Sean Brown: People don't see the sacrifices founders make

0:00Welcome everyone to The Naked Founder, the business podcast where nothing is hidden. This episode of The Naked Founder is sponsored by Financial, the home of money for women. Our special guest today is Sean Brown, founder and CEO of Vessori, which has just been acquired by US tech giant Avalara for an undisclosed sum. Welcome Sean. Thank you very much for having me. It's great to see you again. It's great to see you too and great to be here in the office. Sean, we always start every episode of The Naked Founder podcast with the same question. What didn't they tell you about founding a business that you wish you'd known at the start?

0:31Well, no one told me anything about founding a business. So I didn't know anything at the start. Your family weren't entrepreneurs? No, my granddad founded a caravan, a motorhome dealership. My dad went into that. And, you know, an anorak doesn't really look good on me, so I couldn't really wear the anorak on site. So no one really educated about the tech business. So, but one of the things that I would probably like to have been told earlier is it's not about me building something. It's about the team you can build around you to build something. So I underestimated the power of a team at the beginning.

1:13And you know me at the old days is I thought I could lift mountains on my own and I was completely wrong, which is why it was a failure. But yeah, I wish I learned about people more. it's that old phrase there's no i in team you know and it's it's so true and you're only as good as your weakest link as well um i don't think i've met a more resilient founder than yourself so i think over the years you've been involved in 27 different projects if i'd done a press release on everyone i wouldn't have room for anything else as well and then this business for story obviously has been acquired as well um is the secret resilience and is the moral of the story you don't succeed first time try try try again yeah i i would never associate myself with being resilient because that's never ever come into oh i should try harder i should brush myself off and build myself up again because that's never really been a thought of consideration it's just uh i like to build and the the best fun i could ever have is sat on my laptop just building stuff and so it's not like people can interpret as resilient so it just keeps going and you've finally got one that's hit it's just been no i feel like i've built things that i'm passionate and interested about and if they have a commercial value and if i'm still interested in them i'll give them a good go at launching and getting to market so yeah it's not really uh resilience has never been a thought it's just more what's cool that i can build next is people talk about the happy place so that could be on a beach that could be in a car that could be with family would your happy place be on your laptop building something actually yeah if you if you speak to my wife and even if she manages to get me on holiday i've been on one in like three years where did you go maldives okay sorry nice yeah thank you and i loved it because it was with the children but um they would go to bed around about seven eight o 'clock and i would just sit up on my laptop until two o 'clock in the morning because that is my happy place yeah if i could do it with a non-alcoholic beer and sat and listening to the waves it sounds it's even better but genuinely you know very simple life we'll go back watch tv on the sofa at night but i'll be i'll have my laptop open and like i can't get into series because yeah i just want to build something my my brain always is wired to be thinking the next thing and sometimes i beat myself up for not being in the moment as well but if i wasn't there i'd almost feel i'd be restless and i'd be thinking about the thing that I really want to do.

3:47One of our favourite stories about you, and I've got a few, is when you were in Australia, 18-year-old backpacker, you ran out of cash. Not that story. It's a story where you ran out of money, had a job lined up, collecting glasses in a couple of days' time, and you came up with this idea where you were going to do a raffle, and you were going to raffle a skydive to other backpackers. You didn't have the present, the top prize, and you went out and convinced somebody to give you that skydive, which you then raffled. Yeah. Have you always been that sort of person? When your back's against the wall, you don't panic, you think of a way of making money.

4:21I can't believe you remembered that, but yeah. I won that skydive. Did you? Yeah, you didn't, because my maid did, because I couldn't... I wanted the money for it. Oh, right, we've got that on take, haven't we? Yeah, okay. No, that story is like... Yeah, I think the answer you're looking for is, in the story itself is i uh got a job as a glass collector and pa for uh certain like kind of events that happen in this backpacker bar yeah and it was starting on the monday and i was skim for the week before and they said look you can stay here on a reduced rate i was like i've got zero money yeah you're talking nothing i'm talking nothing to the point where i genuinely remember going past bakeries and sniffing to smell the freshly baked bread to consider and try and teach my brain that it was a nutrient that nutrients that i was smelling i was literally eating nothing bananas and ribetas is what i lived on for a while and uh elite athletes diet obviously 100 you've always been an elite athlete thanks and so no i uh i just thought i've got to go and make some money and um I know that the backpackers hostel that I was getting the job in they were looking to draw more business into it I was like well maybe I can if I can practice using the mic on Friday can I use your space they says yeah I'll fly her for you and they said oh brilliant yeah go and do that and then I went to Peter Pan which is a travel agency out there and convinced them to give me a skydive as long as I advertise on to all the backpackers that stay in Brisbane.

5:59And yeah, just stood on it, went to a library, printed off and literally ripped off, charged$5 for it and sold them on. But it wasn't really a, I'm down and out, how can I fix this situation? It's just like, well, that'll work. So let me go and try it. I made about$250 on the first night just on the corner but that's the thing you see is that like a business somebody outside your office right now on this corner washing cars you know as a lights change that is a business you know fundamentally because you're providing a service to suit a demand um did you ever panic are you the sort of person you know when you're in a bit of a sticky spot that you panic or not or does that when we see the best of sean brown i think my so when i grew up i moved my mum was a pub manager not a landlord just a kind of a licensee and we used to go around all these two for ten pubs and live above the pub and um you know so like mum would go down and work at night i'd have to cook my own food and but like quite young and and then even things like in the pubs the rough pubs so there'll be fights and literally guys headbutting my mum like and just having to throw yourself into it to get people and protect your mum etc from a really young age so my because we moved a lot of places my relationship with stability was completely different to what anyone else's would be unless they grew up in that sort of like changing scenes all the time so therefore my relationship with stability and relationship with risk was completely flipped I felt that staying still was more risky and instable and actually working for somebody for a wage was more risky because then i'm at the fate of someone else not my own so actually my default relationship with risk and stability is completely inverted so does that mean you're unemployable funnily enough so my friend uh he worked at a company called pi metrics i think they went bump but um out in australia it was this psychometric profiling where you play games it's it's not by question answer you play games and the job role that it came out with was uh an entrepreneur and he said he'd never seen it before because like but it basically means i'm unemployable because there's no defined role that i would would work well in as a psychometric profile which is bad for the new employers because i don't know what they're think they're in the house.

8:29No, but you, you, I think, I think, yeah, you can, because we've known each other for a few years as well, but actually, you've always had this, like, being this visionary, but you've got to try and bring your team with you now, and I think that's certainly what you've done with the story. You did a post on LinkedIn, I'm a big LinkedIn person, I like to watch that. No, absolutely. I'll be posting this on LinkedIn as well, but I watch LinkedIn and I look at authenticity is key. I don't like these people who post on social media, everything is great all the time because it's not. But you've posted about the fact that people see a successful business.

9:03They don't see the various businesses that you tried before and they might not have all succeeded. So one business in 2009 that you set up was a little tech business called Social Scuba where people could log their dives and build a community. You sold that for$6 ,000. Doesn't seem like a lot of money. Dollar a user. A dollar a user. Okay, what did you learn from that? so i remember uh around that time i was backpacking and something went wrong in thailand i got my laptop got stolen from me and my auntie and uncle lived in um in hong kong so they saved me and sort of like flew me out to hong kong and said look you've got nothing so we'll we'll look after you here it was whilst up there i was thinking i really want to um build a website because Facebook was just starting to like germinate and there wasn't groups or anything on Facebook yet so I wanted to create a social network for the thing that I loved at the time which was scuba diving so I built that and I remember drawing the website on a pen and paper and then looking at literally holding it up to the the screen saying that's what it looked like how do I do that so I installed Dreamweaver and started playing around just on a little tiny web book and uh yeah just self-taught PHP and was learning off YouTube and then putting it straight into my work.

10:21You were 18 at the time? In 1920, yeah. It was actually my 20th birthday where I got robbed. But that lesson taught you about how to run a business. And actually, if you don't know how to do something, teach yourself. Yeah, yeah. Okay, social chain. I think there's a few companies in the UK where there's like a, you know, Former social chainers have now gone on to big on better things as well. Now, look at social chain. Obviously, it was set up by Dom McGregor and a guy called Stephen Bartlett. You might have heard of him. Famously, Dragon's Den and Diary of a CEO podcast. You went there and then you became, was it head of product?

10:59I was head of product there, yeah. Okay, so what did you learn from that? And what did you learn off of Dom and Stephen Bartlett? Yeah, so I first met Dom because I founded Hatch, which is an influencer marketing platform. Was they acquired? yeah and so i went up to pitch all the social media agencies for them to sell to their clients and dom sent me a really thoughtful long email and i think it's longest email he's ever written and he about why the reasons that hatch and me should would have find a home there and actually what they created there was some was a really entrepreneurial sort of pool of uh young hungry and high agency people and they had no hiring policy it was just pure good feeling which is if i was going to give them credit for something is their ability to recognize people that were aligned with what their values in life were and building something for yourself they did that really really well so actually the one thing i learned from that was always hire the amazing people and have really high bar for what not necessarily look at their CVs you know it's that uh no I don't really look at CVs anyway of course um now we have to hire computer scientists so we need to know that they've been educated correctly or they've done something exceptional my bar for hiring is what's the most exceptional thing you've ever built yeah and um so it's I kind of look at history a bit more but still understanding the person understanding who they are what their desires are and passions and then hiring off the back of that serves me better than a CV.

12:39Just out of interest from Stephen Bartlett when you worked with him before his big break did you look at him and think this guy's going all the way to the top? No. Did you not? No. yeah what was it what was he like back then um he was just he was just a normal normal person he he wasn't he wasn't the hardest worker he wasn't um uh he wouldn't deliver the projects he wouldn't do the sales but he had this uh ability to go on stage and drive in top of funnel leads into the business so the business built off his own investment into his himself to build his personal brand and that went quite far in the marketing world at that point um i yeah he always had like the ability to be good on tv and to be a media personality yeah i would because i knew him through his early days as well and he always recognized the value of the steven barlett brand and still does yeah um and obviously yeah he's gone on to you know to great things okay in 2020 you launched a blockchain technology or your own cryptocurrency called Sean coin yeah and I'm rather hoping the deal you've just done wasn't paid in Sean coin wouldn't have been the problem if it had now the only people who have access to it are people called Sean spelt with an ea or s-h-a-u-n or something similar so so how important is it just to have some fun when you're founding a business and not to fear failure yeah so fun is always where it comes from so the thing is when crypto market started really booming i didn't understand it because i didn't understand the fundamentals of the technology so my approach is to understand something i build it and so i looked at okay well coins go through an ico and initial coin offering and i want to do an initial coin offering so i understand the mechanics and the value of what you're creating therefore is a value for me to invest into it yeah so that's kind of where i was coming from and i just like I didn't do it for any marketing didn't do it for any launch I did put together 5 ,000 people in a Facebook group called Sean to advertise it to and it was just more we met our people um but yeah so I found a Sean coin did the ICO uh I think I can't even remember the economics of it now but it's uh it was just to understand and build um a token and uh yeah I understood it launched it it was quite fun and uh i think it's a bit like i think it's a bit like uh people who are learning to become like uh taxi drivers in london cabbies and they want to learn the knowledge yeah it's you can look at an a to z as much as you want but there's no substitute for learning um doing the knowledge it's like learning a language you can do dual lingo like my wife does every day or you can go to italy for six months and probably you know speed up that process a hundredfold as well and there's no substitute for creating sean coin to understand about cryptocurrency um yeah i'm going to talk to you about micato so micato was a business that i knew you in you grew that to about uh 24 staff you're doing millions in turnover as well and you you you know you stopped doing that at the start of the story what lessons did you learn from micato How to be a shit boss is what I learned.

16:02So Mercato was really tough because I had a really, really bad investor and who actually didn't invest anything into it. And so I'd given up 50 % of the business for a bullied deal, let's say. And then, so because we didn't have any money, i needed to earn money before we built the product so we actually um built a product like again like self-built uh some support with offshore software developers and uh launched it then we got an interested party that was like hey um look we want to use your platform for x and it was completely different to the a and b that i was using it for uh but the ability to pivot and recognizing where I was into a dead end and here's the opportunity.

16:50So I pivoted the use case of it. It was a marketplace for, let's say, founders, entrepreneurs that wanted to launch a e-commerce career, whereas then it flipped it to be a marketplace technology for retailers. So we flipped to become a B2B business and we convinced the customer to pay 50 % upfront so that acted as our seed funding. We delivered it and then went on to win customers like Troy and Pretty Little Thing. and it really started growing from that point on what um the problem with that is i was always using clients money to grow and i was always chasing my own tail to deliver for clients and i would be completely relentless in that delivery and i would bear all the pressure of that but at the time by the team grew quite organically quite quickly and at the time i just treated people as capital to deliver something and didn't treat people as a team which is weird because I grew up in team sports so I just completely lost the value what the value of the company was and I thought it was just purely customer contracts and not the team that were there to deliver on them and build the product so no I wouldn't speak to people badly but I just feel like I wouldn't really understand the nine to five culture I couldn't understand why doesn't why is no one working 18 hours alongside me every single day but of course now I know that they're coming from a different perspective they haven't got the same passion and motivation for this specific thing in their life and I just assumed and expected too much of people unfairly and whenever they would deliver well it still wasn't enough but sometimes that would come out in as a toxicity as a leader and I hated it and you were never it might be never a toxic leader but I think you You probably didn't have that awareness.

18:41And a lot of tech entrepreneurs so head down, focus on the product, they don't necessarily look at the bigger picture stuff. Some people go all their careers without realising that. Character flaw. So you learn a lot from Mercato, and you set Vessori up. You've got these cards in here, and on the back it says, Vessori, the Gen AI platform for any integration or workflow. So when you set Vessori up, what problem were you trying to fix? So actually at Mercato we had a huge issue where these big retailers were coming in and were building marketplaces. Now the merchants, the sellers on those marketplaces were trying to connect their product data from their platforms into this marketplace and of course all the data was in different formats and they're all different systems so the integration and the connection between those systems was non-existent because of course it was Mercato to those third-party systems and we locked on the market for an integration platform to solve our need but the market really had all pre-built connectors and they're quite rigid and when you wanted to do any customization or changes it was expensive and a long time to do that so but we didn't have the budget we were bootstrapped so I um I started getting really annoyed with it half our engineers were working on integrations and then um I decided that you know at the end when the time came for micato to uh to close that i'd um move across across and start building integrations and to try and solve the problem that i experienced as a potential buyer of an integration platform and that's where the story came along so we approached it completely different a novel where we didn't build pre-built connectors we built a connector engine that was configured for protocols but the schema or the system of that would then define that connector and we started using AI quite early to be able to configure those configurations of connectors and then when GenAI code came out where you could prompt and it would start writing code and it was starting to be proficient enough we knew it was going that way so we started building the platform to support that for when it was ready and because we had already built the zero to one as soon as gen ai code came in we then uh use the llm to then start writing the code on top of our orchestration layer and our infrastructure and we were just perfectly positioned to be this next gen ipass platform where no one was anywhere near us if i was asked to write everything down that you just said in that one answer i'd probably get about two words.

21:23Yeah, apologies. No, don't worry. We wanted to connect systems really easily. It's the thing is, is that like you understand it in a way which is beyond anybody else, but but you need to because that's that's your bag. One thing I noticed like you, you're very honest on LinkedIn and you go to a lot of conferences and I looked at a post from you and there was September last year, I think you at Fusori went to four or five conferences and you reckon 50 % of your work, your pipeline work, came through going to a conference. And actually, people who don't go to conferences might not necessarily understand that.

21:57But in your industry, in your industry, why are conferences the way to drive business growth? So I get asked this quite a bit and I love conferences. One, because you're out in the field, you're speaking to people, you're understanding problems, you're trying to find solutions, hot fixes, etc. And it's really fun. um however a lot of people that go to conferences they get their stand and they hope to uh fish and they sit there with a stand and they hope people walk past and it catches their attention they bring in have a conversation they generate leads and that is that works for really well or works that can only work that way for maybe like 90 95 percent of companies at the conferences we go to because you can't identify the buyer until they start speaking to you.

22:46When it comes to integrations there's a worldwide assumption that everyone needs integrations so if you're a tech platform, if you're a retailer, if you're a hotelier, if you're someone in HR you have systems you want to connect and that was one of the other like kind of thesis is why I built for Sore is because I felt that it was a almost it was a commodity that needed to be available in the world at all time like oil you need to connect systems you need to also run cars so i'm ultra clear that everyone needs integrations so we get our stand at these conferences so it's just a focal point but also i send myself and two others or however many others to go out and hunt so we don't fish we hunt so we go and literally speak to every single stand up and down and we just shoot and fish in a barrel because you get to the stand at a point where that sales rep and that's a beauty a lot of software companies only want to speak to the decision makers but we can speak to the sales rep because we can say is your project not going live quick enough because of integrations and nine times out of ten it's yeah integrations are a big pain for us we solve that let me show you they then when showing then call over their boss and then their boss then says here's the card let's speak after the show what's your success rate like at a conference then um put it this way there was a multi-billion dollar company that i spoke to them about um what's your target genuine leads uh that you're aiming for at the conference and it was 90 leads that they were looking for and they smashed it to around about 150 we didn't we went there without a target because we didn't even think about target should be a thing at a conference it is what it is and then um naive but we came away with 150 people which with not just leads with 150 meetings booked out for the next two three weeks because we booked the meetings with them on the stand because they need it so much and then actually the conversion rate from a booked meeting to close so qualified meeting to close at the moment is 100 because we've managed to take everyone through that pipeline to at least so once they're on the hook once they're on the hook they stay on the hook whereas a cold call where you're explaining it to a stranger for the first time is probably next to nothing percentage-wise.

25:17We don't do cold calls. We don't do... We have a little bit of agentic outreach where we have like an agent sales development rep that goes and sources targets for us and then sends emails and follows up and then adds them on LinkedIn and follows up on LinkedIn. And when we get a bite, I then jump into the call. You've never been afraid to jump on a plane, have you? You know? No, I hate it though. Yeah, I mean, you go to America, you'll go anywhere, presumably, for a deal. Yeah. Yeah. I did the other day, not the other day, had a knee surgery about four and a half months ago. Did you ACL? ACL, yeah.

25:51Happens to sportsmen. Elite athletes. I've not had one yet. Yeah, maybe that. So there was a customer over in San Francisco, one of our biggest now, and they hadn't signed at that point. And the project, I started looking at what this sort of commitment from us and them would be. and the reason why I had my surgery then is because I had a break in travel before Christmas it was October before this Christmas just gone and then next travel was for January so I can do that and I should be on my feet by then uh four weeks after surgery and bearing in mind I wasn't stood up for three weeks it was quite a major surgery the fourth week after they said uh we're having a full uh team get together to discuss the Vasari contract so I flew to San Francisco for seven hours and then flew straight back yeah and my knee was blown up like a balloon but got the deal across the line yeah no but it sounds but if you didn't do it and you didn't get the deal then you might not be sitting here right now a couple of things i want to talk about one one in terms of a story i mean you grew i think back end of 2025 by 300 which is the sort of numbers that make people sit up and you were included in the y combinator which is the leading startup accelerator for entrepreneurs and i mean since 2005 the number of businesses that they've sort of invested in it's a business it's like a who's who airbnb dropbox stripe reddit coinbase so what difference did being included in a y combinator make to vasori's story i definitely think it's an amazing stamp of validation y combinator are renowned for investing into like foundational technology or exciting technologies and great founding teams they have rules that they don't back solo founders they back co-founders one with tech and one with commercial and product experience you've always been very careful to say you're not the only founder there's two founders in this business there's two founders so i've been careful to say we're not co-founders yeah we are just two independent founders because i just don't like the denomination of my of even risking that dan is considered as a co-founder and secondary to sean the founder and ceo so i always like us being known as founders independently and together um of the business so but yeah why combinator was you know i just we just had our first baby and i had to fly out there and it was it was tough uh three months on my own um i did 260 uh investor calls half an hour i was like i'd go down to So the Y Combinator is US-based, isn't it?

28:33That's the difference. So you flew over there three months. Left my wife with a newborn. The first or the second? The first kid. The first kid, right, okay. You must have a very understanding wife. Yeah, just sold my house to fund Vassori. Okay. Just, uh... Yeah, the things that people don't see about founders. No, they don't, but also I don't care if they see them or not. Like, it's like, this is, this is my journey that I'm on. It doesn't really matter to anyone else. What did you learn in San Francisco and Y Combinator? Did you say you did 260 pitches or 160? 260 first investor calls. It was three weeks blocked out of half an hour meetings from 4am in the morning and then to around about 6pm at night, San Francisco time.

29:11It's a bit like a TV actor who's got to do a load of media interviews ahead of a film. Because the first one, you sound pretty chipper. By the time you've done the last one of the day, you must be like on autopilot. Doesn't matter, I love it. I love it still. Speaking to different people, handling different feedback, a lot of negative feedback um and it must have worked because i think the story's raised about 10 and a half million dollars isn't it yeah but that doesn't it hasn't come with ease it's it's come from you know refining the pitch understanding what the feedback is and trying to filter out the feedback where just people are nasty and uh actually then yeah every pitch was like changing one percent at a time all the way through and uh yeah we uh in the end refined it with an amazing investor who came on as like the main seed uh he was called stage two capital uh they were fantastic jay poe and mark roberge um with the main partners there and they were fantastic but we spoke on a monday uh to the management partner contacted us through y combinator uh spoke to him on the monday We had a second meeting on the Monday.

30:17Then on the Tuesday, did some go-to-market stuff with Mark. And then on the Wednesday, I was in Austin. We signed a deal there and then. And he actually just shared on LinkedIn a picture of on the day we went and did the IC. He already had the term sheet and he pictured a selfie of me pressing the sign on the docusign. So quite a cool story. You can see your face lights up when you talk about stories like that. And actually, even when things like you talked about, you know, the scuba business that you set up in 2009 as well. It's just fun. You remember that? You know, going out with a newborn child back at home for three months to try to grow Vessori.

30:58That's what founders have to do. Because it's not a nine to five choice. It's whatever is required. um so which makes the reason why your acquisition by alvalara is so important because there's so much work even in a four-year period you're like a 18 19 year success overnight success story there's all these learnings that you've you've done when you they were a customer of yours weren't they yeah and then they said well how do you feel about us acquiring you what happened next yeah so actually i've got a conference in vegas coming up in two weeks and it was this time last year that um you buy these 15 minute sort of like quick pitches that speed dating about your business and they try you try and sell it to them there's a guy wearing a master's golf polo top and they sat down and you pay like a few grand for these meetings and i got on with him and we just started talking about golf and 12 minutes in he says are you gonna sell me anything i was like oh yeah i'll do an integrate build an integration platform he says uh oh we need integrations we've got 1700 integrations we need to build uh i was like oh cool uh let me build one and he says okay build a netsuite one it takes months and i said build a netsuite integration in between x and y and avalara and uh the code started writing it was built we didn't have credentials to access the actual systems but the the foundation of the integration was built in two minutes in front of him he's like wow holy and like let's uh let's follow up and then we started working with them took a while to get through procurement like every deal goes through procurement with us because we're doing the critical system integrations not just peripheral and um then he says ah the team from the mna side wants to speak to you and we had a lot of interest in acquisition uh last year and i said no not really but like i'm still trying to win this contract so yeah i'll do anything to speed someone and then just got on really well the they weren't like traditional private equity type style like fds the cpo turned up and he's leading the acquisitions and his passion and his interest his energy was just i i get it i get that guy and we'd spoke with a lot of people in avalara at that point and the culture the you know the drive even though they've got nearly 6 000 employees it still felt like every individual one of them was like super pumped about what they were they were building so i liked it then started talking about uh the deal structure and um you know it felt like again all the investment my family my wife and children have put into me being away yeah it repaid them like and that i felt like okay right family sorted now good now also um i don't want the story to die don't acquire us and mothball us and it was no we want Vessori to keep building and keep going out serve your customers and serve more grow alongside us and and independently so we keep a team you've paid us really well for the for the business you see value internally for you you're going to maintain the trust that our customers have put into us and I get to then work with an amazing leadership team where where's the downside here I mean you and Daniel Jones you had a co-founder staying in the business yes and uh founder and yeah that's what I meant yeah and all the team and but then also their leadership team were incredible and we met all of them spent time with them in person and uh it just felt like the right move for the family, the business and then them.

34:50Because if I was Avalara and I looked at there's an integration platform here that has the ability to go off and potentially go through its subsequent venture rounds and then be a billion dollar company potential. But we've got an opportunity here to acquire them, resolve multi-million pound issue that we have internally and then they can grow independently. For Avalara it looked like a, if I was putting my Avalara hat on, it looked like a steal because we've got this amazing team, ultra passionate and committed for the foreseeable future, long-term future, and we solved all of our internal problems.

35:29It was a match made in heaven so there was actually no point during the process where I felt unconfident about it happening. You just all felt right. I've always thought of yourself as you don't waste thoughts on stuff that isn't worth wasting thought on and what i mean by that if i did this interview on the friday the odds are you'd still be wearing the same attire that you're wearing now because you've got five identical sweatshirts and six identical trousers just like that you just don't want to waste time on that so you just wear what you wear even though i did hear a rumor that one of your one of your children was born on the 27th of february so he only gets birthday presents 29th yeah yeah he's gone on the leap year the 29th February so he only gets presents once every x number of years.

36:12Oh yeah, see I'm tight. They're very, very sensible. So, so it's not the financial rewards or the rewards generally that get your beans jumping, it's the building that still gets your beans jumping. It's always a zero to one but now I get to go zero to one with inside a huge organisation while still feeling, having that soul feeling of independence which allows me to explore my drive and my passions so there's no a lot of people said to me how's your first day working for someone and actually i it's been better than ever because i don't come in to work now with the existential dread that the business can be no more every single day yeah now it's got the life to go off and i don't have to let's say sign a customer where the revenue isn't quite right for the business i can we can just foresee the vision now fulfill the vision and uh that's the most exciting and things so yeah i think um it's it's it's the best best outcome all right generally delighted to be a final question we always ask at the end of every episode of the naked founder is there's a tradition in the u.s where the outgoing president will write a letter to his or her successor if you had to write a letter to you know a young sean brown founding a business on day one or to anybody else considering founding a business what would you say in that letter uh so at my computer now i've got a post-it note and i've always had the post-it note at any desktop i've been at is uh profit and purpose it's a start reminder at all times don't waste your time on anything outside of profit and purpose because actually and the reason why uh profit is first because profit feeds into your purpose so if i was and i wouldn't write letter to myself because uh there's nothing i would have not liked to have known because i've enjoyed figuring it out along the way if i was going to write a letter to my sons it will be make sure that you and your family are always supported that's absolute number one get that down but then once you've done that invest heavily in mind space time money into your purpose because I do truly believe that once you are once you've found your purpose the contentness and happiness that you have is always there people think why are you working on your laptop late at night and so this is my but this is what I find purpose in like people like to watch tv to unwind I like to build to unwind and this is the thing about profit and purpose if you can get that right and like don't get distracted because everything in life falls into one of the one of the two of those buckets doesn't it really interesting play sport is purpose we did another interview for the naked founder podcast and this particular founder said that she's got three p's a profit purpose passion oh well she would say that i think the probably the purpose comes before the profit and the profit is a byproduct of the passion and the purpose you would argue the profit is what drives the purpose because if you're not making profit you can't well yeah and look like i've grown up in the pub so i know that like you've and i've been skinned recently been really skinned yeah so the um you know i know that when you don't have enough money or haven't got the means to be able to just go and say I'm going to play guitar 24 7 because that was my purpose yeah you can't do that you need to provide for yourself and your family so you need to start with a profit to ensure that you've got the bankroll for the purpose yeah and if you've got that inner purpose passion is part of purpose in my my side because if you've got something you feel purpose of course drive and passion and energy is all going to come I like the fact that you are obviously somebody you build stuff and you're on your laptop all the time but you've still got a post-it note i wonder whether your boys when they reach you know adulthood whether there will be such a thing as a post-it note um listen sean massive thanks for sharing some time giving us your insights as well that's all for this episode of the naked founded podcast as always we're sponsored by financial the home of money for women if you've enjoyed the podcast please press that subscribe button tell your friends and family and as always my name is chris mcguire