The Power of Data Podcast
Episode 25: Why Data Needs Context to Add Value
Guest: Mark Whitcroft, Founding Partner, Illuminate Financial
Interviewer: Sam Tidswell-Norrish, International CMO, Dun & Bradstreet
SAM TN
Welcome back to the Power of Data podcast. I'm Sam and I'm joined today by Mark Whitcroft one of the founders of Illuminate Financial. Welcome Mark.
Mark Whitcroft
Thank you Sam. Founding Partner.
SAM TN
Founding Partner, one of the founders, Founding Partner. Welcome to the Power of Data. Now, typically, we get straight into data. We, you and I know each other well, we first met not in the UK, we actually, this place we're very proud to say, but it's a bit of a cop out. We first met at Harvard.
Mark Whitcroft
This is true.
SAM TN
I can tell our listeners, neither of us did an MBA at Harvard. We were doing an Exec-Ed course there in VC and private equity. But it was a great course actually.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah. So good I've gone back a number of times. Yeah. It's amazing what you can learn in a week.
SAM TN
That's very true. I haven't been back, maybe I should look into that. So, let's kick off with a little bit about your background and then I want to get straight into Illuminate, but tell us about your career so far.
Mark Whitcroft
Sure. Absolutely. And thanks for having us on. So, I am one of the founding partners of Illuminate Financial, we are a venture firm, early stage investor and we invest in two things. Capital markets FinTech or financial markets FinTech, FinTech companies that are solving problems for banks, asset managers, stock exchanges, and major market infrastructure players. And the second thing we invest in is enterprise solutions for financial institutions. So, technology solutions that have more of a horizontal application, but have a target universe within financial institutions. Prior to that, I was an EIR at Startupbootcamp FinTech in 2014. That was when they were launching their global program. And that was the, I think, sixth FinTech accelerator globally. There's now over 50 of them, so a huge proliferation there. Before that I was a front office worker in a number of banks globally. So, I started my career in London, and then moved to Hong Kong with HSBC. I was involved in platform rollout early in my career, which was a great example of how challenging it really can be within these institutions. I then joined Deutsche up in Singapore and New York and helped companies globally raise money in the bond market. So, I sat on the private and public side of markets. So crossing over between sort of the trading floor and the banking side. And then I guess from a FinTech perspective, I was involved in the Accenture FinTech lab as part of the Deutsche Bank team there. And that was my real lightbulb moment, actually, because I was the only member of that team that wasn't from technology. So if technology and business weren't aligned, how much of this stuff is really going to get adopted? So I came back to London in 2014, joined Startupbootcamp at that point. And prior to that, I'd also invested in a number of sort of the new wave of FinTech companies. So, I was an early backer of Nutmeg and Seedrs and a number of other businesses. So that's sort of been the journey and I guess, I met my business partner Mark Beeston, who was the founder of Illuminate and he'd had a sort of illustrious career in a number of different factors of financial markets and FinTech. And sat down with him over breakfast and there was a sort of meeting of minds and sort of at the end of it he very surprisingly said, why don't we figure out a way to work together? So I joined, and he’d set up Illuminate about six months prior to that. So I joined him shortly after that after we tested the waters working together. And I guess fast forward five years, today, we're on our second funder with Illuminate, invested in 15 portfolio companies, all what we would consider the future state of financial markets infrastructure. You know, we're proud supporters, both with capital but also time and effort from our team based in London, New York, about helping them grow and scale their companies and be value add partners along that journey.
SAM TN
Wow. 15 firms. That's incredible. You're a busy man.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah, but as you well know, Sam, right, you look at a lot more to get to your 15. I think over the last five years, we've seen approaching sort of 3000 young companies in the bucket of companies that we look at right, which is very specific niche within a niche within FinTech and enterprise software. So, you know, there's a lot of slicing and dicing and making sure there's alignment with what we care about and what the entrepreneurs care about to get to that 15. And I think out of this fund, we’d probably look at a cadence of four to five deals a year, and maybe building a portfolio of sort of 15 to 25 depending on where we get to.
SAM TN
Let's just say, a lot of people don't know the amount of work, if they're not in this industry, that goes into this, it looks very glamorous on the surface. But 15 firms isn't just 15 investments made, you think about all the time you have to spend on internal operations, on fundraising, on origination, on diligence, on execution, on value creation and support for firms and the governance of these firms. And then thinking further on down the line about an appropriate exit that ticks all the right boxes for the firm and for the investor. That's a lot of work compressed into a cycle for one company that you invest in. And one of the trickiest, I say trickiest, probably the most complicated parts is really understanding the space, understanding not just where the space is today, but where it's going to go. We've looked certainly over the last 12 months of some incredible trends that operate in the infrastructure space that you mentioned. We have Worldpay being acquired by FIS. We have TCS and Global Payments. We have First Data and Fiserv. Perhaps most interestingly, we have Refinitiv and the London Stock Exchange. All transactions that have made big statements in the industry, have been big market movers, and most of which have data at its core. Can you tell us a little bit about your observation on those trends that we're seeing?
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you've mentioned a number of the sort of really big deals the mega deals in this space. But I think, for us, one of the sort of lesser known facts is that capital markets FinTech and WealthTech, actually is one of the most prolific M&A sectors within FinTech. So, you know FT Partners that are, probably have one of the best trackings of data and research in the space. You know, if you look at their annual reviews in 2018 capital markets, FinTech and WealthTech actually was the largest sector both in terms of size and volume and deals. In 2019, it was second only to payments. Now everybody in FinTech knows about payments as an area. But actually, the area that we both operate in is far less glamorous. It's sort of much more nuts and bolts and sort of back office orientated stuff. It doesn't really hit the headlines so much. Where it does hit the headlines, though, is, as you've outlined with the last deal you mentioned is that one of the things that we see in the exchange place is that huge amount of consolidation that has happened and will continue to happen, particularly when we look at the size difference between the largest exchanges in the world and those at the bottom. And the other thing is, exchanges operate with such a strong margin of business compared to a lot of the existing vendors out there. And then to the people that are serving the banks, particularly, trend wise, we see a number of things and I think as labeled with this podcast, data is the core of everything, right? We see major market infrastructure shifts across the whole of the trade lifecycle. So pre-trade, point of trade, post-trade. And a lot of that is driven by new technologies we can buzzword start to play out now, right, where it's sort of machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, DLT and blockchain. But actually, where you look at the realistic application of a lot of this stuff in the industry, we're still very, very early in a cycle. You know, if we take an analogy of where we are on retail finance, 10 years ago the iPhone was just coming out. You look at consumer services that are now playing through with banking and the opportunities there, the neobanks are probably the latest wave of that, but the way that your apps seamlessly interact on your phone, none of this is happening in financial services yet, right. Interoperability has been talked about for years, but we're only really starting to see that play through with a number of providers in that space. Post-trade efficiency, again, huge opportunities there. And you're not hard pressed to find the blockchain orientated and machine learning press releases that are coming out from the industry. But actually, when you speak to the practitioners that sit in these seats it’s a very different, sort of, kettle of fish. So, for us, you know, we think we're probably five years into a 15 to 20 year journey around the re-architecting of financial markets. And we're really excited to be able to support some entrepreneurs during that journey.
SAM TN
Let's talk about data. You touched on it, it's kind of at the heart of everything and at Dun and Bradstreet that is absolutely our thesis, as long as you can ethically source, structure, link, and then apply analytics to that data to create actionable insights, you will be at the forefront of whatever industry you're playing in. A number of the different firms in your portfolio, leverage data, and I'm a bigger buyer of many of them. Off the top of my head Tookitaki, a compliance management software business that applies machine learning to data to provide an enriched service for those firms that it serves. Obviously a lot of the financial services incumbents have looked at Tookitaki as a leader. And a number of banks have actually also invested, as well as started to acquire their services. But data is at the core of it. So how are you when you look at these firms? How are you assessing and diligence-ing the firms, to ensure that they really understand the importance and criticality of that data?
Mark Whitcroft
You mentioned Tookitaki, but it'd be remiss of me to say that every single one of our portfolio companies has data at the heart of what they do.
SAM TN
I was teeing you up for that.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah, thank you. That’s so kind. And, you know, to your point around Dun and Bradstreet, I'd agree with your thesis, right? I think we're moving to a world where, we continue to be in a world where, the proliferation of data continues at a rate where it's very difficult to structure it. And then we have the dynamic of structured versus unstructured data, then putting that into a context for people actually to extract insight from it. Right, data for its own sake is no use to anybody. From our perspective, we are top down investors. So, we look for themes that we think there is material shift happening, and then we look to find the best teams in the world to back that up solving problems in that space. Right. So, to name a few AxeTrading are sort of doing a number of things in the electronification of fixed income, they’re servicing stock exchanges, banks, asset managers, brokers, you know, that is a space where we continue to see proliferation of venues, we continue to see the automation of a very OTC type workflow. CloudMargin, we felt that there was significant automation to happen in the collateral management space in a world where Excel is the favorite tool of every banker. And there's still a number of places where that's the case and will continue to be but you know, we felt the auditability as well as regulatory drivers meant there was going to be material change there. D1g1t, which is one of our latest investments, end to end wealth management platforms, servicing multifamily offices, wealth managers, why is it that in risk management for institutions like banks, asset managers, they have a very different toolkit versus private wealth space. So, you know, we liked the pedigree of the team in having sort of solved it in the wholesale side of the markets and bringing their experience and capabilities and product skill set to that wealth management space. So we sort of bought into that thesis and that whole point of the data is one, you know, finding that standardisation, normalisation, single source of truth for that data to overlay it between external and internal data sources to allow people to enact whatever they want to do. Right. And I think one of the most well-known examples of that now is sort of in the data science space. So, you know, we're definitely looking at a lot of the data architecture, verticals, and toolkits that allow data scientists to really be at their best. You know, an example there is 30 to 40% of the time the data scientists have during the day they're cleansing, normalizing and standardising data, right, that's a very expensive person with a very specific skill set that shouldn't really be necessarily spending their time doing that. So you know, that's an area and then cloud infrastructure. You know, there's a lot of talk about the three main cloud providers, but some of the Chinese cloud providers as well. Most banks are still in the early stages of that journey of migration to cloud. You speak to any senior people in banks, you know, if you talk to the board and you say one of the biggest things to happen in next few years is cloud migration, well, they would have been talking about that five years ago. But actually, the execution of this stuff takes a huge amount of time. So, for us, coming back to your question Sam, we're looking for themes where there is a material shift happening, and then finding, who are the very few set of people in the world that can actually solve that problem. And I think, as you well know, with the companies that you've bought into and backed, that actually this is a people business ultimately. You've got to be backing a team where there is founder-market fit, where they have the credibility and relationships to bridge the gap. And there is a significant gap, we actually call it Crossing the Chasm from being a small FinTech and selling into these very large institutions. So for us, it's about the people the product market fit, to a degree the size of the opportunity, probably less so than where we see with other venture investors. You know, we don't think does this have to be a $10 billion marketplace. Because actually, as we've discussed earlier, there's a huge amount of consolidation that happens in this industry from a trade exit perspective. You know, last summer one of our businesses RegTek.Solutions we sold to Bloomberg and one of the things that we think about when we look at these companies, who are the likely acquirers right? So can we build those relationships over time with those companies to help them on their journey
SAM TN
Thanks Mark. That's really useful. A couple things I want to pick up on there. Firstly, I love working inadvertently with people as smart as you because at Dun and Bradstreet we have our partnerships group. Think of it almost like, you know, when you're a big, old entity with lots of history and heritage like a bank, or like Dun and Bradstreet, many of the banks after 2008 realised they needed to reinvent themselves, change their engines in mid-flight. It's hard to do without spending money and investing, not just on partnerships, but also on acquiring or taking stakes. Banks had their venture arms. Dun and Bradstreet created its partnerships group, almost where we're investing our data into these businesses and partnering our data with their analytics. And what I love about your portfolio is I look at almost every single one in there and I go, well, they could really benefit from Dun and Bradstreet’s rich data, and applying our data to your analytics. And knowing that such smart people have done the diligence almost for us, it's really encouraging. But the most important part you just spoke about is people. And people really are the only thing that we should be thinking about investing when it comes down to it. And it's not just the leadership and the founders, it's the management team and the people below them and the people below them. How do you go about talent management assessments, when you're looking at a company? How deep do you go? And how important is it to you?
Mark Whitcroft
It’s a great question. And it's an area where there's so many different approaches. You know, you have some funds that get founders and management team to do psychometric testing. You know, you have other people where actually they are only investing in multi-time entrepreneurs or people that they've known for decades, so they know that sort of execution piece. We're sort of somewhere in the middle of all of that, for me it's often about, is the balance within the management and founding team, such that when you sort of weigh up all the strengths and weaknesses, either self-identified or not, of those teams, that you come out with the roundabout skill sets, relationships, decision making processes, that, the thinking styles, that will give you the best chance of success. Now, this is even more poignant when you're a young business and you're either very early in product market fit, or you only have a handful of clients. So, we are even more pronounced at the early stage around that people piece. I think some things that often sort of don't get highlighted and probably lessons I've learned along the way to really think about is, and it kind of plays through to the type people that run these businesses that you're investing in, that we're investing in, is that this isn't the sort of 20 year old person who's dropped out of university that has a highly technical background that's trying to solve a problem in financial markets. Often it's people who've worked in the industry have either been part of the problem in those institutions, or have been trying to solve those problems in the institutions, decided actually I'm going to try and do this myself, because I think there's a broader application of it.
Sam TN
Yeah.
Mark Whitcroft
So it tends to be mid-career people. And whilst we are backing multi-time founders as well, that often tends to be people who are very, very knowledgeable either in a certain financial product or technical products or come from a technical background, or have a commercial bent, having worked at a vendor or two, but things like scaling capabilities or scaling experience isn't something necessarily that is there. So, when we think about the companies we're investing in and one of our core thesis will only invest if we think we can actively influence the outcome of the business. So we tend to be very, you know, hands on in trying to help with that journey. And that's everything from planning reductions to helping the hiring, to help with scaling internationally, to helping sort of solidify a lot of the processes, pipeline management, contracting, all the things you're going to be doing with your businesses. But just coming back to the point, I think there's a number of things to me that really often aren't talked about, right? I think storytelling capabilities is one of them. Because these young firms, you've got to have people buy into your journey and buy into what you're trying to solve. And if you don't have the ability to take people on a journey and follow your story that's going to be challenging for every aspect of business, signing clients, hiring. Another thing would be the ability to hire the best people. And I think that's linked to the first point, right? You know, it's often said the first 10 hires in your business, define your culture, as well as a lot of other things. So, can you get the best 10 people in the world to be working for you, as you kick off?
Sam TN
There was telling a story.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah. And then, you know, some of the other things that we've probably learnt along the way is, are you prepared to listen, learn and evolve? As a board member, and as an investor in these companies, there's definitely plenty of things I'm not going to have the answer to. But, within our network, we've probably got a good chance at finding somebody who's very good at certain things. So, you know, are you prepared to take advice along the way, evolve yourself and your team because, whilst businesses grow, the individuals have to grow with the businesses as well. And I think in the early stages of company development that can often be seen either with founders moving out of businesses, with management coming in, or founders continuing to evolve with the businesses. So those are just some of the things that I think I've sort of learnt over the last few years with this stuff. And a point about connectivity and credibility in the sector, I think one thing that Illuminate strive to position themselves as is a trusted partner for the industry, where an introduction into the industry hopefully has more weight than a cold approach. So you would hope some people in your founding team also come with that weight of gravitas and knowledge and network within the industry to help them accelerate their business.
SAM TN
You're absolutely right. And talent is so complicated, and people see it as being a six-letter word and think it's really easy. But to find someone, a man or woman that has the right balance of intellect, the right balance of emotional intelligence, that is at the right time of their career in the right place, wanting to do the same, the right thing for any given role. It's really, really difficult and those five dimensions make it one of the hardest and make or break things, I think, in the investment management industry and also in the technology industry.
Mark Whitcroft
Totally and you know, you hit on an important point there, right, diversity comes in many guises. I think there's nine different measures of diversity when you look at the academics of this now. I think as a weighting in our industry, the most obvious one is the male female imbalance is terrible. It is changing from the ground up. I think it takes a long time, though. But that is one area to think about. The diversity of teams, not only in terms of nine metrics, but what that then results in in terms of different thinking styles, different skill sets, different approaches, and having a decision making process within your management team that allows for those different views to be aired and taken into effect with the decision making. So top down leadership, which was you know, how I was brought up on the trading floor. It's like, if you wanted someone to do something, you sort of shouted at them. Well, funnily enough, that doesn't work very well, particularly when you've got a small firm and you're trying to get people to come along with your vision.
SAM TN
I empathise only too much at the trading floor. And zero humility.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah, and you know, I think ego is a big part of this. We're very cognisant that, particularly within our team, we've strived to ensure that it's a flat structure, everybody's expected to come with a view. Everyone's expected to have done their homework for that view and to be able to sort of back it up. But there's no reason why more junior members of the team aren't going to have a better answer to stuff than I am in our house. And we look to that as the same when we’re sort of investing in companies and it comes back to that, are people willing to be coachable.
SAM TN
Coachable is a great word. And I said the word humility, you have to have a leadership team that are willing to put the right processes in place to have the humility to allow for that diversity of thought. And one of the areas of diversity you don't hear about anywhere near enough either, I think is age. You know, having junior people in a firm provides an incredibly fresh perspective. When we built Motive Partners, one of the phrases that we kept on coming back to, in fact we even used it as the basis of our project name, the beginner's mind, we called ourselves the Beginner's Mind Collective. Thank god we didn't stick with that one. But that's all based around the Zen philosophy that in the beginner's mind, there are endless possibilities. And in the expert’s mind, there are very few. And I think that ability for young people to dream is often lost further up the organisation. It's important to harness difficult stuff.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah, look, I mean, I think we're at a really interesting inflection point within financial services. You know, I think, if I look at the people who are coming into the industry today, and this is this is well telegraphed in, in a lot of articles about the skill sets that they're looking to hire for, right, you know, ability to code but to be very analytic. If you look at the boards of a lot of these financial institutions, you know, it's very difficult to find a banking institution where the senior management or the CEO hasn't mentioned that they're a technology company first, right? But actually, if you look at where the technologists sit in terms of either a seat at the board or in the senior management often that doesn't translate to them being a technology company. But the skill set of the junior people that are coming up in these organisations, you know, they grew up with an iPad in their hand, right? I didn't have my first phone until I was 18-19, I think, so it's a very different type of skill set, and also upbringing, that the people coming to the industry are. And they've also seen a financial services that's very different, you know, financial services, for the most part has had a 40 year expansion. Yeah, granted, the last 10 years have been a bit more of a rough ride since the financial crisis, and a sort of rebasing of the industry there, but it's still been expanding. So, it'll be interesting to see in the new wave, you know, here we are talking about data, what’s data gonna be like in 5-10 years and how are banks gonna be dealing with it? It’s going to be fascinating.
SAM TN
Also how are human beings? You mentioned when you first had your first phone. I had my first phone maybe a year or two earlier than that, maybe because I’m a year or two younger than you. And you’d leave your phone wherever it was, outside a classroom for two, three hours, you come back and you'd be over the moon if you had a text message. Now, if you leave your phone for one and a half minutes, you've got more anxiety than you can possibly control from the flow of contact from different mediums, right, 15 WhatsApp, 60 emails, a text message and a call from your mom. It's very overwhelming. And one of the things that I look forward to thinking more about as the world develops is how do we protect the next generation from that anxiety? How do we structure our approach to data and absorption of that data? I was just at the World Economic Forum in Davos and one of the biggest topics for consideration was how our economic and environmental worlds are colliding, and not colliding in a good way, colliding in a catastrophic way. ESG, for another year, was the most talked about topic. How are Illuminate approaching ESG? And I know as a firm you just released an article not so long ago, talking about ESG and this being our decade. What are your thoughts on that?
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah, one of my teammates, Catherine has written a blog post on it around our sort of working thesis in this space. She's been doing deep dive into it. And I think you've said a lot there so I'll try and pick off the last piece. I think ESG is a fascinating field, and one that is only now getting the headlines that it probably deserves, primarily driven by the news flow around climate, right. And to a degree around governance and the imbalance of governing boards. But if you look at what has been done today in ESG, and the application in financial services, most of it is around governance. It's not so much about the environment and sustainability. Now, I think what'll be interesting to see is how different firms react to this in terms of how it is actually implemented. And if we go back to one of our earlier comments around what is the difference between the PR spin versus the reality of what's happening here? Right? Yeah, so data in ESG, is currently controlled by a small handful of providers. But actually, if we look at what's happening around supply chain management, across multiple industries, everything from retail, right through to sort of foods and goods, and the data that is coming about as a result of new technologies being applied to these industries, we're going to start to get very different readings as to impact, environmental impact or sustainable impact, on a lot of these different industries. So I think there's going to be a really interesting collide between existing providers of ESG and a lot of the new data collection that goes around on sort of Supply Chain Management you know, if we take one example, there's a number of companies out there and you know, alternative data is another space where, huge proliferation of vendors that have come about in the last five to 10 years in that space. If we just pick shipping for a moment here, right, your ability to use satellite data to see how deep boats are in the water to assess how much they have in their hull, how is stuff like that actually going to feed through into ESG. So, again, we're coming back to this principle of not only about data collection, but ensuring that that data is of a credence and quality that gives you the single source of truth, but then putting that in the context that then people can actually utilise. So you know, that data about that ship is no good, unless it's overlaid with something else that's relevant in whatever ESG context that you want it. So I think we're going to start to see this collision of different data sets or different aspects of data collection, that have never really been put together, that are going to start happening.
SAM TN
It's such an interesting topic and, at the moment, we're looking at building out a Dun and Bradstreet and DUNS sponsored awards capability, a large part of which will actually focus on this space. There's a lot being done. It's just not enough. And it takes a lot of time to build up impactful momentum. And you see, we saw that at the World Economic Forum, you know, there's aspirations to plant a trillion trees. That's wonderful. By the time you planted a trillion trees, no one who started the initiative will be left on this planet, it takes a long time to do that. And I think, to your point on financial institutions, they do need to think about who they're advising, what IPOs they're supporting, what the companies that are supporting those companies are investing in. The insurance industry is a great example. The insurance industry invested 680 billion dollars in fossil fuel focused businesses last year, which ironically, some of the causing factors of many of the natural catastrophes that end up being the reason for insurance firm payouts. It's definitely cyclical, we're not looking at it in the right way. But I don't think we're far away from a really exciting new movement and I'm really glad say particularly as two relatively young people in their careers that a lot of this is being driven by the next generation. The Gretas of this world, are not taking any prisoners.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah. And I mean, I think if we just stop and pause for a moment and say, if we would go back 5, 10 years and say, at this point in time, there would be, I think she's 16, 17? A 17-year-old would be able to hold court with world leaders and would be one of the most anticipated talks at big events like Davos and the World Economic Forum. I don't think you believe it. Right. And at one level, and we're probably not getting into politics today, but you know, I think at one level, there's sort of this differing point where you've got people sort of saying the government's need to do something. But actually, government and legislation often isn't in advance of a problem, it's more to put boundaries around a problem where it exists. Private sector needs to be a big driver of this, right, and I think some of the more media savvy as well as forward thinking firms in this space have been very vocal about how they want to take on, you know, some of these points, right. Goldman's coming out around their point on IPOs. BlackRock talking about their ESG initiatives. And I think often this is where you see those companies have got very certain types of management and leadership, you know, in BlackRock’s case, sort of still founder lead, that these decisions can be taken and can be pushed, but it needs a pretty strong CEO to come out and say these things.
SAM TN
You’re absolutely right and Microsoft's another one, you're joining Satya Nadella have committed to not just creating a zero carbon emission business, but also to undoing all of the carbon emissions over the last, I dunno 30 years, or however old Microsoft is. It's incredibly ambitious, and it's necessary, but is it too little too late?
Mark Whitcroft
The sad reality is we'll just have to see if it's too little too late. But you know, more importantly, at least we are at a point where there is a vocalisation of this from the top of the corporate world, because for a long time, it hasn't been a requirement. Now, the other thing that's important here is we're still in a boom time, we haven't seen economic contraction for a good number of years. At some point, the cycle is going to change. And unfortunately, often stuff like this is the stuff that slips. So I think it's going to be important that people are kind of held to the standards, and we'll have to see whether people deliver.
SAM TN
Yep. Mark we’re coming to the end of this. Thank you so much for coming on. I always end with the same question. In fact, I actually always say that before I say the question. I gotta stop doing that. Who have been some of your greatest role models and mentors that have helped you get to where you are today, and to view the world the way you do?
Mark Whitcroft
Ah, that is a great question. I'm a big fan of my business partners and my team. I learn something from them most days, most weeks. I'd hang them up there with that. It'd be remiss of me to say, my parents definitely. And obviously my wife, you know, partner for life there. So for me, those are, probably been some of my biggest influences. And then, you know, I think the other thing I'd say is, this is a very privileged job, you get to meet so many amazing people who have either done amazing things or are going to go on to do amazing things. So, it's very difficult not learning something from everybody you meet in this seat, right? You know, I think being an entrepreneur is just about one of the hardest jobs out there, right? You've got everything banking on this one thing. And that's an incredible privilege to learn from a lot of these people. And you also partner with these people and helping them grow their businesses, right. So there's great times there but there's also a lot of really hard times and, you know, there's no linear journey in in this, as you well know from being at the forefront of starting Motive and same at Illuminate, right, you zig and zag that's for sure. And that's the same as being a partner with an entrepreneur. So, they're definitely some of mine
SAM TN
That's awesome. And you're absolutely right. It’s like buying a house, it never goes smoothly.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah.
SAM TN
That's also privileged position. I really like the point on partners, being your mentors, your business partner, your parents and your life partner, your wife, I wholeheartedly agree with all of those. And I haven't had it put quite like that. So thank you.
Mark Whitcroft
Yeah, well thanks so much for having me on today. It's been great chatting, as always.
SAM TN
Thank you very much. From Harvard to London, and hopefully back to Harvard. Speak soon Mark.
Mark Whitcroft
Cheers Sam.
