¶ Building Connections
What do they say? What do they do? What do other people say about them? And anytime I've ignored that, I've regretted it.
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Use code FOX20 and elevate your marketing game today. Amen, welcome to the pod, thank you. I kind of have to start with switzerland, because that's definitely one of the most random things I've done in the last couple of years. It was fun, wasn't it? It was really fun, but the story is good. Like that email you sent me, I was like a week beforehand yeah thanks for being so open and positive to the opportunity. No last minute uh, trying to say yes to exciting things.
To be fair, your copywriting was a one you. You the email, the copy was strong.
I really appreciate that because, uh, I was, uh I was away for the weekend with fiona and I was eating breakfast and tapping that out in the phone uh, that makes me feel less special, but more impressed it was more authentic. Your copywriting is real yeah, it was.
What was? A very random email about a gathering in switzerland I thought that was a strong, open, strong title I remember I got it on this I think it was the sunday and I was sitting there and I said I was like oh, more like what I was like I don't know I'm either joining the illuminati or I'm going on a really cool trip. Either way, good story. It's definitely the latter. Yeah, slightly disappointed with that. I thought I had a hood and a secret handshake to come home with not yet, not yet.
I have to go through the the various initiations yeah well, people are probably wondering what the hell we're talking about exactly what are we? talking about? We're talking about a small group of people that like to build stuff, um, getting together in switzerland.
And it was a um an idea myself and my friend, uh and co-conspirator on these illuminati type of things, uh, paul campbell, and a friend of ours, um, abby phoenix um, and the three of us just wanted to get good people together who we thought should get to know each other.
Generally people building stuff, not necessarily technical, but I think, probably leaning more than leaning in that direction, and also not necessarily all startup kind of related, but generally people just thinking about how to build stuff and the meaning behind that, philosophy behind it, and getting to know other people like that.
And so we we we had found this place in Switzerland through deep research that Paul had done on 50 different hotels in in Switzerland and it was a short list of three and we visited. He and I went over to visit them. We just stopped at the first one because it was so good we didn't even look at the other two.
So it's ridiculous. If you're not watching on youtube, go to pause. Go to youtube. I'm going to flash up an image now of the hotel, the grand hotel kronenhof. There you go, and I'm going to flash up a couple more images as we're talking.
It was ridiculous we wanted a place that would fit about 150 people comfortably and and that's a kind of a kind of a number kind of thing two, two more two. If it's too much more than that, like maybe 200 or 300. It might be hard to build those kind of get to know everybody or at least have a chat with people, and you know you're not going to get through 150 people in a few days but you might walk away with 20 to 25 people that you spent quality time with.
Um. But yeah, we wanted a space that would kind of facilitate that um and that people wouldn't have to think too hard about activities or meals or they just need to have the room key and know where the room is and we would kind of take care of everything else.
Um, and yeah, that hotel, really it really fit the bill, yeah it's an outlandish event, though, like how you've pulled that off yeah, I don't know, because, like lots of like I can't understate like the whole experience was very different because just how you've designed it. Like I go to a lot of events. I either work at them, host at them or whatever, and they're all fairly meh. They're all pretty vanilla. They all follow the same template formula. They're all grand.
They all also do a different job.
Yeah, true, but very rarely do you go to something whereby there's been so much thought, like I remember you saying on the final night we spent a year working on this. Yeah, and I could see where that was. Sometimes you hear people oh, I've devoted my whole year to this. You're like what the fuck were you doing for the year, because you definitely weren't planning this. The sandwiches are from, I mean, I will, I will say o'brien's wouldn't come that far, unfortunately.
Uh. No, I will say. I will say O'Brien's wouldn't come that far, unfortunately. No, I will say they. You know, it was a part-time thing up until it became a full-time thing. As that year goes. When you're planning an event like that, you know, 10 months out, you're like maybe an hour or two a week, maybe ramping up to something more than that as time gets closer uh, something more than that.
As time gets closer but like two, three months out, you like it is starts to become more of a more of an everyday thing. Um, and there's a lot, a lot of moving parts that need to be locked down. Why Switzerland? Why, that's a long story in and of itself. Um, give us the abbreviated version.
Uh, paul and I had done a thing in in ireland over a decade ago called fun conf, where we had a conference on two party buses, uh, and then we had it in the castle the following year and then following year we flew people on helicopters to initial and then we left it at that because we didn't. What do you do after that? So a friend of ours who had been to all three wanted us to do something new, and he he had just bought a chalet in switzerland. It was a chalet from huam's last christmas video.
I don't know if you remember that, but there's a chalet in switzerland right anyway, he bought that and he's like, will you do an event in this? so we looked at it. We quickly realized it was too small. But then we were kind of already like, oh well, maybe we should do something here. And what if? What if it was this and it could look like that? And then paul did his rabbit hole on hotels and kind of snowballed from there and why do an event?
why, not quick part. Okay, thanks for coming on, emin done no, but seriously, why not?
like you know, it's um I what I learned from doing phone golf and from doing different meetups over the years, that is, if, if, if you're, certainly if you're early in your career, it can be one of the fastest ways of leveling up or getting to know people quickly. If you're the person to bring people together, they'll remember you as well as the people when you go to things. They might remember you, but they'll also remember the person that put it together.
And so if and you can start small you don't have to do crazy stuff, but you can start small organize a small dinner or lunch, you know, invite five or ten people, maybe. Do that regularly.
You quickly build up a small network this is where networking can be good as opposed to the transactional type of networking that lots of people have experience with and probably come away with negative thoughts on it because it feels like transactional it's horrible yeah yeah, but I think, I think you know there's, the opportunity is there for people to create these. Nobody has a monopoly and these types of small, intentional gatherings, and it's not. It's not easy to do, but it's also not.
It's not rocket science either, right, it's not really hard to do and and you can start small and build your way up, um, and I think, yeah, I think it's, it's definitely worth doing what it was very unusual in the fact he flew into three cities.
Just give people a flavor of how it worked. He flew into three different cities. Yeah, picture adventure. I tried to describe it to someone. I came home and I'm like it's kind of hard to describe. Good, that's good yeah no, that is good.
That's the kind of outcome that we wanted. We started from like what do we want people to be feeling the day they leave? What we want people to tell others a week after a month, after a year?
after I thought about it on the journey back what's the residual?
yeah, you know, and when people then revisit in their heads when they're having a casual conversation with somebody, how did they describe it? And we want it to be one of those things where people try different ways to describe and then they're left with look, you just have to be there and it's yeah, that's the best.
It's not like because it adds that feeling of damn it missed out?
yeah, um, so, yeah, we, we. It's an event in multiple stages really. So it starts off on a Sunday night in three different locations Zurich, innsbruck and Milan and then there's like a dinner, meetup, drinks, that kind of thing, getting to know you. But it's a smaller group in each place, so the overall group is divided into three.
So that's intentional, and even this year what we did was we divided each of those groups into even smaller groups so that they would have small dinners, and we asked different people to lead dinners of like six, seven, eight, ten people in different places, and what that meant was you could come to this event based on word of mouth that you had heard from last year. You might not know anybody, maybe you do know people, but you're, you turn up and it's not overwhelming.
It's not like, oh, there's 150 people, it's like here's seven people I'm having dinner with in in Zurich and I've never been here before, and it's a lovely sunny evening and, oh, what a great dinner. Now we're going to to this bar to meet up with other people that have been having dinner around the city and and now, now I'm meeting other people and the Irish ambassador to Switzerland came along. You started in.
Zurich, I was hanging out with her.
Yeah, she is brilliant, she was so much crack and she also very tech friendly.
I thought she was a VC. When she walked in I was like, cause I'd never met her. I knew Connor, but I'd never met her. I only heard about her. And then she walked in. I was like, oh, there's two VCs here, cause they're both wearing suits. And she came over, she goes, you, gary thought you were the money I was like I thought the money had walked in. She was great crack. It just shows you how small ireland is um, even in switzerland.
Yeah, uh, so yeah, but that was that's the goal really just to have smaller groups, people meeting in smaller groups, getting to know each other and then gradually ramping up. And then the next morning everybody gets on trains or buses and they're brought to this tiny little village.
Well, not tiny, but it's not big either it's like two thousand people called Pontresina where the hotel is, and yeah, then more dinners around that town and um more more random people being thrown into the mix, and everybody's being in the same boat is is a good starting point, you know.
¶ Creating Memorable Shared Experiences
So how do you, how did you end up here? Where did you start? Off you know, did you have? Who did you meet last night?
because then you have a story already without having to do that horrible.
So what do you do, yeah?
you're talking about other stuff, that's. That was one of the things I picked up on. I was like this is cool because you're creating shared experiences from the minute you arrive, exactly. Yeah, it's very clever.
Like I was trying to say to someone who was like there was so much thought on the little things and you can see that if you've been at a lot of events, you've done a lot of events you can see where all the little things matter and how the thought went into it of like you get the train together, you go up to the mountains together, you're leaving the dinner on the first night. You're like, okay, this is a good way to ease in, but you've already got a shared experience about how you get there.
It's like a, it's a bonding thing almost yeah, when I, when you say it's, it's great to hear you say little, so much thought put into little things, because that implies that there was a lots of conversation and deep diving on little things and there was.
You can see it though, for you know, it was probably frustrating for us all at times, but we obsessed about the little details some more than others and and depending on the detail and um, but yeah, like, and sometimes when you're doing that, it's very hard to know how it's going to come out yeah, like, there were definitely times where we were asking each other is this, is this really a thing worth worrying about?
or, like, if this doesn't exist with people now yeah right, you know um but you got the major things right. There's that as well, then you were able to you did the 8020, you were able to get a beautiful venue, incredible scenery, everything was the base was there for, like the sprinkles, some people forget to build the base.
They just put sprinkles on you're like you just fucking messed it all up, whereas when you got the base, you can add the sprinkles of just all the little touches, all the little bits of surprise and delight.
Well, the other, the other thing the other thing friends have told us um, and I really like this and I can see this. I can see aspects of this as well as where, like, our personalities come out in this, and so I know there's aspects of this that manifested because of who paul is and the way he thinks about it.
That manifested because of who Paul is and the way he thinks about it, and there are aspects of of how people experienced um things, because of who Abby is and the way she thinks about it and I would hope I'm in there somewhere as well and, and to people who know us, that's a fun thing that they got to yeah to spot like I know why we're doing this thing and I know which one of the three care the most about this thing.
Yeah, you know, so being having kind of our dna, our fingerprints, on the experiences, I think was important to us and I would encourage anybody that organizes events to really think about how to be they very small ones or large ones. Think about how, how you know your personality and that of your team is imbued into, into the experience I was just going to say personality and style.
They were the two things that I thought about while I was there. I was like this is done with style but with human personality. Usually you get one or the other, usually it's all zany or whatever, or usually it's all style and substance, whereas this is the perfect mix of both.
Thanks, gary, it was great to hear You're very welcome.
Thank you for inviting me. It was a memorable experience. It was just so different. What did you enjoy about it?
because you were so deep in it I could see how much was taken. I tell you, I tell you what I probably missed of it like you never get to enjoy your own thing the way your guests enjoy it, because there's always something that coming up that they don't know about. Yeah, right, so none of us really kind of I would say, while that's going on, we probably sat back and relaxed, um, um.
But there were I would say, yeah, the last, the last evening, there were times where you know, I got to caught up with people who I hadn't had a moment to catch up with, and friends and new friends, and it's a very relaxing place to be able to do that.
I love that your kids were there. That was so cool Me and you were at the bar in the second hotel On the first night.
Second night First night there when we were having the dinners.
Yeah, and me and you were going to chat at the bar and your kids were just sitting there behind us. Yeah, we're just chatting and we were, me and you were going to chat at the bar and your kids were just sitting there behind us like drinking coke. This is class. It's just different. Like it was, there was a real, real mix it wasn't just us, like we, we, we.
¶ Networking at Family-Friendly Tech Event
I think there were about 15 or 16 kids started this year and, um, the hotel had, you know, great facilities, um, and we had the whole place to ourselves. So the kids had to run the hotel from the moment they got there. They were just it was so funny and the staff were so friendly and open and, you know, willing to let them have the run of the place and and humor them.
But yeah, it was just, it's a, it was a like a just having a big, massive home for a few days and you didn't really have to have to worry too much about them. And then of course they, they got to meet kids from all over the world, um, and there were kind of two cohorts of age groups. There was like, let's say, the under eights and the over eights, and so they they do different things and there's different facilities that cater to them.
But yeah, it was, um, uh, it was paul's original suggestion to to make it kind of family friendly, and I definitely was resistant to the idea because I didn't some people want to break well, yeah, like I didn't really, I hadn't really spent much time thinking about it, but yeah he, he eventually convinced me and it was. It was the right call.
I think it worked, yeah where do all these people come from? Because it was such a mixed bag and I mean that in the best possible way, your head they came like.
I think you've collected them like geographically where they come from what do you mean?
obviously they came from everywhere. Right, there was a real mix, but like where? Like it's not like a normal conference where buy tickets, go on sale and blah, blah, blah, buy now already burned all that crack. It was very much like there was very much a theme, very much curation, like how did you get 150 people to switzerland and have such a high quality of people?
word about mostly um reputation from last year and from the events that paul and I had done 2011 to 2013. Um, that's pretty much it. The it's, it's, it's. Um, it's not something you can cold email people on who haven't heard of it and say listen, here's the pitch this is gonna sound strange, but there's no, there's no roi. You're not going to be able to justify this to your marketing team or to you know. I don't even know if you can expense this. So, yeah, it's a hard one.
Um, and this is where the word of mouth really comes in. Um, and the reputation piece and people, people vouching for us, like there was. There was a handful of people, maybe two or three people, who, uh, signed up and when we reach out to them, we didn't know them. We reach out to them to ask them how they'd heard about it and they said they heard about it from this person. And we're like we don't know that person either.
It was like a friend of a friend of a friend of the original friend had gone, but like along the line it was like two or three degrees removed, which I think is is a bit mad. but yeah, like I like, I think kind of word of mouth, the distribution that across different networks, different social graphs, different interests and how people kind of work or the thing that occupies their time.
You know, that's probably why we had like there were mostly people that built stuff, because people who built stuff know people who built stuff and that's probably why there was definitely a, a tech, a technical, a technical background to a lot of people there, because people who build stuff and use technology. They know people who do that. So, um, so, yeah, uh, but there wasn't um, there wasn't, it wasn't really by design and I don't think you can do that.
I think it's very hard unless you explicitly reach out, identify people and reach out and invite them directly.
But that's a different thing. So what's your day job then, if this is what you do for?
fun. I don't know if I did that for fun, it was fun after it was done but if this is your weird hobby, what actually pays the bills? um, I, I, I've uh, I founded five different companies over the years, uh, co-founded five different companies over the years. One of them was a consultancy for them, or what startups? It was just a product that sold. Two of them were sold, two of them failed, one of them's still gone. I don't have any more startups in me.
And just to cut you off at the pass, for that inevitable question that comes in the quickfire round at the end, there isn't another company, so what I have is. I'm too old, don't have the energy I'm focused on.
You don't look too old. You don't look too tired. Okay, it's all internal.
That's your internal damage. That's your opinion, gary, it's all. The scars are on the inside. I appreciate it though, so myself and my partner, my partner in life, my partner in work, fiona Kelly. She and I started a small syndicate last year called Broadstone, with the intention of investing in Pre-Seed. You know, at the experimental, chaotic, early stage, where there isn't much evidence of traction, there might be a product that might not be a product, that might be just rough screens.
There might be just an idea it might be some research or there might there might actually be traction. But what does free seed mean to anyone not in the vc or startup game?
pretty much what I just said. Breeze, it's your. It's your.
¶ Early Stage Investment Strategies and Relationships
Years ago it used to be just seed. You needed seed money and then just the amounts that were being invested started to get bigger, such that it was kind of hard to justify four million as a seed. So what would you call like 500 to you know, half a million to 1.5 as investment? So that's kind of got labeled pre-seed.
Yeah, so the money you start with, essentially like there's so many acronyms and buzzwords and startups like just the money you start with, money you need to get going, it's the one this is when you get up and running.
For some people it might be an angel round, you know, but anyway, the the point is the label is irrelevant. What's what's. What's relevant is, or what's important really, is the what do you have and what are you investing in, and at that stage, there really isn't much to invest in other than people. So that's the bit that we really care about and focus on.
Is that why you're at that level? Is that why you went pre-seed?
First of all, it's where I've spent most of my career as a founder, over five different companies, so you know. But it is a different type of investing, right? Whether you're investing as a VC. Whether you're investing as a VC, whether you're investing as an angel, whether it's a syndicate, the, what you look for at that first stage of investing, where there isn't much to invest in, or proof of you know, future success other than what the founders are telling you.
That's a different style of investing to series A, series B, where stuff has been demonstrated, it's repeatable, um, it can be mapped out, it can be, it can be charted, um, modeled and and there's data to support that and that data might exist for, you know, a couple of years beforehand. There's customers you can talk to. There's actual diligence you can do. At that stage of investing. You know vcs know a lot more. At the earliest stage. It's and this is where you know angels tend to come in.
They're investing their own money, they're making their own decisions. They don't have to run it through an investment committee or anything like that. They don't have lps like a vc would have. And so, uh, with with that stage of investment, uh, where, where we come in alongside other angels. It's really all about the people. Do you believe they can do what they say they're going to do? And why do you believe that? And there isn't really a shortcut to that.
Sitting in a room and seeing a startup pitch isn't going to make you. Go take my money. You have to spend quality time with them. You know you have to. You have to get to know how they think about product, how they think about customers, how they think about problems, how they think about hiring, building a culture around that, um, how they work as founders, how they think about fundraising. How did? Where they really want to go with what they're building you know what success?
How they work as founders, how they think about fundraising, where they really want to go with what they're building what success means to them?
long-term thinking, all these things, what?
do you look for?
when you're sitting there chatting to them. Obviously, you do it very differently to most people. You spend time building a relationship. What are you looking for in those conversations? What are you?
looking for in those conversations. I put a lot of weight in somebody that can clearly communicate and can demonstrate clarity of thought around the thing that they're building, and the reason I put weight in that is that they've spent. It kind of demonstrates that they spent a lot of time refining that, probably before they actually decided I'm going to do this um.
And when you kind of focus then in on that, then there's lots of threads that present themselves like you can kind of pull on um around the motivation, like, specifically, why these people like, why are these the people to solve this problem at this time in this market in this way, and like none of that is a predictor of success and if people think that you know you invest in this stage and success is guaranteed, then there's no business in investing in that stage.
It's the most riskiest thing people can do with their capital.
What you're looking for is somebody that will think intentionally and act with urgency with the capital that they get and be able to make decisions based on what they've learned and maybe be willing to change their assumptions or to learn from mistakes quickly, and you're looking for evidence of that in the conversations they have with people, and that can take weeks or months, which is why doing events is always a good thing, right, it's?
all starting to make sense now.
You get to know people right and they get to know you. It's, by the way, it's a two-way street. Not enough vendors realize this. I'm afraid vendors are absolutely, and they should be interviewing investors for the opportunity to partner with them. People will, you know, they'll have the ability to invest, be it their own cash or their investors, their lps cash. There's, there's a first-time.
Founders unfortunately think that there's like a power dynamic where investors control, uh, their future success. They don't founder. Founder controls their future success and they get to decide who, who goes on that journey with them or not. Obviously, there's a lot of work to do.
It's not as simple as just saying that, right, but I think, yeah, it's definitely a two-way street and I think founders should really be be, um, prepared for that kind of conversation or that relationship building process. They should be pushing back and asking, asking questions, testing investors about around, like what they like about the space, what they like to look for, what challenges do they think that the startup will have? And if they were in the founder's shoes, what would they do?
And you can kind of quickly, as a founder, get to a point where you feel if you trust this person or not, because that's ultimately what it comes down to. Um, it's all everybody's happy when the deal is happening, and then when stuff goes wrong and it will inevitably, because startups are hard you want to make sure that the people you've brought on board as partners, as investors, will be supportive and, you know, not be putting unnecessary pressure.
Um, so yeah, it's a two-way street I think a lot of first-time founders take the money that's there, not the money that they should take I totally understand why.
Yeah, absolutely pressures bills to be paid. You want, you want to move fast, you want to hire people. Totally understand why.
But you don't know what you don't know either and you don't know what you don't know yeah, so do you. Is there areas you look at and go? Yeah, these are my areas of expertise. Are you all about the people? Will you invest in a lot of things?
there's areas that I won't invest in, fiona won't invest in, because we don't know them what are they? um, I don't think, consumer e-commerce I don't know anything about that and, yeah, like we, we want to be able to help, we want to be able to support, and it has to be more than just the capital that comes from the syndicate. So, um, yeah, and I, I think, I think, um, uh, you can't waste vendors time. You have to be honest and transparent with them up front and say thanks for sharing the deck.
I don't know anything about this space, um, but here's something I noticed about your deck that you might consider thinking about um, I don't think this is for us, um, because we can't help beyond the.
You know, we can't help in the way that we'd like to be able to help, um, and and we think that's like valuable and helpful at the very, very early stages and, and I think, I think, unfortunately, there are investors out there that will kind of drag things and, um, they won't give clear why is that? because I've heard that so many times um, because they're investing other people's money and they have made promises to return multiples, whatever that is, depending on when they raise that money.
That could be a big multiple or a small multiple and they might be under pressure because some of the funds they've deployed already may not have gone anywhere and so they would hate to miss out on an opportunity, which is why they'll have moving goalposts and say, well, we need to see this, come back to us when you have that. And then you come back and they're like but we also need to see this.
So they're keeping their options open, just in case Cause they can. That's exactly it Right.
Whereas. So what I tell founders is, if you're not getting a clear yes or no from a fund, just deprioritize them. You can keep them on the list if you want, but like you don't need to be spending any more time with them. If they really wanted it, they'd be all over you. They'd be making it happen if they really wanted it.
I was chatting to a person who works in funds recently and I was like, oh, is it getting tough now? And he's like, nope, there's always. The hardest job for me is getting in front of good founders. He's like there's always money to be invested. It's finding the right founders is his job. Talk to me, then, about the areas you do love. What areas do you really? When a deck hits the inbox, you're like, oh, this is definitely worth considering AI, ai, ai.
No, I had to say that. Um, there we go, we got that for the algorithm click, click, click, click. Great, I'll put a clickbait headline on
¶ Navigating Startup Ecosystems and Trends
this. It is funny how, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they're like every investor is a um ai investor and that's all they invest in. It rots my brain, I'm like just don't don't.
I was at a, I had to do a thing for a meetup thing recently and it was just they're all ai founders. I I'm like how are you all AI founders? It's not possible.
That won't last forever. The thing about it is that AI definitely has its place, but it's only going to augment or improve or amplify what's already there, precisely For a small number of extremely well-funded startups that are on the infrastructure side, then people will build on top of them. That startups that are on the infrastructure side, then people will build on top of them.
That's a different story, but the majority, the real place to be at the moment, is if you have existed for a number of years and you have stuff that can be immediately improved with an injection of some API that plugs into any of the AI vendors, that doesn't mean you're an AI startup. I think that's the piece that runs missing and that's summarized it beautifully. Yeah, and I think this is probably.
I feel like this is like the fifth or sixth big cycle since the emergence of Web 1.0 that we've been through, and every cycle it tends to last like four or five years and in each of those cycles there's like a micro. It lasts 18 to 24 months and they all overlap and like it was like web 1.0. Then it was like it started to be like the you know, the democratization of content on the web around 2015 sorry, 2005 or 6 or 7, and then it became the social web.
And then then cloud emerged and mobile as a computing platform and app stores as a a revenue generator channel kind of emerged, and then those two are bouncing off each other for a few years. And then big data came along, machine learning came along, and then crypto, and then you know, and so there's always investors are always going to be. It's all about timing.
We need to get in at the right time, that it's not too early, so that, like, we don't burn a load of money educating the market or investing in people who are going to become incumbents and taken over by the upstarts, but also not too late that we miss the opportunity and nobody knows until after the fact whether the timing was right or not.
And that's why there's FOMO, that's why there's people not giving clear yeses or noes, that's why there's people not giving clear yeses or nos, that's why there's hype cycles, because everybody's trying to make money, but nobody really knows what they're doing, including me.
No one knows. People always ask me like okay, you know you've interviewed hundreds of people, give me, like the key things. I was like you want the key thing, you want the real insight. Nobody knows what they're doing.
It's amazing when you have that epiphany. I think I was like 35 the first time I realized that.
There are no adults. We're all just grown up kids.
We're all just making it up as we go along.
And the good ones just look like they aren't. Yeah, that's the key. How do you sort the signal in from the noise? Because that's your job, essentially is to figure out. Is this a hype cycle or is this actually a mega trend?
um, I suppose that's grounded in in. It's probably easier to figure that out in spaces that you know better. You know so, like, one of the spaces I like is dev tools, infrastructure, the stuff that's kind of really kind of behind the tech that people consume and and that kind of is. My background was building apps and doing stuff around cloud stuff back 10 years ago, so it kind of kind of leans into that um, and so when you know a space very well, it's very easy to spot bullshit.
Um, you know, I think this is why, like consumer stuff, I would stay away from maybe even some types of health tech, um or um or e-commerce.
Yeah, like I said, I just don't know the spaces enough to be able to separate the, the bullshit, from the, from the substance, from the, the hype, and, and I think, um, you know, I think, uh, I think, when you're maybe I'd imagine like the larger funds that like invest in everything they they have to have like specialists within those kind of market verticals for them to help them navigate that I don't think anybody has.
That being said, you know, if you've been around long enough and somebody's sitting in front of you and they're telling you that they're going to do this. You can probably spot it you know, or not so it's kind of like you know, pattern recognition over time there's a bit of that, but there's a bit of, like street smarts, good instinct, you know.
I think the more you ignore your gut instinct and the more you get burnt by ignoring it, the more you know you're like fuck, I should have listened to myself.
How do you know what's the gut and what's just the inner voice? How?
do you know?
what's the what? How do you know what's the gut, though? How do you know what's the gut telling you Not just the inner monologue, kind of going?
oh yeah, I should definitely do this.
How do you listen to it? Is it a feeling?
this is where surrounding yourself with people who you trust is good, like um fiona, and I talk about all the things all the time, because we're partners in everything. All the things all the time, because we're partners in everything, all the things, all the time, but we also we also have friends that we trust, people that we've done stuff with, and I think I think you have to.
You know there probably needs to be more of a village mentality when it comes to how startups are built, like a what's that about? Like a child is raised by the village takes a village.
I think that's, I think that's it I.
A child is raised by the village takes a village. I think that's.
I think that's a, I think there is a spirit there that that that you know, uh, healthy ecosystems should have, um, especially, especially focused on that early stage of chaos and and you know, ideation around it, um, you know, problem and solution and how you, you know problem and solution and how you, you know, build a product and commercially execute on that at that early stage, pre-seed to like series A, I think there needs to be.
I think good ecosystems have that village mentality where founders will help each other and there are people interested in helping them figure that out that you know, maybe have fucked up a few times and want to kind of nudge them away from and help them navigate. That good feeling versus this sounds right, but I don't know kind of thing. So I think, yes, surrounding yourself, surrounding yourself with good people, I think is important what's the state of the irish ecosystem at the minute?
they are a startup ecosystem.
I'm just going to take a drink before I answer this one.
This is where we need to click pay now. This will be the one that will go borrow. It's the one, this one, that gets the likes or the likes, dislikes, whatever. Make them love, you make them hate, you make them feel something.
Amen I think, I think and I can say this with some degree of certainty, but again, it's grounded in my perspective and it's just my opinion caveat out of the way off you go. Don't edit that out, keep that in uh but, but it is, I is.
¶ Irish Startup Ecosystem Challenges and Solutions
I've been around a relatively long time in the context of starting stuff up since about 2007. And I wish we had a more evolved ecosystem here from the perspective of more founders from Ireland starting and scaling in Ireland. From the perspective of a angel ecosystem grounded in exited founders. We don't have the same depth or density of exited founders that are investing their proceeds or reinvesting even a small portion of their proceeds.
We don't have the same depth or breadth or density that other European cities have, and I think there's a couple of reasons for that. But it's a missed opportunity. That's not to say there aren't angel investors. There definitely are.
I think angel investors that have made money outside of being founders, that have lost sleep at night, that have created something from nothing, have uh, you know, done the first 100 sales um, have grown a team, have had setback after setback, have had to fundraise through multiple rounds, possibly bridge rounds, and have come out on the far side of that with an exit, with an outcome and all that experience, and they're willing to take a portion of that and reinvest it back into other founders
that are in their ecosystem.
They're a different class of of angel investor to somebody that made money in property during the Celtic Tiger, for example, or through some other additional business, that's not to say that those people can't be good angels, and it's not to say that made money in property during the Celtic Tiger, for example, or through some other additional business, that's not to say that those people can't be good angels and it's not to say that they're not valuable and welcome in the ecosystem.
It's just that they're different and we don't have enough of the exited founders. Why not? Probably a couple of opportunities or a couple of reasons? First of all, probably just don't have enough of the successes. It's probably just a numbers thing, right? Um, uh, I also think that there has been a policy in place at a government level to discourage founders from exiting because that might mean that jobs are, uh, possibly on the line.
And you know, I think that might be short-sighted and I don't know if that's still the current policy, but it definitely was about 10 years ago. So you know, I think those you know, and I think it's one of those things where just one-sided ecosystem hasn't developed as fast as another side. There are a lot of multinational tech companies here. They employ people, they bring people from other countries to here to pay taxes. They add definitely a vibrancy to the city.
They add an extra layer of prosperity to Dublin. I don't know if that extends beyond dublin to other parts of the country in the same way, um, but they also, you know, are able to pay people high salaries and that provides competition, hard competition for talent with startups. And so I think there's just an imbalance in an ecosystem and healthy ecosystems, whether like startup or in nature, there needs to be a balance and it feels like for the longest time there's been an imbalance.
And then the other side to it is that I think a large part of it is institutionalized from various different types of government activities, which definitely have their place, and I'm not here to shit on that at all, but I think there's too much of it.
There's too much EI money everywhere directly invested into startups and into funds, and then I think sometimes that money might be a bit too easy to come by and that potentially holds back founders in terms of their ambition, and I know it has a knock-on effect in in when um, um, vcs from other parts of europe, vcs from other parts of Europe, meet Irish founders, like that kind of.
It's just another friction point because of the perception of it being, you know, a slow process if there's government money involved, or if one of the things that I would love to see Irish founders do is raise more money abroad, because it means they're competing at a higher level with international vendors in front of international funds. And if you're competing at a higher level, then you're, you're automatically iron sharpens iron.
We talked about it downstairs.
Yeah, absolutely so I think I think that's a missed opportunity for the ecosystem. I think I would love to see more of that we live on an island.
Why don't we do that we?
don't have to stay on an island.
Is that the island mentality, though?
It might be a bit of it, I don't know, and maybe some of this is post-COVID stuff, I don't know, but I think there's missed opportunity for founders here. Like it's 10 years ago, patrick and John headed off and set up Stripe more than 10 years ago, right, and everybody goes why wasn't that? built in Ireland and you know they wrote a post about. You know why they didn't do it and yet, and people think it's changed.
But you know there's companies today that Irish founders have gone to other ecosystems to set up there. Now some of those might be personal reasons, or some of them might be just that's where their network was or whatever. But like the fact that that's that's happening tells me that there's still a problem. Something like 150 founders applied to Y Combinator last year, according to a tweet from Patrick Hollison. Like that's great to see, but also that shouldn't have to be.
It shouldn't be necessary that they have to leave. And so when I say I encourage founders to raise money from people in other ecosystems, I don't mean move to those ecosystems, I mean raise money there and set up here and the wider ecosystem will eventually benefit from it. That exited founder angel problem that I spoke about would slowly but surely resolve itself.
Do you think world-class, massive companies can be built here?
Absolutely. I do 100%. I believe that I think a gap needs to be created for that to happen. I don't know if that can happen with a government being the guiding hand on programs and funding and how that's deployed and the kind of constraints that come with that.
So in the morning you're going to set up a brand new idea to create this gap. What is it?
I've already set it up. It's called Baseline.
Nice segue.
You've done this before um or I should say it's in the process of being set up. Um baseline is a community and a workspace, uh, for as kind of a maybe 10, 15 of irish founders that I think will break out in the next couple of years, and it's independent of government funding. We're entirely funded by membership and by private investors and a handful of corporate and venture partners. And it's certainly not to say that what exists currently is the wrong way to do it.
It's just that I think there's another way and we've myself and Fiona are, you know, putting our money where our mouth is on this. We've taken a 10-year lease on a space up on thomas street.
That is is going to be where this, this community of peers, early stage precede to series a, where they they manifest, where they hang out, where they collaborate, where they bring their team, where they learn from each other, where they grow, and that's going to be in a very organic way that is plugged into other ecosystems, other similar corners of other ecosystems. But like, yeah, I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel, we don't want to sideline anyone else's efforts.
In fact we think that if we do a good job, maybe a rising tide will raise all boats and there might be a positive knock-on effect, and we would dearly love for our efforts to improve the ecosystem, and that's why we took a 10-year lease out, because it takes that long. This isn't something you can. It's not like software. You can just, just, you know, hack something together quickly, stick it up in the cloud, direct some traffic to it and then make some improvements. Um, it's a physical space.
It's it's probably a changing group of people over time who are going through their own stuff and helping each other out in the process, and we think there isn't really something like that that exists. There are definitely programs, there are definitely co-working spaces, there are definitely incubators this kind of falls somewhere in between all of those things and it's just a small little footprint for those types of founders to come and be part of.
And, like I said, if, if we're successful, it'll be obvious, probably take some time, though oh, you've got 10 years.
You'll figure it out. I love your money where your mouth is. That's where it's all about. Bring me back to your own journey then, the ones you started and exited. Bring give me a kind of an overview of those. What did you get involved in?
um, uh, yeah, in 2007 I was turning 30 and I had a crisis that I I thought I had wasted my 20s and so I said I'm just gonna work for myself as a developer. And then, uh, so I built a small consultancy out of that with some friends and we built product for people.
¶ Entrepreneurial Journey and Startup Success
Um, all startups, mostly startups um, but yeah, it was. That was like four years of just like trying to figure out, like, how do you sell? How do you, how do you market? How do you communicate your, what it is you do? How do you bill? How do you invoice?
so startups come to you and go we want to build a product for this, we want to fill a feature of this, and you'd be like no problem, we'll build it and then ship it over yeah, yeah, um, but along the way we we were kind of experiment, experimenting with different ideas um and trying different things and um, one of those kind of stuck um, that was a, um, a cloud deployment platform.
It's a long time ago, but we bootstrapped that from the consulting and we sold it after seven months. We didn't have any other investors and that kind of changed our lives In what way we had money.
Stop being so vague. Don't be modest. This isn't the modesty house.
Come on. Well, I mean, the company hired us. They were a cloud company from san francisco called engineered. They hired us, they, they obviously they paid us um to acquire us. Um. We got incredible experience, uh, for three years. Um we worked there um myself, my co-founders and some people that we hired here in dublin um learned a load in the process, traveled a load to the Bay Area, grew my network, ran some events, got to know loads of people. It was a pivotal moment.
I was able to do some angel investing.
Was that a life-changing sum of money, or was that enough to get you started on the next thing, or what are we talking about?
Somewhere in between. At the time I time I probably think it was a lot it was life-changing yeah, because like I was broke, so like then I wasn't broke, so that's.
Anything is better. All right, life-changing is more than more than I have now working for yourself is hard.
Uh, selling time is really hard and anybody that works from himself as a consultant or a freelancer or even as a small agency of any kind be it a recruitment agency or, um, you know, a marketing or a web development or design agency you're just constantly, constantly selling time and you probably don't have more than a few months of of buffer in the bank. If you do, you're doing stuff really well.
But also, like nobody's gonna buy that, like those companies never get sold because there isn't ip, it just like a list of clients yeah, but like so you built a product within that yeah, and spun that out. And then how did they buy it?
after seven months what, what is? What was the reason? Just that good just that damn good to special sauce it it was.
I thought it was pretty slick for the time, but really it was. It was what you call an acquire. We had visibility and influence in a market that this company wanted to get Right, and this product was a gateway to doing that. And so, yeah, it made sense and it was. It was twice what we thought we we get for it.
So you don't hang around on that what did it feel like being your boss? Being your own boss then, not being your own boss, I think good leaders know when to follow.
Um, and I I really um, I kind of embraced that. I felt I had a ceo now who's telling me what to do and, uh, I, I took, I took his guidance and he listened. He listened to my opinions and then would tell me what to do.
And I think but also, what if you try this?
Oh yeah, that's much better, but that's not what we're doing. That's not what we agreed upon at the board. Okay, yeah, fair enough. So, yeah, I think I really, I think that's really, I think that's, I think that's. Um, you know, earlier on you were saying what, what does he look for? I look for stuff like that. And people, when you're talking to them, is like you know, do, are they? Can they make pragmatic choices about the big picture stuff?
And, as a leader of a brand new startup of like one or two or three people, what does what does that even mean? Right, strong opinions loosely held, but it also is like nobody's investing in a three-person startup. For where you are now they're investing in where you'll be in three years.
That's why conviction in the people is so important at that stage, because there's no other data to go on, and so part of like me investing in you at this stage and it being grounded in where we think you'll be in three years time, part of that is going to be you're going to have a team of people. Do I think you can lead them? Do I think you can attract them in the first place? Are they going to be inspired to follow you? Are you going to give them the space to grow and develop?
Are you going to entr inspired to follow you? Are you going to give them the space to grow and develop? Are you going to entrust them and empower them and delegate in a way that doesn't make you a bottleneck? Are you? going to be able to scale your, your, your business, your people, your culture. So, yeah, I think, um, that's a ramble. I don't know how we got onto that one. No, it's good.
That's how we made your first hundred million.
¶ Founder Reflections on Failure and Resilience
So after that, three years in, yeah, I got the itch, you know the founder itch. Again, I was like I wanted to do something else but I didn't know what, and so I just I left and just took some time out to figure that out. How did you figure that out? I wrote some code, experiment with some different ideas.
I talked to people and, yeah, I decided that I wanted to try and take on LinkedIn and build a professional network that actually had, you know, relationship strength as a as a thing in it, rather than you know, here's somebody who I have a first connection with, but I have no idea how I have a first connection with them. So, yeah, we built something that technically worked myself and a small team. It technically worked, but it was a commercial failure.
I was a solo founder so I have to take responsibility for it. I focused too much on the product and not enough on distribution, on sales, distribution. Yeah, this is I think. I think founders need to be, uh, get comfortable being uncomfortable. And I was comfortable being comfortable, right, I was doing the things that my mind would gravitate towards, that I thought would be valuable, but really it was just to, um, I was probably afraid. I was probably afraid to do some of those things.
So it's really interesting, though, and thanks for sharing that, because I think a lot of people would look at you after having an exit and doing this than the other, like oh sure he figured it out now.
I looked at me like that, like people kid themselves, like what the fuck does success mean? Right, if enough people tell you you're successful, you're going to believe it. And then, if you're, if your name is in the paper and there's some number beside your name and you know people are talking about funding or exits and this, and that you're going to believe that bullshit. Like very easy to fall into that trap.
It's like the um, the difficult second album, right, this, this brand new band comes out of nowhere and they just like, yeah, they wipe the charts. And then the second, the follow-up.
Now the real pressure is on, yeah it's like a massive football fan and like the difficult second season. They're right, they have a breakout season. Yeah, they're like the best thing yeah then, the second season is an absolute flop because?
because it's a different thing. Yeah, they've been figured out, everyone knows them now.
They're like oh, he always cuts in off the right, just cover him on the left foot, he's fine.
They're like oh shit but but in in a startup case it's like you're you're not going to be building the same company again, you're building a different company, probably solving a different problem in a different market at a different time period in the cycle did you think it was the same? Different founders, different team. It's a different thing. Why would it be the same thing?
did you think it was the same formula, though? Do you think? I just repeat I don't.
I think that was my problem. I don't know if I thought so deep about it. Okay, obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, everybody's wise right.
Of course, it's easy now to look back and go. I've just did this, this and this yeah, yeah.
So so that was that that we. We had raised um angel. I put some of my own money in as well, and so we didn't take money from any vcs and we really like I was doing a rolling raise at one point where it was flying close to the wind and it was stressful, solo founder I had second child, um had been born.
Just I wasn't sleeping much, and then I had back surgery and like, just like a few weeks after we launched and oh yeah, man, it was all over the shop and uh, anyway, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Isn't it funny, though, how we always think progress is linear, it's not it's like a rollercoaster we forget, we forget like the other happens.
Life. Yeah, great things like kids and partners, but then bad things like surgery and deaths, like we never really factored these in.
We think of like well, we also think it happens in a vacuum, like life is some other abstract thing that doesn't happen. While this is going on and everybody has their shit. And you don't realize it, Even people that you're in the trenches of it, building your startup, be they co-founders or employees. Everybody has their shit and you have no idea.
Yeah, everyone's carrying a little bag with all their stuff in it.
Yes, and that's and that's, and this is why, you know, being intentional about how you build a culture is important because people bring that in the door, to to, to work as part of the culture.
Whether you're in a physical space or hybrid or fully remote, people have that with them and some people are great at unpacking it and some people are great at hiding it, and it can be very hard as a founder, as a leader, to get the best out of people and recognize that that's the thing and be able to work around it or with it and give people the space to figure that out as well, while still executing with urgency or having a velocity or hitting all the things they need to hit like it's a big,
big balancing act there's lots of juggle, isn't there? yeah, there is a lot why would anybody be a founder? Why would anybody start start something up like it's?
it's lunacy, but if you do, we know where you should go. So then what was the next thing? So you've done four or five um, there was another.
There was a cloud analytics thing. That kind of uh was probably too early way back around 2009. It's probably too early to the market. It was, it was. It worked as well, but the commercial, the customers, weren't really there for it. But three years later they were uh and there were companies raising tens of millions to solve the problem. That anyway. So timing is a thing.
Been early is the same as been wrong.
Yeah, and then the last one, 2019,.
¶ Startup Projects and Global Expansion
I co-founded a company called Boundless, which is an employer of record, employing people compliantly in other countries to pay all taxes, and they're doing great. My co-founders old co-founders Dee and Emily they're doing great. Co -founders all co-founders Dee and Emily, they're doing great, so now, Broadstone, broadstone. So then, yeah, covid, what are we going to do? Let's start Broadstone. What else should we do? Let's do conference and sweat front what else should we do?
Gamekeeper what else should we do? Let's start.
Let's start baseline so so you have the three things running in tandem, but I love the way they all live together. They're all. It's kind of how I think about the podcast. It all runs together Like they're all symbiosis of each other.
There's a guy, who who's, who spoke at our conference last year, derek Sivers. He's like no Sivers. He's like oh, no way, do you know?
yeah he's really good. Yeah, I love his writing.
He's old school web 1.0. He spoke last year did he he? so he came last year. Um, he's cool and um he he wrote a post years and years ago about you can be local or global, but you can't be both, and so in the back of my head, with those three, I think of them as projects. Um, broads, uh, our baseline is my attempt to be very, very local and this next thing, the conference in switzerland, is my attempt at being global and like there's other people involved in that. But that's like my selfish.
That's what I want to get out of it it's my attempt at being um, global. And then broad sun as a syndicate is like a Is that kind of a, a tie between the two of them? Where it's a foot, that's the bridge. It's a bridge where it could be one or the other so but uh there you go.
Hopefully you're listening to the pod and you're feeling inspired. Maybe you want to do new things in your own business, or maybe you have that brilliant idea you've always want to bring a little bit further and see if it works. So why not right now? You listen to the majority of the guests in this show and they've been helped by the local enterprise office at some stage in the journey. They have something for everybody.
Whether you have that idea you want to develop, you want to get your products in new markets, you want to innovate your existing products or you want to expand staff and premises, they have the supports to help. So why not today? If you want to start up or grow your business, then contact your local enterprise office today. You excited about what? You seem very mellow. You seem very. Are you excited about what's coming? Because you've built three things there.
You're building three things early stage. To be honest, they're all three startups. You're only lying to yourself, right? Maybe I am. You're only kidding yourself. You're not even kidding me.
If I was excited I'd probably damage the microphone by getting too loud, so I'm kind of restraining myself without hurting your ears. Yeah, I am. What I get most excited about is when I see founders interacting with each other in the context of something that I've facilitated.
And what I get excited about that is I see potential that they don't see or it hasn't been realized yet or may not be realized for years, and so that's I know it's very notionally and it's kind of abstract and it might sound a bit a bit ponzi, but, like I, yeah, I get excited about that and, and I get really get excited about people who are at the beginning of the ideas and there's lots of what if, what if? what if this, what if that, what couldn't do that imagine if you did.
Just those type of conversations get me really, really excited and so, you know, really focusing and myself in in these spaces kind of gives me access to that.
That's not notion at all.
¶ Founder Insights on Business Direction
Like I love building this podcast, people don't really understand where it's going. I don't understand it really. I don't know where it's going.
Would you say 367? We'll do 400 this year. It doesn't matter, we'll do 400 in a year. Congratulations.
But like it's going somewhere, I couldn't tell you exactly because I didn't start it as a business. I started as a way of meeting people like you and I was just like, okay, this is going somewhere. Even now I'm constantly going right. What's going to be the thing? I'm like I don't know. But I know you're talking about the gut. That's why I tease you earlier about the god I was like in my gut, it's working and it's going to work and it's it's bringing me in the right direction.
I couldn't tell you in five years what I'll be. I'll be doing it, but it'll be. There'll be loads of things around it this is a really important point.
Nobody knows your business, this particular aspect of your work life. Nobody knows it the way you do. Lots of people have opinions on it, say you're mad and have you thought about doing this and why don't you do more of that? And I don't see how you're ever going to make that. That's totally fine, it's, but nobody's going to know it the way you know it historically, how you're thinking about it in your gut in the future.
You obsess about it you absolutely do yeah, I think about it all the time yeah, and I think I think a mistake I've seen founders, especially first-time founders, make is they'll talk to an investor, they talk to somebody who they think knows yeah, and then they'll go off with that well, they must know, because, exactly, nope, yeah, they don't.
They're giving you their opinion or their experience based on one of their experiences.
I learned this from having kids. There's all these, there's a whole industry, especially first kid. There's a whole industry of fear around the first kid, oh yeah, and books. And then there's all the paraphernalia you have to buy the buggies, the car seats. Do you want to go for the 200 euro seat or the 750 euro seat, do you?
want to keep her safe.
How can you put a price on your child's safety?
Oh, we're 19. So we've had our first girl and our first child in general, and it's only now she's 19 months, she's only two years. And now you're like oh wow, it's chaotic, right First year. You're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's nothing you don't say yes to, exactly. You're like I'm not skimping on that. Yeah, exactly, she needs that, just do it.
And then next thing, you know your, your home is full of all this stuff that you don't need and you're like how do you just even get here, what? What do we do with this? And then, and you can't even recycle it and giving it to other first-time parents because they're like no, I think we want the brand new stuff.
We don't want the stuff that's been possibly I had a good test. I said to every parent I knew it's like what's the one thing you bought that actually mattered?
yeah, and I asked 20 people Is there a common thread or is it all over? Shop Minor stuff?
Yeah, right, you know you really want to get like the little bouncy seat, because they'll get hours in that and you'll get some time to have a shower.
Yeah, good advice.
You want to get this buggy because that fits that and you're like good advice. You know logical common stuff.
Multi-packs of onesies. Onesies, that's it, because you can never have enough of them. But um the so, the so, there's a whole industry around, just books around, advice for the first time, uh, parents oh, we did every webinar you have right and you consume it right and you go deep on it and then 19 months and you realize you haven't killed a child, she's doing fine, she's thriving, in fact it's all holy shit, holy shit.
I actually know what I'm doing here, and this is because these books are generalist advice and they might be written by child psychologists or people who've had seven kids or whatever, but nobody knows your kid the way you know your kid.
Nobody knows your startup, your business, your thing, that you spend most of your waking hours thinking about, maybe some of your sleeping hours subconsciously, but nobody knows it the way you do, and I think I think more founders need to to draw confidence on that um because everyone can give advice.
You don't have to listen to it yeah, and you should get as much as you can get surrounded. That's why I'm so interested in what you're doing, so I think environment is such a key indicator of success, like where you spend your time and who you spend it with. It's such a key indicator of success, like where you spend your time and who you spend it with, such a key indicator because, no matter, I don't think it's an indicator of success.
I think it just increases your chances, but still you well, I suppose. Yeah, that's true, but still it might increase them a few blips out of like 10 million. I think you can kill your chances though.
I think I think it can kill you because no matter how exceptional you are, brilliance doesn't really happen in a vacuum. Yeah, you know, you have the exceptionalists, john collison's the world. They have those guys, but the majority are like just plugging away, trying to figure out what's up and timing is involved. You know hugely what's your formula for success, what's your founder formula.
I knew you were going to say that. I bloody knew. I said he's going to be contrary. He's going to be like oh, I don't agree with that. What's your founder formula?
I knew you were going to say that I bloody knew. I said he's going to be contrary. He's going to be like oh, I don't agree with that. What's your one, though? Like what have you done that? You're like I did this and this, and that brought me success, because there is something.
Like. I know you don't want to apply it to everybody, but there is something I actually did write. We like. Cut this out while I go get my laptop.
You can go stage left, grab the laptop and give me the formula, because it's a key piece of the new series. If we don't have this, the whole kind of the new series just kind of falls apart.
So yeah, you wanted a couple of words on the formula.
A couple of words Like give me a formula, you're a scientific guy.
Well, this one will resonate with you, because you actually more or less said this earlier on um, when we were talking about coming to switzerland. Um, be open to change. I think is is, um is. I will probably get most people through just the ups and downs. We were talking about how it's not linear right, being open to change.
That could be you need to pivot, or the market has changed, or a competitor has launched, or you know the funding you're banking on isn't coming through, or you've churned some customers, or there's a whole load of bugs because you decided to go all in on one stack that only one person on the team knows how to, how to work, and now you need to hire some other people to figure it out, or any number of things. But I think being open to change and being able to adapt is key to survival.
I mean, it's probably how humans have managed to still be humans, so I think it's very deeply ingrained in our nature. But I think, yeah, being open to change would be the general formula for making progress I'm not going to say for success, because I don't know what that means true, as individual.
That's what you know. This is why I'm doing it this season, because I'm like I want to see what everybody says yeah, I test. I test all different things. I live by it's a good question. Well, I live by the motto of experimentation and every season I try something new and I try to go. What will people say if I ask them this? What will we do if we do this? So I always try and experiment to see, because I kind of want it.
It's a loaded question, right, because there is no formula and the formula is there's no formula, the formula is it's all individual.
Do a quick fire round, oh no, around, oh no, here we go.
I've also written some questions today you're not meant to write, you're not meant to give it away that you know, that you know the questions. What book do you recommend every entrepreneur should read I did write this down right, I like you've done your homework. By the way, you're like like a school child bringing in your homework to me.
I uh. The internet has long since riddled my brain in a way that means I can't actually hold my hold attention long enough to read a full book. However, that makes me sad, it's a trade-off. What I will say is there is a book published in 1944 by the organization that is the precursor to the CIA.
Okay, what a hipster answer they distributed this handbook.
It's called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a timeless guide to subverting any organization with purposeful stupidity, and they basically handed it to people in industry in, you know, nazi occupied territories okay to slow down the war machine, wow, wow. So it was laden with like bureaucratic directions, just like have meetings after meetings, always question decisions after the fact. You know you cast doubt on this and that, find excuses to not do stuff.
But, like the thing is, when you read through it, it speaks of how large scale organizations and certain government bodies sometimes slow down through lack of purpose, lack of urgency, lack of direction, probably bureaucracy. And and I think I think founders should read this because sometimes they might be selling to these people, and I think founders should read this because sometimes they might be selling to these people.
Sometimes, depending on how quickly they grow, they might hire people like this and they may end up becoming like that.
I've heard so many founders do that. They get really successful quite quickly. There is a lot of money and then they hire experienced people.
And those experienced people are going to do their best based on what they already know. But what they already know are large companies with politics. Ask a fish to climb the tree. It ain't gonna climb the tree.
Ask a fish to swim in the water. It's gonna swim in the water and I, without fail I've had this over and over. You know they might have got to like five employees. Then they're like right, we're bringing in the big guns and they hire from big tech companies let's call it that. And they're like Jesus, I don't know how to do anything without a budget of 200K. Right, you know.
So it's good advice 200K man, what you can do at 200K.
Start five startups at 200K. What's something you'd learn the hard way? Oh yeah, the hard way.
Um, oh yeah, uh, self-promotion, I I hate it. Um, and you're having a real struggle all right for the last hour. In fairness, well, you do a great job of making people feel comfortable, thank you. With this kind of setup going on, um, and it's all about the eye contact, you're doing a great job um uh, watch on if you're not such a fan.
If only you see my eyes.
You know, I think self-promotion culturally is something that Irish people are conditioned against, and I think that can be a challenge for founders, especially when they go to places where it is core to the culture, like America.
And if you don't talk about what you've done and you don't talk about how awesome it was or what you're currently doing and how awesome it is, people assume that you're just not doing anything, whereas an Irish person that might be the last thing after you know three points that they eventually get around to telling you what it is. Unless it's somebody like you, asking questions right, it's going grand, yeah, it's grand Ash, you know yourself just like what the fuck does that mean?
tip?
it tip it like 5k a month?
500k a month. What does grand mean? Yeah, I agree with you right.
So I think first of all it doesn't come well to to irish people. But yeah, it's uh what have you sacrificed for your success? Uh, first of all, I don't think I'm successful, but uh, probably mental health, there's that false monistique mental health.
What do you mean?
uh, startups are hard, failure is hard. Um, nobody's really born with resilience. You have to kind of build it up and, like you said, it's not linear. Stuff goes up, stuff goes down. Sometimes it goes really down, sometimes it goes really up, and um, and yeah, definitely times where, uh, I, um, I did not prioritize myself because I was building stuff, I had felt an obligation to my team, investors, that type of thing, customers.
¶ Founder Challenges and Community Support
Have you found a way of managing that? What's been your strategy? To kind of like help Talk.
You know when I was a solo founder doing cohort talk. You know when I was, when I was a solo founder doing cohort. That's one of the challenges of being a solo founder you don't really have anybody to share the burden with, you can't really talk to employees. You can talk to other founders, but and this is why being part of a community of founders can be really helpful.
I think and it's one of one of the things that I hope people will use Baseline for is to be able to talk about the really hard challenges that are not just like fundraising, go to market, shipping product right, like the stuff that happens.
You know when you're looking at the ceiling at night trying to go to sleep, the stuff that's going through your head, and every founder has their version of that, and so, yeah, I didn't have people around me to bounce that off, um, and so, yeah, that's what I would look for people to people to talk to, and maybe it's a bit selfish building a bit of a community that I'm part of as well to the old started thing solve your own problem.
Yeah, right, right, if you have it. If doubtless more people have it, yeah, what would you do today if I give you 10 million euro? Invest in baseline members? Kind of a cheat answer. Could you do it anyway? Change my mind.
Change my mind.
Right. Follow up question.
I'm going to give you 1 million euro.
You can only invest in one person or one company. Yeah, who is it? Don't give me 10. Or you can give me 10. It'll be good for the clickbait, actually.
I'll tag them all. A few months ago you had Ombara on here and he mentioned me to this question, so I'm going to have to return the favor and say Tipple, they're a great team. The stuff that they're doing, they're just really foot down and kicking down doors. They're just doing. He's a dealmaker. His co-founders, laura and Jamie, just so capable. They're hiring good people. They're also, you know, they're fairly quick to make decisions that are hard to make.
They're not really hanging around on uncertainty. And, yeah, they're disrupting a kind of an industry that has not really had new, new ways of thinking for a long time. So, not to like big them up too much, they still have a lot of work to do what's something in your daily routine? you wish you started sooner um I don't have an answer for that fair, fair enough.
I don't know if I have a daily routine, not a routine guy. Yeah, I don't know if I do. So, you kind of wussed out his answer earlier when I asked you if you started a new company in the morning, what would it be?
It's the baseline, like we have a 10-year lease in the place, we're all in on it, like that's it. And the other thing is is is that, um, you know, like I don't think I'm employable, I don't think I have the opportunity to do anything else, um, uh, or the headspace to do anything else?
This is, this is the thing to focus on, that I can, I can make sure people benefit from my experience, good and bad, um, and I think it'll be a net positive I've let you slide on a couple answers, but this one one, yeah, deliver on this one for me now.
Okay, because I believe you have strong answers.
What is it?
What do you believe other people would find strange or strongly disagree with?
I'm going to have to look this one up, that's all right, you're a man of strong opinions.
I'm surprised. I was like if there's ever a question for Eamon this.
I was like, if there's ever a question for Eamon, this is it. Yeah, that's what I wrote for it. So what do I believe?
I don't know if other people strongly disagree or think it's strange, but I suspect that the general consensus on this is strange, purely based on how the world is at the moment, and the world is fairly polarized, some for very valid reasons, some for probably not as valid reasons, and there's probably a degree of manipulation going on on social media and how people are influenced by different things, and I think there's room for people to be able to hold opposing views in their head.
At the same time, I think there's room for less absolutes and embracing more of nuance. And I don't necessarily mean things when it comes like, comes to like, you know, war, or, but I I just think like they're big picture things happening in the world, right, I'm talking about sometimes the behaviors that people really invest themselves in. That are those big picture things.
They also take them down to the small things that happen, you know, amongst their friends or the family, or in communities or whatever, and or in their work, and I think I think there needs to be more nuance and people being open to being wrong or at least being open to entertaining that other people have a different opinion to them, and I mean as long as those people aren't advocating for, like you know, mass murder or whatever like they also need to, as long as you're not harming others.
As long as you're not harming others, you
¶ Navigating Trust and Gray Areas
know. I just wish there was probably less tribalism or polarization in the world. Same.
Like one thing I say all the time is two things can be true simultaneously. Yeah, like one thing I say all the time is two things can be true simultaneously. Yeah, you know, it doesn't always have to be. People want black, white. Good, bad, hero, villain. The world is full of gray. Yeah, you want black and white, but the world is full of gray. Yeah, what's?
one thing you've spent a hundred euro on, thing or experience that brought you immense joy. I don't have to look down for this one. Good, my first date with Fiona Kelly. We went and we drank some Guinness in some of our favorite pubs around Dublin. I don't think it cost a hundred. That'd be a lot of Guinness. Okay, it was some food, but yeah, she's my favorite person.
And yeah, I think bang for a buck.
It was good money, good money spent, good investment yeah, what's your favorite poll. Would you remember where you went? Yeah, uh, we went to. We went to stag's head, um, and there was a few others, but stag's head was where it all started. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was like a very obvious light being shined in my eyes. You know, it was obvious immediately, nice.
Yeah, I'm lucky. What's the one thing you want to leave with all founders? What's one thing you want to a bit of advice you want to give to all founders? I wrote this one down as well. That's your job.
It's important to get this one right. I think there's so many things to navigate as a founder, everything from the practical stuff, you know. How do we manifest something out of nothing, this idea that we have in our heads, how do we get it to be something that people interact with, that people find value in, that people pay for?
How do we bring other people on those journeys, or other people on that journey, like as employees as teammates, as even co-founders or investors, or either just like other people that we champion, like how do we do that? And then? So things have to happen in a very condensed period of time.
Relationships kind of have to be built on trust and faith, because you don't necessarily have a year to get to know an investor, you don't necessarily have a year to get to know your first couple of hires or your co-founders, and so when time has to be compressed, like that, trust and faith kind of go hand in hand for everybody involved. And one of the shortcuts I've I've used over the years since, since secondary school actually, um, to figure out whether I should trust something or someone.
Um, and it's not always, it's not a hundred percent, right, so, but it might be 80%. I don't know Good enough, but like um, yeah, yeah, what do they say, what do they do, what do other people say about them? And anytime I've ignored that, I've regretted it, and so that's worked for me.
I don't know if it works for other people, but that was how you answered the leaving certain english question about how you assess the otello of rodrigo not sorry, the hotel how you assess the character of rodrigo in otello. That's I say you do it. What do? What does this shakespearean character say? What do they do? What do other characters say about them?
what a reference.
Yeah, pull that out of the bag. Right at the end, mr don levy dream the castle 1994 he told yeah, obviously he did a good job.
¶ Exploring Broadstone, Baseline, and Next Thing
Eamon, where can people learn more about Broadstone, Baseline and this Next Thing?
Broadstonevc. Baselinecommunity. Thisnextthingcom Eamon. Thanks, Gary.
Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.