Three London Business School alumni – Hussein Kanji MBA2007, John Henderson MBA2013 and Mitali Pattnaik MBA2005 – have worked in senior roles at some of the biggest of them of all. Now, all three have taken their experience into venture capital, identifying and backing, and still looking to set up, nascent businesses at the forefront of technological innovation. This was first published in AlumniNews, Issue 131, February 2014. Find out more about our alumni community at http://www.london.edu/alumni

1. AlumniNews ISSUE 131
FEBRUARY 2014
SUCCESS THROUGH IT + VC

2. ■TheBigIssue/Opportunities at the cutting edge of technology
AT THE END OF THE LAST MILLENNIUM, technology
companies were fleetingly the darlings of Wall street
and the City. The entrepreneurs behind them were a
new breed: young, smart and literate in an industry
barely understood by the traditional business
community.
Not all of their ideas flew, but over the next decade
or so, from the mother ship in Silicon Valley, California,
this and subsequent generations of technology
entrepreneurs built the multi-billion dollar businesses
that revolutionised the way billions of human beings
live. The way they communicate, socialise, shop,
consume news, watch films and listen to music. Even
the way they choose life partners.
Today’s technology monoliths, those household
names that dominate the popular consciousness,
were once start-ups with entrepreneurs at their heart.
Three London Business School alumni – Hussein
Kanji MBA2007, John Henderson MBA2013 and
Mitali Pattnaik MBA2005 – have worked in senior
roles at some of the biggest of them of all.
Now, all three have taken their experience into
venture capital, identifying and backing, and still
looking to set up, nascent businesses at the forefront
of technological innovation.
Hussein, formerly of Microsoft and recently named
by The Telegraph as Europe’s most influential
technology investor, has lauched his new venture
capital fund Hoxton Ventures, which has raised
US$40m to invest in European early stage startups.
John – via a major law firm and management
consultancy, Facebook and Summly, a new business
that boiled down web content for smartphones – has
joined White Star Capital, a new venture fund backing
early stage tech companies and the entrepreneurs
who are building them.
Mitali, who has also worked for Microsoft, as well as
Electronic Arts,Yahoo!, Google and Twitter, among
others, is Entrepreneur in Residence at Foundation
Capital, a venture capital house in Silicon Valley.
Here, three cutting-edge technology entrepreneurs tell AlumniNews how their years of
experience in a technology industry that never stands still is helping them shape its future
SUCCESSTHROUGH
IT +VC

3. ■TheBigIssue/Opportunities at the cutting edge of technology
ALUMNINEWS:
What sort of business ideas
interest you at the
moment?
Hussein We’re
looking for
companies we
think can become
very large, billion-
dollar-plus
businesses. Many of
these will be inventing a new
industry. They are the pioneers.
Think back – there was no social
media industry before Myspace or
Facebook. These industries looked
murky at formation. We recently
invested $1.6m on just a slide
deck. We all have anti-virus
programs on our PCs, but there’s
nothing like this in the data centre.
We think this is going to be a brand
new industry category!
John Personally, I’m fascinated by
the digital-currency space and its
potential [at the time of writing,
John was closely following
the FBI shutdown of Silk
Road and confident that
the value of BitCoin
would bounce back].
One of my first angel
investments was in a
BitCoin company called
CoinDesk, a news site for
digital currency.
At White Star we invest in teams
and products that have the
potential to disrupt existing
industries. We’ve invested in a
bunch of awesome companies.
Betaworks, one of our bigger
investments, has churned out great
products and spin-offs like bit.ly
and Dots. Another of our
investments, Bloglovin’, is
disrupting the way people
consume content online by making
great blogs discoverable. Some of
our more recent investments
include BusBud, which is making it
super easy to book intercity travel
and mxHero, which is changing the
way we use email by allowing
developers to build in functionality
that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
“I was part of the team making
early Facebook and mobile games
when most of the company thought
we were crazy”
MITALI PATTNAIK MBA2005
BITCOINING
IT IN: John
Henderson
MBA2013 is
fascinated by the
digital-currency
space

4. ■TheBigIssue/Opportunities at the cutting edge of technology
Mitali My background has always
been consumer internet products
and that’s where I’ll continue to
focus. In my career, I always put
my hand up to do the uncharted,
unbuilt products. I have always
believed in mobile and social. I was
part of the team making early
Facebook and mobile games at
Electronic Arts when most of the
company thought we were crazy.
That’s still what I’m doing now at
Foundation Capital, except without
the safety net of a Facebook or
Twitter. ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’
roles were created by VCs back in
the 80s. The idea is to have
someone in place
that a VC firm
believes will do
something
interesting
and they
want frst dibs
on it. It’s a call
option on what
I come up with.
ALUMNINEWS:
What is the frontier of technology at
the moment? Where is it taking us?
Hussein The migration from PC to
mobile is the largest shift in the
industry. There’s also this new
industry of ‘quantifiable self’. You
are going to see many more
companies trying to understand
what’s going on in your body in a
much more precise and granular
fashion. And you will be able to
action these insights, and do things
with the data to make yourself
much more healthy. This is a big
growth industry. Heaven
knows what it is going to
look like in ten years.
John Wearable technology
will be omnipresent.
Smartphones, watches and
wristbands are just the beginning.
We’ll learn more and more about
ourselves as the data accumulates.
The insights derived from that data
will transform the way we live our
lives (think healthcare and energy
consumption as examples).
“We’re looking for stuff that we
think can turn out to be very large,
billion-dollar-plus businesses.
Most of those are effectively
inventing a new industry”
HUSSEIN KANJI MBA2007
NEW VENTURES: Hussein Kanji and Mitali Pattnaik

5. ■TheBigIssue/Opportunities at the cutting edge of technology
I’m also particularly interested in
developments in artificial
intelligence and natural language
processing. Machines and
algorithms will help people wade
through loads of content on the
internet. What we did at Summly
was just the start. New algorithms
will enable tailor-made content for
you, when and where you want it,
without any humans being
involved. Machines are learning to
decipher what’s interesting in an
article, what’s relevant, and
extracting content that will be
interesting to someone, based on
what the machine knows about
that person. Hyper-personalised
content is almost upon us.
Mitali The kind of thing I find
interesting is collaborative
consumption. What a lot of new
start-ups are doing is
disintermediating markets by
directly connecting the consumer
with the seller. That’s happening
across every industry. I’m diving
deep, business school-style, into
what other markets are out
there that could be
disintermediated in
the same way.
Even finance is
getting opened up
in this manner with
crowdfunding. It’s
going to happen in
pretty much every
industry you can think of.
ALUMNINEWS:
Who are the ones to watch?
Hussein As we consume more
and more services at work, if
you’re the manager you might
want more intelligence in your
network to block some of this
traffic and allow others. Some of
the companies providing the
technology behind this to make
networks smarter are doing
incredibly well. These are billion-
dollar industries. One of the
best IPOs in 2012 was a
company doing
precisely that, Palo Alto
Networks. FireEye,
another one in the
same vein, went public
recently. But the hard
part for us as investors is
to find not today’s categories
but tomorrow’s categories.
“You are going to see a lot more
things that understand what’s going
on in your body in a much more
precise and granular level”
HUSSEIN KANJI MBA2007

6. ■TheBigIssue/Opportunities at the cutting edge of technology
John My former boss at Summly,
Nick D’Aloisio, has just turned 18.
Who knows what he might be able
to achieve as an adult. He hasn’t
even finished school yet!
Mitali Airbnb and Uber are the
poster children of the new
marketplace economies. The idea
of renting a room to a stranger or
getting rides in a stranger’s car
would have been inconceivable just
a few years ago. Now they are
commonplace. Both of these
companies will be very big.
ALUMNINEWS:
Which countries are interesting?
Hussein The geography that does
this better than anywhere else in
the world is San Francisco and
Palo Alto. Still. Which are distinct
geographies. New York has grown
up. A lot. Chicago has come out of
nowhere. London and Berlin are
interesting.
John Silicon Valley
remains the epicentre
of tech. At White
Star Capital, we’re
interested in a
bunch of other
geographies too.
I’m excited about
what’s happening in
London, Berlin and
Scandinavia.Tel Aviv continues to
churn out great technology.
Mitali There’s really no comparison
to Silicon Valley, but there are hubs
of innovation cropping up in
other countries. There are
interesting things
happening in Sweden,
Finland and Norway in
Europe. Israel is a
pretty big tech hub. A
lot of interesting
companies that made it
big have come out of Tel
Aviv.
ALUMNINEWS:
What are you most proud of?
Hussein I don’t think I’ve had any
great achievements. I’m just an
average guy who’s gone into an
interesting industry. I’ve had some
early success, but success by our
definition is success on the
Facebook, Twitter or Apple level.
I’m nowhere near in that league. I’d
“Wearable technology will be
omnipresent. Smartphones, watches
and wrist bands are just the
beginning.We’ll learn more and more
about ourselves as data
accumulates”
JOHN HENDERSON MBA2013

7. ■TheBigIssue/Opportunities at the cutting edge of technology
love to write the cheque for one of
these guys who turns into the next
Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. That
would be a achievement. Maybe
I’ve done that already, but
only history will tell.
John I love my work,
but I’m most proud of
more personal things.
I’ve convinced my
fiancée to spend the rest
of her life with me and we
got married on New Year’s Eve
in Sydney – it was amazing.
Mitali I have been extremely
fortunate to work on products that
impact on hundreds of millions of
people globally. I am particularly
proud of my work at Twitter, where
I contributed to the company’s
revenue products, which were
critical to its recent IPO.” ■
BOY WONDER:
Summly founder
Nick D’Aloisio, who
worked with John
Henderson, has just
turned 18 – and not
even finished school