20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO

Suranga Chandratillake is a General Partner @ Balderton Capital. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer having founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004. He then lead the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, building a profitable business and going public in London where it achieved a peak market capitalisation in excess of $1Bn. Before founding blinkx, Suranga was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation - joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team and ultimately serving as the company's US CTO in San Francisco. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Suranga made his way into the wonderful world of VC? 2.) Why are so many technical European CEOs fearful of continuing the position as CEO? What can we do to improve it? 3.) What does Suranga think makes a great CEO? Which CEO Suranga respects the most and why? 4.) How have Suranga's years as an entrepreneur affected his investing style? Does Suranga have a consistent investing style or does he look to iterate a lot? 5.) Balderton is an Equal Partnership VC, what does that really entail? Why does Suranga think this model is the most efficient? Looking at the new appointment of Lars, how do the GPs assess new candidates for the treasured GP position? 6.) What sectors is Suranga most excited by and why? Does Suranga think there is further to go in the consumerisation of Enterprise Software? Does the announcement of Emergence moving from the sector signal a turning tide? Items Mentioned In Today's Show: Suranga's Fave Book: The Old Man And The Sea Suranga's Most Recent Investment: Cloud Nine As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Suranga on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! I would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsor for today's show: LoyaltyBay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome to the 20 Minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings. Now today really is a special day for the 20 Minute VC for three reasons. Firstly, it is with extreme pride that I announced the partnership of the 20 Minute VC and Mattermark, for which we will be using all of their incredible data and analysis in our interviews with the world's greatest VCs. And I'd like to say a huge thank you to Nick Frost at Mattermark for making that happen, and you can find him on Twitter @Thinker. Next, I'm so excited to bring you this incredible feature week we have for you. We're covering one of Europe's most prestigious and best performing funds. It is of course Balderton Capital, and joining us from Balderton today is General Partner

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  Suranga Chandra Tilak. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer, having founded Blinkz, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge. He then led the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, building a profitable business and then going public in London, where it achieved a peak market cap in excess of $1 billion. Before founding Blinkz, Suranga was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation, joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team, and then ultimately serving as the company's US CTO in San Francisco. And if that wasn't enough, Suranga was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  in 2012, and was chosen as one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders in 2009. But finally, before we dive into the episode with Suranga, the final piece of exciting news is our new sponsor, Loyalty Bay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, sign-up or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their SaaS conversion optimizer tool, they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups, and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. And it's amazing, they've got a free

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  30 day trial and you can find them at www.loyaltybay.co.uk remember that's www.loyaltybay.co.uk but now it's time to welcome the man himself it is Suranga Chandra Tilak, General Partner at Balderton Capital.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:37Harry Stebbings?

  Suranga, welcome to the 20 minute VC. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's great to be here.

• 2:44Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to dive into your background. So can you give us a brief snapshot of the Suranga story?

• 2:51Speaker 02

  I'm not sure it's that exciting, but yeah, I'm originally an engineer. So I studied computer science at university. And technology was definitely my first love from an early age. And that led me to working for a number of technology companies, both in Britain where I grew up, but also in the US. And the last of those really was Autonomy, which is a Cambridge-based software company that I started working for in the UK, but then ultimately moved me to the US and I became their US CTO for a number of years over in San Francisco. And that took me to the Bay Area. And when I got there, I sort of started to fall in love with the whole startup culture and this idea that anyone could start a company as long as they had a good idea and a great team. And, you know, I was sort of really biding my time for that opportunity.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  And before too long, it came along and me and a couple of my friends at Autonomy started a project internally that gained a lot of traction, looked very interesting and we we and the Autonomy team decided it made more sense to spin it out and make it a separate company. So we we founded the new entity. And that company was it was originally based on some of Autonomy's technology originally, around the analysis of video content. But like many great startups, it pivoted about three or four times before it found its real true calling. And that true calling turned out to be an advertising business. So we basically built an engine which would use things like speech recognition and visual analysis to understand the meaning inside video content. And then use that that meaning to target better ads within that content.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  It turned out that if you could target ads that were more relevant to video, unsurprisingly, they were, they sort of performed better and you could charge more for them. And we could keep a portion of that uplift revenue that people would get. And that was the business model that that worked for Blinkz. And so in my time as CEO at Blinkz, we went from zero to about two hundred million dollars of revenue. We went to profitability, we took the company public, and most sort of proudly, we, you know, we built a team of about three hundred people. Who were all doing great things at the company. And then really at that stage, it became a very different sort of challenge for me. So the great company, it's lots of interesting things to do, but. Not really my kind of thing. I'm definitely someone who enjoys the early stage of companies more than later stages.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  And so at that point, sort of with a few of my things I wanted to achieve checked off, I decided to to to quit. So I I retired, handed it over the reins to my second in command there. And then I spent a couple of years kind of working on startups and doing some advisory stuff and so on, all in the Bay Area. And then I decided that I wanted to come back to Europe because I'd spent some time back here at that point and realised that there was a lot of. Interesting stuff going on with venture and entrepreneurship and, you know, way more interesting companies being set up in Europe than there ever were before I'd left, you know, ten years earlier. And and yeah, so decided to come back. And then luckily, when I when I sort of planned my coming back, I. Came across the Bolton team and realised there's an opportunity to to join the firm as a partner. So I I did that when I returned about about twelve months ago now.

• 5:43Harry Stebbings?

  And I heard in a recent interview with you that you stated that at the beginning of your CEO ship at Blinkz, you wanted to hire what you called a real CEO.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:52Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you think there is this kind of slightly fearful trait in in prominent European technical CEOs that are around today? Why do you think that exists?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, you know, there there's a sort of belief in technology, there's been a historical belief that. The technical person who comes up with the innovation of the product probably shouldn't be the CEO. I think that idea has well and truly been replaced in the US where it's okay to do that if you want to do that, but it's also okay to stay in charge. So you have, you know, very, very prominent cases like someone like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, or. Jack Dorsey, for example, who, you know, you know, product and technology people who've stayed in charge of their companies and been the CEO. Um. And I think that that belief and that sort of, you know, that that model of of bringing in a professional CEO, someone who has an MBA.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Um. You know, it it doesn't really exist in the US, but it's it's still exists to a certain extent here in Europe, and I certainly suffered from it. Um. You know, back when we were starting our company, which, you know, now is almost ten years ago.

• 6:54Harry Stebbings?

  That's very interesting that you mentioned Jack Dorsey and I, you know, I'm sure you'll you'll say yourself that being a CEO is completely. Uh. Overwhelming and full time job completely and any work life balance is very difficult. So how do you think Jack Dorsey will be able to manage being CEO of two companies of such stature?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I so, I mean, honestly, it sounds like a bit of a joke, but I I I think the only way you can do it is by not really having another life outside work. Um. I think, you know, most CEOs can pull off sort of two things in their life. So. You know, maybe they um have a family and they have a job, you know, you can probably pull off that, you know, certainly when I was CEO, I felt like I had a family and I had my job and. Didn't really have much of anything else beyond that. No hobbies, no social life, nothing like that. Um. So maybe Jack can do it by basically not having social life, family or anything else. I don't think he's married, you know. So maybe he can do it by just um by just just working essentially. Um. The good news is the companies are not um conflicting in any way. So there's no chance of him having some kind of awkward situation where he feels he's on the fence because he sort of has two different companies to to deliver value to.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  And the other good thing um is that actually because they're so different, I think that creatively he will find them fun to switch between. Sometimes a change is as good as a rest. Um. And so I think that that will probably energize him a lot as well. So it's probably doable, but you know, he'll be he'll be working quite hard.

• 8:11Harry Stebbings?

  And what do you think makes a great CEO then? Is it sheer hard work or is there some inner being that makes one better than another?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I I I've had the, you know, the pleasure of working with some really, really great CEOs and seeing them in action up close. I think there are a number of traits that sort of matter, but there are different combinations of these traits and there are very, very different successful CEOs. Uh. If you look at sort of people who who've done well out there. Um. I think that certainly in technology, if if we just sort of focus in on that. One thing that's key is someone who is viscerally understands the product that they're building and the and the market. Place that product lives in, um you know, if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, that that's what he understood. If you look at someone like Bill Gates, that's what he understood. I think that's that's crucial. It doesn't mean you have to be a technical person, but you certainly need to understand. Understand what it is you're building in a very visceral way. Can't be analysed through just data and, you know, by by sort of reading lots of things. It's something you've got to just get in your blood.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Um. And then apart from that, I think the other big thing about being CEO is sort of judgment, knowing when you have to lean in and take charge and do things. And when you have to actually step away and get out of the way. Um. And that's a really, really hard balance because of course it's very, very contradictory. There are times when. Um. A bunch of people will be telling you what to do and pulling in different directions and you just need to walk in and say, forget it, we're doing this. I don't care what the rest of you say. I'm the CEO, I'm taking charge, here's what we do. Um. And there are other times when. Um. Everybody's asking you for help and you know, saying, what do you think, what do you think? When actually you need to say, you know, I don't know either. We need to think of the staff as a team or. You know, I trust you, you you you know, you take whatever decision you think you should take. So that's sort of the judgment call of knowing when to be in charge and and when to be.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Um. Jack Dorsey calls it the editor, you know, and and not really being in charge, but instead just sort of letting other people flourish. Um. Is a is a really tough thing to do.

• 9:55Harry Stebbings?

  And how do you find that balance then? Is there any ways you can determine which side to fall on?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Well, I think, um, you know, so a good CEO is both at different times. So the question really is when a sort of situation occurs. Um. What, you know, when when do you do which? Um. And and look, it's really, really hard to to call that. Um. I think a lot of it is to do with. Hiring the right people beneath you. Um. If you hire the right team around you that you're working with, then many, many decisions are decisions for the team. So. If you have a great CTO, then you know what technology decisions should be his or hers. Um. If you have a great, you know, chief marketing officer, then. You know, any, any, any PR, you know, crisis you're dealing with should be his or her problem. Um. And you should really listen to them and take their advice. Um. I think where you step in is in the areas in between these, you know, when when when things contradict, when there are.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Um. Topics that are sort of owned by multiple departments at the same time, or where you just know you have a weak team.

• 10:46Harry Stebbings?

  And then which CEO would you say you respect and admire the most personally? Is there one you kind of hold?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  That's a that's a difficult question. Um I look at there, there've been lots of great CEOs. I think um. I'm a huge Bill Gates fan, and I'll say that because a lot of people aren't, uh for whatever reason, and I think that's really miss people misunderstand him. Um. You know, he is um has an energy and attention to detail that's absolutely phenomenal. If you listen, if you talk to any early. Microsoftly about, you know, how much Bill G, as he was known internally, single product, um. You know, it's just sort of legendary, you know, you'd get emails from him at any time of the night or morning, you know, asking you questions about detail bits of your code or whatever. Um and also he's an incredibly strategic thinker, you know, for for for two or three decades, he thought ahead of everybody else consistently, every single time.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Uh which is which is pretty remarkable, you know, I mean, I can't think of many other people who've been able to achieve that. Um I think the power of what he did has become sadly visible since he stepped away from Microsoft day to day. Uh because unfortunately, although Steve Ballmer and so on are, you know, great executives, clearly very smart, very able people. Um it struggled because that job is really hard. Um and I think I think it shows, you know, since he stepped away that that's happened. Um. The good news is, of course, he's doing, you know, arguably even greater things with his talents now, which is which is fantastic. Um the other the other more recent CEO that I'll pick out is Mark Zuckerberg, who I think is absolutely phenomenal. Um. You know, two things about him, one is the confidence that he had, um particularly about maintaining that CEO role. I think. He's become an excellent role model for a lot of technical CEOs. It's not right for everybody, but.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  You know, I meet a lot of technology people who are nervous about being the CEO and who, you know, who feel they need to sort of listen to. The gray hairs in the room or or or, you know, the person with the MBA. And Zuckerberg, you know, clearly just, I mean, he's he's very happy to use people like that, to listen to them and and take their. Take their insight, but he doesn't sort of do what they tell him to do, um what what they tell him to do. So I think I think he's, you know, I've been very impressed by his ability to do that. Um the other thing that he does, which is amazing, is, you know, he has the confidence to make absolute, you know, massive big bets when it when it matters. Um. You know, things like his Instagram acquisition, um you know, so Instagram recently, I think it was last month, exceeded Twitter for the number of users. Um. And you know, if you look at the numbers Twitter is, I forget what exactly, but someone's in a five and ten billion dollar company.

• 13:01Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, Instagram he acquired for a billion dollars. At the time, it seemed crazy.

• 13:05Harry Stebbings?

  Do you remember we all laughed at it when it came out?

• 13:08Speaker 02

  People, people laughed at it a lot, that you know, that he, that anyone would spend a billion dollars on, on a company like that with whatever it was, twelve employees and. You know, a, a photo app company was, I think, the way people sort of derived it. Um, but he understood the trajectory it was on and the direction it was going in, and he was absolutely right. Think about how big Instagram feels now and how big it actually is, the actual number. So. You know, he, he, he has the guts to do that kind of thing. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing, you know, WhatsApp, which is, you know. Huge acquisition.

• 13:34Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Of course Oculus Rift, also a huge acquisition that seemed weird at the time, um, that we're beginning to understand now. So, you know, it, it's, it's great to see someone. Have, you know, the energy of youth and kind of excitement and dynamism that he has, with the sort of checkbook and kind of ability to change the world that he has. You know, still very, very much in his game.

• 13:52Harry Stebbings?

  And we spoke there about kind of emerging technologies. We said about Oculus and we spoke about his acquisition of WhatsApp. What's that, would you say you're most excited about or interested in for the future?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  You mean in general or with Facebook in particular?

• 14:05Harry Stebbings?

  No, in general.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  In general. Well, I think, so, you know, um, there's two things that intrigue me, um, about technology going forward. So. There'll be lots and lots of great companies beyond these two areas, but there, there is a bunch of, um, very interesting new technologies that are going to. I think, uh, you know, change the infrastructure in a big way. Um, so there's, there's, there's a few different ones, but you know, past examples include virtual reality. Uh, include, um, you know, uh, drones and other kinds of autonomous, um, vehicles. Um, basically, these things have become possible because of the developments in certain types of technology, primarily miniaturization of. Computing power driven by mobile phones, but also things like, um, you know, the, the, the sort of, um, availability and, and, and, and cost, uh, the lowering cost, things like cameras.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Um, and, and the, the, the beauty of those developments is that it sort of changes the rules on what actually can be done. So in the same way that, you know, a company like Uber could not have possibly existed until mobile phones existed. But once they did, actually became very, very possible. Um, you know, there'll be other companies like that that will change our lives around drones, around virtual reality, around machine learning and so on. So there's these fundamental changes that kind of change the, the basic toolkit we have, and it's always fun to see what gets built on top. So I'm really interested in that. Um, the second big area that I'm really interested in, um. It's not necessarily just pure technology, but it's the societal impact of what we're doing right now. You know, I I grew up in Manchester, and if you grew up in Manchester, one of the things you learn a lot is about the industrial revolution.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  You learn about technology, you learn about the economic factors, but you also learn a lot about society and about how the industrial revolution, you know, changed everything. And and changed everything about how people live, where they live, how they work. You know, it gave birth in this country to things like the Labour Party and things like the NHS and Social Security and all these sorts of other concepts. The urbanisation that occurred, and I think we're going through a similar shift right now. Where, you know, new technologies enable the new class of workers, you know, the gig economy, the the part-time economy, the multi, you know, the multi-job economy, whatever you want to call it. And people are going to work and live in a very, very different way and their lives will be very different. Some of those things will be amazing. And allow people to do things they couldn't do before. Some of them will be will be challenging and we'll have to work on them as a society.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  And I'm really fascinated by the impact that technology is having on some of the some of the key things in society, which is basically how we all spend our time each day.

• 16:20Harry Stebbings?

  And are you altering your investment strategy then accordingly to those sectors that you've just mentioned?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, like any any portfolio, like any portfolio business, venture capital is a matter of balancing your risk by making a variety of investments in a variety of areas. But for sure, as a firm, we are going to make some really interesting, very futuristic investments, and we have made some already and we'll do some more. Many of them are under the radar because that's the way these things are usually. You know, we we just announced our investment in in in Curious AI, for example, it's a fascinating company that's that's building a complete AI, complete artificial intelligence in a whole new way that people hadn't thought was possible until quite recently. So there are some interesting sort of big bets in the in the real future. But then there'll also be a lot of stuff, as I say, that's shorter term, that is really to do with the fact that society is changing and therefore

• 17:07Speaker 02

  the nature of the tools we will all we all need will change. So look at a company like Nutmeg, which is, you know, allows people to, you know, manage and plan their pensions online. Part of the reason that many people pick it is because it's cheap and it's efficient and it's frankly better than a lot of the options on the high street. But the other reason why it's really important is because more and more of us will have to look after that kind of thing for ourselves. You know, twenty years ago, if you look at our parents or our parents' parents' generations, pensions were generally handled entirely by the state or by large employers. That won't be the case for this generation and certainly not for the next generation. So, you know, there are lots of interesting toolkits and tools like that that, you know, the society will need as as things change.

• 17:42Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to discuss now the the structure actually of Bauldson itself. Uh, because it's got a slightly unusual structure for a VC firm in the way it's an equal partnership VC. So what does that really entail? And why do you think that model's the most efficient model?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  I'm not sure it's the most efficient model, but I think it's the best model. Um, so so um, what what this means basically is that so, you know, Bauldson is an equal partnership. There are very few venture capital firms that are that are equal partnerships, certainly over time. And what equal partnership means is that, um, you know, there are six partners at Bauldson today. And all of those six partners are entirely equal. They all have exactly the same number of votes in every single deal that we make. Uh, they can bring the same number of deals, invest in the same investments. Um, and also all of their compensation is completely identical. So, um, you know, we get paid the same salary. Um, if our companies do well, um, the person who led that investment doesn't do better than the others, they all do exactly the same. So we're in it together.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Um, I think it works a lot, lot better because it destroys a lot of the politics that exists in a lot of venture capital firms. And the problem with the politics is not the politics itself, because people like that drama sometimes. But it's more the impact it has on, you know, great companies that that could do otherwise better. So what I mean by that kind of thing is, you know, if you have an unequal partnership, let's say you have, you know, senior partners and a couple of junior partners. Um, those junior partners are essentially competing with each other to an extent to try and be the guy or the gal who gets the promotion up to be a senior partner next. Um, so what does that mean? What that means is that if they've got a deal that they've done. And that deal now needs some help because maybe things haven't gone quite as well as they've hoped or whatever. The other junior partner arguably has a bit of an incentive to talk down this company's chances, even if he or she doesn't believe in that.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Um, because they know that if that investment fails, they'll have a better chance of getting that promotion. There's a lot of politics that goes on that. Basically has impact on, you know, innocence and in particular on other companies. And so we get to get rid of all of those things at Bauldson by having this equal partnership structure. So I think it works a lot, lot better. Um, however, um, to your question, it's not more efficient. And the reason it's not more efficient is because by being equal. There isn't like a small group that can carry a vote. So everyone has to talk, everyone has, the beauty has to be taken into account. Um, hiring is impossibly difficult because when you hire someone, you're bringing them on as a complete equal. It's very difficult to remove them after that. It's very difficult to sort of try them out for a while. There's no tries you buy, you try before you buy. Um, so, you know, we can take months and years to sort of hire people. So.

• 20:03Harry Stebbings?

  This is my next question with the appointment of Lars recently. Uh. What's the kind of assessment like when looking for a new partner? How, what kind of criteria do you go through?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, every firm is different. Um. You know, for us, a big, a, a, a big part of it is, um, is, you know, first of all, someone who's really achieved something really interesting in their career already. Um. The reason for that is partly because, um, you know, you, you, you want people who have, who have lived, quote unquote, because that helps our own companies, you know, we, when we, when we, when we help entrepreneurs, they, they want to have partners on their board or investment partners who've, um, you know, who, who've been through difficult experiences and who've been through challenging times because they're going to go through those, you know, without doubt. And, and it helps to have someone who's lived through some of that themselves in some other region or some other arena in some way. Um. So, you know, Lars really has, if you look at his background, he was a very early employee of both Uber and Dropbox.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  So he's, you know, witnessed incredible growth in, in two very interesting, complex areas. He was also an early advisor of WhatsApp, so he knows what it's like to be on one of these rocket ships. Um. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of kind of experience and, and, and understanding and knowledge that comes from that kind of, of lifestyle before, before joining a venture firm. So, so that's probably the key thing for us. And the second big thing is, look, just someone that we get on with, because we are an equal partnership. We spend all day and often all night together on Monday every week. Um. You know, if you don't like each other, it just doesn't work. So, um, we look very hard for finding someone that we know is, is gonna, is gonna fit in and be part of the team, but that who brings some fascinating experiences that will help our companies be better.

• 21:32Harry Stebbings?

  And does a equal partnership create maybe a glass ceiling to the current principals and associates? Is that possible?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yes, I, um, you know, like with many firms, we're pretty open about the fact that our policy is that there isn't a clear track from, you know, analysts to principals partnership. Um. You know, that's, that's kind of always been our, our, our policy. Um. You know, certainly there are people who go on to be partners at other firms. That's, that's worked very well. There are the people who go on to be entrepreneurs, um, and so on, and, and who knows, they may come back one day. Um. And there may be exceptions, uh, where for some unusual reason, we think it makes sense to, to make that leap. Um. But, um, but yeah, I mean, I didn't, I didn't think. I I'm not sure that venture is really supposed to be a career that you sort of join at twenty one and sort of slowly progress yourself through it's. It's a little bit too random and a little bit too, um, you know, too much of it is is a little bit too much of a random walk to be able to do it that way.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Um, it's not, it's not, it's not like being a lawyer or an accountant or whatever, um, it's it's a bit different. So I think it tends to suit people who've done something quite different for a while. And then decided they want to apply themselves to this area.

• 22:32Harry Stebbings?

  And if it's okay with you, we're gonna dive into a quickfire round now.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 22:37Harry Stebbings?

  So your favourite book and why?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Uh, The Old Man and the Sea, because it's a book about struggle and every time you read it, you see something new.

• 22:48Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. The best piece of advice you've ever been given?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Nowhere to stick and nowhere to twist. This came from the CTO co-founder of Autonomy. And he said, you know, when you're a startup, you have to go into every single meeting and people will explain to you what they need from you. Half the time you'll have to say, uh, we don't do that, sorry, because you need to focus on what you actually do. And half the time you'll have to actually change your mind and pivot. And as he said, the the difference between a successful CEO, startup CEO and and a successful one is knowing when to do which.

• 23:18Harry Stebbings?

  Career highlight for you?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Taking the company public.

• 23:24Harry Stebbings?

  Uh, thought leader for you in the industry? This could be in VC or in just the entrepreneurial industry in general.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Uh, well, like I said before, I I I look a lot at what Mark Zuckerberg does. I think he's very smart. I think he's um more focused and engaged than ever. Um, and he has a, you know, fantastic um array of capability.

• 23:43Harry Stebbings?

  Enterprise software, is there further to go in consumerisation?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  No, massively. I mean, most most enterprise software still is not consumerised, therefore, you know, most of it is still yet to be done.

• 23:53Harry Stebbings?

  And then finally, the most recent investment you've made and why you said yes?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the last public announcement was Cloud Nine, uh, which is almost a year ago, actually over a year ago now, um. And and it's very, very simple. Um, you know, if you look today at the most forward-thinking development organisations in the world, and by that I mean things like Google and Facebook and Intel. You will find that all their employees do no no longer write code uh on a piece of software, an application they've installed on their PC or laptop. They write it all in the cloud, the same way that Google Docs is, you know, changing and replacing uh Microsoft Word or the downloaded um office products. In in the future, all programmers will write code in the cloud, uh, and Cloud Nine is the is the premier option for that today.

• 24:34Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Suranga, thank you so much for giving up your time to be on the show today. It was absolutely fantastic to have you on the 20 Minute VC.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Thank you, it's my pleasure.

• 24:43Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I would like to say a huge thank you to Suranga for giving up his time today to be on the show. And if you cannot get enough of the 20 Minute VC, head on over to www.thetwenty minute vc.com where you can sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date with all the releases of the latest episodes. Or follow us on Twitter at 20minutevc. But before we leave you today, do not forget to check out Loyalty Bay. With their amazing SaaS conversion optimizer tool, they increase any conversion metric by offering personalised rewards to potential customers to get them to convert. Check it out at www.loyaltybay.co.uk And there's also no financial obligation upfront as they have an amazing 30 day free trial.

• 25:28Harry Stebbings?

  That's www.loyaltybay.co.uk And as always, thank you so much for the support that you've given me along the process of the podcast. And we look so forward to seeing you in the next episode with Daniel Waterhouse, General Partner at Baldur's and Capital.