Giffgaff founder on his new venture: ‘I believe we could change the face of telco’

Giffgaff founder Gav Thompson recently went LinkedIn official with his new venture. He tells MT how Slice Mobile is the 15-year-old idea that he just couldn't shake.

by Jennifer Small
Last Updated: 19 Mar 2024

How do successful entrepreneurs go on to repeat their triumph after exit? In its new With Hindsight series, MT asks serial entrepreneurs to share the lessons they take with them from one business to the next.


Gav Thompson is an ideas man. Having started his career in the “glory days” of advertising – in the 1990s and 2000s – he worked for agencies in London, New York and Sydney, on brands including Guinness, PlayStation and Pepsi, and was part of the launch team for Three.

“In my twenties and thirties, I got to see and soak up all this cool stuff. I gained the ability to distil the learning from working on multiple great brands with multiple amazing chief marketing officers; and there was some kind of osmosis of these very clever people’s ideas.”

Thompson’s move to Telefonica’s O2 in 2007, as director of brand strategy, was his first client-side role, offering him the chance to demonstrate what he’d absorbed during the first 15 years of his career.

“For the first six months I went around asking people why they were doing things the way they were. I had the objectivity of ignorance; my insight as a newbie told me the market had become way too complicated and multilayered for a lot of consumers. I didn't really understand why Orange had to do Wednesday cinema offers. Why did Vodafone have to give out F1 tickets? It felt excessive to the extreme.”

There was a growing base of around 11% of O2’s customers, Thompson says, who “did not care about the bells and whistles; they simply wanted a utility service that worked and treated them with respect and parity”.

Stripping the service down to basics would not only give these customers what they wanted, but would also remove a large burden of cost for O2. Without marketing expenses, physical retail spaces, call centres and handset subsidies, the business “becomes a very simple value exchange model”, explains Thompson.

Dawn of the online community

In 2009, as global director of brand innovation, Thompson launched Giffgaff: a community-based SIM service with no frills, the idea for which he had written in a notebook during a conference in San Francisco. Amid the world banking crisis, the idea hit home, finding its audience at the dawn of the online community, with Twitter (now X) having arrived on the scene just three years earlier.

Thompson observed what was happening in other markets with community-based platforms, such as Tripadvisor. He wanted to harness the human desire to share (and probably show off), he says. “We had a lot of smart geeky people sharing advice about how to transfer music and photos from an iPhone to an Android.”

Even the name itself – ‘giffgaff’ – embodies the idea of reciprocity: it’s an ancient Scottish word for mutual giving. The principle of mutuality is “at the heart of” the business, Thompson says. “And that's a principle that lives on to this day.”

Today, the brand still retains the highest net promoter score of any mobile network, according to its founder, and would be worth “a billion quid” if O2 was to sell up.

The “accidental intrapreneur”

Giffgaff was always a piece of intrapreneurship – intellectual property created within the confines of Thompson’s employment at O2, rather than a business he could launch under his own steam. He was lucky, he says, that there was a willingness on the part of O2 as market leader to consider launching a disruptive brand that, by definition, took share from itself. Giffgaff was started with a £4.5m incubation budget from the telecoms giant, before being launched with “zero marketing budget”, instead relying on peer-to-peer marketing.

Having come from the ad agency world, where “the customer was at the heart of everything”, Thompson found himself – a self-described “accidental intrapreneur” – “feeling very rewarded by the fact that I’d had an idea that was now a business solving problems for some customers, and it was making money”.

Despite having birthed the Giffgaff concept, Thompson knew he was “not the guy to be the CEO”, preferring his “happy place” of marketing and customer experience.

“Halfway through the process,” he says, “we all agreed that my operational knowledge of telcos was not good enough for me to be the leader.”

Mike Fairman, who was part of the team, became CEO while Thompson remained founder and CMO.

This was a lesson in recognising his own strengths and limitations, says Thompson. Post-launch, he remained on the board of Giffgaff for seven years, before moving on to chief marketer roles at a range of brands including Paddy Power and Boden.

Unfinished business

It’s unfinished business for Thompson, who has carried the idea of running his own telco – ‘Giffgaff 2.0’ – with him since 2008.

“There were things that we did well, things I wish we'd done better, things that we definitely didn't do well enough – so I want another crack at the title. This thing hasn’t gone away,” he says.

And so it was that last week Thompson unveiled Slice Mobile. The new brand will be a non-conventional mobile network based on blockchain technology.

It won’t be the same as Giffgaff and “definitely won’t be trying to put Giffgaff out of business”, he says, but it will be based around the power of community.

“I've had 15 years to think about this idea; it’s been brewing for a long time. And the world's changed, so this is a better version for this moment in time. Plus I've got a shedload of knowledge and experience that I didn't have before,” Thompson says. I believe it could and should be really successful, but it's not a given. It comes from the bit of my brain that believes in community and sharing and reciprocity and mutuality, combined with clever stuff around capability, technology, blockchain and network integration that hasn't been used before in this space.”

Thompson has secured investor backing for the new venture, which will operate under his business, Paraspara. As chief executive of Slice Mobile, Thompson has appointed Wavemaker and Lucky Generals respectively as media and creative agencies. He is trying to build on lessons from Giffgaff, and to learn from “some of the failures”.

“I want us to be more entrepreneurial. This time we're not a wholly owned part of a big company. We have some input into our destiny, and we carry some risk, which is both positive and negative. I believe this idea could change the face of telco. But believing that to be true, makes me a lot less chilled.”

He adds: “I'm leaning on some very established colleagues, advisors and partners from my 15 years in telecoms. I'm very honoured that I've got an amazing team. Everything I see, from the research to the product market fit, to the technology, to the economics is unbelievably positive.”

And this time around, Thompson tells MT, the power of his idea will stretch beyond the UK – “because when you have the opportunity to create a global digital brand, why wouldn't you?”

Lessons from the rear-view mirror

Seeking success? Here’s Gav Thompson’s advice distilled…

1. Surround yourself with experts: “Know enough about your own skills to know when you need to pass a role onto someone who has more knowledge and experience than you. Don’t be afraid to hire people who are better than you, to take care of what you’re weaker at.”

2. Be brave: “Don’t shy away from opportunities to make your idea bigger and better. If you have the opportunity to grow globally, or to secure a big investment, take it.”

3. Listen to customers: “Make sure you really, really, see the world through your customers’ eyes, and that you have developed something you truly believe they could fall in love with. This requires a massive focus on customer insight, and a brand built on affinity and love, not just utility.”

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