Office Space: Neil Daly

Neil Daly, founder of Skin Analytics, provides a guide to his beachy working home

London Business School Review

06 June 2014

Strategy and entrepreneurship

Neil Daly, founder of Skin Analytics, provides a guide to his beachy working home

This article is provided by the Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

officespace

There aren’t too many offices where working under a palm tree is encouraged, but Neil Daly of Skin Analytics says it’s all in a day’s work. “Our beach theme reminds us that leading healthy lifestyle means spending time in the sun. We provide people with the tools that can help them make sure that they don’t suffer the consequences of that time they forgot the sunscreen,” he says.

One in three cancers diagnosed globally is skin cancer, and Skin Analytics is a skin monitoring service that analyses images users take with their smartphones and gives them a visual dashboard of their skin’s changes over time. Given that change is the single most sensitive indicator of melanoma, Skin Analytics believes it can help get the right people to their doctor with the historical change information they need to help their diagnosis. It’s important as people delay visiting their GP by up to 18 months after they start to worry about a mole. During that time melanoma survival rates can dramatically drop, so early detection is critical.

Skin Analytics is based at the Wayra UnLtd Academy in central London, having previously been housed in theLlondon Business School Incubator. “We’ve been lucky to get such great support from the School and now Telefónica and UnLtd. Both programmes have provided office space in central London without the cost, so we can spend our money on more important things, like palm trees.”

Having spent time consulting for brands such as Vodafone, Visa and Virgin Media, Daly knows the importance of ensuring his company values are reflected in every facet of the business. “We try to be internally consistent with how we think, talk and build our business. We want to support people to be healthy and we hope our home conveys that message.”

OFFICE TOUR

Beach theme “Everyone loves the beach, right? Well we want our team and the people who visit us to remember what it’s like when the sun is on your skin. It helps get our message across that you can’t avoid the sun, so should make sure you take precautions to minimise its impact on you.”

Macbooks and Androids "We’re all Macbook users here, except for Pietro, our image processing guy. Strangely, we all have Android phones. We have an iPhone for testing but that’s as far as it goes.”

Display TV "Start-ups are always told to do and then ask for forgiveness so we ‘borrowed’ the 60-inch LCD from the conference room to yell our message at visitors to the Wayra UnLtd accelerator.”

Maths “Tom decorated our windows with formulas, most of which we don’t use. Laura, our marketer, keeps telling us technical language scares people, so we try to keep people on the back foot.”

KPIs “As we grow, we need to be ruthless about what we focus on. So we always display our KPIs to be sure everything we do is linked to one or more of them.”

Daly obtained his Executive MBA from London Business School in 2011

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Office Space: Neil Daly

OFFICE TOUR

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