Didoo

How Unruly went Global with Social Video

Some quick notes from the TechTalks@Cass

During the year the Cass Business School hosts in London a series of interviews with some of the UK’s most innovative and inspirational tech entrepreneurs. This evening guests were Sarah Wood and Scott Button, co-founders of Unruly, a platform for social video advertising and predictive analytics.

The company was founded in 2006 and today employs more than 160 people across 13 offices in 10 countries (in their London head-quarters are usually held the Unrulyversity meet ups).

The interview was around their entrepreneurial journey and the secret of their success. Here a transcript of the raw notes I have taken:

Question: one word to boil down to the recipe of Unruly success?
Response: “team” (Sara) and “ambition” (Scott).

How do you scale a small company to a global level?
With “communication”, practices and processes. But most of all communication. Extreme communication (like Extreme Programming, in a way). You never communicate enough (Sara). Also, sending the best people in the company all around the world offices, to share the best practices, to create a shared knowledge (Scott).

Why did you create City Unruly University (a pop-up university)?
1) because it was fun, 2) to create awareness and 3) legacy, to make a difference in the community.

What you look in a person when you recruit? How do you choose who joins the team?
We always look at PANDAs, acronym for: Positive, Anything possible, Nurturing, Determined and A+ players (Sara). The ego have to be put aside in favour of the team (Scott).

What suggestion for a new startup?
1) know your audience, 2) know how do you want them to “feel” using your product (ex happy, excited, etc.) , and 3) know what the user should do next (ex. share, comment, buy, etc.)

Engineering team: Agile + Extreme Programming, and so Pair Programming, and so a lot of communication is required!

Female entrepreneurship and the confidence gap: a working team can help in making you feel less pressure on you.

Content strategy as a service: yes, we can give help even before the content is created (Sara); but we tend limit these kind of services, and focus on our core business (Scott).

Be deliberate on your marketing and promotional actions and choices (Scott).

My conclusions after the evening is, once again: team over egos,  people ove technology.

Go to blog index