Full transcript: Tom Valentine on London Real
0:00 This week on Silicon Reel. very fast in markets. Once we get confident we know what we’re doing. Success in business has always seemed to me to be the product of doing lots of well-executed incremental improvements. On Monday, Silicon Real presents Tom Valentine. Secret escapes. We call it hotel porn.
0:51 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. about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed. Locally sourced. Silicon Real. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Brian Rose.
1:43 I also host London Real. It’s the same studio, but we have not just people from tech. We’ve got politicians, rock stars, authors, whistleblowers, filmmakers, and billionaires, which is where I was last week. I was up in Scotland being trained by the $50 billion man. It’s a very long story, it’s a very interesting story.
2:02 I just wrote a big blog post about it and you can check all of that out at londonreal.tv. The episode’s coming this week. But today we’re here to talk tech. My co-host is back in the building, Mr. Colin Pyle.
2:13 You’re running around, you’re at Harrods selling coffee. It’s all kicking off. How have things been? It’s good, it’s good to be back. Excellent, it sounds like we’re here someone that knows a little bit about that.
2:23 So I’m going to get on with our guest as Mr. Tom Valentine, who is a managing director and co-founder at Secret Escapes, a company which curates exclusive members-only offers for four and five-star hotels and holidays. I believe you’ve had more than 14 million pounds of investments from angels and investors in venture capital such as Index and Octopus, both who we’ve had on recently. We had Ben Holmes from Index Ventures here a few weeks ago, very impressive guy.
2:51 We also had the entrepreneur in residence for Octopus, that’s Debu Perkistawa, former Google guy, a super impressive, very intelligent guy. So we know both of those companies, you’re in good hands. Tom, before this you were a strategy and business development manager at eBay, and before that you were at Oxford, but we won’t hold it against you. Welcome to Silicon Real. Thank you, it’s wonderful to be here.
3:13 Good, well it’s great to have you. I read this quote that said, from you, that said, quote, even from day one when we didn’t have any customers, We did have a business plan. You went on to say, that’s what keeps us sane. Britain has a history of some great travel sites like lastminute.com has got to be one of the most famous British startups. And I was wondering what you meant when you said that and how long has this process taken you?
3:36 So we’ve been working on secret escapes for just over four years now. So myself and employee number two had our four year anniversary on November 1st. So that was all very exciting. Wow, which is baby years for startups, right? But what we meant by that was we launched Secret Escapes kind of right in the middle of the Groupon living social time and there are similarities, right?
4:01 So Secret Escapes is not like LastMinute.com, it’s not like Booking.com. We see ourselves as driving trips that wouldn’t otherwise have happened. We use this term discretionary travel and that’s something that wasn’t really possible to do online before email and mobile really interacted, right? So we saw what was going on, and when I talk about having a business model before we had a business, what we had is a very clear sense of what numbers you’d need to see in the business on day one to know that, you know, that it would eventually be the business we were looking to run, which is, you know, we’re well on track to at the moment.
4:41 But fundamentally what that means is day one, you’re like, okay, what are the open rates to the email we’re seeing, what is the chance of somebody buying when they hit the site? And there were very small numbers. I think we sold two things on our first day. And slowly we kind of built that data into the model. So we felt pretty confident.
4:59 We knew where we had to be. And that’s really important on day one of a new startup because there’s a million things to do. And it’s really helpful to have an objective way to prioritize, like this number isn’t near where we need it to be. Can you be specific when you say email and mobile have to combine in order for your business model to work? Because when you say that to me, it doesn’t obviously click in my head right away.
5:20 Oh, absolutely. So what we talk about doing at Secret Escapes a lot is permission marketing, right? So unlike a booking.com or something where you go to the site with, I want to go to Edinburgh on December 20th or something, Secret Escapes persuades you to take a trip. And I think one of the really important constituents of our business is the fact that the majority of people open their secret escapes email that most people get every morning on their commute.
5:51 Right? So email and now push notifications can be a fun way to take a little break, whereas before so many people were opening email on their mobiles, email had to compete with your work or your home life and you were digging something out. So being able to use what we call often experiential commerce. So not just I need to buy this and get done quickly, but I want to really enjoy thinking about buying this. We think the time for secret escapes was these last couple of years when email and push first started being in people’s kind of pockets on their commute.
6:28 Okay. And what’s the percentage between, say, push to an app versus email? So right now it’s very small. We only launched our apps about three months ago. So for users who have downloaded the app, it’s pretty even, but we’re kind of drip-feeding the app at the moment.
6:44 Okay. Now you mentioned Groupon. I’m glad you brought it up because there’s similarities between them and you. Obviously, they had a ridiculous, in retrospect, rise in acquisition strategy, and they had a clones that were coming up that they acquired, and then that kind of quieted down. Is that something that you think about?
7:01 Does that affect your business model? Do you ever try to get away from the Groupon way of doing things? Well, we definitely think about it because people like you talk about it. Investors ask the question. The skeleton of the business, so sign up and then receive communications about great deals is similar.
7:19 Daily. Daily. Yeah. Okay. Right.
7:24 But we think we’re very different, and again, it comes back to that business model. People don’t tend to unsubscribe as much to communications from Secret Escapes as it appears from the metrics we hear about Groupon, and why is that? We think it’s because the Secret Escapes customer, we’re curating a customer as well as a list of hotels. There’s no will being pulled over anybody’s eyes. very, very clearly a website that will send you luxury travel deals every day, and there’s a group of people, quite a large group of people it seems, who enjoy that, right?
8:04 So we do what we say we’re going to do, but there’s a group of people out there that would identify as being interested in luxury travel deals. Like, you know, I think Groupon’s an amazing business, but I think the problem they had is what is a Groupon customer, right? They sell all sorts of things, so you don’t quite know what to expect, and then I think possibly you don’t let them keep the permission to communicate with you. Do you guys have a minimum amount to sell before the deal is on?
8:31 Because that’s one of Groupon’s big things too, right? Oh, right. No, no, we don’t do that at all. So if one person buys it, yeah. Talk to me about, you said that you don’t compete with, say, the bookings.com, but we actually, funny enough, just had a guy from Hotel Tonight here a week or two ago, and they do some curation as well, and he was saying there can be some tension sometimes between hotels and bookings.com and who’s in charge and that kind of thing.
8:52 But you’re choosing not to be involved in that business model. You’re choosing to kind of do a separate idea, right? Yeah. And the guy from Hotel Tonight is right. There is a huge tension between a hotel and what we call the OTAs, the big guys, so booking.com and Expedia.
9:08 Okay. I didn’t know this. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, Hotel Tonight and us, we get quite a lot of play from this because it’s It’s very rare that a booking.com and Expedia will turn up at a conference and speak because there’s a real forced loyalty there.
9:21 There’s a lot of anger. And what that comes from, fundamentally, is forced loyalty. It’s needing to work with booking.com, but maybe not feeling it’s necessarily that it doesn’t feel fair to you. Like if somebody types in your hotel’s name, booking.com comes up the top and that aggravates hotels. Right.
9:43 Secret escapes, we think we sit right at the other end of the spectrum. There’s that retail travel, you know exactly where and when you want to go. We persuade people to take trips that they weren’t planning to take. When we talk to a hotel, because we think of ourselves as very much a marketplace, we’ve got the B2C and the B2B side of the business. When we talk to a hotel, our killer stat is that nine out of 10 people that book with us weren’t planning the trip before they saw the email.
10:09 Unlike Booking.com or any of the other OTAs, where hotels thinking like, man, would that deal have come to me directly if they hadn’t existed? We can make a really strong case and then they see it in the numbers that those bookings are incremental, they’re right on the top, right? So occupancy of hotels in the world right now is about 70% and that’s with Booking.com and Expedia all helping out, right? We see our market as the other 30%, those rooms that go unsold because the hotel rooms are really perishable good.
10:40 Like if they don’t sell it tonight, they can’t make any money from it. And also in a luxury hotel, they’ve probably paid to clean the room every day. So it’s really important to help hotels clear that extra stock. Were you always a marketplace when you started this four years ago where you’re thinking marketplace? Because now, obviously, it’s a very trendy thing to talk about, you know, you’ve got the Ubers and the Airbnbs of the world and everyone’s talking about efficiency.
11:02 But four years ago, people weren’t really talking about that as much. Well, I’m a marketplace nerd, right? I started my career at eBay, I was at C-Wave afterwards. It’s certainly the way we always thought about it. And so you’re quite right, like marketplace is a very fashionable fundraising term.
11:18 And I think we have that network advantage. Like we grow more useful to both of our sets of customers as we grow. But when we were thinking about it in the beginning, it was more of a how do you break the chicken and egg thing, right? So we talked to hotels early on in the business and we heard that they would be happy if we sold you know 25 room nights for them in a deal and so what that meant is we had to work out how many users we had what the chances of them selling were and have enough deals so that we could delight all of the hotels because you know I’m not sure we could have but imagine we’ve gone live with 100 hotels they’d have sold like you know one thing in the week and we’d have looked bad in the market and and we wouldn’t have been able to scale that side of the business. So in our early days, being a marketplace was all about managing the balance between supply and demand.
12:09 Do you have to, do you kind of take the rooms on consignment? I just don’t even, on the back end of the business model, do you have inventory of rooms or is it clearly, you know, just if the customer wants it, they do it and you don’t hold any risk? Yeah, so we don’t carry that kind of stock risk because those rooms aren’t sold already, Right, so the hotel isn’t risking very much what you know what practically happens is a hotel gives us Maybe 10 rooms a night for the next six months So that’s maybe 20% of their allocation the amount of rooms they have And they block it out on their other channels for just a week and at the end of that week We say what we’ve sold okay, so yeah, there’s no stock risk there interesting talk to me about mobile It’s been a you know obviously a contentious issue mushy monsters brings to mind And we had Davinia Noliz in here about nine months ago.
12:59 And she was the first to admit that they missed mobile strategy. They had Michael on stage at the Disrupt conference. And they laid into him pretty hard about why didn’t mobile work, and you had this. And he was just trying to explain that it’s still tough to crack. And just because you have a good game on a machine top doesn’t mean you could transfer to mobile.
13:20 Is that something you were always thinking about? Is it tough to crack in that app store full of millions where you’re coming from, a web presence. I know you guys do a lot of television ads as well. How has that whole experience been, and has it been tough, and have you been late? So I don’t think so.
13:34 We didn’t have apps till, as I say, about three months ago or so. But we were a mobile business right from the start. And I think the distinction is a bit broader in e-commerce. So right from day one, over half our traffic was on mobile devices. A very significant portion of our sales right now are on mobile devices, and obviously somewhere on desktop.
13:59 But it wasn’t as clear for us that the future was app. Like, you know, we only launched four years ago. It was evident that we had to have a mobile presence. But I think, you know, if you compare us to MindCandy, I think mobile means app. We’re not 100% sure that that’s true.
14:15 Like, you can experience many of the great things about secret escapes just via the mobile site. And the ecosystem isn’t quite there yet. Like linking from an email into an app can be a slightly weird experience sometime. So I think it’ll go that way and the early metrics we see from the app definitely look good. But no, I think we’ve been appropriately cautious with the app strategy.
14:45 And your people click from the email into the mobile experience, click the email onto the site. So you- And critically from the email on their phone into the mobile site on their phone. Email is funny, I remember like a year ago, someone was like, you got to build the London Real email list. And I was like, come on, email’s over, email’s dead, all the kids are on Twitter. And it’s just fascinating to see that it’s still a large part of many business models online, including yours.
15:08 I mean, you must have been hearing this for the last couple of years. And did you ever think that the email wasn’t the way forward? Yeah, and kind of we’re not religious about it. We don’t think we have to be an email business, because there are other ways to do permission marketing. We’re quite excited about how we can communicate with our fans on Facebook, for instance. We’re very excited about push notification. But email is just a huge part of people’s lives, for better or worse sometimes. But you do get pleasant experience from email.
15:43 And I personally think that the kind of rumors of email’s death are somewhat exaggerated. I don’t know what you think, but I’ve been playing around with Google inbox. This is the new one, right? Yeah. I haven’t played with it yet.
15:57 I’ve played with it, yeah. Yeah, I’ve heard about it. And it’s kind of quite interesting. Like it’s- It’s a way of prioritizing and grouping things. Yeah, prioritizing and grouping things and it treats your email like an in-tray.
16:08 A friend of mine on Facebook described it to me and I think it’s kind of right. But on the other hand- By like important things on top of an in-tray. But that to an extent was terrifying to me. Like as a businessman rather than a man uses email marketing. I’d run my life by how email comes in at the top of the inbox. If that suddenly starts changing, that’s not what I expect email to do. I certainly think maybe one day the tasks we do with email will be done with something else, but I think it’s one of those things where it’s unlikely to be email evolves into a different thing.
16:43 I think a different channel might replace it over time. You see it’s funny because it’s almost like trust because I don’t trust them to do it properly So if they’re prioritizing my emails for me automatically, it’s like well I see how bad you do some other things and it’s just they’re not there yet in terms of being able to yeah Google just any way they do their current inbox. Yeah, it’s just you know They they make things that are important and I’m like, why would you do that?
17:10 It’s a strange thing because it’s almost like an anachronism You know, it really is a very old way if we had to start now and start it over and do it It would probably be done in a very different way, but what kind of we have it we own it It has legacy, you know I got my first email address in 1989 when I went to MIT and it was like dot edu and I was like I’m never gonna use this now. It’s part of our everyday life It’s can imagine but with but with you if you can provide something that people kind of look forward to and you’re kind of selling People these dreams and new ideas. They hadn’t thought of doing I guess it’s something people look forward to opening every day.
17:43 Yeah. Yeah. And again, we definitely see that the majority of the early opens are right in that commute dash getting into work, but getting into the zone. That’s interesting. Because I remember as a customer of Secret Escapes, I remember getting those emails and being like, you know what I mean?
18:00 You’re just like, oh, that’d be nice. Oh, that’d be really nice too. Do you know what I mean? Do you see high open rates, but not necessarily converting into sales? So yeah, I think we do.
18:13 I think the open rates are very high for the industry, especially given the fact we email seven times a week. But so I’ll go back to again, we sell discretionary travel, and how many opportunities do people have to take a trip they weren’t planning in a year? Most people, maybe that’s a couple. And so the bargain we’re striking with our members is we give you a little bit of value every day a little bit of joy looking at we call it hotel porn looking at those infinity pools and you know stay with us enjoy that experience stay engaged and you know at some point in your life you know you’re going to be ready and that week and you really see this people open every email that week and they look at like 50 different sales and they favorite ten of them and so they’re ready for a trip and you know I think I think we need both sides of that business what What was the crucial turning point where you said, okay, we have a business here?
19:09 Was there at one point like a year in, 18 months, where it probably wasn’t around a finance base, but a certain critical mass of customers or something where you said, this is something that we’re going to own and this is really going to blow up? Yeah. I think for me, and it sounds small, but I remember very, very clearly, our first kind of 100 sale day. Hotel rooms aren’t cheap. that’s a reasonable amount of turnover going through the site and then you’re like this is a real real thing and then the the other one that happened when was that roughly so you know I think that was maybe it was quite a way into the business it was maybe like like somewhere between three and six months okay right so we’ve been we’ve been working at it for a while because it’s you know it’s often the way it startups where you’re you’re putting incredible effort into a business that in its early months you know isn’t is not driving that much trade at the top line and you know you know what you’re doing is building the method and building the skeleton and waiting to get ready but yeah you know when you actually sell like a proper amount of things in a day that’s very very exciting yeah it’s a big day what’s next I know you’re in Europe and I and I’m curious where else you want to be in Europe and if America’s on the radar or not a lot of people in that seat including name Ian Kimmel men was like fuck America we don’t need them and we don’t need to deal with their
20:32 Laws and all their tough things with the states. Where do you come out on that spectrum? So we’ve got kind of like maybe three phases of secret escape. So we’ve got our UK business. It’s big. We’re very definitely the market leader here. It’s a profitable business. We’ve got our European businesses, which launched kind of either last year or early this year, which are just right on that track. We’re kind of very much the same story. And America is fascinating to us for two reasons, right? Like it’s obviously a huge market but also it’s a huge travel destination. So right now we are in America, kind of we’ve had, I’d have to check but you know kind of hundreds of thousands of signups in the states and you know we’ve got 13 people out there getting those deals but you know we’re a bunch of nerds, right? Like we don’t feel we have to do America, but from everything we see it looks like a really exciting market so you know we’re gonna do what we always do and you know build the business model before we build the business and we’ve done that and just keep going through those gates like is this a thing for us like I think practically speaking America’s such a big market we’ll we’ll always have a presence there you know watch this space maybe I could come back next year and tell you how launch went. You know we’re talking about Peter Thiel earlier in this class at Stanford called you know how to start a startup and you just said we’re a
21:54 Bunch of nerds, and I think about company culture. I mean, is that your culture? What is your culture like, and are you kind of conservative that way, like let’s get the business model and let’s do this. Let’s not raise 50 million pounds and hire 150 people in America. Let’s do it this way. What is your culture?
22:10 I think our culture is one of executing really, really aggressively, and I think those nerdy numbers are what helps us do it. I think we go very, very fast in markets. Once Once we get confident, we know what we’re doing. Because I was a psychologist at university, and I use this term of cognitive dissonance. We are trying to build a loved brand, but we know that the way you do that is through analytical marketing.
22:39 That’s what drives people to join Secret Escapes. There’s seven million members in the UK right now, and we’re very open. We do marketing to tell people about this great new thing that can send them on holiday. That needs to be analytical because that’s the petrol that goes into the engine and we want to make sure we’re doing the right thing there. I think we’re definitely analytical.
23:01 One of our culture questions in interviews is what’s your favorite Excel function? We love that side of the business, but equally we’re a very commercial business. About half the people that work for Secret Escapes are ineffectively sales, business development. Did that question come up on your first date? What if it did?
23:23 My wife’s a lawyer, so I think that the technology they have is just astonishing, but maybe it’s not so much Excel. And so what is your favorite Excel function? My favorite Excel function is a VLOOKUP, but I’m being outpaced by people in the office. There’s all sorts of crazy stuff going on there. Macros.
23:44 Yeah, it goes crazy. Talk to me about television, because it’s not something that everyone’s experimented. We had Busu in here, they had done a television experiment because they had won a proceiving contest and they had interesting feedback. One time they did a completely independent TV commercial and they were already waiting for their analytics and they got nothing. And the second time they did an online and offline kind of combined campaign and they had success.
24:07 You guys have some pretty famous TV ads. They’re really good TV ads, by the way. Very British, very British, really well done and very subtle and I don’t know, it was really good. Is that something that was difficult to do? Was it a tough decision to make?
24:20 It must have cost a lot of money. And how did you come upon that and how did it work out? So actually it comes back to this kind of analytical aggression. So the reason we went on TV was we were only in the UK at that time and we were pretty confident. We couldn’t work out how to push more spend, so more growth through our digital channels of Google and Facebook.
24:41 And we looked around at the market and it really looked as if TV could be interesting, right? There’s all sorts of scare stories about TV, but there’s also lots of brands, especially in the UK, that have grown via TV. So what we said is, what would you need to believe to think doing TV was a good idea? And you can spend a lot of money on TV, and it can evidently drive a lot of response. And the terrifying thing about it is when you test Google for the first time, you can test it with 10 pounds.
25:14 You need to spend a lot more money than that to get your first result. But again, we knew what number we were going to track with the TV, because Secret Escapes, you go and sign on and give your email address in the first session. So we had a view that we could say, okay, what happened in the two minutes after this TV spot or something like that? And what numbers we’d expect to see. And we thought, okay, this sounds just about feasible.
25:38 Now, coming back to the brand side, And the difference between a good TV ad and a bad TV ad can often only be told in retrospect. So we knew we were taking a risk there, but we take a lot of risks with early tests. And as the business grows, if you don’t take some of those big risks, you can find yourself kind of losing momentum. To an entrepreneur out there thinking about TV, how much is that? How much do you need to spend to really get a test?
26:10 So we were told, and I think it’s probably about right, that unless you spend a couple of hundred thousand pounds on just the media, so buying the space on TV, you won’t really understand how your TV advert is going to work at scale. And then, so I think that’s probably about right. Then there’s a question of how much you have to spend on making the advert, like creating the thing that goes on TV. For us as a luxury brand, we had a view that you didn’t want to be that new site with the nasty ad.
26:46 We didn’t spend quite as much on the ad as on the media for the test phase, but it wasn’t far off. Yeah. It looks like a well-produced ad. You had a semi-famous woman doing it. I don’t know her, but yeah.
26:57 Yeah. She was on the whole be-sitting ad. Okay. So she’s famous for Britain. And there was definitely money in that ad.
27:02 It was done well. So we’re talking like half a million pounds. Oh God, no, no. But hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
27:08 Okay. Okay. That’s interesting. And so right away it made sense for you and you kept going with those ads? Yeah.
27:13 Because we knew what numbers we were looking at and we’ve got a general rule in the office that when something goes live and you’ve done your best to get it live that first time, it’s probably going to get twice as good as you slowly optimize it, but equally it’s not going to get 10 times as good, right? And so it was right in that window when we first launched and we’ve got better at it of the years. Excellent. It’s interesting. One of our sponsors on London Real is Squarespace and they do website creation and they’re kind of even going after GoDaddy and the hosting and I speak with one of the marketer guys.
27:44 They did their first Super Bowl ad last year and I was like, Super Bowl ad? And he said the same thing. He’s like, we got to as far as we could scale online with the typical alternatives and he’s like, if you want to go after the big audience, that’s where it is. It’s on TV. You just have to do it intelligently.
27:58 How many more years do you think that that’s going to be true? I had Max Kaiser on here, you know, from Russia Today who screams on his show all day and he’s like, it’s going to be around for 20 years. He’s like, like it or not, it still has a huge, huge audience. I don’t know if I agree with him. I’m curious what Tom thinks.
28:14 Yeah. So I reckon for at least that long, it will be very, very likely that a business like ours will want to have a pretty even split between TV and digital. And I think also digital holds itself back, right? Google says there are a group of people that just will never click an ad. I think that number is lower than people think it is, but if you want to launch a consumer brand, so we want to be known in the countries we’re in, we want to be talked about at the dinner table as a thing you can do to take a really exciting break, and I think you don’t necessarily want to limit yourself.
28:50 Also, if you look at digital, we all know the first pound you spend is the most efficient and then you slowly go up that curve. You don’t need to believe much to think there’s an amount you can spend on TV that’s more efficient than the latest spend on digital. And you think it’ll be around for 20 years? Yeah, absolutely. So the numbers I’ve seen, which I grant you have been shown to me by my media agency, like TV viewing, TV commercial viewing is up in terms of minutes in the last couple of years.
29:17 Fascinating. Really? That’s right. Have you tried like YouTube videos? Yeah, we have a little bit.
29:24 The media is super expensive because actually, not as best I understand it, not that many people watch those ads. We think of ourselves very much as doing brand response advertising. We’re doing adverts to ask people to sign up. Occasionally you get blown out of the water by the big John Lewis style ads, which are very much just about telling a story out there. They tend to think of what you see on YouTube.
29:52 It tends to be either big brand stories or funny stories, and that didn’t seem quite the fit for us. But we’re not against it. We’ll keep trying it. That’s interesting. What’s your next hurdle for the next 12 months or 18 months?
30:03 It sounds like it’s organic growth, but I mean, is it about another fundraise and then to dive into this country, that country, is Asia on your horizon, or what keeps you up at night? So what keeps me up at night right now? So like- All the coffee. All the coffee, I guess. So this is a good time to talk about it because this end of the year period is quite a quiet period in travel.
30:26 So it’s where we do our big thinking. And so next year, next year is going to be about understanding America more. Asia is super exciting for us, both as a place where we could get more hotels, but also where we could build a consumer business. So we’re going to be looking at that. But actually, a lot of our focus is on how you take the processes within the business from processes that worked when there were like, you know, 30 of us all in the same room.
30:57 There’s now over 200 people that work at Secret Escapes. And you know, how do you keep the business one of a business of execution that does what it says it’s going to do and hits its commitments, while also dealing with the fact that people don’t sit in the same room and don’t necessarily know everything everyone knows. So effectively, how do you become a big organization and keep as much of what made us an excellent small organization? And how do you do that?
31:26 I will tell you when I work it out, but I think fundamentally you get the teams to feel primarily like they’re members of their team. So keep those 30 person teams running and just as the general managers at the top of the business, kind of make sure that those sub teams are kind of working towards the right goals. It’s big questions. We had John Collison from Stripe as one of our early guests and they run a very successful company on San Francisco for payments and they have this weird system where everyone gets every email in the thing and they have almost this whole logistical systems of how to separate because they all get the in goings and out goings and everything.
32:06 Isn’t it also the every meeting they have that they get notes for that? Yeah, and it sounds like it works for them, but it also sounds like a little crazy as well And you know our business is you know, there’s an equation underneath it Like how many people visit the site? What deals do they see and then what’s their chance of buying those deals, right? So that’s very is a kind of somewhat linear flow, right? Right, so as much as possible, we like to have teams know which metric they are responsible for and kind of work on that and communicate with the other teams.
32:43 And so, you know, we have this document that’s called the plan, it’s kind of in caps, and like there are, there are names next to the graphs, they used to be names of people, now they’re names of teams, but fundamentally, it’s that kind of equation of how we run our business hasn’t changed, and it’s just a question of you know, we’ve now lucky enough to have a bit more resource to throw at improving that business. What’s been your personal biggest struggle as a change from the two-person guy that I quoted four years ago to where you are now, what’s been the trickiest change for you to make? Well, so when I joined the business, I think I was a pretty competent executor, right?
33:20 But these days, I know I’m making a mistake if I’m actually the one doing a project, right? I’m doing my best and asking for a lot of advice, but trying to work out how to be as good a general manager as an executor. It’s hard, isn’t it? It’s very hard, and people explain it to you in all sorts of ways, but the one that I’ve heard the best is if you have a really good day and manage to leverage yourself, so your whole team is doing five or ten percent better. That’s just so much more than you can achieve just by working twice as hard that one day. But, you know, the feedback loop is a lot longer.
34:05 Right. Right. And for people who start things, you know, with just a few people, it’s almost counterintuitive. In how to start a startup, I think, I forget who was talking about it, but he was saying that as a general manager, think of it as like an editor-writer relationship, right? Even if the editor is doing all the writing, then it’s just not working.
34:25 No, that’s a really good analogy. I was just curious if I can ask you a couple questions. I usually ask everyone on the show. If you could think back and think of the 20-year-old Tom Valentine and give that young man a bit of advice, I think you were at eBay in San Francisco when you were 23, but if you could give him a phone call and give him a bit of advice, what would you tell him? I guess that answer probably changes every couple of months.
34:50 But I think right now, I’d tell him, if you eat 1,800 calories a day, you definitely lose weight. Kind of the whole quantification of health stuff, I’m finding fascinating at the moment. And yeah, I spent far too much time eating millions of chicken breasts. Just eat less food. Eat less food, yeah.
35:07 What’s your best gadget for those out there? So I’ve quite enjoyed my fitness panel of late. You know, it’s a very, very simple app. It’s just a tracker. What’s the best advice you’ve received over the years, business or personal?
35:19 If you can think of it, because you worked with a lot of different companies. So I’ve heard this phrased a lot of ways, but I think Ben Horowitz put it best most recently, which is- Was he quoting a gangster rapper? I think in this instance not, but who knows, which is don’t rely on silver bullets, just tons of lead bullets, right? So success in business has always seemed to me to be the product of doing lots of well-executed incremental improvements. Every now and then the business gets 30% better because of a change we do, but you can’t bank on those.
35:54 Whereas you can say like if we stay a smart and kind of focused team, we can definitely punch out 10 tests this week and make the business just that little bit better. Good advice. Last bit of that question to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us around the world who wants to start a successful company such as Secret Escapes. What advice do you give them? Is there some path that they should follow?
36:17 I know you were pretty young working with some startups on the internet. What should they do? So I was actually having a conversation with a lady who’s just about to leave Oxford with a computer science degree, right? So she’s super, super valuable. And I was talking to her this morning.
36:34 And the advice I gave her is to kind of understand what route you want to take into tech, right? Because especially in a situation like that, people tend to look at their skills right now and what job they could get. But actually, sometimes what you want to do is understand which job might be a little bit harder to get, but gets you to that job that you really want to have in five years. So I’d say chart your course a little bit. Work out what job you want to have.
37:09 And it might be that you take a job in the early years to acquire a skill, right, rather than necessarily to advance your career. Because when you started, what I found to be really powerful is the number of jobs you can do and you don’t have to hire somebody to do, you know, so obviously, you know, coding is one of them, but on the other hand, you know, can you, can you do the marketing? Can you do the finance? And just kind of building that little portfolio of skills can sometimes be very useful.
37:38 And do you think that’s super useful for someone with a computer science degree to to learn something else? Well, you know, in certain people’s case, yeah, right? Like kind of, you know, if what you want to be is the general manager of a tech business and you already have the kind of pure engineering skills, kind of understanding early whether the things you’re gonna do as a general manager make you happy and make you sleep well at night is really, really important.
38:04 What companies in London excite you? The scene here has changed so much in two, three, four years. I’m sure you agree. What are things that you’re kind of looking forward to seeing? So I’ve got to say, what’s really been fascinating this year is seeing some big winners emerge, and maybe outside of the kind of hyped spaces, right?
38:27 So you look at Zoopla, you look at Just Eat. These are businesses that made it easier for people to do the tasks that were really important to them in life, and have grown really exciting brands. So it’s been great to see them emerge, but in both cases, IPO. Right, and not just be a fintech or something that everyone’s been talking about. Functional businesses.
38:51 How do people get to Secret Escape? What’s the best way? I guess when you show up on the website, you put your email in. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you just go to www.secretescapes.com, and you can sign up right there.
39:02 And are you hiring? It’s always the test whether people give out their information for hiring. Yeah, yeah, we’re always hiring. We have always been hiring. I suspect we always will be so there’s a job I think right on there or Tom at secret escapes calm. They can just send a CV right over and where are you based in the US?
39:20 So we’ve got a couple of offices actually we are We’re in New York. We’re in Oakland and we’re in Miami Okay Excellent. Excellent. You’re the one that first told me about this company. Yeah, I was looking I’ve been a I’ve been one of those guys You know, I’ve been the hotel porter or travel porn is but I haven’t I haven’t purchased yet But I’ve been you know, that’s the thing doing a startup myself I don’t I don’t you know that the the discretionary travel isn’t it’s unavailable at the moment. Well one day I hope hopefully hopefully. Yeah, right. That’s fantastic. Um Tom. Thanks so much for telling your story It’s just I think it’s really exciting to see I don’t know really British homegrown except a success showing people like how it’s done you know and and I like the fact that it’s simple and I I like the fact that it’s kind of making a success out of something when, you know, I’m sure Groupon’s going to be back, but you’ve seen it kind of go a little bit too far in this one way.
40:13 And now you guys are doing something very specific with a very, you know, sincere idea in mind. So I wish you all the best, as we say on Silicon Reel, it’s about the people. If you want to check out any of our episodes at siliconreel.com, we just dropped Uber, and a bunch of more good episodes coming soon. Yeah, and reach out, you know, guest ideas, and you know, we’re always looking for interns and people to help us out. So if you want to get involved with the show, tweet at us.
40:37 And we’re syndicating some of our stuff on some startup magazine is helping us out. So lots of people, we have some amazing content. So we’re trying to get it out to as many people as possible. And if you’re interested in sharing some of our videos and working with us in some way, we’re open guys and interesting in getting it into as many hands as possible. Yeah, definitely.
40:58 She was an email at hello at solookonreal.com. And yeah, we got all sorts of great content and great heart-to-heart stuff, too, from the guys that are making it happen so Tom all the bust and thanks so much for coming on thank you for having me all right guys take care we’re gonna bet our whole career on mobile this is a future this is what we think is the right product nobody was saying that they had to have this but we felt that it hit a lot of what the market needed there was a sort of scary and soul searching a few months but then we started getting traction and setting up more hotels and and just feeling feeling that momentum and that growth and we just said we’re gonna be we’re gonna be the best we’re gonna be five out of five and we’re gonna work really hard to get there.
