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- [00:00]
A
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief, How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books that you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu. the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Good morning, good evening, good night, entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel listeners on the new Bucks Network. I'm today with Ben Brabin, who I first came across a long time ago through something that didn't really work out. But rather than me, try to introduce Ben, who's got a varied and interesting career in many things connected with entrepreneurship. Ben, why don't you introduce yourself the way you do if you bump into someone at a social event or a party or indeed a business context, and they ask you that magical question, so what do you do?
- [01:27]
B
Well, I used to answer with long paragraphs of fairly comprehensive stuff about network theory. Now I say I invite people to go for a walk.
- [01:36]
C
Yes. And so can you explain what leads to the invite people to go to a walk project and maybe the origin idea of that? Because then imagine that someone's never heard of walkabout at all and so you're taking them through the very first steps.
- [01:49]
B
Certainly so. Well, three years ago, in the summer of 2023, I was running a series of events bringing together investors and entrepreneurs, technologists, policymakers and communicators. And they were very successful, but they were also very hard to scale. It was a small and hard to grow group. And I thought what could we do which gives orders of magnitude more people the benefit of this kind of activity? So I thought, well, one of the constraints is finding a venue that can accommodate them and another is finding a day that works for everybody. So why don't we simply invite people to meet up in Green park in central London once a month for a short walk and then trip to the pub. And so I started doing that in June of 23, assuming that by October it would have run its course and as the weather got worse, people would stay at home or find something better to do. And yet it grew, it grew. More and more people joined and then people started asking if they could do the same sort of thing in other towns and cities, first around the UK and then around Europe and now into America and Africa and Asia. And so once a month, in about 37 different towns and cities, groups meet and go for a walk.
- [02:59]
C
Fantastic. And you mentioned that you had a sort of demographic of the people, the people involved in the innovation entrepreneurship space. And the reason I heard about Walkabout was through David Clevely, who was a guest at an event I was hosting in Cambridge and has also been on the podcast. I'll put a link in the show notes. And he said, oh, I did this walkabout thing and I'm a curator, serious person, and looked you up. And that's how I found out about it. But is it only for people who are working in that space? Or can someone, somewhere who wants to organize a walk about anything? What are the sort of guidelines for someone who approaches you and wants to start one?
- [03:37]
B
Well, the guidelines are very simple. There's really only one rule, which is that we welcome everybody. So the central premise of a walkabout is that when you attend it, you will be welcome. It's free, Everyone is welcome. And we also are very broad in our tastes for hosts, anyone who is prepared to essentially make that commitment to their local community of hosting a regular monthly walking group. It's a light commitment. It's just one morning, afternoon or evening, and provide a welcome to whomsoever attends. So it is growing largely through its simplicity. But perhaps one of the surprises is that although we say everyone is welcome, it seems to select for, it seems that the most curious and generous people attend. So a strikingly high proportion of people who attend walkabouts are what sometimes called between. They are multidisciplinary. They have interests which range across different disciplines and sometimes different geographies as well. And it is, I think, largely as a result of that combination of curiosity, generosity and multidisciplinariness that we've noticed that walkabout groups start solving problems and creating startup businesses. This was an emergent property rather than a deliberate intent. But when we noticed this property emerging, we started becoming much more deliberate about supporting it. And as a result, walkabouts now routinely deliver startups and support for startups. They organize investment and hiring, and they also bring together people to solve some of the world's larger multidisciplinary, unsolved problems. So we have a challenges theme into which we invite people with really big, thorny problems that have not yet been solved. And our hope is that over time and with more and more Multidisciplinary people. We're going to make a real impact on the world far beyond simply going for a monthly walk.
- [05:36]
C
Okay, so very interesting for people listening. It's a very striking feature of a entrepreneurial venture that's going well. And I'll put this in the social entrepreneurial category because you already mentioned you're not charging people, which suggests that the business model is actually. It's not a business, or at least it isn't a business yet. This is demand driven. People are coming to you wanting to do it rather than you getting the word out. But if someone comes to you and wants to get one going and they buy into the values of welcoming everybody, do you have like a set of guidelines or principles or onboarding to help explain people how to go about it? For example, how to get the word out or how to make sure the right sort of people come? Can you just talk through the. Suppose someone listening somewhere in the world thinking, this is a great idea, I want to do this. What would happen if they contacted you and said, I want to start doing this?
- [06:34]
B
Well, first of all, we'd thank them for getting in touch and congratulate them on their commitment to their community. And secondly, we'd share with them a one and a half page document which takes you step by step through exactly what's involved in getting started. It's a very practical document about choosing a location and a date at a time. And then some thoughts. Yes. About how you communicate it and grow the community that come. But of course, we're not trying to score large numbers here. There is no vanity metric which says a group is only successful if 100 people join it. The groups grow at a variety of different paces, very much dependent upon local conditions. And a group can be every bit as valuable to the people in it if it's only got half a dozen as if it's got several hundred.
- [07:17]
C
Fantastic. And when you say we, it has a slightly sort of corporate sound to it. Are you doing this alone or have you got helpers? Or do you regard the people who signed up to run the local. The local walks as your team? So we as you, plus them.
- [07:35]
B
I think it's all of us. Yes. The hosts, as we call them, are profoundly important. All volunteers. So those are unpaid positions. And there are now about 45 hosts in total. Sometimes people co host, in other words, more than one host at a particular place. But we are, yes, collectively we develop the plan and of course we share experiences between one walkabout location and another. So something which has Worked well in Manchester, might also work well in Birmingham. But we make sure that the hosts are all aware. It's a collective learning system.
- [08:08]
C
And how do you share? Do you have like monthly calls or do you have like a Slack group or a WhatsApp group? What's the technology to make this all work?
- [08:21]
B
So the three main tools we use are WhatsApp, LinkedIn and also Mighty Networks. We have a community platform running on Mighty Networks. We have in the past use Eventbrite, but have migrated to Mighty Networks more recently.
- [08:34]
C
Yes, Mighty Networks is something I'm familiar with. And do you think that's enough or do you see there's going to be a scaling issue when you get beyond a certain size where something might break and you have to come back to it, or is it a sort of cross that bridge when you come to it type situation that for now that's good enough, do you think?
- [08:54]
B
Well, so this, as I said, it began really as a kind of a bit of a side gig to my main business and as you say, pretty much with a sort of social nature to it. And so we used free tools and cobbled together of a service, not expecting it to have particular sort of growth in front of it. Of course, as that growth has come, we've adapted. We've moved from Eventbrite to Mighty Networks, which I think will be sufficient for a little while to come. But we are constantly scanning for better ways to do this. And indeed, I'm supported in that, particularly by a brilliant computational social scientist called Sohan d'. Souza.
- [09:30]
C
Good. And if you imagine this develops, are you surprised by the way this has evolved you certainly. It wasn't your intention for it to be doing what it was doing when you started after the summer. You thought it was going to wrap up. And no, it's. Did he say 37 cities or 40 cities worldwide?
- [09:46]
B
Yes, 37.
- [09:48]
C
37. If it carries on evolving the way it is at the moment, where do you think, if it goes the way you want it to go, what might be going on in, say, 1, 2, 5, 10 years from now? In terms of the scale of this,
- [10:01]
B
around about 30% of the people who regularly attend have PhDs. So although we say that everybody's welcome, we've noticed this appears particularly attractive to very educated people, many of whom, of course, are academics, but a high proportion of whom are infinite entrepreneurs. And so we have, in other words, a formula for pulling together people across a wide variety of disciplines, but with considerable depth in those disciplines. So as a multidisciplinary collective Intelligence organization. I think we have huge potential to solve some profoundly important but otherwise hard to solve problems. So, for example, we have two pro bono challenges running at the moment. One, to find ways to reduce the number of people who bleed to death from non compressible hemorrhage injuries, which is the second biggest trauma related killer of people in middle age. And the other, to reduce and mitigate the effects of electric vehicle battery fires. Now we're working with government departments in the research for each of those on a pro bono basis. But we do know increasingly have organizations paying us to find answers to particularly thorny challenges or to explore territory with which they're unfamiliar. And I think that that is a huge area for development and opportunity. We have a globally distributed intelligent network and we need to find challenges that are worthy of the people within it.
- [11:28]
C
Can you talk a listener through the process by which a challenge is selected and communicated to the group? So I suppose I were to start one in Lisbon with your support in a couple of months time, would you give the challenge or would I choose the challenge? Is the challenge sort of centrally transmitted? And all the walks think about that challenge, or do people select their own challenges and share it and say, is anyone else interested in discussing this one? How does that work?
- [11:55]
B
Well, let me go back a bit. After about a year when walkabout was spreading both geographically and more and more people were joining each individual walkabout, people started coming up to me and conspiratorially saying, this is brilliant, you should monetize it. And as a impoverished entrepreneur, I of course said, tell me more. And usually they would say, well, you should charge people for coming to these walkabouts. And I looked around in these various walks and pubs after the walks that we were meeting, and I thought, well, if I were to ask for £5 or £10 or a monthly or an annual membership, a lot of people wouldn't come. You know, after all, they'd say to themselves, well, it's just a walk, I can do that on my own. And also I've been missing the real value opportunity because I found myself thinking I would pay to spend time with many of these people. This is a very, very valuable network. And it would be a mistake to try to charge people to be a member of it. Instead, I should find a way of charging others, perhaps corporates or even governments, to gain access to this diverse, distributed, energized community. And so it was that that began a more formal search for organizations with really big meaningful problems to solve. And so it depends, of course, upon the consent of the people who are being asked. So if you were to host Walkabout Lisbon, you would have the option, but certainly not the obligation to share those challenges with your Walkabout members. This is not an attempt to get everyone's attention focused full time on those problems. It is instead an attempt to put something in the back of people's minds. It's inspired by Richard Feynman's problems. He had about a dozen problems which he kept in his back pocket. And every time he learned something new, he would check to see if the new lesson he'd learned might solve one of those old problems. So what we do with Walkabout is we provide you with an updated alternative to Richard Feynman's 12 problems, which you can think about anytime you like. And next time you come and walk about, if you remember, then share it through the community platform and we'll make sure it arrives to the people who can make use of it.
- [13:57]
C
Yeah, we'll share a link to. I'm not sure which link to go to for Richard Feynman's 12 problems, but we'll put that in the. We'll put that in the show. Notes for people to review. And so do you have a legal entity, a non profit, a social benefit company or something? Like if a company wants to give you £5,000 or for that matter a million pounds or euros or dollars or whatever, and I imagine from your expression on your face, this has not happened yet, the million pounds anyway, do they transfer? Do you have like a legal entity or a charity that's capable of taking money from all over the world?
- [14:32]
B
We do have a UK registered company. So the company is Amity Parlath Limited which is my company and has been operating for five years as the business consulting business and we have used that company as the host for the Walkabout movement.
- [14:46]
C
Yes. And regular listeners to this channel know that I run an alumni group focused on entrepreneurship for Cambridge University called Chem Entrepreneurs. And all over the world we have events. Obviously there are differences, but the idea there are free events run by a local leader we certainly have in common. And you know the issue of if someone wants to sponsor, how does the flow of funds work? Because if it a small scale event and someone just wants to pay for the drinks at a, an event that ends in a function room, then usually the sponsor can pay the vendor directly. But if it's a big company, then they can't just transfer money to a catering company without a corporate. But the fact you've got a legal entity resolves that. At least. At least. And I would imagine again that if it's scaled and scaled and scaled, then you might need to think about spinning it off to something separate. Or do you see it being an integral part of your business in perpetuity?
- [15:43]
B
I think for the time being it makes sense to keep it in the business. It's possible that that will change over time, but at the moment I don't see any sort of no looming requirement to do so. There are, of course, several different development paths we can follow, but the current trajectory, unless we introduce some of the sort of the new elements that we are assessing, the corporate structure I think is sufficient for the purpose.
- [16:07]
C
And apart from this podcast interview, which this isn't the Joe Rogan show, it's not going to reach hundreds of millions of people. Have you done much to get the word out? I asked an LLM about this project before I called, because it's always amazing what you can find out, and it said the majority of your content is your own LinkedIn profile. To assemble what you're doing, read Ben Brabin's LinkedIn. And so I asked the LLM to summarize your LinkedIn because I wanted to see how that worked. But have you done any systematic getting the word out or publicity? Or is it really just word of mouth like it was in my case? Because I heard about you through word of mouth.
- [16:46]
B
It's very much word of mouth. And in fact, it's no accident, perhaps, that it's David Clevely who is the connection. Throughout the last year, people, very many people in different walkabouts around the country and internationally have said to me, this is exactly what David Cleveland writes about in his book Serendipity. And one of the members of the Birmingham Walkabout actually presented me with a copy of David's book and I read it and of course it all felt very familiar. And then David two weeks ago joined the Walkabout in Cambridge, and sadly I wasn't able to be there. But as luck would have it, I then bumped into him in Tallinn last week in Estonia, where we were both speaking at a conference, Latitude 59. Sadly, he missed the first walkabout in Tallinn, which happened the day before he arrived. But it was a pleasure to meet him in person and thank him for
- [17:36]
C
the excellent book, as David Cleaver's familiar to listeners of this podcast, because I interviewed him about the book and I felt when I read it that it very much validated what I've been doing for the last 30 years. Sometimes you come across an academic idea which better explains what you've been doing than you've been able to explain to yourself. And, yeah, I'll put a link, obviously, I'll put a link to that interview in the notes for this podcast. And is there anything. I haven't asked you about the walkabout because I want to dig a bit into your prior business experience, but is there anything about this project that I haven't asked that you think is important for listeners to. To know?
- [18:18]
B
I think you've covered it very well.
- [18:20]
C
Good. Well, I'm. I think it's a. You know, as with many good ideas, the simplicity of it is part of its power. And if anyone listening wants to. Wants to start a walkabout, we'll certainly have means of getting in touch with Ben listed in the show notes. So can you talk a bit about other things? Because I know, because I've read your LinkedIn profile, but if you think about your entrepreneurial journey, you weren't always an entrepreneur, were you? Because you were in the military. So when you were a child, did you ever imagine you'd be setting up your own thing? When did the idea of sort of doing your own thing first come onto your radar as opposed to having a conventional career and working for other people?
- [19:09]
B
Well, I think. I mean, I started selling things to other pupils when I was at school and I enjoyed that. But then.
- [19:16]
C
Yeah, so can you talk us through that? What were you selling and how much money did you make?
- [19:20]
B
Small amounts. I discovered that if I mixed sugar with citric acid and food coloring, I could sell it to people for a lot more than the ingredients cost. Probably not very healthy, but a lot of people with bright blue teeth were very grateful.
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C
What age were you when you did that?
- [19:36]
B
I think I started. I was about probably 11.
- [19:39]
C
Yeah, so you were two years behind me. I retailed sweets to the boarders at my prep school in Oxford until I was closed down by the school authorities. But in fact, it was the thing that gave me the wrong idea about business for decades because I was able to double my money on a daily basis with 100% stock rotation that I'd buy 10 lollipops for 1P and sell them for 2P in whatever it was. 1974, 1975. And, you know, it's actually extraordinarily powerful way to make money if you can double your money on a daily basis. But. So you did that early and then did that. I had no mentoring and no one in my family. One of the reasons I do Entrepreneurship events is. My father was a philosopher. My mother came from a military family, and there were no business role models around to sort of help me understand where I could take this. So you did that, and then that was your first mention. And where did it go from there? What Richard Branson style. Did you build rockets to take us to other planets?
- [20:45]
B
Well, no. In fact, I had no business mentors. I grew up on a farm. And so after school I studied philosophy and then joined the military. So perhaps I might have been more influenced by your parents than by other mentors. And so, yes, I started my career as a Royal Marines officer.
- [21:03]
C
And I was lucky enough to know someone called Captain Christopher Burns who wrote the leadership manual for the Royal Navy at HMS Arthur. And I'd had a rather ignorant and superior idea of leadership in the military. When I started my business, I used to tell people, we're not an army style organization because here we believe in decentralizing. Until I met Captain Christopher Burns, who told me, you have to remember, in the military we have to teach leadership to everyone on the simple premise that at any moment the person you report to could get a bullet through their head. And if you don't know what to do, everyone can die. And I felt rather put in my place. But do you feel that you were taught leadership in the Marines? Was that true of the Marines as well?
- [21:53]
B
Yes, I think you're taught leadership, but of course you're also given plenty of opportunity to learn how to deal with uncertainty, which I think is one of the preeminent experiences of an entrepreneur. So I think it can provide extremely good preparation for an entrepreneurial career.
- [22:07]
C
But then you left. And why did you obviously decided, or maybe it was your decision, maybe it wasn't. You moved on to other things. But what was your thinking after a few years in the Marines?
- [22:20]
B
Well, it was a wonderful organization. It still is. And I heartily commend it to everybody who's considering their career in that direction. I left in the year 2000, and at the time I was conscious that it wasn't really foreign policy that was making the world go round. It appeared to be the flow of capital about which I understood virtually nothing. So I thought, well, I want to go to where the action is. And this, of course, this is a very different military era from the present day. But back then it was seemed to me the sensible thing to do was to come to London and get involved with a consulting or a banking firm, which would give me sort of the fastest and broadest overview of what made the economy function. And so I found my way to JP Morgan as a trainee investment banker.
- [23:06]
C
And that's money orientated, but it's not. Would you call that entrepreneurial? I mean, I appreciate that because you've been so involved in sort of the entrepreneurship ecosystem. I sort of. And now you're being highly entrepreneurial with Walkabout. Can you, for someone who's listening, we try to make this podcast useful for people who are interested in entrepreneurship. Are the steps you chose ones that you would recommend for someone who's thinking about starting a business? I mean, do you feel that, you know, working for other people was a good idea in your case? And would you recommend it to others?
- [23:42]
B
Well, I would, I'd recommend it, although I wasn't very good at following my own advice. So it seems to me that working in a large impressive organization like CHP Morgan, both a huge privilege and a great entrepreneurial training opportunity as well. I observe, having worked with a lot of entrepreneurs since, that very often knowledge of the problem that they're trying to solve is lacking or if the problem they're trying to solve is something in a well, and it's often not really big enough. Whereas organizations like JP Morgan are fantastic at gathering some of the world's biggest and thorniest problems as well as the resources to solve them. So I certainly encourage spending a bit of time in large complex organizations before setting out on your own so that you have a better understanding of who ultimately might become your customer.
- [24:29]
C
Yeah, I spent most of my working life in Krakow in Poland and there were some very big IT companies. One of them was called Komach, which I used to call the Polish IBM. And I used to regularly push back on sort of arrogant 22, 24, 26 year old software who are setting up their little software house. And they said, oh, we don't want to be a corporation like Karma. I said, well, does that mean you just don't want to be successful if you could, because. And they said, well, there's a bureaucracy, it's such a big corporation. And I said, well, you know, every, every startup that develops into a big business goes through that. You try making 600 million Zwati. So let's say whatever it was, 120 million pounds a quarter, you know, they were a really successful business and I think working for a successful business also teaches you a lot of things that you may be in your unconscious as well about how to get things done, how meetings are run and lots of process type skills which a lot of smaller businesses don't know how to do.
- [25:29]
B
And of course, training on Wall street with an investment bank was a fantastic introduction to finance and accounting. And while the Marines have taught me quite a lot about problem solving and communication and teamwork and leadership, certainly understanding money was new to me.
- [25:45]
C
After J.P. morgan, what came next?
- [25:47]
B
So I left after less than a year because although the dot com bubble had just burst, I together with a friend, hit on what I thought was a brilliant idea. So I left my excellent job at JP Morgan to so against the tide of people returning from failed dot coms and to set up what was then a very novel model, a crowdfunding business.
- [26:12]
C
Engvid, can you talk us through what was it called and how did it go?
- [26:17]
B
Sure. So the organization we called Be My Charity and it's easiest now to compare it with our more successful rival, JustGiving.com we actually launched the same month as Justgiving. And whereas they had raised £5 million of venture capital funding before the bubble burst, we were just two people working evenings or weekends. So we were much leaner. And in the early the first three years when the market reacted much more slowly than both just giving and we expected, we got up to 30% market share despite just being two people with our own funds and nothing else. And just at the point where we thought we had pretty much won, just getting finally was successful in raising more capital, which changed the nature of the competition. And so we were a bootstrapped number two in that market. But I think it's fair to say we were first to recognize the driving value of putting what had been the fastest growing part of charity incomes in the 1990s, the sponsored events online. We saw a huge opportunity there and developed that rapidly. And we continued to do so. And the business went through a variety of different iterations as we explored other forms of crowdfunding, equity, crowdfunding and personal gift fundraising. And indeed looked at ways of exploiting the value of the immense troves of data we collected. And so we kept ourselves entertained and grew a small but high margin business up until a point where we sold it in 2010.
- [27:52]
C
And if you look back at that, what was the origin story? Because obviously there's a bit of a difference between raising money for charities and working for JP Morgan. What was the origin story of that? What led you to think this is worth quitting my good job in the city for?
- [28:09]
B
Well, at the end of my analyst training program on Wall street with J.P. morgan, I took a week off to go to Harris Valley in California to do an accelerated free fall course with a friend from the Marines. I say from the Marines. He joined the same day as me, but he had left to become a computer consultant and his knowledge of technology was pretty polymathic. And each evening after going to the drop zone, we would discuss different business models that we might exploit. And we agreed that the dot com bubble had just burst, so anything we did would have to be self funded. And we came up with about half a dozen different business ideas and this idea was the first of them. And we thought, well, if it's any good, someone else will wipe us out within three months and if it isn't, it'll fail fast, but either way we'll learn. So we set out to do it as an evenings of weekends project and 10 years later we were still doing it when we solved it.
- [29:04]
C
So again, a lesson to learn that if you have an idea, discuss it with your friends, or if you have a friend who's interested in business, talk through ideas with them. Because, and very importantly, always when you're discussing ideas, ask yourself the question, not what's right about this idea, but what's wrong about this idea? And it used to be, because very often people think of their business idea like a new baby or their new puppy and they're looking for positive praise and feedback, whereas the most useful feedback is what can go wrong. And these days you don't even have a friend. You just go to any of the LLMs and you say, this is my idea, what could possibly go wrong? And it's a very, very good process to go through. So anyway, so basically that was a success story. But would you have done anything different where you mentioned that your main competitor, your main competitor raising more money than you and then raising even more money? Would you, with hindsight, do you think you should have raised or is that, is that, you know, what's your comment on that or is there anything else you'd have done differently with hindsight?
- [30:07]
B
Well, we did explore raising money and we were unable to do so. And indeed I know that our main competitor Just Giving found it difficult to raise the second round. And so we thought, as we could see time running on that our resource base was more appropriate for the growth rate of the market. So we were initially we thought that the difficulty of fundraising actually worked in our favor. With benefit of hindsight, I would just observe that there are some markets and this was one where pure cold hearted economics aren't the only drivers. It was a very emotive topic, helping charities to fundraise. Some people felt that we were extracting money from Good causes. Others recognized that we were actually making sure that much more of the money given got through to service provision. And of course we believed that we were doing both that and gathering huge amounts of data which could improve the quality of charity executive decision making. So I think that the only warning I would draw from this if I were to consider doing it again is that not everyone is operating on a sort of cold, rational basis. And some markets, like charity fundraising, carry huge amounts of emotional freight for many people, which can make decisions harder to model and predict.
- [31:25]
C
Yeah, you've reminded me of my American business partner. He used to be the co host on this podcast, Kimo Fontaquidis, who did psychology and I think somewhere in New Jersey. And he said on bog standard sales training, you get told to find out what the customer wants. Bullshit. There are three things to ask. What does he say he want, what does he think he want, but most importantly, what does he really want? And you know, the idea that you're your potential, your potential customer not only maybe hiding what they want, but may not even be aware of what they really want is extremely important in and just as much in B2C as B2B as B2C as well. Because people are complex and they're not always rational. Okay, so moving on between you sold your business after 10 years, so that was quite a significant chunk of your life. And how did you. And did you. Was it like life changing amounts of money for you? Were you able to sort of say based on that you mentioned just recently, you're a struggler, you're not a cash rich entrepreneur now, so was it enough for you to put up your spurs and sit up and retire or if you wanted to, or were you basically faced with, I made some money, but now I need to think what I do next?
- [32:41]
B
No, we kept our shirts, but not much more. We initiated a sale process and then the company we were seeking to sell to got into trouble and pulled out of the transaction with us and with two other targets that they were seeking to acquire as well, which I have to say wasn't something I had anticipated in my risk register. And so we ended up selling to one of our customers rather than to a good strategic partner. And so we were remunerated, but not in a way which reflected the 10 years worth of hard grafting.
- [33:16]
C
Yeah, and again, I always say to people there are no bad questions that if someone says they had an exit, one of the questions one has to ask if you've got any business experiences, like how good an exit? Because I'VE had exits where I've got a tenth back compared to what I put in. In money terms. There's still an exit, but it's not a good exit. So after that experience, how did you decide what you're going to do next, say between now and. Between now and the walkaway story?
- [33:45]
B
Well, okay, briefly, I teamed up with some friends who had a social network and had been helping others to sell things into that social network and together we built an e commerce business selling into that social network. We found that we could either have volumes or margins, but we struggled to find a way of having both. I was disrupted while I was doing that by the discovery of a large fist sized brain tumor which caught us all, caught me and the doctors by surprise. So I spent a year really out of commission having caught it just in time. They removed a lump the size of my fist from just here. And then once I'd convalesced I was approached by, well, on behalf of the government in fact to help organize the government's venture capital unit Introducing overseas investors to UK tech companies so I spent two years as a consultant working for what was then UK Trade investment and introducing overseas investors to UK tech companies which of course gave me a fantastic opportunity to meet lots of entrepreneurs. I looked for ways to automate what we were doing and to develop a technology platform which would do so and found that it was easier to make the case for that from outside government than inside. And so I left UKTI and while I was developing that further I was approached by Canary Wharf Group in East London which had created an accelerator called Level 39 and were looking for someone to lead it. So from 2016 to 2020 I led level 39 which is a cluster of about 250 fintech and cybersecurity companies which again gave me a huge opportunity to meet hundreds of entrepreneurs both from the UK and from about 50 other countries. Which was a fascinating drinking from a fire hose experience of understanding the needs of and the successful characteristics of entrepreneurs. I left there in the early days of the pandemic and built Amitypath, which is really my attempt to bring the benefits of being a part of a cluster like that to organizations which don't have the benefit either of being able to locate themselves in the financial district of London or have customers that are as physically concentrated but co located as financial services customers in London.
- [36:10]
C
So a couple of One insight to share from that that very often doing one job leads you to discover a problem which then you're well placed to solve and many, many B2G, B2B businesses, the founder worked for someone came across something that they thought could be done much better and that led them to start the entity. And I would like to then coming to your, to your, the venture now. Is it Amity, did you say Amity Partners?
- [36:44]
B
Amity Path.
- [36:46]
C
Apologies, my dyslexia kicks in. So Amity Path, what's your business, your customer acquisition process for that? Because anyone who's been in business anywhere in the world knows that finding customers and of course it sounds like a nice product or service or solution to offer, but not that easy to sell, perhaps. So if you, when you started the business, how did you, how did you decide who you're going to sell to and how did you actually knock down their doors and get in front of them?
- [37:17]
B
Well, we started off focusing very much on organizations that had a problem that we thought we could tackle. So it was very much a stochastic approach where we would look out for problems, offer ourselves as providers of solutions, and then by referral we'd be introduced to people with other problems. Which of course was both irregular but also not very repeatable. So classic consulting business, while we looked for ways of providing something a bit more repeatable, a bit more scalable. And that has begun to happen very much as a result of Walkabout, which is now providing a very big part of our top of funnel. So a lot of referral comes to us initially through Walkabout, which as I mentioned, is a magnet for people with a wide variety of interests in many different places and disciplines.
- [38:11]
C
Fantastic. If you go back to the beginning of Amity Path, could you give a vivid example of a problem you thought you could solve and how you went about, just like in the early days of the business. Just an example of the approach that you were using at the start, before you got to the more repeatable side of it.
- [38:28]
B
Sure. Well, so two quite distinct ones. We worked for one large organization which was interested in creating a fund, a fund which would invest in an emerging class of technologies. And they were interested, as a large incumbent organization in exploring the right kind of structure for that. By contrast, we also worked on a project for the Royal Academy of Engineering looking at their prize incentive program. So as you can see, quite a widespread between those two and several of the other projects we worked on, all, I guess, characterized by our interest in data analysis and particularly the case of the prize approach, looking at extreme distributions of outcome and how they can change behavior.
- [39:10]
C
And how did you get in front of the decision? How did you reach the decision makers, was it picking up the phone and calling them or introductions or personal network? Because obviously you've worked for world class organizations, so maybe you just knew people or did you, did you do it like the old way of doorsteping people, following them around? I'm very curious with sales processes, it's all of the above.
- [39:32]
B
And I think your earlier point about what the LLM revealed about my activity on LinkedIn is probably also relevant. I'm reasonably prolific on LinkedIn and have found that an extremely useful source of opportunity.
- [39:43]
C
Yes. There's a Ukrainian entrepreneur in Krakow, Vlad, who says he's 20 years old, younger than me, and I'm very impressed by the way he's consistently cranked out content and over time is a great way of, certainly until the present, a good way of positioning yourself as a, as an expert. Well, is there anything that you've learned in your journey to date that, well, moving towards the end of the interview, that you think that someone interested in entrepreneurship anywhere in the world, listening to this, can learn from your journey that they might not hear from other people that are things that you think that you don't hear other people repeat. Because some people say, oh, you've got to find customers, you've got to, it's all about people. But these are things you can hear from hundreds of different people. But other things that you think, Ben, that you don't hear other people sharing about entrepreneurship you'd like to share.
- [40:37]
B
Yes, there is one thing in particular which is the role of people who are not necessarily the end point of an opportunity, not necessarily the person who writes the check or transfers the payment or signs the order, the people who introduce you to them, and indeed the people who introduce you to the people who introduce you to them. And this really goes to the heart of Walkabout. We've noticed that very often people's approach to business development is strikingly unsuccessful. And then when they stop trying to treat a process as business development and instead treat it as a mutual exploration, that their network starts to work for them, starts to bring them things they weren't expecting. And so this is why Walkabout is deliberately agenda less. We don't say we're now going to focus all of our attention on topic X. Instead, we invite people to explore whatever's on their mind. And what we hear repeatedly, again and again, is how unexpected connections lead to transformational results. Put another way, if it's the unexpected connections that lead to transformational results, then it makes a lot of sense to dedicate some of your time to creating unexpected connection. And it's that that walkabout does I
- [41:49]
C
just bang on what David Cleveley is writing about in Serendipity. He said, because one of the things, the title It Doesn't Happen by Serendipity, doesn't happen by accident. And he talks about changing the odds. And I've come across different examples over the decades, but there's one CEO of a big American company who said one day a I'm open for unplanned meetings. So he told his gatekeepers, if it makes sense, you can book in people, I don't know, cold calls. I want to spend some of my time dealing with stuff which other people are pitching me. Just even if the meeting was a complete waste of time, it got him in contact with a world he otherwise wouldn't know about. And it might be. This is insanely expensive. Why is it so expensive? That might lead to one frame of thinking or this is completely ridiculous, but it seems to be a very real thing. Why? And I often think that the emotional reaction to something is a very interesting entrepreneurial single if you think something's very irritating, very surprising, very weird. The fact you're thinking that suggests there's something about your worldview that's uninformed that you need to elaborate and explore. Well, thank you very much. So this has been a very interesting, interesting conversation. If people want to get in touch with you. You've already mentioned LinkedIn. What's your. What's your preferred way of being reached?
- [43:13]
B
LinkedIn's a great one, but I'm also. You can get me through my website@amitypath.com so that's a M I T Y P A T- dot com and I'm Ben amitypath.com if you prefer it.
- [43:24]
C
Now, a question I meant to ask earlier, but I'll do after the end, is have you given a talk about a TEDx talk or a TED Talk about this? Or would you like to one day?
- [43:33]
B
I've given a TEDx talk about something else, but not about this. And yes, I would like to.
- [43:37]
C
Yeah, because one of the Great I did 30 TEDx events and I don't do it anymore. But it seems to me that the tagline of TED is ideas worth spreading, and this qualifies absolutely perfectly for that. So I might spread it around my network that you are doing this thing and maybe someone will invite you. Well, Ben, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show and I hope that many more walkabouts surface in different places around this planet and maybe others in the future.
- [44:05]
B
Thank you, Richard. Very welcome.