Show Notes 206: From the Archive: Cambridge Legend David Cleevely, Part 1.

Over the next two week's we are re-running our two part interview with David Cleevely, first published in November 2024, episodes 112 & 113.

If you are new to the podcast, you're going to get some really good insights from it. If you caught it the first time around, we are sure that you'll learn something new on second listen.

Join us next week for Part 2.

AI Transcript

00:03

James Parton

Welcome to the Cambridge Tech podcast, talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Faye Holland and James Parton.

00:29

Faye Holland

I'm Faye.

00:30

James Parton

And I'm James.

00:31

Faye Holland

So we've decided to run a two part interview previously recorded with Cambridge legend David Cleveley back in 2024. We just think it's as relevant today as it was when we recorded it.

00:44

James Parton

And this first episode covers really important advice on the Cambridge ecosystem and building networks, as well as some insightful reflections on David's own illustrious career.

00:52

Faye Holland

And if you are new to the podcast, you're going to get some really good insights from it. If you caught it the first time around, I'm pretty sure that you'll learn something new on second listen too. Welcome, David. It's great to have you with us today. Before we start with the planned episode, we'd like to get your reaction, please, to last week's budget. So the bit I heard that I liked was funding for Cambridge to help it reach its growth potential. So take it away. What's your response to that?

01:26

David Cleevely

Well, the government, whether it's been the previous Conservative administration or the current Labour administration, have been extremely interested in Cambridge. They recognize that Cambridge has a pretty unique position in the UK economy and probably contains within it everything we're going to need, or many of the things we're going to need for the 21st century. Cambridge is the fastest growing city the UK has ever seen. The economy has, over the last 20 years, has been doubling every 10 years, which is the kind of growth rate that you saw at the beginning of Silicon Valley. So it's unsurprising in a sense that the government wants to see if it can amplify leverage, all of that and to do so for the benefit of the rest of the UK. The £10 million is there, although it's coming through.

02:16

David Cleevely

The housing department is actually there in order to provide the funding so that we can approach this from a systems point of view. That is, instead of thinking about all these bits of housing or office development or water supply or electricity separately, we think about all of this as a single integrated system. Now, we live our lives in Cambridge. Many of your listeners will, or you live your lives in a city elsewhere. You will see for yourselves how all of those things need to come together to have a decent quality of life. So I see that £10 million as the beginning of a proper systems level, thinking about how can we manage this expansion and improve our quality of life.

03:06

James Parton

And you've talked a lot about the infrastructure Gap and you've kind of touched on that there a little bit. For the people that aren't based in Cambridge, do you just want to go a little bit deeper in terms of some of the challenges the city's facing?

03:17

David Cleevely

Well, the city, as I said, is growing faster than any UK city's ever grown, and that includes all the cities in the 19th century. The problem that then arises is if you're trying to measure that growth, how do you do it? And we have basically two ways which give two different answers. One is the Office of National Statistics, which does that at the level of the nation, and that gives one version of growth which is rather slow. The other is what we actually see on the ground, where we go and talk to companies, measure their real data, see office block occupation, and have a proper ground up database that shows a much faster growth rate.

04:02

David Cleevely

The gap between the two is so large that it means that the allocation of government funding for infrastructure in Cambridge over a 10 year period, which is how you invest infrastructure, simply opens up a gap of about 10 or 20%, which means we're underfunded in education, we're underfunded in health, we're underfunded in transport, there is lack of electricity supply, There are all, in fact, were going to run out of water earlier this year. All of those things need to be corrected. And that's why the government spending 10 million pounds to start to pull this stuff together is so important. We cannot do, we cannot grow unless you sort out the infrastructure first. The infrastructure gap is the most important thing we have to face.

04:50

Faye Holland

And I know we'll come on to that in the episodes that we're doing with you. We'll come on to that in more detail later on. But just keeping us on the budget statement of last week, there was also the announcement that East West Rail is going to progress, which is great news for business.

05:05

David Cleevely

I think it's great news for everybody in the uk, frankly. You know, on the east coast we have the busiest ports in the uk. There's huge amounts of lorry traffic comes across. Everybody knows what happens on the A14, despite the widening to what looks like more like a United States superhighway these days, rather than what I would regard as a normal British dual carriageway. We need to actually move some of this stuff and we need to have the connections out with the rest of the uk. Cambridge is pretty isolated, you know, here we are stuck slightly off the beaten track in East Anglia. We have good connections down to London. You can get down to London in just under 50 minutes. And you can, you know, you can enjoy yourself at Cambridge south, as we call King's Cross.

05:52

David Cleevely

But the thing that really is missing is our connectivity out to the rest of the uk and East West Rail helps us in particular get to Manchester. Now, I kicked off the discussions about how Cambridge can link up to Manchester back in about 2018, and now that's being picked up and is a real project. It's very important that if Cambridge is going to grow, if Cambridge is going to reach its full potential, not just for itself, but for the rest of the uk, so that we can have a thriving economy, we have to have transport links out to the rest of the UK. AstraZeneca still employs more people in Manchester than it does in Cambridge. ARM's second biggest office worldwide is in Manchester. These kinds of connections are really important.

06:43

Faye Holland

The final thing I will say about the budget was there was a lot of talk about industrial strategy, and I know you've been involved in so many of them. How do you feel about going around the loop again on another new industrial strategy?

06:56

David Cleevely

I think a country needs to paint a clear picture of where it thinks it's going to. An industrial strategy of whatever it contains. Contains. The most important message is we're serious about developing our economy. Now, there are details in there about life sciences versus other kinds of sectors and the importance of AI and so on, but really it's a view that when business talks to government, it has some comfort that government actually understands how the economy is going to develop. Most successful businesses and successful countries do have a vision about where they want to get to. It's very important to write that down and to stick by the message about what you're trying to do and make it consistent. Obviously, you change your mind if you get different data and different things happening.

07:50

David Cleevely

But on the other hand, the overall direction of travel needs to be laid out so that people then go, right, we know which way this is going. We've got greater certainty. And that's the way in which we're now going to invest. And it's a very important component. It's not the only thing you need to do by any means, but it's very important to get over a feeling that you're seeing beyond your nose.

08:18

Faye Holland

So now let's get into the details of David Cleveland and your background. Now, we've done lots of research, both of us, and I know you, and I still keep uncovering lots of things about you. So my latest, which I've never heard about you before, is that you, Herman, Hauser and Jonathan Milner are described as the Three Musketeers of the Cambridge Technology cluster.

08:44

David Cleevely

Did you know that phrase came from Tony Quested in Business Weekly? And it's a classic Tony Quested phrase. He's got a real way with words. I quite like it. But the context was very specific. It was used to describe how the three of us have put money into funding the Cambridge Science Centre, which is a charity and is something which I was chair of for 12 years. It's based only a couple hundred meters away from where we're sitting, doing this podcast at the moment in the Trinity center on the Science Park. Fabulously successful institution aimed at helping kids, particularly in the age range 4 to about 11, to understand about science and get enthusiastic about it so they can make good life choices later on.

09:33

Faye Holland

Perfect. And I know we're going to talk about Cambridge Science Centre later on as well, so let's pick up on that too. But for now, you're doing. I've done the intro of that. You're a three Musketeer. And now, James, you're going to. You're going to attempt a more formal introduction.

09:48

James Parton

Yeah, yeah. Which hopefully will then frame the rest of the conversation that we have. So there's going to be a lot of ground that we need to cover and this isn't going to do it justice. But you started in telecoms. You're a serial entrepreneur. You're an advisor to government at both a national and local level. You're a businessman with strong links to academia who rigorously promotes networking and collaboration within Cambridge. You're a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology and you're a Fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering. And last but no means least, at least for this introduction, you received a CBE in 2013 for services to technology and innovation. Does that. Is that a fair summary?

10:26

David Cleevely

It's. It's not bad, James. That's fine. I mean, people ask me what I do at parties and I go. I look at them with a slightly weary look because basically I don't want to bore them.

10:39

James Parton

You go skiing with your grandchildren.

10:41

Faye Holland

Yeah.

10:42

David Cleevely

Now skiing with my grandchildren is. Is something which I really enjoy. Yeah.

10:46

Faye Holland

So we're going back to the beginning and we're going to talk about your career, your education, but actually, I'm going to go right back to your school days because. And this might have actually been on your Wiki page as well, I'm kind of interested whether your innovate, innovative streak actually started. Your entrepreneurial streak started when you was at School because I read that you used to do a whole host of crazy things, including flying cameras from kites, keeping bees, directing plays and making rockets, which I think has a story in and of itself. So do you think that you've always been entrepreneurial?

11:25

David Cleevely

Yeah, I've always been really interested in doing some slightly quirky things. That list covers quite a lot of them. On the entrepreneurial thing, I'd read an old book from the 1930s that was actually owned by my mother and it said any intelligent child can keep bees and can make money out of it. So at the time, I think it said you could. You could start off for five pounds or something. But of course, prices had changed between the 1930s and the 1960s. Late. I then borrowed the money from my parents and bought Hive and Bees. I found wonderful guy at the National Physical Laboratories who was a beekeeper and kept bees down there. And he taught me how to beekeep and I set up a school beekeeping club.

12:13

David Cleevely

My first proper year of keeping bees, I produced over a hundred pounds of honey and sold them to all the parents, which then paid for all my expenses.

12:24

Faye Holland

So yes is the short answer. Absolutely perfect. I love it.

12:28

David Cleevely

There's another little thing twist on that, which is that the chap I met at the National Physical Laboratories then introduced me to a whole series of things that were going on at mpl. And I went to one of their open days at which I was exposed to some really crazy thinking. I saw a video of. Of what it would be like driving down a road as you approach the speed of light. And of course, this was done on a green screen with. With rendering of little lines. I mean, this was very primitive stuff. And the other thing I saw was a demonstration of a teletype where you interacted with this teletype and it taught you maths. And both of those things were the kind of thing, when you're about 16 or 17, really change your view on life.

13:20

David Cleevely

Just in the same way as going to the Science Museum in the center of London and reaching for the ball that always disappeared as soon as you put your hand out to go and get it. Which is part of both why I'm. I suspect I do a lot of innovative things and I value that kind of creativity very highly. But also why I got involved in the Cambridge Science center and wanted to make sure that other kids enjoyed that kind of thing the same way that I did.

13:49

James Parton

So after school, you then obviously moved on to university. You studied at Reading, where you gained a BSc in cybernetics. And instrument physics with mathematics. And then you did your PhD in telecommunications and economic development from Cambridge. So a couple of questions here if I may. I believe you were funded through the Post Office Telecommunications, which later became bt, right? What was the secret sequence of events there? Were you working and sponsored through an employee scheme or had they spotted you as a, you know, as a high potential student? How did that sequence of events come to pass?

14:25

David Cleevely

So it was one of those odd serendipitous moments. I was walking down the school corridor in a break and the Careers Master was short of some people to go and listen to somebody from Post Office Telecommunications explain how you could apply and be sponsored at university. And I went in, I thought it was quite interesting, I thought that the idea of telecommunications was rather intriguing. So I applied along with several hundred others and eighteen of us got selected to be paid for to go to university. But it was rather more than that, and that's rather important because we spent a year before university, so we had to take a year off as it were, year out. And there I learned about special and general relativity, Maxwell's equations, a whole load of other theoretical stuff.

15:21

David Cleevely

I built analog computer, I learned how to operate a lathe, I built a steam engine, I learned how to climb a telegraph pole, how to join wires up, and I even learned how to use a piece of copper wire as a divining rod. And I was able to find an 11 KVA cable by the fact that this divining rod twitched in my hands before we put the drill down so that we could put in the pole. So I learned a whole load of stuff about how exchanges work, how transmission works, the practical problems on the ground of putting all this in. And I learned some very sophisticated bits of physics, mathematics and electronics.

16:07

David Cleevely

And so when I arrived at university, I must admit the first year I didn't really have to do a huge amount because I'd already covered vast amounts of the stuff, although I was dealing with a few other bits and pieces because it was control theory very specifically.

16:22

James Parton

And the second question then was it the PhD that first brought you to Cambridge? Because obviously Cambridge has been such a huge part of your life from that point onwards. Was it that classic case of studying here, falling in love with the city and never leaving?

16:36

David Cleevely

When I finished my degree, we had various job offers within the Post Office Telecommunications and there was one particular one that intrigued me. It was called the Long Range Studies Division. Its remit was to look ahead 20 or 30 years and to form a view of the future. So that then Post Office Telecommunications could then take decisions about technology and investment and so on. And that was based in Cambridge. So I thought, this is nice place. I visited Cambridge a couple of times and the subject area and job really fascinated me. So that's how I ended up. And I did some really interesting projects whilst I was there. But also whilst I was there, I encountered various people from the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge and that's what got me into doing my PhD.

17:31

Faye Holland

So you've done your PhD and then the career starts. And so anyone who goes and takes a Look at your LinkedIn page will see that right at the bottom. I think it's like 51 roles down the page and I'm sure there's been many more. The first entry is Post Office Student. And then really quickly the profile grows to, you know, the entrepreneurial positions, the chair positions. And so I would like to talk first of all about Analysis, which was the first company that you founded back in 1985. So how did that come about? Did you just see a gap in the market and decide to fill it?

18:11

David Cleevely

Oh, we have to go back. Every single bit of anybody's career has roots that go a long way back, so I'm going to have to wind a little bit further back. So when I was at the Long Range Studies Division, I encountered a group called the Communication Studies Group and their offshoot, which was a consultancy arm called Communication Studies and Planning. They were doing work on telecommunications and economic development. So when I was talking to the people at the University of Cambridge, I decided that would be a good way to go. And because I'd been working with this consultancy company as well, a little bit on the side, it turned out that they were connected to the World Bank.

18:54

David Cleevely

The World bank helped fund my PhD, and as a result of doing the World bank and the connection with this consultancy group, when I finished my PhD, I was then a natural shoe in to go to a spin out of this consultancy company, which had joined the Economist Intelligence Unit. So I joined the Economist Intelligence Unit and learned my trade as a consultant and I was director of the Telecommunications Division at that point, which sounds very grand for somebody who is not quite 28 or 29, I think, at that time. And then I thought, well, this is really interesting. I think I can do consulting myself. I'd been doing quite a lot of work with the European Commission on some of their big projects, their big programs. And as part of.

19:44

David Cleevely

I continued some of that work as I set up my own consultancy business. So one Sunday morning I opened the Sunday Times color supplement and there was an article about the Cambridge phenomenon. And I thought to myself, right, that's it. I am going to set myself up as a consultancy and I'm going to do it in Cambridge, and it has to be on the Science park, because that's where everything is happening. In actual fact, my first offices were shared with a company called Owl, and we set up in unit 128, which is, again, no more than about 100 meters away from here.

20:19

Faye Holland

Thank you for giving that context as how you got to analysis as well. But you did this at the same time as, you know, you were starting a foul. You were, you know, you were going through huge changes in your life as well, which a lot of our entrepreneurs that we get on the podcast are also doing. And with that comes all the perks of hiring people, realizing you've got to pay people and sometimes not paying yourself because you've got to pay other people. So what was that actual journey like?

20:48

David Cleevely

Looking back on it, absolutely horrific. I think one does these things being incredibly naive. I would never advise anybody to do what I did. The risks I took. Of course, entrepreneurs don't think of themselves as taking risks. They think that they're in control of the destiny and everything is going to go fine. But there was one year when I didn't pay myself a penny. I certainly came very close to bankruptcy. If things hadn't turned around, if I hadn't worked hard, if, you know, if hadn't had a couple of lucky breaks, yeah, I wouldn't be sitting here. It put a lot of stress on me, as you say. I had a young family. I had a great deal of support in doing all of that. The thing that kept me going was an understanding or a vision about how to scale a business.

21:42

David Cleevely

And I didn't start the consultancy with an idea that it would be me and a couple of others. I had the idea that this was going to be a major force. And the guiding principle for it was a strong intellectual basis based on proper economic theory and understanding and data that was needed to be able to make decisions. And it coincided, rather fortunately, with the restructuring of the whole of the telecommunications sector, where deep insight into how this needed to be done was turned out to be very valuable. By the time we got to the end of the 1990s, there wasn't a deal in telecoms in Europe that my company wasn't involved in.

22:33

Faye Holland

And it took you to your first exit and it's still, you know, it's still working now. It's still, you know, it's still an active company now.

22:40

David Cleevely

Yeah, I think analysis has changed hands a couple of times since I sold it in 2004. I should have sold it in 2001. I got a lovely offer which would have made me pretty rich and because I was so naive and I've seen this naivety and over self confidence in many others I didn't sell, I really should have done. But we are where we are. It took me about three years to recover from that and eventually get to an exit in 2004.

23:18

James Parton

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23:52

James Parton

The next company was abcam, which obviously is renowned as one of the, you know, the kind of stars of the Cambridge cluster. Before we get into the detail of abcam though, how do you leap from telecommunications to biotech?

24:05

David Cleevely

None of these things are ever leaps, right? If you understand the complete detail of how you get to somewhere, you'll find that nobody ever leaps. They always do these things by steps. They're always one hand on the guardrail, as it were. In this particular case at Analysis during the middle of the 1990s, I began to see the Internet and the web in particular as a very major issue of change. And I wanted the company to develop some web based products, tried secondhand cars and selling houses. One of the other components to this was that everything that Analysis was doing was underpinned by a small software team, six or seven people, which I call business processes and services. In other words, everything the company was doing was mediated by the software that were running and we wrote it ourselves.

25:07

David Cleevely

There was none of this stuff that was available for you with salesforce.com or anything else like that. Again, had I realized what jewels we had in our software division, I could have had salesforce.com, i could have done a whole load of other things. It's interesting reflecting on that, but that's all water under the bridge. The point was that I had, or unusually within analysis, we had world class web expertise at a time when nobody else had it. So when I bumped into Jonathan Milner at dinner and he talked about the idea of buying a goat farm and raising antibodies, my initial reaction was firstly, you know, you don't want to have any overheads. But secondly, I. My conversation with him was directed at, if you've got these antibodies, how can you get them to the customer?

26:05

David Cleevely

And it turned out you could send them through the post. At which point I went, well, we've got a web business and Jonathan's expertise in the biochemistry, which I had to learn, you know, different ends of peptides and, you know, I can't even now recite all the names of all the amino acids, but doesn't really matter. The important thing I brought to bear was that insight into business and the web. And that is what made amcam.

26:32

James Parton

Yeah, I mean, Faye, you know, asked the questions about the experience of building analysis. I mean, AB CAM must have been a rocket ship. I mean, what. What was that growth journey like for.

26:42

David Cleevely

AppCam, a rocket ship? I suppose when you look back on it over, you know, 10 or 20 years, when you're getting something off the ground, it really doesn't feel quite as if, you know, all rockets take off incredibly slowly, don't they, when you watch them?

26:58

James Parton

An overnight star that took 10 years to make.

27:01

David Cleevely

Yeah, that's right. You know, we couldn't get any money from any venture capitalists. I do recall bumping into Herman on a train and having a chat with him about ABCAM and saying, how about putting £100,000 in Herman? And he said, I could do that. I've got the email that I sent to Herman about two, three weeks later saying, herman, do you remember that conversation we had on the train? I think we're ready to, you know, if you want to put 100,000 in, why don't you do it? And he said, yeah, that's fine. Replied it almost immediately. And there's a couple of things in there. One is, it's back to my old thing about serendipity.

27:37

David Cleevely

The real point here is that if you think about Cambridge and how it's networked together and the basis on which you trust each other and how somebody like Herman, who's a very shrewd character, he doesn't throw his money around, thought that this was a good idea and understood how it would work. And same with Peter Dore, who also put in a similar amount of money. Those are the things that make these things successful. And you don't necessarily read about these in management textbooks, and you certainly won't read about them in the memoirs of anybody who's a venture capitalist, because it's actually how Cambridge works and it's rather special anyway, so we didn't get any money from VCs, but we did get some money from me, from Jonathan mortgaging his house, from Herman, from Peter, from various other people.

28:33

Faye Holland

I never knew Peter Dore was in as well actually. That's another, yeah, another piece of news there. So we've covered obviously amcam quite a lot on the podcast over the last year because they've had the big acquisition to Danaher. So any observations or thoughts on how that whole process went? Because obviously that's a huge scale.

28:52

David Cleevely

Yes. I mean, again, I mean I knew ABCAM was going to be big, but I didn't realize quite how big, to be honest. Faye, I'm more interested in how do you make something work. I'm a, your classic kind of engineer, really. I'm not particularly interested in the fact that it's going to make vast amount of money. I'm much more interested in the idea and scaling it up and having an impact, which is why I get involved in public policy and why I get involved in charity stuff and Raspberry PI and all those other things. I'm very lucky in the sense that I've actually managed to make quite a lot of money on the way, which has enabled me to make a lot of freedom.

29:35

Faye Holland

So, so let's, I mean again, a lot of the things you've just mentioned there, we're going to come on to, but I want to, I think listeners just from this, the start of the conversation, you know, you've got analysis, you've got abcam, two completely different businesses, but it's that kind of like you've just said, you want to be making things. So, so you've then gone on and founded or co founded or chaired a whole host of other companies which to me are kind of like you're just making them happen. It's, it's using the tech, it's tech enabling these companies. So you know, a few of them to shout out here, three way network, CRFs, control list. I mean there are just so many of them. And I'm thinking about your comment to James earlier that there's steps, things aren't done in a linear fashion.

30:23

Faye Holland

What made you spot these opportunities for starting and co founding new companies? Was it you had a conversation with someone and there was a need so you thought I can help or did you see a gap in the marketplace?

30:36

David Cleevely

Oh, it's always a joint development. It's never one person having an idea. I mean, if you take abcam for example, it's Jonathan and me. Right. The whole point of doing these Things is to have conversations. I like to say when, if you're investing in a company that's come and pitch to you, the best outcome is where they pitch to you. You have a conversation, you have your own ideas, and as a result of that discussion, something emerges that is better than either of you could have done on your own. So there is always that kind of synthesis. The other one is out of all that list, not all of them have succeeded. I mean, one on that list was a spectacular failure.

31:19

David Cleevely

But that shouldn't necessarily put you off the advantage, of course, that the time when I was doing all of those things I had was I had sufficient funds that I could take the kind of level of risk that previously nobody would have been able to do. You know, the biggest single investment I made was, is in a restaurant. One go. That's the biggest investment I've ever made in my. Still the biggest investment I've ever made in my life. In one go. Anybody will tell you're a complete idiot for investing in restaurants.

31:50

David Cleevely

But it turned out to be quite successful for reasons which are to do with putting yourself, I suppose, properly in the position of the people who would want to go to a restaurant like that, and then again bringing the business sense and a lot of business experience to bear so that the whole thing could be successful.

32:14

James Parton

So let's pause a second then and delve a bit deeper into the restaurant because again, it's a bit like my question about the jump from telecoms to biotech. I'm sure there's a good reason for making that leap into another completely different sector. And as you just said, it's the largest single investment you've ever made. So a huge leap of faith to move into an area that. Had you had experience in that sector before?

32:39

David Cleevely

Well, as a consumer, I, I, you know, I do like Italian food. The, the point here is that my nephew, and that's my wife's side of the family, where all the talent is, he had done Natural Sciences at St John's here in Cambridge and wrote the Morrow cookbooks. Many of you listening might have heard of Morrow as a restaurant. And he went off to California to help a friend open another restaurant over there. Came back, appeared in a BBC TV series about opening restaurants. And then went for a long walk from our house in Italy to have a chat about starting a new restaurant. We talked about, we talked about all sorts of things. A Mexican restaurant and a garden restaurant and all sorts of things.

33:32

David Cleevely

And then he talked about the idea of doing something that was authentically Italian and not the spag bog stuff that you get, but proper authentic Italian. He then cooked up as it were a menu and two things that were really inspirational about that menu. One was for the first time it was small plates and large plates. Now again, all this time later, everybody knows that you can go into restaurants and you get small plates and large plates. This was the first time. And the second one was that it was broken up not by antipasti, pasti, sigandi and all those kinds of weird ways in which anybody looking at Italian meal goes, oh, should I have the first one, the third one, can I mix this? And no, the whole thing was broken up into.

34:26

David Cleevely

Was it fried, was it fish, was it stew, was it whatever, right. And then the, the way, the places that it had come from. So you looked at this and it was kind of like an extended tapas, I suppose in a way you could just pick what you wanted in what order you wanted it. And I looked at some of those things and honestly they looked absolutely delicious. And we tried a couple of test meals and I went, right, that's it. And we found the place, which was an old money laundering and rather criminal gang den, an ex casino in Soho, managed to negotiate a decent price for it and we bought the premises.

35:10

David Cleevely

Which is another thing that you learn in business, which is if you've got a restaurant and own the underlying asset, because if you're ever in trouble with a restaurant, the landlord will forgive you, if you don't, the landlord will not forgive you and you will probably go bust.

35:25

James Parton

And that restaurant has obviously gone on to be multi award winning. And it's interesting listening to what you're saying there because actually the way you describe that is very similar to what we hear from the investors we have on the podcast talking about tech investments. You're backing a team or a person and you're backing innovation in terms of menu design and the innovation that obviously the menu represented.

35:46

David Cleevely

Yes, I think that's exactly right. The fact that this is food and not software or antibodies is a kind of, in a way a minor detail other than, you know, I had an intuition the food was going to be absolutely wonderful. Restaurants are actually quite complicated businesses and you need proper systems and you need proper financial accounting, you need proper KPIs. You need to understand everything because restaurants are run actually on very thin margins. Quite often people are obsessed as they are in tech, with the tech. It's such a great idea, it's got to work, right? That's not necessarily the case, there's a whole series of things, including marketing and how you have the underlying financial systems to actually manage what's going on, to actually make that work. And that's what was brought together with Bocca di Lupo.

36:45

David Cleevely

So it's the genius of Jake and his insights, but it's also that business framework that enables that genius to be directed so that it can be productive.

36:57

James Parton

So you've also held a vast number of chair positions in various different startups. My question here was going to be a lot of our listeners are current founders or aspirational founders. So based on your experience of being a chair, what would your advice be to those people, those founders that might be listening to this? What should they look for in a chair? How can an effective chair boost their chances of growing successful business?

37:24

David Cleevely

Well, a good chair is a number of things. Firstly, you're a mentor to the chief exec. You should have gone through to be a chair. I think you will have gone through a whole load of experiences that may be new or novel for the chief exec, and you can talk those through. You have to be an extraordinarily good listener because people will say things almost between the lines, and you have to be able to pick those up and put those into an action plan if necessary. You know, pick something up. I'm going to need to do something about that. You need to be able to read a meeting really well. Everybody's body language. You have to understand that people will say they are agreeing with you, but they're really not. And it's trouble down the road if you don't tease that out.

38:15

David Cleevely

Make sure everybody has a chance to speak. You have to understand the accounts, you have to understand what's going on in HR and personnel. You have to understand quite a lot about how the company actually works, what the business model is doing. And sometimes you have to dive quite a long way down into the weeds in order to be able to do that. Occasionally, if we had a commission, independent reports from a lovely company called Minerva, run by Ben Tucker, into board functioning, because it's always useful to have somebody coming in from the outside and telling you what you're doing wrong as well as what you're doing right.

38:52

David Cleevely

And there was a comment in the recent one which said that me as myself as a chair, I tend to get a little bit involved in the technical detail, but that's because you need to understand whether they're going to be some technical gotchas that are going to prevent you from executing on your business plan. Sometimes you have no alternative but to get to the level of detail that you can determine whether something is going to work or not. Most important, having a board where everybody feels that they're relaxed enough to speak their mind and say what they're really thinking.

39:31

David Cleevely

Because, you know when you've got difficult decisions and you're not really sure, you've got this inner little voice that is telling you which way this really ought to go, and you can make a whole load of noise and that inner little voice gets drowned out. The role of chair is to get everybody's inner little voice out there on the table so that everybody can hear it and then we can decide whether that's the right way to do it.

39:58

Faye Holland

No, I think that's really interesting, you know, and good advice for people who chair boards as well, because I know certainly in a lot of the startups we talk to, some boards can be thrown together, as opposed to you've necessarily selected them. So, actually, people listening to that kind of feedback, I think will be really useful. So we're coming to the end of the first part of the conversation with you, and I just want touch a little bit more on the investment side of things, if I may. So I know we've covered some of these already. You've invested in over 55 companies, I believe. What is the motivation for investing at that level? Is it just. There are lots of different ideas. Do you have a total amount that you want to invest in? Are they all still active?

40:47

Faye Holland

Can you just give us a little bit of a flavour of your own investment portfolio?

40:52

David Cleevely

Well, my own investment portfolio, like all investment portfolios over time, gets winnowed. And from those 55, you're probably down to five or six, which are going to deliver any significant value. When you're looking at investment, and I'm looking telling you, talking about this now from decades of experience, you have a rule of five, which is for every pound you put in, you have to have at least four in your back pocket to follow up, because no company ever goes the way that they say they're going to go or hope to go. And you're going to probably need £4 for every one you originally put in to help support them on that journey. And I look back on some of those investments and I must have been absolutely stark staring mad. You know, you learn on the way.

41:40

David Cleevely

And one of the ways that I learned the most, I think, is through Cambridge Angels, which I founded with Robert Sansom. Honestly, they are the brightest, most interesting, sometimes the most troublesome, but, you know, Certainly the most insightful bunch of people about investment that I've ever, ever come across. We are so lucky in Cambridge to have of such an organization helping startups. As always. You know, I wish I'd known 20 years ago what I know now about investing. But hey, we're 20 years later.

42:14

Faye Holland

You have got that, you've just brought Cambridge Angels up. So let's bring that in. And we have had both Emmy and Emmy Nicol and Pam Garside and Simon Thorpe and Peter, you know, we've had lots of the angels and people in that group, but I mean, you set that up. So we're going to talk about the Cambridge ecosystem later, but, you know, it makes sense to bring this in now. This was one of the major things that you set up and it's another great legacy, isn't it, for what you've done? You've taken all of those investments you've made. You and Robert set this thing up. I mean, it's another great thing that you brought into Cambridge.

42:51

David Cleevely

Oh, it's another great example of serendipity. Robert arrived having sold his company, bought the house opposite me in the road in which we live, introduced himself as a new neighbor, said, where's the Angel Group? Let's have lunch and have a chat about setting one up. So that's what we did. So that's how it was set up. And I used a little bit of, you know, because I was running analysis at the time, that gave me a little bit of support to do things and I'd already done things like Cambridge Network and a few other bits and pieces in Cambridge. So we knew quite a number of people, Robert knew quite a lot of people. So I think we kicked off with an initial dozen or so around the table. In the first place, it's turned out to be very significant force in Cambridge.

43:35

David Cleevely

I mean, you know, it's hundreds of.

43:37

Faye Holland

Millions of pounds of investment, Cambridge and international for sure. So on that note, we're going to pause part one of our conversation with you and in part two, we're going to dig even deeper into your thoughts on the Cambridge cluster public policy. And one of what I think people are going to start understanding is your favourite topics and that's of serendipity. So tune for part two, episode 113 next week. Thank you, David.

44:03

David Cleevely

Thank you. Thank you, James.

44:12

James Parton

We hope you enjoy part one. Tune in next week for part two of the David Cleveley interview.

44:22

James Parton

Today's show was produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV and supported by our media partner Business Weekly. The Cambridge Tech Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms and on cambridgetechpodcast.com if you've enjoyed this podcast, please give it a five star review. It'll really help others discover the show.

Transcribed by https://fireflies.ai/

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