How Creators AND Businesses Can Win In The New Economy- Caspar Lee

0:00Casper, welcome to Secret Leaders. Thank you for having me. Most welcome. Is there a role in the creator economy that you haven't been part of? Oh, that's a good question. I've never worked for a platform. That would be interesting to actually make decisions about how your algorithms are going to affect billions of people, but no. Well, you mean a major social media platform? Yeah. No, exactly. Like a social platform. But yeah, I'll get to work with a bunch of those people. But yeah, I haven't done that. I mean, there are thousands and thousands of roles in the creator economy. I've been lucky enough to do a few.

0:34I've been a creator. I've been a, well, I'm an entrepreneur and an investor and get to work with amazing companies. But yeah, I didn't actually know what the creator economy was when I started. I just thought it was like making weird YouTube videos and it's just turned into this massive thing. But I've even been, I don't know if you remember this, but a few years ago, I think LinkedIn were asking you how creators should be on LinkedIn. and I was in that room. Oh yeah. Before I had any followers. But you're way bigger on LinkedIn. No. Yeah, I didn't have any followers. Surely not. Yeah, at the time, yeah.

1:06So you created this monster. Jeez, I'm very sorry everyone. That's shocking to me because you've got, I mean, you must have grown very quickly after that event. What did you do? Yeah, yeah. Well, you listened to what you said. You should take your own advice, customer. You took the opposite advice to everything I said. I can't actually remember what we talked about in the day but I had like a very small following and then you were talking about how how well linkedin were talking about how they thought linkedin was going to be a place for creators and i remember being like yeah i think that probably is a thing that we could put some time into and then yeah pretty much from around then till now it's gone mad yeah yeah and what's what was the advice they gave you that you took away to build your link chris can you please frame it as these are three ways to grow your linkedin in just 60 seconds i genuinely at the at the time i don't remember what what specifically we're talking about other than just make something up just pretend yeah like other than the idea that well the thing we did talk about what incredible wisdom to caspar off for you chris the audience is going to be really affluent on linkedin okay okay as in i was obviously talking about the affluency of an audience as in like all business people are going to be on linkedin but probably won't be on the other social platforms and so i thought that was a very interesting thing if you were to build any because i've always done b2b businesses yeah historically if you're going to build anything that was probably where you should build and then yeah i mean from there to now get like 20 30 million views a week that's the best thing about giving advice i feel like you can give advice um it might be terrible advice for people but if someone happens to be in the room and goes on to do great things you can be like that was me it is interesting right because it actually depends you know like you say whoever's in the room how open they are and where they are on their journey at that moment whether your advice is exactly the right one for them or not you can still spark a change and they have to still go figure it out along their way like no one ever read one post or listened to one talk and followed that entire strategy to the nth degree but you decide but you do decide but you do decide that that's the right advice for your for your career your next step and then you obviously figured out how to do it to the nth degree but you heard the right information for you at the right time yeah no it's great i mean i i get asked for advice now and now and then now and again um and sometimes I struggle because I'm like it's so nuanced every situation is so nuanced but I think what I've learned is like obviously you can give some broad advice um and it's it's sometimes people will take what they need from it to their nuanced situation you don't have to try and get in the specifics but also the other thing is like just asking them good questions I think is especially when I work with team members in the business like a lot of these people are way smarter they know what they're doing way more than I do so like if I can maybe ask interesting questions I think that's kind of become the more valuable way than just giving kind of advice.

3:48And so that's the only thing when you're sitting on stage, you can't ask everyone a bunch of questions. So you have to try and figure out another way to do that. So most interesting thing that I've understood about what you've mastered is getting out of this creator trap. Right. So the biggest challenge with a lot of a lot of creators, but a lot of people building an audience is it's a hamster wheel and can sometimes be a one-way street and you can also get addicted to that fame and not really plan what your personal exit strategy is and i think you've been very rare in this space to really give that proper consideration and also showing ridiculous maturity from an early age on that you haven't sort of wasted yeah but it's true right it's very rare you want to stop it sorry i was talking to chris you've never said anything like that to me was I hell well if you start doing this shit maybe I will if you start showing some maturity like this anyway but it is prescient rare and really no one else has done it so I want you to actually explain what led to that decision it felt like you could almost see round corners with it and also how important that's been for you thank you that's great I'm going to clip that up and put it on LinkedIn and you can give me a repost.

5:13I think that I, you know, I, I don't think I saw kind of five, I don't know how many years it's been since I started, maybe three, four years. I don't think I kind of had this goal. I just, I knew that I think earlier, I don't know if it will be in the podcast, but you asked me like questions. What, like, how do you have a sustainable career as a creator or how do you have a successful career as a creator? and I think one of the answers I gave was don't make the content about yourself make it about something bigger than you and I didn't take my own advice at the time my content even though I'd bring in interview I'd do interviews try and get other people in like every week I was trying to reinvent what I was doing and it was kind of it relied on me being relevant and I saw that to do that you had to get like more and more extreme you had to like maybe do some sort of boxing event and I'm, you know, I'm not very strong.

6:03You could have beefed up. Oh, thank you. Thank you. But I thought like, okay, there's going to be a time when this stops working for me. You know, I always built the audience when I was like a teenager. And some people would subscribe because I was cute. Some people subscribe because I was funny. And like that kind of thing was going to change over time. As I got older, especially as I started businesses, I wasn't able to make the same jokes. Like, oh, I didn't feel like I could. As I got older, I just didn't find the same things funny. And so rather than like really struggling away to kind of redefine the channel, I was like, this might be a good opportunity to focus on the other things that are working in my life, which at the time was, you know, influencer.com.

6:45We had already started. It wasn't like I started it afterwards. It had already started MV management. And, you know, I also think the other thing was YouTube is really kind of a full time gig. Like if you want to do it well. and I didn't want to just not do it to the best of my abilities. So I thought, let me take a couple of weeks off just to focus on the businesses, see if I can build a team for YouTube and like do it how I do other things, which is like, it's not all just me, but I never figured that out. And I kind of just decided after like a few years, okay, maybe I have stopped that. And so, yeah, I could sit here and be like, it was all planned.

7:20And I think a lot of people do that with hindsight, but for me, it was very iterative. How do you say iterative? yeah thank you i'm south african we don't speak english um so yeah it's interesting right because um obviously a lot of people in your space you know might also um come to this conclusion after burnout or after exhaustion or or after something worse right after just so much trolling that their mental health takes a turn or whatever do you feel like you avoided that extremity yeah definitely avoided the extremity of like the issues people face i think it's weird how some people just become the center of hate and some people become even the center of like what newspapers talk about there's some youtubers who are absolutely massive you search their names on the news not it never comes up and there's some who are just like you know quite big and like every newspaper article is about them and so i kind of avoided all of that i was always like in the background never the top uh and i kind of i think that helps because i think when you're on top people do kind of tend to go after you um and yeah i mean i there were times where i made like a few mistakes like where I made videos I regret making but there was never like one big moment or one big crazy thing and so that was good but there was this like underlying anxiety as a creator I think that I was always a bit worried like like you know what if I do something or say something a little bit off and everything collapses and yeah I think that's something it's not just for creators I think in general we live in a world now where you do kind of worry about these things especially when you you build a brand yeah um be it your own or you work for a brand or you you're part of a big corporation you got to be careful but i think as a creator you really rely on like what people think of you and that can be quite like mentally uh draining if you really care yeah and things can go wrong very very quickly you know the the logan pool thing i always think is quite an interesting one he's managed to come back from it but he made that awful video uh the the Japanese Woods video, and his whole thing just died.

9:22His whole brand died. And it really came back when they did the boxing thing. Yeah, I mean, he's gone. He came back, then he went and did other things. Then he came back. I don't know where he is right now. I think the BBC might say something else today. But, like, yeah, it's... I think people like that, actually, going back to, like, how do you stay relevant? I think some people have, you know, let's say you love Logan Paul's videos that's great but let's just say he makes the same sort of standard as everyone in this for argument's sake one of the big reasons I think people like him are so big is because of this constant like up and down it's true and uh I think it's great at getting attention exactly and it helps and but I think that comes with a mental toll where maybe someone like him can handle but I think someone like you know I don't even want to compare myself with so different but I just that wouldn't be a life for me at all like it would be the way I don't care, you know, if I can fly private.

10:16I don't care if I can sell out an arena. If I'm constantly going through these emotional things, I can't handle it, but maybe he can. Maybe some people literally just don't care. What do you think people stop? That could be the business model though. Like he could, and him and his brother, they could be like, we're just gonna create as much top end drama as possible and it will filter down into fame. Yeah, it's interesting. The question is how much of it is planned or how much of it is just like naturally them. and uh yeah i mean i think there's definitely people who take i think a part of it is like people make like them maybe make mistakes but then they realize oh wait this mistake is actually an opportunity um or like um i think jj for example i love ksi like he's you know his recent song came out i don't know if you saw like people were kind of making fun of it uh but he really leaned into that and like he turned that into like a huge opportunity and it got so many views and actually it kind of grew on me the song and i kind of like it but i'm not a musical maestro so what do you think keeps so many people stuck on that hamster wheel though right because you know yes you can have the extreme experience um and that will obviously take you off the hamster wheel but you know there's the other side of it which is you don't necessarily notice the toll it's having on you but you're stuck because now that's your career yeah i mean it's it's kind of it's not as stressful probably as running a public company but there's kind of similar traits in that everyone knows exactly how well you're doing and a lot of people remind you of it so they can see your views i think spotify is quite cool as a platform because it's kind of one of the only places it's not exactly obvious how many views this podcast is going to get which makes me excited because even if this fails on youtube i can be like guys it's killing it on spotify we are killing it on exactly exactly and millions of views exactly and i just think that uh youtube is like you know people act like they don't look at that stuff a lot of people will say they don't even know how many subscribers they have and stuff but it usually tends to be like they are thinking about that like there's this one out of ten thing on youtube where every time you upload a video like you're trying to get like the best video of the last 10 or you're trying to avoid having like the worst video of the last 10 because youtube literally tells you this and like imagine like three videos in a row you're getting your worst video and and i just think that tends to uh i think that was built obviously to help creators grow but it also is built to like keep you on on it and making sure you're you're keeping people on the platform um and yeah that's really really tiring and i think you know i when young people ask should they become a creator or their parents say is it a good career i think actually it is really good today because even if you don't like continuously do it for yourself there's so many roles now in businesses and so many roles in media that need people who know how to like edit film come up with ideas you guys know this better than anyone and so um i hope some of those youtubers who are like holding on for dear life because they don't want to join the i wouldn't say the real world but the kind of do something for someone else or with someone else uh there's actually opportunities for them they can get really good roles in other businesses so they don't have to do that yeah i mean it's interesting like should you be a creator is a question i get quite a lot and i think that like i don't know if you have to be an out and out creator but if you if you manage the mental load of it i always think my socials exist over here yeah as i don't they're not present in my life but they give me a massively unfair advantage yeah and so if you're able to think about it like that then it's very good for you if you're someone that struggles with the the social anxiety of the views and so forth then i actually would say probably not because i think it can crush people and also i think you know the way that i've i've approached stuff personally is i've been very careful on growing my social because i was so focused on building brands so like as an like i'm more naturally an entrepreneur than a creator and i've seen a lot of people building brands and making to your point themselves the front and center of the brand which if you want to build a brand that can not just last beyond you but can exit and all of the things yeah and you don't want to get stuck with the thing for the rest of your life whatever you create that that is the one beautiful opportunity that a brand has that you can create its own identity and its own thing and you don't need to be attached to that um i literally up until i started heights in 2020 and literally until last year didn't start on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or any of it, because I just really focused on that.

14:44And I think that that has been really helpful for me. It's been great to see, you know, my friends, you know, come out of the blocks as well from nowhere and grow massive platforms and all this kind of stuff. And there's this also, you know, there's this part of it that's really interesting, right? Which is, it's hard for creators sometimes to know what to say and what the story is. And on a personal level, I always felt like until I took heights to 10 million pounds, I wouldn't have any credible story to tell. You did always use to say that, yeah. Yeah. As in, like, literally, I don't want to start doing it until we get to£10 million.

15:15Like, I just feel like... Sales past£10 million recently. Yeah, that's, I mean... But I think it's important to have your own milestones for this stuff as well. Yeah, I do. And that's, you know, for me, when I first kind of stepped away from YouTube and got into other things, I really struggled to, like, want to go and talk about those. Like, I was invited on, like, you know, some podcasts and so on back then and i i didn't want to do it yet because i was like it wasn't just about getting to x revenue but it was also i felt like i needed to go through a few more things um and that could that involve i think that's a great milestone because it's like a number to have um but yeah i think that you know that there tends to be um uh you know people giving advice uh who haven't who haven't necessarily gone through that just because they have a big following and I didn't want to necessarily do that so it's quite nice to hear that that both but for both of you that was a thing like so credibility is kind of what you're talking about like I I think one of the biggest problems we have is that everyone seems to be an expert on business and they're like 22 years old with you know exactly 500 000 followers and they're telling you how to grow a business exactly this you're like you're not I just never wanted to be that person like maybe they can live with that I couldn't live with that I think uh yeah I've always been a big fan of Richard Branson like always written him letters and stuff and what I like about him is you know he's done some incredible things but he doesn't ever like lecture people and he kind of comes across like he's just like this guy who's able to put together big teams who know what they're doing and I think that's like what I would like to try and emulate in my own way it's not going to be an airline but yeah I think those are the sorts of people I kind of look up to people like you walk into the room with and they put you at ease instantly um and uh yeah they just don't really also when things go to plan they don't act like it was all just like this is you do this this and this because i think when you when you put that out a lot of people um don't actually know what it takes to build a business because i think you just follow a recipe and it's not the case so we were talking about earlier when we when i was like what was what was the advice you gave or you were like to me what was the advice you gave and i couldn't tell you necessarily nor was the thing that you said specifically what I went and did and it's so interesting about advice is that I think retrospectively you think about the journey very differently to in the moment like I've just launched a new company and I'm sure that in a few years time I'll be like yeah no we went from like A to B and then tactically we pivoted and actually just completely making it up as you go along and it feels like you're sort of day one again yeah um so yeah I think it's a it's very easy to look very good retrospectively exactly it's even like with investing and stuff um I was listening to a podcast my partner uh and co-founder of creative ventures was on one of the businesses we did was called beehive and it's gone on to do very well and they're like what did you you know see and uh of course we can say like the founder was brilliant this was before they like even launched the product to market um and so you know and i love the way he answered that he's like look like there were a few things but there's also you know it's also a bit of luck it's also like you you know we got there's all sorts of things that add to it rather than it was x y and z and i think sometimes we're taught to do that because when we're doing a job interview that's what some of the employers are looking for they're looking for like oh have you you know do you have a really like specific answer or when you do press or whatever they're looking for something like soundbites and i i like what i've learned recently uh is just like kind of the more people i meet who have done amazing things like i think i was also listening to the founder of succession or the the showrunner speak on stage one day and i just loved how like he was just being so like real and he was like i didn't know this was gonna work like this i didn't know that i was gonna do that that and i was like well it really means a lot to me when i see someone who's at the top of their game say that because it makes you feel like you can do it because you feel like that and it's the same thing when you hear like someone like that gets nervous about doing something like it makes me feel better richard branson doesn't get nervous though uh yeah i want to bet he does know what he's doing yeah he does get nervous because again like to him when he starts a new venture it's a new venture we should ask him you know we should ask okay um can we put this out on the internet richard branson can you tell us if you get nervous yeah do you get anxiety and common secret leaders obviously yeah and would that make you anxious yeah and we'll get casper into that yeah we'll make you feel very comfortable richard i used to write him um i used to write him letters when i was in south africa um trying to get upgrades on his planes that's why he didn't respond wait so you obviously didn't know him no i didn't know him but like i i think that's one of the biggest things like growing up i've i saw premium premium economy for the first time because uh you know you walk through it as you turn right that's so weird about planes you have to walk through the business cast they will sit there like i love those videos you're now looking at them no i always look down um that's why you have to go first class you don't have to that's it but um i i looked you know i would always turn right go to the very back but i'd see those seats i was like that's so cool it became like an obsession of mine like how do i get to premium economy one day um and i i also have tourette's syndrome um and so that's like when i have like involuntary tics i have to stretch my arm when i was younger it was a lot worse and so i was like I'm going to use this to my advantage.

20:37And actually, I did technically have this one where I would push my leg out in front. I was like, I'd write him letters. I would, you know, I have a flight coming up and I don't want to disturb the person in front of me. And I know the bulkhead's for babies. So sweet of you. Can you put me into, you know, premium economy to try and help the plane? He never, ever responded. But actually at the gate, I told the same story every time, you know, shoot your shots. and actually once they put me into premium economy wow that's great how was it it was like i was like blown away the tick didn't come up actually weirdly i did it with my sister and it was it was very as a young person that was really cool and i but i think it started an addiction to trying to get better seats on planes which probably led to everything i've done in life trying to get literally up onto the left i don't i don't know how to explain but i would say that out even when you get money it's one of the only things that money is actually good for i totally agree with that.

21:33I just don't buy anything. Hold on, hold on. There's something else. A new backpack. I got a new backpack. You did have a new backpack. I can't believe it's the second time you're talking about your backpack in 30 minutes. I literally came in talking about it. It's a new backpack. I'm pretty sure you don't need millions to buy a new backpack. It's like a£150 backpack, but because I got Black Friday deals, usually more. Yeah, fair. I've never been so happy about it. I've literally had, like, I got a car recently. I moved to a lovely house. There's something about this backpack that made me more excited i promise you there was like two hours of excitement like putting shit into it my wife was like you have to stop talking about your new backpack it's all you have one too yeah i bought well i actually this is ridiculous i got one who did we just do a uh a brand deal with recently in the same week i got oh hp yeah in the same week they gave me an hp backpack an hp back okay come on you need a i love hp but i'm not joking the compartments of it okay it sounds I've just been like, this is amazing.

22:31I can fit everything perfectly in this thing. Sorry, guys, be clear. They gave you one and not me one. What the heck? HP, come on. I think they said it was in my house, didn't they? I can't remember. I quite like this. My wife, so to be on the backpack chat, my wife absolutely detests my backpack. It is the ugliest, worst thing. It's like 10 quid from Amazon. It's 10 quid from Amazon. No, you need to invest in... But the reason is it's so light. So I've had all these expensive backpacks and they're quite heavy. So we've determined that once you make money in life, all you really want is business class flights and backpacks.

22:58I think that's all you I think that's all you want To be honest I mean look There are other people I've seen it Like they They want other stuff Yeah I'll tell you what ruins Business class Having kids Yeah This is a very A very difficult First world problem Yeah it is What the hell are you How does it ruin You know I'm now flying back What if you upgrade Flying back to South Africa In economy Don't want to grow up Oh I see what you said I thought you were saying It ruins it Because you bring them in there and they keep you where you're from. A, you don't want to piss off other business class passengers, but B, you also just don't want to have a little spoiled child.

23:33I could still never, I don't think I'll ever personally pay for that. I only do it, at the ARC businesses, we don't do it because it's just expensive. So you still play economy? Well, so the way it works is - No, exactly. No, you don't. No, no, no, I do. I do sometimes, I do. I do when I'm on Ryanair and I'm forced to, yeah. I book an economy ticket. When there's no seats. And then - I'll write to the fucking CEO of the airline

24:01but i do i do like i would i personally i would never like pay for a like upfront like a 5 000 pound economy ticket sorry but that would be an expensive economy but i would always try and like find a way like using you know amex like ba the ba card's quite good and then also like i feel like ba's gotten quite good at like providing 300 pound upgrades to business from premium yeah yeah do that and to me that's obviously it's still it's a lot of money for like seven hours but i mean it's pretty good clip this up and get ba to sponsor it right back onto the actual questions in the interview sorry this is i could talk about this all i could talk about planes do i do like i do quite enjoy people who are nerds on amex points there are some people who are just like i mean let's pick it up afterwards because i would i actually think that my wife and i are the biggest nerds really as in there are so many websites out there that you can find the rewards flights perfectly on the days and then if you i need to optimize your life to the ba card but the actual website the ba website doesn't matter you don't need it you just use seat spy but then do you have to then go and book it on the ba site once you've found it or can you literally yeah that's super easy yeah it's i hate it when it loads i mean i know it's a pain anyway yeah you're trying to get your ba thing and i tried to do it with cape town this year after knowing that i had a whole year to book it and i still ended up paying four grand for three economy flights yeah that's cape town the cape town roots if any other airlines listening can you come in and like make more routes it's awful richard branson come on yeah he has actually done it but he's not enough okay casper i love you richard yeah i love richard you're amazing yeah so i suppose for for someone like me from the outside i knew of you as like an entertainer as in like i used to watch you had that super famous clip with tom holland i think yeah which like i don't know why but that always stuck out in my head and now that you have stepped away i would definitely identify you as like entrepreneur now first and business person and so forth are there other people that were doing it with you then that have now also become entrepreneurs and not creators yeah so um there are the people i was most close with it's like joe sugg um uh josh peters is a best friend of mine uh and then there are a few others but uh joe and i have mve together so we're co-founders of that and we launched that with wme so they're a big kind of agency group um and that's that's doing really well now i'm so proud of the team we've built and uh and the creators we're signing and it's like we had this conversation the other day we're like this is so strange like it's become so much bigger than us like in the beginning we like were out there trying to sign all the talent convince them to come and now like the managers are just so good that people are joining and this is you take creators on that you think that they have a uh you know a great future and then you build their brand strategically yeah so we're actually one of like the only ones who actually do that part uh so you'll see when you when you look at our roster we're not just trying to sign um the biggest names uh we do have some people like like i'd say like half of them are already quite big when they join us um but then the other half like you'll notice that they're they're not they're not massive but we see potential um and that's like i think that's like a really cool thing to do as a manager and i think that's you know we we kind of are guided by our team and that's one of the things they love to do that like yeah have your big stars uh but also like help build something um and and because the the lessons i think you learn from those experiences also really help the big stars as well and so it's a real mixture and uh yeah i'm proud we do that together um and there are a few others who have done some cool stuff but joe and i are like really close i mean josh uh has a production company now too um and he's starting to do documentaries he's about i think it's it's going to probably be released by this come by the time this comes out but he's did a film with lily phillips oh yeah okay no okay oh that's interesting maybe we can edit in that we knew no it's good no you guys are gonna your your your girlfriends and wives or what they're gonna be happy that you you didn't know her uh are you are you also married to her okay married it's probably why we don't know we're not allowed to look at the internet anymore yeah good so so she uh she's a an only fans creator who um that would explain it then it came out well just then yeah she uh she she did a day the other day where she slept with 100 guys right um you did that once didn't you chris is this real story yeah and uh and it will be out it's coming out really soon and so yeah he does like a mixture of these like crazy documentaries and then content for brands um yeah jesus so he's doing a talk he's doing a documentary on a lady who slept with 100 men in one day yeah so yeah there's there's this other person i think that maths is complicated yeah there is another person yeah so people get confused i think her name's bonnie i'm saying i think i know her name's bonnie blue because i've seen clips of not the actual content yeah of course not i started seeing clips of the hate that the bonnie lady was getting because she's like sleeping with loads of young i think younger people people are angry that yeah there's that and also i think some of the language she uses in particular i'm not sure what lily does i don't know again i'm not watching this stuff no but i think the language is like quite uh questionable yeah yeah like around like the age and so on christ so but i'm not going to talk about that too much i'm not i'm not trained to talk about such things no no we must get back to your training casper um all right so back to the train training in the original program uh so obviously we're interested in business in the sense that um when you do build a business you're able to scale it build a team walk away like you know or you know at least manage things from a distance all the stuff that you were just saying um is there a way to do that as a creator like you know literally you obviously couldn't work it out for yourself but what is that magic ingredient that people do no i think i think it's actually not the same for a crew so i think being a creator is more like having a like a restaurant in a way and like to make it a really good quality restaurant i think you need that chef in there every day who's like really honest and people are also obviously you you have to be on camera unless you you become an ai creator which we can also go into if you'd like to but uh let's try and avoid ai for at least another five minutes um because every other podcast uh talks about constantly i don't think we've actually spoken about it once proud of you guys too much but We're off, we don't know.

30:30I'm sure you do. Everyone's AI. What's only fans in AI? We've got no idea. We're like two dinosaurs running a business. But what the hell was I saying? I need some AI. Yes, you do. Being able to take yourself out of the business. Yeah, exactly. You have to turn up, you have to film. I think you can definitely make it more scalable. You can make it easier. you say you don't even watch the freaking videos afterwards uh you don't edit them you don't you just turn up like a diva and demand demand your um he does and he shouts he beats them as well people wouldn't believe me but i don't even know if i've reviewed one clip or video that's gone out on my channel brilliant all the shows yeah so so that you know that's an example of of a of a chef who has made mcdonald's for himself because you know he's like he's not he doesn't care about the quality he's all about the quantity i just i just trust the team no exactly no and that's brilliant that was a really good save i love it yeah it was wasn't it it's not even true it's true it's true yeah but uh so yeah no but i there is that level of some people like you can go and do that but a lot of creators still like need to be in the weeds yeah um especially that's a really interesting and very difficult skill that you learn through running a business is how to get out of the way and how to delegate um that's that's exceptionally hard if you are the product yes it's why i think like it you've got you've got creators wanting to be entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs wanting to be creators and when creators want to be entrepreneurs they have to learn so much about business yeah and they don't know about like the hard learned lessons we've done it for 15 16 years like delegation like telling someone no having hard conversations you know building processes that's what we do and so going into the creator world i was like there's no way i'm going to do it all myself i'm going to hire incredible people and outsource the vast majority of it it's a good point i think because you started with that team yeah um maybe you know it's easier than as it grows for you to like maintain that whereas a lot of creators start on their own yeah and then it becomes it's quite hard in that you know transition period and a lot of them their content changes as well so maybe people came to them for like something super organic and now they've got this team maybe better cameras um and actually somehow it takes away from it so um yeah it's it's a it's a tough one it's possible and i a lot of creators now do i mean there's some incredible editors out there who work across tons of creative actually becoming an editor is a huge opportunity i think for young people there's just not that many incredible people doing it yeah so um and and yeah i mean it's yeah that's going back to what we said earlier is like um you know to be a creator today you don't need to just be doing it for your own channel there's so many people out there maybe entrepreneurs who want to become creators who need help and so you can work with them but like a lot of people would be you know would obviously love to build an audience and love to be a creator and love to make money online and all of those kind of things at the same time like i'm going to cape town for a month in january you are like you're going away like how hard is that to achieve like the ability to just take proper time off and not have your entire income stream suffer as a result yeah no so it's yeah i think you know there's a lot of jobs like that so it's not just creators but um i think because it's such a transparent industry and like how well your videos are doing means a lot to you um you know taking holidays can be can be um kind of detrimental if you literally turn off and so a lot of creators then like film their holidays share that with them with their audiences um and it's it's fun i guess because they're doing cool stuff but they're still there's always that thing at the back of their head that it's like okay i need to edit this i need to upload it and i think for like the 10 years i was a youtuber i always had that and now when i you know take i wish it was a month but when i take some time off um we uh we you know i properly get to take time off um and i look i think it's the sacrifice a creator needs to make and i think there are a lot harder jobs out there too so yeah but but it is i do think it does weigh on weigh on people for sure it's interesting because it's totally an industry of uh like uh there's two sides it's absolute freedom and a complete trap sometimes absolute freedom is actually yeah a prison it's really interesting you say that like i think sometimes yeah you know having structure really allows you to you know enjoy the time when you you have a weekend you know and uh i think there's some places that kind of uh offer their employees like unlimited holiday yeah and i think that's almost they do that to get people to take less holiday 100 yeah never works it's yeah i mean i i think the creator thing if not managed well just becomes way worse than the job it's like a lot of people will always say i want to be an entrepreneur so i can be free and it's like well you become an entrepreneur and you end up working like nine to five and then five to nine and that just becomes your life and i think creators are almost worse than that like i've helped so many creators make businesses and half half the time they're just on their phone which is my biggest pet peeve ever that people are always on their phones and all they do is check their views like a non-stop refresh refresh yeah and i think that's almost worse than being an entrepreneur it's like it's like another level well it's yeah as i say it's like it's it's it's like being an entrepreneur with with a very transparent company yeah i guess but to be honest like a lot of entrepreneurs like also in this you know this as well as anyone like you are also being tracked even though it might not be to the public you're being tracked if you have a board or if you have investors and so I think it is that these things are tough for everyone building something that people care about it's just a public feedback loop right like at the end of the day all of this stuff works because there is some accountability beyond just yourself you have investors you have shareholders you have audience like there is also another side to the argument which is that this stuff is important otherwise you can just sort of if it's all down to yourself that is actually takes a lot of discipline to make things move in the right direction just relying on yourself yeah that's maybe why youtube tells you exactly it gives you everything because they want you to to know where you're at it's like when you go to the gym if you have all the information it pushes you um for gym that's good for work it can be good but you can take it to the extreme totally it's quite interesting what you're saying about picking uh smaller creators because i i i'm sitting here a lot of the time thinking that you can build a small audience that is really engaged on a niche topic and if you build a good business around it that can be the dream and so you don't actually have to build a massive audience where people seem when they get into the game of building numbers they seem to think that size is the most important thing but it's actually the depth if you have a small engaged audience you can exactly i think it's easier as well to stay connected with an audience when they're smaller you definitely have a higher percentage of them uh who feel like they have a you know more engaging relationship with you as a creator and so you know a lot of brands that we work with at influence.com they don't want to work with someone with millions of followers there's like a sweet spot and actually sometimes creators when they go beyond a certain following they start to seal that they start to see like deals coming down you think oh the bigger you get the more deals you get but sometimes it's more of a risk for brands to be spending on you because um you know there might be more wastage because you have audiences in different countries well there's also the other side of it which is that your brand reputation can take a real alignment to that person so i actually had this experience um with russell brand oh interesting so we were we only work with customers at heights so he was a customer of ours and so we'd work with him so he'd been a customer for like six months working with him have to say like ridiculously professional yeah like beyond like what you would imagine maybe the most professional person that we've worked with like totally the opposite of what you would imagine he was awesome to work with um really great and engaged and did everything on time and if you're like mate this just wasn't good enough was this pre the documentary this is pre the thing right so you know if you were doing it post the documentary but this is the thing so we worked with him we're with him from jan so 2023 we worked with him from january to june and but because we had a deal with him on his we were usually when i paid advertising and so we were the only two advertisers he'd ever worked with and the other was expressvpn because it's all about security because he's like loved heights and he's into his wellness and all that kind of stuff and he's like does his own research we're perfect person why not um and basically because part of it was his youtube channel which had seven million subscribers um it was growing really fast you'd get about on average half a million to million views per video daily right so there's a lot of output the problem was at the beginning of the week you'd speak to his agent or his manager and they'd go these are the seven titles we're thinking this week right which one do you want to go in and they would just get more and more absurd right you were just like yeah christ i mean youtube is nuts totally and you were like well none of them like that's like we can't go in any of them and that was happening more consistently so when it came to june we were like look love you you're great and all this stuff but we just like we feel like there's going to be a problem for us at some point we're like a credible science company and the options that we have they're so hard to pick like they could blow up for us so we got out of it and the next month all that stuff came out um god you really can around corners well that was just lucky right but that i know but i his his concept became well it's just really challenging and actually but the point being and we had a lot of pushback from customers as well like i'm not i like as a person as an entrepreneur i'm not a judgmental person i very much believe in like this is that person's actual experience and they're a customer of heights let them talk about that thing and like let them talk about their experience and don't attack the person like i'm super anti that and i'm pro free speech and so anyone telling me who to cancel i'm like allergic to it so the more people were telling me to do that the more i was getting annoyed by it um all that being said you also have a responsibility as a brand you know on this other side of this debate which is like what creators do you work with in their size you can totally pick a brand ambassador and they could be of a certain size that's much larger than you are and that alignment you could potentially never undo and so if we were and when that came out we had two press outlets reach out to us to try and basically bash us as the brand that picked like russell brand to represent us and stuff and they tried to write exposés on us had to get my pr firm on them and send the contracts that proved that we weren't currently working with them and if we were they were going to like print it in national papers trying to discredit us as a brand when all we were doing was working this person so it was a very very careful and important lesson that i learned which is you've got to pick this stuff very carefully and actually the larger the influencer the more they have the ability to take down your entire company whether they meant to or not yeah no i think yeah it's it's working with humans and exactly i think that's that's a risk brands ask a lot of questions about now because of influencer marketing they go well um you know you know have you what's this person said over the last 20 years and of course we need as a as an agency influence.com we need to look back into the creator's past like what brands they work with whatever they said that's a big part of our diligence um but at the same time it's interesting because brands have been working with humans like this for like 100 years like celebrity endorsements have been around for a while um and i think you're right like the bigger if there's like a scale of it and the bigger the celebrity the if something does go wrong with that person the more it can affect your brand um but at the same time if it's a small creator and they do something really bad that can also really affect your brand because the headline as you say if the press want to get involved oh yeah totally um they can so yeah it's it's a risk people take ultimately i don't think you know i think people now even though the press might try and make your brand look terrible all of this i think people when they read it understand like you're not the reason they did what they did as a brand there was an endorsement you don't know everything about their personal life but it's important you do that diligence what's your take on cancel culture as someone that runs influencer Yeah, I mean, it's, I think...

42:40Has anyone you know closely been cancelled? Yeah, I mean, we, you know, as YouTubers, a lot of us weren't big in the mainstream press. But a guy went on, I'm a celebrity, one of the YouTubers who I'm friendly with. And he got pulled off the show because he had sent messages, like when he was younger. and I think the headline wasn't talking about when he sent those messages, it kind of just made it seem... As if he'd sent them recently. Yeah, I think that's, I can't remember the exact specifics, but it was along those lines and I kind of, I think ITV took him off the show quite quickly. You know, he had national press talking about him and yeah, it was, it kind of destroyed his ability to, you know, go outside for a long time and he's kind of rebuilt.

43:33I think over time people figured out like the nuances um and yeah it was it's just like for me i never wanted to to go on these kind of big shows like that because i knew like their their goal as soon as you're on there especially as a creator from the new world like you're the one person a journalist wants to go after um and yeah it's easy as well yeah yeah but i i think in terms of cancel culture i think it gets you know i think it can sometimes be used by bad people to excuse their bad behavior. And so I almost worry that when we became peak cancel culture, it allowed actually bad people to blame everything on cancel culture.

44:15True. And so we're going through this other wave now where it's like people are fighting against that and almost saying every time something bad comes up about them, that's the reason. And so with all this misinformation in this world that we're going through, people have moved away from that, but we've got to be careful not to like, I'm not saying I won't cancel culture back. We also got to be careful to have nuanced conversations about actually when people are doing things wrong. You're right. I mean, Trump is the absolute epitome, right, of like he's uncancellable. Absolutely. I mean, he, yeah, he's, I think also America, no matter what, in general, people like a comeback story.

44:52Yeah. And I think, you know, people aren't thinking about the nuances at all when they're making decisions, especially of that scale and who they're going to vote for. I think also that Trump is this amazing thing with him whether it's like a bed of nails everything about him has been negative everything has been explored he's been attacked on everything and so it's very hard to pin him down on one thing yeah and I feel like for example when he ran against Clinton she was like made out to be a criminal and it was the one message they just hit her with every single day but with Trump there's like a million things and so he never gets pinned down on one of them he's always a negative thing so people never take it that seriously yeah and I think um there was this clip that went around you've probably all seen it because i think tiktok and these algorithms feed us all the same thing because we're probably quite similar in what we consume but like it was on like tariffs backpacks only fans um if i you know you need to watch the rest of the podcast to understand what he just said uh but uh there was a video about a guy who has a business i don't know where he was but in america and he was like talking about tariffs yeah and he and he was being told he thought like whoever we put the tariffs on will pay for it yeah he didn't realize like they were going to pay for it and so like it's so hard for everyone to make in democracy like decisions in a nuanced way it's obviously the best thing we have but at the same time like yeah you're right certain messages can drive home actually i think what people realize from this election as well is like people weren't paying that much attention to like the news and to they thought all of these things were gonna like like that stuff that came out about puerto rico uh and all that they're like that's gonna that's it like people had already either made up their mind didn't care people baked it in so yeah they baked it in and i think also in that particular example you know people have sort of decided uh like what letter of two evils they personally wanted to take in this so the the details of puerto rico's or slag slagging off like whatever the thing is it's all circumstantial evidence that already commits a view that they knew about him there's so much stuff and i i don't know like how america works like because it's just such a different country yeah i spend some time there i think and another thing like in the western world this kind of year apparently like like most incumbents lost because inflation is huge across the world and you could also blame america for that too because america has a big say in the economies of the world but at the same time everyone had inflation and everyone who was in power got ousted and so there's so many we don't know exactly why and what happened nuanced point that most people just won't understand yeah but you know that but but you know when you think about this stuff yes you you are joe blogs going to greg's and you do want to know why your pasty cost two pound that cost one pound last year that's a real very that's a very understandable realistic challenge that we'll face moving on from pasties yeah jay's gonna kill us so uh you don't eat pasties with biceps like jay no you don't know um so you were a huge online personality you're now an investor an entrepreneur i suppose when you're investing in companies what are you looking for are you looking for companies that are creator-led or are you looking for companies that you can bring you know value to through creators because you obviously invested in one of my companies and you invested but you also got this is such a bizarre story you also got anton de beck to invest in our company as well so we uh strictly yeah from strictly so you know we were looking for i said to you guys at the time i was like i would love for you guys to invest but can you bring a creator and we were like who on earth would they bring because you know like we didn't need young youtubers we had a marketplace that helped elderly people find care yeah and so you guys were like anton de beck we were like oh my god because older women are just so obsessed with him.

48:43And we then did a joint interview with him on Good Morning and it crashed our website. It was so successful. He was the perfect influencer for us. So tell us a bit more about how it works. Yeah, of course. And I think also with that deal, that's not something where we got involved between you and Anton. We just introduce, he does his own thing. We don't take a fee for that. And that's actually, I mean, And going back to the start of how we started maybe helps explain what we do now is I was getting a few opportunities to invest in businesses because they thought I could be beneficial as a creator.

49:22And I didn't know about investing, I didn't know about venture, but I have a cousin called Sasha who's very, very smart. Like this guy works at all the startups, top of his class at Oxford, top of his class at Harvard, then worked at Bridgepoint where he was brilliant, which is like a massive private equity fund. And so he was there at the time. And I started showing him some of the deals I was getting exposed to. And I said, oh, actually, some of these are interesting. Why don't I invest as well and we'll invest together? And so we kind of did that. Then the next deal, we brought in a few more creators and we built this syndicate where we, the idea was we would make money from our own investments but we'd be more attractive to founders because we would bring in these other people uh and so we kept doing that we uh invested in a company called face it which sold emerged and sold to a bigger company for 1.5 billion uh and that was within two years so for venture incredible it's pretty quick uh unheard of it was yeah so it was is and there were a few others we did like we did wild um which is is ripping um and and so we kind of got these quick not only markups but also cash distributions which are important and then a fund of funds uh kind of encouraged us to go out and raise our first fund um and yeah we don't invest necessarily in creator founded businesses uh what we do is try and use our expertise and like you know our network and knowledge of social media uh to to help the businesses we're investing in navigate that be it bring a creator into a deal and do something like that or you know help them with their paid strategy or whatever they need help with a lot of them are already good at it because we we like that in a founder because especially for consumer businesses it's super important um and then we just invest.

51:21And we've invested in companies like Beehive, Practica, we did 11 labs. And yeah, the first fund's gone really, really well, which is not hard in... Well, sorry, which is quite hard in this climate. It wasn't necessarily hard a few years ago when everyone was just marking shit up, but at the moment that's not happening exactly the same way. And yeah, we're really proud of our achievement so far but it's all about the future and cast distributions that's what really matters unlike unlike you yeah i actually pitched sasha turn me down very very well i don't know if we ever pitched we just had like a really great don't make him feel bad that made me feel really bad about i remember i spoke to sasha a few times um i but but he's really really good and he was really like as in i thought they were really good conversations um he put a lot of time into them um our valuation was too high it's consumer like all of the things but he was really i really rated him yeah like he was very very good i've spoken to a lot of vcs and also i'm also very honest as chris knows i basically would tell you straight if i thought he was a prick oh great but he was awesome on live on camera but he's really really really good he might actually do that yeah but we also we turned down you know some some deals uh that we really regret like only anyone height and video exactly uh and uh and but then we've been lucky enough like two of the deals i can think of out of the top of my head is like uh you know we didn't do 11 labs the first time uh luckily we built we hopefully sasha built a relationship where then we were able to come in um and then even runner i don't know if you know yeah absolutely as well we i know don't man josh they're doing so well yeah we spoke to them uh very early on again we couldn't do it at that point but we were able to still come in and so i think uh hopefully that shows like that people like what we're providing but also the way in which i think it's just it's more simple than that just sasha when he talks to someone um or when i talk to someone you just make sure that even if you are declining they understand like why uh you're very transparent you're very quick they know they're speaking to the decision maker um and uh and that it's not necessarily that because what they're doing is wrong it's just not right yet maybe so if you're investing in a business what are you nowadays do you think that the creator marketing is outperforming traditional marketing or do you think that the traditional marketing still has a like a place for the businesses we're investing in a lot of them aren't doing traditional marketing just because i think you know you know when they're doing like 10 million 20 million arr like some of them might dip their toes in it by that point but most of them are just purely social purely digital what about wild uh wild does do some they've done a tv campaign um and they do but but i think they still way way more of their money spent on on influencer and and social yeah it's the same with us like 90 percent of ours is yeah and stuff basically yeah so i think i mean look i think when you get really big distribution i think in america as well like it's still important to do some traditional stuff i think it helps with the brand uplift i think some of them still do out of home campaigns but a lot of that is talked about on social and if they did a tv ad it'd be talked about on social but like wild last time i spoke to them this might be uh no longer the same but like they i think they have like a 30 person influencer marketing department wow uh yeah i mean they rip and they some of the data they have is like unbelievable and i've always said hey charlie please give it to me and he won't what are the what are the things that people are doing with creators now that is like the next level you know like what's the best version of creator marketing now yeah i mean i think uh it's one i think people have realized again like don't just work with the biggest possible creator who gets the most views you actually have to think about what the customers are and also if you're even if you're able to acquire the customer like are the customers you're acquiring from this creator actually good customers to acquire are they staying on what's their lifetime value and so on.

55:29So people are getting more nuanced. So like, what's the new thing with it all? I think the data is becoming a lot, you know, smarter. I think the people internally at brands are becoming smarter, which is pushing the agencies to be better. And like the cowboys in the industry are no longer kind of doing it as much. I think there is a lot of work around brands doing like an organic post, which is, you know, creator, can you make this for me? And then redistributing or remixing that content into paid media. And so they can use them both as like uh you know using their reach but they can also use them as a creative buy yeah and that's a lot more cost efficient than like building their own ads and so on and they that i would say like for people who don't understand that i think it's super smart if you're a creator and you can get yourself into that position yeah because you make you know you will do an ad with a brand and then that brand will use you as their ad in perpetuity if the ad works and you can get paid for that as well yeah yeah exactly you take a i do one issue but yeah time i mean i have i have some ads running with brands that i shot with them i mean over a year ago that they pay me on every month yeah which is crazy and for brands it's also like yeah it's great they used to have to go and hire a massive production company and a creative agency to to create these ads and now they can get away with hiring a creator and usually sometimes the roi is way better and i'm saying it always is i'm not saying that other stuff doesn't have a place on the other side of this so you you guys can come from the perspective of being the creators so on the perspective of being the brand this is exactly how we run our creative too yeah come on you're sitting in front of a microphone that's true thanks guys hundreds of thousands of followers cuties thanks um but from the perspective of a brand what we've learned over over time is typically a creator and their agents for sure um especially the bigger ones really value like you say their audience uh which is reasonable um the engagement that they'll get and basically the whole thing they'll charge you for is hey yes you can have a shoot with you know casper but you know you've got to pay 25 grand for two hours and you know whatever else and you'll get one one reel out of that and one set of stories and when i was starting at heights you know we would do these things and we just couldn't make them work well i why is crater working for everyone else like they're not that doesn't work for us we spend that money it's a flash in the pan moment we've got a little uptick today well what about tomorrow it took us a bit of an embarrassing amount of time to realize kind of what you guys are saying, which is now when we work with a creator, other than obviously they're already a customer.

57:57So that helps because they have the buy-in and they want to do it. We set up a shoot day. We work with them on the concept, like what is their story with our brand so far? And we get them for a day to shoot, whether or not they post the content on their own Instagram. That's important. I literally say to them, do it if you want to. So far, every single person has done it. But I'm like, because the agents value it so much. I'm like, just take out the contract. don't worry about it if they don't want to do it and you don't want to do it but we'll create such good content with them they want to do it your your cack is lower well wow that was uh entertaining this is our first day in the first day in the office someone almost died um nothing is but what was smart is it's only above you yeah if someone next time can we put it above the guest please i quite enjoyed that it's fine i guess we could i mean it's a startup let's just carry on yeah yeah we'll style it out we'll style it out if you're listening something just fell from the roof and almost killed customer one yeah i'm in the safe seat yeah um you don't get that on the diary the COG no you don't no they look after their guests yeah yeah um okay so yeah i i don't i actually don't care like obviously obviously i do but i know how much value they're trying to charge for that thing which is fair on their side i just know if we create really great content with them a creators want good content for their own feeds because they just do so if it's good enough they'll post it anyway and b as the brand all that matters is that we can use that content in paid advertising that we have control over it and i care more about the license period and the amount of usage and spend i can have behind it those are two things that i negotiate on it's gone to the point now where when an agency will approach or a brand approaches they don't they don't ask for the organic yeah they are specifically making ads for themselves but using you as the i think this is definitely the case for you know you're kind of like consumer consumer in kind of very internet selling like ddc like that kind of but then there is sometimes like you know you're more like trying to do a big brand uplift thing maybe you're a tourism board and you want to have like that that prestige of being on their feed but i think that is usually kind of maybe for the bigger creators that that's still quite important uh but yeah there's a whole i mean it's it's it's really depends it's such a it's there's no like this is the one way to do it type thing it depends what what you're looking for but um yeah i think it's great that this whole industry has evolved to a place where people you know are actually seeing positive roi yeah because that's important and i also like what you said around there like um you know it's not valuable to you but you still understand that the creator should be charging for it because it's valuable for them but that's Sometimes there's deals.

1:00:37People don't understand. Sometimes deals just can't work because something is valuable for one person but not valuable for the other. That doesn't mean they're trying to overcharge. It just means the deal's not right. A hundred percent. And I think one of the most important things to respect when you do these things is that person's time. Literally, that person could be doing anything that day. So if they're choosing to spend that day with you as the brand, they can't do other things as well. And we know when you're busy, when you're busy and you're famous as well, then the thing that you value the most is your time like the money kind of is neither here nor there a lot of times you just want to spend your time consciously so that's me i'm up for anything it's a no i'm here for five hours today i feel very productive yeah he's he's cash one of the things i've i've seen create a space recently is so we've obviously had the transition from normal content to like a lot of gated content now so like all the sub stack stuff or people building their own communities i'm now seeing fans yeah like only fans i'd love to see you on only fans chris gated content is a good example but like with so i have a paid for uh community of entrepreneurs yeah and now i have brands trying to sponsor the community which i think is fascinating because it's probably the best place in the world to sponsor yeah i mean you know exactly as you just got to be careful i guess you got to weigh it up and like i think it's like what you saw with you know amazon you pay for a subscription for ad free and then now they're starting to sneak in a few years yeah you're gonna get the other subscription so i think but you are right like those communities are you know really really valuable as long as it's like hyper so it i normally teach entrepreneurs how to grow or scale or build you know personal brand etc and if you're a beehive or convert kit or whatever like it's the most valuable space in the world yeah you probably couldn't 100 because they're so near the final exactly you couldn't get that outside and so i'm now thinking about my own brand i'm doing less and less and less sponsorships but i might as well tactically partner with you know circle for example because if circle sponsor my community how many of those you know seven eight figure entrepreneurs are gonna use circle it's like i thought i find it such an interesting i think if you can also provide them with like uh like like offers for your community that would be really helpful because in your community we'll not just see it as like an ad it's like this is actually yeah um beneficial or if you know that you know part as long as you're just not bombarding a community that's already paying yeah with ads i think it's great yeah exactly as long as the alignment's perfect for the brand they might give the audience a 20 reduction on signing up because they don't have a necessary a cost of the acquisition in the same way they would publicly yeah and so it's like a it's kind of a win-win i find it a fascinating space is that gated paid for communities can be the best place to sponsor it's gonna be an influence marketing agency pop up after you said that just for that do um do you guys think that uh creative businesses are overvalued then um there was a lot of hype around creator economy uh startups especially during like the crypto boom like you started to see like creators and crypto coming together to create random things i don't even i don't know i I was like, what the hell is this?

1:03:48That was a funny time. You put two words together that are hypey. I do think we, you know, when we, we call creative ventures, but the reason is because we kind of use the power of that to invest in all sorts of businesses. But, you know, the area we still really like is like creative tools that creators use because we think a lot of them can go, obviously they're very important to creators, but they can go beyond creators. Like Canva, I think is a great example. in terms of like you know valuations and so on i think right now valuations are getting higher again at the early stages i think that is more kind of ai related than like the creator economy because right now if you're not in the hot topic you like i don't think creator economy is necessarily like the hottest thing right now i think if you're not ai right now you're probably considered a bit boring yeah and and ever to be honest everyone will no matter what they're doing now it will they'll add ai to it just because either it's a re re spell heights don't you hates exactly you're so weird um and i and i don't think that's one because they're trying to attract uh vc but also i think a lot of businesses now can be rebuilt using ai from scratch so it is an opportunity so you are seeing totally i mean if you have a business now you should at least be thinking how do i do this thing but with ai yeah how do i optimize how do i you know uh At Influencer, I'm working on a project right now to try and see what processes internally can we improve on.

1:05:19And one of the things I've noticed is so many of the team are already doing these things. We just need to figure out how to distribute that information amongst the company. And I think as smaller companies, we're in a unique position to implement these changes fast without worrying about huge policies. And if you're a massive conglomerate, good luck trying to say I'm going to let everyone use ChatGPT. like you have to come up with um yeah more rigorous uh ways of dealing with that so the reason i think ai and create is so interesting outside the hype is like at a fundamental level you're talking about kind of unfair distribution at the top end through audience and then you're talking about you know unbelievably efficient processes and small teams with ai yeah so for individuals that are savvy enough you can build an audience and an ai supported company have limited staff and have a quite big company which never used to exist previously yeah it's it's it's crazy yeah like the whole the creative thing has become something where you need less people to make amazing content and now the other side is becoming less people too and so like individuals can go out and build their own companies uh without needing to be experts in building companies they just need to be experts in what they're talking about or what they're building and and And I think when like initially we had that first wave of people building companies back in the day, you had to be like a business expert.

1:06:41And like what you were building business on didn't matter as much. Now it's kind of the opposite. And you'd need like a marketing team, an operations team, all those sorts of things. But it does make me think like, what's the role of traditional marketing moving forwards? Because like, like I said, I've just started a new company. It's my most successful company ever. And I have almost no staff. And most of it's run operationally and supported by AI. and it's just benefits from distribution and so i think would i ever do traditional marketing i think yeah with your yeah with your company it sounds like 100 i still do think there's so many companies out there um who are going to still need lots of people and i think it's going to make everyone's like 3x but if everyone gets 3x then you need to be 3x just to keep up so everyone becomes almost like how we all got better when we like started using the internet and computers we got more efficient everyone now does that so now we're just normal yeah there's that steve jobs thing and the computer is the bicycle of your mind and so ai is like the rocket ship so you've got to like really figure out how to deal with that but i think you know before personal brand and creator became a really big thing like at the end of the day your reputation was your personal brand and how people interact with you and how they like you and respect you and think of you that stuff really really mattered and the thing that really made me bullish on uh creator and actually on a personal level made me decide to start posting and start doing stuff on linkedin and Twitter and then Instagram literally was I read so much about AI last year that I realized one of the few remaining things left that we'll have as human beings is our own personality, our own view of the world, our own because everything is just becoming so generic.

1:08:19So and it's already happening a lot. So to have your own unique personality and your own stance and stuff and to build your own audience of people who like to listen to you because you are a human and you are you that suddenly clicked for me that like that is actually one of the only edges you have in an AI world isn't it is that you're still human when everything else is commodified by uh tech yeah I think it's very yeah exactly there's there's some stuff that's going to become way more important for people and some stuff that's going to become less less important and I think like with the creator world I think it's quite nuanced um I think that you're gonna you You have people who were creators who were just redistributing information, but no one actually cared about the person doing it.

1:09:00They just cared about the information. I think that's quite easy for AI to come and replicate. For example, like the Daily Mail, if there's a new story happening, and it's on TikTok, no one cares about the person who's telling the story. They just want to hear the story. And so that's the thing. But if it's like someone giving their opinion on something like Joe Rogan or anything, people want to come for that person and it's just like you would never watch two like ai football teams playing against each other even though they could be very good and probably if they were robots even better than real footballers it's not interesting because yeah there's something innately human about our lives that we care about i think i'd like to watch it once the ai play like a crazy game but then yeah without the personality without the imperfection it would all become quite boring yeah and i and i still think like it's going to continuously improve like i think claude for example is getting like really good with so like not being an ai cringe type thing wild uh but yeah there's there's also this i don't know if there's this almost plateau happening with some of ai at the moment where we thought it was just going to continuously snowball at the same rates and it's like there are actually some restrictions with this current way we're doing things uh where where like, you know, people a lot smarter than me are gonna come up with ways to fix that.

1:10:21But I think it's not gonna continually move as fast as it has done for the last few years. There's a great clip, Sam Altman, where he goes, at the beginning, everyone thought like, AI was gonna be like, Terminator, change the world. Now everyone's like, oh, it's a bit slow when I type a query. And it's true, like, when AI happened, I remember being terrified because I was like, wow, I'm gonna be behind, like immediately. And I set myself the goal of like, using it half an hour or an hour every day from the moment the chat gpt came out and i think it's one of the best decisions i ever made but now i'm like god it's slow like why can't it do more yeah and it's amazing how if you're not doing that you are behind if you're not using it all the time your ability to execute on companies is just way less what do you think are the biggest opportunities then that are coming out of the crater industry are they all related to ai or are there other things that we're not looking at yeah i mean in terms of um investments uh i'm always i'm always quite skeptical when people like oh i want to build a um you know a financial uh company for creators to use or i want to do uh you know something where it's not actually helping the creators make better content or it's not easy for the creators to see how much money they can make from it because creators are really difficult um uh customers they like i think i might get this analogy wrong uh but they're like they're like it's hard sometimes they're selling to an enterprise they turn as fast as a consumer and they have like the pockets of a smb like so like they're not the number one audience for you building your business but in terms of like creators building their own businesses um yeah you're going to continuously see it a lot of them do it and some of them are successful some of them aren't i think they have uh very early on um a chance to go from zero to quite a big number very quickly but then they sometimes struggle to get the product market fit because it's like it's inflated because of that and the churn is so real i think that's such a good takeaway for everyone listening is like the the the boring our businesses so for example our business lotty it took more time to get going because we were selling to enterprise care companies but then there's zero churn and so it's just such a compounding thing to watch whereas i know so many people who started creative businesses like absolutely flew but then all the customers are gone yeah within like two years yeah and uh and so i when you know when i when i talk to creators trying to build business i'm like yeah leverage the fact that you have an audience maybe it can help with trying to get customers but actually it's not going to help you long term you you want to actually build something that people would use even if you didn't have an audience and that's just like a benefit exactly and then um and then also leverage the fact that you're created to get into meetings with the right partners or getting opportunities to speak on podcasts or going on stage so for me that's really been important because i've never had a well i do have a student accommodation business in south africa but most of the businesses i'm involved in they're very b2b and so i've never sold my products to my audiences but i've leveraged the fact that i'm a creator to do those opportunities and and then eventually sell to enterprises which as you say long sales cycle but it's also a great business to be in yeah i mean when you look at when you look at a business like that after a long enough period you're like wow that thing's a freight train yeah rather than a lot of the businesses that i get pitched on my channel i always look at and i'm like it's cool now but in five years am i going think that was a good investment probably not so yeah what do you think makes a good leader or a great leader i should say um this i think yeah people who firstly um don't they obviously as people get more and more experience they start to um use that experience to make decisions and that can be great but i think sometimes bad leaders will then build up these um conceptual misconceptions but these ideas on things and then and then they just will turn down big opportunities or tell someone something based on something that happened five years ago and it's not necessarily relevant so i've used the word nuance so much today that i'm almost embarrassed but i think that people who are willing to go against their own concept like misconceptions or their own ideas of what happened in the past i think makes it a good leader and i wish more people talked about the word nuance yeah because i feel like there's so much always lost in translation in the world and it has to be so polarized one way or the other but and everyone has to be right yeah and i think like some leaders i've met like they are so sure of themselves on every single topic in the world and i'm like that terrifies me yeah well that's a tell isn't it yeah you're good at one thing uh what's that saying you have i loved oh yeah um uh it's the kind of people we like to hire at heights which is strong opinions loosely held yeah i love that so that's exactly what i'm trying to say yeah um and yeah i think so many especially in venture like so many people miss out on opportunities because especially the bigger venture companies they have to build teams and then you finally get approval from the person who's been doing this for 30 years and like maybe you haven't been able to as the associate associate or the person sorry the leader of the deal you haven't maybe be able to tell that person all the nuances and they have the misconceptions and they miss out on a great deal because they're not dealing with it themselves and they're not open to new new things or new ideas or going or going like actually everything i know about this you know deal is uh is is bringing up different things that i thought were not right but there's still something special here and i can still do that so what makes a bad boss um a bad boss i think someone who's you know a huge micromanager is i do like you know i do also i like the founder mode thing like people i do think there's an important time to become like really on top of and mustn't be like, I'm delegating everything.

1:16:18Like, just like, I trust you. And that's great. But you really, again, you need that balance. And I think he's giving you some live feedback. He's like, what you said sounds a bit much, mate. Bring it back in. And - It's true though, isn't it? Like people oscillate as well. Like you're probably, you know, you probably will have experienced so much on one side and quite often we go on the other side. Seasons of life, man. Yes. I'm just in a quieter season. Yeah. I'm less - This is spring summer energy, Chris. no but you know when you're when you are when you're on the front line of a company i've built a couple now and i've had good times and bad times exits etc like sometimes you have to be like oh but at least now i can recognize it you go fuck this is going to be i'm going to be in the trenches now for a year and i'm going to have to fight my way back out of this but then you get to other seasons like like now where i'm like okay i don't have to do that all the time so so why would i try and do that again you know i'm just trying to have a bit more of a peaceful life i suppose Yeah, no, 100%.

1:17:14And yeah, no, I think there's so many ways of doing it. It depends on your culture as a company as well. Like, you know, you can't just you can't just walk in and expect like to talk to a marketing company in the same way you'd talk to like a really technical deep learning AI business and like have the same strategy of how to be a boss. and so I think the ability to kind of have some sort of EQ and know like how do you incentivize people beyond just saying things like what do they actually care about and then also I think like today like you know being genuine because a lot of you know we learn like how do we do company values how do we do like all of these like how do we build our culture and like every now and then like some leaders will just stand on stage like once a quarter and say all the right things but everyone's just like oh my god this is so lame like you actually have to be in today's world where people especially in the uk i find like they hate like that sort of airy fairy shit they want you to be funny they want you to be self-deprecating but you still need that stuff but you've got to deliver it in a way that feels like real what's your secret to business success then what is the thing that's worked for you i mean just somehow um convincing really good people to work with me um and so yeah the fact that i'm able to do multiple things is is because of those people um and hopefully i bring something valuable to that um but yeah i i i can't be like it's me it's definitely those people but hopefully i've i've been able to um provide them with with something helpful too and are you are you balanced like how are you looking after your health yeah I'm actually yeah pretty good at the moment uh I yeah I go to the gym a lot I run because of runner a lot uh you're gonna play paddle with Dan I would love to play paddle with Dan honestly I won't come to South Africa just to play paddle with you you shouldn't I think I think exercise I think uh I think sleep yeah these things are hugely important and then I just I have an incredible relationship with my fiance um and so yeah just just just really happy to be honest at the moment but it changes like like i had i had like three years ago just after lockdown i had like really bad social anxiety like shocking i wouldn't even be able to drive a car with like my best friend sitting next to me because i'd feel trapped and like what am i going to say and all of this and like it took me a long time to get through that and i don't know exactly what happened i think a lot of people experienced strange things coming out of that that time um but your brain literally changes so in the experience of something like lockdown which is so unusual your brain you can change from being an extrovert to an introvert through that experience and so many people who were extroverted before became very introverted for a long time and did not like you're saying didn't know how to handle that and because i was the same by the way and how it manifests in social anxiety like really uncomfortable to be around other people because you're not used to feeling anything but comfortable around other people yeah yeah exactly and it was it was like my thing like that's what i built my whole career on was like being working with other people and i became terrified for some reason and and what i learned during that whole thing was like obviously speaking to someone who could help me and their advice was um you know slowly but surely push yourself uh to like you know on that first you know you don't want to go on a long drive okay do a one minute drive then do a five minute drive do a ten and then over time you build it up but don't like run away from it and like just embrace the kind of the fear and now when i have like really big pitches it might not be anxiety that i'm feeling it might be nervousness but like i get kind of excited for that and uh i'm almost getting it like yeah like i had a pitch last night and i was i was again it was like a next level pit every time you get used to it but then there's something else or maybe you haven't done it for a while and then you feel it again but you just feel so good afterwards i don't even miss that that's like the one phenomenal thing about proper b2b businesses is that as your company scales you know you go from smaller brands to medium size to massive and i remember the feeling you get after a pitch when you feel like it went well or you feel like you've got it there's very few things in life like it yeah that sort of i remember we flew back we won bugatti and we basically got told on the day that we won them and then on the plane back it was just like full elation and you don't we don't really have that in what I do these days.

1:21:41And I think that's a great example you got to hear on the day. Usually you don't. And for me, it's weird. I get more excited. Even if I just get through the pitch and I feel like it's done well, then the result, I know it's going to be like, I know what percentage might happen. And so then that's fine. That will be in the back. But just getting through it and being nervous and doing it makes me just so excited. Because like, yeah, I went through a time when it wasn't the case. And I hope I don't get fully jaded so that I don't get nervous because I like that feeling. Yeah, it's true. It's interesting listening to you both.

1:22:10realize you don't really you actually don't really have that in consumer that doesn't really that big big moment thing even if you were to get an award or a milestone that's not really how it works because winning a big deal i mean it could change your business like that changes everything yeah like you know it's consumer it's more like you know when we put when we put out that we won bugatti on socials the company changed overnight because all the other luxury brands were like well if you work with bugatti you can work with anyone and so we then went on an absolute tear two years before the exit which was like aston martin we want loads of other car brands we want yacht brands plane brands hotel brands but we were verified by the fact that we'd want to be getting and so i knew that on the way home it was like i was like we've made it and then all from that point almost you're like i need to sign a contract sign the contract sign the contract and then wouldn't you sell about that i think for consumer it would be more like marketing related activities like where you have to go on national tv or uh maybe you have a meeting with someone who can come on as the face and like that might be a nerve-wracking or even pitching to investors but you're right it's a lot less each customer isn't like this big nerve-wracking experience so that's interesting who'd be your ideal client so what is the big big goal for you before we uh let you go what is the big exciting hairy goal you've got for yourself i think uh virgin virgin atlantic would be pretty good so richard are you listening richard branson that would be good but yeah no it's we've worked with with incredible incredible brands so to be honest i've already worked with all the ideal ones and uh almost almost other than richard um come on come on richard an ode to richard the show casper thank you so much for joining us on secret leaders and bringing that richard energy as well feeling it cheers thanks guys