Full transcript: Fernando Ripolles on London Real
0:28 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real, which is a similar tri-log format with three people. We’ve had guests like Bruce Perry from the BBC series Tribe. We’ve had Tim Ferriss, the four-hour workweek guy here.
0:41 We’ve had futurist Jason Silva, all sorts of different people here. But this is Silicon Real. My co-host today is entrepreneur Colin Pyle, who comes to London via Toronto. sometimes on long motorcycle tours via China and India, getting Guinness Book World Records, you name it. Colin, thanks for being here.
0:59 You’re looking good today.
1:01 Colin Pyle: Thank you. Cleanly shaven as of November 1st. Yeah. So I’m pulling, rocking the Movember this month.
1:07 Brian Rose: It’s a brave move.
1:08 Colin Pyle: And I have to raise some cash, so…
1:11 Brian Rose: Okay. Come to Twitter and… Yeah, how do we do that?
1:15 Colin Pyle: Sponsor me. Yeah, I’ll put the link up. I’ll tweet the link up or the link… I’ll put the link in my personal Twitter, at policy, and then right now, a lot of people are like, well, we want to see something before we donate.
1:28 Brian Rose: That’s fair enough.
1:29 Colin Pyle: Fair enough. Give me a week.
1:30 Brian Rose: Okay, cool. And I always introduce you as an entrepreneur, but we don’t even know what you’re doing. So what is going on with you these days before I get to our guest?
1:37 Colin Pyle: Yeah, just quick. One of the things, lingos.co, so lingos.co is a language website, social network for language learners and teachers. So just launch that kind of six weeks ago. Yeah, really excited. So yeah, check it out. Let me know what you think and then yeah doing a bunch of other stuff coffee and All sorts of stuff producing another TV show in the new year So awesome without me in it which should be good because I’m done being in front of the camera.
2:01 Brian Rose: You don’t like that, huh?
2:02 Yeah, I love your ride in China. So people should check that out as well. So awesome. Very cool. Our guest today is mr. Fernando Tell me if I’m gonna pronounce this rice. Is it rip?
2:12 Fernando Ripolles: Oh, yes. Yes, that’s that’s right.
2:13 Brian Rose: You like that. Excellent Very good.
2:15 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, I can tell you come from San Diego.
2:17 Brian Rose: Yeah I was always very serious about my accents.
2:20 I did learn Spanish when I was in San Diego and I always tried to get my accents kind of right.
2:25 Fernando Ripolles: Do you speak Spanish?
2:26 Brian Rose: Yeah. Pretty good. It’s Mexican Spanish, not Spanish.
2:29 Fernando Ripolles: I was going to say slightly Mexican twang there, but still pretty good. Very impressive.
2:34 Brian Rose: I’m very impressed. I’m proud of my Mexican roots.
2:36 Fernando Ripolles: Usually it’s repolis, so repoies is actually very good.
2:39 Brian Rose: It’s getting there, right? You are the CEO and co-founder of highalife.com, which is a place to recall and organize personal life stories privately or together with friends and family. You moved to London, I thought 20 years ago, but 17 years ago. You joined an early stage Bloomberg at the time where you learned sales and marketing, then you went on to UBS and then Nomura, and then you quit the whole city lifestyle. This sounds familiar.
3:07 Two and a half years ago, I was almost three years ago, you were two and a half years ago. And you started highlife.com. You were a WERA accelerator project?
3:16 Fernando Ripolles: That’s right, yeah.
3:17 Brian Rose: Why are we here in London?
3:19 Why are we here in London? Welcome to Silicone Reel.
3:21 Fernando Ripolles: Thank you. Thanks very much.
3:23 Brian Rose: I read your story and it looks like my story, so I get really fascinated when guys like you come here because this is kind of a startup.
3:29 I’m not crazy. Yeah, I know. Maybe I’m crazy. But I just want to know, before we get into your new business, what’s the biggest difference between running a startup and working in banking?
3:41 Fernando Ripolles: Oh, where do I start?
3:42 Fernando Ripolles: Well, I guess one of the things I realize is how in the corporate world, you tend to just do your work in a way with your eyes closed. You’re not just alive, really. Every day is the routine, is the sort of castration of initiatives or anything that is new. I mean, you’ve worked in banking. Everything is super specialized.
4:10 Colin Pyle: So, I mean, we were just commenting earlier offline, you know, whether you knew X or you knew Y, you know, you are on the credit derivatives desk, right? And that’s all you do and that’s what you specialize in and you are the expert for that particular area and potentially even for a particular region, right? Or a particular group of clients, right? And that’s all you do. And you could do that for like 12 years, right?
4:31 And you go into a meeting and you give your snippet as an expert and that’s it. And you go back to your desk and you do exactly the same thing.
4:40 Fernando Ripolles: I was, you know, I’m doing this more, I mean, it was an exciting side of banking because I was involved with electronic trading for equity. So you had a little bit of the evolution of technology, the trading side of it, the strategic side of starting something new when nobody was trading electronically. But I was doing that, I guess, for too long, and it just became boring.
5:04 And what you see here is you’re actually taking, I’m actually taking decisions every day that can make a difference for good or for bad and probably are things that I don’t necessarily, I’m not necessarily an expert and I just need to just go for your gut feeling and it’s exciting, it’s scary also, so you just need to sort of know that rack sack and responsibility every day and just get on with it and try to make a difference. is very, very different, obviously.
5:35 Brian Rose: You know, we’ve had companies like TransferWise in here and other ones that are trying to challenge the banks.
5:42 And we talk about the innovator’s dilemma. And you know, by being in a banking company, I worked at ICAP, you worked in the banks, it’s almost like the innovator gets crushed there. You know, it’s like no one wants to hear your new ideas. It’s like, look, we’re making great money. Let’s keep making great money.
5:56 Any kind of a new idea, there’s no real place for it in that banking structure.
6:00 Fernando Ripolles: I think they try to make it seem Like they embrace good ideas, right? And obviously they’re telling you, yeah, of course. If you’ve got ideas, come to me and we’ll make it happen. And let’s think outside of the box and bowl up.
6:11 But at the end of the day, it’s actually not true. There is not, because culturally, there is this mitigation of risk, as you’re saying, we’re making money already. Let’s not mess things up, right? It’s not right to vote, right? Yeah, and it’s not like it’s a bad people or anything.
6:29 Brian Rose: It’s just like you said, a culture where there’s just no point in rewarding this kind of innovation. And the person that makes the decision to push a new idea through isn’t rewarded enough for them to take that risk, right? Right. There’s no big equity status for them. Yeah, no.
6:44 That’s way more work and I’m really not going to see the value or benefit, so we’ll just leave it.
6:51 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, they just don’t, they don’t see the benefits of changing something that works. And at the end of the day, there’s always so many layers of management with or without budget that it’s just a grind and difficult to implement. So many times you just do micro innovations in your daily work.
7:15 But obviously, you’re not really going to make a difference in general.
7:19 Brian Rose: Okay. That’s why we’re very well said. It sounds like Ex-Banker’s Anonymous.
7:23 Colin Pyle: Yeah, exactly.
7:24 My name’s Colin Pyle, and I’m a bank banker. And no one has any sympathy for us bankers. So they’re like, yeah, whatever, whatever. I have no bitterness.
7:34 Fernando Ripolles: You understand the attractiveness of that security, and they pay you well.
7:39 But I guess there’s a few that get paid really, really well. And there’s a big mass of people that are just grabbed by the, I was going to say, by the balls.
7:48 Brian Rose: That’s the care you had to say that here.
7:50 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, I can say, yeah, and you know, you just sort of, it’s just enough for you to sort of stay another year, and another year, and another year.
7:59 Colin Pyle: Yeah, so the cash flow is just enough to keep all of your kids in private school, to keep your house payments, to keep your car payments, and then I bet all of your old colleagues in the banking are like, wow, look at what Fernando’s doing, he’s challenging his brain and all that, but yet they still have the kind of golden handcuffs to keep them doing what they’re doing.
8:20 Fernando Ripolles: Absolutely. The things you say in that is that I find that it’s just very difficult for people to realize, generally. I mean, if you’re not in the startup, or if you’re not working in this, what it takes to actually do it. And as you say, it’s exactly that. A lot of my friends are still, obviously, in this world.
8:45 And you meet them, and they’re like, it’s amazing what you’re doing. They feel probably because in a way, everyone generally wants an exit from the rat race, right? But they don’t realize how actually difficult it is. The other day, a friend of mine was like, yeah, you know, it works in market, it’s like, yeah, this is a little bit like a startup, and a startup, and I’m building this, and I’m building it, I’m like, no, no, excuse me, it’s not a startup, believe me.
9:17 You’ve got a huge budget. You don’t have any of the risks, you know, that, you know, here we’re walking a really thin line, right? We have to juggle all these things and there’s no net at the bottom and it’s the first time you’ve walked that line, right, or potentially, I mean, at least in my case, right?
9:32 Brian Rose: Yeah. That’s another thing that comes up on the show is that tech startup is considered very glamorous and especially like the city people are like, oh, wow, but then you’re like, it’s a daily grind and your budgets are low and the stakes are high and you know, we don’t have office space.
9:46 We don’t have budget. this. So anyways, I want to hear more about your business. So let’s talk about hialife.com. We always ask guys some standard questions when they’re here. So I just want to know what have you done? What are your plans for this company? And why do you think you guys will win in the space that you’ve chosen?
10:08 Fernando Ripolles: So yeah, I mean you briefly introduced what we do which is to allow people to crowdsource personal stories or even memories in one single place with friends, family, people they care, in a place that you can trust and where you can, let’s say, manage privacy in a very transparent and clear way, right?
10:29 Colin Pyle: It’s a very interesting thing. I never heard anything like this before. But as soon as you describe it, it sounds like I want to hear more about it.
10:39 Fernando Ripolles: So I guess the vision originally is to enrich and preserve personal identity through memories and to bring people together. And it’s a very big vision.
10:49 But when we bring this down to earth, I guess going to the origins of the idea, when I was thinking of a trip I did with a friend from school many, many years ago, and it was just a random memory that came to my head one day as I was going out of the shower. And I was thinking, I mean, this is a beautiful trip full of really funny anecdotes that we did to Portugal aboard my mom’s car. God knows why she allowed me to get her new car. And I was like 18. And we spent all the money the first week and had lots of crazy adventures.
11:27 And I was thinking about this and thinking, I don’t speak with this guy. Does he ever think about this? Because it’s obviously an important part of my life, together with many other important parts. But surely for him, one day he’s drinking coffee And he’s thinking about this, right? And how cool would it be to actually send him that memory and say, hey, look, do you remember this?
11:49 And for him to pick it up and go, oh, wow, of course I do. That’s brilliant. And what about this anecdote in that trip? And what about that anecdote? And sort of build the story together, right?
11:59 And be able to send, I’ve got precious stories with my mom and my side of the family, my mom’s side, being Spanish’s massive family with really funny stories. And to be able to share those stories with them. And then I’ve got stuff with my wife. And then I’ve got stuff with my kids. And to be able to visualize all that in the same way as I do when I sit down for dinner with my mates and we remember stuff where we speak about funny things.
12:28 Inevitably, we speak about these things all the time. But where do you put those stories? The actual story, right? I mean, I’m not talking about some photographs in Flickr Or you show off in Facebook about maybe your kids or whatever. I’m talking about the actual stories behind that, right?
12:48 We thought that at the time, we wanted a place where all of these things could coexist and have its own idiosyncrasies. Because what we’re trying to do is connect content. That’s what connects us as people, right? Content, really. I guess in Facebook, you collect friends.
13:08 And in LinkedIn, you collect connections. But it’s the content that really brings us together, right? We have stories in common. Now, if we’ve got a lot of stories in common, we’re going to be really, really, well, sort of intimately connected. If we’ve got one story, and over time, I met Colin.
13:30 We’ve gone out for a beer. And then tomorrow, we go out again. And then in one year, we shared a lot of experiences, and that connection is what brings us together. So what we’re trying to do is provide a place where you can, let’s say, build on that content, where content is the protagonist, and build it from the bottom up, making sure that we respect content and the stories as they should. As opposed to respecting the friends or the status updates.
14:01 Brian Rose: Well, I guess. You’re taking a little bit of a dig here at some of our… Yeah, yeah. I’m not sure. It’s a billion-dollar company.
14:07 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, no. It’s not. No, no, no. It’s… I guess that rather than a dig, I’m trying to explain our difference.
14:16 Fernando Ripolles: I’m not having a dig. You know, I mean, you know, the incumbent guys, you know, the great, you know, Facebook for… You know, it’s a source of content for us and, you know, Instagram and potentially even Twitter and Flickr and all these guys right but we’ve just seen Facebook admit that you know their their adoption by younger children is dropping right the teenagers are using it less and less
14:38 Colin Pyle: and I think a lot of people have feel a little frustrated and feel a little saturated by the Facebook phenomenon like they don’t get what they thought they were gonna get from this you know it ends up being like you said maybe someone’s just showing off or presenting a profile that they want everyone to believe which people think is not true.
14:57 Fernando Ripolles: I mean we need a different version. It is. It’s very superficial. I think at the end of the people like or comment but it’s again it’s just I just don’t feel engaged and people say they have seven, eight hundred friends and a thousand.
15:10 Colin Pyle: Like I once had about seven hundred friends and I chopped it down to about 150 on Facebook. Okay interesting. Because I was like… You find people doing that. Yeah it just felt that it was it just got out of control and people that I met once and will never meet again were my Facebook friends and I just don’t know if that’s how I want to use it.
15:30 Fernando Ripolles: Clearly I mean it’s a super incredible successful model right so it would be stupid of me to say like look that’s not
15:36 Valid right because obviously it’s an amazing thing that you know it’s changed the face of the web. But all I’m saying is there’s also a need for a different approach and I’m I’m not saying I’m necessarily going to compete on an alternative to Facebook, but there is space for other things apart from Facebook in the web, because Facebook touch, they have so many touch points. There’s so many startups out there that in a way you could argue that Facebook is a competitor.
16:14 The way I see Facebook is just a communication layer in the web. It’s the telephone line of this era, right? Like the kids, obviously now you’re saying that they’re not so involved anymore, but generally like before they used to like pick up the phone and speak with friends. Now they just, you know, they communicate via Facebook. But you know, what we’re saying is something different.
16:36 So my positioning or the position of High Life is we are actually a different thing, you know.
16:43 Brian Rose: memory be, what would it look like on High Life? Would it be a photo, a movie, a text? I mean like if you can give us like a minute, one minute example.
16:53 Fernando Ripolles: So it’s any combination of what you just said, right? So it’s any combination of text, photo, video, location, tags. It always has an owner and the owner always controls where it goes, who sees, who can potentially see that, whether it’s It’s private or whether you share it privately with a couple of guys or whether you want to make it public for everyone to see.
17:19 Brian Rose: That’s a big thing for you guys, privacy. Yes. I mean, in your description, you put that right up in the front.
17:26 Fernando Ripolles: I guess control of privacy. Because you could use higher life and have lots of public memories, but at least you choose.
17:34 That’s your choice. We want you to be able to control that really, really easily. And also, super important is that you own your content, right? So the stress here is that if you’re going to trust HighAlive or you’re going to put some personal stuff, you don’t want brands to actually, let’s say, segment and mine and service ads with your content, right? You want to keep that, let’s say, private in that sense, right, in the sense of ownership.
18:04 Brian Rose: Understood. Understood. If I created a Google circle, for example, with people that I went to a football game with and then invited them, is that kind of the concept?
18:18 Fernando Ripolles: In terms of the sharing, yes, but still, I guess, Google are still accessing the posts, so you grant access to, as a product, Colin being a product, you give access by signing in their T’s and C’s to potentially segment or mine your content, whereas we don’t. We just have a license to show your content in different formats according to your instructions.
18:48 But the rights to your content are yours. And there’s some interesting things that we’re exploring also, which we can enter later on, if you want, on how we bring brands with a different angle, let’s say a not intrusive angle.
19:03 Brian Rose: Okay, understood. We always like to have a section here where we talk a little bit real and ask some devil’s advocate questions. So I’m gonna hit you with an obvious question.
19:15 How do you compete with someone like a Facebook or a Google Plus? I love your concept and it looks like it might be something that in one day might be acquired by Facebook as like a separate private area, but how do you go after such a giant when you’re coming from a startup?
19:32 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, well, first of all, don’t consider that we’re actually necessarily going for them, right? There’s there’s lots of people on the side that are, as you say, you know, they’re fed up with certain models, right? So it’s a matter of how you make sure that you transmit the values and they find value in higher life, you know, and then you can grow organically, right? We cannot be naive and pretend that we’re going to sort of hit them face-on, right? So I guess for us the important thing is that when you arrive to higher life, higherlife.com, you find enough value to say, hmm, I think this is interesting for me. You know, I can keep my stories here and see my dynamic life in a really fluid way, very different. I mean, go to a very, very clear example. Go to your Facebook timeline, right, and take a look. You know, when we finish this interview and take a look at how it actually looks, right?
20:29 It’s full of irrelevant stuff. It’s full of noise, faces that come and go, people that have liked things, people that you befriended two years ago that promoted a content that suddenly appears there and it doesn’t mean anything to you. And the actual format is full of noise. So we’re trying to bring something different where you can just choose exactly what goes in there. So from a purely selfish point of view, I want to have a call it like online bio, you know, full of meaningful stuff that people sent to me and that I sent to people and all in one place so that I can go and check out stories about my kids and it’s a matter of I guess brand positioning, you know, and that’s a challenge, you know, because it’s not an easy thing to do.
21:18 I think that when people get it and they see what we do, they, you know, there’s always like a wow moment, they go, wow, I kind of see the value right away when I heard about it.
21:29 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think, I guess it’s just the adoption, right? So it’s not as simple an idea as just post a picture to Facebook, right? That’s so ingrained in how we think now, it’s so easy. So it’s getting over that hurdle for people to understand your product and then…
21:45 Fernando Ripolles: I agree. I agree. And the challenge is that, to tell the truth, I mean, the core values are very, very different, But that’s not really, and although we understand them and we think that yes, you’ve got a really good point with privacy and ownership and all that, it’s not an argument for the masses. So you can’t really win a battle based on that because people will switch off. We’ll go like, talking about ownership and what’s that?
22:10 I’m not bothered about that. Of course, there’s people that do and then they immediately get it, but I’m talking about the masses. So we need to engage purely from the visual and how the product works and the product works in a really natural, organic way, in the same way as real life works. And that’s what we’ve tried to build, is mimic how the real life interaction works around stories. So as long as you feel, oh, there’s a place for my stories.
22:41 There’s a place for me to post and post great, but there’s a place for my personal stories, my stuff with my mom. That’s truly personal. and with my kids, you know, and it’s actually a story about something funny they said the other day, you know, and it’s personal to me, my wife, and my kid, and it makes sense for the three of us, it doesn’t make sense for, you know, my 300 friends in Facebook, right?
23:06 Brian Rose: Right. It’s like a family scrapbook.
23:08 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, where do you keep that, right? Exactly. So we’re trying to bring sort of this scrapbook to the 21st century in a way.
23:15 Brian Rose: Okay. You know, we had Simon Devinshire on here a few weeks ago, and he runs Waira in London, which is a huge accelerator run that’s owned by Telefonica.
23:23 And I noticed you were a wire company, and I was wondering, because we haven’t had one on, if you could just tell us why you went for that program and what it was like, as honest as you can be. And I’m curious what stage you were in before you went into it.
23:39 Fernando Ripolles: Right, okay. So yeah, well, that’s a lot. I think we could have a whole podcast about that.
23:44 Well, I guess for, well, our story’s sort of quite specific because we knew Waira from Madrid. So to put you in context, my co-founder, so I founded Hialife together with a guy called David Gomez.
24:00 Brian Rose: Why is it called Hialife?
24:02 Fernando Ripolles: Oh, well, that’s our whole other story. OK.
24:05 We’ve lots of podcasts. Yeah, well, basically, it’s hello to life and making it kind of sort of informal and sort of attractive and young. You know, say hello to life, so it’s very vital very sort of optimistic term and we liked you know the sound of it you know the phonetics of the word yeah so I mean so it’s higher life as it yes in H I Y A higher life yeah
24:36 Brian Rose: all right sorry back to back to wayward Madrid
24:40 Fernando Ripolles: yeah so so yes so David so I founded a high level with David and so he’s he’s sort of engineer by trade, and he’s the CTO.
24:50 And he was involved in the startup community in Madrid with a few different projects. And one of them, actually, he had some share ownership, was accepted into Waira Madrid. So that’s when we actually met the whole Waira team and what Waira was. We heard from the horse’s mouth, from Waira Madrid, that they were going to open Waira in London. And so I met Simon one day for a chat, and he explained me all of this to me.
25:28 And we thought it would be a great idea for us. I think that we were, I mean, there’s all kinds of different projects coming into Waira at different stages, right? Some of them are just purely a PowerPoint. Some of them are sort of established business, or more established, you know? We were sort of, from a corporate point of view, slightly advanced, right?
25:48 So we had gone through a friends and family round. We had a structure. We had an office in Madrid with some developers. We were building a product and all this. But from a product point of view, we’re still very, very, very infant.
26:08 And it’s not an easy thing to build. you know, as we’ve discussed, right? So we thought, look, we can do with strategic consulting, with management, with business models, with a lot of advice, on the one hand. And on the other hand, I come from the city. So I really didn’t, I wasn’t very well connected in the startup community.
26:35 So we thought it would be a great injection of networking for us and to get into the community. So those were the main reasons. I mean, obviously, being sort of having an office in Madrid and being sort of Spanish, the whole telefónica link and all that was also helped.
26:57 Brian Rose: They don’t put a lot of money in, right? Do they put 50,000 euros in?
27:02 Fernando Ripolles: Absolutely. Well, 40,000 pounds.
27:05 Brian Rose: And when did you go with them, a year ago, or more?
27:09 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, so we went in June 2012, and as the first cohort, we stayed until March 2013, usually six months. But they extended an extra three months.
27:22 I think it was just a first cohort kind of deal where they extended it. They brought three months into the state. They brought another three teams, and it just extended our stay for all of us, which was great.
27:35 Brian Rose: And what was the experience like? What surprised you about the whole thing?
27:39 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, I mean, it was great. It was awesome. You have just basically a lot of opportunities that are open for you. I mean, you still obviously have to do all the hard work and try to get the juice. And, you know, a telephonic is a big animal.
27:55 So you need to sort of move in between the lines to try to get the juice. And I actually think that probably we can, you know, I always say that the best juice out of a telephonic is still to come. So if Simon, if you’re listening to me, you know, I’ll still get a lot of juice out of you guys, hopefully. Juice. Juice.
28:14 Brian Rose: Now explain the term juice. I like it.
28:17 Fernando Ripolles: Well, I guess juice is a generalization to say, you know, hopefully, whether it’s PR or contacts or technology or, you know, just generally help. I mean, at the end of the day, there are shareholders. Right.
28:30 Brian Rose: There are shareholders of yours.
28:32 Fernando Ripolles: The relationship continues. So they are there with us for the for the long journey, which you which you’re glad you’re happy to have given that equity percentage Very happy.
28:41 Brian Rose: What if you had to say sort of one negative for the wire experience? What would you or something that they couldn’t prove on?
28:48 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, I guess I guess you know one thing negative, but but it’s not negative on the Wire experience is just the way it is is that you get thrown?
28:56 Into an environment where you have lots of people giving you lots of opinions right and it’s it can be a little bit first a little bit daunting because it makes you think a lot and doubt yourself and you know let’s say you know you and you have somehow slight identity crisis mini identity crisis if you’ve got someone coming to you Brian every day and saying I think you’re tall I think I think you’re small, I think you’re fat, I think you’re this, I think you’re that, right? So after a couple of months of that, you think, who the F-I-M, right? So it really scrambles your head.
29:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, exactly. So am I this, or am I that, or should I be actually approaching things differently?
29:42 Fernando Ripolles: And in a way, what you realize is you have to sort of follow your gut and isolate yourself a little bit from the noise and take a direction. A lot of this advice is really useful and it makes you think in the right way, right? So how to select the useful stuff from the know, I mean obviously that is the difficult bit.
30:04 But in a way I guess that’s a challenge, right? That now looking back I think, you know, were we slightly distracted or too distracted in certain things, right? I guess that for good or for bad, it’s funny, the other day I was reading the original sort of pitch idea that I wrote was that UBS on a plane about high life and what I thought this could be and how it could work. And the other day I was reading it and it’s just incredible. I was incredibly surprised to find it so accurate to what we built and what we have now.
30:41 Fernando Ripolles: I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.
30:43 Brian Rose: Is that a memory on your high life?
30:45 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, it is. But it’s private. Okay.
30:47 Brian Rose: Okay, okay, you should share it with the community, yeah. The fact that, so.
30:51 Colin Pyle: You said your partner is in Madrid. Yes. But you’re in London, and I was just wondering why you’re in London, and if you think it’s an integral part of your company’s success.
31:01 Fernando Ripolles: Well, I guess, I mean, London, just because that’s where I’ve lived in, you know, my family’s here, so I lived all my life here, and it wouldn’t, you know, when we started this, we knew in our hearts that it had to be a UK initiative. Here’s where you have the connections, where you got at least within Europe, right? Where you got the money, where we could have a better chance of success.
31:29 Colin Pyle: English, is that an important piece as well?
31:33 Fernando Ripolles: English also, yeah.
31:34 I think that also with a consumer web product, I guess that for us, at least my vision is, If higher life kicks off and when we become big, if we do become big, obviously we will. But I think that the US is a natural progression, just because they understand consumer web, both in terms of money and in terms of people growing and using consumer web. So we thought, look, it has to be Anglo-Saxon, based on the UK made sense, because that’s where I live. And that’s where I got my mortgage.
32:14 And it would be quite a big thing to quit your job and ask for a mortgage somewhere else. So from a purely practical point of view, obviously, that’s how it worked. And in the case of David, he’s based in Spain. It’s exactly the same situation in terms of his family and the schools and all this and that. So we thought, well, actually, it could work because value for money for the same quality of developer, it’s probably like a third less expensive in Spain.
32:47 I think you probably read the papers in the last couple of years. Youth unemployment really high. Yeah, exactly. So we can find good guys at competitive rates and sort of have our development cost center there, which makes sense. Also, obviously, David being the CDO and the engineer, he could manage that process from there.
33:09 And we could manage this sales and marketing from here.
33:12 Colin Pyle: It’s a nice angle, I hadn’t thought about it.
33:15 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, it is true. It is challenging to be a part, even though you’ve got Skype and you’ve got, you know, you’ve shared all kinds of sharing mechanisms and we sort of visit each other. You know, it is quite a challenge.
33:28 You have to make a good effort to keep it tight. It’s tough unless you’re in the same room. Yeah, because, you know, the whole office banter and the whole sort of exchange of ideas, As you know, when you are in the same room, obviously it does happen more naturally.
33:42 Brian Rose: You were in banking for a long time and you were in equities, so you must have been looking at all sorts of different companies, different business models, and now you’ve been in the startup sector here in London for two years.
33:54 If you had to sign a non-compete and you couldn’t be in the social media space or whatever, what do you call it, consumer media space, for the next five years, what would you go into? What do you find exciting about London tech? as in like different sectors, investing in a different sector or something. Or if you had to start a company and it couldn’t be what you’re doing now. I don’t know.
34:17 Fernando Ripolles: I don’t know. The other day, like as in like having other ideas of other things that you could do. I guess if I tell you I have to shoot you. Really? No, no.
34:28 You know what? I’ve been shot before. No, the other day actually. Twice. There’s all kinds, I mean I have all kinds of different ideas.
34:36 I guess I’m too busy with what I’m doing now, but I don’t know, I don’t know, I guess something definitely simpler, more concrete, I mean the other day I was actually thinking why don’t we build something to read you articles, you know, once you’re on the tube or once you’re walking.
34:53 Brian Rose: Have you thought about that? Oh, to read it to you, like to tell it to you, like read it to you, is it great? I love audiobooks. Audible.
35:01 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah. Audible.com. Actually, does it exist, because I want to download that?
35:05 Brian Rose: I don’t know if it’s, it’s not like current articles, so you couldn’t read like, you know, the BBC, the morning, the highlights, but you could, but Audible is amazing. Keep it quiet, only to your podcast community.
35:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, we’ve got a few days, actually one day, I’m talking about today. Colin, what’s your, what’s your take on this? What are you, what are you seeing that I’m not seeing?
35:27 Colin Pyle: I think, my first question is, so you have four year old twins? Yes.
35:31 Colin Pyle: And when did you start High Life?
35:34 Fernando Ripolles: a couple of years ago.
35:35 Colin Pyle: So how did that conversation go? Because I think there’s a lot of guys out there that aren’t only worried about the cash flow and the mortgage, and here you are, you stepped away from a good job, and you had to go tell your wife, say, hey, I know we have two little ones.
35:56 Fernando Ripolles: That was the most difficult pitch, forget about pitching to ABC.
36:01 Every time I’ve got a pitch, you know, a VC pitch or, you know, a sales pitch or something to do, you know, I think that’s easy, that has to be easy, you know. It’s funny that, because actually David also has three kids, so we always say that we are the London startup with more kids per founder, because we’ve got three each, right?
36:22 Colin Pyle: You’re bringing up the average.
36:24 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, exactly. So it’s difficult, you know, it’s difficult also because I guess that when you’re starting In this scene, there’s a lot of networking, a lot of events, a lot of … You’ve got a family to go back to, and you’ve got to take care of that business.
36:40 It’s difficult to combine, and you need a very understanding and hardworking wife. From a financial point of view, obviously it’s difficult, because you’re scratching from your savings and you see sort of, you know, when you actually start, it’s the end game is sort of very far away, right, and you’re like, yeah, I can last, you know, you don’t get worried. But suddenly, you know, time goes by and you sort of see there in the horizon, it’s kind of there, and you’re like, like, oh my god, you know, I better really kick some bomb and make this happen, you know, because, you know, I’ve got I’ve got responsibilities, you know, and if this suddenly, you know, come on board, you know, I’m going to find I’m going to have to find a way to to to provide you, right? There’s only as much sort of boiled eggs and white rice that you can feed your children with, right? Yeah. You know, sometimes you have to give a mistake, right? Sometimes. And they’re not getting it, they’re not getting any cheaper.
37:41 Yeah. So, so yeah, it’s challenging, it’s very challenging. Yeah, you have to sort of box it and try to isolate that you know yeah the thing that I sometimes I think is that when people I remember when I when I first sort of took the decision to do it you know someone told me you know if you really you know what a race and money they really need to see that you are committed you know you’re committed to the project and that if you need to re-mortgage your house you will do it, and that if you need to, like, sell, you know, your watch, you will do it, and if you need to, you know, and I, you know, sometimes I think, you know, nobody’s going to come with that kind of speech to me in the sense that, look, you can’t get it more commitment.
38:31 You know, you, you know, if someone tells me, are you committed? I say, well, I think just look at, you know, the background and.
38:39 Colin Pyle: Right. Do you ever think about going back to banking?
38:42 Fernando Ripolles: That would be horrible.
38:44 Colin Pyle: But you’re corrupted now. It’s like fine wine. You can’t go work in the box anymore.
38:49 Fernando Ripolles: I don’t know if I could last. I don’t know. I don’t know if I could.
38:53 Fernando Ripolles: I mean, to Twitter, listen, I’ve got three kids actually. After the twins, I had a little blissful accident. He’s an amazing little boy.
39:05 Colin Pyle: You call three kids. You have to provide.
39:08 Fernando Ripolles: If you have to do it, you’ll do it, right? But you’d probably try to look for something different. Maybe use the skills that I’ve learned here and somehow combine them to find, not necessarily go back to investment banking because that would be a killer.
39:23 Brian Rose: Yeah, it would be a creative killer. I mean, it’s funny because you think about the income you used to have and how that can pretty much solve all your financial problems in the short term, but then you realize what kind of a head space you were in to leave and you just would be so stifled, especially after you’ve had a little bit of room to flap your wings, you know, and try some new things.
39:46 Fernando Ripolles: I know. It would have to be something very, very specific and extremely well-paid, you know, otherwise, which you know, it’s difficult because things have moved on and you know, I guess also you’ve been two years out. I don’t know. I mean, I really haven’t thought about it. I mean, probably I should, right?
40:03 Brian Rose: No, it’s a good answer right there if you haven’t thought about it.
40:06 Fernando Ripolles: I guess I should, you know, you still receive calls from headhunters and stuff like that.
40:11 Brian Rose: I don’t. They watch the show. Well, you have to nurture.
40:14 You have to nurture. It’s too far gone. I’ve just gone. It’s too far gone. After the Iowa’s gone.
40:19 Brian Rose: After the DMT episode, they were like, we’re deleting his number. Yeah, they don’t call me anymore.
40:25 Colin Pyle: For High Life, I mean, what do you see for like the next two years and the next five years? Like, where do you guys want to be? Is it like a certain kind of headcount?
40:35 Is it a partnership with another company where you can provide X and Y? Is it an X scenario?
40:43 Fernando Ripolles: Currently, we’re at a very crucial stage. We just released an app a couple of weeks ago, which is live in the app store. We’ve been running the website in this current format for three months, so we’re gathering data or usage and we basically need some cash and we’re going out meeting some people to get some hopefully some money to really expand, right, to expand the team, get the product to where we want, there’s still a lot of things that we need to get right and properly explore our monetization strategy, and hopefully to spend actually some money in marketing, as opposed to free marketing, which is always a bit of a grind, which we also try, but actually get some professionals involved on the marketing side.
41:45 So yeah, hopefully we’ll get there, we’ll get the cash that we need, and we’ll inject that back into the product, into the growth. So we see that there’s, I mean, we want to grow obviously for this kind of product organically. So make sure that people see the value and are actually sending memories to each other and growing that content. But also through brands, where we feel that we got something quite interesting. Because we’ve been speaking with a lot of big and small brands.
42:24 And they see how they can actually surface their digital archive in a really nice, fluid way. And it’s all about content marketing nowadays, right? Like bringing the personal story. You know, that’s what really engages, right? So they don’t sell, they don’t say buy the Volkswagen Golf because it’s 0 to 60 in 6.2 seconds.
42:50 And they say, my wife was pregnant. I was going to give birth, and I had a Volkswagen Golf, so I wasn’t worried about arriving to the hospital in time, or something like that, right? Yeah, that’s a personal story. Yeah, they always bring that, right? So we think that we combine, in a very natural way, personal stories, or your personal stories, with brand stories, and allow you to consume the brand stories, and pick them up, and bring them into your life, and And then contribute with your personal stories to a brand corporate journey.
43:24 So a brand can very easily crowd source their story with memories of Brian and Colin and Fernando and this and that and bring them all into life. People see those stories as the best kudos ever when there’s something emotional going on with the brand. So that’s what we’re trying to sort of…
43:44 Colin Pyle: Are brands afraid of, if you open it up, it’s hard to control the good and the bad and inevitably someone might put up a bad story.
43:53 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah, absolutely.
43:54 Absolutely. And well, there’s two elements there. And that’s a question that we’ve, so the way we tackle that is twofold. One is, first of all, brands can’t curate exactly what goes in, so potentially they could censor or not promote the bad stuff into the public eye. But then what we do is we actually flip the content around.
44:17 So if I send a bad story and a brand replies to that bad story, as long as obviously they reply to it with a solution, that would get flipped, so the solution becomes the headline. So what the brand is promoting is how well we dealt with this bad experience. So it’s a way of turning things around.
44:38 Brian Rose: Interesting. I think brands are looking for that kind of web 3.0 or everything.
44:43 You see it all the time with really intelligent brands where, like you said, they’ll do a short film about a product where the film will be about a scenario and then the product is just there in the background. And you fall in love with, like you said, the story of someone taking their wife to the hospital and then there’s the golf in the background or something like that.
45:01 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah. And Volkswagen, please contact us. We’re looking for sponsorship, as we say.
45:05 Yeah, exactly. But yeah, and also like the history, you know, behind, you know, brands are like increasingly trying to be proud of of their history you know and the fact you know the other day I mean even like McDonald’s is having an ad about some guy eating the 1935 burger you know and having a flashback of how things were you know bring in the past you know we are a proud brand and we had a history you know with our consumers you know and you have to feel proud and identified with that right so so I think that whole element of being part of that journey and bring in, surfacing the history and a really sort of on your eyes. I think that’s quite interesting for brands, you know.
45:53 Colin Pyle: How about sporting events, I’d be like, it just sounds perfect for me for a football team or whatever to have, you know, a curated timeline of that game. Yeah. And people could like just crowdsource it.
46:07 Fernando Ripolles: That’s exactly, that’s exactly. And funny enough, so Man City actually have implemented a solution already with a some really cool guys from Manchester and you know some some start-up but you know it’s kind of more of a tool but the concept of actually going out to let’s crowdsource you know memories the history of the club together with the fans right so So we’ve got a few showcases, we’re speaking with Barcelona, it’s a big animal, so it will take time.
46:39 But super interested and they love the concept of just bringing stories of fans into one single place and how proud I am as a fan that the story of when I first took my kid to see a football match, is actually part of the public journey of Barcelona, which is open to everyone to see. And they see the story of Fernando. Even though I support Real Madrid, it’s just for the record.
47:03 Brian Rose: It’s an exciting niche and I really like it. We always close the show by asking a very classic question, I’m going to ask you the same when we ask everyone, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Fernando or Repoies and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?
47:22 Fernando Ripolles: Oh, well, well, I guess that I would say just really think about what you love and just go for it. I always think I love cinema, right? And I love cameras and technical equipment and photography. And I would have loved to be a film director. For me, that’s a perfect job.
47:55 It has a creative side of it. You have the scripting, the managing, the technical side, the money side, the story side, all that. I find it fascinating. And I probably would have said, look, do you like cinema? Yes.
48:11 Go for it. Just go and study cinema and just follow that dream. And I guess that you’re so engrined by, I guess, the culture that you need to get a good job and earn money. And when you’re growing up, unless you’ve got a vocation, like, I want to be a doctor. But otherwise, you’re like, I just need to get good degrees, go to uni, get a good education, find a job and get paid lots of money right and that’s sort of what is sort of embedded in your head as opposed to what is it exactly what is it that I like right and if you like something then actually apply yourself study that and just go for it right
48:52 Brian Rose: so good advice on that same note to the 20 year old listening who wants to you know do what you’re doing with your life right now what would you tell them to do would you advise them to go into banking something Colin I always talk about you know or do you think that’s a big mistake, grumpy old man.
49:13 Colin Pyle: Well, you know what? If I would, I would advise them to go into banking if they actually really love, you know, the whole banking thing. But if they love it, so I’ve got like my godson, he’s an economist by trade and he just loves it.
49:29 He loves, you know, he meets with his mates and discusses, you know, macroeconomics and, You know, stuff like that. That’s hardcore. I know. I know. So, but he loves it.
49:39 So, he’s working long hours in some hedge fund and, you know, good for him. You know, if you really love it, then great, you know. But if you’re doing it for the money, that’s a dangerous, what, dangerous, I have no bitterness about it. It’s done. It’s put me in this situation.
49:56 So, I’m very happy about it. But then think twice, you know, if you’re just doing it just because you think it’s a good well-paid job and you want the money, then think twice about, you know, if you could find something that you like and make money, that’s the ticket, right? So target that, right?
50:10 Brian Rose: I think Colin and I are thinking these days that it is a great place for a young man to kind of learn what it’s like to be in a corporation, what it’s like to have a boss, what it’s like to do things you don’t want to do.
50:21 And because a lot of times if you go from university to startup, you don’t get a lot of these things. That’s true. It sets you up, hopefully, with a little bit of bugs so you can get your life started. So I think that’s important also to sort of take off a little bit, because otherwise you end up living with your parents when you’re still 30 or 35. That’s tough.
50:46 That’s a tough rap. Yeah.
50:47 Brian Rose: Fernando, how do people get, I mean, if they go to higherlife.com, what’s the easiest thing should they do? They go up, set up an account. I mean, like, what’s the easiest way for them to get started with you guys?
50:57 Fernando Ripolles: Yeah. So just, you know, just go to highlight.com and, um, register. You’ll see that, you know, obviously we are working on the initial journey to make it a guide you more through it. So now at the beginning, as in its current state, you’ll see a little bit empty, but you can go to discover and see how, what other people are doing, uh, with, uh, with memories and with content and basically just hit the new, uh, MIMO and create any, you know, just think about, let’s say your killer story, your party killer story, just put it in there. Or there’s something called gather moments, so you just bring all your albums really, really quickly from Facebook, in this case, so you bring them together in our format, in our sort of memory or story format. So, you know, we’re working on a lot of stuff also with blogs. We think it could be a really good way to surface blogs, so working on how to do that easily with WordPress. But the other way to start is through the app. So just download the app if you’ve got an iPhone, and if you don’t, I’m sorry but you know we’re looking to get some money to the Android too. You know we have to start somewhere, right? And you just download the app and start getting some of the photos and some of the stories that you got on your phone in there and take it from there. I mean obviously both speak to each other, app and web so hopefully you start building. Best thing is to also start
52:26 Sharing some of this stuff privately with friends, family and get them to participate because that’s the fun. The fun bit is to actually wake up in the morning and find out you know friend has sent you you know that story that really gives you a big smile in the morning right or you know or your wife is creating something you know about the kids you know and stuff like that so the best thing is to actually send each other stories
52:52 Brian Rose: now it’s exciting space I wish you lots of luck with this I’m a little tired of this you know two dimensional social media space where it’s just look at my picture look what I did it’s it’s I don’t know it’s not very inspiring so this is really cool I think the medium-term corporate angle is even more exciting so that’s very cool thanks so much Twitter how do people find you at higher life
53:16 Fernando Ripolles: okay so at High Life and Facebook also.
53:18 So we have a page there, High Life in Facebook. And again, when you create a memory, you can actually share the URL. If it’s public, you can share it in Twitter or even in Facebook. So you can actually share the story in the High Life format if you want, or even sign up now in my signature, my emails, I just would see my public life story here and it just clicks you know so you can just go and check out you know all my stories even like my dad you know he’s like 77 and and he calls me from Spain you know what are your kids up to you know what what’s good can you update me I just say you know just go highlife.com forward slash you forward slash repo rippo which is my my address so highlight.com forward slash you forward slash rippo and then you’ll see my public stories
54:06 Colin Pyle: was it only the part not the private not the private stuff not the naughty stuff
54:11 Fernando Ripolles: no but uh but you can see all the stories about the kids
54:15 Colin Pyle: so you’re you’re raising funds your pitch to investors do you just give them a higher life link
54:21 Fernando Ripolles: yeah exactly and I send them a memo of our meeting there Yeah, yeah, I’m silicone real business and then going on calling that I forgot or you know, yeah, no all good again, we’re Some people have reached out because we’re looking for some help. So yeah upon reaching out and you know We got a Pinterest page now, which is really cool. Yeah, and that’s just from people helping out just paying it forward We’re just trying to do a good thing here tell great stories and the more people can help us out the better it is
54:53 Brian Rose: Good stuff. Yeah, well, so, you know what I was thinking that for the Movember campaign You should use higher life so we can see the evolution of your every day of your dodgy moustache. There we go Yeah So you could have a pick you know a timeline of your of the evolution of your dodgy moustache So you can call the account, you know, whatever the name you get attached. I’ll make it public and Hollins’s hash The man’s always pitching Raising money you’re in the pitch. I will do it. All right, cool. We’re on Twitter at silicone real. We’re really responsive We would love to hear your ideas for guests.
55:26 We just want to get everybody from the whole community, VCs, guys that are starting up, accelerators, the whole nine. So give us a shout on at Silicon Real. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, come check us out on YouTube channel, Silicon Real. And it’s all good. As we say, it’s about the people.
55:41 Brian Rose: Fernando, pleasure having you on. Thanks for coming by.
55:44 Fernando Ripolles: Thank you, guys. Thank you for the opportunity. It’s great to have a chat with you guys.
55:48 Brian Rose: Thanks, man. All right, all the best, guys. Take care.
