"The Million Dollar Curtain Pull" with Simon Swords

Hey everyone, this is Nick and I'm going to try keep it brief as usual. The guest on the podcast today is Simon Swords, and we will get this out of the way immediately. Yes, that is the hardest name I've ever seen. Simon is the Managing Director of Fundopedia out in the UK, and he has very graciously advised her to not make a bunch of atrocious tactical errors as soon as we began to exist. And he's otherwise an awesome guy. He very generously recorded extremely late in the UK for this, and I cannot emphasize enough how thoroughly I've been moved by his generosity with this.

Simon helped me well before my blog was big, or the latest articles that blown up. It was all basically out of the goodness of his heart. And even this episode was recorded all the way back in March, so maybe it's a little bit of karma that he's getting his episode out right as I'm doing a huge amount of traffic.

And most importantly, he's an executive that reads deeply and knows his technical stuff. With that out of the way, I'm also going to acknowledge that the audio quality was very sketchy due to various recording issues. And my audience is finally big enough that I'm just going to go spend a bunch of money and upgrade my setup. Maybe pay someone to help me handle internet fame. But in any case, hope you enjoy as always.

Simon, great to see you after a couple of weeks or months that's been, how's it going? Thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, that really delighted to be number four. My number four, that's right. Number four, four is a seemingly nice round number. And obviously you've found out all the things you need to do on the audio by now. So when I get counsel, it's going to be like, hi, death audio.

Just streamed around the world like 1080p or whatever is going to be fantastic. Like maybe OK, who knows. But I was thinking that we were on about like, so we do this online calls in work all day, every day, right? I don't know about you, I live in teams on video. Yeah. And I was like, why what is different about podcasts? And obviously it's the mechanism of recording and then re delivery, right? Out to infinite people. And this is the first time I've ever come on to a call.

What feels like a team's video call? I've been like, so you've got to be really like, so if we start, it's going to be swear. Yeah, absolutely. This is probably going to be the episode my father finally listens to sort of will distress him. But you know, it's it's going to happen at some point. I've been swearing at the others.

OK, that's cool. I just promised no C words. We'll try and keep it kind of, you know, at least somewhat PG 13 or whatever. But yeah, this is a recording. And I was on a panel this morning. And as I was talking, there were people recording the on the cell phone. And I was like, shit, like, this is this is really this is kind of a big deal. Like this could go horribly wrong because I like to add live, right?

I'm not suggesting that I haven't prepared for this call. But I genuinely like I find that I do my best work when I don't know what's going to come out of my mouth next. Which, yeah, yeah, so bad for like news broadcasting and things of that nature that need to be kind of like specific. I'd be like, you know, there's a crash. That's pretty fucking gnarly. I'm sure be OK. You know, like anyway, what we got, we've got some cats. I still got the cat. It wouldn't work too easily distracted.

Something I find funny is, so I think in terms of CEOs or managing directors, you're the person I speak to most frankly, who actually runs like a reasonably sized operation. So you look like someone like canjana. I'd like that. I think the revenue he has per capita is really good. But the size of the shop is like five or six people. Everyone I meet day to day. So that is not yourself. I'm talking like, yeah, just people at work, you know, my normal gigs.

They talk like you in private and then in public have this incredibly polished persona that no one finds charismatic. Oh, that's the shame. The someone described that as inauthentic. They're not being there with things. Yeah. I mean, that's how I think of it. And I'm not quite about it for sure. So they get a little inherently distrustful about it. Right. It's the.

Oh, it's like that the pre-coded layoff rhetoric. Right. It's like they turn up. Oh, you know, we're a family. The finances are in great order. No, we're not going to share any numbers. You know, it's all under control. Trust us. Yeah, trust us. A month later, like they've laid off 10% of the staff. And the part of the iPhone confusing is everyone is like, you know, how did that happen? We were blindsided. And unlike, did you know, see it coming just from how they were talking.

From the fact that they use many words to describe absolutely nothing. Right. That's, they don't use any words at all. So that's that's deeply concerning. It is deeply concerning the fact that they're even here. Yeah, I was talking to somebody yesterday and they're based in the Channel Islands. To the South of the UK for those of you that are not from around here. There's three or four very tax haveny style places that you can go hang out and not pay inheritance tax or capital gains.

It's like the playground to the rich to some extent. And he was saying, yeah, man, like my work some guy flew in and everyone was like, whoa, what's he doing here? And there's this real kind of flock mentality that keeps it in these big companies that become a bit faceless, right? Where it's like people are almost like, yeah, like you would imagine in like the frickin Amazon or something, right?

When there's a group of birds together and they're all kind of hunched together that all looking around like wide eyed right where's the next threat coming from because it's not a safe environment at any time. You know, if maybe boy turns up like, but whenever bird turns up 10% of the people disappear.

You know what I mean? It's a real when you think about that in evolutionary terms, it's like shit, like our little tribe is being called by this threat that comes in. We don't know, but whenever bird turns up, boss, there goes one in 10 of us. This is scary scary place to exist. I would like. I did have a, of course, we have an actual question to talk about. I have to tell you a story first of that. My first manager, you saw it at this company. So he'd been laid off one or two times.

You know, it was interesting because he's really high performance, right? Like he was just in one of those low level roles that when people were doing the finance spreadsheets, he would just be in one of the groups like, oh, we don't need him. I don't know who that is.

And that company, the second company had a woman who would fly in from Sydney. And she was the one in charge of like laying people off because she just had like a stone face and would not become distressed and firing like 20 people in a row just in ball. So they would fly in from Sydney and the company called her the black widow because she would turn out people would just disappear and it got to the point where my friend got laid off.

They would hide her because they couldn't let people realize she was in Melbourne. So they would like sneaker in the back door and your manager be like, hey, can you give him a chat with me? And you'd open the door. You'd see her and go, oh my god, I'm dead. It's over.

I'm gone. I'm gone. That's absolutely gone. This is the end of me. Yeah, she's probably wearing like this diamond encrusted brooch or something that's like a spider that she got for a last bonus or something something like really horrendous like that. Yeah, look, I mean company, I can't big companies do things like face this, you know, not very respectful dismissals of people in order to keep share how it's happy.

So, you know, it's a thing. Share price goes up, you know, whenever you see the big companies lay enough and it's about what incentive rises a company to do that type of thing and not do it the right way, you know, you have to have difficult discussion for people. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but it doesn't need to be spider widow lady. Which is what you mentioned. You mentioned, you mentioned the times you've been forced to do something like that. Obviously not driven by share price go up.

Like it's like respectful. You stayed on good terms. It was fine. It wasn't like this brutal drag them into the room and assassinate them before their colleagues realize what's happening. Do you know what I mean? You know, and then there's like a back window that you're like shoving the bodies out of in the hope that nobody sees. You thought I'd have to leave through the front. You got to go through the fire exit with a box of shit. You know, but anyway, thanks for that.

You know, it's that I'm not going to sit in there can be like, oh yeah, every time I've had to have a difficult discussion, let's go and handle it like my chef's kit. There's the first few times would have been enormously overwhelming for me emotionally because you know, I just didn't know what I was doing.

And there and you know, and on the occasion where it was in almost the overwhelming for the person I was talking to. And it was always my fault. I mean, that was the rhetoric right I've made a mistake here, whatever that mistake is. So it's on me to fix it. Even if that means doing something short term that's brutal for them. But you know, you just you just think about how to make the landiness soft as possible.

And I think I did get that right from day one and that going back to the point we were talking about before is why nobody ever screamed. You shouted at me because there was always like. Yeah, you know, like you're giving me a bunch of care. You know, you kind of give me a reference and you're explaining in words that, you know, not complicated where the mistake was.

And obviously you can get really good at that. You shouldn't ever be surprised because you would have performance managed them in the run up to that chat. I mean, it's just basic. Management shit. You know, nobody should ever be surprised five unless obviously it's a redundancy situation. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, actually, so on that topic of it being a hard conversation, probably that's that's a good segue into the first question and then like I mentioned the Jesse, if we get hopelessly deflected, that's fine, which was, you know, you have to do really hard stuff like that and stress about your income and.

Yeah, you know, why start a business maybe maybe it's a good time to start by explaining a little bit about fund a period because you've had enough of a history that my intro is not going to cover all of it and then then ask why the hell you did it. Yeah, so what did you do and then why did you do it?

Yeah, and I wish that the answer was because I had this grand I wrote a business I have still got the business plan for my first incarnation of the business because it's had about eight incarnations. It is not, you know, it's not I don't want anyone to think leave here thinking Simon defied the odds, you know, like normally eight out of ten businesses don't make it past five years or whatever the stat is right.

I don't want anyone to be like shit, you got lucky one anything over two out of ten he chose one of them what a guy you know I need him on my team it wasn't like that. I think so the business is a data management platform for asset managers on the buy side of asset management and it couldn't be more boring.

And I suppose the correct words are used for it is fundamental, you know, we are making sure that highly regulated data is stored accurately and then reported on accurately and we do that through a bunch of validation checks and imagine like an ETL but built with some very specific use cases in that very specific niche of data.

We get the data set we know what every field means every field is not just a random number it means something quite significant and you know we understand what the data in each field should be and the team that work with us know how asset management works so when we deliver the software we're not just giving them the software we're saying.

Here's the people that know how to use the software in your business and here's all the rules and schema and everything kind of configured all you got to put your data in it and it's going to come out the other side in the reports that you're regulators tell you you've got to produce and it's going to be you know we even use an API we're I could believe you're not financial services.

Then I will use API's and so we're able to collect data from janky csv files in emails like if that's what the system that we always bang on about how we're bringing. Flexibility kind of data flexibility to an inflexible world all is legacy systems the type of monolithic horror stories that I'm sure you and your you know people of your.

World bump into and kind of all have a little cry and go look it's going to send it in this back shit crazy tag file we can have a sit here and moan about it or we can just work out how we're going to be ingest what might as well be unstructured data you know and so we we kind of that's what we do. We do it for some big banks hsbc's you know pretty decent name to have on your roster but we've got basically a good chunk about 30 or so of the largest asset managers in the world.

And I think it's fair to say that we are a market leader in this niche there's only about 300 firms so when you've got 10% of the market that would buy your software about 30 of them using it and you you know you turn up to the RFP you're competing with them either building it themselves usually driven by an upcase cto you then see that software and goes.

I can't build that shit I don't want to build that shit that's boring you know there's not where's the AI baby and I'm like look we can do AI as well but let's just sort the data at first right and then worry about the fancy stuff.

Yeah so fun this winning and it's an absolute success story but it's obviously not where I started so when I was I live I lived in a place called Dagnum I went to a very normal not very nice school that was kind of overcrowded and I was distracted by a lot of the chaos that was existed in my life at home and in school at that time.

And I'm not saying I didn't do well in school but I wasn't the most academic and I think my biggest takeaway from school very much I kind of lived next to the financial district just in kind of east of London just off to the London canary walk is like a down sound and I kind of saw it being built out my bedroom window.

I just had this mental image in my head of all the kids in my school kind of like drone bees being sucked into these new buildings that would be built like just over in this big metropolis of London right and there was something in me Nick that I was born with that was if you like all going over there I'm going the way like I just I'm not following you because the logic was if if I it wasn't really logical it was a gut feeling.

But I think if I you know like human brains are like just designed to rationalize things like you know and put meaning to things is kind of just we have to do otherwise we go a bit mad or maybe I'm just weird but like I have to rationalize what was going on in my head at the time and I remember thinking I'm not going to have any kids because everyone has kids.

I'm not going to go and get a job because everyone's got a job because if I do the same thing that everybody else does and it isn't that what they're doing is not good and not great like if you're happy in a job great like whatever man but like for me I was like if you guys are zig enough got a zag because by by going down the same path as everyone else all I'm doing is maximized in the chances is not it's not 100% possible but certainly I'm not going to do that.

Don't be up there that I'm just going to get the same outcomes you guys right and you're all fighting for the same piece of the pipe I don't I don't want to do that I don't want to go in with the flock of people try and scrap my way up and I think when I so I had that feeling and I went to get a job a normal job and I worked in like coffee shops and retail like news agents and and various other things and any kind like like custard and I'm going to do that.

I was kind of whittling out like things I don't like so when I was working in a news agent I was like well people can be really fucking unreasonable so let's not do something that involves me spending loads of time around like your man in the street because they're just they're unhinged you never know what kind of weird shit they're going to put it any time so I'm not going to work in the consumer and also work in the call center for a large credit card center so I spoke to everyone about their financial issues and that really taught me that people are going to be able to do that.

They taught me that people spend loads of money on credit cards and they don't know how to repay it so I was like right well that's a fucking track. Okay, right and it was almost like going through like my former sieve list and then when I came out of college which I didn't do very well that if I'm honest I kind of just about scraped through a GMVQ which over here put it this way I wouldn't put it on my CV.

You know it's like you know congrats you got drunk for two years but you know nothing of real kind of substance and I remember going into my first proper job in the proper office I was an IT support guy and it just there was a stench and the stench was the death of meritocracy right.

I just remember thinking you're in charge because you're enormous it's massive great man you're a bit scary and you talk like you know what you're doing but you don't and I know you don't because I know shit loads about computers because I spent my whole life geeking off on them building them taking them apart building websites taking them apart I know a lot about everything in IT at that point and I just remember sitting there like you know again I'm kind of.

I'm kind of a manifesting a logic but it wasn't logic all of it was gut feel and it was like if I if I work at a company like this is a big law firm I am not guaranteed progression on the basis of my output.

It is not an input output thing it is a smart input not necessarily a line to doing your job properly that makes you appear like you're doing ship at super valuable or gets you in front of the people that you need to be in front of so you build relationships over teased and coffees with them and not be sure you job you know the bar is basically don't be shit and build lots of relationships with people and that's okay again in that environment that's what you're good at if you don't mind so enough and half

passing it for a day earning your thousand pound of there whatever it is and just rubbing noses with the right people in the office. Can we bootstment like if you climb the ladder or don't climb the ladder well done you like it is I'm not none of this was like these things aren't they're not bad in and of themselves but they were bad for me because as you've already probably established I don't play those games you know like I can't turn up and

say good job that into my manager just because is my manager I'm going to say to him this is a fucking disaster and I'm not sure what brain child this was a yours but actually it needs to be sorted and if you want to be sorted I'm going to sell it but I'm going to tell everyone that you made a mess of this because I want to I want to do a good job there's a fire in me that is I will do what I need to do to get this done and nothing will get in my way if I think it's

something that needs to be done and that again that doesn't play well with kind of company politics taking a long way around yeah that's really interesting because I think one of the biggest pieces of negative feedback again on my writing which I instantly I don't care about at all it's never bothered me but I was just

quite interesting because we get these kind of you know sometimes pretty senior engineers and they go you know what you just said like it's it's not a meritocracy everyone acknowledges that to some degree but then they follow up with but it's you know it's not that bad or it's not typical or blah blah blah blah and every time I talk to someone who

actually runs a company they're like of course that's how it is a big companies not only like not only is it the case that that's what it's like a big organization is not possible for it to be otherwise which put enough people in a system it becomes this kind of intensely political thing and I'm you mentioned like you know being a big guy very serious looking you can actually order my managers in height and that correlate straight

by the way right even the first guy worked with this guy Dave culture he's extremely competent and he has had incredible career progression I think he doubled the salary in two or three years once he started getting in a software now I've actually programmed a little bit longer than him he's a bit more life experience but I suspect a big part of the difference in career progression my

mind hasn't been bad either but I'm like he's way taller than me so people just envision him as like you know that could be a director he's like almost seven foot you know just just put him in does he have a loud boomy type voice he not boomy but like deep and very calm you know you the guy that gets you promoted he is incredible he's outside of that but of course and like that's probably only half of it the other half is just be really tall and that makes that

conventional pathway really unappealing right because you look at it and go well I can't get taller I can get better at my job but that's not the limiting factor here so at some point it's going to go like well this is this is kind of a losing game I very little influence over the factors that drive me up

totally right and and the things that you get out of bed for a burn in mind you're going to devote most of your waking alive hours to it in a night of your world has to be something that aligns your values with the values of the thing that you do right and my values are on a good day

because I'm not perfect bit of integrity quite a lot of hard work do the things you say you're going to do when you mess up only you know standard human in my view anyway this I'm not saying old and therefore I get like a tent like no this is just basic shit

this isn't this isn't like me trying to say that I'm the best person in the world I think this is a very low bar to set on on anybody who wants to be a half decent person and I want to be a half decent person and I want to be held accountable

so when I left and went into work I felt like no amount of me holding myself accountable was going to be a value to the people that I was surrounded with in those large companies especially in IT if I'm honest I think it's bad in most industries I've now spoken to enough people that I'm like

it's somewhere between a little and a lot worse in IT but it's clear not a typical industry around these these grounds no no not at all because you know certainly in the firms that I worked in before I then moved into running my own set of you know

seven or eight failed in businesses before funding yeah it just it wasn't great and there was a lot to be said for you know IT was carved off as a cost for one right so it's a cost of doing business okay well that kind of sucks because obviously there's probably a hundred ways we can have value

but if you know if it depends on your mindset around the IT spent right and of course some of it is keeping the lights on but actually if you invest strategically in IT you might create the next Amazon right there's a lot of possibility if you think about IT being an R&D opportunity and not just an overhead and actually interestingly on that to see how I got out of work my the guy Dean who I started the first company with who still a shareholder

and fund the P.J. who's diluted out a little bit but he owns a good enough amount that I look forward to him getting his payday one day he does all right here and I built a system for the law firm called Alff Advanced Legal File System I think I told you about this

yeah we did speak about this before yeah yeah yeah and it was in like dot net beta it was running on a SQL server I think we we had a rat space like the company SQL server and we'd specified all that set it up and so we were using like port 1433 to run this

janky dot net with those that over the internet kind of using SSL sort of but not because that was the port 1433 but I think it was encrypted into this database everything hit store procedure that it hit the tables all hard coded then did some really cute stuff which was a nice idea but kind of we were in that phase of learning how to code and Dean is the most gifted code I think you know one of the most gifted coders I've ever worked with where we would think we were being smart

and only realized when it was too late that actually we were not very smart and the thing that we built to automate the building of the code was actually going to fuck us over when we started to try and like maintain the thing and make changes to it

and we've all done it right yes I think is not all of us go through that cycle in the sense of like I know what you mean which is when I was a junior engineer I'd feel smart and then I do something and one year later I'd be like why the fuck did I do that

and then at some point it switches over and you feel smart and you're like oh no you know that's a part coming to kill the pelicans right it's going to ravage this flock of little bit goes like you should feel smart it's a trap but some people don't they feel smart they never realize that that's the thing that precedes a terrible mistake and they just keep being smart for like 40 years and I don't know how many businesses those guys destroyed

but I would guess like probably 30% of all destroyed tech businesses are just someone being smart through their whole career right and then they leave and have some stories I was so smart I don't know why these companies keep going on dream and the only reason the lights were kept on right by and the fun and the really terrifying thing going back to like the social dynamics of it and again this plays out magnified multiple times in large companies is if you say it enough

because you believe it the people around you if they're not smart starts to believe it too and now you've got a problem right because you've got this guy or girl saying hey I'm amazing look at all the stuff I do and they and they mean it right and they have mechanisms through which to evidence their smartness you know it's not just a question of saying the smart they'll turn out and say don't look behold my smartness

yeah look how complicated this is you know right I mean one of the biggest lessons my chairman ever taught me is a complicated email it's not a clever email you know you speak in words of two syllables where possible because why wouldn't you why wouldn't you want the widest number of people to understand what it is you're saying down to ten new olds if necessary right why not why wouldn't you cater to the widest audience in your communications stop now I get if you're writing for a certain

demographic but when it comes to your good old fact of business email you know in your dealing with maybe over and I come to you or within the business who cares just use the right words like anyway so we thought we were smart we were quite smart then we smart and I was on coding despite having built this framework that then it was really cool it generated the tables all the store procedures and a bit of a crud in the face as well that we'd be like

oh we got to do this is genius thing all we got to do is add the business logic and we got and we built them this legal case management system they liked it so much that they started to sell it to their competitors and I remember being pulled into the senior partners office and at the time I was like king of the world I thought but in hindsight all he was doing is a lawyer was protecting his ass right he said so you and Dean have done such a good

job building the system I'm going to give you a thousand pounds and at the time I was like yeah that's a thousand pounds that's a crazy amount money a thousand pounds we're talking 20 odd years ago right so that I was earning for the record I was probably earning 20 grand a year give or take so 5% bonus out and I know where that'll do nice and so BC just got a sign with a bit of paperwork yeah man whatever you have a thousand

pounds shit the heck yeah did you do it right like come on now so I signed it so did Dean he got bonus too and then obviously because we were in IT and I was basically the CTO I was the only guy that knew how that fucking thing was held together and trust me it was a real you know sticky back plastic clusters over things like I really was learning on the job had to do basically everything in this like

100 person company with three offices and I was like shit how do you how do you set up a wan and I was I was winging the whole thing but the one thing I didn't wing was making sure that I had access to the emails of people in the business that were important and we're making decisions about what was going on in the business and so I got to see that obviously they were doing these deals with these other companies just

selling the software for like 10,000 pounds a year 20,000 pounds a year I was like mother they're selling my software to other people like oh my god I've taken a thousand pounds for something that is worth right and I didn't know how to ban you software companies at the times but I would have been like loads loads more than what I've been paid that's a number there's infinite amount more than what I've been

paid this is a disaster so I've picked being out for a beer because all the best business decisions especially when you're trying to start a business you don't know what you do get done while you're a bit drunk

obviously sure of course and yeah yeah right just that goes it's like that's just what you do and funny enough I managed to get some guy who was a sales guy working for the company to come on the journey with us guy called Mark and Mark and Dean Mark knew a guy who had loads of money and he put me in the car and I wanted to say 50,000 pounds in for 15% of the business and then Dean and I and Mark split the business three ways like the three amigos which for anyone listening is a terrible idea

one founder not good two founders great three founders not good there's definitely a sweet spot and three and one and not it so there's a problem is it creates this kind of weird Mexican standoff who's actually who's actually getting shit done here and what transpired is that Dean and I were doing all the work to rewrite our into a V2 that we could go and sell because that was what the first business of

Florida was going to sell like this case management system to lawyers but like we're just right again hopefully they won't sue us right here in Frenchman because they can't they can't sue us for just knowing stuff right like they're in mind it's a law firm so they would have had like infinite resource to just sue us to death but fortunately they were so chaotic they didn't know what we were doing they were just

annoyed that we left right and Mark was meant to be the sales guy so I was the IT guy Dean was a IT guy Mark was the sales guy and Mark decided to sit there smoke cigarettes and make cups of tea and he's out of view to it was software shit can't sell it and our attitude was yeah but you're not even you're not even calling up people to do shit and I think he thought because he bought the money in that was fair game like you know and in actually I haven't spoken to Mark since we fell out over it

all but in Mark's defense I was a young jump up little prick who had ideas above my station so you know need this to say Dean and I separated again so we kind of left Mark behind and that was when we went into the shed in my parents garden we kind of like had this fall from grace the first

business it found spectacularly we managed to keep one or two of the clients and that was how we kind of front ended pain to have you know internet connection in a shed in my mum's garden and Dean and I were just so it wasn't that we thought we were smart but Dean must have seen something in

me and I obviously saw something in Dean and the deal basically was and it was almost unspoken but it was like Dean I'm going to go out and make promises to people but I'm an IT guy right so I'm not going to tell people we can build software that I know isn't physically possible right but I'm

going to push the boundaries because you're you're one of the best coders I've ever worked like at that time is probably the only coder I like just met this guy and he's an absolute monster of a coder right like the stuff he could do in flash script like action script back in the day like

in flash right he was doing like 3D modeling and stuff it was probably that just ridiculous like the tycoz and he'd just do that on a Friday night because why not really um so he was a genius and I was arrogant enough and ignorant maybe more ignorant enough to think that if I just go

knocking on doors um I'm going to build relationships with people and if I build relationships with people um they'll they'll buy that you know I can solve their IT problems what I am really good at not to big myself up too much but if somebody sits down with me a business person or someone who

understands how the mechanics of their company works if they sit down with me and talk me through right this is our process for how we handle super basic but like invoicing you know we're in a spest loss removal company and we we have these yellow dockets that you fill out when you go and

take some a spest loss and then that generates an invoice over here and like in terms of being able to map out a system in my head that was always a bit of a superpower I remember I'd come back and I'd just tell Dean everything and and when we were still working in Mark Mark would be like

and you just remembered that I was like well yeah because if you think about it you don't have to remember it it all just kind of makes sense you know like you don't right like it's all joined up so there's nothing here that I need to remember I just remember the first bit and the rest of it

all just like this like it's it's a thing I just it's like describing how a house works right you know there's a there's a door there's otherwise how do you get into it this how I can think about systems anyway we started to get some traction I was good at SEO I was good at

paperclips although I wasted a load of money on paperclips who doesn't I was good at building relationships and I was good at translating requirements from clients who are non-technical to something that I could take back to Dean and we could build together and there's a combination of all

of that we got quite highly ranked for like bespoke software company London and somebody must have Googled that and called us and we were just that at this year we've moved into like a local university and I've taken on maybe our first two people and we was in like an incubation hub at

the University of Essex and they called us up and they said can you build what we now call fund a pdf and I went well you're in restec your huge as you can imagine I've good with them because you've got bare in mind like I come from like no background financial services or anything

really I mean I didn't really stay on any job long enough to have learned anything about how the world worked so I had a very kind of big done approach to things I wasn't very finessed at all I was just like you big bank me little software company I'll do whatever you want

so long as you give me what looks like stead loads of money relative to me because like anything over I think our biggest client at a time might have been paying us to grand two thousand pounds a month right so there's some printing company we were doing our jobs for on a debt time and material

spaces so I went up there we used Dean had not given up on his system generating tool you know like that kind of like fried generation that he was still off to one side slaving over it it was dot net two it's like sigh I've done it this time it's good to work this time

in it never bloody did but it did spit out 80% of what we needed and so we used that tool to quickly hack a prototype together because they spent an hour on the funds I said it needs to do this and can you store funds and share classes and do that and do the other and you know

just Germany you know this is how it should work and so we prototype it out took it out there I took a mate of mine who was basically selling used cars at the time and told them that he was my executive head of sales and he basically held the curtain just right so that they could see what

was being projected onto the wall because the sun was shining in at a really awkward angle and Tom always jokes that that was like the hundred million dollar you know per curtain pull because if they couldn't see what was on the screen so I how could they have bought it

right yeah yeah I was actually just thinking that as you said that I was like how much money was that curtain holding worth I've got a bit good of a million and millions of this point right just just literally holding a curtain the rights of what well he's exactly right I mean if they

if they've not been able to see it they might have not been impressed by they were super impressed they don't even you know what people are like they don't know how to write software you show them a couple of data entry screens and a couple of little steps or whatever and they go well it's done

Nick it's done them and you're like well well well well well it looks done but there's a whole only shit that's not done so let's not get carried away with the whole it's done it's this is a prototype I might even throw this away and start again to be honest because the coach yet yeah

when I was studying I think the most useful thing I got out of uni was mostly a waste of time for being honest and you know I'll say I went to Monash University specifically Monash University is not good don't hire graduates from there but I went to this yeah I had this one good lecture

too was a Gavin Kruger and the most useful thing he told me to be programming and stuff but I would learn that stuff in my own towards the end of the course as we were graduating he was like by the way never show a client like a high fidelity wireframe never do it don't make it look good

he's like you have to do it in PowerPoint or they will think it is done and it doesn't it doesn't matter what you say you can go like it's not done and they will agree but they're going to leave and tell everyone it's almost done it's that they can't disentangle like the button they don't know the databases you know like it's meaningless yeah yeah totally right I've lost count with the amount of times maybe it's only enough times that I shouldn't lose count but it does happen that you get

people coming on and so a sequel cause that we're paying for is you're there a bit expensive to die do we need them yeah that's that's where all your shit stored make you definitely need that delete the app don't like if anything delete the app don't delete the sequel what you do like they

nobody understands really anything about at least they are right I guess that's the starting point because the worst case is the guy like a decommissioned those it's too expensive I don't know the second is squirrel is that a squirrel squirrel like what is this shit yeah just get rid of it

it doesn't make sense so they they liked it they bought it and the guy who was working there at the time says you can keep the IP on it and so we went out and we tried to sell it at the time and not many people were buying it and that was both good and bad good because ultimately it's

all gone good now but at the time it was bad because it meant I kind of gave up on it and we only had a hand for the clients and what that meant is while we had a little bit of residual income from that I think we were probably making a hundred thousand pounds sterling a year it wasn't

enough to sustain us I did used to sometimes sit there when all these other businesses that I was trying to get started with failing and go well look it costs 20 grand a year to maintain it if me and then both take 40 grand a year from it it's not the biggest failure in the world like

40 grand a year 40 thousand pounds a year residual like yeah yeah the whole way through the whole way through this journey when it did ever get too much I would find myself either reading the Sunday Times job listings which I haven't done for many years before and if my staff see me

with the Sunday Times they're like fuck you're going to get a job is that enough it's okay I'm wrong and that's the that's like the black widow precursor at your company just like you got the paper out where I'll get laid off what's each rowing circles around over there is he doing the

crossword obviously I like job listings and somebody can take a look the mad old bastard or what was the other thing so it would be looking at all fantasizing about and obviously not fantasizing about getting rid of staff and and giving people bad news obviously but thinking about

how much can I scale the business down so that it can sustain what the size of team that we are it's it's like that thing that every company that's going from like two founders and then we got to eight people and then we dropped to four people and then we got to six people like there's a real

one day if I can be bothered I'll put out all my tax records and kind of look at the the employee line graph as it goes along and we definitely went back some forwards one day I turned up to the office and there was a fucking mass resignation right then and I didn't have the first clue yeah yeah we

only had about six people and three of them one of them bumped into me in the car park and it is notice in like there on the spot I quit another guy yeah we were just it wasn't that we were bad people and mismanaging them that it was more that it was clear that we didn't know how to manage

and it's not like I had a clear vision for the business and these guys had more issues to pay right they were like this kid nice nice size a nice enough guy but I think he's fucking mad but I think he doesn't know what he's doing like right you can't just run a software company just because you think you can like you've got no you're doing and these guys were smart enough to be like this guy talks a good game but he's he's he's making it out as he goes along and in fairness to them they were

right I was absolutely getting out of bed most days and just being like well what fucking fresh hell it's going to be thrown in my direction today and on that particular day it was legit and at the Justin hand and his notice in in the car park and went up to my desk there was a nice little white

envelope on my keyboard that was a resident resignation note from another guy who was like like quitting within like half an hour each other and then I took another guy out to be like you'll never believe it these you know like Richard and Justin are quit and this guy this guy was like yeah

well I didn't want to say anything but I'm going with him too and you know he just like right okay so basically I'm trying to lend this big client who we did ultimately land and I've just lost basically 75% of my development team it's more respect to me and Dean well I thought like and

and just that like ad nauseam that like and various levels of that but like various I come up with a website I came up with a website to what was one of the fucking mad bastard ideas that I had one of the ideas was oh this is a good one I stand by this one actually it was a URL domain name

notification expiry notification service called expireify.com because obviously everything's got to have you fired the end of the important you could have been the next Spotify so that's that's very important I missed that train by literally seconds what this was it was basically what I was

in the business of doing is whenever I run whenever I ran into a problem that pissed me off in my business or in my IT world I would quickly all work with one of the guys to hack together a solution to it and this problem was obviously on the on the nominate domain name register you

can only have one email address and in a big company that's a problem right you don't want birth to be an oddity when you're five litre.com name or whatever you've got expires and then some asshole comes along and nabs it right and even if it's not about losing the domain name it's

just a headache right you want to get notified where an advance that your domain names have had to expire and you rest yourself certificates before lexin quit was a thing right yeah because both of these are going to cause downtime and it's not going to be trivial to fix and you're going

to look like a bit of an idiot so we set up this thing expiryify that you could create an account on and you could enter a domain name and it would obviously look up as a self certificate expiry domain name expiry and then you could just put loads of e-match dresses in for like to get notified

and you could specify how wrong in advance you want to get notified. It's not rocket science that's probably still useful because one of my one of my co-founders ash wrote down the names of domains we'd like to move our website to and I still got the reminders I checked what day they expire and I'm like one of these idiots is going to mess this up. Well your use case is different

but yeah same tech. Well the reason I'm doing that is because I know they don't have expiryify or something like that right so one of those guys is going to miss the email and their inbox from whatever they bought it from because you're going to be on leave and then we're going to get

through domain it's going to be great. Right I mean that's that's the best thing isn't it I'd trust you to come up with a more furious use I'm like oh this is a handy-dandy little notification tool you're like no man this is a domain squat extreme that you don't get to miss my lens for this

you know I love this. Yeah right yeah yeah yeah this has value what do you mean given notifications tell all the notifications off notice find me whatever domain expiry so so we had that couldn't monetize it I came up with I came up with various local government idea websites for counts

business rates and I tried to make money from Google AdWords because obviously everybody tries that I've got a friend who's insanely successful at that he's making about 30 40 thousand dollars a month I might have made a hundred quid a year you know I mean I just didn't get anywhere and then

one day I had an idea for an HR system and because I was pissed off we were growing and we got to about eight employees now I was like I can't store holidays on the spreadsheet anymore and you got a bear mind again this is like 2010 and I've got to find a system to do this for me so

I googled it and there wasn't any HR type software at the time so I went bugger it we'll build it that turned into staff squared which we sold during lockdown for about seven figures actually which was useful because we then we'll I'll catch up to that but that I would say was my first

other than that this which was a bespoke software company which maybe we got up to like a million pound a year turn over on a good year never made any bloody money because all the projects always overgrown right like yeah it's so hard to make money from selling your time and even if

you multiply that out by having staff that you're selling their time you're always at the mercy of something going wrong or requirements being wrong or a delayed it's out of your control or a member of staff gets sick or three of them quit at the same time right you just you're always

you're waking up in every day is like right so what fresh hell is this there's going to be a problem and it's just whether or not it's a small problem or a massive problem but there's going to be a problem because there's never a problem three day when you run in that type of business so staff

squared started to grow and we started to invest time in that this is all around 2013 from the PV was still making a hundred grand a year staff squared I think we got it up to about 300 clients and I think it was making about 300,000 pounds a year so you know I was it was all right

I mean that said the business started with an idea and said it for about a median quit I mean to to the vast majority of people that would be defined as good you know to just pull something out your backside and turn it into something and then we count like but that didn't happen to

lock down so between kind of 2013 and about 2016 2017 Ben and my miss started in about 2008 in the shed we were just treading water staff squared was growing but it wasn't going anywhere fun to pdf was gathering dust we weren't we didn't know what to do with it and we had to

dispose of our company that if I'm honest with killing me you know it was it was so it was such a hard business to run you know you were only ever one mistake away from not being able to make pay well yeah it's insanely you know it's insanely stressful uh staff time over as high because

you can't control what projects they're working on because you have to take the next project that turns up otherwise gets what guys you're not getting paid so yeah do this shit project for this massive arsehole please and I'm going to sit here pretend that I don't hate them although I do because I

think they know what they want and they're actually just outrageous and they're trying to pay me two pound fifteen a miles bar for what is like a three month project that's going to require like 15 hour days from someone my best developers and you want to give you like five thousand pounds

like it are you high like it was it was that kind of man's like there was no it was it was all over the shop you never knew for one month to the next where you're going to be and then um and then we met and then two things happened at once that changed my fortune um one was I had a

cancer scare which is another thing to open with but you know it wasn't cancer so it was a good thing okay um and then a map yeah yeah always no cancer is a good thing yeah step one in the business plan do not get cancer don't get cancer don't even pretend to have cancer don't even

think that you've got cancer you don't want cancer so I had that and I looked like it was my second time that I burnt out and sat around eating pizza and playing Xbox for two months while the business kind of just about limped on on its own um so that was a good thing because the

following year wanted to get out of the country and I met my wife and she does a very good job to keep me on the straight and narrow and I don't mean that in terms of um like I wouldn't work hard without her but certainly she added a lot of uh infrastructure around me that I benefit from I think and then there's um and then there's uh I met my chairman who absolutely changed my life and sat me down in 2016 and said oh it's more like 2016-2017 we we landed another hand for the

clients for fundipedia through word of mouth. Last year was limping on it kind of plateaued at about 300 clients and no amount of more spending money on it was getting it anywhere and that was just being a total dick all the time and was just difficult clients and everyone was difficult all the time

and um he said look you've got the premier league of clients using your software for fundipedia you don't know why they want it but they do they're big bad names that everybody understands and if they're using it let me tell you that there's other firms out there that need it

and you just need to go and talk to them and it's not going to be easy because selling it at the price stuff whereas a massive headache as we've discussed before yeah but if you get it right you're going to build something of insane value and the fact you've let it kind of with on the

vine to this long is basically negligent so he and I then went on a journey that you know involved me uh having some disputes over the ownership of fundipedia I think I'll put it that way so I don't end up with a defamation thing which we resolved and we took it on a journey to continue to grow it

and we sold stuff squared we we shut down atlas and now we do many millions of pounds in turn over in fundipedia and we expect the profit to be 25 to 50% on that turn I got and we've never lost the client and the team seemed happy my clients seemed happy which is basically my job

because if I have one of those two individual groups and not happy then it's my fault so that's the deal and we'll leave this nicely I suppose into why I do it and the business is successful and it has a bright and stunning future ahead of it but I'm only listing like four five of the

failures I think there was there was definitely seven if you had to move that you know yeah absolutely shit shows it's interesting because I think most of the people I've spoken to who have you know had some kind of success in the software development space most of them have sometimes they had ideas

so bad that they don't even count them as failures but like I can give you an example like technically I've had a failure and I was very lucky and that was like a one-month failure right we okay I built this thing with my my first co-founders is Guy Sam Campbell a genius programmer and we

built something while working for Monash University that converted the spreadsheets into relational databases like is this the whole workflow you upload a thing makes a database host that gives you a UI you can you can do that now and we built that and then very quickly we built out about two

weeks he did a lot of the programming on it and on the third week we pitched it to someone and we couldn't put too much time into it yet but it worked and it looked good and we realized that the people who get angry at data entry to spreadsheets like tend to be the lowest ranked stuff on the

ground and they don't know what a database is and they don't understand why like they just go through that pain and they're like this is how life is you know it doesn't bother them because they don't understand they could be doing something different and I'm like well you know they can

people talk about pain points and I'm like here's a bunch of people being tortured as you turn up and you go do you want to get off the rack and they're like what rack you know I I like it here this is this is work it wouldn't be work if it wasn't painful and you know like that's a failure right

we we had a product and we're just lucky that we gave up really quickly instead of pitching it over and over and it's like data entry staff can't buy this they're they're not they're like 10 steps from the CEO right we're not we're not making a sale on this well and you might

some very very super valid in smart points right they don't have budget they don't have buying power they don't know how to use the system that you're trying to sell them your point probably the top reason not to try and sell it to them yeah you you're going nowhere you're going there fast

yeah yeah that's a failure if you added that all the bows I would have a lot more than eight I you know I built a system in Microsoft access on VBA for a friend of mine called building blocks with an X obviously of course you need the if I and you need the X that's you need the X right

and it had I think it was building within the post-efficient the end of the N no G because obviously otherwise it would have you else so this is this is cutting edge you know it's got the X and you might I mean bleeding edge technology Microsoft access VBA right I mean just absolutely but

the guy that I built it with is a very good friend of mine Steve um his builder and he was smart and he told me this is how builders do this you know add in them finance and uh if you build in the system I'll use it and he did use it and obviously didn't use it forever used it for a few

months and I whether he he probably he probably paid me like beer or something right like it was just one of those kind of bro things to hang out build something together you know I never thought it'd be a business but it was a mindset like the mindset that you just evidence back in you know

that university of shit that looks suboptimal I wonder if I can do something about that all right and and you took ownership of the problem even if the solution that you positive was wrong you at least had a gun you know those people have been like that fuck it

whatever yeah yeah it I think something really interesting is you know you talked about um way upfront you got that thousand pound deal for your first bit of um you kind of signed off like the IP on that right um on your mouth it it is interesting because um if nothing else like taking a stab

but actually establishing a business really uh because it's only been about a year since we've seriously existed and because we all work part-time you know it's a really slow roll yeah we benefit a lot from the fact we've all got you know even even in yourself right we have pretty good

um advisors I guess because like the first email he sent to me was like hey don't start a business without recurring revenue and I think you made that point three times and then ended with like you could ignore the rest of this don't start a business without recurring

and uh you know I forgot about that email yeah I mean that that's the most valuable email I got because when I run that past other people they go like oh yeah don't like I'm like we're yeah if you knew why didn't you tell me why did you wait for Simon to tell me because to them it's so

awesome girl right they're like you know it's it's not obvious people are like yeah yeah I'll do your dev work for a month and it's like that's that's a really painful business model and uh that's our one advantage which is between the six of us and and the advisors we have you like that's not a

small mistake you could I think people waste 10 to 20 years easily just going after fundamentally painful business models um and I'm like you can you can cut a lot of that off but if by just having someone that's like don't do this and charge more it knocks a lot of the growth cycle and starting

up a business um I know it really makes you put your big boy pants on right because um when you're you know just an employee turning up you don't ask hard questions like is is the thing I'm doing useful I don't know they pay but be the crazy assumption it's like I'm getting paid and companies only

pay for valuable things so what I'm doing must be whatever and then not realizing as well that um given that most work in the tech space is like basically worth like it doesn't do anything it's not needed it's not even keeping the light song right it's just fiddling with the switch over and over um

yeah and then the people who do produce don't realize they're producing like millions and surplus over and over um so you just got a bunch of people doing nothing I think they're being super useful and you got a bunch of people who just keep turning up and going like here's the thing worth a million dollars yeah you can pay me 50 grand for the six months you know that's that's fine by me because it's an awful awful deal it's and it's a funny thing actually isn't it because it makes you think

I've never really thought about that I I've thought about it like that but I've not articulated it as clearly as you just did you know what is it something that I hate about the job side of things probably is it something that I don't particularly like about capitalism before anybody emails me

to tell me yes I know I'm a capitalist uh is the system not set up quite right to reward the people that bring the true value to the world you know and what would a fair system look like you know you get very fairly soft I would get but if this was a longer conversation I would get very

philosophical very quickly about it like what is right then what is fair who gets to decide what's fair who gets to decide what the value is well the market gets to decide what the value is okay so how is the market controlled well through regulation right like okay who decides on the regulation

well the regulators okay who chooses who gets to regulate well those in charge you're right how are they how are they putting charge we vote for them do I know do I really do I really have a saying who's making decisions about how the regulation happens which controls the free markets

which controls how companies get the world which therefore controls how they the world you know shit all the way down right but it's a problem and rather than have an existential crisis suppose all you can do is if you do own a business trying to wall the people that add the value

to most you know yeah like we were saying at the start of this call does that work at scale no not perfectly never in fact I'm sure there's some really good people languishing in large organizations that do a lot more than just keep the lights on and they earn the 50 000 pounds every

six months or whatever and that's not sufficient for the value ads if you were going to go true kind of P&L about it you know like this is what but and this is what it made us and this is what but and how do we feel about that yeah this is this is a whole lot of I don't know productivity theater and

yeah that's what I meant by like starting a business makes you put your big boy pants on because if I sit around for a week doing things that like don't drive leads like no one pays me at the end of that month I just I just have to live with it you have to learn pretty quickly like even

our first client they were interested in a data visualization layer and every business is doing this right there like I need dashboards, analytics and blah blah blah blah and I sat down with their lead engineer in the managing director and I learned enough from like just listening and

reading so I didn't go with the normal engineer saying of yeah we can build it in blah blah blah I said you know why do you even care because they're they're like our systems from 1994 and I'm like right but it works so like what's the what's a drama here and then they were like well you know

we're signing we're renewing contracts with these massive hospitals and they're really interested in having better dashboards because a lot of the analytics we do for them it's all security stuff goes up the chain to the C suite and they'd like this to be real time and you know our analysts

after these repeated engagements every month we'd save a lot of money just you know okay kind of getting these there and we kept talking I was like okay sketchy sketchy sketchy and then finally they went yeah I was like they don't really care right they'd like it if you did this but

that's not going to be the sign no sign thing and then finally they go yeah and one of the things underlying the dashboard is we don't know how much we spend per customer because the some of them have like you know 20 billion network logs coming in a month and we don't track how many tickets

they raise with our team how much developer time we spend on each one and they go you know putting the analytics aside if you could build out if you could figure out how much they're costing us so we can add like a few million to their bill if we because we actually have no idea and I was like

why didn't you start with that why are we talking about what we talking about graphs with what you want to know is are you losing eight million dollars per customer of yeah you know if I was working at the company one would have actually instead of being a consultant like the director would have

come in and been like yeah can you make a dashboard and I would have gone yeah sure I mean you pay me a hundred grand regardless of what it does say it's not even malicious I just wouldn't have asked that question because I have no incentive to figure out what the value add is I'm just going

to get into an argument with this guy about whether I should do their work and he's going to get pissed off because it sounds like I don't want to work and as a consultant you're just like how many millions is this so I can charge a percentage of that right and it's an interesting dynamic

right because basically what companies therefore actually if I take your example that face value if you commit to pay somebody who fixed them out of money and they think that that's the amount of money regardless of what they do a great job a good job a medium job a somewhat bad job a super bad job

right right I'm getting paid regardless the reputation element of it kicks in so they're always going to do at least the sticks out of there right there they're not going to shit the bed on the thing they're going to get something done but yeah there's no incentive there there's no lever

for the contractor in that scenario to pull and say I know you said you wanted this but I think I can make your business more or save your business more money if we did that you know because I was up late last night thinking about it or what I went for walking the park at the weekend I was just

smiling oh they're not going to bother right so you end up creating a load of people that just do as they're told by managers who don't necessarily know the right questions to ask these super smart people that if just ask the right questions yeah with tenfold their business potentially you know

overnight yeah and it's one of those fascinating things where I'm like it's possible that you know they won't get anything extra on their um after doing that analysis but I'm like it might genuinely might double the revenue right they really have no clue at all but it's actually

it's not unlikely right if they go to the right hospital and go like hey you guys have been using them way more than we agreed to we just haven't been keeping track um and you're not encouraged to or you're very superficially encouraged think that way at a big corporation they

talk about it a lot you know it's like I got to identify value and blah blah blah blah blah um but then all this smartest people realize that's not how you progress so just even if they're not trying to game the system it's just really hard to reason uh when you aren't paying your bills

with the results of your reason it's it's all sort of fun right you could just do a bad job it's it's all right well I mean it just goes to show that the incentive is that you set people matter you know like something that I've had beaten to me over the years is you need to make sure that

you align people's incentives with not just the outcomes for them but outcomes for the business and that does require a bit of thought it is easier when you're on the outside of the company and it does get harder at bigger companies but you've got to try and find a way I'm

ever going to work for the World Bank of Scotland credit card center there distinct where if you submitted a business idea and I don't know what committee actually measured but like this is like just to show how long ago this was it was actually on a bit of paper right so you'd put out

this little form and put it in this little letter box and I was constantly coming up with ideas right like not and not even because I wanted to money I was just like well this is shit that shit I wouldn't do like that if I was you I don't know why we're doing that and then the end

they they gave like you got 25 pound for each idea that you submitted there wasn't dog shit and I don't know what measurement they used to I think I definitely put some stinkers through that little box for sure there must have not all of it was gold plated but in the end I remember one

of the managers took me to one side and said if we give you a 200 pound bonus we just shut the fuck up like just stop putting in like honestly we've it's all good so I let it go mate like we're not able to make change here like I don't if you've noticed that this is not like there's no

there's no infrastructure that allows us to implement even a good idea and you've put a couple through we can't do it so just just take the calls shut the fuck up go ahead yeah just a refreshing level of honesty of just like listen we're huge we're not going to fix anything you know I

think it's the yeah it's it's in some ways it's like in some ways it was refreshing to start seeing the world that way because a lot of things are making sense you know before I was I think the word one of my friends uses is post cynical you've gone beyond the cynicism it just this is how it is

you know you just deal with it you can complain about it or you can just start a business and figure it out the the thing that was frustrating before that was but before you think about it this way you're just always confused you're just sitting there going to put all these ideas in we're not

doing any of them everyone keeps listening to Greg you know Greg does nobody's talking about this is all very very stressful yeah and then you finally have a model that fits which is like you know these companies which I can't it can and they're not going to move and change anything

and it's it's hard to not look at that as like oh so you can like eat them right because they'll just never respond to any customer concern ever well I mean that's a very interesting point certainly the companies that are out there and there are companies that float around the

financial services sector the bigger larger ones obviously to your point are the ones that are now on the back foot going where what's what's happening is if if they're a wow of a company right you've got these I'm not very good with fish but like minno's like assuming they're smaller than wow

doing the way that's right coming into the ocean right yeah right we're going in that and the well isn't getting decimated all at once but you certainly have any like fins clicked out you know and and and and his having his lunch taken off of him and he's starting to get

booty the bit but the problem is that what the well does is the well buyers the minno order tuna and goes stop it like this gives him low and sucks in there revenue right and and and and and shuts down any innovation in the company and then just carries on being a well right and the

market consolidates and you know you get that not just in financial services vintage you get that everywhere obviously but yeah can you provide customer service can you do the right thing at scale you know Amazon I hear they get this after peeing bottles that doesn't sound like that's working

out well for the people that were there yep yep I've heard I've never checked those stories but I'm like because I've never googled them because you hear about that kind of thing and you're like is that Amazon policy or is that like they found one sicko doing this somewhere in Texas and they've

really blown out a proportion but like the fact I think it's plausible is concerning like maybe they're doing that all over the US I don't know man but I think you know that's capitalism on steroids right that level of just gigantic or some of business that goes in just

you know blows the world up installs doorbell cameras on every house you know to track everything and you know not to get conspiracy at that about it but yeah there's a lot a lot of moving parts when it gets to that size keeping it keeping machine operating when the shareholder price value

going up is what's out of my league put it that way I wouldn't again in those big environments I just go apart I wouldn't flourish your Amazon I don't think yeah it's something that's struck me many many times is how much of the discourse around starting a business is uh

this is the insane starting point right they're just like how do you become Amazon like right out the gate they're like hey let's take lessons from Uber it's like well are you trying to get to like billions of market cap like does that sound reasonable and then practice it's like yeah you

can just make something like fun to peteer right it's like it just solves a problem that's that's the end of the sentence it just solves a problem and the problem solved people pay for that it just needs to be worth enough money that you turn a profit after you run the thing um and you look at

the books people give out and they're like you know go to a peter a teal and look at this and get VC money I'm just gonna like what this is just a job with extra steps and no security right I mean I'm anti VC just because again for me I'm anti VC because the modus operandia for

me starting a business was to have control right right so basically if you take VC you've congratulations you've now got another box now fortunately I can say that now but the funny thing about that is just to be totally heartfelt and honest about it how do I have an idea that was even half not dog

shit that if a VC if rocks up with dead Simon I'll give you a million quick keep going you better believe ten years ago I would have ripped their arm off right because the lure of the the money would have been too much for me to I would have I would have blinkered the the fact that actually

I'm not just taking a million quid here to go and build something I'm giving up my soul I am now employed again and actually if I don't do a good enough job they'll just shut me down so this is actually in some ways I like what you just said a job with extra steps you know and I've got

five rebosses they're all a shit you know I mean like congratulations you're now employed again really because you could be fired you know I mean this incredibly blessed and gifted and privileged position that still of me doing something that commands jowl time which I like to think I'm

pretty you know distanced from no one can come and sack me no no no no no one can turn up say you you know Donald Trump me you fired you know right so that that was the reason I started the business and so that is why and and so that is why VC is now I wouldn't do it and I see other

people doing it and it's a bit like getting on a treadmill and every time you want some more money they they raise the incline a little bit you know and they press the you get and I get the treadmill okay now you want another too many good run you know because you got you got

reliable ROI on that investment I heard about this company type four I think they're out in in Spain and yeah I think they're in pretty good revenue yeah you'd be familiar so I'm not super familiar with the product or anything but I was reading about um so apparently they used to be

like one of the best places to work and I think it was Spain and you know at some point they decided that like doubling their revenue for two years in a row wasn't good enough so they like flew in all you know literally from like nine million to eighteen million they're like two slow you know

not going fast enough for the VCs so flew to a bunch of American investors and the the articles on it are just amazing I've been meeting to read going infinite I've got a copy because if you mentioned that last time we spoke um and I feel like I'm gonna yeah the vibe would be the same and going

infinite just for way more money because it's saying stories right that they're like the um the investors replaced the head of sales with like an ex-sniper and and this life has got these unhinged quotes and you know I should be careful what I say you might take me out like life

right now but yeah these unhinged quotes like you know I've worked with real killers isn't it but it's just you know he's been like I've worked with real killers and this is the most killer tea I've ever been on and it's like my brother in Christ you're selling type four right like I did not we're not out here killing more guys from al-Qaeda like why are you talking like

this? And incidentally after all of that the guy couldn't want to hear. No way did you hear the sales guy just like the guy yeah the same for like after all that mad shitty talked just gone one year later. No I believe it I believe it like you can't you can't parachute in a culture right and obviously if you do try and do that you're just gonna eliminate what's what's there if it was good type form was great I have to use type forms like survey monkey right online online forms and

stuff I mean it's a pretty straightforward model if we talk about. I don't have to look at up yeah I'm pretty sure yeah I think I was just so I was so enamored by the the professional killer story that I never even looked up at the product that needs to know mate you know if it's

being a bit like hitman. Maybe it was a tool for snipers yeah right he's he's out there even now using it to take down people he's probably collecting credit card details whether it was something using it for some kind of the farrier sunlight activity yeah man it's um what was we talking about before? It's sketchy on the type form side of it yeah just trying to I can't remember what

was chatting about what was we talking about before we got to type form. Oh it was VC money I should you know picking up a picking up a boss with extra steps yeah man like and I see all the other fintechs out there running out of runway what's trying to do enterprise sales and it's

like trying to take a Boeing 737 off of a little grass air strip somewhere right they're like we've got to go we've got to go like we're gonna we're gonna get this we're gonna get this that I was running out of runway again were you only had 50 meters mate and you've got a big old plane

you're trying to get out of there so yeah you were kind of always gonna run out of money and then obviously I don't need to tell you and your audience will know but like now you're doing two jobs as the MD you're telling everyone it's gonna be okay all the stuff done worry I've got I'm going

to get some more money it's all good and you're telling everyone on the outside all the invested all the existing invest actually you're not doing two things you're doing about four five things you're telling your staff it's okay you're telling your existing investors it's okay you're telling

all the new investors that you want to get in because obviously you need some new money if you can't get another round out the existing investors look it's not going great I'll level with you but I think if you give me another feeling quick I can really get this plane out I just need another

50 meters I just need another 50 meters and guess what when I was running Atlas I wasn't VC back obviously but I was living in an environment that was similar to that and it was at any point if you miss steps you might just shut down and let me assure you that not only

is that horrible for the business owner it's horrible for everyone involved you know and I get that you know the whole point is some smart guy or woman whatever is going to be in the plane on the 50 meter runway and she's going to pull a bumble you know I mean like the date in that they're

they're gonna they're gonna hit something is the one in 100 unicorn whatever and it's going to fly but you're on so much worse than bootstrapping I think to be honest because if you what's scary about VC is it's not just like you've got to succeed and get to profitability which is

ignorantly what I thought it used to be no no you've got to succeed and 10x their money in the first three years and if you don't do that even if you're profitable and sustainable they'll shut you down because that's not the game you know so I've placed you with a sniper you know

that's such as tower goes right next thing you know you got a red dot on you you're like really I thought I've just busted my ass for two years to get here and now you're taking me out with a sniper like it's that's not that's not fun and even if you are moderately successful then you've

got to keep raising rounds and you know you have to make relatively short term bet on people on clients on use cases you know you're there to I know we talk about hustle I don't because I think that mentality is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life but certainly work hard

and you know iterate iterate you know foul fast you know that whole mentality is okay I have you know fundamentally that's all right but I think anyone who's running at a brick wall which is obviously the metaphor for running out of money is going to make some pretty unhinged decisions

on the way through you know because it's just a high-stressing problem you know I just think of that first spreadsheet to database app and so at the time I would have been maybe 27 so not not too long ago and if someone had approached us with VC money and been like you

know here's here's two million dollars you can you can make this work I firstly I wouldn't have more money today because I had a normal job so I got paid more than I would have salaryed myself at a VC but I also would have waited like that product wasn't going to work yeah and we probably

could have convinced someone to pay us and I would be sitting here today stressing out about like getting this fundamentally stupid idea to take off I I don't even know what the business model is right do you lock them into the database after you migrate the spreadsheet like how do

you get paid a second time I don't know I don't know this would make any sense I'm credible but like someone would have paid me for that because at the time they're paying everyone for anything right and it's an interesting one actually look you go around there you uninstall Microsoft Excel

so they can't ever go back to it a lot they're computing down like you get a little bit you know put a sniper in the office and tell him if you go back to a spreadsheet and stop using this database we're going to shoot you um yeah it's but again not a failure in in my view I don't think

that's a very failure I think you can't keep that you're working on with all of these things it forced you to ask difficult questions about the the the very basic of the economics of the world which is the supply and demand and you recognize that you could supply something

congratulations because most people don't even get to that bit right they're just like it's broke you know and I'm just gonna keep smacking my forehead it's just bad everything's bad right like just this existential learned helplessness that I think exists in in the big part of

the world if I'm honest and I'm not suggesting that I haven't been guilty and I'm still sometimes guilty of learned helplessness where you just kind of externalize the you know the solution to the problem and by doing that obviously you you take the control out of your body and put it in

this manifested or physical beam that you can't control anything what's a very unstopic way of being right um but then obviously you sat there so you you came up with a supply and then you went there's no demand for that you know like bottom line we can have lots of chats about it but I'm not seeing anything here that looks like something that's going to there's not going to be any demand for it good great next you know that to me I for me I know it sounds odd but that's the definition of

a a type of success albeit not a sustained it's not sustained yeah a little wind a window success if you if it's the type of success that you'd be probably need and you'd be very sad if it's the only type you ever get but you know like in isolation it's fine and it is interesting because

you don't build that at a day job in most places um and the worst case is every self and you come up with the you know the first app we actually shipped so I got great news yesterday I'm a different to works now at a hospital so he's one of the directors uh working with us and um he

had this idea for the lab it was literally it just helps hospitals detect when someone has put patient data into chat GPT okay and you know like we weren't sure what the market for that would be because um obviously that's a real issue but it's the kind of issue that I don't know if anyone's

on the hook for it other than the employee he did it right it's it's not the hospital's fault of some more on pulls from a database puts it in chat GPT like so we we didn't know if they'd be keen um and uh you know he pitched it to his own work place instead of you guys demo this and uh

see if we took a look we're very keen and then they asked a question that really excited me which was um they were like wait so we don't the IP for this right and I'm like the fact someone's thinking that means there's probability it's not just being like you know pat on the hand

that's a good job they were like oh we could resell this right and I was so happy I'd coached him because he's an engineer and before that I just kept repeating like if they're I was like I don't think they're gonna be interested if they are you need to make it clear we you didn't do this

during company hours right they don't own the IP um and because I repeated that for months and months and months he turned up and he was like actually no like you guys wouldn't and they were like okay fair enough we'll work out a deal yeah and I was like how many people would just go for that

um you know get the thousand pounds thing and because it's almost like a necessary step right you get burdened on something like that uh and I'm just lucky that I I heard of this happening to people because I you know I I don't work in a job where I think about IP all the time I'm just like

some guy who fixes databases um and I would have been the moron who like let's him deploy it and then six months later when they're selling it for a million dollars go like oh actually you know I uh not too late direct okay yeah yeah yeah yeah be sir could I have some of that million pound

pie no no you cannot because you took five thousand pounds a bit of that tie and you need to just go away now you have no claim yeah but again you want you just described obviously is what I did at the law firm that I worked at um that was a success I built a bit of software that was so

that I say I built it then did most of it I think I came around and did some really bits but then was the brain child behind a lot of that stuff it was just so it was so fast quick and it don't on that then was hired to fix printers so that I could go and do all the big IT manager stuff

right he started coding guess he was fixing printers it weren't then he was like oh yeah I've got I've got I've got I've got to put all the paper in all the printers then share like then while you turn out another ten thousand lines of beautiful code really cheers mate um but you know

we built something that had I yeah yeah we built IP and they built it off of us we didn't know the value of it but like you quite rightly point out you only do that once uh and and then you and then you go shit it turns out that I'm capable of building IP that has value right that's what your

friends done um UK laws a bit interesting over here you have to be super careful we um I don't know I don't want to say something that's not true and I but I will check this I'm pretty sure here in the again only in UK law even if you built it out of hours in certain circumstance

did you confine yourself not out in the IP yeah we're still on a hundred percent sure I'm actually I'm gonna have to book some time with our lawyer next week because I didn't think this was going anywhere you know I was like why does the hospital care so they like patient data all the time

they just don't talk about it um but I I I record it's because you know this AI adjacent there's AI regulation uh so everybody's getting super excited there's value in the product I just don't know companies do a lot of sketchy things right but they can get away with it um so it'd be interesting

to see why they think wow like do they really think it's reducing risk do they just think people lie it because it's got the word chat GPT in it like it's it's pretty unclear right now I've got to say it would be super meta of you if you were to use chat GPT to

entertain what the circumstances around the IP for the chat GPT blocker might actually be do you know it mean it's like go then don't don't hire a lawyer just just last chat GPT obviously yeah it's thing to do it yeah even that yeah yeah because um can't at least come I was gonna say yeah

it's I think we've had a little bit of crosstalk because we're talking so far away that the voice takes a while to reach yeah yeah I reckon um even that like talking to a lawyer um when I just worked at an office I was in a world where lawsuits were a thing IP and lawsuits were

thing people threatened when they wanted to act tough but like no one no one actually had a lawyer right um this is like a thing people yell at you at your new step like you hear from my lawyer about this and the yeah just like having a lawyer and having an account you know you just feel a lot

more empowered as a person not that you know you want to run around suing people because the first thing my lawyer told me was that's how you like just lose ears of your life and stress out um but you don't you don't realize it's an option right like people normally get bullied at work and they

just kind of eat it and uh you just once you engage with that part of the world you're like actually people can't bully me though they'll catch it it'll be terrible for them yeah I always describe it when I started to get into the world of understanding exactly what

you're talking about like IP balance sheets assets liabilities most people think the business is I buy a Twix or a Mars bar for 25p I sell that Twix or Mars bar for 35p well done me I've made 10p if I can do that enough times very basic what you might call to the dimensional the two-dimensional

chess version of business right is is that kind of transactional profit loss you know margins blah blah blah the smart people the people that go on to make get tons of cash are the ones that go yeah yeah yeah that level of business has to exist for sure of course it does that's that's

you know that's how the world goes around so you know markets work but it's only the channels through which those transactions happen or the platforms on which they happen or the data that drives how some of those you know being able to build a solution that knows whether bitcoins

going up or down at the moment like or in the next 10 minutes you know what I mean yeah you would make the IP in that is worth more than anything you could any number of Twix or chocolate bars you could sell for 10p even if you sold a million of them a day your caps there's only a finite number

of people that can buy what it is you're selling but when it comes to IP you know as these big companies of evidence the Amazon's the meta are releasing a new Lama 3 today you know they're not doing that out the kindness of their hearts although I never thought I'd speak positively about meta open

sourcing the AI but that's life right shit but they understand the value of IP they get it they totally get it and they leverage the heck out of it and they know where to buy it that's why Apple got sued for it I think it's Apple watches right they're not allowed to sell them in America I don't

know to fix it now because they they signed an NDA with a company that did the oxygenate a bit of it basically Nick told of their IP built it into the watch and then went cheers and just didn't buy the company they had the whole purpose of the NDA was that they were going to buy the IP in the

oxygenate a bit but instead they worked out how they were doing it and then just ripped it off and so that company sued them and got Apple to stop selling their watches I think I'm reporting that correctly so like that's IP theft you can't do that yeah they do that because it's valuable

like you say they don't behave um as I was going to say what a way to tank a product that being right that's got to be it does I'll look into it to make sure not missing for everyone but that would be disastrous right like Nick told you can't sell these watches he's spent a bajillion already dollars on that's yeah that's that's wild now I did actually have I kind of remember how many questions we got through on the like original list but I did have a lost lightning round of questions

and then let you get to bed before midnight yeah probably every yeah why not um so you know we spoke quite a bit about um you know how you got to where you are in fundipedia and like the personality type that drives um people and running their own business

and and maybe even like the the incentives and viewpoint that gets you there because I think a lot of people run their own business that they realized like I suspect that if you reset and had another 10-year run you probably still end up with a successful business right and it

the it wouldn't be the same plan right it wouldn't be like oh we ended up number one and someone reached out but they're just you give it enough time and pay attention and I just feel like you know you have another story it wouldn't be someone holding the curtain open uh but someone

would have reached out for something and it would have somehow you know resulted in a business and you you can't force that um I guess uh interesting thing would be since if I quite a bit of experience and my audience is mostly engineers and then a few business owners um what kind of

things like maybe in the fintech space or more broadly do you see people just you know just unforced errors when they start a business like so one would probably be take the C money for no reason for example uh one of the other things you see people do and you're just like I could fix

this with one sentence just listen to the sentence I think there's there's kind of two elements to it the first is um make sure that you're not over-focusing on supply and check to ensure that there's demand right that is those basic economics apply everywhere and especially in the start up

if there's no demands it doesn't matter how especially if your audience or engineers don't do what I did and I remember at one point I was panicking when David Hannah Meyer Hanson or whatever his name is was at dhh guy who came up with 37 signals and all that and kind of inventive

Ruby on rails kind of I'm pretty sure he did and I remember sitting there going yeah we've written everything in dot net we're doomed thank you though like uh I'm totally back the wrong halls here where we are so so screwed and then my mate about two years later just evidence how

um how irrelevant that that that kind of thing is around you know um over obsessing on the supply side so in our world in the IT world that is about language platform UX you know there's so many things on the supply side in our world to obsess over my mate just to prove that actually

you can sell a total bag of bolts so long as the revenue and the demand for the product is there then sold a company called cash flow with a K the theme and uh yeah right and uh he sold it for 20 million year and a half a bit large younger and the other half uh he lived just around the corner

from it the time it subsequently moved down to a nice big house in Brighton as he bloody well should and it was written in classic classic ASP so we're talking like the old dot ASP VB script dog shit you wouldn't I wouldn't there's there's I have so much to say about what terrible language that is

but didn't matter it didn't matter it it they just didn't care they wanted to know that he was growing they wanted to know that clients were happy they wanted to know that staff was it that the KPIs that they may now of course they might try and be valued a little bit and say

whether you don't rewrite it in dot net eight or whatever then we're going to chip you away at the sale price but the chipping away for the risk of trying to rewrite what is actually already working quite nicely you might lose five percent of your sale price you rewrite it and cock it out you

could lose all your clients so he was smart enough not to make that mistake so it's applying the mask I think are so important so what was the question again what what would not do oh just just stuff that you see where we're yeah obvious obvious mistakes you see over and over

and I think it's a big one right because even that's a better framing of it because the conventional version you hear is like release early release often fine product market fit but that's actually a little bit less philosophical than like the supply demand framing because that's just a

complicated way of tricking engineers to checking for demand you should just tell them what they're looking for don't force them to release early for their reason right just as long as you know the demands there yeah right and then set up will you continue this integration frame work please don't

want to be down time what you're doing all of this you know rapid release deployment crap um yeah no I mean and and I think get out and talk to clients you know the the theme is the same right you can't sit in your bedroom eating cheeses right coding up the most beautiful website you know

the internet has ever seen and expect that you're going to have some Kevin Costner style field of dreams style revelation that someone's just going to rock up and go I love what you're building that's great it all boils down to getting out of your bedroom put some clothes on

going down the street and chatting to people you know like and and and I'll be honest with you Nick when I first started tried to start a couple of businesses I was that guy I was set there with my Microsoft access building blocks building it for me mate and I was like this is it

I'm now in it well no I'm not even in that scenario I've got one person using it it's given me great feedback but until I get the second person using it I'm playing it this is nonsense I'm just this is not gonna I'm not going anywhere so unfortunately for us you know more introverted types

who are engineers there is no I wish I could sit here and be like and here's what they're not telling you if you just command f seven on your keyboard you'll get your first client that's simple you know it don't work like that you have to go and talk to people and you have to ask

them what their problems are you have to be capable of empathizing with those issues and then building something that you know you find somebody who's happy to to kind of pay you for you know with and if you if you follow those steps as often as I have I think you're right Nick I think I think

it is almost inevitable that you will succeed or you know 50 cent it and get richer die trying you know what I mean like you if you've got that mentality you're gonna bump into the right person who gives you that you can't help it I'm now in the incredibly blessed position that I'm halfway up

the mountain in terms of both age and potentially maybe it's called it success if you want to call it that if I see a little Simon coming down the street and I see him in what I had in me when I was 20 you better believe I'm backing him at the very least we're going for a cup of tea and I'm

going to talking through how to succeed right and potentially I'll even give him some money to help and build the bloody thing right people investing people so if you're out there you're absolutely right if you're out there talking to people and they believe in you because you you believe that

you know you are if you are holding yourself truly accountable which is the reason I started the business to answer that quick question it's because I just I will die knowing I will die happy knowing that I died and it was my fault I like skydiving right skydiving is a hobby that I do why do I like

skydiving if I die it's my fault I can blame it on the guy that packed the parachute I can blame it on the weather I can blame it on some seagull that got in my way I can blame it on a lot of things but ultimately I jumped out the plane it's my fault right I hit the ground I'm dead it's all of me

so fire I'm happy with those of I back myself I will pull the parachute and if the first one doesn't work I'll pull the second one and if the second one doesn't work I'm having a bad day it's all under my control and I think that's why I get out of bed and that's why I enjoy doing

what I do and that's why I keep doing it and I think people can smell that on you you know they will see it in you oh my god this guy I bumped into it and just to validate that I bumped into a woman that I worked with at the first job where I said I didn't you know where big scary man was

and all of that right and there was a 50th birthday party and I got invited to it in Taro's their Taro free third name is and she said and she's very she comes from a place where they talk a very certain way right she went yeah yeah hi how you doing how many millions you were off then

and and I went what she went there was no and she's one of the most street smart people that I'm going to met frankly like she can smell a problem a hundred meters away she was a dad she was absolutely on it in every sense she went when I met you at 19 Simon there was no way

you were not going to go somewhere mate there was just no way like and it was just a question of how far you'd go but there was it was obvious there's obvious like and and she wasn't saying it to blow smoke up my barn or she genuinely meant it she was like it's this common sense of

course you were going to be either obviously I spent my entire life being riddled with anxiety and frustration and thinking I'm never going to make it so I couldn't see it but apparently to the occasion observed it was pretty obvious I was I was going to keep trying until I died or got

somewhere yeah you know not only mentioned it I think there's a handful of people in my life who when I think about it I pretty much picked them early on for and you know I'm young enough that hasn't happened for all of them I think yet but I've got a pretty good idea of like who's

going to to be very successful and in a few of them have actually I know one one guy in particular we're still studying we've graduated yet and he won a million dollars in some you know a I think is like he helped to pause mineral detect a copper deposits from satellite imagery and

they were like yep that's worth a million dollars you know you win the competition and and because there's a student competition he does say he got a million the probably means it's worth like 500 million or something right like that was the that was the version of the

thousand pounds scam right he was just lucky that the total value was so high that you get a million instead of a thousand pounds and yeah everyone I know who's got to say heavy and it's interesting because the predictor is not programming skill he's a good programmer but it's actually like how

many coffees do you have a week with people like how many people you're talking to and the programming is it's it's nice to have because you know what the promise and what can be done but it's it's entirely secondary which is why my our lawyer was horrified by this because he's actually quite a

good programmer himself but you found out last week that I have a standing order in the business that I can't really give orders but because we're all equals but you know everyone respected this and I was like no one can program anything until you have a meeting booked with someone who is

seriously expressed interest in buying which means it probably have to be C-suite and they want a demo right like that's that's the only and like you can't offer the demo because we're gonna say yes because it's free they need to be that interested and I don't know how much

time that saved us because it forced everyone to buy coffee for people instead of just going to their basement yeah totally right you could almost you're making me in playing it back to me like that you're making me think about it in the site anyway which is on any given day when you're

trying to get a business off the ground there's like a two columns in supply and demand right and coding as you were just describing it there fits distinctly in the demand side right and that's not to say that you don't ever do it but the demand has to be mapped to a supply what

you've just done there is smoke you've gone until you can map something that you're doing on the on the sorry on the supply side I had it the wrong way around until you can evidence to me that this work that you know and work comes in many different forms it could be coding it could be

updating our website it could be creating a new newsletter to send to all of our CEO it's like there's lots of different kind of supply things that you can be doing as a business if I can't trace them back to an actual not you tell me there's demand I'm gonna I'm gonna you

know validate that there's demands and draw a line between your your supply work and that demand you're not doing anything in the supply column it's just not happening and like you say that's a that is got to be one of the top five things that happens when a business is you know

off the ground and has a fight and chance to survive or I think yeah yeah I'll kick off because many years ago someone described to me the concept of running ads for products that don't exist because then you can see which ads get clicked on the most and then build that

and that's blue by my I was like oh you can check if someone wants to buy something before you build it you might even be able to get them to agree to give you the money before you build it at a discount yeah and that's the number one way software people lose um and then just you know

I think I heard that five years ago and it's like a throw away sentence over beer and it just steered into my brain I'm like that's how we should probably do things um yeah yeah tell you why and you hear about it is go oh sorry I was gonna say it's midnight but I'll

even if you said before we never read man uh the what you hear about I mean talk about kind of business power in the form of amazon google having their little search boxes that they can watch people type stuff into right and and what they then do to leverage that information to

generate revenue there's like what you just described there is probably almost precisely how amazon and google have built trillion dollar businesses right like just watch what people type in and then build shit that correlates to what they want right and and amazon's even taken it a

step further and started to manufacture stuff the amazon basics brand right like well don't worry about that someone else said it yeah we'll build it and set it to a smart I mean not necessarily uh very uh moral but yeah it certainly makes money yeah yeah and I mean it's it's hard to

I mean yeah it I don't know about the ethics of it but you know that this is the Thunderdome world locked in you know they could not do it but I mean that's just leaving money on the table right that that's where the incentives are if if tomorrow you were like hey Nick you can have the

you know amazon license to start a factory and and make xbox controller competitors right I'm not gonna say no like you know just give me my hundred million dollars let's let's do this it's a no-brainer and yeah you know I think if we if we don't want people to do that we we just need different

incentives and then it's a whole tangled pile of like can you even make a law that doesn't backfire that the example I always give is when I immigrated here there's something called the professional year and it costs twelve thousand dollars a person to sign up for it it's a Saturday

class that you attend from nine to five for one year and the content is things like here's how you write an email in an Australian workplace you know just really like you know it's what you'd give like a thirteen year old uh to give them a bad understanding of business and uh but that is

worth points in the Australian immigration scheme you so you can just trade money for immigration chances I I did it I sat there for a year it's funny because I took it from an organization at the time I worked for the university I was getting paid out of so I was getting

instructed on like how to behave in the workplace by someone who was like my junior in the org chart they didn't know just just just fascinating but you know and the reason I raised that story is presumably someone was like hey you know we need to make sure we're getting highly skilled immigrants

in and they understand the workplace so they put these laws in place and then immediately someone bribed someone else and then got the license to provide this course right so yeah we could we could go to amazon and be like yeah you know you can't you can't make these controllers but if you

do it in a clumsy way um those controllers now cost a thousand dollars because no one else can make them well yeah right the needle has to move and it generally moves too far the other way right so there's the challenge yeah I guess the point is it's it's an actually hard problem and the kind of

cult are like uh just stop them unlike that'll backfire and you know that's how you get your twenty thousand dollar diabetes medication yeah yeah yeah which is obviously what and trying to get rid of in the States which uh what's his name mark Cuban which is great just doing a good job on that

mark Cuban yeah I don't know too much about him but um really probably should find out a bit um yeah I probably like get to bed super later but it was amazing yeah so good having having you on I think is a great conversation thank you thank you thank you thank you time cheers