Tattletech Hot Seat with Helen Brown, CatWalk Genius

Right. So some say that there aren’t enough female entrepreneurs out there. We say who cares, and it isn’t about volume (and yes gentleman, size does count), maybe females just want to create the perfect sustainable business so aren’t really into just hurling every cotton candy, augmented reality, turn magic beans into beanstalk scheme into the start up community. Which is why when we heard Helen Brown, Founder of Cat Walk Genius, present at the TechCrunch Christmas Crunch par-tay in London last year, we stopped and listened. Fashion. Check. Business model. Check. Helping others become entrepreneurs via grass roots micro investment. Check. 

Tattletech: Your site CatWalk Genius strikes us as, well, genius!  Are you now or have you in the past been a fashion designer?  What was your inspiration for this venture?

Helen Brown: I don’t have a fashion background at all, no. I studied Psychology at university and then spent a career in financial services management – so I’ve always had an interest in consumer behavior.

As the internet started enabling much more interaction between people and brands, I knew I wanted to do something that got a traditional sector to be more engaging. Fashion turned out to hold the most opportunities for that, so Catwalk Genius was the result.

TT:  The designers you promote do have some great clothes, but nothing for men.  Do you see this as an area for expansion, or is men’s fashion too niche to bother with right now.

HB: Men’s fashion is huge, but it takes a lot of focused effort to get enough quality brands involved to make it worthwhile. It made sense to stick to the larger womens’ market in the early days, but we’ve definitely got boys in mind for the future.
TT: You must have had some great designers who bootstrapped themselves using your site.  Tell us one of the best designer success stories, rags to riches and all that.

HB: We’re only now bringing the ‘crowd-funding’ aspect to the forefront of what we do, so we’ve still yet to have a designer hit the funding target. We’re planning to run our first full funding trial in the next few months, so let’s talk again in the summer!

TT: From an entrepreneurial viewpoint you look pretty successful – the company is owned by IQL Ltd in Dublin.  Did you approach them or vice versa?  Have any of them shopped on the site?

HB: IQL Ltd is us – all the directors were in Ireland a few years ago so it made sense to incorporate over there. We’re just in the process of setting up in the UK now, which will make it a bit easier to get to London Fashion Week!

TT: I won’t ask you to name names from the designers that you support, but in the “mainstream” world of catwalk fashion, what are some of your favorite old school design houses?

HB: I think I always appreciated the loveliness of the old classics like Chanel and Balmain, but my speed-education in fashion has seen me tickled by the likes of Hussein Chalayan, Gareth Pugh and Christopher Kane.

TT: The concept of crowd funding, along with crowd sourcing, independent/micro debt financing, etc., is a “channel” of the internet that is exploding with new interactive ideas. Do you see any hint of “community” on the web, or is it already too big for that – will personal interaction on the web be a thing of the past.

HB: I don’t think size limits the community possibilities – I expect there’ll be many smaller communities formed around niche interests rather than a few large ones.

It’s human nature to seek out personal interaction so I don’t see an end to that happening any time soon – but it’s up to tech companies to provide the kind of platforms that will facilitate meaningful exchanges about interesting content. If anything, I think the future will see more and more people coming together to pool their resources and create fascinating stuff. -- JLH

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Tags: Catwalk Genius, Catwalkgenius, Crowd sourcing, Entrepreneur, Fashion design, London, micro investments, TechCrunch

Tattletech Hot Seat with Ola Forsstrom, CEO, Ludesi

Twitter can be great, just great. It can also be a pain in the ass to keep up with. But sometimes it brings a lot of joy to our lives when we meet people we normally would never get to meet because this big blue marble we live on is pretty big. It brings us closer to people who share the same values that we have and we find ourselves drawn to the philosophy they subscribe to. We find their tweets to be informational, inspirational, positive and downright savvy. This happened when we met Ola Forsstrom through his insight on being a sportsmen turned entrepreneur. We look forward to seeing what he is working on. We anticipate his insight on health, sports and using technology to facilitate better healthcare. So we give you Mr. Ola Forsstrom, CEO, Ludesi. You can follow him on Twitter here and become happy like we did.

Tattletech: I see you recently Tweeted the Marine Core Fitness challenge, what is your best on that and   how often do you do that?

Ola Forsstrom: Ha ha! There are several different physical tests for Marines, but the one you refer to is probably the sequence of pull-ups, crunches and a 3-mile run. You do the exercises one after the other, in the order mentioned. The maximum score is 100 points and that requires that you do 20 pull-ups, 100 crunches and run three miles in 18 minutes. I can do that, so yes, my score would be 100. I work out regularly, but I don’t take this particular test very often. After a while it’s not that challenging anymore.

TT: As a former professional athlete turned entrepreneur, what made you decide to go into bio tech rather than the fun-loving Web track?

OO: A mere coincidence – I had a friend who was working in this field and we set out to solve certain problems he was facing in his research. At the time I was on rehab from a knee injury, so I had some time over. Before I knew it we had won a business plan competition and I decided on a career shift.

TT: Morten Lund in Denmark is also former professional handball player turned entrepreneur, why do you think guys like you are driven to entrepreneurship?

OO: No idea. Guess there are also lots of handball players who never go into entrepreneurship, so the correlation is in fact probably quite weak. But in regards to who starts companies… I think there are certain traits displayed by the few who “do” compared to the many who “talk”. One of those traits is confidence, another is willingness to create your own reality. A third is taking responsibility, for one’s life, and for the outcomes one is generating. I am convinced professional competitive sports have been of much greater benefit to me than any other education. It’s all about the beliefs, attitudes and inner dialogue you have when dealing with the realities of running a startup.

TT: Why is handball so popular in Scandanavia, are you weekend warrior?

OO: I guess we have tradition here… Sweden was dominating world handball in the 90s. But now countries like France, Spain, or Germany have taken over a bit more. I’m not following it very much unfortunately. And no, I’m not a weekend warrior… I believe an active lifestyle is a key component in my life and not a side-kick.

TT: Your current company is Ludesi develops 2D gel image analysis solutions for proteomics. Now, proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins – so what sort of protein analysis does the RedFin product accomplish?

OO: The REDFIN system allows proteomics researchers to perform analysis of images from two-dimensional gel electrophoresis in a very easy way. The system has won a price as Emerging Technology of the Year on the global proteomics market, and it is the best way to work with this particular type of analysis. Our customers work with the most varying things. Some study cancer, some study environmental effects in salmon. Some work on developing better crops and plants for the future. Others study brain trauma in soldiers. Yet others develop better yoghurts… So, protein analysis technologies are used across a very wide spectrum of disciplines.

TT: Biotechnology and genetic engineering - those seem to be the types of scientists around the world that are using Ludesi’s analysis solutions, how will your product further their research and facilitate future discoveries?

OO: Primarily by increasing the reliability and depth of the results. We have developed a metric for quality control of this type of data that can be used to vastly improve the reliability of the results. And at the end of the day, that’s what pushes science forward: results.

TT: You were in the Top 20 list of Web Entrepreneurs in Sweden this year, why do you think you made that list?

OO: I can only guess. We have penetrated a very competitive high-tech, niche market in biotech/bioinformatics that, traditionally, has been dominated by global multi-billion dollar companies. We have presented a new type of technology and a new business model that has now started to change this market. I guess that is quite impressive for a small Swedish startup. Maybe that’s why.

TT: As the population in the western world ages and the median age rises, what role does proteomics play in making their lives better or longer?

OO: So far proteomics hasn’t played such a significant role in this, but it has great potential to do so. Very simplistically you could say that you can get a snapshot of a person’s health state by looking at his/her protein content. Whilst a person’s genes are static over the lifetime, the proteins constantly change depending on stimuli. So it is in theory possible to monitor a person’s state of health quite accurately by looking at proteins, long before that person has developed any classical symptoms of disease. At the same time, this is a great tool for behavioral changes, as any lifestyle changes will be reflected in the protein composition in the body. So all in all, certain types of proteomics could come to play a major role in prevention and keeping people healthy. One thing is for sure, the paradigm of treating people when they get ill will have to change to a paradigm that says “keeping people healthy”. We can’t afford the alternative. The only beneficiaries of having a population that is chronically ill are the pharmaceutical companies whose ideal customer is a chronically ill young person. But for the rest of us, it makes more sense to keep people healthy.

TT: So we really like @maydbs, we saw you at a concert with her on Twitter – what’s she really like in person?

OO: Maisa is a tremendously energetic and outgoing person, just as positive and driven in person as she comes across over Twitter or other social media! She knows a lot of people everywhere and has always something going on. She’s just fun to be around. Last night she had a private little war with some wasps at an outdoor restaurant here in Malmo, it was quite entertaining! And I know she will kick my ass big time for saying this!

Tags: Entrepreneur, Ludesi, Morten Lund, Ola Forsstrom, Proteomics

Fabulous interview with Tim Draper and What’s Next.se

This was a great interview that Tomas Wennstrom, What’s Next.se did with Tim Draper on Day 1 of ETRE in Stockholm. We really like this news outlet What’s Next – Fresh, innovative and really insightful, genuinely insightful. We miss this tone and reporting style today. Thanks Tomas for keeping it real.

Best way to hear this podcast is to click this link. 

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