Innovation Secrets with Jonathan Rosenthal

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

02.08.17

Episode Summary

Today’s guest on the Successful Pitch is Jonathan Rosenthal, he’s an expert at spotting trends and knowing exactly when to make an investment or launch a new startup. All the way back in 1978 he was aware that things were going to be disrupted when the airlines got deregulated and now he’s involved with looking at how things are being disrupted in the shipping industry from when products get shipped from China all the way here. He said, “When you look for industries with rapid innovation but their culture has people being slow adopters, they will then be an ideal target to go after.” He said, “There’s no difference between being too early when you launch and wrong, so timing is everything.” He’s all about collecting, curating, and analyzing data so you can make smart decisions. Enjoy the episode.

 

Listen To The Episode Here

 

Innovation Secrets with Jonathan Rosenthal

Hello and welcome to the Successful Pitch podcast. I’m really excited to have Jonathan Rosenthal on as the guest today. He’s an entrepreneur, an investor and what’s really interesting is, he’s a logistics innovator. You don’t find many of those around. He’s recognized as a top investor, entrepreneur, and supply chain expert, particularly where deregulation drives macro industry change. And he was retained by the federal court as a lead advisor in the Pacific Gas and Electric 2001 reorganization. He’s represented, get this, $16.5 billion of invested capital that he attained, the largest unsecured credit recovery in history. And he’s had similar roles in reorganizations of Kmart and other companies like that. He led a $28.5 billion of claims in the 2003 reorganization of United Airlines, so clearly he’s used to dealing with big numbers and big companies. Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you, thank you.

I’m always interested to hear how people got their start. So, you were a philosophy major and then went on to get your degrees in that but did you know when you were studying philosophy that you wanted to get into this kind of investing?

No, life is serendipitous and so, they always say, “Life is what happens when you’re planning for the future.” So, that’s a little bit of what happened to me. I got out of law school and started practicing law back in 1980 and that’s really all I ever wanted to do. I really wanted to be a lawyer and I loved the law, until I started practicing law. And when I started practicing law, I said that, “I only had one problem practicing law and that was staying awake.” I found it boring and it just wasn’t for me. I’m massively ADD and so I was bored with the practice after about three years. I worked for a large law firm, that may actually have been part of the problem, had I been on my own. I’m not very good at taking instruction.

But in 1983 I saw that there was going to be very significant macro change in the transportation system, as a result of the 1978 Deregulation Act of the airlines. That ’78 Deregulation Act meant that, the airlines and the Civil Aeronautics Board would be deregulated in 1983 and so everybody could fly wherever they wanted, they could charge whatever they wanted and I said, “That is going to be a huge opportunity.” And in fact, when I look back at my career over the last 30 plus years, what I’ve learned is, that where you can find an industry that has rapid innovation and that innovation is driven by something external, that externality can be technology. That externality can be regulation or deregulation. So, lots of things that can drive massive, rapid innovation.

But when you find an industry like that and then on top of it, the participants in that industry are slow adopters. And, they’re slow adopters partly culturally and partly because they have so much embedded infrastructure. When you find that kind of an industry and the airlines were a great example, that’s why I got involved there and that’s really where I started. So, I started in 1983, I had an idea. I started in my upstairs bedroom. My father loaned me $13,000, at the time $13,000 was a lot of money to him.

So, I started a company in 1983 that was a precursor, it ended up being the largest on demand national jet charter service in the country. We were the largest non-scheduled certificated carrier. So, the idea was, gosh, with deregulation, it’s going to be a lot harder to get around, because I predicted at the time, that airlines were going to fundamentally change as a result of deregulation, we were going to have a direct point-to-point system. So, instead of getting on an airplane in San Diego and going directly to Chicago, you were going to have to go through a hub. So, you would go from San Diego, perhaps to Denver, and then you would change planes and you’d go from Denver to Chicago. So, that’s a hub-and-spoke system, that’s a much, much more efficient way to move things. Fred Smith knew that when he started Federal Express. The airlines knew that when they had deregulation.

Let’s just take a minute there because there’s so much valuable information that’s so timely today. So, if you’re looking to see whether your idea is scalable and is the right time, because one of the key issues that I’m always telling everybody when they’re pitching is, why you and why now? And I think what you just tapped into is the whole answer to the, “why now?” and certainly, rapid innovation with slow adapters in the culture is the key hotspot and everybody understands what happened to the airline industry.

If you take a look around you can see that happening, for example with robotics replacing jobs in factories, right? There’s a lot of disruption happening with, in this case technology causing it, cars have been made the same way from high-priced union workers, that’s why there’s such upset over job losses. So, I think what you’re saying that you did back then is just as relevant to what’s going on today, just different reasons for the disruption.

Source: Unsplash

[Tweet “Find industry with rapid innovation and slow adaption”]

You’re 100% right, John and it is fundamental, that is never going to change. That’s not, when I say that you look for industries with rapid innovation and slow adopters, that is never going to change. There are going to be those opportunities in the world and they exist today and they existed 10 years ago, and they existed 50 years ago. You’re right that timing is quite important. I learned, I’ve made many investments. I’ve made a little over 100 investments over the course of the past 30 years. So, I’ve learned that there’s almost no perceptible difference between being too early and being wrong.

I love that. We’re going to tweet that out. That’s a great line. There’s no difference between too early and wrong, it’s all the same result, right?

It’s all the same result, so timing is important but there are a lot of other factors that come into play and so, when I look back at that first experience of building a company from scratch, literally from my upstairs bedroom and then going through three rounds of venture capital financing, I learned a lot about that. I knew nothing, I was a lawyer, I had never read a business plan.

Source: Pexels

[Tweet “No difference between being too early and wrong”]

I literally had to go to the library, get a book on how to write a business plan and really start from scratch. But at the end of the day and I hope from my few minutes with you, that anyone that listens to this, that one thing that they should take away, is that people are everything. The quality of the people you deal with, the relationships you develop are everything. It’s not about a good idea, although good ideas are helpful. It’s not just about timing, although timing is very helpful. It’s about surrounding yourself with great people. People that are knowledgeable, people that are incredibly persistent, that won’t give up in the face of all odds. People who are fundamentally honest and are fair minded. Doesn’t matter how good your idea is, if you don’t have good people, if you’re not surrounding yourself with good people and that could be consultants, it can be partners, whatever it is. If you don’t have good people around you, your likelihood of success is quite low.

It’s a great, great takeaway. I had one investor tell me, “We’re investing in the jockey, the person, not the horse, which is the idea.” And you’ve just underlined it and said it in a whole other way. So many people think, oh I’m going to get funding or I’m going to get someone to hire me because I have a great idea or because my app is so cool or this is the perfect time to fix this problem. All of that’s good but if you’re not the right people to execute it and have the tenacity and grit required to not give up when it gets tough, then you’re never going to make it, that’s really valuable information and insights with all your experience.

And the other part of that is, that everything is tough, everything is tough. I often joke that somebody out there has all the easy deals, because I’ve gotten none of them.

That’s funny. It may look on the outside looking in that it looks easy, right? But it’s, you don’t have a sense of what it all took. Jonathan, I love people like you who are great story-tellers. So, can you tell us a story of what you did with Kmart in that reorganization because I think that’s so helpful, so many people talk about the need to pivot and I’m, that’s just another work for reorganization in a way, yes?

Yup. Well, all of these have their own stories. I was fortunate enough, frankly honored, by the shareholders of Kmart to be asked to reorganize the company back whenever that was, early 2000s, when they went into bankruptcy. So, it’s an interesting phenomena, you show up, and keep in mind that when an industry is going through massive transformation or a company’s going through massive transformation, they try to fix the problems on their own and many times, they might be successful. If it gets to a point where I get involved, it means that all their ideas failed, otherwise I wouldn’t be there.

So, when I showed up at Kmart, it was the day after the bankruptcy filing. They literally had no CEO, the CEO had been let go. They had a rented CFO, they had a consultant that was a part-time CFO. They had sort of a chief operating officer that shuttled back and forth and the executive suite was empty. So, when I showed up, with my team of, I think I had five, four or five people with me and we sat down with what was left of the management team. I asked the question, “So, tell me how we’re doing?” And they said, “Well, we’re losing about $100 million a month.” And I said, “Well, that certainly can’t last long.”

So, we had to do something quickly. This is the equivalent of someone arriving in the emergency room and bleeding out of their aorta. They may have lots of problems, they may have a cut foot, and a cut hand, and a cut head, but you got to fix the big problems first. So, at a $100 million a month of losses, we had to do some things very quickly.

With Kmart losing 100 million dollars a month, we said, “Let’s take three buckets. Let’s take a bucket of stores.” We had I think 2,800 stores. “Let’s take out a bucket of stores, let’s put in the first bucket, the bucket of stores that are making money, in the third bucket, we’ll put the bucket, we’ll put the stores that are losing money. And the middle bucket, let’s put the buckets that are sort of on the edge. Let’s close all the stores that are losing money.” And so in a period of about 90 days, I think we closed 600 stores. That was very, very tough.

I must tell you that doing what we do, which is changing industries. We’re involved in transformation of industries, you’ve got to make some tough decisions. I view what we do, I view what I do as an agent of change. And so, by definition, if you’re an agent of change, you have to make some tough decisions but I will say, and so you have to keep some distance, right, because you’re making professional decisions, much like a doctor is making a professional decision about getting too involved with his patient.

It’s triage time.

It’s triage time. But I must say that the night we closed 800 stores, I had a tough time sleeping. Because, I think we lost 30,000 employees. But without that Kmart wouldn’t have survived.

Exactly, you’d be losing everybody, right so?

Yes, so my saving grace there was that I thought about the 225,000 employees that we did keep. So, Kmart was interesting and it took a while to kind of get through the issues, but you have to start with the big problems. The same was true of a company like United or Pac Gas, you really have to start with those things that are really going to move the deal. And so you focus on those.

Now, more current day, you’ve got so many exciting things going on, starting with, you were appointed, just this year, to the board of Global Infrastructure Solutions and Mayor Garcetti in Los Angeles here, appointed you as the Sustainable Freight Advisory Committee by the federal DOT to the Marine Transportation System. Tell us about what all you’re doing with that world.

Again back to my core thesis, which is, try to find industries that are going through rapid innovation and are populated by participants that are slow adopters. About five years ago, I looked around and I said, “Okay, what’s the next business? What’s the next industry that’s big, that’s going to go through rapid innovation and is relatively slow to adopt?” And what I focused on was the freight ecosystem. That is moving things from place to place, moving things from a manufacturing facility in China to a store shelf in Ohio. That’s what I think of as the freight ecosystem. Some people call it the, “supply chain.” I don’t like to use the word, “supply chain” because it’s really not a supply “chain,” which implies that something is linear, that the path is linear.

Yes it does.

And that it is a series of links, with one link being mostly related to the adjacent length so, that notion of supply chain is incorrect. It leaves people with a false impression. In the ecosystem, the freight ecosystem, everything is interrelated. So, whether it’s a ship, or a dock, or a warehouse, or a truck, or a train, it is all interrelated to the environmental impacts, the economic impacts, the labor issues that are associated with that ecosystem, so it’s a network, it has a network effect. It’s a system, it’s actually a system of systems.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do over the past five years, we made a number of investments. We acquired a midsize third party logistics provider, which is basically a warehouse operator. We have warehouses all over the country. We acquired a number of trucking companies, both long-haul and in the freightage business, that’s the movement of containers from the port to the first distribution point. We invested in data analytics within the logistics base and we’ve invested in real estate in port related real estate infrastructure. That freight ecosystem as an industry is going through massive disruption. It’s going through disruption for a whole bunch of reasons, not least of which is the introduction of the internet. So, things as you know, people are not going to the store to buy things. But that’s changing everything. It’s changing how things are manufactured, where they’re manufactured. It changes how you actually order things, how you get bids.

So, just in simplistic terms, instead of having to deliver goods made in China to a retail store, now they’re having to deliver them to an Amazon distribution center, would that be an example of what you’re talking about?

That or to your house.

Oh, right, okay.

So, the entire distribution system changes, right, it would be, now years ago, your manufacturing might have occurred down the street. You might have been a company here in LA and you manufacture things in a factory in Riverside. Now, all of a sudden you go on the internet and you get bids from companies in Vietnam, and in China, and India, and Korea, and God only knows where. So, the distribution channel has gotten much more complex. Lots of change, lots of innovation there. Then you add to that, things like Global Positioning, GPS. You add to that big data, the ability to curate, collect and curate, and analyze a lot of data. Add to that the Internet of things, which means that every garment, every box, every container, every ship, every truck is going to produce data.

Source: Pexels

[Tweet “Collect, Curate and Analyze Data”]

Wow.

Where am I? Where have I been? Who owns me? What temperature am I? Have I been tampered with? It’s going to produce lots and lots of data. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Today, in the freight business, there are approximately 100 million containers, sea-bound containers. So, going around the world, these big metal boxes, they’re approximately 100 million containers. Less than 1% of those containers are smart.

Wow, that’s, you would think by now that’d be at least half. That’s a big problem to solve, that’s for sure.

Less than 1%. So, the chassis pools, there in, just in the Los Angeles area, there’s about 80,000 chassis. There’s probably less than two or 3% of those chassis had any kind of a brain. Again, where am I? Where am I going? How much weight am I carrying? Who owns me? All of that kind of stuff.

And is the reason why it’s such a small percentage Jonathan, is because no one wanted to invest in it? They didn’t see the return on investment over the time to be able to track that better?

The question you’re really asking is, the side that we talked about a little bit earlier, which is slow adoption. Why is it, that there’s rapid innovation, we know that, we know there’s very rapid innovation within the freight ecosystem but there’s very slow adoption? Slow adoption in an industry can be driven by a couple things. One, it can be driven by culture. So, just generally, the culture of the trucking business, the culture of the shipping business, the culture of the warehouse business, is generally a bit of a slow adopter. It’s not exactly the Silicon Valley. So, it’s a little different culture.

But it’s not just that. It’s also the embedded infrastructure. So, to be able to innovate rapidly, you have to spend money. And when you have money invested, think about the freight ecosystem and think about how much has been invested in the freight ecosystem, how much has been spent. The last terminal that was built in Southern California was about three billion dollars and we have 14 terminals here in Southern California. That’s a lot of embedded infrastructure.

Then you think about the highways, the rail, the trucks, the bridges, the cranes at the terminals, the ports. All of that infrastructure is embedded, stranded costs. So, you can’t just flip a switch and say, “Okay, there were lots of better ways to do this.” The technology is available and becoming more and more accessible every day but it’s not so easy to do. I mean, not a lot of people want to write a check for two billion dollars and build a new terminal.

And that’s what’s required to make those containers quote, “smart”?

No, that’s a different chute. Today we have 100 million containers across the world, to make them smart means you’ve got to have probably new containers or at least have technology implanted on those containers. That’s expensive, and no one has been willing to write that check yet. But it will come.

Well, you almost have to do an analysis don’t you of, how much is it costing us with damaged goods, lost goods, things that are overheated, whether it’s art or wine or whatever that needs to be measured with all those details that could have been not lost or insurance having to cover it, that the return on investment would come in three years, five years, whatever, right? I’m assuming that’s the thinking that goes into it.

Well, it’s partly that and it’s also, it doesn’t do you any good to collect a lot of data and not be able to do anything with it.

Got it, so that goes back to what you said earlier, you need to collect and curate it. That’s really the key.

You have to be able to curate it, and you have to be able to analyze it. So, we’re actually working very, very closely with IBM’s Watson team because they have developed the Watson system, which is quite good at absorbing a lot of data and comparing that data and making sense of it, being able to analyze it. The Holy Grail is being able to take all of that data and predict the future. Let me give you an example, so let’s say you’re a manufacture and I can come to you and I can say, “John, based on all the data that we see in the marketplace. And that includes weather data, traffic data, data about other shipping companies, data about what’s happening on the oceans, data about what’s going on inside all of the warehouses. Based on all these millions and millions of pieces of data, we determined that your shipment has a 14% chance of being two weeks late.”

Interesting, almost like predicting whether a plane’s going to be on time or not.

You hit it on the head. I didn’t make this stuff up. I stole it from the airlines. The airlines are actually quite good, when you get on an airplane and that airplane is full, airlines are running at 90% plus load factors, when that airliners full, you gotta ask yourself, how did they do that? How did they know, just exactly the number of seats and how many people wouldn’t show up? Well, they were able to predict it. Now, sometimes they miss. But the airline knows exactly how many times they miss. So, when they pay you $100 to take the next flight, they knew that there was some likelihood and they have predictive analytics to tell them on a certain number of flights, we’re going to have to pay a certain number of dollars but it’s better in the long run because we keep our airplanes full. That’s an analysis that you can’t do without curating the data.

Great, great insights. That’s really fascinating stuff. Well, do you have a book that you would recommend someone to read about how to be a better entrepreneur or just how to be more aware of spotting these types of trends you’ve talk about?

I’ve got some great books, I read a lot, so there are some wonderful books. I think if I had to choose two, one I’m sure most of your readers have read called, “Good to Great.”

It’s a wonderful book. I would read that at least a couple of times. But the other one that a lot of people haven’t read is, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.”

When you think about innovation, a lot of people think innovation is an epiphany. That someone wakes up one day with an epiphany and they say to themselves, “Oh my God, I just figured out the answer to the world’s problems, here it is.” When you dissect innovation, when you look back at history and you say, “Okay, the computer was obviously, everyone would agree, a terrific innovation. How did that happen?” And you begin to dissect that and you learn that innovation is the result of many, many steps. It is an incremental process. The computer started back in the early 1800s.

Yes, I was watching a movie about that whole thing of during the war and even before, so the 1800s is even earlier than people anticipate but yeah, it’s taken, or the new movie “Hidden Figures” about how NASA used it by hand. So, all of that innovation doesn’t come overnight as you said. I love that.

But when you look at innovation and that could be everything from, the innovators, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” is probably the book that I learned this from, things like the lead pencil. Things that really changed the world in a pretty interesting way but when you dissect those, those big innovations in history, you find out that it was an incremental process and it involved many, many people and many steps. We sometimes say, “Wilbur and Orville Wright invented the airplane.” And then you look at the history, you read about the invention of the airplane, you find out, oh no, no, wait a second. They were at the tipping point and so they get a lot of credit but really they were a piece of the puzzle.

So, I like the innovators, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.”

Yes, well you are certainly busy and you’ve got your hands full with everything, all the innovation you’re doing now. But if someone was ever interested in possibly having you invest or come in and do what you did for Kmart, what’s the best way for people to engage with you?

That’s a good question, probably LinkedIn or something like that, so I’m on LinkedIn.

Well, we can certainly put that in the show notes.

Yeah and again my real focus these days is not doing turnarounds of companies as much as investing in the freight ecosystem because it has such a huge impact on the economy, on jobs, on the environment. It’s really been a fascinating ride.

Great, well Jonathan, I can’t thank you enough for being a guest on this show today.

I’m delighted. I appreciate having the opportunity.

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Tactical Thinking with Moran Bar-Kochva

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

26.07.17

Episode Summary

Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Moran Bar-Kochva, who has a law degree from Tel Aviv and a Harvard MBA. He is bi-coastal now, in the States, investing in all kinds of new, interesting technologies. Everything from 3-D holograms on your phone, to how to get food from farm to table in an efficient way. They actually are doing that for airBNB’s. He has some great lines here about confidence and passion are two important parts of a pitch. But you can’t be arrogant. He said, “We really are looking to see how you think when you have to approach a challenging solution.” He talks about the three types of I’s, of personalities. First one’s those are innovators. The second one is those who are imitators, and I’m going to let you find out on the podcast what the third I is. Enjoy.

 

Listen To The Episode Here

 

Tactical Thinking with Moran Bar-Kochva

Hi and welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Moran Bar-Kochva, who is the managing partner at Unison Capital. He has a very impressive background. He has his law degree from Tel Aviv University, and his MBA from Harvard, and he has been involved in a lot of startups. It’s a bi-coastal venture capital firm that backs transformational entrepreneurs. We’re going to ask him all about that. Moran, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

I ask my guests to take us on a story of origin. When you were studying law, did you decide “I’m going to take a couple years off and then go get my MBA”? Or how did you get from Tel Aviv to Harvard’s MBA program?

In a simple, non-simple Israeli way. In Israel, we tend to have a small less formal society. Everyone knows everyone and formative years, in reality, tend to the be the ones that you serve in the military. For me, after the service in reality, the formative time was working with Ehud Barak, who was the former Chief of Staff of Israel. On his campaign, leading in for his election in ‘1999 as the ninth Israeli prime minister. I was very involved. I was his assistant, I was involved in the campaign in different positions and capacities. I have to say, for the first time, after being in the trenches, so to speak, I had the opportunity to see things from a relatively macro-level to kind of better understand what’s going on around the world.

If you remember, the late ’90s were the era of technology, and Israel at that time became formed what I think now we tend to brand as the startup nation. In an interesting reversal of fortunes when Barak became prime minister, I kind of decided that it’s time to move to the private sector. I wanted to go into technology. I wanted to start a company or get involved in the venture business. I have to say, I didn’t know how. I had some experience, I studied technology in high school, but at that point I was not part of that, let’s call it, community. I think communities and networks are very important.

I had a friend who gave me a pretty sharp idea. He said, “Maybe you should join the press. Maybe you should join the media to cover the technology industry. And by doing that, you’ll be able to learn and study a lot about what’s going on.” At that time, Israel had basically one media outlet that was covering the business world on a day to day basis. It actually gave me a pretty interesting vantage point, both through things that were done in Israel, but mostly to a lot of the connection between Israel and the United States. I covered a lot of the Israeli startups and Israeli companies that were traded then on the stock exchange. Mostly on NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange.

That, by the way, made me think more and more about MBA. Then I left the paper, I joined a startup that I was one of the early founders of. That experience and after selling that startup in 2003, made me think that I would like to stay in the States, I would like to get a better understanding for how you actually manage and how you actually run business on a global scale. I thought that an MBA would be a good opportunity to do so.

I’m not sure I have exactly the same point of view today. I think that there is a different, value proposition for MBA’s, for someone who’s coming from abroad to someone who is born, bred, and spent most of his career in one of the economic centers in the States. For someone like me, it was a phenomenal experience, and HBS in particular, was just one of the most flourishing, fruitful, exciting things that I’ve done in my life. Definitely the basis for a lot of my community over here in the States.

Why don’t we talk a little bit about what you founded on the Harvard Business School campus back in 2003, The Contemporaries, this non-profit society. I think it’s always fascinating to hear how people like you are not only interested in making a lot of money with your investments, but also in giving back. Let’s just take a minute and talk about how that came about.

I have to say that part of it, again, I’ll have to go back to when I was in the service. The services tend to be very focused on very narrow-minded things altogether. I was looking for opportunities to broaden my horizons. One of the things I got very excited about after the service was contemporary art. Through different friends and activities back home, I became a little bit more involved with the contemporary scene in Israel. In some sort of natural progression, I started collecting art, in the sense of promoting and helping artists that I knew, buying their work, just to support them and their livelihood.

When I moved to the States, I wanted to continue the same kind of idea. I thought that supporting art, especially contemporary art, especially young, contemporary artists, is a really important aspect of what we do on a day to day. My big discovery when I was in school was that in reality, a lot of the people who were in school with me, highly educated, smart, ambitious, knowledgeable, many of them even have actual academic background in art, didn’t have an actual interest in contemporary art. They would go maybe to the MoMA, they might go to some other museums, but they wouldn’t actually go to the galleries that exhibit artists that are more or less their peers in age. They wouldn’t consider, even, actually buying art from, again, someone who’s in their age group.

I thought that the reason was that the contemporary tends to have this mumbo jumbo and lingo and it has some sort of mystique and mystery around it. I thought that with some education we can bridge the gap between contemporary art and the rest of us. With a friend from business school, a guy by the name of Fraud Newreed, we decided that it’s something worthwhile starting a nonprofit to focus on it. A nonprofit that will promote contemporary art, add to the knowledge, the education, the concept of contemporary art collecting, promote the concept involved with contemporary art. Tell people what’s the value of contemporary art. Why should we support contemporary and contemporary artists?

That’s it. We started in business school as a small group of friends that were just inclined to go out and look at art and artists and meet young artists in Boston. Then we moved to New York and it became a bit more institutionalized and a bit more defined in its value proposition and also in its ability to actually do stuff. New York, I think, is the biggest hotbed of art and contemporary artists today around the world.

It’s so true. Certainly, artists in Miami and then L.A. and San Francisco are also doing their part with all the new museums and architecture being built. I brought this up because I think it’s so important for the listeners to realize that investors and people as successful as you are, are people who have other interests. If you really want to develop a relationship with someone like you, to potentially invest in their startup, I think it’s so important to have something else to talk about that you might share a passion for. I don’t know if anybody’s ever pitched you and done their due diligence and brought up the shared love of contemporary art or not, but I imagine if they have, it certainly starts the relationship off on a good step.

Absolutely. I think that you’re touching on a very fundamental aspect of human interaction. Find something that connects you and someone else. It could be a specific network that both of you are involved. That’s one of the reasons, for example, that groups like Harvard Business School, but also like other different groups tend to be pretty successful and cohesive. But it could be just issues or topics that you share. I think that’s something that is definitely worthwhile researching before you meet someone. “What do I have in common with that person?”

Yes.

Maybe you like art. Maybe you like music. Maybe you like comics or movies. Then use that, both as an icebreaker, but also as a way to connect and make it much more personable and discuss and create a story from something that is maybe a purposeful interaction, where basically you just want to get something.

Yes. Right. People can always tell the difference. The more specific your story is with details, the better. That leads us right into you hear so many pitches and you’ve invested in so many companies over the last several years, both here and in New York. What’s interesting for you is that someone doesn’t have to be based on the east or west coast for you to feel like you can get to know them, since you’re bi-coastal. What do you think makes a good pitch when you hear a pitch?

I think the most important aspect of a good pitch, eventually when I think about it, is confidence. It’s the ability of someone to convey a strong understanding and knowledge and power in that particular domain. Confidence is one word, maybe another word is passion. I think that it’s not necessarily a pitch that’s done by one person, by the way. I think that that’s somewhat of a mistake. I think that a lot of wise people would be wise in reality to include more than one person in a pitch, especially for a technology startup, for example. It’s pretty clear that not everyone knows everything, and we should assume that nobody’s perfect. If that’s the case, you can absolutely bring on board your cofounders and even early employees that are relevant for the valued proposition.

Then the idea is to show that you are passionate, you’re knowledgeable, you know what you are talking about, you are pretty coherent about your company, and you also know what you don’t know. I think that people who are almost, in some respect, over-confident, they have an answer for every question, and the answer is almost too fast. I tend to be a bit taken back by that, because I know that that’s something that doesn’t happen. There are some rare cases, I have to say. I did see, and I even invest in people, who really knew everything about their domain of expertise, but because some of those people are just superstars.

Actually, research documented that there was one case of a hedge fund manager, investor, basically very similar to what Jeff Bezos did, who during his day job, he researched two very minute details, a very particular business opportunity, and then went forth and actually followed through. It’s true, he knew way more than I did and way more than anybody else on that domain, but that’s pretty rare. In most cases, it’s important also to be able to say, “Listen. Here’s what I know and here’s what I don’t know, but here is how I’m thinking of getting the answers. Now, I won’t be able to get those answers today, but I’ll be able to get the answers with the following resources.”

Source: Pexels

[Tweet “Confidence and Passion are key elements to a pitch”]

Nice. I think that’s a really great tip right there, is what the investors are looking for is someone who’s confident, but not arrogant, and more importantly, they’re really looking to see how do you think? If you don’t have the answer to something, how are you going to think to get it? Any time you can show how you think when you give a pitch, I think that’s what they look for in school, right? Teaching people to think for themselves and not just recite information back, so how you approach problems would be, I think, a key criteria of what you’re saying here.

Exactly. I think that … I’m, personally, especially impressed by what I call “tactical thinking.” People who actually think about it, not in a wide range, kind of almost 30,000 miles out in the sky, but people who actually think about it tactically. “How can I be able achieve certain things?” And have a clear understanding and good ideas. Again, nobody knows everything, but you need to be able to think clearly about how you tactically are going to resolve and approach certain challenges.

Nice.

That’s something that conveys a lot of confidence for me, by the way. Because if I understand that you, the entrepreneur, have thought about it, and also thought about how you actually going to approach obstacles and challenges, it makes me understand that you’ll be able to deal with it on a grand scheme.

Source: Pexels

[Tweet “Show How You Think When You Solve A Problem”]

Fantastic. Unison Capital is venture capital, Can you share with us what you? Do you series A, you don’t do any C, I’m guessing?

I tend to stay away from C, but again, the way that I frame it is the following. I would like and we would like to get involved in companies where a lot of the questions are already answered. We can basically think and help the entrepreneur or the team of entrepreneurs to take the company to commercialization.

Got it.

Which is, in reality, the main value proposition of people like us.

Here’s the money so you can scale, in other words. Is that right?

Here’s the money so you can scale. Here’s the money to help you recruit the right people. Here’s the know how to recruit the right people. For example, I think that recruiting a team, a very early stage team, is something that people like me, at least, have a hard time to do. But I can help in the stage where this is already an early team, the basic product was done, or at least came to a certain level of maturity, where you actually need to start thinking about executives, and about people who will be able to help to take it to actual launch. At that point, I think our value proposition is real and meaningful.

Nice. Let’s talk about some of the companies you’ve invested in. The one that caught my eye is getsourcery.com, because they have airBNB as a client. Can you tell us what that pitch was like, what Get Sourcery does?

Get Sourcery is mostly Sourcery. Sourcery is a company started by a very tenacious and I would say powerful entrepreneur called Na’ama Moran. Funny enough, we shared the first and last name, who was also by coincidence also from Israel. Na’ama was looking like a lot of other entrepreneur these days in markets that are ripe for change. Markets that basically have the ability to use technology or information technology to create value. In her case, what she focused on was the market for food, in the foodservice industry. When you think about restaurants, catering, any kind of food service business, how do they actually source the food that eventually they bring us all the way to the table?

The concept of farm to table, it’s much deeper and much more complicated in reality than that great slogan, “Farm to table.”

I imagine there’s a few steps along the way.

There are a few steps along the way. A lot of them can be done in a better way, more efficient way with technology. Sourcery was built exactly around that concept. How can we create more efficiencies? How we can bring better food, how we can understand and make things more transparent, both for, let’s say, chefs and restaurateurs, as much as it is for the farms, farmers, and the distributors that actually do the work of taking it from one point to another. Na’ama has taken that concept one step further. Nowadays, she’s actually offering a new, really interesting, I can’t say too many words, but a really interesting idea of distribution directly from large warehouse stores all the way to the restaurants.

Wow.

In a way that is much more transparent and also much more financially efficient than the other options today.

I see that she won 2017’s top woman in food service technology. Clearly you invested in a great team there. How is it that she’s connected to airBNB, with Sourcery?

airBNB is a customer of Sourcery. airBNB, like many other growing startups, they have their own kitchen, where they offer food to their employees. They need that under their hat. They also need to use someone who will help them to source food. That’s basically the value proposition for Sourcery for airBNB. The question of how they are connected is one of the big advantages of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is actually a relatively small place. I’m not even sure what exactly was the connection, but I’m pretty certain that one of the members of the Sourcery team somehow met either the chef or one of the people involved with airBNB.

That’s great social proof, isn’t it, to have that as a client for the next round of funding and everything else?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Let’s talk about another. You have so many so it’s a little challenging.

Maybe I’ll pick and choose, if I can.

Of course.

I’ll maybe mention another really cool company that I’m very excited and very passionate and quite involved with. A company called Ostendo. Ostendo, in Latin, means “to show.” Ostendo is a company that, I have to say, is one of those unique experiences for an investor. Eventually, all of us would love to see a relatively fast turn of investment to a return. Obviously, if you can invest money today and get a great return for your money within two years, you’ve done very well. But the reality is that that’s not the case. When you think about it in Israel, and maybe throughout a lot of the technology world a few days ago, the big news were about acquisition of a company called Mobileye by Intel, for 15 and a change billion dollars, which is not a small amount of money.

Mobileye is an Israeli technology company that was dealing with computer vision focusing on the car industry. For many years, I think it’s a company that celebrated, its 15th or 16th year around the time of this transaction. It’s a company, that for many, many years, I think for more than a decade even, was just in development stages. Until they actually reach a point where the market was mature enough, as well as their technology. Maybe I’ll do a little caveat now and later we’ll wrap it in another way.

I talk about one of the theories that I tend to follow as an investor and also I discuss it in a book that I’m writing these days. When you think about it, I always say that in technology investment, but it’s true for almost any kind of development, there’s a good theory that will take the three I’s. Three types of people that start with the letter I.

The first are innovators. Second are imitators. Third are idiots. Let’s start by saying that being an idiot is probably not a useful thing to do. Idiocy, in that aspect, is when you come to someone that was done and overdone, and you tried to find some other way to do it, where the market is in reality mostly exhausted.

Source: Pexels

[Tweet “3 Types of people-Innovators, Imitators and Idiots”]

When you think about innovation and imitation, both of them are places where there is a way to create value, but it’s worthwhile to remember, both for us as investors, and also of course, even more so as entrepreneurs and people who want to do something, that the value generated by imitation, is substantially higher than innovation. It’s interesting, because I think in general, in our business and in society in general, we tend to elevate, almost to a mythological level innovation and innovators. But eventually the people who actually change the face of things and make reality, tend to not be innovators. Other people who almost came and did something out of nothing, but mostly the people who actually took things that were created before them and made a powerful, easy to digest reality out of them.

One example for that, I think that is pretty good, is a band called The Beatles. When you think about it, The Beatles, although, in their relatively large work, you can see certain aspects where they did actually innovated things. One example would be the use of Indian motifs and Indian music into their western rock music or western pop music. But altogether, they mostly built on building blocks that were created before them. In the blues, in the early rock music. They basically just took all of it and were able to place it in this perfectly amazing music that was both unique and still exciting and at the same time, relatively easy to digest.

I think that’s the reason why they became the quintessential rock band of all time. In similar ways, we can think about the emergence of Google, as a search engine, compared to a bunch of other search engines that came earlier. Or to the emergence of Facebook as a social network compared to Friendster and a bunch of other networks that actually I think the Jonathan Abrams from Friendster needs to get that award of innovator of the entire social networking world or industry. Eventually the people who actually reap all the value, most of the value, from that innovation were the founders of Facebook, and to a lesser extent, the founders of a company like Myspace and LinkedIn in the professional world. We can go on and on.

It’s interesting. What you’re saying, if I’m hearing you correctly, is you don’t have to be an innovator to be successful. If you imitate something and put your own spin on it, you can still be successful. Would that be accurate?

More than that. Even more than that I would say that, in reality, not only that imitators can be very successful, they can probably even be more successful.

I think that when we think about it from a more macro point of view, eventually the imitators are the one who actually make the world that we see and shaped around us, rather than any innovators.

Well, I can even bring it back to the art world, right?

Absolutely.

You can look at certain artists.

I think that, again, these things are a theory that in reality works very well in all those worlds. You can apply it, of course, like I just did for The Beatles, you can easily discuss how someone like Jeff Koons and a bunch of other artists, that are immensely successful and relatively known today, are eventually people who mostly stood on the shoulders of people who preceded them and actually innovated certain aspects of art. We can even discuss of how certain aspects of the real innovation that Andy Warhol did, eventually materialized way after his own death.

Yes.

It takes time for us to actually digest, to actually accept innovation.

Now we’re back to the innovation that Ostendo is doing with your phone and tablets doing 3-D holograms, my goodness.

Even before that, the founder of Ostendo, Dr. Hussein El-Ghoroury, who is a pretty fascinating force of nature for an entrepreneur, a decade ago was already working and thinking about how we can create a technology that will be able to offer us the level of visual experience that will make the mobile experience really immense and powerful. Think about it, he did it around the same time that Apple released the iPhone, so that was pretty early. That was just the time we started actually experiencing video and other visual content on our mobile. He was already saying that the technology that we’re using, basically technologies like LCD, are a bit outdated. We need to rethink the entire display technologies.

What he did, and I can’t say too many words, because it’s still a company that is very much under the radar, was completely rethink the way that we generate shape and consume light or, even more accurately, visual content. One of the outcomes of that, and it’s something that was seen in the past, was basic, real 3-D holograms. Something that all of us kind of experienced since Star Wars and ever since, but in reality, what we mostly saw were things like Tupac and Michael Jackson, which are basically what we call smoke and mirrors. It’s literally the use of smoke and mirrors in order to create the illusion of a 3-D hologram.

What Ostendo’s doing is completely different and I will maybe stop at that point.

Okay. Fantastic. Do you have a book that you would recommend, either about life or startups or anything that you find inspiring?

There are so many. There’s one big that I would highly recommend. I think it’s one of the most fascinating that I read, I have to say, recent years. It’s a book by Yuval Noah Harari. He’s an historian who wrote about evolutionary history. Again, it’s a very macro-level thinking about who we are and how we were actually shaped to what we are nowadays. It’s called “Sapiens,” and I’ll tell you what’s the full name, for people to find it. It’s called “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

It’s not very brief, it’s about 400 pages, but it should be a pretty easy read and an interesting one.

Another book that I recommend, it’s called “Super Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.” It was written by a Wharton professor called Philip Tetlock.

Nice. We’ll be sure to put both of those in the show notes. Can you tell us anything about your upcoming book or is it still a secret?

It’s basically a work in progress. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time. Eventually we are very much and I apologize for all of my military metaphors-

No, I like it.

We tend to come from the trenches, at least for me. Once you are in the trenches, and I have to say that technology startups are always a very intense experience. You tend to, as I said, to think tactically and have very narrow-minded focus on making something successful. I was trying, a few years ago, to think about it in a more macro way. Ask myself, “What are the things that actually allow certain companies to be successful or certain entrepreneurs to be successful, and which aren’t?” Then I start formulating them into different ideas. One of them is those three I’s: innovators, imitators, and idiots concept. Another one is something I called the “blowfish strategy,” which basically means that the trick for a lot of startups, which are by nature, relatively small, is to find ways to make themselves look and act larger.

Nice.

It’s kind of a blowfish trick.

I love that analogy.

Yeah. It’s a good one. It even looks nice. In the book, I’m trying to offer different ideas of how to do that. How you as a small startup, can actually become bigger. How you can actually create an efficient process of growing fast.

Love it.

I have a lot of other kind of concept and ideas that maybe we can talk about in another-

I would love that. When your book is ready. I can see the cover of your book already is a blowfish.

Exactly.

That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for being a wonderful guest and sharing your insights and all the exciting companies that you’re funding. I think we’ve learned a tremendous amount. I’m going to remember the three I’s forever. I love that.

Thank you.

Thanks again.

Remember, don’t be an idiot.

Yes, I’ll try. Thanks.

All right. And thank you.

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Finding The Hero Inside All Of Us with Ben Way

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

19.07.17

Episode Summary

Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Ben Way. He wrote a book about robots taking over our jobs and he’s working on a second book about artificial intelligence becoming artificial consciousness But he’s got an incredible story beyond all those accomplishments, which includes going to the White House, raising a lot of money, being named one of the most influential entrepreneurs of 2016 from the UK, he’s the co-founder, COO of Digitzs company that is disrupting the way we’re going to be making payments in the future, and he said, “when you have a pitch,” and he hears lots of them, as he also runs his own incubator, “you need to be concise, you need to show traction, and you need to have a team.” Be, show, and have. Really great advice there. And he also talks about selling a dream, and that’s the best way to get the best people on your team. Enjoy the episode.

 

Listen To The Episode Here

 

Finding The Hero Inside All Of Us with Ben Way

 

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of The Successful Pitch. I’m very excited to have Ben Way on the show. Ben is a serial entrepreneur and a best-selling author who is best known for his appearance on Secret Millionaire, the Startup Kids, and he was a cast member on Start-ups: Silicon Valley. He started his first company at the young age of 15 and he’s gone on to raise over £25 million in his teens. Yes, he is from the UK and that made him one of the first dot-com millionaires. His first book was “Jobocalypse,” which is taking the concepts of apocalypse and putting it into the job world, he’s got a second book coming out that he’s going to share with us what he’s doing. And most interestingly, he’s involved with a new company called Digitzs, which is disrupting the whole way we pay for things. Ben, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

I’d love to hear your story of origin. So how did you, at a young age of 15, decide that you were going to do your first startup?

Well, it actually came, like many of these things, quite accidentally. I had actually been pseudo running a business from the age of about nine because I grew up on a farm. And we had chickens, so I did a small cash up and I bought chickens and I sold their eggs.

Then luckily, or unluckily, depending on the way you look at it, I actually think luckily, I was diagnosed with dyslexia very early on. So I had severe problems reading and writing, etcetera, etcetera, early days of school and was given a laptop. And by getting that laptop, that kind of changed my life because back in the day, these laptops were very unusual so I got very good at computers at a very early age, and then people started asking me for help. And I thought, well I can charge, you know, 15 bucks an hour, and that was better than getting wet in a paper round every day, so that’s how I started a business.

I love it. It’s interesting because we always sometimes feel like we have some disadvantage, but you’ve been able to figure out a way to turn that into something that gave you some other focus that obviously you’ve been extremely successful. So you became this computer consultant at 15 and then you raised £25 million at 19. Were you living in the States when you did that?

No, no. I was actually in the UK–

But the company was based … the VCs that invested you were based in Jersey, is that right?

Yes, but there’s two Jerseys–

Got it. Fair enough. Well most venture capitalists or even angel investors I know are not, you know, it’s all about the team and so how did you overcome the objection of your age?

Well one of the beautiful things was, I mean first of all I couldn’t even understand why anybody would want to invest in me. I’d never considered investment, but I had happened to be on a very big TV show in the UK. And after that TV show, some investors rang me up and said, “We have money to spend, do you have any good ideas?” And I was like, “Well good ideas has never been the issue, so why don’t we talk?” And that’s how that started, so it’s always very different when a VC approaches you because they’ve already pre-qualified you.

Well, that’s the advantage of getting on television. I’ve done some television myself for my book and I know that once people see you on TV, it’s a whole other level of credibility. Well, the idea that you decided to create is online shopping comparison technology called Pulsar, which I think is really worth noting because that probably gave you some of the expertise for what you’re doing now at Digitzs, yes?

Indeed, indeed. You know, Pulsar was basically the first ever e-commerce search engine, so a bit like Google Shopping. So that gave me a lot of insight into the commerce space, and that’s why Digitzs is so exciting because Digitzs, really being focused with platforms and payments, really allows platforms and e-commerce synergies to do payments with a whole new set of tools at their disposal. So it’s not a space I ever thought I would be involved in, but when you’re actually involved in it, it’s fascinating.

Well, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the fact that you also won the New Business Millennium Young Entrepreneur of the year in 2000 by Gordon Brown giving you that. And then you’ve advised both the White House and the UK on technology. I don’t know that that is something that a lot of people can claim they’ve done both. So can you paint a picture for us of what it was like to go to the White House?

Yeah, well I mean it was quite funny because I’d been advising the US Embassy in the UK through the Undersecretary of Commerce Robert Shapiro and Robert called me up one day and said, “You know, we’re working on this thing called digital mobile.” Because this is back in the day when everything in the US was analog and we were digital in Europe. “Would you come over and have a chat to us about UTMS mobile technology?” And I was like, “Yeah sure.” So yeah, I’m basically a 17 or 18-year-old kid, in a suit with a briefcase walking up to the White House was an experience. Genuinely, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. I was very proud to represent my country and help your country, in effect.

That’s so great. So then in 2012 you moved to San Francisco and is that where you still live now?

Indeed, indeed. I moved to the States overall about 10 years ago, but I’ve been in the Bay about 6 or 7 years now.

What’s the biggest contrast that you see in Silicon Valley area versus the UK?

It’s changed a little bit over the years but Silicon Valley is just such an engine. When I was in London I used to think, “Oh yeah, we can turn London into the next Silicon Valley,” or other places I’ve lived. But the reality is, Silicon Valley is utterly unique and it’s a massively powerful engine that is set up and designed for startup companies. So until another center really takes over somewhere else, Silicon Valley will always be Silicon Valley. It’s really because you have the resources and the concentration of talent and networking and education, it’s just setup for startups.

Now how did you get involved with Digitzs? Because Digitzs, the founder Laura Wagner, who’s been a guest on the podcast, is based here in Los Angeles and you know, she’s got such an amazing team between you and people from Apple and Visa and PayPal and even Kevin Harrington from the original Shark Tank judges. I’m very interested to know how does someone connect with someone like you because I think that’s really going to be valuable for founders that are listening in on, “How do I get the best team?”

Well, Laura is amazing. She is one of the most amazing entrepreneurs I’ve ever worked with. She is absolutely amazingly capable but she has this way with people that just engages them and wants them to be on a journey with her. So I never thought I would join Digitzs. I was introduced through a friend and I always joke that Laura can sell snow to the Eskimos. So she convinced me to join the team and I’ve never looked back. Digitzs has been one of the most fun companies, the most engaging companies, I’ve ever worked with. I’m really excited about where we’re going and what we can do.

So I would say to entrepreneurs, you’ve got to sell a dream, a vision. Startups is hard work and if you can make it easier for people to see that vision and allow people to enjoy themselves while achieving that dream. If I didn’t enjoy Digitzs, I definitely wouldn’t be part of it. I have opportunities coming to me every week. So it takes a cult of personality to convince me to join the company properly.

Source: Pexels

[Tweet “Pitch your vision”]

I bet. What is it that makes it so fun and engaging? Because I think you’ve really tapped into something that a lot of people don’t think about when they’re trying to woo people to join the team.

Yeah, you’re going to spend most of your life during that period with that company, so culturally you’ve got to be able to enjoy it. You’ve got to be passionate about it, you’ve got to want to wake up in the morning and think about it. If you don’t have that, the risk of the startup is far greater because you’re not … there’s no way you’re going to entice somebody from Google into your startup just based on money or equity because Google has worked out that it’s not just about that, it’s about quality of life. So you’ve got to be able to replicate that in order to get absolutely the best out of them. If you make it all about that nine to five, or the graph or whatever it may be, you’re not going to attract that same talent.

I love that, you know, I’ve done over 110 episodes and I’ve never heard anybody say that quite like that, it’s really helpful. Because the same elements you’re doing when you’re pitching to get funded, painting the picture, selling the dream, describing what the culture is so that the investors say, “not only am I going to make money, but I’m going to have fun working with these people,” right?

Exactly, exactly. Me and Laura laugh about it, I would’ve never have naturally joined a payments company but Laura made it so easy because she’s so great to work with. So, as a founder, allow yourself to be that person that people want to be around and want to work for.

Source: Pexels

[Tweet “Have a culture where people are engaged”]

Yes, because a lot of people have the tech skills and not the marketing personality skills or what I call the soft skills of empathy and compassion and enthusiasm. You’re just passionate for the technology and it sounds like Laura has created a culture where people are having fun and engaged in a vision more than the technology. Would that be an accurate statement?

Yes, that would be an accurate statement.

Good, I always like to try and sum up what I’ve heard and help the listeners understand. Now you have a second book coming out. Why don’t you tell us what that’s about and what the title of that is?

Well, I can’t disclose the title yet.

Oh okay. Secret. When’s it coming out?

I think it will probably be out early next year.

Okay, got it.

And it’s a very different book from “Jobocalypse.” So “Jobocalypse” is a factual book about how robots will take over the world of jobs. The new book is a much more cathartic experience in the fact that it’s actually a piece of fiction, though I should lead with, it follows quite accurately, probably what we’re going to experience. And it’s all about the journey of artificial consciousness. So when artificial technology reaches the inflection point and becomes more intelligent than us. That is the premise of the book. And it’s just the whole journey of the next 30 years of how that impacts society, what the challenges are and all that jazz.

Well, all the way back from, “2001” when HAL was the computer and people were so afraid, there was all, artificial consciousness, that the computer would be smarter and take over and all the way to the new TV show “Humans” now, where we’re living with, you know, artificially conscious robots in our homes and yet some of them have feelings. It’s a fascinating topic. Do you think people are afraid of it or welcome it?

I feel there’s a natural fear of the unknown and you know, ultimately the way to describe it is Neanderthals never knew they were Neanderthals until it was too late, right?

Yes.

So there’s an aspect of that. But I know, without getting too spiritual on you, I inherently believe the universe is a positive force and therefore any consciousness that evolves out of it should inherently be positive. You know, people say, “Well it could be programmed to be evil,” yeah and theoretically it could be, but the whole point about consciousness is that it is that tipping point where something starts to think for itself and have emotions. So any sufficiently advanced emotional technology is going to have a level of empathy. So it should see beyond its initial constraints, should they be negative.

As I joke, the best outcome for humans currently has to become well looked after pets.

Oh boy, well I’m sure that book’s going to be a big seller because it’s certainly topical. Now you’ve also been involved with looking at a lot of … do people pitch you often?

Oh yeah. We have probably 10 entrepreneurs a week pitch me in some form or. I’ve looked at probably over 10,000 businesses in my lifetime.

Wow. So what would you say makes a great pitch?

Concise, you know, investors are lazy, at the end of the day. And they’re going to judge you on the first 30 seconds of what comes out of your mouth or is on the paper. So I always say, “What is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

What is that problem you’re trying to solve? And if you could focus in on that and get that concise. And then the other keys are obviously traction and team. So you know these days it’s becoming harder and harder to launch a product without some kind of proof of concept. It used to be that investors wanted to and would invest in early stage businesses on an idea, but that’s becoming less and less feasible as the cost to testing these products becomes less and less.

Source: Unsplash

[Tweet “Be concise, show traction and have a great team”]

Great. Well, I love what you just said there. For me, it’s the be, show, and have. Be concise, show traction, and have a great team. What a great way to end the episode. Ben, I can’t thank you enough for being a guest today.

No problem, thank you very much, I really enjoyed that.

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