When Thomas met Harry and JP.

Bookending a week and two decades in London.

I was in London for 10 days recently. I had some excellent meetings with VCs, co-investors, AI students, start ups, attended a 60th birthday, had a mountain bike ride in the Surrey Hills and saw several old friends. I also nipped over to Ghent for a board meeting. A special highlight was to feed and water one of my offspring. We are now empty nesters.

At the start of the week I went for a walk in Hyde Park with Harry Stebbings of 20VC fame. We are co-investors in Techwolf, but we had never met. I learnt a whole lot about what it takes to build the most successful podcast in our industry, and his investing strategy.

Harry is a consummate professional. When you listen to his podcast it seems effortless, but it isn’t. He relies extensively on research and analytics to fine tune and polish his offering. He is able to slice / dice / repackage his content, and he knows precisely what his audience wants to listen to. It is professional media, and it is at scale.

His curiosity levels are only rivaled by his energy levels. He is the Michael Parkinson of our industry. He puts his guests at ease, and is able to get them to open up. He does this because he has done his research, and he really, really listens.

He also has a line in Andrew Ridgeley Wham shorts, luckily, they are out of shot here.

Actually, I go for a walk or run a couple of times a week with Harry, and if you are interested in VC and Tech, I strongly suggest you do too. A good place to start is this week’s interview with David Schneider. David is a remarkable operator and investor. The ServiceNow scaling story should be essential listening (optional watching) for GTM and founders in enterprise.

On Friday I went to the test cricket at the Oval. JP Ragaswami invited me. We have known each other for over 20 years, but we have never actually met in person. I think we connected via Hugh MacLeod and James Governor. We have discussed enterprise software, social science, literature and cricket for all these years. JP was an early social media and information theory pioneer, blogging when it was brand new. He has had a remarkable career at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, Salesforce (as Chief Scientist) and Deutsche Bank. I consider him to be one of the founders of enterprise 2.0. When wikis and the like were just kicking off, he dragged it into the enterprise. He opened the enterprise world to the possibilities of more open internal and external communication and integration.

He writes lyrically and thinks profoundly. He also knows more about cricket statistics than anyone I know. While the weather was grey, the conversation with JP and his friends was sparkling.

Meeting with both Harry and JP illustrated the massive changes in social media, on another level it illustrates how little changes. Harry does things at scale, but is built on early work of folks like JP. So much of what we take for granted today goes back to those early Cluetrain days.

One day I’d like to take Harry and JP to the cricket. I don’t think I would get a word in, but it would be fascinating. Ideally it would also involve South Africa beating England by an innings.

I forgot to add this earlier, but I think we need a tune. It is cricket related, so if you don’t like cricket, it probably won’t make much sense.