Mel Morris is Betting on What Comes Next

There is a particular kind of entrepreneur who becomes more interesting after the big exit. The obvious route is to slow down, invest, advise, sit on boards and tell stories about the companies that made the fortune. Mel Morris appears to have little interest in that version of retirement. He is still looking for the next thing – and preferably not the obvious thing. 

His career has moved from early computing and internet dating to gaming, cybersecurity, search intelligence and now artificial intelligence and frontier energy technology. But the thread running through it is consistent: he is drawn to problems that other people have either dismissed, misunderstood or decided are too difficult. His first major lesson came with uDate, the internet dating business he built at the turn of the millennium. The company was preparing to float when the dot-com crash arrived, transforming the fundraising landscape almost overnight. Instead of the huge nine-figure sum they had expected, they raised only a more conservative seven-figure amount. Within months, the money was disappearing. The technology worked, the platform was monetising, but there wasn’t enough capital to market it properly. Morris asked his CFO and COO how long they had left. Three or four months, perhaps a little longer. Then came the choice that would become emblematic of his approach to entrepreneurship: “I can tread water and die, or I can try and swim to some yet unseen island.”

He went looking for that island and found another dating business with something uDate lacked – a much larger customer base. The business itself had less money, but together the two companies could potentially become something stronger. Morris structured a deal using stock and a loan note, effectively asking the seller to bet on the combined business. The gamble worked. The merged company was profitable from its first quarter, the seller was paid out within nine quarters and the company became the number two dating site in the world. Looking back, Morris is candid about what went wrong in the first place: “We hadn’t learned the lesson of not spending quickly.” A simple observation perhaps, but it says a great deal about the entrepreneur behind it. When the obvious route disappears, Morris doesn’t seem to spend much time mourning it. He starts looking for another route.

That instinct would become even more important when King Games entered the picture. Today, it is almost impossible to discuss King without immediately saying Candy Crush Saga, but Morris’s version of the story begins almost a decade earlier. In 2003, he became chairman of what was then Midasplayer, alongside people including Riccardo Zacconi and Toby Rowland, who had previously worked with him at uDate. They had a gaming business, a talented team and a proposition they believed in. What they didn’t have was investors willing to back it. Morris and the team spent months travelling around Europe, talking to venture capital firms and trying to raise relatively modest amounts of money. Three million. Five million. Ten million. Twenty million. “No one wanted to know,” Morris recalls.

By Christmas 2003, the company was running out of money. So Morris wrote the cheque himself. He remained chairman through the company’s eventual public listing in 2014, and one of the great misconceptions about King’s rise is that it was somehow an overnight Candy Crush phenomenon. It wasn’t. There were more than ten years between the company’s foundation and its flotation. The breakthrough came from understanding that the game itself was only part of the proposition. King had been making tournament games in which thousands of people could compete and one person could walk away with a significant prize. Morris saw the problem immediately: one winner had a reason to talk about the experience; almost everybody else did not. The model couldn’t generate the kind of virality the company needed. The thinking had to change. Instead of games that ended, build a game that could continue indefinitely. Instead of a new title every year, create more levels. Instead of competing against strangers, compete against your friends. And instead of simply selling the game, create a mechanism where players could wait, pay or invite friends when they ran out of lives. The genius was not one particular feature. It was the combination. The user became part of the acquisition strategy. The game became a social network. And the business model became more important than the game itself. “A company’s business model is a key factor among several that distinguishes those that succeed and continue growing.”  It is probably the single most important lesson he took from King – and it is one he believes is even more relevant now.

AI is changing the rules of entrepreneurship again. The ability to build is becoming dramatically cheaper and faster. A small team can now create software, websites, marketing material and prototypes that previously required significant technical and financial resources. That is an extraordinary democratisation of capability, but Morris sees a corresponding problem: if everybody can build, what makes one company difficult to displace? His answer is uncomfortable, but it’s hard to argue with. “Accept the fact that you’re never going to have a moat around what you’ve done,” he says. Instead, the company has to keep moving. “You have to innovate constantly, making it better, pushing the boundaries. Don’t sit on your laurels.” It is a very different philosophy from the classic start-up model of building something defensible and then protecting it.

Morris believes the defensibility may increasingly lie in the speed of innovation itself. The company that survives isn’t necessarily the one with the most sophisticated technology on day one; it is the one that can keep improving after everybody else has caught up. That thinking feeds directly into his current interest in AI and energy. Morris is involved as an adviser and minority shareholder in a company developing what he describes as a highly advanced solar technology designed to significantly increase the usable output from solar panels. The first scaled installation is planned for his own home and is expected to be roughly a third of a megawatt – large enough, he believes, to demonstrate whether the technology can move from laboratory proposition to something genuinely scalable. His interest isn’t simply technological. It is strategic. The UK wants to become an AI powerhouse, but Morris believes the country has overlooked a fundamental constraint: energy. “How can you exploit AI if you can’t afford to power it?” he asks. 

That question sits at the centre of the work being developed by UCR Group (Universal Collaboration Research), the UK frontier deep-tech company working across advanced scientific electrical and materials engineering, including solar energy capture, power conditioning and advanced ceramic materials. Keith Cook, founder and CEO of UCR Group, describes the proposition simply: to generate more energy, lose less of it, and strengthen the infrastructure that carries it. “Our Alvolt Solar Capture technology is designed to increase useful generation from solar PV, particularly under the low-irradiance and diffuse-light conditions, which is typical of much of the UK, and exactly where conventional systems tend to underperform,” Cook says. The company is now moving from validation into scaled UK reference installations, where performance can be measured under commercial operating conditions. Alongside this, UCR Group is developing a proprietary ultra-low-energy ceramic synthesis process with applications across the energy sector in electrical infrastructure. According to Cook, the technology is intended to improve component durability, strengthen grid interaction and reduce transmission losses. The wider proposition, Cook says, is energy security. Electricity demand is expected to rise significantly, not least from AI and data-centre infrastructure. New generation and grid capacity take years to plan and build, so getting more from existing assets can be an important part of addressing that constraint. UCR Group believes that technology developed, validated and manufactured in the UK to address a national energy challenge represents “a sovereign capability worth owning.” The company’s research also extends into the way frontier research is conducted. “Our work sits at the frontier of established research,” Cook says. He adds that UCR Group’s partnership with Corpora.ai, where Morris is CEO and co-founder, has become an important part of how the company works, enabling it “to interrogate the scientific landscape faster, identify unrealised cross domain pattern correlations, and build stronger academic and literature based foundations for our collaborative research and validation programmes.”

AI requires computing. Computing requires energy. If energy remains expensive, the cost of developing and running AI remains high. The UK may have outstanding universities, researchers and technical talent, but none of that matters if the underlying economics prevent businesses from scaling. For Morris, energy is therefore not a side issue in the AI race. It is part of the race itself. For Morris, becoming genuinely global means more than taking a successful British product abroad. The economics have to work, the service has to travel and, increasingly, technology has to remove the friction of international expansion. Candy Crush is a useful example. It was simple, required little explanation and barely needed translation. You opened it and played. That simplicity became a global advantage. AI could create similar opportunities elsewhere, allowing smaller teams to automate customer service, produce marketing, build software and enter international markets. But lower barriers also mean more competition. For Morris, the challenge is building businesses that can withstand it. He is also critical of the UK’s failure to turn world-class research into world-class companies. The talent is there; what is often missing is the machinery to take ideas to market. Universities face a similar challenge. AI is disrupting a system built around the gradual accumulation of knowledge when information is now instantly accessible. Morris argues that institutions need to judge outcomes rather than cling to old timelines. If someone can prove a thesis in nine months, why wait three years? “In my book, they’ve done the job,” he says. “They’ve proved the thesis. They did it in nine months. Give them their PhD in nine months.” It is provocative, but it captures the instinct that has run through his career: judge the outcome, not the tradition.

So what would Morris do if he were starting again at 20? Build around AI, make it scalable, accept that someone will copy you, and keep innovating. That sounds simple, but it means accepting that there is no longer a point where a business is finished or secure. Technology, competitors and customer expectations move too quickly. The answer, for Morris, is permanent movement. His career reflects that. uDate survived a funding crisis through a different deal structure. King struggled to attract venture capital when online gaming was unfashionable, so he invested himself. When tournament gaming failed to generate enough engagement, the model became a league that never ended. Candy Crush then showed how product design, social behaviour and monetisation could combine into a global business. Now, with AI, Morris is looking beyond the obvious questions: what will power the technology, what will make AI businesses durable when everyone has the same tools, and how quickly can institutions adapt? His instinct is to look one step further. He is drawn to ideas that initially seem slightly unreasonable – rockets to Mars, new forms of energy, technologies and businesses that are difficult to value. “If you think you’ve got something valuable, have the confidence to stay with it,” he says. It may be the clearest summary of his philosophy: entrepreneurship is not about knowing you are right. It is about having enough evidence, conviction and resilience to keep going while everyone else is still deciding whether you are wrong.

What stands out about Morris’s career is not just the companies he has built, but the questions he keeps coming back to. What happens when the obvious route closes? Where is the demand? What is the business model? Can it scale? And what comes next? That approach has taken him from the early internet to mobile gaming and now into AI and frontier science. It also explains why he seems more interested in what is still unresolved than in looking back at what he has already achieved. That has been a theme throughout his career. uDate needed a different route when funding dried up. King needed a business model that investors did not yet understand. Candy Crush became much more than a game. Now AI is opening up a different set of questions around energy, education, competition and scale. For the next generation of entrepreneurs, Morris thinks the tools will be more powerful and the barriers to entry lower. But that also means more competition. Having good technology will not be enough. The business model, distribution, timing and people will matter just as much. And so will persistence. The future rarely looks obvious at the start. Someone has to be prepared to move before everyone else can see where things are going. Morris has spent much of his career doing that.