Monday9 March 2020 ★ 9

CO M PA N I E S & M A R K E T S

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co-founders Pieter van der Does and

Arnout Schuijff were key to Adyen’s par-

ticularly rapid rise — from a valuation of

less than €150m in 2011 to €7bn by the

timeof itsinitial public offering in 2018,

to €25bn today.

Unusually for abig venture capital

group and a relatively unknown

start-up, it was Mr Hammer who had to

go on a “charm offensive” to convince

the pair to partner with Index at a time

when Adyen was not looking for new

investors.

The two men had already successfully

built and sold one payments business,

and the new group was ambitious from

the start — its firstsignificant customer,

Groupon, immediately brought it into

about 25 different markets — and it

turned down “multiple offers” from

prospective buyers.

At the same time, however, Mr Ham-

mer says the company’s “straight-talk-

ing” and collegiate culture made it “an

environment where employees would

want to run to work”, helping it hold

on to its best staff even after its IPO.

With technology’s impact increas-

ingly seeping into every aspect of con-

sumers’ lives, Mr Hammer expects

some questions — such as the ethical

boundaries ofAI or the impact of tech

on labour practices in the less developed

world — will be too complicated for indi-

vidual executives to manage.

“To actually lead effectively, some of

these topics need viewpoints from dif-

ferent parties. Some of these debates are

very difficult.” But while the “tactical

skills” required to deal with such chal-

lenges might be changing, he says the

underlying traits he looks for in invest-

ments — and which he tries to bring to

those he advises — are the same as ever.

“Being an effective communicator,

having empathy, combining ambition

with humility, taking responsibility and

dealing with the unexpected whilst not

leaving others behind — those core ten-

ets have not changed.”

How to Lead. an Hammer, partner at Index VenturesJ

Eventually, after a stint at business

school and some time in another divi-

sion at Morgan Stanley, Mr Hammer

decided he would return to tech, but

only if he could be “part of the action”.

The dotcom period was similarly dif-

ficult for Index, hich had raised its firstw

full fund barely a year before the bubble

burst. “To their credit, they did not

throw in the towel. They took a long-

term view... that, notwithstanding

short-term cycles in financial markets,

there was an underlying technology

growth trend, and thankfully they per-

severed,” Mr Hammer says.

One company that hasbenefited from

those underlying trends is Adyen, Mr

Hammer’s first investment at Index and

his most successful in terms of mone-

tary returns. A structural shift away

from cash and towards digital payments

has created a rising tide lifting all boats

in the payment processing sector. How-

ever, Mr Hammer says the attitudes of

tunnel”, from environmental concerns

to disenchanted junior employees.

Each portfolio company Mr Hammer

mentions is praised for its ambition and

“long-term” approach, but poor timing

almost derailed his own career when it

had barely started. He was two years

into his first job as an investment

banker in Morgan Stanley’s tech team

when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.

Sitting in the comfort of Index’s May-

fair offices, Mr Hammer can look back

on it as “a great learning moment”, butit

was traumatic. “I made a very quick

decision that I did not want to be part of

that sector any more... I was really

questioning what I wanted to do.”

become even more important as execu-

tives find themselves in need of new

types of skills. Silicon Valley has long

valorised visionary — and aggressive —

founder-CEOssuch as Bill Gates and

Steve Jobs, but the model is under

increasing scrutiny.

Founders, Mr Hammer believes, often

have a type of “tunnel vision” that leads

them to ignore everything but the “sin-

gle-minded pursuit of the objective”.

That relentless focus is key to turning

start-up ideas into successful busi-

nesses, but can lead to problems down

the line, which is where backerssuch as

Indexcan help.

Mr Hammer is a director on 11 com-

pany boards and provides informal

advice to many more companies in

Index’s portfolio, and says a key part of

his job is to “give some perspective and

remind them that there are other stake-

holders and there may be unintended

consequences... outside the narrow

T

he past few years have not

been kind to the traditional

image of tech company

founders but Jan Hammer,

who has built a careerout of

finding the best new leadership teams to

invest in, is not discouraged.

“It’s easy to get distracted by the

actions of individual domineering

CEOs”, Mr Hammer admits, but “tech as

a sector is in an increased spotlight

because of the way it impacts our daily

lives everywhere, and really that creates

an incredible opportunity for leaders

because of the magnitude of the topics”.

As a partner atIndex Ventures, one of

Europe’s oldest and largest venture cap-

italgroups, Mr Hammer, 43, will get to

play a key part in shaping how the next

generation of start-ups responds to the

challenges.

Index has raised $7.25bn since its

establishment in 1996, and is currently

investing $1.65bn of funds raised in

2018. Nine of its portfolio companies
      havehad initial public offerings in the
      past two years, while several others
      have been acquired. Early bets on fin-
      techs such as online broker Robinhood
      and Dutch payments group Adyen have
      helped Mr Hammer take the top spot in
      Forbes’ annual list of Europe’s highest-
      returning tech investors for two years in
      a row.
      Mr Hammer, a towering Czech who
      says he would have liked to have been an
      athlete — because “I like competing” —
      compares his role as a venture capital
      investor to that of a sports coach.
      “At the end of the day, the founders or
      CEO of a company are the pioneers. But
      we are equipping them with our time,
      resources and capital in order to realise
      their dreams. That doesn’t mean that we
      know better. We’re there as a sounding
      board, we’re there to help them be bet-
      ter, to tease out their potential and help
      them step up.”
      Such “coaching” will arguably

Bringing perspective to single-minded founders

The venture capitalist

coaches entrepreneurs to

avoid ‘tunnel vision’ and

achieve lasting success,

writes Nicholas Megaw

Jan Hammer:

‘We are

equipping them

with our time,

resources and

capital in order

to realise their

dreams’

AnnaGordon/FT

‘[I remind them] there are

other stakeholders and

there may be unintended

consequences’

Born

1976 Svitavy, Czech Republic

Education

1995-1998 niversity of Oxford, PPEU

(philosophy, politics and economics)

2001-2002 MBA at Insead

Career

1998-2003 arious positions atV

Morgan Stanley

2003-2010 rincipal at private equityP

group General Atlantic

2010-presentPartner at Index

Ventures

Leadership

More interviews illuminating

the personalities of high-profile

leaders by focusing on the

issues they faced

ft.com/howtolead

CV

Why has a manual one-cup coffee maker captured

the imagination of tech folk in Silicon Valley?

To describe Alan Adler as a Silicon

Valley entrepreneur is both accurate

and slightly misleading.

He is an electronics engineer with a

record in innovation. He has lectured

atStanford University. His company is

in Palo Alto, four minutes’ drive from

Google, where he has given talks on his

work. His homewhere he does his

inventing is in Los Altos, close to the

garage where teve Jobs and SteveS

Wozniak started Apple.

But the killer product Mr Adler

created, and which paid for theBentley

on his drive and the beach house at

Carmel-by-the-Sea, is not even

electrical, but a $32 plastic-moulded

one-cup coffee maker, manufactured

locally — and found in 4m homes and

offices in 60 countries.

One other unconventional detail in

Mr Adler’s Silicon Valley story — he’s

81, still innovating, and was nearly 70

when he inventedAeroPress.

My journey toMr Adler’s door starts

at a family Christmas gathering, when

my tech entrepreneur son presents me

— knowing I have a fancy Jura coffee

machine at home — with one of Mr

Adler’s AeroPress devices.My son tells

me they’re huge in the tech world.

The retro, bordering on amateurish,

packaging carries quotes from

customers saying it makes the best

coffee they have ever tasted, but also

gives me a clue why the AeroPress is

big in the Bay Area — AeroPress Inc’s

Palo Alto address.

A quick Google search reveals that

this love of the AeroPress is for real. I

even found an AeroPressdiscussion

threadon Y Combinator’s site: it’s the

start-up accelerator that helped launch

Dropbox and Airbnb.

I decide to find out more— and to

learn why the wholly manual device,

which produces an excellent espresso-

like brew, but is frankly quite a faff, is

such a hit in the world’s premier

technology hub.

In the early 1980s, Mr Adler

explains, e moved from electronics toh

toys. His big hit wasAerobie, a Frisbee-

like flying disc that he sold in 2017 as

AeroPress grew.

His motivation for designing

AeroPress was the paucity of ways to

make a single mug of good coffee. He

found the standard American six-to-

eight-cup drip machine was wasteful of

coffee and energy, as well as making a

poor brew.

He took to his garage for two years,

on and off. The prototype that worked,

his 73 year-old general manager Alex

Tennant recalls, was Mr Adler’s 39th.

Although the simple device

impressed at a coffee fair in Seattle,

sales were slow at first. But when a

local paper ran what Mr Adler calls “a

favourable but not passionate” news

item about Silicon Valley’s homegrown

coffee maker, thedesire for a zero-tech

machine was revealed.

“By 9.30am on the day the article

appeared, there were 10 people lined

up at the one kitchenware store in Los

Altos that had it wanting to buy one,”

he says.

“For months after, they were selling

60-70 AeroPresses a day in that one

little shop. They were taking $50,000 a

month for one line.”

So what is the attraction for tech

folk? I had speculated that it was the

well- documentedwariness echt

industry people have around using

tech. That, and their love of analogue

products.

Mr Adler was more precise in his

analysis, which may be why he has a

Bentley and a Carmel beach house and

I don’t.

“With coffee makers, you have to

just accept what they do for you. With

the AeroPress, you can innovate. Coffee

lovers like to have all the variables in

the brewing process under their control

— the grind, the temperature, the steep

time,” he says.

“When I give talks at places like

Stanford Research Institute, I meet

people who view making coffee like

home chemistry. Sometimes they get it

extremely wrong, but they get ideas

and follow them because they’re

different. It’s hacking, just like they do

with electronics.”

Of course, that’s it, I thought as I left.

The AeroPress is the coffee version of

Linux, the geeks’ preferred computer

operating system. It is not pretty, not

especially easy, but it is effective and

almost cool.

[email protected]

The retro, bordering on

amateurish, packaging

carries quotes from

customers saying it makes

the best brew ever

‘

Jonathan Margolis

Technology

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MARCH 9 2020 Section:Features Time: 8/3/2020- 15:41 User:keith.allen Page Name:MONINTERVIEW, Part,Page,Edition:USA, 9, 1