How we started the world’s most valuable company

The Smart Tribe journey started on a beautiful day in a stuffy meeting room near San Francisco. I had been working on a project for an electronics company for eight months, helping them to cut down their production costs. We had tried everything in the book, from moving factory locations to changing suppliers to laying off people. But we were still behind the board’s target for reducing costs. I felt like my brain was melting, not sure if it was from the Californian sun or from frustration at brainstorming with the same people every day and not coming up with anything new that could save our jobs and the company. We needed a miracle. 

Sergey the miracle 

That night, I met an old school friend who worked for a big tech company in Seattle and was visiting Silicon Valley for a few days. I shared my frustrations with her, planning to pick her brain about how her company – one of the largest in the world – solves problems. “We are terrible at coming up with something new and solving problems. We are too big and bureaucratic and have too much internal politics,” she reflected. “We spend billions every year on R&D, but it often feels like a waste of time and money. You need to look for solutions outside the organisation.”

The next day, instead of going back to that stuffy meeting room, I stayed at my hotel room and looked through files on my previous projects, the majority of which involved helping corporations commercialise new technologies coming out of scientific research. One note caught my attention: “Sergey is not crazy.” I had written that in Russia two years previously. I remembered Sergey well and why I wrote that note. He was an 80-year-old mathematician who I met in Moscow while working on a microelectronics project. He had shown me his research on improving the design of a microchip... Wait a sec? Could Sergey have a solution to my problem? 

I called him the next day. He was still an active researcher who could not convince anyone of applicable solutions for his discovery. It was a long shot, but left with little time and few options, we flew Sergey to California. Equipped with the necessary people and facilities to build a prototype for his research, which we tested in production soon after, within a few months my client started to save millions – now likely billions – of US dollars. 

The obsession begins 

Upon returning to London, I decided that would be my last consulting project. I wanted to focus my attention on solving the problem I had come across so many times working as a consultant: bridging the gap between academia and industry. 

There is a wealth of untapped tech and talent coming out of academia. Why are we wasting it? At the same time, industry keeps reinventing the wheel and spending billions of US dollars looking for solutions that have already been found in science. Less than 2% of the current technologies in the world come from scientific research. The problem continues to grow, boosted by troubled universities that produce many great minds, 80% of whom are forced to leave academia, as there are not enough jobs for them. Not to mention that the biggest problems we face in healthcare, education and climate change – to name only a few – can only be solved with the help of science. 

Determined to change this, I gave up my job and asked my family to bear with me for a while because I would be working all hours with no income and would probably ask them to sponsor my new venture. Clueless about startups, they agreed, thinking I needed a break after an intense career in consulting. Next, I needed to find someone as obsessed as I was with this problem. 

It all started in a pub in London 

I bumped into my co-founder, Kris Jack, in a packed pub in London. It turned out he had just given up his job in a larger corporation to become a founder. He has a PhD in computer science and previously worked as the chief data scientist for the biggest scientific publisher in the world. And he said he believed that one of our biggest problems was the waste of tech and talent coming out of academia. 

I could not believe my luck in bumping into Kris. I had been trying to pitch this idea – back then called findAgenius – to so many people and was only getting polite smiles and words of support about the importance of the issue, but nobody wanted to commit. Kris was intrigued, and we started to meet regularly to discuss the problem. Two weeks later, we joined a start-up accelerator programme, and Smart Tribe was born. 

We are priceless 

A year and a half later, we have grown to over 15,000 people, a community of academics and industry professionals. Kris and I have spoken to hundreds of people, pivoted about five times and realised that we need to break the outdated system of institutional collaboration between academia and business. We can make a difference through individuals speaking directly to each other. 

We are still an early-stage start-up and need to figure out many things, but the value we have already created is overwhelming. The quality of the people and conversations taking place on Smart Tribe is astonishing. In a short space of time, dozens of corporations have been able to get hold of incredible research – which would otherwise be gathering dust on university shelves – directly from labs and start saving a lot of money by adapting solutions to their problems. Incredibly smart people have found jobs in industries where they can make a difference; some have started companies that solve real-world problems rather than create others. And powerful discussions about ethics and tech, education and other issues have become the foundations for government policy changes. 

Our community has battled COVID-19, built software to help people with Alzheimer’s and improve the lives of Parkinson’s patients, helped improve banking financial models inspired by marine biology research and transformed agriculture into sustainable farming – to name a few examples. That is what makes us the most valuable company in the world.