Podcasts

Sharing memories of a special company that created a new online industry, James reminds us of the primitive state of the web in the late 90’s and how the use of dynamic sports data led to one of the first significant web e-commerce applications. OpenBet met the demand of the online gold rush of sports betting bookmakers, enabling the creation of SkyBet and spawning another highly successful start-up in Geneity. James makes clear the key foundations required to successfully bootstrap a business – IPR, Cash, and Team.

Alexis takes us through the Receipt Bank story from an initial vision of business expense management, creating and dominating the domain of Bookkeeping Productivity to now providing real-time data with AI solutions, which answer the key financial questions important to drive 100,000s of businesses. He describes his founder’s obsession with saving customers time, driving innovation in a continuous stream of improvements and building international teams where personal responsibility is paramount. His advice to aspiring founders? “Say No regularly.”

Colin describes the evolution of a market leading global travel service from a tool built for the founders’ own use. With a clear ‘North Star’ to put the traveller first, Skyscanner developed its own ground-breaking solutions, progressively extending this with a series of successful acquisitions. All this was achieved whilst simplifying the customer experience. We discuss the massive opportunities for tech start-ups in China, the ongoing struggle to find sufficient talent to sustain growth and the importance of anticipating customer needs. Colin advises aspiring founders to test their products quickly and to focus on customer retention.

Hiroki describes the journey of discovery that led him to the huge growth and sustained success of GoCardless. Inspired by the Oxford University Entrepreneurs’ Society and the likes of Mark Zuckerberg at Y Combinator, he and his fellow founders built a group payments solution on top of PayPal, developing a deep understanding of banking solutions and in particular direct debit. The rigors of Y Combinator’s Demo Day and early integration with KashFlow changed their direction and launched them on a path of rapid growth. Hiroki encapsulates his story “I have a very strong belief that even the best-laid plans never end up working out the way that you imagine. It’s not like there’s a straight line between start and success. It’s much more of a zig-zag.”

Paul doesn’t see himself as a ‘classic’ entrepreneur. He describes how his experience selling collaboration technologies to the NHS as part of a multinational tech business, led him to bootstrap his own business with only £5,000. He personally developed initial solutions and made his first sale only a few weeks before funds ran out. The success of Nervecentre comes from Paul’s ability to see and realise the potential of the latest mobile technology to revolutionise hospital care in the UK, always putting the customer first ahead of profit. He has built a strong distributed team with a high trust culture: “I find that culture is either reinforced or broken by every decision you make.”

Realeyes provides publishers and creatives with objective real-time measurement of audience engagement with their video content. Elnar takes us through the Realeyes journey with a series of key pivots. The fundamental observation was the shift in video consumption from traditional TV to Digital, in particular on smart phones. He describes how the initial prototypes were developed by outsourced teams and then re-engineered in-house. The future potential for emotional tracking at scale is truly awe inspiring.

Stephen shares how his industry experience led him to build a leading edge AI based business focused on Mobile Video Advertising. Founded in his garden shed in 2012, LoopMe set its sights on the extremely demanding challenge of brand marketing. Stephen describes how previous lessons learnt about selling to the US have accelerated business growth. His story of how he and his fellow founder built a team with UK AI expertise and the children of rocket scientists in the Ukraine is captivating. Stephen’s advice to aspiring founders? “I don’t think there’s a better career path or job or something that would be more exciting than starting a business and growing a business and I think that doing that from the United Kingdom today is a very interesting prospect.”

Jon was at the heart of the rapid evolution of mobile networks and their early interactive technologies. Frustrated by the lack of real-time information on bus services, he saw the opportunity to address this but when confronted with long lead times, pivoted to the faster moving airline industry with easyJet. With expertise in pulling data from aging back end systems, he built a real-time web front end on the NATS system. Jon takes us through the rollercoaster ride of building a second parallel business, relocating his entire development team due to talent bottlenecks, dealing with 80% team churn and establishing the right technical leadership. Through all these massive challenges, Jon achieved his childhood dream to build a successful business from scratch.

Andy recalls how in the early days, his company shared office space, solutions and investers with Paddle before they merged and he became CTO. Both companies worked together to find the sweet spot for their customers and moved away from the original vision of a marketplace. Andy describes the ‘scrappy’ initial stage when solutions were built quickly to prove value and the re-engineering on AWS that led to the resilient, scalable solution that exists today. His advice is not to underestimate the level of personal commitment for success, get the team right, move quickly and focus on products, not money.

From day one, Oyvind and his fellow founders had both a crystal clear vision and business plan for the app commerce opportunity. Having established themselves with a number of smaller customers they stopped all work for six months to focus on their first enterprise client, House of Fraser, leading to a step change in the business. They subsequently managed the scaling challenges of delivering to multiple large customers whilst progressively growing a talented team based on a deep understanding of their culture.

As a marketing director, Joel was one of the first to recognise the potential impact of social media on digital advertising. He founded and bootstrapped agency:2 with Sharon Baker in 2007, winning a contract for the London Olympics. Riding the new wave of social media advertising with Facebook’s powerful algorithms and massive reach, they provided a scalable solution for big brands. Growth accelerated after developing their own unique AI driven Ad Tech Platform as Mighty Social. Joel takes great pride in the team they have built “We still believe that if we’re not agile and entrepreneurial enough, we won’t survive. We have to continually push, always push. Take the risk, but do things like we were when we were only four or six people. The same energy.”

In the final episode of the first Digital Hunters Podcast series, David shares the vision that created this highly prized award and how it has evolved. We discuss how it has provided windows onto the technology revolutions of the last 20 years and raised the profile of the innovative businesses that have driven these. We explore the different business models and wide range of approaches from the founders. With the continued rapid evolution of technology and a UK talent shortage, the need is clear for the education system to cultivate a culture of continuous learning.

Adam Hale, former CEO of Fairsail, NED at Tech Nation and Chair of the DevOps Group asks “What are you for as a business?”. Fairsail won a prestigious place in the Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 for 3 years in a row, growing from £400k to £10M over 4 years. The keys to success were to focus on customer success, innovation and the team. We discuss the strong investment opportunities and infrastuctures available to growing tech businesses and how to overcome the current skills crisis to allow the UK Digital Sector to continue to flourish.

Halli shares the story of Lockwood, creators of the biggest virtual world on mobile, Avakin Life, and 2018 winners of a prestigious place in the Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50.

David discusses the story of Adludio with its CEO and Co-Founder, Paul Coggins. Winners of a place in the Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 2018, Adludio have revolutionised mobile advertising, using the sense of touch and innovative content to create truly memorable adverts for diverse major brands including Jaguar, Adidas and Microsoft. At the heart of this success is Adludio’s leading edge Adtech platform with enhanced targeting and accelerated load times.

Just over a year since our first discussion, RealEyes have moved forward rapidly, expanding internationally and applying emotional recognition and attention measurement to tens of thousands of video ads. They have raised over £28M funding in two rounds and generated 80 new product ideas. Elnar takes us through how RealEyes have used Design Sprint and a Product Iteration process to distill these down to a handful of initiatives and launched a new self service portal RealEyes Go

In this podcast, Nathalie, Pranav and David discuss the latest broadcast trends, market shifts and opportunities highlighted at IBC 2019. Technology rich and time poor, consumer behaviour is changing rapidly with ever increasing competition for their attention. Personalisation is still in its infancy with Data Science, Social Media, Communities, Storytelling and Smart Bundling holding the keys to success.

Nathalie Lethbridge is the Founder and Managing Director of Atonik Digital. She is an international expert in content and commercial strategies for broadcasters, platforms, OTT, digital first and converged digital media offers

Pranav Soneji is one of the co-founders of LiveWire Sport, a digital agency working with sport’s biggest rightsholders, broadcasters and brands, transforming social and digital platforms to maximise engagement and commercial opportunities.

David and Fabio explore the latest advances in IP streaming technologies to meet the ever increasing demands for live HD TV anywhere and the rise of eSports. Services such as Twitch Prime now have between 50-100k live channels with average CDN throughputs of 10TB per second. Rollout of the latest Codex has until now been seriously impeded by the decoding capabilities of clients. Low-complexity video enhancement coding from MPEG (LCEVC) is about to change the game.

There is a tidal wave of niche video content about to come online with people willing to pay for it. David explores the monetization challenges and opportunities for content owners with George Meek, CEO of InPlayer.

Fergus Dyer-Smith, Founder and CEO of Wooshii, has established a worldwide community of professional video production teams, built a platform to connect creators with buyers and created a new global market niche. Fergus takes us through his business journey, pivoting from a production tool platform to a complete managed service whilst continuing to seek out the latest video innovations.

Kirsty Fuller shares the story of Big Sofa Technologies, pioneering the use of video data for non-intrusive market research. Massive volumes of video data are analysed, categorised and tagged by the latest machine learning technologies to create a new ‘Human Data Stream’.

With significant experience launching Channel 5 and BBC iPlayer, bringing massive shifts in the video landscape from broadcast to on demand, David contrasted this with the educational experiences of his children. Much of the new content around news and current affairs had the potential to support teachers and significantly increase student engagement in the classroom. Thus Boclips was born. David takes us through his amazing story and future plans to support remote and lifelong learning.

Red Bee Media have established their end to end Red Lab, enabling rapid innovation for their services and those of their customers. With a new multi-tenanted cloud playout system supporting ‘pay as you grow’, the barriers to entry for content owners are lower than ever. David discusses this and the ever evolving online video world with Steve Russell, Head of OTT and Media Management Portfolio at Red Bee.

Doug shares the great British business growth success story of Peach Video. He reminds us that velocity is a vector with direction as well as magnitude, taking the world of Ad delivery from couriers on bikes organised via spreadsheets to assured digital delivery. Without this, the promise of multi-platform, multi-device, segmented Ad strategies cannot be fully delivered.

Gareth and David discuss the recent Grabyo report on OTT media consumption trends where choice is limitless and consumers are constrained by time.

The market shift from brands to individual shows, kick-started by Netflix, is now accelerating through social media storytelling and global distribution.

Pay TV is at the start of a tough transition similar to that experienced by Music, shifting from a high cost, format and label dominated world, to low cost streaming. The winners will provide consumers with the content they want, on the device of their choice, at a price they can afford.

Key to success will be the ability to promote content on social platforms in the right format, at the right time for the right audience.