Interview with Jeremy Brassington

Jeremy Brassington, an angel investor and entrepreneur, was born in Winchester in September 1951. His single-parent mother left him at the age of two and a half and he found himself in an orphanage. He says of the experience: “I don’t really remember very much about it.  I blanked it out because it was one of those things.  I was an angry young man and I felt I had been dumped, so I needed to get on with my life somehow.  It was a long time ago and I don’t think I’ve suffered as a result.  In fact I think I’ve probably gained from that experience; it’s hardened me up.”

In 2010 Jeremy met his biological mother for the first time and in 2018 he found his biological father who lived in Las Vegas. He says: “It was an extraordinary experience. When I first met my mother, I thought, oh my goodness, I don’t look anything like her.  I’ve got to find my father.  Now I have my mother’s sense of humour.  I asked her ‘Why, why did you call me Jeremy Guy, is it because you have a French mother?’ She responded ‘Oh no my dear. It’s because I met a GI who is your father, and, GI, Guy, I thought would be a good middle name for you.’  So, that was her sense of humour, and I’ve still got that.”

Jeremy found his father after a DNA test and “accidentally finding that there was somebody on Ancestry.com who they said was my father or my son. I knew it couldn’t be my son, so it had to be my father.” He says meeting his father and his family was extraordinary. Adding: “They looked at me and said, ‘Oh my goodness.  You look exactly like Uncle Abe,’ who was my father’s brother.  ‘You have the Rodriguez genes and ears. This is your home brother.’ They were amazingly welcome.  I have seven brothers and sisters in Las Vegas and California. It was just an outer-world experience, it really was.”

His father had not known about Jeremy. He had been on 41 one-way ticket missions during the second world war and was the lead navigator in the bombing of Bikini Atoll. Jeremy adds: “He was told not to hit the target by his superiors and was promised a promotion, and he said, ‘If you employ me to go and hit the target on Bikini Atoll, that is what I’m going to do.  I’m not interested in a promotion.’  He was the only guy to hit the target. By the time I met him he was beginning to lose his mental faculties, but he knew who I was and where I fitted in the jigsaw puzzle.”

They first met at Jeremy’s half-brother’s house and Jeremy was not expecting to meet him that evening. He adds: “I walked into the open-plan living room and there was this wizened old man sitting in a wheelchair. I thought, oh my goodness, what am I going to say?  I went up to him, and the only thing I could say as a Brit brought up in middle-class suburbia, was ‘Good evening sir, how are you?’ while shaking his hand. The whole family fell around on the floor laughing. By the time I left, I just gave him a big hug and said, ‘Papa, fantastic to meet you.  See you again soon.’  I saw him again once before he died a couple of years later.”.

At the age of six he was adopted and started life with a new set of parents. Jeremy explains; “I reckon that was my first entrepreneurial deal where I secured my future by finding the right people on a coach that was taking us all down to the seaside. I flipped from one set of prospective parents to another because I thought they were a better deal, and I lived happily ever after.

Jeremy describes his post adoption childhood as being happy, saying: “I was relieved to be part of a loving family.  We had difficulties with my learning, I couldn’t read and write age six, and I remember sitting on the mat in front of the fireplace being taught ‘the cat sat on the mat’ a dozen times because I had real problems.  I had problems with the English language into my early youth.” Jeremy believes that the problems arose due to having missed out on three and a half years of proper language training. He adds: “It was because I  was an angry young man and didn’t want to, or couldn’t learn, maybe I had dyslexia, I don’t know.”

While at the orphanage, Jeremy attended the local primary school and then after his adoption he was accepted into King’s College School, Wimbledon, of he says: “It was a pretty good crammer for Oxford and Cambridge. Somebody there obviously thought there’s a spark of intelligence somewhere in me and helped promote me to getting into Oxford.”

He studied maths, physics and chemistry at A level and says: “I could do maths and chemistry standing on my head.  I finished my maths A Level algebra exam in 45 minutes and wondered why everybody else was sitting around vigorously scribbling.  I love numbers, I love shapes.  I’m hopeless with language and expression and everything else.”

After successfully gaining his A levels, Jeremy went to Magdalen College, Oxford to study chemistry. He says of the experience: “I had a great time.  I didn’t do much chemistry, but I had a great time.” Having grown up in a middle-class, conservative family, where the emphasis was on doing well, getting a job and pension, Jeremy, says Oxford was “a real eye-opener”.   He adds: “It widened my horizons immensely, taught me how to engage with my peer group, understanding all sorts of different subjects from the ones that I was narrowly taught at school. It was a really, really great period for me to understand more about myself, to actually do a lot of reading, which was difficult for me but I read widely. It was a really, really useful and informative period for me.”

Following his degree, Jeremy realised that he was not going to be a research chemist and decided to get another qualification. He joined Coopers and Lybrand and trained to be a qualified accountant with the intention of using it as a springboard for the next stage of his development.

He says: “I think it was still working within the constraints of the traditional role;   Oxford, Coopers and Lybrand and I then went into a merchant bank (Barings). It was the typical path you would expect somebody with that pedigree to have. I was conforming to everything that my parents and teachers expected of me. Looking back on it, I know that that is not me, but I did that because I thought that was the right thing to do.  I thought that was the right track to go down.  But, nonetheless, it provided me with a fantastic grounding of accounting expertise, business expertise, deal doing, deal structuring, and so on, really useful tools in the armoury for what I was to then do afterwards.”

Jeremy quickly realised that auditing was boring and a large organisation like Coopers was not right for him, he adds: “The problem was that auditing is the dullest subject on earth and I realised that very quickly. I decided that this was not for me. I also felt very constrained within a large organisation. There were lots of procedures, lots of formalities, people expecting you to do things and I was just beginning to break out of the mould that I had found myself in with my adopted parents. I wanted to get out to a smaller organisation. Everything I’ve done has gone from large to small to small to smaller, and now going back the other way hopefully.

“I wanted to get out of that straitjacket, and that was really important for me. I didn’t know why, but that was the driver for me to create more opportunities which perhaps suited my character more and allowed me to be a little bit more of a free-wheeler than I was allowed to be within the confines of Coopers and a merchant bank.”

After leaving Coopers and Lybrand, Jeremy joined Barings merchant bank where he had been working on a project to set up their venture capital outfit; Hambrecht & Quist. Assuming that the bank would introduce an outsider to take over, Jeremy secured a job elsewhere. However, he was invited to remain as the bank had plans for him. He explains: “When I handed in my notice, the powers that be said, ‘Oh no, you can’t leave.  You’re going to be part of this new subsidiary we’ve set up to invest in venture capital.’  And I said, ‘Well nobody told me that, so, I’m leaving.’  The guy I used to work for, John Dare, said, ‘No. Go back downstairs, and we’ll come back to you within 24 hours.’ Within 24 hours they had offered me a partnership job within the venture capital outfit, alongside a couple of fairly senior industry recruits that they had brought in.  That was the beginning of the fork in the road to venture capital, to understanding how you start business, how you build businesses, what risks you take. Taking me on the journey to understand that not everything works, which is really, a really important lesson.”

Jeremy says that only one in ten start-ups will win, so he had to learn how to identify the winners. He adds: “You also have to understand what makes winners. Is it the management team, is it the market, is it the opportunity, is it the combination of all of the above?  What really creates that hope, opportunity and potential in a start-up business?  So that was really, really important for me.  I got exposure to several hundreds of businesses, many of which we invested in.”

With his success at Barings, Jeremy realised that he could do this as well and along with several colleagues, started their own business within Barings. He adds: “I started in the early Eighties, risking money and helping other people to look at how to start up businesses. We were in that sort of culture, there were opportunities all around, and it was a question of whether one wanted to stay within the constraints of the employed status or try and reach out and do some other things, which is what a number of us did.”

As Barings Hambrecht & Quist continued to grow eventually reaching a billion pounds, Jeremy started to get itchy feet.  He had pioneered a relationship with a group of turnaround managers and went to Barings with the suggestion of starting a turnaround fund management group as part of the bank. Unfortunately, Barings thought it was too risky and Jeremy decided to leave to pursue it alone.

Jeremy says: “I left Barings.  I didn’t have a job but  I went to work with this turnaround group to see whether we could set up this turnaround fund.” Within six months the deal was signed and the group started its turnaround fund in 1990. Jeremy adds: “There was an element of risk.  It could have gone flat.  … I suppose that was the start of the switch from where I was before, within a cocooned environment, to starting to become more of my entrepreneurial self.”

One of the elements of his success in taking these risks, is his wife of fifty years of whom Jeremey says: “I think meeting my wife Pearl was really very special, and we are still together today, although she says sometimes, ‘I don’t know why we are.,’ We have a very strong relationship. I think that’s been really, really important in what I’ve done and the risks I’ve taken.  I couldn’t have done it without her backing and support.”

The turnaround funding group aimed to help people whose businesses were failing. Jermey adds: “It was very important from a couple of perspectives.  One, with a turnaround, you learn how not to run a business because you come across people who either haven’t run the business properly, or they’ve hit a wall because of market circumstances.  So you learn even more about a business than you do with a start-up.  With a turnaround or a mature business it’s very different; your shareholders may not want to put in more money and so you’ve got to manage within the constraints of that particular business.  When you hit the buffers, or you’re close to hitting the buffers, you have to do very different things from that which you do with a start-up. Having both the start-up experience and the turnaround experience was a really important part of my schooling in terms of understanding how really to run a business.”

Unfortunately, Jeremy fell out with his partners and ended up arranging a management walk-out (MWO) and he launched Bulldog Partners in 1996. The business switched focus from what Jeremy calls “businesses that were in moribund industries; furniture, packaging, things that don’t light people up when you talk about investment”.

Jeremy says; “The problem with that is that, whereas in a venture capital portfolio with technology, if one company succeeds, it pays for the rest of the portfolio, with a turnaround portfolio it’s very different because quite often buying a company for nothing is actually very expensive.  Therefore, one company doesn’t pay for all the failures in that portfolio.  So, what I then did was to say, OK, if we are going to get the leverage that we need to make a turnaround portfolio work, we are going to have to do it in the technology sector which I know really well, rather than the moribund industry sector.”

Having made some money on technology investments from the early nineties, Jeremy and his partners started investing in technology start-ups and companies that had gone wrong. He says: “We chose companies where, with a little bit of tweaking and sorting out, if there was a good product fit, product market fit, you could then get rid of all the rubbish and then start to sell these to the market when you’ve turned them around, at very much higher multiples than you could with a company in a dying industry.”

One such company was Oxford Molecular, one of the first spin-outs from Oxford University and which Jeremy had first backed at Barings.

 Jeremy explains: “We grew the business (Oxford Molecular) to a modest size with venture capital backing and then I saw the opportunity after I had left Barings to help take them public. I arranged a £2 million equity funding, found a finance director and broker for them and in 1993 we took the company public.  It then migrated on to the main market.  It reached a valuation of £400 million.  But the problem was that it had acquired lots of technology pieces of the equation, lots of companies in the US, and the UK, and for whatever reason it wasn’t working harmoniously.  The integration didn’t really work. Ten years later it was going the wrong way.

“We decided that we could provide some money to help them finish a process that they had to start, because the bank and shareholders were not prepared to give them any more money.  I approached the board and said we’d be prepared to put in a bridging loan of £3 million to change the fortunes of the group. If we hadn’t done it, then this group would have gone into liquidation, the value of the assets would have gone to nothing and it would have been a complete disaster. Whereas with our support, all of those businesses found homes, all of the people employed within the group found jobs, and the founder of Oxford Molecular, Tony Marchington, was able to buy a steam train, refurbish it, and retire gracefully.”

Jeremy next spotted an opportunity in 2003 with one of the portfolio companies they had bought from a receiver in the turnaround fund. It was called Conversor and it was an assistive listening device for people with hearing loss.

The company had developed its invention but had then gone bust. Jeremy explains what happened next: “What I then did was to basically take this product and completely re-engineer  and introduce it into 30 different markets across the world for people who were hard of hearing.  It was a really exciting business opportunity because it was building a business from the ground up with a product that was already proven but needed redesigning, and entering into new markets where it hadn’t been sold into before. It gave me another dimension of growing a business, but it was on a very small scale.”  As part of running the business, Jeremy learned a lot about patents and revoking patents. He adds; “It was very interesting, intellectually stimulating but not particularly lucrative in terms of making money, but nonetheless, what was really good for me was that, a) it taught me how to run a business; and b) it taught me a lot about the assistive technology industry.”

Assistive technology provides equipment, such as software and hardware, to support people who have a disability and need help in engaging with education and daily life.

Jeremy spent the next fifteen years managing Conversor. He adds: “I had been very lucky because I had made a lot of money on previous investments, so I was able to devote the time to what my wife describes as a “hobby business”.  I had been in corporate finance, I had been doing all sorts of deals, and this was the first time I had actually run a business; and actually running a business in an industry which was doing some good.  It was supporting people who had hearing issues.”

After meeting a woman who was using his product and realising the difference that it made, Jeremy said it gave him a flavour of where he wanted to go next, adding: “I’m doing something that’s really important to individuals who need some help and support and is a big tick in the box for me.  I’m doing something useful for a change.  I’m not just taking a cut on a transaction, I’m not just buying a company and selling it.  I’m actually doing some real world good.”

Around 2014/15, while at a conference one of Jeremy’s team was approached with the suggestion of developing an app to allow dyslexic students to more easily record lectures via their smartphones, rather than via the directional microphones and a portable recorders supplied by Conversor. Jeremy set a three-month period to see what they could develop.

Jeremy says: “I came up with a solution which involved getting another company to design an app for us, and sourcing some components from China, some connecting cables, and within three months I went back to the assessment committee and said, ‘There’s the product. It’s a smartphone app that does the recording.  It allows you to bookmark the important pieces of the lecture, then you can upload it to a software program that’s already out in the market, and that does the job for you.’  That was the beginning of what we’re now doing.”

Having developed the concept, Jeremy realised there was a business opportunity. Unfortunately, the app provider was not interested in being part of the deal and so Jeremy was forced to develop his own software program. In 2015, he launched it to market and launched what is now called the Habitat Learn Group.

He says: “It was reasonably well received, but there were some issues but in 2016 we made a fundamental step forward.” The step began with a change in the Disabled Student’s Allowance (DSA) in the assistive technologies market”. Jeremy explains: “The DSA had changed the way that they supported students, and instead of allowing the scribe into a lecture to support a student with dyslexia so that the scribe would take notes for the student, the DSA said, ‘We’re no longer going to support students with dyslexia with a physical scribe.  It’s going to have to be done by the university, not by the Government.  The Government’s role in disability needs to be focused on complex disabilities, not on what we regard as disabilities that, with a bit of reasonable accommodation, can be, can be sorted by the institution delivering the lecture content.’  I thought, there’s an opportunity here, because I think that if we could find somebody who could do note taking and integrate that into my software platform, we’d have a complete solution for students with dyslexia.”

Jeremy started a search for a note taking company which led him to Dan Goerz, who had started a company called Note Taking Express in Canada in 2014.   Jeremy and Dan decided to combine forces and provide a complete service for both the UK and North American markets.

Jeremy explains: “Within a couple of years we realised that we would take another risk, we had to start again with the software.  We completely redesigned the software in March 2018 to make it cloud-based and integrate both his software service and our software together so it was an integrated solution.  Once we had launched this, six months later we realised were joined at the hip and we had to merge the two businesses together.  So we put the two companies together and became Note Taking Express.”

Having captured the Canadian market, the pair set out to enter the US market, funded by Jeremy. He says: “We started signing up some really top-quality customers, we got Harvard Extension, which is their online lecture series; Cornell, Purdue, University of California, Rutgers, plus a lot of the big community colleges like Portland Community College, and so on. We’ve got now 200 top quality higher education institutions across North America that we provide note taking services to. One of the important things that we did was that we created this remote service, and we’re now one of the biggest remote service providers in this market, which in the pandemic was absolutely essential, because in-class note takers are no longer allowed, even if there is a class.”

They introduced a live closed captioning service for students who are deaf and hard of hearing which brought Jeremy full circle to his early assistive technology experience with hard of hearing people. The services have since expanded to be available for all students, not just those with learning difficulties. Jeremy says: “What we realised is that if you look at the demographic of a student population, you maybe have ten to 20 per cent either have dyslexia or have a learning, cognitive processing issue; seven, seven to eight per cent are deaf or hard of hearing; and then you have English as a second language.  By the time you add those together, you’re almost up to 50 per cent of the student population who need some sort of note taking and/or closed captioning support during a lecture.  So we started having discussions with some of our biggest clients to design a learning platform for every student to be supported with live closed captioning note taking services, engagement tools, ability to interact both in class and remotely on the same single platform.”

COVID-19 has helped the business ‘come of age’ in terms of providing a remote service, making the solution an imperative, as opposed to a nice-to-have. Jeremy says: “What we’re busy doing at the moment is attempting to migrate as many of our 200 customers in North America to this new service, which we call Habitat Learn, which is an ecosystem of all of the solutions and will provide a space for student learners to engage with their learning better, to have better support tools. It’s there, it’s accessible, at a press of a button, really, really, easy, and configurable, without having to go into the back-end settings.”

Jeremy and his partner now have plans to go global, looking at India, China, the European and Asian markets. He says: “There’s a huge job of work to be done over the next five to ten years.

Asked if he is likely to get bored or itchy feet again, Jeremy says: “No. I think this is so exciting. I’ve got a team of really talented individuals.  We’re continually developing new products and new add-ins to the platform.  We’ve got so many new markets and strategic partnerships to forge.  I’m relieving myself of the day-to-day running of the business and focusing on the strategic initiatives.  In a sense, I’m leaving behind part of what I did and reinventing myself in a strategic forum where I can actually help drive this business in a very different way.  At the end of the day, I want to become Woking’s first unicorn, which is a very grandiose ambition, but if you don’t have ambition, then why on earth are you on this planet?  You’ve got to have a dream, and if we could create one of Woking’s most successful companies, that would be a great tick in the box for me, and a company that actually does some good.  If we can help learners across the world to access content and enhance their learning journeys, then that’s a fantastic achievement.”

Asked if he would do anything differently, Jeremy says: “You can’t rewind the clock and say, ‘If, if only I had done this, then I could have done that.’  We are where we are. What I’ve done before shapes who I am today and what I’m going to do in the future.  The most important thing for me is how long do I have left?  I want to pack everything I can into whatever it is I’ve got left to maximise the experience that I’ve had and those of my loved ones, my family, my team members.  I just want to make that the richest possible journey.  So I wouldn’t do anything differently, because, I wouldn’t be who I am if I did that differently.”

Looking at the future of education and learning, Jeremy believes that “learning has got to fundamentally change.” The pandemic has changed things and brought this into clearer focus. He says that while some institutions will return to pre-pandemic ways, many will look to the future. He adds: “I think there will be a sea change in the way in which education is delivered, where it’s delivered, how it’s delivered.  Moving from what has been a very faculty-centred arrangement where the technology and the learning management systems are driven by the needs of the faculty. What you need is a solution that is driven by the needs of the individual student.  This comes back to accessibility; it comes back to understanding how individual learners work.”

He references the Universal Design for Learning framework which identifies the fact that we each have different ways of engaging, different ways of learning, and different ways of representing that learning.

He continues; “So we are seeking to create a framework that meets that Universal Design for Learning framework ideology, which is deliver to each learner in the way that he needs to learn best, and to express that learning in the way that suits him best.  What we’re seeing is a move towards student-centric engagement, student-centric learning, where the student can learn when he wants, where he wants, and how he wants, and he can use that learning in the best possible way. As you then move through this debate about learning, it’s not just about academic qualifications; it’s about skill-sets. There’s a big movement at the moment in terms of trying to understand how you teach young people skill-sets, how you engage with them, and how you blend those skillsets with their academic achievements.”

For those considering a career in IT, Jeremy says: “It’s a fantastically exciting journey.  Reach out as much as you can to learn as much as you can.  Do as many internships as you possibly can and engage with people who could potentially be employers in the future. … The only way to get an understanding of what’s out there is to go out there and engage, and go and do voluntary projects.  Get outside of the mould of your strictly limited education and experience different roles, different skill-sets. Do a lot of voluntary work as well because you learn a lot about people doing voluntary work.  Expose yourself as much as you can to activities outside of your cocoon. Find out who you are, what you are best at doing, and stress test yourself in every possible way so you know yourself better, such that when you do start looking at jobs, you know what you have to offer.”

Interviewed by: Jane Bird

Transcribed by: Susan Hutton

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley