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.
Play a little game with me.
Think of the last purchase you made online, that was important to you. Maybe a holiday you booked, a hotel, a new TV, even booking a restaurant.
Have you got something in mind?
Now ask yourself – how much did you enjoy the decision-making experience on a 1-10 scale?
Even more importantly, how content were you with the outcome on a 1-10 scale?
What were you biggest learnings at Jefferies?
Jefferies was a great learning experience for me. Whether you agree with the banking culture or not (most people don’t), you tend to understand your true self a little bit better when it’s 3am and you’re sleep deprived trying to push through a 200-pages presentation, or a 50-tabs financial model. But my biggest learning from those 3 years was understanding that I wanted to be much more involved in the company’s growth stories, and not just watching them from the outside. I understood I wanted to be part of their journey much earlier on, and have as much positive impact as I could on the trajectory of the company.
Getting the advocacy we need from the UK Government to support its home-grown tech champions like Lifebit on the global stage. This is seen in the public sector here in the UK, but on the whole the UK has a lot to learn from the US, who actively lobby on behalf of their national champions. Right now our company is also expanding rapidly to match our growing client-base, finding the right talent to grow our team is challenging, there is so much growth in the life sciences and tech sectors at present which means competing with many other leading companies to recruit the best talent.
I left my old job on a whim!
