James Cobb founded Crowd Connected at the Surrey Technology Centre in Guildford in 2013, after years as a tour manager and event safety specialist. The company now has more than 400 deployments across 30 countries, working with Informa, Live Nation, Coachella, CES and PCMA. He tells Business Matters why he still hoovers the office on a Friday.

What do you currently do at Crowd Connected?

I am the founder and CEO of Crowd Connected, a location intelligence company I started in Guildford in 2013. At its simplest, we help organisations understand what people are actually doing in physical spaces.

The digital world measures everything. Every click, search and transaction leaves a trail of data. Yet a surprising amount of the physical world is still managed using assumptions, rules of thumb, booking systems and somebody’s best guess.

Our technology measures things such as movement, occupancy and dwell time across events, venues, university campuses and other complex spaces. The platform handles indoor positioning, wayfinding, occupancy counting and asset tracking, and it self-calibrates rather than requiring anyone to walk a site fingerprinting it first, so it goes live in hours. We have now supported more than 400 deployments across 30 countries, including Informa events and conferences and music festivals such as Coachella and BST Hyde Park, and tracked more than 250,000 delegates.

My role has changed considerably as the company has grown, but I still spend a lot of time sitting in the gap between the technology and the customer problem. I like understanding why something works, why it does not and whether what we are building genuinely creates value.

We have deliberately remained a fairly small team. There was a time when I was slightly embarrassed about that, because startup culture can encourage you to measure success by headcount. I am not anymore. A small team forces discipline. You have to automate, build products properly and be very clear about what actually creates value. Scaling without locking into fixed costs is a live question for a lot of owner-managers, and headcount is the biggest fixed cost most of them take on.

What was the inspiration behind your business?

Before Crowd Connected I spent many years working in live events, initially as a tour and production manager and later specialising in event safety.

Festivals are effectively temporary cities. You plan everything in extraordinary detail, from how many people can fit into an area, to how quickly a crowd can move through an entrance, to how long it will take to empty a car park. What struck me was how little real measurement sat behind some of those plans.

I remember being challenged at a licensing hearing about where some traffic-flow figures had come from. The honest answer was that I had stood on a corner in a hi-vis jacket and counted how many cars could turn left out of a car park onto a single carriageway in ten minutes.

I simply thought there had to be a better way, so I started experimenting with technology, initially with early GPS equipment and previous-generation Bluetooth devices. At one Wembley Stadium show I strapped a Bluetooth transmitter to a handrail to see whether I could use it to estimate crowd density. That question, how do people really move through physical spaces, has effectively been my career ever since.

Crowd Connected grew out of that frustration with the gap between the plan and reality. Our early breakthrough was an Innovate UK backed proof of concept with Live Nation at Wireless Festival. The technology has changed enormously since then, but the underlying problem is much the same.

Who do you admire?

I admire people who are prepared to discover that they are wrong. One of our company values is “I seek to be corrected, not just validated”, and I increasingly think it is one of the hardest things to do well in business. We are all very good at collecting evidence for what we already want to believe.

I studied history and philosophy of science, so my examples are often historical. Darwin had a rule that any observation contradicting his theory had to be written down immediately, because he knew inconvenient facts fade from memory faster than convenient ones. If you do not admire him for the theory of evolution, you can admire him for that.

Closer to home, I admire people who change their position in a meeting. It is a small thing but I notice it every time.

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

When I was at university, Procter and Gamble contacted me and invited me to an event to learn about its graduate programme. I could not, or more accurately would not, make the date they suggested, and rather arrogantly assumed that if they really wanted me they would work around me. They quite reasonably explained that it did not work like that, so I did not go.

It sounds like an incredibly small decision, because it was. I was not turning down a job. I was turning down lunch. But looking back, it was absolutely the wrong decision, made for the wrong reasons.

What I failed to understand was that an opportunity does not have to be something you want to do for the rest of your life to be worth taking. A few years inside an organisation like P and G could have taught me an enormous amount about management, strategy, finance and leadership, a lot of which I have had to learn the hard way.

What defines your way of doing business?

In live events, you very quickly learn that the plan and reality are not necessarily the same thing. In business I try to apply the same discipline: ask questions, look for evidence and pay particular attention to information that suggests you might be wrong.

I also believe quite strongly in autonomy. Earlier in my career I liked the feeling of being the person with the radio whom everybody needed in order to make a decision. I now realise that is usually evidence of a badly designed organisation. If everything has to come through one person, you have created a bottleneck, not a leader.

Good leadership is about creating systems, giving people responsibility and then letting them get on with it.

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

Treat opportunities as opportunities to learn rather than permanent decisions. When you are young, it is very easy to imagine that every choice closes off all the alternatives. Usually it does not. If an opportunity is going to expose you to interesting people, problems or skills for a couple of years, that can be enormously valuable even if you eventually decide it is not what you want to do.

I would also say that founding a business is considerably less glamorous than people sometimes imagine. I still hoover our office on a Friday. If you calculated my hourly rate you could probably make a convincing argument that this is economically irrational, but that slightly misses the point. In a small company nobody should think a job is beneath them.

And finally, learn to stop as well as start. Once we invest time and emotion in an idea, it becomes surprisingly difficult to walk away from it. Being willing to stop something that is not working can be every bit as important as having the confidence to begin.

This article was written by

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MENLO PARK, Calif. — Shares of Robinhood Markets Inc. surged 8.94% to $119.62 in Friday trading, adding $9.82, as the trading platform rode both a broader rally in crypto-linked equities and a new regulatory development from the Securities and Exchange Commission that positions the company as a direct beneficiary of the growing push to bring traditional stocks onto blockchain infrastructure.

The rally follows the SEC’s issuance Thursday of what it called an “innovation exemption” designed to facilitate trading of tokenized stocks registered under the National Market System, a move widely described as bringing U.S. equity markets closer to round-the-clock trading. Robinhood, which has positioned itself as a pioneer in retail cryptocurrency access and tokenized asset distribution, was quickly identified by market analysts as a primary beneficiary of the new exemption, given the company’s early investment in blockchain-based trading infrastructure through its proprietary Robinhood Chain platform.

Robinhood Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev has previously framed tokenization as central to the company’s broader growth strategy, telling CNBC earlier this month that the technology “allows us to distribute access to U.S. stocks globally.” That comment came amid a public exchange with AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron, who had criticized tokenized stock products as “fake equity.” Tenev responded to that criticism not with a direct rebuttal but by announcing additional perks for users of Robinhood’s tokenized stock offerings, a move interpreted by some market commentators as a pointed response to Aron’s skepticism.

Friday’s advance also came alongside a broader rally across crypto-linked equities, with Robinhood, Coinbase and Strategy Inc. all posting sharp gains as bitcoin’s price climbed above $80,000 following the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision earlier in the week, which signaled a less aggressive path for future rate increases than some investors had anticipated.

The gains mark a sharp reversal from earlier in the week, when Robinhood shares fell between 4% and 5.5% after the Department of Justice charged two former Robinhood engineers with fraud in connection with insider trading tied to cryptocurrency listings on the platform. Investors appeared to move past that enforcement action relatively quickly, with the stock staging a technical rebound Thursday, up 5.41% and again 5.16% in separate sessions, before Friday’s larger advance. Market commentary attributed that recovery to investors choosing to focus on the company’s core platform fundamentals and growth trajectory rather than the specific conduct allegations against two former employees.

Wall Street’s assessment of Robinhood has grown increasingly bullish in recent sessions even amid that controversy. Deutsche Bank raised its price target on the stock to $138 from $136, part of a broader wave of price target increases from major banks that have pushed targets into a range of roughly $130 to $170 while maintaining Buy and Overweight ratings on the shares. Analysts have pointed to several specific growth drivers behind those higher targets, including fee revenue from Robinhood Chain now tracking above a $100 million annualized run rate, and the company’s Rothera prediction-market venture, which analysts say already generates approximately $150 million in annualized revenue and ranks among the largest prediction market platforms globally.

Robinhood’s underlying financial results have supported that optimism. The company’s most recent quarterly results showed revenue of $1.31 billion, ahead of the $1.29 billion analysts had expected, alongside adjusted earnings of 62 cents per share, comfortably beating the 43-cent consensus estimate for a surprise of more than 44%. Net income for the quarter reached $561 million, up sharply from $346 million in the prior quarter. The company’s EBITDA stands at approximately $2.3 billion, with an EBITDA margin near 49%, reflecting a business that has scaled profitability significantly as trading volumes and customer assets on the platform have grown.

Robinhood’s business today spans considerably more than its original stock brokerage offering, encompassing Robinhood Crypto, custody services, the Robinhood Wallet product, and the Robinhood Gold and Robinhood Gold Card subscription and credit offerings, reflecting the company’s broader ambition to serve as a comprehensive financial services platform rather than a narrow trading app. The company, which had approximately 2,900 employees as of its most recent disclosure, is scheduled to report its next quarterly earnings on November 4.

Not every regulatory signal facing Robinhood’s crypto and tokenization ambitions has been favorable. The U.S. Senate’s failure to pass the CLARITY Act, legislation aimed at establishing clearer regulatory guidelines for digital assets, has left a degree of ongoing uncertainty around the broader policy environment for crypto businesses, including Robinhood’s expanding blockchain-based product lineup. That legislative uncertainty has been cited by some analysts as a continuing headwind even as the SEC’s newly issued tokenization exemption offers a more immediate, favorable regulatory development for the company.

Robinhood shares have traded within a wide 52-week range spanning from $63.52 to $153.86, reflecting substantial volatility tied to both company-specific developments and broader swings in cryptocurrency market sentiment, given the platform’s significant exposure to crypto trading activity alongside its traditional brokerage business.

With the SEC’s tokenization exemption still in its early implementation stages and Robinhood continuing to expand both its blockchain infrastructure and its prediction market business, investors are likely to watch closely for further regulatory clarity, along with continued growth in Robinhood Chain’s fee revenue and Rothera’s prediction market volumes, as the next set of catalysts likely to shape the stock’s trajectory heading into its early November earnings report.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, signed an executive order Friday calling on the federal government to take a more active role in regulating artificial intelligence.

He said in a statement that the Trump administration has abdicated “its responsibility to protect Americans,” as AI becomes more advanced and capable by the month.

Newsom’s order recommends more stringent oversight on companies developing AI, while requiring those same firms to develop a “kill switch” for their frontier models in the event they go rogue.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during an event held by the state Democratic Party at the Penn Center on Sept. 3, 2026, on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.  (Sean Rayford/Getty Images / Getty Images)

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“We’re not waiting to act – we’re going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it’s too late. We’re going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action,” Newsom said.

In a video on his personal YouTube channel, Newsom delivered a sharp critique of President Donald Trump, who recently said that the risks surrounding AI amount to a “hoax.”

“There’s still no comprehensive federal law, none, requiring AI companies to report dangerous incidents when they happen, and President Trump has rejected calls for new regulation. No new regulation. Let it rip. He’s dead wrong,” Newsom said.

The order, Newsom said, will speed up implementation of recently enacted California laws that establish a framework for independent organizations to assess AI systems for safety and potential risk.

President Donald Trump pauses as he walks alone along an ivy-covered wall during his final departure from Aras an Uachtarain on Sept. 12, 2026, in Dublin, Ireland.  (Artur Widak/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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The order also moves up implementation of California’s AI auditor registry and oversight program from January 2029 to December 2027.

Newsom acknowledged in hs video message that the idea of creating a so-called “kill switch” for out-of-control AI systems is still largely in its infancy. To explore the concept further, he said he’d be convening a panel of experts.

A kill switch “means a lot of things depending on who you talk to,” Newsom said, adding, “So we want to flesh out exactly what that means and how to come up with a framework that works.”

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., attempted to introduce a federal AI kill switch bill this week, but his effort was blocked by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-K.Y., appears during meeting in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 6, 2026. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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“I think it would be crazy to get on the floor one day and regulate an entire industry,” Paul told reporters. He argued that passing such a piece of legislation would require input from industry leaders.

Trump has generally opposed new AI regulations, arguing that excessive rules could hamper innovation. He has repeatedly defended data centers, saying they are good for the communities that host them. 

He has also said that any slowdown in domestic AI development will lead to China outpacing the U.S. over time.

On Monday, Trump explicitly rejected calls from AI executives for the federal government to impose new limits on the technology. Among those calling for restraining AI were Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Housing affordability varies dramatically depending on where you live.

A new Realtor.com report released this week graded the nation’s 100 largest metro areas based on housing affordability and the pace of new home construction.

Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com, told FOX Business that the rankings were designed to capture the current state of each housing market, as well as its long-term trajectory.

“It’s really a balanced look at the present and the future for how things are affordable now and how they might be affordable in years to come,” Berner said.

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The Des Moines, Iowa, metro area topped Realtor.com’s housing report card with an A+ grade. (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Many metros across the Midwest and Sun Belt regions ranked high on the list, while several higher-cost coastal cities ranked near the bottom.

Des Moines, Iowa, topped the rankings with an A+ grade, followed by Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Houston, Texas; and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Los Angeles ranked last with an F, followed by Providence, Rhode Island; New York City; Honolulu; and Boston.

The report comes as the U.S. continues to grapple with a housing shortage of more than 4 million homes after years of underbuilding, according to Realtor.com.

“Builders are getting squeezed on both sides,” Berner said. “Their costs are going up, whether it’s materials, labor or the cost of regulation. … And on the demand side, they’re seeing depressed buyer activity because of high mortgage rates and low buyer affordability.”

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The report comes as the U.S. continues to grapple with a housing shortage of more than 4 million homes. (iStock/Getty Images Plus)

According to Berner, the highest-ranked metros generally have local governments that make it easier and faster to build new housing.

“They have local government facilitating new projects, not getting in the way, not having really restrictive zoning laws, having quick permitting processes,” he said.

“And these are places with strong job markets that are growing really fast, and the cities are allowing builders to absorb that increasing demand for homes in these growing cities by building a lot of them.”

Many of those markets also have abundant land, Berner added.

“Those places really have some advantages that the coastal cities don’t,” Berner said. “Land is much more available. … They’re also incentivizing these builders to produce dense urban housing as well as the kind of suburban developments that the developers have been working on for a number of years.”

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Los Angeles ranked last in the report, earning an F grade. (iStock)

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Berner said that local officials hoping to improve affordability should start by revisiting zoning rules.

“I think the first thing they should do is look at their local zoning ordinances,” Berner said.