Phil Gooch (#002)
Be clear about what you want from your startup and what you are prepared to give
Company: Scholarcy
Headcount: 4
Stage: Seed
Tell us your story
Since an early age, I’ve often had a side-hustle. At school in the 80s, when Dungeons and Dragons was at its peak, I used to paint other kids’ gaming miniatures for £1 a time. In the late 90s, I used to write games for the Psion 5 handheld computer. When Garageband came out on the Mac, I had a little project writing and selling music loops. This morphed into a little games studio called MacPips that featured on the front page of MacWorld magazine!
None of these really made much money, but they were fun. In terms of ‘proper’ entrepreneurship, working full-time on a make-or-break endeavour, I was late to the party. After working for many years at various publishing companies, startups, in academia, and a spot of contracting, in 2018 I built up a bit of a buffer, and felt I had the skills I needed to allow me to work full-time on a project.
For a long time, I’d wanted to build something that would make the process of consuming research information easier, particularly for those new to a subject. As was the case when I was doing my PhD, but even more so now, there are plenty of ways to discover and access research literature. But once you have downloaded those PDF papers, you are on your own. For students and early-stage researchers, it’s akin to attempting to build a house but being delivered a pile of bricks without plans or tools. The problem is more acute for those who have English as a second or third language, or where English is not widely spoken. Yet the majority of research literature is written in dense English text. And despite advances in technology, PDFs are still the currency in which research literature is denominated, yet these are hard to read on screen.
So I set about building a tool that would address these needs. That would take any research article, in any format (PDF, XML, LaTeX, web) and reorganise it into the way that focuses on the key information. We call this our ‘summary flashcard’, and in our view, it goes way beyond simple summarisation (which everyone seems to be doing at present), because it provides multiple views of the same information.
Early on, I teamed up with Emma Warren-Jones, who became Scholarcy’s cofounder. Emma and I had worked together a previous startup, RefMe. Emma has a background in international marketing, business development, academic publishing and edtech, and I’m good at building stuff, so we make a great, complementary team. After a slow start for the first year, and after some welcome seed investment of £200k from Cactus Communications in 2019, our growth accelerated by over 800% through 2020. We now have thousands of paying customers for our B2C product, Scholarcy Library, and a number of corporate customers paying for our summarisation and document processing engine. We’ve been following ‘lean startup’ methodology, so we’ve kept the core team small for now, with a focus on sustainability and organic growth.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
You know, in the UK, we don’t learn enough about US history in school. For example, about the background and context to the US Civil War. And that ties in to the lack of awareness of the history of slavery in general. So I’m embarrassed to admit that until recently, I’d never hear of Harriet Tubman, until I saw the 2019 film Harriet about her incredible life and bravery. Everyone should see the film and learn more about her work.
What can't you stop thinking about?
I’m a bit obsessed with taking machine-reading technology to the limits, so I’m always thinking about improvements and additions to our core engine. It doesn’t feel like work most of the time.
If I could tell you just one thing...
Be clear about what you want from your startup and what you are prepared to give. I worked for a few VC funded startups previously. These were all fast-paced, hugely enjoyable rides, but I saw the ‘grow fast or die trying’ pressure that delivering 10-100x VC returns from a standing start puts on founders. The VC model is great if your goals and that of your investors are aligned. The bootstrapped approach can be slow and painful, but give you a huge amount of control. As Basecamp (and Grammarly) proved, you can mix both options – build lean and independently, gain initial traction while bootstrapping, and then take investment when you need to cement your success and guarantee longevity. Do you want an exit, do you want a profitable lifestyle business, or can you do a bit of both?
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
Nothing to do with startups or investing, but I’d love to one day meet Steve Reich, the legendary composer.