Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to the brank new season of Jazz Shapers in our 10th anniversary year no less, with me, Elliot Moss. Jazz shapers is where I bring to you the pioneers shaping the business world, together with the musicians shaping the worlds of Jazz, Soul and Blues and we’ve got typically risk taking, problem solving, inspiring can-do guests joining us over these next few weeks. With me today, launching this season in style is David Benigson, CEO and Co-founder of Signal Ai, a global artificial intelligence company. Working for his parents executive search business, the MBS group, David found himself spending hours manually curating stories for the industry newsletter. He spotted a gap in the market for a tech-based solution to insight at scale. With data scientist and academic, Dr Miguel Martinez and tech consultant, Wesley Hall, the trio founded Signal AI in David’s garage in 2013. They are now one of the world’s fastest growing applied AI companies, analysing millions of news articles every day, in real time, improving business intelligence and decision making. David Benigson is my Business Shaper here, the first in this new season in 2021and it’s really fabulous to have you here
David Benigson
Thank you for having me – again.
Elliot Moss
Again, well exactly, I was going to say so most people may not know that in 2016 you were part of a new series at the time called Future Shapers because you were three years into your business and you got to say ‘Hello, I’m David Benigson this is Signal AI and you went off like that...’ but we’ve got a lot more time today. Tell me where this began and how a young person in 2013 decides he’s going to go and set his own business up. I mentioned the inspiration for the idea but loads of people as I often say have inspiration and then they don’t do anything with it
David Benigson
Yeah, thank you, you covered some of it in the introduction but it was in some ways a random confluence of different events, you know, I could give you the polished venture capital pitch version…
Elliot Moss
I don’t want that version because I know David, it will sound amazing and it’ll all make perfect sense – Chapter 1 – this is what happened.
David Benigson
Exactly…
Elliot Moss
What’s the real story?
David Benigson
…but, I’ll give you the backdrop. I almost fell into the dark arts of Law, I was studying that and practiced it very briefly after graduating and I think I always had a sense that wasn’t the industry or sector I wanted to end up in and it wasn’t the right environment for me and then, I had the chance to go and work for Jamie Oliver which was an incredible experience, he was introduced to me by my mother, of course.
Elliot Moss
Which we’ll come onto in another Jazz Shaper – a mother and son first. David’s mother is Moira Benigson and again, I think it was around 2016 as well, Founder of the MBS Group, which is an executive search and recruitment business.
David Benigson
Exactly, so all roads lead back to my mother of course, but she had introduced me to Jamie Oliver and I worked for him and I think that was the first time I had been exposed outside of my parents who run a business together to an entrepreneur and I was totally enthralled by how he approached business and how he thought about creating value and building something and that was incredibly inspiring for me. And so I guess, I was seeking to do something myself and find an opportunity and the original genesis of the idea came through this experience I’d had working with my parents at their executive search firm and this newsletter that they produced and sent out to clients for over 30 years now which is very, very widely received. The thing that struck me at the time was that some of the most impressive and powerful business people around the country were relying on this manually created newsletter produced by a relatively small executive search firm. It kind of struck me that surely there was a better way to achieve what they were doing and to deliver insights and intelligence to these business leaders to help them make better decisions. And so, I kind of went on this journey and I by chance, met my Co-founder, who’s an academic, he was finishing his PhD in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the time and we decided to start this business with the system thesis that if we could aggregate the worlds information that sits outside of an organisation and be ambivalent about media type and modality and language and format, pull that all into a single platform and then we would apply machine learning and artificial intelligence that could analyse this data and extract insight from it, we would be able to surface for business leaders, insights that would help them make better decisions, get ahead of risks, spot threats, surface opportunities for them and ultimately make them more efficient and effective executives.
Elliot Moss
You mentioned the foray into Law almost and you said that’s not for me. You started quite young in this business and you’re young now still but you were particularly young then, and your background before then, it was… I have all sorts of people I meet and in the ten years it’s a privilege to meet the people that have gone and done the Harvard route and then Boston Consultancy Group and other consultancies and then there’s the people that left school at 14 and then there’s everything in-between. Immediately I can see you’re a bit of renegade, you kind of, like some of my children, like to dance to their own tune. It strikes me; you probably like to dance to your own turn as well. Why do you think that is David, if that’s true?
David Benigson
I think I’ve certainly had a bit of rebellious streak when I was growing up and I think that’s in part shaped me as an entrepreneur and helped me be someone who challenges the status quo. You know, I think I probably get a lot of that from my parents and the context with which they came to this country thirty plus years ago from South Africa, leaving a very challenging political context and coming to London as immigrants with very little and I think a lot of peers of mine, other entrepreneurs actually either are immigrants or have some sort of immigrant kind of genesis and I think that shapes a mentality actually as to the way you approach business and that feeling that you have perhaps as an outsider who wants to change things and disrupt things. And so yes, I’ve always had that kind of cheeky rebellious streak within me and you know, I’m currently operating in an industry that’s you know, the distribution of information and intelligence to large organisations of business leaders is a well-established industry that’s been around for decades if not potentially even centuries and we’re coming in as an outsider trying to change things and trying to challenge our clients and often going into very large organisations or Governments and asking them and pushing them to do things slightly differently, and to use and adopt technology in a very very different way. And so I think that shaping that I’ve had as a young person and that rebellious element to my personality has ultimately helped me in the way that we’ve taken the business forward.
Elliot Moss
Well you have taken the business forward significantly 2016 when you were a Future Shaper there were I think 50 employees in the business, you’ve got almost 200 now. You are in a few countries, there’s governance to worry about, there’s funders, you are funded to the tune of around just under £40 million. The renegade in you, the revolutionary, the challenging the status quo person critical that you do that, but how do you manage that with the day-to-day exigencies of actually having to run a business and being very, very structured?
David Benigson
Totally and I think you have to mature and I’ve had to mature as an individual but also you know, part of growing a successful business is surrounding yourself with great people and particularly in my contexts as a first time Founder and as you pointed out, someone who started the company at a relatively young age, with relatively limited experience, is surround myself with great people who have that background and that experience and that pedigree to help us grow and evolve and mature the business and that’s at both an executive level, you know the leadership team around me who have brought a huge amount of knowledge and background to the company to help us grow in scale through to the Board. You know and I’ve added some phenomenal people not just the investors that have put capital into the business but also non-executive directors so for example, my chairman Archie Norman who’s currently also chairman of Marks & Spencer and a titan within UK business and more recently Sarah Wood who’s a phenomenal entrepreneur who founded Unruly Media and sold it to News Corp and so I think it’s about surrounding myself with that calibre of people and then being very humble about what I don’t know and deferring to their experience and knowledge wherever possible.
Elliot Moss
So a previous Jazz Shaper in fact, a few years ago and I think Saul Klein is one of your investors and indeed he was on the programme in the last season so, you’re in good company David Benigson. He’s with me for the rest of this Jazz Shapers programme because it’s about him and Signal AI. Stay with me on Jazz FM to hear much more from him. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy digital sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Tom Grogan and Alistair Moore discuss Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. That’s lucky isn’t it, it’s relevant. Stuart Silver producer extraordinaire, they’re going to be discussing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, their possible application and the key things for organisations to consider when seeking to implement them.
All our former Jazz Shapers can be enjoyed on the Jazz Shapers podcasts and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice and don’t forget Moira Benigson’s the mother of David Benigson, Future Shaper back in 2016. Alternatively if you’ve got a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Jazz Shapers and there you will find a taster of our recent shows but back David, CEO and Founder of Signal AI, the Global Artificial Intelligence Company improving business intelligence and decision making. I love it when I say those things because it sounds like blurb blurb. In your own words, give me like one or two examples of the kind of work that you’re doing right now. You can either name the clients or not, I really don’t mind, but just to give a sense for those people going, ‘oh I’ve heard about AI, I heard about Machining but really, what does it actually mean?’
David Benigson
Sure, with pleasure. So I think a brilliant example of some work that we’re doing right now at Signal is the work we’re doing with G7 Governments around vaccine hesitancy which is obviously an incredibly important topic and was released at the G7 Summit. Essentially what we’re doing there is we’re taking 15 years’ worth of survey data where people have shared what their fears and concerns are around taking vaccines and then we’ve combined that with both traditional media and social media sentiment about what the public and the media are talking about in relation to vaccines and then we’ve tied that together even further with whether people actually go and complete their appointments that they have to take their vaccines and we’re marrying these different data sets up and then using the AI to be able to unearth the correlations and the impact of how the media can affect confidence and hesitance around vaccines, which is of course, an incredibly important topic right now.
A more kind of corporate commercial example is perhaps the work that we are doing with Ernst & Young right now and this is with EY’s audit division and I’m sure your listeners might be aware is under huge amounts of pressure from regulators who are expecting organisation to be able to measure non-financial metrics as part of the audit process. EY did a huge amount of research and they found a correlation between trust in a business and your likelihood of financial performance on an on-going basis. They’ve trained this framework for measuring trust into our machine learning models and then they evaluated and quantify performance of trust as part of that audit process. So for the first time, you’re taking a very very important but qualitative concept of how trusted is a business, how trustworthy are they and we’re enabling an organisation like EY to measure that as part of their audit process.
Elliot Moss
Does it matter, because as I’m listening to you, it sounds, you know that you need to understand Artificial Intelligence, you need to understand how to collect and collate and analyse data. Is that critical for you and the CEO spot or is it more important that you understand a client’s problem whether it’s a governmental problem or whether it’s a business problem?
David Benigson
I think, everything starts with the question that we’re trying to help our clients ask and then answer and I think everything starts with trying to deeply understand the sort of business problems our clients face and then using the technology and the data to try and arm them with the insights to answer those questions more effectively and in a more sophisticated manner. So my knowledge of technology is limited, it’s there but limited, but my understanding of the clients problems and their issues is fundamental.
Elliot Moss
And the team, you mentioned the team earlier. You said you’ve got great people on your Board, you’ve hired lots of good people over there. What’s been the mantra for you in terms of a part of the obvious ‘I give them the space to express themselves and create and great environment’.
David Benigson
Yes.
Elliot Moss
As you as a first time Founder, now implying this a million times but let’s just say. You’re obviously sort of learning on the job but you’ve learnt a hell of a lot. What’s the philosophy that David Benigson has in terms of getting the best out of people beyond the obvious?
David Benigson
Yeah I think the values that we had, you know, back when we started the company in the garage have stayed with us and initially those were implicit values or kind of implicit construct for the way that we work with each other and I think , over time, as the business has matured we’ve had to make them explicit. But I think they’re very key and core to the way we operate, the way we collaborate as an organisation and as a leadership team and it all starts, I mean you mention it, kind of flippantly, but I do think it all starts with an openness and a collaborative environment and a trust of individuals and the ability to give people the space to be autonomous and kind of create value for the company in their own image. I think that we have an organisation that was rooted in academic research and academic collaborations with Universities and that’s where the best and most cutting edge work is still going on in this field. And so we created an environment where we can bring academic research into a commercial context and apply it at scale and that’s the fundamental way the part of the business operates and how we create cutting edge technology. And then I think we’ve taken that principle we were talking about earlier, this kind of pushing back on the status quo. We’ve matured that, it’s not about being rebellious but it is about not taking things for granted and creating an environment whether you’re a graduate who’s joined our company, or the most senior person running our finance function, that we have an opportunity to push back on each other to challenge each other and to incrementally improve the business over time.
Elliot Moss
It sounds like, for those people listening to you now, that this has been easy. As in, you’re incredibly articulate, you know, you’ve got a vision, you are clear about how people should be treated, you’ve got fantastic names of people working with you. Where have the difficulties arisen and what kind of difficulties have they been and what have you done to overcome them, because I’m sure that it has not been plain sailing.
David Benigson
No, no absolutely, I mean often as you go back and describe the history of the company it all sounds like it was one straight line and of course, there were many, many, twists and turns and challenges and I’m sure many challenges that remain. I think what’s been fascinating but also enthralling about running Signal and building this company is, almost at every chapter and every various, the set of challenges that await you have been incredibly different and incredibly challenging and that’s what makes the whole process fun actually because you have to learn to adapt and evolve if you’re going to survive. But I mean, I think, a few things that spring to mind, I remember very early doors, before we’d even gotten going when we were in the garage, we didn’t have a product, I mean we had a printer, we built an algorithm that could classify news documents and so we didn’t have a user interface for that product, we used to print off articles from the printer to make sure that they actually married up with what the algorithm thought the news articles were about and I remember the first time we trained an algorithm that could spot within news content executives moving jobs. I remember every piece of paper that came out of the printer was about an executive moving jobs and I thought, gosh, I’ve quit my job and started this company in a windowless garage for a purpose because of this algorithm has got it right you know, and I remember before we had our first couple of clients, we had no pricing and we had this kind of wolf of wall street financial services client who worked for this asset management firm and he phoned us up and said ’Alright, I want to sign up for twelve months, how much does it cost?’ and I said, look, I’d better call you back in ten minutes. I turned to Miguel, my Co-founder and I said ‘how much should we charge him?’ and he said ‘I don’t know, £1,000 a month?’ and then I turned to my other Co-founder Wes and he said ‘No, no, no that’s far too cheap, charge £3,000 a month’. So then I got on the phone with this wolf of wall street character and I said ‘It’s £10,000 a month!’ and he said ‘Fine, I’ll sign up for twelve months’. I put the phone down and said ‘Damn, we should’ve charged him £30,000 a month’. You know, back then, we didn’t have a product fully developed, we didn’t have a pricing model you know, we were just a couple of individuals in a garage, trying to figure things out. But, you know, I think that through that kind of that ring of fire, both galvanises an organisation and as a team, but you also learn to focus and you learn to get close to your customers and you learn to ensure that the technology that you’re building really meets their needs and answers the questions effectively for them and those were a few examples, there’s been many more.
Elliot Moss
I’m sure, but that sounds like fun as well. I mean frankly to go from one to three to you saying you know what I’m just going to go for it at ten. How do you ensure you keep that fun and that flair and you mention in your values, you know you said we want people to challenge the status quo. Are you the person who stands up every day and say ‘No, I know we’ve got this accepted way of doing it and it seems to be working but we’re going to push again’. Is that right? ‘Who in the room thinks it’s not right?’ Is that the way you do it?
David Benigson
No, I mean, phenomenally we now have a culture where that’s happening right across the board, and like many technology and software businesses we have a relatively flat and egalitarian culture. I think that enables us to move very rapidly and make decisions fast, and break things and fix them and learn and iterate thereafter. It’s enabled organisations like mine, through the pandemic to respond very very rapidly, unfortunately while many organisations and individuals were struggling dramatically during this period, both Signal as a business and many of our peers were accelerating. I think that was partly because of the nature of what we provide to our clients, which at times of crisis, is arguably never more needed. But also, I think the way we set our businesses up, that sort of mind set and mentality of challenging the status quo, of continuously iterating what we’re building, of being non-hierarchical and small teams that are self-organised, enables us to move rapidly, make decision fast and respond the challenges effectively.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, David Benigson, and we’ve got a Kurt Elling cover of a U2 classic. That’s in just a moment here on Jazz FM.
David Benigson is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. David, you have a business which is all about AI, It’s predicated on it working. At its best, it does really positive things, Artificial Intelligence and at its worst, it’s a monster, or at least people would say that it’s a question that we need to be grappling with and indeed, of course, there are lots of ethical questions that are surrounding this area. You have had a TEDx talk, I think, partly on the dangers of AI or the ‘Is it really as threatening as people believe it is’. Where are you now on this and is it one of those, ‘yeah it’s interesting and I’ll talk about it from time-to-time’ or does it trouble you more than that?
David Benigson
Yeah I have a slightly contrary view of this topic and I think we’re grappling right now as a society with huge amounts of hype and hyperbole related to this topic of Artificial Intelligence and we have everyone from kind of, technology celebrities like Elon Musk to our Prime Minister here in this country saying ‘mattresses will monitor our nightmares’ and I think there’s a danger of moving a world of negative propaganda related to this topic. I actually think the challenges, but also the opportunities are far more subtle than that. I mean I think this age of what I call ‘Augmented Intelligence’ not Artificial Intelligence is actually upon us right now, you know, when we open our phones and we order a cab or we shop on line, in our business lives, this technology is kind of seeping into every corner. And so I think that age is actually upon us right now and that doesn’t mean the challenges aren’t as complex that we need to grapple with ethical or otherwise, but I think it’s quite different to this terminator view that perhaps has been presented in other aspects which actually, from what I see at the kind of coalface, is still very, very far, far off. I think the possibilities of augmented intelligence are actually incredibly exciting when we think about the medical industry and the ability to augment doctors to make better decisions to spot cancer faster or we think about security and intelligence and the ability to get ahead of terrorism or other threats to countries and the general public. When we think about our business lives and the context that we operate in at Signal where we’re using this technology to not replace how business leaders make decisions and again, that’s very far, far, far away but actually augment these business leaders with the data that they need to be informed to get ahead of risks, issues and spot opportunities faster and more effectively.
Elliot Moss
Now assuming you can do all that with your augmented intelligence and you can help businesses do that and your revenue grows from £7 million or whatever it is, up to £20 million and, perish the thought, that a tech business starts to make a profit and of course, we know Amazon took before it made a profit and their very profitable now. Where are things going to go for you David in simple terms, what does the next three to five years look like so that your investors get a return, you become super famous as the hero that brought AI and augmented intelligence to businesses and the big P word, the Profit happens in your business. What’s going to ensure you can do all of those things?
David Benigson
Yeah I think this on-going focus on solving our customers problems in the most sophisticated and fundamental way that we can. The business is growing very very rapidly, today we service over 600 companies around the world, some of the largest organisations and Governments. The business is scaling internationally which is an exciting area of growth for us, so we launched in the US a few years ago. We’ve grown that team rapidly and there are still huge amounts of kind of green field in front of us in that market. We also launched in APAC in Hong Kong and other areas of APAC that are very, very exciting to us so we are not particularly focussed on exit, we’re just fundamentally focussed on growth and customer value. I think the business is very profitable on a uni-economic basis, that’s one of the beauties of software as a service, the growth margin is very high, the economics work really well, but we’ve chosen to fund and accelerate growth as opposed to focus on profit at this particular point. But I think, as the business continues to scale, that’s very much in our line of sight and something that we believe we can achieve in the coming years.
Elliot Moss
Will you also be able to achieve to continue to be a renegade
David Benigson
Absolutely! You know, and I think that will remain an important part of our culture, it’s certainly a part of my character and personality, so I don’t imagine it going away but I think it’s about applying it effectively to be able to challenge the business, challenge myself and in some ways challenge our clients and the wider market.
Elliot Moss
You’re in danger of sounding very mature David, I’m super nervous. It’s been great talking to you. Really, really, good stuff and the business are gone from strength-to-strength even in the last few years, extraordinary growth. Well Done.
David Benigson
Thank you for having me back.
Elliot Moss
It’s a pleasure and just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
David Benigson
So, my song choice is Herbie Mann, Coming Home Baby and actually whilst I’m in this business and technology world, my two siblings are both artists. My sister finished a PhD at Oxford recently in Fine Art. My younger brother is a painter and a big saxophonist and a huge Jazz fan and he introduced me to this song and we often listen to it together.
Elliot Moss
That was Herbie Mann with Coming Home Baby, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, the first of the new season, David Benigson. A person who inherently challenged the status quo and continues to do so. A person who has created an organisation that is flat but can also ensure that people can challenge the status quo within it. Allying himself to academic research, the critical nature of robust understanding of things and finally, a vision of the future which is an augmented one where intelligence is both artificial and human. Really good stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You will find hundreds of more guests available to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.