European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos

Author:Pedro Gairifo Santos
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Apress®
Published: 2011-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Saul Klein

Video Island (LOVEFiLM)

Saul Klein was the founder and CEO of Video Island, which after several mergers became what is now LOVEFiLM International, the leading European film subscription service acquired by Amazon in 2011 for $312 million. After Video Island, Klein was part of the original executive team at Skype. In 2007, he co-founded Seedcamp, a European based micro seed fund for Internet technology companies.

Klein is also the co-founder of The Accelerator Group (TAG), a London based seed fund for investing in early-stage Internet services, e-commerce, and digital media businesses. The TAG portfolio includes investments in companies such as Bit.ly, Dopplr (Nokia), Erply, Fizzback (NICE), Graze, Last.fm (CBS), LOVEFiLM (Amazon), Mind Candy, MOO, TweetDeck (Twitter), Wonga and Zoopla. Klein is currently a partner at Index Ventures.

Pedro Santos: In 2002, 2003, you started Video Island. Why did you start it and were you aware of Netflix?

Saul Klein: I wrote a long blog post at the time of the Lovefilm sale to Amazon that there were many companies started who contributed to the business that became LOVEFiLM. LOVEFiLM had a complex history. There were three start-ups just in the UK, and there were others in Scandinavia, and others in Benelux. And ultimately all of these start-ups were amalgamated under the umbrella of LOVEFiLM International. I think there are between five and ten people who could credibly say that they were co-founders of what became LOVEFiLM.

I think there are some interesting lessons. People very often focus on the single or the dual founder story. The Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak story, that then just becomes the Steve Jobs story. Or the Bill Gates/Paul Allen story that then becomes the Bill Gates story. Or the Larry Page and Sergey Brin story, which is still the Larry Page and Sergey Brin story. Or the Jeff Bezos story, which is just the Jeff Bezos story. Or the Reed Hastings story.

But the reality is, before we got into the questions of how Video Island started, it's really important to understand that fundamentally no great company is ever just created by a founder.

Whether it's people like your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your parents, or your sister who you bounce your initial ideas off of, or even your friends in the park, the journey between having an idea and starting a company and then building a company and selling a company is a journey that many people take together. While founders are mythologized in the media in books like Founders at Work, the reality is, even if you look back at Hotmail, Steve Douty or Scott Weiss, who were around employee number 15, were probably as fundamental to the success of Hotmail as Sabeer [Bhatia] and Jack [Smith].

I want to get that out of the way, because I think although I can definitely tell a part of the LOVEFiLM founding story, but you can also get five or ten other narratives that are also very interesting and important.

Santos: I completely agree with that view. Actually, reading the LOVEFiLM story, it

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