SPEAKER: Stelios, it would be
great if you could give us a
couple of minutes and talk
about your history and...
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: You gave
me five minutes didn't you?
All right.
I'm really humbled to be here.
I think attending a conference
like this organized by Google
is an exercise in humility for
all of us because, you know, I
feel as if I've mispent my
youth and wasted the last
15 years of my life.
But it's good to eat some
humble pie every now and then.
And I accepted to speak
because I'm not one to
miss an opportunity to
promote my business.
So if I can sell you some
flights or a cruise perhaps but
I know that most of you
probably have a private yacht
all ready if not a private jet
so you might not be
target audience.
Anyway I'm going to talk
briefly about for five minutes
about three things and
then take questions.
I haven't prepared a speech so
I'm going to keep it really
informal and talk about the
things you want to talk about.
Entrepreneurship.
The environment.
It's kind of hard to switch off
from the previous session and I
think it's worth touching
upon it, again.
And brands, you know, what I
feel passionate about building
brands how they work
on the internet.
And tell you a real story which
sounds like a joke at the end
with your permission to--
it's an interesting story.
Anyway, let's face it
serial entrepreneurship
is probably [INAUDIBLE]
something I put on my
title [INAUDIBLE]
business.
And I think it's the
business [INAUDIBLE]
of ADD, attention
deficiency [INAUDIBLE].
A lot of people, very
successful people, in business
usually are the ones who focus.
They pick one idea
and stick to it.
Is that better?
I'm happy to stand here
actually and switch
off the other one.
It might be easier.
Can you hear from this?
Yeah?
OK.
It works.
So let's take people
like Michael Dell.
He started 20 years ago and
he focused on building a
PC business and he did
very well out of it.
One of the two biggest computer
companies in the world.
Ingvar Kamprad of IKEA,
he focused on one thing.
Also a very humble guy.
He flies EasyJeat by the way
and he's a multi billionaire.
But some of us who are not very
good at running big businesses
or cannot resist the temptation
of selling one of them when the
money comes, you know, invented
this concept of serial
entrepreneurship.
Now, nothing wrong with it.
We're not sort of
harming anybody.
We're not using other
people's money.
Mostly we risk our own money.
And I think that's really the
definition of entrepreneur.
Someone who is
fiercely independent.
Someone who likes to
be their own boss.
And I struggle with the
term entrepreneurial CEO
of a public company.
I think it's an oxymoron.
Betting other people's money
is not entrepreneurship
as far as I'm concerned.
So an entrepreneur is someone
who's their own boss and is
risking their own money.
And there is something about
that mixture of independence
and drive and risk and
downside that produces those
results occasionally.
Now, the problem with doing it
more than once, of course, is
that you can be lucky once.
And I have to make a
confession, I cheated
at the beginning.
I come from a rich Greek
shipping family and I got
money from my father to
start my first venture.
So that's cheating isn't it?
So at the age of 25 I convinced
my father to help me
start a shipping company.
That company wasn't Easy
branded that's why you've
never heard of it.
It was B-to-B oil tankers.
Floated on the New York Stock
Exchange in 2001 sold it 2005
for a good sum of money.
But all ready in my early
years as a businessman I
realized that I had ADD.
So within two or three years of
launching Stelmar I wanted to
start an airline because I
wanted to prove to myself and
my father and rest of the world
that I wasn't just a
rich daddy's boy.
That's what drove me
back then, probably.
Something very, very simple.
And with the last name like
Haji-Ioannou born in Greece of
Cypriot origin I came to Luton
which is an airport about half
an hour from here that nobody
knew back then and decided
to launch flights to
Glasgow for 29 pounds.
Now, that's not a venture
you take to a bank.
Not many venture capitalists
would have backed it back then.
Twenty-eight Haji-Ioannou
unpronounceable last name
in Britain trying to sell
flights with 29 pounds.
So thank God, my father
backed me , again.
The good news is that since
then it's become sort of
sustainable in the sense that
the first two did sufficiently
well that I re-invested some of
it, the capital gains if you
like, into extending the brand.
And that's where the serial bit
comes in in the sense that I
didn't want to follow EasyJet
into a PLC status and remain
the chief executive.
I'm not even the chairman.
We sort of apply the corporate
governance standard that says
the chairman and the chief
executive and the major
shareholder should be
three different people.
So I didn't want to become an
employee basically of the PLC.
I wanted to keep the right
to keep creating companies.
I kept the Easy brand in my own
private company, The EasyGroup.
And I launched another
16 basically brand
extensions since then.
Some are doing
better than others.
I'm not going to stand
here and pretend that
everything is rosy.
In any event I think we all
know that entrepreneurship
entails risk.
And if you're not willing to
lose money occasionally you're
not taking enough risk.
It's as simple as that.
That's my justification,
anyway, for getting
it wrong sometimes.
But I think it's important to
remember that if you've had one
or if you've been extremely
lucky and you've had two
good ones it's very hard to
expect to get a third one.
So I'm following more of a
diversification strategy now
across the board extending the
brand in different sectors,
seeing which one works
and which one doesn't.
One piece of advice, one sort
of rule I follow at the moment
is don't bet the farm.
This continent is very
unforgiving on failure
so only take bets you
can afford to lose.
And the unique thing about--
well, it's not unique but the
unusual thing about what I do
is I stick to the same brand
which makes it very
difficult to exit.
I have to live with my mistakes
and sort them out unlike an
unbranded VC that spreads money
around and if something doesn't
work just walks away
or pulls the plug.
Now, environment and
the joke about brands.
Unfortunately, I had a very
tragic experience when I was
23 when I was working
for my father.
So back in '91 I sort of found
myself in the center of it an
environmental controversy
because one of my father's
oil tankers had an accident
and there was pollution.
And that brought it home
environmental conscience is not
something theoretical for me.
I've been in the middle of a
big problem as early as '91.
And I realized and I worked
very hard since then in the
shipping company and other
companies to sort of make sure
that the protection of the
environment, caring for the
environment is at the
heart of what we do.
It's not inconsistent
with making profits.
It is about thinking how you
run your business and running
it more efficiently.
For example, the oil tankers in
the space of a couple of
decades completely changed the
equipment, the fleet by
designing something more
environmentally friendly and
are still making
healthy profits.
So it is possible to actually
go through a transformation of
an industry, of standard
operarting procedures of
equipment without actually
destroying profitability
and the whole system.
For example in EasyJet we
suggested rather than
penalizing the poor by putting
up the airport tax what the
government should do is
phase out old aircraft.
There are 700 aircraft in
Europe more than 20-years-old
and there's no law or any
system to phase them out.
Airlines like Air Italia
and Iberia and Olympic
keep flying them.
So they're destroying
the planet, not me.
So I think the best way to
think about the environment
is to think about economy
in financial terms.
The more expensive what you're
doing is the more likely it is
to be using a lot of earth's
resources including carbon and
to be creating more
carbon emissions.
Private jet is the least
environmental way to fly
whether we like it or not.
If this group wants to make a
commitment to save the planet
you should sell all your
private jets including the
bosses of Google who
organized that.
So if you really care about the
environment you should sell
the Bentley and get a
cheaper smaller car.
You should occasionally, dare
I say, use public transport.
How many of you here
have an Oyster card in
our pocket, come on?
All right, more than I thought.
Great.
Good.
I hope you use it.
But then if you're really
talking about zero-emissions
transportation hop on a bus
that's going anyway and
it has an empty seat.
SPEAKER: Stelios?
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: Yes?
SPEAKER: Can you come over
here for a couple of minutes?
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: I
have to sit down now?
SPEAKER: Please.
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: OK.
SPEAKER: Come on over
here and join me.
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: Yeah.
SPEAKER: I wanted to pick up on
something that you mentioned
because it actually ties into
both the entrepreneurship as
well as the notion of doing
things right for the
environment which seems to be
consistent with all of the
companies that you've backed
and created, which is the sort
of think of the consumer
in a different way.
I've heard you talk about
sweating assets from a
financial standpoint but also
making it just a better
deal for consumers.
So how many of your ventures
are from sort of a personal
frustration that you had and
paying for something that you
didn't think was right to pay
for and wanted to start
something better in that way?
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: I really
think the road to Damascus in
my case was not being
frustrated myself because, you
know, I came from a Greek
shipping family so I wasn't
flying economy class
when I created EasyJet.
The road to Damascus...
SPEAKER: Michael
Dell does though.
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU:
Well I think he has a
private jet, actually.
But the road to Damascus
was realizing not
everybody's like me.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: It
was exactly the opposite.
It wasn't me being frustrated.
It was realizing that if you
sell something for the many and
not the few you're likely to
end up with a bigger business.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
That makes sense.
I can see that.
And how do you leverage the
internet for what you're doing?
How core is the internet in
terms of the businesses?
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: The
internet was a tool that
replaced the telephone as far
as I'm concerned in '98.
So when I launched the airline
in '95 you had a telephone
number on the side of a plane
because that was the method
of bypassing travel agents.
Cutting out the middle
man, go straight to the
consumer get them to call.
So we had a call center
and everything else.
Now, I was lucky enough and
that's probably what gave the
competitive edge to EasyJet to
grow ahead of its competitors,
In '98 the internet became
commercially viable.
So off came the telephone
number, on came the
website address.
And now 98% of
bookings come online.
And people wouldn't think of
booking any other way now and
it's only the last 2% which is
last-minute bookings if you
are away from your base
and everything else.
SPEAKER: If you were going to
launch a new venture that was
going to focus on internet
related stuff-- I'm looking for
my next business here, if you
don't mind-- what would
you be looking at?
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: Well,
I don't think there's
a shortage of ideas.
I'm embarrased to say that
amongst the 17 companies you
see there there are probably a
couple of failed smaller
versions of the things that
made it in the sense that at
some stage I thought about
social networking or MySpace or
EasyMusic was meant to be this
thing that people go on and
list their songs and
everything else.
Didn't have the time.
Didn't have the guts.
Didn't have the focus to do it.
It's not EasyMusic.com, it's
MySpace that houses the
community about music.
Social networking, I think,
is a powerful phenomenon and
there must be other ways of
harvesting that concept perhaps
in more focused communities.
Is there any other
area of the internet?
As such I don't know.
I still think of internet
as a tool, though.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: I
struggle to think of it as an
industry in the sense that
renting office space, temporary
office space which is what
EasyOffice is doing online real
time with a credit card, taking
payment rather than having to
ship invoices can take off
let's say 20% of the cost of a
business like Regus that is the
business of temporary
office space.
Now why Regus is not using
it they'll tell you that
their customers want
personalized service.
They want someone to take them
around the office and show them
around and give them a cup of
coffee and then they
decide to rent.
But all of that costs money.
So can you do it
more efficiently?
Yeah.
Probably there are many
more industries you can
do it more efficiently.
SPEAKER: And in the sense of
teams a lot of entrepreneurial
ventures seem to have sort of
pairs seem to have made sense
Larry and Sergei, Nicholas and
[? Janus ?], Steve and Chad,
Bill and Paul, where
are you on that?
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: Well,
I'm to individualistic,
I think, to...
SPEAKER: Uhhuh.
So it's not your dad?
STELIOS HAJI-IOANNOU: Well,
it was at the beginning.
Now, he's retired.
He's not very well
health-wise unfortunately.
But I tend to hire people,
operational people that are
much better than me at
running the company.
I think that's my
pairing, if you like.
The airline was set up from a
technical point of view by the
guy who became chief executive
when it floated, Ray
Webster, an engineer,
that sort of character.
So very different to me in
terms of sort of public persona
and marketing but, you know, I
was doing the marketing and
he was running the airline.
Someone had to keep it running.
SPEAKER: Super.
Thanks, Stelios.
If you don't mind
sitting back down.
