Bizstartup.ie - ENTREPRENEURS

Tom Ilube

Garlik

Tom Ilube, co-founder and CEO of consumer company Garlik and former CIO of Egg, the world’s largest purely online bank, was used to being “the new boy” and figuring out how to fit in from an early age, as his father travelled a lot and he grew up in England and parts of Africa.

Ilube's entrepreneurial flair first became evident in university, he recalls.

“At one point I was making bespoke trousers and bow ties with the leftover material and selling them to students. I made a radical diversification into maths textbooks then. I got a teacher to write them, I published them and sold them in schools. From an early age I learned that if you can get other people to do something, you can make money out of it.”

After university, where he studied physics, Ilube went down the corporate path for 10 years, working in a technical capacity in organisations such as British Airways, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Cap Gemini and Goldman Sachs.

The swerve towards entrepreneurship

“When I was in that world I could see the limits to my career. I didn’t really know how to play the corporate game that would take me to the top of the structure I was in. I watched a friend of mine who was doing well in that respect and seemed to know all the important people and I used to ask myself how he did that.

“I realised I was a reasonably talented individual but didn’t understand the rules of big corporate life and felt the pull of entrepreneurship.”

Setting up his first company

Ilube set up his first technology company – Lost Wax, which was recognised as one of the UK's most innovative technology firms – in the late Nineties when he was around 30 years old and developed from there, going on to be part of the founding team of Egg on the technical side seven years later and then setting up Garlik with Mike Harris, Egg founder, in 2005.

Getting into Garlik

Garlik is an online personal-identity company that helps people to protect their personal information in the digital world against identity theft. It already has several hundred thousand customers, has grown 100pc year-on-year and raised over £11m sterling in three rounds of venture capital funding.

The revenue model involves consumers subscribing to pay for the service themselves or organisations such as Sky, Royal Bank of Scotland and MBNA offering the service to their customers as an extra. It currently operates in the UK and US and is due to enter Germany and Ireland this year and later on various parts of Asia, says Ilube.

An unorthodox start-up approach?

“I have decided to set up companies before knowing what business I was going to be in, which might seem unorthodox. In a way, I believe most start-up guys do that, even if they do dress it up as being a well-thought out business from day one. When I left Egg in 2005 I got myself a two-person office with a desk, flip chart and marker pens and thought ‘What do I do now?’

“The idea actually comes quite quickly. If you push most entrepreneurs they will say that at the point of creating their business they had a whole bunch of ideas.

“I was thinking of 20 different directions at the time and just had to establish which I was most passionate about. I need to be doing something that isn’t just intellectually robust – on the dark mornings when the funding hasn’t come in, you haven’t paid the bills and your customers think you’re rubbish, it’s the passion that’s going to get you out of bed.”

Raising venture capital

Six months after sitting down in that office, around July 2005, he had settled on the idea he wanted to run with and took another six months to raise the first £3m of venture capital he needed to build the business.

“It was one of the best six months of my career – the exploration bit. Apart from having a lot of time to myself, I visited computer science departments at universities looking at the technology they had.

“I also had to stand back from the day-to-day running of a big operation – Egg had big budgets, 4,500 staff, several thousand servers and four million customers. I looked at the landscape, decided on the direction I was going in and placed my bet. While I was getting the money in I also had to convince people to leave jobs and come and work for me. That was one of the scariest things when I started up first. People told me they had sold their houses and done other things to be nearer to where I was based and I felt the weight of that responsibility.”

While Ilube bootstrapped for the first few years he says Garlik generated fees quite quickly. “I knew the territory and wanted to build a large transformational venture that was consumer facing and international and also to raise a large amount of money. The challenge was to stretch myself in different ways. I had to be more of a public figure, talking to the press, for example.”

Leading a business is all about personal belief

He believes leading a venture such as Egg or Garlik and making it a success comes down to personal conviction.

“I had to ask myself could I paint a picture of what this business would look like in the future; could I see myself sitting in the business with staff. I carried this around in my mind and was reasonably good at communicating it to other people.

“Every single business starts with a blank sheet of paper. Take Mike Harris with Egg. His aim was to change the way the world of banking worked, and just by saying this, he brought it to life. I learned a lot from Mike, that you can create a future almost just by saying it out loud.”

This is an extract from an article, which first appeared in Owner Manager magazine.