Graham Cooke

Published: 06/12/2024

Few would trade a stable job at a company like Google to start their own business, but that’s exactly what Graham Cooke did.

Entrepreneurial from an early age, Cooke was just 13 when he opened a coffee shop at school after buying an espresso machine and started his first company at 15.

However, it was ultimately his vast product development expertise that led to the creation of Qubit, a leading software as a service company (SaaS) specialising in the ecommerce sector. But the journey to creating Qubit wasn’t a linear one.

The road to Qubit

Before Google, Cooke, who studied politics and economics at Newcastle University, was a serial entrepreneur, coding websites and creating early versions of online marketplaces.

Some of his business ideas were ahead of their time. Cooke says that before the ubiquitous iPod, he had tried to launch a digital music player. 

He also took his idea for a video on demand player to the high street movie rental chain Blockbuster (formerly Blockbuster Video). “I took it to Blockbuster and pitched it to them about co-developing this and putting it in their stores,” he says. “I explained that they could use their store footprint to sell the player and manage the transition from physical to digital. I pitched the idea with my friends, but it didn’t work out. So that was the point at which I realised I was struggling to build these startups.”

Ultimately, Apple created the iPod, enabling people to download music wirelessly, and Netflix built the world’s leading streaming business. “Both products would’ve been interesting. EMI and Blockbuster no longer exist but they could’ve led the charge and innovated with technology,” adds Cooke. 

Red carpet expectations

Despite facing scepticism from some, he joined Google in 2005 as an e-commerce senior project manager for Europe, Middle East and Asia. He was one of the earliest employees working on the Google Ad Platform and Google Analytics. It was at Google, where Cooke honed his skills and gained the confidence to try something new.

He started Qubit along with former Google colleagues Daniel Shellard, Emre Baran and Ian McCaig. Cooke recalls: “It was it was nerve wracking taking the plunge from a plush job at Google. We thought we'd have such a big red carpet roll out of interest in what we were doing from the press. We were four execs from Google leaving to set up this business and the press just didn’t care. No one cared and I was shocked.”

As with any business venture, there were good and bad times. Positives included reporting 250% year-on-year revenue growth and £4.8m in turnover in 2013. Qubit boasted a long list of clients such as Louis Vuitton, Estee Lauder, TK Maxx, Talk Talk, Monsoon Accessorize, Arcadia Group and Superdry . The company expanded into Europe and the United States and secured $7.5m backing form Balderton Capital and Westminster Enterprises. 

SaaS bubble challenges

Cooke and his team experienced a ‘year of hard knocks’ in their first 12 months and one of the most difficult decisions led to him drastically cutting the workforce to stay afloat. Although the business was well placed to exploit the analytics boom, Cooke and his team soon realised that this wouldn’t last forever during the ‘SaaS bubble’ of 2016/2017.

Cooke explains that before the bubble burst, the industry was operating in a honeymoon period where valuations were up by 10 or 20 times, fundraising was easily organised and it felt like ‘the money was never going to stop’. But, then it did, around two years before the Covid pandemic. 

Qubit sale

Qubit survived it all and Cooke helped grow the company’s reputation in the digital space. At one point, company provided personalised shopping recommendations to over one billion users per month driven by artificial intelligence (AI) across more than 300 leading brands.

He later sold Qubit to Canadian SaaS company Coveo Solutions in 2021 shortly before going public on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Cooke remains a strategic advisor at Caveo.

Looking back, Cooke says: “I think the best advice I ever got was that you need to know where you are in a product business and where you sit in the whole ecosystem. Ask yourself if you are targeting early adopters or if you are trying something that already exists but doing it better. I got a lot of advice around customer understanding and user-centric research.

“My chief marketing officer said our answer to our product strategy is not in this building but with our users. We thought we always had to know the answer and invent the solution. It seems so obvious in hindsight, but it was incredible advice.”

The sale of Qubit has allowed Cooke to focus on other work and passions. As a non-executive director of ITV plc, he supports the public broadcast network with their digital strategy. He also runs a crypto AI-focused development studio, developing products and applications that affect future ways of working, creativity and innovation.

He’s become an author, too, recently publishing Web3: The End of Business-As-Usual, which explores the next generation of the internet (Web3) and how it will disrupt the creation of products and services.

While he didn’t use AI to write the book (ChatGPT launched at the time of his book’s publication), he maintains that the technology will be a major disruptor. “I see the future of work being based on AI. Business will experience a 100-to-200-year disruption. It will impact how we access things – everything from music to travel and it’s going to be so different for the next generations!”