David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yep well, there’s, there’s isn’t it, if you’ve got the, the A team with the big idea, that’s the one you back. The A idea with the B team don’t go anywhere near them.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Welcome everyone and thank you for joining this Mishcon Academy session, part of a series of online events, videos and podcasts looking at the biggest issues facing society today. Just to introduce myself, I am Chloe Sweden, a Senior Business Development Manager here at Mishcon and I’ll be hosting today’s event. As we sit here in our Cambridge office, David needs no introduction round these parts, but I’ll do my best to summarise his incredible career so far. David is an entrepreneur, investor, policy advisor and thought leader who has played a transformative role in shaping Cambridge’s innovation ecosystem. He’s founded and supported more than sixty companies, including Abcam, Analysis and the Raspberry Pie Foundation as well as co-founding Cambridge Angels, Cambridge Wireless and the Cambridge Network. Today we’ll be discussing his latest book, ‘Serendipity’, which explores the power of chance, connection and community in driving innovation. We have just under an hour so first I’d like to explore a little bit more about your remarkable career before we dive into the book itself and finish with some audience Q&A. So, hi David.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Hello Chloe.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
It’s lovely having you. Um, before we get into the many, many companies, investments and initiatives that you’ve been part of, I’d like to go right back to the beginning if I may. Um, was there something early on in your childhood or early career that, that set you on this path do you think?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Oh what a tricky question. Um, I suppose there are, I’d like to answer that with two things if I may?
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
For sure.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Firstly one of my earliest memories is probably, I’m probably under three years old I would guess and in the back garden and there’s a worm and I wondered what was inside the worm so I picked it up and I bit it and then some blood came out and then I wondered if there was any more blood in the worm so I then proceeded to bite the worm again until there was no more blood and then it set me thinking about how worms worked and how they operated and so on. Um, and the other one is nothing like as gruesome as that, it’s much later, I wanted to, I read in a book about how to keep bees and I got rather interested in the idea, um, and I’d already been keeping lizards and slow worms in the garden and in tepidarium’s and also sorts of weird things but bees really fascinated me but my parents wouldn’t let me keep such dangerous animals in the garden so I, I started a, um, a bee keeping club at school and in the first year of properly keeping bees, I managed to generate enough honey to be able to sell to the parents who were willing to support it and so I made all the money back that I’d actually spent on setting up the bee keeping club in the first place.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
So it was sort of the combination between curiosity and entrepreneurialism early on, because you could have gone down the path of zoology but you, you sort of, you know, really thought about.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
I nearly, I nearly became a biologist but I really did very badly at O level biology and I, I still don’t understand why and I think it was because deep down I’m an engineer and I think in systems terms.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Uh huh.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
And the way biology was taught was basically you had to learn these facts and take it for granted about how stuff worked.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yeah. Super interesting and part of what you’ve been able to do with that systems knowledge I guess is you’ve created what’s been coined the Cambridge Phenomenon, um, in your view as we sit here in our lovely Cambridge office, um, what is it about Cambridge in particular that makes it so good, um, in terms of, you know, fertile ground for innovation and curiosity?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Well Cambridge Phenomenon was originally coined by somebody who had a chat with an FT journalist and then it appeared in the FT. And then there was a company called Segal Quince Wicksteed who people may remember, uh, in the audience. Um, and they wrote a book called the Cambridge Phenomenon and then that appeared in the colour supplement of the Sunday Times and I read the colour supplement of the Sunday Times and went, I really need to set up my, my company in Cambridge. I was already living in Cambridge and I thought, this is fantastic, this is just a brilliant place. Look at, look at what’s going on here and so that, that moment which was probably the beginning of the 1980s, um, was, was the moment which I kind of clocked that something special was happening and then during the late 1990s, meeting people like Hermann Hausa and Alec Broers who was then the Vice Chancellor and various other people began to build up this network which actually then turned into Cambridge Network and became, I suppose, a passion of mine for pretty well the last twenty five years, about how to connect people up.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
And so in terms of the Cambridge element then, so you’re saying that something already existed here, there was already this sort of like, um, centrifugal force but that actually you added to that and you, you leveraged that for you?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Well, well nobody, nobody no matter how original they think they are ever starts with a completely blank slate right. There’s always, there is always stuff there and Cambridge had already got some of the ingredients that make it special. I mean, if you go, if you look at the college and you look at its emphasis on, uh, or the town’s emphasis on science, and it was on technology and so on, there is, there is a kind of social behavioural set of norms when you, when you look at that which tends to, certainly in the college system, the interdisciplinary thing. I was, I had lunch in college today and there was, um, some people speaking Italian next to me and there were, there was a historian on my, on the other side and I was talking about telecommunications and politics across the way. So the, you know, that kind of cross disciplinarily and meeting interesting and different people is part of that. And the you have this slightly, um, uh, slightly direct way of dealing with it being academic, of being scientific based which means that you’re not posturing quite so much and that does actually lend itself to creating a kind of atmosphere in which you, you could actually see how the culture of Cambridge has developed from those kinds of roots. And there was a moment when in late 1990s, when I went to, uh, Scientific Generics who’s a company down, down towards Melbourne, um, and I’d been invited and I was a rival consultancy company, which I set up my consultancy company, I was a rival and Richard King, a blessed memory, um, said, you know, something has changed in Cambridge, you wouldn’t have been invited to a party held by a rival consultancy company in the old days, something has really shifted. And indeed, he was right. The Cambridge Network and all those kinds of organisations were beginning to build on those early bits and pieces and starting to think about, we are still going to compete of course but you also collaborate, you, and, and that, that foundation I think is very important for Cambridge’s success over the last quarter century.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Talking of success, you have built, um, and, uh, co-founded quite a lot of successful businesses which is incredible to build one, let alone more than one in a lifetime. Um, Abcam, Analysis and many, many more. Is there one in particular that’s your favourite child shall we say?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Ah you can’t chose favourite children.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
I often do.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Um, I think, I’m about to have, I’m about to get grandchild number 11 and so…
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Wow.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
…maybe I’m allowed to favourites in amongst number 11 of them but, you know, the three kids I’ve got, I’ve got no favourites so in the companies I’ve got. Are there favourites? They all have their different qualities, as kids do, right. Um, Analysis was very interesting because it was a way of building something that actually made a big difference to telecommunications in Europe and in the world and, and changed a lot of telecommunications regulation and a lot of the environment that we saw that created the, that explosion in mobile communications and telecoms. We contributed quite a bit to that. So I am, I’m quite proud of that as a, as a thing. I think the Abcam one is really a superb example of how Cambridge works when I had, uh, a department which was doing software and web development and Jonathan Milner, who I sat next to by pure serendipity, at, at a dinner, uh, was complaining about antibodies and I worked out the business plan at the dinner about how much it would cost to make the antibodies which turned out to be correct within a few percent, um, and we worked, and by the following Saturday he was in my office and we were putting that together. That I think, that moment which I can still replay is one of the most interesting things and we’ll get to talk about the book a bit later, but that, that really, really does inform the book. That’s, that’s how those things go on. But I’ve got stuff that I’m proud of now which may, you know, I’ve got a, I met a slightly interesting shall we say, Professor from Glasgow University, and he’s one of the people by the expression on their face knows this person in the audience, in the audience knows this person. We just raised 100 million and we, we are, we have a universal machine for making any molecule. Now if you’re not excited by the idea that you can have, you can now take a molecule, design of a molecule, we can work out how to make it and then compile the code and programme the machines and make the molecule without human intervention. And if you’re not excited by that, and at the same time, a bit scared then there… I’ll have a chat with you afterwards but it really is exciting. It really is exciting. So, you know, what am I most proud of? I don’t know, maybe I am going to be most proud of the things to come, not, not the stuff now.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yeah. Good answer. Um, we didn’t talk about though, Raspberry Pi and actually sitting in that chair last week was Liz Upton.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Right.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Talking about, um…
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yep.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
…the work that, that she did and the incredible journey that she had and they had Raspberry Pi Foundation when, also which you were, um, instrumental in. When you first encountered Raspberry Pi, was there a kind of special source in the team or the technology or the mission that you know that, you know, something great was going to come from it?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Well, you know, there, there was, Raspberry Pi, I need to explain how Raspberry Pi works, worked, right. There is the charitable foundation and underneath it was this trading company with this very peculiar idea that you can make a small computer of about that kind of size and sell it for thirty five dollars and kids would then get hands on experience, we could wire this up into robots and they could do different things and programme the thing and it wasn’t precious in a box and far away from you. So it was basically to, and Liz would have explained, about overcoming the problem of training up computer scientists. And at the time that I joined there was a handful, uh, maybe five people or six people doing the technical stuff and there was this other small, um, charitable thing which had a Board of Trustees and hardly anybody there that was over, that, that owned 100%. And so first of all they, as Sherry Coutu and I had a chat about it and I said, well if you’re being asked to join the Raspberry Pi board, how many milliseconds does it take you to say yes, so, you know, Sherry, Hermann and I joined the board and we sat round for a couple of meetings but very quickly, um, one of the, uh, David Brayburn who had been very instrumental in getting the whole thing off the ground, uh, took me out for a very nice Japanese meal at Japas, just round the corner here and asked me if I’d like to be Chairman of both the trading company and the foundation. So at that point there were probably, I don’t know, a dozen people in total in the organisation. And, uh, I said, yes – I did think about it – but I did say yes and then I put in place a rule which said that somebody doing a job like that must not stay for more than six years. So I gave myself six years to get the thing sorted and laid the foundation for the floatation and, you know, all those other bits and pieces and reworked the governance structure and blah, right. A lot of, a lot of kind of stuff lawyers enjoy really.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Do they enjoy it? I don’t, they do it. Whether they enjoy that bit. Um, so you’ve done lots of things. We’ve talked about sort of the, the board piece, we’ve talked about the sort of the investor and the founder piece. You’ve also, um, advised Government, um, on major national strategies. How different is influencing public policy from building companies and getting involved in the board, like we were just talking about?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Oh, uh, look working with Government is completely different, um, and it, it’s a sort of frustration of course because if you, if you’re used to doing things in business and then trying to do things in Government, uh, and you don’t recognise that you are dealing with a completely different system, um, you will get very frustrated and I know a lot of people who’ve, um, who’ve found that. And to be honest, I found it fairly frustrating, um, in a number of respects but the, um, the thing is that the, um, the, the, the rules and incentives and what’s being attempted to achieve in Government are quite different from anything in the corporate world and so, you know, you’ll get people, people, people react to the environment within which they’re in and the incentive structure and the, the other things around them and then they’ll, they’ll do what’s expected and the civil service and business are utterly different in what they are trying to achieve. But I can give you some examples of my, my time at the Ministry of Defence or, you know, I, I mean I did, worked on the Ofcom, the original white paper for, um, restructuring tech, uh, communications which came out in 2003 and led to the formation of Ofcom which was an interesting experience. And, and one of the things about that, for example, is that you do things and then you have no idea whether it’s had any effect until you see some kind of product that’s emerged at the other side. Um, but I can talk about all, all of those things if you want or we could get on with some other questions.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Well I think it’s interesting actually because that’s completely at odds with sort of the, the founder mentality which is, you know, absolutely immediate isn’t it, it’s sort of like you, you do something and then the next day you know whether it’s worked or not worked.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yes, I mean it depends on the size of the company. I mean, you know, so it’s not quite as immediate as that but there’s an immediacy in accountability for the consequences of what you’re doing. So when you’re a founder or chief exec or whatever, there are, there are those consequences. I suppose, a permsec would say the same thing, a senior civil servant would say the same thing. If I make those decisions then I’ve got to do this stuff, then the consequences will come back to me. But they come back to you in a different way. In the, in the business you are rewarded for having taken the risk and having, um, got something right and people will forgive you in general if you’ve got it wrong. In the civil service the punishment for getting things wrong is, is significantly greater and that’s a. that’s an incentive structure that makes life, once you understand it, you can work with it, but you have, but it’s, it gives you a very different way of behaving.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yeah. Um, so when we reflect on key turning points in your career, given that we’re talking about serendipity today. How much would you attribute to plan and intention and how much to serendipity?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Uh, so, well what would I say? I mean the thing is that, um, plan and intention has been there and I think you need a strategy in the sense that you need to know roughly where you’re going, um, and, you know, in my 20s I had a ten year view about what I wanted to do and, and so that informed me and I kept that up really in that sense that, you know, trying to think slightly long-term. But in the day-to-day you don’t know what’s going to happen so if you take Jonathan Milner and I sitting down at dinner by chance, nobody could have planned that but the, the difference is I suppose whether you’ve got what Pasteur called ‘the prepared mind’, you, you’re interested in other people, you find out about what they’re, what they’re doing, you have a chat with them and you have a prepared mind that looks and recognises an opportunity when it presents itself and then will do something about it, right. Not just go, oh well that was an interesting discussion…
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yep.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
…and then get on with something else. No, you’ve got to, you’ve got to do something about it. So it’s, it’s a mixed strategy in that sense. You can’t, you can’t steer your life and your career without having an overall picture about what you want to do but on the other hand, all these micro events are really important and can take you over there rather than over there.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
On the subject of serendipity, we’re going to move to the book that you’ve just written. Um, it feels like in this way this book is a reflection of your journey, um, but also a challenge to all of use to re-think how we approach chance and connection.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yep.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Um, so starting off, a really easy question. What inspired you to write Serendipity?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
I was sitting in a Parliamentary committee, um, which was actually reviewing the ARIA bill and many of you will know about the, I, I can’t really say it because the ‘i’ in this word just pains me. It is the Advanced Research and Invention Agency and I am afraid that the word invention for me is a black and white film with a man with his hair on fire, wearing a tweed jacket, emerging from a shed holding a test tube, right. It is the kind of archetypal thing that, that, that I think is a problem for the United Kingdom in the idea that somehow an invention is going to solve all our problems, right. So I, I decided, um, actually in that committee, I proposed a different name for ARIA which the then opposition picked up and made an amendment to the bill to change the name of the agency. They didn’t succeed of course, but never mind. Um, the, the, but during that conversation I said, well of course serendipity doesn’t happen by accident, right. And it got such a laugh around the table with the MPs sitting round, I thought, do you know what, that’s a good title for a book. And maybe this is, maybe that’s what I ought to do. And it took me probably three years before I got round to actually, there’s a wonderful thing with Peter Cook met somebody at a cocktail party and said, what do you do? And the chap said, I’m writing a book and Peter Cook said, neither am I. And I think…
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
(laughs).
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
…that is, that is exactly right. The state I was in for about two or three years and then finally I got to the point where I was saying, look I have to write this book and then that’s what I did.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yep, put the focus to it. Um, your book and it’s a fantastic read and obviously hopefully everybody will be picking up a copy. Um, it opens with endorsements from an extraordinary gathering of thinkers, so you’ve got Stephen Fry, Reid Hoffman, Rory Sutherland, Lord Richard Wilson to name a few, that like dropping names there like, uh…
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
21.05
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
…you know, 21.06, um, it’s one hell of a dinner party line up if I’m honest.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah, it would be a great dinner party.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
For a bit of fun, (a) can I come to that dinner party, um, but (b) if you could pick one of them, if you were doing the table plan, for that dinner party, who would you want to sit next to?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Well that’s the favourite children question all over again and I, everybody’s different aren’t they and it depends what you’re trying to achieve in the dinner party and by the way, there are a number of fe…, women in there like Diane Coyle and…
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
You’re right.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
…others that we need to mention as well who, um, you know, who, who, who I would certainly invite to that dinner party. Um, they have some great conversations. All of them are different. I suppose if you want wit and repartee, Stephen is probably that, right. And, um, when I met him, uh, at college where I’m a Fellow, um, Queens, um, with Reid Hoffman, this is, so this is how Cambridge Works, just how tight these networks actually operate. Um, I, I explained to, explained to Stephen about the book I was writing and he said, well of course Erasmus was here at Queens and have you read, In Praise of Folly? And I used quite a naughty word at that point, um, because this, I was trying to get the book out and this was in February and I was hoping to get published in May, um, but actually he was right, you know, it was one of those chance encounters and the book actually picked up some of what Stephen said, um, about In Praise of Folly and having, I read the book. Um, the, he’s a very witty guy and his, his endorsement there of course is entirely his own and is the longest endorsement of the lot but, um, I mean, if you want to know about Government, go to Richard Wilson who I’ve known for ages and ages. I first met Richard back in, back in the late 1980s I think, um, I mean he was Cabinet Secretary and he came to be Master of Emma and helped me with my sense of science and policy and we helped, then led on to the Masters in Public Policy in the Bennett School and all those things, terrific guy. I mean Rory Sutherland, if you want to be able to turn a problem upside and think about something in a completely different way, Rory’s absolutely brilliant. I mean all of them, you know, Diane Coyle, if you want to know about, you know, how to do some really big thinking about quality of life or economics or, you know, trying to wrestle with some of the big problems that we’ve got, she’s fantastic. I mean, you know, all good.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Let’s make that dinner party happen and then you can move around…
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yep.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
…and, uh, sit in different places. Um, the book argues that many of the breakthroughs come from unexpected encounters, structured through what you term as like, deliberate network formations.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Um, like here in Cambridge obviously. Um, can you talk a little bit more about how you see serendipity being engineered in this way?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
So, look, the thing is that, I don’t know how many of you are chemists, but, you know, you, you mix two chemicals in a, in a flask or a test tube and there’s a chemical reaction that goes on because the molecules are bumping into each other and they recombine and they do things. And you can speed that up immensely by putting in the catalyst and everybody understands, I think, you know, we always use the word catalyst for, for expressing this particular phenomenon. Well what’s actually happening is that catalyst is enabling the molecules to find each other so that they can actually react. It’s the same thing in these encounters between people. You, you need to put the structures in place so you increase the chances. Because what’s going on in the solution is not the molecules somehow, you know, have some tube map that they’re following and they’re, they’re going to meet the other molecule on the other side. No, it’s all random, it’s all random movement. We’re all subject to that kind of random movement but if you make it more likely that you’re going to encounter somebody, then it’s, it increases the chance of something interesting or useful and that’s what I mean by engineering serendipity. You can’t be certain so there’s no certainty in the civil service terms of nothing is going to fail but it’s not entirely random in the sense that it’s a very low probability event. You can change the odds.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
And you mention the civil service there. I quite like on the flip side that you say in the book, if I was to design a system with the explicit purpose of suppressing serendipity, it would look remarkably like the modern Government bureaucracy. Um, and it actually makes me think not just about Government but large corporations and, you know…
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
…we, as a law firm, we are a large corporation across many different, um, offices. Um, you talk about kind of being less as engines of problem solving and more as machines for the avoidance of visible failure.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yes.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Which I love, I love that, that, um…
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah that’s right.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
So thinking about not just Government departments but also how corporations like Mishcon and others can, can, can sort of not suppress serendipity.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Well, but, but, you see the thing is that, that, I mean there’s, there’s the, there’s first of all there’s the surface area of interaction, right, you know, a mouse has far less body mass compared to its surface area than an elephant, right. So they behave completely differently and they have different life spans and, you know, everything about them is different. And, and so the second thing is with organisations, you know, if you have a big organisation you have to hold the thing together, you can’t afford to take a risk that is going to demolish the entire organisation so risk avoidance becomes much more important and the, the entire culture within the organisation then starts to shift away from experimentation and risk taking into the, the kind of things that you see and it’s a natural thing, it’s at a fairly extreme end with the civil service and Government because they, they have added problems. They imagine what the headlines would look like in some of the well-known newspapers, so that, that is also something which, which comes into play. Um, so you can explain it. So what do you do to change it? Well, um, I quote in the book, there’s a, I’m going to go off in a slight tangent here but you’ll see why I am doing it in a second. Um, there’s a chap called Clinton Christianson who wrote a booked called, The Innovators Dilemma, which was all about why large companies fail and my favourite example is about steam shovels. Now steam shovels were the original excavators for digging big mines and doing these kind of things and they had steel horses and original with steam engines and then they became diesel engines and very complicated big machines and the business model for selling them was very complicated and maintaining them was difficult. In 1948 a small company in the Midlands took the hydraulic technology that had been used in the Second World War for aircraft and decided they could use it for making actuators that would then actually enable you to dig and excavate. Of course these were tiny things, you know, they were nothing like the capability of the, the, the big steam shovels but who, who, has anybody in this audience really ever seen a steam shovel? Probably not. Everybody thinks of these things as these hydraulic excavators, they took over. How quickly did they take over? Within twenty years, twenty two out of the twenty four steam shovel companies in the world had gone bust. The only two that survived were the two that set up completely separate entities that were independent of the corporate culture, that were independent of the business model and were operated entirely at arm’s length and those were the ones that survived and are now producing the hydraulic shovels. Now I don’t suppose Mishcon or any other, or even a Government is going to do exactly that, you know, they are not going to do something as radical but you do need to give people a safe space away from that corporate culture. And the other bit that’s really important, um, and I was talking to another legal firm about this, this very point. Is mixing, you’ve got to take somebody out of, you know, if they’re doing construction law, go and stick them into, work in a team that’s doing biotech.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yeah.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
And do some mixing across the place so that you don’t allow people to sink into, well not sink into, because you not going to sink into anything but, get, just be too narrow in the way you’re thinking about problems. Very long answer I am afraid.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
No but a fascinating one, so thank you. Um, you also reference how technology has made it easier than ever to connect. I think we can all agree that we’re more connected than ever but maybe perhaps harder to have genuine serendipitous moments. How do you see that balance playing out?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah I, I was thinking about that, um, recently actually because the, there’s a couple of things, well there’s at least three things going on. Firstly, you might rely on technology to direct you to certain things, right. And so you are, um, unless the technology is actively suggesting stuff at random to you, you, you tend to get narrowed down.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yep.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Um, the, the second one is that, um, we are somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of information that we have to deal with. You know as a kid I remember going along, and I mentioned this in the book, you know, go to a library and you would actually spend quite a lot of time looking at books, one of which turned out to be really interesting and then you would read it and you would come across it by chance. But the amount of information that you had to deal with was, was relatively limited. Um, and the other one that you can, the speed with which you then deal with things and don’t have the prepared mind to recognise an opportunity that’s coming along, for example, I met some people last night in London and perhaps 30 years ago, that encounter would have been a bit more important in, because it, and I would have done something with it and the encounter was enabled, partly as a result of technology. So there’s a whole series of things going on here. Nothing is ever straight forward because the technology can deliver some amazing insights and, and give you stuff at random and do things for you but, and I am sure it’s not just that I’m getting old, although I am. Um, and I’m not just getting less capable at dealing with the information load. There is, there is something in there that, that, that does concern me and the, the bit that I just want to give a tag perhaps to another question, I don’t know, but the, you know, for Cambridge, as Cambridge scales up it’s got the mouse to the elephant transition problem itself which is, you know, it’s, and, and being overwhelmed by all these opportunities. How do you actually make sense of it so you can direct that energy so you create meaningful things that are going to happen rather than just chance events that fizzle out.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yeah. We talk all the time about, you know, with, at Mishcon making meaningful connection so that, that makes complete sense. Um, I’d like for, um, uh, to spend some time, um, with some audience questions. So just one more from me and then we’ll open it up to, um, both online and also in the room. Um, looking to the future with your crystal ball, um, where do you see the next wave of serendipitous innovation coming from? And you can’t just say Cambridge, in general, where do you think?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
You, don’t mean geographical location?
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
I don’t mean geographically, I mean sort of, you know, conceptually?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Conceptually, conceptually I think firstly, um, there’s a lot to do in building design and environment design okay. If you look, I spent quite a lot of time with, um, Trinity when they were designing the Bradfield Centre and if you look in, if you walk into the Bradfield Centre you’ll see that that’s actually designed in a, in a really good way, you know, it encourages serendipity. So, I think there is a, there’s a lot to do in that and I was actually given a tour with AstraZeneca with Lee Cronin, my, my interesting Professor from Glasgow. We went round for a rather high level tour, um, and AstraZeneca on Friday and I’d say AstraZeneca have designed their building, um, in a way that really does promote serendipity. I mean, and, and we talked about how they were doing it so I think there’s a lot to be done in simple build, in building and environmental design. Secondly, I think there’s a lot to be done in, um, kind of encouraging people to, I, I talked about jumping into different disciplines within companies or so on. I set up the Centre for Science and Policy here in Cambridge which takes policy makers from Whitehall and introduces them to thirty really interesting people they chat to for an hour and the, the 14,000 meetings have now taken place between the Whitehall people and the people in Cambridge and it’s, I would say there’s no surprise that Cambridge has gone steadily up the Government’s agenda because basically all the civil servants are now talking about this, all of them have had first-hand experience of Cambridge and Cambridge is part of their network, right.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Uh huh.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
So, so think about that. Think about how you do that constructive networking. So there’s a building, there’s an environment and then there is the reward structure, right, which is, how do you, how do you actually encourage that behaviour and, and make it not just something that, you know, I, I might like to do because I like a glass of red wine and chatting to people because I’m pretty garrulous, um, but how, how do you encourage people to do that and get rewarded for it and how do you make, how do you engineer it in that, in that way. Um, and perhaps provide role models so people can see how that works. So there’s, there’s a number of other things that you can do but those are the kind of principle things that I would say.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Great, fantastic and, um, I think building design is an interesting one because I was sat by the kitchen today and had lots of people pass me and lots of people talking about the questions that they were going to ask you so, serendipity by design because I couldn’t get a seat in the regular part of the office. So, um, so I am going to open it up to questions in the room. Um, anybody? I know it’s always hard doing the first question, um, Chris Keen has a question right at the front?
Audience Chris Keen
I always forget that this involves a microphone. Um, David thank you so much for being here, that was fascinating. Um, we’ve known one another for quite a long time which makes me moderately comfortable being a devil’s advocate and I am doing this firmly tongue in cheek, but if someone were listening to this and read your book and said, it’s a lot easier for serendipity to happen to David Cleevely than it is to me. How would you respond to that and how would you encourage them to step out of that mind set and embrace the opportunities that you’re talking about?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
So, I’m a great Jane Austin fan and, um, there’s a, there’s a section in Pride and Prejudice, well there’s a bit in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth is sitting at the piano and I forgot, Colonel whatever his name is, is with her and, um, and Darcy comes across and there’s a bit of a dialogue in which, um, um Elizabeth upbraids Darcy via the Colonel as it were, to say, look, um, what do you think of this man, he would not dance at the, at the ball even though there were many ladies in want of a partner. And, um, Darcy says, in a kind of, he’s beginning to warm up in the book as a, not quite such a haughty character and he says, um, well I don’t find it quite so easy to chat to people in company and I’m not as social as others and Jane replied, sorry, not Jane, Elizabeth says, um, well I don’t play the piano as well as I would like but I blame it on want of practice. And, and I think there is an element of that, okay so we all know piano players who are much better than others, um. but you can improve your piano playing and you can do that, um, and there’s a theory that if you put 10,000 hours in you can get Grade 8 or whatever the number is. Um, I think the same applies with this stuff and I think going back to my point about incentives, you should reward people for making a bit of an effort to do this. Um, so Pride and Prejudice is my answer.
Audience Chris Keen
I love it, that took me by surprise.
Audience
Well that was really interesting. Um, I think for me being probably a younger professional in the room, and I think there’s a few other people I can see around us that would also benefit from this, this sort of advice that you’d give to your younger self as well, so more about like making meaningful connections with people, how do you do that? Sort of maybe a bit of advice you’d give to your younger self potentially, um, with approaching sort of networking and things like that?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah, I, it’s hard to say this because, you know, probably I’m coming across as a very open and, um, uh, person who will talk to anybody but if you’d seen me in my early 20s, you wouldn’t have thought that. I was fairly, not exactly withdrawn, I mean I did like to talk to people and, and was interested in them but I, it took some effort by me and I would say, have more confidence in just opening conversations and finding out about people. Um, and the other one is, this is a long running investment, you should be doing things for other people, contributing to the network because although you, it’s not a transaction, there is something about the general way in which the network in which you’re then a member, then delivers back to you as much, if not more than you put in. But there’s no direct relationship there, it isn’t that I can say I’ll do this for you if you do that for me. That, that is, that just, that is not what I’m saying, I’m saying you do stuff at random. I had a conversation with a young person from Hong Kong today, um, about an hour and a half before we came out. I spent three quarters of an hour with them because, in fact it was Diane Coyle who asked me to have a chat with them right because she thought this particular person was, was worth talking to and I gave them some advice. There’s nothing I’m going to get back from that and yet I know, as I said to her, that, that at some point I’m sure something will come back as a result of that networking and, and so on. What you’re, in your, as a young person, god I really feel old at this point, as a young person you don’t see that because you don’t see the decades of how that builds up and how that then creates that kind of network in which you work. So I would say, try, try and do those things and you’ll see that actually it, it makes your life and everybody else’s life much better.
Audience
Brill. And then just focussing a bit more maybe on the point that I just said around when you were like younger, things that you’d wish you’d done more of potentially? Was it maybe more of the doing things that you’re not giving back as much or is you’re focussing on something that’s, you know, just for the greater good instead of just helping your own self or is that something you, you did already when you were younger and there was something else that you’d rather do?
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Eating less worms?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah, so, somebody, look, yes you can always do that, um, there was, there was a John Finnemore sketch in which the, the sirens were the worst possible sirens because they told you what would have happened if you’d done something differently, um, in your past which is, you know, the thing you really don’t want to know, okay. And, um, uh, John Finnemore was an excellent comedian from that point of view, very, very clever guy. Um, but the, the, um, the thing is that, that somebody once said to me, you always do the best you can because otherwise you would have done something else. And, and, there’s that just don’t, any hints that you want to rewind the tape and think, well I could have done something differently, well I was what I was at the time and that, those were the circumstances and that’s what I was. So I, would I really have done anything differently? It wouldn’t have been feasible, it’s one of these, it’s a bit like thinking about quantum mechanics, you know, would it really have gone a different way? I, I don’t know. I mean there are things that, you know, there’s obviously the experiment, would I go back and tell my younger self a few things – of course I would about, um, some of the decisions particularly some of the investments I’ve made, you know, or, you know, stuff where I thought I should have, I should have done that and I really should have done it but I didn’t do it. But it, I, I, I’m not sure, sorry there was a long pause there, obviously yes, I think I should have been more organised. I should have been, um, more rational in some of the things that I did. But then would I have been who I am if I’d been like that, well I wouldn’t so it doesn’t, it doesn’t work.
Audience
Yeah, thank you.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Two more questions.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
That’s a deep philosophical question that.
Audience
I’m going to ask you a really practical question then. Um, with your investor hat on, what would you say when you see a board or a contact or basically the personalities that come to you for that investment, is there a personal quality that you’ve seen in very successful founders that you would say, yeah I will back you?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Okay, so, uh, I often say, you know, I back Jonathan Milner because he could walk through walls, right. And, that, that’s, that’s very important. Um, but then we’ve probably all encountered people who would walk through walls but after you’ve told them that walking through that wall was probably not the best thing to do and they still did it. Um, so really the quality is, um, you have a discussion with them and what emerges is better than either of you had thought of in the first place. And that’s the most important thing.
Audience
So an openness, is?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah, willingness to, to, you’ve got to listen to the other person. Um, I once met the, the head of the Swiss Armed Forces, a very formidable lady who said, you have to get people through four stages which is; I hear you, I hear you, I understand you, hear you, understand you, agree with you. Hear you, understand you, agree with you and I will do what you say. And the same kind of thing happens in, in doing business and investment. You have to get three people through a lot of stages about under…, a work of understanding each other and if the other person is so fixed that they’re going to walk through that wall as opposed to, let’s have a chat about which wall it might be best to walk through, um, they’re probably not as investible as somebody who will, you know, have that discussion, you’ll get all the way through, you’ve appreciated each other’s points of view, you’ve created something better and then you’ve both decided that that is the wall that you should walk through, okay.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
I’ve always found that teach ability thing with founders an interesting dichotomy though because founders sort of like by their very nature want to go after a problem and, you know, and want to run through walls and then that kind of teach ability piece sort of doesn’t always fit with the kind of personality type?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
So you probably get a clue about my own personality, I, I, the word teach ability kind of doesn’t quite work with me because, um, it implies that somehow I’m, I’m telling somebody something, they’re a pupil and they’re not as clever or they’re not as well informed as me and that is wrong because the, the people who are founders will have knowledge that I haven’t had, they’ll have a view of the world that, that is completely different to mine and so it’s not teach ability, it’s both parties have to learn from each other in order to get to a synthesis. And, and that, that’s what makes people investible because, you know, this is a journey, it’s not just, I’ve got this perfectly formed business plan and okay, we’ll all agree and we’ll walk through that wall. No there are going to be several walls you’re going to need to walk through and you don’t know where they are going to be and, and what you are going to need to be able to get through them. And that’s going to be a co-creation and that co-creation isn’t the relationship between a teacher and a pupil.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Yep, it’s between two equals. I think we have another question.
Audience
Hi, hello David. Um, you mentioned about the dangers and the benefits of technology and I’m curious as a writer how you feel about aspiring writers using generative AI to assist and sometimes even to write their work for them?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
I’ve just, I’ve just quote the end of the book.
Audience
I did see a little bit about it but I’m saving myself.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
It’s finally ChatGPT and Claude, both occasionally wrong and sometimes irritating, helped me think more clearly, broaden what I could cover and forced me to write better. So, um, I wrote that very deliberately because it is, it is actually a message to writers. It is saying, um, don’t, don’t use, don’t use these things as a substitute for your writing but they can really improve what you’re doing, um, and they can, you know, you can ask questions which will take you in places you hadn’t thought of. The writing has to be your own, um, and I think there’s a, there’s a great deal that you can do with, with these bots. On the other hand you have to recognise and I’ve worked with LLMs of different kinds now for a long time and I use them fairly, I mean probably two, three hours a day I would guess, something like that. I mean, when I’m working on stuff. It’s like working with somebody else. You begin to appreciate what their limitations are, um, what their strengths are and play to those strengths and use those. Don’t use them as a substitute for a human being because they’re not.
Audience
Thank you very much. I would be really interested to know from your perspective how you weigh up the balance between investing in an idea and investing in people because as advisors we see founders come to us with what is objectively a dreadful idea but we would back them to the end of the earth because they are fantastic people and vice versa and so I would be really interested to see how you navigated that from an investing perspective?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah well there’s the, there’s the classic isn’t it, if you’ve got the, the A team with the B idea, that’s the one you back. The A idea with the B team, don’t go anywhere near them right, so, um, that’s, that’s the way to, way to think about it. Um, I mean what you’re buying into is optionality isn’t it. I mean the, the thing is that you know that the future isn’t going to be as everybody planned it so, I, I’ve mentioned, you know, the, the nice shiny business plan before. You know, it’s, noth, nothing, you know, it’s a famous thing, none of these plans survive contact with the enemy right, so what you, what you want is the people who you know are going to be able to cope with the, the things that are going to be unexpected that nobody was going to foresee and yet we’re going to be able to cope with it and create something out of it and that’s what you’re, that’s what you’re really investing. You are investing in the team because you’re investing in the options they are going to be able to create in the future for exploiting something. Um, that, that’s to say that you can have a great team but they can have such a bad idea that you don’t want to invest in them. So, so there, it doesn’t quite, it’s not quite as straight forward as that.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Great. Unless there are any more questions, um, we could keep going. Is there, oh sorry, Khan.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
I met Khan on the way in, um, and he promised he was going to ask a question so.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
There you go. Man of his word.
Audience Khan
So I guess something that first time founders struggle with is do you start the company and then think about what you’re going to do or do you have an idea and then act upon it. Does the company first, does the company come first or does the idea come first?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
The, the idea comes first in the sense that you have something that you are passionate about, right. So let’s go to Abcam for example, right. Jonathan over dinner, I remember him getting really animated about the problem with antibodies and for a researcher using an antibody that was the wrong antibody or that it didn’t work in the experiment meant that you lost weeks of effort and it was an absolute disaster and he was utterly passionate about trying to solve that problem, right. Now exactly how you do that, how that turns into a company and what you do is in the second thing. It’s a bit like Simon Sinek’s thing, let’s get the vision right, then let’s get the how are we going to achieve that vision and then what you do, which is the company and the business plan and all the other things, follow on from that, right. So get that hierarchy correct. So, yeah, creating a, creating a company and designing all those bits and pieces, actually you’re probably making a terrible mistake because you’ve got to get that vision thing right first, you’ve got to get it really clear about what, what’s the general thing you’re, you’re, what are you really trying to achieve and then the mechanism for doing it will follow.
Audience
Thanks David. Uh, going back to teach ability and thinking about the comments you made at the beginning of the session about, uh, the way you were taught, uh, for exams and for your O levels. Is there more we could be doing, not at the sort of tertiary and postgraduate education level to share knowledge but to teach in the primary and secondary levels how to think like an entrepreneur. How to break moulds, uh, so that we can compete as a, as a society on a global level rather than just a local level?
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Yeah I, I, you know, it’s a very important question, uh, and very important point. The, the stuff that kids do, you know, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve got grandchildren now and I enjoy really teaching them things but getting then to experiment and do some really wild stuff that makes their parents nervous, but I did the same thing with their parents and they, you know, didn’t have anybody looking over my shoulder, well apart from my wife, and that kind of thing. Um, but they, so there’s, there’s that experimentation thing, um, which I think is very important, um, and, um, the other, and, and not trying to rope learn and put things, you know, that, that is not equipping people for a future. The, the other one about the entrepreneurial stuff, um, I, in thinking about it and about my own kids, um, they’ve all gone on to do entrepreneurial things and when I look at what they were doing in their, you know, late primary school and into their teenage years, I’ll give an example, Adam my eldest, right. Um, at the end of primary school they had a, they had a fayre and they were going to sell products and he had the idea for doing teacher Top Trumps. So we then, I mean this was, the technology now would all you to manufacture these cards really easily but it was quite difficult at the time but, so we manufactured packs of teacher Top Trumps and, and he borrowed money from the primary school in order to be able to fund the materials that he needed to make these cards and it was the only time, the first time that anybody had gone to the school, as a primary school, to, to then say, I want to borrow, I don’t remember what the amount was but it something like forty pounds or something and all the, all the cards sold out. So in terms of what that imprinted in him, because kids at the age of 10 or 11 are very susceptible to this kind of thing. Actually he, he thinks much more, as do all my kids, I can give examples for Matthew and Olivia. So the, the, the, I firmly believe that that’s the case and you need a broad education system that allows for that experimentation and for doing different things in order to encourage it. So, yes, is the short answer.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Right unless there is any more burning questions, I feel like we are going to keep saying this and we’ll we here all evening. Thank you very much for everybody in the room, um, please join me in thanking our guest, uh, today, David Cleevely, CBE, to give you your full title. Um, thank you David for, um, insightful and inspiring conversation. Serendipity is out now in all good bookshops.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Oh yes.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
And online.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Not, not really, not very good books shops I’m afraid.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Okay.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
But very definitely online and if you like it, please leave a review.
Chloe Sweden
Senior Business Development Manager
Out now in average book shops and, uh, and online. Um, I encourage everyone to read it and, uh, you never know what might come with your next fortuitous, um, connection. So thank you and, um, and join me in thanking David.
David Cleevely
Entrepreneur and Author
Thank you very much.
[Applause]