“I realised that as I walked up to the door of an event, it’s not just me going in there, I’ve got all those investors behind me and in my mind they were all watching everything I do to make sure that I’m giving them the best chance of success for their investment so, yes, it would be a bit scary tapping David Cameron on the shoulder and introducing myself to him but I was like, ‘Well, that’s probably what they want me to do’, if I spent the time, you know, drinking with students, they probably wouldn’t appreciate that so, I always was a bit kind of scared going into these things but I knew that I had to make the most of it, I had investors, I had to try and give them the best chance of success and I still have that in my mind now every time I go to an event, I’m like ‘I’ve got to make the most of every minute.’”
Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome Laurence Kemball-Cook. Laurence is the award-winning founder and CEO of Pavegen, an innovative, clean technology company. Headquartered in London, with an R&D centre in Cambridge, Pavegen manufactures a floor system that instantly converts kinetic energy from footfall into off-grid energy, data and rewards. His mission is to improve the world through the power of a footstep. Laurence and Pavegen have been recognised with numerous awards and accolades and Laurence is a renowned thought leader and worldwide speaker on entrepreneurship and innovation. Acclaimed for shifting perceptions of renewable energy, Laurence has spoken at more TED talks than any other tech company. Clients include Google, Cisco, Nike, Adidas and the Federal US government and his technology has been adopted in over 200 sites around the globe.
So now we’re going to hear from Laurence about his vision for Pavegen and how he’s built this innovative business into a global enterprise. Laurence, welcome and good morning.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Hi, good morning.
Susan Freeman
So, we met recently at a networking event for young leaders and I was so impressed with your stories that I thought that we should have a chat. In fact, I checked and realised that Pavegen were guests at a Future Retail Innovation event we hosted back in 2018 so, we’ll have a chat about the pace of change in innovation. But first of all, tell me a little bit about you, your background, how you came to be an entrepreneur.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Sure, yeah. So, like you said, I’ve always been into entrepreneurship, I’ve always had lots of energy for various endeavours in my life and I like design, I studied Industrial Design and Technology at Loughborough University, where I really threw myself into you know product design, ID and from that it gave me a chance to start investigating more sustainable design solutions. I grew up where every lesson that I was taught was all about global warming, it was really starting to become a big thing and when I started becoming a designer, I got a chance to work at E.ON to develop new forms of solar energy that would be used for things like streetlights so, I started my journey looking at different forms of renewables that I could put onto these streetlighting columns. I think we were, it was part of these PFI bits that they were going to put 10,000 of them in, around Blackpool and various other kind of town and cities in the UK and I realised that after a year of working there, working with the Solar Research Institute at Loughborough University and an LED luminaire manufacturer called Advance LEDs that it really wouldn’t work and I realised that in dense, urban environments you don’t get particularly good solar as a solution and we looked at wind and again, for wind to work you need to be on a rooftop, you need to be out at sea, you need to be on top of a mountain but not really installed somewhere in an urban environment so, I failed, I cried, I was upset, hanging my head in shame, I left E.ON and I kept thinking about this problem. Most students return to going back to their final year of university and have other things on their mind but I was definitely focussed on this problem and it really was something that wouldn’t let me sleep and I realised that, you know, the average station can get 71 million steps or 71 million people visiting and I thought well, the average person makes a 150 million steps in their lifetime, if not many, many more than that and that really started my journey into looking at could we capture the energy from a human footstep, could we use something as simple as walking as an opportunity to make a big difference on the world and that’s where it kind of started.
Susan Freeman
So, when did you start and how old were you when you started?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
So, I graduated and finished my work at E.ON in 2009. So, I must have, you know, just coming out of Uni, so I was probably 22, something like that and then I started my journey really. I know that, you know, the thing about the journey of Pavegen is that I did really spend five or six years just researching it in my bedroom, trying to find a solution on the side, so it wasn’t necessarily like a big company that I was trying to launch at that point, it was just, “Hey, I think this is cool”, I’m going to try and, you know, work on it, work away to try and make into a commercial venture and if it’s not going to be a, you know the billion dollar unicorn that I dream of, it’s really fun and I’m enjoying trying to investigate this subject area.
Susan Freeman
So, you spent five or six years researching, sorting out the technology. What gave you your first real break? How were you discovered?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah so, I think the first break was actually, there’s a show in London called New Designers and it’s in the Business Design Centre and they invite like ten students per product design course in the UK to showcase their work. So to the dismay of my highly artistic colleagues on the course who had these amazing designs, I had this simple paving slab and I put it in and suddenly, a TV crew showed up and wanted to film it and then the next day, off the back of this, it suddenly went viral across lots of print publications in London, so I think it was on The Sun, The Telegraph, even like the South London Press, suddenly that went up and I’d created like a really basic website. I like building websites, I thought let’s just build one for my project, it had my mobile number on the bottom, so it wasn’t the most professional website and from this media and it started going viral on Twitter, as it was known at the time, and people started contacting me on the website saying, “Hi, I’m from, I’m from Nigeria, can I distribute?”, “I’m from Japan, can I be your agent?”, “I’m from America, can I invest?” and then I knew, and I probably got a thousand emails in a week and many, many phone calls, like my phone didn’t stop ringing from people wanting to get involved with the project as it was at the time and that led me to start thinking about it more seriously as something that I believed had a potential based on the feedback I was getting from everyone. And if you think about how to launch a business, it’s almost the wrong way to do it because I didn’t really have a product, I had a very, very, very basic embodiment of a product but I had nothing like, you don’t go to market without anything to sell and that’s exactly what I did as a student.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, and I can see that that’s probably the wrong way round so, that was pretty early on in the journey. So how did you respond to all that? How did you get funding?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah, so, I was always into the idea of like tinkering with it and I kept experimenting with it so I had a few things like I knew that what I had at university was effectively a lump of MDF wood held together with duct tape, some very poorly drilled screws holding it together and when you stood on it, it creaked and crunched, it sounded a bit like walking up a 200 year old staircase in like some sort of old stately home so, it wasn’t a great product, it was, it was laughable when people tried it out. However, then from that point I did a few things so, I had some friends who were mechanical engineers at manufacturing companies and I basically persuaded them at night to run through small production runs for new components and I think I paid them in beer, so it was really like they’d take a month, they’d go away, they’d machine me some beautiful stainless steel drive shafts with bearings fly pressed into them, like really beautiful, precision engineering. It took a long time to get those parts made, so slowly I was doing that and then after a few months I had a, probably maybe even a year, I had a rig that would demonstrate the mechanical design and I think it consisted of a chopstick, an old CD, like really basic but it showed the potential of it and I built a rig in my, a garage and the rig was a huge arm that would go up and down and pound this technology and I got it up to nearly a million steps and this was a really important moment because at a million steps, you have to look at the wear on the product and depending on the level of wear, you can make an assumption on what 20 million steps would look like and often, the first thousand steps, it would be worn out but I got to nearly a million, there was no wear on it at all virtually so, it looked really good and then I invited ten of the, like the wealthiest couples I knew, I donned a lab coat because I thought it would make me look a bit more professional, I was in this garage, there was this machine there and I invited them round for a dinner and then took them out like in groups to look at the prototype. I’d also at this point I think got a contract with Diageo to do like a launch around five countries in Europe as like a brand activation thing and so I had this contract, it might have been about £100K but I had no funding at all and it was just a dream really and the couples all came in, I gave my pitch, showed them the contract, they saw this contraption, I was serious like mad eventer kind of image I was giving off and all ten of them invested £10K, but every single one did and I think I priced it at £1 million valuation, which is what I was advised to do, sometimes companies go in at £5 million at the start and you know, they invested and then that really started my journey so now I’ve got, you know, there’s ten fairly happy shareholders with their 10% equity from Day 1 in Pavegen and that’s when the journey started moving forward.
Susan Freeman
So, when was that? What year?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
So, this was happening between 2009 and 2012. The testing, the engineering and then the moment of having the test rig was partly after about 2011, 2012 time.
Susan Freeman
So what, what was your first installation and how did it go?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah, so, throughout that time, I was also, I knew that I needed to test the product, so I think my first installation I, I didn’t know if people wanted to walk on a floor that generated energy so, the first test I did was, I lay down green tiles around London so, if you were walking around Carnaby Street, you would have seen me hidden in a doorway with a little clipboard and I just lay loads of green tiles on the street. Now, look, between us, I did trip a few people up because it was literally like a thick, green tile but a lot of people saw it and would like run over to it and start jumping on it and so I was really interested in how people interacted with the product and they seemed to like the idea of something that looked visual on the floor and then because of that, I went to my old school because I thought look, I just need to test it, do people actually want to walk on my actual product and so I had no permission, I went to a boys’ grammar school in Kent, in Canterbury, and I just turned up there one day, had my car, out the back of it I had my like a 5 metre installation and dropped it in a corridor and when the lunchbreak happened, I just watched and it was amazing. Obviously, the teachers were like “What is going on in our school? Where’s your insurance? Where’s you health and safety?” and I figured that because they kind of recognised maybe I wouldn’t get in too much trouble so, I was there and the kids loved it, like they were jumping up and down on the product, screaming and then after a while, the teachers saw what was going on and they were like encouraging the kids to run and generate more power and if you can imagine, usually in a school like that, the teachers spend their time telling children to stop running and then that started it, I think The Times wrote an article about “Run, don’t walk in this school” and that really gave me a lot more drive to keep understanding where it could be used and I think from there, I kept wanting to work out where else it could go. The dream was to take it to every single, you know with Pavegen it’s to take to every shopping mall, every stadium, every smart city, every transport hub, so this includes airports, train stations, subways, bus stations, all those locations, a weave and dream of, you know, what about a dairy farm, you know, 10,000 cattle coming in and out, there is potential you know for those places so I knew that to get there, I had to prove it would work so, I did the school, then I started thinking well about a dance floor, so I got a chance to take it to Bestival on the Isle of Wight which was set up by a famous Radio 1 DJ and what was amazing there is we decided to charge people’s phones with the energy and people really loved it, we created like a, I stole the roof of my dad’s conservatory and it was like a fluted, plastic, transparent roof – you see them in B&Q, they’re really cheap – and I filled it with LEDs and I made this light-up wall and it did look amazing for considering it was my dad’s conservatory roof and people really loved it, I had like queues around the festival for people to have a chance to dance and to charge their phone and to see this amazing like LED light bar go up and so that led me onto thinking well hold on, people really do like this, like I knew students liked it and then I thought well I’d got a cross-section of two year olds through to fifty year olds, sixty year olds jumping on it and then that further spurred me on to keep this kind of side project as something that I thought could have more potential and then I think that led onto the development of the technology that led onto the testing in the garage from that point.
Susan Freeman
So you were, I mean talking about it now, you know the idea of renewable energy and sustainability and saving the planet, you know it’s part of the mainstream conversation but when you, when you started this I think people weren’t thinking so much about saving the planet so, you must have been sort of very much ahead of your time.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
I think I’d never really heard of the term ‘cleantech’ and I think it really did mean that there wasn’t like funds specifically set up, there was, it was one or two that had started doing big renewable investing but they disappeared quite quickly, it was really in the early days. I even remember like being an entrepreneur now is really cool, like everyone, you know so it really is an aspirational thing to do but like back then I literally was thinking “I need to dye my hair grey” because all these old men that I’m meeting to invest, they were all old, they didn’t appreciate or respect me because I’m just a, you know I was a kid straight out of Uni but I think now the kids coming out of Uni can have a billion dollar idea and people will invest in him or her whereas then it did really feel pretty hard and I think one of my awards I was won was in the RSA, so the Royal Society of Arts, and I got a free membership there and they gave me £5000 funding which really helped and I remember I had all my investor meetings for like years in the RSA and it was, they must have been a bit fed up with of every single sofa and corridor I was like hovering at in Covent Garden obviously a great spot, was hovering at just trying to get this company off the ground and many of the RSA guys used to listen in on my pitches and be like, “Are you sure this is a good idea? It sounds a bit crazy. You’re always here pitching people but I don’t see any progress” which I guess it did feel like that for a few years.
Susan Freeman
One of the things you mentioned when we were doing our networking panel a couple of weeks ago was being invited onto a trade mission with David Cameron, I mean how did that come about?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
I think I just got an email out of the blue, you know I was still just experimenting with it and then I got this email from Number 10 saying you know, “You’ve been invited to China” and then I went in for a briefing and they were telling me all about like not being honey trapped by Chinese spies and I thought okay, well I’m just a guy who’s been playing with this floor generator for a while and then, yeah, I think I just showed up to like a private terminal in Heathrow, which I’d never seen before, got onto, it was a Virgin 747 that was, the entire charter was for this trade delegation with the likes of you know the CEO of the Premier League and Tesco’s, Maclaren, JCB, some of the biggest architecture firms in the world, I think Karen Brady was there as well and that was certainly a really interesting experience for me. I probably wasn’t great at networking, I didn’t really know much about it, I was 100% out of my depth and you know David Cameron was wondering around in his jeans having a chat and I think they, they drunk the champagne bar dry in the plane apparently and I think when I got to Beijing they said, “Karen Brady’s just pulled out, she’s got another engagement” and “do you want to do a quick introduction speech for the Prime Minister?” and I was like err, I think the last speech I’d given was pretty much like at university as part of my course and then I you know got on the stage, made something up and then the Prime Minister Xi of China was up after me so I was like what’s going on so I had to pinch myself a little bit to work that out but I think I’ve always been, I relished the opportunity to throw myself in the deep end and yeah, I was nervous and I was probably trembling but then after then I guess the journey really started from me getting to do TED talks and I think I flew out to Brazil and did a TED talk there and that was a real experience because it’s a, it’s like another level of trying to elevate the idea and I knew as well deep down that to get an idea off the ground, it doesn’t matter if I, if I’d invented nuclear fusion, it was the best possible solution and it was in my bedroom, if no one knew about this idea, it would get nowhere and so I’ve always believed in the idea of using the power of government and the power of celebrity the power of working really closely with your clients to elevate an idea to get global recognition because I don’t think people really paid attention to me until I’d spent time with someone like David Cameron or you know worked with one of the many celebrities that we had over the years to put, paint it on the map and to recognise me as not just like this annoying guy who keeps talking about floors that generate energy who’s come straight out of university.
Susan Freeman
And do you think people can learn to do that because as you, you know, say, you were rather thrown in at the deep end and but you know for a lot of people that would have been quite daunting so you hadn’t had to network you know get to know people you know sell a product before, how do you learn to do that?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
I mean the first thing I remember is at my course you would have to come up with an idea and it might have been like a week long project and then you’d have to stand up in front of 60 people, present it and I always remember that the most confident like alpha male rugby guys would always go up and like shatter this image of being this really confident person and they’d be like trembling, barely able to get a word out and you’d be like hold on, why is this guy who’s you know the most popular, confident guy on the course, caving in front of all of us and I said well look, I’m not the most confident guy on the course but I’m going to make sure that I do a good presentation because it seemed a bit embarrassing so, I remember being really nervous at university doing that and then I think from then on in and I’d had some you know investment and I realised that as I walked up to the door of an event, it’s not just me going in there, I’ve got all those investors behind me and in my mind, they were all watching everything I do to make sure that I’m giving them the best chance of success for their investment so, yes it would be a bit scary tapping David Cameron on the shoulder and introducing myself to him but I was like well, that’s probably what they’d want me to do. If I spent the time, you know drinking with students, they probably wouldn’t appreciate that so I always was a bit kind of scared going into these things but I knew that I had to make the most of it, I had investors, I had to try and you know give them the best chance of success and I still have that in my mind now, every time I go to an event, I’m like I’ve got to make the most of every minute here, you don’t necessarily need to pitch a thousand people but maybe find the most interesting looking people or whoever they are and try you know engage them and find out more about them.
Susan Freeman
And there is a sort of skill to choosing the right people in the room because if you’re in a room with a hundred people that you don’t know, you’ve got to work out who, who it is you should be approaching so I don’t know if there’s anything in that and I know that you talked about how you met one of your investors because you just liked what he was wearing and told him.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah I think it was like some sort of Evening Standard event for leaders in London and I remember thinking well this is probably going to be a good event and yeah I think I went in there, there was a gentleman with like, we were all like milling around and having drinks as we walked in and there was a gentleman in like a rather flamboyant, elegant looking blazer with all sorts of floral designs on it and I think I just turned round, tapped him on the shoulder to say “I really like your blazer” and I turned out he ran like a huge private equity firm, like really significant and we became friends and a couple of weeks later he invested several hundred thousand pounds in the business and I guess that was by chance but I always remember that moment of like “I definitely picked the right shoulder” but I think it’s really daunting because if you walk into a room, often the people that look most scary and most engaged in conversation are probably the ones you want to speak to but they’re probably the ones that already know everyone or know their sect of people but I also know that at certain segments of an evening, people are always looking for an escape from who they’re speaking to, like you can speak to someone for five minutes but sometimes if you walk over and especially if their eyes lift up and they look at you, you can suddenly walk into the middle and I think I’ve done it in an investment event in Saudi Arabia, I kind of pushed my way into a group of six people and then they all like were like “Stop!” and they started shouting and getting their other investors and friends involved and then I ended up having a court of like twenty people around me but it just so happened that as I was giving my pitch, they were like really, really into my area so, I think if you pick it right, it can work well and you’ve just got to be brave I guess and make sure you’ve got something engaging to say to back up the interruption that maybe you sometimes give is someone is networking with someone else.
Susan Freeman
And do you have to be able to cope with rejection as well because some, you know, it doesn’t always work does it?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah, I think, I think the hardest I find is that there are some individuals and I’ve got like many investors who are like this, who are really dry and throughout the conversation you’re like this person really hates me, they’re really not engaging with me, they’re really not, none of my jokes, nothing, they’re so dry, no emotion but then at the end of it they’re like, “It was really great speaking to you” or they do something that, “Oh, do you want to come for dinner?” and you’re like hold on, this has been the hardest twenty minutes of my life and you’ve just invited me for dinner in your club or wherever and I’ve learned a lot that way through, initially I’d almost feel like saying, “Have you got a problem with me? Is everything okay?” and I hold back off that and it’s just the way of their mannerism so I think that’s one, and I think rejection, you know people are polite in the UK and you know in many are of the areas we work in so I don’t think people at a networking event is going to say “Please may you go away”, I don’t think I’ve quite had it like that but I’ve definitely maybe been cold shouldered or maybe they’re like the oil industry and they hate renewables but I think that’s just, that’s part and parcel, you’ve got to, you’ve got to ride with the punches sometimes.
Susan Freeman
So, let’s just talk a little bit about the technology and how it works and presumably it’s more sophisticated now than when you started your prototype in the garage. What sort of energy does it produce and I think you also collect data and I thought that was quite an interesting aspect.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yes so, we’ve built around 800 different production versions of Pavegen over the years, we’ve changed the design significantly. In 2018 we effectively threw away everything we learned and we started again. We went from a rectangular design to a triangle design because we believed that it had the potential to capture every single footstep, we’d capture the energy, it was really easy to install, it was really deployable, really scalable, lots of good stuff around that. But also in terms of the performance of the core product, one of our kind of early employees, I went into a company called Cambridge Consultants, they are one of the most expensive but really, really great technology consultants in Cambridge and I went in there and I said I had funding, I didn’t, and I got like five of them listening to me and they had so many letters after their name, I didn’t know what any of them meant but they were, they were all very bright scientists and one of those individuals who was leading the clean technology unit there, he kept in touch with me after that meeting, clearly I didn’t hire them because I didn’t have the millions that I said I did, but he was intrigued by it and a few years after we first met, probably in 2010, and I think it was 2016 I hired the head of clean technology at Cambridge Consultants and he was a highly respected engineering lead and with his support we built this new version of Pavegen. I was also like why has this guy joined me like, how have I got this guy who’s you know many, many years’ experience, and we built the next version of Pavegen and that allowed us to get efficiency up by something like 20% and we learned a lot, like we sent some of our units off to be manufactured in a factory in Romania and it didn’t have a very good laser cutter and it was really jaggedy as they cut it and it looked like a two year old cut it with scissors when the laser went through it and it turned out efficiency jumped by 10% when this data, which has a fly wheel on it of our product used this jaggedy, poor quality cut and then we realised it was all about how we interrupt the flux path of the magnets as well and so suddenly we had learned lots along they way like that and so how Pavegen works, is it’s a, when you walk on our floor, so you’re walking on a triangular floor and underneath it there is a fly wheel and the fly wheel will, one step will spin the fly wheel for anywhere from one to five seconds and that will then generate energy, there’s a series of magnets and copper within it that generates power. We could store that energy in batteries or we can use it instantly, so if you walk over it, one step will power a light for five to ten seconds and funnily enough, the heavier you are, the more energy it will produce so, our installations in America do yield more and I won’t go into too much detail about why but so what we found on that is we can store it, we can use the energy intelligently, it can go into building management systems and like off grid power systems as well. So we think we’ve developed one of the most efficient ways of generating energy from a human footstep and it’s up to about 45%-50% efficient and if you compare that to like a combustion engine which is on about 40% efficiency, it’s pretty good as it stands as like a machine and we’re working to improve that and to bring the cost down as it goes forward so we’ve learned a huge amount about this area and filed many patents along the way.
Susan Freeman
So, I mean I know you’re now in sort of any number of countries round the world and I saw sort of recently you put a walkway into Abu Dhabi Airport and airports do seem to be you know the ideal sort of place to have your product. I mean, how many people would cross it, you know what electricity are you generating and how are people engaging with it?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah so, what’s been really interesting is like I’m still fascinated about how people engage in our product so, there’s around 10,000 a day who walk over it Abu Dhabi Airport and it’s between Terminal 1 and 2 and it powers the lights in that area of the corridor and then it also, we use the data to drive like an interactive game so, the plane takes off as the more you walk on it in that area and people sometimes stop and like play with it and then the plane glides down. I thought about maybe the plane going down and exploding in a ball of flames if you don’t walk on it but the Abu Dhabi Airport didn’t like that idea too much so we pulled that one away. I mean to date we’ve had over a billion steps on our products around the world. I think soon we’ll actually be looking more nearer the 2 million mark and we need to go and crunch some numbers and it’s just, I think what we’ve found is that we are really a simple way for people to take part in energy. If you think about an airport, an airport is, they can put LED lightbulbs everywhere, they can use sustainable materials and have the greenest airport in the world but if you think about the overall carbon footprint, 99% of the carbon is from people flying on the planes, it makes a really small impact how sustainable the design of the airport actually is in the grand scheme of things and so we believe that actually educating people around sustainability is going to have much greater value in teaching them maybe don’t fly as much or this is how much carbon a flight is, rather than them spending millions on say like a huge solar array on the roof, which is obviously very difficult because of glare in airports but sometimes they’d rather spend the money on having something that’s facing you know the most important asset for them which is people, people make an airport valuable, we saw what happened in Covid, how troubling it was in that kind of airport environment so, we think people and we call this ‘the internet of beings’, people are the most important thing in our cities and our transport hubs, schools and communities.
Susan Freeman
And when you engage with property developers, I mean do they, do they get it, do they want you in their shopping centres and developments? How, how does that go?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah, so it actually first started, and I’ll step back a bit from there is, it first started when we were having a real struggle trying to get some big projects off the ground and I remember saying well I need to prove that this works in permanent environments so, after an unsuccessful investment pitch, we were walking past the London Southbank, right near London Eye and we broke in and at 2.00 in the morning, we illegally installed the product and so I was there breaking in, I had a pickaxe, I had like a concrete ready-mix, I had like all this tools and equipment and we were removing the paving slabs, we drop in our product and we’re mixing mortar, I think I ran out of water half way through so I had to go and buy Evian from a corner shop to mix up the cement, something I haven’t done since I must admit, and then we’re trowelling in the cement and what we did is, we connected to some LEDs, so one step would power like up to around twenty lights from it and that was in Southbank and we left the site, we tiptoed away at 6.00 in the morning without being, I guess, accosted by security and I put the picture on our websites saying like “The future of energy is here. Our first installation is in the ground” and I got a call from Westfield and Westfield said “Look, we’ve been tracking your company. Did you, did you do an installation last night?” and I said yes but they didn’t ask me if I had permission or not so I was fine, there was definitely no insurance or any form of documentation around it and they said “Look, can we buy one?” and I was almost in shock, I was like yeah, okay, you can buy one and you know we ended up closing at a really exciting deal with Westfield, this is in Stratford, in the Olympic Park and now they get around 36 million people a year walking there and that really was our first foray into that level of retail so I think since then, you know we’ve just installed it in the new Westfield Hamburg site so, they liked it enough to come back again and yeah, we regularly work with developers, I think the challenge is probably around how much budget is there and the kind of division of a developer because it’s very easy to just you know put up as much concrete as possible and as much square footage to make the best GDV you can from a deal, whereas you know we’ve been really successful in say Hong Kong where we work with like Sino Land, Capital Land, a number of the leading developers out there because I think the value really is, is when you create that, that lifestyle development that has all the elements that people want which is like fitness, wellness, something really beautiful, maybe art, there aren’t that many projects in the UK that have really, really deeply embody that idea so we definitely do have you know contracts in the UK with developers but I think the international ones are the ones where we see them saying “Oh we want ten arrays” and then they’ll come back and they’ll order another twenty and this is an example, Kai Tak in Hong Kong, a big mixed-use development and then we’ve just come back and done a project with Cyberport in Hong Kong as well so, I wish that UK developers had maybe more vision and a bit more bravery to do these kind of projects and I guess we’ve probably missed the boat a bit on Battersea Power station but something like that where they talk a lot about, they’ve got Electric Boulevard there, would be a perfect news case for our technology.
Susan Freeman
And how does it work? Do they go in as a permanent installation or do you rent the paving stones out or any sort of multiple of those choices?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah, so how we work is we sell our product and we rent it. So, the two models are rental is we work on big brand events so we launched Google’s latest Pixel phone in Chicago, we’ve done dance floors for Guinness on St Patrick’s Day and for Formula E we create electric car racing games. Now the reason we do that is we know we’re on a crusade, we’ve invented a new product category and so brands like to use it but it also gets our name out there so, you know Volvo for example have used it in six countries at an event but then they’ll buy it permanently and they’ll use it in their building so, it gets our foot in the door, it’s also really good because we have lots of, lots of pieces of revenue coming in throughout the year and then with permanent, we sell the technology directly to the end user or the contractor and then we’ll also licence the data that comes off the product and there’s a recurring fee on that. And that is lumpy, you know, we might spend two years speaking about a major contract somewhere and then it will all come through in one, you know, and I guess right now we’re working on some of the biggest projects in the world from Saudi Arabia, across the UAE, Hong Kong and also North America being our, our kind of key markets as well and that’s the mix and then there’s also the recurring revenue piece on top for the data.
Susan Freeman
So, I mean you mentioned the sort of wellbeing aspect and it seems to tie in very well with sport and I think it’s in Hong Kong you’ve, you’ve actually got the product on a running track so, people sort of using the running track are generating electricity, I mean that sounds like you know a really good idea.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah, I think it’s one of my most favourite projects and it comes down to everyone talks about smart cities, like I’ve got smart city fatigue and you say what does it mean, it means interoperable city with great communications, great transport infrastructure, all the buildings speak to each other and you can understand where things are and what’s going on at what time and okay, it sounds alright and it gets a bit into minority report and that a camera will monitor the gait of your footstep as you walk and it will know what floor you’re going to go to and it will open it automatically and it will also tell you if you’ve got a disease or an illness okay, so that’s kind of how we talk about smart cities but I really believe that like all you can say about smart cities is like smart cities are places that should make people happy, smart cities are places that should inspire people to live in cities because it’s been proven that although people are richer who live in urban environments, they’re also less happy, you know living a fast paced life in London or New York, it’s not a great place to live so we need to stop thinking about smart cities as lots of 5G networks that talk to each other but think about as places that inspire people, that inspire wellness and connectivity and community and what we’ve done with Pavegen is, you know if we are speaking to smart city providers like we are a smart city solution but ultimately it’s about people coming together and some of the things we’ve been trying to do is to improve the wellness in urban environments so from anything from a pocket park in Washington DC where you can walk around and your energy will power the lights in the park and it’s got an interactive element, through to this running track. We were approached by the developer to create a space on the fourth storey of a building and in Hong Kong you can’t really run on the street, it’s a really dense, polluted city and so we built this running track in the building that I think JP Morgan and WeWork were the tenants there and now you can come down in your lunchbreak, run around this track and help to power part of the building but they also have like exercise bikes there and we’re building a platform where you can be rewarded for your steps on your mobile device, so you for example you can get a discount on your coffee if you do 100 steps and help to do your bit or you can donate your steps to charity and unlock unique experiences so, we’ve got this digital element but also the element of just you’re powering your building and I think JP Morgan, I found out recently, you know they renewed their lease because they were like “our staff just love this, it’s cool” and I know there’s a bit of a trend on running tracks on rooftops but why are we not doing more with our space when you can actually turn it into a way to connect deeply with your most important asset which is ultimately, you know in this day and age it comes down to what’s your occupancy, can you get people in five days a week and you know Amazon are trying it but maybe they need a running track to make the office a great place for people to live, to come in every day and spend their time you know enjoying the office.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, I can imagine it would tie in sort of quite well with the programmes that the health insurance companies run, you know get points for powering your building and get points on your medical insurance as well.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Definitely, well I need to speak to the CEO of Vitality Health, so if you’re out there, I’d love to have that conversation.
Susan Freeman
And what markets haven’t you cracked yet? I know we talked a little bit about sort of maybe sort of high end residential, could it have any sort of residential use?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
I guess the markets for Pavegen ultimately are endless. You know I mentioned before this dream of a 10,000 cattle dairy farm coming in and out multiple times a day but there’s so much you can do with that. I think with a start-up it’s really important to segment your market and focus on the easy wins. So we obviously have a very similar product that’s sold across all markets but for us it’s trying to find the right growth area so we know that working with large developers is a really good way in. Residential we haven’t done yet, I think it’s like a future pipedream of the potential to, you know we are a B2B company but I think that modern B2B companies should like a B2C, should be really consumer focussed and people do love the product, it’s amazing seeing the reactions we get to it and the idea of putting it into a residential property would be really exciting, so we’d be interested in the idea of you know putting say a 500 unit development, put it in 500, some very small Pavegen arrays in each property that could be in the entrance as people walk into their apartments or maybe some sort of exercise area or the idea that you could power your, power a light in the entrance using your steps is really intriguing so I think we’d love that idea to come to fruition and I think the gyms as well, it keeps coming up, putting it into a gym because why should a gym just use loads of energy for people just to waste that as heat energy when you could actually be reusing that energy in the form of power in the gym itself.
Susan Freeman
Makes so much sense doesn’t it. Also, you mentioned cows but I saw that Purina had launched something called Pet Power today which seems to use renewable energy.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
It’s a fun project so like we have an event part of our business and we’re speaking to PR agencies and brands all round the world to bring their ideas to life and one of those projects was with the world’s largest dog food company, Purina, owned by Nestle and they’ve been touring it and I laugh at this because it is amazing, they’ve been touring it around North America at all these dog shows and they’re using the energy of dogs to power part of the show and the energy is being stored in batteries. It’s not something I thought I’d ever do but every day I see a new article about the impact it’s having for them so, who knows but yeah, dog power as well is clearly happening at the moment. Probably not a Chihuahua though, I think you need to have a slightly bigger dog than a tiny Chihuahua.
Susan Freeman
I think you’re right. And do you think that the pace at which we have embraced technology, proptech, cleantech, has been as fast as you thought when you started with the product and, you know, I was talking about this event we hosted in 2018 looking at retail innovation. Is the pace of change as fast as it should be?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
I think it depends what element. I think like digital elements and Siemens have like MindSphere that helps them run smart buildings and BIM and things. Those elements can change really quickly but when you’re talking about adoption of new pieces of building materials, I think it’s been really slow but then again, you can only work as fast as the developments happen so for example if I speak to 100 developers and they all absolutely love Pavegen, they’re not all going to buy Pavegen tomorrow because they might be working on a project once every four years and we might only be needed at the final six months before it goes live so, I think it is slow because of the inherent nature of that business and you do spend many, many, many years on just a single project and we could spend up to you know four, five years discussing a project with the main client so, I think yeah it certainly is slower, there’s obviously a pessimistic attitude, maintenance is a really big element and I guess I’m used to it now, it’s the world we live in and I hope that we see more ambitious developers, thinking differently, challenging the status quo, because ultimately we need to start making properties more about people, we live in very old housing stock, the way we look at property I think is really outdated from looking at things like air quality, you know noise, all those things that make people have a really happy life, we’re not necessarily thinking about and especially with office spaces, we must have done something wrong because no one wants to be there anymore, you know there’s many, many of these empty offices all over the world, I guess they’re slowly being converted to residential but still, you know we’ve got rethink our offices too.
Susan Freeman
I think we’re doing better in London than we are in other parts of the world, I mean the office vacancy rate in New York is so much higher than London and I’m not quite sure, I’m not quite sure why.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah I know I heard recently, there’s a number of big office buildings that are being converted into residential in the heart of New York because obviously rent’s really high but we need to rethink it to get people to want to return because ultimately, you know I believe the best ideas happen through cross-cultivation of ideas from multidisciplinary teams who are friends, who get on, who can talk and it’s really hard to do that on a Zoom call, it’s almost I believe impossible and especially as we’re building a, we’re building a really complex product with hardware, software, firmware, it’s all those elements, you need people to come together and that I think for big companies to do something different you need your staff to come together so, that really does need a rethink to persuade people to come back in and hopefully, you know, five years’ time we’ll have better occupancy when the Covid hangover has finally disappeared for good.
Susan Freeman
Yeah, people do seem to be coming back but then as you say, they have to want to come to the office, the office has to be a place that attracts them otherwise it’s you know why, why commute an hour if you know a lot of what you’re doing you could do online so, the office has got to have features that you know make people engage and collaborate. And just listening to what you’re saying, I was sort of wondering whether there’s anybody who’s been a particular role model or inspiration to you during the journey so far?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Yeah, I think because I’ve had a few people that, at the beginning I made a lot of mistakes, I took investment from the wrong people, I had various people supporting me who were industry titans and I guarantee you know everyone’s aware of who these individuals would be, like very, very well respected people but they didn’t necessarily have the best for the company in mind when they supported us, so I made many mistakes. I do believe that you can get a great MBA but going in the trenches for two or three years, you’ll learn a lot more than you can learn in a lecture room so, I, I’ve kind of had that experience. I didn’t really have a mentor at the beginning and I think I’ve been lucky to have a couple of mentors, one of them was, is Will King, so Will King founded King of Shaves, he challenged Gillette, built it to a £23 million business and sold it so did really, really well in that journey and he presented me with my first ever award and I made friends with him and he’s someone who’s carried it through till today and then I guess there’s a designer I grew up like learning a lot about, James Dyson and his awful wheelbarrow that he created as his first product and then how he went round to every vacuum cleaner company and they said no and then how, I guess it was the darling, when I was starting of British technology, obviously it’s not British anymore, it’s in Singapore but he was a role model and the failures he’s experienced in his journey certainly related to the struggles I was going through so. It is a bit of a cheesy, contrived mentor or sort of role model but he was really someone that I was learning about probably when I was fifteen I learned about Dyson in my design classes at school, through to doing projects on him at university so, he was someone who has always inspired me to keep pursuing my ideas.
Susan Freeman
And what advice would you give to young entrepreneurs who are listening who’ve got an idea and want to turn it into a business? Would you suggest that they do something else or go with it?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
I mean 100% going with it is the best thing, even if you fail, you become way more employable, you learn many other skills that you wouldn’t necessarily learn in a big corporation, so I’m a massive believer in going and trying it out. I think you’ve got to believe in your idea, you can’t take no for an answer, it’s important to know the power of storytelling so, you’ve got to get people captivated with your idea, you’ve got to build a small army of people who love what you’re doing and can support you through investment and introductions and you know free office space and all those things you need at the beginning. You need to be aware that it’s going to be really hard to find your first employees and you’ve got to motivate them however you can to get them to come on board for ideally, you know, the lowest pay possible because presumably there isn’t much money there but it is really fun building something and you can create your own future. The confines of a 9 to 5 in an office is you know an option out there for everyone but you can create your own life if you become an entrepreneur and build a company around the values that you have and that’s I think an amazing experience. I mean I wish I was in California surfing every day. Sadly, I’m in Central London and haven’t quite nailed the Silicon Valley dream but it is a great experience to be able to do that to really make your impact on the world and I believe the best impact you could possibly make is, is by being an entrepreneur and that’s I think a great reason to have a go and if you fail, it’s still really good for your career and your knowledge base.
Susan Freeman
And where would you like the company to be in five years’ time?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
I guess we’re an interesting space, you know we’ve got a unique product, really defendable, we’ve had strong revenue growth. We’ve had some offers for acquisition and we believe that there’s a great opportunity for us to maximise our growth. We’re only really at POC stage across 40 different countries, we need to be able to be deeply embedded in all these different environments so my, my aim would be to over the next two to three years, to go through an acquisition by a large conglomerate that could really start to supercharge our growth and you know when you’ve got 100,000 staff that can help with logistics, that would certainly make a different to, you know we’re an innovation company, we’re about building cutting-edge technology, we’re not about shipping it across Africa and all these emerging markets, so it really would be to be acquired by a large corporation and then to be part of every single person’s life, to be installed in every home, in every street, when you walk to work in the morning it could power the lights during your walk home in the evening and to be that key part of cities of the future so I think it’s really keeping that trajectory and making sure we’ve got that partner that will then allow us to, to just be another building material, to be thought of like, to be as easy to buy a piece of wood from you know a hardware wholesaler as to buy a Pavegen component for your building.
Susan Freeman
That’s great and I’m just thinking, I’ve not tried this product. Where would I have to go to sort of try it out?
Laurence Kemball-Cook
So, we’re in the NLA building in the City of London, that’s North London Architecture, it’s a group of some of the leading developers in the UK, we have an installation there.
Susan Freeman
I was there yesterday. I wish I’d known.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Oh right. Oh yeah, there’s an installation yeah right there in the main, there’s like a model of the city and it’s right, right there. Nick and his team have been really great and it’s fantastic to have it in there. We’re in the Mercury Mall in East London and then you might have to go further afield, we’re working on some really interesting projects in London at the moment to test it out but there’s installations in you know retail sites in Paris, we’ve actually done about six installations in Germany this year as well so, Germany is probably better suited to Pavegen than the UK is at the moment.
Susan Freeman
Okay, well it sounds as if we need a few more installations closer to home but I mean it sounds great and Laurence, thank you so much for your time and we will watch with interest. Thank you.
Laurence Kemball-Cook
Thanks so much, really enjoyed speaking Susan, thank you.
Susan Freeman
Thank you, Laurence, for some inspirational stories and great insights into the ups and downs of building a business and if you want to try a Pavegen, it’s in the in NLA space at Guildhall in the City of London.
So that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.
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