Entrepreneur Viewpoint

“I want clients that have the potential to exit at $100m”: An interview with Sameer Pal

Sameer Pal has been with RIG almost since its inception. Previously he was with Mercer Management Consultants. Sameer is a RIG partner. A citizen of the world, he was educated in India, Botswana, and the United States. Not a convert (yet) to the religion of blogging, he was interviewed by RIG Principal, Shields Russell.

Sam, why did you join RIG?

I did the big consulting practice. I wanted stay in consulting but to do something entrepreneurial. RIG is an entrepreneurial project in its own right and we work with entrepreneurs. I like seeing the fruits of my labour becoming something real and tangible. The beauty of young companies is that you are starting with a fairly blank slate.

How would you describe what you do?

Well, to be blunt, we help companies (our clients) figure stuff out and get stuff done and we do it better than anyone else. Our value lies in strategy and intelligent execution. We are not afraid to get stuck in and I have no hesitation in saying we are good because we are really smart and we have a strong bias for execution.

Tell us about the most successful client in your current portfolio

Let’s start with revenues won because ultimately that’s what matters. In two years, they have gone from being a single customer vendor to a company with more than 25 major customers. This year (2012) we have closed nearly $6m. That’s what matters. I, and the RIG team, have worked with the CEO to close deals in 5 continents, 17 countries, working in several time zones. And we have done deals in multiple languages including Spanish, French, Chinese, and Portuguese. All our consultants speak more than one language fluently. All, of course, except you Shields.

Describe your ideal client?

First thing, they must have global ambitions and that means they must be targeting a big market.

Second, the product doesn’t eat anyone else’s lunch and can compete in the market based on its technology rather than any business model or accompanying service.

Third, there must be a very capable, professional CEO who has deep expertise and understands their own and the company’s limitations. Someone who is willing to engage with us in a continuous feedback loop. That really matters to me. Someone who is not a micro-manager but trusts us to get the job done in the company’s best interests. And they must not be cheap. By which I mean that they are willing to pay us well because they recognise that when we do our job well we are adding significant equity and cash value.

Accountability is the last point I would make. It has to operate both ways.

Since you aren’t going to be working for them, describe a client you absolutely won’t work with?

The serious nightmare is a company that has a recipe that in my view adds up to nothing but a hard slog and low growth prospects: a company working in commoditised marketplaces where the competitive differentiation is on the margins and value based pricing is near impossible to extract. And it is all made worse when you have a CEO in these circumstances who believes they have a breakthrough product. What you have there is the delusional entrepreneur with misplaced expectations. I am also uninterested in working with companies that have a narrow geographic focus.

What’s it like working at RIG?

We are all different. We are all smart but in markedly different ways. We are a small boutique firm really. Very flat. Producers matter. Can’t produce means you will leave. In that sense, we are an up-or-out company. We are a pretty outspoken bunch. We have a lot of freedom as long as we look after our clients and each other. Teaming really matters for us, both with clients and colleagues. It is a negotiated workplace and that is a good thing. That is the basis of our culture. We don’t always get it right but we know whom to look at when we get it wrong.

What sort of people are you looking to add to your team?

I am not demanding. I just want sharp people with the ability to develop a quicksilver commercial nous. I want people with a genuinely global outlook who aren’t of the nine to six variety. I don’t mean people who taught English in the jungle on their gap year.

What are your ambitions in the next two years?

I want to create an ass-kicking team focused on IP-rich companies with a global market and a product that is truly differentiated and a team of bright ambitious people who are seriously focused on building equity value. And I want clients that have the potential to exit at $100m. That’s fun. That’s a trip. I haven’t manage this yet but I wouldn’t bet against achieving that goal in the next 24 months.

And lastly, why don’t you blog?

My portfolio clients come through reference. I don’t need to blog and I don’t have the time to blog.

Posted by Sameer Pal on November 12, 2012 at 1:00 am in About RIG, Blog, Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Management Tips, Market Views | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Interview with MoveMeOn co-founder Nick Patterson

MoveMeOn was founded in 2011 to fill a gap in the recruitment market for providing select job opportunities to high quality candidates. We spoke to co-founder Nick Patterson, a former McKinsey consultant, about his iterative process of founding and growing a company.

Your website talks of your ‘first attempt’ to change graduate recruitment at Cambridge, what was your vision for that?

I set up a recruitment agency to place students in internships. When I was at university I did an internship at a small consulting firm, and I think the experience I gained from that was more valuable than what I might have gained from a larger firm. At that age you’re still ‘green’ and so rarely get the opportunity to pick up tasks with much responsibility in the larger firms, whereas at small firms the various different types of work have to be done by everyone, so you often get more opportunity to take on more challenging work. Equally the bigger firms are flooded with applications for a small number of places, leaving many students with no internship at all. I didn’t pursue it for very long but it taught me a lot about the recruitment industry.

What was the ultimate catalyst for starting your own venture?

I really wanted to start a company when I left McKinsey, but I didn’t initially have an idea. I ended up stumbling across it because of my own experiences. All of my peers in the city, particularly those in consulting, were being bombarded with calls from headhunters about potential job opportunities. The headhunters had very little idea of what I had done or what I wanted to do; they called with any opportunity that they thought was relevant to me based solely upon having worked at McKinsey. These phone calls were almost weekly and frustrated me and many of my peers. MoveMeOn came out of this – we thought the whole process could be improved. All it really needed was more transparency in the market; the top companies needed to know where they should be looking for the top tier employees.

I also really enjoy the energy you get from working at your own venture. One thing I’ve learned is that if I can see the immediate value in something I’m much more likely to throw myself into it, which is definitely the case with MoveMeOn. Projects in the past where the immediate value is harder to see or non-existent I found very frustrating.

How long did it take you to get it up and running?

From the initial idea to the website getting up and running took around three or four months. This was longer than we had originally planned, and the delays were mostly due to our not understanding the difficulties involved in building a website – a process which we outsourced and learned a lot from.

We had something of a classic startup story in that we made a fairly large pivot and changed the focus of our business further down the line. We had identified three main channels to use when trying to find a job:

1. Your personal network
2. Good headhunters
3. Jobs boards

We started out by effectively being a middleman between good headhunters and job seekers – this wasn’t the most efficient method, but it was necessary to build a strong network of candidates and develop some credibility in the market. Keeping our definition of MoveMeOn fluid was vital at this stage; it allowed us to evolve into the third channel – jobs boards. This proved to be a huge turning point for us and now is by volume and revenue the most valuable part of our business. It’s one of those industries that hasn’t caught up with what can be done online, creating a gap which we were able to fill very well. Often the problem with jobs boards is that there are too many listings, which makes finding the right job a time-consuming process. It’s followed a common internet trend. The past five years have been all about getting volume and choice onto the web. This has been so effective that people are now overwhelmed with “choice” and don’t know where to look. We envisage the next five years being all about filtering for quality. As such, we go for more of a hand-picked jobs approach, only posting the jobs that really excite us and we can see our fairly specific demographic of members working at and enjoying.

If you have sought funding for your venture, what funding options did you pursue?

We needed some capital expenditure early on but it’s not a capitally intensive company. We were lucky to be able to self-fund and were cash flow positive within a very short period of time (in the region of four to five months). We have been approached by institutional investors, so we’ve thought about getting more funding on a few occasions. Sometimes you do need an extra injection of pace and cash to burn through, but we decided that if we didn’t have a very good idea of what we would spend the money on, we weren’t ready for it.

Interview by John Sherwin

Posted by RIG Admin on August 31, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

USEUM – A case study in funding

Boosted by winning Athens Startup Weekend 2012, USEUM is described as “The social network for art, offering two key features; firstly an art archive i.e. the ‘Wikipedia’ of art that is built collectively, and then a podium for everyone to express their opinion and to publicly ‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ aspects of art, as in all other subject-specific social networks.”  We spoke with founder Foteini Valeonti about her experiences in finding funding for her startup.

As part of winning ASW, you won the chance to pitch at HackFWD in the Pitch in Berlin V2 event.  Did you get funding for USEUM there?

“Although it was a great opportunity, pitching in Berlin was very tough and we didn’t get funding.  The other startups had already been through previous funding rounds and had been in existence for at least 6 months.  USEUM was still under construction at this stage so a completely different proposition.  That said, I think had I done a live demo of our mobile app I would have increased our chances of funding greatly as the live demo at ASW was what really counted in our win.”

So after that, what sources of funding did you pursue?

“Well, we felt the best route at this stage was to bootstrap our company and create a minimum viable product using the least possible funds.  Starting out with this model worked well, but we couldn’t take it very far due to some legal expenses.  I decided I didn’t want to get a loan for the business or go to friends and family for funding, so instead set about looking for angel investors.”

“I successfully found 3 investors who were willing to back USEUM.  What I learned from this process, was that to find the best angel investors, you just have to find the people who share the same interests as you, and who can really click with your idea.  In USEUM’s case it was people who are into art and Greek entrepreneurship, so a perfect match.”

Would you use a similar method to get funding again at future rounds?

“Obviously we will give priority to our original investors, as they are the ones who believed in the team and the idea in the first place.  If still further capital is needed we might seek similar angels, although our strategy is to assess all options so we would also talk to some VC’s.  We are lucky enough to have a revenue model from our USEUM Gift Shop though, so as long as we are covered by that we will delay fundraisers and build our value.”

Interview by John Sherwin

Posted by RIG Admin on August 7, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Inspiration, Management Tips, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Smart Connections – Networking with Shhmooze

Shhmooze is a smartphone app that makes networking at events and conferences fast, smart and effective. Michelle Gallen, founder and CEO at Shhmooze, explains how every event junkie out there can benefit from Shhmooze and why she admires founders.

Could you start by explaining what Shhmooze is about?

It comes from the fact that we felt that networking really sucks, it’s hard work, it’s painful, it’s time consuming, and most of us are actually pretty rubbish at it. However, networking is really important when you are in business and even more so when you are in the startup world. I have been in this space for quite some time now, and I felt that there has been a need for a service like Shhmooze.

Shhmooze is a smart phone app that allows you to make smart connections by helping you to check-in to events, both massive conferences like Le Web as well as smaller meet-ups like Tech Club.

When you check-in with Shhmooze, it will show you who is at the event. This is done by analysing a lot of publicly available social media and network data, and as a result we don’t only tell you who is at the event, but also who you already know there, and more importantly, we provide you with smart recommendations of who you should talk to. In conclusion, Shhmooze helps you make smart connections so that you can have fantastic conversations at any event you go to.

How did you come up with this idea? Was it because you went to so many events and got frustrated that you couldn’t connect with people in a better way?

I am definitely an events junkie but it’s a little bit more interesting than that. In my early 20’s I had a brain injury and I basically went from having a fantastic job, working on Regent St, being super happy and active – to being sent home to my parents in a wheelchair. I had to spend a lot of time learning how to do a lot of basic skills again, such as learning how to walk, and how to read and write. I spent a lot of time working with technology to support my learning process. I had memory problems and I needed to often look things up when I was out, so when the first smart phone came on to the market I jumped on it. This made me realise very early on that mobiles could help my brain.

I love to go to events and to meet new people. However, as a result of my brain injury I have prosopagnosia, which means that I really struggle to recognise names and faces. So when I was looking at my mobile one day, I thought about how my phone actually has information about where I have been, as well as information on where all these other people have been via Twitter etc. Therefore the phone can basically scan the room for me, and let me know who I know. It is something which can really help me on a personal level but actually, it also helps a lot of other people since many of us struggle with networking.

How long have you been working on this idea?

The company was formed in April 2010. The technology was built over two years in order to be really solid. We wanted to make it right, and not turn it into a service that is about shouting out that you are in a room and that there are 50 other people there too. We wanted it to be about creating an understanding to why someone would be at a particular event, understanding to what level they want to be connected and to understand what they might want to talk about. We want to make things happen in the real world.

What is the market like for an app like Shhmooze?

I am going to be generalist about this. I think maybe 95% of the competition consists of generic conference apps that are based around the conference organisers’ needs. Sometimes these apps only work at one event since the conference organiser pays for them. There is also another section of apps, which are more about discoverability and work to inform you that this friend of a friend is having pizza at the same restaurant as you are.

I think the difference is that when I go to a conference, I am switched on and I am there with a purpose, that’s when I want to know whom to talk to. I don’t think that there are a lot of apps in this space, and I don’t feel like a lot of people have done the same deep thinking as we have.

What is your strategy for monetisation?

We have a freemium service that anyone can use, but if you are a power networker, then you can purchase additional features. We also work with conference organisers. We offer to upload schedules and speaker profiles for free, but for a certain fee, give them to possibility to have their own brand on the app.

Considering the fact that you seem to be a very avid conference-goer it would be interesting to get your point of view on the startup community in London. Is there a community, especially in regards to Tech City, and if so does it provide any support?

I think it is kind of like the music scene, at first you have an underground scene and for a while, everyone thinks it is cool and then it goes mainstream. I think what Tech City has done is that they have identified a scene, and they are now trying to find a way to consolidate it.

To have the government behind you is very powerful, even if it’s not the only solution to sustain London’s tech community. I think we need a more solid support and slower voices – and you also need the renegades and the anarchists, the people that are out there pushing it. I think Tech City is just part of an interesting support system that is happening. The one thing that I am little bit concerned about when it comes to Tech City is that it seems to be such a focus on geography. I think it we would be great if we get over spatting over geographical boundaries and instead focused on the amount of amazing tech startups that we actually have here.

I know you have been involved in the entrepreneurial scene for quite some time now and I was just wondering what it is that you personally find to be the most appealing factor with this choice of career?

Well, my father warned me to never gamble, as we have had gamblers in the family that had bet their entire savings on a horse. So I didn’t go into gambling, I got involved in startups – which is obviously completely different…

I left a career at the BBC to do my own thing [TalkIrish.com] and after that I just kept on going. I think you have to be somewhat of a risk taker. Personally, I had no guarantees when I left my job, I just walked. You will need a great deal of confidence in the fact that everything will work out.

I think founders are different from people that join startups. I have a massive amount of respect for individuals that have actually founded companies, the people that grind away and do a lot of deep thinking. Founders are an incredible, interesting species.

Do you think you are born a founder or do you think it involves a certain set of skills that you can learn over time? Do you think anyone can become a founder?

I think anyone could do a startup but I think that you wouldn’t be really interested if you are not a certain type of person. I think founders are usually people who are risk-takers, and people who can see potential and not resist the opportunity to do something they believe is right or try something new because they believe they can make a positive difference. There are plenty of people out there doing startups because they know that what they build will generate money, and that’s great too, but for me it has always been about creating something which will make things better, and then I try to come up with a revenue model.

Interview by Philip Gasslander

Posted by RIG Admin on July 30, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Market Views, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

“This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done”

Matthew Painter is co-founder and CTO of import.io, a startup currently in private beta that aims to revolutionize the way that we access, collect and analyse so called ‘big data’. We caught up with him over lunch to find out about his background and how he became an entrepreneur.

Import.io is rooted in some serious programming, how did you become interested in computers in the first place?

I had my first computer when I was 5 or 6, a Commodore VIC-20, and I started programming soon after that really. I started off using Commodore Basic, and soon enough was spending time trying to program role playing games and similar sorts of programs. When I started at Cambridge I was studying Maths but in my 3rd year I switched to Computer Science. This was a fairly easy decision to make given that I’d always loved programming and that I’d had previous experience with it.

And how did you first become involved in startups?

On graduating I left to a startup called headporter.com. This operated on a simple premise: it supplied student unions with IT services (e.g. websites, membership card schemes, email lists etc.) in return for access to all of their databases and the ability to resell data to companies doing target recruitment and similar things. We had signed up all of the Russell Group universities when some unfortunate circumstances meant that we had our finance pulled. This was a blow as we had to walk away from what we had spent quite some time building, but I enjoyed myself while there and I took a wealth of experience with me. Following that I did some consulting before joining Yahoo to build a Yelp competitor. Surprisingly this had an atmosphere much like a startup because it was a small team working on their own project within the company. This was going very well until poor annual results caused Yahoo to shut down the project in order to focus on their core business areas and cut costs.

After this a friend approached me saying he was working on some tech within a large organization that had a lot of opportunities. He found it constrained working within that environment though and thought for a chance of real innovation they would need to start their own company up. Having enjoyed my first start up experience and liking the idea I didn’t hesitate to get involved and it’s been a great decision – this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.

As CTO what sort of challenges do you face most often?

As CTO you’re not just a technological person you’re also a businessman, and one of the challenges we face is balancing risk and reward and making trade-offs accordingly. With startups the challenge is always about balancing efficiency with quality, and this manifests itself at many different levels. One of these might be human resources, for example the Google founders personally interviewed their new employees until the company grew so much that this was no longer possible – a clear trade-off of their time that they thought was worth it. The right workforce in a startup is crucial to deliver results under very tight time constraints, particularly when bootstrapping. I have to make these judgements regularly as we are currently going through an angel round, but we have to keep focusing on the business itself and not compromising the quality of it while we raise funds.

What processes have you gone through in terms of funding?

We started off bootstrapping for as long as possible. We were lucky in that Kusiri (import.io’s predecessor) was self-funded and cashflow positive very quickly so this was not as painful a process as it can be for some startups. It was pretty clear though that to really get a world class company off the ground you do need investment – you need cash to burn through. If you don’t put money into it, you’re not going to get anything out of it.

Finally, as someone who studied computer science, why do you think more American computer scientists enter into entrepreneurship than their British counterparts?

I’d say there is an element of truth to that, American society is a lot more entrepreneurial in general with people more motivated to start businesses. The UK has entrepreneurial people but our culture is more risk averse and we don’t have the same background motivation pushing us forward. Take Silicon Valley for example, people there have been brought up in an environment that will surely breed more entrepreneurs. If we get a few big successes in the UK people will become more motivated to get involved. More encouragement for young people to do computer science and coding would also have this effect. I’m very keen on this, so we were involved in SVC2UK last year, and this year we’re hosting a team for Young Rewired State. YRS fosters the sort of growth we need to see more of in young people.

Interview by John Sherwin

Posted by RIG Admin on July 27, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

“I realised how much more satisfying it is when you are able to pursue something you are truly passionate about.”

Founded in London in 2011, Payumi is an online service that makes it easier and more efficient to collect money from friends or colleagues for a wide variety of social situations where people need to share the cost. Khurram Farooq, Founder & CEO of Payumi talks to us about the different challenges entrepreneurs face during the startup process and why he believes Payumi will change the way we manage our social financial relationships.

How did you come up with the idea behind Payumi?

Given my background in technology and digital media, I was pretty set on doing something in the consumer internet space, and I had a stack of ideas that I was considering. Payumi won over the others because it is a very simple proposition that addresses a real need. People immediately got what I was talking about and so it passed the elevator pitch test 100% of the time. Thinking back to my time as a student, I remember falling out quite dramatically with a good friend over a gas bill and it occurred to me that building a solution to prevent this problem was obvious and long overdue. (Alex, if you’re reading this, you still owe me £27.50!)

Everyone I spoke to about the idea immediately shared with me some of their own furstrationsfrustrations about the process of collecting money from a group and in particular how painful and awkward it can be often leading to stress and even arguments. Through this process of talking to potential customers, we developed the product so that it could work for a wide variety of potential social situations where friends need to share the cost. It was very quickly clear that our solution needed to be flexible enough that it could be applied to just about anything.

I definitely think that the need is there. If you have lived in this city long enough, you know that sharing bills and paying for things as a group is part of everyday life, but do you think this need is big enough to facilitate the behavioural change needed for Payumi to succeed?

As people are increasingly maintaining their social relationships online, it’s astonishing that we still continue to organise group finances by emailing round bank details or worse still collecting cash and cheques. Almost all social activities involve shared expenditure and so the piece that is missing from the equation is how money fits into people’s online social life and this is where Payumi comes in. People are always looking for new, easier and better ways to do things and so I think Payumi will solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in the process leading up to the launch of Payumi?

There were a number of different challenges. I think the first big challenge for me was to find a good technical lead as I am not a technical guy myself, a problem which a lot of founders that are not technical often encounter. The second challenge was of course to get some funding. As a result of my background in investment banking, I had a pretty good network of founders, investors and other people that I could speak to, many of whom I had enjoyed working with before or knew through other connections, so that is how we managed to secure our initial funding. The third challenge is building the right team and I think the idea helped a lot here as some really cool and talented people were as passionate about it as me and wanted to get involved.

How has the product been received by consumers so far?

Everyone loves it! Like any new consumer internet start up our biggest challenge is to just make people aware that it exists. Pretty much everyone coming on to the site ends up ‘liking’ us or saying good things about us, so the initial reaction is thankfully a good one.. We are still building new features in response to feedback and iterating the product rapidly so the product will get better with time and soon move onto mobile as well. We are launching to the public fully next week so these are exciting times for the team. We’re confident people will finally say goodbye to using email, bank transfers, text messaging, phone calls, spreadsheets or notes on the fridge to track and manage payments from friends.

How do you view the market for this type of service and have you identified any potential competitors?

I don’t think there is anybody in the UK market that is providing this kind of service in the same way that we are. There are a couple of companies in the US, such as WePay and Paydivvy who have tried to address the problem by becoming deposit account providers which let you create group bank accounts where one individual administers that account on behalf of the group rather than providing a direct money transfer service between friends. In fact, WePay is now much more focused it seems on pursuing smaller merchants and trying to win business off PayPal.

There are some other players in France (Leetchi) and Germany (Friendfund) but both of these work quite differently to Payumi so I think there is a real gap in the UK market where we can establish ourselves as the leading market player for direct, many-to-one peer to peer social payments. We have a unique model and while we are focused on the UK market for now, we will look to deploy it internationally in due course.

Being located at Hoxton Square, arguably the heart of Tech City, what is your experience of the east London start-up community? Do you feel like a start-up community exists here and if so, have you felt any support from it?

There is definitely a great community here, even though we didn’t locate to East London because of that reason, it was more a matter of convenience for us as we all live in the area and we were lucky to find some great office space nearby. Being part of the community is cool though as being a founder can sometimes be quite a lonely experience unless you have other founders around who you can talk to and who you know understand some of the challenges you face because they have experienced similar things themselves. Having said that, we probably haven’t leveraged the community as much as we should have because we have been very focused on building the product and the team and already had funding in place, but the community is great for keeping up to date on what’s going on in tech in Europe and for the opportunities to network, work with other start ups and share knowledge and experience.
How did you make the decision to leave your job and pursue a career as an entrepreneur?

As a corporate finance advisor focused on technology and media businesses, I used to advise entrepreneurs on strategy, raising finance and mergers and acqusitions so I was curious about doing something for myself – something which I really considered to be fun. I was always so inspired by the entrepreneurs I met who had started from scratch and turned their companies into really valuable businesses but also into great places to work, while having a lot of fun doing it. I felt that I also wanted to build something from the ground up.

So, finally I guess I just took the plunge – luck and serendipity played a part in that I was forced to take a career break to allow my wife to pursue her career in Psychiatry with a 6 month secondment in New Zealand. While I was there, I learned to fly a plane – something I had always wanted to do – and I realised just how much more satisfying it is when you are able to pursue something you are truly passionate about. When we returned to London, I was very focused on building a company and have never looked back.

Do you think there are any specific skills entrepreneurs need in order to be successful?

Persistence, passion and a belief in what you are doing. You also need to be a bit of an all rounder and be able to lead and motivate a diverse team to achieve success. No matter how stressful my day is or however complicated the situation I am dealing with, I still relish getting out of bed in the morning whereas in my corporate job I always felt a bit stifled and often wished I was doing something else.

As Steve Jobs once said in a letter to new Apple employees, There is work and then there is your life’s work – this feels like my life’s work and I am enjoying every minute of it.

Interview by Philip Gasslander

Posted by RIG Admin on July 10, 2012 at 11:53 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Market Views, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

“Surround yourself with smart people and invest time in their development”

StarBase, founded in 1992, is a London-based performance testing software consultancy with established testing expertise in a wide range of industries. We spoke to Stephen Davis, StarBase founder and MD, about the challenges of building your own company.

What were the major challenges for you in the early days of StarBase?

I think one of the biggest challenges was having to learn how to do all the different roles needed to run the business. Now I have people who are responsible for running aspects of the business, but when I started I had to carry out the sales, finance, and operational functions, all while I was still consulting. I was still consulting up to the point we had 10 consultants.

How did you learn to perform the roles you needed?

It’s a combination of two things. The first thing is that you have to be prepared to learn new skills.

The second is that you surround yourself with smart people and invest time in their development. Some of the time it’s about bringing on smart employees who will be able to fix a problem. Sometimes it’s a case of having the right friends, and being able to call them for advice on their specialist area, knowing that they can call and ask for your help, too. I think it’s also about looking for a formal network of entrepreneurs who you can talk to. For me, one of the biggest challenges of the last ten years has been knowing that I don’t have a boss, and therefore I don’t have that person to go and talk to. Not having a boss means it’s hard to measure your performance and to know if you’re doing well. You need someone to be honest with you when you’re on the wrong track, and my entrepreneurial network has helped me understand this.

A revelation here for me was: don’t try to be a hero. You can’t do everything. You’ve got to focus your time in a way that’s going to add the most value. As the business grows, be prepared to delegate, because initially the temptation is just to work longer hours. A major pivotal point in my life was taking on my first administrative person. That freed up my weekends and was a real value for money investment and made a significant difference to my quality of life and that of my family.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on May 25, 2012 at 3:49 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Is this a good time to be an entrepreneur?

The current economic climate provides both a challenging and exciting time for entrepreneurs. We spoke to Shields Russell, Principal and Founder of Rapid Innovation Group, to get his thoughts on what it means to be an entrepreneur today.

How would you define entrepreneurship?

Drawing on my own experience, I would say entrepreneurship has four basic components:

1. Being able to spot an opportunity by identifying a problem that has real value to a significant market
2. Systematically reducing risks by proving that opportunity exists – the more you prove it, the less risk there is
3. Being able to inspire and attract really good people to make the journey with you
4. Being able to make the transition from being a start up – that is to say a company that is trying to prove a business model – to a company that has a viable business model, that can build an effective capability before it tries to scale and build the sort of value that UK start-ups too often fail to realise

A lot of transition takes place over a short span of time. To go through all these stages requires entrepreneurs to evolve their roles at quite a rapid pace. And a last thought: too often we focus on the individual entrepreneurs – the ‘great man’ theory. But great companies are built by great entrepreneurial teams.

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing entrepreneurs today?

The first big challenge, the first critical decision, is picking the right opportunity. And, of course, it’s a challenge to realise when you have it wrong. I think most successful entrepreneurs have been scarred one way or the other by a degree of failure. That is part of the DNA of entrepreneurship.

Is this a good time to be an entrepreneur?

It’s a fantastic time to be an entrepreneur, especially a tech entrepreneur, because the cost of building technology is falling. You don’t need as much money. You can do more with less, and you can do it faster.

I think that the most successful companies are probably started in a downturn because the economic climate promotes innovation: companies are looking for ways of driving efficiency, and ultimately technology is an enabler of efficiency, especially in the B2B setting. Also, a lot of competition is wiped out. A downturn instils discipline; you learn to make less go further, and you can potentially hire talent at a lower cost.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on May 18, 2012 at 12:00 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

The Investment Game: how to choose your investors wisely

Tony O’Shaughnessy, founder of ABS, gave us some key points to consider when looking for investors for your company:

“I think the very first thing you need to understand is why you are looking for investment in the first place. It sounds really obvious but you would be amazed by the number of people who think ‘if only we had investment we could do x, y and z.’ Thinking about money problems alone is a very naïve viewpoint. You should really make sure you know exactly why you want the money, what you’re going to do with it, and that what you are going to do with it fits with your strategic direction. This is absolutely key.

You also have to think about what the role you want these investors to play:

• Do you want them to be equity holders?
• Do you want them to be proactive?
• Do you want them to have valuable employment in the business?

The minute that you have investors it will affect the culture of your business and your employees directly. You need to know that it is a great idea because it allows you to build a new product, etc., but also what it means in terms of the way you operate.”

Posted by Guest Author on May 11, 2012 at 12:28 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Real World Lessons, Venture Capital | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Can successful entrepreneurship be learned?

Dr. Markus Perkmann is a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College Business School, where he researches innovation management, technology development and organisation theory. We recently sat down to talk to him about his views on how entrepreneurship is developed.

How would you define entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship involves some kind of high impact activity that does something new – not just a sole trader. It often is unsuccessful, but has the potential to  lead to success and strong growth. That’s what makes entrepreneurship  really valuable: doing something new and taking a risk. The risk is an interesting thing – it’s about who takes the risk. The question is really what kind of risks entrepreneurs are taking. Good entrepreneurs are good at taking risks with other people’s money because that allows them to scale others’ resources. The other people trust them with their money because they think they’re more likely to be successful than the average person. There are very few entrepreneurs who will have the money to do it by themselves. It necessarily involves pooling resources from different resource providers, and those resources are at risk. It’s not just about personal risk; it’s about constituting a good risk for a potential resource provider.

Can entrepreneurs be created?

Can entrepreneurship be learned in terms of students going through entrepreneurial societies? – I’m going to do a research project asking that very question. With entrepreneurial societies at universities, for example, does going through such a socialisation process make entrepreneurs? From a sociological standpoint, it’s a question of identity and role models. If in your social context there are people who will provide an entrepreneurial role model, I would think that people looking at these role models would be more inclined to consider entrepreneurship as a legitimate identity to adopt. You can see a similar phenomenon in the dot com boom. There were groups like First Tuesday, bringing in people and trying to convey that entrepreneurship is an option, that it’s something that’s there to be learned and studied in a certain way. Think of retail nowadays: no one would think of having one shop or restaurant – everyone thinks of having a chain. But that had to be learned, built. In this sense being an entrepreneur is a constructed model that people take on.

The other thing you could say here is that a lot of entrepreneurship actually comes out of existing organisations. You talk about university spin-outs, but the more likely case is company spin-outs. A lot of Silicon Valley foundings essentially came out of other companies, like Intel which came out of Fairchild semiconductors. Whole industries were created by people leaving their former employers, sometimes with teams, founding a new company, taking their learning and doing essentially the same thing. Large, bureaucratic organisations are paradoxically the most fertile ground for entrepreneurship and start ups.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on May 4, 2012 at 1:21 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

“Building a product that people want” – An Interview with Dragos Ilinca, CMO and Cofounder of UberVU

Dragos Ilinca is the CMO and cofounder of UberVU, a social media intelligence company with bases in London, Bucharest, and the USA. Dragos began our interview by describing the genesis of UberVU as it evolved out of a web-marketing consultancy into a social media posting platform, into a social media monitoring tool, into its current form as a social media dashboard with social media intelligence.

In your opinion, what is the most difficult part of getting a startup off the ground? Is it getting funding, working together as a team, is it actually developing the product, or something else? Or is it everything in combination?

I think it’s everything in combination. It all comes down to building a product that people want because I think everything falls into place from that. Of course in order to build that product, you need a team. We were lucky because we had known each other for a lot of years, we had started other businesses together, but I look around and a lot of people are looking for co-founders and I think that’s really, really hard, finding someone to start a business with. And once you do that, its about just building something that people want—even if it’s a minimal sort of version—because if you do that, raising money shouldn’t be difficult. If you manage to build that product, that kind of means you’ve got a team, and if you’ve got that team and product, raising money should come pretty easily. So in our case, I think it was definitely figuring out what product to build, but I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are starting with building a team, especially in places like London where developers have so many options to choose from. They could work for, you know, the finance industry, or an already-established startup, and if you’re just starting out it’s difficult to get talented people to join you.

Perhaps it’s too early to ask this question, but in terms of your experience working with social media, how do you adapt? How do you know when to stay your course with your vision for developing a product, and how do you know when to pivot? The social media world is constantly changing, so how do you adjust for that?

I don’t think there’s an easy answer to it, but it kind of comes down to traction. If nobody likes your product or buys it, you need to do something about it. If you have a few people who really, really love it, then you need to understand who those people are and why they love it, and if there’s an easy way to reach more of them, that’s your whole market. And if you’re happy with that that’s fine, but if you need a way larger market, you can potentially work with them and figure out what a dumbed-down version of that product is. I think the most difficult thing is actually making the decision. I think deep down you kind of know when things aren’t really going well, and you can stick around for three months, maybe another six months and see: make a plan, and just say we’ve got this deadline and if things don’t pick up we need to do something about it. But I think people deep down kind of know, but they’re just afraid to make a decision. You need to be able to say, “What we’ve done so far, yeah, it’s a lot of effort, but in the end, people aren’t really paying attention to us and aren’t buying the product, so tough luck. We need to start all over again.”

UberVU strikes me as a pretty advanced mechanism, integrating social media and media monitoring. Do you think the days of simplicity in application development are over? In other words, do you think the skill-level required to produce groundbreaking apps will only become higher as times goes on?

Probably. That’s probably true. Because we’re a business tool, so from that point of view, we need a lot of technology to do what we do. But look at something like Instagram, for example: there’s not a lot of technology in there. If you think of technology just in terms of code, you know, other people can build that kind of stuff in a weekend. If you think of technology as also the mechanism by which they’ve been able to build viral coefficients in it so that it spreads and that kind of stuff, then that’s very difficult to replicate by other people. So I think if you’re building consumer apps—if you know what you’re doing—you can still get away with not having a highly technical solution. But even so, if you look at Colour, they’ve got pretty hardcore technology in there, and it’s just a photo app, more or less. So even these things are becoming more and more complex, and I think the reason is that you can do so much more now with the technology and the stuff that would have been impossible to do in real time is now possible, so you can build a lot better experiences for the user; and the second thing is there are so many people looking at the tech space, that if you build something that can be replicated within a week, and you’ve got absolutely nothing else that can make you succeed, then it’s just not worth it, because other people will copy you ASAP. Just look at Groupon as an example. A lot of people think it’s the technology and they built that in a weekend and there are hundreds of clones; but actually the difficult part is the sales behind it, selling to small businesses and being able to scale and that kind of stuff. So if you think about that as sales, not really technology, but technique and strategy, then it’s very difficult to replicate it. In terms of actual code, some people can probably build that in a day. But it’s not that that makes it work.

Since you’re the CMO, I wanted to ask a marketing related question. Since uberVU and so many applications are so heavily grounded in the online world, how important is actual person-to-person interaction in marketing?

I think it’s still important to have the in-person interaction. Not all the time; we started selling online with credit card, so it wasn’t necessary to meet anyone at that point. You could, you know, make the product and the company look more human by having photos of the members of the team on the website, having a video where you present certain stuff, having a blog that’s very human, but now that we’re moving more into the enterprise space and we’re starting to get customers like NBC or the World Bank, for these sort of things it looks like it’s pretty important to meet face to face, and if you cannot do that, at least have a few phone calls. I think the higher price you charge for what you do, the more you need that sort of relationship. And it’s not just because of the person-to-person interaction; usually if you’re charging a lot of money, the solution that you’re selling, you need to really understand the customer’s use case and be able to show them how the product is really going to make an impact. And these solutions are usually pretty complex, so it’s not like a photo sharing app: you take a picture, you share it with your friends, pretty easy to understand. It can be pretty hard to articulate just from a website and understand exactly how that could be used in your organization, and understand how easy it is to use even though it’s got this breadth of features. It’s hard to make the jump from, ok I see this demo video, how could I use it for my specific use case? It’s very difficult to understand that. And people just don’t have the time and don’t want to take the effort, so instead of researching that tool for 30 minutes and not understanding, it’s sometimes more useful to say, ok let’s just have a 30 minute phone call, you’ll tell me about it and I can explain really easily how we can help or how we won’t be able to help and you’ll probably need some other tools.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on April 27, 2012 at 1:45 pm in Demand Generation, Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Market Views, Product Development, Real World Lessons, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)