Founder stories: Personalised AI for self-sovereign digital lives
What inspired you to start Hyphen? What is the mission you are working towards?
At Hyphen, we imagine a future where every individual fully owns their digital presence - and where AI serves as a trusted and personalised advisor in people’s lives. Self-sovereignty, individual freedom and privacy are three incredibly important factors here. I have always been interested in philosophy and my own philosophy is based on the individual. In my opinion, everyone should be self-sovereign. Everyone should own their data. At the moment, we try solving this through regulations but that is not enough.
This is what we are trying to achieve with our personal AI “Kin”: It’s the digital brain that anticipates your needs and provides personalised recommendations to make your life easier and more efficient - whilst keeping your data fully private. You don’t have to trust a privacy policy, you can trust the technology.
Was being a founder something you always wanted to do?
It has never been an active decision. It’s just who I am. I can not NOT build things. I enjoy it but it can be frustrating as well because it’s hard to relax due to the risk involved.
Looking back, I can say that over time you stop being “delusional” when it comes to what it means to be a founder. It’s a good thing because it means you are learning - but it’s also useful to be a bit delusional especially when you want to start building something new.
As a founder, what are some of the biggest challenges you have been facing in the last couple of months at Hyphen?
There is one rule if you want to start a business: You start with the problem - and build a product to solve this as the next step. We actually broke that rule by starting with a vision and the tech. It made things a lot more difficult for us.
Back In January, I thought we would have to close the business: The privacy issue was proving to be more difficult than we had expected and we were struggling to find a business model that worked. This also made fundraising for us an incredibly difficult task.
You eventually did secure the funding you needed for Hyphen. Congratulations! What were some of the obstacles you were facing and what helped you overcome these?
We tried raising money based on our technology - but we didn’t have a product ready for the market or enough reliable data to back it up. This made it really difficult for us to raise funding because investors don’t like that level of risk. We actually went into fundraising twice before we were finally able to close our round with $1.1m.
Finally being able to secure the funding we needed was driven by two key aspects. Firstly, we managed to get our product and our business model ready. Secondly, we were now able to bring our vision to life - with a great product and with data and financial metrics. This is where Scaleup Finance has been a really valuable partner as well. You need the financials to back up your company’s vision and Scaleup’s platform, as well as the CFO support, has been really helpful in guiding us through all of this.
Not only are you a serial entrepreneur, but you also support other startups as an investor. How has this mix of experience impacted how you are running Hyphen now?
It’s extremely valuable. As an investor, I have seen a lot of ideas and pitches. I know what works and what doesn’t. I know what to look out for when hiring people. On top of that, my good network with the VC community has obviously also come in handy for us at Hyphen.
Despite all of these learnings and benefits - I still make mistakes and continue to learn every day. The fact that we started with a vision and the tech at Hyphen is the perfect example here.
What has been one of the biggest learnings on your founder journey so far?
It’s EXTREMELY difficult. I think being a founder tends to be positioned as this cool, almost glamorised lifestyle but that’s not the reality. If you are thinking of starting your own business, there is one thing you should ask yourself: Why do I actually want to be a founder? Yes, it can be fun. It can be rewarding. But it can also be frustrating a lot of the time - with long working hours. I have worked with a lot of founders over the years and I don’t know anyone who is talented enough to not put in those long hours. That’s why you should really think about your motivation to be a founder. If that is not genuine, then going through those rough aspects of founder life will be difficult. Being a founder is not for everyone.
Reflecting back on your founder journey, what piece of advice would you want to give others thinking of starting their own business?
Don't start your own business when you have young kids. If you're thinking about starting a family, then you should make your family a priority. As a founder, you're going to get busy very quickly. Working hours are naturally long, and that will impact the amount of time you can spend with your children.