E205 - Timo Armoo: How you can play the game by your own rules

0:00Hi there, you're listening to High Performance, the award winning podcast that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet. I'm Jay Comfrey, and alongside Professor Damien Hughes, we learn from the stories, successes and struggles of our guests, allowing us to explore, be challenged and to grow. Here's what's coming up today. A lot of successful people have a superiority complex. And I have that. And I also had that when I was young. I was like, I believe I am better than my surroundings. I believe I'm better than my environment. I can be bigger than where I am now. Any business is a vehicle to serve you, right?

0:45Not to serve other people. It's to serve you, to make you more happy, make you more, you know, like give you income to provide for your family. Like it's a vehicle for you. The moment that you move to becoming almost like a slave to your business because you're playing someone else's game on how much to fundraise, how big your team is, how big your office is, how many press articles you have, that's the time that you've actually just lost the game. Don't get involved in the status game. Because the moment that you get involved in the status game, every day of your life, you would be like, oh, well, they've got more than me, they've got more than me.

1:20And it's such a bullshit way to live your life. So today we welcome Timothy Armu to High Performance. This is part of our leadership series with PWC. and we talk often on this podcast about this sense of delaying our happiness of people waiting for a moment in their life where suddenly everything's great and they no longer have problems well you're about to hear a conversation with a young entrepreneur who sold his business for millions and as he will share with you it doesn't mean the game is over timo may well be on level two or level 25 of this game of life but the truth is there are infinite levels to this game and i think it's a really important conversation to have in a world where people are constantly chasing something.

2:02So let's get to it then. The latest episode from our leadership series in association with PwC. And the reason we wanted to work with PwC on these episodes is that they as a business align to our beliefs of building culture, of strong, sympathetic, empathetic leadership, and putting society at the heart of the world in which we live. So let's do it then. Entrepreneur, timo armu on high performance welcome to the show thanks for having me that's what everyone starts with thanks for having me no do it again welcome to the show let's roll there you go what is your definition of high performance i think it's two things i think is one holding yourself to a higher standard i think that is a very important thing and then also having a sense of um how good could you be like i've always said this if someone was to ask me to write a book and i'll write a book about my own life it would be just called how good could you be and i think high performance is like constantly asking yourself the question how good could you be how could you stretch yourself how could you push yourself so that'll probably be kind of my two-prong definition of high performance so who was asking you that question myself even when you were seven eight nine years old yeah i think um so i grew up in ghana like my first 10 years went gone and i think i had um what i'd call harsh love my grandma was uh very much kind of you can do this you can be the best and then it moved to my mom when i came to london she was very much like you are the best just like keep going keep doing whatever that you're doing and just like keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing.

3:54And so I think that I constantly had this sense of how good could you be? Could you be as good a marketer as you think you are? Could you be a good entrepreneur as you think you are? Could you be a good public speaker as you think you are? So just like constantly asking yourself that question, I think it started off externally and then it became almost like an internal dialogue, which worked, I guess. So that's an interesting observation that there are two questions that you can recognize were really effective. Yeah. They just worked. Why did they work? What did it do for you? They offered me a kind of steer towards whether I was getting to the end goal that I wanted to, Because I think for a lot of people, they kind of start off things and they're just stuck in this inertia where it's like, I'm just doing this thing to just do this thing.

4:47and I just keep going on at the tempo and the pace that I'm used to and constantly asking yourself this question of like how good could you be is quite a good way to almost be like well is this the best pace that I can go is this how fast I can learn this thing is this the skills that I should be getting at this point and so when I ask myself that question a lot I tend to question myself as to well am I really giving it everything or has because I've been doing this for the last I don't know two three months or two three years meant that I've just kind of got caught in this meh wave right just kind of yeah things are going fine things are going well so that's what it does to me to just almost jolt me every single time.

5:35So let's talk about specifics then because I think so many people now have fed this dream of entrepreneurship be your own boss follow your passion find your thing sell it for millions retire be happy everything's great so the first question is how did you know that what you were doing was the right thing one of the things that's interesting is like i didn't always want to become an entrepreneur i actually did a um ted talk about this and like at some point i wanted to be a magician and at some point i wanted to be a journalist and at some point i wanted to be like a behavioral economist like i had several different times that i wanted to do something different until when i was like younger around like 15 16 i was like oh my god like this is actually what i want to do with my life and that was because at 17 i had like built and sold a small business and i was like oh my god like this is like magic i kind of think about something i put it out into the world someone pays me for it what was that business so that company was called entrepreneur express and basically it was like an online business publication but it started off with me just like interviewing business people but was an online blog and the way i drove traffic through it was by creating really large um facebook pages you know about inspiration and motivation like tony robbins quotes gary v quotes and i take blogs and i take posts from my blog put in the facebook pages and that would drive a ton of traffic back to the site that got bought around after 11 months that got bought by this american company now known as horizon media so they're like quite a big um ad agency but they started off as being just like a media brand and the idea basically that i had like started off this idea i had started off and thought do you know what would be cool like to build a business media publication and then i had figured out how to get eyeballs to it how to monetize it and then 11 months afterwards like me a random kid in south london some dude who is in america had basically be like yo we'd like to pay you for this and the money at that point wasn't a lot it was like 110 grand but the idea that in 11 months i had thought about something and then i'd like magicked it and someone had basically said yo here's money for it i was like yeah man like this is my life you know i'm going to commit to this and like that was how the whole entrepreneurship thing like really came in not so much at six years old i decided this is what i'm going to do for the rest of my life but if we can go back just two steps before you set up this business at 16 because there's lots of kids that might be doing like business studies projects at school and things like that and it's local or they're selling to family and friends i'm interested in where you had the inspiration to take an idea and actually put it out into the real world and try to monetize it so entrepreneur express was my first like major success but was not my first company right so i started my first kind of money-making project at 14 which was a tutoring company and i was basically the middleman connecting tutors to students and i started of teaching people maths then i grew this network of people who basically could teach like chemistry biology physics blah blah because i was not the best person for that so the hack that i used was i'd go to my school and i just asked the teachers hey um in the last test that you did who got the best grades and then they'll just tell me then i'll just go to those students and i'll just say hey do you want to make some money and so the whole business model was like 15 pound an hour which was quite cheap for a tutor and um i would basically um connect them 15 pound an hour i'll take five pounds they'll keep 10 pounds now how does that actually lead on to the whole entrepreneur express story uh was that grew relatively quickly like we got it to 65 um tutors in six weeks and i was just the connector basically and then what happened as with any kind of uh tutor style business is when you connect the tutors to the students once they've made that connection you're not really needed that much right and so what happened was i noticed that my cart was just getting like smaller and smaller and smaller but what it taught me was like okay you need to own the infrastructure right so rather than just connecting the two how can you build something where you like own the payment own the distribution like own everything so people can't then go behind you and so I then was thinking oh well actually I should have a business where like I am the infrastructure so entrepreneur express was quite a good example of like I own the media I was the media brand and I'd seen you know by that time I think business insider was quite popular entrepreneur.com was quite popular so I was like well they're doing something and it's and it's working so i should just do this for this particular niche um and then from then it was just a bunch of like small um wins like how i got to interview richard branton i basically found my way behind the door um there was a guy who was hosting this big conference and branton alan sugar james khan were all speaking and so i basically was like well i need to figure out a way to get in there and i didn't have a press pass or anything like that so then i basically emailed him and i said hey if i come the day before and i just like lay out all the chairs for you would you give me a behind the scenes pass and he said yeah of course that was how i got to interview branson that story i put on the blog that drove a shit ton of traffic like you know i mean so i think so you asked about how did i know i think it was three things number one because the tuting company had ended in that way it kind of gave me the framework for the next thing number two i had seen companies like business insider entrepreneur.com ing.com i was like oh well they're doing it at scale surely that means there's an opportunity there um and then i think the third thing was i had a bunch of like small wins which indicated that i could be the sort of person who could do something bigger right those sort of frameworks and that sort of like past success dictates to some degree future results meant that it didn't feel unnatural to me i just like oh easy peasy well there's a really intriguing bit on this that that we've asked other guests that started businesses at a young age like yourself so when we spoke to ben francis with jim shark or ben towers who sell his own business at 12 what messages were you receiving from home So I had both an advantage and a disadvantage.

12:35The disadvantage was that my parents didn't understand what I was doing. And the advantage is that my parents didn't understand what I was doing. So the disadvantage, you know, which meant like they couldn't kind of give any advice or any kind of support. It was just like, okay, yeah, do your thing. and the advantage was the fact that because they didn't understand what i was doing it felt very much kind of like uh well you know as long as he's not going to jail you know when i sold entrepreneur express and like the first payment was 70 grand and then within 12 months the other 40 i remember the day that i had the 70 grand and i just like showed my dad i was like and he was just kind of like what you know like what like what are you doing right because like i grew up in like what people call the ends right so like oak and road during the time where there was all that beef going on between like oak and road peckham brixton to him he knew i was spending a lot of time online he just didn't understand like what i was doing he just knew it was stuff and at that time i had gone to uh sixth form i'd found my way into a boarding school so like to him i was doing stuff right and then one day i come back and i'm like ta-da money so i think for him he didn't quite understand but obviously you know once i told him that i wasn't like a pimp or anything like that he was like yeah okay cool and how's the boarding school thing unfolded because obviously most young kids like you from the ends don't end up going to a boarding school so i got a scholarship to the boarding school driven by you or your parents were pushing that or so um between year seven and year 11 i went to a secondary school like a state school right um called city of london like very basic school right um by the way that's like city of london academy not city of london boys city of london boys is an extremely good private school i did not have that luxury and then for sixth form i basically was like i'm smart and so therefore i should go to where the smart people hang out.

14:38And to me, it was like, well, private school, boarding school. So what I did was I applied for four private schools and one of them was Christ Hospital. That was a boarding school. The reason I chose that was because of two things. Number one, I wanted to get out of my environment. There's kind of this whole sense that like, and I find this when talking to so many of my friends, which is like a lot of successful people have a superiority complex they believe they are better than other people and i have that and i also had that when i was young i was like i believe i am better than my surroundings i believe i'm better than my environment and so therefore i must get out of this environment which shows that like i'm better so that was a big uh driving function to go to christ hospital was almost like well i can be bigger than where i am now for anyone who knows christ hospital it's it's uh you know kind of 16th century gowns like you march into lunch every single day um you know just harry potter basically it's like hoggled on earth um and i really any inferiority complex at that point having had a superiority complex when you found yourself there like yes and then that then turn into a superiority complex so oh explain that that sounds interesting i had an inferiority complex because the people at christ hospital a lot of them were like insanely clever doing like further maths a level at 15 you know like oxbridge ready at 14 i was just like all right you guys are playing a whole different game so i thought i'd come into this game being the smarty pants and i realized that you guys are the fucking smarty pants right and so that had me thinking and I said all right what game can I play and what game can I win that was when I then thought do you know what all of you guys have been kind of like coached to get into Oxbridge study the papers do all that stuff I'm going to play a different game and that game was a game of business you guys don't have that kind of like doggedness that kind of like figure it out ability and so there is no coincidence that Entrepreneur Express was like started when I was in sixth form because it was like, okay, look, I'm going to get the grades.

16:58I know I'll get the grades, but I also know that in these two years, I don't care about winning the game of like, who is the smartest person, but I do care about winning a different game, which is the game of business and the game of entrepreneurship. And so that was a key driving function between, uh, behind, uh, kind of really get into business then. I mean, even in Crafts Hospital, man, there was like so many things that i did which were just like entrepreneurial things so i launched something called ch speaks christ hospital speaks which is basically like a public speaking competition it was the first time that had ever been done i launched a new kind of form of a debate club there were so many things that i did which were just like i am entrepreneurial and you guys can't even think about it because all you guys want to do is like stay in your rooms and just like study that's what i mean by it started off as like an inferiority complex and then like went to a superiority complex where so okay i feel inferior in this game but i'm gonna absolutely dominate in this other game oh my what an interesting story hey it's it's incredible and the bit that really sort of jumps out for me is how important it was that from where you go into school and you've got this sense of superiority that you think i'm playing a bigger game than what anybody else around me is how did others react to that because our peer group our environment can often shape us for good and for bad reasons yeah and i'm interested in how others reacted and how you immunize yourself to go to christ college and then to yeah to go and develop from there it depends on the group of people so before i went to christ hospital people saw me as the smart one right but that also involves why what we call like the mandem right so the people like in the end also saw me as the smart one which basically meant there was this i was protected rather than them looking at me with say jealousy they were like he's gonna make it out you know most of the times that feeling is towards people who they think could be good footballers you know people who are good footballers in the ends are often protected because they're like well you're gonna make it out whilst we're gonna do our do our bullshit um so before christ hospital that was a general sense like i almost felt like the golden boy you know like no one could touch me no one could fight with me not because they were like scared of me it was more like oh well he's smart like he's gonna get out of the end so let's make sure that we give him everything we have exactly complex as well exactly um in christ hospital that's a great question in christ hospital i think in the first year i had a lot of quote-unquote enemies because i didn't fit into the thing and i would just do things and just go well why not do it this way right i also think when i sold entrepreneur express and i came back or even when i did the interview with branton and the word kind of went around i think people were like you know really did he and then they saw the picture and they're like oh well you know maybe he knew someone he knew it's like it's like trying to constantly find a reason to uh to like justify their insecurities those were the two main mindsets that i had one was very protected the other was kind of i'd say a bit of jealousy which by the end was just kind of like uh well he's just gonna do this thing so what did you do with that money from entrepreneur express i squandered a lot of it i squandered 40 grand on uh spread betting uh and it all came from a very very very that was me thinking you were clever i know me too um i squandered a lot of it because i thought wow this thing was so easy you know as i mentioned like from me having the idea to build in a distribution and then you know um selling it was like less than a year so i was like oh well you know i've got the midas touch i can just do whatever and then you know realize i didn't i gave some to my dad i gave some that supported on a whole range of things rent that was good but i think most of it was just like a education lesson on like how not to spend money because it did come from a position of me almost thinking like oh well i can just do this over and over again but when you look back on that now can you see the benefits from that yeah i mean the benefits are now that i just you know uh sold my company last year fanbite where it's like that times 10 uh you know like um multiple um millions i'm like well yeah don't do spread button uh so so so i do see the advantage and i do see the benefit of it but i also think i could have learned that by not spending the money you know people say stuff like this which is like um i had to fail so i could learn through my failures like yeah that's cool but i'd just much rather learn from my successes you know like i don't think you but can you though yeah i think failure teaches you different lessons to success yeah i mean i think failure teaches you what not to do but success teaches you what to do yeah so just do more of the things that you have to do you know i often you know find that quite an interesting thing which is like yes i failed a bunch of times and i've succeeded a bunch of times but i've learned a lot more from like succeeding than failing i had an interview with ed sheeran the other day where he was saying success teaches you nothing is what he said you know failure teaches you everything and i i disagree with that because i think that you learn from both i think that's the key though in life is to have both and what you're telling us here is you've got this great sort of story of businesses that started and didn't really go anywhere you've got business selling for a decent amount of money, but then you waste the money on, you know, spread betting and stuff.

22:55It's all about this kind of stretch and reward. You need to stretch, you need to fail, but you need the reward as well. And I think too much failure is actually just kills you in the end. Too much success probably also just kills you in the end. And you get too egotistical and you think you have the might as such. But yeah, I mean, look, like you are right that you need a healthy dose of failure i say this a lot if you look at my linkedin for example it's like oh started a company at 14 started a company at 17 sold it started a company at 21 sold it for tens of millions he must have had a great life and it's like yeah but what i didn't include in the linkedin was like the eight other businesses that i tried and they all flopped um so so you need like a healthy um dollop of that kind of thing what i find interesting about your story is you're not seeing things that are already there and just replicating what other people have done you're looking at the world in a very different way and i think that's where true entrepreneurship lies you know seeing the things that others aren't seeing so is there a secret to it has it just come easy have you learned lessons in how people listening to this podcast can discover what the world needs so i am ironically i have not had any original ideas ever like none of my ideas are original or unique in fact if you look at the idea for um for what fanbytes was which um for listeners was like you know we helped brands to run influencer campaigns right i started that in 2017 and at that time influencer marketing was like on the rise and so all i had basically done was i had seen this had been working in the us and i just said right i'm gonna do that but i'm gonna focus it on a gen z audience that was it right like i didn't come up with the idea of influencer marketing i didn't come up with that um with that and who else was doing that in the uk at that time with the gen z audience with the gen z audience there weren't many it tended to be the like holding companies they're like wpps of the world and any individuals that you knew of in the us a lot in the uk no no not any so one thing is seeing what other people do like some people don't even see it like i think i don't even see what other people do yeah to replicate their success or to understand the way the world is going and then there's other people that do see it and do nothing about it yeah you're giving yourself enough credit because you're seeing it you're doing something about it and you're doing something about it and even it's a tweak yeah is all it takes you're tweaking and and you've selling the business in the end of millions one of my general frameworks has always been well like if someone else has done it then why can't i and then you know let me put a bit of like spin on it all right so um if you ask me well why did fanbites work i'd say one we niched down to that gen z audience but the other thing was like when the influencer market started to become more more um competitive everyone was basically building large sales teams trying to you know hire people and i basically said we are just going to get brands through marketing just through content marketing etc so that approach i think came because I just learned how other people in other industries had done their thing.

26:20And then I just like bring it into my industry. So maybe like to answer your question, I'd say I'm generally very good at being able to thread different models from other industries and then weave them together to make something. But like the actual fundamentals of the idea of the business is never unique. unique it's just always like well this work this work this work i'm just gonna like make them have sex together and then see what happens um and that's what stands out for me in the way you described the business was the simplicity of it as well yeah how powerful is simplicity what made i think fanbytes work is that it was something that had been done several times before but in different forms so when people ask me hey when you sold the company last year did you think this is what would happen you know did you think that you'd sell it and i say yes because it's exactly how i designed it in my head because as i mentioned like 2017 influences were a new thing people really didn't understand that but that's also the exact thing that people felt about tv advertising at some point.

27:38That's also the same thing that people feel about podcast advertising, about radio advertising. I had like studied history enough to basically say, well, every time there is a new form of advertising, a new form of media, it starts off independent and then it ends up getting consolidated. This is just a rite of passage basically. And so in 2017 was, I thought, well, this is going to happen anyway, right? Like radio happened, PR happened, podcast happened, video happened, PPC had happened. And so the simple business is just be the person who has a bunch of this inventory and then sell it onto brands because whether it's five years, whether it's 10 years, whether it's blah, blah, blah, there will be consolidation.

28:26So it was a simple business because it had been done several different times but it was also a hard business right so it was like simple but hard rather than like complex and easy i much prefer those earlier businesses like simple but hard businesses so let's um send a message then to the entrepreneurs listening to this yeah people that would love to do this fanbites became big yeah so it's not possible to do this kind of like you did before yeah in your bedroom on your own build something and sell it explain to us how you recruit people around you how do you pick up on co-founders yeah who do you speak to about investments and sales and all the things that suddenly come your way that you can't possibly know because they don't teach this stuff yeah okay so there's co-founders as team and then there are investors i'll take those in order co-founders so i had a co-founder and then we then recruited a cto so i had a co-founder who was my uh coo then brought on a cto um co-founders are interesting because what i found in general is that you ideally don't want to just start a business with someone that you've just met in an ideal world you want to have some kind of small projects or something that you objectively work with them on yeah see how you vibe and then you go on to then like building a company so many people get enamored with this idea of i've just met this person they're great on paper but what i've come to realize like generally the best co-founders are kind of therapists to each other who can basically like call each other out on their bullshit right so like ambrose called me out on my bullshit a lot at the beginning because at the beginning i was a very bad leader like shocking leader example i was driven by ego I was like driven by me wanting to be right like that was it right and again I was 21 22 then and you know suddenly I'm like running an organization and we've raised a bit of money so I'm like oh my god this has to be right this has to be right and I'm also you know call me out on that several times same times I would also call him out on stuff and I'll say hey like you need to do this instead because the way you are approaching this is not like entrepreneurial it's more of just like a kind of manager type thing what do you mean by that entrepreneurial well so i would say especially at the beginning when we sold the company was um 75 people right basically from like zero to about 25 people i think your leaders need to be comfortable with making decisions that could not work out and i think at the beginning and i also had this um to some degree but i think kind of ambrose is a very calculated person like he has a spreadsheet for his life right and so he looks at risk and then goes uh not sure not sure whereas me i'm like yo let's just go right but from like zero to 25 people i think that you need to be comfortable with all right there's going to be some kind of downside and i'm comfortable with that if you're not what then happens is that you just make a lot of incremental steps rather than seismic steps and so that was a perfect example of how you actually like need to be a bit more entrepreneurial and be okay with decisions where it's like okay um it could go here or it could go here whereas when you're say uh 50 people plus is more like, okay, it could go a bit here and it could go a bit here, right?

32:04But at the beginning, you're like, well, see, so who knows? So that's on the co-founders team. I think the overarching thing is that you want to hire people who would do a good job regardless of where they are. That was a framework breaker for me. So at the beginning of Fanbytes, I overhired for people who were very enthusiastic and passionate about influencer marketing. And I think that was a big mistake. Like what I should have done was like, say for example, I'm hiring a salesperson. Should have been like, well, the salesperson just wants to be the best salesperson they possibly can be. And what my company is, is a vehicle for them to do that rather than like, they have to be so passionate about the thing that we're actively doing.

32:45If you can appeal to people's sense of wanting to be better, regardless of where they are, you would always find the best employees. And then your final thing was about investors. Because man, I'm actually kind of the worst person to ask about investors and the reason why. So we raised over the course of the business, we raised them 2 million. And every single one of them was kind of like weird. So for example, the first ever check that we got was from a guy called Toby Austin. The way that we got him to invest was during my gap year, I wanted to work for his company. and he said no because uh you're too young and we tend to hire people with a bit of experience but i like you and um when you next start your next business hit me up right so like that's a very unrepeatable way of getting investors basically like go to people go ask to work for them they will say no and then raise money from them but i do think over time it got a bit easier we asked people who had investors who they would recommend and stuff like that when you're going fundraising never go fundraising where you are in a position of weakness so anytime we'd raise money because we didn't go out and just raise like you know two million straight from the back it was like uh like 200 and then 300 and 500 then 600 and it was always in a position of strength it was always the business is going this way and you best basically jump on this train because the train is leaving the station rather than kind of like uh you know please can you fund my idea that was a big change in the way that we approached fundraising which made it incredibly easy so can i ask you about the topic of trust then yeah because i'm i'm i'm struck by that first business that you set up the tutoring business where you almost had to invest trust in yeah in both parties and you were disappointed by your margins getting crept down and then by the time that you've set up fanbites yeah you're having to trust an awful lot of yeah people yeah what did you learn about that process that allowed you to be more trusting to others when i was younger i assumed that people had negative intent and then over time i assumed that everyone had positive intent so if you assume everyone has positive intent then you treat them with a good degree of trust until they break that trust like even when i kind of first first uh started fanbites like say someone did something wrong i just go like well they obviously did that wrong to like annoy me you know yeah yeah or they came late to spite me it's just like a very driven way of thinking until i went well actually you know there's there's a logical reason for why this may have happened maybe i didn't give them the right instructions blah blah blah blah business owners always go through that sort of thing where they start off thinking oh i can't believe this person is so stupid and then they go well what conditions did i create which perhaps didn't contribute to that and then they tweak their approach and that was kind of like the journey of trust that i went through so from paranoid to pronoid yeah pronoid yeah i didn't know pro-annoyed is a word is that a word yeah that's a good one he's a professor so oh to pro-annoyed that's cool there you go yeah pro-annoyed where you assume everybody is out to help you yeah is where you assume they're out to get you there's a framework actually i think it's called like hanlon's razor and it's basically um never mistake formalist that can be described by incompetence right and um i remember that thinking kind of going oh yeah of course like maybe they just don't know any better that's why they made a mistake rather than you know they hate me or they want to spy me or something really yeah so you go on this journey and then eventually the day comes where you end up selling fanbites for the reports are tens of millions of pounds right how does that feel how does that feel i think there are three points to selling a company and you know getting like a life-changing thing that you go wow my life has changed the first one is when you get like the offers in and you can see the amount on a sheet of paper yeah and obviously you get your calculator out and go yeah i own this percent that means you know i think i may have done a calculation like 18 times like like just okay just to the penny this means you know And how does that particular moment feel?

37:22That bit doesn't feel real. Right. Because it does look like just numbers on a sheet of paper. Then, of course, you go through due diligence and you go through all of that stuff. I was never phased through due diligence. If you ask my co-founder whether he was phased, he'd be like, oh my God, yes. Because, you know, due diligence is basically 10 weeks where they dig deeply into your numbers, your finances, everything that you've ever said. And like, look, a very healthy portion of deals don't get closed through due diligence, right? And so he was always like, okay, is it going to go? Is it going to go?

37:56But I think I just always just had this sense of, well, this is going to happen. So it's just going to happen. All right. So that first feeling of, hmm, this doesn't feel real. The second one is the day that you get the money. That was just, oh my God, I cannot believe this happened. And that was just incredible excitement. I mean, Mitchell and Ambrose. So we all basically opened up new bank accounts specifically for this, right? And like, they were both on Lloyd's. So we're just like walking around the, just around the office. Cause on the 3rd of May, we announced the deal. So we announced to the public, you know, Times wrote about it, BBC, everyone's like talking about it, but the money hadn't dropped.

38:42So everyone is like, congratulations. donations oh my god oh my god and and and and uh we're like yeah yeah man it's great but the money still hasn't dropped um and then mitch and ambrose are both on lloyd's and so we're just like walking around walking around and then we're like checking our accounts it's like it's because remember we got fresh new accounts for this so it's showing zeros right so like we're checking we're like oh man zeros check again no zeros and then um ambrose then checks and then he didn't start shouting like just shouting like just absolutely like ambrose is quite a calm measured man so when he when he shouts you know something serious happened mitchell also then goes oh my god right and because i'm on santander i i like go and and i'm expecting numbers and it's still showing zero you're then panicking and i'm like i'm like yo i my first thought is like did i give them the right so-called an account number right did i give our lawyers the right to record an account number but then i did it and then happened and i was like oh my god there's a video of me on my phone where it's just a six minute video and i'm just going wow sitting on the floor and there's a bottle of like moe champagne next to me and i'm just like wow wow what like that's all i can say because at that point is elation so the first point is wow this doesn't feel real second point is wow this is real this is my new life and then the next point is actually about two three months afterwards which is that at that point it still hadn't sunk in the world still goes around you know the next day I went to the gym and I went to Sainsbury's and I bought apples and then I went home and someone described it as like if you have a parent pass away so like I kind of got the same feeling is when my dad passed away when i was like yeah pretty much at the beginning of um fanbites and i remember thinking to myself i was going on the bus i was doing stuff and i said oh my god like my life has changed but the world hasn't changed you know three months afterwards was then i was like oh okay the world hasn't changed when the money dropped i was convinced that like the world will change like the earth will open and like everyone will start singing and they'll be like yes you did it my son right but um that didn't happen so those were like the three kind of feelings one was very much like this can't be real the other one was like wow this is now my life and then the third one was like oh okay nothing really changed the whole world just kept going on and kept going on and i find that to be the case with everyone i was speaking to a friend who just sold this company for 400 million and he was just like yeah man next day i went to mcdonald's i was like dude just buy mcdonald's you know um so so yeah those are the changes but that's there's an interesting link there there's a famous study that was done with lottery winners where they looked at the happiness levels of people that win the lottery or have a massive windfall like yourself and what they found is their happiness levels spike massively for a short period of time but eventually adapts back to where it was beforehand yeah that world is normal would you say you're happier now than you were before oh yeah yeah you were categorically your happiness level has shifted like you know yeah i know the whole money doesn't make you happy blah blah yeah okay cool but look like i am significantly happier like the fact that i can take care of my family i can take care of my friends i can do whatever i wanted like tick tick tick tick tick perfect perfect perfect but that also is because like during fanbites i think i was like generally also a very like i was a happy person so it made me happier now if i was like a sad anxious person all the time i don't think that the money would have made me happy so i don't think goes from like sad to happy i think it's like happy to happier and like that's the way that i feel so if so if before the acquisition my happiness was like i don't know seven out of ten i am now like nine out of ten whereas beforehand if it was like well i am just sad and anxious and i'm a two out of ten i would not be a nine out of ten i'd i'd just be like a three it's just still sad exactly just picking up on your dad what was his name godfrey what would godfrey have thought on the day that money came into your account well firstly he'd have thought well thank god that um the thing you've been working on for so long actually turned out to be something um so before he passed away we had a conversation a random conversation i and i swear this sounds like it's from a film we had just started fanbites and we'd got an article in the daily mail and you know he worked in the council and he'd been basically like sent this article and he still didn't quite understand what I was doing.

43:47So I remember him, he called me to his room and then he said, Hey, you know, I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of what you're doing. I don't really understand what it is, but keep going. And then two days afterwards, he passed away. And I think his feeling would have been just incredible pride because I think he always knew I would do something significant. significant even when he was encouraging me to go to university and stuff there was always this kind of like but if you find something else do it which is very different for African parents African parents are very much like education education education but I think he had this kind of sense of my son is going to do something significant I don't know what it is so I think he would go pride and I do think he would also say like I knew it all along in fact a lot of my friends have have said this that like they felt that they knew all along that like there will be some degree of uh success with fanbites i think your dad deserves a lot of credit then in this story doesn't he because i'm not sure you do this if you're not given the freedom and what we call psychological safety yeah from your dad to go do you know what go and be brave yeah yeah and my mom as well i mean like i didn't live with her but as i mentioned earlier like she was very effusive with praise you know like i could have done anything and she's like oh you are the best at it you are the best at it you are the best whatever rock climber the world has ever seen you know so um i think both of them that kind of psychological safety was very big nice that's huge though isn't it that yeah like so what's your mom's reaction to it been like um i think with her there's been a lot of interesting conversations we've had where like she doesn't she still doesn't quite understand it like she understands that you know her son now can take care of her but that's kind of it whereas i think like other people have a much greater sense of what it means for my life for their life i mean my grandma still doesn't understand like when i said oh i'm going to egypt or i'm going to the you know this or whatever some country and she says oh like for work or for leisure and i say well just for fun i don't have a job now and she goes but why you should be working i was like i don't need to now so it's all good no but you know you need to work a man needs to work yeah so i think you know for like for like that mentality it's a bit of a frame breaker but uh for my friends and perhaps like my aunties and uncles i think like they understand it more than my mom basically so you say your your grandma says you you should be working yeah like are we talking to a retired guy right now i think if at age of 28 you retire that is a big problem what i would say is that this is um you know there's this phrase i saw and someone said i wish everyone could get wealthy so they realize wealth is not the answer and i really like that framework because when i speak to friends who you know like sold companies for hundreds of millions or even myself it's like well what else are you going to do with your time and i think everyone kind of thinks they get to the end goal and then life is over but here are two things that i've realized which is often when people uh win the money game they then go and try and play the status game and the problem with things like the status game is that it's just like a never-ending game right there will be someone richer better looking than you taller than you handsomer than you etc and like i've tried to do a lot to make sure i don't get involved in that kind of status game i was with a friend recently and he was comparing himself to this other guy who had sold his company and i said well do you know that like you are richer than that guy so why are you comparing and he said yeah i know but he has a hotter girlfriend and i was almost like do you understand what you're saying basically you started off comparing yourself to this guy in terms of income and wealth and now through something you can't control you are now comparing your partner to his partner at what point is this going to end like at what point is it all right well now he has better looking kids than me like it's just constantly going to be this game and so one thing that I've been trying to do and I advise so many of my friends who who you know who are doing well etc I say don't get involved in the status game because the moment that you get involved in the status game every day of your life you would be like oh well they've got more than me they've got more than me and it's such a bullshit way to live your life so the reason I say all of that to answer about like retirement is it's like no it's obviously not retirement but is also like the thing that i am striving for the thing that i'm in the game that i'm in is more of a going back to the first ever question that that that we said it's like how good could you be right so like could i be the best i possibly can be in all the different uh facets of my life which is not judged by what other people think but more by like how good could i possibly be you know what what I mean and with that um basis before we move on to our quickfire questions to wrap up if I gave you a scale of one to a hundred and a hundred is you you've completed every level you're done and zero is right at the beginning where are you on that scale where do you feel you are the conventional answer that people would give is you know I'm just getting started you know i'm at five percent i'm on five percent and again like yeah i mean that sounds good for the tiktoks and stuff but like but like i think i'm maybe like i don't know like 81 or 82 and that's also because you know especially in business people play games where the rules have been set by someone else.

50:16So people say, right, all right, the next thing I need to do has to be a billion dollars. Why? You know, the next thing I have to do has to go public IPO. Why? And I think for me, I have like set myself a bar where it's not a billion dollars. Like the next company that I do, even after we sold the company within about six, about six weeks, about two months, I had a bunch of VCs being like, hey, here is 10 million. I don't know what you're going to do, but start off with 10 million. I want to know your next company. And I had to have so many conversations. I was like, I don't really want to do that.

50:58You know, I don't really want to do the, like the game that you're choosing to play, which is, all right, let's now raise a 10 million C. Then afterwards we do a 30 million series A, then a 60 million series B, then we'll go billion dollars. Not really. So that's a way to answer your question, which is like, well, I'd say like, yeah, like 81, 82, because the hundred for me is not like a billion dollars. It's like, okay, have a great physique, great body, have good friendships, have good network. And yes, you know, build another company that is a success, but the success is not like, well, did it IPO or did it go to a billion dollars?

51:40if that was my criteria then i'd be like oh you know i'm at three because i'm just getting started it's like all right yeah cool that's nice but um but i think i just have a general uh sense of realism um as well i mean this is a um a funny story actually with fanbites um was business was going well growing etc and and a vc got in touch and wanted to basically fund the company fund i I think, yeah, putting like 8 million into the business and just, you know, raise like 80 million, just like crazy valuation. And he asked me, hey, how do you think this becomes like the next unicorn? And I just said, it's just not.

52:25And he was so like, what? There's not going to be the next unicorn? I was like, no, not really. And I think it's because I had a very good sense of the game I was trying to play. and I had a very good sense of expectations. And I said, hey, I think this would easily make, you know, tens of millions, not hundreds of millions. And he then invested personally. And then when we saw the company, I was like, I told you, right? I think there's something to your listeners, which is like, whether you want to start a company or run in a company, try and figure out like the core function and the core purpose of the reason why you're doing it.

53:05because it can be so easy to like do it for the headlines, do it for the fundraising, do it for the likes, do it for the clicks. And you kind of forget the fundamental thing, which is any business, or at least this is my belief, any business is a vehicle to serve you, right? Not to serve other people. It's to serve you, to make you more happy, make you more, you know, like give you income to provide for your family like it's a vehicle for you the moment that you move to becoming almost like a slave to your business because you're playing someone else's game on how much to fundraise how big your team is how big your office is how many press articles you have that's the time that you've actually just lost the game so i think that's a very important thing for people to internalize as they go on their kind of entrepreneurial journey what a powerful way to finish i think that's the title for this episode play the game by your own rules there you go nice ready for the quick fire questions yes three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you should buy into a high agency high self-agency a high sense of urgency and an unshakable belief that you can be more.

54:22I could work with you. What's your biggest strength and your greatest weakness? Biggest strength. I am very good at getting people really excited about things. If I have an idea or if you have an idea, I can sell you on your own idea if you haven't sold yourself. Biggest weakness is that I am quite impatient. And this is something I've kind of tweaked and i've learned a bit more about myself but i assume that like people have the same incentives as me and so if i'm like we need to do this because it's so fun and at this moment we should do it i assume that everyone has like understood the sense of importance when actually you need to understand what that person's incentives are and then appeal to those rather than kind of well let's just go now and that's a problem if you could offer one bit of advice to your teenage self what would you say realize that most of what you're trying to do has been done by someone else and your goal in life should be to try and collect and synthesize how other people have done things and then put your own spin on it i think i cared too much at the beginning that's why i said during the interview i have never had an original idea i think i care too much about like thinking about things from like i needed to have the idea i needed to be the guy i needed to do it when rather it's you want to collect a bunch of ideas and collect the right people who know the stuff and then bring them together rather than you needing to be the superstar you needing to be the like source of all the answers how important is legacy to you zero i have zero desire for legacy last week i was in cairo and i went to the museum and i saw this massive statue like huge statue of these two people next to each other and it was like you know here lies the king of da da da da i was like 100 years ago these people were the shit now they're dead so now what you know like we're gonna die and when we die everyone be like oh well cool they were good people and then they just get on with their lives uh so i do not care about legacy i have never cared about legacy i've never cared about when i die later on what will people say about me because i'm dead and the people who i care about their thoughts they will also have died does that old saying that you should always aim not to be the smartest person in any room yeah where do you stand on that if you had asked me this question when i was 20 or 21 i would have said screw that be the smartest um and now i fully agree with the idea that you should not be the smartest person in the room and you should know the smartest people in the room as I've just gone up in business I've started to realize something so profound that a lot of business success is not based on what you know it is more like who you know who knows the what so I've now become very well versed in what I call the people collection business so like even my next company i'm not thinking about what it is i'm thinking like who am i going to do it with and then once i figured out the who i'm like yo we will figure it out i know we'd we just would but if we vibe intellectually socially then some magic will happen so that's been a big change from the way that i thought when i was younger up until now your final message for people listen to this episode what would you like to leave ringing in their ears for how you would advise them to live their own version of high performance you should set a bar that only you can measure and you should constantly challenge yourself to pass that bar that living by other people's sense of what success is is a surefire way to be incredibly miserable.

58:46Damien. Jake. I love guests that don't just give you like a stock answer that they actually think about what they're saying where you ask them something and they go hold on most people would say this but I think the answer is actually this I thought he was a fascinating guy. Yeah and the irony was that he said he's never had an original thought in his life and yet a lot of what he was saying was bold and it was daring and it was original. my only thing is i just believe that he's he's gonna have to go again he's 28 years old he's already set up and sold a number of businesses you know the early ones are a failure the most recent ones have been successful people like timo don't stop they keep going and going and going but there was a really interesting response that he gave that i found fascinating and it and it echoed the conversation we had with the crystal palace co-owner steve parish where he spoke about gathering interesting and successful people around him so rather than necessarily setting out with an idea for a business as he said you know i'll like we'll discover that as long as i've got really smart people that i engage with and vibe with and i think there's something really interesting about finding your tribe being around people that share a similar drive similar ambition similar view of the world to you i thought it was really cool i loved it yeah i did too i I think it reminded me of, they often talk about in business, there's cycles, there's the three I's, there's some people that innovate, there's some people that imitate, and then there's the idiots that come last.

1:00:14And I think he actually is an innovator. But by doing that, by imitating others' ideas and bringing them together. Top man. Thanks, mate. Thanks, mate. Loved it.

1:00:28Well, I really hope that you enjoyed that conversation. You know what? I just love the way that Timo continues to explore. And I don't think that Timo would have done anything like the things that he has, experienced the things he's experienced or achieved the things he has, if he didn't constantly explore. I remember Johnny Wilkinson first sharing that thought with us here on High Performance. So if you take one thing away from this conversation, it's the power of exploration. Don't forget, you can also watch these conversations on YouTube, as well as listen to them on your podcast platforms, and find out more from High Performance at thehighperformancepodcast.com.

1:01:03Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.