Episode Transcript
Justine: Hello and welcome to London Stock Exchange CEOs series, Be Inspired. We chat to CEOs, founders and leaders who've successfully listed their businesses on the London Stock Exchange and learn about their journeys. I'm Justine Zwerling, very proud mom and I also work for Primary Markets in Israel. Today, I'm absolutely delighted to be here with Ami Daniel, an inspiring and incredible CEO and co-founder of Windward, a global leader in maritime AI. They IPO'd in London in December on our AIM market. Good morning, Ami how are you?
Ami: I'm good and now I'll introduce myself as a proud father as well because I can also be proud. Why not?
I had a discussion with my daughter on that, and I told her… I was teaching her math and I told her… well, that's my job, I’m her dad, and she told me Ami that's not your job, because you built Windward before I was born. So actually, that was your job. So we had a discussion about what's your primary job – dad or founder. And I think it's a good question because Windward is a bit of a baby for us.
Justine: I was I was looking at your incredible kind of growth journey and more so about yourself, I wanted to start the discussion. I just love your strapline on LinkedIn: 'born by the ocean, sailed in the ocean, now builds for the ocean'. So, first of all, I want to ask you, who are you and what makes you tick?
Ami: First of all, what makes me tick is building things. So I'm a simple Israeli guy. I was born in Israel. I didn't spend too much time abroad. My parents were, you know, my father used to run construction factories or operations, building stuff, buildings, right? My mother worked with Technion, which is like the institution for technology in Israel. I was dreaming about being an engineer. Well, I guess that's, you know, that ship is still there I guess.
I think what makes me tick is building things and finding the combination between technology and business. Actually, I find it extremely interesting to an extent how new technologies open new business cases and allow businesses to succeed more. I think some people say, 'Are you a businessperson or are you a tech person or are you a product person?' The answer is, as a founder, you're all of the above. I can't expect anybody to get the impact in the business if I don't get the impact on the business. I can't expect anybody to get the tech if I don't get the tech. It's a pretty high bar, it makes you work hard, but I think it's worth it.
Justine: Amazing. Thank you. Can you give us an overview, kind of like of your journey to becoming a CEO?
Ami: Well it's a good question, because I think when we built the company, I didn't know the difference between a founder and CEO. And actually, for many years, the word wasn't any different because you're just an entrepreneur. You just build things and you have your team and you work together. I think probably the tipping point is probably about 50 or 60 employees. That's probably a tipping point between a small team, everybody knows everything, everybody knows what everybody's doing, to you need to properly run a company, properly run a management team, properly run its strategy and execute it at scale. And actually going public in another market really helped me, I think, figure out that even better because, you know, life's a journey where we all learn and grow.
I can also tell you a secret that I think two or three weeks after the IPO I asked our chairman Lord Browne around for an evening to spend with me and we had a lovely dinner together and I came to that three and a half hour dinner with one question. What, how should I be running the company different now that we're public in London versus six months ago?
And you know I think it's a journey. But I think that the key is you need to understand that your actions and your words go way beyond just you and what you build, because you have a team following you and you need to be consistent, clear, concise, accurate. And at the same time, empower them and lead. So, we know everybody, there’s like a ton of books on this, obviously, I read a lot, but I think it's just a journey of keep on working on yourself and being better every day.
Justine: And I know that we're all seeing, especially yourself, a heightened risk in geopolitical situations this year. How are you helping your customers assess and manage those risks?
Ami: Yeah. Let's just take a step back. We're a maritime AI company and I think we've been building the company according to a thesis called Vertical AI coined by Bradford Cross from Silicon Valley that says: there are general problems that generally AI like DeepMind can solve. But there are also vertical specific problems, such as everything concerning the shipping and with the implications of shipping thereof that are better solved with a combination of domain expertise in AI, and that's a vertical AI.
So we're a vertical AI a company in the world of shipping. We work with approximately 85 organisations from trading and shipping and energy and banking and governments to basically help them figure, assess risk and be proactive on shipping and shipments and trading. So I maybe give you a few examples – every time two of our customers, BP and Shell, buy and sell any cargo of oil or web plug in anywhere around the world, it has to go through the Windward Platform for anything legal and sanctions compliance. And that really came up in the last two years or so because before that, the regulation didn't exist. So I think that's, and obviously it's a great lead-in to what's happening with Ukraine, Russia.
So we help businesses with due diligence and compliance, we help governments with maritime security, we help logistics organisations with predicting where their shipments will arrive and where they are. So we have about a million cargo owners in the world, almost 50,000 freight forwarders. All of these are really experiencing the biggest crunch in challenge and push back and rules of supply chain ever. So it has never in the history of mankind, been more expensive to ship a box and less reliable to ship a box. I spent last week, couple of days in the HQ of one of the biggest liners in the world. It was amazing to hear them say that visibility was completely not an issue for them two years ago. And it's a huge issue now with five teams. So I think that's really where I think the demand in the world meets the tech. And I think hopefully we believe we're in prime position to help them.
In terms of how does this affect the world then I think first of all, the Ukraine-Russia war is not isolated. It's not a singular event that's happening. I think we should see in the broader context of geopolitical pressures between China and the West. The sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, they're all deeply interconnected and influencing one another. I think the last two years we've seen supply chain crunch. If anybody has been trying to order a car, for instance, good luck with that. Most cars you can get only in a year. Actually, second hand used cars sometimes are worth more than new cars because you don't have a choice at this point.
You've seen, I think the UN said yesterday, the price of crude is at an all-time high. I just bought tomatoes yesterday for five bucks a kilo in the supermarket. It's unbelievable. And inflation is as high as it's been in years. I think the US, we're talking about seven, eight percent, seven percent inflation or eight percent inflation. In Israel they just ratchet up the interest rates today. So I think all of these things are interconnected. The world is one global supply chain, and everything influences everything.
The price of oil influences your petrol station and how much you pay. The demand for cars post-Covid because the people didn’t buy cars in Covid, I think is affecting, the lack of chips is affecting. All of this is affecting. E-commerce is booming and therefore there is more congestion. So I think all of these things together are affecting. Russia-Ukraine is affecting big time on wheat. It's a big export centre of wheat. A lot of containerised goods supply chain have been disrupted because people… Maersk basically has written off Russia completely. They won't do business with Russia.
So all of these things are deeply interconnected and we see them going well into 2022 and probably into 2023. I hope I manage to give a long answer to a very short question, I apologise for that.
Justine: Ami I would like your insights on what were the key drivers for you listing in London and becoming public?
Ami: Sure. So the key drivers for us for listing in London, first of all, is growth. We decided and identified a heightened opportunity for demand and for new products. We just needed to invest more in the tech distribution. And while pursuing that capital raise, we considered private options as well as different public options, including other stock exchanges. We decided that London was the favourable solution because the investor base we felt knows and understands our business intuitively, which I think was, this is the key driving element because if the investor base does not get your business, then you won’t grow, you won’t raise capital. But even if you will raise capital, long term you want growth. So I think that was one choice.
The second thing is our customer base really thinks highly of the London market brand. So we've just yesterday signed a five-year plus three-year renewal with a big customer of ours, which is technically an eight-year contract, which is I think what's really interesting is that they feel now that we're public, we're more stable and if we're more stable they can contract with us for the long term. I think we've seen that on other people as well. That I think is a direct impact of the London listing and that brand.
Thirdly, it provides an opportunity to bring a professionalised board into place, which I thought, as the CEO, is a really good thing because then we can build around us the management of a board that actually challenges us, but also provides industry insights, and we feel that's the right way to build the board for us. They're also founder friendly, impacts like collapsing the share structure and having just common shares, and I think that's, for founders and employees, that's very lucrative, and it also provides liquidity, we provide liquidity to a lot of people who want it. And I think it just makes it easier and to some extent, even easier also to attract talent because, let's say an executive or employee leaves the company, you can just sell their shares if they want to, if they don't want to they can keep their shares, but they have that option. In private companies, oftentimes you don't. So I think the combination of these make London a really good choice, I think, and a really good stepping stone for furthering the growth of the company.
As a leader and a hugely respected motivator for others in tech, could you give us like your top tips for other CEOs and leaders contemplating going public? And also, you know, how did you share the work-life balance for your managing the business, as well as being an amazing dad and going public at the same time? I think these key tips for people are so important.
Ami: Well, I don't know about work-life balance. It's a good question. I'm not sure I have it figured out candidly. I think for growing this business, we had to find our own approach. Unfortunately, or fortunately, nothing works for me the way it works for other people. But I think it's been working well in the last year. In terms of tips for taking the company public. Actually, I think our chairman, Lord Browne, had a very good impact on that. I'm not sure I would ever have done that without him and I could not do this without him. Obviously he has a bit of experience in the London market, and he's also my personal mentor. We're very close and I think doing that… CEO is a very lonely job and I think having a partner like, a chairman like him makes a world of difference.
Obviously, I have a co-founder, we’re super, super close like brothers. But Lord Browne led public companies in London, and I think it was a huge benefit to have him at the helm with us, and to continue having him mentor us for further growth. And I think a lot of people look at building a board as an IPO ‘tick the box’ exercise. I don't. I think of it as… it's part of your building your business exercise and you've got bits that stand out as the feedback we received.
Last but not least, I think we should just understand there is a bunch of things you don't know, so just accept it. Remember the goal and you'll figure it out. If the goal is important enough, I'm sure you get the technicalities. And last not least, I think it's been fundamental and instrumental to get a strong and good executive team around me because I'm not alone. And when I had to focus with my CFO and my CEO on the IPO, we had other people doing a lot of business around us and that didn't stop the company.
So in these things, we need to build 12 or 18 months ahead of time. You just can't just click, you know, push the button and get a management team in to build that around you. So hopefully that makes sense.
Again, I think for us, this is just the beginning of the journey. We're one, as I said, on the morning of the IPO, which, by the way, it was very exciting and very emotional for us to see yourself opening the market in London. I might be in a company that started in the basement. That's super exciting, but we're one percent done, and I don’t think that IPO is the end of the road. Think of it as another chapter. And if you want to have a chapter, it's a great chapter, assuming you're ready to evolve and you'll keep growing and building the company yourself.
Justine: So you talked about Lord Browne. Is he your mentor and your inspiration? And would you recommend other leaders following a similar path to you in terms of choosing mentors and people who inspire you, keep them close?
Ami: Yeah, by the way, I had many advisers through the years, but I think mentorship is something you need to connect on an emotional level for me. And it's also people who need to be able to take it to the next level and be willing to invest the time and resources in you because everybody's busy. But you also need to be able and willing.
Justine: And last but not least, what do you like to do in your very little spare time and kind of what keeps you balanced?
Ami: Wow that’s a good question. So yesterday, yesterday or two days ago, I found myself two days ago at the beach with my kids walking with my bare feet in the ocean. That keeps me grounded. So running keeps me grounded. Doing mindfulness, practising mindfulness keeps me grounded. Reading keeps me grounded. And I have my secret sauce. I have a digital detox every Saturday, so I turn off my phone for 24 hours completely. So no emails, no Whatsapps, no Facebook, no LinkedIn, no news. Absolutely nothing. I don't do this for from a religious perspective, I do this from a sanity perspective. After you’re twenty-four seven bombarded with everything. If you can take a step back and stop that for a bit. That's great.
Justine: Thank you, Ami, for sharing your secret sauce with us. Thank you for your time.
Ami: Sounds good, thank you Justine, thank you for the London Stock Exchange for this great series. Actually, I watched a few episodes, they are really great, and hopefully this is just the beginning of our journey. We'll meet again very soon. So thanks again for having me.
Justine: Please join us to view more episodes on www.londonstockexchange.com.
