Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

S2E19 - Jonny Plein, Co-Founder @ Pouch (acquired in 2018).

October 06, 2021 Riding Unicorns Season 2 Episode 19
Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
S2E19 - Jonny Plein, Co-Founder @ Pouch (acquired in 2018).
Show Notes Transcript

Jonny Plein is the now exited co-founder of the coupon browser extension, Pouch. Jonny spent his postgraduate years working for EY before leaving in 2017 to work on Pouch full time. During his time Jonny and his team were able to win the MassChallenge startup accelerator award. Jonny is now the Director Of Business Development at the Global Savings Group. 

James and Hector sat down with Jonny to discuss the challenges in achieving product market fit, his Dragon’s Den experience and the lesson learnt from dealing with media companies. The conversation also goes on to cover Jonny’s life post Dragons Den, Pouches struggles when raising capital and what advice he has to give to fellow founders now that he has gone through the experience of exiting a company. 

Make sure to like and subscribe to the Riding Unicorns podcast to never miss an episode. Also don't forget to give Riding Unicorns a follow on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep on top of the latest developments.

 


[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to riding unicorns. The podcast about growth startups. I'm James Pringle. And my cohost is Hector Mason from episode one ventures. Each week. We have a new episode with founders or investors in the tech startup community. Our job is to ask questions and ask them about their career and find out bits of advice that they might be able to provide and generally get a feel for who they are, what they do.

[00:00:39] And. The company they work for.

[00:00:41] This week, we're delighted to have Johnny Plein on the show. Johnny started out as an accountant and then he founded a business very quickly. And, in a short period of time, he managed to launch product, get a lot of traction. And go on Dragon's den, which we talk [00:01:00] about. And also he was acquired by global savings group.

[00:01:04] So this episode, we touch on that and his riding unicorns journey in general. So without further ado let's get started

[00:01:15] James: Hi, Johnny. Welcome to riding unicorns. Thanks for joining us.

[00:01:19] Jonny: Very happy to be here, James and Hector. Nice to meet you as well.

[00:01:23] James: So Johnny you have been a founder and exited, and we'd love to hear all about it. So maybe you could take us back to the start of your career through to pouch

[00:01:32] Jonny: Yeah, it's crazy to think that we were able to exit the first company we started so yeah, lets a start from the beginning. I went to Nasim university and studied economics and Chinese. And I thought I was going to be this big bridge between the two countries doing something cool there, but also realised I didn't have any skills whatsoever apart from maybe being able to chat reasonably well. so I joined Aston young on their graduate scheme, like every, brick economics graduate at tends [00:02:00] to do and did three and a half years there in corporate finance. it was okay. but I always knew I wanted to start my own business. Like I wouldn't say my parents were entrepreneurs, but they never worked in a corporate. They was kind of hustled and did their own thing. So the word boss was never used in my house. It was always something I was like, Definitely want to start my own thing, especially like being young and quite have high appetite for risk. I was always keen to do my own thing. so my first AEY when they said, why are you here? Why'd you want to qualify as an accountant? I said, I want to leave and start my own business. And my new manager was not happy with that answer whatsoever. So yeah, it was a bit of a slog to get through that whole process. I always knew I wanted to start my thing, but I'm more of an operator than a creative. And I was very fortunate that a friend of mine from school was worth affiliate marketing industry and the co-founders and he said, look, I've got this idea. do you want to just have a game of table tennis and have a beer and talk about that? I was like, yeah. Great. and he basically had the idea for pouch laid out on the table already [00:03:00] because he worked for this company called Yieldify, which started back in 2012, 13, and their software You may have seen it breeze and you had something in your basket and you went.

[00:03:13] Okay, X on your browser, that technology tracked your mouse movements. And then this is all pre GDPR, and. When you're about to exit, they'll give you a batch code for you too. So he simply thought if we can do this B to C, there's a whole business we can build here that was possible for people to find it. It was a real hassle getting all these pixels implemented on the website. So he thought if we can do what your, to B to C without the need to speak to the retailers, or, do tech integrations, we can build a really good company here. That was pretty much the first comment we had. So we did some research. and found a company called honey in America, doing something very similar with a browser extension. you may have heard of honey because they recently got acquired by PayPal for $4 billion. we did not [00:04:00] get acquired for anywhere near that number. Um, It's just a crazy figure. but we saw it will be done in America. There's another company doing an India and we thought, okay, back ourselves, we know the space, why don't we try and do it in the UK? And so in 2016, whilst I was still at UY, we set up the business and try to launch pouch

[00:04:24] Hector: Super interesting, by the way, at that time, were that companies like my voucher codes. And could you search practically voucher codes?

[00:04:31] Jonny: Sure. Yeah, there were like all these voucher code companies existed, but they had a really bad user experience. if you speak to people that work there, that, admit it, because the way they make money is or SEO based, it's all, Rankings for keywords and Google and all that. Infinite wisdom cannot tell if a voucher code is valid or not. now it's changed because there's been a big shift towards user interest first, but back in the day, it was, can we rank for this keyword? we don't care if the voucher works or not. [00:05:00] Because as long as someone clicks on our link and buys them. we'll make commission. So the reason that pouch hit such a nerve in a good way with general public, is that for anyone that had shopped online before this was problem that no one had actually thought to solve, why don't we make a browser extension that sources all the outskirts for you? So you don't need to use these awful websites

[00:05:21] Hector: where you guys on Dragon's den.

[00:05:23] Because I started it after seeing it there.

[00:05:25] Jonny: you're one of the, I think 40,000 people that evening that did, pretty crazy. We set up the business as an follow them as the company, but we had no idea like what we were doing in terms of building a tech product. Like he was a salesman, I'm an accountant, but didn't have a tech CTO and we never built a product before. I don't know if you guys have ever tried to use five or we're using five back in the day, to hire any technical support, but we found this guide. Said he was a JavaScript Chrome developer in India and said, we'll pay you a hundred quid to build this extension. Here's a list of codes and he didn't speak to us for six weeks and he broke his leg or something. [00:06:00] We like, we didn't know what was going on. but we knew what we wanted it to look like. So we needed a technical co-founder and we looked at some agencies, I would compare that to, having something wrong with your car and go into a document. that's such a asymmetry of information. We had no clue If what they were saying to us was reasonable or not, they were saying, oh, the MTP will cost us 30,000 pounds. We're like maybe it does. We just didn't know. And we didn't have the money to, waste in that way. We had the idea. We had the business model, we knew how we wanted to monetize it. And we had a pretty good roadmap, just like looking at our competitors in the U S there were a few others, honey piggy Cooper, a few others. and fortunately we were introduced to a guy called Vick who became our third co-founder. And I don't know if in your other episodes, if you've talked about like the structuring of how co co founders should, be but. other founders if they're the CEO and they've met their technical, co-founder a while after they've given them, like 10% of the business for us, it was right. If we're going to do this we are all equal [00:07:00] partners, it doesn't matter that it's like, our idea and our commercial model, like we're all equal partners here. So we did 33, 33 33 with Vic. And I generally think that was like the best decision we made because it was a real, we're all in this together. Attitude. And when you're building something from scratch with no money and no experience, like just your glue as what's like going to be super, super important. so after we met Vic we stopped trying to build an MVP. So he was very experienced. He'd worked in tech for 10 years already and was working at an agency and he had some designer friends he knew. And so. muddled together there's MVP. That was purely hosted on his, laptop, put some videos up on YouTube. like whenever someone new joins the team, I always give them an intro of what pouch used to look like in 2016 to now. Like they love it. And, yeah. Then we try to raise some money. So that's how we where you starting.

[00:07:52] James: Did you raise money before you were making any revenue or had you started to make some revenue and have some traction before you raise money?[00:08:00]

[00:08:00] Jonny: we raised money from a German angel investor. That Vic, can you through his kids friend in the playground, like just bizarre. Like, He was quite a successful software entrepreneur and fixed daughter and his son were friends and the wives got speaking and made the introduction and he became an angel investor and he invested 90,000 pounds with the promise to follow on with another, 110, purely on the idea and the team, and the valuation. Was not, no, it was bad in hindsight, it was bad, but we didn't know, someone was willing to give us like as much money as I'd ever seen at the time. And, we just were like grateful for the opportunity and, part of me and my head was. This is a good idea, but every book you've ever read is you always failed this first one. It was failed. First one. So I just went into the whole thing, thinking this is just a learning exercise, like I'll do six months. Maybe it will last a year and then I'll go traveling and get a job, like a VC or something. I had no idea. so yeah, we raised before we had anything really [00:09:00] just on the idea.

[00:09:00] Hector: It's really interesting that, story of raising money it shows great hustle. I think money from such a random place. And I have a friend who, probably three, four years ago set up company. and he'd got on a flight out a holiday. This was just like a budget flight sat next to a guy. They got talking. he's the kind of guy who just gets talking to people, sat next to him on flights. they were talking business and, by the end of the flight, the guys had an estimate committed 150 K as the first ticket to this company.

[00:09:27] Jonny: Incredible. Incredible. Yeah. It wasn't easy to it. Wasn't it must've been BA like premium economy or something.

[00:09:34] Hector: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. and then the moral of the story is always fly. Business class

[00:09:38] Jonny: always be pitching. You don't know who you're going to meet. I was always happy to tell anyone about the business and people were like, oh, are you scared that someone's going to steal your idea? I was like, no, it is to actually make something happen. Like not at school.

[00:09:53] Hector: It's completely true. I think that's one of the common sort of found an IUTs. when they're starting out,

[00:09:59] James: Yeah. [00:10:00] just a slight step backwards. So you've gone through the first process. You've put together your team, you've got angels investment, and you're now building the product. when did you realize we've got something? When did you feel like you had like product market fit and what was that feeling like and what metric made you think that,

[00:10:18] Jonny: that didn't come for a long time? But in terms of like, I, you maybe call it like our first win. we got onto a now defunct accelerator program called mass challenge. It was an American accelerator. That was a non-for-profit that just wants to see impact. So all the, some that were like health tech, ad tech, didn't really work in the UK. Why there are the fonts, but we were on their program. It's a three-month program. the standard 15,000 Amazon web service credits, all of that stuff. And a competition. It was the second year they brought it in the UK. And the idea was that you pitched your business and then there was a final round. and there was a prize pool of [00:11:00] 250,000 that got split up between the bins. Or 500,000. So the year before one business, 1 75 grand, we were like happy with anything. So we, won mass challenge in that, out of the a hundred businesses on the program. I think it was 5,000 applicants, a hundred gone to the program. And then we were one of the top 10 winners. Of the mass challenge, which was great. they had a big fancy award ceremony. I think Brett Hoberman from mae.com came and spoke as like the final judge. we got into Forbes and tech crunch and raised our profile quite a lot just by doing that. And at the time we probably only had two or 300 users, like basically everyone in our accelerator program because we hadn't started doing any marketing or anything. so that was the first. Tick the state. Okay. Maybe there is some demand for this product because these industry experts have said, yeah, we like what you're doing. There's definitely like a big enough market for you to attack yeah, that was our first one. That's when we first thought we were onto something. But our first breakthrough really was Dragon's [00:12:00] den. So after mass challenge, we got that press. We were contacted by the BBC. So we'd only officially launched the product in September 16, the same day that mass challenge started. I only left E Y first of Jan 17. and then we'd only raise 95,000 pound, And do you guys know, like that goes nowhere. we couldn't afford to do Facebook ads. We couldn't afford to do any of these things And we weren't paying ourselves anything, either 500 pound a month. we could basically just afford to try and hire some good people, pay designers and just wait for an opportunity. And Dragon's den was this opportunity. So BBC contacted us, Very much X-Factor they look for good and bad companies. They're making a TV show at the end of the day. We weren't sure which category we were fitted into at the time. My co-founder was terrified of going on and becoming like a nervous, sweaty, meme that people either just totally fails on the TV, like that's all he cared about not the offers I just don't, want to become a meme so we went through the application process pretty quick. And we found out that we were going to be [00:13:00] recording an episode on may the seventh, 2017. And we didn't know when the episode would be ad, even if we did well. So when we got our original angel to commit to another, 50,000, out of pet evaluation and our first round. So when we went into the den. Oh, it made like a few hundred dollars and had two and a half thousand users. why are you valuing ourselves at X? Whatever it was, we could say, oh, actually, someone's just invested this. We're giving you a discount because we really want your support. And then that kind of clears off that question that usually trips people up and they're a non-revenue business. So we just wanted to pop that every question now they asked us. Constitute and that funding and valuation one is often one you get, which is really stupid because in America, like on shark tank, there'll be like, oh, you're in one retail store and you've made a thousand pounds or a thousand dollars.

[00:13:49] Yeah. That's value at 2 million and go for it. It's just a totally different ball game. recorded the episode. And, we got five offers, which was the first time in 15 years[00:14:00] that had happened that every single dragon wanted to put in, we were like totally blown away. And we also knew that we were going to have a really good TV spot.

[00:14:08] Hector: when did you think you were going to turn into a meme, but for all the right reasons

[00:14:11] Jonny: and that's what I mean for all the right reasons for flirting with Deborah Meaden and then telling her no. And BBC team made a meme saying when he showers you with compliments and chooses the other girl, it was brilliant. it wasn't market fit, but it was still another bit of validation that, okay. These people that see all these businesses, even though, the show is a TV show, it was the confidence that uses. And general consumer digital marketing to say five offs and dragons. And it's not right. were always going to have this matter, what happens? That can be our hook. And today four years on it stood out that's before Facebook and Instagram and whatever our ads that we run, like just having that tagline, which is crazy. When you think about.

[00:14:51] Hector: Yeah, that's up to you. Amazing. and so post Dragon's den post, finding product market fit and getting lots of downloads and seeing [00:15:00] some success. what did you set your sights on over the next few years back then? Were you thinking, okay, let's do this for a few years. Let's get an exit or were you thinking let's build a billion pound business?

[00:15:12] Jonny: me and my co-founder, we're both at loggerheads with this because we very quickly fell into the classic startup money trap. we had a skillset of finance, operations, sales, tech, even products at this stage, but we didn't have anyone that was very experienced in digital marketing. And we just didn't understand how long and expensive and how much testing you need to do So when. the episode ad like end of August, we'd raised five 50 and then we were like right, this is going to be a proper seed round. We raised another 108. So we have quite a lot of money in the bank. So the episode went live. We've got like 40,000 users overnight. Suddenly we're making a decent runway. From having nothing to something we're like, great, we're going to be like billionaires here. But our product wasn't right yet, like we had [00:16:00] a really high churn. There were lots of bugs. We'd try to build stuff far too quickly and we didn't lose all of those users. And yet we've had users associate we'd been used from that day, but We weren't mature enough to capitalize Or really, we didn't have the analytics in place to see where our leaky bucket was leaking. So you can imagine August we've had NWA have this thing.

[00:16:20] September, October, November, December, you went to like traditional shopping peak, our numbers every month, just going up and up. It's like incredible come January and February. We've had a lot of people were ready to go use a stop coming in because we don't have our loops and our funnels worked out.

[00:16:37] Cause we just didn't know. And that whole year was basically spent preparing for a TV show capitalizing on it. a button right. Was up. or February numbers were like half of all the numbers. So in terms of like a growth story data up up down, and then down again. I always say it's business. Like If it fails, it's not going to be because it runs out of money. so, you know, [00:17:00] Slow down the down. So down the marketing, and this is when I said, I don't necessarily think you have product market fit at the time because of this, if we would have just kept that, we've had our loops and everything sorted to the point where we just keep going. So come to February, March, we're actually in a bit of a pickle because even though we had like a few hundred grand in the bank, we didn't know how to spend that effectively to get to that next stage. We didn't have enough data and the revenues weren't impressive enough to get VCs interested, but didn't have the honey exit to point to and say, look with the honey in the UK.

[00:17:32] Yeah. Just invest in our site. There wasn't an exit in the space we're talking about. So we, yeah, we were in a rock and a hard place of not knowing really what direction to go. We thought what we need is a corporate partner rather than the VC. And also we could've gone back to angels, but maybe call it a confidence thing.

[00:17:50] Not knowing now my mindset. take Half a million quid or a million quid people without really knowing how I was going to deploy that money. Just like from a moral perspective, more than anything else, [00:18:00] we started having a crowd funds we could have raised half a million quid on the crowdfund, like from our current users, from my angels, whatever it may be.

[00:18:07] But again, I was like, it's half a million enough. Like I was thinking, where do we need two or 3 million here? And I didn't think we'd be able to do that. All small numbers that I've just building up our experience over time changed from the rounds that you raised with Pringle capital. I'm sure some of the same and significant now, but for us at the time, it was like trying to raise 2 million is a massive feat with no track record one year in business. Have you heard of news UK? They approached us when we gone through the list of VCs, that would be kind of series a, there were a couple that were interested, but by the time we have run out of money and they.

[00:18:42] What's it been from the corporate startup lab where they were looking at companies that would save their users money, that they could help grow. And there were three businesses on this, us, a company called swipey, which do white labeled rewards for like restaurants and stuff.

[00:18:58] And another company called look after my [00:19:00] bills which also went to Dragon's den and actually was sold to go compare. Austin's got one on the show. So we were all on this with news UK. And for us, we thought this was perfect. the metrics are looking at different to a VC in terms of the potential of the market and everything else.

[00:19:15] We spent three months working with them and they were meant to put in a million pounds into the business and. Give us tens of millions a year in free advertising, because it was worth them doing it. Every user of pouch that they acquire, they'll get 50% of the revenue. And it's really cheap for them to acquire users, just keep running banner ads or whatever it may be the model was solid. But I don't know if either of you have ever dealt with a corporate in any way to get money out of them.

[00:19:44] James: Yeah, we tried suggestive and uh, it was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but we actually never took any in the end, but we spoke to a number of big like TV networks and stuff about strategic investment and it was [00:20:00] quite, yeah, quite a bad experience. It was very slow and we didn't get anything out of it in the end.

[00:20:06] Jonny: Exactly the same, right? It was this whole glossy thing. These three companies going through this process swipey were out quite quickly, but they wanted to invest in the cost, your bills, and look off my bills and pouch.

[00:20:19] So we're like ki we want to invest on the day that they are meant to sign legal paperwork. They have to buy all my bills. And for pouch, they say, no, we need six more months to make it. And way, like what you've spent probably hundreds of thousands of pounds hiring consultants to run this program for you because they got external help, like tens of thousands of hours. Like we were having meetings with the COO CFO, everyone apart from Rupert Murdoch I'm Rebecca Brooks space date. Like they were in the office next door to us when we were talking to the CFO and what's the point? Like you've wasted our time. We spent three months trying to go through the process, get investment.

[00:20:55] It's just been a total nightmare for everyone involved. We kind of left licking our [00:21:00] wounds. It was like very painful because we'd put not all our eggs in one basket, but this was our funding. And we thought this is what made the most sense as well. So if you think about the history of the company, you know, we exited the company two years after starting. Started mid 2016, got some traction beginning of 2017. When on the dragons then may 17 went live August 17, kind of in trouble, March right in trouble, July 18. And then six months later we'd been acquired by global savings. And that was just, just, you never know what's going to be around, around the corner.

[00:21:34] James: So how did that come about? So we've actually had a couple of people on the show and it's always interesting to ask them about like the first engagement with the acquiring company. Like, Did they call you, it was a chance meeting. Did they email you? Was it like we want to buy your company from straight away or was it kind of a strategic kind of softly coursing process? How did it all come together?

[00:21:57] Jonny: Yeah, I kind of replay this a lot in [00:22:00] my head, in the recent past, but what we were doing with news UK was a solid commercial idea for any media company, with an audience, white label, the pouch browser extension to a revenue share using all the traffic you have, because you're bad at monetizing your traffic as a medium. Music. I put out a press release about that lab and the companies on it and what they were doing. Daily mail picked up this press release daily mail run. What is now I think the largest voucher code website in the UK via their partner, global savings group, global savings group, or a German startup who at the time they ran white label vouch, good website. Media companies all over the world, CNN business, insider data, Mau, Metro. They got in touch with us whilst we were on the lap. We couldn't speak to them because we had a non-compete. But as soon as we were out of this process, as soon as we were out of the process or not out of the process, because it had been need another six months, but we just said, we're not waiting six months, we're going off to do other stuff now. [00:23:00] We said, okay, let's take a meeting. So we met with what I now knew was the CEO, but I actually didn't know he was a CEO. I just thought he was like that manager in the UK. Or at least like one of the co-founders cause he was so young, which just shows I shouldn't. Yeah. Shouldn't judge, we met them in that office in London and he. Said, tell us about yourselves. And we were very Frank and very honest and said, look like we've just been totally screwed over by this big media company. We've just done our R and D tax claims. So we've got 80 grand back in the bank. So we let some people go off and use UK failed. So we were kind of breakeven. We weren't burning through too much cash and we said, we've just been screwed over. We're just trying to find our feet and look for our next opportunity. Very honest, very open it. Wasn't trying to hide anything. And I think they really respected that. Like we didn't know why they went well maybe it's a partnership.

[00:23:47] Just let's try and get back out into the startup world and see what's going on. How it been screwed over by this media company. And they like those immediate companies trying to close these white label contracts. So they knew the exact pain that we'd gone [00:24:00] through. And I guess we bonded over a mutual hate of news UK

[00:24:02] James: founder on who doesn't have to corporate communication policies. Yeah.

[00:24:12] Hector: And I'm sure you speak for many companies, who've been through similar as well. So that he's UK should take notes,

[00:24:17] Jonny: spoken to the founder of tap and field. Yeah. Cause he said the whole thing ended up being a bit of a nightmare. He says he wished they'd just bought him at the time, but. sorry, just mutual founders going through bad experiences to companies.

[00:24:32] James: So also having the first meeting, how did that then lead to, drawing on a, on an acquisition?

[00:24:39] Jonny: So we went into a bit of due diligence with them because they thought they wanted to potentially partner with us, maybe even invest. And we spent about six weeks in due diligence and we flew out to Munich to meet them the rest of the team. And it was after all day of kind of management interviews. They said at the end of the meeting, actually we want to buy you. They proposed quite a [00:25:00] complex deal at the time, which took a while for us to simplify into what became. As much an acqui-hire as an acquisition, they wanted the product, they wanted the team, they wanted speed. We wanted investors or attempt for ourselves and everyone. So it was kind of like a perfect situation. And, since we been acquired, we've grown more than 100% year on year for the almost three years I've been there now. So a very happy ending from two and a bit year period.

[00:25:28] James: so you're still there. And do you think you might go back to being a founder one day? And if so, what would you do differently? And what advice would you give to others that are thinking of taking the leap?

[00:25:39] Jonny: I a hundred. I want to start another business. people kept saying, I'll throw this out. Like when you do the next one, when you. No. We had a deal where we couldn't leave for six months and now brilliant company. I was very happy there and I thought maybe I'll do a year and see where we go. So I applied for entrepreneur first, which I know [00:26:00] I suppose of a podcast very recently. And I just thought this is a really good space for a non-technical founder to to get into very difficult to get into that. But I thought I had the skill sets to do it. So I applied and I actually got on and I'm ready to go. But then, we were talking about what the plans for pouch were and effectively Kind of similar to someone raising a series, a, they said, this is what your budget is going to be. You've got autonomy, you've got an advocate within the business. That's going to be your manager effectively, like your VC board member. Go, just grab as quick as you can. And actually that may be, yeah. To do that with the product. We've got it pretty much from zero to one, and then we were acquired. We never got to go past that. So that was like a very exciting proposition and, glad I've done that with the company, but definitely want to start again and do something else.

[00:26:52] Three pieces of advice. First is like always raise more money than you need. I wish I'd have the confidence [00:27:00] to, raise 2 or 3 million pounds off the bat for our first business. That's definitely what's changed for the next one. It wouldn't be so much our do this as a favor to a young kid.

[00:27:09] It's actually, we've got a proven track record. We learned a huge amount and there aren't that many. Exited founders that say, I've done it once. I'm ready to do it again, that you could put your money into. Most people would still their first businesses or they fail two or three times. And obviously there's a huge amount of learning you're gonna get in that failing, but there's also a huge amount of learning you get in success. So, I would raise a much bigger round for my next company and target, I would say. A bit better in terms of choosing an industry where the addressable market, you can point to trillions and billions in revenue, straight away, rather than, online voucher codes, where there is a big market, but it's as a new commerce, you've got to capture most of it to make a lot of money. The second thing is, get your analytics sorted straight away. I talked about our leaky bucket problem. we did not have good analytics and any large B 2 [00:28:00] C business with so many different touch points, installs, activation rates, like all these complicated metrics, it's still a challenge to have them all very neatly in a, in an actionable way. Don't do it alone. I'm so grateful for the co-founders. that I had, maybe James That's why you've got Hector now for season 2 and you're going to carry on doing it because it probably makes it a lot easier.

[00:28:18] right

[00:28:20] James: A lot more fun and yeah, great having new energy and ideas and everything, and yeah, it's like having a co-founder for the podcast is great.

[00:28:28] Jonny: You know, I'm, I'm like an extroverted person, like bounce off different people. Like I need I need a partner in in, in, in crime in that sense. so to have another co-founder or another two co-founders is definitely. The way to go in my opinion, as long as you have very clear decision-making frameworks, because we never had a CEO as such, because I was controlled of the checkbook and raising money and all the rest.

[00:28:50] And I guess making the hard decisions that was my role, but, maybe we should have changed that, but it worked for us at the time, definitely times where if it was. Yeah, this is my domain. This is my [00:29:00] decision that would have made things like a lot quicker and a lot less painful to make decisions.

[00:29:04] James: Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Great bits of advice there for anyone thinking of Jumping ship and starting a company. Really interesting. So Johnny, where we're there on time, I'm sure we could talk about lots more. There's things we haven't managed to touch on, but it's been great chatting to you.

[00:29:20] We like to round these up with a a game where we ask people to select three people that they'd like to have business lunch or dinner with. So who would that be for you?

[00:29:30] Jonny: I said her name already on the podcast. So she was a few years above me at university and I think we'll with entrepreneur first is just incredible as a program, like people say, how would you innovate in venture capital where they've done. Done it successfully. So just to pick her brain about how to build a culture and a really high-performing organization she'd be great. Someone high up in government, like maybe someone like Michael. [00:30:00] I dunno, just to ask all the questions about the code, that situation, that I haven't got any answers on, get a few bottles of red wine and someone, and like really find out what's happening over the last 18 months, because I'm sure it will be absolutely shocking. If you really go deep into it. And then I finished this book the other week and I've got a lot of questions for him. So Steve Bartlett, who happy, sexy millionaire. Like that book was really good. And I've just got a lot of notes. I want to run by him on what I found. So I think, yeah, those are the three people I'd like to get drunk at lunch with.

[00:30:30] James: Awesome. Yeah. You've got yeah, three points for originality, anyone who's interested go and check out Alice's episodes which is out a couple of weeks ago. Thanks so much, Johnny, for coming on and telling us your riding unicorn story, great insight there into what it takes to start a company. Some of the challenges love the honesty and then, a good outcome as well as very exciting.

[00:30:52] Jonny: I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. You see For shout-outs anyone that doesn't have it. Yeah. Which browser extension. It automatically finds all the best [00:31:00] voucher codes and apply them automatically at the checkout page, black Friday, coming up, you need about extensions to help save you probably 50 pounds a month. So go install it now.

[00:31:10] James: Awesome. Great way to wrap things up. Thanks so much.

[00:31:17] Jonny: Cheers.

[00:31:17] Thanks for listening to if you haven't already please like, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to receive episodes direct to your inbox, go to riding unicorns dot sub stack.com and subscribe on there as well.

[00:31:32] See you next time