Being a named board director of a £500 million listed company may have been enough for some people to rest on their laurels. But not for Anish Kapoor.
“I spent most of my time in the city having lunch with people rather than doing anything useful so I left to go back into early stage tech start-ups.”

He started Telecity plc in 1997 with just two people in an office and in just two short years the company had grown to 550 people in 12 countries turning over £35 million a year. Telecity built the infrastructure that supports the internet in Europe and 80 percent of all internet traffic in Europe still goes through Telecity.
He then started working with an early Venture Capital fund called Rising Stars which invests particularly in tech businesses. The idea for Yuuguu came from his time there.

“I was finding it difficult to work across a portfolio of companies without being in the same physical space as them,” he explains. “Simple things like going through a presentation, brainstorming, or having a session with a customer, were so difficult to do remotely.”

Kapoor spoke to over 200 companies ranging from one man bands to mulitinationals to find out what their top three business issues were.
“They were all saying the same things; that their businesses were not defined by people sitting in a building anymore. They were bemoaning the fact that there was no technology to enable their suppliers, customers, partners and freelancers to work together. So in 2005 Yuuguu was born.”

Yuuguu (japanese word for fusion) is a software system that offers instant web-conferencing with nothing for your client or prospect to download. Your whole desktop can be transferred to your distant conference or you can specify what elements to show, either way it gives great flexibility in business. This is, of course, a great boon to the home worker that needs to connect with his or her colleagues. And those colleagues don’t even need the same software as you.  Kapoor explains:
“We have no office so in that respect we eat our own dog food. Our 13 people all work from home. That was a conscious decision from day one. In this way we can see the problems with the system as they arise. As we solve our own problems we are solving our customers’ as well.”

The core idea behind Yuuguu is to enable people to work together remotely as if they were side by side. In this way companies can use the talents of people worldwide rather than having to recruit only on their doorstep.

“It’s about how no company need work in isolation anymore. We talk about an ecosystem. Every knowledge worker has this problem of working together with people who are not in the same place as you.”

And Kapoor feels he has only just scratched the surface of what is possible with Yuuguu. It is this unquenchable need to improve and move forward that drives him with entrepreneurial spirit.

“To be a successful entrepreneur you have to have a tremendous amount of self belief because in the early days people are going to say ‘that is never going to work.’”
Even when Kapoor was with Telecity there were times when they were virtually out of money and were wondering how they would pay the bills the next month.

“When you are evolving and raising capital you are only ever one bad decision away from complete catastrophe! And that is where the self belief comes in. We went from that situation to one year later sat there with £30 million in the bank.”

The present economic situation is not affecting Yuuguu too harshly either. Kapoor even describes it as a good market for them.

“We are marketing a product that improves efficiency, so when companies are looking for ways to save themselves money they look to technology like ours. We are seeing more demand, if anything, not a shrinking.”

All of Yuuguu’s funding is based in the UK, whereas most of their customer base is in the US.

“There are more business angels for tech businesses in the US, but the reality is that you are where you are and our network of contacts are mostly UK based.”
Yuuguu are currently looking at ways in which social networking and sites such as twitter can be utilised to increase productivity in business. One of the premises of Yuuguu being to leverage existing connections using existing tools and business social networking is one way to do this.

“Businesses are not embracing twitter even though there is the assumption that they are. They are still asking ‘how does this social activity help make me more money?’” 

And obviously Kapoor will be working at finding the answers to this along with currently being a non-executive director (NXD) for Jacamar, an online gaming infrastructure provider and a NXD for Xware, a mobile gaming software developer. Does this busy man ever rest and take pleasure in his achievements?

He laughs: “There is much more to be done before we can sit back and say ‘right that’s done!’”

And no doubt there will be another challenge waiting for Kapoor to solve after that.