“If you make it easy for people to take out their money, they trust you more.”
In memoriam: Nick Hungerford (1980–2023) was the British entrepreneur who founded the online investment manager Nutmeg and helped open up wealth management to everyday savers, and London Real remembers him.
In short: Nick Hungerford was the founder and first chief executive of Nutmeg, the London online investment manager he launched after working at Barclays Wealth and studying for an MBA at Stanford. In this 2014 episode of Silicon Real, London Real’s weekly technology show, he sat down with Brian Rose and co-host Colin Pyle as Nutmeg passed 38,000 clients. He explained how the company chose its name from 519 options, why design research shaped the product, how he raised money after 47 rejections, why he built the business in London rather than Silicon Valley, and why he believed transparency would change personal finance.
Key takeaways
- The name was tested, not guessed. Nutmeg tried 519 names over eight months, and Nutmeg was the only one that scored above 50% for trust in focus groups.
- Observe people rather than ask them. Nick’s Stanford-trained designers used hours of ethnographic research to find unmet needs, which led to features such as separate investment pots, each with its own level of risk.
- Transparency builds trust. He said Nutmeg found that making withdrawals easy, and explaining every portfolio change in a monthly video, made clients trust the company more.
- Apathy was a real competitor. Alongside traditional wealth managers and DIY platforms, Nick saw money left idle in bank accounts as one of Nutmeg’s biggest rivals.
- Never get asked the same question twice. It took him 48 pitches to raise money; he learned to build every investor question into the next presentation until there was nothing left to ask.
- Culture has to be passed on. As Nutmeg grew past 40 staff, he argued that the hard part of culture was explaining it to each new starter, not agreeing it among the founders.
- Join a mission, not a sector. His advice to young people was to work for any company whose mission they believed in and to do whatever they were asked, because the learning lasts.
From Hungry Finance to Nutmeg
Brian Rose opened this 2014 episode of Silicon Real by introducing Nick Hungerford as the chief executive of Nutmeg, which had just raised a large funding round and offered managed portfolios to anyone with £1,000 to invest. Brian admitted that, having worked in banking himself, he did not trust traditional providers with his own money because he could not see what they were doing with it.
Nick began with the name. The company had worked under the placeholder Hungry Finance, which some people loved and others found greedy. Over eight months the team tested 519 names, sorting them into aspirational names, founders’ names, invented words and familiar words used out of context, like Amazon and Apple. Nutmeg was the only option that scored above 50% for trust, so the company bought the domain and kept it.
Designing for how people really feel about money
Nick credited Nutmeg’s approach to its Stanford design roots. Rather than asking customers what they wanted, his designers spent hours watching how people behaved and how they talked to each other about money. The company spent more than a year on this before building the product.
One result was the idea of separate pots. Nick explained that nobody can describe themselves as simply low, medium or high risk, because people take different risks for different goals. Nutmeg let clients set up separate pots for a child, a second home or retirement, each with its own risk level. Research also killed one of his early ideas: a British version of the US money aggregator Mint.com, which failed because British savers preferred to keep their accounts in separate places.
Transparency, fees and three kinds of competition
By this point Nutmeg had about 38,000 clients and ranked among the top 25 wealth managers in the UK by number of clients. Nick said people often joined for performance and low fees but stayed because of transparency, including a monthly video explaining what had been bought and sold. He also said that making it easy to withdraw money made people trust the company more, while lock-ins and exit fees made them suspicious.
He described three rivals: high-end wealth managers charging far higher fees, DIY investment platforms whose users often came to Nutmeg after a few years of managing their own money, and apathy, meaning money left sitting in the bank. Colin Pyle, who had run a currency trading business, agreed that part-time traders rarely beat professionals.
Scaling a startup without losing its culture
With Nutmeg approaching 50 staff, Nick said the hardest challenge was keeping the culture as the company grew. Its culture was to put the customer at the centre of every decision, and he compared this to Amazon’s famous desks made from doors. Brian brought in Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the two discussed its story about whether to allow swearing at work.
Nick’s point was that founders can easily agree on a culture among themselves, but the real test is explaining it to the fourth, fifth and sixth person through the door. He described Nutmeg’s culture as thoughtful, curious and polite, with senior staff and interns mixing freely, and said he had taken on an obstacle race with the team partly because he was too competitive to let them beat him.
Stanford, Vancouver and the case for London
Nick told the story of how he first wanted to be a teacher, took a teaching job in Vancouver and, while visiting cousins in California, walked up to Stanford and asked if he could study there. He was turned away as a school leaver with average grades, went to the University of Exeter, and later returned to Stanford for his MBA. He said neither of his parents had been to university.
He chose to build Nutmeg in London because of the UK’s high use of online banking, a regulator open to small firms and strong engineering talent. He remembered being told at a family Christmas party around 2010 that he would soon find a job, and said the biggest change since then had been how normal entrepreneurship now felt in Britain. He predicted London would match Silicon Valley’s development in a fifth of the time.
Fundraising, motivation and the banks
Nick explained his rule for fundraising: never get asked the same question twice. He said he succeeded on his 48th pitch, about a month before he would have given up, after learning to build every investor question into the next presentation. He also urged founders to understand exactly what motivated them, and said his own drive came from seeing friends and family, such as his sister, retire earlier by paying lower fees.
On the banks, he said many senior executives had visited Nutmeg to learn from it. He described a large bank as a tower of Lego blocks: each division is slowly eaten away by specialist startups until the tower is still standing but every block is small. He doubted traditional banks would invent the next way to buy a house, and expected it to come from a technology company.
Advice on happiness and a career in tech
Asked for advice to his 20-year-old self, Nick joked that he should never have given up his double-handed backhand. The best advice he had received came from his parents: the most important thing is to be happy, and if you are not, change what you are doing. He and Brian discussed research on income and happiness and the idea of measuring national wellbeing as well as GDP.
His final advice to young people who wanted to work in technology was to join any company with a mission they believed in, to do whatever they were asked, and to surround themselves with people who shared that mission. Brian closed by noting that the technology changes but the passion stays.
Frequently asked questions
Nick Hungerford was a British fintech entrepreneur who founded Nutmeg, one of the UK’s first online investment managers, in 2011. He had previously worked in wealth management at Barclays and Brewin Dolphin and studied at the University of Exeter and Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Nick Hungerford appeared on Silicon Real, London Real’s weekly technology talk show, in 2014. The episode was published on London Real in September 2014, when he was chief executive of Nutmeg.
Nick Hungerford died in July 2023, aged 43. He had been diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.
Nutmeg was a London-based online investment manager, often described as a robo-adviser, which built and managed diversified portfolios for everyday savers with low minimum investments and fees. JP Morgan bought the company in 2021.
Nick said the team tested 519 names over eight months. The placeholder was Hungry Finance, but Nutmeg was the only name that scored above 50% for trust in focus groups.
It was his rule for fundraising. After each investor meeting, he built the answer to every question he had been asked into the next pitch, so that eventually an investor had nothing left to ask. He said he raised money on his 48th pitch.
He said the UK suited Nutmeg because British people were heavy users of online banking, the regulator was supportive of small firms and there was strong engineering talent. He also said he thought London was the greatest city in the world.
Elizabeth’s Smile was a charity founded by Nick Hungerford and his wife Nancy in 2022, after his cancer diagnosis, to support children who lose a parent to terminal illness.
He said they should join a company with a mission they are passionate about, whatever its size, do whatever they are asked to do, and surround themselves with people who share that mission.
Full transcript
Read the full transcript of Brian Rose’s interview with Nick Hungerford
00:00:00 Silicon Real opens and Colin Pyle returns
Announcer: In London, technology is the Silicon Roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene: Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators, in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed, locally sourced. Silicon Real: it’s about the people.
Brian Rose: Here we go. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I am Brian Rose. I host London Real. It’s a similar studio: we get some cool people in the room and we try to figure some things out. We’ve had guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist. We had Tim Ferriss from The 4-Hour Workweek, Body, Chef. I know everything, right? I even had George Galloway in here, the Member of Parliament, and he charmed my pants off. It was the strangest performance I’ve ever seen and I fell for it, so check that out at londonreal.tv. But today we’re here to talk tech. My co-host is Colin Pyle. You’ve been gone for six weeks. Did you miss us? That’s what I want to know.
Colin Pyle: I missed it immensely, really. I missed the conversations. I feel like I was left out, and I was listening to you guys.
Brian Rose: I had Patrick on here as co-host, and then our guest from Octopus Investments just showed me up, so I’m the weak link here. We had him on: he’s the entrepreneur in residence for Octopus Investments, and he was at Google for six years doing corporate development. He was the guest, and then the next week he showed up in the co-host chair, and I was thinking this is like House of Cards. Next week he’s going to be in my chair. You never know. But he’s not here, so I feel pretty good. It was crazy while you were gone, but thanks for being back.
Colin Pyle: It is fun. This show is fun. To quote the CEO of EasyJet, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
Brian Rose: Did he say that?
Colin Pyle: That’s what he said about building EasyJet.
Brian Rose: Okay, it’s all good.
00:02:10 Sponsor thanks
[London Real promo removed]
00:02:55 Introducing Nick Hungerford of Nutmeg
Brian Rose: Let’s get on with the show. I’ll introduce this gentleman here to my left. It’s Mr Nick Hungerford, who is the CEO of Nutmeg, the company on a mission to democratise saving and investing.
Nick Hungerford: Absolutely.
Brian Rose: You guys provide an online portfolio management service to anyone with as little as £1,000 to invest. You just raised a $32 million funding round with people like my former CEO, Michael Spencer of ICAP.
Colin Pyle: I had no idea.
Brian Rose: And some other investors. It’s just so exciting to see these big rounds coming out.
Colin Pyle: Huge, right? DueDil and TransferWise. This is happening, and it’s happening right here in London. Even a year ago we weren’t talking about this.
Brian Rose: TransferWise was like 25, DueDil was like 22, and Brandwatch too was like 20. So it’s really a chunky investment, and that’s great to see. Nick, before that you were at Barclays Wealth Management, before you headed west to California for your MBA at Stanford. I want to get your vibe on the Silicon Valley scene, but for now, welcome to Silicon Real.
Nick Hungerford: Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited.
Brian Rose: Thanks for being here. This will be a lot of fun.
00:04:02 Tube adverts and testing 519 names
Brian Rose: I first heard about you guys when I was on the Tube, which shows the Tube ads work, and I do take the Tube because I’m a man of the people. I saw your ads up there with these guys with skinny legs and skinny arms, and I was like, what is this? I’d never heard of it, and you have a name like Nutmeg, which obviously isn’t immediately identifiable as a brand. It doesn’t have the word banking or finance in it. And the more I learned about it, I thought, you know what, I don’t even have an option when it comes to my own wealth management. I come from the banking industry, and as soon as my local bank wants to sell me an equity-linked note, I’m like, no, because I know how much money we used to take out of those things. I don’t trust anybody with my money because I can’t see it. It doesn’t seem transparent and I can’t check up on it. So I was more interested in you guys. Could you tell us about the genesis of Nutmeg, and whether what I’m telling you is what you hear all the time?
Nick Hungerford: Sure. I am going to tell you about Nutmeg, and I would never miss a good opportunity to plug the brand, but let me start with some fun stories, because you highlighted the name there. We actually tested 519 names over eight months to get to Nutmeg. We have a horrendous Google Doc, and I promise you some of them were just so disgusting. I am so glad that we didn’t go with them.
Colin Pyle: You used to be Hungry Finance, right?
Nick Hungerford: Well, Hungry Finance was a placeholder name when we were creating the concept. It’s a fantastic play on words. This is how creative I get.
Brian Rose: It’s actually quite a good one.
Nick Hungerford: The thing about Hungry Finance was that it was very Marmite: you either loved it or you hated it. Especially with the women we tested the name with, one group said, absolutely, I love this, it’s purposeful, it’s meaningful. But another group said it’s very greedy, it doesn’t mean anything, it sounds to me like an existing incumbent. Most of the men we tested with were a bit more neutral: oh, I don’t get that. So we knew we had to change, and it took us eight months. We went through a whole process of trying to decide which of four types of names we wanted. Did we want an aspirational name? So many times in finance you have these aspirational names, named after planets, Pluto and Neptune and all of this.
Colin Pyle: Or Fidelity or something.
Nick Hungerford: Exactly. The second type of name you can have is the name of whoever started the company. So we could have had Colin and Nick, like Marks and Spencer.
Colin Pyle: There you go.
Nick Hungerford: Or Walmart, or whatever it is.
Colin Pyle: Actually, Colin and Nick isn’t bad, is it?
Nick Hungerford: You can invest, silent investor, founders’ equity, gone. The third type of name is just a made-up name. The best example everybody knows is Yahoo with an exclamation mark. It was one of the first, and one of the most famous, and it just doesn’t mean anything. And then you have the fourth type of name, which is an existing word that has an association but is not relevant to the subject you’re dealing with. The two most famous examples in the tech community would probably be Amazon and Apple.
Colin Pyle: I was thinking Orange in the UK, but I guess that’s a mobile service.
Nick Hungerford: Amazon’s a great one, and so is Apple, and Amazon really is the strategic company we look at and look up to. Nutmeg fits into that category, and the reason we went with it was that it was the only name that tested in our focus groups at above 50% for trust. So we knew it was familiar. People remember it, people would be inquisitive when they saw it on our advertising, and people trusted the name. We paid a fair amount for the domain, but we’ve got it now.
00:07:50 Design-led thinking and ethnographic research
Brian Rose: That’s fascinating. How do you do the focus groups? Do you outsource that to someone?
Nick Hungerford: That’s such an important subject for Nutmeg. We are massive fans of design, and this comes back to our California upbringing. Both our head designers went to Stanford as well. They were part of the design school: one was a Berkeley PhD who taught at Stanford, and the other one I always tell is the boy wonder of the design school. They have such an emphasis on the right ways to do design, and we do it through deep ethnographic research. We will spend four or five hours at a time observing people and their behaviours, and not asking them what they want. You have that old Henry Ford adage: if I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. So you’ve actually got to observe people and figure out what they need. Then, as Steve Jobs said, it’s your job to design something that is beautiful and fulfils that need, so that they say, wow, this does it in a way I never imagined. Then you’re on the path to success. So we did do focus groups, and we bring them in house and have lots of people talking, but what’s more important is to watch how they react to each other, especially when they talk about subjects like money, and see what emotions that brings out. Then you take away the unseen things and meet the unmet needs, which is the fascinating part.
Colin Pyle: So this isn’t just the user experience, this is the whole concept of your company. You took a long time to do that.
Nick Hungerford: We took over a year to do this.
Colin Pyle: It really shows. I just registered this week, and the user experience, the design, the whole way through, was so smooth. There are a few companies that just smash it out of the park. I think Uber’s app is incredible in terms of simplicity and user experience.
Nick Hungerford: Uber’s pretty good. And it takes time. It should feel really quick while also feeling really conscientious and really solid. I’ve learned so much about this, and it’s the same for physical stores as well. When you’re designing a physical store, that’s got to be everything about your brand. The studio is a good example: it feels comfortable, it feels professional, it’s not underground and hidden away. So you need to be very careful with design, and a year is a long time in tech terms before you start building something.
00:10:50 Goals, risk and separate investment pots
Nick Hungerford: But in reality what we’re trying to do is transform a 400, 500, 600-year-old industry that has forever been bank-out: we’re going to be open nine till five, we’re going to give you a product called insurance, and you’re going to eat it whether you like the taste of it or not. We’re trying to be consumer-in. If I give one example of how we do this, it’s about the goals we allow people to set up. When people have money, they usually get to £500,000 or more before they finally reach the stage where someone is willing to have a conversation with them about managing it. They go to a private bank and say, I’ve got this money. The private bank says, that’s cool, give it all to me, let’s decide if you’re low, medium or high risk, and I’ll come back in six months and check on how you’re doing. Unless they’re some sort of behavioural scientist, nobody is going to be able to properly articulate in one word whether they are low, medium or high risk. What does that even mean? I’m low risk when I’m playing football because I don’t want to break my leg. I’m high risk when I’m skiing because I go off piste. Financially, maybe I’m high risk for something in the long term and low risk for my house deposit. The designers in our team thought about this and said, why don’t we allow people to make different pots of investment? You can set up four pots: one for your daughter, one for your second home in Italy, one for your fancy car, one for your retirement. With each of those pots you can say, I’m low risk, I’m medium risk, I’m high risk. That is design. That is saying, I understand how humans feel and I’m going to let them articulate that feeling through our product.
00:12:15 Why a UK version of Mint did not fit British savers
Brian Rose: What did you learn in that one year, besides what you’re saying now? What did you learn about what the customer wanted that maybe surprised you?
Nick Hungerford: Some really interesting things. You both come from across the pond, so you’ll know the success of some of the money aggregators. Mint.com is a very famous one. I’m a bit of a tech nerd, and I loved Mint.com when I was over there: great user experience, great design, it let you aggregate your money and see everything very clearly in one place. So I thought this was a great idea. Let’s come back and build this, it would be a good way of attracting customers, like a freemium model for Nutmeg. And then when we started doing the design research, it became apparent that British people, and probably Europeans as well, though I’m not qualified to judge, like squirrelling away their money in different accounts and different pockets. They very rarely tell anyone where everything is, and they’re certainly not going to tell a website, because they don’t want one website knowing where everything is.
Brian Rose: Interesting. So an aggregator over here…
Nick Hungerford: There have been a few attempts, and they’re just coming around now, but that really shocked me. The dynamic over there was, we love seeing everything all at once. The dynamic here was, we love being in control of everything in different parts of our lives.
Colin Pyle: So you thought about being the Mint for the UK, and then you quickly realised you needed to be something different.
Nick Hungerford: Our dream was always to be the investment manager that we are today, but you can bring supplementary products on all the time, and that could have been something we did to help our clients. As it turns out, they wouldn’t have wanted it. So you learn and you evolve in a different way.
00:14:10 Transparency, monthly videos and 38,000 clients
Brian Rose: So fast forward to today. Over the last three years, what did you end up accomplishing, and why do you think you can win in this space? I’m guessing there’s heavy competition, money-rich competition prepared to pay a lot for customers.
Nick Hungerford: We were lucky in the timing. Occupy Wall Street and rising markets have helped Nutmeg, and there’s no shame in saying that. But what has really attracted our customers is simply the transparency and the ease of use. It’s very funny: when we interview customers and ask what they like about Nutmeg, the answer is sometimes quite different to what attracted them to Nutmeg. A lot of people come in because of our good performance, fingers crossed, touch wood that will continue, and our low fees. And a lot of people stay because it’s transparent, because we’re doing the hard work for them, and because they can see how much effort we’re putting into managing their money. We send them a video every month saying, we’ve just bought a bit of German equities because we think they’re undervalued, and we’ve sold some Italian exposure because we think the political risk is increasing. You just don’t get that level of service or communication anywhere else.
Colin Pyle: You send that video out to everyone?
Nick Hungerford: It’s for different portfolios, so you get information about yours. That was a learning for me as well: people come and people stay for different reasons. In terms of accomplishments, I’m proud that I think we have won more awards for innovation this year than everyone else in the industry in this country put together.
Brian Rose: Wow. What kind of awards? For the design, the UX?
Nick Hungerford: A lot of awards for design and UX, but also for the way we think about it and approach it. We’re now in the top 25 wealth managers in this country by number of clients.
Brian Rose: How many is that?
Nick Hungerford: We’re about 38,000 at the moment, and growing fast. Some of the people on that list have taken 250 years to get to that number of clients, and that’s the way technology businesses can develop, rather than the one-to-one sale. I think word of mouth is really important to that.
00:16:50 Three kinds of competition
Brian Rose: How do you deal with competition? If you’re going against the non-innovating banks, I’m guessing you don’t have to worry about them as much, but are other people coming at you?
Nick Hungerford: There are three types of competition for us. One is the high-end wealth managers, who provide a one-to-one service, whether it’s a bank, a private bank or a stockbroker. We don’t play in that market necessarily, attracting customers of £3 million, but customers who are very wealthy and able to access that kind of option get it when they come to Nutmeg. Someone with £3 million is typically paying £40,000 a year to have their money managed.
Brian Rose: That’s totally crazy money.
Nick Hungerford: And with Nutmeg you’re paying about…
Colin Pyle: Less than 1%.
Nick Hungerford: The industry average is 1.37%, and that’s just to have it managed. Underlying costs come on top of that. So it’s pretty easy for those people to calculate that they’re saving £20,000 a year with us. For those high-end customers, including all the costs, it’s 0.3%.
Brian Rose: Wow.
Nick Hungerford: So it doesn’t take much, but you’ve still got to break up the service relationship, so we don’t actively go after that. Those clients come to us because they’ve decided it’s better. The second competitor is DIY platforms. If you don’t have half a million pounds, this is your only option for investing. You go to Fidelity, or Schwab in the States, and say, I want to buy this stock, I want to buy this fund. Lots of people do that, and we generally pick up those customers two or three years after they’ve started investing and realised that actually you need to be looking at this 24 hours a day. You need a team doing it full time.
Colin Pyle: You do need some help. Unless you want to do it full time, or you’re a City guy. I remember when I was running my FX company, people used to day trade through us part time, and I’d think, when you’re trading part time, you’re saying you’re better than a guy who wakes up at five in the morning, goes home at eight at night and is still researching. You’re better than him, and all his colleagues, and all their researchers? You’re just not. It’s so hard to trade part time.
Nick Hungerford: So those are the two ends: people who are smart about cost and performance on one end, and people who are smart about the service on the other. And then the third competitor, frankly, is apathy. It’s people leaving money in the bank, maybe saving up in this country to buy a house or something like that.
Brian Rose: Guilty on apathy.
Nick Hungerford: We’ve got to get you doing something about it. It’s funny: people often say, I’m really good at managing organisations, businesses, finances, except my own. It happens a lot.
Colin Pyle: It’s shocking that it happens that much. For me, I use HSBC InvestDirect and I just manage my own, but even then I’m really just stock picking. I’m not diversified at all.
00:20:00 Who Nutmeg’s clients were
Brian Rose: What’s the average net worth of your clients? I’m sure there’s a big standard deviation.
Nick Hungerford: It’s probably easier to talk in medians, because we have billionaires on there, which has a significant impact on the average. I’d say a net worth of around £330,000 to £340,000, but I’m doing that in my head, because lots of our clients will be in the process of paying down a mortgage, so you net the debt off. And our clients are interesting. Some people come and give us all their liquid cash straight away, but others tend to test us with a small amount and then build up their accounts over time, just to see how we’re doing and check the service.
00:20:30 Hiring for UX from outside finance, and easy withdrawals
Brian Rose: Talk to me about UX, because you mentioned it earlier, and this is what makes or breaks companies, who are we kidding? People get it right or they get it wrong. You’ve obviously taken some time, you’ve got some hot-shot Stanford grads doing it. I’m guessing you watch it all the time and try to improve it. How do you get it right in an industry where everyone’s trying to get it right?
Nick Hungerford: You allow these incredible people to fly. One of the key tenets we took out of building this was that we weren’t going to hire people for UX who had worked in finance before.
Brian Rose: Oh, right. So if you come from a finance background you’re going to build things the way they’ve been done before, where the customer is not important.
Nick Hungerford: Well, there are requirements, and it’s worth mentioning that of course we have compliance and regulatory constraints. You’ve got to plaster the risk warnings everywhere and really make sure you highlight the perils of investing to people, and that it’s going to be bumpy. One way I would illustrate this, and it’s a good lesson for all financial services companies, is something we discovered over the last three years: if you make it easy for people to take out their money, they trust you more. If you start operating on teaser rates and lock-in periods and fees for taking out money, people think, hang on, I’m going to need that. So if we are more open with them, and this is real UX stuff, they tend to be more open with us.
Colin Pyle: It’s funny: when they say cancel any time you want, you’re just so much more trusting. With my coffee subscription, for the first couple of months people were like, hold on, what do you mean I can cancel any time I want? Where’s the catch?
Nick Hungerford: Exactly.
Colin Pyle: There’s no catch, man. If you don’t like my coffee, that’s cool.
Brian Rose: But isn’t it sad that mankind has got to the point where we’re asking where the catch is? It should be the other way around.
Colin Pyle: Very philosophical.
00:22:30 Scaling and protecting the culture
Colin Pyle: What’s your biggest challenge in the next year? Is it scaling? That’s such a big issue in this industry.
Brian Rose: You’re at the scale level, so this is really the big time. Everything you’ve done up to now was so hard, and now that doesn’t matter. Now you have to scale or die. Is it like that, and how do you do it?
Nick Hungerford: We’ve all lived through that as entrepreneurs. Going from one person to six people is different to going from six to 15, 15 to 30, 30 to 80, 80 to 200 or whatever it is.
Brian Rose: And you’re about 40 now?
Nick Hungerford: We’re in that stage of 30 to 80, almost 50, and it’s totally different, so I would echo what you’ve said. There are growing pains: you have to start thinking much more about procedures and policies, and making people happy not just because there’s a couple of beers on the table. It’s actually, we are going to have a proper organisational structure and corporate culture. So when you talk about challenges, it’s easy for me to reel off things like team and product development, but if we really want to be the company we want to be, one of the hardest things we’ve got to do now is maintain the corporate culture we have. Our corporate culture is to think about the customer in every decision we make, whether it’s which office we want and how much it’s going to cost us, or product development. And that’s pretty hard to do. I read a great example about Amazon the other day: they started by building their own desks.
Brian Rose: We didn’t know about that, but we did that as well. Out of doors.
Nick Hungerford: Doors, right. When Bezos went down to the shop, the cheapest wood he could find was doors, and apparently they still have them. Your desk is a door, and if you ask why your desk is a door, they tell you it’s because of the customer: we save it for the customer.
Brian Rose: The whole ethos. If you look at those old 60 Minutes interviews, there’s Jeff Bezos at his door desk, driving a crappy car. I guess everything carries down. I’m reading Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. He’s one half of Andreessen Horowitz, the big VC fund in Silicon Valley, and he talks all about how you make this transition and really try to instil that company culture, and if you don’t do these things and get these managers right, it just isn’t going to happen. He’s also a big fan of having the founder and CEO stay with the company rather than hiring someone to scale it, and I want your thoughts on that. That’s happening less and less. Someone told me a stat recently about how small a percentage of startups still have the founder CEO after three years.
Nick Hungerford: And those are the ones that survive, right? Probably a good 50% of those are dead. It’s tricky. I remember that in Horowitz’s book he goes through a specific instance about swearing.
Brian Rose: Yes. He swears a lot, he got some complaints about it, and they had a big meeting about it. Tell the story.
Nick Hungerford: As far as I remember, they determined that it was a part of the culture and they wanted to keep it. They just wanted people to be comfortable with the fact that there was going to be swearing. These are the kinds of decisions you need to make to reinforce the team, but what’s so important, and what people forget, is that you need to communicate them to new starters. That’s what’s so hard. It’s all very well for the three of us to set up a business and say we’ve got a corporate culture. We’ll have to decide between shirts and T-shirts for the three of us, which will be tricky, but fine, we’ve made our decision. But what about number four who comes in the door? What about number five, number six? The bit that’s often hardest about maintaining corporate culture is the reality that there’s an in crowd and then there are new people, and you have to make sure those new people feel comfortable.
00:27:00 Hiring and onboarding in London’s talent market
Brian Rose: So how do you do this? You’re in the London tech startup market, in fintech no less, where everybody wants the talent. You’ve got to hire the right people and instil the culture. How do you do it?
Nick Hungerford: These are the kinds of questions professors and consultants charge £3,000 an hour for, so here we go. For me, it’s about taking the time up front to explain the culture. I’m not the greatest person when it comes to making sure it’s all written down and handing over a handbook on day one. I think that should be done, absolutely, but where I can personally add value, and you need both sides of the equation, is the pre-discussion. In our company the culture is very thoughtful, very intellectual, very discursive. It’s about wanting to get to know the person next to you, because they’re very interesting but they’re not necessarily going to volunteer that information. Everybody looks out for each other. It’s polite, it’s clean, it’s not edgy.
Brian Rose: Okay, so no swearing?
Nick Hungerford: Not particularly.
Brian Rose: So you’re saying it’s different from some startups.
Nick Hungerford: I think so, absolutely, and it’s different from big companies as well. We all know that as soon as you walk from one place into another, it’s just a different way of doing things. But the atmosphere we wanted to create was one where, no matter who it is, the most senior hire can go and have a drink or lunch with the new intern, because we know those people are going to be fascinating. We know all of us are curious people, and we’re thinking about a mission which is really important. It’s not about being crazy for us. It’s about driving something forward that is really meaningful, and as corny as it may sound, it’s changing people’s lives. The reality is that we have changed people’s lives over the last three years.
Brian Rose: Do you do team-building exercises?
Nick Hungerford: Occasionally. I don’t want to reveal to the team what the next one is, but it’s happening in two weeks.
Brian Rose: Do they stand on the table and fall backwards?
Nick Hungerford: I tell you, some keen beans in our office have just signed everyone up for the fitness challenge at Wembley, this 10K where you have to run over obstacles.
Brian Rose: You guys should look at that.
Colin Pyle: I may not run over them, but I can probably roll over them.
Brian Rose: Is that mandatory?
Nick Hungerford: I don’t think it’s going to be mandatory, because someone needs to hold the drinks at the end. We’re British, there needs to be beer at the end. But the problem for me is that, being fiercely competitive, I’m now going to have to train, because I can’t let any of them beat me. One of them probably will, though.
Colin Pyle: Fired.
Brian Rose: They won’t be there next year if they do it this year.
00:29:40 Stanford, Vancouver and the road back to the UK
Brian Rose: Talk to me about Stanford. You spent two years in California and then decided to come back to the UK, when I guess you could have done something similar in the States. A lot of the people we’ve had in this chair never had that experience. They’ve been here their whole lives. What did you learn at Stanford, what did you learn from the Yanks, and why did you decide to come home?
Nick Hungerford: I guess we can all safely say in this environment that we’ve all fled America, haven’t we?
Colin Pyle: They don’t want me.
Brian Rose: They probably don’t want me anymore either.
Nick Hungerford: Look, it was a life-changing, wonderful experience that I would encourage anyone to go and do. I am a totally different person for being there: incredibly more self-aware, with the most wonderful friends and experiences I will never forget, and that’s even without getting into the academia. Stanford as a university is just magical, and there’s very little way of describing it other than in superlatives. Those two years were very formative in everything I’ve done.
Brian Rose: Was it always a dream to do an MBA in the States, or was it always the West Coast?
Nick Hungerford: It wasn’t the MBA necessarily. When I graduated from high school I wanted to be a teacher. I still want to be a teacher. When I grow up I’m going to be a teacher, and I’m doing a bit of lecturing now.
Brian Rose: Like a university professor?
Nick Hungerford: Just getting into that. But I really wanted to be a teacher, so I went over to Canada and got a teaching job. I lived in Vancouver and really loved it, and on my summer holidays I went down to California, where I had a couple of cousins living. Tech was exploding in California. It was an incredible period, and everyone was having an amazing time. So I thought, this is cool, I’d like to be involved in this, because I’d always loved business as well. That was a real passion of mine, and making money, I guess, which is why university wasn’t necessarily on the cards; I was going straight to a job. They said to me, why don’t you go to Stanford, you love it. So I turned up at Stanford, went down Palm Drive, knocked on the door and said, hey, can I come and study here? And they looked at me and said, are you serious? No, you can’t. You’re from a high school in England, with average grades, and you haven’t done the application forms. Go back and think about it again.
Brian Rose: You literally went to the campus?
Nick Hungerford: I went to the campus, because neither of my parents went to university. It wasn’t something that was ingrained in the family. From that moment I was like, I really want to come here and be part of this. I just loved the scene. I came back to the UK and did go to university. I went to Exeter and had a wonderful time there, with many lifelong friends who are now some of my best friends. I did lots of business ventures there, played a lot of sport and did a bit of work. But that Stanford environment was always going to be where I wanted to learn and do my study. There was a lot of inspiration from other students. We used to get together after class at Stanford, form groups, discuss businesses and rip each other apart.
Brian Rose: It’s the place you want to be, because everyone’s so sharp and highly entrepreneurial.
Nick Hungerford: But it’s more than just entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurs are the kind of people who are good in defence and good in attack: you’re really stubborn, you solve the problems, you’re really good on attack and you’re visionary, but not so good in stable motion. At Stanford there are a lot of entrepreneurial people, but you’re also dealing with people who can challenge you, because they’re sector specialists, or professors who are world leaders in their field. I remember during the financial crisis I was talking to one of my finance professors in his office, discussing another crazy idea I’d had, and the phone started going. He looked down after two rings, looked up, looked down again and said, Nick, do you mind if I take this? It’s the White House.
Brian Rose: Okay, no problem.
Nick Hungerford: Five minutes only. It’s pretty intense.
00:34:20 Why London rather than Silicon Valley
Brian Rose: So you had a good experience at Stanford. Did you think about staying in the Valley?
Nick Hungerford: I thought about it, and the honest truth is that it was better for us to set up Nutmeg here, from a regulatory point of view, a marketplace point of view and a technology adoption point of view. For example, more Brits use mobile banking and online banking than anywhere else in the world apart from Iceland. You’d be amazed to hear that. The regulator here is incredibly responsive to smaller companies. They’ve just set up a new initiative, Project Innovate, where the regulator is going to incubate small companies.
Colin Pyle: That was good to hear.
Nick Hungerford: It’s just great. Everything was conditioned for us to be here. There’s great engineering talent, though you’re fighting with Facebook and Google for those people. So it felt like a sensible fit. And of course, although I’m not from London, I do think it’s the greatest city in the world, and I couldn’t face being in San Francisco where everything shuts at two.
Brian Rose: Amen to that. When you look around at the mentality and the way London’s developing, is there stuff you see through that Stanford lens where you think, we need a little more of this, a little more crunchiness or hipness or UX? There must be some California part of you that takes you in a different direction from someone who went to LBS or somewhere like that.
Nick Hungerford: Maybe. For me it’s not necessarily the cultural stuff. I don’t think I’d ever be a massive hippie-type character. It’s the ecosystem, the belief. To give you an example, when I came back, I was at a drinks party with my folks at Christmas, speaking to one of my parents’ friends who asked me what I was doing. I said, I’m starting a company, and I’ll never forget it: she said, don’t worry, Nick, you’ll find a job soon. This was 2010 or 2011, something like that. I just thought to myself, that wouldn’t be the case in California, because there the whole ecosystem, the cool thing to do, is to be an entrepreneur. More significant than any company that has grown in this country over the three years I’ve been back, or any funding round, has been the entire feeling of development of startups, technology and entrepreneurship in this country. I promise that if I had the same conversation now, that person, even living outside London and being older, would say, that’s cool, that’s a great thing to do. Usually when you’re part of this stuff you don’t feel it, but I think we could all agree that we actually do feel it: the rise of tech, the rise of young businesses, the influx of people from all around the world who want to work in London. It’s phenomenal, and I think that has been the single most important thing that’s happened for our ecosystem. If I could choose what to take from California, I’d take another ten years of development. But from Bill Draper in the 1950s to where Silicon Valley is today, I reckon we’re going to do that in a fifth of the time here in London, and that’s pretty cool.
00:37:40 Regulation, going international and staying focused
Colin Pyle: It’s exciting stuff. From a business standpoint, I guess the biggest problem I see with what you guys do is that it’s so hard to scale outside a country, because it’s so regulation-heavy. For a guy like me, I’m from Canada, I’m here, maybe I work in the US. Having your platform international would just destroy the banks, and I’m waiting for that to happen. But talking about the US regulators earlier, do you see that ever changing, or is that really far down the road?
Nick Hungerford: Let’s get to that stage first. This is one of the attractive areas of fintech, as an entrepreneur and as an investor: we need a tiny proportion of the market to be a massive company, because there are so many people out there and all of them need saving and investment. If we had 1% of the UK savings market, we’d be in the FTSE 100. If we had 5%, we’d be bigger than Facebook. So we don’t really need to go outside.
Brian Rose: That’s the quote of the episode. Five per cent of the market and we’d be bigger than Facebook.
Nick Hungerford: By the way, that’s completely unqualified, not calculated.
Colin Pyle: He’s going to get a call soon: can I take this? It’s Zuckerberg.
Nick Hungerford: I’ll be over there if they want to do a partnership, but it’s going to have to be 60:40. It is the beauty of it, but it’s also the tough bit: because it’s such a valuable market and so big, there’s so much competition. When you talk about challenges, I think expanding into other countries is a bit of a luxury problem. Interestingly, the biggest thing I think about there is not regulation, it’s culture. I am damn sure every European nation has a very different culture and a very different approach to savings. The average Italian moves out of home at 42. That’s very different to how we approach it here. So we’d have to go through that year-long research period in every country before we, as a company with our culture and mentality, would feel comfortable even thinking about it. Let’s spend the next three or four years dominating the UK, get really big, and then we’ll have the resources to start doing that. And I’m happy to have a conversation if you want to start a Canada branch for us.
Colin Pyle: So you could acquire that in the future. You might acquire the guy who’s doing it in Spain or Italy, who knows. You’ll cross that bridge later. Damian said the same thing about DueDil: why do we have to go to America?
Nick Hungerford: True, he was quite insistent on that.
Brian Rose: It becomes that focus. We’ve heard over and over again: just do one thing really well in one market, and that’s usually pretty good. That’s come up a couple of times. Emily from Blaze, who make the bike light that projects a laser image way out in front, started off by saying they were going to diversify products, and then she said, actually, we decided to focus on this one thing and get it right.
00:41:00 “Never get asked the same question twice”
Brian Rose: You’ve been quoted as saying, never get asked the same question twice. What does that mean?
Nick Hungerford: I say it quite a lot when I’m talking about fundraising and how you should fundraise. When I started fundraising for Nutmeg, I think it was the 48th pitch where I got something. I was about a month away from stopping and going into a real job. What I learned very quickly, around number 35, was that I was presenting this pitch, which had been refined and practised with friends and friendly VCs, but it was always the same pitch, I was always getting the same questions, and therefore I was always ending up with a zero result. What “never get asked the same question twice” means is that if you are covering in your presentation the areas which are important to potential investors, then eventually someone somewhere is going to have no questions to ask you, and generally that means there’s nowhere to go apart from offering you money. That’s what I learned on those last ten pitches: I was going to be prepared. In my two or five minutes of talking I would include the answer to the question, and I soon worked out that if you nailed it down, the poor guy who ends up being number 48 thinks, oh God, I’d better give this guy some money.
Brian Rose: So anticipate what they’re going to want to know, or just make sure your presentation is so tight?
Nick Hungerford: Use what you’ve learned from your last presentation, your last conversation, to make sure that question never comes up. If you were pitching an idea to me and I said, what’s the market size here, and you said, well, it’s a million people, but 50,000 of them are going to use the product and we think 20% of those will be repeat visitors, that’s not much: 10,000 people who are going to come back. So when you pitch to Colin next time, you need to say, the addressable market here is a million people, but we reckon 10,000 are going to be loyal, high-value customers. Here’s how we engage them, and after a period of engagement we’ll use them as advocates for our product, and they’ll spread it to another 10,000, and so on. He can’t ask you a question about market size because you’ve dealt with it, so he’s going to ask you something different, about your financials or whatever it is. Then for the next person you cover the addressable market and the financials. It’s a pretty sure way of knowing that if you can answer all those questions, you’re going to get a good result.
Brian Rose: So learn from your mistakes, and if there are no questions at the end they have to write you a cheque.
Nick Hungerford: And then be quiet at the end.
Brian Rose: That’s a good technique.
Colin Pyle: It’s like the snowball effect of pitching: you’re constantly building on your pitch to incorporate what you’ve learned from all the previous pitches. Great advice.
00:44:00 Knowing what motivates you
Brian Rose: Another thing you’ve spoken about is that you need to find out what motivates you and really drill down. This probably goes back to your research work for Nutmeg. You said it could be wealth, lifestyle, notoriety or changing the world, but you need to figure out what motivates you, really get granular on it, and go from there. What do you mean by that?
Nick Hungerford: When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to spend every waking moment of your life thinking about this thing. You’re going to bore your friends silly talking about your company. Your family are going to think you’re a complete nutter because you’re living in an apartment where you also house four people doing coding into the middle of the night. Somehow, somewhere, you’ve got to know there’s a purpose at the end of it. It’s absolutely fine if that purpose is financial. It’s absolutely fine if your purpose is to save the world, and we see many incredible people doing amazing things all over the world for non-profits and think tanks. We see many people doing something because they have a real passion for it, whether it’s design or e-commerce or whatever. But knowing that allows you to justify to yourself why you’re being so mad, because there are always times when you think, why am I doing this? For me, it’s about knowing that I can effect change for people, and particularly for my friends. My sister is a good example of someone who works really hard but isn’t particularly interested in her investments, and I know that by saving with Nutmeg she will get to retire earlier than if she saved with someone else, because we’re not ripping you off on fees and we’re doing everything we can to build an optimal portfolio. That really matters to me. When I ask why I should get out of bed in the morning, it’s because I really want to change the industry and I really want to change the lives of these consumers, and that makes me happier than anything else in the world.
Brian Rose: And what else motivates you, besides changing the world?
Colin Pyle: That’s not enough?
Nick Hungerford: Obviously there are other things as well, but I’d say they’re secondary. I love keeping fit, for example, so I do a lot of exercise. I love being able to travel, and in the last four years it’s been wedding-dominated. I think this Saturday is my 36th wedding in the last four years.
Brian Rose: Always the bridesmaid?
Nick Hungerford: That’s what happens when you go to grad school. I’ve caught 15 bouquets and I still haven’t found anyone, so if you’re listening and you’re interested…
Brian Rose: Do you think everybody falls into one of those categories: wealth, lifestyle, notoriety or changing the world?
Nick Hungerford: I’m sure there are more than the examples we’re giving. There’s definitely a control one, for example: people who want to be in control. We could make a list of the buckets and publish a thesis, I guess, but it’s all about understanding who you are and where it’s coming from. If you were to ask your three best friends and your family, do you think this is a true reflection of me, and they said yes, then I think you’re probably on to something.
00:47:50 How the banks viewed Nutmeg
Brian Rose: A feedback loop. Are you getting any blowback from the industry? Do you hear from banks saying, I don’t know about these guys, they might be affecting our market share? Or are the banks oblivious until they lose a chunk of market share and then do something?
Nick Hungerford: Good question. We do get a lot of visits from larger organisations. It’s amazing the people who have been down to Nutmeg Towers: amazing CEOs and board members of these institutions.
Colin Pyle: Not just to talk?
Nick Hungerford: Just to talk, and to see what’s going on in the world. They have their strategic priorities as well. It’s a differentiated market: we have people focusing on giving advice, people focusing on lower-value clients, people focusing on £500,000 to £3 million, people focusing on £10 million plus. I think everyone’s interested in this, and one common factor that runs from us all the way through these businesses is that we’ve all got to deliver a better client experience. Lots of people in the industry are looking at Nutmeg and thinking, could we provide an online experience? Do we want our customers logging in every day? Do we want them to have that visibility? We’ve taken the view that whether we want them to or not, from a customer service point of view, it’s what they want. But there are different arguments.
Brian Rose: You’ll probably make it the standard, just like next-day delivery.
Colin Pyle: I don’t think most banks want that transparency. I asked HSBC how much, and they can’t even mark you to market every day electronically, and then you find out they’re taking 3% on your FX and all that sort of stuff. They’d rather keep it in the shadows.
Nick Hungerford: And again, that’s such a sad reflection of what is potentially a very noble industry. We’re helping people do these things. Free banking is a good one to argue here. I would much prefer that my banking was entirely transparent, that I knew what was going on and paid £10 a year for my current account, if I knew there was no ripping off and nothing else. Or what can happen is that we don’t know it’s happening, so it’s branded as free, there’s no charge, but then there are all the sneaky charges. I think that’s the wrong way around. It may feel better because I don’t feel the charges, but once you find out, it’s horrible.
00:50:30 Can big banks innovate? The Lego blocks analogy
Brian Rose: You used to work for Barclays, and now obviously you’re at a startup. We all know the innovator’s dilemma, and it comes up in fintech all the time. You see these incubators and accelerators sponsored by the banks. Is it ultimately going to be an innovator, a small guy like you, who brings this whole new experience? Is it possible for a big bank to do what you’re doing, or since their priorities and fee structures are so out of whack, can they never do it?
Nick Hungerford: We should say, by the way, that both the books you mentioned, Horowitz and Christensen, are probably top of the reading list as well. So for anyone looking for summer reading, definitely pick up both of those. But you can do it in a big company. Procter and Gamble is a great example. They deliberately set up companies to compete with their existing companies. That is brave, and it takes some thinking about: how does management develop the style to be able to say they’re committed to doing that? Frankly, one of the issues with large finance companies is that they have so many legacy systems that even just fixing those is going to take ten years.
Brian Rose: Wow, ten years.
Nick Hungerford: And that’s going to be an issue. I think the changes we’ve seen with incubators and in-house VCs are incredibly important, but when I think about who’s going to develop the new way to buy your house, I don’t think it’s going to be banks. I think it’s going to be Google. Someone’s going to come up with something different that isn’t a mortgage, and it’s not going to be a bank. It’s going to be a startup player. The way I describe it when I’m talking to the board of a bank is: you have to understand that it’s like building lots of Lego blocks on top of each other. One Lego block is FX, one is bond trading, one is insurance, one is investments, and you are all of these things. You’re the big pile of Lego, and it doesn’t really feel like you’re being touched too much, because someone is eating away at your FX trading, or someone’s eating away at your investments, and the person running those divisions thinks, it’s okay, I’m part of a big organisation. But if you’re running strategy and you’re on the board, you’ve got to understand that you’re going from this to this to this, and what will eventually happen is that your Lego blocks are all still standing on top of each other, but they’re all really small, because other people have eaten your lunch in every one of those departments. You’ve got to think, do we actually want to specialise in some of these areas? Barclays, for example, really chopped back its investment banking big time in order to do that, and those are very brave decisions. It’s going to be hard for a bank to replicate Procter and Gamble, but they can make efforts to be the best at what they do in certain areas.
00:53:30 Advice to his 20-year-old self, and being happy
Brian Rose: Good advice. Nick, we always ask everyone here a couple of questions at the end, so I’m going to hit you with them. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Nick Hungerford and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?
Nick Hungerford: Don’t give up the double-handed backhand. I had a really good double-handed backhand, and now I’m single-handed.
Brian Rose: Agassi did the double-hander. You had that and you dropped it?
Nick Hungerford: I dropped it because of one coach who, for the serve and volley, wanted me to be more elegant. It was very sad. So that would be one thing.
Brian Rose: I haven’t heard that one before. Were you a rising star tennis player?
Nick Hungerford: I most definitely was a maturing tennis player.
Brian Rose: Have you seen The Royal Tenenbaums? Were you that guy? All right. What is the best advice you’ve ever received in your life? Let’s go for non-business, if you wouldn’t mind.
Nick Hungerford: I’m sure it’s from my mum and dad, and it would be: just remember, the most important thing is to be happy. Said properly and meaningfully, that is so important. If you’re down in the dumps, if you’re earning £300,000 a year and you’re unhappy, you’re not having a good life. This is not a dress rehearsal, so make sure that every day you’re doing something you love, surrounded by the people you love, and be happy. If you’re not happy, change what you’re doing.
Brian Rose: Do you think our metrics are a bit out of whack, especially in a city like London, where everyone says, I’m making this and I have this car, so I should be happy, and they’re not? People aren’t really evaluating themselves, and then they crack after four or five years and life changes.
Nick Hungerford: There was some research recently about the level of salary at which your happiness progresses, and after that you’re no happier.
Colin Pyle: What is it, 75 grand?
Nick Hungerford: I think it’s 75, yes. That was so interesting to me, because the big point there is that at some stage it’s not about your progression, it’s about the progression of the people around you: my friend has a bigger house, my friend’s children go to this school, my friend’s getting promoted. That’s what devalues your happiness. So are we looking at the wrong metrics? I’m not sure it’s necessarily wrong, because that’s humans and that’s how we interact. But would it be better if we looked at gross domestic happiness, like Bhutan, instead of gross domestic product? We should do that as well. I’m very proud of being part of Britain, and of having lived in Canada and America, which are progressive and developing countries, and a good economy is something to be very proud of. But it’s also absolutely certain that we should have a good standard of living, a good culture, reducing crime and all the rest of it.
Brian Rose: I saw my mum recently and she said, without gratitude there isn’t happiness. Actually, there is no happiness without gratitude. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last couple of days and I think she might really have a point. When you see people who have sudden near-death experiences, they come back and are suddenly grateful for all the things they were never grateful for before, and maybe they have a happiness spike. I’m still working on that theory.
00:57:10 Advice for young people who want to work in tech
Brian Rose: The last question: what advice would you give the 20-year-old listening somewhere around the world who wants to be involved in technology somehow? They could be in China or in California.
Nick Hungerford: I would tell that person to do whatever they can to join a company that has a mission they can be passionate about. Whether it’s interning at Amazon, sitting on the doorstep until they finally give you a job, or volunteering to make the coffee at a three-person fashion startup. If I were 20 years old and wanted to be in technology, I would do whatever it takes to go to the company I was passionate about. It doesn’t matter if it succeeds or fails; you’re going to have an incredible learning experience. Do whatever they ask you to do. If they ask you to learn design, learn design. If they ask you to learn to code, go and code. If they ask you to put a marketing event together, go and do that. But surround yourself with people who share a mission, and I think your naivety will be turned into a set of skills that will be incredibly powerful for whatever you go on to do.
Brian Rose: Powerful advice from Nick Hungerford. Thank you so much for that. That’s a good point: don’t just jump into tech for tech’s sake. Go to a place that really shares your passion and mission, because the tech will go away and the passion stays.
00:58:40 Signing up to Nutmeg, hiring and goodbye
Brian Rose: So how do people sign up for an account on Nutmeg? Obviously the Americans are not allowed, and I’m taking that very personally. I was literally going to sign up today. How do people do it? Is there anything they should know?
Nick Hungerford: It’s super simple. Go to nutmeg.com and you can do everything in about eight minutes. If you need to, you can come and see us, you can phone us, and we’re available over secure email and web chat if that’s your thing as well. It’s really hard to say anything more complicated than: go to nutmeg.com and get started.
Colin Pyle: Really easy. I did it yesterday and I’m not very smart.
Brian Rose: Look at you, man, trying out these things. And you’re hiring as well?
Nick Hungerford: Absolutely. Lots of vacancies on our careers page, so please do check that out as well. We’ve got a growing team and a fantastic environment, and you know what it’s like because I’ve told you all about it. We’d love to meet really smart people who share our mission.
Brian Rose: You’re going to get a slew of CVs. Who wouldn’t want to work for this man? Nick, thank you so much for coming in. I really appreciate it. We got an email from one of your people a few weeks ago and I was like, yes.
Nick Hungerford: Thank you. It’s been great.
Colin Pyle: Really good insight. Not only did we hit the business model, but we got some really good thoughts there, so thanks.
Brian Rose: If you’re watching us live, we appreciate you starting off your Friday evening with us, on a holiday weekend no less. If you’re watching on YouTube, please come to iTunes and subscribe to the audio version. It automatically downloads to your smartphone and you can listen on the Tube or on the plane. This is episode 50-something, late 50s. If you want to contact us, it’s [email protected]. We’re always looking for guests, and we’ve got a couple of interns who are really rocking for us and working hard. If you’re a student and interested in helping out, we’ve got lots to do. And hit us up with your guest suggestions on Twitter at Silicon Real.
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Brian Rose: Go to Nutmeg. As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. Thank you so much, Nick, and all the best.
Nick Hungerford: Thanks.
Colin Pyle: All right, guys, take care. Cheers.
01:01:20 Silicon Real trailer
[London Real promo removed]
