Patrick Ryan (#036)
Learn to be mindful. It is very liberating.
Company: Odin
Stage: Seed
Headcount: 7
Warm intro from Ben Rosenbaum (#026)
Tell us your story
I grew up in a small village outside Scunthorpe, a steel town in Northern England. It’s not far from Sheffield. My parents were doctors from Ireland. Scunthorpe is full of great people, but you can really see how deindustrialization damaged communities up north.
We went to the local Catholic primary school. It was mainly English Catholics, as well as a fair few kids with roots in places like Poland, Ireland and Italy. I went to church every weekend, although I’m not religious now. I was lucky enough to go to a private secondary school in Hull - once the heartland of the British fishing industry though unfortunately now a bit of a husk of a city really. It was a really great school with fantastic education, sports, music, performing arts, etc. When I left home, I went to university in Dublin, where I studied Russian and French.
My upbringing allowed me to meet people from many different walks of life, which had a big impact on my career decisions. My cofounder Mary is Chinese-English, and also had a very interesting childhood and career. We’ve both started companies before and worked at start-ups with some great founders. What we are doing at Odin really is just the culmination of our experiences. We are building a community-driven investment platform. Our first product makes launching SPV’s and venture funds radically cheaper and easier for people globally. It’s working really well - we are doubling revenue every couple of months, and have been since June last year.
Long-term, we want to fundamentally reimagine how value is created and distributed; how capitalism works and who it works for. I see creating better infrastructure and driving efficiencies in the start-up and venture ecosystem as the best place to start. This ecosystem attracts the smartest, most ambitious people in society. Great things happen where unusual folks like this intersect, but only if there is a strong sense of community, culture and shared values that bind them. For me, that’s really what’s missing in Europe vs. eg. Silicon Valley, especially on the investor side of the table.
We see our products as a wedge to drive into this market. They attract the quality nodes in the European network, who come for the tools and then stay for the community. As the community grows, we will build out more social features, which is where things get really interesting.
With lots of smart people allocating capital, interacting and (eventually) making governance decisions in one digital location, the opportunities are pretty wild. The data and relationships that this generates have incredible potential for solving hard 21st Century problems much more quickly. Think of it as a social network, but designed around capital allocation rather than advertising as a business model.
We call it Capitalism 2.0.
It’s very aligned with the ideology of Web 3, but we aren’t wedded to the blockchain as a technology. We don’t see much end-user utility in that right now. It just confuses most people.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I love the story of Jim Simmons - the Man Who Solved the Market. He built the most successful asset management firm in modern history and started the quant revolution basically by hiring a bunch of weirdo mathematician outsiders with no knowledge of finance and letting them play. Jim’s mindset is definitely an inspiration for how we think about hiring in our business.
I have another which is the story of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike (Shoe Dog). It’s pretty similar in a lot of ways. Nobody he hired early on had ever sold trainers before. They were sort of a ragtag bunch, but they all brought something special to the table.
I’ve always identified with outsiders and weirdos. The most interesting things exist at the fringes. Some investors say they like to back founders with sector-specific experience. Sometimes this makes sense, but I don’t think it’s always the best way to assess things. If you look at the founders of many super-successful businesses, they’ve almost never worked in the industry they now dominate: Bezos in retail, the Collisons in payments or Musk in automotive (or anything really!).
I guess the learning here is that if you really take something back to first principles and work hard at it, you can often tear up the rule book and make it 10x better, whether that thing is trading shares, selling trainers or building space ships.
In a similar way, I think many of the next generation of great venture investors will seem unorthodox, but will win because they have a very different (possibly better) understanding of how the business operates. We are seeing this already. They may not be the biggest managers in terms of AUM, but the celebrities of Venture nowadays are people like Harry Stebbings, Lolita Taub, Mac the VC, Turner Novak, Sahil Lavingia, Packy McCormick, Serena Williams and Arlan Hamilton.
Their social reach is massive and their frame of reference is very different. I think this means they can get into great deals. With the right teams supporting them, I can see them becoming very powerful and successful. Odin is all about working with these types of people, and letting more people get behind them. However, we are also always looking round the corner. The next crop of investors in really specialist areas like AI and biotech will look very different again.
What can't you stop thinking about?
Hiring. This is a boring answer, but I’ve quickly come to realise it’s the single most important thing in your business. Literally everything stems from the quality of your team. You want to ship product faster and sell faster, so it can be tempting to give sub-par people a chance. But this is rarely a good decision (though it can be useful in releasing bottlenecks). It’s challenging in such a hot venture market.
If I could tell you just one thing...
Learn to be mindful. It is very liberating.
Many of us spend our entire lives held hostage by our own thoughts.
A little space for shout-outs
My wife Galina is amazing. She is incredibly kind, patient and caring. When we got married I didn’t have a salary and I was living with my parents, so I’m glad she stuck with me!
My cofounder Mary is one of the smartest, most unusual people I know. Without her, Odin would not exist. We are quite different in terms of skills and personality, but share very similar values - I think this is why we work so well together.
Finding a good cofounder is hard, so I’m very lucky I met her through our great mutual friend Nina Tumanishvili. Nina is a great connector of people.
Alex Dunsdon has been an amazing mentor over the last couple of years. He has great intuition on things and is building something really cool with Potential.co
There are hundreds more people in our community who have helped us on our journey and asked for nothing in return. People in start-up land are very giving. You’ve been a great contributor to the Odin community, Parin!
The nice thing about the internet is that it really rewards this behaviour.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Dominic Cummings. I think he is one of the most interesting people in British politics, and I like how divisive he is. I enjoy reading his blog.
I actually think he talks a lot of sense. He gets trashed in the media, but I think that’s just because people are too emotional and simplistic about things. They want everyone to fit into one of two boxes in their head - “good people” and “bad people”. Reality isn’t like that. It’s much more nuanced.