Bryce Keane - London's Silicon Roundabout

Full transcript: Bryce Keane on London Real

7:18 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest host today is Mr Colin Pyle, who you would have seen on the show. What about a month ago about that? Yeah, yeah.

7:28 This guy had a currency brokerage startup in Toronto in ’08. I believe you sold that. You hung out for a couple years, and then you decided to ride your bike across China for 60 days with his brother Ryan. 18,000 kilometers later, you get a Guinness Book of World Records. How do you say that?

7:44 By the way, just a quick Guinness Book of World Records. Okay, yeah, I think so. That wasn’t enough so you decided to do the same thing in India. Yeah, you filmed the whole thing. Are you still on the travel channel, or is that?

7:55 Yeah, well, it, the runs finish, but they’ll redo it. I don’t know when, for the China ride, the indy ride won’t be out for a little while. Anyways, this year maybe. Okay, that’s cool. Or you can see it on YouTube as well.

8:06 Now, Colin, is what can I call you? Like, a startup potential entrepreneur based in London. Sure, yeah. Okay, look out London. So that’s Colin.

8:14 Our guest today is Mr Bryce Keane, who is the founder and director of Albion Drive. I am. Yeah, that’s a PR and social agency for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. You have to tell me what that means later. I’ll run you through it.

8:26 Okay, but you might know him more as one of the Three Beards, and it’s a nice beard. Thank you. I trimmed, right, just for this. This is a pretty good beard. Yeah, yeah, I know.

8:35 You know, we’ll get into that later, but these guys run something called the Silicon Drinkabout here in London, which is a free weekly industry get-together. I think for the startup, these are the biggest after work drinks for startups. Now, I think what I love about that is the fact that, you know, you don’t have to sign up, and they don’t screen or do all this. So you just show up, right? Yeah, yeah.

8:53 I mean, it’s sort of a one of three events we run, and it’s definitely the most regular, accessible. It’s just show up. We just started using social and getting the word out, and just doing it every week. And I think the consistency, as well. Yeah, though, I love that.

9:05 I’m just going to get through the rest of it. You also do an event called Digital Sizzle. Yup, which is a larger, I think single-day event. Yeah, that’s quarterly. Okay, quarterly, cool.

9:13 And then You have something called Don’t Pitch Me Bro. Yes, we do. Such a cool name. I do like where I think it’s where entrepreneurs, our founders, can get up and pitch their company ideas in front of an audience of up to 100 people, and then you get live feedback and suggestions. Close, no catching.

9:27 That’s the name. So we actually, we ask for specifically, just for live product demos. And it can be MVP, so minimum viable product, and you have to come armed with, you know, some developmental challenges you’re facing, and then we give them seven and a half minutes to run us through the product, tell us what you, what you’re struggling with, and then we turn the audience over to 120 people in the audience help them solve that problem. So you can’t pitch the company.

9:49 You just have to describe what you’re making. You have to walk them through the product, and it can be as simple as it can be as simple as like a, I mean, could be something you hack together in your bedroom, or we have properly established businesses. The trick is like helping founders take a step back and using the wisdom of the crowds that we built up from our community to solve that problem. Crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing. Yeah, and then, you know, we sort of feed and give people beers, and it’s also obviously a big community.

10:11 Everything we do is focused on community building, so that’s kind of cool, because I’m sure all these guys are used to pitching their revenue projections, and you make them just concentrate on product, the essence of their company, which is just the product. And more importantly, that we make them think about, like, we give them an avenue when they’re struggling with stuff. Like, I literally don’t know what to do. Should I do this? Should I do that?

10:32 Should I pivot this way? Should you go that way? Do you think I should aim at this market, that market? Actually, come in, do you do your demo and we’ll let people tell you, like, let people, and we, I will say this, that we have, very, with all of our Beards events, but this one particularly, a very militant house rule, which is only constructive criticism. Okay.

10:49 There’s enough, there’s enough slagging off in tech as it is. We work really hard to make sure everything we do is quite like focused on helping people rather than kind of tearing them down. So we are very militant about the fact that, like, you know, share your knowledge, your wisdom, but do it in a way that’s like constructive, like, and people actually. I actually thought we would have more of a problem with that, but we didn’t. Everybody just loves it.

11:07 I mean, it’s definitely probably start off with a positive vibe, and then it just stays that way. Yeah, basically. And the thing is, we can open it up, right? We can. We have, we have PR marketing people.

11:16 We have lawyers. We have finance people. We don’t, we don’t have investors generally, just because then those entrepreneurs would probably you know, they would automatically revert to pitch mode, which we don’t want, and they’d be less likely to talk about the problems, which is actually the point of the event. It’s like… yeah.

11:31 So we keep it kind of like everyone else. So everyone else on the journey of a product from MVP right through to scalable. We usually, from the Three Beards community, we tend to have people from all different walks of life, all of whom are interested in technology, is the, as the uniting factor. So that gives us an amazing pool of people to pull in. Very cool.

11:47 All right. Awesome. Well, first of all, welcome to London Real. I think you’ve, we’ve already started talking to you. I wanted to first of all apologize, because our studio is located basically in Silicon Roundabout.

11:58 It is. We’ve been doing this for almost two years, and I’m kind of embarrassed we’ve never had anyone really from the industry whatsoever on the show. What’s wrong with me? I mean, a lot of our guests, like, you know, Tim Ferriss and Daniel Pink, they go here to the Google campus. Yeah, and they love the fact that we’re here because it’s convenient, but we’ve never actually, dove into it, so I apologize.

12:18 And, thanks for coming on to represent. Thanks for having me. Man, I’m, I’m not faced. No, it’s happy to be here, because like you’re not, and I mean, you are an entrepreneur because you work at Albion, but you’re also a guy that gets all these people together, so you’re probably perfect for, for the beginning. I wanted to ask you first, you know, for someone who doesn’t live in London, who, somewhere around the world, maybe they’re in Silicon Valley, or Silicon Alley in New York.

12:38 What’s going on in the London tech startup industry in general? What’s the feel? What would people be surprised to know? I bet they’d be surprised that there’s someone doing what you guys do, which is build this community, because I’m guessing it doesn’t exist in other cities. Yeah, I think we’ve been very lucky, I think, in that sense, and that is a little bit of right place, right time, and a lot of hard work.

12:59 I think we, in the two years we’ve been doing this now, we’ve, we’ve watched an amazing community grow around not just our events. Obviously, as you do it more and more, you know, you’re connected in and you’ve got other events, and there’s been a huge boom in the numbers of, what I would call sort of a next generation of entrepreneurs, because you have to remember London obviously, had the first dot-com boom, 99, 2000, which was a much more, concentrated group, but there was silly money flying around, and there was the crash, so London’s been kind of rebuilding as well, same as sort of Europe. I mean, Europe’s had, particularly recently, a couple of shaky periods.

13:34 So what were some of the startups in 99, 2000 in Britain? I, I don’t remember. I actually went back from Britain to the U.S. just to do a startup myself, so I kind of missed the scene here, but I don’t remember, like, names, but were there, what was it? Big. So it was, and I, you know, I should know more of these.

13:51 I know sort of there were some of the ones like, like, Mike Acton Smith from Mind Candy. before Mind Candy, before he had Moshi Monsters, with mushrooms fame. He had a number of iterations of, he had this one called Perplex City, which was sort of a somewhere between a real-world game, like a kind of a puzzle quest thing that was kind of going on around then. I mean, he’s done a couple of companies. Okay, they’ll have to tell me about those companies, because I don’t know him.

14:16 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m not sure. I bet you forget sometimes that people aren’t in your industry and they should know what Mind Candy is, right? No, no, I just have to, I just have to call home, and I get reminded. He’s almost like, 99, 2000.

14:28 It’s so long ago now, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The internet and tech businesses have changed so much. Absolutely massive. But also, that I guess the thing that fuels that, of course, is always, and there are a number of factors to this, but I mean obviously after the first dot-com boom, there was a massive crunch in capital, and so you know people were investing, and the money went through a really tight period, venture in particular.

14:49 Now there’s an amazing, I mean, there is a phenomenal access to capital in London, particularly early stage. Not just venture, angels, seed funding, crowdfunding is taking off, with people like Seedrs, obviously and you know those sorts of things. There has it, and it’s interesting. I, with work actually in January, I did a startup tour across Central and Eastern Europe, so we did 10 countries in 10 days. Jesus, with an accelerator called Wayra, which is owned by Telefonica, the giant.

15:19 W-A-Y-R-A. What do we do? We did Berlin, Vienna, Bratislava Zagreb, London, Prague. No, sorry. Tallinn, Ljubljana, Warsaw, and Bucharest, and it was every night a different event, and I say we met some amazing people, but it really, one of the things really hit home was actually just how much opportunity we have in London now.

15:44 If you want to start a business, it, I mean, from their financing perspective, from community, from finance, from facility, things like Campus. I mean, the Google Campus around the corner as you mentioned. I mean, that was the first ever in the world. Google had never done anything like that, a completely open source building, which had one Google staff member in an office at the top. The rest was all companies and startups, right?

16:02 That was completely, that was the UK government lobbying Google. That was the taxi investment organizations were doing that to bring that to London. They’ve since expanded that concept to Tel Aviv, so they don’t have Google Campus in Tel Aviv, so to prove that the concept works. I mean, there’s just, there’s just so many sort of things that are kind of coming together. I mean, I’m quite, we’ve always been quite optimistic in what we do, and I remain that way, just because I think you, I think it’s really, particularly here, there is a sort of a kind of a mentality to kind of be a little bit down and be a bit like, you know, looking at the valley and looking at everywhere else, and like, we don’t have any, you know, where are we?

16:37 Big IPOs, where are the billion-dollar companies? you know, we’re 30 years behind Silicon Valley. 30 years. Yeah, 30 years behind. If you, if you think, and also think about this one.

16:46 So Silicon Valley, for a start, is not a place. It’s a marketing concept, in the same way Tech City is. It’s a peace of mind, right? Geographically, if you take the area that comprises of Silicon Valley and you whack it over London from King’s Cross, you would almost certainly encompass Cambridge, Oxford, probably parts of Southampton. So those are, I mean, Cambridge has been to produce a number of billion-dollar companies, right, and more in the hardware space.

17:10 Like, you open up an iPhone, there’s no American parts in it, right? The software and the design is all Apple. It’s amazing company. The chips are like Cambridge Silicon Radio, ARM, up in Cambridge. They have an amazing record of producing the things that go inside the things we use every day, right?

17:26 But you just don’t know, because it’s not something you can see, like in the way that you can see an iPhone. You can say, that’s an iPhone, but actually, if you take, open up, like, what’s inside an iPhone that makes it work, a lot of that stuff’s coming out of Cambridge. So, so what was your point about Silicon Valley, that it’s a concept. So, I think it’s the point that people always want to look and say that we’re not, you know, there’s a little bit of a mentality of being a bit sort of negative about the whole thing, I think, and I think I see a lot.

17:54 You see the step with the step-sister. Yeah, you know, we’re not there. Why aren’t we there and all this sort of down. And I actually, I, we kind of as part of Three Beards, we go completely opposite of that. We’re like, in two years we’ve seen more things happen in the city.

18:05 And if you take a step out and look across Europe, you know, there’s tons of European entrepreneurs who are desperate to kind of move here, you know, because let’s be honest, London is, and I, you know, the finance capital of Europe for a start. So first of all, you’ve got two things. You’ve got Europe’s finance capital, so you’ve got the banks, the City, next to the tech capital, so those two things English-speaking, too. Exactly. Pretty fluid labor market with, with Europe, with you, not with the US.

18:32 Yeah, so much. Why Silicon, though? Like, why, if we’re, if it’s different, if it’s better, or if it, you know, it’s this Silicon name? It’s just, it’s in reference to Drinkabout. Yeah, okay.

18:42 So I should explain that. So do you, ’cause that’s kind of part of the story of where we came from, which is that, the, yeah, yeah. What are the Three Beards? What’s with the beards? And then, got me from, take us there to where the Drinkabout, yeah, cool, cool.

18:54 So, people often ask us, you know, aren’t you worried that you, you are never allowed to shave? Yeah, that’s one of my questions. But so, so, to answer that question, no, because we’ve done November the past two years in a row, and I’ve seen what that looks like, and this isn’t for me. Guys, I can’t see this this is for your benefit, okay? I’m doing that.

19:10 I’m doing this for the wives and children of Britain. Okay, it’s bad man, it’s bad. There’s nothing good about that. No, Three Beards was never, it never started as a brand. It started as an event called the Digital Sizzle, which is our first event.

19:24 It started as three guys who met very randomly, actually, at a sort of a meet-up event in here in Shoreditch, who could have just as easily not met and met at the same event again a month later, and it was all a bit haphazard. There wasn’t much going on. We happened to become mates, and it was quite like, but we end up, sort of, second month, kind of having a few drinks and thought, yeah, well, we shall go and check out what other people are doing, because this event’s a bit kind of iffy.

19:48 This is two years ago. Years ago. You’re about two hundred, yeah. Two, two and a half years ago now. And we went around, we paid, we, and we sort of went to other business, we went to, like, a ten-pound meetup, and we had to sit on the floor and buy our beers to hear somebody talk, and we were like, this isn’t s*** right.

20:01 Right, like, this is a bit dodgy. I just, you know, what am I paying for, or you have sort of two-thousand-pound conferences, which we could not afford. Right? So you had one guy who was a coder and a lifetime startup person, had always worked in startups. One guy who was a web designer, and Brandon, and one guy who was a PR marketing guy who just happened to get along really well.

20:18 Became mates. We went out the pub one Saturday afternoon. We were having some drinks, and we’re just talking about this thing that after you know that we’d gone around, and that, you know, things, it could have, we felt like something was missing. And literally Ben, this was me, Ben, and Mike, at that time, and Ben was like, why don’t we just run our own event? And then we’re like, oh, you know, there’s a lot of events.

20:37 There’d be a bit weird. Wouldn’t it be a bit crowded? No, it’ll show up, and it’s like, f*** it, like, let’s just run an event and see if anyone comes. Have you guys ever been in the event industry? Never.

20:45 That’s like, that’s awesome about it. So we thought, so we were like, so, okay, admittedly this was a couple of points in, but we were kind of like, okay, so the next part of the conversation, I think, sounds good. Yeah, right, like, so we’re like, okay, if we’re gonna run an event, how do you make an event? Like, what’s missing from the events we’ve been to? Right.

20:59 So we’re like, okay, what’s missing from tech events? And the first thing that came up was food. You never get fed at a tech event right? And we were like, look, cool, all right, let’s, let’s feed, let’s, let’s do something with food, right? Because that’s good people like food.

21:12 No, they’re like, okay, well, how are we gonna do that? Like, how we can do food? And I was like, being the token Australian in the Beards, I was like, barbecue. It’s the only food that’s, much like a house party. Nice.

21:21 Yeah, it’s the most social kind of food. It is. It’s laid back. It puts everyone at ease. Not that I want to conform to stereotypes, but I’ve probably just done that then, and I still get the boys to give me s*** about it.

21:30 But the idea was kind of sound, which was, we actually thought we’d have 20 people, and we, in a park. There were two problems wrong with that. One, we found out almost immediately after organizing it, that it’s illegal to barbecue in the Royal Park. Being Australian, I was thinking they’d have barbecue facilities in the parks. I don’t know if they have in the US and Canada too.

21:46 Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? It’s like a big thing to go to the park. Probably should have done my research. The other problem we had was that we had 120 people sign up, so we had to quickly shift to a pub, and we took over the lovely big beer garden at The Water Poet, down on, just off Bishopsgate.

22:02 They very kindly gave us. They had a guy doing a big barbecue out the back, anyway, doing burgers. We had, we managed to scrape together 200 pounds from two sponsors, 100 pounds each, which went straight behind the BBQ, and everyone bought their biz and it was, it was just, and it started. He didn’t charge for admission. Was that always the plan?

22:21 We’re like, we’re not going to try to make this business. Yeah, we never, we never started as, we all had jobs we all had day jobs and stuff, and obviously I still, I still do, but we never started as a business. We started as sort of a, we wanted to see if it was possible to do something that people would enjoy. And the Digital Sizzle originally started as a barbecue to bring together tech startups and creative agencies, so they were we didn’t find that.

22:43 We found everything was quite siloed. We thought we should try that. As time’s gone on, it’s evolved into a much bigger content piece that’s predominantly tech-focused, but we still do get a lot of agencies coming along, because obviously agencies all go to agency events. So at the time I was doing, one of my, I was at another agency and I was one of my clients was Albion, and of course there, they’ve been hardcore tech startups, like, for 10 years. They built the biggest startup brands.

23:06 They did all the sonic identity for Skype, eBay, Innocent, Betfair, Wong. You know, these guys are like, they live and breathe it, right? I was like, well, this is weird. I’m trying to get my head around, like, what’s going to start up, but there’s not really anything that fits with creative people who do this sort of stuff who are interested in startups can get together. So that’s kind of where all the, the, the kind of ethos came from, and it was kind of all kind of loosely based, but it just evolved from there, and then one of the people who came to the very first Digital Sizzle was a, was a lovely young man named Michael Acton Smith, who is of course, the founder of Mind Candy, of Moshi Monsters fame.

23:36 What’s a Moshi Monster? So it’s, did you know what that is? I don’t, you know what this is? Someone had. Well, it’s gone from being a sort of an interactive children’s online game, learning environment, where you adopt a monster and you create your own monster, and this thing is kind of an epic sort of educational game.

23:53 It’s now very much, yeah, I mean, this thing has been around for a while. Children. It’s basically, it’s an entertainment brand. Okay, so these guys have now got, okay, they’ve had, so if you step away from the desktop core product, they’ve had, like, they’ve had a number one album on the iTunes chart for kids they’ve had top-ranking Game Boy, video, like the video games, PS2 games. They’ve got holes like video games.

24:17 I think, I don’t know if they’ve got stuff for TV. They’ve got, you know, they’ve got their own magazine. They’ve got their it’s just an empire of licensing and merchandising, and it’s worldwide. Like, I don’t even know. I mean, since I’ve been living here they launched in Australia.

24:31 They had kids lining up to me, because things, Acton is actually in the game, is Mr Moshi. Okay, so there’s a character called Mr Moshi, and actually he’s drawn, because he’s drawn, it’s, it’s Michael. So they’ve launched pop-up stores at Westfield and had lines and lines out the door. Kids. I mean, he started this company of what, via Albion, like five years ago?

24:50 No, no, no. He’s separate. He’s just one of the first big and probably still one of the most, one of the most prominent London entrepreneurs, for obvious reasons, and probably one of the highest-value companies now. They’re just over on Bonhill Street. They’ve just moved.

25:03 Probably the coolest offices, I think in London by far. Are they gonna, are they gonna do a Silicon Drinkabout? Or, wait, that we’ve done. We’ve already done one. 300 people.

25:11 We did their launch party to open up their new office, because they used to be in the T Building upstairs from Albion. Okay, and they moved to Bonhill Street. They have a slide in their office, which I don’t really like this. Yeah, you can only board from inside the gingerbread house. There’s like, there’s ball pits.

25:23 There’s like grass everywhere. It’s basically like, I guess, if you can have an office where odds are that there’ll be various competition winners and kids coming in and having events and things. You want to make it look and feel like the brand, but also Acton’s very clever, you know. He wants to hire the best people, so he wants to have the best environment the best sort of best culture, I think, you know, to do that. And fair play to him, he’s built an amazing, it’s an amazing office, amazing space, and they’re growing.

25:47 I mean, they’re hiring at the moment. Is he still heavily involved in that business? Oh yeah, yeah. So that’s kind of a little bit different. In London, too, often guys get to a certain point and they sell out to, like, you know, someone in the U.S.

25:58 Yeah. He’s not. Yeah, he’s definitely not. I mean, that’s one of the ones where he’s stuck around, and he’s really helping out the community, basically. Yeah, yeah, and the IPO room is continually swirled around him, but he’s in control.

26:08 That’s actually his second business. His first business was a website called Firebox.com, which is still around. It’s still very big. It’s an online gadgets and gifts and all sorts of crazy things. Fantastic.

26:21 If you ever, if you want a really funny one, go to their, like, most extreme, expensive gifts, and they source, like, you know, air-powered jet skis, and, like, all sorts of stuff. I mean, Firebox is amazing, and he started with his university roommate, Tom Boardman, who is still the CTO at Firebox today, who are also in the T Building. Okay. And these offices make a real difference as far as, like, how much value you can get out of your employees. Like, I was reading an article about the Google New York, and they were talking about how it’s set up, and, like, how much productivity they get out of their employees just by having a really nice work environment.

26:54 I mean, is that true? I, I often, I think it is. I think it’s really great to work in a course. And I’ve been to the Google ones in London. I sometimes wonder if Google’s policy is actually to keep you for as long as possible in your seat or your desk, by just because if you go to Google, right?

27:08 You don’t have to. You don’t want for anything, right? You’ve got the canteen in-house. You’ve got the back, you’ve got the reading room, you’ve got the quiet rooms. You’ve got everything at your fingertips, and it’s all free.

27:16 Obviously, it’s all complimentary. It’s fantastic, right? It gets the most, it gets people sort of totally in the zone, it minimizes your, your kind of distractions, I guess, for other things, and obviously they also, it’s great PR for them, because then literally the best people want to work at Google, right? So that works, obviously it works, right? And the amount of PR stories you see about inside a Google office is kind of testament about that.

27:37 That works. People like holy crap, they’ve got, like, you know, all this stuff, and everything’s cut, you know, everything’s catered for. I think they get like 110 resumes or a thousand resumes per job. Yeah, yeah. Right?

27:46 I remember once, a long time ago, I, I got a lead for a job at Google, and I took a crazy pun. I thought it was, it was a comms job, you know, and somebody took me off, and I applied for it, and I had a call with the HR woman, and she asked me what my grade point average was, and I was like, I’m Australian. We don’t, we don’t and I’m living in the UK. I don’t know if they do that here, but, like, I’ve been out of school for a while, but I’m pretty sure we don’t do GPA.

28:13 I think that’s another, I mean, they, it’s a total Ivy League thing, and they can afford to be that way. Right? Right. You know, what should be that selective? Or is it fair dues to them?

28:20 They can be, but then I thought, yeah, I think also with Google they have a great referral hiring policy, so they always say that everyone who works at Google is often a friend of someone that works at Google. Do they give them, like, 10 percent of their hiring salary, or just perks or something? Some companies do that. Yeah, yeah, if you’re like, yeah, yeah. Hiring bonuses are really common, but I think Google’s a particularly good.

28:39 Okay, so I’m sorry, we were back to, you created this event, so yeah, and so Michael Acton Smith came along, and at this, just around the same time, he started Silicon Drinkabout. Okay, so Silicon Drinkabout, you know, he launched that with, I think the first one they had Dennis Crowley from Foursquare. They had Richard Moross from Moo, and Rachel Bremmer, whose Twitter, Twitter comms were so in. It started as, you know, 10, 15 people in a pub, and it was, you know, Friday night, after-work drinks for startups, and he kicked that off.

29:10 So we started going to that again as punters, just to go along and sort of meet people, because it was sort of the new thing. Probably about three months, I suppose, after we kind of started working on the next Sizzle, and about three, I think three months after he approached us and said, look, I’m seeing a lot of buzz around the Sizzle online. I see all these tweets. I see them talking about it, you know. People are kind of asking me if I’m going or something.

29:33 You know, would you guys like to take over running Silicon Drinkabout? Because I, you know, I want it to be, you know, the biggest offline drinks for startups, but we just don’t, I don’t have time, resource, you know. What was happening was they would have someone at Mind Candy would just send out, would pick a pub at four o’clock on a friday and send out one tweet, so they have one tweet per week, right? And that was it, and it was just shot. The other problem is, if Acton wasn’t there, and you didn’t know anyone at Mind Candy, so you’d seen it on Twitter, like, and maybe that was the whole point of it.

30:04 You would go, you would have no idea who was there because everyone, actually, may or may not realize everyone on Shoreditch on Friday night kind of looks the same. So that was that for me. So, exactly, exactly, exactly. But it was, it was kind of difficult, right, because there’s no budget, and it’s just shown by your beard. So it’s not about hiring a space, or we’re booking places out.

30:20 This was a total new concept, so we said yes. We said, look, you know, we’ve been, we’ve, we’ve gone along. We like the event, but we know how it feels to go and not know anyone. We reckon we can, we could do something with this, and we set about doing just that. For two years every Friday night we’ve just been there.

30:37 We’ve been marketing it. We built the website. We built, did all the T-shirts, did the branding, started booking venue, started getting more organized, negotiating drink specials, getting sponsors in. Started to happen as it got bigger, but ultimately it was just showing up, and we would say every week, if you don’t know anyone, look for the three guys with beards, hear their twists. Look for these guys, go say hello to these guys.

30:56 And the other thing we did, which was we were absolutely militant on, was we always said, don’t focus on the famous founder who shows up with, kind of, eight mates or whatever, because they’ll, they’ll come in and they’ll have a great time, but they’ll talk to their eight mates, and then they’ll leave their own mates. Focus on the guy or girl who shows up looking a bit awkward and doesn’t know anyone. That’s the person you focus on. You focus on, we do, okay, make that person feel comfortable, okay, because that’s who we were when we started going.

31:24 Nobody, you know, nobody. That’s how it feels. Don’t forget how that feels, because that’s the person who’s gonna go away and tell three friends and say, hey, I went to this thing on Friday and I didn’t know anyone, and it was fun, and I met lots of cool people. So you worked the crowd, and you’re a super good host. Yeah, basically.

31:37 Yeah. That’s amazing, basically. Yeah, but, you know, and it wasn’t anything, you know, I never think we did anything phenomenally amazing. I just think we did what maybe people weren’t willing to do, which was, he gave up the most valuable thing, which is time, and we put a lot of love into it, which is just, like, just you know, focus, focus. Yeah, it takes passion.

31:52 It takes a regularity, and the fact you didn’t charge was like the most brilliant thing I think you did from the beginning, because people smell, you know, when they’re trying to be had, and you know this whole sign-up and ten-pounder thing, and people that, yeah. I mean, the thing is, we, we flicked the switch on charging for Digital Sizzle recently, but only because it had become by far the most expensive event we’ve run. They average between two and six hundred people.

32:16 It costs a lot of money to feed 600 people, as you can imagine, and give them free alcohol for the night and space enhancement. Yeah, and everything. Everything’s always been done on private sponsorship, so we’ve been very, very lucky, and we couldn’t have got this far without, you know, our sponsors. Become the larger events. Okay, I have to ask, you put a dollar amount on the value that you have created by Silicon Drinkabout the last two years?

32:39 Are you asking me if someone was going to buy my company? Yeah, Brian and I were talking before, though. It’s one billion dollars right now? I got a pretty good beard. I don’t know.

32:49 I didn’t, if you just think about the introductions you made, and like the growth of just, you know, capital or getting that guy in the corner who had never spoke to anyone, who’s now been hired by this guy because of you. I mean, Jesus, it must be a big number. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never, it’s really difficult. I think, if we would, I think, if we were to go down that road, we may end up like some of the people that do profit off their events, that you can’t see.

33:12 What I mean? I don’t think that way. If we did it, it would kind of be lost, you know what I mean. And the thing is, you’ve got to remember, like, the only thing we have is our credibility and our integrity. That’s our brand.

33:20 So when people want to work with us and they want to sponsor an event and stuff, they’re kind of what they’re buying into is that credibility and that integrity. So then we run things a certain way. We’re very, like, you know, we have creative control over what we do, and it’s running to be its ethos, because ultimately our job is to protect the community that we’ve built as much as is to, to promote them and to serve them. So because my point was that you’ve just created a lot of value by introducing all these different people, whether it’s an agent that see with it would never know where to go, or an entrepreneur, or a venture cap guy that wouldn’t know who to call.

33:51 Yeah. And I think, I think as well, it’s nice. We’re seeing more international faces as well. We have a lot of people saying, hey, I know about this Drinkabout thing, and everyone says that’s the thing to go to when you arrive in London, and that’s really nice. I mean, that’s probably the biggest compliment we could get.

34:03 I think is like people coming in and just being like, I’ve never done this before, and I’ve just moved to London, and I want to do this, and I don’t know where to go. That means we’re doing something right. I think when people stop showing up, then we’ll stop doing it. Right? Yeah, yeah.

34:16 Are you guys completely non-profit? We are, so not, not anymore. So we’ve, so you gotta maintain the beer, so we’re gonna maintain the bids. Yeah, well, actually, funnily enough, so we, the reason we flicked the switch as well, and Sizzle is because Joe, Joe, and Mike, my other two bearded colleagues, have just at the beginning of this year gone full time. So yeah, so what happened was, originally it was, myself, Mike, and Ben, Benjamin Southworth.

34:42 Mike’s web designer, Ben’s the startup guy. So he’s worked in, grew up in Cambridge, worked in subs there, went to Boulder, Colorado, worked in setups there, came back to London. Brilliant guy. One of our Sizzles was a Q&A with the CEO of the government’s Tech City investment organization after their one year being in existence, so we started before, kind of before this whole text anything was around, and we had this thing where it was like, look, you know, the government’s getting a little bit of a lot of flack in the press.

35:09 They’ve released this annual report, it’s a bit fluffy, and then we have a community that isn’t really sure what they’re doing. So we reckon the truth, usually somewhere in the middle. So why don’t we just bring our community in, bang, bring in the CEO of Tech City, answer live Q&A. We’ll do barbecue with all the fun stuff, but you’ll get up on stage, and we will give people a chance to ask you what you can do, how you can help, et cetera, explain what you’ve done.

35:31 Ben did the emceeing at that event, so he did a lot, and that was very good. One, because we thought, again, Google Campus in the auditorium has about 120 take out sponsors, you got about 100 tickets. we did an application. It was free, but we did an application ticket. we had 750 applications for tickets, and we were like f*** that.

35:48 That was when we knew we’d probably we probably, we thought it was something that was interesting, and the community might like it. I think at that point we’re like, they really did need that. That was a year ago. That was a year ago. Okay, and so Ben was poached by this agency, is that right?

36:02 Non-agency. He was poached by Number 10. Number 10 Downing Street sent a couple of people down, little sly one in the back corner there, and you know, the next week he gets an email being like, hello Ben, we were wondering if you’d like to come into a meeting at Number 10 Downing Street. Am I six in the basement? Ben’s response was amazing.

36:18 I’ll get the beards. Yeah, we’ll all come down. Five minutes, two minutes later, email comes back no, just you, Benjamin, and he’s like, come along. That’s it. That’s it, boys.

36:26 It’s over. They’ve got me. They found me. Whatever it is, I did something, past life. The government’s finally caught up with me.

36:30 I’m done for. They could have said they could have sent one of the other beards in there. They might not know it was, like, give my beard to charity. So what can you explain? Because I was asking Colin before, it’s the UK TI, is that what it’s called?

36:42 TCIO. So the Tech City Investment Organisation was David Cameron’s initiative. Set up, it’ll be three years in November. Okay, so, so yeah, so November 2010, so it was David Cameron who basically set up Tech City Investments to champion this area in East London, to promote innovation, and to promote London’s tech startup scene to the rest of the world, and obviously to promote foreign direct investment and get companies to move here. So is there government funding for this audience?

37:07 Yes, I think their budget, it’s not, it’s not a huge budget, actually. I don’t, I think it’s around two and a half million. Better, no. Okay, it’s not, it’s not massive. So they’re not, they’re not huge, right?

37:19 Then their budget comes from UKTI, as you, as Gregory, obviously trade investment. And their metrics are, you know, generally kind of growth cluster growth promoting foreign direct investment into, and there’s all they work with, organizations like London and Partners, in London, London First, who are responsible, obviously, for selling London overseas, and then making London the best for international business here at home. Okay, so they’ve got a lot of, like, you know, it’s obviously they’re plugged in with sort of all those networks.

37:43 So, but it’s been an important organization to have, in your opinion, for this whole area? Yeah, so it’s, it’s been, it’s been a polarizing organization, I think. Like, some people, they, it’s, you know, as I say, it’s like Marmite, or as we call it Vegemite, you either love it or you hate it. I, my personal opinion is that an ecosystem takes a lot of players, and they’re a very powerful megaphone. Beyond this roundabout, right?

38:09 Or gyratory, as Ben often corrects me. It’s got four exits. and it’s called the gyratory. Directory is the technical term, because it’s got more than three exits, and it’s not a circle Jesus. Actually, I don’t know, dude.

38:21 You spend enough time around this roundabout, man. Like, all the pub quiz trivia comes out. They don’t, they don’t do roundabouts in Canada or America. We don’t know what that is. So my opinion on Tech City is, you know, and to be honest, like, when Ben got offered this job, like they basically said, we’re, because the CEO was leaving, and they said, we’re gonna divide the role, we’re gonna have a CEO, we’re near deputy CEO, and originally when he went down there, they were like, who would you recommend?

38:43 Who do you think? He got halfway through, kind of listing off people that he thought were good community organizers in the scene, and they were like, we want you to do it, will you do it? He was like, whoa. So we had a lot of chats about this, and I think you know, and it’s a difficult decision, because his credibility is built up in the private sector, in startups. He’s always been a coder, builder, a community guy, a product guy.

39:01 So it’s, although on the surface maybe it seems a high-profile role for him, it was all about his personal integrity and credibility, and I think that’s really, I think that’s a really valuable way to go into that. And I kind of, I mean, we spent quite a bit of time sort of chatting about, and I just said to him, look, man, you got as far as I see it, you’ve got two choices either take the job and try and make a difference with a much bigger stick, or you sit back and you watch somebody else f*** it up for the year, right? Yeah, so like, what’s the worst that can happen?

39:29 You try and you fail, at least you tried, right? If you sit back, we can’t really complain that the government doesn’t do enough or doesn’t understand. So you have a real opportunity to try it, and to that effect, he’s been phenomenal. I mean he really got, he gave, russian says, but he did give them a massive injection of credibility, because we’d spent two years growing a community, you know, and like, there were a lot of critics of the government who were like, who’s this guy blah blah, and then the community just kind of, everyone backed him, and he’s been really good, and he’s amazing.

39:57 I mean, I, I don’t envy the Number 10. They probably didn’t know what they were getting. But Ben, if you’ve not met him, you should definitely get him on the show. He’s very, he’s absolutely zero bulls*** and he’s super smart, and the thing is, people don’t expect someone in government to actually understand the technology behind what they’re talking about, so he’s this wonderful way of just letting people kind of talk, talk, because he imagines he gets pitched quite a lot of crazy ideas, because he’s a government, everyone thinks government’s made of money, et cetera, and he has this amazing way of kind of just letting people kind of spin out, and then he just ever so gently starts to sort of bring them around to actually realize that he knows they’re completely bullshitting him, and he’s not buying it.

40:30 Is this, like, a zeke? Is it a temporary thing, is he like, I’m gonna do my two years in office, civic duty, and I’m gonna come back, because it’s hard for me to believe a serial entrepreneur would want to leave. So he’s been, well, he’s deputy CEO, and so he ran it. He kind of ran up for sort of almost five or six months by himself, because the previous CEO left Ben got left with it. So Ben had to start sort of trying to basically, trying to sort out what had happened in the year before, from the inside versus looking out for the outside.

40:56 But of course, then, you know, Number 10 had a huge coup. They got Joanna Shields. It was the MD, sorry, the managing director of Facebook for Europe, and Middle East Africa. Okay, yeah. Ex-Bebo, ex-Google.

41:08 I mean, this woman is like, you know, she’s, she’s, she’s you know, way up there, and it was a massive, I mean, obviously it was a huge PR coup that someone that high-profile, coming to that, would come into that job. Yeah, but again, like, we had, we had been doing it for five months and being sort of the face and doing all the media stuff, and had the community credibility, and then she’s coming from, the very much, you know, the high-level tech private sector. So I think Everybody’s.

41:33 I’m kind of interested to see what happens now, if I’m honest. I mean, I, I trust Ben. He’s one of my best mates, and I think, you know, he will always do a good job. He cannot not do the right thing by the community, and I, for that reason, I really back him. And I think with Joanna kind of leading I am curious to see what the combination of incredibly high-level private sector connections and, you know, being able to open the door with Number 10.

41:58 Yeah, I’m really curious to see what will happen in the next two or three years, and whether that will kind of pan out with Ben. I’m not sure. I mean, I think he’s been, I think he’s coming up to his, I think he’s been there for coming up to a year soon. I think, fair enough. Colin, let me just get your opinion.

42:11 You’re an outsider. You, you know, you spent time in Toronto, you’ve done some startups you obviously wrote around China and India and all that stuff. What’s your perspective coming into the London, you know, tech kind of startup industry? Like, what do you see that are, like, glaring, awesome advantages? And what do you see are, like, gaping holes just from, like, the limited exposure you’ve had?

42:28 I think just the community is so bloody big here, you know. Again, Toronto is a relatively spread-out city, and there’s really no startup scene, a little bit, but it’s more on kind of the financial startups. Tech isn’t huge, and I just find in London there’s just this intense community, which, you know, you’re a huge, huge reason that that exists, and so when you come here if you want to get help from a developer or coder, or, you know, get mentored, or they have all they have this whole ecosystem around starting up companies that, you know, is very unique, a way of doing things that you know, not too many cities have.

43:06 And yeah, it seems like in New York, it seems like you would have a friendlier vibe here, as in, meet at the pub, I know this guy, call him. It seems like in New York, or maybe even Silicon Alley, that they would be a little bit more like, my idea, but maybe I’m just being stereotyped. No I think, I think you’re, I mean, there is a very, there’s a very, and you know, to back up Colin, I’m an expat, I’m an Aussie, right? So I know how it feels to, exactly, you know, I can tell we were like brothers from another mother, but you know, I know how it feels to move to a city and not know anybody right, and to have to start all over again and build a network.

43:35 I don’t want people to go, if I, if I am part of a reason why people could come up here now and not have to go through that, because it’s f***ing hard, right? To rebuild your connections, blah, blah, and it weighs, good value, right? I mean, it’s just so much time, and just to find people over. But I think really the interesting thing about London community, I find, is there’s a lot of camaraderie. We’ve seen in two years people who actually become genuinely good friends, and you see people like, and they bring their friends, and, you know, there’s a lot of kind of sharing of knowledge, whereas I think depending on where you are in the US, it’s a bit more brash, sometimes, a bit like, you’re on the sale a lot more, whereas in London, you know, it’s cool to just go to.

44:13 It’s cultural to go to the pub and relax right? Like, they don’t sell. They’re like, oh, I’m working. They’ll sell, they won’t sell, but people ask, they’ll be like, oh you know, I, but it won’t be like, boom, let me show you, boom, this is why it’s going to change the world. You know what I mean?

44:27 Because it’s Friday at the pub, and to that sort of zeitgeist, cultural thing that they do here, which is all business happens at the pub. I guess, you know, we kind of tapped into that in a big way, and I think it’s, you know, the lack of cliquiness, which I find in London. It’s just kind of because it’s such an international hub, where, you know, so many people are, yeah, so many people are immigrants, and so many people don’t have this huge sort of track record of record of 20 years living in the UK, and they have schoolmates, and schoolmates, and schoolmates.

44:57 So you find that more people are, I just find, are more open arms and more willing to take you in. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we’re talking about city that, like, going back to our earlier discussion about Cambridge, you know, which has produced some amazing companies. Cambridge is a city of 100,000 people. London adds 100,000 people per year.

45:14 So you think about that, and you’re like, if you keep banging that drum and being like, this is the, this look at these amazing things that happen to capital, it’s naturally going to attract more and more people, but rather than being sort of from other industries, they’ll start to become sort of tech startups. I think you’re right. I think you get this kind of crazy mix of international entrepreneurs, and that’s when really kind of exciting stuff happening.

45:34 That’s right. So how many years before it’s say on par? And I know this is a horrible generalization, to, you know, Silicon Alley, Silicon Valley, is it behind? You said 30 years before. Yeah.

45:43 So Silicon Valley’s biggest asset was the fact that one of the best things they ever did was the really, really organic and strong relationship between some of the best universities in the world and the tech companies. So Stanford, yeah, yep, and similar to Cambridge obviously. And that’s, it’s Cambridge is almost like a micro-kind of replica of that model, which is smartest kids in the world going in, doing lots of PhD research, coming out. You know, there’s already business networks in place to take in the ideas that companies are willing to fund things, because they’ve also gotten big.

46:18 So Silicon Valley, I mean, it definitely has that. I think where London, I think, comes into its own is that I think it’s a, you, all of those kind of side things so the multiculturals and the international city, the proximity to Europe, the, you know, you’re half, you’re in New York in six hours if you need to be in the U.S., you’re in, you know, Europe, whereas if you’re in the valley, you’re sort of 12, 13 hours from everywhere else. And yeah, I mean, I think, I don’t know if we ever need to be on par with Silicon Valley.

46:46 I think Silicon Valley will continue to do what it’s always done, which is, you know, it very, very smartly and very well has fostered amazing companies, but I think what we’ll see is emerging as a sort of a separate entity, which is as soon as you, the problem with the US business as well is that they, they always focus on the US market. Now this is where it gets interesting. So US, what US hasn’t traditionally done well is scale outside of their own borders.

47:12 They basically, especially Europe, they don’t understand Europe. Don’t screw that up. Black box, and what we’ve seen now, thanks to three German brothers called the Samwer brothers over in Berlin, who, if you haven’t ever run a company called Rocket Internet, okay? Which is notorious, because they have had more exits of companies by effectively copycatting famous U.S. startups, but their genius is rapid execution. Absolutely, rapid scale execution, particularly not just in Europe but in emerging markets, and then effectively the US company turns around, goes, oh, you’ve got, like, tons more market share, we’ll just buy you now.

47:49 A lot of people, a lot of people don’t like the Samwers, because they feel like that’s just showing that Europe has no imagination. That is copycatting. Yes, on one hand, I agree with that. On the other hand, I think they’ve played the internet itself. They very, very smartly went to Silicon Valley and we’re like, these guys aren’t looking outside and we have all these different languages, we’ll do this, and we’ll make sure it’s in every language first, and we’ll ship it, and we’ll get it moving.

48:13 Okay, do you think London is kind of like a midway point where they can come and observe and know Europe, because Londoners know Europe probably not intimately, but they know it better than the US. I think it’s the smartest place. I think if you’re a European entrepreneur, no matter which country you’re from, your business, you know, these days, it has to be in English, because ultimately you want to hit the US market. If you’re a European entrepreneur, you want to hit the US market eventually, but you need to prove that you have enough market traction, an idea that’s original, to work in Europe.

48:39 London makes sense for that reason, and also the access to finance. London represents 40% of European venture deals. France is about 18%. I think Germany is now going up quite quickly, with Berlin, and the Rocket Internet guys, obviously. But what’s interesting about London is the, is that collusion again between capital and technology, so what we are seeing at the moment is a number of amazing businesses emerge in the fintech space, and this is really interesting, this is something I think London could absolutely own.

49:11 Yeah, which is when you put a bunch of banks and a bunch of international brokerage houses next to a bunch of tech entrepreneurs and they all kind of, yeah, it makes sense for people that don’t know. I mean, we are, we are literally, I mean, the reason I moved to Shoreditch is so I could walk to the City and work in the City. I mean, they’re like right on top of each other, which is unlike any other city in the world, which Silicon Valley doesn’t have, right?

49:31 Yeah, even San Francisco, but it’s not a it’s not. San Francisco isn’t really a financial centre, right? I’ve also heard that Palo Alto is one of the most boring places on earth after 7 p.m. Yes, and it’s a goddamn snoozer. Yeah, that’s why.

49:44 Is that? I’ve heard that. I didn’t want anything to do with this. I’m not from California, and I, which it was just, I don’t know, I just thought it was pretty snoozy. So I mean, why wouldn’t you come here?

49:53 So you couldn’t have Silicon Drinkabout in Silicon Valley because all the bars would be closed. So that’s, that’s, yeah, highly enough, as we gear up this year for global expansion, I’m sort of like, should we just avoid Palo Alto? Yeah, yeah, probably. We’ve had the Silicon Tea about. It’s very British, Silicon Lunch, or something.

50:09 Are you expanding what the Drinkabout? We are with this year. We’re working now on kind of extend first across the UK and Europe. We’ll start to hopefully roll out. What we want to do, effectively, is we want to build a much more joined-up startup community.

50:22 We don’t, we don’t care about city rivalries. We don’t put London above others. We think actually, what I would love, or my vision would be, is that if you’re an entrepreneur and I’m, you know, if I’m in Paris or I’m in Madrid or I’m in Manchester, I can just go on the website and go, where’s, oh, where should I go? Where’s Drinkabout tonight? It’s Friday, then I can go meet the people from the scene, and I can just go straight in.

50:41 I actually, I think all of us believe that. I mean, we’re all about community. That’s what we do, right? We want to build communities and I think now we’re at this point where we, where we have, like, a, I suppose, a profile and a brand and that’s really nice, and we’ve met lots of really interesting people, but that is only good if we use that brand and platform to promote the people that make up that community, and that’s what we’ve always done, which is keep looking for ways to do better things, more content, promote those people, and I think this year will be quite interesting for us as we kind of, hopefully, try and gear up to do it more of that, and hopefully, you know, get some more sponsors on board to help us get across.

51:12 Okay, that’s very cool. Let me ask you just a booth, a real quick question just to chop this up. What’s one tech that you think is, is being overlooked right now that you think is just going to blow up in, like, the next three or four years, and what’s one that you think is going to die a painful death, whether it’s a company or a type of technology or a company that’s a very good one. Very good question. I think we are just at the beginning of, I think fintech, right, is going to explode and I think, I mean, you look at companies like TransferWise, which is international currency transfer without paying bank fees, founding employee of Skype’s new venture, who’s also investigated guys amazing around this table is three expats who are not from UK.

51:56 I can tell you it’s unreal. I test it out with Australia. I mean, I don’t know, I pay like 30 or 40 pounds to transfer money home for my dad’s birthday, whatever. Right? Yeah.

52:04 Three quid. I’ve had on TransferWise. It’s transfer, TransferWise TransferWise. Okay, unbelievable. Funding, cynical, also.

52:10 Yeah, earlier, that’s like Peter, Peter B. Yeah, another one, crowds, you know, crowd equity, crowd. Right? Equity, credits, watching right now. Yeah.

52:20 I think London’s going to dominate. I think that there’s going to be some really… What I think is interesting is, in the first round, a lot of the startups are kind of alternatives to banks, and that’s been a very strong, powerful message that’s got them further, like, particularly after the financial crisis. It made complete sense, and I think it’s still a powerful message now. I think people, consumer trust is a bit shaky.

52:38 I think what’ll be interesting will be whether that evolves into collaboration, because the best with banks, with the banks, because the banks are always struggling to innovate. They’ve got, it’s a huge bureaucratic organization, it’s very difficult to Innovator’s Dilemma is the story. Exactly, exactly. And I wonder if London will lead the way into some interesting new products and services that are born out of collaboration. I also think we’ll see people who are still creating products that are going to really kind of send the banks down the road.

53:05 Okay, I think you’re right. And a dog, what’s going down? What’s that? What’s a company that’s not going to be around in the next three years that’s going to miss that race? I got one in mind, but have you got…

53:14 I don’t know if I can answer this one. I’m supposed to be impartial. Oh, yeah I’m a community organizer. I don’t know. I think, I mean, I think I think anything.

53:24 Okay, let me ask you this. Google Plus, Facebook, who wins? Oh, Facebook. Really interesting. You’ve been on Google I haven’t, but I’ve been on YouTube and Gmail a lot.

53:37 Yeah, yeah. The integration, the Hangout stuff is cool. And that’s good. No, otherwise I don’t, but I, Google Glasses, and Google Glasses takes off, so I tried them on the other night. Yeah, oh yeah.

53:46 For the first time, Google Glass, Google Glass. I think Google Glass for me is, is very, very interesting. I don’t think, I think, like everything, it’s not the one, it’s just the start. Yeah, it’s the start of more and more seamless wearable technology, and to that effect, Google, like no other, is in a position to completely capitalize on that right. What happens when we start getting, it’s not gonna be long before we have Google Glass app stores.

54:11 Right? So, like, when people start, the next thing is to develop an app for Glass, which is, like, it’s kind of, it actually sits just above your right eye. So, okay, you kind of look straight, and can I see your eye if I’m looking at you? Yes, you can see my app. So you can see my eye.

54:24 So it’s sort of just about. Okay, so it’s like a frame of a glass. Yeah, so I kind of have to move my eye up. That must be the most annoying thing to talk to someone as well. I only had, I only had it on for, like, five minutes.

54:33 I was sort of, we had Robert Scoble. We got invited to invent Robert Scoble, the famous tech evangelist from Rackspace, because everyone was in town for Luebbe. I’m on a huge learning curve today. He’s dropped so many names. I don’t know this is great.

54:44 Well, Robert Scoble, you should definitely. He is the world’s probably foremost tech evangelist, I guess, is the term that he uses. So much so that he never takes his Google Glass off. There’s even a photo of him in the shower wearing it, quite famously. Again, he was saying he wore it through, like, customs and stuff like this and they, he walked right through, like the metal detector with it on.

55:06 Yeah, really. I mean, they tell that he’s, he’s, and not just Google Glass. I mean, he’s a tech manager. He has a, he’s very similar, similar show to this, like a sort of a video podcasting, and he explores technology, and you know, he’s had, he’s had some run-ins with Google. He had a big famous one about Gmail, added some new setting with your contacts.

55:23 It was a bit privacy invasive, and he went to town, but he again is a polarizing kind of character. He’s a lovely man. He’s really friendly. He’s really enthusiastic, and very, sort of, you know, Palo Alto American kind of stuff, kind of way, very, very sweet but obviously wearing good glasses, where he’s gonna, so they, they sent him on to Paxman. they sent him onto bloody Newsnight to face Paxman when he was in London after the event that he was at and he did all right, actually.

55:49 It was Paxman, Jeremy Paxman, famous, Newsnight, Jones, basically the most intelligent and slightly direct, cynical, graphic British journalist. Like, amazing. He’s got this whole shtick. It’s like, so it was like a little mini debate. Yeah, and he basically, I remember the famous question asking was, like, it was a beautiful spring day in London today, how the bloody hell does wearing that thing enhance it, which I thought was very funny.

56:11 But Rob, I, I was listening to Robert Scoble. We listened to his sort of talk, and, you know, what he actually he made some very valid points about the way that actually human behavior changes with technology. Everything is always, you know, he’s like, like cars. I think he made a point about cars. There’s like people on horses and carriages, but cars were dangerous.

56:30 They didn’t, didn’t make cars illegal, right? People changed their behavior eventually, but everyone said no I’m not, that’s, you know, that’s so cool. And he’s got tons of examples of, obviously, of the way that’s worked. He’s the point that he makes, though, is that the acceleration process and the change in human behavior in the last 10 years has gotten much quicker, much, much quicker. I mean, you know, he was talking not so long ago, people saying that the home PC would never catch on, and a computer was something that took up the size of this room.

56:53 Right? So it’s just that the speed of iteration is much, much quicker with the touchscreen phone. Basically, we’ve done the screen phones. Yeah, yeah, goodbye, goodbye. The old, knock your hands, I mean, Nokia is a good example, and they’re kind of reinventing themselves now, but you know, they, they were huge once.

57:07 Right? And yeah, on the same note, what’s one up and one down for you? Yeah, I tend to agree with fintech. I think is, there’s huge opportunities there, and I think it’s the right time in terms of sort of PR globally as well. I think sort of these P2P lending, P2B stuff.

57:22 I think, if, if it’s done right, and if it’s done, you know, the transparency is incredible that these guys have, and I think it’s, it’s phenomenal to give the average person that kind of access to that kind of information. So I think fintech is good. I think one that’s not so good, you know, I think this whole sort of a gadget for the sake of a gadget stuff that people aren’t necessarily innovating right now. They’re just sort of changing already stuff that’s been innovated, and I think the gadget for the sega gadgets is going to be tricky and example, like, you know, it’s just like this, this constant app race.

57:59 People are making apps for apps, and you know, they’re, you know, I think a lot of sharing. So the sharing community stuff is great, and I think I think a lot of it is going to do well, but I think now that you know, sharing a drill and all this sort of stuff. It’s just, is it really going to work? You know, sharing a car, I think, phenomenal. Sharing it flat, amazing.

58:17 Right? Sharing a dinner with, you know, a couple neighbors, also good, but you know, if I share my watch for the day, it’s, it’s kind of like, where does this stuff end? And I just think people are kind of creating, I mean, like, when you share a car ride to work or share my dog or something like that. Yeah, well, there’s just so much. Yeah, I think it works for kind of big-ticket items.

58:36 It’s overbought, as you would say in finance. Okay, well, I’m going thumbs down for Facebook and thumbs up for Google Plus, even though I don’t, I don’t use Google Plus, but Facebook seems to be in this desperation mode now, where they’re constantly trying to extract money from me to advertise my, my Facebook posts, and it just seems, I don’t know, maybe I’m just smelling the desperation there. Maybe I’m taking this too far, but I just, it feels to me, whereas Google Plus is giving me all these technologies to enable me and connect via YouTube and Gmail, and it just feels like one is outpacing the other and Twitter’s going along with Google Plus.

59:07 But I would say, I tell you, someone mentioned me the other day about Facebook. They said, you know, will your kids want to be on the same social network as their parents? Right? And so it’s interesting if you have, like, a 10-year-old kid, or a 13-year-old kid, or a 14-year old kid, and their 40-year-old or 50-year-old dad is on Facebook actively, and they’re friends together. It’s kind of, you know, whereas Google Plus, I think, you know, allows you to have different circles and stuff like this, and but how many people actually, how many of you goes for the job?

59:34 Yeah, no, I know, but I, I, I agree with you. I think, I think Google, it’s a long play, Google Plus, but I think, I think it’s, I’m holding, I, I would agree with you in the sense that Google’s best thing is integration and making everything seamless, and so from your phone to your desktop, to you, your life in general, and Google Glass will become part of that, because Google Glass obviously taps into your phone, but that’s how it kind of works, and with Google Plus, you operate it just by swiping it, so it’s up and down. So the, the bar on the right, where the Glass thing is, you just run your finger up and down and left and right, and it switches the screen to, like, your emails and your weather update or whatever.

1:00:08 I mean, you can tap it, and it says, voice. Were you impressed by the Glass? I think I need to, I think I need to, I would want to kind of test run a bit longer. I think, you know, being completely fair to Google, I was only kind of wearing it for sort of five minutes, and, obviously, like anything new, it’s a bit disconcerting the first time you put it on, but I think it’s something, I think obviously you could get used to it, but I didn’t have enough time to test functionality too much, and they’re in beta mode, and all that stuff.

1:00:33 Yeah, exactly. But I think, I think you know, I, it won’t be long before there’ll be a Google Play shop just for Glass apps, you know. If it takes off, I’ll, usually see how it sells, though, you know, like when it hits the market, what’s the price point? Like a thousand pounds, one thousand five hundred pounds. Is that the price point?

1:00:46 That’s really nice. What’s your take on the whole privacy issue? Because I know that’s a, that’s a huge thing with you? know, big data and Google Glass stuff. You know what, man?

1:00:55 I’d say I’m glad I, when I was in high school, which was many years ago, that there wasn’t any Facebook, like, at least, like, I often say this like, when I, when I was in high school, if I didn’t get invited to, like, the cool kids party, which let’s be honest, was quite often. At least I didn’t know about it till Monday, man. Now at Facebook, I mean you know, it’s, I worry a little bit about, like, things like, you know, bringing up kids in this digital age of oversharing, and, like, everything’s public, and the digital footprint.

1:01:17 I think the fact is, whether we like it or not, we’re creating a footprint that we cannot really erase, and it will, and the difference is that, between those of us sitting around the table, is that we were old enough and mature enough when that happened to ease through that transition. What worries me, I think, is more like young people, and, you know, the issue with Glass came up, which is, like, if you can sort of take a photo, or, you know, you’re in a public place and you see someone, you know? A guy sort of said, well, you know, like, what about a guy sitting in a playground and he’s got Google Glass on.

1:01:49 You know, people will suddenly, and he could be just, it could be completely innocent, right? But that could, parents could, you know, do it, and you could all get out of hand, and all that sort of thing, and I, I do wonder whether, you know, like, how far the oversharing will go, or whether actually the opposite will happen, and everybody will eventually just be like, they’re just used to it. It’s funny, like, as we go on, everyone’s gonna have a digital footprint with this sordid past.

1:02:12 It’s like President Obama. Most people don’t know that in his book he said, I did cocaine, I did marijuana, and once he wrote it down, everyone was like, okay, maybe we move on. So maybe in 20 years in the future, everyone will expect, stochastically, that everyone’s got a crappy digital footprint, and they’ll be like, oh, you did all that? Well, so did everyone else. If it was Obama, like, doing a lot of cocaine with a dodgy shaky phone cam video, right?

1:02:33 And that was on the internet, on YouTube, and that’s kind of where it gets a bit… It’s a very good point, and that’s the thing. Yeah, that’s the thing. Like, I mean, I think you know, like, going back to one about smartphones, you know, it’s, you sort of see, like you know, really, really, kind of young kids are given smartphones by their folks now, because they want to know where they are all times. It’s like you have this ultra-powerful computer and probably not, not the maturity to know what it means to actually take a moment from your life and then put it out somewhere where other people can access it.

1:03:03 And you know, I think you see a lot of it. Like, you see a lot of sort of really sad cases of, like, online bullying and trolling ticking amongst kids, so it’s like, they figured out so quickly how to utilize this technology for good and bad that it’s almost scary. You know, you’ve got the famous video on YouTube of the child who’s, like, one or two, with a magazine trying to swipe the screen like an iPad, because you’re so used to using the iPad, and like, they’re going up to the TV, and this is not the first one.

1:03:28 I mean, you know, I’ve got family that have got, like, very, very little ones, and they’ll, you know, if they, if they play with an iPad, they’ll go walk up to the TV and, and do the, you know, they’ll change the traffic, change the channel by touching the hand on the screen. It’s like, you think to yourself, you’re like, bloody hell, like, it’s moving faster than we realize, right? Because we’re in control, because we’ve watched it happen, we don’t realize it, whereas I think when you kind of see that, you’re like wow, you know, what will this be like in another 10 years?

1:03:50 Almost need, like, a digital technology and privacy class at like, you know, kindergarten, and teach the kids growing up how to be careful, how to be careful. Yeah, you’re right, the technology is maturing faster than the kids. I mean, like, I have a nine-year-old. We flew on Virgin recently, and she was trying to expand the movie screen on Virgin, right? And I was like, this is just a movie screen.

1:04:08 It’s kind of a one-way flow, right? Yeah, and back when I was your age, yeah, and like, I don’t think she should have a smartphone until she’s 12. I mean, nine, and Jesus, like you said, there’s so much you can do exactly on that phone. So I want to hear about Don’t Pitch Me Bro, because, funny enough, this hour is flying guys, but it’s something that’s, I love the name, and I love the concept, so if you could just break it down for us what the event is.

1:04:32 Yeah, sure. So Don’t Pitch Me Bro was the third event. We launched our most recent one. We’ve been doing it now for, I think, nine months now. So we’ve had, okay, it’s a monthly event, last Last Thursday of the month, usually, and we normally do it at The Wire accelerator and over by Tottenham Court Road.

1:04:46 So it’s actually not in the East. It’s in central. That’s the Telefonica startup, yeah, a Telefonica accelerator, yeah, and who came up with the name, by the way? It’s Don’t Pitch Me Bro, in case nobody heard it. Don’t pitch me Bro.

1:04:57 Yeah. So, the actual name is, we literally didn’t make that up. We took that name. It’s a very common startup phrase, coined by Dave McClure, the famous 500 Startups investor in Silicon Valley. I feel so old today.

1:05:12 Oh, it’s out of touch. We get asked this a lot, though. We haven’t actually had somebody kind of query it once, because it says bro, and actually it wasn’t us naming it. It’s a very famous phrase, because he’s obviously an investor, and he runs an accelerator program called Five, which is very famous. 500 Startups back some very, very good companies, and obviously, by default, anywhere this guy goes, he gets pitched.

1:05:32 And then what happened was, a guy called, I think it was a guy called Andrew Hyde, who started Startup Weekend, created an online clothing store called VC Wear, and it was just like all these t-shirts with amusing phrases on them, from like startup phrases, and I think Don’t Pitch Me Bro became one of those. And so this phrase already existed, and the reason we chose it was because, so we had the Drinkabout, the Sizzle, and we would find, particularly, Drinkabout, the bigger it got, people would come on a Friday, and they would pitch us, and we were like, dude, like, we can’t help you, man. Like, we created the environment for you to help you and to meet people and network, but, like, it’s like, people, pictures like, I need to find a you know, Ruby developer, because I’ve got this badass idea, and you just be like, oh, good, that’s great, that’s search around what we’re dreaming about, buddy.

1:06:15 Yeah, you know, I mean, to be fair, we do do a lot of, like, helping, but if it happens to be top of mind, you know? Like, there’s a lot of… if you’re at the center of things, if you hear of something, you bang, you put things together, but on scale, it’s very difficult. So yeah, we thought, right, we need to. And obviously, people pitching us their businesses, and I’ve got this idea of a bar, it’s like, I don’t know if you think that I’m going to, I have some sort of venture capital fund secretly in my back pocket, or what?

1:06:38 So we decided, right, we need a new event. We need an event that actually can help founders solve these problems, right? Because we can’t solve them on our own. We can’t help everyone. So, Don’t Pitch Me Bro was born, and effectively it’s four or five young companies, early stage, often almost always pre-seed, sometimes early stage investment.

1:06:57 How do you choose them? Applications, anyone can apply, and we send them a list of… we again try to keep it open. So, so that anyone in the community can, can take part if they want to, but we do ask for a minimum viable product. Like, you have to, you are not pitching, you cannot walk in with graphs and spreadsheets. You need to come in with a product that you built, that you made, and you need to walk us through that product, and you need to tell us, you know, three or four points that you want the audience to help you solve.

1:07:24 And yeah, there’s seven and a half minutes to do the demo and to ask for help, and then seven and a half minutes with 120 people in the room. We passed the mic around, and they get in to try and help them, and then drinks and burritos. How many different pitches every night, or every, usually four sometimes five. So, an hour, an hour and 15. Yeah, no, it goes for about, it tends to go till we start at, sort of seven, and it goes to usually around 10:30, 11, because we sort of have take breaks, burritos and beers before, and we have, like, a drinks break halfway through.

1:07:55 So the idea is, actually, as well as solving the problems, is again to connect people with people that can actually help them. So what we did find was really nice when we first started, we thought we’re going to really struggle to get people to speak up, right, because nobody wants to be the one in the room with a microphone to give them the criticism. Yeah, to kind of help them, and actually it was the opposite. People were like jumping, and we had to sort of say, you had to start the rule that you cannot speak unless you’re holding the microphone, because otherwise, like, you just put your hand up.

1:08:20 Yeah, and what we had was, we like we’d see, like these guys, I walk off the stage, and it was just, like, off the sort of front of the room, the projector, and you’d have, like, this bee line of people like, going, look, man, I’m, I’m, I’ve run this or I’m a developer or whatever. I’ll just fix that problem for you. Here’s my car. And it was amazing. Like, people just, they loved it.

1:08:37 And I think, I think it’s kind of, again, just we work really hard, always, with our events to set a specific kind of ethos and a specific kind of attitude, and that has become, I guess, part of our brand and why people like to go, I think, to the events. So keep it positive. Don’t pitch me. Yeah, keep it positive, help those companies, help that community, and do you know, help that community help itself and help each other. I mean, ultimately, like, you know, it’s, I said tonight we’re going to head down a bit later, so I can drink about which is going to be, which would be fun.

1:09:06 But you’ll see, you’ll see firsthand. It’s not like a business networking event. It’s not like, I mean, your background, I think, is finance, right? So I’m sure you’ve been into some wonderfully horrendous networking events with people shoving cards left, right, center, right? Most of them, most of them, there’s a subtle agenda you can smell.

1:09:21 Yeah, or cut through. And actually, the guy that lives in this building, he’d been to a couple before, and I was just like, what are they like? Dude, is it like, really? You know? And he’s like, no, everyone’s just hanging out.

1:09:29 Yeah, and I was like, okay, we have to joke about the anti-networking event, because actually we were, you know, we’re like, look, and finally enough, we also say generally no. We’re very, some anti-recruiters for that reason. It’s the only, only industry where it’s like, we just kind of, we have to say no, because, because ultimately we exist to connect that community directly across all everything, so whether that be to find your co-founder, whether it be to find staff, whether that be to find investment, like whatever it might be, your support or resource, our, our purpose is to get directly.

1:09:57 So middle people, we try to kind of stay away from. You kick them out. We’ve never had to. Like, the ones we’ve had, a few start to show up recently as it’s gotten bigger, and we, if we hear them sort of saying something, we will have a word and say, that’s not appropriate. You can stay, but you cannot.

1:10:12 We’re not this is not, you know, blah, blah. We’ve never had to kick him out. We’ve been very lucky. I mean, I think people know we’re not, waiting. This is a public place, usually, right?

1:10:21 Yeah, not always. Yeah, I mean, I think people come along and they’re like, oh, this isn’t the networking event. I thought it was where I could just go around and shark they like, because the community kind of sticks together. People have become friends. People, a recruiter going around being like, hey, I can find you that job, or what I’ve got.

1:10:36 Well, probably the community almost has begun to sort of police itself a little bit, you know what I mean? Like, they know what they want and they know what they don’t want on a Friday night. Says Friday night, right? Since everyone’s after work beers. Nobody wants to be harassed on a Friday night, right?

1:10:49 I know. It is so. It’s been quite nice. I think people get the ethos, and they just kind of do it themselves. And, and it keeps it real.

1:10:55 You know, there’s a question I wanted to ask you, because you, you kind of deal in this kind of, the lubrication of the industry, you know, getting the people to kind of talk to each other, make it sound quite sexual. Yeah, what’s wrong with me? Three beers, Friday night. Was it Friday? It is Friday, Friday night.

1:11:10 I was wondering how much of it is, it is, is a good idea. The, the, the key to a successful business and how much of it is the relationships that you know, or the, the, the opportunity to be able to be like, I know this guy that can do this development. I know this guy. And within two days, since you know each other, you can trust each other enough to collaborate and make that next product. So I think, I mean, I think, as I said, when we started that didn’t exist.

1:11:35 So we’ve done, we’ve only done this in two years, you know, so two years, and that’s just been by, by believing that there were more people like us out there, right, that would want something. It’s basically givers. These would be, you give first, just pay it forward, pay it forward, right? Help the community, pay it forward, and be, you know, we, the kind of, the manchester that we have, we started was, show up, give a f*** and be consistent. That’s it, right?

1:11:56 That’s the three things we always said to build a community. Those are three things you need to do, and I think if you can do all three of those, and you can, you know, then you, you’re going to be okay. Like, people get that you’re in it for the right reasons, and I think, we began, people sort of like, oh, you know, what are these things? Production, after a while they just word of mouth spread, because we work so hard to make those events as good as possible.

1:12:15 I think to your point about connecting people, I guess it depends on the ecosystem. I mean, I only know London really intimately well, and, and for me, there is a big sharing economy here. There is a big kind of open collaboration camaraderie that we spoke about before. I think you need to welcome people in for them to realize that this is how we do things, and they can open up, and they don’t have to be [expletive] and pitch, and well, it’s like they can actually come and relax and have a drink and feel welcome, and I might come back next Friday, and that in turn sort of my I can’t believe it.

1:12:47 Like, welcome people and setting them off their guard from the first minute they walk in will naturally make them more open and to talking to other people, which will naturally hook them up with interesting people, and you know, they’ll help to sort of find themselves. We will help if we can, and where we can, but I think I think London’s kind of unique like that. I think, going back to original point, there is something kind of really fun about this. There is a really big community vibe, and not just because of us.

1:13:11 I think it’s, it’s a combination of the you know, the universities are starting these entrepreneur clubs. You’ve got, like, the campus we talked about. There’s more early stage seed capital. Around the VCs are kind of active and getting out there, and you know, we’re starting to, with larger events, we’re starting to bring some of those big US guys here, and they’re starting to talk to us and start to say what’s going on there. Once you know what’s happening, I think that makes it all quite exciting.

1:13:34 I think optimism is a really important part, I think, of, of startup. You need to, you know, you need, I, I sort of often say, I don’t, we don’t need the next Facebook to be invented in London. I just need people to think that it’s possible. Okay, that’s strong. It’s interesting, because we’re all immigrants, and we all know that, like, England has this mentality of, why bother.

1:13:55 Like, people get a lot of that. Maybe that’s an English thing, I don’t know, but, and so people harp on that a lot when they come on the show. This kind of, ah, why bother. But it’s funny, you’ve noticed something about England and the English spirit of this pub mentality of, let’s just relax, that actually fosters this great kind of community that you couldn’t find. I’ve lived in New York, I’ve lived in California, and you know, Americans are a little intense when it comes to that sometimes.

1:14:19 Yeah, exactly. So in a way, this, this, that’s one of the real positive aspects of British culture. I think so. And I think, but I think also with the Brits, the other thing is, you know, as soon as you’ve like… as soon as they’ve got something to be proud of, they go for it.

1:14:32 Do you know what I mean? Like, it’s, like, it’s as soon as there is a real-world example. I mean, I always often use the Olympics, Olympics example, right? Everybody left town. Four years of, like, horrendous complaining, and I was like, Team GB’s winning.

1:14:48 Guys, everyone came back. It was the greatest Olympics we’ve ever had, and I think, I think that’s kind of a funny microcosm, because there was, so, you know, everyone was just dreading it, and how we’re gonna do it, and it was, oh, the tube’s gonna be a disaster, and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, and then it happened, and it was great, and Team GB smashed it, and as an Aussie, I’m saying that, and I was super stoked that they did so well, because I remember I went to Sydney Olympics as well, and I, I remember that feeling, very, very well, and they deserved it, right?

1:15:11 I put so much money and effort, but they also showed what’s possible. I mean, they pulled in resource from all over the world to make that happen, and they smashed it. Yeah, it was a proud moment for me to be British. Exactly, right. And the thing, and I think startups are the same.

1:15:27 Britain has some f***ing great businesses to be proud of, and increasingly so. And the problem is that you’re talking about a market where nine out of 10 businesses fail, so if you take that kind of stereotypical British cynicism and apply it to startups, it’s kind of magnified. Everyone’s like, oh, these bloody web entrepreneurs. Yeah, they have very, very, very real success stories. There are very real large VCs investing in very real businesses, turning over millions of pounds, that are hiring lots of people, and that is real, and that is happening.

1:15:55 And I think in any ecosystem you need heroes, right? It’s a winner’s game. So eBay, I think, when you know, when they kind of sold out, they tipped the entire U.S. venture market single-handedly. It happened again 10 years later with Facebook. So it’s a winner’s game, right?

1:16:12 You’ve got to remember that, so the averages, but you need heroes. You need people to be like, I think that’s what you need. People to leave Google and Facebook to go and start a company because they believe they can do it, because they’ve been a part of it, right? They’ve been a part of something, and I think as we get companies like Moshi Monsters, you know, they’re kind of rapidly scaling, and we’ve got other ones like Nashika and Greys, and Wonga.com is doing really well, and you know, regardless of your sector, it’s those companies that will make other people see it’s possible, and it’s also that will, gen, it will breed very talented people who want to go and do it again.

1:16:46 So if a company sells and they get, should they have shares in that company? What have you, often is the case, if you join an early stage, sign up, and it goes well, they’ll then have a little bit of money, maybe they’re going to want to go and do it themselves, and I think the startup ecosystem really revolves on that, not just from a venture point of view but also from a talent point of view. It’s a constant cycle. Those who win reinvest, and read back new companies, and they angel invest.

1:17:07 I mean, it’s, yeah, it, but it does require heroes. It requires winners to start, and then the momentum builds, and I think we’ve definitely seen that in the last five years, for sure, in London, is going really strong. I’m excited, man. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Here, wait to see it, man.

1:17:22 We’re gonna go, I’m gonna show it to you. I know we’re about to go. You know, we do have a few minutes left, is, I want to just ask you a question. I ask most people that are on here, and if there’s a 20-year-old listening right now, and he’s like, yeah, Bryce, I want to, I want to do a startup or I want to get into this exciting business, and all this stuff. You know what advice do you give them, as far as what they should do or not do, to get this dream, which may or may not be correct?

1:17:49 So the first thing I would say, which might be a little bit more to the parents, but also to the kids, is do your computer sciences. UK is, we are short of developers. We need engineering talent more than anything. If, in fact, even if you don’t want to start a business, if you want to be rich, be a developer. Learn languages.

1:18:07 Start coding. You know, we have, it’s one of those things. One of the reasons is that, that’s, we’re a little bit behind as well, is that we, there is a brain drain here, right? Like, at least not as much anymore, because we have these companies, but you know, it used to be that if you were a developer and you wanted to get paid decently, you either worked in a bank or you went to the US, because that’s right, right? Yeah, so you know, do your computer science subjects, do your ICT courses.

1:18:30 For parents of young ones, we’ve got stuff like Code Club now, which is volunteer led, which is in 800 primary schools across the UK, teaching nine to 11-year-olds how to code using Scratch and gaming. I mean, that’s volunteer led. That was started by a UX designer from Albion, and her friend was a developer at Last.fm, and particularly because they were like, nobody’s teaching kids how to code. Is that more important than a second language in your opinion?

1:18:52 It is a second language. So it is the next, the second. It is it is the universal second language. If you can code, you can work anywhere. This is the wrong statement, but true.

1:19:01 Yeah, it’s true. I mean, I wish I could, but I’m sadly not that talented. I just run drinking events, but you know, for the kids at home, I would say, like, honestly, the best thing you could do is, is your, your math, your engineering, get into your computer science course, and even if you become an angel or venture cap guy later, you can smell through the stuff, because you have those skills. Exactly. And everybody’s looking for technical co-founders.

1:19:21 You’ll probably meet about three people tonight, he’ll say, oh, Brian, just looking for this. Yeah, can you code? I’m looking for a technical co-founder, likes a powerful, tech guy that they can pitch with their business, but yeah, I’m looking for one. we have, we have a three, we have a jobs board on Three Beards. The Three Bits website is a jobs board.

1:19:37 It is 99 full of developer roles. Everybody’s looking for developers, good developers. And it’s one of those areas that I really, I really hope, with things like Apps for Good and Code Club and some of those organizations, that they’re teaching at that even at that junior primary school level, you know, your daughter’s level. I think that that will make a big impact. It’s a long game, but I think that’s really important.

1:19:57 I think for the older kids at schools, like, you know, Ben, you know, who’s now the deputy CEO of Tech City, never went to university, told himself how to code. So it is possible to do it, but I think it’s just like get out there and do it, and you know, get into things like Codecademy if you’re older, and there’s a number of sort of online courses you can do to kind of help you start learning, but I would say definitely, definitely, if you can learn to code and you enjoy it and you can, you know, have fun with it, you’ll be fine. I did not expect that answer, did you?

1:20:25 No, it’s a good answer, though. It’s a great answer. Yeah, I would have just thought it’s great advice too. Something else, and from your perspective, what’s up? What’s another thing that they should be looking for?

1:20:35 I mean, should they be starting their own lemonade stand to get an idea, because the entrepreneurship culture isn’t as big here or in Europe as it is in the States, right? Or wrong? Yeah, I think that’s a, I often attribute that to a little bit of, I call that, the, the new world mentality, which is like, growing up as an Australian, I would never let anybody tell me what I couldn’t do, because we had no attached sense of class or history. Yeah, that’s really, I believe it.

1:20:57 That does play a part, that there is no ingrained class system and structure, and if you go up in the States, you grow up with the American dream. You grow up to believe you can do whatever you want. It’s the same in Australia. You know, we, we’re underdogs, we’re battlers, but we don’t ever let anyone tell us that we can’t do stuff. We believe we can do, you can.

1:21:13 You won’t live in a lucky country. You have every resource. You can grow up to be what you want. It’s really important, I think. I think that mentality, that’s why this entrepreneurial scene, or this buzz around East London, is seen as something so unique, whereas I kind of feel like, for a lot of us, like from other cultures, it’s just part of life.

1:21:32 It’s just that we’re applying it to technology. Yeah, whereas here it’s, it’s unusual to be so, like, driven and you know, I mean, like, really kind of going for it, you know, really passionate, going for it. It does stand out in the, in the country, in this country, even in the city, which is, you know, a trade city that’s had immigrants here for thousands of years. Would you, you started your own business in Toronto? Would you say to a kid, start your own lemonade business, start your own paper route, start your own, this, just to get a feel for what it’s like to be that guy?

1:21:57 Yeah, I think I would say, you know, learn to be a good loser, right? But learn to learn to fail, because I think you learn so much from your failures, and I think you’re going to constantly get, you know, people are going to say no, and you’re going to constantly stumble about, and I think if you’re not good at sort of stumbling and learning from those, from those mistakes, then you’re going to have a real tough time, and, and probably get you know, chewed up and tossed out, because your first one’s probably not going to succeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:22:25 Look at any entrepreneur. He’s just littered with failures. Sure, and sure, big companies, but again, that’s something they struggle to deal with. The fail fast mentality is very difficult to deal with here. It’s very much seen.

1:22:35 It’s very stigmatized, whereas, yeah, in the US, it’s like exactly, part of the process. It’s part of your trial by fire, if you want to call it, like, it’s not. Again, go back to that figure, nine out of ten fail. You know, remember that, but don’t let it get you down. Right?

1:22:49 And mediocrity for a startup is the worst thing, right? The last thing you want to do is kind of just, you know, bumble about and not really do anything for two, three years, right? You want to, like, see you know, fly or die, like, take chances. Yeah, ball of fire type stuff. You gotta be, right?

1:23:02 You’re either going down a ball of flames, or you’re hitting. Yeah, it’s nerds. Yeah, it’s got to be one of the other. No, that’s very good perspective. We’re about to go to my first Silicon Drinkabout.

1:23:11 I’m very excited. Okay, awesome. It took Bryce being a guest to get me there. What’s wrong with me? Hey, I think it’s, I think it’s a good following.

1:23:20 I think you can, you know, no, it’s perfect. Well, I should get you. Well, you can definitely introduce some more people if you want to get more tech people on the show. I can absolutely help you. Cool would love some suggestions going forward, because it seems silly that we’re in the middle of this with this happening all around me, that we don’t have someone here every month at least to represent some sector of this thing.

1:23:35 Yeah, yeah, for sure, man. There’s lots of… and the best part is they’re all really nice people, and the good thing about working with geeks is they’ll get drunk and have fun, and then they all quietly go home. Nobody ever starts a fight. It’s great. I love it.

1:23:45 The nicest people to drink with, ever. Sure, and they’re also, you know, they’re also generally the most intelligent people in the room that solve problems you don’t realize exists yet. Right? So that always keeps me on my toes. Wow, that’s cool.

1:23:54 How do people get in touch with the Beards? What are the Twitter handles? How to get in touch with you, et cetera? Yeah, so the best thing is, I would go to our website, which is www.3hyphenbeards.com, and sign up for our weekly newsletter, the Stash, and every Wednesday you’ll get all the rundown of the events. You can find all the Twitter handles and the websites on the, on the Three Bits website as well.

1:24:14 And then, if you ever want to get in touch with us, just drop us an email at hello at three hyphen beards.com, and it’ll go to me, Michael and Joe, and we will, we’ll let you know. I love that email handle. Like, I have info at Monorail TV. Why don’t you do hello? So it’s just Jesus.

1:24:31 If you ever find our 404, Beard’s not found. It’s a terrible, photos after we got shaved last November. Apparently there’s no beard. It’s horrible. Dude, I’m gonna stand in the air, but November was a terrible time.

1:24:43 I grew this beard for all of you. How long did it take to grow it back to where it was? You know, well, it got, I actually, so this is actually quite trim. I, the boys for my birthday bought me a Murdock, full-on shave haircut type voucher thing, so I’ve actually just had this trimmed. It kind of gets quiet, it gets quite thick down here, right?

1:25:01 But obviously I’m Ginger Beer. We’ve got, we’ve got Joe Greybeard, Lord of Scarborough, Mike Tallbeard, and me, Gingerbeard, and of course you know, if it’s a sunny day, and let’s be honest, it’s getting a bit sunny. Direct rare sunlight looks like my face is on fire, man. Like, I gotta be careful, keep that thing trimmed, right? Otherwise, you know, ladies run around screaming.

1:25:15 It’s terrible. Children are crying, and it’s the curse. It’s close to the ginger, ginger beard. I wear it, I work with pride. I got some good beard pictures from, you know, 60, 65 days of shaving on the road.

1:25:27 You get, you got you got probably consistent growth. It looks like, it looks like this is like almost straight across your eyes, right? Sure, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, it’s, and then all the smog and dust from a big long trip, and it’s, it’s could be the fourth beard. I’m sure you’ve heard that before.

1:25:40 Colin, what’s up for you next, and how do people get in touch with you? I mean, you’re, you’re just kind of, you’re taking a few months here to kind of look at all the possible, yeah, experiences going on. Exactly, yeah. So, you know, at Pyle C is my Twitter handle, and colinpyle.com, and yeah, I’m trying to figure it out. I’m looking, I’m looking at a whole bunch of stuff to invest in, to work with, to start on.

1:26:00 So you know, it’s transitioning periods in your life. You take some time and sit and think before you make the next step, because once you do, sometimes it’s difficult to step back. So you should, you might, you might want to get together with the founder of Busu, international language, no, I know that. So they’ve just relocated, and they just raised like 10 million. Yeah, yeah, he’s a really nice he’s lovely.

1:26:23 Oh yeah, he just hired one of my staff members, actually. She’s gone in-house at a startup, so I wish her all the best. I think it’s, if you’re running an agency for startups, it’s only inevitable that you’ll lose good people to a good startup. But look at this, crazy. You can see this incestuous community.

1:26:35 We’re gonna go see it firsthand. Gosh, I don’t know if I can handle it. Well, awesome. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me.

1:26:42 I spoke with one of the Beards, Joe, and then I emailed the second Beard, and when I finally got the third Beard, so I was actually sound like third preference, but I was the first Beard I got past. I got passed around like a girl at a biker bar. We enjoyed it, though, and yeah, and but thanks. I know you guys wanted to come together. I just don’t have the setup, so please say I’ll meet the other Beards anyways.

1:27:02 So yeah, but thanks for coming. You represented more than I thought. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, please subscribe, if you want to see the Beard, come to our YouTube channel at londonreeltv. It’s a pretty impressive beer. You’ll be able to let down.

1:27:15 It’ll be nice. We’re on Twitter, as you know. We’re on Facebook. If you want to intern with us, we got like 15 people all around the world that just help us out at London Real. It’s a lot of fun.

1:27:24 We’re info at londonreal.tv. Three of our interns have gone on full-time in the business. I’m quite proud of that, so track record. Yeah, it’s decent. Yeah, it’s cool, and the crazy thing is that they go into these businesses, but they’re like spies for us.

1:27:36 Oh really? Yeah, you can’t say that, damn it. Anyways, no. However, they’re covered. Hire them anyways.

1:27:42 But, that’s awesome. Very cool. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. It’s been my absolute pleasure.

1:27:47 Thanks for having me. Let’s give a beer. All right, let’s do this. Thanks, guys. And thanks for having me.

1:27:52 To you, okay, let’s go do this. Let’s grab a drink. All right, thanks man. All you’ve got, right, kind of, you’ve got the nutter, you’ve got the, the fanny merchant, you’ve got the kind of, the lovable loser, and you’ve got the kind of cynical, kind, intellectual. Everybody’s got one of them, and they’re kind of grouped under a bunch of young guys going out sort of on the town.

1:28:15 Everyone can relate to the characters. That’s what I was wondering