Alex Caccia

I'm Alexander Caccia. I'm based in Oxford and I'm an entrepreneur and have been an entrepreneur since I was in my early 20s, starting and growing companies. And that's what I'm doing now. But I'm running more than one company, which we can talk about in a minute.

I suppose I spend about a third of my time dealing with technical problems, really trying to understand what we're building because, you know, the companies I'm involved in are all solving quite complex pieces of technology. So I'll spend a lot of time with the engineers, you know, understanding and making suggestions.

And about a third of my time managing. So, you know, when you build a company, you build a team, and you have to figure out how to build that team and build the culture and recruit people and so forth.

And about a third of my time is involved with investment and raising money for the companies and really speaking to people who are either customers or investors who have either invested in the company or are buying our products.

So it's about that balance, I'd say.

Well, I mean, it's a classic thing, but there is no such thing as a typical day.

The usual thing that happens is that not everything's working perfectly. That's just a rule of life.

And I'm much more interested in understanding where the problems are. So because I just have a little motto, which is that kind of good news sort of takes care of itself. Bad news is what , you know, the difficulties and the problems is what you've got to unearth.

And that may sound daunting, but it's actually what's interesting about doing this. I mean, if everything was simple, it would be boring, but it's not.

So spending time digging in, really trying to understand the problems and help people work together to solve them. That's the sort of characteristic of a typical day.

But I do have, again, a mixture. I have very regular meetings every week, because it's important to keep a kind of rhythm of activity. And then there are regular patterns over the course of one to two months.

So when you're doing a project, and in particular in a business, in a sort of technology business, one of the most important things is to develop at pace, in other words, develop really quite quickly.

Now it's very easy to sort of go off track when you do that. So what I tend to do is have phases where we're developing very, you know, very intensely, and then phases where we stop and pause, and everyone talks to each other and we regroup and everyone kind of understands what everybody else is doing. And then we rethink and then plan and then do another another phase of intensive work.

So there's a sort of there's a there's a pattern within the chaos. But of course, if something goes wrong, then I have to drop everything and focus on focus on that.

Well, I think it sort of goes back to the first... I've worked with the sort of engineering teams and designers and that I'm the Chief Executive. And so when I'm with them, I spend most of my time listening to what they're doing.

And the most important thing in my mind is to ensure that there's a very what I call a very trusting culture amongst the people that I work with in that environment.

Just simply because when you're solving problems, it's quite delicate actually and surprising that sometimes the best ideas come from the shyest people.

And in a meeting situation, you often find that the shyest people are the most reluctant to put their ideas forward. And so you have to encourage people to put their ideas forward and sort of manage the culture so that that can happen naturally.

And then the other thing, of course, is everyone's frightened of being responsible for or having to deal with something going wrong.

So you might think from the outside that business is all about being tough and busy and showing off and leadership is about bossing everybody around. But actually if you're building anything difficult or complex, it's actually the opposite.

You have to have a very, very trusting group of people. And it takes quite a lot of time. It takes a year at least to get people working together in a way that they can function like that.

So that's one group and that's I have to say one of the groups I enjoy the most.

Management is a different thing, which is really about creating an environment where that can happen.

So in a technology business, you typically have a small number of people doing the kind of deep technical work, and then a whole team whose job it is to support them. So that's, you know, the people involved with recruitment, contracting, business development, finance and so forth.

But it's all equally important and I don't really believe in a sort of hierarchy of importance in a business. And you do have to take an awful lot of care to make sure that that side of it is working well. So I had to take a similar approach working with them.

And then the third group is dealing with board and investors.

And that's kind of different because the relationship with your board and investors really shouldn't be too cosy, actually. You might think the opposite, but actually the board is there to really ask difficult questions that you may not have thought of yourself and make sure you're addressing them. And also to hold me as Chief Executive to account.

And much as it sounds nice to be completely in charge like a dictator, actually things don't work as well like that.

It's better to have to explain to people what you're doing because you find that in explaining things you can work out where you've made mistakes. And we all do that. We all kind of think we've got the answer. And then when you find that when you're asked to explain exactly why you think you've got the answer, then the cracks begin to appear and that's really important in business.

And then with investors, you know, everything I do requires capital to make it work. So you need to raise money to do it. Because we're developing stuff, we're developing a product that requires, you know, money to pay for the engineers in order to build it.

And the investors, you know, we're asking them to put their money into the company to get a return. And they are, you know, they need to be quite skeptical about it, they need to be asked all the really tough questions, because certainly in the early stage of businesses, many, many fail and obviously they don't want to lose their money.

And so you have to kind of expect the discussions are going to be pretty tough.

And oddly enough, I quite enjoy that. There's a competitive side to me. I like kind of playing sport and so forth. There's part of it which I think is sort of real. You can't expect everything to be easy like that.

And in some senses, if you think about it, it's also about building trust. And it's building trust against the background of people being very cynical and expecting things to go wrong. So you have to be prepared for that as being an entrepreneur.

The best thing is seeing an idea come to life and building a team that get really fired up about seeing that idea come to light. And a lot of the best things are actually quite simple.

I get a huge amount of pleasure out of building something and then somebody actually buys it. You think, my goodness me, they've spent their own money to buy a thing that we came up with. It's incredibly satisfying.

I think that there's a sort of funny trade off, which is the harder something is, the more satisfying it is when it works. And so you kind of, you know, for better or worse, I like tackling quite hard problems.

And so when they do start to work and come off, then that's incredibly satisfying. And, you know, yes, obviously, you want to make money, you want to make money for your shareholders and make the whole enterprise survive.

But actually, you don't, I think it's a mistake to think that you start a business purely to make money. You know, it's, you know, first of all, in the early stage in particular, it's about survival. And, you know, you make money in order to assure your ability to survive.

And then there is a very simple principle, which is that if you do something where there is a market for what you're doing, and there are customers willing to pay the price of what you're selling, and you've identified how to get to that market, then the chances are that you're going to make something that will scale and make a reasonable amount of money.

It's very, very hard to predict quite how much, quite how quickly it will scale. And one of the hardest things to work out is whether what you're building matches what people want versus against what they're prepared to pay for it.

That is actually an incredibly hard problem. And I think as an entrepreneur, probably that's what I wrestle with most, is just to try and make sure we get that right. It's very tempting to sell stuff for as little as possible, but then of course, your business is going to be less sustainable.

I think the main thing is focusing on the problem and really focusing on trying to solve a problem that people really care about.

Well, I think like a lot of things, it's slightly by chance. I started off my career in finance, having done a sort of combination of physics and philosophy as an undergraduate degree.

And then when I worked in finance, I was an investment manager and I went and I visited a lot of companies to, you know, as an investment manager to try and find out what they were doing.

And I just got fascinated in the companies themselves, in the factories, in their processes and so forth.

And, you know, I soon realised that I wanted to do that and not just do the investment bit. And I felt that I was what I call on the wrong side of the table. I wanted to be the people, I wanted to be in the team making the product and dealing with those problems rather than in the team allocating capital.

But I was fortunate and I made a little bit of money in the investment markets. And that gave me my seed capital to start my first business, which I did when I was 24.

Well, that's a very interesting question because I didn't go to school until quite late.

My parents were somewhat eccentric Bohemians and we lived in Italy on a farm, and I was home-schooled, spent most of my time kind of running around the woods and hanging out with my Italian friends.

And then I was sent to school in England, to boarding school in England. I think that, you know, schooling is brilliant, but the key thing is, if I think about it now as being asked about it, what was the most important thing about it?

There were a few teachers that were really inspirational. I had a very eccentric science teacher when I was at Prep school and I was mad about science and he gave me keys to the science laboratory, aged nine which wouldn't happen today.

I didn't have the keys for very long because I was fascinated in making explosives and you know and they soon found out. In fact, I got caught not making explosives, but trying to distill cider to make a sort of stronger alcohol using some of the lab equipment. And then the keys were taken away from me.

And the reason for saying that is that there was a sense of mischief was allowed. And it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't as if it was kind of encouraged, but there was a sort of nod and a wink to that.

I think that being an entrepreneur I certainly find there's a certain amount of mischief to it in as much as the grain of an idea is usually kind of something, you know, why are things like, why are things the way they are? Shouldn't they be different?

And there is a certain mischief in that. I mean, if you just accept everything the way it is, there's no role for mischief. But if you kind of question the way things are all the time, then it's a sort of close cousin of mischief, if you like.

I think that, you know, if anything, if anything I was given as far as education was concerned, it was the confidence to just question absolutely everything.

There was one project I did where we were designing a drone that used flapping wings as the propulsion method. And it was an incredibly difficult thing to do because it's not just like building an ornithopter or something that kind of flaps and flies. It had to do so more efficiently than a propeller.

It's actually a very, very difficult engineering problem. And I'd spent nine months with the team kind of trying all sorts of different ways of building motors and components and so forth and they all failed. I mean we couldn't get this right.

But then one point we actually got it to work and the time when it first flew the excitement in the room was just intoxicating. It was incredibly good fun.

And I particularly liked that project because there was a very, very clear goal. We had to make this thing fly under certain conditions for a certain period of time. And that that galvanized everybody.

But the excitement of actually getting it working for the first time was absolutely intoxicating.

I think that I was quite lucky in the sense that when I worked in the financial sector, I got some training in finance, which was actually incredibly good grinding for what I've done subsequently.

Neither of my parents had any idea about finance. And so I have never had any advice on how to run finances. So I think having advice a bit earlier about that, I was lucky, think, but I would say understanding how financial accounts work and all of that is actually really important.

And I've seen lots of businesses sort of go awry because that side of things has been overlooked. I think it's actually, it's very important that you kind of understand that and understand the maths of it and understand how investors will look at a business from a financial point of view.

And so as I was saying, I think I was lucky that I, that sort of, learned it in my first job, but I think if I'd been given that advice earlier by my parents, that would have been kind of really useful.

And so if I was to impart any advice, it would be, you know, embrace company accounts and get to understand how they work and how finances work.

Because actually, if you do, then the whole process of running a business and building it and making decisions becomes less of a mystery and more something that you can control or, you know, and you don't worry about.

And you know, because if you don't understand it, then you worry about it. And then it's a distraction from what you're trying to build.

So if I was to say the advice, I didn't have that advice, but I got it by chance. But what advice would I give anyone? It would be to embrace that side of it very thoroughly.