Hiten Patel: Thank you for joining us on the Innovators Exchange. I'm delighted to welcome on today's episode, Sherry Coutu. Thank you for joining us today.
Sherry Coutu: Hello. Well, thank you for having me.
Hiten: Why don't we start, Sherry, by just giving a brief intro to your role and some of the roles you've held previously on your journey to date.
Sherry: Okay, so at the moment I divide my time between for-profit not for-profit, so I'll start with the for-profit in the for-profit sphere. I serve on the board of Raspberry Pi, which is the world's largest single board computer company. I chair the remuneration committee and then I'm the senior independent director there. And I've been there since it was an idea in the entrepreneur's mind. I also serve on the board of Pearson PLC, which is the world's largest learning company where I chair the Renumeration committee and serve on the nominations committee. Previous boards include London Stock Exchange Group, interactive Investor international, and Zoopla, where all of which are on the public markets. As an entrepreneur, I have done quite a lot of things and I invest actively as an angel, and I have done for 20 years. In total, I've invested in more than 75 companies and I'm an investor in five venture capital firms.
As a philanthropist, I'm mainly circle around learning and some of the things that learning and platforms or learning platforms. So some of the things that I've done include Founders for Schools and Digital Boost, which support teachers and small businesses with mentors, the ability to learn not from books, but from others. And in the past I've helped found the Prince's Trust Technology Leadership Group, which supports young people starting up their own businesses. And I also served as a member of the Cancer Research UK Venture Board. And as you know, I also support National Numeracy, which is determined to support everyone becoming more numerate often by working with employers to help them.
Hiten: Wow, what a portfolio. And so much to jump into there. Maybe we just wind the tape back for me. Talk to me a little bit about the start of your journey earlier on in your career. So from being a consultant to ISI and then in particular, I'd love to double click a little bit around your founder journey and experience around Interactive Investor.
Sherry: Okay, so my undergraduate was in politics. I did a master's at the London School of Economics in econometrics, and then my first job was as a software engineer working in a large professional services firm. Luckily companies even back then took their role seriously of educating and upskilling their workforce. And so I joined a large firm as a software engineer. Did that for a couple of years before I moved into corporate finance at a different professional services firm. I think that suited, I guess my way of being. I was more interested in the big picture than working on very, very long projects and bug testing, which was not my favorite thing to do, although it's a necessary thing to do. I then went off to business school and really focused on starting up things that made a big difference in the world, and that's what really gave me the confidence right after business school to co-found my first firm, which was later sold to a large company called Euro Money.
And then I started up my second firm, which you alluded to earlier, which is called Interactive Investor. Interactive Investor was, or is still responsible for 40% of the transactions, retail transactions in the UK. And the idea was to make it really, really easy and frictionless for customers to buy and sell shares and save for their future and these sorts of things. We actually started out with a data feed around investment trusts and mutual funds. Those were actually easier to get a data feed for. We then moved into stocks and shares not only in the UK but all around the world and then pensions and other things like that. But I wanted to make it easy, as easy for retail investors to take care of their future as we did in institutional investors. And you remember I was a software engineer. Often our clients were large investment banks and large financial institutions and we made it super simple for them to buy and sell large positions.
And I was like, why is it so hard on the retail? Why are we making it hard for normal people who want to invest in the future of companies? Why are we making it hard? So I wanted to make it easier and took inspiration from some other organizations in the US but created a UK platform that did that. It was responsible for the first financial services transaction in the UK ever, which was quite fun. It was about 17 days after incorporation, somebody invested their first 10,000 pounds over our website. They bought a mutual fund and it was just like, "oh, is that a joke? Are we being hacked?" It was like, no, someone actually did it. It's like we weren't expecting it quite so soon.
Hiten: And so just at that time, so just help me paint the picture. I guess I've got a time in my mind when I watched my parents look at stock prices on Ceefax and Teletext and there was, you'd pick up the telephone to make an order with your bank, I mean, is this the landscape with which you were entering at that time? What were the other providers? What were some of the challenges that you had to overcome or bets you had to make for this? Because history now suggests it's obviously a winning model and a winning play, but at the time, what did it look like for you?
Sherry: Well, I honestly was so frustrated with the way that it was being done and I couldn't imagine doing it any other way except through something like Interactive Investor. And again, using paper and going back and forth through intermediaries that took obscene amounts of fees for doing something which is literally so simple, I found it just shocking and wrong the way it was done. So I couldn't imagine the way it was being done and like many entrepreneurs decided that well knew that there was a better way because I had been living in the US, although I'm Canadian and had friends who were at E-Trade, knew some people who were at some of the other organizations that were very, very easily probably a little bit clunkily, but trading, making it possible with the click of a button had been following Amazon for a long time, was inspired by how easy it was to purchase a book.
It's like why and when we launched it was buy stocks and shares as easily as you can buy a book on Amazon. That's literally what our mantra was and we felt it should be and saw no reason for it not to be. As long as you kind of were a sophisticated investor or an investor that knew what you were doing and you weren't gambling your grandchildren's money away that you did have to, I'm very happy to do the safeguarding that you need to do, but there's no reason to make it impossible for mere mortals to do something which is very normal and important for them as part of society.
Hiten: What was the adoption curve? Was it a success immediately overnight? Was there a certain profile or demographic that were naturally the early adopters?
Sherry: The growth was very, very high right away. So we went on democratizing access to equities and there were people who, and there were people who had always wanted to but either objected to the fees or objected to how much time it took for them to do something which they thought was simple. We'd thought really, really hard about the user journey and we wanted to empower retail investors. So I think the early adopters were in the financial services because they had been doing this before. So we had almost an instant conversion of those that had been doing this, but being grumpy about and feeling aggrieved by how hard it was, how paper-based it was and how much fees people took, we had a whole bunch of innovative features that made it possible for them to talk together. We were focusing on the long tail. Oh, well if you've bought this equity here, by the way, is the institutional research on it, by the way, why don't you connect to a fora that just owns those stocks and shares and talk about it?
Did you like that research that was just published? Oh, let's get you an alert. So we really treated retail people as well as we had treated the institutional investors and made it possible for them to be part of a community to learn more and to benefit more because information is power. But the information had been focused on institutions up until then, possibly because of the transaction cost of friction that had been seemingly necessary before then was so high. The older folks, and again, what it did is the adoption curve was people already doing it because they loved the decrease in fees of like 90% and the decrease in time by 90, 95%. And you'll remember that my first company was also an investment platform but serving institutional investors. So we understood how people thought, investors, and it was just a case of making it easy to buy parcels, smaller amounts of parcels in order to do what was quite a natural part of our capitalist system.
Hiten: And when you fast forward where we are now 20 years later, I guess there's this flip flopping. We pick up around a point in time in which retail investing is real powerful part of the narrative right now. It feels like it's one of those times when people are trying to wrestle with what should capital markets be like and how can they be more vibrant here in the UK? I guess what perspectives do you have now when you follow where we've got to and what's the right role and balance that the retail investors should be having in the story that's out there at the moment?
Sherry: Well, again, I'm sort of aware of how it's also done in other countries and it's very different, the amount of retail participation between Canada where I'm from or the US where I spent quite a lot of time and floated several companies and the UK where there's a lower component and lower focus on retail. I think retail is really important from a cultural point of view. If we want to benefit from the companies we buy from, why wouldn't that extend to becoming an owner of them? And I'm a huge firm believer in participating. I buy it, I want to own part of it and I also want to suggest improvements to it. And I think that's really important. I think a number of years ago they had several campaigns when they were nationalizing things often to buy a part of it. And I would love that to be a greater ease.
I was recently a bit frustrated with one of the FTSE companies, FTSE 100 companies that I'm on the board of, and we were doing a consultation for remuneration and for whatever reason, most of our consultations were not with the retail investors, which again, given my background, you would expect that to be the first port of call for me. But I had fallen into, well, let's make sure that we cover 75% of the investors, which is quite a lot of consultation. And we didn't get down far as what I would call a normal retail person that all of the people who would be using Interactive Investor. So since then I have reached out to Interactive Investors and said, by the way, whatcha doing to help large FTSE companies do their consultations with retail investors? And obviously there's some other players as well in that, but it should be really, really easy. And I'm looking to those platforms to make it easier for all of us to participate in the consultations and the ups and the downs, but ideally the ups, but let's reduce the friction so that you can buy the things that you love the products of. It's super important at a cultural level that we understand the businesses that are the engines of our economy.
Hiten: You paint a really powerful picture here around some of the cultural differences around participation in the capitalism and the ability to benefit from the upside, but not necessarily just what you described it for me, it's not just the economic gains, but that exercising your right to vote and have a say around the control, which is so often overlooked and is probably so much often seen as a bit of an admin burden. So I think it's a really powerful point you make and probably needs to form part of the more complete story I suspect to kind of drive some of that cultural gap that you highlight around people's attitudes to the activity.
Sherry: Yeah, I mean companies aren't just done to us. Our economy doesn't just float around us. We shape it and we have that capability of shaping it with our voices. We can vote with our shares at an AGM, we can comment on a fora.
Hiten: Talk to me a little bit about there's a couple of key transitions you've had and this amazing journey you've had. So talk to me first about this transition from founder to then sitting on the boards of publicly listed companies. What were some of the things that you learned and developed in your founder life that you found really helpful in that next transition? And then what are some of the key differences when you move from, I guess if I have a layman's view where I sit as this kind of exciting founder role where you get to make the calls, you get to drive and shape things and then there's a governance responsibility when you publicly list, which is a slightly different flavor. So talk to me a little bit about the transition, some of the differences as you're one of few people who've gone through that change.
Sherry: Well, so my transition from founder to board of PLCs was made while my second company was still private. I was asked by the board of a public listed company that was incumbent in its space if I would join their board. And I was very lucky in that the VCs who had backed, who had backed my company that was growing insanely fast, they were happy for me to join as a non-exec director of a public company board. And that changed just about everything for me. I had not really in retrospect, I realized therefore what amazing resource your non-exec directors could be to you, but also that they required information in order to do that and our board PACS and our information got so much better at my company after I went on the board of this PLC, which was again a wonderful organization, but it opened my eyes as to how different companies did it and I think it is really important for me developmentally going on another company's board that was already public as we were thinking about is that a good pathway for us?
Would it work? How would it work? It removed all of the barriers that I had in my mind or any resistance that I might have as to whether or not that would be a good thing or a bad thing. And it was clear. It's like, oh, this is not that hard to comply with the governance and everything else. And it gives you some levers that we just don't have available. Secondaries, it allows you to do quite a lot of other things as well that often people paint the picture of, oh, the governance is terrible. It's like it also makes raising capital a lot easier. It makes the due diligence that you go through with large new customers that much easier. It makes all of those conversations easier because the transparency is so much higher. So, so my first was by joining when I was a founder, they also wanted a founder who thought innovatively on their board because they possibly at the time had gotten quite a lot of people who were governancy but not entrepreneurially and they were an incumbent and they had new entrants nibbling away at them from a whole bunch of different directions.
Now me as an entrepreneur, I love nibbling away at incumbents who are ignoring their customers. So it was really just saying, well, can we just worry about our customers a little bit more because they don't want to leave, but the only reason they leave is because they're getting better stuff elsewhere. So if we concentrate on that, and I think it helped change the mindset of the organization that I joined that it really helped change my mindset of that it wasn't a burden to be on the public market. It was a privilege and it helped you do things and that the cost was not as high as a media would have you, would you imagine it?
Hiten: Do you think that's the same now? So what was this about 20, this was just remind me the year when you took Interactive investor public?
Sherry: 2000 for just about, we're coming up on the 25th anniversary of being public. So quite a long time.
Hiten: Do you think given you went through that, given there's a lot of hype and there's a lot of narrative right now about companies staying private longer and rethinking some of those trade-offs, what do you think is fact off fiction, the trade off you described that you made, the assessment you made and conclusion you got to, do you think you'd get to a different conclusion in this current market environment 24 years later or do you think more founders would've benefited from what you described is actually if you can somehow get exposure to the other side and see it both ways, it might be a smoother transition?
Sherry: Well, if I think about the other companies that I've helped float since then, so LinkedIn, care.com, both of those on New York Stock Exchange, Zoopla on the London Stock Exchange, Joby on the New York Stock Exchange. And you may remember that I also joined the London Stock Exchange for nine years but timed out and sort of retired after being on there for too long. So no, I don't end. And you may have noted that this morning there was a release about the intention to float of Raspberry Pi, which I've been on the board of for 12 years. So clearly, I think that the same benefits are there and I've floated one company on Nasdaq, three on New York Stock Exchange, a couple on London and possibly another one coming up on London, assuming that the intention to float goes through, it's very powerful in how it helps a company.
I think there is some governance stuff you have to get used to your compensation, your salary and your bonus and your long-term incentives. You have to get used to those being published. To me that was probably the most annoying, the annoying thing, the need to treat all investors the same, the need to get information out there, the need to make sure that everything that you're saying is correct. Everybody should do that. So the move from private to public is not that hard. If you've been doing things in a sustainable, not so much fly by the seat of your pants way, I think they absolutely hold today just as much as they held back there. I do think we've got a choice of which venues we float in and which countries we choose to do that in. And I believe that it's a kind of a personal choice for every company.
The ones that I've floated in the US, it was absolutely right to float them there. The ones that have been here absolutely right to do it in this country. And I think there's been too much of a focus, if I'm honest on institutional investors and advisors and not enough on retail. And I would, with my background clearly having started up a retail investment company, but I would love us in the UK to do more on retail. I would love everybody in the UK to own a piece of Raspberry Pi. I think that would be awesome, just as I wanted everybody in the UK to own a piece of Interactive Investor, and at Zoopla we wanted everybody who owned a house owned or rented a house to have a part of us. Why wouldn't you? You know you get a lot of brilliant feedback? You hear your customer's voices and together you create something amazing. You can't really do that without deep engagement with your customers.
Hiten: There's a beautiful circularity when you are telling or talking through your story around how that journey you start anchor around retail investors then helping these companies go public with a focus on the benefit of understanding the value they can bring for retail participation. It can kind of zoom out far enough. You can kind of see that link. If I may, I wanted to move on to your philanthropic kind of portfolio and talk to us a little bit around what motivated that transition and where you've landed on that.
Sherry: Well first of all, it's not been a transition. I have been doing philanthropic things my whole life. So since day one I've always been a volunteer at different things. I think I sort of made a decision a long time ago I didn't want to wait until I was dead or dying to start giving back to the community from which I had benefited from enormously. And it's now about 50/50 and it wasn't always 50/50. It used to be, well, I can probably just devote volunteer a day, maybe a couple of hours a month or something like that. And even when I was insanely busy at Interactive Investor as its chief executive, I was still doing volunteer work. It was during that time that I was one of the co-founders of the technology leadership group at the Prince's Trust. So it's not so much a transition, it may be a changing slightly of the balance.
So the first was probably technology was the Prince's Trust. I then started up founders for, well I guess it was Silicon Valley comes to UK and that was a method of helping first time CEOs meet their peers and demystify how hard it was or how easy it was to continue growing their company and to move their mind through, I just have to get to the next financing to okay, let's float it. And then after floating it, let's move into this market, this market and this market. So it was set up as a method of helping first time CEOs understand their life as a serial entrepreneur and then potentially as an investor and as a philanthropist afterwards, that led to writing the scale up report for the government, which is I took a sabbatical from all of my for-profit and my not-for-profit in order to write that report because it took quite a lot of effort.
I have no idea really what I was signing up for when I did that. But I wanted to understand, again, go up into the helicopter and understand it a systemic point of view. Why is starting up something okay but not great and why is growing something that is okay into something that is great over a long period of time better and is it one times better, 10 times better or a hundred times better? And what we discovered through a lot of evidence and a lot of amazing work from a lot of other people is it's about a hundred times better to scale something rather than start something. There is something in the culture in the UK that shiny new thing, let’s start a new thing. Which means that things that have been started that are great rate just get supplanted by something else that started, something else that started, something else that started.
But that's actually really damaging to economic growth and personal growth and career growth and everything else. So the Scale Up Institute is the scale up report, which was just our report. I was asked by the government because they had made a comment in a roundtable that our startup policies, our entrepreneurship policies are brilliant. And I turned around, and I said, well, they're actually damaging your economic growth, you really should change them. And they were like what? So that's what the report was. During that report, I realized again, we broke down what does drive economic growth, which is scale ups not startups and okay, well what are the barriers? What stops people who have these brilliant things from being able to grow them? And we broke that down into five themes. The first is their ability to get talent that has the skills.
The second is now well after they've got the talent, how do they develop the careers and the pathways of the people who are working for them? That is quite hard. Remember your inventory, only 0.5% of companies in the UK grow quickly 0.5%. So 99.5% are shrinking or static, which means your inventory of humans talent that you're choosing to employ, they freak out when they arrive at a fast growing company, they absolutely don't know what to do. So the development of talent once you've got it, is really, really important. And there are very common things you do to accelerate the growth of the people who work for you, but if you don't know that, you don't know that. So we went about making it easy for people who were rapidly growing to onboard people efficiently and help them learn about what they needed to do efficiently, quickly, and to keep on doing that so that the people every single day just ahead of when they were supposed to be able to do it, were able to do it and we're capable of that. The third is expanding into markets, which is if you're in the UK only and you think you have a global product, well what are the commonly used techniques to get that to do a rapid geographic rollout? What do you have to do? There's a totally common playbook that can help anybody who wants to expand internationally to do that. And it's just like, “well here's the playbook it people love it in this country. Well you go get the rest of the world”. And then finance people often think finance is difficult, it's the fourth most important.
You almost don't need to worry about finance If you've got the ability to expand into other markets, the ability to grow your people and the ability to hire people, I would say it almost doesn't matter, but it comes relatively easy. If you focus only on finance and not the first three, you're dead. I mean you literally are dead. But people didn't, again, that wasn't the common parlance. And then the others infrastructure, which was a thing 10 years ago when we wrote the book before, but it's hardly a thing any longer because so many different platforms have arisen that really makes infrastructure for growing companies rapidly so easy. We are talking on Zoom, this is infrastructure didn't exist, didn't really exist very easily. So in answer to your question, the scale up and writing that was fun. It birthed Founders for Schools. The first theme was acquisition of talent.
Everybody was saying the people that I can hire from school or from university just don't have the skills that I need, and I have to spend so much time getting them so that they can do anything. So we set up a platform very, very similar to Interactive Investor if I'm honest, which made it really, really easy for teachers to get people who had founded businesses into their classrooms to talk to their kids about, hey, running a company is not that hard and I get to do this really cool stuff. So set that up. Founders for Schools, there's a digital boost which helps small companies grow big by putting massive amounts of mentoring available to them. If you're running a business, you do not have time to go on an executive education course at University, full stop, but you do have time to have a lot of coffee with a lot of different people to help figure out what you need.
And so we wanted to make it super easy to do just that. So we created something called Digital Boost and that was actually, it was a tweak of the Founders for Schools platform, which you could say was a bit of a pivot intellectually of what we were doing at Interactive Investor, or what Amazon does, or what Zoopla does. Making it easy for people to get stuff. In the case of it's like I want to get a speaker who started up a business in my classroom. I want to get somebody who understands Google Ads and who does it every day to just talk to my team so they can do it. Like it's really hard, shouldn't be hard, but you didn't know where to look if you were a small business owner. So we were trying to make it much, much easier for the inventory of small business leaders. There's millions of people who run small businesses but they don't really know who they can talk to and we thought we're going to make it as easy to find someone to talk you through Google AdWords or LinkedIn AdWords or anything else as buying a book on Amazon. So same sort of thing. So I keep on, I guess the let's make it easy for people to do stuff that they want to do.
Is a recurring investment theme and also philanthropic thing.
Hiten: And just so much in there that was very rich and powerful. I guess the one thing I'd pick up on, you're 10 years down the line from the scale-up report. What's the scorecard on how we've done as a country from nought to ten around addressing some of those key enablers that you described as being critical to enabling companies to flourish?
Sherry: Well, we published a report card every year in November. I think we've done not too bad, but there's still much work to do. So we now have a much greater proportion of scale ups per a hundred thousand of population in the UK. So we measure it by a scale up is good. You need a certain number of companies that are growing per hundred thousand of your population in order to know that you've got a dynamic economy and you're focusing on the right thing. And we have made really good progress on that. It's patchy. We measure it in every local authority around the country. So there are some areas that are super brilliant and there are some that are not yet brilliant. We set up courses to introduce those who are not yet brilliant to those who are to their peers that are currently doing better.
It has been largely adopted by the entire country. In fact, nine countries have adopted the scale up reports’s recommendations, getting visas so you can get new talent easier. We haven't gotten rid of some of the barriers in the capital markets yet, but there's some really important task forces that are working at the moment to fix that. So talent acquisition is okay, but at the same time I think there's so much more that needs to be done in secondary schools and universities around the acquisition of the skills that really are needed by companies that are growing quickly. I'm not sure there's been enough investment by those who employ teachers to upskill their teachers in things like AI. I love what Amigo is doing. I love actually what the Raspberry Pi Foundation is doing. They've got AI courses for teachers. It makes something which is mysterious and perhaps threatening, less mysterious and more welcoming.
There's some work that we're doing in AI and education and that is taking things that teachers are doing all around the country that are working. So innovation by individual teachers, individual schools and then checking that it does work and once it does work we're telling everybody it works. You're safe, your teachers to do this. So I think there's some really good, really good things on that. Finance, follow on finances improved very significantly. I still think there's a real mismatch in early stage. There are many early-stage ventures that are underfunded that don't have enough to make the numbers add up for those in their portfolio. And I've been verbal about the, I am really worried about that. I continue to be worried about that and would really like to see that solved. If they release some of the funding from pensions that are not spent in this country, then that should go a long way.
We're working away at remuneration at the moment. I talked about incentives in the US your bonus and your ltip are bonus is about double what you're allowed to or what it's customary to pay. People in the UK public markets and long-term incentives are five to seven times salary on a annual basis. That disparity makes it very, very, very difficult for scale up companies here to get the talent they need. And you'll have seen that there has been a recent delisting of a UK company that people were very excited about into private equity hands, US private equity hands. And one of the reasons quoted was that they were unable to compensate people in a way that allowed them to beat the competition for talent. This is a solvable problem and it's not yet solved. So I really do hope that they, we've made some progress, but the release of capital from pensions is really important. The removing of barriers particularly to pay your talent. If we can't pay the talent at least in median or upper quartile for performing equally to that in the US people, we have a retention problem. You've got people streaming out of our really fabulous companies to less fabulous companies in the US because they're paid very significantly more. How do I look my spouse in the face and explain that I really like this company and no, I'm not going to take that job offer that will give us 10 times more per year.
How do you explain that to your spouse? It's really very difficult and we don't have to make it that difficult. And one of my prime grumps and the biggest things that I think we could do is proxy agencies have a lot to offer here. The media could understand that paying people equally to work in the same sort of company is important because if you can work at the upper level of a fast-growing company where it's going to be not easy, you should be rewarded the same than if you accidentally happen to be in this country. Why? How does that help us? And I understand that maybe some people say actually people in Britain, it's a socialist country. It's like, well it that's going to result in other companies when they are scaling to choose to locate themselves elsewhere because they can and they should. If we don't solve this problem, then I think they should. And it breaks my heart to say that.
Hiten: So much in what you, you've said kind of pulls together. For me, it goes back to what you were talking about earlier around the cultural impact of retail participation. If you feel like you're an owner, then you don't get the clickbait headlines around how much A CEO is paid, which as you say is out of context. If you believe in the market dynamic that you want the best talent and you want the best company in your region, your market, you'd almost celebrate that, right? You'd almost celebrate that achievement that there is an individual in our economy that can derive that much value.
Sherry: If they've made that much money, we know that 90% of it's going to come from performance pay, which you don't get unless your shareholders are rewarded. It's really simple as you say. So that is a cultural thing that we need to address together as a nation so we can celebrate companies doing well because we should. It's not easy running a company or a charity or any organization or let alone a professional services firm, and it takes very specialist skills to compare to sort of say, this person got a bonus of this or a long-term incentive of this. It's like, yeah, but they drove 3 billion of value in the last year, should not, we have mentioned that their bonus was because of this as opposed to those who probably work fewer hours, maybe have much different skill sets and stuff like that. Maybe they didn't get as big a bonus, but they probably didn't work a hundred hours a week and they might not have, they probably didn't necessarily have the other choices of other companies they could go for that are calling them every single day of the week and saying, come to this company, come to this company, come to this.
I know what you're paid. Come to this company because you'll get more come to this company and this happens. Our senior executives are preyed upon by the wonderful headhunters who are hired by our competitors in other countries, and we are great hunting ground for that. Let's change that.
Hiten: But you're just hearing you say that it's not always that everyone finishes the story, right? The 3 billion of value creation ought to then majority of that trickle to the shareholders, all of it go back to its 30% of its retail participants,
Sherry: 99, 99.9% of it goes to the shareholders. And if you were a shareholder, you benefit from that comes the more of a dividend or a growth in the share.
Hiten: Yeah, yeah. Look, I'm going to pivot slightly. I suspect given everything you've achieved for your career, you could probably write a whole book of lessons that people would gobble up. But I'm going to ask you to pick out one particular kind of challenge that you've overcome or lesson that you've learned that would be most beneficial to listeners that you'd want to reflect upon.
Sherry: Yeah, I liked that question and I think the biggest lesson I've learned, and I'm not sure if it surprised me, but it's really important and I absolutely didn't see it or appreciate it when I was younger, is the extent to which relationships matter. And most of the stuff that I do and that I've been doing for 20 years in the innovation space is definitely not written in books. And when you're in the innovation space, you're trying to figure out stuff that there is not yet an answer for. It's not in books, it's not in podcasts, it's not in newspapers. So pulling a team together to help you get an answer to something that is hard, you can only do that with relationships. You cannot do that any other way. So I think for these, you really need a network so you can solve hard problems that nobody else has solved yet.
Cool, hard problem, let's solve it. As opposed to, oh, it's a hard problem, it can't be solved. Well, it can't be solved if you don't do anything about it. And the only way you can do something about it is by a saying, there's a hard problem I want to solve. I haven't figured it out yet. Can you help me? So relationships and I guess being vulnerable and saying, I don't know if it being vulnerable, but being open and saying, I want to solve that problem, it's worth solving. Don't yet know. Do you know anybody who can help me solve that problem? And then your network will help you. It's not as if you can for many of these things. You can't publish a newspaper problem, problem, this is my problem, would like to solve this problem. But your networks help you do that. And I think the relationships and I think on relationships that there's give and take there. That means that any given day I am doing stuff to help people solve problems.
Am I a shareholder? No. Will I benefit? No. Is it a problem we're solving? If it's a problem we're solving, I'll have that coffee. And I think that it's really, really important. So take time to have coffee with people who are trying to solve really hard problems. Even if you can't see an immediate win for you, if at least you connect to that problem and you think you've got some insights that might be helpful, then do it. And I don't think I really understood that it's how I operate every single day. And sometimes you meet people who are transactional rather than relationship and it's like water and it's like, I don't know, water and oil. It's just like transactional really doesn't get you very far. And I think the media may paint pictures of people being largely transactional. That is not my experience. And I think being transactional or not focusing on helping people do things that they don't know how to do is a really important part, certainly of my success.
But I think of economic growth anywhere and innovation in particular. You'd asked about I companies and boards. I think boards should be shareholders. I think they should buy the products and I think that they should help solve those problems. And so advisory boards create this world shape it. We shape the world we live in. It's not done to us. We shape it. But you need to do that through relationships. And I don't like networking. I'm a complete introvert. It's like thinking about diving into a vat of ice, but if having that conversation is going to help me solve that problem that I really want to solve, I will do that anyway. So I think relationships would be the thing that I've learned that has surprised me the most. And it gives and gives and gives, but it's only in giving that you have the right to ask somebody else. So it's like have at least one coffee for every time you are seeking a coffee from somebody else.
Hiten: Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Thank you for sharing. Just as we wrap up, the final question I always ask guests is to kind of share or throw the spotlight. So if there is a individual or a company that's impressing you right now that you think is worthy of more attention or more people looking up and paying notice to, it'd be great to hear from you on that.
Sherry: Yes, thank you. The other thing is I think curiosity or problem solving is a superpower. Being curious, voracious and relentless. So Spotlight, there's three. I couldn't think of just one or I couldn't narrow it down to just one. So I love what Karen Licurse is doing from Digital Boost, and this is in the mentoring space. And again, it helps, it's virtual coffees and it helps adults learn what they need to learn in order to do the stuff they need to do. And I think the tech use of that and the AI and the machine learning is absolutely World-class, what it's doing, and it just amazes me. So that's really cool in the education. So I've got two from the UK and one from the US. I think I mentioned earlier, the work that Sal Khan is doing with Khanmigo is Green Shoots going to revolutionize secondary education and the ability for teachers to help students acquire really important skills that they don't have at scale.
We need to do a lot more things like that. But I think that how they have approached that and the creation of a way of helping people learn as opposed to giving them the answers, really, really important work there. And I love what they're doing there. Super important. And I really think the team at Raspberry Pi and Evan in particular is doing amazing work. They are making it not only easier for hobbyists, which is important, they're making it easy for those who run small and medium-sized companies to get really brilliant components that help them do what they need to do, literally 10 times easier at a 10th of the cost. And focusing on what small companies need and creating something that's fit for that purpose is beautiful. And many people only focus on huge markets and they build really complex devices. And what I love about what Raspberry Pi is doing is they've understood what people need and they're making it easy to get that.
And you have to be brave to focus on the small and medium sized industrial market and hardware and it's gorgeous what they're doing. The other thing I would say that the call out I would have on PI is they have about a hundred people that work there. Not one engineer has ever left the company ever in 12 years. They hire slow, they develop their staff beautifully, which means that they can do super hard stuff really, really fast. And that may sound easy, but it's not easier. So be careful about, be thoughtful about who you hire and once you hire them, know that you're going to help them on their journey so that you can do the amazing things that allow you to deliver the purpose for your customers that you wanted to. And I think, I don't know any example that has had that degree of retention of staff. It's really amazing example of scaling gracefully rather than disgracefully. And it's a lot easier to scale disgracefully than gracefully.
Hiten: Thank you for sharing, Sherry. And look, thank you for being so generous with your time and thoughts. I've personally taken so much away from just hearing you speaking reflect, and I'm sure listeners will as well. And congratulations on everything that's been achieved today, and I imagine everything else that's still to come. So it's been truly impressive and inspirational. So thank you for making the time to come on the show.
Sherry: Well thank you for having me, and thank you for doing what you do on this show because important to sort of pause and think and there's a lot of effort behind what you do in making it happen. So appreciate that as well. Thank you.
Hiten: Have a great day. Thank you, Sherry.
Sherry: Bye for now.
