#465 Building Startups That Outlive You: Steve Endacott on AI, Legacy, and Bold Innovation

Episode 465

[00:00:00] 

Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to a new president of the CTO Show with Mead today are very pleased joining me from the uk, Steve Endacott. Steve, the way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves. So tell us a little bit about you, [00:01:00] your background, your journey, and what you're currently up to.

So the floor is yours. 

Steve: I'll give you the innovative view to keep you, uh, onboard, hopefully. So, uh, O levels a levels degree. I was an accountant, hated being an accountant. Uh, I just did it 'cause I wanted to make money and it was a route into senior management. And I got corrupted into travel in the early eighties and I became a director at 25 'cause I could cheat and book.

The accounting a bit more, most people. Uh, and then I worked my way through, um, international Leisure Group, and then that collapsed after I took a year out and went back. And then I went to a company called Air Tours that ended up being the world's largest tour operator, uh, carrying 6 million passengers.

And I ended up as, um, chief Operating Officer for the uk. And then in 2003 I went completely rogue and started my own businesses. Which, fortunately I started four businesses, um, two were highly, highly successful. Made me lots of money. Uh, one went bust, [00:02:00] was extremely painful, but taught me a lot of lessons.

So I'm semi wealthy, semi-retired, and it's now about giving back and invested in more businesses. And now in younger people start up, particularly in the AI space. I love disruption. There's nothing more disruptive to our industry, to our sector, to our economy, to our world than ai. And you haven't seen anything yet meme.

Mehmet: I like to start from where you ended, Steve. Uh, why you say this? Why do you think we have. Not seen anything yet. What, and like someone like with your experience team, I'm sure like you have a lot of insights and because you work with a lot of other entrepreneurs also as well. So tell us what are you seeing, uh, in this space?

Steve: Okay. I compare AI to like manufacturing a car. So at the moment, all the focus is [00:03:00] on the engines. So you have Google producing engine, you have open AI with chat GBT. So everybody's focus on the engine, which is the driving force behind the AI tools, which is the large language models. But all of those need to be put into cars.

Somebody's gotta say, what's the shape of car? What's the color of the car? What's the sat nav, how many wheel has it got, how many doors has it got? And that's the business case implementation of ai. And we're right at the beginning of seeing AI being implemented. Across our daily lives in businesses. So I think the technology, yep, it's been around two, three years.

It is rapidly expanding, but the implementations and the uses of that AI technology, we've not even scratched the surface. 

Mehmet: That's very, very interesting. You know? Uh, and, uh. There's a lot of things happening there. So I know one area you focus on is, um, you know, the voice, right? And [00:04:00] what's happening, especially in the last two years.

I come from a technology background myself. Um, you know, back in the days we saw like early, uh, I would say trials for text to speech, and then speech to text. But now this is completely going. So another direction. And I know Steve, like you have even some like, I would not call it, you know, crazy, but it's bold ideas around this.

Steve: Yeah. Well you can call it crazy if you like. Uh, let's start at the beginning. So we created a AI incubator called Newell River, and the idea was to match AI talent, young AI talent coming out of university. With gray hair that could actually create businesses because most of these youngsters are great technicians, but they can't run a business, so therefore we bring them into our incubator.

We pay 'em 30,000 pound a year, [00:05:00] and we give 'em one day a week for the first six months to work on their idea. After six months, we expect that idea to be proved. It goes to half their time, and after a year, we expect to be spitting them out as a separate business. We help 'em raise the funds, we help 'em find the management.

We put the MDs around them, the sales directors around them. We find the consultants and the non-execs to do sweat equity for them and to shape their idea and deliver it intersects as a business and not just an idea. And I think it's really crucial. There's gonna be lots of ideas out there using ai. But to be a successful business is more than just the AI you've got, have the sales team, you've got now how to negotiate, you've got now how to fund yourself.

You've got now how to do the cash flows. You've got how to do the business plans, and that's not easy. So our incubator has, the aim has been out 10 ideas a year and we spun out three so far. And the first one, as you say, is New voice. And we've got a young CTO and um, CEO of that piece. It's called Jeremy [00:06:00] Smith.

And he had a simple vision. Chat. GBT is conversational. It remembers what you said in previous times when you've typed in, so why not make it conversational? Why not literally just talk? It's translated. It goes into the engine or to your own database of ideas. It comes back, it responds in 0.8 seconds, which is actually faster than the human.

We've had to slow it down and you can use whatever accent you like, whatever language you like. So you can basically talk to the knowledge of the internet. Now, that is powerful in its own right, however, we've already found that too many people are scared to invest in it because they think it's too generic.

Well, hang on, the big guys are doing that. They're gonna come, they're gonna win the world. There's no room for the small guys. Absolute, total rubbish. So we've been working on very specific user cases for the travel industry. So we've got a product called Wifely two. So, for example, most travel businesses look to [00:07:00] convert previous bookers, and they have about 20% success mostly.

So 80% say your emails are boring. Yeah, it is one offer to many. It doesn't stimulate to come back. I don't care, and they don't respond. So we're emailing those customers with a very simple tool that says, talk to the AI about where you want to go this year. You just choose a destination and it has a knowledge about that destination to help you refine your dream stage choice.

But everything's recorded. So that dream stage qualifies what departure airport they want to go for, which destination they'll go to, how many people are traveling, what duration, what dates, and that's pumped back into the travel company CRM. So now start marketing on future holiday demands, not just a vague ideas.

Customer may do this because they've done it in the past. That's quite radical, but incredibly simple. And it could only work if it's a conversation 'cause a customer doesn't wanna fill out a lengthy form. Have a chat with an ai and that's a completely different perspective. [00:08:00] Very similarly, we're doing reviews and we're saying don't fill out a written review.

Nobody wants to do that yet. When you come back, we pump information about your trip, be it a complex tour where you've done something every day, like climbing now to, uh, can majaro or just a beach holiday, and the AI will know your name, will know who you traveled with. It will know the dates you traveled.

And can have a conversation about what the weather was like in that period. What was your hotel like? What was the restaurant like? What were the bars like? And it can encourage you to upload photos. Now that's a much greater and in depth user experience and better user donated content. And then you use AI again to create different forms.

It might just be a review. It might be content you want on your website. It might be a magazine article, so you can do so many more things with ai. It just revolutionizes reviews. For example, two different Pacific examples in travel. Small business know what travel's like, has experts on its panel and it says [00:09:00] this is a car that we are building using the large language models.

And by the way, we just plug them in and out. We are not committing to any large language model because they're changing so fast. We don't know who will win. We will just use the best at that moment. 

Mehmet: That's really cool. And I know there is also another startup, um, which is also interesting, which is life's echo.

Uh, which is, it's a blending of AI, legacy and human storytelling. Um, so. Tell me more about this one because I think it has something also interesting in it. 

Steve: Yeah, so it originally came because Smarty uk, uh, basically I am not happy with UK politics and my tech guys said to me, well do something about it.

And I went, yeah, but you know, I live in Rochdale now and I didn't really wanna stand in Brighton 'cause that's where I, I grew up. That's where my friends are. That's what I know everything about. And that's [00:10:00] 400 miles away and went. Well, why don't you create an AI character ai, Steve, we created, and why don't you create a database of all your ideas and all your policies?

So we did, and we stood as the first MP for Parliament, member Parliament using ai. And we said to our voters, look, you could talk to me 24 7 3 6 5, and if I've got a policy, the AI will tell you about that policy. I have a conversation about it. But more interestingly, if I haven't got a policy. It's allowed to go after the internet.

We search your issue, come back, engage you in a conversation, get what you want. So every night I got a list of things people wanted policies on in the Dryton area. It was Uber drivers, uh, sorry, taxi drivers wanting a policy to be more strict on which Uber drivers could come in. It was issues with the bins, it was issues with homelessness.

It was issues with L-G-B-T-Q rights. Basically that allowed me as a politician to understand what the voters wanted to create. Policies [00:11:00] scoped on that and it went to a Pacific database or to the internet, and then we got real people, commuters going up to London to vote at one in 10, whether they like the policies.

We had a common man, common lady check to make sure we only come up good policies. So that was an attempt to use AI to revolutionize politics. We lost, but have a guess. No independent's ever been elected in the uk ever. And there's been a national party leader beforehand, or has been in that area for 20 years.

So we counted that as a success. It was radical, but that led on to Lico 

Mehmet: right now. Just out of curiosity, Steve, and we see this I think everywhere, not only in the uk. So why, when it comes to edge technologies like ai, we see politicians like acting. I mean, sometime, you know, we see them especially, we [00:12:00] saw this couple of times in in Con in the Congress in the us, so.

You start to think for a moment, really like this guy is asking these kinds of questions. Is it like, because politicians, you know, by nature they like to push back, you know, the cutting edge technologies because part of what they do is to put, uh, you know, legislations and, you know, they have to, to control and, you know, make all these policies, like just out of, if you have any insight because you, 

Steve: oh, you did wanna ask this question.

So in the US you have a. So the last, last five presidents were millionaires before become president. So in the US you cannot play in politics unless you've got loads of money yet and you've already made it. So that's a weird situation and that gives you a weird distortion. In the UK we've got educational bias.

Basically the last five prime ministers have all been to Oxford or Cambridge. It's a posh boys trick. And they [00:13:00] go, they go off, get, have degrees in politics, never get a proper job and come and run our country. And they run it quite incompetently because they don't want business people involved. 'cause business people run things like a business and they go, no, it's a democracy, it's not a business.

Well, it'll be a lot more efficient if it was a business. So I don't actually like Donald Trump, but I do like what he's doing with Dodge. I do like how he's charged to actually make. The government process more efficient and the running of our state more efficient. Because if you look at it, AI is a perfect tool to get involved in running.

A lot of the administration functions are done by civil servants, but are they doing it in the uk? No, they're not. So at least in America, you've got people trying to do it. They succeed. I hope so. And I do believe that America will lead in using AI in government and that will change the rest of the world.

So people will go, that's quite a good idea. Why aren't we doing that 

Mehmet: Interesting, uh, [00:14:00] point of view again? Uh, Steve now coming back to, to entrepreneurship and you know, the way you, you, you've done it yourself and you're helping like fellow founders. Now I'm curious to know. First from a UK perspective, uh, the podcast, I'm lucky enough, like it's kind of a global one and I like to shed light, you know, on different geographies.

Um, so if you would look at the landscape today of, you know, founders there, um. What are like some of the common challenges you're seeing, uh, them facing to be able to scale businesses really quick and, you know, get the success? And again, it could be across the board. Of course now AI is, is taking the world by storm and you know, founders are trying to leverage or you'd find like use cases where they can put also ai.

And I don't want to make it too much loaded. I will [00:15:00] stop here and then I will follow up later based on the answers from you. 

Steve: Um, the UK's a little bit interested actually. 'cause for initial startups it's very good because we have a, uh, incentive scheme called EIS, special Incentive Scheme for investment, and it's been increased at 250,000 pounds.

So if you have nothing in your bank account, I think the rule is you have to have a hundred under a. You've been trading less than three years, you can apply to get approval from the government for this SEIS scheme, and basically any investor coming in invested in your business, if he invested 50,000 pound, he will get half that back of his next tax bill.

So he is actually only investing 25,000 pounds. 50,000 cash, 25,000 back next year, you only risking 25,000 pounds, but actually you also get 40% back of the 25,000 pound if it fails. [00:16:00] So you invest 50,000 pounds, you're only really risking 12 and a half K. So that means you want something to be spectacularly successful or to go bust, which is a little bit odd.

Basically that is the startup realm we have where people wanna have the high scalability, the high chances of success, but the high risk of failure as well. And there's a big incentive to get business off the ground. So you raise your first 250, and then there's an EIS scheme where you can raise an up to another million where, well, it's not quite as restrictive as that, but normally you can't raise more than that for angel investors.

And you get 30% of your money back. So the initial fundraising to start a business is actually good. In the UK I would say very, very good. But then you have the death zone because all the venture capital business in the UK say, oh no, we love new startups. What a line bunch of beep because they actually say, we're not investing in, unless you've got two, 300 grand of [00:17:00] turnover and you've got track record of customers and you are growing rapidly.

'cause we don't like risk. Well that's not venture capital, that's this expansion capital. So in the UK you have a good startup, massive gap, and then once you get to a certain size, three or 4 million turnover, then you have good access to expansion capital. So it's a massive death zone that most businesses don't get for it.

So with New Voice, for example, we've raised, um, 600,000 of angel money and we're now raising a valuation of 4 million from venture capitalists at, and they're looking to put a million pound in, but they won't put it in until we've got contracted a hundred grand of businesses under our book. Not unreasonable, but it takes a while.

Uh, and again, a lot of the feedback we got on New Voice is people are actually scared of AI because they're scared of the big guys and they assume the big guys will do everything and there's no room for the small guys. And as I said, that's absolute bullshit. There's lots of room [00:18:00] for the small guys. You pick your niches, you have your black books, you find people in different sectors, they open the doors, you walk through those doors and you build specific user cases for those businesses and those sectors.

Then you've got success. 

Mehmet: So, Steve, this question, which I was trying to ask, but you, you touched on some of the aspects. Uh, we see this debate a lot, again, comparison between the us, uk, Europe, uh, about fundraising, right? And. You know that it's, it's a real challenge. And to be very frank with you, I've seen it also myself, so I've met, at least in the past two years with a lot of founders in the UK who came to Dubai because exactly the same reason.

You know, you just mentioned now. Some, some people they say, yeah, like let them bootstrap, grow the business, and then they go to the VCs and the [00:19:00] VCs will give them the money. But is this a sustainable way for really, let's call it challenging the status quo, which is Silicon Valley and you know, the other big tech hubs and because everyone now, uh.

Back to the politics. I don't talk much politics on the show, but it's like, it's, it's on, on the every, uh, conversation nowadays of what's happening, you know, with the global trade and all this, um, every politician, every economist, everyone's saying, yeah, the global, uh, or globalization as we knew it is done.

So now we need to. Rethink how we're gonna move forward, saying that regarding the venture capital, what need to be done to be fixed. And I'm talking maybe, I'm sure like you have also some insights about not only the uk, maybe probably the larger European landscape as well. [00:20:00] So what needs to be done? I, I started to see some initiatives, but is it enough?

No. Let's, let's see from, no. So for 

Steve: example, uh, for our second stage financing, we're going to Dubai. Exactly the reason you say basically you've got people willing to back and take risks on, on quite frankly, punts. In the AI world, you've probably gotta take five or six punts to make sure you get two or three successes because nobody can predict accurately yet which ones will be a hundred percent successes and which ones won't scale, and which ones will the big guys come in and kill.

Because there is an issue there. So if you gave me a choice, I'll base myself in Silicon Valley, but my wife won't let me, so that's not gonna happen. Yeah, if you gave me a secondary choice, I'll probably base myself in the UK with a follow up backup scheme in Dubai for raising that second stage funding.

And that I think is a good combination of look at the different markets and look at where you can go. But interestingly enough, AI is the first product that's a hundred percent international. So for [00:21:00] example, our product we could easily sell in America as well as New Zealand, Australia, Dubai, uk. And that changes the dynamics.

Again, I'll give you an example. We didn't quite finish talking about life echo. So life echo took upon that platform we built for ai, Steve and said, right, okay, if it's got all my political views. And my wife came up with this idea, 'cause out in the pub, she said, you egotistical, what's it? You've documented all your political views, why don't you document your whole life?

And I went, oh, that's interesting. So Life's Echo uses an AI character to interview you over 5 45 minute segments, your early life, your education, your family, your sports life, whatever section you want as as options for. But we aim to get it done in five lots of 45 minutes and that creates an autobiography, written autobiography.

So you don't have to be posture to have an autobiography. Now you can document your life and have a written autobiography. You can have pictures added, you can have videos added. [00:22:00] But most important, at the end of the process, it generates an AI character with cloning your voice that could talk to future generations about what you did in life and why you did it.

Because one of the sad things about our lives is we are wiped from the face of the earth. After three generations, you may know about what your parents did. You may know a little bit about what your grandparents did. The only thing you'll know about your great-great, uh, parents or your great-grandparents even is their name and where they were born.

'cause that's what's on the registries of legacies, et cetera. That's rubbish. Yeah. You have one life. Go and enjoy that life. But towards the end of that life, document it, leave it for future generations so they can go to me. You were the first A INP, what you were doing, what you mad and I can explain all my logic and what I wanted to do and why I did it.

Yep. So it's a really ultimate legacy tool and I don't think anybody's got any controversy about that. [00:23:00] What is controversial is in the uk, 32% of funerals now are what they call direct promotions, where the body's taken from the hospital cremated and you end up the ashes. Nothing else. No closure event.

And that really doesn't help the grieving process. So we've got an ethics committee where we've got a published offer of the grieving process. We've got palliative care doctors, we've got funeral home directors, we've got old people, homes, directors. And we said to 'em, what's wrong here? What could we help with?

And they said The biggest thing is lack of closure events. So can you create an AI that not only can talk to future, future generations, but could also have the last word at their funeral? Why can't you speak at your own funeral? Why can't you sit in the corner and have a chat with people about your life?

And then you haven't got the big expense. You just go and hire a hall, you go down the pub and you have a very informal, uh, funeral that you control. That's quite [00:24:00] radical and some Catholics don't like it. And we've had a bit of backlash, but you know, you can't be liked by everybody. 

Mehmet: So it's like, uh, and I've seen, you know, when I was preparing for this episode, so it's, it's like creating a ghost, right?

Uh, for our Why is it ghost? 

Steve: It's an echo. 

Mehmet: Just, you know, joke aside, Steve, and 

Steve: I'm not joking. We've built this, we are that in it. 

Mehmet: Yeah, no, 

Steve: I'm joking involved in this. 

Mehmet: I mean, my joke, sorry. Uh, of course it's not a ghost because I believe, you know. I, I see this as an evolution of what us as humans we've done in the past, I don't know, maybe a hundred so years, because the first thing we were, we managed to do is to record our voices.

Yeah. It was like crappy on these old, uh, photographs. And we managed to take photos. Right. And then we [00:25:00] managed to. Full fledged record ourself. And I say this because I believe the next generation is so lucky, at least you know my generation. Because somehow we saw history recorded on, uh, cinema, you know, uh, kind of productions.

Um, because history before, honestly, and this is a little bit philosophical, I tell people we don't know because. Someone heard from someone and then they decide to write it probably maybe 200 or 300 years ago, right? Yeah. So we, we don't know what, what the truth was, but now the internet is a live archive for humans and I'm happy to see, you know, this use case because to your point, like I was just thinking this moment.

Yeah, like when was the last time I remembered what my grand grandparents, you know, even names, right? So now would, would you be [00:26:00] fascinated 

Steve: to talk to your great grandparents about their lives? What better history could you have in your own family? Yeah. To understand where you came from. Understand. Oh, it my grandad's a bit like me.

He is a bit of a hy what's it? Oh, he is got a sense of humor. Yeah. All of this you can create in the echo. It documents you not, it's an echo. You cannot be downloaded yet. That may come, but at the moment it's just, we called an echo about you. What you did, what your life. It's basically creating a autobiography for the common man, so no longer you have to be written famous to have an autobiography.

Now you can have an autobiography that is easily called from the comfort of your own couch anytime you like. Yeah. And then the added twist is you can even cause your voice and it can talk about yourself. I find it fascinating. I love it. 

Mehmet: Uh, what kind of traction you solve Steve? Like when you talk to people, 

Steve: um, two things.

Either hate it or love it. [00:27:00] There's no in-between. Yeah. You either get this and you go, oh, I really like that, and most tech tech really get it. Um, we've had death threats as you do. I've been told that, that this is, you know, against God's will and he's come to strike me down and I'll be eternally damned to how for what I'm doing here.

But at least that's better than some bloke saying, I'm gonna, I'm gonna shut up a I Steve by putting a, a, a ax through his head and through its, uh, body, et cetera, and chop it up. And I thought that was a joke until he then pointed out he had my address, he had my address. And you go, holy shit. So politics is dangerous.

Hopefully AI Steve can move forward and life echo won't be quite controversial. We have gone to the Catholic church as a whole and they have no issues whatsoever. They go, why? Why wouldn't you be able to leave an autobiography? What's wrong with it? Because again, you've got to look at it. You are on this life with a [00:28:00] certain period of every religion, believes you are on this world for a while, and then you go somewhere else.

Every religion. There's no reason you shouldn't document for future generations what you did while you were here. Nothing wrong with that, that that's not against God, that's not against religion, that's just people were doing it a long 

Mehmet: time. Like, uh, autobiographies are with us for a long time, right?

Steve: Correct. So I find it strange that, but seriously, a lot of people just like, oh, oh no. Oh no. I don't like that. And that's fine. We've never intended to have the a hundred percent of the marketplace. We can be very profitable with one or 2% of the marketplace. 'cause the other thing is it's so scalable. We support 25 different languages.

Mm-hmm. So we're focused on launching in the UK for obvious reasons. We're just launching now. Yeah. And we are using AI to answer the phone. We're using AI to create our adverts. Yeah. It's an AI business where we're trying to keep the staffing levels under 10 humans. Because if all the interviews being done by AI and the accounting can be [00:29:00] done by AI, and the inbound phone calls can be handled by ai, why do we need our staff?

That also makes it 24 7 3 6 5 operation that could operate in multiple languages. And I find that fascinating. The boundaries of our, we talk about globalizations ending rubbish. It's Donald Trump having a sulk. I. He'd do a few deals, he'd throw his toys out the pram, a few countries, and it'll all settle down within the next six months because he's a businessman as well as a politician.

And he's, he's flexing his muscles and saying, look at big I am. And he's seeing all the people run to him. So I think he's probably right for what he's doing for America. Not great for the global stage, not great for the global economy, but if you are American first, and that's what you buggers voted for, right, this is what you get.

Mehmet: Right back to just, um, regarding the, you know, the echo is maybe people are finding it creepy, I [00:30:00] believe, you know, the people usually like refuse to or let's say no, no, no, no. Like that, that's, that's never, ever, uh, maybe because they find it creepy because by the way. Like even I've seen people at the beginning when they started to see chat, GPT, it didn't talk yet.

Oh, that's creepy. Like, you know, like people, they get scared sometimes from, you know, new things because you're disrupting. 

Steve: Absolutely correct. And that's why we are, we're allowing people to upload videos, et cetera. We could do holograms. We're not going to, 'cause we know that will creep a lot of people out.

So we're just saying no, no, no, no. Just upload your pictures and Yep. At your funeral we can create a big red book with all your pictures in it and all your videos linked to it and all your autobiography there. So you've got a big document to hand over for future donations. We can allow you to talk to people, but we haven't got anywhere near holograms 'cause we just think that will creep people out at the moment.

But it will come right? It'll be a next stage, [00:31:00] probably a couple of years down the line. We can do it technology wise now. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. Yeah. And, uh, you know, we've seen by the way, like they did it here in Dubai, so multiple times they used the holograms to bring like, people who are like, uh, who, you know, passed away long time, like known figures, of course, uh, singers, uh, you know, and other, other, other public figures as well.

So, so it's, and this is why I find it funny, like, as you said, the technology is already here. Just, you know, like your, your, um. Taking it into another use case. And in another perspective, I would say now back to back to funding and back to startups, and back to the, you know, ambition of many founders who want to have, you know, impact both from technology perspective and of course from financial perspective, creating these unicorns.

So now you talked about the VCs in the UK and the way they treat the founders and. They're not too much into [00:32:00] taking risks. Where do you see the role of, because you mentioned about angel investors, so angel investors, incubators, um, accelerators. Where do you see them playing role in helping these founders creating, you know, the next jury codes?

First within the uk and maybe if you have like, you know, some, some insights on other regions also as well. 

Steve: Well, let's go through the process first of all. So the most important thing for any founder is putting a team together. So I went through corporate life and I got trained in corporate life that you build a team based on your weaknesses.

So if you are gonna be the leader of the team, you've gotta understand what you are good at and what you're bad at. So, for example, I'm great at being enthusiastic. I'm great at the driving forms. I'm great at charging ahead, I'm rubbish at caution. So I've always put next to me, a finance director is highly [00:33:00] cautious or an operations director that's highly cautious.

Yeah. Because you've got balance out your strengths with somebody going, are you sure Steve? Are you doing this right? Are you doing that right? And the other thing that you'd learn from corporate life and probably just general investment. Is having a non-exec board of experienced people with black books that can open doors for you is invaluable, and that's what we are trying to do.

Our incubator is match the gray hair is just as important as as the young ideas because if you don't balance the two out, you don't get a business. The young people probably don't know the tax breaks. They don't know how to know how to do the business plans. They don't know how to do the legals, and that's what we believe we help 'em with, and putting those two things together.

But it's also very rewarding for our gray hair panel. They don't get paid a penny, but they get first rights to investment. They get first rights to [00:34:00] negotiate some sweat equity for helping out. So they get to see the best AI talent, some of the best ideas, front row seats in the AI world. Yeah. And they can also bring ideas.

So for example, life Echo I've brought as an idea to the incubator and say, just gimme some resource for it. Yeah. So I've got a larger share. 'cause I came up the idea. I wouldn't be able to deliver it without the AI resourcing in that team. 'cause remember, one day a week they're working on their own project, but four days a week we can rent 'em out to other spin outs we've already done, or we can rent 'em out to the general marketplace.

So it creates a nice balance and what we find is low. Everybody thinks they've got their own idea. At the moment, the hit rate is about half. Half the time the other AI guys go off and go, oh, I like that idea of over there. I'll go and work on that one with him. And they don't get the bigger share, but they still get a good share of that business [00:35:00] and they work as a team.

So it is an interesting environment and I think it's a really important environment to get business up and running. And then you've gotta find the bigger investments. And the bigger investments are normally a angel syndicates you can go to to actually raise big chunks of money. Or to AI VCs, sorry, not ai.

SEIS and EIS VCs is aggregated together a clump of investors to make bigger investments, and that's how we see it at the moment. So we see it as pure angel individuals who go to, then you go to VCs based on SEIS or EIS, and then you get to the expansion capital. That's how you bridge the gap. It's still a difficult, that gap of when you're getting between a valuation of say, two, three, 4 million and turnover of a million grid is a big gap.

That's where the problem is. So that's where America's a lot better than most businesses. They will pump in [00:36:00] billions into an idea. In the UK you don't even get a million before you've had to PR to prove every stat and every fact and every figure. And that's why we're a cautious company and that's why America will always do better.

Mehmet: Is this changing any soon, do you think, Steve? 

Steve: No. Our whole British culture is founded and ground into realistic business, financial services, et cetera. And gambling on AI and speculative ventures is, is not in the British culture. So if you want that sort of money, go to Dubai, go to America, get it started in the uk, but then expand it with overseas investment.

Mehmet: So let's a destiny, you say, right? Like some people, they say like, uh, you know, geography is a destiny and you know, in order to change this, you need to change the geography. So. 

Steve: Uh P. It is easier now with AI because again, [00:37:00] any investor can now see how it can be ported to their market life. Echo. I think we will be bigger within six months in America, and we will be in the UK just by the nature of the people.

It's a bigger market before you've even get outta bed. And then the very nature of the people, they're more welcoming and willing to look at this idea and look at the concept. The British people are quite cautious. They're quite ground down into this is how things work. You have been to our houses parliament and our bucketing palace and all the bullshit we've got with royalty, et cetera.

I like the royalty. I like history. But Jesus Christ, really in the modern day and age, you have a king and a queen still.

Mehmet: I think it, you know, like I can relate a lot because now, uh. Some facts so people, they don't get surprised. Yes. Here, at least in Dubai and now [00:38:00] Saudi Arabia is on the rise in this also as well. Oh, we like Saudi 

Steve: Arabia. 

Mehmet: Yeah. So people are willing to invest yet and there's a big yet. So just, uh, so the culture, you mentioned culture and I always tell people look like there are two factors.

So people think too much about the vc. Right. The vc, they don't want to take risk, you know, they're in their comfort zone. Now, here is the other fact that I wish people to, to go and check as well, early adopters. So there's the famous, you know, cas, right? Yeah. And then, and then you have, you know, the, uh, this graph of early adopters and then the late comers and the laggers who comes at the end.

So I think. One of the main factors that also allowed these VCs in the US to be like more risk taking is because [00:39:00] they have this culture of accepting new technologies and trying these new technologies. Because I think maybe Europe, middle East, same thing. Oh, let someone else try it once. They are fine. I would, I would, I would check 

Steve: it.

I fundamentally disagree with you. 

Mehmet: Yeah, I, I want to hear you. Lemme tell you 

Steve: why I disagree. For me, the American culture is, failure is okay. You get up again and you try again. In the uk, if you ever go bust or have a business at fouls, you are just, yeah, it's like being shut out. The community 

Mehmet: loser 

Steve: failure is not set to win the uk, whereas in the us, the US look, I tried, it failed.

I'm trying something else. Perfect, acceptable. Perfectly normal. We just don't have that culture. So shy fast, learn fast and foul is an acceptable policy in the US It is not an acceptable policy in the uk and that is the biggest issue, particularly in ai because [00:40:00] God, we've gotta try lots of different things.

I'm doing 10 spin outs because I expect three, four, maybe successful because who knows which ones at this moment, right at the beginning. We are at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Yeah. Okay. You may able to predict the car, you may able to predict the, the, you know, the modern looms would be better than people weaving.

Yeah. But it's a lot awful lot of things that we can't even imagine that AI's gonna do in our future that, because it's not here yet, it's just being invented at this very second. So you've just got to try and learn fast. So, and interesting. One of the things that we have as selection criteria for all the ideas, and I drum into my guys, is I want it to be B2B to C.

Because one thing will happen in ai, it will be copied if other people have access to the same engine, they're gonna build a car. It might not be quite as good a car as your [00:41:00] car, but they're gonna build a car. So you've gotta get out there super fast and get customers super fast and tie it all up by being first mover advantage, which is huge still.

Yeah. 'cause you've got all the customers under contract. You've already delivered a product to 'em, et cetera, and you should do that via B2B because they've already got the customers. Don't spend trying, trying to build a brand. Don't spend time trying to build lots and lots of different commercial contracts.

Go and find four contracts with four large players or already have the distribution and get your product out there Quick. Fundamental rule, ai, it will be copied. 

Mehmet: Good advice. So if we want to wrap up and you know. To give maybe your final, uh, advice to, to, to founders in the uk, let's say, and of also global ones on two things.

Steve, uh, you just mentioned a couple of them, but, uh, [00:42:00] other than ai, is there, like, for example, any other, uh, emerging technologies that you advise, um, founders to keep eye on to build the next big unicorns? I, I know what I'm 

Steve: doing. I've got an electric car business. I, but guess why? Massive disruption.

Everybody's gotta move to electric cars in the next 20 years. Yeah. Get involved where there's disruption. Yep. Look for real businesses that if you put the AI icing on, it could be quite sexy. So AI doesn't have to be the fundamental of the business. It can be the icing on the cake. So if you've got a profitable business, but you wanna increase the PE value, I how many years of earning something will pay.

From say six, which is a normal PE to 1215, put the AI icing on it and that AI icing normally should be, I can now take my product and sell in 25 different more countries. Yeah, because if you've got AI that can speak [00:43:00] 25 different languages, why are you working in an English market where all the big companies speak English?

Go to the Uzbekistan, go to the Russias, go to the Chinas, go to the smaller countries that aren't as competitive and put your products out there. With AI, you can be 24 7 different languages, have your customer support. In the old days, it was really hard to go into a new market 'cause how do you get customer service speaking the language?

Yeah, that's been solved. So think more laterally about what the product you're gonna create and how you can scale it globally. Forget Donald Trump. He's a little irritant that will be around for four years and he'll be gone and the world will go back to normal quite quickly. 'cause global trade is a normality and AI will make it even more normal.

Yeah, so focus on what's your idea, what's your product, [00:44:00] how you've said it in multiple marketplaces. Balance your team. Yeah. And accept failure. It's like going up a ladder. You'll go up three steps and you have to go sideways. You may have to go backwards a couple of steps, as long as you've got the ambition and the drive to get to the top of the hill or the top of the ladder.

Yeah, it doesn't happen. No business plan survives the first battle. It's all bullshit. The business plan will say, you'll lose money in year one. You'll break even year two, you'll start making in year three. How many have we rid of those? How many have we rid of those? It's a load of rubbish. Yeah. Raise as much cash as you can when somebody offers to you.

Take that idea and drive it as hard as you can. 

Mehmet: Great advice. I like, you know, your, uh, optimism. Steve. This is what we need. This is really what we need. I tell people, ignore the noise guys. Again, not talking too much politics, but I said like, if you look to the history, it gets [00:45:00] repeated again and again and again.

And guess what? As you said, things goes to normal after a while. Like, uh, it might take some time, but things goes to normal. Um, Steve, for the UK founders who might have, you know, some ideas and want to reach out, how they, they can get in touch. 

Steve: Really easy. Go into LinkedIn, I'm there. Go onto the internet.

Just type my name in. You'll find me by the AI Steve site. We had 110 million TV views me. Wow. Yeah. Unbelievable TV coverage for a brand new business that'd been trading for six months because we took a different angle. We went, okay, how can we get noticed? Right. We're gonna be the first A IMP. Life Echo will host the first AI funeral.

I guarantee you. I'll get it on tv. Absolutely. So you just got to think about how you get out there, how you find connections. When you [00:46:00] come to me though, please understand, I'm gonna say to you, what's your valuation? And if you say, oh, it's 5 million 'cause I think it's 5 million, I'm gonna chuck you out the door.

So the first thing I say to anybody is right, okay, imagine that we're gonna have a PU 10. So in a couple of years time, you'll be worth 10 times your earnings. So what are you earning in two years time? Oh, I'm earning 50,000 pound, right? So you are worth 500,000 pound, not 4 million. If you want me to invest, come to me with realistic valuation.

Or come to me and offer me sweat equity to balance out that valuation. So I put some in cash, I put some in sweat equity, and I help you get to where you want to go. That's probably the better route. 

Mehmet: Cool. So people who are listening, especially if you are from the uk. You know where to find Steve. I gotta make the life easy.

I gotta put some links for you so you can, uh, reach out to Steve. Steve, really, I enjoyed the conversation. I, as I said, [00:47:00] I always enjoy, you know, people like yourself who have the vision. You have also the optimism, which is, for me, it's like. Comes as a priority because we need more voices like you, I believe, especially in the noise that's happening.

And of course, you know, the experience that you shared and all the, you know, I would say courageous approach. You, you, you took to, to embrace, you know, the, the, the AI and the technology to get humans life better. To let us stay even after we die. I think this is kind of, I'm philosophical on this, but it makes sense a lot if people really thinks about it, uh, with e Echo voice.

So thank you very much for being here with me today and I really, you know, enjoyed it. So this is for the audience guys. If you just discovered this podcast, thank you for passing by. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, so, please, you know, share it [00:48:00] with your friends and colleagues and also subscribe to. The podcast over YouTube, all your podcasting apps also as well.

We are available there. And if you're one of the people who keeps coming again and again guys like really, really, really this year, I don't know, I can be more grateful. Um, because all the accolades that the podcast is getting, we are charting now, you know, on top 200. Charts in multiple countries, and it's not like one hour or two at the same time.

It's like in the same week. We are now four or five countries that today we are recording on the 16th of April, and I just discovered this morning that we are in Malta, we are in Malaysia, and we are in Spain and in Jordan. So thank you very much because you know, the more you share, the more people will get inspired by, you know.

Great. People like Steve, so keep coming. Thank you very much for tuning again, and [00:49:00] we'll meet again very soon. Thank you. Bye-bye 

Steve: again. Bye-bye.