Ben Freeman, Co-Founder & CEO at Omnea on Building an AI Native Procurement Platform, Talent Density, and Founder Paranoia

0:00Ben, welcome to Riding Unicorns. It's a pleasure to have you on this week. Can we start off with just an introduction to yourself and Omnia? Sure. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Hector. So I'm founder CEO of Omnia. I've been building this business for about three and a half years now. Before this, I spent four and a half years building a cybersecurity company called Tessian. I joined the kind of early team there before the seed round and ended up building, running the business out in the US. I moved to New York and we built it to a few hundred people. That was sort of my first foray into venture, you know, venture-backed companies, tech.

0:35I knew nothing going into that. Also, So we'll come back to this, but that's where I accidentally learned about procurement, which led me to Omnia. Pre-Tessian, I had a few businesses when I was much younger. The first Proco one was an events company in Manchester. That's where I'm actually from. And we did like festivals, gigs, student nights. So completely different game. That was obviously a bootstrapped business, very gritty journey. And I actually dropped out of uni for that business. I kind of fancied myself as an entrepreneur and became very existential actually after that. I didn't know what to do.

1:05I did a stint in investment banking at Lazard. I was honestly just a bit lost, but then realized entrepreneurship is what excited me the most. Then I had my Tessian journey and then kind of a long way forward to then start Omnia as well. Happy to kind of come back to why this business and why procurement, which people often ask me. But in terms of just what Omnia actually does, to answer your question, we're an AI native procurement and supply management platform. So we help companies manage their third party spend and automate how they manage their suppliers. so in normal terms like if you work a company and you need a new thing maybe you need to sponsor a booth at a conference or you need to onboard a contractor or get a new tool Omni is a system you like ask for that thing it tells you if there's a similar thing or not it then roots it through the simplest path for approval based on the risk and the cost thresholds and then on the back end we're automating all of that manual but joint work so we become the single source of truth in the system record for supply data with our customers.

2:02A bit like a company will have a sales force for their customer data. We will be, you know, the equivalent for their supply data. And we work with sort of mid-market up to enterprise customers. So companies like Syncesia, Clio, Typeform, all the way up to bigger customers like Spotify, Wise, Albertsons, Edeco Group. And we're about 150 people today across London, New York. Awesome. Ben, like classic founder journey, you know, high performing sort of guy you know wants to start things build things creative has the motivation to execute on the creativity as well even from a really young age by the sound of things and great that you've landed on your feet with Omnia and Tessian of course great exit there and Sequoia backed and all of that so yeah fantastic we're going to dig into a lot of stuff and you guys have crushed it in your first few years you've built one of the most talent rich talent dense teams in the European startup ecosystem.

2:54We're going to touch on that as well. But how did you land on this being a problem? I mean, as you say, it's not like the sexiest space, but it is a very structured process, human driven, traditionally human driven process that presumably lends itself very well to AI and actually becomes really quite interesting when you dig into it, you know, with all of these approvals, collaboration, multi-stakeholder involvement. So tell us a bit about how you landed on this being a problem you want to dedicate perhaps the next 10 years to. Yeah. So by the way, firstly, I was not high-achieving at everything I did by any stretch.

3:31I was a lousy investment banker. So entrepreneurship was definitely better for me. But yeah, I think to zoom out of that question you've asked, firstly, I really wanted to start another business. And it was tough for me because Tessian had actually been a great journey in so many ways. and obviously whatever I was going to do next needed to be bigger, better. I wanted to, you know, I'd learned a lot of mistakes the hard way. I felt I had a lot more in me, but that set the bar quite high because as you said, testing was a really strong business. I was fortunate to be a part of it. And so I was looking at loads of different things, loads of different areas, and I found that phase the hardest.

4:04So just to flag in case anyone else is out there doing that, for me, when I don't know what to sink my time and energy into, I go very existential and stressed. So that was the hardest chapter. I was doing loads of research on different markets. It was not obvious to me at the time that I would start a procurement tech company. And we're talking about hundreds of user interviews for different things. In fact, for Omnia, I probably did a couple of hundred user interviews with chief information officers, with CIOs, and then realized it was a wrong buyer persona. I was building for the wrong people.

4:32I had to go back to procurement people. So there were loads of learnings in that. Procurement is a weird one because I accidentally learned it at Tessian. So Tessian was an email security business. We sold our product to amazing companies. Most of the world's leading investment banks, law firms, tech companies used our product. And you would think they have their shit together, run good internal processes. Mostly true. But procurement was just totally broken. And I remember looking at it, I had a very negative perception of it because frankly, it was a reason we would miss a quarterly target or it would slow something down.

5:06And the procurement teams didn't often stand a chance. So I saw the frustration from their side too. So that was where I became intrigued. And initially, I spotted a problem, which was basically price discrepancy in SaaS. So what I mean by that is, if you look at software agreements at a company, they pay completely different amounts, or almost seemingly random. And it depends on how they negotiated, who did the deal, all of those things. So I thought, right, let's solve that. I did a lot of digging on that. That was back in 2019. I didn't necessarily have a view to quit at the time, but I was just really interested in why it was such a problem.

5:37And I realized, actually, I didn't build Conviction to Build, so I didn't leave Tessie to start another company. And I realized it's not just a money thing. Like, cool, price savings are interesting, but what about the risk and the governance side of it and all that other stuff you have to care about nowadays? That's a huge factor. I also realized that is just one category. It happened to be what I knew. I'd had exposure to it. But there's actually all these other categories of spend that matter just as much. And then thirdly, I realized it's a horizontal play. You can't build a procurement business just for procurement people.

6:11You have to solve it for the employee who wants to buy the thing, legal, infosec, IT, finance, and all these other people. So once I realized it was this kind of broad horizontal play, I came back to the space and thought, okay, that's actually a vast opportunity. The legacy incumbents are massive. They're really clunky. So there's kind of a low bar in the market. You're not going to run out of space. There's a massive amount of pain. So I sort of rationalized myself on it and sold myself to it. But this is over maybe a year and many hundred user interviews. And once the same themes come up again and again, it allows you to build conviction.

6:41And this was in a time where I'd had like term sheets for other businesses. And it really screws with your head because you think like, you know, that's often the barrier for people starting. And once you realize you could do a few different things if you wanted or, you know, you then think, what do I want to do and why? What is going to be enduring? And you have to hold a high bar to yourself. And I found that chapter particularly hard. yeah did you go into these like 200 cso interviews with something you wanted to get out of it did you have some structure around it or was it very open-ended you were just trying to have free-flowing conversations with these people to understand problems like how did you approach that initial initial customer discovery because it's something that a lot of people listening will be going through right now and and lots of people listening probably a further ahead on the journey than they should be without having done these kind of calls yeah totally yeah i would actually say like i really encourage people to do that process and you have to be willing to do a few months of research speak to how many hundred people and then drop it and be like cool it's not what next you have i think you have to have that mindset because otherwise you know you just got sunk cost fallacy i found mentally that's challenging for me it's such basic advice but i read the book the mum test yeah it tells you how to use research but it's good because basically they're guided discussions you might have a hypothesis but you don't want to imprint that on people on the call so you won't get from them you won't get what you want from them so you can as you get later start to iterate you know we started to demo from figma and show these prototypes of what we thought a solution could look like but what i was trying to align on is the pain points why they cared what the drivers of the market were there was much a market kind of landscape exercise anything else because what i started to realize with procurement is it was going to become bigger and more important, regardless of Omnia.

8:28There were macroeconomic factors, geopolitical factors, technology factors that meant this thing was going to take off in some way. And I remember seeing that for InfoSec back when I was building Tessian in 2017. GDPR came out, suddenly InfoSec was more of a thing. And you could see the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer, back then was going to get really important. And they did. They're now teams big budgets etc and i saw the same with procurement so i started to realize there's a bigger picture to this that i can get behind and it's the right time to build a company in this category yeah and what what level of conviction is enough like you know how many hundreds of conversations where the outcome from these people the insight is like similar do they have to be for you to be like yeah okay this is this is good enough or is it is it an instinct or is it a structured process that's hard i don't think i have a great answer for that to be honest there definitely is a point where you're like i think you feel this is the one i'm doing and you have to delineate between that and have i just had enough of the research and want to get on did you feel like one you'd reached a point that you were very confident you could build something that people would pay for.

9:47Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I've got to stress like how much research I did to get to that point. So I think I could argue I probably should have started sooner. And there were so many businesses in my young years that I could, should, or would have started, but found competitors or found reasons not to. So I do think you get to a point where you need to commit. The other thing though is I think to have that conviction, you need to become a bit of an expert in a space. And that's why a load of people will say, you know, start businesses with problems that you know and all of that sort of advice i totally get that i don't follow that advice because that that would be an issue for me i don't know that much stuff if i restrict myself to what i already know they'd be very i'd be like a dog walker or a like hiking instructor so like you know i didn't know cyber security when i did tessian and i had to learn procurement to be able to do omnia so i think you need to get to the point of expertise where people are mildly interested in your opinions you can have a proper chat about it you have market insights you see things other people aren't seeing and you can connect the dots from outside of the industry like my perspective on why procurement would grow was not what a person in procurement would realize that was my upside perspective thanks to my research so i suppose you get to a point where you're like no i know i'm right i felt i knew i was right didn't mean i could execute on it and and succeed but it gives you an unfair advantage yeah i think um yeah definitely unfair advantage i think there's only a very few industries where the unicorn founders in those industries were in the industry before founding that unicorn like bio you know you kind of need to be an expert but most sectors that fresh set of eyes and like having the sort of freedom being untethered such that you can think from first principles is really valuable without the kind of legacy baggage you would get from having worked in the industry for years already yeah i also think because i got really pissed off at some of the tier one funds who i name, will talk about how you have to be so mission driven and you can't do it unless you're, you know, almost implied in this space or in the know.

11:43And you have to have this inspirational, passionate story about why, like I'm not a struggling procurement manager. That wasn't my career. That's not why I built Omnia. I still believe I can be really successful and build an amazing, enjoying company. So I think there's a lot of reasons for it. And that troubled me when I was younger so much, because I thought, you know, I'd start an events business because I knew that space and I could kind of understand it because I could be a customer, but it was a shit market so what i realized is the parameters for my choice are how big can it be can i attract great great talent because i get my energy from who i work with um and it's more about the type of the journey so i think that's how i view it now it's not about the the sector it's about the the the qualities and attributes of that sector of what you can do within it yeah no that makes total sense and okay so so we're rewinding the clock here and you're here you are with super a high conviction around this problem space you were convinced at this point that there were going to be people who would pay for a solution that you had in mind and maybe some prototypes for but what what were some early sort of hair-raising moments that where you thought shit maybe we're wrong or perhaps you know things have gone too fast or yeah moments that kind of scared you yeah so i think i don't think we're one of these stories where like we almost died five times before we got there like firstly we're still really early there's a lot still to prove but we had a decent amount of pattern recognition in those early chapters because I'd built businesses before.

13:06But I think there were moments, for example, we weren't rapid to ship our first platform. And a lot of people move fast, break things, get the first version in customers' hands immediately. You get lots of different advice on this, right? But generally it's like move fast. My view was, well, hang on. We're shipping to highly regulated enterprise customers. This is not an area you can screw around in. and we also weren't first to market. So my view is if you're not going to be first to market, you better be best in market. So we were pretty patient to initially ship and that was scary because in the meantime, people have quit their jobs to join you.

13:41You know, maybe only a few at this point, maybe less than 10, but it needs to work. And so they're getting that pressure. I'd say in my head, I was locked in for the long term. So I wasn't like existentially, you know, holy shit, what's going to happen here? It was just challenging because we had to have that conviction in our view and that patience to endure in that way. So that was kind of scary. It was like, should we not just be getting it in our hands, going a bit faster in that sort of way? And the other thing that was a bit controversial, to be honest, is I decided from day one, we should be global from day one and multi-sector.

14:15If you look at the fastest way to get to a millier or even 10 millier, you should just choose a segment of the market and win it. A lot of companies choose Silicon Valley tech companies to sell to because they make quick decisions, they have money, et cetera. We did almost the opposite. We were selling like cross geo, cross sector, and it basically takes a bit longer to ramp that way. So you're not going to get 0 to 1 or 0 to 10 or whatever as fast as you could have done. But for me, because I thought, well, hang on, we're trying to build an enduring company. What does it matter if we do a few months faster for those made up milestones?

14:48We're going to get beyond them anyway. So we had that approach where we wanted to build from a strong foundation, but I think it is a bit scary at the time because it makes it harder to measure your conversion metrics people start to think is this sensible you know maybe a competitor starting to you know do well in a particular beachhead market whatever so i think it was scary but we stuck to our guns but yeah i wouldn't say we were one of those where like sweet near-death experiences before we started to exist yeah it's interesting i mean there are so many myths in startup building and um and debates as well you know the whole like move fast break things versus uh and sort of lean startup versus like ship the right thing like that there isn't a right answer and you have to do what's a authentic to you but also relevant to you know the specific product and industries that you're building in so i don't know i think it's that there are lots of there's so much strong advice being thrown around on different podcasts um it is very difficult to distill what's the right advice for you but that's why we do the podcast and we get all the advice yeah i mean people can choose i would say speed is everything to some degree so i'm not saying like chill take your time we're like frantically iterating but i think the point is if you know what your customer is going to need to be successful and like the product there's an argument to not ship it before then right so i think it depends to your point it totally depends on the context the business environment but for us it didn't necessarily be like ship it to them next week and just see how it goes and ben i know talent density is a huge focus for you guys i mean I have two friends, two great friends who work at Omnia and I know that they're fantastic and doing great things for you.

16:25But like what, what does talent density actually mean to you all at Omnia and where, well, let's start with that. And then I'll have a couple more questions on it. Yeah. So firstly, just to define what we're talking about, you're right. We, this is the area we probably spike in the most. And we've interviewed, we did over 10 ,000 interviews for the first 50-ish roles. So we spoke to a lot of people and we hire in accordance with a set of values. For example, one is grit and perseverance. Are people going to kind of get their head down and keep pushing even when it's hard? Because it inevitably will be.

16:58So we have different values like that. I won't go through them all. But ultimately, it's about finding people who care greatly about their career, their success, the impact they're going to have. They are willing to make more than a normal amount of sacrifice for those things. This is not a normal journey. There are easier lives to be lived. And so for us, it's about finding those people. And then we're generally hiring for traits more than skills. I think the main area we differ from other companies is sort of that search for mutual fit. I think as a venture-backed business, particularly once you raise from decent investors, you can easily sell a good story and almost hide people to join you.

17:34And I think we were culprits of this post-Series B Tessie. I mean, we raised the big round from Sequoia, we had a bit of a halo on us. And we attracted a lot of people who I think were there for a slightly easier ride or for money or for whatever else it might be, but they probably weren't as strong-minded in how they were going to operate. And so at Omnia, we're obsessed with this mutual fit. So we've got to work out, is this the right chapter for this person's career based on what they know and what they want to achieve in that timeframe? can we deliver that to them or should they go a later stage company should they start a business what does that look like we will happily spend 10 20 hours plus with a candidate properly get to know them only to decide we think you're amazing but we don't think this is the exact right environment for you we think this might be different we might literally refer them to other companies and it feels a bit weird one thing i would say is that because we're so authentic in that approach because we believe it's the right right way to do it a lot of time people interview viewers it doesn't work out the first time there are tens of people at the company where like it was a second or the third time when a different role was available or they were looking for a different set of things so we typically do stay in touch with people and we view that as a long-term play but yeah it's about it's about the top percentile people you know we will i often say we will happily pass on an eight and we don't want to sound too elitist or arrogant about it but we are all willing to put in the work hone our crafts and you know try and build an enduring company so as long as everyone knows what's about and you're on the same journey it should work where where did you learn about what it means to build a talent dense company and like about this approach of mutual fit so i think i was very lucky because the early the kind of early days tessie and maybe first 50 ish people were like phenomenal i was very lucky to work with them i learned loads of stuff i was really young so like i was learning people who knew more than me as well which was was great and it got worse as we hired faster the bar probably dropped.

19:32Not to say we didn't have lots of other great people too, but it did probably trend downwards. And I realized how bad that is. You won't win the market with that approach. You have to keep the bar high. And I became so high conviction in that, that at Omnia, I would rather miss our hiring targets and be a slightly smaller business with a strong foundation than I would the other way. I think another part of it is just on a personal level, when I reflect on not just like my my business and my working life but where I get joy or fulfillment from it's from the quality of my relationships and who I spend my time with and how I spend that time I get energy from people who care about what they're doing take pride in themselves and their work have integrity and so I suppose there's an element of like you want to surround yourself with people that you think are really great people who you would better if these people start a business i'll invest i've actually started a small seed fund when our when our competitors hector and if anyone's been at omnia for five years we'll invest two hundred thousand pounds in your in your business with a one pitch meeting like you know you pitch once you get the money at the end and the idea is like we're we're taking so long to go through this process um and to get to know people that after that like we will you know we kind of we're all in on those people it's actually a really interesting idea is do you do you do you pitch that as an almost a perk when you're interviewing people saying that like we back our people so much that we want to put our money behind you even when you outgrow us or move on that that would be a that would be a draw for me you know if i was looking to join omnia yeah well i'm glad you said that because ironically we've not announced it yet so i suppose this is that depending on whenever this comes out but i do think it's it's authentic too there's not a marketing stunt so maybe it does help people to join but i actually don't mind if people want to do omnia as their practice journey for a few years to learn how to hire how to hone their craft to learn off other people good for them we'll be totally open and honest with them and i'll have them on their way then they're done hopefully we're growing so fast with so much challenge so much exciting stuff you'd be mad to leave i think that's how this uh you know unfolds yeah if we do it right no but yeah i think that's totally fine i think that's right and you know you look at companies like jack and jill which have a huge focus like you on on talent density and i did their precede they just raised a great round from from creandum and they're mostly ex-founders themselves and it's a miracle that they've been able to attract a lot of ex - founders and yeah you're hiring ex-founders you know they're not going to stick around for 10 years but you accept that for this phase of the journey um these profiles are probably the probably the right ones um and that you can that the organization has to adapt over time and i think a lot of founders don't recognize that and they want to be hiring people so that they can grow into the next role but actually you've got to accept that the roles are going to change the shape of the org's got to change through those different stages yes but also you're i totally agree but also like people don't know i often say when i interview people try and be sure this is right for you and we're doing the same in a two-year-ish time yeah two-year plus if you're like do i definitely want to do this for five years you'd never make any decision yeah you know there must be very lucky people out there who know exactly how they want to spend their lives.

22:43I've never been one of them. I'm now like as locked in as I've ever been. And I can imagine doing Omnia for an incredibly long time, but I'm totally okay with people having high conviction that for the next two to four years, this is it for them. And to your point, by the way, some of these people who are very set on founding, even those who've joined Omnia have said to me more recently, I don't think I could be bothered going back and doing that early chapter again. I'm enjoying this phase more. And I think a lot of the reason people want to found is to push themselves to see what they're capable of to work with a great team you can get a lot of that at the right company you don't have to leave you can you have emotional ownership we overpay in equity like we benchmark very very heavily in equity and so i think a lot of those things can be can be given as well and the duty is on the company to perform so well that it's worth them hanging around for so many years yeah and ben do you have any hacks for what you've learned you should ask in interviews when you're doing this sort of mutual fit discovery?

23:36Like what are some of the things that you ask that you think have gleaned the most insight for you? Yeah. So there's a few questions within that because it depends on the role, that person's career. Like I would do 20 to 30 minutes because I'm the final stage or later stage of the interview for most of the roles. Partly is what do they want? Then there's the skillset side of, well, what can you actually do? On the journey side, you've got to figure out whether you could give them at Omnio what they want maybe they want to be able to hire and build a team and to learn a new thing you know if that's in the next six to 12 months along the way or not so you can very much hire our needs and the challenges we set are usually kind of like a quasi onboarding so we try and make it really real life and we'll be really cool and be like this is it the benefit is if we find there's a good fit here you'll already have started to ramp on the company because we've given you a lot of context we always share a danger room with every candidate so they've got the opportunity to read everything so i think from a mutual fit it's a it's a conversation would they need to take their guard down and not be in interview mode, work out what they want.

24:33We need to advise them on that. And we know Omnia really well, so we can actually shape that around them. Some things I ask, I suppose, more from a then skill set or ambition perspective, I often like to calibrate with people on how they think they've done anything. So for example, I might ask somebody, what's the most impressive thing you've ever done? And partly it's because we want people who are really impressive, who have achieved great things, but it's also a relative game. I find the most accomplished people downplay their achievements the most and you know somebody's done something average you know they're what's an example they're obsessed with running and you know this is their thing they're just a running guy or girl and they run a marathon in i don't know four and a half hours and they keep talking about that's in their cv like why that's not so we just want people who spite in the things and that could be anything you could be really academic really entrepreneurial are really good at sport or music whatever it is we just want people who are really good at that thing and want to hone their craft and they have that mindset to life because i think a lot of the traits you see in athletes or academics or business people overlap greatly it's that like heads down conviction on getting good at a thing and holding it yeah it's almost like a it's not quite a paradox but of great people being great because they always want more and therefore think what they've done isn't great and so they're not I mean it kind of actually leads me on to the next thing that I want to talk about which is sort of founder paranoia and whether it's whether it ever goes away you know at this point in your journey with Omnia do you feel like you've cracked something like the Omnia journey is now de-risked and that you know there's PMF product market fit and you're scaling and yes you can improve you can build a big business but you're you're definitely going to build something now or like are you constantly kind of looking over your shoulder thinking shit this could all fall away from underneath me so i'm very cynical so i've never i realized this even pre-omni like i'm never going to get there wherever there is like for me it's the journey and i live in that state of paranoia to answer the question i do i think there's no part of you that thinks we've made it or it's locked in or it's in the back because bluntly like i can see how we'll build the business for the next few tens of mils of ARR.

26:49I know not exactly, but I know pretty clearly how we'll get there, what the team will look like, what the customer base will look like, the challenges we're going to face. So it's not like totally alien to me. So I'm not deeply insecure or paranoid that shit, will we stumble at this block? But that doesn't mean I'm satisfied with that block. I think we could do it better and faster in a higher quality way. And that, you know, for me, it's, I'm excited by kind of the sport of business. It's how well you can do it. and so there's definitely paranoia there i've never got to the point or at least not yet in my life where i feel sufficiently accomplished or on a track that i could stop to think in that way i feel that would just be like retirement to me if that comes so i feel that i most found as i speak to live in that alert mode even and the bigger they get the higher the bar got you know rises of what they want to achieve yeah no and ben i know that you're super aware of like how things both in the organization and your role has changed through the different stages of Omnia.

27:45Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like in reality, how things change? I think as a founder, you're basically allocating capital across different areas and deciding what are the jobs to be done at any moment. So I view my role in quite a dynamic way and I try to structure my time accordingly. So just from practical perspective, I have a weekly meeting with myself where I look at how I spent my time, what I should be doing. And I compare that to the key jobs to be done for the business and if I'm allocating any time to it. So I try and be practical about this because otherwise I just have a blocked out calendar and be on whatever sales, customer call, or internal meeting I need to do.

28:23So I'd never actually be forging a path forward or zooming out to think about the strategy of the broader business and what we should do next. So I think the role has definitely evolved and changed, but I'm fighting to keep it you know similar and so i'm good at certain things i don't want to stop doing and i feel there are certain strengths that omnia has that i don't want to lose for example we have a very very flat org structure every single person who's in a senior role or a managerial type position omnia is a player coach we don't have people whose job is just to manage really and we want anyone you manage to be that they have to be better than you at that thing at that thing it's like you know it's not quite true for engineering there's certain parts where they don't need to be better of coding than the engineers.

29:06But I treat my role the same. And if I can't be better at a thing, then I'll defer to the person we've put in that position of power authority to make those decisions. So I suppose my role seems to be mostly focused on problem areas. So I'm spending my time where it's not working. If something is working, that's great, but it probably then doesn't need me. So it kind of naturally changes. But I don't think there's been a systemic change where I used to do this and now I never do. I'm making a conscious job of like, I will always be on the frontline from a sales perspective i'll always speak to customers i always want to be involved in our customer community and i think that's like the beating heart of the business and that translates through to product you have to have your finger on the pulse of your market and the needs of the customers and their sentiment around you in the market or you just can't can't lead yeah it's what we hear consistently from the unicorn founders that we've had on the show is staying close to customer it seems like the best the very best founders stay very close to customer that they're still pouring through slack customer feedback and those channels and um seeing what's being shared in them because you know the change has to come from the top the direction of the company has to come from the top and you you can very quickly become detached from the sort of where the action's actually happening and we're seeing more companies uh in our portfolio episode one like ripping out layers of middle management and how and you see it even in like ending spoons you know companies like this are hiring you know young people in their 20s to run big businesses who are super entrepreneurial they consider these roles the opportunity of their lifetimes and are super motivated to do it in a way that a middle manager who's maybe looking for the next step and level up of cushiness just won't feel and so people are ripping out these middle layers of management hiring really entrepreneurial people to go like treat a department like a product and fix it and improve it yeah totally we're over i strongly agree and we're over 100 people and we have one person in the company, an engineering manager, who is the nearest thing to being like, you know, their primary responsibility is engineering management, obviously delivery management too.

31:07Everyone else is player coach to some degree and is only as a secondary role doing some management stuff. You said something really interesting about your time management and having the sort of weekly check-ins. Can you think of like, what's one of the recent hard decisions you've made around your time off the back of one of these reviews yeah so it's a game of prioritization so i've just hired my first step at ea who's like supporting me and doing this from a practical perspective um and so the logistics are then handled for me but it's basically things like you can look at a week or two about out and think is that in line with my priorities typically it involves cancelling lots of calls or pushing lots of calls because you realize i don't need to be on that why am i doing this one why am i not writing this or there are certain things we haven't done maybe it's in product marketing or a certain narrative I need to focus on for something we're doing and I haven't dedicated time so it needs to be represented in my calendar so it's mostly kind of time blocking things that must be done holding myself to account for that and then the other stuff can be filled in around it and it only works if you prioritize because when do you know whether you should be canceling an interview or a customer call or a sales call those seem like really bad things to cancel but actually if there's a higher more urgent priority that needs to be done or that that is the right thing to do so for me it's about prioritization and also like i will otherwise work too much you know in an unproductive way if i don't do that very interesting yeah i think more people should have like a bit more structure over there i think you know doing it some people would do that quarterly i think doing it weekly there's a discipline there but i want to ask you what your 20 year old self event organizing self would would say about what you've achieved and what you're doing right now?

32:54Would it be proud? Yeah. Look, I would never, I'd be shocked. Not because it's impressive because I'd be like, how the fuck did I end up in a second venture? Yeah. Look, I think I had high ambitions for myself back then. This wouldn't have been a path I thought I would go on. It sounds a bit trite to even say, but I'm genuinely deeply proud of the people I work with I think they're amazing I think we have such a good team so I know I'd be proud of that and feel good about it I used to when I was younger I was like deeply money motivated so my 20 year old self would want to know like how much you made what does it look like I'm less focused on those things as like primary metrics now so I think I'd have a different lens so yeah I suppose I'd would I be satisfied I probably would have thought I'd get there faster and better i've now realized like you have to have a very long-term perspective on business career life right and the best things come from having that long-term perspective so i think i've probably matured in that sense but i reckon i might be further behind where my 20 year old self hopes i would be to be honest because that just i was that like young kid who was like a bit relentless and wanted to go fast and so on so yeah don't know where the tech thing came from and that would be confusing, but that would probably be my honest appraisal.

34:10Yeah, no, that resonates with me. I think that would probably be a similar answer that I would give about myself. But you have to be proud of what you have achieved. I think you've just raised like 50 million from a bunch of tier one investors, 50 million series B. The company must be worth hundreds of millions. Your estate must be worth a lot. You can be proud of that, and I'm sure your 20-year-old self would be. But I think once you've achieved it, naturally it becomes less of a focus once you've achieved some success the sort of money doesn't make second seat and you're more focused on on the mission the people solving customer problems and the satisfaction you get from building something noteworthy yeah i think so i've also like it's all bullshit right okay the numbers and they mean this and that but like none of that is has meaning the meaning is like how do you spend your time who do you do it with what impact are making so i think if you zoom out like they're the things that stick with you a friend of mine uses the term deathbed thinking yeah they're also an entrepreneur when they like make big decisions and i quite like that because it's like you know are you going to be sad or happy whether you optimize for like a certain amount of money here or there probably not this stuff all fizzles away on the assumption that you're good enough that you're healthy and you're happy just in the primary level so i think so yeah i think there's like a bigger level and that's i suppose what i'm aspiring to as well like how big can we go not necessarily the numbers i think you get the numbers is a byproduct of doing those other things really well yeah and that's what the best entrepreneurs or the best serial entrepreneurs in particular seem to know yeah it's a great lesson to be able to strip away the financial motivation and find something that's more powerful that you can actually be proud of in a sort of wholesome way on your deathbed um that's a noble motivation um i think just that that's the sector agnostic bit because that's where i was so lost because would my 20 year old self have been like wow i'm so deeply glad you're solving those procurement problems for those poor but younger people like maybe you're probably not wouldn't even know what it meant so i think that's what it's like how you're doing it and what that impact is but you don't know the specifics of it yeah no for sure ben we're going to move on to the next couple of sections so future unicorn is there a company that's really early stage out there that you think is the next the next unicorn apart from omnia of course um uh who should we go with there's a few cop-out answers where i could choose somebody you know of a company worth like three to 500 mil that's clearly going to do another round.

36:31Yeah, early stages. I'll go early stage. So I'll go for a company that's not been born yet. Tim Sadler, who was founder of CEO of Tessian, and is a close friend I work really closely with. She will start a business at some point, and I think he'll race to become a unicorn. He's very gritty. He's got a lot of lived experience. We learned a lot of lessons of hardware at Tessian. So I would back whatever he does. I won't say more because it might not be fair, but yeah, I think his next business will get there quickly. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, well, I'll keep an eye out for that. And the dinner party guest game.

37:02So if you were to invite three people to dinner, they can be dead or alive. Who would they be? I would go Nelson Mandela. Obvious reasons, but more grit than anyone ever. His ability to stay optimistic through whatever was happening is quite remarkable. And I often use his quote, the resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies. I've used that a lot. So Nelson Mandela, great guest. I'd then go somebody more in the business probably Warren Buffett because I think he's practiced such great patience and I think we're a very frothy market and I'd love to see and hear his perspectives on all of this VC volatility FOMO driven investing, AI it would be nice to just have it out with him on how these things play out over the cycles and then thirdly I would go I'd go for Frank Slootman Frank Slootman is just an absolute beast deeply respect how he operates and I think he actually just has playbooks to build great companies.

38:01If you've not read his book, he's got a book called Amp It Up. You get given it if you join on, you're in fact, but incredible book, incredible guy. That would be a decent dinner. It's going to be a great dinner. Yeah, I'd love to be a fly on the wall. Ben, it's been absolutely amazing. There's been tons of insight. We could have gone on for hours. I think the conversation around talent density is going to be really helpful for people because it's becoming more of a conversation but hasn't historically actually been that talked about in the startup world and it's like it does help you move incredibly fast you know in those early days which is something we've talked about being so important and um yeah great to hear a bit more about the the problems that you're solving the journey you've been on and um i know the listeners and the audience are gonna absolutely love it so thank you very much for coming on riding unicorns thank you so very kind that's it for this week thanks very much for listening to stay up to date with the latest episodes, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

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