Indeed founder on successful monetisation and making a business strategy

Podcast transcription - 16th august 2018

Peter Cowley:                  So, welcome again to another Invested Investor podcast. Today, we have Paul Forster, who I've have known for about five years. Actually, went to the same college at Cambridge as me, as it turned out, but we didn't find that out for some time. So welcome, Paul. 

Paul Forster:                     Thank you, Peter. Great to be with you.

Peter Cowley:                  So, first of all, let's just talk about your background. So, education, and what you did before you started being entrepreneurial?

Paul Forster:                     Yeah. Originally, from Buckinghamshire. I went to university in Cambridge, here. As you said, I was at Fitzwilliam as an undergraduate, I read geography. And went on, after that, to do a one year Master's at Oxford. And then pretty much left the UK for many years after that. I did an internship at the European Commission eastage. And then I spent five years in Southern Africa: I worked for the National Development Bank in Botswana for two years. I worked for Anglo-American and De Beers, in South Africa, in the mining industry for three years. Then I did an MBA in France; I went to INSEAD. And after that went to the U.S. I got a job with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank. Spent three years there, working in various corners of the world.

Paul Forster:                     It was around that time that I came up with the idea for Jobsinthemoney which was my first business, trying to hire financial professionals, financial analysts at the International Finance Corporation, and going through stacks of resumes. This was the early days of the Web, early days of the internet, in about '97, and thinking, "Well, this doesn't make sense. You should be able to use the Web for recruitment." Companies like Monster and HotJobs had already started and had got traction, but there wasn't any niche website, job site for financial professionals.

Paul Forster:                     So, Rony and I, who I knew from ... Rony Kahan who I knew from INSEAD, we started a niche job board for financial professionals.

Peter Cowley:                  Did you get any finance for that? Did you have any investors?

Paul Forster:                     So we didn't, actually, we bootstrapped it. Our timing was quite bad, in the sense that we hit the top of the dotcom bubble just at the time when ... we trying to raise funding right at the time when VCs had realized the writing was on the wall and this was going to come to a sticky end. Which was good and bad. It was, obviously ... at the time, it was pretty tough to build a business with no outside funding. But on the positive side we developed this, kind of, very scrappy DNA of doing a lot with a little and bootstrapping the business. And I think that served us in good stead thereafter, having built a business during that very, very difficult time during 2000, 2001, 2002, when the bubble burst.

Peter Cowley:                  And you'd exited when?

Paul Forster:                     2003.

Peter Cowley:                  And how big was it, at that point?

Paul Forster:                     It wasn't a big business. It was probably not more than 10 employees. Revenues ... I can't remember exactly what they were, but probably around 100K, somewhere like that, per month.

Peter Cowley:                  Per year? No, per month.

Paul Forster:                     Maybe less. Stretching my memory now, to remember that business, but it wasn't a big business. We got a good exit. It was actually bought by a financial publishing company called Financial News: eFinancialcareers is their financial job site. So it was rolled into that business. It was only after we sold that business that we came up with the idea for Indeed. So we didn't sell that business in order to start Indeed.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah. Sure.

Paul Forster:                     We'd actually begun doing some scraping with the financial job site, of jobs from sites. We had ... I think Washington Mutual was one of our clients, and we scraped jobs from their site, to get them onto the job site. And then we thought, "Well, hold on a minute. Maybe all jobs could be treated this way, and you could create a comprehensive search engine for jobs," which is what we did with Indeed.

Peter Cowley:                  You certainly did. Was there a gap then, or did you have a break after ....?

Paul Forster:                     Well, I spent six months working for the buyer. It was supposed to be a two year contract. I think they got a bit sick of some of my advice, my more strident advice. So we ended up parting ways, even though I had a longer term contract to continue working with them.

Peter Cowley:                  And Rony as well?

Paul Forster:                     He also did, yeah. So actually we both ended up doing six months, and then I suppose that took us to early 2004. And around that time we started thinking about Indeed, and we starting developing it during the summer. It actually launched in late 2004. So, I think it was November 2004.

Peter Cowley:                  And you raised a small amount of finance for Indeed, didn't you?

Paul Forster:                     We funded it initially ourselves, and then we raised one round of funding which was a Series A, in August 2005. I guess that was about nine months, a bit less than that, after we launched. We raised $5 million dollars from Union Square Ventures, New York Times, and Allen & Company. And that was ... ended up being the only funding we needed to raise to take us to profitability.

Peter Cowley:                  That's a phenomenal story, for those people who know what it sold for originally. So what was different? I mean Monster was about, what, 10 years old, probably, or getting on that way; what were you doing different?

Paul Forster:                     We were providing a ... it was a comprehensive search engine for jobs, and still is. So the idea is that jobs are indexed from all over the Web. Thousands of job sites, company websites, newspaper classifieds-

Peter Cowley:                  By scraping, primarily?

Paul Forster:                     In the early days it was just that, and then increasingly we received jobs into our index from feeds. So that's kind of the direction it's taken increasingly, but certainly in the early days it was all scraping jobs, indexing jobs from thousands of websites and being as comprehensive as possible. So the idea is to give job seekers a comprehensive job search experience. To be very easy to find the most relevant jobs from all over the Web.

Paul Forster:                     And we were really the first to apply the Google model to classifieds. Looking back on it, it's kind of amazing.

Peter Cowley:                  Nobody else had done it?

Paul Forster:                     People had tried various aggregation models, but not really in the way Google had done 'search'. In the early days, people thought, "Okay, well Google's just going to do this themselves," and it turned out that they weren't very interested in doing it. There isn't a very elegant engineering solution to the problem. It's kind of messy because every site's different, so I think that was one of the reasons they didn't do it. But ultimately, now, they have actually created a search engine for jobs, but that's been quite recent.

Paul Forster:                     And then we also, to some extent, borrowed the revenue model, pay per click advertising. It sponsored jobs as the main advertising model, which is not quite the same as ... It's actually even simpler than AdWords, because basically if your job is returned in the search results, and your sponsor it-

Peter Cowley:                  It goes further out?

Paul Forster:                     So then yeah, the organic jobs are beneath the sponsored jobs. But pay per click advertising, it's an auction model, and it's analogous to Google AdWords. So not only the search engine, but also the revenue model is similar to, or analogous to Google ... to the search engines.

Peter Cowley:                  See, I preach a lot about cost of customer acquisition and lifetime value. Here you've got a platform, so you've got people seeking jobs, and people who are seeking employees. The people seeking employees are the ones who pay. The people who are seeking jobs, people don't pay anything at all. But there's still a cost of acquiring these people. Did you work those numbers out?

Paul Forster:                     Well, we were very fortunate in that we had a tremendous amount of organic traffic, because we were providing this very, very useful service to job seekers, and we had great visibility on the Web, we were able to get huge growth-

Peter Cowley:                  Viral really ... people saying to other people?

Paul Forster:                     Yeah. Word of mouth. We did do partnerships as well. So we integrated our job search into other websites. Into job sites, for example, as backfill to their jobs. And that's still done today. So there are some interesting distribution channels, other than just direct organic web search. But ultimately, yeah, we were able to grow traffic without spending money on marketing.

Peter Cowley:                  A difficult question maybe, but can you remember how many months in, before you first broke even?

Paul Forster:                     I don't know exactly when, but it would have been in the first couple of years. We were quite lucky in the early days to be able to put AdSense on our pages, because we had so many searches, we had so much traffic. We could monetize it, even before we developed our own ad product, through AdSense. And in those days, Google was quite generous with its AdSense payouts, to publisher partners. They became a bit less generous over time, so it was very important for us to develop our own advertising model or advertising product, which still exists today.

Peter Cowley:                  Be a great example to the listeners of somebody who's actually creating ... effectively funding the growth of business from customers. Because that's what you need to do in the end isn't it really, you can't rely on equity the whole way through as we know; when we go on to talk about angel investing.

Paul Forster:                     So you swapped into a mode where you could fund ... you presumably profited enough to fund the pretty rapid growth?

Paul Forster:                     Yeah. For a number of years we were 100% growth a year. And that was all funded, yeah, through the revenue from our clients. So we were fortunate that obviously prevented us diluting by selling more equity, so it was a bit unusual in not having to raise multiple rounds of funding.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah, we've had Andy Phillips, which is another platform on ... who, you know Andy, as well. Again, the same; he suddenly became profitable much to his surprise actually, after about the third year or second year.

Peter Cowley:                  So you formed it in about '04, '05, and you sold when?

Paul Forster:                     2012.

Peter Cowley:                  So you had about a six or seven year-

Paul Forster:                     It was about eight years in total.

Peter Cowley:                  So how big was the company when you sold it then?

Paul Forster:                     Well it had several hundred employees. It was growing very fast. It was the biggest job site in the world for quite some time prior to that. Yeah, so we didn't disclose the sale price but, yeah, it was quite a big exit.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah. I think for somebody who Googled it, could probably find that.

Paul Forster:                     Some of those reports are right, but some of them are not right.

Peter Cowley:                  And some of the are wrong! Exactly. And you'd had global presence at that point, as well. You had offices around the world?

Paul Forster:                     We were in 50-plus countries, and 60 languages. It was not, obviously, offices ... a physical presence in all of the places, but we did have offices in Europe and multiple offices in North America. And now there are many, many more offices around the world. About 6000 employees now.

Peter Cowley:                  Did you choose to sell, or did somebody approach you?

Paul Forster:                     It was actually ... the introduction was originally through Morgan Stanley. We were talking to them about an IPO, so we were on this path to, potentially, IPO. They had a relationship with Recruit, which is a Japanese HR services company. So they kind of approached us through that channel. We ended up talking, and a kind of fairly tough six month negotiation process, and ended up selling.

Paul Forster:                     So, we either were going to go down that path, or IPO.

Peter Cowley:                  Interesting. So the competition wasn't between Recruit and another company, it was between Recruit and them not getting it, and you IPO-ing?

Paul Forster:                     I think that's right. We didn't have multiple bidders to acquire the company, but we could quite easily have just not sold it. In many ways it would have been financially a much better decision not to sell, but it was a good outcome for everybody, and the company's gone on to do very, very well under the new owners.

Peter Cowley:                  And did you have an out period, or a period when you were tied to work?

Paul Forster:                     I had a year that ... I actually stepped down as CEO, in conjunction with relocating to the U.K. I'm originally from here, and moved here with my family after selling the business. It led into the angel investing, but I spent a year as senior advisor with Indeed. And the co-founder, Rony, he became CEO. He's actually still chairman of the business.

Paul Forster:                     After doing my one year as senior advisor, I haven't been involved with Indeed since then.

Peter Cowley:                  Okay. So you moved back to the U.K. And I met you around about that time I think, when you relocated to Cambridge to bring your two daughters up. You brought your wife over here.

Peter Cowley:                  So why angel investing? What ... you know, it's a pretty risky thing to do?

Paul Forster:                     Well, I think a couple or reasons: one is, just to make good investments. We're in this, kind of, time of high asset prices, difficult to find good investment opportunities in public markets, and other asset classes. I think it's a great way to make good investments.

Paul Forster:                     But secondly, also to be involved in early stage companies without being a founder, CEO, myself. It's a different way to be engaged in the start-up community, and to be involved in multiple different sectors and with different entrepreneurs. It's been very exciting.

Peter Cowley:                  Did you do any investing before you left Connecticut, before you moved down here?

Paul Forster:                     I didn't actually, no. I was not interested at all, when I was running Indeed. I actually did meet a couple of companies I was introduced to, to invest, and took a pass. One of them has ended up doing really, really well. I think when you're very focused on one business, it's quite hard to think about other businesses and how they may be successful.

Paul Forster:                     Yeah, it's only since moving here that I've done that, since 2013.

Peter Cowley:                  And you joined the Cambridge Angels and, obviously, you've been an active member from that.

Peter Cowley:                  The first angel deal you did, was that painful, was the difficult? I mean it's a big jump from wholly ... or not wholly, but owning a proportion of the business and being CEO, and seeing another entrepreneurial journey. What was the feeling like, as you wrote that first cheque?

Paul Forster:                     Yeah, very different. I think that ... you know, the company Cytora was the first one I invested in?

Peter Cowley:                  Oh yeah. Of course, yeah.

Paul Forster:                     I ended up pretty much being the only initial-

Peter Cowley:                  In the Seed Round-

Paul Forster:                     Seed investor, that's right. And just did that round myself. I think that I did learn a lot from that. One thing is that it's better to have multiple investors really, in a business. So if a company's got help, can turn to help from investors with different connections, and isn't just reliant on one person. Which isn't really enough, I think, to help grow a business. So that was a lesson from that.

Paul Forster:                     I think that another lesson I've learnt, not necessarily just from that but from other activities, is not to project too much. I think when you've been a founder entrepreneur you tend to think about opportunities in terms of how you'd execute them yourself. You kind of project, "If I was doing this and following this opportunity, this is what I would do. I would make this a big success doing X and Y." And you have to take a step back as an investor and say, "Well it's not you doing it. It's the team, the founding team." Do you believe in them as individuals? In their vision? In their ability to execute?

Paul Forster:                     It's not so much about judging the opportunity, although that's part of it, it's about judging the team. So I think it's team first. How they're going to be able to execute the idea. The idea also has to be good but, in fact, it's less important than the team, because a good team with a not so good idea can change their strategy, can change their focus, do something different, but if you have a good opportunity with the wrong team, that's never going to work, because that team is not ever going to be able to deliver anything of value.

Paul Forster:                     So I think that's a big lesson, not to project yourself onto the opportunity but to try and evaluate how the team is going to do.

Peter Cowley:                  Exactly. I was on a panel discussing exactly that, in Istanbul, last week. Last Monday. CEO's becoming angel investors, and projecting ... in some cases, the world could even be 'controlling'. Trying to impose control on them, which doesn't work at all. Entrepreneurs are very single minded, very focused. They would soon fall out with somebody who was strong. So hence, a very strong story you made there, about syndication.

Peter Cowley:                  So that's your first investment. Are you still a board observer, a board director of that one?

Paul Forster:                     I'm actually still a director.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah.

Paul Forster:                     So that company's gone through a few cycles. Took them a while to figure out their focus, and now they've decided that insurance is the direction they're taking and they're doing very, very well. I've actually got investments from two insurance companies, and they've found a very clear direction in terms of trying to automate the pricing of risk, trying to do questionless underwriting. I think that's going to be a very successful company, but it's an example of a company that took quite a long time to figure out product market fit and exactly how to be successful.

Paul Forster:                     So, maybe, another lesson is to be patient. Because, at one point I thought ... wasn't sure how this company was going to evolve. It's wasn't clear at all. So I think one does need to be patient as an angel investor.

Peter Cowley:                  Absolutely. I think of the journeys we go on, which are fairly deep tech aren't they?                So how many investments have you made now, in total?

Paul Forster:                     24.

Peter Cowley:                  24? So you've been pretty busy. That's four or five a year. You must be well enough known now, that deals come to you, I guess?

Paul Forster:                     They've come in, in waves, and in different ways. Some are at a very early stage. Some are later stage. Different sectors. Most of them have ended up being in London, actually. So the communities down there. Quite a bit in FinTech. Some data enabled AI business-to-business services. A little bit of consumer market places. Some Legal Tech. Med Tech. Education technology. Some recruitment. A bit of Deep Tech but not so much. So I've done actually only one, in Cambridge, I think, which is Speechmatics, recently.

Peter Cowley:                  Oh yes. Yeah.

Paul Forster:                     But it's a mixture of stages. I've done quite quite of a bit of co-investing with VC firms. So Local Globe, Passion Capital, Northzone and others.

Peter Cowley:                  These are an A, or even B rounds, are they, generally this ... or?

Paul Forster:                     Generally seed, or A.

Peter Cowley:                  Okay.

Paul Forster:                     B, in some cases, but I don't do much later stage, typically. Some follow-on I've done, that's been later stage, where I've already invested early.

Paul Forster:                     So it's quite a mixture. Some, I'm completely passive. Some, I'm Board observer. A couple, I'm a director of. So I try to limit my commitment at Board level. I try not to over-promise in terms of Board involvement. Obviously, with 24 companies I can't be involved in all of them. But it's quite a mixture.

Paul Forster:                     They're all great companies. Very happy with my portfolio.

Peter Cowley:                  None of them failed?

Paul Forster:                     Touchwood, no failures yet, but it is early. And I'm sure there will be failures. There are in any portfolio. But I think it's a pretty strong group of companies, and I think most of them will ... if not all of them, will succeed.

Peter Cowley:                  That's amazing, if you do that. I will be absolutely amazed if they all succeed: all 24. That would rather imply you're writing cheques for a rather long time to keep them alive.

Paul Forster:                     It would also imply that I'm not writing enough cheques, if they all succeed.

Peter Cowley:                  We'll ask you again in five years time!

Paul Forster:                     Exactly. Yes.

Peter Cowley:                  You might be aware that I a lot of my investment criteria on my website, that's partly because I want people to understand what I'm interested in, and partly to stop the flow or staunch, to some extent, the flow. Have you worked out what you're particularly keen on, in investing? Would you look at another deal that came in some other area?

Paul Forster:                     Well they tend to be internet enabled, data enabled businesses. I like marketplaces. They tend to be companies where ... I guess I've put on my LinkedIn profile that I'm interested in, "ambitious founders with focused ideas where I understand the market opportunity." So that's pretty broad. It's not very focused perhaps, itself, but I don't try to focus in one specific area. But I can kind of get a feel for if it's a business I'm interested in. So obviously businesses with network effects, are interesting to me. I tend not to do a lot of deep tech stuff, because I struggle to understand a lot of it. So that falls into the category of "market opportunities I don't understand," in many cases.

Paul Forster:                     I think that I like focus, a product focus. So, quite a few companies I would not be interested in, because I don't feel like there's enough clear focus, or product focus. And then, of course, ticking a sense of the individuals behind the business. How ambitious are they? How driven are they? Those are kind of subjective things, too. Not easy to evaluate.

Peter Cowley:                  That's a kind of gut feel. Yes, exactly. How do you work that out?

Paul Forster:                     I think you have to meet people face-to-face. And that's probably why all my investments have been local, in the sense of being in the U.K. And they've happened to be in London but I haven't done any, actually in the U.S. even though Indeed's a U.S. company, and I lived there for 15-plus years ... I haven't done any, and I think that's probably the reason, because it's nice to be able to meet people face-to-face, on multiple occasions.

Peter Cowley:                  But you do travel backwards and forwards to the States, quite a lot, don't you?

Paul Forster:                     I do, yeah. That's true. I spend quite a bit of time there, but it tends to be time off.   So, no, I don't think it's easy to quantify. I think, maybe, there are ways of being more systematic and using data to determine the character of founders, but I haven't discovered that yet.

Peter Cowley:                  There is a company in Barcelona doing that actually, that I've introduced to a few VCs, round in the U.K. The charge is in the thousands of Euros for doing it. So, pre-investment, that seemed quite a lot of money-

Paul Forster:                     Is that kind of a psychometric test?

Peter Cowley:                  It's a combination of online and offline, and some analysis by psychoanalysts, who know about that. And a report that says, "A combination of what the entrepreneur's likely to be like, and what the team dynamics is like," Which is pretty important as well.

Paul Forster:                     Have you seen the data as to whether they're criteria ended up being successful?

Peter Cowley:                  Exactly!

Paul Forster:                     It's only valuable if ... you have to have done it for 15 years, and then you look and see if the data-

Peter Cowley:                  And then you look back at it. Yes. And everything's changed by then, anyway ... so.                Let's talk about how you contribute to these. So all these 24 ... that's quite a few. There's some that you don't see that often, I guess?

Paul Forster:                     Yeah. So I try to be helpful where I can, in all of them. So if a founder asks me for some advice or for an introduction, then I will obviously try to be helpful where I can. And then others, I'm more routinely involved in. So I will go to Board meetings, where I'm an observer on many occasions. And where I'm a director, obviously, I'm going to be attending.

Peter Cowley:                  How many of that, in total ... the Board meetings?

Paul Forster:                     So there's only two that I'm a director of, which is actually Cytora and Marketinvoice.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah.

Paul Forster:                     Marketinvoice, I've got a substantial investment in. That's a great business, invoice finance.               Then, I'm observer on a number. I'm not going to list them.

Peter Cowley:                  No. No.

Paul Forster:                     There's a smattering of companies-

Peter Cowley:                  Well, you're an observer on Arachnys which, of course, I'm investor, director of.

Paul Forster:                     Actually, I don't think I am.

Peter Cowley:                  You have the rights to be an observer.

Paul Forster:                     Oh, do I! You know more than I do. I didn't think that-

Peter Cowley:                  Do come along!

Paul Forster:                     Yeah, I will do that. But that's another great business.             But yeah, I'd love to spend time with all of these companies ... but. That's another thing that is tricky, is once you've got a portfolio, you can end up spending a lot of time on your portfolio and then it doesn't leave much time to make new investments. So if you want to make new investments you have to kind of be a little bit selfish about trying to make time for that.

Paul Forster:                     But I enjoy all the time I spend with the founders of these businesses, and many of them are going to be very successful.

Peter Cowley:                  So Paul, you've said that you haven't had any failures, but you have had an exit. Tell us about that one?

Paul Forster:                     Well the one exit is a company called Twizoo, which I originally invested in ... it was my second angel investment, after Cytora. And, at the time, it was a restaurant recommendation app. They ended up not being able to get enough traction as a consumer application, and so they pivoted to become a service that provides social media content. So primarily tweets, to third party websites. So they ended up powering provision of relevant tweets to Open Table, for example. That was an example of one of their partners. And they built up some very, very large volumes of traffic with these relationships but, again, they ended up not monetizing it quite as much as they would've like, to build a big business.

Paul Forster:                     They had a plan to create an advertising model using this social media ... so, social media advertising. Nobody's actually done that anywhere. So it was, kind of, a very ambitious idea. They didn't succeed in persuading venture capital to fund this, the ones that they had relationships with. And they had a very attractive offer from Skyscanner. They wanted their technology to, basically, power social media feeds on their own-

Peter Cowley:                  That was pre- the Skyscanner's exit was it ... or?

Paul Forster:                     Actually, that was after. That was after they'd been bought by Ctrip. And they ended up buying Twizoo. That was my first exit, and-

Peter Cowley:                  And it was a reasonable one? You were-

Paul Forster:                     It was a good one, yeah. I got a multiple of my investment back. It's, I think going to end up being a very good asset for Skyscanner. But that's the only one of my portfolio that is, in fact, an exit.

Peter Cowley:                  That's frightening, because I've had about 10 failures. I've been doing it for about ... only about three years longer than you. Obviously, I've got two-and-a-half times more investments.                Let's talk about entrepreneurs. What tips have you got for entrepreneurs?

Paul Forster:                     Well one thing is, the strategy for the business, I think, should be drive by what makes sense for the business, rather than trying to please investors, current or future. Obviously, you want to have good relationships with your investors, but what I see quite a lot of which I think may not be ideal, is people trying to craft their pitch or their strategy to look good for series A or series B, and having that drive the strategy, which is kind of back-to-front. A better strategy is to say, "What makes sense for this business? How are we going to make this business successful? What should the strategy be? What resources are required to execute that strategy?" So what's the funding need? And then, what investors may be suitable and interested in funding this plan?

Paul Forster:                     And then if you meet an investor and they aren't interested in your plan, the right answer shouldn't be, "Let's change the plan to please this investor." It should be, "Let's find a different investor who agrees with that we want to do, which is the right thing for the business. Let's find investors who understand what we're doing and attract them." I think that's a pretty important difference when I see, quite a few ... particularly companies that don't have a lot of experience with building businesses and attracting investors.

Peter Cowley:                  Right. Okay.        And you've got one or two other tips?

Paul Forster:                     Yes. So I think just small things like attention to detail; that, to me, is very important. If I see things coming across my desk, or coming into my email inbox that are full of inconsistencies or errors, or any sloppiness at all, I find that quite easy to be put off by that.

Paul Forster:                     Another one is a sense of cost consciousness. If you can see that somebody has done a lot with a little, and has managed to stretch limited resources to do a lot, and is evidently very cost conscious, that's a very positive signal. And obviously the opposite: if you see somebody's ... in their track record they've raised a lot of funding in their prior business and burned through a whole lot of capital, and have very unhappy investors who feel like their money has gone down the drain and not been stewarded well, then that's a negative signal.

Paul Forster:                     So those would be a couple of things.

Peter Cowley:                  Excellent. Okay. Fine.                And so my final question Paul, which is thrown at you and you don't know I'm going to ask I'm this. I'm about a decade older than you, what are you going to be doing when you get to my age?

Paul Forster:                     Hopefully, I will still be angel investing and making even better investments than I am to day. And, hopefully, these companies will be huge businesses at that point. So we'll see. I don't think I'll be just sitting on a beach and doing nothing, but hopefully doing more of the same.

Peter Cowley:                  Well, and you know you're almost ... in fact, I think we could probably call you 'the perfect angel' at the moment, simply because you've had 24 investments, one positive return and no failures yet. I have not met anybody like that, with this much experience.

Paul Forster:                     Well, that's very flattering, but I'm sure they won't all be successful, and I've got a lot to learn. I feel like it's very early yet and most of these companies are still very early in their journey and, hopefully, they will all end up doing very well. So thank you.

Peter Cowley:                  Excellent. Thank you very much Paul. Thank you.

Paul Forster:                     Thank you Peter.

Peter Cowley:                  Thanks for listening to another Invested Investor podcast. You can subscribe to all future podcasts via our website, investedinvestor.com, or via a number of podcast platforms online. Signed pre-orders for our Invested Investor book are now available on our website. And be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, to get the most up-to-date, interesting and insightful content from the Invested Investor.