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

Intro

00:00Over the last 20 years, I've been a serial [music] entrepreneur in the UK and then Silicon Valley in Los Angeles. The second company was Scatter, which was the photo sharing product. I wanted it to become something that every member of the world would access and use.

00:12When 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. Scatter did not become the Instagram, Tik Tok or X that we see today because it's not existing [music] right now.

00:35When you climb that high, the fall is equally as heavy. But I think going through failure or feeling failure gives [music] 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 a knowing how to open the parachute.

00:54And as you get closer to the floor, [music] you finally work it out. And I think that is something that I learned growing up, which gave [music] me a little bit of courage. Courage comes from taking a [music] leap, throwing yourself in because we don't know the solution.

01:10We 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 [music] was powerful. You just need that one person to say, "I believe in you.

01:24You can do it. You're good enough." [music] These acts of empowerment are so important. What we need to do is we need to try and think [music] how can we be like a kindergarten kid for life. [music] They don't give up. They stand up again. True entrepreneurs will always come back.

01:51Hi everyone, my name is Matt Hager. I'm the founder and [music] CEO of Tail Tree. Tailtree empowers children in a post AI era to hold on to the precious gift of imagination and creativity. So when you arrive at Tailree and you [music] adopt your companion, you will start brainstorming and imagining and coming [music] up with ideas.

02:09So it's a free space for children to explore what's on their heart, [music] what they care about, their interests. Prior to that, over the last 20 years, I've been a serial entrepreneur in the [music] UK and then Silicon Valley in Los Angeles in Eman Venture Labs, helping [music] founders turn their ideas into products and into successful

Say "Yes" When Everybody Says "No"

02:30companies. 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 because everybody agrees with your idea, it's probably too late and somebody's already done it.

02:47So I went to a school in England in Cambridge here, primary and secondary educations. There were certain times [music] 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 [music] was the bell ringing when I was working on something.

03:06I remember once I wouldn't leave the classroom cuz I needed to get my [music] story finished and I was in the flow of creativity and my teacher was like, "Matt, you you've got to go to mathematics now, but I can't leave the classroom because I'm working on something."

03:21I found the answer. You know, I realized that I wasn't going to 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.

03:36The 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 dialup 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.

03:53I 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 a a fortune in the telephone bill. So, she would present me with this telephone bill and say, "Listen, you're going to have to pay for this because you're using the internet far too much."

04:10My response was, "Right, I'm going to 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.

04:25if 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.

04:51It 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 status

Never start a startup without THIS

05:14quo. 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 want to itch, you should [music] not do it because when you get into that struggle, it is going to be extremely hard.

05:31You can lose sight of where you're going. So my childhood does have a direct correlation to tail tree and why I'm building talry. I feel like sometimes I'm building tree for the child inside me. Even though the school [music] curriculum didn't suit me, my dad acknowledged that and used to help me learn through challenges.

05:51Courage comes from [music] taking a leap, throwing yourself in because we don't know the solution. We don't know the answer. I think my father threw [music] 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.

06:07And that was powerful. We [music] used to go and watch soccer together and travel all over the country supporting our team. He would enable me [music] 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 [music] history behind it.

06:24Then he would ask me about the team and statistics, [music] all the different things that had happened during the game. And I felt like I was learning through [music] something that I love, and that was really, really powerful for me. What I'm doing now with Tower Tree is essentially an extension of [music] that.

06:39As a child, I realized that I wanted to help empower humanity to [music] think creatively with authenticity with purpose. I wanted all of humanity [music] to be able to call upon their authenticity and spiritual gifts and serve others with that.

06:54[music] This big thinking, this curiosity, the imagination and creativity and wonder of a child, we all possess [music] that. It's just as we've grown up and we've gone through the system, [music] we have lost that spark. It's not that the spark is not there.

07:12It's just we're not training that spark. Even through the Head Start program that was [music] piloted by George Land at NASA where he tested creativity on 5-year-olds and then repeated that test [music] at 10, 15, and 30. The average genius level creativity [music] in children, 98% of all kids that were tested were deemed as geniuses.

07:33But by the time these children [music] reach the age of 30, it goes down to 2%. Between the age of 5 and 30, the light of learning, the light [music] of curiosity, the light of imagination, it dims down. It goes off. And it goes [music] off because we're not encouraged to pursue that side of ourselves.

07:49We're encouraged [music] to memorize, be graded upon our knowledge, our ability to perform well in examinations, and [music] to become experts in a field that we're supposed to [music] upskill ourselves to be able to perform those duties in societies.

08:05If I held up this pen [music] and said, "How many uses of this pen can you think of?" And on [music] average, kids came up with 15 to 20 uses of this pen, whereas adults came up with [music] between one and three uses of this pen. But for a kid, this could be anything.

08:22This could be a sword. It could be [music] a lightsaber. It could be a rocket. It could be a paper clip. Even kids just need [music] that one person to say, "I believe in you. You can do it. You're good enough." These acts of empowerment are so important.

08:39And that is essentially why Teltree provides children [music] 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 [music] the world can communicate, compliment and share.

08:53We allow children to feel liberated. [music] Having supportive community around you is very very important for entrepreneurs, for creative people cuz without community [music] 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.

Why I Only Invest in Failed Founders

09:23The ideas that started in Eman Venture Labs will always invest in a an entrepreneur that's failed [music] 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% [music] of all startups end in failure.

09:46Around 2005 2006 it was just at the beginning of the smartphone era say Windows Mobile had a a [music] 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 I was going to work on that problem and I was going to actually build scatter which was one of the first ever photosharing smartphone apps.

10:15I 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.

10:33It 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 scatter did feel like a contrarian truth.

10:45you know, you're sitting on a good idea when everybody thinks it's crazy. So, all of these issues [music] 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.

11:02Having 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.

11:21The people, the support, [music] 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 have [music] been able to achieve what I achieved with Scatter.

11:38One of the greatest things that occurred with scatter 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.

11:51So they invited me into their cohort of innovators and I ended up getting the first G1 Android device and Android 1 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.

12:07It was an incredible experience to be able to [music] connect my native app and access the camera. We launched Scatter on Android market. There was like $150 apps on the app [music] store. So we raised in excess of a million dollars to preede the company but we were too early.

12:23Scatter did not become the Instagram, Tik Tok 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 [music] meant it to be very costly, timeconuming and heavy.

12:47And 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.

13:02The 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.

13:17When 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.

13:32I felt very very down and and depressed [music] 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 [music] that you don't want to be doing next time.

13:49Failure means you tried. Means you were actually the man in the arena, not the voice in the crowd. You were doing it. [music] You put yourself out there. You were vulnerable enough to take the risk. you're prepared to be judged and observed for what you're doing.

14:05Which 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.

14:25Why? 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 yet.

The Key Difference: Good vs Great Founder

14:47I always say work on the business not [music] in the business. If you work inside it for too long, you can suffocate [music] and stifle the growth of the business because you are trying to be every member of your team. [music] You're trying to overont control the outcome and the destination of what's going on.

15:04It 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 bunch of [music] people all going in the right direction, all with the same aims and objectives.

15:19[music] 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 [music] 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 [music] do their best work.

15:41I think working on the business is working on a mission where everybody [music] that joins your company feel like it's their mission too. For example, I'm building tail tree. I'm going to make sure that from the chief financial officer, chief legal officer, anybody down to the head of well-being, [music] the person who would potentially be preparing food for the company, they would all have a deep and meaningful [music] connection to the problem that we're solving.

16:05have the vision and break [music] down the miracle of the vision into bite-sized moments. Every single day has its own problems. Tomorrow you have another set of problems. [music] You just have to try and break this overwhelming vision down into bite-sized pieces [music] and feel accomplished every time you achieve these small little milestones.

16:31And I always say miracles come from momentum. Momentum come from a [music] succession of moments. So every day as you're completing [music] and getting further towards the end goal, you're creating this momentum through continuing to attack [music] every day the same and breaking things down.

16:51Working on that company always as I think the difference between [music] being good and being great. These are the things that I've used [music] to help me on my journey as an entrepreneur.