Watch This Before Watching The Social Reckoning Film (2026)

0:00Most businesses are selfish, self-interested and short-termists to the point they're almost borderline sociopathic. And I think business should be at the heart of solving the world's problems. And hopefully the kind of businesses we build at Octopus demonstrate that. So whether it's our energy business, our financial services business or our special needs school business, we're trying to build companies you would choose to be friends with.

0:23Simon Rogerson:Nice. Okay. And what is the, you mentioned a really good point then around short-term focus. What is a symptom, if you're a business owner listening to this, of being short-termist? The only stakeholder you really think about is the shareholder. So it's just the bottom line. Drives every single decision you ever make. And that is not the right way to build a company you want to be friends with. It just doesn't work. So Simon, when I look at businesses, there's been, and you might know this better than most, but there's this quote that gets thrown around that like 90 % of businesses fail within the first year, 80 % in three years, 70 % or whatever, it keeps going on.

0:58When you look at all the businesses that you've been involved in, where do you typically see businesses going wrong for them to fail in a short amount of time? I think it's a few things, right? And it normally comes down to the person running it. So sometimes the person running a business just doesn't have it. It's not in their DNA. They don't have the makeup. They don't have the resilience and the staying power that I think entrepreneurs need. Sometimes it will come down to funding. and I have a slightly different view, I think, to some of the US VCs where actually the best thing I think you can do with entrepreneurs, you can find really talented people and then you can give them too little capital, right?

1:34The moment you give someone too much capital, they tend to piss a bunch of it up against the wall. They do a whole bunch of, they hire too many people, they make decisions too quickly and it doesn't work. If I think back to the start of Octopus, right? I'd love to say age 24, we had this amazing mission, we're going to change financial services. We worked in a sector, it was the least trusted sector in the world. It still is 25 years later. but actually it wasn't a big mission at the beginning it was like frustration and then it's a series of tiny little milestones which are about survival the start of a business is survival you set tiny little milestones and you're the kind of person, the kind of human that just does absolutely everything to hit that milestone then you move to the next one and then the next one it probably took us more than a decade to say actually what are we doing this for we've hit all our financial metrics and all our milestones but actually why are we in business what are we doing this for when we look back when we've hung our boots up and we look back and go, yeah, we're part of building that.

2:26What's special about it? Why are we so proud of that? But I think to answer the question, normally the entrepreneur, they just don't have what it takes. And it's really difficult. The vast majority of the population would love to be entrepreneurs, but actually the reality is quite different.

2:41Simon Rogerson:So one thing that has a potential to disrupt some of that is AI coming in. And it feels like there's two narratives, right? There's your Mo Gorda narrative of it's the end of the world, Terminator 2. We're starting there, right? And the other end is Jimmy Carr who says this is a covers band. It'll never be as good as human beings. Where do you sit on that side of the fence? So I don't think it changes. So I don't think it's like everything I've said is true today, but with AI it disappears. Because I think the same thing. Like, human beings will, like, I look at my kids, and my kids are on their phone, on their phones way too much.

3:22And I'm like, oh, my God, that really hacks me off. And so I try hard for them not to be on their phones all the time, but I'm fighting a losing battle. And I think that's going to be some kind of sick warm-up for what's going to come in the next five, ten years, right? Meta has probably done more for social isolation than any other company in the history of companies. And what's he standing up saying now? He's standing up saying, oh, you should all have virtual friends. yeah what are you talking about right i think what will be needed in the future is you will need things to connect to human beings desperately need to belong to stuff right and whether and i think that can be companies right so that's what i want to build i think the role of technology and ai is to try and make the efficiency of the of the process as as good as possible right i don't want back to the same point i'm not going to spend my time on stuff i find irritating because i don't want to have to do that and if ai can solve that for me and do it instantly and really quickly and really smart amazing but actually that frees up a whole opportunity for connection and that connection could come in the form of relationship with company relationship with people human beings i don't think that's going anywhere but i think ai and technology will just make things way way more efficient we always ask the same last question for people that have listened to this episode what's one question that they should be asking themselves i would say if the company you worked for was a person uh would you want to be friends with it right because if the answer to that is no then you probably need to get another job