Piers Linney: AI Will Change Dragons’ Den Forever

31:43That's why we've been using Win.ai. It's carrying me over the sailing seas of prospecting. It's pulling our sales as therapy playbook live on screen and nudging you in real time. And then guess what? It magically puts everything into the CRM so you never need to learn how to write, read or spell. It's like having a therapist, sales coach and a PA all whispering in your ear. Wow, that sounds beautiful. because when AI knows that sales calls should feel like you're being lifted over the clouds rather than buried underneath the ocean of rejection. I'm sure that your DMs get bombarded by, we call them like a magpie, shiny object syndrome, where they're drop shipping or they're setting up a new business.

32:26For people that are entrepreneurial and they're thinking, all right, how am I going to use AI? How am I going to make a load of money? There'll be people that think, right, I'll set up a copyright in business. what would you say are the dead certs that are probably, we were talking about this off air, but like that have the least amount of risk? No, definitely not copywriting. Give up copywriting. I'll put that out there right now. So I'll give you a real example. I was at a Goldman Sachs event in Manchester at the Midland. And this is Ben and I was giving a bit of a talk and I was talking about voice and translation.

33:03and this lady probably mid-40s came up to me afterwards and said i'm really concerned about what you just said i said why what do you do she goes i've got a translation business i was like i think fast p i said well okay so okay talk a few business right so i've got clients they're quite big clients some are regulated it's very important we get it right a lot of qa i said what's your main cost people translating it and what do you enjoy doing well I love that the QA the liaison with the clients making sure it's right and it fits their particular need okay so you can automate a lot of the translation and you spend the time doing what you enjoy doing that's where you add the value top of the pyramid okay thank you anyway two weeks later I get a message on LinkedIn thank you you've completely transformed my business now that's now so now there's an opportunity i don't really care what you do to be honest with you as long as it isn't copyrighted it doesn't matter what you do there's an opportunity now to augment yourself and your team to be better what you do i i my output now is probably 3x what it usually used to be just in terms of not nothing i do whether it's research or even i do all the work and i check it there's nothing i do cognitively that i don't involve an ai somewhere why why wouldn't have this amazing sidekick, this infinitely patient access to all world knowledge.

34:30I can set it up and prompt it to be anything at any time almost. So if you're trying to start a business or operate a business, you've got to think about your, I said earlier that your main cost tends to be people. And when you try and grow a business, and you should have done it yourselves, especially in your business, the frustration is you're growing revenues and your cost is just tracking it. Or worst case, it's narrowing. What you want is to grow faster by using artificial intelligence and voice and hyper-personalized marketing to engage with customers, engage with them faster, engage in ways that the competition isn't doing.

35:04And then optimize your cost base by getting more out of the human resource you've got so that your cost base doesn't grow as quickly as your revenue is now growing. And that expansion is margin expansion, it's profit, and it's a more valuable business because most businesses are valued on a multiple profit that's the opportunity now in five years to ten years the basics become spell check everyone's got it and everyone can use it or there's an ai that exists to help you use it so you get you get that that issue as well so my advice is to go now so we last night we was we're staying in chelsea and me and zach would i was staying king's crop and uh we were talking about ai and zach wrote a poem for me using ai and we ended up having a conversation and i'm not this this whole podcast isn't about copywriters we're going to move on from that but it's we were talking about okay well that poem is probably the the ai has wrote a poem that could write something more beautiful than any copywriter could ever write so then it gets to the point of like say you write a book okay and i'm i know that you probably would use ai in some form does it get to the point where you're not actually behind that process anymore will you do you think that there will be some kind of rebellion against AI do you think there'll be people that will fight it and what could that lead to yeah so you know go back to my interest in history the Luddites and in the people are smashing up machines and I think you are going to have complexities if you want to call it that globally you're gonna have complexities in the UK Call centers, what, 8 ,000 people?

36:50Those jobs are going away, no doubt about it. Basic admin is going away. A lot of creative is under threat, let's face it, okay? Not that you don't need them, you just need a few of them because you can augment yourself essentially. The other interesting one or complicated one, I think, are what people would like to call low-cost labor economies. so people in countries where they're they can you know you've got countries you know you saw um um tim cook CEO of apple saying look we make stuff in china because there's amazing skills there that's different i'm about just people that are doing things because it's cheaper making things sewing things machines operators knowledge work data entry so once a computer can do all of that, that competitive advantage in those countries goes away.

37:42Once a robot costs a thousand pounds and it can knit a jumper or whatever it needs to do or make a pair of shoes, then that advantage goes away. So you're going to have an issue in some places around the world where the value of labor goes away a lot faster. Now, think of it the other way around, actually. It might be the other way around because you might find that if you were working in America, your cost is really high. So AIs now can do a better job than that. But in Europe, you're still here. So you can still compete. But then as the AI cost begins to drop, that's all it's doing. It's going to zero.

38:20Suddenly, European employees aren't competitive anymore. It drops again. So maybe it is the low labor economies that scale up. Because now they can learn anything using artificial intelligence. But eventually, in that race to the bottom, they're no longer competitive. So knowledge workers are going to have a tough time. That's everything I've ever done. I've got an accounting degree. I'm a qualified lawyer. I was an investment banker in the city. I've been a hedge fund manager. Everything I've ever done will have little value. And what's going to be interesting for all of us is that where we, where we, people got paid the big bucks, you know, the bankers, the knowledge workers.

38:58It might be, you're going to earn 500 grand a year now being a multilingual masseuse so you can cut hair. You know what I mean? it might just completely change but that's actually where the value is now. I don't know. So I think there are going to be real complexities and this is why governments need to start thinking about this sooner rather than later because if they do it too late then there's going to be a lot of people who are upset or find themselves without work. Having said all of that, did we really evolve? I'm not going to pick out any roles in particular but did we really evolve to do lots of these jobs people do all day?

39:31Is that what it's really about? so maybe it's not a bad thing yeah yeah how you generate income and revenue and tax is another massive complexity yeah but i suppose if we were to put you back in the the um the dragon's den chair today would you be fundamentally asking a totally different set of questions based on where we are today if someone's coming in for investment no it'd be similar question because often you're trying to work out the per the person is actually not the business plan not the operational model i'm trying to work out can i work with you are you going to actually generate return are you going to be able to put up with the ups and downs of trying to build a business over let's face it 10 years so it's still the person but i would be asking now about are you using this technology do you understand it because if you're trying to run a business now or start a business like i said you can have a team of people or or or at least augment the team you've got to the extent of 2X, 3X, where you don't need to pay much for it.

40:33It's thousands of pounds a year, not thousands of pounds a month to have this to augment you. So the risk of starting a business now is declining. It did it with cloud infrastructure, software as a service, it lowered the barriers. And now you can have knowledge workers, eventually physical workers that are reasonably cheap as well. But the point is, if you wait too long, like I said, it becomes spellcheck. It becomes the calculator. Everyone's got one. Every SaaS company is now embedded AI into it. You're using the same software as a service. Where is the differentiation? Where is your competitive advantage?

41:08And I think that today is going early, getting ahead so you can stay ahead. And also going back to my pyramid analogy is trying to automate all this stuff so that your human resource and yourselves are actually focused on adding value. Does it then, is there a risk of, there are things about us that will become fundamentally less intelligent? So I, like calculator is a good example. People were probably much better at maths at a point before the calculator because they relied on it more to know it more. Whereas instead I can now kind of outsource it to my calculator. Perhaps critical thinking, I don't really need to do it as much anymore because I can then go, well, actually I can bang that into an AI to figure that out for me.

41:51That's going back to the spell check, isn't it? Is that everybody can do basic critical thinking. People always say, oh, well, the best become amazing. The ones in the middle of the road become great. The ones that aren't very good become okay. But if you're kind of at the bottom rungs of that ladder, you're not necessary. So I was a lawyer. You look at law firms. Are you really going to recruit somebody and pay them 150 grand a year? What some of them are earning. For two years post-qualification? Probably not. so now these organizations look like that again a lot of pyramids in this podcast you know the boss the the senior people and middle management and the people doing the work looks like that you may find they become kind of diamond shape and eventually they invert because all the grunt work can be kind of automated but the problem there is the talent pipeline starts to dry up so as the talent pipeline starts to dry up from the bottom you're not recruiting these people and training them and give them experience you're then almost at the top you're then forced to automate even more and then the senior people begin to retire and then suddenly these are they almost collapse automatically these organizations into nothing so that's the interesting issue about i think talent is and the bigger issue is flipping it you ask about society so take me for example right so i'm a bit of a you know people think i i didn't grow up in particular difficult circumstances right my I'm on my own BMW.

43:16They're working class parents that work hard. Nurse, my dad works in management to become sort of middle class, you want to call it that. But I grew up in an interesting area. You all know it. It's up in North. I went to Burnley College around there. We look like me. It's quite an interesting place to live at the time. So, but I progressed and did okay for myself through social mobility. So how do you become socially mobile? And you guys, I'm sure you do, you've done it as well. Is that because you learn something, you get educated or you learn on your own. And then you take that knowledge and you apply it into a business or career and you work hard and you climb the ladder.

43:52You earn more money and you invest it and it grows and you're socially mobile. The issue of AI is if you think about knowledge work kind of becomes worthless, you don't have the trainees at the bottom anymore, you don't need them. How do you actually climb the ladder? So you might find that actually wealth, the societal structure we have, it almost crystallizes. And that's it. Because if you were me 30 years ago, I can't become a lawyer in the city anymore, an investment banker at Credit Suisse. That's a path no longer exists. Starting a business, can you do that? Because everyone's doing it. You can automate everything.

44:30So my worry is about society is that the haves will become permanently the haves and the have-nots will be permanently the have-nots. And there'd be no way, literally, are moving from the bottom rung to the top. But it feels like there's still that unknown at the moment. So like, obviously a lot of paths will be shut, but I imagine with that, other paths will. Back to horizons. Five years, I agree. 10 years, let's go 20 years out, right? It's maybe not 20 years, as you're going to find out. Quickly, 20 years passes. So 20 years out, I think that will be an issue. And if you take away people's ability to progress, do better than their parents or see the results of the hard work and ambition, I think that's when you actually have a bigger issue than people is worrying about, am I going to lose my job?

45:18Maybe people will be copywriting just for fun after the day. So I want to, obviously, I imagine your bandwidth now when it comes to investment and investing in new exciting businesses, there are probably lots and lots of opportunities, but you're focused on AI. so if you took ai off the table on the project that you're working on what problems do you see in the world that need to be solved that you think actually i don't have the time or the energy to focus on it but that is something that people should be focusing on fixing well so there is another one which i do spend time and energy on i was doing something this morning related to that so you've got artificial intelligence and the thing i'm sort of spent a lot of my time on So last year, I was the Diversity Champion of the Year at the European Diversity Awards, right?

46:05Don't ask me how I won that award. But the answer actually to that is I do a lot of work with Sky. And Sky invested 30 million pounds over four years now into diversity and inclusion, both internally, but also externally. So working things like, you know, Sir Lewis Hamilton, his charity, various other things. And the issue is, is that ambition, it's a bit like the social mobility point, actually, is where it kind of comes from for me. ambition is evenly distributed right perhaps not if you come from a difficult socioeconomic background you might be a white working class lad or you're you come from an ethnic minority you actually might be more ambitious because you need to be yeah right so maybe let's assume it's evenly distributed access to capital support and guidance as well and just opportunity isn't And that's why society still looks the way it does, where the top doesn't look anything like the bottom, right?

46:59And I've seen the top in many different ways and guises. I've been to city drinks parties in tuxedos where I'm like, I've made it here. And people come up to me and say, hello. And I go, hello. And they say, can I have a glass of champagne and two gin and tonic? That happens. You know what I mean? And I'm like, oh. now i because i'm me i laugh it off i'm quite you know whatever pal i'll just dig a hole under you around you and go around you mate get out my way yeah but as other people those microaggressions wear them down so to answer your question what i focus a lot on is helping people to you know be the best they can be achieve their ambitions without going for a lot of pain that i went through because i went to a comprehensive school in a milltown lancashire you know for me to get into university.

47:47I did my levels twice, my levels twice. To get a job in the city was hard work. To get a job in banking was even hard work. But I managed to do it. So this morning, I was a friend of mine, Shah Wasman. She had an event with the rise of the female entrepreneur. So you think, women are doing all right? Well, actually, less than 2 % of venture capital goes into women-led businesses. If you're a black woman, only once a few years ago now only one black woman had raised more than a million dollars of venture capital in the UK in a decade. Fucking hell. So if you look at entrepreneurship let's look at entrepreneurship and when I was on the board of British Business Bank I did some research called the Loan Together Report and this is more about ethnic minorities but it's the same for women it can be white working class lads as well it said look they invest more money in their businesses they're better educated which surprised me actually maybe it shouldn't but it surprised me And they spend more time and energy on it, but the outcome is always worse.

48:50And the way I kind of try to explain that is, it's like, and I've experienced this, it's like you're a hundred meter race, right? You do the same training, the same physique, you've got the same kit and you're ready to go. And someone then says to you, yeah, mate, can you just start 50 yards back? Because typically you've got a bit of a longer journey to even get to the start line. So you start 50 yards back. And then in your lane, they start putting out hurdles. You're like, well, hang on a minute. He hasn't got hurdles. and I knew there were hurdles I knew that you know my school I went to I wanted to work in a city you know mixed race I went to a pretty let's just say it wasn't Oxbridge right and I knew there were hurdles I'm like okay there's hurdles I'm going to deal with these hurdles let's do this and you start running and as you're getting at this hurdle you start to go there's bloody there's invisible hurdles well you put those there and that's bias and then the things you don't know that they're until you actually experience them or sometimes you don't even know it's happening to you but it's kind of there and it's affecting you.

49:48Now, if you're a woman, same visible hurdles, maybe not invisible depending on who you are but then you're starting 100 meters back. That's how I imagine. That's what the research literally showed. So my point is is that we collectively should try and make sure everyone has a fair pop at it. I'm not saying that you should be assisted if you're particularly a woman or an ethnic minority or a white working class lad. I'm not talking about that. I'm just saying you all have a right to get on the flipping start line. Then it's down to you, let's face it. Yeah. Because that's the thing. It always felt like, well, actually, you can imagine trying to be an actor or an actress.

50:29I get it. There are so many kind of setbacks. But you always felt that if it's business and it's your own thing, well, you can build it. But when you talk about it like that with the buyers. So if you could go back to younger peers and the advice that you probably give to people now when you're having these conversations saying, just so you know, watch out for X, Y, this is how you handle this. What are those things? It depends who they are and their background. So I was in the first wave of internet, internet 1.0, literally, in 2000. And if you look back at the first wave of internet entrepreneurs, most of them were wealthy.

51:03You know, mum and daddy had money or they were bankers or they were consultants. So they could afford to take a couple of years out. And I thought that was me. So I left Credit Suisse First Bottom, my bonus. You know, more money my parents probably earn put together in a year. I had this cash. And I thought, well, I'll take two years out. Kitchen my wagon and head west and.com gold rush. Here we go. And worst case scenario, I can always go back to the city. So as I leave the city, across this bridge into the internet, the.com bubble burst. So my bridge back was like literally incinerated. So I was kind of like, oh, okay.

51:37So I was kind of like left on this island with no way back to the city because I'd find everybody. So from then on, for me, it was kind of like, right, okay, I've got to sort of just go forwards. And that's what I say to people is that I do think that business is something that everyone should try and want. I think there's like a book, there's a business in everybody. But your ability to, people say, follow your passion. I don't actually agree with that. I think you should do something you're good at, to be quite frank, which might be a passion. It might not be a passion. But I say to people, find something you're very good at, you can be world class at, or at least competitive at.

52:17Use artificial intelligence to sort of augment yourself and give it a go. But realize that it comes a day or point where it might not be working out and you need to know when to stop. And often most entrepreneurs I talk to, or people who are in careers actually, I say increasingly it's not going to be the first career that makes you. It won't be the first business that makes you. it'll be number two three even four and if you're expecting now to have a career expect to change it four times and retrain along the way so what i'm saying to people now to answer your question really is you've you're going to even more resilience than you even used to have and you're going to have to be flexible and you're going to have to be quite willing to retrain and learn new skills as technology is like chasing you down the street have you heard of gary's economics yeah yeah so So if he'd heard that point, you just said that around starting your own business, he'd have probably gone absolutely insane.

53:12That's because he'd never started a business. So talk about that. What do you think of that advice? So, I mean, you know, this is about Simon Squibb and, you know, Gary. So I'll see these things. And, you know, business is not for everybody. It's not a panacea. But I think everybody should try it once. And it might be a side hustle. There are so many amazing businesses that come across. the ones anyone listening or watching this will probably know and love and it came from somebody who never thought they're ever going to be an entrepreneur in business started something and it might be a passion might be something that is good at and it clicked and off they went because working for other people right i don't gary gary thinks about this one but working for the people jobs forget ai is going away because increasingly and you saw that you saw the thin end of a fat wedge zero-hour contracts organizations don't want human resource they don't want fixed costs sitting on their in their pnl whether you know they're working or not they want people in discrete teams to deliver projects and outcomes it might be a day a week a month it might be three years but you come together you you've got a an objective you deliver it you might work in little groups because you that's like an organization like a team it could even call it a company But the idea I think of a salary and a job isn't long for this world, especially if you start thinking about artificial intelligence.

54:39Because eventually we will report to AIs. No one ever grasped that one, did they? You can't leave us on that. People always think that we're going to be working with AIs. If you think about an artificial intelligence, are the ones now, the ones that can actually properly reason, which are going to come eventually one way or the other. they've got access to all the business information in real time, customers, the market, trends in real time, right? So when you're trying to manage people in the business organization, these discrete teams are going to be employed on these like zero hour contracts.

55:16AI is going to be much better at it because they've got the insight in real time to say, actually, today we should be doing this. They're not reacting, you know, a week, two weeks or a month later when they've read some reports or looked at some data that's been generated in a board pack. So eventually the day will come where you go to work and you're told what to do on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis by an artificial intelligence. Naval Ravikant's got this prediction that we'll have like gig culture. So it'll almost be, I accept gig. So this is what I'm talking about. Well, maybe it's like a different thing.

55:48I'm talking about, well, maybe it's a different thing. I'm talking about the gig economy is coming for all of us. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's his thing of, It'll almost be, I take a gig with a discrete team. We complete the work, we take our money, and then we go and do whatever we're doing for a bit and then you accept another one rather than having nine to five money to drive. So the point I'm making, going back to the point, the question you asked is, if we're all gig economy workers on zero hour contracts, okay, or mentored by artificial intelligence or even managed by it, even recruited by it, because that knows what human resource is.

56:21That's the interview we're about. So if you think about that, then we're all in business. We might be one man bands, we might be one man consultancies, we might team together in a little groups, we like working together and we're quite good at delivering to projects like this. We all become, going back to the industrial revolution, units of production that have to go and find work and market ourselves and network or get our AI to go and talk to 435 ,000 AI looking for someone with my skillset. So that's the thing about it. I think that I kind of agree that business is not for everybody because it can be quite stressful.

56:58But I think eventually we're all going to end up in units of production. I can see that. And eventually the people that don't want to adapt will die out. I mean, that's happening. Piers, obviously you're a wealth of knowledge. And I think like what you said at the beginning, taking those complex ideas. I've got so many ideas just from this conversation alone. We probably couldn't have you on the podcast and not talk about something that you probably get peppered with all the time. Dragon's Den, I guess, take us back. Where were you at in your life and how did that come about? It is bonkers, isn't it?

57:33So I will say, so Dragon's Den to me, my life, right, was probably nine and a half, ten weeks of filming at a studio in Manchester. I turned up for two stints of five weeks. and 10 years later I still can't walk down the street without you know some 17 year old saying oh hello can I have a selfie to my mates on Snap and I'm like what the hell and because they keep replaying it so how I ended up on Dragon's Den so I'm kind of a you know this sort of mixed race entrepreneur made a bit of money ended up on the list of the 100 most influential Black Britons my dad used to who's now no longer with us he used to take the mickey out of me saying in at 99 somewhere done so i was on this list which is nice but a pr to honestly i was quite proud of being on it and then through that you've got some researcher and some tv to do tv production company again we need someone who's like you know ticks boxes i'm sure that's what i'm thinking now i am so the first thing i did was the secret millionaire this is like 2011 so i was approached to do it because i had this profile and i and it was two halves of it one was where I was in Wolverhampton helping community organizations.

58:44The other half, I was in Young Offenders. So when they put it out, they only put out the part where I was in Young Offenders. And I was like, hang on a minute. I gave most money from the other part, which I never actually put on TV. So I was like, anyway, so I'm in this Young Offenders and there's a slight aside story there going back to our previous conversation. So I met a young lad called, let's call him Nathan. He was in there. I met him. He was teaching other prisoners to learn to read. Anyway, I said, what are you doing inside? Because he's obviously quite intelligent and bright. He goes, oh, you know, he did some things you probably shouldn't have done or he shouldn't have done.

59:17Got caught and got quite a stiff sentence. And I said, well, when you get out and the producer's like, whoa, you can't help, you can't help the prisoner, give him money. I goes, I'm going to give him money. I want to get there, I'll help him. So he came out, I mentored him a little bit. You know, he learned to work for me for a while. I made him redundant. It's quite awkward. And then he started some businesses, went back to work in IT. And now, you know, what, 10 years later, He probably earns over 150 grand a year. He's some kind of cloud infrastructure architect, right? So that just shows you that, going back to my point earlier, if you give people a bit of support and guidance, if you deflect someone 10 years down range, they end up somewhere else.

59:52Anyway, so I'm on this program. I did my thing, 15 minutes of fame. That was it. So obviously then that researcher, I think, moves to BBC. They're looking for someone to tick boxes on Dragon's Den. And my name came up. so the first year they kind of approached me it didn't happen I wasn't too sure about doing it to be honest with you anyway they went off and did it somebody else joined but then the following year they said do you want to do it and I thought you know what why not because I've always done B2B so you can't look at me and go oh he's that guy of that company and walk down the high street and buy whatever I'm so angry I never did that so I kind of thought okay I don't know what to do so the producers are chasing me and I'm I'd gone to an event with Sir Richard Branson who'd I think it was like 60 grand to go on holiday with him I was like yeah why not so I gave some money to his charity and after went on this trip with him gave it to Virgin Unite actually what's what it was all about and I was at U Saba which is his private game reserve in the Kruger National Park in South Africa and it's like it's like a James Bond like it's a film set it's like the bush is quite flat it's like rocky outcrop with like like a satellite dish on top of it and it's like a six star hotel with like infinity pools overlooking lions chasing impalers bonkers so i'm there with sir richard hanging out thinking what the hell and i and i thought who do i talk to about the media and business and how you put the two together and does it work and and the obvious answer was richard so i can't remember how exactly it happened but when we haven't we'll have a chat over a beer literally and i went through the whole thing of him he said look you should do it he said yeah you'd be good on tv he said i used to get I always remember him saying this, unless I've just made it up in my head.

1:01:35I'm pretty sure he said to me, I used to get on a plane for a good TV spot. That's what he said. I thought, okay, let's do it then. So I kind of said, okay, I'll do it. And as I walked away, I remember to this day, he made me ring the producers back there and then and tell them I'm in. And I saw no to this day. And that's how I ended up on Dragon's Den. And then what, I mean, from a business, so you're looking at kind of the future, this was 10 years ago, what business opportunities has that brought on? And what doors is that open for you? So I'd say no direct business opportunities. So what it does is people take your phone call.

1:02:12So that's quite powerful. So if I contact somebody or I want to meet somebody, it's quite likely I can get in a room with them. That's quite good. What's quite interesting though, is sometimes you in rooms are people who, they're quite competitive, you know, they might even be billionaires. And they're like, you know, they're talking about this and that and the other. I'm kind of like, right. But they can never be a dragon. you can't we can't buy it um so it it opened doors i probably would not have ended up on the you know board of the government bank doesn't have that particular profile because i was kind of like a bit of an sme kind of champion so that's why i was kind of ended up on the board i kind of represented the uk sme population uh and you know i've been able to do things that i probably i don't know mostly i would never been able to do before but the main thing i would say is is that it opens doors people will take your phone call and that's worth something it was a bit weird because it kind of i was kind of on dragon's den then i kind of had a business didn't really work out and i kind of went quiet for a few years and my partner said you should get what kind of social media and post some stuff i was like okay i have to so so i started like posting things on linkedin and got back in the horse really and then it kind of came back again And then I quite enjoy like doing keynotes and explaining things to people.

1:03:28And I guess the business side of things is that when you, like even recruiting people, you know, people think they don't know you, but they feel as though they know you. And that's quite powerful in a way. But it's also the flip side of it is people think they know you and they don't know you. They know a caricature that the BBC created of it. So Dragon's Den, it's like a multiverse, right? I'll explain it. so they come out the lift which is not a lift it doesn't move this is the box so they come out this pretend lift you've got your pretend 50s and they walk over and then they pitch to you so that's all real right they never stop the cameras it's real at the end of the pitch you sort of say okay i'm going to invest or i'm not that's all real so you shake hands and then you don't hand over the cash there and then a suitcase and off they go let me know in 10 years if you sell the business you go off and do a one multiverses you go off lawyers accountants shareholder agreement subscription agreement you do an angel investment a real proper one sometimes due diligence what they told you on tv isn't reality either that's a whole different multiverse so it's not reality so the deal doesn't happen or maybe they're there for the pr or it goes on for so long the show's aired and they get a better offer fair enough doesn't happen right so that's my that's my experience the tv producers have now got a lot of content trapped on a hard drive somewhere and they're going to make a TV show out of it.

1:04:47So they take it away, probably an hour and a half, and they'll edit it down to three minutes for the snippets, maybe 12, 15 minutes for the long form pictures. And then they go away and they'll show it on TV and I'll watch it and they'll be like, well, Piers didn't invest because he didn't like the brand and the guy started crying. And you're like, well, I didn't invest actually because if you go into the detail of what really happened, he did start crying because we weren't going to invest, but it's because he's got a subsidiary of a Canadian franchise. and that just doesn't work. And he's in the IP anyway.

1:05:19And they're like, well, it doesn't work. That's why we didn't invest. Well, that's not a good story for TV. No. So they create these caricatures. And I think even like Debra Meaden's character, it's like the dragon, you know. I think that's just 1990s misogyny. Now the female investors never have that kind of personality. Debra's the nicest lady you'll ever want to meet quite literally. So I think they create a caricature of you and it's not you. What people think is you and people meet me and they look at me and you can see them looking at me and they're kind of like, where do I know this guy from?

1:05:49I've been in like nightclubs in Ibiza and guys all night go, mate, he's like, mate, look who it is and I'm kind of like, oh, hello and he's like, oh, get you some drinks and all night, he's like, get you some more drinks and I'm like, I'm all right, seriously, I'm all right. He's like, no, you know, I want to look after you, you know, I think you're fantastic. I'm like, okay, it's very nice of you. end of the night I'm kind of like I've really got to go and he's like look it's been great to meet you you're an amazing rugby player I'm like oh god so people people but they don't quite know where from I get that all the time I'm like gee I know you and I'm like yeah yeah I'm about to say you on Drangas then they go you work in Barclays you can do that that'll do so then I was thinking we were obviously we were watching a bit last night just to be prepared now you said that I'm thinking let's say someone says a comment about a business and you take umbrage with it and then it will pan to your face and you took a visual reaction has that actually happened or not really chopping that in afterwards yeah so I think they have to they can't completely make it up so you know if it's typically those reactions are real you might get the old thing when they're editing it like for a tease or something where somebody might say something you'll go and that might be taken from somewhere else but generally speaking uh what was interesting when i was on dragon's den it was in um factual so it's quite a different approach to the to the content whereas now it's in entertainment so it's a different it wasn't at bbc one now is it yeah which is entertainment.

1:07:26I was on BBC Two. It was factual. So it's a slightly different approach to the whole program. I haven't watched Dragon's Den since I, I didn't watch it before I was on it. I haven't watched it since I've been on it. It's really, really quite odd actually. I hear about it and I see clips obviously sometimes on the, on the YouTube, places like that. But I haven't really watched it since. But I like to think that I was the first to do that proper deals. Like, you know, taking 5 % for sensible money. Not, I'll give you 50 grand for 68 % of your business. I was the first to do like, you know, lost my name wonderably.

1:07:58It was, they wanted to give away 4 % for a million, for a hundred grand. They got 5 % in the end. And all the dragons in the green room were like, that's not what it's about. That's just, don't do deals like that. And I was like, whatever. And then that, you know, I won't go into details, but it turned out to be probably the most successful deal. Everyone dragons then. And they sold it for cash. Nice. It's like a 43X and all that. Wow. Is there, I don't know if you'd be able to say this, Are there like maximums and minimums? So they're like, you've got to put this amount of money and you've got to invest in this amount of businesses.

1:08:30No, none of that. It's real. But what I would say, what made me laugh is the producers, they don't want to tell you anything. But they might want to tee up a little bit. So they might say, well, the next one's like, it's a bit, they say like business lessons or I think it's quite investable. Because they think it might make good TV or whatever. And they come out and it was always a completely the other way around because they didn't have a clue. you're talking about a clue about what you'd invest in so that always made me laugh but it is real but like i said it then splits into two multiverses one's tv gonna make a tv show and one you are going to spend the next let's face it 10 years building a business working with these people and you know i've been involved with some of them probably three to five and then they become sort of lifestyle or they don't want you there anymore because it's not going to so you sort of get your money back essentially some didn't work out and then like a venture capital fund one wonders of spectacularly well but it's quite rare i think investments do that well we were talking about wonderfully last night i think we we both bought it for our kids at some point and it's one of those so in terms of so it sounds like it's actually full-on hands you're involved like it's not just a case of there's the money see you later well some people have like a team that gets involved i was involved personally but you're not you're not you're not involved every day it's like an angel investment isn't it you might get involved if there's some pr or to put a fire out of these from support you might be like a chairman's type of figure maybe an advisor but you're not you're not really near day-to-day hands-on um i used to always have a bet with the um people on the show that when it goes out your website's going to crash they'll be like no it's not i've got virtual servers dynamic and i'll be like okay and the only people whose website stayed that was, lost my name, one of the big eyes.

1:10:20Because they actually knew what they were doing. Wow. Piers, this conversation has been amazing. There's been so many takeaways. Thank you so, so much for joining us. If people want to work with you, check you out, how can they get in touch? What should they be doing? So the day job, I'm a founder again, 14 hours a day, is implementai.io. So you can just, if you, actually, if you Google the word implement, I think we come up like number three on Google. It's nuts. Wow. Yeah, or implement AI. We're there. Yeah, well, we've done no SEO, nothing. Wow. So you can talk about that later, how that's happened.

1:10:52I think it's just like the podcast and the YouTube. But Implement AI, we just come up in top three ranking globally. And then I've got my own website, pierslinny.com, if you're interested in my other work and a bit more about me and my background. That's on there. But thank you for having me. Amazing. Thank you so, so much. Thank you.