Join here: https://hopin.com/events/hopin-2021-kickoff

We talked about how Bhushan sees 2021 as a more hybrid workplace with employees returning back to the office cautiously but only a few days a week. We also talked about how schools and universities will also adopt more online technologies for distance learning and offer hybrid schooling.

Finally we ended up talking about our shared experiences of growing up in 1980’s Britain which was racist, sexist and homophobic but how much that has changed through BLM albeit Brexit and Trump have emboldened those racists once again.

We also talked about his amazing career from the early days in Ofcom and his role in the Premier League football rights. Working with Niklas Zennström and a young Daniel Elk at Skype on their proprietary Peer to Peer platform called Jolted, before he joined Daniel at Spotify as International .

Faisal also gave a surprise answer to my suggestion that Spotify and Netflix need to merge to compete with Apple and Amazon.

UPDATE

Shortly after this interview Blippar’s AR platform was used to deliver the world’s first product launch event entirely in AR for OnePlus; the latest smartphone from premium technology brand OnePlus.

Mukul also talks about why Beeb today is a northern male and like Dr Who is genderless and could regenerate into a female voice in the future.

We also talked about why Beeb is not going to compete with Alexa or Google but how the BBC plan to partner with a wide variety of companies to extend the role and reach of Beeb.

We talked about how NLive is continuing to run their station through COVID and what software Martin is using to enable remote broadcasting.

We talked. about the upcoming Community Radio Awards and what has changed and whether there will be an awards ceremony later this year.

We also talked about the newly formed UK Community Radio Network that Martin has formed with a number of station managers across the UK to lobby government on our collective behalf.

We ended up talking about some of the hot topics in radio. Bauer making 260 presenters redundant this September and what that means for local radio. Will DAB+ ever come to community radio and finally are podcasting and streaming services a challenge to radio audiences?

Nigel talks about how Flick has raised £4m and was growing nicely until Covid-19 put a stop to all live sports. He believes Flick will return to growth once live sports like football return. In fact with stadium bans it could see ever greater demand for Flick as fans try to recreate the stadium atmosphere while at home.

Prior to Flick, Nigel, his wife and three engineers started Hubdub that soon pivoted into FanDuel. Nigel recalls how a WebMission to Silicon Valley in 2008 helped Fanduel grow. Some of the other companies that joined them included edocr, huddle, skimlinks, mydeo, WAYN and TrustedPlaces.

Nigel talks about how FanDuel went on to raise $450m+ and experienced hyper-growth in customer acquisition. Sadly the story did not end up with Nigel and his wife growing a Unicorn, selling it and riding off into the sunset. Nigel talks at length about how the Private Equity company engineered to remove him, the executive team and all the staff who held ordinary shares from benefiting from their growth and success. In fact they ended up with zero while the board that consisted of the PE Equity partners engineered it to make themselves millions.

The story does not end there. Nigel and 90 of his original staff have filed a class action suit against the PE company. We await the outcome.

We talk about how Tommy started in the BBC and how he helped discover comedians like Sanjeev Bhaskar. 

Both Tommy and I are Liverpool FC “Superfans” and we talk about our passion for the reds and why so many Asians and people of colour support Liverpool more than any other team. 

Tommy was also at Hillsborough and we touch on the events of that momentous day. We finally discussed the modern day role of the BBC in term sof its diversity and in light of the competition from Netflix and Amazon Prime.

James is as self-effacing as he is charming, recounting with warmth the role it played in the dotcom boom.

“Adam Street was absolutely amazing,” he recalls. “It was a first, unique, and I met the most wonderful bunch of people there. No one has ever directly copied it.”

Now sadly defunct, the venue off The Strand – with its bar, restaurant, library, gallery, and event space – became the go-to place for London’s tech entrepreneurs as they rallied after the bubble burst.

Originally established as serviced offices by James after a career in the navy, Adam Street became a magnet for dotcom start-ups with few assets and little capital. The club itself opened in 2001 in an old watering hole for actors propping up the building.

What would become the first entrepreneurs’ club in London was seeded when James noted the then itinerant nature of Julie Meyer’s First Tuesday networking club.

“Back in those days it was still the case that if you went into a club you weren’t allowed to talk about business – it was not done and was meant to be a subtle under-the-radar thing,” he explains. “So I thought you have got all these people together, First Tuesday moving from venue to venue, why isn’t there a fixed place where entrepreneurs hang out?”

These were the heady days of a gold rush.

Nonetheless, like all roller-coaster rides, the dotcom era was marked as much by the founding as by the spectacular failure of new internet-based companies, with the Lastminute.com IPO in 2000 signalling the bursting of the bubble.

“By the time we opened the club in 2001 it wasn’t such an auspicious time. It wasn’t really until 2003 that we got up to about 1,000 members, but by then a number of characters had helped gather together the bomb-burst and we had a whole layer of true entrepreneurs who came back together after the dotcom highs and lows to rebuild the tech community.”

These included such characters as Michael Acton Smith, creator of Moshi Monsters; Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, who introduced James to the term “podcast”; and Richard Duvall, the man behind the first internet bank, Egg, and co-founder of peer-to-peer pioneer Zopa.

The key to the club’s success was ambience shaped by an enthusiastic staff helping to select the right members in a niche that morphed from a shared workspace during the day into a nightclub for hothousing ideas at night.

“There was no music during the day, but at about 5.30 we put on a little bit – and by 10.30 people were dancing on the tables. I also like to think that we introduced the espresso martini into the London cocktail scene!”

Adam Street’s glory days lasted until 2008, but faded amid the global financial meltdown and the migration of tech entrepreneurs to Silicon Roundabout in East London. At that time James also had music on the mind, reopening Notting Hill’s famous Tabernacle.

Although it played host to battalions of iconic digital pioneers, James believes Adam Street was not just about tech – but primarily about entrepreneurship and making connections, a skill he has taken to the digital leadership experts Hannington Tame.

Google have started to auto-transcribe and index podcasts making them easier to discover.  The next challenge could well be Podcast SEO.  We also talked about the different ways podcasts can be monetised.  

We talked about how she turned down £45m by not working for Michael Birch and that surprisingly isn’t her biggest regret.

We also talked about her current role as an online educator helping small business owners via her Facebook groups ‘Freedom Collective’ & ‘The 6 Figure Expert Club’.

We finally talked about why Sháá joins other people’s masterminds in order to help herself grow.

Despite losing to Mr Gove, they managed to use social media to crowdfund £25k and increased the LibDem vote by 16%.

We talked about the potential negative effect social media will have in the 2020 US election now that Mark Zuckerberg has decided not to fact check political ads.

We also talked about the potential scenarios in a post-brexit Boris world given Alasdair’s PhD research work on ‘Global Britain’.

Dan talks about the struggles at the end of MAID with the dotcom crash before he sold it to Thomson Reuters.

Dan being a serial entrepreneur was soon onto his next business called Venda but this was eventually sold to Netsuite.

Dan took the core Venda technology to start Powa Technologies, "the Shaazam" for shopping. Powa Technologies, was praised by David Cameron and hailed as a British “unicorn”. Unfortunately it ended badly for Dan with investors and directors.

Dan dusted himself down and has now launched Rezolve.

But how did this come about? Paul and I talk about the impact of Satya Nadella on the companies new culture and focus.

Paul and I first crossed paths over ten years ago when he was based here in the UK working for O2. Today Paul is based in Seattle working closely with Kate Johnson, President of Microsoft USA and the executive team.

Cary also talks us through how she had the idea and more importantly how she went about getting the product to market.

Cary's degree in engineering from Nottingham University was 20 years ago, however there are still so few women engineers. We discussed why that is and what can be done to encourage more women.

In the future Cary would like to launch more tangible products through Punchfront Innovation via kickstarter.

We spoke about Jeevan's entrepreneurial journey and his entrepreneurial grandfather. Jeevan talked about the first companies he started.  He started a cab driving company while at University with friends in America. He moved back to Sri Lanka and with his brother tried to start and e-commerce company but that failed due to the Sri Lankan infrastructure and market not being mature.  

Like all good entrepreneurs he pivoted to a successful idea of running Orion City, Sri Lanka’s first operational IT Park to build the infrastructure needed to help other startups.  He soon opened Hatch, Sri Lanka's largest co-working/incubator/accelerator space. 

Today he also runs Veracity AI an specialist outsourced company that helps other companies build their own AI solution.  

He has come over to Manchester to partner with Techcelerate Ventures who work with Founding and Management Teams of Technology Product Companies to accelerate their growth and eventually reach an EXIT, including helping them with product development, customer acquisition, strategy, positioning, fundraising and M&A backed by know-how, data, tools and insights.  

In this podcast we talked about why he has started a new smart multi-vitamin, how he formed such an impressive team including Dr Tara Swart, Chief Science Officer and Alain De Botton, Philosopher, Writer, Entrepreneur.   

Heights is a DNVB (Digital Native Vertical Brand) that sells directly to the consumer.  At present the site is still in beta which means only invited customers can buy the smart multi-vitamin.  Thankfully listeners to this podcast can access the online store and buy their subscription by using the code "Marlow"

We also talked about why Grabble which raised nearly £2m didn't succeed.  

Finally we talked about the future for Heights and how Dan hopes to evolve Heights to offer multiple different vitamin products to address different age groups.  Eventually Dan hopes that Heights will be able to offer total personalised vitamins specific to each individual.  

In this podcast we talked about his new book "Less Perfect, More Happy. - how to overcome perfectionism". 

Perfectionism now has a name for this mental health issue. It's called Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) a personality disorder that's characterised by extreme perfectionism, order, and neatness. People with OCPD will also feel a severe need to impose their own standards on their outside environment.  

Sufferers like Chris were unaware that he had OCPD but had this need for perfectionism which caused him great angst throughout his childhood, all the way into adulthood were it took a toll on his marriage and relationship with his children.  

"The feeling of not being ‘good enough’ dictated almost my entire life." - Chris Ward

This book is about raising the awareness of perfectionism and highlighting the disorder OCPD.  Chris tells the story of his struggle with perfectionism throughout his life in chapters starting aged 4 all the way through to 57. 

At the end of the book Chirs details out his 12 step guide on "How to overcome perfectionism How to enjoy a less perfect, more happy world".  He has also created an online website https://friendfulness.com/

We also talked about the future of blockchains along with some of the challenges holding back the wider adoption of blockchains.

We talked about Sir Tim's recent BBC Reith interview and Tim's new Contract for the Web.

Today the web is being fragmented by countries like Russia, China and Iran to name but a few countries limiting their citizens access to stop free speech. Fake News is rife everywhere and our privacy is rapidly eroding as our permission on our data is centrally controlled.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the 'permissionless' one web space 30 years ago is in danger of crumbling under the weight of the behemoth centralised control of the GAFA's (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) and BAT's (Bidu, Alibaba and TenCent) who want to control all of our personal data for their profit.

Daniel and I talked about these challenges but also the new Web 3.0 technologies like Blockchain, AI and DNS-SEC that is making the web decentralised, ethical, open, free and secure.

Unlike many overly cautious European VC's who focus on short-term revenues, EQT prefer to bet big and dominate a market, a strategy based on Peter Thiel's model in his book from zero to one. European VC's are finally cottoning onto this model as US VC's enter the European market to compete for the talented startups. 

EQT also have a hidden secret called the MotherBrain.  An AI piece of software written in house that helps them discover and evaluate new companies across a broad spectrum of industries.  

We also talked about his former company Huddle which is what brought him from the UK out to San Francisco. 

Ralph and I first met some 13 years ago when he was at BT.

However, that was a lifetime ago and since then Ralph has become an award-winning video creator and documentary producer who flies all around the world, living as a digital nomad, filming and/or live streaming video content for his corporate clients.

I'm part of the "digital nomad" craze so I'll be heading back to Dubai and Oman at the weekend for filming and then editing with some diving thrown in.

In the past year, he has filmed in Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, USA, Rwanda, Russia, China, The Middle East and across Europe.

Ralph started experimenting with mobile video back in 2007, just before the iPhone was launched and his first post-big BT job was to launch a mobile phone festival with Sundance Film Festival at Mobile World Congress.

Ralph is currently working on his first documentary about a kitchen fitter who teaches himself to play drums and ends up headlining Glastonbury. Working title: Impossible Drummer.

Ralph has also recently started a "snack-sized video news" channel called Videosnax on Facebook.

It's clear more and more newspapers are moving to paywalls to replace their dwindling ad-revenue. Is the freemium model dead? Will bloggers and podcasters follow suit as they look to monetise their content.

We also discussed the recent launch of Facebook News. Having failed with Instant Articles before, will Facebook News succeed or be just another tab on Facebook wall that no one reads. Facebook News joins a growing band of news aggregation portals recently launched including Apple News+ and Amazon News on their FireTV. We also discussed the challenge of fake news and if there was anyway to prevent it.

We also have numerous mutual friends and estranged acquaintances but oddly we had never met before.

We talked about Daniel's work on diversity and inclusion over the past 15 years which was truly inspirational.

We also discussed why companies need to focus on the "diversity dividend" to remain competitive.

We didn’t talk about our difference in height!

Julien talked about how Web 3.0 needs to evolve towards 'Decentralised Autonomous Organisations' and how blockchain, ethereum wallets, smart contracts and the unlock protocol can make this new business model a reality.

This was a great interview about the future of the web from a true pioneer. As Alvin Toffler said "The only way you can predict the future is to build it. ... " well that is exactly what Julien is doing.

All I can say is listen and learn because this is how the web will be built and function in less than a decade and forewarned is forearmed.

How do we go about achieving it using the 6 step process to build a personal brand?

• Clarity
• Customer
• Communication
• Content
• Channels
• Connect
• Collateral

The Skill

'Book it Now' allows users to search for and book recommended local services using only their voice.

Our vision is to enable thousands of local businesses to be bookable via Alexa, which will be available for people to use wherever they are. - Charlie Cadbury

Alexa cup:

Launched by Amazon in 2019 the annual Alexa Cup is a global competition designed to encourage the development of Alexa Skills (voice apps) that solve real-world problems in a way that enhances customer experience while also being commercially viable.

We also talked about Alan’s next three books, his three degrees and his work with the Olympic teams.

We further discussed the role of the UK's Office for AI which was headed up by Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright but is now run by Baroness Nicky Morgan the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

We then talked about Katie's on-going work in schools and universities trying to get them to adopt AI courses.

Finally we talked about the potential future role of AI and algorithms to create a UK social score similar to the one being rolled out in China. Was it a good or bad thing? We already have a financial score so what's to stop us having a social score to nudge and correct our bad behaviours and to encourage good behaviour.

Sam sold his first startup, a location platform called Alohar Mobile to Alibaba, before finally starting Otter, the 30-person startup team that hails from Google, Facebook, Nuance, Yahoo, as well as Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge.

Otter was founded, just over three years ago and has raised $13 million in funding from the who’s who of Silicon Valley. e.g Horizons Ventures – a backer of Viv, DeepMind, Siri, Slack and others – who led the $10 million Series A. Also participating were Bridgewater Associates, i-Hatch Ventures, MetaLab, Jay Markley, and Boston investors Jim Pallotta and Stu Porter.

Seed investors included Tim Draper through Draper Associates and Draper Dragon; Dave Morin through Slow Ventures; David Cheriton "The billionaire Professor and 1st investor in Google"; SV Tech Ventures, Danhua Capital, and 500 Startups.

Otter wants to make it as easy to search your voice conversations as it is to search your email and texts. The idea to create a new voice assistant focused on transcribing everyday conversations – like meetings and interviews.

Essentially, a voice recorder that offers automatic transcription, Otter is designed to be able to understand and capture long-form conversations that take place between multiple people.

This is a different sort of voice technology than what’s been developed today for voice assistance – as with Alexa or Google Assistant.

The existing technologies are not good enough for human-to-human conversations,” explains Sam Liang.

“Google’s voice API has been trained to optimize voice search,” he says, adding that when people talk to voice assistants, it’s typically only one person talking and they tend to speak more slowly and clearly than usual.

They also often ask shorter questions, like “what’s the weather?,” not carry on long conversations.

“Human meetings are much more complicated, it usually involves at least two people, and the people could talk for an hour. It’s a long-form conversation.”

With Otter, the goal is to capture those conversations – meetings, interviews, lectures, etc. – and turn them into a searchable archive where everything said is immediately transcribed by Otter's software.

The entire technology stack, including speech recognition, was built in-house. The company is not using existing speech recognition APIs, because they wanted to improve the accuracy, and optimize for multiple speakers, says Liang.

To identify when someone else starts talking, Otter uses a technology called diarization to separate each individual speaker; it then generates a voice print for each person’s voice.

Broadly speaking, this is like the voice equivalent to facial recognition, with the voice print being used to identify the speaker going forward.

Sam envisions a number of potential use cases for Otter's technology, including in enterprise, health care, education, phone calls and more.

We talked about the many changes he has seen from his early days at IBM with mainframes and learning programming languages such as Fortran through to today's newer technologies such as blockchain.

Dave talked about why he believes 2007 was a significant milestone year for technology with the combined introduction/adoption of cloud computing, social media and mobile phones.

We ended up talking about how 2020 will be the next critical key technology year with the introduction/adoption of 5G, AI, Blockchain, IPFS & Smart Contracts aka it's the dawn of the Web 3.0 era.

We then talked through the challenges Andy faced in building two online publishing and advertising companies.

In 1999 he founded one of the UK's first digital publishing businesses & first vertical ad-network in the UK, Net Communities, and in 2015 sold it to Future plc.

Frustrated with ad quality, transparency and brand safety online, he co-founded award-winning viewability technology provider OnScroll in 2013, which after tremendous growth, he sold to Sovrn Holdings, Inc. in April 2016, where he worked until May 2019.

We also talked about the future of print publishing, advertising and especially podcasting as Andy started the UK's first Podcast production company in 2005.

Dave's quote below pretty much sums up my thinking about voicefirst development for the next generation of the web.

"I feel like voice is the new HTML" - Dave Isbitski

Today Richard is starting a new stealth ‘AI focused’ startup in the fintech space. We also briefly talked about how machine learning on large volumes of data can help with trading.

Most salespeople have a wishbone, not a backbone. And they qualify in sales by being given a business card and a phone and told you are one.

Professional selling is like any other profession, you need to work at it. You need to train constantly. So most sales training, frankly, is a total waste of money, you would be better at buying a bunch of lottery tickets. - Marcus Cauchi

He also has a new book 'MAKING CHANNEL SALES WORK': Ten Tools to Create a World-Class Third-Party Selling Program.

Hugh and I first met in 2005 in central London at the Tex Mex in Trafalgar Square at an event with Robert Scoble. Hugh was kind enough to do me a unique drawing for the launch of Techcrunch UK in 2006 which hangs on the wall of my study.

Hugh is one of the most creative and lateral thinking people I have had the pleasure to meet in my 30+ career in technology. - Sam Sethi

Hugh explained that he nearly gave up creating his mini masterpieces. I am so glad he decided to review that awful decision.

We also talked about my prediction for a new Amazon 'Phoenix' Phone, the future of Alexa and his upcoming music revival gig in London.

We also discussed the new Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 (which costs £999) it's a newer version of its business-focused Glass augmented reality headset.

Robert also gave us his insight about what and when Apple might release the 5G iPhone and possibly Apple glasses?

Other companies we discussed include Amazon, MagicLeap, Bose and Unity.

Robert's BooK

Scoble is writing a new book about Spatial Computing and recording his thoughts using Otter.AI to transcribe his thoughts.

We also talked about the impending 'Cloud Wars' between Google, Amazon, Microsoft and some of the other players such as Alibaba and IBM plus who might win.

Think of this as a distributed and trusted newer version of WhoIs Domain Lookup but with more detailed information, that is validated by the community who are paid in 'Tokens' to ensure its validity and maintained over time.

Then in the future, the information stored on the MetaCert Protocol can be used by developers using an API to build products or services to address issues such as phishing, malware, brand protection, child safety, and fake news credibility.

The biggest talking point was around the terabytes of data collection this enables and how AI will be used to build smarter cities that flow and are less polluted.

Paul also talked about his days as European MD of Netscape (he was my boss) and the 'browser wars' as well as his time as GM Europe of Real Media and the early days of video streaming which led us to discuss the current 'content wars' between Amazon Prime, Netflix and the recently announced Apple TV +

Josh is also the co-founder of Tech For UK which tried to engage communities from all over the UK to fight Brexit and campaign for a meaningful vote on the terms of Brexit using tech and social media.

Nicole was formerly the Director of Ogilvy Innovation Labs

Experiential marketing is a growing trend which involves marketing a product or a service through experiences that engage the customers and create an emotional attachment to the product/service.

Physical and interactive experiences are used to reinforce the offer of a product and make customers feel as if they are part of them.

Experiences are positively related to customer's attitudes, mood and behaviours. They also represent a means through which a company can gain a competitive advantage by differentiating itself from competitors.

To achieve success, experience should be engaging, compelling and able to touch the customer's senses and capture his/her loyalty.

Nowadays, experiential marketing is getting more technologically advanced and personalised. The widespread of the Internet and the increasing competition among online retailers has led to the rise of Virtual Experiential Marketing (VEM).

VEM uses the Internet and its various channels to create an enriched and engaging experience by using visual and audio tools. VEM relies on an electronic environment that engages customers and arouses their emotional responses to create an unparalleled experience and consequently capture their loyalty.

The elements which characterize virtual experiential marketing are: sense, interaction, pleasure, flow and community relationship. Furthermore, affective involvement has been identified as a key factor which affects online purchase intention.

Thus, the online experience must emphasize an emotional appeal to the consumer in order to build purchase intention.

We discussed how the non-western world is culturally different and is adopting the web differently to how we in the west adopted it.

Some of the biggest victims in 2018 include T-Mobile, Quora, Google, and Orbitz. Facebook dealt with a slew of major breaches and incidents that affected more than 100 million users of the popular social network.

Matt helped us understand how companies can manage this privacy & data risk before they face significant GDPR fines.

We also discussed my idea of Company Directors needing a license to start and run a company. We don't allow people to drive a car or speed boat without a license but we do allow any Tom, Dick or Harriette to start a company for less than £100.

Just knowing what your fiduciary duties are as a director and what you need to file before you start on your next big idea would seem sensible. Equally refreshing the license every few years would allow Directors to keep abreast of the latest developments.

We also talked about the recent trend in companies helping us take back ownership and control of our data such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Solid and Sarah's company Digi.me Will Web 4.0 be all about unlocking/reclaiming our data from silos like Facebook & Twitter. 

Will we get paid for our time and attention in bitcoin tokens like the Brave browser by Brendan Eich? 

From the potential new EU tax link & copyright filtering laws, fake news removal, through to the new proposed social media taxes, the GAFA's are under attack for more EU regulation.

The UK parliament even issued a damning verdict today on Facebook and said, "Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law"

We will also discuss Kevin Kelly's new article in Wired called MirrorWorlds 'the dawn of the third internet platform’ which is the one I am most excited about.

We talked about what is an ICO and is it a better way for startups to raise money using tokens instead of equity shares? We also talked about the newly announced bank backed STO's. And finally, when will this securely distributed ledger (web 3.0) finally go mainstream?

If you want to learn everything about the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, then this podcast will break it all down for you and piece it altogether to describe how we are going to build the distributed web 3.0 and the dark web in this coming decade.

We also discussed the 'big nine' corporations--Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM and Apple--who are the new gods of AI and how they are short-changing our futures to reap immediate financial gain.

The subsequent rollercoaster ride is an amazing story in itself which they tell in this podcast.

They talked about how the lows were low but the subsequent recent highs have been great. Penny has since written a book about her experiences called ‘Business is Personal’

Penny told us in practical terms how she fixed herself and came back to run a successful Mastermind coaching business and was awarded an OBE from the Queen in 2014 for services to business.

This interview is open and very raw with warts and all but you come away feeling invigorated and rooting for Thomas and Penny as they embark on the next chapter of their life journey together.

We talked about the market opportunity for CBD oil and discussed the hotspots in the world with the UK surprisingly being one of them.

Ninety five tonnes of marijuana were produced in the UK in 2016 for medicinal and scientific use, accounting for 44.9 percent of the world total.

We finally talked about what investors are looking for in new cannabis startups in this new 'green space’?

With a lounge full of boxes and packaging material Suzie realised she was on to something.

Suzie talks about how she found her co-founder, her first investors, the ups & downs of raising money, trying to close high street retailers, while juggling payments on several credit cards before finally securing a £3m investment from NVM Private Equity.