Bonus episode: The ‘secret sauce’ of success - With Octopus Energy CEO, Greg Jackson

0:00Hello, I'm Katie Prescott, and we've got a bonus episode for you this morning from another Times podcast, The Business, which I stepped in to host this week with my colleague Dominic O 'Connell. On The Business, we talked to the CEO and co-founder of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson. And what's so interesting about his company is although it sounds like a pure energy business, actually its most lucrative product is software. Anyway, it's a fascinating conversation and I thought you'd enjoy it.

0:33How do you go from being a market entrant to market leader in just 10 years? Greg Jackson, who's a chief executive and co-founder of Octopus Energy, has done just that. Seven million British households now use Octopus, meaning that it's pushed British gas into second place. He is a proper disruptor. Octopus is still spreading its tentacles, going into Europe, moving in to EV charging and heat pump production. But the secret sauce is what you don't see. The software that links the company to its customers and to energy suppliers. It's called Kraken. And if you know your Norse mythology, the Kraken is a big sort of octopus-y monster that comes up out of the deep and grabs your sailing ship.

1:17It sells Kraken software to other utility companies right around the world. And now Octopus is going to split in two. This Kraken unit is going to be floated as a separate company, which means a whole new set of challenges and opportunities and probably a big payday for Mr. Jackson. So we're going to talk to Greg Jackson today, ask him how he and his team did it and what lessons there might be for entrepreneurs who would like to follow his example. I'm Dominic O 'Connell, columnist at The Times and business reporter on Times Radio. And I'm Katie Prescott, host of The Times Tech Podcast, and sitting in for Hannah Prevett this week.

1:56From The Times and The Sunday Times. This is The Business. Where we put you ringside on the conversations we have day to day with business leaders. To hear their lessons for success in life and in business.

2:12So Katie, like a lot of the entrepreneurs we've had on this programme, Greg Jackson started pretty young. Yeah, he was fascinated by computing when he was growing up in the 80s and he actually left school at the age of 16. to start a computer game company. But I'm afraid it didn't quite pan out as expected. So he ended up going back to school and then on to university, but he kept this interest in tech. Yeah. And then he founded Octopus Energy about 10 years ago when there was that big flowering of new companies selling energy when energy retailing was deregulated. And then, of course, a lot of those went bust when gas prices went nuts.

2:47And then we had the Russian invasion of Ukraine, They got squeezed in that differential. But octopus didn't go under. In fact, it prospered. It did more than survived. So I think really, I'm really looking forward to learning how he did that. Yeah, I remember that period so well. It felt like one energy company after another was going bang week by week. Let's get him in.

3:16Thanks so much for joining us today, Greg. I'd like to start right at the beginning and take you back to growing up in Halifax and later Middlesbrough. When I understand you were always really, really interested in computing and coding, tell us about those days. And also, I'd love to know what your first computer was. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. Yeah. I think in like 1982 or 83. Yeah. I bought it secondhand. I saved up my paper hand money. By the way, if you work out my age, I did a paper hand illegally early. But I saved my paper hand money.

3:52Plus, mum used to give us a, there was a government support called the Family Allowance. And mum used to give me and my sister that to buy clothes and stuff. But I didn't buy clothes. I saved it up to buy computing stuff. And because I bought it secondhand, it was actually, it didn't work when I got it. Got it out of the box. And then almost immediately I had to learn to tinker with it to kind of get it to do anything. But, you know, it opened up a whole new world. An amazing era when you had the ZX Spectrum, then the BBC Micro, which was being distributed in schools. It felt like the world of computing was opening up to people for the first time.

4:21Yeah, not only that, actually, but that's responsible for so much of the things that are great in the British economy and tech today. The reason that we're a fintech leader is that so many people of my generation grew up at that time when you could get a very cheap, affordable home computer and learn to code. And the technology business, Arm, which has produced billions of chips globally in every smartphone, basically in loads of lap everywhere. That grew out of the spectrum and BBC scene in Cambridge. So it's really interesting how we've got decades of benefit as a society, as a country, from what happened then.

5:03And so what was your childhood like? And what sort of things were you coding and doing on that ZX spectrum? so my mum and dad got divorced when I think I was about eight my sister was seven my brother was a year old I don't think mum had ever really had a job before suddenly she had a mortgage and had to you know go and work in a pub in the evenings and she studied by day I think that meant that we had a lot of independence and as a result I got loads of time to tinker with all these things and I loved experimenting. So I guess almost immediately this kind of the mystique and the appeal of being able to sit there with a computer and learn to do more and more stuff on it.

5:45How was school? I guess I did very well at school, but I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy the discipline. I think, by the way, for me personally, it's part of the kind of entrepreneurial mindset, which is I don't like being told what to do. I love working hard but I love working hard on something I think is valuable so you took a sideways route and jumped out of school at 16 and set up a computer game business or try to pursue that I got a job writing computer games okay and then after a while got the chance to go freelance but I got a great lesson in life right which was the first game I wrote as a freelancer I'd say the programming was excellent if you looked at the code it was very elegant but the game itself actually wasn't fun to play and so it didn't get published and I'd worked for a few months without earning anything and I realized just how important it is to focus on your end user your customers uh rather than on the process and that gave me a chance by way to they were just doing six form enrollments at the time so I thought maybe I'll go and get some A levels after all and what was the game called I'm guessing it wasn't Lemmings no it was a it was a wrestling simulator which was quite hard to do on a spectrum but anyway I did it badly um Cambridge followed so it wasn't a bad decision to go back to school what happened after that where did your career take you after university i went to work for procter and gamble you know the consumer goods business for a few years i now feel very entitled about the decision i made there because i knew i wanted to be an entrepreneur uh i knew i wanted to build my own businesses but um i kind of felt i needed a bit of business grounding first and png's reckoned to be you know a bit like doing a real world MBA.

7:26And so I kind of intended to stay there a couple of years. It turns out, by way, working in a corporate can be very, very addictive. Just as you're getting dissatisfied, they give you a pay rise. Every six months, you get a review, which tells you how great you are, but also what you need to do better. And you're surrounded by people that are very like-minded. And so I kind of, I accidentally ended up staying four years and almost had to leave before I kind of, I don't know, lost the will. Stayed. Stayed forever. Yeah, stayed forever. Because I guess unlike being an entrepreneur, right, if you're in a corporate or any business, someone pays you at the end of the month.

8:03And I'm not in any way denigrating that. But I think for me personally, I'd rather be a bigger fish in a small pond than part of a corporate machine. So you ripped yourself out of the warm bath of Procter & Gamble and threw yourself into something much more difficult. What was the genesis of Octopus? And then as we want to talk about Kraken today, what came first? Octopus, the energy business, or Kraken, the software behind it? Yeah, so I had a series of businesses after PNG. Some did pretty well, others not so. But eventually, in the year 2003, with a couple of co-founders, we started a company that built enterprise software.

8:45And we had the privilege of getting to know around 20 large companies very, very well, as we built software to help them access new capabilities and become more efficient. Most companies have got these kind of spaghetti stacks of software that run their business. Decades worth, you know, these kind of sedimentary layers have grown over time. And so anytime they want to do something new, they can't really change what they've got. So they bolt on another piece of software and it's got to integrate all over the place with the spaghetti. And so each individual piece of software you're adding may be solving one problem, but it's making your fundamental problem worse.

9:22You're building more spaghetti. and so we came up with the idea that when we compared large but very new companies they had much much simpler software because they had time to build up all the rubbish but they're still running large companies very effectively so we thought you could re-platform an existing company onto an entirely new stack a new piece of software and get rid of all of the legacy So we went and pitched it to companies, and we started with utilities. The energy sector was facing a revolution. The advent of things like solar, wind, electric cars, batteries, meant that you had a sector where big data was like a quarterly meter reading to one where you were going to get real-time streams, and you had to forecast everything.

10:09So you could see it was going to get complicated. So unlike fintech, you didn't just have the internal opportunity. You had this huge external pressure. anyway so we went and talked to some utilities we pitched the idea and some of them said uh we don't think tech will make any difference uh thank you very much that was brilliant that told us it was a sector right for disruption others told us we're conservative we can't take the risk of doing this someone's got to do it first now that's quite interesting from that really we had the idea we would do it first software is a long way from energy suppliers and how did you make that jump from trying to fix an IT problem for them, a systems problem for them, into becoming actually a customer business?

10:51Yeah, so you could say the same of things like Uber. You know, software's a long way from minicabs. But actually, by creating a kind of very modern software-based business in that sector, you can reinvent the sector. So we thought, in exactly the same way, if we take a modern software-based approach to reinventing retail, energy retail, we can do tons of stuff that no one imagined. Was there also a happy accident that was around about the time that energy retailing was deregulated? So did the two things come together? Well, you know what? I was actually slightly annoyed. You thought you wouldn't have to worry about all these other companies coming.

11:29Yeah, yeah. I mean, I hope this sounds okay, but we kind of thought we had the biggest idea in the world. We were going to transform a global sector through technology on a global scale. And suddenly there's about 50 companies that are kind of set up with you know a few quid in the back of someone's shed uh piling it high selling it cheap without like a big idea and so when i went out there talking about what we were doing it was very hard to differentiate yeah the kind of the scale of what we wanted to achieve the degree of i hate the word but the degree of disruption we had in mind compared to a whole load of other companies and and you know i i remember saying like competition isn't the souk.

12:10It really isn't about having a bunch of people each try to shout loud than the other but basically selling the same stuff. Competition is about investing very heavily, having outstanding operations and truly understanding your customers so you can create new products and services. So were you worried about getting caught to them that other people would just think we don't see any value in Octopus at all? It's exactly the same as Bulb or whatever. All the other companies that are out there. Yes, I was worried about that. And I'd say Bulb was different. Bulb really was founded with a vision. Yeah, and it got big.

12:43And every week, I think there's good competition and bad competition, right? Bulb was genuinely good competition for us. Because every week, we would sit there looking at our customer metrics. Like, how well are we looking after customers? And relentlessly, you're comparing yourself to your rivals. Now, none of the incumbents were doing a good job. All those little companies were doing a bad job. But Bulb, every week, we're like, how are they achieving that? And of course, we then have to try and do better. and we know they now know because we ended up acquiring them they were sitting there going how did octopus do that so i think that was really kind of that drove high standards but the um an interesting byproduct of the number of companies was that we went under the radar in a good way which is the incumbents i think i wouldn't say they were asleep at the wheel but they really didn't see us coming um and it was ultimately an australian company origin energy uh kind of the I think biggest energy company in Australia, that sent a couple of their most senior people on a world tour to find the future of energy.

13:43And they ended up in our office in London. And it was a magical moment when they could see how we'd use technology to transform everything. Just talk us through what happened in 2021 when wholesale gas prices spiked. All these small suppliers got caught in the crush between selling cheap energy and having to buy it very expensively. Was that a threatening moment for you as well, financially, for Octopus? I think on day one, we saw it coming for about six months. You could see the uptick and getting steeper and steeper. I mean, at the worst point, the wholesale price of gas, I think, was 16 times higher than usual.

14:21So if we normally buy, I don't know, like maybe at the time, two or three billion a year of gas, suddenly you're looking at 32, maybe more billion pounds of gas we're going to have to buy. but first of all in energy the number one thing that creates financial resilience is hedging you buy the energy in advance you lock in the price so even though the wholesale price at the time might have been very very high but for our foreseeable needs we'd already locked in the price at a lower level so you could look at that and you could see all those companies that hadn't hedged just collapsing overnight so many of them and companies i'd never heard of with the most random names it felt like they'd all just mushroomed and then completely exploded and i think this was kind of where where regulation had been a bit naive which is the regulator didn't want to talk about hedging because they think like how each company manages that is up to themselves but the reality is if you think you can beat the market you're a fool and so literally the risk aversion at the very core of our business meant that although you could look at that and think it was very worrying the biggest worry we had was for our customers How are people going to pay these bills?

15:27As the hedges come to an end, you re-hedge, and the market is going to be a lot higher then. How will people cope with this? So I immediately started talking to the government and saying, you are going to have to put something in place to help customers. We need a bill support scheme, which happened. But the other bit was, I remember speaking to our investors, because investors are obviously looking at these wholesalers, getting very worried. And I said to them, we are just about the strongest company here. So instead of like battening down the hatches, this is the time to be brave. We want you to provide us with more funding so we can help, well, we can acquire failing businesses.

16:05And this will be, you know, it's that kind of thing. And I hate to say it in such terrible times, but it's opportunity in a crisis. And you say like for us, this is a big opportunity. And, you know, if we don't act now, we may never get this chance again. And that's how we ended up in a position that we could, for example, ultimately, And we acquired a company called Avro that failed with nearly a million customers. And then Bulb with 1.6 million. And by the way, at the time, there were all these kind of reports that Bulb was going to cost taxpayers and bill payers 6 billion quid. The deal we did with the government, a brilliant deal by our team worked out with great civil servants, meant ultimately they made a profit on Bulb.

16:44And I'm really proud of that. Well, let's go back to where you started then, which is really with the tech behind Octopus and Kraken. I loved your description of companies having sedimentary layers of tech and a sort of spaghetti junction that you obviously, you know, you got to start from scratch. Do you think you could have sold that tech to companies originally, you know, in the way that you'd planned to and sort of just done it within those layers? Or do you think you really needed to do it yourself first to prove it? Yeah, no, I sometimes remark, I'm not a particularly good salesman. I'm a very good shower.

17:21So we really did try to persuade companies. But I think the interesting bit is, to be fair, you couldn't see the impact this would have till you did it. I think one of the magical inventions of Silicon Valley was the MVP, the Minimum Viable Product. It's not a prototype. You basically create a business that does something very, very differently using technology and see how it goes. Based on what you see, you then iterate very rapidly, building out the stuff that's working and dropping stuff that isn't. And I think in energy, you knew you would create a more efficient business. You knew you could run it with far fewer people.

18:01You kind of knew you could eliminate a lot of the failures, the service failures. Because with a much more modern system, a single unified data model, you're not going to have a load of things going wrong, falling between the gaps. and a load of people in the background having to try and fix them. But what you didn't know was the degree of innovation you could kind of produce with this. And what is that? I mean, in really simple terms, what is it that Kraken does that makes it more efficient or helps the energy market? Yeah, so the efficiency is, I'll give you an example. I mean, in the UK, one of the clients, one of the large engine companies that moved to Kraken after we approved it closed 17 different systems.

18:40So 17 bits of spaghetti wiring. ultimately this is progress but it's hard, we have to do it in society their head count fell from over 10 ,000 people to about 3 ,500 but the people that stayed their satisfaction, the employee satisfaction went from 2 out of 5 to 4 out of 5 because they could actually do a great job instead of being stuck in a machine where a computer says no and by the way the customer satisfaction went from 2 out of 5 to 4 out of 5 and the company went from unsustainable to financially successful. That's the kind of impact it has at scale. In innovation terms, Kraken, because it's got a single data model that is everything from every customer call, transcribed and analysed by AI through to every metre reading, but forecast for the next two years at half-hour level, updated multiple times a day.

19:35So if you've got an electric car, we'll be forecasting how much battery you're going to need every day, what time you're going to get home and plug it in, and work out a schedule for when we're going to charge it. Collectively, that means today, Octopus alone processes, just in the UK, processes a million items of data every three seconds, which is about 10 times more than Visa globally for payments. Fundamentally, and particularly in electricity, the back-end electricity market has a price that varies throughout the day. Every half hour goes from literally negative pricing to eye-wateringly high.

20:08if we can use technology to get more of the cheap lectures into our customers house at the right times and it's their cars into their businesses and avoid using as much of the expensive times you bring the average price down and you can do you can have dramatic impact i was looking at the charts you know for a day recently you know between the beginning of the day um or the peak of the day which the price was like 120 and the cheapest price during the day was 20 and overnight it was negative. That's how variable this is. If you use technology to optimize that, we can tackle the appalling rise in British energy bills.

20:47When did you realize you could sell that as a standalone product to other utilities? Or was that always the plan? It was kind of always the plan. But it was quite fun. For anyone who's been through these things, I love my investors. I've got incredible investors, we owe everything to the fact they backed us, to be clear. But at the very beginning, when we were setting up the business, they said, do you really need to build your own technology? Surely that's a commodity. You just get it off the shelf. Anyway, a few years in, I started talking to them about licensing the technology, Kraken, to other companies.

21:24And they said, this is your secret sauce. Why would you give it to your rivals? You said, we tried to tell you. And then a few years later, as we're separating Kraken off, I have to say to them, Energy is an unbelievably exciting business. And they're going, yeah, but look at the software. Why are you separating it off now? Because you're going to split them two. Kraken's going to become an independent company, maybe listing on a stock exchange somewhere. Why now? Yeah. So Octopus has continued to grow. I mean, incredibly. I'm so proud of it. And we also, by the way, have big businesses in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, all growing rapidly.

21:59And increasingly, the incumbent utilities in those countries were reticent to license Kraken because they didn't essentially want to give money to a competitor. They'd seen what had happened here in the UK, where we overtook every formerly nationalized incumbent to become the biggest. And what we found is this huge interest in Kraken. But time and again, I'd be sitting there with the CEO of a company. they'd say but how can i license from you when you're stealing my customers and ultimately separating kraken enables it to reach its full potential if you are going to list it and it's a technology company aren't all your advisors saying listen you have to take it to the u.s can there be any possible argument for listing it in london so i think that's really serious the more i've looked at this the more i care about it pension funds in the uk used to put about 40 percent of their assets into uk companies it's now three or four percent right now that has impacted two very important areas the first is companies in the growth stages actually the growth stages octopus and kraken have been through we've raised three billion dollars of investment and i don't know 2.9 of that or something have come from overseas investors now what that means is that when you get to the point where you're thinking about, do you list somewhere, they don't have an attachment to the UK.

23:29Their funds are not raised in Sterling because they don't have a currency reason to be here. They don't have a headquarters or sentimental reason to be here. They're not part of the UK nexus. And so the first thing is that lack of funds. We were able to grow the business because of plenty of companies around the world or funds around the world that wanted to invest in octopus and kraken but it does mean when you get to this stage it's a much more kind of rational decision i think the second consequence of that lack of uk capital going to uk companies is when you get to the stock exchange our stock exchange simply has less capital available less um uh less capital available for uh companies when they ipo to achieve the valuations that perhaps they would in other well the us and also by the way a lot more important than that potentially less capital available thereafter to continue to support companies as they grow globally now i think 2026 could be a bit pivotal we've had the mansion house reforms the pension uh pensions bill and a bunch of other changes that means that we could potentially be reversing that long-term decline in the capital allocated to UK equities.

24:48So we're going to have to watch and see. Behind the scenes, I've got to say that the London Stock Exchange do have good data that says if you control for all the variables, UK companies... Yeah, I've read that data. It's not very convincing. At a certain hour of the day, at a certain time of the night, etc. So I think the point really is that we could be an inflection point this year if those reforms have an impact. Because we've been so starved of capital, it doesn't take a lot of change. a lot of new capital to really reverse that. So fingers crossed. I would say, though, that the other bit here is sentiment matters.

25:21Like, you know, I think it was Keynes spoke of animal spirits. And they're really important in markets. And so if we get the reforms we need and we get the right degree of positive news about LSE, then there is a chance. When are you likely to decide? Well, fortunately, I don't get to decide, right? So I'm a shareholder, but a relatively modest one. Octopus is shareholder, but the majority is held by our global investors. And, you know, they are in conversation, the board are in conversation with both the London Stock Exchange and others. And by the way, they're taking it very, very seriously.

25:57The decision will be over the next year or two. Because I guess it's also about whether you're willing to make that leap, because the stock exchange obviously needs companies like yours. to float to encourage others because it is as you say about sentiment and so i wonder if you know when you say it's something you care about now if you do feel strongly enough about it to try and push that decision towards london that's one of the reasons i'm talking about it now and one of the reasons i talk about the the underlying reasons because i think if we address the underlying reasons you know we can make london win stuff on its own merits and i would hope I would hope that London can win this business on its own merits, but it's got to work.

26:42It's really got to prove that. But I talk about it because I want to see it happen. And I want to see it happen because I'm truly proud of what we've been able to build in Britain. We talked earlier about the Cambridge tech scene of the 1980s and 90s. It generated some great companies like Arm and a whole bunch of entrepreneurs that have created many of the businesses that are going to be the next crop. I'd love to see that followed through and if we can solve the capital markets issue there's every possibility we can create, I don't want to call it a new golden age but genuinely if you look at the number of British companies that are roughly the scale of Octopus and Kraken I'm lucky enough to have two of them but there really is a good chance here so we could enter a positive spiral if we get it right What about Octopus post the split?

27:34is it going to be profitable? Yeah, well, Octopus is profitable in the UK. So our UK retail business made about£300 million EBIT last year. It's just that we are investing so heavily in growth, both here in the UK and internationally, and in research and development. We spent£500 million on those things. So a lot of the bottom line might be, I think you showed£100 million loss. Actually, it's a core business that's strong and profitable, than supporting and being supported by our investors to take this business truly global. And I think more British companies should do this, by the way. One of the challenges in the UK very often has been companies being forced into becoming dividend machines.

28:16And you can keep on paying your dividend until one day you don't exist. What you see a lot in the US is companies spending many years relentlessly investing in R &D and growth. Is that the way you talk about you don't need to show a profit straight away. You need to be thinking about the future. Is that part of what lies behind your row with your rivals about capital rules and off-gems capital rules? Do you think that's stupid? I think the problem with the capital rules is

28:47they don't really understand what causes risk in energy. We talked earlier about hedging. Essentially, if you're fully hedged, you eliminate the vast majority of risk. Moreover, the two big risks beyond that are mark-to-market. That is, if the energy price shifts, your hedging partner, the trading partner with whom you hedge, can demand overnight you deliver, and within 24 hours, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of cash if the energy price shifts. And also, they may require you to post an awful lot of collateral, again, hundreds of millions. Octopus, because of the prudence with which we're run, we're not subject to either of those risks.

29:27we've eliminated them by the way we pay for that it's like paying for a superb insurance policy but off-gen don't even look at it so the equivalent at the moment is it's like if you had a million pound house and it was fully insured but the regulator would be quite happy for you to drop the insurance and have a hundred grand sitting in the bank in case something happens we should explain the off-gen capital rules basically say you need to have a bunch of cash set aside against hard times. Yeah, the problem is a bunch of cash they have isn't enough to help in hard times. But in the meantime, they're not looking at the fact you've got an insurance policy.

30:02Now we're in conversation with them on that. And I think it's nuts. But if I'm your rival, if I'm Centrica, I'm going to look at you and say, but hang on, I have to have all this cash to decide. I meet the rules. You don't. That's just cheating, regardless of anything you might say about whether the rules are good or not. Yeah, well, the first thing is we do meet the rules. The rules absolutely say you have to have a certain amount of capital it's called the floor and we have that they then have a target right it's named a target i you don't have to have it if you if you're not at the target then you have to uh have an agreed plan with the regulator now that's where the regulator does look at all these additional sort of safeguards and in our case the regulator has declared themselves perfectly satisfied we meet the rules so to be really clear we meet the rules um i think that you know uh by the way in post the kraken separation our balance sheet is three billion pounds right uh i.e we absolutely exceed these targets there are some details in terms of how they're accounted for but to be really clear post kraken it's a totally different picture anyway and greg before we let you go i've got to ask you running a company in this mad bad world that we're in at the moment with the rise in generative AI and the AI revolution that's going on.

31:22Donald Trump, very unpredictable, if to use a gentle word, and the president in the White House. How do you think about navigating that as a business leader? You sound quite optimistic about everything, actually. You sound quite optimistic about the UK tech sector. Well, I think, first of all, entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic, right? You couldn't do this job if you weren't. In fact, sometimes people often ask that, how do you stay optimistic or how do you get your energy? If you were playing a computer game, there would be things coming at you from all sides. Yeah, it's awesome. You turn it around.

31:51It's like you're an entrepreneur because you're optimistic, because you're always seeing opportunities. Now, I think one thing about the Trump world is I think it's forcing everyone to act quickly and to make big decisions fast. One of the things that's killing the West, killing economic growth here, is we've become sclerotic. Now, in a world where you can't be sure that next week you're not getting a 25 % tariff slapped on something, you've got to move fast. And you've got to move fast to build your own capabilities, to innovate, to make things more efficient. All of these are opportunities for us to do well.

32:26So I'm not saying I choose this world. But within this world, there are tons of opportunities. And there are some things that are going to be like forcing functions for progress. And, you know, I was reflecting recently that so many of the advances in things like computing or jet engines came out of World War II. Similarly, the things that came out of the space race, those events acted as forcing functions. And so does kind of a little bit of economic chaos. And, you know, some of the world's best companies were found in times of economic chaos. Companies like IBM is an example, you know, Disney.

33:01And so I used to wonder what it would have been like to found a company in the 1920s and then go to the 20s, 20s, 30s, whatever. Here you are. Exactly, here we are. It's kind of the same all over again. Greg, you've been very, very generous with your time. I hope you haven't predicted the start of a new world war. But thank you very much, Greg Jackson from Octopus Energy. Yes, thanks so much for coming in. Thank you both. It's been really great to do this session. And by the way, let's do it again sometime.

33:37so katie i was a really interesting chat with greg jackson who was an amazing entrepreneur he and his co-founders what did you take from what stood out from what he said for you i was really struck by this idea of companies having sedimentary stacks when it comes to their tech backend or stacks, whatever you'd like to call it. Because in this new AI era that we're in, I think this is going to catch so many companies out when you've got this extraordinary new technology that many businesses are trying to work out how to use and how to integrate. When you're dealing with, you know, the spaghetti that he described, I think it makes you realize how very, very difficult that's going to be.

34:19I think you're exactly right. I'm Dominic O 'Connell, columnist at The Times and business reporter on Times Radio. And I'm Katie Prescott, co-host of The Times Tech Podcast and sitting in for Hannah Prevett this week. And if you want to hear more from me and our correspondent in Silicon Valley, Danny Fortson, you can find us every week geeking out with the pioneers at the forefront of tech innovation, covering all the latest trends in tech and the AI revolution. Just search for Times Tech Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. From The Times and The Sunday Times. This is The Business. We'll be back next week.

34:54Until then, goodbye. Goodbye.