Full transcript: Sherry Coutu on London Real
0:00 In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed, locally sourced.
0:34 Silicon Reel. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Reel, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real. It’s a similar show, same location. We’ve recently had Neil deGrasse Tyson here, the celebrity astrophysicist. After we had him on the I checked his Twitter feed a week later and he’s doing a selfie with president Obama. I was like, okay So that was fun. We’ve had Tim Ferriss on here. Who’s the for our everything?
1:05 We’ve had George Galloway here charming my pants off. So that’s London Real check that out at London Real TV But today we’re here to talk about tech. My co-host is Colin pile. You’re running a crew cafe in full effect Yeah, I’ve got some things going on with lingos your sport in the t-shirt T-shirts on for the London Coffee Festival today. What’s it like being a coffee tycoon?
1:27 Yeah, I wouldn’t say tycoon, I have to sell things before I’m a tycoon, right now I just have them. But yeah, it’s really busy right now, we got tons of inventory, we’re selling, we’re moving, we got great press coming up. Lingo’s is doing great, we’re doing a really cool voucher for Lingo’s, so we’re testing it out. Actually, if you go lingos.co.slashsiliconreal, you get a 20-pound voucher to have a language lesson with a teacher face-to-face anywhere in the UK, so go and check that out and let us know what you think.
2:00 Awesome. Yeah, we’ll have a link for that on the YouTube description, or you can click on the screen and go that free language lesson, so go check it out, learn something, and press your friends, right? Exactly. Awesome. Excellent, man.
2:11 Thanks so much. And yeah, the coffee’s good. It’s tasting good, so keep us posted on there. Even Sherry likes it. There we go.
2:16 Excellent. Before we get to the show, I just wanted to thank our sponsors. One of them is bagyourselfabillboard.com, which is this new competition where you can own a billboard right here on Old Street for two weeks and get a million online impressions on top of that. It’s super cool. I’m actually going to submit- It’s super exciting.
2:34 Yeah, an application for Silicon Real. You just do a 60-second video. You tell why your startup is the best in the UK. They select one, and then you literally own this space for two weeks. It’s cool.
2:43 We’ve had so many people on here that have great ideas and great tech, but if you don’t don’t get the word out, it’s hard to get that traction. It’s hard, lots of noise to cut through, so. Yeah, so that’s cool, you should do it too. Yeah, I think Lingos is gonna do it. Any small business or startup who you’ve been around for less than five years, check that out.
2:57 So, yeah, bagyourselfabillboard.com, 60-second video, so do that. And secondly, to Task Grab It, they are an online marketplace that allows you to outsource small jobs and tasks. They do our back end of Silicon Real, they chop up our videos for us, they can do anything. They’re doing a great job, yeah, love them. And so surprised at what they can actually do, So it’s not just cleaning your house and stuff like that.
3:18 So really sort of reach for it, reach for the sky and see if they can do it. Yeah. And they’re part of our startup community. We had Lauren, they’re a head of community here. We just came over about four or five months ago from the States.
3:28 And yeah, they’re really cool people. You know, great startup, great story. So check them out, TaskRabbit.co.uk. And Reel25 for 25 pounds off. Again, more free things.
3:37 More free. You can learn a language and get your house cleaned just by listening to the show. That is fantastic. All right, on with the show. Our guest today is Sherry Kotu, who serves on the boards of many companies.
3:49 Most recently, it’s the London Stock Exchange, Cambridge University, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and also the advisory board of LinkedIn. You founded Founders for Schools, which connects teachers and entrepreneurs and founders of successful startups. You made angel investments in more than 50 companies. That’s correct, right? 50.
4:09 And you hold investments in three venture capital firms. Sherry, thanks so much for coming. Welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you. Oh, it’s quite an introduction, right?
4:17 Yeah. Feeling tired. Exactly. That’s a lot of work. 50 companies.
4:22 Yeah. I mean, there’s so much to talk about, and I want to kind of hear about the earlier days of you being an angel investor, but recently it’s been the London Stock Exchange that’s been talked about. I know you and Joanna was announced in January that you were going to be on the boards. Were you the first female board members of that? No.
4:39 There had been two other female board members before, but they had both dropped off, retired off about six or eight months previously. So they had had female representation for quite some time, then a six-month hiatus. The media focused, however, on the fact that at the time that Joanna and I were appointed, there weren’t any females, but we weren’t the first. Okay. Media.
5:00 As much as I’d like to say that we weren’t the first. Okay. I was wondering, when you got that offer, is that something you had to think long and hard about, or is this something to you that was just a no-brainer? They were saying that it’s going to help tech be represented more on that stock exchange, Or was it a really complicated decision for you? So I’ll tell you a little bit about my background, and then you’ll understand why it wasn’t that complicated a decision.
5:23 So the first company that I started up was a financial services company. The second company I started up was also a financial services company. And the 50 investments that you just mentioned, most of them are double-sided exchanges. So I love exchanges. I love making markets between buyers and sellers, nothing makes me happier than doing that.
5:47 By double sided, you mean sellers and buyers? Yeah, creating a marketplace is creating, you know, selling, putting buyers together with sellers and making it easier for the buyers to buy and the sellers to sell. And so when I was approached about the LSE, which was mid last year, it was, oh, I love markets. I love the transparency. I know and love tech and felt that there were quite a few things that they might think about doing.
6:15 I’d also had this sort of weird experience of having floated my own company on London and NASDAQ simultaneously about 12 years ago. And then more recently, LinkedIn has been one of the companies that I’ve been helping since 2006. It floated. And Care.com just floated. I’m an advisor on both of those.
6:35 So that’s New York, London, NASDAQ, and a number of my investments have floated on aim. So I have a natural curiosity about markets from a bunch of different sides. So it was like, yeah, that would be interesting. The hard part was instead of, usually the boards that I’m on are things that I’ve invested in and they’re small when I start and ideally they grow big. So joining something that is really rather large it was a little bit unusual.
7:03 And instead of being an investor, you’re an independent third party. So it was a little bit strange to think, I usually help companies I invest in. And this was helping one, not that I had invested in, but that I was interested in and felt that I could help them in some ways. And what is your role there? Are you trying to liaise with the community?
7:23 I never know what board members do because it seems like such a complicated job and hard to decide who does what. do you kind of have to take the initiative or do what you do best on that board?
7:36 So as a non-exec and as a director you’ve got to be able to help them with all aspects. They appointed both Joanna and I I think with a view of the tech side of what we did and we are there to help them do whatever needs to be done. There are some people who are recently, just before us, appointed to help on the risk and the audit side of the company. And I’m really pleased that they haven’t hired us so that we could help them with the risk side because that’s probably not my expertise.
8:10 So there are some who are now the head of their risk side and they’re focusing on that. I want to help them make London an absolute magnet for all companies who are thinking about floating. You know, I want London to come here and I’d love their product to be absolutely the best so that if you’re thinking and you’ve got the opportunity in your global company to float on London or New York or Nasdaq or anywhere else you might consider, I’d like to help them think about making London a clear winner.
8:42 So, I mean, my background is being product-focused and helping to develop products that people must have. And that’s probably the entrepreneurial spirit that I bring to it and the zeal that if they don’t have enough of it, I might heap a little bit more on top of them. It would be interesting to see like a New York or a San Francisco based company that’s kind of global to choose to float in London as opposed to what seems to be the other way around a lot of kind of London based companies are like, hmm, should we float in dollars?
9:09 And we saw King float in the US. But we’ve seen Justy talk about, I think, floating over here. Just floated this morning. Okay, there you go. What from an entrepreneur’s perspective do you think is the most important thing when choosing where to float if it had to be sort of just one point?
9:27 Or you can do what I did which was to do a simultaneous float on NASDAQ and London. Well really its liquidity is the important thing. You want to be able to have, wherever you float, have a market in your shares and ideally an understanding and an appreciation for what you’re doing so that they don’t just flip after two minutes because you want to have people who understand and who are interested in you succeeding. So the highest demand? So yeah, and who does the best job at helping your prospective buyers buy you and also help you continue information to the company, to the people, to maintain the relationship.
10:06 It’s not just a single transaction. After you float, it’s a long road and it’s a long relationship, so what can they do to continue helping you think about that, making it easier for you. When you see something like King, do you think, you know, if this was a year from now, I would make sure that that floats in London? Or do you just think, you know, some companies are always going to do that? Or do you think that’s kind of like a sign to us that we should make sure these companies IPO here?
10:31 Well I think if I put on my UK hat, and I’m not a spokesman for the LSE, so I can’t sort of maintain that I am. But if I had an aspiration for all companies to float here, it would make sure that you’ve got a relationship with them early on, that they know why, and that they feel comfortable. I would like a lot more companies choose to float rather than sell out early. And one of my chief bugbears in the UK and Europe is that often entrepreneurs sell out when they’ve got 10, 20, 30, 50 million in revenue.
11:07 And with a little bit of extra work, our ecosystem can help them produce companies that 100, 200, 300 million in revenue. And I think that we fall down on that. So I’d like to get more into the pipeline and more feeling that this ecosystem is one in which they should base a global business. And I think there’s some, just back to your king and other, what are the specialties that Europe is particularly brilliant at? I think that I look at EdTech, I look at MedTech and some of the life sciences, I look at fashion, you look at FinTech.
11:40 There’s some things that we probably do way better here than elsewhere. Financial services is a historical strength of the UK and of London. I think helping those companies choose to be here and operate from here and grow all of their relationships from here, I would very much like. We’re pretty good at gaming as well. I think that was quite sad.
12:11 So I think if it’s a natural market for whatever the company is, then I certainly want to work with them to make the UK the best, absolutely the best place to be. Because it is. Time zone wise, it’s really sensible. If you’re running a global business, I think any global business has a natural affinity for the UK and for London. I say the UK because I think there’s different parts of the UK that are…
12:35 Some are better at other things than I do come from Cambridge, although I do do a lot of things in London as well. But I wouldn’t be an entrepreneur if I hadn’t come to live in London. I never considered being an entrepreneur, or didn’t really know what being an entrepreneur was when I grew up, but it was when I came here and that’s funnily enough went to the London School of Economics, another LSE, and was a student there and met a mentor who was an amazing entrepreneur. And he saw that in me and said, oh, you’re one of those. It’s like, oh, am I?
13:06 And that’s what got my head ticking around to oh, well, I could create a business rather than just taking a job. That’s kind of neat. I like the idea of that. And that was here. We rarely hear that because usually it’s about how the Americans are the entrepreneurs, the risk takers, and in Britain is slowly coming around.
13:22 Do you think it’s the fact that there’s so many, I guess, immigrants and so many different ideas coming through this city and maybe also being at a university that it just felt entrepreneurial or why? Because I haven’t had anyone else say that about London. Well, it was at the LSE, which is famous for having a lot of international students. This guy was an American from Philadelphia who was doing his PhD in mentoring, but he had floated a bunch of companies before. So he wasn’t a British guy that I ran into, but so it was an American who put the idea in my head. But it wasn’t university. I think the universities do a tremendous service here at attracting absolutely top talent from all over the world and putting them into an ecosystem, an environment where you gel and you form the most amazing things.
14:07 And I think the collision of different viewpoints in different worlds is really what has created a lot of the great companies that are around us. And also when you’re at university you’re often open to suggestion and open to ideas because you’re thinking about what the future might look like. And I think at university it’s really where I realize that we create the future. I don’t think I’d really contemplated it that all the businesses that were around me were created by people like you and I don’t think I had that realization that it was us and People like us and people and us being everyone that creates companies because they’re trying to create a better Future and they’re slightly dissatisfied with what other static, you know, whatever the status quo quota quo is You’ve just given me a fantastic coffee and you started up amazing coffee company And when we first talked, it was about the language company, which I love, what a beautiful global business, what a perfect one to base here in London.
15:03 I mean, it really is perfect and creating the market, which is what you’re doing. I can’t think of many other better places to do that. It’s not gonna be East Coast or West Coast here. Sure, and it’s such a natural fit for languages too in London as well. There’s so many different backgrounds and cultures and languages and the history, I think it’s a phenomenal place to start a business.
15:22 Who started it because you saw an opportunity and you wanted to create a better future and you could see a nice way of making that happen. I didn’t have that realization that it was people who were slightly dissatisfied or saw a better way of doing things. I didn’t get that everybody did that, but that is how our world has been created. And it was here in London that I had that realization and it’s what’s made me certainly the person that I am. What is the state of the union of London tech?
15:53 And it’s changing so much even in the last year or two years. And Bloomberg said before he left office that he was looking at London as competition and not Silicon Valley. You’re on the West Coast a lot. I was just wondering what you see because you’ve been part of this ecosystem for so long. Where are we at?
16:10 You said it’s such a wonderful place to start a company. And where do we need to go to make it number one in the world? I say that kind of ashamed. Why should I say that ashamedly? No, we should want to be number one in the world, and there’s nothing stopping us.
16:28 So where’s the state of London Tech? It’s so much better than when I arrived 28 years ago, I can tell you. Where was London Tech 28 years ago? Well I went for my first financing. My first financing strangely was that the man who told me I was an entrepreneur, he finished his PhD, went back to the States, and three years later I started my company and I went to him for funding and I went, do you remember you told me I was an entrepreneur?
16:51 I think I am now. Can I have some money? And he said yes, which was great. And then another was a fellow who had run some companies here. So there were two angels that funded my first company.
17:01 The angel networks are very, very strong here. We are getting more and more serial entrepreneurs who are turning around and funding other companies. And I think that’s really important part of the ecosystem. So people who have started up companies helping others tread the same path is one of the things that creates the momentum and the velocity in the US. Is that the PayPal effect that we’ve talked about?
17:24 Yeah, absolutely. And that’s coming along very, very nicely here. I think I made a couple of tweets earlier this week looking at different startups, and they were absolutely supported by, I mean, these ones were supported by Huddle, or the guys who had founded Huddle, which is great, and you’re seeing more and more in that. think of the syndicates that that I’m being asked participate in and that I’m participating in. Most of them are serial angels or serial entrepreneurs who are also investing you know at the same time and on the side and that’s really nice.
17:52 VCs, I think we still got a ways to go on the on the VC community. One of the things that I’ve seen that I think is quite interesting is pairings of the big funds from the US with some of the small ECFs here and that’s quite nice so a local VC will lead and set the pricing and do a lot of the corporate governance but the reach will go into the US because those guys will become part of the syndicate and that happens a lot and it never ever used to happen so the appetite that investors from elsewhere have to partner with some of our VCs is increasing and I think they’ve seen some really good returns. Last FM was Greylock and you see oaks come in and done a bunch of things.
18:44 I don’t want to go through name names. I’m probably going to annoy people for getting someone. But that’s happening with more regularity and that’s healthy because I think it increases the professionalism of the VCs here and it allows all of us to increase our game. as an entrepreneur it means that you have better access to deep networks and relationships that will help you commercialize whatever it is you have in the U.S. and elsewhere if and when you need to and that’s good because if you only had local or regional VCs to draw upon your networks and your ability to leverage your investors to the benefit of your company would be less.
19:25 So I quite like that. Does it come down to networks and relationships at the end of the the day. I mean, you see such a big picture. Well, you’re asking someone who’s been helping LinkedIn for a very long time. Yes.
19:36 It does. Fair enough. Fair enough. How many VCs are you trying to do? I’ve heard people talk about the things she’s talking about, but they talk about it from a numbers and cents thing.
19:45 You’re talking about having the relationships to trust someone to give them an angel investment. I think it comes down to relationships because it’s people, and it’s people who make the world work, and it’s people who invest in other people. So when I make investments, I’m absolutely investing in the person and the team. And I’m betting that they have the wherewithal to create whatever product that they’re creating. And you can’t just say, oh, go do the US.
20:17 It’s more, well, I could introduce you to somebody, maybe at Qualcomm or any of these, or name a company. And if you have a relationship there, then they’ll probably pick up the phone. And if they trust you and they’ve known you for a long time, then they’ll pick up the phone and they’ll be more interested. But I think the relationships that we all have, I don’t know if you’ve read The Entrepreneur of You. It was written by Reed Hoffman, again, with the PayPal mafia.
20:39 But you should read it. It’s a beautiful book. The Entrepreneur of You. Yeah. Okay.
20:44 And it’s a wonderful book written by the founder of LinkedIn. And he doesn’t think of the world, you know, he thinks of the world as relationships and people. You know, I’ve learned a lot from him and it’s probably how I thought before, but having read it, it’s consolidated the way that I think about things. But it’s down to people and relationships and forming dreams and, you know, you can’t if you’re an entrepreneur, you know, you guys are here doing something together because, you know, you’re having fun and you’re doing it as two people who have a relationship.
21:15 And that’s what makes businesses work. If as an entrepreneur, I may want to make something happen, but I can’t make it happen unless I can get a team around me that also want to make it happen and have different skills and different abilities. And you have to paint the picture or the road that you need or the destination and then get there. And that’s what we as entrepreneurs do. And it is.
21:37 It’s through relationships, in my view. I would never say, just go talk to a VC or that VC firm. My natural would be, well, there’s six people in that VC firm. It’s kind of a natural fit, but this person who worked there, did that, financed that is the person you should really talk to, because they’ll be able to help you put together the puzzle that will take you down that road that you said you wanted to go down. And I think it’s more effective if you think about people and what they bring and how they can help you achieve whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.
22:10 Yeah, the whole idea for the show, I mean, our tagline is, it’s about the people. So it was like getting really behind the person and you’ll listen to people on the show in the last six months and you’re going to see these people in five years from now and seven years from now. And I’m sure you bump into many of the same people over the years and the people, you know, I’m sure the people don’t change that much, you know, and you really do invest in the person.
22:31 Yeah. If they want to do something, you think they want, what they want to do is good, then you’re going to join them on that journey. And through that, you’ll create things that never existed before. And that’s quite fun. But before you know it, you’ll know them really, really well.
22:44 And then you’ll want to do another project together. And then they’ll introduce you to somebody else for something else that you’ve been puzzling about in your mind. And then you’ll find yourself doing something else. How’d you start your coffee? You know, you’re thinking, that was probably, it’s probably a story, you know, like, you know, like that.
22:58 Surely running it, but, you know, having lunch with another Canadian entrepreneur. He said, I have an idea and a couple of people, but I need someone to run it. And yeah, so it’s about relationships and people. Right. And it’s actual real contact.
23:10 The other thing that we found, the consistency is even in this virtual world, it takes people being in the same room to come up with those ideas and being in the same place, at least initially. And I’m so, so powerful that it’s about the people because when you start up a business and you have an idea, the idea you have on day one or before you even start changes so much within that first period of… Well, that’s because you’re learning. Every day you learn and you jiggle it a little bit more so it’s better and a little bit more because you learn something, you think, oh, I’ll do that, and then by then they now call it pivoting, but you’re just making it a little bit better every day, and as long as you make something, whatever it is, a little bit better every day, that’s great.
23:51 And we entrepreneurs, that’s part of our special sauce, is we can super hone in our product on a segment of the population and make something that they must have, almost that they’re addicted to. And the beauty of, I guess, big companies, and I should say now I’m with some big companies, but the beauty of big companies’ inability to super focus and super hone their products is that as a little company, you can get their customers because you can create something absolutely magical. It’s a fairly rare big company that can move anywhere near as fast as a small entrepreneurial company.
24:26 Having said that, we were just talking about scaling up companies. It comes down to the people and the human aspect of what can take a small company with a great product and allow it to grow and grow and grow. When I first joined LinkedIn, they were really quite small and they had no operations outside of the US. Now, they’re just edging up on 280 million and quite a few thousand people that work for them. There’s some great capacity that they had in the people who ran that company that allowed them to get bigger and that is also what I would wish on our ecosystem here in London.
25:06 You’re now getting critical mass of people who have scaled up companies and you’re getting a bit more, you know, a healthy momentum and velocity of people who move through the startup community and that’s very healthy. What you learn in one company can easily be transferred into another company as you You know coach and help you know help you know employees who may be there for the first time get up a learning curve and and and Grow grow as people and and as professionals at helping them do whatever they need to be done Did you were you sold on LinkedIn right away? I mean, it’s gotten so big I saw something like one and a half billion dollars of revenue or something. I was like, I fell off my chair I didn’t realize it had grown that big, you know, so quickly Did you did you know right away when you jumped on and how has the company changed since you’ve been there?
25:51 Well, my girlfriend who was introduced to me by another girlfriend who used to be a non-exec director on my company phoned me up and said, oh, I’m with a friend here in Silicon Valley and she’s coming over, you know, she’s going to come over to London. Can you, you know, are you doing anything? Could you, you know, introduce you to a few people? And it happened to be one of those weeks when you’re out every single night at some sort of networking thing.
26:15 It’s like, oh yeah, yeah, come along. So we ended up hanging out over the week and she was one of the advisors to LinkedIn and I guess sort of understood how, and again, I would have been sold on relationships and networks before because I’m probably a natural connector. But it was at that when I met her that she introduced me to LinkedIn, I was like, oh, that’s so sensible. That’s exactly where, why didn’t it, it’s so obvious it should have existed before.
26:47 And what a brilliant thing. So that was, I think, in December, 2004, four or five, I can’t remember exactly. So it’s been around for 10 years. Yeah. Yeah.
27:02 And then when I next went to TED, which at that point was in Monterey, TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design. It’s a big tech conference, which is fabulous to go to. And if you don’t watch TED talks, not that you know, you should obviously watch Silicon really awesome. I like Ted, too. Yeah, it’s great.
27:20 In addition to that, you should watch Ted Talks, but she introduced me to Reed, who’s the founder at Ted, and we just got to talking, and he was the beginning of his journey. I, by then, had started up and sold my first company to the EuroMoney, floated my second company on London and NASDAQ, and had grown them quite aggressively, and they were marketplace companies. LinkedIn is a marketplace. have skills with people who want skills and it disintermediates the intermediaries or the head hunters, not just them.
27:54 Yes, no head hunters in it, but it allows people to do what they want, again it creates liquidity in the market, it makes it easier for people to find people and connect and technology is beautiful for helping people do that. So they wanted to make the world’s professionals more productive and that was great. I had been doing in financial services was making it easier for investors to communicate with companies. So, it’s like, oh, well, that’s very similar to this, and, well, you’re obviously going to have to expand there and there and there, and how are you thinking about that, and how are you prioritizing your geographic rollout?
28:29 And we just got talking, and I thought it was a brilliant thing to do. I thought it was a really nice use of technology. I hadn’t seen technology used in that marketplace before, but it seemed very, you know, sensible and natural that that was a great way of approaching it. You’d had the early markers of Facebook connecting people and allowing people. You’d seen the social was working.
28:54 This was a different segment of social. And I liked it better as a business to be perfectly frank because the depth of the information that you collect on the people and their skill set is phenomenal, very, very deep, not broad. It’s very, very deep. You think 280 million users and you’ve got what they’ve done for 20 years, who they know, their skill sets. That actually helps me find other people and it helps people find me if I want to be found and if I’m looking for that.
29:27 The other thing that I use it for is an online rolodex. I love using it to keep track of people, particularly in our world of technology. Everybody changes every little while, it depends on what type of person you are, how often and it changes. But the old days when you had business cards, we didn’t even exchange business cards now. In the old days when you had business cards, how long were they before they were obsolete? Depends on how long the person stayed. And I also like the way of I think that we navigate our world through our relationships by and large because they They can help you create your own future.
30:07 The old days, 20, 30 years ago, when you would go to university or finish school, then you go to university and then you become a lawyer or a doctor or something else. And then you’d stay in that career forever. And there, you were actually quite disempowered as a person because it was your employer that decided where you went and how you did it. But now, it’s your skill set. And if you don’t feel like staying at your first job for that long, you may morph into another one and then you might create your, maybe on your third iteration six or seven years out, you might create your first company and you might go back to people you knew in university or high school or maybe the first company and those relationships don’t die.
30:49 They say they’re much stronger than the corporate link. So you’ve seen a change of power from corporations to people and because of that, the relationships between people are stronger And I think that trend is only gonna increase in the future. I don’t see it changing any time soon. Because I think I had an appreciation for that when I sort of first met and I was like, oh, that’s so good. But it’s funny because most people would see a social network, Sherry sees a marketplace.
31:19 Yeah. Yeah. I do, yes, that’s probably right, yeah. You know, you mentioned how you use that as a Rolodex. I mean, you look at your CV and the first thing I think is how do you manage your time?
31:31 And I was just wondering, if you could walk people through, keeping a personal life and a family life and keeping in touch with all these companies and also keeping an active role in all those, how do you do that? Well, there is this great professional social network that I use. Okay, it’s all LinkedIn, right? No, it’s not all LinkedIn, but I do use LinkedIn and it is absolutely a productivity tool for me. So if I’m meeting somebody that I don’t know very well, I’ll look them up on LinkedIn and I will see who I know that they know.
32:03 I will see what else they’ve done, because they’ll say, well, you know, I’m with this company and they’ll say the current company, but I’ll want to know a little bit more about them. Like, well, what did you do before and how long have you been there? Because it helps you answer questions about how, what kind of conversation you might wish to have. So that’s really, really useful. I try to, when I, so I started being a portfolio person about 12 years ago and wanted to split up.
32:30 So my week is split up partially on, well, I’m a wife, I’m a mom, I try to do community give back things at least a couple of days a week and three days a week I stay on my portfolio. So I do split it up like that. So weekends. So even less time than I thought you had, okay. No, but so weekends are very strictly, I don’t do work stuff on weekends and that’s really important and I think I need to do that so that I can respect myself as a mother and a wife.
33:03 Do you check your email or just strictly cold turkey weekends, no? No, I do check email. I definitely check email. But you don’t respond to it per se? Depends on what it is.
33:13 Often it might be deflecting or, I won’t sit down and write a long thing and I will not have a meeting and I try, unless there’s emergencies, touch wood, not to take calls. Okay. And really just so that my family knows that they definitely have me and I’m focused and engaged on the weekend. And give yourself a break as well, let your mind rest. Yeah, no, I actually think it’s better to be fresh.
33:41 But as a portfolio person, when you’re flitting from one subject to another, you are actually probably more inherently fresh than when I was obsessively running my business, which I did 80 to 100 hours a week. I’m more fresh because you can compartmentalize move from one company to another so that that helps. The philanthropic I spend time on founders for schools which we’re going to talk about at some point I’d love to talk about that. Silicon Valley comes to the UK that’s dedicated to trying to improve the ecosystem for entrepreneurship here in the UK well and elsewhere but really excited about that I co-founded that with Reed in 2007 he had he’d done a PhD at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar I as you know, originally came to go to the London School of Economics. Both of us had other feet in other ecosystems of entrepreneurship and felt that we should think about doing things a little bit differently in the UK. So that’s why we set up that. I do some stuff for the Crick Institute, which is, actually, I spent this morning on a site tour. We’re building this building that will house- But King’s Cross.
34:49 Yeah. But King’s Cross. Yeah, walk by there. Yeah, well, I’ll show you. My phone has all the pictures of the building in- It’s a beautiful building.
34:56 It is beautiful, you see it, they’ve got a really cool theater and I can’t wait to hold events in that building, it’s so cool. But picture this, 300 scientists on each floor, all between 25 and 35, all from absolutely all over the world, all there for between 6 and 10 years rotating all the time. How much innovation do you think is going to come out of that? It is, it’s a giant incubator, but the other thing that Paul Nurse, who is heading it up as a CEO has mentioned that we always hear about Nobel Prize winners when they’re older and the awards are given when they’re older, but it’s usually for work for when they’re between 25 and 35.
35:37 So I’m really excited about the advances that are going to be made in healthcare and like sciences that’s going to come out of there. I think it’s magical. I love that at the King’s Cross, it connects really nicely to the Abraham Life sciences and the different, there’s a big cluster of med and health up in the Cambridge area. So that’s going to be really strong, it’ll be very interesting to see how that part of our ecosystem changes and improves because you have serious critical mass that will come on and it will just blossom.
36:06 So that will be fun. So that, again, that sort of philanthropic, the other philanthropic stuff I do is on Cambridge University. I love education and I like the interconnection. I think that I love the power of universities to improve their own communities. So that’s two days a week and I do a variety of things, all of that philanthropic.
36:26 I didn’t want to wait until I was dead to start, or retired, to start giving back to the community from which I had benefited so much. So I do that. I usually try to, there was usually a flavour of technology and bringing people in from the world of technology who might have some capacity to, so Citizen Science, we’ve done a lot of that at Cancer Research UK and the Crick Institute. And you help them understand technology that’s being used in our commercial world and how it’s applicable in their world, often deeply driving down costs or increasing their ability to reach or achieve things.
37:05 And that’s quite fun. I like the mixing up of the worlds. And then on the other side, the segmentation is three days a week, which is a portfolio and I try to spend time with the companies that I’ve made investments in because it’s It’s not a transaction. When you make an investment in a company, you’re committing to helping that person run that company and help them either meet other people or puzzle out problems that they need to puzzle out. Or whatever.
37:32 The average life cycle of your angel investments, would you say? Well, I can give you some interesting stats from Nesta. The average hold for an angel is nine years. Nine years, wow. So the really bad ones die quite quickly, but it’s quite a long time.
37:48 That difference between being a tech, again, if it’s an internet one, it can happen a little bit faster, but a lot of the life science ones or some of the science-based ones take a little bit longer. Like genome projects are like 20 year horizons. Yeah, absolutely, because again, what you’re doing is you’re taking the science, you then do a translation where you’re trying to figure out is there a sustainable model, then you’re doing the pivoting that we spoke about a little bit earlier to get the product market fit, then you get that inflection point, and then you commercialize.
38:21 And that takes a little bit longer if it’s a science-based or a life science-based company before you get that product market fit. And how many Yale Angel investments are you still looking after right now? Just roughly like 10, 20, not that many. I have more than 20 in my, I probably got 30 in my actual portfolio of companies that are, that I’m tracking and have investments and positions in. I’ve got some that have floated and I’m always loath to sell shares after they float because I love them so much by then.
38:56 But actually as a discipline, you know, sort of like, anyway, I’m gonna get into that. But anyway, there’s quite a few. There are very few that I’m actually on the board of or the advisory board and really that’s just a capacity issue, it’s quite hard, but I try to spend time with each of them and they all know how to get me if they need me. So what I try to do is help troubleshoot and try to help understand and if I know enough about what problems they’re trying to solve then I might be able to help them do something depending on what they want to do. So I now try to mainly troubleshoot and make sure that whoever’s on the board knows generally how I might be able to help so that they know when to call.
39:41 And I prefer to help them develop their product to make it amazing than help them with a corporate governance issue, which isn’t that exciting. I’d rather get that zeal and work with the entrepreneur to work out, help them perfect something or make it better so that it’s – and I like strategy as well. Strategy and industry restructurings are quite fun to think about, and thinking about, well, if this is an incumbent, you know, these are the five competitors, what, you know, what’s their move going to be, what’s their move going to be, how can you hit them so they can’t hit you back? I like thinking through this, you know, this, this strategic and tactical moves, so.
40:16 Well, you’ve explained your time management, but I still don’t know how you do it. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of similarities. 40 hours in a day in Cambridge? Is that how? Yeah, we have many more hours today, but there’s a lot of, there are a lot of similarities between companies.
40:32 I do do market spaces, so helping people monetize and put people together, what you’re doing is you’re eliminating barriers of making decisions because transactions, the things that will kill a market is if there’s confusion or lack of transparency. So if you’re trying to make a market, what you’re trying to do is get people up a learning curve so that they feel comfortable about and confident about making, you know, buying something or doing that transaction. So if you think about it that way, then there’s a lot of similarities between a lot of the things that I do. And that means that in some areas, I’m a super expert and others, I know nothing. And so I try to help people understand that I can help you if you’ve got a question around these things. Don’t bother me with that because I probably won’t be that helpful to you, but I might know someone who is.
41:25 Understood. Founders for Schools. Can you walk us through that? Yes. Okay.
41:30 Yes. So Founders for Schools, as you described very accurately earlier, is a way of helping students understand some of the principles that I was talking about earlier about all of the companies that are around us are created by people like they, like their parents, them, like their mates. You know, most of the jobs are created by companies, by people who have started up companies that are less than five years old. In the US there’s a fabulous stat which 100% net new jobs created by companies less than five years old in the US. 25% of the GDP growth in this country created by just 6% of companies, though 6% of companies didn’t exist 10-15 years ago.
42:13 That’s phenomenal. So, however, if, and again, I’ve got school age kids, 13, 14, sorry, 13, 14, and 11. And in their school, when they’re thinking and learning about careers, they’re being told about the sort of careers that you and I were told about, you know, when we were in school. But those aren’t the careers that are going to exist in, when these kids graduate. And you’ve probably seen some statistics about, you know, the greatest problem that we have in our tech world is that the university graduates and the high school students don’t have skill sets that we need. So starting up Founders for Schools was a way of helping schools get introduced by founders of businesses so that we can make it obvious why running a business is the best thing ever to do. So it started out as a, you know, we do this conference, the Silicon Valley comes to the UK in November, usually aimed at university students to help them understand the sorts of businesses that they might wanna create or join.
43:17 We had some leftover fabulous speakers, same sort of speakers that you have on this who are running the companies that are really, really interesting and growing really fast. We have those, used to have those people just at university and they come and talk to the students and say, yeah, I’m running this company, it’s really fabulous and it’s so much better than what was there before. And the kids get excited and think, oh, I can do that. when I graduate, I can do that.
43:39 We had some leftover speakers about three years ago. And we literally had every lecture theater in Cambridge, Phil, there are 6,500 people that come to this conference on the weekend. And, but we still had some leftover speakers because they love coming and talking about their companies. So we said, let’s stick them in high schools, let’s stick them in the secondary schools because there’s kids there too. And actually it’s a shame because the kids often make decisions when they’re 11, 12, 13 that stop them from being able to do the really interesting engineering or mathematical type jobs that are super useful when you get to want to run your own company because they allow you to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.
44:21 So we took some of the speakers, contacted some high schools and said, so we got some really cool speakers and they’re available from 10.30 to 11.30 on Thursday. Can you get some kids for us? And we did that for a few schools around, this was in Cambridge. And it was electric. This is like high school?
44:40 This is high school. Okay, so teams. I think we did year nine and year 10. So they were, let’s say 13, 14. And the speakers came back and said, that was the most amazing thing that I’ve ever done.
44:51 The kids flogged, flocked around them and wouldn’t let them leave because they had so many questions. And they’d never felt such energy from an audience for years. So all I saw was the speakers coming back and saying, that’s amazing. You’ve got to do that again. I’m sure that I converted at least 100 kids to want to do something else.
45:12 And they were just so they’d never met anybody who’d run their own business before. I don’t know. Why don’t you have? Why hadn’t they met anybody who’d ever run their own business before? And I said, I don’t know.
45:23 There’s a lot of entrepreneurs. I don’t know how they couldn’t have, because it was in a fairly entrepreneurial community where we started it. So that was that day, about a week or two weeks later, I had two different parents stop me in the street and say, you know, my child, you put some people, you know, and you run into these people randomly, but they stop me and said, you know, my child hasn’t stopped talking about the business they’re going to run when they graduate and they actually haven’t stopped, you know, I haven’t been able to get them out of the physics book and they were definitely not interested in physics before.
45:56 And this is a girl, and it’s like, Interesting. So, and then I’m scratching my head saying, and what school and what speakers did we send there? Cause I was trying, cause then you’re trying to piece together this sort of thing. So seven or eight months after that, the head teacher emailed and said, are you gonna, do you ever, do you know any other founders that could come again? Because when we did our survey at the end of the year, the kids all vote on what the single most inspiring thing is that they has happened to them in the whole year.
46:27 And the majority of the kids had said, oh, well, that program, when you had those people who ran businesses come in and talk to us, that was the single most inspiring thing. So the head teachers usually sees a random assortment of things that have happened, but the whole year, the majority of them, like 80% said that. And she went, well, what happened? Because it wasn’t her who we’d contacted, it was a teacher who had arranged it. So she talked to the teacher and then they came in and found us.
46:56 So it seemed to work and the kids were really, really inspired. So we did it the next year. Again, fairly manually, we just took some founders that we know who we thought could have interesting stories to tell and interesting businesses, put them into the schools, this time in deprived areas, and this time not just in Cambridge, but Cambridge and in London. And not just people from the United States of America. We actually used our local homegrown entrepreneurs or home grown, partially home grown, because they’re still quite foreign.
47:27 The people who run businesses often come from all over the place, but put them into the schools. And the same thing, it was absolutely electric. So, you know, the hypothesis we were testing the second year is, will it work with local entrepreneurs from Britain? Are they just as inspiring as the foreigners we happen to have in town? And it was the same impact, absolutely electric.
47:50 I described this to this gentleman at dinner and said, I was quite pleased because we’d affected a couple thousand kids by in our little experiments. And he said, yeah, but there’s 3.7 million people, kids, that’s nothing. Come on, that’s not exciting. And I said, brrr, I’m not ambitious enough. Okay.
48:11 And then I thought about it, I was like, well, okay. So my usual things are that you wanna try to get 15, 20% of a market. So if the market’s 3.7 million, do we have, the questions going through your head, Do we have enough homegrown entrepreneurs in the UK to do it? And actually, you do. You can break it down.
48:29 The math is actually quite simple. If you want to hit, say, half a million kids, so 15% of the mark, half a million kids in a year. So question one, can you do it on one event in November? No. That’s okay.
48:42 Can you do it in a series of events? Yes. How many kids are there? How many entrepreneurs? We usually do.
48:47 Usually the events are 100. You have four entrepreneurs. you assume the entrepreneurs will do maybe a couple of events in a year, all you need is about 10,000 entrepreneurs to cover 15% market simultaneous you can do it. So then used this fabulous tool called LinkedIn and looked at the distribution of entrepreneurs and company founders in the UK and we have well in excess of that and people who have started up their own businesses and indeed started up their own businesses several times.
49:13 And then used the database from Companies House via DoDIL which is another fabulous UK companies. So went to talk to Amy and said, so we gave you a list of people who are running companies. Can you filter that list for companies to make sure that the company’s got a million or two million at least in revenue and that it’s doing well? And it’s like, oh yeah, easy. So they made their API available to us. And then before I knew it, we could. We had all of the entrepreneurs data-based in the UK, we could sort them by how well their company was doing.
49:50 And we created an online service for teachers, which is much like Amazon or TripAdvisor or Arcado. You know, say it’s Molly and Milton Keynes. She can say, I want to create an event in, you know, where are we now, April, June. I’ve got some 14-year-old kids, I’ve got 100 of them, and can they come at 10.30? We then do LinkedIn search, find the entrepreneurs near them.
50:14 We then filter for businesses that are only doing well and we present search much the same way. If you’re searching for a book on Amazon, you can search. If you’re a teacher, you can search for founders within 10 miles of you. You if you’re a founder, you’ll get a LinkedIn in mail saying, Colin, can you come on this day to teach this thing? Oh, by the way, it’s only 10 miles away from where you are and this is the date.
50:40 The time if you’re available you say yes because it’s an hour of your time you’re talking about your business it’s to your local community you want to give back and you don’t have to do any prep because it’s talking about your journey and what you were thinking about when you’re in high school and why it’s a great career and why it’s high impact so the entrepreneurs wanted to give back they wanted to say yes they did say yes and now we’re filling up classrooms and we’ve created this fabulous tool and it works and the automated you know sort of platform it works the the the events that you know we used painstakingly put together using you know humans and you know your head you know months in advance the teachers can do and it takes probably 20 seconds the same you know and it produces itself kind of it produces itself so what you’re what you’ll see as an entrepreneur is you’re going to invitation from a teacher near you asking you to speak in an event in six or eight weeks time, you’ll check your diary, you’ll say yeah I’d like to that’s you know it’s around around the corner from here and I can do that I’m around on that day. You’ll stick in your diary, you’ll say yes and then you’ll show up to the school, you’ll wow the kids they might have never ever met someone who’s run their own business before. You tell you you know you tell your story in 10 or 15 minutes they’ve and then you answer questions and then you’ve inspired these kids. Three times the percentage of
51:55 Kids choose to study STEM after one one-hour talk with entrepreneurs. 96% of them say that it’s hugely inspiring and it’s affected the decisions that they’ll take when we do the surveys afterwards. It’s really neat. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever ever done. Totally using technology in a beautiful way. You know, you’re combining Doodle and LinkedIn and you’re combining a database, something called edge database, so the teachers have to to identify themselves by school.
52:24 So if you’re not a teacher, you can’t go anywhere near this database because actually we’d have to charge like a thousand pounds a minute for it because it’s actually very valuable. It’s every entrepreneur and how well their company’s doing in the UK and their private companies. But it’s a very valuable resource for them and we’re just putting in some other cool programming so that if they haven’t done a balance on, if they’ve chosen three, I don’t know, fashion And we might sort of say, well, do you know, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs in your area who also do hardware.
53:00 And have you thought of adding a hardware one into the invitation mix? So we’re now doing some validation checks to make sure that the teacher doesn’t accidentally choose four people that all look like and talk like and say the same thing. So if they’ve got inherent biases in what they’ve chosen, we’re now asking them to ask themselves before they put the confirmed invitations that they are happy with their choice. and they’ve thought about it. You do that, you speak a lot, right?
53:25 Yeah, I do a lot of talks, mostly for young kids, really young kids. The younger the better, I think I almost have this, if it’s eight, it’s too late. We started at secondary, because we knew that we wanted to get them before they made their A level choices. And then we thought, but actually they’re still making choices way earlier than that. So I think our six, seven, eight, right?
53:47 And I talk mostly about adventure and just sort of get out and see the world and talk about my trips, and it’s, yeah, after you finish your talk and you ask many questions and you see a hundred hands go up, it’s just like, okay, you, you, you, and it’s just, it’s hilarious. But I realized they’re just lit up and suddenly they’ve seen something and they think, I can do that, I can do that, I’m like that, that’s what I wanna do, that sounds way more interesting than some of these other things that I’ve thought about are the TV shows and just going back to entrepreneurship, They often think, and the one thing that shocked me was, again, the impact of some of the shows. So they’re like, well, no, I can’t be an entrepreneur because I definitely want to go to university and my parents want me to go to university, and if you’re an entrepreneur, that means you’re a high school dropout.
54:32 It’s like, well, no, not in the world that I know, many, many, many of them have gone to university and have relatively technical degrees, which is why they can do what they do. But because of the media and the different shows that there are, and then they think, no, I’ve seen that, Dragon’s Den. That’s mean. People in business are mean. It’s like, well, actually, no, that’s also not the way that it is.
54:55 So again, it allows you to defray the myths that are out there about business that’s formed by these entertainment reality shows that actually aren’t really reality as we know it in the world of tech. It’s a great PR campaign for entrepreneurs. You mentioned some girls in those high school groups, and I just wondered if we could talk about women in tech real quickly. We had Eze Vidra, who runs Google Campus, right down the road. He was giving me a tour of the campus, and he was like, what percentage of women are in tech?
55:24 And I was like, I don’t know, 20-something. And he was like, 9%. But at Google Campus, it’s like, double that. And he was like, really? And on the show, he was like, get a founder and get a female founder.
55:35 And he was just like, all about promoting this. We do balance for gender on the other validation check that I was just talking about. So actually, when we did our manually curated one, we do make sure. In fact, I did a scale-up panel last year and we had four women who had floated their company and they were all talking, and there was no men on the scale-up panel. I loved it.
55:54 It was great. So we’re getting more critical mass. I think having role models is really, really critical for that. I think being in business is a brilliant career for a woman. I mean, obviously it’s what I did, so I’m sort of drinking the Kool-Aid, but it’s a fabulous job.
56:13 And now that I’m portfolio, that’s the thing that I can do and have kids at the same time. It’s a wonderful, forgiving and flexible future to be your own boss and your own curator of your own life. I think that the businesses that some of the most amazing women that I know have started up are problems that women want to solve and that men may not see. So Care.com, they floated a few weeks ago. They’re a business that helps sandwich moms create the marketplace for the things that help them take care of their kids and the things that help them take care of their aging and ill parents.
56:51 And what it does is it filters, say I’ve got a mother and mother suffering from dementia or diabetes or something, it’ll say, well, these are the people that can help. You can help with these problems. And by the way, they’re rated as five stars. And that’s going to help me figure out who I have to help. It’s a great business, deep marketplace.
57:16 I don’t think it would have been thought up by a man. There are plenty of men who work at the company, but it was a woman trying to solve her own problem. Another one, Move Guides, a female entrepreneur of the year this year, and it’s Move Guides. And the people who get stuck with actually moving their families around usually are what’s usually a woman sorts out all the issues. Right.
57:41 TaskRabbit was a female founder. Yeah, absolutely. And so you’re solving, you know, there are lots of problems that need to be solved and women actually run into a lot of these problems. And we’re just as capable, but in some areas far more capable because we have deep empathy with whatever the status quo is that needs to be solved. They’re doing a mom’s program now at Google campus.
58:01 So it’s a whole mum entrepreneur idea. I mentioned that to someone and they were like, why? And I’m like, mum, mum, mumineers. Yes, I’ve heard that there. And it’s a lump, I’ve heard that.
58:11 Yeah, but, but yeah, very much so. I mean, I think it’s the most empowering, invigorating and choice for any, everyone, but actually particularly women because we will have a unique advantage at seeing and understanding some problems and also being able to create unique solutions for them. Then that’s what entrepreneurs do. It’s as perfect for women as it is men. On the Raspberry Pi, we started up a MOOC in computing last year, which was a joint venture between a bunch of different entities.
58:41 And we went to great pains to make sure that the examples and the communications were given 50% by men and 50% by women. And originally when we started, it was like, oh, well, we need so-and-so-and-so-and so-and-so. I went, wait, hang on, hang on. Actually, but we really need to illustrate this and this and this. And so that now is gender balance.
58:59 But we have almost, if you went on the current status quo, it is heavily towards men. But it shouldn’t be, and there are many, many problems, and I think we all need to work together to solve them. I thought that was good advice. He said, get a woman on your founding piece. He also said, don’t just be you and your buddies that make the company.
59:20 Get someone from a different country and get a woman. Dave McClure put out a few tweets recently, and also the Kauffman Foundation has done some research that show inextricably companies that have women co-founders do better. So you should, absolutely. Either co-founders or founders where you recruit. But again, I think mixed and diverse teams are really important. We do this scale up report at Silicon Valley comes to UK, sbctuuk.co.uk and com. And it tries to package up the secrets of founders and CEOs who have scaled their companies to already to a billion about the things they wished they’d known when they were just starting up. So the scale up report is something that might help might help and we you know we created as a way of just trying to pass knowledge from one to the other. But in that one of the lessons is first of all talent and secondly diversity and bringing together different perspectives be they male or male and female or you know American and Canadian and you know British and you know you know name a country is is far more creative and creates much more interesting and robust solutions that apply on a global basis. If you want a global company you really should have some people from around the globe on it, not just a narrow subset.
1:00:46 And that’s also the magic of what I think we can do as entrepreneurs. We can create global businesses by tapping the community and going back to why London. London’s the most diverse place ever. You know, we can easily get everybody from around the globe here, you know, five minutes. You know, you can do that here much more easily than you can in most other metropolitan areas.
1:01:08 Yeah, that’s definitely true. Speaking of learning from people that have already done this, we always ask someone who comes here the same question at the end, and I’m going to ask you, Sherry, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Sherry, and give that young lady a bit of advice, what would you tell her? I would tell her. Well, 20. So she’s already studied STEM subjects.
1:01:30 I tell her to program. I think programming is a really helpful thing. It equips you to solve a lot of problems. I think data and what you can do with programming and manipulating and seeing patterns for the noise is going to be something key to help us navigate our futures. I think thinking about people and relationships because I think it’s us and people who make the world and I definitely tell her or her to start up her own business because it’s the most empowering, invigorating, high-impact thing you can do.
1:02:02 Well, those are very good. On that same note, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? I’m guessing you’ve received quite a bit of advice from some fascinating people, but can you nail it down to one or two? I wrote that one down. So I think it’s that it was that it’s better to make decisions even if you don’t have perfect information, because moving forward is far more impact than just over-analyzing things.
1:02:34 And maybe when I received this advice, I was over-analytical or over-academic, I’m not sure, but I think momentum and moving things forward is really, really critical for all of us, because we together create a better world, and it’s only by making decisions every day on imperfect information that allows us to move forward. So I think it was that move, make decisions, make changes, as long as you move forward every day, then your impact will be profound. And I think we’re all here and we all want to have impact on the world.
1:03:07 Final bit of that question. Your advice to the 20-year-old listening, assume that this person is not in a major city so they can’t come down to a drink about or they can’t go to the valley. What advice do you give to them if they want to be an entrepreneur or get into tech? What would you say? There are a lot of fabulous online courses, so they should be, if they haven’t taken our MOOC and Computing Raspberry Pi, they should.
1:03:27 They should make things. You know, being geographically separate doesn’t stop any of us any longer. You can find communities online. If you have a passion, chase it. Chase your passion.
1:03:38 That’s the other piece of great advice. You know, I don’t work, I just chase passions, and it’s just a joy, and it’s fun. And do it with people. That’s the quote of the show, I don’t work, I chase passions. That’s a T-shirt.
1:03:50 The final question I have is, what’s with the Canadian mafia? You two are part of it. You guys really stick together. It’s weird because people assume, I remember when I was in the city, I was an American and they were like, you cover the guy at Citibank because he’s an American. And I was like, you know, there’s so many of us that it’s hard for us to make a connection, but you guys really stick together.
1:04:10 So what’s it all about? The C100 is how kind of I sort of, the C100 was founded in the Valley, I guess back in 2008 with sort of the top Canadian entrepreneurs in the Valley trying to help Canadian companies get funded. A little bit more liquidity because at the time and still in Canada the sort of the ability for companies to get funded is still somewhat limited although getting much, much, much better. So, I went to one of those events and then you go to one of those events, you’re a new guy in town and that’s just kind of where your network starts from a little bit.
1:04:42 Because it’s back to people, doesn’t it? Yeah, you meet some great people and you start, you know, having coffees and I think I think a lot of the time when you’re a foreigner in a city, people have been through what you’re going through in a way, so they kind of want to help you out a little bit, and then you just kind of reach out to sort of great sort of Canadians in the UK who have been here for 28 years and have done some incredible stuff and hope that they’ll take the time and give you a coffee. Do you find yourself helping Canadians, but I’m sure you help a lot of people.
1:05:15 Do you have a special affinity for someone from Canada? Of course I do, yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt, I mean, you’ve got a shared past, you’ve got, you know, it’s easy to find a common language if you’re from the same country. And there aren’t that many of us really, right? I think that really helps to have a small size because I think if you, you know, there are, I mean, there’s still not that many Americans here but we’re much more, so we’re probably less likely to- Well, you go to see a Canadian hockey game at the Maple Leaf in Covent Garden and you realize how many Canadians are out here.
1:05:48 You can’t get in. You’re like, what? I didn’t know there were this many here. The neatest thing was last week when I was at TED in Vancouver. That was so much fun because it was an entrepreneur fast design technology and it was in Vancouver.
1:05:59 It felt really nice to be there. I also felt very nice to do some skiing, some skiing, some skiing at Whistler Black Home. And it’s quite a town, isn’t it? Vancouver is beautiful. I haven’t been there.
1:06:10 Sherry, thank you so much for coming. I feel like we could talk for another hour. We didn’t even touch on a bunch of other things. So we might have to do this again sometime. For people that want to get in touch with these various things like Founders for Schools and the Silicon Valley comes to the UK, I know you rattled off some URLs, but are there some Twitter handles or some easy ways for people to find those things?
1:06:31 Yeah. So Silicon Valley comes to the UK is SVC to UK and a 2, not a, like it’s a number 2. And founders for schools is founders, and then the number four, and then schools for the Twitter handles. And maybe we can shoot it around on the YouTube channel. Yeah.
1:06:50 For sure. And just to carry, if someone out there is listening, who may be a teacher, a principal or involved, you know, how do they get this at their school? How do they get access to that database to find the founder? That’s great. They, thank you, they go onto the web and put in www.founders4, number4schools.org.uk UK and you say, I’m a teacher, this is when I want to put my event on and we will have you a fantastic list within 20 seconds.
1:07:20 Our claim is it takes less time than a cup of coffee. You have to know when you want to hold your event, but as long as you figure that out before you come, it’s great. It’s free, it costs you nothing and the impact will be profound on your kids. You’ll open up a lot of eyes and you’ll have a lot of fun yourself. Yeah, that’s like a no-brainer. I wish I had had those in high school, you know, just those speakers to come and talk to you Yeah, I never had anyone. It’s what made me you know, you know when I I was in you know in business I was meeting entrepreneurs that made me think I can do that. It’s the same thing On in your Twitter as well at Sherry Kutu. You’re very active. No, actually, it’s not at Sherry Kutu It’s at S-C-O-U-T-U Coutu you so my surname is Kutu and my first initial is S for it’s some people say it was Coutu you and I I hadn’t really thought about that, but it’s my initial, which is S-C-O-U-T-U.
1:08:11 Excellent, excellent. All right, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can watch us on YouTube channel, Silicon Real. We’ll have the links to all those organizations down at the bottom on the notes. You know, as Colin, we always say, it’s about the people. I think it’s so easy to forget, especially when you’re young and you’re like trying to start that new business that you don’t look to the left and the right of you and you think these relationships are the ones that I’m really gonna use in 10 and 20 years, you know.
1:08:34 Maybe more so than that extra class you took. What are we going to do? That’s what I want to do. We’re going to get us some mischief. That sounds super cool. That sounds really cool. And there you go. Episode 40.
1:08:45 40. It’s been a crazy ride. It’s been lots of fun. It has fantastic people here. So we’re going to keep going. Keep it coming. Yeah. Thanks for listening. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming, Sherry. And like I said, it’s about the people and all the best to you.
1:08:56 Thank you.
