Jeremy King On Raising $104 Million To Give You The Right Insight At The Right Time

Jeremy King’s tech startup has already raised over $100M on its journey to help equip B2C companies to speed up their own growth, and make intelligent, data-driven decisions. His venture has attracted financing from top-tier investors like GR Capital, Kismet Capital Group (KCG), New Enterprise Associates, and Social Capital Hedosophia. Interested in sponsoring this show or podcast ads for your business? Go to Zencastr and fill out the contact information so Zencastr can help you, bring your business story to life.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How consumer data can enable better decision making
• Jeremy’s top advice when starting a business
• What to expect in investor meetings
• How to try out Attest’s data and insights for free

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For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400 million (see it here).

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

About Jeremy King:

Jeremy founded Attest in mid-2015, following 9 years leading global teams across industries at McKinsey & Company. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, originally trained as a scientist with a focus on genetics, ecology and animal behaviour, and also helps to improve state primary schools with his charity work.

Connect with Jeremy King:

• Crunchbase
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

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Alejandro: Alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today. We have a really interesting founder I think that we’re gonna be learning quite a bit about the unique investor meetings about raising money about building scaling and everything in between. So I guess we fell fartherdo. Let’s welcome our guest today Jeremy King: King welcome to the show. No. So originally obviously you know you have your parents from the Us. But you were born and raised in London so give us how walk through memory lane. How was life growing up there.

Jeremy King: Thank you so much delighted to be here and excited to chat.

Jeremy King: Slightly confusing in that as a kid I constantly thought that we would be moving back to live in the us in various places but I was growing up english and I was the youngest of about 30 cousins and they all knew about these. Weird english relatives that they had living in London and every now and then we’d show up in the states and say hello with funny accents and be talking about some different crazy words. Um, and it’s the manifestation I have now is I’ve I’ve traveled a lot in the us I lived in Boston for a while. My wife is Australia and I live in London. But I don’t really hear in english different accents unless I try I can tell who is american who is canadian maybe which state you’re from maybe where you’re from in the Uk. But only if I actively listen and that’s kind of a bit of a gift in that the world is you know much more open and level. It’s also a bit of a curse in that I don’t really know who anyone is and. um’ we’re very confused by all of this so quite entertaining quite fun and it’s it’s fun to bounce back and forth between 2 countries like we do at a test. 

Alejandro: Hey well for sure you got the british accent and I guess you know here with my spanglist you know accent to we got the battle of accents going on. So I’m sure that the listeners are going to appreciate that. So so Jeremy King: let me ask you this I mean in your case, you went on to um to Edinburgh to study biology I mean out of all things biology.

Jeremy King: Um.

Alejandro: So how do you land? you know studying biology.

Jeremy King: Well in the uk. Weirdly, your your major or what you study in undergrad isn’t necessarily related to your career. It’s it’s much more of a qualification. Did you go to college and did you do a subject which you know different employees consider to be hard or challenging. Some. Some degree subjects at college are related to your career. So it’s difficult to be an engineer if you didn’t start engineering. It’s difficult to be a doctor if who didn’t study medicine but everything else is quite freeform so the choice of biology was much more around my personal interests I’ve always been fascinated by. Underwater worlds natural worlds ecosystems how different animals interact with each other. Why tuna are so streamlined in the engineering of the internal blood flow um system of a tuna. All of those types of things I found out to be amazing and I went to uni in college to learn more about that because it was. Getting the qualification but it was also fun to learn and I really personally enjoyed it and it’s quite liberating in the u k that you have this choice and it doesn’t really dictate what job you go for after um, it was then unusual to look at a whole bunch of jobs in business. And compare doing that against doing a ph d in more biology and a whole bunch of other things I thought about but that’s why I chose biology and I was lucky to study genetics and synthetic biology and mathematical modeling of animal behavior and I developed a real love for stats and data and many of those things are things that we bring to life at a test. Today. The things that I believe in things that we believe in and things that we want more of in the world and that’s inspired by starting out as a scientist.

Alejandro: So how do you end up in Mckinsey because I mean going from thinking about blood flowing in tuna to makisia it is is quite ah, quite a jump there hey jerey.

Jeremy King: Well I can tell you the the version I told them would that be interesting. Yeah, so so so like in any big kind of application to ah a big company I was looking for a way to stand out. Um, and.

Alejandro: First go for it.

Jeremy King: My method was as follows. So I basically said in the interview you have lots of how you trained economics or business or um engineers and that makes up seventy eighty sometimes 90% of many Mckinsey intakes and cohorts. So I’m clearly something else. The weird thing is. The more I’ve learnedt about consulting and about mckinsey it seems that what you do is you take larger data sets and then you sort of interrogate them to figure out. You know what is the pattern. No one else is seeing you have to present that in an executive summary. You have to show your method and you’re working and why that. Conclusion is robust you have to constantly challenge the assumptions of look for flaws and test whether you have bias in the method and what you do at Mckinsey is basically identical to what we do in biology where. We don’t have an executive summary. You have an abstract where you have to write a very synthesized version of what you’ve done. We do have huge data sets and you have to find the alchemy of what’s in there that no one else can see and that’s the value you’re adding you have to survive peer review. You have to uncover your own bias. So the very scientific method that I’ve been doing for 4 years means that I’ve been doing. Mckinsey for 4 years more than everyone else in the application pool and that’s why I think I can be effective in this role because I’ve already been trained to do this the bit I don’t have is business but we all know that that’s secretly a little bit easy and that’s what I’m here to learn so I’m coming this different direction and the question of you is is that interesting. Um. So I was trying to stand out and make it a bit weird and unfortunately for mckinsey it worked.

Alejandro: Now now with there you work for quite a while I mean you were for like 8 years and that was like pre-mba and postnba. so so why? why the Nba I mean why did you decide. It was a good idea to do on and Nba.

Jeremy King: 2 main reasons for me personally um, one because I I studied biology I didn’t understand some of the basics of business I didn’t you know, even after a couple of years work at Mckinsey I knew a lot about how to do consulting how businesses work. How decisions are made how boards and executive teams work and you. You know travel around the world solving these extremely unsolvable and difficult problems and somehow with a laptop and a positive attitude and great teamwork and great values and things like that. But I didn’t have a complete understanding of of business I couldn’t really read a balance sheet i. Had never worked in manufacturing or supply chain I didn’t really even have an appreciation about how that bitter business worked I hadn’t really met people who weren’t consultants. Those are the only people I come across or clients. Um, and those are very specific situations. So I I was missing some of the fundamentals. So. Unlike most people going to business school I actually went there to learn stuff about business because for me, it was filling in some really big material gaps that I had the other bit is in many consulting firms including Mckinsey you cannot reach the next level unless you leave for 2 years and do something else and the most classical thing to do is an Mba and I was lucky that. Mckinsey offered to pay for me to do that and I jumped the opportunity. It’s probably the greatest gift I’ve ever received and probably the greatest gift I will ever receive and I absolutely loved every second met all sorts of fascinating people met many of my best friends there also met my wife there traveled to lots of different.

Alejandro: Wow.

Jeremy King: Destinations and learn lots of crazy things and I really try to use that time for maximum effect because deep down I’m like Johnny 5 in sport circuit trying to gain input and learn things about the world and business school was a great place to do that.

Alejandro: Wow I mean Harvard business school too. I mean obviously the the network that you build there is probably is remarkable and if you combine that with a network of Mckinsey I mean a combination that is magical so in your case, you actually went back to Mckinsey. Probablyly because you had to fulfill. You know, whatever amount of time that you had committed to for them. You know, allowing you to do the Mba but then was were were you already like the was the seat already planted of of you wanting to build your own company after the Nba or or how did that happen.

Jeremy King: Um, yeah.

Jeremy King: It was during um so the people that I met along the way that I really admired during the and Nba they were people who’d started businesses to me that looked like magic I I talked to them and I thought how on earth did you incorporate the company in the Us or in Europe how did you. Ah, range accountants how and how did you start to hire people this just as seems impossible. They were like oh that’s the easy bit incorporation 10 minutes $15 get accountants. There’s loads of accountants. You just tell them a problem and you pay them a nominal fee. There’s loads of support out there for you. There’s loads of vc funding all these things work in your favor. All you need to do is just you know take the risk to start and I thought these people were magic. They were like michael jordan and and serena williams to me I thought they were incredible and. What they told me is a you can do this b you just need to have the right set of ideas and the right attitude and it’s out there for the taking and so what I learned is. It’s not magic the bits that I thought were hard are easy. The bits that are hard. Ah, the bits that I kind of wanted to learn and for me, it became a very natural conclusion to to go and do that myself. Um. The biggest barrier for me personally was convincing myself to to not stay at mckinsey and it’s a wonderful career path certainly nothing wrong with it many things right with it and it felt like a really big deal but every bit of advice I got was try it. What’s the worst that can happen. Um and never look back.

Alejandro: So then.

Jeremy King: Forever grateful for the time at Mckinsey and Harvard business school. But I think in many ways that helped set me up for some of the things that um I’ve enjoyed most at attest and learned from.

Alejandro: And obviously I mean Mckinsey 8 years I mean that’s ah, a long time to work in in corporate. So so bring us back. What was that day like when you realize it’s time to to go at it and you know when you actually you know decided to put your notice in and take the leap of faith. So.

Jeremy King:  I basically had a number of people tell me that you need to stop thinking about this and intellectualizing because the 1 thing that all great entrepreneurs do is they actually take the leap and actually go out and get it and do it. Ah. And I was thinking about you know could I start a business part time on the side could I do this in the background could I hire a small team build an Mvp while still at Mckinsey and kind of hedge my bets and every single person who I thought was credible told me you have to completely burn the bridge. No going back. You must go. All in on this thing because not just because that’s what investors want. That’s what the people who would join you in this venture. That’s what they will expect That’s what you should expect from yourself and if you don’t believe it enough to go for it then you’ve got more work to do and so every bit of logic and advice I got and I’m forever grateful to those people and. 1 of them was Matt Prince at cloudflare. He gave me very short words of wisdom but very pertinent that basically said you should do this and you have to burn all the bridges and just go for it. Otherwise you’ll never know and no, you’ll never do it as well as you can um that just said go for it. And there wasn’t a single moment where it dawned on me in the shower or I spotted a gap in the market I don’t have ah a shark tank or dragons den moment like that. It’s an accumulation of experiences and view of the world and beliefs that at some point hit a threshold where I was like I’m just going to go out and try this.

Alejandro: I.

Jeremy King: Because the first action is the most important. Well I did do the exact opposite of what I just said for a month so before starting the company before we incorporated before we started building mvps and talking to investors and employing people and writing code.

Alejandro: So then what what happened next.

Jeremy King: I wanted to prove a few bits of hypothesis to myself and there was 1 particularly weird moment so before starting a test I was trying to figure out the hypothesis that the demand for great data about consumers and consumer insight and knowledge and continuous insight is far broader. Meets the eye everyone in every b two c business wants to be more customer centric and data driven I believed but I didn’t really know that it was you know high belief but no validation. So I I came up with the best validation I could and I went to Waterloo station which is just you. You know near the house of parliament in London quite near where I lived at the time and I went to 2 stores on the upper level if anyone’s seen the born e entity. that’s the that’s the station they run through. There’s kind of a downstairs of all the trains there and upstairs wisdom some shops and all the notice boards I went to 2 of the shops upper level and I went to the store managers. Stores were links of London that sell accessories and tie clips and cufflinks and lots of cool things like that and then Keels which is a skincare and health care company I went a store managed and said what don’t you know about the people of Waterloo station that you wish you knew and they. Out came this tsunami of emotion and lack of awareness and gap they said I don’t know why people kind of don’t come into the store. Do. They even know that we’re here. What do people want to buy when they’re coming through water station. Is it gifts is it this is it that I can tell you what we’re selling I can tell you what head office sends us. What I don’t know is what’s the unfulfilled demand. Why doesn’t every single person walk into our store. What would they want from us that we’re not doing right now and both of the store managers said very similar things. They had very similar problems and when I asked them what are you doing about this right now they said nothing I just hope i. Stock up the store I do the best marketing I can I rely on central functions to give me that but I know Waterloo is different I just can’t say why or what I should do about it I was like right here we go. This is super interesting. So I physically went around Waterloo station and. Each store interviewed a hundred people with a clipboard while they were waiting for their trains and gathered the answers to this question and there were 2 remarkable things that happened one is I personally tabulated that data of a weekend. Um, you know, holding holding a packet of chips. And a soft drink can tabate this data and turn it into the conclusions and I went back to the saw managers with the answer to their question said here’s the things that you wish you knew about the people of Waterloo station that would cause you to meet your quarterly revenue targets and here’s what you should do about it and they were they both said.

Jeremy King: This is the most interesting has ever happened I’m immediately going to bring over all of the team I’m immediately going to send this head office I’m super excited to do all of these things and it was for them alchemy the other weird thing that happened was one of the people accent interviewed end up being the London and southeast england area manager of links one of the stores and she was like. Beep are you doing doing research unlicensed unsanctioned on behalf of links and who are you? What are you doing I was like okay I’m onto something here. Both of those said there is big demand for information and also someone is going to try to control this but deep down it’s going to help you achieve more revenue and that told me. We’re on to something here with the test the early genesis of the product. It was solving this much much wider problem than the existing market research industry covers the demand really was everywhere and we proved that out with more actions over time but the genesis was two months before I even incorporated the company I ran this you know. Self-proving and market validating exercise in waterley station and it was really quite weird.

Alejandro: Wow Now for the people that are listening to get it like what ended up becoming the business model of of the company like how do you guys make money.

Jeremy King: So we we charge an annual subscription. Um to basically get data or show things to to or from the customers that you wish you knew the most about but have no access to um. Most of our customers are b to c companies and they use our product to understand their target mec market better in order to grow revenue faster. Um, the specific ways they do that is I’ve got 30 ideas for a new product or campaign and I want to know which one’s going to work in which country and which language. For whom and which reasons or I’m considering launching in a bunch of different markets or sectors who am I competing against and what do those people care about um these target customers. They’re not in my crm they aren’t my existing customers. They don’t give me feedback I can’t email them. They don’t respond to my campaigns That’s why I need to reach them. That’s why this is the most valuable thing and that’s the problem that a test solves we make it very easy to reach the customers that you wish you knew about, but you have no access to right now and deep down all of our customers use that to grow revenue faster be right? launch the right products build the right things and. That’s a very valuable problem and that’s quite fun to do. Um, we call it continuous insights because that’s what our product gives you you buy it on an annual basis and you can use it every day to generate this data that solves your most valuable valuable growth problem. But every single customer and user uses our product and completely you different way and that’s kind of. The most exciting bit but also the most terrifying bit as we build a product and a company around this very very wide opportunity.

Alejandro: And in terms of um, you know, like really building building the the the platform in the service that you guys are providing here I mean it sounds like quite technical. So how did you go about building the team. You know the the early members.

Jeremy King:  Yeah, the first the first two years really were about building the backend architecture so there was a branch very early on where we could build ah a cheap cheerful and very simple version. Um, which we did. But then we immediately threw it away because it taught us. For the long term to build a really big company that could be at global scale and work at huge transaction volume that we have today we would need to build the architecture right from the beginning so we we set out to build a microservices architecture because we knew that we would be adding. All sorts of different components of capabilities and video and audio and different languages and different conditional logic in very advanced forms of research statistical analysis made easy for cmos who know that they want statistical robustness but have no idea how to go about it. It was. We need to to solve that all in the product so we set out our architecture and the first two years were really building the backend. There was very little you could see we had no revenue to show for it. We had no visible product really, it gradually came into into the light in mid 2017 and that’s when we first started really having commercial success but first two years were building the thing that would support the next four or five years of growth um and we were lucky to get venture funding very very early on and that’s what allowed us to do it this way.

Alejandro: And in terms of a venture funding I mean you guys have raised quite a bit. You guys have raised over a hundred million a hundred and four million to be more precise but how has been the journey of raising that money and going through the different financing cycles for you. Ah.

Jeremy King: We’ve done that across 4 4 rounds so we had a very early seed round then we had a sort of more normal seed round a little bit later than that then we ran a big series a that was led by any e a um, big Silicon Valley investor that was. Q 2 2019 and then most recently we’ve raised with a number of new investors another sixty five plus million and that was in August September Twenty Twenty one so over the course of those rounds we were building out the product and then we had very good early commercial traction and that’s. Accelerated and that led the link between the seed and the series a and the series b um, the crucial moments for us have been twofold one. We launched our first arr ah product on November the first twenty seventeen that was a big moment for us. We did that about six months earlier than we originally thought we’re like I was ready. Let’s take the risk we. Moved all of our existing customers from this kind of ad hoc usage where they would use our product when they felt like it and we said nope you should do this all the time and we’re going to cause you to do it that way huge risk but that really paid dividends in that we grew to 1000000 ar ah and larger very quickly. Um with great retention metrics great um great cac payback and sales cycle metrics. So many many good Sas metrics some that we you know weren’t so good. Um, and then our series a was about a making that all bigger and in more places and b filling in the gaps and the saas metrics that we’d either. Consciously ignored or hadn’t quite cracked yet. Um still working all of those things and that’s why we’re not Nasdaq listed yet.

Alejandro: So then in in in this regard I mean tell us about this funny story that you had at at a series B meeting with an investor. What happened there.

Jeremy King:  Yeah, there was 1 particularly unique meeting where you know most most Vc meetings go a similar way. What’s the founding story tell us more about you. Let’s have a look at the metrics we’re going to calibrate that about what matters for us. We’re going to talk about that like that’s how most. Vc meetings go and that’s a wonderful way to you know introduce companies to investors to figure out what we can do together and that’s always quite a fun process. There was one that really stood out and I shouldn’t name the fund but it was in the bay area and they’re quite distinctive and unique. Where the meeting had the exact opposite process. So I walked into the room and the person said very interesting. Love you to meet you? Um, ah you know I read the deck obviously but what’s more interesting is since this specific frontend engineer joined you’ve been releasing an average. 7.4 times per day rather than 5 before they joined is that attributable solely to that one person or is that something that you were doing more generally and it’s just you know beta rather than alpha and like oh wow and they named the person I was like okay this is very different and they said then they said. What’s also interesting. Is it. It looks like this is your best performing inbound lead generation. Go-to-market campaign and um, but it seems to be positioned at this company size and that doesn’t fit with what you’re telling me about your average contract value in your sales cycle. So if this is indeed your best performing asset. Um, then how is that compatible with you know the rest of your business and you trying to change your strategy to play more into this sort of thing is that what I’m seeing here and it became very clear that this fund had aggregated all possible. You know overt public information. They’d screen scraped our web traffic. They’d mapped our Linkedin to that web traffic and they’d basically done some amazing data science jazz and I said okay, what are you looking at here because it was clearly looking a laptop. He flipped around the laptop. It was basically a bloomberg terminal about a test that was almost as good as our salesforce looker. Another. You know m I and bi toolset but reverse engineered outside in and he’d come up with all of these different hypotheses and the conversation was about testing them I was like immediately. This is very interesting, extremely unique. How have you come up with this blah blah blah blah blah. But’s a particularly surprising moment and you know for many european founders going into and Silicon Valley or Bay Area funds the process is very similar sometimes it’s very different and that was a particularly fun and spicy one for me and I enjoyed that conversation so much. Yeah.

Alejandro: Yeah, no kidding I mean that’s like going into an x-ray and you know everything is a fully visible. So unbelievable. That’s unbeli now for the people that are listening to get um a good understanding of the scope and size of a test day today I mean how. Ah, because the business how many employees or anything else that you feel comfortable sharing. Yes.

Jeremy King: Yeah, so we’re we’re today about one hundred and sixty team members split across London New York and then we have a bunch of people who work in all sorts of other places. We are pretty much half r and d that being engineering product design data science. Um, very big part of how we solve the problem and that we that is behind our mission and vision is fundamentally making very powerful and high quality research easy and accessible to the point where you can use it any day every day for every decision because that’s what. Most companies want to do and that’s why we invest so much in product and design and data science to make that retain that power but make it easy because you know all of the work behind that. That’s our problem to solve and the market desperately wants more data more clarity more customer centricity. And we need to make it easy enough that they can actually do it. Um, the other half our business is a very classical b two b saas go-to-market model. So we have marketing revops sales and cs and we um, we. Most of the time don’t really compete with anybody which means that we set the rules about how we how we go to market how people buy and that gives us a very short sale cycle but with quite a high average deal value and then our biggest focus is on. You know, expanding customer engagement and usage over time. We only charge for 1 thing which is useful data output um, we do that on an ar-only basis but it means that it’s very clean as a customer you only pay for useful stuff. You effectively only pay for what you use. And our job is to convince you that you can achieve this and that you should use it more and for more things and if you do we all win and that’s you know, very simple, very authentic and very clean and that means that we ah you know are also measurable as a saas business and that makes it easy to. Hire people consistently easy to measure ourselves easy to find out where’s areas to improve and scalability is also very you know very easy in theory. Not always that easy in practice.

Alejandro: Now Imagine you go to sleep tonight Germian you wake up in a world where the vision of a test is fully realized what does that world look like.

Jeremy King: Oh I have never spoken about this publicly before it’s a great question so you know what is mission accomplished effectively. Yeah, so.

Alejandro: Yeah, let’s hear it.

Jeremy King: Recap on our mission and then I’ll describe mission accomplished so we exist to inform every intuition and dissolve any doubt by making it very easy for anyone to uncover opportunity with consumer data and consumer inputs. Um, and we say inform intuition and dissolve doubt because. Great marketers, great people who work in b toc companies. They have all sorts of ideas about what their target customers. Want how to win what to launch where to go what to build who to compete with should we price higher lower should we make it purple or green should we get namar or tiger woods to be the face of our brand all of these things are intuitions. Um, we exist to. Add new data and input from those target customers to inform those intuitions. We’re not saying what is right? or wrong. We is helping you make a better decision with more input from the people that you you know that will decide whether you win or lose which are the customers dissolve any doubt many times you know it’s difficult to make bold moves because it’s not supported by evidence or. So many bold moves you could make you. It’s difficult to choose so we dissolve any doubt by saying you can become so confident in doing great research that you can make bold moves and you you know it doesn’t actually feel bold. It looks bold but you’re so convinced by having the right data and the right basis for for choice that you can. Do bold things and this leads to ah you know this is a real example bloom and wild which is europe’s number 1 online flowers retailer. They’ve become that over the last four years um they completely stopped because of a test completely stopped selling red roses at valentine’s day. Because it’s the wrong choice for consumers they delisted the number 1 selling skew at Valentine’s day and that achieved for them a 4 times year-on-year increase in Valentine’s day period revenue um, that’s the type of bold move. They used data from a test to.

Alejandro: Whoa.

Jeremy King: Uncover that bold move remove all the doubt behind doing it. They had the intuition that red roses are a bad idea. No one likes receiving red roses people who give red roses say that it’s lazy last minute they discovered that this is kind of unique to the Uk. So the boldest move is in the Uk but uk only can’t repeat that other places and. They did it and they were rewarded and that’s the type of thing where making consumer research continuously accessible to the right people to inform intrition dissolved out. That’s where that gets real and that’s the kind of thing we like to see so to answer your question mission accomplished is when someone who. Works in manufacturing of t-shirts in Indonesia and they’re trying to export to Canada a knows that they wish they knew more about canadians b they know that if they knew more about canadians they were probably manufacture the right things c they realize they can do something about that because D Attests marketing and awareness allows them to know that e they can open up their laptop and they can use a test to understand that if the stanley cup final ice hockey is four weeks away and what I need to do immediately is print one hundred Thousand Vancouver canucks. This is our year Twenty Twenty Two t-shirts and then finally they will make two years worth of revenue in one week because. They can see this where other manufacturers don’t and that’s where the great power of understanding your target customers really comes to life and you know so simple to help that business so simple to help them unlock these goals. But if that’s happening and that person Indonesia can use our product with no training. Our product works in many languages it is present in many markets. Many people have heard about so our marketing worked our product is so simple that this person who doesn’t know how to do research knows that they can use it and actually use it to uncover a very valuable thing and is valuable. They make 2 years of worth of revenue in one twoweek period and they crush their millennium. Um, their competition all by knowing to their target customers better and if that’s happening we’re probably in 50 countries. We’re probably hundreds of millions of arr. We hopefully aren’t thousands of people because we don’t need to scale our you know infrastructure and and team size in line with ar but lots of good things have happened if that’s if what I’ve just said has come true and. That would probably be my version of mission accomplished. That’s when I’d say yeah everything we set out to do is now possible and I’m wondering what’s next.

Alejandro: Nice now. Imagine I put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time and I give you the opportunity of having a chat with your younger self right? before you were taking that leap of faith with you know for Mckinsey to start a test. What would be that one piece of business advice that you would give to your younger self before starting a company and why given what you know now.

Jeremy King: I was far more focused on investors and fundraising than I realized I needed to be clearly investment is what allows us to be loss making and move faster and build bigger than. Revenue earns us on a cash flow break even basis. So particularly as a saas company with you know, global scale and ambition. You need investment money to unlock that larger opportunity faster and sooner and bigger than you could do by yourself without that investment but I was far more focused on. Sas Metrics what investors wanted and fundraising events alone clearly that was good in the early days because we could win Bc funding early on and then we use that to build a very big and scalable product. But I think I was far more focused on fundraising than building the company. Um, it. Got lucky in that we did a lot of good things early about hiring the right people having the right values thinking about the long term and slowing down things like product and revenue in the early days with the long-term gain in mind. But if I had a time machine I would go back and say don’t focus on fundraising alone. Fundraising is just an enabler fundraising does not make a company by itself. The team makes the company. The customers make the company solving customer problems makes the company fundraising is an ingredient. Yes, it’s like the flour and bread. You can’t live without it but you also need the oven the yeast the customers. The bakery. Sales model the branding the baggage the ability to run payments. You need all of these things and I think I was far more focused on fundraising and satsmetrics in the early days than I should be and if I had my time again I would spend even more time on building the company rather than. Focusing on the enabler which with the fundraising.

Alejandro: So for the people that are listening Jeremy King: what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi.

Jeremy King: I’m on Linkedin I’m easy to find Jeremy King: King um ah tests find me on Linkedin. Also my email is not that hard to to discover first name dot last name at http://askkaest.com. Um, ah, um, not particularly active on Twitter although I might change that soon with the change in ownership and excited to see what happens with that or come and find any events I love to go to sasta I love sas stock web summit always out there. But um, often in London and New York and always excited to chat with other people working on interesting problems about interesting things.

Alejandro: And amazing. Well Jeremy King: thank you so much for being on the dealmaker show today.

Jeremy King: A pleasure to chat? Thank you for the great questions and come and find us at http://askkatest.com you can try our product for free. You can run a survey to a hundred real consumers in the us or Uk and ask them anything that you think would help them with your business. That’s. Why we exist. That’s the thing we make easy and we actually give that away for free on our website so come and try it if you’re a b two c company and learn something new right now. It’ll take 90 seconds to start and you’ll get the results very quickly and you can start wondering what your target customers want and that can be less of a mystery and help you more smash your targets. So. Come find us and thank you very much for all the great questions and the pleasure to chat.

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