A Young Entrepreneur in London - by Ivan Mazour

Three lessons from three failures

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Three lessons from three failures

Over the past decade I have founded a number of companies – seven, in fact. All of them are still running, even though not all have gone well. Some I started on my own, others with a co-founder, and others still with several co-founders at the same time. As with any skill, repetition leads to improvement, and from starting each of these companies I have learned a huge amount – which I have then tried to apply to the next one along. And pretty much every time, although I had prepared for what was now expected, something else would come out of the blue to teach me another lesson. For a while now, I’ve wanted to write down the main reasons that I feel led to the demise of the unsuccessful companies, and summarise the lessons that I have taken away from the experience.

Three Failures

Interactive Art

Interactive Art was not my first business venture, but it was the first that was set up as a proper Limited Liability Company and involved a business partner. I had by that point gained several years of experience in the property market doing basic development and investment, and my friend had been running a company of handymen, so we partnered up to do luxury smart-home installations and renovations – combining technology with high-end design.

Initially everything went well – I was the brake pedal, running numbers and analysing our strategies, as well as doing system design for our installations. My business partner was the accelerator, getting clients, promising the world, and motivating the team. The first flat went well, as did the second, but then we realised that we had not put any capital in the company and weren’t able to afford a support and maintenance team. Things inevitably went wrong after installation, and needed to be fixed, and this took time away from any new projects.

On top of this, I wasn’t able to spend much time on the company for a few years from 2007, and by the time I turned my attention back to Interactive Art, there was no team left, the brand had not been developed, and other companies in the space – which had been new and very exciting – had now grown to a size so large that we could no longer compete. I stepped away and let my business partner continue with the company.

Sapientia

For years I had wanted to leverage my experience of getting into Cambridge – it was a difficult journey, involving moving here from Russia, learning Latin and Ancient Greek when I was 11, getting a King’s Scholarship to Eton when I was 13, and doing twice as many A-levels as everyone else when I was 18. And even then I still didn’t get in the first time, and had to get pooled to another college..

I was able to analyse the experience, realise what I had done wrong, and distil it into a process that could be taught to others. But I knew that given my full-time work with Park Street Estates and Innova Kapital, I was not able to run a business of this nature myself – consultancy requires a huge time commitment. In 2010 I met someone who had faced a similarly difficult journey getting into Harvard having originally been born in Singapore, and we got chatting about setting up a company to help other people get into top universities, both here and in the US.

From the start we came to a very fair arrangement – equal shareholding split, a full-time role for my co-founder, and a salary to match. I would do business development, without taking a fee for it, and she would do the consultancy work and be paid. The rest of the profits we would share equally. By the end of the first year we had 10 clients. By the end of the second, our turnover was £300k. The business development had worked.

In my head, this was to be a fantastic passive income stream. I had established a company, found a great person to run it, and left her to it. Although I could have been a director, I had other matters to attend to, and left all of the responsibility to her. At the end of the second year, expecting a fantastic dividend given the number of clients I had located for the company, I found that the accounts were empty. Everything had been expensed. And as the third year started to roll by, my co-founder stopped picking up my calls, as well as the calls of clients.

Throughout the following year, I would sporadically receive phonecalls and e-mails from clients, first asking if she was ok, then getting angry, and finally taking the company to court. As a shareholder, I had no legal responsibility, but as the person who had brought them in as clients, the responsibility I felt was huge. A three year entrepreneurial experience ended with me earning almost nothing, and spending a huge amount of time and energy to re-build lost relationships. As soon as I possibly could, I transferred my shares to her and decided not to have anything else to do with the company.

42 Tasks

42 Tasks came out of me needing to manage a number of teams simultaneously, across multiple companies, but with some people involved with all of them at the same time. There wasn’t an online tool to do this, and the market was clearly crying out for it as entrepreneurship was becoming more and more prevalent.

Our project manager at Innova Kapital was born in Uzbekistan and had done some technology work there prior to moving to the UK. He still had good connections with the community there and was able to find a developer and designer who were willing to work for sums which were simply too good to be true. We hired both of them and work commenced.

The four co-founders of 42 Tasks quite literally had no idea about how to run a tech company or build a tech product. We were all geeks, and knew all about technology as consumers, but we had never had actual commercial experience in this industry. And as all first-time technology entrepreneurs do, we were convinced that we just had to build our product, and it would immediately go viral.

The product was built quickly, although with little polish. We had an Android and iPhone app as well as a slick online Ajax interface, which had only just started to become popular at the time. Some blogs covered us, and we got 10,000 free users signing up. One per cent of these even converted to paying users, at the impressive price of $2 per month, a price based on absolutely nothing. And then that was it. And we sat there, wondering what to do next. I went back to Cambridge to learn some more maths, and immerse myself in technology entrepreneurship, and 42 Tasks continued to limp on. I, personally, find it immensely useful. At this current moment in time, I think about 5 other people do too.

Three Lessons

The first lesson is about choosing your co-founders. At Interactive Art, my co-founder wasn’t interested in pushing the company forward when I wasn’t there to help. At Sapientia, my co-founder got carried away with expenses and selfishly destroyed the company. And at 42 Tasks, my co-founders, just like me, didn’t know what they were doing.

At Ometria, I am working with three co-founders. Two of us are from 42 Tasks, and we have spent the past three years ravenously absorbing every book, article and course on creating a successful technology company. The other two have a decade of experience in the industry. Between us, we know what we are doing. This is how it should be done. I’m still pretty sure that something unexpected is going to jump out at me – but this time I am ready for it.

The second lesson is about control. At Interactive Art we shared control, but as soon as I didn’t participate, the company’s growth stopped. At Sapientia I never retained any aspect of control, thinking that I could trust my co-founder, which turned out to be a mistake. At 42 Tasks, we weren’t able to stay in control, because we simply didn’t know how to.

At Ometria, all four of us are Directors, and the quorum for a board meeting is four. The legal paperwork was carefully crafted over a period of months, to make sure that each of us was happy with our position and the company’s decision process. Control is set up to be both legally protected, and psychologically agreed to by each of the co-founders. We all understand how important it is to stay on top of the company’s operation, and we all feel that given our experience, we know how to do that.

The final lesson is about having enough capital for the market you are entering. Interactive Art needed money – we should have hired a team of support engineers from the start, leaving us and the main builders to do additional projects. Sapientia didn’t need any capital at all, and this was a great lesson. 42 Tasks needed a stronger development team and a marketing budget, and we didn’t allow for either.

At Ometria, we calculated what we would need from the beginning. Our CFO built a model, and we assumed that we would not have revenues for two years – in case the product-market fit ended up not being right. We budgeted for all of the team members that would be necessary to succeed, even if some of these may have seemed unnecessary at the start. Starting a business is risky in all cases – you need to maximise your chances of success, and this is what we based the budget of the company on. We know that we are fine until Series A, and can all concentrate on the important matters like actually building a product that people want, and then getting it out there.

So these are the three lessons that I have learned from my mistakes. I hope that I won’t be making the same mistakes in future. I’d love to learn from your mistakes – leave a comment and let me know what lessons you’ve learned.

How to raise your children to become successful entrepreneurs

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How to raise your children to become successful entrepreneurs

Looking back on it, from the day I was born I was raised to become an entrepreneur. My mother was a scientist, and my father was a “businessman”, which was the fancy term back then in exactly the same way as “entrepreneur” is now. They both had PhDs from the Soviet Union, which is actually a further degree above the Western PhD, and could only be awarded by a special government agency. This academic background meant that not only were they incredibly knowledgeable, but also that they understood the value of a research-based approach to life.

From the moment I could speak, and could ask questions, they would teach me anything I wanted to know. If my question was due to a lack of knowledge, they would plant a seed of the answer, and then suggest a book I should read to get the rest of it. If, however, they felt I already knew enough to answer my question, they would carefully guide me towards working it out by myself. They never let me take the easy option, and never took the easy option themselves by just telling me the answer – they knew that their approach would help me become an inquisitive person with a passion for learning and a desire to find my own answers.

By the age of four, I had learned about the concept of school, and since in Russia school only starts at the age of six, I wanted to set up my own. My mother got me a desk, some books, and a bell, and I would ring the bell and make her play school with me. She would teach, and I would learn. By the time I got to the age of six, and went to apply to the top school in Moscow, which since it was the Soviet Union was simply called “Number 32″, I already had a very specific expectation of how school should work. According to my mother, although I don’t remember this myself, I walked out of the interview part-way, annoyed that the mathematics teacher didn’t know how to integrate, and that none of the teachers spoke English.

My mother turned me into a life-long learner, but it was my father who turned me into an entrepreneur. As a child, he would ask me who I wanted to be, and like all young boys, I would answer “a businessman, just like my dad”. By the age of eight my English was fluent, and my father, who has never learned to speak it, began to take me to meetings to interpret for him. At first the people we would be meeting would laugh, and find the whole situation rather amusing – after all here was this tiny boy wearing a suit and talking about important matters with a strong Russian accent. But slowly they would come to realise that, in fact, this approach provided my father with an indirect intuition into their thoughts, as well as an important negotiation barrier. As the years went by, we learned to act as a team, with me both translating and providing my own input into the discussions.

By the time I started my first company, I had over a decade of experience of business meetings, board meetings, negotiations, and business in general. The experience was in an industry that I wasn’t interested in, and at a level I was unlikely to experience any time soon, but the skills that I had gained were directly transferable to running a small startup company, and would have taken me years to acquire if I did not have them already. I had in every way been groomed, most likely without my parents realising, into becoming an entrepreneur.

I often think about what I would do when raising my own children, and have distilled it down into a few points:

Firstly, like my mother, I will never tell them the answer to a problem that they can work out for themselves. I will instill in them a desire to constantly learn more, to want to understand how things work, and to always be solving problems.

Secondly, like my father, I will let them participate, at any age, in all aspects of my business life, to give them the amazing advantage of a decade’s worth of experience by the time they are ready to start something themselves.

Thirdly, I will only ever speak to them in Russian, so they are fluent in two languages from birth. Making me learn English was the single most valuable decision that my parents made for me, and knowing Russian is proving extremely valuable now. They need to be given the same opportunity.

And finally, I will let them choose their own path. My parents never forced me into anything. My mother guided me into following in her footsteps and studying mathematics at university, and my father did the same in turning me into an entrepreneur. But they never forced me to do this – the choice was always mine. An entrepreneur always has to forge their own path, and this is how they taught me to live life, right from the start.

The top skills and character traits for an entrepreneur in 2013

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The top skills and character traits for an entrepreneur in 2013

One of my personal development processes, some of which I have described before, is an Evernote document which contains the character traits, attitudes, skills and abilities which I feel would be valuable to me as an entrepreneur. Whenever I come across a blog post or a talk which inspires me, I consider why that is, and write down what I need to do to be more like that person. My document is split into three sections. The main section is just a dump of ideas – I put my thoughts there whenever they arise. The top part of the document is filled with those traits that I want to develop over the course of this particular year. Finally the bottom part contains traits which I feel I have now developed – I keep them there as a reminder so I can see if I am starting to forget any of them.

Last year I focused on a few which I feel I have now incorporated. They included internalising the value of networking and meeting people, for example, and having done this I am now at the point where my next available lunch slot is in 11 weeks’ time. This year I have been focusing on some new ones, and as we come to the half-way point of the year, I thought I would write them down and elaborate on the reasons behind why I think they are vital for entrepreneurs, and anyone aspiring to success.

1. To have absolute incorruptible Grit.

Grit is a fascinating term. Its official definition is that it a positive non-cognitive trait that involves perseverance of effort to accomplish a long term goal no matter what obstacles or challenges lay within the path to it. A few years ago a number of professors at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a paper defining Grit and producing a test by which you can measure your own Grit score. When I originally took it I was somewhat disappointed.

My issues were never with completing what I started, but with being distracted by new projects. My interests have changed wildly, both in business and in the leisure activities I enjoy. I would obsess over certain ideas, but then soon find them rather unexciting.

In the end, I decided that going back to Cambridge would be the best way to build Grit. Using the memory of the discipline which I built up over that year, I am spending this year ensuring that I am never distracted, and that I always focus on the task that logically needs to be done next, not on the one which I feel like doing at the time. This way, there is no option to be distracted by new projects, and I am always moving towards the most important goal.

2. To always be Curious.

This is something that has stuck with me since I first heard Joi Ito speak and read his story. Reading about the many different things he has done was very inspirational, but even more so was his advice about how he got to where he is – that we must retain the curiosity that we had as children, and that we must keep building things and learning how things work.

There was a time in my early twenties that I lost this curiosity. Throughout my childhood my favourite thing was Lego – I would always be building things. In my teenage years, it was computers. I would be building them constantly. And then when I first started in business, I was excited by the idea of building companies, and lost touch with the curiosity that had always inspired me to build smaller things. Over those years my world view became much more limited and with that came a lack of inspiration, a lack of creativity and a lack of confidence.

This year I am bringing back the Curiosity. I’ve persevered in getting understanding how web applications work, to the point of building HyperlinkedIn myself. I am back to constantly building computers. Everything I come across – whether it is a device, a business or even an individual – I am constantly trying to work out how and why they work. It has brought back the confidence to be able to understand and do anything, as well as a wealth of new ideas.

3. To always go after the Cause of the problem.

I spent a few years recently doing nothing but fighting fires. There were some huge problems that needed resolving, but I had not been aware of how they had arisen, and this made it impossible to do anything other than try and fix the symptoms. A lot of time was wasted on this, as ultimately issues cannot be resolved if you go after them at the surface. By the time I realised, it was too late to do anything about it.

Jeff Bezos once wrote in a letter to the Amazon shareholders that while walking through one of his fulfillment centres a Kaizen expert turned to him and said “I’m in favour of a clean fulfillment centre, but why are you cleaning? Why don’t you eliminate the source of dirt?” As Jeff Bezos wrote – hearing it, he felt like the Karate Kid. Reading this, so did I.

This kind of thought may seems strange to others, but it demonstrates absolute commitment to solving problems at their root. Even with something as obvious as dirt, Jeff Bezos and his team still refused to just deal with the symptoms. This year I am applying this approach to everything. Whenever something goes wrong, I immediately work out why, and then change it. If you want to create something truly amazing, it is the only way.

Enternships Blog: "There's only one thing that matters, and that's the team." Ivan Mazour, our CEO of the week

Content marketing - a skill you absolutely must have to succeed

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Content marketing - a skill you absolutely must have to succeed

Ever since I can remember, my father has been writing books. His work is hugely demanding, of both time and energy, and yet he always found additional time to put together comprehensive tomes on a variety of highly complex topics from clean energy to arctic exploration. Once I moved here and learned English, I was promptly drafted in to be the editor of the English version of each book, to make sure that it was translated correctly and set the right tone for the British and American readers.

The books would be encyclopedic in their scope, stretching to almost a thousand pages, and the resources required to produce them were immense. Teams of researchers would scour all cutting edge literature to get a complete understanding of the subject and then handpick the perfect material for the book. My father would spend months putting it together and pushing the knowledge forward with his own thoughts and opinions. It would take years of time and significant capital to produce and publish each one.

And once this was done, the books would be sold in only very small volumes. A quick mental calculation shows that these projects could never have financially justified the number of hours my father was putting into them, if you based it on the market rate for his time. So I could never really understand the point. He is an academic, with a combined PhD in Engineering and Ecology, so I could understand the desire to push the boundaries of a certain subject, but it all seemed rather at odds with his innately business-oriented approach to life.

Recently I began formulating the marketing plan for Ometria, and started to look for a Marketing Manager. When we first started trying to get customers, we tried a typical direct marketing approach – we put together a database of decision makers, got their e-mail addresses and started sending out proposals to set up a meeting and discuss a free trial of our software. This got us nowhere, since e-commerce people are simply inundated with work, and even if our software was exactly what they needed, they would not have the time to read a marketing e-mail or set up a meeting. So we started to learn about how the best SaaS companies solve this problem.

Content marketing turns the entire marketing strategy on its head. Instead of writing messages with a specific offer and request, you produce content that is useful and educating in nature – content on a subject that you know well, and that your customers want to learn about. Instead of interrupting the reader and trying to force them to pay attention, by producing genuinely valuable content which does not ask for anything in return, you educate the people you are reaching out to, providing them with value and gaining mindshare for yourself and your company. Instead of a small proportion accepting the offer in your direct marketing message, a large proportion increase their appreciation for your company and its reputation within the industry. Over time, they become more likely to want to reach out and speak with you, rather than less likely as they would be if they kept receiving unsolicited marketing messages.

So as I continued to interview people, waiting for someone to tell me that they understood the value of this approach and were able to successfully execute it, it got me thinking back to my father’s books. He never really cared about how much money he made from them. But books like “Oil and Gas – A World History” were sent to the top 500 CEOs of companies in that industry, and then gifted by him personally to important people he had meetings with. Decades ago, before the internet, and before the proliferation of blogs and social media, he already understood the concept of content marketing. Other CEOs may have had similar roles and experience, but after reading his books, none could compete with him as an expert in his field.

We all have a subject or area that we want to become the best in, and aspire to be seen as experts and leaders in it. The quicker we understand the value of content marketing, the quicker we will get there.

Why you should ban incoming calls immediately - the MM1 Approach

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Why you should ban incoming calls immediately - the MM1 Approach

These days we have so many different forms of communication available to us. I use e-mail, Google Chat, text messages and phone calls on a daily basis, supplemented by shared notes on collaborative online tools to keep track of progress on various projects.

During the busiest and hardest time of my life – the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge, words that will inspire awe and trepidation in anyone who has had to sit these exams and are now scarred with the stress they embodied – I found myself so overworked that I needed to implement a communications policy to make sure I could successfully complete my revision while still managing my companies and relationships.

My rules were as follows:

1. Emails were to be used when something was important and not time sensitive.
2. Text messages were to be used to draw my attention to something that was important and time sensitive.
3. Google Chat was the only medium to be used for communication that was not important.
4. Phone calls were not to be used at all, except for in the case of genuine emergencies.

This way if I was online and on Google Chat, then I wasn’t in the middle of concentrating on something vital, and so didn’t mind my attention being diverted onto random and potentially irrelevant matters. Important matters, on the other hand, would collect in my Gmail inbox and would get handled in one go at times I’d allocate specifically to that, several times a day. There would be no alert set for e-mails, neither on my computer nor on my phone, so I would do this according to my own schedule. If something was time sensitive, then I would receive a text message telling me to check that specific e-mail, and the text would have an alert which would interrupt whatever I was doing. I would read the text and make a decision whether the interruption was worthwhile.

I sent this policy to everyone I know, including my colleagues at work and to my girlfriend – http://www.tijanserena.com – who, as you can imagine, was not particularly impressed. However, being supportive, she came around to understanding my reasons behind it and helped me by sticking to it, as in the end did everyone else.

One of the courses I was revising for my final year exam was called Applied Probability, and part of the course was Queuing Theory. The concepts were both fascinating and directly relevant to this policy – and based on them I called this communications policy the “MM1 Approach”. The M/M/1 queue is a model of a single server (think a barista at Starbucks) who has tasks allocated to him or her on a semi-random basis and who takes a semi-random time to complete each one. There are two relevant numbers – lambda, which is the rate at which tasks are set, and mu, which is the rate at which they complete them. As long as mu is greater than lambda, everything will be fine. If lambda is greater than mu, then the number of outstanding tasks will grow to infinity – the barista never gets to go home.

Each of us is but a server, completing tasks. The older we get, the more tasks we get. Get married – lambda goes up. Have a child – lambda gets another order of magnitude. Mu depends on our discipline, and how efficient we are. Using lots of productivity tools, we can influence our mu by quite a significant extent. So by using the policy above, we increase it even more, while reducing lambda to the lowest level possible.

Consider what happens with most people. Their friends might send them an e-mail with a lolcat, or a link to an article online. Their colleagues are sending them e-mails about things that are very important, as well as other matters which are not. As they sit and try to complete an important task that requires commitment and concentration, every few minutes they allow themselves to be drawn away by the Pavlovian response – they hear the ping of an e-mail, and it is impossible not to immediately check it. With the constant distractions, the important work never gets done. And most of the time the distracting e-mails aren’t even that important.

Consider now the above approach. You can concentrate on any task, even if it’s one that requires a long period of unbroken concentration. E-mails are collecting in your inbox. Should something be time-sensitive, a text message arrives and its ping tells you to interrupt what you are doing and check your e-mails. You check your e-mails, and see not 200 mixed messages about lolcats and celebrity babies, but only the important items. You deal with them, one by one, and once it is done, go back to the important work you are doing. E-mail no longer rules your life. And more importantly, other people no longer dictate how you spend your time.

And it’s this idea that sits behind the title of this blog post. The most important thing I did during that period, and have continued to do since, is to ban incoming phone calls. Speak to any car salesman or estate agent – they know that the best way to close a deal is a phonecall. An e-mail may be dealt with, but it may also easily be deleted, or its response may be delayed. The decision is up to the person receiving it. A phonecall cannot – if someone picks up, they are at the mercy of the person who called them. Why should we let how we allocate our time depend so directly on other people? They do not know if we are in the middle of something important – but we do.

People don’t like to ignore phonecalls. They have the fear of missing out, in case the person was calling them to tell them something important. Alternatively they think it’s rude to ignore a call. But if it’s important, they will send an e-mail. They’ll find another way to get in touch. And what’s actually rude is someone interrupting your busy day with something they want to talk about, but you might not. People find it a bit strange when I tell them not to use my mobile number since I won’t pick up any incoming calls, but in the end they easily comply, and it does not affect my relationship with them, or my ability to get things done. I’ve taken back my life, and it feels great. Will you do the same?

The APM Principle - what StarCraft teaches us about real life success

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The APM Principle - what StarCraft teaches us about real life success

How many things do you think you can do in an hour? How many problems can you locate, think through, come up with a solution to, and then actually solve in this short time? Stop and think about this, and get into your head a figure that you think is reasonable.

What if I told you the answer was 30,000. Would you think that was ridiculous? I certainly would. We live life with a mindset determined by our experiences and our surroundings, and hence each one of us has our own understanding of what is and isn’t reasonable. Clearly 30,000 logic-related decisions and actions in an hour is an absurd expectation – one that no one would take seriously.

This was my outlook, just like all other beginners, when they first play a game called StarCraft. A highly acclaimed real-time strategy game – a dynamic and convoluted extension of chess, as it were – StarCraft has a number of difficulty settings with the harder ones being quite a challenge. When you master playing against the computer you have the option of playing human opponents, and it is this that has made the game so successful.

The first time you play against a human opponent, you simply cannot comprehend how they crush you, not by a tiny margin, but so decisively that there seems no way to be able to compete against them. As with everything, the next port of call is Google, to try and work out how to play better, and as you search you come across something that is, in the true definition of the word, incredible.

That is a real video. The person in it is not hitting random buttons – everything he does is calculated and for a reason. This is not like memorising a pattern for one of those music beat-matching games, where you see videos of people hitting thousands of buttons on a controller or on a plastic guitar – this is someone actively reacting to a strategic and tactical situation. His mind, and his hands, are genuinely working that quickly. His APM – actions per minute – gets up to 500 at its peak, meaning that he is managing to react to and act on 30,000 problems in the course of one hour.

Without seeing this, without taking some time to let it truly sink in, there would be no way to believe that this was possible. The standard to which one can aspire can be set high, but this is many orders of magnitude beyond what any normal person would have come up with. And yet once you see someone do this, you goalposts are immediately set at that level, and your mindset is readjusted.

I’ve written before about my time at Cambridge. Few people arriving there expect 10-14 hour days of mathematics, including weekends and holidays, to be possible, let alone reasonable. But seeing everyone around you doing it, what you expect of yourself changes, and you successfully do what you wouldn’t have even considered possible before.

So imagine if we apply the “APM Principle” to everything we do. Imagine that we pause to consider what we are trying to achieve in life, work out what we are doing in order to achieve it, and then simply add some orders of magnitude onto our approach. It doesn’t matter if we think it’s possible or not – we’ve already seen that our minds don’t always comprehend how much we can really do. So instead, we just do it. Take what is reasonable, and then do a thousand times more.

I’ve just invested in a company that is valued at £3m without anything – no product, no unique technology, and a in a highly competitive industry. Another company I invested in raised $2m in seed funding half way through last year, without any product either, and less than a year later has just raised $8m at a post-money valuation of $20m. The founders of these companies understand the APM principle. While others spend years waiting for an incremental salary increase, or growing a small business over many decades, they set their target on generating value worth tens of millions in just a few months, and then they go out and actually do it.

Just keep swimming - but only in the direction you want

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Just keep swimming - but only in the direction you want

Back in 2010, I was busy running my property management company, Park Street Estates, and doing property development through Innova Kapital. Even though I had studied mathematics at Cambridge, the extent of my technical ability and workload was creating Excel spreadsheets for cashflows and budgets. Even this was quickly taken away from me by my business partner who turned out to be better at it. The one thing I seemed to know was that there was no way that I could do an online startup, because I had not spent the past decade learning to program and make exciting things on the internet.

In my mind, I had this assumption that only genius computer science majors did amazing things in technology, and because I had missed out on this experience, much though I wanted it more than anything else in the world, that opportunity was not available to me. Every day in the office was a bit of a drag. Nonetheless, due to serendipitously meeting a few other guys, and based around a problem that had been bugging me for years, we created 42tasks.com – three years ago there was nothing out there that would allow small teams to collaborate on their tasks, and for the manager to be able to guide and oversee them. Certainly nothing with good functionality and a reasonable price range. A tiny bit of investment and some offshore developers in Uzbekistan later, and we had a product that was, at least to me, incredibly useful. We had team meetings on how to improve the UX, without actually knowing what UX was, and at the end of the meeting we would send a brief off to Uzbekistan, and the product update would arrive, a month later, looking completely different to what we envisaged. We must have been the most uncompetitive startup in London.

Throughout this time, slowly I started messing around with some basic coding. A bit of plug and play HTML to customise my original Tumblr blog, and then a bit more to customise this WordPress one. Some simple coding through Codeacademy. I went back to Cambridge for another year of mathematics, and spent most of it programming statistical applications into Matlab and R. All of this was in my spare time – I was still running companies, and none of this coding was relevant to any of them. But what it was doing was taking away that unreasonable belief that I was trapped in a career path that I didn’t want. With every month that passed, my knowledge and my confidence improved. I found myself comfortably talking with other developers, and building out small things for myself. There was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Last year, I finally knew that I was ready – not as a technical founder, but as a technically knowledgeable non-technical founder. I knew how to run a good startup. I understood the ecosystem and the processes involved. I had an idea. But I needed a team. Fast-forward a brutal year of networking and I have the best team I could wish for. Every morning is a joy, and by the end of every day we achieve great things. I couldn’t ask for more. But sitting back and accepting the status quo is exactly what this blog post is against. So this Easter I wanted to see what I could create, technically, and by myself. So I present to you HyperlinkedIn – a two day project to solve a problem that’s been bugging me for years. A one man startup in a weekend.

If we push ourselves to destroy the assumptions we all have about what we can and cannot do, then doing great things in general becomes easier. With time, as we succeed in all the challenges we give ourselves, success becomes second nature in all aspects of our life. We have much to learn from Dory. She missed one very important point though – only dead fish go with the flow. So just keep swimming. Always keep swimming. Just make sure it’s in a direction you choose yourself.

The right way to do a cold e-mail approach

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The right way to do a cold e-mail approach

Since the beginning of the year, my team has been researching the UK e-commerce analytics market. The first step towards this was to understand what existing products were being used by online retailers, and what they did not like about them. We tried a number of approaches, including asking one of our student interns to call and explain that the simple questions he was going to ask were all to help him with his university course, but after days of cold calls and cold e-mails, we were not able to get a single company to spend even five minutes answering our questions.

I can certainly relate to the people on the other side of this problem. We are currently recruiting for a number of roles, and get an incessant stream of phonecalls from recruiters who come across our job ads. Most are fended off quickly, but some manage to slip through the cracks, mainly by knowing the exact names of people to ask for most probably by looking them up on LinkedIn. It’s difficult to put the phone down straight away when someone asks for you by name. But even when they get put through to me or one of the other decision-makers, they are quickly discovered and the conversation promptly ends.

At the same time as all of this, someone I know is currently applying for jobs, and I’ve kept a close watch over this process. Her e-mails are polite, extremely well written, and demonstrate all of the energy and passion that she wants to put into the role. She locates the person best suited to make the decision about hiring her, and follows up her e-mail after an appropriate amount of time. And yet, almost all of these get no response.

The book I am currently reading is called Influence – the Psychology of Persuasion. It is a tome that is revered within the online conversion rate optimisation community, as well as in any sales-based industry. It describes the most common principles that compliance professionals use to get people to do what they want. My approach to reading is always to treat it like I am doing a degree at university, so I take detailed notes, and try and make links between everything I learn and everyday matters that I experience. So, of course, I have been thinking long and hard about what my researchers, and my friend, are doing wrong. The answer came not as a flash of inspiration, but from two cold e-mail approaches to me that have immediately been successful.

The first was from a recruiter through LinkedIn – as a type of approach this is the least likely to succeed since most people use it and hence it doesn’t stand out from the crowd. What did stand out was the simple contents of the message. “Hi Ivan. We specialise in growing technology startup businesses in the UK. We grew LoveFilm from 80 heads to over 280 heads at exit with Amazon and saved them £750,000 in fees. Would you be interested in a short meeting?”. Attached was a carefully crafted infographic demonstrating how they can help.

This short message contains all the elements of persuasion needed to get me intrigued. It is highly relevant to exactly the company that I run. It demonstrates social proof in an intricate way – not only have they worked with LoveFilm, but they also saved them money. It also leverages the principle of liking. Just like Pavlov was able to get dogs to salivate when he rang the dinner bell, the same tactic is used here by mentioning that LoveFilm exited to Amazon – by doing so they associate their recruitment agency with this success, leading me to like them more. The principle of authority is used in the same sentence – if they are good enough for LoveFilm, surely they are good enough for Ometria. And finally the infographic is a stab at reciprocity – they give me some value, and hence raise the expectation of me giving them some value back. All in all, a perfectly put together sales approach, and I’m actually looking forward to seeing whether this level of persuasion continues at our meeting next week.

But the second stood out considerably more. It was another one that was highly unlikely to get any attention at all – through LinkedIn, and offering to put me in touch with companies looking for funding. There is nothing that angel investors dislike more than introducers, and I have the same feeling not just through following the herd but due to personal experience. They add an extra layer of friction and entropy in any deal process which often results in time being wasted by the two parties actually relevant – the startup and the investor. But like the one described above, this approach used persuasion principles rather well too. “Ivan. Love your amazing inspirational website. You won’t colonise space with £1bn. You’ll need at least £2bn. I always wanted to change the world… with an idea. Cheaper but still needs cash. So I find companies for Angels. I may have some that fit your unique requirements. Can we talk?”.

It’s been proven that people cannot resist compliments, and that in fact genuineness is not relevant when determining its ability to achieve a persuasion effect. So the first sentence, especially when aimed at my website which is clearly something very close to me, was guaranteed to spark my interest. Then came a demonstration of seriousness, since time was spent on reading my posts. Then the beginning of a debate, which positions him as an equal, and a demonstration of similarity. All this increases liking. It was good – enough to ensure that the LinkedIn invite didn’t go in my current pile of 84 unaccepted ones, and got through to a connection. What followed, however, was so impressively written that I couldn’t help but spend time trying to work out why it worked so well.

Sentence by sentence, the e-mail that followed layered on persuasion principles in an always eloquent and highly engaging way. Liking was established by showing similarity in thought, in ambition, in goals. Any negative attitude I had towards introducers was preempted and turned on its head, not just through a logical argument, but by using a statement from my interview of David S. Rose. And finally, it was finished off with three perfect examples of combining social proof and similarity. The e-mail contained details of three individuals that the person was currently “personally invested in”, and why he likes them. Each of these people were exciting, successful and interesting. By mentioning them, all of their positive attributes were immediately subconsciously transferred onto him. And the proposition automatically became that if he was good enough to work with them, then he is definitely good enough to work with me. The whole e-mail grabbed onto and maneuvered my thought process from beginning to end, with me finally concluding that if I consider myself a smart and successful individual, the only reasonable response would be to meet this person immediately. There was no choice left to be made. All I could do was sit back, impressed and slightly shocked, and invite the person for lunch.

Would I have been able to achieve the same result if I’d been in their shoes? Probably not. But now that I’ve seen these two approaches, and analysed them based on the knowledge I’ve picked up from the book, could I re-create them? I’m pretty sure I can. And finally, can absolutely everyone benefit from understanding them, and changing the way they get in touch with people they haven’t met yet? Definitely.

In a world of flux finding A-players isn’t enough

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In a world of flux finding A-players isn’t enough

Yesterday I spent the day at the London Web Summit, listening to many successful entrepreneurs tell their stories and provide advice. Mike Lynch, who recently sold Autonomy for £10bn, made a point that I have always agreed with very strongly – “the true asset of a software company is its team”. I’ve always believed that finding the perfect team was the most important part of setting up and running a business, and not just in the software industry but in all others too. But doing that is not something you can simply learn from a book – it’s an art, one that you pick up and improve at over many years of experience.

The internet is awash with articles about how you absolutely must pick “A-players” for your team. The theory goes that A-players only like to work with other A-players, whether this is on a sports team, or in a company. If they feel that some people aren’t pulling their weight, they get discouraged because it dilutes their own performance, and in the end they end up not performing as well as they can, and ultimately leaving.

This is valid – I’ve experienced it before. The greatest thing about working with people who are better than you is that they set a bar, and you feel compelled to reach it. If they manage 9 efficient hours a day without breaking a sweat, you end up feeling this is what should be your own standard too. If they come up with great out of the box ideas instead of mindlessly ploughing on, then you end up being more creative as well. As long as you have the right attitude and willingness to learn, then being on a team of A-players will make you one too.

What many other authors seem to ignore though, is that it is no longer enough to just find the perfect people. The process doesn’t end when you’ve found them, and they have signed an employment contract. That is only the first step, and since we are trying to build companies that will scale and become long-lasting, there is a whole journey that follows.

We live in, what has now been termed, a world of flux. The steady forty year career is no longer a reasonable life choice. With the arrival of blogging sites and professional social networks, the concept of a personal brand went from being only relevant to American life coaches, to being a requirement for every ambitious individual. Our blogs, our websites, our LinkedIn profiles and our Twitter accounts all represent who we are and what we want to be, and every A-player will be aware of this and be leveraging it to further open up the range of opportunities that present themselves.

An employer has two options – they can hope that their employees will not realise the power of the personal brand, and hence be more likely to remain in the same position for a long period of time, but if they do then they will almost certainly fill their team with people who are not living at the cutting edge of understanding of today’s world. The other option is to welcome their employees’ personal brands with open arms, to help them to develop it, and to be completely conscious of the fact that at all decision points, they will be making the choice that serves them best at that time.

An employment contract is not a marriage anymore – from the very start, it is the employer’s, the manager’s, or the CEO’s responsibility to understand that their company or team will be in a state of flux. A-players will merge in, add some phenomenal value, and then merge out as they move on to their next opportunity. This continual change is now part of life, both for any individual, and for any company as well. The team is not a constant, it is a variable – it gets bigger and smaller, it gets marginally better and worse, and all we can do is add as much value as we can to the individuals that form part of it, knowing that they will reciprocate both during their involvement in the team, and in the years to come.

Where once the key skill used to be picking the best people to employ, the primary skillset has now changed. A true leader will know the importance of helping his team reach their own individual goals. They will know to ensure that their company provides the best learning opportunity and the best cultural environment for each individual member, so that when the next opportunity presents itself, and that person makes a decision which is both rational and individual, they will choose to remain part of the team, and they will do it because it is the best.