Eileen Burbidge: Why business leaders should be decent and kind humans

For me, this one is so important, I feel so passionate about it. I also see a huge commercial opportunity, so it's like a no-brainer from an investment thesis point of view, but I also see the difference we make for people.

I got really lucky, right? Nobody knows this. Yeah, it's hilarious that you think I got away with it. So obviously I was not given that much of a choice. I was told I was either going to get a medical degree, a legal degree, or an engineering degree. And yes, as we know, computer science wasn't like real, it was the easiest of the engineering disciplines, so yeah, that's what I did.

Honestly, it was pretty cool, and I thought that I would be there for the rest of my life. Like, why would you leave? I thought at the time, because I had grown up in the midwest part of the US, so four seasons, very heavily winter. And so I got to the Bay Area and I was like, why does anyone live anywhere but here, right? The climate's amazing, you've got the ocean, you've got Tahoe, you've got all this outdoor activity, it was phenomenal. And then of course, yeah, the ecosystem, as we would call it now, but I didn't call it that then, was thriving, right? It was awesome. I mean, it was a lot of fun.

I would say that I learned more though in the dot-com sort of bust, so the two or three years that I stayed after the boom, because that's when you saw while an entire cohort just got really lucky. And that, you know, you mentioned the whole Asian thing, you brought up. I was brought up to think you work hard, you'd probably, you know, make enough to look after yourself and your family, and you'll get what you deserve, and it's a meritocracy, and you got to put it in. And going through the dot-com boom and then the bust, you saw actually not all the smartest people I know did well, not all the hardest working people I saw did well. Some of the best people I would have thought just got unlucky with their timing. And so for me, it was really, really interesting those last couple of years about how much of a role luck has to play in things, what timing does for you, and also just not to buy into the hype, you know? We know all the sayings now, right? Everyone's a genius in a bull market, everyone's really smart when everything's going well.

So I did work for Apple, I did work for Sun Microsystems, I worked for a company that went public in 1999, I bought a sports car. I worked for an incubator, you know, that raised 150 million dollars in order to incubate and be like a venture studio. Yeah, was on the cover of Business Week after it spectacularly failed. I worked at PalmSource, which is the operating system for the Palm handheld, you know, PDAs, yeah. And I had been in the Newton group of Apple, right? So I worked at startups and big companies alike.

Well, so I was there when he was out, you know? I wasn't part of that whole kind of crew. It was a bit of a crazy time when I was there, right? It was, you know, the PepsiCo guy had come in, thought he was going to run, John Sculley. I was there with Guy Kawasaki when he came back. And so it was before Steve Jobs came back. And obviously, I don't know if you would know, but we were very sensitive to at the time, and I mentioned I worked in the Newton Group, which was the personal digital assistant, basically iPhone 20 years too early. He hated that thing. Oh yeah, he, it's like on record, you could go, he hated it. He thought it was ridiculous and stupid, which is why it was really funny watching him launch the iPhone. But he hated Newton and he killed it when he came back. And I think even when we were there and he wasn't there, you kind of knew this wasn't a Steve Jobs-y type thing. And I don't know, I mean, I obviously mad respect for him, obviously, but also like Larry Ellison, like Elon Musk. My first impression and thoughts about people like that, or do you really have to be an asshole to be successful?

We definitely try to avoid it, yeah. We do, because there's a couple. One, it is something to prove. I do, and I've said it before, I don't want to work with assholes. I mean, if we get to choose, we're fund managers, it's such a privileged position. We get to choose where we place our bets. Do we choose, you know, to invest in a team that we actually think is going to do great things because they're good people, high integrity, they're going to attract great talent, they're going to be able to resonate and, you know, relate to their customers? Or people are just gonna like steamroll over people, have a revolving door of talent, lots of problems with, you know, people, and also just maybe PR. And also, who do you want to spend time with, right? Because we chat with people maybe more or less than I should, but you know, we're supposed to be there to support our entrepreneurs and to work with them and give them cover, and we've got their back. And that's harder to do when you're like, 'Oh, I don't want to give that guy, you know, or actually maybe I'll just call that person next week.' You want to talk to and work with, and you want to see people succeed when you're rooting for them, you know, as individuals. So I know that not everyone feels the same way. It might sound really naive, it might sound like it's actually foregoing my fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns, but my belief, my hypothesis, is that I'll see better longer term returns because these people are investing in the qualities that I think will produce better businesses.

I'm laughing because, and people will see them, I'm laughing because I'm late. I was happy, yeah. So, so you're giving me credit for I'm just being responsible, but actually it's probably a pretty low bar. And I think if I were to think about, you know, how much I'd like to respond to and how much I'd like to do, you know, I feel like I'm constantly like constantly dropping balls, right? So I guess it's you just do what you can do, try to be, you know, manage expectations, I guess, which is I'm not always going to get back right away. Um, and maybe it's that I was so unresponsive for so long, now you're like appreciative if I just respond one time. I don't know, maybe I just set the bar really low. Also, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I enjoy talking to you, yeah. I enjoy seeing you succeed or flourish or even work through a challenge, because it hasn't always been like about great things or fun things. And I enjoy watching you problem solve. So if you ping with like, I want to be part of that, or I want to, you know, play part, or at least not be a bottleneck.

I got really lucky. I think it was just accidental. So I actually left Skype and then took a role at Yahoo here in London. So I was pregnant with my firstborn, and with all respect, yeah, great business of course at the time, but also good maternity leave, good corporate benefits. It was sort of a good place versus the sort of startup route at the time.

It is actually very, I mean, I guess it makes sense because in the early 2000s, there wasn't that much of a tech scene. So in a way, I guess we all self-selected, right? By going to what we now think of as a big corporate, but it was one of your options, you know? It's before maybe Google ended here, it's certainly before Facebook or Alphabet did, or you know what I mean? Your choices were Yahoo and maybe AOL, you know, like it's pretty early days. But so I had gone to Yahoo, and I only got into investing because my friends who were the Skype founding engineers based in Estonia, they had five percent of Skype when it was sold to eBay, and they decided to set up a private sort of a super angel fund, like a private fund of theirs, 50 million euro, it's called ASI out of Estonia. And they started wanting to invest, but they're in Estonia, weren't really keen on traveling to London all the time or kind of being in the flow. But they would send me business plans and say, 'What do you think about this product idea? What do you think about this person? Oh, by the way, the person is coming through London, not going to be coming through Estonia. Could you meet them for us and tell us if you think they're full of shit or not?' Um, so I just started doing that, and we weren't using the right vocabulary semantics, but it was basically I started helping the due diligence on investments that they were thinking about making. And then we ended up, I helped them make four investments in London between 2007, 2008, when I was on that maternity leave. And then I realized I really enjoyed doing it. I mean, I didn't know what I was sort of learning as I go, but so were they. And we just wanted to back good people. Actually, that first cohort of four companies did really, really well.

Yeah, so one is Treatwell. No way! Yeah, Treatwell. Yeah, we did Treatwell. I know those guys. Yeah, we did it. It was Wahanda when it was first set up with a Yahoo alum. So and actually Lopo is just, he's just launched a fund. So Lopo and Saleem are the co-founders. And then another was Mendeley, which sold to Reed Elsevier, now LexisNexis. Oh, Mendeley is in the, uh, the scientific, yeah, academic problem. Yeah, I use that all the time. It's sick, it's so good. That was one of our early ones too. And I'm not trying to remember, it's gonna be bad if I can't remember the other two. One of them didn't do so well, but you kind of need one to. So it was ClearScore, which was going to be like the Mint.com for the UK, where you can aggregate your bank to your early for the UK market. And then I realized quite enjoyed it. I even considered, for, you know, I don't know, a little bit about moving to studying and kind of making it feels like is before you kind of did remote working the whole thing. Yeah, now it seems so obvious that I should have just kept doing it with them, but that wasn't going to happen. And then I met my, yeah, co-founders for Passion, who started thinking about the same thing and met them through those investment activities, by the way. So we then decided to set up Passion very much in the image of what I'd seen in San Francisco when I was there.

As far as we know, we were the first fund that was not based in Mayfair. And so yeah, we were East, we're on Clerkenwell Road, close to Farringdon. We were the first funds to have a co-working space, which now obviously is very much involved, you know, Balderton's got beautiful offices, LocalGlobe's got great offices, everyone's got great offices for entrepreneurs to rock up, right? But we're the first ones to do that. We were the first ones to hold office hours, which, you know, everyone kind of does. We're the first ones in Europe to publish infographics, which is now completely like normal, everyone's too much. And we put our term sheet in plain English, because it was like, you know, the top of a term sheet, every term sheet says this is a non-binding term sheet, and then it's like, if it's not binding, why are we using these words which make it all sound all legal and such? So we put that in English too.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And obviously we get asked that by prospective fund investors, they might be listening right now as well as entrepreneurs. I think it is harder and harder to differentiate yourselves. I think what we've got going for us is, and it's gonna make us sound so old now, but this heritage, the fact that our original motivation is still probably what motivates us, you know? We haven't gone on to raise, you know, the first fund was 37 and a half, second fund was 45 million pounds, third 145. We haven't gone to, you know, 600, 700, 500, or tried to, you know, become just a mass more capital under management or whatnot, and just try and be multi-stage. We still really like and value working in the early stages. We really like that team building, the company building, getting the product market fit. We really feel like that's where we add more value, that's where we enjoy having the conversations. If you start getting into conversations about your profit margin and you're trying to get three percentage points out of your cost of goods, so like I just gloss over, right? That's not my thing. But if you start asking me like, I don't know, you know, should we hire the sales person first or another like back-end dev, and you know, how do I get the culture to work, and how are we doing remote working and hybrid and all, like those are the kinds of things I really love getting involved in.

Oh, that's funny. I don't remember what I did, but I'm sure I would have talked. So yeah, some negotiating skills, right? Yeah, well, yeah. So I do think, but I think this is, you mentioned this earlier, sort of Asian to Asian, I do think that I'm being completely stereotypical, making a sweeping generalization, but you know, my passion partners have said it too. I think, you know, Asians, there's a, there's a, you like to haggle, yeah. You know, there's this saying that I've said so, it's just, you know, any fool can pay full price, right? Anybody can just pay the sticker price. But certainly for me, something I watched my mom do when I was growing up, and obviously I used to cringe, I mean I hated it, absolutely super embarrassed, like why would we, why can we pay, like why do you not want to, you can afford it, like why are you trying to play off? But what you learn is, I think if you put yourself in the other person's position, if you understand that there's something to benefit both, so I'm not just trying to take advantage of somebody, hopefully it didn't take advantage, but it's like listen, I think we can hopefully help, we can be useful, I think we can, you know, offer good advice without the overhead or whatever reasons you didn't want a venture capital investor. I'm sure that's the way I pitched it, which is, but we're not like other VCs, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Negotiating has been something I wouldn't have thought I was great, because I wouldn't like to characterize myself as a salesperson, yeah. But actually at some point at Passion, we realized after two or three years, so I do actually negotiate most of the term sheets, even if they're not, you know, quote unquote, my deals.

Well, that's quite a compliment. I, I mean, I think if I were to think about that and like what you just said, I think so. I one of the people that I know you're referring to, I think part of the reason is, and this is the whole firm, all of us at Passion, we see so many founders, we can only invest in so many, but I hope that we behave in a way that even if the ones we don't invest in, that they will know that we'll get their back or will help if we can, you know? Obviously maybe we can spend less time than certain of our portfolio companies, and that's the first priority, that's, you know, what we tell our founders, but hopefully we're still supportive, we'll give advice, we'll give feedback, they can bounce stuff off of us even if we haven't invested. And so for instance, one person that we have in common, I think, you know, we missed that deal completely. We didn't get to invest. I was really annoyed because we didn't even see it, so it's not even like we made the wrong call, we didn't even see it, so that was our bad. But by the time I met this founder, I actually sort of was like, well, you know, what is it that you're working on? Was it doing it? It sounded amazing, and I was like, I can't believe we missed it. And then I was like, how come we don't hear more about you? How come you're not? And I'm not saying this is what people should go for, but at the time, because this is quite some time ago now, you know, TechCrunch was the thing. If you got into TechCrunch, it was gonna, you know, you're gonna see all your graphs go up to the right, and you'd probably it'd help with the fundraising and everything. And I remember this founder was really straightforward, they're like, I don't know. And I was like, well, what are you doing? Are you doing? And he's like, well, you know, we use so and so for PR. And I was like, first of all, why are you paying for PR? That's a whole other topic. But then then I was like, your PR sucks, because I've never heard of it. So actually that, I don't know if he's told you this story, the way we kind of hit it off, I was like, I will get you more exposure or attention or response in the next two weeks, and I'm not going to charge you for it, but I bet you I can't. And so he was like, yesterday, I mean, he had nothing to lose in it, right? Um, and then I did. I think I, I don't know what I did, I'm sure social media, but I think I mentioned to a couple other people, maybe invited to, you know, round table or a conversation or a discussion, only because by the way, not just to prove it, but it's not, I'm competitive, but but also because I thought what they were doing was genuinely valuable, right? I was already kicking myself for having missed the deal, so thought this is a bona fide like genuinely good thing that they're building, sounds like they're doing really, really well, I don't know why more people aren't hearing about this as an example of a great UK fintech. So I think it is about we try and treat everybody the same with high integrity, and also try not to be as much overhead as I know we can be, but as little overhead as possible.

Sorry, so I have five.

It's fine. Well, I only gave birth to four, so I don't know, maybe you heard the four numbers. So I gave birth to four. I mentioned the first one that I was having when I first started investing. Uh, so mine are 16, 14, 12, 10, 10, and then I have a seven-year-old stepdaughter with my current partner. And the secret to this, by the way, you're all like, yeah, we co-parent. So I co-parent with my ex-husband, so the older four are with us for a week and then with their dad for a week. At the same time, my stepdaughter's with us for a week or with her mom for a week. So we have a house full of five kids like today, which is why I have to leave to a couple school pickups, or we have a house of no kids every other week.

I think I'm really, really lucky, because first of all, I think the role of an investor, I don't know why people don't talk about this more, but I think it's one of the most privileged jobs in addition to just applying capital or deploying capital, because you know, we fill our days with, you know, meetings or pitches or working with, um, founders, but it's such an opaque, you know, if Jay hits me up, it's like, oh, can you meet tomorrow at 10? And I'm like, oh no, sorry, I can't. He doesn't know we're not an internal company, so it's not like, oh, I know you don't have any meetings. Like he doesn't know if I'm meeting with new founders, existing founders. So if I need to protect my time, I really can. And I think that's we're very, very lucky because of how opaque it is. And I know lots of investors like to pretend they're really, really busy, and of course you could be busy, you could fill your days with events and like panels and lunches and meeting, but you can also protect your time. So I'm really lucky about that. And then I think actually what really brought into sharp focus, because I think you're giving me credit for for fighting balance, but I think it was a pandemic that really, really triggered it for me. Because I had, first of all, I had a lot of, I had, I had a nanny, so I had somebody who would come in and, you know, and right before for COVID probably did the school pickups until about dinner time, so I could go to the office after school drop-offs and be in an office from, you know, anywhere between 9 and 9:15 until five, so that was completely fine, and then also work after the kids go to bed. Now we don't have a nanny, so I go do the school pickups, but I was so lucky for so many years. But I think with the pandemic and lockdown taught me was, because I did home learning with my youngest, so my stepdaughter who's five at the time, can't, it's not like, oh, just listen to that Zoom, honey, and let me know what we got to do afterwards. Like, you know, she's obviously going to space out. So I was listening to all her lessons, we'd, you know, I'd have one earpiece in one ear and she'd have one, and so I was going through all her lessons with her and then doing the work and then doing the homework. And so I kind of did like homeschooling basically, or home learning with her. When I did that, I enjoyed it first of all, but realized how I hadn't done that with any of the older ones, right? And and obviously there's still time with, um, the second youngest. So since the pandemic, I'll go do the school pickups because was I had so much time with all of them, and I really, really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it, and it made me realize how I didn't have that at the ages of the older ones, and how little time I've got left, so I'm gonna make the most of it now.

Yeah, a little bit. I think that's a good metaphor, but you still think of the funds as your baby, right? So we launched the fund, you know, we pitched it to institutional investors, limited partners who invested in the fund, trust us with their money. So you do still think of the fund itself and the firm as your baby. But then yeah, you're probably right, you think of the little hatchlings that you've decided to invest in. And I guess, you know, I should probably mention, because I got to give a shout out, so I'm spending a lot of time as Jane knows with one of our portfolio companies now, so I'm kind of on that operator side now too. And I think what's really hard about that is I probably do want to invest even more time when I'm on the operating side, because I've hired people to work on this company right with me. While in a fund situation, obviously I'm a custodian for people's money, it's not like I sold people vision to come work with me. You work with, you know, give me your 40, 50, whatever hours a week, and because we're going to build something together, that's on the operator side. And so that makes it probably harder to do the balance, but um, yeah, you do feel like they're all your babies.

Yeah, I can't do it's for Tifa, and it's reproductive health benefits, uh, for companies. So where somebody might want to through their employer think about maybe looking into egg freezing or IVF, or has questions about the menopause or andropause, which is, uh, male menopause, or, you know, early detection of prostate cancer, testicular cancer, anything that's reproductive, hormonal, or sexual in nature. Those benefits, for lots of reasons which is a whole other podcast, are apparently not covered under private medical insurance. But everyone goes through, everyone's got a reproductive health system, whether they're going to choose to have children or get married or not, whether they're in a heterosexual relationship or if they're same-sex, actually if they're LGBT, 100% of those people need support to start a family, right? So all of these things exist for every single person on the planet, and yet it's not covered under private medical insurance, while they do cover like vision and dental, but by the way, not everyone needs, because some people have 20/20 vision, and not everyone gets their teeth fixed. But this whole area of hormonal, reproductive, sexual health is not covered. So we do that for Tifa for over a hundred thousand people now at different companies across the UK and a few countries in Europe.

And actually when I first mentioned it to my partner, my husband, and said I was going to do it, he just laughed, watched it, was like, yeah, obviously that was going to happen. Which was infuriating, by the way, because that's my partner saying I told you so, when he didn't actually even tell me. So, so I think it does look really natural now. At the time, I didn't think though that I would have the time exactly to your question. So I didn't know that I'd have the time to commit that I would be satisfied with. And also, this one's an enterprise SaaS business. I mean, we do impact health outcomes for individuals, so we're very much a consumer proposition, but our channel is employers, so we are B2B, you know, business, and we're selling to companies. And I don't have that background. I might give you my opinion on how to do it, but I'd never used HubSpot, I've never done a beauty sales calls in the most part, right? Exactly the type of people I was looking for would have that background, so I didn't think it would be me.

Oh, wow, amazing question. I have to say it's the one I'm running now. Then it's pretty funny. I know you're going to say that. Sorry, I gotta say that. I gotta say that. But I think, I think maybe to to fill in the blanks, part of the reason I feel so strongly about for Tifa right now is because, is because I've mentioned the children that I've had. I maybe haven't mentioned, but you know, I'm 51 years old, so I'm perimenopausal and I'm on HRT now. I also had two miscarriages between my first and my second born, and I also had two terminations in my 20s when I was working at Apple. So I've been through a lot of these journeys. I am an example that you can work through them, you just, you carry on, you work, this is fine. So maybe somebody would be like, you don't need a benefit from your employer. But I am also then first-hand witness to the fact, like maybe it would have helped my well-being of it if I'd taken a day off. Maybe if I'd actually had someone to speak to, it might have made that easier, and I would have been more productive as an employee for the companies I was working with during all those things. And actually, coming off the pandemic, we clearly see companies recognize the duty of care to employees, right? They're looking after well-being finally, and it's the right thing to do, obviously. And so I feel like it's so important to have companies like ours filling that gap for this area of well-being which no one else is covering.

It's first of all very, very flattering, by the way, because I don't know that I'm, you know, an example of successes. I think I know I'm really lucky because I'm happy and I feel lucky to have all those facets of my life and to have those opportunities. You're right though, in terms of like this operating role, I needed it like a hole in the head, honestly, because I don't think I was responding, you know, all that quickly to things even before I picked this up, and I don't think it helped. But I think for me, this one is so important, I feel so passionate about it. I also see a huge commercial opportunity, so it's like a no-brainer from an investment thesis point of view, but I also see the difference we make for people, you know? We've had fertifa babies that were born, we had twins that were born last December, we've got three women who are pregnant now. You see those pictures, or if you're going to help somebody make a decision about their trans surgery, we're changing people's lives, right? So I think, so the point that you made, it's the impact, right? It's we're actually doing something that's impacting people's health outcomes, their livelihoods at work which they've chosen for their career, and also just, you know, their life and their fulfillment and what they're sort of after in terms of their life choices. So it does feel like this is the right thing to do. Somebody's going to succeed at it, I'm sure. I think there are some very successful US companies that could come and just land here and do it, but I feel like we should build a category leader here.

Twitter. You're very active on Twitter, right? I've been less since I've been doing this operating world, but yeah, I remember I do pay attention. So yeah, on Twitter. I'm so sorry, I don't respond to LinkedIn. Like, it's so bad.

Definitely. I'm excited about it.