#7 Stephen Lorimer
How Stephen moved from working as a UK civil servant and working on a Covid-19 contract-tracing app team to joining a startup.
⭐️ Deconstructing freedom: Stephen Lorimer
I met Stephen through his new startup, and I adored how he navigated his professional path through exposing himself to various types of employers before embarking on a portfolio journey. Plus, I have a soft spot for Americans who chose to live in Europe (as you might have seen from my interview with Jane Bertch earlier this year).
🤩 About Stephen Lorimer:
I’m a first-time co-founder - and we’re called Building Atlas. With a zero-touch approach, requiring nothing but the addresses of the entire portfolio, we help holders of commercial real estate: (1) find the best path to retrofitting their buildings; (2) avoid risk, increase the value of assets,; (3) and get access to preferential financing and delivery partners to get the work done.
We work with non-residential property owners, real asset funds, and what startups call ‘channel partners’ that bring our product to customers. These partners range from building facility managers and urban masterplanning consultants in the private sector to economic development leads in city councils.
I still have my hand in public policy as (and it is a mouthful!) the lead expert for the Decarbonisation of Buildings Thematic Partnership of the Urban Agenda of the European Union during 2024. We’re bringing together cities, property owners, energy networks, and the retrofit industry together to test and scale better regulation, finance, and data.
🗽 Freedom dimensions: What do I want to optimise for? Connectivity, and physical connection for me drives not just my personal but my professional choices. My professional career’s existence is to make great places that bring joy to people (see below) and I dream of being in the kind of society where connection is so easy it is almost automatic. I chose to live where I’m surrounded by friends, and I chose a professional lifestyle where co-working, networks and events get things done. When I go traveling, I will choose places with friends and acquaintances there. And in a base in London means that most anyone will pass by soon.
⚡️ Trigger: There were a couple of trigger points. The first was walking down the streets of Paris as an architecture student and knowing that practicing in Europe was where I could take the most pride in making amazing, walkable, joyful, sustainable cities. So I graduated from college in America, bought a plane flight to Dublin, buzzed a doorbell next to the first nameplate with the word “Urban” in it, somehow got a work permit, and I was off in my first career as an urban design and masterplanning consultant.
But the most relevant one was in the Covid-19 pandemic. I was a UK civil servant then; I had traded my comfort zone of smart cities in London’s City Hall to big data policy for the UK government and what felt like… the big time. What did I know? Nothing. Covid-19 happened, I mentioned that I had a background in spatial analysis, could I help - and then suddenly I was on the NHS Covid-19 contract-tracing app team. Employee number five. My job: build the algorithm that tells people to isolate if their time spent near someone with a case of Covid added up to “too risky”. Go get scientists in, get a team of civil servants in. Build a team. We built a product in two months - the pilot was not a success, but we had one and learnt quickly. My breath was taken away.
Going back to a policy job implementing the National Data Strategy later in 2020 in the Government Digital Service felt like demobilisation. In comparison, everything else was boring. It was time to start working in the tech side for real - but my time in the private sector was years in the past after seven years in the public sector.
And it was also getting myself to make new things. I went through lots interviews with occupational psychologists as part of promotion in the civil service. The one thing that struck me from these evaluations was “you want to join lots of things that have started, but you’re less willing to start things others want to join.” And I that person - the one that starts things others want to join - was and is the kind of person I want to be. What can I do to start moving towards that? And what have I been doing to push myself away from that?
🚀 Start: I went looking for my best sideways-ish (see below!) move as the first step and got lucky. Octopus Energy had decided to start a new research team focused on how to tackle the energy transition. There were three things that made this a perfect start. First, all the teams were run on startup principles. As a supplier of electricity to buildings and the cars parked there, I was back in the built environment. And third, the company attracted people and startups that loved innovation. I built a programme that was half policy research that attracted policymakers, big international organisations such as the IEA and C40 Cities, but also one that attracted cohorts of startups to come and learn more about new business models in cities and energy across infrastructure, dynamic pricing, and energy-as-a-service.
🔀 Pivot: After a couple of years, I found that while I was in a super-innovative organisation, being in a non-commercial unit was different than the new business models and offerings being created in more commercial parts of the same organisation. I assumed that our group that moved and talked, planned, and executed like a startup - ‘what is our unfair advantage?’ ‘what is our vision and mission?’ ‘how can we fail fast?’ could give me that feeling of breathless optimism from the contact-tracing app again - but it wasn’t the same as making a product, with customers, and the associated hustle to get them on board.
💰 Finance: In those first steps moving from the public (Government Digital Service) to the private sector (Octopus Energy) it was into another full time job - albeit less well-enumerated. An upward trajectory in money (or status) isn’t linear when you make new starts and pivots.
When I pivoted and started down the road that led to Building Atlas as a startup - for me, I had a rule that I need to stick to a ‘personal runway’ plan that means that I don’t go below three months of cash to live on at any time. While I am building a startup without a salary in these first few months, my expert contract with the European Commission is more, or less, gives me half the money I need in exchange for a quarter of the working days available in 2024. It is quite normal to have this trade-off.
🏆 Why it worked: Could I have gone straight from the public sector as a civil servant for two years and a local government official for four years to a startup? Likely not, it would have involved being with having a long gap and ‘burning’ my personal runway too quickly, and then either moving to full-time work or to a slower pace (for example, 60% of available days for 100% of the money needed).
I really went step by step - a first step to move from policy and research in the public sector to policy and research in the private sector, and then to a commercially-driven startup in the private sector (while having my hand in policymaking in the public sector to keep money coming in the door!).
And I found co-founders that had spent time on our problem of decarbonisation of buildings - I had a feeling that although this was a startup, it was somewhat de-risked!
📌 Learnings: So many things, but I’ll share this. I would love to have given myself the experience of a startup 7 or 8 years ago after time as a researcher of entrepreneurship at Imperial Business School and creating the Mayor of London’s first urbantech/proptech accelerator programme. But I’ve also learned from this experience that ruminating over missing that opportunity caused delay in making this move. When I did this, this truly was a ‘rocket never launches’ experience!
🤔 Key advice: Don’t put yourself into a position to choose revolution or evolution. Where’s that middle ground? The waltz is both a step forward (for a man) and to the side. How are your steps?
☕️ Are you open for my readers to reach out for a coffee chat? Please, so many coffee chats… My LinkedIn.