A Spy for the Other Side - Julie Meyer

Be The Only One Who Does What You Do

‘You don’t want to be the best of the best.   You want to be the only one who does what you do.’ – Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead.

Some of my best friends are British :) …. And they violently disagree with what I’m about to reveal to you as truth with a capital T.      And that’s because in British culture we’re not supposed to show our ego.      That’s why we have the Queen’s award.    You don’t toot your own horn; you wait until someone toots it for you, and gives you an OBE, CME, MBE etc.    It’s Tall Poppy Syndrome – which does exist elsewhere, but it’s a unique British form which says, ‘Who do you think you are – that you have something special to offer the world, or that you are someone special?’

In this context, believing in yourself can be positively subversive.     Thinking for yourself as well instead of just passing on the received wisdom that we should at all times be totally self-effacing and say, ‘it’s not me, it wasn’t that good, and who am I?’

But what if you are really good?    What if you have something special?   What if your soul tells you that you must create or have created something or you are obsessed to bring something to life, or you just know that you have a unique contribution to give?

Can this be positive, or is it just part of a celebrity-doused, reality-show orgy of a lack of culture which exists across the world today?

Entrepreneurs have big egos – to state the obvious.    They are driven more by impact and wanting to impose their vision of the world on the world, than necessarily making billions, having fame or exerting power.     It is one of the most pleasurable experiences in the world – in the privacy of your own chateau :) - at three o’clock in the morning - :)  - to know that you were right and that you shaped the world – influencing its course as an extension of your own personal worldview.    As a star to shoot for, it’s worth it, and no one gets hurt.

So, wallflowers need not apply to the game of entrepreneurship, but you don’t need to be an annoying, extroverted self-promoter who every one wants to shut up either.    This is not about a sense of entitlement.   This about expecting success, and believing – against all odds, that you have and are something and someone that has a gift and an obsession.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of our way, why is this important?

Last time I checked, business was about making money.     Making money is about profits and cashflow.      Yes it is also about providing a great product and service, building a great team and culture – sincerely and difficult as those things are to get right, etc.    But the simple fact of the matter is that if you are not profitable and making lots of cash, you’re going out of business – slowly or fast, long or short game.      Let’s just be honest.

To make money you have to have a strong sense of what your personal strengths are and what you do as a business that only you can do.     If you strip out your ego from that exercise, you’ll have a conversation which goes more or less like, ‘Well sometimes I /we sort do a good job at X, Y or Z, but then it’s really not me/ or us, and we have a lot of great competitors in the market, and we just really got lucky when we did P, D and Q….’

Lazards Freres created the franchise that it did not by being nice, but by doing something that the world perceived it was the only one that could do it that way.    Google and Apple – in search and consumer services respectively – have the profits and cashflow that they have because the world perceives that they are the only ones who can do what they do.     For many women, myself included, Chanel stands apart.     You would no more buy an imitation Chanel suit than try to imitate another woman; it is the only one that does what Chanel does.

Get the point?     It’s not about being the best of haute couture or investing banking or search or consumer services.    It’s about being the only one who does what you do.

So create your own category.  Sing your own song.  Dream your own dream.   Follow your own heart.  Be your own diva.  

The European Commission is so obsessed about creating competition by trying to cut off Google at its own knees that it obfuscates the larger issue that we have no such dominant platform companies within Europe that it can obsess over.     It’s concerned about monopolistic power, but then that is a feature of the capitalistic system.    If you’re really good, and doing something that you do as a firm that only you can do, you do become a monopoly by definition.    By it doesn’t last, as monopolies get disrupted eventually by market forces, hubris, shifting norms and consumer preferences.     I grew up as a professional in a world where Microsoft was a monopoly; no one reasonable would call it that today.

Larger, non-tech traditional firms which are not sure how to engage with this digital, exponentially expanding marketplace tend to look at their competition rather than to think deeply about their customers.      I am a bank, insurance company, airline, oil firm, retailer, what is my unique selling proposition as a firm?   What is it that we are the only ones in the market who can do or deliver?    If you don’t know, ask your customers as they’ll probably respond with a simple answer not a litany of products.

In 1997 in the amphitheatres of INSEAD in Fontainebleau, I was so privileged to have Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne as my Strategy Professors in Period 3.     I had been reading their articles in the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review in months prior to sitting in on their lectures.     I have to admit that I was in awe of their original, fundamental thinking.    They were absolutely subversive people.     My classmates weren’t ready for them.    Chan grew up in an illiterate background in Korea, and used to put his leg around his body in a strange way as I recall.     Renee was one of those strong American women that triggers fear in a certain type of person.     They did not give one hoot about what people thought of them – least of all INSEAD MBA’s.   They were creating their own category, singing their own song, thinking deeply about what they observed, dreaming their own dream, and having conversations with Mike Bloomberg, the Chairman of Samsung, and a host of other giants of industry who sought their advice.

As a result of being the only ones who do what they do, they created ‘blue ocean strategy’ which most educated business people today know about.     Don’t compete in a red ocean.   Go into an uncontested market space:  a blue ocean.    Simple, and simply disarming.     Devastingly effective.

Marginal improvement is not what we’re talking about here.     We’re talking about winning, excellence, grandiose visions executed flawlessly in the market.      This is not about competing or litigating Google or anyone out of existence.   This is about figuring out how to be the only one who does what you do.

Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo are remembered not because they did great work and were better than their competitors.    They are known today because they believed in their own souls that they had none.

Compete if you want to wear yourself out.     The treadmill gives a shape to life, and for some, that’s really reassuring.      

However, if you feel you have a unique contribution to make to the world:    Find that blue ocean, build your own chateau, articulate what game you’re playing, as you can only ever win if you write the rules, design the blueprint and have blue waves washing over you as you swim.

Positive Architecture

I was a babe in the woods as many first time entrepreneurs are….   We don’t know what we don’t know yet.     And if we knew how hard it would be (like being a parent), we probably wouldn’t go there…..   I find that the average person who has never run their own firm thinks there’s a 1 to 3 differential between being an entrepreneur and being an employee in someone else’s firm (no matter how large, mature or well-funded)  in the stress level, requirement for focus, dedication of time etc.   Balderdash… It’s at least 1 to 10 and probably closer to 1 to 25.    Not my view alone, but the view of those who have done both.

This is why we say in EntrepreneurCountry and at Ariadne Capital:  ‘Society works best when it’s organised around the entrepreneur.’        Not only because entrepreneurs have a secret about the way that the world will work in the future that they are bringing kicking and screaming into the present, but they are willing to live abnormal lives to do it.    See my post about Saturday Night Dinner Party Entrepreneurs.

Society Works Best When It’s Organised Around the Entrepreneur

There is something special about the first time you become an entrepreneur:  

• The first time you risk your own capital
• The first time you back yourself
• The first time you say to the world:   “Here I come!”

And there is something disproportionately hard about the first time too.    It’s called:    Rookie Mistakes.

I know I made a few…..   I shook them out of my system a long time ago, but they make me a better backer of entrepreneurs.

Rarely are they the errors or problems of Product/ Market fit, or Lack of Sales, or Failure to Raise Capital.   Although all of those contribute to the big big big Rookie Mistake which is:     Bad Corporate Architecture.

What’s that?    It’s failing to build a strong foundation for your firm so that you can build the Eiffel Tower or Taj Mahal or Empire State Building or Gherken on top.     If you don’t get this right, you’ll get worse than The Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I’ve seen some sad stories…   And my great good friend Gil Mandelzis, founder of Traiana, sold to ICAP, for nearly $250 million, now on their Executive Committee, said at the EntrepreneurCountry Forum a year or so ago, ‘The line between success and failure is a very thin line.’     Very honest of Gil (which is why I have so much time for him) ..   Could he have sold 4 months later?    Possibly – who knows?  He’s pretty impressive.   It takes a giant of a founder to recognise the role of good timing in their entrepreneurial journey, and Gil is both literally one as well as one in terms of his impact, intelligence and integrity.

The grit and the dirt:

• I’ve seen start-ups where the founder has made 7 of his ‘friends’ co-founders and given them founders’ equity only to be the only one doing the work, and essentially realising too late that he had >85% of the equity of the firm in a ghetto of Dead Equity.    Try getting that back from people….
• I’ve seen start-ups where the NXD’s are freaking out while the founder and CEO is a surge of raw human brilliance taking the market by storm.
• I’ve seen start-ups where the Chairman has a veto on acquisition offers, and turns down $300 million cash offers in order to take debt from a firm run by his son-in-law – a rogue move that the founders were unable to stop, but knew was setting them up to be Thelma and Louise going over the cliff.

I could tell you stories, but would have t0 change the names to protect the guilty or my ability to work in my industry for the next 15 years.    I’ve often thought of retiring to Santorini in my golden years, and just writing stories of what happened with the start-ups I backed over the years, but not sure I’ll ever retire, and not sure anyone other than entrepreneurs would believe the tales.    You see every type of inspiring human ingenuity and generosity, and also the bad and ugly side of human nature too in start-ups.     They are a microcosm of humanity:   messy.

But instead of framing this negatively, what is a Positive Architecture?  

To answer this, you have to understand power, and where it lies inside of a company.

There are 4 buckets of power in a firm:

• The founder
• Management as represented by the CEO
• The shareholders and investors
• The Board of Directors

Nothing trumps founder passion.    The riskiest moves I’ve seen by other venture capitalists are frequently when they believe that the ‘founder has to go’.    Entrepreneurs can definitely be their own worse enemy, but they breathe life into their firms …. Every single day.  They are the DNA, the oxygen, the clockspeed, and they give the company its True North and raison d’etre.      I have seen situations where the ‘hired hand’ comes in and does an outstanding job at building the business in a way that the founder couldn’t have done on his/her own.    Great companies tend to have Founder / CEO’s, and most of the big tech plays do as well.

Richard Duvall, founder of Zopa, had a level of insight into the world of the Individual Capitalists and how they would think about money that remains virtually unrivalled.      He was lucky that Giles Andrews was lurking about, as he is building a great firm as the CEO of Zopa, despite not being one of the founders.

Founders have power because you can’t hire them.      They may have charisma or not, but they have a secret.   Good ones bring momentum to the firm because of everything that led them to set the firm up.   They work 100 hours a week not because they’re on overtime pay.    It’s their identity.  They are obsessed.

Smart VC’s want to find the best role for the founder and don’t mess with their equity.      Super smart VC’s recognise that all great CEO’s were a first time CEO once.     Cogitate on that for a while.

Some of the tech accelerators encourage or demand founders who enter them to vest their equity.     This is a concept of taking your equity which you have by virtue of setting up the firm, and putting it in play.   Always say no.   Don’t believe anyone who tells you this is normal.     I promise you:   you will regret this massively.    The appropriate response when this is brought up is:   ‘Do I look like I was born yesterday?’

Founders don’t need to be worshipped, but they should always be respected despite their bad habits, ego and imperfectness.   They gave life to a business which is creating jobs and wealth.   All of society benefits from the work that they do, and the abnormal life they are living.     If you find yourself in a negotiation with a VC who disparages the founder when he/she is not in the room, mark my words:   this too will come your way.      A lack of respect for where creating wealth starts is always a bad sign:   a sign of greed, stupidity, arrogance or all three.    

I have to admit I always get upset when I learn of a story like that of Nadia Shalaby’s:    incredible drive and brilliance leads to major funding, and then a loss of her equity in the firm that the big boys found enticing.     It’s not that she was the right CEO; I don’t know whether she was, wasn’t or could have been.     It’s that she deserved to be part of the upside.    I introduced her to Dialog Semiconductor, one of her investors, as I do so frequently to entrepreneurs who ask for help, and was pleased to learn that it had led to Arctic Sand securing $10 m, only to be devastated to hear from her that:  ‘It’s ok Julie, I’ll do it again.     It’s ok if I didn’t get to keep my equity in this firm’.      I have to admit that I ‘went apeshit’ (a unique phenomenon that American women specialise in) when I heard this last line.

These sad stories are why second time entrepreneurs frequently try to avoid the VC industry entirely and fund their businesses through private or angel capital.     

In the work that we do at Ariadne Capital, we help founders and CEO’s (and their management teams) anticipate how later stage venture capital firms will try to put in place a corporate architecture to suit them.     We know that a lot of the return will come from this, so we always encourage and help founders and CEO’s to put in place a Positive Architecture ahead of their negotiation of a big Series round.     It is worth it to set up a ‘gentle’ preference share class as you’ll get one that hits like a ton of bricks in your next round if not.     Proactively offer Investor Rights that make sense, but don’t essentially make you an employee of the investors.  Make sure that your Board of Directors is non-executive and supportive.

The CEO or management also have a tremendous amount of power in determining a Positive Architecture, but they may be smaller options holders instead of shareholders.    Investors will want to know that the CEO is incentivised properly if he /she doesn’t have founders’ equity.   Over time, power does shift from the founder to the CEO in many situations which is why it’s incredibly important that they respect each other and can work well together.      Sculley / Jobs stand-offs tend to always destroy value for shareholders either short or medium term.

There are investors and then, there are investors.    Investors don’t always win.    I know Net-a-Porter angel investors who didn’t make any money (or at least they told me so), and I know venture capital firms that have acted with enormous empathy, energy and hutzpah to back entrepreneurs as true business partners.     Gil Mandelzis credits Don Valentine, his venture investor, with significant support for Traiana.  Not all are good or bad, make money or not.      But what is clear is that there is most of the time an almighty battle for control of the firm which is either there in a company like a benign current, or a volcano and fight to the death.     Keep your eyes wide open to the fact that the power struggle *is* there; it’s merely a question of how benign/active, and how aware of it you are.

I remember sharing with a bright entrepreneur who wanted Ariadne Capital to fund his business that in reading his Shareholder Agreement and Articles of Association (it’s the legal geek in me that enjoys doing things like this), I noted that if he missed an interest payment in the following year, he would be diluted by 99%.   His reaction was:   ‘they’re good people, Julie.  Chill’.    Good people don’t have clauses like that in investor documents.

I also came off the phone once with the CEO of one of our portfolio companies and some of their angel investors who worked at Goldman Sachs not too long ago, and got a call back from one of the Goldman guys immediately.   We were negotiating a termsheet, and I kept stressing ‘alignment’ which is the secret to most things in life to all parties on the call.    Angel investor from Goldman’s opening line to me on the phone 1:1 was, ‘You kept banging on about alignment there Julie.    In my experience, it’s grossly overvalued’.      You draw the conclusion.

A Special Word about Boards of Directors.    Choose them wisely.   Trial them on an Advisory Board first if you can.     Check their reputation in the market.    I find that many entrepreneurs offer Board seats far too quickly without really testing whether there is alignment, and how they see company development.    More importantly though, NXDs should be adding value, and you as a founder should be asking them what they will bring to the table, not setting up a layer of structure to boss you around.    If you have a problem with asking a future NXD what they plan on doing, then you need to reflect.   Note their favourite thing to say is:   providing corporate governance but that’s rarely an issue early on in a start-up.    

There is a world of difference between Leadership Teams and Executive Committees who are consulted and run firms, and Boards which represent shareholder interests and give feedback and input based on their experience.   I’ve found that the right Board can help a company grow more quickly, and I’ve also seen situations where the CEO was having a strategy argument every Board meeting.     The Board should have the business plan for the year presented to it, and then either back the CEO or find a new one.

Entrepreneurs who are going through a funding round have to become very knowledgable about where the power lies in the investment round which is being proposed.   You can’t rely on your lawyers, your CFO, your advisors to tell you what the agreements say.    Fund raising is like dating.  Make it uncomfortable to make sure you know your other half.   Don’t just  wear your red dress, flatter the other party, provide information on a need to know basis, and then, wham! get the money or the girl/boy, and find out that – and here’s the central point of all start-ups and Positive Architecture:   The Deal is Always Done at the Beginning.    Dear reader:   the most you ever do in life after the deal is done is to course correct.   You never fundamentally renegotiate the terms.       So careful when you close and what you close.

My final word is that if you read this and say, Julie’s article confirms once and for all that I’m a control freak.   Welcome to EntrepreneurCountry.      Most of us are, and it’s not a bad thing.     

As they say, takes one to know one.      Let me know if we can help….  The most entrepreneur friendly investor team in Europe is listed here:    http://www.ariadnecapital.com/html/about/the-team

What INSEAD Taught Me

‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.'

(Marianne Williamson)

When I was 23, my boyfriend at the time in Paris invited me to the INSEAD (leading business school in Europe) gala at the Chateau de Courance.      It might as well have been Les Liasons Dangereuses – it was so magnificent in everyway.     Through the beau, I met his friends, and realised that Dorothy couldn’t go home to Kansas anymore…. If this was business school, count me in.

As an English literature major and Honors Humanities grad, I had never thought I would go to business school but INSEAD was different.   These were people who thought about the world in a way that I had never encountered before.    They also expected success without a trace of a sense of entitlement.

I was hooked.

But both this beau and the one after discouraged me from ever thinking I would get in.    I knew it was competitive.   The word was that 1 out of 7 applicants were chosen.     My GMAT scores were good, so I thought – wait until you have the management profile, and then give it your best shot.

My twenties were all about ‘wanting to go to INSEAD’.    I’ve always set long-term goals for myself.     But from age 23 to age 29 when I went to INSEAD, I was pretty maniacally focused on ‘getting in’.

When I did, I called my mother and screamed, ‘Oh my god, I got in to INSEAD Mom’.    ‘That’s wonderful honey; what’s INSEAD?’     

INSEAD is a business school which caters to globally minded citizens.   Those of us who can be dropped down anywhere, and feel at home love the place.   There is no dominant culture at the school which is quite a strong differentiator compared to American business schools.   And at age 29, I didn’t want to take 2 years out to go to business school.

Today INSEAD has a campus in Abu Dhabi as well as Singapore, but the heart of the school was and is the main campus of Fontainebleau, France, about 55 kilometres south of Paris.      The set up is extraordinary as students live in adorable little villages such as Montigny Sur Loing where I had my flat for the year. 

INSEAD was founded by visionary Harvard grads who felt that Europe needed its own management school.     To set up a business school is not a small thing.    To believe in learning, and that you have a unique take on how people can learn is self-belief, confidence, focus and ambition wrapped into one audacious transformational move.     All of us who go to INSEAD are marked by that self-belief, confidence, focus and ambition.    That is, to go to INSEAD is to not believe that marginal improvement is something you’re ever going to be involved with.   INSEAD Alumni are socialised to believe that they build the world.  

What I learned at INSEAD though was not what I thought I would learn.      Sure I learned how to crunch numbers, strategy, organisational behaviour etc.    I’d always been a high-achiever, not sure I ever got anything less than an A in school ever, but by the time I got to INSEAD, I soon realised in those amphitheatres that there were some folks who were so far ahead of me in certain subjects that I would never ever catch up.    I had to accept that for the first time in my life that I wasn’t the best in my class.

But what I also saw were what my strengths were.    And thank god there were some of those too.      I realised over the course of 10.5 months with 220 fellow students where I had my competitive advantage.     I had always from a young age been able to sit down with very senior people and build rapport.    I was a natural macro thinker, inter-disciplinary in the way my mind works, and comfortable without structure.    I’m a classic if extreme  INTJ.   Compared to my colleagues, I had hired (and fired unfortunately) many people in my twenties as I had worked for myself and run teams.   For the first time in my life, I had a crystal clear view of my strengths and weaknesses.

And because the contrast was so profound put into the context or bell curve of my fellow INSEADers, I did something different for the first time too:   I played to my strengths.     I had all my life tried to fix my weaknesses.     And even when I would have a glimmer of my strengths, I would say to myself, ‘no, not those strengths, I would rather be good at these over here….’

But INSEAD made it clear, and I changed as a result.

A rather amazing thing happens when you play to your strengths:   you develop an Unfair Advantage … a competitive advantage.     And once you really own that, an even more profound thing happens:    You understand what your Unique Contribution to the world is.

I remember the moment it happened.     I said to myself:   That’s it, Julie.   That’s why you are here.    Only you can do that.    This is why you live, and what you are meant to do.   You will spend your life doing that, delivering that contribution to the world.    And the best thing about knowing what your unique contribution to the world is is that you don’t want to do anything else.  Ever again.   Every day is about DELIVERING THAT UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD.

It’s a blessing to be underestimated

I remember sitting across from the then CEO of a major telco incumbent soon after we started advising Skype on their go to market in 2003.     The BBC host asked me which start-up I was most impressed with, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve just started working with this VOIP P2P company, and …..’    Big telco man cut me off live on air, and said, ‘You’re going to lose your shift, and that company will go bust.’     I remember thinking – right back at you, and said, ‘That’s fascinating; you’ve decided to underestimate the entrepreneur who disrupted the entire music industry with Kazaa.    Let me tell you – he is so happy you are underestimating him.    You are giving him time to tear your industry down.’

I had a couple of boyfriends who thought I’d never make it to INSEAD.     I rather enjoyed sharing with them both when INSEAD asked me to join their Board of Directors IN 2009 and also named me one of their 50 Alumni who Changed the World.    It’s a good thing I don’t have a chip on my shoulder….

The point being:   it doesn’t matter what the world thinks you’re capable of.    It matters, and it truly matters, whether you have a clue what your unique contribution to the world is.

All change happens at the individual level. The power to reshape society happens when individuals who have decided on change come together, aligned and determined. But to create sustainable interdependence, each person must first be independent.   You have to own your own s__t.

In the amphitheatres and working groups of INSEAD, at the age of 30, I started to realise the outstanding talents and abilities of my business school classmates. In many respects, they were much more outstanding than me. But equally, I started to identify and measure my own strengths. As previously noted:

• I was a macro thinker.
• I was used to working in unstructured environments and creating structures that allowed teams to grow (probably through landing in Paris at the age of twenty-one without any connections).
• I had hired and fired people from an early age.
• I understood the power of communications.
• I knew how to build long-term relationships.

I came to appreciate all of these assets by virtue of the benchmarking that you inevitably do when you spend every day with 220 of your peers. (I won’t tell you about my weaknesses, but I figured them out, too!)

It’s important to understand your strengths and weaknesses because, if you don’t, you will be unable to play to those strengths and you’ll never achieve independence. Positive things start to happen in a career – and a life – when you build on your strengths rather than try to be good at everything, or allow life to carry you where it will. Once I started to internalise and focus on my strengths at INSEAD, I began the process of building my ‘unfair advantage’. This was the key to unlocking my future. It also helped me locate my true north.

Other aspects of that ‘unfair advantage’ grew specifically because of the time I spent at INSEAD, including:

• A network of friends all over Europe.
• A European perspective (partly because, in those days, before the advent of its Singapore and Abu Dhabi campuses, INSEAD was very Euro-centric).
•  A consequent appreciation of the potential of a Europe-wide network of entrepreneurs to exploit the almost limitless opportunities that were being created by the internet.
•  And confidence in my own ability to launch just such a network.

I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t enrolled at INSEAD in 1997, I would not have founded First Tuesday the following year. I wouldn’t have had the necessary European perspective; I wouldn’t have had the contacts; I wouldn’t have had the confidence; and I wouldn’t have seen the market potential. But I did attend INSEAD, so I was able to develop all of those ‘unfair advantages’. In turn, they allowed me to visualise the possibilities of an entirely new business network, something unique in the market place, a game-changer: First Tuesday.

So the time I spent at INSEAD was crucial in enabling me to realise my potential. But the process had actually begun several years earlier, when I first landed in Paris in 1988. As a result of making that trip, I

• met Pekka Hietala, a professor at INSEAD, which
• led me to want to attend INSEAD, which
• led me to build my business and management experience over the next few years, which
• led INSEAD to accept my application, which
• led me to identify and appreciate my strengths, which
• led me to develop my unfair advantage, which
• led me to found First Tuesday, which
• led me to make my first millions, which
• led me to launch Ariadne Capital, my current business, which
• led me to continue to play a role in the financing of entrepreneurship in Europe - working to create the gold standard for Europe’s entrepreneurs.

As I hope this timeline makes clear, it’s not enough just to gain awareness of your unfair advantage. You must use it wisely. Understanding your unfair advantage should enable you to understand what your unique contribution to the world might be.

Ask yourself two questions:

• What are you meant to give to the      world?
• What can you do better than anyone      else?

I believe that everyone has the potential to make a unique contribution to the world and make it a better place for all of us …

• no matter where they come from,
• no matter how much money they have in their bank account,
• no matter how many qualifications they have or what language they speak.

We shouldn’t tolerate free-riders who do nothing but take from the rest of society.

I believe there are only two types of people in the world:

• First, those who think deeply about how they can make the most of their unfair advantage in order to achieve success for themselves. Life is a game to them, and they are solely concerned with amassing as many hotels as possible on the Monopoly board. It’s zero sum: I win, you lose. And I’ll do anything I can to win.
• Second, those who challenge themselves to build a better system, irrespective of the environment in which they find themselves. They want a more inclusive world, where it’s not about how much you can amass for yourself but about how much you can contribute and build for the benefit of everyone.

I call these two groups ‘net takers’ and ‘net contributors’.

 

Over the years, I’ve found that focusing on what you can provide for others, as opposed to what you can get them to do for you, pays dividends for both of you in the long run. But you can’t be a net contributor for that reason. You have to go into it with the right attitude.

Focus on something bigger than yourself.

For example, when I left INSEAD, I wanted to get into venture capital. That was no easy task at the time, because it was still very much an old boys’ club. My tactic at job interviews was to focus on what I could tell London’s venture capital firms about the emerging internet scene. I would always begin by reeling off a list of those companies that had already secured funding, before moving on to which entrepreneurs were particularly interesting and why. I ended up with half a dozen job offers because I brought these firms information, rather than merely presented myself as a supplicant. Of course, I was delighted that one of those offers was from NewMedia Investors because it really was my dream job, with the promise of working on a lot of the early internet deals that would be taking place in London in 1998 and 1999. But I got that offer because I focused on what I could do for NewMedia, not what they could do for me. Admittedly, at first, my contribution was very small, but I never undervalued myself – I never let myself believe that I had no contribution to make.

That job at NewMedia meant that I was in the right place at the right time to found First Tuesday. In turn, creating that entrepreneurial network across Europe enabled me to build relationships with thousands of entrepreneurs and investors. Much more importantly, though, it also gave me the opportunity to help thousands of entrepreneurs secure funding, find partners and promote their ventures. First Tuesday was hugely significant for me personally, and its success certainly helped my career. But the role it played in building the ecosystem for Europe’s entrepreneurs gave me even greater satisfaction because it helped a lot of other people, too.    Just the other week in Poland, one of leading entrepreneurs confided in me that he found his original funding at First Tuesday Poland in 1999.

If you aim to build something bigger than your own career, or your own business, you must be more focused, more hard-working, more committed, more insightful and probably smarter than the rest of the crowd. Think about how you would like the world to work, then figure out what you – and you alone – can do to make that dream come true. Life is about the execution of that contribution. Once you’ve decided where your true north lays, make sure you look in that direction once a day, keep reconnecting with it. Stay focused on your ultimate goal.

Of course, that can be hard to do. No matter who you are or what you do, you’ll have good days and bad days. There will be highs and lows, and sometimes you’ll find it hard to focus on anything other than keeping your own head above water. You’ll be tempted to leave ‘making the world a better place’ to someone else – someone with more time on their hands and more money in their bank account.

But there's a problem with that.  That's not what leaders do.

Leaders persist in making a contribution beyond making money.  

• Even when they have no money, they care about more than themselves.
• They are resolutely net contributors, confident that they will be able to deliver their unique contribution in the fullness of time.
• They believe in more than just money.

Most of the world loves their own – their own children, their own families, their own companies, their own nations. Most people will do everything in their power to protect their own self-interest. Leaders are different. They have the vision to see that others’ self-interest is their self-interest.

There is a tension between standing out and fitting in in every environment.  

If you are someone who tries to improve, include, create - beyond your self-interest, you will stand out unbelievably in the world.   Be the change you want to see in the world, but don't expect to have a dozen friends encouraging you along the way.

Changing the world is lonely. Leadership is lonely. Opportunity is lonely.

• Many people told me I’d never get into INSEAD, get a job in venture capital, never do this or that.
• Many people said that First Tuesday would never be successful.
• Many people doubted that Ariadne would become important.

I could have listened to them, but I listened to myself instead.

If you travel with the pack, and wait until the rest of your class, or your family,  or the market, or the company, your nation - starts to do something or gives you praise, you will almost always be just that - part of the pack, one of the wolves, in the middle of the bell curve, one of many.   No one will criticise you, but no one really will admire you for being - well, part of the pack.    And most importantly, the world won't really notice that you came and went.

What's my unique contribution to the world?    That's for another article  ... wink... but in the meantime, I'm just here to help you think about your unique contribution …. Perhaps you’d like to start telling your story and share your thoughts on how we  should build Entrepreneur Country .... www.entrepreneurcountry.com ...  

 

Strong Jules in Heels

 

Like many entrepreneurs, I’m a bit schizophrenic.     I have to project confidence while constantly de-risking situations which I realise would make a lot of people collapse.   To make matters (worse/better – choose), I have become partners to many entrepreneurs as their financial backer / confidant/ advisor/ Board Director/ bag carrier.   So their anxiety becomes the knots in my back that I get pounded out twice a week in the deepest of Thai massages where Eva my therapist keeps saying, ‘tell me one more time what is it that you do and why?’

And I’m an entrepreneur because as the daughter of a great one, I didn’t have a chance to escape the fate.   Growing up as my father built the pulmonary medicine industry in California, I saw the incredible toll it took on him to manage his partners, team, hospitals, burgeoning business, while broadcasting on TV the perils of smoking, the demise of tuberculosis, and championing great respiratory healthcare.     One divorce came after another, and only much later did I realise, you honestly wouldn’t choose the life if you had a choice.   But that’s the rub:   you don’t have a choice.

I have some amazing friends as my shareholders at Ariadne Capital and the Limited Partners in our venture capital fund.    We pioneered the ‘Entrepreneurs Backing Entrepreneurs’ model for the financing of entrepreneurship in Europe in 2000.   I threw in the first £550 K of cash, but then asked the founders of Betfair, Coller Capital, Easynet, Genia, Hotmail, QualComm, SES Astra, WILINK and Worldpay and NXD’s of Amazon, Dialog Semiconductor, and others  to back me in bringing this model to market.    Those who had made it through the burning building of building a start-up had a lot to offer those who were considering the flames ….

I can really only exhale when I spend time with entrepreneurs.    Over a glass of Chateau Neuf de Pape at either Julie’s Bar, Amaya, 34 or Mestizo, we will talk about the obsession that drives us… and it is just that:   it’s an addiction to the thrill and the exhaustion of building our firms.    It’s not about keeping score; it’s about bringing the inevitable to the present and slaying the dragons again and again.    

I’m sure that my drive and my enormous competitiveness with myself comes from years of playing basketball and volleyball 3 hours a day as a teenager and young woman.    I hated losing so badly that I played a game with myself that I hadn’t actually lost, but that we had merely paused until I could win at the rematch.     This (un)healthy need to hit the goal always and best means that today I never accept ‘no’, never give up and never go away.   

When I moved to Paris at age 21 in 1988, I started modelling as suddenly my no body fat 177 cm had a purpose other than sports.     I loved the runway but found the industry strange:   women far more striking than I was were lacking in the confidence to be themselves.    It’s as if their beauty had claimed them rather than releasing them.     I managed to bungle myself into job after job just because I had this unstoppable drive to make money, to experience the unknown, even if it meant walking down a runway in a different European city.

Strength in women is not necessarily understood – by ourselves, our friends, our men, our employees, our detractors.    I never thought of myself as strong or feminine – something that people regularly call me today.     I was just brought up to be me.    Because my father was an entrepreneur with little time, and he probably didn’t know what else to say, he said pretty much one thing:  ‘Anything you set your mind to, you can achieve, Julie’.   If I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times.   In my darkest hours, those words replay themselves in my mind like an old record where the needle is stuck.    My father believed /es in me.   So I better as well.

As I got older, I realised as I did the informal benchmarking over the years with my girlfriends who I love all dearly that some were more confident than others:   their level of self-belief had a strong correlation to a positive relationship to their dad.    I started to realise how lucky I was.   My father is a very conservative, traditional man, but not at all sexist.    His high expectations for me meant that I set high standards for myself in every aspect of my life.

But here’s the thing:    I’m not always strong.    My strength is intermittent, unreliable and prone to surges and black-outs.    As an entrepreneur, I have thrown myself into the market, into the arena, and there is no safety – just a set of milestones, curve-balls, near death experiences and – yes thankfully – breakthrough moments.     And we exhale on weekends with friends who also run their own firms at Julie’s Bar, Amaya, 34 and Mestizo.

Like many obsessions and addictions, I would choose to be otherwise, but I didn’t choose this.  And a long time ago, I realised that life is a mental game.    What you believe, you make happen.    

I will always remember one particular basketball game in high school where we ended the first half 49 to 8.     It was an appalling performance against a team who were good but were beatable.    As I left the court at half time, I avoided the eyes of my coach, Salty, who just stared at me, and said, ‘When are you going to decide to win, Jules?’   

He said it so matter of factly as if it all just came down to whether I had decided to win or lose, that I decided right there that I would win.   If he believed in me, I guess I should to.

We came out the opening jump with a basket in 5 seconds, and played a flawless game, basket after basket, pulling up next to the other side at 72 to 72.  It was as if we had refound a groove or a well-worn road, like muscle memory – it was all execution against a design that had been agreed to.    With 20 seconds to go, we made the last basket, and then sat on the ball as the clock went to zero.   The crowd went nuts, and I stood there frankly stunned.     And slowly I realised that my team and I had won the game against all odds.    We hadn’t beat the other team.   We had changed the software in our brain.   The win in our heads was much more important than what had happened on the court.

That game stayed with me for a long time as I realised I was the same person the first and the second half of the game; I had merely decided to win at halftime.

And so earlier this year, as I thought about entering our 15^th year at Ariadne Capital on the 8^th of December, I thought about what winning would mean to me in the next 15 years.   It would mean something about being Strong Jules more consistently.   Jules has always been the term of endearment – the Julie that people hugged, laughed with and at, were friends with, coached and who engaged the world.   The baby of the family; the one who left with $1,000 for Paris.  The one whose German efficiency drove her, her French adventure framed her, her American psyche propels her, and her British residency softens her up.   In the next 15 years, I wouldn’t let the bastards get me down.   I would consistently and systematically play the game of the second half.   I would build not only my business, but help those other entrepreneurs who I cared about to build theirs, and I would never ever get hit, always be able to help people get through to the breakthrough moment from the near death experience, and do it in heels.

In short, Strong Jules is my better self.    Because my dirty little secret is that like most entrepreneurs, I am not her everyday.   I am schizophrenic and slightly dysfunctional.   Travel, deals, pressure, sleep.    Being an entrepreneur is not working for yourself; it’s working for everyone else in fact.    You can easily become what’s left over.    And there may not be much sometimes for stretches of a time.    It rips through your personal life, but you don’t control that either.

Being in our 15^th year, I needed to go back into training for the trek to the summit.   I needed to be in the best physical shape of my life – a feat fairly audacious to achieve at age 48 as I used to be incredibly fit.     Physical strength combined with financial and mental strength and training are the components to being able to play the second half of the game.

My personal trainer, Kamila, who is a walking advertisement for working out, is rebuilding my body 4 hours a week.   She says I’m ahead of plan.    Mentally,  I eliminated all negativity from my life as I tell entrepreneurs to do.    I decided not to spend time with people who are resolutely living in scarcity not abundance, drink cheap white wine at industry events or watch bad TV ever again.    And financially, I’ve done again what I’ve always done all my life: backed myself and asked people to align with me.

But the most important thing is that I’ve found my team, not just my mojo.    I’ve always gotten oxygen from my team.    And when I win, it’s always been a team effort.    In watching the incredible achievement and intrepid journey of entrepreneurs as talented as they come:   Candace Johnson, Christina Domecq, Emma Sinclair, Dagny Taggart, Sara Murray, Anna Hejke, Alison Cork and so many more, I straighten up my shoulders, and shake off the doubt, and double down on the summit.    In believing in them, I always find it easier to believe in me.

What’s great about being 48, and phenomenal about starting your 15^th year in business, is that you can have a license to be Strong Jules even as you know you’re not always her.    You don’t beat yourself up, but you also make no apologies (anymore) for being her and for being strong.

N O      A P O L O G I E S ….. 

It seems to me that there are a generation of men and women out there who will get in touch with their version of Strong Jules over the next decade as the world becomes feminine as I believe that it is becoming.     Like most things in my life, I had to externalise her, to play a game with myself, and to write about her to make it real.    It’s the hack in me.  She is the better me.    By putting myself in the market and in the arena, I can learn from others, and make a contribution to building that muscle memory, that mental software, that neural network of playing the second half of the game.

Strong Jules will tell stories of the best examples of strength I know:   physical, financial and mental.   In the face of insurmountable odds and in the daily routines, the women that win when everyone counted them out.    It will showcase physical, financial and mental strength – how to get it, and how to provoke it in others.   And it will be all about belief.   In ourselves and in others, for strong people need to send the lift down, and around and all over.     We all have our broken heel moments, that dizziness from looking down not up, and that feeling of total aloneness as we press on.   If we want to build a strong world, then we have to recognise that we are not always her.      Even if we aspire to be.    Sometimes we are her only because our fathers and coaches believe that we are or could be.

When my previous business, First Tuesday, was sold on the 20^th of July 2000 for $50 million, I remember signing the paperwork, standing there frankly stunned, and thinking what do I do now that I have  a lot more money than I ever thought I would.   Where do I go – like – right now?    And I remembered Tom Teichman, my first boss in the UK, who took a bet on me in the summer of 1998 and said, ‘Follow me everywhere, and I’ll teach you how to be an investor.’   And he did, and I did.   So as the ink was drying on the paperwork of the First Tuesday sale to Yazam, I texted him and told him, I probably need to talk.    I certainly need a drink.  I may need a shoulder….  If you ever sell a business, the person you call first is probably someone you feel you owe (or love).   Tom took a bet on me 2 years earlier and I instinctively reached out to him when I could exhale.  He was having the Summer Party of Spark Ventures, that warm summer evening in July 2000.    He said, ‘well done – the first one is the hardest’.   I said it wasn’t everything I had wanted it to be.   I couldn’t control everything.  I couldn’t take care of the team across Europe who had built the network with me.   It should have been, it could have been.  And he said, ‘No apologies Jules’.   

Consider this your invitation to make no apologies about who you are and whether you are her all of the time.    If you bet on people and yourself, and find it easier to believe in yourself by believing in others, and count yourself lucky that others have sent the lift down or believed in you, then tell us your story at http://strongjules.com

Bloomberg – 12 November 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/tesco-caught-out-by-digital-change-meyer-Jl3GksGSTgKBNUJROh5KlA.html

Bloomberg – 21 October 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/apple-pay-creates-new-layer-for-the-company-meyer-YcmN3nMuR56qF36kQ73iaA.html

Bloomberg - 6 October 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-not-a-buyer-of-rocket-internet-shares-says-meyer-RdOUhxjoQYyZgD9T4Zg_hg.html

Bloomberg – 22 April 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/new-tech-growth-is-from-enables-disruptors-meyer-tLY1opP5Rri3Mz6Fl8op~A.html

Bloomberg - 22 April 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/how-strong-are-u-k-s-tech-and-startup-industries-fNiO5VXhSvqNsTirgqsZVA.html

Bloomberg - 24 February 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/eu-entrepreneur-funding-not-world-class-meyer-HudJOvghT2iF7erB4P~U3g.html

Bloomberg - 21 February 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/86778930-greek-entrepreneurs-must-stimulate-economic-growth.html

The New Formula to Create a Billion Dollar Firm is being written by Tesla, Nest, Harry’s and Matternet

Quick!

What do a German Razor Factory, an American Thermostat Firm and a Drones business led by a Greek entrepreneur have in common?    They are all vertically integrated plays.

Backed by Tiger Global, Harry’s, an Internet razor factory, not even a year old acquired a factory near Nurembourg which makes razors which was 93 years old.  They have done this in order to control the entire customer experience, while allowing the company to change its products quickly.   There are hints of Zara in their approach.

But also of Nest, the so-called thermostat company, which set out to turn unloved items in your home into objects of desire; it was recently acquired by Google for >$3 billion.     If you unpack what the Nest team had to understand to do what they did, they had to dealt with the guts of houses and their pipes as well as customer design issues and user behaviour.

What a change!   Time was where horizontal (not vertical) tech start-ups were the darling of the Valley Venture Capitalists.     Once upon a time the world was PC-centric, and Wintel, the Windows-Intel alliance, ruled the PC Platform.     Software was the greatest invention to make people wealthy as the margins were massive once you sold the stuff.     Niches had to be found amongst the horizontal layers above the operating systems.     Nobody dethroned Microsoft until the world started to move beyond the PC.

Fast forward to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas January 2014, and I saw platforms everywhere – the car, the home, the person.    Elsewhere we know that the ship, the space rocket ship, the airplane, the train are all becoming platforms as well.      How are each of these industries catching up?   They are looking for entrepreneurs who are taking a system-level approach to the total customer experience in these new ecosystems around the new platforms.

What defines an ecosystem or a platform I hear you ask?    Well, in a multi-stakeholder world, an industry is an ecosystem.      It’s a system with a sense of order, natural allies or camps, but not an inherent hierarchy.     Those who organise the economics for those ecosystems are the winners.    I call those companies platforms.

It’s a good place to be.

Those who touch ground – whether telcos, hospitals, schools, airlines – get regulated, must build infrastructure, pay tax.    Infrastructure is a tough place to be.     That’s why the technology platform companies are winning – iphone & ios are in the ascendancy, not Vodafone or Telefonica.     They leverage the investment that other people are making, and organise the economics for the ecosystem.     Upside without the pain.

The challenge for the CEO of a traditional larger enterprise whatever sector is to reimagine their industry as an ecosystem, identify their natural allies, ask what they can do to make in their interests to work collaboratively, and to open themselves up to consumer-orientated applications to run over them.    British Gas could have created Nest.   British Telecom could have created Skype.     Volkswagen or General Motors could have created Tesla.

But they didn’t.     They didn’t reimagine their industries as ecosystems, so an entrepreneur did.

The transportation sector is no different.    Amazon’s announcement that they were testing drone delivery forced the CFO of every DHL, Fedex, UPS and TNT to do two things before Christmas:

• reforecast their revenue downwards from Amazon
• look for a dance partner in the UAV space.

That’s the thing – again and again – Goliath doesn’t have the clockspeed, rests on his laurels, doesn’t anticipate change much less embrace change, and that gives the David the opportunity.     I saw that in 2003 when I had just started advising Skype, and the CEO of a major incumbent telco told me I would lose my shirt with Skype and they would go bust.     I responded, ‘how fascinating:  you’ve decided to underestimate the entrepreneur who disrupted the entire music industry with Kazaa.   Let me tell you – he is so glad you are underestimating him right now.    You are buying him time.    To change the world.’

Andreas Raptopoulous, Founder of Matternet, is creating a vertically integrated drones company.     It is the most loved and inspiring UAV business in an industry which is feared.    He aims to create a wonderful total customer experience with drones, re-imaging the way that delivery of necessary goods come to people and their interaction with them.    He has to be an expert in robotics as well as customer design.     This system-level approach combining hardware and software is making the company one with huge momentum.

So if you want to build a billion dollar company, it’s a hardware & software combination today.     The Harry’s, Tesla’s, Nest’s, and Matternet’s show the way.

Palo Alto Goes Global

Silicon Valley can’t save the world, but a federated model with
rich toolkit can.

I grew up near Palo Alto, so if I
had a bias, it should be that Palo Alto is the epicentre of the tech
world.    And as ‘all things tech’ come
to be understood as the driver of growth in business, like a massive snowball
picking up speed down the mountain, it should be more important what’s
happening in and around Palo Alto.

And yet the world is becoming more
and more flat.     Entrepreneurs who
change not just the world, but major industries, can come from any corner on
the planet.       Skype put Estonia on
the map.    Nathalie Kaspersky put Russia
on the map.    Daniel Ek – Sweden.    Mark Shuttleworth South Africa.    Roman Stanek who has sold to Sun, HP and
now is backed by Andreesen Horowitz, the number 1 venture fund in the valley,
the Czech Republic, etc etc etc.

But what Palo Alto does very well is
to say, ‘if you aren’t a Delaware Corp, if your accounts aren’t done in US
Gaap, if your angels didn’t hail from Stanford, and you don’t know where the
University Café is, then we don’t think we can engage with you.    It structures the unstructured data of
start-ups.    And the cartographers
always win.    Those who structure
industries make all the money as they create a self-fulfilling loop.   ‘I define what’s good; therefore what’s good
comes to me’.     As a marketer, I tip my
hat to Silicon Valley.

So God help you if you are from
Odessa, Doha or Cairo, and don’t land and stay at San Francisco Airport.     You don’t stand a chance.

Or do you?

The world is driven by networks
today, but it is also driven by the tug of rope between the incumbents in every
industry and their eying up the ascendancy of the challengers.    This David and Goliath struggle is always
epic, and defines how broad prosperity travels through the populace.     The new David’s seek to solve problems
that they can perceive in society, and so mass adoption of their solutions
tends to be good for most of the population.  
Entrepreneurs have to be inclusive in their approach or they may fail to
find a market.   So the essential
challenge that David brings to Goliath is to open up.   The winners of the last generation’s game
establishes Goliath as the king pin.  
But there is always another round.    
There’s always another subversive entrepreneur who seeks to topple all
of the established winners and incumbents and create a new order of
things.   And I’ve worked with a few of
the big ones; it’s an awesome battle to witness up close.

In one vision of the future, ‘big
tech’ and mostly US tech by the way takes over every industry as Amazon has
taken over storage and books, Apple music and telecoms, Google advertising, and
you get the picture.    But there is
another version of the future whereby large enterprise get wise to the game and
lean in to the tech challenge.    They
realise that tech is no longer an industry, but a layer.   And the CEO’s of those large industries
embrace that layer.     They crave those
digital revenues whether they are radio stations, banks, telcos, retail shops,
airlines or health care firms.    And
they suss out that the problem lies in the business model that they’ve been
working to.    Innovation is not about
technology but economics; otherwise, we’d all be flying the Concorde – we’re
not; we’re stuffed into jumbo jets.

Case in point:    Kodak and Polaroid and Instagram were in
the same industry.   And yet they didn’t
have a dialogue     Instagram was organised
around the consumer, and the former were working for their suppliers.

Size used to drive market
power.   You couldn’t be small or young,
and be listened to.    I’m a record
label, so I’m big, and you, artist, are small.  
Take it or leave it.    But then
canny David’s decided to play a trick on those old Goliaths.     They changed the rules of the game.   They realised that the world had gone
network.    Business was no longer
linear.    It wasn’t that I sold, you
bought, and one of us had to win, but that we were participating in a
transaction with multiple parties:    
consumer of music, artist, distributor etc.    Someone needed to organise those economics,
and David stepped up to the plate.

Enter Apple which broke the hold
that mobile telecoms firms’ had on the consumer.   Enter Spotify who exploded a market enabling
mass discovery by reducing the cost of production and distribution but also by
organising the economics for the ecosystem at the heart of the music industry.

Enter Monitise whose CEO and Founder
Alastair Lukies said a very basic thing at the beginning of his 10 year
journey:  ‘If mobile banking is going to
work, it has to work for everyone – the telco, the bank, and the individual who
gets a lower cost of capital’.    Watch
out Western Union who’ll charge you 22% if you’re poor.    More than 1,000 financial institutions are
now serviced by Monitise who have bought their US competitor and been backed by
VISA 5 times.    Monitise created the
economics for the mobile banking industry; that’s why it’s experiencing the
biggest J curve in UK tech industry history.

But how do you repeat the success of
a Monitise over and over again.   
Where’s the entrepreneur factory?   
How do we breed in the right software in the mindset?     Truth is that there have always been great
entrepreneurs throughout history distributed around the world.     But the infrastructure for releasing their
gift is not evenly distributed around the world.      And Palo Alto exerts a very firm control.

Once upon a time, Britain took over
the world.     It cleverly said, ‘The
language is English, and the civil service works like this, and the currency is
the pound.’    They structured their
universe, and the benefits came back multipled, reinforcing their place at the
centre of the world they touched.     

Today’s challenge to take Palo Alto
to the world is no different.      The
cartographers win.    As Wayne Gretzky
said, ‘a good hockey player plays to where the puck is, but a great one plays
to where it is going.’     We must grab
hold of where the world is going, and internalise that future vision in order
to play our best game today.

We must opensource the tools to
win.     Our corporates must become a
legitimate highway for the digital cars who are looking for distribution.      We must desire to become the industry
architects and to position our companies as the operating systems of their
industry.

A couple of years ago, I set up a
venture capital fund.    We have found
great British entrepreneurs to back.  
But what I hadn’t fully internalised at the beginning was the game
despite 25 years working in the tech industry.  
The ‘game’ for every European tech venture capitalist is to back a
start-up and sell it to a US big tech firm.  
That’s it.    It’s actually not
creative.   But  I didn’t get into venture
capital to sell to the Americans.

We must change the rules of the
game.   We must aspire to organise
industries.      If we genuinely know
where that puck is going, then the game we play today is not a Palo Alto-centric
one.    It’s a game of disruptive
economics  with open-sourced productivity
tools.    The software is actually in the
brains of the entrepreneurs and the CEO’s of large corporates who will dominate
this next decade.     Whose code are you
writing?

--- Julie Meyer is the founder of
EntrepreneurCountry Global

 

 

 

The Power of the Crowd

Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, is not listening to his focus group.  The thing about focus groups is that you don’t (always) get to choose them.  The web gives a voice to special interest groups and brings sites which rate value like Trip Advisor, Mumsnet, IWantGreatCare to life.    Governments and politicians will be rated online soon too.   

Just as technology and digital business models are transforming mature industries, so ‘the crowd’ is transforming democracy.  This isn’t about mob rule or Arab Spring.  We all will be doing the governing, not being governed in the future.

The infrastructure of democracy- otherwise known as government – hasn’t really changed in 500 years.   When people required horses to get to London in order to be represented, then the concept of parliament and the need for Westminster was a powerful one.

Today, people, and not just 200 year olds or digital natives can make themselves heard through YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.  Direct.  Not in the slow motion of representative
democracy currently on offer in major western democracies: I vote you in, and you go off to Westminster and do what you do.  I learn about it later, and shrug my shoulders if I disagree.  
Indirect is *out*.  We all feel we know best.  We demand to be heard.  We don’t accept the proxy of government as it’s currently constructed.  We are ignoring it or voting for UKIP which might be the same thing.

After the devastation of World War II, the world quite rightly gave itself a bearhug.  It wanted  a collective kind of bond, and established models of ‘collective exchange’: the NHS being the prime example.  The implicit social contract was one of deference:   we vote you in, we trust you, and we endure the consequences.  The web flips that on its head, making peer to peer exchange and crowd-sourcing  the de facto model of social exchange: collective action through individual empowerment
is not only possible but the imperative.

I thought about all of this as I spent the last 4 days in Istanbul at the Dell Women’s ntrepreneurship Network (DWEN) annual event where the protests went right in front of our hotel. Here 200 alpha females descended upon this city of 13 million to talk about the bottom-up, tech-fueled, Dell-enabled empowerment while the protests surged by individuals who begged to differ with a very
top-down, patriarchal approach to government.    

At its core, the Istanbul protests are about a symbol – the one major park in the city which could be torn down.  But it’s really about the transparency over the decision-making as to what to do with the park.  And it’s even more about whether the government is sliding towards a disintegration of church and state separation.   You have to peel back the onion a bit to really understand what’s going on.  The Erdogan government believes it’s delivered on its social contract.     They’ve ushered in growth over 3 elections spanning a decade.  Whether growth would have happened anyway is another matter.

I couldn’t help but think of Valery Gisard d’Estaing’s remark when France voted ‘No’ to the Lisbon treaty;   ‘Vote again to get the right answer’.

Government with representation – the very basis upon which democracy has its credibility – is getting granular.     What ‘representation’ means is being defined very specifically these days.    
As data expands exponentially, sampling is becoming less relevant as there is a very real sense that all data can be measured if you have the right tools.  That is, I don’t need to be represented; I only really need to be counted, and I want to participate directly in the major decisions, not just the one big decision about who gets into office.  A very powerful form of direct democracy could be waiting in the wings.    Representation doesn’t mean that you ‘get into office’ and then you shut the door, and do your job.  The door is open.  If you are a political leader, you must keep establishing your connection, your mandate, your leadership.  Government is  a constant campaign.

Leadership without followership is bankrupt.  Erdogan’s decision to fly to North Africa while the country is erupting in protests and now a general strike shows perhaps fatal signs of arrogance.  It
is a strategic error to aggravate your citizens by turning your back on them while they are flexing their muscles.

The average 20 year old in the United Kingdom doesn’t identify with the political party offerings.  
They are however socially and politically aware and active, but traditional party membership is lower than ever.  The digital natives see that things can change quickly in the online world.  Why is government so slow to implement change in the ‘real world’?   

Institutions preserve problems, and entrepreneurs and start-ups are created to solve problems which the founders can’t believe don’t exist.  In their mind’s eye, the world should work a certain way, and they become obsessed to bring that future to the present.  There are strong similarities
between entrepreneurs and how they shape the world, and how citizens see their ability to shape society today.  Not everyone will be an entrepreneur.  However, we will all play a role in shaping our societies in an increasing entrepreneurial way.  The world of kickstarter and kiva where people contribute their own funding to solve social problems is coming soon to your local community.

I can see a world very soon where people shrug their shoulders about what their local government does with their tax money, but they will contribute amounts – perhaps small at first – towards solving community problems.  On top of paying their taxes.  They will just assume that the collective exchange model of local governments will be ineffective, and that they will have to take charge.  The rise of new schools is evidence as well as new models of healthcare like the Circle
Partnership.   Could it be that the Big Society is really little societies in action all around us?

Not too long ago, my eye caught a Times article which stated that 57% of all revenue collected through Stamp Duty went to administer – you guessed it – stamp duty.  That’s collective exchange in action.  It’s fat, it’s not using technology to be efficient.  New lean government which is being
co-created with local little societies have low administration fees if any.  It’s not that social justice is less important; it’s the means whereby it’s achieved is not through big government, not through a 60’s era collective exchange framework.

The individual is on the rise.   No longer are strong individuals thought of as narcissistic, selfish, greedy.   They are seen as capable of creating positive change for society.  The web enables us to choose what we consume more easily than ever.     We will consume government differently as
well as we will co-create it on a regular basis, not just at the time of the election.  We will not be separated by terms like ‘labour’ and ‘conservative’, but empowered by causes, campaigns and
beliefs.   The early adopters of ‘new government’ or ‘government in the internet age’ are on the streets of Istanbul as well as taking their GCSE’s in London.  But early adopters spread to the majority and before you know it, you have a revolution on your hands.

Government is being redefined.  Leaders emerge when history taps them on their shoulders. Witness Mandela, Thatcher, Aung San Suu Kyi, Pope John Paul II.   The next Prime Minister of both Britain and Turkey are not only listening to their focus groups right now, they are
building them.   They must have a systematic way of listening daily to what the people want or the people will find someone who will.  The entrepreneur knows he or she must think big, start small, and move fast.  That world has reached the altar of politics.  The holy curtain has been ripped, and behind it, stands just you and me.  We the people.   The revolution is afoot.

 

Serial Entrepreneur Ed Bussey Receives £1 million from Ariadne Fund

SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR ED BUSSEY
RECEIVES £1 MILLION INVESTMENT FOR QUILL

 

QUILL
ANNOUNCES FUNDING FROM ARIADNE CAPITAL’S FUND AND LEADING ENTREPRENEUR
27 May 2013 – LONDON – Three-time entrepreneur Ed Bussey today announces the successful closure of £1 million investment in Quill, the pioneering content creation platform he founded in 2011.

The investment comes from Ariadne Capital’s Fund and leading entrepreneur investors, including Shakil Khan (Spotify, Summly, buy.at), Rupert Ashe (Graze, Videojug), Karen Hanton(toptable.com), Andrew Burge (King Content, iSUBSCRiBE), Nick Beare (BBC
Worldwide, LGI), Peter Read (Techlightenment, Songkick) and Andrew Grahame (Mr
& Mrs Smith).

 

Formerly called iTrigga, Quill provides businesses, including Shop Direct Group, Swiftcover/AXA, WPP and Aegis, with high quality, web-optimised content, on any topic and in any language, helping them increase both revenues and reputation. 

 

In a move to capitalise on the rapidly increasing demand for digital content, Quill has developed a ground breaking technology platform, which it uses to manage the workflow and quality
assurance of a global network of writers, editors and video producers, across 30+ languages. Quill offers a more efficient, hassle-free and cost-effective way of producing content than is possible in house or via traditional content production agencies, whilst guaranteeing that all of its content is of a consistently high “on brand” standard. 

 

The funding will be used by Quill to grow its management team in the UK and overseas, to expand its specialist, multi-lingual writer and editor base to meet the rapidly increasing client demand for its services, and to accelerate the global roll out of its technology platform.

 

Prior to launching Quill, Ed was COO at mobile phone utility and social networking site ZYB,
which was acquired by Vodafone in 2008 for €31.5m.  Ed joined his first start-up team at online fashion retailer figleaves.com in 2000, which was sold to N Brown, the home shopping group, in October 2010 for £11.5m.

 

Ed Bussey, Founder and CEO of Quill, said:

 

“We have an outstanding investor base of leading digital entrepreneurs and we wanted to build on that investment approach with the ‘Entrepreneurs Backing Entrepreneurs’ ethos of Ariadne’s
investment platform. Ariadne has backed some explosive growth companies over the past decade, and we’re excited to be joining their portfolio.”

 

Commenting on the investment, Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital and Managing Partner of Ariadne Fund commented:

 

 “Not only has Ed impressed me over the years - and I was always looking for an opportunity to work with him - but I loved the fact that he was ex-special forces. Compared to that, entrepreneurship is a piece of cake!”

 

 

- ENDS -

 

Note to
editors

 

To organise an interview with Ed Bussey, please contact Seven Hills:

 

Henrietta
Walsh

[email protected]

+44 (0) 20 7199 2212

 

Josh
Davis

[email protected]               

+44 (0) 20 7199 2218

 

About Quill 

 

Quill (formerly called iTrigga) is a fast-growth content marketing company that specialises in writing for the web, on any topic, and in any language.

 

They are building a global network of specialist writers, editors and video producers around the Quill technology to meet the rapid growth in demand for bespoke digital content.  Their vision is to be the leading worldwide platform for writers.

 

Quill helps businesses to reach and engage better with their target audiences using tailored, web-optimised content. Quill offers a more efficient, cost-effective and scalable way of doing so than is possible in-house or via traditional content production agencies.

 

The workflow and quality assurance capabilities of the Quill Platform, coupled with in-house editors, ensures that all of the content is at a consistently high standard – from product descriptions and bite-sized news round ups to feature articles and in-depth opinion pieces, while guaranteeing “on brand” content for clients.

 

Clients, which include Shop Direct Group, 888, Swiftcover/AXA, WPP, Aegis and Publicis - count on Quill to write in their language, helping them improve their revenues and reputations.

 

Quill offers a number of other content services, in addition to editorial production: strategy – designing tailored content plans for clients; video; infographics; easy-to-integrate, customised news feeds for client websites; and content distribution, including blogger outreach, automated social publishing and article syndication.

 

About Ariadne Fund

 

Ariadne Capital has £5.3 million under management, and 25 leading Limited Partners (LP’s) who are individuals who lead global leading firms in private equity, media and telecoms and technology. The fund invests in ‘digital enablers’ – the enabling technology and tools firms which are transforming the large industrial sectors (financial services, media, retail, healthcare and energy). A typical investment is £250,000 to £500,000, but the co-investment and follow-on investment from the LP’s is substantially more.  Ariadne has within its shareholder base and LP’s the access to capital to ensure rapid growth for its portfolio firms.

 

 

Dr Liam Fox, ex Defence Secretary, UK, speaks at Follow The Entrepreneur

DrLiam Fox - SPEECH to ‘FOLLOW THE ENTREPRENEUR’ SUMMIT – Hampshire -24^THMay 2013; 09:20

 If any of us in this room run up debts, which - if we are typical UK citizens, we will - we know that there are two remediesthat we can take to deal with the problem. The first is to spend less and the
second is to increase our income. If we are able to do them both simultaneously, so much the better. And so it is for government.

 It seems very surprising to me that there are still some who do not understand how important it is to deal with our current level of debt. The global economy has expanded by almost 55% in real terms since the year 2000, growing from $32.2 trillion dollars, to $69.7 trillion last year. Why, we should be asking ourselves, are we not sharing in that growth. The answer is that we are too heavily indebted, too heavily taxed and too heavily regulated, especially in today’s global economy. Money goes to where money can be made and money can be moved, and the sad truth is that
Britain and the other Western economies are less attractive destinations for such money than we need them to be.

But let me have a minor digression to consider debt as a strategic issue. Our past is littered with examples of empires weakening, or in some cases falling, as a result of economic weakness.

Hapsburg Spain defaulted on its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and suffered rapid inflation as a result of an influx of New World Silver.

This economic weakness coupled with the outcome of the Nine Years War and the death Spain’s Charles II saw the end of Hapsburg Spain.

Or look at pre-Revolution France.

By 1788, Bourbon France was spending 62% of royal revenue on servicing its debt. 

It is no coincidence that some historians claim 1788, and not 1789, to be the true start of the French Revolution.

It was on the 7^th of June of that year that one of the first revolts occurred over an attempt by the government to enact new taxes to deal with France's unmanageable public debt.

Or look at the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was paying 50 percent of their budget on debt interest payments by 1875.

In fact, the last payment on Ottoman debt was finally made by the Republic of Turkey in 1954 - even though the Ottoman Empire was dissolved 36 years previously!

The dire economic situation was only exacerbated by numerous wars and conflicts leading up to World War I and the Ottoman’s ultimate defeat.

And we shouldn’t forget our own history.

The contraction of European influence in the 20^th century was driven as much by the economic exhaustion of European nations over two World Wars as it was by political enlightenment in support of decolonisation.

As a result of the First World War in the 1920s and 30s, Britain’s national debt was regularly over 150% of GDP.

After World War Two, it peaked at around 250% of GDP.

As examples of the effect on UK foreign policy, economic considerations underpinned both the British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, and the abandonment of the Suez campaign in 1956.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the debt position recovered to under 50% of GDP – a quarter of a century after the end of the War.

Britain’s so-called ‘East of Suez’ moment in 1967 when the Wilson Government announced a major withdrawal of UK forces from South East Asia, was a response to the decline in the country’s relative economic strength.

Thus, big government debt is a strategic liability for our country, but it is also the enemy of wealth creation.

So where are we now? At the end of this financial year, our public sector net debt will be around £1200 billion and we will be paying over £47 billion in interest payments alone – costing each
taxpayer around £1250 per year, rising to around £1700 each by 2015/16. Our debt interest is now the fourth biggest recipient of public money in Whitehall. What is worse is that the year after next, our debt interest will be higher than our education budget and the third biggest recipient of taxpayer’s money.  In a true monument to socialism, we will be spending more money servicing our
debt than educating our children.

And this is the real problem with debt. It has to be repaid by someone, some time. So let’s start to talk about what debt really is – it is simply deferred taxation. Government debt requires us to have
tax rates far higher than they need to be, creating a disadvantage for our wealth creators compared to their competitors in other, lower tax, economies.

But there are a few other ground rules that we also need to understand if we are to help our entrepreneurs.

First, growth and wealth creation are not the same thing. You can get economic growth with higher government spending and borrowing, but it is only an illusion of prosperity.

Second, Governments can create the optimal conditions for wealth creation, but it is entrepreneurs who will ultimately provide it.

Third, Government must champion both aspiration and opportunity. Without opportunity, aspiration can merely result in disappointment and bitterness.

If we are to begin to set the appropriate conditions for more wealth creation, then Government must control its spending or it will squeeze out the entrepreneurs. I believe that we should aim to
freeze public spending for at least three years, a move that would see baseline spending totals £70.4 billion lower than today. If we were to go further still and freeze public spending for five years at 2012/13 levels, annual spending would be £91.2 billion lower in 2017/18 and the cumulative saving over five years would be an incredible £345 billion. It would go a long way to putting us on a sound and sustainable footing in our public finances and maximise the chances of finances being available for a growing private sector.

As economic recovery gathers pace we need to return to the concept of sharing the proceeds of growth. But this time, instead of sharing the proceeds between public spending and deficit reduction, we need to share the proceeds of any growth between tax reduction and ultimately debt
reduction.

We must encourage competition as it is the means by which we measure our respective talents against one another and generate efficiency and excellence.

We must reform our tax and benefits systems, translating universal benefits into tax cuts wherever possible.

We will also need to take a radical review about what government does, and does not, need to do. A further round of privatisations and asset sales would not only improve the public finances but
would create a competitive space in many sectors of the economy.

Small businesses are the cornerstone of our economy and will create the employment of the future. We must support the corner shop owner who stays open late at the expense of family life, the small
business owner who hasn’t had a holiday for years, and the young graduate with the bright idea who needs finance to turn it into a wealth creating reality.

We must reward those who take risk in the taxation system for without risk, there will be no innovation. If we see every tax break and incentive for the wealth creators as “a tax on the rich”, we will not create the environment where would-be innovators will see the balance of risk and reward as being in their favour.

Let me just take one example – capital gains tax. You’d be hard pressed to find an independent economic analyst to dispute the assertion that a tax on capital gains does not inhibit investors from
realising their assets. That’s why I would like to see the tax reduced, if possible to zero, for a minimum period of at least three years, creating a tax window that will encourage businesses to sell assets, invest in capital, and generate value for the economy. Any fall in revenue at the Treasury would be offset handsomely by the increased business activity and job creation the measure would encourage.

Suspending capital gains tax would be a radical statement that shows the world Britain is open for business. We have travelled too far down the road of allowing ourselves to believe that wealth is
an embarrassment, where in fact, it is what creates jobs, higher tax revenues and new inward investment.

We need to understand that in the new, highly competitive global economic environment, entrepreneurs will be the drivers of change and the generators of prosperity. Only by creating the appropriate financial, regulatory and political environment will we be able to set free the talents of the entrepreneurs who will enable us to provide the cutting edge technologies, we will require to compete in the globalised era.

There is no question that entrepreneurship is booming - as Lord Young’s recent report on small businesses showed, the recession has produced half a million net new businesses. If we are to
encourage this trend we need to have a tax cutting agenda.

The future is not with big Government but with big ideas, not with the suffocating state but with the empowered individual, with the wealth creators not the wealth consumers. Much of it will be in this
very room.

Higher taxes limit aspiration, but most pressingly, they encourage businesses to sit on their hands rather than get out into the global market and sell hard. It should go without saying that, if we are to create growth, economic activity must be encouraged, not stifled, but that is not the conclusion an external observer would draw from our existing tax system.

Britain is brimming with entrepreneurial individuals who want to make a better life for themselves - to own a home, run a business and secure a more prosperous future for their children. To give them the opportunity to realise this aspiration, bold and strategic measures are necessary. A radical approach, rewarding the risk-takers, and energising the entrepreneurs, is what can get us back on track, and reverse the damage wrought by Labour.