Elliot Moss
That was Quincy Jones with Comin’ Home Baby. Welcome to the brand new season of Jazz Shapers. We are back and it’s me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues here on Jazz FM. My guest today, kicking off the 2023 series one, in typically pioneering, change-making style, is Sarah Turner, Co-Founder of Angel Academe, an angel investment network supporting female founded tech businesses and introducing more women to angel investing. Despite twenty years’ experience connecting technology start-ups with investors and partners, Sarah had never considered becoming an investor herself. As she says, “I met a lot of angel investors and they were always men.” Noticing these networks had a lack of dialogue with and openness toward female founders sparked an epiphany and Sarah launched Angel Academe in 2014 with her business partner, and now husband, Simon Hopkins, aiming to tackle the gender disparity. Angel Academe’s network 70% women, including entrepreneurs and senior leaders, have now backed over 45 ambitious, highly scalable tech start-ups, helping them raise of £100 million and vitally, they’re creating more diverse environments for the benefit of all. Sarah and I will be talking all of this in just a few minutes and the music today, the very first Jazz Shapers of 2023, comes from Marcus Miller, Wayne Shorter, Ezra Collective and here’s the one and only Etta James with Something’s Got a Hold on Me.
Etta James, it’s just getting better and better here, with Something’s Got a Hold on Me. This is Jazz Shapers. My Business Shaper, the first one of 2023, as I billed earlier is Sarah Turner, she’s the Co-Founder of Angel Academe and they make angel investing easy and indeed bring women, more women into the angel investor world. It’s lovely to have you here, welcome to the very first programme.
Sarah Turner
Thank you so much for having me.
Elliot Moss
No, it’s brilliant. Tell me, cast your mind back, 2014, people talk about epiphanies and they say, ‘I just had to do it.’ If you can remember how it felt at that moment because we’ll go into your, your history as it were and how you got to that point but why then? Why did the penny drop? What made you actually become a founder yourself?
Sarah Turner
Good question. Right. I mean, I had worked in technology. I had been working with start-ups for a long time. I went to lots of pitch events. The scene was getting quite busy again after a bit of a long slump after the dotcom crash and everything but the scene was really hotting up again, technology was very exciting, there was a lot more money going into the market but these pitch events, I started taking pictures and it was just a sea of men, men pitching to an audience full of men and you might, you know, if it’s a big room you might see a couple of women around the edge and you know, they were often the event organisers, not the actual investors. And I had made an angel investment at that stage into a friend’s business, as quite often happens, I’m sure you know that and it kind of made me realise the penny dropped that you know, he was just raising ten, twenty, thirty thousand pounds from a bunch of his friends and customers and it was like, oh, actually, you know, it’s a meaningful amount of money but it’s not the skyrocket amounts, it's not Dragons’ Den is it? And it kind of like made me think, “Ooh, this is interesting, actually I can participate at that level,” I was you know, at a point in my career and my life where my finances felt secure and there was some wiggle room, some room to do some interesting stuff with. So, I started joining angel networks because there I thought I had good instincts about people and technologies that might win, there’s a whole bunch of stuff around investment that I didn’t really know, I wasn’t a finance person, so what the question, so I went to these networks hoping to learn and collaborate with other people and that wasn’t really what happened. There’d be a nice buzzy event and then you were basically left to negotiate on your own with the poor entrepreneur and I was just kind of a bit self-conscious about it because I was very conscious of their time, you know they want to be speaking to genuine investors, not people who are feeling their way around and just kind of very conscious of what I didn’t know and I was just looking for that thing, how can I have a group around me of people who, you know want people like them to invest alongside, so that was where the penny had dropped. I’d run my own businesses before but they were consultancy businesses and this is a different ball game when you run something that’s kind of, I suppose it’s a product, you’re not selling a service so, it did feel like a proper step into entrepreneurship from just being self-employed, I suppose.
Elliot Moss
I mean it’s a network product isn’t it essentially, you’re bringing people together, as you said, and then the product is and here are some possible opportunities for you to go and invest in. Was there any sense of, obviously it’s a female founder led proposition, so from your point of view, was there massive inequity? You talked about men in the room but at that point because I don’t want to talk about now and then the future, was it obvious that women were getting a really bad deal? Was the treatment of women in these situations just palpably different?
Sarah Turner
There definitely was a sense of that, you know, they were talking to these all male audiences, even if the audiences were young, it was quite an alpha male environment, it’s very networked, everyone knows each other, deals get passed around between each other and I did feel I could see that female founders came to present, they’re at an immediate disadvantage, there is nobody who looked like them in the, in the audience and you know it’s not because they’re unconfident, these are kind of, I think, natural, instinctive things, so even the confident ones and then it just felt that on the investor side, there was this immediate credibility gap. What is this woman doing standing up there talking about software? You know, we all know software is, you think Mark Zuckerberg don’t you, you think the Google founders, you think Bill Gates, you don’t think a relatively young woman. And there’s still quite a lot of that I think, there’s some very good research showing that there’s a credibility gap for women playing in male dominated environments but strangely, the reverse doesn’t happen, when you have a male founder running a business that’s targeted at women, actually they don’t suffer from that disadvantage.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me to find out much more about why Sarah Turner set up the Angel Academe, what it does and the kind of issues that she is addressing directly and has been indeed for the last eight, almost nine years now. Time for some more music right now though here on Jazz FM, it is Marcus Miller with Hylife.
Marcus Miller there with Hylife. Sarah Turner is my Business Shaper, she’s the Co-Founder of Angel Academe, they make it easy for women to become angel investors. When you set this business up back in 2014, part of this to me looks like you were doing something to address a societal issue as much as a financial and entrepreneurs issue and I’m trying to work out whether at that time you were going, ‘I’m going to make loads of money doing this’ or ‘This is just the right thing to do and I’m compelled.’ How much of the commercial side had you looked at and gone, ‘This is a viable business’ or was it much more about that issue of ‘hold on a minute’?
Sarah Turner
I didn’t write business plans. I kind of dived straight in. I was confident about my instincts, I thought I could kind of make a business that would wash its face, it’s never been about building a huge business, it’s not about making me rich personally through Angel Academe but it’s about hopefully helping some of these founders succeed and making them rich because they’re the next generation of angel investors but also giving women who are risking their hard earned money as angel investors, hopefully helping them get a decent return as well, so I’m hoping to make my money back on my investments rather than Angel Academe itself. Although, you know, I want the business to do well because that’s a sign that we’re fixing a real societal need and the…
Elliot Moss
But that was my sense because the, I’m not saying you’re like a, you know, one million percent altruistic but if I look back at what you do and what you’ve done, there’s always been quite a public spirited element, whether you were the you know digital specialist at the Department of UK Trade and Investment or whether you’ve been a board member in various industry bodies, those things take time and they’re not for immediate return, they’re about changing things. So the changing things bit to me is interesting and where do you think that’s come from?
Sarah Turner
Yeah, no, no, that’s really, I’ve always wanted to change things. I think I was a terrible employee when I was working for other people because I could always wanted, I could see how this could be better. Can we do this?
Elliot Moss
And why though? Where’s that from and when did it start?
Sarah Turner
I don’t know, maybe there was this sort of frustrated entrepreneur in me, kind of that didn’t emerge until a bit later on but I have always been whatever you know I started off as most people do in some really crappy jobs but I was always very motivated to do my best and you know be nice to people and people kind of admiring what you did as being a huge driver I suppose, although that sounds a bit needy.
Elliot Moss
No, not all. Is that parental influence? Is that friends? Where do you think, if you look back?
Sarah Turner
I think that is, that is friends but I think it’s, you know, it is common to a lot of people and you know listening to other founders and entrepreneurs speak, they always find time to do other stuff on top of their business and people are, want to give back as well, so, you know, I want to…
Elliot Moss
Some do, Sarah, I mean, you’re nice, not everybody wants to.
Sarah Turner
Okay, not everyone but a lot of people, I’m not unique in that and yeah, you know where I see unfairness, I do want to make a difference and in this particular area I thought I was in a really good position to make a difference was well because I had networks, I had a bit of money that I could angel invest. I think if you’re encouraging other people to do that with their own money, you’ve got to do it alongside, I don’t believe in kind of encouraging other people to take risks that you’re not prepared to…
Elliot Moss
Yeah, the skin in the game is important.
Sarah Turner
…to take. It’s absolutely vital and for credibility as well.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of the other credibility, obviously once you’re a founder, you have more credibility with other founders and they see that you’ve gone and actually created something, given birth to the business. In terms of the barriers to entry, for you then or in anything else you’ve ever done, how do you address those? How do you continue to address them? And I mean all sorts of barriers, whether it’s attitudinal barriers or whether it’s practical barriers, how does Sarah Turner get through those?
Sarah Turner
Well, you’ve got, you know, barriers are part of life aren’t they and kind of finding your way through them, over them, round them or whatever and I think you know, you’ve just got to keep pushing, if you believe in what you’re doing. I mean, the other thing I think is just about being, so Nicholas Taleb, you know the author Black Swans, wrote a book called Antifragile and I think that capsulates it for me, it’s, everyone talks about resilience but it’s more than resilience because resilience suggests that you bounce back to where you were before but antifragile might mean that you have to change direction completely, you have to pivot, you have to do things and the, you know, the best founders are able to do that, so you find ways round but it might mean actually making really big changes and dramatic changes in your own life or business or career or whatever.
Elliot Moss
And honestly, for you, obviously that’s a great philosophy and I totally, Captain I concur, but is that easy for you to do or is that something that you know…?
Sarah Turner
No, no, no, I kind of you know, I resist the world changing round me and fight it and but you know, there comes a point where you just have to face it and like, the world’s changed, this isn’t going to work anymore, we’re going to do this now. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it.
Elliot Moss
There’s a thought for Saturday morning or whenever you might be listening to this. Sarah Turner is my Business Shaper and you’ve just got to confront it and get on with it and address it. She’ll be back very soon, in fact in a couple of minutes but right now we’re going to hear a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Tom Grogan of MDRxTech fame talks about Web 3.0, the next iteration of the internet and what businesses and individuals need to be thinking about when formulating their strategies and pursuing valuable, impactful projects.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers, there’s many years of them I am reliably informed, I think back to 2010 or something crazy, even before the wheel was invented, and you can find them on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice, whatever that is, you have freedom to do that. But back to today, the main event, it’s Sarah Turner, first up for 2023, Co-Founder of Angel Academe, an angel investment network supporting female founded tech businesses and introducing more women to angel investing. Covid happened to everybody. We’re sort of ‘coming through it’, it feels like there are less masks and full respect for people who want to wear masks, I quickly add, if you don’t, that’s fine too. For you though, did it level the playing field because depending on who you read and what they think, it kind of either exacerbated the situation as it related to equality with regard to gender or regard to wealth or it ameliorated it and I’m interested to see what happened in your world.
Sarah Turner
Well I think it’s a bit of both, I don’t think there’s a straight answer to that, it just depends on your individual circumstances, your business. We were able to pivot, it was one of these seismic shocks that’s, we were able to pivot quite easily to become an online organisation and it was quite dramatic because prior to lockdowns, you know everyone said you can’t invest in a founder unless you’re staring at the whites of their eyes and actually that proved not to be correct and once people adjusted to the new reality, investment surged for the next year/eighteen months or so and you know we certainly rode that wave. Things that I noticed in my network primarily women, whether they’re founders or investors, is that suddenly they had a whole lot more domestic responsibilities so they were home-schooling their kids, maybe their husband was working at home as well, so just you know getting that peace you need to get on with your own work was massively disrupted. And we had people whose kids had left home that came back for lockdown and then came back with their boyfriend or girlfriend as well so, suddenly you know mum was feeding a family, cooking and cleaning for a family again and just when they thought they had some time to themselves so, I think it did hurt women in some additional ways but you know I think what’s special about founders and you know just referencing our earlier conversation is, they have to find a way through this and we’re looking for founders that have got that support network so, you know, most of the businesses in our portfolio, they’ve got kids, most of the women have got kids, most of the investors have kids but they’ve got these good support structures at home which buys them a bit of time to build their businesses, they’ve got plans in place so that they can deal with the domestic crises that emerge and also they’ve got teams around them in their business that can take some of the load as well, that’s really important as well, isn’t it.
Elliot Moss
And just turning that on its, just briefly I’m thinking about turning that mirror towards you now because in your business, your partner is now your husband, you have support networks, how does that all work for you as you went through the Covid hard, the very you know early stages and then the middle and now hopefully we’ve come, we’re looking behind it. What was that like for you and how did you cope?
Sarah Turner
Yea, so Simon and I have been together for I think it’s 21 years now so it’s quite a solid…
Elliot Moss
What an established partnership.
Sarah Turner
And it’s an established partnership, we’d worked together previously, so it wasn’t this crazy plan that we hatched up as a married couple and actually, his role initially, it was mainly me and then he, he would be a very supporting partner but no, I mean he’s my number one supporter, my number one confidant, there’s nobody I trust more in the world than him and vice versa and I think that’s so important in a, in a partner isn’t it and that’s not to say that you know we don’t invest in people who are single but, you know, they might not have a husband or a partner right now but they will have other people in their lives that can provide that support. I think we focus very heavily on founders but these are team sports aren’t they, these businesses, you can’t do it all on… well you might start off doing it all on your own but if you are going to grow, you are going to need help, aren’t you.
Elliot Moss
Absolutely and the only thing I question I guess around being you know married to your business partner, is that it’s really important you have healthy abilities and mechanisms to manage conflict. How does that work for you two? If there is any conflict. Looks like she’s thinking, ‘I don’t ever argue with Simon’.
Sarah Turner
He just does what he’s told, doesn’t he. You know, conflict is inevitable isn’t it, it’s not nice, it’s not something we seek but you have got to kind of you know there are things that we disagree on and you’ve just got to talk it out haven’t you and come to, come to a conclusion, I mean it’s the same with a business partner and I think it’s been very…
Elliot Moss
But there’s more emotion, Sarah, isn’t there because there’s more, there’s more in that relationship than simply business.
Sarah Turner
Well I think we’re very clear about our roles in the business, so it’s important to have that defined and who is the ultimate decision maker in that area of the business. You know, you fundamentally have to respect that person don’t you so, even if you don’t agree with their decision, you have to live with it and then you have to say actually, ‘you were right’ when it turns out to be the right, so you know you’ve got to be gracious and a big person, it’s not about egos, it’s about making something work, isn’t it, for the benefit of everybody.
Elliot Moss
Indeed, stay with me for more from my Business Shaper, Sarah Turner, she’s the Co-Founder of Angel Academe with her husband, Simon and they seem to work through things rather well here, if we’re to believe you, which I do. Time for some more music right now, this is Wayne Shorter with Footprints.
The thoughtful sound of Wayne Shorter there with Footprints. You are listening to me, Elliot Moss, here on Jazz Shapers, very happy to be back and I’m very happy to be back with my first Business Shaper of the year, it’s Sarah Turner, Co-Founder of the Angel Academe, they are an angel investment business specifically for women and that’s an interesting and a different point, which I want to come to before we let you disappear around, isn’t time that we didn’t need one of these but that’s a slightly bigger question. The question I have now is around the role of an investor and an advisor versus the role of an executive in the business. Now, you’re both. You run your own business and you invest in others. Where are you at your happiest, firstly? And then the second question is what’s the difference fundamentally between being slightly removed but having skin in the game and actually running the thing?
Sarah Turner
Oh, it’s massive. I mean we don’t invest in businesses to tell them how to turn their business, we invest in businesses because we believe that the founding team are the right people to build this business so, our job is to stand back and be available to support them as and when they need it but basically, it, you know it’s their job. We’ve got experience, we’ve got contacts, we’ve got things that we can share with them but it’s up to them to execute so.
Elliot Moss
And do you like having that role because often, you know, I’m a non-exec on a couple of boards and on the one hand I really like being able to help and on the other hand I’m frustrated that I’m not helping enough or I’m not sort of directing things, there’s this contradiction, it depends. Do you have the same feeling, as an investor, sometimes?
Sarah Turner
I mean, actually, I really like it, you’ve got none of the responsibility but all the, all the fun, haven’t you, you get to kind of go on the journey with them, the ups and downs but without, you know, without the heavy lifting behind it, so it’s really nice and it’s just so intellectually stimulating, it’s other people who are changing things isn’t it, I mean we keep hearing how there’s this massive productivity issue in this country and the businesses that we’re investing in that are bringing, developing new technologies are the key to kind of improving productivity but also creating good, good jobs for the future for our kids and future generations.
Elliot Moss
Do you need to train or do people ask for training in terms of how do I be a good angel investor? And is that something that you offer?
Sarah Turner
I think one of the most joyous things, I always say, it’s just the calibre of people who’ve come forward to do this. Amazing people. These are amazing women who are just super confident in their own domains but even if they’ve built their own business, they may never have raised angel investment, they probably didn’t or you know we’ve got a few women that raised money from private equity or sold to private equity but never did any, so this whole world is unfamiliar to them and it’s, you know it’s finance, there are some things that you do need to know, it’s about building your instincts, it’s experience, it’s learning by doing, so you know we provide lots and lots of education just to help people build their confidence but the main thing is putting people together so that they learn from each other because everyone brings something to the party from their day job, from their previous experience, we’ve got some really, really experienced investors in the group now, so the people who haven’t done it before can learn from them, you can ask all the questions, all the, you know and you can, if you’re not a finance person, you can lean on somebody who has got a finance background to do that bit of due diligence or if technology isn’t where you’re from, you can speak to somebody who knows about tech so.
Elliot Moss
So now this metaphorical room, which you went into before 2014, which was full of alpha men, now you have a different panorama, a different vista in front of you. Is there a fundamental difference in the way that a woman approaches an investment opportunity to a man or is it simply down to the individual? A genuine question around whether there’s a real gender difference, you know the whole clichés around men are more arrogant, women are more humble and all that.
Sarah Turner
I think there is. Obviously, there’s this huge generalisations and you, you know you have alpha women like you have alpha men and you have some incredibly modest, respectful men and those are the ones that tend to turn up in our group because they don’t think they know it all already, there’s stuff to learn but I do think that there are some behaviour differences between men and women and lots of clever female founders have managed to adopt those kind of male traits but it’s this talking with absolute assurance, being very comfortable about painting this really, really ambitious future and truly believing that. I think there’s some other interesting research and it was looking at male founder versus female founded businesses and asking them first to talk about how their business was going and you know women were very grounded about it and men were saying ‘oh it’s great, everything’s fantastic’ and then they looked at the actual business performance and the female businesses were, on the whole, doing better than the male businesses, so you know, that kind of, the fake it till you make it thing, I think is just less natural to most women and it’s what makes me like working with female entrepreneurs, they are ambitious, they are confident but there’s just a little bit less blag.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest, Sarah Turner and we’ve got some Ezra Collective for you, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Ezra Collective there with the incredibly upbeat Victory Dance. Sarah Turner is my Business Shaper here on number one, 2023, just for a few more minutes. I asked you earlier, I said I was going to ask you about do we still need to have something which is a network of angel investors dedicated to women rather than men. So my question is, Sarah, do we?
Sarah Turner
So I’d love to get to a point where we don’t have to talk about gender, I really would but I think you know we have got to accept we’ve got a fundamental, structural imbalance. Atomico, very well respected, European VC, does an annual report and yet again, the number they came up with was that the amount of venture money that went to female founders was only 2% of the total invested this year and you know, from where I sit, where I see amazing, brilliant female founders, that isn’t right.
Elliot Moss
And how are we going to change that? How are you precipitating the change? Where is it going to come from? We talk about allyship, we talk about industrial strategy, we talk about all sorts of things Sarah and yet, and I remember having Debbie Roscoe on the programme a few years ago, and it was pretty much the same stat and it kind of makes me think about electric cars and the infrastructure and people saying oh no, we’re going to take another fifteen years to get, you know 3% of the country covered. At what point will 2% be 20%, be 40%, be 50%? Where do you think this is going to go and how can we accelerate that pace of change?
Sarah Turner
So the, you know, the insight I had in 2014 was it, was about changing investors and the gender makeup of the investor community and you know, not saying that men couldn’t invest in female founders, I’d love it if they did it more often but actually, you know if we had more women investing, it would change the conversation and level the playing field somewhat but the research that we’ve done since then and other people’s research is that you look at where women are putting their money in this early stage investment market and they’re twice as likely to back female founders as male investors are. So, you know, we were onto something back then based on a hunch but it’s borne out to be true.
Elliot Moss
And just thinking about other, other things that may happen and I’m just thinking about the 30% Club and the number of, you know almost I think legislation mandated a number of women on boards and that’s really moved the needle. Do you think it needs to come to that? Where we actually say this is what you have to do when you raise finance or is that just too nanny state-ish?
Sarah Turner
Yeah, I’m, I’m not convinced by quotas, they have their place, they have their uses and that be dramatic improvement in the number of women in board but you know what it says to me is that there are these incredibly successful, wealthy women out there, we’ve never had so many women with the financial capacity to invest so, how do we mobilise them or some of them to do something interesting and fun and useful with a small proportion of that money that they’ve worked so, so hard to build up.
Elliot Moss
Well look, you’re going to keep going.
Sarah Turner
Yes, absolutely.
Elliot Moss
You know where you want to take this.
Sarah Turner
Absolutely, I’ve got the bit between my teeth. It isn’t easy but you know we will get there.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you. Thank you. Thank you for you time. Just before I let you disappear, to go and raise more money and make this change that needs to happen, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Sarah Turner
So, I Wish I Didn’t Miss You by Angie Stone, she’s one of my favourite soul recording artists. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her a couple of times performing here in London. It’s an amazing song and she’s an amazing woman, been around for a long time but is less known than she should be.
Elliot Moss
Angie Stone with Wish I Didn’t Miss You, the song choice of my first Business Shaper of the year here in 2023, Sarah Turner. She talked about being antifragile. You’ve got to be prepared to ditch what you’re doing and do something different in the interests of moving forward. She talked about having clear roles in her partnership with her husband, her business partner and how as long as you are clear on those then conflict is managed in a healthy way. And she said, “I like changing things” and she’s been changing things for the last eight or nine years and there’s still more change to come. Positively moving the amount of money invested in female founded businesses from 2% up to 50 as fast as possible. I’m sure she’ll do it.
You can hear my conversation with Sarah all over again whenever you like, as a podcast just search Jazz Shapers or you can ask your smart speaker to play Jazz Shapers. Alternatively, you can catch this programme again, Monday morning just before the Jazz FM Breakfast at 5.00am.
We are back next Saturday with my next Business Shaper, Jasmine Richards, Author and Founder of Storymix, a children’s fiction development studio with a social purpose, make sure you join me to find out what that’s all about. Up next after the news at 10.00, Nigel Williams has great music, interviews and live sessions too. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
You can hear or conversation with Sarah all over again whenever you’d like to as a podcast, just search Jazz Shapers or you can ask your smart speaker to play Jazz Shapers. We are back next Saturday with my next Business Shaper here in the new 2023 series, Jasmine Richards, Author and Founder of Storymix, the children’s fiction development studio with a social purpose. The Jazz FM Breakfast is up next with the one and only Nigel Williams. Have a great one and I’ll see you on Saturday.
Jazz Shapers is back! It’s official and this Saturday I’m joined by the Co-Founder of Angel Academe, an angel investment network supporting female founded tech businesses, Sarah Turner is my first guest. I am Elliot Moss and I will have more of that alongside the music of the shapers of jazz, soul and blues this weekend.
On this Saturday’s Jazz Shapers, kicking off our brand new series, we heard from Sarah Turner, Co-Founder of Angel Academe, an angel investment network supporting female founded tech businesses. That programme is now available for you to listen to again as a podcast and through your smart speaker, just search or ask for Jazz Shapers or you can hear it again nice and early Monday morning, 5.00am.
Welcome to the brand new season of Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, kicking off the series in typically pioneering, change-making style, is Sarah Turner, Co-Founder of Angel Academe, an angel investment network supporting female founded tech businesses and introducing more women to angel investing. We’re back next Saturday with my next Business Shaper, serial entrepreneur, Charles Dunstone, Co-Founder of mobile phone retailer, Carphone Warehouse and Founder of the broadband and TV provider, the TalkTalk Group.