Jess Richmond: "This is our life's work"

24:22Like, that was probably our thinking, essentially. And then you kind of realise, of course, look at the US. Look what's happened there, you know. We were wrong, of course. These things can shift really quickly. So there was just a very much like in your face, like that could change very, very quickly and have this significant impact. So that was one part of it. But I think the bigger part of it has always been what our ambition was, which at very early days, we had this very ugly infographic on Notion of these various steps for the company. And at the base was let's get the sustainability accounting right because people don't consider it at all.

24:59Back to the truck tray example, right? But we've always thought of this through this kind of finance-based lens and said, well, that's just an input. So the next piece we wanted to do was social impact and nature. Now, we didn't prioritize those because the world didn't go that way. And you think you've got to stay really agile to what people are going to pay for, not your ideology on how something should play out. So what we did do is go, well, actually, with these changes and with this stuff coming in and with this maturity on the reporting, people are essentially saying like how do I consider this as part of my decision making you've got governments at the moment just bringing in new procurement policy saying we must evaluate environmental and social impact alongside these like major capital decisions but people don't know how to do that and so we came back again to the core which is what we know of procurement like at the end of the day this is about decision making so on our little step ladder of where do we want to get to, instead of this suite of all this social impact space, we said, we've got sustainability accounting, but our product is effectively financial accounting software.

26:04It's a ledger. It's got everyone's transactions. It's very familiar. So we can actually leverage that to think a bit more broadly about what we could be. And so we've always had this ambition to say that someday is a home of better decision-making and better decisions to us are financial, social, environmentally considered. And we have modules that allow us to get the inputs to do that. And now we are saying, well, actually, now is the right time to go in and help people make better, faster decisions because AI has dramatically changed what we are able to deliver. It has dramatically changed the way that we can make this accessible.

26:39It's made it extremely affordable. We can now be a multi-product company in a way that you could not with the capital we had 12 months prior. So why would we not use this point in time to go and run at that? and my belief was that if we did do that and we came in with Someday Procurement sitting alongside Someday Carbon and we had the Lego pieces in the back end from a product perspective to keep building out these products quickly, efficiently, affordably that we could actually get to that suite that was you know the future ERP in our lens that we thought would take 10 years. We could probably do that in two or three years and we made that decision in May last year so we're nearly at 12 months and we're selling that second product now.

27:21So the opportunity has just dramatically changed to say we can be a multi-product company earlier than what organizations have ever been before. But there's been a lot of lessons in terms of how to execute on that as well that we've had to learn. So share some of those. I mean, 12 months in some senses is like now sounds like a very long time in the age of AI, but actually even AI in the background has changed a lot in those past 12 months or even what's possible today wasn't possible to build cheaply and excessively six months ago. Maybe could we take a couple of layers of that? One is like at the strategic layer, what have you learned?

27:58And then maybe I'd love you to opine a bit on the customer layer and then the build and product side. Yeah. So I think at the strategic layer, you've got to make a really active decision on whether this is a pivot for your company and you are building another product while you're still running your current product and you're essentially running a pilot to see whether you're going to drop one or go with the other. That's one word. Or are you legitimately building an add-on to your existing product? Or are you building a second product in a suite under a narrative that makes sense for your customers?

28:37You have to be very conscious about those choices at the strategic level. And I think I was not strong enough on that decision. So I think in my mind it was, well, I often talked about, I wrote a memo for our investors around a comparison to Rippling. You know, there's all of these different modules that sit under it. There's, you know, the source of truth for the employee, but then they have all of these different products and that we could do that as well. But at the same time, I chose a completely different brand to go out with, which was RIV. And that was on an assumption that our existing customers would find it too confusing that one minute we're doing carbon accounting and then the next minute we're doing procurement.

29:16The other strategic learning and why that proved to be wrong was you have to pick your ICP properly if you're going to go multi-product. And someday we've been very fortunate, but in other ways it's created a lot of, I guess, rabbit holes for us in making that very bold selection. So in Someday Land, we sell one minute to a fashion retailer and in the same week we might close an international gold mine. We might sell to a local restaurant one minute and then the next minute we'll sell to a listed tech company. We have such variety and we've always had such great inbound. So it's kind of made us, I don't want to say lazy, but certainly not bold enough in our decision making on who are we for?

30:08Where is our outbound engine going to sit? Because we'll have$100 ,000 drop from here and then half a million dollars drop from here. And we just think, oh, well, like we're for everyone. You know, it's working for us. We're better than everyone who says you can't be for everyone. We're somehow special. But coming back to like, what's the strategic learning on that? You kind of have to be like, okay, if you get the inbound, close your inbound. That's not particularly difficult for us. So great. It's like the cherries on top, take them. You're not going to turn people away. But that's very different to being extremely conscious and bold and saying, these are the people we care about.

30:44We are going to set up the engine room to go and find those people, hunt those deals down, close those deals, own a category, go, go, go. I didn't make that call early enough. And something that I always talk about with the team internally, it's like, if we want to be like a PE style company, or if we want to be what we were before we took VC, and a really profitable firm, then you can do that and you can do a good job of that. And in some ways, it's a danger for us because we know that world pretty well. Like I can run a profitable company. But once you decide that, no, the impact you need to see to bring what you think is right to life and you go and take venture capital to bring that to life, then I shift gears entirely.

31:31So all this sounds great and it would have been great in our old world where we were a bootstrapped company and things were working. But it's not going to be the path to be a$10 billion company. And so I constantly keep that in my mind. And I think that's really important, especially for founders coming in now where it's, again, easy to build. It's glamorous to build. If you want to take venture capital, if you want to build a global company, it's not going to be about that. It's going to be about how quickly you can infiltrate a certain customer, how quickly you can sell, how quickly you can have the trust.

32:03And so by sort of diluting our rigor and thinking on some of that and saying, well, someday, someday, someday that people come, we can do the same thing in our multi-product land. We can be for everyone and just see where they come in. And if we sort of see more customers in one area over another, then that's where we will go. And so I was just poking the bear around in all of these industries being like, where is that going to come from? And when we stopped doing that and said, well, it's working still pretty well. I mean, we're still bringing in good revenue through the door, but it is a bit of a, it's still not enough to be what we want to achieve.

32:43So when we said no, actually, we are selling a second product. We are pulling it in under our suite and we are selling to the customers we want to sell to, to have the impact that we want to have and who have the need most directly. I had to get comfortable with, and I'm like, I bet, I place too many bets. Like I'm a little bit, you know, hedge here, hedge there. And if this one doesn't go well, I've got plan B. If this doesn't go well, I've got plan C. Like I do that probably too much, like to our detriment. So every decision I make is like, well, if ABCD happens, then EFG can happen. And I needed to stop doing that and go, just place a bet, Jessica, that these are the customers we should go for.

33:22And if in six months you're wrong, you're wrong. You failed. Get over yourself. It is what it is. You don't have to have plan B, C, D, E here. Because when I do that, I just hedge how deeply we go on these things. And the second we made that decision and went like, no, this is who we're going for. And it's coming in under a Sunday suite. We're not running a different brand. Within like 30 days, we'd closed our first government contract. Okay. So quickly, let me come to this. So you sunset Riff, which existed as a brand for two-ish months. Is that right? Yeah. If that. First of all, congratulations, because saying no to something is very hard.

33:57And like, what changed? Why were you suddenly like, screw it. I'm going to do it differently. I'm going to take both the self-reflection around me being part of the problem here. Yeah. But also I'm going to go all in on something that feels to me much scarier and less well traversed. Comes back to a bit of that thing. I know Blackbird talk about like life's work or like what do you what do you actually energize to do for the next 10 years to become this like generational company? And I think my dabbling in areas where I sort of knew there was a good business case and that would come off and be quite profitable.

34:30But I just actually didn't have any like passion for those areas. Like I didn't necessarily want to work with those type of customers and do that type of work. And so as we were sort of seeing like seeing a bit of pull there and a bit of pull here, I just realized like I will be sitting here dabbling for another 12 months. And I think because we'd made the bold bet to go to a second product, we've been doing this for a few years now. I was like, this is the time. Like there's been a fundamental change in how the world works. There's a fundamental incentive for organizations to do things differently that there's never been before.

35:03We're sitting here with capital. We're sitting here with a great team. We've got the capacity to run. And I'm sitting here just dilly-dallying around on 10 ,000 different ICP profiles. What am I doing? Just go hard on the thing that I consider to be my life's work. So what we did is we said, right, we are good at navigating complex internal systems. We are good at cutting through the noise. We are good at building trust really quickly with people who are navigating new things. That's been our background. It's what we're exceptionally good at. So the thing that's most impactful for me is if we can improve decision making quality and speed where the public funds are involved, where the impact on SMEs around those decisions is significant, where various groups of communities throughout the country are going to be impacted by these decisions.

35:58Where is that? It is government agencies, departments, higher education and local councils. They are the ones making the decisions that drive this whole country. They're the ones making decisions that impact mums and dads, right? So for me, that's where my passion sits. I've always had a little bit of a like finger in the policy or politics pot. And so if I can come in and say, well, the world has changed. We have to adopt these new approaches. Productivity, efficiency, equality, all of these things can be achieved so much faster, so much more directly than ever before. But I know you're slow and I know that you're going to find it very hard to navigate this.

36:38I think we can do a fantastic job of that. I think we have the products and the people to do a fantastic job of this. This is what I'm energized by. This is what I can work till 3am on every night of my life and be happy about. This is what I want to do. So we did the presentation for the team and said, great, I know you're talking to the miners over here and I know you're talking here and I know you're closing deals, which is great. And these deals are significant. We do over 30, 40, 50k ACVs, right, that come in. So you could be very distracted by that and just keep going. But we said, no, like this is our life's work.

37:09This is where Lindsay and I get a lot of drive from. This is our biggest impact. Just do this, please. And what we have learnt from that as well. So are you turning down the 30K ACV? We take what comes in as inbound, but we're not going to go and hunt for them. So you'll still see. And you're comfy if the product ultimately doesn't serve them that you'll churn them. Yeah, exactly. We will actively churn. This is what I said to one of our sales guys. Like, you know, if this is, you know, the path that they're on, we have got to be a bit more bold here and actively churn. like if this is what we need to do.

37:41We haven't had to do that, but that's where the rules of the game are sitting at the moment. But in doing that as well, you realize how deep you can go on a certain space to understand it, understand that customer. You can go far deeper. You can understand policy changes, procedural changes, workflow changes. You get to know one agency, you get to know 50 agencies. It's the same problems. It's the same people. Repeat, repeat, repeat. So now I can see how much more efficient that we are as a sales team, as a go-to-market team, and how much more effectively we can build trust by being really direct and clear on that versus sitting there and going, well, whatever falls in our lap, we'll take and we'll have mediocre success as a result of that.

38:24And I think there will be some folks in a post-AI world, you know, where actually the revenue, early revenue, whether it's sticky, but early revenue is actually easy to get. Yes. And there's the risk that for some of those founders, it takes them longer and longer and longer to realize there is a sort of product cost associated there. So I think there's a lot to be learned from your experience. Michael often said to me, you know, you guys needed to have spent more time in like the trenches, right? Because we've avoided that. And so I think some founders in my position be like, this is amazing.

38:54Like we'll probably be profitable by the end of the year. We have customers that want what we've built, which is obviously the hardest thing to do. But we've never been in that position where it's like nobody has what we want and we've got six months of runway and we've got to burn it all down and we've got three months to go. Let's go, let's go, let's go. Now, part of the reason we'll probably never be in that position is the DNA of Lindsay and I, we don't get into that trench. There's no way you've got like four months of runway left. And as I said to Michael last week, I'm like, we're not those people where you get in the trench and we're like, let's go.

39:26You know, maybe that's, you know, a fault of ours. But we're not energized by that. As I said, we're the contingency planners. So I don't want to be in the trench going, oh, there's 12 weeks before we buy the whole team. We don't deliver on customer value and it all turns to shit. Like I'm not somebody that's energized and motivated by that. I am energized and motivated by building a strong company, not a startup, a strong company. And so when I am building that. You've got a point of view. What's the difference between a strong company and a strong startup? I think the mentality on startup is that it's just like crazy bold bets, which it is obviously to a degree regardless.

40:03But you sort of have the mentality that it's a little bit brittle or fragile for these periods. And if you are like us and you sort of sell to enterprise and you sell to government and you have these big contracts and they're multi-year and you have these obligations and you're doing engine room work in those organizations. I do not have the mentality that like somebody is a startup as a result of that because the startup narrative is like, well, not many survive and it could be the end at any point in time. So therefore we make these crazy bold bets and like it is what it is. We have kind of gone down this path where we are this really trusted software and support inside these organizations that have compliance requirements, have these big obligations.

40:46We're in the engine room of some of their biggest decisions. So I take that really seriously. And we had like a customer on a call here a couple of months ago and they were introducing us to a CFO. And she was like, someday it's not a startup as such, but they're a new company. And we were all like, someday it's for sure a startup, right? But we don't have that as our persona. It's not a mentality we have. We have a mentality that this is an enduring company and we want to reach strong profitability as early as possible. and we want to play the game that we want to play to be here in 10 years time and to add the most value to customers.

41:22So if that is sort of your mentality, then you're certainly not someone that's like, oh, I'll jump in the trench with three months to go and no one wants my product. And that's where I thrive. Like, it's just not, we don't have the DNA of that rightly or wrongly. And maybe that's wrongly. Well, I want, I want to pick up two things there. I'm going to start quickly with, you said you had this conversation with the team. It feels like they probably saw a different version of Jess than they've seen before, right? Which was like, I love that you've got all of this fabulous inbound. I'm going to value that less than I'm going to value you pouring your energy into this new ICP.

41:56And also, you know, they'd been living this sort of universe of the last 12 months of like, we're building an additional product. It's going to get called RIF. Oh, actually, hold on. RIF is no longer around. Like how did the team respond? Because I'm sure also you had people come into the team who were passionate about climate. What was the sort of team response to this sort of tumult and change? Yeah, 100%. So we have some of the most exceptional team members probably of any startup of our stage because we can attract them on the opportunity for impact. So when we get some brilliant senior engineer that leaves Canva for us, it's because they care so much about the work, right?

42:38And so I did have some of them come and say, one of the key reasons I'm here is because I want to have this impact. I'm not exactly over the moon about dedicating my life to like a procurement process, right? And so this is where the vision has to be so well understood by your team. And you can't just stand on your soapbox and founder your way through 40 minute monologue on your vision, right? No one really gives a shit and no one really like believes you. you kind of have to be so much more grounded in that so for me for example I would say all right um the reason we're going for this is because this is where the outside impact is and these are how decisions are made in these organizations and I know because I've been there and I know what you see is that this is a departure from um climate but actually if you care about sustainability and you want people to make these decisions this is the engine room you have to live in I will literally go and get say like the procurement policies of these state governments And I will highlight that this got dropped three months ago and it says we must now evaluate sustainability and social impact and we must innovate in our process.

43:44And I will highlight that and put it in our deck and go, yeah, it's not me bullshitting you with my vision of the world to motivate you. This is literally what people are trying to figure out how to grapple with. And this is what we've always imagined. We've always wanted good decisions to be through this lens of social and environmental and financial impact. You're never going to get rid of that. So you actually have to build a product and you have to build the capability to actually grapple with financial payback as much as environmental, as much as social. And if you're not doing that, then I know that you're really passionate about the sustainability side, but you're never going to be a$10 billion global company that everyone uses as decision infrastructure.

44:25And therefore, you won't have the impact. And we have a very logical team that get that. But I think you have to do the hard work as a founder if you're going to make those switches and those changes and be really direct to actually take the time to brief your own team the same way you would investors or the same way you would explain to a customer. Because if they're not genuinely on board with that shift and they can't see what you see, undoubtedly you're not getting the best from those people. Yeah. I mean, I think what you've alluded to there is quite a clear line of sight and logic. And it's quite in keeping with the DNA of someday to move to this hyper pragmatic space, which is like actually Trojan horsing.

45:07Yeah. Which I think is some of the language that you've used, you know, like making sure that the decisions that get taken, take into consideration things that you care about. You're not asking someone to consider a new thing. Exactly. So the second part I really want to pull out here is customer. Yeah. Your ICP now is like the unsexy world of government procurement. And the people who do those jobs diligently against a backdrop of a thousand different considerations. Why do you love working with these types of customers? I think that we are able to bring something a little different because it's not exactly like going in and running a startup and being at the forefront of tech.

45:45Like the average, very risk averse person is not going to do that. And a lot of the time that people that have sat in those organizations or come from those worlds are also not the people that have exposure to it. And therefore you don't, you can't see, can't be what you can't see. And so they just don't go and do it. Whereas I think we're one of the few software companies that have kind of come from this very, very grounded place who also have the capital and the resources and the team to do things at the forefront of of tech and you don't often get that combination and I think what it means to me is I I'm not overly thrilled with the idea of oh I go and sell to lovable right it's just not where I have particular I don't know DNA or passion but if I can go into a department or an agency who has a mandate to you know put public funding into local businesses and make decisions that impact mums and dads and families in that region and do so through all of these lenses.

46:48And I can come in and our team can come in and say, we've been you effectively or we get you or our parents are you, our friends and family are you, we know you. We get to come in and take away so much fear and take away so much complexity that gives them the breathing room to just define like how you're actually going to tackle this next period. And I used to love it at a micro level. I used to love putting on a hard hat. I'd go up into this zinc mine and be covered in shit and sit there with these engineers who, you know, it's annoying. Like, oh, I don't want to use the cloud. I don't want to log in here.

47:24Look at my piece of paper that I've done things on. But I just get so much joy out of sitting there and going, Frank, I'm telling you, this is going to be easier for you. Just sit with me. And I think we have as a company, Lindsay must be one of the most patient human beings in the world. We have the patience to sit with those people who don't know what AI is. Most of the agencies we're talking to, they don't even have full access to co-pilot yet, right? They're in a very different world. And we have the patience to sit with them and take them through what they need to know to trust us, to go to that next stage where we're all on this sort of same wavelength of how do we do better for the people that we serve here.

48:03And that to me is like extremely impactful work where we can put that DNA that we have to work in the best possible way where the consequence of doing that is also really quite outsized. Yeah, I mean, and just to make plain for people who may misestimate the prize to be won, even from a TAM standpoint, like one in three dollars spent in most OECD countries is spent by government on a thing. 100%. So, you know, helping them make better decisions has phenomenal upside from an impact standpoint. But also we're talking about large amounts of dollars, large amounts of transactions that have economy-wide impact.

48:43Billion dollar budgets. You've got one state, I mean, just take Tasmania Public Service, 30 ,000 employees from Find Me. Many companies that have 30 ,000 employees. So your ability to have an impact and give those people an opportunity to use the latest tools for their own careers as well. we know what the uncertainty is there. They should have an opportunity to do that. Taxpayers should have an opportunity to understand that people are leveraging what is available to get that efficiency, productivity, better services. Like the TAM is enormous and look at Australia is one thing, but I mean, every country is the same.

49:20That's right. So talk me then through the go-to-market strategy around that. It has to reflect the timescale you're going to be working on and the educational requirements around that. How have you thought about that? Yeah, so I mean we're doing one at the moment where you know it's I think we've probably done it at record pace because of the things that we are really good at but first sort of government customer that we've pulled through is you know you're in three four months of conversation we just did 950 questions on everything from cyber to social to sustainability everything you can because you're about to then update the process of the 950.

50:00You see the process and you're like, oh, quite ironic that all of these difficulties that you are having as an individual that's trying to procure from us is insane, right? So we are exposed to the very thing that we are solving immediately. But I think like we're able to sort of come in and go, well, we know how long that's going to take. We're probably going to do that faster than anyone. and we know what those processes look like. The good thing about these types of customers and it's similar for anyone tackling this space is you kind of get one, you get many because if one agency or industry has gone, the organisation has gone through this, then great, I don't have to, you know, my DD has been done for me by another agency, right?

50:43But also the social proof because there is this sense of like, oh, is that departmental? You must be safe. Exactly, 100%. You sort of, you have that. The other thing is when you think about, as we said before, like running a company instead of just running like a startup and all of the rules that have applied to startup land in the past. A lot of that is changing now. And I think one of the ways where you can go in and add a lot of value and I guess deliver that trust much earlier as well is to also go in in a services play. And I know services like terrible, terrible uh i think the best companies at the moment globally you'll hear about forward deployed engineers all of the time right everyone that is going after a really high um acv that has an opportunity to expand is going in in this forward deployed way because we used to have all these memes in product management land around you know the pizza with all of the toppings if you start accepting these changes to your product from all of these people that's irrelevant now i can go on customize a dashboard for an agency, which is usually all they want very easily, right?

51:54So, we're not in pizza topping land anymore. So, if that is all true and you can do it profitably, which has definitely been our background, why are we not going in? And forward deployed engineering doesn't just mean like a software engineer. Why are we not putting our best people forward and delivering that service upfront initially to help them navigate this process, to improve the workflows or their governance structure or their templates, all the things we have the capability of doing. Charge for that well and then help them make the decision on whether they're going to expand and roll out our suite or are they going to build internally, whatever.

52:32It's on us to make sure that we add the value that they wouldn't make that decision as it is for every software company right now. So if you're worried about, oh, they'll just build internally if I help them learn how to build an agent internally and won't buy our software or you've got bigger problems, like go and go and capitalize on that and for us I think that's been a great strategy is that we have that capability to essentially run an AI native services firm do that particularly well in a way most consultancies cannot because they're not at the forefront of building with and using AI in the way that we are build the trust and then come along and that that ICP allows us to do that as well pretty effectively we we had to do that in carbon accounting and we did it pretty effectively no finance team or accounting team had really sort of heard about this.

53:19We tackled it first as our own firm. We to date probably have around 1800 people that have been through our academy because we've been upskilling people and educating them on that space. So really I see that sort of AI literacy and leadership as foundational work for people to know how to procure your software in the first place. Now most startups aren't going to have the ability to deliver that because they don't have the capability internally in the first place. Who are you going to deploy into that customer to do that work? That's fine. And it's not for everyone. I think it's, you have to be very conscious around like, do we have the DNA?

53:55Are we particularly good at delivering like an exceptional service or are we actually a phenomenal PLG style product? Why would you do it? You just have to know who you are, where your lane is and play that well. But if you are particularly good at that service aspect and you know you can get in earlier and you're trying to sell tomorrow, not in 12 months time when the chips have fallen a little bit more in terms of how do we procure AI innovation use cases, then you actually have to find a way to get in quicker. Do it. And so what's the approach been there? Because for Someday 1.0, as you mentioned earlier, the academy, like Lindsay built out together with others in your team, this incredible sort of like online learning platform of like upskilling accountants to become carbon accountants.

54:36Are you thinking about it the same way? Is it an education-based module or is it humans? Humans. I think at the moment, I think if you are going into these sort of slower customers that aren't at the forefront of tech, you're not selling to tech, you have to just accept that A, they don't know how to procure you. B, they're sitting there working out what the guardrails on co-pilot should be and who should have access. um c like talking about building an agent is just like a theoretical sort of concept at the moment for the most part so even if you have the best product going around that's going to transform everything you've got like three layers until somebody is going to get to you and say okay yes let's let's actually adopt that like that's just fact so i think you're in a world now where you actually have to be able to do it for them you have to show not tell you don't do a little demo to show people how to use your product and say good luck and customer success will check in with you in 30 days time and i hope it's going well that's not the playing field it probably will be in 12 or 18 months and so if you're playing in 12 18 months well as with nearly all commentary on this space at the moment this this conversation will probably be irrelevant but if you're playing today, you have to take a do it for you mentality.

55:57Super interesting. So you're obviously, I know it's early days, but you're chatting to governments all over Australia and presumably elsewhere in the world. How big are the differences in these conversations? Yeah, I think the best way to sort of show up in those types of organisations, whether it's government or some other old school mid-market industry, is if you're a technical founder and you have an amazing product, I would say you have to find somebody that's writing alongside you that that customer can resonate with almost instantly. So my best conversations to date is, and again, founders have to sell.

56:35So that's a given. You have to be able to go in and talk about your lived experience in some way or tell a story that helps those people have an aha moment that you really get it. And if you don't have any of those stories and you have never been exposed to this and you don't really have a mental model of who's who in the zoo because you've kind of worked in the zoo yourself like if you don't have any of those things I'm not saying it can't be done but it is extremely difficult so you have to be able to go and walk in the door and not really even talk about your product in the first 30 minutes you're sort of sitting there and going generally this is the space we're in I like to lead nearly all sales with stories like so I was talking to such and such or when I was at such and such.

57:20This is what was happening. This is what the pain point was. Thanks so much for making the time. I'm so keen to hear whether any of that resonates. And I know it's going to resonate. I know damn well it's going to resonate. To the core, I will pick the story. I will pick the character. I'll pick the examples on what I know is going to hit them because I've done my research. I've looked at every policy. I've looked at every tender that's gone out, I've gone in, I've downloaded every single$10 ,000 over$10 ,000 spent, I know who they work with, I can pattern match. And you have to be able to pattern match in those types of organizations.

57:54We do it at a really granular level to the point where for each role, like even a CFO, we'll have CFO persona that we know is going to be someone that is extremely disciplined. They have implemented the governance and the workflows and the policies and procedures, nobody is getting$20 ,000 through that organization without going through these steps. And we'll have a persona for the CFO that has that ambition, but has not been able to execute on that. And everything is entirely manual. And the template on SharePoint is from 2017. And so if I know that I have that person, I've worked for that person.

58:27It's been my responsibility to try and help improve things for that person. I'll come in and say, oh my gosh, like the last nightmare SharePoint update I did where there was a 2017 business. Yeah, exactly. You should see what I do. You can talk to it and then you're not talking about the product. I'm not like someday 2.0 does blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm just establishing that I know you and I get the pain you've got. And if you're open to it, I can share what I've learned about that. And here's what I've built. And I, I'm not saying that we're sales, you know, gurus, but I do think that that's how we've been able to get into those types of organizations and have a relationship where that trust exists.

59:07It's this notion of like, it is about opportunity. AR literacy is about opportunity. I think we've talked, you know, schools have talked about digital literacy for a long time. We've understood that that has some kind of an impact. I think the difference has been that in some respects, even if the education system didn't get it right, we live in a digital world, young people have smartphones, whether they do or don't have social media at the moment is, you know, a question for regulation. But, you know, nevertheless, there was this sense in which the exposure was coming from multiple angles. So even if societally we didn't design it right, there weren't going to be huge amounts of people left behind.

59:42It doesn't seem clear to me that the exact same thing will be true for AI. And certainly not for the part of AI, which is how can this become an enhancer to your day to day? How can you get the most out of it so that you are maximally productive and still have a job at the end of this process? 100 % and I think so often we're clouded by the LinkedIn world of what the narrative is on this right and I find that rather exhausting because we're just sitting there with all of our opinions at these macro levels of AI and at the forefront of like one particular tiny square of the economy in tech. Like I talk to my friends who might be like a conveyancer or ones working in reception or I look at my own parents, you know, that only got a smartphone because COVID made them scan a QR code, much to their disgust, right?

1:00:30That's like the world that I'm from and I talk to those people and I see what I see in our organisation and the insane level of shift in job definitions and what good looks like now. And they are brilliant operators. And that is a dramatic change. How would I assess their productivity and their output today versus even three months ago? Chalk and cheese. Say more about that because you mentioned like you now are staying up late, you know, delivering PR. So how have you thought at someday team level about what kind of an agentic supported workforce looks like? it's really highlighted to me what good is going to need to look like in some of these like customer organizations which is great because we've almost developed our own case study for the approach but if I try and be really practical on this we've gone through probably the same journey most tech companies have been going through where there's been such a shift in what each role can do.

1:01:32So design can now code, software engineers can now design, but not only can our non-technical people go and do, you know, pay for some front-end change with their eyes closed very, very easily. What we've also seen is a little bit of a fear of stepping on each other's toes. You like your peers, right? You get along with them really well. And so what we had as an example as a designer is like I'm an exceptional designer but you know Simon he's the engineer like what's Simon going to feel if I just go and ship basically this whole new piece right and then amazing redundant will you feel redundant so am I adding to taking away something that has been their identity and their job since forever and I don't really want to do that right that's the friction that's happening inside all of these organizations today now the difference between us and I think a lot of companies is, say, Simon is at the forefront of understanding what AI can do.

1:02:36He experiments himself and he's an excellent educator. So he's very confident in his own capabilities and he has already redefined his role mentally. He knows he's not going to be sitting there doing a front-end PR and so he's not put off by that. He's not scared about that. He realizes that his role now is to move essentially into internal tooling that sets up better outputs for the non-technical people to do that work who are closer to the work. So Simon's already moved on to non-technical tooling. He's already set us all up. And so Simon went and ran a workshop with me and Lindsay and our designers and said, hey, I've gone in, set up all these agents.

1:03:13I've gone and used our design system. I've set up all these guardrails of everything that we've done. I've pulled X from linear over the years. I've got this to as good as I can get it. He knows that I hate dark mode. So he's like, Like, look, it's normal. It's normal. It's not Debbie. Why do you hate that, man? Because I'm just like, oh, it looks so Debbie. And it just looks unnecessarily Debbie. Like, why do you guys do this? So he's like, look, I've got it in normal looking software. Just come in. This is how you guys can use it. And he was so incredibly patient with our designers who were like, am I stepping on your toes?

1:03:44Like, not at all. This is what I want you to be great at. This is how I work through these bugs. This is how I prompt. This is what you can do. So because we had that, we were just accelerated. Now all of us are on this system that Simon set up. He keeps it up to date. He helps us when it gets complex. But I have four extra people shipping product compared to three months ago. But if you have a Simon who is not at the forefront of this, hasn't done his own research and education, isn't confident enough to go and educate and support everyone else in the team to take that lift that he has just taken, what does he do?

1:04:16He says, that's my job and I haven't figured it out yet. So you need to slow down until I figure it out. And then I'll come back to you. And that's exactly what is or is about to happen in essentially all of your customers' organizations. So you have to break through that. And if you can help them break through that, as we've done, the productivity shift is extraordinary. Like, I feel like I'm on some kind of drug every day. Like, it's wild what we can achieve in a day now and what I can personally do in a day. I'd always felt like being non-technical was this huge disadvantage, right? And now I'm like, it's not at all.

1:04:53It's amazing if you have a Simon and you have a team that is getting around it and you're improving those internal tools all the time. It's a different world, not just in terms of what those people can do and their own careers and their own skills and what they do, but it absolutely changes the game in terms of the strategy you can execute on because we would not have been able to run this concept of multiple products if you didn't have that. How would we have the resources? We're a small team. but you're internally building the tools to do that, changes exactly what you can do. I mean, it just does strike me that Simon is an unusual person.

1:05:29A lot of people in the face of uncertainty, their instinct is fear. That's very human. And it's interesting that he hasn't taken that approach and you've elucidated quite clearly what the uplift of that can be. So I want to pick up, I want to come full circle, you being the non-central casting founder. And you sort of alluded to this earlier, like I'm not the technical founder. it's come up multiple times in the interview so there has been I think it's probably fair to say a area of insecurity perhaps as a founder like any of us who are non-technical founders are very aware of that fact about ourselves right but also you've come from kind of you're not you didn't grow up in Surrey Hills in Sydney or in you know Cremorne in Melbourne you know you didn't grow up around you mentioned you know your friends are receptionists and yeah you know conveyances and you know real people quote yeah um for the people listening to this who themselves are not steeped in those same networks with those same connections yeah what's your advice to them yeah I think it's basically the world has changed on what you can do now whether you have those skills or you have that exposure or not you can literally take an idea that you might have go inside and up to call a pro account, go into choose your poison of various platforms to bring something to life as a prototype and go and talk to the people you already know to sell it.

1:06:51So I would say do it. You should be following or optimizing for proximity to customer, not capital. And most of the time, if you are a real person, the real problems you want to solve are lived experiences generally. And so you obviously know people that have those problems. You obviously probably work in a work place that has that problem you can build the app probably in an afternoon you can go and give it to that person and say you know would you pay for this and this is exactly what we did in a different world with our very glamorous SharePoint sites we just did the thing put it in front of people and started paying for it and I remember Blackbird being like what do you mean like you've already got a couple hundred grand like who's paying for this shit and I'm like excuse me but uh maybe we They were surprised to learn people are willing to pay.

1:07:40They were very surprised to do that. But if you can do that, then like getting to the, finding the fancy people with the capital, that's not the hard part anymore. If you can show that you've spun something up and that you have some customers and a lot of people do. I speak on a few panels. I talk about this a little bit. So I often get young people from regional areas reaching out to me on LinkedIn and being like, how do I do this? And I just say the same thing every time. what you can achieve is only just your limitation on what you think you can do. If you just say to yourself right I've got 48 hours how far can I push this idea and how many people can I go and put this in front of in 48 hours you'll change exactly the way you think about what this next step needs to be.

1:08:24It's literally never been easier to do that so why would you not? Like the worst case is it wasn't a good idea and it failed and you go to work again tomorrow like the best case is it totally changes your life so have a double brilliant final question for you jess what's a big question you're grappling with right now yeah i'm a lot of big questions as i'm sure there is for many founders at the moment but one particularly in the space that we're in is how much time and energy should I give from a strategic perspective to forecasting out what is going to be reality for our customers of society and then I think near future and so I often think about seeing how much is changing in our own organization or in tech industry and knowing that the dominoes are going to keep falling and affecting other areas we're not anywhere near I don't think the peak in terms of what AI can do and how it will be applied.

1:09:28So what happens when people start to realize what some of us are starting to see? How does that play out? Do we end up in a world where from a financial perspective, we can't justify how we have structured companies? The headcounts we have are just nowhere near what reality looks like anymore. Are we going to need to be in this world of universal basic income and then how do you wrangle what's my job at the moment really should I be hypothesizing around that and putting energy to that and should that be influencing the way that we build or we think about building I do that at a little bit of a basic level at the moment in terms of well you know everything essentially should be headless so you kind of need to anticipate that agents are going to do the jobs of people and your product needs to become a database for them otherwise you're doomed I go to that level and I prepare at that level but is there anything else I need to do or is that just so far outside of our control there is no point and just focus on the three months ahead the three years ahead don't get too lost down that path and I think that's probably something a lot of people are grappling with at the moment and importantly that's what our customers are also grappling with that's on their mind so I think the best thing we can do is it's impossible to not think about it but is to show up authentically in those conversations when you're sitting to someone and you're showing them like here's my agent that just did a 10 times better job of evaluating this tender than what um jonathan has ever done over here that is that can be very confronting so i like to show up as authentic as possible in those conversations go i know that's confronting this has happened to us but this is how I see it.

1:11:15What do you think? And invite the conversation. I don't have other tactics in terms of how to go beyond that at the moment, but it's a really unusual time that we're considering this level of meta question and everyone is around us as well. Big question. Very big questions. Thanks, Jess. No worries. Thanks, Kate.

1:11:37Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn more from other ambitious people building, designing and creating the world that we all want to live in, then please hit the subscribe and follow button. This podcast is a labour of love from the Blackbird team and Day One. The show is produced by Camilla Herring from Blackbird. Our marketing genius is Laura Cofford. And our editors are from Day One. Andy Jones, Sanjay Chabaria and Georgia Catalan. Thank you all so much for listening and I'll see you all next week.

1:12:12Thank you.