Nic Brisbourne - Founder of Forward Partners

Full transcript: Nic Brisbourne on London Real

1:19 The innovation, 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.

1:35 My guest today is Nic Brisbourne, who is the founder of Forward Partners, an investment business which works with e-commerce companies from raw idea through to Series A, offering a package of investment, proven methodologies and office space. Nic, you have 15 years’ experience in the VC industry, investing in over 25 companies in London and Silicon Valley as a partner at the venture capital firm DFJ Esprit. We had Simon Kukon as one of our very original guests, like over a year ago, I think.

2:04 You also author Europe’s most popular VC blog, The Equity Kicker. It’s fantastic. I was reading through it today. You write a lot too. It’s like once every day or every other day, once a day.

2:14 Yeah, fantastic. Viewpoint, you have backed up with lots of scientific evidence, with an, which an MIT engineer loves. Nic, thanks so much for being here and welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you. You know, we met at the ICE Christmas dinner, and we were hanging out, which is a fantastic group of entrepreneurs here in London that’s kind of chaired by Mr Alex Hoy, who’s also been on the show.

2:34 And we were talking at dinner, and I know you said to me, you know, you were a venture capitalist for so many years, and then you wanted to do something different. You kind of wanted to use a different methodology from the one you know we’re so used to, and the one that we know is VC, and I was wondering what that idea was, and if Forward Partners has become what you had envisioned? Cool. So in many ways, how’s that for a question? That’s good.

2:59 I like that. That’s, it’s become more than Forward Partners has become more than I envisioned, actually. So what I wanted to do was to get earlier stage and to find a way to add much more value to to our portfolio companies. Okay, cuz you were later stage with VC. Yeah, we were Series A, Series B.

3:18 So, you know, still pretty early stage, but you know as businesses get more capital efficient, you know, increasingly think that really the first money and that first half million pounds is where it gets really exciting. You know, it’s where the company’s formed, where when things go well, they can go really well, really fast, and you get the most value appreciation. Okay, so once to get early stage and then you know when you are investing early stage, then you know there’s less money, and so you know the other parts of the package become more important, and so I started thinking a lot.

3:46 Well, what does that actually mean, right? You know, what is the other part of the package? What should it be? And, you know, what we were doing at DFJ and, you know, what all great VCs, you know, Series A and Series B level around the world have done for a long time is, you know, we work really hard for our portfolio companies, and you make sure that you have a good network of people you can connect them to, for, you know, for sales or for recruitment, or to help sell the company, that sort of thing.

4:13 And then you also work hard to be able to offer them advice at the board table. You have a lot of experience at different companies, how to grow a sales team, how to think about digital marketing, this sort of stuff. But, you know, wanted to move beyond the advice and the contact book. And, you know, so we talked. I talked to a bunch of entrepreneurs, asked the question you know, well, you know, if you could have help from your, um, from your investor, what would it be?

4:37 And everyone majored on BD and recruitment. So when I was first thinking about leaving DFJ and adding more value to the portfolio, those, you know, those were the areas I was thinking about the most. But when I came to Forward and started talking with Neil Hutchinson, the founder of Forward there. They had a what was at the time called Forward Labs, and there they were helping build startups from Day Zero, with help with BD and with recruitment, but also with development and design and marketing, and I can see there the beginnings of a package which was just really powerful, you know, kind of a speed of everything that an entrepreneur needs to get started.

5:20 And so then, you know, we kind of took that package and thought, you know, how do we work this, how do we make it so it’s really attractive? Right? So the best entrepreneurs will look at us and say ah, I want to come to them, I want to work with them to get money and to get the help that they offer, because that will give me the best chance of success, and it really, you know, what any individual entrepreneur needs depends on, depends on the skills they have.

5:41 So we’ve got one guy that we’ve just backed who’s an amazing digital marketeer. So, you know, so, you know, we’re helping him a bit with marketing, but, you know, that’s not why he’s come to us. He’s come to us for help with product and design and development. You know, that’s where we can make the most difference to him. Maybe a bit of recruitment too.

6:00 Um, whereas, um, if I look at I’m not going to name names, because kind of pointing to the areas where they’re not so strong. But you know, I look at some of the others, and you know, they’re strong on product, but maybe don’t have the marketing experience, so they, the balance of help that we give is a little bit different. Okay. And do they help each other as well to do any of, I guess, I don’t know if you call them portfolio companies, but we call them partner companies.

6:22 Partner companies. Okay, it’s important language. Is important, yeah. And we do, we know, like, again, we’re different to conventional VCs, and And we do really partner. It’s, you know, we’re there helping to build the company in a much more meaningful way than than a traditional VC.

6:34 You know, we’ve had lots of VCs on here. I’ve made sure that I’ve kind of got a lot of the big ones, whether it’s Index. We just had Accel on. We’ve had Balderton on, and you know they all come on and say once you’re with us and we cut you the check, you’re going to have access to our network and you’re going to have our time, but then I look at these guys and they’re on the boards of 12 companies, and so I know in theory that’s what they want to happen, but often times that breaks down.

6:59 Now the I mean, those good funds do a great job of helping their companies. The, you know, we all as investors do get quite stretched, but, you know, um, I’ve worked with Index in particular, all in the past bit with Accel, and now actually with Balderton more recently, you know, and they’re there helping their companies. The, you know, and they do work hard for them, so people do get stretched at times, but, you know, I think particularly for the successful companies, they really do deliver.

7:27 Right? But they’re later stage usually anyway. Yeah. I mean, that’s the key point for us. So you know we like to work with the companies, as I say, from concept, raw idea through to Series A, and then we want to get those companies in great shape for an Index, an Accel, a Balderton to invest, and, um, and work with them from there.

7:43 And, you know, and then we will start to take more of a back seat as they take more of a front seat. Right? I’m trying to think of a company that would come to you and and the company that might walk in the door and say, Nic, we’d love to work with you right now. I’m guessing their options are a few. They can maybe go to an incubator, or go to an accelerator, or maybe just go straight to angel and try to do it on their own.

8:03 What are their different options, and why, why should they maybe choose Forward as opposed to those other options? And these days there seems to be so many options. Yeah, yeah, too many options. Maybe. So, a little bit more about our investments.

8:17 Maybe we’ll help set the scene for that, so you know, we work from raw idea through to Series A, but you know we think of our investments falling really at two points on that journey, so one at really at the concept stage, that’s about half our deals, and then the other half are maybe a year away from Series A, so kind of more seed stage deals than idea stage deals. Okay, and so for the idea stage deals, then, you know, there are no, there are no VCs that want to invest at that stage. Most accelerators these days, you know, certainly the bigger ones, are, you know, they’re a little bit later stage.

8:51 They want to see companies with products, and so on. So those entrepreneurs, their choice is really between us and angels. Right? Yeah, you’ve said before that sometimes you’re their only option for institutional investment. Exactly, us and angels.

9:02 Yeah. Okay, so how do you start that early? I mean, how do you recognize someone with a good idea and invest in them? That’s the million-dollar question. Well, that’s what we’ve set out to do, and, um, a lot of investors are going later stage, because, you know, the argument for people who only want to invest once there’s a product in the market is, you know, it’s super cheap to get a product to market, and so if you’ve got anything about you as an entrepreneur, you can find a way to do that before you need to come to me for money, and then I can have a look at the product and see whether it’s resonating with customers, and that’s the basis of my due diligence.

9:39 That’s the logic. Right? That’s the classical thinking, and we’ve heard it so many times on this show. It’s the minimum viable product, get it done, go to Google Campus, make sure it happens, and then start talking to people. Yeah, and, see, to me that misses a huge opportunity, which is, you know, there’s a bunch of great entrepreneurs there, particularly business-oriented entrepreneurs, and if you say to them, want to talk to you once you’ve built a product and got a little bit of traction, then which is the message they’ve been hearing, then the only option they have is to run around and try and find a tech co-founder, and the business co-founders outnumber the tech co-founders, kind of three or four to one in London.

10:16 You know, we go to these tech co-founder events, because, you know, they’re hunting ground for us, and, um, we ask the question. You know, we sponsor these things and do a little talk at the beginning. How many of you here are solo founders? How many business, you know, like maybe, you know, 60 or 70% of the audience? How many of your technical founders, you know?

10:35 And it’s like 20%. And so these business-oriented founders, you know, have to work really hard to sell their companies to these tech co-founders, who very often take large stakes, and, you know, and they’re getting married to people that they barely know. So the tech guys are running the business transaction more than the business guys. Yeah. Like, the balance of supply and demand is way skewed.

10:55 Is that a London issue? Is that because the business people come here? Or is it the same in Cambridge? It’s the same. Cambridge, same in California.

11:02 And the reason is that if you’re a technologist and you want to found a company, then you can build the first version of the product yourself, right? If you haven’t, you know, and so, you know, half of those guys just do that, right, and so they go out of the market, and so there’s always going to be an imbalance. Interesting. And so that, you know, and that’s where we play. So, you know, the sweet spot for us is people who have got, you know, some experience, got a 5 to 10 years of experience, know their domain well, got a great idea, and, you know, and then we can work with them to really flesh out the idea, make sure it’s great, make sure the first version of the product built is one that really resonates with customers, you know, find those first customers, get the economics looking great, and then raise the Series A.

11:46 Okay, so you’re looking for the business person with the idea that can’t build the MVP, and that’s where you specialize. That’s a sweet spot. Yeah, okay. Now you specialize in e-commerce. Is that still the case, and why pick such a niche?

12:00 So, yes, it is still the case, and a big part of what I wanted to do when I left DFJ was to be sector focused, and the reason for that is that by being sector focused, you, you know, you build up some real expertise in an area, and so you make better investment decisions. You’re also better able to help your companies because you understand their business better, and your network of contacts becomes stronger in their specific areas. You become more attractive to the best entrepreneurs, and so that was why I wanted to focus on that area.

12:29 And, you know, if you look at, if you look at the US, you know, the most successful strategies for venture capital funds over the last 10 or 15 years have, you know, have been twofold. One is the sector-focused funds. So Union Square Ventures stands out as the best example there. You know, they’re focused on network businesses. Okay.

12:45 And then the second strategy is higher value add, you know, with Google Ventures and recent Andreessen Horowitz, and so on. That’s kind of younger in its gestation, but that’s the other thing that we picked up. Okay, as in, they really take an active role in the company and brain-dump all their knowledge. Like Andreessen Horowitz, they have all these specialty people as well. Yeah.

13:01 So the key thing is, you’ve got a team of people that help. You know, you’re not just a fund of investors, you’re a fund of investors and a team of operators to help the companies. Okay. So you notice those two things, and that’s what you’re doing here. Exactly.

13:14 Which is interesting. I haven’t heard this business model, and I’ve done 80 of these shows, so you’re kind of doing something unique in London. I would say yeah, no, very much so. Yeah. Okay, and one more question.

13:24 I mean, I was listening to the series, how to start a startup, which I think was Stanford University, and they had a lot of people from Y Combinator there, and former grads, and a bunch of interesting people. And I think the Y Combinator person said that they ran the numbers on their 200 or 400 startups, and they found that the most successful teams were with two or three co-founders, and that the ones that did it alone had a very hard time. What’s been your experience?

13:48 Or is your idea to take that business guy in and marry him with a tech person? How have you found co-founding team success rate? You’re a numbers guy. If you run the numbers statistically, what is it? What is it like?

13:59 I, so I totally agree with the conclusion coming out of Y Combinator. It’s so much easier to run a business if there’s two or three of you at the top. It’s, you know, it’s a hard business, running a startup, as you know. Um, and you know, there’s just a million things that come at you all the time, and if you’ve got a partner at the heart of your business, a co-founder, then there’s someone who you can, you know, you, you problem comes in, you can have your, you know, your little panic reaction without upsetting the team, upsetting your investors.

14:29 That’s important. If you have, you know, ideas about how you might solve problems or new things you want to try, someone you can talk to when those ideas are only half-baked. You know, all those things are super hard if you don’t have a partner, a co-founder, at the centre of your business. And so, um, we’re big believers in the importance of teams. You know, where we, uh, kind of look at it in a bit more detail though is, you know, do you need to have that partner on day one?

14:54 You know, if you have that partner, like, if you’re a business-oriented person, you’ve got a great idea, and you’ve got a co-founder, then that’s great, right? If you’ve got someone you want to work with out of the traps, that’s fantastic. But if you don’t, then the best time to find that person is not straight away, when your idea is still kind of pretty half-baked and only really exists in PowerPoint. It’s, in a couple of months, when you know you’ve validated the idea, you’ve launched your first version, you’ve got, you know, a few customers, only a small number, and you go and talk to people and say, look, hey, I’ve got a real business here.

15:22 This is a real thing. Do you want to join? And at that point, you unlock a much larger pool of more qualified candidates, you know, and these often are techies, and there’s, there’s a lot of, um, sort of co-founder CTO types who really want to get involved super early stage in startups, but, you know, they’ve tried it once, pairing at kind of day zero with a business-oriented founder, and the thing flopped, because ultimately it probably wasn’t a good idea, right?

15:46 And so by, you know, when you go to them with a story of the company that’s a couple of months in, and you know, and it’s just got much more substance to it, then they say, okay, like, I’ve always wanted to join really early stage, and, you know, this looks great for me now, and they don’t get many opportunities to join businesses like that. Are you a matchmaker of sorts? Are you Match.com for tech in London? Yeah, but that makes you feel lonely, or somehow doesn’t it?

16:08 Right now it is lonely out there, but, um, but very much so. So Talent is one of the key things that we help companies with, and helping through that process of figuring out, you know, what sort of co-founder is going to be best for you, and then helping them find that person, is very much part of how we help. I can just imagine the horrible unions that are going on out there when some business guy bumps into some tech guy. They don’t know anything about each other, but they’ve never met anyone like each other, and they just say, okay, let’s do it, ‘cuz I’m, I’m in a, what, I’m in a scarcity mindset right now, ‘cuz I don’t have options.

16:38 I mean, you must see that all the time. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and we see people who have paired up in that regard, in that way, and then we look at it and go, like, that’s made, that’s made, you know, you as an individual we would have invested in, but now, then, now this two of you, it’s not working for us, right, and it’s over. I mean, that’s, it’s too late, right? And the whole idea is now crushed, and the equity’s been split, and now, I mean, it’s almost you’ve lost your one-year, two-year window, kind of, right?

17:01 Well, in the worst case, yes. I mean, so they’ve got a chance. Maybe we’re wrong in that assessment, you know. So they go and try and do their thing, obviously. But, um, but yeah.

17:09 Okay, a lot of guys are listening, on women too, and they’re thinking, wow, how could I be the business person that would impress Nic? I’m wondering what are you looking for? I’m sure there’s a bunch of intangibles, but you mentioned earlier you’re looking for a certain amount of experience. Are there certain traits, as in they’ve stuck with jobs in the past? Or, there is, is it background, education?

17:28 Is there anything that you found works? So, you know, there’s certainly nothing in background and education. You know, we’re huge believers on taking people on merit at the point at which we meet them, not, you know, like they managed to get some degree at a good university or anything like that. Um, so what do we look for? You know, we look for someone who has first and foremost got a great idea, and they’re passionate about that, and they can explain it clearly.

17:53 Uh, and you know, one of the big questions we always have, right at the get-go, you know, when an entrepreneur’s at the beginning of their journey, it’s like, you know, how much are they going to stick with this, right? You know, do we really think that they want it, you know, hard, right? And you’re going to stay with it for five years or more. How can you tell that? Well, see, you know, you look at what they’ve been doing, right?

18:11 How hard they’ve been working on the on this project in the background. So, um, so one of the guys we just backed had been, um, you know, so he handed his notice on his job the day after he signed the term sheet with us. Um, but for the previous year he’d been working on this company as a side project, and he had a site live, and he got his first few customers, and, you know, persuaded some developer to work with him for free, and, you know, so like, you could see, like, and he wanted it, and he chose his jobs in order of the previous five years in order to build up his experience base.

18:40 Okay, you know, he could feel he wanted it, right? Okay, so the CV must tell you something, what they’ve been doing for the past five years. I mean, you must be able. So in that case, very much so. You know, one before company called Lexo, um, which is a marketplace connecting, um, small companies with lawyers there.

18:56 Um, you know, Daniel, uh, was a lawyer before, and so what we liked about that, you know, he really understood the lawyer side of the equation, what drives those guys and girls, you know, and how they were going to, you know, how to make Lexo attractive so they would work with him, and, uh, and again you could really feel the drive. Been so he had been highly successful in his five years as a lawyer. That was a big part of it. Okay, and do you do multiple meetings over a weeks and months process before you choose, or do you get a good feel right away by people?

19:26 Um, so, so you know we do get a good feel right away, and that, and that is important, but then we do have a process that we go through. So, you know, we keep it quick. You know, we really set ourselves up to, uh, to be as entrepreneur-friendly as we can. And, you know, one of the things that, um, that investors can be very guilty of is spinning entrepreneurs’ wheels, you know, taking meetings when maybe they’re not, you know, that likely to invest, and then, you know, and then not saying no.

19:53 They might. Yeah. So, you know, we really work hard not to do that at all, uh, and, uh, and to keep our processes very fast and transparent. So, um, the way we work with companies at the idea stage is there’s a couple of meetings, one, maybe two meetings, and then we have, uh, a workshop process that we use, which is based on the business model canvas, which is a way of looking holistically at the whole company, uh, and then working through what are the assumptions behind it.

20:19 And that helps us to see the assumptions that have been made, um, uh, and then we have a stack-ranking process, which says, okay, so these are the most important assumptions by criticality to the business, and how easy they are to test. And we look at those and think, do we believe those? You know, like, you know, so they need to be proven, but what’s that got telling us? Uh, and you know, if we think they can be proven, then that’s a really great sign for the company.

20:41 Uh, and I, me, talk with the entrepreneur, right? You know, this is how we’re seeing this. Do you see it in the same sort of way? If we invest, the first thing we should do is try and validate these assumptions, uh, and then that becomes the work plan for the first couple of months after we’ve invested. How do you say no, and do you usually try to give it a time frame in your mind when I have to get back and give these people yes or no?

21:03 So, yeah, we try and do it very quickly. Uh, we haven’t done this yet, but, you know, um, one of the things I’d like to get to in the next year or two is a clear, um, almost like an SLA for entrepreneurs, you know, like, if you, uh, if you contact us, we’ll reply within this sort of time frame, and if you meet us, we’ll get back, um, with a decision, again, in within a couple of days. We just started actually sending out questionnaires, feedback questionnaires, after we meet entrepreneurs, and, you know, we get some feedback, right?

21:29 You know, yeah, did we set this thing up effectively, were we present in the meeting appropriately, did we ask the right questions, did we get back to when we said we would? You know, I want to know what you think is the future of funding for startups in London. You know, every week I turn around and I seem to see kind of a new accelerator, a new incubator, a new Fortune 500 company that’s coming in and saying now we’re going to accelerate here, accelerate there, and I got a funny feeling that these are going to continue for the next couple of years, and there’s so many options.

21:55 I think there’s like five or eight different fintech accelerators out there. Is London over-accelerated? Is that the wrong choice for certain people to go on these 90-day programs, you know, or should they be thinking about doing something else? So I, I think we do have too many accelerators. I think, you know, particularly corporate accelerators are mushrooming, and if you look at the motivations for corporates, you know, that lot of these big companies, they desperately want to harness more innovation somehow, and they don’t know how to do that.

22:25 Running an accelerator is one way that might deliver that benefit for them, and it’s pretty cheap, and they get, you know, they get some good column inches, some good marketing benefits, uh, uh, and so I think there’s a lot of that going on. I think that, you know, probably they won’t get the benefits they hope out of it, but, you know, that’s a wave that’ll take a couple of years, probably, to work its way through. Um, that said, you know, depending on the program, right?

22:47 If you’re not taking any equity, then, you know, uh, why not, going to do this for 90 days, you get free office space, you get your networks, um, get a bit better, and, you know, one of our companies, um, um, in the logistics space, there’s a logistics provider, you know, I mean, I wouldn’t say they are, but they they’re just setting up an accelerated program, and I was like, wow, even they said accelerated program. What’s the deal? No equity. You know, we get to know them a bit better and we get to meet some other people, and, you know, then potentially acquire one day, and so, so why not?

23:17 Right, right. Okay, and the corporate ones don’t usually take equity, right? Some do, some don’t, but yeah, but if they don’t, then it’s a, you know, so we backed a company called Dat Loop last year that had been through the Microsoft accelerator, right? And, you know, it’s just, you know, was just they got free office space and some good networks for 90 days, and they just used that, right? Yeah, no, I bumped into a few few people that have asked me that, and it’s kind of like, yeah, what are you doing now?

23:37 Plus a lot of people since they don’t have the means outside their current full-time job or whatever they’re doing, like, what are you actually going to be doing in 90 days from now? Maybe not much else. So this could be a great way for you to get the knowledge, get a network, talk to people, don’t give up equity. Yeah, and there’s something there. Now what if you’re giving up 8% of the equity and you’re going on, you know, a 90 or 100-day startup?

23:56 Does that change things? Yeah, right? You know, that’s getting up for 10% of your company, but it’s only 10%. It’s only 10%, but, you know, 10% here, 10% there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. You know, uh, and so, you know, at that level, um, you know, some of them are great, some of them are not, and you need to take, you know, a very careful decision about whether it’s worth 10% of your company.

24:22 It also depends on what your strengths are. So, you know, as an entrepreneur, so I think what a lot of these accelerators are really good for is helping people to really quickly build out their networks. You know, particularly if you’re coming from a foreign country, you know, from Eastern Europe, maybe, uh, you arrive in London, then 90 days with a good accelerator, all of a sudden you’re, you know, hugely well networked, and that would take you maybe a couple of years otherwise.

24:42 So that can easily be worth 7 or 8%, right? Um, you know, what we’re doing, uh, working with companies for a much longer period of time every year, um, is, you know, that period of time enables us to really build a solid business, right? Help build a product, get customers, validate the economics, and, you know, and hence drive a big increase in valuation in 90 days. You know, there’s only so much you can do, right? Um, and so I think that, you know, in most cases accelerators are good for the use case I just described.

25:16 Okay. Biggest mistake startups make? I know it’s a general question, but you see it every day, plus you’ve been in this business for so long, or these days that might have changed in the last few years. Yeah. Biggest mistake startups make?

25:28 I think the, I think the easiest mistake to make and the most common mistake is, um, you know, have your, you know, take the initial vision for a product and idea, and and then just go build that, and not be receptive enough to feedback, you know, not spend enough time talking to customers, or talking to customers in the right way. So many companies now, you know, they’ve read The Lean Startup or skimmed it, and, um, and they want to build a minimum viable product, uh, and then they don’t don’t build the best MVP that they could, right? They build one, maybe they should have built it here, but they, you know, they build it over here, a slightly different feature set, and, you know, and then it doesn’t really resonate that well, and they’re trying to iterate from the wrong base.

26:10 You know, actually, there’s a phrase that IDE use, which is slow down to speed up, and which I think is really relevant for startups at the early stages. You need to take a little bit of time to really understand what are the emotional, you know, what are the emotional kind of hot buttons around your product for your customers, and then once you understand that, you know, then you choose what your MVP should look like, and then you’re in a much stronger place, right? So don’t go too fast into product, which is what we’ve heard the market been preaching at us for a long time, right?

26:36 You wrote a blog post recently saying good startup hypothesis must be falsifiable. Is this a little bit about examining your product and examining what your methodology is first? Yes. Yeah, yes. So it goes into that, um, definition, into that same, um, yeah.

26:53 So I think, you know, to the extent that you can have great clarity over what it is you’re trying to build, and why, uh, and how much of that you know, and how much of that is guesswork at the moment that you’re going to test, then you’re in a much stronger place. And it’s really easy to, uh, to want to move super fast, and you kind of know, you know, right? You can feel it and what it should be, and so you just want to build, and, um, you know, as I say, that can end up with not quite the right product, and then you’re starting from the wrong place, and the thing can never, will never be as good as it might have been.

27:32 Right? So that’s the funny thing about startups. A great founder believes in his vision, uh, in a completely irrational way, right? Or he wouldn’t be doing what he does, but also a great founder constantly gets feedback from the market in case they need to pivot. I don’t even know if you use that word anymore.

27:48 So how do you strike the balance, and how do you convince your portfolio companies, or partner companies, to strike the balance, because sometimes you’re dealing with people that are very passionate? So, so, so striking the balance is key, right? And that’s true in so many areas of life, and it’s so easy to say and so hard to do. I read another blog post recently about getting the right balance between optimism and critical thinking, which I think really talks to this point.

28:13 Cynicism and, uh, with two extremes. Yeah, exactly. Was it hope without something? Um, is it, you know, hope without critical thinking? Critical thinking is naivety, and critical thinking without hope is cynicism, right?

28:24 And, you know, you don’t want to be either of those, right? You want to be in the middle, but, um, but it’s a tough balance to strike, and, uh, and so you need to strive for the balance, and knowing when to listen. You know, because as an entrepreneur, you get all sorts of advice from, you know, everyone. You know, everyone wants to be a mentor these days, and take the coffee, and you get all sorts of advice, much of it conflicting, knowing which bits to take and which bits to ignore.

28:52 Uh, isn’t easy, and, you know, and ultimately that’s about your judgment as a founder, and, you know, and having great judgment is kind of one of the differences between success and failure, ultimately, right? So you want the right mentors around you. Well, you’ve got to talk to a lot of mentors. It’s about knowing which ones to listen to, right? You know, which ones do you go to see again and which ones do you not?

29:12 Right? Talk to me about the boardroom. I know you’ve had some early experience on boards. I, uh, was listening to that same How to Start a Startup series, and someone from one of the companies said that, you know, in all their time they never remember something, a board vote, anything but unanimous, and so I think that’ll surprise a lot of people. And I had Philip Oter here from Accel a couple of weeks ago, and I said, what’s it really like at a board meeting?

29:32 You know, is it what we think it is, or is it like some movie? You know, what does it really feel like? And I was wondering what you learned about boards, about consensus, over the years, and I’ll ask you, how does it really work? So, good board meetings are not that different to good meetings, full stop. You know, there, they are, you know, relatively informal, uh, and you know, everyone’s clear on what you’re trying to achieve and pushes forward to the same objective.

30:01 You know, bad board meetings are where everything gets very formal, and you know, people are, you know, I’ve been in board meetings, actually, particularly in the States, where people fall back on formality, uh, as a way to avoid difficult discussion. Okay, you know, and I say in the States, so it’s very common, uh, for US companies to have a lawyer present at the board meeting, something that we never do over here. Is that because it’s so litigious, or is that just someone that’s not doing their homework and not building coalitions, or what is that?

30:30 Um, it’s interesting. So I think in part because it’s litigious, but also because, um, so the, the it’s interesting, isn’t it? I, I think it’s because, you end up, um, when the lawyer’s there, then, um, you’re able to quickly check back on, uh, you know, had any given decision impact on things that the company has done before? And so yes, so I think you’re right. It’s because they’re litigious, and they’re more worried than we are here about taking a decision which might be, uh, at odds with a contract they’ve done previously, or so on.

31:10 I think it is. Yeah, must be. So that makes for a bad board meeting. Yeah, well, you know, so then, you know, then you know, if people want to avoid difficult decisions or difficult discussions, then, you know, they can be constantly saying or asking you you know, well, how does this look from a legal perspective? And, uh, and, uh, exploring fear scenarios rather than getting to the heart of the matter.

31:32 Okay, and what was your bad experience when you first started out with boards, or what did you learn or fail to do? Yeah, so, um, you know, when I look back at myself as an early board member, it makes me cringe. Um, and so, you know, I was, uh, at least I thought I was smart, you know, and I’ve seen quite a lot of companies, and could see the path that the company should be taking, but, you know, and also lots of little things that could be done better, and so the mistake that I made, and it took me a while, you know, more than one board, to learn this, was to, um, try and, uh, try and help the founders, the CEOs, on too many levels, like, you know, I think we should be doing this, A and B and C and D.

32:19 Um, and what I learned over time was that, you know, by far and away the most effective way to operate is to figure out which of those is the most important, A or B or C or D, and focus on that. Uh, and, you know, and really just try to have one thing that you’re trying to help with at any given moment. So, one theme at a time. Yeah, okay. And do you have to build coalitions with board members?

32:39 Do you have to always have a discussion going, you know, constantly, not just quarterly at these meetings? Is there any kind of, so, so, you know, in a good board, there’s relationships between the board members, and, you know, they do talk a lot, and, you know, quite often you see these people around at different places anyway. Um, you know, when you start talking about building coalitions, then it starts to sound political, and, you know, and that’s, you know, if you’re into that, then you’re into a bad place.

33:05 You know, ultimately, if there’s any kind of fundamental disagreement between the CEO and any of the other board members, then you’re in a difficult place. Um, when you know, when everyone’s aligned on strategy and on what the business should do, then it’s easy, right? Then things flow. Um, if there’s a fundamental disagreement, then it starts to get difficult, because um, well, you start interpreting data in different ways. You want to look at things in different ways.

33:33 You want to talk about different things, and you ultimately, it’s the CEO who controls the company and should control the agenda, but the board member has a certain amount of power. In some ways, is kind of a little bit the boss of the CEO, and so that’s, it just gets very difficult. I think Ben Horowitz talks about that in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, just the relationship with a board member and a CEO, and how, yeah, you really need to stay on the same page, and as soon as you get off that page, it makes for a very short tenure, or you know, a lot of tension, and sometimes you can’t.

34:02 Some, you know, like, you get off the page but you’re stuck on the same board because you’re still invested, and that can be hard to work out. Right. Let’s talk about Horowitz really quick. You mentioned, uh, you know, Andreessen as maybe a model of yours as far as having all of that full-service, you know, personnel in there. You know, uh, Ben just taken his first European board seat on TransferWise.

34:18 It was a big news for us, you know, billion-dollar valuation here in London, big investment. What do you think of, you know, that firm coming to Europe, coming to London? Is that a sign of things to come? Does this tell us something about what the Valley is looking at as far as abroad? Or what would your read on that?

34:35 I think that the world is a smaller and smaller place every year, and as investors, particularly if you’re managing a large fund, you want to be in the best companies in the world. Right? We were talking, um, a little bit earlier on about, um, you know, the number of billion-dollar companies that there are. Right? You know, and it needs to be a billion-dollar company, or a billion-dollar company, if it’s going to move the needle.

34:56 Fresh in bits now, and, you know, there isn’t so many of those in the US that they can afford to just focus there. So I think we’re going to see more of it, right? And it’s also interesting, because you have a kind of a separate ecosystem that they can invest in, that might not be correlated to the Valley or to other, you know, and so you don’t know what ideas are going to come up, or, you know, what they’ll learn in a different regulatory environment. Or, yeah, exactly.

35:18 Different cultures produce different ideas, and therefore different types of startups. Uh, and yeah, for sure. Um, and particularly as the financing climate gets stronger here in Europe and in other startup centres around the world, then, you know, we’ll see more and more great companies, um, coming out of all these different places, and Silicon Valley’s kind of market share of the best companies is only going to decline over time. Talk to me about the Equity Kicker.

35:42 That’s your blog. Hugely popular. Fantastic ideas. How do you come up with the ideas? How do you be, how are you so prolific?

35:49 Because I think we’ve seen the great bloggers or writers really do produce daily content, or multiple pieces, to try to keep people engaged. How did you come across it, and do you find that the writing actually helps you in your own business? Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t keep doing it, um, just for the bling. So, uh, my routine is, you know, in the morning I have a few Twitter lists, um, which I scan, and I save articles from those, uh, and then my routine, I spend, you know, half an hour to an hour and a half reading those, uh, and, you know, 9 days out of 10, maybe 19 out of 20, my blog idea comes from that.

36:26 And that’s in the morning. I’m always curious, so I try to fit it in in the morning, you know, before you get to the office, or in the office. No, no, in the office. Yeah. So I do the reading sometimes before I go to the office, but I actually do the writing in the office, and so if I have meetings, then it’ll be in the afternoon.

36:40 But one of the first things I’m doing every day is looking at my diary, thinking, you know, what, when am I going to have time to write my blog post? You try to do one a day. Yeah, yeah. Okay, and I have been, you know, like, um, uh, I actually missed a couple of days last week when I was in the office, ‘cuz I was ill, and I was like, so, running at half speed. But the, you know, I haven’t missed a, uh, I haven’t missed a working day blogging for a long, long time.

37:03 Really. And how long have you been doing this for? Um, so since we spun out of Cazenove, so since June 2006. So I wanted to write the blog when we were at Cazenove Private Equity, um, but Cazenove had had issued something like six press releases in 180 years, and so the idea of someone there blogging was like a total no-no. Anyway, so we spun out from Cazenove, and I started blogging straight away after that.

37:22 Okay, and some of the titles are fascinating. I mean, they’re they’re, they’re very nice and simple and backed by data. You like data, don’t you? And so you get a graph there. You get something, you know, uh, music labels are, rake too far.

37:33 Two great rules for writing and life. Facebook is a powerful advertising platform, all with kind of some bar graphs and some information. It’s nice and short, and you’re just I guess, what’s what’s what you fancy, or what is on your radar? Is that what you write about? Yeah, so I write about what’s on my mind and what I’m, um, what I’m reading about at the time, and so, you know, if you look at the subjects that I’ve written about and how it’s evolved, it, you know, really, really reflects, um, where I’ve been investing.

38:01 So, you know, the strategy of DFJ versus Forward Partners, and then the types of things that I’ve been investing in, uh, and, uh, so, you know, now you see a lot more stuff about really early stage companies, then it was a bit more about Series A, Series B when I was at, uh, DFJ. Um, so yeah, so actually, I think, kind of the benefits beyond, you know, so it’s nice. It helps build a profile for myself and for partners, but the other things that it does for me, uh, are twofold, really.

38:29 One, that, you know, really forces that daily rhythm of reading, uh, ‘cuz it’s easy to not find the time for that, so I really like that. And then two, uh, the act of writing down your, your thoughts forces you to really complete them and think them through in a way that you just don’t, and so it just really helps me, um, well, just to be a bit smarter. Maybe. I don’t think that’s a problem for you, Nic. I got a funny feeling.

38:54 Um, do you also find that it’s a great, you know, a de facto PR move for you, that you get a lot of companies that contact you, or they read your blog, and you’re like, wow, this guy’s the real deal, you know, he’s not just a guy with a checkbook? Do you find yes? Definitely. You know, what I hear all the time is, like, you know, even though we barely met or I’ve not met you before, I, I feel like I know you, because I read your blog every day. Uh, and, uh, yeah, so it definitely helps build a profile and build that personal relationship, you know.

39:19 Uh, Nic, and I just shot like a two-minute video here quickly to phone, and I was, when I was reading your blogs, I was like, you know, it would be great if you did the same thing on your blog so I’m just putting that out there as an idea for you, because it’s also a great way to complete your thoughts. If you have to do it to camera, even if it’s two or three minutes, that’s interesting. It could be good. It could be interesting. Again, uh, you know, it’s a great way to get your thoughts all together, and I couldn’t have done it a few years ago when I started this, but the more and more that I talk to camera now, I can just be like, I can kind of complete an idea.

39:47 So I’m putting that challenge out there. Then you got to do it in real time. Yeah, then you have to do it real time, but, you know, your ideas are very, very, you know, very short and contained. So, um, and so I think you could just get them down in a couple of minutes. So I’m putting that challenge out to you.

40:01 Maybe one a week. Yeah, yeah. We think about that, definitely. Talk to me about London. If there’s one thing that we have to keep our eye on the ball here, not to drop it, to make sure that the ecosystem continues to grow and stay positive, and it is a great environment to be.

40:14 What do we have to focus on? So, you know, I think we’ve really got to stay focused on getting to the exits. You know, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And, you know, I come all in favour of celebrating success as companies grow, be that big customers or raising a Series A or a Series B, or a big round from Andreessen Horowitz, but, you know, ultimately that counts for nothing until you get public or you sell the company. Uh, and yeah, so that’s the thing to focus on.

40:41 Okay, you know, there’s something called a media bias, and in technology we suffer it probably 10 times more than any other industry, because you read about it on TechCrunch. I mean, they even say they love funding articles, so you always hear this money here, and this money here, and this money here, and yet, you know, yeah, exactly. You know, it can become a goal in itself, right? You know, I got the Series A from big brand name investor, and now what do I do, right?

41:07 You know, um, yeah, as I say, right, you know, it’s about building a sustainable company ultimately, and that’s what gets you the exit. So, you know, ultimately that’s really what’s most rewarding, I think, for a lot of the best entrepreneurs. It’s, you know, that’s how you leave the legacy. It’s like, I, you know, I build an amazing company with a great product that people love. Look at TransferWise, right?

41:26 You know, how much do people love that product? And I’ve built a company that I’m proud of, um, because, you know, I love the culture here. Typically, right? One thing that continues to come up on this show here is, you know, the 7 to 10-year time frame. And I just think, again, from the media bias and the other things that we read, we assume that it’s like a two or three-year turnaround, or you hear these stories, and it’s just not.

41:44 If you go back to the numbers, you know, you find out that even the huge success stories, you know, Facebook, 7 or 8 years before they went public, and all of these stories, um, that it’s good to keep that in mind. Yeah, I mean, there are examples of companies that get to huge valuations really fast, but you know, they’re the outliers, you know, and you can’t have a strategy of being an outlier, you know, if you’re starting a company or investing in a company at day zero, as we do, then you’ve got to figure it at a 7 to 10-year journey. Absolutely.

42:13 Let me ask you a question that I’ve just been kind of pottering around in my head for a while, and I’m by no means an expert, but when people talk about the valuation of a company when they raise money, is that the wrong way of looking at things? Is that a way to really get a weirdly inflated idea in your mind? And should you instead be thinking, okay, Andreessen Horowitz just invested $58 million in TransferWise, and they’re going to build that and maybe grow it to a certain percentage, but when we start throwing around this company is worth a billion dollars, even though only a small percent of the equity has just traded hands?

42:42 Is that kind of inflate things in our mind in a wrong way? Um, so it’s, it’s an imperfect measure of progress is how I would think about it. You know, so if TransferWise is valued at a billion dollars by Andreessen Horowitz, then, you know, it’s the best number that we’ve got. You know, it’s, it’s imperfect for lots of reasons, uh, and, you know, but ultimately there is no way of knowing from fundamentals, or on an absolute basis, what their company’s worth, and so, you know, that is the best guess, but, you know, you’ve got to, um, you’ve got to just keep in mind that it is, it is just a good yardstick, and it’s not any kind of, um, like I say, you know, it’s not a final valuation, and ultimately it doesn’t count for anything unless, you know, unless you get to a sustainable profit business in a good exit.

43:27 Right. So keep focused on the long-term strategy. Let’s talk about you personally, really quick. You seem like a man who likes to run the numbers on everything, and just constantly check, which goes back to your articles as far as looking at the numbers, and then constantly making sure your product is doing what you think it’s going to do. You’ve run some things on yourself as well.

43:43 You refused the caffeine that I tried to push on you in the door, and, uh, you found that certain things work for you, certain things don’t. I know you said that meditation works well for you. Uh, how have you found certain personal habits, maybe reading in the morning, you know, works better for you as opposed to others? So the one habit that I do religiously, which, uh, which I love, is, so, I get up half an hour before feeding the kids to go and do some exercise.

44:08 You know, I have a very quick protein bar, and then I go for a run or do half an hour’s exercise at home, and this is like six in the morning, or, yeah, half six. Okay. Yeah, maybe, quarter to seven. Okay. Um, this is the routine for success you found this works.

44:21 Right? Me, yeah, you know, and so that gives me more energy, uh, and, uh, you know, so both longer in the day, and it kind of makes me feel much more positive, and, you know, sometimes it’s not possible, right? When I’ve got too much work or I’ve got a flight to get or something, and, you know, a couple of days without that, and, you know, okay, I can really feel it. I get a little bit grouchy. It’s like, you know, you were talking to me before about your queue test, you know, and that’s, you know, after a couple of days of not exercising in the morning, I feel a bit like that.

44:48 Right? My queue test was, if you’re waiting in the queue and you’re getting angry at the fact that there’s a queue, then you’re not, um, you’re not keeping an eye on the bigger picture, which is, you know, the great place you’re in, the companies you’re with, the people you’re around. And that probably means you haven’t maybe done your exercise or done your meditation. So you do the half hour of exercise in the morning, then what’s next for you? Um, so then, you know, then the kids start to get up, Fiona starts to get up, and so, and I get ready for work.

45:13 So it’s kind of a mix of getting ready, in a bit of family time, uh, cycle to work, uh, and then, uh, and then get into it. The so that’s the only kind of really regular habit I have. Do you meditate too? I do meditate, but I, um, but not regularly. So, um, one of, this, people always laugh a little bit at this, but one of the things I do, one of the times I meditate the most, is first thing in the morning.

45:40 Um, so if I wake up, um, like 15 or 20 minutes before it’s time to go for my run, then, um, then I, then I lie there, literally, in bed and meditate on my back, you know, and I’ve been told before that that’s not, you know, that’s not meditation, that’s a lie-in, but it really works for me. No, don’t, that’s what I do in the morning. What I do is I wake up, I brush my teeth, and I go back into bed, and I sit up against the headboard, and then I do my 20 minutes.

46:04 Then do you do 20 minutes every morning? Yeah, yeah, see, yeah, I would like to do that. I haven’t found it’s hard, ‘cuz you’re doing then you’re doing exercise on top of that, so that makes up like an hour window in the morning. Yeah, exactly. And then I, um, this is the other slightly strange one for meditation.

46:18 So I cycle around a lot to meetings, and so on, and, um, and every time I get to the lights, I just kind of get a 30 or 60 depending on how long the lights are, meditation, there, really kind of soft focus on the red light, and, uh, and, you know, and that makes a difference. Again, I actually, so when we moved office, to, uh, to our current office just by Hoxton Square, my commute from home, uh, dropped from like 50 minutes to 10 minutes on the bike, and the number of lights dropped from like 5 to 2, and I, I felt that right immediately. You missed your meditation, missed, missed the light time.

46:50 Yeah, it’s an interesting point. You can get bits of meditation in, you know, and you kind of get bits of quiet time, and it’s funny, training can be a form of meditation. Much so, you know, reading those articles and compiling your thoughts in the morning at work, before people get in, can be a kind of a weird quiet time as well. And so doing that, reading in the morning and then writing your blog, I’m sure that’s really helped you over the years to just get your head in the right space and to get ideas.

47:14 Yeah, yeah, yes, you know, and get those thoughts really kind of clear you must do a lot of communicating, so communicating to people that you work with, to new firms and things like that. And if you think you only have, say, 10 or 20 or 30 seconds to get an idea across to someone, and if it’s nice and clear and concise, then you’re going to be, and it takes a lot of work. You know, it’s like the Apple cliché. It takes a lot of work to make these products look so simple, and it’s the same with ideas, right?

47:39 So the best way to do it is to practise, to write or film videos, that kind of thing. Yeah. One of the interesting things for us over the last, um, year and a half at Forward Partners has been, you know, how do we describe ourselves? You know, and then there’s kind of, as I described it here, you know, we work with companies from concept through to Series A, and, um, that is something only we arrived at relatively recently, and, you know, when we started saying that, and we’ve got different stages that, you know, we can kind of talk about how that breaks down and how we help companies at different points.

48:05 All of a sudden it started, you know, that just really started working with, uh, with people, with particularly with entrepreneurs, and everything started falling into place. But, you know, we had to go through a couple of iterations of things in order to get there, and, you know, each one wasn’t quite perfect, but a bit better than the one before. And you just got to try stuff and iterate, and so on. Yeah, that’s so important. A good exercise is take 15 words and make them all words that a 10-year-old would understand, and write out your objective.

48:31 Is a business or describe it? That’s a fun one. It’s a good one. And so make it so your grandma can understand, or someone and if your grandma can’t understand it, then rewrite it until it’s like, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, D, du. And, um, so many startups, I’ve been guilty of it too.

48:45 Don’t, don’t do that. And yet they’ll spend all their time on the product and this and that, and yet they haven’t distilled in their own minds and their co-workers’ minds exactly what they do, which means that everyone’s probably doing something slightly different. So that is actually one of the tests that we, you know, when we, uh, you know, when we’re trying to think whether an idea is a good one or not, you know, can we distil it into 10 or 15 words, and, you know, is there a compelling elevator pitch that we can see?

49:07 Right, right, at the beginning. Right. I had Guy Kawasaki in here, who, uh, you know, is a, a social media guru, and he was the chief evangelist for Apple for four years, and he said that every company should have a mantra, which is not their slogan, but which is, say, three words, and so it’s like, du, D, D, D, du. And he was offering the ones for Spotify and for this and for that, and it’s, it’s not like so Nike wasn’t just do it. It was, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

49:29 I should have remembered what he said, but it was interesting. If you can try to think of what your mantra is too, by condensing it even more, so weird, have to think about that, you know. And for us, uh, I think it’s helped great entrepreneurs, you know, about, you know, really helping, and, you know, and then we’re helping entrepreneurs, but key to the whole, uh, business of investing is is is working with great people, right? Working with great companies, ultimately, and that passes the 10-year-old test, because they can understand it.

49:53 Yeah, fantastic. Nic, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you those same ones. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Nic? I’m guessing he was studying Cambridge at the time, and give that young man a bit of advice.

50:04 What would you tell him now that you’ve seen it all up to this point? What would you tell him to do or not to do? Yeah, interesting. I would say, I would say, take it slower, and stop, stop trying to think you can have the whole world in five years. Okay, were you in a bit of a rush?

50:24 Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, again, back to your kind of marathon versus sprint. Yes. And, you know, I mean, I think like a lot of, I don’t know whether this, whether it’s true of a lot of young people, but certainly for me, I was, you know, coming out of Cambridge, and, um, and, um, thought I could take on the world. Probably thought I was a bit smarter than I was, and, you know, and they kind of, it’s really easy to over-index on the importance of smarts versus experience, and all these sorts of things.

50:49 Right. Right. Good advice. I’ve heard that a couple of times before. Um, best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal?

50:56 Best advice I’ve ever received, maybe something in those early VC days you might have learned from one of the first mentors? I’m not sure. Yeah, you know, you, I think I’ve received a lot of great advice over the years, and I’m struggling to bring anything to… is there any piece that you usually pass on to companies? I mean, you kind of told me one earlier, where you said, don’t tell them A, B, C, D, and E, just focus on one thing. Um, yeah.

51:24 So, well, so, so focus is a key thing, isn’t it? Um, and it’s, um, and if I find myself saying one thing more than any other to entrepreneurs, it’s that you know, when you start a company, uh, there’s, you know, there’s always lots of different opportunities, and, you know, quite right at the early stages, you’ve got to explore all of them, right? And, but then when you start to figure out which is going to be the main thing for your company, then, you know, it really pays dividends to focus heavily on that.

51:52 What is quite difficult, um, is to then turn off those other avenues, because you’re still not sure whether this one’s going to work, and so it’s like, you know, that’s like giving up on that optionality, and is, is difficult for a lot of people, right? But usually the right thing to do. Yeah. Right, because you have to be all in on that single product first, don’t you? And it’s a good test, right?

52:09 If you’re not sure enough about the other thing to go all in, then, that’s, you know, there’s a question to ask yourself there too. Right. That’s well said. Last bit of advice to the 20-year-old that’s listening out there, you know, at Cambridge somewhere, who wants to be in tech, and maybe that’s already a bad sign if that’s all they want. But you must meet people all the time that have great ideas or want to pursue this line of work.

52:29 What do you tell them? What advice do you give them, what they should do? So I think that, you know, the best thing, um, that a young person can do, if they want to be an entrepreneur, is to join a tech company, uh, and, you know, be part of a success story. You know, work with some other people, um, you know, great entrepreneurs, learn what they’re about, learn a bit about the market that you want to play in, uh, and, uh, you know, and then you’ve got a great experience base, and you know, and hopefully you’ve kind of become sufficiently familiar with, with your, um, you know, the areas that excite you, to really kind of find that great product.

53:07 Um, so that would be my advice. Should they, um, get out there and meet people, and kind of go to these things, and start talking to people? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Networking is hugely important. Definitely.

53:17 Um, yeah, so one other thing that comes up a lot is, you know, should I share my idea? And good question. Yeah, the, you know, to that my answer is always emphatically yes. You know, ideas are cheap. The key is uh, really, uh, executing on it well.

53:32 And by keeping your idea to yourself, then, uh, you’re not going to get other people’s input on it, and so when you do come to execute, you’re just going to do a much poorer job of it. You know, much better to talk to everybody about it, and it gets road-tested, and you kind of develop it in the right ways, and then you’re much more likely to build a great company on the back of it. Do people sign non-disclosure agreements anymore? No. When was the last time you signed one?

53:53 When was last last time I signed one? So, I did sign one about two or three years ago, when this, uh, a Belgian 3D, don’t disclose it, 3D printing company that wanted us to sign in, but it was really, you know, and we thought long and hard about it, and we did that because it was a really exciting opportunity, and they were, uh, they were a Belgian, um, company, that, you know, we could have thought maybe it’s reasonable, you know, to not expect them to kind of think about this the same way as, uh, as they do in California and London. It’s interesting how you know, people are now with the fact that it’s the idea isn’t the value, and it’s, it’s all about the execution of the perfecting of the idea, but if you tell that to someone who thinks the idea is worth a lot, it’s really hard to communicate to them that that’s just an idea.

54:36 And yeah, yeah, ‘cuz, yeah, and, well, in some sense, it’s like, so I have an amazing idea and you’re saying the idea doesn’t really count, and so it’s like, well, I was really proud of my idea, and now you’re saying that ideas don’t. So it’s like a hard message to hear, right? it kind of devalues the thing that you hold precious, somehow, right? It’s very nebulous. Uh, Nic Brisbourne.

54:54 The Equity Kicker is fantastic. People should definitely check that out. Uh, great reads, great way to get new information every day, soon to be on video. Um, how can they get in touch with you if they want to explore Forward Partners? You guys have a great-looking website, a lot of great information on there.

55:09 Thank you. So, um, so get a referral to us, is one way. Um, that’s the, um, the best way to get a conversation going. Okay, how do they get a referral to you? Um, find someone we know.

55:19 Okay, so you appreciate a warm intro, that’s what you want? Yeah, we love a warm intro. You know, out on social media, get to know us a little bit, you know, comment on my blog or follow me on Twitter, you know, all those things would really help. But then the other things that I’d point to are, uh, uh, we once a month run office hours, and so we meet with, we did one last week, uh, actually, uh, and I think we met with 26 entrepreneurs for 15 minutes or so.

55:44 Uh, and so there’s, you know, there’s open applications for that. Um, and, you know, the hit rate for getting a meeting out of an application there is much, much higher than emailing us direct. Okay, um, although the meetings are short. Uh, and then finally, we run regular events as well. Forward Partners Live.

55:59 We’ve got the next one, uh, on the 25th of February. Skim CEO, yeahia is going to come to that too. That’d be cool. Um, um, you know, so I’m at, everyone, the whole team is, is it every one of those, and that’s a good chance to meet us as well. Interesting.

56:13 So you don’t, so, and I appreciate the fact that you like a warm intro, not a cold intro. Does that mean someone’s done a little bit of due diligence and done some work? So, you know, when means is, you know, someone that we know that we respect, who whose opinion we respect, um, you know, understands your business, and or likes you enough to put us in touch? Right, right. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

56:37 It means something to me too. On Twitter, they can follow you at, for partners, what’s your personal Twitter? Uh, Brisbourne, Brisbourne. Okay, fantastic. Um, thanks so much for coming on.

56:45 I’m so glad we met and you. We had a great conversation at the ICE dinner. Um, so thanks so much for that. Uh, this is exciting. Uh, I love reading your blog, and I love to see, kind of, your perspective, and it’s interesting to see how these models, you know, develop, and so how it becomes more nuanced, how these companies get helped, and it’s not like the old-school way of, you know, this choice or this choice, and there’s kind of these hybrid models.

57:08 So yeah, there’s lots of, um, there’s lots of different models emerging, and, you know, I think that’s great, right? You know, I think there’s, give different options for entrepreneurs, and different entrepreneurs are going to want different things. You know, hopefully what Forward Partners offers is going to be attractive to a good selection of the best e-commerce entrepreneurs, and will do well, but it’s certainly not the only way to do things. It’s a sign this industry is maturing.

57:27 In the city, so there you go. Fantastic. As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. Nic, you’re one of them. Thanks so much for being here, and, uh, I wish you all the best.

57:34 I hope to see you at your offices, uh, this month, for that, uh, for that day, uh, with the CEO. Thanks, brilliant. Thank you. All right, take care. Cheers.

57:45 This week on Silicon Real, we have Alex Torres, VP of global product marketing for Moovit. We have 1515 million users already worldwide. We currently collect more than 2 billion pieces of feedback every one or two months. You really need to have that help and that support from the uh, from your community. Put yourself in your user’s shoes.

58:12 The desktop years are gone. We deliver a new product version every single month. I love mentoring people. I love G, I mean I love helping people, I mean, and I love networking. SE the moment in the right way.

58:25 On Monday, Silicon Real presents Alex Torres, Moovit. Take more risks, be more bold