 Thanks, Sameer, for joining us. I guess many of you know what Funding Circle is, but for the benefit of those who might not know so much about the company, could you give a brief introduction? Yeah, sure. So for those of you that don't know, Funding Circle is the largest online small business lender in the Western world. We've originated over $5 billion of loans to thousands of businesses across the UK, US, Germany, and the Netherlands. We provide a platform so we don't actually lend any money ourselves. But we allow anyone, so governments, individuals, people like all of you, institutions, to kind of bypass the banking system and lend money. And that means that investors get access to stable, attractive returns, typically of 6%, 7% a year. And small businesses get access to fast, low-cost loans. And you guys have come a long way in the past few years. And when you started, you had an interesting setup. None of you were CEO. And I guess now you're the CEO. How did that come about, and how did that work? Yeah, so we were three co-founders when we started the business. And as many people do, we were friends from university. It was very difficult to decide who would be CEO, to be honest. So we just kind of said, well, we'll all be CEO, and that's fine. And then Index Ventures became an investor in the business and said, look, this kind of system doesn't work. And I think we already were starting to see that it doesn't quite work when you've got lots of different people doing things. So in the end, it was a bit simpler than others, maybe, because the business was originally my idea and I had a slightly larger ownership than the others. But it's always worked quite well, actually. We've never really questioned it, maybe, because the business has gone well, and we all get on well, and we've all been friends. But I think it was definitely a benefit to having one of us as CEO. And the timing of when you founded Funding Circle is quite interesting. So you founded the company in 2010, right after the financial crisis, banks were sort of retreating from small business lending. How has the market changed since you got started? Yeah, so when we started Funding Circle, it was in the middle of what was certainly the biggest recession of our lifetime. And we were doing a lot of work on it, but it was quite scary, because we had jobs. Some of our friends were losing their jobs. It was quite a big deal at the time. And when we came to the point where we wanted to start the business, we basically worked out that it wasn't regulated. So we talked to lawyers and people, and they said to us, hey, just send a letter to the regulator. If you don't hear back, it's fine. Just go and start the business. And obviously, we didn't really want to quit our jobs in the middle of this massive recession to do that without. So we kind of hounded the regulator until we got an answer. And even then, it was a pretty scary period. And I think what you've seen since then in small business lending is there's been a huge continuation of this trend, which is, whereas in consumer lending, banks have actually come back into the market. Consumer lending is actually at a higher level now than it was during the crisis. In small business lending, banks have retreated massively, and they've continued to do so. So actually, there's this huge gap still in the market for what, and I'm not talking necessarily about the small businesses that might be here, tech enabled, these are very much restaurants, pharmacies, small manufacturing firms, the kind of real core of the economy that needs capital to grow and expand. They're not going to travel every year or do all the amazing things everyone else is doing. But they need that money, and that actually is really starving the economy everywhere, Germany as well, of growth. And one of the ways that you compete is by your use of data. So you use data in interesting ways in this marketplace. So what are some of the ways that you've been using data, and what are some of the lessons from that program? Yeah, so I think when we've started our business in every single market, every single country, in the first two years, the loans don't perform quite as well as we want them to. And part of the reason for that is small business lending is really, really hard. It's not like consumer lending where you can just kind of take a bureau score or something and just do it. You actually have to aggregate huge amounts of data to really get predictive. But the really nice thing is once you've actually been able to go through that kind of R&D phase, you can really start to use data in pretty amazing ways. So right the way through, right from targeting, we use a lot of data to determine which businesses to target in terms of online advertising, email advertising, even stuff like TV now. You can target people right the way through to propensity modeling on when a borrower starts to apply. We have a good sense for how quickly they need that money, how quickly they need to be called. So we use machine learning to determine which borrower to call first so that we can give some borrowers an expedited process, some don't need as much time, credit models, everything. So once you actually start to get into this data mode, you can really apply these tools and techniques in very innovative ways. And one of the things I've said quite often, which not many people seem to listen to, is banks are very, very regulated companies and they're regulated for good reason. If a bank goes bust, we as taxpayers ultimately have to stand behind them. We're funding these schemes, these deposit reinsurance schemes. So regulators are not going to let banks use the latest tools and techniques in terms of machine learning, especially stuff like deep learning. It's actually going to happen in places outside the banking system, FinTechs, Asset Managers, people like that. And that's a huge opportunity for not just us, but for everyone here, is that you can actually use things that banks fundamentally won't be allowed to use. And regulation cuts both ways, right? A lot of other startups don't have to deal with the regulated environment that you have to deal with at Funding Circle. So what are some of the things that you had to do differently or some of the key decisions that you had to make along the way, given the regulated environment that you're operating in? Yeah, I think there's a few things. So we are a regulated business. We don't lend money ourselves. We don't guarantee returns and things. So we're a bit more like an asset manager than, say, a bank. But I mean, there's a couple of things. So we look after people's money. We've got $5 billion of money. We've got 80,000 retail investors, individuals with money on the platform. That means when you hear stuff like move fast and break things, the original Facebook stuff, you can't really do that kind of stuff. Because if you lose people's money, that's the end of the business. So you need to take a different approach to the money parts, the kind of bits where people really care about things, to other stuff. For instance, on the borrower side, split testing application forms, things like that, we're quite happy to move fast and break things there. But in certain parts of our business, they just need to work all the time, everything. All the money needs to add up. People don't want to lose money. And the second way we've done it is we've tried to instill unprecedented transparency in our business. We publish every single loan that we've done on our platform in a spreadsheet so people can analyze the performance in real time. With our staff, we're regularly communicating everything about the business. And one of the things I think that went wrong in the crisis with banks was no one knew what was going on inside these things. They're so big, so complicated. Whereas if you make your business model super simple, at the end of the day, funding circles are a very, very simple business. People are lending money to small business borrowers. That's as simple as it gets. It used to happen even before banks existed. And you make everything very, very transparent about it. It's very hard for people to do bad things or for things to go wrong, because it's pretty much all out there. And when you talk to people about funding circle, one of the things that comes up a lot is culture. And I'm sure a lot of the folks in the room would be very interested in hearing how you've built a sort of culture that's both inclusive and fun, but also very oriented around kind of hard work and going the extra mile. So what are some of the things that you've done to build that culture? Well, I mean, I think we care about it a lot, which obviously makes a difference right away. We've worked in environments where probably culture wasn't as important a thing. Traditionally in finance, people just pay you lots of money, and they kind of tell you to get on with your work, really. And you don't really know what's going on. This culture of transparency is because I saw in lots of institutions, you don't know what's going on. And if you don't know what's going on as a kind of employee, you feel very, very disempowered. So lots of things from straightaway, I mean, this is obvious stuff in some respects, but monthly bonding, going out all the time. We started doing this when we were six employees. We have 900 employees now, but we still will go out every month and do an event in all our different geographies. I mean, it gets bloody expensive after a while, but it's the kind of stuff that people really value. Making the whole thing about values. So in Funding Circle, we have five values. We try to keep it less than, I think, a lot of other people. A lot of people have 14, 10 values. I kind of think you've got so many values, why do you care if you can't remember these things or if it's not part of what you do? And making it integral to everything. So we compensate people not on just their performance, but actually how they meet our values. Being open, transparent is one of our values. We want our business to be a very transparent business. We want people to readily share information. We reward and penalize people if they don't do that. So you need to kind of make it central to everything you do, otherwise people just don't care. Why would you care if you know you can just perform and you're still going to progress and things like that? And what's Ping Pong Fight Club? So I hear you have some data scientists that are nationally ranked ping pong players. Yeah, so we compete in a competition in the UK. It's called Ping Pong Fight Club. We tried to bring it to the US, but I think people didn't like it because we just won it and they didn't want to play anymore. But I think it's quite nice because what happens is, I mean, we lost the last one, which is a bit annoying, but we turn up with 100, 200 people from Funding Circle. We're always the best supported team. And when you do a platform business like us, it's a bit like the kind of Amazon's justy type business models where you have to be number one. If you're not number one, when you're the biggest lending platform, investors want to come to the place where they're the most loans, the most stable returns, borrowers want to come to the place where they're most likely to be accepted. They get the fastest loan. The data, the person who has the most data can do the most innovative stuff. So what I kind of tell the team is like winning and being number one is not just this kind of thing we say because we're competitive. It's our business model. We have to be number one in a market. Otherwise, we will lose. And in certain categories of business, I know food delivery is one. Only the number one player actually makes any money. The number two doesn't ever make any money. So the table tennis stuff is kind of silly in some respects, but it kind of reinforces this notion that we have, which is winning is our business model. We have to be number one. It's the most important thing about what Funding Circle is. And if we go into a market, we don't go in to be... A lot of people were surprised when we went to the US. We've ended up as a number one who said, oh, you know, you can be number three, number four. You know, you have to be number one. If you're going to enter these things, you have to play to win, basically. And connected to your culture, you've done something quite interesting when you've acquired other companies where you've taken the founders of those companies and made them co-founders of Funding Circle. Can you kind of explain how that's worked and what the thinking behind that is? Yeah, I mean, it's worked well with some co-founders, with others it doesn't. I mean, it's a very interesting thing. Like, I'm sure a lot of people in the audience are entrepreneurs. You know, we acquired a couple of companies to enter different geographies. And it is quite difficult to, you know, integrate people who are entrepreneurs. You know, people don't... If you're an entrepreneur, do you really like working for someone else like them? I know I certainly wouldn't like doing that. So, we try to create an environment where we get the best of global. So, we have a very matrix-organisational structure. We have a lot of global functions where we can really add a lot of value, so stuff like data, technology, areas like risk management marketing. But then we try and give local geographies a lot of freedom to execute. We try and make people feel like they're still part of a very entrepreneurial company because when you're in a new country, you know, like, we're the biggest lending platform for small businesses in the Netherlands, in Germany, but that's a lot smaller than, say, our UK business or our US business at the moment, growing much faster but smaller. So, we don't want to stifle these new geographies with things like that. So, I think it's a nice way of doing it. It's not without its challenges. But if you want to maintain the kind of entrepreneurial and rural drive of co-founders when you acquire companies, you've got to kind of think quite deeply about this kind of stuff. And Index Ventures just published a piece about rewarding talent, about how your entrepreneurs should think about options, pools and rewarding employees to attract the best talent. What's your thinking on kind of granting options and what would have been some of your key learnings in that area? So, we have always given options to every single employee in our company. I think it's really important. I think when you stand up in front of people and you talk to them and if you want them to care about this kind of stuff, you know, they have to be owners. They have to feel part of the success. They have to understand it. You know, we've been doing that, you know, right from day one, we continue to do it. It's important to us as a business. And, you know, I think a very large portion of our business is owned by employees. I mean, I have noticed cultural differences in the US. This is a very, you know, well-trodden path. People, if I look at my kind of, you know, employees in my business, like people in the US really understand it. They really value it. I think that's starting to change in Europe, certainly continental Europe. But people still say sometimes to me, hey, I'd rather have a bit more pension or, you know, I'd rather, I'm like, look, you guys are crazy. This thing's gonna be worth loads of money. So, but I think things are changing. And ultimately, I think you have to kind of do what you know is right in the long run, which is for people to be owners and, you know, kind of not acquiesce to this, just pay me a bit more money or things like that. Because I think in the long run, people will feel pretty pissed off if they're not part of the success. And very quickly at the end, what's next for Funding Circle? Well, I think we just want to keep growing and expanding. You know, we've got this platform. We've ended up as the number one in all the markets we play in. You know, we're originating, you know, $260 million a month now, so we're the largest in the world. And we want to keep adding more and more countries. And I think one of the things we've learned over the years is just to be relentlessly focused. You know, we do one product pretty much, the same product in all our geographies. And we're just going to keep rolling that out to more and more countries. But we're just going to get amazing at it. You know, if you do one thing amazingly well, that's when you can use all this machine learning, you know, deep learning, all this kind of stuff. If you try and do too many things, well, so we'll just keep doing one thing amazingly well and as many countries as we can. Please join me in thanking Sameer for joining us. Thank you. Thanks.