Comment: There's no success like failure

Monday 20 November 2017

Tom Hacquoil is clearly a bright and determined young tech entrepreneur, who earned money designing websites at home when he was just 13 years old. Just over a decade later, he’s now launched a new group of companies.

But it has been far from a smooth ride from his bedroom to the boardroom. In between, he’s even experienced the torment and taboo of bankruptcy. But does he regret that? Not a bit of it.

Express met him to find out why:

Henry Ford, who knew a thing or two about building a successful business, once said: “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing,” and many more wise souls, from Churchill to Edison, have mused about the importance of failure. The problem is, in a highly competitive world agitated by Daily Mail sub-editors and litigation lawyers, failure can be portrayed as something to be feared. Indeed, some people seem to revel in other people’s misfortunes.

For 25-year-old Tom Hacquoil, however, the opposite is true. Still only 25, he speaks with candour and positivity about the failure of his first business five years ago, when he had to let staff go, and take a significant financial hit. Indeed, so integral was that difficult experience to his own development that he has retained the company’s name – Infuse – for his new venture: a group of companies that he hopes will shift the focus of IT in Jersey from primarily supporting the needs of financial services to creating a culture of creativity.

“I’ve always been a bit of a nerd, and had started designing websites when I was 13, so I left school at 16 to set up a technology company called Infuse Internet, which did web development and design,” he said. “After a couple of years, I became more interested in building a business rather than programming so I started employing people, got an office and built a company up to ten people. That did quite well … until it didn’t.

“I was good at programming but not so good at running a business. We got a lot of support locally, but my experience was growth, growth, growth – with revenues doubling and headcount on the up – and I hadn’t made much provision, from a capital perspective, for bad times. Then in 2013, a couple of clients shelved some projects and our revenues went from about £60k a month to £5k a month and the cash quickly evaporated.

“I’m not shying away from that because it was a good educational experience. I joke that my friends went off to get degrees but I went to the University of Bankruptcy.”

Pictured: I don’t shy away from the fact that I like being the boss and thinking strategically," says Tom Hacquoil.

Fortunately for Tom, he had a trusted client in Calligo, who took him to lead their software development team and he spent the next four-and-a-half years with the Cloud-service provider, eventually becoming Chief Digital Officer, which gave him plenty more exposure to managing a business and people. At the same time, he helped Digital Jersey to develop its coding programme.

“I don’t shy away from the fact that I like being the boss and thinking strategically, rather than immersing myself in the details - so no one was particularly surprised at Calligo when I decided to set Infuse Group up earlier this year. I left on good terms and I’m still a shareholder in the business.”

So what is different about Infuse today?

“The big difference now is that I have a co-founder called Tom Luce, who runs the technical side of the business. Unlike me, he took an academic path so we come to the business from different angles: he has the intellect, I have the experience; he’s more conservative whereas I’m more aggressively risky. We’re also best friends so it plays really well - he is the yin to my yang.  We’re in a good place now with a strong team behind us.”

 The new incarnation of Infuse is a different model to the last, although the eponymous consultancy business, called Infuse Consult, remains. Infuse Build, meanwhile, develops software products and there is also Infuse Labs and Infuse Capital. Tom is particularly excited about the latter two.

“The goal behind Infuse Labs is to build our own products and sell them. We have designed one app so far called Pinpoint, which is a digital recruitment tool, and we’re building others. We don’t want to offer consultative services for the rest of our lives because our time isn’t scalable and I’ve played that game before. Instead, we want to build software products that we sell to customers on a monthly basis. That’s where the value is because I’m very passionate about building export business for the Island. A lot of the IT industry in Jersey exist to support financial services; that’s all well and good but it doesn’t really grow the economy - it just recycles financial services’ money through it.

“It seems illogical to me that while the whole point of the internet is to make where a business is based irrelevant, not enough software development goes on in Jersey. Yes, there is development to service banks but in London or Silicon Valley, they’re building export products for different technologies. The majority of the digital talent in Jersey is the former; we’re trying to bring more of the latter to the Island.”

Pictured: "We have built a reputation as a company that pushes the boundaries, so we have been fortunate to attract good people locally."

But while Silicon Valleys and Roundabouts are magnets for tech talent, can Jersey really build and attract the brains to make it competitive?

“We have built a reputation as a company that pushes the boundaries, so we have been fortunate to attract good people locally, which means we have a dependable talent pipeline into the business. We’re also very lucky to have Tom [Luce], who is the Gandalf of web development and probably the best in the Island. Having him drive the development team is great for two reasons: firstly, it means we have fantastic products, and secondly, it is a great recruitment tool because people want to work for Tom because they get better at what they do.

“That said, recruitment will always be a bottleneck for us. We have people knocking on the door asking us to build software but we just haven’t got the people at the moment. Frankly, it is Jersey’s biggest challenge, which I don’t think is a controversial subject.

“I founded the coding programme at Digital Jersey, which is an entry-level talent pipeline for the Island, and we’ve always employed people who have graduated from that six-month, industry-led scheme. The skills taught on that course are the open-source, forward-thinking technologies that we require and are not readily available in the marketplace.

“Jersey definitely has a lot of talented entrepreneurs and programmers but, as I said, most are focused on servicing the financial services industry. That is completely understandable but we do need to broaden the skills base. There are hundreds of different roles in finance and the IT industry is just as complex. Jersey has the foundations for long-term success but it is long term. What we need is some ‘poster-boy success’ and I hope Infuse Group can lead by example. We also need to have more businesses achieving success independently of Digital Jersey because it is a chicken and egg problem: the people don’t come because the businesses don’t exist but the businesses won’t arrive until the people exist. Digital Jersey is doing a far better job at than some detractors give them credit for, but there is a long way to go.”

With Infuse Capital, Tom plans to create an ‘ecosystem’ of digital entrepreneurs who have the freedom to develop their own software but want to remain connected to Infuse.

“The thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is no longer technology but the desire to become the best employer in the world, which is a lot more than having a ping pong table and a break-out pod, which some companies offer to differentiate themselves in the talent pool. What I care about is building a company that people want to work for and I don’t think Jersey does enough of a job of making sure that people really enjoy their work.”

Tom’s longer term plan is to gather as many likeminded entrepreneurial developers as possible and help them to develop business skills along the way. And when some of them invariably choose to go it alone, Infuse Capital will invest in that new business and provide staff, space, tools, resources and mentoring as well as capital in exchange for a percentage. 

“We want to create an environment in which people want to work and when good people leave, we want them to stay connected to us. We will incubate talent but keep everyone together in a mini-ecosystem. Tom and I will always own our four core businesses but we might have ten or 20 per cent in another 15. But we only want to do that if we can add value to those businesses. If they’re better on their own, then great, but my goal is that they want to stay with us.”

At the moment, Infuse Group only employs four people directly but it subs out development and marketing work to a much larger team of ‘friendly faces’ in Jersey and London. So far, the feedback on their work and vision has been good but dependent on location, for which Tom has a theory:

“When I talk to people about Infuse Labs and Capital in London, the feedback is incredibly positive. There is less enthusiasm in Jersey but that’s because people tend to be more risk adverse here, and I’ve certainly seen that as a 16-year-old entrepreneur.

“Although born in Jersey, I don’t have much of a public profile here but a few people know of me and the fact that I’ve built a business that hasn’t succeeded might be a positive thing in San Francisco and London but in Jersey it is mostly negative. I’m old enough to shoulder that because I know it was the best thing that could have happened to me but I would like to see Islanders take a more positive view of failure.

“The fact is we’ve been active in the market place for the best part of a month and we have more work than we could possibly fulfil, and that is really encouraging. I have a two-year-old son and bills to pay and I was worried [when leaving Calligo] about taking a pay cut, but I have a massive appreciation of the Jersey market for responding positively to what we’re doing.”

Infuse’s ‘live’ product on the market, Pinpoint, is an AI-driven recruitment tool, designed to make the hiring process more efficient by pulling together all the online profiles of a candidate under a single view. The longer term goal is for Pinpoint to learn from previous appointments to make recommendations for similar roles. This ‘network effect’ means that the more people who use it, the more accurate it becomes in ranking and selecting candidates. It is about using big data to influence recruitment decisions.

“I think people over-complicate technology but it is simply an attempt to make businesses more efficient. Yes, at the moment our audience is predominately financial services but that will evolve and we don’t just look at Jersey. At least 50% of our clients are London-based so, when it comes to new products, we look at what the UK is doing, we look at what America is doing, and we look at what consumers want. There are a lot of big picture shifts, such as the growing peer-to-peer market, that Jersey doesn’t necessarily participate in.

“We also look at consumer trends and demands. Our digital marketing data feeds back into product demand and we’ll use that information to decide what to build and when. It can be as simple as a client saying to us: “We really need this” or “This is inefficient” or “Our customers are asking for this”. We will build it for them but we might then partner with them and sell it on to others.

“We are not sages; we just look at what the market tells us to do and learn. Above all, I’m pretty bullish about the Infuse Group and our reception to date has been really favourable. If it works, fantastic. And if it doesn’t, then at least we’ve tried.

This interview features in the  latest edition of Connect magazine here.