Entrepreneurship

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)

         

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)

         

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)

         

“The only guidepoint is reality” – Interview with Andy Hutt of triOpsis

Andy Hutt is founder and CEO of triOpsis, a real-time visual intelligence company designed to provide technology that allows enterprises to use mobile devices to track the status of products and services on the ground.

I can’t promise any words of wisdom at all, but I can promise words.

1) Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur rather than go down a more traditional career path?

Lots of answers to that. As with most things in the world, life is a bit more complex than, I woke up one day and said, “Fantastic! I’m going to do this.” Life evolves to a point and you make some decisions. For me, one of the most important ones, and it is only one of many, is when I looked at a traditional career path, I just saw boredom. My background is in finance; I’m a qualified accountant. Way back when I worked for PwC, I worked in Private Equity Transaction Services at Deloitte, I worked in corporate finance, blah, blah, blah. And the problem was whenever you looked at the career path of any of those, it was frankly just boring. And for me, I didn’t want to spend 30-40 years of my life doing that. At all. So it’s about how to make a change. And any change is very difficult to make.

For me, the obvious one with the skillset I had was to go and set up a business. It was possibly a bit of a random choice in terms of where we went, but you have to use what you have around you. I had no background in software prior to this, I had no background in retail, no background in utilities, never set up a business, all those kinds of things. But you have to make a decision that says, I need to change something. I need a more interesting path in my life, I need to do something which I find more satisfying, more enjoyable, and I have more control of.

2) What new skills and specialisms did you have to develop as you got triOpsis going? How did you develop new skillsets?

One of the skills a potential entrepreneur has to have is risk taking. Risk taking possibly equates to stupidity or arrogance, because if you knew all the risks, you probably wouldn’t do it because you’d assess you’d fail; or you understand the risks, and you’re so arrogant that you think you can succeed anyway.

A lot of people are very risk-averse when it comes to trying different things. I’ve never set up a business before. Ok, fine, how do you do that? You just go and talk to some people, get a bit of guidance, and do it. And a lot of it comes down to just doing it. I’ve never run a technical team before, in terms of coding, never run a PR campaign before, I’ve never been a salesman, I’m going back to when I started the business, and it’s about risk taking, just dive in and do it. And if you work out you haven’t got the skills, learn. So, can I be a salesman? Yes. If you can’t afford a salesperson at first, that’s what you have to do. You can’t say, “I don’t have those skills!” You have to dive in, do it. The key thing is, if you’re prepared to take that initial risk—which is basically whether you’re prepared to show yourself up, whether you’re prepared to effectively fail—you need to learn quickly. Dive in, learn quickly, chuck it at the real world and off you go.

In terms of acquiring new skills, it’s partly about risk taking, it’s partly about confidence, and it’s the ability to learn quickly. A large chunk of my view of the world, when it comes to learning and entrepreneurship, is about surviving enough failures to succeed.

Most of the time, until you’ve made your business, you’re assembling a collection of small failures. If I go back to the first sales pitches I did four years ago, I cringe. I’m like, “My God, did I ever actually pitch something as stupid and vague as that?” But you have a go and you just learn, and that was a failure. You’ve got to collect these failures. And in terms of how you fund the business, ideally with entrepreneurship, you need to get enough funding to survive enough failures to have learned enough to succeed.

People view failure as though there’s only one way to fail, which is, you know, like the Eurozone at the moment: BIG! And actually, entrepreneurship is lots of little failures. “I tried that, it didn’t work. Put that to one side. I’m going to try that, ooh that didn’t work, ooh that does, let’s do more of that.” Ideally it’s not catastrophic. I got a good piece of advice early on, which is, “Never bet the ranch early on any particular given path.” Some people say, “You’ve got to do it the whole hog, just go for it!” And if you did that, put all your money in one strategy, one path, one thing, and it fails where do you go? I’d rather spread the failures, and then try and learn where I passed. “That bit did succeed, I’ll put some more money over there.” With failures you learn. Success doesn’t actually teach you anything, it’s just like, Oh, I got lucky. More of the same.

3) How do you balance breadth across industries and depth within an industry?

It’s a really good question because for me, success only comes if you focus. But it’s actually the point I was making a second ago about failures, because you don’t actually know which market, which product is going to be a success. So what you have to do, and what we did, is we started off in brands and we tried retail, and we’ve ended up in utilities; we ended up in water, and we’re now in gas and electricity. It’s a case of the same learning curve, but the ultimate goal has to be a focus. As a small company, you don’t have the resources to do lots of stuff. Provided you understand that to start with then you may succeed. If people don’t understand that to begin with, if they think they can have a go at everything, they will fail. You can’t. Unless they’ve got a really big bank balance, in which case, good luck to them! So, what you have to say is, ultimately I do have to focus to succeed, but I don’t know where to focus, so it comes back to how do I learn? How do I fail, etc.? And what you try and do is get into a niche where you think, yeah I’ve got something real. And that particular point to me in terms of business is what I was talking about earlier: you have to get that in the real world. You can’t sit in an office and think, right, it’s going to be this. That’s the way for me. You have to take the risk and then actually go and talk to that particular client. And they’ll probably go, “Oh that’s rubbish.” So you go back, you have a think, you listen and then you go back and you try that again. And ultimately it comes down to, sadly, what will this generate in revenue for somebody or will it save them money? You need to understand that as an end point.

The only guide point is reality, and that’s the bit when I was talking about risk taking earlier. A lot of people aren’t prepared to take a risk. And a risk is standing up in front of people and actually potentially looking a bit stupid. And for a lot of people, they’re not prepared to do that. The ultimate arbiter of everything is reality. You can’t sit in an office and make a profit. You have to actually physically go into the real world, get your product into the real world, and get real world feedback. Think of anyone who sits in an office and says, “Yeah, this is the best thing since sliced bread!” For our products, we could say, “Yeah insurance market, hey! We can do all of this stuff!” But actually if you spoke to someone in insurance they may turn around and go, “Err, you can’t do it for these reasons.”

4) What is the lifestyle of an entrepreneur like?

The lifestyle of an entrepreneur? It varies. In the world of big corporates, hard work is when you have lots of work on. For a small business, when you’re an entrepreneur, that’s easy. I’ve got work. The hardest part is when there’s nothing. You know, there aren’t any projects. You haven’t got a team of people, you have to sit and you have to go, I need to do something, I just need to create something from scratch. That’s hard work.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on April 20, 2012 at 5:12 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Real World Lessons, Sales, Strategy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Customer (and Patient) Control – An Interview with Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli

Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli is founder and CEO of Patients Know Best, a personal health record system designed to put the patient first. By giving patients control of their own health records, the system allows more efficient and effective relationships between doctors and patients, as well as between doctors and specialists comprising teams of care providers. Patients Know Best is based in Cambridge, UK.

1)   Before Patients Know Best, had you ever thought of doing something entrepreneurial, or did the drive really start with the problem and solution you discovered?

I started with something entrepreneurial in a sense because I knew I was going to start my own company. I was setting myself my own syllabus, so I went through medical school having learned how to program; I was just teaching myself how to write medical software and the intention was that I’d basically solve problems for physicians. And that’s what I did during medical school. I also grew up in Cambridge, and in Cambridge… I was told in school that when you’re in Cambridge, you start your own company, so I believed them. I knew I would do that one day. The final piece for me was learning business, so I worked for a management consultancy in the States, in Washington D.C. While there, I saw the problem that I thought, “OK, this is really important I could commit to, I can see myself dedicating the rest of my life to solving this because it’s really important.”

Beyond that, there’s also a business model behind solving this problem, and I guess I just wanted to solve this for myself. I was facing the problem as a patient, trying to organise my care, trying to manage my health. I spent a year sulking that no one was doing it, and 2008 came along and I said, “You know what, I’ve literally written the book, so I have to do it. Let’s just go and do it.”

2)   How much has the service evolved since you started as a result of patient and physician input? What developments do you foresee with regard to the service in the near future?

We started with an embarrassingly minimum viable product. We took all the classic startup advice, start with the minimum market product: we launched with only one feature. I came back to the UK and I began asking for interviews from my friends who were doctors and then asked them to recommend other doctors to speak to. They weren’t saying, “My problem is I don’t have a PHR.” They said, “My clinics are overrun with patients and I’m always late in helping my patients. There are budget cuts, I can’t get enough staff…” All these very clinical, very operational problems. So I just began building up clinical problems, and I thought, if you use the patient as an asset rather than a liability, we can help. What’s the minimum feature they would need, that they would pay tomorrow, to use? And the one thing they said was, “We want to send messages to patients across institutional lines, if the hospital wants to send a message to the patient and cc the GP, or GP send a message and cc the social worker, for example.” And that was the only thing we launched with.

To give you some contrast, the UK government spent tens of millions on Healthspace, which is their sort of attempt at a patient portal. And only after they went through that sort of tens of millions did they get the feedback of, “I don’t really need any of these features, but I really need to send messages.” So then they began trying to do messages, but by then they’d spent so much money, no one was going to give more money to develop the software any more. So, we started from that feature and every single other thing you see in the software is because a doctor, a nurse, a patient sat down and said, I need this, or I’m stuck on this.

The whole thing top to bottom has been built by the user saying what they need; we respond every two weeks by putting out new features. From our perspective, it’s great because we’re only building stuff that people care about, but also our users are huge evangelists. Every commissioning customer who uses us can point at a part of the screen and say, “That was mine.” And then they go and tell all their friends, “Go and use this software because that was mine. And also, whatever you tell these guys, they’ll do it in two weeks. They really respond really quickly and I’ve never had a software company do that with me.”

3)   In one of your customer videos, Gary Hotine describes looking for something that would be like “Facebook for Patients.” I’m curious to know how apt a description you feel that is for Patients Know Best.

A lot of our users describe us as the Facebook of healthcare. When we trained patients in the beginning, the docs were kind of worried that the patients wouldn’t understand how to use the software. When we sat down with them, most of the trepidation was that they did not believe the docs had actually handed over the records and given them control. But as soon as they get there, they’re like, “Oh, I see, that’s like Facebook. I’m good.”

From that point onwards they just go ahead and use it. It’s like Facebook in the sense that it’s a very easy method of communication, pulling data from everywhere and it can send lots of places. It’s not like Facebook in the sense that we’re not selling your data and we change the terms of use every week: we are not confusing our financial benefit with your privacy desires.

4)   When you started, I’m guessing it was pretty much just you. How did you then go and assemble a team? What qualities did you look for?

It started with just me having the idea and doing some of the research in the States and then deciding I needed to go back to the UK to start it. Cambridge was the place to do so, both as my home and because I’d heard that Cambridge receives 7% of all VC funding in all of Europe. It’s just a crazy number. So I came back to Cambridge and just did a bunch of things to start building the team. I emailed the CEO of Cambridge Network and said, “I’m coming back to the UK, I’ve trained as a programmer and I’m starting this company; I have no team, no product, and no customers. Who do you think I should talk to?” “Let’s have coffee.”

I think he took pity on me, but he said, “You know you should talk to Ian, he’s a CFO of VC backed companies and I think he’ll talk to you.” It turned out we shared the same pub, and we kind of just spent 2 hours the first time talking about the company and he thought it was really interesting. Over the next four months, the poor guy, Ian, taught me accounting. And then eventually he became a member of our board of directors and CFO of our company. So he was the first really heavyweight executive to commit his time to the company.

Then from the development side, I started by just getting some contract developers to build the proto-type and then some other ones to build the final software. We now have developers from the UK (obviously), but also the States, from France, from India, just a real international team. And they tended to have some experience with healthcare in the past that meant that they were as frustrated with healthcare as I was. And so they’re quite evangelical.

In parallel with that, I got a meeting with Dr. Richard Smith, who was the former editor of the British Medical Journal. It took me six months to get a meeting with him—because everyone’s trying to get a meeting with him—but I knew when I was reading his editorials as a medical student, he was always on the patient’s side, often to the anger of his colleagues and medical professionals. But he’d always be on the patient’s side. I knew that if I could just get a meeting, he’d get it. And sure enough, he got it and he agreed to new meetings. And then one day, he agreed to be chairman of our board of directors.

As you build that core team of world class people, it’s just easy to get people. Everyone then wants to join up.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on March 16, 2012 at 5:23 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Management Tips, Product Development, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

What role do universities play in the entrepreneurship ecosystem?

Entrepreneurship and innovation are being touted as a way forward for individuals faced with the challenges of the recession. We talked to Dr. Markus Perkmann, Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College Business School, about the role universities have to play in developing innovation to stimulate the economy.

What role do universities have to play related to entrepreneurship in the current economic climate?

It’s a highly contested question. A lot of people, some policy makers included, believe that universities can play a very big role in stimulating innovation, in the sense that the technologies being generated at universities could be commercialised and lead to new companies, job growth and so on. Having said that, a lot of the technologies that are generated at universities are at a very embryonic stage. Hence the value of a lot of the knowledge produced at universities, even if it’s patented, is quite low commercially speaking. The knowledge that’s being produced contributes to science, to public discussion in journals. Academics often focus their careers around publishing as much as possible,  so they are not always commercially-focused.

While commercialization has its place – and we have the evidence to prove it – the primary long-term role of universities remains education.  It’s about educating the workforce and developing highly skilled human capital, which in the long term will lead to innovation. This is not an immediate process as it takes graduates some time to grow into their jobs and contribute to innovation and growth.  Spin-out companies are more immediate – Imperial, for example, has generated 81 so far. Even though these firms make important contributions, it’s probably too much to expect universities to single-handedly turn around the economy by looking at them as a treasure of knowledge that’s just there on the shelves waiting to be activated.

What is really important is to have good universities that produce excellent science and provide first-class education. Close interaction between universities and industry can help achieve this. Our research suggests that there is a lot of value in collaboration between universities and companies. This helps academics to find new topics, and it may provide the ground for patents or other intellectual property that may get commercialized later down the line.

Are universities making best use of their intellectual property (IP)? How do you think universities could maximize the potential of their IP?

A long time ago, universities didn’t care about IP. And then around 1980 there was a law in the US that put universities in charge of their own IP and gave them a mandate to commercialise it. Since then, a whole movement has started of professionalising IP management at universities which has resulted in the emergence of Technology Transfer Offices. More recently, a lot of universities have realised they need to reintegrate TTOs with their broader business engagement strategies, which include collaboration with industry.

Increasingly universities are realising that not all collaborations need to focus on extracting as much IP as possible. In some cases, they need to be softer on IP and focus on collaborating. There are also examples where universities are relinquishing rights to IP companies when working together with companies because the proponents believe IP is too much of an overhead.

Overall, my view is: horses for courses. In some instances where it’s about developing new drugs, it’s about IP, so that’s clear cut. However, for more upstream research and development, the value of IP may be too low. Hence it may be better to say let’s do without it and make everything open. There are some examples in pharmaceutical R&D right now. This can make collaboration faster, more effective and more impactful because more people can draw on the results which are laid open.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on March 5, 2012 at 4:30 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Market Views, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Why I started Rapid Innovation Group

We recently sat down with Shields Russell, Principal and Founder of RIG, to talk about the company’s beginnings and his evolving thoughts on working with entrepreneurs.

Why did you start RIG?

“There are essentially three capabilities involved in starting a high growth technology company: solving a real problem for a customer; designing and building something that addresses it; and then taking the product to market.

“I’m not good at the whole equation. I am not a technologist or a product person. I’m interested in taking products to market, products that solve the right problem, by which I mean a problem that really matters to the customer and that they will willingly pay to resolve. 

“So when I started this project I wanted to create a specialist firm that was focused on the unique set of challenges that affect early stage, potentially scalable technology companies.

“The challenge was to find a business model that would enable us to develop and retain the expertise necessary to tackle these early stage issues, and in that way, RIG is quite innovative.

“I have never really considered working for someone else as a serious option. I like the freedom to create. That is what is important.”

Has your view on working with entrepreneurs has changed since you started RIG?

“I value blind faith and passion less. I appreciate much more the virtues of systematic business building and risk mitigation simply because I know that if more entrepreneurial companies adopted this type of approach, the probability of their success would be much higher.

“A lot of success still has more to do with luck – being in the right place at the right time – than it has with design. Passion is a pre-requisite but it is overrated as a prime driver of success. Lots of people are passionate – that doesn’t mean they are successful.

“Learning and the ability to iterate are far more important. Being an entrepreneur implies taking a risk but the smart entrepreneur is the one who knows how to limit and reduce risk.”

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on December 9, 2011 at 9:49 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)