Did you do any business-related or other studies before you “jumped in”?

 

My undergraduate was in Finance and Operations Management before I went to Investment Banking. Then, I worked at MNA here in London for a couple of years before moving to California and pursuing an MBA with a huge focus on entrepreneurship and some marketing. And it is after/during my MBA that I started my own companies out of business school.

 

Did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

 

No and I still don’t consider myself as an entrepreneur which is funny because I have founded 2 companies and I am now working in the start-up world as a sort of freelancer, helping startups getting up, running and building a process that will help them scale and go forward.

I am sort of the foil to the entrepreneur. When I started my own companies, my co-founders were the visionary and creative people who had a lot of drive while I am the energizer bunny, making sure that things are well in place, that they are done in a formal way, that they are setting up the company for success from more of an operational perspective and not necessarily from a drive perspective. I think for start-ups it is important to have both.

So while I work in entrepreneurship, I still don’t consider myself an entrepreneur but I like dealing with entrepreneurs which I do quite frequently.

 

How did you come up with LYVLY?

 

LYVLY was a spin out of SPORTIFIK (his former start-up). The reason why we came up with LYVLY, was to understand the market that we were in. It came from understanding that we were serving mainly students and young adults that were looking for opportunities to be more active in their daily life and recreation centres are a great place to do that. What we started realizing is that in college people are pushing you to do more sports and everything that is available and it's easy but once you are done with college you are in a bit of a vacuum.

So we tried to see how you can fill that void by going through corporate wellness. Basically we went to HR department and say “Hey! you should really have programs to help your employees to be more active, more social and more well”.

 

What inspired you to become an entrepreneur ? Is it your personal and/or your professional background ?

 

What inspired me to be an entrepreneur, in other words to pursue my own idea, started a little when I was doing investment banking which I enjoyed but at the end of the day I felt that it would be great to give something back to some extent and it was frustrating to not help on transactions, just revise and not deal with any of the product. So a large part of what let me to be an entrepreneur was me wanting to be in charge of end to end operations from the financing to the strategy and then implementing it to the market and sales. I have found the full picture of that really interesting.

You are also driven to make the world a better place even if it is in the smallest way

possible. In our case, it was to help people to manage their recreation centres better.

 

What would you say were the hardest challenges you faced? : what kind of drawbacks did you encounter ? ( in terms of relations, time management...) Could you give an example ?

 

I can only pinpoint the biggest challenge, especially with the first start-up.

So we were just getting started and after 3 or 4 months we had to pivot and change everything and have 6 months of rebuilding. We launched the first product in the market and got some really good adoptions with really huge amount of people testing it out but in the end we only closed 30% of what we expected within the first year. We had to do something else, keep going.

We ended up trying to sell the company, figure out if we wanted to pursue strategic partnerships etc… There were so many issues. The toughest thing was to decide to sell the company, not succeeding in that and shutting it down.

Amazing experience but very very tough mentally, as we worked during 4 years and had a lot of success in it. There was no easy decision to be made and we had many arguments with my co-founders who I still love and get along fantastically but at times they could get incredibly emotional and I like to think I am a very rational person. But it is still a ration/emotional process.

 

How do you think current political events will influence entrepreneurs (eg Brexit)?

 

No one knows what’s going to happen with Brexit. The big thing that Brexit is going to hurt is the availability of good talent. In California, they manage to crack the best simply because they have, despite what Trump makes you believe, a pretty good immigration policy when it comes to getting good talent to work in the top start-ups and it’s not just within the United States but also for people coming from Asia, Europe, South America and Africa. They are quite welcoming to people that have good talent. We tend to do the same in Europe, especially within Europe, and London became the hub  of that because it is the centre of finance and you get a lot of capital in.

I think the ability of top startups to attract talent is probably the number one thing that will make them succeed and unfortunately with Brexit you are sort of putting a question mark on that. Will startups in London still be able to attract the same kind of talent from the rest of Europe as they are doing today ? And I don’t really know.

They of course have plenty of talent in the UK as well.

 

Could you name 2 tips you’d give to a university student interested in the world of entrepreneurship.

 

It depends on the individual but I would really say, unless you really need to launch a start-up immediately, unless you are one of those outliers who not only have some technical knowledge, huge amount of drive and ideally a little capital behind them, my first recommendation will be to get a real job. And I don’t mean startup is not a real job but launching your own startup is really tough and you need a little bit of training before. You need to get real life skills, methods of work and be organized. A professional experience is insanely valuable.

The second one is to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Most of the time the founders of a successful company are quite incredible individuals in their own right but what is great is that they understand that they also lack skills in some areas and can surround themselves with people that will complement that and help them. Surrounding yourself with people that are better than you is a hard skill because you need to motivate them to think that you are a great person to benefit from their expertise.

 

 

Do you feel confident for the future? What are the two main provisions for the future?

 

Like on a personal level ? I feel my future is great haha.

Right now, I am working with a number of start-ups which I am really enjoying and from that perspective I think start-ups are going to continue to exist obviously. Internet made it all easier. It is an interesting time to be working in this field. The latter is much more accepted now, than it was 10 or 20 years ago. There is really a lot of talented people that are forsaking traditional career paths to try to have a bigger impact which can also be a harder failure right? But they are still pushing boundaries of innovation.

 

What's the trend right now ?

 

For the popularity, you just have to look at the numbers. Here in London, FinTech is a sector way bigger than others. Machine learning is really cool right now.

The reality is that hot sectors tend to raise more money and have higher evaluation at any given point in time. It doesn’t mean that success or failure rates are the same. That’s the reality. There is no trend.

 

What do you seek in a company you consider to invest in?

 

Number one thing is the founder. What’s his personality like? How is he going to inspire others ? Is he driven ? What is he going to get from it ? Is he a person that is going to fight tooth and nail to make this a success ?

I don’t claim to be the best to judge people and to really understand what drives a founder to be successful but I like to think that at various times in my career both as an entrepreneur and now as a consultant, that you do meet these individuals that you are like “Oh my God, this person is inspiring to a different level” and that they will succeed regardless of what happens, that he or she is going to make a success.

That’s the first thing that investors need to look at especially at the early stage. Later, there are different factors that are also important like the size of the market or if it is the right moment etc…

Besides, you can see how they actually plan their execution plan, what is their market strategy, does it make sense, have they figure out what exactly they want to do and how. Everyone has an idea and the reality is if it is the right person and right market, doing it in the right way is much more important than what the idea is.

 

What on the contrary puts you off ?

 

I don’t believe in investing in ideas, there has to be a decent amount of work and validation behind it. Don’t try to raise money on an idea, just demonstrate that it can work. If you haven’t done that work, just forget about it.

I also really hate arrogance and it’s weird because some entrepreneurs can become the best because of that arrogance. However, when you are launching a startup, you have to be humble and leave the ego at the door because there is no way that you know everything about what you are doing better than everyone else. You need to get advice, to be open to other people’s ideas and listen to them and then make up your own mind.