Steve Hanney (Non-Executive Director - Technology) Interview August 2023
Steve ‘the Sponge’ Hanney is the real deal. A serial entrepreneur in the tech space that learnt his craft in the corporate world then went solo in Silicon Valley to build, develop, and sell his successful creations. He is currently the founder of Aspenify, the platform upon which LDA’s Cohesion solution is based.
Speaking with Steve is interesting. Interviewing him about his journey was always going to be the opportunity to learn a thing or ten.
Interviewed by Lesley Lomax August 2023
Steve, you’re an entrepreneur focused on business and technology innovation, can you tell us a little about the journey that got you there, particularly where your entrepreneurial skills came from?
“I started out being an instructor in technology. And I became a sponge for all the information I was exposed to. I learned over 40 classes when I was an instructor, and I wrote five of them from scratch. So, I learned a hell of a lot about all sorts of bits and pieces - from how to write a user interface to software to how to run and administer computers, to how computers work in their internals, so I was able to get a very broad knowledge.”
“I then went into solutions architecture, which gave me the ability to understand the bridge between business and technology. I was able to connect the dots between what the business needs and what the technology can do to solve it. And because of that, it led me into the entrepreneurial field,because I was always thinking of new ways to do things with software and with technology, and these ideas kept popping into my head. I had fifteen years within a company called Hewlett-Packard and I had many different roles ranging from, as I said, instructor to Solutions Architect to Head of Business Development for Outsourcing, And so I was innovating inside HP.”
“And then, eventually, I said ‘screw this’, I’m gonna do this for myself. And I launched a company called Sequoia back in 2005, that was focused on a new technology called the cloud. Back then 18 years ago, the cloud was very new. And people were like, the clouds a bunch of crap. But I was there advocating for the cloud. And I was able to build a business around it. And we grew rapidly. And then we sold that within five years, to a large reseller in the US.”
“I stayed with the reseller for a while, and then I got the itch, I needed to go start a new company. So back in 2018 I started this new company and called us Aspenify. So, being an entrepreneur or innovator has naturally been in my blood. But I think the combination is searching for new knowledge, and then being able to apply that knowledge to solve problems. That’s why I’m an entrepreneur.”
When you set up Sequoia there must have been skills that you didn’t have, in terms of starting a tech company. So how did you fill your knowledge gaps in terms of creating and scaling a business?
“Because I’d been doing a lot of training by then through my career, I had built very robust training programmes around skill development inside HP. I knew how to transform from being an engineer to a consultant. I recognised that there were soft skills that are required, and technical skills and business skills. So, you need to bring all three of these together.”
“One of the major things I’d learnt in the soft skills area is a technique called whole brain thinking. What whole brain thinking is about is you have a thinking preference for how you operate your daily life. Some people are very analytical. Some people are very relationship based. Some people are very structured, some people are very innovative. These thinking styles are coded under four colours yellow, red, green, and blue. I’m what they call very, very high yellow, I’m about 95% yellow, which is a synthesiser, an innovator, a structured thinker.”
“I do have skills in analytical, and relationship thinking but I’m not as peeked in those. When I started Sequoia, I knew I needed to build a team around me that excelled in the areas I didn’t. What then made Sequoia so special was that I worked with an individual that was very structured, and an individual that was very analytical and an individual that is very relationship based. And the four of us formed the core of Sequoia. And, and that stood the test of time. So, the key is to know where you’re strong, and where you’re not so strong, and go hire in those people who are strong in those disciplines that you don’t have skills in. I think for any business leader, any entrepreneur - do not assume you know it all, that’s the biggest mistake any entrepreneur can make.”
That’s interesting Steve. So, in 2018, you founded Aspenify and described it as ‘a solution for knowledge lifecycle management, that software enables individuals, teams and companies to capture, share and monetise knowledge and experience’. In layman’s terms, how does your platform achieve that for a business? And why should they care?
“That’s a great question. I think I would steer the conversation slightly differently now, because we have to pull out the current definition of Apenify. The current definition of Aspenify is ‘we empower organisations to drive consistent results at scale’, full stop. What do we mean by that? When you’re trying to launch a new programme in an organisation, what you are doing is trying to innovate, and it takes a long time from getting that idea to its successful fruition. Complex ideas can take years. The only principle behind our product is to shorten that time.”
“So, you can get from A to Z to launching that new idea faster than anyone else. So why should you care? Because you get to market faster, you get results faster. And those results are consistently managed, meaning you can scale that to whatever size you want. If you want to go across the territory or country, or go global, you can drive that consistently across the world faster. That’s why our product exists”.
And does it also mean that a company can be more agile in the sense that if they spot an opportunity that, as you say, can take some years to get somewhere, it means they can steer the tanker faster?
“Absolutely. It’s all about helping companies become more agile, because they can take new ideas to market faster, or they can launch new programmes faster. When we started Aspenify, I had launched large global programmes for many, many years, decades. And I’d always had to go through the process of building out all the content, building out all the training, building out all the websites, portals, you know, knowledge, bases, tools, you name it. And I did that manually, every single time. I’d start from scratch, every single time. Now, with Aspenify, you can build a library of knowledge or build a library of people or a library of capabilities that you can reuse. So when you go to the next new idea, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. There’s also an efficiency about reuse, about not trying to reinvent the wheel every time we try and do something. Launching product A and then launching product B doesn’t require you to start from scratch, you’ve got everything there, you can drive efficiency across the organisation.”
It’s equally applicable when you’re creating a startup. It’s arguably sensible to try and fail fast as well. By that I mean if you go through a process, leveraging knowledge, you can make a more informed decision as to whether to keep burning money chasing that dream, or to adjust and focus on something else that may achieve returns for you. So, if you go back to the beginning of Aspenify, the two goals were to get new programmes launched faster, and more efficiently.”
Taking you back a bit Steve, you and Don Phillips worked together at HP for several years. You and Don are working together again to apply the Aspenify solution to create LDA’s Cohesion platform. What is it like to be working with Don again, and what attracted you to Don’s vision of Cohesion as a solution for entrepreneurial learning and support?
“As you go through your life, and as you go through your career, you have opportunities to work
with amazing people. And I count Don as a thought leader, as a kind and engaging person who really cares about the people that he works with. And I personally want to be associated with people who care, and who are visionaries in terms of what they want to do. As you go through your life certain people stand out, and Don stood out.”
“When we started Aspenify and we thought about connecting in the UK, to start building the
business out in the UK, Don was the first person I called. That history that we had, that history that we shared, was hard. And it was full of interesting times, interesting moments, but I think that’s when you learn to work with the person, you get to really know them. And I felt that I could trust Don with my idea and we’ve been partnering ever since.”
And what about Don’s vision for Cohesion as a solution for entrepreneurial learning and support, how do you think that’s going to work? What attracted you to it?
“At first Aspenify was there to help with people’s knowledge development. Along the way, as a
software company particularly, you have to follow where the money is. As such we ended up going into more traditional lines of business, so we kind of lost the ability, if you will, to stay on that core mission of knowledge development. So, when Don approached me around what LDA’s mission was, and the ability for us to use Aspenify to build the Cohesion platform, I was all in because it realises the original vision that I had around helping people develop knowledge.”
“I feel very strongly that there is a real opportunity in the industry to provide a knowledge platform for entrepreneurs, that isn’t fragmented all over the place. A place that they can go to that connects all the dots and brings all of that together. That’s why I love the word ‘Cohesion’. Because that’s what it means - you’re bringing it all together into one platform, and you’re not necessarily owning all the data, but you’re connecting all the data.”
As an entrepreneur yourself, would Cohesion have helped you back in the early days?
“Oh God, yes. It will help me now. Every company goes through transitions. In the startup
community, there’s the concept of your very, very early stage, when you’re in that zero to a million- pound range. How you're organised to get to a million pounds is different from how you go from 1 million to 10 million, and that’s different from how you go from 10 million to 50 million. And what you think of as your best practices in that first stage, are not the best practices in the second stage, and so on. So as an entrepreneur, you’re always thinking, ‘okay, how do I prepare for the next stage’? How do I make sure that the underpinnings of my organisation are able to scale and grow. And if you make a mistake in that transition, even though you could have had a successful zero to 1 nmillion stage, then you make a mistake, you’ll lose it all and your company will fade away. So, what you’re constantly needing to do is have that reliable community, and the reliable knowledge base, and continuous education that enables you to prepare for those transitions through your business life. And that’s what Cohesion is there for, to help you find the information faster, and learn more effectively.”
And LDA’s Cohesion gives you a community of experts that you can rely on?
“Absolutely, that’s the missing piece. I mean, if you just read about it, you don’t internalise it. If you read about it, talk about it, and engage with somebody to really understand it, then you can make a difference. The hardest thing I think, for any entrepreneur, and I see this all over the place, is that we entrepreneurs can also be a little bit egotistical. Because you must be the one that’s beating the drum, you have to be the one that’s out there, spearheading the idea forward, right? So therefore, you’re going to be protective of that idea, you’re going to be the one that says, ‘that’s my idea’. And I don’t need any input from outside. I’m going to call bull on that. Because you must get input, to continue to develop yourself. And if you think you know it all, you will fail. You need to have people around you, your advisors, that you listen to. You don’t have to agree with them, but listen to them, because they’re the ones that will help shape and grow your business with you. And they’re very motivated to do so; most human beings want to help other human beings. And that could be free advice. It can be paid advice but listen to the advice.”
I think you may have partly answered this question - what can you share with new entrepreneurs, about the skills needed and the pitfalls faced when creating and scaling a technology company in particular?
“You wholeheartedly must believe in what you’re doing. You must advocate for what you’re doing. So, communication skills and presentation skills, and being able to handle the pressure of being in front of people, that is part of the job. But also, I think, you’ve got to have other capabilities, like tenacity, perseverance, and you’ve got to realise that it’s a roller coaster, you’re going to have good days, you’re going to have bad days; you need to be able to handle the stresses of that.”
“There’s a lot of elements to being an entrepreneur over and above just having great ideas. Having a great team around you acts as a bit of a buffer, which is back to what I was saying earlier. But I think that one of the core tenants of a great entrepreneur is never giving up. When you fail fast, you want to fail fast. But then you must adjust and get back on your horse and go forwards again. The saying, “if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try and try again”, that should be the epitaph of every entrepreneur.”
Services connected to new technology around AI, low code, no code type platforms are they a wave of opportunity for entrepreneurs?
“I think the speed of innovation today is accelerating, and it continues to accelerate. You know, it
used to be the case that, every decade, you’d have one transformative technology. Now you’ve got five, and they’re all going in parallel.
AI is one. Low code, another. Quantum computing, the innovation in industries, innovation in finance, and agriculture, in manufacturing, logistics supply chain, the world is changing rapidly. Climate change and logistics, travel challenges around the world. Trade is changing dramatically. The whole idea of open trade across every country is going away. And now you’re going to see clusters of trading partners.
So, all of these things are innovative, and the opportunity for technology to drive transformation today is better than it's ever been. So, I think we’re entering a kind of heyday of technology transformation. And I think the opportunity around AI, particularly AI, is the equivalent of the internet. When the internet was starting, that was a game changer. I think if you’re interested in tech, or you’re interested in starting a company in tech, there’s no better time to do it.”
And do you think AI is something people should be embracing, or fearing?
“Whatever new technology comes out there is a light side, and there’s a dark side. Think about when internet banking came out how much fear and uncertainty there was around that. Now it’s
pervasive. Think about how much fear there was about using the Cloud, putting all your data in the cloud, now it’s everywhere. Every technology goes through some level of uncertainty, through a community of adopters. There is a really good author in the US called Geoffrey Moore. His book Crossing the Chasm is worth reading. The idea of the book is you have these adoption curves, they’re basically bell curves. And right up front, you have these early adopters. And then at the end, you have the laggards. Everybody is going to be in one of those elements of the curve, so it’s no surprise - you have the laggards saying, grumble, grumble, grumble. And then you’ve got the early adopters saying this is fantastic, I’m excited, let’s do it.”
“Rest assured; AI is not going away. You can either be the ones that embrace it, saying “I’m going to figure out as much as I can about this”, or you can be somebody that says “It’ll never happen, burn all the bridges”. Most times the big waves, the internet, the Cloud, AI, those are going to go through the whole curve, and there’ll be iterations of it. What we think of AI now is going to be called something else 10 years from now.”
“But I’m all for entrepreneurs, and the target audience that we’re going after with Cohesion are the early adopters are those on the front end of the curve, and there’s a massive opportunity to
embrace. The hard part is differentiating yourself, because everybody in that category now is
embracing it, you must find your unique value, and unique selling points.”
You’ve worked in both the UK and US, and you’re now back in the UK. Do you see ecosystem differences between the two as far as entrepreneurial success is concerned?
“I’m an investment champion for the Department of International Trade. And my job is to look at the UK and make it attractive to outside investors. My whole objective is to bring investment into the UK. And I’ve thought a lot about what’s different about the UK versus Silicon Valley. I do believe that access to Government assets, resources and funding is much easier in the UK than in the US. Point blank. Even though there’s still some rigour and process you have to go through, I think the Innovative UK programme is a good one. But we recognise that it can be oversubscribed and at times it can feel a bit bureaucratic. So, I think the Government programmes I would give good marks to. I think UK universities are very active for innovation. There’s a lot of incubators and business programmes that you can get into that are good in the UK. And most universities have programmes around that you can participate in.
For me I think it breaks down a little around clusters, and where you can get private money. These are not pervasive across the UK. And it’s very hard to get private money. Whereas Silicon Valley is built on private money. 99.9% of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley do not take government funding. They take private funding. And it’s changed a lot in Silicon Valley in the last 12 months; it’s even harder to get private money. But the way that the system works is that private money is fueling innovation in the US, not government money. That’s where I think
the UK has some catching up to do.”
