Nick Jenkins, Moonpig founder, discusses being an entrepreneur in the UK & his lessons in business

Former Dragon and founder of Moonpig, Nick Jenkins, answers questions about life in Russia working in commodities, failing before he experienced success and that infamous Moonpig jingle.

Mr Jenkins Mr Jenkins founded Moonpig in 2000 on his return to the UK and subsequently sold the business in 2011 for £120 million. He appeared as a ‘dragon’ on Dragon’s Den in the show’s 13th & 14th seasons and continues to invest in start-ups.

SUBSCRIBE for more speakers ► http://is.gd/OxfordUnion
SUPPORT the Oxford Union ► https://oxford-union.org/supportus
Oxford Union on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theoxfordunion
Oxford Union on Twitter: @OxfordUnion
Website: http://www.oxford-union.org/

ABOUT THE OXFORD UNION SOCIETY: The Oxford Union is the world’s most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. Since 1823, the Union has been promoting debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.

The Oxford Union is deeply grateful and encouraged by the messages of support in response to our determination to uphold free speech. During our 200 year history, many have tried to shut us down. As the effects of self-imposed censorship on university campuses, social media and the arts show no signs of dissipating, the importance of upholding free speech remains as critical today as it did when we were founded in 1823. Your support is critical in enabling The Oxford Union to continue its mission without interruption and without interference. You can support the Oxford Union here: https://oxford-union.org/supportus

Spookiest moment I had was when I went to go talk at a primary school about careers and um and and the teacher said has anyone heard of moonpig and about 300 primary school kids all went like like you know so of they’ve been as they’ve been hypnotized moonpig.com I

Thought wow I mean the CIA would love to be able to get inside children’s heads like that I think we we’ll open it up to the floor now for any members that have questions for Mr Jenkins um I look to the member of the blue jacket

Uh well I think the F the first the first thing is when you’re going to start a business is you’ve got to commit to a country and and that’s quite a big thing I mean I you know I lived in Russia for I lived in Russia for for

Nine years but I but I was never going to commit to starting a business there because it wasn’t I I I just didn’t feel comfortable enough with the legal structure and so on to actually say I’m going to be here for long enough to make this business work so the first thing

You have to ask yourself is right if this works am I happy to be here for the next next 15 years every threeyear business brand takes 15 years just um and and it just takes longer um so that’s the first thing I think as a as a

Foreigner I would say there is a um there is a much more vibrant entrepreneurial Community now and a much more vibrant investor community in Britain um than there has been there certainly was 20 years ago uh we have a very good um a lot of tax incentives for entrepreneurs who’ve exited businesses

To reinvest in stter businesses through the Eis scheme and the seis scheme which have been very very successful and encouraging people like me to reinvest um because the the very best people at judging whether or not a startup is going to work is someone who’s been through that cycle themselves if you had

A government Department that was dishing out cash trying to work out the best startup to invest and they would make a hash of it so what they realized very early on is what we need to do is just encourage entrepreneurs to take risk some of their money and we will chip in

The tax they would have paid and that’s the incentive for them to to want to encourage that um so I think we have a very um uh encouraging uh environment we’re not as bold as uh as the American startup Community I think it’s easier to raise large amounts of money uh in

America but then the scale of the opportunity in America is so much bigger when I look at one of the businesses I’m involved in where we look at um uh we’re about to break into America and we look at midsize firms that have a turnover of five billion I think that’s massive um

So I understand why people are prepared to invest more money in startups and I think also they’re prepared to throw throw more money at the wall and hope some of it sticks um uh whereas here I think you have to work quite hard in the early stages to raise money uh but um

But I think it’s I think it’s a very it’s a very welcoming environment and and also the fact that someone is someone is is is is foreign doesn’t make any difference whatsoever um um you know people always welcome welcoming new ideas L to the member in in the back bench

Um yeah I I I think you need when when you first when you first started once once you’ve got to a position where you have enough money to be able to to to guarantee that you’re actually going to be able to pay them for more than a year

Um uh then then suddenly you’re into higher H ing a different League of people you’re hiring people who are who are not worried about the risks of being in a startup you know the risk of joining a startup is that you run out of money in three months time and and and

Entrepreneurs tend to be pretty bad at crashing things into the ground and then telling everyone really sorry but I can’t actually pay your salary for the last two months and we’ve just gone under so a lot of people don’t want that quite understandably so when you have

That when you have enough money to be able to pay them properly then then that’s I do think it’s important to make people feel included through option schemes and and um uh but you know there are ways in which you can you can give incentivize people with a share in the

Business without actually just constantly giving out shares you know you do it through an option scheme that if they’re there at the end when it when it exits they will benefit but if they leave quickly they don’t um so um but but by and large when you can afford to

Pay people proper salary they’re not sacrificing anything so they’re just like any other any other hire whereas the ones that you try to get on board when you have no money those guys are the guys who are taking a risk that they’re not going to get paid or they’re

Taking a pay cut um and and that’s a that is a different kettle of fish I recognize the member in the front row there y yeah I mean it’s it’s a really interesting one because there hadn’t been one for a while um you what you find with sound bites is they they

Jingles as they’re known they there’s a rash of them and then everyone gets a bit sick of them and thinks oh no Jingles ready p a no one does them for a few years and then someone says no one’s done a jingle for a few years I think we

Can get away with it and so we we just caught it right I think we were um um we were there at the same time as um the other the go compare go compare happened around about the same time um so there were a couple run but it it it

It worked I think the other thing is we only spent £30,000 on the advert so it the the production values were quite different from the production values of other adverts which sort of made it stand out you know by being a bit cheap but funny enough you need to stand out

And um so you’d be watching a whole lot of very very slick adverts of motor car you know you get a whole lot of lovely music and I’ve got no idea what this is about but it’s lovely and then m.com and what the what what was that um and so it

Sort of it J and and that’s kind of you need to wake people up in the season what was that that you know not like an advert I’ve seen so that was the interesting thing about adver I had to learn is that we had to educate people about we had 30

Seconds and 80 maximum of 80 words to be able to convey the idea first of all this is a real this is a real greeting card because when we first started and obviously no one else had done this before um people would people would say

I I chat to them about it and they go so these are eCards no they’re not eard no these are real cards so we had to get over the idea first of all that these were real cards so we had to show a real person com through a letter box arriving oh so

It’s something comes through then we had to show somebody on a screen replacing the name within the front page of the of the card so that so people didn’t understand that the personalization wasn’t just happy birthday John lots of love Nick it was about changing the

Front the front page so we had to convey a lot of message in that in that advert um and and then get people to remember the name um so the jingle was very very helpful that spookiest moment I had was when I went to again talk at a primary

School about careers and um and and the teacher said has anyone heard of moonpig and about 300 primary school kids all went like like you know sort of they’ve been as though they’ve been hypnotized moonpig.com I thought wow I mean the CIA would love to be able to get inside

Children’s heads like that but um uh so it’s very very powerful stuff um and you know I you know we all remember the Jingles from our youth um and you know we had a Mars a day helps you work rest and play that was a big one when I was

Around um they work well could you talk a bit more about the carbon technology uh yes so uh so I’m I have a large St in a company called Green energy options and we make we make the inhome displays that go inside when you get a smart meter fitted you get an

Inhome display that tells you how much energy electricity and gas you’re you’re using and our next generation of that is it combines with a uh a thermostat and um and controls your boiler now here’s a very I mean I I I could talk interesting I could talk about Plumbing for quite a

Long time which I but I do have enough selfawareness to know that’s not a very interesting subject for most people but people talk when you buy a gas boiler people they sell you it on the basis that it’s 95% efficient um what they don’t tell you is that it’s only 95%

Efficient if you have if you have it heating the water at below 70 degrees every single installer who installs these things turns the the the the volume up high so almost every boiler in this country is is operating at 70% efficiency so there’s a potential to

Save 20% of the gas bill of the amount of gas used in heating um in the UK and and so the the the new version of our device um talks to the boiler regardless of whatever setting it’s on it talks to the boiler in a way that makes sure that

It’s always on the most efficient setting and and that that itself could save an enormous amount of gas being with the houses will be just as warm but it will just by using a bit of intelligence it will uh it will um save an enormous amount of gas in in heating

So that’s the kind of thing that I’m looking for the the other thing we get involved in is is the management of the grid we’re going to have to Electrify a lot of our homes in the next 20 years and the problem you have with that is

That if every Tom Dick and Harry has an electric water heater and they flick it on um then it would all be about 8:00 so there would be a massive Surge and and you have to build your electrical system to cope with whatever the surge is so

There’s a lot of money in managing the demand um and trying to work how can we do that so if we have a large battery in the house what we can do is we can is we can we can trickle feed that battery and then the battery can feed that spur so

What the system sees is just a constant demand of electricity so there lots lots of really interesting stuff which will help us solve the problem of how do we get to carbon zero um and and there it’ll be a combination of a lot of different solutions um and that’s the

Bit that I find I find really really uh fascinating I I I recently installed ground Source heat pumps in in my house my house is 420 years old and people said it will never work it’ll never work it works brilliantly um even this week um so uh so so that’s that’s been there

A combination really of I the the technology is kind of simple enough for me to understand you know I’m not that bright um so it’s not too difficult and I can get my head round I love the physics of it and I love the understanding the big how it fits in

With the bigger picture of how we generate electricity in and Power in the country um and and ultimately it’s a problem we’re going to have to crack so um so I find that really interesting like Russ a lence well I mean having moved from the commodity trading business in in in

Moscow where I lost six of my clients to gunfire or bombs um to go into the greeting car business was quite a pleasant change um uh to my knowledge nobody has been murdered in the greeting car business in the UK um for quite a

Long time so I mean there was a uh so it was uh it was it was a well it was a welcome I mean I thoroughly enjoyed it and I really I led my time in in Russia but commodity trading was a bit of a that was that was a tough environment to

Be in I I um I wasn’t involved aluminium was the worst I mean the the guys in our aluminium Department had this bulletproof car bombproof car that that you they had to pick up clients in and nobody wanted to drive it because everybody it was always the driver that

Got it um um and um but um those were interesting times um there have been a few big success a few successes that I saw during my time there um Oppo ice cream I think you probably have heard of that one um that came on the show relatively

On they’ve done really really well uh they didn’t they didn’t take I I can’t remember I think I might have offered invest they didn’t take investment in the end uh but they went on to to do very well um uh there have been one of

My the two ones that that did very well that I invested in was the SC Sublime science which was a children’s science party business uh which we I think we sold 18 months after we invested in it that did that did very well which is great fun um and the and the snaffling

Pig pork scratching business which went on to to do very well uh but but then there are you know equally there are some that have just um I it’s very interesting going back and I I go through occasionally go through the list of all the ones I looked at and just

Check them on company’s house and see if they how they or look them up on Google and see if they’re still going um the reality is business is quite tough and um a lot of them a lot of them just plot on as they were and they they they don’t

Really grow They Don’t Really shrink there are a lot of businesses that just don’t don’t grow um it’s easy when you when you speak to the sort of the entrepreneurial the young startup Community there’s a sort of belief that you know everything will oh we’ll start

Here and we’ll go to there and we’ll go to there and the reality is not many companies do and there is a bit of Survivor bias in that in that the people who come to talk to you at places like this are generally the people who uh who

Have have done well so you don’t hear um from the people who who failed um at at my business school we used to get entrepreneurs to come and talk to us we had one guy who’d invested his entire family fortune in a Cutlery business in Sheffield and he’d start his thing by

Saying I’ve been invited here to tell you how things can go wrong my company was a complete disaster and I lost all my money and this is how it happened and and I was so grateful that he would come up and talk to us about failure because

Very often people you know people don’t so you have to understand how many companies how many companies just you know either never really grow or just just die what more what happens more often than not is that they make enough money to keep the to keep the the entrepreneur uh alive

Never enough money to pay any dividends and no one ever buys them and that’s sort of a zombie investment um you know it’s the Living Dead uh doesn’t you don’t get any return from that at all um and that that’s the the worst you I I’d rather they died early failed early or

You know or did well later on but so I have one last question for you before we wrap up um what piece of advice would you give to the students of the University of Oxford and our members um um and can you give us something to to think about this

Week yeah I I I I I I talk at quite a lot of schools about entrepreneurship as a career and um there are two paths to entrepreneurship you can either um learn about a particular sector be employed for 20 years get all the contacts get all the knowledge of a sector and then

After 20 years approach investors and say I know all about this sector I would like to invest for you to invest in me to do my own thing that’s one way of going about it um and by that point you’ve got proven back you you’re much more investable because

You’ve got experience a bit of maturity and you’ve got contacts and you know the sector that you’re in um so you’re more likely to get investment but you’re also at a stage when it’s quite difficult to take risk on the other hand if you start when you’re 20

21 you can afford to fail I if you’re already on nothing and you haven’t got anything you haven’t got very far to go back so you you can afford to fail a couple of times and every time you fail you’ll learn something more from that and eventually you’ll and you have to

Pick businesses that don’t require a huge amount of investment there are plenty of businesses that start up without any investment and and grow organically and and get there and you might start one and that grows lots of student you find lots of students who start businesses uh organizing parties

Organizing events or and that that then morphs into something else they do after after University but it’s about cutting your teeth as a as an entrepreneur and learning a bit about you learn a bit about law and and and you you you gradually pick it up and five or 10

Years in by the time you’re 30 you’re actually quite experienced at at business and you’ve got a you’ve got a couple of things that have done well and by that point you can end up doing the thing that you you’ll then become become more investable and so so I do think

That it isn’t um uh and people often say is it you know it’s always such a risky career the one advice I would give to you from my position now I’m now 56 I don’t feel it but I am apparently um is that when you’re 56 the worst thing is

When you’ve had a career in banking and you get made redundant at a point when you have family to support you’ve got school fees you’ve got the most expensive time of your life you lose your job in banking when you’re 50 you’re not going back in and that is far

More risky than than than having a few failures when you’re 20 if you can learn to employ yourself you will always employ yourself regardless of however old you might be um and and regardless of so you will never be prejudiced against yourself um so learning those entrepreneurial skills and learning how

To employ yourself very early on is actually bizarrely not a risky thing to do it’s actually an insurance policy for later on um and and just remember if you start with nothing and you end up with nothing you’re no worse off um so um so that that’s perhaps the message I’d

Leave and as a career um it’s a very exciting one there’s never been the most important thing I think I’ve learned from it is that I have never had I’ve had I’ve had exciting in moments I’ve had terrifying moments I have never been bored and I’ve

Done some jobs in the past where I’ve been bored had a dreadful job at University when I had to I clerical job where I was copying licensed details from one Ledger into another Ledger and by 10:30 I’d be looking at the clock thinking please let it be 5:00 no it’s

10:30 ah it was physically painful it was so boring um but I’ve never been born I’ve always you know in life you want to get to you you want to get to 5:00 and wish it was still 2:00 because You’ got loads more that you would like

To get done you never want to get to 2:00 and wish it was 5:00 and a lot of people end up doing jobs because they look like great careers and they think they’ll get a fantastic salary and they get to 2 o00 and they wish it was 5:00

Or if you’re a lawyer you wish it was 11 o’clock in the evening so you could go home you know because they have to work late but the um that that’s perhaps the one thing I’d leave you with is is you know it entrepreneurship as a career is

Is a you know is not as risky as you might think it would be and there’s never a dull moment well well thank you so much for coming to be with us this evening and it’s been a real pleasure to to speak with you um yeah thank you all so much

Thank you very much