Beacon's Fraser Robinson: "The more swear words people use to describe a problem, the bigger the opportunity"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Fraser Robinson, founder of Beacon, to talk about solving supply chains (2:45), the problem (5:10), his first startup (11:15), becoming the “adult in the room” (18:30), the early days at lastminute.com (19:50), starting another business in 2010 (22:30), getting recruited to Uber (24:45), running Uber in Europe (27:10), how to move fast and not break things (30:00), on whether Uber can survive (32:00), the mistakes in London (36:20), doing the big deal with Saudi Arabia (38:30), leaving in 2018 (42:10), getting sued (45:20), and being left on the tarmac by an oligarch (46:50).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.4	The minute you become higher profile, a couple of my investors said to me,
0:08.8	OK, your head is now above the parapet.
0:12.7	Look out.
0:13.4	Stuff's going to start happening whether you like it or not,
0:15.7	just because from this moment onwards,
0:17.9	you are going to be a little bit more high profile.
0:20.6	And they were right.
0:22.2	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and
0:36.9	inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:39.1	Thank you for tuning in this week on the pod.
0:42.6	We have a bit of story time.
0:44.4	So our guest is Fraser Robinson, and we can introduce him to you this way.
0:50.1	If you've taken an Uber anywhere in Europe, Britain, Africa, the Middle East, you have him to think.
0:59.1	That's because during Uber's wild kind of high growth days, Robinson ran Europe for this and took this, you know, little brazen San Francisco startup from virtually nowhere, at least in, you know,
1:12.2	in the UK and Europe and beyond, to all over the region. Now, these days, he has his own
1:18.5	startup called Beacon. He left Uber in 2018 to start Beacon, which is a freight forwarder.
1:25.6	And you're probably thinking, what is that? And we'll get to that.
1:28.2	But it is basically the middleman between retailers on one end,
1:32.0	their suppliers on the other,
1:33.1	and making sure the former gets what the latter is making.
	...

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