Chris Hadfield: An astronaut’s guide to pioneering leadership.

mitchellake on July 21, 2017

This week I had the absolute honor to speak with Chris Hadfield – a man who needs little introduction (but I will anyway). Chris is a man of many accolades, namely, the first Canadian to ever walk in space, and who famously sang David Bowie’s Space Oddity on the International Space Station, racking up over 4000 hours in space and 36 million youtube hits.

 

More than just a mere Astronaut and Commander of the ISS, Chris is also a musician, writer, and leadership coach, and had a previous life as a downhill ski racer, test pilot, fighter pilot and Director of Operations for NASA at Star City in Russia.

If there was anyone who knows about facing adversity, being a leader, and understanding how to identify great talent, Chris is the man. We are humbled to be joined by him in Australia as he tours Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne on the 22nd of August, the 24th of August, and the 25th of August respectively – tickets for those events can be found here. 

But before Chris makes the trip across the pond, I was able to spend some time with him:

Matthew Parker (MP): What advice would you give based on your experience to entrepreneurs who are considering starting their first new ventures?

Chris Hadfield (CH): Well let’s see… Number one – Never give up on your dreams. Giving up on your dreams has a cost, giving up is not relieving yourself of a burden, it’s actually the opposite. If this is something that is in your category of dreams, then keep it dear to your heart.

Number two; It’s going to fail. There are far more failures than there are successes. Expect the fact it’s going to fail. Look at SpaceX for example, it has had so many failures, some spectacularly so, but they’re gaining success as they go. So expect and anticipate failure and that’s where you learn the most. If you get away with something and get it right first time, it’s not an effective teacher and you can’t learn from it as you can’t analyse it.

Number three; You still need to earn your daily bread and have a backup plan. You don’t want to be completely destitute, and there are so many ways to attack it. It takes patience, tenacious patience. Look at Bonnie Raitt – the American country folk singer. She worked and played for 25 years in bars before she was an overnight success. As Bonnie did, and as I have always aspired to do, is love the process, don’t only love the product, and don’t wait for the finish line to be satisfied with what you’ve done.
And the final thing is that it’s not going to turn out as planned, so accept that…

MP: What character attributes do you observe are most critical to success in pioneering adventures?

CH: Competence – you have to have the technical savvy, and the earned understanding to recognize the opportunity as it happens. And the only way to get that, I find, is having a perpetual dissatisfaction with your own level of competence. Always be striving to understand it better, to dig into it, to keep asking yourself why, and how do i get a clearer picture of this particular problem or issue?

Then you need confidence. Confidence comes from competence. The more capable you are and the more you understand something the more likely you are to make a good decision on that and have the right level of competence to carry that through. Then finally patience. It’s going to take time, it’s going to take longer than you want. Tenacious hard work, staying confident throughout. Even if it is an overnight success, that’s only one facet of the entire thing. All my various achievements, from being a downhill ski racer, fighter pilot, as a test pilot, singer, an astronaut all of those challenges have required that same combination.

MP: So following on from that, what advice do you give to founders as they face adversity and challenges in building their business?

CH: First you need to convince yourself, otherwise you’re incredibly handicapped in convincing anybody else. And the only way you’re going to do this, is do the work. Understand it better or earlier than everyone else. Dig into it so you have the best chance as the world is evolving around you. You will hardly ever have all the data, but if you collect enough knowledge, then you’ll put yourself in the best position to make the right call. And if you have all this knowledge, and have the confidence, then you are the contagion, the Typhoid Mary, that is convincing the people around you to stick with it and not just do things the way they’ve always been done.

Technology and ideas have never been advancing as quickly as they are right now, so the opportunity, even though competitiveness is high, the opportunity is higher because of the tools we have. But this is ultimately part of the process that we’re in, so be the process evangelists of what you believe in to enable the people around you.

MP: You have worked with a lot of high achievers, but what does it take to create a high-achieving team?

CH: I Just helped with the latest Canadian space recruitment, and had 8000 people apply for 2 spots so yes I can talk around this.

Number one; you’re looking for someone who has the proven raw material – what type of skills or intellect or physical capability is needed for this particular job – and try and define this. But then also the proven ability to perform, someone who has used this intellect to perform, so not just someone with an IQ, but someone who is doing something with that IQ.

The other thing to keep in the back of your mind is hire lucky people – they’re probably lucky for a reason. Dice don’t care who’s rolling them. So if you can find someone who has a pattern of luck that’s a pretty good thing to look for as that person is finding a way to succeed in an otherwise random environment. Where have they had those “right place right time” moments – if that’s happened more than once, that could be a silent indicator of the type of person you want to hire.

Then also, what is the environment you’re hiring them into, and try to use the opportunity during the process to integrate them into this environment to see how they react and people react to them. When I was hiring people into my office at Star City Russia, I would make sure they have all the things I wanted from them, then get them to go around in the office to interact with all the people working there and ask questions. This gave me an opportunity to see what they’re like engaging with other people and get second and third opinions to see if this person is right. But even with that huge filter, not every astronaut who is hired goes into space. For Nasa’s astronaut selection they went from 18,300 people and they chose 12, so hopefully, they optimized their chances of finding the best person to send to space.

Let other people weigh in. One of the things we do when selection is over, is go down to the medical clinic and ask if anyone stood out, for good or for bad? How they treat someone who doesn’t “matter” is an indicator of a personality trait that’s important.

MP: Changing tact a bit, what do you think of current Space oriented entrepreneurial ventures like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic?

CH: I think it’s a natural progression. If you look back to many of the complex technologies like sea travel, that was not for passengers, that was not for the faint-hearted, that was dangerous and people were killed! When Ferdinand Magellan launched his first five ships back in 1519 with 250 people to sail around the world, only 18 people and one ship made it back.

That type of pattern repeats itself always. In space flight, we don’t really know what we’re doing and we should expect the fact that the early explorers take the greatest risk. But after a while, the technology and operations become competent enough for people who are completely unqualified to take these journeys with no concerns. It takes zero skills for airline passengers – a briefing for 1 minute for safety, even for something as difficult as flying across the Pacific. And there’s no reason to think space travel won’t go the same way. But right now we’re still in the Magellan period, it’s dangerous and hard and complex. Maybe we’re at the tipping point where we can bring one or two passengers – but the briefing takes 9 months not 1 minute. And these paying tourists have to live and train in pretty rugged circumstances in order to be capable to take these trips. But i’m all for it, however, it’s still early day and it requires patience.

MP: Finally, what technological advancements, emerging or future are you excited about?

CH: The major impediment in space travel or any sort of travel in this world, is energy and energy source. When we discovered fossil fuels, coal, etc… and the advancement of petroleum-based power sources, they improved our quality of life and allowed us to advance so quickly, and feed more people in our history. But it’s unsustainable and it damages the environment. It’s also very limited as you can only generate so much power by burning fossil fuels.

But the power of the atom is much more interesting. That’s where the real advancement of our future lies, in finding the next true power source. I don’t think it’s fusion just yet given the level of pollution, but it is the next important step and ultimately it will also solve a lot of problems for propulsion and for leaving earth which is the biggest problem for space travel. Fossil Fuels only give so much propulsion and it’s such a wickedly brute force and dangerous way to leave earth. The odds of dying on my first launch was 1/83 which are just unacceptable odds for something you’re going to do more than once. It’s getting better over time but it’s still the same core mechanism.

One to watch would be the Ad Astra Rocket Company which uses the magnetic charge of relatively heavy molecules and then accelerates them to get to a significant proportion of the speed of light and then you can get a great thrust from every atom.

BUT –  you can’t wait for the magic of the future otherwise you’ll wait forever. You have to take the technology that already exists and then pushes it to its very limits. This is what we have right now, and it’s incredible what we have, but don’t wait for someone else to do it, don’t wait for the magic to occur, and if it doesn’t exist, take the best there is, and improve it. It’s what every entrepreneur should take to heart in pursuing their particular area of expertise

MP: Before you go, I wanted to give a special shout-out from everyone here in the space and technology industry, thank you so much for everything you’re doing

CH: I really can’t wait to be there talking to everyone and inspiring the young people in the crowd, and also the re-inspiring of the adults. You can constantly reinvent yourself. I love that interaction, showing pictures, discussing ideas, and having a great Q&A with the crowd, and perhaps a bit of music!

Chris will be touring Australia in August, visiting Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne on the 22nd, 24th, and 25th respectively. If you’d like to buy tickets, you can find them here. I know i’ll be getting tickets and seeing him in Sydney as a truly inspirational person and someone who we can all learn a lot from regardless of what we do.

MitchelLake has nearly two decades of experience in identifying leadership and building teams for the world’s most exciting technology ventures. Do you feel lucky? Let’s talk.

Email sydney@mitchellake.com to find out more.

 

FinTech Interviews: GROW Super

mitchellake on June 27, 2017

Over the coming weeks, I will have the pleasure of sitting down with many of Australia’s leading FinTech CEOs. Each will be discussing the specific vertical of Financial Services they are looking at and share their insights.

For the first interview in this series, I sat down with the CEO of GROW Super, Josh Wilson, to discuss the stream of innovation that is occurring in the Superannuation vertical.

Matthew Parker (MP): There have been a few new “disruptive” superannuation businesses launch over the past 2 years. Why is this happening now? What has created the right circumstance for this to occur?

Josh Wilson (JW): Firstly, the technology is now there to create a super fund affordably. Until 2-3 years ago, everything was paper based and you needed an enormous administrative operation to deal with the paperwork. But the introduction of Super Stream democratised the space making it easier for new entrants.

There is also a social movement which has seen a realisation that there are fundamental flaws with our established superannuation funds, and the industry as a whole. It’s a combination of ideology and technology that was the catalyst.

MP: Expand on that, what do you mean by a change in ideology?

JW: The established players have never had to work for their customers. Compulsory super was introduced in 1992 and since then people have been put in default super funds without an understanding of what they are doing. There is a distinct lack of opacity for what you are signing up for. But there is also no real competition; no-one is building a better, more customer-focused product, and the increased price doesn’t reflect quality at all. The average Australian is falling $330,000 short of what they need in their retirement under the current model, and customers aren’t being told that they’re going to be short. The industry needs to educate customers on what the real goal is of their super and what they need to achieve those goals.

MP: In the context of an increasingly competitive market, why is GROW’s approach different?

JW: I think we need to be careful in this new age of super, with all of these new businesses coming out. If managed improperly, you put your entire retirement at risk. You also need to make sure you’re seeing value. If you’re just slapping a funky app on the front end, is that really enough?

I feel we’ve taken a very different approach to super. We know we don’t know more than the best and biggest fund managers in the world, so we’ve joined forces with them. We chose Dimensional Fund Advisors to manage our users’ money. To put some context around how much of a powerhouse Dimensional are, Aussie Super (Australia’s largest industry super fund) have $100billion under management. Dimensional have more than $600 billion globally. For the average Australian, Dimensional is not an option for them because the minimum investment with them is $1 million. By aggregating our fund together, we are able to give the average Australian access to one of the biggest and best fund managers in the world.

MP: I’m squarely in your target market. I use an industry super, why should I change to GROW Super or any other new super fund?

JW: Everything comes back to the “Why”. What is the ultimate goal of putting your money away? If you’re going to do it, you should do it properly. We want to help everyone get to that number which will help them be comfortable in their retirement. So communicating with them, helping them realise what that goal is and what they need to do to close that gap is vital. Depending on what that looks like, our Super Spare Change feature can really help (it helps save spare change directly into super].

MP: But how are you convincing young professionals that super is something they should care about?

JW: It really is a war of attrition. We’ve been very active and focused on social. We have tried to be witty and engaging in order to break down barriers – super has this horrible reputation of being boring. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Ultimately, if you put enough of the right facts in front of the right people you will eventually make them care, and that is our ultimate goal. Whether they go with us is neither here nor there, but people need to wake up to their super. Being broke is not funny. So it’s about creating brand equity, and then having the facts and results underneath. So far it’s been really well received with nearly 10,000 early adopters and $50million under management in just under one month, so we’re really excited about that.

MP: If the super is being managed by Dimensional, how much control do you / I have over how the super is being invested?

JW: “Control” is a funny word when it comes to super… Globally, only 7% of individual active fund managers perform better than the index, so who are any of us to think we can do better than them? So control isn’t really about what funds you want to put money into, it’s more about controlling whether you’re going to reach the financial goals you need to get to. That being said, with GROW you do have an option to put up to 15% of your super into industries you are passionate about including green energy, sustainability, and industrial tech.

MP: Pivoting the conversation slightly, startups often struggle to hire. How have you built your team so far?

JW: Some people have been with us on this journey from the start. But most people are coming for the “Why” and believe in the mission of the business. We’re really looking for renegades, people who have fantastic raw talent, who are a bit different, who we can shape and grow. We don’t really look at CVs, it’s more the intangibles and oddities that are interesting to us. Everyone here at the moment has approached us (*hint*).

Check out GROW Super here , and stay tuned for my next blog with another one of Australia’s leading FinTech CEOs.

FinTech Interviews: Uno Home Loans

mitchellake on June 11, 2017

In the second of my series interviewing FinTech CEOs, I sat down with Vincent Turner, the CEO of Uno Home Loans.

Matthew Parker: There have been a few new Mortgage brokering businesses launch over the past 2 years, why is this happening now? What has created the right circumstance for this to occur?

Vincent Turner: Good question… One of the drivers is that it’s one of the last transactions left to do digitally. People are now more comfortable applying for financial products online such as credit cards and loans, not just researching and comparing. As people become more comfortable transacting online with their holidays or flights or clothes, they start to think “why not money too?” Ultimately people want a digital service and there is now an impetus from a customer and commercial perspective.
We’re also seeing success globally with financial software that would have been previously accessible to only brokers, banks, accountants or wealth managers, being made available to the public; such as SoFi and Wealthfront in the US. These companies are really financial services companies, not technology companies. They are very competent at customer engagement, with a high touch model using customer service and sales. Alongside great digital marketing, branding, and engineering to back that up with great data to understand how the customers are being serviced. They were not just using marketing to trap customers into traditional services.

MP: In the context of an increasingly competitive market, why is UNO different?

VT: In our case, it’s definitely the iceberg effect. What customers see is 20% of the core product capability, but there’s so much happening underneath. 40% of what we’ve built is the software for the customer services team so they can be rockstars to answer questions. Whilst their on the phone they can run algorithms for each customer to make sure they’re getting the best product for them. For a broker, it may take most of a day to collect all the relevant information, compare appropriately and call the customer back.
The next 40% is our engineering and relationships that enable us to plug in to 93% of banks in Australia. We also have direct accreditation with most lenders and institutions.

MP: Why have you chosen to partner with Westpac? Does this go against the FinTech “ethos” of “disrupting the banks”?

VT: Disrupt the outcome for the consumer.. Don’t focus on the competitor, focus on the outcome. There’s going to be winners and losers in the next 10 years. Winning doesn’t mean putting the banks out of business, it means improving all the customer outcomes. For mortgages, this could be price, or product experience but ultimately it’s a unique product that is customised for them and improves their outcome. Westpac has demonstrated through their investments that they are interested in the future of banking and know that it’s not going to look the same in 10 years time. They are also interested in changing the customer outcome. But also, just to be clear, they don’t get special treatment through our product (as hard as that is for people to believe). If they offer the best product, they get the deal, but really, 30% of business goes to major banks, 30% with tier two lenders, and 40% with specialist lenders.
They also enabled us to be where we are today. No VC realistically would have invested $16.5million in us, especially when a chunk of that was pre-launch, but that enabled us to hire great people, build our product and release it very quickly. We couldn’t have done this with half a million of seed funding.

MP: Talking about people; you were able to hire a fantastic executive team early on, why did you choose to do this, and how did you prioritise your hiring?

VT: Well, we founded Uno on January 4th and launched our first product on May 27. We had to build a product across 4 platforms, create a strong brand, sign 19 lenders and onboard them, and hire and build a customer service team… Pretty hectic. We hired people for very clear jobs who executed on a specific task. At launch we had 29/30 people, and now we have 38. It was absolute mayhem! Fortunately we knew most of the people already, and they backed us and we had the capital to get them on board.
We ended up taking quite a few people out of a corporate environment, which was a bit of a trial by fire for some people. Culturally working in this sort of business going through that much change is really different as there’s no structure or process, you just have to own every decision. There’s an adjustment that has to happen, and unfortunately some people just don’t land on their feet.
Interestingly, we decided on “culture” really early on, and looking back, they were totally wrong, just words you’d find on a motivational poster… We needed values that would help us make decisions, this ended up being; “Design matters”, “Make complex things simple” and “make data informed decisions”.

MP: So if you had another run, what would you do differently?

VT: I would have loved to have had more time to hire in a more deliberate fashion, onboard, and structure everyone’s roles. I’ve been a founder before, but never had to recruit and manage people in the same way so that’s been a massive learning curve and i’m still learning. Also I’ve realised that you have to make decisions to internalise skills vs outsourcing. For example, compliance we outsourced for a long time until we hired our Compliance Manager, and now it’s ingrained into everything we do and we’re really good at it. There are no shortcuts to the things that are core competencies to your business.

MP: You have a few people who are in Product roles at Uno, what does “product” mean to you and why is it important?

VT: A couple of quotes to throw at you “You can’t polish a turd” – so unless the product is good you’re wasting your time. And “Nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing” – if people are coming onto our platform and it’s awful, then our business will fail. For us, the product team focuses on supporting the user to achieve the outcome they want to achieve in whatever way possible, and a large part of this is creating an awesome customer services platform for our services team here. We’ve been able to ship product every 2 weeks and learn really quickly which has been great. Every iteration is with the mindset of “will this enable the customer to have a better outcome?”

MP: So where next for Uno? Where do you see the business in the next 6 months?

VT: We’re coming out a really fun first year, and now we’re focusing on scaling the business. For us that means fine tuning what we’re doing and ramping up what we’re doing at the front to improve customer acquisition. We also need to grow our servicing team while improving the back end so they can do a better job. We’re currently doing 10x annualised growth at the moment and we would be expecting to do 4x the business next year.

MP:Any final words for prospective entrepreneurs?

VT: People tend to think there’s two models to take a business to market – either bootstrap or take venture funding. But I feel there’s a third option which is do what we did – find someone with a strategic alignment to what you’re doing and who has deeper pockets.
This has really enabled us to grow quickly and given us a fantastic board to ask us the right questions. I would love to see other entrepreneurs think about strategic investors that would be interested in what they’re doing.

Check out Uno Home Loans here, and stay tuned for my next blog with another one of Australia’s leading FinTech CEOs.

Interview techniques – Bringing out your STAR qualities

mitchellake on May 29, 2017

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself doing an increasing amount of interview coaching for candidates. Each one of these are individuals who I really rate, but for some reason they’ve been falling short at the final furlong in processes. Through this coaching, I’ve found myself giving the same advice so I thought it would be useful to put a number of the techniques people have found useful into a series of blogs.

I’m going to start in the middle: the interview.

Interviewing is like telling a story about your life. You’re creating a narrative around why you’re well-suited to progress to the next chapter of that story. Sometimes this can be daunting, but there is a useful structure, which combined with some data, can help create a really exciting narrative that will increase your chances of starting your next chapter.

Use STAR

Situation

Task

Action

Result

I work mostly on Sales and Product leadership roles and for all candidates I would expect them to use a variation of STAR to show me specifically why they are great for this role. So let’s run through each in more detail:

Situation: What was the situation when you started in that role?

Provide context to why you were brought into the business at all. Let’s break that down into more questions: How many people in the business or business segment? How was it performing? What was the turnover? How many people were in your team? What were some of the challenges the business was going through? Etc.

Task: What task were you brought in to achieve?

Everyone is hired for a reason! Why were you? What were you brought in to achieve? Was it “build a team” or “get revenue from X to Y” or “attract X many customers to the platform”? The list is endless, what was your core task that you were brought on to achieve, or what is a recent task that you recently set your mind to achieving?

I’m conscious we’re all constantly adding to that task list, but pick one or two and provide a throughput narrative around that one achievement.

Action: What actions did you take in order to achieve said task?

Exactly what it says on the tin. If you’re a commercial person, how did you grow that business segment? If you’re a product person, take me on the journey of developing the roadmap to get the product to an improved place! This is where you get to showcase what you do on a day-to-day basis, and where you really shine. Make sure this action piece is directly relevant for the role you’re going for.

Result: From these actions, what was the outcome?

This should be as data-driven as possible. Regardless of what you work in, there is always a data-driven measure for success. Either it’s a $ number, or it’s an acquisition number of customers or increased conversion rate. Every good candidate should know exactly what their metric was for success because otherwise could you objectively measure your quality in a role? Also, often it’s tied to a personal commercial outcome.

Ultimately, you’re creating a narrative for why you’re awesome. So put as much structure and data around that narrative as possible and it will vastly improve your conversion rates in interviews.

Hope that helps! Drop us a note if you want to have a chat, we always happy to provide personalised advice:

sydney@mitchellake.com

Tequila Valley

mitchellake on May 25, 2017

Mexico City, or Ciudad de México, CDMX for short, is one of the largest cities in the world with over 22 million people and a lot of traffic. Over the past couple of decades the city has been going through major transitions and gentrification and today the city looks and feels modern and safe. This is especially true of the areas where I spent the majority of my time, Roma and Condesa, where most of the cities startups are located.

During my time in CDMX I was fascinated by the history and traditions. I went to a lecture about the Aztec Empire, sweat it out in a traditional temezcal , explored Teotihuacan via hot air balloon, watched a folkloric ballet, visited La Casa Azul – Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house and now a museum, and went to numerous markets. While culture and tradition is very important in Mexico, it’s hard not to notice how much Western influence is around the city. As you walk down the street it’s common to see a local fruit juice stand or 6 peso taco stand in front of a Starbucks or Hooters. Much of this foreign influx is due to CDMX being an established financial center, and becoming an important business center, particularly for the Spanish-speaking world, but definitely not limited to it. Some have called it “Tequila Valley”.

One of my projects while I was in Mexico was to research the talent landscape for a client looking to open an office in CDMX. My main takeaways are that there is a lot of talented and well-educated candidates in the market so it is very uncommon to hire foreigners. To attract talent it seems candidates value similar perks as the ones I work with in San Francisco, such as flex time, PTO, and work from home, especially since commuting in the city is a bit of a nightmare. Companies also offer training or English lessons to attract talent. While there are a lot of bilingual offices, for any local position it is highly recommended to speak the language.

Who are the established and up and coming tech companies in CDMX?
Prestadero – platform that offers relatively low interest loans with no need for guarantees or warranties
Etraining –  e-learning & crowdsourcing platform
Kubo.Financiero – micro-finance company that offers a platform that connects regional lenders with borrowers
Descifra – Big Data analytics company focusing on social and economic behaviour
Kueski – online lending company
GoVenture – entrepreneurial startup that is focused on serving the financial needs of other entrepreneurs
Boletia – company streamlining the online marketing and ticket sales process
Coinbatch – affordable money transfer services in Mexico

Co-working spaces
Centraal – provides spaces to work, attend events, meetings and network. They offer flexible packages from personal memberships in open spaces to spaces dedicated to companies.
Cowork – the city’s most recognised co-working space offering monthly memberships per person that give access to all our services and to our community.
Publico – This is the workspace I worked at, the highlight for me was 2 rooftop areas with great wifi to work from or host events.
Urban Station – also offers a terrace that can be used for events, along with hourly rates, fractions or prepay cards, and special company packages.
WeWork – offer private offices (for teams of 1–100+) with glass walls to maintain privacy without sacrificing transparency or natural light.
Cardumen – focuses on startups and they have alliances with incubators and accelerators, to generate ecosystem.
Punto – They offer a One Day Pass providing free access to try the facilities.

Startup Incubators/Accelerators
StartupMexico – support high-impact promising Startups, providing them with physical space, mentors, workshops, funding, and a critical professional services ecosystem.
ImpactHub – located in Roma – both and incubator and co-working space. ImpactHub is the world’s largest global network of entrepreneurs and innovators, with more than 8,000 members in more than 65 cities.
Naranya – an accelerator and early-stage co-investor led by Pablo Salazar.
Endeavor – works to catalyse long-term economic growth by selecting, mentoring, and accelerating the best high-impact entrepreneurs worldwide.
Numa – accelerates startups, supports corporates and public institutions to develop and implement innovative projects.
Victoria147 – the first training, empowerment and acceleration platform focused on empowering women entrepreneurs and promoting gender equity.

Lisbon, the new Silicon Valley?

mitchellake on May 9, 2017

Lisbon has been the most liveable country thus far on my Remote Year journey. There are so many parallels to San Francisco, the city that I call home. I like to call Lisbon “The city by the river”, I was fortunate to live close to the water and had views of Lisbon’s own Golden Gate Bridge. The vibes are happy and relaxed like many other countries along the Iberian Peninsula, but there is also a bustling start-up scene.

During our welcome event we got to meet the General Director for Economy and Innovation for the Lisbon City Council who introduced us to Made of Lisboa, the official community of Lisbon-based innovators and a great place to stay up to date on Lisbon’s innovation scene. He called Lisbon the new Silicon Valley, the West Coast of Europe. The Lisbon city council is focusing on balancing tourism with economy and their 5-year vision is to not just compete with their European neighbours, but to compete on a global scale. Made of Lisboa was founded just two months before we arrived in Lisbon and is first focused on building out incubators, hubs, accelerators and co-working spaces, then they will build out their community of startups and entrepreneurs. The city currently boasts 16 incubators, 2 dozen accelerators, and 50 co-working spaces and creative hubs, all of which were founded within the last 4-5 years.

I was also introduced to Miguel Alves Ribeiro, the Head of European Growth at Zomato, an Asian based company that specialises in online food services. He spoke about their decision to enter the Portuguese market and the challenges they faced around adapting their product to a new culture. He explained that Portugal is a small country so if it works out it’s easy to expand to other parts of the EU and South America if something goes wrong no one cares because they are “the ass of the EU”. He believes launching in Portugal is much easier than other EU countries because most people speak English, lower cost of living and lower salaries, fairly cheap office spaces, great internet infrastructures, people are pretty app savvy and like new technology, and a great talent pool of people that can speak a lot of languages. Portugal is also an easy commute from other parts of the EU and South America and it’s a non-issue for Portuguese to get visas to go to other countries because they have no diplomatic issues.

Miguel said the biggest challenge entering the European market was the working culture. He went from India where people work 12 hour days to a culture where people typically finish work at 4:30PM and leave work at the office. To some that might be challenging if people need to connect with colleagues in other time zones or if you have employees elsewhere that put in a lot of hours, but to others this screams great work life balance! We both agreed that it is easy to fall in love with the people, food, weather, and opportunities in Portugal and are excited to see Portugal’s growth over the next 5 years in their expansion into tech!

Who are the established and up and coming tech companies in Lisbon?
Uniplaces  – Online platform to find student accommodation and they now are in 39 European cities.
Codacy – Automated tool to review code.
TalkDesk – cloud-based call centre software.
Chic by Choice – Luxury fashion rental site.
Unbabel – online translator startup that uses machine learning and crowdsourcing.
CrowdProcess – FinTech startup using machine learning to make credit risk assessments.

Co-Working Spaces

Second Home – This is the co-working space I used during my time in Lisbon and it was great. They have a full cafe, variety of seating areas, and is decked out with plants giving it a very fresh vibe. It’s also located over Time-Out Market which is an amazing indoor space with a variety of great food vendors.
WorkUp – Located at the university stadium so not only do you have access to all the usual co-working facilities, but also things like the pool and golf court.
Coworklisboa – a flexible workspace targeting freelancers.
Ideia – Located close to the airport so perfect for jet-setters.
Village Underground – Creative co-working space with unique architectural structure made from shipping containers and double decker buses, recycled into office spaces, a café and conference room.

StartUp Incubators/Accelerators

Beta-i – located in central Lisbon, they have worked with over 500+ startups and run various acceleration programs.
Lisboa Empreende – a City Council funding Lisbon program for startups and SMEs.
Invest Lisboa – one-stop shop for companies, investors and entrepreneurs looking to set up their business in Lisbon.
Startup Lisboa – a private non-profitable association that provides entrepreneurs and companies office space as well as a support structure. Mentoring, link to strategic partners, access to investment, help with business basics, networking activities, communication.

Sources:
Made Of Lisboa

When Adele met Albert: A navigation of the UK/Australia payments landscape and hello to contextual commerce

mitchellake on April 4, 2017

In the beginning

There I was, in Sussex, with an approved visa and my 3 bed semi expertly packed into a shipping container that would land in Sydney in 53 days. That hit me. 53 days is a long time, Sydney is far away. As the fumigation bomb went off inside the container, the ‘there’s no going back now’ thought went off in my head. The upcoming flight with two children under three was reminiscent of giving birth to my first; it took 30 hours, at points I thought I was going to die, but I made it through. And in this case the end result was landing at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith.

In Australia, enjoying brunch one day, I very quickly met someone special in Albert. As I specialise in payment technologies, I was instantly intrigued by CBA’s EPOS/iPad hybrid (this being Albert) being swiftly operated by the waiter and I needed to know more. I have now joined MitchelLake and will continue my focus on payments.

Cashless societies
My initial thoughts are how far advanced Australia is vs the UK with Albert and the $100 pay-pass limit. The UK became the first ‘cashless society’ defined by Visa as when over 50% of transactions are made by alternatives to cash in May 2015, while Australia reached this milestone in late 2016. In reaching this the UK had to fight a mistrust of contactless payments, the initial limit was set at a timid £20 though the current card stats from the UK Cards Association tell us that 1 in 4 card transactions are now contactless and that equates to 125 taps every second. The UK enabling the London transport system to accept contactless bank cards gave adoption a sharp rise; over 1 million rides per day are now paid for via contactless. Just over 450k of the UK’s 1.7 million merchant terminals are now contactless with a mandate for them all to be by 2020. Aussies, however, got straight into pay-pass and big retailers such as Coles and Woolworths were quick to get the infrastructure in place as evidence indicated where contactless readers were available customers would use it. Eight out of 10 transactions are contactless here and the $100 limit is over double the UK’s now increased limit of £30.

ACCC do not bow to the banks and side with Apple Pay

Contactless leads into Apple Pay. Banks in both the UK and Australia have felt the tech Goliath has been piggybacking on their infrastructure as it operates from pay-pass systems. In the UK, Barclaycard felt additional pain as supporting Apple Pay would admit defeat for Pingit, its money sending app that identifies the recipient via a phone number. Barclays was notably absent from the list of banks and participating issuers supporting Apple Pay when the mobile payments service first entered the UK in July 2015, they held out until April 2016 but succumbed to consumer demand. In Australia CBA, Westpac, NAB, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (notably not ANZ) applied to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to collectively negotiate with Apple. The banks had a number of issues around transaction fees but they desperately wanted access to the iPhone’s NFC controller. This to allow their own digital wallets to communicate with contactless payments terminals as without they feel it is anti-competitive. Apple had not granted such access for any bank in the world so a bold move and one they have not been successful in achieving. The ACCC decision came in a couple of days ago and Apple has been victorious.

The primary reason was they were not willing to erode competition between Apple and Google’s android phones and felt this could reduce competition for payment devices other than smartphones. Apple is not the most popular operating system in Australia with 50.1% of phone sales going to Android, and 46.6% on iOS (2016), but Apple is far and away the most popular brand. These banks refusing an Apple partnership are blocking three quarters of Australian card holders from Apple Pay to protect the potential success of their own wallets. Like Barclaycard in the UK, how long can they do this for? Will consumer demand for Apple Pay overcome?

In the UK Apple Pay had the ill feeling, and that is putting it very mildly, of the consumers towards the banks in their favour. People were crying out for an alternative to the banks as ‘bankers’ and evil are synonymous in the fall out of the 2008 financial crash. In Australia, there is certainly a feeling that the banks are too powerful but Apple Pay will not quite have that resentment driving desire for an alternative. Also with the contactless limit so much higher do Australians even have the want for it? We shall see.

Contextual commerce

While the ACCC was deliberating. the next buzz in payments has arrived. I’m afraid you must put down the kettle as there’s no time for a cuppa and the surf is going to have to wait. Guys, the pace of payment developments is fierce! Say hello to contextual commerce. Consumers are now online – we know that – but increasingly inside social and messaging apps or marketplaces. This creates opportunity for them to make purchases within context if merchants can adapt to this behaviour and connect to them in this environment. Contextual commerce is merchants implanting purchasing opportunities within our everyday online social lives, have you seen the buy buttons appearing across Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook? The future of this is in voice command as the time between desire and purchase needs to be a short as possible.

Contextual commerce is set to crack this, and it is surely the future of payments on both sides of the globe. From what I have discovered about payments down under, Australia embraces the new, but you’re also willing to fight your corner. I am looking forward to experiencing the perpetual innovations from both the FinTechs and the banks here.

Want to chat payment technologies or technology in general? MitchelLake has a team of global experts in a location near you, and we’d love to chat about what’s making you get out of bed, or about your talent needs. 

Get in touch now.

Test. Tweet. Dream. Repeat

mitchellake on April 3, 2017

At the start of 2017, one of my (many) resolutions was to get out and attend more networking/speaker events within my areas of interest – digital marketing, growth hacking, customer experience and UI/UX design. I had the best intentions in the world of following this through, however we have all been there – it comes to 6pm on Thursday night, you’re stuffed after a long week/day, feeling all of your thirty something years. The last thing you feel like doing is making small talk and forcing your brain to work one more time – it’s too easy to just go home, make dinner and chuck on a few Judge Judy repeats (don’t judge me – she is awesome).

A recent evening saw the similar scenario, and add the fact that Sydney was enduring yet another Darwin-esque torrential downpour of rain. It would have been all too easy to just say “oh, I’ll just go to the next one”, which I briefly contemplated. But I said to myself I had made a commitment, and I will see it through. And I am very glad I did.

I attended the Sydney Growth Hackers meetup (run by the very charismatic, smart Daniel Siepen) at the funky offices of Freelancer. Three excellent, accomplished speakers and three insightful entertaining presentations:

Tamir Vidger, 18-year-old whizkid and self-employed growth hacker/consultant
Dan Draper,  VP of Engineering at Expert360 and part-time executive film producer
Charlotte Crivelli, Head of Growth at JosephMark

Here my key takeaways:

Test, test…and test some more

Anyone who has read “The Lean Startup” by Eric Reis or “Lean UX” by Jeff Gothelf will be familiar with the above expression. Growth hacking is about conjuring up hundreds of ideas, constantly testing them and picking the best ones from there. Do your best to never assume. Your prerogative or solution on a certain topic may seem totally logical to you, but it may not apply to everyone else. We all see things differently, hence the emergence of Agile cross-functional teams, most prominent in fast-moving start-up ventures. When it comes to lead generation, Tamir advises the usage of multiple channels. One channel may bring rapid success, but that may be for a finite period of time. The market is constantly changing and you must continue to adjust and evolve. Similarly, using too many is time-consuming and may be non-effective. Focus on a few channels, and do it well. And remember – when coming up with ideas for hacking, don’t over-complicate your ideas. What may not work for someone else’s product, may produce excellent results for yours, whether it creating an eBook on Slideshare, producing regular blog posts, a short video piece or creating a separate landing page for a new campaign.

Don’t f#@! the customer

Atlassian’s infamous and very well-known slogan. Many businesses fail to realise the importance of a customer’s lifetime value. It is so easy for us to focus on customers that spend a lot of money with us very quickly, as opposed to customers that require a little more TLC in order to become big, regular spending customers. By educating customers, helping them or providing assistance, there is a greater chance they will buy from us and subconsciously become brand advocates for our business/product, leading to greater word of mouth and referrals.

Follow me, follow you…AH HA!

Millenials won’t understand the play on words I just did there #eyeroll. Anyway – Dan Draper (Head of Engineering @ Expert360) gave a fantastic presentation centred around what he calls his “academic, just for fun, narcissistic” project – automated growth of his Twitter account, a bot called “Tweet Dreams”, adding followers while he sleeps. While first attempts at this were far from seamless (Twitter suspended his accounts on multiple occasions for suspicious spamming/robot like activity – not just a pretty face evidently) – mainly due to the bot adding multiple spamming/fake accounts, it leads to a number of important questions: who should he be following? Which users were following him back? Perhaps more importantly, WHY were they following him? We can apply these questions to ourselves when it comes to other social media platforms, such as Facebook friends and Instagram followers. Sure, it’s great having 10K followers on Instagram (who doesn’t love an occasional visit from the attention fairy, a boost to the ego when you’re having a fat day), but how many of these are real, quality followers who genuinely enjoy the content that you post? By constantly testing and tweaking the bot, Dan was able to successfully reach a point whereby the bot ads approximately 10-15 followers a day with very little effort.

#No Filter

Hashtags. Similar to Vegemite – you love them, or they literally make you squirm and rue the generations gone by. There is no question that hashtags have helped businesses grow product sales and individuals grow their online presence through various social media platforms. Certain obvious hashtags like #nofilter, #selfie, #picoftheday and #followme are incredibly popular but don’t create value and are somewhat overused. The trick is to be able to create or use a moderately popular or unique hashtag that will attract attention. For example, a friend of mine works in media and has pretty much coined the hashtag #noselfiecontrol to great effect – it’s memorable, he’s grown his Twitter/Instagram followers massively and others have started to use it. Like with everything though, nothing is infinite – hashtags have a certain shelf life. You cannot use the same ones forever, because those lonely spammers will soon pay you an overdue visit.

Stay tuned for my next piece in a month’s time. Happy Monday, hackers!