other and I just, I would think that these would be the last people that you could even get online, that you could even get to open a browser, let alone show their works of art. And I’m talking from the curator side as well, you must be talking and maybe I’m being unfair.
5:08 So tell us about the industry, Bernadine, if you could tell us about how you got involved and just what your feel is for art tech going forward.
5:17 Bernadine Bröcker: Sure, definitely. The way you describe the industry is how it works. It’s extremely slow paced, reliant on networks of people around the world who are super connectors. But as you said, they’re getting older, they’re kind of getting out of touch with emerging markets.
5:34 So there really is a need for tech to get involved in order for the collaborations and the exchange of ideas to continue happening and not rely on humans. What brought me to this was I helped set up a gallery in Mayfair. We were selling Impressionists and Modern Paintings. It did really well. We set up in London, then we set up in New York.
5:58 And some of our clients would come up to us and say, I have a work that was perfect for that exhibition, but I didn’t know about it until it was at the museum. Is there any way that I can just let the museums know that I’ve got this amazing work without exposing it to the market. And when I say that, the reason you wouldn’t want your work to be known to the market is just, you don’t wanna be hassled for it to be sold, for people to know that you own something that’s that valuable, that kind of thing.
6:27 Brian Rose: Okay, so confidentiality is a big thing.
6:30 Bernadine Bröcker: Exactly, confidentiality is huge. And so I thought about it, I heard these people and I thought, let me find out if there’s anything out there where they can just communicate with museums directly. And it was just impossible. The only way was through academics or through art advisors, through people in the market, like auction houses and art dealers.
6:51 So there was no real way for the public and the private sector to really interact. And I thought it’s easy to do with a website, really.
6:59 Brian Rose: And did you have a tech background at all?
7:01 Bernadine Bröcker: Kind of, I guess. I was a graphic designer in New York before coming to London to do my master’s in art history.
7:07 Brian Rose: Parsons, so you had to go there.
7:09 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, exactly. So Parsons and I actually ironically did some work for a short period for museums doing graphic design for museums. So somehow it’s come full circle. And so, yeah, I kind of understood HTML, CSS, but I’m definitely not a back end coder or anything like that.
7:27 Brian Rose: OK, so you started this January 2012. You left the the art house you were at and you just said I’m going to do this.
7:34 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, I mean, I started off with it weekends, evenings, just on the side to see if there really was something there. And by June of 2012, it really was like, okay, this deserves full attention. And I was lucky enough to have the backing of some great people from the beginning who were collectors who understood the art world and said, we’ll fund you if you do wanna do it.
7:57 So during those six months, I knew the funding was there. I knew that we could potentially do it. So I was investigating how it could work.
8:06 Brian Rose: OK, and when did you decide to go with Microsoft Ventures? Because that’s like a 12-week accelerator program, right?
8:13 Bernadine Bröcker: Yes.
8:13 Brian Rose: It’s interesting, because we’ve had a lot of incubators, accelerators in here, and they can change companies. They can also be the wrong thing for companies. So I’m curious.
8:21 Bernadine Bröcker: It was a huge decision.
8:22 I don’t think I would have known. First of all, coming from the art world, you don’t even know about accelerators. But I kind of, there came a point where we felt we were very much in the art world, but there was something missing. And we were also trying to figure out our subscription and revenue model, and just exploring the different means. And so I started reading Lean Startup and all those kinds of things.
8:43 And then you suddenly realize that a lot of the companies that you admire and that you see doing well have gone through an accelerator. So I started investigating and came upon Microsoft Ventures because of the fact that we do code in .NET. So I just thought, well, Microsoft, okay, we don’t have an aversion to Microsoft. And not to say that a lot of people have an aversion to Microsoft. But it does have an old-school vibe to it.
9:11 Brian Rose: It’s not funny how that can happen so quick. Yeah. Because 20 years ago, it was the opposite. Yeah. Yeah.
9:16 Bernadine Bröcker: They keep saying, we’re the original startup. And I guess you could think of it that way.
9:20 James Dawson: Well, big success does breed contempt in a certain way.
9:22 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, exactly. And I think they are.
9:24 Brian Rose: Google will start getting hated as well soon. Yeah. Also, the innovator’s dilemma. As soon as you get a big model with a big company with a big revenue model like software, then you don’t want to make the changes. And I mean, the same thing will happen to Google in the five, 10 years, I think.
9:37 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, definitely. And I guess it’s nice that they were so introspective to be like, actually, we want to help some young companies out. And so they don’t take equity. You just go in for 12 weeks. They’ve changed it now to 14 weeks.
9:49 And the first day, you are put into a room with 12 advisors, including someone from branding, someone from PR, someone from, what else, venture capital, someone from like lean teaching leans to methodologies, just basically all these experts legal accounting and they break down everything you’ve done. They crush your ego. They make you feel like you’re nothing but luckily you’ve just made it into the accelerator. So you know you are one of 12 that they have chosen out of hundreds but you still feel like, why am I here?
10:22 And then slowly you figure out what you need to do in those 12 weeks. And we came out of the accelerator a much more concrete and focused company than when we went in.
10:33 James Dawson: Did you choose? I mean, there are obviously lots of options here. There’s tech stars, there’s Weira, there’s incubators.
10:41 I mean, there’s so many.
10:42 Bernadine Bröcker: We did look at others. I think Microsoft Entrance was the only one that we really kind of wanted to go with. Also, as I said, we had shareholders already, so they could be a little bit more weary of what we were doing, whereas a big brand like Microsoft, they can kind of trust and the fact that they’re not taking any equity. it was quite a good option for us as a company with stakeholders.
11:04 James Dawson: When did you start the Accelerator program?
11:07 Bernadine Bröcker: In February, beginning of February.
11:09 James Dawson: This year? Yeah. Okay, and it ended in April?
11:12 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, end of April. So it was three months.
11:14 Brian Rose: And did you find that you’re actually doing something with any of the other startups in the Accelerator? Did you get to know them better and?
11:22 Bernadine Bröcker: I mean, we were all oddball, right?
11:24 So we’re, first of all, four ladies and we’re working with art And we basically are completely different from everyone else. So it didn’t really work that we would collaborate, but there definitely was a lot of overlap in the type of emotions, the type of problems you’re struggling with, and you can just advise each other, really. Yeah. And you accelerated at Central Working? Yeah. In Whitechapel.
11:46 Bernadine Bröcker: We were actually one of the first people in there when it was still almost a building site, and we kind of grew with it.
11:52 Brian Rose: So James Layfield, from the CEO there, he said it was zombie-proof, that building. He said it has its own electrical generators. It’s completely off the grid. I don’t know.
12:01 Brian Rose: He said it was like a beautiful building. It was almost like the selfridges of its time.
12:06 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, it looks like a little selfridges. It’s this huge building with like decorations and things and they’ve just basically cleared it out, taken out all the partitions and made it this huge space where you can work. And there’s a lot of people there, including the Barclays FinTech accelerators there as well.
12:23 Brian Rose: Escalator project, right? If you look at you and the company, say, from May and January, what are the biggest changes that you made by going through that accelerator?
12:33 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, there’s so much really. We of course started generating revenue. I think that was one of the biggest things.
12:39 We finally kind of cracked it and figured it out. Of course, it’s not the scale that we want, but we started getting that type of…
12:48 Brian Rose: Through being there, did you get access to clients off the back of that?
12:53 Bernadine Bröcker: I wouldn’t say clients particularly, it was more about the mentors, so we got assigned a mentor who was involved with a lot of telecoms companies and as a result we kind of understood subscription models better and why people would sign up and what kind of incentives you have to give people and why they would renew their subscriptions and this type of thing, which We always kind of knew that it had to be a membership-based company, but we weren’t sure how.
13:23 Brian Rose: What is the trick with subscription? Because everybody wants a subscription model. Everybody wants the Grey’s model, the Zipcar. I just paid for an annual Zipcar subscription. I’m wondering if I’m ever going to get that back.
13:34 You know, Collins’ Crew Cafe is a subscription model. It’s obviously an investor’s dream, but what do you have to do, like when it comes from a startup, either one of you, to kind of get people to buy into that?
13:45 James Dawson: The beauty of a subscription model, and you’ll have thought through this in a lot of detail, is that you don’t have to keep selling. You do one sale, and then the cash just keeps coming every month. You can predict that your money is going to grow, and it’s going to keep coming.
13:59 In return for that, you have to provide really clear, defined value to the client to do the subscription model. A lot of software is moving that way, so software in the old school used to pay millions up front, and then used to pay a small service fee down the line. It’s all moving to just peer subscription, pay us a thousand pounds a month or 500, whatever. So in the art world, what do you have to give them? I mean, if you’re a curator though, they need you for a long time, right?
14:24 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, that’s the thing. Exhibitions are planned five years in advance, specifically also because of the slow turnover of information. So we are working with a really slow sales cycle when it comes to you as a collector upload your optics onto the system. going to take a while before curators start responding. So we decided that it had to be an annual subscription because in a year you’re likely to get quite a few messages from curators asking about your work. And then to kind of incentivize people to think about it as a long-term thing, we’re also offering 10-year memberships, so it kind of gives you the idea that this is something that it’s not just for now, it’s something that you register your works of art, they’re They’re anonymous on there.
15:08 They’re completely secure. No one knows you own them, but they can contact you. They can say, this Picasso is perfect for my exhibition. I’ll send them a message. And no one knows your email address.
15:18 No one knows anything. It’s just direct.
15:21 Brian Rose: Who’s harder to get money out? The curators or the collectors?
15:25 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, I think with the curators, we actually aren’t charging them.
15:29 We are working with them on a nonprofit basis, just for a variety of reasons. I’m trying to think of the most easy way to say it. First of all, museums are like universities. So to even get five pounds subscription, you have to go through a whole bunch of decision makers. So that is a long-term process.
15:49 And secondly, it’s kind of, we’re in this gray area where museums are not supposed to help the private sector earn money, let’s say. So we kind of have to show that we’re saving them money before we can charge them, in a certain sense. OK. So you think you might charge them someday. Yeah, but in a different way.
16:12 We’re still exploring how curators feel comfortable with that. But they are a wealth of knowledge, and they’re organizing these amazing events. So we are letting them sign up for free and basically help collectors raise the value of their works.
16:26 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about your business a little more, just so people know. I mean, you have 400,000 plus works of art on your system.
16:33 You’ve got 150 museums, five of the top 10 most visited museums. I mean, these are big numbers, right? And there’s 55,000 museums in the world? Yeah. So, and what are you trying to do to provide this anonymous service online?
16:46 Brian Rose: So it’s really a small group of people just looking at each other’s things.
16:51 Bernadine Bröcker: Yes, and I mean, it is very niche, but it is quite broad, because even though you think about a collector of art, you immediately think of the billionaires of the world. But really there’s, according to some research done in 2012, there are about 950,000 high net worth individuals or ultra high net worth individuals who have works of art that are of museum quality. So it is quite a market.
17:15 And there are a huge variety of reasons why these people would wanna be on our system. It’s not only because of the fact that they get the feeling of sharing something with the museum and sharing it with the public and that kind of feel-good factor. There are also some financial benefits. Of course, you’re saving money on storage. If it’s in storage, you’re saving money on insurance because it’s insured while it’s at the museum.
17:40 So you kind of have small financial benefits as well. And then in some places, like the UK, if you exhibit your work a certain amount of time a year and it qualifies as an important work of art considered by Eta Marci as culturally significant, then you get a tax break on inheritance tax.
17:59 Brian Rose: OK, so that’s a big upside.
18:01 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, exactly. There’s a huge upside.
18:03 Bernadine Bröcker: And the public benefits, because these works, instead of being in a warehouse somewhere or being hidden somewhere, they actually come out to the public.
18:11 Brian Rose: But they don’t pay you for the works of art. So if the Tate Modern displayed my Ai Wei Wei piece for six months, they don’t pay me, but they do insure it and store it for that time. And they pay for the shipping. OK, and get me press and potential tax credits.
18:25 Bernadine Bröcker: And of course, the fact that a work of art almost has like a CV. Part of the value of art comes from where it’s been shown, who has owned it.
18:34 Brian Rose: So it jacks your market price of your art up. Yes. And your other collection.
18:39 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah. But then again, see, that’s where the gray area comes in. We’re not trying to, we’re not guaranteeing that your work of art is gonna go up. We’re not saying like, register it and it’ll happen. But there’s a nice benefit of having your work in a museum.
18:52 Brian Rose: Is this the LinkedIn for artwork?
18:54 Bernadine Bröcker: Facebook of artwork. It’s interesting because there are a lot of art tech companies out there. So there’s a company that just raised like a lot of money from index. I’ve heard of Artsy and Auctionata and Artfinder.
19:06 Brian Rose: Did someone just raise money from index?
19:09 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, a company called Artbinder, which is led by also a woman. But that is solely about helping the market and helping sell works of art. And a lot of the art tech companies work with art sales. We stay away from the market completely, and we’re trying to basically bridge that world with the culture sector that is so on the other side of the spectrum.
19:35 Brian Rose: Okay. So art finders like the eBay of art. Yeah. And you are the… Is that the wrong one?
19:40 Bernadine Bröcker: I mean, I wouldn’t call it that. No. Well, there’s also the other thing. There’s a whole bunch of them. So art finder is contemporary art by emerging artists that you can buy at an affordable price, then there’s ArtBinder, which is a collection management system for galleries and dealers.
19:55 So, like, there are so many art tech companies out there. It’s a huge little industry.
19:59 Brian Rose: Is art tech kind of late to the game by a couple years because the art world was slow? I mean, do you see it as just kind of catching up really fast right now?
20:07 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, yeah.
20:08 It’s really, really exciting. I think there’s also a transition happening with a lot of the important people in the art world becoming older and starting to think about who’s going to, where it’s going to go. So people are inheriting art, people are inheriting galleries. And so you kind of have to think what’s gonna happen in the 21st century to this market. So an interesting thing is how do you curate and allow people to find the art on there?
20:34 So for example, you have to categorize it really carefully so that if I’m a curator, I can go on and I can find a piece of art.
20:39 Brian Rose: Yes. How do all your categories work? It must be it.
20:41 Bernadine Bröcker: It’s terrible when a curator doesn’t find the work that they want, you know?
20:44 And you think it’s on there. I need to make sure that the keywords are working because we kind of left it in the hands of the collectors and we said, upload as many keywords as you want. You can upload where it’s from, you can upload everything and then curators will be able to find it. But sometimes collectors get a little bit nervous about why am I tagging it so much? I don’t want it to be that visible.
21:04 I’ll give you the name, I’ll give you the artist and if someone wants to know, they can contact me. But that just doesn’t help the search engine. So we constantly are trying to find out innovative ways to make sure that the discoverability is still there.
21:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s tough. How’s your tech?
21:22 Do you see this as a big tech search engine type piece? Do you have to spend a lot of money on tech? Or is most of your money now going to need to go to marketing?
21:31 Bernadine Bröcker: I guess you could think of it in the way of how our team is structured. So we’ve actually got three people in London full time working on client development and business development.
21:40 So the rest of my team is just basically Focusing on the clients and making sure that we’re listening to them what they need what how they’re reacting to the system What’s bothering them? What kind of new things would be exciting and and then on the other side we’ve got one full-time Coder who’s like our guru and then we have about three freelancers that work with us all the time So if you think about it client development is a huge part of our right of our sister of our of our Because there are individuals a high net worth, there’s only a million of them, then there’s not a billion of them, so you can kind of go at them methodically.
22:19 Brian Rose: Exactly.
22:19 And the museum curators, you have to, do you have to wine and dine them like the art world? Or is this just my depiction of the art world?
22:27 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, but that’s the whole thing that we’re trying to go against, right? We’re trying to not be that middleman who’s whining and dining and schmoozing. We are using the tech to make sure that you can connect without us even knowing.
22:40 So people say, oh yes, so you must know so-and-so at this museum. And I say, yeah, he uses my system, but I don’t necessarily know him because we don’t get in the middle. Okay. However, of course, if they do want us to get involved, we can help with insurance, we can help with storage, we can help with cataloging the works. A lot of them are not photographed.
23:00 So just that whole side of it is still from an industry that needs to get digital.
23:04 Brian Rose: So a lot of them aren’t photographed, interesting, because we’ve had some people in here. I’m thinking of one, Jenny Griffiths from SnapFashion, who works down at IDEA London. She has an image recognition. You see a dress, you take a picture of it, it tells you where you can buy it online.
23:18 It’d be amazing if you could take a picture of a Van Gogh and then it tags it automatically.
23:23 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, there’s some cool stuff happening with image recognition and paintings. I mean, I know some guys who are, actually, they’re one of the teams that are now coming into the Microsoft Accelerator. They’ve got an image recognition app for museums, so you get the tag on your phone, or you can listen to it on an audio guide. So instead of having to hold an audio guide from the museum, you can just look at the picture, it recognizes it and tells you what it is.
23:48 Brian Rose: Nice. There’s a lot going on. That’s potentially way down the line, I guess, when it comes to like our art recognition. Yeah. 3D art.
23:56 Bernadine Bröcker: But to digitize every work of art that’s in the world, it’s huge. You can stop. You can stop. And wine and everything. Right, right, right.
24:04 I mean, if you think about it, percent of the optics in museum collections are not on display. Now fair enough a lot of it is for example you’ve got one wooden relic from some time period you probably have 50 others of those the British Museum has 2,000 of those so they’re not going to be on display all the time but there’s a huge proportion of works of art that aren’t even known and a lot of them are not even digitized so one of my colleagues Francesca she was working at the British Museum, helping them catalog their collection of prints. Because they’ve got so many prints that they don’t even know what they have.
24:41 Brian Rose: Right, big market, big market. When you leave the accelerator, is it like kicking a child out of the house to go to college? I mean, do you miss being accelerated?
24:51 Bernadine Bröcker: We might be the child that’s kind of still living at home.
24:54 Brian Rose: A 30-year-old?
24:55 Bernadine Bröcker: Because we’re still there. I mean, we were lucky enough that we could stay at Central Working. And as a result, it didn’t feel as cold-hearted booted out. All of us, the whole accelerator stayed for three more months after the accelerator. So we kind of had some time to digest that we’re now on our own.
25:16 And even so, we all work together still. We all kind of talk to each other digitally or in person. There’s a lot of communication still. And with our mentors, we’re still in touch. I mean, it’s all time.
25:29 Brian Rose: OK, and what’s the next step? You just raised a quarter million pounds? Is that right? And that gives you a year, you said, 18 months of…
25:37 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, I mean, we do have the runway, but we need to kind of prove everything that we’ve been hypothesizing about what’s going on.
25:45 So we have a few really exciting new features that we’re developing, that we’re launching in September that really will change things. I think I mentioned it as well at Demo Day. So for example, for museums, This is getting a lot further into our business. So we are helping individual works go into exhibitions and as a result the work gets the benefit of being in an exhibition and the exhibition gets the benefit of having a work that’s not seen as often as it usually does.
26:16 But these exhibitions are IP in their own right and they are extremely valuable to museums and in order to make it more viable, especially in Europe where budgets are getting cut, It’s very good to move exhibitions around the world to different venues. Entire exhibitions. Yeah, entire exhibitions. So we’re kind of creating this side platform where museums can talk to each other about moving exhibitions around the world. And then our original database becomes even more valuable because when an exhibition goes from, say, France to the Netherlands, some works can’t leave France.
26:53 So in order to fill in those gaps, you go to the private collectors and you say, do you have a work that would work in this situation?
27:01 Brian Rose: Well, someday you pitch the exhibition, would you create it maybe one day?
27:05 Bernadine Bröcker: We are working with a few private collectors who want to pitch their… Bestati branding exhibition.
27:11 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, I mean, there are amazing stories behind why collectors own what they do, and it doesn’t have to be like Picasso’s, it can also be like some really interesting collection of stamps or arms and armor. And the way the person has collected it has a story, there’s a reason they have bought all these things. And that can be an exhibition in and of itself. It’s the love that you have while you’re collecting. And we’re really looking into making that more available to museums as well and bridging that.
27:40 Brian Rose: You know, James, I’m thinking like from an investor standpoint, if I’m going to put money into this, I’m thinking, yeah, but is there someday this exponential payout. Are people always thinking you’re going to get into the art trading business? Or are people always thinking, now we’re going to sell Amex gold cards, sorry, black cards to these people? I mean, there must be people thinking.
28:02 Bernadine Bröcker: Oh, so much, so much.
28:03 Brian Rose: And so what do you say to them? Because you want to show them potential billions of revenue, but then you also, you said, I think, trust. How many potential subscribers are you going to get if you’re not charging the museums? How many potential subscribers are there in the world?
28:18 But ultimately, you said trust is your most important piece in this world.
28:22 Bernadine Bröcker: Yes. So that’s the thing. We’ve been approached by, they’re called the private salespeople at a lot of these big organizations who are like, so just sometimes if someone asks you, how do I sell my Basquiat? Why don’t you point them in my direction and you’ll get an introductory fee?
28:38 But that will break all the trust and everything that we’ve built. And also, we are working with museums that have an extremely strict code of ethics when when it comes to sales of art. So we’re like trying to make sure that we stay on that, on that ethical high ground, I guess you could say. So, I mean, yes, there is potential there in the future as long as it’s an opt-in feature that’s separate from Vastarian itself and separate from the museums, it’s possible.
29:08 There’s a lot that’s possible. I think, yeah.
29:10 Brian Rose: It kind of remains murky because you upload everything there and then someone might see that piece of art and go, I’d like to buy that all.
29:17 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, the work of art is only visible to museums, and we personally verify every single museum on there. Okay.
29:23 Brian Rose: And do they sign a big disclaimer and everything, what they can and can’t do, the data and all that stuff?
29:29 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, the terms and conditions say what you can and can’t do with the data, and it specifically says we are not here to market works of art for sale. But museums themselves know what they should and shouldn’t be doing, so it kind of speaks for itself.
29:42 Brian Rose: I sneak into a museum and just look up their database and I’m like the Sotheby’s guy and I’m like oh yeah yeah yeah I mean you worry about people hacking your system?
29:51 Bernadine Bröcker: Well that’s everything is reportable so if you get a message from a museum that says hi I want to buy your work I’m in partnership with Sotheby’s that collector if they’re unhappy they’re gonna report it to us and that person won’t be allowed on the system anymore. Same with the works of art themselves people keep saying how do you know it’s real how do you know it’s authentic, all this kind of stuff. It’s all self-regulating, but we also have a partnership with a big organization called the Art Loss Register, where you can check if the work of art has been registered as stolen or lost or fake before in the past. So we don’t take on the liability, but we’re giving you all the resources to be able to make sure that everything’s okay.
30:30 Brian Rose: You read these days, like every other day there’s an article in The New York Times about an artwork that was owned by someone and stolen by someone. Like if I was an art dealer, so I was
30:40 An art owner, I’d be paranoid about putting my collection online because there might be a hundred people lining up to take it from me. I mean, do you have to deal with this?
30:48 Bernadine Bröcker: I mean, that’s a huge issue, especially in the antiquities world. When you’re talking about works of art that come from like year zero, there is a huge long story of where it’s coming from.
30:58 Brian Rose: Genghis Khan has a claim.
30:59 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, it’s really difficult and we are constantly in touch with people about that. But right now, I think the hot topic and something that is being talked about at the and everything is the fact that some of these works they they’re really old so there’s no way you can tell if it was dug up yesterday and for example with works from Iraq or Afghanistan or Cambodia a lot of these pieces are coming into the market and people don’t know where they come from so there has to be a lot of more of a tighter surveillance of what’s going on with the works of art because well there’s rumors that some of these antiquities that have been stolen out of sites in the Middle East have actually funded terrorist activities and things like that.
31:44 Bernadine Bröcker: We’re getting onto a whole other subject, but yeah.
31:46 Brian Rose: A lot of things talking about here. Let’s talk about women in tech. You know, we’ve had plenty of women guests here, but you hear it all the time. There’s not enough women in tech or the women fairly represented in tech.
31:56 You’re kind of new to tech, but you’re all women. Like you said, you stick out like a sore thumb at essential working. What’s it been like? What’s the experience and what needs to change and what doesn’t need to change?
32:09 Bernadine Bröcker: I love the fact that we transitioned from terrorism to women in Tester, ambush, ruining the tech world.
32:15 Bernadine Bröcker: No, I think that I never noticed that there was an issue there until actually the day that they announced the cohort, because we went up on stage and we were the only girls. I was like, wait, what’s going on?
32:26 Brian Rose: Right. You said it on stage. You said you can find us because we’re the only girls.
32:30 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, exactly. So, but the thing is we didn’t realize it. We’ve never thought about it that way. And also, it’s not an all-female team, because I set out and said, I’m going to hire only women. I mean, it was, they’re the right people for the job.
32:42 So Angela’s fantastic with her network in the Americas. Marta is Polish, but speaks Japanese and Mandarin and knows everything you want to know about Asian art. So that’s the type of person that needs to be in the team. If it was a guy, then it wouldn’t matter. Yeah.
33:01 Brian Rose: Maybe we’ve been spoiled, but all the women we’ve met on the show and Tech have been like off the charts. You know, Emily Brooke from Blaze and Sherry Cottou and Jenny Griffiths and it’s like the whole like Courtney Boyd Meyers is like they’re all killing it. So they make the men look bad, you know, I don’t know if that, is it, do you find like when you’re pitching venture cap or anything, is there, I mean, is there anything different, you know, being female?
33:22 Bernadine Bröcker: I don’t know, because I don’t know what it’s like to be a guy pitching for venture capital. I mean, I do think that we we’re extremely positive and we just go for it. And I don’t think I don’t think that reflects badly, right?
33:38 Brian Rose: OK, let’s talk location. You are from from where are you from?
33:42 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, I’m I’m my parents are Dutch. I never lived there. I was born there. And then we moved to South America. And I guess I would call myself Dominican Dominican.
33:52 Brian Rose: You went to school in New York City. You’re here in London. Yeah. Why should Vastari be based in London? Why shouldn’t it be somewhere else, and will you someday be other places?
34:02 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, that’s a funny question. I think the reason we’re in London is because the art world here is quite diverse, and there’s a lot of emerging markets that are coming into here, so Brazil, the Middle East, China, Japan. They’re all very present in London, and as a result, you kind of see where the communication divides are happening, right? So everyone meets in London and that’s where everything happens, but as soon as they go back out, the communication stops.
34:30 So it’s a great place to start building a product like this. Also, I guess, what else? I think we’ve got, we started off thinking that we were going to be only in the UK and we kind of were like, well, there’s tax incentives, there’s great museums in the UK, let’s put them together. And then we had a journalist in the States write about us and suddenly there were a whole bunch of American collectors and museums interested in what we were doing. And then we had some press actually in Ukraine and Russia and Poland and there were a bunch of more people interested.
35:06 So all of a sudden it turned into a worldwide product without us really trying and we realized that it’s really about the global connections that happen. So I mean our successful connections are all international. So going from the UK to the US or Netherlands to Brazil, to Netherlands to China, China to the UK, that type of stuff. So it’s…
35:29 Brian Rose: Will you need people on the ground though in those places?
35:33 Bernadine Bröcker: Maybe eventually, depending on how it develops. At the moment we’ve got a hands-off approach as soon as it comes to the logistics. We can help advise you to the right shippers if you want to have suggestions about that or who you should be getting doing your insurance. But really, we’re just connecting people. So you don’t really need to be at the exhibition space itself.
35:56 Brian Rose: James, you worked in the banking industry, and you were trying to get us to go electronic. And I remember it was a really difficult job because you were trying to get us old school business guys to stop transacting business on the phone and go online. And you built the whole Broke Protect system, et cetera. What do you see as big issues when it comes to her cracking the art world? I don’t know what it’s called.
36:17 James Dawson: That’s a really good question, Brian. So the issues when you’re taking a phone-based or a traditional black book-based business, digital, is about, for me, the most important thing is user acceptance and users actually using it. And there’s a huge amount of distrust that you’re going to have to win people over. And you’re going to have to build a ton of mechanisms. You’ve seen all of that.
36:44 You’ve got to give them a lot more than they had before, and you’ve got to make their lives a lot easier, and you’ve got to make it really easy. I suppose one of the things that we focused a huge amount on was the actual user interface and people being able to use it really easily and really dumbing it down and making it so that it’s just a no-brainer. I’ve got my little black book. I’ve got my network. this guy John I could call and he could get me some stuff but actually this thing is so easy to use it’s so beautiful I can get so much more from it plus there’s all these other stuff I’m gonna start using that and you’re not gonna get everyone but you’re gonna start getting enough people that it’ll start creating a bit of a tipping point.
37:29 Bernadine Bröcker: Well that’s I think what is happening now when you were saying about what we’re doing with our funding it’s very introspective looking at the product figuring out how to make people fall in love with it I think when we started out it was very much this is a database and it’s gonna be serious and we have to look serious so you kind of think of old-school kind of clunky type of things when you think about serious like the online banking you know it always looks really serious but to be honest people love feeling like it’s easy exactly what you’re saying so we’re completely transitioning into a different type of UI that’s a lot more about feeling like you’re in an amazing place that you can still secure
38:11 But can really achieve a lot and fun and beautiful and
38:14 James Dawson: yeah, yeah, so so then I suppose that that makes the question Are you gonna focus a huge amount of time on your brand and the feeling that that gives off is or is it more for you? about Building that collection of investors on the one side and museums on the other side and their ease of access and their ease of Use of the system. I mean because that’s an interesting
38:36 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, I mean the lucky thing about working in a niche market like the art world is that you And the brand thing kind of starts happening.
38:44 So people now kind of know about us. Even though we’re a startup, we’ve only been around for two and a half years. People in the art world do know about Vastari. So you kind of, that brand is starting to come together. And the more you talk about what exactly you’re doing and are consistent about what you’re doing, I think that brand gets built itself.
39:05 Brian Rose: So how would you describe your brand?
39:08 Bernadine Bröcker: non-partisan trustworthy connector of people.
39:12 Brian Rose: That’s like six words for the next year what’s your biggest challenge?
39:18 Bernadine Bröcker: Gosh finding the time for everything. No I mean I think it’s about that focus so we’ve got all this stuff we want to do there is so much that can be done because there’s nothing being done so So it’s very easy to get distracted.
39:37 Bernadine Bröcker: I think we need to focus on getting Vastari right as a product that people love, that they want to use, and then also work on the features that will really entice museums and make them money so that it becomes a tool that they want to use all the time.
39:52 Brian Rose: Is hiring a big issue? I mean, do you need like two or three more key people or not necessarily?
39:58 Bernadine Bröcker: At the moment, no. I mean, our last funding round, we hired a few more people.
40:03 So it kind of grew and now we’re basically, it’s quite lean, but it’s a good place to be right now.
40:10 Brian Rose: Okay. Personal habits. Do you work 24-7? Are you working Sundays?
40:15 Do you encourage your team to do the same or do you let off the reins a bit? I’m just curious.
40:21 Bernadine Bröcker: When I started off, I was 24-7, weekends, I was unbearable.
40:26 Brian Rose: You have a lot of energy. Do you keep this energy up all the time?
40:30 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, basically. I guess that’s the thing. Now, I’m a lot more honest. I’m like, there’s a lot more you can get done. 10 to 6 or 10 to 7, 9 to 7, you get a good day’s work.
40:42 And there’s a reason that that’s kind of the tradition. It’s because it kind of works well, and you take time off in the evening, think about stuff, and then get back into it. And also, we take a break. We really go and have lunch together for an hour, maybe less, depending on how much work there is. Really get disconnected from the computer just it’s the time we talk and really make things Get to the right conclusions and not chase your tail
41:05 Brian Rose: It’s smart. It’s very smart. Yeah the weekends. I mean, there is no such thing as weekends when you’re working You gotta work Saturday’s I was actually I was over at the Google headquarters and I walked in and it was like seven o’clock and everyone was work Was walking out and the guy showed me around we show me the cafeteria. They always show off their damn cafeteria That’s Google guys, but I was like where’s the late nights where the all-nighters where’s all this stuff and he’s like Brian He’s like anyone pulling an all-nighter is isn’t planning. He’s like they’re not getting their stuff done He’s like that’s a total person. That’s just not and it’s a marathon, right? Like it’s not it’s not that you’re gonna be It’s not the same as when you’re working on a project for a company that you just have a deadline and you have to finish It by this time point you’re gonna start running the next day and the next day and the next day I think that’s what you learn. Otherwise
41:56 You’re you’re done. There is there is no more energy.
41:59 Brian Rose: Is that true? Same from the guy that has the craziest week and
42:03 Bernadine Bröcker: It is true. You can’t just always be killing yourself Yeah, because you need to you need to get stuff done the next day and the next day next day And if you haven’t if you’re working all night, then yeah, it’s something I mean Sometimes you go on to like creative frenzy and then you just yeah, say well, let’s go for it That’s fun. Another interesting thing. Someone sent me an email Yesterday with an African problem at the bottom of it that said to go fast, run alone, and to go far, run together, I don’t think.
42:34 Brian Rose: A whole advocate for team working. That’s what I’d repeat that as well. It’s good to get those African proverbs from your side of the earth.
42:40 Bernadine Bröcker: No, they’re always right, that’s the thing about it. And I just wanna say I do love everybody at Google.
42:45 I love Easy Vitra down the street at the campus and Daniel at the Google headquarters. Thank you for the tour.
42:51 Brian Rose: Bernadine, we always ask our guests a few questions at the end. Let me hit you with them. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Bernadine and give her a bit of advice, I’m guessing you were in Parsons.
43:01 Bernadine Bröcker: I don’t know.
43:02 Brian Rose: What would you tell her to do?
43:04 Bernadine Bröcker: Drink less.
43:05 Brian Rose: First time I heard that. OK, all right.
43:08 Bernadine Bröcker: No, I’m joking. Would she listen? Probably not. It’s New York, right? No.
43:16 Bernadine Bröcker: I think I’m a person with no regrets, really.
43:19 Brian Rose: Would you have tried to get into tech earlier, or was that the right time? Did you need the background in art first?
43:28 Bernadine Bröcker: I think what’s cool is taking something that you get to know really deeply and then apply tech to it. I think I’m really happy I learned coding, and I’m literate, so I’m not lost with all the code.
43:42 But I think that you need to know a niche market really well. If you just go in knowing how to code, then the market is not there.
43:51 Brian Rose: Right. And we see that happen in a lot. Second part of that question, best advice received? Business or personal?
43:59 Bernadine Bröcker: Ooh, that’s a tough one.
44:01 Brian Rose: It’s always a tough one. Take your time.
44:04 Bernadine Bröcker: I think, yeah, it’s all about the team to work together.
44:08 Brian Rose: Is this you’re taught at the incubator or the accelerator?
44:11 Bernadine Bröcker: No, well, yeah, they definitely are always like the reason we accept people is for the team. But I think I started out Vastari on my own with investors and they were invaluable, of course, it helped a lot, but outsourcing coding to people and kind of thinking like I can do this on my own, and it’s probably the reason it took a bit longer to take off.
44:34 I think that it would be much better if I had thought of it more as a team effort and just the atmosphere in the office now, just having great people around you that you can really work with and understand without words is fantastic.
44:47 James Dawson: It’s hard running a solo venture, man. It’s just hard. You put so much pressure on yourself, you’ve got nobody to bounce things off. It’s just, it’s hard.
44:56 Bernadine Bröcker: Exactly. Yeah, it’s really hard.
44:58 James Dawson: It’s not worth doing. And there’s no fun. Don’t do it.
45:01 Brian Rose: Don’t do it. Last part of that question is, to the 20-year-old listening to us from anywhere in the world, what do you tell them if they want to get involved in tech somehow?
45:12 Bernadine Bröcker: I think a lot of people in tech look at other companies and compare themselves and and say like, oh, I haven’t done that, so I probably am not the right person to go into tech. If I had thought that way, then I wouldn’t be here today. I think everyone builds their own path and builds their own trajectory, and everything you do is baggage and learning experience to take with you.
45:37 And as I was saying, a job I did in New York for a little while, graphic designing for museums is now affecting my decision now, and I would have never thought that back then. So just absorb everything that you’re experiencing and think about it as your own journey.
45:51 James Dawson: Good advice and trust yourself. And also just because these people are doing it and they’re on the magazines doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing either. I mean, they all just jumped into tech, you know, a couple of years ago, trying it out.
46:04 Bernadine Bröcker: So I think-
46:05 James Dawson: But they are the best people to get advice from as well, right?
46:08 Bernadine Bröcker: So you totally get amazing feedback from those people and you should listen. But to a certain extent, You can also start listening to so many people that…
46:17 James Dawson: Get too much advice and then you just… Yeah.
46:20 Brian Rose: All you need to do is just listen to Silicone Reel every week and you get the inspiration to go. Yeah, you’re there. How can people get ahold of you? What’s the best way for them to follow you? You’re on Twitter or what’s the best way?
46:30 Bernadine Bröcker: Yeah, I’m on Twitter, I’m bjkbrocker, so those are my initials. And I am also available on email, so it’s bernadeenatvastari.com. And if there’s anyone listening that’s a curator or an owner of large amounts of of art, they should go straight to the website. Exactly. You can try out Vassari for free as a collector with five objects, so you can try and see what kind of response you’re getting.
46:53 Bernadine Bröcker: Otherwise, you can get the annual subscription and upload your whole collection. It’s unlimited amount of uploads. And as a curator, yeah, you register and we’ll call you up and check who you are. Make sure that you really are who you say you are and you’ll get access.
47:07 Brian Rose: Love it, love it.
47:08 Brian Rose: I’m so glad we had you here. It’s an exciting field I know nothing about, but I’m learning.
47:12 Bernadine Bröcker: Well, any more questions, let me know.
47:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, I will probably hit you up. If you have any questions for her, you can.
47:18 Bernadine Bröcker: Or a 60-minute tour of the National Gallery. Happy to give it.
47:22 Brian Rose: The connections, right? No, this is a fantastic scene. Like, being just over here in the Silicon Roundabout, we don’t get the Mayfair art people, so it’s nice to see that side of it.
47:34 Because people around here, a lot of times, are just pure tech plays, so we don’t get other industry plays. So it’s great to hear about it. please visit Bernadine on Twitter and check out the website, it’s fantastic. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, come check us out on YouTube. We’re all looking pretty good today.
47:51 It’s a little warm in the studio, but it’s all right. It’s the hottest day of the year.
47:54 James Dawson: Yeah, it’s like the hottest day of the year, but it’s all good.
47:57 Brian Rose: And if you’re watching us live, thanks for watching. I don’t know what else to say, James.
48:00 James Dawson: Thanks for being here. It’s a great story, huh?
48:02 Bernadine Bröcker: It’s been a pleasure. Really, really nice to meet you. It’s been good fun.
48:04 James Dawson: We have like the best seats in the house. We’re just like listening to this great story. We’re really lucky.
48:08 Brian Rose: As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. You’re one of them, I wish you all the best, and thank you.
48:12 Bernadine Bröcker: Thank you. Thank you. It’s been really amazing.
48:33 Brian Rose: All right, take care.
