Estelle Lloyd’s streaming service is fun for kids and a safe place

‘Kids want it to be fun and parents want it to be safe. And it has to have a learning component’ – Estelle Lloyd speaks to Andy Martin about her children’s online streaming service, Azoomee

Douglas and Estelle Lloyd, the husband-wife team behind Azoomee (Tom Naylor)

Can you be married to someone and still be business partners? “It’s great,” says Estelle Lloyd, one half of Azoomee (the other half is her other half, Doug). “Being able to go to someone and say I really screwed up – and get uncensored feedback. You need that.”

Estelle grew up in Provence and studied at the University of Montpellier. “I spent most of my time outdoors. It was beautiful and free, but I wasn’t content.” By virtue of persistent cold-calling, she got an internship with a French bank in New York. “It was sheer willpower, back in the days before email. I think they gave me the job just to stop me calling.” She went for two months and stayed 10 years, mainly in investment banking, then had a year’s sabbatical doing an Executive MBA at Columbia, where she took a class with a professor who was also an entrepreneur. “He was an inspiration. He made me wonder, what would I do if I started something on my own?”

Having had a ringside seat for a decade, she had noticed what often went wrong with start-ups: “They need a lot of money to invest in infrastructure and then they don’t get the revenue…” So she was careful about not “setting myself up for failure”. Her passion at the time was renewable energy. She had collected a lot of data about who had invested in which company and then she realised that the data itself was valuable. Other people wanted what she already had. And it didn’t require infrastructure. Thus VB/Research, her first business was born – a “mini-Bloomberg” as she describes it.