What were your biggest learnings at Bain & Company?
That hard work and a great team can solve pretty much any problem; That it’s always worth looking at the data, analysing it and most importantly acting on it; that structured thinking should be celebrated and if something doesn’t feel right in the numbers it’s probably not right – keep digging until you find it!
We founded Omnipresent in November 2019, months before most of the world was unexpectedly flung into enforced remote work. Omnipresent started as an idea to simplify the process of hiring and paying employees, wherever they find themselves. Guenther Eisinger, Omnipresent Co-founder and Co-CEO, and I had worked with global teams before and found that there were too many complexities when it came to hiring the best people – there needed to be an easier way to do that.
We certainly think so. There is a clear need and opportunity to improve the process for employment verification across the UK. The existing process is broken; it’s painfully slow, non-standardised, lacks proper security measures, and doesn’t always follow data sharing standards. This reality is echoed in what we’re seeing around the world, from US disruptors attracting sizable funding, to UK Gov pushing for digitisation.
I’ve always had a love and appreciation for art and design and aged 17 sold antiques on Portobello Market – I was the market’s youngest antique dealer and it was an important learning experience in how to sell. I quickly realised that it’s often the story behind the antique and not the object that people are drawn to.
I agree. Tech companies, especially tech startups, are the critical drivers of innovation – they learn, iterate and deliver faster and force the market to improve their offerings. We also see a pollination of disruptive models and technologies between different markets (food, fashion, retail, etc) – a good example is Uber’s fundamental model being applied to food, groceries and delivery.
Banked is a new global payment network offering Pay by Bank as a real alternative to the card schemes.
Whilst open banking has been around for four years, much of the focus on utilising it was for account information services, providing data to help make more informed financial decisions. For Banked however the focus has been on payments to improve upon legacy experiences, reduce costs and provide business efficiencies. Businesses are becoming much more interested in the benefits and this coming year is set to be a big year for adoption of the payment method.
The past two years have caused no end of chaos and disruption. Yet, the UK’s entrepreneurial spirit seems unphased. According to Companies House, almost 80 new businesses were created every hour in the first half of 2021. Despite the challenges, new ideas continue to flourish – and long may that continue. However, many businesses don’t make it through their first year. Sometimes the idea doesn’t work in practice, the business model is flawed or the market fit simply isn’t there. But more often than not, businesses fail because they cannot raise the capital they need to continue. According to research, nearly 2 in 5 businesses fold for this reason alone.
Why we say “f**k dating apps, 6 days of the week”.
Monday 3rd: New match!
Tuesday 4th: Hi, how are you?
Wednesday 12th: Hey! I’m good thanks.
Thursday 20th: Sorry, been busy! What’s up?
Friday 21st: Nothing much! Would be great to meet up sometime.
Saturday 22nd: Sure, how about next week?
Sunday 28th: …
Monday 31st: New match!
What were your biggest learnings from your experiences with Lovefilm,Secret Escapes and Oxalyst?
Those three businesses have very little in common, except that they all took inspiration from something successful and tried to replicate the model somewhere else.
Two of the three of them have proved very successful.
It’s hard to distill the learnings definitively but I would say that people/culture and strategy are the two defining characteristics of long term leaders. LOVEFiLM and SecretEscapes had them, Oxalyst didn’t quite.
I left my old job on a whim!
