Europe has world-class engineering, deep tech and success stories from Skype to Spotify, yet its ecosystems in London, Berlin, Dublin and Edinburgh often lack the connective tissue that makes the US move as one. Sitting between American and Asian influences, and hemmed in by fragmented markets and regulators who barely understand the industries they govern, the continent has struggled to build the venture support its founders deserve.
Drawing on a career as a founder and now investor across some sixty-five companies, Eamonn Carey shares what he looks for early: coachability, resilience and genuine founder-market fit, the passion you can feel fizzing even over Zoom. He makes the case for more serial founders over moonshot unicorns, reflects on how COVID has changed fundraising and humanised everyone on the call, and argues that democratised access to knowledge, better role models and real inclusion are how we widen who gets to build.
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Today, we have we have an Irishman. We've a countryman of mine. We're we're both from Dublin. And Eamonn Carey is a a chap that I met a good few years ago now in in London, which is where he's based. And we've we've hung out a bunch of times.
One of my one of my favorite people in in tech, I think one of the most interesting early stage investors in in Europe, not least because he's been on both sides of the table. He's been an entrepreneur. And he's been in different versions of the the investor side.
So we'll bring him in now and have a have a chat. Anyone that has any questions, please feel free to fire them across in the web app or phone app, and we'll see what Eamon has to say. So Eamon, hello. Are you there?
I sure am. And that's a very generous introduction. Thank you. Yeah. It's all lies. But, you know, you told me to say it. Yeah. I know. Bet the PR retainer is working. Exactly. Exactly. So start I suppose just a quick a quick intro maybe about yourself.
Better coming from you than me. You know, the what what's the one minute Aiman Carey story? Sure. So well, thanks, everyone, for tuning in, and thanks, Brian, and and everyone at Turing for having me. So my name's Eamonn. I am, as Brian said, a former entrepreneur.
I started life as a a frustrated journalist, and I was very lucky. I learned how to code when I was quite young, so I'd always been noodling around with the Internet and and trying to kind of get more people to go on IRC and use that and build their own websites and stuff like that when I was in school and and college.
And when I went out and started working in in media organizations, was saying to them, hey. We should pay more attention to the the Internet and particularly to mobile. They didn't share my excitement for those media, so eventually, I quit and started my first company creating mobile content and experiences and, you know, websites and apps back in two thousand five.
I grew that company out of Ireland into the UK, Middle East, a little bit of work out in in Asia, and was lucky enough to to exit that, and then started a games company with some friends and I also exited and then an education company which I ran directly into a brick wall.
So, I've experienced kind of success and massive failure or education as I prefer to reframe that. And and kind of in twenty twelve and thirteen, started thinking about how I could help other people. So started mentoring at Techstars, which is a global network of accelerators, and and we're one of the world's largest VC funds.
So started out mentoring there, doing some angel investing, and came on full time in twenty fifteen to run one of our programs in New York, moved back here in twenty eighteen and have kind of co run programs out in Asia as well and I'm now a partner at the Fund.
So I've, in total, invested in about sixty five companies across Africa, Asia, Europe and the US and as Brian said, suppose the empathy. Mostly what I do is kind of precede investing because I know what it's like to be kind of sitting with an idea in your head and maybe a cofounder.
So I love getting involved at the really early stage of businesses and hopefully supporting them as they get through kind of series a and beyond. It's a pretty it's a pretty interesting place to be. You know, you've gotta be seeing a lot of fascinating ideas crossing your desk and meeting some some cool people.
To maybe just give us a quick bit of context about Techstars, first of all, but then maybe talk a little bit about the fund, which is the newer the newer part of what you're doing. Techstars and and, you know, I I've met Brad Feld and the seen some of the work that Techstars did early on, know some people that were invested early on by them.
But the London side of it, the UK side of it that you're involved with, how does that how does that run? Yeah. So so for people who don't know, Techstars runs well, is the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. So what that means is we run start up weekends.
So at every stage of your kind of idea, you can go to a start up weekend, meet some cofounders, brainstorm, build out an MVP over fifty four hours, and, you know, about a third of people who who go to those start up weekends end up kind of spinning up businesses off the back of them.
We then run accelerator programs where we invest up to one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in ten companies. In each program, we run forty five of those programs around the world and those ten companies come into the office or onto a big Slack channel and a lot of Zoom calls in the current era and we give them access to lots of mentors, advisors, partners and investors and try and help them kind of have two or three years worth of experience in thirteen weeks and then, you know,
continue to support them through investment and access to our network and beyond for the remainder of their life. Techstars London was the first programme that Techstars opened up outside the US, so the first London programme happened in twenty thirteen. You know, we've invested in companies from all over Europe and have had companies come from the US and Asia who wanted to expand into London or into the UK ecosystem more widely, as well as lots and lots of companies from across the UK, Ireland, and who've who've wanted to kind of grow their business in
in this part of the world. So everything from kind of pre seed to to to some pre series a companies across any any sector. So I've invested in everything from cartoon cats that write letters to children to teach them how to read and write, right the way through to beyond visual line of sight drones for, you know, road construction and, and and heavy industry.
It's a pretty it's a pretty varied map that you've got there. What about the fund mentioned earlier is a I think is it a twenty twenty venture? It seems like a great year to start something. How how did that come together? And what what is it what do you do that's maybe a little bit different to your regular regular VC?
For sure. So the the fund came together in in twenty eighteen originally in in New York, and it kinda came together around two big themes. One being a lot of the pre seed funds in New York that had set up in kinda twenty thirteen through fifteen with a maybe five or eight million dollar fund had been become quite successful.
And when they went out to do fund two, you know, fund two became a fifty or eighty million dollar vehicle, and suddenly they were writing two million dollar checks into companies at seed stage. There was a little gap in the pre seed market, and plus at the same time you had a bunch of founders and operators who were starting to see some liquidity through exits and IPOs and secondaries and various different things.
And so the idea was what if we brought all of these clever founders and operators together, got them to pool their resources, got them to pool their deal flow and say, hey, my former VP of product is starting a new company. I'm gonna put twenty k in there.
You know, who else is interested? So we put all of these people together in a in a Slack channel and ultimately then decided, well, what if we all pre committed some capital? We still share the same deal flow. We can still invest in lots of deals, but there's a central fund that can choose ones that it wants to invest in.
So started it in New York, had great founders from Casper and Warby Parker and General Assembly and One Medical and lots of others, and so took the same model this year and brought it to Europe. And again, brought on some great founders and operators from some of the major kind of European success stories of the last couple of years, including Olapic out of Spain, Super Awesome who were recently acquired by Epic Games and many, many others, and it's the same model.
We have, you know, fifty of the smartest founders and operators in Europe who've got lots of experience of growing and scaling businesses, of hiring and firing people, of going through investment processes and who have an insanely good network and so they share deals, we decide which ones we want to invest in, and then we pool those resources to help those companies that we invest in.
So saying, hey, if you've got a question about, you know, user acquisition at scale, well, then you can go and talk to the folks at Casper. All of those companies we invest in join the same Slack group with all of our founders and operators from the fund in New York, the fund in Europe, and the fund now in LA, and we just announced the fund in the Rockies, in the US as well.
So it's a pretty broad swathe of some of the best entrepreneurs in the world this network, and we try to be as supportive as we can and as hands on as we can because we think those founders and operators have the most relevant and, in many cases, most recent experience to be able to help companies.
And we've invested in lots of companies that have come out of Techstars. We've invested in lots of companies that have come through other accelerators or not done accelerators at all. Ultimately, you know, we wanna kind of increase the volume of communication between the ecosystems in Europe.
Right? I think London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Dublin, they have great ecosystems. In a lot of the time, there's not a lot of connective tissue between them. And so, you know, our view is if we can start building this fund, just in Europe, but across the Atlantic, there's a lot of a lot of potential we can unlock there.
Yep. Totally agree. Totally agree. And I think it is one of the big differences between Europe and the US, the the interconnectivity that I mean, you know, the US being a single country and Europe being a collection of countries, and it definitely there's definitely a bit more friction.
So good to see good to see what the and the fund, I think, like, you've one of the partners is in Madrid. Is that right? So you've got you're kind of all over all over Europe geographically as well. Yeah. Yeah. So so so we have, you know, we have people from the the Baltics to Greece, you know, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Ireland, UK.
So, you know, we've got a pretty good representation of of the kind of major ecosystems and and then some of the smaller European ecosystems. So we're seeing great deals coming in from from from all across the map, is which is really, really good to see.
Cool. Cool. So maybe for for the next bit of the chat, we'll talk a bit a little bit tactical, and then we can talk a bit strategic and then get some questions in from the from the audience. When I just in terms of founding teams, you know, you can't even imagine how many how many pitches and you see and finding teams you meet.
What what are the qualities and or skills or values? What are the key components that you look for in finding teams? What are are there people when you meet them, go, this is a great idea, but they're just there's the thing there's the x is missing.
You know? What or this is maybe not such a great idea, but the peep that this team has really got the what we need. How do you Yeah. I mean, I think the I suppose one of the biggest ones for me is coachability.
Right? Particularly as we think about, you companies coming into Techstars or companies that we invest in at the fund. The best founders that I've ever worked with are ones that are really learning machines and ones that are very honest and open and will share the challenges that they have and will take the feedback that you and others give them and and process that information and synthesize it and and make decisions based on it and then communicate, you know, those decisions back to you and say, decided to go with your advice.
This happened, and so I changed back to my original course, or, you know, know, thank you for that advice. We went in this direction, and it's now, you know, increased our revenue by three x in the last, you know, fortnight. So I think coachability is is is really, really key, because I think it's tied in with with likability as well.
Right? I mean, you know, if if someone is open and honest and and coachable and and easy to kind of converse with and and build a relationship with, well, then that's that's obviously very handy when it comes to building relationships with potential clients, building relationships with people that you're going to hire, etcetera, etcetera.
So I think that kind of coachability factor is is is very important. I think resilience is is extremely important. You know, if you start like, starting a company is both the the stupidest, craziest, and best thing that I that I ever did, and I had so many people who told me that I was insane to do it and that I was, you know, insane while I was still doing it, and we still see that with companies that we've invested in today.
So, you know, again, you've gotta be able to kind of take some of the knocks that are going to come along the way and learn from them, right, and kind of go, okay, this didn't work. It's not because I'm a terrible person or because I didn't work hard enough, it's because maybe I was a little bit too early to the market or maybe I didn't take certain things into consideration, but I will never ever make that mistake again.
So I think that resilience is key. And for me, the other one is kind of founder market fit. Right? I wanna when I talk to founders, I want them to be so passionate about what they're doing that even through Zoom, I can actually feel that energy fizzing off them, and I get equally as excited about what they're doing.
And, you know, if you look at, you know, the companies where I'm on the board, you know, when I met Ben from from pesky fish first, the way that he talked about the fishing industry and fish supply chain and logistics, don't get me wrong, I ate fish.
I didn't know anything about the fish supply chain or the logistics or the ins and outs of it, but the way that he talked about it, I was like, oh my god, this is incredible. You could feel that energy, the same with so many other founders that I've backed.
Ultimately, you want people who have that passion, who can convey that passion and who are really obsessed about the thing that they're building so much so that, a, they've decided to start a business and b, that they have an understanding of potentially how to make that grow and scale and how to understand what other people who've maybe tried this before have failed as a result of.
So I think those are really key things. And, you know, I've invested in solo founders. I've invested in four, five, six person founding teams, you know, but those kind of core things of coachability, resilience, and and founder market fit, think, are are really critical for me.
Yeah. I think there's a difference as well between the founders and founding teams that find a problem and decide to solve it versus, you know, go looking for something like, where could we build a startup versus people who are like, this thing really pisses me off.
I wanna fix it. Or why is it gonna be done this thing yet? Let's let's make it better. The the the kind of canonical thing that we see in that regard is, you know, you you meet someone who goes, look, I've been a lawyer for twenty years.
And every day I spent two hours going through this process and I used to try to eat bananas that we had to do it. One day I told a friend of mine at the barbecue and he said, I could build a script to, you know, automate that and and make it a little bit better, and so we started a company and, you know, versus someone who goes, I read a Harvard Business Review article that said this was a problem, so I've started a company with two other people from business school.
You know, who's who's got the instant network? Who's got the empathy that they're gonna be able to use when it comes to selling? Who's got the real understanding of what that problem actually means, and then what are the adjacent services and products that you can wrap around that.
And I'm not saying that's always gonna be a guarantee of of success, but for me, that's always been something that I've looked for is, like, if you're if you're scratching an itch that you feel yourself, if you're, you know, building something like, I started my first company because I was really annoyed that no one would take the opportunity that existed in mobile content seriously, and I got so annoyed about it that I quit my civil service job in the public service broadcaster in Ireland and started a company,
and that kind of rage fueled probably the first little while in the company when we weren't making any money. So, you know, I think you do have to have that kind of real passion for for the pain point because I think you can convey that when you're talking to people.
Yeah, yeah. And you can't fake it. It's it's, it's very apparent. And you you mentioned about that you'd like to get involved early with companies, that's a big part of what you do. What's your I don't know if that's the right way to put it.
But so companies raise some money with with the fund or tech stars, and you're working with them. And one of the first things they decide to do is hire some people. Where do you like to see founders focus when it comes to hiring?
And obviously, it depends on their strengths and weaknesses in the team. Is there a favorite hire that you're like, yes, I love when they go for that? Or there or or is there something where you're like, oh, don't don't do that. You know, that never works.
So the thing I hate is when the CEO hires a personal assistant as the first person that they hire. Like, that's a, like, I I always think there's a there's a yeah. There's a correlation between how quickly someone hires an executive assistant and how quickly the company will go off the rails because, like, literally, no one is that busy when you're an an early stage.
You should be able to deal with, you know, many of the processes that are going on. So that's a hire that I very rarely, if ever, ever, ever, ever want to see. The hires that I love seeing are when teams hire people that are much smarter than they are.
You know, when I'm interviewing for the companies that I work with, you know, I love seeing them hire people who are junior and and and mid level in their careers and and kind of thinking about how they can, you know, grow into big roles within the companies, but I also love to see them going, I'm gonna hold my hand up and go, this person is like could be the CEO of this company someday and is ten x smarter than I am and is gonna be able to put all
of these processes in place. Like, that I I really love to see. You know, there's no specific role. Really, it depends on the company. Like, you know, some you know, if it's if it's a technical company, very tech you know, machine learning company, most of those companies are great at technology and really rubbish at selling.
And so maybe bringing in someone who's kind of marketing slash BD. You know, if you're a b to b company, most companies most companies hire BD people and never hire salespeople who can actually close deals. So hiring salespeople is obviously key. But then there's lots of other companies who are like, they're great salespeople, but they build absolutely rubbish technology, so they need to bring in, a CTO or they maybe need to outsource part of their development and bring in a kind of VP of engineering.
So I think it depends on the company and where kind of the founders founder or founding team are weak and also kind of where the levers are that they need to pull on in the next kind of you know, couple of weeks and couple of months to actually grow the business and start to get scale or over the next twelve to eighteen months, what are the things that need to be true for them to either become profitable or for them to get to a stage that they can
raise their next round of funding. So you kind of think about it both strategically and tactically like that. And when you're when you when you come in with back companies and they're that's is that generally the first bit of external capital that they've had?
Probably fiftyfifty, I guess. So historically, I suppose when we you know, the very first couple of batches of Techstars, it was, you know, for the most part, the companies coming in, we were the first investor that they'd ever brought you know, and then as as you started seeing things like kind of AWS and Google Cloud and all of these kind of different APIs and platforms come out where you could, you know, and even no code nowadays, you know, I think people can get to a stage where in this part of the
world, can do an SEIS RANs, you know, relatively easily and and and reasonably quickly. I think the same is true in other in other markets, so there's a greater availability of angel capital and and and pre seed capital. So now we see a lot of companies coming in and doing tech stars when they've raised five hundred k or they've raised a little bit more and suddenly they're going, oh, ****. Like, what do I do now?
It's like, you know, I have I have money and I have a a good founding team, but, like, how do we put the building blocks and foundations in place to make sure that over the next, you know, one, three, five, ten years, you know, we have the right technical architecture in place, we have the right team and planning in place, we have the right kind of strategic way of thinking about the business in place.
So, I think, you know, we've seen some companies that are that are a bit further along coming in, but but, you know, still, a lot of what I do is, yeah, we're we're kind of the first the first check-in, and it's it's a lot about kinda helping them get ready for a million pound raise or a three million or a five million pound raise and, you know, putting the systems and processes and metrics in place to to help them get to that.
Do you do you work with any any companies that you would that would be considered maybe Zebras or considered that that VC is not the the root for them? Do are you involved in any mentoring or any angel investing in those in those spaces?
Yeah. I mean, look. I think I think one of the really interesting things that's starting to happen now is a, a growing realization that not every company is going to be, much less should be, a unicorn and that, you know, getting to be a billion dollar company is not necessarily the process that everyone should follow.
One of the advantages, I guess, of of the stage that we're investing in companies at is that actually what most VCs would consider, like, a a waste of time return, you know, so, like, a three year well, like a five, ten, thirty million pound exit.
You know, it's actually a material return on capital for us, and it's a really material return on capital for founders. And I've had this argument with a with a bunch of different funds and a bunch of different people to kinda go, look, if you're a founder from doesn't matter where you are in the world.
You come, you do Techstars, we have six percent, you go, you raise an angel round and and give away kind of fifteen percent. So you and the other founders own eighty percent of the business. You know, you get to, you know, fifty k MRR.
Things are going pretty well, and then Adobe comes knocking on your door and says, hey. I can give you twenty million dollars for this company. Right? You know, you could hang on and say, okay. Well, I'm gonna try and build this into a multibillion dollar company, or I run the risk of Adobe going, well, we couldn't acquire them, so we'll just build our own competitor.
And then you go, actually, you know, for me and my cofounder, that means eight million dollars each. Like, that's a pretty life changing amount of money. And that then becomes, you know, the next company that that founder starts. There's no fear in starting it. They have the money.
They they've bought their house. They they can kinda do whatever they want, so it creates serial founders. So, yes, you know, I've invested in a couple of companies who, you know, I think are exactly on that trajectory, and I think it's there is a kind of siren call of VC that people sometimes succumb to, And I think it's you know, VC is great for a lot of companies, but it's not it's not great for a a very, very great deal lore who should really be thinking about kind
of either bootstrapping or or doing kind of an angel round and being, you know I think Roland from Forest and I talked about this a long time ago, but, like, what's the start of equivalent of a Mittelstand company in Germany? You know, a company that just does one thing really, really brilliantly and and, you know, makes a ton of money doing it and doesn't think about, like, oh, this is just my wedge into a much bigger market.
They're like, I just do, you know, x process incredibly well and make twenty million dollars a year doing it, and that's it. Thank you very much, and good night. I think we need more, and we will see more businesses like that. Know? I think you've got kind of NDVC and Uncapped and Clearbank and and lots of other people out there.
So there's a growing access to the types of capital that those businesses need that isn't dilutive, funding that comes with a board that's thinking about, hey. You need to hit these metrics to raise your next round of money, and it's not about, like, oh, your product needs to do this.
Like, frequently, those two things are are at odds with one another. So I quite like the idea of investing in kind of companies that are, you know, about delivering a realistic return or about building an amazing product and not necessarily thinking about, okay, I need to now spend, like, a hundred million dollars on Instagram ads to get myself to, you know, the the number that I need to do whatever direct listing.
Yeah. No. I the the the point about repeat founders versus versus unicorns, like, if we're building ecosystems, if we're building a new way to do business in Europe, I think we need a lot more of the the repeat founders and the serial founders rather than shooting for the the moonshots.
You know, and we'll we'll we'll get the we'll get those unicorns coming as well, no doubt. So for for given the the times that we're in and all that, what impact have you seen in in the startups that you already work with, the startups that are coming to the table now?
How have you seen COVID? Has it changed the way people are approaching you? And and are you seeing different things in pitch decks? Are you seeing different things in conversations where? Or is it just all a little bit altered? So we're we're seeing different things in in terms of, like so people are raising for longer periods of time.
Right? So if, you know, companies that are going out and doing, you know, seed rounds, series a rounds, etcetera, you where previously they were kind going, oh, we're raising for twelve to eighteen months. It's now eighteen to twenty four months because people are still going, what's gonna happen next year?
Are we gonna have a virus or are we gonna have a vaccine? Are we gonna have I mean, we're definitely gonna have a virus. Are we gonna have a vaccine? Are we gonna have all of these different things? It's like, well, I don't know. No one knows.
And so therefore, you know, raising a little bit more money seems to be the norm. You know, evaluate weirdly, I think I saw some data the other day from from SPV and others where it was like, you know, the way that we're tracking at the moment, there will be roughly a fifteen percent drop in the amount of capital invested in companies this year versus last year.
And when you think about what happened this year, that's extraordinary. Like, you know, the world shut down certainly in this country for quite a long time and actually, know, probably for about a month, you know, March, early April, maybe even knocking into May, you know, most VCs and most angels were kind of going, I'm going to look inwards and have my own portfolio.
Now there's, like, money sloshing around like I I've never seen before and rounds getting done extremely quickly. So, you know, I think deals are happening. People are seeing the pace at which things like education and health care and other industries are changing. Obviously, are presenting that everyone is more remote first, and kind of talking about how they're building that culture as a remote first one.
I think a lot of people are talking about mitigation strategies. Should we go into kind of tier, you know, whatever second, third, fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth, tenth lockdown? I mean, hopefully not, but, you know, for some b to b companies in in my portfolio, particularly ones that are kind of at enterprise level setting into kind of banks or health care or others, you know, that entire sales process basically shut down in in kind of April.
And so a lot of those companies now have been kind of moving away from trying to close sales and moving more on, you know, iterating their products, spending time, like, meaningful time with their potential partners and customers because those potential partners and customers are sat at home going, well, actually, I have an abundance of time to do customer discovery and conversations with you now.
So I think a lot of the b to b companies that I've invested in will come out of this with a product that's ten x better than it would have been had they continued building and trying to sell. You know, for the b to c companies like pesky fish, Kenco on Banjo Robinson, like lots of those companies, you know, their volumes and their revenues have gone through the roof because people want to order fish directly to their house.
They don't want to leave the house and go to the fishmongers. They want to get Kenco so that they have their fruit and vegetables and five a day, and again, going to the supermarkets versus getting that delivered direct to your door, you know, which of those two things is is more compelling?
So I think, you know, different companies have adopted different mitigating and mitigation strategies, and certainly, we're seeing a lot more people kind of going, oh, you know, how do we build better entertainment for, for, you know, remote teams, distributed teams? Like, how do we kind of create culture, amongst distributed teams, etcetera?
How do we think about those kind of water cooler moments that no longer exist when, you know, your water cooler is, the tap in your kitchen and the only other person in the house are your housemates? So there's there's a few people kind of thinking around those types of areas, but I was surprised.
Like, I I I genuinely wondered when all of this started to happen, would there just be, like, like, a massive drop off of people willing to to start companies? But then, like, you know, o seven oh, I mean, I started my second company in in in two thousand nine, back end of nine.
You know, the first one, two thousand five, went through to kind of the last crash, which was obviously radically different, but you see some of the best companies in the world came out of of kind of o seven through o nine, you know, Airbnb and Stripe and and and many, many others.
So I have no reason to think that this won't be similar, that we won't see incredible innovation coming out of what's been a pretty desperate situation. You know? But I've been really heartened to see that, yes, early on, capital kinda stops flowing, but, actually, if anything else, it's it's now kind of doubled down in in volume since since June, July.
It feels like one of the big things that's that's been a separator between startups and corporates over the past well, forever, I guess, excuse me, has been physical spaces. You know, startups working out of coffee shops or bedrooms or garages or whatever versus corporates in nice offices and city centers.
And now over the past six months, most of us have been working from home in some form or another. I wonder how that's gonna impact you know, are there people who who previously were just in their corporate job in their office, and now they're working from home?
Are they thinking now, maybe I'm a bit closer to start up culture. Maybe I should I'm a bit closer to start up mindset. That that idea that I had, maybe I'm gonna just give it a go. I mean, I think that that whole passion economy is gonna absolutely explode over the next little while.
You know, what we've seen with, you know, even outside of the kind of, let's call it, the tech startup world, you number of people that are doing like food trucks or the number of people that are offering Coursera courses or the number of people that are kind of starting their own podcasts or all of these kind of different things.
Like, think there's gonna be an explosion in opportunities for exactly that reason. People are going to have been I never knew I was as good as I mean, I'm not saying I'm very good at making sauces, but I spent a lot more time making sauce when we were under lockdown than I did previously and occasionally kind of went, Jesus, maybe I should go and be a chef like this tech stuff is.
So I think there will be an explosion in that. I also think there will be a whole range of new problems that people will discover and a whole range of new solutions that people will kind of come up with as they sit at home and look at a twelve inches screen for whatever ten hours of the day.
So I do think we'll see this kind of, you know, whatever Cambrian explosion of of of great ideas both in the tech industry, but also a bunch of people going, you know what, it's okay if I wanna go and start a business where I turn over forty grand a year or fifty grand a year, and I'm I'm ecstatic because I'm doing something that I love, and I wake up every morning going, amazing.
Like, I get to, you know, walk a hundred yards down the road to, you know, walk five meters out of my room to to actually do my job versus getting on two trains for two and a half hours to go to some corporate monolith that I hate.
You know, I I do hope that one of the big things that comes out of this is a, people are happier doing what they're doing, and b, the people retain the sense of human connection that existed during lockdown. Like, it's been amazing doing calls with people.
When we were interviewing companies for Techstars, like, there was this one company I was interviewing, like, his cat kept walking over and back in front of the television. I was like, just pick the cat like, it's fine. I'm not gonna think less of your company if you pat your cat.
Like, that's that's okay or people's kids coming in. Like, I was on a call with a couple of colleagues of mine a few days ago talking about a a deal that we're working on, and, you know, this this kid walks in. She must be, like, six or seven or something like this, and she was like, oh, dad.
I wanna do x. And he was like oh well I'm on a call we'll do it in a minute' she goes well dad I'm bored now' I was like well how do you argue with that?' can't say no so you just go and that humanity we've missed when people are in kind of you know whatever just a bland white kind of conference room and you know I'm here Mr.
Business so let's talk about business. It's like oh here's my collection of guitars in the background suddenly I can talk to people about you know something that's not their startup. So I think if we can retain that human connection, which I really hope we do, then, you know, maybe maybe there's some silver lining in this, pretty dreadful cloud.
Remember last year, the guy on BBC when his his kids and wife burst into the into the room, and it was a big talking point. It was Yeah. All over the Internet. That that guy, he was really we didn't know at the time, but he was preparing us.
My I think everybody everybody in the Turing team knows my kids pretty well now. Because my wife said if I'm running late in a meeting, she just sends them in. And they just you know, that's that's the meeting over. So is this is human life.
Like, I think this is this is the bit that we've been missing. Like, everyone you know, I think this is one of the really nice things is even talking to other, like, later stage VCs or, you know, later stage companies or, you know, like, yes, they might have a billion dollar fund and be doing all of these different things, but then, you know, they're also sitting in front of, like, you know, a half chopped loaf of bread and, you know, all of these other kind of things that show that they're
kind of human as well. Right? And I think that's been, you know, that humanizing nature of what's happened has been, as I say, a little bit of a positive in the midst of a lot of negatives. Yeah, I hope so. And I agree with you.
Question in, vital topic. What's your favorite sauce? Some something in the audience wants to know. Tell tell us about your cooking, Eamon. This is my favorite topic. I wish now we could have had forty five minutes on this. No. So, I think think my I mean, I'm I'm that's a really good question.
You know, that might be the best question. Whoever sent that in, I'd like, that might be the the best question I've been asking a long time. I I mean, I love hot sauce, all sorts of hot sauces for steaks and various different things.
There's a Korean spicy Korean sauce that I had a Korean portfolio company. They send me stuff from from that part of the world every so often, so I can't actually tell you what it's called, but if I were at home, I'd show you a picture of it.
And making sauce I mean, I'm I I default to, like, just, you know, tomato sauces with lots of olives, but you cook them for, five hours, so it releases a lot of the flavor. So low and slow sauces for me. Do you do you know Ran Fishkin?
Yes. So SEO. I mean, Ran talk to our companies recently. Yeah. So next time you talk to him, you should have a chat about cooking. He's obsessed with cooking. He manages to put cooking into every slide deck now, which it's great. Challenge accepted. Yeah.
He's he's pretty sophisticated though. Another question in, and it's referring back to something we were supposed to so we originally, you were gonna come up to Edinburgh last summer to TuringFest, and we couldn't make that happen in the end. But the thing that you're gonna talk about is something I was really fascinated about, which is east not east versus west, but going back to your you kinda had your your eureka moment when you were on a subway train in Korea a long time ago now.
Two thousand ninety nine, two thousand? No. Maybe a bit later. Sixteen years ago. Two thousand four. Yeah. Two thousand four. Okay. And there was some and there was a kid on the on the on the underground in Seoul watching Spider Man on their phone, and you're like, oh my god.
The the future of content is gonna be in our pockets. Yeah. And we and we've seen, you know, TikTok, obviously, is the kind of latest incarnation. We see a lot of stuff coming out of out of Asia that it's almost like the, you know, Asia was ripping off the US for for a while, maybe in hardware, and then maybe in software, and now it feels like we're doing the other way around.
It does Europe have a place in all this? Are we just gonna be bouncing around between, like, the US and and Asia? Or is are we gonna find a European, thing that we do? I mean, I think we do I think Europe does machine learning and AI pretty well.
I think, you know, I think Europe does a lot of things brilliantly. Right? We maybe don't shout about it as much as as other parts of the world, but, I mean, you look at Spotify and Deezer and their predecessors, Kazan, others, we've done music, admittedly piracy in the case of the last one I mentioned, but legal music in the case of the other two very well.
You know, I think Europe has an interesting opportunity because it's at that kind of midpoint between the two others. You know, I think sometimes we have a tendency to kind of downplay things in Europe and I think part of that is there hasn't been the kind of venture capital ecosystem in Europe has perhaps not been as good as it could be, particularly as we get into kind of growth stage companies, but then you see what Daniel Ek announced recently in terms of kind of funding these types of moonshots.
There's some amazing stuff happening in food tech in this part of the world, like a company in Barcelona called Nova Meat that's probably one of the smartest companies working on the whole area of three d printing food at the moment. They're doing extraordinary stuff.
There's extraordinary companies in kind of clean tech and energy tech in the Baltics and Nordics. A friend of mine is on the board of a company that's doing miniature nuclear reactors. There's like the most bonkers kind of deep tech stuff going on in all sorts of universities in various different places around the continent.
I think what we've lacked is the VC ecosystem to support that. So I think that's developing and will continue to develop. And I think there are influences that we can take from the US and influences that we can take from Asia to form something that's that's coherent.
You know, the the challenge as well from a European perspective is it's very difficult going market by market by market. Right? Like, you know, we touched on it earlier. The US is kind of one country, admittedly very different cultures, East Coast to West Coast in the middle and all that kind of stuff.
But like it's nowhere near as complicated as going from, you know, I mean even going from Ireland to England is different. Going from England to France is really different. Going from France to Estonia is totally different again, right? So I think there's a lot of systemic challenges from a European perspective, but you know, I think there are also massive opportunities and some extraordinarily intelligent people, you know, working who have sold companies or who have worked for some of the big kind of US and Asian companies who are
now starting to kind of build their own things. Know, I think that that influence out of Asia has been something really interesting. Right? Facebook have obviously looked at WeChat and gone you know, WeChat is effectively the operating system for China, and I think they're trying to kind of now what they're doing merging kind of Messenger and Instagram messages, and eventually, I'm sure they'll find shoehorn WhatsApp in there unless the regulators get to them first.
You know, like, I think we're gonna start seeing and I see more and more companies pitching me for Techstars and for the fund, and when I say, well, you know, where did the inspiration come from? They say, okay. Well, it's some of the, you know, some of the big travel apps in in China or the UI is inspired by some of the really popular kind of messaging apps in Japan and Korea.
Like that I think is really exciting because those are mobile first economies, right, and those are places where know, your first interaction for a lot of people with the Internet was on a phone versus on a on a screen. And so the the user interface and the user experience is radically rethought over there.
And, you know, I mean, even audio messaging and how big that's getting now, like, lot of that was a function of, you know, the complexity of writing in Chinese, and so audio messaging becoming huge on on on WeChat. So there's a lot of lessons that startups can take from companies in in that part of the world and the days of kind of people going, oh, Chinese companies are just ripping off US companies.
Like, that's just nonsense now. Like, actually, if anything, it's either way around. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. I'm just thinking about some there's even some cultural influences that were they're just so ingrained that we don't even notice them. My mom recently started sending emoji like, she's discovered emojis.
I get emojis from her, like, every day now, and that's very clearly an Asian Asian origin. What kind big pay pop is? You know? As you you mentioned TikTok earlier, you know, you you look at all of these. You know, there's a brilliant book called The Birth of Korean Cool, which is about how basically the Korean government has subsidized the the kind of the the cult cultural diplomacy of the country through movies, you know, so Oldboy, Parasite, like, all of these types of movies, k pop.
Yeah. You know, technology industry is massively subsidized in in Korea by the by the government, and it's all a kind of cultural soft power that they're, that they're projecting. Same is true, you know, out of out of Japan for years, out of China more recently.
So it's fascinating to watch all of these kind of dynamics. And, yeah, you know, my my my mom has discovered emojis recently as well. It's a, you know, seminal moment in in in everyone's communications with their parents when they get their first kind of smiley face.
You know, I never never thought I'd see the day. It's true. But if I ever get them from my dad, then I'll know that we've really reached another another level. Another another question in kind of following on a little bit from what we're talking about is about European legislation.
And do we have a bit of an issue in Europe with legislation and regulation making it more difficult for startups versus you know, all the other all the other areas that we've been talking about? And if we do, how do we address it?
So so yes is the short answer. You know, I think one of the problems is I mean, you know, you you look at the the I mean, we so I mentioned NovaMeet there a couple of minutes ago. There is legislation that's pending in the EU now that would make it it that company would no longer be able to describe the product it's creating as meat.
Impossible could no longer call it the Impossible Burger because the meat lobby in Europe you know, is is kind of agitating that, like, sausages have to be pure, you know, actual meat. So, like, there's a bunch of entrenched industries that are flexing their muscles.
We have a very serious problem as is evidenced in particularly with what's happening in this country at the moment, but also more laterally that a lot of the people making these decisions are people who don't really know anything about what they're talking about.
And so the folks who are drawing up regulations, the folks who are debating regulations and ultimately deciding on enacting them and otherwise, in many cases, are people who are probably still getting their emails printed out for them. Right? So I think that's a big problem that we have, and I don't know that we necessarily have an effective tech lobby in Europe.
I mean, I don't think we you know, we have Kodak in in in in the UK, there are other people, you know, around the fringes, but I'm still not sure that we necessarily have an effective tech lobby that kind of is I mean, a, that can educate the people who want to be educated, which I suspect is not a huge number of them, and and b, can kind of agitate when when certain decisions are made that are just kind of batshit crazy.
So I think there will be, you know, there there are some green shoots, you know, you look at the kind of FCA, the regulatory sandbox around fintech in in the UK, you know, the CAA around kind of drones and and and what they're doing.
There are green shoots in terms of regulatory bodies, but I think one of the big problems is that certainly at a European level, like, the people who are making these decisions literally have to breeze what they're talking about and don't really care to be informed.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we see with Oh, vote. I think the solution is, like, get out and vote. Yeah. Yeah. Well, European elections are always a always a a bit of a funny one. There's there's usually some different kind of politics emerges there as we've seen.
But, yeah, even like GDPR, you know, clearly, there's good intentions behind it. But I think we're all pretty sick of those pop ups, etcetera. And, you know, does it actually work? Does it just entrench Google? Does it make it harder for start start ups to compete?
So just to maybe touch on before we finish up is the way so the world, you know, the world's changing all the time, that's been accelerated this year. And we're still not sure in what ways that's ultimately going to be accelerated. But entrepreneurship certainly seems to be on the rise, technology, entrepreneurship in particular.
But it's something that's been a pretty exclusive field so far, and certainly relative to the potential number of people that could could participate. So how do we how do we make tech entrepreneurship more accessible? And that's across socioeconomic lines, across geographic lines. You mentioned that you've invested in Africa, for example.
And tech in Africa seems to be absolutely booming, although still obviously early stages. But even even closer to home, like, how do we well, how do we change our education system? You know, like, that's that's not go too deep. But what what do you think are the the key things that we need to think about?
So I think look. The the the big thing I'd say is that the the playing field is a lot more level now than it ever has been. You know, when I started kind of traveling around and and kinda thinking about investing in companies or, you know, even when I was running my own companies and and kinda going to various different conferences, you could see the gulf in understanding and, dare I say, ability and and nerds from the companies that were coming in from kinda California and maybe even New York versus the
companies from Europe versus the companies from, like, everywhere else in the world. And it was just because there was a density of knowledge and talent and understanding in in in the US. Right? You know, now we have people who have, you know, in in Europe, you've got, you know, people who founded Skype who then seeded TransferWise, who then seeded, you know, lots of other companies.
So I think, you know, we're starting to see some of that kind of knowledge build up. I think the other thing that's kind of made the playing field, you know, now, I you know, I go to well, when it was possible, I just go to Startup Istanbul every year, And they would bring in founders from all over Africa, Asia, Middle East, etcetera.
And I remember judging a pitch competition where the second and third place were won by two graduates of Gaza Sky Geeks, is an accelerator focused on female entrepreneurs in in Gaza City. Right? So and and when I was talking to the founders afterwards, they were saying, oh, it's you know, they they're reading Medium.
They're listening to the same podcast that everyone who's, you know, on this on this conference is is listening to. They're, you know, asking questions on Quora and Stack Exchange, you know, all of the you know, so they have access to that same body of information.
Like previously, if you wanted to do CS one zero one at Harvard, you had to physically get into Harvard and then you had to be able to afford to go there. Like, now you can download the course off iTunes. So access to information is is a lot more democratized, you know, so I think that helps.
Number two, you need to tell people that this is an okay thing to do, right. So, you know, when I mean when I was in school, you know, we didn't we didn't even have computer classes like the idea of teaching someone a computer language.
I mean, I learned ancient Greek in school and Latin instead of learning a language that I, you know, both of which to be fair weren't actually quite good to learn, but like, you know, I'm not going to have a conversation with someone from two thousand years ago, you know, might have been a bit more useful to learn HTML or, you know, JavaScript or something else, right?
So I think there are things that we need to do in school to encourage entrepreneurship. I think universities are doing a good job of it now. It also needs to start one stage earlier so that people don't think I have to be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, a teacher, or whatever else.
They think, oh, well, I can go and work for a startup. And we also have to tell people not everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, right? You don't have to be a founder. You don't have to be CEO, COO, CTO, but you can go and work in an early stage company and they should understand what options are and how that works and how they can generate potentially some personal wealth by doing it.
And then I think, you know, at Techstars, we run, you know, close to a thousand start up weekend events in in now about a hundred and sixty countries around the world every year, which are, you know, generally free, open to anyone who wants to to apply.
I judged one for for teenagers in Kiev, at the back end of of last year, and they brought people in from kind of all around, Ukraine to do that, including, you know, some of the the more kind of crisis ridden areas. And, you know, seeing fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year olds coming up with actually, in many cases, really, really good ideas.
You know, you need to kind of foster that sense of community. You need to have a place whether it be, you know I mean, it probably can't be Slack or Discord or any of these. Like, you you this kind of some of this needs to physically happen when it's when it's possible, but I think we've gotta expand the the remit of education.
We've gotta be better at creating communities. We've gotta have more role models. So if we're gonna have a community, then have someone, you know, a a local success story come in and be a mentor. Right? Like, people have to kind of learn how to give back to their the community that's benefited them, and I think when you start getting all of those people those pieces of the puzzle together, that helps.
Then people need to see it's not just like, oh, here's someone from Ireland who became successful. It needs to be like, here's someone who looks like me from Ireland who became successful. Right? So I think it's gotta be more inclusive and more diverse all around.
And, I mean, I think that's the the the case for everything that we do. Like, if we're just you know, if I run an accelerator program that's full of just, you know, white men, you know, or other people who look exactly like me, then then I'm, you know, I'm the problem.
Right? And, you know, I think everyone needs to be conscious of the you know, a, that diverse teams produce better outcomes and b, that shouldn't be the reason. Right? Like, diversity is a fact, inclusion is the challenge, and that's the thing that we need to kind of work on.
Agreed. Agreed. Eamon, great stuff. Perhaps predictably, two Irish fellows talking to each other. We've run we've run a little bit over time. So we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up there. As ever, good to catch up. I'll be in touch with you soon, but thanks for joining us today at TuringFest.
And thanks very much for tuning in, thanks for having me. It was great to, great to be here from my office. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Eamon. Cheers. Bye bye. Okay. So that's a wrap on today's talks. We had a bunch of roundtable discussions earlier with peers talking about interesting challenges and topics of the day.
We're gonna have more of those next week. And we're we're probably gonna we had four today, I think I think it'll be six next week, we'll we'll pop them in the schedule at the start of the week and keep you keep you posted.
Sign up early, though, because they're they're they're hot ticket. They're they're gone out the door straight away. We've also got next week just to give a quick preview. We've got Emily Tate from mind the product talking about decision making. We've got Ben Orenstein from Tuple talking about pair programming.
And then we've got our old pal Ran Fishkin is back to talk about the duopoly of Facebook and Google and what you can do to to well, what are your alternatives are, I suppose. And then at the end of the week, that's on those three keynotes are on Tuesday.
And then next Thursday, we have back from she spoke at Turing Fest last year on a Turing founders, Fantastic speaker. Everybody loved her. Doctor Emily Anhalt, and she's gonna be she's a psychologist in Silicon Valley. She's also recently a founder of her company, raised some money actually last week to build mental gyms for mental health gyms, I think is the tag.
So Emily is going to be back to to have a chat and to talk us through, I guess, coping with the way the world is right now and how we can look forward. So that's a wrap for this week. Our partners are online at the moment.
Please do go and have chats. There's a lot of good stuff going on there. You know, and there's also a lot of hiring happening. So also always worth looking at that. And we'll see you these all these videos are online. If you've missed anything during the week, it's all online.
Now you can just jump into the the TuringFest platform. But that's a wrap. So see you next week.
