Full transcript: Dan Crow on London Real
0:39 People. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Bri- Rose. I host London Real, which is the same studio. We get people in here like politicians, rock stars.
0:53 Who else have we had in here recently? Oh, we had Tim Ferriss from The 4-Hour Everything, astrophysicist like Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s pretty crazy, so check that out at londonreal.tv. We just launched a new website, actually, with the help of Squarespace. It looks pretty cool if I do say so myself.
1:07 But we’re here today to talk about tech. My co-host is Colin Pile, entrepreneur teaching people how to speak languages, selling coffee. How’s it going? Tired, busy, all going well though. Yeah, it’s a dream of an entrepreneur.
1:19 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, tired and, yeah, yeah, you can’t complain. Sales problems are good problems. And, no, things are going really, really well. Just designing three new blends for the coffee, which is exciting.
1:29 So yeah, that’s always, that’s always good fun, you know, going down to Italy and sourcing new products and figuring out new blends. So yeah, no complaints. Fantastic, man. You’re like the operating officer, you’re the Tim Cook of coffee. There we go.
1:40 Yeah, I’ll take that. Awesome, awesome, thanks, dude. On to the show. Our guest today is Mr. Dan Crow, who is the CTO of Songkick, a company which allows you to track your favorite artists and never miss them live. Right.
1:52 Before that you worked for Google for four years on their Google Squared technology, which is a major component of their search. Before that you worked for Apple in the late ’90s for 4 years. You worked on their QuickTime product among many other things. You’ve written articles for The Guardian entitled “Why Every Child Should Learn to Code” and “Why Startups Shouldn’t Just Be for the Young.” Dan, welcome to Silicon Real.
2:15 Thank you, great to be here. Great to have you here. You know, it’s wild to look at your CV on LinkedIn because, you know, you’re old school, you’re an OG, as they say. I’m very old, yes. I mean original gangster.
2:27 Original Gangster. I mean in a nice way. It’s just we get a lot of people that come through here but you know, they have 5 years of experience or 8 years, so they’re kind of new to the tech space, but like you’ve been coding back in the day. You were doing tech startups in Britain in the early ’90s. Yeah, although we didn’t call them startups then because nobody heard of that term here.
2:45 But yeah, I did what was essentially what we would now call a startup back in, like, ’93, which was amazing. And you know, before we got going here we were talking about Old Street and its transformation. I mean literally in the last month, the station has transformed from like, you know, a heroin alley to like, you know, these popup startups, these popup social media companies. There’s like all these fresh juices now instead of like the local produce. It’s like a bit of San Francisco, it’s funky colors.
3:14 They’re tearing down the main building that used to house Huddle and all these other big companies. They’re building a 12-story building called The White Collar Factory. I mean, Dan, what do you think when you see this kind of transformation? I think it’s exciting. I mean, you know, I grew up in London, right, so I remember London back in the ’70s and ’80s, and this was a really depressed part of London.
3:34 There was no opportunity for people in Hoxton and Shoreditch. It was just kind of a place that was depressed. There was no jobs, you know, people had, you know, generally pretty groy lives and to see it transform into a place where, you know, this is a vibrant hub of innovation, there’s all this new stuff going on, you know, it’s pulling everyone up, I think it’s really exciting. So it’s great, I think it’s awesome. It’s really strange to see happen because for a long time I didn’t even know the startup community was here when I was hosting London Real, and then a year ago we met Bryce from the Three Beards and, you know, we started doing the show and then I started noticing it, but now it’s really hard not to see that it is the Silicon Roundabout.
4:14 Yeah, yeah, we’re everywhere. Where’s the next roundabout? What do you think? Good question. I mean, they’re saying it’s by Canary Wharf because of the low rents.
4:22 I don’t know. Yeah, because it’s pretty expensive now, it’s getting. That’s definitely right. I mean, you can tell that like there’s a lot of people wanting to come here now because they think it’s starting to rise slightly, you know, the rents are going up and, you know, things are changing, and, you know, I know a bunch of startups who have already started moving out of, you know, Shoreditch, Hoxton and looking a little further afield. There’s a nice little cluster going on in Clerkenwell.
4:43 Well, there are people sort of pushing north and east out, you know, up towards Dalston and out towards, I, you know, the government has this thing where they want to have this long corridor stretching out right to the Olympic Park. Well, I don’t know anyone’s actually gone out that far yet, but they’re pushing in that direction, so I think, you know, it will spread. That’s actually a really good thing because I think it’s really exciting to see this kind of little community that’s grown up around this particular place, but if it’s really going to have an impact it needs to be not just one tiny bit of London but all of London, all of the UK, right?
5:10 That would be really exciting. So one of the things that I do is, you know, in my copious free time, is, you know, try and help out some of the cities outside of the UK find their own sty communities and doing what I can to promote that. So I’ve been up in Sheffield recently. I’m working with the University of Leeds, where I did my first degree, to help them out a little bit. I was up in Manchester doing some mentoring at the end of last year, and so, you know, they were all these like little mini tech cities sort of springing up around the country, and that’s really exciting.
5:41 It’s great if we can see more of that spreading throughout the UK, I’d be delighted. What’s number two, three and four when it comes to cities in the UK for tech? Well, I don’t know, kind of, like, I don’t know if anyone’s actually measured that, but it’s probably it would be like Manchester, right? There’s quite a lot going down in Bristol, sort of Bristol, Bath, because universities and a real cluster going on down there. Is it about the universities really?
6:03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they tend to form around universities because it’s like, you know, it starts with young people coming out of university with, you know, a good tech degree and some enthusiasm and trying some stuff out, and, you know, the universities are starting to get that they can help that process. So yeah, it tends, it’s tending to cluster around the university. So it’s Manchester, it’s Bristol. There’s something really interesting going on in the sort of triangle spans between Sheffield, Leeds and York, so there’s a cluster of really great universities up there, a long tradition of innovation up there, so I think that could be the next big one.
6:37 So who knows, I mean, you know, hopefully it’ll be everywhere. It should be everywhere. And Cambridge has always been a big one. And Cambridge has historically been like the place in the UK. I was actually up in Cambridge yesterday talking at the Centre for the History of Computing, which is a really awesome place where they’ve got all these old school machines.
6:54 I mean, going back to the days when I started programming back in the ’80s. And yeah, it’s an amazing place and that’s very much sort of hooked into the, they call it the Silicon Fen, which is their kind of the name for their sort of cluster, and that’s been going on, you know, for 20 years now. The Fen, what’s Fen? Fen? Well, Fen is like a low marshland, and, you know, Cambridge is very, there aren’t many like, you know, large mountains in Cambridge.
7:18 It’s sort of the opposite of Silicon Valley with the Sierras. Is Cambridge flat? We’ve got to make a trip out there, I’ve never been out. Yeah, it’s really worth going, it’s really interesting. Okay, if someone’s got a company out there, let us know, maybe we’ll come out and do it on location shoot.
7:31 It’s a good idea, right? Songkick, I’ve heard of it, I think a lot of people have heard about it but I don’t know that much about it, and I was wondering if you could walk us through. You’ve been there for a long time. In startup terms. Startup terms, right.
7:42 I’ve been there for three and a half years. Okay, so the company’s been going for nearly seven, so I’ve been there for about half the company’s. Because you hear the name and you’re like, oh, that’s been around a few years. Yeah, we, you know, we’re one of the, we were one of the first 10 or 11 startups in East London, so we’re like, we really are like one of the one of the original ones. So Songkick, yeah, so I mean Songkick was formed from the idea that, you know, if you love music you want to go and see a great band live.
8:08 You know, you’ve got your favorite artists, the people you really like to see. Each of them’s got their own website, they might have a Facebook page, but the information is scattered all over the place, and it’s just, you know, if you keep up with one band it’s okay because you go to one place. If you keep up with 20 or 40 bands, ah, that’s a lot of work, right? To find all the information, where do I buy tickets here? You don’t, you know, people don’t go to concerts they’d like to because it’s too much effort to actually track all of that.
8:34 So Songkick does that for you. We attempt to go out and find all of the information about all of the upcoming concerts around the world and have them in one place, and then you can tell us who your favorite bands are, we’ll tell you when they come and play in your city. So you, you know, the tagline, you never miss your favorite artist play ever again. And it’s that kind of feeling, you’re in the pub with some mates and they say, hey, I saw this amazing band last night, they were great.
8:59 It’s like, well, don’t tell me that today, tell me that like two weeks ago when I could have bought tickets and gone and seen them. And Songkick solves that problem. It makes sure that you get to see your favorite artist. And we’ve done some surveys of our users and on average our users go to see 70% more concerts the year after they use Songkick than the year before they use Songkick. We love that.
9:18 That’s great, because we’re all music fans, we do it because we love music and we think going to see a great concert is just like an Earth-shaking moment for you. It can be it can be just such a, you know, an energizing moment and we want more people to have that experience and go and see awesome bands playing live. Has your business model pivoted at all over seven years, because so many things must have changed, and, you know, streaming music and why plan and all these other companies that maybe not into your space but have got into the space.
9:44 Sure, and, you know, the music world in general has changed a lot, right? So, you know, with streaming coming online, and I mean who buys CDs anymore? Well, there we are, I’m old, I remember buying CDs, I remember buying vinyl. You know, so it’s all gone online and so that world has changed dramatically and it’s continuing to change at a really tremendous pace. So yeah, I mean we’re still evolving the business model.
10:11 We started out as an affiliate service, so basically what would happen is we would tell somebody about a concert, they’d come onto our site, look it up, buy tickets from a third party and we’d get a fee for sending them referrals. So that’s a pretty nice model, and in fact because we’ve got such scale that actually is a pretty nice revenue model. Recently we’ve actually started selling tickets directly ourselves, so we’re now a ticket vendor also. So we take an allocation of tickets for upcoming shows from promoters and we sell those directly on our site, and that’s, you know, that’s a nice business model too.
10:44 So we’ve added that on to our basic model. What’s interesting about Songkick is we fundamentally haven’t pivoted kind of the product and what the business is about. So we started out saying we’ve got a problem to solve, we want to get more people going to see live music, we want to let them know when their favorite band is coming to town, and that’s at the core still what we do. We’ve added some really interesting services around that but we’re still doing that, and millions of people use us every month around the world and they love it.
11:12 And that’s great, we’re very happy. You know, we’ve had a lot of founders and a lot of CEOs in here, I don’t know if we’ve had many CTOs at all, so I was wondering while you’re here if we could take advantage of you and can you just give us some of the basics of how your job, probably has changed a lot over the years too, but you know, when you come in as a CTO and not the other side of things, like what is your primary vision, that thing that you have to do? I mean I guess in the beginning it’s all this information in one space, but you have to constantly stay ahead of the curve.
11:39 What’s it like being a CTO? What’s it like being? It’s easy, I don’t do very much, it’s pretty much it. What do I do? Well, that’s a good question actually, and I often ask myself what do I do as a CTO.
11:51 So I see my job as having kind of a couple of facets. Obviously first of all, I’m the guy who ultimately is kind of thinking about the technology, but as much as possible I like to have a team of great people around me to do that. Actually in the day-to-day a lot of my work is as a leader and helping people get better. I mean my biggest aim in life is to make myself redundant, is to have a team of extraordinary people around me and help them get better at what they do until they can take over what I do and I can, you know, retire.
12:30 Haven’t managed that yet, but still, I, you know, at Songkick we’ve got some great people, and it’s just so much fun, you know, seeing them develop and get better at what they do and get a broader and broader remit. And then the other piece of what I do is I sort of sit as the primary representative of technology in the broader discussion around the company, so that’s, you know, product discussions, business discussions, organizational discussions, you know, whenever we’re talking about at a high level how does Songkick operate, what should we be doing, how can we do it better, I’m the voice for the technology group about how can we bring technology to help solve the problems that we’re trying to tackle. So, you know, I hope I can kind of influence and shape and say, you know, okay, the world is changing, what’s happening in the world of music, how is that changing, you know, 6 months from now what will that look like, what do we need to build in order to be really effective in that space?
13:26 It’s a tricky job, it’s a really tricky job. It seems like a lot of job, or is a lot of your job just having the right networks in with the people at Google and the Facebook and all these companies to know kind of what’s coming in six months or to know how to partner with them? Yeah, I mean we do a lot of partnerships, I mean partnerships are very important to us. So we have partnerships with Google via YouTube, with Spotify, with Facebook, with Foursquare, with the BBC, a whole bunch of people are partnering with us in various ways.
13:53 So yeah, that’s absolutely a very important part, and so staying on top of their development and how their technology is evolving and their product is evolving is really important, but it’s also kind of the macro feel. So one thing that’s really interesting about the music market is that, you know, live music is replacing recorded music as the principal source of revenue for a lot of bands now, right? So actually about a year ago in the States it was for the first time in recent memory that overall the music industry made more money from live than from recorded, and that trend is just continuing.
14:24 So there’s this kind of long, long-standing macro trend that, you know, like recorded music is going to become free or close to free. It’s already, you know, if you pay 10 bucks a month to Spotify or some other, you know, Pandora or a similar service, you can essentially get all of the music that there is or very close to it for 10 bucks a month. So each individual record is sort of free at some level, right? And that’s the way that that’s going, I think.
14:51 This is my theory, is that eventually recording music just becomes a marketing tool for telling, you know, helping people discover new music, and bands will actually make their money by playing live, which is great for us because we’re in the live space, but that’s a really interesting trend. And if that actually plays out, what does that really mean for how the business works, how the whole industry works, and how does Songkick fit into that and continue to have a successful business and be, you know, hopefully a key player in that movement? So those are the sorts of things that I’m thinking about.
15:23 Have you seen the number of concerts increase over the last sort of, I guess you guys would be in the great position. Yeah, we have, and we’ve actually done some quite nice infographics to show that. So we’ve plotted out the movement of bands, so we basically plot all the tours that bands take, and if you look at it, like how we did, we did one like four years ago and we did one like 18 months ago, and the one from four years ago is like it’s just kind of like this little cloud of bands touring, and then if this is on a map of the globe, if you look at the one from 18 months ago they’re just like everywhere, they’re going everywhere, between every country, and there’s this huge expansion.
15:59 So yeah, I mean we’re definitely seeing more bands getting much more active in the live music space, and just, you know, they’re working harder and harder at that, and there are, I think there’s a real awareness in amongst musicians that, as that evolves, they’ve got to change how they interact with their fans, how they, you know, see themselves. I mean, bands are entrepreneurs, right? They are classic entrepreneurs, and so they are adapting to a changing world, which is really interesting to watch them do that, and we’re trying to provide them with tools to help that and, you know, make that easier for them.
16:38 And so I think that’s a really interesting trend. It’ll be fascinating to see where that plays out. Have you seen the movie called Artifact? It’s about the band 30 Seconds to Mars, which is fronted by Jared Leto, who won the Academy Award for Dallas Buyers Club. So he’s an actor, sometimes, you’ve seen him before, he’s pretty good-looking kid.
16:54 He was in Fight Club as a minor role, and he had a big fight with EMI over, like, the course of 3 years, and they basically, EMI was suing them for money they owed them from recording music and selling music, but they had sold, like, worldwide top number one hits and they still owed EMI money, and they were like, so it’s a whole documentary about their battle, and it’s pretty interesting. It’s called Artifact, which is a great title because it kind of, like, talks about their art as being an artifact, but at the end of the day, they tour is the only way they personally make money. And they’re still touring, they’re one of the hugest rock bands in the world, and, like, at the very end it’s like, and we still owe EMI 1.2 million.
17:29 And it’s all about the whole timeless history of basically recording studios trying to f*** over artists and how you constantly battle back and forth with whoos is what. But it’s interesting because, and now they’re touring like banshees and they make all the money from that because they never signed, I think what’s called a 360 deal, where the label gets a cut from their music and then, like, whatever they sell is basically just free promotion for their tours. Exactly.
17:50 I mean, I suspect that’s where the music industry ends up, right, is that for most artists it is just promotional material to get people in. And you know what’s really exciting is, I think music is better live than recorded. I think when you put it down into a stream or on a CD it dies at some level, it gets overproduced, it’s a one, you know, it’s one perfect thing. If you go and see a band live they make mistakes, they improvise, they react to the audience, and it’s a real, it’s a viscerally different experience, I think.
18:19 It’s more exciting. You see a band, a really great band playing live, it’s an exciting moment, and you, and in the audience it’s unique, that moment will never happen again, and, you know, you feel in the moment, you get lost, right? You get that sort of, like, tunnel vision thing comes in and you’re just, like, completely consumed by it. That’s a really exciting moment. If we have a world where there’s more of that and less dead music on CDs, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
18:44 It’s interesting because as humans we’ve only really had recorded music for, what, 100 years? Yeah, so I think it will turn out to have been a blip, right, for, you know, you go back to ancient prehistory and people have been playing music live to each other, and I think, you know, we will see, there will be this yet like 100-year span when there was this kind of weird blip where we sort of did this recording music and it goes away again, listen to it on our own. I think it’ll stick around for a while.
19:09 Well, maybe I may be exaggerating for effect slightly, but you know what I mean, right? No, I know exactly what you mean. You know, you mentioned companies like BBC, Google, that kind of thing, you cut partnerships with, and I’m always curious when you have, like, a startup company, you know, we know that the timeline and the cycle for cutting partnerships with these big businesses, even getting phone calls back, can be like 6 months, a year, 18 months, or at least I’m assuming that.
19:30 How did you find it in the early days, or is it still that way for you guys? I guess you’ve been around for a while. I mean, actually, I think most of the people we’ve worked with have been pretty quick, but it varies. It took a while for us. I mean, we’d been talking to Spotify for a while before we actually did something, but it was a great partnership when we actually put a product out and we’re still working with them actively and continuing to do things.
19:57 We just had a Spotify Songkick integration demoed by Mark Zuckerberg at F8, a couple of, like, last week, so that’s pretty exciting. So, you know, I mean, I think we’re, it actually varies a lot. Sometimes it’s really fast and some of these companies now are really moving at the same speed that startups would. Sometimes they’re pushing us, it’s like, why isn’t it ready yet? So that’s great.
20:18 But, you know, it’s mostly a lot of hard work being done by our business development guys, and they’re led by enr CEO, who does an amazing job of building those connections, you know, getting those guys comfortable with us, getting us comfortable with them, and cutting the deals that allow us to be successful, and that’s really the heart of why we’ve been able to do it, is the hard work that primarily Ian’s put into making that happen. What keeps you awake at night? I mean, what are you always worried about, like some guy at Google spending 20% of his time to come up with the replacement of Songkick, or some social network plugin or something that just, you know, takes a lot of that information and then just all of a sudden it’s like you wake up, and we were talking about you streaming YouTube before we went live here, and all of a sudden your business model has just been completely replaced?
21:06 Well, you know, I mean, there’s always a risk of that, right? I mean, I worked at Google for a while in their search group, so I know the resources and the smart people that they can bring to bear on a problem, so I mean, in theory, yeah, they could probably try and do something along the lines of what we’re doing. I’m actually not that worried by it though, partly because, you know, if a really huge company like that decided to do it there’s not much we could do about it, so why worry?
21:33 It’s not much point in losing sleep over things that you can’t control. They might hire you after they take over the space, who knows. But also I think the really huge companies tend to look for the really big opportunities. One of the really interesting things about Google is it’s really hard to get a project off the ground unless it’s genuinely going to be a billion-dollar business because Google can’t see things that are smaller than a billion dollars.
22:04 Public company? And well, it’s not just public, it’s just big, right? I mean, you know, they’re throwing off $15 billion a quarter, a quarter of free cash, which is, when you think about it, it’s staggering. I mean, the joke in Google was the hardest job in Google was you had to shovel all the cash out of the way to get to your desk in the morning. But I mean, it really is, it really is quite strange working in an organization that’s kind of at that scale, because suddenly things that, when you’re a startup, something that is, like, maybe initially a, you know, $100,000, a million, even $100 million opportunity looks like, okay, great, 100 million, if I can get a market cap, if I can build a company worth 100 million, that’s enormous.
22:44 To Google that doesn’t matter, it’s too small to worry about, because you can’t make an impact on Google’s success unless you’re in the billion-dollar range and hopefully in the multiple billions of dollars range. So it actually skews their vision of what’s possible and what they want to put resources into, and I think that gives enormous opportunity to smaller companies because we can do the things that, you know, initially look smaller and that’s great success for us, and then from there we can then grow upwards and we can, you know, build a head start. I think that’s what we’ve done, is that we’ve got now something that is certainly not couldn’t be reproduced, but is far enough along that it would actually be quite a lot of work for somebody to build the the system that we have underneath that can pull all that data in and make sense of it and present it back to users in the form that they want.
23:34 So no, I’m not particularly worried about that. It could happen, but, you know, an earthquake could happen. Kind of back to Innovator’s Dilemma, we always talk about, happen to the innovator now. Yeah, but also I guess if you’re under a billion they’d rather kind of acquire you and see if they can turn you into. Yeah, I mean, that’s one of their strategies, right, is that if they see a company kind of coming up from underneath they’ll attempt to acquire.
23:58 What was it like working at Google for 4 years, and how have they done without you for the last four years? I don’t know how they’ve worked. I think it amazes me, there’s a trend. Obviously, did the stock move when you left? No, no, unfortunately I wasn’t quite that important.
24:15 Google’s a genuinely astounding place, it really is a, I mean, it’s sort of a magical wonderland in some senses, right? You were out of their New York office, New York office for 3 years and then out here in London for, like, 18 months. And, you know, I mean the quality of the people is astounding, it really is, it’s absolutely unbelievable. So, like, the year that I joined Google they hired 3,000 people, they had a million and a half people apply to join.
24:48 I mean, they can pick and choose literally anyone they want, and they do a good job of doing it, they do a phenomenal job of doing it. They’re really good. Well, occasionally there were mistakes, but, you know, but no, I mean, just going to work every day and knowing that you’re working with, like, exclusively world-class people is a joy and it’s really amazing, and they work on products at such scale. You know, I’ve written software that’s used daily by a billion people.
25:15 There, you know, you’re not going to get many opportunities in a lifetime to say that, I’m going to do something that a billion people will use today. Wow. And that’s a rush, it’s a real rush to say that you’ve, I mean, small little things, right, but it makes a difference and you feel like you’re having an impact at such a scale. So I loved working at Google, really awesome company, and, you know, like the perks are great and, you know, they work on really hard technical problems and yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed my time there.
25:51 Why did you leave? Okay, so that’s a good, that’s a very fine question. Give us the real story. So I was in New York, so I did most of my time in Google in New York. It wasn’t, I mean, that was still, I wonder, the New York office started, I mean, it was still growing in New York, right?
26:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, now if you’re a Google employee you run New York, it used to be the investment bankers, but back in ’06, back in ’06 there, I don’t remember how many they were in New York, a few hundred in New York, I think maybe a thousand, so it was small for sure. I mean, there were only, there were only, like, fewer than 10,000 employees in the whole company when I joined. And now it’s 50. Yeah, that.
26:30 And they acquired DoubleClick while I was there, which is in New York, and which was, like, they added like 12,000 people in one day. But so New York was really exciting. I had a great time in New York and we did some really exciting work in the Google Squared project, I’m incredibly proud of, and so, you know, that was a really great time. When I moved back to London, so I moved back to London because my wife and I were living in a 29th-floor apartment, one-bedroom apartment above Times Square, which was great fun, and then our daughters arrived, our twin daughters arrived, and we very quickly realized that a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is not conducive to two, like, you know, young young ladies joining our life.
27:11 It’s barely conducive for a couple. Yeah, that’s right. No, it was getting a little tight there, so we decided that we were going to move back to London because we’re both British and we have a lot of friends and family here, and it’s been great for, from, you know, amazing, my girls, it’s been great, and coming back into the startup community has been awesome. I actually enjoyed the Google office in London a little less. It’s more remote from Mountain View.
27:32 So Mountain View, you know, the Google office is there, that’s where Larry and Sergey are, that’s where the epicenter of all the decision-making is, and when you’re in New York, you know, New York’s a really big office now, London’s a bit smaller. I kind of sort of got to the point where if I wanted to continue my career at Google I really had to move back to the States to do it. I didn’t want to do that for personal reasons, and I would also found that, you know, there was this startup thing going on in London and, you know, I’m for better or worse a startup guy.
28:00 I’ve done six now, Songkick is my sixth startup. When I left the UK in ’96 there were no startups, there was barely a tech scene, there was really nothing happening here, and I came back and, hey, man, look, there’s all these really interesting little companies going on. So I was like not enjoying Google as much because I moved back to the London office. I was at the point where it was like maybe, maybe time to do something new, and I kind of, like, looked around and there were lots of really, really interesting companies, and I got introduced to Songkick and as soon as I met Ian and met the rest of the team it was like, these are the sort of people I want to work with.
28:37 This is really interesting. So, but the average life cycle of someone at Google is quite low anyways. I mean, the guy, the Google Plus guy just left. I mean, it’s like 3 years or four years, I don’t I don’t know what the actual figure is, but yeah, I mean, come through all of this, this is one of this is one of the things that drives Silicon Valley, by the way, is that all of these big tech companies, what they tend to do is they’re constantly throwing off people who’ve basically gone through, got a world-class education in building great software, and get excited and go and start their own company, and that’s how the Valley works.
29:06 It’s, you know, it’s these big tech companies essentially acting as kind of, you know, another layer above the universities. They suck people out of, you know, the great grads out of universities, they train them up for a few years, and then those people go off and start their own companies. So yeah, I mean, that happens a lot, even to Google. There’s only so far that kind of, like, you know, free massages and sushi chefs can take you before you want to go off and do your own thing.
29:33 And, you know, Google and the other tech companies deliberately hire entrepreneurial people, it’s one of the things that they look for when they’re hiring, is, like, people with that entrepreneurial spark, because that’s what will drive them to build great products for Google, but guess what, it’s also what drives them to want to go and leave after a while and go and do their own thing, right? You know, we’ve got to get some scoop on Apple while you’re here. Oh yeah.
29:52 You know, you wrote an article in November 2012 called “We’ve Passed Peak Apple, It’s All Downhill from Here.” Now you don’t have to talk about that specifically, but what was it like there in the late ’90s and then what have you seen since then? I mean, the company’s changed so much, it was a hardware company back then, was. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, I mean, I was in the software group, but yeah, it was primarily a hardware company. It was computer hardware.
30:14 So when I joined, so I joined Apple in ’96, just around the time that Gil Amelio took over as CEO, and iPhone was ’97. No, iPhone was later than that, was like n- No, iPhone was like 2007. Yeah, it was much later, much later, I’m getting my decades wrong. It’s okay, because I was there pre-iPhone, so I was there before Jobs came back. Okay.
30:37 And at that time Apple was a real mess. I mean, I joined this company the first year they lost a billion dollars. You know what they say in the Valley, you know, a billion here, a billion there, and soon you’re talking real money. But, you know, it was kind of frightening. You know, my wife and I moved out, we’d emigrated to the States, I was on an H1B visa, and the company lost a billion dollars and it was like, are they going to be around?
31:00 No one thought they were going to last more than two or 3 years before they were done. And it was chaotic, they were like, they were selling like 26 lines of computers, nobody could tell you what they all were and why they were different. You know, the company just basically ignored management. You know, Gil would stand up on stage and say, this is what we’re going to do, and everyone would just, like, walk out and ignore him and carry on with whatever pet project they were working on.
31:22 It was doing stuff that was completely unrelated to its core, so it was a real mess. And then in, like, ’97 they acquired NeXT and Steve came back and very quickly became the CEO. Gil was out and Steve was back, and within a matter of a few months he turned that company around. In fact, the first year after he came back they made like $800 million. They went from a billion-dollar loss to an $800 million profit simply because Steve came back and he basically took that company and, like, shook it and refused to let it die and kind of, he just willed it back into life, and it was a really amazing thing to see and, like, see up close and personal because so I remember I was in a meeting and at the time we tended to have, like, all these, like, cross-functional meetings where, like, 20 different people would come and talk about a project.
32:13 This was just after he’d come back, like a couple of months after he was CEO again, and we’re about 5 minutes into this meeting, fortunately not for my product, and Steve turns up on a, he just, the door opens and then walks Steve Jobs, and, you know, he was, even then he was, like, you know, legend because he’d started Pixar, he’d started Apple, he’d started NeXT, and he says, okay, what project is this? And the Lee stands up It’s my project, I can’t even remember what it was, and Steve says, why should Apple be doing this? Tell me right now, why should Apple be doing this?
32:45 And the guy’s like, sort of mumbles through that couple minutes and Steve cuts him off, says, I’ve heard everything I need. Leaves. The next day, not only is the product, the project, no longer something Apple does, the entire team gone, they never turn up to work again, they’re just gone. And apparently he did this like four or five times around the company, he would go into these meetings and just pretty much whatever they said, just fire the team. And I tell you, word spread around Apple campus like wildfire that Steve was doing this, and, you know, the next week everybody knew exactly why their product was completely aligned to Steve’s vision and strategy and could tell you in 30 seconds exactly why.
33:23 And the whole, this whole chaotic mess just kind of snapped into alignment behind Jobs’ vision, and he cut it away so they had four products instead of 26 and he simplified it, and he was a genius at product marketing and product development. He knew how to build and market products that people just kind of viscerally had to have. So it was, you know, watching him do that and the process and kind of taking Apple from a company that was dying, that had a few years left of life, and starting the journey of turning it into the most successful technology company in the world has ever seen, that was pretty impressive.
34:02 It was really an education to watch him do that. Have you seen the last interview? It was an interview done with him at NeXT before he rejoined Apple. It’s like an hour, you should definitely watch that, it’s really interesting. You can see, he’s so intense, his intensity a bit mellan and a bit like, oh Jesus.
34:19 Yeah, he was a, I mean, I was, depending on your point of view, either lucky or misfortunate enough to, he got very interested in one of the projects I was working on. So I was the manager for QuickTime applications. So QuickTime is the digital video. Yeah, me, at the time it was like way out ahead, the leader. And I was running the team that built the application, so the, you know, the actual user interface that the users saw to play back videos and do various other things, and it had originated as a test product, a product we used internally to test whether the underlying video technology worked, and we needed something to play back video, so we just released it and it was a horrible mess.
34:57 And Steve said, no, we’re going to do this properly. And so for six months basically every week the team and I met with Steve and we would bring in on paper huge designs and he would look at, he’d get out his director’s loupe, the little eyeglass, and he’d be looking at them. We would be arguing. Really? Yeah, he had his little director’s loupe.
35:16 Right, okay. And he would, we’d be arguing over, like, the shade, the particular shade of gray of individual pixels, the angle of the C, the speed of the animation effects that we were using. And this is a guy who’s running not just Apple but also Pixar at the same time, so he’s running two multi-billion-dollar companies and he’s caring about this level of detail of the design. Absolutely phenomenal. And, you know, if you said something to Steve one week, the next week he would absolutely remember every detail.
35:49 So if you said to him, next week we’re going to show you this, you better damn show him exactly what you said you were, or he would, like, he would get real mad. And it was both kind of the most intense and inspiring six months of my life and also some level kind of the most sort of frightening and terrifying as well. He was a really difficult man on a personal level, he’s one of the most unpleasant human beings I’ve ever met. Just dress you down if something was wrong.
36:24 Terribly. Yeah, and just complet-, he had no, he did not care at all what it cost, he only cared about the end result, which in a way is extraordinary because he, his standards were so high and he just refused to accept anything that didn’t meet his very exacting standards. So it meant that at the end you produced a product that you would not have believed you were capable of. He just forced you to lift your ambition to an incredibly high level. On the other hand, if you went to Steve and said, I can’t deliver this, it’s impossible, we’re launching this 2 weeks from now and you want me to completely rewrite this from scratch, it isn’t possible, that wasn’t an acceptable answer.
37:04 So you had to find a way to rewrite it in two weeks and do something that was kind of technically virtually impossible. So, you know, we ended up working ridiculously long hours and just burning people out left, right and center, and people would quit because they couldn’t face working with Steve anymore, and it was just like, it was, he was brutal, but very, very, very effective, and he was a genius. I mean, his intuition for what made great products, I’ve never seen anyone operating at that level ever, and I’ve worked with some pretty, you know, some pretty amazing people, but his ability to just kind of understand and force the creation of products that people would, you know, line up for hours when they’re launched to buy and would be, you know, bought by millions of people and make Apple phenomenal amounts of money.
37:59 No one could do that in the way that Steve could. Can Apple survive without him? Well, so that’s an excellent question. Look, there’s no doubt, of course, Apple can survive without him. Apple is stuffed full of smart people.
38:12 It’s not like that company’s going to go away, they’re still the most profitable company in the world, they’re still you know, selling amazing products, it’s not going to stop. I mean, Jony Ive is a world- class industrial designer, he’s just top of his game. They’ve got great people there. I think that they will probably, I mean, when I wrote that article about Peak Apple, you know, my thesis is basically it’s not that Apple’s going to stop being successful, but I don’t think they will be quite as creative and driven as they were in Steve’s day, because that company was so about Steve.
38:50 Right, it was, he founded it from day one, it was a company built in his image around his personality. It was a very, sort of, internally very secretive, very command and control kind of company. So it was like Steve at the top and all the rest of the people working in Apple were basically doing whatever Steve told them to, which, when you’ve got somebody at the top who’s that good and that far ahead of the rest of the world, it works incredibly effectively, but the problem with that kind of approach is that when you lose that person at the top, unless they replace them with somebody equally as good, the whole thing tends to crumble.
39:28 And I suspect that to some extent that will happen, and I think that the rate of innovation of Apple has slowed since Steve went and was no and died. And so, you know, I do think you can see a slowing. Does that mean Apple will stop being profitable? No. Does that mean Apple’s going away?
39:47 No. Well, I mean, I’m going to continue buying Macs. I think that, you know, awesome computers, that they’re, you know, everything they produce is amazingly good and they’re going to continue to build great products, but I suspect they’re not going to be as innovative anymore. But that’s just a guess. I mean, I was there like, you know, 15, 20 years ago now.
40:06 Wow, that’s a great story, man, that’s going to make an awesome clip on YouTube, man. Colin, what am I missing here? I, we could ask him so many different things. Yeah, there’s so much, you know, you come from such a phenomenal perspective in terms of being around the tech space and, you know, computers and coding for such a long time. Where are we going in 5, 10 years?
40:25 You talk about ation and Apple, you know, where’s the next, I, you know, the iPad or the iPhone or well, I think consumer tech is really hard to predict, but I think there are sort of certain sort of big technical trends that are starting to emerge that will probably dominate the next five or 10 years. How they exactly translate into products, I think is, if I knew that, you know, but ones that interest me certainly are, I think, a, artificial intelligence, which is kind of, you know, my background. I think he finally going to start to really hit the mainstream in a big way through Facebook, AR, I’m not sure.
41:06 Well, maybe actually Oculus Rift is quite interesting, it’ll be interesting to see what Facebook do with that. But what’s the best example of consumer AI right now? Well, probably the best example is games, right? There’s a bunch of games, if you play, like, strategy games and war games and things like that, they’ve got actually really sophisticated AI in them. But there’s a really cool company that I know in California called Anki, and they do a little car racing game, so it’s basically like Scalextric where you’ve got little racing cars, but they’re robots and so you can program them from your smartphone and hold robot races.
41:39 And you buy T-Talk or something, I think I remember. Yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah, yeah, that’s right, it was. Yeah, and it’s really cool and it’s like 200 bucks or something, right, for this car racing set. It’s a really awesome toy, I’ve played with it, it’s great.
41:52 Fun, it’s just like awesome fun, but it’s actually really sophisticated robotics and AI. So I think AI and robotics and Google, by the way, Google are going after robotics in a huge way. With the cars that drive, they’ve got the self-driving cars, they bought Boston Dynamics, which is the DARPA-funded military robot. You should go and check out the Boston Dynamics robot clips on YouTube. They are, those things are scary, they’re like creatures.
42:18 Yeah, yeah, creatures that Ian, they’re building animals, right, like pack animals for the Army and stuff. No, they are really, that’s what one of their things, got a four-legged robotic dog and they’re using it for C stuff around on the battlefield. That’s extraordinary. They’ve got the things that can, like, jump onto the top of buildings, it’s like science fiction, but Google bought them like at the end of last year. They have like an alpha dog, pecking order.
42:41 AI. Yeah, yeah, run as a pack. Yeah, yeah. And you’ve seen all this stuff they’re doing with the quadcopters now, where they’ve got swarms of quadcopters that can coordinate and do things like play basketball and they can, you know, they can, like that car company, they learn from each other, they learn how to as a swarm. So I think robotics is going to be huge.
42:59 Basically what Google is doing, I think, I mean, this is not inside information, this is just my theory as an outsider now looking at it, so I think Google have done a really, I mean, clearly Google’s done an amazing job of, like, indexing the web, right? Google search, then, you know, the big thing that it does is it indexes the web. What Google are trying to do now is they’re trying to index the real world. So Street View, the self-driving cars, the Glass, the robotics, they’re trying to extend their reach into the physical world, and I think that’s Google’s next big step, is that they are going to basically own the physical world in the same way that they, this is what they’re trying to do, in the same way they own the, in the virtual world right now.
43:39 So robotics is going to be huge, AI is going to be huge, wearable. So we’re talking about Glass, right? I think that Glass is this really, really early prototype of what will come, but I think that in the future, I don’t know exactly what the technology looks like, but we will essentially have the information from the Internet available to us all the time. It’s going to be constant, so you’ll have part of your field of vision will be dedicated to constantly being connected to the web, and at that point the web becomes your external memory.
44:12 I mean, think about this, right? When I was growing up, the thought that at one in my lifetime I might carry around a small slab of plastic that would keep me completely connected to all of the world’s information, every piece of human knowledge that’s ever existed would be instantly accessible to me on a handheld device that I could carry with me all the time. It’s Star Trek, total science fiction. I mean, if somebody had said that to you 20 years ago, you’d have said, you are crazy, what are you smoking, that’s never going to happen.
44:43 And now it’s our everyday lives. So the next logical evolution of that is that, you know, the one problem with the cell phone is I have to take it out of my pocket and do things to it, charge it. Well, charge it. Well, yeah, battery is a whole another thing, right? Pet.
44:56 No, no, I mean, mine too, right, I hate the battery thing, but if you can get that to the point where it’s not even something I have to do, but it’s just there, you will have systems that can monitor your body state, monitor where you are geographically in the world, what am I looking at, what have I been doing, and it will have enough context about me and what I’m doing to be able to instantly give me exactly the information I want, and it will just appear there all the time, a stream of incredibly information to whatever it is that I care about them doing. I think that’s where we end up, probably a decade or so from now. Did you see the movie Her?
45:34 I haven’t seen that yet. It’s really good. Yeah, I haven’t seen that. Really intense, but it’s this whole AI being, and, you know, she starts like arranging his emails and then she decides to send his book off to a publisher and, like, I, you know, it’s like, I wish I had one of those people. So, like, well, I think we’re moving towards that kind of world, right?
45:51 And I think we, I think we are so close to it now. So I think certainly in our lifetimes, and I think in the next decade or so, we’ll get to that kind of service and that kind of, so you’ll be constantly plugged in wherever you go. Now I mean there are obviously some really kind of scary potential implications of that, particularly if you think about what’s happening with the NSA and, you know, like, you know, this, as with any bit of technology, there’s good things and bad things and it could be used for, you know, bad, you know, bad by bad actors for bad things.
46:22 But you know, I’m a Sci-Fi kind of guy, actually quite excited by this stuff. Yeah, I think those osses are coming soon. You know, before we finish up, just quickly on the Google Glass, did they did they do that wrong, did they launch it wrong? I know it’s had a lot of bad press, a lot of people don’t want to touch it, don’t want to use it, or is this really their beta, you know, for the next couple years? I don’t think we can tell yet, I think it’s too early to say, right?
46:44 I mean, clearly what they’re trying to do is kind of use it as a beta test, right, and get sort of, you know, the excited early adopters to get on it and then kind of gradually introduce it. I think it’s way too early to tell whether that’s actually a successful strategy or not. I think it might not be. I think there certainly, you know, there certainly been a backlash against it, right? So I mean, you know, there’s good reason to believe that that might have been a mistake in hindsight.
47:11 I don’t think it sort of matters that much. I think the current angst around it will eventually be forgotten and it will get swamped in the, in sort of the noise. I mean, you know, when iPhone was launched there were a bunch of people who thought that’s never going to work. Yeah, yeah, go look at the early, go look, yeah, right, go look at the early reviews of the iPhone, most of them were like, I don’t really get this, it doesn’t make any sense, no one’s going to buy this.
47:38 So I think, you know, when genuinely ricy new technology comes in, it tends to be that people don’t react well to it initially, it’s like people are like, I don’t really get this, and then they start playing with it and it’s like, oh, now I get it. And I said suspect that, I mean, Glass itself, the actual current product, clearly isn’t going to be an enormous smash success, but I don’t think it was ever intended to be, and my guess is it was intended to be a kind of early, an early attempt to kind of, a first hesitant step in that direction. When we actually get to the point where we’ve got, like, the iPhone of wearable devices, which I think will look and behave quite differently, I suspect then I think we’ll see mass adoption.
48:21 Yeah, it could be a really intelligent strategy in retrospect. We look at it from 10 years from now, because they’re not trying to sell a million of them, their success isn’t built, maybe the, we know the price point’s going to drop drastically over two years, so maybe you just get it out there, get some early adopters, find out the way you want to go. You know, we had easy VRA from campus lond over here, he let us play with it a few weeks ago and it was fairly interesting and super fun, but you also get the feeling that it’s got another 12, 24 months before it really connects, you know, it’s a prototype.
48:50 Yeah, it’s a prototype at this point, and so that tends to be my view, is that you know, it’s a clunky prototype, but if you actually sort of squint a little bit you can see what it might become, and that gets really exciting. Yeah, that gets crazy exciting. Dan, we ask everyone who comes here a few questions at the end, I’m going to hit you with them. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Dan Crow and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do?
49:15 Start a company, because you weren’t doing that back then. No, I wish I’d, I wish I’d started a company like a decade before I actually got into startups. And why is that? Because it’s just so much damn fun, it really is. You know, when it goes badly it’s awful and when it goes well it’s like an amazing feeling, it’s a rush.
49:37 You know, when you get something that people actually want and will pay you money for, it’s like, wow, look, I built something that people actually want to use, like lots of people, and that’s a great feeling. And I never, you know, I started out to be an academic, that’s that was my ambition, I to be, you know, Professor Dan. Actually I’m a professor now, but that’s kind of coincidental. But I discovered that building stuff was just great, I really, really enjoyed building complex, interesting things And now I’m kind of building complex, interesting companies and that’s amazing.
50:12 So you didn’t get that same buzz at Apple or at Google? Well, to some extent, yeah, because I mean, even, particularly Google, right, Google is always trying to find new things and always trying out new products, and, you know, the 20% time, which was very much a thing when I was there, and they encourage people within the company to try new ideas. So, you know, Google particularly, it’s possible to try to sort of trial something and, you know, potentially get it turned into a product.
50:37 I think it’s got a little more difficult since I’ve left to do that, by the way. But a startup is so direct, right? If Google, if you try something and it fails, at the end of the day, you know, Google continues on, right? If you build a product that doesn’t work, Google continues on. It doesn’t, if I mess up at Songkick potentially the company goes away, right?
51:00 In a startup it’s so direct, it’s so kind of like, there’s no hiding, there’s no excuse, you either succeed or you fail. It’s just the clarity of that, it’s exciting, and you sort of live on the edge and that’s great. Well said, well said. Second part of that question is, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? That’s a really good question.
51:24 Steve Jobs, tell you. Yeah. EXA the f*** out of. Yeah, well, yeah, often, there is no, can’t. Yeah, Steve, something that I like that Steve said was that focus is the art of saying no.
51:41 That’s something that I’ve really taken to heart. It’s not what you decide to do, it’s what you decide not to do. And that’s really, really important in startups, right, because a startup is a grand experiment and you’re going to try a bunch of things out and you could be doing a million things, right? I mean, you know, think about the live music industry, there’s just loads of things that we could be doing at Songkick, and if we try to do, like, 20 of them, we, a 25-person company, guess what, we would be terrible at all of them.
52:07 If we pick one or maybe two things and do those really well, that’s how you succeed at a startup, right? That’s the one advantage that a startup has, is it can figure out one thing and just do that one thing so well that you do better than anyone else in the world. Yeah, that’s when a startup really hums, is when it figures out what that one thing and just it’s excels. And so that figuring out what are all of the, there’s all these wonderful opportunities, all these things I could do, what’s the thing that I ought to be doing, and, you know, throw away all the others, even though I could make money from them and they could be successful.
52:39 No, throw them away, focus on that thing that’s going to really drive you to success. And you know, something now at the point where we can do two or three things because we’ve, you know, grown and understood the market, and that’s really exciting, but, you know, that deliberately chopping yourself off from things that, you know, good ideas, but saying no, I’m going to do this thing really well, that’s really important. That’s good, we haven’t heard that before, I like that.
53:01 Last part of that question is, you know, to the 20-year-old listening around the world in China and Australia in Japan, what advice do you give to them if they want to get to be part of the startup community? I think the two, let me give you two bits of advice. The first is, be persistent. You have to be incredibly persistent because startups are all about failing and failing and failing and failing and failing and suddenly you find something that works, and if you can persist through the monumental amount of failure that you will experience on your way to success, then that’s how you get there, right?
53:39 So that persistence is incredibly important. The other one is bravery. You have to be brave to be a startup entreprene- and I don’t mean that in kind of a self-serving way, I hope, but more that you just have to be prepared to take risks. It’s all about what I call mitigated risk-taking, so take risks but know how to kind of, like, mitigate them. I think this is one of the reasons why places like Silicon Valley and Silicon Roundabout work so well.
54:06 Tech clusters are a way of mitigating the risk of doing a startup. So if I do a startup and I’m in, you know, like, you know, Albuquerque or the middle of nowhere, right, wherever it is, and my startup fails, I’ve got a problem, you know, I have no job, I have no money, and I’ve got nowhere to go. If I do a startup in London or San Francisco and it fails, well, I mean that’s not a good thing, but guess what, now there are a thousand startups right around the corner who’d love to hire me.
54:37 And so being in a cluster is a way of mitigating the risk. So risk mitigation is really important. So it’s finding, you know, it’s being brave enough to take risks but not stupid enough to take risks that kind of like existential. Good. Wow, strong advice, very strong stuff.
54:54 Yeah, very good. Around, Dan, thanks so much for coming. Hey, my great pleasure, it’s been great. I’m glad that you were watching us and then you contacted us and look at this, you manifested your own destiny, that’s awesome. If you’re watching us you can do the same thing, you just contact us on Twitter at Silicon Real.
55:09 But thanks so much, man, these stories are fantastic, we could probably talk for another, I’m sure, forever and ever. Great. How do people get a hold of you and Songkick, etc.? Well, you can follow me on Twitter, I’m @croin. Crow?
55:24 What, croin? I actually have two, q-u-i-n-e. Yeah, that’s right. Always happy to talk to people there, and come to songkick.com and check out our service. And we always love people who love live music.
55:40 Fantastic, I love it, I love it. If you’re listening to us on iTunes you can check us out on YouTube or on Twitter or on Facebook, all the usual stuff. If you want to email us it’s [email protected]. We got a bunch of recent offers, people that want to help out with all sorts of part of behind the scenes here, so keep those coming. Yeah, keep them coming.
55:58 I, you know, two, call, two phone calls this week with guys that, you know, are probably going to help out over the next few months and summertime, so, you know, instead of working on the tan you can help us out a little bit in between. Oh yeah, it’s so much fun being here, you get to hang, meet all sorts of cool people, etc. So episode 44, we’re going to keep going, it’s great, we’ve got our year anniversary coming around. Who would have thought, who would have thought, who would have thought.
56:20 But it’s great, you know, it’s fantastic, me and all the people that are coming through here and just makes me more bullish on the whole scene and the city and everything. So as we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. You’re one of them. Dan, thanks so much for coming and all the best. Hey, thank you, been good.
56:34 All right, guys, take care. Dropbox is still a US company hosted on US soil, hosted by Amazon, and we know that Amazon have, you know, they’ve given data to the US government through PRISM, so what we’re seeing now is a lot of companies who are building, you know, allowing you to have your own private Dropbox on your desktop, so you’re building basically your own mini cloud server with your stuff but giving you the same kind of access and apps that Dropbox might. I think the second thing is we’re seeing a lot of, a lot of work going into encryption, so you know you might store your files on Dropbox or Box or Huddle or whatever, but then you can add an extra layer of encryption on top of that where you hold the key, which means that, you know, even if someone were to come to Box or Dropbox and say, hey, you know, we want the files for this person, whatever they gave them would just be a complete scramble.
