Full transcript: Brian Taylor on London Real
0:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real, which is a similar three-person format. We’ve got guests like four-hour workweek Tim Ferriss. We’ve had six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates.
0:37 We’ve also had Bruce Perry from the BBC series Tribe. Check it out, but today we are talking technology. My co-host today is Colin Pyle, who runs online language schools, gourmet coffee companies, and mustache contests. How’s it going? Mustache fundraising.
0:56 Okay. Well, the mustache is going really well. It’s shockingly well. The fundraising is going horribly. Okay.
1:03 So I… You’re trying to say something here? Well, I didn’t… I really waited to push it, and I haven’t started so much. I wanted to have like a good stash before I started really pushing it.
1:12 So it’s coming. It’s halfway through. Okay. Exactly. So you’re trying to subtly say that you would like funding so they can come see you at pile C on Twitter, right?
1:21 Yeah, I’ll tweet it out through Silicon real too. And we’ll put it at the bottom maybe of the YouTube page so that in the comments maybe. So everyone knows it’s there. You got to get paid for doing that to yourself. I know exactly.
1:33 There’s no excuse. All right. I’m like meeting people too. And you know, the first thing you have to say is, you know, I don’t normally look like this. Do you actually say that?
1:42 I do. Yeah, what’s up? One girl today was just like you totally didn’t have to say that right? She knew yeah No, she was like I thought like you’re pulling it off and I was like, oh really really Never know. Everyone’s got their own. It seems like you have a hot tub at your house. That’s all I’m saying Yeah, I don’t know what the people think. I’m like a police officer. Yeah. All right. We’re gonna move on from that Our guest today is mr. Brian Taylor who is the CEO and founder of pixel pin which quite simply provides picture password software Brian, you work with military intelligence and defense companies before you developed your approach to online authentication, which uses personal pictures to replace passwords, as far as I understand.
2:22 That’s very good. Yep. That’s pretty good, yeah. Welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you.
2:27 You know, you’ve got a crazy story, and I just wondered if you might share it with us, because I watched your video that I think you filmed at Waira, where you talked about how I think you were working with the London Met surveillance team. were trying to transfer some military-grade surveillance onto the Homeland Security guys. And you looked at their password security system, and you found it very complicated and yet very simple. Can you hit us up with that story?
2:51 Yeah, sure. I’ve got a very long background in military communications and surveillance systems. And I managed to get a gig with a company called Talus to move their handheld thermal imaging technology out of the special forces and things like that. and in the intelligence community. And they wanted to move into the Homeland Security market, mainly as a result of 9-11 and 7-7 and all those kind of things.
3:20 So I was given a blank sheet of paper for a year and told to go out and meet lots of different people, which I did, I met an awful lot of Mr. Smiths that year. And it culminated in a big country house demonstration of lots and lots of technology that you don’t normally see in Lincolnshire, of the craziest guy who is like Q-Off, James Bond. But for a very short period of that time, I was doing some work with one of the surveillance teams and I was horrified to realize that they do pick up their laptops with very sensitive data on it, as you can imagine, to go out into the back of the white vans and go and follow people.
4:02 They really are in white vans. Absolutely. Okay, I just don’t want you to. They could have fish and chip on the side, whatever, but they’re real. So essentially they have a big problem of security because of the sensitivity of the data.
4:20 But the other thing is that because of that, they have three levels of security to go through. Each level is a randomly generated password that is 15 characters long. That changes every month. So essentially, bless them, they do what you and I would do because we can’t remember all of those things. They write them down.
4:38 So there is no security. And it was literally a throwaway comment that got me into the situation that I’m in today. And I said, why don’t you use pictures? Because in a high intensity environment, we remember pictures better than anything else. We kind of all looked at each of them and went, I haven’t done that, I haven’t seen that.
4:57 And I thought, no, I haven’t either. So from that I spent three months in the London British Library in the intellectual property department. I’ve subsequently raised my own patent, which is going through, it hasn’t been granted quite yet and I’ve spent £50,000 of my own money on patent lawyers, I won’t call it MVPs but on de-risking the technology and doing prototypes. Okay, because it’s important for you to own this technology so people don’t copy what you’re doing So you I mean, I’m just just quickly back to your story These guys had post-it notes with these 15 out of 15 letter alphanumerics on their laptop. It’s not quite as bad They do as every policeman has if they have a log book. Okay, so they hold it in their log book Okay, you know so it’s on them all the time. I do the same thing and just for anyone that wants to steal my iPhone I’ve got passwords on my iPhone that are for banking and all this stuff I mean, and I was I was on the phone with HSBC the other day and he’s like, what’s your six to ten digit security pin?
6:01 And I forgot and it’s just this whole frustrating procedure. It’s almost it’s it’s an anachronism, right these passwords Well, it is it’s I mean passwords have been around a long long time since the Roman times Yo, and certainly whilst I was in the army you have to have a password to get back into base and all these kind of things but you’ve You’ve got to remember that within the world that we’re in now, the internet connected world, they’re just not good enough for the job. Not because passwords in themselves can’t be good, because they can be, but we as human beings can’t remember difficult passwords.
6:38 And it’s just hard, so we are the weakest link in it. So that’s why Pixelpin was invented to essentially make it fun, make it easy, make it accessible to any language any age range all that kind of stuff but we do all of the security and the hard work behind it okay and quite simply if someone wants an example it’s usually a personal photo and the security process is picking what four points on that photo in a specific order it’s that simple right okay and like you said you make the simple stuff look easy right that’s well it’s taken us a long time but yes that idea doesn’t sound novel but if you would have told me how to do that a year ago I wouldn’t have come up with that especially using your own picture that’s it’s quite now can you explain how that is more secure then yeah sure password I guess it’s not an apples and apples kind of comparison so it’s an apples and oranges comparison but so there’s two sides to it so I’ll do the apples first so passwords a they’re not good be we’re not good at them and see they are words so they can be dictionary attacked by computers and probably 90% of any word that’s been thought of in the planet in any language in any dictionary is now in a dictionary attack file so you just bash the database with these things and you will get 80 to 90 percent of stuff within a matter of minutes. The other side of the the coin is that the longer the password then the more securities. But equally, industry standards
8:19 Don’t, current industry standards, the Microsofts, the Googles, the whoever, don’t use encryption. They use something called hashing. And basically what that does is it converts that word into a set of numbers and strings of letters and numbers and letters, that when you then put your password in, you hash it again and you match it up to the thing that’s hashed as well. So you’re not actually matching words together, you’re matching the hashing. And what this means is that anybody can just hash random numbers until you get it right. And essentially hackers are very clever people, they know that we put a one, two, three on the end of things or you know we use a zero instead of a naught and sorry instead of an O a five instead of an S and they they can do all these permutations so it’s it’s very easy to break. Going on to the orangy side of things, essentially a picture and the way certainly that we store it isn’t comparable to a password at all. And there’s also many more points of interest on a picture. And if you were to do the very basic maths of it on a computer screen of 1,024 by 760 high, it’s like 850,000, whatever it is, it’s a big number to actually go through. But we’re clicking on certain areas. So there’s something called information entropy, and that is to do with how busy the picture is. A bad example of a picture would be a boat on the sea with the moon behind it because there’s only three things you can look at. A good example would be a picture
10:11 Of the Sistine Chapel because it’s a very detailed, lots and lots of information in it. So you can use any picture, I use the tube map because I’ve only moved to London two years ago and I’m still learning my way around. And so I use the tube map and that is a way of learning the tube map and it’s also personal to me. Did you ever think about going with a standardized picture? Was it in the beginning of your development at Pixelpen? Was it ever that?
10:38 No. We’ve done a lot of work with Nottingham University as well. We had a PhD student for three months. She was brilliant. And there’s an immense amount of academic work behind all of this that says we remember because we’re humans we remember pictures better than anything else. So right from the offset it was use a personal picture because if I show you my personal picture I can even show you the past points on it. It is very unlikely that even within two minutes or certainly a day you will remember it because it’s not relevant to you and so but the recall for me is it’s it’s a personal picture and I can tell myself a story about that day or that event or whatever and that recall is the big thing and a lot of the academic research would also cover things that say that if you do use the standard picture people forget their past points very quickly whereas if it’s personal it’s in long-term memory much easier. Okay all right well we always ask people that come here just some basics about their companies so I’m going to ask you the same questions about Pixelpin. Sure. Well you know what have you done so far What are your plans for the future, you know, and what makes you guys different and then finally my favorite question is why will you win?
11:51 In this space. Okay. Go back to question one. Yes What have you done? Whatever done or what are you going to do?
11:58 That’s kind of a combination question you obviously take this pattern very seriously because I guess that’s the core of your technology, right? Yeah, this is it’s certainly the process of what we do So what we’ve done we have we’ve been very fortunate in raising finance from the technology strategy board. I didn’t know about the technology strategy board, did you? No. Okay, alright. Maybe give us a quick minute on that.
12:19 Sure. Technology strategy board is a government crango. They’re not a government affiliated thing but they have a lot of money to invest in technology and essentially to make Britain a better place in the world market. So they have run competitions every month and in this particular instance it was for hundred thousand pounds and I think 18 companies got through and 14 companies have actually been able to take the hundred thousand pounds but it’s not just a gift it is a grant so you don’t ever have to pay it back 14 companies per month get a hundred grand there’s there’s a lot of money in there’s a lot of money in this and it’s a big it’s a big deal yeah it’s big national deal and but the Achilles heel to it or the difficulty is they don’t just give you the money, you’ve got to get match funding from private investors or put your own money in if you’ve got it. I didn’t have any because I’d spent my 50 grand. So we got investors and we were fortunate enough to get a private company called Trant Holdings involved and also Telefonica as a result of Wirer. So you took some of the Wirer funding money and put that into that? Yeah. So we managed to match fund that and obviously gave equity away as well. Subsequent to that we’ve spent a year doing the project which is very specific and the technology stretch board rules are really quite severe because they’re used to dealing with huge companies like British Aerospace or General Dynamics or people like that. They’re
13:57 Not used to dealing with startups but they have been very good in accommodating. So you You spend the year developing the product, de-risking it, doing everything that you can do. But even during that year, you’re not allowed to actually sell anything. And if you do, any profits from that come off the 100,000 pound grant. So, and then there’s monthly Gantt charts that need to be updated, risk registers, all sorts of things.
14:22 So it’s quite a heavy overhead. And you’re still in that process? No, no, we finished that in July. Yeah, July this year. Okay.
14:32 Okay, so that was the past, you put your money and got the patent, you had this program. What’s for the future and what makes you different? Okay, what’s for the future? Future is world domination, of course. Awesome, spoken like a true yank.
14:44 Yeah, absolutely. We want to be in the next two years everywhere on the planet that you see log on with Facebook or log on with Google, be it on an app, be it on a website, whatever. And the reason for that is because unlike Google and Facebook, we do not harvest any of your data. So we give you, for the first time, a private transaction with that website or that company that you’re dealing with. So when you’ve finished that transaction, we don’t know where you’ve been.
15:18 Yes, they’ve taken some information from you because you’ve wanted to purchase something. You then go to another website. That second website doesn’t know you’ve been speaking to website A. So privacy is really, really important. And I’ve been on some kind of government crangoes myself over the last four years to do with privacy.
15:36 And there’s legislation coming through the government, as I’m sure you’re aware, with all of the hoo-ha with the NSA and GCHQ this year. It’s the best advertising we’ve ever had, thank you. And so privacy is really, really important. Was that always part of your business plan from day one? Always, always.
15:56 So how does Pixel Pin get involved in hiding where you’ve been before and after? Because we simply don’t look after that information. So Pixel Pin is a consumer product or do you sell it to a Facebook or something? It’s a business to business product. So the aim is that website owners can log into Pixel Pin and just set up an account.
16:19 So we’re essentially a global single sign on solution that uses pictures. So as time progresses, there will be Pixel Pin logos all over the world. And wherever you see that, if you have a Pixel Pin account, then you can use that to log in. Right. Good.
16:36 All right. And finally, why would you win in this space? Why you guys? Why this small company? Why a startup in the UK?
16:43 Why? Because this is serious business. Yeah, it is serious business. I think the why comes from the people who are involved in the business and the history of the people involved in the business. We all come from essentially large organisations who, quite frankly, haven’t got the bandwidth to do the job and when they do do something, they don’t generally do it very well and I’ll give you the best example that I can, which is Microsoft is a huge organisation.
17:12 They do have a picture password login for Windows 8 but it’s a very small team who put it together and they were forced to push the phone out very quickly and it has already been hacked and broken because they’re just using what they used to normally do. We’ve taken a very different view, taking military grade encryption algorithms and everything we do we encrypt, so every single piece of information. We don’t do any of the normal industry standard stuff. The other thing is, this is all we do. So you’ve probably worked in large organisations and you’ve gone, hey, I’ve got a really good idea, can I do it? And they say, no, get on with your day job. They’ve got different priorities. So this is our one area of expertise which we can grow in terms of a roadmap going into things like identity management and all sorts of things. There’s a whole world of stuff out there. We’ve just got to get this bit going first.
18:11 Okay. Fair enough. All right. Well, this is where we get real during the show and we hit you with some devil’s advocate questions. I hope you’ve got one.
18:17 Got one. one right let’s talk something quickly like the new iPhone the new iPhone has the thumb the thumbprint biometric to get you in so are you at all worried that biometrics are going to completely pass your pixel pin solution by and if so why or why not not at all a couple years ago my business partner Jeff was part of the UK passport and identity group and I don’t know if you know but in the UK nobody’s ever had a requirement to carry IDs and we will never do that as a nation. And one of the reasons he discovered was there are over a million fingerprints on the police databases of unsolved crimes. So there’s a million people who are not going to ask for an ID card.
19:10 But also being accountable in that way is just abhorrent in the UK. The other thing is with biometrics, they are becoming very good, they are becoming robust but it’s still not a kind of technology that you can roll out easily. It also incorporates and costs money because you have to have physical hardware to either look at your retina, your thumbprint, whatever it is and at present it can be easily spoofed as unfortunately within 24 hours Apple found out when somebody put a thumbprint onto a jelly bean and got into the iPhone with that. So it’s time will come. There are situations in government and probably military where individuals will be forced to use it but it’s not ready for the wider populace and it won’t be for the next 20 years. I’ll even give another example of the Irish scanning systems that were put in for fast tracking the yeah I saw those they got taken out this year really okay because you were allowed to voluntarily give you your eye info to get through faster yeah and no one wanted to do it is that no no it wasn’t no one wanted to do it was with too many false negatives so kind of anybody was going up to and it was letting them through or just not letting the right people through okay so the tech wasn’t there they have that in Canada in the US though the iris scanning yet? Do people use it for frequent flyers? Yeah, it still exists.
20:42 Okay. Colin, what do you got? What do you got for us? Well, you always go first on these and he took mine. I’ve got another one. There’s lots of them. I guess for, I don’t really understand the technology behind sort of the picture and just pixie. How do you patent that? Is it the technology behind the encryption?
21:05 Or, because for me it seems very difficult to sort of just control that idea, right? That’s not an unreasonable question. In the UK you can’t patent software. In America you can patent software, but what you can patent is process. So anything that is repeatable, you can patent that process.
21:28 The patent for using a picture as a password unfortunately has lapsed. So that’s part of the investigation that I did. And whoever had that didn’t have the foreground of what it is or whatever it was to keep it going. But it’s out there in the public domain. So it’s available to anybody to do.
21:47 Microsoft have implemented it. Microsoft have their own patent that, essentially they’re not particularly following because even though they’ve got a picture, they’re not actually following their own patent. And I can give you the details of that. Samsung have their patent very specifically as the nine dots on on their Samsung phones and things like that But what the patent is is very much about the process behind what we do. So as I mentioned earlier Almost anybody could come up and implement something like this But because of our specialist knowledge and expertise and where we’ve come from over the last 20-30 years is we’re doing it to the highest standards.
22:31 So we hope, ultimately, to be the role’s voice of this kind of thing. Because there are a couple of minis out there and they’re not very good. So I guess that’s a huge sort of hurdle of branding and awareness and education. It’s branding, awareness. Well, actually, the education part, bless them, love them, hug them, Microsoft is spending millions on educating the world for us about Windows 8, for example, using a picture.
23:00 The nice thing about Windows 8 is they can only use their technology on any Windows product. And about three years ago, I did a little bit of work in Reading at their campus. And they wanted us to put our front end onto their SharePoint product. There was no money forthcoming, and I was spending my own money, so I said, no, we won’t do it. But what I’ve learned is we can replace their front end.
23:24 So when we get there, we’re in a stronger position than they are. You know, you’re one of the couple of Wera companies we’ve spoken with. We had Simon Devinshire, the guy, you know, the head of Wera here in London, and we had High Life in here, what, last week, two weeks ago. What was it like going through the Wera process, and then what’s it like post-Wera? That’s what I always wanna know.
23:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wera is a real godsend. It was the first opportunity, all of us as a group, we were able to sit together. We are spread over the country, the West Country, And so three times a week, for example, we video conference in the morning to say what we’re doing, what we did yesterday, what we’re going to do tomorrow. This is your team.
24:06 That’s right. So to have that facility, A, to sit there and actually be together and work was great. The other thing is, as I’ve mentioned, my background is very much military communications. Really, really happy walking into any big company you want. But I can’t speak finance.
24:24 I’ve never had to do, you know, terms of employment. I’ve never had to do equity stakes, anything else like that. So WYRI was really, really good because they educated us with all of those things. They had amazing motivational speakers coming in, not just motivational speakers, but people who have been there, done it, and actually simplified some of the, some of the, especially in the, in the side of equity and the SEIS, EIS, all of these kind of things that we’re still learning about.
24:56 So that was a fantastic opportunity. We took a lot out of it, but we also put a lot into it as well. And having, so it was a fantastic experience. I wouldn’t change it for anything. When was this?
25:12 What period? It was July 12 until April 13.
25:20 And so, yeah, that was really, really cool. So you were in there with High Life? Yeah. Cool. Yeah.
25:27 But the other thing is being with other people as well and seeing how they’re operating and being able to ask questions of each other. And also the introductions. I remember on the, I think it was the second day we were there, the center area, the Agora, there were about 70 people in there, and somebody was talking to them. And they were making quite a lot of noise. And I’m going, oh, just keep quiet, will you?
25:50 For goodness I’m trying to work here you know and then at the end the speaker said so go and have a chat to the teams they’re just in the pods behind you you know anyway so people turned up and I was polite at that point of course and so we showed them what we were doing and then and they were going that’s amazing yeah we could so we’ll differentiate we could you so do you mind if I ask who you are yeah where’s Samsung you know mobile phone manufacturers and it was actually Telefonica’s global annual briefing to all of their handset manufacturers and people like that so there’s no way I could have got in front of people like that yeah and there’s been many more stories like it. Okay and what’s it been like being separated from the womb you know was there was there some shock at first? Oh always. It’s been what seven months right? Okay. Well actually there’s been shock and discontent I think we have to say because everybody got so used to being there and so I’m very pragmatic about things. We have so much money we’re going to do so much with it and so I said we’re going back to Tech Hub because we were at Tech Hub before. We got desk. Oh sorry, back to Tech Hub.
26:57 We’re going to start charging. Exactly. New business model. And anyway so we went back to take up because it is perfect for us. We get two, three days a week in there as a team, and if we’re then out at the minimum of two to three days a week selling, we want shooting in the head. So that works really well. So it was difficult to start off with for everyone just to settle down, but as soon as the team had sat in there for a couple of hours, it’s It’s like, it’s really cool.
27:34 Okay. What’s going on in the next year for you guys? Do you have certain companies, certain sectors that you’re targeting? Yeah. Is it mostly big business?
27:44 Are you going after, you know, the consumer? And then from there, I’ll ask you more questions. Sure. Right. Initially, we’ve actually gone live on a few websites, mainly in the startup world, because, you know, they’re very flexible and very quick to do things.
28:00 Only enough, we’ve also been incorporated into the technology strategy board’s website. But what’s really interesting there, they managed to incorporate it into two hours, and it’s taken the best part of six months to actually go live. It goes live next week. So dealing with big companies and small companies is very different. But we have…
28:23 So what you mean by go live? I can actually go and create an account on Pixelpin as of next week or as of today. Sorry, Pixel Pin itself, you can set an account up today and it’s been live in under beta since July. But when you go to the technology stretchboard site, you’ll be able to log in and do transactions on that. We’re on a couple of other websites as well, but what we’ve done is we’ve concentrated on two aspects, the self-service side and people have just come along to the website and signed up and plugged in and they’re away working which is fantastic which is exactly what we want.
29:04 But the other side is the big business side so we do need to address that and we’re splitting in between fintech, e-commerce and essentially betting and we’ve gone into those three areas specifically for, you know, very, very sensible business reasons. And so the FinTech area, we’re really fortunate enough to be dealing with and doing a proof of concept with a big high street bank at the moment. We’re talking to a few other banks as well, so there’s more to more to address there in the coming weeks and months. On the e-commerce side, we’re doing user trials and have been for best part of a year now going into a proof of concept and a live trial with them in the next couple of weeks. So all of these proofs of concept trials are essentially paid for trials as well so when we go to our VCs and people that we want to raise money from they say yes it’s a great idea but we want to see real business being done. So that’s starting to happen now and the final one, the betting is because it’s you know we it’s on your mobile phone as well it’s on laptops it’s on tablets or whatever it is you might be down the pub and you want to cheeky bet on your favorite team you might have had a few beers so being able to log in and not have to remember a password and use a picture is a lot easier I do most of my best testing on a Friday and Saturday night down the local pub. So yeah, I know my limit when I can’t log in. And so that’s a good thing.
30:48 So big business to bedding is big business. But bedding has a huge amount of cash available to it. And they are they are the the the pace setters in the technology. So that’s why we’re down down those three particular routes. Fantastic. And his telefonica, it seems like a perfect relationship potentially? Yeah, Telefonica we’re doing work with but unfortunately Telefonica are like the other big companies, they’re huge and so we are engaging at various levels on their front end for the O2 website. Internally for Wira Global, we’re talking to their guys down in Madrid and there are other meetings coming up as well. So it It is happening, but I don’t think Telefónica know that Wirer is their internal businesses as well.
31:41 But it’s a strange situation, but that’s changing quite dramatically. You know, I’ve got to ask you a question, Brian. And you have a unique perspective in this way, unlike any of the guests we’ve ever had. You’re no spring chicken, are you? That’s a fact.
31:55 As you said in your Wirer thing, you’re wise. So you must have been older than anyone else in the Wirer space. I think myself and my business partner, Jeff, we beat everybody and just adding our ages together was the average age of the other 16 teams. So yeah, we’re not spring check-ins. And what do you see, because I’m not either, and I must say when I look at this whole industry for the last 20 weeks, there’s so much energy going on, and you go one of these three beards events and everyone’s talking about these great ideas.
32:31 I used to say, people are excited about their jobs, which is an amazing thing. What do you see that maybe other people don’t when you’re watching this younger generation? And what do you think you add, not being part of that generation? Well, actually, it’s funny because you kind of see yourself as part of that generation, which is dangerous in its own right, because my body can’t take it anymore. And drink a bit every night, isn’t it?
32:55 Absolutely, yeah. But it’s really good, it’s fantastic to see. So many very, very clever people excited about what they do. I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve had three different careers in my life so far, 10 years in the military, 20 years in military air space companies, and now this.
33:16 And this is the best job I’ve ever had. There’s no doubt about it. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. But the energy, it’s infectious, and it does keep you going. I always ask this question to people on the show, if you had to get out of security for the next few years and sign a non-compete agreement and go into some other tech sector in London, what would you go do?
33:39 I mean, you’ve seen a slew of companies at Waira, you just mentioned things like Fintech which are huge in this city, like if you had to walk away from Pixelpin, what would you go do? You wouldn’t go back to the military, I guess. Why not? It’s always going to be there. I do know what my next start-up is going to be and I’m very happy to share it because I’m sure somebody will do it before I get the opportunity to do it and that is to have virtual windows. The flat that I live in looks onto a brick wall. I’ve got daylight coming in but I want to incorporate a flat LCD screen, high definition imagery from around the world of beautiful places and guess what, somebody’s going to have to go and film it. So that’s me and then be able to stream it there, but connect it up to like the Microsoft Connect.
34:29 So as you walk towards it, things, you know, the perspective changes. So that’s, so if anybody out there wants to do that, go for it, because I want one. To afford those windows, you wouldn’t have a brick wall, maybe looking out into the window. So that’s kind of a catch-22. If you can afford the technology, you can afford the better flat.
34:49 It’s only a TV screen Prices are always coming down anyways So five years from now, where do you guys want to be? Do you want to be on every on every security? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Are we gonna go to ATM machines and be pressing pixel pen? There is there is that possibility We’ve even spoken to BMW about you know, starting their high-end cars because they do have touch screens in there So it could be anything you know anything that you’ve got to log into and has a touchscreen and talk to us about this whole, you know, Edward Snowden, I mean, is he your angel investor in a weird way?
35:23 Has this really helped you, a lot of this, you know, extra security concern or not? You asked him to hack it? Yeah, yeah. This is actually a double-edged sword. My whole career has been security-based, the official secrets out there, this, that and the other.
35:41 And so, being in the kind of commercial world that I’m in now, I’ve also had to learn to speak to people because the best way to keep a secret is just not to tell anybody. So now having to go out and promote your own business, it’s an unusual thing for somebody of my background to have to do. So the double-edged sword part is Edward Snowden, in my view, has done the wrong thing for the right reasons and which is fine. GCHQ and the NSA, bless them, they got caught doing what they should have been doing in the first place, because that’s their job.
36:21 Has it been good for us? Absolutely, because it’s brought security into the public awareness, and it’s a big and very, very important topic. You said he did the wrong thing for the right reasons. What did you mean by that? Well, he signed an official Secrets Act thing.
36:38 You signed something, that’s your word, you don’t change it. I’m just coming to the end of certain things that I’ve worked in that have a 20 year life on them and I’ve not been able to talk about them. And I never have. And is that your view, is your view pretty much the same across the intelligence community, would you say? I don’t understand the question.
36:56 Like your former peers, do they kind of agree with you as far as once you do sign up, then you kind of, it is an oath. Yeah, absolutely, it’s kind of old school, I know, but yeah, you’ve got to have some integrity. And on that same line, Were you ever hesitant to talk about your tech in such an open way because you’re worried about your idea getting grabbed? Yeah, but the other part is you’ve got to talk about your idea to get it out there. And whether it’s grabbed or not, if it is grabbed, then we’ll just have another competitor.
37:29 It won’t stop us doing what we’re doing. There’s a huge pie out there, a huge pie. Do you think NDAs are an anachronism? They are, but they were a sign of trust and commitment. Have you ever used them?
37:44 Yeah, absolutely. Okay. What do you think, Colin? You look at businesses every day when you see something like this. Sure.
37:51 I wonder if you could maybe touch on the revenue model a little bit, because I guess in the short term, I guess just maybe explain some of the revenue side of things. As we say, business to business sales, so the web company will use our services. We charge on a per user per month basis, and we don’t mind if the end user uses the system once a month or a thousand times a month. We just charge for that one-off user. So that kind of caps things for the business as well.
38:26 But are they paying now for sort of the security that’s provided? So they don’t… Maybe like HSBC, I have the token and my password. Yes. Is someone getting revenue in the background?
38:37 Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah, because the people who are making those devices, the hardware devices, I think they’re about $15 to $20 a time. So someone’s making a lot of money out of that. $15 to $20 per piece of kit.
38:51 Each time I… Oh, per piece of kit. I was like, no. No, no, no. RSA tokens, the things that change every minute, they’re about $15 a pop, I believe, but they’re all hardware-based, so there is an industry making money out of that, now this is a pure software sale, so there’s no additional hardware costs, no additional integration costs.
39:16 So the revenue model is very much a per usage. What we’re also noticing going into the three markets that we were talking about earlier is that people want to have an annual license fee, may want to own the software on their own servers, and that’s fine because I did a few years in heading up professional services for an Intel company, and we can do all of that. But ultimately, it needs to be a balance of both. So we need revenue coming in from large companies and then we need multiple revenues coming in from small companies and it will grow through that way.
39:57 Do you need to relocate to the US at some point? Is that a market you need to be in, boots on the ground as we would say? I’ve had the pleasure of working in San Francisco and Silicon Valley myself with this company called Wind River which is now an Intel company. I’m not sure it’s necessary. Having somebody there, I think, is going to be necessary. And we do fortunately have people in the wings who are saying, hey, I’m here, I can make a local call, I can get on the local aircraft and we can do business that way. If we as an internet business and a digital business can’t do deals without having to get on an aeroplane, then I think we need to be shot.
40:39 You think so yeah absolutely yeah it you know it is always important to have that first personal contact yeah but after that I’ve done sales in the past with with Wind River and I’ve not met my customers after the first time and you know I’ve made good money right but you didn’t mean that once oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that’s why we need somebody on the ground in those countries interesting Quick question. You were kind of one of the success stories from crowdfunding. Yeah.
41:11 So maybe, and did you raise on cedars? We raised on, we actually raised on both. Okay. We raised on Crowdcube at the same time as we got the investment from Telefonica. Okay.
41:25 For convoluted kind of legal reasons we were told that or advised that we couldn’t take the money. because of the business model that CrowdCube were using. I believe CrowdCube have now fixed that and we could have done that now, I guess. How much would you have raised on CrowdCube? 55,000 pounds.
41:46 About the same that Waira gave you? Yes. Roughly, okay. And the issue is because of the timing of Waira? The issue was to do with, at the time, the nominee structure.
41:55 The legal structure. Yeah, the nominee structure. Whereas on Cedars, and we’ve raised a full SAIS round of £150,000 with them, Cedars already has or had and still has the single nominee structure so we’re not dealing with the best part of 200 individual shareholders, it’s managed via Cedars. So you have raised money on Cedars? Yeah, 150,000. When did that close? April this year. Okay, all right. And what did you think of the whole experience, equity crowdfunding experience? I think it’s great.
42:23 It’s great for two reasons. One, actually three. One, it gets you out of the clutches of the VCs because you actually go out and do something and it gives you breathing time and then breathing time. Two, it allows armchair investors to actually do something which is a punt possibly, but there is a potential of real return. So it’s small amounts, you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. And the final part is, for us, we found it really important that people got the message, understood it, and it kind of validated the product and what we were doing, because it’s not just me in my little bubble, there’s 300 people out there going, this is a good idea.
43:06 Yeah, no, it’s definite credibility. You mentioned the clutches of the VC, are the VC in your future, is the Series A in your future and how do you feel about that step? Yeah, no, the absolute 100% is a VC and Series A in the future and the big difference, and again, this is all part of our learning over the last two years, the big difference is finding the right VC, not only for the right amount of money and the right amount of equity, but that can bring us to bring speciality to bear, open marketplaces, all of those kinds of things. So essentially bringing the smart money, the big money has to be smart money and opening those doors. We are in discussions with various firms and they’re always very polite which is nice and always have better coffee than I do, but you don’t expect that.
44:00 But that will come in and we’re working on that now. Okay, but it’s not a necessity right now. It’s not a necessity but it is something that we want to be able to boost the business and grow the team. The cash raise will primarily be marketing I guess in the business or do you need more cash in the technology side? So we’re running two models of self-signup and a professional services.
44:26 As soon as you get into professional services, you need more people, technical people, and you need good technical people. So there will be a growing of that. There will be a growing of the sales and marketing team, and then pure marketing, so advertising the whole bit. So it’s a three-way split, essentially. And when are you looking to raise?
44:47 We’d like to have that sorted out by March, April next year. He has the VCs if you’re listening. Yeah, get in touch He has the posture of a man who is not desperate for VC money. And I like that you can tell you can tell in their eyes But he’ll wear your t-shirt if you give money, right? Yeah You know Brian I want to finish on a question we ask all this people that come here on Silicon real and London Real for That matter. So here we go If you can make a phone call to the 20 year old Brian Taylor give that young man a bit of advice What would you tell him to do or not do? This is a lot of life lived there, too It’s only one bit How old are you, Brian? I’m 55
45:31 The strike kid was his name, John Carlson He was 23? Yeah, 23 He had to think back three years I think I asked him what the 15-year-old John would do 35 years ago, I’m back here That’s gonna take your time Actually, there would be three separate areas, but I will only answer one because I’m still going through legal angles with one of them. I can probably guess that one. You got it. The best bit of advice I would make is start quicker and never give up, and that’s it and persevere.
46:07 I’ve done startups, but for various reasons in the past, I’ve always gone, no, that’s hard and it is about perseverance. Okay and that’s what you’ve noticed with pixel pen, just keep going. Absolutely. Okay on that same note what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? Actually the best advice that I’ve received was at Wira and it wasn’t a guest speaker it was actually Simon Devinchere and he gave an anecdotal thing of being in a race and he used to be an athlete and he said as soon as you look back at the competition you you lose. So just keep going. You know there’s competition behind you, but just keep going.
46:43 And I really like that. That’s like spoken like a sprinter. You’re saying Bolt says that as well. Any of the 100 yard dash guys, 100 meter, they always say, never look to the side. Never. Like you said, you know they’re there, but you’ve got one thing to do. And if you look at the pros, that’s all they do.
46:57 Yeah. But it’s such a good point, but it’s always a question when you talk to money people, right? They’re always like, oh, what if you do if this person, you know, if Facebook or Google comes into your industry, and you just kind of say, it’s possible, it’s always possible, right? Yeah, good. Bring it on.
47:15 Yeah, but just focus. Yeah, last bit of advice, and you do have a unique perspective here, but to the 20-year-old that’s listening who wants to get into the tech startup industry, I mean, they’re hearing all this news about it, they see all these successes, what advice do you give to them? I have an engineering background, and so I did an apprenticeship, I worked on high high voltage radio systems, tropical scatter systems, telephone systems, stuff like that.
47:43 As a 16 to 20 year old, either get an apprenticeship, start looking up free education on programming. The last time that I programmed, I was programming in hexadecimal on a Z80 chip. I don’t understand all of the concepts that people are talking about right now. But the advice is just get stuck into it. If you want to play about in that area and love it, you’ll make a living, a good living.
48:12 So get a bit of a technical background. Yeah. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. If you could give advice to the 50-year-old listening to this, wanting to maybe take that idea that they’ve had and make it a reality.
48:24 Good question. That’s what you did, right? Yeah. Just do it. I mean, what you got to lose?
48:29 Well, a lot, I guess. A lot of people think, you know, 50, maybe you got a mortgage, some kids, some school costs. How do you make that jump? I think that’s so hard for people to get over in their mind. And I think that’s the difference between people who do a day job and people who will actually take that risk.
48:46 And I’ve generally been a risk taker. It’s just a mentality shift, isn’t it? All you have to do is believe that it’s worth the sacrifice to do that. In addition to that, maybe it’s because of my background and 10 years in the army, it’s like you don’t give up. You just get on with it and do it.
49:07 That’s good stuff. Colin, what did I miss? What did I miss? Did we add everything? Yeah, I think it’s good.
49:12 I think it’s great advice, great story. I love the technology. I love this technology. I see it being scalable. I like you guys take on the market and like you said, more competition, the better.
49:23 There’s plenty of pie out there. Absolutely. something you’re looking for or was that something you wouldn’t want because you actually want to have it open to everyone? No, no, an exit is absolutely part of the business plan. So in the next three to five years we want to wait. Because we’re not spring chickens and I want to go back flying again. You want to take those pictures for your window. Flying, where are you flying? What were you flying? I’m a private pilot and I’ve been flying since I was about 13 gliders and things like that but for the last four years I haven’t been able to afford it because I spent all my money on this.
49:55 Okay, so the exit is to get back in the air. Yeah. Although it seems like this guy isn’t gonna be out of the business for a while. Seems like you got some startups in your mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
50:04 You don’t seem like the beach type for the rest of your life. Awesome, Brian, thanks so much for being here. Really cool idea. We haven’t really had someone on that talked about TSB. We haven’t really had a technology that’s so scalable like this.
50:16 It’s incredible, yeah. And it has a lot of B2B purposes. So thanks so much for being here. Pleasure. Silicon Real News, things going on?
50:24 Donate. Donate to Movember. Donate to Movember. Yeah, we got our new Silicon Real website rolling out, should be live next week. It’s going to have all the episodes up there, you can easy to find everyone, we’ll contact info, everything.
50:37 Yeah, and once we launch the new website, we’re looking for ideas and blog and it would be cool to try to create a one-stop sort of area where people can find out stuff. Yeah, we’re looking for guest blogs, especially from former guests on the show and there’ll be a lot more going on there. So check that out, we’re on Twitter at Silicon Real. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, come check us out on YouTube. You can see all of our unspring, chicken-like faces, except for you, on YouTube channel, Silicon Real.
51:03 And that’s it, it’s episode 21. 21. It’s pretty awesome, right? Not bad. Over five months.
51:09 Yeah. In our third season right now. Third season. And there we go, as we say, it’s about the people. And thanks, Brian, for being here, I appreciate it.
51:15 Thank you. All right, guys, take care. Cheers, man.
