Interview: Dan Crow, CTO, Songkick
London’s tech start-up scene, buoyed by cloud, is really beginning to flourish, with evidence of this aplenty at the recent Silicon Milkroundabout jobs fair on Brick Lane. There, The Cloud Circle met with Dan Crow – the former Google and Apple man who is now CTO of the event organiser Songkick. He explained why the fresh-faced techies around us should be excited about their prospects. By Dom Pollard.
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Dan Crow CV Education: Work history: 1994-1996 Head of Software Development, Art of Memory, Chipping Campden, UK Music favourites: Favourite live bands: Buzzcocks, Pulp, Inspiral Carpets, Blur, |
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It is an unseasonably mild Sunday afternoon in late October and more than 100 London-based tech start-ups are gathered at the Old Truman Brewery on London’s trendy Brick Lane. They are setting out their stalls to attract some of the UK’s finest young computer science talent. The event is called Silicon Milkroundabout and it is organised by the Internet based gig tracking company Songkick. The day is essentially a jobs fair – allowing the young companies in East London’s ‘Tech City’ to meet face to face with prospective new employees. More than that though, the day serves perfectly as a tail feather shaking exercise for one of the UK’s most exciting industry prospects. Names like JustEat.co.uk, LastFM and Shazam are present and with 500 jobs to be filled collectively, the air was rife with enthusiasm and opportunity. Dan Crow, the chief technology officer of Songkick, was himself the personification of this atmosphere. Indeed, “there was nothing like this when I left,” he says, gesturing down towards the impressive congregation of 100 companies and 1,500 job hunters below. “There were really very few opportunities here if you wanted to go and build really great, cool products – but boy there were opportunities in California.” Any attempts to grow a technological hub or centre of excellence will, inevitably, be compared to California’s Silicon Valley – the technology capital of the world. Here in the UK we have our own tech community emerging, one which many will be hoping could one day rival its west coast, USA counterpart. 'Tech City', as it is has been officially dubbed, is an area in the heart of east London, covering Old Street’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’, down through Shoreditch and out to the Olympic site in Stratford. Tech companies ranging from one-man start-ups to Blue Chip enterprises are beginning to flourish here, with estimates putting over 500 companies in the area. Songkick was among the first when it formed four years ago. |
| Cloud computing has no doubt been a massive enabler of this development. Most of the companies present host their applications on a public cloud – it's the only way they'd ever have got off the ground, they tell us. Songkick itself does not operate in the cloud, because it bought infrastructure just before cloud really started to take off. However, as a truly international business – with over three quarters of its “substantial” number of users coming from outside the UK – Crow expects that it’s simply a matter of time before the company makes the move.
“I suspect that if we had started a couple of years later than we did that we would have built on the cloud from day one,” he says. “If I was starting a technology company today, I would build in the cloud. I see no reason not to. One of the great things about it as a start-up is that as you grow you can get tremendous spikes in traffic and the cloud allows you to deal with such fluctuating traffic really easily, that’s a huge advantage. The cloud is a great thing for allowing start-ups to be far more adaptable and flexible.” Speaking from experience, having spent a decade working with first Apple and then Google in America, either side of a stint building his own web start-up, Blurb, Crow maintains that the comparisons between the British and US tech scenes are becoming more valid every day. “One of the interesting things is just how many support services there are in the Silicon Valley,” he says. “It feeds on itself so you get a critical mass of start-ups which attracts more start-ups to the area and it snow balls from there. London’s just getting to the point now in the last year or so where there are enough successful companies that you’re beginning to see that same ecosystem starting to grow.” Yet, you may ask (and we did): why would someone working for a global superpower in the technology industry – Google – decide to trade it in to become the CTO of Songkick, a small start-up with 30 or so employees which is only four years old and, like most young tech firms, is yet to turn a profit? “I wanted to work for a company of 25 people, not 25,000,” he states, plainly enough. “I just love start-ups – I love the pressure and the opportunity they offer. I love it when it goes well and you learn so much when it goes badly. I really wanted to get back into small companies again and help not only them but the industry around them to grow.” With the event going on around us forming the perfect example of that philosophy in action, Crow echoes these sentiments throughout the time that we spend together. He is keen to implore graduates to look at start-ups as a viable and exciting career path. “Rather than just being a small person in a big company,” he says, “you can play a big part and be genuinely entrepreneurial, that’s why start-ups are a great option.” That is, of course, what Silicon Milkroundabout is all about and Songkick has been an integral part of its creation and growth. As for his primary interest these days, Songkick is a live music technology site and the second largest music ticket site in the world behind Ticketmaster. “The idea behind it,” Crow explains, “is that you tell us who your favourite bands are and we will tell you when they come and play a concert in your town so you never miss them again. I will often read a review of a great gig that happened last night and think ‘I would have loved to known about it before rather than hear about it after’. Songkick solves that problem. “One of the things we found from our research is that, on average, people who use Songkick go to 70 per cent more concerts the year after they started using Songkick than they did the year before.” His passion for not only working with start-ups but also for the concept of the company itself is abundantly clear throughout. The chance for Crow to operate in an entrepreneurial manner and channel his efforts towards tangible, visible results is one he relishes – all the better that it also allows him to work every day with his primary leisure pursuit. And there are plenty of opportunities like this available to the 1,500 attendees to the Silicon Milkroundabout today, he maintains – now that people are becoming aware of what’s going on. “Songkick,” Crow tells us, “was one of the ten original companies in what is now called the Silicon Roundabout. At the beginning we were finding it difficult to hire creative developers. We realised by speaking to friends and other companies that it was a problem that everyone was having so we tried to find a way to solve this that was good for Songkick but also the tech community generally. By pooling our companies together we thought it would be easier to attract people in to speak to because many of the companies don’t have a very big profile. “Today the event is bigger than we ever envisioned. We have had to start reserving places because the demand is so big that we will easily reach capacity here. Clearly there are demands from both sides – from the start-ups to get a greater attraction than you could ever manage and the demand of people who want the opportunity to work for start-ups. That, in turn, helps by building a community and encouraging people to think about start-ups as a viable career option.” There are a variety of different roles up for grabs among the companies at Silicon Milkroundabout, with some harder to fill than others. Whereas software developers may come through thick and fast, Crow believes that “the relative immaturity” of the tech scene in the UK is reflected in the lack of product managers and quality analysts, both of which are notoriously hard to find. Other companies told us that while Java and C developers are present in abundance, those with skills in Django, Pythen and Hadoop are harder to come by. The universities and government now have to do their part to fill these skill gaps and to help the industry grow, maintains Crow. And the rewards could be handsome. Looking once again to our cousins across the big river, in 2009 – the latest figures available – software accounted for 1.1 per cent of US GDP. This is about the same as oil and gas extraction. “You look at the economy of the States and a phenomenal amount of wealth generated is through software,” he says. “Britain needs to realise that’s what the future looks like.” As ever, the issue of gaining funding is of fundamental importance for any start-ups and Crow says that although venture capital funding in the UK is becoming more accessible, “there’s a lot to be said for boot-strapping in the early stages”. By this, he means looking for bank loans, using credit cards, or borrowing from friends and family to get an idea off the ground. “You just need that first £10,000 to get you going and to prove the company has value in the market,” he says. In terms of more general advice for budding entrepreneurs and infantile start-ups, Crow’s message is clear. “I think focus is incredibly important. I was fortunate enough to work for Apple in the late 90s and I knew Steve Jobs quite well. One of my favourite sayings of his was ‘focus is the art of saying no’. It’s very easy when you have a little bit of success to look at the 30 other things you could be doing that are related to what you’re doing but that’s the wrong approach to have. All great companies have at their core that focus and ability to say no.” Upon his final reflection, Crow leaves us with the same sense of optimism and enthusiasm that had greeted us at the start. “I’d love to see Britain be a place where people can say they can create the next great product – the next Apple, the next Google, the next Facebook. Twenty years ago we did not aspire to that, but we do now. The government is starting to understand its importance and there’s enough companies here now that we can see it happening – people are changing their attitudes and people are starting to believe that it can happen here.” One gets the feeling that with a few more Songkicks and one or two more Dan Crows, it might just happen that little bit quicker. |
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