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Ivan Mazour

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36
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2016-01-08
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2016-01-08
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1
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  1. “A year ago, and I'm hoping to at some point start my own family definitely within the next five years and be able to balance that with what I'm doing at a Metria. So Phil Wilkinson and I often have sort of jokes because he doesn't work weekends and I sort of call him a wimp for not working weekends.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So five years are definitely with a metro. We've got such a cool journey ahead of us. We're nowhere near ready to start thinking about finishing it. We're sort of three years into probably a 10-year journey, but if we can do it in eight, that works as well. Realistically, we've got a step-by-step process. We've launched the final version of our marketing automation platform recently. That's going to be sold within the UK market for the next 12 months to get us to the point that we can do a series A. And then we're going to hit international expansion. So really for me, that means I'm going to get an amazing team of VPs. I can hire people with experience. I can hire people that can really help me take this to another level above and beyond. I mean, I've got some great friends already that are running amazing businesses on behalf of other founders. And the things that I've learned from them, I'd love to have people like that in my organization. And on a slightly personal level, I got married.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I actually do have a headshot. I might be able to dig it out. It's definitely a photo of me in some glasses with a pudding bowl haircut, like long round haircut. We can make that work.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I don't, I don't. I actually, funnily enough, my mom tried to get me to wear glasses because I've got a cataract in one eye, which means one eye can't see. And the Russian doctors thought that was a good idea. So for a few years, I did even have glasses. No, no.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And I love maths, right? Yeah, so If that's the first thing you tell someone, that's probably not going to make the wannabe friends with you.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “My mom and me, I was foreign. I didn't necessarily have many friends when I was younger because I could barely speak English.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I mean, that's a really hard. I think I have two that formed my life. I'm not sure I can call them my favorite book, but I think it's relevant to discussion we've had. So one is Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And I have met a lot of people who I felt were thinking in the same way. And then an hour or so into the conversation, we'd be like, did you read that book when you were younger? And it'd be like, yes, yes, I did. It formulates a way of thinking that almost makes you entrepreneurial by nature. And I read that when I was 18, and it just changed my life. It meant that after university, I did try and pursue a career in banking, which with a master's degree from Cambridge, you sort of end up doing at that sort of time. I think that was vital. But the other one is Dale Carnegie with How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I read that a bit earlier. I was about 14. And I was a massive nerd. I was brought up here with my mom.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Email inbox, so I'll always get back to people if they send me a hangout. So I think that's more of a communication tool, but for me, I use that as a productivity tool because it means that I don't get interrupted by phone calls or text messages or anything else.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I'm surrounded by productivity tools. If I look at tabs that I've got open right now, to-doist for the task list, I just wish from any do. I used to love any do, but then they made it complicated. Google Keep for managing my main report. So I have a shared Google Keep with each. So, you know, Hannah Runs Marketing, Josh Run Sales, and so on. And so we picked that up every week in the morning on Monday. I absolutely cannot live without Google Hangouts. So on my blog, I have two posts, my communication protocol and my notification protocol, which I've spent a long time thinking about. People cannot call me. I don't pick up my phone. That doesn't happen. It's not an option. I don't read texts because it's another stream of messages in another inbox. What I do do is I reply to all emails ever. And I absolutely have Google Hangouts, which will pop up only during the moment that I'm in my”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's hilarious. No, no, but I actually do have a set of reasons behind that because it's also, it was very obviously a generic answer and it's the sort of question that you do tend to get asked. It's just I read his book and his book was absolutely epic and it really gave me an understanding of how he, I guess how he behaves and how he acts. And it polarized a lot of my founder friends. Half of them were like, oh God, he runs a horrible company. You know, I'd never want to work for him. And then half of my friends were like, well, actually, if you want to achieve something absolutely massive, that's the way you got to be and you make some sacrifices along the way. And I'm slightly more on that side in that I actually sit here and I have respect for all the sacrifices that he's made. It's not just him chilling there with his, you know, billions and his rockets. It really is a life that has been totally dedicated to achieving entrepreneurial perfection. And I think that is very much a reason to admire someone. So hopefully it's not just because I want to build spaceships, which I kind of”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Oh, that's really, really interesting. I think it's, I guess it's got to be Elon Musk. I think that sounds generic. You're probably tired of hearing that.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Within just a few years of making a few investments and thinking, I want to start a tech company to people sitting in a room of a company that I founded that I was the CEO of that, you know, I was surrounded by individuals that attend 20 years more experienced, much smarter than me talking about how we can make this an amazing company. And that moment has stuck in my head and that is definitely a highlight of my life, basically.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Do you know what? That's a really difficult one. I don't think it's quite a career highlight, but there's a moment that I remember, and I think we'll remember forever, of sitting in my boardroom when we just increased our board. We have some amazing advisors on our board. Our first investor director, Elizabeth Ling, was at eBay, a PayPal, at TalkTalk. She then ran one of the largest online retailers in the UK. She now heads up data science at El Savia. So she joined us. We have Dr. Mike Baxter who'd started a number of e-commerce technology companies and consults companies like Google and Dell and Argos and so on. We've got Ali Mitchell, the founder and president of Huddle. We have this, we have Terry Parsons, the CTO 192.com. These are sort of board. And I remember sitting in that room looking around these people, having a discussion about Emetria and how we could do it better. And I just, it dawned on me quite how far I'd managed to get.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Do you read Thomas Youngess, of course? Yeah, I mean, there's a few. There's David Skock, there's a few others as well, but really basically every morning, SASTA.com, especially now they've done this thing that picks up Cora through scraping and there's always new content on there every day. I love it. It's basically a guidebook for how to run a SaaS company. There's very little that I do that I didn't learn from his blog.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Go away. I do think one big thing will happen, which is that there will be a new e-commerce platform developed within the coming years that is based entirely around personalization. At the moment, you have to plug in a personalization provider and an additional platform that will sit and help you do product recommendations and slightly change the website and reorder things and so on. And that's extremely complicated and difficult to do. I think somebody will wake up to the fact that even the best platforms like Magento and Hybris and DemandWare aren't built to be able to do that and somebody will launch a platform that's built just for that and that will be a billion dollar company undoubtedly.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think brick and morts and mortar stores will definitely always remain. I think people don't want to live in a fully virtual world. I mean, I have to say, I would love to be able to do things like shopping in an entirely virtual environment because it seems like a waste of time to actually go to a physical shop. But I think I'm in the minority there. In reality, my wife is a fashion blogger. She would never accept that as a way of shopping. That would just never work. I think it's changing entirely that if you go into top shop now, one of the things they promote is the ability to go install, go on their website, buy something and have it delivered to your house. So effectively, it's no different to sitting at home on your computer, but you're being encouraged to come into the store to look around and discover new things, but then to make the full transaction through the e-commerce way of shopping and through obviously the sort of the delivery and logistics that match that. I think there's a huge change into what's happening with offline retail. But I don't think stores will ever...”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Because although the company was good and everything else was good, we hadn't moved far enough forward on the VC relevant metrics, which is basically the recurring revenue, for us to have needed to have that discussion about investing. So I think my biggest takeaway is to wait until you absolutely know you've hit all the numbers that are necessary to raise whatever round you're raising, and then just go out because you can close that round within a month if you've got everything in place.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I guess I would have probably the main learning, I would have probably waited a little bit longer to go out and speak to the VCs. I got a little bit overexcited because we were approached inbound by a number of different funds that were very good. And we get approached quite a lot by the usual principles that reach out and just want to have a half hour chat and then just want to record it in the CRM. But this was much more than that. This was several funds saying, look, we really like your company. We'd like to put you through the entire process of considering whether we should invest. And there were some big names that, you know, that I really wanted to work with. And so at that time, we had sort of revenue in the single digits of thousands, monthly recurring revenue and pounds. It was low. And I basically decided to carry on having the conversation, even though I kind of knew that we weren't really ready to raise at the valuation that we were expecting and that we ultimately ended up getting when we raised.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Of recurring monthly recurring revenue that was just going up and to the right and it was going up like a hockey stick. That was evidence that the idea that we initially had a year prior to that that the Angels invested in had been validated within the market and all we needed now was some capital to speed things up.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yes, so would the angel, it was all about here is the team. And at the time when we did the angel round, we didn't have revenue, we just had engagement metrics. So it was here are some beta clients who are using Emetria and they log in seven times a day and they absolutely love it. Here is the team, here's my CTO Al, who has a PhD in machine learning in artificial intelligence. Here's our chief customer officer, James. He's had a number of exits. He's been a tech entrepreneur for multiple decades. Here's my co-founder, Jalal, that's together with me founded in Over Capital, but also has a finance and design background. So we were the four founders and it was a combination of those founders plus the engagement on the platform that allowed me to close the Angel round and get people excited about what we were doing. With the VCs, it was actually really a chart.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Look, can you just speak to Phil? Phil's the e-commerce expert and he'll speak to you and then it turned out that I'd already tried to sell Emetria to Phil as a potential customer. So literally the world, everything just connected together and we met and we had a chat and we built a really strong sort of bond and friendship and Phil's an awesome entrepreneur. I think he's had, I think, five exits. And Alex is actually on my board now after the latest round. They are the second biggest institutional investor in Emetria. Alex Anson. Yeah, so I'm from Sachi Invest. He's an amazing guy with probably the best reputation in London. Everybody loves him. So no, I've really enjoyed working with all four of those guys.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Perfect That's good. I'll send you a list of a few more. And they are all amazing. So Maria was the founder of Angel Lab. And I'd invested maybe three, four times before that, but I met her and I was one of the founding members of Angel Lab when she set it up. And I think that was probably one of the best things that propelled me forward in terms of being able to truly get in front of the best companies, meet the best founders. So I'm extremely grateful for Maria and for her help and really for getting me to where I am today. Andy and Phil are also, I met them both actually at exactly the same time. Funnily enough, so I'd met Andy through an introduction. I mean, obviously he's founder of basically the best SaaS company to have come out of London. So an amazing investor. But separately, I'd been introduced to a company that Phil was involved with who then became a customer of Emetria. And Andy just said,”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yes, absolutely. So my experience had been as an angel. So I was very comfortable putting together the first angel round. It's something that I'd been on the other side of the table for many, many times. And so I raised that initial angel round from the most amazing founders, a small proportion of the round were people that I'd invested with together before. And they were the first ones to come in. And that was extremely helpful because, of course, they provided everyone else with a sense of confidence and validation about myself and about me, about my team. But actually,”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “More each time they renew, so it's been great. If you can do that, it's just the perfect business. So I'm not worried about SaaS as a sector becoming an issue for us, becoming almost too hot. But the little sub pockets within SaaS, I think we've seen a few particularly hot ones at the moment. Recruitment software, huge at the moment in SaaS. I think there's a potential risk to being in one of those if it follows the same cycle as I experienced in analytics.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Relevant to the investors anymore. And it really dissipated very quickly. There was an up and down within just a couple of years. And that really was fascinating to experience. We actually learned from the market that marketing was far more important, that retailers didn't want data. They wanted actions that drove engagement and revenue. And so Metri is actually a marketing automation platform, a customer inside and marketing automation platform. So we leveraged our understanding of the data to actually take actions. And that has actually allowed us very much to expand quickly and get the numbers and the metrics that we need that has allowed us to raise the round. So I think SaaS in itself will probably stay hot for a long time, purely because it is a great business model. It's a recurring revenue business model. If you can control Cha and we've had very, very negative revenue churn, we have people paying us much.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, you know what? There's actually a slightly separate aspect of hotness that I really experienced directly and personally. And that's the fact that we launched as an e-commerce analytics company. So my idea, having come out of Cambridge for the second time, I wanted to apply data to a massive market. E-commerce is a two to three trillion dollar market with retail being 10 times bigger than that. So it was clearly huge. And I initially had the idea of a metro being an e-commerce analytics company. And when we launched in 2013, analytics was one of the hottest things. So I remember funds being created, KPMG did a hundred million dollar fund just for analytics companies. It was perfect. By the time two years later, we came to raising our big ground, it had transpired that one analytics wasn't interesting or relevant to the market, but two, analytics wasn't even that interesting or relevant.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “In you. So the other side of the barbell is there, but it does very much require you to have the metrics and to be a good company. There's no way that you can trick people by the time you've come out of your beta stage or your launch stage. At that point, the only thing that matters are the numbers”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Of the investors, and that does actually make it very hard for some of the companies that are maybe better equipped, so they might have a better team or a better understanding of the market. It just makes it harder for them to get the attention that they need. So that's the battle at the lower end, which is the heavier end, I guess, of the barbell. Certainly at the late stage, if you have your metrics, you will just have your funding. It really comes down to that. If you're a fast-growth, my experience has been SaaS. That's because metric is a SaaS business. But, you know, if you have a fast-growth recurring revenue business, it's growing 300% plus. You've hit that 1, 2 million and your recurring revenue number. There is no question that you will raise your round. You might, if you're extremely hot in terms of your growth, raise it from the top tier VCs, the ones everyone knows. If you're not quite hot enough, there will be a multitude of funds who'd be happy to invest.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit of a one-sided barbell as well, though, because there really is a huge amount of funding available at the early, early, early stage. I mean, I'm a mentor at a few of the accelerators. Typically, my advice is obviously fundraising is sort of 90% of the questions that you have during those conversations. My advice is always that absolutely anyone can raise an SEIS round today. It is a case of working really hard at it. It's a case of reaching out to potentially a thousand people. But to raise £150,000 where the government is pretty much underwriting that entire investment is possible for just about anyone with any idea, any slide deck. And that's pretty extreme, actually, because I have to say there are lots and lots of companies that are out there and they are vying for the attention of the investors, for the eyeballs, for the mind share.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Next year, which will be double digit millions and dollars, and which will really allow us to set up offices internationally and have the huge growth in terms of sales and marketing. And with the recent fundrais, what do you make of the funding environment and the landscape at the moment? Well, so actually the main thing that I'm seeing right now is this concept of a second seed. It's because the Sumiz A rounds have become so large. $15 million Series A round is not abnormal these days. That's absolutely standard. And that does mean that, of course, you have to have very significant contraction. And getting that traction is surely possible, but it's pretty likely that unless you're one in a million, unless you're a Xenophots, for example.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “A second seed, a seed plus, a seed extension round. It's one of those, basically. Is it a bridge round? I love the bridge round. See, the thing with a bridge round is actually I'm not against calling it a bridge round because ultimately it is bridging us to the Series A, but it is significantly bigger than our previous round, and it is what once would have been called its two and a half million dollars. So that would have certainly been a series A a few years ago. The reality is these days that's not enough to build the huge scalable sales and marketing machine than one would need. And that's really what a series A round is about. It's about building an expansive sales and marketing strategy. So this round was very much for us to take the team from 20 to 30 people to improve our product and hire even more engineers and to make a difference to sales and marketing, of course. I've doubled my sales team, but it's not quite a true Series A, which we're looking for.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Because if you're going to invest £1, £2,000, one, the best companies won't take you and two, you've still not really get any communication. You wouldn't be able to learn from it. So I settled on an amount which is the usual sort of angel investor amount of sort of, you know, 20, 30,000 pounds, which would give me the ability to learn about how that founder was running that business. And, you know, in some way, try and help in the early stages. There was very little I could do to help. And over these four years, I really got to a point where hopefully people see me as a value add investor. But that really was my reasoning behind and making those investments as a stepping stone to becoming a tech founder. Talk of investing, a huge congratulations to you for raising another round with Amatria. So can you tell us a little bit about the latest round of funding for Amatria? Well, so it's actually a second seed. We can talk about that as well. There's a bit of a trend right now for doing a...”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Best people become technology founders. And so I knew I had to learn. And if you think about it, there's only a number of ways that you can learn. You can learn from books and by reading. And there's some amazing blogs. And I'm sure we'll have a chance to sort of talk about them later. And you can learn from people. And I love reading biographies. At the moment I'm reading biography of John D. Rockefeller, but actually getting involved in some way with the people that were at the forefront of the technology scene in London seemed to be the best way of learning. And so I realized that by making investments, I would be able to be on the inside of some of the best companies led by the smartest people who've already had the experience and therefore were most likely to succeed. And then I actually stopped and thought about, well, you know, how much capital am I going to be able to allocate to this? And how much do I need to invest in each company to be taken seriously as an investor?”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Company. I learned enough from the investment side and I learned enough by going back to university and refreshing my knowledge of mathematics to go and build a data company. And here I am today as the CEO of Emetria. And it's very interesting that you started off then as an investor and then became the founder of a tech company. We often hear the alternative being that you obviously found a tech company and then move into the investment side. How do you think then that founding the company after investing helped you? So I actually took a very structured approach to it and I wrote a blog post many, many years ago which is still up on my blog as my approach to investment which quite literally talks about the fact that my dream for all of this is to build a truly world leading technology company but that I accept the fact that I don't have the experience and that it is a very very competitive industry in that only the”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “mathematics that I'd studied, all of the kind of the nature that I had, to be quite a sort of data focused person. And so I decided to leverage some of the proceeds from the company that I built in Nova Capital, which was a property development business, together with my co-founder, my business partner, Jalel. And we started making angel investments into technology just to learn about the industry, really, just as our way of leveraging our interest of technology into something that could potentially become relevant for business. And that then took over my entire life. So within four years, I'd made 30 investments. I'd stopped property development. I'd gone back to Cambridge to do another year of mathematics to get a master's in computational statistics and applied probability. And then I came back and I decided that it was time to start my own technology.”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So following up, basically I'm Russian by birth. I was born in Moscow. My parents both had PhDs and my mother brought me to the United Kingdom to study mathematics at Cambridge. I was eight when she decided that for me, but it took me 10 years, but I did end up studying Master Cambridge. So I was a nerd. I was probably the geekiest person at all the schools I ever went to. I was banned from using computers at two of my schools for trying to hack the network and all sorts of things. And then I ended up starting my first company in a very non-geeky industry in property because in the UK that was what was the biggest, most publicly visible industry to get involved with as an entrepreneur or the books or the TV shows or the media, that's what they were talking about, property. And then at around the age of 26, 27, I found myself not really utilizing the...”

    2016-01-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 029: VC vs Angel Funding & The Future of E-Commerce with Ivan Mazour, Founder @ Ometria · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source