Yahoo Finance My first boss: Gerard Grech, Tech Nation CEO
The people who helped shape some of Britain's greatest leaders
Gerard Grech is founding CEO of Tech Nation, which offers support for growing UK tech firms. Grech, 50, has over 20 years’ experience in digital media, web, venture capital and start-up development in London, Paris and New York. His career has helped build hundreds of digital products and develop business strategy in technology businesses. After a decade of Tech Nation supporting the UK’s start-up sector, the UK government pulled its £12m funding in January.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a front row seat in how things have evolved in technology for the past two decades.
When I went to Orange as group head of music and video in 2001, it was at a turning point when music and mobile phones were converging in the telecoms business. Dutchman Peter Verkade was the chief commercial officer there; he spent time with me and was my first real mentor. He taught me how to be front and centre at meetings and how to present myself when I was securing funding for big projects, when so many people have different agendas in the business.
You may have your own department and team priorities, but spending time and understanding how these align with the business as a whole makes a huge difference, as does meeting people who have influence over funding for your projects internally.
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Peter taught me how to balance out what I was saying, and showed me how important it is to meet people who have influence over a decision individually and take the time understand their needs, in order for a big project to come off in a large organisation. This was key for me having worked for myself previously. It isn’t just about your product and service, it's about how it adds value to the larger business.
Valuing relationships is a big part of this. The people you meet have their own objectives and it's about finding common ground and working from there. He taught me to pay attention to the finances of the project. You may have a great idea but I learned how to back it up with evidence and make the numbers as credible as possible before going before the investment committee.
Peter was very charismatic and would say the unexpected in big meetings. It would disarm people and his charm resonated with the CFO and CEO. That in itself was very positive. While we were under pressure to deliver 3G and make bold bets, he reminded all of us that it was a privilege to be working in such an innovative area and not to forget that.
One of my projects was trying to develop a music community on mobile. I was excited about it and I wrote an email to Apple to scope their interest in a music phone with Orange. I didn’t realise at the time that they had other plans in how it was evolving.
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The best way to understand the market is to create it. We were doing trials with customers and that was the beauty of innovation. After five years, I went to Paris to be director of strategy and business development at France Telecom, who had acquired Orange. I did a Facebook deal in 2006 which was an early initiative of a mobile operator venturing into new growth areas. It gave me confidence in how to strike deals and raise the time and resources required to make a pan European, multi-country deal.
This later helped when Tech City became Tech Nation in 2014 after several funding rounds with government – and staying focused on what needed to happen in the market and then agreeing with the proposition.
Research shows that when you bring together different domains you can generate extreme value. Tech Nation was working with government, investors and entrepreneurs, and it captalised on the changes and brought forward a transformative industry where the UK is now third in the world after the US and China. When we first started there were only four places where a tech unicorn existed, now there are over 20.
We are extremely proud of the work we did together at Tech Nation in making sure we connected the dots between all the elements of the ecosystem. Now is an exciting time in a different way, such as how to commercialise scientific discoveries, because our challenges are becoming more complex and intergovernmental.
Leadership has evolved from more authoritative to more influence based. As we are entering a growth slowdown and we have to innovate so much more. I am interested in how we turn a nation to be more pro-innovation; it means testing and trialling different things and not having the answer to everything. There is an exciting decade ahead.
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