Smarter Web's Capital Structure and MORE Preferred | Andrew Webley SLP780

Andrew Webley (0:00)

We're sitting on a balance sheet that's built on not only the best capital in the world, we executed that trade in seconds, one of the most liquid types of capital in the world.

Stephan Livera (0:10)

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Joining me today is Andrew Webley. He is the CEO and founder of Smarter Web Co in the UK. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew Webley (0:21)

Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Stephan Livera (0:25)

So Andrew, give us a bit of a background on yourself and how you got into Bitcoin, and then we'll sort of get into how you decided to turn Smarter Web Co into a Bitcoin Treasury Company.

Andrew Webley (0:36)

I started my career in 1999, and I joined a very small company that became one of the biggest companies in the UK, Hargreaves Lansdown, the largest retail broker in the UK today, about 40% market share.

So I joined this very, very small company. The internet was really just starting. Google didn't exist at the time.

And I was lucky, I suppose, and they had the right business model. The internet turned up and that changed the business model away from effectively a lot of direct mail to web-based activity. And I was a key part of that team. We listed it on the stock market. I left the business in 2009, after 10 years, when I was the head of online. And I often describe it to people as a well-paid apprenticeship. And then I'd always wanted to run my own business. Steve Lansdown and Peter Hargreaves were very aspirational people to work for. And I was about 30 at the time. And I figured that if I didn't set up my own business, I would never do it. And it took me a while to make that decision, maybe two or three years, perhaps. When I made that decision, my son was, I think he is one and a half, he's now 18 So I just moved into a new house, all this sort of stuff which I still live in today.

So it was a difficult decision, but I felt that at the age of 30, if I didn't do it, I would never do it. And it was one of the most satisfying things that I ever did, setting up what was effectively a profitable but small business.

Stephan Livera (2:16)

And then to the Bitcoin side of things?

Andrew Webley (2:19)

Yeah.

So I did that for a period of time and I'd always been interested in investing and I've invested in lots of different things over the years, you know, good and bad. But about 10 years ago, I stumbled across Bitcoin. I'm being completely honest with you. I didn't really understand what it was at the time. I didn't see it in the same way that you see it today. You know, I didn't know whether it was a medium of exchange, you know, a store of value or just something that you could speculate on. You know, and maybe the truth is at the first experience of it, it was a bit of all of that. And, you know, in some people's eyes today, it still is a bit of all of that.

But then it wasn't until Sailor pivoted strategy, and I luckily saw strategy. And for me, because I had money in pensions and ISIS and things like this, which you can't now, you can kind of buy Bitcoin or things that have got Bitcoin on the balance sheet, of course. But it wasn't until Sailor pivoted strategy that I saw it as a credible store of long term value, really. So I often say to people, that was my Bitcoin moment, which was what, six years ago. And then very, very quickly, maybe another two years after that or something, I started to think that we should have such a thing in the UK. And I looked for years and we didn't, and I couldn't find one. And that's how this next phase of our business has come about.

Stephan Livera (3:46)

Yeah. And so walk us through the timeline there, because there were a couple of years where everything just went really, probably late 2024 to 2025 is when you saw MetaPlanet, and then 2025 was obviously a big year for all the Treasury companies, but also a lot of them dropped a lot from the high. Talk to us about those few years for you at Smarter Web Co.

Andrew Webley (4:10)

Yeah. So I looked for several years to find a UK version of strategy, and I couldn't find one. So we got to, I don't know, around about September of 2024, and that's when I decided that I would list my business on the stock market. So MetaPlanet was, I think, doing the strategy then. Capital B in France, that's a good company. I think they'd either just started or were just about to start, but it wasn't anything like the heady days of 2025