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The Times Tech Podcast
Bonus episode: The ‘secret sauce’ of success - With Octopus Energy CEO, Greg Jackson
00:35:06
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- [00:01]
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- [00:33]
Greg Jackson
This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.
- [00:36]
Katie Prescott
Danny One thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company?
- [00:45]
Greg Jackson
Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech and teams, all doing things slightly differently.
- [00:53]
Katie Prescott
ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization, connecting people, systems,
- [01:02]
Greg Jackson
data and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos.
- [01:06]
Katie Prescott
Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com hello, I'm Katie Prescott and we've got a bonus episode for you this morning from another Times podcast, the Business, which I stepped in to host this week with my colleague Dominic o'. Connell. On the business, we talked to the CEO and co founder of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson, and what's so interesting about his company is although it sounds like a pure energy business, actually its most lucrative product is software. Anyway, it's a fascinating conversation and I thought you'd enjoy it.
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Dominic O'Connell
How do you go from being a market entrant to market leader in just 10 years? Greg Jackson, who's the chief executive and co founder of Oliver Octopus Energy, has done just that. 7 million British households now use Octopus, meaning that it's pushed British Gas into second place.
- [02:03]
Katie Prescott
He is a proper disruptor. Octopus is still spreading its tentacles going into Europe, moving in to EV charging and heat pump production.
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Dominic O'Connell
But the secret sauce is what you don't see. The software that links the company to its customers and to energy suppliers. It's called Kraken. And if you know your Norse mythology, the Kraken is a big sort of octopussy monster that comes up out of the deep and grabs your sailing ship. It sells Kraken software to other utility companies right around the world.
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Katie Prescott
And now Octopus is going to split in two. This Kraken unit is going to be floated as a separate company, which means a whole new set of Challenges and opportunities and probably a big payday for Mr. Jackson.
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Dominic O'Connell
So we're going to talk to Greg Jackson today, ask him how he and his team did it and what lessons there might be for entrepreneurs who would like to follow his example. I'm Dominic o', Connell, columnist at the Times and business reporter on Times Radio.
- [03:03]
Katie Prescott
And I'm Katie Prescott, host of the Times Tech Podcast and sitting in for Hannah Previt this week from the Times
- [03:09]
Dominic O'Connell
and the Sunday Times.
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Katie Prescott
This is the business where we put
- [03:12]
Dominic O'Connell
you ringside on the conversations we have day to day with business leaders to
- [03:17]
Katie Prescott
hear their lessons for success in life and in business.
- [03:25]
Dominic O'Connell
So, Katie, like a lot of the entrepreneurs we've had on this program, Greg Jackson started pretty young.
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Katie Prescott
Yeah, he was fascinated by computing when he was growing up in the 80s and he actually left school at the age of 16 to start a computer game company. But I'm afraid it didn't quite pan out as expected. So he ended up going back to school and then on to university. But he kept this interest in tech.
- [03:46]
Dominic O'Connell
Yeah. And then he founded octopus energy about 10 years ago when there was that big flowering of new companies selling energy, when energy retailing was deregulated. And then of course, a lot of those went bust when gas prices went nuts and then we had the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They got squeezed in that differential. But Octopus didn't go under. In fact, it prospered. It did more than survived. So I think really, I'm really looking forward to learning how he did that.
- [04:13]
Katie Prescott
Yeah, I remember that period so well. It felt like one energy company after another was going back bang, week by week.
- [04:19]
Dominic O'Connell
Let's get them in.
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Katie Prescott
Thanks so much for joining us today, Greg. I'd like to start right at the beginning and take you back to growing up in Halifax and later Middlesbrough, when I understand you were always really, really interested in computing and coding. Tell us about those days and also I'd love to know what your first computer was.
- [04:48]
Greg Jackson
Well, first of all, thank you for having. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. Yeah, I think in like 1982 or 83. Yeah, I bought it secondhand. I saved up my paper and money, by the way, if you work out my age. I did a paper and illegally early, but I saved up my paper and money. Plus mum used to give us a. There was a government support called the family allowance and mum used to give me, my sister that to buy clothes and stuff. But I didn't buy clothes, I saved up to buy computing stuff. And because I bought it secondhand, it was actually it didn't work when I got it, got it out the box and then almost immediately had to learn to tinker with it to kind of get it to do anything. But, you know, it opened up a
- [05:24]
Katie Prescott
whole new world, an amazing era. When you had the ZX Spectrum, then the BBC Micro, which was being distributed in schools, it felt like the world of computing was opening up to people for the first time.
- [05:32]
Greg Jackson
Yeah, not only that, actually, but that's responsible for so much of the things that are great in the British economy and tech today. The reason that we're a fintech leader is that so many people, my generation grew up at that time when you could get a very cheap, affordable home computer and learn to code. And the technology business arm, which has produced billions of chips globally in every smartphone, basically in loads of laptops everywhere that grew out of the Spectrum and BBC scene in Cambridge. So it's really interesting how we've got decades of benefit as a society, as a country from what happened then.
- [06:15]
Katie Prescott
And so what was your childhood like and what sort of things were you coding and doing on that ZX Spectrum?
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Greg Jackson
Look, so my mum and dad got divorced when, I think I was about 8. My sister was 7, my brother was a year old. I don't think Mum had ever really had a job before. Suddenly she had a mortgage and had to go and work in a pub in the evenings and she studied by day. I think that meant that we had a lot of independence and as a result I got loads of time to tinker with all these things and I loved experimenting. So I guess almost immediately this kind of the mystique and the appeal of being able to sit there with a computer and learn to do more and more stuff on it.
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Dominic O'Connell
How was school?
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Greg Jackson
I guess I did very well at school, but I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy the discipline. I think, by the way, for me personally, it's part of the kind of entrepreneurial mindset, which is I don't like being told what to do. I love working hard, but I love working hard on something I think is valuable.
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Katie Prescott
So you took a sideways route and jumped out of school at 16 and set up a computer game business, or tried to pursue that.
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Greg Jackson
I got a job writing computer games and then after a while got the chance to go freelance. But I got a great lesson in life, right, which was the first game I wrote as a freelancer. I'd say the programming was excellent. If you looked at the code, it was very elegant. But the game itself actually wasn't fun to play. And so it didn't get published and I'd worked for a few months without earning anything and I realized just how important it is to focus on your end user, your customers rather than on the process. And that gave me a chance by the way too. They were just doing six form enrolments at the time so I thought maybe I'll go and get some A levels after all.
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Katie Prescott
And what was the game called? I'm guessing it wasn't Lemmings.
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Greg Jackson
No, it was a wrestling simulator which was quite hard to do on a spectrum. But anyway I did it badly.
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Katie Prescott
Cambridge followed so it wasn't a bad decision to go back to school. What happened after that? Where did your career take you? After university I went to work for
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Greg Jackson
Procter and Gamble, the consumer goods business for a few years. I now feel very entitled about the decision I made there because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I knew I wanted to build my own businesses, but I kind of felt I needed a bit of business grounding first. And PNGs reckoned to be a bit like doing a real world mba. And so I kind of intended to stay there a couple of years. It turns out by the way, working in a corporate can be very, very addictive. Just as you're getting dissatisfied, they give you a pay rise every six months you get a review which tells you how great you are, but also what you need to do better. And you're surrounded by people that are very like minded. And so I kind of, I say accidentally ended up staying four years and almost had to leave before kind of, I don't. Lost the will, Stayed. Yeah. Wind up staying forever I guess.
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Katie Prescott
Unlike being an entrepreneur. Right. If you're in a corporate or any business, someone pays you at the end
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Greg Jackson
of the month and I'm not in any way denigrating that, but I think for me personally I'd rather be a bigger fish in a small pond than part of a corporate machine.
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Katie Prescott
So you ripped yourself out of the warm bath of Procter and Gamble and threw yourself into something much more difficult. What was the genesis of Octopus? And then as we want to talk about Kraken today, what came first? Octopus the energy business or Kraken the software behind it?
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Greg Jackson
Yeah. So I had a series of businesses after P and G. Some did pretty well, others not so. But eventually in the year 2003 with a couple of co founders, we started a company that built enterprise software. And we had the privilege of getting to know around 20 large companies very, very well as we built software to help them access new capabilities and become more efficient. Most companies got these kind of spaghetti, stacks of software that run their business, decades worth, these kind of sedimentary layers of growing over time. And so anytime they want to do something new, they can't really change what they've got, so they bolt on another piece of software and it's got to integrate all over the place with the spaghetti. And so each individual piece of software you're adding may be solving one problem, but it's making your fundamental problem worse. You're building more spaghetti. And so we came up with the idea that when we compared large but very new companies, they had much, much simpler software because they had time to build up all the rubbish, but they were still running large companies very effectively. So we thought you could replatform an existing company onto an entirely new stack, a new piece of software and get rid of all of the legacy. So we went and pitched it to companies and we started with utilities. The energy sector was facing a revolution. The advent of things like solar, wind, electric cars, batteries meant that you had a sector where big data was like on a quarterly meter reading to one where you were going to get real time streams and you had to forecast everything so you could see it's going to get complex. So unlike Fintech, he didn't just have the internal opportunity. You have this huge external pressure. Anyway, so we went and talked to some utilities, we pitched the idea and some of them said we don't think tech will make any difference. Thank you very much, that was brilliant. That told us it was sector right for disruption. Others told us we're conservative, we can't take the risk of doing this. Someone's got to do it first. Now that's quite interesting from that really, you had the idea we would do it first.
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Dominic O'Connell
Software is a long way from energy supply, isn't it? How did you make that jump from trying to fix an IT problem for them, a systems problem for them, into becoming actually a customer business?
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Greg Jackson
Yeah, so you could say the same of things like Uber software's a long way from minicabs, but actually by creating a kind of very modern software based business in that sector, you can reinvent the sector. So we thought in exactly the same way, if we take a modern software based approach to reinventing retail, energy retail, we can do tons of stuff that no one imagined.
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Dominic O'Connell
Was there also a happy accident that it was around about the time that energy retailing was deregulated? So did the two things come together?
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Greg Jackson
Well, you know what, I was actually slightly annoyed because
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Dominic O'Connell
you thought you wouldn't have to worry about the company.
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Greg Jackson
Yeah, like. Well, because we had the. I mean, I hope this sounds okay, but we kind of thought we had the biggest idea in the world. We were going to transform a global sector through technology on a global scale. And Suddenly there's about 50 companies that are kind of set up with a few quid in the back of someone's shed, piling it high, selling it cheap, without a big idea. And so when I went out there talking about what we were doing, it was very hard to differentiate the kind of. The scale of what we wanted to achieve, the degree of. I hate the word, but the degree of disruption we had in mind compared to a whole load of other companies. And I remember saying competition isn't the souk. It really isn't about having a bunch of people each try to shout louder than the other, but basically selling the same stuff. Competition is about investing very heavily, having outstanding operations and truly understanding your customers. You can create new products and services.
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Dominic O'Connell
So were you worried about getting caught to them that other people would just think, we don't see any value in Octopus at all. It's exactly the same as Bulb or whatever, all the other companies that are out there.
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Greg Jackson
Yes, I was worried about that. And by the way, I'd say Bulb was different. Bulb really was found in the vision. Yeah. And it got big. And every week I think there's good competition and bad competition. Right. Bulb was genuinely good competition for us because every week we would sit there looking at our customer metrics, like, how well are we looking after customers? And relentlessly you're comparing yourself to your rival. Now, none of the incumbents were doing a good job. All those little companies were doing a bad job. But, Bob, every week we're like, how are they achieving that? And of course we then have to try and do better. And we know they. We now know because we end up acquiring them. They were sitting there going, how did Octopus do that? So I think that was really kind of. That drove high standards. But an interesting byproduct of the number of companies was that we went under the radar in a good way, which is the incumbents, I think. I wouldn't say they were asleep at the wheel, but they really didn't see us coming. And it was ultimately an Australian company, Origin Energy, I think the biggest energy company in Australia that sent a couple of their most senior people on a world tour to find the future of energy. And they ended up in our office in London. And it was a magical moment when they're like, they could see how we'd use technology to transform everything.
- [15:04]
Dominic O'Connell
Just talk us through what happened in 2021 when wholesale gas prices spiked. All these small suppliers got caught in the crush between selling cheap energy and having to buy it very expensively. Was that a threatening moment for you as well, financially for Octopus?
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Greg Jackson
I think on day one, we saw it coming for about six months. You could see the uptick and getting steeper and steeper. At the worst point, the wholesale price of gas, I think, was 16 times higher than usual. So if we normally buy, I don't know, maybe at the time, 2 or 3 billion a year of gas, suddenly you're looking at 32, maybe more billion pounds of gas we're going to have to buy. But first of all, in energy, the number one thing that creates financial resilience is hedging. You buy the energy in advance, you lock in the price. So even though the wholesale price at the time might have been very, very high for our foreseeable needs, we'd already locked in the price at a lower level. So you could look at that and you could see all those companies that hadn't hedged just collapsing overnight.
- [16:07]
Katie Prescott
There were so many of them and companies I'd never heard of with the most random names, it felt like they'd all just mushroomed and then completely exploded.
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Greg Jackson
And I think this was kind of where regulation had been a bit naive, which is the regulator didn't want to talk about hedging because they think like how each company manages that is up to themselves. But the reality is if you think you can beat the market, you're a fool. And so literally the risk aversion at the very core of our business meant that although you could look at that and think it was very worrying, the biggest worry we had was for our customers. How were people going to pay these bills as the hedges come to an end, you re hedge and the market is going to be a lot higher, then how will people cope with this? So I immediately started talking to the government and saying, you are going to have to put something in place to help customers. We need a bill support scheme. Which happened. But the other bit was I remember speaking to our investors because investors obviously looking at these wholesaler getting very worried and I said to them, we are just about the strongest company here. So instead of battening down the hatches, this is the time to be brave. We want you to provide us with more funding so we can help. Well, we can acquire failing businesses and this will be. It's that kind of thing. And I hate to say it in such terrible times, but it's opportunity in a crisis. And you say, like, for us this is a big opportunity and if we don't act now, we may never get this chance again. And that's how we ended up in a position that we could, for example, ultimately. And we acquired a company called Avro that failed with nearly a million customers, and then bulb with 1.6 million. And by the way, at the time, there were all these kind of reports that Bulb was going to cost taxpayers and bill payers 6 billion quid. The deal we did with the government, a brilliant deal by our team, worked out with great civil servants, meant ultimately made a profit on Bulb. And I'm really proud of that.
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Katie Prescott
Well, let's go back to where you started then, which is really with the tech behind Octopus and Kraken. I loved your description of companies having sedimentary layers of tech and the sort of spaghetti junction that you obviously you got to start from scratch. Do you think you could have sold that tech to companies originally in the way that you'd planned to and sort of just done it within those layers, or do you think you really needed to do it yourself first to prove it?
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Greg Jackson
Yeah, I sometimes remark, I'm not a good salesman, I'm a very good shower. So we really did try to persuade companies. But I think the interesting bit is, to be fair, you couldn't see the impact this would have till you did it. I think one of the magical inventions of Silicon Valley was the mvp, the minimum viable product. It's not a prototype. You basically create a business that does something very, very differently using technology and see how it goes based on what you see. You then iterate very rapidly, building out the stuff that's working and dropping stuff that isn't. And I think in energy, it wasn't. You knew you would create a more efficient business. You knew you could run it with far fewer people. You kind of knew you could eliminate a lot of the failures, the service failures, because with much more modern system, a single unified data model, you're not going to have a load of things going wrong, falling between the gaps and a load of people in the background having to try and fix them. But what you didn't know was the degree of innovation you could kind of produce with this.
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Katie Prescott
And what is that? I mean, in really simple terms, what is it that Kraken does that makes it more efficient or helps the energy market?
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Greg Jackson
Yeah, so the efficiency is. I'll give you an example. I mean, in the uk, one of the clients One of the large engine companies that moved to Kraken after we proved it, closed 17 different systems. So 17 bits of spaghetti wiring. Ultimately I mean this is progress, but it's hard. We have to do it in society. Their headcount fell from over 10,000 people to about three and a half thousand. But the people that stayed, their satisfaction, the employee Satisfaction went from 2 out of 5 to 4 out of 5 because they could actually do a great job instead of being stuck in a machine where computer says no. And by the way, the customer satisfaction went from 2 out of 5 to 4 out of 5 and the company went from unsustainable to financially successful. That's the kind of impact it has at scale in innovation terms. Kraken because it's got a single data model that is everything from every customer call, transcribe, I mean and analyzed by AI through to every meter reading. But forecast for the next two years at half hourly level, updated multiple times a day to if you've got an electric car, we'll be forecasting how much battery you're going to need every day, what time you're going to plug it in and work out a schedule for when we're going to charge it collectively. That means today Octopus alone processes just in the UK processes a million items of data every three seconds which is about ten times more than Visa globally for payments. Fundamentally, particularly in electricity, the back end electricity market has a price that varies throughout the day. Every half hour it goes from literally negative pricing to eye wateringly high. If we can use technology to get more of the cheap electricity into our customers house at the right times and into their cars, into their businesses and avoid using as much at the expensive times, you bring the average price down and you can have dramatic impact. I was looking at the charts for a day recently between the beginning of the day or the peak of the day, which the price was like 120 and the cheapest price during the day was 20 and overnight it was negative. That's how variable this is. If you use technology to optimize that, we can tackle the appalling rise in British energy bills.
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Katie Prescott
When did you realize you could sell that as a standalone product to other utilities? Or was that always the plan?
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Greg Jackson
It was kind of always the plan, but it was quite fun. For anyone who's, I don't know, been through these things, I love my investors, I've got incredible investors. We owe everything to the fact they backed us, to be clear. But at the very beginning when we were setting up the business, they said do you really need to build your own technology? Surely that's a commodity you just get off the shelf. Anyway, a few years in, I started talking to them about licensing the technology, Kraken to other companies. And they said, this is your secret source. Why would you give it to you?
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Katie Prescott
Why? We tried to tell you.
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Greg Jackson
And then a few years later, as we're separating Kraken off, I have to say tonight, energy is an unbelievably exciting business. They're going, yeah, but look at the software.
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Dominic O'Connell
Why are you separating it off now? Because you're going to split it in two. Kraken is going to become a independent company, maybe listing on a stock exchange somewhere. Why now?
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Greg Jackson
Yeah. So Octopus has continued to grow. I mean, incredibly. I'm so proud of it. And we also, by the way, have big businesses in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, all growing rapidly. And increasingly, the incumbent utilities in those countries were reticent to license Kraken because they didn't essentially want to give money to a competitor. They'd seen what had happened here in the uk, where we overtook every formerly nationalized incumbent to become the biggest. And what we found is sort of this huge interest in Kraken. But time and again, I'd be sitting there with the CEO of a company, they'd say, but how can I license from you when you're stealing my customers? And ultimately, separating Kraken enables it to. To reach its full potential.
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Dominic O'Connell
If you are going to list it and it's a technology company, aren't all your advisors saying, listen, you have to take it to the us? Can there be any possible argument for listing it in London?
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Greg Jackson
I think it's really serious. The more I've looked at this, the more I care about it. Pension funds in the UK used to put about 40% of their assets into UK companies. It's now 3 or 4%. Now, that has impacted two very important areas. The first is companies in the growth stages. Actually, the growth stages Octopus and Kraken have been through, we've raised $3 billion of investment and 2.9 of that or something have come from overseas investors. Now, what that means is that when you get to the point where you're thinking about, do you list somewhere they don't have an attachment to the uk Their funds are not raised in sterling because they don't have a currency reason to be here. They don't have a headquarters or sentimental reason to be here. They're not part of the UK Nexus. And so the first thing is that lack of funds we were able to grow the business because of plenty of companies around the world or funds around the world that wanted to invest in Octopus and Kraken. But it does mean when you get to this stage, it's a much more kind of rational decision. I think the second consequence of that lack of UK capital going to UK companies is when you get to the stock exchange. Our stock exchange simply has less capital available, less capital available for companies when they IPO to achieve the valuations that perhaps they would in other, well, the U.S. and also, by the way, a lot more important than that, potentially less capital available thereafter to continue to support companies as they grow globally. Now, I think 2026 could be a bit pivotal. We've had the Mansion House reforms, the pensions bill and a bunch of other changes. That means that we could potentially be reversing that long term decline in the capital allocated to UK equities. So we're going to have to watch and see behind the scenes. I've got to say that the London Stock Exchange do have good data that says if you control for all the variables, uk, I've read that data, it's
- [26:10]
Dominic O'Connell
not very convincing at a certain hour of the day, at a certain time of the night, et cetera.
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Greg Jackson
So I think the point really though is that we could be an inflection point this year if those reforms have an impact because we've been so starved of capital. It doesn't take a lot of change, a lot of new capital to really reverse that. So fingers crossed. I would say though, that the other bit here is sentiment matters. I think it was Keynes spoke of animal spirits and they're really important in markets. And so if we get the reforms we need and we get the right degree of positive news about lse, then there is a chance.
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Dominic O'Connell
When are you likely to decide?
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Greg Jackson
Well, fortunately I don't get decide right. So I'm a shareholder, but a relatively modest one. Octopus is shareholder, but the majority is held by our global investors and they are in conversation, the bordering conversation with both the London Stock Exchange and others. By the way, they're taking it very, very seriously. The decision will be over the next
- [27:11]
Katie Prescott
year or two because I guess it's also about whether you're willing to make that leap. Because the stock exchange obviously needs companies like yours to float to encourage others, because it is, as you say about sentiment. And so I wonder if, you know, when you say it's something you care about now, if you do feel strongly enough about it to try and push that decision towards London, that's one of the Reasons.
- [27:35]
Greg Jackson
I'm talking about it now and one of the reasons. I talk about the underlying reasons, because I think if we address the underlying reasons, we can make London win stuff on its own merits. And I would hope. I would hope that London can win this business on its own merits. But it's got to work. It's really got to prove that. But I talk about it because I want to see it happen and I want to see it happen because I'm truly proud of what we've been able to build in Britain. We talked earlier about the Cambridge tech scene of the 1980s and 90s. It generated some great companies like ARM and a whole bunch of entrepreneurs that have created many of the businesses that are going to be the next crop. I'd love to see that followed through. And if we can solve the capital markets issue, there's every possibility we can create. I don't call it a new golden age, but genuinely, if you look at the number of British companies that are roughly the scale of Octopus and Kraken, I'm looking to have two of them. But there really is a good chance here. So we could enter a positive spiral if we get it right.
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Dominic O'Connell
What about Octopus Post the split, Is it going to be profitable?
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Greg Jackson
Yeah, well, Octopus is profitable in the UK, so our UK energy retail business made about £300 million EBIT last year. It's just that we are investing so heavily in growth, both here in the UK and internationally and in research and development that we spent 500 million on those things. So a lot of the bottom line might be, I think you showed 100 million loss, actually. It's a core business that's strong and profitable, then supporting and being supported by our investors to take this business truly global. And I think more British companies should do this, by the way, one of the challenges in the UK very often has been companies being forced into becoming dividend machines and you can keep on paying your dividend until one day you don't exist. What you see a lot in the US is companies spending many years relentlessly investing in R and D and growth.
- [29:41]
Dominic O'Connell
Is that the way you talk about? You don't need to show a profit straight away, you need to be thinking about the future. Is that part of what lies behind your row with your rivals about capital rules and ofgems? Capital rules? Do you think that's stupid?
- [29:53]
Greg Jackson
I think the problem with the capital rules is they. They don't really understand what it causes risk in energy. We talked earlier about hedging, essentially, if you're fully hedged you eliminate the vast majority of risk. Moreover, the two big risks beyond that are mark to market. That is, if the energy price shifts, your hedging partner, the trading partner with whom you hedge can demand overnight, you deliver within 24 hours tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of cash if the energy price shifts. And also they may require you to post an awful lot of collateral. Again, hundreds of millions. Octopus, because of the prudence with which we're run, we're not subject to either those risks. We've eliminated them by the way we pay for that. It's like paying for a superb insurance policy, but OFGEM don't even look at it. So the equivalent at the moment is. It's like if you had a million pound house and he was fully insured, but the regulator would be quite happy for you to drop the insurance and have 100 grand sitting in the bank in case something happens.
- [31:00]
Dominic O'Connell
We should explain the off gym capital rules basically say you need to have a bunch of cash set aside against hard times.
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Greg Jackson
Yeah. The problem is that a bunch of cash they have isn't enough to help in hard times. But in the meantime they're not looking at the fact you've got an insurance policy. Now we're in conversation with them on that and I think it's nuts.
- [31:18]
Dominic O'Connell
But if I'm your rival, if I'm Centrica, I'm going to look at you and say, but hang on, I have to have all this cash set aside. I meet the rules, you don't. That's just cheating, regardless of anything you might say about whether the rules are good or not.
- [31:29]
Greg Jackson
Yeah. Well, the first thing is we do meet the rules. The rules absolutely say you have to have a certain amount of capital, it's called the floor, and we have that. They then have a target, it's named a target, that is you don't have to have it if you're not at the target, then you have to have an agreed plan with the regulator. Now that's where the regulator does look at all these additional sort of safeguards. And in our case the regulators declared themselves perfectly satisfied. We meet the rules. So to be really clear, we meet the rules. I think that, you know, by the way, post the Kraken separation, our balance sheet is 3 billion pounds, right? That is, we absolutely exceed these targets. There are some details in terms of how they're accounted for. But to be really clear, post Kraken, it's a totally different picture anyway.
- [32:20]
Katie Prescott
And Greg, before we let you go, I've got to ask you Running a company in this mad, bad world that we're in at the moment, with the rise in generative AI and the AI revolution that's going on. Donald Trump, very unpredictable, if, to use a gentle word in the president in the White House. How do you think about navigating that as a business leader?
- [32:44]
Dominic O'Connell
You sound quite optimistic about everything, actually. You sound quite optimistic about the UK tech sector.
- [32:50]
Greg Jackson
Well, I think, first of all, entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic. Right. You couldn't do this job if you weren't. In fact, sometimes people often ask, how do you stay optimistic? Or how do you get your energy?
- [32:58]
Katie Prescott
If you were playing a computer game, there would be things coming at you from all sides. Yeah.
- [33:02]
Greg Jackson
It's also, you turn it around. It's like you're an entrepreneur because you're optimistic, because you're always seeing opportunities. Now, I think one thing about the Trump world is I think it's forcing everyone to act quickly and to make big decisions fast. One of the things that's killing the west, killing economic growth here, is we've become sclerotic. Now, in a world where you can't be sure that next week you're not going to get 25% tariff slapped on something, you've got to move fast, and you've got to move fast to build your own capabilities, to innovate, to make things more efficient. All of these are opportunities for us to do well. So I'm not saying I choose this world, but within this world, there are tons of opportunities, and there are some things that are going to be like forcing functions for progress. I was reflecting recently that so many of the advances in things like computing or jet engines came out of World War II. Similarly, the things that came out of the space race, those events acted as forcing functions, and so does kind of a little bit of economic chaos. And some of the world's best companies were found in times of economic chaos. Companies like IBM as an example, Disney. And so I used to wonder what it would have been like to found a company in the 1920s and then go for the 20, 1920s, 30s, whatever.
- [34:21]
Katie Prescott
Here you are.
- [34:21]
Greg Jackson
Exactly. Here we are. It's kind of the same all over again.
- [34:24]
Dominic O'Connell
Greg, very generous with your time. I hope you haven't predicted the start of a. Of a new world war, but thank you very much, Greg Jackson from Octopus Energy.
- [34:32]
Katie Prescott
Yes, thanks so much for coming in.
- [34:34]
Greg Jackson
Thank you both. It's been really great to do this session. And by the way, let's do it again sometime. Today's episode of the Times Tech podcast
- [34:46]
Katie Prescott
is sponsored by ServiceNow ServiceNow describes itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention, connecting people, systems, data and AI so workflows more smoothly across an organization.
- [34:59]
Greg Jackson
The platform integrates with different clouds, models and data sources, bringing them together in one place to help your team.
- [35:06]
Katie Prescott
To learn more about how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com
- [35:15]
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Greg Jackson
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Katie Prescott
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- [36:12]
Greg Jackson
That's B O M b-s.com and use code audio.
- [36:21]
Dominic O'Connell
So Katie, I was a really interesting chat with Greg Jackson who is an amazing entrepreneur. He and his co founders. What did you take from what stood out from what he said for you?
- [36:32]
Katie Prescott
I was really struck by this idea of companies having sedimentary stacks when it comes to their tech back end or stacks, whatever you'd like to call it. Because in this new AI era that we're in, I think this is going to catch so many companies out. When you've got this extraordinary new technology that many businesses are trying to work out how to use and how to integrate. When you're dealing with, you know, the spaghetti that he described, I think it makes you realise how very, very difficult that's going to be.
- [37:03]
Dominic O'Connell
I think, I think you're exactly right. I'm Dominic o', Connell, columnist at the Times and business reporter on Times Radio.
- [37:11]
Katie Prescott
And I'm Katie Prescott, co host of the Times Tech Podcast and sitting in for Hannah Previtt this week. And if you want to hear more from me and our correspondent in Silicon Valley down, Danny Fortson, you can find us every week geeking out with the pioneers at the forefront of tech innovation, covering all the latest trends in tech and the AI revolution. Just search for Times Tech Podcast Wherever
- [37:32]
Dominic O'Connell
you get your podcasts from the Times
- [37:35]
Katie Prescott
and the Sunday Times, this is the business.
- [37:37]
Dominic O'Connell
We'll be back next week. Until then, goodbye.
- [37:39]
Katie Prescott
Goodbye. Foreign. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.
- [37:56]
Greg Jackson
There's a lot of excitement around AI right now, but the problem is what happens after the demo when you have
- [38:01]
Katie Prescott
to plug that technology into a real company.
- [38:04]
Greg Jackson
Different clouds, different data, different systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
- [38:09]
Katie Prescott
ServiceNow's platform is designed to help people by connecting these pieces, enabling organizations to coordinate work across departments, tools and increasingly, AI agents.
- [38:20]
Greg Jackson
In fact, the company says more than 80 billion workflows run on its platform
- [38:24]
Katie Prescott
every year, which gives you a sense of the scale of operations it's designed to handle.
- [38:29]
Greg Jackson
Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com
- [38:37]
GNC Drop Advertiser
that new thing? Yeah, we've got it. The Drop by GNC Bringing you all the newness that matters. Hand picked by the pros who actually know what's up and what's proven to work, we keep you on top of the trends and dialed into what's next. Whether you're crushing it at the gym, leveling up your game, or thriving every day, the Drop by GNC is where the latest solutions in health and wellness land first. Nonstop innovation and fresh finds daily explore what's new and what's next on the Drop by GNC.