Jon Bradford - Fostering Innovation and Entrepreneurship through Techstars

Full transcript: Jon Bradford on London Real

0:00 In London, technology is the Silicon Roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation.

0:30 Locally filmed, locally sourced. Silicon Real. It’s about the people. Alright, I’m starting this off. You guys ready? Yeah. Okay.

0:44 Here we go. This is Silicon Real, the video podcast dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real, which is a similar format. We get three people in the room.

0:56 A lot of nonsense, see if we can figure some shit out. We’ve had guests like Tim Ferriss from the 4-Hour Workweek. We had Bruce Perry from the BBC series Tribe. We’ve even had drug smuggler Howard Marks in here. All good people. But we’re here to talk tech. My co-host today is none other than Mr. Max Keiser, who hosts the Keiser Report on the television channel Russia Today. He was formerly our guest on London Real, where we talk about, what, Bitcoins, Bernanke and Buffett. We had a lot of talk about it.

1:22 Yeah, and you were most recently here to talk crowdfunding now Maybe crowdfunding George out Galloway’s run for mayor and your new company start join You’re becoming quite a presence here in the silicon roundabout max. That’s right I bump into you sometime sometimes I’m becoming a presence a nuisance I don’t become a nuisance and around the silken roundabout area sometimes. I feel like you’re stalking me I don’t know. Yeah, the hockston grill. That’s my that’s my office. Then is that it’s great You get free web access, good coffee, the waiters are very surly, so I feel like I’m back in Paris, which I enjoy, and it’s great.

2:00 Thank you so much for being co-host today, I appreciate it, it’s good to have you here. Super. All right, our guest today is Mr. John Bradford, who is the managing director at Techstars, which is the number one startup accelerator in the world. Repeatedly.

2:12 Strong words. Strong words. I like that. companies with a free office space I think an initial seed investment maybe around $18,000 in exchange you take about 6% in the company and they do a 13 week boot camp program with absolutely in one of seven cities around the country and around the world you got Boulder you got San Francisco Austin London a lot right yes you’ve had how many companies come through your place in total across the board there’s now almost 300 in London we’ve just recently opened so we’ve the one he just started.

2:43 So we’ve just finished 10 teams and we’re on the lookout for 10 more. Okay, awesome. Welcome to Silicon Rail. Tom, thank you for having me. You’re very welcome.

2:51 Your name has been dropped recently by a lot of people. And I find when I’m, keep hearing someone’s name over and over, then sooner or later, they need to invite our show. Was there a swear word involved in that process? It’s like, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, John Bradford, John Bradford. And I was actually at a law firm this week, Taylor Wessing, you know.

3:04 Oh, my God. International law firm. And it wasn’t me. It’s completely unfounded. Really, I don’t know.

3:10 I was talking with guys, they’re very smart guys, they’re one of the few law firms to have a presence right here in Shoreditch. I think they’re right here on Great Eastern Street. And they mentioned you, Simon Walker, one of the partners there mentioned you, and we were talking about the bubble, the first tech bubble. I was actually part of that. I was here as a broker in the city of London.

3:28 I was 27 years old, this is 1999, I was doing okay, not great. And I got an offer to be the CFO of a dot-com startup in New York City called luxuryfinder.com. We had 15 million in funding from like all the hot names in the Hamptons, like Leon Black and all these crazy people, and I went there and knew nothing about what I was doing. Working in the city is not the same as being a CFO. Have you ever played top trumps?

3:50 Is top trumps a UK thing or a US thing? This is like a bluffing game? Yeah, yeah, so I can beat that. So I was the CFO of a startup in London that raised $25 million, and equally, it had never been heard of before. It was called paperx.com, and it wasn’t a porn.

4:06 Okay, what year? 2000, we raised $25 million in six weeks from the first point we announced it. This was first quarter 2000, right? This was, it was the week before Christmas, we went out to raise money and they had closed and the money was in the bank by the end of January. In 2000?

4:25 In 2000. Right, okay, because a year later, you couldn’t have done the finance. In 2001, in March 2001, I switched the lights out. Yeah, because that was the bubble, because the top of the NASDAQ was like March or June of 2000? June because we went from 0 to 85 people and then about six weeks later we were 30. Okay. And clearly like Soho Square is the place that you really want to start a startup. We were talking earlier about about cost of startups but I remember when I was part of this whole crazy thing I remember getting a magazine like Wired or Fast Company and you go through the magazine and there was like twice as many ads as copy. There were these full color ads of all these and the thing was like an inch thick. Do you remember the conferences? It’s the only thing I refer back to I really think conferences then actually had proper swag bags like you had tickets for Concord and you had like three bags to put inside the bag that you had already turned up with and it sounds like it feels like I’ve been cheated now you go to a conference and you end up with one of these linen things with three things inside yeah well that’s interesting question let me ask let me ask a question good you the IPO money that was raised during that time as you point out, it went into a lot of things like promotion and swag and it didn’t go into the technology actually in a lot of cases. What about today is that similar to what you see today? I think the whole world is a very

5:46 Different place. It’s exceptionally lean. I think the whole, we did some math, so the 25 million dollar startup, we reckon, I did some math with the CTO about a year ago, to do that startup today that would be about a million dollars a million okay so so there’s a huge disparity in terms of the amount of money required so so going back to the late night early the late 90s yeah dot coms were started and they had to build technology from scratch they build applications from scratch they went to an integrator and technology integrator absolutely we we spent a huge amount of money with a I can’t even remember who the integrator was but we built it and then six months later threw it away because it was rubbish right now contrast that today to get your point about costs, these new technologies, they’re basically plugging together existing off-the-shelf technologies, remixing them, launching them.

6:39 So the cost, so you’re saying the cost has dropped by, it sounds, from what you just said, by 99%. Absolutely, not far away from that. I regularly say that to people, so they get really excited. So I was, there was a second startup after the first one, which raised another $25 million. And they kind of go, you raised $50 million and say, in real money, that’s about $2 million today.

6:57 Because it feels like it’s just, unless you were there, you have no appreciation of, like, it was a big sum, but how much did Webfan raise? A Webfan, it was here at hundreds of millions, right? It was $300 million as their seed round. Set up all that grocery delivery company, right? And it failed badly.

7:15 Okay. So you’re in Techstars, you see companies every day, I think you accept like 1% of the candidates that apply. And at first, that doesn’t seem like a lot of money that you offer, but you’re saying you don’t need much these days to get a minimum viable product. Yeah, I mean the reality is, coming back to our point about money coming down, is the barrier to entry historically was you had to go and find the right people to give you a lot of money. So the cost has completely collapsed.

7:41 Now if you look alongside that, you’ll see that historically you’ve always needed to know the right people, the contacts, the know-how, the expertise, who are the people you need to be speaking to. That in some respect has increased in value over time. But as a total proportion, so if I described like 25 years ago, or 25 years ago, 10 years ago, that was worth a million dollars, and the cash was 25. Today it’s still a million dollars, and the startup costs a million.

8:08 So the proportion by which the intangible value of the know-how, the expertise, is actually increasingly more important. And by the way, that cost is continuing to collapse, and I don’t know quite how far that will go, but it effectively trends towards zero. And so therefore, actually, the need for money, money is important just to some extent with MVPs and technologies like that to just get the things started, to keep the lights on, to feed the people.

8:38 And actually, a minimum viable product. So build your first prototype. A minimally viable product? A minimally, a minimal, I think. Minimally viable product?

8:46 Yeah, exactly. What is that? So what is that? That is essentially enough to prove that there is actually a real product or a market for what you’re trying to do. What is the threshold for that?

8:55 In what sense? How do you know if it’s been, the value has passed a minimally valuable threshold? It’s a number of users. When somebody says, yes, I like that. And sometimes actually what people mistake is, people believe that you have to build technology to prove that there’s a product that somebody wants.

9:13 Actually there are other ways of proving that and that might be just physically going and getting people’s faces. And actually spending time or doing clipboard surveys or whatever might be the case. The idea that actually you need to build technology first and then, because this is a big European US thing, so the US are extremely good at let’s sell it first and if somebody likes to buy it, we’ll build it. And there’s a really good example. The examples they give in kind of the general scheme of things is you put up a Big Muck website, you say I’ve got this really cool service, you really need to sign up, you do the sign up process and then it comes through and it takes your credit card and you put in your details and then you get to the other end and it says, actually, sorry, we haven’t built this yet, but when we have, we’ll take the money off your credit card.

10:00 So there’s a proof point that actually somebody wants that product enough that they’ll put the money where their mouth is. So that’s a really, that’s actually quite a common thing that Americans and the technology scene are actually using as a proof point, yeah? Europeans tend to be a little bit more shy, you already know this, and they tend to be a little bit more reserved and stare at their feet a little bit more when they go to a nightclub. And what they’re more likely to do is, let’s build it first and let’s try and sell afterwards.

10:30 And you know that more often than not, actually building stuff and what you want and what they want are normally two different things. So you say Europeans are more like that. Europe is quite a large region with a lot of variations. And certainly Britain is very different than continental Europe. So how do you see that play over those between Britain and continental Europe, or is there no difference?

10:51 I think there’s a big, well, what’s the answer to that? I think Europe is a very old continent. It’s been around for a lot longer than, say, for example, the US. So I think there’s a lot closer ties between how old is America? 240 years?

11:06 240 years. So how many generations would you describe that? 14. 14. So in 14 generations, you have built everything that you’ve got today.

11:18 So at some point, there’s normally somebody within the family who’s actually started their own business. When you’ve got something like the Romans did 2,000 years ago, you’ve got a few more generations. So as a product in Europe, we have a lot more people who work for other people than they start their own businesses. And so, I mean, your point is that we just culturally are not set up to start our own businesses because we’ve been around so much longer and we’ve built enough infrastructure and enough kind of corporates.

11:49 So I think the age of any jurisdiction, I think, actually has an impact upon the number of entrepreneurs in the community. It’s probably true. Max, you look at financial markets all day. Does this feel bubbly at all, the tech sector in London, or tech sector in general? I think it does feel kind of bubbly.

12:04 I like it. I’ve just come in the last six months or so last year, and coming into this area and talking to people, and it has a lot of great energy, I think, the young, this generation coming up right now. I think they are very hungry. I think Mark Zuckerberg has had a key. Is it not like the smallest bubbles in the world?

12:24 I think big bubbles. They’re like the little frothy ones that come around the edge of a glass. I think the Mark Zuckerberg phenomenon has galvanized a new generation. I think this new generation of 20-somethings around the world are really disgusted with themselves that one of their fellow 20-somethings can be $10 billion richer than they are, or something that any one of them could have come up with. I think in their guts and in their hearts, they’re repulsed at themselves, they’re self-hating.

12:51 This comes up all the time on the show because we think people want to get into this industry because they want to be rock stars. No. And it’s bullshit. I know. What’s the typical exit?

12:59 Seven to 10 years, it takes hard work. I mean, you must deal with these people all the time. They want to come in with you, they want to exit in a year. Have you heard of a one-a-peneur? No.

13:09 What’s that term? I want to be an entrepreneur. Oh, a one-a-peneur. So in any kind of, as you describe in the cycle of bubbles, there was a generation that come out and go, oh, yeah, we want to be entrepreneurs. That’s a one-up-nur.

13:21 And if you ask the question of an entrepreneur, most of them kind of go, I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m just doing my thing. We had, when I originally started my programs, I created this small survey for a bunch of entrepreneurs. The first one was like, so when did you first figure out you were an entrepreneur? And some of them said, am I?

13:42 Other people tell me I am, I just don’t believe, I don’t think of it myself, I just build stuff. I build my own business. And that’s the people you want? Those are the people that we want. That just naturally gravitate toward building businesses rather than like, I’m not trying to be a hipster or I’m not trying to be a mod or a rocker.

14:01 It’s not a thing, it’s something you are, you’re not. It’s not something you aspire to be. Yeah, no, I think that’s probably a better way of like, you know, separating wheat from chaff. Levels, small bubbles and big bubbles. Yeah, you know, let me hit you with a question.

14:16 We always try to hit people with a bit of devil’s advocate. I’m sure you got one, Max, but I’m gonna hit you with one. Is the world too, is it over accelerated? Is it over incubated? You know, we’ve had Y-Res in here.

14:27 We’ve had BizSpark, which is Microsoft’s unit. We see all of the, you know, FinTech Innovations Lab and this and this and this. Is it overdone? I mean, this is something you guys have been doing for many, many, many years. Do you see these other, like, especially like a telephonic or a Microsoft, get involved and you’re like, look, we’ve been doing this, we don’t need you here.

14:44 Does it hurt you, does it help you? A corporates or acceleration or? I guess both. So I think the biggest, so in the world that I exist in, I want smart people to get over the bad ideas and get into good ideas. So the idea of somebody standing around for 12 months in their own time, trying to do stuff without any feedback.

15:08 I mean, what we do is essentially just spin up feedback loops much, much more rapidly. And so what we actually discover is most people, the first thing that they wanna do is not necessarily a thing they end up doing. So how do you move people through the cycle much, much faster? And actually, as a community or as a country or whatever you wanna describe it, is there is latent potential within any culture of a certain amount of entrepreneurs, yeah? So I think there’s a finite number of entrepreneurs in any given country, yeah?

15:38 So what you want to do is say you’re a genuine entrepreneurial, let’s get you doing the good stuff faster, rather than wasting a lot of time burning, spinning your wings, whatever you want to describe it. So therefore, you do that and we do that using other entrepreneurs. So that’s the big difference. So if you want to talk about corporates, they do have things to add, but one of the things that we spend a lot of our life doing is, so my funding essentially comes from professional investors and angels.

16:07 Being entrepreneurs. We use entrepreneurs to help the entrepreneurs in the process. So it’s a very, it’s a horrible way of describing it, but it’s by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. And it’s almost like you’re looking back retrospectively and saying, you know what, I made all of those mistakes. I don’t want you to have to repeat them or have to go through them.

16:26 This is what I would do now. So it’s kind of how you, it’s a good way of spinning up the ecosystem much, much more rapidly. Max, what are you feeling like, I mean, you’re, you’re in the middle of, of making your startup, it’s going to start, I think, in January. What do you find is the hardest thing? Is it getting the right people? Is it getting the right mentors? Like, are getting the right contacts in the industry? What, developers?

16:46 I would say the biggest challenge in this space is coming up with a viable product plan and information architecture, like the documentation that goes into it, that is the scaffolding upon which you build and go forward upon to avoid the dreaded scope creep. The idea You’re going off of the main thoroughfare of what you’re trying to develop. So finding people that can manage a project, project managers, I’ve always found to be the most difficult person to find.

17:15 There’s great technologists, people who can create programs and do things like this, but they’re not necessarily good project managers. Finding a good project manager, however, is worth 10 good technologists, or whatever the ratio is. But I think that’s… And fortunately, I have found a couple of people that really fit the bill, so I’m pretty happy about that. Is that story you hear a lot?

17:37 See, I would argue something slightly different. I think, actually, in London today, one of the biggest problems is there’s a lack of good technical resource. Now, it might be product or project guys, but there’s not a lack of, as I described earlier, one-up earners. It’s kind of the BD guys. There’s like, I mean, you know, those guys running around All Street today.

17:57 But actually, the thing which is you lack is the capacity to actually build interesting things and deliver things on time. Yeah, I think we’re talking about the same thing, just in terms of managing a project and having deliverables and delivering those things on time. Ideas are really cheap, but it’s actually delivering a product. Execution and delivering is hard to find people who can do that. And I think that’s readily recognized across the board, both by other entrepreneurs and government and things, and it’d be interesting to see where they come back in terms of what’s the solution to, because we spend a lot of our life trying to import talent from, whether it’s Estonia or Romania or Bulgaria, whatever might be the case.

18:38 But we still haven’t, we’ve got, what’s happened, and I know you guys know this already, is over the last 12 or 18 months, there’s definitely been an increased activity around startups here, and the argument that actually seed capital is now a lot more available than it was because of tax breaks in the UK. But you suddenly have talent, really good ideas, you’ve got money, but then there’s this gap of like, I now need to employ another four people, I just can’t find those four people that actually need to be able to address that problem. Let me ask you, Silicon Alley in New York was always the runner up in the start come startup space and was really kind of treading water for a number of years.

19:21 And then within the last 24 months, I would say, it’s exploded, right? So you’ve got these billion dollar startups coming out. So it was just a matter of getting a certain critical mass and then boom, it became huge. So in London, you’ve got a front row seat. Is it something like this in the works?

19:36 This is critical mass coming where suddenly, boom, a billion dollar startup pops up, and then it’s suddenly like, they’re on the map and off the races. So I think the answer to your question is absolutely. But I don’t think they pop up. I think they already exist. They’re just not mainstream enough for people to recognize that they’re coming through.

19:53 So to get to a billion dollars, even Mark Zuckerberg, who did an awesome job at Facebook, It took them seven years to float a business. These things just don’t, I mean, they might feel like they’re overnight, they don’t. So you’re absolutely right, with New York, these things have suddenly become much more, I think the word you’re looking for is mainstream. It’s part of the public, just the ecosystem, sorry, it’s not even the ecosystem, it’s just mainstream.

20:17 Let me ask you this, so now that New York is a big, let’s say, rival to Silicon Valley, because New York is culturally a very different place than California, and it seems as though talent’s actually being pulled from California to New York, from kind of the Stanford space, more East Coast, is that true? Or do you see that happening? And could it happen to London, where somebody’s saying, you know what, I kind of want to be in London because culturally it suits me, and so you might see just a cultural backdrop be an influencing factor.

20:48 So I don’t think we’re actually drawing people away from Silicon Valley, but I think people are making decisions not to move to Silicon Valley to start their own businesses. I think that’s a real difference. And actually saying, I think that’s one of the big ethos is around tech stars, which is you should be able to build your business wherever you are. And that’s hence, actually the point being is we’re actually everywhere apart from Silicon Valley. So we’re in, we started in Boulder and we went to Boston, New York, Seattle, Austin, London.

21:17 So you’re making a conscious effort to stay out of there. We’ve made a conscious issue. I think David Cohen, the founder, basically says we love working in ecosystems with a chip in the shoulder that actually wanna not be in the valley, but actually wanna be able to do the stuff right there on the ground with themselves. Like Max says, are we missing something in London? I mean, are we missing that PayPal effect where someone has a huge billion dollar exit and then those 10 entrepreneurs take their 50 million and reinvest it?

21:42 Totally, and that’s not just a London thing, that’s a European thing. Because the conceptual idea of options and things like that has just not been pervasive within the general ecosystem. So when businesses have exited and made lots of money, there hasn’t been this second order effect. You wanna create people who have enough money to pay the mortgage, but not enough money to retire. Because actually when you paid for the mortgage and all you have is your personal living costs, then it creates a whole different dynamic in terms of like, I just need to have enough to feed myself, but then I can take bigger risks about like doing something interesting.

22:18 And you’ve maybe had the back seat in terms of you might not have been the founder, but you might have been one of the first 10 employees, you know what it feels like to be in a business that grows. And the big difference, and there’s a really good example of that, in the northeast of England, there’s an organization called Sage, which was, and I think technically still is, the biggest software company floated in the UK. And 99% of the shares were still held by the founders when it floated.

22:45 They just, because the business started in the 80s, and only started making progress in the 90s, The idea of giving away shares to employees just seemed like alien. So I think there’s certain things in the system which will spin up, and you’re absolutely right. Until we have that generation, I see that generation coming through with huddle, I see that with Moichi Monsters, I’ll see that with, there’s a lot of other businesses that that middle management section will benefit and be able to pocket two or three million, or enough to actually say, I’m good enough to retire, but I’ve got enough to start taking risks next time out.

23:20 How many companies are on your radar, like on a daily basis? I mean, like, that you try to get involved with, hook them up, or try to grow their presence, even after the boot camps? So, selfishly, so I work in the assumption that I will help anybody who kind of reaches out to me. Uh-oh. Well, it’s fine.

23:36 People heard that, and you get a lot of emails. Well, as I just, no, I mean, genuinely, I was talking this morning at Demo Day, and I said, look, it’s dead easy, my name’s John, J-O-N, and I work for a company called techstars.com. If you can’t guess my email address, you don’t really deserve to get my attention. That’s the tension. It’s a hurdle.

23:54 It’s not a very big hurdle, but it’s amazing how many people, I mean, this is the big cultural difference between the U.S. and Europe. Having that conversation in Europe doesn’t incentivize somebody to email me. There’s a significant proportion of people who go, oh, you may not have to email you. You won’t just help me.

24:11 And you laugh like it’s the smallest hurdle in the world. But it’s amazing how many Europeans or London-based people will not reach out and do that. And maybe it’s this cultural thing. I mean, I have this big thing which is, the Brits did pretty well at one point in terms of world domination and the commonwealth and had the empire and stuff. Did pretty well as well.

24:33 Spoken like a true Irishman. Yeah, we’re pretty stupid. There’s a whole different story behind that as well. But what’s interesting about that is… You built a Titanic though.

24:42 Yeah, it didn’t go very far. In Belfast. Jesus. You had to bring it up, right? Yeah, why?

24:48 Well, it was okay. But what’s interesting is, I think what’s ended up happening is the Brits by their very nature are very diplomatic. The English are exceptionally diplomatic. When you run an empire that big, there’s so many politics that diplomacy is actually one of the most important parts. But actually, I personally believe that what that means is the way the Brits actually speak, all of the language is very coached. We might do that. We could do that. We should do that. I mean, Americans have a very affirmative… The language is very much affirmative.

25:20 Yeah. Well, I mean, I know… And it’s this trickle-down effect. It’s about the emails again, which is, well, I might email you. It’s like Americans would say, I will email you.

25:29 I’m almost surprised that when I’m invited to be on the BBC, they send an email saying, We would like to call you about and discuss the possibility of perhaps having you on the show if it works within, maybe, right? And then you call them up and they’ll say, we’re thinking about having you on this show and this is what we’re thinking about talking about and are you in London? And now contrast that with a New York network, they’ll say, please be at the studio at 3 p.m. to talk about so and so.

25:57 Thank you. Click. Yeah, exactly. But it’s amazing. I think there are subtleties within the system that it’s not about money and it’s not about engineering talent.

26:09 There are culturally things that actually have to change. And it’s not just like a British thing, there’s a whole bunch of Europeans which are exactly like that. But isn’t there also a political element? I mean, in the UK, obviously, there’s a huge political divide between right now being played out with the so-called benefits cutbacks and benefits and the outcry from sectors of the society that feel that they’re having their benefits cut, and they deserve the state to be providing these benefits, and the state is saying, we want you to be more entrepreneurial.

26:41 Going back to the whole factor of revolution, the state is taking this position. There is a political element to this as well, where people almost are reluctant to be entrepreneurs because they think they’re becoming political sellouts. They’re forsaking their roots that go back to the socialist roots. This is a huge country. Are you suggesting that Europe are just a bunch of communists?

27:02 There’s a huge socialist, you know, and communist political baggage that a lot of people still carry that seems to interfere with their notions of just becoming entrepreneurs. Yeah, but does politics not just interfere with entrepreneurship in general? I mean, I always describe, and I’ll probably get shot down for this at some point in the future. saying, we talked about why is this happening today. Actually, one of the things that actually, and this will be thrown in my face at some point in the future, we should be thankful of the bankers completely blowing up the economic system. Because actually, the reason why, to some extent, entrepreneurship is a necessary evil is because there was a meltdown four or five years ago.

27:46 Which kind of brings us back to something here in London, which is financial technology and FinTech. Because clearly, they seem to be the world leader in this area, FinTech. they lead Silicon Valley. They lead Silicon Valley. They’re the number one in the world.

28:01 Or is that a perception that’s misguided or is that true? It’s absolutely true. And actually, if we were having this conversation a week’s time, I might be able to tell you something which was profoundly interesting about the need to do fintech businesses in the city of London today. What are the success stories? I mean, we’ve had transfer-wise in here. We’ve talked about Wonga when you were here. Are there other ones that are behind the scenes? Stripe, I guess that’s kind of more American. That’s an American. Actually, that’s Irish.

28:25 Yeah, John Collison, our guest, second guest, exactly him and his brother. I think this, I think what’s interesting is coming back to this is a seven year span. And even like Tavid with transfer wise, he’s, he’s one to year three or four of the business. So I think there’s a huge number of businesses which are coming through, which have really strong potential. But in any given day, it’s really hard to call which ones are going to come through. But I think that’s That’s a big difference when you walk around All Street.

28:55 If you kind of go back, the ones that come up time and time again are the businesses that started six or seven years ago. So there’s kind of a whole spectrum which are gonna come through in the intervening period. So I wouldn’t wanna call anybody out. And besides FinTech, it comes up a lot here, as you would expect, because we’re in London, but besides FinTech, what else do you see London winning in as opposed to the Valley of Common? I don’t think we win.

29:20 I think everybody wins. really stupid and couch and political is so I have to I have to but you’re not a socialist I’m not okay but nobody wins nobody wins from Belfast so he’s half American yeah exactly so I see in fairness I regularly say to people I’m completely a political having been born and brought up in Belfast I have a complete distrust of politicians that was ingrained into me I could see that And I have and I have and I say this it’s kind of a cringe when I say it because I got friends who Who’ve actually fought in wars to have the vote. I’ve never voted in my life And actually I will probably go to my grave never voting because you and Russell Brand I actually just think it encourages them. I mean if we had an option, which was none of the above I would start voting Yeah, I see make voting in the UK compulsory And then the bottom one at the bottom says none of the above and see how many people vote for actually I don’t want to vote for somebody. I agree with that. There’s a couple countries have yeah Australia does that you can actually be thrown in this into jail if you don’t vote right But you have a choice of none of the above do you I don’t know about that I just I think typically you have to vote for one of them and what they do is they They score the card as a as a protest statement, which is I don’t want to vote for any of these people. Okay, sorry So what was the question?

30:43 I am curious because what we’re sitting here, we’re rubbish in the Europeans and the socialists and I agree with a lot of that, but is there something that London does better? I mean, I want to say one thing about the drink abouts that you go to is it’s not everyone I talk to isn’t pitching me and isn’t giving me their card. It’s not like this really hardcore way that the Americans do business and there is something nice about, you know, that it’s more of a community.

31:06 You’ve been here too long. Yeah, I know. Max, help me out here. I’ve gone native. So your point is well made and actually in fairness coming back to your question about New York There’s actually I I think that London is much more analogous to New York than to Silicon Valley or anywhere else and I think in some respects They will become rivals or they’ll actually become very strong partners with each other So I think media and London is really strong and it is in New York. I think ad tech is really strong in both parts I think fashion and creativity is really strong in both locations locations, Fintech, New York, London are also very strong on those two.

31:43 So I think there’s actually, they’re almost like kissing cousins, whether they’d like to admit it or not. And I think a lot of those things that we described, actually the Valley is not particularly good at. Like some of the biggest entertainment businesses in the world, if we kind of exclude people like Universal and Disney and the old school, actually have come out of Europe, whether it’s Spotify, Last FM. So there are things that Europe are actually…

32:09 Post-production here in London is doing all the big post-production apparently for Hollywood movies. Exactly. So I think it’s rather than we’re better, we just do, well actually we are better at certain topics than others because we have an industry, it’s not to do with the technology, it’s actually the background in the industry and the sectors that exist are strong sectors and industries in the country and the question is can the tech community actually or can those communities themselves pull together and actually do interesting things. I actually think FinTech is actually a really interesting space and you talked about it. Transfer-wise is a really good example. WONGA is another financial sector business and there will be a series of them. I mean I’ve seen a few. Damian from Judil. Judil is another really strong startup so. What about you? What if you had to sign like an accelerator NDA and you couldn’t do would you do anymore and you had a chunk of capital is and you had to pick one sub vertical what would you go into? So I already do two other startups okay in my spare time because I’ve just got so much time in my hands so I actually run I’m a founder of a business called F6S which is essentially if you apply to an accelerator today I think we now cover off something like 95% of all accelerators actually use that platform as an application process so that was born out of my personal frustration when I was running accelerators which was

33:37 Actually you get a thousand applications how do you whittle them down to ten at certain points and so we built a whole bunch of mechanics to make that really easy and collaborative and blah blah blah so that that we did and what’s interesting about that is there’s nice something like over a thousand accelerators around the world. I mean, there’s a massive number, because it’s so cheap to do, and actually to spin up. And all of the real value is in the know-how and the expertise.

34:05 So that’s kind of one thing I do do. The other one, oh, and the other story I tell about that is when there’s a gold rush around accelerators, what you want to do sells spades, yeah? So it’s kind of, we’re selling infrastructure, we don’t even sell it, we give the infrastructure away for free. The second one is, and it only just launched today, is a European tech blog called tech.eu, with a guy called Robin Walters, who used to work for Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and then at NextWeb.

34:35 Because one of the big personal frustrations I’ve always had is, much as I hate saying this, I think one of the core elements of a really strong ecosystem is having a really good media. And I was talking to the guys from The Economist about this yesterday. And I personally feel that in Europe, we genuinely don’t have anybody to stand up and represent European tech businesses in the media because NextWeb and TechCrunch are very West Coast-centric. So that was something that I’ve kind of gone away and fixed.

35:07 So I tend to think of opportunity, I think I spend my life thinking about what are the practical bits in the system that might be fixing. And what did you do? In other words, I understand you, TechCrunch and these folks are very West Coast-centric, so you did what? So Robin was the European editor for Next Web, and they had a reorganization in the middle of this year. And so we decided that we would start a European tech blog.

35:32 Which is? Called tech.eu. OK, so tech.eu. And so how long has it been up and running? What time is it?

35:40 So it’s a brand new session. It’s about three hours old. OK, so this is this. So we’ve been planning this, and it actually launched at 2 o’clock this afternoon. This is Friday, the.

35:48 So popping out of the digital womb is this new startup as almost in real time. In real time. So people are seeing that, like they’re in the operating table, and they’re seeing it being birthed, like aliens. So you think it’s undercover, the tech sector here. So what’s interesting is each of the different, so Europe is gonna be different.

36:07 Actually, Europe’s a lot different from the US. So historically, the US has been very focused around Silicon Valley. And what’s happened over the last two years, you talked about it with New York, is there’s been an eruption of tech hubs being two words, not one, across the US. And whether that’s Austin, or Boston, or New York, or Seattle, or wherever, there’s suddenly this like, you can do startups anyway. You don’t have to get in a plane and fly to the west coast.

36:34 And Europe is very, very similar in terms of, it’s got London, it’s got Berlin, there’s interesting things happening in Paris, in Stockholm, in Helsinki. But what’s also interesting is the media is very regionalized as well. And so therefore, if you actually want to know anything about European startups today, it’s really hard to find somewhere which is a node or a portal or whatever. So tech.eu is essentially what we’ve done is we don’t plan on it being a large organization, but the idea behind it is we want to have two or three really good journalists that actually write original content.

37:11 They might only write two or three articles a day, but what we’re going to try and do is aggregate some of the content from each of these local media outlets and actually float up and curate some of the best pieces but it’s almost like to say if you’re an American and you’re looking across and you say I have to read something about what’s going on in Europe today there’s a natural hub to actually start to glean some of that content so that’s kind of what we’re playing around with. Whether it works or not I don’t know but it’s worth trying. Max what do you like in London besides fintech? I would not say that I’m the best really I’m still kind of new to it you know my I’m just exploring what’s going on here so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say I’m the best. So what do you see being different from here from New York given I just said that all that they’re the same thing but maybe slight timing slightly yeah I think it’s just six months to twelve months before it really breaks out in a big way so that’s I find that exciting, because it’s going to be, it’s always exciting to be part of a big wave like that.

38:12 It’s going to be longer, two years, three years. Yeah, but since I’m part of it, I like to, I’m optimistic, you know, I’d like to think that I will be helping that happen. In dog years. Do you find that you doing what you’re doing right now is start showing that it’s easier to do, say in London, that if you were doing something similar in New York, there might be more people to do it. I know Courtney Boyd Myers was here, it was hard to get any idea out because there’s There’s so much going on in the media and so many ideas and so many companies.

38:39 Do you think it’s easier to start something here? Well, I’ve always been involved in FinTech in some way, or I like to call it FinTech Media. So I’ve been doing that for 15 years in one form or another, going back even longer than that. So when I came here and started meeting up with people, there was already a huge FinTech infrastructure. And I met a lot of folks that were doing very, very high-end projects for banks in the city with very big budgets and doing very exciting projects. But they were not necessarily had a startup budget in mind. But then kind of digging down deeper into it, found people that were ready to break out and get more entrepreneurial. But in that space, I think there’s a lot of talent.

39:26 What’s the biggest mistake you see startups making? Staring at their feet. Okay. And we want to be rock stars. No, but we’re staring at their feet. What do you mean?

39:35 Not making that phone call, not pitching, what, what? Not getting out and not talking to people. Do you think it’s about meeting people, ultimately? People are, I mean, one of my teams recently that went through Techstars, they literally stayed, they buried themselves in a bedroom for two years and built this awesome piece of tech. And you kind of turn up and you say, so what do you usually think of it?

39:57 So we haven’t launched it yet. It’s like well, it isn’t finished yet. It goes back to the artistic comments. Yeah So I think I think this is this is this is this is this is the big struggle that that Europe has which is Americans are very naturally salespeople Whereas Europeans are we want to polish stuff before we give it to anybody and maybe that’s a an education system as much as Anything to do. I mean somebody said to me and tell me if I’m wrong that actually kids at high school people actually are taught to do presentations. They’re not taught to do presentations but regularly have to stand up in front of their peers and do presentations in high school.

40:37 I don’t know, is that true? I remember Show and Tell when I was a kid but there’s debate calls. Show and Tell is something my three-year-old now does, but it’s not something I did. When I was in high school we had a closed circuit television network and people were doing their own TV shows and that was broadcast to the entire school because it was right next to New York City and somebody’s father worked at NBC and they were upgrading their studio and they took the old studio and stuck it in the high school.

41:04 So then suddenly people had access to state of the art broadcasting technology and started making shows. So I think just the proximity to New York and media is why you see huge media spill over into the environs of New York City. So maybe it is an American thing. There’s a total lack of salespeople in Europe. People are, are very, very, I mean, this has to be, we’ve never rubbished Europe before so much on this, it’s okay, it’s me, it’s not you.

41:30 Yeah, you’re European. Yeah, that’s fine. I’m Irish. Yeah, all right. We hang off the edge of Europe, yeah?

41:36 Yeah, you have the Euro, so actually you don’t in Belfast. Not in the Belfast, we don’t. Well, in Wall Street, right, there’s this saying, ready, aim, fire, yeah, or ready, fire, aim. Yeah. Ready, fire, aim.

41:48 And then, so that, that was, you know, in Wall Street, just get the order first and then worry about, you know, the details later. You know, just get the order, get the order, get the order, get the order, and then worry about it later. So I think you don’t find that here so much. People are very, you know, they want to… I don’t see this as rubbishing it.

42:02 I think it’s kind of saying the unsayable. Most people recognize this in the environment, and they know that somehow they need to be much better at it themselves. So I don’t think, I don’t personally think it’s rubbishing it, I think it’s just saying something which already needs no one and exists in the system here. But there’s an industry around that British shyness, let’s say. Let’s talk about Four Weddings and a Funeral and Hugh Grant.

42:29 Yeah. That became a multinational huge hit because women fell in love with Hugh Grant, who was not the American over-selling guy, but the reserved fella. That became a stereotype, it became a type, and it was huge. And you see that playing throughout British marketing as Schweppes’ effort, or something. The understated sale is part of the sale.

42:55 I mean, they’re selling understatedness in an aggressive way. I’m just trying to work out who you’re going to find in the next 23 weeks, who is the Hugh Grant of the tech world. There’s a challenge for you. What happens when someone leaves your boot camp? Do you, are they out of the womb?

43:10 Do you literally kick them out or do you try to take them on a road show to get more funding? So the teams themselves physically stay in the same space. So the teams have access to the physical space we’re in for up to eight to nine months. So they don’t go anywhere. We like to try and keep them the same space to keep momentum within the organization.

43:30 I tend to run away and do other things in terms of trying to find the next 10 teams. But we create a support structure for the teams, part of this peer-to-peer support. But it really is like, at some point you gotta let them free and get on with things. But one of the things that we recognize is not whether it’s week two after the program, but is something that we feel that we need to do better at, which is supporting the teams beyond the program. One of the things that happens practically is they tend to raise additional funding.

44:01 So on average, the teams which actually participate in Techstars go on to raise about a million and a half dollars. So they get handed over to another entrepreneur or other investor. And so therefore, our job to some extent is done at that stage. We still act in their interest because we take exactly the same shares as the founders. We don’t take typical investor type shares.

44:23 So our personal approach is if you’re the founder, we have exact same shares as you. So you’re looking out for us and we’re looking out for you. And over a five or seven year period of a startup, the biggest problem is, I was going I was going to say lawyers, it’s not that far away, but you’re going to have a bunch of legals that happen in the system, and you can’t write in all of the clauses that you need to protect yourself. So the best way we’ve discovered is we just align ourselves with the founders, and that’s the best protective mechanism for us as shareholders.

44:57 Million and a half dollars on average? On average. That’s big. That’s a lot of money. And that’s across 300 businesses.

45:04 That’s not like 10 on average. So we’ve got pretty strong proof that it actually works. You’ve got the Midas touch over it, tech stars. It takes seven years, but there’s a few small gold mines in the middle of our portfolio, so we’re pretty happy about it. All right, I’ve got to hit you the question, which we hit everyone with here.

45:21 I might’ve hit you with this on Ax on London Real, but if you could make the phone call to the 20-year-old John Bradford and give that young man from Belfast a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do? Why the hell did you do a currency? As a job worker, that’s a degree. As you can tell, yeah, I’m a fully qualified chartered accountant with tax exams and all sorts of weird and wonderful things. I think what would I say is, why did it take me so bloody long to learn that actually I didn’t work in corporate environments very well?

45:50 I worked for Arthur Anderson for 10 years and they announced to me three weeks into my training and I said, you know what, you’re a pure, a P-U-R-E, and I said, what the hell’s that?” And he said, a previously unrecognized recruitment error. Jesus, nice, that’s harsh. Yeah, it wasn’t bad. I was there for a few more years afterwards. So I think the thing I struggled with was I kind of have a reverence and within a corporate structure, even with someone like Arthur Anderson, I seem to always be the stone in the shoe. And at that point, I just felt really odd. It just didn’t feel right. Having said that, I couldn’t be what I am today without having done all of the things I’ve done in the past, and that’s part of the rationale I do what I do and what I do today. Sorry, there’s too many doo-doo-doo-doo’s, is actually teaching people that they don’t need to go and work for a large corporate. It’s actually completely okay to actually just get out there and start your own business, and it’s not an odd thing, and it’s the most normal thing to do in the world.

47:02 Do you think they should do that straight out of school, or do you think you should go get some experience in a big company, go to Payne Weber when you’re a young kid, or go to the bank, that kind of thing. Do you think they should do that, or go straight in? On any given day I change my mind. Sometimes I actually think the person I am today is because I actually had a framework that I learnt to do a whole bunch of stuff. And it’s a bit like going to university, it’s the capacity to think within a framework and being able to give the freedom to actually do those things is actually valuable.

47:35 Going straight out of university and just being told to just go make it up. But then some people are just built that way. I mean, I’ve got a very good friend, you should interview him, a guy called Dwayne who ran Cashflow. And he tells an amazing story. I’m not even going to tell you the story, but get Dwayne on from Cashflow.

47:53 He’s just awesome. I would ask Dwayne to email me, but then he might, if he might not, if he’s European. Yeah. Oh, it’s okay. He’s a proper East End boy.

48:02 It’s actually just sold his business for, I don’t think I’m allowed to say, but a lot of money. Okay. What was I going to say? Advice to the 20 year old listening who wants to be part of Techstars or wants to get into this crazy business. What do you tell them?

48:16 What’s one thing that they should be doing? Doing it come what may. So what we spend our life trying to do is find people who are doing it and we can help them. We don’t want… It’s a bit like this weird thing around investment capital.

48:29 You don’t raise investment capital to start a business. You start a business and sometimes you need investment capital. Techstars is exactly the same thing. I don’t want people to join Techstars to start a business. I want Techstars to be there to help support them in a business that they’re growing already.

48:47 So the best thing they can do is just get on, build a kick-ass product and make a real business. And that’s the same, as I say, whether that’s tech stars or investment capital or VCs or angels. I think there is a real risk in today’s environment that people think it comes a different way. That’s the real problem with, whether you call it shark tying or most of the UK- Dragon’s Den. Dragon’s Den, which is…

49:11 So I know one of the guys who used to be on that program and he said, when I sat in one of the panels one day and I suddenly realized people were coming to me and saying I want your money to start a business, they said you’ve got it completely wrong. That’s just the wrong way of doing this stuff. And that’s why you take a small stake, 6% or 10%. Keep it low. So we want to just be enough so that we can make money for our investors, but we don’t get in the way. Okay. Awesome, John. Thanks so much for being here. I just wanted to get Max’s opinion. Have you changed your mind on Wongo or do you feel the same way, as you did a few weeks ago. There was a recent ruling here.

49:46 Well, they recently, because of my campaigning, they’ve had their business capped. Is it capped? They’ve had it capped. Is it over? Not over.

49:55 But it’s looking that way. They’ve been capped. Is that because of you? My campaign, I’ve taken full credit for it. So how many billions of dollars have you just taken off their share capital potential buy-in?

50:04 Well, I think of it more in terms of how many billions of dollars of people will not be impoverished by the predatory lending techniques of this scallywag. You’re bringing down the entrepreneurial- You really have been here too long. It’s socialism what you’re doing. You’re bringing them down. They were providing the service.

50:19 No? No, no, no, no. I liked Wonga. But clearly I hit a nerve because they’ve been capped. So next they’ll be kneecapped.

50:29 So either they reform or… That’s Belfast. Yeah, exactly. We go Belfast. Either you reform or we put a cap in the bath.

50:36 We send you to Belfast. That’s it. It’s a dangerous company to invest in because they’re worth a billion and now they’re probably Why not? Just a little piece of money. So it’s called risk.

50:44 Capitalism entails risk. You just want to be handed money with no risk? That’s what I don’t like about these bankers. I mean, you’re right. They don’t want to take risk.

50:50 They just want to bring money all day long. What’s the problem with you people? They haven’t floated yet. You can’t invest in them. No.

50:57 I just, it was a rough valuation, I guess, now if you want to, so. All right. So thank you for getting rid of Wonga, Max. Yeah. What else is on your hit list?

51:04 We’re getting rid of Western Union and a company in the UK called World First, which is a Forex market. So one of my teams has just recently completed Techstars, is actually going after Best Western. Best Western? No, that’s the wrong one. West Virginia.

51:21 West Virginia. That’s right. Because actually, you’re right. The average fee that they have is they take 10% of money’s transferred. Yeah.

51:30 Because it’s similar like payday loans. They just scalp the people that can’t afford to have bank accounts, right? There’s another one. You should have Lawrence on. Lawrence is awesome.

51:38 Okay. Who’s doing this? from Nigeria and actually the reason why he’s doing what he’s doing is because he’s been through that process of having to send money home to his mum who wasn’t particularly well. Yeah, the remittance business is ripe for disruption to say, to put it that way. Yeah, so you’re going after them as well.

51:57 Lawrence is trying to fix that one. Well sure, not personally but more as a collective. As a collective. Yeah. They’re a big collective of that collective.

52:07 They’re going out of business. All those businesses that are sending money using the techniques that they’re currently using are going to be out of business in three years. They’re going to all be gone. You know the finance world very well, Max. What else do you see?

52:20 Do you think foreign exchange is going to be taken away from the big banks and go into some type of fintech startup or other markets on top of that? Yeah, foreign exchanges and money wiring and all these services are directly in the cross shares of Bitcoin. So I was going to say to you, so do you do weekly predictions on what the price of Bitcoin is going to be the following week? Jesus, if we did, when Max was first on here, Bitcoin was like at a couple of hundred dollars. That’s right. That was six months ago. We got to a thousand. Yeah, it went over price of gold. Just a couple of that, you know, yesterday. Oh, what? One Bitcoin for one. One Bitcoin went over 1240, $1,240, over the price of gold.

53:03 But the Bitcoin, as a money transfer mechanism, somebody sent $150 million last week in Bitcoin. Their total cost was 39 cents. Was that CIA? It’s unknown who sent that money. How do we know that was sent?

53:18 Because it’s all the public letter. It’s all in the blockchain. You can see the transfers. And what? Then we had Iran agreed to drop all of its nuclear programs this week.

53:28 Is there something connected here? The cheapest. The strangest things ahead. The cheapest. What, Iran and the CIA?

53:33 Collaboration? What’s the good way? What never happened? Well, I mean, if you want to get into that kind of comparative game, I mean, let’s talk about HSBC. It’s an $8 billion money laundering operation for Mexican drug lords that they’ve been directly responsible for 60,000 decapitations in the last few years.

53:49 So who’s a terrorist, buddy? Who’s a terrorist? Hey, I’m not on the CIA. Who’s a terrorist? Who’s the terrorist here?

53:54 Be careful, Michael. Jump all over. Let me explain. So 39 cents to send $150 million. Now the cheapest any bank can offer that service of all the money center banks is $200,000.

54:04 So I mean, how are you going to compete with that? You can’t. So they’re going to have to radically reform or go away. And what’s your call on this latest price increase by Bitcoin? Does it help things?

54:13 Does it help the market? Yeah, it does. Because it gets people talking about it, it gets the media talking about it, it gets adoption rates higher. Clearly, it’s volatile. But the use of Bitcoin is exploding in China, it’s hitting India, and the remittance business So how valuable does the total population of Bitcoin have to be before it’s a proper currency? Or a tradable currency in a stable firm?

54:38 My guru on Bitcoin is a guy named Rick Focavigna. He was here two days ago, sitting there. He started the Swedish pirate party and he’s, the Time magazine’s hundred smartest guys in the world or in the running or something. And he says between two and five million dollars of Bitcoin is worth stable. Somebody said to me yesterday it had to be at least $100,000 per Bitcoin and to get to a certain liquidity level.

55:01 Yeah. Well, if it captures 1% of the Forex market, which it can do, that’s $100,000 per Bitcoin. But that’s the Satoshi, which is the 1,100,000th of a Bitcoin. I mean, then you’d be trading in these Satoshis, and you wouldn’t be trading in Bitcoin itself. Yeah.

55:17 So the number of outstanding Bitcoins, which is at about 10 million going to 21 million, that doesn’t even matter, does it? Since they’re infinitely divided. How long will it take to get to 21? It’s like another 100 years. Is it?

55:26 But that doesn’t even matter the number, because if you can divide it to whatever, it doesn’t really matter how much. That’s right. It’s divisible to quadrillions. So I was completely lost in this until somebody talked to me and said, actually, don’t think of it as a currency. Think of it as a commodity.

55:42 And think of it like gold. Yeah, I think that’s true. And it’s a tradable commodity and a very highly liquid commodity. Yeah, I think that’s true. But it’s like there’s a physical mass, and the word mining is not there for just a reason.

55:51 But it’s like, we have an asset, and what you’re having is basic economics, which is supply and demand. There’s an increasing amount of demand for a liquid asset, and there’s a finite amount of supply. So it’s only going to do one thing. The question tends to be, at what point does it flatten out? Yeah.

56:09 That’s right. So there’s a big guessing game, and a lot of different folks have different opinions on that. But I agree with you. You think of it more as a commodity. I think that I call it, like when I was on ITV this week, they said, what is a Bitcoin?

56:20 For the ITV audience. I said, well, it’s a precious number. You know what a precious stone is and a precious metal? This is a precious number. There’s very few of them, and they’re highly sought after. They take it from there.

56:31 There’s a Warren Buffett quote I read these days, and he said, gold is something that we pay people to dig out of the ground, so we can then take it and put it in a hole and pay people to guard it for us. That’s how he described it in a comment. But there is actually a cost of mining bitcoins. There is. There is.

56:47 Absolutely. it’s not that dissimilar. Yeah, but Warren, you know, gold is outperforming Berkshire Hathaway by a huge factor for the last 10 years, 15 years, up until the last two years. So as an investment, gold has been outperforming his vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway, rather being gold compounding at 22%, 23% up until recently anyway. So I mean, as an investment vehicle, it’s been outperforming Berkshire Hathaway.

57:10 So I’m not sure, you know, if I’m looking for outright rates of return, silver also, Number one return’s been silver over Berkshire Hathaway, so he’s just blowing smoke up of everyone’s ass. That’s why you’re here, Max, to tell us these things. Thank you. Max, I hope you don’t retire with all of your Bitcoin wealth. It’s a daily struggle.

57:28 I hope you stay around. You know, Rick was here, the pirate party guy, and he said that he predicts a future where the new wealthy oligarchs will be all of these tech geeks that got in on Bitcoin on the ground up. And instead of seeing like all these, you know, Russian money and Chinese money, you see all this geek money and they’ll be going around like living large and they’ll We’ll be running shit and we’ll be like, God damn it, it’s this whole paradigm that we didn’t think it existed.

57:49 And Max will be up there too. Well, we were the first media outlet to cover it. It’s three years ago, three years ago. And you’ve owned them for a lot longer. Yeah, we’ve been covering it.

57:58 I’ve owned them. But many people in this space, you know, one of the early adopters, I mean, if you put $30,000 into this three, three and a half years ago, it’s worth $100 million for $30,000. So I mean, a lot of these people. But why would you have put $30,000 into this three years ago? Because people who got it right away, like I went with Rick to this conference in Prague three years ago, and just the people in the room were complete converts to this idea, and they were accumulating these things.

58:31 And once you understand what it is and how it works, it’s really a shift in how you think and people accumulate them. So a lot of people have 100 million, not a lot, but 100 million dollars, 10 million dollars from virtually nothing, that’s a pretty common occurrence at this point. And of course every single day, you see millionaires popping out like bubbles out of a champagne bubble. That’s scary. Do you feel vindicated in some way, Max?

58:56 Of course I feel vindicated. I’d like to take, you know… In two weeks’ time, you’ll be a billionaire. Exactly. There will be a Bitcoin billionaire pretty soon.

59:06 I mean, the Silk Road guy, his stash, the guy accused of being the dread pirate. The alleged guy, even the ones that the FBI can’t hack, they’re worth half a billion. Half a billion. Yeah, Max made a good point, is that all the Bitcoins they seized from the Dread Pirate Roberts, if that is him, they can’t touch. That’s right, can’t hack it.

59:27 They can’t hack it, so it’s still out there somewhere. Right, so I think it’s not a coincidence. In the last couple of years, you’ve seen encryption play a big role politically with Edward Snowden. Is that kind of like, do you know when ships sink in the middle of the ocean and you create this bounty that you can go after? Is there an equivalent of actually going and finding those Bitcoins?

59:52 Is there bounty hunters for Bitcoins? Well, the fact that it’s impregnable, it’s done, like the guy, he threw away a laptop. Does it become a wasted asset? It’s dead. There’s a lot of Bitcoins that are just been lost and will never be retrieved.

1:00:08 I think it’s like a ship analogy, except there’s so much ocean, like you just will never find it. It’s in fine, I’m fine. Like the guy who we just can’t learn this past week, he had Bitcoins on an old laptop that he threw into a landfill. They’re worth $5 million now. Now that landfill, those Bitcoins, I think are safe to say, are gone.

1:00:25 Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re gone. That’s a fair point. So I see in fairness, the 10 million Bitcoins actually aren’t 10 million. That’s right.

1:00:34 Than the number because they’re gone. They’ve been de-mined. Yeah, put back in the ground. Yeah, the actual float is probably a lot smaller. Okay.

1:00:41 And where’s Bitcoin going next? Is it going to be stable here, drop again? No, no, I don’t think it’ll achieve any kind of stability for a while at a much higher price. Okay. But still going up.

1:00:52 Yeah, a lot of volatility. I mean, what’s interesting, I guess in the last couple of weeks, you’ve seen the emergence of these alternatives to Bitcoin, like Litecoin. And there’s like 50 or 60 other alternative currencies. And a lot of people are not trading in between the currencies. I think that’s very healthy.

1:01:05 It’s a good competition, and it just forces more adoption, and I think it’s very positive for Bitcoin. And I think the Chinese are now fanatically getting into Bitcoin. India has yet to really embrace it. That’s going to be a big move for Bitcoin. The hedge funds are now buying it as an asset class because there’s a way to do so with the Bitcoin investment trust in New York over their second market, the very second market, Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, the guy’s second market.

1:01:34 Yeah, yeah. Not the, not the Winklevoss guys. It’s a different guy. That’s right. They, they, they’re big into it.

1:01:39 They believe the market cap can get to 400 billion. Okay. From the current market cap at 12 to 13 billion. Now, okay. That’s obviously a big move.

1:01:47 Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There we go. John, thanks so much for being here.

1:01:52 That’s all. Thank you. If you want to get ahold of you, I’m not going to tell you his email address, but it might have something to do. Yes. And his first name, which is John J. Owen. Yeah, that’s it. And Twitter your JD at JD Yeah, okay. You’re one of the early Twitter adopters with the one two letters. Yeah. Well, I was lucky on that occasion Okay, good on max. You’re at Max Kaiser Twitter. Um, what about start join? If people want to get involved? What do they do?

1:02:18 Well, we have a pre registration up right now at start join calm Okay, so you can pre register and I think our beta opens up We’re doing an internal beta. It starts next week. I think we’re gonna open it up within four weeks You’re gonna give us any more details on this? Well, you know the basic the basic strokes on it I mean there it’s it’s crowdfunding except that you know, we’re bringing in some new features and it will have a Bitcoin piece within going into it the Bitcoin piece is kind of tricky because for a lot of reasons and But we think we found something that will be that’ll work within within this in this environment, so I think that will be a lot of buzz.

1:02:56 I’ve already got some people throwing money at it from the VC community at valuations that are beyond what I thought it would be worth even a week ago. Fantastic. There goes the bubble. There is the bubble, a small bubble. These small bubbles are starting to look bigger and bigger.

1:03:17 There was a time when the entire universe was just a speck of dust. And then you had the Big Bang, you see? And this is from little specks of dust. From the small acorns. You end up with the small finger.

1:03:28 You know, great oak trees grow. All right, you heard it here first from Max Keiser. This is a tiny spec, soon to be the Big Bang here at London Technology Scene. John, thanks for being here. I appreciate it.

1:03:39 You’re episode number 23. If you want to follow us, we’re at Silicon Real Twitter. We just launched a brand new website that makes all of our guests look extremely good looking. It’s amazing. We’ll take a look for that to happen.

1:03:49 It’s amazing what you can do with Photoshop. And yeah, if you’ve got guest suggestions, please send them in to us. It’s about the community and reflecting what’s going on out there. We’re having a lot of fun, but thanks, Max, for being the co-host. Oh, thanks, Brian.

1:04:01 Much appreciated. And as we say, it’s about the people. I wish you guys lots of luck. Thank you. All right, take care.