The Cryptian 2021-22

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From Oliver Hale (2012 – 2019)

Oliver is a serial entrepreneur and is passionate about Technology Startups, currently on the Alacrity Technology Accelerator (Wales' largest Tech Incubator). He is CEO and cofounder @ Trovalo | We're building a Data Marketplace.

He talks and blogs about #tech, #fintech, #startups, and #entrepreneurship and is based in Cardiff.

An honest guide to building a Tech Startup in 2022

I’m sitting here writing this blog post in the downstairs of an old worn-out Cafe Nero in central London about a two-minute walk from Trafalgar Square. I came to London today for the sole purpose of meeting an investor panel and also managing to meet one of our Data Providers who is on a trip from India. As I’m sitting here reminiscing about how busy my life has become recently I thought I would write about my experience being part of a team building a Data Tech Startup in 2022.

HOW DOES THE ACCELERATOR WORK?

Our journey with Trovalo begins in the October of 2021 with myself and now my cofounders moving to Wales to join the Alacrity Foundation. Alacrity is a Tech accelerator programme, 15 months long, which helps kickstart the founder's journey into Tech Entrepreneurship. Similar programmes include Y-Combinator and Entrepreneur First. However, the main difference between these programmes and Alacrity is that we operate on a demand-driven programme. In essence, all the companies that graduate out of Alacrity do so because they are able to demonstrate significant demand for their product/service. The way Alacrity does this is by sourcing its ‘problems’ from Government and the private sector, in short, this reduces the risks of start-ups failing due to productmarket fit. As always, demand in the form of paying customers is the most powerful form of validation.

Link to Alacrity: https://alacrityfoundation.co.uk/

2 months into the programme our team was given the problem statement: “If Data is the new oil why isn’t Data traded through the UK the same way other commodities are, e.g. London Stock Exchange”.

If I recall correctly the Team’s initial reactions were confused but also surprised that we were given such a broad problem statement, this was unlike Alacrity (based on speaking to previous cohorts) but also meant there was a lot of scope for creativity.

ON A SIDE NOTE; THIS IS WHERE WE LEARN TRANSFORMATIONAL CREATIVITY WHICH ALONGSIDE PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES IS STILL A VALUE WE KEEP AT THE CORE OF OUR BUSINESS.

IDEATION: WHY IT IS SO IMPORTANT

After much ideation and mapping out the data acquisition process as we knew it, we settled that the area we could disrupt with 15 months on the programme was helping businesses discover more relevant datasets. Just in this narrow part of the data buying process, we encountered a tonne of problems that buyers and sellers of data felt on a daily basis. These included some of the following:

- Legal Contracts are a “pain in the arse” - it can take up to 14 months for contracts to be negotiated and signed. Finding the right data set can take months. This is because data is use case dependent e.g. what may be useful for a company may not be useful for another.

- This is how Trovalo was born, the marketplace was made as a necessity to make data accessible and understood by all. Hence democratising data and knowledge became our mission.

THE ODDS ARE AGAINST YOU.

In my opinion, Data Startups have a reasonably high barrier to entry. Although using data to generate insights isn’t exactly a new thing, it’s now only become widely accepted in society within the last 2 years (the creation and adoption of Amazon Web Service and SAP Data Exchange have helped significantly). As a result, knowledge is held by a handful of skilled people who usually are in existing Data Scientist roles at FAANG companies or Defence Prime contracting roles. For myself as the CEO and Business Lead of the team, this presented a networking problem. How can I associate myself with this elite handful who can adopt me as one of their own? This is where the Alacrity network benefitted us, we were able to be introduced to a variety of experts who individually played a huge part in our business's development without those I don’t think we would’ve been able to bring a product to market.

This begs me to wonder the following:

‘for those who aren’t as lucky as we were going through an accelerator programme, what can we do as an industry to lower the barrier to entry for startups and encourage innovation within Data’:

Here are my two cents:

1. Increase the network of DataTech Startups in the UK. Data is a niche topic. Startups in the Data space are even smaller, by fostering collaboration tools and providing startups with the opportunity a space to collaborate on innovative projects is one of the few ways we will be truly innovative. Note my emphasis is on truly innovative not iterative on existing products.

2. Work with Academics to innovate on new ideas. University spin-out companies are not a new thing, however when we accidentally stumbled into working with a PhD Academic who is an expert in Data Marketplaces and economics. Not only do academics provide a wealth of knowledge, they usually are able to understand where the room for innovation is needed vs where it is wanted in the industry. This is an important distinction to make.

3. Improve communication between (fortune 500 and defence primes) private sector and startups. The established private sector tends to be inefficient and non-agile. As such innovation is slow to be adopted. In my opinion, better communication between startups and large corporations benefits everyone in the long run.

CLOSING REMARKS

Despite all of this on behalf of Trovalo I am so grateful for all the mentorship and support we’ve received so far on our journey. The list of names of special mentions would need a separate document for itself.

We can’t do this alone - we’re hiring a 4th member of our team because setting up a startup is hard, especially when you have ambitions to become a Unicorn Startup. Right now we’re a week away from launching to a handful of early users and I’ve never been more excited than I am now. This is one thing we’ve always emphasised here at Trovalo:

We want shippers - we ship and we ship fast. We are currently looking for another member to join our awesome team. So if you also love shipping fast, feel free to apply here: https://www.trovalo.io/careers-and-jobs-at-trovalo

As always I would love to hear your opinion on what we’re doing so free to reach out on LinkedIn or at hello@trovalo.io