Remaining Relevant

What are you working on that will still be relevant in ten years?

Jeff Bezos says the most important question is what is not going to change. I was asked this last week by an eager developer during breakout at a startup event. I had a couple of answers.

Calling AI Entrepreneurs

The Scan Springboard UK forum is for startup entrepreneurs. It’s a community support network with the big kicker of access to the NVIDIA Inception programme. This is the starter kit for AI innovators.

Qualification for the programme requires a minimum of two people, one of whom can develop software. Your company must be officially incorporated, have a functioning website and be less than 10 years old. Other than that, anyone can apply.

Inception includes free credits for courses at NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute and discounts on technical workshops. It has preferred pricing on hardware and software, cloud credits with partners, and access to venture capital firms. This is a low cost way into a business that can be very high cost.

Most of the conversations I had at Springboard were around robotics. Physical AI is the hot topic but the appeal goes beyond that, I believe. Given a choice between coding invisible agents in the background of businesses, and building robots for work and the home, engineers choose robots. They are tangible, impactful and cool.

Advice for Founders

During an early session, Scan CEO Elan Raja shared valuable advice for founders, based on personal experience and from enabling many startups. The most important thing to get right is who you work with, including both staff and partners. That’s why Springboard and Inception matter, because they are the right partners.

Elan noted the importance of taking a long-term view. Hence the reason for asking what will still be relevant in ten years. You must be prepared to take risks, to fail in other words. And you must know your numbers inside out.

Elan also flagged the UK’s generous package of R&D tax credits that are an important source of startup funding. We used these when we built OTAS and they were part of the attraction for buyers of the business. In an environment where raising over £5 million is easier than raising less, government schemes matter for small startups.

Matt Quirk, EMEA General Manager at Supermicro, considered the two most important elements of startup success to be the right platform and speed of execution. NVIDIA’s many options and product names can appear confusing, but they work together, are backwards and forwards compatible and are designed for accelerated computing.

In a later session, Tim McSweeney of Restoration Partners shared the secrets of what VCs look for in startups. It begins with ambition and where you want your project to go. Then it’s the problem and how you will solve it. Only after hearing a credible story do VCs consider capital requirements. It takes at least 6-9 months to get comfortable with founders. The more you do to answer why you and why now, the better your chances of being funded.

Compliance and Service

Having thought for a minute, I suggested two areas that will remain essential a decade from now. The first is compliance. Regulations are everywhere and technology that ensures accurate compliance at speed saves money for all manner of businesses. I appreciate that this is not the most inspiring of suggestions, which is why there is a gap in the market.

The second area is customer service. All around us there are frustrations with websites, chatbots, and humans who are not empowered to help. There are huge waitlists for health services, hours on hold to get through to utility providers and constant bombardment with messages to visit the website.

The answer is not to go back to receptionists, check out assistants and humans on every call. The focus on costs will prevent that happening, with labour scarce and the cost of employing people rising. The solution is to find other ways to provide better service.

This may mean equipping customers and colleagues with better information. AI is excellent at extracting information from disparate sources.

It could be reducing friction through digital IDs and bypassing the endless requirements to repeat information.

It might even be building a cool robot that entertains and informs while serving customers.

People buy from people and every product needs promotion and selling. If you are starting a company you may be surprised to discover that’s your number one role. Once you realise this, you appreciate that customer service is the consistent theme running through every successful company. An aspiring entrepreneur with a ten-year vision might build a business that helps others to deliver it.

Questions to Ask and Answer

1. Where can I improve customer service in my business?

2. When was the last time I asked clients what they want?

3. Where would speed and accuracy improve processes?