Building a VC Backed Platform in the Age of AI | Sam Browne, Let’s Do This – Co-Founder & CEO

In this conversation, Sam breaks down the reality behind startup fundraising, Y Combinator, venture capital pressure, founder psychology, and why AI is reshaping the future of sport and live experiences. From raising early money through SEIS/EIS, to learning how VCs really think, to deciding when to pivot and when to stay true to the mission, this is a candid look at what it actually feels like to build at high speed.

Sam also shares why most founders misunderstand venture funding, how to handle investor pressure, what makes AI different from past hype cycles like crypto and virtual events, and the advice he’d give to anyone starting a business in sport today.

He talks openly about the mental side of leadership too — from anxiety and pressure to decision-making, ambition, and building a company without losing sight of the life you actually want to create. It’s an honest conversation about growth, trade-offs, and staying clear on the bigger picture.

Chapters
 00:00 What people misunderstand about venture-backed companies
 01:50 Raising early capital in the UK with SEIS/EIS
 04:42 Getting into Y Combinator and lessons from Sam Altman
 05:51 The pressure and expectations of serious VC backing
 07:07 What YC taught about competition, luck, and top founders
 08:22 What investors actually bring beyond capital
 13:24 What happens when growth slows and investors get aggressive
 13:54 Should every founder take venture capital?
 17:47 The emotional reality of building under investor pressure
 18:35 How to choose whose advice to listen to
 24:27 Balancing founder vision with VC expectations
 25:39 Why AI matters more than crypto or virtual events
 31:12 How AI is changing event technology and operations
 35:09 Going all-in on AI without “burning the boats”
 40:16 Why AI automation matters more than small marketplace gains
 42:45 Advice for founders starting a business in sport today

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

On this episode, I'm talking with Sam Brown from Let's Do This. He is a co-founder of the company, a big VC back company out of the Y Combinator group, and someone that I've known for a long time, obviously from my work with Run Through, and they're involved in the same space as us. So I know him as someone who understands the VC space very, very well. So the conversation today was focused around VC backed companies, and there might be tips and hints in here that you could potentially take from that process and the things that he's learned to apply to what you're doing. And there's positives and negatives to that sort of structure when you're starting a business. And then we also delved into AI and how that's going to play out over the next few years and what that his company are doing to try and pivot into that space. And for me, I find this quite interesting because I'm deeply embedded in this sort of world and I'm learning a lot every day about this space. And I think that it's really interesting to have part of your mind in this. And it's good to see a company like um let's do this move into this sort of space and in the same niche essentially as run through. And to see how that plays out over the next few years is going to be absolutely fascinating. And and this conversation today was with Sam, and I've asked him plenty of questions that hopefully you will find very useful.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

People don't appreciate that raising the venture is the fuel for the rocket, it's not the end point in itself. I think loads of people, myself included, start a business and their parents and their friends and everyone is like, ah, what are you doing? This is wild and dumb and like not real and and not something there. And you kind of have this thing in your head where you think, oh, like once I've raised X, or if I've got investment from Y, then I'll be legit and then it'll be good, and then it'll be sort of like there. And it's sort of I spent so much of the early years seeing raising around as an endpoint, rather than actually raising venture is and should be symptomatic of it already working or an element of your sort of thesis being proved out. And so the point should constantly be on how are you raising the business, and then venture is a great source of capital to accelerate that execution rather than aiming for the round as an endpoint.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Yeah, your your story is a bit different, obviously, because you kind of started off your seed stuff with people you knew, investors, but then what really supercharged it was when you went and moved to the States and did that. Can you talk about how that happened and what you did?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Yeah, 100%. I think there's a load of abuse given to the UK government at the moment, lots of it quite well founded. But a scheme they have which is brilliant, is is the SAIS and EIS scheme. So the small enterprise investor or investment scheme. Um, and that scheme is is a great way of being able to raise your first 150K on SEIS or your first million on EIS. Those numbers might be slightly outdated, but directionally they're correct. Um, which which gives an incredible tax break for early founders. So if you're sort of starting off, definitely go and get pre-authorization as registration of SEIS, because in the first 150, I think it might be 250k at sort of 2020 in late 2017 that we were doing this, um, they get 50% of their tax tax back on on funds raised. And if the company doesn't work out, then they get another 50% back. So they can essentially invest 100% but only be risking risking 25%. And those early days, I mean, I started a race series out of um out of uni and and after during that period of time got to meet a load of people who were passionate about our sector and and had money, the races we were doing were wildly expensive and almost certainly very overpriced. Um, but be having access to those people meant that I could kind of get that early round and that early funding done quite well. And really, during those early days, if you get capital early, which we were fortunate to, you end up just wasting a larger percentage of it than if you get capital later. So then we were super fortunate to get onto Y Commodator at the start of 2018. Um, and that was obviously just heaven for startups. Like to get onto it, I just tracked down the email address of the guy who was running it at the time and sent him, I think probably 200 different emails as far as like just daily progress updates and and things. Um that person was uh Sam Altman, who's obviously gone on to run open AI, so we didn't realise how quite how useful and impactful on the world he would he would be. But during YC, I think we really saw actually almost always just focus on revenue growth, just like focus on like focused on building something people want and focused on on growing. And unless you have an unbelievably good reason why your why your core metric is not revenue, like your core metric should be revenue. And it was during that period of time where we really started working out actually how yeah, the how you play the game with with the VCs, but also how you make sure that you get the best bit of of venture capital and avoid a lot of a lot of the the sort of worst pitfalls of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Obviously, going into that, it's a bit of a change up from having people you knew are like in the UK to go into a very, very serious VC pack thing. What were the expectations that that changed when you did that? Did you feel a different kind of pressure when that happened? Or was it just an extension of what you were doing at the start?

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Yeah, I think the reality is that whenever you go to a new institution, particularly something which is very widely respected, you always play this story out in your mind that it's going to be wildly competitive, that you're not going to fit in, that everyone's going to have their shit sorted out, and you're going to be just behind the eight ball. And actually, you realize when you get into those rooms that everyone has the same fears, fallibilities, flaws that you do. Um, Obama there's a great clip that I've seen of him talking about being at the highest tables of global power and and him sort of looking around and saying, like, these guys aren't all that either. Um, and I had a much smaller experience, obviously, of that my first couple of weeks at Cambridge, where I had all this anxiety that everyone was going to be so wildly bright, and I was like, There's just as many idiots here as as there are in any other walk of life. Like, and I think with YC, it was the same. Like, we arrived, it was at the start of the crypto boom. Like it was like early. Obviously, I wish that I bought way more Bitcoin than I did then. Um, but every our first group partner meeting that everyone was talking about. We were in a group with OpenSea, who ended up being this massive NFT marketplace that boomed and and then dropped a lot and then sort of like coming back again. But they were all talking about crypto kitties, and Alex and me were looking at each other, being like, what is a crypto kitty? Like start of 2018, like, what is this about? And so I think there was a lot of I can't, I think reassurance at that point that actually anyone in any room is just trying to do their best, they're just trying to work it out, they have the same sort of flaws, fallibilities. There's a couple of people that you meet where you're like, you are just so wildly better than everyone else that I've seen that they make you feel incredibly inferior. Like for us, that was John and Patrick Connenson, the founders of Stripe. Those guys are just yeah, different breeds, absolutely incredible. But for the vast majority of people, it's the same things that we're all going through. Like, there's no more brilliant people that are necessarily there than any other than any other area, and that's where like luck does play a huge amount of of a role. And we've been so unbelievably fortunate to be part of a big VC brand early. And this is one of those things that I talk to founders quite a lot about is that capital is capital. The best things that investors are ever going to do for you is give you good cash on on clean terms. And all of the I've pitched the vast majority of VCs in the world, and all of them talk about the secret source they have or this operating model or this like intelligent analytics platform, all this kind of stuff. Like that we've never seen any of that stuff come come through. I think that beyond the capital, the the the three things that can be really, really helpful. Like one is the quality of the partner. Um, so we were incredibly lucky off the back of Y Combinator to get this um guy called Pete Flint, who's been incredibly amazing for us. He was one of the founders, founding team at lastminute.com, and then was the founder and CEO of Trulia, which for those in the UK is like right move in the US. He sold it to Zillow for three and a half billion. Amazing guy, passionate runner, really good, good man, um, and has been incredibly supportive the way through. So the partner can be very helpful. The brand is helpful. So we were so fortunate with YC. When you're raising venture, the game you're constantly trying to play is to switch the scales of optionality. So normally all of the optionality and venture is on the part of the venture capitalist. So they get to see loads of companies all of the time, see all of their data, see all of their metrics, and they can pick and choose whenever they want to be there. And as a startup, you're trying to pitch everyone and trying to go through everything. Um, but ultimately you you don't have, you can't create that same level of FOMO. And one of the amazing things that YC does is demo day, which is at the end of the program, the end of the sort of three months that you're out in San Francisco, they invite all of the top VCs in the world into one room, all at the same time, and all of the investors see all of the startups at the same time. So if you're good and if your startup's done done well over that period of time, you have all the optionality. And that's and you can apply that to every fundraise that you do, which is to try and not speak to any investors. Don't be constantly always sharing data, always sharing stuff going through. You want to be thinking about the story that you're gonna tell, and then speak to as many of investors who you've had a warm coffee or intro with who kind of know you and are kind of interested in your space, speak to all of them in a week. Just back up your diaries. I mean, I've whenever we've done a round, I've done like a hundred calls in a week where I'm just speaking to everyone all at once, because then you know that actually you're likely to have the optionality, not them. And that's when you can make sure that you don't have like terrible terms and those things are there. So, like having great brands really does help. Um, I think the the third thing is that you want to be really focused from early on on the fact that founders haven't been through this before. And so we all think in terms of valuations and capital raise. And so we have this myopic focus on how much did you raise at what valuation. Whereas investors who have been around this mulberry bush loads of times and understand how it works, they understand that actually the terms are often much more important than the numbers involved. So they, for particularly if you don't have if you don't have a really good like anchor VCs that are going to try and protect the founders, which which Y Combinator is incredibly famous for, they'll start putting in all of these terms into the investment documents, which actually are super like beneficial to them and not as beneficial to you. And the reality of every single startup I've ever seen, open AI is going through it right now, you hit a you you hit a bump in the road. Like it's not all plain sailing. Business is never just up and to the right. Stripe, I spoke about, I think one of the best run companies on the planet, had its uh share price go down about 90% at one stage. Amazon also dropped 90% at one stage. Like you will hit this at some point. And a lot of what the investors and the VCs understand, particularly the more unscrupulous ones, is that when they get into that situation, if they have certain terms of protections, they can really hammer you and they can really make it incredibly painful and sort of accrue a lot of the value. And so you you need to have this sort of like in really strong, like it's always a bit painful sort of spending the legal fees around the funding rounds. But we've been in incredibly good position because we've had great partners who have eyed us really well, great brands that have like actually that that are gonna do the right thing and sort of like care about their reputations in the way that sort of some of the smaller brands won't and like won't won't care as much, and really good legal advice to mean that if you do hit bumps in the road, you can solve them and you can resolve them, you can get through them. Whereas where in vet where founders can just look at what is the sticker price and what's the thing and not focus on these other terms, then you can end up in in that that's where a lot of the really bad situations end up happening.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

That'd be really interesting in terms of like what happens when like for me, when something goes wrong or the growth slows or something changes, when you've got a an aggressive fund behind you, I imagine those pressures are intensified quite a bit. Whereas if you're taking money from people who don't have that sort of intensity or backing behind them, it's a bit more relaxed. And how does that change the way you treat the business in terms of like how hard you push on? And yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Yeah, I think there are founders that should take venture capital and founders that shouldn't. And that doesn't mean there's founders that are good and founders that like it, it's always put into these simple buckets of like more ambitious founders and less ambitious founders and whatever. I don't think that's true. I think it's a character type, and something whenever whenever I speak to someone who's wanting to go and take venture, I ask them immediately is what does pressure do to you? Like, Matt, I've known you for a long period of time. You're someone who performs unbelievably well in pressure. Like, if you wanted to go and do venture, you guys, I mean, happily you're wonderfully sort of profitable, have been for a very long time, so don't need to. But if you wanted to do venture, you would be great because actually when that pressure mounts on and when you're getting hammered, you're someone I've seen repeatedly finds that fuel. Like you, you kind of like you probably have the same levels of the negative connotations that I do as and all of us have anxiety and and stuff around it, but like when the pressure's on, you'll be like, Yeah, great. Whereas other people and some people that I work with who are much more capable, much smarter, much brighter than I am, when the pressure goes on for them, they don't do their best work because they think about every sort of different scenario of how everything can go wrong, and they and and they're much better in an environment where they can think and plan more strategically rather than right, you've got to pull off a hail uh pull off a hail mary here to go and get this done. And the like venture capital almost always will make your life as a founder worse. Like, there's very few scenarios of founders that I know or that I've been put in in partnership with who would say that being in a venture-backed company has improved their quality of life, or definitely not their work-life balance, or whatever. Because ultimately, like they're buying racehorses, like they are buying a stable of a hundred racehorses. They know the odds, which is that like 75-80 of them are gonna break their legs and gonna get put down. Of the 20 that survive and sort of like get through, like 15 of them will be okay and we'll do kind of well and whatever. Four of them might be good, but most of the fund is gonna be on that racehorse that ends up like winning, like sort of winning the national or whatever, or whatever it is. Like, and so they're going to hammer all of those racehorses because their fund economics work off that they're not obviously it's a different capital allocation to. I mean, pension funds obviously put some of their money with VCs, but it's a it's a difficult, it's a very different capital allocation to private late-stage private equity or whatever, where you where you don't have winners and losers. Like venture is a it you what you return your fund normally off of one or two bets, and so you you kind of have to decide do you want to be in that environment or not. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, who started by Combinator and uh are incredible and have become like wonderful friends and have been there through through sort of like the the darker chapters, they PG always has this thing of like you want to be in the fastest flowing water, and I think venture will often put you in the fastest flowing water because suddenly suddenly it's not just that I always have this, like a lot of my friends say I'm very, very driven and like self-motivated and that kind of stuff, which I don't think is true. Like I love staying in bed in the mornings and I love lying in, and I'd like kind of a day with going on a run and reading a book is pretty pretty heavily for me, which I don't think I've done for the last 10 years. But like I think there is a there is a there is a a lot of the reason why I work as hard as I do, and I think that I go as hard as I do is because you have these like societal presses and structures around you, and for some people, like I do think for me that has been a real positive. Like that's been something which has meant that like I constantly feel behind the eight balls. I constantly feel like I need to be learning more, and so I constantly have that thing. But like there's lots of I've had therapy for the last five years and found it incredibly helpful. There's a lot of really like dark, slightly abusive traits to that. And there's very much like there's this sort of constant, there's this constant feeling of of when you when you're sort of venture back business, and anyone who's listening to this who has a venture back business, like I know will resonate with this, where like there's a slightly like showing your dad your homework, or like, I mean, would love to say your mum or your dad your homework, but venture has a massive gender problem. Um, so it normally is showing your dad your homework, but but showing your dad your homework, and it's always been like, yeah, but like go again, like be yeah, but what's better? Yeah, but like, but this other portfolio company is doing this, and like so like there's always this sort of like it's never this sort of like, yeah, well done, this is great. Like, it's always like, what's the next thing? Like, as far as because that's how because their returns don't work if the company's good. Their returns only work if the company's a world beater, um, because they're having to cover for so many of the horses that got shot.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

How do you pick and choose the people you listen to in those situations, though? Like, you'll have multiple dads in this scenario that you're talking about. Like, how do you know is it the dad with the most money that's backed you, or is it like the dad that's been with you since the start? If you know what I mean, and like to balance all those things all at once must be a tiresome process, and to know which master to please, I suppose, in every scenario would be extremely hard. And that must take up so much like mental energy day by day when you're trying to grow this business.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Yeah, it's a pretty question. One of the things that YC look for in founders that are going to be unsuccessful is how many group partners. So, group partners on YC are the amazing entrepreneurs. So, Tom Blonfield, who started Monzo, is a good mate of mine who um is a group partner there now. They're these people who look after kind of like maybe eight companies at a time. Um and they look for the founders who go and speak to the most group partners in their first 30 days, and always almost always those founders will be unsuccessful because they're shopping around for advice and they're essentially trying to find someone who's gonna confirm what they believe to be true is actually true, and and and sort of like get their get that answer. And a lot of people do that, and we've been unbelievably lucky to meet I've met Musk, I've met like all of these incredible founders, and none of them know the answer because they don't have context. And so the the real answer to your question is I very clearly sort of stratify in my mind what areas of problems I'm likely to have, and then 80% of the 80% of the problems in life, you know what the right thing to do is, but you just don't want to go and do it, and so like Bezos always has this thing where anxiety doesn't come from uh like like the vast majority of stress and anxiety comes from a problem which you know you should do something about but you haven't, and therefore the quickest way to reduce anxiety is just to take a step. And that that normally then goes and drops that step off. And so where I try to look at is essentially four core areas of of my life. Like one will be product and and what's happening on the product, one will be the business and everything which is happening on the team, on the commercials, anything which is there, one which will be kind of my psychology and and and sort of like my emotional side and everything which is which is which is sort of like sort of internally, and one is like what I call like a life worth living. Like people that there aren't many tech CEOs that you would look and say, like, yeah, I want to have their life, their life's great, or whatever. Even even Brian Chesky, who I think is an amazing guy, is built an incredible company and that kind of stuff. Like, I want to have a family, like I want to have a family, I want to do all those things. He hasn't been able to do all those things, he feels very isolated and hasn't sort of he had his he's got sort of back in touch with a bunch of his childhood friends now, but like hasn't had that on on the way through. And within each of those four areas, I then try to have people that have deep context on each of those things. Um so, for example, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, I think, have just the most brilliant life, they have a wonderful marriage, they have two brilliant kids, they have been wildly successful. But also, PG gets to do the things that he loves doing, which is doing research and that kind of stuff. Whereas on the business, Pete Flint is has built something much bigger than than than I built, has been far more successful. And I try and have those people have enough context that they understand without me having to go through ages and ages and ages of time, what likely the right scenario is. And what Pete is brilliant at doing on that front is he's very good at saying, Yeah, there's an answer for this, and this is the answer, or saying, Yeah, it's tough, judgment call. And that's really powerful because a lot of things there is. An answer for. There is an answer about how you hire your first employees. There's an answer about compensation frameworks. There's an answer about distribution channels, pay marketing strategies, influence strategies. There's not an answer about do I optimize at this moment for supply growth in the UK versus starting international expansion. That's hard. Every founder reaches that point. And so the answer is you have the most context CEO, you've got to make a call. So I don't I think it did waste a ton of time early on trying to keep everyone updated, constantly feel like you need to be available, feeling like because they've given you money, they should therefore have access to you, which they shouldn't, because ultimately they gave you money to make the money. And if you make the money and you never spoke to them over the last four years, they're gonna love you. And if you lost the money and you spoke to them every week, they're gonna hate you. So there's no point doing that. But something you said that I think is that speaks to a real sort of truism of how it feels and and how it can be experienced as you go through it, is trying to trying to make sure that you know when you're actually trying to get advice or when you just need something. Because to your point of well, which daddy do you pick when you need someone's money, then for sure that like if you're in a hole and you need cash and they're the person who has the cash, all bets are off. Like you you've got to go and do that, but you're not going for advice, and don't like confuse yourself into thinking that you are. Like, in that scenario, you're going because you have an endpoint which you need to go and achieve, and and you need to have that conversation. So and that is the right thing to do in that scenario because because, yeah, that's the that's the limiting step that's on the company at the at the time.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

It's interesting, like it's obviously like a you're you've got big backers, you've got big VC funds supporting you, and you've had the ability to talk to these people over a long period of time. So the amount you're learning and the amount you're you're building your own brain must be must be amazing. But like to balance that vision of the company you started versus the vision of the company that needs to become to fulfil what the the VC back companies require, which is their like that their money day essentially. That must be hard because of your background in the sport and how much you care about the products, versus they are thinking about this for like one meeting a month and it's not really their day today, and it's your everything. So just moving into like the kind of the change up of what let's do this or focusing on is interesting, I suppose, because that kind of leads into this as well. Obviously, the AI market's become massive the last few years, things have grown at such a fast pace in the last six months, the world's completely changed, and it'll change again in six months' time. How do you battle that? And you can see what you're currently doing to battle that, but how do you battle that with keeping the initial vision of what the company was? And has that vision been updated now as it was from the start?

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Yeah, again, great question. There's there's a book of letters of Bezos' earnings calls that I think should be mandatory reading for essentially any founder. And what you see throughout that is a load of useful stuff, but especially Bezos' vision for what Amazon was going to become never changed, but his route about how you got there, he was not like tied to that at all. Like that wasn't something he really cared about. And for us, let's do this, the vision has never changed. Like, we believe in the power of offline experiences. That was something that was really born in me from an early age and a pretty bad illness that that I had, and we want to be the online company that gets everyone together offline. That hasn't changed. This whole like anti-tech tech company, like, how do you drive IRL experiences? The roots to get there has changed. And there's a really interesting thing when you're in business for a while is that you see these boom cycles go through, and you're trying to pick which one is foundationally gonna change everything, and which one is fundamentally attractive but not really there. We've seen three big cycles really. The first was crypto, and it was super interesting. You will remember from I'm sure you got pitched a million times on this at run through the whole focus on NFTs and are the NFT tickets gonna be really valuable, and is this something, is this the future of online commerce and stuff? Ironically, I think what's happening, well not ironically, but I think what's happening in stable coins now is is is gonna change a bunch of stuff. But we were looking at that, looking at all these companies around us that were getting crazy valuations, massive amounts of capital. I mean, OpenC OpenC, I think went from YC to $17 billion in like 18 months. Like it was crazy, and they were a group partner for us. So we were like looking at those guys going, oh, they've worked something out like there, which is massive. But I think in that one, for us, it was this isn't fundamentally changing our industry. Like this is something which is kind of happening over there, and yes, there's always an envy of when something like super sexy and super exciting is happening somewhere else, and that's natural, but it wasn't something which was there. The second thing was then the virtual events period during during YC, during COVID, um, and seeing what happened, particularly with Hoppin, where you just had this like platform doing these virtual events, which we had all the tech to do, and this one was harder because we had all the tech to do it, and it was going crazy as far as this virtual event space exploding. Hoppin, I don't know, raised, I think Hoppin went from zero to four billion to zero or something in about two years. Um, I didn't go to but it but it sold for like a fraction of the money that it raised or whatever. Um, and that one was tough because we were like, this is big, our business has got zeroed, like we've been obliterated. Like, is this a thing? But again, that didn't stick to the A, we didn't think that COVID was going to be around forever and thank God it hasn't. B, we didn't think those experiences were fundamentally brilliant. Like, we didn't think there was something there which was which was there. And and C, and most importantly, it would have been a complete divergence to the vision of what we wanted to do. Like, I love being on finish lines and being at experiences, and yeah, we focus on mass participation, but I love being at music festivals as well. Like, I think there's something around that shared connection in the real world surrounded by people that you love, which is one of the most important parts and important factors of life, and I think will be one of the most important things do this next generation. So, again, we're like that we will spin up as we did with you guys, a kind of virtual running thing to keep try and keep organizers going through for this period of time, but it's not something we we we we're gonna go hard in. With AI, that's different, we think, and we'll see whether we'll see whether collectively we're all right or not. Um, which is that I think AI for the first time in a long time foundationally changes how all of us are gonna live our lives and also interact with with technology. And when we were seeing the the focus for us early was all on search and discovery, and then we started doing the registration and ticketing side as well, but there was still very much this pretty strong element on the search and discovery side. What we saw with AI was was two things, and this was starting to come through in our numbers as well. The first is that search and discovery is that marketplaces are directly proportional to how disaggregated the data is. So, for example, booking.com has been a very valuable marketplace because I'm going to Paris, there's any number of hotels pretty much that I could go and stay with, and therefore the the there's a lot of value in the marketplace and the comparison because that data is so disaggregated. Um, whereas there wasn't a big spot like marketplace, for example, on on music, like Spotify was sort of a different thing because you had like quite deep aggregation on the on the majors, although that did end up into like much higher disaggregation in into the long tail, or it's always been really hard. There is no massive marketplace that that sort of ended up being really big for energy in a huge way. Like you kind of have these meta marketplaces a bit, but they've never ended up being anything like as large for the proportion of the amount of money and energy, because energy is pretty aggregated. There's quite a small number of options and quite a small number of suppliers which are there. And we thought with AI that there's so much organization of the data which is happening in the agent, that essentially the aggregation of that data and the organization of that data is happening quickly to mean that I'm already looking for races now on Chat GPT. I already already do my hotel, we use Claude for everything, but I do my hotel booking down through through through Claude. That's kind of like where I'll like Opus is kind of where where I'll where I'll go. Like, and so there is this whole um difference between the where the value is going to sit in an in an AI world, and then on the other side, the core elements of organizing an experience and running an experience haven't fundamentally changed. And I'm realise sort of talking to one of the biggest organizers in the UK and one of the biggest organizers in the world during this, but and if you disagree, definitely say because you have more expertise than I do. But I don't think technologically it's fundamentally changed for about 25 years. Like it's the the registration ticketing platforms are a bit better here, they're a bit better there, but they're kind of similar. The CRM platforms are a bit better here, the integrations are a bit better, the UX is a bit better, more mobile optimized, the um uh timing stuff is still RFID. Like there aren't there, hasn't there been this massive change. What we started seeing from AI is the opportunities to automate huge swathes of an organizer's stack through AI were huge. Um, and we were sort of uniquely positioned to do it in the way that we had two things. One was we were already one of the sort of five biggest platforms in the world, so we had a bunch of volume, but we were also of those five the only one who was likely to go mega hard at this for a mixture of different reasons, but as far as the the sort of like ambition that we were gonna have have around it, and therefore we felt that actually the the greatest way of getting driving more experiences IRL together was to generate and grow these experiences more, and therefore same endpoint, but different route through. And we were just seeing, we were starting to see, we had all of these different experiments on, we had social discovery experiments on, we had marketplace experiments on, we had standard registration ticketing experiments, AI registration experiments, and we just got this massive pull from the market of saying we all know that this is gonna change stuff in a really big way. We're not in the situation individually to be a tech company that's gonna do that that at that scale, and we're now at the point where obviously we can automate customer service, like we do, I think we now automate 93% of all um London Marathon's customer service side, but it's a customer satisfaction score which is I think 30% higher than it than it was when it was human. So it's not just that it's faster, cheaper, it's also a lot better. Um, but now with the marketing side, you can automate your uh CRM communications, you can automate your meta campaigns, you can run uh experimentation much more easily through through your whole marketing suite. So the focus now is that how we sort of like drive you much many more ticket sales, and and that's sort of coming through. And then operationally that's gonna that's gonna come through as well. So the reason we did adapt to this wave in the ways that we didn't previously is this one is and and we've done the four biggest deals we've ever done in the last seven weeks, um and and a lot of that has been this sort of foundation of being that technological partner and the AI tools that we can provide. We think that this is going to accelerate us towards our vision and not prove a distraction in the way that crypto or or um or or virtual events were.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Yeah, it's interesting how you've done that. And are you at the point now where you're kind of shedding your old skin completely and you're going fully down this route, and that's the commitment you made, and you the reason why you avoided the the virtual stuff and the the crypto stuff was because you felt it wasn't there. And do you think there's a just looking to three to five years' time and the way it's gonna pan out? Do you feel like you are literally just all in on this and there's no going back? And because, like you said, people looking for um bookings on Chat GPT and these platforms, and it's very easy to find that sort of stuff, like that's just been taken off the table, and then there's no way of going back because it's just impossible to do that, or do you feel like you'll revert back and tap into these different elements over the next few years?

SPEAKER_01 35:21

Or yeah, yeah, there's a big, very popular LinkedIn view of burn the boats, which is this whole uh no going back, no plan B, whatever. I can't remember what it was. Doggins. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know he quoted it, but I can't remember what the original sort of uh moment in history they originally did it. I think in reality, that's just like a really irresponsible way of running business. Like, I I think you you have to have you have to have plan B's and you have to have options, and you should be experimenting all the time, and you should be seeing what happens. And I definitely think there's gonna be a big AI crash. Like, as far as I think there's there's too much innovation happening, there's too much going on to mean that everything has been like perfectly priced. Like we always have this view as humans where we think that I think that normally the people who end up on the outest, most extreme ends of of capital management, which all which they end up being in some ways over optimistic around sort of like the rate at which change is gonna happen, how things are flowing through. And also they back themselves to know exactly how it's gonna play out. And none of us know how this is gonna play out. Like it looks now that data centers are gonna be in space, which we were in with a YC company three years ago that was saying that was mad, whereas now it's kind of like, yeah, of course, but there is so much uh capital commitment on uh compute now that it's a big question mark over like how does that does does that just continual to flow to NVIDIA or are the models I mean one of the things that one of the things we're seeing now is that the models are fundamentally good enough now that it's almost a human adoption and and sort of engineering integration problem that it's a sort of frontier model problem for a lot of use cases. And that's meaning that in a bunch of the products we're using, we're using the most frontier models on the research side, but on the actual application side, it's better for customers to have the quicker models that are cheaper, that are running faster, and that are already good enough for what needs to be done and what needs to be there. And I think for a huge amount of work, the models are already good enough. And that then means that kind of LLMs become in some ways the ultimate commodity because you have whatever the big models which are all there, they're all basically good enough because they're kind of all they kind of all are, but unlike other commodities, your switching cost is almost immediate. Like you can't change where you're getting oil from in a day, but our engineers swap between LLMs literally in a day. They'll be like, oh, okay, I'm gonna use this one for this one, this one for this one, or whatever. And and so if you have this like commodified space with very high uh ability to switch and pretty low like contextual lock-in, because especially if these products sort of take off, we're actually rather than becoming like reliant on one LLM for all of our context building, we're gonna be having our own sort of that's where I think Apple could play a really interesting role, like having having actually all of our own sort of like trained data set being there and then and then and then layering it into. Because I mean, if I get to a point where I'm happy, like obviously all the the open clause stuff, if I'm happy hooking up all of my WhatsApp data, that has way more context on me and who I am from the last 15 years than the last 12 months of Chat GPT conversations. So I think if that then happens, then it feels hard to imagine there isn't some kind of like correction where like the models become cheaper to run, you can run them locally, you don't need as much NVIDIA commute, the the models become more commoditized. It's not to say they're not still going to be like worldly valuable, I think they are, but there hasn't ever been a boom of this size without a correction. And there will be when there's a correction, there will be loads of people saying, like, I'm sure I'll have probably people of our partners, I'm sure I will have organizers. I know it won't be you, but I will have organizers being like, You got it wrong. Like, see, AI is not that big a thing, and like you guys have gone so hard behind something which isn't ending up being the thing. But in the same ways like the internet was the thing, like just because like just because dot-com happened didn't mean the internet wasn't the thing. It was, I do think that this is, I think what we're able to do for organizers now. I mean, take take run through. Like, you guys have obviously been one of the most brilliant partners for us over a very long period of time. If you looked at the role that lets do this, and uh this quick question for you, I'm gonna give you my my theory and then would love to hear your answer. As your technology partner, if I was sitting there saying, like, right, we're gonna grow the marketplace listing and and S E R L M uh like traffic to add an extra 5% over the next three, four years, or we're gonna give you the AI agents to be able to automate 75% of your business and automate a lot of your growth. My theory is that you would much rather us be doing the AI side, but I would love to get your your view on as well.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

Yeah, you know, you know my thoughts on it, and I'm deep in this sort of stuff as well, so I'm gonna stand it to a pretty high level. So I I I really do think for a larger business that is really interesting. So for the smaller businesses, they probably take the 5% and do the work themselves. Like it's a completely different conversation for who you're talking to. For us, yeah, that's definitely a better way of doing things. And yeah, the open clause stuff's fascinating. And watching videos and people buying different mini-max and putting them all together and they're acting as human beings and talking to each other on Slack groups is absolutely mental. And I think that there's definitely something that's going to happen with larger businesses that's gonna have a lot of like operational cost savings, and that's something I think that what you guys are doing now and the play you're making will have a lot of value to those big players in this market, but then it kind of just forget about the rest of the smaller players. But then, if you can offer them marginal increases in in sales because of integrations to different platforms like Meta and that sort of stuff, then it's gonna be best of both worlds for either side of things. So I'm all for that sort of push into this new space, I think, is a smart move. And I for me, I I am interested in how you're not only playing out the uh the the AI boom and how you interact with that and showing that your competence across different um different areas of it to show these big organizers that aren't interested in it, but also that VC element and and that boom in an area that might just crash or it might just be forever, and you've just got yourselves in a position where you're like, Well, we're innovator in this niche in getting people offline on uh sorry, yeah, was that right? People offline online, whatever it is. Um it's the real world, yeah, yeah. Then you're in a really good spot. And yeah, just kind of I could talk to you all day about this sort of stuff, I know, but I think I just want to like ask you a question to kind of give the the audiences as a final one to to wrap it up. And in if you're giving advice to a a founder right now starting a business in sport actually, keep it to that niche. What would you what advice would you give them? Because AI is so easy, you can get stuff done yourself, you can be a one-person team with lots of different people doing things with agents, access to capital that might get a bit harder. There's a bit of uncertainty right now of what's gonna happen with actual human beings and their jobs and that sort of stuff over the next few years. Like, what advice would you give to someone who's got an idea in the sport world? Would you go down that route? Would you do it yourself? How do you play it?

SPEAKER_01 42:46

If this was you in 2018 without you knowing what you know, there's an amazing woman who I think all of us occasionally meet these people, and Matt, you're one of these people for me when we when we were starting the company, where you see someone thinking about stuff in a way that you that you haven't, and it changes your perception. I'm going to Tokyo for the marathon next week, and I had this experience at the marathon the Tokyo Marathon last year, and it's woman called Professor Irene Tracy, she's the vice-chancellor of Oxford, so basically CEO of Oxford University. And I need to learn the French because I quote her enough and I never forget remember the French. But she always had this, she has this her favourite saying is step back to to leap forward. I don't know whether she does, but both me and my wife have I wouldn't say crippling ADHD, but but definitely ADHD, and Matt, you you know my wife. Um and I think there's always this temp temptation if you're the type of person to go and like run in to do a startup and to to go and fly in and that kind of stuff, is is just a st is just a start. Whereas I think the most valuable thing when you'd when you're going and like you do have to start, and you do have to go in to take the first step, and you all those things. The truth, but everyone gives that advice, so like I don't think it's necessarily like super interesting. I think the most valuable thing is to do two things. One is to go away for a day on your own with a notebook and write, and there's something about writing about what you want your life to be like, what you want to do, what you want to build, which is that it's much easier for thoughts to be irrational cognitively than it is on paper. There's something about externalizing the writing, which which is which is really there. And the second thing is to go and have a dinner with a loved one who you really respect, which is always hard because most of us want to hear about how they are and that kind of stuff, but where you prep them that the only thing you want to talk about is this business that you want to go and build and what you want to go and create and what you want to go and generate. Because Sam's whole stuff of there's never been a better time to start a company. I think is I think is true. Um I think that capital will become like more or less challenging in different areas, and there's definitely that you there's definitely much more focus on revenue, part of profitability, than just sort of like sprinkling AI on stuff in the way that there sort of maybe was a couple of years ago. Um but I think the opportunity to build something the opportunity to build something really meaningful with very little capital has never been bigger and never been better. As far as for us, we have to hire loads of engineers to go build out of the systems, go and build that platform and that kind of stuff. And for those bigger scale platforms, AI is not that close right now to being able to say, okay, yeah, and and I think our team and engineering team has changed view quite a lot around saying, like, at what level are we just going to be able to do a really great rebuild? Versus actually, do you go and try and fix what's what's what's what's there and sort of like improve on there? And I think a lot of the scale platforms are going, I think the sort of strategy is working down the latter. So it doesn't mean that you can go and build Microsoft overnight and and they have a bunch of like big advantages from being like inbuilt systems and and and the master amount of uses they have. But I think there are loads of areas which will fundamentally change. Like for us, I believe so much in what will happen to sports and experiences because the unemployment will go up, it's already going up. Like there will be a a lot of us get garner a lot of our value from the careers and the jobs that we have. And if you suddenly don't have those careers and jobs, you're gonna see religion growing. You're gonna see, you're gonna continue see running and mass participation growing because that's that's something which brings meaning, meaning and purpose and and value to our lives. And so I think the opportunity to go and build into the sport space, into the into the experience space is is is bigger than it's ever been. Like, we've had this trend for 30 years of people buying experiences, not things, and yet there's so many more things out there. Like we need more experiences, we need more people building experiences, we need more sport, we need more people investing in sport, we need more brilliant people working in sport. And there's a there's a uh Ari Emmanuel who who is the runs runs Endeavor and set up this um platform called Mari M-A-R-I, speaks brilliantly about this, where he talks about sort of the second order effects of AI, as far as like you have the first order effects, LLMs, and then you have these second order effects. Fewer people have to spend their time being accountants. There's more we believe there will be this like massive second renaissance where just there are all these experiences and you want to be back to Paul Graham's point in the fastest flowing water. If you want to be in the fastest flowing water, I think that I think that the the I think if you're going at the LLMs, Sam Altman has this big thing of like, don't go to where we are now, go to where we're gonna go. Because like it takes time to build, and you want to go to where you're gonna go. And like if you go to where we are now, I don't think there's gonna be some new LLM which end up being the winner. I think the winner's probably anthropic's having its moment right now, but I think the winner's probably Gemini. Like, I think that's probably how that plays out. But I think experiences sport is where it's gonna go next because everyone has more time, there's either universal basic or extensive income, there's more opportunity to go there. And so I think going starting a business in that space and building a muscle, even if the first one doesn't work or second, whatever, will be really, really valuable. But I think by stepping back to leap forward, right now, this is the last time for probably the next 10 years when your life isn't gonna be complete insanity. Because as soon as you know, you've been doing this for longer than I am. As soon as you start a business, all you think about, all you talk about, all you live every single day in the shower, and we wake up at three o'clock in the morning with anxiety when everything is your problem, like it's gonna be all consuming. And so this is kind of one of the last points you're gonna have for a while to really set your set your target and set where you're gonna go. And I think I I I didn't do that, but I have done later, and I found it incredibly valuable when I'm having a bad day and when I'm having a bad week, or having a bad session, or that person you're desperate hire doesn't take a job off, or the exec isn't aligned with what you want to do, whatever, all those things, which is going to be a part of your every single day life. You can look back on that piece of paper and you can call up that friend and see whether you're still on the right path and see or see whether you need to need to make an adjustment. So, yeah, I think step back to leap forward, take a bit of time, and then go for your life.