E187 - Brent Hoberman, lastminute.com founder: the hard truths of entrepreneurship

0:01Hi there, I'm Jake Comfrey and this is High Performance. This is the podcast that reminds you it's within. Your ambition, your purpose, your story are all there. We just unlock it by turning the lived experiences of the planet's highest performance into your life lessons. So right now, please allow myself and Professor Damien Hughes to speak to one of the most impressive and successful entrepreneurs on the planet so that he can be your teacher. Listen, if you are an entrepreneur, if you're a business person, if you're a CEO, if you're an employee or an employer, but you want to hear a really honest, serious, in-depth conversation about life in business, about life as an entrepreneur, about how you can go and do it yourself, then this is the episode for you.

0:46Today, this awaits you. The obsessiveness you need to succeed is not for everyone. The best entrepreneurs, I'm sorry in this day of work-life balance, they don't have work-life balance. Work is their life and they love it. We were very much of the opinion that the way we were going to put everyone else off was make ourselves out with a little bit of bluff to be much bigger and more successful than we were already. So we would say that we're not just going to say to people, here's a good idea. We're going to put our flag in the ground and say, here's a good idea and do not try and stop us because we're going to conquer it.

1:22we've got everything going for us you know we've got a steamroller of money and people and talent and everything years before we did we price it after a shortened roadshow by an increase during that 10-day period more than anyone in europe has ever increased the price we go public 18 months from launch faster than i think still anyone has ever gone public we are 43 times oversubscribed and then on the day you'd watch the stock and then we see it keeps going down. However you can build that confidence, whatever it takes to find it, because that will help you do so much in life. So today we welcome a guy called Brent Hoberman, who you may well have heard of.

2:04He famously co-founded LastMinute.com and the story around that, the way that they built it and exploded and then there were struggles and challenges. It's a really fascinating conversation. which you'll hear over the next hour or so. But Brent didn't stop there. He's gone to do some of the most fascinating things, including recently being the co-founder of Made.com. And we'll talk about this and what happened there in this conversation. But we're also going to discuss what Brent looks for in an entrepreneur, why he's decided to co-found the Startup Accelerator Founders Factory and the Tech Community Founders Forum and the huge seed fund First Minute Capital.

2:42tech businesses co-founded by Brent have cumulatively raised well over a billion dollars he sits on some of the most interesting advisory boards he meets some of the most remarkable people and so much of it he believes is your mindset your approach your hard work your dedication so please welcome Brent Hoberman

3:11Well, thank you for joining us, first of all. We always start with the question of what represents high performance to you. What would you say? So I'd say high performance for me is a combination of things. One is that sort of obsessiveness, but where you don't know you're being obsessive, where you get into a flow state. To me, the definition of flow state is you lose track of time because you're enjoying what you're doing so much. So I think that leads to high performance and excellence. Because even somebody will say, maybe perhaps minor ADD like me, is when I get into that state, I really can focus.

3:44And then I think I'm at my best. But the other thing in high performance in business, I'd say, is like playing chess. It's having a vision, thinking many steps ahead and thinking of all your options, but then also being able to think of the micro and the detail and what's your next move, while also thinking 20 moves ahead. So are you able to be the obsessive, all-in entrepreneur and at the same time see 20 steps ahead and at the same time have the small day-to-day vision? or is it about building teams to carry out all those different tasks for you? I think it's both is the answer. I think to my mind, the best entrepreneurs are those that can have this absolute micro detail in their mind, in their head, but also probably create systems whereby they're having information reported up to them.

4:34They have systems where they know what is the details that are showing where things are going red, amber, green, way deep in an organization. organization and they're also able to have this big strategic vision and they're able to attract incredible talent to help them execute on the vision and it's now the most exciting time to be an entrepreneur because i don't know what you know but i don't think the world has ever been a more exciting place to operate with the way that social media and the internet and the way we're all connected was interesting i was speaking at a school last week and then i asked the room in the school how many of you are thinking of being entrepreneurs this was kids from 13 to 18 and it was self-selecting because it was the entrepreneurship society, but nonetheless, about 98 % of hands went up.

5:17Now, when I was at school a million years ago, I think you would have had one or 2%. So it wasn't a thing. So to your point about timing, now entrepreneurship is a thing. It's a real option for young people. They've seen so many people do it and succeed. That said, it's harder in one sense in that there are no barriers to entry. So it's easier to enter, But once you're in it, you've got to work out how to be at your best performance because there are going to be a lot of people competing with you. So if you were giving advice to those kids at that school, the 98 % that want to do it, what are the steps that you'd advise about how to take those initial?

5:56Yeah, so that was a good question that I was asked was sort of what skills should we be building to become entrepreneurs was what somebody from one of the state schools there asked me. And it was interesting because, to be honest, it was asked very meekly and quietly without confidence. So it gave me the clue. It's like the first thing that person needs to do is work out how to build their confidence. Because entrepreneurs are, for better or worse, they're almost always quite confident. Now, confidence is something I think we can all learn. I certainly recall to them how when I was a 16-year-old spotty teenager, I had very little confidence.

6:31But I built it up through various ways. And I said to her, I said, look, build your confidence. What's that mean? Practically, join the debating society. Learn to speak in public. Speak whenever you can in public, for example, because that sort of stuff, as you guys know, it becomes so much easier every time you do it. That's one of the skills to be an entrepreneur. Now, the other one I pushed on was breaking the rules within reason. I think it's lateral thinking. It's like, okay, the era of rote learning, that's going, going, gone, should be gone because you can use Google for that, right? But what you can't use artificial intelligence for yet is lateral thinking.

7:07How do you break the rules? How do you think differently to everyone else? And then the other thing I said is how do you understand the future? So entrepreneurs need to understand the future in a counterintuitive way because if we all understood, if you're building a business plan and everybody is in agreement with you that this is going to work and this is exactly what the world's going to be like in five years time, you've got no edge. Why is lateral thinking such an important part of being an entrepreneur? Because I think lateral thinking helps you solve problems in different ways to everyone else.

7:34You've got to zig when others zag. You've got to find different ways to solve problems. And then the last bit that we haven't talked about, what's the other skill you need to build up to be an entrepreneur? Sorry to go back to that, but is tenacity, determination, passion. but particularly that's focused on that tenacity one and that's i guess similar to sportsmen right which you guys know much better than i do but it is that point of being an entrepreneur you face failure so many times you face rejection so many times we've all heard the stories of people who've gone to 100 people to raise money and 99 have said no but it's the hundredth where they say yes so you've got to keep going through all those barriers and keep learning keep getting better but have that self-belief and that's the hard bit the other hardest bit of being an entrepreneur earlier, I think, is who do you listen to?

8:19Because if, like, I listened to my good friends when I first had the lastminute.com business plan, and almost all of them said, Brent, you're crazy, you're bonkers, this internet thing's never going to work, and you should get a life, you know. But somehow, I still had enough belief that I'd understood where this internet thing was going in 1997, and that they had sort of missed the boat. So I wonder where that came from for you, then is this because i love the idea right that anyone can be an entrepreneur do you subscribe to that or do you think that you don't sorry i wish i because you because it's because it's someone that you were born with or it was the messaging from your father or your grandfather or it was your schooling it's i don't think it's that i was born with it i think i'm very wary of and i was with as i may have mentioned with mattia flamini the footballer uh doing this entrepreneurship of talk and we were both of the opinion that it's sort of dangerous to say everyone can be an entrepreneur because actually let alone for people's mental health this resilience isn't something everyone has and and people can find happy what we want is people be happy right they can find happiness in many different ways and my wife tells me when i say to my kids you have to be an entrepreneur whatever they're like make sure they know they can be happy in lots of different other ways it's not just that um and i think what i mean is by people being suited to be an entrepreneurship.

9:36It's this point that the obsessiveness you need to succeed is not for everyone. The best entrepreneurs, I'm sorry in this day of work-life balance, they don't have work-life balance. Work is their life and they love it. And not everybody is going to love work that much that they can give it 95 % of their whole life for a period of time. I mean, my view is it's a time period and I'm slightly ageist about this. I think you want to be an entrepreneur, do it young. So if there are people listening here, I'd say, don't put it off. Do it when you have very little to lose. Before the mortgage and the kids, ideally, it doesn't have to be, but that's ideal.

10:14So that that stress is less. Because the stress, if you've got the mortgage and the kids and you have to pay for all the stuff and you've got all people depending on you, is so much greater. And that's what the great Reid Hoffman entrepreneur says, when you're being an entrepreneur, always think about what your worst case is. What's your plan Z? If it all fails, in your mind, you've got to be happy with that plan Z. So if there's someone listening to this and they've got this great idea, because we are listened to by so many wannabe entrepreneurs, young business startups. Entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs.

10:42But also the people who are responsible for the next generation of entrepreneurs, the teachers and the parents. They're all listening to this podcast as well. How do we create a society that is resilient enough to deal with the knockbacks? Yes. is optimistic enough to keep coming for more knockbacks and is brave enough to realise that the reward comes only after the risk. When you fail, you should take it as a learning experience. So in business, there are these great examples of particularly like Supercell, which is a 10 billion plus gaming company which does Clash of Clans and all that. And their story is how they have failure parties.

11:20You know, when the game has failed, they have multiple teams competing on different games to launch. And then they'll have a failure party where the person whose game they just pulled and said, we're going to pull all funding from your game, talks in front of the whole company and says, here's what I've learned. And they have champagne and they celebrate the closure of that game. So we need a country and a culture where we are so much better at dealing with failure. We need a country where we can stop the schadenfreude. One of my biggest obsessions is that schadenfreude, although it's a German word, meaning obviously having great joy in others' failures, is really the most British of terms.

11:57um it's something that this culture and forgive me my friends at the daily mail but stop it if you're working for the daily mail um stop that culture because you're you're one of the biggest culprits in this country you think that's where it comes from because i see it all over twitter yeah i guess it's not just i don't want to read i think arguably the mail is a mirror what they would say to me and i have is that they're a mirror of what they see in the country right they would say those articles get read the most yeah exactly exactly that's why they're just mirroring it. But we do somehow have to be happier when we see other people succeed.

12:27And that means also not reveling in their failure. It means not building people up just so we can knock them down. And this is all a microcosm of entrepreneurship, right? Because this is what happens. This is the cycle of entrepreneurship. You're going to go through those highs and lows. And this is why, again, going to the point is maybe not everyone should be an entrepreneur because you need to have that sort of slightly thick skin and it's very hard having suffered this myself when i was i used to say with last minute.com when we went public we were like for a minute there we were on the cover of business week and we were like the best thing since sliced bread and then the market burst and we were literally burnt and toast you know it was like the worst thing and everybody the media was like saying is martha lane fox my co-founder the most hated woman in britain was a big headline you know and she'd done nothing wrong it was just the market turned and the media loved saying, oh, you know, these young kids who we all said were brilliant.

13:17Well, now we think they're idiots. And that is a tough thing to go through. And it's not, we were lucky enough, Martin, I'd have lots of support systems and a hundred million in the bank, let's be honest, once we'd raised. So it makes it a lot easier to deal with the brickbats. But for some people, dealing with those brickbats will just knock you down. But what I'm interested in is that, that comment that not everyone can be an entrepreneur and you almost have to go through these saving experiences to find out it's not for you so what are the if there's anyone listening to this it's going well I don't know I quite like the idea of trying out but I don't know if I am well equipped to handle a lifetime of these ups and downs on this roller coaster ride what sort of advice would you give to anyone to find out whether they do have the resolve to do this it's have you been through lots of tough times failed and picked yourself up again have you got some sort of either support system around you or that deep inner resilience, which you could just have on your own.

14:12And actually, by the way, I don't want to over-egg the external support system because often, by the way, the best entrepreneurs are they're often unhinged individuals with a massive chip on their shoulder and massive insecurity. So if anyone is listening to this and they were bullied at school and they're a little bit insecure, but that insecurity is instead of driving them underground, has driven them to have outsized ambition to prove themselves that they're better than the bullies, then entrepreneurship could be a brilliant gateway for you. I love that. What a brilliant way of reframing struggle for every young kid.

14:43But it's so true. When you look at the best entrepreneurship... Does that happen for you then? A bit. So, I was a South African born Jewish entrepreneur who'd been to America before and then came to England one year here and then boarding school. Some of the most English, lovely boarding schools. So, I came to England as this immigrant under these English boarding schools and which I was very lucky to be at. But I was definitely the outsider. And I think these schools are actually almost more brilliant if you are an outsider, because then there are zero chances of any entitlement. That's knocked out of you by your peers.

15:20And if you can use that immigrant energy to say, actually, I can more than fit in here. I can win. So it turned me into somebody who wanted to win and work extremely hard. So academically, I don't think I was one of the brightest at school, but I got an internal scholarship because I secretly worked really hard. I'd played for the first football team, not because I was really that good, but because I would knock people over with my determination. If somebody got the ball off me, I would be angry and get back and try and get it. There was a determination that shone through. Can we talk then about your path?

16:01Because Because I'm well aware that, you know, we're lucky lots of young people listen to this podcast. And I don't want to age all three of us here, but all three of us fully understand the story of lastminute.com. But if you're 25, it happened when you were basically zero, right? So I love the story. So you saw the birth of the internet. You saw the power that the internet would have. And you had this amazing idea, which became lastminute.com. I would love to know where the idea came from. But then I'd love you to tell us about the bravery of delaying carrying it out because you felt the world wasn't ready for it.

16:34I think that's the secret sauce here. Timing is absolutely critical. So the idea, I was lucky enough to work in a strategy consultancy, which meant that I was being paid to learn. So media and telecom strategy consultancy, which is a wonderful thing because you're paid to learn in the early days about internet and cable and TV commerce and all these early things in 95, 96, just as the internet was dawning. So I was lucky in that I guess part of my bit that was unusual is just I love gadgets. So it was literally my father was an engineer, a tinkerer, and he built like the first radio station in South Africa ever.

17:09So I just – and he would give me all these little gadgets early on at school, like a pirate radio station I ran at school and all this thing. So it was just – I fell in love when I saw the internet early days. It felt like magic. So I kept obsessing about it, like what's the opportunity? and then I'd look at business plans in early days of TV commerce and all this sort of stuff and what was almost pre-e-commerce and think my god this makes so much sense and I thought well the only thing since 96 I thought well the only thing I would buy now on the internet because I can really is books on Amazon that was it so I'm like god this model makes so much sense there must be other stuff that you could do with this new platform that's coming so that's when I just thought literally of myself as a customer which is often a great way to start a business and just thought, well, I'm a procrastinator.

17:55I would literally do everything at the last minute. So I sketched a one-page thing of last-minute vision, which was going away, going out, staying in. The three things you can do at the last minute. So I wrote with a friend a sort of 12-page business plan, and then did this, as you highlight, an uncharacteristic thing. This was in 1996 and I put it away in a drawer. I thought this is a wonderful idea, but A, I'm not equipped to do it because I've got no credibility. I've never managed. I was a junior consultant. I'd managed probably one or two people at that point. B, I didn't really understand the internet particularly well.

18:34And so what I did then was I left that company shortly afterwards to get more experience in the internet. So I worked for a little startup, online auction startup, and then I worked in an internet service provider. Both were smart in that they gave me massive opportunities. So like I worked, the internet service was owned by BT and News Corp. So when you were very young, what better way to do biz dev? I could call up anyone in the world because you say, I'm working for BT and News Corp. And everyone's like, yeah, of course, I'll take your call. Because I think a lot of young entrepreneurs think if they're not being entrepreneurial, then they're not on the right path.

19:10Whereas what you're saying is don't do that all the time. Go and be employed. Yeah, build credibility. I always say what entrepreneurs need to do is build credibility. There's a myriad of ways you can do it. First is your own experience. Then it's getting other people around you who add credibility to your story. Whether it's advisory board or smart investors or first hires. What I'm really intrigued about is this idea that you've had. because when you tell me that, I can imagine that it looks so blindingly obvious to you. Maybe the timing isn't right. But I can almost imagine if I was in that situation, I'd be like, somebody else must have had this idea.

19:49And therefore, if it's so obvious, somebody else will do it before me. So how did you overcome that? Yeah, with fear. You're absolutely right. And it was, Last Minute Comm is such an obvious idea, right? When you describe it, it's like... The best always are. Yeah. And the best... How do I not think of Airbnb?

20:11Deliveroo, it's all there. It was all there for us. Exactly. Well, Deliveroo, that one's a tough one for me because actually we did restaurant food delivery before any of those at last minute.com in about 2002. Ouch. But I wanted to do it more, but my chairman said, no way, you're already doing too many things. In fact, with hindsight, I should have just stopped everything else and just done that. So the timing, the delay, in reality, hard enough to know I didn't actually have an alternative. Right. Right. Because it just would have been a bad plan at that point. We might have been able to raise a tiny amount of money, but we wouldn't have made it.

20:41But then you're right. I would open the papers all the time and read the news and fearful that somebody was doing it. And actually, as we launched, we're close to launching, we're just doing our fundraise. Somebody heard about us, our plan, and then approached me and said, oh, I'm really advanced. I've raised 20 million to do last minute something. Do you want to merge in with me? and we called his bluff called him that was rubbish and it was rubbish but it was interesting how you get those sort of moments those seminal moments where you do get so i want to believe like some people sort of say you have to be so secretive and whatever i've always wanted to believe that it's not the idea you can tell everyone you can trust people mostly sometimes there are bad actors but you can still beat them with in this case actually momentum so the other point is such an obvious idea but by the time when we did get to launching two years later and I persuaded Martha Lane Fox to join me and all that, we were very much of the opinion that the way we were going to put everyone else off was make ourselves out with a little bit of bluff to be much bigger and more successful than we were already.

21:40So we would say that we're not just going to say to people, here's a good idea. We're going to put our flag in the ground and say, here's a good idea and do not try and stop us because we're going to conquer it. We've got everything going for us. You know, we've got a steamroller of money and people and talent and everything. Years before we did. Did you do that publicly or was that? Yeah, we were very public. I mean, we were very. I mean, I know you courted PR, right? Yeah. The two of you. But the two of you became synonymous as youngbritish.com entrepreneurs, right? But those messages were also within the industry as well.

22:11You were. Yeah, we would. I mean, we did things like, I think one of our smart moves was when we were 10 people in a fifth floor walk up with very little money, we hired as our chairman, a wonderful man called Peter Bough, who was from KLM, who's the chairman of KLM, which at the time was a huge airline. And it was like, how on earth? It's those moments where people, how on earth did you get this guy? And the lesson for people listening is you've got to aim really high in terms of talent as well, but how did we get him? You've got to have something to give. And for him, what we had to give was, here's a story he can tell his grandchildren about.

22:43He understands this internet thing, but also more importantly, he can learn about the new, new thing. Because he was smart enough to know this internet thing, it just might be mega. And if I understand it better than all my peers, that's a good thing and maybe these young clueless people will figure it out so you get going you get a great chairman and things start to motor do you remember the moment where you went from being a entrepreneur and wanting that success to actually thinking hold on a minute we're actually making waves here something's happening yeah i think one of the early moments of i mean there were a couple of early moments where i thought god this is actually going to happen one weirdly was actually buying the domain name for£16 ,000, two installments of£8 ,000, I managed to buy lastminute.com domain name from a German.

23:29So that was a big sort of seminal moment. But more importantly was the customers. When you feel you've got customers coming online, buying, loving it. And we were going viral before viral was a thing. This was sort of in 98. What happened is Martha and I sent an email, and in 98, hardly anyone had email, right? But we sent an email to all the people we knew, it wasn't many, the email about the company, the launch of the company. And those emails were going round other people's offices. They were all sending it because everyone's like, yeah, who doesn't want these amazing deals at crazy good prices?

23:59So we learned that we were going viral. And then we just saw this customer demand pickup. So that's when we thought, actually, we might have something. And I think the other seminal moment was getting some of the key suppliers on board, things like getting BA on board. At the time, BA's market share was huge. I think it was like 60 or 70 % domestic or something. So if they'd said no to us, Although we weren't just airlines, we were lots more, but still that was the core, that was the start of the journey. If they said no, we probably would have failed. We were like, look, we'll do all the work.

24:31Don't change your process. You know, the media pilloried us for saying, oh, you're not that integrated, you're not that tech because you're manually entering the fares. So they come around to our office and see people manually keying the fares. But we're like, we're going to do that because that's the way they work with existing travel agents. And we're not big enough to change the way they work yet. But once we do get big enough, they will. And then it meant for BA, similar to the Peter Bauer conversation, this was like, this is free R &D. We're going to learn about this, and it's not going to cost us a thing.

25:00So, again, I'm really intrigued when you go into that meeting with BA, for example. How do you know what to offer without giving away too much at that stage? Because in business, you can smell desperation with somebody, and if they're looking at it, they know that you're desperate. but you need this deal here as one of the pillars of it. I think partly in this case, it was getting multiple suppliers, airlines on board at the same time. None of them would go on their own. But once we managed to get the core of the top four, and that was where there's a bit of entrepreneurial bluff. It's sort of like, Alitalia, well, of course BA's on, of course Deutsche, of course Lufthansa's on.

25:40You don't as an entrepreneur ever want to lie, genuinely, but you do want to keep like, so you want to keep the conversation open with, say, Lufthansa. so it's still possible. So you're not lying and saying, Lufthansa is about to sign. Well, they may or may not be, but at least they haven't said no. So you don't want to know, because if you're lying, the world is small. A, it's just an integrity, but you do have to bluff a bit as an entrepreneur. So that's one way not to be desperate. But I think it was this point that BA could see us as R &D, you know. And what was the thrill for you at this point?

26:12What was driving you at this point? one i had this toolkit of the technology so that was fun is that you have eventually we had this very large budget to eventually to build something really great and innovative on the technology so i always loved being innovative when you're really innovative and breaking new ground you're able to track the world-class talent so probably one of the things that's most exciting is not unlike in the sports world surrounding yourself with with a plus people so if you're doing groundbreaking things and known, we were, I think, known to be one of the more groundbreaking companies based in London.

26:49So we became a talent magnet. So what's really exciting is being a talent magnet. And so all the other things, I think, the customer growth, the innovation, etc., the funding, fundraisers, the supplier deals, they all helped us get more talent. And there's nothing more energizing than going to work every day with brilliant people. Yeah, of course. Let's talk then about the groundbreaking things what is the the moment that you were most proud of when it came to rewriting the rules of business and tech and entrepreneurship at this point what do you think about when i say that i mean i think partly it was just that it was the fact it was so unusual then i think if we're going back then it was to things like our martha and i both got on very well with our old boss at spectrum strategy consultants and when we told him we were going to try and build this business he said well look there's always a job for you talking about the worst case he said come give yourself six months because no one ever who's who do you know who's raised with a 30 page business plan with no real experience um a million dollars which is what it was at the time and we're like oh god no one you know we don't know anyone's done it um so i think it's got as part of it's got to be that breaking ground at the beginning but i think the other thing i was most proud of looking back is just that we kept innovating maybe too much actually but hell why not you know why would it be too much lack of focus right give us an example yeah um voice recognition it's top popular today yeah i think we built the first ever very early early 2000s first ever database you could talk to to book hotels with your voice um so my critics would argue it was probably a bit gimmicky i would argue it's building the future before everyone else sees it but to what benefit there are other bits of innovation i could say which were core and strategic and where we did very well but i think there are some times where i could probably be accused of falling in love with innovation for innovation's sake that said i think that's quite attractive to the right type of talent who want to go to that sort of company but to me there's a dichotomy here in what you're describing because there's that need to be innovative and be out there and demonstrating all the traits of an entrepreneur.

29:00And yet you've also described that you've become this talent magnet for really great people to come and work for you and created a culture where those people can thrive, but while they do it in a focused, disciplined way, is a different skill set as well. Would you describe how you manage that dichotomy of those two roles? Yeah, look, I don't think, I think we were very young, so I'm not sure we did everything perfectly, But I think it's true that when you walked in, and that was something I was proud of, if you walked into the last minute of office in the heyday, there was this incredible, young, buzzy energy and dynamism.

29:36And partly that was because we were giving young people ridiculous responsibility. We were putting them under crazy pressure. So we had unrealistic, impatient deadlines, which motivated the best people and made the less good people, the average people, leave. and I think that's an important lesson I often talk about and don't always practice as much now as I would like to can you do that today I think you can I think it takes more courage and more strength of your conviction I think one needs to that's why I do speak now more about these examples of of Netflix is the most obvious one where there's that sort of culture of radical trust but when when you're not good enough then you go and urge paying people to leave do you Remember that from the Netflix story.

30:22They would pay. And I've spoken at my companies, my head of HR hates it. I'm like, guys, if you're not loving your everyday job, please can we pay you to go? Because if you're not loving it, you shouldn't be here. We are doing such fun. We're so lucky in my world to be working with technology in, as you say, one of the most exciting times to be in technology, that if you don't love it every day, then go. You're average. I don't want you working for me. Have we not reached a point, though, where there's a bit too much entitlement, where people think they deserve to have a job and you can't possibly get rid of me unless you go through all of the proper hoops.

30:53And, you know, there is a risk. There are lots of podcasts or influencers or social media accounts that will tell everyone that they can do everything and they shouldn't ever take no for an answer. There's some dangerous messaging, I think, out there, isn't there these days? Yeah, and part of the messaging, I think, is to be blunt, and this is why I'm very unfashionable, I'm going to say, is about work-life balance. To me, high performance, excellence, in your job or in working is when it doesn't feel like a job. So may we all be so lucky is the fair counterpoint. Try and find that job that you love every day because you'll be so much better at it.

31:30And so I think that's the challenge when we're talking about this work-life balance thing is if people hate their job, I get it. And it's a toil and a struggle. And then you only want to work nine to five. But when you're working in these tech businesses that are globally competitive, that should be able to attract the best of the best of the best. Why settle for people who want nine to five? But that's only, is that only because nine to five didn't work for you, right? You were able to do 24-7. Yeah, I was seven days a week. I mean, I have this bad example. I was crazy. But that's fine, right?

31:59But you know, like survivorship bias, it worked for me, it should work for everyone. I do believe that you can be exceptional and also be an exceptional father and an exceptional husband and exceptional son and friend. for me it slightly depends on where you are in your journey yeah now i i'm still ridiculously on email most of the time and yes my wife and family think uh you know dude would try and stop it a bit and sometimes my wife would go on holidays where there's no reception um but i i do still take my holidays now and all of that stuff and i do try on weekends and i'm i think i'm present for my kids So yes, you're right, but I'm no longer 27 years old and starting my first business.

32:41I just think to be able to do that and win and still have balance is super hard. I was just talking this morning about a friend of mine who says, who's founded$4 billion companies. And he says, if he's listening, he says he only works in the mornings. He's only ever worked in the mornings. And the afternoons he chills. It's not like one of these books where they go, do three minutes of deep work one day a week and you'll achieve everything. The problem is I think those things are playing into what some people will have come to this podcast for, right? They would have seen your name on the front of this podcast, you know, someone who has invested in and founded unicorn businesses and been one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs in the UK in the last 20 years.

33:20They will have come to this thinking, great, I'll find some shortcuts. I'll get some quick answers. Yeah, I think the only shortcut I could give them in a sense is this point of credibility. the more credible you are the more money you can raise the more great people you can have around you so that's the circle you can get there's a bit for me bent where this idea of finding a job that you love almost loads an awful lot of pressure on people there's that research around i think it's called a fit mindset where people think that unless i meet a partner for example and i immediately love them and i immediately connect them it can't work and the idea is that the longer lasting more durable relationships are often take time to percolate and to eventually grow so what i'm interested in is what are the kind of questions that you'd encourage people listening to this to ask themselves until they eventually do find something that they love because it might not be an immediate love at first sight partly i guess it's what i try and do when i think i'm interviewing okay is say what do you love doing every day so i'll ask people what do they love doing every day.

34:27And then I'll describe the job and we'll try and go through it and say, look, if this isn't what you're going to love, then it's not for you. We should get to that quickly. I think there's another thing I was thinking about coming into this, that there's something about status we need to try and get away from, status versus happiness. So I think that what I mean by that is I think some people will think of a job that they'd rather work in, say, forgive me, but say an investment bank and they hate finance or they hate numbers or whatever, but they'd rather do that so they can tell their friends they work in a high prestige job versus working in, I don't know, let me say, in a shoe shop selling shoes that they're brilliant at and they love it and they love people, they love engaging and they can be the best of the best and eventually they could run that shoe shop and set up a whole chain and, you know, so because they love it so much and they're so good at it.

35:15So it's that idea, I think, partly, I think the wrong thing is, so some of the mistakes we're making is that in society, people are being pushed to go to high-status jobs rather than jobs they're going to be brilliant at. So I think it's do the ones you're brilliant at, play this game. And in my little while I'll talk about how I read French and German literature so I could get into Oxford. I played the game because if I'd done maths and English, I wouldn't have gone in. You know, I just knew I'd be good enough to get in for that subject, but not for another subject.

35:46Let's talk about status. What did it due to your status when lastminute.com finally had that thing that everyone dreams of if they're an entrepreneur you floated you did an IPO and within a week the share price starts to drop and suddenly you know what was wonderful doesn't seem so wonderful anymore how I'm interested in how you dealt with that personally because we can't talk about entrepreneurship with not talking about the ability to deal with failure and struggle yeah struggle okay I wouldn't call it failure yeah But struggle, yes. So I think it is a sort of very strange time. So we're sort of February, March 2000, the dot-com bubble's in full flow.

36:24You know, Martha and I would walk into a party of very important people and people would be looking around saying, oh, they're here, you know, and we were very young. Less good than you think. Honestly, I sort of worked out, I did psychoanalyze myself after and say, actually, I don't care about that. What I cared about then, to your point, is I was so obsessed by the business that I cared about how we were doing. I looked at the numbers every 15 minutes via SMS at the time on my mobile phone, conversion rates by sector, by category. So all the time, so this absolute obsessiveness. So unhealthy, isn't it?

36:56So unhealthy. But what I love, but the obsessiveness meant the whole team was so obsessed. So they were all on the top of their game trying to work out how we could keep the customers happy. so what we did is when the share price tanked by 1.95 percent down it was focusing on the numbers and the customers and how we would prove the cynics wrong was another motivating force it's like there were so many of people so cynical about what we were doing that there is some motivation about how to prove them wrong what i then engineered eventually yesterday when i sold last minute i then thought well what do i care about what was it that was good about running this public company and what was bad.

37:36And I decided the bit I'd miss most, strangely, was relevance. I said, when I saw Last Man, I said, what I wanted to do was say, good morning and good night to my kids, to your earlier point. And then what I wanted to do was the love of a deal, doing deals. I still want to have a job where I could do deals because I love that. But then it was also what I thought I'd miss from Last Man to Come was the relevance. And by that, I think I really mean is that I was able to meet interesting people all the time. that's when I started doing all these other things in my life so I thought okay this is going to keep me being able to pick up the phone to some of the most interesting people in the world because that's something that I think will keep me energized and and young for a longer time can we just talk then I just want to get into this IPO moment yeah it's still seen as the holy grail of entrepreneurship right what's it actually like when suddenly this exciting dynamic quick to react business is then involving bankers and banks' decisions and, you know, people putting pressure on you who weren't there before to make sure that you're driving things in a direction that perhaps wasn't the reason why you started in the first place?

38:42Quickly going back to our IPO. So what happened? We time it perfectly to some extent in that it's March 2000. NASDAQ is at the all-time high. That's the date we price our IPO. We price it after a shortened roadshow by an increase during that 10-day period, more than anyone in Europe has ever increased the price. We go public 18 months from launch, faster than I think still anyone has ever gone public. We are 43 times oversubscribed. And then on the day, you watch the stock. It goes up, I can't remember, a bit, but not enough. We know that night, we're not celebrating, Marta and I. I'm like, oh my God, we've been priced for perfection.

39:21This is really scary. And then we see it keeps going down. The stock just keeps going down. But that said, we knew we'd raised 100 million pounds plus so we had firepower and armory and the ability to sort of pull through with persistence but your point about the ipo yes i think there are lots of things that are troubling for an ipo for a company so young and i think we could talk about made.com which did an ipo so made.com for those that i co-founded a company called made.com that was spun out of one called my deco that didn't do brilliantly because we got the dna of the founding team a bit wrong.

39:54So I thought, okay, let's spin out this other one, made.com, which the one clever business model point was direct from factory furniture to consumer, cutting out the middlemen, no wastage, 50 % cheaper, and sounds like a beautiful thing. So get made goes 10 years plus in, 400 million pounds of sales. Then they will decide, the investors, that they want to take the thing public. I then say, actually, I've been through the trauma. I've got the scars of taking a company public. It's your lives. I'm a small shareholder by now. I'm like, if you guys want to do it, I'm not going to stop you. But by the way, I'm leaving the board.

40:29I'm not going to go through the pain of what could happen because I think the problem with the furniture business is you're only as good as your sales last week. And of course, things can turn. Now, as history says that I was quite lucky not to be on the board because the company raised 100 million again and went bankrupt within 18 months of going public because they changed the business model and they bought a lot of stock from a model that was almost no stock buying. They spent the 100 million mostly on buying stock, which they couldn't sell when COVID lifted. It's not that these people were stupid running the company.

41:01I don't say that at all. I think they were partly pushed into a false view of what the company could be worth. So they went public and thought, okay, you know, the last private round was like, I don't know, four or 500 million. So if we're going to go public, we need to get it to 2 billion. How do we do that? Well, we pump this thing for growth and we put all our chips on red and we go and then when that bet doesn't come in they don't go they go bust partly some of that is to do with the nature of public markets and venture capitalists at that time in the cycle late late stage venture capital saying you've got to bet it all on this and similarly for last but to come ipo i do remember you have to put these when you go public you have to put these really punchy forecasts in and so one year our forecasts were to grow a hundred percent we grew that year at only 80 percent to which point my chairman is paying for blood the market's paying for blood our share is our share price is tanking even more and my chairman basically is like oh brent you said it was going to be this it wasn't um you should go wow um so it can be tough wow almost like predicting your growth is an exact science and that 80 isn't brilliant anyway Yeah, yeah.

42:13You made a comment about the DNA of your founding team where you said you didn't quite get it right. Tell us about the DNA that you've learned of a team and what works well. So I think what works best, and again, forgive me again for those people who are over 30 listening. I'm ageist about this still. The reason why there was some magic at Last Matter Come in the early days is we hired smart, hungry, young people who this was career defining. So when we hired experienced people from the travel industry, for example, almost inevitably ended in failure. Not every time. There were lots of them that were just hired from these big companies like Thomas Cook and Tui and whatever, who were sort of 40 plus.

42:58They were careerists in the travel industry. They couldn't adapt with us. They didn't have the energy. They didn't have the work ethic. And we had to fire them. So I think, but it was the young, brilliant, hungry people who had minimal experience, but maximum adaptability that helped us build the culture. And you knew that those people would also hire brilliant people. They weren't going to suffer fools like, they only wanted to work with amazing people. So what's the killer question you ask when you meet someone and they want to be part of a team that you're running and you want to find out the truth about them?

43:33I think it's how obsessive they are. And I remember one venture capitalist in a slightly different context, but saying to me that when he's trying to invest in someone, which is similar, an entrepreneur, he'll talk to the entrepreneur a little bit about the company, right? And then he'll try and say to the entrepreneur, oh, so tell me about your family. Oh, so tell me about your hobbies. And the best entrepreneurs, he said, would get him off that subject and back to the business. They don't want to talk about anything else. There's a bit of that in those interviews where you're trying to see how much they want it.

44:03the other bit is the obvious one how prepped are they have they really done their homework I'd love to talk about your the letter to your younger self that you wrote because you know we've just spoken about a period in your career where it was right at the beginning you were young risk taking loving the journey and I think sometimes to stop reflect look at how you first started is really valuable for people listening to this so would you mind if we took you through each of the points from your letter to your younger self. So we've kind of touched on this one, but gaining credibility early on. Your key point for people who would love to do something incredible.

44:42What's the number one rule, do you think, for the number one tip for gaining that credibility quickly? I think one way is just to be excellent at something. So it could be something really quite niche and trivial in the scheme of things, but actually if you can just take a side and say, look, I did this thing and I'm like world-class at it, then I think that that makes a big difference. So, and that's partly shows how they can think out of the beaten track. It partly shows their level of obsessiveness, dedication, but also to your point about how you give that quid pro quo back, right? Because then there's always something they've got to educate somebody else about.

45:17Are you too humble to tell us what you're world-class at? Oh God, I don't know what I am world-class at. I think now I've gotten better at, I guess inspiring people hopefully and having a vision and getting people excited and being a little bit maverick about it so the fact I'll say things that are not forgive me but sort of politically correct you know I'll say things like I really believe them but I think actually sorry when I go back to what somebody wrote in a magazine called CIO magazine my former CTO wrote the thing about Brent is he cares so much so this was a CTO last minute writing that look you could see if something was going wrong i was almost going to cry you know um so i think he said he said that that passion and and how much i cared shone through to the team and that imparted a sense of caring to other people um of giving a damn about what we're doing and what we're trying to build so that idea of being on a mission together to build something great very good which in turn leads to your second point which is about creating an exceptional culture which focus to lots of business leaders and sports coaches that talk about culture as a competitive advantage if you get it right what are your lessons on that i think you know i was somebody was as we dug up this letter somebody said to me look brent how many of these are we living by now because it's one thing to say them it's another thing to live them even when you've written them and say you've lived some of your core principles by them and i think the one way to your point on culture where I think our teams make mistakes, and I'll say this maybe partly because I'm chairman of a lot of stuff, not CEO, so it's a bit harder, is being too impatient when you hire.

47:05So what that means is you fill a job with someone who isn't quite the right cultural fit because you want to fill it. Or you do the mistake of hiring experience over talent. It's this line that I love repeating is that you should rent experience and hire talent. And I think there are times when we haven't done that and we should have. And it's this impatient thing that's so hard when you are running a business and trying to move fast and you're like, okay, you'll miss next quarter's numbers if you don't fill this job. But long-term, the culture is a long-term thing, right? You build that early DNA and it's very hard to break.

47:44So don't break it early on. If you break it by compromising, it's almost impossible to get it back to that dynamic culture you want but it might short term you might be playing the calculation which is well my numbers will be better next quarter but it doesn't work um long term because you've got a really interesting position then haven't you that having like now being chair of different businesses and you've had that chairman shouted at you for only 80 growth what lessons would you give to your ceos and leaders about how to communicate up to you then where they might have to come and say listen we're not going to hit the growth targets that we're projecting but if we wait a while we've got to get the right cultural fit in that'll mean yeah well i had this conversation this morning and it was very open conversation on my cos and it's absolutely that it's about a it's the open dialogue frequent dialogue they always say good news travels fast i think bad news should travel faster if you're going to build trust so so that's important and then i think it is being on the same page on the long-term versus short-term conversation.

48:46And to the point again about the public markets, the other thing we didn't highlight, the worst thing about public markets is they're so short-term. But the joy of being a building a private company is so long as you've got cash, then you can think long-term. Controversy can be good. Yes. Why? Yeah, so that I did write down because I think when you're in the heart of controversy, you think it's a problem. So this was partly I'm referring to the debate, which became a sort of pub question. Are those Muppets running lastminute.com? Are they absolute idiots? Or are they doing something clever? And it was, with hindsight, when we were living that, we should have just said, how amazing people are debating this.

49:24You know, the fact that there are some cynics about us only means we're more talked about, which actually means more customers will find us and buy our products. So that's a good thing. So courting controversy is something I've tried to do more and more when building consumer brands um i think how do you do that you go to the edge you don't quite step over it but i used to say to my marketing directors if you're arrested i'll get you out it'll be fine um if you just go really far to the line i don't know if you just cross it just a little bit then then that's okay and we did cross the line a bit i'll give you one one small example of is um we screen scraped which means we pulled in flights and seats from easyjet and ryanair by pulling the data from their websites, which technically is the breach of the Computer Misuse of Information Act, which is a criminal penalty, I think.

50:13But we did it anyway, so we could put them into our dynamic packaging engine and bundle them with hotels. Expedia couldn't do that, our competitor at the time, because they were blue chip American, you know, whatever. Whereas we were just like, to hell with it. We'll try it. What's the worst possible thing that can happen? And are we doing something amazing for customers that we could happily stand up and say, Yeah, this is okay. And then one of the other anecdotes on that was just after we sold the company. I remember Michael O 'Leary of Ryanair sent in his team to our team. And they said, what are you doing?

50:44How are you doing this and whatever? And they went in and they saw what our team was doing. And they said, oh, this is fine. No problem. And then they took out full page national ads saying lastminute.com thieves marking up our flights. So the next one then is about, we've touched on it briefly, Brennan, but get the right DNA for your team. would you break down the dna for us really it's about people who want to set the culture you want so it's some of these cultural values of obviously integrity is a key one um i actually put charm somewhere but the other one is just simply it's it's it's let's not say raw intelligence because maybe that sounds a bit too limiting but let's say being really savvy if you are learning and curious actually sorry that's something we haven't talked about today is curiosity so that's the other thing actually i should have said when screening for talent culture dna all these things we're talking about we with sin of omission from all of us curiosity is what we should be talking about too and then you want workaholics and you want tenacious people this is their career defining moment they're in this now because they can see this as their pivotal step that maybe they'll only be with you for a couple of years and they'll launch something else and that's fine too If they give you an incredible few years and they hire in their stead other great people, they've still helped you perpetuate that positive DNA and culture.

52:05And I'm a little bit worried what I'm about to say next will sound twee, but where's kindness and decency and humanity and all that? I think integrity and charm, right? I mean, I think integrity and charm, I think, cover that. I'm not sure about kindness, actually. Kindness is the school motto of my kids' school. And I think it's important there. But I sort of actually think, you know, politically incorrectly now, that actually being tough at work, and it's the thing I say I took away from the Steve Jobs bio, reading that, is that when he was the toughest, and, you know, being pretty obnoxious with people, I'm not advocating doing it to that extent.

52:48but you can take away from that that him being tough with unrealistic demands on people being sort of super demanding having crazy deadlines not being so american and saying to everyone oh well done guys that's all every every week let's say aren't you all heroic it's like no you once this month you did something amazing and he says it to you and he means it you know and then then the a players again say great this is my place because there's no bullshit around it there's know like everyone's amazing it's like no when he says you're amazing you know it's true and i think that's how you create that culture of people who who win that said i do believe that you know one of the other things that last minute i always say when i thought it was going to work was when i would see people outside on a friday night in a pub together that may not have been because they were the kindness to each other but what it did mean is they were friends i think kindness is a debate for work actually.

53:42Yeah, I don't offer it as an answer. I'm interested in... But look, I'm not, but I agree with you in sort of arrogance, no, obnoxious, no, no jerks, you know, all of those things. So I think there's a limit to how far you can go to some of these sort of pushy characteristics, right? Yeah, because you mentioned the Steve Jobs one and having read that biography, I think at times he comes across like a bit of a dick. And I think there's a lot of people that don't get a voice that would have been burnt out or badly damaged by being spoken to in in that way and i i'll sometimes worry about we sort of lionize characters like that these strident belligerent leaders i know and then but i i then thought you know i used to hold myself back at last morning from being more strident and obnoxious you know but then i sort of read that book and sort of thought well maybe i should have gone a bit harder sure maybe it would have been okay because when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

54:39Yeah. You know, so maybe there is a bit of that. And we can't argue with his success, right? No, no, exactly. But I agree with you. There are some people who get burnt out along the way, but those are the people who, to be honest, in your culture, talking about the culture point, they probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. It's brutal. What about the people, though, that are incredibly talented, can do amazing things for your business, can offer that cognitive diversity that every great business needs, but they actually can't, they don't have much personal resilience, they can't deal with the aggressive nature that some businesses adopt, I would worry in my business, I would lose a great person, you know?

55:19I think it's, I guess it's the point is, if you do have a culture, which despite all this demandliness, there is culture of respect, of excellence. Of course, there are always ways to structure this, But I guess if I'm seeming overzealous in this, it's slightly reacting to what you alluded to earlier, which is I do sometimes see pockets of entitlement and people who, as you say, think the world owes them a chill, relaxed job and they can coast. And what I think I'm trying to say is that companies that win can't have many coasters. And I think we are all aligned on that. Nothing comes for free.

55:56You know, you can't have this. Like, you can't see Steve Jobs. You can't see Brent Hoberman. And you can't have what they have. Like, this shit wasn't free. This kind of plays into your next point, really, which is it's okay to be unreasonable within reason. And this reminds me of a conversation. Have you heard of Adam Grant? Yes. He's an author, lecturer, thinker from America. He joined us on the podcast. And he spoke about disagreeable givers. So you can disagree with people in the workplace, but in a positive way. And he also gave us a great bit of advice that, you know, when you want more from someone, you don't just demand more.

56:31You say, I think so much of you and I think you're so talented and you can do so much that I'm telling you that's not good enough because of you. It's the great way, I think. And it plays really nice into what we're talking about, that maybe this is the best way to look at dealing with people in 2023. Because with the best will in the world, it's different to 2003. Yeah, I think telling people to strive for excellence and that they shouldn't be satisfied with average is a great way to put it. But equally, having that culture where everybody is urging each other to be excellent is important. And this is what I'm trying to refer to as I think, if you let that break, I don't know how to fix it.

57:11So taking people on the journey with you is your next point. Yeah, I guess this is the vision point, right? Building towards something that is so exciting. And nowadays, more than back then, it's vision and purpose, right? I think what is wonderful about, and now I am going to sound a bit more modern, is working for purpose is great. Helping to make the world a better place in business is a great synergy. And I think the best businesses in the world now are doing that. And they're doing that partly because it's a good thing to do, but partly because if they want to be talent magnets, they know it's the only way to do it to get the best people in the world have choices.

57:46and they want to work for companies with amazing visions where they can be proud of where they work because they're going to fix some of these big problems we have in the world. So let me take you back to 1996 then because when you were describing where you could see the internet going, I was reminded of that famous Schopenhauer quote that talent hits a target nobody else can do, genius hits a target nobody else can see. So when you talk about visions of being able to almost look and go, I can see that this is going to be huge in this particular industry, how do you go about putting yourself in a position to spot these trends to be able to recognize opportunities it's it's surrounding yourself i mean i like this saying that you're the you're you are the function of the five people you spend the most time with um so i think that's something so you want other people you can spar with yeah i think it's also understanding you know which are the trends now that are hype and which are reality so i i i would say an example in today is generative AI, which I think most people now know about ChatGPT and all these things, you know, I think that's real.

58:49And I think so trying to spend time understanding what opportunities that's going to create makes sense to see the future. And then I also think it's a combination of technologies, trying to think, look in a simple, well, look at all the changes in healthcare and health and health technology with big data and AI. Say, okay, this is going to create opportunities or augmented reality plus training? What's that going to do? So I think the future is pretty obvious in that sense. And I think it's also, it's that expression that it's already here, but it's unevenly distributed. So then I think travel's a great, somebody very smart who worked with me is going to travel the world now, go to Japan and whatever.

59:25I'm sure she will come back with saying, I've seen this amazing thing somewhere over there in the world, and we should bring it back. so sometimes i think it is a point of just stepping back taking time off for a few months if you really want to think of your next big idea it is that shower time right but extend it by by a thousand times what i love about this conversation is that when we talk about your past and your experiences you're fascinating when we talk about the future like your eyes light up you start your animate like you are as curious now about the world and our future as you would have been as that sort of dynamic person in their mid-20s, right?

1:00:03Yeah, absolutely. Look, I had one of the most exciting, I was half an hour late, only half an hour, my wife's listening, for dinner on Friday night, because I was having a conversation with the founder of Stability AI, which is one of these big, large language model companies, which is generative AI. And I couldn't stop, you know, it was just so exciting and fascinating. This is someone who I think is going to change the world. And thinking about how and the permutations and how you go about doing that, that's energizing and quite honestly a privilege to be able to spend time thinking about it.

1:00:30How do we keep feeding our curiosity? How do you do it? I'm lucky, I guess, in that I can meet people. So it's this point. That's where events are important. So part of my life is this founders forum, this series of events. And what we can do there is I can just read about, I read a lot about stuff. I spend time investing in things like LinkedIn and Twitter and stuff where they're learning about what I'm interested in and Google News and all these things. So they're actually really pretty good for me, but I think it's because I've invested time in them again. So they're popping up with new things and new businesses and new ideas that are relevant to me.

1:01:07Then I'm lucky I can read about them. I can reach out to the founder on LinkedIn and then get engaged. I would go to interesting people on Twitter or LinkedIn and find out who they're connected to and just follow them. You know, because I'm like, okay, if this brilliant person is following all these people, go do it. Final one, people who doubt you can't see the future that you can. The first response to that I wrote was, how do you convince them? And the second response I wrote was, well, should you bother convincing them? Where do you sit on that? No, I think you shouldn't convince, try and convince some of your doubters immediately, because often that can be toxic energy, as you've sort of alluded to in our Twitter point.

1:01:42It's sort of like having, if you're a Brexit or Remain, having the debate with someone. It's just like, you're going to use up so much energy. If I try and persuade Jacob Rees-Mogg to vote Remain, you know, that's probably not a great use of my time. However, if I can prove it, I think that's the point, is you just focus on this point I alluded to, is like proving the cynics wrong. Just go and do it. Fantastic. Man, I've loved this conversation. We've now reached the point where we just do some quickfire questions that we do with all our guests. What are the three non-negotiables, Brent, that you and the people around you would ideally buy into?

1:02:19Integrity, charm, and grit. Nice. What's your greatest strength and your biggest weakness? My greatest strength probably is this blind optimism that I like just peering into the future and just jumping over cliffs and trying to build a parachute on the way down. Greatest weakness probably is I can be overly obsessive sometimes. What's the thing people get wrong or misunderstand most about you that frustrates you a bit? I think for me probably it would be this point of if somebody calls me a networker I sort of find that slightly belittling to be honest so I think because I do have a broad network and I think investing in people is important but I don't think it's what defines me I think what defines me is an approach to business and using my brain to do that not who I happen to know what advice would you give to a teenage brand just starting out I think I'd give a teenager the advice about confidence.

1:03:20I just say, however you can build that confidence, whatever it takes to find it, because that will help you do so much in life. I was, as I said, a very shy teenager. I was lucky. That sort of got fixed. And people get very surprised now when I say, you know, I was 16. I was super shy. They're like, what? You? Really? So I think there is that introvert, extrovert in all of us. And I think I was probably an introvert and now i've probably trained myself not to be and your final message really um to our high performance listeners what's the one thing you'd like to leave ringing in their ears after this fascinating conversation which we're very grateful for i think i don't want people to be put off by the idea of entrepreneurship i don't want to the fact that we've said it's hard doesn't mean that it's not going to be right for a lot of the listeners here and i don't think i've highlighted enough how rewarding and exhilarating entrepreneurship is when it goes right.

1:04:16And the joy of building something from nothing is incredibly satisfying. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you guys. Thank you.

1:04:29Damien. Jake. You know, I think it's easy for people to just go, oh, some of the stuff that Brent said was outdated, you know, like 24-7 being addicted to business, right? But there is actually a truth that needs to be spoken about working for yourself, about being an entrepreneur, about setting up a business. And I think that too many channels and podcasters and influencers see a value in telling you that anyone and everyone can do it, because the fact they believe anyone, everyone can do it, gets them follows, gets them likes, gets them shares, gets them retweets but it's not the truth yeah and i think actually what we've just heard from brent is the unfiltered truth about entrepreneurship that might not apply to everyone but that everyone has to hear could you resonate with a lot of it in terms of you know when you think about the origins of whisper that you and sonil set up yeah i mean it was interesting you know because you look at something like what i've tried to do with high performance i'm doing it much later than he says most entrepreneurs should do it before you've got a mortgage do it before you've got kids do it before you've got married i've done all of my stuff at a weird time so we set whisper up and three years later just as it was starting to explode and get big we had our first kid we then have high performance and you know i've there's you know huge ambitions for high performance being a global brand and not just a podcast yet i'm doing it at a time where i have got two kids and a wife and a tv presenting job and a production company and i'm the chairman of charity and the vice president of another charity and two dogs oh yeah the dogs so there is an argument that you can't do everything but then i think we have to be a bit more nuanced about what this is right so with something like whisper i'm a founder i'm not the ceo with something like high performance i'm probably closer to being a ceo and to making decisions every day but with an amazing team um where there is also an actual ceo who takes on a huge load yeah and i think that that for me is what's really important and I think we have to understand that you can do amazing things but it's a team sport having people around you is the single most important thing yeah I liked it and I liked it because not all of it is comfortable to hear yeah you know like the like the example they exchanged the lauding of Steve Jobs and you go yeah incredible but there's also a cost of to a lot of people that we often don't talk about people that were burnt out or chewed out or just dismissed by somebody like that but i think there's a real value in hearing somebody champion it and tell you why that kind of mindset is valuable because by the way i think you can have a really dynamic really exciting really hard driving really creative business and kindness can be high up the agenda i do believe that he doesn't and that's absolutely fine and like you know again it's a reminder because i'm sure some people will go oh you I didn't agree with what Brent said.

1:07:25Great. Let's have disagreeable givers. Let's have diversity of thought. Let's bring people into your world who don't think and act like you because I tell you right now, your social media channels have been handpicked by you. Therefore, you've only picked the ones that you like or agree with, right? So this stuff's good. People shouldn't be scared of confrontation or disagreement. People should embrace it. Yeah, because we challenged Brent there and it wasn't done in an antagonistic way. It was a tell me how I can understand your viewpoint and expand my own horizons. And I think that speaks to the very heart of what we're trying to do here on the podcast.

1:08:03We're not just offering up anodyne solutions and telling you there's a formula or an algorithm to high performance. It's the opposite. You have to find your own definition and your own pathway. And what Brent's offering us is just one path. and I'm absolutely standing alongside him and championing him when he says that it's not free you can want to be a successful entrepreneur but guess what you can't go from A to F you've got to go through B, C, D and E and you've got to fail and get knocked back and go a few times again there is no shortcut yeah but again I think there's something there that what you're describing was a really powerful point that Brent spoke about which is patience that's an important lesson for all of us that it takes time high performance isn't an overnight success I love that conversation it was brilliant, thanks mate Well look, huge thanks to you for listening to today's episode of the High Performance Podcast don't forget we're coming on tour, we're touring around the UK over the next few months it's not just a live podcast, it's a live theatre show it's going to be great fun we're no doubt coming somewhere near you so if you want to get involved just go to thehighperformancepodcast.com to get tickets.

1:09:18But please continue to spread the learnings you're taking from these conversations. Remember, there is no secret. It is all there for you. So chase those world-class basics. Don't get high on your own supply. Remain humble, curious, and empathetic, and spread the messages from this podcast. You spread it, we'll grow it, and between us, we can hear from the most incredible guests over the next few years. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

1:09:49Thank you.