CEO DOSSIER
Known to some as ‘the dotcom hero’, Brent has played a part in many successful online businesses, most notably co-founding lastminute.com. Today, he is focused on several online ventures, including mydeco.com, PROfounders Capital, and made.com. Will he strike gold again?
early years
Brent is a graduate in French & German from Oxford University. From 1992-1994, Brent worked at management consultants Mars & Co. From 1994-1997, he worked at Spectrum Strategy Consulting. In 1997, Brent worked at internet start-ups QXL.com and LineOne.
In April 1998, Brent co-founded travel business lastminute.com with Martha-Lane Fox. His mission statement for lasminute.com was “to delight customers with great value, inspiration and solutions when they are going away, going out or staying in.”
By 2005, lastminute.com was the number one travel website in Europe. Today, it is one of the only start-up brands in Europe to frequently be featured on the list of the top 10 e-commerce sites in several European geographies. On 20th July 2005, the company was acquired by Travelocity Europe for $1.1 billion. In April 2006, Brent stepped down as CEO and became the chairman and chief strategy officer of lastminute.com. He served in those positions until January 2007.
In February 2007, Brent founded mydeco.com. The website was officially launched in 2008, and Brent now serves as the executive chairman. In July 2009, Brent cofounded PROfounders Capital. The company invests in early-stage internet ventures.
As ceo
Brent managed to take lastminute.com from a new website venture to a company that generated revenues of over $2 billion. The venture was not without its mistakes. Brent is very open about his successes and failures with lastminute.com, using his experience to guide mydeco.com and all other online endeavours. When talking about lastminute.com, he said, “We should have been more aggressive about hiring better people in areas such as customer service and financial accounting – but we were too busy worrying about growth.” His strategy and approach for mydeco.com has been not rush into anything. He had ambitious goals of moving into the United States, but was in no hurry to do so.
mydeco.com is now the leading interior design website in the UK, with over 600,000 unique visitors a month. The company has only 35 employees, and that is how Brent wants it. Brent has said that mydeco.como will never become a public company. When talking about company profit, Brent said, “We have expansion possibilities, into B2B, in-store kiosks, and we have just launched in America with us.mydeco.com. This could present a huge opportunity. But mydeco.com it is not profitable now.”
In December 2012, Brent talked about his goals in moving forward with MyDeco, “We’re still on a journey and very few companies would aim to change an industry in one-and-a-half years. But we have the largest aggregation of furniture in one place in the UK. This means five million products, thousands of retailers – including all the big names like John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Heals, Habitat, Feather & Black, Laura Ashley, Debenhams and Next – 75,000 models of 3D furniture and 110,000 3D rooms built by customers.”
Besides mydeco.com, Brent also helped to found PROfounders Capital. The company’s focus is to invest in internet entrepreneurs’ new businesses. In 2010, Brent and PROfounders invested in made.com, an online furniture retailer. Talking about this investment, Brent said: “From an investment trend perspective, we see an exciting transition from retailing to 'me-tailing' where consumers are in control, influencing which designs make it into production and with a more direct connection to the factory. Made.com is good news for talented designers who struggle to achieve scale production as it will showcase the best new talent to the buying public and generate demand for their products.” Brent is also an angel investor for many other online businesses.
Brent is not afraid that the recession will hurt his business, stating, “After 9/11, my board [at lastminute.com] told me to sack everyone and go home. They didn’t think the online travel industry stood a chance. What actually happened was that customers went to the internet for better deals. A recession is similar. Customers are after value.”
In 2009, Brent’s online success was recognised was when he was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for the UK.
In own words
On running a public company:
“The experience of running a company through that sort of turmoil and torment and cynicism is a rich experience, though obviously it's one you wouldn't want your shareholders to have to go through…The pressure it puts on you is quite intense.”
“What worries you is: are you going to drive this company on to be successful – an exciting business that you're passionate about? If you're not that sort of person; if you're not passionate, it's not going to work. You're not going to get anything.”
On setting up a business:
“I'm worried that for some people it's too hard to set up a business, I'm worried about people finding sources of capital. That's very fragmented and a lot of people don't know how to do that…A lot of it is about having the culture to break the rule, to stand up to authority; having a culture where failure is accepted and having a true meritocracy where ambition is not seen as a threat to the establishment.”
On his decision to live and work in the UK rather than the US:
“I was like, wow, I can't differentiate myself. I don't think I am smarter than these people; it is not physically possible to work harder, so I had better work in England where people don't work as hard. That was a very conscious decision. You've got to play to your innate competitive advantage. I am probably not enough of a techie to have really thrived in Silicon Valley. Most of the people who do really well there are Stanford engineer types and I did modern languages, so I would have been given less leeway to do what I was able to do here.”
