James Mitchell (#007)
If you poke a stable system hard enough, you might find that you start a change that cannot be undone.
Company: Strategic Blue
Headcount: 34
Stage: Series A
Warm intro from Phil Gooch (#002)
Tell us your story
I’ve always been intellectually curious, wanting to know how everything works. I was lucky enough to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge where Physics was my favourite science. But during my time there I found that no matter how hard I studied, for me there are parts of the subject that are just impossible to truly understand.
After 4 years at Cambridge, I was ready for a change of scene and defected to Oxford. I researched novel nanostructures that I was able to make self-assemble out of billions of short strands of DNA that I ordered on the internet. There is nothing as exciting as making a model out of toilet rolls and elastic bands one week, and looking down an electron microscope to see something remarkably similar, just a week or so later.
I eventually left academia because I didn’t want to spend my career on just one narrow research speciality. I ended up stumbling into commodities trading, where I was hired by my future co-founder, and first angel investor, John Woodley. I started out scheduling power deliveries, bringing excess wind power from Denmark to the UK so that we could turn off diesel generators. This both reduced carbon emissions, and was a profitable activity for the bank, so a win-win. During that time I also tried my hand at day-ahead trading of power and lost EUR15,000 in 15 minutes, without having a clue why. After that experience I decided to become an originator of structured deals instead. I turned out to be quite good at pulling together complex, multi-party deals that created win-win-win scenarios.
I was working on a renewable energy deal when I found out something quite shocking - how much electricity a modern data center consumes. Back then several percent of US power generation was used just to power and cool data centers. I realised that it was far easier to improve the efficiency of major carbon emitters like the IT industry, than to attempt to generate ever more renewable energy to power them. As a major upside, doing so should also be far more lucrative, so another win-win-win!
I jointly researched, and presented to senior management the idea to trade cloud, treating it as though it was a commodity. We successfully took the idea through a rigorous research phase, and even struck deals with Amazon Web Services and a trial customer. However, at that point the Dodd-Frank legislation was finalised, and it blocked banks from doing anything as innovative as the idea of trading cloud like a commodity. I was allowed to retain the intellectual property, and encouraged by John Woodley to keep going as a startup. I’d have ignored him, if he hadn’t been willing to put his own money behind the venture.
Fast forward 10 years and my company, Strategic Blue, manages the cloud purchasing for over 50 customers, buying from not just Amazon Web Services, but Microsoft and Google Cloud too. Our trading pedigree and proprietary tech stack sets us apart from other “cloud resellers”. We create a win-win-win for our customers, cloud vendors and ourselves by minimizing our customers’ IT footprint, encouraging the use of efficient hyperscale data centers, and helping customers forecast future usage and allowing cloud vendors to use that for capacity planning.
After all that, do I still miss science? Absolutely. But Strategic Blue’s customers come from lots of different industries from a startup solving the energy crisis using cold fusion through to CERN - any recovering physicist’s dream customer!
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I was invited to speak at a conference in Boston a few years ago. At lunch I sat next to a really friendly, intelligent, personable chap who turned out to be a climate-change denier. After a full 40 minutes of trying to change his mind, I produced the graph showing the CO2 concentration in bubbles extracted from Antarctic ice cores dating back over 600,000 years. This is the one that oscillates up and down for 600,000 years before spiking over 3 times higher at the start of the Industrial Revolution. His reaction was, “But is 600,000 years really that long compared to the age of the Earth?”. At this point I just gave up. It turned out that at the table listening intently to my efforts was a professional climate scientist. She came up to me afterwards and consoled me with her view that I had done everything I could. Sadly, this made me feel worse about our planet’s future, not better.
What can’t you stop thinking about?
Chaos Theory and the Lorenz Attractor. This basically boils down to an appreciation that if you poke a stable system hard enough, you might find that you start a change that cannot be undone. Stretch an elastic band too far and it will break. Provoke a tame animal enough and it will attack you. Pump enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the climate will change.
If I could tell you just one thing…
We all know that we should “keep our options open”. However, when that isn’t possible, and you’re making your choice, firstly avoid unacceptable downsides, secondly maximise the number of ways you can achieve a good upside, and only then look for the low probability ridiculous upside, as ridiculous upside normally comes with a lot of downside risk too. i.e. hedge your risks.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
If the warm intro resulted in a really long conversation, it would have to be Sir David Attenborough simply because he has led such an interesting life, seen parts of the world that have now been destroyed, and there must be more stories that he could tell that didn’t make it into his biographies.