459: Forging Meaningful Business Partnerships with Jean Oelwang of Virgin Unite

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2:44Hey guys, welcome back to another Founder Podcast episode. We're here in the studio, blessed and humbled by Jean Oweng. And she is the founding CEO and president of Virgin Unite. So Jean, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you, Nathan. And I'm humbled to be here with you. You have such an incredible community of founders. It's an honor. Thank you. And look, it's always awesome to do these interviews in person. and you really just get to connect with the guests on a much more intimate level. So the first question that I wanted to ask you is how did you get your job, aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today?

3:28Yeah, it was actually eavesdropping is how I got my job because I happen to be working for Virgin at Virgin Mobile in Australia and I was at the time, Richard Branson, who was my boss, was on my board. So we were driving in a car and I overheard him talking about how he wanted to do more. philanthropically. So I quickly ran home and wrote a plan on what Virgin could do. And then he called me. And I remember standing in my little house in Roselle. And he said, let's do this. So I hung up the phone and danced all around the house. And that was the beginning of Virgin Unite some 18 years ago now.

4:04Yeah, wow. And can you tell us like, you wrote up this business plan, what did that original business plan say? And if you compare to now, what was the difference? Very, very good question. So the original plan was thinking about we had at that time, I think we had about 25 big businesses in 15 different industries. So the original plan was how do we mobilize all the employees and all the businesses to really drive huge change in the world and how do we build this kind of, I guess, connective tissue with communities that they worked in. And so that was the start. And we did that probably for the first, I would say, probably for the first five years.

4:43And then it grew into something that was bringing together these collectors of leaders and spinning them out to be independent. But always our roots were in the company. So it changed. But now it's actually even better because it's almost embedded in who we are as a company. And they're all non-for-profits just for the audience, right? So the companies, so in the very early stages, we were working with all the Virgin companies, the for-profit companies, to put purpose at the centre. But the ones that we incubated and spun out are all not-for-profit. Got you. And how do you guys get the funding?

5:21So we get the funding from a few places. One is Virgin Group. They cover all of our overheads with the Branson family. And that way 100 % of what we bring in the door goes right back out the door again to projects. Yes. And other ways we do, we have a social enterprise that we've created where we bring entrepreneurs, founders, philanthropists on these journeys, these experiential opportunities where they can be in South Africa or India, all over the world to really be with the projects. And so through those, we've created the social enterprise that also creates funds to fund the projects. And then the third way is we just have this extraordinary community of people that help fund the different projects.

6:05So I want to talk more about the projects. But before we get to that, I want to talk about the earlier days, Jean. Like how did you end up working for Richard Branson? How did you end up, you know, being the CEO of Virgin Active? No, no, Virgin Mobile. Virgin Mobile, yeah. CEO of Virgin Mobile in Australia. how did you end up there and you said offline that you were setting up mobile phone businesses all around the world tell us about that yeah so for the first 18 years of my career we would go into a country and this was the wild west this was the early early years of mobile so we go into a country work with partners and help set up a mobile phone company and so I'd be there usually from two to three years and then we'd help get a local team on board and then we'd go to the next one.

6:55So I did that for a long time. And then I ended up here in Australia working for Optus actually. And so I was at Optus for a bit and then went to work for the National Parks and Wildlife Service. And then when I was there, I got a call from Virgin and they said, would you come help us start up a mobile phone company? So that was my start into Virgin. And so you kicked off Virgin Mobile in Australia. Yeah, with an amazing team. So I was first the marketing director in Virgin Mobile Australia, and then I became the co-CEO by the time I left to start Virgin Unite. Yeah, wow. And can you tell me about the experience of, I guess, working with Sir Richard Branson and what that whole experience has been like?

7:40How often do you guys work together? Like how does it all work? Yeah, and first good on you for getting him on the Funk Coffee magazine. That was early days. I thought that was like well done. Yeah, that was early days. It's great. It's really good. Yeah, and it's been, you know, our first experience with each other was when we were launching Virgin Mobile. And he embellishes the story of it. But what we decided to do is we were going to hang him from the largest helicopter we could find and fly him into Darling Harbour, land him on these cages to release our competitors' customers. And so he loves to tell the story about dangling and hanging in the air and coming into Darling Harbour over the bridge and then just shooting up and going over.

8:20and I just remember being on the ground being so nervous because we had not managed to get him insurance so I remember him kind of flying up and just screaming I'm sorry we didn't get you insurance so that was our first moment together and then after that it's just been fantastic I mean he is an extraordinary leader I'll never forget a lesson he taught me right in the beginning where we launched Virgin Mobile and the whole executive team was sitting in this boardroom waiting because he was there in town and we couldn't find where he went and we were looking everywhere for him. And then we finally found that he was in the customer service center with headphones on, listening to customers and talking to the customer service reps.

9:01And then he came up to meet us and he had a list of 20 things that we were doing wrong. Wow. And it was such an important lesson for me about A, deep listening, but B, who you listen to. and he's just brilliant at that he's brilliant at listening and learning and constantly being curious and uh and then also obviously just he thinks so big you know it's um it's one thing he's just such nothing nothing is impossible and he hates the word no and so he always is thinking about how we can do something rather than not do it and one other thing i think that i have really learned from him is the importance of play and joy because I came from you know building mobile phone companies and used to working from early morning late at night and so when I first started working with Richard I'd come with these agendas like from eight in the morning to six at night and he literally just ripped them up and we ended up on the gatherings we do we have work from nine to noon and then the afternoons are for play so that people can get to know one another Wow that's crazy so I'm curious okay I've got to dive a little deeper here so what what does play look like and getting to know people what what is the purpose there?

10:21Yeah I think he really feels strongly and it's helped me understand how important this is that people get to know each other much better when they're in a place of joy and play like some of the gatherings we do would be at a place where people can go kite surfing or they can go sailing together they can go running together or biking together so that sometimes is what play looks like but sometimes we're in a place where that's not available and it's just literally going for a walk with someone or just taking time and playing a game of chess or just literally sitting and having a conversation and i think that's the depth of where you get really connected with people and build those partnerships in those moments of joy and play rather than just kind of PowerPoint after PowerPoint after PowerPoint and just people sitting in a dark room.

11:08That's the place where we've really seen stuff take off. So you overheard a conversation he was having and you built up the courage to write a business plan which was end up being Virgin Unite. I'm curious is that a common thing where he's constantly being pitched ideas or is that kind of environment very entrepreneurial you know saying yes to a lot of things always wanting to say yes and is that common or he they call him Dr. Yes in the company and and he has to surround himself with people that will say no because he never says no and so now he's actually put some controls in place because for a while the group expanded way too big and we went into all kinds of things and then we tightened a bit now but he's still someone that if he hears something he thinks is unacceptable he'll be on the phone in a second saying we need to do something about this Like even like one time, I'll never forget he was on a plane with this woman and she talked about this birthing condition that young women have in Nigeria where they lose their baby and they become incontinent.

12:22It's called fistula and thousands of young women have it. And so the next day he called me and he said, you're getting on a plane to Nigeria and we're going to get Natalie Imbruglio, the musician, on the plane with you. So literally within a week, I was in the tarmac in Katsina in Nigeria, and we started a whole program around helping support young women with fistula. So he's constantly looking at ways he can tackle unacceptable issues and turn them upside down. Hey, FounderFam, I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders.

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13:39Yeah, wow, that's crazy. So let's switch gears. One of the reasons you're here is you're on tour for your new book, Partnering. Can you tell us what compelled you to write that book? And it's about forging the deep connections that make great things happen. Yeah, and I mean, this links to the conversation we're just having, too, because I think Richard never does anything alone. He always collaborates and realizes that he never has all the answers. And so that as well has been a huge, important lesson for me. And we were starting this group called The Elders. This is one of the first projects we started at Virgin Unite and incubating it.

14:19And I never forget Richard coming with a letter from Nelson Mandela that said, OK, I'm in. We're going to start The Elders. And it was an idea that Richard and Peter Gabriel had. And I remember getting that letter thinking, oh, my God, I just quit this great job in Australia. I'm now working for a crazy man with a beard in London. And are we really going to be able to do this? And we started it. And I remember sitting at the feet of the elders who were people like Nelson Mandela and Grasa and Archer Shiptutu and Kofi Annan and President Carter. It was an incredible group of 12 leaders. And I'm thinking, how did they become who they were in this world?

14:54Like, how did they have these outsized legacies of impact? and what became really clear after watching them is that they became who they were because of each other and because of the partnerships they surrounded themselves with whether it was the people they worked with the people their families their friends and so I kind of went on this mission 15 years ago to interview as many partnerships to find out how we can build these deep connections in our own lives that make us the best version of ourselves but then how we take those deep connections and ladder them up to large-scale collaborations.

15:29Okay so how do you first of all identify great potential partners? So we went on a mission and we were looking for two things. One was they had to have longevity in their partnership and then the second is that they had to use their partnership to have made a bigger difference in the world. So we found some that lots of people will know like Ben and Jerry or Archie Tutu and Leah, but then tons of leaders from all over the world that people may not know, like Lester and Ray, who are fighting the death penalty every day in America. And then interviewed about 65 of them after we made that selection over those 15 years.

16:11And it was so beautiful because even though they were all different kinds of partnerships, friends or family, business, it was beautiful to see the common patterns that came up amongst all the partnerships. So you hear stories like some of these that you're talking about where a company from a commercial standpoint partners with another business and it's game changing for that business. If I talk from personal experience, I've always found partnerships incredibly difficult to bring to life. I remember one time there was WeWork, famous WeWork before they became not so famous yeah uh they wanted to do a big partnership with us and you know we were going to get the magazine digitally and you know as a gift to every single member and they had you know well well over like 50 100 000 plus members all around the world and it was when they raised a ton of money they didn't have the bad press and all the stuff the crazy stuff that happened next and and uh they were doing a lot of acquisitions all sorts of things and i remember i was talking to them and were going up and back and they wanted to test it out, this and that.

17:19It just never ended up going anywhere. And that seems for me personally when we try and do partnerships with other like-minded businesses that perhaps have a similar mission to us in terms of supporting entrepreneurs or facilitating their growth in some way, shape or form, it just never comes to life. And I'd love to hear kind of what are the things that you see people that people often do wrong when it comes to partnerships or they don't come to life? Or what are the things that people need to look for to be able to find that right fit? Yeah, this is a super important question because I think even the great partnerships that we interviewed, it was super hard work.

18:06It wasn't easy. But I think the way some of them fail, there's a few things because we talk to tons of people to figure out why a partnership fails as well as why they're successful. And the things that came out are things like a lack of shared meaning. So if you don't have that kind of something bigger, that intoxicating purpose that you're headed towards, it's hard for the partnership to stay together, particularly in a business partnership or collaboration. One of the other things was disconnected values. values so you didn't have the same set of values and principles yes which is breaks up a partnership almost immediately the other one was an imbalance in commitment so if one partner really wants to do this and is all in and the other one's about you know maybe 50 percent and it'll eventually crack because one will feel like they're putting in a lot more than the other one and then two other things that came up one was this kind of roller coaster of drama of you know it's some partnerships that come together that aren't supposed to be together.

19:05They just have this constant friction and conflict that they can't get through the other side of. And you see that happen sometimes. And then the last one is something we call the superhero syndrome, where if one partner thinks they have all the right answers, they're the number one, then the other partner is going to tire of that over time. So those are some of the reasons we saw them break rather than be successful. You talked about one which definitely rings true is that, you know, that mutually beneficial exchange in value creation. Yeah. I'm thinking just of a partnership. We tried again, like we've tried many times.

19:46And there was one, I'm not going to say the company's name. It is a well-known company. and oh look they were really kind of tit for tat around you got to do this we do that and we did some stuff and then it didn't do that well and they did some stuff and and yeah in the end it was just like you know what like let's just stop yeah how do you find you get the right balance for that mutually beneficial exchanging value and then it felt like they were just trying to take as much as they could. Yeah, and that you shouldn't partner with them. It's just such a waste of energy then. You know, that's the other thing is really deciding who you, there's a continuum of you're going to have a lot of deep connection, deep partnerships on one side, and then a lot of light touch acquaintances.

20:33And I think choosing who you invest your time in is so important. And I think it is that intoxicating something bigger, that you have that kind of thing that you're both there for, that gives you the kind of, I guess, strength and power to kind of push through some of the difficult moments when you're first figuring each other out. And I remember we merged the Carbon War Room, which was this entity we'd set up that was really about market-based models to reduce carbon. And then we came together with this science-based group that was more technology-based, which are gaps that we were missing, called Rocky Mountain Institute.

21:09So you had Richard Branson, the crazy entrepreneur, and then Amory Lovins, the crazy scientist. and we merged those two organizations some 10 years ago now almost maybe eight years ago and in the beginning the merged organizations were 15 million and dollars annually now they are over 200 million 400 people and they're doing amazing work with energy transformation with sector by sector industries with business and i think that's an example of where it really works where you have complementary skills. You're not competing with each other. There's a real reason to come together because our ultimate goal was scaling the energy transformation.

21:48And that has been an extraordinary partnership. But it wasn't easy. It was like we had to decide we were going to give up our brand in the early days, which was a tough thing. And it was a right decision. And then we had to figure out how we merged two incredible teams, which was also something we had to thoughtfully do. and then it was just figuring out what does that joint strategy look like. So I think there aren't a lot of mergers like that, particularly in the not-for-profit sector, also sometimes in the business sector, because they are hard work and it takes a lot of effort. But my gosh, the other side of that has just been amazing.

22:22How do you know when to keep going? Because you said oftentimes that this can happen where it's kind of a bit rocky. How do you know if to keep going and keep pursuing pursuing or persisting with the partnership? Yeah, I think if you can't see a shared something bigger on the other side, something that's going to have tremendous impact if you come together as businesses and if mismatch values, like if you see respect not there in the beginning, like equal respect as a partner. And like when you're saying tit for tat, that's not building a partnership. That's more they were just trying to get from you what they could.

22:58And I think you have to go into a partnership thinking about what you can give through your partnerships rather than what you can get and if people don't have that mentality it's not worth trying to pursue that because you will just be in this transactional game that will never get to a deep connection relationship between the two organizations yeah look I love these stories because because the idea of leverage can be so powerful when you think of partnership what advice would you give to our community of early stage startup founders that might be on the early stage of their business journey, perhaps hit market fit, recently launched, using partnerships as a vehicle to move their business forward?

23:42Yeah, I think a couple of things. One would be, think about as a founder, do you want a co-founder? Because like many of the people that we interviewed, like Ben and Jerry, or Joe, Nate, and Brian from Airbnb or the Innocent Drinks founders, they all had two or three co-founders. So I think that's the first thing to really think through. What's missing in who you are that you could get from someone else that you could multiply the growth that you would have in your business tenfold just by starting there and also have more joy. And as you know, founding something is so hard. I mean, every day is so hard when you get up And having someone there with you on that journey just makes it even more joyful and gets you through those rough times.

24:28Because a lot of those co-founders talked about when one's down, the other one was up and they were able to bring each other back up again. So I think that's one place to start. I think the second is just thinking about your relationship with your employees. And, you know, often we think about our teams as like numbers on spreadsheets and names on spreadsheets rather than as human beings. and changing the way we lead of not bottom-down leading, but how do you partner with your team and kind of shifting that mentality because that will make them feel joint ownership with what you're building and creating and will make them want to work even harder for you and want to build something spectacular.

25:07And then I think it's also thinking about your board. That's such a crucial part of an organization when you're founding it. And I think we think a lot about what skills someone's going to have or are they well known or but very rarely do we think about what are the deep connections that people may already have on the board so that they start with that strong relationship of trust and respect because it just helps build the rest of the board and makes it even closer and tighter and makes it a more effective board. So when you talk about a board how should a founder know when to set one up? Yeah, this is a very good question too.

25:45I have tended to be on the side whenever we've been starting our initiatives and founding something or even when we were building mobile phone companies in the early days of setting up a board earlier rather than later but setting up a more friendly board to begin with. Like an advisory. An advisory board. So you're not like spending every second like responding to a board but you have a group there that's got your back and that's going to make you maybe think from a different perspective and you're so tired when you're starting something you know you're just like slog so how do you make sure there's people there that kind of lift you out of that slog to see that bigger picture so I found that to be super helpful and then as you grow your board's gonna evolve you know it's gonna take on different shapes depending on what growth period you're in interesting and attracting board members yeah which again comes down to that do you have that intoxicating bigger that people are going to want to run to you know is it an idea that you have to found your business that people are going to want to be part of and that you're going to have team members coming to board members coming to and then i think it's also just about going out and finding people who have built things before when you're founding something so they understand that early phase building a business and i found those people to be super helpful because they're also very empathetic to where you're at and I also just think finding those people that also complement your skills because you can't as a team have everything in one team so by using that board as kind of an extension it helps you scale even more rapidly.

27:21So we've talked about partnerships from a commercial aspect and partnering with other businesses or individuals from a partnering standpoint, co-founders, board members. Is there anything else on the partnership side that you think would be really helpful for our community that we haven't discussed that you would like me to ask you? Yeah, for sure. I think partnering with customers and with your community is super important. So I think thinking about really listening, you know, there was a beautiful quote in one of the interviews I did where he talked about if someone doesn't listen to you, then it's like you don't exist.

28:02And so the most important thing is sitting and being in space with your customers. Like when we started Virgin Mobile, we used to have what we called V dinners and we'd invite customers into our homes, our personal homes and cook dinner for them and have a conversation about what they thought of our product, how we could do better. And we got more insights from those v dinners than we did from any formal market research you know it was just brilliant um yeah so it's thinking of them not just as customers that are making money but how do you change that into relational so that you're building relationship with them and the same thing with communities like what who in your community needs your help as a company and who can benefit from what you're offering to build that connective tissue into the community as well yeah that's gold.

28:51Oh, we got to do that. So when it comes to, I guess, partnerships from a commercial perspective, what kind of ratio? Like, is it one in five you see work? Is it one in three? Is it one in 10? Because like, yeah, I have to be honest, Jean, like I'm a little jaded when it comes to commercial type partnerships. We've never been able to make them work. Yeah. And I'd say you're probably right it's more in the end that few are working but we have to question why that's happening and i think part of it is because it's we're so driven from the time we are born when we're in school when we're university to be hyper individualistic you know we're so so driven to be the one that we have to be the company that wins that we're so driven towards competition like that And I think that's what stops us from partnering because we think we can't open that door.

29:49And that's what cracks a lot of the partnerships as well, is that they come together and they're competing when they're trying to be a partnership. So I think that mentality in the world is probably what breaks a lot of partnerships. And I agree with you. I think a lot of them blow up because people aren't at the table for the benefit of the other person or the other company. They're at the table more because they're thinking about how it will help them. And if people go in that way, then they're never going to be able to build this kind of sense of mutuality. And I think there's in the world, I think there's this just huge lack of almost, I'd call it informed confidence or shared humility, where people think they have everything that they need to be successful, but they don't see that by partnering.