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Mar 29, 2024 ยท 2024 #12. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
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Speaker 3
that was the week no time to be meek the goal is to seek the next big thing that was a week that was a week stand back think big dig deep
Speaker 3
Technology's buzzing, it's in our veins We're on top of the game, breaking the chains
Speaker 3
That Was The Week That Was The Week That Was The Week
Speaker 2
Hello, everybody. It is Friday, March the 29th, 2024. It's raining in San Francisco. Late March, rather unusual. and it's raining in Palo Alto at least according to Keith Teare whose newsletter whose That Was The Week newsletter on tech is entitled Data Driven Investing and he begins his editorial saying it's Friday morning in Palo Alto rain is drizzling down my windows and the weekend will be wet sounds very depressing Keith well except if you're English you actually like the sound of rain don't you Andrew? Well, I actually rather enjoy it. I like the fact that it upsets other people.
Speaker 2
How has it influenced, though, your editorial on data investing? I have to admit, I'm always a bit skeptical of this concept of data investing. I mean, it's a truism. You only invest when you have the data. So what's the big deal about it?
Speaker 1
well well there's all kinds of data so if you of course every single investor makes an investment there's two things you need to know about them one is they have a goal in mind and secondly they have some kind of data that supports their decision so data is is everywhere but that use of the word data is usually reduced down to what venture capitalists call due diligence so they might get the company's finances they might do background checks on the founders they might do some market analysis to decide whether that company is in a high growth industry where the upside is unlimited that is data but what this week's stories that people have written and that's why the title's there there's a lot of content this week written by and I have to I have to say Keith I mean for people watching the your AI artist is getting worse it looks like a
Speaker 2
Sort of a swirl of different colors, almost a nightmarish ice cream cone. Where'd you get this imagery from?
Speaker 1
So you know what happened is I asked ChatGPT, I gave it my editorial, but I pressed enter before it got the editorial and all it got from me was Give Me Grays and Reds, Shades of Gray and Red.
Speaker 2
I don't think ChatGPT is ever going to become Rembrandt. Anyway, so we've got terrible art, we've got miserable weather in Palo Alto of all places in late March, and we have data investing. What's happening this week on the data investing front? I know you were quite influenced by an interesting piece from our friend Mike Butcher at TechCrunch. about data finding that unicorn founders are underdogs and that female founders are rising. What's interesting about that data?
Speaker 1
Well, the first is most of the people who believe in data-driven investing have this assumption that founders can be scored based on where they went to school. and that the likelihood of outcomes, for example, Ilya, who's a professor at Stanford, has a whole thesis about where founders went to school correlated to unicorn production. And what this study that Mike Butcher is writing about says is that the strongest signal is that they're underdogs. And by underdogs, he means not white males that are American by birth.
Speaker 2
he says there's lots of immigrants there's lots of brown and black skinned people and this was a defiance report yeah from a company a research company Defiance Capital I have to admit again a little bit of skepticism you include yourself in that because you're an immigrant but you're hardly an underdog certainly in the United States and you came here as a successful entrepreneur there's no underdog quality to that
Speaker 1
Andrew, if I took you to Eastfield Estate in Scarborough... Yeah, but that's another issue. I definitely wasn't rated to be a success.
Speaker 2
Well, let me include myself then. As an entrepreneur, although I'm a serially failed entrepreneur, I would be included as an underdog here because I'm an immigrant to the US and there's nothing about me that's the underdog.
Speaker 1
I beg to differ. I think a lad from the Jewish North London district is not necessarily an overdog. You had to struggle somehow or other to get where you are in life.
Speaker 2
My struggle?
Speaker 2
The point is that these categories are a little vague.
Speaker 1
so well that that in a way is my point Andrew the vagueness of the categories means that it's super hard to use data intelligence to find them and that's why I put it in Mike in a way is saying look the facts are so weird that actually you couldn't discover these winners by doing data-driven work prior to them being winners. You wouldn't have been able to find them. So I put it there because it puts a question mark over how realistic data-driven discovery is.
Speaker 2
And so I thought it was a good... Yeah, and isn't it sort of, you know, the thing with these... Knowing the earlier research at Stanford, I mean, everybody knows that a lot of VCs invest in Stanford or Harvard grads, so that's a no-brainer.
Speaker 1
It is, but it doesn't correlate to success in the way they think it does. I mean, there is some correlation, obviously. Some minority number of big winners went to good schools like Stanford. So there's obviously some correlation. But the real question is, is it better than what you would do by You Know, Randomly Making Decisions Based On Companies You Meet. And the answer is no, it isn't. That's why the other article about the S&P 500 is so important.
Speaker 2
Right, and that was an interesting piece on the S&P 500. It shows that if between 2010 and 2020, had you invested $100,000
Speaker 2
S&P 500 return would have been $364k and hedge funds would have been $160k. What about VCs? Where's the VC element here?
Speaker 1
Well, the average VC would have been done far worse than both of these. The top 5% would have been as good as the hedge funds. So that tells us that
Speaker 2
It's not wise to back startups or to try to become an investor. You're just better off putting your money in the stock market.
Speaker 1
no it doesn't actually say that it it says that you if you are going to put money in the stock market you're most likely to do better if you put it into an index that's probably the anchor point that i i believe that's true well most people put it in indexes because it's easier and simpler and safer so now in venture capital there is no such thing as an index you can't put your money in an index so if you're going to do venture capital at all um you are stock picking in the way that the hedge funds do so you're mostly going to underperform the average when you do that and and therein lies why the rest of the articles in this ai section this week are interesting because they're all people trying to beat the average using data and which is always the case with investing isn't it i mean there's you know if you can beat the average by 0.1 percent then then you become very rich and if you don't you lose all your money well that's always the goal but um what's happening now is that being successful is becoming possible so so in the past that goal was hardly ever met but the point of the editorial and the stories is we're now getting to a point where where A Data-Driven Approach Is Showing Real Value.
Speaker 2
Well, you would say that, Keith, because of SignalRank. I mean, that's what you do.
Speaker 1
So... Yeah, but even though I would say that, you've got to challenge me about whether it's true. And if I would say that and it's true, which I think it is, then that's... Well, going back to... I mean, as a...
Speaker 2
in a simple sense. I mean, if you're putting your money into the S&P 500 in an index fund through your broker and go to Merrill Lynch or many other places to do that, why try to beat the market in a more sophisticated way in what you're trying to do at SignalRank?
Speaker 1
Well, let's start with the fact that there is an asset class called venture capital and it is their job to invest money and return more than they invested. So it doesn't really matter what I would do personally. But what we're assessing here is whether the venture asset class can be improved using data. and and of course it it should want the answer to be yes if it's possible because that's the job of the people in venture capital their job is to turn money into more money and return it and then do it again so that That tees up the question very well. Andre Retterath is in this week's newsletter a lot. He's based in Germany and he runs Data Driven VC newsletter and he runs a VC fund called Early Bird. he's on the record for a long time talking about how to find what venture capitalists call alpha and alpha is you know the very best outcomes using data as a filter in the selection process so he he's in there now I don't think there's any evidence yet that he has been able to succeed at doing that he's a strong advocate of it and I may be wrong I haven't seen his outcome numbers so I'm not sure he can do it but it felt to me like this was a perfect moment for me to disclose the work I've been working on this week which is building the next version of SignalRank where I think we do do it. We actually deliver on the promise. And so Andre and two or three other writers plus SignalRank are in the newsletter to compare and contrast approaches and likelihood of success.
Speaker 2
Well, the other news, Keith, this week is that Sam Bankman Freed got sentenced to 25 years in prison. He used to promise that he knew how to beat the system. I'm not suggesting you're the next Sam Bankman Freed, but what does this story tell us about promises of guys like SBF that they know how to beat the system?
Speaker 1
Well, I think it's fair to say his promises turned out to be true. What he was accused of was illegality when things went bad. But now that we're a year or more past those events, it turns out that the investors in FTX are going to get their money back and then some because the market in Bitcoin and other derivatives came back. but he still committed the crimes he committed you know in his attempt to either cover up or save a bad outcome.
Speaker 2
A few months ago we had the SPF conversation I said to you the guy's obviously guilty and he deserves to go to jail and you said well he hasn't been tried yet let's wait to see what happens would you acknowledge that he he's guilty and deserved a long prison term?
Speaker 1
I certainly I would acknowledge that he's guilty and he had his moment to prove he wasn't and failed so clearly he's guilty but I think what he's guilty of is really bad judgment correlated to something less bad which was an attempt to save a sinking ship so the 25 years if you compare that to the 110 years which would be have been the maximum sentence but a lot more than the five years that would have been the minimum
Speaker 2
One imagines that the judge strongly felt that the guilt was stronger than... I mean, what's your take on the argument that he was trying to do good and that he was funneling some of the money to effective altruism and that he certainly was no Bernie Madoff buying... Buying Jewels and Cars and Real Estate.
Speaker 1
He definitely is not a Bernie Madoff. He's on the spectrum, I would imagine, from what I see. And I think he thinks he was trying to make things better. I don't think he was thinking I'm gonna steal this money for myself so you know his awareness of the law and the lines he crossed seems to have been extremely poor in doing that and so he made some judgments that were illegal and he's been found guilty for that but if you're his parents who are distraught I think you would think of him as a kind of a challenged good person as opposed to a bad person.
Speaker 2
Well, there's an element culturally also of fires here where both parents teach at Stanford Law School. They teach tax law. They must have known that he was skirting the law, if not breaking it. Some people have accused them of being involved in this. Has the SBF, you're in Palo Alto, even if it's raining today, Keith, has this had any impact on how people think about their supposedly brilliant children and their startup endeavors?
Speaker 1
I think the answer is no. I mean, it's interesting. I have a friend who's in another part of the world who resigned from a very top financial institution this week in order to pursue a career that is in the crypto space. And this person is a very stable, smart, intelligent person who believes that his income, which is constrained in his current job, will become unconstrained as he makes this move.
Speaker 2
So crypto still is a- Is that your warning to this unnamed fellow that he should Be A Little Bit More Realistic?
Speaker 1
I think he's figured that out. I think he's grown up, so he'll make his own moves. But he does have children and a family, and he's taking a lot of risk. And crypto, therefore, still can do that. It can still attract talent. And that's because the promise of the upside is still very strong, as it is with data, by the way.
Speaker 2
In other news of the week, leaving aside SBF, some interesting stuff, Keith, about Apple. Three pieces on Apple in That Was The Week newsletter. Two in particular that I was intrigued by, about the EU share of Apple's global revenue and whether or not Apple might simply say to the EU, it's not worth it. We're going to just leave the market. It's only 10% of the market. Is that Is it conceivable that Apple would just shut the door on Europe, on the EU at least?
Speaker 1
Well, it's 7% of their global revenues. Not Europe, the EU is 7% of their global revenues. And if the EU is fining them more than 7% of their global revenues, which it is, then Pure Economics will say let's not be in the EU which would deny EU citizens access to Apple hardware and software unless they buy it outside. So I don't think it's a crazy idea that they could do that. MG Siegler engaged with that story in one of the other articles and he definitely gives it some credibility as does Daring Fireball
Speaker 2
The Gruber, but particularly Gruber is doing it from he seems to always be in Apple's pocket one way or the other. I mean, it would be a very dramatic move. It would involve them shutting down all their stores. You wouldn't be able to have an iPhone in Europe. You wouldn't be able to own a Mac. How would this work?
Speaker 1
Well, the real story here probably is how irrational the EU is when it comes to innovation and technology. And I think this would probably end up being true for Google and lots of other companies. I doubt it's just an Apple thing. The EU has taken on the mantle of fighting big tech to preserve the interests of its citizens. and what these articles expose is that there's a contradiction at the heart of that because the EU isn't important enough for the fines it's wielding. The fines it's wielding by the way are enormous because they find companies based on their global revenue and they find them a percentage of their global revenue even though the EU is just the EU. So the EU, the audacity of the EU in taking on big tech is very likely to backfire one way or another whether it means Apple won't be in Europe I think is a detail that doesn't really detract from the irrationality of the EU in how it's proceeding and of course our own FTC and DOJ seem to love the EU approach and are doing their very best in a very different way because they They're more savvy about what is legal and what isn't legal. They're not attacking these companies for the same things the EU is, but they are attacking them.
Speaker 2
So what would you say to people who see the EU as the only series of states actually standing up to big tech? You think that's not true?
Speaker 1
Well, it is true. The real question is, is it smart? Is it smart in business terms or in ethical terms? Does it serve the citizens of Europe in any way at all? Like the fact that Apple has to drop the lightning connector in favor of a USB-C. Who really cares?
Speaker 2
No one cares about that, but I was thinking if... I mean it's still very very hard to imagine it would be a massive massive development but let's say Apple or Google or Amazon pulled out of the EU that would offer enormous opportunities for EU entrepreneurs wouldn't it?
Speaker 1
I doubt that because they'd have to come up... If they could do something better than Apple, they already would be. You know, the most... That's not the point.
Speaker 2
I mean, if Apple's not there, then it gives them an opportunity to sell phones or app stores or... Yeah, they'll sell Android services.
Speaker 1
But I guarantee those European citizens who are able to will still buy iPhones. They just won't buy them in the EU. They'll pay more because the iPhone's better. They want it.
Speaker 2
so it become like the old Soviet Union people be smuggling in jeans but rather than jeans it's iPhones
Speaker 1
It is like the Soviet Union. I mean, it's a... What, the EU? When was the last time you went there? The EU government, from a regulatory point of view, let's be specific, I'm not making broad statements here, but from a regulatory point of view, it's a top-down bureaucracy acting without any mandate from its citizens.
Speaker 2
You're saying that the government of the EU... The government of the EU.
Speaker 2
...is equivalent... to the Soviet Union?
Speaker 1
Well, it's a centralized authority taking decisions.
Speaker 2
You're beginning to sound like Mrs. Thatcher, Keith. I don't know about that. Or some of the other Brexit people. So are you suggesting that it was wise for the British to pull out?
Speaker 1
I empathize with those Brits who felt the EU was some kind of an overlord. I do not empathize with the nationalistic A Lobby That Was Part Of Brexit. But the part that believes the EU is kind of a top-down overlord making decisions that it really has no democratic mandate for, that I agree with.
Speaker 2
Do you think that Apple, though, even, I mean, I understand the point, well, maybe it's Not Worth It Economically for us to be in Europe but it's more than just economics there's the value of having beautiful Apple stores in London and Paris and Rome so it's hard to imagine even in the worst case scenario that Apple would would simply pack its bags and and leave the EU isn't it well remember Tim Cook started life as a CFO and
Speaker 1
If you're earning 7%, but they're fining you 10%, you're paying to be in Europe. You're not making a cent. You're paying to be in Europe. And instead of them taxing you, they're fining you to get your global revenues. I don't know that you can sustain that. Your shareholders actually should be angry with you if you do. because you're getting zero out of it. And I think the lesson here is the EU has got to become a little bit more smart about its fine scale.
Speaker 2
Well, I don't think the EU would be particularly concerned. I think, if anything, they might consider it a victory. So this reflects a broader splinter net. Last week, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about TikTok and the US attempt to nationalize TikTok. A Cold War, Economic Cold War, Tech Cold War with China. Are we seeing then, a book was written a few years ago called Splinternet, a lot of people have always warned about this. Are we seeing the long-term fragmentation of the internet? I mean, we already know that there's a Russian internet, an Iranian internet, a Chinese internet. Is there about to become a European internet as well?
Speaker 1
That is the obvious consequence of everything that's going on, which would, I believe, be a terrible outcome for humanity. But that is the trend. The trend is for governments to try to police and control the digital presence inside their borders with a set of rules that the companies have to abide by. and that goes for mergers and acquisitions as well as it does for rules, as well as it does for privacy. I mean, it's really everything. So if you're an executive at a big tech firm in 2024, your life is significantly harder than it was in 1994 when the internet first started, when authorities were not really a consideration.
Speaker 2
No wonder it's raining in Palo Alto, Keith. And what would this mean? I mean, this is a very speculative idea. I am still enormously skeptical that we'll even get close to this. But what would it mean to these global US tech leviathans like Apple and Google and Facebook and Amazon?
Speaker 2
if the internet splinters and then their main markets are really just left in the U.S. ?
Speaker 1
Well, the U.S. is measured by human beings. It's a fairly small percentage of the global market. Measured by money spent, it's a very big proportion. Asia collectively is bigger now than the US on both counts and so if you were to think you know the question was what are the most important markets for big tech I think the UK is still one outside of US and UK and Asia India is a rising one if you don't include that within Asia and
Speaker 1
you know for Apple at least China is huge so I think Europe by which I mean the EU is somewhat unimportant in the big picture and that's just an economic reality and I you know that said every government is copying what the EU is doing because governments in a way that they like rules and bureaucracy because that's what gives them their authority and their power. So there's a natural inclination if you are a politician and a government to emulate the EU. And I do think that's happened in India, for example, with TikTok. So it's a very, very difficult navigation if you're an executive of big tech. It's one of the reasons I believe that citizens using these technologies, they're kind of creating a bottoms up globalization that doesn't really have anything to do with these top down government bureaucracies. and I think ultimately users will have the power to force the politicians to keep their hands off the tools.
Speaker 2
This is not an issue this week but we've talked about it in the past we will in the future about initiatives to take smartphones and social media out of the hands of kids not just in Europe but in the US. What about AI? Is that going to change anything? One interesting piece of AI news this week is that Amazon is doubling down on its investment in Anthropic, one of the most independent of credible AI platforms, completing a $4 billion investment. Last week, we talked about one AI company that now has been incorporated into Microsoft. Is AI changing this? How will that work?
Speaker 1
Well, AI again is American centric. So if you're sitting in Europe where the rules are such that any half intelligent entrepreneur leaves and comes to America, you're faced again in this next generation of technology with an American centric innovation world. where most of the money is going to flow to the innovators. And so, you know, Europe was the first to regulate AI. It just passed an act at the EU level about AI, which is effectively going to exclude Europe as being a reasonable place to build an AI company. Mistral is an exception. It's a French company, Mistral AI. So I think AI is just another example of Global Technology, largely centered here in the States, having to navigate governments in the rest of the world.
Speaker 2
And what about the Amazon news? Does it speak, and I've written about this, we talked about it, about this really not being this new AI boom isn't really a startup boom it's a boom of top-down companies highly highly capitalized companies does this reflect that the fact that Anthropic now I mean, how many players are there in the AI market in these broad platforms? There's Anthropic, there's OpenAI, there's Gemini, there's, I guess, Microsoft, although they're heavily invested in these other companies. There aren't any real startups.
Speaker 1
Well, ultimately, they're all startups because the truth is, just like with mobile and with the cloud, the big companies are late to the game. Google won the search wars because as a startup because no one else was paying attention and you know the smartphone
Speaker 1
turned Apple from a company that was borrowing money from Bill Gates into one that was bigger than Microsoft. So, you know, Apple was almost bankrupt when it got that investment from Bill Gates. So the truth is, pretty much every generation of transformation is fueled by startups.
Speaker 2
In the past, but the point is, it's all very well going back to Google, and you're right, of course, about that. But there isn't a Google in this AI market.
Speaker 1
Well, yeah, there is. It's open AI. and OpenAI was a two-person startup originally, if you go back to 2015. And so the truth is that nobody believed it was possible to do anything close to what OpenAI launched last year until they launched it. And I don't know if you remember the gasping that went on with ChatGPT version one.
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's interesting about, I mean, we can talk about this another time, but it's interesting with OpenAI that The Reason They Were Successful is they took a Google white paper and developed it.
Speaker 2
I'm sure Google originally borrowed ideas and white papers from Microsoft.
Speaker 1
Yeah, where you're right, and by the way, that speaks to the importance of open intellectual debate, publishing, learning from each other. The world can't really innovate without knowledge. And so that cross knowledge is super important. Where I'm going to agree with you is the price of entry to AI is now too high for startups. Sequoia Capital this week did this offsite. My video of the week is from it. and it had many of the founders of these companies speaking and they talked a lot about what comes next it's about four hours worth of material all on YouTube and I strongly recommend anyone interested in AI go and look at it but Andrew Ng who is in the video of the week this week is probably the most prescient spoke at length about the next stage now the next stage is multiple AIs being used by users against and for each other and he talks about how you know you could use Anthropic and give it output from ChatGPT and it will improve on them and vice versa you can even do self-referential so you can go to ChatGPT and get an answer you can give it its answer back immediately and say can you improve on this and it will so the next stage is is
Speaker 1
When AIs Talk To AIs.
Speaker 2
We've always had the promise the next stage it'll get more democratic we will see no doubt but there still are real startups one of them is Keith's startup of the week a genuine startup a small two-man shop that is building or began as a two a small two-man shop like Google I guess building an all-electric intercity bus network in the UK EMBA what is it about EMBA that caught your fancy Keith?
Speaker 1
The entrepreneurialism of the founders. I mean, you know, you wouldn't think that buying buses was a good startup idea because they're expensive. In this case, by the way, these buses are manufactured in China. They're less expensive than any equivalent they could find and they're super high quality buses. and they're all electric they can travel around 300 kilometers on a single charge so it's city to city the UK is a fairly small landmass so you can get most places on a single charge on a bus and they've started between two Scottish cities they now have 34 buses in the field Is it a B2C company?
Speaker 2
Is there a brand called Ember, you can buy a bus ticket.
Speaker 1
Yeah, you buy a bus ticket and it's got modern technology like you can know where the bus is at any minute using your phone. So it's got Uber-like characteristics in software.
Speaker 2
And who are they competing with? This is an old market. I assume it's an ideal opportunity for disruptive startups.
Speaker 1
They're competing with large old-fashioned bus companies.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I can imagine. So it's Uber in a sense all over again. Yeah. is it a big market I mean what's the market I think it's a big market in places where cities are close together which is most of Europe so I think it can be a pretty huge market yeah and what about the idea of an electric all electric intercity bus network in the in the US I don't know if anyone remembers the last time you went to a bus station intercity bus station in America Keith they're very depressing places
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, you know, the 42nd Street, New York, Manhattan bus station comes to mind, which I'm very familiar with, but there's others. You know, I think American cities are too far apart. So until battery technology can take you roughly 600 miles, maybe 700, which it will, that's coming.
Speaker 2
Then It's A Little Bit Harder To Imagine Wanting To Stop For Two Or Three Hours To Recharge Yeah And Does Ember Have Recharging Networks It Just Uses Standard Recharging Networks Anyone Could Use So If You're Going From Glasgow To The North You Have To Stop To Recharge The Bus not not in the uk because there's there aren't that many cities that are further apart than 300 miles interesting well we'll keep our eyes on that finally x of the week it's not elon musk trying to do with that elon musk it's the acquisition of Affinity by Canva. Tell us about this and why, again, in a sense, it's another startup of the week.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I cheated. I wanted to make it startup of the week as well. Affinity is basically Adobe Photoshop and and Design Tools, Photo Tools, and also Adobe Illustrator, which is a vector graphics tool. It's a British company that's built very, very high quality to those three pieces of software. and Canva is kind of like Figma that Adobe just failed to acquire due to regulations. So this is Canva, a startup, acquiring Adobe-like characteristics to compete with Adobe.
Speaker 2
Yeah, a lot of the press was about this, described that Ars Technica described it as a non-subscription based weapon against Adobe. Is it a large market?
Speaker 1
You know, I paid a one-time fee of I think it was $300 to buy the Affinity software about three years ago, all three, $99 per software piece.
Speaker 1
I use it because it's good and I don't have to pay a subscription fee. So now every three or four years, they create a whole new version and they made me pay the $99 again. So they do get your money more than once, but it's several years apart.
Speaker 2
Do you think Adobe is vulnerable on this front, not just in photo apps, but in video as well?
Speaker 1
I think of Adobe as an old-fashioned company owning software that is going to go out of fashion at some point. or be commoditized in the way that Affinity is commoditizing. So DaVinci Resolve is also already better than Adobe Premiere for video as is Final Cut Pro, I think. So almost every single piece of software Adobe owns is being commoditized or cloudified by Figma, Canva, and others. So I don't see long run how Adobe Survives Unless It Does What Microsoft Has Done Successfully Which Is Transition To A Different Kind Of Company With Different Kinds Of Software In The Case Of Microsoft Is Azure The Cloud Business Intelligence Software Stuff That Is Really Good And Scales That Makes It Compete With Amazon And Google And Others So You Know
Speaker 2
You're not particularly optimistic on Adobe. Interesting. And finally, Keith, both Ember, your startup of the week, a Scottish-based company, and Affinity, they're British companies. Of course, you and I are British, so you have a particular knowledge of the British startup marketplace. You railed against the EU. Is Post-Brexit Britain. Is it a more innovative place? Would you have had Ember and Affinity in the UK if it was still part of the EU?
Speaker 1
That's a hard question. All my questions.
Speaker 1
Ultimately, I would come down to two people more than 10 years ago in the UK, Reshma Sohoni and Saul Klein. who set themselves the task with Seedcamp of turning London into something that's a bit more close to Silicon Valley in terms of business practice. They've been quite successful and catalyzed a whole set of developments that lead to these two companies and many others even existing. So I think the credit goes to people like that. The government, Self-consciously seems to want to encourage that in the UK now, certainly not get in the way of it. And that's very strong in fintech where the UK has sandboxes, which are basically software environments where, for example, banks or insurance companies are forced to make the interfaces available to developers to build new stuff that competes with them. So the UK does have a kind of a more open, competitive feel to it.
Speaker 2
And certainly if in this dramatic worst case scenario, the big US tech companies decided to leave the EU, it would be a wonderful business opportunity for the UK. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3
The goal is to seek the next big thing That Was The Week That Was The Week Stand back, think big, dig deep That Was The Week Technology's buzzing, it's in our veins We're on top of the game, breaking the chains Opinions so insane
Speaker 3
that was the week that was the week that was the week