Full transcript: Mike Butcher 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’ve got rock stars.
0:52 We’ve had politicians like George Galloway that came in here and talked all sorts of craziness. craziness, we’ve had whistle blowers like CIA agent Ray McGovern last week, filmmakers, authors, it gets pretty crazy. So check that out at londonreal.tv but today we’re here to talk tech. My co-host is entrepreneur Colin Pyle making coffee, owning the coffee world which is a big space, a competitive space, right? Very competitive. How’s it going at Crew Cafe? Yeah it’s good man, just back from Toronto was back home last week for a wedding and you know entrepreneur troubles, the shipment goes missing for about 48 hours which was lots of fun But yeah, things are going good.
1:26 Some big news coming up, new website launched and yeah, just plowing forward. Excellent, excellent, that’s good, man. Well, we like to see this, you know, fulfillment is one of those hard things. So if you get that right, then you get to win. Surely the world is sick of coffee by now.
1:39 Yeah, no, it’s a drug, I’m a legal drug dealer. You’re a drug dealer, right. All right, fantastic, on with the show. Our guest today is Mr. Mike Butcher, who is the editor-at-large for TechCrunch, where you report about startups, venture cap and technology trends.
1:54 You’re also the co-founder of Tech Hub, which we all know is the global community and workspace for tech entrepreneurs. You also are the founder of Kodak, the coalition for the digital economy. That’s a non-profit. That’s a non-profit. You guys lobby for legislation for tech in the UK and on top of all that, you were one of Wired UK’s top 100 annual influencers in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014.
2:18 Jesus, Mike, that’s a lot of influence. I think there must have been a Taipei mistake somewhere along the line. You I think are a grunge rock drummer disguised as a journalist. Mike, thanks for coming. Welcome to Silicon Real.
2:31 My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. No, it’s a pleasure. It’s, you know, you have a very unique style, Mike. It’s a kind of no bullshit.
2:37 You really give it to people straight and I think that’s kind of why they’re drawn to you. You’ve got some great videos on the web. You have one that’s called How to Deal with Tech Media, which I encourage any entrepreneur to watch because it’s kind of from Mike’s standpoint of what not to send him. Don’t send him invites to your launch party. Don’t send him.
2:54 Well, sure, by all means, invite me to the launch party, but don’t expect it to be considered to be news. He wants a purple cow, not a black and white cow, and that’s what makes news. I even learned something. I came, it was how to deal with the tech media, you can Google it, Mike Butcher, how to deal with tech media. It’s just a bunch of slides and there’s a video as well about a speech I give fairly regularly.
3:19 I’ve done it quite a lot now, but it was only, I was born out of frustration that many technology entrepreneurs don’t know how to pitch their startup. And when you’re doing a startup, you can’t afford expensive PR people and things like that. So you have to pitch the media yourself and they weren’t doing it right. And especially often in Europe when you’re dealing with the technology entrepreneurs talking in their second language into English, for instance.
3:45 So it was just trying to help people really. and also from the perspective of the journalist. A lot of PR people, God love them, they do their job, but they do it from the perspective of how you PR something rather than from the perspective of the journalist. And so that was what I was just trying to get across. Right, I also saw you on stage.
4:04 You said something to an entrepreneur that was pitching. You said, 2004 called and wants its pitch back. So you’re not afraid to give him the real deal. Well, I have actually made an entrepreneur cry, actually, on stage once. Just once.
4:20 I think maybe once, more than once. I don’t do it on purpose, I do it, I think often perhaps to some extent there is a usefulness in sort of shocking people into really rethinking how they’re coming across. Not just because we do it just for fun, but to allow them to sort of really look outside themselves and work out, hold on a minute, I’m not getting across what I’m trying to say here. And the thing is, is it wouldn’t really, nobody would really care particularly were it not for the fact that 50% of what entrepreneurs do is about communication.
4:57 They’re trying to get across a new idea or a new concept. And that’s what, you know, if you can’t communicate, then you’re, you know, you’re not gonna get halfway there. You spend a lot of time in the States and you obviously cover, you know, tech worldwide. I mean, when the Yanks see you, they must think this is the most un-British guy we would ever expect, because you’re not the reserveness, you know, maybe you’re not even British. Maybe that’s why.
5:19 But I mean, do you think that’s why they embrace you as well, because it’s something kind of different? Actually, I have a long history of working with US and North American companies in the media. I was one of the early journalists on the industry standard back in the day in the dot-com boom and bust. And in my capacity as an editor of a business weekly here in the UK called New Media Age back in the day, I meant plenty of North America, so I got used to the culture and how to interact.
5:52 I guess also I’m a little bit of a runt in a sense, I moved around as a kid, I didn’t stick around much in one place, my family moved around a lot and so I just had to kind of come out of myself and make friends real fast because I knew I’d be moving on in a couple of years, so maybe that’s what happened to me as a person, I suppose. Did you ever expect you would be doing technology journalism, say, ten years ago? Absolutely not. Well, ten years ago I was definitely in the space, but when I was starting out as a journalist, I started out as a generalist. I was on the Hammersmith and Fulham Chronicle newspaper, Down With the Massive. It was a wonderful newspaper. There was really only two stories in Hammersmith back in the day, which was 25,000 pound Rolex watch stolen off the Fulham Palace road, or drug death on the Peabody estate. There was literally nothing else. Nobody was tripping over cracked pavements or complaining to the council about the trees or something. It was just literally one massively rich people or incredibly poor people but rich people or poor people and so it’s kind of quite fun to cut my teeth in the sort of you know sort of knockabout world of newspaper journalism. Was it hard-nosed news journalist guys would hard drink hard and work hard and did they teach you about a deadline? There was a lot of going to the pub definitely. You totally got… Packs of cigarettes? Well gosh the chain
7:23 Smoking amongst reporters is notorious but the other thing I think also is like it does teach you about deadlines and I went on some of the the systems back in the day and even today to some extent is you know you write copy and and the sub editor would just like it’s not you know you run out of time and they just take it straight off your screen you’d be halfway through writing it on then they’d finish it off and send it off to the to the printer but so it did definitely sort of give you a concentrated the mind shall we do you wish some days that some of the bloggers out there would have had like a a hard print deadline so they can know what it’s really like or do you think that’s just old people talking? Well, I mean, there’s great things that to be learned from between the traditional journalism and the new style of journalism.
8:09 I think one of the things that attracted me towards sort of blogging and when I started my own personal blog, for instance, back in the early 2000s, the really fun thing was it was kind of like jazz music. it was a different, just riffing on things, and you’re just putting things out. And all of a sudden, you could say anything you liked, more or less, within the bounds of libel law or whatever. And so it’s much more freer, I think. And Michael Arrington, who started TechCrunch, came up eventually with this rather interesting phrase around what he called process journalism, which was basically putting information out there that you knew, and then waiting for the community to come back with more, and then putting it out again, and that sort of interesting feedback loop, which actually still exists to this day, actually, especially in North America, where the freedom of speech is fantastic.
9:07 So it’s really interesting. The new style of journalism, I think it’s still going on today as well though. We’re still exploring it with things like social media. Right. Let’s talk about Disrupt, because you were just in San Francisco about a week and a half ago.
9:20 I saw you on stage with Kevin Hart from Eventbrite, who we had in that chair a few months ago, and Disrupt just seemed to be like a big deal. It seems like there’s some big people on the stage, like Mark Cuban, the Uber CEO, and it sounds like you’re talking about real issues. I was wondering, first of all, can you talk about what Disrupt is, because I know it’s a TechCrunch product, and also, what does the Valley feel like? Because we don’t know here. All we do is read the reports, and we don’t know how it feels there, and does it feel different, say, than when you were there a year ago.
9:50 Do you see any of those mentalities leaking over here? I think, well, because of what I do, and since I’ve been working for TechCrunch and since, well, I was freelancing in 2006 and I fully came on board on 2007, that over the years, European entrepreneurs have had a much more of a Silicon Valley mindset, shall we say, basically move fast, break things, throw up minimum viable products, if that’s not too juggy. Just to throw things against the wall and see what sticks.
10:23 We definitely took on that culture. And the other thing I think that happened, but I think one thing that we need to always remember is that when you read blogs like TechCrunch or GigaOM, Readbook Web, Recode, all of those guys, you are getting a flavor and a compression of the valley and the vibe there, but it’s not quite the same as being there. And I think the great thing actually about the the valley is particularly and is that they are very open They’re very you know They’re you could literally parachute into town and go listen I don’t really know anybody you can I go and see and people would pretty much generally help you out and there Because it’s it’s practically it’s an immigrant culture. I mean it’s It’s in the west coast is you know the frontier mentality of the US and so you know anyone coming into town is very welcome You know the more the merrier. It’s much more also a much smaller city than you realize People know everybody you pretty much know everybody virtually if you if you rarely get into the thing into the under the skin of it I don’t forget Sam friends like what?
11:29 850,000 yeah, it’s not big not not by many standards Yeah, but of course the interesting about it of course is as we all know is this high Concentration of of people in in the technology industry and literally I was in Dolores Park Just before disrupt and just chilling out with some beers with some people at a barbecue and you know all around me Practically could hear people talking about what they were working on or what they were going to launch or who they were raising money from It was a little bit. Yeah, it’s a heady atmosphere Is it too much sometimes do you feel like get to come home to London to unplug and hear a conversation about banking or media? Fashion or something. Well, I think there is something nice about especially European cities where where, yeah, people are in a variety of industries.
12:16 It’s something heady and exciting about being in the inner city which is very dominated by one industry like technology and if that’s what you’re in. And of course, but of course I know people who literally just, they’ve got to get away from it all. A friend of mine, an entrepreneur in San Francisco was going out with another entrepreneur and it all got too much to him and he just, he ended that relationship and went out with somebody who wasn’t in tech at all, you know, somebody in the art world.
12:46 And so, just so that he could decompress in a different way. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Burning Man has become so popular, is it’s a way for these people to decompress and not talk about technology whatsoever. Right, for a week, maybe. For a whole week, sorry. Have you been, are you a burner?
13:02 I’m going to confess, I have not been to Burning Man, no, although I feel like I’ve been around There are so many people who have that I can quite easily fake going, yes, I had a really great burn. Because Burning Man, it was just before the disruptor just after, because it was right around that time. Yeah, it was traditionally just before, you know, it’s sort of the end of August. So after the burn they go to disrupt. Yeah.
13:29 But it’s only become much more dominated by, dominated I think is the wrong phrase, but But certainly quite a high concentration of technology people, people in the tech industry, go to Burning Man now over the last, say, few years. Previously it wasn’t nearly so associated with the technology community. Talk to us about Disrupt. How long has it been going on in San Francisco? What was the idea about it and what makes it different because it’s put on by a media company as opposed to one of those huge conference companies, which is the rest of what conferences are put on by?
13:59 I think, well, actually, you make a very good point. I think the thing about us is that because we are primarily a journalistic organization and so when we want to do a conference, we basically put people on stage that we want to ring news out of. And that’s very different to your average conference where you’ll get a bunch of people on stage and as good as they are and as interesting and fascinating as they can be, they tend not to be there to be questioned.
14:31 And I think that’s what’s different about us, and when we do a technology conference, when we do Disrupt, our conference, that we put these people on stage with journalists, with our team, and the journalist just sits there and grills them for 20 minutes, 20 minutes or a half an hour. And that’s the idea. And, you know, hands up to these people who go on stage and have a journalist grill them in front of thousands of people and 50,000 people on the live stream or whatever it is.
15:03 But that’s what makes it different. So we really do try and get some real value out of it at the event. And I think the other thing is also with our TechCrunch startup alley where people just line up and you can literally walk down this line of small or medium sized startups and just get pitched relentlessly. So for investors, it’s fantastic because they get all this deal flow and the entrepreneurs themselves can just wander up and down and just make tons of contacts super fast.
15:36 And it’s an annual conference at San Francisco? Well, it’s annual in San Francisco once a year. It’s annual in New York once a year and about April-May. And we’re now doing it in Europe as of last year. We started it in Berlin, which was very successful at the first European TechCrunch Destruct Conference.
15:54 And we’re doing it again this year in October. Quick plug, October 20 to 21, 21st of October, this year in London. And I’m afraid I can’t give you guys some exclusive of our speakers just yet. Sorry. Breaking nose.
16:12 But I can tell you that we’ll bring a bunch of people over from the valley and we’ll have the cream of the crop of the European entrepreneurs and investors. So it should be fun. You wrote an article that went out this morning in City AM that said London tech, it’s more than just hype, and it talked a lot about how there’s more fintech jobs here now than in New York, about the big amounts of money that are getting thrown around, a billion dollars worth of companies acquired here privately this year, and now Disrupt is honoring London.
16:42 Is London grown up now? London has definitely grown up, and it’s been growing up for thousands of years, but The great thing about it is that, I think it’s very unusual that a city will have not just one industry dominating, but many industries of massive size. So in London you have the financial industry, financial tech industry is very big. You have the fashion industry is very big, media is big, arts, culture, you name it. So all these vertical industries are all equally big, and I think that’s the thing about the opportunity for Europeans also, I think, is rather interesting because, you know, we are the stone throw from continental Europe, is that we can build effectively the Silicon Valley of fashion, the Silicon Valley of music, the Silicon Valley of media, what have you, in Europe and particularly out of London because it’s got this great confluence of big industries.
17:45 I mean, that’s not to take away from the capability of the Valley, which can never be underestimated, but these guys build big cloud platforms, big APIs, big platform players, whereas our vertical, our ability to create big companies in these big verticals is increasingly, increasingly important. Does it feel like sometimes the Valley doesn’t have that industry depth where they don’t have like the huge media depth or fashion depth or even the banking industry that they they are building like the tech platforms, but they don’t necessarily have that. Does it feel that way sometimes?
18:16 Well, I mean, the Valley is incredibly robust and you can throw anything at it and it’ll just eat it up and take it on board. I mean, I think the Valley mentality though is not just about one place. It’s been said very often, I’m sure you’ve heard it before the phrase that Silicon Valley is no longer a place, it’s a state of mind. So if you have that state of mind, You can do anything in the sense that you’re a kid in a back road bedroom in Moscow, and you can come up with something like Cut the Rope from Zepto Labs, which is a massive sort of breakout game, or you can come, you can sit in Copenhagen and come up with Zendesk, which ended up floating on NASDAQ.
18:57 So that’s the important thing. The interesting thing is that the Valley in San Francisco, and New York as well, I guess, also, they do love to disrupt. they do into overuse that phrase, sorry. But they do love to be super disruptive. They’re not particularly, they’re not obsequious to existing industries.
19:22 Sometimes I get a little bit, there are one or two companies I come across now and again, who really, they try to saddle up to an existing industry and sort of solve a fairly small problem rather than what I like to say is holding a 44 Magnum the head of a big company or a big industry and saying, you know, do you feel lucky punk basically, which is more, much more fun if you ask me. So they like to just wreck things out there. Yeah. Take a sledgehammer. Are you seeing, like, you know, lots of innovation?
19:52 I, you know, from over here, I look at the valley now and it’s just like, you know, you watch the Silicon Valley TV show or whatever, it’s massive. Yeah, that’s exactly. Yeah, yeah. It’s actually a fly-on-the-world documentary. disrupt is exactly the same as it’s portrayed. But you know you see these massive pillars of the Googles and the Facebooks and you know they’re just acquire acquire acquire and you know what do you see the next Facebook Google in five years like is there going to be another one or is it just going to be x acquisition by? Well I mean you could look at the the current state of play like the big Fiverr, the Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
20:38 Funny enough, people don’t really mention Microsoft much these days, or maybe with Minecraft they might get back in the game. Well, I think that, apart from obviously putting the grey flecks in my hair just for show, unfortunately I I have actually been in the industry long enough to see how it’s progressed. And what I see is so much more happening in the last five years than even the previous 10. So we really are on a J-curve here, right? It is getting pretty ridiculous.
21:14 We’re walking around with the supercomputer virtually. I mean, this has more, the iPhone has more power famously in it than the computer that shot a man to the moon. So where that goes is anybody’s guess. And so actually, the big plays are still coming. People talk about the internet of things.
21:37 We know it’s happening. And it’s relatively, we’re only a couple of years away from somebody coming up with an absolute massive platform around that. So there’s everything to play for. And there’s all sorts of big problems that haven’t been solved, problems. Do you guys like checking email, for instance?
21:53 Come on, you know, somebody’s going to come up with that solution to that. So when you use email, it’s just it’s a highly antiquated system. What is it? Yeah. So there’s lots of lots of other things that are location.
22:04 Health care is incredibly important. You know, we’re working around with a device which is basically going to be like a Star Trek tricorder relatively soon. So lots and lots of big things coming. Definitely. You know, we talk about London a lot.
22:18 What about Berlin? I know you have a lot of ties to the continent, to the Nordic areas. But we don’t talk about it that much here in London, we do focus on ourselves. We do, but they focus on themselves in Berlin as well, don’t worry about it. They’re at least as myopic as we are.
22:32 I mean, they’ve added to Berlin. Oh, I mean, not for tech reasons and not to look around. I mean, they had a big float recently in Frankfurt Exchange, but I mean, what’s going on in Berlin? What’s going on in the rest of Europe compared to here that you see? I mean, arguably the biggest technology entrepreneurs out of Europe the Sanware brothers who were famous for cloning Silicon Valley companies. They’d done it literally surrounded the U.S. with clones of U.S. companies in a sort of pincer movement.
23:01 Is this wrong? Rocket. Rocket internet. Yeah. I mean, incredibly successful. I mean, and…
23:07 Have they gone public or are they going to go public? They’re going to go public with Zalando on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and worth something like $6 billion. So, yes, this is going to give them a big cash pile for which they can then basically go and do whatever they like. But to your point, the interesting thing about Europe is we’ve ended up with a sort of a triad of London, Berlin and the Nordics being really, really big hubs of innovation. So Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen and London of Berlin and then we although we’ve got plenty of startups coming through from southern Europe they haven’t managed to get quite the same amount of traction or attract quite the level of attention. I don’t think it’s not going to be like that for it’s not going to be like that forever of course. I was just in Lisbon for instance in Portugal and and some really you know some good companies coming out of there you know it’s a little bit feels a bit like the But Berlin with with nicer weather They’ve even got a bridge which looks like San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge actually so so who knows what will happen, but they’ve got those big three big centers Seem to have attracted a lot of attention especially from investors You know we’ve seen some big series be around coming through here in the UK especially in fintech you know transfer wise due deal we had on recently and You guys ran an article where you interviewed VC Bill Gurley
24:37 Which was called his winter coming and he said quote piles of public money are helping to keep private money stupid Does it feel frothy in London to you? I mean you you were at the standard back in the day You’ve seen the bubble before you were just a disrupt. How does how do things feel here? Well, I mean the standard the classic response and the clock’s response, which is correct, which is that During the dot-com boom and you look and look all of the graphs Real public real cat cash public my cash public money institutional money money, pension funds were invested into companies which were literally worth 20 pages of A4.
25:16 They really didn’t have any revenues, they virtually didn’t have any real sort of game plan as it were. The difference now is you’ve got enormous amounts of private money, venture capital mostly, going into start-ups and that’s risk capital. This is high net worth individuals, You know pots of cash that some institutions could set aside for risk as opposed to the public markets But when companies do float now? They get because of the dot-com boom and bust they get the absolute You know put through the absolute ringer and the companies that float these days are genuine real companies They’ve got real revenues hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues Look at King Candy Crush star sagas and you know big revenue generating machine although, of course, it’s down recently on the markets, but it’s had a pretty good IPO.
26:05 You’ve got Zoopla, which IPO’d here in the UK on the property side. So these companies have real revenues, and that’s the difference between the frothiness of the boom and bust era and what’s happening now. And what happens now is you get companies which really do go for traction, but they do look at the bottom line far more, yeah. You know, Moshi Monsters, you know, recently laid off like 30 people and, you know, they’re struggling with the mobile strategy, but, you know, they’re still in the game.
26:34 But I wonder what it’s like for you to see kind of these, kind of these UK tech 1.0 companies, you know, kind of moving back while the 2.0 is kind of, you know, take the back of the peloton or something like, or go to the front. Is that strange for you to see, or is it just natural part of evolution? Is that the right way of describing what’s happening here? Well, in arguably take something like lastminute.com big established company floated, um, early biggest UK success?
26:59 One of the earliest, yeah biggest, I mean the sort of poster child of the UK.com boom with Brent Hoberman, who’s still doing stuff today, was an idea ahead of its time. And then ironically, or not ironically, but not unexpectedly, he’s an investor now in YPlan, which does more or less what lastminute.com does, but on the mobile, because it’s built specifically for the mobile experience. And that’s the game changer, is that now a lot of the things that were predicted back then just didn’t really go anywhere, you know, you were trying to surf the internet on a terrible old Nokia, now you’ve got a real device that you can use and actually gives you real value in the form of Android and iPhone particularly.
27:47 So it was the old phrase that it takes much longer for predictions to play out. I can’t remember the exact phrase, but it takes a lot longer for things to play out. So even then, you’ve got wearable devices now coming through. Nobody has really sort of worked out where that’s going other than smart watches and things that track how many steps you take. What do you think of the Apple Watch?
28:19 What do you think of the Apple Watch? It looks interesting. If I ever dated or hung out with someone with an Apple Watch, I’d slap them in the head. Because I couldn’t imagine someone not being… I already hate it when people look at their phones.
28:30 And now a watch, it’s going to be buzzing when it’s on their hand, but that’s just my myopic view. What do you think? It is going to be the first biggest wearable, isn’t it? It is. They say they could sell like millions and millions of those.
28:42 I think they’ll do well. And you’ve got to remember that these things that I watch in the Samsung Gear and things like that work primarily in conjunction with a smartphone. I don’t actually have one, I don’t have one right now, but I had a pebble at one point, I left it on a plane, which is kind of annoying. So I had a pebble watch, and I found that when I was using it, and I’m sure this will be coming out when people start getting used to these things, is that it just allowed you to be a little bit more easygoing with what you were doing.
29:12 So you get a text message instead of having to pull out your phone and put in your PIN number, wipe it, check what’s going on. You just would just look at your watch literally and just go, oh, I’ll reply to that later. And it made you curate things more in a more natural way. It could it felt like it could fit into life more easily somehow rather than being effectively assaulted by this smartphone in your pocket all the time and having to kind of pull it out all the time, which felt, and it kind of just tire, it just gets tiring basically, doesn’t it?
29:46 A friend of mine, Alex Tew, has just launched an app called Chequi, which sits on your phone and tells you how many times you check your phone a day. Yeah, and the other day, mine was 75. So I haven’t checked again, maybe I’ll just check again, see what I’m up to now. But it’s just ridiculous how much you check your phone, especially in my industry. You mentioned mobile a couple times here.
30:07 When you dressed that guy down on stage and said, 2004 wants their pitch back. It was, I think, in response to his lack of mobile strategy. You know, Moshi’s gotten caught up, maybe because they didn’t go mobile quick enough. Why plan got the mobile right? How much do you see companies today, the ones that adopted mobile being the winners?
30:24 Are people even embracing mobile enough right now? Well, you just got to kind of look at someone like Zuckerberg just said only a few months ago that we are a mobile-first company. Facebook is a mobile-first company. And they basically build things now on mobile and then see how they can roll them out onto the wider platform, the wider web platform. They don’t build on the web first anymore.
30:50 And that’s because they know that a billion people in India and the many millions in Africa are poised to just come straight on. And that’s via smartphones. So, start-ups must think in that way themselves. Mobile first. If they’re, assuming it’s appropriate for what market they’re attacking or what they’re doing, yeah, but I mean, companies that, to me, that have website first and they don’t think about a mobile product, I often just ask them, why, really?
31:28 Why are you not thinking about mobile as well? It’s kind of a discussions party, probably over at that point. Yeah, but you know at the same time, you know you look at some are people over 50 purchasing on their phones You know I mean so there’s still this massive market. I think for some products that It’s not there. I think in the next five to ten years. It’s gonna be everything right well Yeah, but you look at tablet growth is pretty much supplanted Desktop and laptop growth and the some of the principal buyers of those tablets are people in there in the senior years It’s just so much easier So, it’s a no-brainer, I mean, it’s barely worth arguing about really.
32:09 Fair enough. Yeah. Mike, it’s sunny in California, Andy McLaughlin’s out there climbing redwood trees on his weekends. Why haven’t you moved to California? Well, I happen to like Europe.
32:23 So many people are kind of drawn to that. I’ll live there for a few years. The Indian summer today is beautiful. I know. We’re having a great summer.
32:29 I mean, like, were you ever drawn to, like, I’m going to go do this for a few years, know for TechCrunch and all that stuff or New York or some type of? Well I sort of mentally find myself going in completely opposite direction. I was walking around Tahia Square in Cairo last year looking at the graffiti around the Egyptian revolution and then later on that day going to a conference for Egyptian startups and I would bump into a guy who’s was building a startup around notifications for the iPhone out of Cairo in Egypt.
33:02 And I just thought, this is so much more interesting than being on the Stanford University campus. Not to put those guys down, but I guess that’s what I like about that is just finding that sort of diamond in the rough. Perhaps it’s because when I was a drummer in bands And I also ran music newspapers. And I used to like finding the new band, as opposed to covering the band that was already well known. So maybe it’s something mental.
33:37 I don’t know what it is. But that’s kind of fun. I think it’s fun. And it keeps you interested, right? Yeah, and do you think the value for investors is now moving that way as well, whether it’s to Lisbon or Bucharest or even further into Egypt and that kind of thing?
33:52 Well, actually, yeah. I mean, I just covered a company that, I can’t remember the name of it, sorry, but came out of an accelerator in Cairo called Flat Six Labs. There’s Oasis 500, which is an accelerator out of Jordan. There’s, I was in Bangalore earlier this year
34:15 And there’s started coming out of there. Well, the thing about it though is that, I mean, Valley investors typically won’t invest companies that are more than a 30 mile drive away. Is that still the case? Pretty much. And that will probably always be the case.
34:35 And that’s the case even for investors in London necessarily because they want to be able to look into the eye of an entrepreneur and say, right, is it really going to work? Because when you invest in a company, it’s a long term thing. But occasionally, you will find things that people just go, boom, I’m in. And last year, I came, certainly two years ago, I was in Ghana, Africa, in Accra, the capital, and found a company called Saya, which was a little bit like WhatsApp, but specifically for Africans.
35:07 It had the African sensibility about the app, built on Android. But these guys had built it for, not just Android, but for feature phones as well. so it had that little Java stuff going on. So it was like WhatsApp, but not for really throw away phones that you can buy super cheap in Africa. And they ended up on the disrupt, TechCrunch disrupt stage and had investors from London.
35:31 And so occasionally you will find that happen, definitely. But I say to entrepreneurs in Europe, I always say just like get on a plane, get out there. If you don’t have any local VCs or people to back you, Get out there, get on a plane, show your wares to these investors wherever they are. And in London, New York, San Francisco, in Stockholm or Berlin, wherever they are, just go and hammer down the door because they’re not necessarily gonna come to you. Do you find that in some of the ecosystems they’re so, things are going so well that often people are getting funded at an early stage almost too easy?
36:10 So maybe the better ideas and the better entrepreneurs are outside of those ecosystems, which is maybe what you’re sort of seeing there. I’m sure, sure enough, what is it like, the Tennyson poem about Ode, about thinking about the grave digger who actually could be so much better more than he is, but nobody knows who he is. And I think that’s what it’s like finding an entrepreneur, an out obscure place, or maybe an emerging country. And you know, the kid sitting next to Stanford goes and can just literally bump into a VC.
36:49 It’s the luck of the drawer, isn’t it, unfortunately? But I think you have to, you know, one of the disadvantages of the game that we’re in is that often people will invest in people that they know and they like and they mirror them. You know, why you see too many, you know, white middle-class males invested in by white middle-class males, unfortunately. And it’s something that, you know, it seems to be sort of, it’s structural to some extent. People have to break through that, they have to think outside those boxes, but not often you’ll see investors think, you know, I’m going to get out on a plane and I remember You were talking to an investor I know in London who found a company in Philadelphia.
37:37 And they said, they went, just literally said, we’re gonna come over and see you. Gone out over and see you. Got over to the guy and said, have you seen any Silicon Valley VCs? And the guy in Philadelphia said, well, nobody, I’ve tried to reach out to those guys, but they won’t come out and see me in Philadelphia. But this investor would come out from London to see him.
37:55 So some smart investors can think that way, definitely. You co-founder of Tech Hub, do you ever miss operating? I mean, you report on this stuff all the time and you write, what, six, eight articles a day? Or you write a lot? Okay.
38:10 I write as much as I can. Seems like a lot. Do you ever feel like you want to get back and operate? Do you ever see an idea, even if it’s for a media startup or not, that you’re like, ah, I really want to go do that?
38:23 If I come up with an idea about something, it’s usually to scratch niche. I don’t think about it as a business. But I haven’t come up with that many that I think I would ditch it all in just to go and become an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, I’m a little bit too much of a magpie in the sense I see something bright and shiny and want to go and look at it, rather than concentrate on one thing at any one time. And also, it’s a great privilege that I have to be able to talk to such a variety of fascinating and interesting people.
38:58 And when you get to that point, this is pretty good. I think, though, that for me, I think there’s still something to be done around location. I’ve never really seen a really, not many location apps that I think are really amazing. I’m like one at the moment, particularly, called Tap Talk, which is a company out of Berlin, the app called Tap Talk, which kind of sends a picture of you or what you’re looking at to your friend, and then it adds a picture of where you are as well, your location on a Google map, and then draws a nice line between you and the recipient.
39:34 And I think that’s kind of fun because you can go, oh, oh, you’re around the corner. I think that’s an interesting idea. Haven’t been many location-based startups that have gotten tons of traction, but I think there’s something interesting to be done there. Because I think also, going forward, how you connect people could be, I mean, you look at what Facebook did during the Arab Spring, for instance, Facebook and Twitter were very interesting about how they were used by revolutionaries and by protest movements in the Arab Spring, and doing something around location would be interesting.
40:08 Yeah, no, definitely. How did Disrupt feel this year as compared to like one year ago? Were there some themes that kept coming through on stage or did people feel a little bit more bullish about things or a little more conservative? Because you really have the front row seat for all this stuff, because you’re talking to everyone, you’re reporting some of it, but you must know the feeling. Well, I mean, I was a bit bowled over because we turned up and we had an all hands meeting backstage before we went on before the conference and our heads of staff turned around and said this is the biggest disruptors ever, this is over 4,000 people and this is not a cheap conference to come to, necessarily.
40:51 So it’s priced very much at certain people, at investors, at serious entrepreneurs. And yet, it’s the biggest disruptor you’ve ever had. So there’s absolutely no, it’s not going off the boil. This is not going away. This is getting bigger and bigger.
41:09 One thing that we think, some of the things that came out of disrupts this year in San Francisco were very enterprise, with tons of enterprise-style companies. solving problems for consumers but in a kind of an enterprise fashion, and sort of health and medical was also another kind of a theme that came through. I often think that there are some great European companies that certainly will be bringing to disrupt in London in October 2021, not 2021, 20 to 21st, which will be around health medical. I think certainly European companies are very strong on that area.
41:54 What would the theme be in 2021? Oh gosh, yes. Well, isn’t there a movie called that? The disaster movie? Heaven knows. Perhaps we’ll be dead of Ebola by then.
42:06 New York and dead or something. Yes, yes. But it’s funny, you get some of conferences that we’ve done we ended up with a self-balancing motorcycle with gyroscopes in the floor that would right itself if it got hit at 30 miles an hour it would stay upright which is pretty cool the lit motor that was awesome and then some companies you know they look really great on stage sometimes and then they don’t hear from them again just the luck of the draw to some extent if they get but the interesting thing is they often get funded whatever happens almost so it’s a very good platform for talking to investors you know this this show here we’re always our tagline is it’s about the people and we’re always getting these stories like behind the people because we think that people invest in people and not companies and I was wondering if it’s something you’ve seen in Silicon Valley or over the years that even if the guy with the gyroscope motorcycle even if the company dies you might see him again and maybe you’ll interview someone in 2007 and you’d be like, there’s something with this guy or girl and then you’ll see him again.
43:14 Do you find that the same people tend to have success or you see them over and over again? Is there a personality factor? I think sort of card carrying entrepreneurs just can’t keep away from starting something new and whatever happens on the life cycle of their company, a couple of years in after they’ve been acquired or they’ve done an exit or whatever it is, they’re back with the new idea. And I think that’s the thing that became very interesting over the last few years is that back during the dot-com boom, you saw people maybe do very well for themselves and they literally disappear. They go and buy an island or go and buy a house on an island and then you wouldn’t hear from them again virtually. But now these days, and I think certainly young European entrepreneurs also very much think that way. They come back again and again with new ideas, and that’s exciting because you see repeat entrepreneurs, they know what they’re doing, they’ve got experience and it just makes them so much better.
44:19 We’ve still got many first-time entrepreneurs in Europe particularly, but they now have, like I said earlier about Silicon Valley being a state of mind, they’ve taken that on board very much and they keep coming back with new ideas and it’s exciting to sit down with someone you’ve known for a couple of years and say, right, tell me, so John or Rachel or whoever you are, what are you going to do now? That’s kind of fun. It must be fascinating to watch those personalities.
44:44 I think those second, third, fourth time entrepreneurs, they’re the ones that really go after something bigger than just a profitable business that has good cash flow, right? I think sometimes they’ll go after, they have the money, they might have the house and the mortgage and they’re okay and so they try to really take them down. also you watch some entrepreneurs, they go on through a journey and they continue, effectively they become family friends with some of their investors and they just, you know, they go to the investor and say, hey, you know, George or, you know, whoever, dude, right, I’m back again, here’s my new idea, and they go, I’m in, you know, and they go on this sort of long long-term journey together and of course you get new get I mean in you know sort of titans of the industries like Elon Musk or Reed Hoffman get to the point where they’re practically their own VCs and and they can drop a few millions on their new their own venture and that’s that’s a whole other ball game of course you know our last three guests on the show have been women we’ve We’ve had Diane Perlman from Microsoft Ventures, then we had Sandy Carter from IBM, and we had Claire Cockerton from Innovate Finance.
45:59 We always talked about, at the end, women in tech, are they represented enough? I wanted to bring up something, due to an article I saw in your Twitter feed, like a week or two ago, where you talked about harassment in tech. I think it was an article you really didn’t have to write, Mike, but you wrote it anyways and you called out an entrepreneur or an investor for some bad behavior and some emails and you had fact checked it and you just really called it out and I don’t know if that was a hard article to write or it was an easy one for you, but you really came it out.
46:28 The first time I’ve seen it addressed, and I just wonder if you could talk about that issue. Why does it come up and why did you write the article? Well, it’s all out there on the internet, so I might as well spell it out. It was about an angel investor in central Europe called Pavel Kereda who had a meeting with a New York based woman entrepreneur in Berlin at a conference and then only a few hours later sent her a horrible email practically demanding sex basically.
47:00 And I think unfortunately because of the nature of the technology industry there’s so few women I think that poor, it’s very unfortunate that women often subjected to this sort of And I think, you know, they are very stoic and fantastic for frankly, you know, ignoring these pathetic overtures. But in this case, the entrepreneur, Get Your House, called him out on it and gradually basically started to tell people about it, but not name. And then gradually it came out in the press and we wrote about it on TechCrunch.
47:39 And I think the reason that we sort of went hard on that story, as it were, we were, we went in on that story was because it was so well documented this really disgusting overture to someone who literally only a couple of hours earlier was just simply having an ordinary business conversation and the assumption that somebody would even consider jumping into to bed immediately after literally having a casual drink or conversation talking about tech startups or whatever. It’s just so pathetic. And it must happen so often to women.
48:23 It’s pretty awful. But the reason we went in on this story was because it was incredibly well documented. The entrepreneur herself wanted to come out and just talk about it. And I think it was a positive thing, because it basically fired a shot across the bowels of men who act in a terribly chauvinistic, old-fashioned, 19th century manner, and are disrespectfully of women in our industry. And it was just so well-documented that there was really no, we weren’t gonna stand idly by and just let the investor get away with this sort of behavior.
49:04 And it’s just a, it’s a warning shot to say, you know what guys just behave and just behave respectfully and you know, you know, be a man basically and don’t be an idiot. Right, I mean, it’s history, it’s already so stacked in one way that it’s just like, errant behavior like this could go without being reported or anything. Nobody, nobody, and I think also, Gertrude herself said this, is that nobody’s saying that, hey, you know, two consenting adults can’t go off and, you know, if they love each other or they like each other or they like the look of each other, or whatever it is.
49:37 It’s a free world, and if they’re two consenting adults, they’re two consenting adults, fine. But just this pathetic and risible behavior by some people should just be called out and just say, just don’t be an idiot, and it’s just wrong. It’s just pathetic and wrong, and it’s just, it shouldn’t be tolerated. And I think the base argument about this is saying if you’re going to have a business conversation with someone, have a business conversation with them, and then if you want to talk to them in a more of a personal manner, then that’s what you do and you do that.
50:17 Like you would ask any guy or girl out in a normal manner if you wanted to do that. mixing the two you know you people need to be a little bit aware of the some of the great gray areas it’s it’s and and you don’t it basically devalue it devalues the conversation you had earlier all of a sudden instead of being an entrepreneur you’re being looked at like a piece of meat which is just you know it’s just stupid and wrong so so we called him out on that and I think a lot of people thought well fair enough you know it’s important to to raise this issue, let’s be grown up, let’s be adult about this, and let’s move on and make it a better industry. Yeah, it makes everybody just a little extra vigilant, so thanks for writing that, that’s really good.
51:06 Just a couple more questions before we finish. Three companies in Europe that you’re looking out for in the next 12 months that excite you? Oh, God. Not this question. Watch the NASDAQ story.
51:18 I won’t talk about a company, I will talk about a movement. I had a very interesting conversation recently. I went to a squat in the middle of Soho in London and we still have squats there. I’m not sure. I think it’s being shut down this week from Onegala and I sat on the third floor of a squat in the middle of Soho and had a three hour conversation about cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and the future of society.
51:54 Sounds amazing. It was. It was a good podcast. I’m going to, yeah, well, I’m going to be writing it up. Well, it’s certainly the most newsworthy and most interesting aspects of it.
52:05 But the, I would definitely call cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, but it’s not just Bitcoin as as a currency, but Bitcoin as a platform, and cryptocurrencies as a platform, as being really a Pandora’s box, which we’ve only barely begun to open. This is going to be extremely interesting going forward in the next few years. Our entire financial system is set up in one particular way. Capitalism pretty much won against the Soviet Union, shall we say, and against Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and that’s the way the world works these days.
52:52 But if there’s one thing entrepreneurs do, it’s disrupt, and there’s some very interesting things which will be coming out of that world in the next few years, definitely. But I think you wanted to ask me about particular companies. I think I already mentioned Tap Talk, I like Tap Talk, but I don’t know if it’s next billion dollar startup particularly. Okay, I found out the crypto was a good one. So yeah, we ask everyone here that comes a few questions at the end So I’m gonna ask you Mike if you can make a phone call to the 20 year old Mike butcher Get him to stop drumming for a little while and give him a little bit of advice. What would you tell him?
53:25 I would say Don’t defer to your masters nearly so much Mike Don’t don’t listen to anybody as much as you maybe you might have done and just go and be more confident of your own capabilities, your own abilities. And if you have a vision, then go for it. Don’t think that you have to serve time necessarily in one industry. I think we’re now in 2014, obviously, and I think that the world has changed now where somebody who is 20 can just go, I have the tools available to me.
54:07 I have, you know, all I need now is a laptop, Wi-Fi, power, hopefully, and access to information and technology and access to networks. I think that when I was 20, unfortunately, I didn’t have access nearly to the networks I could have had. And just… The human networks. Yeah.
54:27 Yeah. I think that, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And so I had to find my way in the world. But I think the great thing about technology is incredibly empowering to people who maybe come from more disadvantaged circumstances. There was a great story just the other day about a kid in North London who’s got a million followers on Twitch because he’s an incredibly good computer gamer.
54:53 And it’s not something that he would have ever had been able to do had he not had access to technology in the way that he has. So I think yeah, just be confident and don’t necessarily listen to the people who say you have to serve time as much as maybe you have to think you do. That’s good advice. On the same note, best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal?
55:22 Shakespeare, I think is the best advice I would lean on, lean on, which is, love all, trust few. That’s our first Shakespeare quote. That is our first Shakespeare quote. And that’s in 160 episodes of London Real, no joke quote, Shakespeare. That’s very good, Mike.
55:42 Last part of that question is to the 20 year old that’s listening to us around the world in China, Australia, South America, who wants to be involved in tech. I know that’s a general question, but what are some of the things they can do to be involved in their local tech scene or the global tech scene? Well, guys, if you’re out there and you want to make your tech ecosystem better, you should really always think about the entrepreneurs are the ones really who should be leading your ecosystem.
56:08 So there are often corporates and governments who want to get involved. These guys don’t really know how it works particularly. The community is the one that should be looked to and listened to and the community of entrepreneurs are the ones who should lead the entrepreneurial community, not be led by some other entity. Those are the people who should lead. Those are the ones who should put on the events. The entrepreneurs should get together and get the bar, buy the bar for the drinks and get everybody together and put on the hacker events and things like that. Those are the ones who know how the problems that they’re trying to solve.
56:45 And if you want to read up about it, it’s Brad Feld. Brad Feld, F-E-L-D, has done some brilliant writing around creating entrepreneurial communities and I’ll commend him to you, here’s some of his writings. And also don’t be afraid, you know, you can email techcrunch tips at techcrunch.com. We all, the writers do actually read thousands, a lot of these emails that come in. If you want to email me, you can email me on mikebutcher at techcrunch.com.
57:18 Reach out to me on Twitter, at Mike Butcher. I get a lot of incoming from lots of different areas, but that’s probably an easy one to do. So, good luck, I hope you guys do some awesome stuff. Yeah, and watch Mike’s 15 minute video about how to contact him, make sure it’s a purple cow, be nice, be persistent, there’s a few other things on it. But yeah, yeah.
57:41 Be human. And then, what was I saying, make a good product, that’s what he was saying. Yeah, totally, I mean. Make a good press release. Yeah, product is king and queen of the industry.
57:52 Fantastic. Mike, thanks so much for coming on. I love the fact that even if we’re both reporting on things or in the media space, we can have you on because it’s great to get your knowledge. Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.
58:04 Great fun. It’s been a pleasure. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can see our extremely good looking faces on YouTube. So check out our channel. Send us an email at hello at siliconreal.com.
58:13 Like this. Share this with your people. Suggest some guests. one’s coming up, Uber’s here I think next month, and yeah we were packed for like six weeks or something. Yeah we’re busy busy times. Uber wanted to come on today but I said Mike Butcher’s here. There we go. I bumped Uber. You did. I’m not bumping Mike for Uber, I made that conscious decision. I appreciate it. I know when Mike Brett is buttered. I don’t have the Mike Butcher app on my phone but it’s how to hold your glasses. He did that during the ice bucket challenge.
58:43 Unfortunately, my glasses are under a taxi in Stockholm at this point, so I have to go and get some more ones. So we’re missing the look. Excellent, as we say on Silicone Reel, it’s about the people. Thank you, Mike, and I wish you all the best. Cheers, guys.
58:56 Cheers. All right, guys, take care.
