Sam Talks Technology

Stephen Pankhurst was the co-founder of Friends Reunited along with his wife Julie.

In 1999, Stephen’s wife Julie, was pregnant with their first child. She had just used the internet to track down her long lost Grandfather that she had never seen.

Realising the power of the internet, and a desire to find out what some of her old school friends were up to, she came up with the idea of FriendsReunited, exploiting a gap in the UK market following the success of US website Classmates.com.

Friends Reunited was officially launched in June 2000. The very first version of the site looked pretty horrible. Stephen was not a graphic designer, so he just knocked together anything.

However, the functionality worked and very soon they started to get people coming to the site and registering themselves against schools. Nine months later, after a redesign, some hard work, lots of extra features, encouragement from users and the odd mention or two in the press, things started to get interesting.

By the end of the year, it had 3,000 members, and a year later (2001) this had increased to 2.5 million.

By December 2005, Friends Reunited had over 15 million members and was bought by British TV company ITV plc for £120 million ($208 million), plus further payments of up to £55 million based on its performance up to 2009.

In 2007, ITV Chairman Michael Grade described the site as "the sweet spot" of the internet and stated that "Friends Reunited is one of the great undersung jewels in the crown ... one of the most important bits of ITV going forward, a massive presence, and profitable"

That year the site made a profit of £22 million, but its market valuation had fallen sharply from the £120 million paid by ITV in 2005 and it achieved growth in UK traffic of only 1.2%, compared to Facebook's 2,393% and Bebo's 173%.

In March 2008, after losing 47% of unique users in the previous 12 months, the site dropped the subscription fee required to contact members, but the decline continued.

In 2009, Friends Reunited was sold for £25 million to Brightsolid Limited. By December 2011, Brightsolid estimated that Friends Reunited was worth only £5.2 million, a fifth of the price it paid to ITV two years previously.

The company relaunched Friends Reunited in March 2012 with a new emphasis on nostalgia and memories.

On January 2016, Friends Reunited revealed that it would be closing down the website after 16 years of operation. On February 2016 the site closed down.

Sháá Wasmund (MBE) is one of the UK's most prominent female entrepreneurs and a champion of small businesses. She is the author of the #1 bestselling book 'Stop Talking, Start Doing' and the founder and driving force behind Smarta, the UK's leading support platform for small business owners.

Sháá was educated at the London School of Economics, during which time she wrote for Cosmopolitan. After interviewing World Champion boxer Chris Eubank, he asked her to manage his PR - and while still at university she promoted Eubank's second world title fight (with 18 million viewers).

In 1994 Sháá started her own PR firm, with Sir James Dyson as her first client, and helped build Dyson into a global leader.

In 1998 she moved into the digital world, becoming a founding director alongside Sir Bob Geldof of the early travel site Deckchair.com. At its peak Deckchair was estimated to be worth £20m, but following the crash of 2000 it was eventually sold for £3.2m in 2001.

She went on to launch her own social networking site, Mykindaplace, selling it six years later to BSkyB in 2007 for an undisclosed sum thought to be in the single-digit millions, before setting up Smarta in 2009.

As well as dotcom failures and successes there were the golden opportunities that slipped through her fingers.

Shaa passed up the chance to become managing director of teenager social networking site Bebo, founded by Xochi and Michael Birch, just 18 months before it was sold to AOL for $850m (£560m) in March 2008.

She's philosophical about it now and remains friends with the Birches, who also supported her next venture, Smarta.

Shaa was awarded an MBE in 2015 for her services to business and entrepreneurship, she was voted as one of the Top 20 Most Influential Entrepreneurs on the UK by The Sunday Times and the Institute of Directors named her as one of the best-connected people in the UK.

Today she runs the Freedom Collection & 6 Figure Expert Club via Shaa.com and recently published her new book “How To Fix Your Sh*t”.

Dr Alasdair Pinkerton, a senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, a Geopolitics expert and an advisor to 10 Downing Street on the Commonwealth.

His future-looking PhD research explores the issues of ‘Brexit’ and ‘heritage’, and the implications for the UK’s relationship with the Overseas Territories and the wider Commonwealth – not least as the UK seeks to narrate itself as ‘Global Britain’.

We talked about the implications of post-Brexit on business, trade deals and Boris' desire for an Empire 2.0

Dan Wagner is the CEO of Rezolve and a serial technology entrepreneur who has created a number of successful technology businesses over 35 years.

Dan's newest venture, Rezolve, creates a whole new buying or paying experience for customers through its mobile image and audio recognition technology. It allows any form of advertising or media – print, outdoor, audio, video, social – to be instantly “shoppable” by a consumer with a mobile device, delivering commerce anytime and anywhere.

In 1984 Dan, aged 20, set up his first online information platform (MAID). Ten years later Dan floated Brightstation PLC for $250m on the London Stock Exchange. MAID was also listed on NASDAQ in 1995.

Wagner then became marmite with the UK press, loved when becoming the youngest CEO of a public company in his 20s but disliked as he presided over the company's 95% share price decline in the dot-com crash in 2000.

In March 2000, MAID now Dialog's Information Services Division was sold to Thomson Corporation of Canada (now known as Thomson Reuters) for $500m.

In 2001 Dan founded his second company (Venda) which was built out of the ashes of one of the most famous dotcom busts, fashion retailer Boo.com, after he bought it for £250,000.

Venda created a cloud or on-demand (SaaS) commerce platform that went on to run major retail customers' eCommerce sites (including Lands End, Tesco, BooHoo, TJX Companies, Nieman Marcus and many more). Venda considered a flotation in 2008, before the financial crisis shut the IPO window, and looked at the idea again in 2011. Venda was eventually sold to NetSuite for an undisclosed amount in 2014.

In 2007 Dan also founded Powa Technologies, an e-commerce business based on Venda's business solution, but with additional services for in-store and mobile point of sale and software for mobile payments. In 2016, the Financial Times reported that two years after raising $80m in investment, Powa Technologies went into administration. The newspaper City A.M. reported that Wagner was to enter into legal proceedings against a former Powa director and investors, accusing them of colluding to force the company into administration.

In 2017, the Times reported the High Court had dismissed Wagner's application to set aside a statutory demand for the repayment of a $2 million loan from former Powa director Ben White. White and Wagner subsequently settled all claims in a private agreement.

Andy McLoughlin is a partner at Uncork Capital in San Francisco, focusing on B2B software opportunities.

Uncork Capital is a seed-stage venture firm that commits early, helps with the hard stuff, and sticks around. Really.

Andy's investments include LaunchDarkly, Coder, Crossbeam, Focal Systems, Human Interest, Pattern (acquired by Workday), Test.ai, Simplify, Fountain, GreatHorn, Bigfinite, and Identify3D, as well as a number of companies still in stealth.

Andy was previously a prolific seed investor into many well-known startups. Postmates, Buffer, Intercom, Pipedrive, Hullabalu, RolePoint, Tray.io, Bugsnag, Thread, Calm, Secret Escapes, Apiary (acquired by Oracle), Import.io, Zesty (acquired by Square), Marvel, Cloud66 and more.

Prior to becoming an investor, Andy is best know for co-founding Huddle with Alastair Mitchell. Andy had many roles at Huddle over the years - Head of Technology, Head of Product, Head of Marketing, Head of Strategy / Business Development, GM North America - but he was most passionate about building a great team and a great product.

Andy stepped back from his executive role in 2015 but remained on the board of directors until the company's acquisition in 2017, when it was eventually sold to private equity for $89m in August 2017.

That sum is far less than Huddle's reported peak valuation of up to $300M when it snagged a $51 million Series D funding round in 2014.

Paul Fabretti is Executive Communications Director at Microsoft. Paul has over 15 years’ experience at the forefront of business development and digital marketing - integrating search, pr and social media into meaningful, global campaigns with some of the biggest brands in the world such as Microsoft, Skype, Outlook, OneDrive, Telefonica, O2, Lexus, Dyson, Hasbro Games, The North Face.

“I work for the Microsoft US subsidiary. So that's a 7,000 person, 30 something billion-dollar business that is entirely based out of the US.

My role is to drive executive consistency across the external communications, which is rather a grand way of saying it's just to make sure all our leadership [team] are saying the right things and the same things.” - Paul Fabretti

Cary is an award winning entrepreneur, engineer and the CEO of Punchfront Innovation.

Cary is the designer of the Bootclaw which she successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter in November 2015. Today Bootclaw is a bestselling sports accessory available on Amazon and Sports Direct.Cary was awarded the inaugural Iris Award at the NatWest Everywoman Awards in recognition of her business success through effective implementation and use of IT and Communications.

She was named UKRC Woman of Outstanding Achievement 2011 winner for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and was the Breakthrough Pioneer award winner in Red Magazine’s Hot Women Awards 2011.

Cary is also a Manufacturing Engineering graduate from the University of Nottingham. She regularly speaks at events as a STEM ambassador about her passion for getting more girls interested in science and technology, knowing that enthusiastic role models can change lives.

Jeevan Gnanam is the CEO of Veracity AI. Jeevan is a founder member of the Lanka Angel Network, which targets Sri Lankan entrepreneurs and companies and helps them to grow by providing venture capital and mentorship.

Jeevan is also the visionary behind Sri Lanka’s first operational IT Park – Orion City, home to some of the world’s leading IT firms. Since its inception in 2008, Orion City has experienced steady growth and is on track to achieve its goal of being a 3,000,000 square feet facility by 2020.

Tony Fish is an investor, pioneer and author of 'My Digital Footprint'. He recently took a year off in Australia to rest, recuperate and rethink his next career move and the future of corporate governance.

He has come back refreshed and will be telling us why every board needs to have a Corporate Data Officer.

Dan Murray-Serter is the co-founder and CEO of Heights a new smart multi-vitamin. Dan is a successful serial entrepreneur having launched the award-winning Grabble - "The Tinder for Fashion" - with his co-founder Joel Freeman.

Dan is also the host of Secret Leaders his own podcast as well as the President of Foundrs a private network of later-stage entrepreneurs. He is also a writer for Forbes and an Angel Investor.