25 Years of Building Startups Explained in 17 Minutes | TaleTree, Matt Hagger

1. 0:00 – 2:30

   Intro

   1. MHMatt Hagger0:00

      Over the last 20 years, I've been a serial entrepreneur in the UK and then Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. The second company was Zkatter, which was the photo-sharing product. I wanted it to become something that every member of the world would access and use. When you're working on something that means everything to you at the time, you're putting your heart in it, your soul. Unfortunately, 95% of all startups end in failure. Zkatter did not become the Instagram, TikTok, or X that we see today because it's not existing right now. When you climb that high, the fall is equally as heavy. But I think going through failure or feeling failure gives you great weaponry for the future, gives you a, an armor. I think for entrepreneurs, most of the time you're falling out of the plane without, uh, knowing how to open the parachute. And as you get closer to the floor, you finally work it out. And I think that is something that I learnt growing up, which gave me a little bit of courage. Courage comes from taking a leap, throwing yourself in, because we don't know the solution, we don't know the answer. I think my father threw me in, knowing that he was there, I guess, if I went wrong, but made me feel like I was on my own doing it, and that was powerful. You just need that one person to say, "I believe in you. You can do it. You're good enough." These acts of empowerment are so important. What we need to do is we need to try and think, how can we be like a kindergarten kid for life? They don't give up. They stand up again. True entrepreneurs will always come back. [gentle music] Hi, everyone, my name is Matt Hagger. I'm the founder and CEO of TaleTree. TaleTree empowers children in a post-AI era to hold on to the precious gift of imagination and creativity. So when you arrive at TaleTree and you adopt your companion, you will start brainstorming and imagining and coming up with ideas. So it's a free space for children to explore what's on their heart, what they care about, their interests. Prior to that, over the last 20 years, I've been a serial entrepreneur in the UK and then Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, and at Iman Venture Labs, helping founders turn their ideas into products and into successful

2. 2:30 – 5:14

   Say "Yes" When Everybody Says "No"

   1. MHMatt Hagger2:30

      companies. [gentle music] When everybody thinks your idea is crazy, you should take it very, very serious. That's more important than having everybody agree with your idea. If everybody agrees with your idea, it's probably too late and somebody's already done it. So I went to a school in England, in Cambridgeshire, primary and secondary educations. There were certain times at school that I enjoyed. Writing stories, drama, art, stuff like that where I could be creative. But one of the hardest things for me about going to school was the bell ringing when I was working on something. I remember once I wouldn't leave the classroom because I needed to get my story finished, and I was in the flow of creativity, and my teacher was like, "Matt, you've, you've got to go to mathematics now." But I can't leave the classroom because I'm working on something. I found the answer, you know? I realized that I wasn't gonna have the creative freedom that I had when I was, uh, in kindergarten. My childhood was challenging, but as soon as I found the internet, I became incredibly excited about the idea. The way I start companies, it comes from an inherent problem that I am trying to solve, a pain that I have. Every time we used to connect to the internet, dial-up internet, it would crackle and it would load up the web pages, and I would often visit my favorite website, which was obviously my football team. I would see that nothing had changed on that website. I need to solve this problem because I'm costing my mother a lot of money. Every time I dial up, I'm costing her a fortune in the telephone bill. So she would present me with this telephone bill and say, "Listen, you're gonna have to pay for this because you're using the internet far too much." My response was, "Right, I'm gonna build something that prevents this from happening for me and everybody else." So this desktop news alerts protocol was built. As soon as you connect to the internet, it would go straight to your favorite website, check to see if there was any breaking news. If there was, it would deliver that breaking news to your desktop. And that simple idea was a big one. I got a feasibility study grant from Cambridge University Science Park and ended up going on this huge journey, and it was an invention that everybody wanted to, uh, implement, and it ended up being rolled out as Sky Sports News alerts platform with Premier League football teams and breaking news at Sky, and that's a broadcast media corporation in the UK. It was a very exciting period of my life. The only thing is I didn't understand what venture capital was. I didn't understand what entrepreneurship was. I just knew I was solving a problem for myself. So these two episodes made me realize that if I was going to progress in life, it was going to be through my own curiosity and my own ideas as opposed to following the

3. 5:14 – 9:18

   Never start a startup without THIS

   1. MHMatt Hagger5:14

      status quo. [gentle music] I have to be honest about it. It is not for everybody. If you don't have a deep and meaningful passion, that scratch that you wanna itch, you should not do it because when you get into that struggle, it is going to be extremely hard. You can lose sight of where you're going. So my childhood does have a direct correlation to TaleTree and why I'm building TaleTree. I feel like sometimes I'm building TaleTree for the child inside me. Even though the school curriculum didn't suit me, my dad acknowledged that and used to help me learn through challenges. Courage comes from taking a leap, throwing yourself in, because we don't know the solution, we don't know the answer. I think my father threw me in, knowing that he was there, I guess, if I went wrong, but made me feel like I was on my own doing it, and that was powerful. We used to go and watch soccer together and travel all over the country supporting our team. He would enable me to open up the map, find out where the city was, and I would be directing my father, and then I would learn about the city that we were visiting and the history behind it. Then he would ask me about the team and statistics, all the different things that had happened during the game, and I felt like I was learning through something that I love, and that was really, really powerful for me. What I'm doing now with TaleTree is essentially an extension of that. As a child, I realized that I wanted to help empower humanity to think creatively, with authenticity, with purpose. I wanted all of humanity to be able to call upon their authenticity and spiritual gifts and serve others with that. This Big thinking, this curiosity, the imagination and creativity and wonder of a child, we all possess that. It's just as we've grown up and we've gone through the system, we have lost that spark. It's not that the spark is not there, it's just we're not training that spark. Even through the Head Start program that was piloted by George Land at NASA, where he tested creativity on five-year-olds and then repeated that test at 10, 15, and 30. The average genius-level creativity in children, 98% of all kids that were tested were deemed as geniuses. But by the time these children reach the age of 30, it goes down to 2%. Between the age of five and 30, the light of learning, the light of curiosity, the light of imagination, it dims down. It goes off. And it goes off because we're not encouraged to pursue that side of ourselves. We're encouraged to memorize, be graded upon our knowledge, our ability to perform well in examinations, and to become experts in a field that we're supposed to upskill ourselves to be able to perform those duties in societies. If I held up this pen and said, "How many uses of this pen can you think of?" And on average, kids came up with 15 to 20 uses of this pen, whereas adults came up with between one and three uses of this pen. But for a kid, this could be anything. This could be a sword, it could be a lightsaber, it could be a rocket. It could be a paperclip even. Kids just need that one person to say, "I believe in you. You can do it. You're good enough." These acts of empowerment are so important. Well, and that is essentially why TaleTree provides children with this global community of kind and creative kids. Our mission is that kids all over the world can share their works of art with one another. Kids all over the world can communicate, compliment, and share. We allow children to feel liberated. Having supportive community around you is very, very important for entrepreneurs, for creative people, 'cause without community, I think we would struggle. So when you make the decision to become an entrepreneur, it's so important that you are deeply in love with the problem that you're solving.

4. 9:18 – 14:42

   Why I Only Invest in Failed Founders

   1. MHMatt Hagger9:19

      [instrumental music] The ideas that started in Iman, Iman Venture Labs will always invest in a, an entrepreneur that's failed three or four times because of the learnings that they get from the failure. They're closer to their success with every iteration. And of course, some of the companies succeeds the first time, has a lot of luck. But 95% of all startups end in failure. Around 2005, 2006, it was just at the beginning of the smartphone era, so Windows Mobile had a, a smartphone, and there was this rumor that iPhone and Android were coming. I was playing around with a Windows Mobile, and I realized that the power of a camera was ... gave us extraordinary abilities as humans that we could share what we saw in real time, that I made the decision that I was gonna work on that problem, and I was gonna actually build Zkatter, which was one of the first ever photo-sharing smartphone apps. I was incredibly excited about the potential of what I was building. Of course, with any startup, you need to raise capital, and you need support. Because the smartphone era was at the very beginning, I found it very, very hard to explain to people what I was trying to do. It was like, "This will never take off. People take their photos, they get them developed, they share them with their family. Nobody wants to see other people's media." One thing which is really interesting is that Zkatter did feel like a contrarian truth. You know you're sitting on a good idea when everybody thinks it's crazy. So all of these issues w- I was, I was being faced with was just very negative, and I couldn't really see how in the UK I could get my business going. Luck and timing are hugely important. Having a product that country or that market wants to adopt, having access to the technology that will enable you to distribute it. So I decided to take a bold leap. In the US, particularly in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I saw so much positivity around new ideas. The people, the support, the way people encourage me and get behind my ideas. The whole ecosystem was just incredible. And if I hadn't have gone out there, I don't think I would've been able to achieve what I achieved with Zkatter. One of the greatest things that occurred with Zkatter was that Android had just launched, and there was just six people in the team. And I met, uh, one of the Android team members who were working under Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, on this project. So they invited me into their cohort of innovators, and I ended up getting the first G1 Android device. And Android one was dropped where it wasn't even launched, the Android ecosystem. It was just a beta. So we got access to the developer kit, and we could start building. It was an incredible experience to be able to connect my native app and access the camera. We launched Zkatter on Android Market. There was, like, 150 apps on the App Store. So we raised in excess of a million dollars to pre-seed the company. But we were too early. Zkatter did not become the Instagram, TikTok, or X that we see today because it's not existing right now. We didn't have access to distribution because the app stores were new, and we were launching and helping these ecosystems to evolve. All the technical resources required to continue to iterate and build on unstable systems meant it to be very costly, time-consuming, and heavy. And what the biggest takeaway from some of this is that just because you have an idea that's so profound, if you don't have an addressable market or the ability to distribute your idea, you might end up being eaten by somebody that arrives on time. The product life cycle is very, very important, and being in the right place at the right time with the right technology. You often become an R&D lab for somebody that can take your idea and launch a better version of it because they are on time When you're working on something that means everything to you at the time, you're putting your heart in it, your soul, all your attention and passion is going into it, it becomes a way of life. When you climb that high, the fall is equally as heavy. I felt very, very down and, and depressed because I wanted it to become something that every member of the world would access to my product. But I think failure is great feedback. It tells you all the things that you don't wanna be doing next time. Failure means you tried, means you were actually the man in the arena, not the voice in the crowd. You were doing it. You put yourself out there. You were vulnerable enough to take the risk. You were prepared to be judged and observed for what you were doing, which is why our relationship with failure needs to change. What we need to do is we need to try and think how can we be like a kindergarten kid for life. They're not scared to fail. Nature is not scared to fail. Unfortunately, with adults, when we fall on the floor, we often run away and we never come back. Why? Because of shame, embarrassment, through all these things. It's so hard and so brutal when you fail, but there definitely needs to be a greater acknowledgement and understanding that this is part of the journey, and I'm not finished

5. 14:42 – 17:14

   The Key Difference: Good vs Great Founder

   1. MHMatt Hagger14:42

      yet. [gentle music] They always say work on the business, not in the business. If you work inside it for too long, you can suffocate and stifle the growth of the business because you are trying to be every member of your team. You're trying to over-control the outcome and the destination of what's going on. It can suck the energy from you and everybody that's in the company. When you're building a company, company means company, right? Doesn't mean you. It means a, a bunch of people all going in the right direction, all with the same aims and objectives. There are certain founders that are really good at scaling their business. They're really good at working on the business. I think they make great chief happiness officers as opposed to chief executive officers because they have the ability to bring people in and understand the type of people that their company needs when they need it, and empower those people to do their best work. I think working on the business is working on a mission where everybody that joins your company feel like it's their mission, too. For example, if I'm building Taletree, I'm gonna make sure that from the chief financial officer, chief legal officer, anybody down to the head of wellbeing, the person who would potentially be preparing food for the company, they would all have a deep and meaningful connection to the problem that we're solving. Have the vision and break down the miracle of the vision into bite-sized moments. Every single day has its own problems. Tomorrow, you have another set of problems. You just have to try and break this overwhelming vision down into bite-sized pieces and feel accomplished every time you achieve these small little milestones. And I always say miracles come from momentum. Momentum come from a succession of moments. So every day as you're completing and getting further towards the end goal, you're creating this momentum through continuing to attack every day the same and breaking things down. Working on that company always is, I think, the difference between being good and being great. These are the things that I've used to help me on my journey as an entrepreneur. [gentle music]

Episode duration: 17:15