Full transcript: Julie Meyer on London Real
0:00 In London, technology is the silicone 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.
0:31 Locally filmed, locally sourced. Silicon Real. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real. It’s the same studio, but it’s not just tech. We get some crazy people in here.
0:52 We’ve had Mr. Tim Ferriss over the Four Hour Everything. This week we have Lopez who claims he’s got the second largest book club after Oprah. He’s a fascinating guy, investor, entrepreneur and this next week I just interviewed Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I don’t know if you know that book, but yeah I just sat down with him last week at the Excel Center and yeah he was fascinating and then I listened to the whole audio book and anyways it gets pretty crazy.
1:19 And the Culture High too? Oh yeah, we were at the Culture High premiere last week which was fantastic with Adam’s gorgeous so a lot going on there that’s London Real TV but we’re here to talk tech today my co-host is Colin pile bringing his coffee to Harrods it’s all kicking off what’s it like being a coffee tycoon yeah super caffeinated and but yet still tired no things are great yeah Harrods next week super pumped and we’re going into all the Soho house rooms across the UK that’s big starting next week as well so yeah lots going on looking for new staff so if you’re interested in joining. Oh, look at you. You know, big, big, big growing company. Drop me an email just calling at crewcafe.com or tweet at me. And yeah. Good. I mean, you’re the premium coffee and you’re in premium places. So you got to be happy about that. Right.
2:08 Harrods, the whole house. So I was just kind of 25 to 45 and Harrods is 45 and up. So look at you hitting the demo. All right, cool. Thanks for being here. On to the show.
2:18 Our guest today is Julie Meyer, who is the founder of Entrepreneur Country, which connects the world’s enterprises with leading digital enablers. Or as you like to say it, you introduced David to Goliath. You’ve got a conference coming up in London on October 29th with the theme, The Art of War. You’re also the founder and chief executive of investment and advisory firm, Ariadne Capital. Your passion is Europe’s growth story.
2:44 Julie, welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you, good to be here, thanks for having me. Yeah, no problem. I was watching one of your TEDx talks, she has two, And you said, stop worrying about the money. The more you don’t focus on the money, the more money finds you.
2:58 And I just wanted to start with that because it was definitely something that gets your attention. You said if you have the right ideas and if you’re good and articulate them, the money will find you. Is that true? You know, I went to Paris when I was 20 years old and I was there for six years and I had this boyfriend who was much older and much wiser and had a hell of a lot more money than I did when I was 22 years old. And he was really bored watching me at age 22, wonder why I didn’t have any money and how I was gonna break into the French technical, be a business person in France at age 22.
3:28 And finally he said, you know, Julie, just stop worrying about the money. And I remember thinking this was the stupidest comment. He said, if you’re good, the money will find you. And I just thought, yeah, right, that’s easy for you to say cause you made all this money and you’re blah, blah, blah until I realized, Julie, that’s why he made all the money. He stopped worrying about the money and that’s how he made the money, right?
3:45 So the, I see entrepreneurs being obsessed constantly about not having money. And they forget that the reason why they’re an entrepreneur is they’re obsessed and they’re compelled to bring their vision to the market, right? Entrepreneurs have a secret. They know something. By virtue of their background, their expertise, the unique life story, they have a secret.
4:04 And they need to bring that secret to the market. The real big difference from entrepreneurs and the rest of us, because there’s a lot of Saturday night entrepreneurs that talk about this stuff at dinner parties on Saturday nights, is entrepreneurs are willing to live the abnormal lives to bring that to market. And they forget every once in a while, they just say, oh my God, I have no money, right? I’m living on air, what do I do? And so they need to remember that the job of the capital provided, the job of the venture capitalist is to go find those guys.
4:32 And throughout history, it’s always been that way, right? It’s not, you know, we don’t remember Queen Isabella. It was Queen Isabella’s job to find Christopher Columbus and make sure he settled the new world for Spain, right? We, you know, Medici family, okay, fine, but it’s really Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, those are the guys who painted the Sistine Chapel, right? So that that entrepreneurial group of people, they haven’t always been called entrepreneurs, but they are out there.
4:55 Those people that create wealth, but they they have a vision of the future and they bring it kicking and screaming into the present. They’ve been called adventurers. They’ve been the artists. They’ve been the industrialists and the money people. It’s our job to go find them.
5:10 And capital always follows ideas. It’s not that ideas chases the capital. The capital follows the ideas. It’s interesting we had you know Simon from DFJ in here in the early days We’ve got index on this week and a lot of entrepreneurs look up to these You know big VC funds as kind of you know The guys on the on the mountain and they choose you but you know the way you say it is is VC isn’t an industry itself It’s a supporter of industry That’s right the problem and what happened with the the the meltdown the financial services crisis and all the rest of it Are the best is financial services forgot that it’s a service industry to industry This whole London is a financial center, okay fine, but it’s a service industry to industry.
5:50 Its job is to back industry. That’s the job of the financial services sector. And that’s why, why would you ever invest in a banking stock, right? If you’re a holder of shares in a bank, where the majority of the profits of the bank are basically going to the employees, right? I think employees should be properly compensated and incentivized to high performance, but the majority of the profits of banks go out to the bankers, not to the shareholders.
6:17 So it’s a pretty messed up kind of situation there. And really, people put capitalists and bankers and entrepreneurs, and they say, oh, those capitalist greedy people. Most entrepreneurs I know are a skint. Most bankers I know are not. So you got people who are risking it all, you got the house on the line, the wife’s going nuts and all the rest of it, never seen anything.
6:38 And then you got really high paid employees. Not the same thing. entrepreneurs are risking their capital, their living, abnormal lives. So the view that I take and the view that just kind of, you know, permeates from area and capital is let’s recognize that it starts with the entrepreneur. In fact, society works best if it’s organized around the entrepreneur and society is not organized around the entrepreneur right now, right?
7:05 So that’s our view. We treat entrepreneurs not just with respect. We give them progress reports on Friday afternoon. Here’s what we’ve done for you this week. We don’t want you to go into the weekend not knowing what your investor, area of capital, has been doing for you this week, right?
7:19 So what other venture capital firm do you know anywhere in the world who’s basically saying every week we’re going to tell you what we’re doing to help you in your entrepreneurial journey? That’s the difference, right? So we’ve got people going back 15 years who basically said you connected me here, you treated me with respect when nobody else was doing it, you introduced me to that person, you helped me along the way, so now that I made this money, yeah, I want to put money in your fund or I’m doing my next thing I want to tell you about it before I tell other people about it because the fact of the matter is, is that most people don’t treat entrepreneurs with respect until it looks like they’re going to be the next big thing.
7:54 So Ariadne’s capital has been around for 13 years. You always Skype in the early days. Have you seen the VC community go the wrong way then in the last three to five years in London or is it going the wrong way and does the valuation kind of frothiness make that even worse? So we’ll be 14 years old on the 8th of December and I’m really glad that the day after I sold First Tuesday to Jerusalem Global, I decided, okay, I wasn’t able to do everything I wanted to do with First Tuesday, so I’m glad that I pitched my tent out there and said, we’re going to build the gold standard for the financing of entrepreneurship.
8:29 And I’ll tell you right now, and I don’t say this anywhere else, but the Silicon Valley Sandhill Road of Europe has not been built, right? So a lot of people think that they are there, but my competition, right? So 5% of my fund is my money. There’s not a venture fund in Europe where the general partner has 5% of their own money, not a single one. You cannot find that general partner in Europe for a venture capital fund.
8:52 So the first thing wrong with the venture capital industry is that the GP is not aligned with the LP. Most of them are on a million pound salaries, right? Instead of having a million pounds of their own money in the fund, they’re being paid a million pounds, right? That’s a big difference. So my competition are employees, right?
9:10 Nothing wrong with being an employee, but I’m sorry, that’s not the venture capital business then. That’s go be a consultant, go be an investment banker, but if you’re dealing with somebody who’s got their life on the line building their business and you’re making a million pound salary, you’ve got a big challenge to understand what they’re going through in terms of the level of risk that they’ve taken. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that they’ve got one play in their playbook.
9:33 The European venture capital community is basically trying to find the best European entrepreneur to back to figure out which US technology firm they’re gonna sell it to, okay? So because we haven’t created platform companies in Europe like the Facebook, Amazon, Brigade, those platform companies were all the values being created. So we’re backing more or less application companies and selling them to US platform technology firms. So the entire European venture capital community is making money for America.
10:02 That’s a problem, that’s a real big problem, right? So all of this government money to back European venture as well, it’s ultimately not creating long-term sustainable growth. It’s not the value is not accumulating to Europe and the UK. But we’ve had a few IPOs recently, so we’ve seen them monetize that way. I mean, King and Just Eat, they’re not necessarily looking for a US exit, are they?
10:25 No, it’s true that, in fact, somebody was just telling me recently, 80% of the institutional investors in the London stock market American institutional investors which I haven’t been able to verify that was told to me just a couple of hours but I thought that was kind of interesting but you’re right the IPO market you know there’s definitely stuff is coming through to the market and it seems like the a market is a lot stronger than it used to be and you know I’d argue that neither one of those are really you know technology plays are good businesses you know but neither one of them are necessarily known for their use of technology they’re online businesses definitely right yeah do you think that problems in the the culture of the entrepreneur or do you think it’s a VC problem and those are the only companies they’re backing? Which problem? So in terms of you know creating products for platforms in the US? Well so they you know the opportunity today is for the Santanderas, the Aviva’s, the Paddy Powers, the Bower Medias and so forth retailers, insurance company banks and so forth to become platforms. We’re not going to create new Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google’s in Europe, in Asia Asia or in Europe, we’ve got to open up the existing companies and for them to be platforms, for them to become essentially highways for the start-ups to go to market.
11:36 No venture capitalist is going to give $50 million sterling euro to a start-up to basically acquire customers. They’re going to have to do a deal with a partner and those partners today. Every UK entrepreneur is thinking, I’ve got to do a deal with an app store. I do a deal with iOS or Apple App Store, et cetera. So the point is that if you didn’t go to Palo Alto for your funding, you go to Palo Alto for your distribution.
11:59 And if you didn’t go there, then you go to Palo Alto for your exit. The whole thing revolves around Palo Alto. And yet the macro trend is that great entrepreneurs can come from anywhere on the planet. But the infrastructure of entrepreneurship has not been evenly distributed, right? So we need to think a little bit more deeply because it’s a system-level problem to the question of what’s the problem.
12:18 It’s a system-level problem. Is it just the London stock market? which is the London stock market, it’s that the corporates are not actually highways for these digital cars that are coming down. They don’t even know necessarily how to do that, right? They’re not cloud-based platforms.
12:36 And what do we mean by that? The future retailers and banks, their business model is gonna look like what Apple did to the music industry. It’s all gonna move towards that set of economic models where there’s clear economics for multiple parties, right? It’s going to be what Apple did to music, what they did to telecoms, what Google did to advertising. All of those business models are going to look like that.
12:58 We just need to look at the digital winners, move forward 10 years, that’s what’s going to happen, right? So the sooner we get there, the sooner we have more choices in terms of how entrepreneurs go to market, right? And I’m not saying anytime soon that people are going to say, oh my God, I need to do a deal with Royal Mail to go to market and get access to, you know, 20 million customers through Royal Mail. But they should be thinking, I should be able to do a deal with insurance company, I should be able to go to market with some of these, because what do the banks and the retailers have?
13:26 They’ve got customers. They’ve got big customer bases. The telcos, you know, the NHS should be a massive highway and platform for British healthcare app digital health companies to go to market. Is the NHS a platform to go to market for digital health companies? Or anywhere close?
13:43 Is there any likelihood of that happening right now? Well, it was all over the paper that they’ve, you know, the Independent on Sunday said we’ve got a big 30 billion dollar black hole in you know for the NHS but nobody’s saying let’s reimagine the NHS to make it really sustainable it’s got to have a P&L that doesn’t mean worse health care that means sustainable health care that means all of these new applications could actually be delivered to all of the patients across the country but because we’ve got this mental blockage that healthcare and education have to be cost centers and we We can’t imagine that there’s a contribution to GDP that British healthcare and education could make. We just say, oh, she must be talking private equity.
14:27 Oh, it’s about private. It’s not about privatization. It’s about how do we create sustainable models today? And it’s really about platforms and the app economy, which is working in every other industry. It’s going to hit, you know, we’re not just going to continue to fund the NHS to the tune of 30 billion.
14:46 This partnership theme is something you talk a lot about with entrepreneurial country and I always want to get into this David and Goliath narrative, it’s got a great name to it, but I believe you’re saying that all of these startups ultimately have to partner with these huge companies and the huge companies need the Davids as well, but I don’t know, could you go a little further on the narrative that you stole obviously from the Bible? Well, if you think of every digital startup, whatever kind of data play they are, whatever enabling technology they are, they’re really an algorithm. That’s what a startup is.
15:17 An entrepreneur has identified a problem in the market and he or she has an understanding of how to make money in terms of solving that problem. So it’s really kind of cute because I spent a lot of time with a lot of corpus and I was like, oh my god, we have this problem. And it’s just like, great news, guys. There’s an entrepreneur out there that’s been working on that problem for two years. You’ve discovered that problem last quarter, they’ve got the solution and they’ve been selling it into the market for 18 months, right?
15:40 So the Davids are way far ahead. They are problem solvers, they’re visionaries, and they know stuff. The Davids know stuff. They understand that consumer data is the new entrance into the business model. They understand the world’s gone network.
15:54 They figured out the future. Davids go to entrepreneur country, which is AKA the future, every single day, right? So if we could aggregate perfectly all of those digital Davids, we’d have perfect information about the future, right? Nobody’s listening to the Davids. The Goliath, they’ve got the customers.
16:11 They’re the highway. They’ve got, you know, so if a David, instead of talking about technology, instead of getting all, you know, hyped up when he is in front of his customer, the Goliath could say, Mr. Telco, Mr. Bank, just give me access to X amount of your customer base, right? Y period of time, and I’ll deliver Z material revenue to you.
16:33 Let’s just do a couple of pilots and trials this year, and I can show you how you can make, net new revenue in mobile payments, retail analytics, whatever it is, right? How many of those discussions happen? First of all, David’s waiting for nine months to get in front of the right person in his Goliath. And then Goliath is not really treating him or her with any kind of respect. Then they’re operating on different clock speeds.
16:57 Then Goliath is saying, oh my god, how do I make sure that this will not fail? In reality, if it fails, good news, right? You didn’t spend a lot of money on something that didn’t work, right? Lots of stuff fails. In fact, it’s not failure, it’s just it didn’t solve the problem.
17:12 So you still know stuff, you know what doesn’t work, right? Lots of failures before the breakthrough, right? So pilots and trials, you all gotta get comfortable. Not everything’s gonna work, right? So there’s so many mismatches in David and Goliath, dancing one short, one tall, one’s girl, one’s boy.
17:28 There’s just all sorts of mixed matches there. And yet, that’s kind of this third vision of the future. because the first vision of the future is just US technology firms take over every industry. Lots of evidence that they’re gonna do that. Second vision of the future is these digital disruptors, the Elon Musk’s of the world, Airbnb, Uber.
17:48 They’re getting the money and they can tell the story. They take over the future. 95% of the universe is not Airbnb or Amazon. What’s gonna happen to them? They’re not gonna fall off a cliff.
18:00 What happens to 95% of the universe, which is all of these unsexy corporates, mid-market, middle-stunt companies around the world. What’s their fightback strategy? Well, they need some people that got a story to enable them to give them a cut of all of this digital revenue happening, right? So they’re trying all these different models. And what entrepreneur country says to them is, don’t spend your money, don’t hire McKinsey, don’t buy companies, don’t set up a fund, don’t take equity for office space.
18:32 Don’t create an accelerator. Do it. Don’t create a cost center. Focus on your digital P&L. It’s about making money, right?
18:42 Seems really obvious to me. So what do you say to the weekly phenomenon in London of the large corporate opening up an accelerator? I won’t go through the list. We’ve had a lot of them on the show and they’re doing great work, but it seems like a never ending process of these things. Are those good for business?
18:59 Yeah, you know what I would say? There’s always the second hour of the conversation. The first hour of the conversation with anyone that’s running the accelerator who’s participating, the first hour is always good. Everything’s perfect, it’s great. We’re meeting people, oh my God.
19:13 If you stick with them to the second hour, that’s when they’ll really start to tell you what’s really going on. They’ll say, oh my God, I’ve created a kindergarten of baby companies. And your financials are not improving. You’re right, did you notice that? I said, I did, I read the report, right?
19:30 So people are doing all sorts of stuff on the cost center, but it’s all sexy stuff. Oh my god, there’s events. The alcohol is flowing. So the first hour of the conversation, it’s all good news. You stick with him to the second hour of the conversation and you say, what’s the CFO think about the cost center?
19:48 Oh, it’s funny that you asked that because he said after this point, we’re cutting it off, right? Because at the end of the day, it’s forecasting season. Budget 2015 is coming around the corner here. What do we know differently about digital revenues for pick your favorite sector, favorite company, right? That’s the reality of the business is what the revenue looks like, right?
20:11 And we’re now well into this whole digital transformation. So we can’t be playing around with this. It’s not just about people meeting each other. This is about really, do we really have a cut of those revenues? So what Monitize did in mobile banking is that they actually gave the banks a cut of mobile money revenue that would have gone to Western Union or PayPal, right?
20:31 Activation, another great London-based firm. Activation, mobile application development business. The most downloaded FinTech application has been built by Activation for Lloyds, right? That’s good. That seems to me like a David helping a Goliath to dance.
20:50 Downloaded apps, right? Fastest growing new business channel. That strikes me as a really good, you know, story to tell and so forth. So those are the kinds of David and Goliath when it’s revenue, it’s about getting new customer channels open, taking costs out. That’s what the David should be doing for the Goliath.
21:07 So you’re not a fan of accelerators. Well, I just, you know, I’ve yet to, people talk about accelerators and they’ll say, oh, we got 140 companies here. Great, there’s a lot of people to meet in the hallway. Yeah, you know, I say, you know, I’d much rather hear a story like what Activation are doing for Lloyds in terms of revenue, downloaded apps, and so forth. That, to me, makes sense.
21:31 Just having lots of companies in an office doesn’t make sense to me. I did that. I’ve been in large, 1,000. I did first Tuesday. It’s great stuff when you’re 33 to do all of that, right?
21:44 But it’s really about the quality of your revenue stream. So it’s not that I’m not a fan. It’s just it’s tiring, right? At the end of the day, if you want to make money, there’s got to be a different model. That’s refreshing, we haven’t had anyone put it that way.
21:58 Yeah, no, it’s interesting. It does seem a lot like busy work for someone. And I guess, you know, you look at some of them, the ones that make the most sense to me are like the virus, for example, where a lot of that tech can be funneled through to Telefonica. And in a way, Telefonica is a, you know, is a Goliath that can take advantage of a lot of those other ones. But I see a lot of them run by banks or these big, you know, call them consulting slash accounting, You know, I think they’re gonna have difficulty implementing and turning a profit, but what they do a lot of the time is try to make those introductions and how, I don’t know always where they make any revenue off of those introductions.
22:39 It’s gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. Julie, why are you still here in the UK? Why not go back to Sand Hill Road and do your thing over there? I’m sure you can compete very well over there. Why did you stay in the UK and Europe?
22:51 Love it here, yeah. Yeah, because there’s a massive opportunity, so there is a certain inefficiency in the market, right? So I’m typically in C2A of British Airways going to a European city, right? The work that we’re doing with IBM as a founding global partner, I know you had Sandy Carter on here, the global head of ecosystem development, so we’re really close to IBM, and we’re doing a series of David and Goliath dinners, so I’ve been in a different city. It felt a little bit like Captain Mustard in the kitchen with the rope.
23:23 Kind of like if I’m in Copenhagen I’m talking about mobile payments, if I’m in Berlin I’m talking about retail and it’s been fascinating to see that patchwork quilt and to gain a kind of deep understanding of the way we talk about retail in Milan is different than Berlin and so forth so it’s intellectually fascinating but from a kind of making money perspective I came in September 88 and the period of time between 88 and today let’s just simply say there’s It’s been a building of that European marketplace, right? And pre-Mastric, pre-Euro, all of that kind of stuff, massive inefficiency, and people have made money in building the efficiency, building the infrastructure, right? So what I do is I look for closing the gap between inefficiency and efficiency.
24:08 In the next 25 years of being in Europe, this market’s going to operate, it’s going to consolidate, it’s going to integrate, there’s going to be a lot of opportunities to make money by viewing it as a marketplace. There’s 450 million great people that live in this market, right? And there’s unique opportunities, but what I know is that hands down, like with a company like Quill, Ed Bussie who we backed and then SmedVig came in on the back of us and so forth, them compared to their U.S. competitor, now they’re both equally funded, right?
24:37 And their U.S. competitor doesn’t even know that there’s a market outside of New York City, whereas Quill’s proposition and content development is any language, any style, any jurisdiction, they’ll create that content for you, outsource content, crowd of journalists, cloud platform and so forth. So if you can do like the pay mill guys in Germany, people say that they’re like the stripe of Europe and so forth, they’ve figured out that last mile. If you can do your proposition across 10 different smaller regions across Europe, you’re good, right?
25:12 So if you don’t have to worry about all that complexity, but if you’ve got it nailed, if you actually become big in Europe, like e-buzzing, another $100 million revenue European technology business that nobody’s heard of, video advertising like GoViral, like YouTube, they’ve acquired nine businesses across Europe. $100 million, they’re probably, I don’t know, hurtling towards an IPO. That’s hard. It’s hard to be 15 regions, nine acquisitions, $100 million business across Europe.
25:41 I just have so much respect for that. And then I just think that there’s a big opportunity, because when I do go out to Palo Alto, as I did in August, there’s just something about that, forgive me, alpha male, arrogant, American Silicon Valley hype machine, that I’ve really, Americans are taught kind of on day two of their life, tell the world what you think, until you get outside of America and you think, oh my God, the world doesn’t actually really wanna know what I think. And now, as an American, I go back there and I think, shut up, just stop talking about yourself, right?
26:18 So I kind of understand how the Brits look at the Americans. They’re just like, will they stop talking, right? You know, I’d much rather hear a story like what Apptivation are doing for Lloyds in terms of revenue, downloaded apps, and so forth. That, to me, makes sense. Just having lots of companies in an office doesn’t make sense to me.
26:38 So I want to be that bridge between helping British entrepreneurs, all the talent, ego in check, right? They’re not talking about themselves all the time. Now the challenge is that if you’re going to say that you’re going to own the market, you got to say you’re going to own the market, right? And they don’t do that, right? So there’s an opportunity because I can say with and for them, we’re going to own that market, right?
27:03 So these seven explosive growth companies that we’ve backed, we’ve helped them say, gonna own that market, right? That’s what we do. So I bring a little bit of that, you know, understanding that marketing chumps technology. You got to create the market, you got to create the position in the market, and you got to tell people that you do that. Hopefully we do that in in a less, you know, antagonistic, alpha male, arrogant, you know, way. Because I just think that this is about real change that’s happening in society. It’s about driving prosperity all the way through society it’s not just about getting you know billion-pound valuations and stuff like that. Interesting observation from an American no less of America I mean we see versions of that we’ve seen the latest show Silicon Valley which I used to talk about more when it just came on and you know you see the competitiveness of these top white alpha male billionaires but I’ve never put it put so well. But then you know we also we’ve heard before and you What keeps coming around is that quality is often the quality that makes the Steve Jobs or that arrogance and that drive to, I’m going to own the entire market, I’m going to create the best product possible and I can do that, rather than often the more reserved European entrepreneur often says, I’ll create something for that platform and then you get an exit.
28:27 I didn’t think Oliver Samwar was reserved. I didn’t think that Mike Lynch was reserved. I’m not sure that the ambition, drive, aggressiveness is not there. I think it’s delivered in a different way. What I would say is, and this is when I met Sandy Carter at IBM Smart Camp in February on San Francisco, and I was on panel with a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs to a global audience of startups were saying, basically, if you’re not in Silicon Valley, you’re nobody, you have no chance.
28:55 It was kind of like a softball to hit out of the park, and I just kind of said, I really disagree with that, right? a macro trend, undeniable, undeniable, that it’s great entrepreneurs can come from Timbuktu. They don’t have to be taking their Starbucks at Palo Alto. So the macro trend is that they’re coming from all over the planet. It’s that infrastructure which is not evenly distributed.
29:18 And that’s really the opportunity is to build that infrastructure. This is a social good, but it’s also a big business. It’s about that closing the gap on efficiency. And then also, the thing that I think people have not really cottoned onto, but we see it so clearly, is that what’s happening at the micro level with business models, of which we’ve been fortunate to work with some great entrepreneurs that have really organized the economics for their ecosystem.
29:45 Look at what happened with Tesco. 250 million pound profit black hole, right? Why is that? Because the people who were reporting that, the fraud happened because they thought, well, we just have to keep on telling the same story. But how do you tell the same story about the industry if the business model has changed?
30:04 Micro and macro are connected, right? So the good thing about working in venture capital is you’re studying business models of startups. That actually is being reflected into a much broader canvas right now. Basically, all that stuff happening in Wall Street, all of that reporting in the city of London. And that’s the interesting thing about the big wide world.
30:25 And Silicon Valley and Wall Street We’re having a lot of back and forth right now on Bitcoin. You got Mark Andrews and then you got the, you know, Wall Street saying, I don’t know about Bitcoin, right? But imagine if you could have that conversation globally, right? It’s just super interesting how this is all going to play out. And I think innovation always wins, right?
30:44 I’m just going to bet on the entrepreneurs because I really think that they have better information about the future. You mentioned Europe, three cities in Europe that we haven’t heard about besides Berlin, that excites you, that you’re going to, that you’re like, we need to be paying more attention to. Yeah. Because we don’t want to talk about leaving. All of them in Poland.
31:01 I was in Poland last week. I was blown away. I was getting on the flight to Warsaw Monday morning last week and I said, how did it happen that I’m spending the week in Poland? I don’t get how I allowed that to happen. By the second day, I had met Anna Heike who happens to be Martin Heike’s sister who runs Intel Capital out there.
31:21 When I was in this I was in the shipyard that Lekwalesa had, you know, solidarity, a big thing for Americans, and she was his interpreter. So she started telling me a little bit about Polish history, stuff that I didn’t know, I didn’t know the Polish government had never surrendered for 50 years from the day they were invaded by Nazi Germany until it returned to Lekwalesa, the Polish government never surrendered. And all sorts of fascinating facts. I tell you Go shopping in Paris, but back the Polish entrepreneurs because these guys have unbelievable grit. Unbelievable grit, right? So we all have the benefit of just accumulated capital. We don’t know what it’s like for your entire treasury of a nation. Yeah, sure, we know people that have lost money and so forth. Imagine if the entire country has its wealth confiscated, right? And then to try to to rebuild that 25 years ago, right?
32:14 We’re through a quirk of fate, whatever, and so this group of people, Polish people, 40 million of them, boy, do they have a chip on their shoulder. Boy, are they gonna prove to the world they’re not second class. Unbelievable drive. Good entrepreneur material, right? Go to SOPOT, go to Gdansk, go to Gevinnia, go to Warsaw, these people.
32:36 I met the founder of Aseco, massive systems integrator. I met the people at Aviva Poland, smart people. They were finishing my sentences. They were just like, yeah, no, we know what you’re talking about here. Let’s just get to the point of how we implement this.
32:50 CEO of Sanofi, amazingly smart women. These people that I met, I thought, hands down, right? You look at a lot of the laziness that you, in Western Europe, people are looking for work-life balance. They’re not talking about work-life balance in Poland, right? Okay, that’s good.
33:09 Poland, haven’t heard that one before. What else? What else? I gave you four. I gave you four cities in Poland.
33:13 Four cities in Poland. Yeah, I bet you didn’t even know they could dance because really three cities. I bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t. Guilty, guilty.
33:19 I knew a couple of cities in Poland. So what’s Poland missing in order for them to move to the next level? Is it they have to come to London to make it happen or does the more ecosystem and financing have to go to Poland? Good question. Discovery.
33:31 They need to be discovered and to be discovering. So the corporates need to be able to discover innovation that’s going to help them grow faster. And the startups need to be discovered, right? So that’s why we position Entrepreneur Country as a discovery platform. Because back to this fragmentation, it’s a little bit different if you’re in Oregon and you’re trying to find somebody in Atlanta.
33:49 It works a little bit more easily. But across, again and again, I’ll be talking to the guy at Airbus who’s doing innovation. I’ll get off the stage in Prague. And they’ll say, visual analytics, you know. We’d be good for Airbus, but we don’t know how to reach them.
34:01 It’s this inefficiency and fragmentation. So what Poland needs is actually what people in Newcastle need, which is what people in all of these different, they need to be able to find each other. So that discovery process is broken. It’s not even broken. It’s never been built.
34:17 That’s that infrastructure of entrepreneurship doesn’t exist across. So we can’t create Palo Alto across 450 million people. But the way that you would build Palo Alto today is different. but you surely don’t need to go to Palo Alto in the same way that Poland doesn’t need to go to Palo Alto and so forth. What you need to do is you need to make sure that if you’ve got a solution to a problem, people can find you.
34:41 You made a statement in one of your TED Talks that people in their 20s today, I think you pulled some people in your company and they didn’t think of themselves as working for you. They thought of themselves as like working for themselves or their own P&L and it’s a concept that I hadn’t heard articulated before. What did you mean by that? And how is that relevant to entrepreneurs? Well, I just think that the tide of history is shifting to the individual all across the board.
35:04 I didn’t think that anybody in their 20s thinks that they work for anybody. They wouldn’t say it that way, right? If they, you know, they might be respectful to me and say, oh yeah, no, we work for Julie, we work for Ariadne and so forth. I just don’t think that they think of it that way. And to be honest, I didn’t think of that that way.
35:20 So even though I’m really old, when I was 23 years old in Paris, I didn’t think I worked for anybody. And then, oh my God, I went back to Boston at one point And I started working for a marketing agency, and the HR director took me aside, and she said, you know what the problem with you is? And I said, I don’t know what’s the problem. And she says, you think you work for yourself. You work here, right?
35:37 And I thought, caught, right? So I think I see it in myself. I never thought, now I grew up as the daughter of an entrepreneur, so I had other problems. I just have never thought that I work for somebody. But I see that behavior, right?
35:51 These guys, sure, they wanna be part of the team. I’m not saying we’re not a team. We’re a team, right? but they understand being an individual capitalist, which I think is very positive. I think there’s very few downsides to that.
36:05 So what I really mean is that never before of the tools, the technology, the understanding of what it means to kind of put your shop front out there, even if you’re inside of a business, for you to basically say kind of like, what do I bring to the world? What’s my contribution? What’s my value in the market, right? What am I going for that? And if you get these guys on their own, right, and you make them feel safe with a glass of wine, they’ll tell you where they’re going.
36:28 They’re saying, fuck, you’re somewhere, I’m running my own business, right? So, you know, I think it may be in Naples, Italy that it’s difficult to get a job. I don’t know, right? But I do know that the guy in Naples, Italy may not be able to get a job, but he damn well can create his own job today, right? So this idea that there’s somebody holding you back is just yesterday’s concept, right?
36:52 So I think the world is becoming a lot more libertarian. I think it’s becoming a lot more individual capitalist. And I think all of these issues around the way we collectivize risk, the way we try to collectivize security, not gonna be talking about this stuff in 10 years time. Because the kids that are in their 20s right now, that kind of, you know, on July 1st, you know what I say to people on my team? I say, no, what day it is?
37:15 In July 1st, I say, no. Today is the day you start working to take on money. the first six months of the year, you’re paying tax. Now you’re paying, you know, you get to spend the money. I said, surely not, surely not.
37:29 I said, oh. Robert Kiyosaki would love you, yes. So the point is, it’s just that they’re 25. What do they know? You know nothing at age 25.
37:37 By the time you get to be 35, you have mortgages, you have families. And when these 25 year olds get to be 35, they’re gonna say, who created this system? Oh my God, we could do this better. we could do it more efficiently, right? We can actually take that collectivization, we can collectively organize ourselves using technology.
37:58 We could do things locally, right? So when I wrote about responsible business in the FT and I said, listen, I have to take responsibility for the fact that homelessness in Earl’s Court Road exists, right? I haven’t solved that problem, right? Governments don’t solve that problem. I get a direct tweet from somebody who says, we are a social angel group in Earl’s Court Road called Wild Blue Cohort, we’re solving social problems in Earl’s Court Road, would you like to join us?
38:22 I thought, fantastic, this is a sign of the future, right? It’s a sign that people are taking responsibility and saying, there’s homelessness in Earl’s Court Road, we’re gonna nail that problem, right? So increasingly, government’s just being disrupted and all of that power just keeps on shifting down to the individual, which is gonna create a lot of other issues. I’m not saying that it’s perfect or panacea, but I’m just saying that’s the same phenomena. These kids that think that they work for themselves, problems being handled differently locally, it’s part of this whole thing.
38:52 It’s no longer about the way we collectivize things in governments, all the rest of it. We’re gonna have to organize ourselves collectively in different ways using technology. London, sticking point bottleneck for the future. What’s the main one that you constantly see when you think about London and the UK as far as something we have to make sure we avoid? Are we something we really need to do differently?
39:14 So London is really good and the United Kingdom, just in general, I mean, the opportunity for what we’re doing with entrepreneur country in terms of building the infrastructure, the systems of this new world, that’s a really British thing to do. Took over the world they did, right? They put the system in place. They said, you know, it will be Greenwich Mean Time. It will be the British pound.
39:36 It will be English. The civil service looks like this. Brits know how to structure the world. But the world is changing. And so the risk to London is that we hold on to the old order of things instead of building the new order of things.
39:49 So first peer-to-peer lending company in the world, Zopa, 2004, right? We did that deal in 2005, right? First peer-to-peer lending, crowdfunding, all of these new Bitcoin, all of these monetize, beat that quote, all of these financial services, you know, WONGA also, unfortunately, because they’re always good and bad and everything, but the point is this is that if British people would just keep on doing what they do well. They structure the world. They create infrastructure, systems, and in particular, in the financial world.
40:21 That’s what British people really, really good at, right? So instead of holding onto the old order of things, if they embrace the new thing. But the challenge is, are they an older child, right? Younger children build the world. Older children save the world.
40:36 They preserve the world. So what London and the United Kingdom need to do is they need to become a younger child. They can’t think like the older child. We’ve got everything to lose. You’re losing it.
40:48 So get over it. Build the new world. Build the structure into the new world. And as you go around the continent, to Ireland and Poland and everything else, you’re actually competing with younger children, right? Second born, later born children, right?
41:05 That have no vested interest. The Bitcoin exchange business which we invested in, that’s setting up these emerging market Bitcoin exchanges. I tell you, if you’re a poor person and pick your poor African country, you have no vested interest in the rules of the game being what they are. They want to change the rules of the game, right? So most of the universe wants to change the rules of the game.
41:29 So you got London and Britain that more or less kind of want to keep the rules. So they need to disrupt themselves or get comfortable with that. That’s it. Okay. Do Londoners work hard enough or is that just a stereotype given to us by the alpha males in Palo Alto that we don’t work hard enough?
41:49 Work is relative to what you want to work, right? I think everybody should work exactly the amount of work that they want, right? People want to work 20 hours a week, think they should work 20 hours a week. They need to understand fully what that means in terms of their ability to buy nice clothes and cars, right? I think people should absolutely be able to lock themselves into whatever lifestyle.
42:08 I have always, all my life, worked more than 80 hours a week, and I tell you I’m a real happy person. Nobody forces me to work hard. My father at age 78 still works 80 hours a week. Not because he needs to. He loves it, right?
42:19 Some people love to do stuff. They love to contribute what they can contribute. Not everybody’s built like us. Some people should be able to work 20 hours a week. They’re just not going to be able to shop at the same place as I shop.
42:33 Well put, right? What’s your typical day like? What is something about your routine that we might not be surprised at or what is something that we might be surprised at? 80 hours is a lot of hours a week. Always have grapefruit juice in the morning.
42:45 It makes you feel great. Like a smoothie? Yeah, no, no, no, no. You just squeeze the grapefruit, you get all the juice, I’ve been told that I lose weight drinking grapefruit juice. It’s working for me.
42:55 I love it. It makes me feel good. Do you meditate? Do I meditate? God, no.
43:00 I don’t meditate. No. I talk to myself. Is that what meditation is? I talk to myself.
43:05 I walk around the house and I kind of talk to myself, you know, I get it all out of my system, I shake it out, yeah. Okay. And secrets for being on the road, is it something that energizes you or do you have it any ways that you make that handle because that can be pretty grueling for that job. Yeah. Oh yeah, gosh yeah.
43:21 You know, it’s all about the clothes. For a woman, it’s all about the clothes. You got to look great on the road. If you look great, you feel great. That’s for women.
43:28 I don’t know how it is for men, never been a man. But the point is, it’s just that it’s all about the color scheme, it’s about getting, close it don’t wrinkle it’s about you know like last week in Poland every day wore black right it was great every day wore black was just a theme black on black every day and was all you know and it’s just you gotta it’s like anything in life you got to psych yourself up for it right literally at the airport of Warsaw a week ago I was kind of like how is it I’m spending my entire week in Poland until I meet Anna Anna starts telling me all about Polish history so I decide I’m going to write a blog on why Poland matters. Boy, did I have the evidence for that by the end of the week.
44:05 And I get kind of excited because I’m meeting all these great people and I feel that I’m learning. And then, you know, so how do you psych yourself up for anything in life? Whether it’s grueling travel or whether it’s 80 hours a week or whatever, I’m not saying it doesn’t take a toll. It takes a lot more of a toll on me today than it did 15 years ago to work 80 hours a week, but I’m also in better shape. I just decided about five years ago to get myself into kick-ass shape, right?
44:29 So I love being in good shape because it enables me to do great work, right? So a lot of people kind of get fat. You can’t do that. If you want to work 80 hours a week, you can’t do that. If you want to make a great contribution to the world, you can’t get fat, right?
44:43 So like I stripped out alcohol, not because I don’t like glass of wine, but I just thought Saturday nights, if I’m with people that I really like, I want to have a great glass of wine. most of us do bad white wine at bad events right most of us spend time with people we don’t really like we watch bad TV we drink bad wine so I just said ix night to all of that years ago I just said drink good wine with pee pee you’ll love good code where do you find the time to hit the gym I have personal china okay I’ve got the most awesome personal china she is living walking proof you could see my personal china I just say every day I say well it’s so great till I said you know I just want to look like you Camilla you look great so I got you know I’ve got somebody who works me out. In morning, evenings, weekends all of the above? Yeah kind of whenever I can fit it in. She lives close by me and she comes over we do two times on the weekend and two times during the course of the week. The thing is you know when I worked out three hours I was really really fit when I was in my teens and my 20s for women and women technology entrepreneurs and women venture capitalists and people that have you got to be fit right can’t be mentally fit unless you’re physically fit it goes together, and always played sports, right?
45:55 So I know what it means to be fit, and once you’ve been fit, when you’re not, you know it. Right, and mentally you know it as well. We’ve had some incredible women on recently, including Sandy Carter, we had Claire Cockerton last week from Innovate, and this phrase comes up, and maybe the phrase is the flaw, but the phrase is women in tech, and is that a phrase that bothers you when you hear it? Is it something that we should talk about, or should we be talking about other things than just this phrase, Because it seems like that’s not actually addressing the issue.
46:23 So one of the chapters in my book, Welcome to Entrepreneur Country, which I published a year or so ago, and I really, really mean this, is the world is becoming feminine. So I don’t mean that it’s not an anti-men statement. Some of the most successful men I know are feminine. They always say, please, Julie, don’t refer to us that way. So I thought it was very clever.
46:44 I took all of the positive qualities and I called them feminine. Is that good? That’s good. intelligence, all of the positive stuff and I said those are feminine leadership qualities and those are the ones that are helping you become successful. So if we live in a networked world, people whose brains are naturally wired to think about their group, never been a man, so I don’t know, but it appears that we’re ahead of you guys on that.
47:08 We naturally think of the group, not because we’re angels, but because we naturally think of the group. So women make arguably better leaders in many, many respects. So rather than women in tech or women in boardrooms or all of these kind of like ghettos, I just focus on the fact that the world is becoming feminine and I see lots and lots of evidence for that. So I kind of worry about the men. I really do.
47:34 I’m worried about you guys. I’m worried that we might have to have quotas for you guys in a couple of years. We should be talking about men in tech. Yeah. Men in tech.
47:42 Yeah. That’s an interesting observation. We’ve had a lot of people here suggest that people get a female on their founding team and just to be thinking of this whole, not to mention that’s your half of your audience, but just to be, like you said, thinking in different ways. Well, I thought it was interesting that somebody said recently, they sent around a Twitter feed, I thought it was just so breathtakingly condescending. He said, are there only three women venture capitalists as partners in Europe?
48:08 Which is kind of a way, if you think about it, you guys might not get this, but it was kind of like saying it’s pitiful, right? And so he said, is it just three? In Poland, in four days, I meant four partners who are women in venture capital, right? So the point is, just because we don’t know the outstanding, whatever, pick your category, pick your gender, pick your race, pick your whatever, just because you don’t know those people doesn’t mean they’re not to be discovered.
48:32 And that’s the big issue. Some of us, I have a big mouth. I like to talk about my companies. I like to talk about my vision. Not every woman, partner in venture capital is gonna be known, but they are out there.
48:44 They just might be in Prague, or Gavinia, right? Or whatever, right? So the point is just how do we get people who have a story to tell a contribution to make, how do we get those guys on Silicon Real? Let’s make it happen, Julie. A few questions for you at the end.
48:59 We ask everyone that comes on here, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Julie, I don’t know if she’s in Paris or where she is, and give her a bit of advice, what would you tell her? So the 20-year-old Julie was really lucky she had an outstanding father. My dad is the best father in the world. He was super busy, so he only said one thing to me, and he said, anything you set your mind to, you can achieve. Because he didn’t know what else to say.
49:21 He was so busy. But thank God he said that. So I always knew anything I set my mind to, I could achieve. And I kept on investing myself, even when people said, no, you should do this, you should do that, blah, blah, blah. So, but, you know, it took the boyfriend to say, stop worrying about the money, right?
49:38 It took INSEAD at 29 to put me in a group I could benchmark myself against a peer group and I said oh my god I’ll never be as good as those guys over there at that stuff but I can see I’m better at them than this so if I could the 20 year old Julie if she could have learned the lessons from in Sian I made every rookie 101 mistake with first Tuesday I’ve done I’ve made so many mistakes if the 20 year old Julie could have learned from all of the mistakes which I wrote about in my book welcome to entrepreneur country. Boy oh boy, wow, you know, Julie to age 20 would be amazing. But you know that’s life. You learn that stuff along the way and then you try to tell those stories. So what I try to tell, as I did last night at dinner, I told an entrepreneur who’s about to sign a deal. I said don’t do that, right? You are the guy who’s making this and you’re bringing people in as equal partners and they’ve done jack shit for that position, right? Don’t give people your equity, right, if they’re not making the same contribution, the same risk. So So corporate structure, corporate architecture really is the reason why people win.
50:43 And a lot of people don’t know that. A lot of entrepreneurs, their first business, they make the mistake of making a profound corporate architecture mistake. I’ve learned this stuff over 20 to 48, 28 years, right? I just desperately try to help people get the message out about the mistakes that I made. And also I managed to do enough stuff along the way to kind of keep the balance where It was always like, you know, for every one step back, two steps forward, ish.
51:11 Okay, second part of that question, best advice you’ve ever received, not from your father or your French boyfriend? Could be business or personal? Yeah. Jeremy Collar has given me, who’s just one of the wisest men along the way. You know, I always wanted to have a business partner, which is why I made the mistakes I did with First Tuesday.
51:29 And then I wanted to have people on my board, because somehow I thought, you know, it’d be valuable to have people on my board. And I think Jeremy just said at one point, Just like Julie’s, just stop, just stop. You’re just trying, you know, all of just stop. It’s you, just keep on going, just do your thing. You know, you own the company yourself, it’s you, just go forward.
51:46 Stop trying to create all these people stuff around you, right? And I think that there comes a time where you can create a lot of noise, you can look for everybody else to give you advice and to create, you know, everybody becomes a mini advisory board, but at the end of the day, it’s just really all about your muscle and listening to yourself and your gut and so forth, that’s the most important thing that you gotta figure out in life, right? It’s just, what do you make of any situation?
52:13 I just met somebody, why don’t I trust him? I just met a woman, she, on paper, looks like the right person to hire. I just don’t feel that I should, right? So there’s something going on in your makeup, your mental ability, your neural network, which is working for you all the time. You gotta listen to it.
52:32 So trust it and stand on your own. Last part of that question is to the 20 year old that’s listening to us from around the world via iTunes or YouTube, what advice do you give to them if they want to be an entrepreneur? They want to grow up and be one of these people you’re talking about. Do anything else. Do anything else.
52:46 It’s just, you know, it’s not, there’s nothing glamorous going on here. Right. Is it been rockstarred? Has this whole lifestyle been rockstarred? No, no, no, no, not at all.
52:55 And so that’s what I would say. It’s just like if you can really deal with the unbelievable stress of driving the chain. Most entrepreneurs I know are skinned, right? Very few of them make any kind of money whatsoever. If you can deal with the fact of you’re going to have more bosses than you ever thought possible between your customers, your bank, your shareholders, your employees.
53:18 If you can deal with all of that stress, right, and you still feel so compelled to just do it that you are not going to be okay unless you bring your product at service to market do it otherwise don’t do it okay if you’re thinking about work life balance you’re having the wrong conversation okay and don’t think about the money as well now okay that’s awesome stuff we’re out of time tell us more about entrepreneur country coming up what is the art of war what’s going on it sounds you know it’s very Sun Tzu e what’s happening at that event what can you get out of it just tell us a little bit more about it entrepreneur Entrepreneur Country forum.com, we are basically, we’re bringing Poland, we’re doing Poland Goes Global at Entrepreneur Country. We’re having Andrea Fabreu of E-buzzing, $100 million revenue company talking about that.
54:04 We’ve got Made TV, Jamie Conway talking about local television, why it’s not just about video and online, it’s about television locally, what does that mean? We’ve got Mark Congee of Activation talking about how he’s solving problems for banks that they thought about last week, but he’s been solving for two years. So we continue to bring great entrepreneurs to the stage for 500 people every entrepreneur country forum. And what we’re doing basically is we’re trying to get people to have that dialogue sooner because what we know a lot of our investment methodology at Ariadne Capital and Entrepreneur Country is based on Carlotta Perez.
54:40 So after people read Welcome to Entrepreneur Country, the second book they should read is The Theory of Disruptive Technology and Adoption by Carlotta Perez and what she says, second half of the cycle. about Goliath embracing David. And what that means is that if we do that sooner, and entrepreneur country is part of doing that sooner, so everybody understands the same thing happens every 60 to 80 years, the sooner Goliath embraces David, the more prosperity ensues across society, right?
55:10 We wait late, we all kind of think that, you know, it’s all gonna happen, we get billionaires. Not a problem with that either, but if we care about society and evenly distributed prosperity, which I do, then you wanna be part of the discussion that we’re having at Entrepreneur Country. Powerful, I love it. Go ahead, go ahead. What’s the date and where is it?
55:29 So you wanna go to entrepreneurcountryforum.com to register. You may want to participate. There may be, you might wanna pitch, you might wanna be on stage, you might wanna be exhibit, you might just wanna invite people. So at entrepreneurcountryforum.com, got it all there. How can people get a hold of you directly?
55:46 What’s the best way? Twitter, do you give your email out? It’s always fantastic. At julianmarimire, julietteareadneycapital.com, all sorts of ways. I’m easily accessible for people who try hard.
55:58 Fantastic, all right, very good. I’m gonna call it there. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, come see us at our YouTube channel. Give us a rating, maybe, every now and again. They help out, right?
56:09 Yeah, give us a review on iTunes. Share us and like us on YouTube. You can see our extremely good-looking well-lit faces, yeah, on YouTube. Julie thanks so much for being here. You’re very opinionated. I like that and everything you say Seems to come from in the heart as in you know, you’re saying these things, you know Not to be opinionated or not like putting someone down. You’re kind of saying this is your take on it So thanks so much for coming here No, no problem my pleasure as we say on silicone reel it’s about the people there we go and I wish all the best thanks Thanks so much. Thank you. All right. Take care Once you’re in a buyout industry, the key skill you need to have is being very very very good at spreadsheets to analyze the target company in as much detail as possible.
