Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
00:01:21 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:01:21] S1: Alrighty. James, good to have you. Thanks for having me. Maybe just like a short intro about myself and then about yourself because we're talk... We'll be talking, like, mostly about you now. Curious about your entrepreneurial journey. A little bit about myself. I'm Calin Fabri. I'm the host of Venture Europe, which is, like, the biggest independent media in Europe. We reach around 100,000 people monthly. And on the side, I coach, tech CEOs and help them with the fundraise for series b or series c, mostly from the side of storytelling. This is about me. Let's talk a little bit about James. James, you're the CEO of ProFound. You recently announced a €100,000,000 Series d round backed by Sequoia, Kleiner, Lightspeed, and others. And what you are doing is AI agentic for marketing. Yeah. But I guess we'll get into that and get more specific maybe with time. But maybe let's let's start, like, with with your childhood because you had this entrepreneurial instinct from the early days. From my research, I've learned that you've been selling candy, you know, in the, I don't know, primary or high school playground. Tell us about that story. [00:02:41] S0: I mean, I don't I I don't actually talk about that much. I feel like it's a very common story for people that build businesses, like large businesses. You you... If you trace back enough, I feel like it always starts quite young. Yeah. Fun fact. I actually... And I've never said this before. It wasn't actually candy. It was in high school, and it was bacon sandwiches. [00:03:01] S1: Okay.
00:03:01 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:03:01] S1: Okay. [00:03:02] S0: The the the the food at my high school sucked. And there was this cafe around the corner that if you called them, this is before Uber Eats, you'd call them and they would come and deliver bacon sandwiches. And everyone loved these bacon sandwiches. And what I could... The the the the rule, the arbitrage, you could say, was that you had to, like, leave the school premises, which you weren't allowed to do. Right. So I'd have to run out of the school premises, grab a bag of the bacon sandwiches, and then I'd come back onto the school playground and, yeah, mark those things up and, make a make a tidy profit. [00:03:34] S1: You actually... You say that this is a common story that you can trace back in most of the entrepreneurs, and also you kinda hear it for Warren Buffett. Used to sell newspaper, right, like, when he was five or six. Like, do you think there is a gene, or do you think there is something kinda inherent to people that wanna start businesses, like, at a early stage? And do you... And then, like, do you think entrepreneurship can be thought?
00:04:01 · James Cadwallader
[00:04:01] S0: I don't know if I'd say entrepreneurship can be taught per se. I think it has to be a natural interest. Like, to me, I know it sounds it sounds a bit blunt, but like making money and like trying to make money even when with... When I was selling bacon sandwiches, it was like fun. It was like an interesting thing to do. I found it attractive as my idea. I think you need to have that kind of interest. I laugh with my with my wife that, you know, if I was... If you put me on a beach, after, like, twenty four hours of relaxing, I'd be driving myself crazy. I would be, you know, I read books about founders, about business people. That, like, that's my idea of fun. So if I'm taking the day off, like I tend I tend to work. I go to the office six days a week. I tend to take Sundays off. Well, my relaxation on a Sunday will quite often be watching like a David Senra podcast or Right. You know, watching interviews with people that I admire. So I just find it naturally interesting. And I think that probably has to be true. I think it's hard if you're not naturally inclined. Because it's the the nature of starting a business or being a founder is so self starting. Like, you know, quite often, this sounds crazy, but quite often, I don't... There's nothing to do in a weird way. Like, there's no... No one's given you a list of things. You you have to figure out what to do. And it's like very... You need to have an internal nuclear reactor that can kind of drive you and make you curious and make you wanna push on things. So you have to have that drive to wanna learn, to wanna study, to wanna dig in, like, to ask questions, to challenge things. So I think it's like a very inward facing engine that has to exist. But I guess you can learn it. You can kinda teach yourself it, I suppose.
00:05:52 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:05:52] S1: I guess it kinda takes a lot of energy to learn about the things that you don't know. So every day, you have to be slightly obsessed about learning more and pushing. So it's just like a lot of push. To your point, like, no one is going to come, like, with a task list. So then you need to figure out, like, what you need to do and what are the priorities to move the business forward. [00:06:12] S0: Yeah. [00:06:13] S1: And walk us through, like, your first business, Kyra. Like, what are the things that you've learned there that you apply now at ProFound? Yeah. I mean, [00:06:22] S0: I I had businesses before Kyra. So Kyra was a marketing tech company that we started in London. Prior to that, I'd started other things, actually, outside of tech. I traded gold, and I spent time in China, like, importing products from China. And learned to speak Chinese Mandarin and kind of yeah. I was like doing things before Kyra. But when I was at 23, I met... Because I didn't go to university. So I suppose that's the... I had a... You know, the... From the age of 18 to 23, while my friends were at university, I was like trying to start businesses. And then I guess my... I got my mind open to tech. So this is in London in like 2013. Mhmm. I'd say the London tech scene still, even today, is not Silicon Valley as much as we want it to be. Like, you know, we call... We had Silicon Roundabout back then in Old Street. So I started going and hanging out around there, and I met some cofounders on Reddit. And we launched... [00:07:24] S1: Yeah. We Reddit?
00:07:24 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:07:24] S1: Yeah. We Reddit? [00:07:25] S0: Yeah. They were on, like, r slash London and... Or maybe r slash startupslondon or something. And we built a consumer app in 2013 that helped you find things to do in the city, which was this, like, social mobile local period that everyone was into back then. It was a bit of a smash hit. It went super parabolic, and we got millions of users, but we couldn't monetize it. So we basically started pivoting into like advertising and like working with brands to monetize what this consumer product that I'll spare the details, but like, we went through lots of iterations of that business and ended up with kind of like a pseudo software based agency where we connected large enterprise brands with content creators. And I worked on that until 2022. And I, yeah, I I left that business in 2022, had like a mini exit. I mean, that business was fucking hard. It sucked at times. Yeah. [00:08:31] S1: Why was it hard? [00:08:33] S0: It was just like pushing every day, pushing a heavy boulder up a steep hill. And I think like the the the biggest lesson that I took from that business is like, you know, the the market is everything. [00:08:53] S1: The market is everything.
00:08:53 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:08:53] S1: The market is everything. [00:08:55] S0: Like you can have the analogy I use. I I like I like analogies. The the the analogy that I've used is like the the team are the rowers. So you have a team of rowers, you know, rowers. Then the product is the boat that you're in. So you have a boat. And then the market is the river. Mhmm. And, like, you can have, like, a bunch of fat guys in a skiff on the rapids, and you're gonna go very far, very fast. [00:09:26] S1: Right. [00:09:26] S0: Or you can have, like, Olympian rowers in a polycarbonate, perfectly tuned boat The opposite. Going the opposite direction, and you're not gonna get very far. So I think, like, so much of... And, like, when when I had... When I stopped... You know, when when... Before I started ProFound, I spent so much time, I joined an accelerator called South Park Commons, and I was just obsessed with markets. I'd say tailwinds or markets are interchangeably. Because it's not just size of market. Don't just wanna pick a big market. You wanna pick like a... Markets are not, you know, they're they're they're not static. Mhmm. They move, and they got that... You know, market is either growing or dying, basically. Yep. And really, you wanna pick a market that's gonna grow really, really fast. And ideally, you time it well and try to be early, but there's a lot of black magic in that early stage because if you're a little bit... You know, if you're a year too early, you're toast. And if you're a year too late, you're toast. So you have to, like, time it very well.