Business
James Layfield is an entrepreneur and investor creating positive change through innovation in sectors ranging from property to financial technology. Most recently, James co-founded Clearfind, an easy-to-use, unbiased artificial intelligence platform that is changing the way companies manage and optimize software with data. James is a general partner in a fintech investment fund Treasury with the cofounders of Acorns, Betterment, and a board member of Paypal, and has angel investments across a host of technology ventures. James has founded and led multiple successful companies including Rise, the world’s largest fintech innovation platform, with Barclays; Never Ever Limited, an innovation catalyst and consulting agency; and Central Working, a shared workspace hub for business professionals. James is currently an ambassador for CognitionX the AI event, London and Partners, and the ScaleUp Institute. He also serves as the New York Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London. Most passionate about The thing that I'm working on right now is something that I've been exploring for the last four years, in a really interesting area of the world: software. I'm working on a company called Clearfind. We’re here to help people bring software into their company as effectively as possible and manage and reduce the cost of the software. James’s career and story I think of myself as a serial entrepreneur. I've always been driven by an absolute passion to try and solve problems that I have faced in my life. I basically created the idea of co-working in the UK, even before the work came around, which is quite exciting, through financial technology. I've been working in financial technology for the last 10 years with some of the biggest banks in the world. The number of available options in the market has increased exponentially and yet the tools with which to navigate it are the same. That's why there is this beautiful, cool area for tool like clarified. We're bringing that together with AI so that we can augment people in their jobs to make consistently smarter decisions. We think we've excelled at that. The first three years of our journey were spent working out how to do the software and then gathering that data. We only launched it in October of last year. We’re a four-year-old company that has been selling since October of last year. The reason is that it's really hard to do the thing that we've managed to do. Once we went to market, we found that this resonates with that audience of companies spending between three and 10 million a year and also with consultants. We have a couple of the world's largest consultancy firms working with us and are already getting some great results. On top of that, we have companies from many different sectors, from finance and banking to biotech and high-tech. Among all of these organizations, the commonality is the amount of money they're spending annually on software and the complexity of the ecosystem. Best advice for entrepreneurs I think basically to listen. I have to constantly remind myself of that. What we're doing is going back through the real insights that we have in our business from our real customers and opening our ears to listen to what they're telling us. You then start to adapt and change your messaging and product in a way that's going to resonate with them. The biggest, most critical failure with customers Many years ago, one of my first ever ventures was an experiential creative agency. We had just gotten to the final stages of hopefully about to win Microsoft. We were meeting the people whom you never want to meet when you're trying to sell someone, which is the procurement team. We want us both to come away really happy with this deal. That's where my little ego became a nightmare. I said, “I think the pricing is really fair right now, but are you sure you want me to look at what a fair price would be?” Absolutely. I got off the phone and like the absolute...