The Future Is Now: Tugce Bulut Of Streetbees On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Take your board on a journey. As a founder, you’re answerable to your board, but you have to be honest with them. In the early days, we wouldn’t share our challenges and missteps with our board — instead, we shared snazzy marketing presentations that made things look rosier than they were. Over time I learned that this just doesn’t work! It’s better to be honest and to be clear about where you need to improve. Not only does this build trust but means you can get help and support with those challenges from highly experienced people. If anything, it’s better to overcommunicate than paint an overly rosy picture.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tugce Bulut.
Tugce is the Founder and CEO of Streetbees, the world’s first human intelligence platform. She is passionate about the power of data and the positive change it can bring to the world. She is a published author and Master’s graduate from Cambridge, specializing in poverty alleviation and global living standards. Before founding Streetbees, she spent six years as a strategy consultant advising technology and consumer companies to accelerate growth in international markets.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I am passionate about the power of data and the positive change it can bring to the world. At Cambridge University, I specialized in poverty alleviation and global living standards. After that, I spent six years as a strategy consultant advising technology and consumer companies on how to accelerate growth in international markets.
In this role, I helped the world’s largest companies launch products in new markets. But one issue kept cropping up; I just couldn’t find trustworthy data. Existing market research solutions simply weren’t good enough. The over reliance on multiple-choice questions to deliver quantified results limits what consumers can say — and just reinforced long-held preconceptions, missing out on novel and innovative ideas.
So in 2015, I founded Streetbees — with a dream to build the world’s intelligence platform, providing data about the lives of real people, in real time.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I think it was really right at the start of my career when I was working on my PhD on mechanisms of poverty alleviation. I did quite a lot of travelling as part of my work, particularly in places like India where I visited a lot of factories to understand working practices, conditions, and salaries. While I was there, I stayed with some amazing host families which gave me a real insight into the lives of people working in factories used by major brands. It was a real eye opener to walk into these buildings where a thousand people were working so hard and it really put my mind towards thinking how brands can be part of the process of equalizing development in countries around the world. It really helped kick off the idea for Streetbees because it helped me understand how when brands understand people in developing nations, it can help drive huge levels of investment and have a massive impact at an economic and social level.
Can you tell us about the cutting edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
It’s all about our machine learning, really. Our advances in NLP in particular, linked with “transformer architectures” are now enabling neural AI to learn the semantic structure of text. This is now being bridged with image to text and text to image breakthroughs which is huge when our data collection is all about free text and photos of people living their lives as consumers. Our technical moat is our data, we have a rich dataset containing images and text (including brands). Using this we can basically train our models so that our proprietary data leads to unique ML predictions that effectively have learnt the semantics of our bees’ (that’s what we call the people who use our app) relationships with the brands we serve.
How do you think this might change the world?
For me, it’s about unlocking investment in developing countries and using technology to create new opportunities for businesses that ultimately benefit those countries. These advancements in machine learning and AI enable Streetbees to offer global consumer brands incredible intelligence about consumers around the world so they can meet the needs of those consumers. This, in turn, helps to drive investment in developing countries around the world. The tech itself is an enabler, rather than the change itself.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
I think the big concerns with most AI-driven solutions are around trust and diversity. We have 4.5 million people around the world sharing their lives with us. Sometimes this is something as simple as taking a photo of what they’re eating and who they’re with, which is pretty straightforward. However, people also share a lot more detail around their feelings, their personal situations, and their fears which is clearly more sensitive information. We use machine learning to take people’s words and understand how a combination of context and emotion has driven the choices they’ve made around their purchase and consumption behavior. It is critical that we — and any business collecting sensitive information like this — do everything in our power to ensure that specifics are not shared. On the diversity front, businesses like our must ensure we’re not building in any bias — conscious or unconscious — into our machine learning. We deliberately ensure that our programmers are a diverse group to ensure we don’t simply replicate the sort of single line of thought that has dominated in many businesses for years.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
It was less of a tipping point and more of a build up as I realized, when working as a consultant, that the data I needed to make the right decisions just wasn’t out there. In talking to my co-founder, we established that the problem was the two things were missing. First, huge swathes of people around the world weren’t included in most market and consumer research data and second, the data that was being collected was done using tick boxes and recall so it wasn’t accurate enough. I guess if there was a tipping point, it came when we thought about the fact that everyone has a mobile phone now and that there must be a way to capture the real moments of purchase and consumption through that channel. Ultimately, we ended up selling the idea to a leading brand before we had the technology fully in place to support it, so there was a heck of a development cycle at the start!
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
Consumers are changing faster than ever before and demand products that are tailored to their exact needs, or they will switch. As a result, established consumer brands need to stay as close to their consumers as small local brands can and that requires a new approach to market research and consumer insights. Our in-the-moment collection of individuals’ thoughts as they consume or buy products levels the playing field for brands that can’t be stood next to a consumer but at a quant scale that makes business decisions and million-dollar investments possible.
Our technology is already leading global brands to make key strategic decisions, launch new products or improve localized messaging. For widespread adoption, we need to share what our technology makes possible and for the market research world to full embrace in-the-moment multimedia intelligence gathered in consumers’ own words. That migration is already underway and for early adopters the competitive advantage is clear so I don’t expect it to take more than a couple of years.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
It shouldn’t be innovative, but we do encourage our prospects to sign up and use our app — nothing explains how flexible and rich the solution is like completing a survey on nighttime skin care or a family dinner occasion. With Streetbees GO we also have fantastic country and category specific dashboards and so a large proportion of our marketing shows the product at work uncovering growth opportunities and answering the common business questions consumer brands face.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I owe a lot to Paul Ahern who really kickstarted my career. When I completed my PhD, it was in the wake of the financial crash, and no one was hiring. I applied for maybe 50 jobs, and Paul was the guy who took a chance on me and brought me into the Parthenon Group. Once I was there, he was an amazing mentor and really understood what made me tick. That meant he brought me up through the business quickly and gave me direct exposure to clients much earlier than would have happened normally. On top of that, he was an extraordinary salesperson and really taught me how to brings clients along on a journey.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
That’s a big question! There are a few ways I could answer, but I think really my focus is on my role in the UK start up scene. Streetbees is several years into its life now, and I really love working to help support and inspire the next generation of startups — particularly those in the tech industry and those founded by women. I have to admit that I hate writing, but I love public speaking and it’s always a joy to speak to groups of entrepreneurs and help them to move forward. This week I was hosting a dinner to help some B2B founders connect and to keep building that community. I think it’s really important that founders — and especially women — take some responsibility to pave the way and support those that follow them. And if I can help people to sidestep some of the potholes that I experienced, so much the better!
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)
- When it comes to pitching to investors, trust your gut. You have got to have a connection with your investors and if it’s not there, you need to put serious thought into walking away after the pitch. As a relatively young, female founder in the tech industry, it was clear on occasion that the room full of middle-aged men I was pitching to just wasn’t going to take me seriously — even if they did choose to back Streetbees. Investors are long-term partners, so the trust and connection has got to be a two-way street.
- Take your board on a journey. As a founder, you’re answerable to your board, but you have to be honest with them. In the early days, we wouldn’t share our challenges and missteps with our board — instead, we shared snazzy marketing presentations that made things look rosier than they were. Over time I learned that this just doesn’t work! It’s better to be honest and to be clear about where you need to improve. Not only does this build trust but means you can get help and support with those challenges from highly experienced people. If anything, it’s better to overcommunicate than paint an overly rosy picture.
- Not all sales are good sales. To be frank, in the early days we would sell anything to anyone as long as it closed a deal. I think our low point was a project for a beer company who sent us 50 cases of beer (which we had to lug up to the office ourselves!) for a tasting evening. We had people tasting the beer and filling in surveys on the Streetbees app. It was miles from the machine-learning, high scale, SaaS business we’d envisaged but we lacked the ability to qualify out potential clients. It took us two or three (maybe four) more years before we really learned that lesson and now we are much better at concentrating on working with the right brands, on a recurring revenue basis. The lesson is that you can’t let short term customer wins dictate your product roadmap — tempting though it is sometimes!
- Organizational design is critical. In the early days of a startup, you’re growing so fast that you’re effectively backfilling roles all the time. We grew from 10 people to 50 in six months and everyone was reporting into either me or my co-founder, Oli, which just wasn’t working. I think we really woke up to the scale of the problem when we lost 10 people in two months — that’s 20% of the workforce in a matter of weeks. It seems crazy, but it was only then that we realized we needed another layer of management. Founders can’t do it all and you actually need to plan your long-term organizational structure much further ahead than you think in order to be able to implement each phase of it when you’re ready.
- HR is an independent function. This is related to the previous point and again, we learned this later than I’d have liked! Startups are incredibly fast-paced, vibrant businesses and founders are always going to be caught up in the business of meeting customer needs and growing the organization. You absolutely have to have an independent HR function that looks after you people. In the early days, we had no onboarding program at all, and we probably let some people down because we just weren’t looking after them properly. Equally, if someone wasn’t working out, we didn’t have those conversations and things just dragged on which was bad for everyone. A really professional HR team may seem like a luxury when you’re moving at a hundred miles an hour, but it really is an investment that pays off.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I don’t know if it’s a movement, as such, but I am really interested in the idea of helping people keep their relationships healthy. I think there’s an incredible amount of focus on meeting people — just look at the huge array of dating apps which cater to every personal preference. But it feels like once people are in a relationship, that’s it. You find your own way though, and it either works or it doesn’t. Maybe if things go off the rails, you might get counselling, but there’s a lot of ground between swiping right and a therapist. I am really curious about the idea of an app that helps couple to keep their relationship on track — more of a preventative approach that would ultimately keep people happier for longer.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There’s a quote from Jeff Bezos that really resonates with me; “When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work.” He’s talked in the past about the fact he was in a great job, earning a lot of money when the idea and opportunity to start Amazon came up. And the thing that pushed him to make the leap, which was a huge risk, was the thought of what he’d look back on and regret when he was older. It was that thinking that led me to risk founding Streetbees and which guides a lot of my thinking on a daily basis.
Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
Show me the money! Kidding, of course. I’d just focus on what we do and our vision which supports the whole value chain for helping brands to grow. We have a community of over 4.5 million consumers around the world who share incredibly rich details of their lives with us in a really engaged, honest way, at the moment of purchase or consumption. We take unstructured data and use cutting edge machine learning to understand real purchase drivers and then make available in an always-on format to uncover growth opportunities that simply couldn’t be found with traditional market insight. Simple as that!
How can our readers follow you on social media?
I’m on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/tugce-bulut/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
