Greg Jackson

This episode is brought to you by Octopus Energy.

Now, you know, we love talking to entrepreneurs on this show.

So with us is the founder of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson.

Right, I'm going to start with this.

If you could change one thing to help Britain's economy grow, what would it be?

Nice one, Greg.

Well, thanks to Octopus Energy for powering this episode of The Rest Is Money.

I'd

Love to see pension funds putting more money into British businesses.

Over the last 25 years, they've fallen from 40% of their investments going to British businesses to 4%.

That's bad for business here.

It's bad for our stock market, but it's also bad for pensioners.

In fact, a Canadian pensioner will get almost double the pension from the same amount invested as a British pensioner.

We need to sort that.

Early on, the most important thing is to start building a customer base.

Until you've got customers, you have no idea whether the products and services you're offering are going to be the ones that people want.

So a lot of people spend far too much time building out pages and pages of business plans, thinking too hard about what they're going to do rather than just doing it.

You know, the great fun of launching Kraken was it was the engine that powered Octopus to grow, you know, ultimately to the biggest energy supplier in the UK with, I think, the best service.

But we were able to license it to our rivals as well.

So the interesting thing is the world is more complicated than you think.