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00:00:00
00:00:01
James Moed
1 Plays3 seconds ago
We talk about going from wanting to be a 'media person' to being an actual design consultant and ultimately ending up working for an old school satellite company.
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Transcript
Introduction of James Moed
00:00:01
Joe Waltman
All today we have James Moed. James, thank you for making the time.
00:00:05
James
Thank you, Joe. It's been a while and I'm i'm glad to finally be on the podcast.
00:00:07
Joe Waltman
Tell me about it.
Pre-INSEAD Journey and Career Decisions
00:00:10
Joe Waltman
All right, first question, same as always. Refresh your memory. What were you doing prior to INSEAD and what have been up to for the last 21-ish years?
00:00:19
James
Okay. So prior to INSEAD, like directly prior to INSEAD,
00:00:27
James
I was taking some time off and, uh, hanging out on the beach in Salvador, Brazil. Um, and, uh, But prior to that, I was working at it's funny, like I guess I would call it a podcasting startup, but there were no iPods in sort of broad circulation. So I can't really call it that, but it was it was sort of an audio pod. It was a customized audio startup.
00:00:54
James
And I dealt with a lot of trying to get various content partners on board. And I was working with an NSEAD alum. And she sort of sparked my interest in getting an MBA. And I had wanted to come back to work into the international sphere. And so that's what made me want to apply.
00:01:08
James
And that's what I was doing. But then NSEAD asked me to delay my entry. And so i'm like, hey, I'm going to go to Brazil for a while, which was great. and But but like the the most interesting note about that moment my life was that As I was kind of almost like on my way to sort of like to Brazil, I got a call from Google asking me if I wanted to interview.
00:01:30
James
And I was like, ah you know, I really would. But, you know, I'm heading off to Brazil to go hang out on the beach for six months. And so, you know, it's not really a good time right now. I've already made my plans because, you know, like it was Google at the time.
00:01:43
Joe Waltman
something you said for playing hard to get. Yeah. i It sounds like you did. You'd end up actually not even taking that interview.
00:01:48
James
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely i think I definitely made a career working in customer insight, but I i wouldn't call myself a futurist.
Early Career in Media and the Dot-com Boom
00:01:56
Joe Waltman
So this this podcasting company was what you did fresh out of college or was this sort of the last real job you had before it's yet?
00:02:01
James
no No, no, I was... no i had... I think... um yeah When I was in college, I had already sort of imagined myself as wanting to work in, you know, quote unquote, the media and broadcasting in some way. In fact, like my very first job out of college was working in Finsbury Square in London at Bloomberg Television, where I was like a junior video editor.
00:02:22
James
So I went from that and went from that, sort of like left media production specifically, and ended up working in sort of business intelligence around radio and broadcasting, did some stuff there.
00:02:23
Joe Waltman
Hmm.
00:02:31
James
And then had a bunch of jobs in my 20s, then ended up joining this startup and sort of the first dot-com boom in sort of like 2009, 2001.
00:02:41
James
And so I had imagined myself as like, I'm really interested marketing. media, content we didn't call content back then, in that whole space of telling stories and selling them. And I was really interested in that. And this is how also, then I sort of imagined myself as a bit of a i don't know if the word is like a media darling.
00:03:00
James
but I imagine myself as as making my career in that space. In fact, when we had Welcome Week, probably the reason why I fell for VIP hook, line, and sinker is because i already had the sense of myself as like, oh, I'm going to go become you know get my MBA and then go back into the world of media and do
INSEAD Experience and Career Pivot
00:03:17
Joe Waltman
These are my people.
00:03:17
James
something.
00:03:17
James
wasn't sure why.
00:03:18
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:03:18
James
These are my people, right? And and you know it's where Welcome Week works really well is when it like calls you out on your and ambitions and pretensions in like the best way possible.
00:03:26
Joe Waltman
Weren't you the ones that like, you were one of the guys that brought like brought like a suitcase to the the final assembly for the like the the private flight to to Ibiza?
00:03:30
James
Oh my God. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. i was I was going, I was going to, I was going to visa.
00:03:32
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
00:03:34
James
It was, it was amazing. Yeah.
00:03:35
Joe Waltman
Well, but...
00:03:35
James
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. and So that's, yeah.
00:03:40
Joe Waltman
So I want to ask a question mostly for self-reduces because I think I had a similar um misguided idea about myself or a long time ago. Like what do you think it was that made you want to go down that route? And when did you sort of become, you know, dissillut whatever the right word is. For me, it was definitely disillusioned. Like that's not for me, you know.
00:04:02
James
I mean, like, I had been interested in sort of, I don't know, like, TV and radio and that kind of stuff since I was really a teenager, right?
00:04:14
Joe Waltman
Uh-huh.
00:04:14
James
And sort taken that through college. I'd interned at, I interned at television stations. I interned at TF1. This was the big, you know, I was a very confused American intern at the French headquarters of TF1 in Paris.
00:04:26
James
Like, I'd done a bunch of stuff. And and I think it was fascination with, you know, watching interesting stories, you know, get spread around the world in that way, working with creators and creatives.
00:04:38
James
I interned at MTV. I don't know, like I was always trying to touch on
Post-INSEAD Challenges and New Direction
00:04:42
James
that space. I can't really say I know exactly what it was, but I definitely know exactly what it was that disillusioned me, which is that I finished in Sayad, I didn't have a job offer and I was, you know, looking for work.
00:04:48
Joe Waltman
What's that?
00:04:52
Joe Waltman
This is a good segue because this is the next part of the question.
00:04:54
James
This is the next one.
00:04:54
Joe Waltman
Let's let's get, yeah.
00:04:55
James
Okay, good, good. I'm here. I'm here for you. I'm here you And so, um and I remember looking at different job offers and I was interviewing at Warner Brothers in London basically be like a marketing manager for like co-branded ringtones.
00:05:13
James
Right. And I think I had this moment of just being like, I mean, I guess it's media. i mean, I guess it's media property. And I guess this is probably a decent job to have, but it was just such a come down from what what wanted. And so I could tenth sense it was like some,
00:05:31
James
I mean, like business school on some level just teaches you that everything is a widget in one, you know, in one way or another.
00:05:31
Joe Waltman
Hmm.
00:05:39
James
And I think I have this moment of like, oh, yeah, like this space that I had been fascinated by and inspired by when I was younger. I guess, you know, when you look at it from an MBA point of view,
00:05:51
James
I mean, I guess you know it's it became suddenly more boring and certainly I could got a sense that the job would not be inspiring or not be creatively fulfilling.
00:06:02
James
Like it wouldn't tap into whatever had gotten me into the ah sector over the previous sort of ah years.
00:06:08
Joe Waltman
So it was ringtones that caused you to lose your innocence. and so
Consulting at Jump Associates
00:06:14
James
I guess so. i mean, also took comes from the struggle of finding a job and i'm trying to you know really they like get my get my foot in the door i'm be like, oh, is this what it's going to be to get my foot in the door? Yeah, and so it really gave me like a crisis of confidence. And it kind of led me to what I ended up, you know in you know eventually led me tend to what ended up doing.
00:06:17
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:06:32
Joe Waltman
Which was? let's Let's start going down that path.
00:06:34
James
Okay, so let's see. So like... Probably the other thing to add is that at the time, and not only was trying to get a in the media, I was also trying to get a work permit in London, which was proving very, very difficult as you may remember as well.
00:06:48
James
Quite challenging, right? And um
00:06:50
Joe Waltman
i was actually I was detained for a number of hours on on one on one return to the UK.
00:06:53
James
I mean, I was waiting for you to say that, you know, because even though I know that story quite well.
00:06:54
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah.
00:06:58
James
um Yeah. And so had to repatriate myself back to America. moved to San Francisco where I had some contacts and I was doing like some independent consulting and stuff like that. And then um i really was like, I don't know you know what I really didn't know where to take my degree and where to sort of take my career. And I was just just talking to all kinds of different people.
00:07:20
James
um But I think for me, it really was. tough to not have a narrative to sell, to not have like, and I could make them up for various interviews, but like, but I did to not really have a sense of of what I wanted.
00:07:26
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:07:32
James
And so, um, I had an old boss who I got on really well with, who is now doing something different. you Clearly the startup I had worked in had sort of imploded. um And he's like, you know, I just met this company.
00:07:47
James
They do this sort of design related stuff. Like, I don't know. i just like they I think that they think like you think. And I think you should go talk to them.
00:07:59
James
And so basically I had nothing to lose. And so I ended up interviewing at a small consultancy called Jump Associates, which probably not a ton of folks here would know.
00:08:11
James
But basically, if you can imagine, it was like the early days of design companies having a seat at the table in the world of product development or product innovation. Right now, that seems quite normal. You've got the Airbnbs, which are sort of design helmed. You've got sort of UX and customer experience that really are now just fundamental to the way we think about products. so But back in the day, you pretty much like product development was pretty much like sales guys and engineers, like battling it out.
00:08:39
James
Right. You know, determining, trying to to say that, oh, owner no, where we know the customer best.
00:08:40
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:08:44
James
Right. So you had a lot of products that were very technology led and do a lot of products that were sort of like slim products built around marketing plan. Right. And so there we were. So there was this this this company and. um I know how to explain it but was basically a group of designers and ethnographers and anthropologists who were saying, getting to know customers differently, doing research differently, prototyping ideas in a way that's very normal for designers, but not very normal for business. And their customers were loving them and like were inviting them to really have a seat on the table to help them with their product and customer strategy.
00:09:21
James
And what they really needed was an MBA, person with a decent pedigree to sort of join the company and help them look a little bit more legit.
Exploration in Emerging Markets and Personal Life
00:09:32
James
And so in the, yeah you know, so i interviewed, and remember leaving them and being like, i don't know where I am, but like this type of thinking, the way they're pushing problems, this really connects with me in some way.
00:09:43
James
Right. And so one thing led to another, and did a short stint with them and then I joined them. Um, and you know, it wasn't,
00:09:49
Joe Waltman
Wait, this is right after INSEAD this is a a little little time?
00:09:52
James
This is maybe maybe nine months, something like that.
00:09:53
Joe Waltman
Okay.
00:09:58
James
and so And so, you know, i mean, it was like it was ah the deal was somewhat transparent. Like I needed a job that I felt like, you know, just I need something to make me and to inspire me a little bit or to give me some to sort of help my sort of creative juices flow to some degree.
00:10:15
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:10:15
James
And they needed someone a bit businessy to, you know, to to to get in front of clients and to. and to be able to just to say hey it's to just to say things more than, wow, we have this really good idea, to ground down the marketplace in this way or that way.
00:10:30
Joe Waltman
Yeah. Cool.
00:10:34
James
but
00:10:37
James
It was a type of company that made everyone do the type of sort of core work, core training that underpinned their work, which meant to say that like, I was not just sent in there to do PowerPoint slides.
00:10:50
James
Like pretty soon I was out there in the field interviewing customers with anthropologists, you know, and we're not talking about sort of like quick, like usability studies or stuff like that. We're talking about like,
00:11:02
James
you know, like very much guided by the sort of the world of ethnography and anthropology PhDs, I found myself in like interviewing a woman about her household decor needs and furniture.
00:11:14
James
I'd interview for two and a half hours. Then I had to go back to the office and rewatch that video and like take post-its of all the things that she might have said and recombine those post-its into insights.
00:11:28
James
and then go back and watch a video again, right? Which is like in the world of sort of PhD level anthropology, this is very normal. um But for me, I was like, oh wow, like they're really not sort of breaking me down, but they need me to have those sort of core customer empathy skills in order to quite rigorous, yeah.
00:11:45
Joe Waltman
or Or being quite rigorous, shall we say.
00:11:48
James
And I mean, like, I mean, and and and today don't think there's almost any companies that really
00:11:49
Joe Waltman
Cool.
00:11:54
James
use that kind of rigor when doing customer studies, which is kind of too bad.
00:11:56
Joe Waltman
Yeah,
00:11:57
James
But certainly like I had, I also almost consider my time at Jump Associates as being like second graduate school.
00:12:03
Joe Waltman
yeah for sure.
00:12:04
James
Right. Like, like certainly
Career at Viasat and IDEO
00:12:06
James
I was applying things I knew from business, but it was very important for them that I'd be able to take the business side and triangulate it with a real deep understanding of desirability, human behavior, and just the creativity of being able to, to take those insights and turn them into product ideas, product concepts, get them back out in front of stakeholders, customers and things that.
00:12:16
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:12:30
Joe Waltman
And how long are you there
00:12:33
James
I was jump for maybe two years.
00:12:36
Joe Waltman
for? Okay.
00:12:37
James
And then, right so then at the same time, so... For anybody who follows design, design innovation, sort of world, like this was at the time at which a company called IDEO, right, was beginning to sort of build its reputation, right? So IDEO was like the the brand in the space.
00:12:55
James
um They were working on this idea that I guess people call sort of design thinking, which is the idea that you can take these sort of ways of thinking about people, ways of thinking about quick prototyping and testing, and you can turn them into just a way of thinking that can apply to business broad.
00:13:11
James
right not just me in the hands of designers. And so who was working at IDEO? but Someone who maybe has been on the show, Santiago?
00:13:20
Joe Waltman
A certain South American? Yeah, yeah, he has
00:13:22
James
A certain, yes, exactly. A certain Ecuadorian who was at that time head of business development for IDEO Boston.
00:13:25
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:13:29
James
And I think, no, he had been and he had moved to IDEO London, right? And they were beginning to hire a new type of person on their design team, which is someone they called like a business designer, right? And like,
00:13:43
James
you know The business designer is probably also IDEO's way of saying, like hey, we need a bit more credibility in the boardroom. We present these you know consulting plans, if you see you know these these concepts for sort new product directions.
00:13:56
James
But certainly, i think the way they were pushing was like, that we want business people, for people with a business eye, to be like in the room with the designers, with the designers and researchers, informing how they even frame the problem in the first place.
00:14:11
Joe Waltman
Mm.
00:14:11
James
right So not just like someone putting like some Excel spreadsheets on an idea to make it look plausible, but to really get there and like be part of the team. And so ah he said, hey, we're hiring this dude to call Business Signer. It sounds like you've been doing a bit of something like that and I was like yeah I of course was like know having struggled to get my work permit in London you know three years before um i was very very excited to get back to the UK and to just get back to I'll be honest to the kind of like you know international career that maybe Inceit had promised me you know because like you know it was you know it was you know when I was working a job was my first time ever as a consultant and I'm like
00:14:44
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah.
00:14:52
James
is my life really going to be like flying to Des Moines, flying to Philadelphia, like just flying through all these sort of like crap ass American airports, like doing like extended business trips for the rest of my consulting life.
00:15:02
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:15:05
James
No, I want to, if I'm going to that, I want to do it in
00:15:08
Joe Waltman
Flight crappy European airports.
00:15:10
James
Europe. have you spent, on just yeah you know, I think the average European airport, even but you know back then was still much, much nicer than the average
00:15:19
Joe Waltman
um All right. We don't need to start this. i've Now that I've been in the U.S. for, God, 12 to 15 years, I've become very, very American. We don't into that. We'll save that for another time and not record it.
00:15:31
Joe Waltman
All right. So let's move on. How long were you at IDEO for? and And what was it?
00:15:36
James
I was at IDEO from 2007 to 2014. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:15:42
Joe Waltman
Oh boy. Wow. That's, that's a pretty good tenure.
00:15:43
James
oh yeah yeah yeah no i mean like it was, for me, like it was also, I'd been, i had like a hundred, and to lot hundred buildinging I had a ton of different jobs and that was beforehand.
00:15:47
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:15:53
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:15:54
James
So like it was, it was cool. today And again, like it was, and I think it was a place where I took some of the rigorous stuff I picked up at that first consultancy at Jump and was able to do that work but with a greater profile a greater more international exposure with a more important brand and like in and those like the were the days where you know a brand like ideo was like spreading this idea and thinking was like just getting into all kinds of rooms right and like i mean like i could talk through all the different projects they were all over the world from like
00:16:28
James
private wealth in Hong Kong to interesting ones sort of working for Ikea, the stuff from like packaging for McDonald's, did a bunch stuff on sort of digital bank transformation in Beirut, you know, like
00:16:40
Joe Waltman
Yeah. Cool.
00:16:47
Joe Waltman
cool
00:16:47
James
like If you remember, maybe like a lot of kids have been saying, people who went to Instagram like this, but like I was a kid when I was little who had been like opening up atlases and spinning the globe. That's just a thing I did for fun.
00:16:59
James
right And so so like being in the London office of IDEO and having these clients all of the world, it really just felt like I i was like making my kid dream kind of come true. Of course, not just like going to these airports and going to these like clients, but like when you work for IDEO, of course, im like when i like I did a bunch of work in Dubai and the Emirates for a while.
00:17:20
James
And like a lot of us have been to It's very superficial. It can be really fun. But I had the excitement of being able to like also visit Emiratis in their homes, you know, and take tea with people and ask them about their needs around financial services.
00:17:29
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah.
00:17:32
James
Right. And just but ask them about their families and about how their lives went, and about their their motivations and anxieties and and what it was like to be an Emirati. And so I always felt like that, you know, when I did business travel, i was all I almost always had the chance to sort of see a very personal angle to how life was really lived there.
00:17:51
James
um
00:17:52
Joe Waltman
That's super cool.
00:17:52
James
It was super cool. It was super cool. Yeah, i would say and i would say I would say that like,
00:17:55
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:17:57
James
i definitely helped IDEO shape the definition of this thing they were calling business design of like say like, yeah, I, like if you put someone like me in a room doing user research, I'm going to ask different questions than someone who is a graphic designer or then someone who's purely an anthropologist, right? Like I'm going to,
00:18:20
James
you know, like like all great consulting is pattern finding. And so like, if you come from business background, you're you're you're hearing what someone says and you're connecting it to what you know about the market space, right? So it enabled me to ask different kinds of questions. And I think, you know, there were maybe like 20 of us business designers in the company.
00:18:37
James
And and i think we, a bunch of us had to do the work of proving that.
00:18:37
Joe Waltman
that.
00:18:43
James
getting designers and creatives to think about business factors early in their process could yield better results, but not just like better results from like a market viability point of view, but better results from creative point view, like from introducing new prompts say like, Hey, the value chain works like this. like if the person we're talking to is this one node in this pretty complex business system, okay, like what if we spoke to people in the other part of the business system? And then what if we triangulate what we heard from one human, we heard from the other human and seeing if there was market arbitr opportunity there.
Freelance Work and Microfinance Initiatives
00:19:17
Joe Waltman
Interesting. Interesting. Well, let's, let's, um, let's move on. So you, you were there until you said 14 or 17. Uh-huh.
00:19:25
James
I was there till 14. Basically what happened was 2013, 2014. So can that when started in 2006, 2007, the clients were like, if i can say that when i start in twenty oh six twenty or seven right clients were like
00:19:41
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:19:42
James
prototype these things you must be like sorcerer, right? Like literally they just thought that like just talking to real people in a small scale and like throwing together solutions really fast, testing them was just like amazing.
00:19:55
James
Only we, IDEO experts could do it. If you fast forward seven years, at that point, you know, certainly the work around design thinking around these methodologies have begun to weave themselves into general business practice.
00:19:58
Joe Waltman
yeah
00:20:07
James
And so what you found is that our, it was, i wouldn't say was becoming harder to sell projects, but you definitely had clients who were like, I, you know, like, this is no longer sorcery to me.
00:20:16
Joe Waltman
we're doing this in-house yeah yeah yeah
00:20:18
James
Or like, are we or no, and not they're like, I know what this is. This isn't sorcery. I don't want to pay quite so much for it, but I'm also really bad at right? Because they're, I think now we're in a stage where lot of them do it in-house, but back in like 2014, they knew what they didn't know and they just didn't really have the skills.
00:20:39
James
And so I was also getting a little bit and a little bit sick of like consulting for for a company, right? And I just like have the feeling that like there were companies out there who, they just wanted someone to accelerate their team a little bit, like come in help them take things that they kind of knew how to do already, but just like do them better, do them faster, et cetera.
00:21:04
James
And that became the basis for like my personal consulting practice. I basically went freelance, right?
00:21:09
Joe Waltman
Oh, cool.
00:21:11
James
yeah
00:21:11
Joe Waltman
Doing similar kind of work.
00:21:14
James
Yeah, I guess you could describe me as sort of like an accelerator. Like there are times I'd be like working closely coaching a UX team. There'd be times I'd be working with like a product lead, helping them sort of map insight to other stuff.
00:21:25
Joe Waltman
How'd you, did you find the business from your, from your previous contacts at IDEO or did you go out and like find new?
00:21:30
James
Yes.
00:21:31
Joe Waltman
Okay.
00:21:32
James
Yeah, yeah. It didn't require a ton of hustle, which is what made the business quite nice. um Yeah, it's my very first gig.
00:21:37
Joe Waltman
Great.
00:21:41
James
ah yeah I mean they' in fact there were projects that I think I definitely got the some projects that IDEO had turned down or just like from a financial whatever point of view and like in anyone who's done sort of independent consulting knows that like like you know you can get paid a pretty decent rate per diem and still be a tiny fraction of what they would pay ah proper consulting yeah yeah yeah exactly right yeah and so like I was happy to sort of
00:21:49
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:22:05
Joe Waltman
Somebody like IDEO. Yeah, for sure Yeah. that that Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:12
James
take the, can I say the word sloppy seconds on this, on this podcast?
00:22:14
Joe Waltman
I think arbitrage is the word you're looking for.
00:22:16
James
Sorry, that's what meant.
00:22:18
Joe Waltman
yeah
00:22:20
James
And of course, know, what made it interesting, it was like some of the projects like couldn't, the idea wasn't able to take, but of course like, it's a bit like if you go to a store and you see something on sale that has like a really cool color, a really cool pattern, and you're like, oh, I guess this isn't for everybody, but maybe it's for me.
00:22:35
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:22:36
James
And so, yeah, so one of my first clients coming out of idea
00:22:36
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:22:42
James
a French microfinance bank or lincoln ad so microfas bank that was based in France that worked primarily in Francophone Africa.
00:22:45
Joe Waltman
a
00:22:50
James
And so I think they had wanted with IDEO, but definitely i think the budget didn't work out.
00:22:50
Joe Waltman
Cool.
00:22:55
James
And um yeah, so I spent probably the better part of a year and a half off and on. working with them, helping them. I guess like we ended up creating something for them that but they call the Growth Lab, but what really it was just sort of like a little sort of cluster inside of the company that both helped them sort of do concepting around potential future projects, as well as doing a bit of inspiring around both sort of design thinking methods in general type of customer centered transformation.
00:23:23
James
um And so it was really cool, it was really cool people. I was able to bring other people I had known into the work and ah and and And I guess i I'll be honest, like when I had worked at IDEO, I'd always wanted to do more emerging market work, right?
00:23:41
James
And that kind of work doesn't often pay very well. And so it happened, but some of that work was bit few and far between. And so I found as a freelance consultant, I was able to sort of do emerging market work, did a lot of stuff around financial services, micro-lending, sort of um both individually work around microlending either to very small businesses or to individuals.
00:24:05
James
um I did a bunch of work about micro health insurance. But in any case, I was able to um work in markets that had not really been accessible to me as sort of a higher price consultant.
00:24:14
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah.
00:24:14
James
And of course, I mean, i like i have to admit it was you know from just a cultural exploration
00:24:14
Joe Waltman
yeah
00:24:24
James
personal growth and personal adventure point
Cultural and Professional Balance in Madagascar
00:24:26
James
of view. It was amazing. You know, like I did again, but again, like, so it's similar to someone what i was describing in Dubai, but in a different context, right? So like I would spend a bunch of time in Madagascar and that certainly on my free time, I was going off and seeing lemurs and going, you know, hiking and stuff like that.
00:24:44
James
But then the rest of my time I was in the marketplace, you know, talking to people about, you know, how they sold apples or, you know, how they able to, to, you know, get enough stock and what they did around credit and their personal relationships and things like that.
00:24:57
James
And so it was, it was, yeah.
00:24:59
Joe Waltman
but
00:24:59
James
Yeah. Like I definitely, I, it was, it was a dream come true many ways.
00:24:59
Joe Waltman
a
00:25:02
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah that ah that sounds that sounds lovely. And how long did you have your own firm for? Or or you or your you're still?
00:25:11
James
I, no, no, no, no. So I had my own firm. You ah could argue that I had it like more or less until 2019.
00:25:24
James
There was an interlune in the middle when a consulting gig turned into sort of me acting as interim design director for a um for a big sort of Russian and emerging market telco.
00:25:29
Joe Waltman
A job.
00:25:38
James
And so I guess I kind of, that was like
00:25:42
James
Like a very, you know like most of the time that I had, had ah i like I'd say my my consulting work was a combination of really, it was a funding sort company combination of emerging market financial services work as well as some mainstream.
00:25:56
James
And I did a bunch of stuff around private wealth. So it was like, I was really seeing all the extremes of of wealth.
00:26:00
Joe Waltman
Two ends of the spectrum. Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:01
James
Yeah, it was worth it. And, you know, it's it's ah it's ah it's amazing. You know, like, um you know, the very poor and the very rich have a lot in common. I think only when you're very, very poor and very, very rich, do you have people who want to give you loans, who make house calls.
00:26:16
James
All the rest of us have to go online and go to a bank. But if you have a ton of money or practically no money, someone goes to your door and says, hey, can I lend you some money?
00:26:18
Joe Waltman
That's funny. That's funny.
00:26:23
Joe Waltman
That's funny. That's good. ah So what have you done in the last five years?
00:26:28
James
ah Yeah, so it was so um so i so the other thing to say that in the in the not in the middle of this, but but in 2018, I got married.
00:26:39
James
We had super fun wedding in East London. if you've ever been to a Jewish Scottish gay wedding. I mean, have you you yeah yeah, it me it was it was it was ah is pretty fun.
00:26:53
James
The other thing that was happening around that time ah was that my now husband and i had decided we wanted to start a family.
00:26:54
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:27:01
James
And so were in the process of working with lawyers and surrogacy agencies and stuff like that. And so let's our son was due in September 2018. We got married in May of 2018 and we were itching to leave London.
00:27:21
James
and then we sort of came to another realization, which is that um my parents, you know, my parents had been pretty late. And so they were pretty old at this point. They are pretty old. And so I think we had this moment realizing, oh like our kid's going to born.
00:27:32
James
And if we don't live the United States for a little while, that our kid is never really
Return to New York and Joining Viasat
00:27:38
James
going to know his grandparents at all.
00:27:38
Joe Waltman
so
00:27:40
James
At least certainly on my side, right? My husband's... um family who's much younger. Right. And so, yeah, so we decided to not really spur the moment. We said, okay, we're going to move back to America. I had not been in America a very long time i had not been in america for a very long time.
00:27:54
James
um We moved to New York city, um which was, you know, maybe about three and a half hour drive from where my parents were living. um yeah And, and I know our son was born in September of 2018. We moved to New York city in January of 2019. And this is a long way of saying that, uh,
00:28:13
James
We're in America and I felt the real need to get a stable full-time job. um And so
00:28:21
Joe Waltman
kids have a way of focusing um things and in your active.
00:28:21
James
so kids are really focusing on kids, kids, kids, kids.
00:28:24
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:28:25
James
And suddenly the the cost living New York City have a way of focusing your needs.
00:28:28
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:28:28
James
um And so basically what had happened was at the time I had been doing some consulting work for a Peruvian billionaire. who wanted to bring internet to the farthest reaches of the Amazon and the Indies. And I had done a bunch of interesting research, basically like following this rural road in Peru. we just kept on going until we could get no internet at all, until we'd find a place that had no no it internet of any kind, right? then trying to interview the people there and trying to understand what their needs were.
00:28:59
James
It was super interesting work, but the technology provider for project ah ah for that guy was this satellite company called Biasat.
00:29:11
Joe Waltman
Yep.
00:29:11
James
And so there we were, and again, they're based in San Diego, so you probably heard a little bit about them. And so I was doing work for this Peruvian company and I was sort of helping them do their negotiations around, certainly around sort of service design or what the product specifications would be ah with Biasat.
00:29:16
Joe Waltman
ye
00:29:32
James
And at some point the guy advised that, it's like, Hey, you're, you're just a contractor, right? you know, like, why don't you come? What do you We think about working for us. And, um,
00:29:42
James
I mean, that basically, that's what I did. right so I talked to them and and it was really it was interesting.
00:29:44
Joe Waltman
Nice.
00:29:46
James
you know like I had come to New York City thinking that I would get this job New York City. And before I knew it, I was telecommuting and going to San Diego every, I don't know, couple months and working with this very, very, very engineering oriented product team, trying to help them figure out how you do something very human, which is...
00:30:02
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:30:06
Joe Waltman
And fairly old school, right? A lot of DOD guys, a lot of very, very defense-y US government-y stuff.
00:30:11
James
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. well, yeah, I mean, like like San Diego has a real telco cluster and you could argue the advice I was in the business of putting very powerful satellites up in the sky or at the times for renting or leasing them whatever and basically making money off what you're able to do when you can get connectivity to very remote places.
00:30:13
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:30:18
Joe Waltman
yeah
00:30:31
James
So have they had basically three businesses. One was super rural connectivity, right, in the US and other parts of the world and potentially in Peru. um One was internet on planes. And if you've flown in the U S or internationally, you've used the internet and you've almost definitely used our product there.
00:30:51
James
And, and then we had a whole, a whole military wing, right? So basically like where are the people who need connectivity in really unusual places. And so I worked for a while on this rural connectivity business.
00:31:03
James
I've moved, I've been a VIA for five and a half years and I've touched a bunch of different businesses for the past couple of years. I've been, I was, i had the I've taken the role of being the very first sort of user experience or customer experience sort of senior person in our military business.
00:31:20
James
um And, you know, my father was in the Department of Defense, but I don't come from a particularly military background, so wasn't sure if I'd be a good match. um But I'd say two things sort of occurred to me.
00:31:32
James
ah One is that, like...
00:31:37
James
the like The typical user experience for military products is just not very good, not very very good at all. and i when And when I look at the gap between what a consumer product is and how people use it, and I look at what is offered to ours to our forces,
00:31:54
James
to our forces You know, you're like, oh like it's I thought i think it's it's really dangerous to have really bad user experience on the um um the in the in the world in the world of the defense.
00:32:01
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure there's been some tragedies as a result, right?
00:32:05
James
And you definitely don't have military folks.
00:32:06
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:32:08
James
You have you have some. You have very military folks who saying, oh, no, we need this to be easy. You'll never hear them say we need this to be delightful. Right. You might hear them say we need to drastically reduce the cognitive load on warfighter.
00:32:21
James
right? And you can win them over with that argument, but you know, you don't have a ton of sort of consumer demand saying, oh God, I wish it was only two clicks to understand this bit of data about the adversary something like that, right?
00:32:33
Joe Waltman
Mm-hmm.
00:32:35
James
um And so I think it's been, um so I found myself surprised at how compelling the mission of doing ah customer experience work in this space was to me.
00:32:48
James
And I also found that like, I guess you could argue that I've always been drawn to extreme users. I've been drawn to people who, you know, the standard of digital businesses don't really design for. it You know what i mean
00:33:05
Joe Waltman
Yeah.
00:33:05
James
It know, whether that's sort of like someone, you know, a farmer in Madagascar or whether it's, you know, a junior, you know, comms operator the Air Force or something like that. um Yeah, I think there's just, there's something um um' um I, I'm, I guess I, I find myself an intrigued by working and trying to understand the lives of folks who don't get a ton of attention from mainstream business.
00:33:29
Joe Waltman
yeah Yeah. From a design perspective, that probably is is very interesting.
00:33:32
James
Yeah, but I would say they did not teach me that in the end.
00:33:33
Joe Waltman
what
00:33:34
James
One of my professors would say, wow, James, that's that's that that doesn't sound like your route to becoming a billionaire.
00:33:39
Joe Waltman
Yeah, yeah.
00:33:43
James
But it is very satisfying.
00:33:46
Joe Waltman
That's good. That's good. Well, thank you. Let me let me ask the ah the the the kind of punctuation mark question that I ask everybody. and if you don't have anything, just say you know no, not really. But is there anything that um we as the community can do to help you?
00:34:01
Joe Waltman
um And or or alternatively, can you do, is there anything you can do to potentially help our other colleagues in our promotion?
00:34:14
James
I mean, I think that I'm beginning to see it through the, and say on sort of WhatsApp group already, but I think there we could be even more of a brain trust for each other.
Alumni Networks and Podcast Conclusion
00:34:27
James
you know, like I am a member of a Slack group for alumni of IDEO. And of course, like IDEO people, they're creatives of all different types. you can just They just, fundamentally want to help each other creatively solve different problems, but it's a very rich community community.
00:34:43
James
not just about sort of job opportunities or business opportunities, but like it's where people really get to ask each other interesting questions on how they'd approach different problems. And i think the inside community, particularly not just for just the sheer brain power, but all the international perspective and the sectoral breadth that we show has the potential to do even more than we do already, right? of Like not just find each other contacts, but begin to, so we did have almost like ah
00:35:15
James
yeah, to to help each other with a bit of creative problem solving. And so I think i would I would throw myself out there, certainly for the things that I know about. And I think I would love to see that more from the community. But I would say that I don't know that we need any formal effort as much as we need more people to be willing to be a little bit but vulnerable or a little bit inspiring and put a question out there to the group and say like, hey, like this is a toughie. Or have you ever known Like, ah here's something I've never seen before.
00:35:44
James
Have any of you seen anything like it?
00:35:45
Joe Waltman
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would be a wonderful use of that of that WhatsApp
00:35:51
James
I just want to say to everyone, I've been drinking this this beverage this whole time.
00:35:51
Joe Waltman
um
00:35:56
James
And I just, I think I burped at least a few times during this podcast. And I want to apologize to the fine ladies and gentlemen of NCI for my terrible manners, which have not, it which if anybody remembers, I have have not improved since 2003.
00:36:04
Joe Waltman
group.
00:36:08
Joe Waltman
i'll be I'll be editing all of that out.
00:36:09
James
but through twenty or three
00:36:10
Joe Waltman
Don't worry about it. We'll we'll we'll clean it up and in post-production.
00:36:12
James
I think you won't at all.
00:36:12
Joe Waltman
ah
00:36:14
James
I'm pretty sure you will not, but thank you.
00:36:14
Joe Waltman
No, I No, I won't. no i won't i I don't know how to edit.
00:36:16
James
yeah
00:36:17
Joe Waltman
James, thank you so much for your time. Really really good talking. Really good catching up.
00:36:21
James
Yeah, sure. Yeah, just thanks for inviting me.
00:36:23
Joe Waltman
Take care.