Full transcript: Damian Kimmelman on London Real
3:21 Let’s get on with the show. Our guest is Mr Damian Kimmelman, who is the founder and CEO of Duedil, which organizes private company information into a real-time decision intelligence tool. How’s that? It’s good, pretty good. Huh.
3:35 You got big companies that use your product like McKinsey, KPMG, Dell, the Home Office and Stripe. We had one of their founders, John Collison, on last year. Great company. You guys just raised either 17 million or 17 million pounds, dollars, I’m not sure. In C Series, it’s dollars, but we’ve actually raised about 22 million in the last year.
3:54 Okay, all right, $22 million in last year. Okay, um, sounds bigger than dollars. Sounds even in Canadian dollars. There we go. That’s a lot of loonies and toonies.
4:07 The Financial Times called you guys the Bloomberg of private companies. I was trying to think about that earlier, and then I realized, isn’t Bloomberg a private company? But we will talk about that. You just won the International Entrepreneur of the Year award from Tech City News. Congratulations.
4:20 You had a lot of competition. I mean, the other award winners were like 20 people that have been on this show, sat in that very seat. Guys like Hussein Kanji, Sher Kotu, Easy VRA Tavit, Chris from TransferWise. I mean it was like a who’s who on the stage that night. Yeah, I shouldn’t have won, no, but she did.
4:35 I think somebody, I think somebody paid. I didn’t pay them, but I’m sure I’m sure that was rigged, money exchanged hands. Um, Damian, thanks for being here. Welcome to London Real. Thank you, thank you for having me.
4:47 You know, I remember that term Duedil from my old days in the banking world. I’m sure you know it. The guys in M&A, I was always in trading, and my M&A guys would always just use the due deal. They’d be like, they would always use it as Wall Street guys did, in a non-Wall Street term, like you’re about to get married. They’d be like, did you do the due deal on her?
5:03 And it was always like, you’re about to do a deal, and then you need to do the due diligence, as in run through all the numbers, and it was never considered necessarily a sexy thing to do, because the analysts would kind of do it, but it was the way you found out if the deal was really worth doing, or if you were just going to buy a dream or something. You weren’t being told, and I was wondering, you know, if you look at your business model, it seems like so many great companies, so simple, and yet it’s such a big game-changer, and like you guys are getting awards for good reasons. When did Duedil and data like this become so hot, and become so sexy and so important?
5:36 Well, I think that there are a number of ways of explaining it, but I think the easiest way to explain it, and both of you worked in public markets. Well, if you look at the bid-ask spread, so the difference between somebody what I want to sell versus what somebody wants to buy, that’s dropped down to next to zero, which means that all these algorithmic trades are creating so much liquidity in the market. There’s so much, they algorithms producing news, and their algorithms reading the news, and making, taking actions on top of the news, and that dropped you know, the bid-ask spread next to zero.
6:27 That means that there’s so much information. There’s no information. If information is surprise, you know, if information is the difference between the ones and the zeros, the context the, that means that you have to go to other markets to find the excitement, right? To find the opportunity. And when you look at private markets, private markets in Europe alone, there’s a 250 billion euro shortfall in lending.
7:01 There’s a 450 billion euro misallocation of finance, private companies. These are indicators that there’s a huge amount of disorder in the information. And you know, it wasn’t that long ago that private companies, that public companies acted like private ones. You know, public companies only present their financials four times a year, right? It’s not the rest, it’s speculation, yeah, or news from the company.
7:37 But That’s going to change. You know, 99%, 99.8% of businesses are private. They make up 50-plus% of GDP across any first-world economy, and if you look at those stats, then you realize the amount of opportunity is really, you know, people say the, you know, we’re going to be, the economy is going to change because of the, you know, small to medium-sized businesses. Well, that’s why, right? The opportunity is with the small to medium-sized businesses.
8:10 You know, there’s been a huge trend of private companies acting like public ones, and you know, with the likes of AngelList and Seedrs, or you have Funding Circle and what have you, just as there’s a huge trend of, for the last sort of 10 years, of individuals acting like companies, and that’s just organizing the disorder of information. So the eBay is the Stripe, the eBay is the Squares of the world. You know, that’s the people acting like companies. And then you have the Funding Circles, AngelList, and ourselves, the private companies acting more like public funds.
9:00 When you meet someone and you pitch them on what you guys can provide to them as a service, is there a place you start? I mean, a lot of people probably see Duedil and they’re like, I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know how it could, you know, affect my business. Is there something simple you hit with right away, as in, this is what we can do right now? So we ask them what their problems are, because the data can be useful for a number of problems.
9:25 I think what separates us from our competition, what we’d like to show, is that we, you know, were concerned about the company’s problems. A lot of the incumbents don’t take phone calls. They don’t listen to their customers. And most people that we speak to, I think, to be fair, our product, you know, still has a lot of work to do. We still have a lot of stuff that we need to build out, but one of the things that people keep on coming back to us and saying is you guys really listen and take feedback, whereas nobody else will you listen to us.
10:10 It falls on deaf ears. You made a good comparison, like if you look up someone that you want to hire, pretty much these days you can go to LinkedIn, or they have to provide you with a CV, with, you know, 10, 20 years of their history and where they went to school and everything. But if you go to a private company, you know, say you’re doing business with a private company that’s going to have receivables, or you’re going to have to trust them to a certain way for reputation reasons or cash flow reasons, and you come up with very little, right?
10:34 Very little, especially before you guys came along, especially available electronically. I’m guessing even now, you know, even now, you think the access of information with Google and the great search engines still really hard to find out information about private companies, and isn’t it crazy? And, you know, what I, you know, 10 years ago LinkedIn did this thing where they allowed people to put up their CVs online, and everybody was like, I don’t want to put my CV up online, but people started to realize that by putting their CVs up online, you’d be found for a job instead of having to find a job.
11:14 And that flips the whole dynamic, and with companies, people have often conflated this notion of a private company means privacy. And that’s wrong. Private means a limited liability, private means limited, privately held, not publicly held. It doesn’t mean privacy. That’s a a incorrect conflation.
11:45 You limited liability is probably the biggest wealth creation invention of all time, right? It’s created Silicon Valley. It’s created, you know, the the ships that went to sail the seas to the Spice Islands and it’s a concession by Society for the common good. It says you can screw up, you can f*** up, and we’re not going to put you in jail. And that’s amazing, right?
12:13 That means people can take audacious risks. They can, you know, put all this, you know, information up online and give it away for free, and you know, and the the thing that is dangerous is that because of the word private has been conflated with privacy, you have the creation of a anonymously owned companies that can intimidate competitors can manipulate tenders, and when the going gets stuff completely disappears and that’s really harmful to society. and this is a concession given by Society for the common good.
13:09 And I’m not saying that companies need to open up all of their information. That’s wrong, but understanding who owns a company, and you know, and who that is is very, very important. Do you look at yourself as more of an information company than, say, a fintech company? We look at ourselves as a technology company. You do.
13:33 Okay, because you’re just providing information out there. The fact that it’s financial information is so, you know, the way I… so we’re predominantly technology-based company. the reason why I don’t think that we’re a business information company is because you know, we come from a tech background. We’re trying to fix a problem in the market with technology not, you know, the other way around, and I think you being an information provider is really missing out on the opportunity.
14:16 You know, data isn’t as valuable as information and to create information from data, you have to create context. The ones and the zeros, right? And data is not the new oil. That’s like, have you ever heard that? People say, some people say, like data, I’m running in the wrong circles.
14:39 Yeah, you’re running with the not cool kids, right? the Vice guys. Yeah, so that goes along with big data. It’s not about the data in your opinion, it’s the information. It’s the information.
14:50 So data is not the… so some people say data is the new oil. I don’t know any commodity that grows exponentially every single day. Right, I don’t. So just on that level, it’s just incorrect. It would have no value anymore.
15:07 A commodity like that. Yeah, and when everything that consumes electricity at some point will be connected to the internet and will be a data provider, you have a huge amount of data. You have data glut. And what happens is you really need to look for the information and the insight from the data, and the way that you get that is through context, through collaboration, so speculation, and through analytical algorithms, and the biggest value in data is in insights that lead to actions, and the actions that are attributable back to the data.
15:53 Can you give us an example of some data that you guys might get a hold of, and then the information you would provide a client? Certainly. So, and I want to caveat this by saying the last three and a half years, what we’ve been working on is building the infrastructure so that you can process huge amounts of data, and that you can model it in really exciting ways. So we’ve been building the infrastructure to do the kinds of things that you want to do, but the kinds of things that customers can do right now is they can find all of the companies in Northwest London that have a debt-to-equity ratio of X that are in whatever industry you want.
16:47 Conversely, you can find, you know, one of our clients, who has really interesting, you know, company, Zipcar. They, I used them last weekend. Yeah, yeah, impressed. They look for new businesses that start up 8 800 met away from a particular, a particular sort of parking spot. There are a huge number, you know, everything from non- you know, Nos and nonprofits looking to look at their donor list and reconcile it against you know, businesses and individuals, and look for proxies of their net wealth to marketers, to people who are trying to understand the risk profile of their portfolio.
17:50 It’s a really really broad range of use cases, and that’s why we always go for… we ask for what’s the problem, because financial data has so many opportunities to help with that. Yeah, I was thinking like credit scores, and that’s like, you know, iteration one, right? And then there’s like so many. I wasn’t even thinking that you could, you know, search by, you know, company geography, money raised, this kind of thing. I’m already thinking how I can use it for this business.
18:20 I’m thinking sponsors. There we go. I’m sure you’re thinking coffee, right? Well, and you guys just in the UK, UK and Ireland, 20 other countries through our API. 20 other countries, because as a small business owner, just for an example, that I’m going through right now, is you know, I’m looking to buy about a thousand machines, and I’m dealing with a an importer from Portugal and a factory in China, and it’s like when or how far away do you think we are from making some of this information global.
18:50 Yeah, and allowing small businesses like me to make more informed decisions. Certainly in the next 5 years. Yeah. There’s so many data sets that are so exciting. So imports and exports, you get that globally.
19:12 You understand. And what’s interesting about imports and exports is that you have a proxy for exposure to a currency, so it’s not only useful for finding importers and exporters. It’s also useful for FX. Yeah, which is your background, right? And you know, there’s so many.
19:37 That’s the thing about data. There’s, you know, something might not be useful to one type of user, but it can be useful to another, and it can be really, really useful to another. And the opportunity is really about handling the data properly and being able to traverse it, and being able to really build ways to manipulate the data, and extract value from it. What did Gordon Gekko say? The most valuable commodity I know of is information.
20:15 Yeah, yeah. And like, you’re right, information to one person is useless, and to another it can make a huge… I’m just thinking about even the traders in the city, if they can look at private companies for trends or info or whatever, they could use that, and, you know, to trade public markets. Anyways, my mind’s going crazy. I was wondering if you could tell us about the genesis of Duedil.
20:32 I mean, is this something that you just sat back and saw all happening four years ago, and you saw yourself on stage accepting the award. I mean, was it, was it that simple or linear, or has this completely changed over the last few years? I always knew that it was going to happen. So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll start from where I started, so back in university I flipped a lot of properties. And I made quite a good amount of money.
21:07 I went to St Andrews in Scotland, and this was sort of 2002 to 2006, and you had a sort of a three-pronged awesome effect, which is, you know, burgeoning, you know, real estate prices. You had the Prince William effect, so a lot of Americans came to the university, and you had a problem, and you actually had two other really quite cool things, which was a lot of the universities went through this fire code regulation that you had to if you had housing of multiple occupants, there had to be certain fire doors and fire safety measures, and and then you had a real arbitrage on the US dollar to pound. So I bought in US dollars and I sold in pounds, and so it was just a wham bam, thank you, ma’am, of awesomeness.
22:16 Perfect storm. Perfect storm of great macro trends hitting a small town with, you know, nobody was competing on doing real estate. You know, if I was trying to do it in London, you know, as a student, but being a student in a small town, there wasn’t a lot of competition, so that was really an awesome thing for me. And in doing that I realized that I could not work for anybody, and I thought, what’s the big next thing? And I realized that, you know, real estate wasn’t going to happen for that much longer, and so I, I’m, I looked at the opportunities and I saw you know, one of my best friends who I wanted to go into business with had been roommates with Chris Hughes from Facebook, one of the founders of Facebook.
23:17 And I realized that, you know, social gaming was probably going to be the next big thing, and what was bigger than poker, because poker was the biggest social game at the time, or like our view of what social gaming was. It was online. Maang maang is Chinese gambling. It’s you know, it’s a game that’s totally offline, but we thought that we could port it online. It’s got four times the demographic of poker, and there’s a huge Chinese diaspora, and while it’s illegal to gamble in mainland China, we thought that we could get the Chinese and other countries who had been separated from families and who want to, yeah, game with each other.
24:25 And so we decided to build it, and we we hadn’t, we didn’t know this, we didn’t know how to do front-end development. I was a front-end engineer, and so we met this guy, and he was pretty cool. He had built some pretty beautiful sites, and so we got him to come on board. One thing led to another, and we realized that we would, yeah, be in trouble if we launch this. We went to Vegas for 10 days, which was trouble in itself, but we realized that either we’d be shut down or something bad would happen to us, okay, from the gambling industry somewhere.
25:19 Yeah, from China. From China. Okay. And so we said, you know, my friend Rob said that he wanted to finish his PhD. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I said to this guy who ran the front-end agency, I said, listen, you know, why don’t we set up a company together?
25:45 I will put, I will, I will put you know, whatever you put in, I will match whatever you put into the business. He put in £60,000 into the company from Barclays, loan, and it was based off of his current assets, so his house and things like that, and his management accounts. And six months went by, and things just got more and more dubious. And I asked my accountant, can you look at these accounts, can you see what’s going on? And he said they’re totally cooked.
26:25 And I said, “Christ, yeah, these are your partner’s accounts?” Yeah, okay. And I said, wow, this is really scary. you know, this is a real problem. This is a problem that an institution can’t read these accounts.
26:43 This is a problem that I can’t read these accounts. And at university I’d done an internship for two years doing risk assessment on CDSs. What you would probably know is completely hilarious, doing risk assessment on, you know, a market that’s completely not transparent, and you can’t, I TR to credit TOA SPS for nine years. Love those guys. And doing risk is a joke on that, like it, and I, I, but I realized when I’d done this internship that pricing risk effectively was central to every B2B interaction, and I realized that if Barclays couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t do it, then a whole lot of people in between couldn’t do it, and that was really the genesis of Duedil.
27:46 And it was to simplify it. Duedil was the idea that it was, you know, it’s an abbreviated due diligence, right? That was the original notion of the word. Plus it was unique and all of that. Then when we launched Duedil, we opened up.
28:10 We got approached by ActionAid, and they said, you know, can you show us, do you have the data on the FTSE 100 companies that have subsidiaries based in tax havens, and it’s this pitch, and at the very seen it’s spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. but every company is making the world a better place you were saying, change the world, but this could really change the world. It could, you know, presenting evidence instead of conjecture in politics could really change the world, and that was really exciting, but we realized that, you know, to do the work on the tax haven stuff, it only took you know, two or three weeks’ worth of work.
30:09 So you guys did the numbers on Starbucks and Google, and yeah. So if you go, so we were really scared at the time, but if you search ActionAid Duedil, okay, you can see that all the data is attributable back to us. To you guys. Wow. But, and they wrote an article about how they found all the data, but we were a real young startup, and we were like, ah, put, see one under companies.
30:32 These are hopefully going to be our clients, right? And so we weren’t sure if we wanted to take real credit for it, so, but we just wanted to be acknowledged, because we knew that it would be transformative, but we realized that if we really wanted to be transformative, we really had to build the infrastructure, and so most of our work has been on building infrastructure on the stuff that you don’t see. Very recently we’ve started to productize and started to show some of the things that we can do with that infrastructure, and realize some problems that we made with the infrastructure.
31:18 It’s not all like a perfect story, like everything goes smoothly, and you but I think that the most exciting stuff has yet to come. And this is really, you know, it’s really the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much data. It’s such a fallacy to say, you know, that businesses won’t share this data. You know, I think you said before there’s a difference between opening up information and exposing it and sharing it.
31:58 They’re different. They’re different, you know, privacy concerns for different data sets. Right, some data you want to share right with a few, you share secrets. Right, you don’t share them publicly. And so I think a lot of people don’t understand about Duedil is that we’re not about exposing everything.
32:22 We’re about if there’s data that’s public, we make it easy to access right, because that’s public data. If it’s private, we will certainly abide by those rules. If not, you know, try and help users to make that private, because I think it’s about choice. Some things are out of your choice, and that’s what should be in the public domain, and when the public domain says this shouldn’t be public anymore, then we should abide by those rules. And that’s sort of my view on data, but businesses will share, and you’re starting to see it, if users will share, you know, if people will share what they had for breakfast, yeah, on Twitter.
33:15 If people will share their CVs, and that was really personal before, right? But it helps them. Are you seeing attitudes in business change to where people are like, wow, now I see that if I share information about my financials I can get more clients that way? Totally. Look at AngelList, or look at Tradeshift.
33:35 Right, so Tradeshift is invoices, and it’s a network of invoices, and that’s really cool, right? Yeah. We had MarketInvoice on here, so a similar model. Yeah, I mean, that’s fascinating, how that can open up capital immediately. Yeah, right?
33:51 And then look at AngelList, where you share a huge amount of stuff, but you allow access to certain investors to see it. Right, that totally is transforming venture capital, and now it’s really super scary for some VCs, because it, it, it’s hurting their model. Sure, access to their, they kind of controlled the funnel, and they had access to the information, and now it’s let’s, let’s talk about the US because it’s obviously always the big old elephant, and like everyone’s business model sooner or later has to address what’s happening there.
34:28 I don’t know. And then that’s why I’m going to ask you this, and we had MarketInvoice on, and he’s like, look, we’ve got plenty to do here in the UK. We’ve got, you know, huge receivable market. Our models are based on Companies House, which I know your original one was. So yeah, how does the US play in?
34:42 Is it a completely different business over there as far as getting information, and do you care, and you’re, I don’t say that because I’m American. You’re American too. I’m American. Our Co is American. There’s a reason why we’re in Europe, you know.
34:58 I’d love to be in America. I’d love, like, for you, maybe it’s a little vanity, but it’s like, it’s my, my home, and I’d love to have a business that’s recognized in America, but to be honest, that’s just ego. There is a huge, huge opportunity in Europe. If you look at those figures again, there’s a 250 billion euro shortfall in SME lending. There’s a 450 billion euro misallocation of finance, private companies.
35:29 There’s something like 97 billion in unpaid trade credit, you know, just in the UK, 97 billion, right? I’m, you know, like it would be a sucker, you’d be a sucker to just want to go into the US. It’s for vanity’s sake, right? And there’s, it’s not as simple as that, because in order to really understand companies you have to understand beneficial ownership, and, you know, a lot of companies are owned by American companies, and to trace that beneficial ownership but that’s not the only way.
36:14 And I think it’s a, you know, the problem with the UK taxine is that it doesn’t have balls, right? It doesn’t have the balls that Americans have, where they will put money down on God knows what and be like, this is going to change the world, right? Right, right. Is that called risk appetite? What is that?
36:43 Yeah, it’s risk appetite. Big balls. We’ve heard that before, though, like we’ve definitely heard that before. So what’s your point about that? Well, that’s the reason why everybody thinks that they need to go to the US, okay, cuz that’s where the balls are, or that’s where the market is.
37:00 Well, that’s where the capital is, with the balls, that’s where the balls are, follow the balls. I didn’t know that’s what people were thinking when they’re saying that. Is that the implicit thing there? I always thought people were thinking that’s where the market was, and if you don’t own that market, someone else will, and then they’ll come over to the UK and swallow you up. Look, every single place has a huge market.
37:18 You think the US is the only one that’s making money? They’re going to be more billionaires in Europe than in the US in the next. There was a, a thing I, I don’t forget who, but by 2025 they’re more billionaires in Europe than in the US. There’s a market for, if there’s a market for Spanx, that’s multi-billion. You know, the pullup women’s underwear.
37:48 There’s a market for everything. And people often look at markets in the wrong way, you know. If you were to ask somebody what’s the market of portable music when the Walkman was around, they’d be like, oh, that’s about 200 million a year, you know, steady steady earner, and then comes the iPod, right? And you know, what’s the search market? You know, what’s what’s the the the the the, you know, the size of the search market?
38:24 Google, it’s about 100 million, right? You know, it’s just ridiculous. Thinking of markets, think of problems. Think of, like, how does this problem, how many people does this problem affect, and is it the entry point of that problem? Right, and that to me is the real way to look at a market, not to look at it in, you know, the, the market cap of, you know, current, you, providers of a service is there, but if those numbers you talk about for the UK, there must be 20 times that in the US.
39:06 If there’s someone doing that in the US, there is a market for that business there. Right, so um one of the other reasons why, uh, the US is really difficult for fintech is, um, there are 50 different states. Right, right. There um, so data is all over the place. Banking systems all over the place.
39:31 Uh, you don’t have anything streamlined. You, um, have a, a, a cultural problem with, um, that the idea of businesses should be private and it’s for privacy sake. But, um, you know, every single one of those businesses, it’s crazy, because if you look at West Coast VCs, a lot of them are really ignorant, because their whole premise is based on the fact that, you know, the more you share the better off you are, you know, this, this rouso thing, and then they’re like, okay, but for businesses, there’s an exception, right?
40:13 Not mathematically. There’s, there’s that, that’s the law mathematically, but for businesses, no, right? And they don’t really like see the, the hypocrisy. And, um, you know, I would like, you know, easy wins. Europe is an easy win.
40:32 It’s got great banking systems. You’re, we’re in the financial capital of the world in London. You know, it’s f***ing expensive in London, but, um, you know, we’re right next to some of the best universities we, um, have great visa policies, where we can, uh, get anybody from Europe or the US, and you start to see, you know, we’ve started to see a lot of candidates from Eastern Europe, uh, and from the US, being like, you know, we want to come to, so Eastern Europe European candidates who’ve immigrated to the US being like, we want to come back, and they want to come back to to London.
41:15 I think that’s pretty, pretty awesome. Okay, so no plans immediately to go to the US? I don’t. I just, it’s not, it’s not, um, it’s something that we’re always re-evaluating, and something that we’re always um, looking at, but, um, there’s a huge opportunity in Europe. I find that refreshing.
41:39 Man, everyone always seems to be like no, but they can’t get, they, they want to get there now, you know. So, but I, you know, I think what you say, people all, they just see, you know, 350 million people, right? And that’s, oh, it’s a bigger market, so let’s go over there. But I love, you know, the way you look at it, and that market size is, is this moving target, and it just, because it’s existent now, today, with the existing players, is this size doesn’t mean, you know, you can’t find new markets and new opportunities, and find the person that would never have a Walkman and, you know, now has, has an iPad every time they leave the house.
42:12 So the, the real big thing is literally the balls. Um, Europe has so many things going for it for fintech. You know, it has distressed economies, like, um, uh, Spain, where, um, you know, it, the, um, average, um, number of days to get paid is 100 days. That’s a huge opportunity, right, for somebody like MarketInvoice. That’s an awesome you know, invoice discount opportunity.
42:47 Then you have, you know, opportunities in fintech, in the UK, you have tons of, of, of opportunities and tons of different ways to cut and slice it. Um, and in the US, for fintech, you have a lot of ballsiness, but you have the balls right. It’s, you talk about those numbers for the UK, ior I love the ball, the ball thing, so I’m glad that we can use that word. But, you know, London Real, it’s about the ball, it’s about the ball. But I mean, you mentioned those numbers about inefficiencies, cuz it’s all about those inefficiencies you can exploit, and that’s the size of the market.
43:21 If you look at that in England, you can imagine what they are in a company, in a country like Spain or Italy, where I just, maybe I’m wrong, but I just see like a place where there could be these massive inefficiencies that have been like that for a long time and will stay that way, uh, for a lot of different reasons, but I’m speculating. What do you do with $20 million? You try not to flush it down the toilet. Did you ever think it’s too much? I raised too much.
43:46 No, it’s too little. Okay, London’s f***ing expensive, right? London’s f***ing expensive. That’s in dollars expensive. Yeah, that’s true.
43:55 Um, so um, you, you know, I, I, I, I do think um, that it’s too little, but it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s the right amount for right now. so it’s not the be all and end all. But it’s enough for us not to screw it up. Okay, well, so you, you seem like you have a really cool company culture. I mean, I saw some videos about your company, and it just seems like everybody wants to be there and work there, and obviously you guys got lots of awards and stuff.
44:32 How do you keep that, see them a lot? Yeah, whatever you’re doing. How many employees do you have? What, how many employees? Uh, 37.
44:40 Okay, what’s the, what’s the culture like? Is that defined by you? Is that something you thought about a lot? You don’t pay a lot. Um, you got to pay for some awards for us, by the way, but, uh, so there, there, there’s nothing behind that.
44:50 It just happened organically. I think we, you know, we try to do. This is going to sound hypocritical to some people that, um, know me well, so I’m going to caveat it just by saying we try and do things in moderation. So in terms of salary, we try and, you know, um, give a fair wage, fair options, fair, um, we really try and be equitable. We have a culture that I think is very um, Buddhist in the sense that, um, it’s, um, yeah, there aren’t that many rules.
45:43 The only rule is to use your head and to not do stupid s***, but that’s more on like things that you know will be bad. You don’t steal, you know, those kind of rules, the fundamentals. What we try and do in the company is we try and hire um, people who are super proactive and who have a really great attention to detail, and give them, uh, the flexibility and reduce the barriers for them to be prod-Ive, um, and I see my job as not motivating but reducing the things that impede motivation and allow them to be, because people are always self-motivated right, good people.
46:46 Yeah, yeah. And, um, but they hate b******t, and so if you remove the b******t, and you don’t allow b******t to happen, and you have to be able to clamp down when b******t happens, but if you reduce that and you’ve hired great people, um, then it’s a fun place to work, because you know, fun place is not a place where you just get to dick around. A fun place is where you are really energized about what you’re doing, and you get to dick around, right? Right, and you get cool stuff done.
47:26 Yeah, right? And so you feel positive at the end of the day about doing the stuff that you really love. And that’s what I try and do in the company, and sometimes I get it horribly wrong. But I think, um, so far we’ve gotten it, um, right. How important is it to have a face on a company?
47:51 You know, we know with Facebook it’s Zuckerberg, and was Apple it was Jobs. And you know, I’m putting you in good company, you know, for Duedil it’s definitely Damian, and you know, you’re out there, and you know, you, the award went to you, and I know there’s a great company behind you, but is it important for it to have a pretty outspoken person or a pretty high-profile person these days? So, uh, I think yes, um, but I don’t think that that’s my main job or goal.
48:22 I think that, there, my main goal is not to run out of money, right, and to hire the best people, to, you know, and retain the best people to achieve the goal of the company. I was reading an article actually just recently on that, about the number of CEOs that have Twitter and are like, have a social presence, right? And it’s, if you take the top, I think it was the top 500 companies in the US, public or private? And we got to talk. Yeah, I think it was I think it was public, because they were talking about how Elon Musk has a really public profile and how he can tackle things instantly, right?
49:01 So when the New York Times writes a shitty article that’s b******t about Tesla, he’s on it that day, writing a blog and tweeting about it and quashing it instantly, right? And so few CEOs actually have that public profile, and they were saying it’s um, they did some data, and it was, you know, hugely beneficial to have that public profile, um, so you, and the public trusts the company more as well. They were saying, so yeah, I think, um, there’s a reason why all of these satires are coming out about Silicon Valley and stuff, um, and it’s because, you know, it’s a thing now, and they’re going to be yeah, um, even more, right?
49:45 Yeah, it’s just getting started, right? yeah, um, and that’s kind of validation that it’s the next big thing. I don’t see it as a sign of that. It’s, I actually think that it’s a validation that it’s a thing that it’s actually stable. I don’t know of any satires about bankers.
50:05 Well, there were movies in the ’80s and ’90s, but yeah, lately no. It’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which is about a guy in the ’80s. Yeah, um, article written about that recently. Yeah, was it? Yeah, about how these things used to be… ccal… now it’s Silicon Valley, and it’s for a good reason, right?
50:24 Yeah, I didn’t know that. That’s awesome. I was just, yeah, I making that observation. Yeah, well, you talked about the lack of balls. You know, we always comes up at the end of the show, whether we’re talking about where does London stack with the rest of the world?
50:38 Okay, we naturally look across the Atlantic a little bit, and maybe we should. Silicon Valley has been around for 50 years, 70 years if you go back to semiconductors, but what do we need to do different here? You know, you said everyone’s looking to the West for balls. I mean, do we need to find some here? Do we need to throw our capital around more here?
50:54 I mean, you’re here doing it, but what the culture has to change, right, or we’re not going to get the acceleration. We’re not get the Silicon Val. The culture is changing. Yeah, and some of the East Coast faces are starting to come to to London, like yours. And yeah, but also, you know, they’re actually starting to be like, well, you know, actually, it’s not just, um, Tel Aviv, which is crazy.
51:19 Like let’s put offices in London, and before they were going straight to Tel Aviv. Yeah, okay. And, um, which is which is weird if you look at the number of a billion-dollar companies um, uh, out of, out of the, out of London and out of like general Europe. um, I haven’t done any of the, the real numbers, so don’t quote me, but I think that that’s uh, you know, it’s tremendously myopic. Um, what I think we have to do is encourage that, um, comp competition, one.
52:03 So encourage the competition and venture scene, and then two, um, I think that European companies have to really look at the opportunities in Europe itself and not build companies that should be built in the US. The US has great opportunity that they’ve milked, uh, tremendously and that is 350 million people all the same language, yeah, um, which is English, um, so you, that who are all connected, right? Um, Europe has a huge amount of opportunities. I think that, um, fashion is an opportunity.
52:57 Actually, I think, um, uh, Aeronautics is an opportunity in, in London. I think, um, actual, you, um, making things, but I think the biggest opportunity certainly is fintech, um, because it’s the best test bed for fintech. You are in between the two largest um, um, um, uh, you, powers, being in GMT, in between China and the US, and that’s, um, awesome you know, um, and if you start to address some of the problems um, that the world’s facing, uh, I, I think that that’s really quite cool.
53:50 What’s your biggest challenge in the next two years? Is it hiring, finding the talent, or staying focused? Yeah, both. You actually, I should be a CEO, and is, is you wrote an article, The Huffington Post, recently about immigration. Is, is talent hard to find for you?
54:10 I would say for certain positions, yes. Um, and, um, uh, I think you’d always be deluded if it’s, you think it’s easy, but, um, because it’s not, you’re probably hiring the wrong people if you say it’s easy. But do I think it’s a lot easier than in the US? Um, in a lot of ways, yes, because, um, the US is fortunate that they have, um, 350 million people to choose from, um, so they have a huge candidate pool. But their visa policies suck, right?
54:48 Getting people from abroad just sucks. Um, and we live in a global economy, and there are smart people in, yeah, Africa, there’s smart people in Asia, there’s smart people in Europe, there’s billion- dollar opportunities in Africa, there’s billion-dollar opportunities in Asia, their billion-doll opportunities in Europe, and quite frankly, you know, I sort of like the way that the Chinese do business, um, in the sense that, you know, they’ve gone into Africa. I don’t, I, I want to caveat that, but I don’t like what they’re doing in Africa, but I like the fact that, you know, they’re willing to go into Africa because there’s huge opportunity, and they say to these governments, and it’s pretty cheeky, they say, oh, we’ll build the infrastructure if you let us excavate, you know, this, but you need the infrastructure in order to excavate it.
55:45 So um, there, you know, that’s awesome. And, um, they look at places and they look for where other people are too scared or too worried about the opportunity, and they have rich pickings. Um, and, um, this, um, xenophobic sort of, um, American idea that the US is the only place um, where there’s opportunity is totally shortsighted, um, and frankly, idiotic. I love it. I’m so glad you said that.
56:24 Uh, you know, we always finish up with a few questions. They might be a little personal, but I’m going to hit you with them. Uh, if you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old, uh, Damian Kimmelman and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do, not to go to university? Really? Yeah, didn’t… nothing.
56:42 Loved university, and I loved, you made a lot of money in real estate. University, and I, but, um, you met your co-founder that screwed you over to start the business, but any, like, your life evolves in so many different… if I didn’t go to university, I wouldn’t have met my girlfriend, now, and, like, I wouldn’t have been in Canada last… yeah, last week. Uh, so, uh, yeah, I, but I wouldn’t have gone to university. No value there. Really?
57:13 Not, not worth the time. It’s not that there’s no value, it’s that there’s, there’s no value to what I want to do. Okay, um, and I stupidly um, didn’t do an internship, um, at a, at a startup so a lot of the problems I’ve had to experience myself, and that could arguably be said, well, you know, isn’t that better because you’ve rewritten what you want? And I don’t really buy into that. I really, you know, the reason why, look at Elon Musk, or, you know, all of the PayPal Mafia.
57:55 That’s, like, that’s awesome, and the reason why they did so well was, I think, was because they were all in a great company at the time that, you know, grew tremendously during a short period of time, and they saw what worked, and they were able to use those insights in other companies. You have the Peter Thiel, you have, um, you know, Elon Musk, you, why am I, um, uh, you have um, a YouTube guy too, right? Yep, um, Chad Hurley, um, and, um, you also have, um, uh, um, Chris from LinkedIn, can’t believe, um, I forgot his name.
58:41 Lin guy. Yeah, so you, you wish you would have started earlier? Is that what you’re saying yes. Okay, so rather than perhaps go to university, spend four years working for startups and learning and learning that way. And now I would say for people that are going to thinking of going into university, you know, either, you know, look 10 years ahead and what do you see?
59:07 You know, you see a huge amount of opportunity in the Internet of Things. You see a huge amount of opportunity in biotech, yeah, and, you know, this is all, yeah, information seeping out into other parts of the world, right, and I think that’s what you’d want to try and work on. Good, uh, second part of that question: best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal? Should probably have a canned answer for it. It’s always the toughest question.
59:47 Everyone’s always like, damn, what about business? Um, I think, um, you know, I’m a big fan of Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen and they say something that I really object to, and it’s one of the only things that I object to. Um, and they’re like, um, yeah, this whole thing about startups and failing, we don’t like failures, we like winners. Like, don’t fail. And I see what they’re talking about, but I think that you know, really refining how you fail, and optimizing so that, so failures don’t cost a lot should be the message, because it’s, it’s fine, like, and say we like winners, and everybody likes to win, right?
1:00:54 And it’s wrong saying that, you know, failures all right, failures not all right. But it’s both of those messages miss the mark, which is learn how to minimize the cost of failing, of trying something out. The whole point of the internet is that you can try things out, and the whole point of a startup is that you can test assumptions. And you know, I was really, when I first started out, I was really shy about failing and failing publicly, and, you know, and asking for help.
1:01:39 And I think that’s the worst thing that you can do, look like an idiot. I look like an idiot all the time. You do, yeah, loads. As my butcher, you know, the first time that I pitched Duedil, I was sweating, I was nervous, I was stuttering, I couldn’t, like, I couldn’t keep my eyes open because I was so, like, nervous. It was just in front of, like, 20 people.
1:02:06 And it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. I hate public speaking, it’s something that I try and get over, and try and do a lot to get over, but it’s, you know, it doesn’t come easily. Damian, thanks so much for coming by. This is a great story. It’s really compelling, this story.
1:02:31 I want to see how this movie ends, you know, or at least see, I don’t want to 10, see, see at least Rocky 2, three, or four, or something like that. Bling bling. Watch. Um, how can people get a hold of you? Are you guys hiring?
1:02:42 What’s the whole story? So we are hiring um, uh, a huge amount now. Uh, we’ve only hired three people since our Series B um, uh, largely because we wanted to make sure that we could scale. Now we’re hiring, um, a lot. We have actually, I think, 17 or 18 positions open.
1:03:04 Um, so that’s very different. Yeah, um, but, um, uh, you can reach me on Duedil um, uh, on Twitter, which is doer. Yeah, okay, D. I tried to do the dude and it was taken. Okay, um, which was pretty lame, but of course the dude would be taken, right?
1:03:27 Yeah, the dude, no, but it was D dude. Okay, Goa, all right, so at do deal with an r on the end for you, at do deal for the company, and they go to your website as well for jobs and things like that. 17, 18 jobs, man. I mean, Jeez, if you’re not, we’re in a tough economy, right? Come on, guys.
1:03:43 If you’re unemployed out there, seriously, if you’re not caring right now, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Um, fantastic talking to you. It’s exciting to see what you guys are going to do, and that the possibilities are really limitless with this information. I, I I haven’t even be started to get my head around some of the things that he can do. You know, I want to get an account actually.
1:04:01 I’m sure you do too. Now, right? Absolutely. Yeah, a lot of good info out there. Um, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, um, you can catch us, our beautiful faces, on uh YouTube channel, and uh, if you’re listening to us live, thanks for watching.
1:04:12 Uh, as we say, it’s about the people on London Real. Um, thanks so much, Damian, and all the best to you guys. Thank you. Awesome. All right, guys, take care.
