The Up Group

Last night, we were privileged to host an informal dinner at The Langham Hotel for fifty CEOs and C-level executives from across the European start-up and corporate technology community.

Our thanks go to all who attended, for making the evening such a vibrant source of discussion and insight. 

Attendees

Made.com, Chairman

Criteo, CEO

MindCandy, COO

Web Reservations, CEO

Housetrip, CEO

Vouchercodes.co.uk, CEO

JustEat, COO

Wahanda, CEO

Kelkoo, CEO

BaseKit, CEO

Skimlinks, COO

StylistPick, CEO

Livebookings, COO (The Up Group, NED)

Lyst, CEO

onefinestay, CEO

GlassesDirect, CEO

Currency Cloud, CEO

Chemist Direct UK, CEO

Funding Circle, CEO

Brainient, CEO

Quill, CEO

LoveHomeSwap, CEO

MyBuilder, CEO

7Digital, CEO

GreenManGaming, CEO

USwitch, CEO

Busuu, CEO

Qype, former CEO

Dressipi, CEO

Media Ingenuity, CEO

Mangahigh, CEO

Long Tall Sally, CEO

Videdressing, CEO

WAYN, CEO

Weve, COO

Ezetop, CEO

Qubit, CEO

YPlan, CEO

Codemasters, CEO

Rangespan, CEO

TrialReach, CEO

Avangate and CloudBag, Co-Founder

Payment Sense, Founder

Guardian, Chief Digital Officer

Yahoo!, VP & MD EMEA

Google, Country Sales Director UK

Facebook, Regional Director EMEA

Braintree, GM International

viagogo, MD Europe

The Up Group, CEO

Following on from our last post on Friday’s London Web Summit, we have summarized the panel discussion about the developments in online education; an area in which we have witnessed rapid growth and innovation over the past eighteen months.

Online Education

• Chip Paucek – CEO, 2U (Start-up focused on partnering with great schools to bring degrees online)
• Jan Reichelt – Co-Founder & President, Mendeley (Destination for discovering, managing and sharing academic research papers)
• Andrew Ng – Co-Founder, Coursera (Platform for elite universities to provide free online courses)
• Ed Cooke – Co-Founder, Memrise (Online visual learning tool)
• Matt Cynamon – Regional Director, General Assembly (Moderator) (On and offline courses in technology, design and entrepreneurship)

Explosion of EdTech – What is behind this?

• In general, web adoption is increasing and especially within education. We have seen that the continued introduction of new and improved web technologies enabling more effective collaboration and communication online has prompted an explosion in online learning, where these are critical success factors.
• Andrew from Coursera thinks they (Edtech founders) are the reason for the growth and increased accessibility. He is a Stanford professor, and by putting his course online he has been able to reach 100,000 students instead of the 400 he can access through traditional teaching methods.
• Online has a positive effect on offline too. Being able to offer online lectures as part of traditional offline courses allows course leaders more opportunity to interact with students during face-to-face time, which generally results in improved performance.
• The panel generally held the view that it is less important to focus on the existence of online learning platforms for their own sake, and more pertinent to observe web adoption and innovation by education institutions; schools embracing the web makes a huge difference. Businesses like 2U and Coursera exist because of their ability to partner with such institutions.

Rapid adoption of Edtech by traditional institutions – why have some been swifter than incumbents in other traditional industries?

• Overall, the panel felt that a basic passion to educate and an openness to learn, makes educational institutions more willing to do new things. Coursera is a free service and exists because institutions like Stanford are motivated to reach a wider audience.
• Their core mission is to make a positive difference, and to have an impact; not just “be seen” to embrace the web. This motivation and the open and connected nature of the web have driven large and elite institutions to take the web seriously as a vehicle for education.

Edtech one year from now – what will it look like?

• Chip from 2U sees further developments happening in the certification of online courses. He hopes to see an improved understanding of how to credit people who have studied online and how to match the quality of the accreditation with offline learning.
• The availability and access to high quality online learning will only increase. For the panel the ultimate vision is for an individual who feels like learning a totally new and random subject will be able to find and access an online course to attend immediately.
• Online lectures will continue to permeate traditional learning and will free up more and more time for professors to do more interactive learning in class.

Last Friday, we joined a host of key players in the London Tech scene at the London Web Summit in the heart of The City. We were able to listen to views from some of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors. What follows is a brief summary of a panel discussion focused specifically on the tech scene in London.

State of The London Tech Scene

• Eileen Burbidge – Partner, Passion Capital
• Arnaud Bertrand – CEO & Founder, HouseTrip
• Eze Vidra – Head of Campus, Google
• Pete Smith – COO, Songkick
• Greg Marsh – CEO & Founder, OneFineStay
• Martin Bryant – Managing Editor, The Next Web (Moderator)

Funding

• The prevailing view was that as a result of an increase in ideas and access to capital, there is no better time than now to try to start a business in London.
• Passion Capital has seen an increase in the number of submissions for funding, the level of follow-on investments in London, and the interest in investing in London-based start-ups from international investors.

Talent

• London is seen as a hub of technical talent in comparison with many other areas of Europe. Although Housetrip was founded in Lausanne in Switzerland, the decision was made early on to move the headquarters to London in order to recruit developers.
• Regardless of this, the panel felt that hiring is still the biggest challenge for European businesses, particularly at CxO level, where there is not felt to be enough of a volume of experienced executives to meet demand. Onefinestay relocated a CTO from the US after a 6 month UK search.
• London’s diversity is its greatest strength. Unlike other cities, there is no mono-culture. Greg Marsh chose to start Onefinestay in London and then in New York because he felt both locations bring to bear a great variety of talent, industry, cultures and attitudes. Whilst this means it is a competitive environment, he believes this type of environment is the only place to start a business like Onefinestay. Tech-specific meet-up groups and jobs fairs like Silicon Milkroundabout (founded by Songkick) now exist to address the competitive issues of hiring against big Financial and Technology institutions. 

Tech City

• Though the launch of Tech City by the government has polarised public opinion, the panel felt the general impact on the image of entrepreneurship has been positive. Putting a spotlight on start-ups is validating Technology as a viable industry to work in and is helping in the efforts to recruit.
• As well as morale, positive impacts have been felt from a policy perspective as changes have been made to influence tax relief for small businesses, visas for international talent and broadband availability.

Exits

• Though the general public perception of the volume of exits in London is low, the panel was positive about the City’s performance; citing examples such as Llustre (acquired by Fab), CrashPadder (acquired by AirBnB) and Moonfruit (acquired by Yell Group) as great recent outcomes.
• There are many local champions flying under radar that for various reasons have had to reposition themselves in order to achieve exits and international scale.
• More can still be done from a policy and governance perspective to make it easier to have a successful exit in London, and to increase the number of local champions to prove London as a global Tech player.

The Up Group was proud to sponsor February's London Product Tank, the largest meet-up for the European product community.

The theme of this month's meet-up was "Talent - how to find it and how to nurture it", a topic close to our heart(!)  There were some interesting talks from Gareth Jones, Partner and Head of Fresh Thinking at The Chemistry Group, Ken Ward, former Director of Talent at Mind Candy and Kate Leto, former Head of Product at MOO.com.  
Over 250 people attended the event, proof that Product Tank continues to go from strength to strength.  The March meet-up will take place on Wednesday 20th at the same venue: Central Foundation Boys' School, Cowper Street, EC2A 4SH.

The London Business School has organised a great line up of speakers for their Entrepreneurial Leadership Series. With interest in entrepreneurs and start ups at an all time high, it was no surprise that the lecture room was packed out last week. There was a mix of fairly studious looking MBAs thinking about taking that leap and setting up on their own. This was combined with a smattering of suits from the banking and corporate world no doubt hoping that they would at some point do the same as well. Everybody convened to hear Alex Kelleher talk about his experiences as an Entrepreneur – the successes, the failures, the learnings and where his ideas for ventures come from…

To introduce the man himself, Alex Kelleher (www.alexkelleher.com) is the Founder and CEO of Cognitive Match, a real-time optimisation software business. The firm has recently been nominated in Techcrunch’s The Europa awards. Alex is a well-known figure in the tech industry having now had two successful exits – Vivid Edge, a UK web agency which sold to Framfab (now LBI) and Touch Clarity, a reporting / analytics provider which sold to Omniture (now Adobe).

For any aspiring entrepreneur, there is always incredible value in listening and understanding how people have built successful businesses. It was great to hear some of Alex’s thoughts ranging from the idea and initial concept to take to market (ideally something you care about), how to set up, dealing with venture capital firms and also the subtleties between the UK and US on the start up scene. Most valuable I think for anybody in the audience was his view on concept vs. execution – it is not necessarily the idea itself that makes a business successful but rather better execution than anybody else doing something similar. One of the main barriers to somebody setting up which we often hear is the fear of not having a great and truly innovative idea for a business. Whilst many in fact don’t, it was good to hear that the idea is not the be all and end all!

A few points from Alex to note:
• Hard work!
• Speak to VCs all the time – you never really stop fundraising.
• It is vitally important to have that experience of setting up – finding an office, finance, legal – dealing with all the stuff you never thought was important gives you a real appreciation of how a business runs day to day.
• Hire the right team and incentivise them in the right way.
• Protect your equity (at all cost)
• Sell for cash

Whilst in general these talks are informative and fairly thought provoking, it does make me think about the following:
1) What makes a successful entrepreneur and how does Alex embody this?
2) Do people who go on to be successful entrepreneurs actually find the advice of those who have already ‘done it’ useful?
To start with the first, Alex is a good example of somebody who really seems to have grown with the tech industry. Two exits before the age of 40 and creating $75m worth of business is very good going! What seemed to come was a certain sense of at times muddling through in the early days, not knowing where exactly things were going and the fact that plans never always quite go to plan… His talk included anecdotes about tripping over wires and HP’s website going down at Vivid Edge – there was a sense of craziness. He has become successful partly through having a great idea at a good time, hard work, dedication and a sprinkling of maverick.

Answering the second is more difficult. I do sometimes wonder how many entrepreneurs actually take advice on board. Please do give us your comments on this! Whether this is somebody telling you to re-think your product, your potential shortcomings – everybody always has an opinion they are happy to share! To build a successful business from scratch I think you have to be pretty bullish. If at times this is ignoring ‘helpful’ comments then I imagine it can be easy to gloss over people’s input and advice. Whilst Alex had some very good points to note, I do think that he could have expanded more on the challenges of setting up and also discussed with the audience (who broadly speaking I imagine came from more corporate backgrounds) the realities of running a small business. These evenings are great to hear from somebody who has had success but it’s always a shame to feel that you are really scratching the surface.

Many thanks to Alex for a great talk and do check out the next speakers who are yet to come.

Post by Claire Hogg, Consultant, The Up Group

On the 30th September the Up group visited the Museum of London for the morning part of the Social Collective, a “forward-thinking social media conference”.

The aim for the event was to offer far more than just another introduction to social media: to move beyond the typical rallying cries from similar events of “Join Twitter and set up a Facebook page for your business”. Social Collective aimed to really explore how we communicate within different platforms, and how we should measure and integrate social media into our business strategies, customer service and marketing campaigns.

As life at the Up Group seems to get busier each day, we couldn’t stay for the afternoon’s open debate, nor Chris Hall’s keynote on Social Clarity or Didier Mormesse’s discussion of a CNN global research study on “shared news”. However, the most enjoyable talks from the morning certainly went some way to fulfilling the organisers’ primary objective of going beyond “just the theory” of social media.

Brad Little did one of the 2 morning keynotes, his subject being “Measurement and Insight: the Rights and Wrongs”. Brad heads up NM Incite, a joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey which helps businesses to harness the full potential of social media intelligence and so drive growth and performance. Brad represented a refreshing mix of charisma and passion for his subject matter (which many speakers at events like this demonstrate), with the professionalism and credibility that one would expect to see representing either McKinsey or Nielsen. Through that combination Brad had the audience’s undivided attention, which he retained throughout by basing his observations and suggestions on hard data and meaningful research. For example, a recent online survey demonstrated that 68% of consumers consider “environmentally friendly” to be the most important requirement when purchasing a new product or service, however unprompted user feedback ranks it as last.

Brad focused his talk on the need, when first involving a business in social media, to know why you’re doing that: what the objectives really are. Is it more exposure? More direct sales? More “word of mouth” referrals? A better customer service experience? Improved public sentiment for your brand?

With that question as a starting point, Brad suggested that businesses will be far better placed both to organize their time and resources around making Social Media work for them, and to measure the results that they obtain.

But as refreshing as it was to hear a professional, polished and thorough consideration of best social media practices, it was difficult not to feel as though a lot of what Brad was saying was slightly old news. While any type of collaboration between Nielsen and McKinsey is exciting – and will doubtlessly lead to extremely interesting research and many useful case studies over the coming months and years – it seemed a little as though NM’s professional, analytical and considered approach might be just a little behind the curve, as opposed to predicting where the curve’s going next. In the fast-moving world of Social Media, it is “what’s happening next” or “how do i get results now” that people need and want to know about, not “give me more facts about how many people sign up to Twitter each day”. It is perhaps this fact, ironically, that means Brad – who promoted his personal Twitter handle on every page of his powerpoint – is following 412 people on Twitter, and yet is still only being followed by 477 people.

It’s not confidence-inspiring to have a gym instructor who is in worse shape than you. In a similar vein it should be important for all social media advisers, consultants and experts to demonstrate an ability to establish a genuine social media presence, and a noteable following for themselves and / or their own company, as it is this element of social media that businesses struggle with – not the question of how popular Twitter is, how impactful a successful viral marketing campaign can be, or how to set up a Facebook page.

The other Keynote from the morning session came from Paul Harrison of Carve Consulting, who spoke about “Social Opportunities for brands in 2011”. Carve is a digital consulting practice that has developed corporate social networking strategies, social media marketing and social recruiting programmes for a range of private, public and not-for-profit organisations.

Paul was a hugely engaging and entertaining speaker, who appeared to love both his subject matter and being on stage. His talk was broken into 11 predictions for 2011:

1. People Prefer to Listen to People, not Algorithms.
2. Everyone is a Critic (Paul referred to popular startup Glassdoor.com, in which company salaries, reviews, and interviews are posted anonymously by employees).
3. Listening Grows Up (by which he meant that businesses would focus more on actionable listening, not just “listening” to customers’ conversations because it was suggested to them that they should do that at the last social media event they went to..)
4. You Cannot Fake It (meaning that you need to be fully engaged and committed to your Social media strategy, you need to start now, and you should never forget that your Digital DNA will go with you…)
5. The Rise and Rise of the Social Star (businesses will increasingly hire chief networking / listening / social officers to build their brands. He recommended a book called Empowered by Josh Bernoff to help you in hiring passionate and engaged employees that want to talk about what you do).
6. Get Processes and Policies in place (to allow everyone in the organisation to contribute to the social media goals)
7. Corporate Websites are going the way of the Fax (brands won’t focus on their own site, but rather they’ll build on top of existing social platforms as that’s where everyone is. He used the highly functional example of the Easyjet Facebook page, on which you can book a flight directly).
8. Ideation / Crowdsourcing
9. Facebook Places (which he suggested will really take off).
10. Race to Create the World’s Dumbest App Continues (he suggested not participating in this, and warned CEOs from creating an App for their business “because they think they ought have one”: unless there’s a real need for it, he suggested not bothering).
11. Remember the 80/20 Rule (focus your social media strategy on the few things your business does which lead to the best results).

What was particularly interesting about Paul’s talk was that during it, everyone was taken in by his energy, humour and passion for the subject. His list of 11 predictions for 2011, however, seemed at the time to be more of a reflection of current trends and ideas (only slightly more evolved).

On reflection, it would have been easy for Paul to guess – along with the rest of us – what the buzzword equivalents for “Group-buying” and “Location” might be in 2011. Instead he offered a pragmatic and broad assessment of current themes in social media, and how they will most likely evolve over the coming year, which was genuinely useful and interesting.

In conclusion, although the morning talks at the Social Collective did explore how businesses might achieve quantifiable success through effective social media strategies, it did feel as though much of what was said had probably been heard many times before. A lot of businesses want to use Social Media to build their brand, to get more sales, to have more people “like” what they do. But more often than not, if a product or a service is genuinely great then businesses don’t need a strategy – word about what they do just spreads like wildfire. But often if it’s not that great, then it won’t spread, and hearing about new social media strategies, trends or websites will be fairly unlikely to change that.

Post by Neil Frame, Associate, The Up Group