Optimism in an era of uncertainty

Hello, I'm Katie Prescott, and we've got a bonus episode for you this morning from another Times podcast The Business , which I stepped in to host this week with my colleague Dominic O'Connell . On the business we talked to the CEO and co founder of Octopus Energy Greg Jackson . And what's so interesting about his company is although it sounds like a pure energy business , actually its most lucrative product is software. Anyway, it's a fascinating convers ation and I thought you'd enjoy it . How do you go from being a market entrant to market leader in just ten years? Greg Jackson , ch whoief's the executive and co founder of Octopus Energy, has done just that. Seven million British households now use Octopus, meaning that it's pushed British gas into second place. He is a proper disruptor. Octopus is still spreading its tentacles, going into Europe , moving in to EV charging and heat pump production. But the secret source is what you don't see, the software that links the company to its customers and to energy suppliers. It's called Kraken and if you know your Norse mythology, the Kraken is a big sort of octopusy monster that comes up out of the deep and grabs your sailing ship. It sells Kraken software to other utility companies right around the world. A now octopus is going to split in two . This Kraken unit is going to be floated as a separate company, which means a whole new set of challenges and opportunities and probably a big payday for Mr Jackson. So we're going to talk to Greg Jackson today, ask him how he and his team did it and what lessons it might be for entrepreneurs who would like to follow his example . I'm Dominic O'Connell, Columnist at The Times and Business Reporter on Times Radio. And I'm Katie Prescott, host of the Times Tech podcast and sitting in for Hannah Prevat this week . From the Times and the Sunday Times This is the Business Will we put you Ringside on the Conversations we have day to day with business leaders to hear their lessons of success in life and in business So Katie, like a lot of the entrepreneurs we've had on this program, Greg Jackson started pretty young. Yeah, he was fascinated by computing when he was growing up in the eighties and he actually left school at the age of sixteen to start a computer game company, but I'm afraid it didn't quite pan out as expected. So he ended up going back to school and then onto university, but he kept this interest in tech. Yeah, and then he founded Octopus Energy about ten years ago when there was that big flowering of new companies selling energy when energy retailing was deregulated. And then of course a lot of those went bust when gas prices went nuts and then we had the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They got squeezed and that differential. But octopus didn't go under. In fact, it prospered, it did more than survived. So I think really I'm really looking forward to learning how he did that. Yeah, I remember that period so well it felt like one energy company after another was going bang week by week. Let's get him in Thanks so much for joining us today, Greg. I'd like to start right at the beginning and take you back to growing up in Halifax and later Middleborough. When I understand you were always really really interest, ed in computing and coding , tell us about those days and also I'd love to know what your first computer was. Well first of all, thank you for having me. My first computer was Azeddic Spectrum . I think in like nineteen eighty two or eighty three. Yeah, I bought it second hand. I saved up my paper around money. By the way, if you work out my age, I did a paper around illegally early . But I saved up my paper around money. Plus, mum used to give us there was a government support called the family allowance. And mum used to give me and my sister that to buy clothes and stuff, but I didn't buy clothes. I saved it to buy computing stuff. Because I bought it second hand, it was actually it didn't work when I got it. I got it out of the box and then almost immediately had to learn to tinker with it to kind of get it to do anything. But you know, it opened up a whole new world. An amazing era when you had the Zeddic spectrum, then the BBC micro which was being distributed in schools it felt like the world of computing was opening up to people for the first time. Yeah, not only with that actually, but that's responsible for so much of the things that are great in the British economy and tech today. You know, the reason that we're a FinTech leader is that so many people of my generation grew up at that time when you could get a very cheap affordable home computer and learn to code . And the technology business ARM , you know, which has produced billions of chips globally in every smartphone, basically in loads of laptop everywhere. You know, that grew out of the spectrum and BBC scene in Cambridge. So it's really interesting how we've got decades of benefit as a society, as a country from what happened then. And so what was your childhood like , and what sort of things were you coding and doing on that Z ed spedctrum. Look, so my mum and dad got divorced when I think I was about eight, my sister was seven, my brother was a year old. I don't think Mum had ever really had a job before. Suddenly, she had a mortgage and had to go and work in a pub in the evenings. And she studied by day. I think that meant that we had a lot of independence. And as a result, I've got loads of time to tinker with all these things. And I loved experimenting . So I guess almost immediately this kind of the mystique and the appeal of being able to sit there with a computer and learn to do more and more stuff on it. How was school ? I guess I did very well at school, but I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy the discipline. I think for me personally it's part of the kind of entrepreneurial mindset, which is I don't like being told what to do . I love working hard , but I love working hard on something I think is valuable. So you took a sideways route and jumped out of school at sixteen and set up a computer game business or do that. I got a job writing computer games and then after a while the chance to go freelance . But I got a great lesson in life right, which was the first game I wrote as a freelancer. I'd say the programming was excellent. If you looked at the code, it was very elegant, but the game itself actually wasn't fun to play and so it didn't get published and I'd work for a few months without earning anything and I realized just how important it is to focus on your end user and your customers rather than on the process . And that gave me a chance by way to they were just doing six four enrollments at the time, so I thought maybe I'll go and get some A levels after all. And what was the game called? I'm guessing it wasn't Lemmings. No , it was a wrestling simulator, which was quite hard to do on the spectrum, but anyway, I did it bad Cambridge followed, so it wasn't a bad decision to go back to school. What happened after that? Where did your career take you after university? I went to work for Proctor and Gamble, you know, the consumer goods business for a few years . I now feel very entitled about the decision I made there because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to build my own businesses . But I kind of felt I needed a bit of business grounding first and PNGs reckoned to be, you know, a bit like doing a real world MBA . And so I kind of intended to stay there a couple of years. It turns out by way working in a corporate can be very , very addictive . Just as you're getting dissatisfied to give you a pay rise, every six months you get a review which tells you how great you are, but also what you need to do better , and you're surrounded by people that are very like minded . And so I kind of I accidentally ended up staying four years and almost had to leave before I kind of kind of lost the will. Stay ed up staying forever. It's unlike being an entrepreneur, right? If you're in a corporate or any business, someone pays you at the end of the month. And I'm not in any way denigrating that, but I think for me personally , I'd rather be a bigger fish in a small pond than part of a corporate machine. So you ripped yourself out of the warm bath of Proctor and Gamble and threw yourself into something much more difficult. What was the genesis of octopus ? And then as we want to talk about Kraken today , what came first Octopus the Energy business or Kraken the software behind it? Yeah, so I had a series of businesses after Pain G. Some did pretty well, others not so , but eventually in year two thousand three with a couple of co founders , we started a company that built enterprise software and we had the privilege of getting to know around twenty large companies very very well as we built software to help them access new capabilities and become more efficient. Most companies have got these kind of spaghetti stacks of software that run their business, decades worth, you know, these kind of sedimentary layers have grown over time . And so anytime they want to do something new, they can't really change what they've got. So they bolt on another piece of software and it's got to integrate all over the place with a spaghetti . And so each individual piece of software you're adding may be solving one problem, but it's making your fundamental problem worse. You're building more spaghetti . And so we came up with the idea that when we comp ared large but very new companies , they had much, much simpler software because that had time to build up all the rubbish, but they were still running large companies very effectively . So we thought you could replatform an existing company onto an entirely new stack, a new piece of software and get rid of all of the legacy. So we went and pitched it to companies and we started with utilities . The energy sector was facing a revol ution. You know, the advent of things like solar, wind , electric cars, batteries meant that you had a sector where big data was like a quarterly metre reading to one where you were going to get real time streams and you had to forecast everything. So you can see it's going to get complicated. So unlike Fintech , he didn't just have the internal opportunity. He had this huge external pressure. Anyway, so we went and talked to some utilities. We pitched the ide a . And some of them said We don't think tech will make any difference. Thank you very much. That was brilliant. That told us it was a selector right for disruption. Others told us we're conservative . We can't take the risk of doing this. Someone's got to do it first. Now that's quite interesting . From that really we had the idea we would do it first. Software's a long way from energy suppliers and how did you make that jump from trying to fix an IT problem for them, a systems problem for them into becoming actually a customer business. Yeah. So you could say the same of things like Uber . Software's a long way from mini cabs , but actually by creating a kind of very modern software based business in that sector, you can reinvent the sector. So we thought in exactly the same way, if we take a modern software based approach to reinventing retail , energy retail. We can do tons of stuff that no one imagined. Was it also a happy accident that was around about the time that energy retailing was deregulated? So did the two things come together ? Well, you know what? I was actually slightly annoy ed because you thought you wouldn't have to worry about the only other companies coming. Yeah, yeah, like we had the I mean, I hope this sounds okay, but we kind of thought we had the biggest idea in the world we're going to transform a global sector through technology on a global scale. And suddenly there's about fifty companies that are kind of set up with a few quid in the back of someone's shed piling it high, selling it cheap without a big idea . And so when I went out there talking about what we were doing , it was very hard to differentiate the kind of the scale of what we wanted to achieve. The degree of I hate the word but the degree of disruption we had in mind compared to a whole load of other companies. And you know, I remember saying competition isn't the soup. You know, it really isn't about having a bunch of people each try to shout loud than the other, but basically selling the same stuff , competition is about investing very heavily , having outstanding operations and truly understanding your customers so you can create new products and services. So were you worried about getting caught to them that other people would just think we don't see any value of an octopus at all? It's exactly the same as Bulb or whatever. All the other companies are out there. Yes, I was worried about that. And by say Bulb was different. Like Bulb Rebe was found was quite aision div. Yeah, and it got big and every week I think there's good competition and bad competition, right? Bulb was genuinely good competition for us because every week we would sit there looking at our customer metrics like how well are we looking after customers ? And relentlessly you're comparing self to your rival. Now none of the incumbents were doing a good job. All those little companies were doing a bad job, but Bob , every week , how are they achieving that? And of course, we then have to try and do better. And we know they now know because we ended up acquiring them. They were sitting there going, how did Ocopus do that? So I think that was really kind of that drove high standards . But an interesting byproduct of the number of companies was that we went under the radar in a good way, which is the incumbents I think I won't say they were asleep at the wheel, but they really didn't see us coming . And it was ultimately an Australian company, Origin Energy , it comes out the biggest energy from Australia that sent a couple of their most senior people on a world tour to spline the future of energy and then ended up in our office in London and it was a magical moment when they're like, they could see how we'd use technology to transform everything. Just talk us through what happened in twenty twenty one when wholesale gas prices spiked, all these small suppliers got caught in the crush between selling cheap energy and having to buy it very expensively . Was that a threatening moment for you as well financially for Octopus? I think on day one , look we saw it coming for about six months. You could see the uptick and gets steeper and steeper . You know, I mean at the worst point , the wholesale price of gas I think was sixteen times higher than usual . So if we normally buy on a like maybe at the time, two or three billion year of gas, suddenly you're looking at thirty two, maybe more billion pounds of gas we're going to have to buy . But first of all , in energy, the number one thing that creates financial resilience is hedging. You buy the energy in advance, you look in the price. So even though the wholesale price at the time might have been very, very high , for our foreseeable needs, we'd already locked in the price at a lower level. So you could look at that and you could see all those companies that hadn't hedged just collapsing overnight. So many of them and companies I'd never heard of with the most random names. It felt like they'd all just mushroomed and then I think this was kind of where regulation had been a bit naive, which is the regulator didn't want to talk about hedging because they think like how each company manages that is up to themselves. But the reality is if you think you can beat the market you're a fool. And so literally the risk aversion at the very core of our business meant that although you could look at that thing was very worrying, the biggest worry we had was for our customers . How were people going to pay these bills? As the hedgers come to an end , you re hedge and the market is going to be a lot higher then. How will people cope with this? So I immediately started talking to the government and saying, You are going to have to put something in place to help customers. We need a bill support scheme, which happened . But the other bit was I remember speaking to our investors because investors obviously looking at these wholesale getting very worried . And I said to them we are just about the strongest company here. So instead of like bat downten the hing atches, this is the time to be brave . We want you to provide us with more funding so we can help we can acquire failing businesses. And this will be, you know, it's that kind of thing and I hate to say it in such terrible times, but it's opportunity in a crisis. And they say like for us this is a big opportunity. And if we don't act now, we may never get this chance again. And that's how we ended up in a position that we could, for example, ultimately, and we acquired a company called Avro that failed with nearly a million customers and then Bulb with one point six million . And by the way, at the time there were all these kind of reports that Bulb was going to cost taxpayers and billpayers six billion quid. The deal we did with the government, a brilliant deal by our team worked out with great civil servants, meant ultimately the government made a profit on Bulb and I'm really proud of that. Well, let's go back to where you started them, which is really with the tech behind Octopus and Kraken. I loved your description of companies having sedimentary layers of tech and the sort of spaghetti junction that you obviously, you know, you got to start from scratch . Do you think you could have sold that tech to companies originally, you know, in the way that you'd planned and sort of just done it within those layers or do you think you really needed to do it yourself first to prove it? Yeah, no, I sometimes remark I'm a particular good salesman. I'm a very good shower . So we really did try to persuade companies . But I think the interesting bit is to be fair , you couldn't see the impact this would have till you did it . I think one of the magical inventions of Silicon Valley was the MVP, the minimum minimum viable product . It's not a prototype. You basically create a business that does something very, very different using technology and see how it goes. Based on what you see, you then iterate very rapidly building out the stuff that's working and dropping stuff that isn't . And I think in energy it wasn't you knew you would create a more efficient business . You knew you could run it with far fewer people. You kind of knew you could eliminate a lot of the failures, the service failures because much more modern system a single unified data model , you're not going to have a load of things going wrong falling between the gaps and a load of people in the back ground having to try and fix them . But what you didn't know was the degree of innovation you could kind of produce with this. And what is that? I mean, in really simple terms, what is it that Kraken does that makes it more efficient or helps the energy mark et. Yeah. So the efficiency is, I'll give you an example. I mean , in the UK, one of the clients, one of the large engineers that moved to Kraken after we proved it closed seventeen different systems. So seventeen bits of spaghetti wir . You know ultimately I mean this is progress but it's hard we have to do it in society Their headcamp fell from over ten thousand people to about three and a half thousand . But the people that stayed their satisfaction, the employee satisfaction went from two out of five to four out of five because they could actually do a great job instead of being stuck in a machine a computer says no . And by the way, the customer satisfaction went from two hundred five to four out five and the company went from unsustainable to financially successful . That's the kind of impact it has at scale . But in innovation terms, you know , Kraken because it's got a single data model that is everything from every customer call transcribed and analyzed by AI through to every meter reading , but forecast for the next two years at the half hour level, updated multiple times a day. So if you've got an electric car, we'll be forecasting how much battery you're going to need every day, what time you get at home, plug it in, and work out a schedule for when we're going to charge it Collectively, that means today octopus alone processes just in the UK , processes a million items of data every three seconds , which is about ten times more than visa globally for payments . Fundamentally partic,ularly in electricity , the back end electricity market has a price that varies throughout the day. Every half hour goes from literally negative pricing to eye warmingly high . If we can use technology to get more of the cheap electricity into our customers' house at the right times and into their cars, into their businesses and avoid using as much at the expensive times, you bring the average price down and you can have a dramatic impact . I was looking at the charts for a day recently. Between the beginning of the day or the peak of the day, which the price was like one hundred and twenty and the cheapest price during the day was twenty, and overnight it was negative. That's how variable this is. If you use technology to optimize that , we can tackle the appalling rise in British energy bills. When did you realize you could sell that as a stand alone product to other utilities , or was that always the plan? It was kind of always the plan , but it was quite fun. For anyone who's I don't know been through these things I love my investors. I've got incredible investors. We owe everything the fact that they backed us to be clear . But at the very beginning, when we were setting up the business, they said, Do you really need to build your own technology? Surely that's a commodity you can just get off the shelf. Anyway, yeah , a few years in I started talking to them about licensing the technology cracker to other companies and they said, This is your secret sauce. Why would you? Why would you give me too much? Why tried to tell you? And then a few years later, right, you know, as we're separating crack it off, I have to say to Night Energy is an unbelievably exciting business. Like, yeah, look at the software. Why are you separating it off now? Because you're going to split you going to split into it Kraken's going to become an independent company maybe listing on a stock exchange somewhere. Why now? Yeah. So Ocopus has continued to grow, I mean incredibly, I'm so proud of it. And we also by way have big businesses in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, all growing rapidly . And increasingly the incumbent utilities in those countries were reticent to license kraken because they didn't essentially want to give money to a competitor. They'd seen what had happened here in the UK where we overtook, you know, every formerly nationalised incumbent to become the biggest . And what we found is, you know, sort of this huge interest in Kraken. But time and again I'd be sitting there with the CEO of a company and they'd say but how can I license from you when you're suiting my customers ? And ultimately separating Kraken enables it to reach its full potential. If you are going to list it and it's a technology company, aren't all your advisors saying this and you have to take it to the US, can there be any possible argument for listing iten in London. So I think there's really serious the more I've looked at this, the more I care about it. Pension funds in the UK used to put about forty percent of their assets UK companies . It's now three or four percent , right ? Now that has impacted two very important areas. The first is companies in the growth stages. Actually, the growth stages octopus and kraken have been through . We rais'edve three billion dollars of investment and two point nine of that or something have come from overseas investors . Now what that means is that when you get to the point where you're thinking about , do you list somewhere , they don't have an attachment to the UK Their funds are not raised in sterlings, they don't have a currency reason to be here. They don't have a headquarters or sentimental reason to be here. They're not part of the UK nexus . And so the first thing is that lack of funds, like we were able to grow the business because of plenty of companies around the world or funds around the world that wanted to invest in octopus and kraken. But it does mean when you get to this stage it's a much more kind of rational decision . I think the second consequence of that lack of UK capital going to UK companies is when you get to the stock exchange , our stock exchange simply has less capital available less less capital available for companies when they IPO to achieve the valuations that perhaps they would in other world in the US and also by way a lot more important than that, potentially less capital available thereafter to continue to support companies as they grow globally. Now, I think twenty twenty six could be a bit pivotal . We've had the Mansion House reforms, the pension pensions bill and a bunch of other changes that means that we could potentially be re versing that long term decline in the capital allocated to UK equities . So we're going to have to watch and see. Behind the scenes, I've got to say that the London Stock Exchange do have good data that says if you control for all the variables that data, it's not very convincing anything. At a certain hour of the day, at a certain time of the night, etc So I think the point really though is that we could be an inflection point this year if those reforms have an impact because we've been so starved of capital. It doesn't take a lot of change, a lot of new capital to really reverse that. So fingers crossed. I would say though that the other bit here is sentiment matters . Like you know, I think it was Kane's spoke of animal spirits and they're really important in markets. And so if we get the reforms we need and we get the right degree of positive news about LSA , then there is a chance. When are you likely to decide? Well, fortunately, I don't decide, right? So I'm a shareholder, a relatively modest one, one Octopus is shareholder, but the majority is held by our global investors. And they are in conversation, the boarder in conversation with both the London Stock Exchange and others . And by the way, you know, they're taking it very, very seriously . The decision will be over the next year or two. Because I guess it's also about whether you're willing to make that leap because the stock exchange obviously needs companies like yours to float to encourage others because it is, as you say, about sentiment. And so I wonder if, you know, when you say it's something you care about now, if you do feel strongly enough about it to try and push that decision towards London. That's one of the reasons I'm talking about it now. One of the reasons I talk about the underlying reasons because I think if we address the underlying reasons , you know, we can make London win stuff on its own merits. And I would hope you know I would hope that London can win this business on its own merits , but it's got to work. It's really got to prove that . But I talk about it because I want to see it happen . And I want to see it happen because I'm truly proud of what we've been able to build in Britain. You know, we talked earlier about the Cambridge tech scene of the nineteen eighties and nineties . It generated some great companies like Arm and a whole bunch of entrepreneurs that have created many of the businesses that are going to be the next crop . You know, I'd love to see that followed through . And if we can solve the capital markets issue , there's every possibility we can create, you know, I don't want to call it a new golden age, but genuinely if you look at the number of British companies that are kind of roughly the scale of octopus and kraken. And I'm looking at two of them, but there really is a good chance here . So we could enter a positive spiral if we get it right. What about Octopus post the split? Is it going to be profitable? Yeah, octopus octopus is profitable in the UK. So our UK retail business made about three hundred million pounds eBIT last year. It's just that we are investing so heavily in growth both here in the UK and internationally and in research and development. You know, we spent five hundred million on those things. So a lot of the bottom line might be , I think you showed a hundred million loss . Actually, it's a core business that's strong and profitable , then supporting and being supported by our investors to take this business truly global. And I think more British companies should do this, by the way. One of the challenges in the UK very often has been companies being forced into becoming dividend machines . And you can keep on paying your dividend till one day you don't exist. What you see a lot in the US is companies spending, you know, many years relentlessly investing in R and D and growth . Is that the way you talk about you don't need to show a profit straight away? You need to be thinking about the future. Is that part of what lies behind your row with your rivals about capital rules and off Gems capital rules? Do you think that's stupid? I think the problem with the capital rules is they were kind of They don't really understand what it causes risk in energy We talked earlier about hedging. Essentially, if you're fully hedged, you eliminate the vast majority of risk . Moreover, the two big risks beyond that are market to market. That is if the energy price shifts , your hedging partner, the trading partner with whom you hedge, can demand overnight you deliver and within twenty four hours, tens of millions are even hundreds of millions of cash if you price shifts . And also they may require to post an awful lot of collateral again, hundreds of millions . Octopus because of the prudence with which we're run, we're not subject to either those risks. We've eliminated them. By the way, we pay for that. It's like paying for a superb insurance policy, but off gem don't even look at it. So the equivalent at the moment is it's like if you had a million pound h ouse and you was fully insured , but the regulator would be quite happy if you drop the insurance and have a hundred grand sitting in the bank in case something happens. We should explain the off gym capital rules basically say you need to have a bunch of cash set aside against hard times. Yeah, and the problem is a bunch of cash they have isn't enough to help in hard times . But in the meantime, they're not looking at the fact you've got an insurance policy . Now we're in conversation with them on that , and I think it's nuts. But if I'm your rival, if I'm centricular, I'm going to look at you and say, But hang on, I have to have all this cash set aside, I meet the rules, you don't. That's just cheating regardless of anything you might say about whether the rules are good or not. Yeah, the first thing is we do meet the rules. The rules absolutely say you have to have a certain amount of capital. It's called the target at the floor and we have that . They then have a target, right? It's named a target. I you don't have to have it. If you if you're not at the target , then you have to have an agreed plan with the regulator . Now, that's where the regulator does look at all these additional sort of safeguards. And in our case the regulatory regulator has declared themselves per fectly satisfied, we meet the rules. So to be really clear, we meet the rules . I think that by the way, in post the Kraken separation, our balance sheet is three billion pounds, right i. e. we absolutely exceed these targets. There are some details in terms of how they're accounted for. But to be really clear , post Kraken, it's a totally different picture anyway. And Greg, before we let you go, I've got to ask you, running a company in this mad, bad world that we're in at the moment with the rise in generative AI and the AI revolution that's going on . Donald Trump very unpredictable if to use a gentle word and the president in the White House. How do you think about navigating that as a business leader? You sound quite optimistic about everything actually. You sound quite optimistic wins . Well, I think first of all, entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic, right? You couldn't do this job if you weren't. In fact, sometimes people often ask, how do you stay optimistic or how do you get your energy? If you play'ingre a computer game, there would be things coming at you from all sides. Yeah, it's awesome. You turn it around. It's like you're an entrepreneur because you're optimistic because you're always seeing opportunities. Now I think look one thing about the Trump world is I think it's forcing everyone to act quickly and to make big decisions fast . One of the things that's killing the west, killing economic growth here is we've become sclerotic. Now, you know, in a world where you can't be sure that next week you're not going to get twenty five percent tariff slapped on something , you've got to move fast and you've got to move fast to build your own capabilities , to innovate , to make things more efficient. All of these are opportunities for us to do well. So I'm not saying I choose this world , but within this world, there are tons of, you know, there are tons of opportunities and there are some things that can be like forcing functions for progress . And you know, I was reflecting recently that so many of the advances in things like computing or jet engines came out of World War two , similarly the things that came out of the space race, those events acted as forcing functions and so does kind of a little bit of economic chaos . And you know, some of the world's best companies were found in times of economic chaos. You know, companies like IBM as an example, you know, Disney . And so I used to wonder what it would have been like to found a company in the nineteen twenties and then go after the twenty nine twenties, thirties, whatever. I can't here. Exactly. Here we are. It's kind of the same all over again. You'll be generous for your time. I hope you haven't predicted the start of a New World W.ar But you than veryk much , Greg Jackson from Octopus Synergy. Yes, thanks so much for coming in. Thank you both. It's been really great to do this session and by the way, let's do it again sometime So Katie, it was a really interesting chat with Greg Jackson who was an amazing entrepreneur he and his co founders . What did you take from? What stood out from what he said for you? I was really struck by this idea of companies having sedimentary stacks when it comes to their tech back end or stacks whatever you'd like to call it , because in this new AI era that we're in, I think this is going to catch so many companies out when you've got this extraordinary new technology that many businesses are trying to work out how to use and how to integrate. When you're dealing with, you know, the spaghetti that he described , I think it makes you realise how very, very difficult that's going to be. I think you're exactly right . I'm Dominic O'Connell, colonist at the Times and Business Reporter on Times Radio, and I'm Katie Prescott, co host of the Times Tech podcast and sitting in for Hannah Prevat this week. And if you want to hear more from me and our correspondent in Silicon Valley, Danny Fordson, you can find us every week geeking out with the pioneers at the forefront of tech innovation covering all the latest trends in tech and the AI revolution. Just search for Times Tech podcast, wherever you get your podcast from the Times and the Sunday Times. This is the business. We'll be back next week until then. Goodbye. Goodbye