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Hive chief John Furneaux: 'Being a Brit earns trust with Americans, but US business culture is adversarial'

Hive founder John Furneaux wants to open a London office, but is waiting for Brexit to be resolved - © Neville Elder
Hive founder John Furneaux wants to open a London office, but is waiting for Brexit to be resolved - © Neville Elder

Homegrown Tech Talent is a series that celebrates the British entrepreneurs and business leaders taking tech global – here, Hive founder John Furneaux talks taking on Slack and the joys and challenges of Americans doing business with Britons.

John Furneaux’s big break came on his way back from Burning Man. The South East London-born entrepreneur was driving home to San Francisco from the hedonistic Nevada desert festival when he regained phone signal. He had a string of voicemail messages from Thomas Korte, the elusive founder of prestigious start-up accelerator AngelPad.

Furneaux’s workplace software company Hive had initially been rejected for the programme, but a spot had since opened up – and Korte wanted him in.

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“I hadn’t been responding,” says Furneaux. “Because I don’t pick up, he’s like: ‘S***, this company must be hot. I’m Thomas Korte, I ring this founder and he’s not picking up!’ Little does he know, I’m wearing no clothes in the desert.”

Korte had been put in touch with Furneaux through other British tech entrepreneurs, Chris Le Breton and Kes Thygesen of recruitment software company RolePoint. Furneaux had met the pair and taken them out for drinks in San Francisco weeks earlier.

“If you help people in a foreign land with no expectation of return, then sometimes when you’re on your way back from a naked party in the desert, you’ll get a call that says you got into the world’s best accelerator,” laughs Furneaux, 36. “They didn’t even know what I was building – they just said: ‘He’s a good bloke.’ And I guess partly because they were Brits, which was nice.”

Maintaining niceness might be easier said than done for British entrepreneurs in the rough-and-tumble of American business culture.

But Furneaux, born in Greenwich and raised in Sidmouth, Devon, says Britain’s reputation for fair play has helped him to get ahead in New York. Hive is taking on competitors including Slack, Microsoft and Asana, founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz.

America, Furneaux acknowledges, is the most competitive market in the world for “software as a service”, but he decided anyway to set up in New York instead of starting smaller in London.

“Got to set the bar high,” he says, grinning. “You've got to go to the crucible. If you want to win the biggest fight, you’ve got to take on the scariest person.”

Plus, Americans love doing business with Britons. “Americans guess, correctly, that we play with a very straight bat – and I’ve found it very helpful in earning trust.

“Being a start-up, one of your biggest challenges is how to earn trust, because you're small and unproven. Being a Brit has helped in that because people correctly presume that we're earnest.”

Hive has successfully won contracts with American firms and institutions including Harvard University, Starbucks, Uber and IBM, as well as British clients including the Economist and PR giant WPP.

Gentlemen’s agreements, handshakes and giving someone your word mean a lot in the UK, but the Americans handle things differently. “American business culture is adversarial – I don’t mean that in a horrible way or a negative way or a nasty way. But everyone understands that.”

“Fair play” helps Hive to get business with American firms, but could it also make it a sitting duck? Possibly, says Furneaux, to the extent that British negotiators need training on how to watch out for the cutthroat Americans.

In one of his first jobs as a consultant, he had “cultural adjustment training”, which was designed to warn unsuspecting Brits that “gentlemen’s agreements” count for very little on the other side of the Atlantic.

Furneaux, who studied law and mathematics at Cambridge University, followed his consulting role with a job at Huddle, another British-founded software company, where he eventually worked as the global head of customer success.

Huddle, valued at one point at up to $300m, sold in 2017 to a private equity firm for around $89m, two years after Furneaux and both co-founders left. Huddle had been UK-founded but then tried to break America. Did he learn anything from that experience?

“It’s my possibly incorrect but heartfelt belief that the US is the hardest SAAS (software as a service) market in the world,” he says.

Potential customers are being bombarded with pitches from competitors. “Americans have the latest shiny stuff advertised to them, way more than people in London do,” he says. “It’s not that companies cannot expand from the UK to America – of course they can; the Beatles did.

“It’s [more] that I don't believe that a company should not assume that its product market fit, or market success in the UK or Europe, will translate to the same level of penetration in the US, because the consumers just know more about their options.”

Customers, he says, “have got a list of six. You’re going to have to beat the other five.”

He thinks that Hive has the edge because it's user-friendly. “The Telegraph website doesn't give out a handbook that it mails to everyone so they can use the website. So why on earth do we put up with the idea that the tools we use at work have to come with training or a manual?”

The number of apps and software logins that office workers have to contend with can now stretch into the double figures. The best-known upstart is Slack, but there’s also Trello, for task management; Okta, for security logins; Citrix, for remote working; Evernote, for note-taking; plus Google Drive, email and countless apps for calling and communication.

Hive has ambitions to be the one that unites them all. “We just don’t believe that our kids will have 75 work apps,” Furneaux says.

Furneaux built the first version of the software “halfway up a mountain” in Lake Tahoe, the California ski resort a few hours from the San Francisco Bay Area, which is popular with techies. “I coded and I ate, and I coded and I ate some more. I came down the mountain. I was also sunburnt because I'm as Caucasian as they come. So I was hilariously sunburnt and fat, but I had at least made this appalling first version of Hive.”

Unlike other tech entrepreneurs, he left Silicon Valley behind and decided instead to found his company on the east coast. “For the software we make, there's simply hugely more normal businesses on the east coast than on the west coast,” he says. “Normal” means advertising, finance, law and manufacturing – basically anything other than tech.

“We are massively more popular – proportionally, almost everyone we deal with is ‘normal’,” he says. “If you can win the hearts and minds of someone who doesn’t really like tech, that’s the game – that’s the challenge.”

Furneaux wants to open a London office and says that he has plenty of American employees desperate to move to the UK – but he’s waiting for Brexit to be resolved. His board will ask why he doesn’t open the European office in Ireland, Paris or Geneva and avoid the Brexit drama.

“I want to go to London – I just want it to be settled so we could do so with certainty,” he says.

In New York, Hive’s next steps are a move in the New Year to a brand new office in the World Trade Centre. Revenue has grown fourfold and staff numbers in New York have doubled from 20 to more than 50 this year.

“When we fly into JFK and my mum is like: ‘Where’s the Hive office?’ I want to be like: there,” he says, miming pointing out of a plane window.