May 21st, 2012 — Mark Littlewood
As well as hosting Ken Segall at our CEO Tales on Thursday 31st May in London, we’re excited that you also have the opportunity for a very limited number of people to join us for a small pre-talk workshop and round table discussion with Ken before the main event. You need to be able to get to the venue by 4.00pm on the day.
For a chance to join us for the workshop prior to the talk, you need to be registered by 5pm on Friday 25th May and make sure you answer the registration question, “If you could ask Ken Segall one question, what would it be?“.
We will select, with Ken’s help, the participants over the weekend and let the selected attendees know by Monday 12 noon.
May 21st, 2012 — Mark Littlewood
Following our little video interview with Mr & Mrs Smith Founder and Chairman Ed Orr a couple of weeks ago on their bond issue, it seems a few other companies have been thinking the same way.
Leon Restaurants, purveyors of fine and healthy fast foods to the masses have launched their own bond issue, this time with payment in their own currency, the £eon pound. The £eon Pound can be used in their own restaurants as well as, they hope, other participating places in due course. This means that they can offer a relatively higher rate of interest on their bond.
Disclosure, I know the founders socially and think they run the best restaurant chain on the planet. I was more excited that they opened in Kings Cross than I was about the new concourse.
Henry even gave me a free wrap once but I do not own shares…
The Leon Bond…
Dear Leon Club Member,
Last month we sent out an email to a small group of Club Members to see if they would be interested in investing in a Leon Bond. We were overwhelmed by the response and have decided to launch it for all Club Members in early June.
This letter is intended to tell you more about the bond and to let you know what you will need to do if you want to invest, so that you can be ready.
“This is a brilliant idea! It sums up what I love about Leon :)” – Leon Club Member
What is the Leon Bond?
We are often sent messages asking us to open new restaurants – so often that we wondered whether the people who eat with us would like to get involved in helping us grow. This kind of collaboration between customers and businesses is increasingly common – King of Shaves have issued a bond, as did our friends at Hotel Chocolat. It is very simple. Club Members who want to get involved lend Leon the money, and in return we give them interest along with some other edible and non-edible perks. We’d rather pay interest to our Club Members than to the banks.
What would we use the money for?
Expanding the Leon chain by opening new restaurants in carefully selected locations, creating jobs, and making good food available to more people. We are also planning to set up a not-for-profit Leon Foundation. In future we may use the money to set up Leon outside the UK. A proportion of the money may be used to replace debt we currently hold.
The Leon Foundation
Our vision is to make it easy for everyone to eat good food. We are currently doing this in our fast food restaurants, but we believe that our expertise and contacts can be of use more broadly. So we are setting up the Leon Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation with the same vision. The first step of the Leon Foundation is to set up an annual summer cookery school with chef Mitch Tonks on the river Dart in Devon for children with renal illnesses, who require a very specific diet. The children we will be taking come from homes where very little or no primary cooking is done.
How does the bond work?
We are launching the £eon Pound: an alternative currency that will be available in Leon restaurants. You can use it to buy food, drink, cookbooks or anything else in any Leon. We are also talking to like-minded business who would accept them too.
- You buy a three year bond, after which time you can ask for your cash back or you can ask to extend
- You will be paid interest in £eon Pounds
There will be three bond options you can invest in any combination up to £10,000 in total:
1. Invest £1,500 for three years and receive 120 £eon Pounds each year
- equivalent to a 8% net return or 10% gross return for the basic rate taxpayer
2. Invest £3,000 for three years and receive 300 £eon Pounds each year
- equivalent to a 10% net return or 12.5% gross return for the basic rate taxpayer
3. Invest £5,000 for three years and receive 600 £eon Pounds each year
- equivalent to a 12% net return or 15% gross return for the basic rate taxpayer
- In addition to the interest, every bond will be entered into a seasonal prize draw only for Leon Bond holders. This will be drawn four times a year on the autumnal equinox, the winter solstice, the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. Prizes will include places at our cookery school on the Dart in Devon, residential cooking holidays, hampers of food from our suppliers and other goodies. (more…)
May 21st, 2012 — Mark Littlewood
Current attendees for CEO Tales with Ken Segall, ex Creative and Marketing Head at Apple, 31st May, 6-9pm, London. Thanks to the support of Imperial College Business School, we now have additional places available but hurry, we probably won’t for long…
- Translate Media, Co-Founder
- Cogenta Systems, Chairman
- Phagenesis Ltd, CEO
- Integrity Software, Group FD
- Energysys Limited, Operations Director
- Energysys.com, Managing Director
- Revolution Software, Managing Director
- Capital SCF, MD & Founder
- Fidelity Growth Partners, Partner
- MMC Ventures, Investment Director
- Global Sales Outsourcing, Director
- Angel Seeder, Entrepreneur
- Kernel Magazine, Reporter
- Cogenta Systems, CEO
- Kulu Valley, Business Development
- Top10, Co-Founder & CPO
- Grapple Mobile, Design Director
- Softcat Ltd, Chairman
- IdeaPlane, Business Development Analyst
- Episode LLP, GP
- Bossa Studios, Co-Founder, MD
- Telefonica UK, Head of Enterprise Lab
- DFJ Esprit, Partner
- Matchbox Mobile, Creative Director
- Optimas Consulting, Managing Director
- Amadeus Capital Partners, Investment Manager (more…)
May 18th, 2012 — Mark Littlewood
We’re delighted to be hosting Ken Segall, Apple’s ex Creative Head and Marketing Director at our CEO Tales held at Imperial College London, 6-9.00pm on 31st May. We asked everyone that registered what question they would like to ask Ken. With over 200 people registered now, we thought it was time to have a look at some of the questions and we thought we would share them. While, ”What was Steve Jobs’ most annoying trait?’ amused us, we’re not sure it will make the cut.
Ken has already answered one recurring question, ‘Can Apple be as successful without Steve Jobs leading the way?‘ in this guest blog post. If you want to ask anything else, feel free to chip in. As we now have a slightly bigger, upgraded, venue we still have some space so it is not too late to register.
To get your creative juices flowing, here are the other questions people would want to ask Ken…
If you could ask Ken Segall one question, what would it be?
- Which emerging nations does he feel has the levels of entrepreneurial verve that could match the creativity of Silicon Valley?
- Anti-patterns: Why did Sony go wrong when Apple went right?
- Who will win – the closed operating system of apple or the open architecture platform such as Microsoft?
- Is the marketing approach different for small, growing companies than for large corporations? Would “think different” have been the right approach without the global brand awareness already?
- How do you makes others see the value of simplicity?
- Do you think Apple has peaked?
- What are the disruptive changes that social networks bring to marketing?
- What’s the one piece of advice he’d give to Microsoft, Google, Oracle.
- Is Apple’s Insanely Simple approach going to limit their success in selling to businesses
- How was it working for Steve?
- What would you spend most of your time doing on a day to day basis?
- What would you spend most of your time doing on a day to day basis?
- Was think different the first campaign idea or did you have many others before
- Was think different the first campaign idea or did you have many others before
- IBM or Apple? Which is the more innovative in their business models?
- What are you most proud of?
- What other companies are insanely simple?
- How much of it all was Jobs and how much was the team? What’s the right mix of interference of those holding the vision vs those implementing it?
- How much of it all was Jobs and how much was the team? What’s the right mix of interference of those holding the vision vs those implementing it?
- Think of it to ask him on the night
- Think of it on the night
- How did you make it so simple!
- What other design do you admire in the online market?
- when will simple also mean cheap ?
- when will battery technology develop sigificantly ?
- Can Apple be as successful without Steve Jobs’ single minded focus?
- ?
- Would Apple have been so successful with ‘just’ great products and ‘average’ marketing?
- What does the Apple TV look like?
- Why do digital products seem increasingly complex?
- Where do you get your design inspirations from?
- what were the practical methods Apple used to innovate (meetings, focus groups?)
- How do you do?
- What is the thing most companies are missing?
- Could Apple have achieved the same success if they had chosen a different obsession?
- Can’t think of a good enough one at the moment sorry!
- Apple regularly builds simple and elegant products on initial release but then adds features and complexity over time. Does this result in an improvement or dilution of the originally executed idea
- What would the single bit of advice be he would give to companies aspiring to follow in Apple’s design and innovation footsteps
- How (if at all) would he recommend to engage customers during a product’s design phase?
- How does he get inspiration for his creative designs?
- Do his values in life cross over into his creative work?
- How does the creative landscape of the UK compare to the US? (more…)
May 16th, 2012 — Mark Littlewood
It might just be possible that one of the world’s leading management thinkers, Professor Clayton Christensen, author of the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma‘ and other extraordinary books will be remembered principally, not for his contribution to innovation and management thinking which is immense, but for the ideas he shares in his latest book, ‘How will you measure your life?‘
He spoke at last year’s Business of Software Conference about the job your product actually does (video and link to full transcript here).
How will you measure your life? does contain lots of great ideas about management, but more importantly, some brilliant ideas about managing and thinking about your own life and what is really important.
“Over the years, he also noticed that many of his former classmates at Harvard and University of Oxford, where Christensen was a Rhodes Scholar, had ended up deeply unhappy. “Something had gone wrong for some of them along the way: their personal relationships had begun to deteriorate, even as their professional prospects blossomed,” he writes in the prologue of his new book, How Will You Measure Your Life? Many of these folks stopped attending reunions, and Christensen sensed that they “felt embarrassed to explain to their friends the contrast in the trajectories of their personal and professional lives.” Bloomberg Businessweek
How will you measure your life? is less about business, more about, well, life…
“When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to under-invest in their families and over-invest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.” Clayton Christensen.
We just shipped 50 copies of the book to the first of the 200 or so people who have already registered for Business of Software.
We are offering the next 25 registrants for BoS 2012 a copy of the book too. We know you will value what it contains.
Our next BLN CEO Tales in London on 31st May with Ken Segall is proving exceedingly popular. Not only is Ken sharing one of the few ‘insider’s views’ on why Apple has been the phenomenal success over the past 15 years, his book, ‘Insanely Simple, the obsession that drives Apple’s success‘, has just hit the New York Times bestseller list with some rave reviews.
Ken will talk about his experiences at Apple as well what that means for any technology business trying to emulate their success. You would be simply insane to miss it. More info…
May 15th, 2012 — Mark Littlewood
There has been a lot of talk about the decline of the VC ‘industry’ in Europe and the US recently and the vast plethora of options that have opened up for entrepreneurs from crowd-funded sites like KickStarter that offer people the chance to purchase goods in advance to crowd funded equity sites like Seedrs in the UK and the vast array of US startups that have been enabled by the passing of the JOBS Act.
Some companies will always value venture funding from top quartile investors, not just for the money, but for the significant value that having such a firm on your side brings – both in terms of a network of useful people and in terms of the message such funding sends to the market. There is a huge difference between funding something on KickStarter, where you are doing the funding because you like the idea and want the product and ‘investing’ in a company for a return. Given the current, ahem, frothiness in the market, it is highly likely that some people will be investing in what they believe will be the next Facebook with no realistic understanding of the risks involved. Caveat emptor and all that though this is an interesting post on the Great crowd funding train wreck of 2013. Makes some good points.
Another alternative form of fundraising a few companies are looking at is a bond issue. A bond offers a company the opportunity to raise money without selling equity, you are offered interest on a loan for a fixed term at the end of which you get your money back. Clearly, this is not a very viable option for a startup company – there is no way you can have any visibility on their ability to have the cash at the end of the term, but for a more established company looking for growth capital, it seems to be an increasingly common option.
I caught up with Ed Orr, co-founder and Chairman of Mr & Mrs Smith at an excellent networking event held by Scottish Equity Partners recently and here he explains the thinking behind the bond that they have just offered to their members. It promises to pay a fixed interest rate of 7.5% in cash, or 9.5% in Mr & Mrs Smith tokens over a four year term. Bond issues are still subject to FSA regulation.
Broadly, the alternative options for them would be venture funding which would cost significant equity, an AIM listing – costing both equity and huge advisory fees (Ed used to be a broker so he knows the drill!), or a partial sale of the business. All of these options would mean there was less control in the new entity for the founders, higher advisory fees and potentially significant management time involved in managing the process.
For relatively stable companies with predictable cash flows, bonds may become increasingly common as a form of financing growth.
Our next BLN CEO Tales in London on 31st May with Ken Segall is proving exceedingly popular. Not only is Ken sharing one of the few ‘insider’s views’ on why Apple has been the phenomenal success over the past 15 years, his book, ‘Insanely Simple, the obsession that drives Apple’s success‘, has just hit the New York Times bestseller list with some rave reviews.
Ken will talk about his experiences at Apple as well what that means for any technology business trying to emulate their success. You would be simply insane to miss it. More info…
May 8th, 2012 — Rachel Salmon
Our next BLN CEO Tales in London on 31st May with Ken Segall is proving exceedingly popular. Not only is Ken sharing one of the few ‘insider’s views’ on why Apple has been the phenomenal success over the past 15 years, his book, ‘Insanely Simple, the obsession that drives Apple’s success‘, has just hit the New York Times bestseller list with some rave reviews.
Ken will talk about his experiences at Apple as well what that means for any technology business trying to emulate their success.
We were delighted when he agreed to write a guest blog for us and as we’ve asked each registered attendee to send us a question for Ken, we decided to ask him to pick one and answer it here. It is probably one of the most common questions asked about Apple. Here’s his response…
Ken Segall joins The BLN in London. 31st May.
Can Apple be as successful without Steve Jobs leading the way?
“It’s one of the more popular questions about Apple. And it was being asked even before Steve Jobs passed away. It’s a reasonable question, too, given that Apple’s astronomical success has been so clearly tied to Steve’s leadership.
If you care to take the pessimist’s point of view, you need only point to 1985 and summon the “history repeats itself” argument. After all, Steve Jobs did leave Apple once before, and the results weren’t pretty. A succession of three ineffective CEOs failed to produce remarkable products, and the company slowly slid toward mediocrity. After 11 years without Steve’s influence, Apple’s days seemed to be numbered.
However, I’m not a pessimist. I don’t give a moment’s thought to such worries—simply because the Apple of today bears absolutely no resemblance to the Apple of old.
People seem to forget that when Steve left in 1985, the company was practically a newborn, only about seven years into its journey. It had really created only three computer models: Apple II (a hit), Apple III (a flop), and Macintosh (great idea, not a commercial success). It didn’t have the track record of greatness it has today.
When Steve returned to Apple, he faced an almost impossible challenge. He had to lead a company teetering on bankruptcy back to financial health. Even more difficult, he had to lead it back to relevance. These were not things he could do overnight.
One step at a time, Steve executed a plan. He adjusted his executive team, bringing in the best and the brightest. He created the online Apple Store. He shook up the industry with iMac. Fairly quickly, he had managed to at least right the ship—Apple was profitable again. What became clear was that Apple did have a future, but only if it kept innovating.
With iPod, Apple looked beyond computers for the first time and began its transformation into a consumer electronics company. With iPhone, Apple redefined the smartphone category. And with iPad, it basically invented computers all over again—changing the way we connect to the world.
From the time Steve returned, Apple has created so many technology revolutions, such things are now expected of them. Every new product introduction is so eagerly anticipated, the buzz begins to build many months in advance. And the success of each product only creates a higher level of anticipation for the next product down the pike.
In short, Apple has become an innovation machine, having well absorbed Steve’s values. The executive team understands that Apple will continue to thrive only as long as it keeps innovating. And it’s well aware that a failure to innovate would put all of the company’s gains at risk.
In the future, many will look at decisions made by Apple and debate whether Steve would have made the same decision. That’s a pointless exercise. As civilization advances, as market conditions change, as new threats and opportunities arise, Apple will face circumstances that Steve Jobs never imagined. Tim Cook and his executive team will make their own decisions.
But I have no doubt that their decisions will be based on Steve Jobs’ principles—the same principles that have made Apple the most valuable company on earth.”
To hear more from Ken Segall and to ask your own questions, join us for what will be a brilliant evening on the 31st May, 2012 when Ken will be talking about his new book, listed in the New York Times Best Seller list this weekend. For more info and to register click the link below.
The BLN CEO Tales with Ken Segall and UK book launch of ‘Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success’. 31st May, 6-9pm, Imperial College London.
Tickets selling fast so register quick.
