LONDON — Speaking in Ankara, Turkey, on Saturday, British Prime Minister Theresa May refused to condemn Donald Trump's executive order on immigration, arguing that "the United States is responsible for the United States' policy on refugees."

But huge numbers of Brits aren't so reticent, with more than a million people signing a petition to block the American president's upcoming State Visit.

Trump's decision to block immigration from seven Muslim majority countries and suspend America's refugee program has caused serious alarm in the US, with emergency protests erupting across the country. The nation's tech industry has also spoken out, with companies from Google to Airbnb pledging money or aid to those potentially affected.

And some in the UK tech industry aren't staying quiet either.

'A very dark and worrying time'

TransferWise, a buzzy London-headquartered money-transfer startup, denounced the executive order in a memo sent to employees over the weekend obtained by Business Insider, and pledged support to any employees who might be affected. It said (emphasis ours):

"We've seen some incredible scenes from the US overnight.

"I think everyone knows my views on immigration and how important it is to both a company's and a national economy's growth and innovation.

"To be very clear, we do not support this policy from President Trump. If it affects any of our team, we will do anything and everything we can to help.

"In a very dark and worrying time, to see the immediate reaction of real people from the lawyers to the protesters in the airports has been incredible. I hope that's something we can all take inspiration from."

The firm operates around the world, including the US, and its Estonian cofounders have previously been outspoken about their support for immigration and their company's reliance on it.

In an emailed statement, CEO and cofounder Taavet Hinrikus said: "The impact of this decision is deeply worrying. Immigration is key for innovation and for economic growth. Hearing the immediate impact on those caught up personally in it right now is deeply distressing."

'Today I feel I don't belong anywhere'

The executive order — an evolution of Donald Trump's frequently promised ban on all Muslim immigration — blocks immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

There has been intense confusion about what the ban entails: Legal US residents with green cards were initially denied entry, though this is reportedly no longer the case. And there was also uncertainty as to whether the ban would also affect dual-nationality Brits born in one of the prohibited countries. The UK Foreign Office now says that dual-nationality Brits will be exempted— but it has still caused alarm. (Although this has since been contradicted by the US Embassy in London.)

In a blog post on Medium seemingly written before the Foreign Office issued its clarification, Khash Sajadi — the British-Iranian cofounder of Cloud66, a firm now based in San Francisco, wrote: "I was born in Iran, I am British and I work in the US and today I feel I don’t belong anywhere ... What makes me feel like this today is how my country, Britain, responded to this decision: with silence."

'This ban is indefensible from any angle'

Despite this exemption, there are still concerns that it could have a material impact on some British businesses.

TechUK, a trade industry body for the UK technology ecosystem, provided a fairly cautious comment, writing: "We will continue to follow ongoing developments and companies should monitor advice issued by the Foreign Office. Tech companies will want to prevent a damaging impact on people in their companies, and on the cost of conducting international business more generally.

"The movement of the skilled talent around the world drives the creation of innovative products and services, and in turn has been a key part of both the US and the UK’s tech success of recent years." (A spokesperson declined to answer a request for clarification as to whether TechUK condemns the executive action.)

One London startup CEO that Business Insider spoke to was more forthright, saying they're considering scrapping plans to relocate their business to the US as a result.

"I think there was an inevitability in technology that you had to go West. Silicon Valley is the technology equivalent of the Great Attractor. Funding, exit opportunities, ecosystem etc the opportunities there are unmatched. A Trump presidency would have made an impact but my expectation was that it could have been business as usual for the tech industry. The events of the last week challenged this belief," they said.

"Now about 20% of candidates that we are assessing could fall into a ban (unclear as it changes hourly). Right now I’m being forced to choose between talent and location and frankly Silicon Valley is no longer a priority as a result."

They added: "I echo the sentiment from the CEO of Box, this ban [is] indefensible from any angle: moral, economical, safety-wise. My concern is about the disruption of independence between executive, judiciary and legislative."

Joséphine Goube, CEO of Techfugees — an organisation that tries to find tech solution to help refugees — predicted it could see more businesses operate overseas offices. "In terms of UK businesses' hiring and strategies, it is likely we will see again TLA & other tech leaders expressing their opposition in the press but without real impact in changing May's agenda," she wrote in an email.

"What's likely to concretely happen is that the tech sector, an industry well tuned to having teams working online and abroad, will do more of this (think of TransferWise or Azimo who have offices in Eastern Europe for their tech teams), if not full relocations in European countries as London's offices costs & salaries are becoming way too high compared to other capitals."

'Let the new administration settle down'

Brent Hoberman, cofounder of Lastminute.com who has gone on to launch startup incubator Founders Factory, said that the tech industry, with its heavy use of skilled immigrant labour, is "an industry that is absolutely built on being open rather than being closed." The executive order could actually be an "opportunity" for the British ecosystem in the "global war around talent," he said — as long as we "fix our own rhetoric around Brexit."

Harry Briggs, from BGF Ventures, echoed this sentiment. "The tech companies in Silicon Valley and New York are waking up to the fact that, with a stroke of Trump's erratic pen, their key employees, even those with Green cards, can suddenly be barred from returning to their country," he said in an emailed statement.

"So this should make London (and Toronto, and Berlin) much more attractive places for tech businesses. Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon already employ thousands of their engineers here. Trump's actions will likely accelerate that trend. "

Laurence Garrett, a partner at Highland Europe, was expressed far less alarm than others in the industry. In an emailed statement, he said: "I am sure that UK and European businesses operating in the USA will be able to navigate the new Trump immigration laws. It's early days so our advice to our portfolio, many operating in USA is to let the new administration settle down."

'Values matter in everything'

Ali Parsa, a British-Iranian entrepeneur and cofounder of medical tech company Babylon Health, sent a memo to his team and other contacts when the executive order came out attacking it as "abhorrent." He wrote (emphasis ours):

"I have been lucky: I have lived in developed countries and in emerging countries; I have been a native and an immigrant; I have habited among the poor and the rich. But it doesn’t matter where I was, what I have been or who I have been with, people alway seem to have the same dreams, just different opportunities. The US stood for a promise to give the opportunity to live that dream. That promise attracted the best talents from far and wide, and made America amongst the most prosperous in the world. We judge people by the humanity of their hearts, the ambition of their dreams, the purpose of their hard work, and the extent of their wisdom and not by the country of their birth. Anything else is economically shortsighted, politically divisive, and socially abhorrent. Values matter in everything, including our national security and prosperity."

'It's f--king boneheaded'

Some London investors have spoken out against the executive order. In an email, 500startups partner Matt Lerner said he was "scared" and "angry," and cited the impact refugees have had on the American economy. "It’s fucking bone-headed. First of all, it’s cruel and inhumane to turn away refugees and lawful permanent residents suddenly with no warning. From an economic standpoint, it’s counter-productive," he wrote.

"Immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie to Andy Grove, have powered innovation and created millions of jobs throughout American history. That’s why we have offices in 20 countries, including muslim countries like Turkey, Bahrain and Malaysia - we want to find the world’s best entrepreneurs, wherever they are."

On Sunday, Eileen Burbidge, a prominent London-based (American) venture capital investor and member of the Prime Minister's Advisory Group and chair of Tech City UK, tweeted: "been Stateside since Wednesday and I can't believe what's happening here... how much more has to happen b4 impeachment proceedings, please?"

In a message, she praised the demonstrations across America protesting the order. "Being in the States these last few days has given me a firsthand view of how tremendously people have rallied to exercise their first amendment rights in expressing their objections to this unlawful, unconstitutional and unethical order -- and seeing that gives me hope," she wrote. "It reminds me that we each have a voice and our collective voices can make a difference. It also reminds me that silence can be deafening, so I hope people and leaders all around the world will continue to make their views known whatever those may be."

Hussein Kanji, a partner at Hoxton Ventures, said in a phone call that it "feeds the other side," a reference to concerns raised by Senator John McCain and others that the order will aid Islamic State. And putting aside the politics, he said, it was "very clumsily implemented," citing the confusion around who is and isn't banned.

'Human rights abuses'

Jim Killock, executive director for digital rights organisation Open Rights Group, attacked the British government as being complicit in the ban. "Britain cannot condemn the ban on Muslims entering the US if we are providing the data being used to vet them," he said in an emailed statement.

"MPs who voted for the Investigatory Powers Act need to ask if themselves if this is what they wanted when they endorsed bulk data collection last year. We urge the UK government to immediately legislate to place safeguards and limit raw data sharing with the US so that it cannot used to commit human rights abuses."

This story is being updated with more comments as they come in. If you work for a European startup, we want to hear from you. What do you think about the executive order? Might it affect you? Get in touch: rprice@businessinsider.com

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NOW WATCH: Google stopped asking these 7 job interview questions because they were so tricky

Menu Next Door, the startup which lets you cook for your neighbours, is no longer available in London or Paris — the only two cities it expanded into outside of Brussels, where it was founded.

The company raised $2 million (£1.6 million) in seed financing in May 2016. At the time TechCrunch reported it had 900 cooks on the platform and 110,000 users.

But the service is now only available in Belgium, according to its website, and it looks like some of its employees left in September and October of last year.

According to LinkedIn, the country manager for France left in October 2016 and its COO left in September. The company's UK general manager told Business Insider he too has left and there is no longer a team in London.

The company allows anyone to sign up and create a menu of their own home-cooked meal for a set date in the future, which neighbours can then pre-order, all through its website. According to Crunchbase, the startup is backed by Index Ventures, Local Globe, Kima Ventures, and TheFamily.

A spokesperson for Menu Next Door said in an emailed statement:

"To create a new and better version of Menu Next Door, we're totally focusing on Brussels for the next few months. Menu Next Door is at the 'iteration stage' of the business, a stage where flexibility is at its upmost in order to get a strong product/market fit. This is part of the life of an early-stage startup. These decisions will lead us to the creation of a better and stronger service for both our chefs and our customers."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Google stopped asking these 7 job interview questions because they were so tricky

The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

As part of an ongoing series, Insider Picks features products or stores poised for big things. The subject of this spotlight is a direct-to-consumer fine jewelry company called Mejuri.

Most women associate getting fine jewelry with special occasions, like anniversaries, engagements, and birthdays.

But that doesn't have to, and frankly shouldn't, be the case if you ask Noura Sakkijha and Justine Lançon, the cofounders of Mejuri, a Toronto-based jewelry startup.

Sakkijha and Lançon launched Mejuri in early 2015 with the idea that women don't need to wait for someone else to give them fine jewelry; instead, they wanted to put the purchasing power in the hands of women, giving them the opportunity to buy contemporary, fine jewelry for accessible prices.

"We wanted to create a class of jewelry for women who shop for themselves the way they shop for their shoes and bags," Sakkijha told Business Insider. "Women don’t want to spend their whole paychecks on high-quality jewelry; they want to have a choice to buy high-quality, non-overpriced jewelry for their day-to-day lives. And we are giving them that choice."

Women currently account for 89% of the company's transactions. As a woman, I totally get why it's resonating with this demographic so well.

The jewelry market looks crowded, but if you pay close attention, it’s mostly divided into very classic and expensive fine jewelry or affordable costume jewelry that won’t last. Women want something in the middle, and Mejuri fills the gap with it's delicate collection of rings, earrings, necklaces, and bracelets, which retails for as low as $25 for a solid gold stud to as high as $325 for a solid gold evil eye necklace. 

To that end, Sakkijha and Lançon told me Mejuri has already exceeded over 1 million dollars in year two of operation and reports 20-30% of monthly transactions are from repeat customers. "We've established a great level of loyalty with customers in a product category that is perceived as a non-frequent purchase," said Lançon.

The company's direct-to-consumer business model, which allows it to keep price markups low, and its commitment to customer service are largely to credit. Since launching, Mejuri has relied heavily on customer feedback to improve its jewelry. 

"We involve our customers in product feedback, since this helps in the evolution of our quality and choosing what we introduce to the market," Sakkijha and Lançon told me. "We also give them the ability to reach out to us via email and text, and will be integrating more and more technology to speed up our response times. We’re really driven to provide a luxury experience to every single customer."

After getting to wear a few pieces from Mejuri's current fine jewelry collection for a few weeks, I'd recommend the company as one of the best places to buy fine jewelry online. Not only is Mejuri constantly putting new pieces into production (it's established a lean and quick supply chain that allows it to get products from concept to store in 3-4 weeks), its message, its high quality, and its transparent prices are all things I can get behind. 

The company sent me a pair of hoop earrings ($125), choker-style necklace ($255), and ring ($170) so I could get a sense of the jewelry's overall quality, and each piece feels and looks a lot nicer than its price suggests. They're my new everyday go-tos, and I'm already eyeing a couple other pieces I want to eventually buy for myself.

Mejuri is smart addition to the jewelry market and one that's going to be great for customers, be they women who are shopping for themselves, or people who are looking to find great gifts for the women they love that don't put a huge dent in their wallets.

Have a closer look at some of my favorite jewelry from Mejuri below: 

READ THIS: A jewelry expert shares everything you need to know before buying an engagement ring

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Wearing a choker with another slightly longer necklace is a subtle way to step up your jewelry game. 

Spheres Choker, $255 | Diamond Necklace, $290

These elegant threader earrings don't have backs to them, so you can adjust where and how they fall.

Grace Threader Earrings, $170 

Stacking a few dainty rings together adds some extra sparkle to your outfit and looks cool. Feel free to mix metals, too — yellow, rose, and white gold all play well together. 

Diamonds Line Ring White Gold, $200 | Solo Diamond Ring, $175 | Beaded Ring White Gold, $73 

Europe's tech clusters in London, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere, host thousands of fast-growing technology startups.

And if you look solely at "unicorn" startups that are worth $1 billion (£803 million) or more, they're even starting to rival Silicon Valley.

We ranked the 34 coolest startup CEOs in Europe, taking into account the founders' personal careers, as well as how innovative their companies are.

We've decided to use a broad definition of "startup" for this list, in line with VC Paul Graham's definition as pretty much any fast-growing company. So we've got companies that range in size from a handful of people all the way up to companies that are on the verge of going public.

We also decided not to include Israeli startups on this list. You can see our ranking of tech startups in Israel here.

Additional reporting by Shona Ghosh, Hannah Roberts, and Lara O'Reilly.

34. Sean Murray, CEO of Hello Games

Sean Murray is the CEO of Hello Games, the small British game development studio that created "No Man’s Sky"— one of the biggest (and most controversial) games of 2016.

Hello Games used to be known for its "Joe Danger" series which let people play as a stuntman on a motorbike, pulling off stunts and tricks. But Murray had an ambition to build something much bigger.

"No Man's Sky" lets players explore a vast universe that was created by an algorithm. Its scale has impressed everyone from Kanye West to Elon Musk. But not everyone was a fan. The game caused outrage online after it failed to live up to many of Murray's promises. Cut features included planetary physics, rivers, and large spaceships.

Country: UK

33. Pietari Päivänen, CEO of Future Fly

The younger sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Arielle Zuckerberg, was an early investor in this Finland-based startup, which has so far raised $2.5 million (£2 million) in seed funding.

Set up by a team of former game designers, including CEO and cofounder Pietari Päivänen, Future Fly is best known for its gamified chat app Rawr which lets its users create 3D-animated avatars.

Country: Finland

32. Mariusz Gralewski, CEO of DocPlanner

DocPlanner is a service that lets users find doctors and book appointments. It was founded by Mariusz Gralewski, a former University of Warsaw computer science student, who serves as its CEO today.

In June 2016, the Polish startup acquired and merged with Spanish rival Doctoralia, and raised $20 million (£16 million) in a Series C funding round.

Country: Poland

The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

At Insider Picks, we're dedicated to finding emerging brands with products that will add value to your life, whether it's a set of nice sheets for your bed, a pair of stylish computer glasses, or a hoodie that will last you a decade.

Linjer is one of them. With millions in sales after only a few years of operation, the leather-goods company has filled the demand for affordable luxury and is poised to become the industry's next breakout watch brand.

Launched in 2014 by Jennifer Chong and Roman Khan, Linjer was founded on the belief that shoppers shouldn't have to compromise quality for a good deal.

"We were fed up with having to choose between fast-fashion products that don't last and luxury-branded goods that are really expensive," Chong told Business Insider. "Many of us are left with little choice but to buy fast-fashion that is bad for the environment, bad for our wallets, and in many cases bad for the workers who make it."

Linjer launched its first Kickstarter campaign for bags two years ago. Not only did the campaign raise over $350,000, but Linjer made $1 million in sales in its first 14 months. 2016 was projected to be another banner year.

Chong and Khan recently expanded Linjer with a line of minimalist watches for men and women.

"We didn't want the experience of checking the time to be stressful, so we decided to make old-school analog watches to bring some 'analog peace' into our lives," Chong said.

Linjer spent 18 months perfecting two watch designs, and it paid off. The Minimalist and the Classic watches each come with vegetable-tanned leather straps, Swiss movements, and scratchproof sapphire crystals. Best of all, both retail for just $249.

The watches raised nearly $1 million on Kickstarter. Now the company is just trying to keep up with demand.

The Insider Picks team recently got the chance to try out Linjer's watches. Read our thoughts and see if you want to buy one for yourself.

Breton Fischetti, senior director, commerce:

The watch tried: Linjer The Minimalist Men's Watch, $249

It would be hard to think of a more simple but well-designed watch. The face is easy to read but still minimal, and having the date is a must for me, so I'm glad they included that feature. The leather band feels sturdy and well-made, and while not immediately soft, I get the feeling it's going to break in with consistent wear.

This is also the lightest watch I've worn in years. I can barely feel it while I'm wearing it. It feels like a great design and value for the price; you get everything you need and nothing you don't — plus it will look good in both formal and casual settings.

Ellen Hoffman, commerce editor:

The watch tried: Linjer The Classic Women's Watch, $249

I’m not a regular watch-wearer, mostly because I never found a watch I wanted to wear every day. But Linjer might turn me into one yet.

I value form more than function when it comes to watches (I always have my iPhone within arm's reach that I can check for the time); I see them as pieces of jewelry. To that end, I love the look of Linjer's watches. I got the "Classic" watch with a 34 mm face, rose gold case, and navy leather strap. Rose gold seems to be a real love-it-or-really-really-don't shade of gold, but I'm a big fan, and I'm excited it's an option Linjer offers. I'm also a big fan of this watch's thin band and smaller face; they give it a feminine touch. To echo Breton, this is also the lightest watch I've ever worn. I keep forgetting I’m wearing it.

Overall, it feels and looks a lot nicer than its $250 price suggests.

Tyler Lauletta, commerce reporter:

The watch tried:Linjer The Minimalist Men's Watch, $249

I've found that in most cases, at least for my taste, less is more when it comes to watches. That's why I'm really enjoying my watch from Linjer. It's extremely clean, the perfect weight, and looks great on my wrist. The leather strap is comfortable enough that it's easy to forget it's on my wrist at times. If you're looking to bring some simple sophistication to your watch collection, Linjer is a great option that doesn't break the bank.

Kelsey Mulvey, commerce reporter:

The watch tried: Linjer The Minimalist Women's Watch, $249

Writing for Insider Picks has turned me into a regular watch-wearer. While I still check my phone for the time, having a watch strapped on my wrist makes me feel more put together. All of Linjer's watches are free of logos, so you can easily dress them or down. The brand also lets you choose from three different sizes, so I went with a bigger watch face — not all watch brands give their customers as much autonomy.

Linjer's men's and women's watches all retail for $249, and they're available in a bunch of great colors and sizes.

DON'T MISS: This site offers high-end watch brands at some of the most competitive prices you’ll find

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Years before UberCab started ferrying people around cities and AirBed & Breakfast began offering spare couches and bedrooms, a young lawyer named Jason Finger sat down one night at his office in New York City and decided to solve the pesky problem of what to order for dinner.

It was 1999, the height of the frenzy of the first dot-com boom.

Finger was fresh out of law school and working at the law firm O’Sullivan, Graev, and Karabell.

For some reason he had taken it upon himself to walk around the floor every evening and collect dinner orders from his other late-working junior colleagues.

Finger registered the URL SeamlessWheels.com in 2003.

Calling in these orders, coordinating payments, and then organizing the incoming food-delivery people, who all appeared in the lobby wielding soggy plastic bags at the same time, was about the nightmare you might expect. So Finger and a friend decided to come up with a solution.

They built a food-ordering website that catered to law firms and investment banks. They called it SeamlessWeb.

SeamlessWeb launched in April of 2000 and ran right into the teeth of the dot-com bust. Finger raised less than half a million dollars, paltry by the overcaffeinated standards that came later, but the service caught on quickly with the employees at several high-powered law firms and investment banks.

SeamlessWeb contracted with hundreds of Manhattan restaurants and gave its corporate customers and their employees a way to browse menus and place orders over a website, expense meals to the company, and coordinate the flurry of deliveries.

The business, headquartered in midtown Manhattan on the corner of Thirty-Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, grew briskly. Restaurants appreciated the increased volume and the companies loved how it tamed the chaos of monthly expense reports.

If there’s a forefather of the crowded family of on-demand delivery startups that now jam the tech hubs of the United States, Asia, and Europe, it’s SeamlessWeb.

'You've got such a beautiful family. Why don't you spend more time with your beautiful baby daughter?'

Finger was among the first to see that the internet could do more than connect people with information and one another in a purely digital realm; it could also efficiently move physical things in the real world.

He understood that if it worked for food, it could work for other things. And he drew up plans to take advantage.

Seamless Meals, as he called it, was going to be one service. He also had another idea, which he dubbed Seamless Wheels. The notion was to create an easy way to book and expense town cars, the same way the company had made it easy to order food.

Finger registered the URL SeamlessWheels.com in 2003 and over the next few years started introducing the service to blue-chip law firms like Dewey and LeBoeuf, White and Case, and Debevoise and Plimpton.

The investors he approached about Wheels were wary.

“Every institutional investor I spoke with was like, ‘Black cars are niche, it’s only New York City, it’s only bankers, there are long-standing relationships with companies, there is no opportunity in the consumer market,’ ” Finger says.

Finger dismissed the warning. 

At one point the transportation coordinator at a law firm suggested that Finger tread carefully, because the rumor was that the Russian Mafia was involved in New York City’s black-car business. The Italian Mafia will kill you, the saying goes; the Russian Mafia will let you live and kill your entire family.

Finger dismissed the warning. Then one day, he arrived at his office and picked up a voice mail. The message was from a man who did not identify himself and left no return number.

It has long since been deleted, but both he and his wife, Stefanie, who also worked at SeamlessWeb and listened to the message, recall it the same way:

"Jason, we understand you’ve been pitching a car service to large enterprises in the New York City area. We don’t think that would be a good idea. You’ve got such a beautiful family. Why don’t you spend more time with your beautiful baby daughter? You’ve got such a good thing going with your food business. Why would you want to broaden into other areas?"

The message was “a slap in the face,” Finger says.

He suspected it was from one of the long-standing town-car companies that had profitably served the banks and law firms for years. They weren’t eager to see an online intermediary come between them and their clients.

Stefanie recalls being frightened by the message and said “just the thought of someone following us home from work was super-intimidating.”

The story has a happy ending, though.

For the first time Finger wondered whether the car business was worth it. Even aside from the veiled threat, Seamless Wheels could hurt Seamless Meals. If a car kept a senior bank executive waiting at an airport, it would jeopardize the Seamless brand.

This was before the era of the smartphone, and there were few ways to coordinate drivers on the road to ensure that clients got a smooth pickup experience. Then there was the reality that investors simply weren’t that excited about the car-service concept.

 Seamless Wheels continued working with the same law firms for a few more years, but after that voice mail, Finger largely gave up on developing it further.

The food business grew and expanded to serve regular people at their homes as well as companies. In 2006, the food services company Aramark acquired SeamlessWeb and put pressure on Finger to focus on the food business, which was growing rapidly outside of New York City.

Eventually he shut down Seamless Wheels.

The story has a happy ending, though. Finger raised private equity and spun SeamlessWeb out of Aramark in 2011, then shortened its name to Seamless.

Two years later, it merged with a newer and smaller rival, Grubhub, and is now the leading online food-delivery company in the United States.

But Finger still thinks about the town-car market and has watched Uber’s early growth with admiration and even a little jealousy. He now believes Seamless Wheels was too early and couldn’t have succeeded before the era of smartphones and ubiquitous text messaging.

“I look back at my life and certainly I have regrets,” he says. “The car offering is not one of them. Maybe I am rationalizing because it has been a huge opportunity. But a lot of things from the timing standpoint just didn’t seem to fit.”

Copyright © 2017 THE UPSTARTS by Brad Stone. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company.

SEE ALSO: Steve Jobs used these unique public speaking strategies to get people to do what he wanted

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NOW WATCH: What it's like to take the 'Uber of seaplanes' from NYC to the Hamptons

Kris Yenbamroong is the chef and owner of Night + Market, a restaurant with two locations in the West Hollywood and Silver Lake neighborhoods of Los Angeles. He was named one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs in 2016. 

His restaurants are bright, colorful nods to the authentic Thai cuisine he mastered at his parents' restaurant, Talésai. But at home, Yenbmaroong was attempting to work in a space that was altogether uninspiring. 

Laurel & Wolf is a Los Angeles-based interior design startup that pairs clients with designers to refresh specific rooms for $149 each. For $249 a room, you can pick from three different designers whose concepts you can preview before selecting. 

Laurel & Wolf designer Jessica Ruiz Lee helped Yenbamroong revamp his office space — let's take a look at how it turned out. 

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The Night + Market restaurants are located in an exceptionally colorful space. Regular customers include celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, Aziz Ansari, Lena Dunham, and Ryan Gosling (though Gosling apparently only gets take-out here).

But at home, Yenbamroong was dealing with a rather uninspiring space. Over the last few months, he has been working on a cookbook with his wife, Sarah St. Lifer, that's due to come out this year. "It was so cluttered that I'd open the door, look at it and think, 'I can't work here,'" Yenbamroong said to Laurel & Wolf. "Then I'd close the door and go sit on the couch, which has its own distractions."

Yenbamroong enlisted the help of Laurel & Wolf to maximize the productivity of the space.

A Harvard Business School graduate took a risky dig at billionaire venture capitalist Chris Sacca on a recent episode of "Shark Tank"— and it almost paid off.

College friends Jon Staff and Pete Davis recently appeared on the show to pitch their startup, Getaway, which rents out tiny houses in the woods for city-dwellers looking to unplug.

Staff and Davis, who have already raised $1.2 million in seed funding, walked on the show seeking a $500,000 investment for 5% equity at a valuation of $10 million.

They set their sights on Sacca, a legendary angel investor who made early bets on Uber, Twitter, and Instagram— and shares the cofounders' love of the outdoors. The Upstate New York native owns two wood cabins on Lake Tahoe, in addition to an estate in Great Falls, Montana.

Davis took a shot at Sacca in what looked like an attempt to guilt him into an investment.

"You have brought and shepherded much technology into this world, and you know technology needs a counter-balance. We can provide a counter-balance," Davis said. "You can pay amends for helping bring Twitter into this world. And this is the anti-Twitter."

It seemed to work. Sacca offered up $500,000 for 7.14% stake at a valuation of $7 million.

This would have been a better deal for Sacca than Gateway's prior investors had been offered. Staff and Davis worried taking Sacca's offer would irritate their most loyal backers, and ultimately turned it down.

Still, Staff, who is CEO, admits it was a tempting offer.

"You get caught up in it, for sure. ... Chris Sacca is a big deal. I didn't really know that fully. But all my Silicon Valley bro-friends are like, 'Chris Sacca, dude, like what!" Staff says, putting on a Southern California accent.

"But ultimately … it doesn't matter how famous you are, even if you can add more value because you're Chris Sacca. It's like, I have people who backed me from day one, when this was totally a crazy idea, and I can't give you a better deal than they're getting and go face them."

They walked away empty-handed.

Sacca later tweeted that he was into the idea, but couldn't find evidence to support a $10 million valuation.

Within 24 hours of the episode's airing, 100,000 visitors came to Getaway's website, compared with its typical 1,000 to 3,300 visitors a day. The company also experienced an uptick in reservations. Davis said the company's half a dozen tiny houses are booked through the end of summer.

Getaway's houses, which range from 160 to 200 square feet, are located within two hour's drive of Boston and New York City. Each home comes with s'mores supplies, board games, heating and electricity, and the creature comforts of home. They rent for as little as $99 a night.

Staff and Davis hope to bring the cabins to 30 US cities by 2022. 

SEE ALSO: A pair of Harvard students have designed tiny houses that could be the future of weekend getaways

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Company builder Entrepreneur First has helped to create highly successful startups like AI startup Magic Pony Technologies and bike light creator Blaze since it was founded in London in 2011 — but things don't always go to plan.

Each year, Entrepreneur First looks to find high-flying individuals that could start and scale a tech business.

It then pairs them up with another person on its cohort and asks them to come up with an idea for a new tech startup. Typically, a technically skilled founder will be paired with someone who will be able to run a business and crunch the numbers.

However, the founders don't always gel in the right way once they're paired.

"We always have problems with teams who are really good friends and they love going to the pub together," Alice Bentinck, Entrepreneur First cofounder, told Business Insider last month, adding that just because you get on with someone doesn't mean that you're going to be good at running a company with them.

When this happens, Entrepreneur First will step in and break teams up.

"We speak with them [the founders] individually about next steps," said Bentinck. "We try to create an environment where it’s perfectly fine to say: 'It's been really great working with you but we're not being productive and the opportunity cost for us is too high so let's go and find you someone else. And that's totally fine."

About 50% of people on the Entrepreneur First cohort find their cofounder in the first two weeks and the other 50% take up to 10 weeks, Bentinck said.

Entrepreneur First provides founders in its cohort with £17,000 in pre-seed funding, mentoring, and workspace. In return, it takes an 8% equity stake in the company that is created. The startup factory raised a £40 million venture capital fund last year to invest in its alumni when they graduate and when they raise subsequent funding rounds. So far, it's backed approximately 30 companies with this fund.

The shift towards older founders

Bentinck and her cofounder Matt Clifford, the CEO, started out accepting only graduates onto Entrepreneur First, often choosing to take computer science coming out of from Oxbridge. But that's changed in recent years.

"One of the big shifts over the last year has been really cementing a move away from graduates," said Bentinck. "So graduates used to make up 100% for [cohorts] 1-3, then it moved down to about 40%. It's now moving down to 5%."

She added: "If you've just come out of uni — it's not impossible, it is still true for some people — but it's relatively rare that you have the depth experience or the depth of skills that mean you can compete with other founders."

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• London-based social media app Fling burned through $21 million in less than three years.
• Fling never brought in any revenue.
• The founder splashed out on 1st class flights, Ibiza hotels, and Michelin-star restaurants.
• The app struggled after Apple pulled it from the App Store last summer for becoming too sexually explicit.

In early July 2015, temperatures were rising in the boardroom on the top floor of a 12-story office block in Hammersmith, West London.

Marco Nardone, the 28-year-old CEO and founder of social media app Fling, had called an emergency meeting the day after his app was removed from the App Store by Apple for being too similar to the notorious Chatroulette platform.

The atmosphere was tense and Nardone was furious, three former employees said, because his COO, Emerson Osmond, had gone behind his back. Specifically, he was angry because Osmond had told Nardone's assistant not to order tents for the office that would allow staff to sleep by their desks and work around the clock to get Fling back onto the App Store, a former employee told Business Insider.

Nardone shouted and swore at Osmond before squaring up to him as if he was about to do something more, said two former employees. At this point, Nardone's Italian father, Remo Nardone— a man in his eighties and Fling's biggest investor — stepped in to try and cool the situation down, one of the employees said. But his son didn't react well. He swore at his father before hurling a Pret a Manger baguette in his direction. It narrowly missed and collided with a glass window above his head. The event was described to Business Insider by four former employees.

In the lead-up to the incident, Fling — a social media app that raised $21 million (£17 million) from investors — had become inundated with explicit photos. Built by a London startup called Unii, Fling allowed people to send photos and videos to strangers around the world. The random recipients could then chat and reply to the sender. The app also showed "Flingers" a map of where their Flings had landed.

At its peak, Fling claimed to have 4 million users on its app, who sent a total of 50 billion messages. However, the revenue-free company burnt through the last of its millions in August 2015, according to documents produced by bankruptcy administrators.

The app — built by up to 50 staff and backed by a network of wealthy individuals from the UK, Italy, and Asia — struggled to retain users. Mismanagement at the top of the company was a major issue, according to nine former employees that Business Insider has spoken to over the last three months.

Several of them said they believed Nardone's behavior changed significantly during Fling's lifetime, while others told stories of mysterious girls around the office and wild party weekends. But more on that later.

After failing to secure the funding it needed to continue, Fling quietly shut down in August 2016, based on bankruptcy administration documents submitted to Companies House by Unii Limited.

Nardone told Business Insider he refutes what his former colleagues have told us, but he declined to comment further.

Fling started out as a social network for students

In 2012, Nardone set out to build a social network for students called Unii from an office on Berkeley Street in London. That's the Berkeley Street that adjoins the legendary Berkeley Square in Mayfair, where a nightingale once sang for Vera Lynn. It's the capital's most expensive neighborhood.

The 28-year-old — who attended the £37,000-a-year Charterhouse boarding school before studying physics at Imperial College London — worked as a trader for Credit Suisse for a year before becoming a technology entrepreneur. His father is the multimillionaire founder of Enotria Winecellars, a successful wine business that distributes wine and spirits to bars and restaurants around the UK. "Marco felt pressure to live up to his father," said a former Fling employee. In person, Nardone was hyper, ambitious, and volatile, our sources said. He had the ability to charm investors and would-be employees, but several former staff said they ended up scared of him, citing his unpredictable moods and confrontational approach as major issues.

Describing the concept behind Unii to Tech City News on a speedboat in the River Thames in October 2014, which is where Tech City News got entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas, Nardone said: "Unii.com is a social network made exclusively for students in UK higher education and it allows students to better engage with individuals and societies at their university or college." The platform included a jobs board, opinion polling, accommodation matching, society pages, and student offers.

Nardone secured approximately £1.5 million from his father to help him build and launch Unii.com, according to a former employee, who added that he went on to receive a total of around £5 million from his father for Unii.com and Fling.

Things started off relatively well at Unii.com. "The culture of the company was great, the team was a good mix," an ex-employee said. "However, from the top, it was built to feel like a university startup built out of a dorm room. I think it envied what Facebook had become, and wanted to emulate what they had done."

Unii.com attracted 100,000 UK students within six months of going live, according to Nardone. But the entrepreneur said he had a flash of inspiration for Fling while on a flight to Hong Kong in January 2014, which ultimately led to the demise of the Unii.com platform.

"While I was staring at the flightpath map on my seat screen I had one of those insane moments where my fingers couldn't type my idea fast enough on Notes,"he told TechCrunch. "What if we shook up the messaging structure? What if you could 'fling' a private message out to the world, and literally see it fly and land all over a world map – much like the one I was looking at on my British Airways seat screen. By the time we landed I had already prototyped the designs for Fling."

When Nardone returned to London, he pulled his engineers off the original Unii idea. He assigned them to build the Fling app and moved them into a new, top-floor office in Hammersmith — far from Mayfair — that had the ability to accommodate more staff. The new HQ was roughly 15 minutes walk from his riverside penthouse apartment at Distillery Wharf.

Fling was built in less than four months between March and July 2014. When Nardone felt it was ready, he took it upon himself to set it live in the App Store in July without consulting other people in the company. "Marco made decisions completely on his own to the point where the tech team didn’t know what he was doing," a former employee said.

Fling was getting 'a thousand users every 10 minutes'

Almost immediately after the launch there were thousands of people signing up to Fling on a daily basis, according to a former employee. "I remember seeing the signups just going up, and up, and up, and up, for the app," they said.

"We were pretty chuffed because we were being told 'this is all organic' or 'I've only spent a few hundred pounds on a few Facebook ads' and the numbers were shooting up like a thousand [users] every 10 minutes." It later turned out that considerable sums of money had been spent on social media marketing campaigns in order to get these users, according to three former employees and documents submitted to Companies House.

Fling's tech team wasn't anticipating the initial strain on the company's servers and Fling's infrastructure buckled.

"Our tech guys had no clue what was going on so things started to fall over and Marco started to show his true colors and lose his rag on a regular basis with the tech teams," said a former employee. "He’d shout and scream and throw things across the office." These claims were supported by four ex-employees.

"The ego took over," said the same employee. "The perceived success took over. He was likening himself to Evan Spiegel, the Snapchat guy, and all this bullshit." Another employee said Nardone used to compare himself to Elon Musk.

Apple banned Fling after nudity became a big issue

Insufficient computing resources weren't Fling's only problem.

Within weeks of launching, people were using the app to send nude photos and sexual material to strangers.

In an early review of the app in July 2014, TechCrunch's Natasha Lomas wrote: "The most obvious use-case — beyond shiggles [shits and giggles] — appears to be as a virtual hook-up app to find remote sexting buddies to photo-message to one-on-one."

Lomas later updated her story to say: "Well that didn’t take long; the first five replies to my inaugural Fling included one picture of a penis. Don’t say you weren’t warned."

In September 2014, three months after the app was released, a moderation team was hired in the Philippines to vet photos on the platform. There were about 10 people moderating Fling content at any one time, according to a former employee, who said Fling was paying the moderators about $20,000 (£16,000) a month in total.

Nardone kicked other male users off the platform who posted inappropriate photos of themselves on the app.

"They couldn’t even have a photograph with their shirt off," said a former employee. "Unless it was him. He would then boost himself to everybody on the [Fling] database." Nardone used to promote "influencers" on the platform using a feature known as a "Super Fling" so that their Flings would reach up to 5,000 people at one, according to the employee, who added that Nardone had access to "the whole user base."

Nardone would regularly walk around the office with his shirt off, according to multiple former employees.

As Nardone clamped down on male nudity, he allowed female users to "pretty much do what they wanted and actively encouraged it as well by boosting pretty girls and stuff like that," said a former employee. "Guys were getting booted off the app as soon as they approached it while girls were getting absolutely trolled as soon as they were on it. It was just a spiral."

In June 2015 Fling was pulled from the App Store by Apple with no warning or notice. Apple hated the fact that Fling was a randomized messaging app that was similar in many respects to the notorious Chatroulette, according to a former employee.

"It was the worst day of my life,"Nardone told Business Insider's Matt Weinberger at the time, referring to the day he found out his app had been pulled from the App Store. The removal took Nardone by surprise. He found out while having an unrelated a conversation with a would-be venture capital investor. As he reached for the investor's phone to show him how to download the app, one of his executives stopped him, muttering "no, no, no." As Weinberger wrote at the time, "a perplexed Nardone made it through the conversation. But when he asked the employee what had him so agitated, he got the worst news that an app startup can get: It had been removed from Apple's App Store."

On the day, Nardone asked staff to work late so they could address the issue. The CEO turned up in the middle of the night with two women that staff had never seen before and took them into a room, according to three former employees.

Commenting on the evening, one employee said: "He came into the office around midnight, with two girls I’d never met before in my life. He proceeded to be in the social space, which we had as a chill-out room. It had a big company sofa and [fake] grass on the floor, big screens, all that sort of stuff. And he basically frolicked, for want of a better word, with these girls in that room, sending out Flings of the two girls kissing."

Unsurprisingly, Fling's employees were not able to fix the problems with the app in one night.

For 19 straight days, Fling's team worked all hours of the day and night trying to build a new version of the app that met Apple's guidelines.

Nardone wanted to put up tents in the office so that staff could work longer hours. When Fling's COO told him that this might be a violation of UK employment law, there was a heated debate in a boardroom that ended up with a baguette being thrown at Nardone's father.

As the engineers worked on the problem, Nardone went to Ibiza with two other members of staff, according to multiple sources and Instagram posts like this one. While in Ibiza, Nardone and his staff stayed in a suite at the Ushuaïa beach hotel, which is one of Ibiza's premier hotels, complete with an open-air club.

One former employee said the trip was to a "supposedly quiet beach to have a relaxed weekend so they could think about stuff." But while in Ibiza, Nardone took them partying.

The ex-employee added: "[It was] full on, full-scale, Avicii partying, which is well documented," the source said, referring to a concert they attended featuring the Swedish DJ.

"Ok FIIIINE Avicii, I'll fly over to see your opening party tonight pfff 😆 #weekendbreak#avicii#whynot," Nardone wrote on one Instagram post that he uploaded from a British Airways business class lounge at Heathrow airport.

James Campbell, a former iOS engineer on the Fling app, told Business Insider that "staff morale was severely dented" while the app was off the App Store and Nardone was in Ibiza.

Eventually, the engineers made a new app, almost totally from scratch, that removed the "chat-with-strangers" feature and made it more like Snapchat, with followers and broadcast options.

Apple approved the app and let it back into the App Store on July 14, 2015, while Nardone was still partying in Ibiza, according to an ex-employee.

"Can't tell you HOW PROUD I am to introduce the #new#flingapp to you 😆🎉✌🏼️ the team did 19 all-nighters to get it out quick - here's a sneak peek before launch 😜#startuplife#family," Nardone wrote on an Instagram post.

Referring to the time, an ex-employee said: "We were slogging our guts off. So that left a really bitter taste in the mouth of pretty much everybody, so he started to lose people at that point. Understandably so."

The new version of the Fling app, which Nardone later described as an enhanced version of Fling, was not well-received by users, who gave it an average rating of 1.5 stars out of five on the App Store.

Nardone's behaviour took a turn for the worse when he returned, according to three former employees.

Fling COO Emerson Osmond left in August 2015 and several others followed suit. "The entire marketing team resigned en masse," said one of the former employees. "About 10 people. That was September 2015 onwards. They all quit, and they actually weren't that often at the brunt of his wrath. They just didn’t want to be there."

From then on, Fling really struggled to retain users, with most people downloading the app onto their phone for around 30 days before deleting it, according to one employee.

Money was spent on first-class flights, extravagant parties, a tour bus, and Michelin star meals

Despite the internal problems, Fling raised millions of pounds, with Nardone's LinkedIn profile stating that the figure totaled $21 million (£17 million) over its lifetime. Two former Fling employees said around £5 million of that came from Nardone's father.

"He [Nardone] was pouring money in at the top of this thing and it was just pissing out of the bottom in terms of users," said one of the former employees. "He was pumping tens of thousands of pounds a day through Facebook advertising and Twitter and what-have-you without telling anyone that he was doing it."

The rest of Fling's funding came from a syndicate of investors that was largely assembled by ex-Goldman Sachs banker turned hedge fund manager Raffaele Costa, according to three former employees.

Costa, who did not reply to Business Insider's request for comment, owns a 54-metre mega-yacht, according to Boat magazine, worth $25 million (£20 million). The Italian multimillionaire, who is the CEO and founder of Savile Row hedge fund Tyndaris, refers to himself as "Captain Magic," according to a Financial Times article from February 2013. He met Nardone in the summer of 2013, according to a former Fling employee.

The same former Fling employee said: "This guy [Costa], he delivered. He could raise money dead easy. He had an amazing network of very, very high net worths from all of the world, including many Italians. They were pumping in money [to Fling] basically on his say-so and Marco's enthusiasm. We basically seemed to be constantly raising money and that's mainly because Marco was constantly burning money."

Nardone wasn't afraid to spend big, either. Meals at exclusive London restaurants like Nobu, Aqua, and Hakkasan were paid for by Nardone on the company account, according to two former employees, as were business class and first class flights.

"He had no concept of the value of money," said one ex-employee. "Literally none. He used to think he was lean. He used to tell us we were a lean startup yet we had top floor offices in Hammersmith with strip lighting down the ceiling which the developers hated because it reflected on their screens."

Nardone didn't hold back when it came to marketing either, both online and offline.

One employee said there were "two tours in the USA, including a full-on fucking bus completely decked out in Fling colours." The bus cost tens of thousands of pounds, according to the employee, who added that it was once used by musician Lenny Kravitz.

"He [Nardone] controlled everything financially," said the former employee, adding that there was no chief financial officer (CFO) or accountant. "It was a black hole. No one had sight of what was in the accounts. He would just spend how he felt like he was going to spend. He had no idea what a budget was."

Nardone's office in Hammersmith had a view over the river. He equipped it with two iMacs, a luxurious rug, and customized wood flooring. He "basically built his own little throne room," as one former employee put it.

Adding to the company's overhead, there were at least three staff members at the startup who were on salaries in excess of £100,000, according to two former employees.

Nardone himself paid himself over £204,000, according to a payroll spreadsheet seen by Business Insider.

Staff claimed the CEO's behaviour was inappropriate

Multiple employees told Business Insider that they considered Nardone's workplace behaviour to be inappropriate on more than one occasion. Four of them said that they hope people never have to work under him again.

In addition to throwing a Pret a Manger baguette at his father in the board room, Nardone also threw a cup of miso soup at his head of design in front of the whole office, one employee said, while another said that he threw chairs around the office as well.

Nardone was regularly seen in with mysterious women on business trips and at parties attended by colleagues, according to four employees.

Staff said that Nardone lost a lot of weight during the lifetime of Fling but they couldn't understand why. Another said that his mood became increasingly erratic around the summer of 2015, around the time he went to Ibiza.

In March 2016, Nardone hired his girlfriend Toni Allcock as head of human resources (HR) to handle some of the backlash he started to receive from staff. Allcock did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

"He attempted to funnel all unpopular or unpleasant decisions through her," said one former employee. "It was relatively common for staff leaving to have some part of their pay held back and take a while to reach them. Unsure if this was some sort of leverage or just petty."

Another former member of staff said: "When people built up a resentment towards him he seemed baffled and considered it just angry townspeople pointing fingers at the 'guy at the top.' Occasionally he'd (appear to) arrange token gifts in an attempt to appease people somewhat. These varied from cookies all the way up to full-day team-building activities. In my opinion, he started a company simply to be the 'boss' because he feels that's his natural station."

The money ran out and Fling took its app offline

With staff leaving and money running out, Fling started to run out of options. The company needed a constant stream of money to fuel its aggressive marketing efforts and keep paying its employees.

The bankruptcy administrators wrote that Fling struggled to raise further capital as a result of its "legacy issues," which included, but were not limited to, "senior management who left the company after Apple App Store removal, high overhead costs as the company owned and had developed 10 other products (not solely the Fling application), as well as low product growth and retention." Nardone initially set out to build a series of apps and websites for students, including one called Studently and another to help students find accommodation, but these products never really took off as Fling became Nardone's main priority.

As the finances dwindled, Nardone stopped using and paying for the Fling content moderation team in the Philippines. Users immediately took advantage and began behaving as if they were on Chatroulette again. Ian Morris, a contributor for Forbes, wrote a review of the app in September 2016 titled, "Social Network Converts To Amateur Porn Hub Overnight."

The app shut down quietly at some point towards the end of last summer, with users complaining on Twitter that they hadn't heard anything from the company about why they couldn't access their accounts.

Nardone burnt through £9 million in 2015 and almost £3.5 million in the nine months leading up to 31 December 2014, according to the administrators' report.

A former employee said: "He basically went down in flames at the end of the day. His dad got to the point where he wasn’t going to pump any more money in."

Fling filed for administration in August 2016

London-based Resolve Ltd was appointed as the administrator on August 26, 2016, by Nardone's father. Resolve employees Simon Harris, Mark Supperstone, and Ben Woodthorpe handled the case but none of them responded to Business Insider's request for comment.

The administrators were tasked with rescuing the company or achieving a better result for Unii's shareholders than if it were wound up.

The administration process was dragged out over several months, with the company filing not one but four "notifications of intent" to file for insolvency administration.

The administrators wrote that a number of companies looked into buying Fling in the six months leading up to September 7. But in the end, Nardone set up another company called DSCVR Ltd and used this business to make an offer for Unii of £250,000 on August 4, 2016, which was accepted on August 31, 2016. The administrators wrote that the company's intellectual property (IP) was valued at £213,639, while the office equipment was worth £15,100.

DSCVR Ltd is expected to fold due to a lack of funds, according to a former employee. The company had not filed for administration at the time of writing.

The administrators went on to state that the money is simply being circulated — passed from one of Nardone's companies to another — but stressed that there was nothing illegal about the deal.

Nardone travelled the world after his company filed for administration

Fling shut down with debts of £880,997, including a £120,268 debt with Twitter and a £45,068 debt with Google. The administrator's report also shows that former COO Emerson Osmond is owed £98,634, likely in unpaid wages.

While reporting this story, Business Insider contacted more than 15 former employees.

Nardone told Business Insider on January 5 that he denies all the allegations made by his former employees.

Prior to that, he sent two screenshots of a LinkedIn conversation between Business Insider and Chung Lin Hsieh, one of his former employees, where we asked what life was like working for Fling. He did not explain his logic for sending the screenshots.

Fling is no longer available for download on the App Store and existing users can't use the app.

Fling has not made any announcements on its website or its social media channels to inform its users that it is no longer in business.

Photos on Facebook and Instagram show that Nardone has been away on holiday with his girlfriend during the administration process. The entrepreneur visited Bora Bora, Nice, Venice, the Maldives, and Miami all in the last few months. "You just look at it and he's one of those rich kids of Instagram," said a former employee.

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LONDON — Investment in UK startups and fast-growing private companies fell dramatically in 2016 according to data from Beauhurst, a company that tracks high-growth businesses in Britain.

Deal numbers fell by 18% to 1,460 last year and the total amount invested declined by 12% to £4.1 billion ($5.1 billion), according to Beauhurst's data. It is the first yearly drop in investment since the company began tracking equity investments in private startups and high-growth companies in 2010.

Beauhurst describes the figures as "a dramatic halt to years of growth" and "a worrying trend for the short to medium term." It follows a slowdown in momentum in 2015.

The obvious explanation for the slump in investment would be Britain's vote last June to leave the European Union. However, Beauhurst cautions on this interpretation, saying there was no significant drop in deals after the vote. The busiest month for investment was September when close to £500 million was invested across 117 deals.

Still, the amount invested each month fell off dramatically after January. Press coverage in the run up to June's referendum was full of predictions of a possible recession if Britain voted to leave the European Union and this may have put off investors.

Beauhurst’s Head of Research Pedro Madeira says in a release announcing the numbers: "The large-scale drop in equity deal numbers across the board is concerning, not least for the businesses who are looking to raise capital to fund their growth.

"But it’s not all doom-and-gloom – investors and companies (many of whom opposed Brexit) have kept a stiff upper lip and continued their deal-making. Skyscanner’s acquisition was the largest (of those with disclosed values) since 2011; crowdfunding platforms are moving up the value chain and (in some cases) becoming proto-fund managers; life sciences has always been a strong sector in the UK, and the opening of the world-leading Francis Crick Institute will surely further cement that."

Beauhurst says crowdfunding is "emerging as a real alternative for funding later-stage companies," with bigger companies turning to it as a method to raise money. However, the data shows the total number of crowdfunding campaigns fell by 14% compared to 2015.

Crowdcube, one of the UK's biggest crowdfunding platforms, said on Thursday that it saw a 20% rise in investment in the six months after Brexit.

CMO and cofounder Luke Lang said in an emailed statement: "While the Government tackles the economic and political outfall of the decision to leave the EU, we believe British businesses are becoming more attractive to investors right now, particularly with the country’s reputation as a centre of excellence for fintech and other highly disruptive startups."

Beauhurt's figures also showed solid growth in early stage funding for life science businesses, up 19% to £202 million.

The biggest investment of last year was a £210 million investment in food delivery startup Deliveroo in August.

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"If we were to renew the employment deal today, what would it look like?" asks Jolt CEO and cofounder Roei Deutsch.

Jolt is a fast-growing San Francisco-based startup that connects Silicon Valley pros with companies around the world for videoconferenced lectures. So if you're a Polish startup and could use an hour of expertise from a Google engineer or a Stanford professor, Jolt has the hookup.

From Deutsch's perspective, modern employment is kind of a raw deal, especially for the mythical millennial tech worker: When they go looking for a job, Deutsch says, young people aren't looking for lifetime careers — they're looking for places where they can spend 12 to 24 months learning what they can before they go on to the next thing. It's a big part of why even the top tech companies have such high turnover.

In fact, Deutsch says, the opportunity to learn is a more powerful attractor for top talent than lavish startup perks like snack kitchens or yoga classes. For many, Deutsch says, the chance to grow personally and professionally is more valuable even than a fat paycheck.

And so, about six months ago, when Deutsch and his cofounders went to build the Jolt team, they sponsored studies into the habits and desires of Silicon Valley and New York City tech workers. What they came out with was a concept called "Chapterships," a new concept of employment for a new kind of workforce.

The Chapterships concept has helped them grow to 14 (and soon, he says 18) people. Now, having built a product team in Tel Aviv, Jolt is starting to grow its Silicon Valley presence with the same methods, using the $2 million in venture capital it raised in July 2016.

What are "Chapterships?"

The name comes from the fact that, as Deutsch says, "we help you better prepare for your next chapter." He even wrote a free book about it, that you can download here.

This Chapterships philosophy has two key tenets: 

• After two years, your job is done, no matter what. At that point, you can either leave the company with no hard feelings, or else find a new two-year "mission" at the company. "It doesn't mean I'm firing you, it means 'let's find something new for you to do.'" 
• There are no Google-esque perks at Jolt whatsoever, and Deutsch cops to the fact that he's paying employees below market rate. Instead, that money gets reinvested into what he calls "employee success." You come in with a list of things that you want to learn, and Jolt invests "tremendous resources" and assigns you a manager to help you get there.

As an example, Deutsch says, one of Jolt's engineers recently came in to discuss his personal learning goals.

After his two years at Jolt were up, the engineer told Deutsch, he wanted to be the CEO of his own company, but he was concerned he wasn't confident enough. Rather than try to convince him to stay, Deutsch made it part of his development plan. 

"We're probably the first startup to send an engineer to acting class," Deutsch said.

To Deutsch, it's a way more valuable investment than those startup perks, designed to "distract" employees from the fact that "they're stuck in a job that doesn't help them improve," he says.

Experimental

This is still an "experiment," as Deutsch readily admits. As Jolt refines the concept, he says, some employees are even going to have their stock options fully vested after two years as a push towards giving them "total freedom" when their two-year chaptership is up.

Nobody should be at Jolt if they don't want to be, he says. It's sort of similar to Google's famed ATAP secret labs, where researchers are given two-year employment contracts and shown the door at the end, to encourage fast innovation and nobody to stay on their laurels.

And as for any concerns that the 2-year model encourages high turnover, well, Deutsch says that it's still the tech industry, after all.

"People leave anyway," jokes Deutsch.

SEE ALSO: The future of tech is already here — and nobody cares

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: An Israeli startup invented a compost bin that converts kitchen waste to cooking fuel

A London startup that posts packaged flowers through people's letterboxes has raised £3.75 million to help it expand its business across Europe.

Total investment in the company, which allows people to order fresh flowers via an app or a website, now stands at £7.25 million.

Founded in 2013 by Oxford graduate Aron Gelbard and former hedge fund partner Ben Stanway, Bloom & Wild claims to deliver tens of thousands of bouquets a month to customers in the UK and Ireland.

The startup said the additional funds will be used to improve the customer experience, develop new products, expand Bloom & Wild's corporate gifting business, and expand Bloom & Wild into new markets across Europe.

"People's most exciting moments come straight to their mobile via WhatsApp or other messaging services — we're enabling them to order flowers and gifts from the palm of their hand with better product, designs and payments," said Gelbard in a statement.

"Our mission is to make sending and receiving flowers a joy, using technology to turn emotions into an action in the simplest and most beautiful way possible. This attention to detail sits as a core value to our ambition to be Europe's most loved flower brand."

The funding round was led by Burda Principal Investments, Hubert Burda Media’s investment unit, while previous investors MMC Ventures and the company's other angel investors also participated.

Camilla Dolan, director at MMC Ventures, said in a statement: "Aron and his team's commitment to delighting customers through the power of flower continues to amaze and impress us and is reflected in the business's growth to date - it is exactly this kind of focus and ambition we seek to support at MMC Ventures.

"We welcome Burda Principal Investments as a co-investor and are confident that this additional funding will allow Bloom & Wild to further develop its market-leading position using technology to bring joy to its customers."

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NOW WATCH: How to escape quicksand — it's easier than you might think

One in every five UK startups intends to open a European office due to Brexit, according to survey results published Tuesday by Silicon Valley Bank.

The technology bank's annual "Startup Outlook Survey"— based on responses from 940 startup executives — aims to gauge startup perceptions on business conditions and Brexit, as well as fundraising, hiring, and policy issues.

It found that 21% of UK startups are planning to open up a new office in cities such as Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm, which are all trying to take on London's Tech City.

At least five UK startups have moved to Berlin as a result of Brexit, according to an article in The Financial Times last November, which said 39 more were seriously considering the move.

The survey also found that around one in 10 (11%) UK startups are thinking of moving their headquarters away from the UK to another European country after the EU referendum.

1% of respondents said they were definitely going to move their HQ to Europe as a result of Brexit, while 5% said they were now thinking of moving their HQ outside of the UK and Europe.

London betting startup Smarkets is one of the companies starting to move to the US as a direct result of Brexit. The company, which classes itself as a peer-to-peer betting exchange and is expecting to post revenues in excess of £20 million for FY 2016, told Business Insider last September that it is planning to open a new office in a currently unknown US city early 2017.

The startup execs cited the following as their main Brexit concerns:

• Lack of long-term opportunities for non-British employees in the UK (32%)
• Harder to raise venture capital funding (21%)
• Becoming more expensive to run a business (21%)
• Getting harder to attract talent from across Europe (12%)
• More difficult to sell into Europe (7%)

"The Brexit findings in our survey this year are compelling and we are pleased to bring some data to a conversation that has been largely anecdotal," said Phil Cox, head of EMEA and president of Silicon Valley Bank’s UK Branch, in a statement. 

When Business Insider asked Cox why roughly 80% of startups aren't planning to expand into mainland Europe, Cox replied: "It's not a case of not planning to do business in mainland Europe. These are digital businesses – it's more a case of not necessarily needing boots on the ground to expand into Europe.

"They may be looking to open outposts in other continents, namely the US and Asia, where it's not as easy to run a business from the UK due to time zones or languages."

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NOW WATCH: Science says parents of unsuccessful kids could have these 6 things in common

Entrepreneurs dream of building a startup that's as successful as Tinder. Sean Rad, 30, cofounded the dating app in 2012. Today, it has tens of millions of active users worldwide.

For the uninitiated, Tinder is like a "hot or not" game for single people. Users swipe through photos of other singles in their area. If they find a person's profile attractive, they swipe right; if they don't find the person to their liking, they swipe left. If two people swipe right on each other's photos, they become a match and can then message each other. To date there have been 20 billion matches.

But even when you have a rocket ship on your hands, running a startup isn't easy. Rad has been through cofounder drama, lawsuits, and a firing. A few years ago, he was asked to step down as CEO of Tinder. He had been dragged through a public lawsuit involving his cofounders and had given some heavily criticized interviews to the press.

From that experience, Rad says he learned an important lesson: It's lonely at the top. And being a good leader doesn't mean you have all the right answers all the time. "This idea of this perfect being who's the CEO doesn't exist," Rad says. "It's far from the reality."

Rad sat down for an interview with Business Insider in November, for Business Insider's new podcast called "Success! How I did it." The podcast follows the career paths of business leaders who have achieved remarkable things. During this podcast, Rad explains:

• How he came up with the idea for Tinder, thanks to a cute girl in a coffee shop.
• When he realized Tinder was a hit.
• The marketing tricks his team used to make it go viral.
• What it's like to get fired from your own startup.
• His advice for people in leadership positions or who want to start the next Tinder.

When we recorded the interview with Rad, he was Tinder's CEO. In December, he stepped down as CEO (again) and became its chairman.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. You can listen to the episode below, or keep scrolling for a transcript of the episode:

Success! How I Did It: Episode 1 Transcript: Sean Rad, Tinder founder and chairman 

Alyson Shontell: What does Tinder look like these days? How many active users and swipes?

Sean Rad: There are tens of millions of active users in over 196 countries. We've made 20 billion matches since we started [in 2012] ... Our mission is to create new connections and bring the world closer together and help people meet others they otherwise wouldn't have met.

Shontell: Let's go back to the pre-Tinder days. Have you always been interested in entrepreneurship? Is this what you thought you'd be doing when you were growing up?

Rad: I was always interested in solving problems and building things. I had a general curiosity, and when I would see a better path for something, I felt this annoyance in me, like I had to do something about it. But I didn't start this journey saying "I want to start a business" or "I want to be an entrepreneur." I just want to solve problems, and one thing led to the next.

Shontell: And the first business you started was in college?

Rad: I started a company called Orgoo while I was a freshman at USC. I was frustrated that I had to use all of these different accounts to communicate with my friends. I had my work email, because I was working at the time, I had my school email, my high-school email, my Gmail, and every different IM account. And I kept jumping from screen to screen, and this was before the mobile phone was what it is today.

I felt there had to be a way to bring it all together. That's what Orgoo was. It was a huge technical challenge, especially for someone who's never done anything technical. I had no background in computer engineering, but I just saw a better way that I could communicate.

Shontell: What happened?

Rad: Orgoo launched in 2004, and within the first three months it accumulated over 1 million sign-ups. One thing led to another, and we got wrapped up in some IP issues with another company and unfortunately had to shut down.

Shontell: You later joined something called Hatch Labs, which was part of IAC and where Tinder was born. What was Hatch Labs?

Rad: I joined Hatch Labs to help incubate companies that are starting to take advantage of different signal points you have with mobile ... I went to Hatch really knowing I was going to find one thing I really love. I don't like to be distracted by a lot of things. I like to throw myself into one thing. But I think it was a great place for me to experiment and find that one thing.

Shontell: So it was a startup incubator where you could test ideas and see what worked. One thing started there was called Cardify — it wasn't even Tinder. What happened there?

Rad: The idea for Tinder came about before Cardify. I had two ideas coming into Hatch. One was Tinder and one was Cardify. We ended up shelving Tinder to pursue Cardify. And in two to three months we developed Cardify. It was a local rewards program. Whenever you swiped your card at any business, we would give you points. You didn't even need to take out your phone. We just connected your credit card to the cloud.

We submitted it to the App Store, but Apple was a little hesitant because we were asking users to put their credit cards in the app and this was a foreign concept. It was right around the time Square started submitting their app (2012, 2013). It took us about 90 days to get approved.

So within that 90 days, I didn't want us to continue iterating without any customer feedback. It would have been a little pointless. We took that extra time we had and built Tinder. It was called Matchbox then. It wasn't the whole team — it was a few of us who went rogue.

Tinder was sitting there and [cofounder] Justin Mateen started marketing it. Right away, within days, we knew we had something. Looking at the engagement, we very quickly shuttered everything we were doing with Cardify. It was a hard decision but it paid off.

Shontell: What was the genesis story of Tinder? Did a lightbulb go on at some point?

Rad: The idea came about because — I'm still shy — but I was incredibly more shy four or five years ago. I was going through some personal growth, where I was really trying to understand why I had trouble and digest why I had trouble walking up to someone and introducing myself. It created so much anxiety.

Shontell: So you were single and you were having trouble walking up to women in bars?

Rad: Yes. Not even in bars, just girls I liked. One time I was sitting in a coffee shop with my friends and there was this girl across the room. I looked at her and she looked back, and I was like, "Oh s---, she caught me looking at her."

At first I was nervous, but then I realized, wait a second. Now she looked at me, she smiled, and she sort of let me know she's interested in talking and I no longer felt anxious. Then I started thinking about that and analyzing it, and realized that if you can eliminate the question of whether or not someone wants to meet you, then you would significantly take away the barriers to making a new connection. And that's where the idea for Tinder came from.

Shontell: Does that girl know she inspired Tinder?

Rad: No, I doubt it.

Shontell: How did you know Tinder was an instant hit?

Rad: We had the app. Justin was figuring out how to promote it. Then one day he took everyone's phones and spammed all of our address books, including his own. I thought, "OK, this probably isn't going to work, but let's try it."

We texted literally 500 people. Immediately, 80% of the people we texted signed up. The next day, we grew 50%. And I thought, "Wow, that's shocking." When we were looking at the metrics and the engagement was shocking. We had to fact-check what we were seeing.

It really set in when our friends were telling us their stories. One of my friends was telling me about how he never knew this girl who he would see all the time, was interested in him, and they started dating. Within a matter of weeks we were hearing all these stories and it shook up our friend group.

Shontell: So your friends were matching in ways they probably never would have.

Rad: People who knew of each other but never exposed any interest were now getting connected. So we immediately knew this could have a huge impact on society.

Shontell: Were there anything else you did to get that initial kick?

Rad: Yes. It was a funny story. Justin's younger brother was throwing a birthday party for his best friend at USC. And he had a bus going from USC to his parents' home. The bus was going back and forth, so a total of about 500 students. Justin called me one day and said, "Let's pay for the bus and call this a Tinder party." I was like, "It's some poor girl's birthday — what do you mean we're going to call it our party?"

So he called the birthday girl and asked, "Can we make this a Tinder party? We'll spend money and make it bigger and better" and she was really excited about the idea.

So we paid for the bus and put a bouncer at the door and told every student that they couldn't walk in unless they downloaded Tinder. You'd literally have to show Tinder on your phone. So about 400 people downloaded Tinder at USC, and I'm sure no one really knew what they downloaded when they walked in.

But then they went home and opened the app and started matching with each other. It really created a phenomenon within USC.

Shontell: It seems like it really caught on on college campuses, with the first being USC. Did you intentionally do the college-by-college thing?

Rad: We realized after that event that it was an effective means for getting the word out. We also realized our harshest critics would be college students. And if we can win our harshest critics then we can win everyone else.

Immediately after that, every afternoon the whole team would leave the office, get in a car, and we would drive by every fraternity and sorority in Los Angeles, then San Diego, then Orange County, and every school we could cover.

Every time we would go to sororities and fraternities and talk about Tinder, we would that night see 100 sign-ups. Every single sign-up in the beginning mattered. We were stopping people on the street, and we'd go into coffee shops and talk to each other like, "Oh, have you heard of that app Tinder? It's such a cool app!" Anything we could do to get the word out, we were doing.

I'd take out the app and say "Oh this is interesting! Who told you about this great app called Tinder?" and yell it in the coffee shop, so people keep hearing "Tinder" in LA. And then what happened — and this was nuts — we sort of cornered the West Coast, which is where we lived. Then in January everyone went home for break and I guess told their friends.

So in the beginning of January we had about 20,000 users, and at the end of January we had 500,000 users, all organic. The growth curve was unimaginable. It was pretty amazing.

Shontell: You had run other startups before Tinder. What's it like as an entrepreneur when you finally realize you've found something really special, viral, and rare.

Rad: When something is growing as fast as Tinder did, you don't think about it. You're up until five in the morning working. I remember days where we didn't sleep because Tinder was crashing and we had to refactor the prototype code that we developed to get a proof of concept. We were refactoring it while maintaining it because it was getting hit by users, and John and I were designing and Justin and Whitney and the whole team were thinking about new ways to get the word out.

It was a small team of 15 people that literally did not sleep for the first year. You just don't think about it because you're getting all this feedback from your users and you just focus on executing and delivering for them.

Shontell: How did you come up with the swipe? That's what I think really resonated.

Rad: The first design of Tinder was like a stack of flashcards and had an X and a heart. A lot of the core attributes of the product still exist. [Tinder cofounder] John Badeen came to me one day and said, "You know, people like to swipe on photos, and I think people should be able to swipe on this and put [the photo] into categories."

He had this image in his head where you're moving objects. What do you do with flash cards? You put them in flashcard boxes, and you put cards in stacks. He was envisioning — "I'm dragging something , and I'm going to create this thing called 'swipe.'"

I said, "Look, that sounds cool, but I don't think we have time for that. We have a whole backlog of issues. We can do it when we have time." In typical John fashion, he told me initially it would take two weeks, and then he did it on a Saturday night and showed it to me Sunday morning.

Shontell: You're 30 and you're in charge of a rocket ship. As a CEO, how do you learn to grow up in the public eye? There were times you did, sort of, step in it.

Rad: Look, I think Tinder has definitely grown as a company, and I've grown a lot in the process. I think the key to growing, whether it's within a company or as a human being, is to be humble enough to learn from your mistakes.

Admit them, recognize them, use them as opportunities to grow. Have the courage to say "I learned from that and I'm taking away some valuable lessons and I'm going to be better tomorrow as a result."

One thing we encourage throughout the entire company is a beginner's mind-set. It doesn't matter how much you've experienced. Don't have the attitude that you know everything and you know what you're doing, because then you might miss some very important things.

That's why a lot of times younger, less jaded entrepreneurs end up disrupting industries they know nothing about. Because they don't have any preconceived notions of how to do something and they're able to reimagine it.

At the same time, having the humility and that beginner's mind-set allows you to find creative ways to solve problems, and you learn through that process. You develop your own culture and ethos as a company. Each one of these learning points, both for me and the company, were moments when our culture developed.

Culture is really just the consequence of things you've learned and the way people act, and a lot of that starts at the top.

Shontell: Almost every big startup with cofounders that I can think of has had some sort of issue or drama around it. Which is no different for Tinder. Let's talk about that. You and Justin were cofounders. But now he's no longer part of the company.

Rad: Every company has issues at some point, because when you're starting a company or you're doing anything that then grows to a larger team, from a few people around a table to something much bigger, what becomes very important is holding everyone accountable. It's hard to hold your friends accountable.

When you're building a company together you become extremely close. These are the people you see in the morning, afternoon, at night, in the middle of the night. And you're experiencing some very harsh working hours and you're also experiencing the happiest moments of your life together, and that bonds you in a way that very few things can. And that inherently is going to blur the lines between friend, colleague, employee.

So every startup goes through this. And it's just part of the process of growing up as a company. We've had our stories, just like Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat. It is what it is. As long as you learn and grow from it.

Shontell: The elephant in the room is that Justin, your cofounder, is no longer with Tinder. Had a relationship with another employee, there was a lawsuit; lots of texts became public. As a result of some of the texts, you ended up losing your job for a little bit as CEO of Tinder —

Rad: Not as a result of the texts — it was one year later. So the two things didn't have a high degree of correlation. But yes, there were some hard times as we were growing up as a company and some relationships that were not productive. But we've moved past that and we've learned a lot.

Shontell: I think the point is that everyone talks about the happy startup stories. And you don't realize when you're going to go found the next Tinder that you might have a brutal fight with your cofounder or you might have to deal with a lawsuit someday. Or you might say the wrong thing to the press.

Rad: It's not as glamorous as people think. The first thing I always ask whenever anyone is pitching me to raise money or looking for my advice on an idea is, "Why are you doing this?"

If it's because you're chasing some glamorous life you saw in the movie, "The Social Network," the reality is much harsher. When you're building a startup, it is hard. Especially a startup that's growing at the rate of Tinder and you have to be all in and you have to be committed. Solving this problem has to be personal or else you're going to crumble.

You really have to do it for more than the clichéd reasons, which are "I want the freedom" or "I want to work for myself."

Believe me, there are moments when you want to crumble in a ball in the corner, but you find the perseverance through the passion that you have for what you're doing and the love you have for your users. So you have to do it for the right reasons. Or else, even if you have the best idea in the world — Tinder was a great idea — if we weren't passionate as a team and dedicated, we would have failed.

Shontell: What's it like as a CEO to go through that, and then stick around, to your credit?

Rad: I think some of the greatest lessons I've had came out of being fired. I learned a lot.

Shontell: How did you get fired? Did Barry Diller pull you into a conference room?

Rad: Fired is an exaggeration. I was asked to move over and be president and continue to run parts of the company. The thing was, we were growing so fast that naturally there was a lot of doubt whether or not a 28-year-old who hasn't really experienced something at this scale would have the experience and business intelligence to carry it on and make the right judgment calls.

To be honest, even I had doubts. I was terrified. Tinder was growing faster than anything and it was stressful. So we made the decision together. A lot of people think it was this adversarial thing. It was a decision we made together to bring in someone new who had a little bit more experience to help us scale the company and, as part of that, I took a different role.

I would have done things differently. I didn't really agree with the board on how we did it. And I learned two life-changing things from that process. The first thing is, when you're growing up, you think that being at the top means you have all the answers and you know what you're doing, and I felt a lot of pressure because people would come up to me asking me to make all sorts of decisions. And it's lonely at the top, because no one is guiding you. You feel a lot of pressure. That is a hard experience.

But what I learned through no longer being in that position, and not having the pressure of making every decision, was that being a leader doesn't mean you have all the answers. It means you're able to ask the right questions; you're getting the right people together who each are imperfect in their own ways. No one is perfect. But you have a common mission and a common sense of where you're going.

But this idea of this perfect being who's the CEO doesn't exist. It's far from the reality.

The second thing I learned is, I sort of reminded myself why I'm doing this. I started Tinder because I was passionate about this product. And when I was no longer CEO and I didn't have the title and I wasn't the person running the ship, what I realized was what mattered wasn't the title, wasn't the money, wasn't any of that. It was the love and joy of being able to wake up and work on something you love.

So I still got to do that, and that was a reset in my own head. It was a great reminder. And sometimes when you go through hard times it's a great reminder of why you're doing this and what's important and valuable.

You sometimes fail and experience hardship, but if you look at it as an opportunity to grow and you're listening, there are lessons and it makes people who they are. That is the one thing about perseverance in any startup or going through any experiences — don't back down from adversity. Learn from it.

Shontell: And today things sound good — 100 million downloads. I do have one question, about being part of Hatch Labs. How much do you think being part of an incubator within a company that has tons of resources (IAB) contributed to Tinder's success? And what do you think the outcome would have been like if you had just done the traditional "I'm going to raise some money from a VC and do it alone" approach?

Rad: Tinder — even though we were part of an incubator — the incubator was Tinder, because I was running the whole West Coast for it and everyone on the West Coast was working on Tinder, and I hired almost everyone that was in the West Coast Hatch Labs office at that time. So it wasn't different in that sense.

What was different is that there was an environment where it was OK to fail. Because if we failed on one idea we'd just shift to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and we could really pursue our passions without a lot of stress. It actually doesn't matter what scale of a business you are. When you're trying to innovate, the process is the same. You have a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, learn from the success or failure, apply it to the next step, learn, apply it to the next step, learn apply it to the next step. That's true if you're building a startup, that's true if you're the size of Tinder and building the next great feature. It starts with creating an environment where it's OK to take risks and fail. As long as you're learning from it.

Shontell: Everyone wants to be you, everyone wants to figure out how to build the next big thing. What advice do you have for aspiring founders who want to build the next Tinder?

Rad: The most important thing is you're doing it for the right reasons. What that means is you have a desire to solve a problem that you empathize with in some way, shape, or form.

It could be a problem you have, it could be a problem your friends or colleagues are having, an inefficiency you're having in the world. But start from a place of actually empathizing and coming from a position of trying to solve something, rather than some dream of just working for yourself or making a lot of money or anything like that. Because companies are hard and require a lot of perseverance and determination, and you just won't survive through the highs and lows unless you're doing it for the right reasons.

The second thing I would say — because there is a disillusionment about startups — is that a lot of the young entrepreneurs I meet mistake a startup as a license to not have a direction or clear mission. And I always tell them, day one at Tinder, we had a clear mission.

Now, that mission evolved and goals evolved, and we iterated and we learned and that changed. But at any given moment, we had a plan. And great entrepreneurs are always prepared. They have a plan. And they have a great team that understands that plan and understands what the goal is at every phase of the business. So having that clarity is important. Both the clarity of why you're doing what you're doing and what you're doing.

Believe me, the number of times that very, very intelligent, brilliant young entrepreneurs can't answer those questions clearly for me, makes me feel that people need to hear that more.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A psychologist explains how to tell if you're ready for a committed relationship

Tinder, a dating app owned by IAC, has tens of millions of active users and is now worth about $3 billion.

From the day it launched four years ago, cofounder Sean Rad says he knew he had a hit app on his hands. Downloads rolled in quickly, and engagement metrics were off the charts.

"We texted [Tinder to] literally 500 people," Rad says of the launch. "Immediately, 80% of the people we texted signed up. The next day, we grew 50%. And I thought, 'Wow, that's shocking.' The metrics and the engagement were shocking. We had to fact-check what we were seeing."

Rad detailed the marketing tricks his team used to get Tinder off the ground in an interview for Business Insider's new career-focused podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

Here's an excerpt from the podcast:

Shontell: How did you know Tinder was an instant hit?

Rad: We had the app. Justin was figuring out how to promote it. Then one day he took everyone's phones and spammed all of our address books, including his own. I thought, "OK, this probably isn't going to work, but let's try it."

We texted literally 500 people. Immediately, 80% of the people we texted signed up. The next day, we grew 50%. And I thought, "Wow, that's shocking." The metrics and the engagement were shocking. We had to fact-check what we were seeing.

It really set in when our friends were telling us their stories. One of my friends was telling me about how he never knew this girl who he would see all the time, was interested in him, and they started dating. Within a matter of weeks we were hearing all these stories and it shook up our friend group.

Shontell: So your friends were matching in ways they probably never would have.

Rad: People who knew of each other but never exposed any interest were now getting connected. So we immediately knew this could have a huge impact on society.

Shontell: Were there anything else you did to get that initial kick?

Rad: Yes. It was a funny story. Justin's younger brother was throwing a birthday party for his best friend at USC. And he had a bus going from USC to his parents' home. The bus was going back and forth, so a total of about 500 students. Justin called me one day and said, "Let's pay for the bus and call this a Tinder party." I was like, "It's some poor girl's birthday — what do you mean we're going to call it our party?"

So he called the birthday girl and asked, "Can we make this a Tinder party? We'll spend money and make it bigger and better" and she was really excited about the idea.

So we paid for the bus and put a bouncer at the door and told every student that they couldn't walk in unless they downloaded Tinder. You'd literally have to show Tinder on your phone. So about 400 people downloaded Tinder at USC, and I'm sure no one really knew what they downloaded when they walked in.

But then they went home and opened the app and started matching with each other. It really created a phenomenon within USC.

Shontell: It seems like it really caught on on college campuses, with the first being USC. Did you intentionally do the college-by-college thing?

Rad: We realized after that event that it was an effective means for getting the word out. We also realized our harshest critics would be college students. And if we can win our harshest critics then we can win everyone else.

Immediately after that, every afternoon the whole team would leave the office, get in a car, and we would drive by every fraternity and sorority in Los Angeles, then San Diego, then Orange County, and every school we could cover.

Every time we would go to sororities and fraternities and talk about Tinder, we would that night see 100 sign-ups. Every single sign-up in the beginning mattered. We were stopping people on the street, and we'd go into coffee shops and talk to each other like, "Oh, have you heard of that app Tinder? It's such a cool app!" Anything we could do to get the word out, we were doing.

I'd take out the app and say "Oh this is interesting! Who told you about this great app called Tinder?" and yell it in the coffee shop, so people keep hearing "Tinder" in LA. And then what happened — and this was nuts — we sort of cornered the West Coast, which is where we lived. Then in January everyone went home for break and I guess told their friends.

So in the beginning of January we had about 20,000 users, and at the end of January we had 500,000 users, all organic. The growth curve was unimaginable. It was pretty amazing.

For more on how Rad built a $3 billion startup in his 20s, listen to the full episode of "Success! How I Did It," below, or subscribe on iTunes, here.

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Atomico has raised a $765 million (£613 million) fund to invest in European technology startups, shrugging off any concerns that Brexit has made it harder for venture capitalists to raise large sums.

The London-based investment firm has now raised a total of $1.5 billion (£1.2 billion) to back companies across Europe that have the potential to scale into billion dollar businesses.

Atomico, founded 10 years ago by ex-Skype CEO Niklas Zennström, claims that the Atomico IV fund is the largest fund of its kind in Europe.

Speaking to Business Insider at Atomico's head office on New Bond Street in Mayfair, 51-year-old Zennström, said: "If you compare it to other pure-play European VC funds, it's the largest."

Rocket Internet, arguably not a "pure-play" European VC, announced it had raised a $1 billion ($800 million) fund in January. Elsewhere, Japanese tech giant SoftBank announced a $100 billion (£80 billion) tech fund last October but that's set to be invested worldwide and much of it is expected to go towards mergers and acquisitions as opposed to VC deals. Other household VC firms such as Index and Balderton have also raised large startup funds that European companies can access but none of them have been as big as Atomico IV.

Atomico raised the new capital from wealthy family offices and pension funds across Europe, which have traditionally been risk-averse, according to Zennström, who cofounded Kazaa and two other companies before setting up Skype.

European startups have long-struggled to scale to the same size as their US rivals due to a lack of capital, according to Zennström. That's largely because institutional investors in the US (particularly large pension funds) have been more willing to pump their billions into VC than their European counterparts.

"If the European pension funds allocated half a percent of their assets to European venture, that funding gap would disappear," he said. "We have all the ingredients here [in Europe]. We don't need to raise money from the US or other places. There is plenty of capital here."

Zennström, reported to have a net worth of $1.3 billion (£890 million), said in September that he believes the next Facebook will come from Europe. This is partly due to increasing amounts of funding but a couple of other factors are also at play.

Five of the world's top 10 computer science institutions can now be found in Europe (ETH, Oxford, Imperial, EPF, and TU Munich), according to an Atomico report published last November. The same report stated that there are more professional engineers in Europe now than there are in the US (4.7 million vs 4.1 million). There's also an increasing number of business development mangers for startups to hire.

"For me, when I was recruiting people to Skype, it was hard to find experience at a fast-growing startup so you had to hire people from the US to come," said Zennström. "Today, there's many people working for Skype, Spotify, lastminute.com, King, Zoopla, whatever. They've learned the skills to scale a fast growing company."

Although Europe doesn't yet have an Apple or an Amazon-sized tech company, there are several firms that have grown into substantial technology companies in recent years. Enterprise software company SAP is now worth $107 billion (£86 billion), while Spotify and Zalando are valued at over $10 billion (£8 billion). Cambridge chip designer ARM was bought by SoftBank for $32 billion (£26 billion) last year.

Innovative technology companies are being developed across Europe and not just in the traditional tech hubs of London, Berlin, and Stockholm.

So far, Atomico has invested in 85 companies, including the likes of "Clash of Clans" creator Supercell, which was acquired by China's Tencent for $8.6 billion (£6.9 billion) in June 2016, and Swedish payments firm Klarna, which has also grown to become a $2.25 billion (£1.8 billion) business.

The new Atomico IV fund will be used to back approximately 25 startups across all stages over the next 3-4 years.

Nine companies have already received capital out of the new fund, including Austria-based Lilium Aviation, which is due to test a flying car prototype in the next few months.

"We like to back entrepreneurs who have big ambition. But also when they are about to scale," said Zennström. "So we would come in when they have achieved a product market fit and the company needs to shift focus from innovation to scaling. That means we're investing in Series A or later, say B or C."

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MealPal, a monthly lunch subscription service, just expanded to London — its first city outside the US.

MealPal lets users select and pick up a daily lunch from a variety of participating restaurants. The monthly price of $119 (without tax), covers lunch Monday through Friday — which means each meal costs less than $6. 

Founded in Miami in January 2016, the service has expanded to Boston, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. In London, where over 150 restaurants have signed on, each meal costs either £4.80 ($6) or £4.39 ($5.50), depending on the plan you choose.

The service was started by the cofounder of ClassPass, a startup that gives customers access to a selection of fitness classes in a particular city for a flat fee (MealPal was called MealPass until it rebranded in September 2016.).

On February 15, the company announced that it raised $15 million (£12 million) in VC funding.

Now that MealPal has added so many restaurants for users to choose from — over 600 New York City restaurants participate — the options can get overwhelming. So the team launched what it calls a "Tinder for food" function in September 2016. Users can now swipe right or left on 100 ingredients they like or dislike, and the app's bot will recommend meals based on those preferences.

I tried the service for a week when it launched last year (before the new update). Here's what happened.

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I was instructed to log on between 7 p.m. and 9:30 a.m. before each lunchtime to select my lunch and set a pick-up time. (The update now lets users choose lunch starting at 5 p.m.)

To find my first meal, I filtered by location, which narrowed my options to 10 restaurants within a three-block radius of the Business Insider office (MealPal has since added dozens more). I chose pulled pork sliders from The Hog Pit.

On Monday, I ventured outside to pick up my food, which felt strange since I often bring my lunch.

Snap is about to have what should be the biggest tech IPO of the year. But while CEO Evan Spiegel and company are generating the expected level of buzz for their efforts, their move to the public market is an outlier among startups.

At least, that’s according to a recent survey of 941 startups — 69% of which were from tech — by Silicon Valley Bank. As this chart from Statista shows, just 16% of those companies see going public as their most realistic long-term goal.

Instead, the majority see an acquisition as their end-game. That shouldn't be a huge shock: While getting bought out isn’t the most idealistic route for tech entrepreneurs, it’s usually the most straightforward, especially for companies which just don’t have Snap’s potential for growth.

SEE ALSO: Here’s how much the biggest tech companies grew in terms of revenue last quarter

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"A business is like having a child," says Heidi Zak.

Zak is the CEO and cofounder, along with her husband Dave Spector, of bra company ThirdLove. In 2012, Zak left her position as a Google senior marketing manager to found her startup.

Zak (who, by the way, has two human children) explained that entrepreneurs need to be in it for the long haul. If you have doubts about being able to raise your baby — er, develop your business idea — for years to come, you're in trouble.

So before you quit your job and go all-in as an entrepreneur, you'll want to ask yourself: Is this something I could spend my life doing?

Just as important, you'll want to consider: Is this something I could spend my life doing and be happy?

ThirdLove, which sells bras online and aims to provide women with a better fit than traditional retailers, has raised over $13 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. 

Based on her experience starting the company, Zak said that especially in a company's early days, entrepreneurs should be comfortable working 80- to 100-hour workweeks. That necessarily means sacrificing time with friends or on other non-work activities. 

But even after that, Zak said, running a company is all-consuming.  

When Zak meets with aspiring entrepreneurs who she mentors informally, she asks them: "Are you willing to give up the stability of what you're doing? Are you willing to give up your salary? Are you willing to give up time and energy — for a while?"

"Sometimes," she said, "people honestly are like, 'I'm not.' And then I say to them them, "You should not be thinking about quitting your job and starting a business." 

Zak said she sees a "halo" around entrepreneurship these days — people think it's "cool" to start a business.

And while it can be cool, Zak said there will also be "dark days" when you're not sure if your business will ever succeed. 

"Those moments in time are really hard," she said.

Of those "dark days," she added, "There's a reality of what really starting a company is like."

SEE ALSO: If you want to start a business but can't 'find your passion,' here's the first step to take

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