#114 - Graham Mills, Co-Founder techspert.io - On how access to on-demand expert knowledge can give us exponential advantage

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to take our ability to make critical decisions to a completely new level. My guest is Graham Mills, Co-founder and Managing Director of techspert.io.

Graham is a scientist by training. He completed his PhD in pancreatic cancer chemoresistance at the University of Cambridge, having further worked scientifically in R&D at Genentech and Avidity Biosciences. His commercial experience comes from roles in venture capital at both Abingworth and Johnson & Johnson’s corporate venture fund, all of which preceded his most entrepreneurial endeavours, both as co-founder of smoking cessation startup Abdicare, followed by Biotechspert, which has evolved today into techspert.io.

techspert.io was born out of the frustration with the challenges in connecting to the right experts at the right time. Current solutions on the market have evolved based on decades-old principles, closed networks and manual subjective matching - which make it error-prone, biased, slow and highly costly. techspert.io was founded to solve this – and their approach inspired me, hence I invited Graham to my podcast. We explore what why our ability to make better more informed decisions on the topics that really matter needs a complete overhaul, and how this can spark competitive advantage. We also dig deeper into the question: "What’s the secret to creating a remarkable software business?"

Here are some of his quotes:

“We were setup about three years ago, really recognizing that, first of all knowledge, in many ways is how companies stay competitive and make some of the most important decisions around the world today, really access to high-quality knowledge on demand.

Yet, while we realized a huge importance of this knowledge exchange and access, the way through which companies were identifying and accessing it felt like it was designed in the 90s and remained there.

The way people currently go about solving these issues is one, they ask someone in their company, and if not, then they either pay a lot to a consultancy to go away and do an eight week project, or they just Google it. The challenges when you're Googling, the information you look at it's probably because someone is paid to be the top of Google SEO and that's not necessarily the right insight for your type of product and your type of company.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How one way to grow value and defensible differentiation is to focus on quality and objectivity over volume and bias.
2. Why focusing on playing the infinite game is going to bring you further than trying to win the short-term game.
3. That growing your empathy skill is key to deliver remarkable value – not only understanding the ‘pain point’, but also deeply understand how your customer feels, what they care about, and what powers they have to deal with.