Craneware - Keith Neilson

Victoria  [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Victoria Stevens and welcome to this podcast, Stock Exchanges. In my day job at Liontrust investing on behalf of our clients in UK stock market listed companies, I am fortunate enough to cross paths with some of Britain's most inspiring entrepreneurs. It's a huge privilege to sit across the table from the people growing and running these businesses. And in this series, I want to share that privilege with you, our listeners. Today I'm delighted to welcome as my guest Keith Nielsen, the Chief Executive of Edinburgh headquartered Craneware, a healthcare software company listed on the Alternative Investment Market here in London. Now Keith set up Craneware in the late 1990s with his childhood friend Gordon Craig having spotted a gap in the market for the automation of manual billing processes in American hospitals. And more than 26 years later I think the company has a rightful claim to being one of the UK's most successful software export stories. It's quite a feat, I hope you'll agree, for a couple of entrepreneurs from West Lothian in Scotland to build a business that sells today to around 40% of US hospitals and yet it still retains its Scottish heritage and headquarters. And along the way, Craneware has materially expanded its product offering and its customer list. It's listed, as I say, on the AIM market here in London. Keith has grown the business at the time of recording, to a market cap of close to £600 million and still owns around 9% of the equity of the business today. So Keith, I'm so looking forward to getting into all of that on the podcast today and hearing your story. So thank you so much for joining me.

Keith [00:01:40] Thank you for having me.

Victoria  [00:01:41] So I think we'll start right at the beginning, growing up in Scotland. Did you ever imagine that life would take you in this extraordinary direction? Tell us a little bit about your roots?

Keith [00:01:52] Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the other co-founder, Gordon, and I think it kind of started, we both happened to, our families moved into a housing estate on the edge of Edinburgh. So our parents all worked at least one job. I remember my parents were doing a couple of jobs, so you know, they were working to put food on the table, and so we were kind of left just to  ourselves. So we got, we got to have wonderful adventures together and just became really good friends.

Victoria  [00:02:19] Amazing. And so after school, as you're thinking about those early stages of your career, I think you went to university, Heriot-Watt, studying physics, if I'm right, which isn't potentially the most natural way into the software space. But tell us a little bit about how you went from that childhood friendship, which presumably was all about playing and doing the normal things that kids do, to moving into a more business-orientated mindset, particularly around coding?

Keith [00:02:44] Yeah, I mean, I think actually, though, that the business part probably started in and around that early school time. We were fortunate in that we grew up at a time when the ZX81, Sinclair ZX81 and the ZX Spectrums came out. You know, I remember Gordon, for his Christmas, got a ZX-81 and had to build it and put it together. You know, and this was this was high tech, this was future world, so you know, he used to write software, then magazines used to print lists of software. So you would type them in and then you would record the programme on a tape and then you would sell them around the doors and you would have in those days, you know both school friends would buy them, but then there was also a whole bunch of adults that would buy computer games because there was just not many other sources for them. And so we were kind of trading computer games from 10, 11 years old.

Victoria  [00:03:45] Amazing.

Keith [00:03:46] And selling and writing things from then.

Victoria  [00:03:47] So early entrepreneurialism there and a bit of drive. And I mentioned in the introduction that you've built a business today that enjoys a really high market share, not even in the UK or Scotland, but over the pond in the United States. And I think it would be really interesting just to get into, how on earth did that happen? So what was your eureka moment, if you like, where you realised there was such opportunity over there in the States?

Keith [00:04:12] So the eureka moment, as often these things come about, came about through following my heart. I had met my then girlfriend, now wife and still wife, in Edinburgh. She was from the US and at the time I was travelling back and forwards and travelling across to the US with the company that I was with and I had arranged to meet her and we started seeing each other and kind of having a long distance relationship from there. And then I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at the end of 1998 and happened to be sitting along the table across from a lady called Nora McNeil, who is a healthcare consultant. And whilst we were doing that, I think she was being polite and kind talking to the Scottish boy. I think kind of, you know, and I was just asking, you know I'm always curious about what people do and how, you if they're in business, how their businesses work. And I was just asking her about her business and her business was in healthcare and at first I thought when she was quoting numbers and scale I really thought she she was either over-exaggerating or she was out with the numbers. I think at the time it was somewhere in the region of about $1.6 trillion she was claiming for healthcare. I was kind of thinking how can healthcare be that big? And completely coincidentally, I was doing my MBA at university and I had a project to hand in which was a marketing project and I hadn't even started it because I was more focused on the holiday that I was on and the break that I was in. And I formed that on well what about a software company that addresses the healthcare market and did it from there and of course once I started research in the numbers, I was just massively impressed with the scale of the market. But what I really liked was if you think about back in the 90s was it was right at the time with the dot-com boom. And so the idea then, and I could never get my head around this, was that a company from Edinburgh would then be able to deal with millions if not, billions of people around the world. What I really like about that market was it was roughly 6,000 hospitals. So you've got 6,00 customers spending a lot of money. How can you help them? Because they must have needs that you can help. And the work she was doing was very manual at the time. And she had put together some tables and some access tables and things like that. And it just became really apparent that it should be software, and we could do something with that. And that's how it started. Came back to Scotland again. Met up with Gordon for a pint and said, I've got this idea, I think this might work, and you know, let's have a look at it, and that's where it kind of went.

Victoria  [00:07:06] And you went from there?

Keith [00:07:08] We went from here. Yeah, literally from a bedroom floor, you know plotting out, I think it works this way and putting plans out and then from like that on the bedroom floor and drawing them out from there and taking it from there.

Victoria  [00:07:19] So from the bedroom floor, you're building this software company, you've spotted the gap in the market. How do you go from that point where you've got the base in Edinburgh to building a business where you're having to, you know, go out there to the States, presumably travel quite a lot, get to know your customers, get those first key reference customers. Because I can see how, you know once you've spotted that gap in a market, you know the actual coding of the product is one thing, but actually trying to get the foothold in the US. I mean, that is not an easy feat, is it?

Keith [00:07:50] So that's where it was kind of a multi-stage process. Originally, the concept was we were writing the software for Nora McNeil's company, and then she was going to take it, and she was going to distribute it, she was going to take it. So this was a way of, you know, being able to really enhance what she was doing. But very quickly we realised that that was the bottleneck and that the demand was outstripping that. So we were over there and certainly, you know, travelling there every second week. Spending time over there, going out with customers, just sitting down with them, installing software, listening to how they were going about their day-to-day job and then going, oh well actually if we did this that would help you there and you know just doing good old-fashioned marketing. It's not the promotional marketing but just the understanding marketing, so you're trying to get under the skin of the persona of the person that's going to use the software.

Victoria  [00:08:48] Understanding the customer and actually using the customer's own perspective to lead the development path.

Keith [00:08:54] 100% 100% and then also trying to delight the customer as well because I think this is something we understood from quite an early stage, is once the customer is happy they then are far more willing to invest in what you're doing and your success, so if you can invest in their success all of a sudden you're successful by just by that nature that they're being successful.

Victoria  [00:09:19] You become entwined, really embedded with each other.

Keith [00:09:22] And I think, you know, when I look back to those early customers, I think that was very much what it was all about.

Victoria  [00:09:28] Yeah, absolutely. So let's zoom forward a couple of decades, because what I really want to get into is, and I know we can only do this skimming the surface in the podcast format that we have today, but I really want to give our listeners a bit of a sense for what you feel is Craneware's secret sauce, its key competitive advantages that have made you so successful in your marketplace. So perhaps an easy place to start there would be to give them just a quick flavour of just how broad the product now is. What is it doing for the customers?

Keith [00:09:57] Yeah, so when we started, we were just doing a very niche application, as you said, correcting billing and it's all to do with coding and the way that they record things to send either insurance companies or to the government and making sure that they got that correct. Once we started doing that, though, we started to realise that the data that was flowing through our system, then gave us a really good indication of how the hospital was operating and whether they were operating efficiently and effectively. So nothing we do is clinical, so we don't make bedside decisions for the hospital. But what we're trying to do and what we are trying to impact is all the decisions that go around those bedside decisions. So where the patient is, the funding of the hospital, the purchases of the hospital to make sure they are purchasing efficiently and effectively and that operational administrative cost is a huge overhead for hospitals, so very small tweaks to that and improvements to that then release many many millions of dollars for hospital clinical care.

Victoria  [00:10:56] Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that's going to, from this point on in the conversation probably feature quite heavily is this concept of the importance of proprietary data, underpinning everything that you do and underpinning your competitive advantage. I think you talk about 200 million distinct patient encounters, which is a phenomenal number. And that is data which, okay, you can't use it, as I understand it, in an identified format, you can't identify the patient from it, but at an aggregated, anonymized level, that's something which has huge value if you can derive insights from it for your customers.

Keith [00:11:31] In the US though, most hospitals are individual corporations and they have to operate like a company, so there's anti-competitive laws and there's a lot of fear that the financial aspects of the hospital will drive the clinical decisions, so they're kept very much apart. So historically, hospitals have operated very much in silos and what we've been able to do by collecting that data together and then understanding how individual hospitals operate, is then aggregate that data together over a national kind of scale with the 200 million records. And then from there start to see those insights. So you can tell a hospital that's in rural Idaho or is in suburban Chicago or metropolitan New York. You can give them a cohort of data that is really relevant to them and this gives them insight they've never had before because the hospitals are really really starved of data other than their own data. They've got lots of clinical data and there's some amazing clinical databases out there in the world but there's very little that tells them how they can operate efficiently and the challenge is with a hospital is that it's such a dynamic market. So if you imagine a new drug comes out. There's obviously been the GLP-1, Wegovy and Mounjaro that have come out. They've kind of changed lots of aspects, but even the simplest of vaccines coming out has to be coded for, it has to recorded through all the systems. It has to ordered, it has be stored, it has have to be, you know, they have to work out have they got room to store it at the right temperature?  All these different kind of things happen that have a knock on effect to the backend operational system. So it's constantly changing as well. So what was right to do yesterday might not be right to tomorrow. And so that's where this live database and the ability to be able to look at these insights gives tools into the hands of the people that are operating and running hospitals, the ability just to make that efficient.

Victoria  [00:13:39] Yeah, absolutely. I think that point about data probably leads us quite neatly onto one of the, what I have to say is one of, the hot topics at the moment. I'm dying to hear your take on it, Keith. We've talked about it many times, but that is the potential impact of AI on yes, your business, but also I'm really interested in your view of how it might impact enterprise software. I think it perfectly sums up the, I mean I can only call it a bloodbath, that we've seen on the stock markets globally here in the UK but also certainly over in the States over the last couple of months, six months or so. I mean I can as I say only call that a bloodbath it has been decimated by these fears that AI is going to kill enterprise software and I think it's a perfect microcosm of the panic that's hit the stock market and for such businesses that as I was leaving the office today to come to the podcast studio I saw this headline pop up which called it 'the software apocalypse'. And I suppose the first thing that I would say at a very high level or ask you is, are those fears well founded?

Keith [00:14:45] So first of all, AI is and can be a fantastic tool. It's a massive productivity tool, absolutely amazing from a productivity perspective. So you've got this huge acceleration in terms of what you're doing. But we've got to be a little bit careful of the hype. And we're in a cycle just now where the AI companies are all out fundraising just now. There is a lot of fundraising going on. And so it's in their interest to hype where they are. I think a bit of lazy journalism has snuck in as well, particularly around software. And where I think people have got confused is they've confused large language models with software language models. And they're two very different things. So the reason that AI is brilliant, so Valentine's Day coming up and you know we'll pretty much all use it to create some kind of poetry or something like that for our partner.

[00:15:45] Oh, you old romantic Keith!

Keith [00:15:46] We'll all pretend we haven't, we'll have just written it and I normally do write them myself, but anyway we'll put them in there and it's brilliant at that because it is studied and it is read pretty much every book, every romantic poet, it's looked at them all over the period and it has able to join up the dots between them. The problem with software is that software isn't a language in that way, it's a structure that comes together and interlocks and interweaves in a different way to the syntax of language. And very, very few, if any at all, corporates that are producing enterprise-grade software, which is millions and millions and million of interlocking code coming together, have actually ever published that on the internet. Because that's proprietary. You're never going to put that out there. So these large language models have never learnt those in a way that if I was sitting in my bedroom I would be able to do a proof of concept of what Craneware does very quickly. Yeah, I'd be able knock something up and it would look brilliant, but it would be based on a very rudimentary format. It wouldn't scale, it wouldn't have the security, it won't be able have the tens of thousands of users being able log on to it at the same time and access it. It wouldn't be able to deal with 200 million records, it wouldn't be able do all these things. And we're a long way away from AI being able to create the software that can do that. So what it does do, is it means when I'm sitting there and I've got an idea, I can sit at my desk and I can go into GitHub co-pilot and I can actually get it to produce some code for me. And it will produce something that will give me an idea of okay right so that's what I'm trying to do, I want to look for this data, let's do that. So I can get the rudimentary so I call it 'white page syndrome' so it's when in the past you know if I've got a report to write I'll go make a coffee or I'll go and do my tax return I'll do anything, putting it off and procrastinating on it. And what it does it gets you over that part but the output then gives you ideas and that's what sparks the new ideas. But the sparking of those new ideas comes from the experience, it comes from having the other code base. So if we then take that GitHub copilot and apply that to our internal code base of millions and millions of lines that have been generated over all of these years, we can get something a bit more meaningful but still not a finished product from that, it still needs work on it. And it's It's about all the interactions. So again, from the outside world you think well code's made up of these small objects, you write a little subroutine and you add all the subroutines together and that's what you get your software. The problem is the interactions of all those subroutines are hugely complex and we're not at the stage yet where AI is able to do that. Now will it come? Yes, I have no doubt it will come at some stage but the people that are going to benefit from that are the large software companies because we're going to be more productive. So we had a very specific example through the course of the second half of last year. Government in the US came out with some new regulations around this charity drug programme, a different way of administering the programme. So our hospitals were really faced with the potential of some of their most expensive and high volume drugs going through this new programme where they didn't know if they were going to get paid for them or not. And that's a huge thing because if they don't get paid for them, they then can't do care elsewhere, they can't keep doors open. You know, they can't deliver babies or whatever else that they're doing. So it was really important to them. But what we were able to with the combination of AI and the team we've got, is very quickly get a solution out. And I don't know if we would have done that without AI and being able to do it in that time. But what it meant was we were first to market with that. So we had a solution ready. The government brought it in a ridiculous timeframe. I'll probably get into trouble for saying that, but it got, it brought in a ridiculous time frame but there was only a matter of months from when they said this is how it's going to operate to supposedly starting. And we were the only company that really had an end-to-end solution from that and it's because we have that code base and we have the skill and you've got also that data to be able to trial it against, because again whatever you're producing has to then go through QA and testing and everything else.

Victoria  [00:20:22] I mean, this really is the supposed holy grail of it, as I said, the productivity, the efficiency increases that it can bring that allows companies or could allow companies to leverage their existing strengths to great effect. I find that really interesting as a kind of practical example. So in that example, what proportion of the code for the new solution would have been crafted by AI?

Keith [00:20:48] Probably a relatively small proportion of the final code would have actually been AI and the original stuff probably would have all have been binned at some point going through it. But what it did was it gave people ideas, it said right okay we can sort that, okay that's not how I'd solve it but actually if I did that and tweaked it this way and did this and did that, that would do and oh hold on that's pointing to this and we've done something similar to this before, so let's pull that piece of code. And then once you've done that, what it's very good at, is then being able to help you optimise to specific languages and specific architectures. Yes. So it can then take that and test it and run it through. So that's where it, then you get these productivity gains from there.

Victoria  [00:21:31] That's interesting as well, because that's like, it's almost being used there as a springboard for human creativity, whereas a lot of the narrative has been exactly the opposite of that. It's been, well, AI creativity is going to almost kill creativity from humans.

Keith [00:21:45] So, there was a great programme on Radio 4 the other night there when I was driving home and it was about spotting hidden masterpieces that have gone away and identifying them as being by famous painters and worth money. And they were talking there about, oh well, does AI not do this? And the speaker on that summed up just exactly the same as the software challenges, that they can't. No one has loaded all of the high-definition images of all the great masters' works onto the internet. So it's not been taught yet how to do that. What he was saying was, it will happen eventually and then it will be a very useful tool but just now it still needs that human interaction. Now what it can do is it can take a lot of the heavy lifting, it can take out a lot the drudgery of these things and the repetitive nature of it and that's what software has always done. You know, so I kind of feel just now. I'm getting really old and so I'm kind of sitting here going, you know, I remember sitting in the Liontrust offices and all our investor offices, what was it, about eight years ago and being told that blockchain was going to kill our business. You know, and at the time I said, but why would it? It's not relevant for our business and that's just for our businesses. You know it wasn't a relevant technology, a very valuable technology in very specific applications and will change those applications, but it's a tool. And I think AI is very much like that. It's a slightly different tool in that it's going to evolve quicker and it's going to continue to grow and grow along with us. But I think that the big beneficiaries for it are the people that embrace it and use it internally. And as I say, I don't think it's the bedroom warriors that are going to get all the benefit. They're going to get head starts. Unfortunately, I think private equity is over-invested in too many of them that were using the early tools that were really quite hard to tame, have used them very effectively to create early products, but the problem is now, as a company like us, we can look at that and we can pull all of the stuff that they're doing, so workflow analysis and all that, we can pull that off the shelf now. So we can build that all into our product and just leapfrog ahead. So what I think we'll see, is we'll see a lot of those little companies be consumed or join other companies with the ideas. They'll be the kind of imagineers maybe. Yes. The bedroom people that had kind of some of these concepts, they will be the imagineers that will then help steer AI within larger companies. That's my kind of feeling.

Victoria  [00:24:28] I'm really loving this because I'm getting, and I'm hoping our listeners and our viewers are getting this sense as well, I'm getting this palpable sense of excitement around this new technology that is really enabling. And I think that's what's been missing, I suppose, from this debate. It's all about the fear. And not enough has been talked about the opportunity. So it's really nice to kind of reframe the narrative in this conversation.

Keith [00:24:48] I mean it can touch everyone's lives just in simple things we can all do that just takes away some of that drudgery of going through your inbox and getting rid of all the spam and everything else. It can do all that, work out whether it really is spam or it's a message from your auntie that you need to respond to, you know, those kind of things that all kind like just get lost because of all of the noise. It can that but it can also just enhance what we're doing. Right just now though, particularly LLMs, large language models, are not suitable to be able to be creating enterprise-grade software. They will help and they will certainly work alongside engineers and they'll certainly be part of co-developing with engineers, but it's teams of engineers, it's teams of experience coming to that.

Victoria  [00:25:37] And when we've been, I mean, what we've been trying to do as investors, because ultimately, the difficult thing about all of this is that nobody knows quite how this will evolve. And those who profess to know, we are at this point at the foothills of this fantastic new technology. And quite how it plays out is going to probably surprise us all in certain ways. But I think the things that are coming through loud and clear from the interactions that we have had with our software companies, I think there are a few kind of points to bring together to say okay if companies have one or or hopefully a number of these things then all of these come together as multiple sources of competitive moats, mini-moats if you like or some of them are obviously huge and so one of those things is obviously proprietary data, we've talked about the importance of that. One of them is the kind of complexity and breadth of the solution, how many hooks does it have into an organisation, how complex are the problems being solved?  

[40.4s] But I think another really interesting one is this idea that quite a few companies which we talk to that have got significant market positions in a certain end market, just as you have with your US healthcare customers, for those companies, I think we've found quite often that they can be quite interesting spearheads for the larger players, for the larger AI and software and sort of the US big tech players to get a foothold into a valuable market so that they could almost use you to help their go to market. And I think that's something if I'm right, that you found with your alliance with Microsoft? So I wondered in the short time that we have, you could give us just a quick overview of what that has meant for the business?

Keith [00:27:58] Yeah, so we were very fortunate, the team, we consume Microsoft Azure services and computing power. So if you just imagine computing power, and the team kind of said, right, we're consuming enough power, now we should be getting a discount, some kind of volume discount on it. And we approached Microsoft to be able to do that, and lo and behold, very interested in talking to us and yes, there are volume discounts available. So we started to negotiate this. And through that journey, and meeting the Microsoft UK team to negotiate that, it turns out that the database that we've got is actually quite unique. They've not seen one that size, and it's of a scale that is very different to anything that they have either here or in the US, which really was good for us, because it underlined what we'd been saying for a long time, so it was great to be able to say that. But what it also meant was it meant that it was worth them introducing us to their healthcare teams. And so Microsoft have what they call their legacy environments and legacy areas they want to go into and both education's a really strong one for them, but healthcare's a huge one for then as well. And as they are doing their transition across into the cloud and becoming a cloud company and effectively becoming an Azure company in there, they want do more of that. And I think just now, or certainly when we first started speaking with them, they were doing about $10 billion maybe with that, which in the big scheme of Microsoft is actually quite small. You know, when you look at it, and they don't have a huge number of hospitals that use their cloud services. They have lots of hospitals that use all their office tools, but don't have that and the two don't actually go together. So we then got introduced to the healthcare team across in the US. Now, coincidentally, the UK, as I said, because it's consolidated a lot of its data over the period, the NHS is quite a rich environment for Microsoft. So a lot of the healthcare team have either grown up and cut their teeth in the UK or in Europe and they're now across in Redmond. So when we arrive in Redmond, everyone we get introduced to is Brits or Europeans or they've got experience of the UK healthcare system. And then that's when you then start to realise, well, even if you've got all, and the UK data system is still quite fragmented, but even if had it all, it's 50-something million records, all of a sudden we're four times the size of that. So that becomes something that's really attractive in its own right. But then also I think that the thinking is and why they then extended just our original sort of volume discounts to go to market strategies with it, is because I think they're seeing that as a way for them getting into the hospitals. So we can give them, we can give them a beachhead, we can them a reason for why hospitals can benefit from Microsoft because not only do they get our applications, but they also then get the Microsoft cloud services. Most hospitals are, in the past would be very shy pre-COVID, wouldn't have wanted to go to the cloud. They would want their own data centres. Now it's just too difficult to keep on top of a data centre. You know, just the sheer vulnerability of having an individual data centre is too much. So we've got all this data, what we didn't want is we didn't want the responsibility of actually managing our own data centre to be able to do that. So that's why we've outsourced it to Microsoft and in the same way we are seeing hospitals do that, but they're choosing, they've got choices between Microsoft, between Google, between AWS, to be to be be able do that, but what we felt was that Microsoft were the most suited from an enterprise standpoint particularly for hospitals and for the protection of patient data within there. So that's why we went down that route.

Victoria  [00:31:50] Yeah, so interesting and I know I could keep talking about these topics for the rest of the podcast, but there's definitely other things that I want to ask you about before our time together is over today, Keith. So one of those things is, obviously with that, you've got your Scottish heritage, which we've covered, but with the predominant customer base of the business, in fact the entire customer base of the businesses being based over in the States, your decision to list here in the UK on the Alternative Investment Market or AIM is a really interesting one, I think. So can you explain a little bit for the benefit of our listeners why you chose that listing venue here in the UK and have you ever, had you ever considered moving it to the US or did you consider listing in the US to start with?

Keith [00:32:33] Yeah I mean it's pretty easy. The advantages of AIM is you can list a far earlier stage as a business than you can pretty much in any other market around the world. And it's successful and you get the support of fantastic investors that come in from a very early stage and then support for a long period of time and are able to scale with you. And that's quite unique I think around the world. And so when as we kind of got to that point where we'd outgrown our venture capital and our private equity, it was kind of the next stage is well, do we just go to a bigger private equity or do we actually take this on and take it public? And that was probably the bigger decision for us. Jurisdiction didn't really come into it at that point because I think we've always thought ultimately we will be a US company, we will be US domiciled because our customers are there. We really love the fact that we're still Scottish and we keep that and we've got our development teams all in Scotland. But ultimately I think at some stage it probably makes sense to raise capital in the US and actually when we looked back at in 2006 I think it was, when we looked at it, one for scale, AIM was there, but two it also gives you access to US investors as well. And so from there, I mean, we've had, I can't say it's always been peachy through there. I think the first, well, what are we, we're coming up for, we must be coming up 20 years now. Next year, yeah. Next year will be 20 years. So the first 17 of those were good, if we exclude the COVID years. The last two years have been brutal on the markets. They really have been hard over here. So then, have we then looked at moving the business across the US? Not moving the business in the past. So we've, we've always thought at some stage it will probably end up being US ownership, but I think like just that's the end. I don't think we've ever made a secret of that for, for everyone who kind of said that. I think COVID probably freed things up a little bit more as well, because video conferencing became just the norm. Yes. And, and that's made it a lot, a lot easier as well. And at the same time we've got to a scale where we've got a really established, really good quality subject matter experts across the US as well that run the teams across there.

Victoria  [00:35:06] So for the moment, to summarise it, it works.

Keith [00:35:10] Yeah, we can never say never because we just don't know what it is, things come out of the woodwork sometimes. There's no immediate intention to do anything. The AIM market, when the AIM market is working positively and working efficiently, it has got to be one of the best markets in the world. I mean, we've had a phenomenal run. You mentioned thankfully we're in here we're not looking at screens and stuff like that to see share prices. Refreshing to get away from them. It's very refreshing to get away with them for a short time. You know I mean you mentioned we're £600 million market cap just now I mean we've been £1.2 billion. Yes. So it's kind of that whole kind of range backwards and forwards in there is daunting. I mean I think you know it's probably a great example and again, you know, coming up for 20 years on being a CEO in the public markets means you've seen a few cycles. I've been through a few cycles and you know we had had the business for eight years before we listed, you know it does feel like it's just it's part of a cycle just now.  

Victoria  [00:36:20] And many of your other investors, you know, we are all long-term and actually you invest in a public market quoted company, I think you have to be willing to take rough with the smooth in terms of short-term share price moves and focus on the ability of a business to compound over the long-term and that's what Cranware has demonstrated powerfully that it can  do. So maybe this is a great point to you to raise the spectre of the takeover offer that you received from private equity last year and I think I really wanted to raise it on the topic of that long-termism because for me and my team we were really encouraged by the fact that the board robustly rebutted that approach, saying that it fundamentally undervalued the company's long-term prospects. And I also mention it because of course that's quite a difficult thing to do when you personally own nine percent of the equity you know that takeover approach I think valued the business at not that far off a billion, a billion sterling. So you know when you're, when you're thinking about weighing that long-term opportunity versus the bird in the hand at what was an optically quite a healthy premium to the share price at that time, it would just be really interesting to get some reflections on how you were thinking about that?

Keith [00:37:36] Again, I mean, nothing against the bid that comes in and I know, you know, just about every tech company hears from private equity every week in some form, you want to go for a coffee or whatever. And that never goes anywhere and you just kind of hear these things. Very similar to this, I mean, a lot of respect for the, you know, for the Bain team and everything that was there. But we'd been through an exercise not long before that, you'll remember, we came around all the investors to say, well, look, what do you want to do with regards to this? You know, we're hearing that the thing to do just now is to move from the AIM market to the main market and that would miraculously, you, know, solve all the share problems and re-rate and everything else. And we were quite sceptical of that anyway, but what that allowed us to do is have really good conversations with shareholders about what our plans for the business were long-term, and also to get an indication of whether there was buy-in for that, and just get a kind of feeling for where valuation was, and where people's minds were as well, and whether they were needing or looking for short-term exit, or whether they we're looking for something slightly longer-term as well. And then it was then just a case of, actually for our defensive team, to be able to look at and just compare that to the models. Look at the number that was, you know, indicatively offered, so never really formally offered, but indicatively offered. Look at that and decide it wasn't close enough to something that would be exciting for all of our shareholders. And so that was really it. And so again, nothing pointed in it, not trying to make big positions or anything or anything there, but at the time and continuing to today, the value we see in the business is considerably more than even what that indicative offer was. Considerably, and a multiple of that. And when you then start to put that together, you know, we've got this, what is pretty much a unique data set. We've got these new tools that are coming round and available to us that by the day are making us more productive and more able to access that data. We've got a wonderful customer base. I mean, to have a customer base that understands the need about profit, but then uses that profit for the benefit of good. You know, I mean I'm a CEO, so I don't sleep that well, but I don't not sleep because I'm worried about, you know, the market that I'm in. I'm really proud of my customers and what they do. So having the opportunity to be able to delight them and actually see what I think we can do over the horizon as well just now for them, to really be able enhance their opportunities. They've got some real challenges coming along, but we can be part of the solution for that with what we're doing. And I don't think the indicative offer got anywhere near to understanding that. I felt it was kind of tied up in a little bit, the market is, gets itself in its way and it's the same with the share price just now. You know, everyone's following the share prices for all these companies and so therefore, if they're going down, they're going down so that's the worry. There's not enough thought about both the long-term runway and maybe there's a slight alternative to this or maybe there is a different way of doing that. And I think the Bain approach was probably more mechanistic from them as it has to be, you know. They're looking at short-term horizons, short-terms returns, or relatively short-term returns from that. And we just, we just saw a better picture from that.

Victoria  [00:41:23] I think it's so refreshing to hear that from a UK listed market CEO, because one thing that gets thrown at our market so often is the seeming inability of people over here in the UK to take that longer term view, to want to stay on the journey, not to get out at an early stage. And I think that's probably in the round, that's probably a fair accusation to throw at multiple businesses that have been listed in London and have got out too early. I mean, Arm is kind of the poster child of that. But that's why I think it was so refreshing to see that, as I said, that robust rebuttal and wanting to stay on that journey for the long term.

Keith [00:42:04] Yeah, I will not tell you what Mrs. Nielsen said on the Sunday morning when she read the article on the paper. Oh, don't. Because that was less positive. I think I've still got the bruises on my arm.

Victoria  [00:42:19] So we're coming to the end of our time here together Keith but I always have one final question that I ask our guests which is, if I gave you the opportunity to exchange places with any other person in any other career just for a day to see what it was like who would you pick and why?

Keith [00:42:35] I dreaded this one because I've been listening to the other podcasts and there's been some great answers on that. And it's like do I go something high-brow? And then I think well everyone that knows me knows that it's just not me. And then I thought right okay, do I go for someone trendy? And then I thought my kids will then ridicule me mercilessly, and then I thought, right, okay Scottish. Rugby season coming up, should I go down a Finn Russell and then again I'm a donkey forward. Not a nice silky back. So that doesn't work. So I wondered if I could use it as an opportunity to do a bit of time travel?

Victoria  [00:43:06] Wow, I'll allow it.

Keith [00:43:08] And keep the Scottish roots in there. And we've just had Burns Night and I was kind of at a Burns supper thinking about this. I was thinking he grew up in a time when there was huge political upheaval, there was a huge scientific explosion, there was the Scottish Enlightenment was going on and he arrived in Edinburgh as this kind of customs worker, farm labourer, cattleman, and kind of wrote poems and pulled that all together. But he must have mixed and been in bars and pubs and stuff with, you know, like David Hume and Adam Smith. And if he wasn't actually didn't know them personally, that would be people would be all talking about this. The buzz would be not about AI or blockchain, but it would be about philosophy and, you know, how do we help the common man and love and adventure and a bit of drinking, a bit of you know, you laughs and just nonsense. And it just seems like that would just be a day in that life just to experience what that would all be like and just having that kind of all coming together.

Victoria  [00:44:22] And pre-technology.

Keith [00:44:23] And pre-technology, getting away from the phone for a day.

Victoria  [00:44:25] Yeah.

Keith [00:44:27] How good would that be?

Victoria  [00:44:28] I love that answer, Keith. Thank you so much. And I'm glad I let you jump in your time machine for us as well. So thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope for our listeners, they enjoyed the episode. And if you did like it, I'd be really grateful if you'd consider subscribing to the podcast or following the series on Spotify, Apple, or your usual podcast provider. And I always have to remind people that nothing in this podcast should be construed as investment advice or a solicitation to purchase securities in any company or investment product mentioned. We'll see you next time.