Hello and welcome to the programme.

Hype, noun, extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion.

We don't go for it on the bottom line, but we know enough about capitalism

to be able to say it is a pretty ubiquitous feature of business life.

And we'll delve into it today.

Both the hyping of product to consumers and the hyping of companies

to investors. In the former category, the 2006 film Snakes on a Plain was a classic of the

form, fantastic name, easy to promote engagingly online, huge audience anticipation, but a mediocre

product that was a let down at the box office after the first day or two.

I have to concede we've even featured objects of hype on this programme from time to time,

with varying shades of naivety on our part, from WeWork, the shared office space provider,

which went from talk of a valuation of $50 billion to near bankruptcy

over the course of a few weeks. There was SpinVox, do you remember that one, the company that

converted voice messages to text messages, but which turned out not to be using its much vaunted

technology to do that, as much as call centre workers in South Africa and the Philippines.

Well, there is a lot to talk about. On one view, hype is like optimism. It's a healthy way to

generate enthusiasm and make the world advance. On another view, it's a dangerous distortion of markets.

I have three guests with interesting views on the topic. Let us meet them. First off, serial entrepreneur and investor Brent Hoberman.

Currently chair and co-founder of Founders Factory and First Minute Capital, still probably widely remembered from 1998 as the co-founder of the travel website Last Minute.com with Martha Lane Fox, one of the early dot coms in this country.

And Brent, you've done so much since Last Minute.com.

It must break your heart that I'm still referring to it.

But it was actually quite an interesting story, wasn't it?

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