Rarely is your first idea your best idea, with Mitti's Luke Anear

20:29Luke Anear:And insurance, if you can get half a percent, it's massive. Yeah, those margins matter. Yeah. So every single one of our customers already buy insurance. This is such a fascinating industry because insurance came about in 1666, the Great Fire of London. And even back then, the fire departments were owned by the insurance companies. And people had a plaque at their house to say which insurance company they were with. And the fire departments were supposed to, I don't know how true this is, but they were supposed to prioritize only the places that were on fire that were their insurers. It's when a market doesn't work as you intended.

21:03Luke Anear:Yeah. And so, you know, this model hasn't changed for hundreds of years. And yet all of our customers already spend money on it. So I think now we're able to say, hey, we'll not only give you the tools to run your business better, but we'll also be able to underwrite the risk of things going wrong and then help you improve every day. So it's really cool. It's an exciting time. And I think we're just getting started. So exciting. So take me through, actually. I can see that the insurance business, and it's been one of the most successful parts of the kind of midi universe for the last couple of quarters and certainly a couple of years.

21:37Talk to me about like the move there, actually, and you alluded to this. You needed sort of five years of data. Talk me through the product strategy behind saying we're going to start here. Did you have to like collect different forms of data in order to set yourself up? Did you have a sense of what time horizon you were working to there? or is it actually at some point you looked back and said, I've got what I need to do a thing that we had on the backlog?

22:01Luke Anear:Well, I knew we were onto something early on. Probably a year or two after we started, we had insurers from around the world coming to us saying, can we buy your data? And we weren't interested in selling our data to anyone, our customers' data. But they could see that they would get richer insight into their own customers through you, right? Yeah, we would see what people were doing every day. If they were storing food, were they checking the temperature of the food? and if they had trucks and they would check in the tires on the trucks and how often they did that. All these data points, billions of data points.

22:30Luke Anear:And so we could see the behaviors of a team every day. We knew what great looks like in each different industry and we were used across all these different industries. At the first eight years, we had no external salespeople and no marketing. This was all inbound, so we kind of tapped the nerve. So it gave us this insight that no one else had. Insurers could only see when someone put a claim in or when they renewed their policy, they'd get limited data points. And so we knew - It's actually wild how much money is in an industry that is so blind. Yeah, it is so blind and yet it doesn't, it's got by because it hasn't had to know all that in order to make money.

23:07Luke Anear:It's just that we can now do it better. And so that's what's amazing about it. It's a huge industry. It hasn't done it as smart as what it could and yet it's still been incredibly successful. You know, there's$7.1 trillion spent last year on insurance globally. It's a lot. Like people don't understand these numbers, like we throw them around, billions, trillions. If you break it down into like seconds, a million seconds is 11 days. That's how long it takes to get through a million seconds. A billion seconds is 31 years. That's the difference between a million and a billion. But the difference between a billion and a trillion is 31 ,000 years in seconds from 31 years.

23:48Luke Anear:And so this is a massive industry. It's one that all our customers already spend money on. It's a huge enabler for society. You can't even go and have a drink at the pub unless the pub has insurance. You can't get in an Uber unless they have insurance. You can't even do this podcast unless this building has insurance. So it enables society. And I think we're now well-placed to disrupt it. So it's pretty interesting. So talk to me a bit about incentives because I think one of the interesting things about insurance markets is there is this informational asymmetry between the person buying the insurance and the person selling the insurance.

24:18them the insurance. Theoretically, their incentives align if they're good actors, but insurance markets are all designed around the moral hazard of like someone doing the wrong thing in the car or letting somebody else drive it when they're not supposed to, all that sort of stuff. Has that been anything you've had to kind of manage in MIDI or is it so obvious to your customers? They're like, we already use all of your products. We can use that to lower our premiums because we know we are a lower risk than our competitor. Is it as straightforward as that?

24:44Luke Anear:Yeah, our customers take their data from the MIDI platform to their insurers to get lower premiums. But that's not actually the biggest advantage, which InsureTech's been around for 20-odd years. And most of the InsureTech companies I've seen haven't worked that well because the promise was we have this magic data and we can now price insurance cheaper. But the replacement cost of goods goes up every year. So I don't think the promise should be necessarily, hey, we're all in a race to make insurance cheaper. It's not reality. Tesla found this out when they started to insure their own cars and then the price of parts went up significantly on the backside of COVID and there was shortages and things.

25:21Luke Anear:And so I think the promise of, hey, let's all try and make insurance cheaper is not necessarily going to play out for everyone. Our promise is we will help you run a better business. Your stores will be more profitable. Your manufacturing plants will be more efficient. You'll have less downtime. If you're in fruit and vegetables, you have 9 % less wastage if you use our platform. Like we We have now all the data points. And so that is worth way more to any business than a reduction ever will be on their premium. So yes, we can price premiums cheaper sometimes, yes, but we'll give you something way better than that.

25:55Luke Anear:And that's what's unique about that value proposition that we have. Yeah, that's awesome. So we've talked a bit about, we've sort of circled around the quality of your data and you've talked publicly about, hey, in a universe of AI, one of the few things that is truly valuable is proprietary data. Outside of the insurance business, how else are you thinking about the value of your 20 years of history of customer data and your many thousands of customers? What are you at? 80 ,000 customers or something now? Where else do you see some opportunities for MIDI now with that data set in mind? Well, I think the thing about AI, if you throw AI at everything, it becomes inefficient.

26:34Luke Anear:And we're seeing companies right now getting hit with the costs of AI because they're often throwing AI at very broad problems and allowing everybody to do whatever they want with AI. And what do you know? It ends up costing a heck of a lot of money. And so I think the thing that we have with our data is we have context about a business. We understand what's important to that business. They've physically gone and checked the things that are important to them every day. We've seen what that is. They capture it in our platform. They take photos of the things that are important. If they've got an oil fryer, they check it each day.

27:08Luke Anear:They want to make sure that it's clean, it's tidy, the oil's been changed, all these sorts of things. Electrical cables are intact. There was a huge company in Australia, it's actually a global company, but they were pulling their fries out to clean them and the electrical cable was rubbing on the floor each time. And over time, they wore through the insulation on the cable and it then became - Hot oil and cables, not - Yeah, and electrocution as well. And so we get to see this. There's 4 billion images that our customers have manually taken one at a time, all labeled in our platform. So we have this incredible rich context.

27:41Did you back label it?

27:42Luke Anear:No, they labeled it. They labeled it at the time. Because it's all attached to an inspection form. And so they would have a question, are the tires on the truck within legal limits? Yes or no? And here's a photo. We then understand that that is a tire that belongs on a truck that belongs to a inspection about that make and that model of that truck, which exists in a transport company that does long-haul road transport. And so it's all labeled because of the structure and the way it is. So customers did the work for you. Yeah, it's very unique in that sense. There's tens of billions of data points and four billion images that are all labeled and we can see exactly what they relate to.

28:26Yeah, that feels like the tip of the iceberg of what you're going to be able to get out of the value of that. So I guess thinking about some other founders who might be looking to try and make this shift to an AI-led company, maybe they have also been operating a sort of traditional

28:38Luke Anear:SaaS company for five, 10 years. What would your advice to them be about thinking about, well, okay, what have I got? What's my advantage over somebody who starts a company fresh using all the AI tooling that's available to them right now? What would you say to them is the way they should think about that strategic opportunity? I think it comes back to what is the problem you're solving for people? and how you're solving it uniquely. So I wouldn't be too concerned about the technology so much. It's just the tool on how you solve the problem. AI in terms of models and frontier models, that's changing every day and being commoditized.

29:13Luke Anear:I think if one model is going to be 3 % better than another, does that really matter for most people? Probably not. What matters is the application layer. So how is that technology applied to solve a problem? So I wouldn't worry too much about how do I use AI to solve this other than are you bringing intelligence or automation to the problem you're solving in a way that is, I guess, unique. But again, I never set out to build a big company. I never set out to be a CEO or make a lot of money. What did you set out to do? Solve a problem. I just wanted to solve a problem where I saw people getting injured every day, and I thought I could do something about it.

29:48Luke Anear:I don't want to see all these people getting injured every day. And I was part of the problem because I was running around spying on them after they got injured. And so once I realized I'm part of the problem, I need to be part of the solution, that changed everything for me. And so there's been so many bad ideas in the creation of MIDI to where it is today. And so - What was the best bad idea? Oh my goodness. I built a training platform in 2007 and it was terrible. It was like, I don't know, a bad version of PowerPoint that you can get online. And, you know, there was a document management platform we built in 2010.

30:24Luke Anear:There was so many things. Our original sales model was we had people telemarketing and ringing businesses to see if they wanted safety documents and stuff. Like that was horrendous, the things we went through there with trying to convince people that they should take care of their staff and, I don't know, it was just so many things. Nothing seemed to be going right for a long time. And so this is my point about solving the problem and being focused on that because rarely is your first idea your best idea. And it's the iteration and the 50th version of it and the customer feedback that you get along the way that makes it so good.

31:00Luke Anear:The checklist app, that came in 2012. I started the company in 2004. And so people look at that and go, oh, what did I think of a checklist app? That's so simple. But in order for me to arrive at a checklist app that was easy for you to configure, I'd had to go through how do we solve this problem globally? How do we deal with jurisdictions that have different laws in every country? And how then do we deal with different industries? So transport's different to restaurants and food and hospitality. And how do I build something that solves all these things? And it becomes overwhelming. And it probably took me two years to break all that down to go, you know what, I need to dumb this right down to a flexible interface that people can build whatever they want.

31:41Luke Anear:And so the simplicity comes through that complexity of unpicking all of the different variables. So you distill it down. So I wouldn't over-index for trying to build a big company or trying to build the thing that you think is going to make you a lot of money. I would over-index for the problem that you feel passionate about, that you think this is worth getting out of bed for every day. Because I see a lot of founders, they like the idea of being an entrepreneur. I want to have my own startup. And I think they're terrible reasons to start. It wasn't like a founder, being a founder was not a thing in 2004.

32:18Certainly probably not in Townsville.

32:20Luke Anear:Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, I would, and I've, we've had people who've been with us and then they leave and go and start their own thing because they want to, want to do their own thing, which is fine. But I would say you've got to find a problem that you really care about because it's going to be hard. And whatever you come up with is probably not going to be much good at first. And so you got to go through the cycles. And if it's not something you really care about, then you'll probably either start thinking about, oh, how do I sell this thing? Or how do I flip it or whatever, or shut it down?

32:51Luke Anear:So for me, I've had plenty of times where I thought, what am I doing? But what else was I going to do? I cared about the problem too much. And that's what keeps getting me out of bed. And so when that's what's driving you, then quitting isn't really an option. Like you want it to continue. Yeah, yeah. Well, I wanted to bring a couple of threads together because you've talked previously about like this new wave of AI makes possible product build that, you know, you had in your mind's eye but that was just like too much sludge in the way to get there. But also, as you've said, this adjustment that you're making from this highly flexible eye auditor, like the kind of ability for any customer to kind of configure their own checklist to a world where you can personalize.

33:34Talk to me a little bit about what product build looks like in MIDI right now and how different that is from even two years ago, let alone 10.

33:43Luke Anear:Yeah, look, I think there's a Mexican standoff at the moment between engineers, designers and product managers because engineers can now design and they can manage. Product managers can submit PR and write code. And so, yeah, there's this and designers can also submit pull requests as well. So it goes in all directions. I think what we're seeing now, though, that probably wasn't clear six months ago was that everybody can leverage these tools to do their jobs better. But just because you can do all these things doesn't mean you're going to do them as well as someone who's dedicated to that each day.

34:17Luke Anear:And so I think everyone's now starting to realize that, yes, you can vibe code some stuff if you're a designer and you can prototype. So the timelines have compressed. We used to have to go out and do all this research. We would sit down with designers. They'd design an experience. We'd then go out and do more research, sit and validate it. Then we'd sit down with engineering managers and they would start scoping. That whole process, which might have taken three months, now is solved in a prototype in 24 hours. And so I think the biggest change is the compression of that initial prototyping. And then the ability to be able to actually deploy product at production scale is still a complex challenge, particularly when you've got millions of users, you want to build something that scales for people and then is efficient now as well, because if it's not efficient, it'll cost too much money to run.

35:06Luke Anear:And so we're solving different challenges now and different scaling problems. So engineers are able to supervise more of the work being done. AI writes 90 % of our code, but they're also having to make architectural decisions that perhaps they weren't involved in in the past. We're now running our own infrastructure and servers and things we never really did before. So they're new skills and capabilities that we haven't had. So everybody's roles, I'd say we've rebuilt the company in six months, everybody's role has changed. And some roles don't exist at all, not many. Nearly every role has adapted and changed.

35:43Luke Anear:And then some are brand new roles that didn't exist before. And so it's fundamentally changed how we take an idea and take it to market. And the other cool thing is, particularly for engineers, is they're closer to the customer now. You know, we're getting, you know, feedback comes automatically into a Slack channel. We see it every morning. It gets, you know, I guess prioritised in terms of what we're going to solve for each day. And that whole process was probably three or four steps removed for engineers quite often. They're on the end of a, you know, JIRA task list. That's right. without the sort of technicolor detail of what a customer says to motivate you.

36:21Luke Anear:Yeah, the essence of their world. And so we're back to it's fun again. Like building product is fun again. And I think we're seeing people in all parts of the company get that satisfaction flywheel again and the feedback from customers. Like we're deploying improvements or new features 24, 48 hours sometimes after what they've told us. and they're going like this is incredible like and then they give us more and that is not how you know the experience was for for most of of our journey and uh yeah building products got fun again it's really good that's awesome you've said previously that actually maybe one of the surprising things about the ai wave is you're actually hiring more experts can you say more about that yeah subject matter experts so because we can build so much so quickly you have to make sure we're building the right thing.

37:11Luke Anear:And the process of going out to customers and getting all this knowledge and then that has been replaced with a subject matter expert who can make those decisions with the team here and now. And so in the space of a two-hour session, they will make 50 product decisions as opposed to maybe a two or three-week process where they made 10. And it's night and day. Can you give me an example? Like if you hired someone in that you wouldn't ordinarily have thought would be sitting in a MIDI team? Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples. So one is where we've taken someone from our go-to-market team that used to be a construction manager and then went into sales.

37:49Luke Anear:They're now what we call an industry chief for construction. So, you know, Blake has worked in construction. He knows what needs to be built. And in the past, he would have to try and get it, you know, pushed through product. So his world's changed. And then we brought in Luke Dippel, who was the COO of Guzman and Gomez, and then fishbowl and sat down with him and went, right, how do we build for quick service restaurants? And again, it's like, you know, the clarity. So, okay, there's two things that matter the most. One is inventory. Do we have the food that we need to sell? And the second is labor.

38:20Luke Anear:Do we have the people? And then everything comes down from that. And so all of a sudden you get clarity and everyone can make decisions and move forward. The amount of decisions we can make now in a day are, you know, an order of magnitude greater than in the past. So good. So let's talk a bit about market disruption. You've done a couple of acquisitions into MIDI. You brought back actually your CPO. Brian Swift. Yeah, back into the business. Talk to me a bit about how you're thinking about MIDI's future strategy. You can do so much more build internally, but you're also thinking about who else do we need in the team and maybe that's an acqui-hire or maybe that's actually technology that you're bringing in.

39:00Can you share a bit about your feelings on where that might go in this weird, disrupted world we're in?

39:05Luke Anear:Yeah, again, it comes back to what are the problems we're solving and as we solve them, where does that take us into? So we're getting, you know, now we've got computer vision, for example, where we supply cameras to customers. They can sit on the top of their food preparation lines. We can see how much tuna goes into a bowl, how much rice, and then we can coach. Are you doing the full installation layer of all of that? Yeah, sending out electricians to go and wire it up, all that, yeah. And so it's amazing. But then we can help employees get their feedback for their consistency and things like that so they get that feedback loop happening as well in ways that they never have.

39:42Luke Anear:I spoke to someone on the weekend who used to work for their first job as Boost Juice and they're like, oh, my God, if that was helping me back then, I either would have got fired or would have been really good because he was like, I used to come in hungover and just put all sorts of stuff in there. I had a boost juice the other day. I'm sure boost juice is great these days. And he was just one person. But, you know, I think getting that sort of feedback for everyone is being key. So for us to be able to give customers now, I guess, more solutions, that takes us into the acquisition opportunities where we go, well, what makes sense for our customers?

40:18Luke Anear:We're now giving them a holistic view of everything that's happening inside their business. but we don't give them a whole lot necessarily outside of it. So we look at opportunities around imagery from different places and things like that. I won't go into too much detail but there's lots of stuff we're looking at that's pretty cool. That's awesome. So we've skirted around this a lot, your love of a frontline worker. It's always been a part of the story of safety culture now MIDI. AI has had this interesting feature of it's probably affected desk workers more at this point than it has people in frontline work because they work in the physical world and you know it's had a different impact can you share a bit about what you're learning about AI adoption and tool adoption amongst that kind of cohort of customer and right down to the level of like what's the feeling and vibe on sites in you know food and restaurant and beverage you know environments for people using AI tools most of them still think that AI is taking a Google search and putting it in chat GBT and getting a better result.

41:23Luke Anear:So most people in the blue collar space aren't using the power of AI to any real degree. But we are taking customers on that journey now where through our AI assistant, they can be working on, I was with a diesel mechanic a while ago working on a boat and he had a part of a rubber coupling and all he had was half a word of the brand of it because it had been torn apart and took a photo of it, put it into our assistant, and then can find it was able to work out what part that was, what supplies you can get. And literally, it was blowing his mind. He's like, this is a whole other world. This would have taken me hours of ringing around trying to figure it out.

42:01Luke Anear:So we're seeing frontline people now able to do their work more efficiently and get these things done. And so I think blue collar workers are less impacted by some of this, but I think the rules are the same for everybody and that is understand how you can use this technology to do your job better and I think you'll be fine. The majority of jobs are not going to disappear because of AI. They'll be enhanced by it. Some will disappear, sure, but most of them will be enhanced by it. That's the opportunity for everybody. I'm not one of these people that's just like all pro AI technology. It's always the best.

42:37Luke Anear:I think fear is a really healthy thing and And people have always been fearful of new technology, and that's a quality that we should maintain. People were fearful of withdrawing from ATMs in the 70s when they came out and there was lots of things like that too. So I don't think being fearful is a bad thing. But at some point we've got to ask ourselves, when does fear stop serving us? And when do we then turn this into a question of, okay, this is here. The genie is out of the bottle. It's not going away. How do we use this? And that can be in their personal lives. It can be designing homework programs for their kids.

43:08Luke Anear:It can be in their work lives. It's, you know, I think too, technology for the sake of it is not necessarily a good thing. And so we should always be conscious about where we deploy it and ask what's most important here? What's the big picture? You know, I think you look at what social media has done. I wouldn't think that many people would say it's unanimously good. In fact, you know, a lot of people would probably say the majority of it's not that good. I think there's ways we can implement it. I wish there was no infinite scroll with social media. If we just took away infinite scroll and just mandate that companies can only give you - Well, you know, it was a mistake originally.

43:43Someone wrote a line of code that didn't end and that created the infinite scroll.

43:47Luke Anear:Oh, there you go. But I think that's an example where we've got to be intentional about how we use it. And it doesn't necessarily always just mean it's always going to be good. So I think it's important that people assess it. But understanding it is the first thing. How can this help us? And what are its limitations? And then go forward from there. I'd love to go a little bit deeper on that. What are your customers telling you that shape the way you're deploying AI tooling within your product? So, you know, you talk a bit about empowerment. What I'm hearing is like people need to feel empowered by it, otherwise they'll just fear it.

44:19Is there a way that that has shaped the way you've designed products so that the frontline worker does actually feel like it's helping them do their job, not surveilling them or whatever else it might be?

44:30Luke Anear:I think the old school style of management was command and control. So it was deploying processes and procedures onto frontline workers so that you could control the outcome of their work. Right. Treat it like a production line. Yeah. I think what we're able to do is firstly trust that people will usually do the right thing if you give them the information. Our view is that if you empower people with the right information at the right time, they'll make great decisions. And so that has been our experience as well. And we often see particularly big companies say, well, we don't want our frontline workers to have access to this.

45:06Luke Anear:And when you ask why, the answers are usually not very good. We even had a massive construction company who told us that their frontline workers should not be allowed to build their own workflows to do their work on our platform. We have to set that at head office. And I want to ask why. They said, well, they could put rude pitches in the workflows of themselves. They're like, these are construction workers. because they're going to take photos, all sorts of things. I'm like, they can do that now. And why would they do that on a work app, not any of the other apps that they could be using if they wish to?

45:35Yeah.

45:35Luke Anear:When you interrogate the reasoning behind often management's decisions, it's often protectionist. It's like we're fearful of a bad outcome that may happen one day or it did happen. Therefore, we'll make a blanket rule. And we do this in society as well. Designed for the 1%, not the 99%. Exactly. And so no one now is allowed to be able to think for themselves and they will have to follow all these procedures. And we're like, that's not getting the best out of your people. And so, yes, guardrails, yes, process has its place, but not for the sake of it and not at the cost of people feeling like they're able to do their best work each day.

46:09Luke Anear:And the best teams in the world have that ability to empower their teams and they feel like they have individual responsibility for the outcome. And so that's how we build our company. Let's build products that do that because very easily we could have gone down the path of giving big process-driven companies more ways to control their workers. And the irony of all of this is if you give the frontline workers the ability to do their jobs better than ever, the amount of innovation that comes through is greater than anything management would have ever come up with. And I'll give you a practical example.

46:44Luke Anear:There was a Byron Bay store manager at Kohl's Supermarkets. Kohl's had a 700-question checklist that they did on every store all around Australia every three months. And I don't think I'm sharing too much. But anyway, they all know this happens. And so anyway, this Byron Bay manager, he came up with instead of a 700 question checklist every three months, he came up with a one question checklist that would be done three times a day. The one question checklist was for their fruit and vegetables. And the question was, would I buy it? And the answer is yes or no. And they would take a photo. If it looked good and the answer was yes, that's the end of it.

47:19Luke Anear:And that goes away. If the answer was no, then logic would drive more questions. It's not like are there seven slightly brown marks on the tomato? It's just would I buy it? Yes or no? And from that, they were able to, they rolled that out nationally and they were able to catch all sorts of stuff where strawberries would come in overripe because they'd been stored too long and stuff. And it was incredible what came just out of that one thing. And I could give you thousands of examples where customers have innovated on the front line and then it ends up going back to head office. Yeah. And I've got, I guess, some strong beliefs about individual responsibility and empowering people and trusting them.

47:57Luke Anear:It's the same way I raise my kids that give them the sense of responsibility. Tell them, you can run across the road if you want, but if the car hits you, you will die. And then let them make the decision and watch what happens. They make a good decision. And so it sounds a bit morbid, but I can remember from a pretty young age that the girls, they had a sense that they were in control of their destiny. and that's an empowering thing. And so I think in society, in business, it's a really good thing to say to people that you're individually able to affect the outcome here and you're responsible for something important.

48:33Luke Anear:Make good decisions and they usually do. I love that. So let's actually go from product, go to market to team. How has that worldview affected how you have built safety culture and the culture of the company and the way that you run it? I always feel that we're not customer-centric enough. And yet, anytime I've met people who have left, I just had someone last week tell me this had left five years ago. And they said, you know, this is the most customer-centric company that is around. And I still feel like it's not enough. But apparently, it is very different. And we've heard that a lot from people.

49:08Luke Anear:So I think that's been at the core of everything. At the core of our culture is the customer above all else. and I'd hope that we continue to get better at empowering people to be able to feel like they're responsible for a big part of the outcome. I hope you don't mind me saying but I remember on our founder thread a couple of years ago there was like a discussion that went on amongst some founders about, you know, what role perks play in keeping teams and you had this like killer line that was just like no one comes in for the ping pong table or whatever and you just sort of like slammed And that culture that had really developed, particularly out of Silicon Valley and kind of taken over a lot of tech companies, that it was all about the stuff around the job that was being offered.

49:52I feel like you had quite a counter-normative view then. Maybe it's come back into fashion now. Do you think that served the business over time?

50:00Luke Anear:Look, I think there's a balance between trying to obviously be competitive as a company. You want to have a great place to work. We have, you know, La Chia runs the kitchen in Sydney and cooks for everybody every day with her team and all these wonderful things. But I think the question you're talking about was, if I remember right, was in a forum where a founder was asking how far do we go with the perks and what should we do. And I think my point was if your mission isn't at the core of why people join, then it's not they've joined the wrong business. And so, you know, I think the perks are fine and you have some fun and it's great.

50:33Luke Anear:And we've always had ping pong tables and stuff because I think it is important to have fun at work. But it's not the main thing. And it's the same, you know, I've never been a big advocate for either work from home or work from the office. We've never mandated it either way. But I do see that if people have, you know, long periods where they don't interact with team members and things very often, then they do tend to get more depressed, more isolated and things like that. So I think it's about balance and figuring out, you know, how can you have fun? How can you enjoy your work? but at the end of the day there's got to be a compelling reason to get out of bed that's beyond yourself if your life is about trying to get the sugar and trying to make yourself feel good all the time then it's only going to get you so far and I think it's much more sustainable if you get your enjoyment from helping other people I learned that pretty young that money was not going to make me happy I grew up with no money my mum raised me and by the age of 18 I was earning$120 ,000 a year in 1995.

51:35Wow.

51:36Luke Anear:Yeah. And all my friends were poor. I'd be able to go and do whatever. I had a place I was living at on my own and I was lonely and I thought, this is not the secret to life. And so growing up, I thought if only we had money, life would be great because all our problems were, I thought, around not having enough money. And so I learned that lesson probably by my early 20s that had really cemented it. And the criteria when I started Safety Culture was I want to do something that made the world better. I want to do something that solved the global problem. And I wanted to have more money in the bank when I woke up in the morning when I went to sleep so that I wasn't always stressing about money.

52:12Luke Anear:And the irony is the more value you give other people, the more they pay for it. Yeah, it's interesting when you realize that the secret to that is to give to others. It feels like you've delivered on your three goals already. I mean, more to come. Yeah, I've always set goals that are way off. And so there's goals I've set that I haven't achieved yet. The irony is that everything I'd written down, especially when I was younger, I achieved all of those things. So for a while, the goals weren't big enough. And I'm like, I've got to set bigger goals. And I think that was the thing. Some people may have remembered the Tough Man Challenge I did when I was 20 and I was living in my car and made$42 ,000 in a night.

52:52Luke Anear:That taught me the power of setting a really big goal. For the audience that hasn't heard about that story, can you share it? The short story is I wrote down a goal to make$40 ,000 in a month somehow. I was earning$700 a week as a trainee private investigator and came up with this idea to do a tough man challenge, like a no-rules boxing thing. Tried to do it in Sydney, couldn't do it here. What's a tough man challenge? It's like a boxing competition essentially where people can come and fight. And I didn't know anything about these things, but my friend and I had talked about it once. And so that's what I thought I'd do.

53:22Luke Anear:End up unable to do it in New South Wales because the Boxing Federation wouldn't allow it. Went to Darwin, drove to Darwin, slept in my car for a month at the beach and put this thing on and it cost me 22 grand to do it. I was literally going up to people in the street and selling them tickets that my friend had faxed to the Darwin post office. Faxed? That I was tearing up on the old - We might have to explain to some of our newer listeners what a fax is. Well, faxes had shiny, people probably don't realize they had shiny paper. It was like you had to tear it off. Yeah, it was terrible. And so I would tear tickets up and go and try and sell to people and then get money to go and buy lunch and stuff.

53:55Luke Anear:So that experience, though, I think taught me about setting a goal. And the thing was after that, you know, people would hear about it and I would say, wow, I wish I was that motivated or whatever. I think they didn't. The thing they didn't seem to understand was that each day I was waking up, I didn't have some amazing voice in my head telling me, you're awesome. This is the best day of your life. Like you're doing this thing. I had a voice saying, this is ridiculous. I do not know what to do next. And this is probably going to fail. and so I just ignored it and had no other option. I burnt the bridge and, you know, I had to swim.

54:28Luke Anear:So, you know, I think that lesson taught me that you're probably capable of more than you realize and setting goals and then committing to them properly is so important but then consistency and showing up each day. Commitment gets you started and consistency gets you finished. So you've still got to show up each day and do it. I like that. And that's helped me over the years too because some days all I could do as I was building the company was show up. I just didn't have the energy. to be able to deal with one more problem. And I'd wake up and think, I don't even want to go in today. And I know all I got to do is put my shoes on, go in there and I'll figure it out.

55:03Luke Anear:And it's okay, I think, for people to feel that. I think often people are very hard on themselves, particularly when they're trying to build a business. And I think, oh, you know, some days I just don't know whether I'm doing the right thing. It's like, that's normal. Yeah. One of the great suggestions you made when we were catching up about this episode is like, what do people actually care about? So we went to LinkedIn, didn't we? And we asked a bunch of people to submit some questions and some of them were okay. So one of the questions I actually did want to ask you a bit about was how you have sort of thought about product market fit and how you thought about, you know, how that's evolved over the 20 some years that you've been doing it.

55:38The question was, can you share one assumption about safety culture, now mid-ease product, or market that was once true, but you deliberately had to kill to unlock the next phase?

55:47Luke Anear:There's been products that haven't got traction like we thought they would or hope they would. and so then we've had to kill them off. We've probably not been as good at killing stuff off as we could have. We tend to let stuff still carry on because some of our products are so mission critical and customers are running businesses on them, we tend to let them keep going when we probably should kill them off. Do you have a good heuristic now on when you would do it? Like clear-eyed, if it's not being used by X number of customers or the monthly active users are too low or the revenue is too low, do you have a sense of what you would use to kill?

56:18Luke Anear:It depends on the size of the opportunity but I think certainly if something's been going on for two years and it hasn't got traction then that needs to go generally though i would say if you haven't got traction in three months then you're doing something wrong and now i'd say it's probably even you know i'm sort of talking weeks now i'm like where's it at two weeks later three weeks after launch like what's happening and are we moving fast enough to iterate so i think now it's probably you know three months max if you haven't got really strong signal, then either fundamentally change it or kill it.

56:50Luke Anear:It's probably in that. Am I, are we going to do that every time? No. But I think as a general rule, you've got to be pretty hard on yourself and the teams in regards to what you allow to continue if it's not getting traction. But the beauty is we can change things dramatically very quickly now. So you should be pivoting or changing or figuring out what it is that's not working very quickly. And if you think about one of the reasons why product teams don't do this, it's like so much sunk cost bias. Because you described earlier the process of building product was this elongated, quite torturous process of people designing and redesigning and researching and then breaking down the problem and building and whatever.

57:29And then it's inevitable that when you finally launch it seven months later and it's a bit of a flop, you think, no, no, no, there's a hope yet because we did all of this work to get there. But if it only takes seven days to ship it out, then hopefully some of that sunk cost bias is.

57:41Luke Anear:Yeah, that's right. I think it's easier to make the call. But then if you go through that process many times over, say, seven months, you then still have a lot of fatigue in the team because they've tried all these different things. And so there are different problems, I think, that come from being able to ship faster. People get fatigued more as well. And so you're still dealing with the human. Novelty overload. Yeah, the human dynamic in all of this. So one of the other things I wanted to ask you a bit about is you're known in the Blackbird portfolio as being a master fundraiser. Have you got any advice on what you've learned in the fundraising universe over the years about things you see other founders consistently do wrong?

58:21Luke Anear:It's funny. I don't know if I like that term. I've heard it a couple of times and I understand why people say it. But to me, it's like, oh, you're really good at selling stuff to people is how I can interpret it, which I don't feel I ever have. All I've done is shared the problem and my passion for the problem that we're solving. and my thoughts and how we're solving it and the traction that we have. And I think that's the key is we've always had traction that we could demonstrate what we've done and what customers have adopted. Disruption doesn't come from innovation per se. Disruption comes from adoption of technology.

58:59Luke Anear:And so I think there's a lot of people running around talking about, oh, we've got this great tech, we're innovating, we're doing all this wonderful stuff. But if you can't demonstrate adoption, then you're asking. Does anyone care? You're asking investors to make a big leap of faith. Yeah. For us, we always had adoption from day one, and that is what has helped with fundraising the whole time because investors could see the traction, they could see the use cases, which were always really surprising, like people in Antarctica using it to check gear or all sorts of stuff, and then they could also see the opportunity ahead.

59:33Luke Anear:Most of the time I wouldn't talk about insurance. I wouldn't talk about our consumables. We sell a quarter of a million things that you can wear to work in the workplace and stuff from our warehouses in Australia and the US. And if I explained all that, people would say, you're trying to do too much. And so I reduced the pitch. I reduced the scope of what we're doing down to, no, no, we just got an inspection app. Now we're adding training. And I would just try and gauge. And it was only a few investors over the years that ended up getting the full pitch out of me. Lee Fixel was one of them from Tiger.

1:00:05Luke Anear:He was awesome. and just asked great questions and was prepared for the big vision. Whereas most people, I think, would think, well, there's too many variables in that. You're trying to do too many things. That's probably one of the things I've been told the most over the years is you guys are trying to do too much. You just need to stop and focus on just a few things. How did you have the courage not to listen to that? I knew they were wrong. And I knew that we weren't betting the farm on all these things. So insurance, we seeded that with$2 million in 2021. We started that business. It was a$2 million investment from us, a$2 million investment from QBE.

1:00:42Luke Anear:And then a few years later, we bought them out. But we weren't betting the farm. And so we had a great leader in Dan Cummings who has led that business up to today and continues. And he was able to start with a small team, small budget,$4 million. And I was able to back him to do that. And so I didn't need to take my focus off the other things, our core software business, for that business to start to grow. And so I've kind of seeded parts of the vision as side bets and allowed them to grow while we still do the main thing. And so I knew that the opportunity was there. We just had to do it in an order and a sequence.

1:01:21Luke Anear:And I, frankly, didn't have the capability to figure out how to do this as fast as what I probably would have liked to have. and how we scale and manage teams and all that stuff. So I think, you know, we've got a phenomenal team today and that continues to get better. And I think we got better at promoting internally. I think for a long time when you're trying to build a business, you kind of get told you've got to keep getting better people. And so you're always looking outside the business. We've got to get some really clever person who knows how to do this thing. Shiny resume. Yeah, you know, they know how to run go-to-market because they did it at XYZ Company and they got the playbook.

1:01:52Luke Anear:and after a while I realized that the playbooks from other places don't work. You've got to figure out what actually works for this particular customer set and what the problems are and how we uniquely solve them for them. And some things may carry over but the idea that someone comes in and rolls a playbook doesn't work for us absolutely. So I think it took a lot of years to have the confidence to say, you know what, we're better off backing someone internally who doesn't necessarily have the experience but they have the DNA of the customer. Yeah. And they'll make the better decisions. They're brought in on the mission.

1:02:27Luke Anear:Yeah, and so I think that's something that we've done a lot more of these days. You know, Tom Dance, our CTO, Tom has been here since 2014. He can do the job and he's great at it and away he goes. And so I think in the past, Tom probably didn't believe he could do the job and we probably didn't push him hard enough into the opportunity. So we've all grown up. We're all, you know, Tom was from Townsville as well. He worked for Townsville City Council. And so we've all had to learn a lot, but I think we're starting to figure it out now. Super fun. So my final question for you, Luke, what's something you've changed your mind about?

1:03:03Luke Anear:Well, actually, when I first heard MIDI last year, when we started thinking about using MIDI as the name, I was like, I don't know about that. It just, I don't know, it didn't mean anything in particular to me. And I'd been around for a while. Did you spend 300K getting someone to give it to you? we saved her in a K this time, we didn't. And then after, you know, over a couple of months of looking at other names and, you know, you go through all the AI models to say, give us names, like, you know, and just at the end of the day, I came back and thought, what matters is the brand and the narrative that we build around a word.

1:03:37Luke Anear:If we, look, if we're all sitting in a room right now and we were going to come up with a new name for our computer hardware business and we say, let's call it Apple, I'm pretty sure the reaction would be that. We'd all have a bit of a laugh and go, yeah, well, that's not going to happen, as if we'd call it Apple. That's right. It's more to do with the experience we deliver to our customers every single time they interact with our brand and the narrative and the stories we tell around Mitty now. And I think we have really good opportunity to tell the worker stories. You know, we've had Caleb Holloway who came into our office.

1:04:09Luke Anear:He was the only survivor of the drill shack explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. So 140 people in the rig, most of them got rescued. But in the drill shack where the explosion happened, there were 12 people. 11 of them died and he survived. And we're just talking with him now about doing a series of going, let's go and find like the unsung heroes of the workforce, the single mums that, you know, are doing two jobs and trying to do stuff that have gone above and beyond. And let's help them, you know, put their kids through college or let's go and find the hardest workers that no one ever hears about and acknowledge what they've done and stuff.

1:04:43Luke Anear:And so I think we can tell some great human stories. And so I've always loved, you know, storytelling and film and things. So I think we've got an opportunity to do that now with MIDI and it's a fun time. This is our new side hustle. You're going to give it$2 million and someone will quietly, you'll never tell an investor, but it turns out you're going to become like a film set. Maybe. Like we did the Founder Series. Yeah, that's right. We did us and Canva and a couple of others. We did Bright and Finder. And before that, we did The New Hustle in 2017. So there is a little bit of a track record there.

1:05:19Luke Anear:But I think, yeah, I think there's some great stories to tell. And if there's any, you know, budding videographers, storytellers out there, then reach out because it's an area I'm passionate about. And I'd love for us to be able to go and tell great human stories from all over the world. Heard it here first. Luke, thank you so much for joining us on Wild Hearts. Thanks, Kate. It's been fun.

1:05:41Thank 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 produced by Camilla Herring from Blackbird. Our marketing genius is Laura Cofford. And our editor is Andy Jones from Colour and Sound Creative. Thank you all so much for listening and I'll talk to you next week.

1:06:11Thank you.