Zarja Cibej, CEO and Founder of tech startup, myTamarin – Interview

Recruiting, Your career

Founder Zarja discusses with us how to help working parents at work, the childcare market and the benefits of learning to fail quickly

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It would be great to hear a bit about your own career journey in your own words.

I started my career in professional services as a corporate lawyer which I loved! But I wasn’t close enough to the action, so I wanted to move to the business side. I went to business school and did an MBA at Wharton. After that, I joined BCG where I spent almost a decade as a management consultant and absolutely loved it. I moved around with BCG a lot – I was in the States then in Israel, then in the Netherlands, then back in the States and then finally in London where I have been for the last few years.

It’s in London where I had my children and a lot of people think that, especially for women, once they have children, they just want to slow down or even stop working. But for me that was never an option. I’ve always loved working.

But if I wanted to continue to work, I needed to sort out my childcare and so I encountered the challenge of childcare. That’s how my Tamarin started.

Did you always have an entrepreneurial mindset or could you see this issue and thought ‘I’m going to try and solve this?’

It was a combination really. I come from an entrepreneurial family where my father has built and run a software development company. Ever since I was a teenager I was always involved in his business and was learning from him. But at the time I thought, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to have an amazing idea, which I didn’t think I had. 

I’ve learned two things since. First, it’s not about an amazing light bulb moment, it’s in fact all about problem-solving. And second, the idea is just 5% of the success; the 95% is hard work. But I never came across a problem that I felt passionate about until I had children.

I saw how broken the childcare market was first hand –  I became curious and I started researching the market. I also started experimenting by helping my friends, my parents find nannies and nannies find jobs. And, by the end of my second maternity leave, I realized that I was more passionate about solving this problem than the problems of my big clients at BCG. It was not easy to leave BCG because I loved the job! I still love the brand, but it was such a strong pull, so I resigned and started my Tamarin full-time.

Out of interest, what type of projects were you focused on at BCG?

I was mostly in the retail and consumer goods space. One of my clients was one of the biggest grocery retailers here in the UK and I worked with them on topics such as growth operations, organizational optimization and basically all aspects of the business.

It’s interesting that you already came from that very customer-centric point of view from your consulting, so when it came to childcare, you adopted the same attitude.

You’re right. I brought into childcare quite an analytical lens, but also a very customer-centric approach. 

That meant that our MVP was a very simple webpage that I coded myself in WordPress and put some money behind Google ads and pretended that it was an automated solution when it was not! But I got my first client that first day. So I realised that I was onto something.

We didn’t build this beautiful product first and then put it in front of customers. That was a really good way for us to put a viable product in front of customers, get their feedback early on, and then develop it further from there.

myTamarin has a few products including a consultancy arm, a B2B offering and the platform itself. Can you give an overview of who my Tamarin is?

So the name myTamarin comes from the tamarin monkeys that create parenting family groups to help each other when their babies are small. And this is what we do. It does take a village to raise a child. But we’ve lost that original village because of our global lifestyles. So we want to build a modern village for modern parents.

First and foremost, myTamarin is a one-stop-shop childcare platform, designed for both parents and nannies – they are our core customers. We find the best nannies, vet and train them, then match them with the right families. Then we support them with legal, HR, compliance and payment so that we create peace of mind and make this complex journey, very simple, fast, efficient, and delightful. That’s really the core of what we do.

Now on top of that, we’ve built a few interesting additional products. Firstly we now have virtual newborn support and sleep support. We actually had a virtual offering even before the pandemic. New parents are supported remotely by newborn experts and are guiding them through those early weeks or through any sleep challenges which any parent will know are the biggest thing when you have a baby. We help empower them to become the best parents they can be.

We also have the B2B arm – we offer our product to corporates so they can give it to their employees. We help working parents find care, which their employers are subsidizing. This is beneficial because balancing family and work is hard and childcare is a critical enabler in that equation. The pandemic has really exacerbated these challenges, which has opened a lot of doors for discussions with employers about this.

What have been the main pain points with starting this company?

Childcare is not a new market. It’s actually a very old market but that’s exactly the problem! It’s an old, archaic, manual market that lacks digitalization and generally technology and innovation. We’ve seen a lot of innovation in other industries over the last decade but childcare has been largely neglected. Even looking at the web pages, they look like they’re 10- 20 years old. Behind the scenes, the entire process is manual and labour intensive! Therefore parents and nannies are getting a suboptimal experience, and the service is more expensive than it should be.

Why do you think that there’s such a lack of innovation around childcare?

I have a couple of hypotheses. A lot of people feel that childcare is a female problem, although this is changing. And as we know there is a huge imbalance in terms of gender, among the investors. Investors are mostly men and we know that people like to invest into problems or industries that they’re familiar with and can empathize with. This has definitely changed over the last few years, but I think there has been a lag of investors catching up with the opportunities in the childcare market. 

Also, childcare is quite a high touch product. Childcare is typically the second largest expense of a family after a mortgage – it’s huge. And it’s about your most prized possession – your children. You’re not just going to go into an app and select your child’s nursery or a nanny like you would call an Uber driver. So much more is at stake. Very few people would buy a house without seeing it multiple times and having multiple conversations. Childcare is similar and so we don’t want to fully automate the entire process just yet, so to some investors it seems less obvious as an investment opportunity because it doesn’t follow exactly the same model as SaaS businesses.

But that’s definitely changing. We’re seeing more investment into this market over the last few years.

How do you approach creating a culture for the team?

When we defined our culture before the pandemic hit, what really stood out was empathy. The way we define empathy is ‘we don’t just listen, we hear you’. That is meant for our parents, for our nannies and for each other. This is how we treat our parents. This is how we treat our nannies. This is how we treat each other in our team.

During lockdowns, we found completely remote working at the beginning slightly challenging. For us, we realized that the remote was hard because we are in that stage of the business where we need to collaborate a lot and discuss new ideas and improvements all the time. If someone didn’t ask a question for six hours, that’s time lost and can impact the customer experience. We found that what works for us remotely is that we have this virtual office, which means that we have cameras on for the entire day. If someone has a question, they’ll ask; if someone has a suggestion, we’ll discuss it then. The entire team recognizes we’re just so much more productive that way.

With the team, how do you approach the topic of diversity and inclusion?

Interestingly, we actually have the opposite challenge to most companies as we are basically an all-female team. We’re having a really hard time attracting men. We find that women and especially mothers with younger children are very drawn to what we do because they can very much empathize. We’ve tried, and the reality is we probably forced a few male hires just to have men. And it actually didn’t work out. I think that’s perhaps one of our learnings is that you have to strive for diversity, but you can’t really force it.

Do you have any advice to other companies about making sure they are inclusive for working parents, what would you advise them to do?

We know that working parents are on average very loyal, efficient and experienced employees, and employers should therefore try to retain them. We know from our own research that the most important things for working parents are flexibility and child care. If they don’t have childcare, there’s no way that they’ll be able to work.

In London, parents are spending anywhere from £20,000 more a year on childcare full. Corporates need to understand that they need to give parents time and resources, either educational or indeed financial. Some corporates in the US have started giving working parents some cash allowances to address specifically childcare.

And how about in the startup space?

Parents need flexibility. But the challenge with flexibility, or actually any benefits, according to our research, is that employers are struggling with benefits for working parents only because they don’t want to actively positively discriminate. By providing childcare support to working parents, you’re giving them a bit more than you’re giving to others. So employers need to find the right balance of benefits and support for everyone.  

We’re not suggesting that every employer should financially support the parents, but empathy, understanding, support and education around childcare options are quick wins. Financial support is the cherry on top. 

myTamarin has done research about how the pandemic and how it affects working parents. Why did you do that and what were the main takeaways?

As a parent myself and through all our clients, we have felt the pressure of the pandemic and this new setup on working parents quite acutely. At the same time, we felt that this pressure and struggles just weren’t as obvious to other people that were not in this space. We were trying to quantify how no childcare and no schools was affecting working parents. 

At the end of April, the results were quite bleak. The majority of parents were just not coping! This was something that we wanted to make sure their employers understood. P­arents were doing everything to NOT show that they were struggling because they didn’t want to be furloughed or have their promotion delayed. But behind the “Zoom curtain” the reality was different. We wanted to show that blind spot to employers.

And we empathize with employers too because it was such a massive change. How do you actually move everything online and make sure your bottom line is protected too? It was hard.

We did the second part over the second research toward the end of last year and unfortunately, nothing had changed. Employers were still offering this unprecedented level of flexibility, but for parents, that just wasn’t enough. Parents need childcare. If they don’t have childcare, they can’t do the work. For working parents, childcare is a very much needed infrastructure, just like public transport is to all of us. Explaining the magnitude of this to employers was really powerful.

If you have to give other founders one piece of advice, what would it be?

Get comfortable with failing. The only way you can actually get feedback, learn and progress is by offering your product to the market, and basically letting potential users throw darts at you. And that’s painful! We don’t want to go out there to be told this is not right. We go out there because we want to create something really amazing! But you really need your users or potential users to participate in the building of your product. My personal barometer is if I’m not a little bit ashamed of what I’m putting out there, I’m probably too slow.

– Thanks so much for your time, Zarja!

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Ex-Amazon Co-Founder & CEO of Perchpeek – Interview

Recruiting, Your career

Disrupting the ever stressful renting process, Paul talks to Lara about his career from dipping his toes into investment banking, Amazon and eventually starting Perchpeek, an app helping employee relocation become quicker, cheaper and happier.

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Please could you take us through the start of your career?

I studied PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford and when I arrived, people had already done a few bits of work experience. I felt like, ‘wow, people are really on it here – I need to sort my career out’. The main work experience seemed to be in investment banks, the biggest active mis-selling you’ll ever see! They basically wine and dine you and pretend that it’s not too bad. Off the back of that, they interview you and you get a summer internship. So I was at Credit Suisse for one summer in the Investment Banking team, which if you ask anyone who knows me, was a dark time in my life (laughs). A lot of crazy hours! But you definitely learn a lot – I still got a few Excel shortcuts in the back pocket from that.

Also, I realised I didn’t want to work for a company that was doing stuff for other companies, like professional services – you’re so disconnected from what the company’s actually doing. So that was actually really useful because it basically wrote off this massive group of companies.

After university, I went traveling with my Credit Suisse earnings – a big positive from investment banking – when a recruiter called about roles at Amazon. So I worked at Amazon for about three years. But I always had this itch in my mind about Perchpeek, so after Amazon, it felt like the best time to start it.

Where did that itch to start Perchpeek come from?

When I was travelling with my partner, a lot of our friends were moving to London and having quite a painful experience. Have you relocated yourself at some point?

Yeah, when we first met, I was moving house and I’ve moved house since. So yeah I’m familiar with how painful it can be!

I think it’s quite a common issue which is why there’s lots of startups in the space. We moved to London and it was just so fragmented! So we started doing a few bits and pieces in the space, trying to find a better way. A few big pivots later, this is where Perchpeek is now.

Did you come from the angle of ‘this is a really good idea – we should start a company to solve this’?

No, it was analytical in terms of ‘I’d like to start a company’. When I was looking for jobs, I realised I might as well start a company on the side if there’s no overheads of doing it.

I wrote down three different idea, but the renting idea felt like the biggest problem and most tech involved.

I had always been loosely interested in entrepreneurship. Plus, I could just spend loads of time learning about basic website development and ‘get out the room’ as they say in startup land.

After Amazon, you were part of a prop tech cohort / incubator. How did that work out and what effect do you think that had on you being able to launch a business?

Really useful! In 2017, when I was still at Amazon, we had a few customers with a very rudimentary product. So we tried fundraising and found PI accelerator. The most useful aspect was meeting other companies who were equally clueless as us and figuring it out together. When you’re in the startup ecosystem for a while, it becomes quite easy to meet people and network, but when you’re not inside, you don’t know anyone.

We were also lucky because it just de-risked the whole experience for us. People always said to me I can’t believe you left Amazon to start a company. It was part of a £200k fundraise where we knew we could at least have a year of doing stuff. Plus, they had some really great experts who helped with things like legal and GDPR and accounting and just all of the stuff that you don’t think about, but, ends up catching up to you now the line.

Now that you’ve had Perchpeek for a few years, what would you say have been your main pain points of being a founder?

Good question. Firstly, choosing what to learn yourself vs what to find others to help with. Most founders want to do lots themselves, but it’s not the best idea to spend months learning to code or learning digital marketing or whatever it might be. At Amazon and other corporates, time is somewhat directed for you. Whereas as a founder, what am I going to do to today?

Secondly –fundraising is stressful and hard. You develop a very thick skin after hearing ‘no’ a lot. Plus, you’re not necessarily improving the business – even if it’s good to get smart people giving their insights into the company.

Are you fundraising at the moment?

No, we’re not – which is probably why I’m in such a good mood! We just finished one round at the end of last year so now we are going into execution mode. I’m really enjoying getting stuck in again, plus our team is growing quite a lot. That’s something else on my mind – how do we make sure that everyone is pulling in the same direction?

How many people are on the team now?

There’s 32 of us now. Since I first met you, we pivoted our business. We now take on a lot of the operational complexity of relocating. We organise all your viewings for you, your shipping quotes, short-term accommodation, long-term accommodation, council tax, banking – anything to do with your relocation. It’s a lot more hands-on which means we need a lot more people.

I remember when we were speaking last, you were looking to build out your B2B offering because it was currently a B2C company. How did that progress?

Originally, we connected you to a great home but you would liaise with the agent / landlord. But we learned that actually people didn’t like that, along with all the other pain points in the relocation process. So, we built out that side of the product so we could support all of this.

But we had two main issues – firstly, we weren’t making very much money, which isn’t great for a business running out of money! And secondly, it’s really hard to locate people who are looking to move.

So we realised companies know when employees are about to move and it’s a great benefit to support people that are relocating. So that’s been a great pivot for us!

Has your focus always been on international moving, as opposed to within London?

Initially it was within London but then we realised our sweet spot was people moving to London or outside of London. Now it’s mainly internationally, although about 50% of our moves are US because the US is so big that state-to-state relocation has a lot of the similarities with international cross border moves.

Have you fully launched in the US now?

Yes – we’re active in 47 countries now, which sounds very grandiose! But in reality, it’s a good way to launch internationally without loads and loads of overheads. Even if we’re only moving a few people to each of those countries.

So you’re actually physically moving people?

We’re actually moving people. For somewhere like Japan, we need stuff in the app! Initially we have freelancers so we don’t have to hire people in every country especially where we don’t have very high volume. But it helps us grow horizontally and build out an international company, which is in keeping with our new mission of helping people move around the world!

How do you balance having an international company with establishing and encouraging a healthy company culture?

We used to think a good culture was everyone sitting in one room going for drinks, team lunches on a Friday, events etc. It felt a lot easier, right? You see people all the time! Now we’ve realised you have to put in more intentional effort to build a culture. We are doubling down on written communication so that people in different time zones aren’t left out. Plus we focus on mental health and provide access to resources.

Also post pandemic (if you dare to dream), we won’t return to full time in the office. Instead of having someone trek in for an hour just to sit there with headphones on and reply to emails and then commute an hour back, we want to focus on good quality company and retreat. We’re excited about building a new culture in this new space!.

How did you realize that culture needed to be more intentionally put together?

I think it was a feeling and then we asked everyone and then it was like… okay, we need to do something different! We had a big issue in terms of communication around company goals and objectives. It’s quite easy when you see each other every day, but suddenly you don’t see anyone! Someone in Sales might not speak to someone in Operations. So the more we asked, the more we saw this is definitely a big issue! So we’re just trying to improve our communication and understand what benefits work in a remote world and then post pandemic, what does this hybrid work model look like?

We’re seeing more companies come to us with advice around culture in terms of diversity and inclusion. How do you approach that within your company?

This was a really big issue when we focused on hiring people in London, whereas now we hire from all over the world. We just naturally have a more diverse pool of applicants because we’re open to hiring people from any geography. It was quite a learning curve for us because it really showed which unconscious biases we did have. Instead of looking at someone’s CV, judging companies, judging education, you don’t have any of those in-built prejudices!

Also, I think what is typically defined as a good culture (in-person, beers on a Friday, team-building aspect) doesn’t actually work for everyone.

Yeah, it’s definitely exclusive – it doesn’t work for people with kids, people who don’t drink.

Exactly! I think underlying the conversation around returning to the office is that people are worried about losing that culture. But that culture doesn’t work for everyone. And baked into that model is the notion that people who succeed are these social butterflies who are good at – what’s that phrase? – greasing palms or rubbing elbows (laughs).

We definitely wouldn’t say that we have solved it but we’re finding that by being open to recruiting internationally, we are becoming more diverse.

That’s great! One final question – if you had to give one piece of founder advice, what would it be?

The main one for me would be don’t be afraid to pivot and be honest when stuff isn’t going well.

Once you go out, raise some money and get committed, it’s quite hard to actually step back and say ‘what have we learned here? Are we going down the right path?’ I think we could have grown or been successful a lot faster if we’d been honest. I think being willing to fail quickly and pivot helped us grow faster.

That’s great advice! Thanks so much for your time Paul and speak soon!

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Ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-BCG Co-Founder of Mustard Seed – Interview

Recruiting, Your career

Alex Pitt, Co-Founder of Mustard Seed shares his career journey and his experience of co-founding a VC fund.

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Could you start by talking us through your career?

Consulting was a relatively short period of my career. It was 3.5, close to 4 years in total with Boston Consulting Group. I started out as an undergrad at the London School of Economics, which is where I met one of my closest friends and now my business partner, Henry Wigan. We met playing tennis just behind LSE on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. That was the seed for our friendship and our business partnership.

I started my career in investment banking, not because I thought it was the right career decision necessarily, but just that it was what everyone was doing. I jumped on the bandwagon – looking back, do I regret it? No, I don’t, but I think if I’d known about management consulting at undergraduate level, I would definitely have prioritised applying to the top consulting firms over investment banking. But I did meet some really interesting people and that Goldman Sachs network I was a part of does still raise its head in all sorts of different ways. I think the breadth of skill set in consulting would have been superior. Still, I was very fortunate to get an offer from Goldman Sachs. I applied to 20 banks or more at the time, and got rejected by almost all of them.

I spent a couple of years at Goldman Sachs. I realized quite quickly that I wasn’t cut out to be a banker. I don’t think I was very good at it. I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. Within about a year, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. I didn’t really know – I think I’m still inching towards what I really want to do now. But back then, I didn’t have a clue. I thought business school was a good way to experience people who’d worked in all sorts of different areas. I’d always wanted to live and work in the US so I thought, “why not apply to a couple of top US business schools?” because the concept of an MBA was born in the States. And I was extremely fortunate to get accepted to Stanford and had an amazing couple of years there.

That was really a very transformative time in my life. I met my wife, Alyson, during my time there. She was, and hopefully will be again soon now that the boys are a bit older, a neonatal intensive nurse. My Stanford friendships and my LSE friendships have been real pillars in my career. I love this confluence of networks. I grew up with this perception that your personal and professional networks were completely separate things, and it just becomes more and more apparent to me every day that they are completely overlapping. There’s huge value in every conversation I have with friends and colleagues as I get more experienced in my career. Much of it is also about soul searching and practical tips on career progression.

I had an amazing two years at Stanford but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. Now I’m obviously an entrepreneur but back then, I didn’t really have that at the front and centre of my mind. I was quite young when I went to business school. I guess I was still in that phase of career building blocks, for better or worse. I thought, management consulting, working for one of the top firms, would be a great building block for my career in terms of what I learned and who I met. That who part of it was really important if I was to be guided by them in business. I wanted to have people I could be inspired by and who were great to work with. Frankly, I think that’s where I’ve got it wrong in my career before: I made that judgment poorly and thought someone was going to be great to work with, but they didn’t turn out to be quite so good.

I was quite keen to stay in the US after I graduated from Stanford. I’d done a summer internship with BCG in Chicago, and I had an offer to join them permanently there, but I actually moved my offer from Chicago to New York and joined them full-time there. And that was great fun. It was really good, joining BCG post business school, especially in New York. A bigger office exposed us to all sorts of different projects across different industries. We worked with Sony BMG on a marketing effectiveness study. We worked with United Nations in defining their country strategy. I also worked with Loblaw’s, a big retailer in Canada, and with Wrigley on whether they should get into chocolate instead of just making chewing gum. It was pretty wide-ranging, and really interesting. Then I had an opportunity just after Alyson and I got married towards the end of 2008 to move to the UAE, which was an adventure, and we thought it would be quite nice to start married life on neutral territory, somewhere new for both of us.

Really the intention was to go for a year, but we got to Dubai and thought it was pretty fun for this stage in our lives. We ended up staying for almost six years. At that time, in my early thirties, I was starting to think about doing something a bit more different – maybe a bit more interesting, maybe a bit more entrepreneurial. And quite accidentally, I was contacted by a former BCG partner who was creating a new group within Mubadala, which is now a very large Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, but at the time was small; just being established. He was building a strategy and portfolio management team and it just all sounded really interesting.

I joined Mubadala, and spent 5.5 years in different roles and increasing seniority, always focused on driving change projects. I really enjoyed the network aspects and the project management aspects of getting things done and seeing meaningful improvement or change through my activity. This is something that I’m sure you hear from many consultants; consulting is really interesting and you work with great people, but you deliver a presentation and sometimes lose sight of what that actually yields in terms of client output. It was great to bring some of my BCG skillset and networks to a job where you were with a principal investor, which had hundreds of millions, now billions, under management. I could, for example, sit down with our CFO and say, “Okay, why have we got 80 portfolio companies across the world, all buying the same things? Let’s set up a joint procurement initiative.”

We actually brought in some specialist consultants to help us with that, and created a team. We could drive ongoing savings in common areas of spend such as consulting services, travel, as well as indirect areas. We did exactly the same thing with shared services. Why would we need 80 portfolio companies all with their own accounts payable, HR, payroll, IT support functions? We centralized, and that drove quite a lot of efficiencies. That’s a bit of a whistle stop talk through the first phase, or the first 15 years, of my career.

The latter stage, Mustard Seed was, as I said at the beginning, a function of my close friendship with Henry. We’d always wanted to do something together since our university days and it took us 15 years to get around to it. I’m very glad that we did finally get around to it – I think if we’d left it too much longer, it would have been too late. He was at BlackRock, so he’s a proper investor. I’ve learned on the fly about venture investing and to be honest, many of the aspects that I most enjoy about what we do at Mustard Seed are around business development, network development, investor relations…

Both of us were at a time in our lives where we were looking to do something more entrepreneurial, more meaningful with our careers. I could see myself drifting for another 15, 20 years in the Middle East and waking up at age 60 and thinking, “What just happened? What have I been doing here?” Henry has his own very personal story. He was a very good investor in hedge funds, most recently with BlackRock in London managing lots of money, but also thinking, “What is this all for? I’m investing in companies that aren’t really doing much to improve the world.” I think BlackRock has come on a long way now in their identity around this. We decided initially to try and create our own business, like Movemeon has done very successfully, but we didn’t have any good ideas, and were getting very frustrated. We spent about six months on Skype at the time, which no one seems to use anymore.

I think the best idea that Henry had, and this was the best idea that either of us had, was bottling Swiss mountain air and selling it in China, which I think someone is now doing quite successfully. Long story short, we thought we’d live vicariously and find other people with much better ideas than we could ever have. It happened really quickly. We just started showing up at universities where we had friends; went to Oxford, London Business School and London School of Economics, etc where we had friends who were running entrepreneurship clubs. At the beginning, the explicit goal we have of now backing entrepreneurs who have a social purpose wasn’t front and centre in my mind; I think it was much more so in Henry’s mind. It all happened quite subconsciously for me at the beginning, as we were rocking up at universities saying we had £20,000 of our own money to invest in one or two interesting startups.

These meetings became really big events where we had 100-150 students, often our age, often more experienced than us, sending us their business plans and really keen to chat. We were really intimidated and overwhelmed by this initially. We still are in many ways actually, but that’s how it all started. We made a couple of investments in companies that we thought had a really important social purpose to why they existed. Our friends then got involved, and this informal network of friends started coalescing around what we were doing. Before we knew it, it was taking up all of our headspace and all of our time. Maybe we couldn’t concentrate on our day jobs anymore. I think we both knew by the end, in early 2015, that we couldn’t in our heart of hearts continue doing this as a side gig; that it had to be all or nothing.

It was quite scary for us because we both have children. To move away from financial security, at least in the short term, was quite scary. My wife grew up in Mississippi where her father had the same job his whole career, and there was always a sense of security around that and change was quite scary initially. I think one of the great things about it now is it does, as entrepreneurs, afford us the flexibility to work the hours that we want from where we want. I can’t imagine a big corporate that would have allowed me to move to South Alabama, which is where we are now to be near my wife’s family for a couple of years while our boys are young. That’s the flexibility I really cherish and I feel very grateful for. Then there’s a sense of purpose with what we’re doing. It’s been five years now, we’ve got 35 companies that we’ve invested in across Europe, all doing, we think, really important things. Not all of them have been successful sadly, but some have been really successful, and just observing their progress, hopefully playing an important role as investor in those companies, has been really rewarding. Often, we’re on the boards doing what we love doing, which is connecting dots within the network, and trying to bring valuable people to those important things the companies are working on.

I’m very input driven in how I work. Henry’s much more output driven. I think it’s quite a good combination actually. And I really enjoy it.

Where does the name Mustard Seed come from?

Henry’s wife came up with the suggestion because of the parable of the mustard seed in the Bible. We thought it was a really nice analogy for what we do, and actually it turns out that mustard seed is referenced in quite a lot of different places, not just in Christianity. There are novels like Don Quixote, and mustard seed is used in quite a lot of cuisines as well. And it’s just a little bit different. A lot of the other investment firms have fairly boring names with references to harbours, stones or mountains. We thought Mustard Seed was a fresh young kind of name for what we were trying to do – very importantly, playing the role of guardian / mentor / friend / partner on the journey from being a seed to a company.

What would you say helped you take the risk of starting your own thing?

It was now or never in a way, not to put it too starkly. There was a sense that we were at the right stage of our lives where our kids were still very young, but we had the prospect of a very high cost of living soon. If we pushed things back a few years, we would have been taking a bigger financial risk. I also explored a couple of big corporate roles and I had a really interesting offer from a very large multinational to come back to the UK and be Head of Strategy for Europe for them. That just wasn’t right for me, my heart wasn’t in it. I went through the process and it was a really great, well-known household name brand, and it was a very senior role, but I just couldn’t bring myself to sign with that organisation.

If you were to give just one tip to other people trying to start out on this journey, what would it be?

You never know until you try in life. It may feel very uncomfortable, especially if someone’s built up a very successful career with large corporates and in consulting – but even if they give it a try and their startup fails, which most companies do, they’ve got a few years of valuable experience. That individual is 43 instead of 40 or 53 instead of 50. And what’s that in the context of a long life and a long career? These are really valuable experiences we get and otherwise there’s going to be that sense of not having tried something.

Otherwise, it’s really important to be guided by and work with good people. I’ve always had a sort of guide, and it’s been amazing having Henry as a close friend and co-founder. We work in different ways, as I’ve said, but he’s also been great as a sounding board for me and I for him throughout the process. There are people who can do it without a co-founder, but that’s rare.

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