Entrepreneurs are a resilient bunch; they experience challenges and disappointment regularly. Yet, the successful ones somehow manage to summon up the strength to build back. One of the few groups with comparable experiences are athletes; from their general dedication and motivation to their calling to their ability to deal with set-backs in droves.
Ben Waterman, founder of Strabo, a smart investment platform founded in 2022 with over 3,000 users and a £5 million valuation, knows a lot about resilience, disappointment, and the power to be found in building back. A competitive track and field runner turned investment management professional, he missed out on an Olympic qualification time by just a second. “It was a very dramatic change,” says Waterman of the shift.
Then came his first corporate role at a French bank in London managing the money of high-net-worth clients and investing across sectors. He says he was the only employee who used a standing desk and describes himself as someone who paced around the office “like a caged animal at the zoo.” However, without that first financial role, the former athletic talent might have never started Strabo. “The MD took a bet on me and liked my sporting background in the interview,” he shares. “They chose me over other candidates that had more relevant experience, which is something I’m grateful for.”
In fact, it’s a methodology the former athlete has taken into his own hiring practices at Strabo today. “I like investing and betting on people from unorthodox and particularly sporting backgrounds because I felt like I learned the most from sport much more than anything else.”
Waterman’s founder philosophy
His hiring approach at Strabo can be called holistic. Instead of professional qualifications being the sole determinant for securing a job, he looks for softer, transferable based skills and experience, which he feels aligns with the startup culture better. “The number one thing that I look for over everything else is fire, passion, and people that do things outside of work,” he says. “Sport is a massive plus, but generally some demonstration that they have some sort of go-getter attitude about them and that can also be projects that they worked on on the side.”
“I was saying to another founder recently that startups are the closest thing you can get to professional sport. It’s that minimum to low chances of outside success and real challenges in resilience.”
Hungry, hard-working candidates are ideal for startup situations, he believes, because startup life is “constant firefighting.” As the founder of a scaling one, he feels he has a strong intuition for the right fit:” I feel like I can tell within five minutes of meeting people whether they have that passion,” he explains. He elaborates on this type of character: “The sort of people that have an insatiable curiosity to tinker with things which makes it easy to work with them because you’re just harnessing that power and you hang along behind rather than have to motivate them.”
Waterman has a lot to say about the confluence of founder life, particularly in the startup stage, and the athlete mentality. “I was saying to another founder recently that startups are the closest thing you can get to professional sport. It’s that minimum to low chances of outside success and real challenges in resilience.”
The former pro-runner believes track and field is particularly humbling as “you’re always going to lose more than you win.” As a result, he got “comfortable with defeat and disappointment” as much as he did with winning. Describing it as a “very high pressure, very fast paced and very difficult” sport, he feels it aided his ability to jump into a financial career, but ever the athlete, he soon grew bored of the steady pace of corporate life. Athletes tend to be goal oriented, and Waterman, despite his corporate pivot, remained such.
That first investment management gig turned out to be a useful one, as he soon realised how ripe the sector was for disruption. “The software was very out-of-date, very clunky, very slow,” he reflects. “These people were paying exorbitant fees without any semblance of online banking that was respectable, let alone analytics tools and forecasting and anything automated.”
An entrepreneurial idea forms
The experience got Waterman thinking about the type of clients his future business might service. This included moving away from ultra and high-net-worth clients and towards more of a middle market. “So where you have too many assets to bank traditionally, but not enough where you get a bespoke experience and can take advantage of wealth management,” he explains of his intended client-base.”
“So many people treat a launch as this massive thing; that you’re not ready to launch or you don’t think the product’s ready and then you launch and it goes live and no one uses it, and it doesn’t matter at all…”
He put the idea under his hat for a while, but it would resurface later. After the French bank role came a position at an impact VC fund, and when Covid caused his position to be made redundant, Waterman attended Oxford University’s prestigious Saïd Business School. The cumulative experiences, he believes, gave him the confidence to enter the entrepreneurial arena. “I didn’t want to go back into corporate and I wanted to have a swing at something.”
That “swing” became Strabo which started off as a multi-currency platform. Today, it’s a marketplace where users can track their existing portfolio on their platform, but also can add investment products and communicate with their advisor on a flat fee basis with access to “more fun stuff that you’d usually only get through your bank.”
Strabo’s shifting services
In business, formulas can work for a while, but pondering one’s position in the market and pivoting services when the need demands it is part of a sustainable growth plan, and Waterman came to this reality this year with Strabo. What began with an idea to move into solutions for financial advisors has shifted to building a suite of investment products. “What we came back to was the idea that selling low ticket items to higher net worth individuals is not as scalable as being able to sell them investment products, which is the least groundbreaking revelation of all time given that that’s what all these investment shops do,” he admits honestly. While not an entirely innovative offering, he’s working to ensure the delivery stands out: “We’re trying to be really thoughtful about providing people with investment products they don’t currently have access to and would be able to be added to their portfolio responsibly.” This, he continues, includes alternatives like startup investments. “We’re launching a partnership with WineFi, who are a fractional wine syndicate platform,” he shares as an example.
In other words, Waterman and his team are trying to cater to the 5-15% portfolio allocation towards alternatives: “There’s enough products on the market selling low cost stock trading, brokerage accounts, pensions, even crypto, there’s like a whole wealth of that stuff,” he states. “But I always come across interesting stuff and think I would like to allocate a portion of my money towards that and would like to have a centralised platform to do that on and also track the values of it because those things are very liquid; they don’t trade on the open market and it’s difficult to know what they’re worth and how to compare them.”
Waterman has an interesting view on future fundraising with Strabo. He doesn’t want to raise any more money in the future. Instead, he seeks what he calls a more sustainable approach to reaching profitability over a longer life cycle. “Because the world of software is so uncertain at the moment it’s very difficult to know how you can ensure longevity and raising money puts a big timer on the door at which point you run out of money and you need to grow into the next valuation up and that’s very challenging,” he explains. “We’d like to build what might take a bit longer but is more of a sustainable business model over the long term and part of that is investment products, in a world where software is replaceable and anyone can generate software in a few prompts.”
For other founders planning to launch a new product or service, Waterman has some great advice that applies to any and all sectors. Simply put, get it out there and get testing.
Get testing – Waterman’s launch advice
“It’s the movement that gives you the information,” he states. “If you’re constantly launching things, you can get unexpected results from users; and we only knew to launch to financial advisors because we were talking to our users and found that an advisor had signed up as a consumer and started creating dashboards for his clients. So, start talking to users and launching new features with a high velocity even if they’re not perfect,” he advises.
“So many people treat a launch as this massive thing; that you’re not ready to launch or you don’t think the product’s ready and then you launch and it goes live and no one uses it, and it doesn’t matter at all. So launch as many times as you want and there’s no limit to that. It’s better to just launch things and get them out in the market and get them being criticised. Once you have information, then you can start assimilating that to make decisions on what to do.”
Considering Waterman’s at the helm of a business that’s hit a £5m valuation in just four years of existence, I’d say that we should be listening to his method of launching fast and frequently, because if entrepreneurs are known for anything, aside from resilience and motivation, they’re known for experimentation, right?
