James Vincent: The Founders’ Founder

0:00: Hello everyone, I'm Roger Howe, co-founder and CEO of the branding agency How and Howe.

0:06: Welcome to another episode of The Nugget, where we're excavating more business gold for founders and leaders.

0:13: And I'm joined today by a bit of a heavy hitter in the tech company Landscape.

0:19: He's not a tech guy himself, but he's spent his career helping founders of tech companies articulate their offerings to the world.

0:26: He's worked alongside Steve Jobs for over a decade and is responsible for defining the way we think about many of Apple's groundbreaking products.

0:34: And as well, he's advised some of the world's most loved brands like Airbnb, Patreon, Roblox, and many more on how to articulate their category defining products to the world.

0:46: We're very pleased to have our good friend and fellow agency owner James Vincent on the show, so welcome.

0:51: Hey, how are you?

0:53: Very good, thank you.

0:54: Very good.

0:54: Thanks for having me.

0:55: So just, , obviously we had a little bit of an intro there, but, , it would be interesting to hear directly from you on why it is you've spent so much time around founders and some of the early learnings you've had from that.

1:08: Yeah.

1:10: , well, you know, I sort of, I was lucky I guess I started with, you know, probably one of the.

1:18: The founders, founders of the last, you know, period of time in the, if you think in the late 90s, I got a call you want to work with Steve Jobs.

1:26: I was in New York, I flew to California the next day kind of thing.

1:30: , around that time, I think Steve represented the humanities and technology coming together, maybe the first humanities person in technology.

1:39: It was kind of ugly back then, you know, Microsoft, Dell, you know, things that didn't really work, didn't look good, didn't feel good, weren't humanistic, and Steve just was the first humanist to say, no, no, no, it needs to feel good and look good and be aesthetic and understand the human condition in order to make that huge impact.

1:58: And so, , I got hooked, you know, I came out to run the agency, , the shite day had the account.

2:06: We launched iTunes and iPod.

2:09: 1000 songs in your pocket, 99 cents for your favourite song.

2:14: , you know, it was one of those, I don't know, I was a drummer in a band from 14 to 17, a DJ at college, and so I sort of knew music and then obviously these music products came along and it was just one of those stories where I thought music, I thought it was gonna be a rock star, it never happened.

2:28: Now I stand on stages but with a clicker, , talking to people about founders wasn't exactly what I imagined, but yeah, so then music became the through thread and.

2:40: And just sort of figuring out how to market iTunes because no one knew what media was, no one knew what iTunes.

2:45: In fact, Steve didn't know what iTunes was until it became a piece of software.

2:48: It was a dotcom at a certain point and then had a talk about a physical product in iPod.

2:55: You know, you, everyone had a Walkman, 12 songs that skipped, or they had a real player that didn't make any sense, or they stole music from Napster and Limelight.

3:03: So it was just this huge revolution that technology creates human magic, and Steve was able to.

3:11: Encourage and create an environment where creativity, whether it was working with Johnny Ive in product design, who was sort of part of the trifecta and working with us, , at Shire and then in 2006 I created Media Arts Lab, which was the agency just built for him to launch iPhone and that grew to becoming, you know, one of the, one of the agency models maybe about created around an idea, a great company, and Media Arts lab was recognised that ideas are media.

3:41: And we were gonna, and they are media arts, not advertising or whatever we called it before.

3:47: , so that was all like just an incredible explosion of, of, of, , transformative technology through the eyes of a great founder that we saw the world differently, you know, , as we all know.

4:00: And so that was my beginning and then after that, , I couldn't help but work with more founders.

4:07: What is it about working with founders that you particularly like?

4:12: I think as a if you think of like 1984 as an ad, you think of like the big corporate company which back then was portrayed as IBM and you think of the sole person who has an image of the world that is better, and I'm gonna follow them.

4:26: , and that has been the last 25 years of working with founders is just the belief that you can get further and follow, you know, a pretty optimistic arc.

4:38: And I would frankly say in the last few weeks and months that that, you know, the people standing up, the Elon Musk's represent a different representation, techno.

4:49: Retro whatever, like it's not an optimistic version of the future.

4:54: It's a more challenged version of the future.

4:56: And so, and I'm sure I can, I'll touch on this because I'm now, you know, I constantly work with different founders and I'm starting to see how different founders are coming up through AI are just a different breed, , and they see technology a different way, so.

5:10: But in my, in up until this moment in time, my heroes have been Steve Jobs.

5:16: I worked with Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Evan Spiegel at Snapchat, and they all tried to bring the very optimistic even social media that wasn't like you could create real friends through things disappearing rather than sticking around, or Airbnb you could create, and I worked at Airbnb with Brian and did the magical trips launch for a generation of people that didn't want to own things, they wanted to have great experiences.

5:38: You know, the paradox of being away but feeling at home and seeing the world through, you know, other people's eyes was a great expanse for that moment.

5:46: So creating generational brands through those opportunities.

5:50: So yeah, I just, I think been very lucky to go from one to another to another and, , learned a lot from working with those incredible founders.

5:57: Fantastic.

5:58: And we've spoken to and with some of those founders on the podcast, , or founders in general, where we like to hear from them about their personal journeys, and I suppose you've been more an observer to many of those different journeys from the outside and from that experience, maybe it'd be interesting to hear from you if you see particular traits or attributes that are common among founders and make them.

6:25: You know, part of that special breed, hm.

6:28: Yeah, no, it's not, you know, it's not that it's, you shouldn't just wake up one morning and say, oh I think I'll be a founder.

6:33: I was gonna be a, you know, an accountant, but today I'm gonna be a like it's extremely challenging.

6:40: And it requires a skill set that is both exceptional in terms of capability, but also unbelievable resilience.

6:48: Because, , the, the number of different roles you'll have to play in order to be a successful founder changes over time, right?

6:55: So, .

6:57: You know, I've been asked to talk about this a few times last summer I was at EQT in Stockholm talking about, and the idea was I was actually up on the stage with .

7:08: With the fella that plays in succession, , that plays the the the Swedish crazy, , Sars, yep.

7:18: And he was playing the out there founder that actually uses that as a negotiating tactic to humble the, you know, , the Murdochs.

7:28: I mean, the, you know, , into, you know, sort of submission.

7:32: And that was a type.

7:33: And I, I think that type, let's call it the outlier.

7:37: And typically I think it takes an outlier character to say, no, I'm not going to follow what everyone else is doing.

7:45: I'm gonna do something different and I believe it so much I can get other people to invest money in.

7:49: I can get other people to follow me.

7:51: I can walk into a room 20 times a day for years to come and convince people that my version of the future is the right one.

7:58: It's a lot.

8:00: And so what does it take to be that?

8:02: Certainly somewhat of an outlier, but then over the course of the journey.

8:07: If you go from like early stage, you know, to seed stage to Series A, B, whatever, all let's imagine you get all the way to IPO.

8:15: Over time you have to go through being a great leader, being a great fundraiser, being a great ultimately manager of a culture.

8:24: , and so, you know, if you look at that span, let's say it's 10 years, you start off needing to be the outsider, much more.

8:33: And you have to over time figure out where your journey is and how much of an insider you become because you become the new establishment.

8:40: If you're successful, you actually become the new establishment.

8:42: You're like, you know, Uber went from being the, not the taxi to being the, you know, and, and, and that's, you know, Apple became from 3% market share to being the predom preponderant, you know, either the phone in your pocket or the one that was copied that's like the phone in your pocket.

9:00: .

9:01: And so that is a journey from outlier to insider.

9:05: And so I think you really have to examine yourself, and I think there are different journeys, as in different categories require different things from you.

9:13: , but I would argue all the way through, and actually Brian Chesky is famous for talking about founder mode.

9:19: And it's worth looking into, and I, I had, sorry, my own podcast a couple of, couple of years ago, I had him up on a stage and asked him about.

9:26: Founder mode, and he talks about how, no matter what stage you're at, the founder always needs to be the truth.

9:34: They always need to be the little squeaky wheel that one pushing for the bigger idealism, because all around you as you as you bring a bunch of VCs along with you and money and people and people are looking for an out.

9:48: For 5 years from now, I, you know, I just work nonstop for 5 years, where's the out?

9:52: And the founder's job is to say actually the out is 8 to 10 years from now, because if we go for an out at that point, and I'm just, just doing it in terms of length of, you know, journey, but it's just as an example, as a metaphor for like keep the ambition high and founder mode is always to keep reminding people of the mission in the room, where whatever stage you're at.

10:13: And so do you think, , I guess that would mean that.

10:18: Some of the most valuable traits you can have is adaptability and being able to change.

10:24: And so do you think, you know, some founders might fail because they don't adapt and change, or because maybe they're less capable of learning and changing as a as a result of that learning?

10:34: Right.

10:35: It's funny like I I mentioned Uber and Travis, I mean, Travis is an extremely difficult founder.

10:41: , and I spent the day with him and decided we weren't going to work together, but .

10:46: It's funny, I think that actually Uber in the early stages needed someone that outlier, like, meaning no taxis are gonna be replaced and I'm just gonna put, you know, when he went to London, he put 10,000 cars on street corners, paid them all ahead and then launched the app, and everybody went, oh, what's this?

11:04: Oh my God, there's a car 3 minutes away.

11:07: Now, if you didn't have that level of chutzpah, would you have so quickly conquered a pretty inefficient way for, you know, assuming you're not a taxi driver, but, right, and now we all benefit somewhat from that, except the fact that the investors came in and now they charge you ridiculous multiples on their original investment because they now have the network effect having dominated everything.

11:30: But that was the front load, but then as he became someone that was trying to.

11:35: Explain and build a culture, you know, he was building a pretty toxic culture and it wasn't as inclusive and the driver felt very excluded because they also had a self-driving car unit within it.

11:46: So there were these decisions.

11:48: I think you could love Uber, you should love Uber.

11:50: It should be a brand you love and you just don't.

11:52: I'm just not sure about it, because why?

11:54: Because of the founder.

11:56: But could they have been as impactful without that very, very tough outlier?

12:01: So there are certain businesses that require that, and there are others that where it's OK for a founder to be more, you know, ameliorating the situation.

12:09: Yeah, I guess, , deciding which rules that you want to rip up and replace, .

12:16: Uber, they really pushed it, didn't they in terms of, , even what was legal in different cities and they just sort of forged ahead and then worried about, let's worry about the legal implications later and that does take a certain amount of balls to do that, is it?

12:30: Like, just not, you know, just ignore the laws and and imagine the better world and then everyone will come around eventually.

12:37: It's quite a high risk scenario as well.

12:40: Yeah, and you know, I mean, Steve was incredibly ballsy with, you know, with regard to, I don't know, changing the The music industry changing the way your relationship with carriers on phones, you know, I mean, imagine 2005, I remember asking people, what phone do you have?

12:54: And in America, people say, oh I have Verizon.

12:56: I was like, no, I said, what phone do you have?

12:58: Oh, whatever whatever one they give me for free.

13:00: You literally had no relationship with your phone.

13:03: If you're in Europe, maybe you liked Nokia.

13:04: If you had a BlackBerry, maybe you liked the buttons.

13:08: But you've gone from, it was actually the carrier that and so Steve was like, we have to, we have to have a conversation where we.

13:15: Have a relationship with the carrier, which is why they were stuck with AT&T for an exclusivity deal.

13:20: And then the customer becomes Apple.

13:23: And so they gave them an exclusivity so they could then become, have the connection directly.

13:28: But transforming a category as Travis did with taxis or Steve did with carriers, requires that amount, walk into a room and ask for the unaskable.

13:39: There are clearly lots of other markets where it's not necessarily to do that.

13:43: So also sort of picking your battles, figuring out whether you're the right pattern match for the challenges ahead.

13:49: And I guess, , also with that and that need for change and and adaptability.

13:58: Perhaps there's also a time when a founder who has is particularly good at one of those stages, , that you mentioned before, actually.

14:06: Has to then stand aside and let someone else look after the next stage of growth.

14:11: , so.

14:13: I'm just interested to hear your take on that, you know, when should a founder know what they're good at and when should they delegate and know that they need to stand aside and become a chairperson or something like that.

14:25: Yeah, I mean, I, I think I'll just maybe explain it through, you know, we've worked with, I don't know, 180, 200 founders in the eight years that our company founder that we partner with, , you guys sometimes, which is great.

14:38: , and ours is a peer to peer advice thing where we, we only work with companies if we work with the founder.

14:44: So it's about, it's not about the marketing, it's about the existential storytelling of the company.

14:50: Story led strategy.

14:51: So you like what's your imprint on the world?

14:53: What can we pull out of the founder themselves.

14:56: We've worked with, you know, we, we'd done a sort of mapping exercise and there are founders of every shape and colour.

15:03: .

15:04: And, you know, sometimes it's deep scientists who have no proclivity at all to tell a story or a researcher or a, you know, or AI people that are brought up on pattern recognition and learning are data scientists, and they're not typically as don't have as much of a understanding of how to tell a story.

15:26: And so that's, you know, that's obviously, , a lot of the work we're doing now.

15:31: , I think they come in all different shapes and sizes, , and, but I would say that.

15:39: , in, in the type of work we do, it's finding out what they're good at, making them better at the things they're not good at.

15:46: , and, you know, yeah, sometimes, sometimes a founder can have still have an impact but not be the CEO.

15:53: And sometimes there's a realisation there of like someone else should run the company.

15:57: And maybe that they still keep the title CEO for, you know, but the COO is really running the company because they're not really a day to day person, but they need them in that position.

16:06: So I think sometimes that's about what the board is doing or what the investors are doing to influence what's, what are the success metrics?

16:14: What role should this person who's clearly vital, what role should they play?

16:19: And is it necessarily the running of the company or is it the carrying of the torch?

16:24: Interesting.

16:24: And so.

16:26: You would say that actually through your work helping with the narrative part of of companies, you end up actually spilling over into advising on many other things.

16:38: Yeah, I mean, yeah, for sure.

16:41: So, , you know, examples being I don't know, product development, right?

16:45: So here's the story of the company.

16:47: OK, now how do we make sure that the products live up to that?

16:50: Obviously, I think Apple is kind of the gold standard of that, like the product people, whether it's Johnny and his design team or whether it's the product, you know, the hardware or software people and following an idea that is the imprint of what Apple thinks a device should be, , or a software experience should be.

17:10: And so oftentimes we get called first we do a narrative project and they say, OK, can we do a deep dive on making sure that our products live up to that, or can we reinforce what makes this the right product strategy?

17:22: , another one will be internal culture, like what do we believe in, beliefs and behaviours and how do we behave with each other and, you know, and it doesn't have to be nice to each other.

17:30: Like, you know, there's there's, I know it's pretty famous.

17:34: Netflix has that sort of notion of we're not a family, we're, we're a team.

17:40: And there's people on the bench and there's people on the field.

17:43: The people on the bench need to be as good as the people on the field so I can rotate them in.

17:46: So you think of like Pep Guardiola and Man City of like, just, well, they used to be a very, very good soccer team.

17:52: , and so you build the team, , and, and so internal culture we're often called to do that.

18:00: Investor stuff, , you know, the story we're working on right now, you know, I was on a call with an investor this morning saying, yeah, this company should IPO in 2 years, and the CEOs, you know, has some other journey that seemed longer and so what we're trying to do is to figure out what that story is for the next 3 to 5 years.

18:19: So let's bridge it.

18:19: Between 3 and 5 years, as Steve would say, you can't connect the dots looking forward, but you can look back.

18:25: So if you say, My destiny, where I want to go is here.

18:28: I want the imprint to be this.

18:30: So I connect the dots looking back, whether it's 3 to 5 years, we'll decide how quickly we go along that journey.

18:35: But building that framework of the journey towards an outcome, either a public icon with IPO or a merger or a sale or or whatever that is, whatever the final destination is, planning the long term strategic arc of the company comes out of narrative.

18:51: , and there's many, obviously the more obvious things like how do I, you know, what's the website look like, what the story, and often we'll work with a company like How and how in terms of how does that come to life, visually, experientially, , in design within the product itself, all of those kinds of things.

19:09: So you would say that the, the, the narrative itself is much more than just the outward facing.

19:15: , interpretation of the company, it actually, you know, spills into so many more things and provides so much more value and potentially even can be more valuable over time than even having the right team of people together.

19:27: Hm, yeah, again, it depends, but I think, you know, typically, I think the companies that matter are, imagine you're a cocktail party and you go, oh, have you heard of?

19:38: Whatever.

19:39: You go, oh yeah, sure.

19:40: They're, they're, aren't they?

19:42: da da, oh, OK.

19:43: You're not sharing with them a strategy, you're sharing with them a story.

19:48: But oh yeah, yeah, Uber's the car that da da da, oh, Airbnbs that, you know, they, they, they're really into their like hosts understanding the locals, so if I wanna really be in, you know, some city and really understand it, that would be a really great way to do it because the hosts will help.

20:03: Elevate the experience, , and so I think story comes before strategy and narrative.

20:12: And so as that does, that's how you have the biggest impact on culture.

20:17: That's how you be delineated, becomes mission critical.

20:20: If you're going to IPO, if you're going to IPO you're suddenly confronted with the, well, people are gonna buy shares in this company.

20:27: So it's you, your audience goes from being the people that need to use it.

20:32: And the people that are, you know, funding it, , and the people that are working there to being, well, maybe just about everybody.

20:39: So then what have, what, you know, if you work backwards, then what are the, what are the markers?

20:44: What are, what's the paper trail that you've left that suggests that this direction that we've got to, and, you know, 05 years ago we created this, and then we created that and so there's real understanding of the journey.

20:57: , and so yeah, I think, I think the audience can get bigger and bigger and bigger, , over time, and, and that changes the optics of how important it is.

21:09: But we would say storytelling is mission critical and as important if not more important than strategy and actually becomes a strategy.

21:17: It's, it's a story version of the strategy.

21:19: And I think typically, you know, you would watch your strategy and then, and I'll I'll tell you a funny story, like I remember.

21:26: , Steve, I would present a brief, like this is what we're working on, you know, it's gonna be this and we're gonna do that and then.

21:33: And Steve would be like, that's so boring.

21:34: Like I'm not interested in that.

21:35: Where's the idea?

21:36: And I'm like, well, it's just the brief.

21:37: He's like, no, I want to see an idea.

21:39: So he'd want the idea to be upfront.

21:41: He'd want the story to be part of the conversation and typically in agencies you'd be like, show me the strategy document.

21:47: It's boring, but we'll let the creatives come up with it.

21:49: And he'd be like, no, I want a hypothesis for what it could be.

21:52: I'll give you an example.

21:53: For the app store, there's an app for that.

21:56: We wrote on the brief and she's like that's it.

21:58: Like, no, no, no, we're just, no, that's it.

22:00: I, he didn't say that very often, but when he did it it was great.

22:03: 100 Songs in your pocket was like one of the briefs that we wrote, right?

22:05: And then maybe there's a writer out there that's gonna come tell me that actually they wrote that.

22:09: I can't remember.

22:10: But anyway, so it was always a bunch of us and the writers would come in to help write the brief to show to Steve.

22:16: Now he's a particular creative mind, so he wanted to see an idea that was a hypothesis from early on.

22:22: So I think it's just two ways to look at the world.

22:23: Do you want a strategy?

22:25: I think Amazon's a bit more like a strategy, right?

22:27: You those famous meetings where everybody comes in and they have to read for 10 minutes, and then they all sit and talk about it analytically, and let's try that, let's try that.

22:35: There's no real intention until the strategy is built, whereas you'd walk into an Apple meet and say, well, that's where we're going now, how do we get there?

22:42: So I think they're just two different approaches to things and obviously I'd be more in the story led.

22:47: And in your work you do creating or helping shape narratives for companies.

22:54: Do you have a particular set process that you go through to be able to do that?

22:58: You know, how do you actually create a narrative or or hone a narrative?

23:02: Yeah.

23:03: Well.

23:04: You know, as I said, we're called founder, we couldn't afford the vowels, so it's FNDR.

23:08: We only work with the founder and their team.

23:11: So that means it's a peer to peer kind of narrative therapy is the way we talk about it.

23:16: And so our process is designed to provoke the founder to tell us their story.

23:23: To throw stimulus, ideas, strategies, words, pictures, things that are going on in culture, opportunities, and have them respond to those.

23:31: And that's how I'd worked with Steve for 11 years.

23:35: Show him ideas, put a hypothesis up, have him break it down, have him grab the pen and draw.

23:40: You, you got this wrong, right?

23:41: And he writes it up and I'm like, yes, that's exactly what I needed.

23:44: I needed a reaction to an idea.

23:46: The idea has to be close enough to be a good.

23:50: But it doesn't have to have cracked it, but it's in putting an idea up that you then get into a debate around ideas.

23:56: , and so that process was very much orchestrated and that's how we operate the founder, which is our first meeting we call a provocation.

24:06: How can we provoke you to say shit about where you want to go and what are the challenges, what are the opportunities.

24:11: , our second meeting is story.

24:15: Most people's second meeting is strategy.

24:16: Can we nail the strategy so we know what the story should be?

24:19: We're like, no, we're gonna explore, we might do a story exploration, and Steve and my partner and Nick will come up with here's 3 or 4 different stories that you could be.

24:29: Let's explore them and through story we'll decide if the strategy's right.

24:33: And it's like, yo, that one, I love that one, but I don't think that's where the business is gonna go.

24:37: I love, that's the one where the business is going, but it's boring.

24:39: So I love a bit of that and a bit of that.

24:41: Great, that's what we want, so we play with these.

24:44: , hypotheses of story and then pull the genius out of the founder is on the founder team, so it's the senior execs too.

24:53: And so we go from a provocation to a story, and then strategy and story sort of merge and you say, OK, now let's bring in the strategy, who are the people that need to hear this message?

25:03: And typically, you know, people have 3 or 4 different audiences and then they have 3 or 4 different platforms that that has to, whatever.

25:10: A website or a conference or, or the internal marketing or the external, you know, launch of a product or they'll tell us at the beginning where the story needs to land and our job is to land them in those places.

25:23: And, and then if, if we land, say, on a, oh, the role of the website is with the consumer or the, OK, great, and this is the messaging great, then that becomes the brief to bring in a partner like a design partner that would then go nuts and bring it to life.

25:36: , but it's trying to really orchestrate everything that a company does through the lens of what the, I, I think quintessentially if you ask people, either founders or VCs like what a founder about, it's about pulling the, the little gems, the genius about what I really want to do with this company and get rid of the noise and clarify what that is and then lay that out as a plan so that in this long journey you don't lose track.

26:05: , but actually fulfilled the outlier objective of that dent in the universe that you were looking for.

26:13: Right, so the simplification is as important as the as the content, I guess.

26:22: Yeah, I mean, hopefully today I didn't use a bunch of big words because I try not to.

26:26: Like we don't use big strategy words, we don't use like Steve used to beat me up if I used a big word cause British people have a reputation for walking into a room with a new word, right?

26:36: And that must be a British strategist.

26:37: In fact, my first meeting.

26:40: They were like, just come along and watch this.

26:42: And a guy came in and he did have an accent not dissimilar to ours, and he said, Steve, I've got some research.

26:47: I want to share it with you, da da da, and he clicked on a presentation.

26:50: I soon learned I never did a click presentation ever again with him.

26:54: , and he start, so anyway, we did some research and and he's like, just one question.

27:00: How long is this presentation?

27:01: And he's like, oh, it's 73 pages.

27:03: He's like, great, can you just go to 73?

27:06: And we went to 73 and he looked at it and he went, yeah, got it, got it.

27:09: Yeah, it wasn't worth the 72 slides.

27:11: What else you got?

27:12: And this was minute 3 of a 1 hour meeting, he had nothing else.

27:16: So I'm sitting there, I hadn't said a word, I was just listening in, writing notes to myself like never come in with a 72, never not have 7 other things you're ready to talk about just in case he doesn't want to talk about that.

27:27: Like, it's about pulling the genius out of the founder by understanding how they're looking at things, what are the issues you can solve that day, being useful.

27:36: And so Media Arts Lab was a 500 people being useful for Steve Jobs in terms of how it could communicate change in the world.

27:43: And anybody that's worked in media arts lab will tell you it was pretty doctrinaire in terms of its weekly rotation.

27:49: What does Steve need?

27:50: How do we go shoot 10 campaigns in one weekend, was all about bringing those ideas to life, , in, in that very specific way.

27:59: And as you can hear, the source material for how we work continues to be somewhere in there.

28:04: In your.

28:06: , your career working for various different founders, but also growing your own business.

28:13: How do you think you have grown and what are your biggest challenges yourself as a founder and a and a leader?

28:20: That's a great question, Roj.

28:21: I'm gonna just .

28:25: Push into that because I think that I built an agency that was bigger than it needed to be or should be.

28:34: , it, it wasn't an agency, but it, but I think because I built Media Arts lab from 40 people to 340 or something and 5 offices and I was in expansion mode and actually the thing I do is a very intimate 1 to 1 thing and people just want to talk to the to the partners in our company.

28:52: You know, and we're bringing these incredible people to work with us, who are all now leading strategy departments all around the world.

28:59: , and, but it was hard on them because they'd be like, no, no, no, where's James or Stephen or Nick or because, right, so it wasn't about, and so actually we're better as a helicopters coming in and coming down on ropes work for and then leave.

29:11: because that's kind of the offering, peer to peer.

29:15: And I got lost in our growth, so we were 25 people two years ago.

29:20: , and suddenly we were like, obviously, you know, this it's been a challenging couple of years where I was like, wow, we actually don't have enough work.

29:27: And so we've been through a much clearer rationalisation and the market had to tell us.

29:33: I didn't see it, despite supposedly being able to advise founders, I couldn't see it myself, so maybe I need a.

29:39: Adviser of my own, couldn't see it myself that I'd built the wrong business around the the wrong team around the wrong business, and it wasn't anybody's fault, except my own, maybe, that I hadn't identified that the core of what they wanted was just a small intimate process and we shouldn't try to have three teams of directors and people and growth and long term.

30:01: It's actually, it's right to be small.

30:04: , and now we're small, it's much better.

30:06: And, and I don't, yeah, it's, it's a, it's the right size.

30:10: And I think maybe there's a lesson there, which is there is a right size for companies and just continuing to grow isn't always the right thing.

30:19: You can grow past your optimum size.

30:22: And then you end up doing things you don't want to do.

30:24: You end up spending all your time managing the company, not advising people.

30:27: You end up, and that's actually what people wanted to do, that's what I'm good at.

30:32: Maybe I'm OK at running a company, but I don't know.

30:35: , but I'm definitely good at advising founders.

30:37: And so I was spending less time doing that and more time trying to parlay the work to other people and then people were like, but we wanted, you know.

30:46: So yeah, that was my own realisation and I'm sure that there's a lesson in there for other founders.

30:51: Interesting, we have a very similar thing in our agency because in terms of keeping design quality high, , it's as soon as you grow too big, then you can start to lose control of that craft, making sure that the standards are upheld and It's for us just growing very slowly and intentionally and making sure we have the right people in the right place rather than just, OK, let's take all the work and and great because I liken it to.

31:19: , almost having a like a Michelin star restaurant approach, you know, we're not trying to run a restaurant chain with thousands of outlets that does exactly the same thing.

31:29: Every single thing we do is handcrafted and you want someone to come to you with one brand one year and then they move to another company 5 years later and they're gonna get a completely different thing, which is completely bespoke because that's what companies need.

31:44: It's yeah, it's interesting the parallels there but you're called How and how man.

31:48: If I come and work for how and how I'm asking when do I meet the how, at least one of them.

31:53: So, you know, we're not called.

31:55: James, Stephen and Nick, but close enough.

31:57: Yeah, exactly.

31:58: We do make a point of making sure that we're there and visible and, you know, and, and how are aware of how each project is going and, you know, the check-ins there.

32:07: And look, the future is gonna be, you know, with the capability of AI is going to be small groups of people.

32:13: So, , new skill sets or just, you know, .

32:18: AI being crafted by the experienced people, and I mean experience in terms of the domain as in a great designer, but also their experience in terms of working with AI, , all of which we're just learning about, , right now, but there's probably smaller operations, you know, I think Sam Altman said that the next billion dollar companies could might be run by one person.

32:40: , all evidence suggests that a lot of the what we know to be craft.

32:48: will be , a lot of, a lot of that, , will be operated by AI, , and our job will be the human interaction, the curation, the, the articulation and imagination of it.

33:06: , and, you know, yeah, I, you know, we had 350 people at Media Arts lab because we were shooting 3 commercials every weekend, but Again, I'm not sure they probably have that anymore.

33:17: We had a 50,000 square foot space with three cameras ready to go.

33:20: Well, maybe pretty soon they'll just be hitting buttons and curating that through AI.

33:26: , so I think that obviously is, I think it would be, it's important for us to recognise.

33:34: With AI, the conversation is changing on multiple levels for founders, multiple levels.

33:39: I, you know, if you think about that growth path, you would, OK, I'm now, you know, I'm at Series A, so I'm gonna get 50 people, and then I'm at Series C, so I've got 300 people and then by the time I'll be 3000 people and then I'll work towards IPO and I'll be 10,000 people.

33:53: I don't know whether that's true or not, right?

33:55: So do you have to be a great manager of people or a great manager of machines?

33:59: I, there you go, there you go.

34:01: I saw Kraftwerk last week and, , live, and they're they're, they're 1970, , they were talking about computer love and they were talking about half human, half machine, and it was so prescient, you know, so many years ago.

34:19: And just a reminder of at that time it seemed so.

34:25: , delightfully naive, and they were really out there, Kraftwerk, weren't they?

34:28: , you know, electronic music and, and, and seeing this future coming of of auto dating and auto bounds and computer love and, and, , and now we're in the middle of it and it's happening to us.

34:44: And of course it's our belief as creative people that we offer something special and unique.

34:48: I think we will continue to do that and should continue to do that and continue to put the human touch on whatever gets created, , to what extent.

35:00: How many man hours, women hours, people hours are needed to get to that is more the question.

35:06: You know, we want as much won't be replaced by AI will be replaced by people using AI.

35:11: It may be a better way to think of that exactly.

35:13: It's I guess we're in the business of communication, which is, you know, connecting humans together and the means by which we do that is changing quite dramatically.

35:25: Because as you said, you know, it used to take a vast amount of resources to create a TV commercial or a piece of communication, but now if we can do that much quicker, then does that mean that we can communicate better?

35:39: Or does it mean that there'll be more communication out there, which is less considered because of the amount of time it takes to do it has been reduced so much.

35:49: And that's, I guess the way that I think about it.

35:52: My fear is that we'll just have a lot of content, a lot more content out there, which is just not very valuable.

36:00: It's funny because the, the, the, you know, the, the adolescence thing that just came out a week ago and has rocked the whole world in terms of the subject matter, obviously, , 13 year old boys, you know, being that violent.

36:15: , versus the, the technique of shooting unedited in, and how much craft and preparation that was.

36:25: Amazing, right?

36:26: And you could argue that's an incredible, no one could ever do, right?

36:30: But all of those innovations go into AI.

36:33: So you will in the future go to them and say, OK, I want to shoot it, but I want to shoot it in a one take style of adolescence.

36:40: And there you go.

36:41: So the leaps still, there will be many leaps forward made by humans, , and almost all of them will be made having AI as the tool for them.

36:52: And then of course, over time.

36:55: People are saying, Hey, I'll make the leaps themselves, and, , I don't think anybody knows whether that's true or not, but I guess if you follow the direction it's going in, the compounding effect is massively exponential.

37:08: , and I think in all of that, just reminding ourselves just why we're always looking for the humanistic story, we're always looking, is just ensuring that the human is considered and that the machine isn't designing for other machines, , in a at a very existential level.

37:25: , is, is the job of, and that's why we like working with founders, because they're not bureaucracies running companies, they're not machines running companies, they're humans.

37:35: Well, on that note, thank you so much, James, , for all of your insights.

37:39: As always, fascinating conversation that leads us in many different directions, but also just incredible value for, , founders and leaders who might be listening to this.

37:49: So thank you for your time, your insights and your knowledge.

37:52: You're welcome.

37:53: It was fun.

37:54: Thank you.