Ivan Mazour - Founder & CEO of Ometria

Full transcript: Ivan Mazour on London Real

0:28 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. I also host a show called London Real in these same studios. It’s with three dudes, sometimes girls. We’ve got guests like Tim Ferriss. We got Max Keiser from Russia Today screaming about Bitcoin.

0:41 We got Howard Marks talking about smuggling cannabis. It’s pretty crazy, so check that out if you’d like, but we’re here to talk about tech. My co-host is entrepreneur Colin Pyle who runs online language schools gourmet coffee companies Drives motorcycles across China and is representing Movember That’s pretty good. I think that’s the best intro I’ve ever had for me really not bad. Yes, Movember is coming along. It’s coming in It’s looking looking better. Did you trim it? No, I tried today actually, but they were too busy But I still need to raise a bit more cash. It’s pretty pathetic. I’m about 40 pounds. So Um, you just looked at me like neither one of you know, how can we do that?

1:21 Let me see what I yeah, so I’ll post I’ve posted it on the last video with Brian from pixel pin on the YouTube I’ll tweet it out and just yeah five pounds two pounds three pounds. Whatever you can afford. It’s a good cause I met the I met one of the founders a few weeks, but actually a couple months ago And it’s a great story and it’s for a good cause. Okay done and you got you got stuff going on the coffee right now I don’t know what’s up. Yes, the Kickstarter campaign is going live as we speak.

1:47 So, you know, we’re taking the piss of Joe to George Clooney. If you have an espresso machine and you’re tired of drinking crap coffee, then hit up the Kickstarter campaign. We’re developing sort of a specialty coffee organic blend for an espresso pod, so. Awesome, I have an espresso machine and I just don’t like the coffee. I buy the premium coffee.

2:05 And on the other day, I was like, Jesus. You know, if I do make it, you know, normally I’m drinking bulletproof for the London Real But for this I try to keep it real so cool good. We’re checking that out awesome our guest today is mr Ivan Mazour who is a Russian-born? London-based serial entrepreneur investor and author you’re the CEO and founder of ometria Which is an e-commerce analytic software company you’re also founding partner of Innova capital Which is an early stage venture cap fund investing in UK based technology startups did I get that right straight up?

2:36 That’s that’s pretty good Ivan welcome to Silicon real. Thank you for having me You know, it’s a big pleasure having you here. You know, one of our first guests on London Real was a guy by the name of Mike Mulcaddis. And he was this Iranian guy who had left Iran when he was like eight years old and made like a six month tour across Europe to escape to Sweden. And he was actually one of the founding partners of Sony Ericsson, you know, one of the first smartphones.

2:57 And he helped create airplane mode on your phone. So if you ever switched to airplane mode, that was something they did. But he had this concept called an immigrant mind. And his whole idea is that when you come to a country as an immigrant, you think about everything differently. And all three of us are immigrants in this country.

3:13 You don’t have a plan B. You’re willing to do things you wouldn’t normally do in your country. Your pride goes out the window. You’ll drive a cab if you have to. And you also, I think you see holes in the London scene where other people just notice, oh yeah, that’s the way it works.

3:29 The tube doesn’t run at night. You can’t get a taxi on a mobile phone. The NHS is this way. And I was just thinking about that today because we’re all kind of in that pool. And Ivan, I was wondering for you, as a guy who wasn’t born in London, do you think that gives you kind of a different way of looking at things or has that helped you as an entrepreneur?

3:47 Definitely, definitely. I mean, this immigrant mind that you just mentioned, I feel like I have that, right? And my journey wasn’t quite the same as a six month trek to get here, but the day we left was the day the tanks rolled into Moscow and the White House, the Russian White House got fired on and it was the whole perestroika happening, communism was collapsing, There was a revolution going on basically and my mother said that was it, time to get out. So she took me, we picked up, we moved here, I saw cornflakes and yogurt for the first time like that, that didn’t exist.

4:17 We went to the corner store and we landed and we saw all this stuff, we were like, whoa, what is that, right? And then she worked and I worked my way through the education system basically and you know, you start off as someone who doesn’t speak English and it’s hard, you don’t fit in, nobody really kind of helps, especially back then. You know, now London is a multicultural community, people are welcomed here. Back then we were kind of the odd ones out and so I picked up the language and I went through international schools and I got into kind of the standard British system.

4:44 I was the first Russian guy to get a King’s scholarship to Ethan and I basically just kept going, you know. And the other thing is I reckon it’s easier for us to fit into all sorts of social circles and I don’t know if you find the same thing. You know, anyone who’s born here, they have their circle, right? grow up around that their parents said it or whatever it is whereas I don’t feel like I really connect or relate to anyone but I feel like I fit into all of them and I enjoy hanging around with all sorts of people, I enjoy meeting all sorts of people, I find it really easy to just get along with everyone and some of my British friends aren’t quite the same from that point of view.

5:20 I find that I don’t have that many British friends, I like them but I find maybe it’s because they have backup plans and they have like you said family, social groups, when you come here, you don’t know anyone. First of all, I think you’re attracted to other immigrants. Like I look at my friend base and it’s like South African, South African, Canadian, you know, all these different people. I think, yeah, I think as an immigrant, you often, you don’t have that, again, that support system of going to school here for 30 years or whatever. So a lot of the British kids maybe have enough friends already to sort of say that and they’re just busy, right? You can only, I think, only really have a handful of really good friends because it It takes time to foster a good relationship and some people just don’t have the time.

5:59 Yeah. You know, there’s one other aspect of that immigrant mind, which is weird because people think immigrant and you think, you know, a lower skilled worker, that kind of thing. But when I got here as an immigrant, I worked in the city of London and I had this idea and I bet you do too, maybe even you, is that you look around and you’re like, you know what, I think I can do this better than these people. You know, I think I’ve got the, I will work harder.

6:19 I will sleep on someone’s sofa. I will do this. I can’t go home, you know, and I can’t go back and be shamed. I got to make it here. So I find that you almost take it to another level.

6:28 It’s almost like a weird superiority complex. I don’t know if you ever thought that. It was more that I didn’t wanna fail, right? So I got here and I just, I remember the first couple of exams and everything, I was coming like bottom of everything cause I couldn’t understand. You’d go and study like chemistry, but without knowing the technical terms in English, you’d have no chance, right?

6:46 And I just, I didn’t wanna be at the bottom. And so I just had to work extra hard to get to the top and that happened in education. And that’s basically happening now in everything that I’m doing. So it definitely gives you a lot more energy, a lot more stimulus to just get on with it and succeed. I’m sure you’ve heard every Russian stereotype joke in the book.

7:03 Hit me with one. I hope you have one ready. I’m ready to come prepared. I know all the American ones. They don’t even faze me anymore.

7:12 In a weird way, I almost play up on my yankness. As a yank, I can get away with so much, and maybe you can as an immigrant. But like you said, you were here back in the day, but now it’s such a multicultural city. But back when you were here, what, 20 years ago? Yeah, 22 now.

7:25 Then it was quite unique and you wouldn’t hear Russian being spoken on the sidewalk here. You’ll hear it. You’ll hear so many languages. Yeah. I mean, now actually, so around Central, around West, probably one in 10 people are Russian.

7:38 You walk around. On my walk home, 20-minute walk, I probably see four or five families wandering around all speaking Russian. So it’s changed a lot compared to what’s well. I think it’s one of the only multicultural capitals in the world. I’ve lived in New York and I love New York, but when people get to New York, especially as immigrants, they want to be Americans, like they assimilate really fast. Like your taxi driver from Niger, he’ll be like, I’m American, and I’m like, you’ve been here six months. And it’s like, but here, I think everyone keeps their individuality, you know, the women rock in the burkas in Knightsbridge, they don’t care, you know, people are doing this. And I don’t know, it’s nice that way.

8:11 Yeah, Toronto is hugely multicultural as well. But they’re, they’re even more segregated, I think. In Toronto, it was like Greek town in Little Italy, and they just really sort of separate, they don’t intermingle as much as I find here. I find it here. It’s very much kind of just, you’re just here.

8:27 Yeah. Well, you know, this is turning into a London Real episode, so let’s get down to business. You do a lot of things, Ivan. You’ve got a really interesting story, and I know you’re involved in a bunch of pieces, but I wonder if you could talk a bit about Emetria now, which is, you know, your e-commerce analytics software company, and then something you had mentioned to us earlier, talk about big data. A good buddy of mine just finished a master’s degree in computer science, Paul, and he’s gone to New York to work for a big data company.

8:55 It’s just a huge field. There’s a lot going on. I think a lot of big corporates have no idea what to do. To be honest, I think they’re being sold a lot of bad things by a lot of companies. What is going on with Ometria?

9:08 And we always ask, what have you done? What are you going to do? And why do you think you’ll win? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like those questions. Definitely.

9:15 I don’t know where. So, yeah, it’s my favorite thing to talk about right now, big data and e-commerce, right? We sit in the intersection of all of that. And I started off wanting to do a web analytics company, right? So this is the big one.

9:27 I’ve done a few businesses before, but I wanted to do something that was going to be scalable and truly, truly big. And so I thought, okay, what’s the best business model right now? And that software is a service because it’s just exponential. You keep adding people and if you treat them right and if you provide the right product to them, then they won’t let go. And you just keep adding people on and on and on.

9:46 And then I kind of looked around at some of the best kind of companies that have done that recently. And web analytics looked like a really good option. But it was very, very full of very successful companies. So it’s a segment that’s kind of already busy, right? You’ve got Kissmetrics, awesome company, awesome founder, same with Mixpanel, they’re everywhere.

10:04 And so I looked around the various other industries and verticals where those products wouldn’t actually solve the problems. online retail, so e-commerce, that was where it wasn’t working. So you can put in Google Analytics, something like that, and they can tell you how many thousands of people came to your site last month. They’re not going to tell you who the best customers are, they’re not going to tell you when the best customers on the site, what products are performing well, what trends are happening in terms of that, what your most profitable individual products are, and who the best people to buy those are as well, and how to get more of them. All of this sort of stuff could be turned into an algorithm, right? It’s at the end of the It’s just it’s just data, right? It’s data about people and you use it to do a better job for them to provide a better experience So by by using our tech a retailer makes their customers happy and makes more money So that’s like a win-win-win and then you couple that with a software as a service business model And that’s like a win for the founders the employees the shareholders and everyone else So this seemed like like what I should be doing right now and I actually I took I took a year to go back To Cambridge, so I did I did mathematics at Cambridge. That was my degree I took a year to go back to one more year just focusing on statistics probability Computational mathematics so kind of what you’d call big data

11:13 But more more the mathematical side of it and started looking for my team to make this happen and the last year I finished in July last year came back to London got the team together September and in February we we launched this company So it’s it’s pretty exciting. I probably haven’t even answered your questions Just think about they were recruiting like madmen out of Cambridge for these for these grads So it’s it’s a very that’s you know what let’s switch topics for a bit because that’s a fascinating subject right so when I was in Cambridge I made a lot of awesome friends just really cool people a lot of them wanted to go into consulting that was the big thing so when I did my undergrad that was 2003 onwards that was everyone going into banking right and then we had the credit crunch everything collapsed now everyone wants to be in McKinsey or Bain or whatever it is right that’s the one thing they want to do very few people wanted to be entrepreneurial so I was vice president of the the Entrepreneurs Club, there’s a club called QTech, Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club, and there was a president and a couple of VPs, and so I was one of the VPs, and it was great, you know, but it was small, there were maybe 20 of us out of 11,000 students, and you think, what’s going on?

12:16 And there’s an awesome organization, and you should probably have those guys on there, Entrepreneur First, Matt Nallis, right, X McKinsey, they’re actually, they’re finding the people that don’t wanna join the Entrepreneurs Club, right? And they’re persuading them, just take a few months out, before you go and sign up with one of these consulting firms something just come in and spend a few months being an entrepreneur will put you in a room with other people like you and if you create something good it’s gonna be really good and you know what their track record proves it so I think they’re turning that on its head because it’s very hard to find entrepreneurial startup style people in Cambridge in my experience and you need more and more organizations like that that can actually actively sift them out and and sort of funnel them towards the cool tech companies that are here in London that are dying to get access to that kind of talent. Is that because you want young straight out of school, do you think once they go work for McKinsey for a few years they’re different people?

13:04 Yeah. Why start them that soon? It’s opportunity cost too, I guess, right? So you go work for McKinsey for a few years and it’s just, your salary is huge and it’s just all of a sudden to step out and try something with an entrepreneur is… It’s hard.

13:16 It’s hard to make the decision. I mean, one yes, it’s you’re sort of put committed in poker terms, right? You’ve put everything in this career and your next step doubles your salary from 150 to 300. You’re like, why am I going to do any of this? Like, I don’t know if you heard the story about Amazon, I mean, I hope it’s true because I only read about it on the internet, but when Jeff Bezos wanted to start Amazon, he went to his boss and he was working on Wall Street and his boss looked at his business plan and said, this is an amazing business, it’s going to do really well, but the person starting it isn’t the guy who’s on a million dollars right now, right?

13:44 So you’ve got the best job you can possibly have, why are you going to throw it away to do a startup? And he was like, you know, screw that, I’m going to go and do it anyway and now he’s Amazon. And I think that problem is faced by a lot of very smart people and not many people have the strength to go and make the decision he made. So start them young, that’s what you’re thinking, or at least put the idea in their brain and they can do these things. Absolutely.

14:04 As grumpy old man, we talk about all the time about, well, we meet a lot of people at the drink about that are like, I’m 23 and I’m going to do a startup and sometimes you think it might be good to have a couple of years of experience in a corporate world. But I think we’re talking, that’s not necessarily about founders, but about people sort of supporting the founders, which I think is one of the main things that runs the ecosystem in the Valley is, you know, Stanford and Berkeley and all these great schools that are funneling into all these startups, not necessarily as founders, but as sort of the engineers and a lot of the framework. But they need to have an attitude as well, right?

14:36 So their attitude needs to be sort of the startup style attitude. So if somebody’s waiting for 4.59 to start, you know, sort of doing the last bit of work and then five o’clock, bam, they’re out. Or if somebody’s at the interview, I mean, we had this, I remember hiring the first person from Metria, and the guy we hired is awesome in every way. But until we found him and we had people coming in and they were like, yeah, so we want foreground a month. And this is before they even explained why they were good for the role.

15:02 This was a junior role at the time. It was literally an internship position. And you have all these people who have such high expectations before delivering any value. And the startup person, you come in, you deliver value, and you show so much promise that as founders, we can’t possibly not give back, right? And that’s missing, I think, a lot.

15:20 And it’s around here in London that it’s best. But once you start coming out of that and you go to the universities, the mindset’s still old school. It’s still how much salary can I get, when can I get out of work, that kind of thing. Whose fault do you think that is? I think it’s because the tech community is new.

15:36 Silicon Valley’s had that for a long time. Startups are fun, right? But they’re a lot of work. They’re a big time commitment, a big cost commitment, a big emotion, stress kind of commitment as well. And as an employee of a startup, that’s true for you as well.

15:49 And so you have to become accustomed to that. That’s got to be part of what you want to do, part of your nature. And we’ve only been doing it for, what, 20 years, reasonably, maybe less than that. So I think by the time where we have the same historical pedigree as Silicon Valley, given another couple of decades, I think it’s going to be fine. Yeah, definitely.

16:07 In this area, it’s infectious. Like, everyone’s talking about it around here. I just want to go back to big data real quick. I mean, you said there’s a lot of exciting things happening. For people that don’t know what it is or what’s happening, can you just give a layman’s explanation?

16:18 Yeah, yeah. term is actually it’s incorrectly used all the time right I could say it’s hugely complex data sets that are impossible to to compute and analyze and manage using standard technology and so big data technologies were created to make sure that you could actually make use of that you know process it if I always forget the statistic but you know YouTube for every hour of time that passes 120 hours or something like that or upload it so how do you keep up with that and that’s where the big data tech came in but the reality of what’s happening in the world right now is that it’s kind of medium data so we’re medium data company. It’s a hard sell, so we call ourselves Big Data SaaS for e-commerce.

16:51 It’s a really simple kind of elevator pitch. But in reality, it’s the little bits of data that you collect and you put together in the right way and you use to power something, whether that’s a better experience to your customer or preferably in our case, a strategic decision about the business. That’s what we’re really trying to help people do. We want online retailers to understand what they should be doing to improve their business in a sort of general kind of holistic way.

17:14 It’s the medium and small size data put together in a big overview that I think is really driving the companies forward. But otherwise, it’s what you said, a lot of companies are selling their product, calling it big data, but probably not delivering on the value that they’re trying to suggest they can deliver on. Yeah. And I want to get into that. Yeah.

17:31 I want to know more. So where are you guys now and what’s your plan for the future? You know, where are you located, employees, financing rounds, just to get an idea where you guys are at? Definitely. now 600k. We’re relatively happy with that because we’re kind of we’re quite over subscribed. We’re taking Angel so although I’ve been in to see a couple of VCs, there’s a couple of VCs I’ll be super keen to work with but equally as an investor myself and I spend quite a lot of time doing tech investment I know the the balance that needs to be struck between it and right now we’ve got an awesome team and so bringing on board an extra person could be amazing but it could disrupt that as well. So we’ve really just we’ve surrounded by self by the absolute best angel investors that know the e-commerce space, know the SaaS space, and we’re just putting that round together now to close by the end of December.

18:15 And the team is nine people full-time, but we’re normally on about 12 or so in the office, you know, a couple of interns, some contractors, and just pushing forward really, trying to expand to about 15 by the middle of next year. First revenues are going to start hopefully next week, this is the exciting time right now. So you’ve been in development up until now in testing? Yes, so we’ve been in development until May. So launched in February.

18:36 Launched the beta version. So launched the company in February. Launched the beta version of the product in May. Tested that and then released the second commercial version early October. So basically free trials, one month free trials started in early October.

18:48 We’ve just come to the end of those and we’re just now converting everybody onto the paid accounts. Which takes us from being a startup hopefully to being a growth company. And that will be pretty cool. So it’s a great time. Are you hitting the pavement?

18:58 Like trying to talk to these big companies? Or is this the kind of product where people can just show up and sign up or do you have to kind of close individual sales with different retailers? It’s both. We spend so much time, so myself, my co-founder, I’ve got three co-founders, four of us putting it together. So two of us are literally hitting the pavement, but actually sometimes.

19:16 So the other day we were voted sixth hottest Russian startup by Mashable, right? And so half the team is Russian, two of the four founders are Russian, half the team is Russian. We’ve got Russian product, Russian website, a presence in Russia, and say that’s a big market after the UK. But after that, 10 signups straight away. So it would take me a month of hard work to get 10 signups, and then you get one article like that, and it’s just like, bam, done.

19:39 So it’s a combination of both. The actual integration is easy. So for an online retailer, if you want a platform that we support, you press a button. It’s free. It appears.

19:48 After 28 days, you love it, and you pay. Also we hope. We’re just about to find out now. Okay. And so you’ve got these dual interests.

19:55 You’ve got people in Moscow, people in London. Do you outsource your tech? No. Well, that’s another key issue that I’m always quite keen to talk about, right? So I did that before, of all of my ventures, I did a, I wanna be startup.

20:09 You know, a lot of people who are like young and they’re like, I wanna do a tech startup. So I did that without knowing what a startup was. I thought, let me just build a tool without understanding that around a software product, you need a company, this is a long time ago. And we built a task management platform, right? And it was mainly because I felt like I couldn’t find anything on the internet that did what I needed to do.

20:27 Collaborative, small team, you know, 10 people. How do you run your tasks? Now there’s a million options. Asana is probably the best one. They’ve just wiped the floor with everyone, right?

20:36 But back then we hired two guys in Uzbekistan, $1,000 each a month, right? Good, but not super amazing. And then we just realized what was wrong with the situation, you know, outsourcing. So you do everything over Skype and then you put together a project plan, you send it over and then we’ll come back and be completely wrong. And then you do it again, you’d fix it up and then, you know, a month would pass and nothing would happen.

20:56 And then some guys built a company called Wunderlist and took a million euros and built what took us six months and about a day, basically. And I realized, no, no, no, you can’t do this, right? So you weren’t saving money outsourcing. Yeah, no, I mean losing opportunity. Everything, we were losing everything.

21:11 Time is money, right? Exactly, big time. Not to mention the frustration and everything else that goes on. We got stories about outsourcing. And where do you want this company to be?

21:20 Like in a few years, do you want Amazon to be using you? So actually we’re almost bringing Amazon Tech So the mid-tier retailers, right? So it’s a great time to be doing this because a lot of, you know, one of our customers is a company called John Smedley, 200 year old company. For them e-commerce is, you know, a tiny blip in the history of that brand. And they get the value of data, but they weren’t developed as a data-driven company.

21:42 They’re not like fab.com, which is literally a data-driven e-commerce company. So a tool like ours allows them to learn in the most easy possible way of how to leverage that data to become more profitable and more successful. So it’s a great time to do it, But Amazon and all the big boys like that, they’ve got this down already. There’s not a lot we can offer them above and beyond what they have. So we expect us to be the leading brand across Europe.

22:05 The US isn’t a major focus. We’ve got one customer from there, but it’s not a big focus for them. But UK, France, Germany, huge markets. Russia’s growing, 20, 30% plus a year. Turkey, even more than that.

22:17 So all these markets are coming up. We want Metria to be the one tool that drives the strategic decisions that all these companies are making over time. And hopefully on track for a Series A in 2015. Okay, good, let’s get real. Now it’s time to hit him with the hard questions, yeah?

22:31 I’m gonna go first, unless you’ve got something. No, not. No, I had a buddy before that went to, where did Paul graduate from? I don’t know, it was somewhere in the middle of London. Imperial, I think.

22:42 Yeah, Imperial College. And he was working for some of these big data companies and they were having these clients, I don’t know, like these large, conglomerate pharmaceutical companies things that sell products at Boots and they were running their big data and then coming to them and really just giving them old-school marketing advice so they would be like oh yeah and they would just give them these general concepts and they weren’t actually using the data for like specific granular things they were saying you should do this then they would come back in three months and say well that didn’t work and then they were saying you should do this how do you know that you guys aren’t gonna do the same I mean like how do you discern what ultimately is almost like a human judgment you know I don’t know if that That makes sense.

23:19 No, it totally makes sense. Again, it’s something I’ve thought about long and hard. When I started this, I thought, you know what, we could automate all of this, right? There’s humans doing merchandising, web analytics, all of this. Why do you need a human that’s just make a machine that can do all of it and just run the company for them, right?

23:32 It’s probably like a true statistic. Exactly. Exactly. And then I very quickly learned people don’t want to kick people out of their jobs, right? So the head of e-commerce, instead of saving money, and I thought, you know, it’s a great opportunity to save money, you know, instead of paying ridiculously high salaries, 150 grand each or something, you could build some software to do the job.

23:49 People don’t want to do that and that’s absolutely fine with us as well. So now we’ve switched to being able to empower the people that are doing their jobs and let them do it properly. So we’re basically, I mean as one single example now, we’ve built a feature that allows them with one click to identify customers that bought at Christmas last year and haven’t come back since. So these are people that have forgotten all about your brand, you know, time moves very quickly these days, there’s loads of online sites, your competitors are literally one click away.

24:14 Like back in the day when there was no competition. Now you sort of, you know, Google on, you know, do a search on Google and press back if you don’t like what you find. So for them, being able to reactivate all of those customers that haven’t come back for 12 months at the perfect time, which is Christmas, because they know they bought last Christmas, that’s like a guaranteed win. That’s, you know, it’s an obvious one. And of course we measure the revenue that comes back so they can actually see, yeah, you know, all those guys came back.

24:37 So there’s some obvious ones that aren’t just kind of pulling the world over there. You know, it’s it’s it’s genuine insights that we’re doing okay, but you are making human decisions because ultimately you have to say Let’s do this this and this definitely and they’re a bit of a guess Yeah, okay, and and then people don’t like the black box approach, right? There’s some awesome companies doing multi device attribution, for example, but even then I mean the tech is just absolutely phenomenal You know a friend of mine I saw him for breakfast the other day at brain, right?

25:04 Literally a company has grown to I can’t even mention it But the highest valuation I’ve ever seen within a one-year period, right? amazing tech but even then as they’re building it a lot of it is currently kind of quite optimized by humans they’re making sure that those customers they have which are huge customers those customers are getting the service they really need you know they’re optimizing that ROI on it I don’t think it’s currently possible and whoever you know whatever companies are saying it’s fully fully automated I don’t think that’s currently possible there’s always a kind of I don’t know if you know you know the concierge MVP approach of the lean startup there’s always that kind of concierge service there’s a little guy sitting in the back you can’t see him but he’s always helping people out have you seen that ad recently it’s on TV or something and it’s got some little baby and he keeps hitting like an iPad and ordering encyclopedias and then the guy the encyclopedia calls up China and he’s like we’re back and they start shipping all these trucks full of encyclopedias and then it’s it’s it for Adobe I like to issue Adobe marketing cloud yeah do you know what’s happening I mean you know I guess that’s a classic example black box where no one’s really thinking about right what the date is Tom anyways that was just when I I came up with, Colin, what do you see in this business?

26:09 Yeah, I always, again, I’m not sort of math-brained or developer coding, so I don’t always understand the value in the technology behind the scenes. So I guess maybe explain a little bit about why, sort of, what differentiates you from competitors in the space. Because presumably, it’s a pretty crowded space. Sure, sure. The SaaS model’s been proven and works and big data, you know, analyzing big data and utilizing it to increase your sales.

26:36 Is also proven, so maybe just say why, tell us a little bit of the technology. Do you know what, so I get asked this question quite a lot, as you can imagine, right? And so, after this Mashable article came out, we got a whole bunch of VC interest, inbound interest, and it’s all kind of analyst level. And some of them have been great, but some of them have been quite sort of rookie, straight out of university. And this is one of the questions that’s always on their list, right?

26:59 From the rookie? Yeah, yeah, from the rookie. On everyone’s list, not just from the rookie. But before I answer, I always hit them back would name a competitor because it allows me to frame the context of my answer. So if you can think of a competitor, then I can try and explain around that.

27:14 If you can’t think of a specific name, I can give a general description of what’s going on in the industry. Sure. General then. General. I don’t know a competitor.

27:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know some people in this space, but I don’t… Again, I know a new company called Visual DNA, but again, I don’t think it’s… It’s not quite the same. It’s not quite the same.

27:30 But so this is it. competition for the marketing budget and the mindshare of the e-commerce companies, right? So the head of e-commerce, the marketing manager, merchandiser, all of that, they’re constantly inundated with, hey, we’ve got some tech that’s going to use some data to help you make more money, right? And so there’s a huge competition in that. And so immediately everybody out there thinks, wow, you know this, it’s just too hard to spare, there’s too much going on, you’re never going to be able to build anything.

27:55 But once you start actually getting into the industry, you can bucket everything quite easily. guys doing like product recommendation and there’s some guys doing like basket abandonment tools which is you know that email that comes back if you don’t actually buy anything there’s there’s all these little kind of widgets there’s a little pop-ups that come up and tell you you know 20% off if you add 20 more pounds to your basket and there’s companies doing all these individual things but the thing is in the middle of all of that right you you have the the brain as it were you have the thing that powers the decisions that you make about your business and currently you you have two polar opposites in the industry and you’ve got Google Analytics which is free and And in Russia, there’s a similar service.

28:31 You know, Yandex is the Russian Google, as it were. So there’s Yandex Metrico, which is the same thing. And it’s totally free, but it’s a web analytics tool. It can tell you where your customers are coming from, but it can’t tell you which ones are profitable. It can’t tell you anything about products and stuff like that.

28:44 So it doesn’t help an online store. It would only help like a blog, you know, something like that. And on the other side, you have Adobe Marketing Cloud, right, Adobe Marketing Suite. And it’s 200 grand or something like that. Plus you need an analyst that’s trained in Omniture, which is the analytics platform that has been bought by Adobe and does what we do.

29:04 So you’re talking a quarter of a million to start, probably three-year commitment. You’ve got this analyst making 70 grand a year minimum. It’s a big hit. So the bigger companies, they can definitely afford that. Small companies are stuck with Google Analytics.

29:17 And so the opportunity was literally, where is the holistic platform for online retailers as a product, a product developed by what the retailers need, right? So we’ve got an amazing UI UX team in-house, amazing designer, but we’ve also started from the very beginning by identifying what the requirements are of the online retailers. So our investor director is ahead of e-commerce, we have a bunch of consultants and contractors involved that are at all levels.

29:44 So some are analysts, some are merchandisers, some are kind of strategic directors of e-commerce companies. And we put together exactly what was needed just for that specific niche. So not the sort of the other subsets of, hey, let’s use data to create ROI marketing through attribution or through emails or so on. But we just created this strategic platform that could power the company going forward in future. And so we do the majority of something like Adobe or IBM Core Metrics or Webtrends, which are the three big companies that were in this space.

30:15 We do almost everything that they do. We’re cheaper, we are much easier to set up. We’re not as customizable as those tools, right? So if you want a super custom setup for your very specific business, sure those companies will do it, but it’s a lot more expensive. If you’re a mid-tier retailer, you’re making 10 million a year, you know, you get the value of data, you don’t really know how to dip your toe into it, we will put you on the right track straight away.

30:37 I was wondering how you spend your marketing dollars, because I just quoted an ad from Adobe, so obviously they spent their marketing money enough to get me, of course I’m not gonna buy their product. We were talking about George Clooney before. Yeah, before. I mean, how do you spend your marketing dollars? How do you get out there?

30:52 I mean, you’re a start-up. I’m going to start asking this question to everybody that’s interested in it. Yeah, it’s a good idea. I think that if I could watch that for all the guys that have come through, I would definitely love to hear those answers, right? Yeah.

31:03 Yeah, exactly. You’re the first. Yeah. So each industry does it in a different way, right? So I think what we’re doing is quite relevant to literally the vertical that we’re going after.

31:13 So conference is absolutely huge, vital to get the brand out there, vital to get known. So the tech press is great and you get a lot of interest and you get a lot of interest from VCs and stuff like that. But the online retailers and the people that we’re selling to in the online retailers, they don’t really read the tech crunches and the mashables and so on, right? So we got to get to them and they go to very specific events. So e-commerce expo, internet retailing, things like that.

31:37 So we’re always present at those. From next year, we’re going to start taking stands. So we’ve already signed up to a couple to take stands. This year we were just going and we built up a very strong network already. that people would make introductions at those events and say, oh yeah, do you know about these guys, et cetera.

31:51 We’ve trialed PPC, but it’s not particularly huge in terms of, you know, right now we’re integrated with Magento as an e-commerce platform. We’re just going on board with our Hybris and Shopify. And we’ve got an API, but we don’t particularly want too many clients using the API because it’s hard work from both sides. PPC is paper customers. Yeah, paper clicks, sorry, paper, yeah.

32:09 So you know Google Adware is the paid advertising, right? So in order for us to identify an online retailer, 1 million to 50 million in revenue, who’s on the Magento platform using Google pay-per-click, like Google AdWords. I mean, you’re waiting a week before one guy clicks, right? It’s slow. It’s a slow burn.

32:26 So for us, it’s more of a brand awareness play. And from next year, partnerships and biz dev. So we’ve actually got a partner in this building right here. I mean, I was literally just about to pop in before I might come and see them afterwards. A very cool Magento agency, you know, do really cool work.

32:41 We’ve already got a client with them. So they build their website. we do the analytics, we’re just going to keep rolling that out. So it’s a good value proposition for us to get together with the other tech providers that don’t do what we do but already have customer base so we can cross-sell with some of the system integrators that are building the sites because they get to offer a special service above and beyond and get a revenue share. And then business development, I mean, then yeah, we need some guys going out there and literally just making phone calls, going to offices, trying to explain the value of what we do and just building up those leads.

33:11 Yeah, I was wondering because you’re you’re an investor too and you’re obviously an entrepreneur and I was wondering what lessons you’re trying to learn as the entrepreneur from the Investor side of your split personality and being like don’t do this because if I was investing in that company I would not want you to do this or do this, you know, because you kind of come from two different sides Hmm. So I love it. I mean basically that’s why I invest right?

33:32 I’ve got a very specific approach and I don’t know that many people that that have the same approach but I’m not investing for the capital return on that specific investment. I expect a much higher capital return through a Metria and I’m optimizing the chances of that by making the investments that I make, right? So imagine, my previous businesses were in education, in property, they weren’t very tech. The one tech thing that I did was 42 tasks, the task management app, and that wasn’t even a startup.

34:00 That was just a bunch of guys making a website and just waiting for people to turn up, you know? So then I realized how important it was truly understand the business side, and I knew I wanted the big data side. So I did the university thing. I went to Cambridge to do the mathematics aspect. But then how do you very quickly become a professional tech founder?

34:18 How do you shrink 10 years worth of experience into one year? Well, with my CFO, we built up quite a big capital pool through a lot of the property development we were doing with Inover Capital. So the two founding partners of Inover Capital, about five years old now, we did a bunch of property development. We built gated communities outside of London. We built, you know, we redid and remodeled apartments here within London.

34:39 So we took some of that and we started investing, small amounts, I mean, you know, literally tiny seed amounts. But the companies that we invested in, I built very strong relationships with the founders. And that was the point. The point was, you know, here, have some money. I’m not going to be an annoying investor.

34:54 I’m not going to sit there trying to tell you what to do with my money or tell you what to do with your business. I’m doing this because I trust that you’re a cool guy and you know what you’re doing. I’ll give you my suggestions and thoughts based on my experience, which is probably not as much as yours but still at least I have it from lots of companies and I’ll listen to you in terms of what what you think is happening out there what you think is the best way of building a business and so now I’ve done that 16 times I’ve got 16 investments one has failed you know it happens and with the EIS I actually get 60% of the money back so it’s only 40% loss anyway but that 40% was totally worth it it was a e-commerce business believe it or not it literally explained why it was so important to have these kind of data driven decisions available and it helped me put my team together we use them as a case study we help them we try what we tried to help them as the core founding team and of the other 15 one is very close to an exit now which will be my first exit so exciting times. How long from investment to exit? So for this one it’s just been over a year and a half not that long but I haven’t started I mean it’s my third year of investing now I’m still very new as an angel investor. So three years actively investing? You haven’t seen an exit No, I’m projecting seven years, so in terms of my cash flow that I’ve allocated to this,

36:05 I’ve made sure that I can do the same level of investing that I’m doing now for seven years, 40 companies in total, and then hopefully at the end of seven years, something’s got to start hitting. Otherwise, I’ve really made some bad decisions. It’s a very statistical approach to investing. You wrote a blog on this on your blog, I’m going to read it later. You actually remind me of Jeff Bezos, because this is how he decided to sell books on the web.

36:26 He saw the exponential growth of the web. He’s like, how can we best take advantage of this? Books have this really long tail, and he was like, that’s what we should do. This is the best day ever. I’m going to take this clip.

36:37 You’ve just likened me to Jeff Bezos. I’ve both become famous. I’m going to dine out on this for the next hour or so. It sounds like that’s also why you decided to do the company you’re in right now, because it’s highly scalable. All these different things happening at the same time.

36:52 Which is interesting, because most people that sit in that chair, it’s a passion project. Who are you kidding? sports, higher life, the list goes on, you know, the passion project, except I was thinking of, I’m gonna give you another prop here, John Collison of Stripe sat in that chair and the reason he started Stripe is because his previous company they found it really frustrating to make internet payments, so as opposed to, I actually found this really frustrated in 1999 at my dot-com startup, but I wasn’t John Collison so I didn’t, I decided to start up that company, I just found it frustrating, but it sounds like you are looking at the failures of of your previous companies and trying to.

37:25 Absolutely. I think failure is a really important thing to learn from. I’ve had a crazy journey with my last companies. Amazingly, each one of them is still going in some way, shape, or form. If you go to 42tas.com, that it works.

37:39 I still use it. I’m probably one of 10 people that still use it. $2 a month, that was a great plan. We probably screwed up that pricing model hard. I had an education consultancy, which went really well for two years.

37:51 Revenue positive, no capital investment. We were helping people that didn’t understand how international education systems work. Literally like me, like when I got here, we were helping them prove that they were worthy of getting into the top universities, right? And it was just fantastic. And then suddenly, year three, my business partner decides to screw me.

38:09 No, you know, doesn’t pick up phone calls, doesn’t pick up emails. Clients will come back to me saying, what the hell’s going on, we wanna refund. No money in the bank account. I’m like, right, what do you do here? So.

38:20 You learned that lesson early. Exactly, ups and downs, right? a billion dollar company. Exactly. All right, I gotta ask you this question.

38:26 You’re uniquely able to probably answer this and I want the honest truth. What’s happening in Russia? Like what is the scene like there? What’s the tech scene like? Does the political issues affect any kind of commerce?

38:40 Do you have to worry about what the Kremlin does? I don’t know, I’m just curious. A little bit. So it’s very easy to talk about Russia sitting here in London, right? And that’s the one thing.

38:49 So I personally, you know, I remember Russia when it was in the communist days and that was both completely crazy, but also a very simple and it was a very simple life where you were well looked after. Education was excellent. You know, healthcare was excellent. You had everything you wanted, but you couldn’t have any more, right? So that’s- There’s a lot of nostalgia in Russia by the older people for the old days.

39:10 Absolutely. I mean, my mother, you know, she’s in her 70s. She loves it. She still thinks the communist was amazing. She’s got a PhD in mathematics.

39:18 That’s kind of, I followed in the footsteps when it comes to that. She used to work on the Russian space program. And she thinks back and she was like, scientists were remunerated better than anyone else. Much better than politicians, much better than anyone sort of doing any kind of entrepreneurial activities. In communism, it was hard to be an entrepreneur.

39:33 But still, the scientists, the teachers, they were the doctors, they were the ones really super respected. And so there’s a lot of value in that. And it’s not like that now. But when we got out of there, when my mom and I left, it was the early 90s. It was literally the beginning of the 90s.

39:47 And it was just, it was the wild west. You know, what you hear about and what you see, I mean, I don’t know if you guys ever had a chance to watch some of the movies made in Russia about the early nineties in Russia. It’s- Are there any good ones? Yeah, I mean, I’ll literally, I’ll give you a list later. It’s amazing.

40:03 Is it accurate? Yeah, it’s accurate. That’s what it was like. People would drive around in their Mercedes 600s as they were known, right? And shoot people.

40:10 Which is moronic, because they’re actually not called that. You know, it’s just like a Russian. And they would, I mean, they would shoot people. and they would roll up to like a corner shop. You don’t really get corner shops in Russia, but like a bakery or something like that, or a gas station, a petrol station, and they’d take it.

40:24 And there would be nothing you can do. Just take it. They would just take it, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Right, so somebody had to come in and sort that out.

40:33 So it was a land grab, a huge land grab. And so Putin came along, and he got rid of all of that, and he had to, so the level of political control that exists now, and that’s what you hear all this stuff about, like the pussy riot and everything, Without that, Russia would be horrible for the people. Without that, you couldn’t have a business, you couldn’t have a life, you’d be scared of all the gangsters. Now you’re a bit scared of the government, but you know what that’s a safer life to compare to what it was like in the early 90s.

40:57 I’ve heard this from other Russians. Rather be afraid of the government than the gangsters. Yeah, yeah, definitely. The government, I mean, the government’s not gonna come after the small person running a petrol station. You know, the government might come after some big guy trying to make moves, political move, something like that, and you know, We’ve seen some of this happening in London some of the cool cases stuff like that Yeah, but the your your average Joe just trying to get on with life. No chance, you know, they’re they’re gonna be left alone and tech I mean you so you mentioned tech tech tech in Moscow tech tech in Moscow is great So the the big thing I’m waiting for is for the kind of you know The buzzwords right now the buzzwords need to spread but in a good way not just people saying them But like UX and data science and growth hacking right like these are concepts that are pretty well established here If you want to go and get a good UX guy, you’ll get a good UX guy.

41:45 What’s UX? User experience. Right? Exactly. That is what Russia is like.

41:50 I’m part Russian. That is what Russia is like. So imagine your full-time role is making front-facing web products, and that’s the level of knowledge. So the user experience kind of science that’s been developed in the States and here in the UK, like proper human-machine interaction. You can go, you can do a master’s degree at one of the top universities here in human-machine interaction, literally user experience, like all of the science is not really available over there.

42:17 So they’re five years behind. Exactly. Eight years behind. Exactly. Technically, and in terms of intelligence, they’re right up there.

42:22 Same thing. So they can build amazing code. They can build, you know, they’re super smart and super, you know, on it, but they just, they don’t have this new level of knowledge. You know, the growth hacking knowledge that we have here. It’s just phenomenal.

42:33 People know all sorts of little tricks. They know how to market. They know how to build a startup. So building the product requires UX, building the startup requires growth hacking, and if you’re in data, then you need to be a data scientist, right? And so trying to do that over there in Moscow, it’s hard.

42:47 You don’t have the people with the right kind of training. And we’re just waiting for all of that to pass over. So that’s why we are based here in London, and we’re selling to the Russian market. It’s the ridiculous way round, right? Most people are like, what are you doing?

43:00 Why don’t you hire devs out there for half the price and sell to here? But actually, we believe that this is the solution. solution is to build a kind of world-class product. London is the place. There is no difference between Silicon Valley and London. The talent is as good here. You just don’t, you know, you don’t get people asking $150,000 straight out of university. So yeah. What companies in London impress you? If you had to give me three, what do you really like, you know, like what’s going on, whether it’s a specific sector or a good business plan? Wow, this is tough. I’m gonna have to mention companies I’ve invested in. Is that hard?

43:34 Can we know that? Yeah, you can. The zones are honest. I know. I’ve got it.

43:39 So let me tell you in that case. It matches my point, right? So if I’m investing in order to learn from the best founders, I’ve seen three do incredibly well in my time, right? So why plan? I’m an investor in that, right?

43:52 Why plan? Okay. What do they do? So they are an app. And basically, when you want to do something last minute, and it’s tonight, and you want to find out.

44:00 Oh, why plan? Yeah, why plan? Sorry. Why plan? Accurated best things you can possibly find and an amazing user experience We actually I asked the founder for his UX guy and then we brought him in for a bit to help us out during the early Days, right now they’ve gone to New York recently. They’ve gone to New York recently. That’s exactly right. It’s going well It’s going well. I mean, basically it’s still early days So, you know the full kind of picture hasn’t come together yet, but London based on how well things went here in New York It’s gonna be amazing. It’s a tough company to build. There’s a lot of things coming, you know, it’s not just a tech play It’s pulling together all of those suppliers of all of those events and making sure that they integrate and bring them on board and Curating and finding all the new ones that come up. So it’s it’s a tough one But the founding team they’re just I mean in terms of executors Unbelievable, you know, they mapped out what they were gonna do for a year and then they just did it They did it day to day today today They could tell you what they’re gonna do on the 17th of April next year and I bet you won 17th of April comes That’s exactly what they’ll do. They’re British No, exactly, I was going to say, because I saw them at Leweb, they were, I guess the summer, Leweb was here and they were, they spoke and, yeah, where are they from?

45:06 Yeah, so Eastern European, but I call them exactly where they were. So I love the user experience in Y-Plane, I think it’s fantastic, and I have had the app now for, since that day, in Leweb I downloaded it and I got like 10 pound coupon or something. Yeah, yeah, so I was like, yeah, sure, but having used it, I’ll make you use it off I’ve got to show it, but I need to. Same with me, I downloaded it after Courtney Boyd Meyers was here, and I haven’t used it.

45:30 And I see it on the tube, and I haven’t used it. Alright, so I’ve used it once, it’s a little bit embarrassing. Girls Allowed concert, the O2 best concert I’ve ever been to. It’s literally reunion. Girlfriend loved it.

45:40 He’s admitting a lot of things. Girlfriend loved it. Girlfriend loved it. That’s smart. Okay, why plans one?

45:45 Two more. Okay, so two more. I mentioned this already, but let me mention it again, Adbrain, right? So this for me is the most impressive bit of tech, right? So this is hardcore tech.

45:54 I mean, we’re talking data algorithms that are on a next generation. Like one of the hardest things right now is identifying what all the devices that we use, how they link up together. And in our company in Emetria, we have the luxury of, you know, being online retailers, you have to log into the site to really do anything. So as soon as you log in to do a checkout on your mobile, we know that’s your mobile, we put everything together. But in digital advertising, you know, you’ve got phone, you probably change it every couple of, you know, maybe every year, every six months or something, depending on when your the contract runs out, you’ve got your tablet, you’ve got a whole bunch of computers, one in the office, one at home and so on.

46:28 Like how to work out how all of that comes together and without having a single unifier that tells you, wow, this is this person, that is the best mathematical statistical challenge that I can think of right now and they’re solving it. And they’ve grown to a team of 20 within a year. They’re knocking out the funding rounds, they’re knocking out the customers, the customers love them, they’ve got a stack of signed letters of intent for more people who want to use them, but they’re not ready for that.

46:54 They’re still in beta right now. I mean, that’s one of the crazy things that they were saying to me. So there’s an accelerometer in the iPhone, right? In all smartphones. And based on how you walk, they can actually fingerprint who you are.

47:07 So if they pull that out, I mean, they can, you know, they can identify a person. It’s like a fingerprint. Exactly, exactly. Can you imagine? And it’s coupled with, you know, it gets connected to what Wi-Fi you’re using and so on and what GPS location you’re at.

47:19 There’s a lot of other data points, But the fact that they’re taking it to that next level is just fascinating. So what is it, an app or an application on every one of your devices? It picks up information from every device. So it’s like it’s a very heavy piece of tech that sits on a server in the back end and it connects to, you know, basically connects to all levels of the technology stack behind digital advertising. And it allows people that wanna advertise on mobile to identify the people and advertise to them across all the mobile devices that they have.

47:45 And that side of it is interesting, but it’s the statistical play around trying to work out Because there’s more in that space. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Third company.

47:56 Okay. Third company. Okay. This is literally the coolest guy ever. It’s an investment as well?

48:01 It is. Yeah. I mean, I’ve got to do it, but honestly, because… It’s spoken like a true investor. It’s got to be done, right?

48:06 It’s got to be done. What do you got? If you’ve got an audience, you’ve got to speak to them. So WISC. I invested in this.

48:12 So actually, I tried to invest in the first round. I wasn’t allowed in. Right? It was like that. So Nick Holzer, the founder, was on The Apprentice.

48:18 Do you guys ever watch The Apprentice? Yeah, a couple of years ago, he got to the final, awesome concept, which I’ll tell you about. Basically Alan Sugar was like, what is this? I don’t get it. I don’t like it.

48:30 And he chose to go with something else. And that obviously didn’t work out, right? So then Nick came out and he carried on with his company and it’s a single click button. Again, so I love this because of the tech behind it, right? But one click, you go on a recipe site, you like it, you press a button, it checks you out of your favorite supermarket.

48:45 And the tech behind that means one, you need to integrate with that site really easily. two, you need to scan the recipe and identify what each of those products are and match them to the products of the supermarket. But like on top of that, you’ve also got to match what the volumes are, you know, how much of it to buy. They’ve got a slider. So if the recipe is for four people, but you’re cooking for three, it’ll tell you how much to buy automatically.

49:05 If you like- So it does that automatically? Automatically. Hardcore machine learning. Wow. It’s just absolutely- What happens if the offering, if you only need 75% of the butter?

49:15 Yeah, yeah, no, sure. So you still have the option. Then they give you the whole thing, yeah. So literally, a little thing slides in, right? You choose your favorite supermarket, or you have a preset installed.

49:22 So if you like Waitrose, or Ricardo, or Sainsbury’s, or whatever, you just test, cause I think, if you just click the dropdown, it automatically locates the right products within that. If you don’t want it, you click cancel. Or if there’s multiple choices, so if it’s, I don’t know, like a steak or something, and there’s like the premium luxury steak or the standard one, so you just click and choose which one. And just, yeah, the machine learning behind it, fantastic, tech team, you know, really, really solid.

49:46 The technical co-founder Craig basically built this ultimate tech team of super, super nerds in a good way. I’m like a super, super nerd, hopefully, and they sit there and they just crunch these numbers like Craig. Now, they’re doing wine recommendation digitally, like algorithm style. With this food, this is the wine you should have, and they’re in Birmingham, actually. They’re not even a London-based company.

50:06 I keep trying to persuade them to come over here, but in Birmingham, lower office costs, low salaries, really nice burn rate. They’re not worried about investment really, they’re just, they’re gonna build this. And all three of these are billion dollar companies. Okay, all right, I like that. Couple more questions before we wrap up.

50:23 How do you hire people? It’s the hardest thing ever. I’ve gotta hire five more people in the next six months. We found our first hire through internships, right? You’ve heard of these guys?

50:36 And we went through like- Is that a company call? Yeah, yeah, literally. Like entrepreneurial interns, right? Like that kind of thing. And we interviewed like 40 people Loads came with MBAs and they were like, yeah, we’re awesome. We were consultants, you know, we want 50 grand a year We want to sit on your board and we were like dude, this is an internship. Like what are you playing at?

50:55 Exactly and then he just came along and he was like I’m an entrepreneur I did a I did a company doing a mobile game and that was really cool But I got screwed by my development team that I did an agency doing some analytics But then, you know, I found that quite hard to grow now I just want to get a bit of experience and I’m gonna go and do my thing again And we were like awesome come join us. He’s like you know a core pillar of the company and then after that We we went out and we we basically started looking for the devs right and so we put an advert on Stack Overflow Crit well I put an advert on everything right and we put an advert on Stack Overflow careers and We got a bunch of people applying and one of them was working at Vodafone in Portugal Right and we looked at his back and he was working in marketing and this is for a front-end UX position like developer And so we looked through his background and it was like he’s an awesome developer, but he’s working as a marketer What the hell’s going on? So we got him a ticket. We literally put him on an easy jet flight We got him over for the weekend We like spent some time with him literally just like as a sort of as a test experience and and he was great And he’s sitting in the office right now. He we tied him down with some sellotape today. So he carried on doing some work He’s got an awesome mover mustache, you know, yeah, and he could lay lay and he’s just doing his thing, right?

52:07 I was missing a prop. You keep whoever you have who’s amazing. So Head of Operations has been with me for about 10 years. He’s been with me through Inova Capital, through all my previous companies, basically, right? So he’s there, Roman, he’s still there with us now.

52:22 We got another, we got our content marketer as an intern. She came through another company called Inspiring Interns. She did a few months as a test run. And initially all she could do was write. She was a really good writer, but she didn’t really get the tech scene.

52:36 She’d understand how to kind of do the whole marketing side. Now she like runs our blog, she runs all the digital marketing that we’re doing, she totally gets it. She’s like in the sort of six months or so she’s been there, she’s picked up what doing a startup is all about, you know? And then finally we’ve just got the ninth hire, ninth person, Greg, and he was a very specific kind of individual that we needed. Somebody with kind of real-time analytics knowledge, back-end stuff, so somebody who could help us expand a lot of our integrations and things like that.

53:04 And actually there, we went for an old school approach. We had to hit a recruiter, because it’s such a specific niche that we needed to fill. And we interviewed a whole bunch of people and no one quite fit. And culture is so important. I bet you everybody who sits in this chair is talking about, yeah, it’s all about culture.

53:19 Totally true. So somebody who had that skillset and also fit with the company culture, we didn’t manage to find directly ourselves through a network or anything else. So we went out to a recruiter and again interviewed a whole bunch of people and got him. So volume I hear volume coming up here. Yeah, which I haven’t heard from everyone I mean like you really like to see as many people absolutely And when it comes to culture, do you have to meet them multiple times or do you get the vibe right away?

53:43 We’ve we’ve got a solid process that actually saw my blog I’ve got a thing about yeah an article about how your company shouldn’t be a company should be a cult Right, and this this is a term. It’s not I haven’t coined it It’s been covered quite a few times before but so we run it like that as a first step You know, we do the interview one person does the interview and that’s the kind of you know The the rubbish test you get rid of the people that just don’t fit at all Then they’ve got to be willing to come in for a full day and on the full day they do a project They do some work and then they go for lunch, right? So that’s the kind of social test they see what’s going on I see how they eat exactly they see how they easy and see how they treat the waiters and waitress true So true. It’s a big one. It’s good girls to it’s a good shit test for girls Sorry, go ahead in tech. You normally find people treat waitresses very nice, right?

54:27 Like it’s it’s never normally a problem and the third one is the gauntlet, right? So if they pass the first and second they’ve got around the gauntlet I don’t know how long I can keep that up for but at the moment it’s still going They’ve got to be interviewed by every single person in a row Even if that takes four hours five hours, it doesn’t matter and everyone has to say yes And then everybody is allowed to say no It doesn’t matter how much time we’ve sunk into that if they say no We don’t like this person and they could justify why then we agree and we start again because each one of the people in my team right now, right? They are very valuable.

54:59 They are a core part of the team. And if their effectiveness is gonna be reduced by a new person coming in, I’m not having that, right? So the four founders, we’re not gonna allow that to happen. So we run this gauntlet and it takes time and it’s a problem in terms of scaling because when you have 20 people, what are you gonna do, have 20 interviews? So at some point, it’s gonna have to stop.

55:18 But while we’re this startup and while we’re loving what we’re doing, this is how we’re gonna do it. This is gonna be a clip on YouTube called the recruitment gauntlet. Yeah, another, just on the recruitment side, how do you sort of monetize it? Do you give your employees warrants and options, like more, I know a lot of people say that that’s such a big piece in the Valley and it hasn’t really transferred over here. So I just, out of your, Totally true.

55:43 We’re doing the MI scheme, the option scheme in January. And so we, everybody who joins will get options. They have to be with us for a certain amount of time. So we don’t hire with options. It’s not part of the starting package.

55:55 We want those people to really prove that they’re gonna stay with the company, that they believe in the company, that they fit in and everything else. So a couple of guys are gonna get options very, very soon. We’re super excited about that. We’re really happy for them to be supporting the company and we wanna give them something back in terms of the growth that we’re gonna see soon. And hopefully the rest will also get that when their time passes and we’re gonna keep doing it.

56:20 There’s a chance that some of the senior hires, when they come in, you know, some of the top level guys as you build the management team and so on, will have to give them options straight away as part of the package. But I think in terms of employees, it’s really important for them to show their dedication and not to start bargaining about, oh, you know, how many options do I get and so on. It’s a tricky thing, I’ve worked at companies in the past where there was a lot of options, there was a question about vesting, there were some guesses on market capitalizations based on where the company’s gone public, And I found that once the event happened and over time, you almost, it almost was counterproductive because people were not in the company because they love what they did or they wanted to make it better.

56:59 They were always checking their net worth. And then once they had a certain amount and it went lower, then you had these negative effects. And I don’t know, it’s tricky. It’s true, yeah. It’s tricky to make it work out right.

57:08 Your paper. Paper millionaires, right? Yeah, yeah. Loads of them around at the moment, right? No, Ivan, we always ask everybody in this chair a few questions and I’m gonna hit you with them right now.

57:17 If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Ivan and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do or not to do? Amazing, I would tell him to not give up. So can I go back a few more years, more 20, right? No, way more, I know, 14, 15, right? Because basically I was super, super nerd, right?

57:36 Double super, until about 15. Double super. Yeah, double super. And I came to this quite late, but then I discovered girls, right? Like a 15, right?

57:43 What happens when you go to boarding school, et cetera, you don’t really meet girls, you know, anyway. So then that happened and programming and all the geeky stuff, which I was really good at fell by the wayside, right? Now it was all about, hey, let’s go and chill in a cafe or whatever. You know, it was all about kind of spending time with people socializing and so on. And then that dragged out for a few years.

58:00 And actually when I got to Cambridge the first time I’d taken a gap year, I’d started my first business during my gap year. I wasn’t even that interested anymore in mathematics and statistics and everything else. It was hard to get back into it. What I would tell him is actually that basically what I thought was the future was the future. And that all of this stuff about socializing, hanging out, and just generally enjoying life, that’s just a trend that you’re going to get bored of very, very quickly, so don’t fool for it.

58:25 There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be my CTO right now, right? He’s actually smarter than me, I find it hard to admit, but he is, right? But there’s no reason I can’t be at least somewhere near his level of coding ability. And I wish I did have that. So that would be my bit of advice.

58:41 Okay. That’s true. I haven’t heard that one before. Give up on socializing. Yeah.

58:46 Women are a trap. A bit of socializing is fine. Women are a short-term trend. You get to the point in life where you’re like, actually, all this sitting around a computer screen, no, that’s stupid. That’s not going to get you anywhere.

58:58 Let’s go and build a whole big social circle of friends and have cool people to hang out with and be considered cool and all of this. And actually, that’s the passing trend. That’s the one that doesn’t stay indefinitely. All you need is a couple of strong people in your life, a good wife-girlfriend partner, family and some strong strong friends and then afterwards you couldn’t I mean you can change the world right if you dedicate yourself in the right way that’s good advice I like that on that same note what’s the best advice you’ve ever received wow okay so it’s from a book it’s it’s probably not the best advice I can’t put anything in terms of the best but there’s one springs to mind right now and I find that I relate very well to people that read the same book at the same time it’s called rich dad poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki right and loads of people read it. So I read it during my gap year. So the first thing I did, I left, I left school, I got my A levels and everything. And I thought, what do I want to be? I want to be successful as a businessman, as an entrepreneur. And I read all about like stock market investing. And it just seemed really boring. And like, you know, I’d read all that. But the big thing at the time was property. And so I read this book and you know, in it, it says, so you can go and you can work or you can work to build something, right? And it, and they call it a passive income stream

1:00:08 And all of this, but the point was that instead of doing something linear where you, you know, you have a bit of an increase and a bit more of an increase and so on, you build something that scales exponentially. And in the book, it was all about properties. So you know, you buy some investment property, wait for the rental income, you buy another one and so on and so forth. And actually that was my first business. That was what I did.

1:00:26 And then I create an estate agent out of that. And I did lots of property related stuff. But that concept of building something that’s scalable exponentially, not just having a a linear path through life, where at the end of it, you’re, you know, maybe 40 times or, you know, whatever 40 increments more than you were. What I want is to be able to do a thousand X, right? I mean, people have shown that that’s possible. And using that you can then take that to the next step. So, you know, look at Elon Musk, he did a software company, quite a generic software company and made lots of money. Then he did a massive PayPal life changing software company. And now he’s doing $3 billion life changing companies, Like that that is the kind of thing that I want to do. I never had such a person In my life there were no Elon Musk’s at the time But that book that I read just put me on a path of not thinking about anything linear Just thinking about how to get to a thousand X in a very short amount of time. I like that That’s very good The last part of that question is to the 20 year old listening to us right now on iTunes watching us on YouTube What advice do you give to them? You know, they want to get into the tech sector They want to be like you someday. What do you tell them?

1:01:32 I guess don’t be the one entrepreneur, right? So don’t do the 42 tasks like I did. Don’t think, yeah, I’m gonna build this, it sounds quite cool, people will come, I’ll get investment, that’s just not how it works. I think maybe this is just my personal approach, but I like to learn from people who’ve really done it. And so, and everything now is available, right?

1:01:51 So when I was 20, on the internet, you couldn’t find stories about how to create a startup. You didn’t have blogs. Right now, anybody who’s got a successful startup, most of them are blogging about it. This is how I’ve done it, this is why I’m doing it. That information’s out there.

1:02:04 So before you go off and spend two, three years on an idea for a website, a social network for cats, that’s happening, someone’s doing that now, I saw that recently, right? Before you go off and do that, maybe just have a look at how social networks were created, just compare that to your business model and see is this possible? And if it’s not, go and look around for a long time until you find a niche. And we think we found that with the metric. We spent a very long time doing that research until finally found that, yeah, this is what can be done.

1:02:31 So I just say that, you know, definitely jump in, but jump into the research. Don’t jump into making something because you think it will just work out. Good advice, man. There is so much info out there right now. It’s really hard to come up with much of an excuse if it comes to, like you said, doing your dill, do diligence, checking the market, even diet, exercise, there’s so much info out there.

1:02:50 And watch every episode of this show. Yeah, watch every episode of Silicone Reel at siliconereel.com. What did I miss, Colin? Tell me. And read ivanmazur.com, my blog.

1:02:58 There we go. I think we could be going on here forever. We haven’t even touched on your property sort of non tech business or you’re an author as well So you have to come back for London Real maybe yeah, yeah, I’ve never made that offer. I would love to I would love to thank Um, but yeah, yeah Um great, this was awesome. Um, thanks so much for the insight on this if they people want to get in touch with you What’s the best way Twitter? So any any social network? I literally have everything so Www.I’ve been miss or calm big email link on there. I post very rarely I post every two weeks, maybe something like that, so I don’t spam people.

1:03:32 It’s all about my journey. It’s all about my learnings from investing and running a metria and so on. And there’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Anything you can do, it’s all up there. Just hit me up.

1:03:43 Always happy to talk to some interesting people. Okay, awesome. We have our new Silicon Reel website coming up. It’s looking pretty hot, looking very fresh. So that’s happening.

1:03:52 We’re at Twitter at Silicon Reel. Support calling from November. Check out your Kickstarter or retweet that. Yeah, and a new website, when it comes out, you know, we’re going to be looking for more help, some guest blogs, stuff like that, so if that’s something that interests you, reach out and we’ll have a chat. Maybe Ivan will blog for us, or rip a little piece of his blog.

1:04:13 No, no problem. Okay, that’d be cool. Ivan, it’s a huge pleasure to meet you. You know, I saw your pictures of you at Eaton on the website, and I didn’t know what to expect, but actually, you’re okay. Thank you.

1:04:23 Thank you. That means a lot. I appreciate that. I really does. Thank you.

1:04:27 It says a lot about me, so as we say on the show, it’s about the people, thanks so much for coming, all the best. Thank you. Thanks for having me.