Resident Advisor: Bootstrapping a Global Music Empire - Nick Sabine

30:05just subconsciously and consciously just distancing ourselves. And I think there's also an unseen cost within the business. It kind of feels like if you look at it in a family context, it's kind of like mom and dad fighting and mom and dad think that no one notices, but everyone notices. And that's just not helpful. And I think great leadership in that moment would have been, hey, the reality of this situation is this, it needs to change how we're going to deal with that. And it went on for way longer than it should have. And I feel a real sense of sadness. Who was the person who clearly identified that this was happening to create the moment of change?

30:53Oh, that's a good question.

31:01I don't know. Were you getting feedback from your colleagues, the two of you? Yes, we were. I think it was becoming less enjoyable to work together. that was a significant shift. It had been really enjoyable up until that point. And there'd been a real mutual respect for the complimentary skills and characteristics that we both have. And I just remember that it just wasn't as enjoyable anymore. And I would just distance myself from him in projects or in meetings or what have you in a way that was not helpful in the fact that we were growing this company together. And I remember staff used to talk about the fact that there was a disharmony at the top, but we wouldn't necessarily, I don't think we realized how present it was or the impact that it was having.

32:09And if we had, I think we would have dealt with it sooner. But it wasn't, it wasn't, I look back on it now and I realized that we should have had the conversations we ended up having in these facilitated environments far sooner. And I remember we used to walk, we used to just go on walks at lunchtime together along the canal in East London. And that's when we started to have these deeper conversations about the fact that, you know, we weren't entirely happy in doing what we were doing and things that needed to change. But I can't remember who actually brought it to the fore because it felt like a gradual, it felt like we'd just kind of been slipping into a place where it was not good for us or the business.

32:52Were either of you threatening to leave the company? Was it sort of like, look, if we don't sort this out, X has to happen?

33:00I remember at one point I thought, if we can't sort this out, this is not working for me. And I'd given my life to this company. So the prospect of stepping away, it was incredibly jarring for me. And I think that was one of the things that highlighted how much we needed to do to actually repair this. And so it was in the best interest of the company that we repaired it, but also in the best interest of ourselves, because we'd given so much to this and for it to no longer be as enjoyable as it once was. And I think also just the pressures and the stress of running a company, which gets to 100, 120 full-time people as people who'd never been in that situation before.

33:46That is, I often liken it to like a lobster being boiled where over a number of years, the work just gets more and more and more and the responsibility gets more and more to the point where you don't even necessarily notice it. And it actually wasn't until I stepped away that I actually felt how much weight I'd been carrying up until that point in terms of responsibility. And so I think the stresses of just running this business also was taking its toll on us personally, which made it more difficult for us to nurture the relationship together. and I think in my own, obviously I can only speak for me, but had I been willing to share that, or had I even been aware of it, but had I been willing to share it and say like, I'm really struggling here.

34:36Like this feels like a lot and I'm not sure where we go from here. I think that would have created the space for perhaps him to share something similar and for us to work through it together. I remember our last conversation and it feels like you went through a real transition. I want to know what about your leadership style has changed from who you were to who you are now. So 20 years, how has your leadership style changed?

35:10I would say authenticity. I don't think I knew who I was then. And I certainly wasn't confident enough to show up as myself. whereas now I feel more confident in who I am and more confident in my ability to actually just show up in any given situation as that person without the need to seek validation in terms of how the other person might respond to me. I'm more confident in my self-assessment and actually being able to speak to that which I don't think I was back then. When I started Resident Advisor I was only 19. So, you know, we were really making it up as we went along and I certainly was.

35:53And, and I remember these moments in, as the company grew, where throughout the year, 51 weeks of the year, I would just be as me as I could be. And then we would get to, we would have these kind of summits as we used to call them, where we'd get the whole company together. And, you know, at the beginning there was 20 people. And then at one point there was up to a hundred people. and I would stand up in front of those people and I would give a kind of a year-end speech to kind of recap how the year was and share some thoughts and I would essentially step into the role of what I thought a CEO needed to be and so I would get up on stage and I would talk with dramatic pauses and intonations and hand gestures and things like that and it would be like an over-prepared speech or presentation.

36:40And I would come off the stage thinking, absolutely nailed that. That's exactly what a CEO should be. And then I would have people come up to me and say, Nick, who was that? And what I didn't realize I was doing was actually stepping into a role rather than remaining authentic to who I was. And I think that was because I was not secure enough within myself to actually stand there in front of everyone, just as myself, just as the CEO or co-CEO who built the company and I don't face that same challenge anymore. And the willingness to actually just be as authentically me as possible in any given situation, professional or personal, I would say is the biggest shift in my approach to leadership.

37:25How much of that is a function of age and maturity or the fact that, you know, running narratives through our heads, like you're successful now, you've built a successful company. So there's more confidence to say, I've made it, I'm a success.

37:44I think we were a successful company, even when I wasn't able to be fully authentic myself, to actually fully trust who I was. The company was actually tracking really successfully. And I was tethering a significant portion of my identity and my confidence to the success of the company. So actually, I was energized and emboldened by the external validation that I would get for lots of people saying, wow, this thing's so big and you're so young and it's so great. And all of these things would actually give me this, I guess, it's kind of like artificial confidence that things were going well and that I was doing a good job.

38:26And it wasn't until you know, a life moment, actually going through a divorce that I was forced to essentially have a breakdown personally, and then rebuild myself from that point that I actually realized the gap between who I was and who I was pretending to be. And so I would actually say it wasn't the success of the business that actually drove that change or gave me the deeper sense of confidence. It was actually a life event that forced me to self-inquire and really discover who I was and who I am. So divorce is obviously quite a big life transition moment, a big change in your life. And people move through the change, either positively or negatively.

39:13It sounds like yours has been very positive, very reflective. I'm wondering if you mentioned just authenticity, I'm wondering if you weren't showing up as your authentic self at home as well. And that's what led to conversations, a divorce, a big change in your personal life. Yeah, I don't think I was, but unknowingly. So I didn't have a true sense of who I was for probably 35 years. And, you know, the thing that actually sparked the transition was I, in 99 % of people's phones, I was Nick at RA. and at one point I asked myself the question who am I without this company and I realized I couldn't answer it and it was that moment where I knew okay I need to I need to step away and I need to make some changes in my life to actually be able to answer that question and as long as I'm tethered to it in a day-to-day capacity I'll never truly know and so it was but the the the moment of divorce really sparked that self-inquiry that led me to that question.

40:17And so, yeah, I think it was a huge blessing. I remember my acupuncturist who worked not far from here actually, when I saw her the day after it all happened, she said, well done, you've done this on purpose. And I couldn't wrap my head around it at the time. And I remember that was just ringing around and around and around in my head. And I look back on that now and she was right. I think for men, especially men who grow up in a patriarchal conditioned society, we often need a moment of deep distress to actually break ourselves open and actually start to really inquire as to who we truly are.

41:06And that moment was so dark for me and I felt so lost because I identified as a husband and I was central to a great group of friends and I was co-CEO of this company and all of these things were that were kind of shaping my identity to the world but also to myself kind of evaporated in you know this in a split second and I felt hugely lost at that moment I didn't know who I was and so the rebuilding process kind of began at that moment. And it was, in hindsight, it was a huge blessing because I don't think had I not had that level of distress and felt as lost as I did, I wouldn't have necessarily been incentivized in the same way to fumble around in the dark and find the ladder and pull myself out.

41:54And it was that multiple year journey that actually really helped me learn more about who I was, learn to trust that and feel worthy in that sense of who I was. And so to come back to your question around not showing up authentically at home, in hindsight, no, but I wasn't conscious of it at the time. And because I don't think I had that like self-confidence within myself to be fully myself. And I think what happens in that situation, and I see it happen in lots of relationships is when we're either consciously or subconsciously playing a role within a relationship, we never fully trust the love that comes back because subconsciously, we know it's not the authentic version of us.

42:40Right. Because there's a facade up, you're saying you're playing a role. Exactly. Right. And that can be conscious or unconscious. It was unconscious for me. But I think the impact of that is we can never truly trust the love that comes back because that we're not being fully authentic. and that was a journey I had to go on and I am grateful for that for that moment as difficult as it was. And you mentioned earlier the sort of showing up as yourself 51 weeks of the year and then the 52nd you've got your you know keynote week and you've got a present in front of the company and you're a different person so who are you in the 51 weeks like how are you describing yourself and is that a good version of yourself anyway?

43:19Definitely. It's a version I'm proud of. I was optimistic, playful, very personable, so really able to get on with people and build an environment where people felt supported and motivated to contribute to the project. And so I am proud of that version. And And there was just a real sense of, and this is how it felt genuinely to me, like we're just in this together and we're trying to build this idea and create this company with this shared set of skills. And that's why it felt so weird when I kind of went into this like CEO mode where I was kind of stepping outside of myself to become something that I thought I needed to be that actually throughout the rest of the year, I didn't think I needed to be that, but that's born out of just an insecurity.

44:19Okay, I'm stepping up in front of this company, they need a leader, a CEO, so I better perform that role. Whereas actually, if I just stayed myself, optimistic, naively sometimes charismatic version of myself, then it would have maintained that connection. And actually, what I'm saying at that point would have landed with much more depth and realness. So what happened in those moments? It sounds to me like there was a feedback loop that really opened your eyes in that 52nd week, as we call it, that one week where things were different. Was that eye opening? What happened? Who told you that you weren't yourself?

44:57Well, it was actually, it came after the moment of divorce. I was effectively broken open and but I didn't leave the company at that point. I kept working. And so I would come into work and I would be sat in a meeting room with one or two colleagues. And I was physically there, but not mentally there. And I was no longer able, like the feelings I had were so strong and overwhelming with what was going on for me personally, that I wasn't able to override them cognitively. And I might just start crying in the middle of a meeting. And were you a crier previously? No. Only on comedowns? Yeah. Is everyone like, were you out on Saturday?

45:47No, I was at home crying. And so I would find myself in a position where one of my colleagues, and we have to remember, this is a company where essentially colleagues become friends. We're literally in this together and some of my most deep and important friendships have developed through people working at the company and me working with them. And I would just start crying in a meeting and one of them would be like, are you okay? Or what's up? And I was no longer able to pretend that I was okay. And so I would just have to tell them or would choose to just tell them how it is. And what I didn't realize at the time was that by me as the co-leader of the company being deeply vulnerable in that moment, it actually vastly increased the level of trust and intimacy that I had with people within the company.

46:46And there isn't a high functioning leadership team out there that isn't built on trust and intimacy. And what I didn't realize was my unwillingness to show those parts of myself was actually creating a barrier and distance that wasn't conducive to building a great company. And so by me breaking down in those moments and actually revealing myself fully, it then created the space for other people to do the same in a way that transformed many of my relationships, which I thought were good, but they became great as a result. And it was in those moments and in those conversations that I started to get feedback about things like, you know, that keynote address, like who was that?

47:31Because all of a sudden it created space for people to actually give me honest feedback in a way that I could truly hear it and then receive it openheartedly and then make the necessary changes. And so it took my vulnerability and my willingness to reveal who I was and how I was feeling to create the space for other people within the company to realize that it's safe for them to do the same. So after two decades of building the company from a side hustle thing that is just for fun because you want to go to raves to the largest independent ticketing website in the world, or definitely electronic dance music website, full stop, right?

48:16Yeah. Like building a really big company like that over two decades, I suppose you've gone through all of this work and sounds like you've got to a really great point and you're so in love with what you do and the culture of the team, where you've got to personally. Why leave?

48:37because I couldn't answer that question of who am I without RA and I knew that I would never be able to truly answer that question whilst I was tethered to it on a day-to-day basis and when did that first that question first appear in your head 2018 probably same time as your divorce yeah

49:03and I because I'd also realized that around the same time I realized that I'd never been bored you have to remember I'm so committed to this project I love it so much I'm so passionate about what we're building I love the team I love what we're contributing to the culture that in every spare moment I was working it didn't feel like work but I was working so even if I was at a festival and there was a few hours before the group were going to go on an adventure or what have you, I'd be answering emails. Or if I'm on holiday, I'm waking up early, answering the emails just to make sure that we're on top of things and then I'm enjoying the holiday.

49:45And it never felt like I was working. I was so enmeshed with it. And then I had a realization that I'd never been bored. And I really felt like there would be a benefit to being bored and to feeling bored. And I knew that whilst I was running it on a day-to-day basis, I would never actually have the ability to be bored for an extended period. So I actually, when I stepped away, I actually committed to being bored for three months. And that meant literally like, you know, going to the beach without my phone, spending entire afternoons on the couch, not reading, not looking at my phone, not listening to music, just fully immersing myself in the discomfort of being bored and did that for three months.

50:29And that was something that never could have happened if I was still working on a day-to-day basis for the company. And then it was at the end of that three months that I was like, okay, what now? What will I do next? But before you get to what now, what question did you answer? So who did you find out you were? What happens in a process like that? It's very much an inward journey. And I remember actually the one really significant moment of change actually was I was sat in my first therapy session in 2018. And the therapist that came very well recommended and I sat down with him and I was explaining my situation to him.

51:15And I was explaining things to him that felt really important to me. and he said none of that matters and I was like what and he said the only thing that matters is your relationship to yourself and it took me three weeks of saying that question again and again in my mind to start to even realize what that meant and that was and once I did I realized well I don't have a relationship with myself I've got a relationship with lots of other people You know, I used to think I had 50 best friends, you know, all around the world. I, you know, one of the most beautiful things about running this international company in being immersed in the culture that I love was I developed these really beautiful relationships with people around the world built on this shared passion point.

52:04And, but I didn't realize that there was an unseen cost of giving myself to these relationships. Like I used to not walk to the shops to get milk without calling someone. And it could be like someone in London, it could be someone in Buenos Aires, whatever. but I was always just in contact with someone else. I'd go on holidays, never on my own, always with big groups and I'd be the one organizing it. And so, it was a real kind of course correction in terms of like how I do life. And so, it was a realization that, oh, I don't have a relationship with myself, but I need to and I want to. And then that became the primary focus.

52:41And that was the journey that I'm still on very much. Yeah, I know. I always think there's a really odd paradox that we're suffering from such a mental health epidemic. And the core function of that is loneliness. And yet the great unlock to finding inner peace and joy is ironically solitude. you know chosen solitude which is obviously a very different thing but it's so fascinating to me how at the two extreme ends of the spectrum of happiness and fulfillment and despair and sadness is actually the idea of being alone yeah it's just weird to me but I mean obviously many things are paradoxes in life but you know that one particular you know hearing you talk with such passion about being given the space to be alone and what that unlocks for you.

53:33And just the realization that one should be alone and one should spend time alone. And for the next couple of years in that process, I actually swung the pendulum far too much the other way. As people often do, right? Yeah. I went from being central to a big group of friends, always with people, organizing big events, all of these things to just literally always being on my own, hardly ever seeing anyone and actually learning to really love that in a way that the old Nick never could have imagined. And, you know, eventually got myself to a point where I started to love it too much. And I realized that I needed to actually like, you know, come back and find the, you know, the middle way.

54:12You mentioned, you know, you started the business at 19 years old, and it grew 30 % year on year, pretty much like clockwork until COVID. obviously COVID is a pivotal moment for a lot of businesses and many failed but I can't even imagine when people can't go raving they can't book tickets they can't go out they can't do things what it's like for a company for culture for you your stress levels your leadership style can you take us back to that moment in 2020 2021 how did you get through it what what was your reality inside the business. So overlaid with the significance of that moment, I had already made my own mind up that it was time to step away.

54:55So energetically to some degree, I've already left, but practically I'm still there because we're just like integrating the succession plan. Then COVID happens. And obviously that's not the time to depart because it's kind of all hands to the pump. And so - You must have felt very bitter after 20 years, finally getting to that moment, and it's a bloody pandemic. Bitters is one way of saying it. It was indescribably hard. We lost 95 % of revenue overnight. And we are a sustainable business economically. So we need to earn one more pound than we spend at the end of every year to remain viable. And fortunately, we'd built something of a chest.

55:49We had a golden rule from the beginning where we always wanted to make sure that no matter what happens, we had enough money in the account to pay three months worth of salaries. So whether we were five people, 10 people, what have you. And luckily, we've managed to kind of maintain that golden rule throughout our growth and development. And that was essentially the thing that saved the company because we actually had a pool of funds that we could use to pay people when literally the revenue tap was almost completely turned off. Do you not have to do layoffs? I mean, fundamentally, people weren't doing anything.

56:21Yeah, we did. But we really tried to, you have to remember, it's almost like a family, this company and the sense of devastation at having to actually lay off a huge number of people. And we're also, you have to remember, it was such a time of unknowingness. We didn't know really what was happening. We didn't know how long it was going to last. We didn't know what it meant for us, for the culture, for the world. And I just remember that it was basically every day just being immersed in spreadsheets with our CFO. And we would just sat around and we were just like, you know, the spreadsheets went from the predominant color being black to the predominant color being red, like very, very quickly.

57:07And it was frightening to think, okay, we could lose this company here. And through no fault of our own, really. And I remember it was just, you know, every day we were working incredibly hard to try and figure out how we were going to get ourselves through this, how we could communicate to staff with realness that we really don't know what's going on, but we are committed to trying to do this in the most RA way possible. And then also realizing that the only way we get through this is actually by laying off some people because we to cut costs massively. And how did that go? We ended up, it was basically every week.

57:51We're like, okay, we think we can survive. Okay, we're just going to let go of like 10 people we have to do this week. And then like a fortnight would go past and we realized that the trend was that this situation is going to continue. We're not going to generate any more revenue than another 10 people. And so it was kind of done in stages. Okay. So you did like death by a thousand paper cuts. Well, because it meant that people, we were paying people and employing people for as long as we could to try and manage things to actually not have to actually just like cut a, you know, just cut a huge, like cut half the company off.

58:28So this is really interesting because the conventional wisdom, having been through this stuff myself and having therefore asked a lot of people about how to deal with this is even though it's the humane thing to do, what you're describing, you're keeping people and jobs for as long as you can, etc. Culturally, it's very hard for a culture of people to keep getting that shock and disappointment, whether it's in your control or out your control. Obviously, pandemic, you do get the extra sensitivity of people having the awareness that it's out of your control. However, that sort of emotional, cultural shock inside the company to keep happening.

59:10The conventional wisdom is even though that's kind, actually, that's the biggest killer to company culture, because it creates just an ongoing trauma over and over and over and over again, shrinking and shrinking and shrinking versus the incredibly brutal way of doing the opposite, which is you cut half the team, even though you don't need to cut half the team at that point, you sort of take the opinion that this is what's going to happen. The writing feels like it's on the wall about this it's gonna fucking suck either way 10 people tend to react badly if you let go of 10 people or 50 people right it's it's horrible for everyone so you deal with it once and you deal with a culture fallout once properly but you at least give people the kind of confidence it's not going to happen again so this was the advice I was given I had to do a whole bunch of layoffs 18 months ago um I didn't want to do it and I didn't want this advice to be true but you know I asked enough people and that was the advice that was given and I was like well well, you know what?

1:00:06You don't go and seek other people's experience if you're not going to then take it. And I did, and it was probably the right decision. I'm wondering if listening to this, you're wondering on reflection, well, we can compare. How was that experience? Do you think there's some truth in the experience share that I've offered? Like, is that actually what played out or did it go well? I think there's wisdom in what you shared. The difference for us - Other people's wisdom. There's wisdom in what other people shared. The difference for us was our workload went up because all of a sudden there's millions of people with tickets that want their money back.

1:00:47There's event organizers in the thousands around the world that are also scrambling themselves to either move their shows online or cancel them or reschedule them or what have you. we're having to develop products with our engineering team to be able to do mass refunds, different types of refunds for different situations. So the company's workload skyrocketed in that moment. So it wasn't a case of actually, well, we can just like do what you're doing and actually have this one moment of deep distress and then hopefully beyond that, because we actually needed people for as long as possible because the moment we released 10 people, because we needed to to keep the company going, it wasn't like there was like the workload that those 10 people were responsible for then fell on the people remaining.

1:01:36And so actually what was happening is the people who were still in the business had to shoulder the burden of work for a company that was 100 people and then eventually became 50 people. But there were still 100 people's worth of work there. And so actually it was a really difficult moment culturally because there was a huge amount of stress within the business because people didn't know if the company was going to survive. People didn't know if their jobs were going to be there in a few weeks' time. And on top of that, there was a huge amount of work to be done. Yeah. And they say that growth solves all culture problems.

1:02:06So 30 % year on year, sorry, for 18 years or 19 years, whatever it is, would create a magical culture where things seem to be fine. So how did culture feel when you kept having to do this? What was it like for you? was that actually a culture shock for yourself as a leader to witness a different reality inside the business? Hugely. It felt like a very, well, it was kind of, it was interesting. There was a spirit of togetherness because there was a real connectedness between the leadership team and the company and people could see how much it was impacting us emotionally. And we were fortunate that it happened after years of our own personal development and a willingness to truly feel comfortable sharing what was alive in us and what was happening.

1:03:05So we could be very real in the impact that it was having on us and actually share in a way that staff could visibly see how distressing it was for us. And they could trust the information that we were giving them. Because it's also that the communication element in a crisis is all, it's another challenge, right? Not only are you looking at the numbers, how are we going to navigate our way through this, but actually, what are we going to share with staff that's real, that gives them a true sense of what's going on, but doesn't spook them to the point where they're completely panicked. Yeah. And they just weren't, they weren't situations that we'd found ourselves in before.

1:03:41we have over all the years had an incredible retention rate at the company. And so never was there a situation where we needed to let a lot of people go or think about how we manage that or how we communicate that internally. So it was a huge culture shock to actually all of a sudden be dealing with essentially an existential crisis. And on one hand, maintaining that optimism that we're going to get through this and we'll survive. But on the other hand, realizing that if this thing continues for years, RA will no longer cease to exist because it's built on there being live events around the world.

1:04:23When you think back to letting people go, what did you learn? It doesn't sound like you had to do all of that much before like a lot of leaders do. So do you remember, do you have any tips, I guess, for people to actually let go of people empathetically?

1:04:42honesty and a willingness to feel the feelings that are associated with that experience. So if you're, for example, it really impacted me emotionally. And rather than just burying that, I would allow that emotion to be present in the conversations I was having with people because that was real for me. And it was distressing to have to let people go. And so actually just allowing that emotion to be present, I think created a more real experience in those moments. And perhaps it was different for us because there was this big external event and people naturally had an understanding that we were under an enormous amount of pressure and this needed to happen.

1:05:30But I think just honesty would be the core message in that. And honesty in terms of what I'm feeling, but also honesty about the situation and why we're taking the decisions that we're taking. What about leaving RA? So, you know, you eventually fire yourself, essentially. What happened? How does that all, how does that actually play out? You had a plan, a pandemic happened, you must have been like, maybe I'm the harbinger of doom, I probably shouldn't try this again, but you go and do it again. So who are you communicating this with? What is a succession plan? How long does it take? Like, how does one leave a company?

1:06:03So we were fortunate that fairly early on in the years advancing that, we had hired someone as our CFO who we sensed could actually be a great leader for the company. And then he transitioned to being COO and he was instrumental in the work that we did to guide us through COVID. I'm hugely grateful to him. And so we were working incredibly closely. So his name's David with Paul, David, and myself. And we were having open conversations at that point as well. And so there was an awareness that at some point I would be stepping away. And actually Paul and I chose to both step away at the same time to essentially create the space for the next generation of the company to be successful.

1:06:51I genuinely believe that the next phase of the company can be its most successful yet with us having stepped away. And I think that's only possible if there's a full break. And so I'm on the board now, but I'm not day-to-day involved. And there's an understanding that the people who are in charge of the company now have the autonomy to make the necessary decisions to grow the company. And in my experience, people work best in a way that I call a freedom within a framework. So the framework is clarity on the mission, clarity on the values, a real understanding of what they're there to do. But there's enough freedom within that where they feel supported by the framework, but there's enough freedom where they know that they can be autonomous to a level that allows them to actually feel that sense of agency and make meaningful decisions on a day-to-day basis.

1:07:40And I think that applies whether you're at the top of the company or the bottom of the company. And so for Paul and I, it was really important that we created the space for the next group of people who were going to take the company forward to actually feel that sense of autonomy, feel that sense of agency that it's now theirs and how it grows and how it developed is fundamentally down to their work and their ideas. And so the step away was actually designed to create that environment. And obviously having half the company depart in COVID and then slowly we started to rebuild, all of a sudden now there's opportunity to hire new people and bring in a more diverse set of ideas, people from different parts of the world and actually build the company.

1:08:26It was interesting because it was an opportunity to build a company that would be fit for purpose in four or five years time, rather than continuing to build the company in a way that was fit for purpose, perhaps for five years ago. Yeah, a bit of a rebirth. A complete restructure out of necessity. And actually it was a restructure that was, we literally like blank piece of paper. If we were after COVID, blank piece of paper, if we were building this company today, what does it look like? And take all the names off and actually just like, what are the teams look like? What are the structure look like?

1:09:00And actually that process allowed us to make a significant structural change in a really relatively quick space of time that is actually the kind of the core fundamentals of what underpins the success of the business today. And it's important to celebrate endings. So how did you celebrate leaving? How did you literally leave? It was very, very surreal because it was COVID. And so the offices were closed. And so I remember being on a Zoom with all of the company on the gallery view and just Paul and I just giving a speech to say goodbye and then just closing the laptop and bursting into tears. On your own?

1:09:52On my own. Yeah, I was completely on my own in that moment and it was the surrealist way to close the chapter of something that had meant so much to me. I've given my life to this project. I've given everything I had to it. I'm incredibly proud of it, but I realized that it's time to head in another direction. And to say goodbye through a screen felt so disconnected from that reality and it's almost inhumane it was it was really sad because it wasn't representative of what this thing meant to me and so I literally just closed the laptop I even get a bit sad thinking about it now I just closed the laptop and and that was the goodbye and yeah thinking about it today it's sad that that's how it had to end just as a result of the world at that time Nick, as you know, big RA fan, big raver.

1:10:55Hope I've still got some left in me ahead of me, but most of my wonderful times in my life have been facilitated by you subconsciously. So as a fan, authentically, thank you. So glad to have met you. And I'm very thrilled that we get to share your story on Secret Leaders. So thank you, mate. Thanks so much for having me. It's been great. That was my conversation with Nick Sabine, co-founder of Resident Advisor. I found this episode moving and incredibly insightful. And as someone who's a huge fan of what RA's done, it's actually been an honor to have the chance to speak to Nick. If you found value in this episode, please take a moment to share it with someone who might benefit from Nick's wisdom and experiences.

1:11:32And if you haven't already, be sure to check out our YouTube channel, Secret Leaders Podcast, for more inspiring conversations with exceptional entrepreneurs and leaders. Thank you for listening.

1:11:49Thank you.