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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Good morning, good evening, good night, entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel listeners on the nbn. Today I've got a very special guest with me, David Clevely, who's a well known entrepreneur and author in the British and I think global entrepreneurship ecosystem. But rather than me, try to introduce you, David, in the way that I can manage based on what I know about your profile, why don't you introduce yourself the way you do when you're maybe in some other part of the world where you're not so well known and someone walks up to you and asks you what do you do?
- [01:44]
C
Well, Richard, actually my response generally when somebody asks me what I do is a bit of stunned silence because I find it very difficult to actually talk about the things that I do. But for your audience, I think the important things would be to highlight that I have started a number of companies. I originally had a consultancy company called An Analysis which was a telecoms consultant which I sold in 2004 I co founded a company called Abcam which originally started business as selling antibodies over the web and then diversified and was floated sold to Danaher for about $6 billion about a year and a half ago or so. And I've done a number of other companies and I built a number of networks, things in Cambridge, such as Cambridge Network and Cambridge 3G, Cambridge Angels, who are the angel community. And also in policy areas, I've done some work connecting the University of Cambridge up with policymakers through a thing that I set up called the center for Science and Policy. And all of those latter of things are concerned really with turning serendipity into something that's operational.
- [03:08]
B
Yes. And one of the reasons I invited you onto the podcast is you've recently published a book called Serendipity. It Doesn't Happen by accident. And there's a clue to what the book's about in the title, obviously. But rather than ask you to summarize the book, let me kick off with asking you why you decided to write the book.
- [03:31]
C
I decided to write the book because I've been struggling, as we all do, I think, to try and make sense of what we observe. Now. I described some of the organizations that I'd set up, and I'd done those really as individual projects, not necessarily with a kind of underlying architecture. Although, for example, the center for Science and Policy, which had a completely novel way of thinking about how to connect policymakers and researchers, did have quite some deep thinking about the underlying architecture. But it's always bothered me that the things that have led to breakthroughs in my life and with many other people that I know have occurred with remarkable frequency and the opportunities that have opened up, like Abcan, for example. So you get something that's worth $6 billion created as a result of a chance encounter at dinner where somebody who's in business and understands the web meets a researcher who understands antibodies and wants to solve a problem. Those kinds of things strike me as not just, oh, well, that's interesting, let's move on. But they are actually fundamental to the way in which the economy and society works, and therefore it's worth trying to think deeply about them. And because I'm an engineer, I want to use that knowledge then to actually engineer systems that then deliver that rather more effectively.
- [05:11]
B
And you have this concept of engineered serendipity. And the book, which I read some time ago, I've just been refreshing myself on the book just prior to this interview, comes up with it's very much the idea that you can create structures and environments where serendipity, which people imagine is chance, is much more likely to happen. Is that a fair summary?
- [05:40]
C
Yes, I think it is. And the trouble is that in common parlance and the way we use the word chance in everyday life is we have no control over it. It just happens. But that's not really what's going on here. And in the book I describe what is truly random and what is deterministic and various ways in which you can't predict the future, for example, if you have chaotic systems. But the real issue here is if I construct something so the probability, the probability of a good thing happening or the resources coming together or people sharing ideas has been raised, then the probability of the good outcome is also raised. And I use the example particularly in one chapter very heavily about Cambridge in the United Kingdom, Cambridge in England, to illustrate how that actually works in practice. Because Cambridge has produced something like 27 or 28 $1 billion companies, or gone over a billion dollars for a town of 130,000 people, that's knocking it out of the park. And it's an extraordinary thing that's happened in Cambridge, and I think it's not the only reason, but a very strong part of this is the way in which those networks operate. And in the book I spend one chapter on trying to explain the mathematics behind some of the networks without going into the maths to show why those extraordinary coincidences aren't as extraordinary as you would think and how you could actually change the likelihood of them occurring.
- [07:25]
B
Yes, and I think you're aware I found it with Peter Cowley, who sadly died a couple of years ago, something called Can Entrepreneurs, which fosters supports entrepreneurship among alumni around the world through locally led chapters. And I've been thinking, based on your book, about the type of people and roles we need to have in each chapter, because you have this sort of concept of connectors and experts, and there's people who know a lot of people a bit, and other people who know some expert or have access to particular resources. Can you highlight the key roles in a community? Perhaps, and to the extent you can apply it to something like an alumni network with geographic nodes, but it could be based on any other network you know of. What are the most important people to have in your network if you want it to be as effective as it can be in supporting serendipity?
- [08:19]
C
Well, the most important people are going to be the people who connect and who connect between groups. And that's a property of networks. It might be worth digressing slightly into talking about network structures because unless you understand, I think, how networks are constructed, a lot of this becomes a little bit.
- [08:44]
B
Yeah, by all means, digress. I always say that I listeners, I think they're intelligent, if not experts. And so do explain.
- [08:54]
C
Okay, so in the book I have two example networks. One is a village called nodebury, which has 32 nodes in it, unsurprisingly, and another network called Edgerton, which also has 32 networks in it. Both names have been chosen for slightly different reasons, but I think we can understand that Nodebury is actually what will be called a large world network, because the number of people you have to go through in order to reach anybody else in the village, on average, turns out to be nearly five. And that's in a village of only 32 people. Whereas in Edgerton, which, as the name suggests, is an aristocratic network, there are three major connectors in there, and they make everybody connected. And so you can get from one part of the village to anybody else in only about three steps. And the question really here is, if I've got a network like Nodebree, where it's going to be a real uphill struggle to connect anybody with anybody else, how do I go about sorting that out? And it turns out, of course, I constructed this example very specifically for it. But it turns out that if you just connect up three pairs of people in Nodebury, the number of people you have to go to drops from about five to three, and it's as good as Edgerton, even though the structure of the network is quite different. Now, what's then also different about Egerton and Knobury? Well, Edgerton relies on just these three people connecting everything up, whereas Nodebury is much more distributed. And provided you don't snip the three extra nodes that you've added in, snipping other. The connections to other nodes won't really affect the amount of hops that you have to make from one person to another. There's another very important factor in here, which is what I call the rule of three, which is that anybody who is a distance of about three away from you will have an influence on you. And there's a lot of evidence for this. There's a book by Christakis and Fowler based, which they wrote in about 2011, I think, on how the fact is that if your friends are fat, you're going to be fat. If your friends are happy, you're going to be happy. And it's certainly the case that I've observed in Cambridge that if you're three or fewer away from somebody, you can get in contact with them and they will help you. Once you go further away than that three hops, you won't get anything, you won't get any cooperation, you won't get any resources, you won't really get the introductions, you won't get the other stuff. And when you look at a place like Cambridge, it is, I think, well under three, you know the connectivity. So now let's ask the engineering question, which is what you originally posed, which is, well, what does that tell us about how we do it? Well, I in notebury to connect it up. I connected up, I looked at the network, saw how it was connected and then put in three extra links. And if you've got enough data to be able to do that, that's a good way of doing it. You probably don't have enough data because you don't know about everybody's personal relationship, so you can't do that. But you can identify people who seem to be very well connected and you can identify those people, particularly if they belong to different groups and then you can make sure that they are connected because then you're going to reduce the span across that network, the average number of hops, very, very significantly. So it's a job of just looking at the network, finding out who's who and then starting to introduce people. And you'll find that the distance and the way in which the network functions will actually change very dramatically.
- [13:19]
B
Yeah, that's a good idea. I mean we have local leadership, so I'm a sort of meta leader that there's a board, but each chapter dotted around the world has its own leader. But one of the things I'm planning to do after this interview is to think through what you've said and maybe they should be doing some analysis of the people in their local community. But the other one idea I had was that each chapter should have an ambassador who is kind of responsible for dealing with other chapters, so that if someone's going to Tokyo or going to San Francisco, they can get in touch with the camel's ambassador who deals with sort of incoming inquiries, so that there's a person whose job it is to help connect people who almost by definition won't know anyone in Vancouver or wherever and help them find those people as they come in, assuming what they want is a face to face encounter. But I don't. So I was thinking in terms of having specific roles. But does that make sense to sort of identify people whose job it is to have that role, or is it more a value that everyone should have?
- [14:25]
C
Oh, well, I think if you've got the kind of organization where you can do that, you should obviously do it. And I have a request to you, Richard. I'm going to be going to San Francisco in March, so I will be coming to you with some suggestions for how I can get Some interesting chats whilst I'm in San Francisco. If you know, any tables, serendipity tables that I can sit at or networks that I can plug into.
- [14:50]
B
How much? When are you going exactly? Just soon. March.
- [14:53]
C
You said March. Yeah.
- [14:55]
B
Okay. I'll get my. Get my skates on.
- [14:59]
C
Yeah. Well, well, right.
- [15:00]
B
So.
- [15:01]
C
So the. But. But the reason for also mentioning this, not just, Just the, The immediate, oh, Richard, can you please do me a favor? It's exactly how this stuff happens. Here we were, we. We started this podcast with no knowledge that this was going to be a link that was going to be made that could potentially help me be introduced to some people in San Francisco where that link might turn out to be useful for either or both of us. And that supposedly chance linkage, which isn't really chance because we arranged to have a podcast and we were going to talk about serendipity and networks, then turns out to have another outcome. And that's what I'm trying to get to in my book, that. That kind of jump, you know, we haven't taught like this, so now we've got the chance to do it. And guess what? Something happens. Now there's a chap called Mark Granovetter who back in the 1970s, wrote a book or. No, wrote a book. He wrote a paper called the Strength of Wheel Ties, and he tried to get it published in various journals of sociology. Now, let. Let me tell you what his. His thesis was. He said, look, if I am, you know, a member of a club, let's take it a golf club or something like that, and I want to find a job, am I going to find somebody in my golf club who's going to be able to introduce me to my next job? He said, it turns out that that's unlikely. The people in my golf club are strong ties with me because they share, you know, I play golf with them. I see them quite a lot. The weak ties are the ones that span those groups. Somebody in the golf club will know somebody else at another, I don't know, let's go for clubs, football club or something like that, Right? And that is the way in which I'm going to get my job. And he said those. And it links to what I was saying about the rule of three. Because if you think about, if I'm a member of a group, I'm going to go to one other person in the group, they're going to span to another person in the group, and then they're going to know somebody else. So we got this weak Ties and you're at the limit of the rule of three at that point. So Granite Butter tried to get this thing published, got rejected more than a dozen times. It's become the most cited work in sociology. And it's very important because I think it's. It's another take on why this stuff happens. The network science or the network mathematics is one thing, but we have to understand how people are interacting and why. I picked up on your San Francisco point or your chapter's point was, oh, I can do exactly this. I could jump from my club to your club. And I've got another introduction. It's putting into place place into play exactly what Granovetta was, was getting at all the way back in the 1970s.
- [18:09]
B
Interesting. And I want to ask about values because one of the things I'm very strong with, I'm getting entrepreneurs as a voluntary organization. I make money in business in my companies. I live off dividends, and that means I've got the space to do this sort of thing pro bono. And I do all my. So entrepreneurship support things at my own cost. And we're all run by volunteers. And I think quite often the stereotype of business people, certainly in Poland, where I lived most of my life historically to do with communism and a lot of other reasons, there was quite a sort of negative stereotype of business people being greedy and selfish and sort of evil capitalists. And I said, I very much baked into the DNA of chem entrepreneurs along with Peter, the idea that being helpful earned is important, that well, for people at all stages of the entrepreneurial journey, we're not just a club for we use the Cambridge logo to open doors, but there for other people to come through as well as us. And I'm interested in what you've got to say about the kind of values you need to cultivate in a network to make it productive and helpful and to increase the chances of serendipity. I think it's important, but I want to know what you think.
- [19:24]
C
Well, I think you're actually highlighting an extremely important point and perhaps one which I don't emphasize enough in the book. And I think it's Voltz, who's currently governor of Michigan, Minnesota, who gave an address at Northwestern University, which you can watch on YouTube in which he. He says the smartest person in the room is usually the kindest person in the room and vice versa. And he makes. He's got a rather extended metaphor with the office in this particular address, but he makes that point that actually you need to learn to Be generous and to listen to other people in order that everybody can gain. This isn't a game which is zero sum. This is definitely something where by cooperation you can make the cake bigger. And an absolutely essential part of that is to be kind and generous and to do that ahead, well, ahead of any reward that you might think you might be getting. And certainly in my own life, when I look at that, particularly in business, if we're talking about business in this case, whilst there be disappointments, nevertheless, the vast majority of those things tend to pay off far more, far more than you would ever expect if you were taking a narrow, selfish, zero sum game view of the world.
- [21:04]
B
Yes, and one of the things I say, and you'll see this when you come to the open coffee event in a couple of months, I say that when people introduce themselves, I'm a great believer in process as a sort of not laissez faire is not the right way to organize a gathering. And I say people should introduce themselves with answering four questions. Who they are, what they do, what they're looking for, and importantly how they can help other people in the room. And then follow up by saying if everyone gives more than they get in this room, by definition everyone's going to get more than they give because there's a kind of a surplus created by each person. And it's not entirely intuitive. And I think that I say I'm interested. So you agree with me about the idea of values. The second thing is culture, because you mentioned that if someone hangs out with happy people, they'll be happy. If they hang out with fat people, they're likely to be fat. And I think the culture of an ecosystem is shaped by shared experience which leads into how people are going to get those experiences in a mobile, increasingly mobile world that I'm very interested in, the way that traditional institutions like school, shop, maybe the church, in days gone by a coffee shop used to be the places that people got together. And in the modern world where people are very often in somewhere they're not from, what type of institutions and meeting places are good serendipitous ecosystem needs to have. And I wonder if you've got anything to say about that question.
- [22:43]
C
Well, I think you do need those homes, you need meetings, places where people can come together. Your structured meetings that you talked about are a very good way of doing that kind of thing, isn't not the only way, but they're part of how you would do that. If I look at how that's evolved in Cambridge, for example, you know it started off with a few of us I used to walk into was recycling and I would bump into Alec Broz, who, who was the then Vice Chancellor, who'd be walking into the old schools. And so I'd get off my bike and I'd walk along and have a chat with him. And as a result of that, when. And I also knew Herman Hauser. And so when the three of us were sitting at a dinner table, we were having a chat and it became obvious in the context of this particular dinner that we need to do something. Which then led to the formation of Cambridge Network. And so there are these. You can put those things together, I think, whether they're slightly more, and I don't want this to be pejorative, but they're more formal or artificial. You're doing those structures rather than organic in the way that I just described. But you need those seeds and you need to have those interactions going on. I think that the problem is perhaps also something which one needs to be careful of, particularly me, as I'm getting a bit older. I'm not looking in the rearview mirror, and that is that with social media, with existing in not physical space, as it were, and being able to divide one's attention and time between a whole series of short, competing things, you are doing something very different. I was once sitting on the train on the way down to King's Cross from Cambridge with a couple of colleagues. It was probably late 1990s, early 2000s, and my consultancy, company Analysis, was operating across the entire world. And in the course of the train journey, I had dealt with issues from Southeast Asia and Australia, Europe, uk, and was preparing for something that was going to happen in the United States. Now, that's fairly normal these days. Everybody will say, well, you know what? But we are now talking more than 25 years ago, nearly 30 years ago, and it was a little unusual. And I've just said to my colleagues, this is just amazing. I'm just. It's as if I'm, you know, I've. I've spanned the entire globe doing. Doing this. This work that I've just done. And dinnerly opposite me, it turns out, was one of the most famous and authoritative professors of social anthropology who said to me, do you think it changes your sense of presence? And it completely rocked me on my heels at that point, because that's exactly what it does. And if you're going to do the networking and the social interaction, and we're managing to do this, of course we're learning how to do it through Video. But it does change our sense of presence. And we as human beings have evolved to be physically present, to be able to do things. Exactly what effect this has on our ability to maintain relationships and engage in those serendipitous conversations, I think is an interesting question.
- [26:31]
B
Indeed it is. And obviously, I mean, during COVID we were all forced to learn how to do this. But from time to time, I attend online meetings and there are certain things like here in this is in zoom, you can have breakout rooms. And if there are breakout rooms, it's possible to go out into smaller groups with people scattered around the world. And I. But again, I come back to the idea of housekeeping rules and process, that there's a rule in comedy, you should be the person you're making jokes about. So I tend to make jokes about older white guys, referring to myself. And I say that if you don't have rules in the breakout room, an older white guy will tend to dominate proceedings. And so you need to have housekeeping rules. Like one rule of one minute, after one minute, you regulate yourself. And if the old white guy doesn't self regulate, you're empowered to interrupt because otherwise the sort of the bullies dominate. But basically you're saying that we need to learn how to engineer serendipity in a more online world in a way that might be new. Do you have views on that or do you just regard it as a as yet unsolved problem?
- [27:45]
C
Well, I regard it as unsolved, and I can give examples of why it's unsolved. I mean, I've taken part in experiments, experimental meetings in that sense, where you could choose which rooms you went into, you could go. It was as if you could go and join a group that was in having drinks, and you could go and have a chat with one group, group and then move away and go and talk to some others. And they try very hard with the interface to make that natural. But that is nothing like either sitting around a table and watching everybody's body language and being able to see that. And the human brain is capable of processing enormous amounts of information about what's going on as you can if you're standing, standing around with people holding drinks and having chats, because you can, you see stuff and you react to it. And it's very difficult to provide that kind of interface in a virtual world that captures anything like what you're doing there. Now, we're in danger of making two mistakes here. One is to think that therefore the physical world is better than the virtual world. And the other one is the virtual world will never be able to deal present things in a way that actually is in tune with the way in which we have been wired up to recognize the physical world. Both of those, I think, could well be false. But for the moment we are operating. We're hobbled actually in the way that this works. At the same time. At the same time. Your point? I can now talk to people at the drop of a hat that I previously couldn't and I could maintain networks that I previously couldn't. And in terms of discovery, for example, when I'm using an lln, I will routinely say what are the connections between this and other ideas? And what stuff haven't I talked about that might be relevant to this and get it to suggest some serendipitous stuff that would have taken me a month and a half in the university library to discover. So there's, I don't know, I mean, there's an apocryphal complaint of somebody in ancient Egypt saying this art of writing is going to destroy memory.
- [30:17]
B
Up to a point. I mean, my father taught philosophy both in Oxford and Cambridge, mostly in Oxford. And so I can put a foot in both camps. But he said that you can't having know how without know what is pretty. If you don't, you can know how to map read, but if you don't know where London and Oxford are, it's going to be hard to use your map reading skills. And I think it's a balance of different skills. But I certainly think the, the point you made earlier in that answer about what you're picking up as a social animal, like even hovering on the edge of a group at a networking meeting and, and just, you know, half an ear and seeing. And sometimes you can see a sort of. Again, I don't want to hit be too critical of older white guys, but you. Someone dominating the conversation and just the body language of the people around them, you can see they're a bit bored.
- [31:08]
C
Yes, absolutely. And it's very difficult, it's very difficult to pick that up because you've got all sorts of bits of information, including the one you're talking about. When you think about a group, literally the physical orientation of people when they're standing in a group tells you an awful lot about what's going on in conversation.
- [31:29]
B
Yes. So there's something that Peter Cowdy said and also Alex von Sommeren, who I interviewed years ago. He did a workshop at a course I attended at judge about 20 years ago at Curiosity. And as did you? And he was talking about his company, Encypher, and how he happened to bump into some people from Fidelity Security in the lobby of the hotel of the event he had failed to get a booth at because he was too late. And someone said to me, gosh, you're really lucky to meet the. He said, yes, I was lucky, but I wasn't hanging around in that lobby by accident. He felt he had made his own luck, that he was there looking because he wanted to meet people. And the chances of meeting people from Fidelity Security at that conference were much higher than just going to the pub in Cambridge.
- [32:21]
C
Precisely. Precisely what I'm trying to get at, in my book. Look, he changed the odds. You know, it might have been that conference or another conference or something else. And he, you know, getting a booth might signal one thing and have. He would have had one kind of conversation. Another one is he didn't get the booth, but he still made the effort to go to the conference. That's another part of. We were talking about being generous earlier, but another part of all of this is just make the effort, do something. I was late in. You know, my day has been late today, partly because, you know, as I was leaving the Glass House, a kind of networking venue in Cambridge, the person who runs the Glass House wanted to have a chat with me. And I made a conscious decision. I am now going to be late, and I'm going to consciously be late because this conversation could turn out to be really important. I have no idea where it's going to go, but the very fact that we're now, literally, serendipitously having a chat means I really now need to make an effort. And part of that is that effort for Alex was going to the conference and being time. I was sacrificing something that was certain later on in the day for something which was uncertain now. But, you know, it turns out to be a very important conversation.
- [33:52]
B
Yes, indeed. And so, I mean, in terms of the sort of implications for people listening, one of the. You often hear different podcasters and authors saying, it's important to focus. And I always. I'm very bad at focusing. And I always feel other people can focus so I don't have to, which is a rather sort of sound. It might sound more arrogant than I mean it to, but if you're trying to build something, get a business or a venture going, you can't spend too much of your time wandering around in environments where serendipitous things are going to happen. Or can you? Is there like a rational approach to budget, like one day a week for serendipity, or like, how should people build it into a busy lifestyle if they. If they. Because I think you very much serve me to much lesser extent, but also are in the luxurious position of not. Not having already done something. So you're not still working on your first big thing. But if someone's listening to this, hasn't yet built a company and succeeded, how much serendipity should they build into their weekly calendar or month or year?
- [35:04]
C
Well, there's a rather interesting parallel with this with bees. I started keeping bees at school. I recently acquired some more hives again, after a gap of more than, gosh, more than 50 years. And. The honeybees are supposed to react to the waggle dance where the foragers come back and signal to the rest of the hive where they should go and collect the nectar from. But only about 80% of the bees actually do that. 20% of the bees ignore the instructions and go off and do something else. Now, whether that's coincidental that Google used to have this one day a week you could go off and do whatever you wanted on your own projects, which also turns, coincidentally to be 80, 20, I don't know. But I would say that if you're down below 5% of your time doing serendipitous, slightly random, odd things, you're probably in trouble. If you're doing much more, more than 25 or 30%, you're probably in trouble. It probably lies somewhere in between whether you could codify that. I don't know. One of the odd things about it is that you're probably going to have to do it quite almost spontaneously. I mean, you can arrange to go to a conference, which will be that kind of serendipitous opportunity. So you can arrange some things, but other stuff, you're just going to have to play a year. And at the end of the week, assess whether you spend enough time focusing on what you need to focus on. Now, I'm a great believer in focus. You know, the, the one thing that, you know, if I've got a task to do and I've got, or a business plan to implement, or I need to do some strategy or whatever else it is. Yes, absolutely. You need to really focus on that and think very hard about it and have. And not brook any distractions or idle things. But when you're in the creative stage or where you need to have a different kind of perspective on what you're doing, boy, you shouldn't get off those Tram lines and look around, go and explore the forest next door and then maybe come back to your task. But is don't spend all your time just highly focused on one thing because you will fail?
- [37:37]
B
Yes, indeed. When I was asking Serendipity about your background, one of the questions that I asked you, this primary focus of this interview isn't your entrepreneurial career. And obviously we're talking mainly about the book. But I often ask people about their. Their childhood and their background. And when you mentioned beekeeping, I think I read that your parents wouldn't let you keep bees at home and that's why you started a beekeeping club at school. At least that's what. That's what the Internet told me in its wisdom.
- [38:08]
C
That's completely true.
- [38:09]
B
And I wonder. It'll be interesting asking. And also, apparently your father was in the military but was quite unconventional at the same time. Is that also true?
- [38:23]
C
Well, my father, yeah, my father was looking back on it. I mean, the thing is, you never really realized these things. You're growing up as a child and you never really quite understand your parents until you get to their age and beyond and then you can understand it. But my father was very quirky. He was stationed. I was born in Germany, he was stationed there. And he used to do cartoons. He'd tried to get into art school, wasn't allowed into art school. When he was much younger, his career, he turned out to be selected to be a computer. He was in the registry for the government and then was recruited into doing decodes, the ultra codes and then the Japanese codes over in India. And all this is. I never made sense of it. It was all jumbled up. And then he does this cartooning and then had a career in the civil service in the Ministry of Defense in procurement, as it happens, but then consciously decided that he would not get involved in the civil service because he loved the cartooning so much. And that's what he really did. And there's one promotion board. He said, well, for you this is a career. For me it's a distraction. So he, he was. Yeah, I think I've inherited occasionally that kind of not quite saying the conventional and acceptable thing.
- [39:59]
B
Yeah. But what I was going to ask. So that matches what more or less, that is more detail, which I'm glad to know. But do you think your parents would have been surprised that you went into business? Were they sort of. Obviously, perhaps in not being conventional, going into business is an unconventional thing to do. But looking back on it, do you think your sort of entrepreneurial Character emerged from your upbringing or despite it, because sometimes it's a barrier, like you're not allowed to keep bees at home. And that creates the entrepreneurial spark. I think, well, I'm not able to do something I want to do. What's the way around that obstacle, which. Finding ways around obstacles, I think is one of the many key traits an entrepreneur has to have. But looking back on your upbringing, do you think that helped prepare you for entrepreneurship or did it come from somewhere else?
- [40:53]
C
I don't know the answer to that, Richard. I mean, there are all sorts of things that I could go into about my childhood and upbringing and so on that I could offer as explanations, none of which would be complete. All would be partial and probably hardly any of them true, really. But I did things that were entrepreneurial. That beekeeping thing, for example. I produced enough honey and then sold it to the parents at the school. And of course, then they wanted to support the beekeeping club at school to recover all my costs. So that taught me something about how this stuff worked in a way that I wasn't. I suppose you. You learn by doing. In that sense, the. My parents, if I go to the point where I was thinking of setting up my own consultancy and doing things, they were. They were really opposed and they were very, very worried. Now, it's odd because my father, as a cartoonist, was maintaining, effectively an entrepreneurial activity, and he organized it. You would have liked the way he organized it, Richard, because what he did was he had 30 different magazines, so if any one of them dropped out, he could always find another one to supplant to replace it. So he managed his risk on the downside and enjoyed himself and got an income on the upside. My mother was a teacher, but for both of them, they'd anchored themselves in public service. My father still a servant, my mother a teacher. And the idea of going off and being an entrepreneur and taking these risk was terrifying.
- [42:39]
B
But they were terrified vicariously on your behalf. They were terrified of you stepping away from security, Is that what you're saying? They are opposed to you quitting a safe job to start a consultancy.
- [42:51]
C
Opposed is not the relationship that I have with my parents, but I could tell they were deeply, deeply unhappy with it.
- [42:59]
B
Interesting, yes. My father's no longer alive, but it's something I can, I very much give him credit for. I said at his memorial service, I couldn't go to his funeral because of COVID that he. When I was about 16, he said, look, we're not rich. And, you know, I was at A public school with kids who I thought were much better off than I was. And that sense of relative poverty was something that motivated me a lot, that I wanted to have money because I didn't want my life to look like my childhood. No, I've got enough money. I don't have a car. I don't have a watch. It turns out that I didn't actually want all that stuff I thought I wanted when I didn't have the money. But he said that we're not rich, but we're not poor, so you can afford to take risks because you'll always have someone if you want to, because you'll always have somewhere to come back to. And I felt very supported by that mindset from my parents. And even though they weren't business people, I sensed that they were sort of giving me permission to go off and do my own thing.
- [43:58]
C
Yes. I don't think I got quite that sense of permission. I got this sense of they really didn't like it. And the line that I was pursuing was very different from the way that they thought about the world.
- [44:18]
B
Yeah. Another feature of the entrepreneurship communities that I've been involved in establishing is I sometimes make a joke of this, that I say that if I go around to a regular party, and this may not be true in your life and in Cambridge so much these days, that if I go to a party and I tell people I'm a business person or an entrepreneur, they look at me like I'm a freak. And if I organize an entrepreneurship event, I. I briefly feel normal. Because obviously, by definition, the people who come to entrepreneurship events, at least are supportive of the idea. And you mentioned this business of surrounding yourself. No, you come like the people you surround yourself with. And I want to make this useful for the listeners. And so I would like to. And I think in your appendix, too, you talk about actions people can take to help foster a serendipitous life. But I don't expect you to recite. I don't know if you can remember everything that's there, but if someone who hasn't yet read the book, which I recommend people buy and do read, but if they haven't and they don't get around to it, what sort of things should they do as they go through this year next to try to increase the chances of serendipity in their life?
- [45:31]
C
Well, we've talked about a number of the issues or the number of things that people would do, the tactics they could employ. I mean, one is go out and do things and Meet people that you would. You have to put a bit of effort into it. Whether it's like Alex turning up, Alex Van Sommer and turning up at his conference or whether it's getting to one of your events or whatever else it is you do that. Number two, you'll put about kindness and generosity. You know, be kind of generous, offer stuff as you again, you put that into the framework that you talk about the way in which your room works. I have one particular thing which is a bit geeky, but I have about 11,000 or 12,000 people. I think on my phone there's a list of contacts, unheard of number. When I was constructing my consultancy company, when we got to five or six thousand contacts for the whole company, I thought that was pretty good. But actually if you look at people like Roosevelt, he kept a card index of everybody he'd ever met and certainly Bill Clinton as it happened, that wish to make sure that you write people's names down and note them. It seems like a chore and terrible number. When am I ever going to talk to them again? Turns out that's not the case in this long tail of all our encounters. You may come back and you may talk to somebody. As many times I've talked to somebody and encountered them and said, well, yeah, we last talked, I think it was about 14 years ago. Right. And there's a. You, you that, that makes a big difference. But it's that that is part and parcel of taking an interest in other people and seeing them as, you know, important and, and show respect, you know, and, and that's. So let's say you, you go out and create the opportunities, you put stuff into the system, be generous, you make sure that you're noting what's happening, you show people respect. And lastly, I'd say really be curious about things. Don't say, I mean the old thing about Newton sitting under the apple, showing the apple falling on his head. He could have just said darned apple. I mean this probably didn't happen, but he could have said darned apple and then just moved on. But just as Einstein tried to think about, hang on a second, if the speed of the light is constant, what then happens? What are the consequences of it? And went through a train of thought that these days we can explain quite easily, quite simply. But when he was doing it was very, very difficult. Just in the same way you need to come across stuff that you shouldn't dismiss things to think about. Why did that really happen? I often think, Richard, you've done businesses and so On. And if we get back to the entrepreneurial side of this, there's something about listening to your inner voice here, which is good in social situations, but is also good about business models and about the decisions you're taking. The human brain that's evolved and it's not, you know, it's not just popped out from some single design that somehow is optimized for what we are doing now. It's an overlay of all sorts of complicated things. And you've got to recognize that there's stuff processing that you're doing that is not conscious, that you're not really aware of. And just be listened to that curiosity, explanation. And just there'll be a whisper somewhere that'll tell you about something you should be curious about or follow up on. And don't let the noise overwhelm that. Sorry, that's a bit kind of. I might be sitting on a beanbag going om at this point. But, you know, there is something in there.
- [49:46]
B
No, I agree. And all those things make perfect sense. Thing I'd add to that is in terms of what to be curious about, I often, when I'm doing. I do workshops for school kids. Sometimes I say that if you have a strong emotional reaction to something, something's very surprising, or you find it really annoying, or it's way more expensive than you thought or much cheaper, or you feel very angry about something. If you ask yourself why, what is it about that thing? The curiosity about a strong reaction. I see you're waving your arms, which the listeners can't see. I think you're being polite and not interrupting.
- [50:21]
C
I'm being polite enough to interrupt him, but I'm very enthusiastic about that. That's you inverted commas, whatever you is. There's a deep psychological discussion is presenting yourself with something you better. You take notice of that. It's a real clue something has just happened. And as. And I mentioned I'd left the glass house. And the question being posed to me by Catherine, who runs the place, was something which I had thought about. And what I was doing when I was answering was using it as an opportunity to say, can I marshal all of this? And is this an opportunity for me to think rather more deeply about the causes of what she's asking me about, so that by identifying those causes and the chain of causality, I can now give her a better answer? And that is part of what you're doing with serendipity and meeting people and understanding what's happening. When Fleming looked in that petri dish, many people had looked in that petri dish many times before. But it was Fleming who said, so why isn't the fungus growing there? Or rather why the bacteria? So I got that the wrong way around. Why is the bacteria, not bacterium, not growing there? It's because the presence of this penicillin fungus. Wow. And dozens of people will have seen that before him.
- [51:59]
B
Yes. So having a fresh set of eyes. There's a very good TED talk and I'll put it in the show notes. I can't remember who gave it about the importance for user experience and product design of looking at the first time user of something. I think he talks about how the, you know, you get this nasty plastic labels on apples and peaches and things. And he describes. He takes you through the first time you come across that and how annoying it is to remove the label because you're obviously not going to eat it and you can't get it off and then it sticks to your finger. And then he says, but the second time you buy an apple you don't notice the sticky label because you're used to it. And so the inconvenience of seeing things through fresh eyes is very, very important as well.
- [52:48]
C
You know there's a phrase, see things through the eye of a child. Right. It's the absolute naive. And there's a lot to learn from social anthropology about that because social anthropologists are trained to go into a situation and observe and not come with any values or framework, but then interpret it in a particular way. You're recording and you need to. It's not objectivity, doesn't quite get it. It's objectivity and naivety with an intense curiosity.
- [53:21]
B
Indeed. And I think we're going to. We haven't mentioned the AI revolution. It's not particularly what I want to talk about, but I think there are so many. There's so much optimism about what the machines are capable of and they're capable of incredible things. And we're probably not. The thing you mentioned before. You've got a new idea. And getting multiple perspectives on an idea you've got which control the entire body of knowledge on the Internet in half a second is truly remarkable. And I'm sure that we haven't even begun to explore that. But at the same time, this sort of spatial awareness of what's going on around the computer that one of my islands is not there.
- [53:59]
C
Look to jump into really technical terms. This is phylogeny, hauntogeny. Right. This is the difference between what you can observe with facts and then interpret them. Which is what an LLM does with a training set. But we're the project, we're the product of this evolutionary process. And the fact that we are interacting with these LLMs is the product of three and a half billion years worth of something. And it's the mistake that Searle the philosopher makes. If I go back to what your father was possibly dealing with, he has this experiment about the Chinese room where the book comes in and the person in the room translates it by looking it up in another book and then passes a translation out. And he says, well, is that intelligence? You could make this into a machine. But like a lot of philosophy, he draws the circle around that far too small because the very fact that you could have that experiment is the product of a massive amount of evolution. And the machines and the training sets seem to me to have this finite limitation on them. And we may have a finite limitation, but it's not as obvious to me that it's anything like as small a space as the ones that the AI inhabit. And I have a suspicion, and this is the first time I've articulated this, Richard, so bear with me and listeners, please be, be forgiving. But I think there's something in there about the level of complexity that we have had to develop. Not we don't personally develop, but as a species and as you know, as a biota and had to develop. That means that an LLM is a dwarf compared to the complexity that we embody. And therefore while superficially they appear to be really be quite clever and they can help us. They're super smart research assistants. I love the stuff, it's fantastic. But there is a long way to go. Now the people who think we're getting close to the singularity and we'll get artificial general intelligence and other things will disagree with me and we may both be right and we both be wrong because it's quite possible that, that in an adaption sense, an AGI may be better adapted to exploiting the future than we are, in which case we're dude and it won't matter. As Darwin says, and I quote him in the book, it's not the species that are the strongest or actually the fittest that survive. It's the ones who are most able to adapt. And it's nothing about optimal or good. It's simply could you adapt to the new circumstances and exploit them?
- [57:08]
B
Yeah, and there's something about the efficiency of biology as well. There's a great TED Talk, I think his Chris Barlow, Vancouver, who talked about how there's no petrochemicals industrial conglomerate in the world, whether it's Siba Geige or BASF or ICR or whatever it's called these days, that can make a glue anything like as good as a barnacle, and a barnacle has, that sticks to the bottom of a ship, has incredibly few resources on which to make something that's better than the best human process. And that's on the one hand. And then the way that animals learn the resources they have on which to learn how to walk, the billions that are poured into teaching a robot to walk. And there's nothing like the genetic memory in the training sets of the LLMs. So there's something about how efficient not just people, but the whole natural world is compared to the computed world, which isn't again, to downplay the incredible achievements, but just there's a lot of catching up to do on the side of the computers, I think.
- [58:12]
C
And it's one of the reasons why, you know, I've got this, I'm chair of this company up in Glasgow called Chemify, which has a universal machine for making any molecule. Right. I mean, we, we are exploring chemical space in a way that mankind has never been able to do. And the sheer vastness of what is now opening up before us is getting close to the space that the barnacle has been exploring for, well, a barnacle, let's make a rough guess, 400, 450 million years, right? That's the kind of. Maybe a little longer than that, but that, that's the kind of time over which they've been able to develop that we are now getting machines which will enable us to explore those spaces in compressed time in a tiny fraction of the time that it took the species to do the same thing. Now, the implications of that, I think are pretty profound, actually, and as profound as, as profound as what we've been talking about, about AI. You know, there is this material space and design space that we hope we can explore as well as what the AI is doing in terms of the mental processing and processing of data and.
- [59:37]
B
How close and I don't know, I'm aware of Chemify, but I don't know anything about its current state. How closely is the company to generating viable business, you know, new materials that people that are much, much cheaper or have much. Because either it's going to be better than existing materials in terms of its performance or much cheaper to make or a combination of the two, I would imagine.
- [60:02]
C
Well, we set up the first hemi farm, which is a couple of warehouses In Glasgow, in Merry Hill. They became operational last June.
- [60:15]
B
We're doing it and there are clients. It's making money.
- [60:18]
C
Oh yes, we have the major, all the major pharmaceutical companies. As Vance.
- [60:22]
B
Yeah, I'm quite old fashioned. I also sort of what I call the grandmother question. Are you making money? Because it seems like sometimes in the startup, sometimes in the startup world, people forget that that's quite important.
- [60:32]
C
It's the equivalent of faith, hope and charity. But the greatest of them. Yes. Is have you got revenue? Yes, we've got revenue. We are making money. And, and I cannot say anything on this podcast, but boy, are we coming across some interesting things.
- [60:49]
B
Good to hear. Congratulations. There's one question I haven't asked and I don't know the answer to this question, but I'm struck both in the entrepreneurship space and in the entrepreneurship support ecosystem space, of which serendipity is sort of obviously an important element of the question, whether or not it's a good thing to be well resourced, that quite often having too much money can be positively counterproductive because it stops people being creative and it means they get lazy and they start having high cost ways of doing things which you don't do if resources are scarce. And I struggle with this a little in the chem entrepreneurs space because I expect people to be volunteers and I can afford to cover the overheads. But on the other hand, there's an idea that it's not really sustainable if it relies on volunteer power. And do you think that the way the national government or the local government or other philanthropic institutions support and subsidize entrepreneurial ecosystems is the way it should be? And is more money the answer or is it more spending it wisely? Or do you have anything else to say about the role of funding this activity in a good way as opposed to a damaging way?
- [62:11]
C
I think we've got a lot of the structures wrong. I think if you look at models like Cambridge Angels, which you're right, you know, a lot of Cambridge Angels will do things on a kind of voluntary basis, but they're actually getting some opportunities and then perhaps getting some monetary return out of it. We need to think about how these systems work. I think that the civil servants in particular, who don't know about business and don't know how this stuff works, have a very Janet and John coloring book view of how this stuff actually operates. And we need.
- [62:44]
B
Can you clarify the Janet and John image?
- [62:48]
C
A very simple reading book for elementary age kids, for the American audience, that kind of level of thinking we need to break away from it. And we've had a discussion in this, in this chat which illustrates just how complex some of these networks can be. And one of the corollaries of that, and I've proposed in a new kind of network across the United Kingdom for encouraging or enabling the United Kingdom to have more scale ups, is a way of understanding how those networks work, how those motivations operate, how people then interact, and therefore using that to design something that's quite novel, which, by the way, has been rejected by the government. But there we go. It's not the only thing that I'm doing. So I'm fairly happy with that.
- [63:45]
B
So basically the status quo isn't. You're attaching. You said at the beginning you've got plenty of time, but I sense you're worrying about the time.
- [63:56]
C
Well, yeah, we're now about 15 minutes over where I thought we have plenty of time.
- [64:02]
B
Okay. So there was one more question about what Cambridge should do to improve its public infrastructure. Based on a letter you sent to the Financial Times a couple of days ago about. You said that Cambridge was part of the King's Cross.
- [64:18]
C
Oh, yes. I published something about King's Cross, the public infrastructure look back in 2018, 2019. I produced with John Miles and a few others, a plan for how you could do rapid mass transit in Cambridge for about one third of the conventional cost, particularly if you were going to use things like light rail or tram systems, which are basically 20th century or 19th century solutions to things. And I think we really do need to think about something in Cambridge because when you've got exponential growth, it catches you unawares. It doesn't look like it's doing very much and then suddenly it's doing a lot. But the rate of growth hasn't changed. What's changed is the sheer scale that you have to deal with. And that's going to catch us out. And we need to do it in advance before it gets to us and we're leaving it very, very late. Very late.
- [65:20]
B
Anyone who's been to Cambridge recently will agree with that. David, I do have more questions, but I think we should regard this as a public service. Well done. So thank you very much indeed for your time. I'll follow up with the things that we discuss where there's a role for me. And of course, I'll let you know when we're going online with the podcast and encourage everyone who's listened to this podcast to go out and buy your book.
- [65:43]
C
Great. Thanks, Richard. That's been a real pleasure. Thank you.
- [65:46]
B
It.