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Navigating the Startup Landscape, Emerging Tech, Global Markets & VC Insights | Ian Foley | WT3 003
21 Plays1 year ago
Millions of People Are Not Living Their True Potential!” Join us for the third episode of What The 3, the no-bs podcast for emerging tech startups.
In this episode, we sit down with Ian Foley, a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who has navigated the startup landscape from zero to IPO. Ian shares his journey from the early days of mobile video to his current role as the founder of Infrastructure Ventures, a firm focused on bridging the gap for entrepreneurs in the Global South.
He dives deep into the lessons he’s learned from pivoting based on customer feedback, identifying untapped opportunities in emerging markets, and predicting the next big waves in technology. Ian also offers invaluable insights into the venture capital ecosystem, revealing what VCs are really looking for and how startups can position themselves for success.
Throughout the episode, Ian emphasizes the importance of mindset, perseverance, and finding the right co-founder. He shares his top five ‘Startup Desert Island’ essentials and the one piece of advice he’d give to aspiring entrepreneurs. This episode is packed with unfiltered wisdom and practical insights that will resonate with anyone building a startup in the emerging tech space, from blockchain to AI and beyond.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to episode three of the What The
Insights on Building a Business
00:00:05
Speaker
Three podcast. This is the podcast where myself, Liam, and Thomas bring on guests who have infinitely more experience than us to tell us about bringing a business from zero to one.
Ian Foley's Career Journey
00:00:17
Speaker
Today, we have Ian Foley, who has an absolutely amazing career history, having started his career in consulting and finance, working in the San Francisco Consulting Group, Telco Italia Ventures, and MCC Global.
00:00:30
Speaker
later working at Stanford Research Institute, where he helped build Siri, what is in Apple's now voice technology solution.
Entrepreneurial Ventures and Acquisitions
00:00:39
Speaker
After six years, he came to the conclusion that after focusing on helping others, he wanted to now focus on building companies himself, where he started his entrepreneurial journey as VP of business development at Rhythm, a mobile video brand advertising company that was later acquired by BlinkX.
00:00:55
Speaker
He then went on to become VP of Sales at Ume, a provider of digital video brand advertising, which he took from 30 million to 170 million in revenue and IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013.
Innovations and Awards
00:01:09
Speaker
then going on to founding AcuteIQ and running that as the CEO, a customer acquisition platform that used machine learning to predict purchase intent. They received an award from SAP for the most innovative enterprise software. AcuteIQ was also then acquired by Trajectory Solutions in December 2017.
Guidance for Entrepreneurs
00:01:32
Speaker
After his startup experiences, Ian created Playbooks to help other entrepreneurs succeed and move forward towards private equity. As the venture partner of Xenon Ventures, where he worked with a portfolio of 30 companies on improving their valuation by helping them raise capital, undertake M&A and building new business lines.
Transition to Web3 and Beyond
00:01:53
Speaker
Next, Ian went on to become the Chief Business Officer at Arweave, where he helped 250 companies get from Web3 to Enterprise Web2 and improved operations. He then joined Binance as Chief Business Officer at BNB. CZ was interested in applying the same playbooks of helping large ecosystems to support BNB's ecosystem of 4,000 apps.
Supporting Global Entrepreneurs
00:02:17
Speaker
Currently, as if that wasn't enough, Ian is now the General Partner of Infrastructure Ventures, where he was working on finding entrepreneurs in the southern hemisphere and giving them a better opportunity to build and raise capital than they would have if they had done it as an entity in their own home country.
00:02:32
Speaker
Ian is looking for the next generation of entrepreneurs in still untapped markets, believing that if we can crack the problem of providing the right opportunity to the best founders, they will have positive impact on hundreds of thousands of lives. Ian, thank you for being here with us today.
Market Opportunities with Ian Foley
00:02:48
Speaker
Let's talk about how we look at the market landscape and finding opportunities. Well, excited to be here with you guys.
00:02:55
Speaker
I believe one of the first stories we were talking about is how you were talking to the producers of Family Guy. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah. So this is when I was at Rhythm. Rhythm was the first mobile video ad network. So I suppose you could blame me for all those annoying ads you see on a mobile phone. So beforehand, it was still just too expensive to actually put
00:03:25
Speaker
video on mobile phones to give away for free by the ad model. And so there were companies out there who were doing it to get paid to get access to video to watch on your phone. This is before the iPhone back in 2004, 2005. So we were first to market and when the iPhone came out, we were to create our own at that point, our own video ad network.
00:03:54
Speaker
with content. And we also were creating apps. We actually created the first video app on the app store when it launched. And we got to number one, but there weren't that many app stores at the time.
Strategic Business Adaptations
00:04:09
Speaker
It's easy to get to number one. So vSnacktor was called launch. We got some great content.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I responsible to keep on finding new content. So that means going after publishers, content providers, to get content to be able to watch the other content and then see the ads. So it's a kind of chicken and egg. You need the content then to get the ads. And at that point, we were building the whole thing. We were building the apps, we were creating the actual source of the content and sourcing advertising, the whole thing.
00:04:44
Speaker
a lot of work. But we needed to do that. It was a starting point of a new industry.
Customer-Driven Business Strategy
00:04:49
Speaker
So you needed to do the happy lifting. And I remember there's a wife, family guy, who's Reverend, we were
00:04:55
Speaker
trying to sustain our lead in the app store and finding a good start. And thought, well, let's go and find new content. So we went around, I went down to Hollywood, met the guys in the Fox studio, who at the time had a number of assets, including Family Guy. And I said, listen, what we should do is we should put Family Guy on V-snacks. And there was silence in the room.
00:05:25
Speaker
for like, no way. But they said, well, what we are thinking of doing is putting our own app around Family Guy. We don't really want to license our content. And that was the aha moment. And why it's curative finding, it's listening intently to customers, because this is what was key for us as we, in that meeting, we listened to what the Fox team said and actually changed the whole business strategy of the company. So rather than
00:05:51
Speaker
go out and put our own branded experience of eSnacks, we then started powering up all the other tier one, tier two content providers as their apps. It sounds obvious now, but at the time we felt there wasn't enough basically movement in the industry to do that. But the family guy, that really wrecked me to realize there was an opportunity to do this. There was an opportunity to go in and power up third-party apps. And it's really,
00:06:19
Speaker
example of why support is it's realizing that listening to your customer, having them drive your strategy is far more important than you thinking what is right.
Leveraging Feedback for Growth
00:06:30
Speaker
And so that, amongst many other instances, is a key actor, because it is the heart of what I believe in, which is that listening to the voice of the customer, even very early on, talking about from zero to one, this forecast about so very early on, if you can
00:06:48
Speaker
happy or strong idea, have a hypothesis around what you want to build, but test it by talking to customers. Test it like we did, but we did a bit later, too late, in terms of talking to a family guy. Ideally, we would have talked to them earlier and got their opinion earlier, but we didn't. So, advice to those who are building companies is listen to the customers early and often, because they can often be a great guide to help you build your business. Amazing.
00:07:16
Speaker
In that sense, how were you listening to customers at that part of your journey? Well, up until then, we thought we had to go and build the whole stack ourselves. We had to go and find the content, find the advertising, build the actual app, go into the marketing, customer acquisition. So we felt that we had to do the whole thing.
00:07:39
Speaker
But by listening to customers, we realized we should just focus. Focus on what we were really good at, which was finally advertising. They had the content, and their brand could find the audience. So focus on what they were good at. Awesome. So I've got a story here about another tree falling in the forest. Yes. One thing I do, as I suppose a side hustle, is I am a cartoonist for Fortune magazine.
00:08:10
Speaker
Um, and I, I got into that, um, by, uh, by Ashwick originally, I was a, um, a journalist at university, um, in England, because in England actually, um, as a journalist, it was great because you get invited to all these really nice events that got on like the, went to Henley and went to Wimbledon. Cause I, as a journalist, I went invited out. So it was great, great, great way to begin. But the tree falling in the forest is, is about, um,
00:08:36
Speaker
15 years in, as I was still writing on the side, I had moved from writing to university was more as a way just to understand industry. By the time I was in the industry, I was writing, really just to keep up and build a brand, I suppose. But I began to realise it clearly that
00:08:54
Speaker
you know, I was yet another tree falling in the forest, yet another person in technology, in Silicon Valley writing about tech, you know, yawns. I just feel what. I really felt that I am 5'5", I did analysis, you know, those tools you can look at, and they can tell you the heat map of where people look on the page. And I'd find that people would like read the first sentence,
00:09:21
Speaker
scroll down to my article, look at the art, maybe an image or something, and then read the last sentence. I thought, oh, this bloody work. Basically, we were not appreciating it. So I thought, why don't I try a different medium? Let's adapt to the zeitgeist of today, which is really about thinking about sharing
00:09:45
Speaker
and engaging with others. So I thought that let's move into the world of cartoons. And because of my background in advertising, I thought, well, let's create a single panel cartoon, probably a big mistake, but it's a lot harder.
00:09:58
Speaker
to do a cartoon on a single panel and a multiple panel. But I came from that advertising space. Oh, I'll create a 300 by 250 ad unit. That would be my cartoon. I could send it around, but I can send it to all over the internet, although people may not want to see it. I could do so. So I end up building this single
00:10:19
Speaker
cigar panel cartoon concept. Now, basically, it was like the 1000 words I've put together now, now, as I say, pictures with 1000 words, so that the the piece there is, is realizing sort of being a tree falling in the forest, it was a realization that, you know, you need to constantly find a way to keep innovating, be competitive, differentiate yourself. And that was a hard change. But I realized it was a far more effective one. And I got
00:10:48
Speaker
Because of that, I got into fortune and other other occasions, my cartoons, which I was not getting into watching my articles. So it is the upside. Yeah, I had a similar conversation with a mentor, which was you've got to make sure you're in the right boat rowing the right direction. Yeah. And you could be trying your hardest to work in the financial sector.
00:11:16
Speaker
compared to the amount of money you could make or the amount of progress you could make in, say, 2017, 2021 in the blockchain space. It doesn't matter how many years you work there, the water's flowing the other way. That's true. Well, on my bed, we're sinking to use your energy. Actually, I was lost. I was lost in the Pacific. Lost antsy. That was my identity. Just a sea of content.
00:11:42
Speaker
Okay, so third piece, really looking at discovery, last nine science and something that we've talked about recently. Can you take our audience through a little bit about? Yeah, so I'm so I suppose that having done a few startups myself, I've realized how hard it is to the people who got actually access capital. So if you got an idea, and you're fortunate enough
00:12:08
Speaker
I suppose to be born in San Francisco or maybe London or Beijing, but I think some 62% of all capital is employed. Well, you've got a pretty good chance that you actually have a chance to get capital to build. You'll come if you want to go down that path of building a venture-backed startup. So opportunity is great with those vacations. Now, if you go beyond that, let's say across America, it's harder that MIT did this research report
00:12:38
Speaker
Um, and I remember reading it. Um, it's actually, I feel sometimes I read this report, you know, how simple to talk about they read, you know, Satoshi's like white paper discovery moment. Well, I had my discovery moment when I was reading this MIT report and it was called lost Einstein. He was talking about like how even in rural and, and mid-size America cities, there's a, there's millions, literally millions of Americans who have not been able to live on that true potential.
00:13:07
Speaker
It got me thinking. I was like, well, maybe it's not just the northern hemisphere. Maybe the biggest opportunity is the summer southern hemisphere.
00:13:14
Speaker
she's even further removed. I mean, imagine you're like growing up in Sao Paulo, or you're in Nigeria or Indonesia. How hard is it for those people to actually get capital? And it was like, I suppose it was reading that report was a really important one to sort of bring to the forefront of what I wanted to do next. And that was really the basis of what I'm doing now, which is infrastructure ventures.
00:13:38
Speaker
where you come from really, really matters as to whether or not you can get in the room. And that's just a reality. It's not a good or a bad thing. It just is regardless of how you feel about it. So yeah, it is a real problem. Last time I was in Jakarta,
00:13:56
Speaker
I was meeting the Chamber of Commerce for various different things. And one of the problems they were trying to solve was how do we get money into the country to support these young burgeoning entrepreneurs? And we were looking at everything from the association of blockchain to essentially money lending. They call it a different, it's a different translation words there, but basically short term loans and that kind of stuff.
00:14:26
Speaker
how they could start getting innovation into the technology they were building rather than buying it in from outside. It was actually quite an interesting couple of weeks. There's no way they can get funding unless you have someone who is of status sponsor you in, which is basically like getting a GP of a VC to know you, which is not easy.
00:14:52
Speaker
It's fascinating because we always see, like when we talk about lost Heinsteins and Southern Hemisphere, like we see it on the other way around because when building tech, we have a lot of entrepreneurs here in the North that are like, oh, we want to deploy our tech in the South. And then find it hard to find actually funding for that even in the North. But what I always find so interesting is that it's people that are from Europe, right? That want to deploy and maybe they've lived 10, 20 years in Africa.
00:15:20
Speaker
or in this case, Africa, I always find it interesting that we see less African entrepreneurs. And it's solely for this reason. It's like there's no capital. If you don't have capital, why would you build? And if you build, you won't build with a PhD from Europe, you probably build with your local team. I think this
00:15:44
Speaker
Giving giving the southern hemisphere more access to capital i think it's going to be in massive change in narrative i think a perspective of next ten years and. In tech and everything that drives it right.
00:15:58
Speaker
Exactly. And what's interesting is you look at just population growth. I mean, by 2050, I suppose, I'm saying this in the question, obviously, we have India, China, the US. What countries do you think are the next three or four behind them in population size? Indonesia, for certain, one of them. Yeah, Indonesia is one. Nigeria, I believe? Nigeria is another. Yeah. Brazil? Argentina? Yeah. Brazil.
00:16:26
Speaker
And the final one is Pakistan. So I mean, these are, this is like, no, this is incredible. Just the sheer, I mean, and you've got to believe there are incredible.
00:16:37
Speaker
companies are yet to be created. And this is why I think interestingly about blockchain fits in, is that there are some capabilities that blockchain provides, which I suppose democratizes tech to the extent that people in these parts of our can actually build a lot cheaper. I mean, this is the upside of the frameworks that get created, whether it's a wallet,
00:17:01
Speaker
or it's some basic building tools which just give these tools the hands of people and you can do so much more nowadays with these tools. You don't need as many people and you can actually more quicker get product to market and provide the same level of quality as you'd expect in building anywhere. This is what is incredible. It's a huge force of democratizing, democratizing tech, that's what I see.
00:17:27
Speaker
Do you think, and I would love to talk about, because I think these are very important points and I think it's a nice segue into the advices for what you would give to these entrepreneurs. But I wanted to add one question here, which is, do you also believe that tech has more impact in these countries due to the fact that the problems that tech solves, if say blockchain or AI or anything else, is more impactful due to the fact that there's a different culture, different infrastructure for tech?
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it plays out already. This is played out about 5, 10, 15 years ago with the rollout of mobile phones. There is far more value for a farmer in Kenya to have access to...
00:18:14
Speaker
of phones, they can like book price of obvious projects, the marketplace as opposed to like arriving in the marketplace and having to take the price it was given at that time. So even this has been long proven as tech can help
00:18:31
Speaker
leapfrog in these markets, because it's starting from a different stack. In fact, it can start from a completely fresh. So I think there's that piece, which has long been applied, mobile phones, the most recent one. But the other piece, I think, is just the access to finance. That's the one I think is from some of this whole comes about capital. But
00:19:00
Speaker
It's really hard for people to get access to a bank account. But with a wallet, you know, a blockchain wallet, you could very easily move money around and transfer around. And let's say there's going to have to be
00:19:15
Speaker
regulation and there's simpler ways to access the water. But the concepts of the fundable nature of money and how it applies with using blockchain for that is really exciting. And I think this huge opportunity is across the whole global south. I'm seeing another folks here with Stellar who have a number of their companies and their ecosystem are building
00:19:42
Speaker
great technologies in Central and South America around remittances and things like that. And then likewise in Africa and in Asia. I know, for example, some of the companies that we were supporting at B&B, many of them are gaming companies based in Asia. They're creating these casual games
00:20:04
Speaker
which were far more higher takeout rate than they had in the global north. And it was really because they were dealing with the local situation. So you had a chance to develop really innovative casual games.
00:20:19
Speaker
And we see instead, up here, we're waiting for the next Marvel masterpiece. It takes basically years, if not months, to build out the next version. It's a different pace. So I think there's both a technological leap, and also there's a lot of great
00:20:40
Speaker
services that can come out, whether it's, you know, it's finance or gaming or many other areas that live with something or actually tend to lead lead and be the source of innovation.
00:20:52
Speaker
Gaming has always been huge in APAC. Definitely casual gaming and mobile gaming. Once mobile gaming got big, it got big really quick with microtransactions in APAC. As to when you would look at the north and the west, mobile gaming is big, yes. But when it comes to microtransactional casual gaming, it's been completely different from a different level at it. But the reason why it's so big is not because the US
00:21:22
Speaker
picked up casual gaming that was actually easier. Absolutely. Okay, so I think it's probably time to segue quite nicely into what advice, so really looking at startups who are looking at the market landscape and looking to find that opportunity, what are the top sort of 10 tips or pieces of advice that you would give startup founders who
00:21:51
Speaker
are starting their journey. Yeah, I would say the one which is as key as starting off with everything is get moving. Get moving. There's always a tendency to hold off.
00:22:12
Speaker
and always a tendency to wait for another day. One of the greatest maxims, like action this day, it's like never ever stop doing and driving forward.
00:22:26
Speaker
And so I think that's the most important thing is constantly be a source of energy. I always say the people who I work with, they'll need advantage. The only real advantage that startups have is speed. Nothing else. We don't have talent. We don't have talent. We never have enough talent. We never have enough capital. But we do have this speed. And so we can get things done faster. We shouldn't have large committees to make decisions. Don't we have one or two people?
00:22:54
Speaker
And so therefore, as a result, it is maximize that use, really move at such a pace that the incumbents, that basically you can drive forward at a far quicker pace, speed out incumbents, find ways to create new markets, keep on testing your hypothesis. So the constancy is keep moving, moving fast.
00:23:23
Speaker
That's one. Let's think. I said the other one, which I've mentioned in part, was listen to customers. I don't think any company I ever started ever ended up being what I intended it to be. I mean, there's this kind of overall kind of objectives I want to accomplish. And like the whole Lost Einsteins, what do I want to accomplish? I want to help
00:23:47
Speaker
help generation and all generations ahead gain access to capital. But it's staying, it's listening intently to customers and being ready to pivot. But pivot once you listen to customers. I do know that Steer Jobs famously, his point was that
00:24:13
Speaker
You don't need to listen to customers. I drive customer activity. And he is an outstanding example of that, where he actually created concepts, which we would never have thought about. And I remember Henry Ford famously said, if he had been told, if he had listened to customers, how to build a car, they told him to build a faster horse.
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, I was waiting for that one, yes. But these are people who are real, I suppose, brilliant in their foresight. I think for the average plot, a plot like myself, listen to customers pivot
00:24:55
Speaker
Pivot to between, as you'll learn test output, this is pivot, so you actually find out what you actually, what they'll buy from you. And so I think that's an important one. Can I push you on that one a little bit? Can I push you on that one a little bit? Henry Ford or Steve Jobs, but if you're not, listen to customers and pivot.
00:25:15
Speaker
With respect to listen to your customers, I think a lot of our listeners are going to be thinking, yes, but how? What would you say is the best method of listening to customers? Is it calling them up one by one and speaking to your first 1,000 person? Is it hot jog, house flow when you're looking at the website conversions? What should they focus their energy on? Yeah, so I'll give you an example. So I originally, I had this example of an idea I had.
00:25:44
Speaker
And I end up not pursuing it because I listened to customers early. So the problem I saw in the marketplace was there are many aid agencies all over the world, particularly in the global south, who need to receive money from the charity donations that come from, let's say, North.
00:26:10
Speaker
And the problem I saw was that most of them are paying way over the odds on exchange fees. And I thought, let's go and create all these Neobanks. Let's go and create a Neobank for the charity sector. A huge opportunity that billions of dollars spent by charities. So that was like market research. And then I thought to myself, okay, seems to be a strong opportunity. Let's now go and talk to the actual charity themselves. I scheduled about 20.
00:26:40
Speaker
20 interviews I spoke to these people asked like, if I could create a product which would improve your business, would you want to go for it? And these conversations evolved over time. And I began to realize, actually, it was a really bad idea. Because, yes, of course, they would want to improve
00:27:03
Speaker
their costs. I mean, it was something that would make sense. But if you dug into it, actually, they don't care. I mean, it's unfair to say this, but truly, the people who are the executive directors in charities are in the business to gear charity. They're in the business of doing good in parts of it. It's not of interest to them. The back office operations doesn't
00:27:26
Speaker
get their heart to flutter. They don't care to someone. And you see that. You do all these analysis of the different cost structures or challenges, and you're just stunned at how more this headcount comes in. So it's there, but it's not a priority for them.
00:27:43
Speaker
And I also found out that most times the people who are on the boards of these charities, they often have someone from a bank on their board. So I would be like knocking on their door saying, Hey, I would like to be your neo-bank for a year in the global south. I could do a better job than any other bank. Oh, by the way, though, you're board members of bank and then you really don't care. So I realized I could build that business. I could.
00:28:10
Speaker
And I'd probably still be building it today. But it would be a slow, painful journey. And so it was like, listening to customers there was like, deep down saying like, every step of that journey, what would be the various components that would make this successful. So I began to realize it was, yes, there was a need, but the actual onboarding, the customer acquisition would be really, really painful.
00:28:36
Speaker
Can I ask you one more question on this? And not necessarily on this, but on the fact that you said be ready to pivot. Is there such thing as, like, is there a limit to pivoting? Or do you over pivot? How much free capital, how much time you have? I mean, there are, you know, you know, your cell Thomas in the blockchain space,
00:28:59
Speaker
It is a question of survival. Many districts are like that. Can you keep your costs down so you can survive until the opportunity
00:29:14
Speaker
that maybe need market, maybe the regulatory, maybe a customer change of behavior. So if you really believe in an idea, and you believe the idea is it's on the cusp, and you want to put a delicate time to it, well,
00:29:32
Speaker
and that you have the support of it, then that is something you may need to listen to the market and pivot accordingly. But I would say, you know, after probably external pivots, you probably think like, is this a right fit for me? If I misjudge the market, is it not ready? Maybe it's, I'm too early, or the pain point isn't sufficient, or the incumbents are too strong. I mean, so I would say that,
00:30:01
Speaker
I'd say the number of pivots is dependent upon every circumstances.
00:30:05
Speaker
does seem to be a case is if you have a strong idea and you believe it's time is right, it's not about us staying lean and ready to advantage of when the time does generate. And that may require some pivots in that time frame. That makes sense. I fully read definitely when it comes to blockchain, but I think not only for blockchain, I think any emerging tech industry has that piece where you just, if you think it's right, this applies. AI is a very good example at this point to LLMs actually.
00:30:37
Speaker
So what would be your third or fourth point for our listeners? Yeah. So this is around basically software. So you can solve so much now with these new AI tools. And you're seeing companies basically being built with very, very small teams. And it definitely lowers the barrier to entry.
00:31:04
Speaker
And I learned from the wrong end of this myself. So when we were at Yumi, Yumi was a company that we were fortunate enough to take public. Where we started out, it was a technology company, but a lot of the back office was done in Southeast Asia. And it gave us a tremendous advantage because we could,
00:31:29
Speaker
we could basically have very low cost way to get great engineers and we built it and we went public testing. But the problem was, was that we became dependent on that structure. And while we had been building out this large team, our competitors, some of them hadn't gone public yet, had built basically an all data trading platform. And as a result,
00:31:55
Speaker
And over time, it became increasingly clear that we couldn't iterate as fast as they could. And that actually became part of our undoing, ultimately, and we're not getting acquired as a publicly traded company by another company. So it was an example of take advantage of all these tools out there. You may give yourself a short term
00:32:21
Speaker
by using people to do something. But in this world, it doesn't, long-term doesn't make any sense. So I always encourage people to think about new tools. And one of the actual newsletters, and everyone wants to subscribe so they can think about this, is a kind of superhuman.ai. I recommend people look at that one. It's a great daily digest of some of the new productivity tools that are being created.
00:32:48
Speaker
And it's a great way to keep up to date with them. I'm actually subscribed to them. They have really good content. And you'd be surprised how many new tools come out every day.
00:33:04
Speaker
to various degrees of quality. Yeah, it's great fun to try them out. I mean, there is, but you do realize that this is the sort of downside of the just the sheer simplicity of now to create products is just an abundance. And maybe there's a scenario on like our sheer products that get created, which actually goes to back to my early point, which is, you know, you really have to think how to find something.
00:33:33
Speaker
very competitive and value add. And Racer listens to your customers intently to get to that point because it's so easy in the software industry to build tech. The two that I'll take away from that is human scale can be a liability at some point. You've got to use that technology and then super human AI keeping on top of what's coming out now and leveraging that to accelerate the business that you're building.
00:34:02
Speaker
With the perspective of understanding motivations of VCs and looking at the market landscape, if you were going to look at a new market landscape, what would you be doing? What would be the first thing that you'd have to say, okay, this is 100% a good idea or not? So I think from the point of view of VCs is to understand their thesis. Every VC,
00:34:31
Speaker
This is, I think, a lot of entrepreneurs, the first-time founders, don't understand the full ecosystem. So as a quick experience, the VCs themselves have their own bosses. They're called limited partners. Limited partners are, they could be university endowments, they could be institutional, large-scale fund managers. So they invest in venture capitalists. Venture capitalists have to, every maybe four to eight years, depending upon the cycle of their fund,
00:35:01
Speaker
or go out and try and secure additional capital, additional capital from these limited partners to invest. And they're out there pitching themselves, just like you, as an entrepreneur, are pitching to VCs, these VCs, pushing those partners. And when they're pitching, they have to demonstrate what is uniquely different about their fund. Because just like I just mentioned, all these software companies, there's many of them, there are literally nowadays thousands of VC firms, particularly there was a huge
00:35:31
Speaker
bump in VC, new first time fund managers back in late 2018 to 2022 or so. So there's a lot of people pitching these into partners. They all have to come up with their unique thesis. Their thesis is what you as entrepreneurs should understand is that whose thesis matches what I am building.
00:35:54
Speaker
And where is that VC in their fund distribution? So if you talk to EC and they've spent all their capital, which is wasting your time, and there are a number of VCs out there who basically
00:36:13
Speaker
either are chosen to not invest. I think sometimes the valuations are too high or too depressed. And I think they can basically wait out longer to try and get even better at a price. So I think that it's understanding the motivations of that BC, their fund and where they are in their fund cycle. So that's important to understand. And then the other piece is trying to find ways to
00:36:44
Speaker
know and have connections to VCs. The best way to digital VCs is to actually have a deduction. So find someone who knows someone, either one of their portfolio companies or the VC themselves. By the way, try to get a warm deduction into them. So therefore, as you're entering a new market, think about who are the right VCs or the right partners, how are the best way to get in touch with them.
00:37:12
Speaker
And then another thing, actually, as well, is I think it's to understand the motivations within a VC fund once you've pitched. So fortunately, if you've now got your VC interview, you've had your half an hour long discussion. So you're likely to be speaking to an associate analyst, or maybe a principal. It's a decent sized company. Or maybe it's one. It's a small fund. Maybe the founding final, general partner.
00:37:41
Speaker
And at that stage, they may be talking to many, many companies like you, they may be just showing up in some of the landscapes. They'll think a meeting means you're ready to start cashing the check already. And the other thing to think about too is what happens in VC funds. Typically, most VC funds, every month they have a partner meeting and when they'll have someone
00:38:06
Speaker
who will then say, I've got this adjusting opportunity. And this is why I think it's of their own thesis and why it maps to the thesis of the fund. And so they present it to the fund. And then there's often a vote or there is some form of decision making where it ends up. There's some interesting analysis done actually on BC fund thinking where like attempts are like,
00:38:36
Speaker
Should you get a majority or is it a small minority? Sometimes a small minority is more likely to get a confirmed and definitive minority is a better decision from a VC than the majority of the VC final. I explain what you might mean by that. If there is one partner who 100% believes in this deal,
00:38:59
Speaker
as opposed to maybe there's lukewarm interest, but as a majority goes over the line, at least the former is better than the latter. It's conviction is what is a key characteristic of VCs making decisions. They need to have conviction in the fact that your opportunity, your business is going to make enough returns to be able to generate
00:39:26
Speaker
It's a venture return, which is at a minimum like three or four X, the cow that they put into you. So it is a, and it's been proven that conviction-based investing is a strong reformer because you can find individual opportunities, which may otherwise be lost if you just simply make a decision on majority.
00:39:51
Speaker
So this is some of the insights that happen within VC fund. So think about that. It's not just you. It's like what's happening internally with their VC fund and their decision making and understand that it may take time. It's not just because they're to their thumbs. They're actually really deeply thinking about
00:40:11
Speaker
How that your opportunity compared to many others that could be coming now the next because their funds are like Eight years that they have time to make a decision. They don't need to make investments They have to think very carefully about here's this opportunity the right time the right place to invest and does it fit with my This is the portfolio we're looking to create here
00:40:34
Speaker
Amazing. As a VC, what would you be looking for from a company? So maybe coming at that from a different angle? With this new fund in Bishasha Ventures.
00:40:48
Speaker
I am, what we do is we invest, we actually invest, we used to take 5% equity in all the companies that we built. We're not, we are, we go through, they go through a process of identifying these individuals from the global south as a course, it's a 12 week course, the first four weeks all online, and they go through that, and then they pass that, then they come out to Lisbon, and then they have another two months. At that point, we then form a company
00:41:18
Speaker
It's something like a venture studio rather than a traditional fund. We create an investment in these individuals and they are part of our portfolio. We do have the opportunity to make a follow-on investment.
00:41:32
Speaker
But that normally is a blend upon a signal from an external investor making an investment themselves. So our approach is not to be societal. Our approach with this is basically to create a venture studio with thousands
00:41:52
Speaker
of companies. It's more a filtering exercise than picking individual winners and having a small 2030 portfolio size fund. It's a very different model, because what we're looking to do here with the Versace Ventures is kind of a lost Einstein concept.
00:42:11
Speaker
is we need to get to scale, a scale which is probably unseen before because of the sheer opportunity that affords us in front of us. If we have the whole of the global south, we can't be doing it investable 30 companies. If you want to find zero to one, our view is there's an untapped market for finding people early on. And we have some interesting tech that we built that can find basically these entrepreneurs
00:42:41
Speaker
way before anyone else does. And we use this tech to go and like proactively find them, reach out to them and engage them and say, I see you are about to sell the company. I would like to work with you. So it's like we are different than most
00:42:55
Speaker
venture studios, a bunch of funders, that we actually practically go out and search, find these companies. We have less inbound, more us practically finding. That's a slightly different model. And it's, I think also, in this sense, a bit easier for entrepreneurs because they need.
00:43:13
Speaker
less outbound themselves, like you will be inbound, right? But what kind of skills are you looking for when you're doing this outbound? Like when you look at these entrepreneurs, like, how do you match them up with your investment thesis at Infrastructured Adventures? Yeah, so the key set that we're looking for is the
00:43:35
Speaker
build activity. So there are a number of databases out there that we are constantly looking at that give us a sense of what people are building, what tech they're building, and then be able to evaluate their tech independently. So we're able to see their history of activity. So we're trying to use public data sets
00:43:58
Speaker
as a way to help make decisions. And actually, this is very similar to the company called AcuteIQ. I formed about six or seven years ago, the one that we're in, AI and Fentech. In that company, I created a database of 21 million small business company records and then ran
00:44:19
Speaker
government data, open government data against it to find signals of a need for a small business to need a loan. And so we find, for example, that a small business had a liquor license about to expire. And therefore, because of that, is a good reason for a bank to reach out and ask that person if they wanted a loan. So think about the same concept now as I'm applying to
00:44:43
Speaker
people in the local south. There's a very large set of people looking for signals, signals that would suggest that someone is building something, and then there's a signal also that they're building something which could be interesting and relevant, and relevant to an innovation that we think could benefit from access to capital. And so that's what we then use, then reach out to these people
00:45:12
Speaker
invite them to come for the first four weeks, which is, again, online. And then if they pass a series of tests, which is like tests around their idea, we do peer-based learning and tests as well. So this is a way that we make sure we create individuals who are curious, willing to learn, and if they fulfill upon that, then we then have the chance to bring them out here to Portugal
00:45:41
Speaker
We then form a company and then they do the other two months of activities. We do things like how to price your product, how to build a sales and marketing strategy, how to build your product, how to use AI tools to help build your product. We try to think of constant ways to improve the operations. It draws upon the playbook.
00:46:04
Speaker
The playbook I developed, whether it was at a start-up research institute or my own companies, I'm recently working with finance and RWE. This is a playbook of how to help come to go from zero to one.
00:46:16
Speaker
It's absolutely fantastic. And I think that to your last minute, I think it's very important for founders to understand, to know what they don't know. Because in that case, they're easier to supplement with, in this case, from your side. You can add faster value to their companies because they already know what they don't know. I think that's a very important piece with founders, generally.
00:46:46
Speaker
And then the other thing that we've also found is our programming that we've created. It's all self-directed and peer-based learning. And the reason why that's important is that
00:46:59
Speaker
There's a tendency of most founders to think that their idea is the best thing since fly spreader. They don't dare show anyone else in case someone steals or runs away with a brilliant idea. But in fact, that's a massive fallacy because there are lots of ideas. Idea is the cheap. Well, the hardest thing is execution. It's like timing, market timing, execution. And so therefore what we have found is that by creating this program where it's peer-based learning, so the idea is that
00:47:24
Speaker
You're in this program. There's a cohort of other people like you. We provide the core pillars of insight on each topic, let's say, so sales, marketing, pricing. What are the different types of pricing you could use? Then we do a pricing exercise. And then we have a peer-based review exercise. And that's great because then you have other people review your idea, your peers. And then actually, we find the most interesting thing is actually when people
00:47:54
Speaker
review other people's actual company ideas, that's when they learn the most. There's a famous thing like, you know, the best way is to learn is to teach. And so when you find that actually being in a position where you are peer-based reviewing someone else's idea and then the merits of their pricing strategy or their good market strategy helps you think more clearly about your own. And so we find it to be a great program. And this is this program that we use
00:48:23
Speaker
has done so well in other instances. You look at some of the top tools out there for coders. So there's this thing called 42, which is a group which is now pushed through 20,000 or 30,000 people coding. And they have found this peer-based review learning has been far more effective.
00:48:46
Speaker
then there's additional, yeah, I'm in a classroom, here you go, this is the, listen to me, and then I'll test you two months, three months out. Cool. I'm mindful of time. So I'm going to ask for your know yourself pre post IPO, your final rule, or couple of rules and advice to startup founders. Yeah. So this is, um, so it's somewhat like knowing where, what you'd like to do, um,
00:49:16
Speaker
And almost what you don't like to do. So I found it easy to know what I wasn't good at. And I definitely think I'm not good at like, if you think about the startup, the whole post IPO world,
00:49:33
Speaker
I really enjoy helping companies at the pre-startup, the zero to, I suppose, three or four. Zero to one, I focus on most right now, but I really have found that
00:49:47
Speaker
It's important to know yourself because if you know what you like to do, then they will help you be more effective at doing it. So it really goes back to the idea about the pivoting. If you really believe an idea and you think that this is, you just can't stop thinking about it, wake up, think about the idea.
00:50:11
Speaker
then do that, you know, know yourself, do that, don't waste, don't listen and be persuaded to forego following your, you know, I suppose your dream or your, you don't have regrets, you know, don't have regrets. Like, often people ask me like, about their idea. And I say, you know, this is my opinion, but just go for it. You know, it is, it is,
00:50:39
Speaker
there's no reason why you should not go out. If you look at an idea that just bubbling inside you, do it. And if it doesn't work out, do another one or find something else to do, but at least try and find a way to actually go in and build a solid if that's what you want to do. So know yourself and be able to
00:51:03
Speaker
And as I say, action is day. If you want to do something, go and do it now. Don't wait. Don't procrastinate.
00:51:11
Speaker
I've heard the same thing as builder, sustainer and evolver. Know what you are in order to put yourself in the best role. If you're a builder, that's great. But if you hit V1 or post IPO, you might not want to be in that role anymore because different things are being asked from that role that maybe a year ago was very good for you. But a year later, it might not be because of the company circumstances that change. Yeah, I see. Pretty good or bad.
00:51:38
Speaker
Yeah, but post-IPO is a much more process driven, and it's harder to, at that point, pivots have a significant impact. Yeah. Well, now it depends on something.
00:51:57
Speaker
So pushing on to the research topics of the brainstorms, there's one piece we've covered in depth already, but I think it's worth sort of summarizing in terms of bridging the gaps for Lost Einsteins and your current work with Infrastructure Ventures, especially we know we've talked about how you identify these technical founders in the global south. One is the unique market opportunity. And whilst we know the challenge is sort of identifying them,
00:52:27
Speaker
What do you think the main aim here is to sort of drive the innovation and the economic growth and how this is going to sort of maybe even change the game? Yeah, my intention within Visual Adventures is to build really the biggest incubator out in terms of driving this, solving this problem around the global south, this mismatch between talent and capital.
00:52:56
Speaker
And obviously, there's a danger that you build a large number of companies and there's an issue, there's a signal to noise ratio. So the key is, you have to be able to identify
00:53:17
Speaker
early on is why our training processes are so important. Finding the people with the right mindset, the curious mindset that they're having an idea and the right mindset. And so for us, it's finding that the right entrepreneurs and they break through this program of training so they give them the best chance. But the key thing is we're not looking to
00:53:42
Speaker
bring them to Portugal, to remain in Portugal. Our geotabists have sent them, you know, go back and build in your own country, but now have the training, the knowledge, the resources that you can build in your own country. Now, mentioning on your own chart about the challenges you are facing in Indonesia, some people faced in Indonesia. So if you could
00:54:07
Speaker
They'll have a chance to be trained up and then go back. And what we do is we create for these founders who come to our program an EU-based company.
00:54:19
Speaker
So therefore, they have the vehicle that they can then use to raise capital, because so many times that we came across people who, and we also brought them a bank account too, that as well, we get the bank account and a company based out here. And the reason why that's important is that, you know, you hear individuals that say in Pakistan, who can't get
00:54:39
Speaker
an account on Shopify. Why? Well, because they don't have a bank account, they don't have a recognized bank account, or, or they don't have, or they just don't have confidence in the corporate structure of a, you know, Brazil based company, or one in, in, in, in, anywhere, where it's not considered a similar standard of governance. And so therefore,
00:55:06
Speaker
We are trying to find a way, our big, big, big objective is to bring great talent, nurture it, and then serve back to build amazing companies in the global south.
00:55:18
Speaker
It's brilliant. One of the things that I found fascinating and wanted to talk to you about actually was how do you navigate that? Obviously, you did quite a bit of work on the bios of researching you going into this conversation from FinTech to marketing tech to cybersecurity to telco to blockchain. It's quite a story arc, frankly, in terms of specialization.
00:55:43
Speaker
When you, well, specificity in the sector that you're working in, when you're going into a business, and this is really for our viewers or something to really dig into, and even for people that might be interested in infrastructure ventures, is what is the process you go through of identifying a space in emerging technology? What goes through your head?
00:56:12
Speaker
Well, I think it first of all starts on what are the macro trends? And in that, from that perspective, where is the market need, the customer need, and then behind that will then likely follow the capital to support that. So that's the macro view. And then diving into the specifics, it's like understanding
00:56:41
Speaker
What are the dynamics of the market we're going into? Who are the leading companies? What amount of capital is available? And what is the experience of companies deploying capital? And then to start talking to people. So I'll give you the example later on about the Neobank for the charity sector.
00:57:06
Speaker
I was talking to 20 people. I mean, by the time, if I continue that, I should have talked about 50 people. I try and talk to about 20 to 50 people. And the large edge that I find of this approach is that once I started talking to individuals, I start to get their opinion. I then almost co-opt them into helping me out because I then say, I've listened to what you say and I've learned further about this.
00:57:35
Speaker
can you now be my alpha or beta customer? And so because you've brought them on the journey, you're more likely to transition those 20 or 30 people you've spoken to, if they represent little customers into their potential customers. And now you have someone who is, this is part of them. A similar example of this is on the venture side, is that on the maxims I've heard is if you want to,
00:58:05
Speaker
If you want to basically raise money, ask for advice. If you want to get advice, ask for money. They learn from customers and ask them for their advice, and you may actually get customers at the back end of it. And then that's like listening to people and having a hypothesis concept, which is this sort of scientific method, which is like
00:58:34
Speaker
Try and, as much as you can, divorce yourself from the idea. Yes, you're clearly passionate about it. You wouldn't be doing it otherwise. But try to find a way that you'll want to remove from it. Like, this is my idea. And I want to improve upon this idea and hypothesis. Let's test it. And you start talking to me, but I'd say, hey, Thomas, I got a hypothesis. I love on the market. I love to share that with you.
00:59:00
Speaker
and I'm getting your feedback. And so then you begin to frame it as that kind of scientific method. And then ideally, you're less likely to be captured by the momentum that can sometimes come if you just follow what you believe. And it's even more the case in technical first-time founders who often
00:59:26
Speaker
have basically a technical hammer and constantly looking for nails to hammer it in. But actually, as much as you can, try to treat it as an experiment that needs to be validated.
00:59:39
Speaker
I think that's brilliant. When you're looking at these investments, and really, it's kind of all investment, because one's an investment at time, and the other is your capital. When you're looking for signals and trends from both sides of that table, what would indicate to you or
01:00:03
Speaker
through your experience, what has indicated to you a ripe opportunity to say, okay, I am going to work in this industry right now, or something that our viewers or potential students and cohorts of infrastructure ventures can go, well, Ian said, this is the right way to go about looking for that opportunity. This could give me the best chance of getting in touch.
01:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say that one of the strongest signals that I found to be helpful to break into a market is if there's some
01:00:41
Speaker
regulatory change that is coming down the pipeline. And where someone else or some change that requires customers to think differently and pushes up, this is as an issue that may not have thought about beforehand. Because there is such a, he would never quite appreciate how much
01:01:08
Speaker
how hard it is to get people to change. They often say, your product needs to be 10x improvement on the incumbent to have a chance of basically taking a customer, taking an interest in you. Because the switching costs are so high, because think about it from the point of view of the customer game, but it's over the customer shift. There you are, you're talking to like,
01:01:28
Speaker
And the VP, if you're lucky, of this line manager, he has to not, this could cost the business, he has to get a lot of people in his organization to agree that this is a problem and agree the problem as it is right now. And then he has to get budget for it. Bluebird has got budget for it already.
01:01:47
Speaker
other priorities may come up and depending on the market. Maybe there's a round of cuts. So there's so much that could go wrong. But if you identify a change that is required in the marketplace, then this is something that you can align yourself with. And it's much easier to wedge yourself into discussions through that.
01:02:15
Speaker
So there's a question here. You don't have to answer if you don't want to. But again, this is all towards sort of driving our readers towards actually looking at a market before running head first into an opportunity that, as you say, is just really exciting. How do you predict the next big wave in technology? Is it that famous glass ball you've been telling us about off screen or?
01:02:48
Speaker
I suppose the one piece I'll share with you, which is one reason why I'm interested in the blockchain space. And I suppose it's a reflection of the fact that I saw it off in the telecoms space where it began. As I mentioned earlier, some people have got into the blockchain world because
01:03:11
Speaker
They read the white paper and clamped onto that. A friend of theirs is buying crypto and told her to do so as well. But my story is far more prosaic. My story was that I saw the evolution of the technology. I said to myself, look at this, and there is the on-premises, on-premises,
01:03:38
Speaker
storage. And basically, the idea of all your technology is in the office. Remember, the old days, you have a server below the desk. That's on-premises. And then with Amazon in 2005, Amazon created cloud-based computing. At the time, everyone said, why would I put my secure data in the cloud? I mean, it was unbelievable. Because you would say,
01:04:08
Speaker
I want to be able to take my horses down to the basement and show them that is where the data is stored. Why am I going to put up in some random cloud? Everyone can look at it. And it took actually some, I think the Pentagon and then Johnson Johnson, a few other companies,
01:04:22
Speaker
chose to work with Amazon. And suddenly, the market changed. And then everyone thinks, oh, it's quite normal to put the content in the cloud. And so the next evolution, to me, naturally is decentralized cloud company, because it's cheaper. And you're going to look at it because you can see the trends happening today at the top of the stack, the stack being like the application level there.
01:04:47
Speaker
the middleware, the hardware, et cetera, and then all the way down the chip. So think of the top of the stack right now is it's commonplace. Everyone thinks about decentralized applications. What is Uber? It's a decentralized application. It means you don't need to have a taxi company
01:05:08
Speaker
buy a taxi service. What's Airbnb? You don't need to have hotels to offer, and they'll basically guests to stay in different hotels. So the idea being is that if that's the application of a layer, it's bound to come down into the lower part of the stack. And that's a trend that I saw. That's why
01:05:32
Speaker
I went into blockchain was because I saw ultimately that is going down. Blockchain is sort of middleware and then the protocol and then basically that the layer of tech is a natural blockchain or will be the next step after Amazon centralized to be decentralized. It also has something we want it centralized, but the evolution of tech will go to decentralized cloud computing.
01:06:01
Speaker
But it does require some experience in the tech market or I think generally experience in the industries that you worked in and maybe some skeptical views as well in order to say, well, you know, this, it actually makes sense to go this direction. I remember when I worked for an agency and we did supply chain software and at some point like, you know, I started doing blockchain and we're talking 2017.
01:06:25
Speaker
And then we started to do another supply chain supply chain project. And I realized, why are we doing this? Like on, and this was 2017. So, you know, the blockchain tech was not that far, was pretty far away from what it is right now.
01:06:42
Speaker
I was realizing why are we not doing these supply chain things on blockchain? Because blockchain is like the perfect layer for supply chains. But in order to see that, like I've been then already working, I was then already working for 10 years in tech, right? So I've been doing supply chain and SaaS and all these other things that I could then understand like, hey, there is actually an opportunity to do this on blockchain. But if you are, you need to have some point of
01:07:09
Speaker
it like an intro or a perspective on the market and in order to actually come to those views, right? To an extent, I would say that yes, it helped the helpful. I mean, the one I provided the recommendation that people subscribe to the superhuman.ai newsletter. If people have the chance, I'd recommend
01:07:33
Speaker
a podcast. It's called Founders. The Founders podcast is really interesting. It takes this individual who basically reads hundreds of biographies and commits them around key individuals and shows how these individuals have many symmetries. It's a great learning experience to understand what are some of the common
01:08:01
Speaker
characteristics that make successful entrepreneurs. So yes, Thomas, I think, you know, knowing that having someone saying in the marketplace is helpful. But you read some of these stories, and generally, actually, you know, if you think about like, bark, bark fizzard, like business biographies are an untapped gem, in my view, is because what a business biography is, is it's no,
01:08:28
Speaker
50 or so years of someone, or not longer, in a business where they've been successful, distilling their ideas into 200 pages for you to read. It's stunning. What is the best way to learn about innovation? Because human nature is repetitive. We're not reinventing, we're not doing anything new here. It's all pretty much the same. Humans are the similar
01:08:55
Speaker
interest to build, innovate, et cetera, for millennia. But what is interesting is that how? What are the approaches these people have taken? And so I think it is, I'm telling the market is very helpful, but I'm looking for traits and insights in as much as we as an individual is equally important. And you can do that by reading some of the
01:09:21
Speaker
stories to parts almost like befriend the long dead business heroes I suppose. We've talked and I've pushed a little bit I'm mindful of how you look at a market and how you sort of judge a market landscape and what you personally do it. The one piece that I think is just missing from that equation is this last bit which is
01:09:49
Speaker
How do you know you've actually stumbled across something? What are the criteria? I mean, obviously someone buying something from you and VC giving you money, but there's a spectrum in there where you can see, okay, this many people are willing to buy. Where does that line sit for you? It's been tremendously on each and every company. But I'd say that in general,
01:10:19
Speaker
You have this sense of, if you're sitting on a company, which is taking up, you know it. You know it. You have problems like hiring, or maybe less so, the AI of it. But you certainly have, it's like when you've got true product market fit, as I think Mark Andreessen said, product market fit is that you really know that you've got it.
01:10:48
Speaker
It's very apparent when you're there. It's a tough road to get there. And there's a lot of challenges on that journey. But once you get it, you walk into a customer and you don't need to explain. They get it. They say, this is a problem. And if the pricing is right, then we're ready to move forward. And it's a very different experience than what everyone asks
01:11:17
Speaker
is used to, which is waiting on trying to get a meeting and then kind of get budgeted and things like that. But if you've found a problem and it is a big enough problem, it's very apparent. Okay. I mean, in the general criterion, say, right at the beginning of that spectrum,
01:11:40
Speaker
when you're sort of thinking about the success of an idea and you may have had some indicators. Do you think about things such as sort of market demands, the competition in the space, how scalable the solution is, anything like that? Yeah, I think it's important to write from the get go to plan for victory, you know, and therefore as a result is to create a company which is designed to scale and make sure that
01:12:06
Speaker
It is important to define, to determine what is your kind of value. When I gave this example, everyone about the.
01:12:13
Speaker
the company rhythm where we realized our core value wasn't doing the whole thing. It was finding a specific part where we could focus on. So if you early on in your idea can identify what your kernel value, like in your proof of concept, you show that to the customers. If you can identify that is, and then I suppose outsource everything else or like find to perform with something else, just focus on that kernel of value
01:12:40
Speaker
That is itself is step one, is that you've found something that people want and you focus on that and then build around that core starting block.
01:12:55
Speaker
I want to add, Charlie, you and I had this conversation, I think, half a year ago for a particular product. I remember that. We know there's market demand. We see it all around us. And then we actually started to push it towards potential buyers. And we found that we were actually too early. We found that.
01:13:18
Speaker
to the point where we were like, OK, well, you know what? We're going to leave this for now. We know it's a good product, but we're going to leave this for now because it's too early. But the market, the competition, and from a scalable perspective, all said yes. We couldn't validate it with the customers because the customers didn't see the value for it, where I think the rest of our industry did see the value for it, but not at this moment in time. Right.
01:13:44
Speaker
just being too early. I think the last piece on that, on this, which obviously kind of nicely segued into is how unique does your value proposition have to be? Should you be, does it have to be completely brand new? Because I see you've done sort of both brand new, faster, smarter, cheaper, which makes more sense or which was easier in your experience? Well, I think that
01:14:12
Speaker
It's the value proposition has to be sufficient that it gets a buyer to want to change from either current incumbent or to buy a new service. And it's down to their own cost economics. And so one of the approaches that I have found to be particularly successful is you create a basically, you create a spreadsheet and you outline
01:14:40
Speaker
what it is that you're doing and how it can add substantial value to what they're currently doing. Obviously, there's a B2B, it's just B2C, B2B, so into enterprise. If you can demonstrate that you can provide an eight or 10X improvement on their current business and you provide, create a spreadsheet, have them work with you for that, then you've given your champion in that organization a strong
01:15:05
Speaker
um, tool to demonstrate your value proposition because it's like, it's, it's, they have contributed to it. It's their figures and they can see how this will make a difference. So that's on, on a B2B terms of like, how do you create a compelling, um, value? You actually need to work with the customer to illustrate how that your, your product can make a difference on a B2C. So it's, it's a bit harder because, um,
01:15:34
Speaker
But I suppose the way to do it there is to test on a subset of users and determine if there's some sort of standard metrics around SaaS based product, like the churn rate and an uptake and lifetime value and things like acquisition cost, things like that. Those are some of the metrics that are well understood in the marketplace that you can use to validate whether you're on the right track
01:16:03
Speaker
And you have a sufficient, you need valuable position that the customers keep on coming back and buying. All right, so we're now on to the final segment of the show. And this is where we ask Ian, if you didn't have the bags, the big bank accounts, if you didn't have the reputation, or the phone book, the black book that you have, all the people that you've worked with that know and love you,
01:16:27
Speaker
what you are starting again with the knowledge in your head. What would be the top five personal startup desert island essentials that you would bring with you if you were going to start your journey back again?
01:16:43
Speaker
an idea that I'm really excited about. I'd like really to find a great co-founder. The many companies start off as a solo founder with an idea. If you're a technical founder, it's a lot easier because technical founders can stretch to building the business themselves. If you're like a non-technical founder, it's a bit harder to do. I am
01:17:04
Speaker
by my background. I'm not a technical person. So the key for me is to find a strong technical founder or co-founder of this. And so that would be important for me. But everyone knows you're self-ident. If you know what you're good at, in my case, I know I'm not good at tech in terms of building code. So I need to find someone who is excellent at building code. And the district this year,
01:17:34
Speaker
There's a friend of mine called Chris Barton. He was the founder of Shazam. And he was saying, he described to me when he spent literally months talking to the very, very best people in the whole area of technology around audio technology and found this absolutely stunning guy, Avery Chen. And basically, Avery and him work on another one of our co-founders. And that's an example of taking the time to find the best
01:18:03
Speaker
co-founder to build a great company. Okay, number one, good find find a good co-founder number two. Well, this is now down to yourself is is is have a the right mindset, constant element of being curious and learning like this, the idea is that you should always be hungry to keep
01:18:24
Speaker
learning from others and try not to, as much as your passion or your idea, not to personalize it. So you take it in a way which is you get too corrupt. You got to try to think about it as an independent activity that needs to be looked at rationally and thought of as a scientific method, a experiment, a hypothesis that needs to be tested. And so having the right mindset
01:18:53
Speaker
is absolutely critical to ensure that you have the best chance to, as you don't get carried away with the idea, you take a rigorous step-by-step approach to evaluating it. So you can get the best chance for customers to buy the product. Yep. Number three. Probably perseverance. I mentioned that if you can, it's rare that you launch a product with the right
01:19:18
Speaker
first time get a good market approach and the right, the customers say it and the right product. So if you can,
01:19:28
Speaker
have the ability to prepare yourself for a long journey. It is a journey of both highest and extreme lows. But they are, it is, if this is what you want to do, and again, you have to be passionate, you have to really believe in this. So often, you know,
01:19:50
Speaker
whole startup thing is somewhat viewed as an amazing experience. Well, it is, but it's challenging. And then you have to often say that you have to put your family to be understanding what you want to go through. It can be hard in terms of it doesn't always work out. And so you have to be able to get yourself mentally prepared for a long term. And I always feel this part of that is
01:20:19
Speaker
to be as much as mentally fed as physically fed. So keeping yourself active, there's a lot of burnout. You hear about people talking a lot about mental health issues around being a startup entrepreneur. So try to find a way to break away and think. I mean, you hear about someone like Warren Buffett, who is a brilliant investor.
01:20:45
Speaker
He spends a large part of his day just reading, thinking about interesting business ideas, and knowing when the white business appears in front of him, he's ready to make an immediate decision. He's ready to put like hundreds of millions of dollars down because he spent the time to read and understand the market.
01:21:04
Speaker
don't try to fill up every hour of every second of your day, just because it makes you feel busy trying to really sort of have the ability to think. So there's a lot to that in terms of just the right mindset and then having the structure and the person there acts. Absolutely. I felt there was something, one of my old mentors, one of my old CEOs used to say, which was,
01:21:30
Speaker
a start-up journey on average is about seven to 10 years and having that mentality in your head as you go into it puts you ahead of most of the game. Knowing that it's going to be long means your expectations for the mother of all sadness and misery are set correctly. If you've got a three-year timeline, a two-month setback is much more emotionally charged than if you think you've got a seven to 10 year deadline. Things take a lot longer.
01:21:59
Speaker
it's a lot longer than we all expect. And everyone creates their spreadsheet around revenue growth. And they will have this hockey stick and it's all within, funny enough, within five years. Well, three years if you decide not to do a five-year projection, all of them have this take-off after end of year one, year two, when
01:22:23
Speaker
They've got the only horse and horses adage when they're doing their commercial plans. This time next year Rodney will both be millionaires kind of thing. Thomas and myself have also seen commercial plans or projections and you're like why? And the answer is because it feels good. Or how?
01:22:53
Speaker
So on to your third, what would be your third desert island? Fourth actually. Maybe having a kindle now that is because it can give you access to hundreds of books to read on your desert island if that's where you are. Obviously the power source as well but having a kindle is having access to other
01:23:19
Speaker
other people's experience and knowledge and just keep on trying to keep up to date with trends. Try to assume that you don't know all the answers at all, and the fact that you need to keep on learning. Kindle is a fantastic, easy solution to do that. Then I was thinking about Kindle because I think you can take them
01:23:44
Speaker
And in the glare of the sunlight on the desert, on a beach, you were able to see it in the clear of the leaf, where you could take a tablet or something like that. You seem to have experience with that. I imagine. The fifth, sorry, the fifth. It's somewhat similar. There's so many great tools out there. There's podcasts. I mentioned one of the founder's podcasts.
01:24:11
Speaker
um, attending, um, events. I mean, I am even the same. I'm all constantly going to, um, uh, meetups though. Um, in the evening about new topics, new, new businesses, um, to try and like learn about things that I'm not, I'm completely, um, no knowledge about, but it's, it's, I think the most, you see it actually in academia right now. Um, the most interesting areas in academia right now aren't in this vertical sort of, um, sort of
01:24:40
Speaker
It's actually the crossover. It's like chemistry and physics or psychology and chemistry. It's fascinating, these are the crossover points in different parts of studying. And that's what you don't get if you just simply focus on just the way that you should. So like learning from other industries
01:25:07
Speaker
trying to think about things in an orthogonal way, and that means getting out there. That means maybe not catching up on the latest Netflix episode for that particular night and going out for a meetup on something which is very different. It could be a sound quantum computing, which seems to be on the customer next hype cycle.
01:25:30
Speaker
That's brilliant. I can only thank you for your time, Ian, and spending the time with us. Where can our audience find you, connect with you, or even apply to Infrastructure Ventures? With Infrastructure Ventures, we're out there practically finding people. We use our data tool to find people, but you always go,
01:25:54
Speaker
to some who come over the transit and such, and that is that infrastructure.ventures. That's the site there. By myself, we reached on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way to reach me. Also, those are probably the best ways I'm constantly kept up with those two. Well, thank you for your time today, and I hope you have a good rest of your day and your meetings. Thanks so much. All right. Bye. Goodbye.