#88, Tech for good and the future of migrant safety: Tom O'Sullivan, Founder and CEO @ Animus Bytes

0:00In terms of Migrant Watch, we're using open source data to infer locations of people at risk at sea. It'll be something like 25 nautical mile radius, but better than a thumb on a mat. And that really is the first step, is about giving the right people with the right tools the information they need to go and do really what they want and what they're setting out to do, rather than trying to get a ruddy great big oil tanker to look for a dinghy.

0:33sometimes you meet people in life who just inspire you tom o'sullivan is an ex armed forces entrepreneur with a wealth of life experience and life lessons that have really shaped a remarkable individual following a profound conversation with a trusted analyst tom Tom identified a significant issue with immigrants facing perilous conditions at sea, often with fatal consequences. Leveraging his knowledge of geospatial technology, Tom and his team are on a mission using public data sources to track the whereabouts of vulnerable and desperate people on these treacherous journeys and ultimately saving lives in the process.

1:20Tom also candidly shares how he achieves balance in his life, incorporating practices like box breathing, visualization, meditation, and drawing inspiration from his love of philosophy. We also delve into the personal sacrifices Tom has made in his entrepreneurial journey, adding a profound layer of credence to the timeless mantra of everything happens for a reason. Tom is a super authentic individual. There was so much emotion and meaning in this conversation. I'm sure some of the things that we cover will resonate with many people. This is Tom O'Sullivan.

2:05Tom, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders podcast. How are you today in sunny Devon? Yeah, very well. Thanks, Gareth. And thank you very much for having me on your podcast. Absolutely. We were thrilled to get you on. I was really excited about this one for a number of reasons, which we'll unpack in due course. But let's start with the question we always start with. What does good leadership mean to you, Tom? I think for me, mainly it's about ownership, both of your responsibility and of your failures. If you're bringing a group of people together, you should be walking the path first, as far as I'm concerned.

2:39And that might require some hacking through. sure but i think it's ownership and and having humor and humility in the face of the inevitable failures and protecting your guys and girls from that very very good answer completely agree it kind of sounds a lot like leading from the front yeah um forging the path for the for the team behind you sort of thing and being that first guy over the top sort of thing you know to give it a military phase actually in the military side obviously you've got a military background tom Does that perceptional leadership, does it come from that experience? Or where does this sort of lead from the front mentality come from?

3:16I think there's definitely a lot from the military and finding my style. And I think early in my life, I wasn't very good at communicating what I wanted people to do. So it's far easier to show them. And also, when you look behind you and you see a group of guys following you, and they're not being forced to, they're either there through curiosity or because they genuinely believe in what you're doing. And I think that's a style that I've taken with me because I'm comfortable to do everything alone. It's great to have people who are happy to share the journey with me. And it's resonated and stuck with me through my life, really.

3:55That's great. I think having your peers follow you when they're not being forced to is very rewarding, isn't it? So let's go back to the beginning then, Tom, okay? You joined the army, I believe, in early 2006. Is that right? 05-06, yeah. 05-06. Talk us through, let me just ask you the basic question. Why did you join the military? It's something I wrestle with often. And I don't think I have a very good answer for myself. From a young age, I was very interested in doing something purposeful. And I wasn't one of those people that knew I wanted to be a doctor or I was never a kid that said I wanted to be an astronaut.

4:33I felt purpose when I did purposeful things. I probably couldn't articulate why or what that was. And I just had a natural calling to move in that direction. And that was the beginnings of trying to find out how to get in the army. I understand you did a couple of tours of Helmand province then. I was in Musakala in 2009. So, Musakala was a contested piece of land in Helmand province that was given back, I think, twice before we arrived, and then obviously given back recently. But subsequent to our tour, it was handed back to the Taliban. So you joined the military, you obviously get your first taste of leadership there.

5:17Yes. It shapes you in a very formative time of your career. What lessons did you learn from your military experience that have stood you in good stead in your professional career since that since you left the army? That's a very big question. I'll attempt to unpack it in human terms, because I think for me, the lasting lesson has always been that you don't know a person and you probably will never know them very well, unless you spend a great deal of time with them. But everybody has similar thoughts, similar worries and similar concerns in their day to day life and most people have a family if not husband and wife children and the complications and things that that brings as well and a person isn't a name a rank or a number you've really got to dig into the whole human being and at that point it's a privilege you've got to work at that and and so someone's behavior or someone's performance is a condition of their circumstance and their situation.

6:24And you can't possibly hope to help somebody or work with somebody unless you can walk the path of trying to understand who they actually are and what are the things in life that they think are important, sacrosanct, and what are their goals, aims, and objectives as a human being. What sort of, like taking business and leadership aside, were there any other life lessons that you kind of took from that experience, Tom, that shaped you? Yeah, for sure. I mean, in its rawest form, we're very fragile. And that both brings a huge amount of potential anxiety to a person, if you look at it in a fatalistic way.

7:01But equally, there's a huge amount of freedom seeing how fleeting life is, how easy it is snuffed out, how fragile we are when we think we're not just bulletproof, but we ignore our health and fitness and it's easy to do so. But to have a permanent reminder of how fragile we all are is a real asset. And life feels like a privilege to me. I'm in a place in life where I feel like I'm in free time. Early on in my life, there were periods where had the cards been slightly different, I wouldn't be here. And it's not some sort of twisted fascination with the circumstance. because it's very easy to become short-sighted about the whole military danger thing.

7:50We drive cars every day, you know, but we see that risk in a very abstract way. We don't really associate the dangers of road traffic accidents with driving. But to have something as abstract as combat or situations like that, I mean, to give you an example, I sat on a daisy chain IED that someone was trying to set off. We could hear them trying to set something off. yeah and and as as we walked away my bum print was on top of one of the mortar rounds that was connected to the device so and and you think you know that's a big thing for a human being to sort of try and work out in their head at the time but as as you get older you realize that there's a huge amount of lesson in that and and also there's you know i feel nothing but gratitude for the experience because it's easy to sort of and i don't want to kid you that it's with me every day but but certainly it's set a tone of perhaps behavior or certainly gratitude for the rest of my life to date yeah for sure did you know what tom right whenever everyone has periods where they're stressed and they feel you know burned out or whatever but if you sit down i read a lot of stoic content yeah i'm a big who's your go-to my go don't say seneca uh no it's marcus aurelius actually meditations meditations is an absolute game changer for me and i know it's pop it's popular in in the military isn't it well so it should be it's like the only self-help book you need and it's 2000 and something years old it's unbelievable isn't it and i mean it's kind of like i i see meditations and also seneca's letters and some of the work of apetitus as well it's kind of of like the original self-help book isn't it that all 100 it kind of it was the uh they kind of invented the genre you know i'm sure it was going before that as well but you know in terms of modern world i think one thing that stoicism does practice is to is to consider and think about your own mortality okay yes and but but when you do that and when you practice that if you sit down and actually think about it in your and you're in a stressed state it de-stresses me more than anything you know what i mean when you think about your own mortality and you think about gratitude do you know what i mean it kind of brings your heart rate down almost it makes you it puts you in a more reflective mood immediately and then if you chuck box breathing on top of that you know what i mean which is meditation stuff obviously then i mean it is it beats the hell out of any uh drug you can you can take in my experience how many seconds box breathing are you doing seven i do yeah wow okay so just to be just to be clear to the listeners that's seven my seconds might not be full seconds actually not one one hippopotamus two hippopotamus so for those listeners who are unfamiliar with box breathing it's basically uh breathing in and then pausing for in this case seven seconds and then obviously then breathing out but slowing down your breath so it takes seven seconds to sort of empty your lungs and then pause in at that state for seven seconds and then going back up and just going in that box, in that four-pronged box-like way of breathing.

10:58Like any conscious breathing, it has an immediate impact on your parasympathetic system. Yes. So it immediately brings down your heart rate and it's wonderful. I mean, if anyone hasn't tried it, and I wouldn't suggest, you know, obviously listeners, please don't put yourselves in a stressful situation just to try it out. But if you find yourself and you are armed with the simple tools to do it, it's incredible. You obviously sort of seem to be into this type of stuff then. So what type of, are you into meditation? How do you relax and bring your stress levels down? How do you go about it generally, Tom?

11:34I meditate a lot, not as much as I should. But meditation, again, was one of those tools that in an earlier life, I don't want to say previous life, because I talk about the phases of my life in iterations. And they all come with their own identity. And for me, meditation was something that was never part of that identity initially. And like lots of tools, when you're scrabbling around to find something and you're desperate, you start using something because it's seemingly the only thing available to you. And meditation was like that. I found myself for a few years in a place where I felt just extremely stressed and anxious for no real reason that I could tell.

12:16and meditation became a practice, a daily practice that showed huge benefits. And I'm just talking like 10, 15 minutes a morning. My life at the time was in total chaos and it was about bringing some order to that. And I don't mind chaos. There can be huge amounts of opportunity both as a human and outside of that. But when you start to feel like you're completely out of control and the chaos is being given to you rather than you being a participant in creating it. Yeah, meditation's been brilliant. I think routine is one of those things that whilst both making my peace with the fact that we control so little in our lives, most of the time when we give ourselves a hard time, which we do all the time, and incidentally, that's a useful tool that I use every single day is identifying when I'm doing myself down.

13:13but when when we're going through the chaos if we can identify what we control i find that very settling too because we find that there's not an awful lot we do control yeah you can only really in terms of our conduct we can only control our intention to a point i mean and that's that's at a stretch and our breathing yeah we can set our intention on our breathing yeah and we can only judge ourselves by that you know the outcome the effect involves other people or situations that are completely outside of our grasp yeah so if we can disconnect the beating ourselves up from not achieving the outcome and examining whether the intent was good then actually there's only one thing to ask and it's normally yeah absolutely the intention was good and i think most people might use that absolutely that's that's really really good point i think it's kind of like the cornerstone or one of the the main messages from the stoics is you know focus on what you can control and you know don't pay too much attention to what you can't control because what you can't control is normally the stressor isn't it you never really ever stressed about things you can control no no what do you think of visualization when you've got something to do like you know a presentation business event something what do you think about using your mindfulness and your time of meditation to visualize things, to almost run through it as an exercise before the event itself.

14:37Is that something, is that up to all you've used before? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And regularly. And in fact, I was interested in it a few years ago and I read some papers, which I believe were peer reviewed, but don't quote me on it. But they were compelling enough in what they had written and the outcome. In essence, they had a group of athletes, one of the groups they got to train, let's say leg press once a day for seven weeks yeah and the other group they did everything else but leg press but they got them to visualize leg pressing for seven weeks um and they found that actually the control group who had done nothing were as you'd expect no better at leg pressing but the visualization group were significantly higher than expected wow and and i think you know So our brains are powerful things.

15:29And I think I can see the logic. But certainly there's a level of comfort, I think, in presentations, a great example, because a lot of people are, for good reason, by the way, terrified of public speaking. I think it's a fear worse than death, literally. And for me, I can see that it's not about the public speaking. It's about a million years ago or whenever, when we were living in a tribe of people, if we embarrass ourselves and embarrass the tribe, we get ostracized. We basically starve to death or have to fend for ourselves. Public speaking is just, it's the fear of being embarrassed. So I go, what are the stressors?

16:08Well, not knowing my lines, of course, I can solve that problem. That's on me. Okay. What are the other things? Well, I don't know if people are going to like it. Well, I can't control that. So that's out of your control. so yeah and and then but i again it may be i'm gonna try and i'm gonna try and oversimplify stuff for myself because it makes it more manageable and and then i can feel like at least i'm in control of some of that stuff because i think it's natural that we all feel quite stressed out most of the time um yeah and that's not a bad thing it's not a bad thing no stress is good for you in many ways you just don't want it to take over your operating system do you because then that's when you get into problems.

16:49Tom, let's get back on track then. You left the army 2011. You pursued a career in security and risk management, a common career path for ex-forces people. How did that opportunity come about though? And talk us through your experience of working in that space as a consultant. Well, like all army officers probably who end up in the security industry i left having promised i was going to do something other than become a security consultant and then again life has a sense of humor but um i left the military so i was i was medically downgraded for hearing loss and as an officer you know i could have stuck around and been training officer or something like that yeah i took the choice and just you know very gratefully said thanks very much and left and at that time again, I was in a place where I didn't really know who I wanted to be.

17:45The army had been great at giving me an identity. And all of a sudden, I wasn't that person anymore. And I think I just gravitated towards a group of people who were similar. And of course, the security industry has a lot of ex-military people in it. And again, I'm very grateful. In my life, the things that have come by accident are always where the gold is in terms of experience. And for me, I left during the Arab Spring and I went over to Libya, Somaliland, I traveled all across Africa. And I just saw some incredible places and met some amazing people and just had another education. It wasn't formalized military travel to destinations that the military was going to.

18:32It was all over the place on my own pretty much. It was freedom. It was a privilege and it felt like a bit of fun as well. But it was completely by accident, really. Someone was good enough to take a punt on me, having met me a couple of times and recommended me. And I ended up spending a few years in some super cool places. And then I came back to start a family and ended up resurrecting some old skills and working with a group of people to start a cybersecurity business. and from there found an angel, got our first little bit of funding and moved to some offices in London. All right. And then blew my life to pieces for the first time.

19:18In fact, I don't know if that's true. It might not be the first time. I had this idea that I wanted to be this, I don't know, this tech startup person. I said to you, I left the military and just lacked any identity at all and was still in a place where I didn't really know who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. And happenstance took me on a path of the cybersecurity journey. And I bumped into a few people. It sounded like it was something that would be interesting and it had purpose. There were things going on which people needed help with and perhaps lacked the immediate skillset. And as an organization, we could fill that gap.

19:57But fundamentally, it was, for me, I think I was distracted by the sort of fake romance of being a founder and owning a tech startup and getting funded. Because, of course, what the hell did I know about being a founder and owning a tech startup and getting funded? And we moved to offices in London where every business there was going on the same path. and we were talking to Silicon Valley Bank and others who were suggesting what the pitch deck should look like for your Series A and Series B. WeWork at the time was being peddled as this amazing template. The startup culture at the time that I saw anyway was all about getting funded rather than doing something that you enjoyed doing that people would pay money for.

20:51Again, Again, it was an education for me. My family was living in Cheltenham and I was getting the training to Pannington every day. By the time I got to the office, I was probably already four hours traveling to come to my swanky offices, which cost 10 grand a month, which I didn't really know why I was paying for. How many staff did you have? There were three of us. Oh, right. Okay. You probably could have been more cost efficient then, do you think, then looking back now? Yeah. Oh, 100%. And also, there were decisions made that I kind of just let get out of control. And I had a crisis. And at that time, I just decided that enough was enough.

21:29My wife at the time and I were having real problems. And we had two young kids. I was commuting basically most of the day and missing bedtime every single day. And this was not the life that I wanted to lead. and the work was miserable. Everything just started to get quite toxic for me. And my wife at the time, you know, and I just said, something's got to change. And I asked her what she'd like to do. And she said she'd like to move to Spain. So we moved to Spain. Oh, wow. Okay. Is she Spanish or something? Or was there a reason to Spain? No, no, no. No, I just think it was a vision of just getting away, but not so far that we wouldn't be completely out of reach for everyone else.

22:10Because naturally, I'm quite a hermit. I would have loved to have gone to Peru or South America. Colombia, if you've not been, Colombia, Mexico, those countries are filled with some of the most beautiful people in terms of character and humility, and also just beautiful countries. So I would have loved to have gone to South America, but we ended up in Spain as a happy medium. And by the way, I'm either doing something or I'm not, so the whole South America thing may seem extreme to anyone listening. But I mean, most of the decisions in my life are either one thing or the other. And we went to Spain and it accelerated the collapse of my marriage, which I think in retrospect is a good thing.

22:51But it also put me in a place where, in essence, I had nothing. And I turned my back on the business 100%. And I just wanted to be rid of it. And so it continues and I hope it's doing amazingly well. And I'm so glad I left. So you set the company up, but then you left, you passed it on. you left it. No, no, I just walked. I just got on a plane with my wife and kids, went to Spain and left it at that. It had become so toxic. My life had become so marred by this venture and the whole experience around it. And I felt so disconnected with myself. I look back now and I sometimes have nightmares thinking, if the situation at the time wasn't that bad, I might have just hung on.

23:36And that would have been awful, just hollowed out as a human being doing something you didn't want to do. So I'm grateful for the cataclysmic period because growth is painful and change hurts. And you've got to go through it. You've got to shed your skin and move on and learn from it. There's a lot to take from failure. And I think there's certainly in the UK, we have a culture of avoiding failure. I'm not suggesting that we should all go out and just blow things to pieces, but there's not a lot to lose. Then there's a huge amount to be gained from trying something and just going, do you know what?

24:17That was the wrong thing to do. Yeah. From my point of view. Yeah. So you've come back to the UK then. You obviously get back into the security space for a while and then you decide to set up your own company again, essentially. Go through it, well, not through it all again, But you're armed with so much more knowledge and experience now, Tom, that you can go into this with your eyes wide open. Was that how you were feeling about it? Tell us how Animus Bites come about. Well, like we said before, we started recording. Life has a sense of humor. And actually, I'd promised never to start a business ever again.

24:50I quite fancied just pursuing my art. So I paint and I do 3D art and other bits and pieces. But I came back and someone asked for some help with a project. And I gladly started to help them out as a contractor. And the project was software development. And as the conversation grew, their customer looked like they needed a more formal way of us delivering it. And Animus kind of happened through my intention to do a good thing rather than bootstrap something. and to really formalize the renaissance as I saw it, whilst giggling about the fact that I'd obviously gone against my promise to myself that I'd never start a business.

25:35But I think that's life. It felt natural. And as you kind of alluded, it gave me an opportunity to have a hard line and some defendable things that I'm not going to do. And I'm not going to borrow money to build a business because I think that's the wrong path for me. It doesn't mean it's the wrong path for anybody else, but certainly it gave me a far better idea and structure to coming back into it. How do you manage your balance in your life now then? Having gone through all this experience, obviously I know you're into meditation and things like that, but how are you managing your work-life balance right now as an entrepreneur with ambition?

26:17I don't want to sound contrary, but the way I would answer that question normally would be to say, and it might sound offhand and flippant, but to say that I have a life life. There's no work life because firstly, as we've established, I get up pretty early. So my wife is a wonderful human being firstly, but secondly, she gets up at a normal person time. Right. And so I'm awake from three in the morning. Oh my God. I love, no, between three and four. But I love that time. It's precious to me. I'm at my most creative. And I also have something in me where when other people are awake, I'm concerned about being attentive and making sure that I'm poised to help with something, whether it be in the home or with projects or applications that we're making.

27:08And I want to be available to people. I know no one's crazy enough, unless they're overseas, no one's crazy enough to be up at that time. It's my time. It's gratuitously selfish in that way. So how do I manage the work? Well, I do it all before anyone wakes up. And then the work becomes a conversation because at about nine or 10, that's when the email conversations start and then phone calls and things like that. So my day, very much like today, the waking hours for normal people are spent talking to me. Sure. If I want to get stuff done, I've already done that. Or I finished at 7.30 and I'm going to pick it up tomorrow.

27:44Okay, I want to talk about the technology element, especially about Animus Byte. I understand you build operational intelligence solutions, leveraging things like AI and machine learning. How have you found that from a technology engineering standpoint? What challenges have you had to overcome to build a solution that you want to build? I think in all things, understanding the problem is critical. And I think for me, finding a person who really understands the problem that we're trying to solve is the hardest thing. In terms of Migrant Watch, we're using open source data to infer locations of people at risk at sea.

28:28In that context, there are lots of analysts around the world trying to do a similar thing, perhaps mandrolically or perhaps with enhanced tech that helps them do that. I'm not necessarily trying to automate it end to end, but certainly from one of my trite sayings, if you're doing something three times yourself, automate it. It's about taking away the laborious mandrelic work and letting people like analysts do what they're good at and analyze data, structured data that's presented to them in the way that they can interpret and infer stuff to the best of their ability. So I'm all about finding problems.

29:11And the code's not an issue. The code's just Lego. But it's got to tell a story. And that story is driven by finding someone who can articulate a problem effectively so that we can come back at them with a solution that hopefully covers off the outcome or outputs that they're requesting in their problem statement. Yeah, sure. So what kind of organizations do you build these solutions for then? Who is your core customer? Well, Migrant Watch for us, our core customers are NGOs. So non-government organization, NGO. Non-governmental organization and charity. So for example, Médecins Sans Frontières, we've not approached them yet, but we will.

29:54And I would very much like something like Migrant Watch to be something we would just do because if they find it useful, then tick. We have private businesses who are engaging us in bespoke software builds. And Migrant Watch for us could be something philanthropic. that we would gladly see used. So when we start to approach organizations like that to join the alpha and then beta testing, it would be nice to just see it have an impact, have an effect. What a cool thing to think that at a desk you can create something that potentially might impact the saving of life. We all have heard in the media about the issues around illegal immigration coming across the, you know, boats of people coming across the channel, some horror stories, absolutely horrific stories of people drowning and things like that.

30:52How much of a problem is this, Tom? How many people are floating around the Mediterranean and the English Channel trying to get into places like the UK? How much of a problem is there to solve? Well, how many? More than there should be, firstly. For us at the moment, we're focusing just on the Mediterranean. So when we do scale, we've proved the concept with a user, an NGO who will have been on the alpha and beta trials and who confirms that it works for them in their workflow. At that point, we can scale what we're doing to really wherever they want the effect. What I mean by how much of a problem is how many people are dying as a result of us, you know, not, you know, of these trips happening across stretches, of water i'm assuming you track these boats whatever the these in some cases rubber you know sort of very very primitive equipment yeah yeah in most cases so how do you track them we're inferring locations through social media chatter and other communication oh wow okay i understand the simple solution would be to get live satellite data yeah but satellites satellites are really expensive, even though the costs have come down enormously.

32:09So trying to solve the problem in a way that makes it less costly so that we can prove something. And then if we do introduce satellite photographs and imagery, it enhances the already working thing, if you see what I mean. We're inferring through models that we've trained, we're inferring locations because of chatter and social media descriptions. But your first question, how many? So pre-Christmas, people traffickers, and this is just one instance, people traffickers had dragged a rubber dinghy of about 30 people out into the shipping lanes, which is their modus operandi, because then they get picked up and someone has to deal with them.