Mel Morris, CBE, interview with David Plumb.

We were privileged to be joined by Mel Morris, CBE, at this year's Deep Tech Demo Day. Mel is a pioneering digital entrepreneur with decades of experience in scaling disruptive technologies at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.

Our Chief Innovation Officer, David Plumb, hosted a fireside chat with Mel. 

Learn more about our Deep Tech Innovation Centre here: https://warwickinnovationdistrict.com/deeptech/ 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

So today I was fortunate enough to interview someone who's a founder, chairman, and investor in businesses that have exited for over £7 billion over the last decade. Mel Morris CBE was on stage and we had the opportunity to talk about his career, the number of innovative things he's doing, and also his new corpora platform where he's looking to develop new scientific discoveries through AI. It was an incredible opportunity to hear from Mel. It's a pleasure to have you here, Mel. You may not know that Mel has chaired, founded, and invested in businesses that have exited at over seven billion dollars worth of businesses. So he is an incredible person to have here with us today. I've been a customer of at least one of your businesses. So throughout the afternoon, let's figure out see if we can figure out which one it is.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Did you buy a cybersecurity product then, David? No, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

But didn't you have a dating business? Yeah, well, let's not go there. You could be embarrassed by that. It's not that one. Just to be clear, but it's not that one. So look, I'm going to start out, if I may, by just asking the simplest of questions, just to explain your entrepreneurial journey and how you've got here, if that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Yeah, I don't want to bore you because it's spanning now close on six decades. Not six full decades, but six actual decades. Historically, anyway. My journey was really quite interesting because I wanted to work with computers from day one, right from leaving school. And that was really difficult because I was only 16 at the time. And I went to look for a position to start writing computer software. That's what I wanted to do. But there was a job in computer operations which I was going to look at, and I couldn't do that either because I wasn't 18. I couldn't work shifts. So I ended up decalating output from a printer and then delivering around the offices. And after about three minutes, probably three months, but somewhere between there, I got extremely bored with that. And one of the women who worked there said, Why are you so miserable? I said, I want to write computer software. My husband is the computer manager for EW Bliss, part of Gulf from Western. Why don't you go and see him? So I said, I'd love to. So I go and see him, a gentleman called Tony Bohr, and he said to me, Well, why don't you just take a week's holiday and come and see how you get on? We'll teach you and see how you see how you cope. Sure. Only one problem. I've got no holiday left. They said, Well, you know, can't you take a week? I said, I won't take a week off sick, I'm not sick. I tell what I'll do, I'll basically have my noses in, I'll come to you for the week. I know if I don't shape up, there's no job, but I sooner do it that way. I was offered the job three days in. I ended up with a guy who was a computer science graduate, which was very rare in those days, and he was a real superstar at writing software. But he wanted to be lazy and he wanted to teach me as fast as he could so he could put his feet up and I could do all the work. And I loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was such a great mentor. And I realized from that age I could write software. And what I found with software is it's a great challenge of coordination, correlation, planning, doing all those things, ideation. And I had a knack of writing software that was extremely efficient, very small and compact, and that set me on a journey that put me through all of my businesses. One of those companies ended up going from software into hardware, or at least a blend of the two. So I got into hardware design and we're producing products that basically was what the first ever intelligent caching disc array, which ended up selling for over $100 million worth of product very quickly. So I moved to the States to work for Wang Laboratories, had the pleasure of working directly for Dr. Ann Wang over there, who was a fantastic inventor. I mean, this guy was a refugee from Shanghai. He was the person who created the patent of hardcore memory, which put IBM into the computer space. With the money he got from that, he formed Wang Laboratories. And he later suffered from cancer of the esophagus, and he was off work for about 18 months. Came in one day, and I'm upstairs in this meeting, and we're debugging a problem with a computer system. And the people in the room, most hadn't really worked with him. But he's asking, What problem? What problem? So one guy says, Don't worry, doctor, we'll figure it out. He says, What problem? I said, excuse me. Please tell him what the situation is. So he walks around the room with all these circuit diagrams, never seen them before in his life. He walks around, he gets his cane out, he slaps it down, goes, problem here. Fetch board and soldering iron. And he figured what this minute problem was that people have been working on for months. And I just thought, wow. And that set me on the path. It said, no matter how good you become, you're never going to be as good as him. And that inspired me to do all sorts of things in pursuit of trying to at least be better than I was. I worked for Wang doing computer tuning, going down the biggest customers, helping them get those, and then built a business doing that. After that was a business called Minitech. Then that then became ProMetrics, doing PC software, and then that got bought out by Platinum. I became New Product Development Manager. That sold. I then went to doing New Date. After that, I got involved in four other companies, one in social media listening, one in Google Advertising and those sorts of markets. One in terms of intelligent sensors, one in terms of today, which is Corpora. And so many businesses en route to that. In UD, two of the people who worked for me there, one was a guy called Toby Rowland, one was a guy called Ricardo Zacconi. Became close friends to both. They wanted to buy this small star to be in Sweden doing computer games. Computer games. I didn't join them. They said, Would you be chairman? I said, Yeah, would you help us raise money? Yes. We scoured Europe looking for funders to back what became king. No takers. For several years, no-takers. Until one point, they're about out of cash and they said, What are we going to do? I said, I suppose I've better write a check. So I wrote a check to Keith Monday, and I stayed as the chairman of that company until it went public on the MISE in 2014. And Candy Crush was about probably 10 years into the creation of that business. So, but we knew it was going to be a success from day one. Lots of things to talk about at some other time. But that was the journey. And but the King story isn't about me. I provide the finance, I chaired it. It was about the team that worked in that business. Ricardo was a fantastic CEO. Sebastian Knutzen was the head of design for what went on. I just had the pleasure of working with a great team and helping backing them in any way I could.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Wow, that is quite a journey, isn't it? And um, you know, there's some really interesting things to pick out there. I mean, the giving up your job on the basis of hoping that you're gonna get it's gonna work after three. I mean, that is really bold and brave. Um, and I love the humility, you know, the bringing together the people, it is fantastic. Um Candy Crush might be the one where I'm a customer, I've got to be honest. Um I'm not sure I did. It's too late now, I'm afraid. Um, but actually, interestingly, it was known as an incredibly innovative business, and I think it'd be interesting if you if it's okay to perhaps bring out why it was so innovative.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Yeah, um, I mean the game was important, but it's not, in my opinion, the major part of that story. The game was important because it was a game that could be played by anyone pretty much of any age. So it was ubiquitous in its in its market opportunity. But but the secret, in my opinion, was again coming back to Ricardo and the development team, and and we'd figured out that we were doing computer games that were effectively tournament games. So you could sign up to play online pool against other people, and it would be a tournament. So lots of people would enter the game, sometimes two, three, four thousand people. They'd all pay a few euros to play to get to one prize that one person would win the tournament, and that one person would probably walk away with the check for three, four thousand euros. But maybe three thousand people played that game to get to that point. How many people wanted to talk about it after the tournament had finished, do you think? Do you think it was 3,000 or do you think it was one person who walked away with the check? And and we figured out that you can't scale. You can't scale that. You can't scale that. There's no viral link to that. Because 2,990 people are absolutely fed up because they're wasted their money. Particularly those that got closest to the finish line. So we the business model was fantastic, it moved from being a tournament. Think of it as a cup. Those of you into soccer or rugby will know on a cup, it's a quick death. You you go in a round, you lose, you don't go to the next round. So on a cup, there's one winner. But you think about the Premier League, and it's a league. You come number two, it's a pretty good place to be. Actually, if you come number 19, it's a pretty good place to be. Even better if you're 16. So it's one of those things where we wanted a league. And then we looked at companies like FIFA, who had the brilliant model, which was well, you want to play FIFA, which one are you on? I'm on 2026, so I've only got 2023 still, it's not as good. It doesn't have all the new players, the new teams in, and so on and so forth. So we wanted a league, but we wanted a perennial game. So, what do you call a perennial game? You call it a saga. So can you crush became a saga? It's never going to end. It's going to have more levels than you could ever count. And where does the league come from? It's pretty easy, it's going to be your friends. And because everyone can play it, people will begin taunting one another on what level they've got to. So the model was you can play the game, two, three, four lives. When you run out of lives, you can sit and wait for an eternity while your friends are getting ahead, or you can pay, or you can refer n number of your friends to get more lives. It was the ultimate expression of a viral game. The business model made the game, it made the company. And at peak, we almost got to ten million dollars per day in revenue. But only around three or four percent of people ever paid. David didn't. It's disgusting, really. I think my kids did. So so it was the game had to be something that anyone could play, from grandparents right the way down to grandkids. They could taunt each other. Where are you at, grandma? Oh, yeah, how many of this? Okay, I'm at 4,022. And and the frustration of having to wait got so bad that I know David actually got his credit card out on several occasions to get ahead. All right, and that's what happened, and the rest was history. Is that a good answer?

SPEAKER_01 11:48

It it's an amazing answer, isn't it? I mean, you think about some of the things that have happened in the last decade, you know, the Roblox and the Fortnites. Um, you started all of that in terms of them thinking about it as an ecosystem, thinking about it as member get member, community, uh, the freemium model, getting people hooked involved, sorry, and then and then figuring out how to, you know, it really was so innovative, um, which is incredible. And kind of over this last decade, we've seen a lot of changes with the tech, and you know, I can't do a full sentence without somebody mentioning AI to me at the moment. Um, it's very difficult to get through. I'm just interested in your perspective in terms of AI, the challenges, the opportunities, and where you see that going.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

Okay, just a quick show of hands. Has anyone ever heard of a paper called Attention is Everything? Okay, all right. So that paper, and you should answer that. If you if he can't, he should be fired. Okay. Otherwise, you're you're a complete facade, otherwise. So that paper was was authored by about four or five people in Google at the time. Uh, one of the guys, a guy called Leon Jones, uh, younger cunz, a couple of others as well. And that was the paper that basically figured out transformers. I don't mean the things, the robots that turn into whatever cars and things. It was the transformers that became the model of how we can actually predict the next word in sequence of a body of text, of a, of a, of a topic. And we saw that paper and we looked at it, thought, wow, this is really interesting. We went on a different path. But that paper was absolutely the starting point for today's incarnation of the tools we see today, ChatGPT. AI, its origins go way before that, but that was the trigger point. Then ChatGPT, October, November 2023, you know, they they launched. I think they're launched in some ways too soon, but it's typical of American companies. Let's grab the market. It may not be fully baked, it may not be quite ready, but we'll get it out there, we'll get a footprint. We put loads of money about promoting it, and by gum, did it take off? Absolutely took off. I mean, even Eclipse candy crushes growth in people terms, and and they were able then to get their valuation up, which let them borrow more money and away they would go. And Google did the typical thing that you see in these things when someone does something that causes, I think it was a half a trillion of value, shifted around the market in the space of a day or so. It shifted the market, it changed the whole dynamics of it. So Google is saying, hey, our stock price just tanked because these guys have launched this. But we've been working on that, we were the founders of this thing. What are we going to do? We'll rush the market with our offering, and it was an absolute disaster. It was an absolute disaster. And then Microsoft decided we've got to jump in. Then all the rest started to come to market. But what happened was, had they not have launched then, we wouldn't be where we are today. It was not yet ready, it wasn't done, it didn't matter. It showed enough of the potential of what was there. And there's a lesson from this for all of you, which is that in Britain, and I'm a big, big, big, guilty person for this, we obsess, we over-engineer, we over-develop, we spend too long trying to get it perfect. The Americans don't do that. They slap it out in the market, and they'll go through n iterations of it in a space of three months if they have to, but they'll corner that imagination of the market. And that's what happened. And so from then, the rest is almost history. But the acceleration of AI in the last three months eclipses what happened in every point prior to that three months from when ChatGBT was launched. And it's off the charts, and we cannot afford to ignore it. The implications of it for universities, for everyone in everyday life is huge. We've got to rein in the energy demands and all those things, but it's absolutely massive. I hope that helps.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Absolutely. I mean it's really interesting when I hear you speak because it's this intersection of kind of customers, business model, the behaviour, the tech. You're able to kind of see across all of those different things, and it's that intersection that I think build really good deep tech businesses. Um, I'm obviously interested in your latest deep tech venture. Um, as I understand it, you've been ingesting all of this scientific information into Copora, and you know, I think it would be amazing if you could just tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yeah, so you know, attention is everything. That that was the paper. That that that changed how I looked at things, it had a massive influence on what we were doing. We were on a parallel path looking to basically understand a massive corpus of information, hence the name corpora. Corpora being the plural of corpus. And when we set out, we wanted to try and use whatever technologies were around to get a head start. So we said, like, we want to do this at scale. So we said, what is it at scale? What do you mean by that? And an avi was, well, someone said, well, is that a few terabytes? No, no, no, much bigger than that. Well, is it is it maybe a is it a petabyte? No, much bigger than that. We want to be looking at hundreds of petabytes, maybe even an exabyte one day. And we want to be able to therefore take that size of corpus and and understand what's in it, correlate it, graph it. So we looked at graph databases, Neo4J, DGraft, you name it. We looked at vector databases, we looked at PineCone, all these things coming along. None of them would scale to anywhere close past probably a few terabytes, and it's very little further forward today. So you have the classic challenge of scaling out is the only way you can go. It didn't scale up enough, and if you wanted to scale out from a few terabytes to handle hundreds of petabytes, you're talking about thousands of servers. It's an absolute nightmare. And if it's a graph, you've got to segment your graph across all those things. It's a challenge. So we decided, as a bunch of lunatics, we are, that we'd actually set out to look at scale up. How can we ingest, understand, fully map, correlate, graph, vectorise, do whatever we need to do with a massive corpus, and we have to do it at speed, otherwise we'll spend 20 years trying to do it. So we obsessed over the efficiency of our technology. Our entire platform today runs on less than 8 kilowatts of power. Entire platform, mapping over 200 petabytes of unstructured data. And then the trick was then we wanted to compress that. Models compressed data, but they don't expand it again. They don't have the ability to give you the attribution of where that information came from. We wanted a lossless compression. So we've got a compression that gets data down to about one and a half to two percent of its size, but we can fully expand it, knowing exactly where it came from, taking it to the exact article, what it says, where it is. And then the next piece was condensing that view of that information into a form that's fully graphed, fully vectorized, all those things that you want to do, and be able to answer questions very precisely by being able to look at all of the totality of information around that topic, corralling it, condensing it, and getting it down to what we call the net unique view of information on that question or topic. And we do that in milliseconds. Once you've got to that, meanwhile, Chat GPT launches and it threw us into absolute turmoil. Oh my goodness, this is gonna change the world. This is gonna change how people consume information. People are gonna think it's all real and they're gonna get running away with, oh, I've got my nice medical diagnosis from Chat GPT, it looks fantastic. It says I've got nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, it's all really just a facade of what's there. So we said, but if we can take our information, the ability to corral the information of a small topic, a really precise set of questions, and we can pull the net unique view together and then decompose it again to use a small model to be able to represent that, we can make a tiny model look like it's five times the size of Opus 4.7. And that's what we built, and that's what it does. And we've demonstrated to a few people today that wouldn't stop asking questions. Am I right, Helen? Absolutely. They wouldn't stop get tested. Well, how about this then? Try that with it. And so corporate AI now can take you from a simple challenge statement to produce a really elaborate problem definition to doing a fully ideated solution, to validating that solution, to working out a development roadmap to tell you what the staffing should be, what equipment you need, what the use cases are, what the patent application to protect it all should be, and what the pitch deck is for grant funding or for your VCs. And it's basically a complete scientific frontier research platform in a box, one-stop shop. Now the entire process, I think less than 30 minutes is a good example of it, Andy. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Yeah. Wow. That's pretty amazing, right? So to bring it to life, are there any challenges or questions that you could share that you've asked it and you've got, you know, things that have excited you?

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Oh, loads, loads. So on route to this, funny story, en route to this, uh, there's a lovely guy called Daniel Hayes, and I've got to know him really well. And he's now met him on a few occasions as well. Uh, and he represented this little group called UCR, Universal Collaboration Research. And we weren't ready, the platform wasn't launched, even in its prior incarnation. And Daniel said, we'd really love to use your platform. We've heard what you're doing. We'd like to use it to try and see what we what the patents are in this space, what the intellectual property is. And I said, We're not ready. We're not ready. Go away, we're not ready. We're not ready. We'll let you know where we are. He kept going at it and go, and by the way, that's a great quality. For you, the entrepreneurs in the room, do not get put off. Learn from kids. I want an ice cream daddy. You can't have one. But I want an ice cream daddy. And they'll keep up in the game until you give them an ice cream. Okay? Now, when you're a grandparent, of course you give it them straight away. You don't even wait, do you? So that's our job. All right. So you're in this scenario where you know he kept pushing. And he said to us, we want some queries on a thing called, remember it well, multi-layer ceramic bus bars. Now we're only a stone throw away from JLR, and some of you in the room probably would actually have an understanding of what that probably means. Okay. I didn't know much about it at the time. We ran some queries, and I had 10 minutes, ran some queries through, sent them to him, and I go, what's that about? That's interesting. Two minutes later, wow, ten minutes later, can we have a call tonight? I think, here we go. I told you it wasn't ready, I've done you a favour, and you're just like those guys that worry. You just want more. You just want to keep going, that's it. So we had a conversation, we weren't, it didn't have a license, we had no business model. We said, okay, we'll let you use the platform. Where they've ended up is in a really interesting, and this is, and by the way, we were so impressed by them, we actually provided some grant funding, we provided some pre-seed funding, they've had less than a million pounds of the funding. They now have a working prototype of a device that can take the output of a solar panel, and I'm talking about a current state-of-the-art solar panel, and boost the usable output by 2.4 to 1. 2.4 to 1. It would make solar the cheapest form of energy generation by a country mile, better than fully amortized nuclear, you name it. But besides that, they wanted to do that with ceramics, that's where they started. They also created a new, more efficient method of creating plasma, sparks that are 7,000 degrees and above, with the amount of energy you get from an electric kettle. And with that, they can now produce ceramic materials that can do wonderful things. And our problem is they can do so much that our problem is actually, what are we getting all the people to allow us to implement all these things and do these things with it? But they've done that, and the platform's been a big part of that journey. Does that help?

SPEAKER_01 24:47

Well, yeah, I mean it's not quite cold fusion, but we're getting there, I guess, in terms of um the energy. Um does it do, I mean, we talked about the scientific side of things. You know, if we were asking it for peacekeeping in the Straits of Hormuz, I mean, can you go in that side? Can you go humanitaires? Can you go politics?

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Is this guy a plug for Neo? Is he? Obviously, Neo got to him and said, I didn't quite have enough time to quiz Mel this morning. Would you just bring that into the talk? You know, so Neo is one of the guys on the peacekeeping force in in Warwick University, and this morning we gave him a license key for what we call curve. Curve is the real-time viewer on this data set we have. Now, I talked about 200 petabytes, but it's actually looking at changing data sets in the world in real time. So every day there's like three or four million new articles for news coming in. There's new patents, new SEC filings, you know, all come in real time. Curve is the window into that, and Neo wanted to have a license key for that. So give him that. And he asked exactly that question. I said, look, this is a scientific thing for trying to work out problem definitions and coming up with solutions. But I tell you what, I'm going to take the risk and try it on these this question. And it'll probably blow up in my face, all right, and it probably won't work, but we'll try it. I love live demos, they're they're really horrendous, but we do them all, don't we? So, you know. So, but if you if you pull it off, it's worth a thousand PowerPoint presentations. There could be smoke and mirrors. So the challenge was how would we bring about a mediation in a conflict between Ukraine and Russia was the one he gave me. So we tried that, and it's come up with a pretty good stab at all the things you'd have to look at and then to come out with how you would actually implement that. So it's it's not where I would like it to be, David, on that, but it's a few hours at most to be able to just change the generics to do that, so we can then take on probably the politics if not all the humanities, but certainly the politics side of that. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

I'm um I'm I'm conscious that we haven't got a huge amount of time, so I'm gonna go from that global right down to a sort of very specific question. So we've got some amazing deep tech founders in the room. I wonder from your own experience what advice you might give to a deep tech founder.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

I think it's interesting because you know, been having been there before and having been there and and failed when I had no money, okay, which is a really difficult place to be because you you don't know where you're going to go with it. And having been there where I failed and had enough money to survive that and just regroup and go again, I would say the following that you have to have a pretty good indication, not of feasibility. Forget feasibility, go for viability. You want viability. It's no good coming out with a deep tech innovation that requires 10 times as much energy than another solution but has zero pollution because no one's going to use it. So you've got to think: is it actually viable? Viable doesn't just mean it works, viable means it's commercially valuable. It has a market opportunity that you can identify and go with. And then you've got to decide, even if I do this, how does that, how do I get to that go-to-market piece? And sometimes it's not something you can do yourself. Sometimes you've got to look, well, maybe it's a licensing deal with someone who understands that market. Now that might not satisfy your grandiose view of valuation, but it but it's going to give you a fast-track path towards that, and and you probably could get somewhere close as well. So think about what it is you're doing. Is it feasible? Is it viable? If it's viable, what's that bridge between where it is now to go to market and and be wary of that VC trap? You can easily spend, if you if you think you've got your idea pretty well sourced, you might even have a bit of a prototype. You could waste three, four, five, six months of your time writing documents to try and get a VC to respond to you. Even when they do, they'll always say, Yeah, we'll talk to you. Let's look at it, we're quite interested in this, and it goes nowhere. The emotional roller coaster that brings is huge. It's huge. And if you talk to four or five of them, and they all say no, you'll doubt yourself. If you're confident about what you want to do, have the passion, keep going at it. I want an ice cream, Daddy. All right, I want an ice cream. You can't have one. I want an ice cream, and you just keep going at it. But don't talk to too many until you figure it out how you do it. And don't necessarily treat what they say to you as the things you need to do. If it was as simple as that, they'd have backed you and just said, just do these few things. So they don't know the market. VCs are followers of fashion. Look at the AI investments now. The people on the fear of missing out that are coming in behind it, they'll probably have no chance of getting many times their money back on it. VCs follow fashion. If yours, what you've done, is what you've done is really unique, really novel, they won't understand that. Don't expect them to. So when they ask you, what do you think the total addressable market is of this? Walk out. If they don't know the market, you're going to aim at well enough to figure out that's huge. If you think the guys that did Uber, we've worked out how many taxi journeys there are in the world, and we think actually that the market for this thing is pretty big. In fact, in London, it's probably worth about 2,000 a year, maybe 2,000 a month. It's bloody huge. We're going to disrupt the entire taxi marketplace. I don't know how big it is. Have you got the ball to the back it? That's all I need to know. And what did they do? They did a smoke and mirror show by arranging for a car to be just around the corner to demonstrate it to, I think it was Bob Cagle from Benchmark at the time, to invest in it to say, look, here's how it works. Oh my god, they must be pretty big already. The car already arrived. But he was sold, invested literally within a week of that. He didn't have to go into a big PowerPoint presentation. Here's what the cars look like, here's the branding, here's how we're going to market it. Going to put an app out there, everyone's going to want to use it. And it's disrupted that market massively.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

That's great. I love it. Um, my last question, because I'm conscious of time, but I promised I'd leave a bit of time for any questions from the audience. So start thinking if anybody's got a question. My last question is really in this investment space. So obviously, bootstrapping versus investment, how do you know when you should go to investor? When do you need one? What's the trigger for you?

SPEAKER_00 31:52

I I don't think there's a binary view of that or even a litmus test you can apply. Uh and I'll take Corporal as a classic example. So we saw ChatGPT go to market. We saw perplexity, and I don't have a lot of, I don't have a lot of respect for the product. They were. I think now they're figuring out lots of good things, they're doing some great work. But at the time we thought, wow, we need to go in this bandwagon. We've got a tool that's better than all these things, we should put it out there in competition. We didn't have the resources to market that, to compete with that. We were never going to get the the toe hold that was required. Well, we'll go and raise some money. So we did our business plans around that. We went down the VC courtship, and no one wanted to back us. And you know, they were absolutely right. They shouldn't have backed us. It wasn't worth backing on that plan. And they did me a big favor because they forced us to find the route that we could go to market with, and we can now do it without them. And now and we've moved from a licensing model, we don't license our technology. We might talk about license with Yuli who said that. But we're not licensing our technology. Why? Because the value of what it produces will be democratized by a licensing model. And I will not democratize a product that can go from a simple challenge statement to a fully ideated solution with patent application in less than half an hour for 20 bucks a month. Because some kid in a bedroom using it will actually put loads of people out of business by just filing patents on the back of that. I won't do that. So our model is we either allow people to use the technology for a share of the IP, or we invest and we also allow them to use the model the product for a share of the IP, and that's a medium to long-term gain. We have no revenue. I'm not bothered about that. The revenue is just a facade, it's just another measurement. But we're building value in allowing companies that can utilize our technology to accelerate their value, to bring their product to market one, two, three years sooner, and for probably a fifth of the cost. And in there, we can actually extract value. But I mean I'm talking about small bits of value across a broad base. And that's the model we're now on. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

Any questions from the audience? I think you first there.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

Thank you very much, Mal. It's been inspiring today. Uh if you know my question is, um, when and how did you decide to do your philanthropy work, your charity work like in SAR? Yeah. Where where did it come from?

SPEAKER_00 34:28

I I think just just giving back. All right, and if you've ever seen the movie, you know you you'd know exactly what that's that's all about, which is a fabulous movie, by the way. So I I I'd made a lot of money over lots of businesses. And my attitude was I'd like it to go to some good. Right? So we created this this trust which has got a very wide remit, medical sporting and research technology, and it has a very wide remit. It gets involved in all sorts. We sponsor sports people. Uh Genevieve Somerville will represent us in the Olympics next year, on the the Winter Olympics. Sponsored her since she was about 11 years old. Uh we've got tennis players we sponsored. We've got someone who was in the Olympics this year, Winter Olympics, who's actually uh basically a solo bobsleigh athlete. All right, she lives, she was born in Derby, and uh, you know, and there's no snow there, by the way. So you can imagine the work she goes into. So we put money in, but they put lots of hard work into it. We sponsor medical projects, we sponsored pure technology projects, uh, and we go where we think there's a value to be had, not in a return, but in terms of what's the impact of those investments. And and and it's great to do that, and it's it's carried us into all sorts of conversations that I feel honored to be part of because of that.

SPEAKER_03 35:50

So I have a question which is around the conflict between values and interest. So if you're a founder and and you found a product where you generally market, why can't we still do it here when you when you just have to try what kind of market in the UK why can't you plan and do it there? So is there a conflict between values and what do you think of that?

SPEAKER_00 36:16

I think that uh I'm a big sovereign fan. Okay. I think that and and you guys are uh on on my journey I see working with universities like this and others, I think, as being a key component of how we actually survive as a nation, how we thrive as a nation. And and you know that that means more to me than making 10x what we might make doing that. Um so you know, enough is enough. One pound more than enough is plenty. Okay. So you can go to the States. That might be the reason you go there, isn't because of the market, it might be because of the backing. And I think we've got a lot of work to do in the UK to increase, to accelerate, to make the fit of that backing process better. Uh, and I think and we've seen some great initiatives. I met with a lady called Josephine Kant three three weeks ago. She's one of the founding members of D Sit Sovereign AI. Fantastic initiative. So it's happening, but the answer is because I want to I want to try and help other things.

SPEAKER_03 37:20

The ground, so values first. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

I mean, it's a great place to wrap it up. I have to say, it's fantastic to hear Mel speak, isn't it? What an amazing, inspirational person to have in. So I think he deserves a round of applause.