Barney Hussey-Yeo - Are founders just wired differently? - Anatomy of a Founder - Digital Frontier

Episode Transcript
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(01:00:00):
(upbeat music)
Welcome to the Anatomy
of a Founder podcast.
And we're really excited to have you.
And before we start and go
into your story and business,
I would like to ask
whether anything interesting
or fascinating has
happened to you this week.
Well, thank you for having me.
Interesting or fascinating.

(01:00:21):
I just got back from a
really interesting meeting
with the NHS Counter Fraud team.
For context, we're giving
government a couple of teams
for six months to go
try and do a big project,
save some money.
And it is kind of wild to me
that the government loses 50
to a hundred billion a year.
And for context, the UK government budget
is a trillion a year.
They lose 50 to a

(01:00:42):
hundred billion to fraud
every single year.
And it is wildly outdated how they're
trying to tackle it.
So just went to look
at how NHS Counter Fraud
is functioning and they
lose about 1.5 billion a year
to fraudsters in the NHS
from all these
different interesting sources.
So hopefully we're
gonna give them a team,
get access to some good data

(01:01:02):
and hopefully save the
country a billion or two,
which would be nice, put
that back into the NHS.
So that was my weird and wonderful kind
of start of the week.
Was that this morning?
That was literally got out
of cab from this morning.
And also the last 10
minutes of the meeting,
there was a bomb scare,
alarm thing all rushed out the building.

(01:01:23):
And I was like, this is wild.
This is so interesting.
Okay, so you're riding on
that adrenaline high now
from one meeting to another. Exactly, yeah.
So you hyped up from the bomb scare.
Cool, okay, well that said,
do you want to kind of go
into what Clio is all about,
how that works and
where you've come with it?
Yeah, so like the brief context,
we're 10 years into
building business almost,
I think our 10 year birthday party

(01:01:44):
is at the end of this year in November,
which is very exciting.
Like the back story is I
was a computer scientist,
studied machine learning at uni,
went and did a masters and then worked
with data scientists for a
year before I started Clio.
And the problem I was
always trying to solve
was working in FinTech
and financial services,
all of the customers
had the same problem.
They were pushed an

(01:02:04):
enormous amount of credit
by their bank, given no help,
couldn't manage their
money, low financial literacy.
So I thought this is
like one of the biggest
societal systemic problems.
And if you're going to turn around this,
rise in populism and if
we're going to get people back
to like a healthier,
happier Western society,
you need to sort this out.
People need to be wealthier,
people need to close
that income and quality gap,

(01:02:25):
which is huge.
So that was kind of
like the founding mission
and it's just been all over the place
over the last like nine, 10 years.
But today we're 250
million era, 400 staff globally,
we're profitable, we're
going to actually own a year.
So we're good candidates for an IPO in
about a year or two,
when we're kind of
above that 500 million mark,
which is nice.

(01:02:46):
And yeah, it's been like insane,
being 24, one year work experience,
running a multi-billion pound company
with hundreds of staff is
like a crazy thing to do
in your twenties.
That's a wild decade, yeah.
I was going to ask about that as well,
because you said you
worked as a computer scientist
for a year and then
you found this problem
and you really wanted to act on it.

(01:03:07):
How was that?
Like, you're only a
year into your career,
I think after a year
of being in my career,
if I just said, okay, we need to
completely change things,
upended, do this, only
have a year of experience,
were people on board?
Did you have to convince people?
Or like, how did you take that idea
and that like
ambitious go-getter attitude,
I guess, and put it into?
I think founders are all wired like
slightly differently

(01:03:27):
to the general
population, if I'm really honest.
So I remember at the time,
I think a great trait or like tell
if you should be a founder
is if you're working in a
successful kind of company
and you think you can run the company
better than the CEO,
at 23 after my master's, whatever it was,
I was very, you know, I
thought I was exceptional,

(01:03:48):
I thought I was amazing, I
thought I could be the CEO,
I thought I'd run the company better.
The company eventually went bust,
I probably would have done a better job,
if I'm really honest.
But I knew I wanted to do
bigger and better things.
And my two paths were to do my PhD at UCL
and I was applying to do a
PhD in recommended systems
with a great professor there.
Or it was to join entrepreneur first

(01:04:10):
and try and start a company.
Back in those days, like
starting a company in London
was still fairly weird.
Like venture capital was pretty unknown.
I had no idea how you'd
raise money, any of these things.
I saw this kind of amazing program
and some of my machine
learning kind of cohort
had actually been to be the
program in the previous years.
And when I looked entrepreneur first

(01:04:31):
and the people going through that cohort,
they were all these
fantastic, fantastic people.
So I was like, I just want
to be around the smartest,
most ambitious people.
And I thought like both those avenues
were really interesting.
And I ended up getting
sold by Matt Clifford
to join entrepreneur first over a beer
in this weird pub in Bermondsey,
which I'll always remember.
He probably won't remember.
But I got sold to do that.

(01:04:52):
And then, yeah, off to the races.
Did you, how did you set
up that meeting with Matt
and the pub?
Was it just a chance encounter?
I actually was just
writing about chance encounters
right before this.
So it's interesting to hear you say that.
There's always these
moments in your life, right?
Where like something happens,
it completely changes everything.
I've had like, I look
back over the decades

(01:05:13):
and there's so many of
those kind of pivotal moments
that changed everything.
But my like chance
encounter of that story is Zoe,
who was the head of
talent entrepreneur first,
had invited me to a dinner,
which had, I think,
Srirangar, the Boulderton partner,
and it had a couple of
the ex-EF cohort members

(01:05:34):
as like a panel.
And then we were going to
have a dinner afterwards
and Alice was there and
a few of the ex-founders.
And I was sat next to a guy called Tim,
who was the founder of Permitive,
really smart guy, really amazing.
And Alice was like down the table, one.
And I kind of like
pitched the problem to Tim.
And Tim's like, dude,
you gotta start a company,
you gotta do this.

(01:05:55):
And then Alice is like, you know,
is he good enough to be a founder?
Should he be a founder?
Like just in a little moment,
and Tim's like, yeah,
yeah, he should be a founder.
And then I didn't wanna join
because they paid you, I think,
1,300 pounds a month at the start.
Like you've got absolutely nothing.
It was no longer like
the YC 500K equity story.
It was very little.

(01:06:16):
And Matt did a very good sales job on me
to try and get me to join EF.
And it was definitely
like the best thing,
or the best moment,
or the best decision
I've ever made for sure.
That's very interesting.
And speaking of YC,
I saw the other day
that they put out a call
for something very similar to Clio.
And I think it was you that posted

(01:06:37):
and said, got some competition coming up.
So 10 years ago, you had this idea.
And maybe this is also the time
to talk about how Clio works,
because obviously I've tried using it
in the past few weeks and I can't,
because I'm here, even though I was like,
oh, could I put the state I'm from
and like try it that way?
But how is it to kind of be
so ahead of your time in a way,

(01:06:58):
or like have these
people come up with this idea
that you were trying
to champion back then?
And obviously it's worked, but.
Yeah, for context, it's conversationally.
So it's very much like
ChatGBT for your money,
a long time before ChatGBT.
Yeah.
It was a complete accident, to be honest.
Like, so machine
learning was like my E.D. Feeks
and had been through university

(01:07:19):
and being a data scientist
and like machine learning was everything
and data was everything.
So I knew the financial data was like
incredibly valuable.
And the first version of the app
was built for a data scientist.
So it was graphs, it was
stats, it was machine learning,
it predicts when I'd run out of money,
had all this fancy stuff.
No one would sign up.
My girlfriend at the
time wouldn't sign up.
My friends wouldn't sign up.
My mum would sign up,
no one would sign up.

(01:07:40):
But I had one little feature,
which was pinging me
and kind of harassing me
when I was running out of money.
And it was stupid, it was like an SMS.
It predicts I was running out of money
and go like, you spent like seven times
in delivery this week, you're an idiot.
Like, just chill out.
My friend saw that and he was like,
dude, you should just build that.
Like, that's funny.

(01:08:00):
No one wants to open their banking app.
Like, just make it fun.
And that was actually like
a really hard moment for me.
And I was like, he's kind of right.
And I built this demo where I had my
laptop with iMessage,
I had my phone, and I had
this beautiful conversation
back and forth with Cleo,
which was completely fake.
There was no machine learning at all.

(01:08:20):
And it wasn't for a while.
And it was this really
rich and deep conversation
where Cleo understood
everything about me.
She understood like my goals, my needs,
my wants, my financial picture.
She had this like
very rich understanding,
like just a friend with like a really
super intelligent AI,
like context, that memory.
And she was able in
this conversation to like,
tell me what to do about my money.
And I put that on a landing page,

(01:08:41):
which is literally one
fold of a landing page.
And it was the little demo,
meet Cleo, your intelligent AI assistant.
And instantly that took off.
Like the waiting list
went through the roof,
like instantly everyone went to sign up.
And as I started
letting people into Cleo,
as I'd like built a
little bit of machine learning,
but not a lot, it was truly fascinating

(01:09:01):
to see like the human product market fit.
We're talking to an AI.
People, I don't know if you ever remember
a smarter child at MSN back in the day,
might predate you.
But people genuinely
want to talk to these AIs.
And I really kind of understood
the inherent product market fit,
just looking through those conversations.
And we had this
Facebook messenger at the time.

(01:09:22):
And every week it would
get faster and faster,
the admin panel, like at the start,
it was like one, two conversation,
every like minute or two.
Then it was like, oh,
you see them every second.
And then it was like,
if you've seen a
celebrity's notification feed,
when they've just like blown up,
it became that.
And I was like, oh my God,
this is like truly something.
So we just doubled down on that.
The first four years of the business

(01:09:42):
was building this AI system,
building a Facebook messenger.
And that was, our office
is actually like literally,
you can basically see our old apartment
and office over there.
And yeah, that was like a great kind of,
it was very lucky, but like obviously
we've ridden the wave
and I've had LMs and I always knew NLP
would become this big thing,
so the research output was there.

(01:10:02):
But even myself, I probably
couldn't have like imagined
how close the AGI would become in such a
short period of time.
And then on the topic of, I guess,
timing and a lot of people, I think,
get caught up on
finding the right moment,
the right time, the right,
if you boil down to the right day,
the right second, the
right meeting, you have,
is there such a thing as
being too early or too late?

(01:10:24):
Definitely, you could argue,
Cleo was too early in a lot of ways.
Like we had a moment of like the,
there's always these high peaks.
So you have like the Gartner Hight Cycle
and we were the first
kind of Hight Cycle bots,
Emerson, Messenger,
like we were kind of there
and then it died and everyone was like,
why are you building an AI system?
This is stupid.

(01:10:45):
All the VCs are like, this
is a gimmick, this is a fad.
No one's ever gonna like,
it's never gonna get intelligent enough,
et cetera, et cetera.
You can be too early,
but I think the most
important thing for a founder is like,
do you have like the founder market fit?
Do you have the founder idea fit?
And if you find a
problem so big in the world,
you're like, it annoys you
and it like burns at you.
That's like such a good

(01:11:06):
sign to go start a business.
Don't do what the MBAs do.
And the MBAs like look at
market trends, see what's hot
and then try and jump on the trend
when they have no kind of
purpose need want to be there.
I think you've really
got to kind of have lived
and breathed and experienced
that problem either yourself
or in industry before
trying to go fix it.

(01:11:27):
I'm like pretty agnostic.
Like I found an angel investor lot now
and I will fund people
that are like 40, 50,
I'm not seeing a 60 year old founder yet.
Really?
Not yet.
But I will also fund like 18 year olds
just out of college.
And yeah, I think
there's very interesting things
and how big the
companies they'll build are.
I think the risk

(01:11:47):
profile is very different,
but I think you can be
a founder at any age.
Yeah, no, it's interesting.
And like, I guess going
back on that point you had
about founders are
sometimes just wired differently.
They feel like they
can just run a company
right out of university.
And some people I think would say
that that just means
they're ahead of themselves.
If you went to like someone

(01:12:07):
who's been in it for 20 years
and be like, I could do
this differently and you're 19,
they'd probably say, no, you can't.
But sometimes maybe
it's not the experience,
it's just the ambition that
they have to put that forward.
It's like really interesting.
There's a little bit of academic research
on like what makes an entrepreneur
and what makes a founder,
like some interesting stuff at Stanford.
And like megalomania is

(01:12:28):
like the common trait,
like people that think
they can change the world.
And I do think you have to
have a little bit of megalomania
to be a founder.
Like generally like
doing what a founder does
and creating something from zero,
especially when you're no one.
If you're 40 successful
already rich, had success,
it's much more rational than normal
because you can raise funding easy,
you know how to run a team, you know how

(01:12:49):
to build a business.
Like that's quite logical.
But if you're gonna be
a founder in your 20s,
you actually need a little bit of like
radical self belief.
And you need to be able to
push through so many walls
and do so many things
that I think you just have
to be wired slightly
differently to the normal person.
Do you think you can
learn that trait though?

(01:13:10):
There's like I think it's
"Grip" by Carol Duxworth.
I think there's like the
mentality of like, yes, I'm
and like, I can do this
and like, I can, you know,
is it innate?
Like, do you have that talent innately
or can you learn into?
And I do think, I do think

(01:13:34):
that you learn every year
of your life, right?
And every minute of
life, you're learning,
you're getting better.
And so I definitely
think you can develop that.
But if you look at the most successful
founders of all time
and you look at like the
backgrounds they've come from,
there's always a little
bit of adversity there.
Like whether it's the immigrant founder,
whether it's the
founder that came from XYZ,

(01:13:54):
the founders that have
like were born incredibly,
wealthy, they were very, you
know, very well taken care of,
had the best education.
They can be some of the
top academic performers.
I saw this at EF actually, EF Hyatt,
or like had a lot of highly academic,
very small people in the cohort.
It was generally just all Oxford Bridge

(01:14:15):
graduates in reality.
And there was a very big
difference between the ones
that were kind of, you
know, you knew they were wealthy
and you knew that they'd come from money
and the ones that hadn't.
And I do think like a
little bit of that struggle,
that grit, like does help you.
Because the biggest thing

(01:14:35):
that stops these companies
in reality is not their
inability to raise funding
or get product market
fit or whatever it is.
The biggest reasons
startups in the United States
just fail is the founder gives up.
The founder's like, this is too hard.
This isn't saying like, I
may as well just go work
for Google or Meta and
have like a very chilled life.
And it's very rational thing to do.

(01:14:56):
The ones that actually
persevere are the ones that
in times where it's
completely irrational,
where they're paying
themselves like 25K a year,
where they're like
getting hammered every day
and no one wants to give them money,
somehow find a way to push through.
So I do think like a
little bit of inherent,
like you've seen struggle and
adversity in life is useful.

(01:15:17):
But you've got to
caveat all this, don't you?
Like there's like obviously
massively successful people
that came from Eaton and
have done amazing things.
So, you know, it's interesting though.
Well, on that note, do you, I mean,
other than your first
year out of university
and in the nine to five working life,
are there any early
entrepreneurial spirit signs
that you remember like even as a kid?

(01:15:38):
Cause you know, sometimes I
can sense it even with like,
you know, friends, children or like my
cousins or something.
And they're like doing
something at the age of 10.
And I'm like, why are you doing that?
Like, where's your head going?
And they're like, oh, we
could do this and this.
And they're quite
innovative at a young age.
But I'm just curious
if you felt like that
innate feeling of...
Yes.
I think I grew up in

(01:16:00):
Sheffield, went to a state school
and I don't know, around like 15, 16,
you realize you kind of need money
and you realize you
need real people money.
So like, there's
actually like a 16 year old,
not that many
opportunities to make real money.
Yeah, like you're not gonna,
like no one wants to
work for minimum wage
and kind of do that.
So I had entrepreneurial endeavors.

(01:16:21):
I won't kind of disclose all of them,
that from a young age, I
was trying to make money.
Or I was like, I knew, yeah, I was like,
I'm gonna be successful.
Did things differently
or I was very unafraid
to break the rules, maybe.
Thinking outside the box.
Yeah, exactly.
But like even my
friends and I would like buy
12 packs of soda or pop,

(01:16:43):
if you're from Wisconsin, you
would call it pop obviously.
But we would just like
sell it to our friends
for $1 a can.
And then from what we just spent $4 on
for like an entire kid, we just made 12.
So there's your profit right there.
But those are those like
little signs that I think of
and I think of like that young
entrepreneurial spirit for it.
But going back to, I
guess the start of Clio,

(01:17:04):
if you were to, well,
there's two questions here,
but if you were to
launch it today, would you?
(laughing)
It's actually very
interesting the YC thing.
Like literally there's a call for
conversation AI startups
in personal finance.
So it's like, we would
be the hottest company
in YC right now.
Like if I was at YC and I was going to

(01:17:25):
demo day in two weeks,
we're gonna demo days in two weeks,
I would raise more than
my series A valuation.
I'd raise more money
than I did at my series A
and I'll be off to the races.
This is an amazing
moment to start a startup.
If you can say AI for anything,
if I look at all my
angel investments actually,
is AI for X, AI for X.
And there's just gonna
be so much disruption

(01:17:45):
and so many cool companies
built in the next 10 years.
There's never been a better time
as long as you're an AI founder.
(laughing) Don't do anything else, it has to be AI.
But yeah, it's really a special moment.
Yeah, and if you launch,
like so going back 10 years ago,
so not launching today,
but launching back in 2016,
would you have done

(01:18:06):
anything differently then?
Knowing now, I guess the last 10 years of
how things have worked.
100%, so we're a consumer company
and it's quite different from a lot of,
there's not actually
that many consumer companies
get launched and are successful.
A lot of companies you
see in startups are B2B
and there's always kind of
prevailing logic in startups
and there's like a folklore
and the folklore of
consumer was always like,

(01:18:27):
you just build it,
you get MAU, you get DAU
and then you monetize in like five years
and you do not think about revenue,
you do not think
about the business model,
it's about building this killer product,
has amazing retention, these amazing MAUs
and that's the only
thing you should focus on.
And where this came from
was ad business models,
like you're gonna build
Google, you add an ad model on it,
you're gonna build
Facebook, you're gonna add model.
It was always driven by

(01:18:49):
the best consumer companies
had just been ad businesses.
So if you're not going to
be an ad support business,
it's not the case for
building a consumer company,
you actually have to think
especially in something
where there's actually
a cost of goods sold.
So if you're in financial services,
you're selling something and you're
losing money every time.
So in my series B, I had
this beautiful exponential

(01:19:10):
weekly active user chart,
500,000 weekly active users,
growing faster in revenue,
growing faster than anyone else
and it was beautiful,
but COVID had just happened
or was just happening and we
work in Uber had just crashed.
So the meetings I went
into went from watch your WAU,
watch your attention
to watch your revenue,
watch your unique economics

(01:19:30):
and I didn't have any of that.
So the thing I would do going back
is I would think about the business model
way more deeply from the start.
And I think that's
the hardest thing to do
as a 24 year old as
well, like you know nothing.
Like have you even seen a piano before?
Probably not.
I don't think I had.
So anyway, if you're
building a B2C company
and it's not an ad supported business,

(01:19:52):
please, please think
right from day one
and try and have revenue
as your key metric, not just MAU,
because you'll get into this situation
where you then like,
oh my God, like I've got to
build this business again.
And that's very, very challenging.
And on that point as well,
I guess like when you're 24
and you're trying to
pitch this idea, you know,
like you said, you
would focus more on that.

(01:20:13):
Was there any point that you had realized
how much you have to pitch yourself?
Because also going back on your point of
like being a founder,
there's something in a founder
that makes them tick forward.
You know, if your idea
fails, you're still a founder,
you're probably going to
go on and do something else.
You have that nature to you.
And I sometimes find, speaking with
founders as well myself,

(01:20:34):
they don't beg themselves up enough.
And I'm like speaking to them and they
get kind of bogged up
in these numbers and like this thing.
I'm like, talk about you or what you did
and you made it happen.
And I'm just curious if
that's something at the age of 24
that you're able to do if
you don't have the experience,
but try and prove yourself worth without.
It would like, the two
things I always remember from EF
and it's like talking to VCs at the time,

(01:20:55):
it was like passion and ambition.
Like the thing with European founders
is they're inherently not as bullish.
They're way more conservative.
They aren't as ambitious and they aren't,
it's like they don't
come across as passionate.
And the way that manifested
for me when I was pitching,
and I'm sure the VCs that
got my pitch at that time

(01:21:16):
kind of remember and like
people still talk about it,
is I was just incredibly passionate
and I was incredibly ambitious.
Like this was going to be
a Google science company.
So I'm 24, I've had a
year's work experience.
And I remember telling Nicholas Zentrum,
I'm building a Google science company.
Like, I think I like I
disc Skype accidentally.
And I was like, I don't want to be Skype.

(01:21:37):
I was like, I want to build a huge, huge,
ginormous Google science company.
And that served me really well.
Like passion, ambition,
at the early stages is really important.
And the best bit of
fundraising advice I got
was actually from Tom
Blomfield at the time.
He probably didn't remember,
but I went to see him in
the one so early office.
There was like 30 of them there

(01:21:57):
and I'm like showing
them the landing page
and he's like, yeah, cool, whatever.
And we were talking about
fundraising and he's like,
I think you just,
the one thing you have
to remember from this is,
one, you show traction.
So you have to show up into
the right exponential graph,
whether it's like weight lists,
like whatever it is,
you have to show height

(01:22:17):
and you have to quickly
show there's something here
that's hot and interesting in the world.
And you demo it by this, this and this.
The second bit, which
is actually where like
BC should spend most time talking about
is the strategic
middle bit, which is like,
what should go to market?
What's the first product you launch?
How do you expand?
Like what's the
product going to look like
in the early stages, all these things?
He's like gloss over that.

(01:22:37):
Do not talk about any of
like the near term strategy
or what you're gonna do in the near term.
Don't talk about how
you're gonna make money
or acquire customers.
He was just like, pitch the
third bit, which is the vision
and tell everyone how you're gonna build
a Google size company.
Can't say how you're
gonna be bigger than Google.
Logically, coherently, you shouldn't be
having a VC meeting.
So I always just remember like,
even today if I'm

(01:22:59):
pitching a VC, it's like,
here's the traction,
forget about the messy middle.
I'm gonna build a Google size company.
And I think every single
founder should take that
as their kind of playbook for pitching.
And I see them get it wrong all the time,
like constantly, constantly.
Do you think founders lack,
some founders lack ambition

(01:23:20):
or did they lack the
confidence to be ambitious?
I mean, it's just, in
America, it's like inherently normal.
I mean, sometimes I talk to my friends
and like, why are you
asking me what my big dream is?
Want to just offer a pint?
And I'm like, I don't know.
And there's like,
especially in the, like,
my friend's going
through a YC at the moment
and she's pitching in two weeks

(01:23:42):
and she's telling me like,
what's happening in the batch?
And we just had like a
forum, which like a YPO
and we went into detail on it and it's
like so interesting.
Just everyone is
radically ambitious there.
And like, there's an
inherent culture of like,
you are gonna do big, big, big things.
So I think it is in the water
and it is in the locale,
the people you're with.
In London, go talk to your friends

(01:24:03):
about your start-up idea.
They will give you 20 excellent reasons
why this is a terrible idea
and you shouldn't do this.
And they're really good at it actually.
It's like so easy to be a cynic.
It's like so easy to be a critic
about anything that you're doing.
So inherently in Europe,
we're always like meeker,
weaker, less ambitious,
where America, actually China.

(01:24:23):
You look at China as
like a hundred year plan.
They always have a plan for
the next 50, a hundred years.
And if you look at their
plan from like 10 years ago,
20 years ago and what they actually did,
they execute on it really well.
So say you've got two
massive countries in the world,
the global superpowers,
they're radically ambitious,
that have a level of innovation
that is unheard of in Europe

(01:24:44):
and are like just not constrained.
Like especially in China,
they are not constrained
in terms of level, ambition, state
support, whatever it is.
So I think Europe has
just missed a massive
like ambition trap.
And I think we're like stuck in the
stagnation that we are
because there is a lack of
the most ambitious people
building ginormous Google size companies.

(01:25:06):
We're often like, we're
gonna build like the UK version
of X and that's never a good business.
So I don't think America has a problem.
I think Europe has a huge, huge gap
and like really needs to be sorted out.
I guess from my perspective, sometimes I,

(01:25:26):
if I meet someone, I can
sense that they have that.
They're not afraid to say it
or they don't wanna just
like tell someone they want
and maybe it's
because of what they receive
and feedback backwards,
but like they might have the ambition
to create a Google size startup.
But then if they say that out loud,

(01:25:47):
they don't want their 20
friends to tell them not to.
So I think the ambition might be there,
but I just question whether or not
it's just a confidence issue too.
It's the cultural norms,
it's what's in the water.
It's how we, even the VCs in Europe,
VCs are supposed to be the most risk on
ambitious people in the world, right?
They're the people that
are supposed to be investing
in the next Larry Sargay.

(01:26:08):
And if you pitch
European investors even today,
they're like, they're meek and weak.
They are like generally
like pretty unambitious
and pretty risk off, but
you should talk to a US VC
and like they're your projections.
Like where's the next 10X?
Like there's just such a gulf there.
And I do, I think it's coming.

(01:26:28):
I think like enough
capital and enough time,
like the ecosystem develops
and people start to learn the norms,
but the Valley's just done that for like
20, 30, 40 years now.
Whereas we have barely done a decade
and we're only starting to now
see the second generation companies.
So I do think it's
like changing slightly,
but it's just changing so, so slowly.

(01:26:49):
And this is like
massive risk we have in the UK
of people just leaving for America,
either to raise more capital
or just to start their business there.
And I think if Europe
can't get innovation, right?
Like it's just done as a continent.
Like the stagnation will not
support social safety nets.
It will not support the government
in any way, shape or form.
So if it can't get innovation,

(01:27:10):
it can't start
building these like ginormous
outlier companies.
It's like Europe is just
done and the UK is just done.
I always say Europe and
the UK in the same breath
because I do think of
us in the European Union,
but we're not.
But yeah, like I think
it's a European problem.
It's not a, it's not a
value problem at all.

(01:27:31):
So you moved clear to the US
and I'm sure there was a lot of reasons
that went into why you did that.
But what is this ambitious like culture?
The reason you did it, why
do you think it did so well?
I guess what was that whole decision
process looking like?
If you want to build a Google,
it's like a very, it's
like a very rational argument
for me and very logical.
It's like, okay, if you want to build a

(01:27:51):
Google size company,
you're gonna need a
massive TAM and lots of users.
Where's the biggest market in the world?
The US, where are the
best startups in the world?
The US, if you're gonna win
and you're gonna win globally,
you have to win in the US.
So like I inherently
knew I had to win in the US
and win globally.
And I had had a few like
great angels at the start of Clio
who were like hyper

(01:28:12):
ambitious like Nicholas Zenshroom
and Tavett and they were
always global, global, global,
which really helped me as
like a 24 year old in London.
So it was just natural for
me to launch and try and win
and be the best in America.
Not the best still, I'm
working out being the best.
And to all these what
I see startups come out

(01:28:32):
in the next few years.
Exactly, yeah, exactly, yeah.
Is there any reason
that you decided to stay
based here yourself though, in the UK?
I was actually gonna
move at the start of COVID.
So I was just getting my visa,
I was gonna move to New York.
Very excited, COVID
happened, everything got locked down.

(01:28:52):
And like, just because
of COVID and like travel
and how that all played out,
I didn't end up moving in the end
and I ended up spending time.
And then, you get kind of
financially trapped as well.
So in California, capital gains is,
you got the federal which like 20%,

(01:29:14):
you've got the 18 or more on top of it.
So in the UK, it was 20%,
now it's been raised to 24
and we'll see what happens with that.
But once you have enough,
once your company's
worth a certain valuation,
like that extra 20% capital gains is,
you're getting into like hundreds of
millions to territory.
So it does become like a
tax equation for you as well.

(01:29:35):
And probably like one
of the biggest advantages
the UK has is like lower
capital gains in San Francisco.
But when you're still like a series A
or a series B company,
you haven't made it yet,
but you're not even thinking about that.
It's only when you've like
been able to sell secondary
and have like a big valuation
that that actually
becomes part of the calculus.
So honestly, like I
would be in the US now

(01:29:56):
if it wasn't for COVID.
And the reason I'm not
just in San Francisco now
is because I'm just
seeing how the UK is going.
And I'm like, I really
feel like I can have an impact
and I can fix it.
And I would love to
build a $100 billion company,
HQ in the UK, pay tax in the UK,
hire people in the UK.
And I would love eventually,

(01:30:17):
to be that publicly listed company
that is like chartered that success.
I think Europe can turn it around.
I think it's really important for Europe.
So I think it's really
important for Western society
to have a strong
innovation economy in Europe
that's growing and economies are growing.
Because if you just
have the US with no allies,
it becomes a very bipolar world and a

(01:30:39):
very dangerous world.
So I think a strong Europe is really good
for Western democracy.
And it really scares me,
kind of like the
trajectory we're heading.
There's a little bit out there,
but I'm like genuinely worried about it.
And I think I can
have an impact in the UK
to turn that around.
That's good.
That's kind of an optimistic out for you,
wouldn't you say?
Keeping your roots
here, having Clio in the US,

(01:31:00):
trying to champion what's possible.
I think you can build a
trillion dollar company.
I thought it was,
especially in this day and age,
there is no reason a British
or French or German founder
can't build a trillion
dollar company in Europe today.
And I think we need those
kind of ambitious founders
and these ambitious
companies to set the way

(01:31:21):
and lead things.
And it's just so, if you
look at the economy of Europe
and how it's made up, it is made up of
centuries old banking,
legacy, oil, gas industries.
And because their
revenues aren't growing,
taxation isn't
growing, GDP isn't growing.
If you look at the US,
all of the biggest

(01:31:41):
market cap companies' revenue
is growing
tremendously, which drives GDP,
which drives taxation,
which drives their economy
and drives prosperity there.
And if you don't have innovation,
if you don't have a
company that is growing
at a really big clip at scale,
it will just continue to stagnate.
And if the economy keeps stagnating,

(01:32:03):
we're not gonna be able to fund the NHS.
We're not gonna be able
to pay for social security
and benefits.
And there's terrible things
that will happen in Europe
if we don't turn this around.
I'm just like, I'm
looking at the 10, 20 year view
and I'm like, this is bad,
this is bad, we need to fix it.
And maybe it's a little bit megalomaniac
to think I can be the
one that can fix it,
but we'll go there.
Yeah, but I guess

(01:32:23):
wouldn't you say that sometimes
during the hardest of times,
some of the most
greatest of innovation happens
to try to fix it?
It's just like yourself trying to say,
maybe you're ahead of yourself saying
you are gonna be the one to fix it.
But a lot of founders
are, they look on the,
I don't know if it's the bright side,
but they look on the
opposite side of things.
And they see this
very like bleak outlook,
this like scary tech 10 years, 20 years.

(01:32:46):
And instead of saying, we're all screwed,
they try to do something about it.
100%, yeah, and if you look at,
I don't know if I
rationalize it in my head,
like if you look at all
the generational companies
that have been founded,
they have largely been
founded in downtowns.
So they haven't been founded
at the peak of the hype cycle
when like life is good and
everything is kind of hypey.
They're generally founded in periods
where there's like
low capital availability

(01:33:08):
and such you can get a monopoly
and you don't have that much competition
and you can grow
really tremendously well.
And even you look at
like technology advancements
and innovation like from
nuclear and World War II
and just everything
came out of DARPA and ARPA
and all these kinds of things.
They do generally come out
of like big societal issues
and big societal governmental problems.

(01:33:30):
So yeah, I would definitely,
like you need optimists in the world,
you need people that are building things
and changing things.
You know, we're just
a bunch of Moany Brits
over on our shitty island
complaining about things.
So don't wanna be that.
Yeah, no, I think it's just,
someone said this to me a while back
and it's always stuck with me

(01:33:50):
is that the world is full of problems,
but with that, it just means the world
is full of opportunities.
But that's kind of just like the nature
of being a founder as well,
is you find this problem
that you've experienced
and you cannot stand.
You can't do it like, you
just can't do anything about it.
So you just try to do something about it.
And maybe that's just what fascinates me
about startups and founders in general.
I think there's like a

(01:34:10):
really visceral thing there
where you see a problem
and you get viscerally annoyed at it.
Like today in this
NHS counter fraud stuff,
they were telling me
like what the GPs are doing.
They were just
telling me about this fraud
that was happening.
And it was like, I was like getting--
So annoyed.
I was just getting so annoyed
like banging my hand on the table.

(01:34:31):
And cause they're in it for 20 years,
it's just kind of like
blasé to them and they know it.
And I think the people that
do actually make a big change
and the founders are the
ones that get pissed off
by problems and then go on to solve them.
I think they are the people in the world
that do actually make an
impact and do change things.
I'm not saying like everyone
else doesn't make an impact,
but there's generally, if
you look at human innovation,

(01:34:52):
it is like a fairly
small cohort of people
that have like moved the world
forward in like dramatic ways.
You know, you do need
those people in society
and they do think you look at history.
It is a small cohort that is driven
by a tremendous amount of change.
The outliers of the world really though.
Is there anyone, and I guess
that's a good question too,
is there anyone

(01:35:13):
entrepreneur, anyone outlier
that you've always looked up to, I guess
in the past 10 years
or your entire life?
Definitely, don't say you're the master,
don't say I'm joking.
To be honest, not really.
I think there's like,
there's historical figures
that have done
amazing things as presidents

(01:35:34):
or prime ministers or
leaders of countries.
There's a lot of individuals.
I don't think there's
like any one individual
like idolized and thinks amazing.
But it's all of them.
It's like the collective
history of like innovation,
progress has come from
thousand people, 100 people.
Like not that big, it's

(01:35:55):
probably way more than that actually.
Probably 10,000 people will go there.
But it's a fairly small cohort.
It's had a disproportionate
impact on society and life.
And for the better if we look at history.
That's interesting.
I think sometimes when I
ask people that question,
it's always like the basics.
Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates.
I don't know.
There's always these
different types of where it's like,

(01:36:16):
okay, but then what?
Some people, when I like
what some people tell me,
it's just like, don't
know my dad or my mom
or someone that they looked up to
because it was like they felt
that entrepreneurial spirit in some way.
I am curious as to how
you've handled growth with Clio.
So you mentioned a lot of gross ads
earlier on in this
conversation and 400 staff globally.

(01:36:37):
Is that right? Yeah.
How do you manage
something that was just once a seed
of an idea, something that
you really wanted to start
and change to now being
able to manage a team,
to be able to manage these expectations
and how do you just deal with that
pressure as things grow?
Yeah, people always talk about this.
I think it is very
correct, but they are these stages

(01:36:59):
and you can put a number on them almost.
It's like the first 10
people, the first 30,
the first 100, the first four,
they are these
different stages of being a CEO
and your job is radically different,
like so different in every stage
that it kind of blows your mind
and you have to quickly understand that,

(01:37:19):
quickly adjust all your ways of working,
quickly understand
what best practices are,
how to run an org, all
these kinds of things.
And different founders are
also suited to different stages
and more so than others.
And if you're gonna be a
successful long-term founder,
you have to really grow
and really grow with it.
So, the thing I always
say to founders coming up,
the thing that's gonna be the hardest
is not gonna be building a product,

(01:37:41):
the product strategy, the company
strategy, raising money.
It's not gonna be the code.
It's not gonna be
acquiring customers, any of that.
The hardest thing about
building an organization
is getting hundreds of
people to do the thing
that you want them to
do at a high velocity
and be happy and want to do it
and all grow in the same direction
and be hyped up about it.

(01:38:02):
And it's fantastically hard.
And we're only talking
about an organization
that's 400 people.
It's tiny in the scheme of things.
I don't know, Google was
very 50,000, maybe more.
They are different operating systems
and different ways of
working in each of them
and you have to master them.

(01:38:23):
The one coherent
thread through it all though
is just from being
your high school captain
of a football team, whatever it is,
to leading a team, it's the same thing.
It's like you need to give people energy,
you need to get people excited,

(01:38:43):
you need to get them
brought into the mission,
you need to build
enthusiasm and camaraderie
and relationships,
and those same skillsets
of you being the captain of this thing
or the leader of this little
thing when you're in school
to actually building a
massive organization.
It's quite inherent and
I think a lot of people
either have it or they don't in a way.
You can learn it, get better at it.

(01:39:05):
But I think that conviction,
ability to convince people,
ability to motivate
people is the hardest thing.
It's the hardest thing to do at scale.
People are the messiest.
Making them effective
is the hardest thing.
Everything else is secondary
and if you're really
analytical and logical,
you'll figure all
that out and it's pretty,
you don't even need to be that smart

(01:39:25):
to do all the rest of it,
but you need massive EQ and IQ
to try and get lots of
people to do the same thing.
And no one is born perfectly at it.
You do have to put a lot

(01:39:46):
of time and effort into it.
So I was more analytical,
so I probably say I wasn't the natural,
the natural lead on the people front,
but I've got very good
at it over time, I think.
Debatable with my staff.
Yeah, right.
But yeah, that's
probably the interesting thing.
Yeah, definitely.

(01:40:06):
And I think I guess when it grows
and if it quickly grows over time,
you also, it was like 50 to
200 people and 400 people,
like those are growing
pains in and of itself.
And I was listening to
a podcast the other day
about actually Steve Jobs,
about how much he was
championing the art of simplicity
and everything.

(01:40:26):
So product design,
marketing, advertising,
and also communication.
So I'm curious as to what
you think about whether or not
there's been a time that you accidentally
overcomplicated things,
or if you've had to keep
that simplicity in mind
when you're growing,
be direct, be communicative, be simple,
not overcomplicate things.
What are your thoughts on that?

(01:40:48):
I'm very direct and very transparent
and I try and keep things very efficient.
I would say though,
there are different
ways of building a company.
I think Apple is this
extreme outlier of like,
it's hardware, you
gotta be really kind of
thoughtful about quality and what you
ship before you ship.
You've gotta be like,
everything has to be

(01:41:08):
so simple and perfect.
And hardware just has
this inherent cycle.
If you're building like an airplane,
you gotta build it perfectly
because you're gonna kill people.
If you're building a B2C
product that's like kind of weird
and out there for like
a Gen Z and millennials,
don't build it like Apple.
Build it in a very fast, innovative way.
So I think there's
multiple ways to be successful
as in a company inherently.
And it depends on

(01:41:29):
what you're trying to do
and how you're wired.
And I think a different CEO
could have been successful
at Clio in a completely different way.
But you've kind of gotta make that choice
and then make sure
everyone in the organization
is brought into it.
Some people can't think you're Apple
when you're actually doing Clio
and it's very, very different.
Everyone has to understand,
we're gonna ship
stuff, we're gonna do tasks,
we're gonna like learn from

(01:41:49):
our customers very, very quickly.
So I think B2C
products, having lots of bets,
having like
complexity does come from like
doing lots of things, seeing what works,
learning with customers.
It's like the best way
to build a B2C product.
It is probably like the complete inverse
of how you build a spaceship.
If I built a spaceship, you

(01:42:09):
would not wanna get in it.
It would blow up very quickly.
Like one of those ones
that you would build in school
for like your race down
the river or something.
Exactly, and it would
not go well for anyone.
So yeah.
That's interesting.
Very different, but yeah.
Yeah, I think some people might say like,
Steve Jobs was a simple man.
Some people might say that

(01:42:30):
founders are just simple people.
But I would say it's quite
subjective, depending on it.
Like it depends on the business, it
depends on the person.
It depends on what
someone views as success
in the first place.
I think, I agree.
I think the thing
that they have in common
is they have a taste.
They have a view on the world
that they want to impose on the world,

(01:42:50):
for lack of a better word.
They say Steve Jobs had an aesthetic.
He had a point of view, he had taste.
And everything that lives in
Breathe Apple is his taste.
That office, he
designed like the bathrooms
in that crazy office.
Like there's an, kind
of, because it's your baby
and it's your thing,
it's like you're birthing
into the world, so it's your taste

(01:43:12):
that is going into the world.
Steve Jobs probably
had better taste than me,
giving it a clear in its
design language at the moment.
But I do think the very best founders
are so into the
product, so into the detail,
so into just everything about it,
because it's their baby.

(01:43:33):
And they've spent 10, 20
years, 30 years doing it.
So there's a common
thread that these people are
way too controlling, way too opinionated,
and really want to see their taste seen
and loved in the world.
And I think that is
very different to how most,
if all humans did that, you can imagine
what the world would be like.

(01:43:54):
It would all be arguing with
each other every two seconds.
No one would do anything for anyone.
It would be like absolute chaos,
but you do need like a
couple of these people
that are gonna like
rally and push their view
of the world forward.
I think it's interesting.
And those qualities and characteristics
that I find it quite interesting that,
you're talking about
founders and you said they,

(01:44:14):
but would you not lump
yourself into those views
and those tastes and
those characteristics
that you were just-- Oh, I'm like,
yeah, I'm the obnoxious megalomaniac,
control freak, imposing
his taste in the world.
Yeah, that's how this
podcast is gonna go.
Yeah, definitely.
Like I'm, I've got a
very strong point of,
my point of view on
the world is very simple.

(01:44:35):
It's like, they will be these agents.
They will be these agents in every major
domain of your life,
health, wealth, education, you name it.
But you're already seeing it say like,
"I live my life with O3."
Like, "I don't make a decision in my life
"without consulting O3."
Like, generally they use it
hundreds and hundreds of times
a day in like ways
that most people don't.

(01:44:55):
And I'm like, I'm like
an ultra power user of it.
And I use it incredibly
effectively and incredibly well.
And it's made me like
10 times more effective.
That agent will be in
lots of domains in your life.
You have multiple agents,
they'll do different things for you.
But I think the way you can computer,
is gonna computer and,
the way that we're gonna
interact with computers

(01:45:16):
through the next generations
is just how it's kind of
progressed from the last 40 years.
And 40 years ago, you had a mainframe,
you sat at a terminal in a big building,
you were attached to it,
you were holding to it
writing in like punch cards
and like basic programming languages.
And then you have like the PC
and it became like in your home,
a little bit more natural.

(01:45:37):
And it was still like a little bit weird
where it was command line.
And then you had a GUI,
which was like more natural, more human.
Then you had networks
and you had the internet
and you had mobile and
just basically computing
has evolved to be more and more human,
every bit of the evolution.
And the ultimate instantiation of this
is just like you have an agent,
you don't even have a phone,
like you just talk and
the screens around you,

(01:45:57):
you live your life.
And then it's just this
very powerful assistant
that can do immense
amounts of things for you,
that makes your life easier, simpler.
So you can accumulate
knowledge at far faster rate
and you can just do what a hundred people
would have taken to get done before.
So I am just so bullish on this,

(01:46:18):
like one single idea of agents
that everything I'm gonna do in my life
is gonna be fulfilling that vision.
And I'm either gonna be
right, I'm gonna be wrong.
And I think I'm looking like
I'm gonna be right these days.
So I think it's probably the
right kind of vectors go on.
And if I'm right, then
there'll be these like,
bigger than Google
companies in each of these spaces.

(01:46:39):
And I hope Clio is one of
them in financial services
and it'll do masses for society.
It will change how
people view their money,
live with their money or change their,
a change income inequality or change
like the number of
people that have savings
and people who are in
paychecks, paychecks,
it will fundamentally
reshape all of society
in so many important ways.
I don't know if you've used,
like I've used O3 for

(01:47:00):
health stuff recently
and it is, blows my
mind how much information
and how useful it is and
how much I can learn from it
so quickly.
And we're like two years into this,
like it's such early innings in AI.
I'm obviously like very biased
and drunk a lot more in Kool-Aid on this.
But I generally think this is like
how the world will change.

(01:47:21):
And if I'm gonna spend
my time doing anything,
why wouldn't I try and
tackle society's biggest problems
with the most interesting and relevant
important technology of my lifetime?
So good time to start
a company basically.
Yeah. TLDR.
Well, that actually was gonna lead me
to one of my final questions,
which I could probably assume
what your answer would be to it.

(01:47:42):
But if there was
someone today or tomorrow
who was 18 just out of high school,
24 just out of college, university,
whoever's listening to this,
depending on how you call it,
or even 40 and wanting to just like
break that traditional path
of their corporate career,
what would your advice be to them

(01:48:03):
to start to find the idea, to get going?
I mean-- Just goddamn do it.
Like, you just have to
jump in in these things.
And you, what a lot of people do
is they try and do what you're saying,
which is have the perfect idea,
have the perfect moment,
have the perfect business plan,
have aligned it all up
and thought about it.

(01:48:24):
And it's this like failure
to launch mode a lot of times.
I just went through this.
It was a good outcome with a
really good friend of mine.
And she is, her
background is like stunning,
like double first and PPE from Oxford.
Like she ticked every goddamn box
that you can ever tick in your life.
And she's very, very successful.
But you could see her as

(01:48:45):
she was starting to think
about selling a startup.
And she's radically
ambition, all these kind of stuff.
But it was like, like the McKinsey
consultant in her was,
there was a delay to launch.
And she like, it was just like,
I was just pushing
and pushing and pushing.
And she's amazing, it's fantastic.
And she like, she
launched and she should,
she raised loads of money
and she's doing amazing things.

(01:49:05):
But I think people that are very tracked
and very successful have like a,
they feel like they've got more to lose.
So if you're on a 300k salary at Google,
you've got more to
lose than the 24 year old
that's just gone off college.
But I think it's
really important for society
that that person on 300k at
Google or in private equity
or in investment bank or,
you know, or you name it,

(01:49:26):
like they should also
be starting companies
like the best and brightest in society
shouldn't get locked into these traps of
wealth accumulation,
ear being a lawyer, being PE.
Cause that's where all
the money is made generally.
If you come out of
these top institutions,
you'll go into hedge fund PE lawyer,
you'll try and make a ton of money.
And then they are actually
like a lot of the smartest,

(01:49:47):
brightest, most
ambitious people in the world.
And they get trapped in these zero sum,
like negative sum games where they may
accumulate 10 million
at the end of their career
or 20 million, whatever it is,
they'll work incredibly hard,
but they'll have no impact on society.
They won't move the ball forward at all.
They'll look back and be like,

(01:50:08):
that was like a grind and horrible.
Did I do anything good for humanity?
And like the answer is like largely no.
And I think that we have
this huge glut of people
based in the US and
the UK and across Europe,
where they get trapped in these moments
and they should be founders and they
should start companies.
So if anyone is one of those people,
like just take a year and just go do it.

(01:50:32):
Like your CV is actually
better having started a company
versus like missing that year at Google,
missing that year in PE,
like just go do it and yeah, like good.
If you're gonna make real wealth as well,
and you're gonna work really
accumulate power and wealth,
the only like meaningful way to get to
like hundreds of millions,
billions is actually

(01:50:52):
not PE or being a lawyer.
You're gonna get to like
10 million, whatever it is.
You wanna change the world
and have a huge amount of wealth power.
Sounds crazy again.
You have to build a startup
and you have to own equity in
a highly appreciating asset.
So for the most
ambitious people in the world,
I think getting to
that multi-billion status,
building a generational company

(01:51:13):
and then being able to use that
to do great things in society,
I think is the way to live your life
in the most interesting way as well.
You may as well try.
You may as well try.
Just try, that's good advice.
And that said, I
unfortunately are out of time,
but I think that that
advice, just try, just do it.
And maybe not live on

(01:51:34):
regrets is a good thing to end on.
Good name, love it.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you, Barney.
It was a good one.

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Barney Hussey-Yeo - Are founders just wired differently?

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Barney Hussey-Yeo - Are founders just wired differently?