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Startup Mindset, Blockchain Barriers and the Future of Decentralized Computing | Tim O'Brien | WT3 002
27 Plays1 year ago
Embrace the Shit Running Towards You!" Join us for the second episode of What The 3, the no-bs podcast for emerging tech startups.
In this episode, we sit down with Tim O'Brien, co-founder of Node Army, who shares his incredible journey from military officer to blockchain entrepreneur. Tim dives deep into the challenges of scaling a tech venture, the importance of building the right team, and the lessons he's learned from his unconventional career path. He also shares his insights on the future of decentralized computing, the barriers to mass adoption in the blockchain space, and how his startup is working to overcome them.
Throughout the episode, Tim emphasizes the value of resilience, embracing failure, and maintaining a sense of humor in the face of adversity. He reveals his 'Startup Desert Island' essentials and the one piece of advice he'd give to aspiring entrepreneurs. This episode is packed with unfiltered insights and practical wisdom that will resonate with anyone building a startup in the emerging tech space.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'What The Three'
00:00:03
Speaker
All right, well, welcome to our next episode of What The Three.
Meet Tim O'Brien
00:00:08
Speaker
Today with us we have Tim O'Brien, who has pretty much done it all. In fact, I'm quite jealous of your life story,
From Law to Investment Banking
00:00:15
Speaker
frankly. The jack of all trades, or as you put it yesterday, we were having a chat, mayonnaise layer of everything. So law degree, British army officer, investment banker, including Silicon Valley for Web 1.0,
00:00:32
Speaker
Risk specialists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Colombia, and Nigeria. Security and defense
Discovering Ultrarunning
00:00:39
Speaker
tech for U.S. government agencies, including two-time SPAC listings on the NASDAQ. Postgraduate and fraud management, a fraud investigator, an aid worker in Sierra Leone, Senegal, Kenya, Panama, Lesbos, Greece, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Thailand, and the chief of staff for Archer High Network, not to mention
00:01:01
Speaker
of being unemployed, biotech entrepreneur, blockchain governance specialist, running the accelerator program for the Constellation network, and the bearded ultra runner and single dad who's 52 at any other time in his life.
Learning from Failures
00:01:16
Speaker
Just to be very clear, an ultra run is how long?
00:01:23
Speaker
It's anything over a marathon. Basically, I'm not very fast, Charlie, at all. So I realized that I just can keep going. So I'm stubborn. So I decided years ago, I was working in the Middle East, came back to London, and I was working the same pace seven days a week, always on call. And I just decided to go off into the hills where the phone doesn't work. And the excuse that I had to have
00:01:50
Speaker
was undoing an event. So I started doing these long distance runs, which I took my time over and were very long so that I could turn my phone off many hours at a time, which was the only way I could get some downtime. Okay, fair enough. That's incredible.
00:02:07
Speaker
I mean, that's an incredible career you've had so far.
Opportunities in Career Changes
00:02:10
Speaker
Like, you say, like, stubborn and I just keep going. I think that seems to sum up what you've just said there, but it seems like you just keep going into whole different arenas as well, like, tangentially related, but it must have been quite a rewarding career to this point.
00:02:25
Speaker
Oh no, I've got nothing to show for it. I've failed comprehensively at most things, but each failure has given me an opportunity to do something else. And of course, looking back, it wasn't a failure. When something came to the end of its natural sort of course, it often feels like you've failed at something or you haven't succeeded at something rather, or the macro market conditions have been unfavorable and you've been spat out of the machine of investment banking.
00:02:57
Speaker
I think it's with a bit of maturity and a bit of age looking back that actually I've been very fortunate with all of the changes that I've had. They haven't actually been disasters at all. They've been moments when I've been in a chrysalis or incubating myself and then coming out and letting it fly again.
Knowing When to Move On
00:03:17
Speaker
I know we're just in the early intro part of this episode, but I think that's some really salient advice for founders and potential founders that are watching because it's something that I found myself in that knowing when something's run its course and knowing when to not decide it's a failure, I've done that myself.
00:03:37
Speaker
the emotional attachment you can get to businesses and projects where you just don't want to put them down because you feel like oh if it ends here i'll feel it's a failure rather than looking at everything you've learned from it and what that then allows you to go on to next i do think it for me comes from this idea of
00:03:54
Speaker
I had you growing up and going through like school university you have the idea that you have like maybe one career and one passion one thing that you'll build from small acorn to a great tree, not realizing that you can find that acorn any point in your
Philosophy on Bravery
00:04:07
Speaker
life. I think that's really fast and i think what you're saying that really resonates with me cuz i'm thirty nine i'm thirty eight.
00:04:15
Speaker
and I've only come to that realisation over the last year or so and I've still got ties to projects going back 15-20 years that I just need to sever. There's a fantastic book I read a couple of decades ago, I think it was, about a bomb disposal expert during the 1980s in London for the Met Police when sadly the IRA were going through a campaign of bombings of civilian targets in the UK.
Walking Away as Bravery
00:04:45
Speaker
And this guy his his job was I mean he was incredibly high-powered Incredibly dedicated to his job. He would arrive as the guy to try to defuse or disarm a bomb that was set to kill or maim or or Cause fear and terror to a civilian population but also to destroy value in terms of the property or our infrastructure whatever He
00:05:13
Speaker
his mantra was braver men walk away. His whole purpose and his mission was to disable and disarm the bomb. But often the bravest thing he could do was walk away, was look at the challenge in front of him, realize, you know what, I can't
00:05:31
Speaker
Digest this I can't solve this I can't on this bomb It's wrong. It's run its course I'm not no longer the right person for this role or this role is no longer the right role for me The bravest thing I can do is accept it and walk away I was gonna say I imagine also in those bomb situations Sometimes you say you know, you're not gonna fix it.
Unexpected Project Endings
00:05:56
Speaker
The aftermath is gonna be devastating But you've got to stop preparing for that now
00:06:00
Speaker
Because you're just delaying it and you're going to make it worse. And that is brave, going, OK, this is going to be bad. But the sooner I start dealing with it, the better. And I think that's the case with, as you say, with the projects that end in the way that you don't want them to.
Fairfon CEO Steps Down
00:06:16
Speaker
I think that's exactly the case. And then there's other projects where you've misunderstood what the ending is meant to be. And you just stay there and turn it into a failure by not leaving. At least I feel like I've done that with projects.
00:06:29
Speaker
I found a very good example of that in a very positive way is Fairfon. You probably heard about it. Like the CEO of Fairfon, I think, ran the company for five years and then came in and announced with like, hey, we're doing better than ever, but I'm stepping out.
00:06:44
Speaker
because I am a builder. I'm not a sustainer, I'm not an evolver. I've been training my replacement for the last year because I know that I can only do the piece where I am really good at and that's building. You put me in a sustainer and evolver role?
Accountability in Leadership
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's not gonna go well. And the fact that he chose that, and I think he went to the board of...
00:07:03
Speaker
probably the board or something like that. He's still involved. We said like, I am not going to be the day to day CEO or being in operations day to day. And I think that was one of the bravest decisions I've ever seen a CEO make from a company that's doing was actually up and coming, right? Like they were making the money that we're looking, they are looking really good. He's like, Nope, I'm stepping out. I cannot bring this company to the next stage. I think it's what you said to him. It's like, you know, a brave man understands what he needs to walk away.
00:07:33
Speaker
100%. So, I mean, from that challenge, shall we, shall we move on to, I think we've already got a little anecdote there just in passing, but should we move on to the end of those section? Do you want to take it away?
Army Training Exercise
00:07:42
Speaker
Well, I mean, the title is first one really, Tim, if you could explain, we all know that shit runs downhill. I think I'll pretty much just leave it there. Yeah, it does. And no one really wants to be left holding the accountability.
00:08:01
Speaker
especially if we don't feel that we were responsible. But sometimes as a leader, we need to, and it can be the right thing to do. And look, I remember it was a career-defining moment for me. I would have been a young 24-year-old captain in the British Army training soldiers in their initial training.
Leadership in Criticism
00:08:23
Speaker
They were going through their final exercise, dawn attack after being out on patrol overnight, and everyone was watching.
00:08:31
Speaker
They had, we had the training major with Colonel and the measurement sergeant major. They were the senior guys. We had the company commander, my boss, or my direct boss, and the company sergeant major, and a few sort of training staff as well. And they're all sitting there.
00:08:48
Speaker
in the early hours of the summer. It was a nice, glorious summer morning of dawn, about 4.30 in the morning, having a mug of coffee and watching the platoon of prospective infantrymen going through their final attack. And it was an absolute disaster. The guys were useless.
00:09:08
Speaker
They've been training for this for weeks and weeks, learning all the skills, and everyone just forgot. Everyone forgot everything they were facing the wrong way. They dropped the magazines. They didn't see where the enemy was. It was just an utter disaster.
00:09:24
Speaker
The exercise finished, or that phase of it finished. Everyone sort of gathered around, the Colonel stood up in front of everyone and gave everyone the phrase we would use in the British Army is gave them a bollocking and said, you were useless. And then turned to the training team and said, I don't know how you think you've prepared this platoon for their training for the last 14 weeks, but they were shambles, should be embarrassed, unprofessional uses.
00:09:54
Speaker
And then he left. Regimental Sergeant Major turned to the non-commissioned officers who were in the training team and said exactly the same thing. This was atrocious. You should be ashamed of yourself. And then he turned and left. The Major then turned around. He'd just been given a bollocking by the Colonel. So the Major turned to me and gave me a bollocking and then turned to all the soldiers and said, that was useless. You let everybody down. It was pathetic. What about your skills and drills? You forgot everything you'd been taught.
00:10:22
Speaker
It should be a shame of yourselves. You want to join the infantry and you do a platoon attack like that, it was terrible. And the company sergeant major then turned to my platoon sergeant, the rest of the training team and the soldiers and said the same thing, terrible. It should be a shame of yourself. And each time you could see the shoulders of the guys who weren't really accustomed to getting
00:10:46
Speaker
a four day exercise and then protruding through the night and then get it. These are 17, 18 year old, 19 year old guys. Their shoulders, their morale was just getting lower and lower. And they knew they were terrible. They've forgotten everything. They just have brain fried brains during the exercise. And then they left the major and the company sergeant major then left, leaving me as the remaining boss with my platoon sergeant and the soldiers. And I'd just been
00:11:16
Speaker
given abolishing by the Colonel and by my comedy commander, they write my career reports. They write their reports on me and my career progression recommendations. And I'd just been soundly chewed out by them in front of everybody, including my own soldiers.
Role of Middle Management
00:11:35
Speaker
So my soldiers looked up at me waiting for the shit to roll downhill.
00:11:41
Speaker
And for some reason, I decided just to hold the ship. If you like, the ship didn't roll downhill. I turned to the soldiers and had that moment of clarity that sometimes we're very lucky to get. And I said, look, you are under a lot of pressure. It's the first time you've done it. I've seen you preparing for it. I know what you can do. I believe in you because I've seen you doing it in rehearsals. It was just
00:12:07
Speaker
pressure, tiredness, a little bit of lack of experience that got you this morning. We've got some mugs or some big containers and flasks of tea and coffee over there. You were going to get it when you finish the exercise. Get it now. Have something to eat. Open your ration packs and get some calories in you. Sit down, gather yourselves, and we'll do it one more time with no one watching. And of course, they were brilliant. They got everything right.
00:12:35
Speaker
They left that exercise feeling confident in themselves and reassured that where there's accountability, it can be held. It doesn't have to flow down onto someone else. And I didn't have to give them a bollocking. And look, what was it to me? I already knew I was going to be leaving the army, so a career progression for me wasn't
00:12:58
Speaker
that much of a necessity, not that it would have made much of a difference. In fact, if the story went back that I treated my soldiers this way, that would have been much better actually for my career, but that's by the by. The truth was that those soldiers that would have been in the summer of 1998, those soldiers would have been junior leaders on operations in Afghanistan five years later.
00:13:27
Speaker
And some of those guys might have remembered just the way that we worked, that I trusted and believed in them. I thought nothing else about it until...
00:13:39
Speaker
10 years later, when one of the guys had been commissioned into the army, was gone through Sandhurst, he'd become an officer himself, and then he retired and left. And he wrote an autobiography about his time in the army. And one of the stories that he referred to was that moment on that final exercise, Dawn Attack, where I just protected the guys and stopped myself from the natural knee-jerk reaction of
00:14:07
Speaker
criticism coming in this year, criticism being directed out to someone else. But because I broke that, that flow, it gave an inspiration to people that needed it at that time. And of course, they were so much better. They went off to phase two training, infantry specific training, and they got all of the training they really, really needed there. This was just an initial training.
Embracing Business Challenges
00:14:31
Speaker
The value of it was more about, I suppose, the experience of
00:14:37
Speaker
being believed in when the chips were down. It says a lot about how important middle management is.
00:14:48
Speaker
Like understanding what you need to filter down and what you need to filter up. What you need to let go down and what you need to filter up. I think every version has its examples about middle management. But middle management, though right, is often you're taking a responsibility, even though it's not your responsibility to take. Yeah, I think so. I think it's interesting.
00:15:17
Speaker
When, I don't know, maybe transition around the millennium, but you see a lot of examples of that change starting to happen. And I think it's especially rare in the forces, to be honest. From what I've heard, it's quite a monolithic structure of authority.
00:15:36
Speaker
So I imagine that's that's pretty unique having that kind of um experience for those soldiers um tim So sorry jolly. I was going to say tim. When when do you know? What how? How do you examine shit as it's rolling towards you? Um You know certainly looking back at the military and indeed in business subsequently, um I
00:16:06
Speaker
I run towards it. And towards it, so you can get the best look possible and then decide whether you need to pass it. Because obviously sometimes you need to, it needs to carry on going sometimes surely. You know, I'd say I embrace it. That's the thing because the biggest lessons I've had have been in the most challenging experiences. And if, um, if something's easy,
00:16:31
Speaker
I don't always feel as if I'm learning from it because any of you are used to it. Again, is that saying train hard, fight easy and make things as challenging and demanding as you can when you have the capacity and when you've got the ability and the space and the time and the funding and the headcount so that when things get really, really tough, you've actually
00:16:57
Speaker
already put yourself under more pressure than circumstance can give you. So you know what you can deal with. If things are easy and you aren't necessarily lean, hungry, aggressive,
00:17:19
Speaker
It's very, very difficult when you're tired, your funding is running out, you've got HR issues, the macro market isn't as healthy as it was to somehow find margin, to somehow find capacity, to somehow find belief.
Advice for Founders
00:17:37
Speaker
When things are tough, I would always look for the challenge. And actually, that's probably why a few of my roles I've moved away from at various different times in life, because it could be
00:17:50
Speaker
comfortable And I don't necessarily want it to be comfortable because if things are comfortable, that's when we don't you don't build muscle you don't push your envelope you don't You don't explore your limitations And so yeah when when I see shit running towards me I'm happy usually in a sick peculiar way because I know that that I'm gonna have to face a challenge now that maybe I've not faced before and
00:18:18
Speaker
and find a way to resolve it. Or I find, oh, I've dealt with this before. I know what to do. But the reason I've dealt with it before and know what to do is because the previous time this challenge came through, I embraced it. Yeah. And if you run toward it, do you feel also, well, less surprised because you already see it coming and instead of like kind of washing it over you, you're just like, all right, I'm taking this hat on right now. It kind of almost de-risk it by embracing it.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yes, the only difficulty is if you're in an organization, a leadership team that doesn't necessarily see that as being part of your role. So if I've got a schedule A of duties, responsibilities, deliverables, and I suddenly go off to the margins of my remit and invest a lot of time, effort and energy
00:19:17
Speaker
doing something that isn't cool, just because I like dealing with challenges, that's not helpful to a business. That's not helpful to a leadership team.
Transition to Tech Entrepreneurship
00:19:28
Speaker
If it's, I don't know, dealing with an HR issue, well, yeah, sure, but we should have HR capacity to be able to manage that without one of the leadership team diluting their attention on an HR issue or a
00:19:45
Speaker
a marketing issue or a tech issue, we should have capacity within the verticals to do that. And so it can be a major fault of some founders to not let go of things that they did in the early stages of a startup process. But then when you get vertical leaders in each particular function of your business, you should invest them with trust rather than go
00:20:11
Speaker
Okay, this is really mission critical now. I'm the one that needs to do this. Someone else needs to have the same lessons. Speaking of lessons, sort of the second part of your backstory in this, that if you hadn't been defrauded, I think... Yeah, you're looking for personal stuff, I'm afraid. There are others that look at this list, you probably couldn't, nor would you want to, to be fair.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, basically, I'm very open about challenges in life. I lost a six-figure sum in an investment fraud. You'd think one would know better. The prospectus was better written than some of the ones that I wrote and were submitted along the stock exchange. It was a very, very compelling and convincing fraud.
00:20:59
Speaker
And sadly, if a fraud is a fraud from day one, it usually means that there aren't any loose ends that you can follow and pull the threads and find out what happened. If it's fraud from day one, then it's often a very elegant structure that you can't get to the bottom of. But yeah, I was defrauded. I then studied what had happened with a bit of a tenacity that you might expect if it's your own money and discovered that I had enough
00:21:29
Speaker
ability to get to the bottom of situations like that. So I set up a kind of fraud business, set up a consultancy with a couple of partners, and I studied post-grad and fraud management. And it was some years after that that I actually joined Save the Children International as their head of anti-corruption. So I made a profession out of this in due course, out of being defrauded.
00:21:54
Speaker
And the money that I had in the bank I'd thought about doing an MBA But actually as it turned out that the learning that I had and the professional development that I had From having lost it was probably more valuable to me than an MBA might have been Ironically, it's cool I don't know if You'd like to talk about this next bit your father passing your ex-wife, etc Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's it's
00:22:22
Speaker
if there are people watching and doing this that it might help then yeah I've got to put it out there. So my father was very risk averse and was very comfortable at giving me suggestions on life and career and guidance on life
00:22:43
Speaker
I had to make my own path. And it just so happened that, yeah, he died as happens in life. When I was in my mid 40s, at a critical part of life where you're making some major decisions on what your next steps are. He would have been very comfortable for me to have a a ploddy job in a stable business, earning a pension and
00:23:12
Speaker
with 25 days leave a year and a nice mortgage. It really wasn't for me. And so I had to, as people who've lost a big influence in their life, you realize that you're the grown up now and you have to make some decisions for yourself and for those who rely on you. And that was a, it's a cathartic moment when you realize you have to step up to the plate sometimes yourself.
00:23:43
Speaker
The ex-wife, we separated when I had two very young children and then divorced. And basically I had to make some choices. Do I make a home for my children or do I leave them and focus on my career and move to the city? And the choice that I made was be a good dad and to be available for them.
00:24:11
Speaker
And so I then realized that the only type of job that I could do would be a job that meant every other weekend I could travel a long way away from London to be with them. And the flip side of that, of course, was I couldn't have two homes. So when I was working at the time for Save the Children, a big NGO with headquarters in London, I lived in youth hostels, which was a novel experience in my late 40s, but the right thing to do.
00:24:39
Speaker
And actually I started thinking I wish I'd done that when I was an investment banker because for 11 pounds a night to have a bed with no bills When I was in the office until 3 in the morning anyway, and I'm back by half eight That would have been a great way of putting some money away But yeah living in hostels it was it was challenging and you see other people that have been reduced to that sort of circumstance around you as well, not just People backpacking around Europe but people who have got nowhere else to go
00:25:09
Speaker
And that was an interesting grounding at that time for me. Hey, we had a pandemic. The pandemic meant I lost the consulting gigs that I had at the time.
00:25:22
Speaker
and retreated back to, yep, looking after the children, living away from London and not earning anything for the best part of a year. So I had to accept the weight of substantial debt to continue to manage life. And each of those circumstances put me in a position where
00:25:51
Speaker
the there was no prospect of getting a nine to five monday to friday careerist kind of job because that just wasn't going to um well look hey if you're going to be able to save save um won two thousand pounds a month three thousand bucks a month um that would have taken me at that time quite a few years of saving at that rate
00:26:20
Speaker
if I could even do that, to start to pay back the debt that I had. So you have to look for other outcomes, other opportunities. And those other opportunities for me were starting to work in governance in blockchain and to be hired as a, to grow an ecosystem, to offer governance, compliance, and regulatory risk advice to blockchain projects. And I was very fortunate to be able to do that. And
00:26:49
Speaker
that just flipped very, very fortunately, rode a bit of a cycle, the very end of the last bull run, with a few opportunities that normally I wouldn't have dared think about. But because I was in that situation, that was all I could do. And I was very fortunate, right place, right time, as sometimes happens. I'd banked a lot of karma, and maybe this was my opportunity to
00:27:19
Speaker
to get some some outcome there. That's awesome. That's awesome. I mean, it kind of takes us quite nicely onto the what happened after you left the military and how does that story evolve for yourself in terms of. You know, how do you how do you go from being a captain in forces to to running block chain basically running? Yeah, well, Charlie, I think the interesting thing was I remember that would have been I mean, it ages me now. The late 90s, I was leaving the army.
00:27:49
Speaker
And we had a desktop that I shared with two other platoon commanders and we would book time on it where we needed to write our reports on our soldiers and fill out exercise plans and training logs. Certainly didn't have my own laptop. I mean laptops back then were a couple of thousand pounds.
00:28:18
Speaker
was applying for a job in investment bank of all things, corporate finance. I think it was because one of the things I really enjoyed, apart from working with soldiers when I was in the military, was being able to give us a bit of specialist advice on a particular element of knowledge that I had. So I remember being on an operational tour and a senior officer coming into the operations room and saying, tell me about that village and pointing at the map
Overcoming Tech Barriers
00:28:46
Speaker
16 officers in the ops room that were all staff that were all there and company commander pointed at me and said well that's that's Tim's area of responsibility that village so I was briefing a very senior officer and then a couple years later I was briefing the defense secretary on a similar circumstance on a particular part of something that I was specialist in didn't have the big picture I just knew my little specialist specialization
00:29:14
Speaker
And the amazing thing was months later to then have strategic planning come back down to the chain of command that included a little germ of something that I might have recommended a few months before. Where would I get that kind of buzz of being able to influence something to a small degree and see my insight becoming part of something bigger?
00:29:40
Speaker
Well, there are a few ways you can do that, not into politics. But going into investment banking, I was able to, in corporate finance, give some advice to corporates, to board level C-suite executives. They could take on the advice that myself and the team that I was then part of.
00:29:57
Speaker
might offer and make strategic decisions and determinations and plans that included the recommendations we made. So I applied for corporate finance, a number of different banks. I went to visit the city. I went to see guys and girls that I was at university with who worked in the city already, because I'd had four years in the military that got into the city. And I remember walking into someone's trading floor and going, wow, everyone's got a computer. That guy's got two. And my friend looked at me and went,
00:30:26
Speaker
Oh, dear. Oh, dear. So I went out to I think it was PC world back in those days and bought a laptop, did an army resettlement course, you had funding to do a resettlement course every eight weeks of an afternoon. So I went off and did a community access course in it and did a resettlement course of learning MS office. And actually, it was website building, which
00:30:52
Speaker
It was crazy that I was able to do that. Manchester University, even in classes, of how to build websites and how to use the internet in late 1998. So I went on that course and effectively learned back to front, top to bottom of being how to be a tech end user and to get rid of the fear. And then by the time I joined UBS, as it was, I
00:31:20
Speaker
was the most powerful and empowered end user that was in that part of the bank at the time because most people used the tools on a desktop or laptop without questioning what was behind them.
00:31:34
Speaker
without questioning, okay, it can do this, but can it do more? I was always looking to try and find out what else these systems could do. This is back when people have Nokia phones that you could just about connect to a computer if you had the right software and the right cable, and you could manage your address book. I found a way to take the corporate address book
00:31:58
Speaker
of my colleagues in corporate finance put it into a CSV file imported into that document and then to that file format and upload it into my phone. And I had all the senior bankers queuing up at my desk so that I could basically inject their little Nokia phones with the phone numbers of all of their colleagues at the bank. So they didn't have to add them one by one. And it was just
00:32:26
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, this is technology, this is what it can do. Doesn't everyone know how to do this sort of thing? Because you learn those sorts of things on the fly. You learn how to go to a website that has a website back in 1999 in banking that has corporate financial data. Companies have to present their accounts, as many viewers will know,
00:32:50
Speaker
in specific ways, in specific fields, so that it can be imported into regulatory news service and be imported into stock exchange filings and so on. So each field represents or is allocated a specific code.
00:33:09
Speaker
If you're then looking at aggregated data, all of the fields for P&L, balance sheets, multi-year for a British listed company appear in the same or appeared then in the same format, in the same fields, and you could download a website, import it into Excel, and then export it into a document that you were preparing for a client without having to type in all of the data again and again and again. You could just export it.
00:33:39
Speaker
And just little tricks like that. What I used to say is I've found ways to be lazy. And it's clever lazy. And I suppose looking back, I used to tell the soldiers to do that. If a soldier was cleaning that up, the platoon was cleaning their barrack block, and they didn't do a very good job of it over the three hours it was allocated, we would send them back and tell them to clean it again, and we're back in two hours to check. Come back again, you're still not
00:34:09
Speaker
You've missed this. You've missed this. It's still not very good. We'll come back in another hour to check. And only then we'd pass them and they could go off and have a beer on a Friday night. I used to say to them, look, I'm not messing around. This isn't for fun. If it's good enough the first time, I'll fall you out. You get three hours of your end time. Just work harder. But actually, you're working less in the long term. Be lazy. Do it all right the first time.
Luck and Resilience in Business
00:34:38
Speaker
And so
00:34:39
Speaker
I often will look for, and I'll invest a lot of time doing something once, knowing that I can replicate it again and again in the future. But by God, it looks so complex and clunky the first time you're doing it. And someone's looking over your shoulder saying, why are you doing that? It's taking so long. Just copy and paste. Well, no, if I just copy and paste, I can't do this with a macro that I've just built.
00:35:04
Speaker
50 times in the next month. It was little things like that. And so having less fear of technology, which I did have to begin with, I was bewildered by it, and just diving into it and then thinking, what can I do with technology? Got me into sort of an entrepreneur's mindset, I suppose. And I loved one of my first clients. I was very, very junior analyst in the bank, but we were working with Traffic Master.
00:35:33
Speaker
And this is a company that used to detect traffic flows and speed flows and used to be able to get a dashboard monitor and tell you when you were coming up to a traffic job or to slow a traffic. And the guy that set that business up had gone to a yacht fair in Portsmouth, I think it was, and had been intrigued by walking onto a yacht that the yacht's security alarm could detect when he was walking.
00:36:03
Speaker
He bought a few of these, put them on motorway gantries, and then got his wife to drive backwards and forwards at three o'clock in the morning when there's none of the traffic to confuse it. And he was tweaking with the settings of this security count detector to identify
00:36:22
Speaker
that it would trigger when the car went below a certain speed and above a certain speed. And basically by putting a couple of these cameras alongside each other, he was able to see when traffic was flowing freely and when traffic was slowing down. And that was the original genesis of a company called Traffic Master. And I loved what they did. It was just understanding the insight that an entrepreneur had to develop a product and find a niche that then became compelling to his market.
00:36:53
Speaker
So I used to love doing that sort of stuff. I was very lucky to spend time in the tech group in London and then move to San Francisco. Well, it would have been, I was going to go on
00:37:05
Speaker
New Year's Eve, 2000, 2001, but there was this thing called the millennium bug that everyone was a bit worried about. So I wasn't going to be in a plane over midnight on New Year's Eve, even though it would have been a pretty neat place to spend the millennium. So I went to, I think on two days after the new year, 2001, and yeah, was working in the software and semiconductor team in San Francisco for UBS. Got a lot of fun out there.
00:37:34
Speaker
until the dot-com bubble really burst. God, no. This is, like, Tim, I mean, we've been out talking for a while, and there's so many, like, so many, like, nuggets of advice and perspectives and things that you're throwing out there. And I've been very fortunate to actually have worked with you over the last couple of years, like, in and out on some projects.
00:38:03
Speaker
And it always fascinated me, as you always said, that you're the marinade layer, but you come in with all these small things and nuggets and perspectives that you have.
00:38:16
Speaker
But if you would give all these advices, would you bundle them a little bit for like new startup founders or serial entrepreneurs? Like what kind of advices would you give them? They're all not that fortunate to work with you. Although I assume that after this podcast, you might get a couple of calls at least.
Top Advice for Startup Founders
00:38:34
Speaker
But what kind of advice would you give an entrepreneur or starting founder
00:38:42
Speaker
um in order to become successful or at least become like looking in in a way at the world where failure is is something that you learn from and and you know where resilience can be taught and and worked on in good times like you've mentioned before i think the most important thing is don't be unlucky um i mean people say that um
00:39:09
Speaker
some businesses are successful because the founders were lucky, but then the founders would say it took me years of hard work to be this lucky. It does take years of hard work to be lucky, and I'm not lucky by the way, I've not succeeded. It's always a journey, it's always a challenge. But what I would say is that I don't believe in coincidence anymore. I don't believe in luck.
00:39:37
Speaker
But the flip side of that is because I embrace it. And I would encourage people to do the same. What I mean by that is I think it was Exeter University a few years ago that ran a study and asked subjects to come in and read a newspaper. They're going to be questioned on some of the news articles and not be paid for that at all. And they were split into people who had applied describing themselves as unlucky or that people think I'm unlucky and people
00:40:06
Speaker
who thought that they were lucky and other people thought that they were lucky. And these groups of people sat down and read the newspaper. The people that considered themselves and others considered unlucky finished the newspaper, sat down and waited to be asked questions. They weren't asked any questions. They were paid for their time and off they went. So people who were considered lucky and considered themselves lucky would be reading the newspaper, reading the news articles, but would notice an advertisement.
00:40:36
Speaker
And in the corner of the advertisement, it would say, if you're doing the study at Exeter University, put your hand up and you'll be given 20 pounds. Thanks for noticing this. And so the people who consider themselves lucky saw these elements in the test, in the study. And it's because they weren't constrained, I think. Their minds were not constrained to what they were focusing on and addressing at the time. They were open to
00:41:05
Speaker
other influences, and they were open to other stimulus, and they weren't blinkered. And I think that's one critical thing that I'd say, because if you're building a business, you might have a great product, but you might not have identified an alternative utility for it. Or you might not have seen a competitor that is actually
00:41:29
Speaker
coming up with a different development a lot faster and is going to reach the market quicker than you. If you're focusing too much on what you believe is your mission, you might miss some really substantial opportunities outside. You might miss so much, especially in the day where we're on our phones a lot. And if we're not working and we're in transit or if we're standing at a queue waiting for a coffee,
00:41:56
Speaker
How many potential investors are also queuing up with you in Starbucks, for example? They might be that one person that you're trying to get the attention of, you just don't know. But if you're focusing and channeling your attention somewhere else, you're putting the blinkers on, you miss the opportunity to identify those opportunities. And they are out there. The amount of times that I've bumped into someone who
00:42:24
Speaker
was meant to be in Kenya and they were back for a week in London walking down the street and bumped into an old school friend. I've found myself walking towards the railway station that connects with Heathrow Airport and saw the guy who defrauded me walking the other way and coming to the country that day.
00:42:45
Speaker
I just stopped in the middle of the street and said, I think you need to talk to me. He was absolutely bewildered. What on earth was I doing? How did I know who's going to be in the town on that street at that particular moment? I had no idea. He just happened to be there. But he was there. That was the coincidence, was that he was there. But the fact that I noticed it takes an element removed from coincidence because I made it happen. This isn't
00:43:15
Speaker
This isn't law of attraction stuff. This is it's happening. It's out there It's whether you notice it or not whether you notice those opportunities and if we don't notice those opportunities then Find someone in your team that does and you can hire someone who's lucky Because they are the people that when they're reading the newspaper, they notice those little messages that are positioned there for them and
00:43:45
Speaker
That's why some companies get those opportunities and your company doesn't because there's someone in there that is open to the what if, I suppose.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting because I find that especially holding true for emerging tech industry as there's so much opportunity running by. And I think that's also the downside of it because there is so much opportunity. It's sometimes like people are like, okay, I am going to now focus on my stuff because it's an overload of.
00:44:20
Speaker
Which might also be a problem because you'll miss the opportunities that you want to take. But as you said, if there is someone that is lucky and is looking at these what-ifs,
00:44:38
Speaker
Uh, then, then from that perspective, uh, you know, you don't need to focus as a founder on it. You have somebody who focused on these options or at least filters them out and says, yeah, there is a lot of noise that our opportunities, we don't need, but there's the sort of five that we're going to take. Right.
00:44:54
Speaker
So Tim, all these anecdotes, all your experience, all your failures and learnings from that, there is a lot of advice for startup founders out there. Can you give us your top 10 of those advices? Not necessarily in what's most important, but the top 10 things that you say, these are things that you at least need to be mindful of if you're a founder.
00:45:20
Speaker
in an emerging tech industry that has high velocity, like blockchain, like AI?
Outsourcing vs In-House
00:45:25
Speaker
Look, I've been very lucky to have been around a lot of entrepreneurs who've been successful, much more so than I have. And I've learned my own lessons, but it's always helpful to learn other people's lessons, so you don't have to learn your own. Learn from someone else's mistakes.
00:45:41
Speaker
So first thing first, I would say try and stay healthy and fit. Healthy body, healthy mind, agile, lean, all of the things that should be applied to your business should apply to you as well if you can.
00:45:55
Speaker
It's so much easier for long haul flights for getting up at four o'clock in the morning for that conference call with an investor in a different time zone, et cetera. And you'll sleep better. And the sleep that you can get doesn't need to be quite so long and lazy and what have you. Abbas used to say to me that if he needed something done quickly, give it to someone who's really, really busy.
00:46:23
Speaker
And the rationale behind that, which I think was very true, was if someone's spinning fast, then they've got more capacity because they're spinning fast, not because they got capacity. Someone who's sitting over in the corner of the office, not doing very much, doesn't necessarily have capacity. They might be where everything goes to stop. So I think about that too. Think about yourself being that person. Make a decision. Either burn your boats or keep a life raft.
00:46:53
Speaker
There are arguments for both. There are metaphors for both. There are historical stories that support both. I'm not going to go on about Vikings and Helena, Troy, but just make your choice and be very, very clear as to which it is. If you go halfway between the two, then that's when we start to feel flabby in terms of our commitment to our corporate mission, I suppose.
00:47:22
Speaker
Thirdly, I'd say it's not necessarily about the startup lifestyle. The startup lifestyle can be exciting, it can be cool, it can be bonding with your co-founders, but you need to aspire to have something beyond that. Otherwise, you'll always be surface surfing.
00:47:42
Speaker
You'll always be going to the coffee shop to do your work in the day. It's not always about being in that startup lifestyle. If it is for you, then that's where you'll always be, I'd suggest. Keep on top of finances in particular, both personal and professional, gets one of the worries off, or it means that you can address something that is a major worry. You'll identify earlier if something is a red flashing light,
00:48:13
Speaker
rather than hiding it and it becoming overwhelming when it's too late to be able to do something about it. If you have co-founders, you're a group of co-founders, document your agreements. One of you will inevitably leave the team at some point. Every business that I've seen go from startup through fast growth to maturity, someone who had
00:48:37
Speaker
I bled for the business with their co-founders, always leaves. It's just the law of averages. It's not a bad thing. It's a natural evolution of humans and also of a business that inevitably someone who's deemed, let me see, indispensable or considers themselves part of it,
00:49:01
Speaker
is no longer there. It's always dangerous when you have someone who's indispensable, by the way, because you can't necessarily replace them. So if you have a major corporate event that you then get through, whether it's a big fundraise, a flotation, a launch,
00:49:20
Speaker
That's the moment where you sort of take stock of where you are. I would also at that point, go out to some recruiters, give them a job description for each of the key members of the founding team so that you've got a backup plan, should you need to try and find someone to join you to replace someone who leaves. That's a very interesting de-risking strategy. Like having contingency plans just when it happens or when in case it happens. So you put it in a vault.
00:49:48
Speaker
It also means that at various different iterative points in your business's journey and your own journey, you have to identify what it is you actually do. You give yourself a job description, which is kind of helpful to you. We all hear the word pivoting and all that sort of stuff. The only successful pivots or the only pivots we really hear about are the ones that end up being successful. So
00:50:14
Speaker
Pivoting sounds cool. Sounds like a great thing to do. All these great companies began as a refrigerator company and then became the world's biggest mobile phone company. What a great thing that was. But they're unusual and that's why they are spectacularly successful and notable. If you look to pivot for the sake of wanting to pivot and being part of the zeitgeist, the reality is investors in particular, stakeholders possibly will think
00:50:44
Speaker
Well, you just failed and you're starting something else. So it'd be very, very clear about if it is a change of the business and how you've ended up determining that that's something you should do. A critical thing I'd say for me is outsourcing. It can be very effective and efficient to do to outsource some of your headcount, some of your workload. It's very expensive.
00:51:09
Speaker
But on a day rate, on a
Openness in Relationships
00:51:12
Speaker
weekly rate, on a monthly rate, it can be effective and efficient and very cost-effective because you're not bearing the risk of, let's say, benefits, 401k, pension, health care, gym membership, office space potentially, annual leave, maternity cover, paternity cover, illness cover. You're just getting someone for the hours that they work for you.
00:51:38
Speaker
and you can turn the tap on and off at 24 hours, seven days, 30 days notice, whatever it might be. It avoids you giving away equity to people that otherwise might seek it. It avoids you using, well, using relationships that you might want to keep for the future. But the challenge with it is if your build phase or the phase that you're using
00:52:07
Speaker
outside consultants and contractors for is longer than your cash flow is planning for. It's incredibly expensive and you can run out of your, you can over burn and run out of cash very, very quickly through outsourcing. So if you outsource and it's, it then needs to have a period of transition
00:52:26
Speaker
to your own internal staffing. It might be that you don't need it. It might be built, and then it's operated with a much lower headcount. But if it's built and operated, you are then going to be building with a headcount. You've got to get that headcount in place at the right time in your cash flow rate. Otherwise, you run out of cash because all of your projections based on headcount were for employees, but you're still burning at contractor rates.
00:52:52
Speaker
And it's something I'd really take a good look at. This is interesting. That's exactly like the business that we're in. And we're often saying, we often have clients or potential leads that say, look, we don't want to outsource because it's too expensive. And then you look over, OK, what do you need? OK, you need a dev team. You need this, that.
00:53:15
Speaker
Okay, yes, with your rates just for your salary, it's probably less expensive. But with everything that you currently have, and as you said, equity, paternity leave, sick leave, 13th month, whatever the country is and what the rules are, it now gets really expensive, very early on. It's generally where we always say, look, we hear you, we agree with you, but outsource your POC, your MVP, your version one.
00:53:40
Speaker
and ensure that you have a transition period in order to have your staff trained up, have a good knowledge transfer. So when it hits, it hits right, and then everybody is happy. And I say it from the tech side, but Charlie, I mean, that goes the same for marketing, obviously, right? At the point I wanted to make for that was speed. You can turn, like, firstly, the contractor has references or case studies.
00:54:08
Speaker
So they've got a reputation they want to defend, as opposed to an employee can bounce from job to job. The average standard of an employee is what, 13 to 18 months this time, this time this decade, as opposed to, I think it was four, two decades ago. So you're not really seeing longevity in staff and you have to hire them, you have to background check them, you have to do the rest of that kind of stuff, whereas you've kind of already got that in a business agreement.
00:54:36
Speaker
That's it. But we all then think that the contractors that we outsource to are going to really, really want to work for us and come in house at some point in the future. And if we over rely on that, the truth is they generally don't, because someone who's chosen to be a contractor has a contractor lifestyle, which is very, very unique. And the idea of them being tied down to work for one employer in one sector in one strategic business is something that they
00:55:06
Speaker
most likely don't want to do or they'll do for a while and they'll want to revert back to being contracted. So there's that concern too. And I suppose the other final point, and this is one of my failings, and I identified this talking with Charlie in advance of this call, choose your strategic approach.
00:55:32
Speaker
have a theme that you follow, whether it's a favorite business mentor, a favorite book, a favorite style of management, of development of the business, so that other people can recognize where you might be in terms of your thinking. I don't and haven't ever done that. And I know that that's a bit of a gap in my own development if I run a business.
00:55:56
Speaker
because other people can't put their finger on the way that I'm necessarily planning my strategic goals and my delivery of my outcome and so on, because I'm not following a particular approach. So that's a big learner for me. And then the final point would be if you're in a relationship, you're married, you've got a partner, you have family, you've got dependents, but particularly if you're in a relationship
00:56:26
Speaker
be honest and open about what you're doing. Try not to hide and segment work life too much. It's the way we often should exist in many phases of our professional life, being able to separate work and personal life. But when you're building a business, when you're a founder and you're thinking and living and breathing your business, be open and honest with your loved ones or loved one because
00:56:56
Speaker
like it or not, they're tied to you while you're in this journey yourself. And if you keep secrets, they always bite you on the backside. And you're going to be looking for support at some point with various times from your emotional crutch, from a relationship, and they need to know what it is that you're going through. So share the good times, and then they might be there with you for the tough times, but they need to know what's going on in your mind.
00:57:25
Speaker
like
Building the Right Team
00:57:26
Speaker
work life balance exists, but generally, like your your work life always spoils over to your private life and vice versa, right? Like, I think definitely and again, like, you know, an emerging tech space that we're sitting in, I think it's very often the case and I don't necessarily think it is a bad thing. As you said, as long as you keep the lines and communication, people around you are very open and transparent, so they know what what is going on. So they also can create that understanding.
00:57:55
Speaker
have that understanding what you're going through, right? Like, even if you're, you don't need their support, they're still like, Oh, yeah, okay. But you know, there is, we know he is, he has a big launch coming up, right? Like, for instance, okay, that's great. Like, I'm rooting for him. He doesn't even support right now. But at least I know why he's less available for it. Yeah. And if we're bullshitting ourselves, they're more likely to call us on that straight away.
00:58:18
Speaker
That's a very important thing, like checks and balances. This is brilliant, Tim. Really, really good points. I think that kind of summarizes the first part of everything that we discussed kind of in these 10 points. I think we want to take on to the next segment, Charlie. You want to take that one. So we're going to do something a little bit different with this episode and essentially go through the brainstorm segments there.
00:58:43
Speaker
we came up with whilst the team was collaborating and researching Tim's story because it was so rich and so vast. The first piece is really about building the right team. I think when it comes to strategy, especially operations, if you don't have the right team around you, there isn't much you can do. You're pretty much dragging everybody up the hill.
00:59:10
Speaker
behind you, wondering where they are and why they're trying to run off in a different direction. I know I've certainly had that problem a few times where just you feel like you're running at what is a jogging pace, but people don't quite get it. They're not quite aligned and you're sort of operating at cross purposes. So that's really the first sort of place you'd like to start in this like brainstorming session is how do you identify the right team? What is it?
00:59:40
Speaker
What are the considerations necessary to do that? I mean, I know you've got your kind of standard startup team where you've got your hacker, hustler and hipster archetype, which is essentially Liam, myself and Thomas. What else do you need? How do you identify that really? You know, I've been very lucky in that I've
01:00:08
Speaker
I've operated in two very, very different areas. In the military, you don't choose your team. You are allocated them, or you are fortunate enough to inherit them, or you're fortunate enough that people join your team, but you don't choose them. And I've been on an operational tour with 30 guys who I didn't choose. And they all have their views, their opinions, their skills.
01:00:38
Speaker
their abilities and their strengths etc. And you have to upskill a lot of people or you adjust expectations or you develop a reserve or you encourage people to maybe look for a posting somewhere else. Different ways of doing it. I mean my platoon's signaler had the broadest accent that
01:01:08
Speaker
you could ever have. And he was impossible to understand over a radio net. It was a challenge. But at the same time, he was brilliant with RadioKit. So it was a case of sort of, well, he manages and operates and maintains the radio set. But when I'm speaking with a company signal, and maybe I'm going to try and
01:01:37
Speaker
do some of the voice procedure instead of my signaler managing the radio comms because his voice was impossible to understand. His accent was brilliant but difficult to understand over the radio but he was so good with tech. I
01:01:55
Speaker
didn't take interviews for the radio signal. I just had the guy who'd been on the course and therefore he was allocated to me for an operational tour and that was it. You just got to make do with what you have sometimes. On the other hand, you sometimes have the luxury of looking around and going, that individual is a really good leader in their formation.
01:02:22
Speaker
So you know what, I'm going to send this person off on a promotion course because I think it'd be a really good last call for leading this section. And that is in your gift to manage. So some parts of managing a team and building a team are in your gift and some of them are not.
01:02:44
Speaker
And sometimes you've got to hold a mirror up to yourself. And whatever it is that you're criticizing someone for, or trying to develop someone's skill within the team, you've got to think, am I doing the same thing and being as critical for myself as I am about other people? We're always much more critical about others than we are about ourselves. One of the things that we need to do, and founders need to do, but we need to do as founders is we pride ourselves on being
01:03:12
Speaker
as good, if not better, at the skills in the business than the person that we've now hired to do those skills. And we can waste so much of our own time when we should be looking up, managing strategically and building by focusing and criticizing someone who doesn't do things as well as we did last year. And I would say that
01:03:38
Speaker
You've got a few opportunities to demonstrate operational excellence and then transfer the responsibility to that person that you've now hired or is in the team to deliver it for you. We can't always reach down, otherwise we don't have capacity, founders don't have capacity, leadership team don't have capacity to stay in that startup mindset where they did everything.
01:04:03
Speaker
This is one of the other reasons about the startup monitor. It's great, it's fun, but we've got to evolve. We've got to hire specific people to do specific tasks or train people to do those specific tasks, to free up the management, to maintain accountability and responsibility, but to delegate and allow people to grow themselves.
Delegation and Empowerment
01:04:23
Speaker
I fully agree. I also found definitely in organizations where you come in to work on operational excellence generally, that is like, you know, middle management or higher.
01:04:36
Speaker
You need to have also a baseline where management that already created is like, hey, this person is going to come in to upscale us, to evolve us or whatever. If that doesn't happen and you're just being announced, you come in as middle management, you're being announced, oh, we have a new manager and you come in with fresh energy and you're like, okay, well, we're going to actually evolve some of these things.
01:04:59
Speaker
if that is needed, but there is no there's no narrative around it, it gets really tough. And there's a lot of resistance up front. That could have been
01:05:13
Speaker
Well, I'd say avoided by the existing management or middle management, at least creating a narrative for operational excellence, even if they are unable to do it, right?
01:05:30
Speaker
would mean that you as leader and you're higher for operational excellence or you're higher whoever it that you would need to say well we're currently not at operational excellence but this person is going to be which again is a very grave decision to make because you know you need to basically
01:05:46
Speaker
say out loud your shortcomings as a leader, which I think is very valuable because it makes you vulnerable as a leader. But also, there's not many leaders that come to that point and say, yes, we need to hire for this or we see that we need this. I totally agree, Tom. And the thing for me is, I guess, if you build operational excellence, so you have a team and you have
01:06:13
Speaker
I wouldn't say the courage because I wouldn't want to blow smoke up my own backside by saying that. But if you've got the courage to build and train operational excellence within your team, that means that you're not over reliant on that indispensable person because you can build someone else. You know you can do it. If you hire operational excellence, you're overpaying. It's going to be very, very expensive. Also, you've hired someone who might not be flexible in terms of their skill set. They might not be able to retrain if you need them to.
01:06:43
Speaker
Whereas if you hire a good fit and then train their gaps in operational excellence or professional skill set, if the company pivots, if the needs change, then you've got a degree of confidence that that person is flexible enough to move with you. And they probably are more loyal because you showed a belief in them and upskilled them and gave them confidence in themselves and a vision of how they're going to fit in your business in the long term.
01:07:13
Speaker
than if someone has hired and come in and is executing straight away. It is a challenge getting the blend right. And that's where maybe it's the opportunity to hire a couple of gray hairs together with a couple of new people. I mean, I've been in businesses where the intern became the chief strategy officer in a matter of three years. That was unique, but it's,
01:07:41
Speaker
It's again, it's having an open mindset to see if it can be done. Working with mentors is often helpful as well, because they can often see and pinpoint the potential in staff that you hire who might not be in the right role, but they're the right person. They might not have the right responsibility or remit, but they're an incredible player in your team. And they've got operational excellence. And the great thing about that is if you've built a
01:08:10
Speaker
culture of operational excellence. It doesn't matter what you do, you'll be good at it. That's the beauty about it. And that's why you often see a team moving off and doing something else again in a different sector because they know how to work with each other. They trust each other and they've achieved operational excellence, but possibly not.
01:08:38
Speaker
What would be a way to describe it? Specific purpose excellence. They know the how. They've got the how sorted, maybe not the what. If we use nature. For me, when I used to work in healthcare and then later in tech, we always came from a servant leadership that was always a really massive thing to
01:09:08
Speaker
build out operational excellence. As a leader, yes, you stand with the troops and you're with them. But what I always found, and also that framework and method goes from a perspective, if there's no management needed, don't be there. Be a coach, be a motivator, be around, but don't manage. If you manage motivated people that already achieved operational excellence, they're actually going to push back.
01:09:35
Speaker
They don't like to be managed because they already know that they're good at their job. They already know what they need to do. They probably know better than you two. That's very interesting. And I think this often comes back to not the dilemma of a founder, but the challenge. You know what you want to achieve, but you don't necessarily know how to achieve it. If you can surround yourself with people or hire people that are good at finding out the how, then
01:10:05
Speaker
You don't have that tension of, I could have built this company, which you sometimes have. I don't know why these founders are so up themselves because I could have done that. They've just been lucky. You have people that know that they're the only ones that can work out the how and make it happen for you. And you're the only ones that have the strategic vision to identify what it is that you want to achieve and the absolute drive to get there.
Recognizing Right Team Members
01:10:32
Speaker
And put those two together and you've got a great mix.
01:10:35
Speaker
I want to get in here before we start to run out of time, but I wanted to ask, what do you look for when you're trying to build the team? I think another valuable piece for founders, especially going for that zero to one journey, is
01:10:52
Speaker
When to, and this is something we've kind of referred to earlier. So when do you cut loose? When do you think, okay, I've tried every which way I can to help this person grow, train them to get them along. Like what it's, I find, I find that's something that I've seen over and over again with many founders is where it's just like, you just have to get rid of this person. Like what is the, what's the, what's the opposite to that? What do we, um,
01:11:21
Speaker
When's it time to sort of let go? I suppose it's a very difficult one. I've let go. I've been let go. I've not had the courage to let someone go and they've stuck around and it harms the business. But also I've held on to people longer than I should have done. They've become good. It's a really tricky one, isn't it?
01:11:51
Speaker
I guess, do you need bums on seats in certain roles in the business? And you can accept that they're not the right person, but they do the right job? And I'm talking sometimes about, let's say, back office functional responsibilities or a salesman's a salesman kind of thing. If you get out there and hit your numbers,
01:12:16
Speaker
No, no one else in the organization likes you and you don't live and breathe the values of the business, but you're making the business a success. It's I think it has to be a it's ultimately comes out of a brand choice, a personal choice of how you want to operate. But the moment that someone literally the day that someone is
01:12:42
Speaker
reducing value of the business is the day that they've stayed a day too long. They should always be adding value, even if they're not contributing to the bottom line, they might be adding value in terms of culture, because you as an organization may be saying, I still believe in you, you're not yet adding value, I'm still going to invest in you. And just doing that to someone that hasn't yet found their
01:13:09
Speaker
role, their success, they haven't got to their competent level yet. Just showing that I believe in you and I'm going to give you time to get to competency really might help your business more because the rest of your team will think I'm going to go that much further.
01:13:24
Speaker
this leadership team because that really resonates with me, Tim. Because I've always believed in values-based hiring. I think you can teach skills you can't teach to share values. And I think what you're talking about there, again, I think it was Charlie who introduced me to the concept of kind of the right person, wrong seat, or the wrong seat, right person type thing. I think there's some instances where
01:13:49
Speaker
which I think is kind of aligning with what you're saying there, where you've got someone that knows the right person for the business. They're currently maybe in the wrong seat, but it's because that seat doesn't quite exist yet. But you know that seat will exist in six months time, for instance. And you know that, okay, culture-wise, this person makes sense. They're in slightly the wrong seat. We know we need to maybe create a new seat for them, or wait for that seat to become
01:14:17
Speaker
necessary in the business. And I think it's for me, it's about trying to identify whether those seats will exist in future or and how soon or whether you're just kind of trying to create a dream seat for someone to sit in just because you like someone.
01:14:31
Speaker
And to that point, actually, I found that if you communicate that clearly to the people that sit in those seats, and that might be the wrong seat or the wrong person, often they will agree with you. Because if you're sitting in the wrong seat, you'll feel it. If you're not the right person, you'll feel it. But if somebody, and it's often really hard, and I think maybe all of us have been in that situation where you got hired for a job and you realize, you know,
01:14:59
Speaker
week two, you're like, oh, I don't belong here. But you know, the money is good. And I'll see if I can make it. And you're kind of like, you know, you go through the mud, you figure it out, we'll get better, but it won't get. But then if you know, that the company comes to you and says like, hey, we see that you're not the right person for this job. However, as you said, like,
01:15:19
Speaker
your values really like sit tight with with what we do. Let's find something or let's let's, you know, mold the job for you because you are a good we think you are a good fit basing your values, you just don't have the skills.
Scaling Technological Ventures
01:15:33
Speaker
And again, it's just that like, you know, you communicate that transparently that goes a long way for the rest of the team.
01:15:39
Speaker
It shows that you're investing in your people. And the other way around as well, I guess, right? If indeed it's not a good fit, you should let go, as Tim says, if it decreases value for the operation and for the business, and you should do that sometimes as soon as possible, because if you don't, it's harmful for the rest of your team.
01:16:01
Speaker
The rest of the team will let me, like this guy is adding no value. Why is he still here? Right. Yeah. I think it's interesting though. I've got an anecdote around a role where I applied for a role and they decided I was.
01:16:16
Speaker
overqualified for it and therefore but they didn't want to lose me so they created a role for me and made me feel great. But then within three to six months, I realized that they had a need for the role but because it had been created for me, they didn't have the infrastructure and the culture and the business to work with that role. The teams, the other teams didn't know how to work
01:16:40
Speaker
with me in that role. We were partly remote, and I was the remote person, which was a huge issue with this, meaning that the integration so that the only answer was I would have to relocate for it to work, which was an absolute barbecue stopper, as Charlie would say, for me on that position. And it was a bit of a waste of everyone's time in respect. Yes, I helped them develop a lot of systems and such, but
01:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, they needed, they realized that they were missing a seat and they tried to put me who was really the wrong person in that seat just because they needed it right now. They needed to take, because that was available, they needed to take six months, plan out the role, bring someone in that was the right person. So yeah, it can definitely be an issue that way as well. Okay, so now we've kind of had the conversation around, it's probably not,
01:17:34
Speaker
But it's probably best to know when to let go, but also maybe not accept roles which aren't a good fit. The next piece with respect to the sort of strategy and operations is really talking about how we scale and manage technological ventures. Like what are the key components? What are the motivations to get there? And obviously with what you're doing now, Tim, that's pretty much what you're doing now. So what would you say are the, I suppose your story in doing that?
01:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, look, we all want that sort of search for the golden fleece or whatever you call it, of building once and selling multiple times. And so that was always in the back of our minds, in my mind. Yeah, the whole software wall. But also, having moved into blockchain a few years ago now and working with various projects, the big concern that they always have is
01:18:33
Speaker
attracting community to operate their decentralized platform. So the whole premise of, if you want to call it mining, but recording the ledger
01:18:46
Speaker
carrying out the sort of the calculations that allow a coin to be minted if it's minted or earning rewards by performing transactions and recording those transactions on a ledger.
Democratizing Blockchain Participation
01:19:01
Speaker
And obviously also depends upon the purpose of the chain and what
01:19:08
Speaker
what transactions have been recorded and validated and processed. It's also conducting that decentralized computing power and providing it. Now, I came to blockchain a little bit late, if you like, if we're talking about OGs, I certainly wasn't one of those. And I came to blockchain and was asked to join a governance council for a network. Excuse me.
01:19:38
Speaker
if you like my, we'll scratch your back Tim, was that I was permitted to join the beta network, the network 1.0 as a node operator. And that potentially I could earn rewards and tokens for running a node on the early network. Now, I
01:20:03
Speaker
then realized that I didn't have any capability in Linux. I've not operated decentralized computing before. I'd used jungle this back in the day when I was running a business, but that was S3 storage on Amazon with a skin over the top of it. It was very, very good. And actually, when I look back, I was probably more technically advanced than I thought I was. But then I was trying to identify how to build a node on this particular network.
01:20:32
Speaker
And when I was doing so, all I had was some documentation. I had some documents printed out, and this is how you do it. And goodness me, it took me a while. I tried it on Amazon, I tried it on Google, I tried it on Vulture, I tried it on DigitalOcean. All seemingly the same build on Linux, but they weren't. They're all slightly tweaked and slightly different. So the glitches that I found are one,
01:20:59
Speaker
on one provider I found different glitches using another one and I didn't solve the first glitch from the first one I couldn't work out how to get that to work and it took me weeks to build up my skill set and build up to the point where I was able to comprehensively and reliably build a node but what I'd actually done operating in Linux and building a decentralized node first of all I went for a
01:21:28
Speaker
Yeah, Amazon, then Google, then Vulture, you know, as it was at the time now, Akamai, DigitalOcean. I went through all of these, and every time I made an incremental change to my build, I'd taken a snapshot, just because I thought that's what you do. If you're climbing up a cliff face, which I don't do, I've got the upper body of a T-Rex, but I'm not a climber. But if you're climbing, you always,
01:21:55
Speaker
anchor yourself. And as you get higher up on the cliff face, you put another pit on in or whatever they're called, get another anchor point. That's what I was doing when I was building and developing and coding the node. Now, for many, many of you tech guys, this is an easy thing to do. But for me, it wasn't. And this was interesting. I basically discovered a tech barrier to entry for blockchain. Now, in blockchain, we all want to say that we're decentralized. We are
01:22:25
Speaker
We're democratic, we're democratizing computing power and inviting the world to participate. And all you've got to do is have the imagination, inspiration, and a few tokens as your stake and you can join in too. It's not like that. And the metaphor that I use, and I'm not a golfer, so those of you that don't like golf don't think that I am, and those of you that do like golf, I'm sorry.
01:22:52
Speaker
I remember going on a trip with some buddies who were golfers and they spent the whole of the round, I was walking around with them, the whole of the round talking about the fleet vehicle that the company job, the job that they had with their employer was going to give them a new company car next year. They were planning on what that car was going to be. They were buying auto car. They were researching it. They could tell me how many cubic feet luggage capacity the BMW 3 Series had.
01:23:17
Speaker
what the color code was, what the description of the leather color code was, the horsepower and the miles per gallon. They drew these figures because they were passionate about what they were aspiring to do. If I had come along the next weekend in a BMW 3 Series and parked up and gone and met them again, they would have been really upset with me.
01:23:44
Speaker
because I'd have said, well, it's blue. Yeah, but which blue? Blue. And what horsepower has it done? Because I hadn't been passionately involved in the process to get to where they were hoping to be. And they would have thought, I've done a shortcut, I don't deserve to drive that car and be there in their buddy group, because I've not put in the hard yards of researching and of
01:24:12
Speaker
dreaming about getting that car like they're doing. And I think the same thing happens in tech, in blockchain in particular, where we invite everybody to participate, but you can only really get over that threshold if you're in the club, if you've got those key skill set, the tech ability. And that, if you like, is a filter. And it filters out people that we kind of don't really want
01:24:42
Speaker
operating and underpinning the backbone, the spine of blockchain. Because we don't want everybody to be able to participate. No, we do want everybody to participate. No, we don't want everybody. It's kind of that strange tautology. So I found myself trying to build something that we all want everybody to be able to build.
01:25:04
Speaker
but following a set of instructions on a technology platform that I was finding too challenging. So I was climbing up that cliff and hammering in supports as I made changes. I was taking incremental backups and as I then completed the build and I had a node that worked, and whoopie do, it was on the network, I realized that
01:25:27
Speaker
I got a backup which was 95% complete. 95% correct because the one that I completed was operating. So I then was able to turn to a colleague who was also trying to build and struggling and actually gave up and say, let me share my backup with you. And I was able to transfer a copy of my last backup and say, it's 95% ready. The last phase that I do that you need to do was just
01:25:58
Speaker
import your wallet address, configure a password, and take a final backup you saw, and then launch and join the network. And I started sharing these with a couple of buddies, a couple of panels, and they were able to import and launch my backup as their decentralized computing platform on DigitalOcean, as it turned out. But the same thing worked on Linux, Vulture, AWS, and Google.
01:26:27
Speaker
And I then realized, you know what, this could solve for one of the challenges that the projects face, how they organically encourage a large community, because that's what it's all about, right? You build a community, you invest in building a community. It's a long, drawn out process of talking to stakeholders, influencers, community leaders,
01:26:50
Speaker
And then you've got to incentivize people and get your tokenomics out
Scalable Blockchain Solutions
01:26:54
Speaker
there. I'm going to issue this. These little rewards are going to be issued if you run a node on the network or you join our platform. And it's a challenge to grow that network. So I was looking at it from another point, going, well, if we make it easy to launch a node and
01:27:15
Speaker
a business then hosts those templates, then individual users in that businesses community can then join multiple communities of blockchain and support multiple different networks. Now we also had, there are a number of projects that I know Thomas knows, no point naming them here because we don't want any lawsuits, but there are a couple of Ponzi-Nomic node projects
01:27:43
Speaker
that they weren't actually running nodes on a network. They were, in order to get tokens into the community, you had to state them. Those tokens that were then staked, some of them then became rewards for other people. We don't like that, obviously.
01:28:03
Speaker
And then there are also nodes that weren't really nodes. If you join a network and you think you're running a node, you're not actually running a node. It's a virtual node, and it's being operated on your behalf. So at that point, I then realized here's an opportunity to curate templates on the marketplaces.
01:28:27
Speaker
being accepted into the marketplaces of digitalization, Vulture, Akamai. And you could host your template on the marketplace of these providers.
01:28:37
Speaker
And if a user goes on to digitalization, has an account of digitalization, they can then go to the marketplace and launch a virtual machine that's pre-configured with 95% of the node build that they need to be able to support a network and its operation as a node runner, as a participation in the network.
01:28:59
Speaker
And for me, that was a way to offer scalability to other projects that were struggling with their scalability. Because one thing that happens across all blockchain projects is they have to and one has to develop scalability. Now, we could be here talking about how you scale marketing, PR, tokenomics in the case of blockchain projects.
01:29:27
Speaker
incentives, community events. How do you scale? How do you get in front of as many customers as you can? How do you get in front of as many potential clients as you can? There are many different ways of doing it. I'm the last person to talk about that. This is a sort of Tim Robbins kind of thing out there and getting your message out there. But my goal was to, again,
01:29:52
Speaker
find that lazy way, the cheap way, that I can then give to other businesses and say, I found a cheat code for you to scale. The cheat code for you to scale your network size in the blockchain environment of your numbers of nodes is, well, we build a template. You don't expect people to have to configure it and code it themselves. We give them a template, give them a
01:30:19
Speaker
an opportunity that all they have to do is fall into it and press a button. And what we then are doing now, and this is where we are now, is building a software that lays on top of it that will, I mean, we did it and we've done it in beta already, but takes you through the steps that you haven't yet done. Like a wizard. It's a wizard, exactly. And we then have got another phase that we'll then be doing where we have load management
01:30:48
Speaker
So that management software that sits on top of the node, it might well be, and I hope I'm not going into too much detail, but the processing power that a blockchain network might need might be processing, but it doesn't need bandwidth, or it might be bandwidth, but it doesn't need the graphics chip kind of capability, or it might be that it needs really decentralized low latency with facilities all around the world,
01:31:17
Speaker
but it doesn't need bandwidth. So balancing those out, we might be able to, and we're planning to be able to say, look, instead of having three virtual machines to run three nodes on three different networks, we found complementary demands of blockchain networks and blockchain projects where this one needs very low latency in different locations around the world. This one needs
01:31:48
Speaker
high processing power, and this one needs a high data balance or data throughput. Each of them has their mission critical element of a virtual machine, which is not in conflict with the other. So you know what? Instead of having three virtual machines that might cost 60 bucks a month each, we'll go for a higher spec one at 100 bucks a month.
01:32:15
Speaker
that each of those nodes can operate on the same virtual machine with obviously Chinese walls in between them, but with the same node management system across the top. And this means that a particular node operator has de-risked their investment. They've increased their opportunity of working and supporting in different networks of blockchain projects. But we facilitate that by reducing the
01:32:43
Speaker
human interface requirements of managing three separate virtual machines. We empower digital entrepreneurs, if you like, blockchain entrepreneurs, to participate in the blockchain economy, but without that challenge of upskilling. Because we want them to be able to, and this comes back to a lot of our operational excellence, we don't need people that can build nodes, we need people that can operate
01:33:12
Speaker
If you're a blockchain network, you want people to run nodes for you with light touch, keep the plates spinning, don't believe in the project, put your stake in the wallet and support the project and earn rewards. We don't necessarily want people who are building our coders because there aren't enough of them.
01:33:36
Speaker
There aren't enough people with the ability to code nodes. We want people who will operate nodes and believe in a project and where it's proof of state, they'll put their state together. And that then gives the opportunity for identifying other opportunities that come out of the scalability solution. And if the scalability solution is providing nodes through templates,
01:34:04
Speaker
from a community that comes to the template provider rather than necessarily initially to the blockchain project. Obviously, we share. Obviously, if someone comes to us, they then become a customer client, passionate advocate of the blockchain project. But what we can then also do is say to those people, if it's a proof of stake, they don't have enough stake.
01:34:27
Speaker
Well, we're gonna put code nodes together for you. So we're gonna have fractionalized nodes. You can participate in a fractionalized basis and earn pro rata rewards in the project. And you know what, over time, as you earn more and more rewards, you might end up having a state that's able to participate and run your own node. We want people to be empowered. And that then for me is the ability to
01:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, develop scale for blockchain projects. But the only way this happened was because I was banging my head against a wall, realizing that I was bumping up against that tech barrier to entry. I was
Breaking Blockchain Barriers
01:35:06
Speaker
struggling to get over the threshold through the membrane of, yes, we all want to be decentralized computing in a democratic, sovereign, individual blockchain environment.
01:35:21
Speaker
but only if you're really part of the team. And by not being able to get through that, I think we are harming the potential and possibilities that blockchain offers.
01:35:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think very, very often, if you're in the team, in the group that does blockchain, and I've seen this on conferences, people often seem to forget that mass adoption doesn't come through, you know, the 20,000 advocates that we have that are happen to be engineers, right, or the shielders. Now it comes from everybody's mother or girlfriend or friends that
01:36:00
Speaker
Can do Well, can set up a note as simple as possible and achieve scalability for for a blockchain that they maybe don't even care about. But since it's so simple, they will do it anyway because they can make money. Right. And it's those kinds of things that
01:36:17
Speaker
You know, you call it like kind of like the cheating way, but I think that that's generally what the general public wants. Like if
Simplifying Node Participation
01:36:25
Speaker
you look at when the app stores got introduced on phones, right? Like the reason why apps are so easy because it's just a three-click thing to anything, right? This is very similar. And I think that definitely with emerging technologies, we often go into that point where like, no, of course you can join, but only if you have like this really big list of requirements that you can't really acquire and you need to know the right people.
01:36:47
Speaker
It's kind of like going back to downloading back in the day again, right, where you got into news groups and you needed to know people. It's kind of the same thing. It's like, yeah, you can come in, but if you're not really want to put the work in,
01:37:01
Speaker
you're not one of us and you don't get the rewards where I think the scalability of what you're doing here says like, Hey, look, you know, doors are open. Come in like fraction or a full, it doesn't matter. This is how we do it. It's very simple. We help both the end user setting these things up and, and, uh, uh, what your project, uh, chief adoption. So it kind of breaks some barriers, uh,
01:37:26
Speaker
that I like, and I, you and I come from the same network that I didn't think existed, uh, because I come from software, which is, which I found super interesting when you're like, I remember you coming up a note army and like, yeah, that makes a hundred percent sense. Like I'm not sure why I didn't come up with this. And because I had the same issue, but I was like, yeah, but I'll figure it out. Where you're like, yeah, no, this is a scalable solution.
Decentralized AI Processing
01:37:50
Speaker
And I think that that's, um,
01:37:53
Speaker
It's super interesting and you kind of do risk everything as well and people can be either anonymous or not anonymous. It doesn't matter. Right. So to summarize for the non-technically initiated, do the hard work, do the hard things, template that up so everybody who's lazy can do that easier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.
01:38:17
Speaker
Pretty much. And then make it available to everybody that... Make it available to... Yeah, make it available to individuals and make it available to projects that, as a scalability solution, I think that's our plan. And look, I mean, that's blockchain. It's almost a given that AI processing should and will become decentralized in due course as well.
01:38:47
Speaker
So Node Army's blockchain nodes right now, but it'll probably also become AI processing solutions that individuals can host themselves either for a personal basis or for decentralized projects in the future. But this is the fascinating thing about being a founder.
Simplified Bitcoin Node Setup
01:39:08
Speaker
I've had the idea, but I'm not the guy necessarily that will implement and execute. So I've got a great
01:39:15
Speaker
a great partner, a tech partner that's working with me and I'm in no doubt about the journey that I'm on and my role but more importantly the importance of those that are going to make it work.
01:39:31
Speaker
I was just trying to figure out what the software that I used to set up my Bitcoin node is currently turned off at the moment. But I went through a similar experience of trying to get a node set up, finding it really difficult. And then a friend of mine who built a Bitcoin wallet and is really into the whole Nostra environment showed me
01:40:01
Speaker
a packaging environment kind of it was on Linux that allowed me to get a Bitcoin node sort of up and running and a lightning node like yeah once I tried his method it was like 30 minutes and I was thinking I was like holy crap it was just so cool to then have my own Bitcoin node my own explorer just running um and yeah when you've got those sort of tools it does help onboard people so much faster I completely agree because it can be very challenging I'm quite tech savvy as well
01:40:31
Speaker
So our plan is you go to our page on Digital Ocean Marketplace in due course and you'll be able to, it's like a buffet, choose which projects you want to support and participate in.
01:40:46
Speaker
Yeah, very cool. Okay, cool. So, okay, let's move on to our desert island essentials.
Starting Over Essentials
01:40:54
Speaker
So Tim, what we're going to be asking of you is, if you were to have to start again, start over, what are the five essential items, courses, concepts that you would take with you to your startup desert island? So everything, so basically trying to look at
01:41:12
Speaker
Things you require from your career where they say it can be an idea it can be a physical thing it can be a set of books whatever you think but one Top five if you can so far I'm not sure it's been invented yet, but the first thing I would take would be a bullshit detector We all need one I think
01:41:40
Speaker
And I think a lot of us would need to turn it round and actually be presenting it to ourselves more often. Present it to the outside world. But yeah, bullshit detector. If anyone knows why I can get one on Amazon, I'd love to.
01:41:57
Speaker
But yeah, that would be my first thing. Do you feel that your own internal bullshit detector has improved throughout your career? And if so, do you have any tips of things that help you kind of sniff a whiff? It's tricky, you know, because look, if we're having looked at so many business plans, so many fundraising documents, white papers,
01:42:26
Speaker
Because they're templated these days, people know what they need to put in there. And so you almost get what we used in the army called a DS solution, a directing staff solution, where you end up looking at something and it's got everything in it that you expect to see. And you think this is a really, really well put together document, but actually, it's possibly because someone's read the right templates.
01:42:51
Speaker
and they've built something to a template they don't necessarily believe in what or own what they've said in a proposal and so the BS detector doesn't always pick up on that. I think you almost have to go out of the environment and have a think about it and
01:43:12
Speaker
that can mean something as mundane as, I don't know, inviting a founder round for dinner, you know, see how they behave. If they do the dishes while you're
01:43:29
Speaker
clattering around making the making the doing the cooking, if they clean up as you're going on, if they offer to help if they roll their sleeves up.
Trusting Your Gut
01:43:38
Speaker
It's different human conditions that will give you little flags as to positive behaviors, but also negative behaviors. Do you as a founder, do you want to present yourself as someone who is
01:43:58
Speaker
periodically successful or recurringly successful. Do you want to go to that pitch meeting or do you want to be in a pitch meeting meeting someone who's raising money and they've got a Rolex on or they've got a different sort of $5,000 watch on, for example? Or do you think, well, you're asking me to fund you as an investor and
01:44:20
Speaker
looking at your burn rate, your travel and expenses seems a little bit higher than I thought. You've clearly got an expensive, you like telling left when you go on the plane, put it that way. But it's strange. It's that different BS. I've been in meetings on behalf of an investor where someone sat there with an expensive watch and expensive pair of shoes and it's reassuring. And I've been in meetings where it's been horrifying.
01:44:51
Speaker
because the same watch and the same shoes with a different carriage or a different context of the person wearing them gives you either a green flag or a red flag. So there isn't a one size fits all bullshit detector. It's a real challenge and you've got to sometimes just go with your heart. What I would say is over my life,
01:45:22
Speaker
more often than not, if I trusted that initial gut reaction, I would have wasted a lot of time because that initial gut reaction is, in my experience, more often than not, it's right. And on that, if your initial gut reaction is a negative one,
01:45:47
Speaker
You might choose to believe in the prospect that's in front of you. But you'll always have that awareness that you had shortcomings and reservations about it at various times. I used to ride a motorbike a lot. And if you're riding a motorbike and you see a rock or a stone in the road ahead of you, you have to look away from it. You have to look past it. Because if you look at it,
01:46:17
Speaker
you go where your tension is and your front wheel will hit that stone and you will find that the handlebars judder or shake or worst case, you come off the bike because you're looking and focusing on the negativity. If you look past it, you go into safety and you avoid the risk. So even if you choose to not go with your gut reaction,
01:46:47
Speaker
I think that's the bullshit detector really. If you choose to ignore your gut reaction, it's something that's still out there and you're aware of it and you're focusing on it. Is my gut reaction, which was originally negative, is it wrong? Is it wrong? Is it wrong? Oh, the thing that I was really worried about has not happened because I've been focusing on it for so long.
01:47:09
Speaker
Yeah, you need to figure out whether it's a stone or a boulder. If it's a boulder, you can't look away from it because you're going to hit it eventually anyway. But if it's a stone, it can be avoided. What's the next thing you take with you on the island? This is something that is a luxury for many people, but I would suggest some sort of a consulting gig.
Side Hustles as Safety Nets
01:47:32
Speaker
some sort of side hustle that you can continue to do part-time whilst building your main effort so that you can keep the lights on, keep the bills paid, have a sense of success, progression, personal compensation whilst you're focusing on what might be a long-term challenging build with
01:48:00
Speaker
with a lot of roller coaster elements. You have lots of dips, you have lots of challenges, you have lots of failure. That's what we all learn from and grow from. And that's why no one else is doing what you're going to do because you're the only person that can do this, but you will fail on the way at various times. If you've got something, a side hustle that can just keep some bucks coming in. If you don't have the savings to be able to do it, but you can somehow keep the lights on, that would be a great thing to have.
01:48:29
Speaker
There have been times when I had the luxury of that, and there would be times when I haven't. Just because you have a safety net doesn't mean that you don't commit to what it is you really want to do. The safety net can be there to mixing metaphors. It can be stabilizers on a bicycle as well, not just a safety net. You don't have to fall off the bike. You can just have a bit of a wobble and still carry on going the way you want to go. So yeah, that would be the second one.
01:48:59
Speaker
Okay, number three.
01:49:01
Speaker
Three, it's a very easy, quick one.
Stoic Philosophy for Resilience
01:49:05
Speaker
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I enjoyed learning about stoicism at various times in life when I needed to be quite stoic. And yeah, there are other ones since the obstacle is the way is a more modern than the accessible version. I think that's Ryan Holiday. But yeah, I've never really managed to get through properly the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the original book.
01:49:31
Speaker
But I have it and I would take it on the desert island and finally get through it. We would have the time for it.
Emotional Support in Startups
01:49:41
Speaker
In terms of the real big thing I would take with me there would be a cheerleader of some sort. Someone who will give you a boost to your morale when they think you need it and just out of the blue when you don't even know you needed it. But someone who
01:49:56
Speaker
gives you a call or gives you a bit of a nudge and says, you know, you're doing a great job. Not a lot of people could do what you're doing. You might think you're struggling, but look at how far you've come already. Someone who really just has your corner and is a great cheerleader for you.
01:50:16
Speaker
And if you've got a, let's say you've got a dog, wow, wouldn't that be great? Unconditional love and belief in you. It's that sort of thing that you need sometimes, just that emotional crutch.
01:50:34
Speaker
Look, sometimes you can take emotion and the person you're taking it from ends up with less. But if you can have the relationship with someone where they can share support with you without it diminishing them, that's really what I'm talking about.
01:50:51
Speaker
I think we'll take that as two, shall we? A cheerleader and a dog. I feel that I've actually got both of mine snoring next to me the whole way through. I've been muting myself so you don't hear my chow chow. I would completely agree with that. My two contract workers, one of them is the secretary and one of them is my security guard and they work with me every day most of the time just so that I can do what you're saying there.
01:51:16
Speaker
pretty much a wrap. Unless you have a fifth, there's usually five personal essentials to it. Yeah, we only have four on the list. No, I'd only put four on the list. I don't know what happened there. I do apologize. I think that's why Liam very kindly split that into two, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what I was saying, yeah. All right. Water filter, maybe. Hey, how about that?
01:51:42
Speaker
I was going to to expect something like, you know, people with beards are generally more trustworthy. But no, I mean, look, there is something that on my personal side, I would use.
Pomodoro for Productivity
01:51:55
Speaker
And that's a Pomodoro timer. So we're all often at risk of going down a rabbit hole of a task and spending a disproportionate amount of effort on something that doesn't deserve it.
01:52:08
Speaker
So one of those Pomodoro timers, the tomato timer, 20 minutes and burst, or splitting effort into 20 minute bursts, I think can lead to a lot greater effectiveness and efficiency.
01:52:24
Speaker
That's the end of the podcast for this episode. Tim, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Your career has been so insightful and so interesting. I know you sort of said that you feel like there's been, you've sort of failed upwards throughout the whole thing, but if you wanted to give one piece of advice on that, for me,
01:52:43
Speaker
For me, the thing that hit home is actually the thing from the very beginning, which was the idea of knowing when to cut ties for things and knowing how to reframe things that you may have seen as a failure before. That's what resonated most for me. If you could only leave one piece of advice for someone right at the end now, what would you say is kind of the one thing that you've learned the most? It's always about returning a sense of humor and perspective.
Humor in Tough Times
01:53:14
Speaker
However bad things could be, life is a lot tougher than just business. And we've got to put that into perspective. And if you can smile, when things are tough, that's a great asset and skill to be able to have. And maybe reading Kipling's poem, if I think that's a great, a great handrail to have in life sometimes.
01:53:43
Speaker
Fantastic. Tim, Thomas, Charlie, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. Remember to like, comment, subscribe, all the great stuff you need to do, and it really helps us out. And we will see you on the next one. Goodbye. Thank you. Goodbye.