Full transcript: Suranga Chandratillake on London Real
1:36 This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real. It’s the same studio, but it’s not just tech. We’ve recently had, I was telling Suranga here, the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch on here.
1:46 He’s the Scottish actor. He was also the guy in Braveheart. I don’t know if you remember the movie Braveheart. Do you remember that movie? There was the old guy in the movie that had that arrow stuck through his shoulder and then they had to take it out and he like punched somebody.
1:58 So it was that guy. So he was sitting there and he was really an old school actor, a little intimidating at first, but a really sweet guy. So we had him in there, and we had the godfather of hip-hop, Mr. Afrika Bambaata, here about a week ago, too. So that’s all at London Real.
2:13 You can check that out at LondonReal.tv. But today, we’re here to talk tech. My guest is Manchester’s own Suranga Chhadra Tilaka. Chhadra? Chhadra Tilaka.
2:24 Chhadra Tilaka. Yeah. Very good. I had it before you came here. You are a partner at the UK-based venture capital firm, Balderton, which primarily invest in Europe-based technology and internet startups where you focus on Series A. We’re going to talk more about that later. Before this, you were Chief Technology Officer of Autonomy Corporation and then you spun out Blinks, which was the intelligent search engine for video which you later IPO’d in 2007. You spent a lot of time in California, but you hold a master’s from in computer science from the University of Cambridge in addition to lots of Patents, we’ll talk about that later too.
3:01 Balderton, since 2008, had some very big exits, including Betfair, which IPO’d for $2 billion. Bebo, who was sold to AOL. Natural Motion sold to Zynga. ScanSafe to Cisco, the list goes on. Lovefilm to amazon.com.
3:15 And MySQL, a billion-dollar sale to Sun Microsystems. Serenga, welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you for having me here. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be here, too.
3:24 I tweeted you guys a week or two ago, And I was like, we’ve got to have you guys on. You guys are major players here in London. And I was actually researching you. And so I saw your name came up, and I think I read your article in The Telegraph. And I was like, yeah, I’d love to have that guy on.
3:39 And then, boom, you came back. So I’m sure there’s a lot of cool guys over at Balderton, but I’m so glad you’re here. So thank you for being here. Yeah, no, definitely. It’s great to be here.
3:48 Cool. I’m going to throw out a quote from you and just see if we can kind of go down this line. You once said, quote, what is it that Stanford is putting in the drinking water, that Cambridge isn’t. You’ve probably heard this quote back to you a few times. It’s not anything to do with technological smarts.
4:04 It’s something else. You went on to say, the only difference is an aspirational difference. It’s a cultural, attitudinal difference. I got my degree at MIT in engineering. I graduated in 93.
4:15 And I don’t remember the word entrepreneur ever being said. And so that’s probably closer to London and California in a weird way. And so what is it about Stanford that it breeds that entrepreneurial spirit where the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily take that leap? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a great question.
4:33 Yeah, I don’t think either Cambridge, your Cambridge or mine are as good at it as Stanford is. And obviously Stanford isn’t the only thing that creates that entrepreneurial buzz and feel in the Valley and San Francisco. There’s the whole area in general mix has a lot to do with it too. So while many great Silicon Valley and San Francisco entrepreneurs have spent time at Stanford or have gone through Stanford in one way or another, there are also many who haven’t.
4:56 And so it’s not like it’s the only component. But I think it’s to do with this idea that if you want to make an impact, then one of the smartest, easiest, most efficient ways of doing that is to start the company. And I think when you think about the average undergraduate, someone who is 18 to 22 years old, who goes to study at any of the schools you just mentioned. MIT, Cambridge here in the UK, Stanford in California, or any of the other sort of top-tier schools like that, you know, typically the kind of person who goes to a place like that wants to have an impact, you know. They’re working hard, they’re smart, they are taking this step into an organization that’s going to test them, that’s going to challenge them, but they also hope it’s going to be a platform, a sort of springboard into something bigger and greater, you know.
5:42 Very few people who go to these sorts of places are lazy and kind of want to do nothing afterwards, right. They all have a mission of some sort, even if they haven’t figured out what that mission is. And I think that when you go through these organizations and these places and these institutions, there are lots of different signals you get as to how you can have that impact and how you can do something interesting with your life. And they are different in different places, often because of the environment in which those places are based.
6:07 And I think that in Stanford, the overwhelming message is the way you can have an impact and the way you can change things and change the world for better and really use your skills and your talent in an interesting way is to start a company. And that’s a very, very deep ethos, which spreads across the whole of Stanford. And that’s the interesting thing for me, is that it’s not just a double E, which is electrical engineering, or computer science thing. It’s a thing that impacts the people who go through the medical school there, the people who go through, I think, the arts.
6:35 It doesn’t really matter what you’re studying there. You’re given this idea that if you want to change things, you should probably go and start a company to do it, or at least join someone who is starting a company. Whereas I think in other places, there is, while you may have that message, especially increasingly. You also have competing messages like, you know, stay in academia, that’s the way you can change the world. Or go join a big company and change it from the inside, that’s the way you can change the world. Or go to government and change the world. All of which are true to some extent, but I think Stanford’s message is more focused on the entrepreneurial idea and as a result you see the sort of, you know, wealth or wave of entrepreneurs that come out of that place. Right, and so when you’re talking about a culture change it’s impossible to change a culture from the top up, it really has to be from the ground up, doesn’t it?
7:16 And so, especially in tech, in this space, we’re always hearing about, yeah, you know, the Valley, and the Valley thinks big, and they think about the $100 billion company, and we think about this and that. But like you said, we’re in London. London’s a fascinating city, because it’s the center of government, it’s the center of finance, some call it the center of fashion, advertising, all of these pieces in Europe. And so there’s constantly different people you meet in this city, which is refreshing, because you get great ideas, you don’t just bump into entrepreneurs, you know, in sandals all the time, You meet different kinds of people, but there are plenty of different business models in this city, including one of them, is to go into government.
7:50 So, you’re not really gonna change that culture fast, are you? No, no you aren’t. Maybe it shouldn’t change. You shouldn’t change, exactly. Culture is ultimately an authentic thing.
8:00 You can’t create culture or change it in some sort of top-down edict sort of way. Plenty of people have tried in history, and in general it fails, right? And so, I don’t think that’s gonna change. And I don’t think you have to copy what Silicon Valley is. I think one of the big issues that people sometimes have is they get obsessed with copying this thing that is Silicon Valley.
8:18 And no one is going to be Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, arguably Silicon Valley itself, isn’t really Silicon Valley anymore. So it’s sort of a fallacy to try and recreate it. I think what you have to do is say, well, when we say we want to recreate Silicon Valley, what do we really mean? And I think what we really mean is we want to be a place where people can build, in particular, high growth, primarily technology driven or technology companies, and do that in a capital efficient way that brings to the country or the city that it’s in all the benefits that brings from employment to you know economic growth and just a vibrant sort of lifestyle and environment and if that’s what you mean then there are many ways of doing that that are not Silicon Valley and I think that’s what we’ll see from these other growing hubs and London is one absolutely there are a couple of others in Europe I think but also there are others in the US as well so you know New York has changed dramatically in the last five ten years I know you spent some time there and so was Boston which again is a place that, you know, used to be very, very different, you know, 15 years ago, and now it’s, it’s a very, it’s a hive of activity, but in a different Bostonian way.
9:17 Right. I want to hear more about your backgrounds, and I want to know why you came back to London, but what’s a day in the life like for you? I mean, I check your Twitter feed, and you’re at the Microsoft Ventures Pitch Day at the Cocoa in Camden, you know, you’re, you’re at Seed Camp, you know, I just can only imagine what it’s like being you, you know, you’re a partner now at Baldurton. I had Ben Holmes on here from Index, and I asked him kind of the same question.
9:41 I think there is an idea of what it’s like to be a partner at a VC company, and then the reality. Just like there’s an idea of what it’s like to be Bono, and then the reality of his life. You know, can you walk us through what a week is like for you? What you spend most of your time doing? Is it a hard job?
9:55 Is it fun? Is it have its own kind of issues? What’s it like? Yeah, so I wish I knew you were gonna ask me that question, because I would have brought with you with me a PowerPoint that I did a couple days ago, two weeks ago that analyzed what I spent my time on. And the reason I did it is because I’m new to venture.
10:12 I’ve been a venture capitalist for all of three months really now. And so what I did was I actually took my calendar for the quarter, for the three months and split it into different categories. And then I asked one of my partners who’s been a venture capitalist for I think 15, 16 years now and asked him if I could do the same with his calendar and he very kindly let me. And I wanted to compare what I was doing versus what he was doing to try and see if I was making some huge mistake about where I was spending my time.
10:37 Because one of the things that people tell you going into venture is that, you know, time management is the critical thing, because there are so many things you could be doing, most of them are interesting, and so knowing where to spend, you know, certain portions of your time is very important. So anyway, if I’d known, I would’ve brought you the full detail, but going off memory, what’s interesting is that I spend the majority of my time on, I would say, you know, three big things. The three big things are portfolio companies, so companies that we have already invested in, and spending time with them.
11:07 The next big thing is new entrepreneurs. So basically spending time with entrepreneurs who are out there in the markets that we invest in, which is certainly all of Europe. And then the third group is spending time in the ecosystem more broadly. So that’s everything from sitting here and talking to you to meeting with many of the other companies and organizations that are involved in the process of building small fast-growing companies. And the reason I spend time with them is because those people will help our companies and also will often help us understand where the next companies might be coming from.
11:37 So it’s amazing how actually you spend, in my case, I seem to spend about a third, a third, a third on those three. I think the more time you spend at a firm, you will spend less time on that ecosystem because you probably are more integrally part of it and so you don’t need to sort of spend time tending it and you can therefore spend more time meeting new companies and non-existing companies. So over time, I think it will shift. But as a result, my average week is full of meetings, And most of those meetings are with small companies, either ones that we’ve already invested in.
12:06 So it’s board meetings, or more often actually, because we’re relatively early stage, just informal catch-ups with the companies that we’re working with. Anything from product to hiring people, to firing people, to legal issues, to new growth that’s sort of changed something about the model, or all these sorts of things. You sit down and chat to and listen to issues, and if you can provide advice more often than not, Just be counsel, just be a listening board.
12:31 A lot of time is spent doing that in a very sort of unstructured way. And then a lot of time is spent meeting new entrepreneurs. So people who’ve set up a company and who have an interesting new idea and are trying to understand how they can take it to the next step. And that could be with an investment from us or it could be other ways. But we talk to all of them because we try to help them take that next step one way or another.
12:51 There’s a great concept called the power of no. And you must have to say no sometimes because I’m sure everybody to a certain extent wants to bend your ear about an idea and there’s only so much time in a day, even meet you for a coffee. There’s only so many of those in a day. And so how do you decide when to meet or when not to meet or even when to return emails, that kind of thing? Yeah, that’s a great question.
13:11 So one of the things that I, you know, so when I decided to be a venture capitalist, I spent a lot of time thinking about how venture capitalists work today. And I did that by really reaching out to my network of other CEOs. and asking all of them about their experiences with venture capitalists, who they liked, who they disliked, why, and so on. And what I was trying to do was understand, first of all, if I wanted to even do this job, and secondly, if I was going to do it, how I would do it, you know, what I would model myself on.
13:41 And one of the things that came back as negative feedback with not all venture capitalists, but certainly a decent number of them, was the fact that people didn’t even give the time to say no. And so one of my little rules is I’m always going to at least say no. Because there is not a single person who reaches out to me who hasn’t spent hours and hours on their idea and poured tons of emotional, psychological, physical effort, stress, et cetera, into this idea.
14:13 It doesn’t matter if they’re a four-year-old company with 20 employees or just one person on their own thinking this thing. It’s a big thing. And to reach out to someone is another big barrier. And I think it’s really sad when people don’t even respond to that email. And so maybe I’m lucky because I’m relatively new at the gig and so therefore, I’m not getting that much inbound, I suppose, perhaps, but I’ve decided to at least say no to everybody and to give people at least some kind of insight into why I said no.
14:40 I try to meet as many people as possible, even if it’s for a short time and I’m figuring out sort of smart ways to be more efficient with my time, so perhaps I can meet people for shorter periods and that kind of thing because anything I can do to help is something I want to do but there are always gonna be some I simply can’t meet with. The easiest reason for a no is when someone reaches out to us, as many do, with ideas that simply don’t fit what we do. We typically invest in European companies.
15:03 The vast majority of our investments will be in the US or with a European founder. There are people who reach out to me from Baltimore with a Baltimore-based company and I say, well, it’s probably not going to work. We typically invest at Series A, so relatively early on, and to the people who reach out to me with companies that are even much further earlier, although I may meet with those, because that’s always interesting, or people who are way beyond that, and that’s probably a no.
15:29 And then we also generally don’t invest in things like clean tech and biotech and so on, and we get a lot of those. So those are the main reasons I would actually just say no and give a very simple one-sentence answer. Otherwise, even if I am saying no, I try really hard to elucidate why I’m saying no, because I hope that the feedback is somewhat useful to somebody. Is conflict with the portfolio, is that another reason to say no, or not a reason not to have a meeting?
15:52 Yeah, it’s usually, usually with a conflict of comfort, my answer will be, I’d love to meet to pick your brain on things, but know that there’s a conflict. So, you know, are we gonna invest in you? From what I understand, probably not. But I would still like to meet you because we have a portfolio investment in the area. So if you can tell me more about this space, I’d love to meet with you.
16:11 And then, you know, there’s a tiny number of people who say, okay, now that I know that you’re an investor in X, I’m definitely not gonna talk to you because I’m scared of what I might give away. And that’s fine. But the vast majority of people still meet with you anyway. They just mentally draw a line about what they’re going to reveal or not. Because they know that I think this idea that the ideas alone are what sort of creates the success is silly.
16:35 I mean, the reality is execution is probably, I don’t know, 80% of it. So very few people these days are super paranoid about, I’ve got this magical idea that if I tell anyone else, then somehow that will be the end of my business. So is information completely transparent these days or are there a few people that hold out or are there a few of the stealth mode projects or is that all gone? I think it’s less and less. I think stealth mode still makes sense if you have something which requires a lot of pre-build, so particularly hardware, certain very large technological products on projects, or something that’s so disruptive that there’s kind of a nervousness around its commercial success if too many people know too early, but it’s rare.
17:14 It’s definitely rare. From what I understand, talking to my partners, 10, 15 years ago, often there were NDAs exchanged before meetings would happen, whereas now it’s a pretty rare occurrence. That’s inconceivable pretty much now. Pretty much. It’s not impossible, but definitely not rarer.
17:30 Okay. Talk to me about Balderton. You guys have a niche in April you announced, I think a fund is about $305 million, Strictly Series A, Strictly Europe. It’s a nice little niche to be in. It’s very focused. It’s been noted by a lot of people as a place where you you just want to be, why there?
17:47 Why restrict yourself? What happens when the BCD rounds come? What is your mentality for that choice? Sure. I think a lot of that boils down to our philosophy as a firm of what bench capital is.
17:59 I think you can look at bench capital and say, it’s just another kind of fund management. And it’s about investments, and it’s about picking a company or companies acquiring portion of that company and then essentially sitting back and hoping that your thesis, whatever that thesis was, plays out, that it grows in value and at some point you sell that stake. The other way of looking at venture capital is that it is a process where people get involved in companies and help build them.
18:29 How much you help, how you help, the flavor of your help depends of course entirely on the company and it changes from company to company, but I think that if you have that view and that’s really our view, then you realize that first of all you can’t invest in lots of things, secondly you can’t invest in things that are that far away from you physically, and that thirdly you want to try and limit what you’re investing in by as many axes as possible in order to ensure that what you’re doing is replicable and scalable in some way, right? So if you invest in you know a series D company and a seed company at the same time, the problems those two companies face, as important as they both are to each of the companies, completely different so you know you will have to go through a massive context switch as an individual if you’re trying to help both companies in the same day and so will your whole organization right you know we have a talent director who helps people hire people who helps our companies hire people the kinds of people that you hire when you’re a series D company totally different from the kinds of people you hire when you’re a seed company right she would have to you know be doing both in the same day perhaps in the same hour and I don’t think that’s actually very effective you know to you know you do switching first of all there’s probably one person who does all of that that well and secondly even if there was the the cost of changing all the time will
19:40 Be will be massive and would kind of leave you spinning and so you know I think that if you believe that you’re gonna get deeply involved and really try to help people build their businesses and and really help them build their companies then you do have to limit yourself somewhat as frustrating as that can be and trust me it is really frustrating there are times when we meet companies that are earlier than then we would normally invest in or later than we would normally invest in and we have you know painful conversations around the table, which can go on for, you know, hours in some cases. And we have made occasional exceptions because we just felt so compelled. But I think that, you know, to do it really well, you want to try and focus with the majority of your business. Now, there are other firms that are larger organizations that have multiple teams that focus on these different areas. And I think that’s absolutely fine, right? There’s no reason why, you know, there are five partners and five other investment professionals at Balderton. We could have a, you know, the same number again doing late-stage investments, or the same number again doing seed investments.
20:36 That’s fine, but I think as a relatively focused team who like to work together and on all the same things together, we’re an equal partnership and we’re a very open organization internally, we think that it makes sense to focus like that because that way we can be way more effective for the companies we’re trying to help. When your companies grow into those later rounds, what happens? You follow with them? Yeah. Okay.
20:57 Yeah. provide the perspective of having been there from that period on. We are you know very happy to admit that there are times when other people will help in other ways. One of the interesting things we’ve done though is try to build a team that can help companies as they grow and in different ways. So for example if you look at the partnership we all have very very different backgrounds and that’s and you know one of the neat things about our partnership is it’s an equal partnership which means that all of the partners are you know both economically but also from a sort of vote and wait perspective equally distributed so there’s absolutely no difference between any of us and the nice thing about that from an entrepreneurs perspective is that we all equally care about every one of our investments so there’s no concept of this is my investment and I care about it more because you know I’ll do better from it if I if it succeeds versus you know that guy’s investment you know if he does well then maybe he’ll look better than I do in the partnership and so by removing that barrier what it means is that there are times when you know I will very honestly say given what you’re doing right now, company X or CEO Y, you should go and talk to my partner Tim or you should go and talk to my partner Daniel because they’ve been through what you’re going through more times than I have.
22:03 And so being able to switch like that allows us to support people as they grow and as their needs and so on change. But as you grow, you will probably bring in more investors and some of those investors will be better at certain stages and we welcome them to the table and hopefully use what they bring to the table. And you define Series A by size? Yeah. That’s a great question.
22:24 We don’t really define it by anything beyond a sort of a sense of where a company is. So size is a thing that changes very much with the market. So instead it’s more about, you know, Series A is typically, in my mind, you know, a company that is, you know, has built a product that has a pretty solid focus on what that product really is, has a, you know, the beginnings of an idea of a business model around that product. They have some level of traction, right?
22:51 They’re either showing that people care about the product and using it and are engaged with it, or they may be selling it, depending on the kind of business they’re in. And really, they get to the stage where they’re saying, look, this thing works. We’re in the market that makes sense. We’ve built a sort of small team that makes sense. We’ve built a product that’s showing a lot of promise here. Now we need capital to grow the team to really sort of start to structure some of this. We need capital to help market and sell this thing at at more scale, but we also need investors who realize that while we think we found the right vein that we want to dig into, it may change and we may need to change direction at some point in the future.
23:25 It’s not just a matter of like building out new markets or whatever. And if you’re in that phase, I think you’re a Series A. Whether that’s $2 million, $5 million, $20 million, whether that’s 3 people, 10 people, 50 people, actually it’s very different depending on the company and the kind of business you’re in. So it’s difficult for us to define it based on that. We try to define it on these admittedly fuzzier things, but it’s like what someone said about art.
23:49 You know, I can’t describe exactly what it is, but when I see it, I know it. Right, yeah. I think that’s what a judge said about porn as well. Yeah, I was gonna give you the higherbrow example, but yeah, sure, let’s take it there. That’s gonna make a great clip of what series A investment is, because a lot of people don’t know, so that’s a good question.
24:05 Is this market over incubated? What do you think of the incubators? You know, we’ve been covering this space now for almost 18 months, and there are so many incubators, But I can’t tell if there’s too many. Or do they add something valuable to the system? Obviously, Seed Camp has been around.
24:19 Barclays is doing it. Weira is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. The co-working spaces have them everywhere. There’s the FinTech Innovation Labs there.
24:27 They’re everywhere. And there’s obviously even more iterations on them. What do you think about that? Is there a point where it becomes over-incubated? When you see a company that’s been incubated, are you thinking yes?
24:38 Or are you thinking it also comes with its own issues? Yeah, sure. So the American in me says that We don’t have to worry about this, because if we are over-incubated, then the market will sort itself out soon enough. But to give you a sort of more useful answer… But will it?
24:54 It’s like weird, because a lot of these corporates come in that seem like they’ve got a lot of juice and a lot of money they can just spend, and it feels like they could incubate for years without getting the feedback. Sure, but it will change, if things change for them, I think. And we saw that in the dot-com boom, right? So in the boom, there were a bunch of incubators, many of which were corporate, and many of which shut down in 2001 and 2002. Idealab, that comes to mind, okay.
25:16 Yeah, yeah, and Idealab was a little bit different because it was set up purely as an incubator and it was a bit of a different play, but there were corporate ones that I don’t even remember the names of now, but that were set up by banks and telco companies and so on. And it was an unsustainable business at the time because actually, at that time, the amount of capital required to build a business to any really significant scale was significantly larger than it is today because of the cost structures involved. And as a result, all these incubators created a whole bunch of orphan companies that couldn’t really go take the next step.
25:46 So I think it’s different now because actually you can go through an incubator and even if you fail to raise some massive round at the end of it, even by raising a small amount, you can actually get another six months, another year to prove the product and so on. So it’s a bit different. So I can see why there are more and they’re perhaps more sustainable today than they were 10, 15 years ago. But having said that, we could be over incubated. It’s very hard to know.
26:08 I don’t think we are, my personal sort of view on this, and the reason for that is that, you know, first of all, I do see genuinely interesting companies in just about every incubator I have visited. And the other really interesting thing that I always say about things like incubators and entrepreneurialism in general is that, you know, you don’t have to be a successful company to benefit a lot from trying out being an entrepreneur for a while in your career. I think that, you know, increasingly, we are all going to have to be entrepreneurial some way or another. If you look at the stats around the way the jobs market works and the fact that, you know, people forget a job for life, people don’t have a job for a decade or even a job for five years these days. And so understanding that you need to be entrepreneurial in the way you think about yourself and that, you know, me-ink is a real is a real concept, you know, is very important. And one of the best ways of experiencing that is to be an entrepreneur and throwing yourself out there and saying, okay, I’ve got this idea, I’m gonna run with it and see what happens. And even if you fail horribly, that’s okay. You will learn a lot about how it, you know, what it takes to run something, you know, what it takes to be this sort of rounded individual who understands a bit about the way commerce and business and everything else works. And, you know, I think that’s a great incredibly valuable thing
27:19 Whether or not, you know, these companies succeed. So when I look at incubators, you know, I look at them and I know that the majority of the companies there, you know, aren’t going to make it to series, you know, A, let alone B or C or an IPO, but that’s okay because I think everyone who’s involved, assuming they go into with the right attitude will benefit a lot from it anyway and even if they go and do something very different after that it doesn’t matter and it’s still massively valuable to them I believe you know so for those reasons I think it’s cool there are lots of them out there I think it’s great that corporates are you know spending the dollars to actually do it and the pounds to actually do it and you know I think that in that sense it’s it’s a benefit for all of us the one that comes to mind to me in the States is Y Combinator you know you’ve had a lot of success a lot of big companies they sponsored this class at at Stanford, how to start a startup, which I listened to on podcast forum, of course.
28:04 And they really had some interesting stats. They ran the numbers, was it three partner, three team founders, founding teams, two, one. I mean, they have a lot of data. And I was wondering if you see in them, I mean, are they the premier one in the US? Are the things you see in them that are like, wow, they do this, this, and this, right?
28:20 That maybe we should kind of look at in London to do this, this, this, right? Sure, yeah. So they systematize it more? Yes, I mean, so YCE is awesome, right? It’s less of an incubator, more of a phenomenon really, business phenomenon, frankly.
28:36 I think one thing that I notice about YC companies that I feel European companies could learn a bit about is how they tell the story. There’s a lot of teaching and tutoring that goes on at YC around how you pitch your story and how you tell your story. And I think that there’s still a bit of a prevalence in Europe at times about this idea that if I’ve got a great idea or a great product or a great business, I should need to tell my story. It should be obvious from my traction or whatever else.
29:03 And of course, that’s somewhat true sometimes. But I don’t, as an entrepreneur myself, I don’t see why you’d ever stop at that. Like surely you should seek to perfect your game in every level, in every way. And I would say that one way, one of the things I’ve learned about being an entrepreneur is that you are always selling one way or another, whether to new recruits, whether to investors, whether it’s customers, partners. And I think YC is very, very good at helping you understand how to think about what you’re trying to sell as an idea and how to compartmentalize and structure that into a pitch, a narrative that really makes sense.
29:40 And I certainly look at companies that are awesome companies, but it takes me a while to dig into what it is they’re doing and why they’re doing it, how they’re doing it. And that’s a real shame, because there are certain cases where if someone’s not gonna give you the time to dig in, then they’re never going to see what you’re doing. And unfortunately that means you probably won’t raise money and you’ll probably not hire the right people and probably not get the right customer and so on.
30:01 So I think that that’s one little thing that we could do better here in Europe. And I don’t know, I haven’t spent enough time with the incubators here to know how well a job they’re doing of that, but I think that’s one area that certainly I’ve been coaching entrepreneurs on because I think it’s an important difference. Yeah, I think they had a part, a class in that at the Stanford lecture about the narratives. I’m sure they did, yeah. Yeah, it’s crucial because especially in this, we’re so time poor in this world That narrative really sticks in your head and more so than you think even if you’re an analytic type guy like you are Maybe I am it’s still that that in that story is what always the David and Goliath sticks in your head, right?
30:35 You know humans pretend that or some humans pretend that they think in spreadsheets. We don’t right I mean every bit of research you can read about neurology or you know, the development of human mind, you know We’re social animals. We’re storytellers, you know, we are not we’re you know math and numbers in a fundamental sense, yes, have an impact on us, but that is not the real way that we really make decisions most of the time. And so, I think that understanding that and therefore using that as a tool as well is critical.
31:04 Now, that doesn’t mean that people are gonna invest you just because you have a great story. Of course they’re not, or join you because of that. But I think it’s a very, very important part of what happens. Let’s talk about you. We’re in the States for a long time.
31:15 You act like a Californian. That’s a compliment, I’m from there. And you were operating for a very long time, you know, with blinks, with the IPO blinks. The IPO here, but you were still in the States when that did. I’m sure I can thank you for a lot of things that go on in YouTube today because of blinks.
31:32 I’m not sure if that’s true, we can check in on that later. Why leave the operating environment? Why go into VC and why come back to London? I’m sure you’ve had to think long and hard about this. I’m sure your kids probably have American accents.
31:43 I’m not sure. Why make that decision? Yeah, yeah, no, they do. And more shockingly, so do I, at times, it seems. But no, I mean, so I guess there’s a bunch of questions there, but why investing versus operating, so I love startups.
32:03 If I look at my life, and if I look at where I’ve had the most fun, and where I’ve been the most effective, I guess, it’s always been involved in startups. From when I was, before I was two digits old, before I was 10 years old I could code and me and my best friend at the time had this great master plan to build a computer game and go and sell it and become millionaires and it failed miserably of course but ever since that day, ever since those days I’ve always been involved in technology companies in that small early stage. It’s just a very, very compelling thing for me because I love technology in a very, very visceral way and I love that it’s now changing the world in an amazing way.
32:41 That wasn’t obvious even when I was a kid and I wasn’t a kid that long ago But I remember explaining what email was to someone once, friend of a family, and then beginning to realize how it was going to have this chain result into so many other things. And I think that it’s just a wonderful privilege to have the right skills and to live in a certain period of time where you can be part of that massive wave of change. And it’s just so exciting, because you learn so much and you see so much.
33:11 And then, of course, it creates this amazing culture around the team and the people who do this, right? Because there you are, a small gang of rebels trying to change this thing that you think is really important, that you have to change. Everybody, it feels like everybody’s against you. There are terrible, terrible lows of which I know. You like that.
33:30 You never liked that at the time, at all. It’s horrifying and really, really bad. But if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. And you realize that a year, two years, three years later. And so I’ve always enjoyed all of that.
33:44 And I think that whatever I did, whatever I do in my life, I’m going to want to be involved in that sort of world. What I realized, though, when I did Blinks, which was the company that I founded and ran for a long time, was that you have to have such passionate belief in the thing you’re doing in order to be a really effective entrepreneur. Because there are so many of these lows that you have to believe irrationally that this thing’s going to succeed. otherwise you can’t, you can’t do it, right?
34:12 You have to be kind of a crazy person or a slightly naive person, a combination of both. And I looked and I didn’t ever find the single idea that I think made me think, yes, this is the one that I drop everything else for to go and do. And I think you have to have that, otherwise you can’t be a good CEO again. But I still wanted to be part of that world and to help people perhaps who were doing that. And so I left Blinks a while ago now and as a CEO at least and I spent a lot of my spare time since then working with founders and entrepreneurs.
34:46 I did angel investments, I did a lot of mentoring and I’ve discovered that I really enjoyed that and while it isn’t quite the same as being in the hot seat yourself, it’s definitely pretty close. But I think actually great investors are generally pretty operational and great operators understand the investment mindset and I think that in many ways you have to get both. I learned a lot about the investment mindset running blinks and now that I am an investor I think the operating experience is going to be a valuable thing to know and have. Regarding the other question which is about US versus Europe. Yeah I mean you could go you could have gone down the road, you could have gone to Andreessen, you could have gone to a lot of different places. Right, Sandhill Road, yeah. So it’s a really good question and it’s one that you know I pondered about a lot. Basically the reasons are you know usually the most interesting opportunities are in the less obvious obvious moves, right?
35:35 And that’s something I’ve learned time and time again. And I love that, and I love rolling the dice on that kind of thing. You know, I think it’s boring to do the obvious thing. A lot of my fellow European entrepreneurs who moved to the Valley stay there forever and are very, very happy there. And having been there for 10 years and had kids there and everything else, I think we could have easily done the same thing.
35:55 But I really thought, you know, it’d be nice and interesting to do something different, and I wanted to sort of see what different could be and what could that could mean. And, you know, I spent some time back in Europe and I came out and visited and stuff and I did a really interesting lecture tour that took me around universities in the UK and I, as a result, met lots of people studying particularly computer science and engineering. And what I realized is that the raw talent and the raw energy and excitement around perhaps starting companies and doing these things was alive and well, you know, and it was alive and well in a way that it hadn’t been 10 years earlier when I’d last been in the area.
36:26 And then I started to dig into sort of what’s the infrastructure, what’s the support, what’s the community. And I discovered stuff that never existed 10, 15 years ago. I mean, shows like this, all the other publications that help support the community, venture capital firms that are finally investing in a more Silicon Valley kind of way, angels who are getting involved, who’ve done it before, who’ve had great exists themselves, and who are actually helpful.
36:48 And all of these things have started to happen in a way that hadn’t happened before. And I started to realize that there was a wave here that could be really great and that could be really interesting. And I thought, well, what better than to go and get that if I can be helpful, if I can provide the perspective from the Valley, which sometimes is valuable, sometimes it’s not, but also be involved in something that’s more nascent, that’s more fun, that’s messier and more chaotic, and I love that a lot more.
37:13 And then you look at the other things that are very compelling about being here. One of the things is the diversity, right, so Silicon Valley, although it’s a very diverse place in that there are a lot of immigrants and so on, it’s still very Californian as a place, whereas I think Europe is not one place, you know, it’s Berlin, it’s London, It’s Paris, it’s Stockholm, it’s Copenhagen and many other places. And that diversity is really cool and really energizing and so that drew me to it as well.
37:39 And then finally I guess somewhat patriotically, I do believe that although I am both an American and a Brit, but patriotically I do think that there is Europe in general and the UK in particular have a great history in entrepreneurialism. If you learn a bit about history as I did growing up in Manchester about things like the Industrial Revolution, you’ll realize very quickly that many of the great first entrepreneurs came from places not that far from here. And it’s a shame that we’ve sort of lost our way a little bit in some of that.
38:09 And we haven’t completely. There have been some great entrepreneurial successes over the last 20, 30 years, but it hasn’t been at the depth that I think it could be. And so to be part of that new movement and to be able to help in some way, that seemed like a really sort of fun thing and a meaningful thing to do. I’m sold, Ben. I want to move here and I already live here.
38:25 You know, I’ve tried to describe this ecosystem to other people and it just it there’s some great energy in this city right now There’s great passion. I think everyone feels like we really are on the verge of something there’s everyone is willing to help everyone’s willing to collaborate and The other thing that I noticed is that in a good or bad way, there’s no There’s no PayPal Mafia. There’s no tiered structure So you’re not walking around and you’re not rubbing elbows with the guys that have made it necessarily Everyone’s still trying to make it everyone wants to make it and so I feel like we’re in this unique place that in in five years isn’t gonna exist anymore, where then you will have the success stories and the tiered and then the reinvestments.
39:01 How do you describe London when you try to get it into your head? What is this ecosystem feels like? Also, it’s not just London. Of course, it’s Cambridge, it’s Manchester. It’s not just the roundabout.
39:10 It’s all parts of London. Have you got it figured out in your head? I haven’t fully. I’m trying to spend as much time as possible in all those areas to try and figure it out more. I think you’re absolutely right.
39:20 It’s earlier in the development of the community. And so the nice thing about that is that it does feel like a more level playing field. One thing people don’t talk about a lot in the Valley, but it’s true is that it isn’t actually as open and transparent as people like to pretend it is. It is a little bit elitist at times. And I think that having pedigree, whether that’s Stanford or Berkeley on your resume, or whether that’s having been one of the right companies, does actually make quite a big difference.
39:45 And not to say you can’t break through, people do all the time, but I think there is a bit of that there, which is very natural. happens in every society, but I don’t think that’s happened as much in Europe yet. And that level playing field is fun. And I like the fact that I meet, and if I look at sort of two pitch meetings side by side, I’ll meet one person who’s really young and has never done any of this before, knows nothing about any of this, doesn’t even really know what venture capital is, and he or she is pitching me this great idea.
40:14 And then I’ll meet someone who’s kind of, someone who’s been involved in two or three companies and is well connected and everything else. And actually, we get to look at them equally. The downside is you don’t have the depth of prior experience, which is so helpful. Going back to the irrationality point, entrepreneurs, especially the good ones, are irrational, completely irrational. There’s nothing rational about starting a company and believing that you’ll take over the world.
40:39 I mean, why would Mark Zuckerberg ever think that was going to happen from this project in his dorm room? So you have to be a bit of a bizarre personality to do that. But the other thing that helps is things like role models, being able to see that other people have done this. And maybe now, they are way beyond your reach and you could never even imagine speaking to them. But if you dig into them and read their stories and their history, you realize that actually they were not dissimilar to you 20 years ago or 10 years ago or whatever it is.
41:09 And I think that’s the key thing that we don’t have as many of here. And the role models we do have, sometimes they’re a bit tired and it’s not really as relevant to the current generation of entrepreneurs as it perhaps would be to one 10 years ago. And so I think having depth of all of those sorts of people around the ecosystem is key and that’s one of the things we don’t have quite as much as you would have in the US. Certainly in California and even in areas like Boston I would argue where the, sure it’s smaller but they’ve been 20, 30 years of interesting tech companies.
41:36 If there’s one change that London needs to make for the next five years in order to promote tech, what is the one thing you see that we’re lagging on? We’ve obviously seen the tax incentives. We’ve seen immigration being talked about. I don’t know if that’s gonna change now, but is there some bottleneck that you see where we really need to make sure this doesn’t or does happen? Learn them specifically or?
41:56 Yeah, oh, UK or UK. Sure, okay, well. Or Europe even if you wanna go ahead. Yeah, so if I say UK, just because it helps me feel my answer better, immigration, immigration is for me the number one thing. I don’t think taxes are as important.
42:10 And it makes some sense, especially breaks on investors, I guess, you take a lot of risk, and that’s what a lot of the UK stuff has been. I don’t think it really matters for entrepreneurs. I think when you’re a second or third time entrepreneur, you start to think about your tax bill, but I never met anyone who started a company somewhere because the tax bill was gonna be lower if in 10 years’ time they sold their company for a billion dollars. In fact, if you met someone like that, you probably shouldn’t invest in them because they’re thinking about the whole thing.
42:37 That’s a low margin business you’re talking about. Exactly, exactly. I’ve always said that my personal philosophy on taxation is if I want to maximize post-tax income or wealth, then I’d rather do that by increasing pre-tax than trying to reduce the tax. That’s sort of my mentality. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have that mentality.
42:55 And the proof, by the way, is the fact that we’ve just spent a bunch of time talking about probably the most entrepreneurial place on the planet, and it’s California, which is I think second only, so Hawaii, the second highest tax. And also, by the way, a tax nightmare. They have retroactive taxes a couple of years ago. They have all kinds of crazy property taxes. So it makes no sense as a taxation place.
43:18 So as you can tell, I passionately feel that the tax thing is a bit of a side argument. I think the much bigger issue is talent. There aren’t that many people who are going to do this crazy thing, because it’s crazy. And there are also not that many people who are willing to follow these crazy people. And we have to be a place that is a magnet to and that opens the door to these people.
43:39 And you look at our portfolio companies, what’s the single biggest issue they all have? It’s hiring, right? And it’s not because there aren’t good people. There are great people all over the world. And we just need to make it easier for them to be able to get those people and get access to those people.
43:53 And I think that that’s something which in general, Britain has been good at for a couple of thousand years. If you look at the country, there has been a lot of immigration to this country for a long time. It’s why we have one of the most diverse societies on the planet. And I think it’s benefited this country massively and maintaining the right gateway for the right people and maybe sometimes all people. That’s a key part of what has to be solved.
44:17 And this is, you’re really talking about non-European immigration, because we kind of have that somewhat settled, although sometimes Cameron seems to be talking about restricting European immigration, which seems ridiculous to me. But you’re talking about immigration from India, from China, I mean, from America. wasn’t easy for me to get over here either. Yeah so yeah again and my intent is not to get like overly political but yeah so first of all there are a lot of people who talk about restricting even immigration within Europe and you know I think that would be a retrograde step and and yeah it’s also about immigration from the rest of the world too because unfortunately the genetic dice do not roll in some convenient way you know they roll all over the world and and the reality is that the next Steve Jobs or one of the people who could be the next Steve Jobs is probably somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa and unfortunately nothing you or I or anybody else does is probably going to change that boy or girl’s opportunity to become the next Steve Jobs, which is deeply saddening for me.
45:14 But I think that as a country, we should at least be helping the one who might be in Estonia or the one who might be in the US or whatever else and I don’t see why we can’t do that more. So that to me is the biggest thing. And like I say, it’s from that very, I guess, high-level philosophical argument, but also all the way around the very simple tactical issue, which is that what is the single number one issue that high-growth tech startups have in London right now and Britain right now?
45:41 They will tell you it’s talent. And if the pool of talent they could source from were greater, they would have less of that problem. Right. Well said. A lot of people watching are young entrepreneurs and even older entrepreneurs that are just starting that I’m sure are going to email you and expecting no’s or yes’s.
45:56 But you have been through the IPO process, and for a lot of people starting off, a lot of people, that is the ultimate goal, and I’ve talked to people sometimes, and they’re like, IPO, IPO this, and I’m like, you know, what about private capital? And it seems to be three letters that are always on people’s minds. We’ve obviously seen some successful exits this year in London, which probably makes it more on people’s minds, but you’ve lived through one a while back, seven years ago, right?
46:19 And you’ve seen what it’s like, you’ve seen what it’s like afterwards, then you have to deal with the stock price every day, you probably still get phone calls about the stock price of blinks. is what have you learned, what can you pass on knowledge-wise about the IPO process and is it a necessary step in today’s age? Sure, sure. I mean, look, I think the most important thing and plenty of people have said this before me is to understand that an IPO is not a goal or an exit, you know, an IPO is simply another step in your journey as a company.
46:46 And it’s, you know, it is what it is. It’s a fundraising step, right? It’s a certain point in time. It makes sense either due to the quantum or the nature of what you’re trying to do where the best way for you to raise the next amount of money that you need is to do that publicly, to offering equity publicly, and doing it through a regulated market, and that’s all an IPO is, no more, no less. I don’t think, and so from that perspective, absolutely, there are many great companies that will not IPO, and that’s absolutely fine, because what they will do instead is they will discover that for their business, they can raise the money privately, or they just don’t need that much capital, and therefore, public or private, they don’t need sort of late stage capital per se.
47:25 And I think we see a lot of, you know, all of those combinations going on right now out there. I mean, you just need to look at some of the really, really large companies that are growing right now in Silicon Valley, particularly sort of some of the Y-combinator companies you mentioned earlier, people like Airbnb, then companies like Uber, you know, Square, I mean, a lot of these companies have been able to raise significant, significant amounts of capital without going public. And I think that’s fine.
47:47 And I don’t think they necessarily need to go public anytime. Facebook was one that did go public, but that resisted it for a very, very long time. I think potentially would have resisted for longer if they could have. The big thing you have to realize that because it is not a goal or an exit or an end point, actually remember that there is something you’re going to have to manage afterwards, and that’s a big, complex, difficult thing. And I’ve experienced the highs and the lows of that through blinks.
48:10 The blinks share prices has dipped and dived and also soared to heights. And it’s a very destabilizing experience for you as an individual, as a CEO. but also most importantly for your team and your shareholders, who are the two constituencies that you end up caring about the most, because they’re the two constituencies who give you the most, right? Who invest in you either financially or through their time and efforts. And you want them to do well as a result because they believed in you at some point in this story and you have this duty, moral duty at least of nothing else to try and ensure that that belief, that mission turns into reality.
48:50 I know a lot about what it’s like to do an IPO, to work for or run a public company, and I can spend hours giving you ideas and examples of things that go well, things that go badly, but the most important you realize that it’s not an exit or a goal or an end point, instead it’s just another step. It’s a step that can make sense, that is not the only step at that stage anymore, at least in today’s market, and that also if you take that step you have signed up to new responsibilities and you need to take those responsibilities seriously. I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end, I’m going to ask you if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Suranga and give that young man a bit of advice, I guess you’d be at Cambridge at the time.
49:30 Yes, I would be. What would you tell him? What advice would you give him? It’s always a difficult question. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to say a slightly sort of cliche thing.
49:43 What I would tell the 20-year-old me is, what’s your health? Which sounds a bit left field, but I think that if I look at what the last 15, 16 years has been, the one thing that I really dropped the ball on for chunks of my life was my health. It’s a really important thing. I think that, again, when you get into ideas and if you’re in a company that’s growing way rapidly and you want to do all these different projects and be involved in all these things which is the kind of thing that the 20-year-old me was going to want to do and was always going to do.
50:21 It’s easy to sort of let certain things drop by the wayside. One thing is kind of balance in your life, having other interests beyond the thing you do as work. Luckily I kept a bit of that. Another thing is family and friends and again luckily I think I was able to keep a bit of that balance and I didn’t do too badly on that front. But the other big thing is health, and you sort of realise that at a certain point in your life that actually none of this is worth it if you’re going to go to an early grave.
50:48 And so I think that’s something which has changed a lot. Now people are very interested in this balance issue, both psychologically and emotionally as well as physically, the whole concept of mindfulness and the whole concept of balance and of understanding that it’s important to all these things. What I found as I’ve adopted more of that myself, and I’m no kind of mass adoptee of these things by any means, is that actually it’s maybe better than the thing that I focus on.
51:15 Because actually if you’re healthier, you can work harder, you can concentrate for longer, you can focus and drive for longer, which is a weird thing. It takes a while of adjustment while you kind of switch, but once you do switch, I think it makes a huge difference. That’s the thing that I would, I think the 20-year-old me totally missed. Good advice. First time I’ve heard that.
51:33 I’m really glad you brought that up. a lot of us tech and scientific type people since you’re so focused on the brain sometimes I know this was the case when I was you know at MIT and engineering I was just like it’s all about the brain and the body is just to carry this brain it’s this exceptional brain that everyone tells you is exceptional yeah and so you’re just you focus so much on that that everything goes goes by the wayside best advice you’ve ever received business or personal interesting question so I think the best advice I ever received on the on the on the on the business side was a was it was a really funny sort of conversation I had with one of the co-founders of autonomy the CTO co-founder of autonomy guy called Richard Gaunt and he just as I was starting blinks I had a chat with him he had kind of like ducked out of the entrepreneurial scene by then he’d been sort of so fabulously successful he wasn’t doing that kind of thing anymore and I said to him like you know do you have any advice and he said have really important piece of advice to you this is a great rule that you can live by for the rest of your life and I said okay tell me tell me and he said you know one day someone’s gonna come to you and they’re gonna listen to what you do when you pitch them you know when you’re selling something to them and they’re gonna completely misunderstand what you do And they’re going to, you know, you’re going to say X and they’re going to say at the end
52:51 Of the meeting, okay, okay, get it, you do Y, right? And he said, and that day you’re going to have to completely, you know, you’re going to blink and then turn around and say to the person, yeah, you got that exactly right, we do Y. And essentially in your brain completely change everything that you do and now, you know, start to pretend that you’re actually doing the second thing. And then, and in your mind, figuring out how you’re going to pivot your company to start doing Y.
53:16 Now, unfortunately, the next day, you’re going to meet somebody else, and you’re going to go to them, and you’re going to say that we do this certain thing, and they’re going to say, oh, okay, I get it, I get it, and again, they’re going to misunderstand, and they’re going to say that you do something else, a third thing, and to that person, you’re going to say, no, no, no, you’ve completely got it wrong, we don’t do that, and you’re going to stick to your guns and say, we do this, and I said, well, hang on, how is that success, and how is that advice, and I said, well, this is the point, the entrepreneurial challenge is knowing when to change and when not to, because the opportunity space that we all end up in, where you start a tech company, typically is some big, large field that’s changing rapidly.
53:52 And as a result, you have lots of choice. You can go in any direction you want to. And frankly, there are pots of gold in many of these different directions. But the weird, weird, hard thing that you’ve got to do is build up an internal radar so that you know when sometimes someone says, I think you’re going here, or you should go here, you say, absolutely no freaking way. I know that I need to keep going in my direction.
54:13 But at other times, weirdly, someone’s gonna say, but how about this way? And because you understand the feel so well, you suddenly realize that this person has spotted something that you’ve missed and now piecing it all together, you absolutely need to shift it that way. And being in that state of mind where you understand the feel so well that you can pivot at a moment’s notice because it makes sense and you know that viscerally, but at the same time, non-pivot at a certain times because you know viscerally that it’s the wrong idea.
54:40 If you can achieve that balance of mind, then you’re there. And that’s what I look for when I look at entrepreneurs. We invest in companies early stage enough that there’s almost no chance that the ultimate business that they end up building, if successful, will be the business that we invested in. So it’s almost stupid to look at that. We still look at the company and the product, but not because we care about the company and product per se, at least in my mind, but because we care about why this person has started building this company or this product.
55:08 And if when you start to understand the story of how they got to where they are right now, you see that they are the kind of person who knows when to focus and blindly focus, whatever the rest of the world is saying, whatever’s crashing around them, keeping their head, you know, to sort of bastardize Rudyard Kipling slightly. But at the same time know when to take the right input and totally swivel. If you spot that sense in someone, then you know you’ve got a real entrepreneur.
55:31 Right, last question to the person out there that is gonna finish watching this and they’re gonna pitch you, they’re gonna email you, they’re gonna meet you. What do you wanna hear in that 60 seconds? what don’t you want to hear? Is there something that’s not even a pet peeve or just something that they should work on before they come and hit you with their idea? Oh, that’s difficult.
55:53 There is no pet peeve, and people, I think, make an impact in very, very different ways. So I don’t think there’s sort of any single one thing. I think, especially at the stage that we are looking at, that we are looking at, the most important thing, the easiest thing to start talking about early and to help me understand who you are and what you’re trying to do is to talk about your product. So some people come and do this sort of three slides of what the market is.
56:24 That’s important, but we can do that later, right? Some people come in and do three slides of who they are. Again, really important, but not the most important thing right now. I think the most, the focal point is to say, this is this thing that I’ve built. And if you think about it, The product has in it implicitly some aspect of what the marketplace is and what the market is.
56:43 It has implicitly inside it who you are because you’ve built yourself into it. It has implicitly your team because seeing what it does helps me understand who you’ve had to hire and coerce into doing this thing with you and a bit of where you came from and all these sorts of things. Starting with that is probably the most useful thing. I give an example, I talked to a company called Noisily the other day who do this really interesting thing where basically it’s a sound environment setting where if you work particularly like on your own in a home or in a busy noisy environment, they produce sounds and soundtracks that help you focus and so on.
57:19 And they gave me all the other answers eventually, but they started off with we produce this product that does this and I can’t possibly give, I can’t do it as well as they can. And that helped me understand immediately kind of where they were going, who they sort of probably were what they’re trying to do and then you can ask the other questions but I think that’s the thing don’t try and lay it up and set it up and over analyze and over you know construct your story instead hit me with you know the the heart of what it is which is what it is you’ve built at least so far and then from that I think the natural conversation flows. Someone once said to me by the work you shall know the workman and I guess you see that a lot of times in the product. You’ve just said it in an infinitely more picky way than I have, exactly.
58:01 Suranga, thank you so much for coming. This was even better than I expected. I mean, this is just the kind of perfect hour that would be great for anyone along any stage of their development as a company should listen to, you know, just to kind of get perspective on the market, to know what you’re thinking about, that kind of thing. How can people get in touch with you to contact you for whatever reason? Is it Twitter?
58:20 Is it email? What’s the best way? Yeah, I mean, all of the above work. My address is saranga at bulletin.com. Twitter is actually generally more effective, as you found.
58:28 So Serenga C is my Twitter handle, and just because I monitor it super regularly. So yeah, so I think that’s probably the easiest way, but I mean, it doesn’t really matter. And you will get an answer from him. I will try really hard. And I guess if you think you’ve reached out to me and you haven’t had an answer, or if this happens going forward, reach out to me again and tell me that I didn’t give you an answer because I owe you one.
58:49 And do you have an assistant for that, or that’s going to be you doing all that? No, it’s going to be me. So it may take time sometimes, but luckily I travel a lot, so I spend a lot of time on planes without an internet connection and that’s a great time to catch up on those. Good, good, very good. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can come watch our extremely good-looking faces on our YouTube channel.
59:06 Also, we’re gonna be posting short videos on our Instagram, so follow us there. We’re putting out Vine videos on Twitter as well and we now have a teaser trailer coming out every Friday for the episode coming out the following week, so this’ll be out with kind of a 40-second teaser trailer. We’re also sending out a survey soon and I wanted to hear how you consume Silicon Real and we wanna make the changes accordingly. Obviously, we had these live episodes. We had the full episode on audio and visual.
59:29 And then we put out small clips. But I just want to find even more ways that people can find out. Because I think this community loves these stories. And they love to hear from the people on the ground like you. And I even think the Valley and the Alley likes seeing what we’re doing over here.
59:43 But sometimes, they don’t know how to consume it. So I’m always looking for that feedback. You know that from Blinks. I mean, the consumption, video consumption habits of a human have to be all over the place and constantly changing these days. So there you go.
59:56 Or at Silicon Real on Twitter, send me a message, hello at siliconreal.com if you want to suggest guests. We make these things happen very quickly. As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people. You’re one of them. I just, I’m so glad you’re back.
1:00:10 I’m glad that you’re kind of here in the UK to make all this happen. And yeah, I think this is just the most exciting time to be in tech right now. And it’s a fantastic weekend moment. So thank you so much. Thank you.
