Insights from a £54M fund pre-seed investor

In this episode, Oliver Kicks, Principal at Concept Ventures, the largest pre-seed fund in the UK, shares his background and the story of the fund. Concept Ventures is a £54 million pre-seed dedicated vehicle, mainly focused on founder domain expertise or founder market fit.

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00:00 Oliver Kicks Welcome to the Tech Story Podcast, a place where we interview founders, investors and interesting people in tech. Today I'm very excited to welcome Oliver Kicks from Concept Ventures. Concept Ventures are the largest pre-seed fund in the UK. Oliver was their first employee and now principal. So Oliver, thank you for taking the time for being with us. Would you like to share a bit of background and the story of the fund?

00:26 Charles Brecque Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks so much for having me on. Excited to be here. Happy to go back, I don't know how far you want me to go. As far as you want. Yeah, so I was born in London, grew up in the south of Spain, spent most of my summers despite the good climate and weather, indoors, online games, a lot of forums, things like that. So I was very much like an early tech adopter on that basis, always had a bit of a weird obsession. I'd been fast-boarding a few years, went to uni at Exeter, studied flexible combined honours which is a bit of a mixed degree, it suited my generalist style I think, doing a bit of criminology, sociology, through to Spanish and English, multiple things like that. And then realised at the moment when I was going to graduate, I'd spent my last few summers and Christmases intensely trying to get internships and work with cool tech startups, things that I thought were going to potentially be exciting businesses impacting consumers further down the line. So I think that's what really sparked my interest in working in the start-up and tech ecosystem initially. So upon graduating I went and worked for a crypto fintech in London. Crypto was still its nation but even back then it was still on its early innings and joined that as one of the early employees, stayed with them for about a year. They were focused on interoperable dApps in the cross-chain ecosystem but realised maybe not the space I wanted to launch my initial career in because obviously your first few connections in business stay with you for a while. So then moved into the food media world, joined a company called Mob where I helped launch their subreddit, looked heavily at cross-growth opportunities from multiple subreddits and other digital communities and wanted to help them diversify channels. So that was a really, really exciting story to be part of. I think they were one of the first creative businesses in the UK and still left myself wanting to do more. I think that generalist muscle came back and I was like staying with one company is great but what if you could work with multiple? And that's where I fell into the world of VC. So I joined Concept back in October 2019 as the first employee. We were formerly known as RFC Ventures and it's been an incredible journey since. So just for a little bit of background on the fund, we're a £54 million pre-seed dedicated vehicle so we are mainly focused at two people in a pitch deck stage of investing. So looking heavily on kind of founder domain expertise or founder market fit, that's what gets us really excited, but also then helping them to work through that kind of like first of all to 18 months of their business and help them kind of get set up for success going forward. So that's really been what I've spent a lot of time thinking about and doing for the last three and a half years and we're hugely privileged to be in this position and got an amazing team doing it and the first few cohorts of founders are doing pretty well but obviously always kind of keen to learn and do more and expand our investment horizons, look at other sectors etc.

03:45 Oliver Kicks A lot to unpack but I guess from your experience in crypto, fintech and community, how much of that do you apply on your day to day for actually looking for companies or founders?

04:00 Charles Brecque It's a good question. I think around actual like practical implementation, less so. I think I focus a lot on like post investment support as well so look after our founders once we've invested, look at the onboarding workshops, how we can support them with their kind of core KPIs but with the actual sector expertise I think relatively little. I think having like a beginner's mindset to most things really helps. I've done stuff in insure tech, in fintech which is obviously where I spent a bit more time earlier on but a lot now in mobile games, games infrastructure, AI as I'm sure everyone's talking about at the moment but also now B2B marketplaces. I think being able to have like prolonged exposure to sectors has kind of like flywheel benefits and you know compounding effects which we can talk about in a bit when it comes to kind of sourcing and supporting but yeah I think actually not trying to build too much of a niche or area that I spend too much time in has actually been more useful in my career today yeah so in short probably not that much of my background that I actually use day to

05:08 Oliver Kicks day. Because when it comes to investing the next big thing is always changing and that's why

05:14 Charles Brecque you don't want to specialise, is that why you haven't? A little bit yeah. I also think owing to the stage we invest at you have no idea what's going to walk through the door. Like we're looking at business in like the architecture space through to you know climate and I think if you are too narrowly focused you need to you know you're putting yourself at risk, kind of like not seeing enough opportunities and I think as well when you look at like the most successful investors out there at the true early stage you've got Y Combinator, 500 startups and kind of a few others in that category. Diversification and large portfolios is really what they're very much respecting so like the power laws of venture where one or two outlier investments will kind of really factor in the line share of the return so that's sort of what we've been trying to construct that naturally will lead to like more diversification of verticals as well so we try not to go too

06:11 Oliver Kicks niche. Interesting I mean I know Y Combinator they've got hundreds of companies every year but 50% of them are in AI so do you still sort of index based on general themes?

06:24 Charles Brecque Yeah I think like when we look back on kind of like our annual or biannual LP reports like we have to report on the diversification with both sectors and kind of like team etc but I think with like the YC case that's very much like trends driven so yeah I mean yes naturally like the top of funnel has been pretty full with AI stuff at the moment but it's a scary space to be investing in right now to be honest there's a lot of uncertainty as to how like the landscape is going to kind of play out where does the value accrue what sort of businesses should we really be like getting excited about I don't think anyone has got that sort of an answer right now so I'd be pretty wary of people who are kind

07:04 Oliver Kicks of over indexing at this stage or at least yeah that's what we think. Interesting hot take and I guess a company or a founder considering concept ventures what should they know about you to sort of auto qualify themselves and then how do you qualify and make decisions?

07:25 Charles Brecque Yeah so as I mentioned like it's very much like the first 12 to 18 months of a company life cycle so usually you know it's very soon after incorporation or like leaving a full time role and sometimes we speak to people who are still in an active role but generally we cap the kind of rounds that we want to participate in at one and a half million pounds at the very upper end we see stuff that's small as 300k 500k a million all of that's kind of very much fair game but what we want to see is sort of UK and UK adjacent businesses raising up to one and a half million pounds and I think you know it's very much as I said on the founder and the ambitions of the people behind the business so that's where we spend a lot of our own process kind of digging into and focusing on. Now what our process looks like it's kind of clearly outlined on our website but we do have four main steps first meeting with kind of like me or one of my colleagues on the junior team second meeting we often like digging a little bit deeper to competitive landscape like async communication with the founder generally on a few like key points that we want to get clarity on before moving forward then the third step is usually like bringing one of the partners getting like a partnership view on it and then the fourth is an IC or investment committee so it can happen in like a week and a half if we do are forced to move very quickly but I think as you probably experienced with angels and other investors on your cap table it's like a very people-centric investment style and I think if you're made to make decisions too quickly it doesn't really sit right when these are kind of 10-year relationships so whilst we want to move quickly and keep up with the market we also want to be respectful of the relationships we're building with founders.

09:13 Oliver Kicks Yeah I know that there's a lot of I mean I know a lot of it comes from the US and why I see around creating a bit of FOMO so that you can get the investors over the line more quickly but I understand you know you're ultimately it's a long-term relationship and you don't want to be getting in for the wrong reasons because that then just creates disalignment and surprises because once you're actually invested then you know what happens.

09:41 Charles Brecque It's not good for anyone and I also think you know we as a firm have tried to look in maybe slightly different areas so our largest backer is the British Business Bank or the British government they have a mandate where they want to kind of like invest in more regionally focused businesses and kind of plug that gap a pretty see that we've identified and felt as a firm. We really see that like looking where other funds are is a actual differentiator if you're able to build conviction in a team and opportunity that isn't also being thrown kind of six term sheets at the same time actually lets you kind of feel you get a better chance to understand the business what their kind of key challenges are going to be over the next 12 to 18 month period and be more helpful and thoughtful with like round construction and everything else at the moment of investment.

10:34 Oliver Kicks So how often do you leave London to meet? Yeah a fair bit. And beyond Oxford and Cambridge?

10:42 Charles Brecque I went to Brighton. Well we an unannounced investment is headquartered up in Edinburgh. Okay. We've been looking kind of in Northern Ireland for a bit we haven't pulled the trigger in any companies yet but yeah we're very open and think that there's amazing talent actually across the Southwest as well we've seen we've got two companies in Bristol about to back a third so yeah I think it's a long-term game to make the venture like we're year one of the 10 year fund life cycle and I think the fact we've already been able to move outside of London's been great but there's always more work to do.

11:17 Oliver Kicks No congrats because I was at a Tech Nation panel with investors and the whole theme was investing outside of London and one of the investors said to a founder based outside of London just move to London and then all the founders sort of I mean it was a wonderful to watch but you know I think that the reality is that the investors on the panel hadn't made any investments outside of London and so I guess it's great that you're already

11:56 Charles Brecque doing that. Yeah I think in like a post-Covid world as well people should have more like flexibility with their own like mindsets and yes London is where it's a melting pot of talent opportunity obviously but at the same time it's often like repeat entrepreneurs people who've made some money had a lot of learnings have a great network and they don't actually need to be in the city 24 7 and have a little bit more time to kind of relax and step back from like the frantic nature of it all and as well as like we've got a company called Condense down in Bristol and they have like kind of unrivaled access to top talent coming out of that whole region and there are kind of competitive advances that come with it too so yeah I definitely don't think it has to be London or nothing.

12:46 Oliver Kicks Yeah that's great and I guess going back to you, what's been your favourite moment since since being with Concept?

12:56 Charles Brecque Yeah there's been many I mean it's been a really really amazing journey started as I mentioned back in late 2019 we were running an SEIS and EIS fund so that's kind of like a tax scheme in the UK there's certain funds that can roll up investors and act as a fund on their behalf and we did that for a few years whilst we sort of built a track record and tried to like plug that institutional gap. Over that time we like worked with some amazing companies and founders and you know built those really strong relationships and learned a lot from them had some that have been incredibly successful some that haven't and learned a lot throughout that process which you kind of can't see like been very keen and aware to like feed back into the engine and the company's growth. I think the biggest like most exciting one for me is like when you see a company like really become very real like ultimately you meet two people who are usually a little bit weirdly obsessed with a problem and then you kind of see them like not that we don't speak for six months but you catch up come to their offices six months later and they're suddenly like a team of 10 and you really kind of start to feel a company coming into existence so I think seeing that over the years has been really really rewarding. Obviously like fundraising milestones are great but seeing an incredible product out in the market as well this is called 11 Labs we invested in it was you know very much like MVP prototype and now you know they're one of the leading companies in the AI revolution right now so it's amazing to see sort of that happen in front of your eyes over like what feels like a massive massive sort of shift in the like modern tech narrative so being part of that is awesome but yeah I think the final thing to say is just it's a massive privilege to work with companies who are you know going on these crazy ambitious journeys and trajectories and play a very small part in that that's been time and time again my favourite part of the job. I guess it must be quite rewarding to because you're investing so early you'll probably invest pre-trends and I guess yeah you know to see yeah we sometimes happen to be here yeah it must be really rewarding and what's what do you wish you'd known before joining Concept yeah or becoming an investor yeah yeah I still don't it's obviously like a I think every month you draw like a new insight try not to do too much kind of pattern matching I think one of the things that would have been nice to like really learn like soon it was like it in our view at least and we see that like this is one of the common like internal narratives are like all about the team and all about the people and I think over time you can get think this is the next best idea and like it's a space or market you know pretty well and you think there's like rock-solid foundations everything they're articulating and telling you about the world seems to be very true but ultimately like if the team aren't right or they've kind of overlooked kind of one of their core weaknesses in the founding team ultimately they're not not going to be having a very easy time with that and I think that's kind of one of the central things we keep coming back to. We've looked at kind of the solo founder versus co-founder risk our data says it's tough on the co-founders and the solo founder side but obviously there's always like outliers and people who prove us wrong consistently so again it's about not being too rigid with our

16:32 Oliver Kicks mindsets and just being open to new data points and new new yeah perspectives. Yeah I'm a solo founder so I've often had the the questions and I guess I there's a stat I don't know if it's true but I think 60% of startups fail because of co-founder issues so I guess it's it's something to

16:55 Charles Brecque you know balance as well. Yeah it's a really I mean that's what we we always try to like see around the corner on when we are meeting early teams like have they worked together before have they got experience with conflict resolution all of these things and yeah I mean you can't regardless of how much time you spend prior to investing you it's really really tough to try and like mitigate or understand too early on like we only get whatever a few hours a lunch and afternoon like you can't really spend for a long period of time so yeah I think it swings

17:26 Oliver Kicks both ways time will reveal all I guess. Yeah and I guess you know what sort of red flags have you sort of picked up on yeah just generally across all the companies. I mean I guess obviously it's not necessary to say oh this is a bad company but I guess for founders listening what should they be looking out for not necessarily because they're looking to raise funding but because it might

17:52 Charles Brecque impact their growth potential. Yeah I think maybe if I do talk through like the funding lens because obviously we see a lot we got a lot of cold outreach we got a lot of people kind of pitching through network etc and I think ultimately talking about the team again but like why specifically you why have you got an unfair advantage or a unique perspective why are you going to kind of tell us something we didn't know or the world didn't know we'll kind of ICP customers what are they going to kind of find out from you and your products and vision of the world that they didn't already know. I think too often that's not clear from things I see and you can have a 25 page pitch deck with incredible market analysis and graphs and data points and McKinsey reports but ultimately like if you can distill that into one sentence or paragraph that's what gets us excited and want to get on a call and I think that's you know if people are often starting a startup for the sake of starting a company that's also quite obvious through that sort of lens of being that way so we'd definitely press people on kind of why them why this team and you know it doesn't always have to be perfectly articulated and often people from outside of an industry who can completely rethink it and reinvent it but yeah I think it's a it's a good kind of way of thinking or framing to go into conversations there. The other kind of main thing is understanding that like founders do hold a lot of the cards when it comes to momentum and building sort of either a fundraiser or even like the very early foundations of a company and one of the things that we and I know a lot of late stage investors look for as well as sort of momentum and pace of execution and I think there's a number of times I can think of a founder who we've kind of like said no it's a little bit earlier we don't have the data points but they've showed consistently like showing up sending kind of reports showing what they're doing what they're building what traction they're having it doesn't have to be revenue even but just being able to communicate that and just showing up I don't think enough people even managed to do that so that's like

19:56 Oliver Kicks a really good early barometer and absence of kind of data for us. Yeah I think well investor relations whether they're your current investors or not is super important because ultimately there it helps engage and brings them on the journey but as a founder I it's it's not easy to to report because you know there's always the fear that actually momentum will slow down and sometimes it does slow down but then it's like how do you make sure that you know it doesn't spook your investors ultimately if they're good investors they they'll understand and work with you to

20:35 Charles Brecque get back on track but yeah that's very fair and that's again comes back to the like trust and working relationship thing right like if you're pushed and crammed into these very accelerated timelines they're going to have you know the VCs won't understand your company well enough people are going to kind of struggle to really be as helpful as they can be and yeah in the absence of that trust you will maybe try and hide the kind of hard times like bad information or like negative news is always going to be like relatively hard to get out of a company you've got to sort of call them up and dig in through conversations to get out if you haven't got that relationship and openness but if somebody comes and they say hey look we've had this issue it was two days ago it might be like an employee's equity or a big customer churning whatever but this is what we think we need to do can we just soundboard it can we talk through like all of these are much more productive and you know healthy ways to to deal with that and that's kind of you know something

21:33 Oliver Kicks we're really learning and trying to build into our own like support with our companies yeah well good luck i mean yeah it's uh it's it's tough building startups is tough but if you can

21:43 Charles Brecque counsel your investors is a sounding board and that's that's that's great yeah that's true i think we've the reporting component is like interesting like we all have we're a team of seven now um and we have um individual relationship kind of leads on on deals so like if you were to kind of source a company and lead it through end to end and then like manage that relationship then obviously it's your job to extract the information keep the team open and abreast to kind of the latest happenings in companies so yeah like we're equally responsible as kind of the founders to work with them and bring that back to our to our team and we think that's quite a good way of doing it so how often you know what does a healthy relationship with a family like in terms of check-ins is it every week every two weeks every month yeah that's um actually something we have like a bit of a fluid view on um we think like no founder and no company at the same you could be a third time exit entrepreneur or you could be a first time founder with no work experience coming straight out of uni those are very different profiles and those people need very different things from early stage investors and if you're the kind of experienced repeat entrepreneur you often want a bit of capital and accountability and maybe some market insights like hearing stuff through the industry like competitors friends etc and those are relatively you know we sometimes just have like a quarterly catch-up and monthly or like we have whatsapp groups with all of our founders so we'll you know talk on a weekly basis with most but structured catch-ups we're probably more likely to do that with kind of first time uh founders and they often want that they want to talk through decisions talk through you know the journey as they progress and i think that's really nice balance we've found i think there's no one size fits all approach to this stuff and anyone who's trying to do that um yeah it's maybe not going to be that successful but i also think at the other end of the spectrum you've got the large very large funds are huge platforms and resource to to be you know hand holding and helping founders and that's awesome too but it's just not what we have and what we are so i think we definitely lean towards the um yeah take it case by case yeah well i think whatsapp groups are super valuable and yeah yeah they're great i mean end up pinging people over the weekend and you know everyone's just like one call away it's so much easier than emails everyone gets enough of those yeah no i agree and um i guess you mentioned you're in the first year of a 10-year fund um so you mentioned you know obviously investing outside of london but sort of what's the vision for the next 10 years then so we want to be the number one pre-seed option for founders in europe that's kind of our 10-year vision we know that like repeat reps at that stage seeing kind of multiple companies in multiple sectors going through that journey there's going to be a lot of like parallels and similarities like obviously we already see that and we think we can be you know the best platform and option for founders i'd be that you know collaborative if you want to build a kind of solid first round or you just want us in and want to then go and find a specialist that seed or whatever that we can see a number of routes to getting there um how exactly that's going to play out we don't know yet but we have very clarified vision on like what the next two funds look like for example where we are going to be investing out of this vehicle for the next three years and then um leaving kind of follow on beyond that and then yeah raising and deploying from two new funds after that so it's fairly well charted um we have a lot of work ahead as always um but yeah it's super exciting like that's you know been on the journey for the last three years not that it is building a startup yourself but i think when you are like the first person in um outside the gps it's a really really kind of rewarding um journey to go on and with all those kind of founders i'm working with now it's been been amazing across your portfolio of companies you know what is the maybe a one or two pain points that they all sort of encounter yeah i mean that's they're so varied um but i think there are some honestly like many many people have kind of lack of access to talent or need great full stack engineers whatever it may be and the way we kind of view that is like that's not really necessarily our role we want to try and help where we can on that but very much down to founders to motivate incredible people to join their business so yeah that one's just like across the board at table stakes i say unless you meet a team who are literally like got all of their first seven highs lined up whatever um i think one of the things that's tough for any founder regardless of experience regardless of industry but going from as i said like two people with a great idea for the world to suddenly like something more is transitioning as like an individual um we're very focused on the people as i mentioned and like but also the psychology and the deep rooted like strengths and weaknesses behind everybody and i think that's something that not necessarily that people have got wrong but i think everyone needs to be aware of and kind of react to because if you're suddenly waking up and you're like 15 people 30 people and you know there's a lot of softer stuff around culture around onboarding around you know scaling and planning for the future i think all of that stuff maybe does go unnoticed so the relentless focus on kind of metrics or fundraising and some of these other other milestones um so i think that's something we always try and like talk to our founders about and try and give our input and thoughts

27:33 Oliver Kicks because we've you know built our own culture over time too so have some good good viewpoints on that i was hoping you say legal or oh finance but you did team me up with that one i think a bit you missed it but no i guess yeah talent is is key and um but it's one of those things where you need to hire quickly to also be able to deliver on your plans but but it's also something where

27:55 Charles Brecque if you rush it then it can also backfire and yeah it's very much like a balancing act from what we've seen like higher slow far fast as the adage goes um but often yeah i mean you you just can't push some of these things and it always takes longer than we think from experience they're like oh here's the cash flow forecast and the budget forecast and you can see we've got like three engineers starting in a month and then in reality it's actually a bit longer than that by the time they're onboarded and up to speed in notice periods so yeah yeah i think just being able to help founders like be aware of those limitations and i think you do mention the legal side unless you've raised funds before it's quite a confusing sort of landscape um and process to go through so we try and like actually be really transparent we've got our term sheet on our website we really want to get off like very impartial advice to founders on you know how to run a fundraise how to you know especially when they're going and raising subsequent rounds but even at the moment that we are investing we want to be like very open about um terms and the implications for their business because i think that's uh you know something that's quite daunting and unless

29:09 Oliver Kicks you are a repeat fund you probably haven't gone through before yeah well it's great that you publish your term sheet um because i think uh as a founder it's difficult to know what standard and

29:20 Charles Brecque um at least by putting out there it helps them do their homework yeah we tried to make it as vanilla as possible over the years but inevitably every time there's something that people want to change or tinker yeah it's um yeah look i think it's completely mental at our stage to be trying to put in anything too funky or restrictive um ultimately it's that pre-season stage is a lot about like hypothesis testing and you know we've acted in that a lot of people are not going to um always have the crazy fund return story that's just like the reality of of a venture uh and stuff up more broadly so i think yeah just having a bit more like plain lightweight um

29:59 Oliver Kicks legals is in everyone's interest great and um in terms of you know going back to you know growth um you mentioned growing the subreddit um yeah so over 80 000 yeah yeah so reddit is i mean as you know i love seo and um yeah we had a lot of success there um we've recently been looking more at social media as a way of um you know creating our own audience and and and all of that but reddit is an area where i'd love to learn more so um how do you get started and and what do

30:39 Charles Brecque you do to grow your reddit community yeah i think it's still like the best and pure social media platform out there i think twitter gives it a good run but um we'll see like with the recent mass changes how that all all plays out um but yeah i think it's a really incredible like vertical segmentation of interest and so you can find such like strong compassionate users so when we're going back to the mob stuff when we were working with them they were producing a lot of content for instagram facebook um and ben the founder wanted to look at how they could access reddit as a new channel um because of just how like interested and engaged each of the users were uh i think like now there's a bit like diminishing returns of tiktok instagram and all these things the audience is never really yours you can't have that much of a um bidirectional interaction so i think reddit was really really amazing for that and uh a lot of it is looking for what communities already exist because usually with a platform like that as like the tool that it is um people will naturally create and organize themselves into sort of communities little packages and they can be really really broad like television and they can be very very niche like i don't know succession to go down within a specific example um and what we saw is like the idea of growth hacking could work quite well there so posting content through to a broader group so in this case it was gif recipes somewhere where people were sharing like cooking videos and content and putting in like very lightly branded and um uh yeah stuff that was cross-posted through from our own community and slowly kind of drip fed people back through and did that over enough time added an engagement around like giveaways um suggestions on recipes but actually what we realized over time is like it was incredibly useful for um feedback on like what sort of content would be successful what sort of content they want to see more of because i think on instagram and places like that is very much like yeah this looks great tag my mate and it's not very um yeah like descriptive it's very sort of social in in its um nature so reddit's incredible for that like people who like and know what they're talking about to give their thoughts often giving too much you know their own opinion on things but yeah i think it's an amazing channel and something people should be looking at we're in the process of trying to explore a early stage uk ecosystem and um we're launching something called fund finder which is helping founders in the uk to access um if concept aren't a fit um a number of other uh uk active investors and we're going to be launching that probably later this month and we wanted to off the back of it surface a lot of resources around kind of questions you should ask vcs as a founder but also you know what's having your data room how to prepare your kind of like pitch deck and ancillary documents um and with that we wanted to kind of launch somewhere where people could come meet other founders connect speak to the concept team if they need ideally not pitch and talk through investment ideas but more like general advice and so that's something we're kind of thinking hard about and whether that takes the form of a subreddit probably not slack i don't know if people have enough slack communities but

33:59 Oliver Kicks we're going to come up with something soon and hopefully get it out in the world great no so i guess so back to the reddit it's create a community find bigger communities that are relevant cross post more generic general and then engage um to create a bit of traction and then um yeah but the your your founder community is really useful um because i think as a founder um it is good to meet other founders and often the best place to meet other founders is for investors and

34:32 Charles Brecque yeah um i think so i mean it's whether the is whether the founders want to meet specific founders fund founders other legal tech founders whatever it may be or is it kind of just anybody out there and i think the idea of like surfacing and sharing information is a really powerful one i think with having to give up your evenings and go to like specific hosted events or drinks and networking things there's not always like the best format so to have something more like drop in drop out um easy accessible could be really great but yeah it's still in uh ideation place so good luck

35:06 Oliver Kicks don't expect anything soon right i'll expect the notification yeah yeah exactly it'd be great to have you yeah yeah love to and um conscious have taken all of your time so i'm gonna ask you the closing question we ask all our guests so um you're on the tech story podcast so what's your

35:25 Charles Brecque favorite software or hardware tech product oh well we were talking about whoop before we came in um on the hardware side i do love my yeah analytics sleep data all of that stuff i love mine too yeah we need to i need to get you as a friend on there oh we compete on the uh yeah when it comes to software that is a very good question i mean actually looking back on like usage there's an app called zero for intimacy actually that's the most vc cliche thing ever but i do love intermittent fasting like just really helps me to a not get fat but also be to keep my brain pretty engaged and focused in the mornings and they've got a really simple like time track i think it's a new york-based company i don't even know how they monitor well i've seen a bit of monetization i haven't converted but it's a nice simple product which i think simplicity is genius sometimes so that's pretty good um outside of like obviously the apple suite because i love all of

36:25 Oliver Kicks our stuff um but yeah any other ones you want me to go into no i mean i haven't had a zero so i'll i mean i i guess i skip breakfast i don't know if that counts as probably does it's just a rebrand yeah but um yeah i yeah i really like the whoop um not not that i'm a you know fitness today but i quite like it when i know that i don't need to feel bad about not working out because i've already worked out yeah no that's true that's true uh and what's your favorite um i mean i i like superhuman um just because if i can't do something i can set her a reminder and that way everything always gets done yeah um i i like recently i've been playing a lot with zapia okay um and i've been using open ai's zapia connection to process data from other apps and then make decisions based on it oh cool um so that i can then also like do various things um so that's that's been quite fun but

37:34 Charles Brecque final one on that i've been playing around with glide which is like a um front end for air table you can basically get into anything google sheets edible but like a no code app builder and have built all of our like portfolio management tools inside of that and you can like just spend hours and hours on that it's so fun and so powerful and we have like gpt summarizers now as you said yeah process monthly reports extract data all that stuff so yeah that's been really fun yeah

38:02 Oliver Kicks doing a bit more like building stuff yeah i'll have a look at glide but um yeah well thank you very much for being on the show thanks for having me and um yeah best of luck with concept and finding all the british unicorns outside of london yeah well send them away um and yeah love to meet as many of you out there

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