the elite INTERVIEW
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a-knocking. In 2004, Lastminute.com co-founder and Silicon Roundabout godfather Brent Hoberman offered him a job running lastminute.com’s lifestyle business. “Brent and one of my good friends had gone to university together. I’d talked to him a bit about my previous CRM business and we’d done a little bit of consulting work with lastminute.” Champalimaud was experiencing something of a crisis of confidence. “At that point, I’d worked for myself all my professional life and it’d only been a modest success. I thought maybe I wasn’t designed to do this and perhaps I should go [and] try working for somebody else.” There are worse people to work for than Hoberman when perfecting the craft of running internet start-ups. “I’ve got a huge amount of respect and admiration for Brent.” And though he describes his time at lastminute.com as a “great experience”, it soon became apparent Champalimaud’s calling was to start another business himself. “I loved it. We did a really good job, it grew incredibly quickly; when I left it was probably 50% of the business in terms of orders sold. And we built a great team.” After a long day at the office, Champalimaud tried to book
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a massage. When internet searches, email exchanges and phone calls to salons proved fruitless, he gave up. “It was such a rigmarole that by the time I got to the end of the search I actually didn’t want the massage any more,” he recounts. “It dawned on me that you book everything online – you book your flights, your cars, your hotels, your dating life – but you don’t do your hair and beauty.” What’s more, the hair and beauty industry was crying out for transformation. Not only was it a “large, fragmented marketplace”, which would benefit from an aggregator or marketplace, but local salons were struggling to haul themselves into the 21st century and wean themselves off antiquated booking systems. As Wahanda launched on Valentine’s Day 2008, Champalimaud had something to prove. “I felt like [I was] the only guy who’d been in the internet world, pre-internet stage, who hadn’t had a home run. I felt like, ‘what’s wrong with me?’” Though he was modest about his success to-date, investors were in no doubt as to his credentials as they lined up to invest in Wahanda, which he billed as “the OpenTable for spas and salons”. The initial £1.5m, a pretty punchy seed round by anybody’s standards, was raised “on the back of a PowerPoint presentation. We didn’t have anything to show them. We had a team – we had four people – and we had a business plan. That was it.” It was clearly enough to persuade investors to part with their cash. One anonymous investor backed Champalimaud from the get-go – without knowing a thing about his new venture. “We had one investor in particular who’s a big US billionaire and had invested in my previous business. He came to London and we went out for dinner. He said to me, ‘Lopo, what are you doing next?’ I said, ‘I’m working on a new idea,’ and he said, ‘great, I’d like to invest.’ I said, ‘I haven’t told you what the idea is yet,’ and he says, ‘it doesn’t matter, I’m in’.” He was ‘in’ to the tune of $1m (£650,000). “It was an incredible privilege but I also felt a huge amount of responsibility as a result,” admits Champalimaud. “I asked him much later on, ‘why did you do that?’ And he said, ‘there’s nothing else but people. If you believe in a person, that’s it.’” The American billionaire was just one of a handful of highprofile investors. Other familiar faces amongst those who put in seed capital are Brent Hoberman, Stefan Glaenzer and Wolf Hengst, the former head of operations at Four Seasons. Though Champalimaud’s general approach is to “take as much money whenever it comes to you”, he rejected investment from “one of the world’s biggest VCs” during that seed round
My mother’s a real force of nature; she’s quite amazing
27/02/2015 19:22