The $14 billion Nscale story and how founders succeed in Silicon Valley

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1:43Danny Fortson: Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast, where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I am Dani Fortson out here in Silicon Valley.

1:55Katie Prescott: And I'm Katie Prescott, Katie in the city, the city of London. And this week, we're talking about the people who are building the AI companies that are taking over the world.

2:05Danny Fortson: People like, you know, Josh Payne, once a coal miner, who in his spare time read some entrepreneurial books. And all of a sudden, he's become the CEO of a multi-billion dollar data center company called N-Scale. just raised$2 billion from investors, including NVIDIA, valuing the company at$14 billion. Life happens fast. Life happens fast.

2:34Katie Prescott: Raised a lot of money and raised a lot of eyebrows, I should say as well. But our big question this week, and there's no way we're going to answer this in half an hour, but bear with us. What does it take to stand out and achieve that kind of success in the highly competitive world of tech, and especially in this mad wild moment that we're in of AI? Is it about access to the right markets, the right people, the right capital? Or is it a unique vision, great leadership, and a killer instinct?

3:06Danny Fortson: That's right. So later, we're going to be talking on the pod with Alice Bentink. She's the CEO of Entrepreneurs First, which is a talent investor that is on the global hunt for the world's future founders, often before those individuals even have a business idea.

3:24Katie Prescott: Yeah, a company that's just raised itself$200 million. And we'll be asking her why you shouldn't start a business with a friend. So maybe there's a lesson there for us and find out what she thinks it takes to become a successful entrepreneur. And spoiler alert, as you'd imagine, it involves working all hours. But first, Danny, let's talk about something that you've been following this week, which is this extraordinary social media trial out in California. It's been going on for a few weeks now. And we've even seen Mark Zuckerberg, obviously the founder of Facebook, now Meta, be grilled by lawyers in really an unprecedented way.

4:04Katie Prescott: Just remind us of the background to this. What's been going on?

4:07Danny Fortson: Yeah, so I went down to LA last week and spent all day on some very uncomfortable wooden benches at the back of a courtroom for this landmark trial that's taking place that, you know, depending on who you talk to, could be the kind of turning point for this kind of multi trillion dollar social media industry. So Metta and YouTube are the defendants. They're fighting allegations that their products are designed to be addictive. They have willfully built addictive products that are harming the mental and emotional health of their users. And in particular, this case is about one user. She's a 20-year-old woman.

4:47Danny Fortson: She's known as KGM in court documents. And this is the first of what they call bellwether trials. So there's something like 2 ,600 lawsuits against the social media companies.

5:03Katie Prescott: Goodness me, what from individuals like her?

5:05Danny Fortson: From individuals, from school districts, from local city, state governments, state attorneys general, a whole menagerie of people. And so they have kind of combined all of these 2 ,600 into two separate courts. It's one federal, one state. This one is a state in L.A. And of the roughly 13 to 1 ,600 cases filed in the state court, they've chosen five or seven. And they said basically, look, the evidence is going to be broadly the same. The arguments are going to be broadly the same. Let's establish whether this new legal theory that social media is itself a dangerous, faulty product designed to be so by the people who make them.

5:49Danny Fortson: If we can prove that, then that opens the floodgates to huge settlements. Think big tobacco in 1998, that kind of idea. And also forcing these companies to really change how they build these products to make them not addictive and therefore not harmful to people.

6:09Katie Prescott: You talk about the benches being uncomfortable, but I imagine some of the evidence was pretty hard to hear as well.

6:15Danny Fortson: Yeah, it's pretty dark, you know, and I should say just to kind of ground us in what is happening here. The beginning of the trial for the first several days, you had over a dozen parents standing on the courthouse steps with pictures of the kids that they've lost. Wow. Either through suicide or dying and viral challenges or whatever.

6:38Katie Prescott: You know, something that they've linked to social media.

6:41Danny Fortson: That they blame directly on social media. Yeah. and KGM in this case she started on YouTube when she was six she got Instagram when she was nine she was self-harming by the age of 10 so it's just all it's all very very dark and part of the job of the of the defendants Meta and YouTube's lawyers is to kind of take apart that argument and say actually KGM had a terrible home life it's very heavy and like real and the stakes could not be higher. It was all very kind of cinematic in a way because you walk into the courtroom. There's two tables, plaintiffs, defendants. The plaintiffs, the lawyer is this guy, Mark Lanier from Texas, devout Christian, pastor.

7:26Danny Fortson: He's like a performer. He's very engaging. His two co-counsels are his daughters. He has five kids, two. So it's literally a family defending a family. And on the other side, you have Meta and YouTube, and I should say TikTok and Snapchat, they were also defendants. They settled right before the case started.

7:47Katie Prescott: Fascinating.

7:48Danny Fortson: So it's Meta and YouTube, and they have just this roster of the best corporate product liability lawyers in America. Sharp suits, super slick. And as you start the day, like everybody's like wheeling in these carts full of these banker's boxes just full of documents and so there's like a whole like there's probably three or four dozen boxes stacked up around these tables of all the evidence that they're going to try to draw on and this is this first bellwether case and then there's a doing in the soligon in federal court starting in oakland as soon as next month with another

8:26Katie Prescott: five or seven bellwether cases so it's a big deal yeah so and it's also going to ripple out globally whatever's decided.

8:33Danny Fortson: 100%.

8:33Katie Prescott: Well, it's a huge topic of debate here. And actually, we're going to have Baroness Kidron, who's a big campaigner for children's rights and a big supporter of restrictions on social media, on the podcast in a few weeks' time. And she was actually in front of a select committee this week looking at this. But let's move on from California to here in the city of London to talk about N-Scale, which I'm going to describe as a British company, although that is up for debate, but a company that develops AI data centres and it has raised an astonishing$2 billion, valuing the company at$14.6 billion. And it's the largest single funding round raised by a British startup.

9:20Katie Prescott: And as well as announcing the big money, it's also announced some big names too on its board. Nick Clegg, former UK Deputy Prime Minister, of course, but then former President of Global Affairs at Meta, Sheryl Sandberg, Meta's former COO. And the names that it's got as backers are astonishing too, like NVIDIA, its customers include Microsoft, OpenAI, all the companies we were just talking about actually, ByteDance, which owns TikTok. So Jensen Huang has said that Nscale could be a national champion for the UK. But I mean, I know you've looked into this really carefully. It came out of nowhere for us, didn't it?

10:02Katie Prescott: I mean, I think I first heard of N-Scale when Donald Trump was over in London for his state visit with all the tech bros. And there were those big announcements about funding in Britain from the likes of Microsoft, as I just mentioned, and NVIDIA. And they were all linked to N-Scale. And they came out in this press release from the Department of science innovation tech we were all like hang on a sec who is nscale and looking them up they hadn't filed accounts on companies house they have just dropped today wednesday as we're recording but it was who are these people and suddenly they're worth 14 billion dollars it was like it just like dropped out of the sky like oh nscale okay who are they and then it turns out that is

10:48Danny Fortson: run by this 30 something guy Josh Payne from Australia who again no one has ever heard of and so we just started looking into it and this is back what six months ago so I just did a deep dive into everything I could find on him and found out that like basically his Nscale was a very very new company less than two years old at that point and that it had actually never built a data center which I was like, hmm, that feels relevant for the company that's supposed to build all of the data centers in the UK after all these deals.

11:22Katie Prescott: Handling many billions. Yes, exactly.

11:26Danny Fortson: But what's really interesting is that there's been a series of stories that have been dropping in this past week. Other people looking into like, who is this person, Josh Payne? What is this company and scale? And that's why I'm so happy to have Alice on today because, again, I think oftentimes this happens like a company just comes bolt out of the blue. And there's like this really larger than life or interesting or really gifted CEO at the heart of it or whatever. And I think that's the question a lot of people are asking now about N-Scale and Josh Payne because it has raised all of this money.

12:00Because it is in the center of the data center build out that everybody's talking about in the UK.

12:08Danny Fortson: and basically does this guy does this company have the goods to deliver well should we talk about what we do know about him and then so as you say he's in his early 30s he got interested

12:22Katie Prescott: in entrepreneurship from reading business books like the four-hour work week when he was working in a coal mine and so that got him interested in renewable energy and crypto mining yeah and it seems that nscales actually spun out of a crypto mining business which actually it wouldn't be the first data center company to do that right that's exactly what core weave did and he explains because

12:49Danny Fortson: he's done one interview now with the new york times he explains like he was over in australia he'd gotten into renewable energy he'd raised some money somehow and he's like oh i'm really interested in this books a ticket a 24-hour journey to Oslo Norway I paused when I read it he's like yeah I just stayed there for two weeks and I left with a signed letter to buy a data center in Norway you're like yeah how'd you do that there are lots of data centers in Norway it's cold and has free energy exactly and thus began the kind of the journey where you know a year plus later he's he's at state dinners in the in the red carpet and and best mates with

13:33Katie Prescott: with jensen wong so here in the uk and i was just looking through their accounts before we started recording which they say have only just come out today which is mad for a company that's worth 14 billion dollars that they've just finished and they're out of date because they're for 2024 Nonetheless, in December 2024, the company signed an agreement to buy a chunk of land in Loughton and has bought that for about, well, they put down a deposit of£2 million. They've now paid the deposit£40 million. And they're building the various infrastructure there to put energy in place to build a data centre.

14:13Katie Prescott: So it looks like here in the UK, that's the first one. But they've also got spaces, as you say, in Norway and in the States.

14:19Danny Fortson: I think it's worth also just kind of making the point. ChatGPT like hit the world like a meteor three years ago, effectively. So there's a lot of companies and a lot of people being like, oh, this is going to change the world. I need to get in on this. And so like these kind of what they call NeoCloud companies, these companies that have kind of started up or shifted their focus to building AI data centers. This is not a unique thing. And scale isn't the only one, but it does speak to this moment where if you're in the right place, right time, and you're kind of in it to win it or whatever, you can make some extraordinary things happen.

14:56Danny Fortson: Because there's this, I think, four companies, the big four hyperscalers, that's Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. They're going to spend something like$600 billion on data centers this year. And they spent about$500 billion last year. you know, like a trillion dollars in two years, you know, so there's a lot of money sloshing around. And they need they can't do it all themselves. They need partners. And then you have folks like Nscale, like Josh Payne, who are like, I'm going to put myself in the middle of that.

15:29Katie Prescott: And it's worth talking about some of the circular deals that we've been talking about a lot when it comes to AI, which are a part of this. I mean, just in the accounts, it was really striking. Nvidia paid$60 million for a stake in Nscale, right? But in exchange for that, that they're going to basically underwrite their lease for a facility in Texas for$860 million. So if they don't pay for that, NVIDIA basically is the kind of the big dad coming in saying, hey, you know, I'll back you up here. And if it falls through, you know, they get more N-Scale shares. Yeah.

16:03Danny Fortson: And NVIDIA has put hundreds of millions in N-Scale. But of course, what does N-Scale need to buy? What's the main thing they need to buy? NVIDIA chips. And that's what a lot of people like, well, NVIDIA is just going around the world funding its customers. Someone coined this term the announcement economy, you know, where you have these like big announcements and share prices go up and down or whatever. But as you move away from the announcements, and then you have to kind of circle back to like, okay, well, are you delivering on said announcement that made your share prices go up and made everybody kind of jaws drop?

16:34Danny Fortson: That's where we are now. We're moving to that next phase, post announcement.

16:39Katie Prescott: And a couple of points before we move on, There are, as you said, so few players involved in this. And the fact that they're all involved in N-Scale is a huge sign of strength for N-Scale because you need the chips, you need the power, you need the money. Oh, look, you know, you've got Microsoft and NVIDIA and then Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg. And then on top of that, there is an obsession at the moment, as you know, here in Europe with sovereignty and ownership of AI and data centers. And so this allows Britain essentially to say that it has and other places in Europe to say they have ownership of their data center of their AI infrastructure.

17:20Katie Prescott: But the money is still coming from the US.

17:22Danny Fortson: Can I say one thing about our friend Sir Nick at the Times Tech Summit, you may recall.

17:28Katie Prescott: I do. I know what you're going to say.

17:30Danny Fortson: He went up on stage and he's like, Britain is becoming a vassal state. why are we getting so excited about bunch of sheds everybody's like 30 billion pounds of sheds who cares about data centers why are we getting all excited about this fast forward six months and he went further

17:48Katie Prescott: he said sheds with chips that are just gonna go out of date in a few months

17:52Danny Fortson: and here he is joining the board of the prime shed maker it is the

17:59Katie Prescott: shed maker

18:01Danny Fortson: exactly the newest like sexiest

18:04Katie Prescott: shed builder in in the uk well we've invited nick clegg onto the podcast so fingers crossed he can

18:11Danny Fortson: come and tell us what his new opinion of sheds is exactly i imagine it may be a bit more nuanced

18:16Katie Prescott: let's say well it feels like a good time to move on to our interview yes and you know try and answer that question about what does it take to succeed in this mad bad wild world of ai yeah like basically

18:30Danny Fortson: how do you become Josh Payne? How do you go from like, hey, man, I'm reading four hour work week in between shifts to like, now I'm a billionaire.

18:40Katie Prescott: How do you go from the coal mine to I don't know, the mine? Well, hopefully, our next guest Alex Bentig will be able to tell us so we'll be back just after this.

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20:07Danny Fortson: Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast. Our guest today is the CEO of Entrepreneurs First, which you can think of as kind of like a talent agency that looks for people, not companies, to invest in often before those people even have a business idea.

20:25Katie Prescott: Their portfolio of companies is now valued at over$16 billion. And the majority of those founders, no surprise perhaps, are working on AI.

20:36Danny Fortson: Some of the companies they've backed, Clio, friend of the pod, Poly AI, friend of the pod, Magic Pony Technology, which was acquired by Twitter. And as we record, this company just announced, as we mentioned, $200 million in fresh capital at a$1.3 billion valuation. That was quite the intro for you, Alice. So welcome.

20:59Katie Prescott: Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here. So you describe yourself very much as a company, but you are also like a fund. Just for listeners who might not understand that, how do you explain that difference? and what difference does it make to the way that you think about who you invest in and how you operate?

21:16Alice Bentinck: So if you think about a fund, a normal VC, the main thing that they are providing to the founders that they work with is capital and very large amounts of capital. The difference with what we do at EF is because the unit, the thing that we're investing in is a person, an individual, before they've necessarily started a company, before they actually have an idea or a team the main reason why somebody comes to us to work with us is for our product um so you know we see ourselves as a product company that has a business model that is is venture capital but actually the main reason that individuals come to us is that they're trying to figure out what they want to build you know building a startup if it goes well and you know i speak from personal experience here it's a 10-year journey and actually taking the the 12 weeks of ef to explore what do you want to spend the rest of your life working on?

22:07Alice Bentinck: What is your life's purpose? What is the work that you want to commit yourself to? And who do you want to work with that on? And having the opportunity to test it out, test out different co-founders, test out different ideas. And honestly, one of the memes we have internally at EF is that everyone comes to EF with a bad idea, something they're deeply attached to, that within the first two weeks, they pivot off and end up working on something that's much better. And I think it's because ultimately coming up with an idea is it's a process. It's a skill. It's something you can learn. It's not something that is necessarily innate.

22:37Alice Bentinck: So yeah, ultimately, EF is a product company, but we make money through investing.

22:42Danny Fortson: When did EF start?

22:43Alice Bentinck: So we actually started in 2012 as a not-for-profit education company, and we started investing 10 years ago.

22:49Danny Fortson: So you've been doing this for a decade plus. Can you like orient us to this moment? Because it's all a bit bamboozling and kind of the world feels like it's moving a million miles an hour. And we were just talking before you came on about nscale which is like founded by this guy who was coal miner you know reading a four-hour work week between shifts or whatever and all of a sudden he's a billionaire in the middle of this whole thing and it feels like things are quite extraordinary right now i'd love to get your sense of kind of not to mix my metaphors on this coal face of like of how things are

23:23Alice Bentinck: working right now it is pretty crazy and companies are being built faster than ever before i think that's super exciting and one of the big pieces of work that we've done as as ef over time is is trying to push this cultural shift in what the most ambitious people want to do with their lives away from the status quo you know i started my career at mckinsey it's where i met my co-founder and we've been trying to push this idea that actually one of the most aspirational ambitious things you can do with your life is become a founder and that has never been more true and i think we are in this golden age of entrepreneurship where it has never been easier cheaper or faster to build something that is unbelievably consequential for the world.

24:00Alice Bentinck: Now, I think for investors, the challenge is, where do you put your capital? If I look back to sort of autumn of last year, and when we had we had a demo day, and it's amazing to see how investors preferences are changing from October of last year to January's demo day, how their preferences are changing, because they are constantly trying to work out what are the big labs about to release, which of the startups or which of the industries is it going to kill that they should or shouldn't be investing in. And so I think we're in a very reactive market at the moment, probably one of the most reactive markets I've seen in the decade that I've done this.

24:33Alice Bentinck: But I also think to some extent that's right, because the market is moving so fast. Now, the great thing about EF's model is that we can take a lot of bets. We built 100 companies last year. We should do about 25 % more than that this year. And so it means that we can take a very broad portfolio approach to what might be hot. And if you look at EF's more mature portfolio, some of our biggest companies are, you know, Clio, which is a B2C app, or Aztec, which is a really deep tech piece of blockchain technology. Or if you look at PolyAI, which you mentioned, which is, you know, a B2B facing AI company.

25:11Alice Bentinck: And so our thesis has always been not technology driven, but founder driven, you know, what are the most smart, ambitious, interesting individuals talking about right now? And whatever that is, we want to back it.

25:23Katie Prescott: It's not an easy one, though, is it spotting talented entrepreneurs? How do you spot people who you think really should be founders and have got what it takes and actually people who are brilliant, but entrepreneurship is not for them?

25:38Alice Bentinck: So this is really the core of what is hard about what EF does is having taste in individuals before they've actually taken the leap. So instead of evaluating them on their idea or their traction or their technology, you're evaluating them on their behaviors. And so I suppose some of the behaviors and self-beliefs that we look for are something that's really obvious, like being smart helps, being really, really smart helps. Like your ability to solve problems. And when you're a founder, as I'm sure you're very aware, when you're a founder, there's a lot of problems every day. You're kind of clock speed on solving them and usually tipping towards the right answer.

26:14Alice Bentinck: That matters. But it's not sufficient. You need to have a strong bias to action. you need to be able to build, you need to be able to create.

26:20Katie Prescott: But I think some of the things that we look for the maybe slightly less obvious is, we like megalomaniacs, you know, we like people who

26:27Alice Bentinck: are looking to unleash their power and their beliefs on the world. And that's not really something that is typically okay to say within, within sort of polite, polite society. But when I speak to founders, and, you know, probably the most common answer to why do you want to be a founder, they will say something that's more socially acceptable, like I want to have impact on the world. But when you actually unpick what that means, you know, they'll say things like, yeah, I want to have a billion people who are using my product. I want to influence how they're living their lives. I want to influence how they think.

27:00Alice Bentinck: And that is that is megalomania. And I think it can be a very, very powerful driving force for some of the world's most successful founders. One of the other things we look for is pro-noia, which is the opposite of paranoia. So paranoia, you believe the world is conspiring against you. Pro-noia, you believe the world is conspiring in your favor. And it's so interesting, some of the founders that I worked with who have been super smart, really good at building so fast, high velocity, although, you know, ticking all the boxes, but they didn't believe that they were going to have a great outcome.

27:30Alice Bentinck: And so you then start allocating too much of your brain space to downside protection. And actually that means that you're not fully committed to what you're doing and the market can sense that and you can sense that. And so actually many of the most successful individuals that I've worked with, they believe the world is conspiring in their favor, they've never doubted that they would succeed. Now, it's obviously not sufficient to succeed. I do think it's necessary. You do have to believe that to some extent you are different and that the odds are stacked in your favor. And so actually one of the really difficult things that we have to do is sort of, you know, looking at someone as an onion and working out how many layers do we need to peel back to actually work out what is motivating this human?

28:07Alice Bentinck: What is their ultimate goal in life and how likely are they to get there and it's you know we work across Europe India and the US and for each of those cultures it's very very different and you know how those people present you know how does megalomania present how does ambition present how does pro noia present and that's that's actually sort of a key part of what EF has been able to work out is okay well they're saying one thing

28:30Danny Fortson: how do we actually get to the crux of what they actually mean what's your biggest miss oh um

28:36Alice Bentinck: Um, we've definitely had misses when we've said to people, it's not a no, it's not yet come back in a year. And actually the best founders don't want to, they don't want to wait. They just want to get going right away. And we're seeing, you know, the, the age of founding and sort of what founders are getting funded right now is just going younger and younger and younger. And when we first started EF, it was a graduate program. You know, it was, it was something specifically designed for graduates. And over time, our average age sort of crept up sort of mid twenties, but now we are right back down investing in you know 18 year olds or college dropouts um but you know someone like james dackham who uh he's just raised 220 million dollars for his company olex and they're building a new kind of chip that actually uses photonics rather than the traditional gpu architecture what they're trying to do is create a lower cost chip that is also higher in efficiency and it's pretty exciting we actually first started working with him when he was 18 on his first company co-mind which was a brain computer interface to detect issues with the brain.

29:38Alice Bentinck: And, you know, it felt pretty high risk at the time. This was, what, seven years ago, to back an 18-year-old to basically build a medical device and then watching him, his insane determination and the insane velocity to get his product into hospitals in the US while basically still a teenager. And now he's started his second company, age 25. You know, those kind of individuals who are basically just unstoppable. and I do think there is something about when you start really young what you're signing up to is is founding as a career path and I still don't think this is talked about enough often founding particularly in Europe has talked about okay you tried building a company didn't work out you know go and join a startup or go and join a big company but I think this idea of actually the best way to learn how to be a founder is to be a founder and maybe your first company isn't going to be the massive success but you know try that first company when you're 18 when you're 22 whatever and then use those learnings to deeply inform what your next company will be you will be a better founder you'll have better founder intuition and so i think you know the more we can push this idea of the founding career path the more great entrepreneurs we will have in the world how much

30:39Katie Prescott: do you think about diversity in your cohort i mean we know it's an enormous problem that female founders don't get funding in the way that guys do and you can talk about diversity in other ways as well clearly of backgrounds too i mean is that a consideration and you try and reach out to people who might not naturally, you know, take on founding as a career path because it is inherently risky, you know. And so for a lot of people, actually, like, that's frankly not even a possibility.

31:07Alice Bentinck: Yeah, we do think a lot about this and have done since we first started. You know, when we first started EF, I think rather naively, we thought we could solve this problem very quickly and started a not-for-profit called Code First Girls, which has now taught more than 100 ,000 women across Europe to code for free. And the idea was, you know, we'd create more women with technical backgrounds and that would increase the number who end up founding. We've seen a little bit of that, but yeah, it is a perennial issue for us. The way that we work with this is constantly trying to raise awareness of what it takes to become a founder on that founding path.

31:40Alice Bentinck: And usually it's through bringing together smart, ambitious, underrepresented groups to meet each other and to have those conversations and to see that it's possible. You know, with women in particularly around about 25 % of our cohorts are women. And actually last year, many of our best seed rounds actually had female founders as the CEOs. So we do see some remarkable and fantastic outcomes for female founders, but I think still there's like, there's an awareness issue and tipping them over to try it. That's kind of what we're pushing is, how do you help them take that first, that very first step?

32:13Danny Fortson: I have two questions. One is, you know, you're in San Francisco now, the home of Y Combinator, the startup bootcamp that has kind of this like global amongst founders anyway, like, you know, it's a big attraction. How do you set yourself apart from them when they're also doing some something similar, not same to you, but like, what do they invest now is 100 grand or 200 grand for 7 % of the company. And then the second question is, you're obviously not from California, but you're here now is that big cultural gap that people have talked about for for ages does that still exist is it getting smaller is it getting bigger with yc you know

32:52Alice Bentinck: yc is the most incredible investor and really pioneered this you know very early stage pre-seed investing when everyone else thought it was crazy i mean the main difference between us and yc is that yc predominantly takes people who are in teams and who have companies and our product is designed specifically to help individuals go through that very first stage of even deciding what the idea is and who to work with. And one of the things that we offer is a pool of co-founders who are committed and ready to go right now. You know, smart people always know other smart people who could be great co-founders, but often the commitment isn't there and the commitment to go right now and be interested in the same things.

33:29Alice Bentinck: You know, we see a lot of co-founders of convenience where your best mate also wants to co-found a company. And so you sort of try and make it work and end up working on something that neither of you are actually that interested in because you're trying to protect the relationship more than actually working out what is the thing that you want to dedicate this founding journey and your career to so yeah that's probably the main differences and then in terms of culture so I moved to San Francisco two years ago and I have to say I'm still surprised almost on a daily basis how different the culture is between the US and and Europe um go on it is I strongly believe that all founders but also all investors need to sort of do a pilgrimage to the Bay Area to immerse themselves in the optimism, the ambition, but also the speed that things happen out here.

34:20Alice Bentinck: I think that's the thing that has really, really surprised me is that the speed in terms of transferring information between investors, between founders, the speed that people get things done, whether they're a VC or a founder. but if I look at our companies that have come out here the speed that they get to their first 100k of revenue is just like unlike anything else I've seen because of the size of the market would you say it's the behavior of the customers so customers here are more interested in the profit motive they are more inclined to experiment with new products and it means that you know they're thinking in hours and days rather than weeks and months and I think that is one of the big shifts And one of our investors, Charlie Songhurst, who's on the board of Meta, he actually said to me, you know, one of the things that you will undervalue, and he was completely right, was that the culture of the companies will be set by the customers, not by the founders.

35:15Alice Bentinck: And so if you're working with customers that take two months to get back to you, three months, you know, you're going through a long procurement process, all the rest of it, that is the speed of your company. That's how fast you can go. Whereas if you're working with customers who just have that super fast clock speed, that will be the culture of the company. And I do think that is really, really undervalued by founders from outside of the Bay Area. I'm a big believer in the quality of European talent and the quality of our universities, the quality of the founders that are coming out of Europe.

35:41Alice Bentinck: But I do think, you know, the Bay Area is 50 years ahead of us in terms of the depth of the ecosystem here. And it is setting the norms and the clock speed for how this industry works. And I think you do need to come and get exposure to it.

35:54Katie Prescott: It was really interesting earlier, you talked about the sort of culture, sometimes hiding an entrepreneurial spirit and you having to peel people back like an onion. What do you think you have to peel back with European founders compared to American ones? Now you're kind of straddling both sides at the Atlantic. And what can European founders learn from maybe US culture or vice versa?

36:18Alice Bentinck: I suppose the trope is ambition, ambition, ambition, ambition. Like Americans just come across as more ambitious. But I think the misinterpretation of this for a European founder is, cool, I'm going to come up with some big lofty goal that sounds outrageous. Firstly, in my experience, the big lofty goals actually don't sound outrageous enough. And they just need to put, I spoke to one VC who's European but based here. And she said, they just need to put two zeros on everything. Doesn't matter what the number is, just more zeros. I think actually the more nuanced way of thinking about this is ambition shows up in absolutely everything you do.

36:53Alice Bentinck: And it's how you behave and it's how fast you move and it's how ambitious you are in what you think you can achieve. So I was speaking to one VC out here who's invested in a lot of European companies. And I said, well, what feedback do you have or what's the comparison that you see between European and US founders? And they said, well, European founders are very methodical. They're very thoughtful about their product development. And really, they were just saying they're slow. You know, again, it comes back to this thing of are you thinking in hours and days or weeks and months? And it's much better to quickly get it wrong than methodically plan it.

37:28Alice Bentinck: And honestly, in startups, probably still get it wrong. The methodical planning isn't going to save you. And so I think this idea that ambition is literally how fast do you respond to messages? How quickly do you build? How quickly do you throw things out? How quickly do you get new customers onboarded? And it's that sort of ambition in action that I think Europeans often get wrong.

37:47Danny Fortson: Before we let you go, could you give us a little window into like your world? What is like the most kind of out there idea that has come across your desk?

37:56Katie Prescott: What are we all going to be talking about next year?

37:58Alice Bentinck: Space is hot right now. We've got a great company called Icarus Robotics that just raised$6 million and they are building autonomous robots for space. So, you know, who is going to be manning the ISS in future? It's going to be these miniature robots moving things around the International Space Station. We've got a bunch of people working on brain computer interfaces, both invasive and non-invasive. I think time will still tell, you know, what that looks like when it actually is in customers' hands. but I think there's something really interesting and exciting there. We're still, you know, this wave of AI is still so novel.

38:34Alice Bentinck: Surely there's something more than chat for us to interact with these incredibly powerful models. You know, we have some of the world's most impressive technology in our hands and, you know, we're still chatting to it in a way that's sort of like texting, SMSing with somebody in 1997. So what are going to be the new ways that we interact with it? Is it going to be brain-computer interfaces? I think that's super interesting.

38:52Katie Prescott: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Thank you so much for hosting me. I mean, what an amazing story of kind of how to find the ingredients of a successful entrepreneur, but also ultimately, you know, there are wild cards. And, and so there's no perfect formula. Yeah, it's more art than science, it sounds like.

39:17Danny Fortson: But it's also and we didn't get into this, but it feels like, you know, the the people they raise the money from 200 million, it's like all these tech billionaires like Patrick Collison and like all these people and all of those people have networks upon networks upon networks I imagine a lot of the people that come in through those networks and through the you know top universities and everything but um I don't know

39:39Katie Prescott: space robots that sounds pretty cool I thought you were going to be bouncing off walls over that one I love that your favorite things are space and robots I know space robots first answer it's like danny's going yes we got space and robots next year cool and brain chips i mean you know what extraordinary thing but on the point about the ingredients that make entrepreneurs i was really struck when she said we want megalomaniacs yeah you want crazy people because you do and in my experience the top entrepreneurs are actually very difficult people

40:14Danny Fortson: as well yes and that's why you always read those stories of like whenever something you know goes wrong at company x then the kind of the what i like to call you the the now you tell us stories come out where it's like all the people who are like let me like start spilling the beans about what difficult people these people often are but you have to be kind of uncompromising in a way that most people aren't.

40:39Katie Prescott: Yeah, a megalomaniac, I think, sums it up.

40:42Danny Fortson: Yeah.

40:42Katie Prescott: Ruthless.

40:43Danny Fortson: Mm-hmm. And able to just...

40:45Katie Prescott: And that total self-belief.

40:46Danny Fortson: Pronoia, exactly. That's a new one for me.

40:49Katie Prescott: We should add it to our tech lingo for the...

40:52Danny Fortson: Yeah, pronoia, exactly. We should double click on that one.

40:55Katie Prescott: So, what do you reckon? Have we learned what it takes to be an entrepreneur? Can we do it?

41:00Danny Fortson: Yes, because you're a megalomaniac, so you've got it.

41:05Katie Prescott: And you're like totally pronoid. about life. Everything's working for me.

41:11Danny Fortson: Yes, exactly. Anyhow, well, that is it for this week's episode of the Times Tech Podcast. If you're enjoying the show, please drop us a line to let us know.

41:22Katie Prescott: And we'd love to know your thoughts as well on today's discussion. What do you think it takes to make it as a successful entrepreneur? Do you just need an idea or the ability to work really, really hard. Get in touch.

41:35Danny Fortson: That's right. So email us at techpod at the times.co.uk. That is techpod at the times.co.uk. We'll be back here next week.

41:45Katie Prescott: See you next week.

41:46Danny Fortson: Bye.

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