In this episode of Scaling Green-Tech, Katherine Keddie is joined by Tim Rault-Smith, a seasoned scale-up leader turned startup advisor, who now helps founders navigate growth in the EV technology space. Tim was one of the early employees at ForgeRock, the Identity and Access Management software company that rapidly scaled from a small European team to IPO on the New York Stock Exchange before its acquisition in 2023. Tim reflects on his journey through the birth of the Internet and a variety of roles at Sun Microsystems, to co-building ForgeRock’s support services and helping shape the technologies still underpinning today’s digital world.
They dive into the realities of being part of an early-stage team - from working unpaid “idle time” and juggling multiple hats, to navigating crunch points, raising venture capital, and scaling sales globally. Tim also draws on his current role as a startup advisor in the EV and charging space, offering practical lessons on product-market fit, the importance of commercial partners, and the level of commitment it really takes to succeed. If you’re interested in startup scaling, climate tech entrepreneurship, or what it takes to grow from a founding team to a global player, this one’s for you.
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Katherine Keddie: The solutions we need to save the planet from climate and biodiversity crises are here, but they won't make a difference unless they are adopted at scale. We are Matt Jaworski and Katherine Keddie, and we have focused our careers on ensuring that this happens in time. Back in 2021, we started Adopter, Europe's first marketing company working exclusively with scaling green innovation. Since then, we've supported organisations from pre-seed start-ups and Earthshot Prize finalists to international unicorns and global NGOs. We've worked with green technology solutions across fintech, construction, food systems, nature and finance, and more. We also mentor on some of the world's leading venture builders. We are on a mission to support 100 high-integrity green innovation solutions by the end of 2025. and 1000 by 2030. This podcast is the next step on that journey.
Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Green-Tech podcast. I'm here with Tim Rault-Smith, who was one of the early employees at ForgeRock. ForgeRock is a recognised global leader in digital identity and access management. They were an absolute pioneer. They pioneered the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in IAM. During his journey, Tim was involved with rapid scaling and served as a VP for six years across various technology services. He is now, amongst other roles, a startup advisor and a board member for Saline Ventures. He is particularly involved and knowledgeable in the EV and charging space. So he'll be sharing his experiences of being an early-stage employee at a huge foundational company for a lot of innovation that's happening today, and then some advice from his experience working with different startups. So thank you so much, Tim, for joining us today.
Tim Rault-Smith: Thank you for having me.
Katherine Keddie: So we're going to start off with a little bit on your journey so far. So what led you to join ForgeRock and then tell us about your journey with that company and then to where you are now.
Tim Rault-Smith: Well I grew up when computers were basically new. So this was the early 80s and there were things called home computers, which older members of your audience will remember, before they were called PCs. And so it was a really exciting time, which then relates to much more recent experiences, which I'll come back to. And there were a lot of small companies, a lot of innovation, a lot of startups. So I suppose that was a seed that was planted in me very early, when I saw how rapidly an industry could develop. So later on, I did a computer science degree. I worked for a variety of companies. I spent a bit of time working at a supermarket called Safeway at the time. It got bought by Morrisons in the late 90s. I wasn't stacking shelves. I was doing data analysis. In fact, I was really doing what you would now call data science. All throughout my career, I've had these little experiences which in the end have been very useful dealing with startups and helping them. In fact, when I was an undergraduate back in the late 80s, I tried to do a law course as part of my computer science degree, but they couldn't fit it into the timetable. I ended up doing philosophy instead, which was also very useful, because philosophy is quite pivotal in really understanding AI. And of course, that's a huge topic of growth in business today, and one that I probably will end up going back to at some point. Where did that leave me? So I ended up working for myself for a few years in the late 90s. I was working for myself just as a freelancer. Actually, I was a computer trainer, so I was teaching people in a business context. I was teaching people various different IT technologies. And I remember having a discussion. I didn't know anything about startups. I remember having a discussion with a friend who was involved in a startup. And I said, well, I run my own business. He said, oh, no, you don't. You're just a freelancer. And I was a little bit offended by that. But again, these are things which stuck in my mind. And later on, I kind of realised when I was part of a proper startup, it's like, yeah, actually, there is a big difference working for yourself and providing a service versus starting a company and building something that is bigger than just one person. Fundamentally different. So of course I understood that later. And so I, while I was working for myself, I had some opportunities to get involved in yet another very fast-growing industry, which was the internet. I had become aware of that. In fact, again, when I was at university in the late 80s, I had email, I had access to discussion forums. There wasn't any web because the web was only started in 1991. But I had opportunities to do things which then later on in the mid 90s, as the internet was starting to grow, started to break out into mainstream society. And so for me, it was like, well, oh, I've got email again for the first time in five years. Great. And I realised, I don't know if it was my experiences with home computers in the early 80s where I saw something that I knew, even though I was just still a kid really, I had an absolute conviction that this was a technology which was going to change the world. Computers were going to change the world. There was not a shred of doubt in my mind. Same thing with the internet. I was still reading, I was still buying magazines for computers in those days. Again, the web was quite new, so there wasn't the information out there that you see today. There was a particular type of computer which I was interested in, which was fairly niche by the mid-90s. There was a great company called Acorn back in the early 80s, and they produced a thing called the BBC Microcomputer, which was, again, it was absolutely huge in Britain, BBC sponsored. And it was how a lot of my generation learned about computers. All the schools had funding to get BBC microcomputers. They then developed some chips, they developed some further computers. Something that not everybody will know, some people will know this, is they actually designed the very first ARM processor, which was, and I know this is a sustainability podcast really, but I'm a technologist, so this is the kind of thing I'm interested in. They designed the ARM processor, which was ultra-efficient, and throughout the 90s they found different use cases for it, but really when it came into its own was when mobile phones started to get smart. Because it was so efficient, it used much less electricity than, say, the Intel processors, which were dominant at the time. And ARM processors ended up being in every iPhone, and they're now in every Mac, and they're in most, if not all, Android phones. So this was a small British company in Cambridge. So I was following them, and there was a computer magazine for enthusiasts of Acorn computers, and I remember reading one of the letters, and this guy said, why are we spending so much of this magazine talking about the internet? Some of us just want to sit and use our computers at home like we always have. And I thought to myself, there is somebody who just hasn't got it. Because if they think that computers are not all going to be connected to the internet in the future, then they're living with their head in the sand. As far as I was concerned, it was as obvious to me in the 90s that the internet would become computing, as it was to me that home computers were going to take off and computers in general were going to change the way that we live our lives. So I found that I was excited about the internet and I was working for myself as a technology instructor and I was given an opportunity to go and work at a company which some people will remember called Sun Microsystems. Now, this is a legendary company in the computing world, and it was responsible for very important technologies, and was also very focused on developing not just products, but standards. A friend of mine who became a good friend called Kevin Streeter, he was running the UK educational services team for software. It was actually while I was still a freelancer. He sent out an email to all of the freelancers and he said, Sun is investing more in internet technologies, they're doing a deal. And they ended up with a situation where they had done a deal with AOL, which was one of the early internet service providers, and Netscape. And again, I don't know if you remember Netscape, but some of your listeners, some of your older listeners will remember Netscape. And Netscape did, originally they did a browser, but they also developed a whole bunch of internet products. They developed a web server, a mail server, something called an application server, which effectively is what allows websites to be more interactive. So they developed all these things and Kevin sent out an email to all the instructors and said, would anybody like to join some training courses to be trained up as an instructor for these new products? The brand name that was put out there was called iPlanet. So he said, you know, we're developing this iPlanet training courses, these iPlanet training courses, and we need some instructors. I thought to myself, I've got to get into this. I'd been doing more basic computing stuff, operating systems, networking, some programming. I was teaching all these things. And as far as I was concerned, I knew by this point, this is late 90s, I knew that the internet was the future of computing. It was not even a question in my mind. So I thought, well, this is the future. If I don't do this, then what am I going to end up doing? And so I replied as quickly as I could to make sure that people didn't get in ahead of me. And it was like, if it had been a real queue in real life, I'd have been at the front of the queue, and then I'd turn around. There's nobody there. And I'm thinking, why is nobody else getting this? Because for me, it was obvious. And of course, I was right. I mean, I'm not a genius. Well, sometimes.
Katherine Keddie: You've definitely had your moments, I think this was one of them.
Tim Rault-Smith: I have my moments, indeed. And I think there are a few points in my career where I've just made a decision to go, I'm just going to go do that. And in hindsight, it's been something that's allowed me to build experience, that put me, to go back to your actual question, and this is a very long answer to a short question, to put me in a very good place when it came to a startup. When I joined Sun, when Kevin employed me, I joined knowing that I was going back into a big company so that I could have opportunities to move around and have different experiences. So I tried to make sure that I would. Well, I wanted to experience different teams, different roles, always quite technical because that was my background. But I'd also had, I'd been to an event sometime when I was still at Safeway. So it was probably about 1993. I, although I was a techie, I actually worked in the marketing and trading division. So the commercial division. And I was taken along by one of the marketing team to an event by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. They were talking about career planning. And I suppose this goes back to what I've been talking about because I realised from that talk that I listened to that I needed to take control of my career. I think the world of work was changing, but I think there were still a lot of people who expected, in those days, to join a company when they came out of, say, university, and stay with that company for their career. That was still not uncommon. But the talk that I went to, they said, well, take control of your career. And one of the specific pieces of advice they gave was, always, no matter what you do in your career, always spend some time in sales. And they suggested a couple of years in sales. So there I was at Sun in the early 2000s. I had joined as an instructor. I went into support. So that gave me some real good experience in troubleshooting. And again, experience that would come in very useful later. Then I did a little bit of consulting work and then I got an opportunity to go and join the sales team. I would go along into sales meetings and I would explain the technical aspects of the products. I would do demonstrations. I might set up a proof of concept. Now of course this is a big well-established company with lots of products and I was focusing on the software side. And because we had such a broad portfolio of products, I had to specialise. What I had done is specialised in identity products since probably the late 90s. I was teaching some stuff in the late 90s which was around network security. So I learned all about encryption and certificates and all sorts of stuff which are the underpinnings of the secure internet. And that led me into identity management, and access management in particular. Single sign-on, you know, when you go to a website and it says sign in with Google or sign in with Apple or Microsoft or whatever, you know, that's single sign-on. You know, I was dealing with those technologies back in about 2001 or not the actual protocols that run that today, but really they were the prototypes of that kind of technology. And so I worked on and off with that for most of my time at Sun, and then I ended up in the sales team, which was selling those products to customers. And so that gave me, although I wasn't actually a salesperson, I wasn't responsible for closing deals, I felt that it was close enough that I had ticked that box, that I had set myself when I'd been to that talk back in 1993, that I was spending some time in sales. So to ForgeRock, so this was the late 2000s, Sun Microsystems was having a tough time. And there were lots of things going on in the computing world and the IT industry that meant that Sun was struggling to sell its products. It was largely things like the rise of cloud computing. And whilst that was a huge opportunity for a lot of companies, especially startups, and I'll come back to that, there were, well Sun was predominantly, although I had spent my entire career at Sun working on software, actually Sun was fundamentally a hardware company. You can tell what a company is, where does its revenue come from? And although Sun had, you know, so you may have heard of Java, the programming language and an entire programming system, Sun wrote that in the early 90s. Did they ever make any money out of it? Probably not. But they used it as a way of marketing themselves as a solutions company rather than a hardware company. But where did the revenue come from? Selling hardware. So they sold computers. That's what they did. And of course, a lot of people towards the end of the 2000s were moving towards cloud services. And people like Amazon, Google were building huge cloud data centres, but they weren't using Sun hardware. They were using commodity hardware. And this is what happens in an industry. It grows and it becomes, you know, Sun had premium products that were great in the late nineties when people were building the infrastructure for the internet, but then it became commoditised, and then it becomes much harder to make money out of it. So Sun had been essentially declining gradually ever since I'd been there in 2000. And eventually, the rumours started coming out internally that Sun was up for sale, there were various possible buyers, and it ended up being bought by Oracle, one of the biggest computer companies in the world. So Sun was disappearing. Now, I knew that I didn't want to work for Oracle, for various reasons. And actually, I was ready, I had been ready for some time to go back out on my own. Because I felt I'd got some good experiences, I had learned a lot at my time there. So I took voluntary redundancy, which was great, because that gave me a little bit of time where I didn't need to earn money, or much money. where I could go out, do a bit of freelance consulting work. I didn't really want to go back into training. I did do a couple of training things. But at the same time, some colleagues contacted me and said that they were interested in starting up a new company. Because Sun had made quite an important decision in about 2007, which was to open source the Identity products. Not all of them, but some of the key ones. Now, that meant that they could… There's a lot of confusion about open source and free. And again, may or may not be that relevant to your audience, but there's a lot of people who think that open source means, by definition, free, which isn't quite the case. But again, we get back into the legals because there's a whole bunch of different software licenses that you can use when you release software. And Sun had actually developed a new license, and I think one of the people who was instrumental in this was somebody I used to work with at ForgeRock later, called Eve Maler, who is a great, great internet pioneer. And she ended up working at Sun during that period, and she helped to put together this license, which essentially was an open source license, but for commercial use. They had released the software, the source code was available to anybody who used the product, but if you were going to use the product for commercial purposes, you had to buy a license. So free, but not free. Available open source for anybody to look at. but not actually free. So they'd released the software and Oracle is not known for being particularly keen on open source. We had this sense that Oracle might well kill the open source projects. So we started ForgeRock essentially to adopt those open source projects and keep them going. And so a whole bunch of people from Sun and some partners of Sun started to assemble, led by a guy called Lasse Andresen, who's then subsequently gone on and done some other startups and been quite successful. He now lives in Silicon Valley. And he, largely his vision was to bring together a bunch of people. And I remember some of the phrases that he would use. He liked the idea of just hiring a bunch of smart people and seeing what they can come up with. So yes, there was a vision, but it wasn't fully formed. We knew that we wanted to help Suns customers who had invested in the identity products. to give them an alternative to what we believed was probably going to happen with Oracle, which was Oracle would take over. As usually happens in the software industry, a company will take over another company and then what they will do is they will gradually shut down the products, particularly as Oracle already has its own identity suite. So essentially, what they were doing, they weren't buying Sun… Well, they bought Sun for lots of reasons, but in terms of the identity products, they weren't necessarily interested in keeping them going. They just wanted the customers that they could migrate onto the products that they developed themselves. Now, in the end, it was a little bit more complicated than that, because some of the Sun products in places were better than the Oracle products. But what we did is we just sidestepped all that and we gave customers an alternative. And we said, look, if you're happy with your Sun products, they're open, we'll adopt them, we'll then start developing them further as ForgeRock products, and that way you don't have to be forced to go to Oracle.
Katherine Keddie: So in those early days of working with ForgeRock, it sounds like you have lots of clever people together in a room trying to work out what this company is going to be, and the vision is still building the plane as you're flying it. Were there any crunch points or moments where you were like, this isn't going to work, or we're struggling to put something through or we're not going to make payroll. Tell us more about that.
Tim Rault-Smith: There were, although I was somewhat hidden from those moments. Because I was still on the technical side. When we were deciding who was going to do what, people had different backgrounds and experiences. When we started, we actually had no products of our own. We had just adopted the open source products. So yes, we absolutely wanted to be a product company. But we started really as a services company. And that's quite an important distinction. And again, I'll come back to that. If you're a services company, you sell your time or you sell a service. But services only have a ceiling on value. Products have the potential to grow much quicker or much bigger. Because we only had really two main services to offer at the beginning, support and training. And I had experience in both. When we did actually have one of our rare physical in-person meetings in a flat in Norway, I seem to remember, in Oslo, we went around the room and people were talking about, I think it was one of the first times that we'd actually met all together in person. I think there were probably about 12 people there. A lot of people knew each other, but some people didn't. So we had an introductory period where… And this was, by the way, an all-day meeting. So we had set aside the entire day to get to know each other. It was a time where people were trying to figure out what was their role in the company going to be. And I recognised we only had these two services to offer at this particular point. And I knew how to run a support service. And I looked around the room and I thought, well, yes, one or two people had got some support experience. But I was the only person who'd done it full time for a couple of years. And I knew what it needed. So I volunteered. I basically stepped forward. There's a concept called parade ground volunteering, where everybody lines up. And when the request is made, everybody steps backwards. And whoever's left at the front, that's kind of de facto they have volunteered. And it was a little bit like that. Everybody else said, oh, no, I can't do support. And I was left being the one who was in charge of support.
Katherine Keddie: Generally, what people are interested in is you are one of the first employees at a hugely influential company that has grown as a foundation for, I mean, the work that I'm doing. Absolutely. Anyone who's working in digital marketing, anyone who's using a website, you know, like foundational work that you did. So Crunch Points is a good starting off point to hear the stories of how, what does it actually mean to be an early employer at a company that grows like that and scale at the pace that you did?
Tim Rault-Smith: So one, not so much a crunch point, but something that happened over a period of time. When we started, there wasn't any expectation of actually getting paid, initially. So we had this concept called idle time. So some people, like myself, I had gone out as a freelancer, so I was earning a little bit of income from a few sources, and it was enough to keep me going. So I was able to not take a salary from ForgeRock. Turned out to be 11 months. And that was, in hindsight, I spoke to colleagues many years later and I think I probably got the rawest deal out of anybody. Because I didn't know. I'd never done a startup actually. So I had, I didn't know what to expect. So I didn't realise that I could ask questions. I could, and I could question what was being done. Other people had done startups, so I suppose it was that I didn't know what questions to ask, because I didn't know what I didn't know. So that was quite an interesting experience. So I didn't realise that other people actually were getting paid much sooner than I was. But, you know, these things you learn in hindsight. So that wasn't so much a crunch point, but it was an indicator that we started out with basically no money. And so we started out using people's idle time. Other people still had a full-time job. So they would, in evenings and weekends, make their contribution to ForgeRock to help build software or maybe do a little bit of support in their spare time. There were lots of things. And in those early days of a startup, even though we had, we were larger than the average startup, I suppose, because we started, like I said, by the time we had that meeting in Oslo, there were at least 12 people, possibly more. But because nobody was being paid, it didn't actually really matter how many people there were. It was a way of getting people on board with a vision. And although we weren't getting paid, one of the early things that Lasse did, which I thought was very, very clever in hindsight, was he gave people the opportunity to have early shares. So even though I wasn't even technically a founder, the first five in the company were the founders. And again, that's a large number of founders for a typical startup, and we weren't a typical startup. So I actually was one of the next few people to join after the founders. At one point, I didn't even know that. I didn't know that I wasn't a founder, because I didn't really know what a founder was, because I'd never done a startup before. I was part of the founding team, I suppose, although I wasn't, strictly speaking, on paper a founder. But what Lasse did, he met with everybody individually who had been recruited or asked to come along with the journey. And we all basically signed a very simple agreement that said we would work for free, that we would be available should that develop into something a bit more formal, like an employment contract, but would also get a few shares along the way. So that was a way of motivating people. So I would say to any founder today, as you're recruiting your early team, from my experience, that was a very powerful thing. It built commitment. And so, yes, we lost a few people in those early years. Some people decided it wasn't for them. We originally had a big vision of an entire computing platform, almost like our own cloud platform, with loads and loads and loads of products. I mentioned earlier the Netscape products, like a web server and an application server and a mail server. We never did those things. We ended up quite quickly realising that where we could make a difference in the market was in identity. Which was great for me, because that's what I'd focused on for 10 years. We definitely had some challenging times. Again, I wasn't that aware of it at the time, but yes, finances were a problem from time to time. We actually had customers very early, and that was quite helpful. They weren't paying us huge amounts, but to my mind, having never started a business, I thought they were quite impressive amounts of money. Within a year, we had our first customer paying us more than 100,000 a year, which I thought was pretty good. Again, later on, when you're dealing with enterprise software, with companies that are making billions, then spending $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 on a piece of software is not a big deal for them, which I now know. But at the time, it seemed like a really big deal. And so because we had revenue, we were able to, I suppose, we were creative in terms of how we managed our cash flow. But very early on then it became clear that in order to grow, in order to keep doing what we were doing, we would need some investment. So up to that point we were what they call self-funded. The founders, this is one of the distinguishing things about the founders is they had all put in a little bit of money to start the company, whereas I hadn't been asked for any money. So that was really the only distinction between a founder and somebody who was also part of the founding team. And what I then observed is everybody was wearing multiple hats. I was doing support, but I was also helping with sales activities and I was also helping review code and review documentation and things like that. And as we grew, I noticed that the CEO, Lasse, was not responding to emails, and this started to become quite concerning to me. Because he was like where the buck stopped. He was the CEO. So when a customer, I was dealing with customers every day. And if a customer had a problem, I would need to escalate it. And because we were a very small company, there weren't very many places to escalate it to. So we, you know, so I would talk with Lasse on a very regular basis. And as our CEO, sometimes he would step in. He had a bit more corporate experience than I did and commercial experience. So he would get involved with customers and if there was a problem that he would help calm it down from that perspective. I started noticing that he wasn't responding anymore. I then learned that the reason for that was that as a CEO, your job is to make sure the company exists, right? And in fact, he was spending a lot of his time talking to venture capitalists and other funding organisations. Which seemed strange to me at the time, having not had that experience. But in hindsight, it's like, well, it's obvious. That's what a CEO has to do. Because the CEO has to go out there and get the money to allow the company to grow. So within, I think it was about two and a half years in, we got our first series A funding. We had hired a great guy called Neil Chapman, who had been at a venture capital firm in Norway. And he was actually hired into sales. And again, I thought that was strange. I now know that raising money for a company and selling a product, there's lots of overlap in that, which I, of course, I now understand. But I didn't know that at the time, because he was the first venture capitalist I'd ever met. So I didn't really know what that involved. I kind of had heard of what venture capital was, but I didn't have the experience. So Neil taught me a lot. And one of the things that he mentioned to me along the way was when the documentation came through, because I had a few shares, when the documents came through for the VC funding, I had to sign them along with everybody else. I'd never seen a document like this in my life. So I went to Neil because I knew that he had experience being a VC in the past. And he said, look, you know, most of this is standard stuff. You don't need to worry about it. And in that conversation, he said, well, look, what ForgeRock is doing is not untypical of a startup. I didn't realize, I didn't realize that was a kind of like a playbook for how to run a startup. But he said, what is different about ForgeRock is it's doing it much more quickly than I've ever seen before. So I thought, this is interesting. And it was a point where I suppose I had a little bit of optimism that we might make it as a company. So after that, I think the financial worries started to become less important. And then, and it also gave us obviously a big bunch of cash that we could then grow. So we went out, we hired people, we got more offices, and we were able to grow much faster. We grew our sales team. Absolutely critical that sales is built as early as you can possibly build it as a company. A lot of, so let me relate that to more recent experience now that I deal with startups on a daily basis. You see a whole variety of startups. Most of them though are people who have a passion for something and they want to for different motivations, they want to turn it into a product just because they love it, and because it's what they believe in, because they have a purpose, a mission. Obviously, in the green tech space, you get a lot of people in the space with an absolutely clear vision of what they want to do in the world, and that's why they're wanting to start this company. But most people who start the companies are the people with the technical expertise or the knowledge of the domain. What really helps a company is where you start it with a co-founder, with somebody who's got some commercial experience. Because it's not enough just to have a great product. You've got to get that product out there. And in order to do that, you've got to do marketing. You know this more than most people. You need to do marketing, PR, sales. You've got to get all those commercial aspects right. And again, when we started ForgeRock, amongst our first 10 to 12 people, we had people who had done sales. And so most people were technical. We were still very biased towards techies, but we had Lasse and we had a guy called Hermann, who was our first salesperson. And then we hired Neil quite soon afterwards, this venture capitalist that I'd mentioned. There is a school of thought, and I think it has some merit, that if you want to go and do a startup, if it's a product startup, it's not a bad plan. And I forget who I heard talking about this quite eloquently. It's actually a good idea to go out and sell stuff even before you've built it, because you need to validate the market. A lot of people have great ideas and some of the startups that I've worked with over the last few years, they've had great ideas, but they spent a long time building their product before they went out to market. And they got out to market and they discovered nobody wanted to buy it. And that's quite tough. But what you can do is if you've got the right help, the right commercial experience, the right partners, people who can help fill those gaps, you can go out and test the market first. Product market fit is a phrase which I don't hear enough from the founders that I've been working with or people I've been speaking to. You can have a great product, but you've got to find a place where that product works. I can give you an example of one that I'm involved with right now. There's a great guy called Ben McDonald who runs a company called Nodum. And in fact, in the news recently, there's been quite a lot about car charging. So as you said in the introduction, one of the things that got me into startups was electric vehicles. But now that I'm involved with it, so I've been helping Ben, and you mentioned Saline earlier. So Saline Ventures has been also assisting Ben in getting his, essentially, commercialising his product. So there's been a lot in the news about electric vehicles and charging. And there are a number of solutions for people who don't have the ability to have a car charger at home. quite hard and it's quite expensive to own an electric car if you don't have car charging at home. So Nodum has been set up by Ben as a way, it's essentially a cable management system. So you put it on the side of the house, it provides an arch, the cable then drops down and the idea is you put it on the side of your house and it goes over the pavement. Now, a lot of other solutions are things like gullies. So you actually get the council to come and cut a channel, or you get approval from the council to cut a channel so that you can run your cable along the pavement. Ben’s is just a different way of doing that, but running it overhead. Now, back to product market fit. Ben had this idea because he lives in a terraced house in London. And so this is his solution to the problem that he has. And again, a lot of founders will do that. They'll come up with a solution to something that they have experienced themselves. And a number of the founders I've been dealing with have done exactly that. The problem is that getting a council to agree to put something that goes over a pavement is quite hard. And in fact, all the people doing the various companies that are doing cross pavement solutions have all found similar problems. Getting councils to agree that you can cut a channel in the pavement is equally hard. In terms of product market fit, there are lots of other places that Ben's product actually could be really helpful. And there are use cases, people with disabilities, cables actually. I don't know if you've ever held a car charging cable. Some of them are really heavy. So to have one drop down that you can just kind of swing, slot into your car. That's brilliant and for some people that's going to be a game changer. That might be the difference in allowing someone to have an electric vehicle who otherwise couldn't. So those are the kind of things. So Saline has been helping Ben in as much as anything else in finding that product market fit. So, you know, we're all quite excited about what that's going to do in the future now. And it might come back, might be looping back to cross pavement. Maybe there will be some forward thinking councils who are prepared to allow people to put the charge beam on the side of a house. But at the moment, exploring that product market fit is really the main thing that Ben has to do.
Katherine Keddie: So as you've been talking, I've been noting down a few things in terms of key advice that you have either as an early employee or a founder of a company, both from your experience obviously with ForgeRock and then as an advisor now for startups and work with Saline. A few I wrote down, and I'm sure there's loads that you can add, so please do. Find the right product market fit. I think something that we often say to people that we work with is, when you find the right product market fit, you get people in calls that say, yes, exactly. That is my problem completely. Actually, the sales process becomes one of negotiating what actually the support looks like specifically, but the problem, you're immediately on the same page and you don't have to really like sell and explain that problem and find the right moment to get the MVP out and getting it out as soon as possible.
Tim Rault-Smith: And even sell something before it's out, if you can. And you can't do that with everything. There are certain types of products, if you know, if you're confident that you can deliver them within a fairly short space of time, if you can sell them before you build it, there's nothing wrong with that.
Katherine Keddie: And I guess that comes back to, you know that it's a problem that people genuinely really have. If you say, we're coming up with a solution for this and they go, oh please, let's talk about it.
Tim Rault-Smith: Because if you wait, with certain types of products, if you wait until you've built them, A, the market might have evolved and you haven't captured it. Somebody else might get in there before you. And there are certain industries, I suppose, where, you know, the big name gets the lion's share of the business. And so if you can be the first, there's a thing called first mover advantage. If you're first in there, then sometimes you can be, you can dominate the market.
Katherine Keddie: Another thing you've mentioned a couple of times both in your career and then also in the early stages of ForgeRock is having the right commercial people and I guess having experience firstly from a technical perspective, what does it mean to actually sell something that people need and speaking directly to customers and then also for the startup, do you have the right commercial talent in your team?
Tim Rault-Smith: So as I said, most startups are people with the domain knowledge or experience technically, who have this idea. And I guess ForgeRock was an unusual startup. We had a much bigger team than you would expect, much quicker. And so we had everything in-house. I suppose we must have used agencies. I wasn't so close to it in those days. Yes, I remember we did use the odd agency to do things. We used external lawyers, we used external accountants, we used external marketing companies, all the usual things you'd expect. But when you're a very early stage startup and you're quite small, and most companies grow much slower than ForgeRock did, if you don't have somebody in the company who knows the commercial side of things, find a good partner. You know, you don't have to have internal marketing expertise. You don't need to have… I mean, selling, yes, you're always selling. So you have to have some sales within the company, but that's because the CEO de facto is the salesperson for most companies at the beginning, when you're just one or two people. That's one of the jobs the CEO has. But this is where someone like Saline Ventures comes in. So Saline Ventures is a venture arm, it's actually a separate company, but it was started by a guy called Tim Smith (no relation!). And his vision was to help, not so much startups actually, they typically have worked with later stage companies, but companies who have a great product, typically they're family businesses, but they're quite small, they're privately owned, but they need help with business development. That's what they do. And so Saline Ventures has been formed with the same philosophy to provide a partner to startups on the business development side of things. So now, most companies will use that service for a period of time. If they grow sufficiently, then I would expect them to have their sales in-house. But having someone who can do it for you, particularly if they can access the right market for you, is very helpful and can accelerate things.
Katherine Keddie: Okay, so we've talked about product and product people having sales expertise, MVP at the right time. What advice would you give yourself now, knowing what you know and having gained the experience that you have? If you think about yourself when you first joined ForgeRock and to anyone else who is an early employer or a founder, what's the number one piece of advice that you would pass back?
Tim Rault-Smith: Let me take it off in a slightly different direction. Because one of the core things which I think we had, which I think, which I would want to see in the startups that I work with, is commitment. Now, commitment is not scarce among startups. You know, people don't, starting a startup is hard. But there are levels of commitment depending on the experience and background of the people in the startup. What you will also find is that even between founding teams, typically, you know, a lot of investors that I speak to, they prefer to invest in founding teams rather than a single founder because they get a variety of experience and they, they get a couple of people who can bounce things off each other. And you know, the, the, um, they can compliment what the other one does. What you often get, as soon as you build a team with more than one person, you get different background experience and expectations. One of the key things in business at all levels, startups, enterprise, whatever, setting expectations. So setting expectations with your staff and with your team is as important as anything. Going back to commitment, people will have different expectations on what kind of commitment is required in a startup. There's been a lot over the last 10, 15, 20 years about work-life balance, about mental health. All of these things are important. When you're in a startup, you're doing something that not many people do. And so you've got to know that you actually have the energy to do it properly. So when it comes to work-life balance, and I've seen this, some founders that I've worked with, you know, I'll send them an email or give them a call or something like that. No answer because they're off on their annual holiday in wherever that might be in France or Cornwall or wherever. And that's fine. You know, everybody should have a break. When you're in a startup, you have to accept if you're going to be successful, that the commitment is probably going to go above and beyond and having a nice tidy barrier between your work life and your home life is going to be hard. Now some people spend a lot of energy enforcing that division between their work life and their home life, and that's fine, and I respect people who do that, but that isn't necessarily what's going to make a startup successful. If you're in a startup, and certainly my experience of an international startup, because we had customers in our first year in various countries, including New Zealand, and we had a support team of one full-time person plus me managing it and building it. So we had one employee whose job was support in Norway. And then we had all of the rest of us who were starting and building the company who had, you know, we had lots of hats to wear. So I was doing support one day and the next day I might be out on a sales visit. But we had a customer in New Zealand. If they had a problem, we had to be able to support them. Now, we didn't have anybody in New Zealand. In fact, we didn't have anybody outside Europe in those early days. And so who was going to look after a customer that in the middle of the night in England might have a problem? Now, you can't have a nice cozy nine-to-five doing that. Now, I'm not saying that everybody should put their entire personal lives on hold for their startup in order to make their startup successful, but you've got to understand what kind of commitment is involved.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, and I think a lot of your success came through the sacrifices that you had to make at that early stage, right? To scale that fast, it was the pace that was really different about ForgeRock.
Tim Rault-Smith: I think so. And I think everybody was pulling in the same direction. So yes, I mean, we had a hugely committed team and it was successful. By the way, ForgeRock doesn't exist anymore. They got bought a couple of years ago. What was interesting is that even though I left the company shortly before they actually got bought, I suppose I was able to experience the entire life cycle of a startup through startup, first funding two and a half years in, several subsequent funding rounds. We actually IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 and then got bought by private equity in 2023. So that for me was really fascinating to see that whole life cycle from Inception, all the way through to being acquired by another company. So the technology is alive and well, most of my ex-colleagues are still working very happily for Ping Identity that bought ForgeRock.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah. I mean, it's literally a, from being 12 people in a, in a virtual room, um, to IPO and then, and then being bought, I think it's, you've literally seen each stage and what's the most common mistake you see with founders who are early stage looking for that growth trajectory?
Tim Rault-Smith: Is there a most common mistake? There are plenty of mistakes. Let me give you a couple of examples. There's one which I've seen recently where a company had taken on a lot of investment in order to build a product for a particular market. Now this was probably one of those, if I think, and I think even the founders would recognise this in hindsight, that they hadn't done their product market fit, certainly not in enough detail. So they had some early interest, and maybe this is a common mistake, is mistaking interest for business. A lot of people love a good idea. Are people willing to put their hands in their pockets and actually buy the product? And so I think this was one of those mistakes. They had taken the interest as being enough to take on a lot of investment, build a product, go out to market only to discover that people weren't going to buy it. So what they then did, after some years, is they decided to pivot. And pivoting is a great thing. And of course, startups can pivot in a way that no one else can, because you haven't typically got the momentum in a particular market that holds you back from making a big switch. So they pivoted and they decided that what they'd built could be applied to a completely different market. But they'd also run out of money at that point because they'd been waiting for this initial market they'd been going after to be converted into actual real sales. Now, they go after this new market. And they'd run out of money, so they needed to raise more money in order to go after this new market. It was too little too late. And again, I know that they would acknowledge this now. And in fact, they failed. So they went out of business because they couldn't raise that money. Because most investors will look at it, and they'll look at the cap table, and they'll see how much money's already been invested, what the company's worth. And if the company now needs to do something completely new, effectively they're starting from scratch. So what is the value of all that investment which has already been spent? And actually when you then invest in a company like that, you invest probably reasonable amounts of money because they've already built up a staff and they've got commitments, they've got contracts that they were committed to. So they've got to keep funding those things. So you've got to raise the money. But all the money that they've raised so far is all gone, but it's sitting on the cap table. So all the earlier investors are expecting if the company is successful to get their money back and hopefully some profit. So in this case, I was, I was talking to them and saying, if you, if I, as an investor was to come in, I would be paying you a certain amount of money for a very tiny portion of your company. It doesn't look like a very good investment. And not that many companies get themselves into that situation, but most of them fail before that actually. Most startups fail. So taking on too much money too early is a problem before you've actually got product and revenue. You need to do it sometimes. You hear about the big Silicon Valley tech companies, where people put billions into companies that are pre-revenue. They haven't actually sold anything. That's a different market, a whole different scale of market, and it does happen, but it happens only in very few distinct situations. Most startups start very small, they take a while to grow, and you kind of need to get that right balance as early as you possibly can. It goes back to the sales thing. You've got to sell stuff if you can. One of the things that ForgeRock did, which one of the startups I'm involved with is doing now, which I think is, I'm not sure if it was deliberate, but it's certainly very clever. I mentioned that we had adopted these open source products from Sun at ForgeRock. And when we first started, we had nothing to sell other than services because they weren't our own products. Now, we developed, we built a development team, and we then continued building the products as our own. And so we became a product company. But after our first investment, we hired a new CFO, a guy with some Silicon Valley experience. And he came to one of our company meetings, in fact, one of the ones near Faro that I mentioned earlier. And he had only been in the company literally days. And he was asked to stand up and introduce himself. And he said, well, when I examine services companies like you, and I was a bit taken aback by that. It's like, we're not a services company. We're a product company. And actually, he was absolutely right. Because we, although, it goes back to what I said about Sun. What was Sun? Sun was a hardware company, because that's where the revenue came from. We were a services company, that's where the revenue came from. And so you know what kind of company you are, because of where your revenue comes from. So ForgeRock started as a services company, and then develop product. So this company that I'm involved with now is a company called 3ti. They build a really, really fantastic freestanding charging unit for electric vehicles. It can be delivered on a lorry, it can be installed in a day, it's got solar, it's got car charging, it's got batteries, it's got an entire software platform to manage it remotely. It's got to be plugged into the mains because the amount of solar that you can generate from a small device the size of a shipping container isn't enough to charge 12 cars, but it's enough to supplement and top up what the cars need. They actually started out effectively as a services company. So they started out about six, seven years ago, building solar car park canopies. Now, kind of product, but actually they were essentially a project management organisation that built these solar canopies. And that gave very early revenue. So they managed these projects, which involved manufacturing, and they had to obviously deal with the customers. So they had the commercial side as well. But while they were doing this, they discovered that there was this gap in the market. Because one of the things they discovered through doing these infrastructure projects, which, you know, building in car parks, is you need planning permission and there's all sorts of red tape that you need to go through in order to get these projects done. Now they managed to do some successfully, but they realised there was this market for something that was freestanding, where they can just simply drop it onto the car park. It doesn't get attached to anything other than plugging it into the mains. And because what that does is it sidesteps a lot of the planning and the kind of engineering analysis work that needs to be done for a construction project. And then what happened was, and this is a recent development, they built this product alongside, they call it Papilio3, and there have been some great YouTube videos. There's a good EV channel called Everything Electric, it used to be called Fully Charged, and they have done a couple of features, one a few years ago and one more recently, on the Papilio3. Really good watch. Maybe we'll include a link to it in the notes. And so they realised there was this gap. And as the company developed, they found they wanted to spend more and more of their resources developing the product. And the recent development is that they just sold off their solar car park construction business. So they are no longer a services company, they are now fully a product company. So they now completely focus on building the Papilio3 and selling it. In fact, they lease it in most situations. But it's been a fantastic journey to watch. And it's been a hard one. In fact, they've had all sorts of challenges. Their founder sadly died last year. And there were all sorts of repercussions of that. They found a new CEO. And they've had to reorganise the business a couple of times. But with all of those experiences, they've come out hugely stronger. And as a product company, I think that means that they have the potential to grow much bigger than they ever would have as a services company.
Katherine Keddie: So there's that resilience and scaling potential.
Tim Rault-Smith: And they can partner. So what I'm hoping to see is that they will go, they've currently got one manufacturing partner in the UK. I know that they're talking to a second. What I'm hoping to see is that they'll go international and that they will find ways of manufacturing their product in different markets. Because there's nothing restricting it to the UK market. It's something that could work anywhere where there is a car park that needs car charging.
Katherine Keddie: But that early service offering allowed them to have some revenue and some traction and it'd be a real business.
Tim Rault-Smith: Absolutely. Now of course they have raised capital, they've raised investment along the way. And they've raised a significant amount, because these things are not cheap. You know, developing these kind of products, which are the size of a shipping container, that's not a cheap thing to do. But they probably had to raise less than they would otherwise have done, because they had something that they could sell along the way.
Katherine Keddie: And I think, especially in the current investment market, having traction is such a value add when speaking to an investor, right? So, I mean, if you were an EV founder or startup or someone who's looking at charging, for example, the infrastructure, and you were trying to raise funding in this environment, what would you do?
Tim Rault-Smith: I would, well, there are different ways of raising money. And one of the things that I've seen again, quite recently, is a company which was raising money. They were actually, they were more of a scale-up. They'd been going for quite a few years. They'd done a couple of pivots. They were raising money from an institutional investor, and this is like a million, probably a million and a half pounds worth of capital raising. What they didn't do, and this is no fault of their own, this is just one of those traps that you fall into as a startup, they didn't actually do enough due diligence on the funder. Now, anybody funding a startup, will typically go through a due diligence process. A lot of startups don't realise that it's a very, very good idea to do the reverse. Because you need to know where your money is coming from. You need to know what the motivations are behind the people with the money. Money does strange things to people. And once people have it, Things that they believed all their lives, they can kind of disregard. Principles that they've held all their lives, they can abandon if they get too focused on raising more money on building their wealth. So you've got to know where the money's coming from, because that will drive the strings that come attached with the money. A lot of institutional investors will want a board seat. We saw this with ForgeRock. Each time we had a round of funding, we had a new person on the board representing that money that had come into the business. And so you've got to understand where the money's coming from. So what this company discovered is that this institutional funder didn't actually have the money. What they were doing is they were taking it out to their network and offering it as a proposition so that they could raise the money. But they had an exclusive deal, which meant that the startup in question wasn't able to go out and find alternative sources of money, and it nearly broke them because they were beginning to run out. And by the time they discovered that the institutional funder didn't have the money, they were getting very, very lean. So they had to do an emergency fundraise, which is not a good position to be in. They had to basically do a complete drop in their valuation of their company. You don't want to get into those situations. So in answer to your question, somebody in the company, either in your startup or in one of your partners. This is where again, Saline is good at this. You need somebody to keep a very close track of your basic day-to-day finances, your runway, your projections, and you need to be on top of that. Most founders find that hard because they're not from a financial background. So if you can't do it yourselves, find somebody who can do it for you.
Katherine Keddie: We actually have another episode with Mitesh from EcoVentures Council and they are doing a lot of free, I mean it's more on the legal side, but looking at the nitty gritty of what are actually the details of your fundraise. So if you're interested in that, have a listen to that episode. I think that's really useful advice, obviously born from lots of experience and seeing where companies go wrong. Thank you very much, Tim, for all of your input today. I think it's been fantastic and really useful. We'll put all of the links to everything that you discussed in the description below. Is there anything that you haven't mentioned that you'd love to leave the listeners with, particularly for climate tech founders, those in the EV space more broadly?
Tim Rault-Smith: Well, okay, that is an interesting question. There is so much information out there, and so don't rely on your hunches. You can go out and do a lot of research, and there are a lot of new AI tools that are really good at research. So things that might have taken weeks to research, you can actually go out there and get a pretty good stab at it. It might not be 100% perfect, there might be hallucinations, but there are some great tools out there to help you research a market. Don't rely on hunches. You've got to go out and test. You've got to go out there and make sure that you know that there is a market that you're in. And remember that interest doesn't always result in sales. And so you've got to test, you've got to go out and talk to customers to make sure that it's beyond just, yes, that's a very interesting product. I can imagine somebody using it. Versus, yes, that is a product I would buy, that would be instrumental to my business, I can see how that will affect my bottom line. Those are the kind of questions and those kind of conversations that you need to be having as a founder.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I'm going to put my job potentially on the line to invest in this solution because I know it's going to help me.
Tim Rault-Smith: Exactly. Buying from startups has its risks. And I remember when, again, at ForgeRock, where we had companies doing due diligence on us, just as a supplier. I'd never heard of that before. Again, I'd never done startup. But of course they had to do that because they didn't know we were going to be still existing in three months' time. because we had no track record. Makes perfect sense now. It was something that was very new to me at the time. But yes, I mean, any company that's investing money in anything, you know, whether it's for capital or equity or whether it's just buying a product, they need to know that between the time that they pay the money and the product is delivered, that the company is going to still be there.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah.
Tim Rault-Smith: And even beyond, of course, you know, I spent most of my career in services. You know, I was there to make sure that customers got the value out of what they bought. So of course the company has to exist perpetually, essentially, to make sure that that value is maintained.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah. Which is why when someone says, yeah, that sounds great and it's not actual traction, there's a big difference between showing interest and actually committing.
Tim Rault-Smith: Yeah. And there's another aspect of that, which is understanding the sales process within your customer. So if you, you know, you can talk to somebody who is the end user of your product. And they will probably be very enthusiastic. And especially if it's a technical conversation, if you're talking to somebody technical. Techies often, if they can bond over something that is relevant, they can have great conversations. But you've got to understand, who is signing the checks? Who is the person? Who does this have to go through and what is the process within that company, your customer, to get it from somebody showing interest to somebody actually being able to get the money out of their finance team and send it with contracts and all that stuff? And that's, for a lot of organisations, if you're selling into large companies, enterprise, or public sector even more so, if you're selling to government or councils, then you've got to understand what that process is. And it's not trivial. Again, working with a partner who can help is very useful.
Katherine Keddie: I think that's a good note to end on, but there are so many gems of wisdom in this episode. So thank you so much, Tim, for giving us your time, your input, your expertise. And for anyone who would like to learn more about what you do, it's going to be in a link to the description. And I'm sure there's loads more that people can learn from you. So have a look at Saline Ventures and have a look at some of Tim's work. I'm sure you'll be interested to hear more. So thank you so much, Tim, for your time.
Tim Rault-Smith: It's been fun. Thanks, Kat.
Katherine Keddie: Thank you. All right. Thank you, everyone. And you will catch us on the next episode of Scaling Green-Tech.
