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RICK JONES: Thank you all for coming.
It's a real pleasure to see so many people here.
I've got the absolute privilege to introduce Brent
Hoberman to you, who is, well, a bit of a personal hero of
mine, having been through the dot-com boom and bust myself.
We almost worked together, in fact, with a company called
QXL.com, before Brent left to found Lastminute.com.
So he probably made quite a smart move.
Anyway, Brent probably needs no introduction, but just to
summarize the journey he's been on--
obviously, you know, I'm sure, about lastminute.com and its
incredible success.
But he's gone on then to found mydeco, PROfounders.
They're an investment company who have built the likes of
onefinestay and Made.com.
He sits on the board of the likes of TalkTalk, the
Guardian Media Group, and recently, easyCar.com.
So he continues to be very much an entrepreneur.
So if you'll join me in welcoming Brent.
Thank you.
[APPLAUDING]
BRENT HOBERMAN: Great.
Thank you, guys.
So I think Rick had suggested that, first I talk about the
actual-- because many of you are very entrepreneurial and
an entrepreneurial company, maybe talk about the actual
startup bit and what that was like then, and I guess maybe
what it's like now, because of some of the more recent ones
that I've done.
So it was a long time ago when we started Lastminute.com.
It was actually, I think, '96 I had the idea for it.
And the idea was based--
I guess that's important, too, is where do the ideas for
these things come from.
And this was very much based on the fact
that I'm late today--
I've always been late--
and literally, procrastination and the fact of putting off
tomorrow what I can do today was a
personal character trait.
It also started because I was at a strategy consultancy
which was not a bad place to be-- one
called Spectrum Strategy--
where we just worked on media and telecoms.
So we worked on, back in '95, I think a company called
ViewCall, which was a bit like, I guess, Microsoft Web
TV before that, if you remember Web TV and trying to
put shopping onto TV sets.
It didn't work, but I was very lucky to be consulting on it,
and then thinking, god, this e-commerce thing-- this idea
of shopping online or on a TV set and electronically--
to a strategy consultant, it just seemed so damn obvious
that it's a good idea.
And then I thought, in '96, well, why
aren't I buying online?
Because I'm a classic early adopter.
Even my kids think I-- basically every gadget that's
going, including today the UP and whatever.
So I thought, well, what would I do and what would I buy?
So it really just started as that.
I just thought, well, I would do
everything at the last minute.
And there must be a logic.
And then when you thought about that more and more, and
I drew that one piece of paper which one often does with
bubbles of what could you do at the last minute--
everything, actually, including some stuff we never
got to, like information, actually.
But the initial premise was going away, going
out, staying in.
So it included ideas like DVD rental, like
restaurant food delivery.
We even bought-- it's an interesting thing.
At many points, we were too early.
And a good example of that probably was the acquisition
of Urbanbite, which was a restaurant
food delivery service.
In probably 2000, we bought them.
And then since then, obviously, many of you who
will be familiar with, I guess, GrubHub in the States
or Just-Eat here or Delivery Hero--
these are $100 million plus companies.
But probably a lesson that Lastminute.com did do-- one
lesson is we tried to do, probably, too much.
Partly, that sort of worked, because I was slightly insane
at the time-- much younger, no kids for most of it, and no
wife for a bit of it, so working obsessively.
And so in the end, we ended up across 14 countries and going
public and all that.
But I guess going back to that early start up bit that's,
again, more relevant--
so I had the idea, then thought about it, discussed it
with a friend.
He wrote down a few pages on it because he was much
brighter than me.
He was working with me at Spectrum Strategy Consultants.
He was much brighter, so he had lots of time.
He didn't need to do the consultancy work for more than
a few hours a day because most of his work was done.
And then he wrote down--
a guy called Rogan Angelini-Hurll, an
old friend of mine.
And he wrote down some stuff on it.
And then we decided--
well, I looked at it and thought, god, the internet.
This was in '96.
There's hardly anyone on it.
It's a bit of a niche of a niche--
in other words, online travel, online leisure, people aren't
doing this at all.
And I don't really understand the internet, either, at that
point in '96.
I bought a book from Amazon US, and that
was most of my knowledge.
And I'd actually also done a study for cable and wireless
voice over IP, where I did--
again, not knowing any of these.
It's quite important sometimes not to know anything.
I said, this is really going to happen and really be
important, not really understanding why or the
technologies behind it.
Cable and wireless-- all their guru technologists said, no.
Here's why it won't happen.
And obviously, the muppet was right and the guru was wrong,
which I think often happens.
I'm not saying that I'm often right, but I think too much
knowledge is one of my mantras--
that I think if you know too much about something, you
don't do it.
Thomas Cook didn't do Lastminute.com because they
knew too much.
And that's important.
So what happened is then we shelved the idea
for a couple of years.
I then went and thought, well, I really do like reading about
the internet and learning about the internet, so I need
to go and do it.
So I spent six months at LineOne, which is the internet
service provider owned by BT and News Corp doing biz dev--
very powerful for somebody who was 25 years old--
fantastic in that you could ring up any company.
So I'd ring up eBay or On Sale-- which was the other big
online auction site at the time-- and say, I want to look
at your model for Europe, that sort of stuff.
And because it was BT and News Corp, they would talk--
not because it was me, the 25-year-old kid
who didn't know much.
And so it meant I had this amazing overview.
I then met Tim Jackson, who founded QXL, at
a Red Herring event--
saw him speak when the company was just him, thought, hey,
I've been looking at this online auction thing.
And here's somebody's who's going ahead and doing it.
So I spoke to him, using, of course, the initial intro of
BT and News Corp and why don't we partner with him?
In the end, we didn't partner with him.
I just said, well, why don't I join you?
It ended up I was the first employee--
but I'd like to think part of the
founding team, I remember--
searching on some search engine then--
It wasn't Google--
for online and software and finding Blue Duck software.
So we replaced what he was trying to write
with Blue Duck software.
And we had an auction platform even then.
But then after four months, Tim and I very quickly fell
out, which was very lucky for me, because then I just went
straight away after that-- having seen four months of
QXL, seeing that online auctions were working, seeing
e-commerce was working, thinking I knew a lot more
than I did, I thought, right now, I'm going back to that
Lastminute idea.
Lastminute.co.uk was registered, and was actually
my non-compete with QXL, as an exception.
I said, right, I want the exception to be able to do
Lastminute.co.uk.
Tim thought it was a terrible idea.
So he was like, fine, go for it.
You can have that in your non-compete.
I actually tried to get Baroness Lane Fox, as she's
now called as of today, Martha Lane Fox, to join QXL.
But Tim had a no poach thing, agreement there.
So I couldn't go leave and work with her.
So I said, well, don't come then, because we might want to
do something together afterwards.
But then, after I left QXL, I asked Rogan Angelini-Hurll,
the guy before I'd mentioned earlier who I'd done the
initial idea with--
I said, Rogan, do you want to do it?
Do you want to leave your analyst job and all
that sort of stuff?
He was doing very well and decided not to.
I then had dinner with Martha and my girlfriend at the time,
now my wife.
And Martha made lots of jokes about needing a geek--
geeks weren't so chic then--
and about what a crazy, crazy idea this was.
And then the next morning, I rang and I said, you know, I
wasn't joking.
You should do this.
And so she left Carlton, and together, we finished up the
business plan and raised--
interestingly, at the time, this was '98,
we raised $1 million.
And our old boss from Spectrum-- because we were
both at Spectrum.
And our old boss said to us, who do you know who's two
really inexperienced people under 30 who have raised $1
million for a business plan?
It's so interesting now.
You think of that question, and I'm sure all of you would
say, I know 10, 20 people who had done that.
But in that time, we didn't know anyone.
And almost no one in the UK had done that.
So he was like, look.
Quite cute, cute idea, but why don't you come back to us in--
you can come back to Spectrum in six months.
Just set yourself a deadline.
If you haven't raised money in six month, then come back.
So what we then did-- we wrote 20 people.
One of them, Martha and I, we'd all declined to work at
Spectrum-- but a very bright guy called Thomas Hoegh, who
has since gone on Arts Alliance to be behind
companies like LOVEFiLM and Lastminute.com
And I refound him through Planet All, which is
interesting-- another example of where you can be too early.
Planet All was, I guess, Facebook many, many years
before Facebook.
And Amazon acquired it and used the team to
do something else.
But I refound him through that.
And so we wrote to 20 people.
It wasn't connections.
We didn't really know them.
My dad, actually, invests in venture capital
funds in the States.
But he looked at the business plan.
And this is-- he hates it when I quote this.
But he said-- because there were lots of commas missed out
and all sorts of stuff-- he's a real detail guy, my dad.
He said, "The only person who would invest in this business
plan is someone who's never read it," which
I thought was damning.
But he's been very, very supportive otherwise.
So we sent the plan off to 20 people, including me--
I remember chasing some guy down Brompton Road and saying,
let me drop this in your letter box and whatever.
So of the 20 we wrote to, 10 agreed to see us, and five
agreed to invest in the end.
The thing that created them investing in was--
Arts Alliance were a typical investor in those days, where
they were very-- all HBS--
very analytical, very much asking for, look, what is the
number in year three?
How do you justify this assumption?
And I was thinking, I used to write business plans for a
living, but I know this is fiction.
So why are you worried about that assumption in year three?
And I understand now, as an investor, how you want to see
people's logic and how they work.
But they were not going to get there until another guy called
Tom Teichman--
and I will just tell this anecdote, because it is quite
fun and serendipity.
I had clipped from the Guardian, when I was looking
for a job, a little ad for a company
called New Media People.
And they said they did recruitment.
And they also did some investments.
So that clip, that piece of paper, was still in my wallet.
I then rang up directory inquiries.
You remember how inefficient it was then.
Directory inquiries--
inefficiently good, I guess, because they
got the wrong number.
They gave me the number for New Media Investors, not New
Media People.
I then rang, spoke to a guy called Tom Teichman--
I got straight through to him-- who ran it, and started
telling him the idea.
And after a couple minutes' call, he's like, that sounds
fun and interesting.
Come and see me.
Martha and I went to see him, and after five minutes, he
said, I'm in--
as opposed to the Harvard Business School
guys, who were still--
and we'd seen them months before.
And they were still analyzing and
stressing us out and whatever.
Once he said he was in, they were in.
Then we got Innovacom, which is France Telecom's fund, and
then one of the other investors,
[INAUDIBLE], got in--
North Zone from Scandinavia, et cetera, et cetera.
So we had this actually really bizarrely good roster of early
stage investors for just this $1 million.
I asked for slightly less at the beginning, and then
halfway through the process, I realized the technology was
going to cost more.
So I couldn't raise the price, so I had to sell 40% of the
company, I think, instead of 33% is what we were going for,
for the first round.
I could go on a lot more about the process.
But then what happened is lots of disasters and absolute
roller coaster of up and down--
site that really didn't work.
The first thing Martha and I used to do every day was try
and buy something, because it was such a challenge.
And it would so often be down.
It got me into this real micro--
probably put me off running a big tech company ever again,
because I would start to--
even as we got bigger and when we had 2,000 people, I would
still get the sales every 15 minutes on my mobile by text
message, sales by product category and conversion rate,
as a way of mainly, by that point, making sure that the
tech team would be very embarrassed if I got to a
problem before they did, which unfortunately still happens
quite a lot.
So that was how that one started.
And I won't go into too much of the next bit.
But then we almost ran out of money many
times, did bridge loans.
And I learned what a bridge loan was and stuff like that.
And then luckily, the ramp of the growth got there.
And then we actually went public in 18 months after
going live and two years after the company was founded--
I think faster than any other European company had done.
We raised the price during the IPO road show more than any
other European company had done, which may not have been
so good, because then it went down a lot.
Some of you may remember the share price went down 95%
after we went public with revenues of a small pub,
massive losses, but raised 120 million pounds.
Priced on March 10, the day the market peaked.
March 10, 2000, the day NASDAQ peaked, is when we priced.
We went up on March 14.
And the first day, the share price went up a little bit,
and we knew it was all wrong, because it was meant to go up
a lot on the first day.
And that day, everyone thought, god, you guys must be
feeling on top of the world or whatever.
And I remember just thinking, I just feel the pressure of we
are priced for perfection.
And I actually wrote an article on the guy who did
Facebook's IPO--
not that it was the same thing.
They're very different in a million ways.
But I just felt, again, they were being priced for
perfection.
I didn't understand why they'd done it at that price.
But anyway, for us, what happened is we did raise 120
million pounds, which was quite a bit of money in 2000,
particularly after no one else could raise any money after
the bubble burst.
And then we went on to buy 14 companies, launch in, I think,
12 countries, and sold the business in 2005 to
Travelocity for over $1 billion.
And since then, I've done a few other things.
I started mydeco.com, which was based on the premise that
I'd just bought a house after doing the cliche thing of you
sell your company, and then what do you do?
You buy a nice house in London, probably.
And I did.
And then I thought, how am I going to do it up?
And even though my wife was an interior designer, she would
describe to me what it would look like.
And I'd say, I can't visualize this.
Then I'd go and buy that CD to try and visualize it.
And it was like a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and without
real products, as well.
And I thought, this doesn't work.
And then I went to some tech guys.
And I said, could you actually do a 3D tool that needs no
download and have real products?
And what would it cost to model real 3D products in it?
So we crazily raised money and built 120,000 items in 3D of
real furniture.
About 700,000 people have built rooms in it.
That's good, but not great.
Great would be seven million, really.
I still think it's the best tool out there for if you
really want to do something very simple.
But it's not quite good enough.
So what we did is we actually sold it into a company called
Floor Planner who just work on B to B and just work on doing
that sort of stuff.
So we've got a stake in a very good company there.
And then the other thing that happened out of mydeco is--
another thing in the business plan-- often, it's the things
in the business plans I don't do that are the
best models, actually.
So the one in the Lastminute.com business plan
that got taken out was the TripAdvisor model.
It was why don't we have a reviews and rating site and
all that sort of stuff?
And a couple of people said to me, Brent, you can't do
everything.
Cut that bit.
I don't understand.
It's too complicated.
Take that bit out, which was probably
still the right advice.
I don't think we could have possibly done one more thing.
But similarly, in the mydeco plan was the obvious thing of
how do you disrupt an archaic industry like
the furniture industry?
You go direct to manufacturer and you crowd source.
Hence, the founding of Made.com, where I did see--
I hate copycats, but I did feel I'd had that idea.
Then I did see that there was a company in France called
Myfab doing something related.
I thought I was meeting with Myfab when I finally got to
one of the founders, Ning Li, the Chinese co-founder.
And fortunately, when I met him, he'd just left.
They'd had a little bust up at Myfab.
And so I said to him, yippee.
Great.
Let's just do this together--
50-50.
Mydeco will give you all this.
You do it.
And we'll raise third party money and do it.
And so that was how we did it.
So it was quite a good story of that model plus the assets
mydeco could bring.
And also, mydeco put some people in there.
Some of the co-founders came from there.
So it's become a very good team.
And we've raised quite a bit of money from some good
investors for that business.
And it's scaling nicely.
Other ideas recently--
so the other recent one is another idea I tried to do at
Lastminute.com in about 2002 or 2003, but the team said
you'd be nuts was actually P2P car rental.
It was pretty obvious.
We owned Holiday Autos.
We did seven million car rental days a year, and always
fighting with the margins--
very tough.
Still, car rental actually has relatively high margins
compared to lots of the other travel stuff.
But I still thought this business might go the way of
air one day.
So I thought, right.
I've got my car in my drive.
It's not being used.
Why can't other people use it?
And at the time, I think the key thing was that-- it
wouldn't have worked then, so it was lucky the team said no,
because basically, what's changed is--
it's Jason Calacanis who's done this big thing now on--
the big Sequoia question, he says, is why now?
Why is this the right moment to do it?
So why is now the right moment for peer to peer car rental?
And it's all the stuff that you guys do every day.
It is because you can unlock your car with a mobile.
You can walk around, you see where it is,
et cetera, et cetera.
You don't have to wait for the key holding stuff, all that
sort of stuff.
So the friction goes.
And I think there's also something about security and
knowing who people are and identity and trust and all of
these factors.
So I went to Stelios and said, you've got
this EasyCar business.
We had been talking for awhile about it.
Why not do P2P?
And he and I had many conversations with Rogan,
who's now PROfounders' capital.
And we decided we would try it together.
So PROfounders invested.
And I'm on the board of that one as well.
We have just confidentially hired a CEO
who starts next week.
So we're very excited about that.
So I think we'll start to see some more traction there,
because initially, we didn't really have a CEO of the
business, for various reasons.
But we do now.
So other stuff we've done--
another investment I mentioned, the Jawbone UP, but
the one the more I use this, the more excited I am.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Jawbone guys.
But the more I use this, the more excited I am with the app
we've invested in, which is called Moves, because it's
just an app.
And it tracks.
It does tracking.
I know Google have actually done something similar with
Google Now, I think it's called.
But that seem to be a good focus for you guys, which is
good, because all the privacy guys will get at you and they
won't get a me.
Moves has been downloaded a million times in a month.
And it's still very early.
But as I say, it's an app, uses the accelerometer, et
cetera, as to how many steps you've done every day.
And we're very pleased with that initial launch.
So that's quite an exciting one.
So otherwise, we've mentioned some of the boards I'm on--
Guardian, Timeout, Talk Talk, EasyCar.
Shazam is another I just joined recently.
And one other thing I do is a thing called Founder's Forum
where we get entrepreneurs together to brainstorm--
top entrepreneurs.
And we've just done an event in LA where we took 80
companies from the UK to meet with the best of Hollywood.
We did a brainstorming with will.i.am--
a little brainstorming with him as the futurist.
As you know, he's actually very good on it.
So it was really, really quite fun.
And then next week, we're doing Rio.
And then we'll do London after that.
Questions?
[INAUDIBLE].
John.
Hi.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
BRENT HOBERMAN: Yeah.
Sorry.
The question was too much info can be a bad thing.
And how do we cope with--
sometime's not.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
BRENT HOBERMAN: Yeah.
Sorry.
I got it, I've just been told to repeat the
question for the mic.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So I first try and say--
if anyone's pitching us, I think the first thing is just
can you convince me to use it, that I would use it, that I
need it very quickly?
Or if I don't need it because it's targeted at women or
whatever, can you help me understand very quickly that I
know lots of people who would?
And it's amazing the number of, firstly, ideas that we get
that don't go through that very simple,
damn obvious thing.
The second thing is I do think there is, for entrepreneurs,
there's salesmanship, there's logic flow.
There's all sorts of other things that doing those
spreadsheets do help with and validate.
So I guess it's having a balance of who's on the team.
So Rogan, who I mentioned on PROfounders, is extremely
numerate, way more numerate than I, and just loves
spreadsheets.
I'm allowed to say that publicly.
He does.
So I think it's a good balance.
But I always tell him, look, I'm really not interested in
what their four year plan is, because it's wrong.
I want to understand what the team is, where the passion is,
and where the consumer need is.
And is it big enough?
So those are the sort of things.
But genuinely, so often, I think the entrepreneur's best
friend is that blind optimism and willful ignorance that
makes you go through stuff and go overcome challenges.
And the other point is if we'd known how hard Lastminute.com
was going to be, how hard it was going to be to build that
website, how close we'd be to running out of money because
the website didn't basically work, how hard it would be,
how actually insane it was for British Airways to say yes to
us in the beginning when they had 50%
domestic market share--
and a lot of them didn't really want the business,
didn't want Lastminute inventory to be boosted.
So if you knew enough about the industry, you'd say, well,
actually, BA logically will say no to you.
And therefore, you haven't got a business.
So you have to just be blindly optimistic, come
at it another way.
I guess the way we came out with them is like--
this internet thing.
You want to look smart to your bosses, right?
Because there's this internet thing out there and a few
people are talking about.
So we'll give you free R&D. It's not going to work, our
thing, of course not.
But we'll give you free R&D.
And we'll work with faxes, which people
criticized us hugely.
I remember lots of people telling us we were idiots
because we worked with faxes and there's this actual online
company and a fax line.
And I'm like, because it was the only way to work with BA,
because BA, for tiny a operator, for example--
and many of the airlines--
wouldn't build an EDI link for you if you were selling 10
seats a week.
So you have to say, give me a better rate this way.
So I think that ignorance helps you
overcome your problems.
But it's instinct as well.
AUDIENCE: So I have a question.
This is really weird.
So you said that you'd been ahead of the market a few
times as an innovator and entrepreneur.
When you look at the market where it is now, from an
investor's perspective, from a chairman and getting involved
on boards, et cetera, how do you spot and identify
companies that are ahead of the market?
And do you come across ideas now that you think are way
ahead of the market but that you wish you could invest them
because you know there's a need?
BRENT HOBERMAN: Yeah.
That's a really good question.
So what ideas are ahead of the market and do we see that are
too far ahead that you might still want to do?
I guess robotics is an obvious one.
As I said, I love to meet-- the reason why I got into the
internet and the whole thing was I just love gadgets.
I remember in '96 looking at a robot hand across the world,
and you could control it from a computer, and thinking, wow.
So I still think robotics today is one where you see a
lot of these video conferencing robots that run
around rooms.
And I get them to present to things like Founder's Forum.
I think it's slightly nuts, but I love it.
But when you think of what it means for manufacturing and
all that sort of stuff.
3D printing is another one that we've had for years, and
I've been tracking it for years.
And obviously, we've done 3D printer products, actually.
We've run competitions for designers to build products
that, then, Alessi would actually make.
So we did that at mydeco.
You'd print it 3D, and then Alessi would
then make it properly.
So I think, then, it's just understanding what do these
trends really mean?
So we've looked at-- and there's mass customization.
There's an ex-Googler, Anastasia Leng, who many of
you will know--
Makeably, looking at that model.
And when you look at that sort of model, you say, I love the
idea of mass customization, but is it too early for all
that sort of stuff?
And then I think you just have to look at
the longer term trends.
And in that case, is the pricing--
is it disruptive enough is another thing.
Often, I don't like the ones which are just
not disruptive enough.
Other trends, I think, other spaces we love that we haven't
done enough-- online education.
Another thing I am--
I've got to say this proudly, because I still
believe in the brand.
But in this country, you normally have to be
embarrassed about it.
But I'm also on the board of Eton or the governor of Eton
and looking at their online strategy or
online education strategy.
And I think that's a whole area which you all know.
And many of the big US gurus will say, kids, when you look
at your university, make sure that they've got enough money
to last you through that three or four year course, because
they might be bust by the end of it, is, I think--
I can't remember--
one of the US guru's views on it.
So I think these are areas where
you'll see massive change.
And med tech is the other one.
I think there was a TED Talk yesterday I just saw tweeted
about, which--
apologies-- but analyzes your pee through your iPhone and to
help your health.
I think there's others ones where you lick something on
your iPhone and analyze your glucose levels and all that
sort of stuff.
So there's got to be incredible innovation there.
I think both those sectors, though, are really hard,
because you've got regulation, governments, and
philanthropists, actually.
Philanthropy is probably the enemy of the
online education model.
We're in two of them.
One, Mangahigh, where you learn maths by playing games,
and which is a great idea that the only challenge-- the real
challenge is, is Salman Khan or Bill Gates going to give
that stuff away for free?
And then the other one we're doing is busuu, an online
language learning network, social language learning,
which has got 25 million people signed up to it.
So those sort of things like language learning are great.
I guess you could look at the disruptive and say, well, will
Google Translate do away with language learning need?
But I don't think--
I think people will still always
want to learn a language.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering to what extent it's important for
startups to be able to generate, quickly, revenue and
to be sustainable quickly.
Because when you look at the press, all the startups that
lose a lot of money, all these companies go public, they're
actually not profitable.
So I was wondering if there's other criteria, or if you
think the market is just wrong.
BRENT HOBERMAN: Yeah.
How quickly do you need to make money as a startup?
I actually had--
I don't think it would be too secretive to say, in the Moves
meeting-- and I could be wrong.
So I had the meeting with the Moves guy yesterday.
And they'd been talking about, in their product pipeline,
doing lots of premium--
the old premium model.
You give it away free, and then premium.
And then they said to me, look, actually, we think we've
validated enough of this that we're just going to go for it
and not worry about the premium stuff.
And I said, yippee, because I wanted them to have 10 million
downloads before they start worrying about how to monetize
it, because monetizing from a million downloads and the 1%
who's going to pay for whatever-- it's
just not worth it.
And to be honest, there is something about market.
There are enough--
the logical thing is if there are enough investors who will
pay for traction, then you should go for traction,
because otherwise, your competitor's
going to kill you.
Because the other point is there's a US company that
wants to do what these guys are going to do
that's after them--
but if they're starting to price for key features like,
say, calorie counting, then the US company says, yippee,
I'm going to offer that for free.
And I'll get Sequoia to give me $30 million.
And I don't need to worry about money for five years.
So I think you've also got-- there's
the competitive dynamic.
Of course, I understand profit and all that sort of stuff.
And I understand it's a good thing.
And if you have one of those rare business models that you
can do it all, fantastic.
But I think if the market's going to pay for traction,
then somebody else is going to get paid for that, and you're
going to limit your traction if you're trying to eat too
much money out before you're big enough.
And it's not enough money anyway when you're small that
it's worth worrying about.
But equally, we have other businesses like Made.com,
which we run much tighter.
We're not at the old Buy.com model or Zalando, dare I say
it, where we try and lose money on
every incremental sale.
But we do still pay a lot of attention to lifetime value.
In other words, do we have to make money on the first sale?
This PPC is so expensive.
[LAUGHING]
BRENT HOBERMAN: I know.
I'm glad that Graham from QuBit is explaining to them--
or that they're all muppets, if you've read his article.
Hopefully, that will depress PPC prices and we'll--
well, some of us will be happy.
[LAUGHING]
AUDIENCE: Hi, Brent.
Thanks for coming in.
You talked briefly about your role as an educator and
evangelizing computer science.
When do you think computer science will become part of
the core curriculum alongside English, maths, and science?
Because I think it will do.
BRENT HOBERMAN: It's funny.
It's a really good question about computer science being a
core part of the curriculum.
Weirdly, and I was having this discussion with Sherry Coutu,
who some of you will know, yesterday, actually, because
Sherry is doing something which Google will probably be
involved in, I think, to encourage people who have
studied STEM to talk to schools and excite them about
that career choice.
I think people like will.i.am can do a lot more than me--
him going and saying, I'm going to study programming and
this idea of geek chic I alluded to earlier.
I think people like that, saying-- and actually,
Christian Hernandez tweeted it yesterday.
There's a Code.org video on the web now with Gates and
people and basketball players or whatever
saying, coding is cool.
However, from my ignorance point of view, I actually
didn't code.
I coded in Basic when I was 12 or 13 and wrote some basic
games in Basic--
very basic.
I wasn't that good at it, though.
I did it, fortunately, with another guy
who was much better.
But I don't know what he's done.
So my view is I actually went and studied-- weirdly, I did
French and German literature and went to Oxford, where, to
be honest, I think the only thing I really learned that
was useful was being taught to think laterally and to cram
incredibly, and to analyze a huge amount of information
between midnight and 3:00 AM the night before very quickly.
So I think those sort of skills actually
are also very useful.
However, yes, I still think learning kids to code--
but I'm not so obsessed that--
I have a 10-year-old daughter.
And I haven't--
at school, they have pushed, and I've helped them push
CoderDojo or one of those into the school.
But my daughter didn't want to do it, and I
didn't push her to it.
She's definitely good on playing apps, but less on--
so I don't think it's key.
I think the other interesting point about this is going
back-- sorry to sound starstruck about will.i.am.
But the other thing he's added that I thought was very
interesting is that he is on this campaign to add to STEM--
STEM is now STEAM.
So I don't know if you guys have come across this
expression, STEAM.
So STEAM is where you add the A into STEM.
So you say, it's not just STEM.
You need to put arts into there as well.
And that's really what kids need to learn.
And I think that will give you the creative element.
And I guess if people want to talk about--
I guess they mentioned Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs as the
sort of brain that have the right brain, left brain.
And so I think that saying that bits of
both sides are good.
But I think the key thing, actually, for kids is to do
whatever they're most passionate about and what
they're best at.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
Back in your previous days when you were pitching
Lastminute, did you ever go to an investment or a VC or an
incubator and say, this is our idea?
And then did they ever ask you, well, what's your value
add if you're not actually coding and providing the
programming?
Have you ever come across that?
BRENT HOBERMAN: It's funny.
I guess there is--
I still don't see it, because I think it's all about
building teams, right?
And I think the first value add, I would argue, is can you
hire the right people?
So I think the thing that, to be honest-- not to sound
self-congratulatory or something--
but the thing that got people about Martha and I at the very
beginning was just these two nutters were so passionate and
excited about what they were doing that I think they
thought other people would follow us.
AUDIENCE: Right.
BRENT HOBERMAN: And probably, also, we were smart enough to
know we didn't know.
So the fact that I wasn't a techie, but
actually, I love tech.
So I do know how to talk to techies, mainly that I would
go to them and say, this can't take eight months.
It's really a whole load of if statements, and how does it
take that long?
So I was a little bit dangerous.
And I did make--
I think my real claim to fame is in CIO Magazine, I was
rated as the third hardest CEO to work for, for the CTO--
the third most impatient and most unreasonable--
so I think having a level of unreasonableness, and a
dangerous enough amount.
But what was it about this?
Also, for me, it was, could I look at a web page and
understand a bit about what's behind it?
What would really need-- and ask the right
questions of the techies.
So it was very much--
the dangers that would happen at Lastminute as we got
bigger-- we put in these project management layers.
And then I always cite the example where I got into one
meeting where they told me this project was going to take
eight months.
And I was like, it just can't.
It's not that--
it just doesn't seem that hard.
And then when I got into asking the right questions of
the techies, I was like, this is obvious.
Which are the bits that are really so hard?
They described one bit.
And I'm like, OK.
Brilliant, because I don't need that.
We can get to that later if it's really successful.
That bit--
and then what was eight months became two months.
And then a project that you would have said the ROI is too
risky or whatever suddenly becomes very viable.
So I think that's a lot of the skill is knowing how to ask
those questions.
And the problem it becomes is you get lost
between all those layers.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So looking at your various startups, where do you think
the biggest hurdle is in terms of number of users?
Is it from zero to 500, 500 to 1,000, or 5,000 to a million?
Where's the biggest challenge?
BRENT HOBERMAN: We often talk about where--
it depends on the type of company, right?
Is there a natural cap out in some areas?
And some of our companies, we've been looking at what's
happening on the market and thinking,
god, does it cap out?
I still think that if you've got a really good management
team, momentum is a very addictive thing.
So you can keep building on it.
So whatever defines momentum in your space-- it's different
numbers in different sectors, right?
But if you've got momentum and you've got good enough
leadership-- so let's take the Moves example.
They've got to a million.
Now, partly, granted, a lot of that is that initial burst of
Apple store promotion.
So can they now build on the momentum?
Can they build an Android app fast enough?
And can they then get the right people in
to build upon it?
So I actually think that's still the hardest bit, is
getting from naught to that few
hundred thousand or whatever.
And that's the bit where I'm most relieved.
I still think there will be a time now where that will
probably flatten for a bit.
But I think during that time, they'll have enough of a
validation story to get more great people, to get more
great investors, and to take it to the next level.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
RICK JONES: Thank you very much, Brent.
[APPLAUSE]