Full transcript: Emily Brook on London Real
2:14 Much for being here, appreciate it. Let’s get on with the show. Our guest today is Emily Brook, who is the founder of Blaze, which produces the laser light, which is an LED bike light with a laser that projects the symbol of a bicycle about 5 m ahead of the cyclist, to tackle the most common cause of cycling accidents, which is vehicles turning across an unseen bike. You guys raised, I think, 55,000 pounds last year from Kickstarter. You’ve had some investments from Index Ventures and the Branson clan, I think around 300 grand.
2:45 You studied physics at Oxford, product design at Brighton. You were the inaugural member of Entrepreneur First. We were just talking about Matt Clifford, who was here a couple months ago. I like that guy. I like that guy.
2:57 Emily, welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you very much. You, he did that very well. I’m also hiring, and if you want to roll in marketing, you’ve got it. Jesus, I feel like I should be hiring.
3:05 We are actually, we don’t pay. Oh, okay, gotcha, understood. You know, I was, I was actually riding my bike home from the studios here to where I live, just north of Regent Street, like about a week ago, and I made the ride, and you know, London’s a fabulous city to ride a bike in, just cuz it’s so much, so many things to see, you know, but when I got home I told my little girl and my girlfriend. I said, I’m not going to make this ride anymore, because it just felt that if I did it every, every single day.
3:30 It’s just felt statistically unsafe, and I was just wondering if you could tell us what, what you think, Emily, is the state of the union of bike safety in London, and what you guys are, are planning to do about it? Well, it’s, you’re right, and especially that ride to North Regent Street, that’s pretty grim. It’s terrifying, and as we all saw just before Christmas, there was nine fatalities in a fortnight in London alone, which is horrific. All bicycle related.
3:54 All cycle, yeah, cycle fatalities, nine fatalities on for bikes, and there was, I mean, one day after it was, yeah, horrific. And it’s, it’s terrifying. Safety, personal safety, is the biggest barrier for people to cycle in the city. I mean, there’s still half a million journeys made by bike in London every day. But again, you’re right.
4:12 The odds are, the odds are against you. We’ve all had somebody immediately close to us or ourselves, and who’ve had an accident. You know, you are people. You hear it happening every day, and it’s it’s, you know, the space is the, it’s the war on the roads. It’s being seen.
4:26 It’s, as a cyclist, you have such a small footprint. And that’s your challenge. You’re just not seeing. Drivers instinctively don’t look for a bike. They look for a threat to themselves.
4:35 They look for another vehicle and another bit, a tonnage of metal coming at them and a cyclist can be tucked over. While I was developing it, I was working with a driving psychologist, a chap whose life’s work is to analyze accidents for a living, which is pretty, pretty grim. Wow, but he has some really interesting insights, and one of them is the second most common cause is vehicles coming out of a side junction, and you hear it happening again just as obviously, frequently, as the blind spot.
5:01 But a car pulls out right into a bike. And that happens because a bike is coming. It could be right on top of you as you come out to the junction, but if a driver looks, they scan, they take that split second to look. They don’t look on the other side of the road. They don’t look in the middle of the sky.
5:15 They look in the middle of the oncoming lane, because that’s where a car is. But a bike can be tucked over just that little bit further to the curb, which means he’s right on top of you but just not seen. And then you have the classic: the vehicle pulls out and you get the, “Oh, sorry, mate, I didn’t see you.” Well, it was right there. And an interesting by the by, my company’s actually incorporated Smidy Limited, which is “Sorry, mate, I didn’t see you,” before I knew what to call it.
5:39 It’s hard to get mad at the drivers, cuz it’s not like they mean, they mean poorly. They’re just not paying attention, which can probably be on a statistical level of being even drunk. You know, they did some tests with like texting and driving, and it was worse than drunk driving. Yeah, texting. I mean, texting.
5:52 I’ve got no, no sympathy for people who are looking at a phone when they’re driving, and it’s just idiotic. But I do, for the large vehicle drivers, you often see in London these exchanging places. We can go and sit in a cab of a big truck or a big bus, and it’s bloody terrifying. If you sit there and you look around, you can have, you know, either yourself or somebody else walking up the inside with a bike. You just can’t see them.
6:13 And you can imagine, especially being a truck driver coming into the capital. You’re on the wrong side of the road. You’re, you know, you haven’t slept for a long time. You’ve got bikes just everywhere all around you. It’s terrifying, and yeah, I feel, I feel bad for them too, but it’s a serious, it’s a very, very serious problem.
6:30 You know, you said that you, you work with a psychologist for a while, and I know you were, I think, you were in design school when you came up with this idea, but you didn’t just, I mean, the, I didn’t just pop into your head. You actually researched it and spent some time riding around public transportation and everything. Yeah. Now, I left Oxford, bizly physics at Oxford wasn’t much fun, and left to go and do design in Brighton, which, which was, and during my studies I’d never been on a bike, but decided to cycle the length of the UK for charity.
6:55 So bought a bike, trained for 4 months with a girlfriend and cycled the length of the UK, and fell in love with my bike. And here I am two years later with a bike company. But during the ride, I realized that the countryside was relaxing and gorgeous and beautiful, but the cities were downright stressful and dangerous and exhausting, so I got off my bike the week the ride finished. had to start my final year and design a product from start to finish. And I wanted to find the biggest challenge for city cyclists and tackle it.
7:22 So about 6 months of that year was spent working with a ton of other cyclists, working with the driving psychologist, working with the bus company and the council, being out on the roads myself, have a geeky helmet cam on my helmet and getting strange looks. That was basically footage of pedestrians, be like, who dude? But yeah, analyzing kind of what accidents actually happen, deep diving into the statistics and seeing, you know, the frequency of which accidents happen.
7:46 I came back to start the year with a brilliant idea. I had it all sorted out. I’d done the ride and realized that all bikes need brake lights. Obviously, all bikes, cars have got them. Why don’t we have them?
7:57 I want the dude behind me to know I’m slowing down. Brake lights, we all need brake lights. so I went back to start my final year, and running into my course leader, Rman, was like, “Mr Morris, Mr Morris, I’m going to do brake lights for bikes. It’s brilliant, it’s brilliant.” He’s like, well, I, I don’t believe you.
8:10 Well, hang on a minute. He’s like, well, no, I mean, is it really a problem? Go away, find a problem, research it, find tell me what the biggest problem is, and then tackle it, and then come up with a solution. Don’t start with a solution. I don’t want to hear a solution.
8:21 And he’s completely right, because once I did the deep dive, I realized that actually such a small percentage of bikes hit from behind. It’s this side sweep, blind spot incident. And there’s one statistic I found that 79% of bikes hit are going straight ahead, and somebody else turns into them. And so that’s what I wanted to tackle, 79%. Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought, I wouldn’t have thought that.
8:44 I guess no one is just cruising along going straight ahead, not making, not, you’re not at a junction, you’re not making any movements, but it’s somebody else who is, and they turn into you, just having simply not seen you in time. So from that perspective, even, even like a horn or something wouldn’t even work, because you’re not aware that they’re even making a move. A horn is interesting, though, because a horn kind of, it helps in the same way the laser light does.
9:06 It’ll help you be seen when you can’t be seen, right? So you can be lit up like a Christmas tree, have every bit of high vis and light and flashing gadget you want, but ultimately if you’re caught in that position where the driver ahead of you just can’t see you, you can’t be seen, and a horn, at least, unless it’s a very big vehicle, it’s noisy and they can’t, and a bell often can’t be heard. At least that is, somehow, could help you be seen when you can’t be seen, which is what the light tries to do.
9:31 You know, when I hear about Blaze, and when, when Colin told me about you guys, like, you hear the story about you, and you weren’t even riding a bike a few years ago, and then you get this idea, and now you’re making this hardware product. You’re flying to China, you’re doing all this, and like, I’m sure people ask you, they’re like, who does this girl think she is? I mean, you’re doing all these things for the first time, and I, I listen to an interview and you’re like, look, we’re designing a product.
9:52 We’re mass manufacturing. We’re doing this. We don’t necessarily know all the answers, but we’re going to try. I mean, where do you get that mentality from, that you’re going to be able to solve the problem just as good as anyone else? I’ve got absolutely no idea what I’m doing.
10:04 I didn’t, when I started, but you just very well got to put yourself in a position to learn. Ask people. I just, my number one manist is to learn to find people who do, like, whatever it is I’m trying to do, whether it’s hiring or raising money or growing a brand or whatever. There’s a ton of people out there who have done it and are infinitely more experienced than I am. So go and ask them.
10:23 Go and borrow five minutes of someone’s time and ask as many questions as you can. And just get on with it. Ultimately, like, I don’t know. I feel really lucky I never got on the corporate path. I mean, I started it.
10:34 I was at Oxford reading physics, which was my path into the City, which was apparently what I wanted, and I’m really grateful I jumped off in time, because so many of my friends didn’t, and then it’s, you know, once you’re out there just getting on with it, you just have no option but to keep on getting on with it and learning. Whereas, if you, you know, you’re in a suit behind a desk for a couple of years, it’s very hard to step away from that. We’re both ex-bankers, but you know, we’re going to let that.
10:56 You made the leap. Oh yes, we did. Yeah. So look at us. All right.
11:00 So you just went ahead and went for it, basically. So you went from this design. How do you get to a Kickstarter campaign last year? So the design had the prototype at university, because my final year project, the press that generated straight away was the trigger to make me think, hang on, this needs to become a reality. This needs to be out there.
11:17 It took me about a year to figure out that that needed to be me to do that. I was, I patented it at uni, and I was hoping to manufacture, to license it to somebody else, a manufacturer who’s done it before. I, I certainly knew I didn’t have that expertise. What was the actual patent around? The first one, so the one that was granted is projecting head of a two-wheeled vehicle for safety.
11:38 Broadly speaking, it’s the concept, and that’s, that was really interesting because I did it myself. I got as much free legal advice as I could get my paws on, sure, and saw as many lawyers as I could, I could. And got some help from the university and filed a patent myself. But from then on it was me working with the attorney’s office, with the patent company. And they were really helpful, because instead of being me just being an attorney pushing paperwork back and forth, it was an individual trying to get a product protected, and they were really helpful, and that helped get it pushed through, and then from that we spun out more technical patents, which is on the internals and how it’s put together and how it’s manufactured and to kick-start last year, or even to starting the company.
12:18 And so that was, so finished, it got sent to America, to Babson College, on an entrepreneurial scholarship by Santander, which opened my eyes up to entrepreneurship. So that was really interesting to me. Entrepreneurship. My stepfather is a very successful businessman, and to me entrepreneurship meant kind of, I don’t know, big cats getting bigger, own, you know, big, big company. I didn’t, I don’t know, if just business in my mind.
12:42 I never can thought about it, and the program was sponsored by Santander, and it mainly Latin American countries, so guys from Brazil and São Paulo and all sorts, all over the world. I was the only Brit, probably the only native English speaker, and to them entrepreneurship just meant getting on with it, like starting a company because you didn’t have a job to walk into. So a guy in my course was 22. He ran three companies he had a t-shirt printing company, he ran a men’s only chain of beauty spas and a recycling waste roofing company, and he was a full-time student, and he did those three just to pay for his tuition, and he’s like, so what, like, someone’s got to pay the bills?
13:21 And it was, that was really interesting, to, like, that was, I think, the road kick up the ass to actually just get on with it. These guys are, why can’t I? I mean, I’ve got so many more resources that my, I’m so lucky, you know, I could surely do this easier than they could. Why aren’t I. Okay, so then came home and got accepted to Entrepreneur First.
13:39 Okay, that was 2012, and was that a was that a no-brainer for you? Did you need some help? Did you need some mentoring? I knew, yeah. You could have gone other ways.
13:47 You could have gone WEA maybe or other incubators, right? I was brand new to the scene, knew nothing about tech, knew nothing about entrepreneurship, knew nothing about studying a company. I heard about Entrepreneur First and it was just a to me. Yeah, no-brainer. I’d learn, I’d get some help to build a network, to build, start a company, so it’s accepted to that, and then spent the summer.
14:05 I came here. I came to the roundabout. I helped run Silicon Milk Roundabout. Okay, in the early early days, and that exposed me to the whole startup scene. Obviously, that was really awesome.
14:15 And I’m still obviously connected to lots of those people. Those first three months, sitting in campus when campus first opened right. But Entrepreneur First is very tech focused, so they’re very much about building an online business. They support teams or have a co-founder, and not particularly supportive with hardware, understandably. And so I was looking to build a tech company, so I had a co-founder.
14:40 I spent the summer trying to learn to code, trying rather than Su succeeding. Was that a requirement, Entrepreneur First coding? Not so much, but I wanted to learn, so like if I was going to be dealing with somebody who, that was the language they spoke, I wanted to at least understand the language, even if I wasn’t very proficient in speaking it. So I did that, but was constantly letting him down, because constantly going back to Blaze. So constantly meeting lawyers, constantly meeting designers, constantly taking it over and just not being able to leave it alone.
15:08 And then at the end of the summer, my bike got stolen. This is like two weeks before the kickoff of Entrepreneur First, two weeks before boot camp. My bike got nicked, and it’s the bike I’d bought to do the long ride, the bike I’d learned to ride on, the bike I’ve been riding ever since, the bike I loved. It completely irrationally broke my heart. I was just like, what on Earth is wrong with me?
15:28 But went to the police station and registered it. Got home, was still in a mess, went online and saw that a guy just been killed by an Olympic bus turning across, turning across him. It actually turned out to be Dan Harris from Moo at the time, obviously didn’t know that, and then that kind of was another, a double slap on the face of like what the f*** am I doing? Look at me. This is, look how upset I am.
15:50 This is what I care about. This is what I should be doing. Called my mom, it’s like midnight, and said, Mom, I think I should be doing Blaze. Yes, Starling, we know you should be doing Blaze. We had to wait you to figure it out yourself So thanks.
16:01 This, this is like a year later. This is a year later. Yeah, since you had the first idea and everything. Okay, so that was September 2012, like, right? So it, this is what I’m doing.
16:09 I didn’t know if Entrepreneur First to support me. Amazingly they did, and incredibly grateful. So boot camp kicked off two weeks later. We did a two, a Kickstarter two months after that. Okay, wow.
16:20 And that was last year. That was 2012, end of December, November, December 2012. okay. What was your Kickstarter experience like? Busy.
16:29 We made a, we made a video in, we made a video from shooting to edited to up on the website in 36 hours. It’s fast. We wanted to get it out before Christmas so we wanted to have it up live that month before Christmas. We managed to get it done in time and blasted it over to Kickstarter, and like, all sitting there ready for to go, me and an intern, Will, my first TI, who’s still with me, he’s tripping, awesome, but it was me and Will and, uh, like, superer ready to go, and got no response.
16:56 Got no response, got no response, and not even, is Thanksgiving in America, so nobody’s in the office. It’s not going to get approved for 3 days, and we had to stop 4 days late, but Kickstarter was amazing. We were one of the first companies in the UK, so we launched in the UK, the LA, the week, the month Kickstarter launched. Okay, so our biggest challenge was educating the UK what the hell Kickstarter was. You can imagine my mom’s generation being like, so I’m not going to get a product for potentially months?
17:23 No, I’m not getting it in your company. No, why would I give you money now? Like, well, KCK, that’s how it works. It is, it is a social phenomenon. Like, you need like, kind of, to, to know other people did it, and you need to feel like it’s part of something that’s socially acceptable.
17:38 You can’t just jump in. It fits much better with the American culture. I feel prob true too. I found that so much when I was running my Kickstarter campaign, like, one of my co-founders, you know, she comes from Notting Hill, and she’s got lots of, you know, some fancy friends and stuff, like guess, and they just didn’t understand the concept, like what do you mean? I’m, I’m buying, you know, I’m giving you money for coffee that I may or may not receive.
17:59 Yeah, in X number of months’ time. It’s just like, this doesn’t make sense to me. So true. Yeah, it’s funny, because like even like in the first couple of weeks of, when Blaze first kind of became real, like, after my exhibition at University, the cycling blogs picked it up. It’s just a concept, and the ones in America were very different from the ones the ones here are like, I think the British mentality can be at times just to say, yeah, but, yeah, but you hear something awesome, and someone’s like, yeah, but she hasn’t done this, or, yeah, but like, without any information, the Americans like oh my God, that’s awesome, you good girl, like, thank you, trying, it’s a good accent, it’s not bad, yeah, that’s good so, so it was over subscribed, the Kickstarter, you were shooting for 25, you got 55.
18:41 Was this, was that the beginning of all of every everything for your company, for the publicity, for the money? What was the most important thing Kickstarter was not for the money. There was three reasons beyond the money. First and foremost, we were obviously, it’s the beginning of Entrepreneur First. We’re having MVP and Lean Startup ranged at us from left, right, and center, and to me Kickstarter being the only person in the cohort with a hardware offering.
19:03 No, no, sorry, that’s not true, one, one other. I wanted to get something out that I could test as soon as possible, and to me Kickstarter was the perfect way to test your MVP before you know, you actually put any money behind it or go and speak to manufacturers or go and speak to retailers. So I wanted to know, I mean, this crazy idea of strapping a laser to a bike and cycling around town. I want to know that other people thought this is actually a good idea.
19:26 So proving the concept, it’s in valuable for that, if you reach your target, and you do well, and people will actually pay money for this that’s invaluable, then the feedback. So our 782 backers are still unbelievably active and very much part of Blaze right now they are, I mean, it’s more than one person’s full-time job communicating with these guys on a daily basis. It’s they’re part of the company. The product has changed so much in the twelve months from them coming on board to it shipping into their hands.
19:55 Things like, straight away, they stuck their hands up and said they want it to be USB charge. Fine, built it in, so designed it. But their feedback isn’t completely invaluable, and the press, like, you know, we were a tiny startup, well, what, yeah, startup, you know, never done this before, straight out of university, and suddenly we’re on the world stage, and we had retailers approaching us, so Evans, Halfords, Cycle Surgery, you know, emailing us. So Kickstarter, yeah, it was an amazing experience.
20:24 Is that how you got the follow-on funding primarily? Um, nope, nope, that was um, so yeah, didn’t, wasn’t obviously, people who think that they should be funding their company on Kickstarter, be hesitant, you, so she raised before then, so um, did a very, very small Angel round just after. Okay, um, friends and family round, um, more because it’s being offered from some incredibly fantastic people than me really thinking about it too strongly, but that was so I still had that open, and then went to Founders.
20:56 Um, I was very lucky to get an invited to Founders Forum, where I was in the demo room, where you, you know, demo hardware, um, keeping the incredible people entertained. I’m standing there with my little laser light, and one minute I have Ashton Kutcher walk past, next minute it’s Richard Branson, next minute it’s Liam Casey, the next minute is, you know, these incredible people. So Founders Forum is actually quite formative to this whole journey right, and that’s where I met the Branson, that’s where I’ve met Saul, a client of Index before, but I met him again there, met Liam Casey, us to PCH doing our supply chain, and I had the rounds still open from the Angel round, and, um, Index and, and Branson’s both expressed interest, and I was very flattered but didn’t have enough room in the round because of doing a tiny Angel round.
21:37 So ended up calling the, the lawyers and saying can we close the round that we have open and open up another one at this price to get these guys in, and then what, what the hell is going on? I like, I don’t know, but it’s high quality problem. They are very, very lucky but it’s, um, but it’s fantastic because they’re obviously two, um, it’s a, yeah, it’s a great advocate of what we’re trying to do and belief in what we’re doing, and, um, they’re fantastic help and fantastic to work with them.
22:05 When did you ship your first products? So you closed the Kickstarter January last year roughly? Okay, um, a year later, a year later, a year later, and that was obviously late, but okay, that’s, you know, I’m still pretty proud of you right? It’s, I mean, there’s, um, if you never haven’t come across, um, oh, uh, shop, uh, shop lockets. They do a wonderful series called Blueprint, which is Hardware Founders.
22:30 They do, like, um, uh, profiles of Hardware Founders on, and most of them have done crowdfunding, typically Kickstarter, and they’ve got the series of wonderful postcards and t-shirts, and they kind of, you know, breaking news or Kickstarter ships on time, and all these kind of wonderful, but all it’s all true, like, all the first-time hardware entrepreneurs are, you know, unanimously optimistic. Yeah, you were quoted, you said getting the prototype to a mass-manufactured product is the hard part, not the Kickstarter. Definitely.
22:56 I was wondering if you could expand on that and tell us what your life’s been like for the last 14 months or so? Okay. So getting a prototype, um, is not easy, but it’s, it’s durable it can be you yourself in a workshop for a few weeks or months, or it can be getting a designer on board, or it can be, you know, getting some expertise, but you can get one of something in your hands that does what you want it to do, that’s imaginable. The really hard part is then getting that one thing manufactured on a large scale.
23:22 How large are we talking? So in the hundreds and thousands of units? Yeah, yeah, okay. Um, because I mean the biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges for a first-time hardware startup is the working capital that demands, so you have to pay for the ship before you can sell it, months before you actually get any money from it. Um, and for a startup that’s just trying to pay a couple of salaries, you know, that’s really, really hard.
23:43 So that’s an immediate challenge the engineering expertise to actually get this thing to be able to manufacture at a price, so you can afford to manufacture on scale where each component is so sensitive on cost, and your margins are completely, I mean, it’s make or break whether this, you know, making one, it can cost £10,000, and you’ve got one, but then can you get it at a price? You can do thousands of those and sell them for X. Um, and you know, the drog ofies is ultimately is likely going to be not down the road.
24:09 It’s going to be the other side of the world. It’s going to be in Asia. It’s going to be using expertise from, you know, other continents. Um, yeah, I mean, the, the manufacturing game for Mass scale consumer offering, it’s a learning curve, like this right, and it keeps all the suckers out, I’m guessing. Um, yeah, I mean, it’s, yeah, is it’s new as well.
24:29 It’s typically very large companies make hard work for very large companies. Um, and now with the likes of Kickstarter, with the likes of VC investment, with the likes of individuals being able to think that they idiotic enough as you said earlier to try and get, you know, a product to many people. It’s, it’s happening for the first time, and China is not quite ready for it. But we’re trying to work it out and they’re more ready than they were. I mean, could you have gone to China 5 years ago and asked them to do what you’re asking them now from a small-scale perspective or small company perspective?
24:58 Um, yeah, and I’m sure it would have been possible. There would have been endless, endless heartbreak and headache, um, things going wrong, and I mean, I think the only way you could probably do it is to actually move out there, to actually move out there, and have a presence on the ground and be able to go into factories on a daily basis. Um, or have a big team out there so I’m working with PCH. They’re a design company in, in the UK. No, what are they, PCH?
25:23 Um, so they’re founded by a crazy Irish entrepreneur called Liam Casey, who is possibly one of the most ins operation entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. He moved to China in ’96, and started managing the supply chain for some, some big companies, and since manages the supply chain for, well, I probably, I’m not allowed to say, but the biggest brands, things like, probably, and ultimately they’re a supply chain management company, but they’re now supporting smaller companies, hardware startups, to ship product and manufactured product, so they have an incubator, which is 4 months, based in San Francisco, which, they, through that period, they you to a prototype that you can raise money on or you can crowdfund. So I’d argue that’s the easy part, but I mean, that’s a huge help.
26:04 So you go out there, you, there’s an amazing network they’ve got behind them. They take you to China for two weeks to see manufacturing happen. Um, you learn a f***ing ton. You didn’t do this, probably, no, they, I missed that, cuz you already started. Yeah, okay.
26:17 And then the accelerator, where they support, they basically have, I’m basically a baby client. I’m a client like all the others, but they support me, helping manage my supply chain. The biggest thing that they offer is working capital, so they support my working capital. And I’ve got a team of about, varies between five and 10, in PCH in China, who, I mean, they feel like Blaze. I go out there.
26:40 I flew out to China by myself to spend New Year’s in a hotel by myself in China, basically, to give Bob Wang, who’s my project manager a very large hug, because the guy had been amazing and been fighting hard for us and trying to get the product sorted in time, and, but again the model is not perfect, so fact factories in China want to deal in large numbers, low volume. I mean, low, low complexity, large volume products, so they want to be dealing, you know, shipping out millions of very simple products, that they can just repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. Up comes a little kind of, you know, upstart London hardware startup that wants to create X number of hundreds to start off with, incredibly complicated bike lights.
27:18 Oh, and by the way, I’ll change my mind every 10 seconds and want to take that off the tool and change that pattern. Oh, by the way, yeah, we want to do that. I know that can be a bit cheaper like, you know, we are, China is nightmare. So it’s really hard, and PCH, they’re used to working with very big companies with a lot of process and a lot of resource, so the information flow back and forth over this last year has been really tough, but there isn’t, there isn’t a perfect answer.
27:40 And we’re trying to make one. Sounds fascinating. You spent 65 days in China. You’re a guy that deals with working capital issues. Why, what do you, what do you see when you listen to Emily, a nightmare?
27:50 You know, I had to deal with people in Europe, primarily for, for the coffee side of things, but, and in terms of complexity of coffee is a lot, lot simpler than sort of what you were dealing with and trying to ride around China, understand that the difficulties of, just sort of, the Chinese culture to think outside of the box a lot of the time, and so you’re right, you go into, you know, I, I visited a few manufacturing plants, and they like things that have been done before, and that, you know, is a simple product that they know how to use, or that they can see what it’s for, whether it’s, you know, I went to one that they did shoes, right? So any, everything, from golf shoes to football shoes to running shoes, and was just that, that’s what they did.
28:29 So yeah, doing a small number of a really high, highly complex product is probably with minimum a water, the laser in it. It’s like, what are you doing? Sounds like Austin Powers movie, right? With it, I want a what is he? I want, comes this crazy English CEO, who’s kind of like this emotional woman, who’s like, right, cares about her product way too much and comes and asks too many questions, and it’s them.
28:52 Yeah, I think, I think we a shock. I think it’d be, it’d be hard to get them on the entrepreneurial train, to be like, listen, you work with me now, and then, you know, this thing blows up, and you, you know, we’re, we’re great customers, for is that a selling point for the Chinese when you deal with them, or is that a selling point with, no, p, p, PCH? are backing me because they want me to one day be Apple. You know, millions of these. They, they’re bringing down the barriers of the, you know, the very high barriers to a first-time hardware startup, to enable you to grow.
29:20 I think that’s a that’s a great incubator concept, though. You know, in this, you know, in this area, of course, you see incubators popping up every few weeks, not really adding a huge amount of value, but for that perspective, like, what a great investment from them to be like, listen, I can take a great idea, a great product, a great person or team, and you know, launch them years, you know, faster than it would have taken. It’s challenging. It’s really, really hard, but it’s so they, they, there are a few hardware-specific, St, accelerators out there.
29:49 There’s Dragon, there’s, there’s a few, but it’s it’s the steps after that, like I just said, which is the really hard part, is, is actually once you’ve got your your thing, how do I make many of them? And, and they’ve got that bit that they’re helping with, which, and this is our first hardware company in 50 episodes, right? I mean, we’ve had everyone on here, but not a hardware startup that’s actually Koo. Koo is kind of, yeah, I guess Koo. Okay, yeah, all right.
30:12 Maybe, maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe, yeah, maybe maybe, a smaller scale. They got the Raspberry Pi backbone, kind of thing, stuff that’s already been developed. How is the last year done? Where do you give yourself a rating on one to 10? I mean, how have you done?
30:23 You delivered the product, how’s been the feedback, and what’s the next couple steps? I know you tell people, you know, you’re, you’re working on many products in the long run. So how are things? The last part I come back to, cuz that might have recently changed. The first part has been the best part of this entire two-year journey.
30:42 So going from like a nuts idea at University to actually this thing being in many people’s hands all around the world. Like, our customers are bizarrely spread literally in every, every corner of the world, and hearing their anecdotes of actually using the light for the first time and, you know, the classics, which I just didn’t think about before it happened, were you the unboxing videos that start popping up online. 15-minute unboxing videos of people, you know, mounted head cam and open their Blaze box for the first time it’s like, what, this is actually this crazy un, is there a website for that?
31:12 Unboxing videos. Unx videos. I’m, I’m sure there must be. It’s just a thing I had not realized. I not realiz.
31:18 There’s a brilliant one with the guy’s doing it, and he’s, he’s got the helmet on, he’s like, he’s sh, hands, he’s opening it up, and he’s talking about everything and then there’s a ping, goes, oh, that’s my chicken. He, see, go off, and, like, takes the chicken that addition of the microwave, and it comes back, and back, back to the Blaze light. But yeah, we, we, we sent out a customer survey. There was a quality issue with the first batch of brackets, that to me was the end of the world, and was a complete disaster, shutdown.
31:44 And it really obviously upset me, and we were trying to work out how serious the situation was. So the girls were like, right, well, let’s send out a survey and ask, ask the customers you know, what, what their thoughts are. Meanwhile, I just booked flights and took three, the team. So Matt, my designer and Phil, my COO, three of us went out to China for a week to go and sort it out, but meanwhile, this survey went out, customer survey, and has some pretty standard questions in it, you know, looking for NPS score, score, and some, you know, pretty standard benchmark questions that we could benchmark ourselves against other companies, and while we’re in China s*** hit the fan, like have these really hardcore, full-on meetings, and I, I was, you know, really upset and then we had to, it was a real kind of like coming together after we hit rock bottom.
32:26 Like, everyone, the team and tryer and us were working out to get this sorted out and getting replacement brackets out to everybody, and you know, fix the problem going forward, and blah blah blah. Then we get a Skype from the team in London, like, oh by the way, and we’ve got the results from the customer survey. I like, geez, guys, I’m not sure I can deal with that right now. No, no, no, no. I think I think you should.
32:44 And then, so, looked at the survey, and that has been, that was amazing. So hearing people, what their realization is of, of actually riding with the light at night on the city streets. People bloodly love it. They trying to, trying to be humble. Like, I, I mean, I love it obviously.
32:59 I mean, I have a [expletive] day, and I go downstairs and I put my light on my bike, and I cycle home, and I’m grinning by the time I get home. And it’s, there’s a funny thing, because people a lot of the comments were how they’ve noticed people seeing them, obviously, more, and like thumbs up from other cyclists and taxi drivers and bus drivers, and a few interesting insights that I hadn’t thought of when I was designing it was they realized a lot of people commented about how, when drivers overtake them, they take longer to cut back in than they would otherwise. They wait till they’ve gone past the projection, and then cut back in, few yards ahead, rather than just nipping straight in.
33:30 And pedestrians, I mean, that is when we hear the whole time. When we experience most nights, we cycle with it. I so often find somebody will see that before they see me and not step out, which is an immediate win. Yeah, pedestrians are dangerous. They really are, and other cyclists can be a little dang.
33:45 Headphones in, phone out, just step out in front of a bike the whole time, and then they freeze sometimes, like they don’t move. Oh, they see you, and they get that rabbit. Oh, it’s a bike. You’re like, who, you going to go left, you’re going to go right, or I’m just going to go straight into you. Yeah.
33:58 But yeah, and there’s a big part of it which is, like, it’s a funny one, because the product was designed to solve an actual problem, a serious problem, cycling fatalities and I did my very best to go small, some small way to tackle that, but when you actually put it on your bike, there’s another element, which is, it’s just bloody good fun as well. You’ve got this green symbol traveling on the road in front of you, and all of our customers are like, it’s really fun, it’s awesome, love, love for that which is a funny one, because I don’t think we can, I don’t know, like, we can market it as, it by the way, it’s also really fun. Yeah.
34:30 Do people get cheers from people, like, hey, nice light, or, yeah, Blaze, or it’s, there’s a funny time at night, if it’s, pubs are emptying, and you’re cycling through and you got your laser light in front, and the people like, who, what the hell’s that? You get a lot of, yeah, a lot of comments. All right, so you’re getting some feedback you didn’t expect from those people, and is that being incorporated into version 2.0, 3.0? And what’s going on in your head as far as that?
34:51 Is that the, is that the main priority right now? Yeah, so there’s all the laser light. So, so, had a recent kind of complete about-turn in my mind, if I’m honest, and this is very early stage, so this isn’t set in stone, and we’re just talking about it as a team, but we have a ton of other things that we are working on and other products that we want to bring out. There are so many problems for urban cyclists, locks, bike security, helmets. I mean, there’s just endless, and you can add value pretty much any direction you want to look in, and we’d love to be doing that right now, but I had a mentoring session with, through Albian, through with a Rich Reed of Innocent smoothies, and U Nicholas from Skype, and a few other really kick-ass people, and the question was asked, you know, what’s next, what products are coming from Blaze next?
35:34 And I did my SP about all these things that we are working on and really excited about. And he kind of said, no, I disagree. Okay, why? Well, Rich, speaking from Innocent, when they started Innocent, they, there was another soft drinks company that launched exactly the same time that he was, you know, obsessively tracking, and it was his hobby to watch their every move, and see what they did. And they’re now worth whatever it is, X factorial, more than Innocent were when they sold Coca-Cola.
36:00 Um, that’s Red Bull, and it’s a one-product company. You look at GoPro, one-product company. We have a really awesome, kick-ass launch product that, you know, it’s people are talking about it. It solves a problem. It’s innovative.
36:13 It’s you know, it’s, and now we’ve got the feedback from our early customers, and we really know it’s not just us. We’re not idiots. You, other people do like it too. I’m kind of thinking, to, hang on a minute, we’ve just got to execute this first and foremost. Like, it’s, it’s a, it’s, you know, we have an awesome product.
36:26 We need to make sure we get it right. We need, make sure, we need to get it out there, selling, and, you know, known around the world, and that’s a big enough job for now, than to try and get distracted and running off in every other direction and develop. We’ve got a tiny team. So at the moment, I’m kind of thinking, actually, to put the brakes, not put the brakes, but just to hold off and trying to run, I get over excited and lots of things on that’s a fantastic realization, and something, yeah, heard so much.
36:55 That focus, right? Focus, focus. And a lot of people when you only have a few people on your team, that, to go out and develop another product and deal with that whole supply chain issue again, and talk about it, and like, the laser light also, it’s not, it’s not intuitive. People need to see it for the first time. See it, you see it, makes sense, but you need to, the first time you introduce to it, you’ll be like, whoa.
37:16 B, and that’s a marketing challenge in itself. We are doing a real light. I can tell you that. Okay, which is awesome, but it doesn’t project. You break light, finally, kind of doesn’t break.
37:27 Okay, it’s a rear light. You’re light always breaking. Okay, always breaking, always breaking. Yeah, it’s that lovely kind of complimentary, matches the front light, but the laser light is our flagship product, and I want to focus on that. Okay, I mean, how many billion bikes are there in the world?
37:41 I mean, you have a potentially huge market to penetrate. Yeah, so you could be spending a lot of time just, you know, you could be spending years just getting people to know about the Blaze, and that, yeah, it’s a big market. It’s huge. It’s not like, you know, a very tiny niche that someone else is going after in same, and it’s growing. So Australia is really interesting to us, because they’ve got the bike light season is very seasonal, so it’s obviously during the winter when it’s dark, that’s when lights are sold in Australia.
38:05 It’s obviously the opposite seasonality. They’ve, they’re booming. They’ve just turned 80% of the CBD into cycle lanes, and they take their cycle safety very, very seriously. They’ve got a compulsory helmet law, and they spend a fortune on their bike kit. So Australia, for example, is really interesting.
38:20 Tons of cities in Europe that, you know, cycle mad, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin, America, San Francisco, Portland, there, there’s some big places that we need to reach. How are the Yanks treating you? How are you finding penetrating America for your product? Well, bizarrely, 25% of our customers are from the States already, and we’ve done no marketing there. We’ve done no outreach to the States.
38:42 But that’s our next big step. That’s, yeah, we need to tap into that, and, and be known in the States, and pick the kind of key retailers you want to talk to, and get a presence over there ASAP. Okay, and what, out of curiosity, what’s, is there fear of competition, or does the patent sort of cover you from that? I don’t waste my time thinking about it. We have a patent.
39:02 We have a couple. One’s been granted, other ones will be. Ultimately, if somebody wants to rip it off, they will. I mean, there’s quite a few things in our favor, in that if you type in projecting bike light, green bike light, laser light, anything, quite literally, my face at the moment comes up. Like, we, we, we, you know, we, the world knows that we started this.
39:23 And an existing bike brand, bike, the cycling industry is very loyal. Sure, you have brands that you love and you stick to, and it’s very vocal as well. It’s a real community, and very collaborative, and if you know one of the big guys suddenly started bringing out laser lights, I don’t know, I would try to cut. I certainly wouldn’t sit quietly. And yeah, if it’s, if it’s in some bizarre territory far away that I’m haven’t reached yet, and it’s saving lives in the other side of the world, so shouldn’t say to my investors, your Index, it’s a big pie, right yeah, and if you want to sell, say, 10 million units, like in the next couple years, what do you need to do as a company?
39:59 Do you need to raise another big chunk of money? Do you need to double your staff, or, or is it not, or do you not need to, the way you’ve set things up? I’d love to think we don’t need to. I’d love to think we don’t have to be a, a jaob bone. We don’t have to raise bazillions.
40:13 I, I mean, I think our biggest challenge is getting the BOM down. I mean, completely brutal, so getting the component prices cost down in China, and getting the product cheap enough that we can afford distributors, so once we tap into the distributor market, so that’s the level, OB, beyond retailers. You go direct to distributors, then they have huge reach and I think that that will open up a ton of doors for us, and we’re very nearly there. So that’s, that’s pretty exciting.
40:38 Okay. But that, if we’re talking just immediately increasing numbers of units sold, getting the BOM down and speaking to distributors. How do you hire? You need to be really bright and ride a bike to, oh, to work for you, pretty much. What, I, okay, I mean, because you know, you, you, you weren’t doing this two or three years ago.
40:56 You were in uni, so, but I’m sure you found a way of doing things that works for you. You seem like that’s what you do. So is there any kind of thing, any knowledge that you’ve gained as far as attracting the right people? Gut. I go on my gut, and we’ve just, we’ve got a really young team.
41:13 We’re really junior. We none of us have got any relevant experience to what we’re doing, but we’re figuring it out as we go, and ultimately, like, I don’t think there’s particularly relevant experience for what we are doing, because we don’t know what we’re doing yet. We’re figuring it out. I was hiring a COO about seven months ago. I wanted a grownup.
41:30 I wanted somebody who, with experience, that I could learn from, somebody who’s been a big part of a small company, somebody who’s built it and, you know, has a lot of experience in that, and I could learn a great deal from. I had some incredible applicants. We had, we’re hiring a marketing lead and an ops lead, and for some reason we had way more for the ops, of the marketing, we had, like, for example, a guy that built and sold eight companies and had been a professional cyclist at some point.
41:55 I ended up hiring somebody, Will, junior, ended up hiring somebody younger than me, who is just bloody bright and has completely complimentary skill set to me. He was an ex, he was a consultant at deoe and operations, straight out of uni. And did that for three years, and then came and joined us, and he has been smashing out the part for the last six months, and I’m just, I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky. He’s now, I’ve made him a co-founder and my COO, and he’s a thought partner with me, and he’s on board for all the strategy thinking and the planning, and I feel really, really, really, really lucky to have found him.
42:27 But that’s the kind of way I’ve kind of gone about it. It’s kind of finding young people who are willing to learn and get on with it. You were in San Francisco 3 months ago, or a few months ago, and you, you were speaking out there, I think at a conference or something. Would you ever consider moving your company to San Francisco? And, oh, here it goes, and why or why not?
42:46 Okay, okay, here we go. Here comes the hate. No. So, yeah, I love America. I love if I’m honest, I don’t love London.
42:56 I’m not a London girl. Never have been, or I’m a country girl from the countryside. Okay. I find London quite daunting. I find it quite, in personal, I find it quite L can be quite lonely place.
43:09 I think everybody’s so busy. I’m so busy that I bring my head up at the weekend, and I’ve forgotten to make plans, and sunnyway everybody else has, and it’s, I don’t know, I’ve, there are parts of London I love. So I love it up here. This has become my family, my community, my friends. Shortage round, okay y, but it’s, yeah, I’ve always got a thirst for other places, and I love traveling, and I love being in other places.
43:32 I love America. I love San Francisco. I really wanted to move the company out there. They’ve got a very strong hardware scene, obviously, a huge bike culture, better weather. PCH is out there.
43:41 They’ve got a, yeah, they’ve got the incubators based out there. Okay. Then, and then, I, my advisers and my board were like, oh, hang on a minute, you know, we’ve got a really good presence here in the UK, a ton of press, you got a ton of you, Index, and Branson, you can pretty much meet anyone you want to, and I’m, we’ve, we’ve achieved a lot in the year, an awful lot, and it’d be really Dar to pack all that up and just move it to America, so it would probably be the next place I’d love to open an office, for sure.
44:08 And I love it but I’m, yeah, not upping sticks and moving everybody there. Okay, and does the tech scene feel different out there than it does here, and just what’s been your experience between those two worlds? So the tech scene, I mean, I’ve, I’ve only been fairly limited time out there. The tech scene out there is very tech, so you find yourself just having, talking about nothing else, and you’ll be at drinks, and just everyone’s like, so-and-so raised this, they’ve had this, they’ve that, that what their office is like, and so-and-so raised this, and they go on to this, and it’s like, just, oh my God, can we talk about something else?
44:37 I couldn’t deal with it. It’s unbelievable. And the hardware scene is not quite that, but it’s, for more than we’ve got here. So that’s, to me, exciting. Yeah, and the London hardware, to be, give it, I mean, it’s actually booming right now.
44:54 It’s really, really taking off there. A bunch of us doing this, as bunch of us, bunch of us idiots trying to build product for consumers. So it’s getting really exciting now. It’s beginning to be a bit of a community around it for the first time, and we’re all talking to each other and sharing knowledge. So actually, yeah, it’s going to be really exciting here as well.
45:11 What am I missing? Colin, yeah, we, you know, outside of the, the, the laser light, what do you think? What other sort of innovation do you think could, could, could save lives on bikes? Save lives on bikes. I mean, it’s all going to be about being seen, building the awareness of the bike on, on City roads, and if it’s not going to be at a consumer level, then there needs to be an infrastructure level.
45:36 Cycle lanes and better signage and better infrastructure for cyclists, because in London, it’s just terrifying. That there’s just, yeah, a bum fight out there. You, you’re happy with Google cars and all this sort of stuff? I guess, well, that would be, as long as they’re building the tech for bike straight away, so they have the tech to kind of spot a bike and let you know a bike in your blind spot. They say they can’t.
45:57 They, I think, as long as it’s not raining, they can see it’s not rain, or that’s useless in London. Yeah, they are trying. They are recognizing bikes and bike patterns, but yeah, apparently if it snows or rains, everything goes out the window. Really? Yeah, for recognition and all.
46:11 So if they could recognize the laser, be probably easier for pick up a green laser. There we go. But that, so, there’s a bunch of concepts I was working on when I was developing it. There’s about 10 that we took to kind of poop stage, and there was a lot of them work, and RFID or Bluetooth tagging between a bike or a device and a driver, right? But ultimately, after speaking to bus drivers and vehicle drivers, they’ve got so much going on in their cab as it is.
46:34 They’ve got six mirrors to check. They’ve now got extra tech, and they’ve got GPS. They’ve got all these devices to look at, and stuff, and you’ve had something else telling you there’s a bike. Well, hang on a minute, where, you know, where am I supposed to be looking, and something else beeping at you, or more information to a driver. I don’t think might would could be counter counter hav, but there are some quite exciting concepts in that space.
46:55 It definitely needs to make some changes. Well, cuz I don’t feel safe out there, so, no, and I don’t know. It’s not about helmets, may, maybe it’s about B better lanes. I don’t know. I’m not quite sure.
47:05 But, and how, so one of the biggest reasons why I dislike biking sometimes, so I bike, I cycle all over the place, but is theft, right? So who’s going to solve that problem? So I think there’s two, two, two angles to it. So we would, we’re working a guy called Elliot Stock, and looking at Bike Tracker, which is the device that basically tracks the bike once it’s stolen. And so we were working on it for about 12 months, and working with him on it, and it’s, it’s a really exciting space.
47:32 There’s a ton of people looking at it, and a ton of people look at, they got letter press. Ton of people ultimately just tackling it with tech. I don’t think it will work. For one, the tech changing so quickly, thieves will catch up and work out how to override it. All of the devices so far, if you wrap it in tin foil, it doesn’t work.
47:51 So thief just has to find it and wrap it in tin foil. The expense of the, of the product, basically putting a mobile phone in the bike, the BOM is so high that it probably need a subscription model on top of that, that if your bike’s worth that much, you probably won’t leave it on the street. You take it inside. I think, I mean, the best defense I’d come at it with is actually just a better lock, better materials, better innovation there, you know. The D-lock has not been revisited for a very long time, and thieves are pretty good at breaking into one now.
48:21 Yeah. So it’s funny, my one of my really good friends works for a Specialized And so he ran their CSR department for a long time, but now he looks at, like, innovation and bike technology and how cities are changing, and structure. He said one of the big problems with, with sort of the, the tracking is that there’s actually not the infrastructure for people to go after all the thieves. So if you started having a process where you could actually track all the bikes that are stolen, the police would be inundated.
48:49 Yeah, the police would be spending full-time, all their job, going after B. We had meetings with the Cycle Task Force, which is the Metropolitan Police branch deals with bike theft, and they were really supportive, and said, yeah, give us any prototypes you’ve got, we’ll test them, we’ll come out with you at night, we’ll get, we’ll put some bikes out there, we’ll get stolen. It sounded really fun but, but yeah, like, we would have to rely on support of the police chasing it up, which isn’t really probably what we want.
49:12 The police, idiots, going after their own bike, trying to get into a right vigil type stuff and, yeah, yeah, that’s, we have to tackle a few questions for you, Emily, before we wrap up. We ask everyone that comes here, so I’m going to hit you with them. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Emily Brook. Yeah, give that young lady a bit of advice. Yeah, what would you tell her to do?
49:33 You studying physics at the time. Yeah, I was about to say, thinking about working in the City, she probably wouldn’t get to University. Probably get out there, get some life experience, go work. Really? Yeah, I mean, unless you’re, you want to become a doctor.
49:47 Unless you want to, you need the degree for, for the education and the stepping stones to get that to get your vocation. Just get them with it. Especially tons of friends who go do some, my sister included, some bizarre degree in some bizarre university in the middle of nowhere, and they get drunk for 3 years, and they come out and they haven’t learned anything, and they’re in X number of thousands of pounds of debt. Would, if I think I mean, you can have fun when you work.
50:12 Why not? Why? You can still have a social life, and you can still get drunk, and you still grow up and find yourself, and all that kind of crap, but just get on with it. I, I mean, I’m talking from a girl that spent six, six years studying at four different universities. I kind of wish I got on with it.
50:28 Emily Brook says don’t go to school, kid. That’s awesome. On that same note, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? Let’s say in the last two years while you’ve been doing business, best advice I’ve ever received. There are many ways to skin a rabbit.
50:44 So, my first year I spent a lot of it terrified. A lot of it, very scared. I wasn’t doing things right. Am I doing this the right way? Should I be doing it this way?
50:51 Should I be doing it that way? Have I chosen the right way? Is this the right way? I’m not sure. S***, have I done the right thing?
50:54 Oh, I made a mistake. There’s so many ways to do it. Like, ultimately, there’s never going to be the right way. You’ll make a decision. I mean, now I run my, my, my business thinking, and just the fact of make a decision, and informed decision, on the information you’ve got available to you at the time, and then get on with it, right, and learn that decision, and learn from it.
51:11 There’s never going to be, don’t panic, and don’t worry about, are you doing it the perfect way? Much more valuable to get on with it and learn than think about it. Good. Last bit of that is to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us, you know, from around the world, you know, who wants to be an entrepreneur like you. What should they do?
51:26 What advice do you give them? Find a problem. Find a problem that they really care about. Find a problem that’s going to keep you up at night, that’s going to get your brain thinking and get you out of bed in the morning. and don’t start looking for the solution.
51:38 Don’t think of that really cool app you want to build. Don’t think of that really cool product you want to make. Think of a problem you want to solve, and then dedicate your life to solving it. That is so crucial. I don’t know, we’ve heard that so many times from people here, from John Collison at Stripe, and etc, etc, etc.
51:53 And that’s what’s great about the Kickstarter, ultimately, is because you know that someone wants it, right more than anything. Like you said, you didn’t do it for the money. The press was great too, but you know, it’s proof of concept, right? There, convince yourself, even, that you know, yeah, it’s, should I dedicate my life to this? Right?
52:08 And as humans, we’re really anecdotal, and we have these dreams, and we have these visions of what we’re going to create but if it doesn’t solve the problem, then it’s never going to go anywhere. Yeah, that’s so important. So many people now I find, just an app for the sake of an app. You know, I mean, it’s like, you know, you have to say, and the best companies that we hear from, and the best founders, are always that passion and solving a problem, usually a problem that they, you know, that they had.
52:31 Someone who gets emotional about her bike, so you should work on bikes. Emily, thanks so much for being here. It’s a really cool story. It’s, it’s, it’s a very unique story, but it’s just one. I hope you really kill and sell millions and millions of units.
52:45 No, the case may be, okay. Yeah, cuz then you have to film. If people want to contact you or apply for jobs or whatever, what’s the best way? Emily, blaze.com. Things, blaze.com.
52:57 Next week, there we go, so they can get them in two weeks. Okay, I’m going out and buying one. Yeah, I think I better buy one too. Put our money where our mouths are, so awesome, fantastic. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can see our beautiful faces on our YouTube channel.
53:15 Follow us at Silicon Real. Hit us up with an email, hello silicon.com. We’ve got like three or four people working for us now. Yeah, the interns are great, man. Yeah, two, two guys that are just fantastic, and guys keep coming.
53:26 We you know, we, we aren’t here without our, you know, people helping us out. So yeah, definitely episode 46. It’s all good as we say, it’s about the people. What a fantastic community. Emily, thanks so much for being here.
53:38 Thank you, and all the best. Thanks for the coffee. You’re welcome. All right, take care. We had a lot of emails from people saying, when are you going to come and start Code Club in my country?
53:55 And I was like, clearly not, I’m very busy, so. But we also had emails from people saying, when can I start Code Club in my country? And that’s a lot more interesting, so I thought, as a team we thought, how can we enable those people to run a Code Club organization in their own country, supporting their own local volunteers, hosting their own meetups, managing their own website, like registering volunteers and do the same as we do here in the UK, but like, you know, in a more culturally sensitive way.
