Bridget Harris

And we've been very, very profit motivated ever since.

So over the next 20 minutes, I am here to talk to you about, first of all, the profit stack.

So I've put this together especially for this conference.

So this won't be the last you hear of it because I wanted to start to think about strategically how we have done that because profit doesn't just come from selling a £5 product for £10.

It actually comes from a much more strategic idea about how you build your company.

Metrics that matter, Nathan mentioned a few of them.

The kind of things that will tell you and indicate whether your company is profitable and then how we share that profit.

So let's just talk a little bit about profit, because as he said, VCs don't talk about profit very much.

It's only if you're really motivated to make it, you really understand what it is.

Because the news is for founders, business profit is not how investors intend to get a return on their investment.

um i don't want to overthink this but hands up if you agree the founder business plan is basically invent something make money you know i mean that really that's basically what we're trying to do that's our you know our end goal vc business plan it sounds it feels like it's the same but it's not invest in stock and trade make money

So, yeah, sure, we're all aligned to the same goal, but it's very, very different to be investing in shares, basically the value of shares going up versus making profit off a product that you can sell to customers.

And this has been our mantra as founders for the last 10, 15 years.

So I'm sure you all know this guy, Jason.

He talks about it.

Everybody recognises this whole kind of SaaS subscription economics, which is you absolutely hammer your sales and marketing.

You grow like, you know, as fast as you possibly can.

kind of numbers nathan was just talking about and then you basically ipo you exit you bet you do what you want to do to get to get it up well and that is what they have done this is the this is uh some some data that i found which shows that a lot of uh public so they've ipo they've done their big exit they're still not making any profit they're still trading in the value of the shares of their company they're not making business profit it's the value of their shares where they make money

And the problem is, is that for a lot of people, that is not good enough.

Because that VC model is, if you're being a little bit mean about it, you'd call it a Ponzi scheme.