Four Pillars Gin cofounder Matt Jones on making your story come true

0:00Founders, I know what's on your mind at stupid o 'clock. After failed attempts at counting funding rounds and doom scrolling, you've finally settled on something that will surely put you to sleep. Payroll and compliance. Don't let the boring stuff slow down your startup growth. Global HR and payroll platform DEAL, that's D-E-E-L, can handle all the complicated stuff around international payroll, compliance, visas and onboarding, so you can stay focused on building. Visit deal.com slash 360 to learn more today. Less than 10 years after a$30 ,000 crowdfunding campaign, Four Pillars did$35 million in revenue.

0:47Hello and welcome. Budri Gamawara from the Gadigal lands here in Sydney. It's time for Startup360 with Simon Thompson and... Julie Trowell. Ta-da! Ta-da! Great to have you in. Had a good week so far? Oh, yeah. It has its ups and downs. We're going to have a pretty cracking guest on today. Would you like to tell our listeners and viewers who it is? Today we have creative strategist, serial accidental entrepreneur, and he calls himself Serial Failure, which is a story, some things that I want to dig into. With Matt Jones. Matt was one of the three members of Four Pillars Gym, an extraordinary Australian story.

1:26It sparked what became a massive gin renaissance in this country. He wrote a great book about it, Lessons in Gin. I would thoroughly recommend anyone who's interested in storytelling and marketing to read that. He runs Think Story Experience and does a lot of really great brand growth, brand strategy work. So I'm very excited to catch up with him. Before we go any further, I do want to say that Startup360 is supported by Deal. Hire, manage and pay anyone anywhere. So thank you to Deal. I'm not going to do too much of a Deal spiel this week, but I am just going to quickly point out that there was much hand ringing over the news that Canva has had its valuation drop.

2:13I kind of feel like this is not its first rodeo. It's something that we've seen before, if you remember back to 2022, when it was Airtree and Blackbird, who had an independent valuation that took the value of the business down 36%, bounced back, bigger, better than ever. At this point in time, we're talking$34.9 billion,$49 billion dollar-y-dos Australian, massive company. That puts it in the top 15 of ASX listed companies, if it was a public business. So it seems like a little bit of a hit, but I just go back to this is a company that has 31 million paying users amongst 265 million globally and that is and a good product and a great product uh because the whole thing was there's some concerns around what ai is doing to the business but of course uh cliff has worked very hard on transforming canva into an ai business in the last six months but there was harry stebbings 20vc podcast where the idea that the company may only be worth 12 billion us was floated.

3:33I would point out that Anthropic at this point in time has 300 ,000 paying customers. So less than 1 % of the number of paying customers that Canva has. Canva has been profitable for nine years. It also has something like$1.2 billion in cash sitting there. So I don't think it's going anywhere in a hurry. I don't think anyone should get too worried about this. I think one of the advice that was on the 20VC podcast was buckle up if you're an investor, but it'll still be strong in the secondary market. So. And they also have vision for doing good in the world, their philanthropy. Yeah. Well, I mean, for Cliff and Mel, it doesn't really matter because they're giving away 80 % of whatever they've got anyway.

4:15So everyone can calm the farm on the canvas story, but it's always an interesting one. And business is swings and roundabout, something we're going to talk about in just a moment with Matt Jones. All right, so don't go away. We'll be right back with Matt Jones to talk story. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any business in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere and get visas handled fast so you can stay focused on scaling. Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits and compliance so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 37 ,000 fast-growing companies trust Deel to move fast.

4:57Visit deal.com slash 360. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash 360.

5:09And we're back. We're back. We're back. You're back. I'm back. Got you back. We got someone new on the couch. We do. Last week we were doing the soft drink. We're going a little bit harder this week. Sadly no samples at 10 a.m in the morning. Well they do make an excellent non-alcoholic version but I didn't think it was once you get the taste for it. Yeah. The mother's little helper. Yeah. Go anywhere. So let me tell you who we have on the couch. On the couch we have Matt Jones who who describes himself as, and we're going to get to all the three things, creative strategist, an accidental entrepreneur, and my favorite, a serial failure.

5:52I took this from where I found on your website. Well, clearly I failed to bring gin or alcohol-free gin, so I have proved the third thesis straight away. Awesome. So tell us your story. Oh, my gosh. Anyway, that's enough for today. Okay, A &C. It was a big great to have you on. Could we start with the bigger questions? Look, I mean, yeah, I mean, but why don't we start with the bio? Start with your bio. I trained as an economist. I was a really not very good economist in the UK in the late 1990s. Didn't know what to do with my life, so I went to a pretty random job interview. Didn't even know what I was interviewing for, and it turned out I was interviewing for a job in military intelligence.

6:35And so luckily there were no major conflicts in the world at the time. You were almost a spook. I dated a spook briefly. Oh, wow. But no, I was sort of in the back rooms doing the economic analysis on what the spooks were finding out and fascinating world. But I very quickly realized I'm really bad at the economics, but I'm quite good at the communications. And so I quickly, as quickly as I could, I moved from the civil service into politics and I became a speech writer and a campaign strategist and learned a lot in politics. Probably the main thing I carried with me was this sudden realisation about how irrational the world is and how irrational people are.

7:14Because it's a really confronting thing, because generally you go into politics with these sort of noble ambitions. If I'm not going to change the world, I'm going to help the people who are changing the world, and we're going to develop these great policies, and we'll solve crime, and we'll solve education, and we'll solve health. And then you look at voters, and you realise these people have real lives and real concerns, and they're not mostly listening to your clever policies and the fact that you've just visited all 17 Scandinavian countries and looked at the way they run their health system.

7:42And they vote on things that are much more primal. They vote on identity. They vote on feeling. They vote on, my family's always voted Labour or Liberal, or I just don't like the sound of his voice, or I can imagine having a beer with them. And politics teaches you very fast how little people listen to facts and all the nonsense, all the knowledge you want to share with them. And really, they make decisions based on feelings. So without realizing it, I got this incredible grounding in brand building. And so I was a serial failure. I never worked in government, which is the ultimate sign of failing in politics.

8:15I wrote lots of speeches for future prime ministers, no one who won anything when I was working for them. But yeah, it gave me this grounding and understanding how decisions get made, how behavior is influenced, how stories can shape how people see the world, can frame a political party, but can frame a product, can frame a business. I'm just curious, any speech that you wrote that is memorable, that may have gotten some aha moments or that changed minds? And what was the formula if you do have a story as a speechwriter? The first speech I worked on, I'm not going to say wrote. Authorship is a very hard thing in speechwriting.

8:51So I'll just paint you a quick picture. So there's a few rituals in British politics that everyone's obsessed with. Everyone is obsessed with prime minister's questions. It's this 30-minute moment when the prime minister has to stand up in the House of Commons and basically take the best from the other side. And the opposition leader gets exactly six questions. And you can use them as you want. You can have them as one run up, but it's a bit like facing it over from a fast bowler or if you're, you know, the first guy I advised, a pretty slow bowler. And, you know, you use these six questions to try and set up the prime minister to try and trap them.

9:27And if you can picture the preparation for Prime Minister's questions, PMQs, all the clever kids from the party, both, you know, when I was working for Ian Duncan Smith, David Cameron was in the room, George Osborne was in the room, as well as sort of senior advisors, people who were good with words. I got invited into that room first because I was doing bits of research in my original policy area of transport. And I was just finding little bullets we could fire at the prime minister. Promises they'd made six years ago in a manifesto that we could get a little gotcha. Another thing that the British are obsessed by is conferences and party conferences.

10:03When the whole party gets together, normally in a tired old seaside town like Bournemouth or Blackpool, and suddenly the hotels are full of, in the conservative side, sort of blue-rinsed ladies who are coming along to sort of, you know, enjoy the sea air and enjoy the conference season. And, you know, so you'd see people like Margaret Thatcher stand up and give these thumping speeches and then 30-minute standing ovations. So when you're preparing for those speeches, it's all in the hotel room the night before and the advisors are sitting on the floor. And depending on how senior the person you're writing for, they might have got a small room or a big suite.

10:36So you're all sort of up into the early hours writing. So it's very hard to say who exactly wrote the speech. It's very much a team effort. But the first one I was really involved in was for Theresa May when she was chair. I think they still called her chairman of the Conservative Party, which is unfortunate, but she was chair of the party. And it was time for some truth. It was time to explain to the Conservative membership that they had a brand problem. They'd lost, you know, catastrophic leads to Tony Blair in 1997. 18 years of Conservative government had been thrown out in its ear. Tony Blair comes in, things can only get better.

11:11New Labour. New Labour, education, education, education. 2001, they get thumped again. And what tends to happen in opposition is you make this sort of almost this category error where you go, think about the people who are left behind when you get beaten in a parliamentary election. It's the people who hold seats that are sort of immune to changes in culture. So all of the sort of swing seats, they've all gone the other way. It's only the hard, in our case, the hard blue conservative seats are left behind. The people who are like, what changed? What shifted? You know, my constituency still loves me and still votes conservative.

11:48So generally the rump of the party left behind goes, the problem is we didn't go hard enough to the right. I'm still here. I'm a good old fashioned right winger. If more people thought and campaigned like me, we would win. So you have to then take people by the hand and go, no, no, no. The next election will be won in the middle. We need to make the journey back to the center. We have a brand problem. We're not going to win by going hard and right. We're not going to win by having better policies. We're going to win because we change how people feel about us. We need a new narrative. We need a new story.

12:17We'll come back to the importance of narrative. So Theresa May decides to take this on and a group of us help with the speech. And she delivers this line to the conservative room. And she says, say it quietly, but there are people out there who think we are the nasty party. Now, that was 100 % true. And it went down like a bucket of sick on a hot day, like that room, just whatever the opposite of a standing ovation, it was a sitting novation as she sort of delivered this truth. And ultimately, she was right. Ultimately, she became party leader many years later. Ultimately, she became prime minister.

12:51Ultimately, David Cameron effectively took that truth and ran with it and made the conservatives a more electable alternative to Labour. But in that moment, that was a level of truth that that room just could not take. and made a lot of headlines. A literal truth bomb. Not necessarily for the right reasons and a literal truth bomb, as you say. And, of course, you only have to look at Australian politics at this point in time and it all seems very familiar. And here we are playing the same song 30 years down the track. We are. We are. And, I mean, there's a lot we can learn and, you know, I'm in the middle of launch.

13:28I'm in podcast launch mode at the moment. I had Allegra Spender on the podcast last week and it was really interesting talking to her about the fact that, you know, she has come in as a true outsider. In fact, I wrote for Startup Daily about the power of the outsider. But, yeah, it's a fascinating one and politics, you know, it works to the beat of its own peculiar drum, that whole industry. I kind of want to go down this path because I've just been writing and Allegra Spender is our guest speaker at the Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards on September 10th. She also blessed me in as an Australian citizen.

14:00Yeah, exactly. But as someone who also has been covering politics for 30-plus years, and I literally found the photo of me during the 1996 election sitting about this far away from Paul Keating at a campaign breakfast, which I'm going to show everyone on the awards night, young me as a political journo. But what fascinates me about this at this point in time is that for a lot of time the startup sector has gone, politics, just get out of the way and let us get on with it. Favorite utopia episode. And now they realize the impact it can have on their lives and how it can shape their future. And there's suddenly an engagement there.

14:48But it's an engagement that they don't quite understand and they don't understand the retail nature of politics. And I've had quite a few. let's just say full discussions. I won't say heated, but, you know, trying to explain what's going on because, again, it's one of those moments where I feel people don't quite understand the customer and they can't understand where the customer sits in politics and they don't understand the politician's customer. It's a really tricky one for the business community. If you're big enough that you can go stomping into the room, great but if you're not one of those people it's a real challenge to be heard and what would your advice be to founders in the current climate i mean these are these are big fascinating questions these were almost kind of dinner party and a bottle of wine questions but i think there's there's a few things you've touched on strong gin i think navy strength a lot of navy strength canberra strength gin um look i think there's a few things i think one of the things you touch on there.

15:56It's really important as a founder to be highly empathetic. Now, what you're touching on is the need to be empathetic to politicians. You go, well, I'm coming to Canberra as a founder and saying, this is what my sector needs. I interviewed Don Pym for episode one of my podcast StoryWork, and he is trying to have enormous impact on the fintech sector and encourage another generational shift and upgrade in terms of how much we're investing in fintech in this country. And that includes influencing Canberra and lobbying in state capitals to try and create the right conditions for fintech to thrive and the right conditions for more boomerang talent, as he puts it, to come back to Australia and invest and build careers and build businesses here.

16:39But we also need to be empathetic, as you say, to what is going on for them. And I think that's really important for founders, not just to influence politicians, but when they're thinking about customers. It can be so easy when you're someone building an AI-powered agentic SaaS platform that's going to transform the workflow of X or Y or Z. You can't just sit in your sort of ivory engineering tower going, we have solved this. Why don't they get it? We're just going to march in and show them the betterness, the superiority of our solution, and they will buy it. My stupid customers. Yeah. Who are their stakeholders?

17:16What are their fears? What are their concerns? What else is going on for them? They are humans. And empathy connects to something else I think is really important, which is system thinking. We need to be better system thinkers. We need to understand that our success will always happen in the context of a system. And the system operates with rules. A system operates with guardrails, with restraints. So if we want to make change, we need to understand what needs to shift in that system and which actors need to do what to make that change. And that's a truism, whether you're talking about making change in camera or seeing a category make the change to adopt your product.

17:55And then the third thing that you made me think about is the responsibility that I think our politicians have, which is to be more driven by narrative. When I interviewed Allegra, it was just after the federal budget. And so I had to sort of say to her, look, you've been banging the drum for tax reform. It's something that I believe is needed, you believe is needed. The Labor government have now gone hard with tax reform, but not necessarily the exact flavor that you've been proposing. How do you deal with that? And how do you sort of deal with being supportive of the fact that they're addressing the issue, but then also critical or constructive in how you deal with the exact policy?

18:35And one of the she talked about that she felt was missing and I should know, I'm characterising what she said. Please go to the record for precise quotes. But she said the disappointment is they really didn't start with why. And without getting too Simon Sinek here about it, when I think about starting with why, what I mean is starting with a narrative. And this was true all the way back to when I was advising politicians 20 years ago. Begin by telling people about the country you want to build. Begin by telling people stories about your ambition, your beliefs, where we are, what got us here, where we're trying to go, what's going to get us there, and then show us how policy fills that in.

19:13And I think if politicians did a better job of narrative, they would take people with them more, including the founder sector, and we could have some more empathy and some more understanding about where they're trying to go. But maybe everyone's just given in that we're so attention deficit and so in need of the short, pithy sandbite. and the punch to be thrown and the fact to be hurled into the radio news vortex that we've lost the ability to actually weave these larger narratives. But what's fascinating also in these layers is that irrationality that you spoke of initially, and you only have to look to America and the whole Donald Trump thing.

19:53And he did weave an incredible narrative that appealed to a lot of people however we ended up with everyone who voted for the face-eating leopard party being surprised that they had their faces eaten by leopards uh we can often do things that are against our own self-interest uh especially when it comes to who we vote for and it's it's such a quirky interesting thing and and when we look at the rise of one nation right now a lot of the people who are backing that party are people who would be harmed by its policies if they are implemented. I hesitate to draw constructive business lessons from the rise of the far right and the Trump movement and the One Nation movement.

20:39But if I was to draw along the - Well, the technology sector, a lot of it is all in on what's going on. It is. And if we try and pivot from critiquing the worldviews of the Peter Thiels and Elon Musk's this world to, you know, constructively thinking about what, you know, listeners and viewers of this podcast can take, I'd recommend going to the writing of a guy called Seth Godin, someone I've always sort of followed when it comes to marketing theory. And there's a line that's always stuck in my head. It's sort of, you know, my little version of what would Seth say in this moment. And it's this idea that people like us do things like this.

21:14And really, it is a positive framing of the idea of identity decision making. So we talk about identity politics. I think that the narrative that has corrupted so much political thinking is the narrative that says, ask not what country you want to live in, but what team you want to win. And so what Trump does so well is he gets people thinking about the fact that we're on this team, you're on that team, our team's winning. So even when people catch Trump in a clear lie, or catch Nigel Farage in the UK in a clear lie, or catch Pauline in a clear lie, because things have become so team-driven and tribal, they can say, well, the fact they're trying to catch me in the life shows that they're against me.

21:54So it almost kind of reinforces this us versus them identity narrative. Let's flip that into a positive and exciting frame for someone trying to start or build a business. How do you get your customers, your users, your investors to go, people like us make moves like that? And I think that is actually, unfortunately, the psychological hack that those political leaders have found, which we can also use for good. And is this sense of not trying to win always with feature conversations or with, you know, beautifully hockey sticking growth charts, but simply having a worldview that connects to identity.

22:31A business like ours is going to work like this, is going to grow like this. It's this notion of having a business and a brand that sends a signal, a signal to the right people to say, come and join us. We're trying to do something different. And it's people like you who should be joining us here. So I do think that way of thinking, that way of political marketing has to an extent broken politics, but there is maybe a useful lesson to learn in terms of business. I keep thinking like that empathy understanding is really important to understand, not necessarily what, in addition to what has to be changed, is what's the problem?

23:04If we can all agree and get angry on the same problem, there's kind of your hook that can turn into a narrative. And curious if you've worked with any, if you have any stories of companies that you have worked with that have shifted their narrative and how you use narrative and what narrative is for you. I don't know if you mentioned something about, it's not about the, it's not storytelling. You were very deliberate. It's not storytelling. So I'm really curious about storytelling or frameworks and narrative and how and why it's important? I'll use my very limited political skills to slightly sidestep the question for a second.

23:40Great. Love it. Thank you for calling that out. So I moved from politics into the world of brand strategy in 2005, 2006, actually. I moved to Australia in 2005, got my first job in an agency in 2006. And it was this really fascinating time. Facebook was two years old. The iPhone was 12 months away from being held up in Steve Jobs' hand. And that next sort of five years was this transformative period, iPhones, iPads, Facebook, YouTube, cloud computing, whole new platforms. You think about like, you know, we were all raised in a generation where your parents would have said, don't get in the back of a stranger's car, then Uber, you know, you can't just go home with a stranger and sleep on their couch, then Airbnb.

24:20You know, you look at the early writing of Rachel Botsman with books like What's Mine Is Yours, the sharing economy, this notion of social connectedness, transparency created the conditions within which we could share things. We could create whole new disruptive models. At the same time, consumers for the first time could feed back instantly on the quality of the customer experience they've received. We'd come out of a 20th century sort of advertising industrial complex of make mediocre product, cut as much cost out of it as you can, pump its tires up through advertising, and it doesn't really matter by the time people have bought it to notice it's mediocre because they have no way of feeding back and so you could sort of inflate mediocrity.

25:00Now we're in this new world of transparency, empowered consumers where really to an extent quality was going to win. So I'm working in brand agencies at that time. This is 20 years ago going we have left the world where the most important thing is the Mad Men era. What story can you tell? And the most important thing is what story will others tell about you? This was fueled by the fact that traditional linear TV had been completely fragmented. So the TV that we still watched by the schedule, the TV where the best part of half of all adults in America watched the last time Sam closed the bar in cheers, like this notion that we gathered around the fireplace that was radio and TV and we consume the same content, but we also consume the same ads.

25:45Apart from major live sport, that is now gone. that is fragmented into a million tiny content pieces. So when you sort of add all that up and then you add another 20 years, my sense of the battle for story now is it's not about the story you tell. It's about the story that you make true. It's about the story that you orchestrate in the world so other people tell that story about you. And that's a much harder story to control because let's say you're Qantas. Qantas have been through an interesting reputational journey over the last few years, very little of that has been due to any diminishing in the quality of the advertising product.

26:25It has been due to a lack of investment in planes, a lack of on-time performance, endless cancellations and delays, a sense of corporate bad behavior around hoarding COVID miles and passenger credits. It's about poor performing in-flight entertainment systems, the lack of Wi-Fi on international flights, a sense of an obsession with direct flights to London while flights from Sydney to Melbourne keep getting cancelled. And they have now turned the corner on that. I think Qantas over the last few months has been the best on-time performing airline in the world. They have turned the corner, not because their storytelling got better, but because the story that was being experienced and then told about them was getting better.

27:09So So your question then about narrative and sort of having a story that understands what people are feeling and understands the problems that you could solve for people, understanding where you could take the world from too, that is less about the story you're out there telling every day. And it's much more about the story you're telling yourself internally. internally. So if you're, you know, to be really specific, I remember meeting the founders of Deputy, you know, fantastic Australian business back before their Series A. So Steve and Ashik had come out of setting up, Steve had a cleaning company where he was, his team were cleaning commercial planes.

27:52So they were cleaning lots of different types of planes. They were cleaning some in international, some in domestics, their cleaners needed different levels of security clearance. And if someone caught in sick, then they had a real problem. It was sort of very disruptive to the business. So he wanted to build better tech to manage his people, to manage his casual workforce. So Sheik was a technical genius who built that. They spun that out into deputies. So I met them at a time where they're starting to think about what deputy can be. And I very, you know, minorly helped them because they were quite brilliant.

28:23And it's gone on to be a, you know, unicorn business and, you know, great Australian success story, but help them think about what they were really doing and the fact that they weren't just helping managers like Steve better manage their casual workforce. They were helping to build the operating system for a world that increasingly was going to run on casual labor. About 70 % of Americans went to work every day in an hourly paid casual job. They needed a better platform to build their careers on, to manage their time on, to manage their attendance on. And that was the deputy opportunity. So there you then go, if we have that bigger narrative, if we can tell that bigger story to ourselves, to our product teams, to our customers, as technology changes fast, and I think this is really pertinent right now, as AI and agentic possibilities change things quickly, if you have a deep sense of purpose sort of enshrined in your narrative about where you are trying to take business, your category, the problems you're trying to solve for your customers, as technological or technological possibility changes and shifts and elevates, that story can still accommodate it.

29:28When you have a very narrowly defined product story, as soon as the technology shifts, your story's gone a little bit out of date. I just want to validate something here. You said something about a story about you and sharing this. So I spoke to a mutual friend of ours, Andrew Everingham, CEO, founder of Capital E, wonderful guy. And he just, he literally said he has a crush on your mind, by the way. But he said that exactly what you just said, your big message right now is about the importance of stories and how we consider doing that better. It was just the overall, he loves how you, the overall way you think about the world of marketing, advertising, social, and AI right now, where it's headed.

30:08It's a fascinating time to be alive. Look, it is. And I mean, I spent, I turned 50 this year and my co-founder at Four Pillars, Stu Greger, who is a fantastic guy, great marketing thinker. He's now the CEO of Lark. He turned 50 a few years before me and he did his, he treated 50 as a birth year, not a birthday. And so he went around and sort of collected all these sort of bucket list sporting events and he went to the Masters and Formula One and played golf at all the great golf courses in the world. I, for my sins, went to the Cannes Advertising Festival. So I approached the bucket list a different way.

30:44But I went there and I'd never been before because I'd worked in branding experience and brand strategy. I'd never been an ad guy per se. But I was just fascinated to go at this time, exactly this exciting time to be alive, this exciting time to be in a world of communications and marketing and persuasion when AI seems to be changing everything. It's changing how businesses and brands and people get discovered. It's changing how content gets created. It's disrupting every rule that we could imagine ever was a rule, every constraint that we thought was a constraint, but you're trying to then find what is the truth.

31:17And one of the things I find really interesting at the moment as I try and write and think about these things is I sort of try and have empathy for the overwhelmed founder, the overwhelmed marketing leader, faced with this almost infinite set of tasks and choices, this infinite array of advice that is offered to them say you must do this. Overwhelmed consumer too. A hundred percent. And so within that, how are we going to make choices? How are we going to sort of come up with a theory or a thesis about what business we're trying to build and how we're going to grow and what we're going to commit to?

31:53How are we going to put appropriate blinkers on, be appropriately curious about what's changing and at the same time, appropriately focused on what we're doing? there's this great line from Marshall Goldsmith, the leadership consultant. He's got a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. Now that is a really helpful truism because let's say you're four pillars five years in. A lot of what had got us to the five-year point was clearly not going to get us to the 10-year point. But a lot of the things that we'd been doing for five years that had got a small group of people to really fall in love with four pillars, not just the liquid, although it was sensational, but the brand and the ethos and the craft and the aesthetics and the community, you didn't want to lose a single one of those people.

32:39So some of what got us there was critical to keep going, but some of what got us there was not going to be enough. And no one tells you which is which. So these choices you have to make, what to hold onto, what to evolve, when to be curious and open, when to stay focused. I think these are the really hard things for all of us in this world that feels, as you say, completely overwhelming from every angle. There are so many paths I want to go down in this conversation. So I have to try and focus too. And so you brought up four pillars. And for anyone who is not familiar, the three of you built this incredible business.

33:16You wrote a wonderful book about that experience, Lessons in Gin. I left it at home today, so it's not on top of the pile. I'll make sure it is there was that in part to help you unpack what you had done and understand where you'd been and try and figure out what the success looked like because there's a few paths I want to go down one is you're not a great believer in minimum viable product so I'm wondering would you have gone with minimum viable gin when do you make that move at that point in time and going back to the McQueen conversation you had on StoryWork, your podcast, where you wrote a great piece of Startup Data a couple of weeks ago about the founder mythology and the other things that people get wrong in their storytelling.

34:08Talk to me a little bit about that complementary team that you put together in the lanes you're in and dealing with building a business with your respective expertise so thank you for the kind words about the book i wrote the book not as a memoir because my life has not been particularly interesting but as you say as a sense-making exercise to go what did i the non-gin expert bring to a founding trio where two people were enthusiastic expert gin and wine and booze people in every sense more experienced in that category in that industry and there was me, the Jack Daniels and Coke bourbon drinking child, but who knew something about brand and had a curiosity about how the world was changing.

34:55What did I bring? What were those instincts and how did that maybe help to shape the way that we brought the exceptional gin and that vision to market? Because perhaps the thing that I had brought was the most transferable lesson. You know, if you're working in another category, you could only take so much from the quality that Cameron brought to the gin making but you can maybe take something from the theory and the principles so that was the point of the book if we rewind back to the very not minimum viable product we started with i was actually going through a camera roll yesterday and my wife who rebecca borne jones who sort of led marketing for four pillars for the first six seven years and i found the photos that she took the day that she went to the final print press check for the first the first roll of four pillars labels and the beautiful copper foil on the label.

35:44Everything about that original product, the liquid developments, the custom bottle, the beautiful copper foiled label, the photo shoot we did with this wonderful photographer called Anson Smart. We actually did it in Stu Greger's house and his dining table. One of the very best in food photography. Oh, unbelievable. Everything about it. And so it was maximal, not minimal viable product. Now, we did that not because we rejected the lean sprint MVP philosophy, but because we had a narrative, we had a worldview that began with, I would say, sort of the right combination of ambition and humility. And if this is something that any founder takes away from it, I think this balance is really important.

36:28We can sometimes get very caught up in the excitement of our desire to be a founder. our desire to bring something to the world. And actually the humble perspective to go, you know what, probably no one wants or needs this right now. And the truth was in 2013, absolutely no one woke up every day and went, if only there was a great Australian gin I could add to my shelves. No one looked at their back bar and went, look at all that empty space. If only there were more gins to fill it with. Gin wasn't even a category anyone was interested in at that point in time. It was kind of instead. With the exception of Mr.

37:00Hendricks. And Mr. Hendricks was doing very well at sort of breathing some new life into a dead category to the point where they had 60, six zero percent of the category was dominated by this one sort of quirky, curious brand in that dark medicinal bottle that sort of went against all traditional category cues. And we've got a lot to thank Hendrix for because they'd started to separate the idea of gin from that 20th century queen mother's favorite Nana's tip, or gin makes you sad, all of that stuff. And Hendrix was a bit funky and different and tell everyone in the bar that you bought the expensive gin simply because there's a big flag of cucumber sticking out the top of it.

37:36But no one was looking for Australian gin. So you had to then go, well, we're solving a problem no one has. What does that mean we need to do? Well, what's our thesis? And our thesis from a product point of view was Australia is the world's greatest untapped gin laboratory because gin is distilled juniper. If it's not juniper, it's weird vodka. But after that, it's whatever you want. And Australia's whatever you want is more delicious than anyone else's. We've got the world's most extraordinary flavor culture. We are part Asian, Middle Eastern, European. You look at our botanicals. You look at our native citrus.

38:11Like everything that grows here is extraordinary and delicious. If we could distill that into a gin, we can make the best gin in the world. But we only have the right to tell people that if from day one everything is brilliant. Because the world is full of very good gins, we've got to make something shockingly good. and the packaging, the photography, the storytelling have to evoke that. People have to taste it with their eyes before they open up the bottle and taste that. That was the product thesis. I think the more interesting thing for this conversation then was the business thesis because the other side of humility is going, not only does no one need what we're about to make until we make them need it, but also we're not the only geniuses that have had this idea.

38:53We're not the only geniuses have gone, ah, Australia, gin, good plan. So have the humility to go, why have others tried and failed? And it was very clear that there were two structural problems, strategic problems, system problems in Australia. One is Australia is small. So if we are just going to accept the size of the gin category as it is today, there's not much of a business there. So how do we solve that? The other is in that small market, we send most of the money to the taxman in the form of excise. We have the second highest excise on spirits in the world. 31 bucks a bottle. Great. It's over$100 per pure litre of alcohol.

39:29And that's not a complaint. It's a fact, but it's a structural fact. So you've got to accept that if you go back to the product thesis, we've got to make unimpeachably exceptional product. That's going to cost lots of money. We've got to buy a Rolls-Royce level still from Christian Karl of Germany. We've got to get a custom bottle made in China originally and then France, and now they're made in all the glasses now in Australia. We've got to spend a lot of money. We've got to raise a lot of money. Effectively, we're going to dig a really big hole and then every time we sell a bottle, that money isn't filling in the hole.

40:00That money's filling in a hole in the budget in Canberra instead. So we've got to accept those facts. So that then led to a growth story. And the growth story we told ourselves was, we've got to build a brand that is a domestic success. We cannot define ourselves by scale. So we're going to build a craft brand at scale. That's unusual. Normally, when you say craft, people hear small. We can't afford to be small. We've got to scale. We've got to be bigger than Hendrix within five years. We've got to build an international brand. The Australian market alone isn't enough. And to pay for it, we've got to take advantage of this new world of social media and e-commerce and direct consumer and win high brand loyalty, high margin direct sales.

40:44and that means we've got to have the competence to walk into rooms with our friends at Dan Murphy's and our friends at Cole's Liquor and say, by the way, we're about to launch a crowdfunding campaign to sell the first batch of Four Pillars and we will not stop there. Every single person who buys direct from us in that crowdfunding campaign, we will go back to them in a month and try and sell them more. Don't worry, we're not fighting you for sales and I remember promising Dan Murphy's in our first ever meeting while watching our distributor kind of go white as I'm saying this, I said, every time we sell direct, they will send 10 people to Dan Murphy's.

41:17Don't panic. Don't worry when you see us because no one was doing it. No one was aggressively going after direct consumer sales. We said, we have to. We have to build a brand. We have to build loyalty. We will sell gin and send a recipe book and a hug and we'll build that database and we'll take that margin and we will reinvest that in your channel. And that relationship held. If you looked at the numbers, less than 10 years after a$30 ,000 crowdfunding campaign, Four Pillars did$35 million in revenue. And if you looked at the sales volumes, that 10 to 1 ratio pretty much held for a decade. That direct-to-consumer engine of margin and brand growth, as soon as we could, we remortgaged our homes and we bought a building so we could have a physical destination, a place to build brands, offer hospitality.

42:06You were building relationship too with the customers. Which is what I want to ask in that one. So when you got your initial group of Ginvestors on, was that about capital or was that about building a tribe, those evangelicals? The Ginvestors were capital. Yeah. I think we raised 20, we found 20 people to put 25K in each. That's because we need a capital. and we agreed as three founders how much money we could afford to gamble with and we realized we needed some more. I think we benefited enormously from their passion and their energy and they were the first tribe but the really important tribe were the 307 people who bought a bottle on crowdfunding.

42:54We didn't do crowd equity, that sort of more modern concept of you know which I guess BrewDog started in the UK with their equity for punk scheme and now is quite fashionable. It was just good old-fashioned pre-sales. And 307 people put their hands up and bought one bottle or a couple of bottles. They were actually the first passionate tribe because they had no equity, but they all had a little feeling of ownership. We have helped bring Four Pillars to market. And we would get emails years later from people talking about the fact that they still hadn't opened their batch number one bottle of Four Pillars.

43:23That had this kind of pride of place. I get photographs all the time from people with their completest collections of, you know, 15, 20 different original Four Pillars labels. So I think it was that crowdfunding campaign that really built that first tribal energy. So I'm interested in that narrative. And I want you also to explain what's the difference between narrative and storytelling. But what I'm hearing is that narrative of those first 307 investors who bought one bottle, you're treating them very differently. It's unique. They get this special treatment, if you will. So I like that, that, that narrative is interesting for me as a different kind of consumer.

44:00I don't have to be, oh my God, I go into Dan Murphy's and all the choices that I have. So talk more a little bit about that narrative and the difference between what you say, narrative and storytelling, and how do you infuse them both? Or how do you coach founders with them? So I think storytelling is an act. I'm widely on the record as saying that, founders and leaders and CEOs need to accept that they are now the storytellers in chief their businesses, because it is increasingly hard to have a moment, an opportunity to kind of grab the microphone and tell your story. Having a narrative is knowing instinctively the story you want to tell consistently, the story, the picture you're trying to stitch together in people's minds every time you get the chance to do a bit of storytelling.

44:48So storytelling is building that narrative and is based on that sort of intrinsically understood way that you make sense of the world. So the four pillars narrative really developed because in a crowdfunding campaign, so we ran it on Possible, the Australian platform. There was Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Possible was the third biggest platform at the time, and it was the Australian one. You're doing something really interesting because you're selling people a product that does not yet exist. And so it really forces you to say, well, we can try and describe, we can try and do storytelling about botanicals and we're going to distill this.

45:23But we haven't done it yet to an extent. We're telling lies. We can sort of film Cameron as he's sort of in his Walter White phase, sort of in a little laboratory, you know, messing around with botanicals. But at the end of the day, that alone is not going to convince people. Instead, we've got to tell them why we're doing it and what they'll be part of and where we're going. And, you know, so we talked a lot about Australia being this place that could stand for more than just, you know, a Paul Hogan 80s view of, you know, barefoot on the beach that we're this place of, you know, multiculturalism and lame ways and incredible urban environments and flavor and culture.

46:00And let's try and distill that. And, you know, we want to make something where, you know, no corners are cut, where attention to detail is exceptional. And we want to take people with us. We told people if they bought a bottle of batch number one, as well as us sending them a bottle when we finally made it, they would in perpetuity get first dibs on any future batch number ones we made. So we told them this story, which, you know, we promised that we kept that they would always be the closest and most important people to us. So in doing that, you're trying to sort of share, you're trying to sort of broadcast your beliefs, your values.

46:35You're trying to give people the sense of people like us want to be part of this four pillars tribe. We try to create this sense of family. It's a very hackneyed term. Don Pim, when I talked to him about Up, he said people talk about loving brands all the time. The reality is most brands we tolerate at best. We don't love them. but he really wanted to build up bank as a banking experience that people love that they felt something for i think you can decide that but it can't just be a a word you use or a principle that goes you know in the staff room it has to be something you you commit to but yeah that that that really sort of framed and we're always narrative is about sharing your worldview and i think you know it's interesting to talk about this on a podcast there are moments when we haven't yet earn the right to tell people a long story.

47:20And then there are other moments when people are sitting forward and they're listening in and they actually want us to tell them more. And when people invite you to do that, that's when you need a narrative. You need to be ready to go to the next level to say, why are we really doing this? So to pick up on that founder storytelling, ultimately you get to a point and the founder helps you bring everyone along and build the brand. The company is bigger than the founder, ultimately. When do you know that moment where who's at the top, who's leading and who's telling the story? Is it the company story?

48:02Because I look back at Qantas and I think we got to a tipping point there where the CEO became almost bigger than the brand and then it took the brand down with his reputation. So it's a really tricky experience to be able to balance those two things. One, be the storyteller in chief, but not be bigger than the company you're building. Being the storyteller in chief does not mean you need to be the story. And being the storyteller in chief does not mean you have to subscribe to this very on-trend notion of building in public. So I'll start with four pillars and then I'll come back to your question, right?

48:40If Four Pillars had built in public, there would have been a lot of high-vis in our photographs. There would have been forklift trucks. There would have been things that revealed the reality of running a production site that is full of explosive liquid that has to keep people safe, that has to handle hazardous materials. A lot of that is not very romantic. Bond and excise. It keeps things in bonded exercise, a very sexy term, the unsexy bondage. And so you have to decide how you are going to curate your story. And so some businesses will benefit from building in public, but I don't think every business does.

49:25So that then brings me to answering your question. and a little bit back to the earlier conversation about story and the difference between story and storytelling. So for me, there are three really critical stories that any founder and any growing business that is now growing beyond the founder needs to define. The first is the narrative. Now, to an extent, the founder often is the walking narrative. Think about the founders of, you know, great disruptive businesses from Airbnb to Netflix, they're often quite famous for the founder memo, that sort of memo or that letter that the founder wrote to the business, because the founder realized, I embody the narrative, the worldview of the business is my worldview.

50:11But at some stage, I need other people to share that worldview. So I need to write it down. So The instincts of the business are simply intrinsically and immediately, automatically understood because the founders across everything. But as the business grows to a point where the founder cannot be across everything, that's where you need to formalize the narrative. What do we see when we look at the world? How do we explain the world? What is our ambition? What are our beliefs? Where have we come from? Where are we going? What problems do we solve? For who? In what way are we trying to make the world a better or a different place?

50:45How will people feel that? How will they experience that? What value does that create? At some stage, you've got to formalize that and go from, well, that's just my story to that is now our story. The second story that I think we do not work on anywhere near enough, and this goes exactly to your question, Simon, is we all need to write our growth story. Now, the growth story is not a story we ever tell to anyone outside of the business, but we tell it a lot to ourselves, our teams, and our investors. The growth story is the theory we subscribe to about how we are going to grow. The growth story is what tells us how the different pieces in front of us, how the orchestra of possibilities is going to play.

51:25We as the leader are the conductor. Sometimes we're going to turn to the audience and we're going to explain the piece ourselves. But other times we as the leader just need to conduct the rest of the business and get it working, get it playing. But we've got to decide what music we're trying to make. I've never used this analogy before. I'm not sure how it's going. I may abandon it shortly. I think the audience is going to be singing along at one stage. But yeah, so we need clarity. We need story because back to the discussion earlier of this overwhelmed, overabundant world of possibilities and choices, we need clarity of theory.

51:57And as we grow, we need that theory to evolve. And probably you think about the narrative versus the growth story. The narrative is hopefully gonna remain reasonably constant, but that growth story is gonna need adjustments as we hit some turbulence. I've gone from orchestra to flying a plane. As we get to 38 ,000 feet and go, you know what, we don't want to stop in the atmosphere. We want to get this to the moon. The growth story is probably going to need to evolve quite a bit. Hopefully the narrative stays firm, stays true. And then the third one, as discussed earlier, is the story that is experienced in the world.

52:31And that again is where we need to create this separation between the people, the leaders, the founders, and the business. Four Pillars was not Matt, Stu, and Cam. Matt, that Stu and Cam were actors in the story that was Four Pillars. So, you know, Cameron would come around from the production side of the distillery and just say g'day to a group and host them. Stu would run incredible events and fill the room with energy and fun and charisma. You know, I would do less of that. But all of us were just pieces of this wider thing and ultimately we wanted every single person. You know, when we sort of, you know, the day when we sold the business to Lyon, we had, you know, 150 staff coming to work at Four Pillars, most of them in this incredible distillery in Healesville, in the Yarra Valley.

53:15We wanted every one of them to be part of the Four Pillars family and as much embody the Four Pillars story as the founders. So that's where you then start to get clear on how people will experience the brand story and the role that each individual plays. So I think if you can get clear on those things and understand how all of them sort of fit together, almost like some Russian nesting dolls then you can make quite cohesive decisions about what do I need to do as the founder what role do I need to play where is my strength what's my superpower and where do I need to start to supplement that and where do other voices need to be heard more than mine and I'd also add as part of that narrative story and articulating it to the team it has to be a melody that they can leave the room whistling it has to be have a clarity about it that sticks in their heads because often we go through that experience where people articulate a vision and everyone gets confused and they're forgotten by the time.

54:14This is the power without without you know you said to me before we started we were talking about politics and you know what you learn on the campaign trail and it's the same now launching a podcast you know you're sick of saying something and you know you've got to keep doing it because it's only just being heard so I'm a little bit sick of hearing myself talk about story because the podcast is called Story Work but it is critical because story is like music for the brain. And if we try to articulate strategy to our teams in the form of a 53-page densely typed PowerPoint document and then a set of values or behaviours that they have to memorise, this stuff doesn't stick.

54:53It's a people's story and it sticks. And one of the things I was really always proud of at Four Pillars, we had this incredible team of people at the distillery who would host and take tastings. and all of them told the four pillar story in their own way, but all of them found their way to exactly the same meaning that you would want them to, but they all took their own path. And then when Stu or Kamarai would host a group, you could see they would always take the opportunity to sit in and listen, not so they could copy how we told the story, but how they could latch onto one bit and go, oh, it's a really nice little nugget.

55:29I'm going to absorb that into my story. So whether we think story, whether we think melody, this stuff has to be contagious and fit in our brains in the way that humans process information, which is generally through story, not strategy. Okay, so continuing the music analogy, when and where there have been times where there were wrong notes that just pulled the song off, didn't work, we call these flirtings, what you learned from your failures. So where's a story that you can share of a flirting or something just didn't go the way you went, but you got a lot out of it in the end and whether it was a pivot, you're never going to do that again, uncovered something else.

56:08So what's your flirting? I've not heard the term flirting. I may adopt it. I'm trying it on. You're welcome. You're welcome, yeah. Look, it always sounds, I've probably got three, and none of them are necessarily profound. I don't think we ever had a real kind of, you know, existential crisis. So the first one is the closest. And it's, you know, it's the thing I don't love talking about because we all went through it. And COVID was an absolutely, you know, it was an external shock, not an internal shock. But you did learn a lot about yourselves and the decisions you'd made to that point. And you learned a lot about yourselves as decision makers.

56:49And we were very fortunate heading into COVID because the industry was decimated. The industry was absolutely rocked. You know, people couldn't go into bars. People were stuck indoors. We were running a major hospitality venue that we'd invested a lot in. we'd actually just put money down on a lease for a second hospitality venue in Sydney, just as the first lockdowns hit. So it was a terrible time for Four Pillars. We were 12 months into our partnership with Lyon. Now, the reality is, we still had all leadership decision making, I chaired the board, we were still entirely in charge. But that feeling of having a big brother, not so much looking over your shoulder, because they really weren't, they were hugely supportive, but that sense that if the shit really hits the fan, and I just went out on a limb there and assumed I can say shit, and I've done it twice, if the shit really hit the fan, that's three, someone would have our back.

57:41And as a result, I think we made confident decisions. We made no one redundant. We kept everyone in the boat. We prioritised, you know, I wrote a, talk about narrative, I wrote more emails through the first six months of COVID than to the staff of Four Pillars, and longer emails than in the five, six years prior to that, because we told them stories. We tried to be the number one source of information about flattening the curve, about epidemiology, about why this stuff is happening in the world, about mental health. I wrote a long email about people over paper, how we were going to suspend the creation of all collateral, anything that was unnecessary.

58:17We were going to keep the dollars in the business so that we could keep our people in the business. We very quickly saw a pivot into two growth opportunities. One was direct consumer. Better or worse, school from home meant people started to drink a lot more gin at home and collect a lot of gin at home. A beautiful bottle of limited edition Japanese-inspired Four Pillows was good retail therapy and relatively cost-effective. So our direct-to-consumer business was now flying. We started to make hand sanitizer. We chose not to do it as a few distilleries and breweries did as a sort of gift with purchase to encourage buying.

58:51We actually did it in response to, we had several people reach out from doctors and nurses forums on Facebook direct Cameron saying, we're really struggling here. We've got enough product in our clinics, in our hospitals, but we're going home and we're feeling we can't protect our families. We're not going to take stuff from the hospital. We can't buy anything. Can you help? So Cameron decided he wanted to do something to help frontline workers. So we called it Take Care. We deliberately packaged it very plainly. And because the duty-free business, we had been the number nine gin in the world in duty-free.

59:26at the end of 2019, which is pretty extraordinary, given where we were as a brand. That just went to zero overnight. International travel went to zero. So guess what we had? All these one liter bottles. So we didn't mess around with little spray containers. We went, these are frontline care workers. They're doctors, they're nurses. They will figure it out. So we just sent liter bottles of hand sanitizer down the bottling lines. And now we've got direct consumer gin going through. We've got hand sanitizer going through. We needed more casual workers on the bottling line. So who do we use? All the really chatty people from hospitality came and were utterly disruptive because all they want to do is talk and tell stories.

59:59That's fine. We want to keep everyone in the business. And so we really held the company and the culture together through that. So it wasn't a flirting, but it was a learning about what was important to us. Much more of a flirting was not an MVP, not a minimum viable product, but one of the few times we second-guessed the market. We got panicked about Navy strength. You mentioned Navy strength earlier. Now, Navy strength gin is so cold because way back in the day of early days of gin, the Dutch actually invented gin. They called it Hanover. Very hard to say without spitting all over people. And the British Navy were terribly jealous of the brave Dutch Navy, Dutch courage.

1:00:40They realized that Dutch courage came from the fact that the Dutch sailors were simply drunk. They were drunk on Hanover. The British Navy go, okay, well, we need more drunk sailors. We need gin on board our ships. Unscrupulous distillers on the dock sides of Plymouth and Portsmouth go, these idiots will be far out sea before they realize they've got a barrel that's half full of water. We'll water all the gin down. So the Navy start to proof the gin before they leave port. They pour some on some gunpowder. If it was more than 50 % alcohol to water, the gunpowder would still light. The gin was proofed.

1:01:11Navy strength is sufficiently above 50 % alcohol that your gunpowder still goes off. 57 % is industry standard. We thought we'll make that. That'll be fun. This is the best story. We'll make it at 58.8%. Your gum powder is fully going to light. It's incredible gin. It's aromatic. It's delicious. I mean, you can drink it straight out and still at 93 % alcohol. Wouldn't recommend it, but you can taste it. It's beautiful. But it means that bartenders love it. It's bartenders, you know, sort of catnip because it keeps the alcohol level of your cocktails very high. It doesn't get diluted by silly things like ice and mixers.

1:01:45The problem is we pay excise on this country based on alcohol level. So Navy Strength gets slaughtered by excise. So the excise was about to push the price of a bottle of Navy Strength way over 100 bucks. We panicked. We thought, oh, my God, that's unpalatable for people. How do we solve that? And without really thinking it through, we decided to start to bottle Navy Strength in the 500 ml bottles that we used for our very limited edition barrel-aged gins. So we also barrel-aged a lot of gins, a lot of gin for whiskey lovers. and barrel-aged gins you tend to sip you don't tend to mix them with tonics it sort of works they're in 500 mil bottles navy strength is for cocktails glug glug glug glug glug big pour suddenly we've shifted it into 500 mil bottles turned out people didn't care about the price they cared about the quantity what have you bastards done like you know and so you're making me feel like a drunk because i'm getting through my navy strength bottle far quicker because you made it smaller and so very quickly we had to go back and that was one of the last times that we sort of caught ourselves second guessing.

1:02:43I think we had operated with never arrogance, but a lot of confidence. When people said to us, typically, the industry doesn't do things that way. We're like, yeah, we get that, but that's how Four Pillars is going to do it. And that was one of those rare moments when we caught ourselves, I think, in a bit of what I'd call sort of big business package goods thinking. We're like, oh, we're worried about price. So it was a small thing. I think the bigger flirting is not really a flirting at all because it wasn't a failure, but it is something that I often question, which is I think we had a very, very clear growth theory about how we were going to build the brand in Australia.

1:03:21We did overtake Hendrix. We did things that everyone said were silly. We made, you know, within the first five years, we've made more than 20 different gins. Everyone said that's going to confuse the category. It's mad. The reality is we needed novelty and scarcity and limited editions to fuel the direct consumer business, to create the margin, to create the consumer behavior, to build the database, to build the advocacy that we could then reinvest and drive bars and reach. We understood the system we were trying to build. When it came to export markets, all of those local advantages fell away.

1:03:54We had Australian travelers supporting us and we often focused on cities and countries with direct Qantas flights and we went really well in Singapore and resorts in Thailand and Bali and Vietnam. But as we went to Europe, we went to the UK, we went to America, all those direct consumer, all those sort of, we called them our intimacy strategy, a lot of that fell away. And I don't think we really figured out our growth formula. So if you then looked eight years in, the only market in the world where we hadn't changed distributor at least once was Australia. Never changed in Australia. every other market, 30 markets worldwide had all had at least one distributor change and often two or three distributor changes.

1:04:33Not because anyone at Four Pillars failed. And actually that growing footprint created the sense of a global brand. Optics are really important. Australians who love Four Pillars love the fact that when they went overseas, it was there in the Qantas lounge. It was there in the airport duty-free. It was there in the five-star resort when they got to the other side. It was there in the American bar at the Savoy. That was really important for our domestic optics. But I think if I was to play that game again, the one thing maybe I'd take a bit more time on is to really think about what is our theory of growth when so many of the advantages that have helped us grow here get left behind in Australia.

1:05:11And I wonder if that would resonate with other founders who've built something incredible in Australia and then they try and take it to the world and go, ah, I never really thought about the fact that some of the things that have helped me win are things I will leave behind when I get on that plane to go overseas. This week you've got Phil Moyle on StoryWork and you've done a great piece for Startup Data this week that people can read and then click through. I thoroughly recommend everyone listens to the StoryWork podcast with you. What have you learnt about venture from your conversations? Because it's a very different world to the other ways people can build and the growth story that they have.

1:05:53So Phil was just a dream guest to get on because I've got some pretty good relationships in the world of venture capital. I've known the guys at EVP, Equity Venture Partners, for a long time and worked with them on some of their portfolio companies. And narrative is really important there and growth theory is important. But Phil Maul, who is one of the co-founders of Main Sequence Ventures, which is really the venture arm of the CSIRO, the ventures that they are dealing with are in the deepest of tech with the longest of time horizons. And so I think it was really fascinating listening to him.

1:06:30So his background, he was a theatre director. And as I say in the piece, so really he's never changed what he's doing, which is he's always been trying to say to people, I've got this idea. I don't really know how I'm going to make it happen and I don't really know what it'll look like yet, but will you give me a stage in 12 months to put it on? If that was the line I... Now he's going, we have this technology. We think it could transform the possibilities for compute, for health, for education, for space exploration, for energy. It's going to take a while. And by a while, I mean 10 years, 20 years.

1:07:01But this could be something that shifts. And this is a language they use at Main Sequence. A critical frontier for the planet. Come with us on that journey. And so for him, this act of storytelling is so critical because it really is getting people to buy into a future that is barely imaginable based on a technology that is barely proven. So I think this stuff is important in all venture to some extent. But main sequence and deep tech is absolutely the extreme edge of that, which is why it was such an interesting interview and sort of proof of concept. I do a little activity when I'm coaching, peer coaching.

1:07:40I do an activity called Remember the Future, where you pretend it's you choose a time frame to two years, 10 years, whatever. And then the founder will tell the story in the present moment. And it shifts things. There's, you know, there's things that are around that, that there's psychology around it. Is Mr. Jones going to do this for you right now? Should we let you? Yes. The think story, experience, experience. So pick a time frame for now, six months, 18 months, two years, what have you. And we're in that moment right now. We've just come back to Startup Daily 360 because it's still around and tell the story of what has happened with StoryWorks since that's your main focus right now.

1:08:20Where is StoryWorks and how has it changed? What has it done? What's the timeframe? Okay, so I'm just going to buy in. Great. And scene. Yes. Over the last two years, StoryWorks has had this really interesting impact in that on the one hand, as a podcast, it has grown and has built a really strong audience. And what's been really pleasing about that is the audience isn't just people who traditionally have bought into the value of story. It's not just people from advertising and marketing. It's actually built this really powerful audience of people who want to lead, who want to grow businesses, who want to grow careers and are curious about the role that story can play.

1:09:02We've started to run more live events. We've started to bring people together in physical community because actually the best place to tell stories and hear stories and gather around stories is in the physical world. But what it's done for me as well is open doors and let me get into rooms where I stand on more stages and I sit across the desk for more leaders and I talk to them and help them understand the role that story can play in helping them build the thing they want to build. And the impact I'm most proud of is that we are elevating story from belonging to the marketing department to belonging to the CEO.

1:09:37And story as a strategy is becoming more and more normalized as something that the most senior leadership needs to take seriously rather than the grownups have done the work and they leave the room and then they give the brief to the comms team to tell the story. And I also love about six months ago, you did two podcasts, one with all the living prime ministers of Australia. That was a great one. Their stories were fantastic. and also all the unicorns that have bubbled up in the last 18 months. That was another great podcast that I enjoyed. And can I tell you, the unicorn one was better. Thank you for playing that.

1:10:14How did that feel? It feels good and feels true. And I love the model. I love the idea. I love the constructs. And I've always been very taken. There's not a lot that I love about the way that Jeff Bezos does business these days, but I've always loved the fact that if you want to pitch an idea at Amazon, or at least you always used to, you had to come up with a PR FAQ. You had to say, if we're going to develop this, what does the press release say? Why is it newsworthy? And what will people ask and what will our answers be? And if you can't send that postcard back from the future, if you can't tell that story, you can't place, situate the story in that future of success, then we are not going to greenlight it today.

1:10:57Thank you for playing. Final moment. So much I would still love to talk about, but we've got things to do. Yep. Worlds to build. What brings you joy?

1:11:13Two things bring me joy. People and value. Fundamentally doing things with other people. That sense of, you know, I was going to say going into battle together, but life doesn't have to be a battle, but life is sometimes a battle. You know, I really appreciate it in the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. You know, this notion, and again, I'm a big paraphraser, this notion of, you know, success in life is not avoiding pain. Like there's lots of pain in life. Success in life is aligning pain with things that matter to you. And so, you know, a lot of business is going into battle. What gives me joy is going into battle with people I love, people who give me joy, people who give me energy, travelling together.

1:11:54And the other thing that gives me joy is that. We're few, we're happy, few, we band of brothers. Exactly right. And the other thing that gives me joy is that feeling when you walk out of a room and you went, I added some value there. I created some value. And I think that for me is profound. My dad always drummed it into me. It's like, you know, when you walk into the room, what value walked in with you? And when you left the room, what value did you leave behind? And that gives me joy. And that feels good. And there are moments when you feel yourself, especially in the agency world, you're selling things, but you're not even convinced that this thing that you're selling is valuable.

1:12:25It feels really good to know you added some value to that. Well, Matt, I think you have added enormous value to Startup360 today. Thank you so much for your expertise, your insights. It was a brilliant conversation. Of course, if anyone wants to get you along, they can get in touch via ThinkStory Experience, keynote speaker. Sure thing. I mean, Matt Jones, I've got one of the world's most generic names. But, yeah, you can just put in Matt Jones, story, brand, gin, any of the above to your nearest Google search engine. You'll find me on LinkedIn on the website. and join me on StoryWork. You'll find on StartupDaily.net.

1:13:00A hundred percent. That's one of our regular contributors. Thank you so much. Really appreciate having you in. Thanks for having me, friends. All right. That's it, girlfriends. All right. We'd better just get out of here at this point in time, I reckon. So I'm going to say this show is a SmartCo media production produced and edited by the fantastic Matt Jackson. Thanks to Ella. Thanks to James. And, of course, to Deal for their support. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and read StartupDaily.net for tech news for free and as i said you have to listen to story work it's great some great conversations with some amazing people don pym and phil michael all incredible so tune in for that have a great weekend we'll see you next friday bye for now