James Hirst: Co-Founder and COO of Tyk

0:00From GEICO Subconscious News, I'm Tammy Racing Thoughts. Tonight, you just left for work and had a non-specific feeling that something was happening to your place and it wasn't good.

0:08Elliot Moss:Dan? Exactly, Tammy. It could be smoke damage, theft, or just too much caffeine, but you can't stop thinking about it. But with renter's insurance through GEICO, your stuff is covered, so you don't have to worry. And that's great, because the weekend is coming up and it's chock full of social obligations that are ready to fill that void. Oh boy, will they, Dan? It feels good to worry less. It feels good to GEICO. Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishkondorea. What you're about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM. However, the music has been cut due to rights issues.

0:43Elliot Moss:This is Jazz Shapers with Elliot Moss on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal.

0:55Elliot Moss:Listen in colour. Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musician shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today for the final Jazz Shapers of the season is James Hurst, co-founder and COO of Tyke, an API management platform on a mission to connect every system in the world. It's not very ambitious, is it? Having left law school and become a barman, James, his head was turned by the arrival of something called, here it is, drumroll, World Wide Web into the mainstream. Joining one of the UK's earliest consumer internet service providers before launching his own startup, building and hosting websites and e-commerce platforms for hundreds of businesses, including major music festivals, James then met his future co-founder, Martin, when they joined a digital consultancy on the same day.

1:38Elliot Moss:James and Martin later saw how most global internet traffic flows through APIs, which basically allow different systems to chat to each other and share data, but can be error-prone and a security risk. Tyke was launched in 2016 to secure, control, and scale this critical infrastructure. And now Tyke is the technological backbone of global banks, telecommunications companies, and some of the world's most iconic brands, powering everything from mobile apps and connected vehicles to streaming services, e-commerce operations, and border security systems. So quite important stuff. I'm very happy to have you here.

2:10Elliot Moss:Thank you. It's great to be here. I can't call you Mr. API, but I'm going to call you Mr. API. What's an API when it's at home, please? Well, it's an acronym, Application Programming Interface. How many times have you been asked that? Exactly, and it's not particularly illuminating. Effectively, an API allows one computer system to talk to another computer system, and those systems could be anything. It could be the app on your phone wanting to get the latest weather information from the Met Office. That is done through an API. So, effectively, the interface between two systems. And so phones, ATMs, 80 % to 90 % of all traffic on the internet is related to APIs?

2:51Absolutely. I think in today's world, pretty much everything we do that's digitally is connected in some way. So whether it's a fitness tracker, a mobile phone, a connected car, probably the thermostat, smart thermostat in your home, it's all API connectivity. Bonkers, it's everything.

3:06Elliot Moss:When you were growing up in Rygate, did you imagine that this would be the thing you would be talking about? Absolutely not. I wasn't aware of what an API was. They didn't exist then? No, didn't really find out about the internet until I'd left home, really. Was the technology thing interesting to you as you were growing up? Yeah, I liked computer gaming. Didn't really have the equipment for it, so I had to learn how to optimize and upgrade what I had. So I got a taste for computers that way. But I was never a programmer. Maths were never my strong suit. So interested in the technology, but always a little hampered technically in terms of implementing it.

3:42Elliot Moss:Now, we jump forward to this business called Tyke. It's another one of those things, I say this quite often, I meet people that are building businesses which are absolutely fundamental, James, to the world around us, and no one's heard of them. Your business, I think, is in 34 countries. You power all sorts of things around the world. How did that happen? Right place, right time, and making the right connections with the right people, I think. I met my co-founder at a consultancy I was working at, and we enjoyed working together. He was very much the creative technologist of the partnership. I was more on the operational and business side, and we ran really interesting programs for people like the United Nations, people like the NHS, helping people give up smoking using digital technology.

4:30And it turns out that my co-founder, Martin, is a real technical creative and always has a side project. And one of his side projects was to build a new technology platform. And to do that, he needed to build it with APIs. And it wasn't working because there was no tooling around him to help him build the product he wanted. So he built his own. He built his own what's called an API gateway and an API management platform on top of it for his own needs and open sourced it, made it available for people to use for free on the web. And it turns out a lot of other people wanted the same thing. And from there, we turned it into a business.

5:09Elliot Moss:We're going to get into some of these things because there's a lot to unpack there. But briefly, am I correct in saying that your first employee was in Paraguay? That is correct. Capital city of Paraguay is? It's like a general knowledge test. We can do that just before Christmas. Asuncion. I think it is. I think it's Asuncion. I don't know why I know that. I've never been to Paraguay. Me neither. The first one in Paraguay, which is basically a statement, isn't it? It says, doesn't matter where you work when you work at Tyke. Absolutely. And when we started Tyke, we were both in London, both working for a consultancy in London.

5:44We'd found this idea. We'd found this product that people wanted and were interested in building a business. And over a few beers and a pub, where some of the best ideas come from, We resolved that, yeah, we should turn this into an actual business because people are taking the free software. Let's turn this into something. The sticking point was that Martin and his wife had just had a baby and his wife is a Kiwi. And they'd always said, we're going to move to New Zealand when we have a baby. So that could have stopped us in our tracks, but we said, no, it's okay. You can work remote. I'll work in London.

6:18We'll build a team in London and you just dial in. And this obviously before COVID.

6:22Elliot Moss:This is 2016, is that right? Yeah, that's right. Right. And well, 2015, when we're having these conversations, and at that point, working remote was unusual, but doable. And then when we started to make our first hires, we looked for someone with the right talent, the right skills. We looked in the community of people using our software, and this guy was making great contributions. We interviewed him. We thought he was in Germany. Turns out he was in Paraguay. He was just working for a German company from Paraguay. So we hired him. And about the same time, my co-founder, Martin, moved to Auckland, New Zealand.

6:56So we became a very distributed business very quickly.

6:59Elliot Moss:James Hurst, my business shaper. He's co-founder and CEO of a business called Tyke. I really like the name. So three people, totally international, from Paraguay to New Zealand to the UK. And very early on, and again, as you said, pre-COVID, pre the idea that people could work from wherever they work from at whatever time, you were embracing this kind of dispersed workforce. I mentioned radical responsibility. When I read about Tyke, I'm like, that sounds really cool. And it sounds really enlightened. In your own words, explain what radical responsibility is and why it's so central to Tyke. So one of the challenges you find when you're building a business where it's so distributed, not just physically, but on a time zone basis, is how do you communicate?

7:46How do you make informed decisions? It's possible to solve for that quite easily through process because you can mandate that when we make a decision, we involve all these time zones. And within 24 hours, you can get a decision made. But in most instances, you are not in control of a timeline. You can't sit for 24 hours for the clock to go around. Therefore, you need to have a credo internally that says people are empowered and supported to make decisions, to take autonomous decisions, and that that is a non-negotiable. Because if you have to run a problem up the line and then back down again to get an answer, you will fall behind.

8:29And so to benefit from all the many advantages of being able to recruit people wherever they are and allow them to work wherever they are, this has to go hand in hand with it. Because the working practices that have evolved out of the factory floor or the office in a city, don't translate to global distribution. They don't translate to global timelines. So radical responsibility is at the core of it for us.

8:55Elliot Moss:Which I love, but that is kind of scary. I mean, you need to hire people that are really driven, that can really be grown up, that love autonomy. I often, over my working life of 30 years, have talked to people as they move into more senior positions, and I've talked about the blank piece of paper. A lot of people do not like that. But that is essentially what leadership is often about. How do you square that circle? Is it just about hiring people who could all be entrepreneurs? You're looking for people to join the team who treasure autonomy and who not just that they can cope with it, but that they really prize the ability to manage, control, and shape their own day.

9:36And how do you know when you're talking to someone that they are that person? It's really hard because most people will say that they do. And very quickly, you can find that people do not. First of all, you are looking for clues in the recruiting process, not necessarily about their working life, because often working life is dictated by the strictures of the organization they're in. But, you know, are people involved in external extracurricular activities? Are they a key part of organizing a local five-a-side team? It's those kind of clues that give you an indication as to whether someone might fit.

10:09I think the other thing is just to be very open, transparent, and upfront about what day-to-day actually means. It's not the same as you're doing now, but you're doing it from a desk at home or you're doing it from a desk by the beach. It is a change in the way that you make decisions. It means that you can get great value from people who are perhaps overlooked in an office environment. But it also means that people who have really succeeded through the power of kind of oratory or being a personality or persuasion in a meeting room, they can absolutely flounder when put into a remote first business where no one's in the same time zone because their way of getting a decision made will be to pull together the people they trust, have a discussion, have a debate.

10:56Strongest discussion in the room at the time wins and that's how they get stuff done. To have to then translate that to working asynchronously, having very carefully thought out and laid out written arguments. Folks who've been successful elsewhere can flounder. So at that point, a willingness to bring people on and have those open conversations early on. And if it's not working out, have some open discussions. How many people in the business today? Around 120 at the moment.

11:24Elliot Moss:120. Very independent, very driven souls who don't depend on oratory skills. I'd be absolutely doomed. I wouldn't last one minute. What a shame. Anyway, he doesn't need me because he's got some fabulous people here. It's James Hurst. He's my business shaper. He's the co-founder and CEO of Tyke. He'll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now, we're going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing.

11:51Elliot Moss:In this clip, we hear from Tarek Ralph, architect and founder and CEO of Catalog, a digital work hub aiming to give people a radically simpler way to coordinate work. The Mishcon Innovation Series Inspiration from founders of cutting-edge businesses In association with Jazz Shapers With Mishcon Derea I think founding your own business has a lot to do with Understanding what you're looking to do in founding a business Like why do you do it? Betting on yourself and acquiring all the skills necessary To build a team, build a product, market it, raise the capital It can be quite a lot of friction but it can also be quite a lot of fun.

12:30And if you know why you're doing it, it gets a lot easier. I've always been interested in making and building things, which is where I got into architecture, which is where I've been making software. And so large parts of my job don't feel like a job. The parts that, you know, running a company still, there's a million friction points every day. There's friction with customers, there's friction with product, there's friction with all kinds of, you know, unforeseen issues that pop up every now and then. but when you find joy in the act of building which is what i do it just becomes a necessary pain and the side effect and so knowing why you're building a company why you want to start a business and what you're looking to get out of it and having clarity around that

13:10Elliot Moss:generally helps quite a bit the mishcon innovation series in association with jazz shapers with mishcon d 'orea jazz shapers on jazz fm in partnership with mishcon d 'orea It's business, but it's personal.

13:54Elliot Moss:many won't. Just again, explain how that works and why Martin and you went, you know what, this is the right way to build this bit of kit. So open source software is a movement that's kind of central to most of the modern web. It means that the software is made available to people to contribute to, to read the code themselves. And the rights to the software don't lie with the person who wrote it. They are open to the community to use it. And depending on the license that's attached to that software, it means you can take that software and use it for free within certain boundaries. The big advantage for us was that when this idea came about, there wasn't any funding.

14:39There wasn't a big business plan about how we're going to take this out to the world. Actually, what it came down to was making the software available to a community of people who would find it interesting. And it then self-propagated. A few people grabbed hold of it and used it, found it useful, told their friends, and more and more and more. And you get that rapid growth without having to do any advertising. No marketing, no spend, no investment. So it was a way to bootstrap interest in the product and build initially a bootstrap business for the first few years, entirely out of open source software.

15:12Elliot Moss:And I think I read somewhere that the open source thing keeps you honest. In other words, If it's catching on, it means there's something in it and what's called the product market fit is real versus kind of closing it down and trying stuff and not really knowing if the community of experts are digging it, are into it. Yeah, with open source software, there's no sales pitch. There's no PowerPoint presentation to try and convince someone to use it. People can open the software, inspect it. They can go through the code line by line. And so it means they can also contribute to it. They can identify areas that can be improved.

15:44They can make those improvements themselves and share it with others in the community. And we found it was a massive accelerator with the biggest enterprises out there. So banks and healthcare love open source software because there is no black box being installed into their business. They themselves, their own teams, can go through the software, understand what it does, have control over it, and not be worried about the motives of the people funding it.

16:11Elliot Moss:as you're talking about this and the radical um responsibility and you know the way you said you know if you're if you're if you're the person in the room that's persuading and all that that's not going to be the skill set you seem to value authenticity very very highly whether it's about the product or whether it's about the people is that right because it's a very down-to-earth james very un-corporate-y un-businessy kind of characteristic i don't mean that rudely to people that are great at business, but there's something incredibly grounded about the way you view the world. Thanks for saying that.

16:45I think the huge advantage with taking this approach for building a business out of an open source community, of giving people radical responsibility, is it makes life a lot easier. You're not trying to put up a front. You're not trying to sell a concept that's been created in another room. You're simply empowering the people who get value from it, building the ecosystem around them so that they can take it forward themselves. And I think bringing people into that, bringing people into a business that has that, not necessarily a purpose, but has a vision for how a business should run, is very empowering, and it's a great way of building momentum within a business.

17:27Elliot Moss:James Hurst, my business shaper, co-founder and COO, and we were talking about open source technology, or an open source approach, rather. We're talking about radical responsibility. and I mentioned that it's a really cool philosophy. Sometimes you read about these companies in the Harvard Business Review and they say this was the scariest company on earth. I remember that being written about an ad agency many, many years ago. If they were doing a case study on you, it would be this just is a new way of doing stuff. Have you always been like this? Has this always been a kind of feature of how you go about your life, James, not just in work?

18:02Well, I think on a personal level, it is important to be genuine, open, transparent. And I think that is a value that I strive to follow myself. And I think that then, if you're building a business, if you're building a company, it's always going to be, to some extent, a reflection, perhaps a mirror of yourself. because you can't build a small, fast-growing business with artifice. People won't buy into it. People will not join with you. You know, the term company, you know, we talk about a company. And a company, it is a gathering of people with a common purpose, if you go right back to the meaning of the word.

18:44And that common purpose can't be faked. So I think allowing people to buy into that, giving them openness and transparency around what you're doing, what the performance is, how the business is, performing where it's winning, where it's failing. That's hugely powerful in terms of motivation and in terms of building loyalty within a team.

19:05Elliot Moss:And also, it's complementary to your view about jargon. I've read again about the fact you hate jargon in industry, and that's probably for the same reason. There's sort of artifice around what it means, and real meaning is obfuscated, and therefore you're not clear what's going on. And you're keeping people out. I suppose it's a bit exclusive as well isn't it and and what you do again if i if i was a big multinational company in simple words what are you doing for me right now if you were explaining to someone because i'm conscious i haven't i haven't delved into the the debt without without we didn't want to go too deep down the rabbit hole but just in simple terms those apis you're basically creating those for all sorts of companies to move data around in whichever way they need to do so when we're working with a large global organization typically they'll be delivering a product or a service to the people who are their customers.

19:53And those customers might be consuming that service or product at the point of sale. We work with one of the US's biggest retailers and supermarket chains. Every interaction their customer has at the point of sale, scanning vouchers, loyalty cards, making payments through the credit card, stock control, it's all going through APIs. So it's the real, it is the infrastructure that underpins the technology of their business. So we are fundamental to what they do. and we allow them to change what they do quickly because making a change to the technology in thousands of supermarkets across the US, that's a big undertaking.

20:31Rewiring all of that is hard and so if the APIs are secure, solid, stable and well-formed, that job is made much easier and you can do it at scale, you can do it more quickly. So it offers them an ability to innovate but it also gives them reassurance against hacking, against security risks, and importantly, against loss of service. The worst possible thing is Labor Day sales, your point of sale goes down. So those APIs have to be 100 % rock solid. That's where we come in.

21:00Elliot Moss:Strong pipes. Final chat with my guest today, James Hurst, and we've got some Manu DiBango for you as well. That's in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal. James is my business shaper, James Hurst, co-founder and COO of Tyke. Jumping back to the creation of this business with Martin. He lives in New Zealand. You live in the UK. What time do you normally talk? Depends on how summer times align, but it's early in the morning or late in the evening. And so we are very aware of the different state of mind. Both of us will be in when we have to have a difficult conversation.

21:42One of us might be just enjoying a few coffees and full of energy. The other might be at the end of the day, a very long and grueling day. We'll bring a different energy to the conversation.