 Rydyn nhw'n ddweud o'i meddwl i chi i'n meddwl. Mae Sarah Wood yn gynnwys yn meddwl i gyd ar hyn o'r llai cyfnodau. Sarah wedi'i ddweud o'r gweithio, a rydyn nhw wedi gwneud hynny, ac mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio ar hynny, fel y pethau yn llaw. Rydyn nhw'n gweithio'n meddwl i ddiweddog. Sarah wedi'u cofnodau i fynd â'r unrwyll. Mae'r cyfnod o'r cael ei wneud y meddwl i'w ddyn ni gydag yma'r gwestiynau am gyflosbrydau a'r gweithio. 81% o gweithio adegyniol, 100 ymgyrchu rhan sy'n ei gweithio i'r byw yn ymgyrch gyfer o'r gweithio'r cyflosbrydau. Rwy'n cael ei gweithio'r gweithio, drwy dwych chi'n gwneud 300 o gwybod a'r gweithio'r cyffredinol i'r newid gwr yn seftymbeu y 2015. pan ydych chi'n gweld o ymdaint o'ch troom hwnnw a doedd yn oed yn rhywun. A dyna'n ymdaint o'ch troom yw yn yr oed yn y命 yma, ond mae oedd yn cyd-aith ei gweithio, yr oed yn sylfa o'r ymddangos, ymdaint i'r ymdaint celfodau a gwybarthu ni. Ond dyna'r ymdaint o'ch troom hwnnw i'n gweithio i'r ymdaint. Felly ydych chi ei geifredig, Osor yn angen i gath i'r newid a'r newid ymdaint, Number three is cooler than number one actually, isn't it? Because if you're number one, witness of the X-Factor, you know, you're no longer on comparing to X-Factor because that's an awful show. But it's entertaining, I'd like it. Virtually co-business woman of the year, best CEO of the year at the 2016 Europas Awards, city AM entrepreneur of the year 2015 and one of ad ages 20 women to watch in Europe. She is a member of Texas's entrepreneur advisory panel, a technology ambassador for London and OBE in June 2016. Sarah is also an associate lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches, now this sounds really good, teachers of course in mash-ups, memes and lollithics. We're all going to be signing up. And this is for online video culture and the screen media revolution. Something to add is that I've also had the pleasure of working with Sarah and she's no stranger to city either and was awarded an honorary doctorate for outstanding entrepreneurial leadership and commitment to furthering education and technology. And that was last year. Yes, of course. And Sarah, I think to this day, has been dubbed the best ever graduation speech ever. Lots of hats were involved. That's right. Seven hats, was it? Seven hats, yeah. Fantastic. The big box and lots of hats. How many hats today? Just one? Just the hooding. Sarah also was instrumental in the founding of City Unru University. Now did any of you attend City Unru University? Leon did, okay. But that was a partnership between Unru Lee and City and specifically Cass Business School and that was a pop-up university which we believe is London's first ever pop-up university for the start-up environment and it's fantastic. We had academic practitioners and the stats that came out recently were staggering. I can't quite remember how many it was but it was, I think, close to 10,000 people had turned up to those sessions. So it's been fantastic working with Sarah on that. And also my gaggle of student graduate entrepreneurs worked at Unru Lee as part of the Hive. So there's a space at Unru Lee's offices that we had 15 to 20 of our student graduate start-ups some of which are doing really, really well now. So thank you again for letting us squat in your premises there. That was fantastic. So it's brilliant that we can close the loop slightly and invite Sarah now to present the next talk which will be an interview-based scenario with Leon. So thank you very much for that, Sarah. We can all give a welcoming round of applause. Thank you very much, Alex. Can you all hear me at the back if I speak at this volume? No. OK, we will need a couple of mics then. Have you got two mics? Yeah, there's another mic. We will share a mic if another one. Can you hear me at the back now? That's great. Get in the thumbs up. Thank you. So I'll just do a brief introduction because Alex... No, you can't do another introduction. You've got to get up and some talking. Well, very brief of my brief introduction I was just going to recap very, very grippy on what Alex said about... Well, thank you very much for joining us today. It's absolute pleasure and honour for you to be here. The intro that I will do as a shorter version is just to recap. You're an academic at one of the leading universities in the world. You founded a 300 strong company with like 20 locations around the globe. Sold it for $114 million. You've got two world records for the most few advertisement in 2010-2013. You've won 22 awards and counting, including an OBE from the Queen, as Alex said last year. So in the next 40 minutes, that's the story we wanted to just talk through today. So in that case, I think it probably best just to start at the beginning and talk about like why did you start unruly and where did that come from? Well, I think it's really important to know that entrepreneurs can come from anywhere. And they're not born, they're made. And I think this is a real key point. So there's nothing when I was growing up as a kid that would have made you go, yes, she's definitely going to be an entrepreneur. She's going to be running million-dollar businesses. I can't wait to see what she does. Never anything like that. I didn't work really hard as a kid. I loved dog walking. I loved babysitting. I would love working in the shoe shop and flipping pancakes and selling ice creams. I might have gone. She's going to work herself into an early grave. But what happened by the time I was in my late 20s, early 30s was I had two kids and I was an academic at Sussex. Absolutely loved what I was doing. It was early American literature. Such a passion of mine. And then teaching, which is a real vocation. But I was living in Hackney and then commuting all the way down to Sussex. And for any of you who know Sussex Uni, that's a long way. Every week I was having to leave my little one, Ezra, at the nursery, knowing that I wouldn't see him for two or three days. And every week it broke my heart. And I just thought, actually, I don't really want this forever. But it's hard to make a break. And it's hard to make a break when things are going well. And things were going well. Liverpool Fellowship, there was lecturing, all great. But then 7-7 happened. For me this was the big turning point. And often when you speak to entrepreneurs, you'll find there's a moment. And it's not always a pleasant moment either. It's a death in the family, or it's a near miss, or it's something that just triggers a change and gives you the confidence to make the change and to make the break. For me it was being close to 7-7 in London when that happened. Not close enough to be injured, close enough to be evacuated and to go home that day feeling really lucky. And I didn't make it to the British Library. That's where I was doing my research. But 55 people who were also in that area didn't make it home that day. And I came home thinking, that was a near miss. I'm incredibly lucky. If this was the last day of my life, was this the way that I wanted to spend it? And what I realised was that I wanted to be close to the kids, much closer. And I wanted them to be part of what I was doing because I'm so passionate about my work, that they need to be part of it. Otherwise everything feels separate and I don't like that. And I wanted to have more impact. I love working with people, doing cool stuff, the great work that we've all done together. City, I went to City University and that's just the kind of stuff that I love. So came back and thought, well what do I want to do? At the same time, I was having conversations with Scott. So Scott has been, gosh we've known each other since university. Scott Barton, my co-founder, Matt Cook, who was working with Scott at another company. And they had just finished one project and were looking to start something else. And we thought, okay well let's do something, let's do something together. They were looking for a third person, someone, basically someone who could be the glue, someone who could make shit happen. And that was just always something that I've quite enjoyed doing. Give me a problem and I'll make shit happen. Might not do a great job, but I'll do my best. I'll have a whack at it. And that's kind of what you need when you're doing a startup. You need people who are going to have a whack at it. So we set up Unruly January 2006 and I remember late 2005 trying to find us office space and it was before the co-working spaces. And I was putting leaflets out in the Truman Brewery. All the pigeonholes. It was when there were still pigeonholes, pigeonholes in the Truman Brewery. Anyone got any spare desks? And it turned out someone did have spare desks. So we went into their space. It didn't have a window but we weren't going to let that stop us. It didn't have a table but we weren't going to let that stop us. So we had a plank of wood and two traffic cones. And that was our table. And that's where we planned our first iterations. And actually this was a problematic table because I would sit on it all the time and I always liked wandering around. So I would sit on the table and as soon as you sit on the table like that it's like a Laurel and Hardy sketch. The whole thing goes boom and up ends. So it was kind of very early chaos and we didn't know what we wanted to do but we did know that it was a really exciting time and we knew that we wanted to be in digital and social specifically. So 2005, social web was just kicking off. Delicious was big, Flickr was big, Digg was big. There was nothing for comedy and our very first venture was called EatMyHamster.com. This is a comedy, a web 2.0 comedy site, aggregated lots of jokes, videos, funny pictures, built a community, that was the aim, to build a community around that site. Everybody could vote on their favourite jokes and they would rise to the surface. We had a lot of fun building that but it didn't actually, we struggled with the community. So we ended up killing that after a few weeks but they were kind of the early days and they gave us a lot of lessons into what was going to come next. Okay, so very interesting, almost humble beginnings. Yeah, so, I guess the interesting question there is the crossover between the academia and the start-up and that's quite an interesting route from being a lecturer and having this academic background and then coming into a start-up environment. How did that help or hinder what was the transition like? So I think the first thing to say is it's not that unusual. There are lots of academics who come out of Stanford and have a start-up, who come out of MIT and have a start-up and they'll often teach lecturer research at the same time. So it's not something that feels weird if you're stateside but in the UK it seems to be something that feels a little bit more unusual. How did it feel? The skill set is very similar. So if you're curious and if you're interested in researching and exploring and finding things out and asking why, then it's great to be an academic. If you're curious and you're interested in finding out why, then it's great to be an entrepreneur. Real similar behaviours that work well. And then what we did over the long term was leverage that academic interest into something that was powerful and special and unique to Unruly that our competitors couldn't copy. So the fact that I was working very early on with Caroline, so Caroline Vietz who's the co-founder of Citi Henry University and the reason that we first met each other was because she came across our data set. So our second project after Eat My Hamster was viral video chart and viral video chart tracked the most shared videos on the internet and at the time it was all tracking the blogosphere because this was pre-Twitter this was pre-Facebook even Facebook was just for university students at that point. So we were tracking what was being the most shared what was the most talked about videos of that data. And there were a couple of real early adopters Caroline was one at CAS and then there was a journalist for Wired called Matt who very early on found out about us, came to talk to us and wanted to do more with what we were doing. So I met Caroline through our data and we started looking at that data and she said well have you ever thought about bringing this data together and working out why. Why are these videos the most shared what are the common characteristics optimal viral coefficient that will determine morality and scale really interesting questions and we spoke to Caroline and lots more academics who came to us and who we approached so the academic interest became a bit of a USP front really because suddenly we had a load of academics who were interrogating our data set and our data set now I think is either two or three trillion views it's a crazy insane number of video views that we've tracked so we know where people are viewing next we know which videos are successful which parts of the video and what we've been able to do with academics is build out a tool set to explain why why are those videos successful. So something that to dive a bit deeper into that then there is quite famously unruly can predict how successful a video is going to be because you measure the response of the viewers and there's something about certain types of video that you have started to find or over the years you've worked out these types of video this type of content will do better and so those theories some have been talked about today from cognitive psychology social psychology and persuasion they talked earlier today to Daniel Conymon thinking fast and slow and I've heard you talk about the amygdala and the limbic brain and so the question is just simply like what do you think makes a video go viral and we should come back to thinking fast and slow because I think that's a really big component of how unruly is growing as much as it has it's by combining the two thinking fast and slow modes but in terms of virality and what drives that so what we discovered was that there were two key drivers for virality one was emotional intensity so rule number one elicit an emotion incredibly strongly so make someone laugh but they have to be laughing out loud a snig is not good enough a smile isn't good enough or make someone cry but the tears need to be rolling down their cheeks so cry them a river that's the kind of intensity that's needed or surprise them but if you're surprising them their eyes need to be widening it's that kind of level of surprise or shock them you want them jumping out of their seat or inspire them and you want to see the hairs rising on the back of their neck so that's the first thing creating an emotional strong emotional connection and if you're choosing between negative and positive it works much better if you can go for a positive emotion and they're more likely to be shared than negative ones although there are some exceptions to that anger being one of the exceptions so that's the first piece and there are all kinds of subtleties by demo, by market, by content vertical by the device that you're watching on so this is a huge generalisation but it's just kind of a starting point and then the second area is social motivation so once you have somebody who's feeling that way they need to discharge that you need to do something without feeling you know how it feels, if something incredible happens you want to talk about it you want to share that experience and tell someone about it so that's what you need to think as a content creator okay, I've made someone feel something really intensely why would they want to share this and it might be simply to share the experience but it's normally a bit more nuanced than that they might want to show off I'm the first one to see this you've got to see this they might want to help somebody you'll find this really interesting you won't believe what's just being launched it might be for utility sometimes with film trailers for example people share because they want to go and see a film at the weekend and they are looking at trailers and they see a trailer wow, that's incredible and they share it with their friend this is the one we're going to see at the weekend social good, there's just all kinds of reasons and social motivations for sharing so they're the two key elements beyond that it's about distribution in fact this is what Caroline's research found out before anyone else was looking at this in the States or anywhere Caroline realised that the network factor the network effect was absolutely critical and in fact the distribution of a video and what you paid for distribution and how much you invested in distribution was more important than the quality of the content itself and that's something that is increasingly true as the digital space and the online landscape has become more and more cluttered okay so it reminds me of like classical rhetoric the whole pathos, ethos, logos so pathos is appealing to the emotion first of all so that's even 2,000 years old possibly there's nothing new under the sun word of mouth is nothing new, the Bible spread, there are all kinds of things that get spread by word of mouth but what we were latching on to in 2006 2007 was the digital opportunity and I think that's what was new for all of a sudden you could create something and it could be spread in minutes around the world and that was quite new and quite exciting and that was the opportunities that was the opportunity that brands were really keen to see so you took those core principles from all those disciplines but you also measure them so you've got the data to back it up as well with the chart, I think the chart was it's such a good point and the measurability is key because what brands were searching for at this point and still are searching for really is how do you measure success on digital and still we see brands just thinking about impressions or just thinking about views and not really understanding what that means and we've always been focused on beyond the view once somebody's viewed something, what do you want them to do next how do you want them to feel and what do you want them to do next and it might be you want them to share it but it might be something else you might want them to donate money if it's a charity you might want them to go out and choose Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi the next time you're at the supermarket it's broadcast next week at 8pm on a Tuesday night wherever the action is we're always very focused on brands being able to measure what comes next Make me think, is it a good time to show a video? It's a great time to show a video so one of the things about Unruly is it's all about user choice so as we've built out the formats they're not interuptive formats it's not pre-roll where you have to sit through and watch 30 seconds it's user intended we call them user intended video placements so the user always chooses you can skip if you don't want to watch them on pre-roll and if it's in feed the sound is off and you have to activate the sound the idea here being you want a better user experience otherwise you end up with an ablocalypse so this is critical so there are certain moments in the calendar during the year where we do see at brands really going all out to create awesome content and we work with them all the time to help them create quality content content that is worth watching worth sharing content that people will love sometimes that's a challenge because they're just like no no no we just want a quick ad we just want to get the word out but there are moments when they're really focused on creating great ads the Super Bowl is one of those moments when the advertising content becomes the content the Olympics is another moment Christmas actually is another moment when the ads are themselves the content and people get excited about them but I'd love you to choose which video we watch here I've got the most shared ad from the Super Bowl which was Budweiser born the hard way and the most shared ad of the Olympics which was Channel 4 superheroes actually from the Paralympics so let's have a show of hands if you want to watch Bud born the hard way raise your hands now it's close enough I'm going to have to count raise your hands again one two three four five six seven eight nine okay and raise your hands if you want Channel 4 superheroes okay it's Channel 4 superheroes let me I might need Alex to do it yeah you should just cut it manually or just come in and then it should no you can't bring us so we've gone from we've kind of jumped from 2006 almost to 2012 so just bring us back to the beginning again I think Google was kind of one of your first clients if not your first client what were the next steps after that office with the three of you and this wobbly table how did I guess today we've also been talking about business growth and organisational challenges of a business what were the key sort of points along that journey so our first client was the BBC £5,000 to tell them what the most shared trailers that they'd ever created were and there are many many clients since then we moved from that small space into a slightly bigger shared working space when there was five of us and then we've moved regularly around the building in the Truman Brewery and then we moved down the street onto fashion street always staying in the area so we're very much a shortage start up and we love being part of the East London vibe it's just so much going on it's really creative everyone really enjoys being there it's not too busy either it's the other thing we never go to Central London I'm always like there's a lot of people here it still has a little bit of calmness around it which I quite like so what are the challenges been well in the very early days the challenge was finding the right product so I mentioned eating my hamster I mentioned via a video chat well that was a great product but it wasn't a billion dollar business product certainly not with the runway that we had we didn't have a very long runway we needed to start making some progress seeing some revenues but what it did tell us was that there was a need and the need was brands and agencies were creating video for web and did want to get them seen online and were struggling to do that so we built our distribution platform from that we were like oh ok and at that time YouTube just didn't have any ads it didn't exist there was no Facebook there was nowhere to do this so this was a really good opportunity for us to come in and create that platform and that's what we've been building out the first challenge was getting it seen getting it noticed having them at far really a chart really helped there though because that was getting talked about and getting traction so people were kind of on the great vine people would hear about it and creative agencies would certainly know about it and we were often the ones that pointed us in the direction of media agencies and as we've grown the challenges have been scaling into other markets so this has been a big big thing for us we went to France first off we went there in 2010 we went to Paris not because it was strategic but because it was easy we could speak a bit of French we could get there on the euro star we could hire someone and interview them in person and then we could get over there so that's been a big thing and communication as we've grown has been absolutely critical and I do still find this one of our biggest challenges as you grow an organisation how do you stay aligned how do you make sure you all know what you're shooting for what the deliverables are and what's expected of everybody I think we might have a euro star here today actually but one of the we've got quite a lot of founders here today and I guess are there things you might have done differently second time around things that went really well that were key because growth is never always just a linear progression that fits and starts and were there key moments where there were big jumps that's one question trying not to do two questions at once and the other one is what would you have done differently so there were key moments when there were big jumps when we launched the distribution product was a big moment when we started taking serious revenue and I remember when we got the first Bacardi deal up until the time we got the Bacardi deal that was in late 2007 at the same time that we were doing I was writing a novel and splitting my time between the two and I'd always said when we get the big deal when the big deal comes in I'm here 100% I'll put my book down I remember having to put the book down when Bacardi came in and apologised to my agent and said I'm really sorry, I'm not going to be ready when I thought it was 10 years later, still not ready that book's never happening now and I'm not going to go back and write it ever, it's gone but that was the moment for me personally that Bacardi deal, direct deal with client, multiple territories we needed to go out and find publishers and that was building, Scott was selling and I was delivering and when there was a campaign sold to be delivered that's when I had to get myself onto Google Translate start finding out who in South Africa who in Sweden, who in Norway because it was an international campaign multi region campaign who was going to be able to carry that campaign and then start talking to them about rates and get them up and running So that's interesting because you talk about your role Ben and what was a day in the life of Sarah Woodlike at these different stages at the beginning and the middle and more recently, how has that evolved what have the changes been? So at the very beginning, the first 12 months when we were iterating through all these ideas and trying things out it was just quite relaxed to be honest a lot of brainstorming, a lot of cups of coffee we get on really well with each other we enjoy spending time with each other we enjoy thinking about what's coming next, testing things there's never any judgement there's never any finger pointing we just try stuff, we know what our tests are if it doesn't work we try something else so that was very much the first year it was blissful if I'm being honest I absolutely loved it then when you start having clients things change so I would say the next phase where we had clients and I was servicing clients directly my memory of that when I look back is I see myself normally in the dark so I would do a day at work, that was all fine but then I'd be coming home at night and working through the night as well I would be waking up at all hours of the morning to check the platform to see how delivery was going did those Swedish publishers pick up when they said they were going to they're waking up now in Australia I just need to check in Sydney because I know we have three or four publishers so it was like the matrix and I was on it the whole time making sure that we were delivering that was probably two to three years in before we started to scale I think some of the founders here or some of the CXAs would probably know the feeling of breaking into the morning three in the morning checking a project is there anything you would do differently given what you know now I'm not at all I'm going to say this with all honesty I get asked this question all the time but I think it's a character flaw that I can honestly say and I think about this question so hard and I always look for a better answer and this is the reason because I don't spend any time thinking about what I would have done differently would have just isn't a tense that I think much about it's always what am I doing now what are we doing now what could we be doing and they don't spend much time looking back I'm sure there are a hundred things that we should have done differently of course there will have been a hundred things a thousand things we should have done differently but I can't identify them I'm just very much focused on what we should be doing differently now oh I can tell you a hundred things right now that we are trying to do differently because as we grow we continue to need to evolve and we need to move faster in certain areas so yeah, a hundred things now that we need to be doing differently but yesterday that sounds like such a positive approach just generally and that's always come across at your city unruly events and I think that ties in with the mission and your vision and values that you want to get about those so our mission is to deliver the most awesome social video campaigns on the planet and this is very much how we work with brands and when we come in every day in the morning this is what we want to do and when we hire people we hire people who really care about this and who want to come in and do the best that they can have an impact not be a cog in a wheel ties to our vision be the team and the tech that transforms digital advertising for the better I got taken up on this actually a few weeks ago I was in a now a part of news strategy day and I was talking to them about vision and saying how important it was and I was saying whatever we do we always do it on the basis of our vision we want to be the team and the tech that transforms advertising for the better and the very sensible very knowledgeable management guru said to me he said I think you're already doing that he said do you not think it's time for a new vision and I was like oh my god and it did remind me of Reed Hoffman and I remember talking to him about his vision and LinkedIn's vision and he was really good at recognising actually when you need a new vision and actually they had very clear KPIs around their vision and he was saying we've reached our first vision now we're moving on to our second vision for me I kind of think that digital advertising still has a long way to go I think it certainly can be improved and there's lots of scope to improve the quality of the ads to improve the quality of the distribution to improve the quality of the user experience I think there's a lot of transformational needs to happen within the advertising industry but it's a good thing I thought he raised an interesting point and it was one that shook me what hasn't changed is our values well actually that's not true either I'm going to tell you how they have changed so here they are deliver well inspire change share the love they've evolved is what I would say these started off as being attributes so the first thing we did you're asking about the challenges of scaling and growing and one of the growing pains and one of them is hiring and as you grow when we were 30 40 people it became impossible for me or Scott or Matt to rigorously interview everybody so we would say we still do see everybody before everyone gets offered a role they have a founder interview and we spend 10-15 minutes just talking to them actually trying to scare them off I'll always say to them are you sure you want to work here because this is not an easy place to work it's an incredible place to work it's a job of a lifetime but it's not an easy place to work we work hard we care a lot and you need to know that before you accept this job but we couldn't do the full day pair coding for Matt or I couldn't spend half a day sitting with someone in ops looking at how they trafficked our tags so we started thinking about our values and the attributes so we have something that we call the panda the PANDA the panda test we want people who are positive and passionate but most importantly positive that's absolutely key people who are A think that anything is possible and are agile the pairing of the two you want people to have a great vision think they can do anything but at the same time be agile and know that there's lots of tiny little steps that are going to be needed to get you there and you're going to have to course correct multiple times N, nurturing, no ego so important we could not build our business if we had egos in the business helping each other, nurturing each other has been absolutely key to retaining our best staff to having a very diverse environment a real different group of people and helping to get over big problems and we've had many problems on the way D, deliver wow we want people who will deliver, deliver what they say they will when they say they will and that's absolutely key to building trust across the team and then A, A players we want people who are in it because they want to be part of an A team want to work really hard and want to deliver and do great work so we had our pandas and then people said well we should have some values as well that come out of those panda behaviours and this is how we distilled it into these three core values and deliver wow ties in with our mission to deliver the most awesome video campaigns on the planet inspire change so you mentioned embrace change and this is the one that's evolved so when we first had embrace change as our value this was all about making it clear to people that they would need to be open to change if they wanted to work unruly because we're changing things all the time our clients will change their creative at the last minute they'll change their targeting parameters they'll change their dates we can't say oh that's not any good we say no problem we're on it that's the kind of people that we want at the same time though what we found and we changed this just last year to inspire change is we're not just embracing change unruly we're inspiring change inspiring change in the industry inspiring change in business culture and we really wanted to encapsulate that and then share the love we're such a bunch of hippies but this is really important this is why it's great being this is why it's great being an entrepreneur and not an academic because when you're an academic you can be there for your students but you're just a cog within a wheel and you have very little control over the culture that you build and the impact that your company has when you're an entrepreneur you can build a company that does pro bono campaigns for charities that does charity matching for employees and that shares the love in terms of knowledge as well so we peer review each other we mentor each other there's a lot of sharing of information and knowledge and skills that goes into this so yeah we are very much I wouldn't say we're driven by our values we're powered by our values and it's the values that it's like it's like our jet fuel our rocket fuel that's an awesome answer are there any people who inspire you I'm sure you inspire lots of people but are there any people that you're inspired by? yes and it's generally not it's not kind of impossible people so I'm you know Cheryl Sandberg I'm sure she's incredible of course she's incredible it goes without saying she's incredible Marissa may have course she's incredible Angela Merkel of course I can look at all these people and go they're incredible but what I find is it tends to be the people that I see on a day to day basis that inspire me and it always has been and I think this is the case with lots of people we're inspired by the people around us we're doing amazing things so I'm inspired by my team the dedication that they have sometimes they give always they surprise me and they do awesome things and that's really inspirational and that's a virtuous circle because when you're surrounded by people who are inspiring then you want to be your best then your best self I could go on and on here but then it just gets it so I won't push you on that one so that kind of does tell us a lot of the story I'm trying to remember what the next slide was were you keen to ask me what was coming next? exactly exactly thank you in a long day sorry Cheryl thank you so what's on the horizon for you? so all this horizon is near and far so let me just start very near so next week is International Women's Day and this is always a big day for us it's a really exciting day really we have 48% of our team of female, 46% of our people managers of female 44% of our board is female this is really unusual for a tech company we're a bit of an outlier so on International Women's Day that's the moment when we take the opportunity to celebrate all the great people that we have male and female in our business who help us create a diverse vibrant thriving atmosphere in a place where people want to come and work and I always think it's important to remember that having a happy workplace extends your lifespan it's one of the keys to longevity is working somewhere that makes you feel happy so why would you want to go to work somewhere where you're miserable or where you feel you're not appreciated so having that positive environment where you celebrate what's awesome about everybody people feel good they feel better they deliver better work so they will live longer if that's a goal, I know that's not everyone's goal but anyway, I've just mentioned that so next week International Women's Day we're doing some video recording there's breakfast and the really cool thing that we've seen over the last 10 years is a massive increase in I guess it was the tech scene it's tech city, it's what's called silicon round about then it was called tech city now it's called tech nation and seeing the growth in startups and entrepreneurial spirit and the activity that's been happening in the area means that there's lots more going on than there ever has been so when I look at International Women's Day on Wednesday it's a really exciting day so I'm going to All Bright in the Morning and this is a new fund and I'm an investor in this fund I believe really strongly in it it's a VC fund that supports female entrepreneurs and it's set up by Anna Young former CEO of Hearst and Debbie Wasco, founder of Love Home Swap both great women who are massively inspiring to me and I can't wait to have breakfast with them and some of their other investors on Wednesday morning Sadiq is coming along to that as well Sadiq Karm who's also a big supporter of women in business and female entrepreneurs then I think I'm doing something with Nat West so lots of brands have been getting behind International Women's Day and it's easy to be cynical about this and go oh well they would wouldn't they but right from the start we've been big believers in encouraging brands to take on social causes that need to be authentic but going with them running with them, not being afraid of them so on the big trends that we've seen and I hope we've helped to drive over the last five years it's been precisely that when brands have come to us with an idea for content we've said that's a great idea and it would work really well if you partnered with Age Concern or you could do that but if that's going to look authentic you need to be working with the Red Cross because if you're not working with the Red Cross you need to be working with our XYZ and look authentic and it's the same with any of the brands that we've talked to we always talk about purpose and we say to them by all means be talking about International Women's Day but before we agree to help you with it tell us what do you do and what are you doing as a company what are you doing for your people what are you doing for your customers how is it true and authentic to you because if there's one thing we've learnt over the last ten years of testing video content and if you don't have that authenticity then you will fail and you'll fail spectacularly and it will be a big PR blow up people will be fired jobs will be lost shareholder value may well decline so really important to recognise that and that's why our testing tool Q actually tests for authenticity so when we're running their videos through our testing software and we do panels it's very much of thinking fast and slow thing the facial coding and the biometrics so you can get the immediate response but we also do panel testing do you think this brand does really stand for this and we can start to get a sense of how authentic campaigns will come across as being and that is super important International Women's Day lots going on and hopefully we're working with brands there that have a real sense of purpose and genuinely care about this longer horizon ok that's next week next week first name terms with the mayor Siddiq is coming a lot Siddiq Khan is coming well he's got his business council which he's gathered together and we had the first meeting of that in April and the next meeting I think is coming up soon but what I like about this council it's less about meetings and it's more about what happens in between the meetings and I think that's the key to actually making things happen so beyond next week we've got lots of video things going on business stuff going on so now a part of news core there's a real opportunity for us to be using their titles more we can play that at a moment it's a nice play out video so Storyful which is a social agency that's owned by news we work very closely with them in fact I'm going to go to that video right now because the video I'm going to show you is the most shared video of all time and it is the content has been sourced by Storyful and it's absolutely smashing and I think this one's good this one goes straight off that's Android Friends Forever 2015 part of the nostalgia wave so we track emotional trends in advertising so we can see globally which emotions are trending and across which markets and they peak certain times of year for a period of years you see inspiration becomes a thing humour becomes a thing satire becomes a thing and that was very much part of the big wave of nostalgia that we saw in 2015 and that's Storyful content so UGC uses generated content that brands can then use to clip together very quickly and cheaply fantastic content that we can then distribute and amplify across our platform so what we see coming down the pipe for us is offer brand solutions as being part of news actually does remind me of one other question about looking at the future obviously there's more AI creation of content do you think there would ever be a time where machines would create better content than humans so there is already an AI agency and it's been around for a couple of years at the moment there's still lots of humans stitching things together and it's conceivable that you would have that scenario where you'd have a neural network creating thousands of ideas and then a second neural network rating those ideas and then probably ultimately you might still have a human deciding which of those ideas they wanted to run with but I think we're a long way from that and at the moment for all the talk of automation and we see this in the advertising industry in particular where there's been a big rush to what's called programmatic buying programmatic buying seems to need more people than ever before from what I can see because there are more tech partners than ever before so it needs more people to troubleshoot to problem solve, to communicate to fix those leaky pipes so I think we are seeing big shifts in the industry but at the moment it's very much the communicators who are the leaders the people who can communicate are the people who are going to win in our industry because they're the ones that are being the globe that are stitching together all the different partnerships and pulling something that is of value to the brand I'm just conscious today that we've we've asked the audience if they have any questions as well so I'd just like to open up has anyone got the question? I can hear that, I can hear that what may this want to sell to Newscore? Great question rather than a public listing so a couple of reasons so public listing sometimes it's just about timing the markets aren't always in a great shape for that and also running a public company is not something that any of the founders really have ever aspired to do there's a lot of admin and bureaucracy that comes with that so I think it can be a great route but it wasn't necessarily the route that we were looking for we were really enjoying being independent and being our own bosses growing our business but what we did see and we've been approached by many people so when we had that approach it wasn't the first one we've had several approaches and we just always brushed them off and we were very happy being unruly but it was a little bit different when Rebecca came to talk to us back in early 2015 she had been around the world looking for a best in class video advertising company and she'd been to the US and she'd been to France and she'd been around Europe and she'd been to Australia and then finally she came back and she was tasked with this news knew that video was important to them making of news, it was important to the distribution of news it was important to advertising and when she came to us she just saw a partner that didn't just deliver ads but that understood video content and had video expertise that could be really powerful and what we saw was an incredible opportunity to partner very deeply with a global media company that has titles in Australia the biggest titles in Australia that has the Wall Street Journal in the US and Realtor as well, the second largest real estate site in the US and that has The Sun and The Times and you might not like those titles but they have titles that have passionate audiences and audiences that care a lot about them and we know how valuable that is to brands brands, they want increasingly valuable audiences quality media and passionate audiences that care about subjects and that's what we saw in news so it was more natural than you might have imagined testing and acquiring authenticity does the process work with you a large number of potential videos and then you've read it through your algorithms to find the most suitable or can you actually reverse engineer and say this is what we need therefore we will make such a video so it depends on the brand depends on the budget depends on the time frame on one extreme we have DCO which is Dynamic Creative Optimisation and you can test on the fly so give us 50 creatives we'll run them all and we'll know within 24 hours which ones are the most successful and put your media budget behind that that's what we thought everybody would want to do but in practice it doesn't work like that in practice often there are multiple stakeholders and there's lots of decisions that are made around the brand equity and the brand is headed that maybe need a bit more thoughtfulness than a few more people actual people in the room to discuss so what we tend to do is we'd like to come in early before anything has been created and we'll do a brand audit so we'll test maybe 10 or 12 different pieces of content that the brand have created that their competitors have created that their audience really likes so what for them are the hero bits of content we'll run tests through them this is the emotional palette this is the type of content that your audience really enjoys and is already sharing and talking about is there an intersect between that and your core values so if your audience is sharing lots of funny stuff well that's great if as a brand you have permission to be funny but if you don't then maybe you shouldn't be going for funny you should be finding something else so we help them find their emotional palette and where they can be authentic then we help them brief their creative agency and it's joyful and it's UGC whether it's a company like the Smalls which is a great pro crowd source content company whether it's a big agency we help them brief for emotion for social motivation and to build that into their ideation process they go off create content come back and then we test we often test three or four different bits of content and then we can say yeah that bit of content with the guy actually works better than the one with the mum you'd be surprised to know that in Japan it worked differently so they can use us then to hone bits of creative and decide which one is going to be the hero or which two or three will be the heroes and how that might vary by market we can also help them decide what the image should be because we can see facial recognition shows us 37 seconds in emotion goes off the scale that's the image that we should be using and look we test a soundtrack as well and here's the soundtrack 30 seconds of soundtrack that really get people's hearts racing well in that case let's make sure we use that for the skippable pre-roll so in that five seconds before people skip they see the right image they hear the soundtrack but it might be that it's going to be going on to mobile and it's going to be sound off in that case it's different again and we might be thinking okay so to what extent a subtitle is going to be important and which bits do we need to subtitle so it gets used to impact the creative and hone the creative and then also gets used for distribution and that's the core of our revenue we distribute these videos across the open web and I know this open source and openness is something that's really important to Drupal really important to Unruly we're not a walled garden so 84% of our views take place on commscore 250 sites so these are the big premium sites but we also work with lots of small niche blogs passion sites because that's where a lot of conversation happens and we want to make sure that when we're putting those videos out there they're in the right places the right time of day, on the right devices are being found by the right audience and that's a huge part of what our testing also does because we identify what's called a custom audience a really custom audience that tells us the sweet spot tells us which sub-segment of your audience, PNG or Unleaver, whoever it might be which sub-segment of your audience is most likely to enjoy this content and respond positively to it because that's the audience that you really want to be reaching it's given away all your secrets but thank you very much that's very generous, I'm kidding they're not secrets but I will say this because it's important for founders and entrepreneurs to know because it's all about the execution you can know all this stuff but if you don't execute on it then it's not worth the paper it's written on it's all in the execution in the team building and having the mission and the values and the incredible people who want to come into work every day and build something spectacular you're right you're right I think one more have we got time for that one more and then make it a good one do you just talk a bit more about fast and slow yes, ah yeah so fast and slow so I think the carnival book is I think it makes a lot of sense and we apply it in different ways across the business so one of the ways we apply it is with our testing methodology so we still use panel based and we use facial coding so we try and capture information quickly from people and instinctively but we also still want to capture that thoughtful information where there are other side of their brain is considering so that's one way but really how I think about it is in terms of managing and leading a business making sure that you're doing things rapidly and making good progress in the moment but at the same time having the time to stand back and have that bigger picture thinking and giving each other the space to be able to think more slowly about what might be coming down the line in one, two, three years so we have a lot of different pulses that are very kind of considered and thought out so we have daily pulse all our teams have daily stand ups a lot of the XP practices extreme programming practices that have come out of our dev team you'll see in the other teams as well so everyone together in the morning at the Trello boards is going for us because we have teams in different markets so they can use that to communicate so that's kind of the fast bit they can make sure they're accountable they're doing what they need to be doing today what is the most important thing right now the same with planning games so when we plan we have two and a half weekly cycles so every two and a half weeks the dev team comes in with the commercial team and decide what they're going to build the funniest moment when we were doing the due diligence for the news core acquisition was when they wanted to see our roadmap half weeks and then they came back a couple of days later and we said well we can tell you in the next two weeks and one day or we can tell you in the next one week and three days you can see how this was going because big companies tend to plan really long planning cycles and think about the big end goal and we're very much focused on what does the market need now what can we deliver now what's the MVP the minimum viable product that we can deliver that has the most value to people right now and that's great but you do still need to put aside the time to think well where might we be in six months and twelve months and how is that market panning out and oh look here is Amazon over here oh and it's coming at our industry at a hundred miles an hour and it might still be thousands of miles off but at a hundred miles an hour it's going to get here pretty quickly so we have quarterly it's just bog standard business stuff at the end of the day so yes we have the dailies but then we have weekly exec meetings where we all come together and talk about how we're doing on our quarterly playbook so we have quarterly playbooks and those quarterly goals are relayed at Townhall but relay isn't quite the right word because before they're relayed at Townhall they've been discussed in smaller groups in retrospectives ahead of the quarterly Townhall and then we report back on how we did on the last quarter so it's really just about having discipline around thinking and communications making sure that we've got the time yes to run fast but also to know when to stop and just take the minute to think yeah I hope you'd want to join me in saying thank you very much to Sarah she truly is one of the big tech success stories at recent times in the UK so we're very thankful for you joining us today and it was a very informative story that we just had there so thank you very much