Risk, Resilience, and Redefining Success with Piers Linney

21:52Jeannette:the research online for the pharma companies people who wanted to access these doctors so we'd pay the doctors like 100 quid to go and look at something for a few minutes and then we'd obviously add a margin and sell it on to the pharma companies and that did okay but you know you needed more more money to scale it and after the dot-com crash you couldn't raise more money luckily my co-founder and his family kind of kept it going for a while i left so the The thing about that was, though, although it was hard work, is that you saw an entire economic cycle in 12 months. It was like, leave the building, raise 700 grand, put a team, then raise, I think we raised about 700, okay, put a team together, build a product, and a developer then, it cost an absolute fortune, build a product, take it to market, start selling it, find product market fit, start running out of money, do a convertible round, get rid of half the team, do an emergency finance and do a down round and then kind of you know you find yourself out of a job like literally in 12 months that'd take five to seven eight ten years even in kind of in old old world economy so that was quite where it was a baptism of fire that's that was the first business and then i went into a business where somebody else owned a bit i had a few shares in it which was in kind of a media so this was doing um lots of djs had all their rights so we're going to do custom burn cds and this is pre pre mp3s and itunes right i mean just dating myself there aren't i it's really old that does and i remember sitting down a guy came around to see us downstairs i remember this he was sat downstairs and you i was kind of like what are you doing oh we're looking at ways of um helping people find music and it was what's it called now it's bought by apple my mind's just gone blank the thing on your phone where you can listen to music what's it called my mind's gone blank i have to find it no um no uh spotify no um the one where you can hold it up to um you can hold it up to some music it'll tell you what it is oh i don't know it's far too techy for me don't use that anyway so these guys now then it became like a unicorn basically and then And then Shazam, that was it.

24:10Jeannette:Shazam! Yeah, he sat downstairs. And then it was just text, there was no apps, and all this stuff. It was just bonkers, and that became like a unicorn. Anyway, so I did that for about two years, and I got out of that eventually again, because I was a downsize myself. And then when I started making money is when I started understanding that, right, I've got this skill set now. I'm a lawyer, I'm a banker, I understand Finance City. I built a website, and then one of my ex-bosses had like a kind of a 2000 vintage venture capital fund, which I kind of helped him sort of tidy up a little bit. And then the regulated vehicle, we changed the name and we used it to do sort of financing various things.

24:43Jeannette:So through that, I was kind of raising money in the UK and Germany, some in the US, but mainly US hedge funds. And then from that, I started working out, well, actually, rather than me going and finding the deals, I know what deals they look for. So I started creating the deals. So that became quite lucrative. Then I became a partner in one of those hedge funds for a while. But all the time, the money I made, because I was making quite a lot of money back in those days, I was investing in companies, helping people buy companies, doing M &A, starting them. And some grew, some didn't work out. We could do a whole podcast of things that didn't work out, to be quite honest.

25:19Jeannette:But some of them grew. Some got to like, you know, 50 million in revenue, four, five million EBITDA, and then we exited those, and I've been going ever since.

25:28Piers Linney:and so so tech has been a big part hasn't it Piers you know a lot of those businesses that you talked about tech is sort of you know obviously an area that you're massively interested you're passionate about it and obviously the business that you've got today is very much focused on AI and kind of how everything is changing the world of tech and what advice would you give to someone today that's looking to start a business that maybe is a bit of a technophobe or less confident with tech than you are because almost if you can't get your head around this stuff I think it's quite difficult to survive in business today right um yeah so so how do you get comfortable when you do not have a natural aptitude for tech and you're an entrepreneur that wants to scale up what's the advice you

26:18Jeannette:give to people that might be in that place so i've always been interested in the the next thing actually i spent a bit too much of my life to be honest with you different podcast discussion living in the future not the now so so i was always interested in the next thing like the next wave of communications and mobile technology and machine to machine and you know the iphone rather than blackberries and then cloud infrastructure and hosted email and then unified communications then more cloud and now you know blockchain crypto and now it's kind of but along the way, I can't write a line of code.

26:54Jeannette:I did a bit of HTML back in the day, but I can't write code. But I understand enough about technology to be dangerous and to kind of have an idea about the rough architecture of what I'm trying to do. Somebody else would probably put together the actual architecture and somebody else would actually build it. The beauty of the world we're living in is that, and this sounds corny, but it is true, is that technology is being democratized, right? Now, you can't quite sit there and just tell it to write, create an application. You know, if I heard of vibe coding, you just talk to a machine and it writes code and does something, then you iterate it.

27:31Jeannette:You know, you probably couldn't put that into production. But the days of, you know, getting someone, paying someone to create an MVP for you or a simple version of your app or prototype, I mean, I guess probably, I don't know if you can see it behind me here, that's a 3D printer. So now you can conjure things into actual physical reality as well. So the barriers to entry are being reduced. They're going down, especially when it comes to code and technology. I've spent, sometimes successfully, other times not so successfully, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds, sometimes my own money, on code that was worth nothing.

28:07Jeannette:It just took too long. It was too complicated, too expensive, and it never went anywhere. That's going away. So the good news is the barriers are coming down. Very soon you will be able to. The problem with technology is moving so quickly, everybody thinks it's going to stay as it is, and it never does. I always say, people say, oh, yeah, but it won't do this. And I always say, hyphen yet after everything. So there will come a day, the not too distant future, where you can talk to a machine, and it will write you the code for a perfectly production-ready, deployable application, whatever you want that to be.

28:41Jeannette:That's the good news. The bad news is everyone can do that. so going back to your question what it still boils down to is what is the problem you're trying to solve think what AI is I've got my AI team supervisor t-shirt on think what AI is everyone's looking to use a technology not solve a problem with the technology so when we started Implement AI we were not really thinking about what's it going to be this business it was just get on the pitch and start kicking the ball around and talking to people, especially businesses about AI, how they think, how they adopt it, how their stakeholders approach it, how do you reduce the barriers?

29:26Jeannette:And through that, we did lots of almost like consulting and pilots. And through that, we learned what we think is the way to approach it. We built a platform. So the beauty of it is, and we did that, it would have cost us millions of pounds to do what we did three, four years ago, right? Amazingly, the first two years of our business was profitable. I mean it's unheard of we've actually paid ourselves a salary it's insane I've never paid myself a salary for a long time so that's the key is that you've still got to find a problem something you're you know people are you know find your passion I'm not a big believer in that you've got to be interested in it because you might spend six days a week doing it but just find something you're flipping good at right and then use technology to come into existence I mean now I can doodle an idea on paper turn it into a 2D image using AI turn it into a 3D image iterate that so it looks about right turn that into a CAD drawing and just print it and it's in real life, it's in my hand so you couldn't do that three years ago so that's the beauty of it you can now, now the competition is going to become it's going to be enormous more and more people are going to find themselves looking for gainful employment because this technology is going to displace a lot of repetitive, mundane, low-level work, if I can call it that.

30:45Jeannette:I'm probably not the right way of describing it. But, you know, work that the technology can do just as well as we can. And it's going to get better. And that bar is going to keep rising. So eventually, everything I've ever done, law and accounting degree, lawyer, investment banker, hedge fund manager, all that stuff that I got paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for a year is going to zero. And I really mean that. You are better off being a plumber. so so so yeah so seriously in in that mix of opportunities what you've got to do is think about not today three years down the line where do you think this technology is going to be and i write about a lot of my newsletter where do you think it's going to be and try and do something that's not going to be headed off by it at the pass because you can't compete with it so you've got to add that human experience empathy you know i think you know care is a great one i was at a A conference of the day is a franchise sector.

31:42Jeannette:Great sector, you know, very interesting people, very passionate about their businesses, lots of care companies there, care at home. And I'm kind of saying, you know, you've probably got longevity in care because people want a human experience. But eventually, in the next 10 years, and I'm really pushing about it, I could be five, you will happily let a robot look after your elderly parents. But you still need a human to put the home together, manage it, and what it's doing, and why and the empathy and understanding the relationship so i always say it's like a pyramid of value like that of human labor cognitive and physical and it's been filled with technology for the industrial revolutions first second now the third well now the fourth actually but the pyramid got bigger global populations wealth there's more small money going around to spend so the pyramid got bigger even though the triangles and portion got smaller but now the pyramid is not getting bigger populations are static unless you're in africa maybe and there's more technology now you've got intelligence that can use all the tools and now eventually you're going to have embodied AI so robots so you've got to think about that top pyramid which is getting smaller and migrate there and play in there and add value but using the technology so the last thing I'll say that will shut up is you've got to become a master at it use it every day sidekick create images create videos just just understand the power of it and that will help you understand where the world's going.

33:07Piers Linney:Well, and I guess don't be afraid of it. You know, it's here. It's not a future thing. It's here. It's now. It's moving fast. And I remember we were, probably about a month ago, we were at the Festival of Entrepreneurs with our common friend, Alex Chisnell. And you were on stage and you said, remember, AI is the worst it's ever going to be today. So it might not be able to do everything that you want it to do right now, but it won't be very long at all. It's like dial-up internet.

33:33Jeannette:It's dial-up internet. you always say that AI it's the worst it's ever going to be and I say that I grew up in the age of dial-up internet the first ISPs and I've got a Starlink on my van conversion that took 30 years the equivalent has happened if you think about it in generative AI probably 3 years and then it's going to be a year, 6 months, a month, a week a day, couple of hours, couple of minutes then it'll create artificial general intelligence and that's going to be better than us or cognitive tasks and that's going to be better inventing better robots so they can then place AGI into it and off they go doing their thing.

34:09Jeannette:Then you're going to create ASI, a super intelligence where you don't even understand how it thinks or what it does. It's going to solve aging, solve nuclear fusion. The people you love won't have to die horrible diseases before their time. Fantastic. Problem is, I'm not sure what we're going to do all day.

34:26Piers Linney:Well, I guess that's the point though, isn't it? where is a human valued in whatever the offering is right so if you take hospitality which is a sector that i've been in for many years you know things like answering the you know calling the front desk to find out what time the gym is open clearly not you know you can you can solve all of that but actually you might want to have an interaction with um the chef for example that has cooked you the beautiful meal and can talk about where he's from and all of that kind of stuff but i think customer segmentation is interesting as well because if you're a business traveler normally you want to get in get out get your wi-fi have your meetings that's it whereas if you're traveling for leisure again you know you possibly value more of a human interaction in different parts of the customer journey so i think there's a there's a piece around really understanding your customer segmenting it and saying okay where can tech completely replace but where are humans still valued because a human to human connection is still, you know, worth something in certain parts of the process, right?

35:31Jeannette:Yes, I think hospitality is a good example, actually. You've got some roles. There might be, you know, there were call centres in hospitality. There were people, you know, working. I worked in hospitality when I was a student in bars. I used to be a speed flare bartender. I did it in Germany and various places. I worked in restaurants, usually in the bar, though. and you know that that's hard to do you know the day will come when you have a pretty capable you know cocktail robot that can crack a few jokes and make any drink you want perfectly every single time but it's but it's some way out but the point is like even hospitality is you've got this kind of pyramid in you and some roles they are going to go away so you've got to think about if you work in hospitality or it's your business is what are they and i always say there's like three vectors right variability value and velocity So if it's high velocity, like a fighter pilot with tracking 200 targets, humans can't do that.

36:26Jeannette:AI can. If it's high variability, you're doing lots and lots of things. I'm doing a bit of waitressing. I'm doing a bit of bar. I'm doing a bit of cleaning. I'm emptying the bins. I'm going to pick up some more stock. AI can't really do that. If it's low to medium value, humans can do that. AI can do that, sorry. If it's high value, like care maybe, or trying to sell a private jet, that's probably not going to be an AI, it's going to be human. So you've got the extremes, right? If it's anything in the middle though, it's a human machine partnership. It's where they're going to work together in different roles or in the same organisation doing different things.

37:03Jeannette:But all the time, at an exponentially increasing rate, the cognitive AI and then the embodied AI, just AI on legs with lots of sensors, is going to get better. It's going to be chasing after the human work essentially so people say to me all the time what are we all going to do I don't know, did we really evolve to go and work in I'm not going to pick on particular jobs, I've done most of myself but in a call centre or stuck behind a computer all day, keying in just data into a computer, I don't know I'm not convinced

37:40Piers Linney:No, and actually I was listening to a show I think it was on Wake Up To Money or something like that a while ago Sounds like a show you were listening to you've probably been on it you've probably been on it I love Wake Up To Money, it's a great show but on there they were talking about something, it was a really high percentage, something like 50 % of jobs today didn't exist you know, 6-7 years ago but it's just going to grow even even, you know, change even faster isn't it? I don't buy

38:09Jeannette:I don't buy, there are going to be lots of new jobs to displace the old jobs just like what happened when the PC came out I think there are lots of new jobs implement AI our business we've got lots of people in job with job titles that didn't exist two years ago yeah but we say to them we're going to hire you maybe one more of you but apart from that you need to build agents to automate what you do that's that's in their job description

38:33Piers Linney:yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah but it's it's more radical thinking isn't it and I think for big organizations it's harder than if you're an entrepreneurial starter because if you're an entrepreneur you've got the opportunity to build this right from the beginning you know you've not got legacy systems that you have to unpick and legacy processes that you have to unpick which is sort of riskier if you've got millions of customers to deal with you know that transition is a lot harder i think with big large organizations but they've got more to lose though

39:02Jeannette:probably large organizations when we're large ones is you know they've been through these cycles of you know technology transformation all this stuff and three-year cycles and these projects are like like painting the fourth bridge you get to one end you've got to start again the other end you never it's never ending ai is an extended existential risk to these large organizations and they've got to really rethink what they do because their competition are not all the people at the annual conferences they all go and meet and have cocktails with and champagne it's a new entrant that does what they do with 25 % of the people now if you're GE you're not going to get a new entrant or Lockheed Martin suddenly making jet jet aircraft if you're in knowledge if you're in the information economy maybe even hospitality to some extent because you can now create you know a bar or an environment I was in Japan recently and the robots there aren't as clever as people think they are quite often but still especially in China especially robots kids are growing up with them and interacting with them it's quite normal so you're going to have the competition is going to be the organisations, there's always this saying going around, isn't there?

40:04Jeannette:AI is not going to take your job or kill your business. Somebody using it or a business who's deployed it is going to. And that is absolutely true. So they've got to bite the bullet and start small, think big, and start implementing this technology. Because otherwise, in an exponential world, right, linear plans, linear approach to growth and change isn't going to cut it.

40:27Piers Linney:Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. I think whole functions will disappear. So if you take something like revenue management, yield management, you know, it's data. You're not going to need a revenue manager to be changing the prices of a, you know, a room in a hotel overnight. You know, that will all be...

40:42Jeannette:Then you get to, I think, organizational, like, employment silos start to break down, right? Say you're reasonably good at finance, haven't you even been qualified? You're in the finance department, right? You don't know a huge amount about credit control and all the jargon, but now you can find out very quickly because it's there for you. AI models know it they've got all the knowledge that's sitting in there you create an agent to actually do the work then you think oh actually now I'll do the revenue analysis well a very good analysis now you do that so the point is if you've got a career you've got to start thinking about what is it I'm good at what are the adjacent roles that I could do with a little bit of help from AI and that is a future to careers it's spreading your ability to add value to organisation not sitting in a silas saying well I just do revenue analysis that's it yeah that's not needed we have people who say to us I've got a team of four people all day and what do they do well they sit on phones all day listening sorry they sit listening to recorded phone calls all day from our customers or support calls looking for compliance training or missed revenue opportunities that no longer is necessary I don't care what anyone says there's no point dancing around it and we talk about you know augmenting humans most of what we do but in some cases there are roles that you need to redeploy

42:01Piers Linney:them yeah absolutely absolutely right so so here's when you think about the world of entrepreneurship do you think entrepreneurs are born or made i think it's a mixture so look at we'll look at

42:17Jeannette:the year i grew up in right most entrepreneurs um people who are backed by say the the venture capital funds you know back of the three eyes of the day they were people who were in business and they they learned a trade whatever it was it could be a trade or it could be working in finance and they thought you know what i'm actually better than my boss at this my boss wants to retire i want to take their business over so they then went to these funds and remortgaged their house and raised some money and a bit of debt bought mbo's management buyouts or management buy-ins and that's how venture capital kind of started really and private equity came along and buying entire businesses more financial engineering now they they may have been born to some extent so i think the born bit is that you've got to be able at some point whether you leave school and start a business or whether you decide one day to stop being an employee and become an owner right and all the risks that come with it including leading your house there's got to be an element within you that's willing to take on that risk and be able to look at a situation look at a market and in your head work out well if i do x y and z in this environment i should be able to create this much value and i'm willing to take the risk to do that i think that is in it's inherent it's intrinsic you're kind of born to some extent but being an entrepreneur being a business leader you can 100 % learn it you know places like sandhurst or or in the u.s academies they teach you to be a leader all right there's thousands of business schools around the world teaching you how to operate a business so you can learn business and operations i don't always think you can learn the risk appetite you've got to it's got to be part of you now you might learn to take on more of it because you understand the risk more because you're an expert so in your head there isn't that much risk but externally it looks like there's a lot of risk and as you know when you're building a business especially a new one like when you're raising finance you know your first money is from people who love you they don't even care about the business and as you move out in the ring there's There's people who, they know you.

44:15Jeannette:There's people who know people who know you. Then it's networks. Then it's VCs. Then it's people who don't know you. And they do more due diligence and work to find out. And then you do your series, your series, your seed, your pre-seed, your seed, your series A, your series B. And as you move out, there's less risk. There's a lower return. That's how you should think about it. I think it's a mixture.

44:37Piers Linney:Yeah, yeah. And attitude to failure, Piers, because, you know, you mentioned earlier that a lot of the stuff that you've done, we could do a separate podcast on the things that didn't go right um what's what's been what's helped you bounce back when things have not gone well do you think so partly where i am bloody mindedness

44:56Jeannette:but uh you know our businesses um you know we had one of big cloud business actually we had to sell in a fire so it cost me like it cost me millions of millions of pounds personally but you know you look at the people who used to work for me now and i've worked with some of them since they've They work for me. And I look at them all and they're all over. They've been LinkedIn-like. They're all like leaders and directors of this. They own this. Some of them make millions, right? Some of them, I help them make millions. So you look at that and I love seeing that. But it is soul-destroying. There's no doubt about it.

45:25Jeannette:And I remember when in one business we had to go and get the, put into administration actually, and we had to go and get an independent lawyer to sign a stat deck. It's like a death certificate. And I'm sat in these little old lawyers' offices. All the big lawyers are back at HQ waiting for me. and his lawyer said you were right I'm like I'm well it's in tears and he's like you're right I was like no I've got to sign that and he goes oh right yes okay sorry sorry anyway he goes off to get his stamp and I'm watching on this like screen in the wall in his little reception Sir Philip Green in a select committee being grilled about where's that 600 million quid of pension fund when he gone and I remember thinking and the sky were trying to ring me to get me on the phone what's going on because I was like quite well I was better known then and they lost interest in me because I said Philip Green and I thought there's always somebody there's always somebody having a worse day and then I got up and got on with it right started a new business and then my only mentor I've ever had is Ken Elissa and I remember once I had another thing that didn't quite work out so well I was in his office and I was moaning about it and he said look you know self-pity doesn't become you you know you were clear of all you invested, stakeholder, plan was it didn't work out, it's partly timing the market went against you just get up and get on with it and I thought right he's right so I got up got out six months writing a new business plan starting a business put money in a raise some money and that one didn't work out either it's just like but then you then you go again you only get out of bed for a couple of weeks and you go again as long as you're honest with people around you even if they don't fully understand um and and you've you know you've done your best I think yeah it's okay it's when you've just given up or you can't be bothered or you haven't tried to pivot or do something you just thought whatever i think you know you've got to do your best and try and maximize and attain as much value as possible but sometimes as you probably know that's all you do know you've just got to fill the hole in and get and carry on because throwing more money at it throwing more time at energy isn't gonna get you anywhere and you know that in your heart of hearts and often especially first-time entrepreneurs or people don't you know you think this is the one the first business is the one that's going to help you buy an island and it often isn't is it it's

47:34Piers Linney:the second third fourth case is fifth yeah yeah absolutely but i love the process it's the process

47:42Jeannette:of having an idea and starting something and then testing out your hypothesis and hopefully then getting to scale it there's nothing else nothing else like that yeah well it's the hunt isn't it

47:54Piers Linney:as opposed to a certain degree it's you know it's the chase and the thrill and all of that that comes with it and then all of a sudden you know if you're successful it's amazing but like you say you've got to be prepared to take those people don't people don't get the grind you hear these

48:07Jeannette:words don't you they sound cheesy the grind but it is we started afferton bikes what five years ago you know and we started a bike company just before covid it's the worst time you could have started a bike company the last 25 30 years because everyone bought all these bikes thinking everyone's going to buy bikes and no one did there's a glut of demand they've all been you know discounted lots of bike companies went out of business and all the bike shops went out of business but we just kept going and we print our bikes using 3D printers so we had no inventory or stock so our model helped you know five years later probably next year hopefully we'll break even but it's a stock it always is and you could be even like all these companies where AI where there's something you read about them they're worth billions of this and billions of that they've got a long way to go

48:57Piers Linney:yeah yeah and how do you deal with people that say oh it's all right for you pears you know you've got your there you are with all your money your successful businesses on tv but they don't know to your point the grind the disappointments the heartache the sleepless nights the risk that you take personally and you know kind of professionally as well with other people's money so so how do you respond with that when people are a little bit flippant about what they see as your perfect life perfect success when we know that the reality is is often very different right well i don't really

49:31Jeannette:talk about my life a lot if you look at any of my social media i talk about business and stuff and where i am what i'm doing maybe very rare very very rare there'll be a post about my life so it's quite quite private about that but you're right people do they say oh it's right for you it's like well hang on a minute you know just you and then you can sit down and sort you know you don't want to go on about it but you start to talk about the sacrifices you made and you know relationships and there's you know money money you've lost money you've made and you know you get to the point where you're sort of comfortable really but even when you've got i've got two businesses now right afton bikes is kind of getting there now implement ai could be very exciting you know it's a fast moving market but you know it looks like it's growing pretty quickly that's worse in some cases they think well alright okay the plane's on the runway now and it's taking off and I'm reaching like you know the right speed to pull back on and you're like is it going to take off and at what trajectory what angle and have I got enough fuel and it doesn't matter whether it's kind of going badly sometimes or going really well the concern and the worry in running a business doesn't change

50:39Piers Linney:yeah yeah yeah absolutely so you've got to you've got to have grit determination nation be prepared to take the hits don't stay down too long get back up crack on learn from it i guess is the big thing as well isn't it yeah but i also think that go again but i also think

50:53Jeannette:that the gig economy is coming for everybody so organizations don't want people on jobs and salaries and poe they want people in you know in sort of discrete periods of time might be a week it might be a day it might be three years but they want people on contract so i think that it's like the old saying isn't it that there's a book in everybody i think there's a business in everybody but i think everyone's gonna have to start thinking about that at some point they're going to be in business or at least trying to find work themselves and if you don't become a master of this technology you know there's is it 9.5 million people in the uk out of a working population of 43 million that choose not to work right however you want to describe that they're never going to work even if they change their minds because they're out of the market they've got no skills and the skills you need now and the need for junior roles is kind of drying up and that's the worry and the worry about ai really is two is one is bad actors using it but the big one we're talking about is almost like wealth and social mobility crystallizes so look at me how did i end up sitting in this podcast with you got educated worked my socks off a bit of chat you know networking.

52:05Jeannette:Now if I can't get a job as a young lawyer because AI can do it, how do you climb the ladder? So you've got to start thinking now about climbing ladders or having those skills so you can do adjacent roles and add more value to get on in life.

52:21Piers Linney:Because if you don't, you won't.

52:23Jeannette:Ever.

52:24Piers Linney:Yeah, you're absolutely right. And Piers, through your career, life, professional personal you'll have had loads of advice can you think of a standout piece of advice that's really helped you over these years well i kind of mentioned earlier really is um don't chase rabbits down halls so yeah let me let me just put a bit more light on that sometimes you know

52:48Jeannette:something's not going right right it might be your entire business it might be a product it might be i don't know somebody you've hired just not working out and you stick your head in the sand and if I do a bit more work on it but you know it's not going right and you learn as you get older maybe you're more objective about it it's more ruthless but sometimes you've got to cut your losses you can't just keep sinking value into it whatever that looks like and you've got to cut your losses sometimes rather than keep going down holes and getting stuck just fill it in and move on

53:20Piers Linney:yeah yeah knowing when to quit move on

53:23Jeannette:yeah

53:26Piers Linney:yeah that's a great piece of advice And Piers, can you think of the toughest time you've had in your career in life? What's been the hardest time for you, would you say?

53:36Jeannette:I don't know. I've got two arms, two legs. Depends how you define tough. But I suppose the time where a lot of things kind of came together, really, was like, actually, kind of when I was on Dragon's Den, actually. But after that, I had to put a business in administration that spent five, six years building. they put two million could have made money into it that was quite complicated um got divorced so that was going on at the same time so it's quite a few things going on and then what do i do and then who am i problem i had with the media especially is like luke spurs linney what is it is he some northern lad done well is he some diverse inclusion champion is he a dragon what is he and they couldn't really work me out not that i care but um i had to kind of define myself really So there's a period of time where I kind of went off the radar, really.

54:28Jeannette:I kind of thought, I just need to go and do my own thing and be myself. And that was, then COVID hit. And then I was kind of doing some things there. But then eventually I thought, well, I need to kind of get back on the horse, really. So I did kind of one maybe on LinkedIn, a bit more content. And I started some businesses and some worked out, some didn't. But now I'm kind of back, really. And I think this is the most exciting period there will be in my life. and in my generation, actually, and maybe even the next generation, to be around, to be this collection of atoms sitting here doing stuff.

55:03Jeannette:And I'm interested in business and the economy and society. And it's all going to transform, touch, if this is wood, in my lifetime. And I think it's... I always remember the film, where Master and Commander and Russell Crowe looking at his wooden ship going, today's technology, gee, there's never going to be like this again, this wooden ship. And I think you can say that about any period in time, but I think we are at an inflection point between the analogue and the digital, and that includes us.

55:36Piers Linney:Absolutely. Fantastic. And yes, lots of repositioning of you as well. You know, Dragon's Den, what you're doing now, the bit in between. Yeah, Dragon's Den was interesting

55:46Jeannette:because Dragon's Den didn't define me, I suppose. People see me as a dragon. and it helps you open doors and it's a great thing to do it's amazing I got asked to do it if you think about it I did nine investments nine handshakes, six deals one return the fund probably the best deal ever on Dragons Den wonderably lost money in the kids books I probably got a 45x on that one went out of business and four got my money back almost like a venture capital fund like a miniature version of a portfolio kind of returns and I get to do things that I probably wouldn't have got to do otherwise that be on the board of the government bank or we'd be here talking to you so it's definitely life changer but I'm glad that it wasn't something that kind of defined me it's something I did for a

56:29Piers Linney:short period of time yeah yeah yeah absolutely and so Piers if you could describe this year

56:35Jeannette:what word what would it be and why new species it's two words but that's AI it's transformational and we are building a new species

56:48Piers Linney:yeah fantastic I agree with you and Piers we have a brave old brilliant playlist, what song are you going to add to our playlist

56:57Jeannette:I was really struggling with that one actually I've said something that's uplifting actually

57:04Jeannette:Sounds of Blackness Optimistic

57:07Piers Linney:we've not had that

57:09Jeannette:I was thinking some random tune back in the day actually, I mean I know lots of true that's quite optimistic one it's quite churchy though i'm not that religious

57:18Piers Linney:it's going on the playlist that's great and here's last question what does brave bold brilliant mean

57:23Jeannette:to you so brave and brilliant really are the same thing in a way it's combining that you know to be if you're brave you're brilliant i think if you're brilliant you're gonna have to be brave to be seen and be heard so you've got to combine the two excellent thank you pierce it's been an absolute

57:39Piers Linney:joy nice to see you thank you for having me Well, I have to say, what a remarkable conversation with Piers Lynne. You know, a leader who teaches us that ambition, resilience and ethical scaling can really create that lasting impact. So if today's episode resonated with you, please take a moment to rate, review and share Brave Bold Brilliant. It genuinely helps us reach more leaders, more entrepreneurs, more innovators and change makers. And remember, if you're ready to elevate your leadership, clarity or purpose, connect with us through Brave Bold Brilliant, Jeanette Linkfoot Associates as well.

58:18Piers Linney:You know, go beyond ambition, build impact, legacy and the meaning for yourself. So until next time, stay brave, stay bold and of course, always stay brilliant. I really hope you've enjoyed this episode of Brave Bold Brilliant. remember check out our new website www.brave-bold-brilliant.com you're going to find loads of resources on there that's going to help you with your leadership journey and with the businesses that you're trying to scale up and grow so take care everyone and remember there are no limits to your growth but it is by being brave and bold that you're going to unlock your brilliant