#97, Tim Levy, Founder and CEO @ Twyn: Being a Fifteen-Time Founder

0:00Well, firstly, I'm hoping that with Twin, we will build a user-generated content platform platform so that you, me, and everyone on the planet can build their own authentic twin. And then when they're in their armchair age 75, they can talk to the 21-year-old version of themselves.

0:26This episode is a real deep dive into the career of a serial investor and entrepreneur. walking away from a huge salary in the city of London in the late 90s. Tim Levy just knew. He just had that feeling that there was more out there for him. It just did not feel right. He left that job in insurance with nothing to go to and ended up taking a step into the entertainment industry of all places, ultimately growing a very successful business, financing film productions, amongst them a couple of Hollywood blockbusters as well. Fast forward to today, and Tim has 15 business ventures under his belt, has invested millions of pounds of his own money in startups across a really impressive portfolio, which includes notably MyTwin, a digital interaction platform where celebrities interact with fans and others on a hyper-realistic immersive platform.

1:23This is really impressive, I can assure you. It was incredible to chat about that. We discuss also the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, investing on conviction alone, something that Tim has tended to do over the years, and what Tim looks for in a prospective investment. Some really important pieces of wisdom there. And we also talk about what Tim is most excited about and also most fearful of in relation to the growing artificial intelligence boom. This one is a real treat. Tim is a fountain of knowledge. I took so much value from this. I could have spoken to him all day. It's Tim Levy.

2:06Tim, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders Podcast. I've been really excited to talk to you. First of all, we always start with this question. What does good leadership mean to you, Tim? Yeah, great question. I think a good leader is a good listener. I think the first thing about leading is you have to speak widely, choose obviously who you're speaking to carefully. You have to take on board a lot of information. But at the end of the day, you have to be decisive. So you've got to make decisions. You can't beat around the bush for too long. And you've got to be prepared to carry the weight of those decisions and carry through what you've determined is the right path.

2:47You've also got to be a good communicator. I've seen an awful lot of people running businesses, super smart people, often struggling to get others to go on the journey with them. So decisiveness, taking people on the journey, communication skills, loyalty, ambition, obviously. I mean, most leaders are naturally ambitious and competitive anyway. Not necessarily visionary. You know, that can help as well. And I think having strength of character. So any leadership role, you're going to be challenged a lot. You're going to make a lot of mistakes. People are going to look to you and be afraid. You've got to be able to show people that you can deal with whatever is thrown at you and lead the organization through that.

3:39Can I quickly zoom in on one part of that, Tim? Obviously, you've been in leadership roles for a long time. Taking people on the journey with you, that's a very important point. But it's easier said than done, okay? obviously you're ambitious you're a visionary you've got goals some of these people don't have that work for you they have different goals away from their professional life how do you take people on the journey but i know it's a very broad and it's very different for every individual but but in terms of you in terms of how you get your team on board with what you want how do how would you how do you typically go about that if i think of the organizations that i've been part of I've been a founder 15 times.

4:16So that means I've been at the ground floor assembling the first few members of the team on 15 different occasions. So those first few members of the team are absolutely crucial because it's really impossible to have more than five or six direct reports in any organization. So those first five or six people who are in key management roles as you build an organization are fundamental. So if I look at Twin, my number two, my COO is amazing. And he's the person who day to day is communicating with all the people in our organization. So you need an incredible people person who's just super good at getting people motivated, excited, passionate.

5:07I see my job as trying to be inspirational, you know, having the vision, setting the strategy, explaining to people what we're doing and why we're doing it, hopefully getting them excited about that. But I think leadership is not an exact science. It's an art. And it's a constant job of working with people to help them to see why there's tremendous value in what they're doing and why what they're doing is really rewarding. But, you know, it's endless. It never stops. Very well said. Okay, Tim, some of the listeners would be unaware of yourself. Please, can you give us a little bit of an introduction on how you pursued the vocational direction that you ended up pursuing?

5:49I already mentioned that I've been a founder 15 times. I guess I knew pretty early on in my career. I mean, I was employed at one point in time in the insurance industry, believe it or not, until I was about 26 years old. And I was 26. I joined the company when I was 19. There were five of us. By 26, there were 105 of us. And I'd learned a huge amount from my boss. And I went to see my boss one day and I said, I'm quitting. And he said, you're not quitting. I said, I'm quitting and I'm leaving the industry. And he said, I don't believe you. You're just quitting to steal the clients and go to another company.

6:28And I said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand me. I am leaving the industry. He just would not believe me. And I made some very arrogant statements like, you know, the canvas of the insurance industry isn't big enough for me to be able to draw on or some nonsense like that. And, you know, because the insurance industry was very sort of, you know, old school tie and very, not really at that time, very much into innovation. And I quit. And I mean, to give you some sort of idea, I was 26, I was earning£200 ,000 a year. So I'm 54 now, that's 28 years ago. So£200 ,000 is probably the equivalent of what, £800 ,000 today?

7:12Yeah. So I quit with no job to go to. So my 800 ,000 equivalents, and I was having a great lifestyle, and I quit. Bloody hell. You must have really believed in your own ability to do that. Well, I just knew that what I was doing wasn't right for me. It didn't make me feel happy. I applied for a job advertised in the Financial Times. And I went along for the interview, and the job was selling structured tax products for a boutique. And they offered me a job at 50 ,000 a year. I took the job. And the first day that I arrived, the government announced new tax law that killed the structured tax product they'd been selling.

7:58God, sorry, I shouldn't laugh. You must have been spitting. And on the same day, they announced accelerated tax relief for investment in the film industry. And I knew nothing about film. Well, around what time was this, Tim? July 1997. I knew nothing about film. I knew nothing about tax. And I sat down with my new boss and we sort of sketched out some ideas of a product we could create. About a month later, he came to me and he said, I'm selling the company. I want you to form a new company. Take all this film stuff that we're working on. And after I finished selling the company, I'll come and join you.

8:37And so I did. I moved out of the office, took the staff. And a month later, he'd sold the company. He came to me and he said, look, I've sold the company. I can't come and join you because I've been indicted for tax fraud in Denmark. He was Danish. So he said, just pay me a royalty. If you ever managed to do a deal, he probably expected that I never would. Pay me a royalty. So I did a first deal, paid him his royalty, did a second one, did a third one, paid him his royalty. Then he said, look, Tim, just pay me 250 ,000 pounds. I'm gone for your hair forever. So I did. That was in 1998. That business ended up raising over$10 billion.

9:20Billion? Billion. Over the next 17 years, producing, financing, and distributing over 600 films, including Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3, The Bourne Ultimatum, Jurassic World. I mean... The big Hollywood blockbusters. Loads of big blockbusters. I mean, I think we did$3 billion worth of films with Walt Disney, probably$2 billion with Universal. That company was my first... It was only around for two or three years, and then it was succeeded by another company called Future Capital Partners, which was doing substantially the same thing. So we would have called ourselves an arranger of investment.

10:02so we sat between film companies like the big hollywood studios and like independent producers who were looking to raise money for their film projects and typically they would have most of the money that they needed to make the film but they needed somewhere between 10 and 20 percent to finish their financing. And my company would then, without getting into too much detail, structure a way in which the film could be made, which would bring tax benefits to UK investors, the value of which would be shared with the filmmaker. And that would provide them with the rest of the money they needed to make the film.

10:47Between Factor 8 and Future Capital Partners, $10 billion worth of films. Obviously, I got to know the film business extremely well. We also did television. I also eventually got involved in the live entertainment business. And when you're in a business and involved at the end of the business, which is the packaging of projects, you get to meet everyone. You get to meet the talent. You get to meet the behind-the-cameras people. You get to meet the agents, the lawyers, the banks, everyone who's involved in that process. So I got to know the entertainment industry extremely well. It's one of the hardest industries in the world.

11:27It's an industry where if you're an outsider, it's extremely difficult to make money or even to understand the way the industry works and what's going on. And in many respects, to be so successful, I mean, to give you some idea, Future Capital Partners probably generated fees of 800 million pounds over a 15-year period. I mean, enormous amounts of money. That didn't all end up in my pocket, sadly. No, of course. You had investors and stuff by that point, I'm assuming. I had no investors, in fact. Amazingly, that business, there were two of us who invested. And I think we put in a total of maybe four million pounds between us, pretty much the same amount each.

12:19And that was the only money that was ever invested in that business. I had no venture capital in that company. I had no outside investors. So, you know, we ran it entirely ourselves and I bought him out in 2007. So obviously amazing to start with that much luck. And I think, Gareth, it's a really important point for your listeners to stress. But actually, Tim, can I stop you there? It doesn't sound like luck to me. You had a lot of hardship early on and you obviously just kept on persevering. And then your luck turned. Do you know what I mean? So I think it was testament to your, obviously you having that moment where you knew that the insurance industry and that job was not right for you.

13:03walking away from an enormous salary, knowing that it was the right decision, that sort of shows me that you deserve that success because you took that chance, you know. So, yeah, that's a fantastic anecdote. It's a good question for your listeners and anyone to ask themselves, who in that situation, you know, with that big salary that I had and, you know, having, frankly, quite an easy life and a good life and obviously earning a lot of money very young, who would have quit for nothing just because they knew that it wasn't the right thing. Very few people would do that. Very few. And I think probably that's a really good test of who's an entrepreneur and who's not.

13:45Yeah, absolutely. So I suppose most sane people would have said, oh, I've made lots of money. That's very good. I'm going to invest it in the stock market or I'm going to invest it in property or something like that. I didn't do that. My view was what I love is making things happen. And so I've invested in about 80 private companies. Eight zero. Eight zero. Almost all of which I've invested in since 2007. Right. Is it a theme there, Tim? Do you invest in certain industries or certain types of businesses or is it just whatever tickles your fancy at that time? Or is there some sort of strategy behind your investment?

14:28Yeah, good question. First and foremost, I invested in people. My view was I'm trying to find exceptional people who not only have ideas that I think are good and are going into markets where I think there's a lot of opportunity, but they are people who are very resilient and can deal with everything that I know is going to be thrown at them. So I would say that the common feature was the sort of people that I was investing in. To be frank, I think I invested too diversely. My investments in the financial services industry, which I know very well, and the entertainment industry, which I know very well, have generally been very good investments.

15:10When I've invested in other industries that I've not known quite so well, it's been a bit more hit and miss. Some of the investments that I made, I made because I felt they were personally important to me. In 2009, I bought a piece of land, a big piece of land, right next to the ocean in a town called Budva, which is the sort of number one tourist destination in Montenegro. And we're building a 340-room apart hotel there. So 220 residences, 120 bed, hotel room, retail, quite a big project. And I invested in that a lot of money. I mean, I've probably put 10 million euros of my own money into that project.

16:00And there have been other investors who invested alongside me in that project. But I invested because when I originally saw the site, I sort of looked at the beach with the palm trees and the mountains behind and the snow on the top of the mountains. And I had a vision of what that location could become. Yeah, sure. I was lucky. I had the wherewithal to make that investment based on that vision. but you know i the beauty of what i was able to do was i could see something in my mind and i could pursue it and and try and make it happen now that is the hallmark of a visionary tim for sure so and and and the added part as well montenegro is an up-and-coming resort the one thing that people have to bear in mind is it took us 14 years to start building in montenegro 14 years.

16:55So 14 years from signing the contract to buy the land to actually starting construction. So complicated has it been. And I often use this saying when I talk to people about businesses and I say, it's not how good your idea is. It's not even how well you can execute on it. It's whether you can stay in the game long enough to actually see it come to fruition. Yeah, that's so important, isn't it? You've got to stay in the game long enough. And I think this is relevant to what you said earlier. You've got to stay in the game long enough to get that bit of luck to get you ahead, haven't you? You know what I mean?

17:33If you stay in your marketplace for 20 years, at some point, you will catch a break. You must catch a break, you know? You hope so. So, yeah. I invested a lot of money. I mean, probably 20 or 30 million pounds of my own money in a bioethanol business. The government announced a policy in 2008 that gradually we would start to blend biofuels with petrol and diesel such that we could reduce our reliance on oil. And there was a pathway up to 10 % by energy. and one of the types of biofuels that people thought would be successful here in the UK was taking poor quality wheat, which we apparently grow a lot of in the UK because it rains a lot.

18:24And that wheat is currently used to feed animals and we're excess wheat. So we export quite a lot of it to Europe. And you could take exactly the same amount of wheat, feed exactly the same amount of animals, but use a part of the wheat that wasn't being used at all and turn it into a form of alcohol called bioethanol. And you could take that bioethanol and mix it with petrol, and it would replace a part of the oil that you would need for the petrol. And remember, this was a time when electrical cars weren't really taking off. And so it was thought to be a policy that would reduce our reliance on oil, increase energy sustainability, create jobs in deprived areas of the country.

19:14Our plant is going to be in Grimsby and creating a lot of jobs, manufacturing jobs, which are always very valuable in a country like the UK. Not remove any food from the food chain because you produce exactly the same amount of animal feed. And in fact, you'd have a byproduct from your manufacturing process that would be CO2 that you could capture and put in your drinks to add the fizz. So, you know, one commodity to one product at the moment, one commodity to three products, creating jobs, opportunity, and so forth. It sounds too good to be true. No government tax intervention, no cost to the government of doing that directly.

19:55compared to solar, which was getting billions in government subsidies to make it competitive at about the same point in time. So we thought, no brainer, everyone's running to solar, bioethanol is where it's at, the UK has virtually no production capacity, it's importing everything from Brazil, you know, let's do this. Long story short, I learned something very important. biofuels covers a number of different types of bioethanol and biodiesel. And they come from numerous different sources, some of which compete with the food chain and some of which are environmentally damaging. Not all of which, but some of which.

20:41And people like Friends of the Earth came out and said, we don't like these biofuels. It's food versus fuel. It's food versus the environment. and we talked to the government and we said, well, yes, for some biofuels, but not for ours, because look, ours is coming from this wheat and it's all good stuff. And the politicians said, too complicated, too nuanced a story to be able to defend this. So they threw the baby out with the bathwater, scrapped the targets or reduced them massively. Ultimately, no need for the production capacity in the UK, the business failed completely. It took a few years and many rounds of finance and business failed.

21:27And the guy running the company, who was CEO, who was doing a great job, left. And I said, look, Dave, if you ever find another business you get involved with, contact me and let's chat. So a few months later, he called me and he said, I'm buying a tofu business. £500 ,000 sales run by a hippie guy. He's been doing it for 20 years. Produces this really lovely tofu that his customers love. No interest in scaling it. Wants to retire. We're paying him£500 ,000. Are you interested in investing? So I said, we'll put in£100 ,000. So we backed that company. That was 2017. That company this year will probably have sales of 25 million.

22:12And by the way, I knew zero about tofu. And they're just about to be sold. And I probably can't say the price that they're being sold for, because I think it's still subject to final negotiations. But it's being sold for a multiple of the price that he originally paid, which is monumental. I can imagine the multiples in that industry are probably enormous if he's got his product on the shelves of major supermarkets and things. That must be, wow, every cloud has a silver lining. The point that I'm making is, again, both of these are arguably more to do with luck than any skill on my part. But what you do learn as an entrepreneur is you're going to have bad things happen and you're going to have good things happen.

23:02And the bad things are never quite as bad as you think they are. And the good things are never quite as good as you think they are. And it's a bit like you need a philosophy that's a bit like the Rudyard Kipling poem, If. I used to study that in school when I was a kid, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, I haven't read it for a long time, but I know what you're talking about. We'll put it in the show notes. And then the other quick story I was going to tell you was I got to know the financial services industry very well. And in about 2007, 2008, I got an approach through a friend of mine. He said, I'll come and meet this guy, Bill.

23:37He's starting a new company. So I met Bill and Bill was starting a company that was a technology-driven platform for financial advisors. And the Financial Conduct Authority had basically said, advisors need to be completely transparent about fees and there's going to be a new era in financial services. Plants are going to have access to all their information in real time. And this is going to need these technology driven platforms. And I knew the industry quite well. He sat down with me. And he told me he talked me through his plan. I said, How much do you need? He said, it's 14 million to get us to cash flow break even on the basis of that meeting, I invested 7 million.

24:27Was that because of his passion and or was just the product, did it look incredible? What were you investing in? So I guess you'd call me a conviction investor. I don't think that you find many of them in the UK or Europe. It's just not the way things are done. He understood the industry incredibly well. He was a bit of a nonconformist, quite a tricky individual in many ways, but I knew the industry well as well. And so I was able to quite quickly validate in my own mind what he was telling me, I could see the direction of travel. I believed in the plan. And so I said, yeah, I'm in. Now, we ended up selling that company for$120 million about three years ago.

25:14It also made some profits over the years. So it was... Did you only invest$7 million or did you have further rounds of investment as well, further down the line? Well, that was a good end. Yeah, I think the reason I tell that story is that often people say, well, you know, you've got to be careful and, you know, diversify a lot. And the point often is, if you really passionately believe in something, and you have good reason and good expertise to be able to understand something, then it's not necessarily a problem to be a conviction investor. We probably need more of it in the UK and Europe. Absolutely.

25:59Well, I think if you're a, and correct me if I'm wrong, Tim, because I obviously haven't done this, but if you're a conviction investor, then you are far more likely to get your hands involved and to really help that investment work. And whereas if you're not a conviction and you've invested purely on some formula that you've learned, you're not going to be bought into helping that entrepreneur, are you? Do you know what I mean? You obviously had an emotional attachment to that, not just that entrepreneur, but that business plan. So you were going to give it more. You would not have allowed that company to have failed, essentially.

26:32Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, I think that... Yeah, I feel passionately about all the businesses that I've invested in. Because even though I might not be running it day to day, I have invested because I believe deeply in the founder or the founder team and the mission that they're on. And I passionately want them to succeed and I want to do everything that I can to help them succeed. And so I have a network. If I can use that network to help them, I will do so at a moment's notice. I would never ask for anything. I will do it because I want them to succeed. This episode was brought to you by Be Digital.

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28:00Can you give us your top piece of advice for entrepreneurs seeking investment, okay? And also your top piece of advice for investors in terms of selecting businesses to invest in. As an entrepreneur, focus on identifying a real problem that needs to be solved, one real problem that needs to be solved, and work really, really hard on finding out how you really, truly solve that problem. I see way too many entrepreneurs who tell me what they're doing, and there's three or four or five or six problems that they are trying to solve. They go, yes, and it does this, and it also will do this. And by the way, you know, there's also this.

28:54And just understanding the real nature of one problem and working out how you're going to solve at an amazing level that one problem is hard enough. So I think most entrepreneurs overreach and try and do too much. Have you heard of the saying, boil the ocean? They tried to solve too many things. Yeah. So I think that would be my one piece of advice for an entrepreneur. In terms of an investor, easy. The founder or the founder team. Focus in totally and ask yourself the questions. What does this person have to lose if this business fails? not just money but also reputation but also you know pain and suffering um ask yourself how good are they dealing with daily problems how resilient are they are dealing with that how how what's their ability to pivot you know are they the sort of people who are sort of very entrenched in their ideas most businesses that i've been involved in have had to pivot several times.