This Much I Know - The Seedcamp Podcast

What3words, recently described by the BBC as “the app that can save your life”, was recently catapulted to the top of the app and play store, thanks largely to a clearly defined b2b2c strategy. Tune in as CMO, Giles Rhys Jones, shares how they made it happen, from building an in-house creative team and using content to remove the barriers between their supporters and decision-makers in large organisations, to the importance of brand identity and purpose in overall strategy and startup success. Links: Giles: https://twitter.com/gilesrhysjones What3words: https://twitter.com/what3words

Recorded live at the Seedcamp Marketing Summit, Hannah Craik discusses one of the most pressing issues facing marketers today: how to balance short-term spikes vs. long-term penetration. From her roles at digital media agencies to ASOS and now Heist studios, Hannah shares practical insights on how to generate sales today while also keeping one eye on future cashflow. She also depicts the importance of brand visibility and its synergy with short-termism. Listen in as Hannah shares how she tackles the challenge of big data gaps and the inherent desire to make decisions based on any information that can be found along with the fundamental - though difficult to measure - the importance of creative content. Links: Hannah: https://twitter.com/hicraik Heist Studios: https://twitter.com/heiststudios

The transition from dealing directly with a product to becoming a manager of people can be a challenging one for many founders. In this week’s episode of This Much I Know, Carlos is joined by Emily Brooke - Co-founder of Beryl - the company on a mission to get more people cycling and to transform cities. Listen in as Emily uncovers how that mission has evolved over time and her own transition from getting her hands dirty with product development to developing people, all while striving to build a purpose-driven business. Emily’s journey to inventing Beryl and launching its first, now iconic, green laser light, wasn’t the most obvious one. After dropping out from a physics degree at Oxford, where she struggled with the lack of tangibility the course provided, she went onto study Product Design in Brighton. It was during that time she started to research why there was such low uptake of cycling in urban cities and created Beryl to help address some of the key barriers. Now the Beryl laser light can be seen across all Santander Cycle bikes in London and has also been adopted by cycle hire schemes in a number of other major cities. After raising more than £100,000 on Kickstarter for the laser light, Beryl has gone onto launch its own cycle hire scheme - Beryl Bikes. Tune in to hear some of the biggest manufacturing and commercial hurdles the team has faced over the last seven years and why Emily believes strongly in the need to build businesses with purpose. Links: Emily Brooke - https://twitter.com/buzzbrooke Beryl - https://beryl.cc/ and https://twitter.com/berylbikes Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com/

“It’s very difficult to spot an outlier in the early days. At series A, outliers are not obvious. If you go towards group decision making, you can miss some of these outliers.” In this week’s episode of This Much I Know, Carlos is joined by Luciana Lixandru, Partner at Accel, the top-tier US fund with a strong presence on the ground in Europe. Prior to joining the firm in 2011, Luciana worked at Morgan Stanley and as an investor with Summit Partners. Currently, she successfully proves Accel’s thesis that innovation and talent can come from anywhere. In conversation with Carlos, Luciana reveals how partners at Accel filter investment opportunities to spot the next global winner amongst local champions. She also shares details on how the fund operates internally, and why being connected with an associate should never be taken as a slight. Tune in to hear Luciana’s journey from leaving her hometown in Romania for Georgetown to mastering financial terms whilst at Morgan Stanley and eventually investing in such tech superstars as Deliveroo, UiPath, Tessian, and Framer. Links: Luciana Lixandru - https://twitter.com/LucianaLix Accel - https://www.accel.com/ Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com

Carlos is joined this week in the studio by Daniel Korski, co-founder and CEO of PUBLIC, a London-based VC fund that invests in tech startups transforming the way public services are run and delivered. Daniel is also the Chairman of the GovTech Summit, the largest global event for the Govtech sector hosted annually with French President Emmanuel Macron, and has 20 years of experience in senior positions in government across the UK, EU, and US. Most recently, Daniel served as the Deputy Head of Policy at No. 10 Downing Street and Special Advisor to David Cameron. He has also been an advisor to the Vice-President of the European Commission and has previously worked for the UN and Foreign Office in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. Tune in to hear Daniel sharing his unique story - from embarking on a career in diplomacy, politics and journalism before using his expertise to back Govtech startups tackling largely traditional and undisrupted sectors the UK economy still largely depend on. Daniel also delves into the shaping of the UK government’s ‘digital revolution’ and how it thinks about delivering its services, to how governments are thinking about the role of entrepreneurship and the broader startup ecosystem on the national economy. Links: Daniel Korski - twitter.com/DanielKorski PUBLIC - public.io Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com

Nilan is the VP of Growth at TransferWise, which he joined 7 years ago. Previously Nilan was VP Growth at HouseTrip, in charge of scaling the company’s growth in the European market. He’s also worked as Chief Marketing Technology Officer at Holiday Extras, where he was responsible for all areas of technology, marketing and customer acquisition. Nilan also advises a number of early stage startups on growth and getting traction. Links: Nilan Peiris - twitter.com/nilanp Devin Hunt - twitter.com/hailpixel Seedcamp - seedcamp.com TransferWise - transferwise.com

Sally is the Chief Innovation Officer of Photobox and a commercial Product Director with over 20 years of tech and digital experience. She is currently leading product innovation at Photobox where she is responsible for new revenue lines and leads an end-to-end team who develop and launch new products. Links: Sally Foote - twitter.com/sallyfoote Devin Hunt - twitter.com/hailpixel Seedcamp - seedcamp.com Photobox - photobox.co.uk

Earlier this year Stripe hired Google veteran Matt Henderson to head its newly expanded Dublin engineering hub. Before joining Stripe Matt led Google’s strategy for scaling the Google Play app store. In prior he led Amazon’s marketplace strategy in Europe and founded shopping platform Rangespan, which was acquired by Google in 2014. Links: Matt Henderson - twitter.com/_matt_henderson Devin Hunt - twitter.com/hailpixel Seedcamp - seedcamp.com Stripe - stripe.com

Hiring a head of growth and paying for Facebook ads isn't enough to scale growth. Growth is a mindset that needs to filter from the top down. On this week’s episode of This Much I Know, Matt Lerner, founder and CEO of Startup Core Strengths, joins Carlos in the studio. Prior to founding Startup Core Strengths, Matt was the London-based partner for 500 Startups, where he initiated the ‘Distro Dojo’ seed-stage growth program for the funds’ portfolio companies. Matt also had an 11-year run at PayPal where he lived through the company’s 15x hyper growth phase from progressive startup to Finch giant, culminating in him leading b2b marketing for PayPal UK. Join Carlos and Matt as they delve into the nitty gritty of why growth marketing has a negative legacy when contrasted with growth hacking for product teams, why overthinking metrics is a dangerous game to play for early stage founders and whether Eric Ries’s lean methodology of ‘build, measure, learn’ is in fact a relevant playbook for marketing teams. Matt also details the reasons behind founders mistakenly assuming they have product market fit, the key proxy metrics that pre-revenue startups should use to determine what areas to focus on and why the determinant of growth success is based on the five core pillars of - Message, Metrics Focus, Process and Team. Download a free copy of Matt's e-book 'Growth Hacking for Founders' at: https://startupcorestrengths.com/GH4F Links: Matt Lerner - twitter.com/matthlerner 500 Startups - twitter.com/500startups Startup Core Strengths - startupcorestrengths.com Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com

The mistake many Western tech giants have made is seeing China as just another country where they could easily get a few million users instead of focusing on localising their product offering. Carlos is joined in the studio this week by one of our very own partners, Sia Houchangnia, who has recently returned from a month-long deep dive of exploring the venture landscape in China and south-east Asia. In this episode, Sia unpacks the key differences in approach between VCs in the far East and those in the West - from investment strategy and portfolio construction all the way to the differing perceptions of what investor value-add looks like. He also provides unique insights into the challenges faced by European companies when entering the hyper-competitive Chinese market (and vice-versa), the rise of Chinese ‘super-apps’, how to address the gaps in engineering talent coming out of the region today as well as why the prospect of more EU-Chinese collaboration is one we should be excited about. Links: Sia Houchangnia - twitter.com/siahouchangnia Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com