DeepTech

So today I was fortunate enough to interview someone who’s a founder, chairman, and investor in businesses that have exited for over 7 billion pounds over the last decade. Mel Morris CBE was on stage and we had the opportunity to talk about his career, the number of innovative things he’s doing, and also his new corporate platform where he’s looking to develop new scientific discoveries through AI. It was an incredible opportunity to hear from Mel. It’s pleasure to have you here, Mel. You may not know that Mel has chaired, founded, and invested in businesses that have exited at over 7 billion dollars worth of businesses. So he is an incredible person to have here with us today. I’ve been a customer of at least one of your businesses. So throughout the afternoon, let’s figure out see if we can figure out which one it is. Which uh Did you buy a our sub security product then, David? Is that what it was? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But didn’t you have a dating business? Yeah, let’s not go there. You could be embarrassed by that. It’s not that one. Just to be clear, it’s not that one. So look, I’m going to start out, if I may, by just asking the simplest of questions just to explain your entrepreneurial journey and how you got here, if that’s okay. Yeah, I don’t want to bore you cuz it’s running now close on six decades. Not six full decades, but six actual decades, historically anyway. My journey was really quite interesting because I wanted to work with computers from day one. Right from leaving school. And uh Uh that was really difficult cuz I was only 16 at the time. And I went to look for a position to start writing computer software. That’s what I wanted to do. But there was a job in computer operations which I was going to look at and I couldn’t do that either cuz I wasn’t 18. I couldn’t work shifts. So I ended up decollating output from a printer and then delivering around the offices. And after about 3 minutes, probably 3 months, but somewhere between there, I got extremely bored with that. And one of the women who worked there said, “Why are you so miserable?” I said, “I want to write computer software.” “My husband is the computer manager for E.W. Bliss part of Gulf + Western. Why don’t you go and see him?” So, I said, “I’d love to.” So, I go and see him, a gentleman called Tony Ball. He said to me, “Well, why don’t you just take a week’s holiday and come and see how you get on. We’ll teach you and see how you see how you cope.” Sure. Only one problem, I’ve got no holiday left. They said, “Well, you know, why don’t you take a week off?” I said, “I won’t take a week off sick. I’m not sick.” I tell you what I’ll do, I’ll basically hand my notice in. I’ll come to you for the week. I know if I don’t shape up, there’s no job, but I’d sooner do it that way. I was offered the job 3 days in. I ended up with a a guy who was a computer science graduate, which was very rare in those days. And he was a real superstar writing software. But he wanted to be lazy and he wanted to teach me as fast as he could so he could put his feet up and I could do all the work. And I loved it. Absolutely loved it. He was such a great mentor. And and I realized from that age I could write software. And what I found with software is it’s a great challenge of coordination, correlation, planning, doing all those things, ideation. And and I had a knack of writing software that was extremely efficient, very small and compact. And that set me on a journey that put me through all of my businesses. One of those companies ended up going from software into hardware, or at least a blend of the two. So, I got into hardware design. And we’re producing products that basically was what the first ever intelligent intelligent caching disk array, which ended up selling for over a hundred million dollars worth of product very quickly. So, I moved to the States to work for Wang Laboratories, had the pleasure of working directly for Dr. An Wang over there, who was a fantastic inventor. I mean, this guy was a refugee from from Shanghai. He was the person who created the patent of hard core memory, which put IBM into the computer space. With the money he got from that, he formed Wang Laboratories. And he later suffered from cancer of the esophagus. And he was off work for about 18 months. Came in one day, I’m I’m upstairs in this meeting, and we’re debugging a problem with the computer system. And the people in the room most hadn’t really worked with him. But he’s asking, “What problem? What problem?” So, one guy says, “Don’t worry, doctor, we’ll figure it out.” I said, “What problem?” I said, “Excuse me, please tell him what the situation is.” So, he walks around the room with all these circuit diagrams, never seen them before in his life. He walks around, he gets his cane out, he slaps it down and goes, “Problem here. Fetch board and soldering iron.” And he figured what this minute problem was that people have working on for months. And I just thought, “Wow.” And and that set me on the path that said, “Man, how good can you become? You’re never going to be as good as him.” And that inspired me to do all sorts of things in pursuit of trying to at least be better than I was. I worked for Wang doing computer tuning, going out to the biggest customers, helping them get those, and then built a business doing that. After that was a business called MiniTech, then that then became Prometrics doing PC software, and then that got bought out by Platinum. I became new product development manager. That sold. I then went to doing New Dates. With New Dates, I did a cyber security business. After that, I got involved in four other companies, one in social media listening, one in Google advertising and those sorts of markets, one in terms of intelligent sensors, one in in terms of today which is King Digital. And so, many businesses on route to that in New Day, two of the people who worked for me there, one was a guy called Tommy Rowland, one was a guy called Riccardo Zacconi. Became close friends to both. They wanted to buy this small startup in Sweden doing computer games. Computer games. I joined I didn’t join them. They said, “Would you be chairman?” I said, “Yeah.” “Would you help us raise money?” “Yes.” We scoured Europe looking for funders to back what became King. No takers. For several years, no takers. Until one point they were about out of cash and they said, “What are we going to do?” I said, “I suppose I better write the check.” So, I wrote the check to keep them on the and I stayed as the chairman of that company until it went public on the NYSE in 2014. And Candy Crush was about probably 10 years into the creation of that business. So, but we knew it was going to be a success from day one. Lots of things to talk about at some other time. But, that was the journey and but the King story isn’t about me. I provide the finance, I chaired it. It was about the team that worked in that business. Riccardo was a fantastic CEO. Sebastian Knutsson was the head of design for what went on. I just had the pleasure of working with a great team and helping backing them in any way I could. Wow, that is quite a journey, isn’t it? And you know, there’s some really interesting things to pick out there. I mean, the giving up your job on the basis of hoping that you’re going to get it’s going to work after three I mean, that is really bold and brave. And I love the humility, you know, the bringing together the people that is fantastic. Um Candy Crush might be the one where I’m a customer, I got to be honest. Um the one play? Um I’m not sure I did.

It’s too late now, I’m afraid. Um But actually, interestingly, it was known as an incredibly innovative business, and I think it’d be interesting for you if it’s okay to perhaps bring out why it was so innovative. Yeah. Um I mean, the game was important, but it’s not, in my opinion, the major part of that story. The game was important because it was a game that could be played by anyone pretty much of any age. So, it was ubiquitous in its in its market opportunity. But But the secret, in my opinion, was, again, coming back to Ricardo and and the and the development team, and and we’d figured out that we were doing computer games that were effectively tournament games. So, you could sign up to play online pool against other people, and it’d be a tournament. So, lots of people would enter the game, sometimes 2, 3, 4,000 people, that’d all pay a few euros to play to get to one prize. The one person would win the tournament. And that one person would probably walk away with the check for 3, 4,000 euros. But maybe 3,000 people played that game to get to that point. How many people wanted to talk about it after the tournament had finished, do you think? Do you think it was 3,000, or do you think it was one person who walked away with the check? And And we figured out that you can’t scale You can’t scale that. You can’t scale that. There’s no viral link to that cuz 2,990 people are absolutely fed up cuz they wasted their money. Particularly those who got closest to the the finish line. So, we The business model was fantastic. It moved from being a tournament. Think of it as a cup. Those of you into soccer or rugby will know a On a cup, it’s a quick death. You You’re going around, you lose, you don’t go to the next round. So, on a cup, there’s one winner. But you think about the Premier League and it’s a league. You come number two, it’s a pretty good place to be. Actually, if you come number 19, it’s a pretty good place to be. Even better if you’re 16. So, it it’s one of those things where we wanted a league. And then we looked at companies like FIFA, who had the brilliant model which was, well, you want to play FIFA, which one do you want? I’m on 2026. Oh, I’ve only got 2023 still. It’s not as good. Doesn’t have all the new players, the new teams, and then so on and so forth. So, we wanted a league, but we wanted a perennial game. So, what do you call a perennial game? You call it a saga. So, Candy Crush became a saga. It’s never going to end. It’s going to have more levels than you could ever count. And where does the league come from? It’s pretty easy. It’s going to be your friends. And because everyone can play it, people will begin taunting one another on what level they’ve got to. So, the model was you can play the game two, three, four lives. When you run out of lives, you can sit and wait for an eternity while your friends are getting ahead, or you can pay, or you can refer n number of your friends to get more lives. It was the ultimate expression of a viral game. The business model made the game. It made the company. And at peak, we almost got to $10 million per day in revenue. But, only around three or four percent of people ever paid. David didn’t. It’s It’s disgusting, really. my kids did. So, so it the game had to be something anyone could play from grandparents right the way down to grandkids. They could taunt each other. Where are you at, Grandma? Oh, yeah, I’m only at this. Okay, I’m at 4,022. And and the frustration of having to wait got so bad that I know David actually got his credit card out on several occasions to get ahead. All right, and that’s what happened and the rest was history. Is that Is that a good answer? It It’s an amazing answer, isn’t it? I mean, you think about some of the things that have happened in the last decade, you know, the Roblox and the Fortnites. Um you started all of that in terms of them thinking about it as an ecosystem, thinking about it as member get member, community, uh the freemium model, getting people hooked involved, sorry, and then and then figuring out how to, you know, it really was so innovative. Which is incredible and kind of over this last decade, we’ve seen a lot of changes with the tech and, you know, I can’t do a full sentence without somebody mentioning AI for me at the moment. It’s very difficult to get through. I’m just interested in your perspective in terms of AI, the challenges, the opportunities, and where you see that going. Okay, just a quick show of hands. Has anyone ever heard of a paper called Attention is Everything? Okay. All right. So, that paper, Andy should answer that. If he If he can’t, he should be fired. Okay? Otherwise, you’re you’re a complete facade otherwise. So, so that paper was was authored by about four or five people in Google at the time. Uh one of the guys, a guy called Leon Jones, uh Yann LeCun, a couple of those as well. And that was the paper that basically figured out Transformers. I don’t mean the things, the robots that turn into whatever, cars and things. It was the Transformers that became the the model of how we can actually predict the next word in sequence of of a body of text, of of a of a of a topic. And we saw that paper and we looked at it and thought, “Wow, this is really interesting. We’re on a a path.” But that paper was absolutely the starting point for today’s incarnation of the tools we see today, ChatGPT. AI, its origins go way before that, but that was the trigger point. Then, ChatGPT, October November 2023, yeah, they they launched. I think they launched in some ways too soon, but it’s typical of American companies, let’s grab the market. It may not be fully baked, it may not be quite ready, but we’ll get it and we’ll get a footprint. We put loads of money about promoting it, and by gum, did it take off? Absolutely took off. I mean, even eclipsed Candy Crush’s growth in people terms. And and they were able then to get their valuation up, which let them borrow more money, and away they would go. And Google did the typical thing that you see in these things when someone does something that causes, I think it was a half a trillion of value shifted around the market in the space of a day or so. It shifted the market. It changed the whole dynamics of it. So, Google is saying, “Hey, our stock price just tanked because these guys have launched this. But, we’ve been working on that. We were the founders of this thing. What are we going to do?” We’ll rush to market with our offering, and it was an absolute disaster. It was an absolute disaster. And Microsoft decided, “We’re going to jump in.” Then, all the rest started to come to market. But, what what happened was, had they not have launched then, we wouldn’t be where we are today. It was not yet ready. It wasn’t done. It didn’t matter. It showed enough of the potential of what was there. And there’s a lesson from this for all of you, which is that in Britain, and I’m a big big big guilty person for this, we obsess. We over-engineer. We over-develop. We spend too long trying to get it perfect. The Americans don’t do that. They slap it out in the market, and they’ll go through any iterations of it in the space of 3 months if they have to, but they’ll corner that imagination of the market. And that’s what happened. And so from then, the rest is almost history. But the acceleration of AI in the last 3 months eclipses what happened in every point prior to that 3 months when when ChatGPT was launched. And and it’s off the charts, and we cannot afford to ignore it. The implications of it for universities, for everyone in everyday life is huge. We’ve got to rein in the energy man demands and all those things, but it’s absolutely massive. Over the hills. Absolutely. I mean, it it’s really interesting when I hear you speak because it’s this intersection of kind of customers, business model, the behavior, the tech. You’re able to kind of see across all of those different things, and it’s that intersection that I think build really good deep tech businesses. Um I’m obviously interested in your latest deep tech venture. Um as I understand it, you’ve been ingesting all of this scientific information into Copora, and you know, I think it would be amazing if you could just tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so you know, attention is everything. That that was the paper. That that that changed how I looked at things. It had a massive influence on what we were doing. We were on a parallel path looking to basically understand a massive corpus of information. Hence the name Copora. Our Copora being the plural of corpus. And when we set out, we wanted to try and use whatever technologies were around to get a head start. So we said, “Okay, we want to do this at scale.” So we said, “What is it at scale? What do you mean by that?” And and our view was, well, someone said, “Well, is that a few terabytes?” No, no, no, much bigger than that. Well, is it is it maybe a Uh, is it a petabyte? No, much bigger than that. We want to be looking at hundreds of petabytes. Maybe even an exabyte one day. And we want to be able to therefore take that size of corpus and and understand what’s in it. Correlate it, graph it. So, we looked at graph databases, Neo4j, Dgraph, you name it. We looked at vector databases, we looked at Pinecone. All these things came along. None of them would scale to anywhere close past probably a few terabytes. And it’s very little further forward today. So, you have the classic challenge of scaling out is the only way you can go. It didn’t scale up enough. And if you wanted to scale out from a few terabytes to handle hundreds of petabytes, you’re talking about thousands of servers. It’s an absolute nightmare. And if it’s a graph, you’ve got to segment your graph across all those things. It’s a challenge. So, we decided, as a bunch of lunatics we are, that we’d actually set out to look at scale up. How can we ingest, understand, fully map, correlate, graph, vectorize, do whatever we need to do with a massive corpus, and we have to do it at speed, otherwise you’ll spend 20 years trying to do it. So, we obsessed over the efficiency of our technology. Our entire platform today runs on less than 8 kW of power. Entire platform. Mapping over 200 petabytes of unstructured data. And then, the trick was then we wanted to compress that. Models compress data, but they don’t expand it again. They don’t have the ability to give you the attribution of where that information came from. We wanted a lossless compression. So, we’ve got a compression that gets data down to about 1 and 1/2 to 2% of its size, but we can fully expand it knowing exactly where it came from, taking you to the exact article, what it says, where it is. And then the next piece was condensing that view of that information into a form that’s fully graph, fully vectorized, all those things that you want to do, and be able to answer questions very precisely by being able to look at all of the totality of information around that topic, corralling it, condensing it, and getting it down to what we call the net unique view of information on that question or topic. And we do that in milliseconds. Once you’ve got to that, meanwhile Chat GPT launches and it threw us into absolute turmoil. Oh my goodness, this is going to change the world. This is going to change how people consume information. People are going to think it’s all real and they’re going to get running away with oh, I’ve got my nice medical diagnosis from Chat GPT, it looks fantastic. It said I’ve got nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, it’s all really just a facade of what’s there. So, we said, “But, if we can take our information, the ability to corral the information of a small topic, a really precise set of questions, and we can pull the net unique view together, and then decompose it again to use a small model to be able to represent that, we can make a tiny model look like it’s five times the size of Opus 4.7.” And that’s what we built, and that’s what it does, and we’ve demonstrated to a few people today that wouldn’t stop asking questions. Am I right, Alan? Absolutely, they wouldn’t stop at it. Get tested. Well, how about this then? Try that one. And so, Corpora AI now can take you from a simple challenge statement to produce a really elaborate problem definition to doing a fully ideated solution, to validating that solution, to working out the development road map, to tell you what the staffing should be, what equipment you need, what the use cases are, what the patent applications to protect it all should be, and what the pitch deck is for grant funding or for your VCs. And it’s basically a complete scientific frontier research platform in a box, one-stop shop, that entire process I think less than 30 minutes is a good example to Andy. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That’s pretty amazing, right? So, um to bring it to life, were there any challenges or questions that you could share that you’ve asked it and you’ve got, you know, things that have have excited you? Oh, loads loads. So, on on route to this, funny story, on route to this, uh there’s a a lovely guy called Daniel Hayes and I’ve got to know him really well and he’s now I’ve met him on a few occasions as well. Uh and he represented this still group called UCR, Universal Collaboration Research. And we weren’t ready. The platform wasn’t launched even in its prior incarnation. And Daniel said, “We’d really love to use your platform. We see We’ve heard what you’re doing. We’d like to to use it to try and see what we what the patterns are in this space, what the intellectual property is.” I I said, “We’re not ready. We’re not We’re Go away. We’re not ready. We’re not ready. We’ll let you know when we are.” He kept going at it and going and by the way, that’s a great quality. For you, the entrepreneurs in the room, do not get put off. Learn from kids. “I want an ice cream, Daddy.” “You can’t have one.” “But I want an ice cream, Daddy.” And they’ll keep up in the game until you give them an ice cream, okay? Now, when you’re a grandparent, of course you give it to them straight away. You don’t even wait, do you? So, that’s our job. All right? So, So, you’re in this scenario where, you know, he kept pushing. And he said to us, “We want some queries on a thing called,” I remember it well, “multi-layer ceramic bus bars.” Now, we’re only a stone’s throw away from JLR and some of you in the room probably would actually have an understanding of what that probably means, okay? I didn’t know much about at the time. We ran some queries and I had 10 minutes, ran some queries through, send them to him. And I get a WhatsApp back. That’s interesting. 2 minutes later, wow. 10 minutes later, can I have a call tonight? I think, here we go. I told you it wasn’t ready. I’ve done you a favor, and you’re just like those guys at work. You just want more. You just want to keep going. That’s it. So, we had a conversation. We weren’t didn’t have a license. We had no business model. We said, okay, we’ll let you use the platform. Where they ended up is in a really And this is And by the way, we were so impressed by them, we actually provide some grant funding. We provide some pre-seed funding. They’ve had less than a million pounds of the funding. They now have a working prototype of a device that can take the output of a solar panel and I’m talking about a current state-of-the-art solar panel and boost the usable output by 2.4 to 1. 2.4 to 1. It It would make solar the cheapest form of energy generation by a country mile. Better than fully amortized nuclear, you name it. But besides that, they wanted to do that with ceramics. That’s where they started. They also created a a new more efficient method of creating plasma. The sparks that are 7,000 degrees and above with the amount of energy you get from an electric kettle. And with that, they can now produce ceramic materials that can do wonderful things. And our problem is, they can do so much that our problem is actually where are we going to get all the people to allow us to implement all these things and do these things with it? But they’ve done that, and the platform’s been a big part of that journey. Does that help? Well, yeah. I mean, it’s not quite cold fusion, but we’re getting there, I guess, in terms of um the energy. Um it it does it do I mean, we talked about scientific side of things. You know, if we were asking for peacekeeping in the Straits of Hormuz, I mean, can you go in that side? Can you go humanitarians? Can you go politics? Is this guy a plug for Neo? Is he? Obviously, Neo got to him and said, “I I didn’t quite have enough time to quiz Mel this morning. Would you just bring that into the talk?” You know, so Neo is one of the guys on the peacekeeping force in in what a university. And this morning, we gave him a license key for what we call Curve. Curve is the real-time viewer on this this data set we have. Now, I talked about 200 petabytes, but it’s actually looking at changing data sets in the world in real time. So, every day, there’s like three or four million new articles of news coming in. There’s new patents, new SEC filings, you name it, all coming in real time. Curve is the window into that. And Neo wanted to have a license key for that. So, given that, and he asked exactly that question. I said, “Look, this is a scientific thing for trying to work out problem definitions and coming with solutions. But, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to take the risk and try it on these this question. And it’ll probably blow up in my face, all right? And it probably won’t work, but we’ll try it. I love live demos. They’re They’re really horrendous, but we we do them all, don’t we? So, you know. So, but if you if you pull it off, it’s worth a thousand PowerPoint presentations that could be smoking mirrors. So, the challenge was how would we bring about a mediation in a conflict between Ukraine and Russia was the one he he gave me. So, we tried that. And it’s come up with a pretty good stab at all the things you’d have to look at and then to come out with how you would actually implement that. So, it’s it’s not where I would like it to be, David, on that. But, it’s a few hours at most to be able to just change the generics to do that. So, we can then take on probably the politics, if not all the humanities, but certainly the politics side of that. Wow. I’m um I’m I’m conscious that we haven’t got a huge amount of time, so I’m going to go from that global right down to a sphere it’s sort of a very specific question. So, we’ve got some amazing deep tech founders in the room. I wonder from your own experience what advice you might give to a deep tech founder. I think it’s interesting because yeah, been having been there before and having been there and and failed when I had no money, okay, which is a really difficult place to be because you you don’t know where you’re going to go with it. And having been there where I failed and had enough money to survive that and just regroup and go again, I would say the following. The you have to have a pretty good indication not of feasibility. Forget feasibility. Go for viability. You want viability. It’s no good coming out with a deep tech innovation that requires 10 times as much energy than another solution, but has zero pollution cuz no one’s going to use it. So, you’ve got to think is it actually viable? Viable doesn’t just mean it works. Viable means it’s commercially valuable. It has a a market opportunity that you can identify and go with. And then you’ve got to decide, even if I do this, how does that how do I get to that go to market piece? And sometimes it’s not something you can do yourself. Sometimes you’ve got to look well, maybe it’s a licensing deal with someone who understands that market. Now, that might not satisfy your grandiose view of valuation, but it but it’s going to give you a fast track path towards that. And and you probably could get somewhere close as well. So, think about what it is you’re doing. Is it feasible? Is it viable? If it’s viable, what’s that bridge between where it is now to go to market and and be be wary of that VC trap. You can easily spend, if you have if you think you’ve got your idea pretty well sourced, you might even have a bit of a prototype, you could waste three, four, five, six months of your time writing documents to try and get a VC to respond to you. Even when they do, they’ll all say, “Yeah, we’ll talk to you. Let’s look at it. We’re quite interested in this.” And it goes nowhere. The emotional roller coaster that brings is huge. It’s huge. And if you talk to four or five of them and they all say no, you’ll doubt yourself. If you’re confident about what you want to do, have the passion, keep going at it. I want an ice cream, Daddy. All right, I want an ice cream. You can’t have one. I want an ice cream. And you just keep going at it. But, don’t talk to too many until you figured out how you do it. And don’t necessarily treat what they say to you as the things you need to do. If it was as simple as that, they’d have backed you and just said, “Just do these few things.” So, they don’t know the market. VCs are followers of fashion. Look at the AI investments now. The people on the fear of missing out that are coming in behind it. They put in no chance of getting many times their money back on it. VCs follow fashion. If yours what you’ve done is what you’ve done is really unique, really novel, they won’t understand that. Don’t expect them to. So, when they ask you, “What do you think the total addressable market of this walk out?” If they don’t know the market you’re going to aim at well enough to figure out that’s huge. If you think the guys that did Uber, we worked out how many taxi journeys there are in the world and we think actually that the market for this thing is pretty big. In fact, in London, it’s probably worth about 2,000 a year, maybe 2,000 a month. It’s bloody huge. We’re going to disrupt the entire taxi marketplace. I don’t know how big it is. Have you got the balls to back it? That’s all I need to know. And what did they do? They did a smoke and mirrors show by arranging for a car to be just around the corner to demonstrate it to I think it was Bob Kagle from Benchmark at the time to invest in it to say, “Look, here’s how it works.” Oh my god, they must be pretty big already. The car’s already arrived. But he was sold. He invested literally within a week of that. Didn’t have to go into big PowerPoint presentation. Here’s what the cars look like. Here’s the branding. Here’s how we’re going to market it. Going to put an app out there. Everyone’s going to want to use it. And it’s disrupted that market massively. That’s great. I love it. Um my last question cuz I’m conscious of time, but I promised I’d leave a bit of time for any questions from the audience. So, start thinking if anybody’s got a question. My last question is really in this investment space. So, obviously bootstrapping versus investment, how do you know when you should go to invest? When do you need one? What’s the trigger for you? I I don’t think there’s a as a binary view of that or even a litmus test you can apply. Uh and I’ll take Car Por as a classic example. So, we saw ChatGPT go to market. We saw Perplexity. And I don’t have a lot of I don’t have a lot of respect for the product they were. I think now they’re figuring out lots of good things. They’re doing some great work. But at the time, we thought, “Wow, we need to get on this bandwagon. We’ve got a tool that’s better than all these things. We should put it out there in competition.” We we didn’t have the resources to market that, to compete with that. We were never going to get the the toe hold that was required. Well, we’re going to raise some money. So, we did our business plans around that. We went down the VC courtship. And no one wanted to back us. And you know, they were absolutely right. They shouldn’t have backed us. It wasn’t worth backing on that plan. And they did me a big favor because they forced us to find the route that we could go to market with. And we can now do it without them. And now And we moved from a licensing model. We don’t license our technology. We might talk about licensing with Uni. He’s said that. But we’re not licensing our tech Why? Because the value of what it produces would be democratized by a licensing model. And I will not democratize a product that can go from a simple challenge statement to a fully ideated solution with patent application everything in less than half an hour for 20 bucks a month. Cuz some kid in a bedroom using it will actually put loads of people out of business by just filing patents on the back of that. I won’t do that. So, our model is we either allow people to use the technology for a share of the IP or we invest and we also allow to use the the product for a share of the IP and that’s a medium-to-long-term game. We have no revenue. I’m not bothered about that. Revenue is just a facade. It’s just another measurement. But we’re building value in allowing companies that can utilize our technology to to accelerate their value, to bring their product to market 1 2 3 years sooner and for probably a fifth of the cost. And in there, we can actually extract value. But I’m I’m talking about small bits of value across a broad base. And that’s the model we’re now on. Thank you. Any questions from the audience? Thank you. First there. Uh thank you very much, Miles. Been inspiring today. Uh been writing quite a few notes. And my question is, um when and how did you decide to do your philanthropy work, your charity work and and and start? Start, yeah. Where Where did it come from? I I think just just giving back. All right. And if you’ve ever seen the movie, you know, you you know exactly what that’s that’s all about, which is a fabulous movie, by the way. So, I I’d made a lot of money, I’ve got lots of businesses, and my attitude was, I’d like it to go to some good. All right, so we created this this trust, which is got a very wide remit, medical, sporting, and research technology, and it has a very wide remit. It gets involved in all sorts of We sponsor sports people. Uh as Genevieve Somerville will represent us in the Olympics next year on the the Winter Olympics. Sponsored her since she was about 11 years old. Uh we’ve got tennis players we sponsored. We’ve got someone who was in the Olympics this year, Winter Olympics, who’s actually uh a basically a solo bobsleigh athlete. All right, she lives She was born in Derby, and uh you know, and there’s no snow there, by the way. So, you can imagine the work she goes into. So, we put money in, but they put lots of hard work into We sponsor medical projects. We sponsor pure technology projects. Uh and we go where we think there’s a value to be had, not in a return, but in terms of what’s the impact of those investments. And and and it’s great to do that, and it’s it’s carried us into all sorts of conversations that I I feel honored to be part of because of that. Okay. Jacob. So, I have a question which is around conflict between values and interest. So, if you’re a founder, and and you found a product journey that has a great market, and it’s valued Why should you still do it here when when, you know, you yourself described what type of market UK is? Why should you not just move to somewhere and and and do it there? Um so, you say conflict between values and interest. What would you say to that? I think that uh I’m a big sovereign fan. Okay? I think that that and and you guys are it On on my journey, I see working with universities like this and others, I think as being a key component of how we actually survive as a nation, how we thrive as a nation. And and you know, that that means more to me than making 10x what we might wait make doing that. So, you know, enough is enough. One pound more than enough is plenty, okay? So, you can go to the States. That might be the reason you go The reason because of the market, it might be because of the backing. And I think we’ve got a lot of work to do in the UK to increase, to accelerate, to make the fit of that backing process better. And I think I know we’ve seen some great initiatives. I met with a lady called Josephine Cant three three weeks ago. She’s one of the founding members of D Set Sovereign AI. Fantastic initiative. So, it’s happening. But the answer is because I want to I want to try and help other things. The grounds of values first. Yeah. Is that all right? Yeah. I mean, it’s a great place to wrap it up. I have to say it is fantastic to hear Mel speak, isn’t it? What an amazing inspirational person to have in. So, I think he deserves a round of applause.