Eze Vidra - Head of Google for Entrepreneurs Europe

Full transcript: Eze Vidra on London Real

0:09 This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real. It’s the same studio. We got a little bit different types of guests.

0:14 We just recently had astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was a former wrestler in high school, and he put me in a headlock. You know, I know. And I can do anything about it. He’s quite big. Um, we’ve also just had, uh, Edward Snowden’s attorney, Jessica, uh, Jesslyn Raddick and we had Nelson Mandela’s prison guard, uh, sitting in that chair right there. So it’s pretty crazy, pretty crazy story going on there. You can check us out.

0:36 You got coming up. Uh, we have a guy from a band called enter Shikari. It’s like a huge kind of like hardcore punk that mixes like trans electronic music. And he was speaking at the zeitgeist day Z day, uh, about a week and a half ago. So I interviewed him and he was, I meant, I meant to say during the show, dude, you’re really a rock star.

0:53 Like, really, but I forgot to say that. But he was a really cool guy, a really smart guy, really quiet and mellow, and then you look at him on the videos and he’s just like going crazy on the microphone, but like really nice easy going guy, so. Anyways, that’s coming up. You can check that out at LondonReal.tv, but today we’re here to talk about tech. My co-host is none other than Colin Pyle, who rides motorcycles across China.

1:13 You’ve got crazy companies going on, lingos. We’re drinking your crew cafe. Delicious. Yeah, it’s delicious. I like it.

1:19 It’s kind of lemony. It’s not too strong, so it doesn’t give me like the headache I get from espresso. The smooth Arabica beans only. You’re the king of coffee, aren’t you? There we go.

1:28 I’ll take that handle. Nick Martinez as well. And Espresso Martinis last night. No, things are going great, man, just super, super busy. Have some wonderful press coming out this week for crew, so Sunday Times and Independent Evening Standard.

1:41 Wow. Yeah, it’s going on. How do you swing all that? Well, it’s primarily from John, so business partner who’s a, we’ll call him a celebrity chef. We’ll go there.

1:50 I’ll go there. His TV show kicks off on Monday. a lot of stuff for his TV show and then London Coffee Festival next weekend so there’s lots of stuff going on for that too so good it’s good to have famous co-founders maybe that’s something we can get off of this exactly cuz my TV show didn’t make me famous so yeah awesome before we get to our guests I just want to thank our sponsors one of them is fintech innovation lab they just had seven other companies a pitch recently at the Royal Institution at Mayfair I think it went really well we had one of their companies pixel pin in here months ago, awesome companies, awesome stuff.

2:22 If you wanna get in touch with them for investment purposes, you can email them fintech at Accenture.com. So thanks to those guys. And to TaskRabbit, who just landed in London about four or five months ago, what you can do is you can outsource tasks to other people in your community. They’ll clean your house, they’ll fix your car, or what they do for us, which is backend, silicone, real stuff. So they have some highly skilled people over there.

2:42 Yeah, it’s great. You’d be shocked at what they can do for you. Yeah, we had Lauren, their head of community on here a couple months ago, she’s awesome. And so please welcome these guys to London. It’s TaskRabbit.co.uk.

2:52 You can get 25 pounds with the code REAL25, and you get two hours of free work. And for the beards, they clean up afterwards. These people, they’ll hook you up. So thanks to them. Anyways, on with the show.

3:04 Sitting here in studio is Eazy Vidra. Thank you for being here. You are the head of Google Campus London, which is Google’s first physical startup hub, providing entrepreneurs with work and event space, mentorship, educational programs. you guys are celebrating your second anniversary this week. Wednesday.

3:21 What you guys have, I mean, I’ve looked, all your tweets, you’ve got royalty coming through there, you’ve got all sorts of things happening. It’s been an amazing week. I just, for some reason, I figured the campus had been a long, much longer than that. You must get people saying that. Yeah, me too, actually.

3:32 I think I aged more than two years, but we officially opened the doors two years ago. It’s like dog years. You know, that is fantastic. I just want to finish off your resume. You’re also the head of Google for Entrepreneurs Europe, which empowers startups and entrepreneurs around the world.

3:46 You had an event. I just came from the campus, so we’re gonna talk about that a little bit. You’re also the founder of Tech Bikers, which is a cycling community that donates to children’s libraries. I think you guys went to Paris? Was that your last name?

3:57 You’re from Paris to London. Paris to London, yeah. Okay, we had some- Not quite China, more cycling, but I can tell you more about it. Some of our guests were on that trip, so they’ve talked about it. You’re a native Argentinian, you’re raised in Israel, you speak fluent Spanish, Hebrew, English, easy.

4:11 Welcome to Silicon Real. Thanks for having me, it’s great to be here. I’m glad you’re here. got, you know, the King’s tour of Google campus, or campus London, as we will call it. And I got was it five floors, six floors with the basements, it’s seven floors, if you count the basement, okay, and minus one zero and up to five. Okay, you, you’re doing your second anniversary celebrations this week, you told me you have an 1100 events there in a year.

4:33 Yes, that’s 367 days. Yeah, it’s like an average of three a day, including weekends. And the incredible thing about it is the range of events. It goes from anything like regular meet-ups, where it’s communities like AngularJS, like really hardcore techies meeting to talk about certain technology, or women in tech, or hackathons over the weekend. Just about a month ago, we had something called flood hack.

4:57 You might have heard about it on Twitter and stuff. The UK got hit with the worst floods that it had in its history, and the tech community was called by the government, and the government said, the hardware companies, I’m not talking about laptops, like, you know, the construction companies are giving us sendbacks and shovels. What can the tech community do to help, you know, flood victims? So it was February 14th, Valentine’s Day, and we sent an email out to the community.

5:24 We got 200 people to sign up in less than 24 hours to come on a hackathon on a Sunday. This was Friday. They came on a Sunday. We had to cap the registrations, and then the result was amazing. They built 17 prototypes that, you know, two of them got funding, and eight of them would consider, like, really high quality.

5:40 So this is just an example of one event out of the 1100, but we can talk about each one and it’s like magic happening every day. There’s like a really magic atmosphere over there. Like I was starting to get a little bit of the buzz as you took me from like basement up to the second and third floor and it just feels like anything’s possible over there. Is that by Google design or why? I’m so glad you came.

5:59 You know, it’s usually when I describe what campus is, I say that if there was an equivalent between real estate and software, campus would be an open source building. It’s like a physical operating system for startups where you can plug in, in different ways, right? So there’s a cafe, and in the cafe, any entrepreneur can sign up and work from the cafe for free. Now, we didn’t invent the coffee shop, you know, there’s been coffee shops before, we didn’t invent wifi, but when you have a community of like-minded people that are all smart and passionate and all building companies, and they come together, you know, there’s a lot of magic that happens.

6:30 I think that it’s about serendipity, really, like the person you’re gonna meet, the next person you’re gonna meet can change the course of your company. So people talk to each other, people sit there and just absorb the atmosphere. Some people are local and regular, some people just come straight from the airport and they know that they can come to campus and be with the like-minded startup community. And then we had, for example, on the ground floor, which you’ve seen, the Demo Day of Le Camping, which is a French accelerator that we support in Paris, and 12 of their startups pitched on stage.

7:00 They’re doing a road show of their Demo Day, and they just came from Berlin yesterday. They’re doing London at campus, and then they’re going to other cities as well. This is a great example of building bridges between communities and then there’s 12 startups and then they had beers and VCs and everyone was talking and then you have the co-working floors, you have accelerators, you have seat camp, you have startup weekend Europe. So it’s a whole theme park for startups and you can just decide how you’re going to plug in.

7:29 I think, so I’ve been there too, I think the energy is great and I’ve been to a lot of places in the city. So many have popped up, right, in the last two years. Like co-working spaces. Yeah. And just some of them are just the wrong energy, the wrong environment, it just doesn’t feel right.

7:44 It really is, it’s open source. I think the fact that people can just hang out in the basement for free, it’s like, you’re right, people can just show up in the city and know that they can go there and find someone to chat with, find someone to have a beer with later. It’s just really cool. At the end of the day, communities are not made of buildings, they’re made of people. And we try to curate this community and make it really accessible and open.

8:11 And we help everyone. So it doesn’t matter if you’re building on Google tools or if you are just starting or if you’re going to raise a million dollars or you’re going to fail tomorrow. We try to help everyone through the programs and the activities that we do. So a lot of the stuff is done by the community and by our partners. A lot of the stuff is also done by Google and Googlers.

8:29 So just as an example, every week we have a program called Google Office Hours where where we bring Googlers to mentor startups one-on-one on different topics. So I think today it was on social media. You can check out campuslondon.com. And 27 startups signed up to receive mentorship from Googlers. So it’s a place that you know that you can come, have a cup of coffee, excellent Wi-Fi, speak with someone smart about your company, and then just hang out, like you said.

8:55 And it’s not, there’s some co-working spaces that I’ve seen that they’re really good, but I think that the combination of everything, like co-working, accelerator events, you know, coffee, everything together in one place is something that I haven’t seen before. And I think that that’s actually the model is working. Can you take us back two years and talk about where you were when you were creating this thing? And did you, I’m guessing you didn’t have this wonderful amount of success right away.

9:21 I mean, it’s amazing we’re catching you this week because it’s like, you know, so many awesome things are happening, you’re celebrating your second year, but you know, was it always this way? And did you have a certain number of things in mind when you came to create this space? It’s a great question. So my background is product management. I pretty much had every title before and after product manager working for different companies.

9:41 I also co-founded my own startup in Israel that developed text input solutions for PDAs. I’m dating myself. Personal data advices? I remember that. And then I did business school.

9:55 Sorry about that. Now you have to apologize for having an MBA. It’s not cool these days, right? You know what? What’s the start-up valuation method?

10:04 You add a million dollars for every engineer and you subtract a million and a half for every MBA. We had the Matt from Entrepreneur First and he’s like, his program is all about tech and smart people. I’m like, where are all the MBAs? He’s like, no, we can’t just keep them away. They don’t accept him, do they, at Entrepreneur First?

10:22 So an MBA can teach you other things. That’s a separate topic. But I did my MBA at London Business School, and I was finishing my MBA, it’s an executive MBA, and I decided, okay, my last job, I was running Search for AOL Europe, and I was managing a team of senior product managers in London, Hamburg, and Paris, and I felt like, okay, I’m not learning so much as a product manager anymore, I’m more like managing, I want to do business. So I joined Google to do business, and I joined the strategic partnerships team, and it was really cool because I got to launch products and I launched Google Shopping in Spain from scratch and I launched local shopping in the UK which was connecting to retailers physical inventory so if you wanted to buy let’s say a phone you could see where it’s available online but also where it’s available near you on the shelf and if it’s in stock right now and so it’s a really cool experience but really my passion was startups I was taking personal time off to go and mentor startups in accelerators and I was pretty much I had a blog still have that’s called VC cafe and right now it’s ranked number four and in top venture capital blogs if you believe out of the top 50 if you believe those rankings I was surprised myself and I was coming back home and searching in the internet of Google for startups venture capital what’s going on am I ever you know is there any opportunity and then I found

11:45 Out that Eric Schmidt has this crazy idea that we’re going to do an an innovation center in London. Maybe it wasn’t that crazy, but it just announced that we’re going to do an innovation center. So I saw who created this internal site, and I sent her an email. She was the director of consumer marketing. And I said, hey, I found out that we’re doing this innovation center.

12:03 Can I help? And she said, well, in a few months we’re going to be looking for a head for it. So that’s the only queue that I needed. And then I went and I set up about 35 coffee meetings with different friends in VC, accelerators, startups, et cetera. And I said, if Google was doing this innovation center, what do you think are the challenges, the opportunities?

12:22 Do you think I would be a good fit? What do you think I should put as my priorities in this case? And I wrote my first 100-day plan before they offered me the job. So when the time came for the interviews, they asked me, what are you going to do as the head of campus? And I said, well, let me show you.

12:37 And a lot of the stuff that we do today were in my original plan. So you’re asking me, do you have the success back then? Absolutely not. There was a lot of conspiracy theories of, why is Google doing this? People were saying Google’s doing this to poach engineers, to invest in companies for cheap, or to steal their ideas, which it’s all wrong.

12:59 But it took a long time to prove our worth to the community, and really operate the space in the principles of Google, principles of openness, innovation, diversity, et cetera. And I think I never stop to look back, never, until this week, when we celebrate the two-year anniversary. Because I have a real baby. Campus is my baby, but I actually have a son who’s a real baby. And I feel it’s incredible.

13:30 I’m looking back, and I feel really proud about what we’ve accomplished with an amazing team. And it’s a little bit of a startup inside Google. Why call it Campus, London? Was that important? language is very important.

13:45 I think campus is a really fitting name for it because it wasn’t that trivial, by the way, because we call the Google offices campus. So when someone goes to Mountain View and they go to the Googleplex, it’s called the campus. So it’s a little bit confusing to some people, but it is a place that’s really dedicated for learning and for community, and that’s what a campus is about. So I think that’s fitting, you’re not gonna see, it’s not like all classrooms, like university and stuff, there’s not a quad in that sense, but you do have a lot of smart like-minded people that are there to learn, network, connect with each other, and everyone’s kind of like wearing the startup attire, right, like hoodie, sneakers.

14:36 Today I’m a little bit dressed up because I had some important meetings, but usually you would find me like a T-shirt and a hoodie as well. So that’s, it’s casual, it’s not a corporate environment, it’s not like an office. Like if you look at the ceilings at campus, it looks like Sarajevo after a bombing. Yeah, yeah. And that’s on purpose.

14:53 Looks like a rave. Yeah. Yeah, nice. It’s on purpose. And what did it look like one year ago?

14:58 Different? Yeah, we made a lot of changes. Two years ago, it looked terrible. And when we took over the building, I mean, I joined, I started leading this project when it was a construction site. And I was lucky to work with the architects and be able to input into the concepts and kind of like what we wanted to do with the space.

15:18 It used to be Barbican offices and it was the most corporate environment you can imagine, like an office from the 70s with suspended ceilings and carpet. Orange carpet or? Offal. It’s actually like the office, the British TV show. Yes, like an office that immediately makes you depressed when you walk in.

15:36 So it came a long way from there. But now that we turn to, we talk to startups a lot about building an MVP, minimum viable product, and then iterating based on your user’s feedback. So I guess that campus followed the same principles and we built an MVP. We started with the minimum viable product. We had some teething problems, and not problems, but just challenges, stuff that we learned along the way with access and how do we manage all of it, and how do we connect people within the building, et cetera.

16:09 I think the biggest change that we’ve made this week, actually, is that Central Working, former partners that used to manage the cafe at campus graduated and they opened their own space in East London. And the cafe at campus is now managed by campus. And we took a slightly different approach to it and we said, let’s make this a little bit more high-tech, because we used to have the cork board even back then. And we used to have the registration system, is really cool because you register online, you get a code, and then you come to campus and we give you a plastic card that matches your online profile to the card.

16:44 So when you check in, we know who you are. Now we have like this giant touch screens that show you the tweets or people’s messages about campus live from all over the world. We have a tag cloud that shows you what people are saying about campus. All the pictures that people take on Instagram, if they tag them campus London, they show up on the screen and that we have these like ticker screens where we can put messages and let people know like, hey, Bill Merries, the general manager, the general partner of Google Ventures is speaking now on the ground floor if you want to come up. And that’s the biggest change that we’ve done. Another change is that we installed cameras in the event spaces so we’ll be able to stream events going forward. So I can imagine campus in a few months maybe where you can sign up to attend an event physically but if you don’t have a campus next to you it’s gonna be very challenging for you so why don’t you tune in live to the event and what we’re trying to do is really make this startup knowledge you know first of all demystify it a little bit and make it more accessible but also like you know level the playing field so if you can get inspired by someone or learn how to use a tool or how to do marketing or or whatever, you have a way to do it, engaging with campus even remotely.

18:03 Now you guys are building some big offices in King’s Cross, and Google’s gonna move everyone there at some point, right? Because you’ve got offices in Victoria, Tottenham Court Road. Not campus, actually. Okay, that’s my question. Is campus always gonna be something separate?

18:14 Is it true you report directly to Google Ventures in America and you’re the only guy over here that does that? Yes. I might have some inside information. So, I’m part of the Google Friendship and Risk team, which is part of Google Ventures. So usually, when I explain it, I say Google Ventures invests in startups for equity.

18:33 It’s an amazing fund. They invest for financial return. It’s not a corporate venture capital arm, in that sense, that invests for strategic value. Google Ventures is a financial fund that uses the power of Google and the resources that Google has to help their portfolio companies and, as a result, is able to add a lot of value. Google for entrepreneurs doesn’t invest in startups.

18:56 We invest in startup ecosystems. And we do it through partnerships in some cases, and in own and operated projects in some cases. So Campus London is our European headquarters. And it’s probably the biggest manifestation of what Google for Entrepreneurs can do or does. And we also have a campus in Tel Aviv.

19:16 We have partner spaces in Europe, in Paris, and in Berlin. So in Paris, we partnered with NUMA, which is a new sort of center for entrepreneurs Silicon Sentier which is a kind of like their version of silicon roundabout it’s a seven-story building filled with startups actually there’s a six it’s modeled after campus it kind of looks like campus and and then we have the factory in Berlin which you probably guys you probably heard of and it hasn’t fully launched yet it’s fully launching in June and it’s gonna be great when it does so we’re able to connect these communities to each other but also to Google and there’s a lot of good stuff that happens as a result. This company I saw today that gave a presentation, will you invest with them or just help them out?

20:05 How do you partner with them? At the moment, Google Ventures doesn’t invest outside of the US. That’s strange, right? Well, it’s not that strange. Google Ventures is a new fund.

20:16 It was started relatively new. If you think about the life cycle of a venture capital fund, it started in 2009. And it takes you like three or four years to show results. And I think it’s now in a stage where they built a team of about 60 people and they make something like 300 million a year of investments. Right.

20:43 It’s about one and a half billion total. One and a half billion total. They add a minimum of 300 million a year. Let’s go from anything from $100,000 to $250 million that they invested in Uber. So I think that the model is now in a stage where it’s been proven.

21:03 But until now, Google Ventures hasn’t invested in companies outside of the US. And there’s also a level of maturity as well. The Silicon Roundabout or Tech City is not where it used to be two years ago. So it was also very different back then. It wasn’t as attractive maybe, but I think that more and more, the news about what’s going on here and in London and also in the rest of Europe is starting to make its way to the U.S. and people are starting to notice …

21:31 It took a little while, right? It took a while, but people are starting to notice that, you know what? Actually innovation can come from different places and London is a really interesting market for it. What reaction do you get when you go back to San Francisco or New York and you’re like, I’m the campus London guy. Has it changed in the last few years?

21:50 Before I moved to London, I used to live in San Francisco. And before I moved to San Francisco, I used to live in New York. So I don’t quite look at it as a foreigner, because I know what they’re thinking. In New York, when I was living there, if you weren’t in finance, you were a second class citizen. I used to work for a startup.

22:09 That’s harsh, but I used to work in finance. Harsh, but you were a first class citizen. I used to work in a startup in New York that did financial services, but I was a product manager. And I think that now it’s very different. And San Francisco has the highest density, or the Bay Area has the highest density of tech startups anywhere in the world.

22:31 So I think that when you go back now, it’s a little bit like, if you go to San Francisco, they look a little bit like you’re from New York, like less developed startup ecosystem, but, you know, maybe something interesting. And I went, last time that I went to the Bay Area, I spoke at Stanford and I gave a talk about the London startup ecosystem. So I think the more we communicate, you know, the wins, the more we communicate, the things that make London special, and, you know, like the density of network that we are able to achieve here now, the areas of specialty and some of the key benefits.

23:09 I think that UK, for example, is one of the most progressive countries in the world when it comes to angel investment, tax breaks, and policies, it makes it really attractive for people to invest. Crowdfunding is regulated. Equity crowdfunding. Equity crowdfunding. You can do it, yeah.

23:26 So I think that there’s a few things that are special to us, and we don’t celebrate enough, and we don’t communicate enough, especially to North America. So I think that even though they may look at it as a smaller ecosystem, we need to go there with confidence and talk about what we do. And more and more, we’ll get the respect. Feels like we should make a documentary about this right now. Because everything’s changing so fast in this community.

23:51 And it has all these factors that the city financial district is literally blocks away. And you’ve got this ecosystem that’s developing. And five years from now, we’ll look back. And this tax situation is probably never going to be repeated in history again. And we’re in the middle of it.

24:04 And we probably aren’t noticing it. You never notice when you’re in the middle. I think money talks, a few big exits in LA over the last few weeks and all of a sudden it’s like, Ooh, LA is the new tech place. You know what I mean? I really think just these money headlines of 2.2 billion or whatever Facebook bought, was it Oculus or whatever?

24:25 Oculus, right? Yeah. And then there’s another big exit in LA too, digital production company. So the headlines love these half a billion, two point whatever billion and it’s just we need those. Yeah, it’s something we ask every guest that comes on, and I might as well ask you as well, is it, what do you think London has as kind of an asset over other cities?

24:44 And then, you know, what are its liabilities? You talked earlier about having more confidence. We’ve heard that from a lot of people here, VCs, where people pitch, you know, the billion dollar idea when it should be a hundred billion, that kind of thing. It’s just not scaled enough. But what do you see as an asset here?

24:57 I mean, you’ve lived everywhere. I can tell you what’s not an asset, and it’s the weather. Oh. I mean, that’s the one thing that we cannot agree that it’s really not recommended. It’s got your ear from Israel all the time.

25:08 Yeah, it’s got your ear from Israel all the time. Yeah, Toronto minus 20 and freezing rain and wind. That’s true. Everything is relative. There’s a bright spot even in the weather.

25:17 We didn’t really have snow this year, so I’m just saying. I think we had a winter. It was a pretty mild winter, but it’s so cold. It’s the end of March. Give us a break.

25:26 Yeah, it was cold. I’ll give you that. It was a little cold. Yeah. I’ve been getting soft.

25:31 I’ve been here for almost three years, and I think two degrees is cold. besides the weather. Besides the weather, of course. So I think what’s going with the strengths of London are the talent. First of all, our ability to attract talent, one, because you have some of the best schools in the world in London and down the street, you know, down the road in Oxford and Cambridge.

25:51 And there’s lots of international talent that comes to these schools or to work in the city and stays, and some of them trickle to startups, and that’s really unique. unique. And the other thing is the concentration of capital and wealth, which is one of the richest countries in the world. If you flip London upside down, just the city a few blocks away from here, you know, you would have more money than the rest of the continent. And a lot of that money is now being directed to startups, which I think is a key strength.

26:18 And finally, I think that you have this concentration of brands and the financial industry and, know, every agency in the world, every brand in the world and it’s so concentrated in one city like in the US if you wanted to speak to the politicians you go to DC, if you want to speak with the entertainment industry you go to LA, if you want to speak to the media industry you go to New York you know like and so on and so forth. Here you take the two and it’s like two stops away or you take your bike and I think that’s really unique about London so increasingly you know in places like Israel or San Francisco if you throw a rock you’re gonna hit an entrepreneur most likely. In London it wasn’t the case but in East London it’s starting to be the case and it’s cool to be an entrepreneur. Graduates finish school and they feel like actually startups is a potential career for me. I don’t just have to go and work for the bank so I think that we have a lot going for for London although we’re still very early in the journey of London. I compared mostly to New York but it’s going to take as much less time to get to where New York is today than it took them.

27:28 And the liability is there’s, you know, unfortunately the cost of living is a structural, you know, risk that you can take out. It costs a lot of money to live in London. And if you have a 50,000 pound investment, it’s going to last you less, probably. And technical talent, there seems to be a shortage of technical talent. Just look at the cork board at campus or the job board that we have that’s really popular, and technical talent is this thing that’s in most demand, and from what I hear, the graduates don’t leave school with the level that the startups need them to have.

28:04 So they study classic computer science, but studying computer science today doesn’t mean coding, and it doesn’t mean hacking, and this is what you need to be a successful startup. So it’s like that classical Cambridge education, not necessarily, like you said, doing the the hackathons and coding real world solutions. We need to adapt the curriculums and make them much more, you know, tied to, first of all, new technologies, not just what we’ve been always studying in the past.

28:29 And second, it needs to be much more hands-on practical. And then there’s the other thing about ambition, vision, confidence, which is a cultural thing, really. And it has to do with role models and it has to do with, you know, with being exposed to it. Because frankly, if you’re a first-time entrepreneur, and maybe you’re afraid of failing, you don’t want to take even bigger risks. You want to get to revenue relatively quickly.

28:57 The angels want their money back relatively quickly. It’s a question of maturity. And I think that that’s going to change. And it’s going to change with role models. And it’s going to change with some sort of thought leadership of people hearing, like Bill Merries was talking at campus on Tuesday, it’s OK to fail.

29:15 Silicon Valley is dripping with failure. And actually, you want to invest in someone that failed before, because then they know they already made a few mistakes on someone else’s dime. And you can count on the fact that they learned something out of it. So I think that we need to keep saying it, not take things for granted, and we’re going to get there. Yeah, I think that’s going to change really fast, just because I know it’s a British cultural thing to be a little bit risk averse and to look at the newspapers.

29:44 Like we rip down our celebrities and that kind of thing. But in London, I mean, look at the three of us, you know, we’re all foreigners here. There’s so many foreign people coming through this town that it’s becoming its own kind of personality of, you know, visiting people in finance or tech or whatever. And I think that whole mentality will change super fast, faster than an American city, I would guess. I think I agree with you.

30:05 There was the, I just read in some article that, you know, Scotland has their bid to maybe, they want to become independent maybe, and they’re asking their people if they want to be an independent country versus being part of the United Kingdom. And then some people are saying that London should be its own independent country, like we have our… City state. City state. Singapore or something, yeah.

30:26 And I don’t think that we want to go there, but it is a metropolis and it’s a very unique place. I remember during the Olympics, the mayor said that London is the only city in the world that no matter what nationality you’re from, you’re going to have a local fan base of 10,000 people minimum. no matter what country in the world you’re from. We just ran last month a survey of campus members and we got something like 1,300 responses. So it’s a small sample of the campus community.

30:52 From the 1,300 responses, we actually haven’t fully released the results of the survey but I’m giving you guys a nugget. People, we asked people where were you born. People responded from 98 different countries. Okay, from like Argentina to Zambia. You have the entire gamut of A to Z.

31:09 98 different countries. And this is also something that we shouldn’t take for granted. Diverse teams make better decisions. So you need to have people from different cultures. You need to have women in your team.

31:22 And if you’re running a startup and you’re a group of buddies from school, I would really encourage you to increase the diversity of your team. Because you’re going to make better decisions. You’re going to understand your users better. And London is very unique in that sense, and you can find this diversity. Take us to 2017, you’re celebrating the fifth birthday of your baby, Campus London.

31:45 What does it look, how does it look different? Is it bigger? Is there a Google Ventures arm somewhere hidden in the seventh floor? What do you want? What would you want?

31:57 Because this is the real question. I would ask my users, what do they want? Look, I like- You treat it as a startup. Yeah, totally. And I like to say yes a lot And I like to take little bets, and usually they pay off.

32:12 So we’re going to keep experimenting. Right now, we’re about to launch the second class of a program called Campus for Mums. And it started in Campus Tel Aviv. And we did one in London a few months ago. And now, on April 8, we’re launching the second class.

32:26 And one of the participants, I don’t want to say the company for privacy, but she was the chief marketing officer of a big technology company that’s global. And she’s opting to participate in this. Now, how will 35 moms going through intensive training in startup going to change the world? We think it will. And we think that we have to start somewhere.

32:50 So our vision at Google has always been, think big, but start small. So I don’t know where we’re going to end up, but I think that by 2017, you can be sure that we’re going to start a lot of different initiatives and see what sticks. I love that idea. I’ve never heard anyone pitching me moms. That would make a good reality show as well.

33:11 There’s so much that can be done, right? It’s just, you know, a guy starting a business for moms is pretty tough. You see guys start up businesses for kids after they’ve had kids, you know what I mean? You know what’s the biggest audience of casual games? Moms.

33:27 You know what’s the biggest audience of e-commerce? Moms. 70% of people buy Nespresso pods or female. There you go. Almost a lot of them.

33:35 And you have a female co-founder, which is great, but I think that we need to have this awareness that actually this is something that it’s not going to change unless we change it. And when you change it, it’s going to be for your benefit. So a lot of the programs that we do focus on this sort of stuff. What else? I can tell you that we’re now running a program called Black Box Connect with our partners in Silicon Valley, where we are taking a startup from different major hubs where Google for entrepreneurs is active, they go through a nomination process and then they go through a selection process and I believe right now there’s something like 20 startups in Silicon Valley for two weeks and they’re living in this house, sorry, they’re living in this house and they’re getting mentorship and support and they get to meet people like Kevin Rose and they get to meet with serial founders and with VCs and then they take this knowledge and they go back to their countries, some of them are from Pakistan, India, South America And I think that we’re, by bringing these people together and giving them the best training that they can get, we’re not only creating magic for them, but we’re also enriching all these communities.

34:45 And I believe that there’s a lot of debate between if entrepreneurship is something that you’re born with or that it’s taught. And in my opinion, entrepreneurship is contagious. It’s something you get contagious. And the way that you get it is by practicing it or by knowing someone that practiced it. So some of the stuff that we do is we do it directly, some of the stuff we do through partners, like Startup Weekend that I introduced you to, which essentially they run this event formats that last for 54 hours where you come on a Friday and usually it’s 100 plus people from different backgrounds, some developers, some designers, some business people, some people that work for a law firm, whatever you may be doing, maybe a butcher or a barber, whatever.

35:26 You come to a startup weekend, and about 50% of people pitch an idea on stage. I want to do a dog dating app, and the crowd selects the ideas that they want to work on. Usually it’s about 20 projects, and they divide themselves into teams, and then they spend 54 hours creating a prototype and working on the idea. What it does is it lets hundreds of thousands of people around the world taste entrepreneurship, And then statistically, about 30% of them quit their job and join a startup a year after participating in a startup weekend.

36:03 So we’re the biggest supporters of Startup Weekend globally. I sit on the board of Startup Weekend Europe that officially launched yesterday. My manager sits on the board of Startup Weekend Global or App Global. And I think initiatives like that and partnerships like that enable us to have this widespread reach and help people become entrepreneurs. That’s a real safe way of sort of trying it out too, right?

36:27 Exactly. Because a lot of people, it’s such a risk for them, they might have a mortgage or kids and to sort of quit their job and go for a weekend and sort of play around and test some ideas out and see how it feels as well. It’s not that you have to continue with that idea that you played around the weekend, but you’re going to feel what it’s like to work with a multi-talented team, like what it’s like to work with a designer or developer, how do you validate your idea and get customers to use your product?

36:53 It teaches you a lot. And even though it’s 54 hours, some of these projects actually survive and become companies that raise money and do the thing. For example, there’s one called Play Capture, and I think maybe I’m butchering the name. And what they’re doing is they say there’s a billion captchas. You know what’s a capture?

37:12 Yeah, yeah. It’s a character you have to type in to make sure they can determine you’re a human. I get less than 50% of those, right? I’m really bad at those. Right.

37:19 Sometimes you have to refresh. I know. And you’re like, stare at them? I’m like… you like the Rorschach paintings now, it’s like so hard. So this guy said there’s a billion of them served every day, every day. And instead of typing something ridiculous to prove that you’re human, couldn’t you do something different? For example, if there was a goal and you had to like flick a ball and like score a goal, wouldn’t prove that you’re human because you have to click in the right spot, etc. So they gamified it. And now they have like major brands working with them to make their captions animated and into a game because there’s better engagement and you can put a brand there.

37:57 So that’s an example of a startup that came out of Startup Weekend and out of campus in this case and it’s doing really well. Yeah. How much of your job is communicating the message because you know Kevin Rose you mentioned from Google Ventures you know he’s really well known because he does tons of great shows media he does interviews his podcast everything like how much of your job is getting your message out there? I mean, it comes, there’s ups and downs, or not ups and downs, but sometimes more, sometimes less.

38:24 Recently, I’ve been really heads down focusing on the anniversary of campus and launching a bunch of programs. I manage a team of volunteers at Google, 20 percenters. Google has this concept of 20 percent time where you can spend 20 percent of your time working on something that utilizes your skills, but not necessarily what you were hired for Google to do. Someone do that in Google? Or do you have to elect to do that?

38:49 Traditionally, it was mainly for engineers because there weren’t that many opportunities for non-engineers to participate in that. For example, Gmail started as a 20% project and it became a real massive product. I needed help with campus and I put in an internal system these opportunities for Googlers to get involved and help me scale programs and I got about 50 people to apply the first time I interviewed about 25 and I hired 10 and to run different programs at campus and these are people that are experts in what they do like I needed someone to run a survey they’re from the research team at Google that their job at Google is to run surveys and analyze data and I needed someone to run social media and I have an amazing guy from wildfire that you know it’s like a startup was acquired by Google that does social media competitions and stuff. So I take experts to help me and sometimes it’s really all-consuming. So I work on different programs and formats and partnerships, etc. I do a lot of traveling. Sometimes it requires doing media, but it really is ups and downs. I don’t spend most of my time doing media.

39:59 Okay. Something I want to ask you, I’m sure everyone’s thinking that’s watching is I want to know what is it like to work for Google and what would be the difference if this This was the Microsoft Campus London or the Cisco Campus London or the Telefonica Campus London. I don’t want to get you in trouble. But if you could answer those two questions. Yeah.

40:17 So I’ll be honest and I don’t want to sound cheesy, but if you’re going to work for a company and not work for yourself, work for the best company you can or like the one that you feel inspired by. Because if you’re inspired, you’re going to come to work happy and you’re going to be passionate about what you do, and it’s not going to feel like work. For me, Google is that. My friends used to call me Chazougal in Israel. I was always good with search, and I was really passionate about Google and Google products and stuff.

40:52 And yeah, it’s been a little bit like coming home from me. I had an offer from Google, or I passed all the interviews in 2006 in New York. And at the same time, they were taking a long time to get back to me between rounds. And my girlfriend at the time was now my wife, said, why don’t you apply somewhere else in the meanwhile just so you talk to people. You have other interviews, and you’re not just nervous waiting for them to call you.

41:20 And I wasn’t used to, like, Americans sometimes just interview for the sake of interviewing, to have the option. In Israel, it’s like, no, if I don’t want the job, why would I even spend the time? And ask.com ended up making me an offer. And in California, at the same day, I talked to three people. They said, double your salary.

41:39 Move to California. When can you start? And in Google, I told them, I have an offer from these guys. And I said, well, congratulations. You passed all the interviews.

41:48 And in three weeks, we’re going to have a committee with Larry and Sergey review each application and we’ll let you know if you get an offer. And I said, oh, I can’t. The offer expired. So in some ways, it was coming home for me to join Google and when I did four years ago now you took the ass.com in 2006 I did bird-in-hand yeah double the salary going to Cali I used to say like so there used to be a t-shirt yeah should be a rap song yeah it was it was awesome and I know regrets like it was it was like it’s a great like smaller but still you know very profitable innovative company and I got to work directly with the CEO on some crazy projects.

42:32 And I became a senior product manager within a year, where at Google, it probably would have taken longer. But yeah, to answer your question, what if the campus would be run by another company? I can’t answer that question because I don’t really know. But I’m friendly with a lot of people from Microsoft Ventures. My friend Sachi runs Microsoft Ventures globally.

42:54 And Diane, who runs Microsoft Ventures in the UK, the tech bikers with us and they sponsor tech bikers. So I think that different companies have different models and different cultures and they’re all valid and there’s some people that it resonates with more or less. So if you’re doing enterprise tools, maybe you wanna go to the Cisco accelerator incubator. So I’m not ruling it out. I think that there’s more room for corporate support in general and the more help startups can get, the better for the startups which is great for the community.

43:28 And I can just attest to what I do. And I definitely have the Google culture and the principles of innovation at Google in what we do. We strive for excellence. We measure success. And we have ambitious goals.

43:45 We think big. Or we want to make a big impact. It’s not just to tick the box. I got a tour of the Google headquarters in Taunton Court Road by Daniel Arajo. I think he’s a brand manager over there.

43:58 He runs a lot of like the big data stuff. And he was walking me around and people were leaving at six o’clock and he showed me the cafe. And I was like, people are leaving early. And he’s like, yeah, yeah, they encourage you to work the hours. If you’re staying up late at night, three days in a row, he’s like, you’re probably not working efficiently.

44:11 He’s like, all these right answers you think you would hear on an interview or something. And then I was just like, after 45 minutes, I was like, Daniel, do you watch your back? Are you always worried about keeping your job? Because Google’s like a dream job. I always wonder, is it a place where you feel like, Man, I really need to innovate this month, or I really need to stay on top of my game to stay working for the best company.

44:30 Have you heard of the term OKRs? No. So it’s actually something I recommend to a lot of startups to look into. It’s objective and key results, so every Googler has OKRs. And you set these goals, and they’re quarterly, and they’re measurable, and they’re public as well.

44:47 Other people know what your goals are. And to get promoted, it’s really hard to get promoted, because you have to exceed expectations several quarters in a row, and the goals are aggressive to begin with. They’re not really easily achievable. So, although you have everything, you have the food, you have massages in a Google office. We don’t have it at campus.

45:09 I gave my perks a long time ago. There’s no massage room in campus? This is the maximum I got. You’re like the outpost in the Wild West frontier. I call it cyber-beria.

45:20 Cyber-beria. So, you know, although you have all of that, people work very hard, and Google tends to take over-qualified people for their role. Not in a bad way, it’s like because the company is likely to grow, you’re going to be expected to do the next step of your job, right? So like if they take you like too green, you’re not going to be ready to do the next step. So people work really, really hard.

45:50 It’s not that you’re watching your back in the sense that you don’t want to lose your job, but because you have these clear goals, and because they’re transparent, and because you need to exceed these goals in order to get promoted, it’s almost like a self-policing system. And I actually highly recommend watching the video by my colleague at Google Ventures, Rick Clow on OKRs, because if you are able to create this culture in your startup, at the end of the day, what you want is self motivated people that it’s like a self driving car. This is what I tell my 20% there’s a great 20% project. It’s like a self driving car. Like we set the direction together and you know how to get there. But in order to do that, there’s a lot of insights packed into it, right? Like a lot of tech, a lot of decisions, a lot of like different systems working with each other. And this is what you want to create in your company. And you guys are developing a self-driving car as well. Yeah, they’re quite amazing. They’re quite amazing. Yeah. And Google X is doing, that’s one of the projects that Google X is doing. Google X is Google’s innovation or R&D arm in California. And, you know, they created Google Glass, which I have a pair here, I can give you a demo later. And they have self-driving cars, which looked like science fiction a few years ago. And now people are saying like, the founders actually feel like the longer we wait you know with introducing self-driving cars the more lives are unnecessarily

47:13 Lost on stupid accidents and it’s just huge use cases for industry and agriculture etc and there’s project iris and project loon i don’t know if you heard of them project iris is a contact lens with a chip that measures the level of glucose in your tears for diabetics so instead of hitting yourself in a pricking with a needle you can always know if your level of sugar is out of the regular norm and you get an alert when it happens and project loon is providing there’s five billion people in the world that are not connected to the internet in remote areas that countries that don’t have the infrastructure so these are balloons that fly 30 kilometers and you know over the earth and provide wi-fi connectivity to people. I just heard Facebook’s doing something similar.

48:04 I’m not sure if it’s something with satellites trying to connect those 5 billion people, right? That’s the next huge opportunity for the world, not just for Google or Facebook. It’s like more than half the planet is not connected. What’s going to happen when we’re all connected? What can you do when everyone’s connected?

48:21 Double the entrepreneurs, but naturally. I don’t think it’s going to be enough, double the entrepreneurs, right? Because right now entrepreneurs There may be 10% of the population, but you’re going to have more than 50% more of the users. So that’s why I think the diversified staff is so important because you grab guys from China and India and these areas that are massively populated where there’s a lot still to get online. Totally.

48:49 Totally. And sometimes we think that we’re the most advanced in everything, especially if you live in the West Coast. You think there’s no innovation happening outside of Silicon Valley. If you feel like there’s something in the water, that’s the only place where you can innovate sometimes, no offense, Silicon Valley folks. But actually, there’s places in Africa that are more advanced in mobile payments than we are here in London, and in education, and in communication, manufacturing, and fashion.

49:13 And I think eventually every industry is going to get disrupted by tech and software. It’s just a matter of time. Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and Ning, and now he runs a very successful VC fund that just raised a billion and a half yesterday. And he says, he has a famous article. It says, software is eating the world.

49:33 Well, software will eat the world. Which means that every industry, as you know it today, is gonna get disrupted by the internet. And to an extent, even what you’re doing with crew, like you wanna change how things are done. maybe no longer have to buy your coffee in the supermarket. There’s, you can do a subscription and we’ll send it to you.

49:53 Everything, fashion, education, manufacturing, whatever. No, I always ask people sitting here a question at the end, I’m gonna hit you with the same thing. If you could make a phone call to the 20 year old easy and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Buy Bitcoin. Could you buy it then?

50:12 Could you buy it then? Wait for it to come out and buy it when it comes out And sell it when it was a thousand. And start mining. Start mining. Yeah.

50:21 And create your own Bitcoin maybe first. Do you have positions in Bitcoin? Is that something that… Are there a lot of projects in Bitcoin that are happening on campus? I know a couple.

50:31 I mostly have regrets with Bitcoin. Okay. Do you see… They go missing? No.

50:36 It’s like… Mount Gox. It’s like, you know, like I lived through the first bubble and I didn’t invest in startups Then I didn’t join a startup in time, and they missed the bubble right and like and then Bitcoin happened And I just remember like tweeting the Kevin Rose put on Twitter that like you know It’s hitting 350 and he had an algorithm that told me like okay He’s gonna sell some at 350 and I’m like you know That’s probably a smart move because I don’t think it’s gonna go any higher and then like two weeks later It was at a thousand, but then it was at 650, so I think sometimes you just have to do it. You know JFDI Just fucking do it.

51:14 Jumping frog digital incubator. On Bitcoin, an Australian real estate company started accepting bitcoins, primarily to attract Chinese investors. Okay, nice. Yeah, isn’t Virgin Space accepting bitcoins as well? Bitcoin is huge in Argentina because no one trusts the banking system.

51:33 Right, or the currency or the inflation numbers or anything. So there’s startups that are being set up just to do Bitcoin for Argentina. So yeah, that’s a booming one that it’s really interesting, I think. But other advice that I would give my 20-year-old me is always remember work-life balance. Okay, you weren’t always good at that.

51:56 No. So I think that’s important. Like, if you don’t invest in yourself, you’re not going to be effective at what you do. And we all tend to, especially when you’re doing like startup stuff, you know, it’s all-consuming, crazy hours of the day, working weekends, sacrificing everything, and sometimes you have to do it for a period of time, but it doesn’t work for the long run. So for example, this morning, I woke up last night, I had a big night last night, I had a big week, but I woke up today, I went to the gym, you know, I do meditation, and I a baby, right now they’re a brother in Toronto, but I tried to come home for the time for the bath.

52:38 It’s really important to keep this work-life balance and it’s going to make you more effective and at the end of the day success is about balance, it’s about rounded. Usually it can be very successful in one side of your life, but it means that you’re sacrificing something else. And I forget exactly what’s the compromise, but they said something like, you know, you can be, you can have kind of like friendships, career, or love, but you can only pick two of them.

53:08 You know? So like, pick yours wisely. Are those the three? I think, maybe I’m butchering it a little bit, but like, there is this like compromise that you have to make, like, don’t make the wrong compromise. Yeah, you can’t sprint the whole way, and I think as young men, you know, when you’re entrepreneur you’re like, I’m going to do this, and women too, yeah that’s true, that’s true, alright.

53:29 And then you try to do it for two years and then you have a breakdown and you realize you’re just so unhappy that you don’t want to get up in the morning, you don’t want to get off the sofa, and then you’re like, now what? I have friends that were very successful, but you know, I don’t want to name any names for their privacy, but when they finally like, reached massive levels of success, generational wealth, it didn’t make them much happier. They sacrificed a lot to get there, but the result, the outcome on its own, didn’t make them that much happy, and then they went and did it again.

54:01 Because it’s about the journey, and it’s about the thrill, and it’s about feeling like you’re doing something productive with your life, and fulfilling yourself. So if you want to go for the long run, literally figuratively you know you you need to pace yourself on that same note of advice what’s the best advice you’ve ever received good question I always ask people this question but I never thought about the answer for myself somebody asked me these questions the other day and I didn’t know what to say so where’s sunscreen no I’m joking and I think that the best advice I’ve ever received was from my wife actually and she said you have to create opportunities and it sounds maybe trivial but what do I mean by that for example when I was having this situation and like interviewing with Google back in the day and I was waiting on this one thing but like why wait you know you have to create opportunities so I’m like yeah I could apply to other places but could you know could shoot maybe all this stuff it’s not creating opportunities creating opportunities is sending your CV interviewing and getting an offer. Now you have an opportunity so you have to create opportunities constantly and I had a manager that said that good people should always interview and it’s the same thing for startups as well even if you’re not thinking about interviewing it’s like should always think about disrupting yourself you know like constantly create

55:34 Opportunities and many times it’s you do this by by helping others and and sometimes you do this by taking risks or by trying something that you haven’t tried before like learning you know like I taught myself and I started blogging because I wanted to teach myself what it would be like to like host a website like develop some features for it you know like consume all this information and make it into something that other people would appreciate and I think that that’s the best advice I got like creating opportunities disrupt yourself I’ve never heard that before disrupt yourself I like that like that and And creating an option, I think what you even did inside of Google to get your current job is phenomenal. Like, you know, go to the interview with a one-year plan.

56:19 It’s creating a realistic opportunity for you to get that job. Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, I believe that luck plays a role, but you have to, it sounds cheesy. You have to make your own luck. And making your own luck means creating opportunities. So just, you know, I believe that it’s a, it’s a part of it is being prepared.

56:38 Being prepared means being interested, it means constantly learning and it means reading you know it means not thinking that you know everything and like learn from others, seek mentorship, ask questions and you know like what’s the name of that book how to make friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie and he said like interested is interesting right like people that only speak about themselves and now I feel bad because I’ve been talking this whole show but I’m doing this to share right right and so people that just speak and don’t ask questions you know you’re not gonna learn much new because you already know what you know ask questions be interested and yeah last bit of that question is what’s the advice you give to that 20 year old that’s listening to us somewhere you know in China or Australia or the States what advice do you give to them you know if if they want to one day you know be part of of the Campus London or be in the tech business.

57:37 Yeah, so to be part of Campus London, that’s very easy. I mean, there’s many ways that you can get involved, but the first step is become a member, go to campuslondon.com and sign up. And that means that you get a code, and with that code, you can come to Campus and work from the cafe. You can also sign up to one of the many events that we do every day, and you don’t have to sign up for it, just apply, you know, sign up to the particular event. You don’t have to even be a Campus member, although I would recommend it.

58:03 So you can also sign up for mentorship every Friday or come to campus EDU or, you know, participating campus for moms or one of the many programs that we organize. You can also apply to, for workspace and apply to, you know, to rent a desk at tech hub or apply to seed camp and get access to their fabulous network of mentors around Europe and go to startup weekend. Next weekend, there’s a startup weekend at campus. It’s gonna be amazing. I think you guys should jump just to come and see it and tell me what you think because it is a very unique environment.

58:36 So there’s many ways that you can interact and it’s up to you, but it’s very simple. All the details are on campuslondon.com. What advice I would give the 20 year old starting startups or wanting to get into startups? I would say, of course, follow your passion and try to solve a real problem through technology. And if you don’t have the skills, the technical skills, I would recommend that you spend some time in acquiring them or learning at least about them, so you can speak with a developer that you’re working with and understand their challenges and what’s possible.

59:07 Is that learn how to code, is that what you just said? Yeah. Okay. I mean, you can learn how to code or you can learn how to design or you can be really good at UX or you can be a growth hacker or like learn how to get people to sign up or learn the motivation behind clicking. Whatever it is, learn technical skills.

59:25 And don’t underestimate the experience that a big company can give you before you become an entrepreneur, because you’re going to learn a lot joining a big company, and sometimes it’s good to have at least a couple of years of experience of seeing how teams work, what’s email etiquette, how to run a meeting, how to work with a team. And I’m all for people following their dreams and stuff, But maybe you don’t have to drop out of college necessarily. Although there’s many examples that would prove me wrong, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

1:00:05 But there’s three of them. And there’s probably a lot of skeletons. People dropped out of college and ended up in much less fortunate positions. So don’t underestimate the value of education. Yeah, we’ve talked about this before.

1:00:18 We both are fans of potentially getting out of school and working for a corporation for a couple of years seeing how things work there. On the advice, I just want to curate, I think a vast percentage of our listeners would be all want to work for Google, or maybe one day work for Google. Any advice for the kid out there that wants to work for Google? How do you do that? Well, my job is to encourage more people to become entrepreneurs, not necessarily to come and work for Google.

1:00:44 And not everyone will be able to work for Google. But I would say all the job openings are out there. If you go to google.com slash jobs, you can see all the openings. Probably the best way to get into Google is through referrals of people that already work at Google. And you have to, if you don’t have the skills now, think about how you can get there.

1:01:09 If you want to be the guy that’s an expert in analytics, be an expert in analytics. Teach it to yourself. Go to events and classes and learn the tools that will make you very successful in that particular area. But really, it’s about fit. The right opportunity, the right skills, the right time.

1:01:30 And you have to try to know. So I would give people my email and encourage them to send their CV to me. But let’s not do that. I guess you’re probably saying just basically become the best you, because Google is looking for the best. Exactly.

1:01:45 And be prepared. Thank you for that, yes. And be prepared and get some skill sets. And let’s be honest, there is a technical element here. So, you know, get skilled in one or many of those elements.

1:01:54 Yes. So you can at least speak the language. And have a plan B. You know, like when sometimes people have a very one-track mind, and this is a problem with perfectionism, it’s like successful people have had probably good outcomes, right? Like it was always like this, right?

1:02:12 Like they tried something, it worked, tried something, it worked. Problem is what happens when it doesn’t work and you fall on your ass? You know, like, don’t let it kill your game or, you know, get you off balance. Like, have a plan B. And there’s a great book that I read by this Israeli guy, professor called Talben Shachar, he’s a lecturer at Harvard.

1:02:32 And it’s called The Pursuit of Perfect. And he says the difference between perfectionism and optimalism. He said perfectionists, they never actually experience success. And to one of my faults is I consider myself a little bit of perfectionist. you never really experience success because whatever you achieve you feel like that’s not good enough like because you know I may be on the squash champion of London but until I win the European championship and then when it doesn’t work you just don’t know what to do because like this is that’s what all your whole plan was like to get that so optimalism is instead of the line going like this it’s like you know rounds and rounds and rounds and still pointing up But you’re gonna have ups and downs it may not work for you to work for Google go work for another Tech company start your own have Google buy you You know like work with the company that sells services to Google and and get to know how Google operates that way and then apply I work for you know different search companies before I joined Google and I became an expert in search like I worked for shopping.com in Israel and I was helping organize shopping data, and then I worked for and Gerson Norman Group in New York that was an expert network that connected experts mainly with hedge funds and so like I was classifying people’s information like I was trying to understand what do you know what’s in your head and getting people access to what’s in

1:03:59 Your head by understanding that and connecting it to the right people that need access to that information. Then I worked for ask.com and I was managing vertical search and then I moved to London And I joined AOL, and I was running Search in Europe for AOL. And by the time I applied for Google, I had such a rich portfolio of search product management experience that I didn’t really, it wasn’t a big stretch. But if I went straight to Google, on what basis would they hire me?

1:04:28 I wasn’t the best in anything. And I didn’t have these diverse experiences from different countries, different cities, different products, different industries. So it’s not gonna be one size fits all and it’s not gonna be the only thing that you do. Like have plan B and plan C. And optimize your life for what’s best at the moment.

1:04:48 So optimize your current situation. Don’t try to perfect it necessarily. Exactly. Okay, but you’re not necessarily living that. You’re constantly battling between those two.

1:04:57 Constantly battling. Last question is, what does the slogan, don’t be evil mean? And is it something that Google people still say? Or is it a joke? No, it’s really one of the principles of the company when Larry and Sergei, before they went public, they wrote in 2004, I think, they wrote the Founders Manifesto and then they set the principles according to which the company will run.

1:05:24 And Don’t Be Evil is probably the most famous one because it’s so bold and simple really that it attracts attention. But what it means, it means do the right thing. We try to do things that make the world a better place. Some products that we do are not making money for Google and actually probably costing money to Google. But we do them anyway because they make the world a better place.

1:05:53 And one example of this is Google Books. When we started with Google Books, it was unclear, first of all, if it can be done. You have copyright issues. How are you even going to do that? books are paper and then like Google’s algorithm is software and and famously like Larry called one of the engineers to his room and he’s like okay how many books are there in the world and then he said like give him a number and then he said how long will it take to scan a book and he said I don’t know like we never done it so he got someone to buy him a scanner for his room he took a book and scanned each page and then he made like a formula of like how many books and if this takes like this amount of time and with the improvements with a better scanner etc and he’s like yeah we can do it so let’s launch the first version with like a hundred thousand books and long story short and you know like Google did this to help get people access to this information so I think don’t be evil is really do the right thing for humanity not necessarily for money and and there’s many other examples of Google doing this sort of thing.

1:07:06 Fantastic. We could keep you here for another hour but I’m gonna wrap it up. Eze, thanks so much for coming. You know you’re not only a good ambassador for Google but the whole campus is like a whole nother you know a different venture you know. Thank you. It really is a crazy campus and like I said go by and check it out. I got a really cool vibe when I was there. I was starting to get a little bit like kind of drunk on all the just and everybody’s such a good vibe of people and you get like drunk with all the ideas going on, I don’t know.

1:07:32 Next time you come you should talk to people because honestly you can ask questions and everyone will be happy to tell you what they’re working on and maybe you can get more people for the show that way, you know, like you don’t have to be, to reach a certain level to be interesting. Everyone has a story. Definitely, definitely. Sure. Awesome.

1:07:49 If you’re listening to us on iTunes you can come check our faces out at YouTube channel Silicon Real or at Silicon Real on Twitter. If you want to get a hold of you, what’s the best way at Campus London? London.com or my Twitter which is ediggs or edigs. Why is it that? Long story, long story.

1:08:05 All right, nickname or something like that. Okay, so those are the best ways to hold you. And if you’re in tech and you’re a cyclist, we’re going to announce the new dates for tech bikers September 19 to 21. The first year we did it 40 people, although they told me that the maximum was 30. Last year we did it with 70 people. I think that this year we’re going to to try and go to 100. We cycle from Paris to London, 320 kilometers. It’s all founders, VCs, techies, and we do it to raise money for charity to help kids get access to education.

1:08:37 So if you’re in tech, watch that space, techbikers.com. Fantastic. Yeah, we know some people that went on that trip, so that’s quite a ride. Yeah, it’s amazing. If you’re listening to this and you want to be a guest on the show, send us an email at hello at siliconereal.com. It’s all good, right?

1:08:52 Yeah, it’s all good. Keep the Twitter. We love the feedback, love the guest suggestions. You know, if you want to help out the show and you’re just interested and you know Maybe just new to London and want to sort of meet people and help us out always looking for help So just tweet at us and I’m usually the guy answering it. So yeah fantastic. Awesome Well, um, you know, this is the show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene It’s about the people’s our slogan easy. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having it’s leisure. It’s been awesome I’m thinking about actually releasing this also as a London Real. What do you think of that?

1:09:23 It’s cool with me all right good awesome um I wish you well we’ll probably talk to you next year at the third anniversary and all the best to you guys awesome thanks for having you guys cheers there’s a scramble for Africa at the moment like there was a scramble for Africa in imperial times at the end of the 19th century it’s that’s 80% of Africans now with a mobile phone but what’s going on in Lagos with e-commerce is unbelievable Lagos is the type of city where you expect to see drones in the air you know it’s like Blade Runner and it’s It’s bonkers but it works, you know, the drone goes all the way around Mount Kenya and delivers 10 on the way back.