The long road to the last mile : Nic Humphries and Matthew Brockman reflect on 25 years of Hg
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How did Hg’s founders decide to focus exclusively on software investment?
There's always this sort of trial, we're very fast to do things, we see if it works, we follow, we drop stuff if it doesn't work. That experimental phase, or that sort of entrepreneurial experimentation, I think has been really in the DNA. Even today, I still think we trial stuff. Even if you think about AI, we trial stuff very quickly, we see if it works. We're quite happy to make some errors. It's just kind of really in the culture.
Entrepreneurism, innovation definitely is the DNA that I think still kind of goes through us. And of course as you get bigger there's a risk you lose some of that, so you have to kind of really refocus and re-kind of concentrate on it.
Can you could you tell Matthew your first impressions of him when you first met? What were your first impressions of Matthew?
Very good looking guy.
So we find ourselves in a restaurant at eleven AM in the morning, um, talking about our kind of twenty fifth kind of anniversary and we've not even been provided with any decent drinks. Do you want to start off with kind of like how you think about kind of like what's happened to the firm over that period of time?
Uh I'll start with saying it's probably the worst twenty-fifth birthday party I think I've ever been to in my life. Um so far. Two two I said two glasses of it. Yeah, exactly. It gets better from here. Um well I joined part in the journey, right? I mean I came after ten years. So I still feel like a bit like the new boy in town, if I'm completely honest with the look, I mean it's transformational, right? I mean f even for the for the version I saw, which was probably fifty people in a room in London, largely, it's very small operation in in Munich when I joined. I mean, you just think about Not just the scale of the organization, but just the reach and the number of companies we built and the people we employ more broadly and the clients we serve.
I mean it's just been an extraordinary, extraordinary run just in terms of the yeah, where we've where we've the sort of level we've reached now. As we sort of come out of our teenage years and we start to become semi mature. Yeah. So what were you I mean
like What were your initial impressions? 'Cause you know, we were chatting for couple of years at least before you joined and we needed to kinda find something that was like meaningful to grab you out of Apex, which at the time of course was a much bigger, much more storied, much more kind of prestigious firm. So like in a lot of ways you were coming from a firm that was already hitting kind of like, you know, I guess ten billion dollar fund or something at the time. Eleven million euro, yeah. Yeah. Um coming to this kind of like scrappy place that was probably managing what, a couple of billion at the time and genuinely like a You must have been like, What am I?
thinking of doing here at the time. I think I told you a story once, which is I was going back to the force talking to you and a few others. And I sat in my room in an office in London in in England in the summer of 2010 with the like the pros and the minus. It's like, why should I do this? Why should I not do this? And it kind of wasn't very easy to make a decision. And ultimately you just have to trust your gut. I did it for two weeks literally trying to work out what the right trade-off was. And I in the end decided you have to trust your gut, right? And the gut was If I really brought it down, it was like if you don't do something like this now, you're never gonna have a go at something entrepreneurial.
Yeah.
And my father being an entrepreneur and I had a family and whatever, and I just thought, I'm at that age, my kids were probably three and five, so it was a little bit reckless from that perspective, if I'm completely honest with you. Don't tell my wife. Um but it was just like you're never gonna get a shot similar to this very easily. But so it's very uncertain, right? It's very hard to codify this is gonna work, it's very hard to codify exactly what you're getting into. Um and then I remember there's a second phase in twenty twelve, the end of twenty twelve, and we've been going for two years.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
How did Hg’s founders decide to focus exclusively on software investment?
0:04–5:40
2
What was Matthew Brockman’s “leap of faith” leaving Apax in 2010?
5:40–12:40
3
How did the 2012‑2013 turbulence shape Hg’s strategy?
12:40–20:10
4
What does the “last mile” concept mean for turning AI into real workflow solutions?
20:10–25:59
5
How is Hg trial‑and‑error experimentation built into its culture?
25:59–30:44
6
Why does Hg believe product‑led innovation beats traditional investment judgment?
30:44–34:18
7
How is AI expected to change Hg’s portfolio building and customer engagement?
34:18–36:04
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast
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