Join us for an insightful conversation with Wared Seger, the visionary founder and CEO of Parrot Analytics, the global leader in audience demand measurement for entertainment. Under Wared’s leadership, Parrot Analytics has revolutionized how the industry understands global supply and demand, capturing data from over 2 billion audiences across more than 100 languages and 200+ countries. This data-driven approach empowers industry leaders to make informed decisions about content creation, distribution, acquisition, and marketing, driving growth and audience retention on a global scale.
With a unique background in neuroscience and a passion for technology, Wared has steered Parrot Analytics from its inception in 2012 to its current status as the frontrunner in entertainment analytics. His contributions to the industry have earned him recognition as one of Variety’s 30 Under 30 Hollywood Leaders, Forbes’ 40 Under 40, and The Hollywood Reporter’s Upcoming Hollywood Leaders.
We unravel the personal and professional life philosophies that have shaped our guest’s leadership and the company’s ethos. From confronting early challenges to reshaping what life/work balance means, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for aspiring entrepreneurs and business enthusiasts alike.
We are a new channel so please subscribe if you like this content, leave us a comment and a thumbs up.
Timestamps:
00:00 – 🔮 Intro
06:51 – I want to change the world 🌍
23:28 – Learning Entrepreneurship 📚
30:06 – When your vision starts Impacting People’s Lives 🌟
32:55 – Resilience is the single most important thing 💪
35:54 – Validating “an Idea” – The Beginning of Parrot Analytics 💡
41:04 – 2 years of Experimenting 🔬
48:49 – Creating “Demand” 📈
51:55 – What does Parrot Analytics do anyway? 🤔
56:27 – The president said, “I fucken knew it” 🇺🇸
1:01:56 – Product Market Fit & Pricing 💸
1:09:00 – Currency in The Attention Economy 🕒
1:15:11 – Always follow the money (How does your product impact your client’s wallet?) 💰
1:18:15 – Disrupting Hollywood 🎬
1:21:17 – Category Creation? 📊
1:28:20 – I’m horrible at “enjoying the journey” 😅
1:30:50 – Redefining Work, Life Balance ⚖️
1:40:12 – “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Is that true? 🤷♂️
1:45:18 – Two privileged idiots talk about how to find meaning in your job. 🎙️
1:56:34 – How the fuck do you even CEO bro? Doing 8 full-time jobs 👔
2:00:00 – A biological machine (Mental & Physical well-being) 🧠💪
2:15:26 – How to reset (Hit the bag & Talk about it) 🥊🗣️
2:23:40 – A word of advice to myself (Impostor Syndrome) 😰
2:31:50 – Be borderline arrogant 😎
============================
Podcast Transcript:
So my advice isn’t just like, “No, like, he knew it.”
It’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is like, if he didn’t know…
It’s okay to say…
Just say, “I don’t fucking know!”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I literally don’t know.
Hey, listen, I never claimed to know everything.
I don’t know.
How should we find out what the answer is?
What experiment should we design?
Who should we ask?
But how do we get the information? Because I don’t know.
Welcome to the Melding Muse podcast.
A space that celebrates people,
the journey that made them, and the exciting right waiting ahead.
Today I’ll be talking to Ward Seager,
brother, disruptor, footballer and CEO and co-founder of the groundbreaking data science company,
Parrot Analytics.
He talked about his journey, what he takes to disrupt Hollywood, dealing with stress
and pressure, redefining work-life balance, arrogance, confidence, resilience and a bunch
more.
This was a conversation I truly enjoyed and inspired me in a bunch of ways.
And I can’t wait to talk to him again for part two.
–
long time coming.
So I’m going to crack this thing right open.
Alright, I’m excited.
The courtesy of Adrian.
So shout out Adrian.
Adrian, amigo, this is for you.
This is for you my friend.
This is for you.
I found this, a bottle of this in New Zealand.
So if we like it, we can actually gain some more of this.
Alright.
Why do you like Mezcal?
Like where do you discover this, by the way?
I discovered Mezcal in Los Angeles.
Oh, that’s right.
surprisingly. If you go out in New Zealand, if you grow up in New Zealand, that’s not
a common drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what I’m asking because it’s not really common
you find people that go, my favorite drink is Muscat. No, but I, you know, I, my, my
cousins are Mexicans. So I had a free introduction to a lot of like pan cultural foods and drinks
and, and, and heritage and all that. So, but my first real foreign to it was in LA. And
I just love it. So Adrian, do you like the, um, let’s just smell it first. It’s the, it’s the
smokiness of it. It’s the smokiness. Salud. Here we go. First episode. Oh my goodness.
That is tremendous. That’s very nice. I must say I like me because my dad is an absolute fanatic of
it, but I never drank it like this. You know, it was almost like we went to a Mexican restaurant and
I just had a couple of shots and I always went.
This is way too strong.
But having it like this with a little bit of ice, it is very, very nice.
You know what I do also?
I crack some salt on it.
Some Himalayan salt on it.
I should have told you.
I brought some salt on it.
No, that’s all good.
Next time.
Next episode.
Actually, I got some salt out of the lamp right there.
Just shave some of it.
If your audience is like this, later on, and requesting encore.
Next one we do with salt.
It doesn’t matter.
We do it.
We do it.
We do it anyway.
We have to do it anyway.
– We do it for us.
– We do it for another excuse to get.
Again, thank you for being here.
– No, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
– It’s the first episode, so the fact that you made
the effort to just, you know, to not be, you know,
worry about whether or not I have zero subscribers,
which I don’t, I have nothing, but you still made it here.
I mean, I appreciate it a lot.
It shows how low who you are.
– I appreciate you having me.
I’m not sure that I’m gonna add a lot of value
to your listeners, but I know that,
You’re gonna this is gonna be successful because I just I just know who you are and the quality of the things that you do
So whatever you do and that you put your heart and passion into it is gonna be successful. Thank you, man
Yeah, I’m confident. So if I can contribute tiny little percent to you’re gonna contribute a tremendous amount
Because I’m gonna use you as like this is look I got this guy to talk to me
You’re gonna be like the the guy who started in the beginning whenever you get like the bigger guess you are the one that always come back
Yeah, I started that.
You started that.
Yeah, that’s Dwayne Johnson.
But actually, three years ago, that was me.
You had to begin episode one.
Yeah, it’s interesting how things start.
And I looked at some of the biggest names in podcasts,
like Rogan and stuff, and you see the first episode,
and you go, “Damn, how fucking far has he…”
And part of it is just putting yourself out there.
And I think that something that comes, for me anyway, is unnatural.
Because I’m a private person by nature.
We were just talking about that before the start.
And putting yourself out there for people to,
especially nowadays, because what happens is we spend our time online.
And so we see people on social media and they,
even when there is no problem, they’ll find a problem.
And they’ll nitpick everything.
And they’ll take things out of context.
It’s not even a full sentence. It’s like four words as part of a massive ass sentence.
And then they’ll say, “That’s what Esty believes.”
You’re like, “Wait a minute, can you just let, like, finish the sentence?”
Because I clearly say that, you know, only applies in certain cases.
And so, particularly nowadays when things are like so charged and people are so like,
“Oh, they’re just out for blood.” I don’t know why.
I don’t know why. Why would you spend your time just, you know, like, just, I don’t know.
I wish people would just chill.
But that’s also why I like your energy and what you’re putting out there,
because I know it’s going to be a positive force in the world.
It is. It is. It’s trying.
I mean, the whole idea of the podcast really was a…
When I get to talk to people like you, who actually inspire
people like me to get better, to be passionate about things that I do.
And that’s one of the things that…
When I started the podcast idea, I was like,
“Man, I sit down with you and with many other people.”
And we had conversations, sometimes in meetings,
that have nothing to do, I just started to spiral to this conversation where I’m like,
“Man, this is very useful for me. It helped me a lot professionally, personally.”
And they just record them and put them up there, see if people get interested.
– And if we help someone on the other side of the world,
that may be going through a rough time or is looking for inspiration,
just work on her little project and she just sees something and she’s like,
“Wow, that’s inspiring.” And then that’s worth it.
– 100%.
That’s worth it because there’s so many of these stories that we don’t hear and that’s
a part of the internet now that just amplifies the sharing of knowledge and information.
Yeah, 100%.
Inspiration, yeah.
Yeah.
Let’s start talking about, I mean, this huge little tiny project that you started many years
ago that is now leading the industry of entertainment.
Tell me about how did you…
First of all, how do you decide, okay, I don’t want to work a regular job, I just want to
start my own company.
Oh, okay, I see.
Yeah.
So from the very beginning, yeah.
And let’s find something fucking hard.
Yeah.
Because I love that.
And let’s just innovate in an industry that takes so long to adopt something new.
Yes.
Well, there’s a lot there to unpack, so we’ll have a drink first.
As it is going down quite a few years now.
The most I realized that the most, and a lot of people, I’m not the first person to realize
this, but the most impactful things to do are usually the hardest things.
And even in business, even at work, when we have certain decisions to make, it’s quite
often, it’s not always, but quite often, in fact, almost always actually, that the best
decision is the hardest decision.
And that applies here and applies in a lot of our daily facets in life.
So for me, we’ll start at the very beginning.
I went to Oakland University.
I studied science.
My background was in science.
I was a nerd.
And I was always interested in the applications of science and how you create things.
I had dreams that I don’t want to change the world and all of that sort of stuff.
Um, and, and so I started just, just looking up against power of the internet.
I mean, I actually remember, you know, you and I are old enough barely just to remember that,
you know, the, the, the very first dial up experience you have the very, yeah.
And then you’re like online, like, oh my God, I’m playing chess with someone on the other side.
That was for me, that was the first thing that I did.
Oh my God.
Mind blowing beyond my blog was like incredible, you know,
And then then you kind of evolve, you know, and then like a year or two later and then you’re playing this online game
You know and then like, you know, your sister picks up the phone, but it breaks your bro, you know
You’re too tight. I love that
And you’re like put down the dog
You couldn’t talk you couldn’t use a phone
Disconnect you but then it was in those days that I started just reading about
And I as a kid, I would always you know try to like find
oh, that’s seven world wonders, like how were they built?
These world wonder people kind of, a lot of them,
to this day we struggle to explain the creation of.
And I would be fascinated.
I’d just be like, wow, someone thought of creating that
at some point, someone thought of creating that.
And then that very quickly led to the realization
that someone thought of creating everything around us
At some point, literally everything around us, like this, this microphone, this cup,
this little can before, like, you know, someone probably owns a pattern of the
probably owns a patent on the shape of this, this, this can, you know, the laptop,
the screen, the light, everything, everything.
At some point, it didn’t exist.
And they’re they’re almost they’re almost never, you know, inflectionary zero to one.
They’re always like iterations on a prior thing.
And then, you know, wasn’t a can first shape.
They changed and morphed and shaped and someone was like, oh,
and point to this again and whatever.
And so I started looking like, okay,
what are some of the things that were created that,
like this scan, but had a big impact on the planet,
on the world, on society?
And so you have to go on like, okay,
now things that have to impact billions of people’s lives.
And some of the most impactful advances in society
were, you know, I mean, let’s like name them.
It’s the electricity, you know, the light bulb, the internet,
that, you know, that changed for me, that changed before and after.
It was a completely different civilization, humanity.
Right. And wait, let me ask you a question.
Were you thinking this at age? What? Like, how?
Like teenager, teenager, when you were like, you’re teenagers,
I was teenagers, teenagers.
I was playing soccer and thinking about that.
Yeah, right.
And playing video games.
But like, yeah, yeah,
so you had these dreams, you were really young,
you had this vision of just,
I want to create something for the world.
No, I just, like, I just want to change the world.
Right. And I don’t know why.
Or how? If I had to cycle,
well, I don’t know why I was thinking it.
I certainly didn’t know how I was going to do it.
I didn’t know I fucking hate how it was.
Can we swear at you? We can swear at you.
Yeah, okay.
You can do whatever you want.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I didn’t know, I certainly did not know how
I was going to do it.
And I didn’t know why I was thinking about it.
Um, if I had to psychoanalyze myself, you know, as a kid, I think it’s because,
um, probably a number of reasons.
I think upbringing makes a difference and you know, um, both my parents were engineers.
Right.
And so I was always like raised to be curious to figure out how things work.
You know, I was always encouraged to fix things when things, things broke,
like see if you can fix that.
You know, and so even like with with with my friends at school or something will break and I’ll be like and I’m like
Oh damn this bar. I’ll be like, oh, let’s see if we can fix it, you know, give a screwdriver like let’s just play with it
Yeah, um, and it was just more like you’re curious curious, you know
um, and so I think that probably uh
drove a lot of my inner
curiosity about how things work in the world and how things were created
Yeah, I was fascinated by that
And I have it like a lot of folks in my family were creators some of them are artists musicians
You know engineers and so I probably was not I’m probably the least talented
Anyone that I know my family so I wasn’t unfortunate wasn’t gifted or anything
I wanted to be at some point a professional soccer player, and then I did the odds and I realized I wasn’t
I wasn’t good enough and so so that was a disappointment, but so beyond that I was alright. What do I do next?
No, but I was I was interested in just how things work and so I started looking at okay
What are the some of the things that made the biggest impact on the world?
just at least I understand how they came to be and
Those things are you know the internet I talked about the the the the electricity the light bulb
penicillin
Internal combustion engine industrial revolution that changed how things would work right like everything transport and so on
And so these things were moments throughout human civilization that you can point to that were inflection points that like change the course of what happens next in humanity.
Yeah.
And so and then I started looking at them like, OK, what do they all have in common?
Because some of them are hundreds of years apart.
They were developed by different people and so on.
And they all broadly had three things in common.
I figured out and maybe someone else, I don’t know how I remember figuring it out, but they’re broadly had three things in common.
There were almost all things that had a consequential change on humanity after they came to be were
usually rooted in science.
There’s a scientific source to create that creation.
And they had elements, so that’s like a Venn diagram.
So I drew the first circle of science.
The second circle is technology.
And technology is the application of science.
So a lot of people think technology and science are synonymous.
They’re not.
Technology is the application of science.
You take something that is a scientific innovation,
or invention rather, and then you apply the application of that,
the innovation of which is broadly categorized as technology.
And the third was entrepreneurship.
That is taking that technology that is rooted in science
and taking it to the mass market,
taking it to people,
to have real-life users around the world.
And so all of those things,
if you look at any one of those things
that we were talking about,
at some point,
they had rooted in science,
and then there was a technology element to it
that applied that scientific principle
or scientific principles,
and there was an entrepreneurship element
that said, “Hey, let’s package that somehow
and commercialize it or take it to the mass market or release it on a wider base.
It’s a way of thinking and sometimes the people who are the best at thinking scientifically
are very bad at thinking mass market.
There’s a lot of people throughout history that invented some of these very same advances
that we’re talking about.
And they died very poor.
The people remember them as the inventor of that thing.
But actually it was only once someone came after them
and packaged it and took it to the mass market.
Now we remember that that invention was theirs
or is now present.
And so it’s a way of thinking that just is more like
commercial, it’s more like how do I package it?
What problem does it solve?
How do I take to mass market?
How do I make it repeatable?
And so all that had elements of these three areas.
So then I decided, okay,
I want to play in the middle of those three,
long story short,
I want to decide I want to play in the middle
of those three circles.
And that’s what I went out to do.
I went out to study science.
And so I got my background in science and neuroscience
and technology was the application of science.
And I was lucky that at Auckland,
they had rolled out this relatively new master’s program
that was designed at teaching people,
teaching science students or graduates,
the elements of business.
– Okay.
– And this was some phenomenal people
out of Auckland University,
and Oxford and Cambridge came together.
Jeff Witcher, Professor York Kistler at Auckland,
Margot Bethel, there’s a bunch of people that came together
And this is way back after the Knowledge Wave conference,
like 2000, we’re like, oh, how do we create a knowledge-based
economy in New Zealand?
Because in the 1950s, New Zealand had, so it was like,
one of the top, and it was like third or fourth.
Or someone won the top 10 GDP per capita on the planet.
And that’s because at the time we were exporting our primary
industries to the rest of the world.
So meat and wool and milk and products and et cetera.
And then fast forward, other countries started competing with that.
So then suddenly countries in Europe didn’t need to buy New Zealand milk
because they could buy milk from Denmark or wood from Finland or whoever.
And so we lost that competitive advantage as a country.
And so anyway, so a bunch of smart people came together around the year 2000, decided to create a pathway to create a knowledge-based economy in New Zealand,
where we could amplify our creation to be more knowledge-based and build an economy that was more technologically centered.
And out of that were born a bunch of different programs that I think have been on their own right, tremendously successful.
university programs, commercialization programs,
incubation programs, startup incubation,
the whole ecosystem was kind of subsequently born out of some of the steps that were made there.
One of those things was the development of a master’s degree that said,
“Hey, we’re going to take a bunch of science graduates and teach them about business,
teach them about commercialization, teach them about what is a patent.”
And New Zealand at some point had one of the highest scientific publications per capita
on the world. So we would, as a country, we would publish a lot of inventions, you know,
or findings, scientific findings, but had one of the lowest patents filed per capita.
And there was a gap there. And so there’s a gap there, but there’s a commercialization
gap. Like we’re cool identifying trends, picking up patterns, whatever. But we were not very
good at commercializing those things. And so anyway, so then they took two things. They
they said, “Is it easier to teach business?”
We could either take a bunch of business students
and teach them about science,
or we could take a bunch of science students
and teach them about business.
Because they wanted to create a program that was a hybrid,
because that’s kind of like how technology,
you’ve got to take something scientific
and then file a patent and invent something,
create something.
And usually science meets business.
And so they kind of ran this parallel program.
And long story short, they found that it was harder to take business people and teach them science.
And it was easier to take science students and teach them business.
Right.
For a number of reasons.
And well, they hypothesized for a number of reasons.
So anyway, so they decided to take a bunch of students, science students, and teach them about business.
That was the faster way to get there.
And so I’m a product of that program.
I was one of those science students.
The program is still running in Oakland.
So I did that.
So I decided, yeah, I didn’t want to follow through
with my specialization in neuroscience
and spend my entire life in a lab.
I wanted more to apply science.
So that was the science part.
And then the technology part at this masters
in Bioscience Enterprise that taught me
the foundations of business.
of business and then got involved in local programs,
entrepreneurship programs, startup competitions,
and so on at university.
So I ran a bunch of them and that also taught me about
working with real life companies, internship programs,
and various things as a student you don’t really get exposed
to ’cause you have quite a sheltered life inside university.
And so that was the technology part of it.
That’s the second circle.
And the third circle was entrepreneurship.
Remember, those are the three things that all those things that changed the world had in common.
And entrepreneurship, I think you can’t learn.
You have to do to just to learn.
You have to do it to learn it.
You have to get the scars and be like, oh, yeah, shit.
That one. Yeah, that one hurt.
That one. I know. I know how to do that better next. Yeah.
Yeah. And so that’s what that’s when Parago started was that was actually
at the very beginning, you know, the the.
And I said this to our investors in the early days.
I’m like, “Yeah, whatever, tell us about the market size and so on.”
But I said, “My goal here is to learn about entrepreneurship.”
I think we’re going to, I hope, and I think we’re going to create a lot of value.
But my goal ultimately, because they ask, “Why are you doing this?”
As I would, as would I rather, if I talk to an up-and-coming entrepreneur
and they’re looking for investment, like, “Why are you doing this?”
I want to see if they’re in it, you know, if they’re in it, and whatever.
and whatever.
I just said the truth, I answered the truth,
which is I want to learn about entrepreneurship.
Because I think down the line,
I’m going to take what I’m learning here
and I’m going to combine that with my knowledge
about technology and science, and hopefully,
I’m going to try to create things that change the world.
Later.
And so this whole initiative, this whole experience
was a learning exercise for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to try to
create value for you as an investor, for us as a company.
But ultimately my goal was to learn.
And a lot of really wise people, some mentors were like,
this is a thing you have to learn.
You can’t just study entrepreneurship if you have to do it.
And so that’s what I had to do.
That’s how it started.
That’s the very beginning.
Before we even started working on the company,
that was my personal journey to getting to deciding
to wanting to do this.
– Wow.
Okay, first of all,
I didn’t know about that whole program about New Zealand.
So that’s very interesting.
So let’s go back to the moment where you go,
okay, well, I wanna learn about this.
And then you landed on this idea
for what is today, Para Analytics.
– Yes.
– How did that come to?
– We had–
– And first of all, also I wanna ask you
because I’ve always wanted to do this forever.
Like, oh, I have this idea for this company.
I was always too caught up in, how do I even get started?
– Yeah, it’s hard.
So if I was listening to a podcast that would, you know,
help me to get my ideas together,
how the fuck do I even start this?
– Well, luckily now is easier than this ever.
– Yeah, now is a lot easier.
– Now is a lot easier.
– Back then, how the fuck did you even figure it out?
– It’s hard and like, it’s just hard.
And honestly, because as we just explained,
I didn’t know anything.
– Yeah, yeah, yeah.
– I was doing this to learn. – So how do you navigate that?
– I was doing this to learn.
And the real answer, like a lot of people are like,
“Oh, Picino, we do this and get mentors and teach.”
And yes, we got the advisors, whatever,
and people that have done it before,
certainly, they kind of show you the pathway
that’s super helpful.
But the truth of what actually happened was,
I was just stumbling in the dark,
and you just stumble.
Nowadays, again, it’s different.
You have access to so much information,
so much resources,
and you can have AI developers
building shit for you.
Now it’s just incredibly different.
It’s very different.
So back then, and remind for people who don’t,
the timeline they were talking about is 13 years ago.
We talked about 14 years ago, something like that.
The world was different.
This is pre-AI, this is very bad internet days.
And the truth is, it was just,
you just walk into a door, a slam door, and jump, and then you’re like, “Oh, fuck, that wasn’t it.”
That was, this is locked.
This is not the way.
So you got to try to find another door to get to where you want to.
Now I see the full thing.
I’m like, oh, this is the route.
This is how you get there.
But back then, the answer to your question, how is, I don’t know.
I didn’t know.
And it was just like the only thing that I had and the only thing that I think you still need,
even today with all the tools that’s available to you.
Because you got to remember, the tools are not just available to you.
They’re available to everyone else.
And so what sets you apart?
And there’s a lot of people, and I posted something in our company Slack channel recently
that was talking about, the CEO at NVIDIA, talking about how persistence.
And resilience as well.
And how people have high expectations.
Generally he had found that they have low resilience.
And so that’s kind of what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is like, oh, I stumbled into like a lot of block doors and just
like, you know, a lot of bruises.
You just kept going.
That’s what I’m trying to say.
Just say, I just kept you just keep going.
And if the door is locked, find another way.
And remember, like, again, if you don’t know everything, you’re in the dark.
It’s pitch black.
You don’t know.
And it’s hard and it’s lonely because people don’t know the experience
they’re going through.
And a lot of people are like, why don’t you just get a, get a normal job?
Like just go get a job somewhere.
– That’s exactly it.
– Especially if you’re like, you know, while educated,
you’ve got, you know, people, like it’s not hard,
especially if it’s not hard for you to get a job.
– Yeah.
– Just go get a damn job.
Like why are you doing this, you know?
– Yeah, yeah, yeah.
– And so that’s, so the reason why you’re doing it
has to matter.
– Yeah.
Why do you think, what do you think that was
that kept you going?
– Well, my reason, again, for the very beginning
of studying was to learn.
– Right.
– I wanted to learn and I knew it was going to be hard.
So that wasn’t, I wasn’t a robot.
– Oh, I see, I see.
I wanted to know which door it was.
– Okay, I see.
So learning was this sort of like the North Star.
I wanna actually figure out how this shit works.
– I’m gonna figure it out.
And again, I don’t know whether that was ingrained in me
as a kid, like I’m gonna figure out how this thing works.
Like I don’t know.
Okay, it’s not this screwdriver.
Like it’s another one.
It’s like, I need something else.
Like I just wanna figure it out.
And so my goal from the very beginning was to figure it out.
Like just know, figure out how to take an idea
that was rooted in science or technology.
and scale it and take it to the mass market
and get people using it and iterate on it
and build something of value that creates value.
I’m a big believer in just creating value for the world.
And I wanted to learn that, that was my goal.
And that meant that I wasn’t turned off by, you know.
– By things that would, you know.
– Yeah, by setbacks or doors that would close in my face.
And I’ve had a lot of doors close in my face.
– I just people questioning
why you were doing the actual thing.
People questioning, people laughing you out of the room.
I’ve had a lot of people just laugh me out of the room, you know?
That’s what I think breaks a lot of people as well.
It’s just like…
It’s so damn personal.
People just go, “Oh, this is dumb.”
You put your whole life and heart and soul into something
and you’re like, “I’m passionate about this. I’m going to create.”
And unfortunately, a lot of people just look at it and be like,
“Yeah, for one or more reasons.”
And maybe rightly or wrongly, regardless, they just tell you, “Shit.”
Yeah.
And that hurts, it stings.
And one of the things I had learned that I had to have,
also along the way, that I also learned as part of this experience
is you have to have a thicker skin.
You have to be able to withstand setbacks, withstand punishment.
– Yeah. It’s ruthless, man. – It’s ruthless.
And a lot of people say it’s the hardest thing you’ll do,
like creating something, building a company,
doing a startup, doing a…
I don’t know. I think it was Elon Musk.
I was like, it’s like chewing glass, you know?
And a lot of people have like different, like they use different analogies and
metaphors and so on to explain it, but it’s freaking hard.
Yeah. And you have to have a good reason of why you’re doing it.
And you have to be passionate about it and you have to be resilient and you have to
have persistence. And so the answer is like, how do you, how did you do it?
It’s like, I don’t know. I just kept going. Just figure it out.
Just keep going. Yeah. Just keep going. Figure it out.
And I’ll obviously be smart about it.
Like ask people that have done it before,
like, “Hey, there’s three doors here.
Like which one should I open?”
‘Cause one of them, there’s an alligator behind it.
One of them gonna fall down and never bit back up, you know?
And the other one gets you to where you wanna be.
Like, “Which one should I open?”
They’d be like, “Oh, you wanna open that one.”
Now I’ve also had people give me the wrong answer.
– Yeah, yeah.
– Very, very experienced people.
People that I really looked up to and like almost idolized
that would be like, “Oh, that’s definitely,
that’s the door you wanna open.”
– That’s the way.
– And then I open it and it’s fucking alligator
just took a big chunk out of me.
You know, oh shit, that’s not the one.
That’s not the one.
So then I also learned a few more things along the way,
like trust your intuition.
You’ll always have the most information
about the thing that you’re doing.
Because you’re in it, you’re living it, you’re breathing it.
And so you also have to have a filter
that takes what people are saying
and distill it down to where you are
and ultimately have to make a decision
and know that you’re gonna have to live and die
by your own decisions.
Like it’s you that’s gonna get bitten.
by the alligator.
It’s not the guy who gave you that voice.
Because whatever happens is like,
“No, I told you that’s the door,
but maybe you opened it too fast.
You should have waited before you opened it.”
It’s never their fault.
It’s always going to come down to you.
So there has been many cases where,
you know,
like you’re at odds,
you’re at odds with a group of people that,
and they’re very influential because they could be,
you know, stakeholders in the project
that you’re talking about.
and they tell you to go a certain direction,
and you just, you have to decide,
is this the direction that I want to take?
And if not, then you just say, “I hear you, I understand this,
but this is where I think the right decision is.”
And this has been a lot of cases like that.
But I don’t have the answer to your question.
I didn’t know.
The answer is I didn’t know how to navigate it.
You just keep going and just figure it out.
But again, nowadays I look at resources available,
“Oh my god, that’s just…”
Yeah.
That would have been a godsend, you know?
Same as when we were kids.
15 years ago, this would have been helpful to have this guide here,
or this podcast, or this interview, whatever, you know?
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs,
because as a designer, you need to have thick skin.
But it’s not the same as somebody telling you to shove your idea and shoot it in the face.
And even then, even as a designer, you still feel this thing.
You’ll feel this thing, but it’s not the same.
But imagine this thing that like your present is not like two days worth of design
It’s not yeah, it’s like to eat the last two years of your life
Like every day every night every afternoon every lunch every nap you’re dreaming a day dreaming about it
Like imagine that and then someone telling you this is this is shit
This is so ugly like this thing that you’ve painted for the last two years, you know
Yeah, so that’s thing imagine that but like amplifiers so much more so you have to have that resilience
you got to like keep in mind why you’re doing this and
And over the years, my motivation changed.
Right.
I now today, no longer, I’m no longer motivated by the same desire that I had 14 years ago to learn.
Right.
I still don’t get me wrong, I still want, obviously there’s so much that I don’t know that I want to learn.
I’m always going to be a student of the game.
But along the way, you create something of value, and then you start to see it impact people’s lives.
And then you’re like, wow, this mission that we set out to create, or this vision that we set out to bring to life is actually within reach.
And that starts to excite you.
And then you start to see that it’s impacting people’s lives.
In our case, our work is used by creators,
people who make TV shows and movies and producers
and impacts fans, billions of fans around the world.
And then as a consumer, you see something like,
wow, I was involved in that.
I helped make that.
– I held that second season of that show that I love.
– Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Not biasedly, that’s what the data says.
(laughing)
– Oh man, let’s go back a little bit.
– ‘Cause I realize people might not know
what we’re talking about.
Exactly. That’s what I’ve done.
So let’s go back.
But yeah, I mean, to wrap that whole segment up, resilience.
Yes.
I think it’s incredibly important.
It is perhaps the single most important thing.
And I meet a lot of people, I interview a lot of people,
I meet a lot of people who believe that somehow their intelligence sets them apart.
Right.
And as a kid, you know, I was like, “I like you, I like you.”
It is worth nothing in the real world.
Especially nowadays.
If you think your intelligence sets you apart in the age of AI,
you’re going to have a tough few years.
You’ve got to be able to now do something different.
You’ve got to be imaginative, be able to connect the dots.
You’ve got to have resilience.
You’ve got to be able to envision something and pursue it
and create value for everyone involved.
And, you know, along the way, of course, if you’re the leader of the project,
then you also have to pick up other things on you.
Like you have to motivate people, you have to inspire people,
because, you know, when it gets dark, it doesn’t just get dark for you.
– Yeah. – It gets dark for everyone.
And now you’re almost at the head of getting dark for everybody as well.
– Exactly. – The responsibilities.
And so then you have to realize it’s not only even just about you anymore.
It was when you started.
It’s no longer just about you, you know?
This thing grows and you have like millions of subscribers everywhere and so on.
You have people working on the project and so on.
And something happens, you know?
You fuck up.
You say something that you shouldn’t have.
And then ST is about to get cancelled.
You’re smoke a joint with Elon Musk and shit.
ST is about to get cancelled.
I don’t know if that’s cancellable anymore.
But like…
No, I’m just kidding.
Something is going to be cancelled in the future.
You never know.
But you know, I’ll do that with you if you’re keen to one.
I’ll get cancelled with you.
I got you back.
Let’s do it.
Then you realise that when it gets dark
and Essie is about to get cancelled,
it’s not just going to impact your life.
It’s going to impact everyone else.
It’s going to impact that person that was working on something else
that you’ve got them working on this project.
And you start to feel responsible for that.
All that to say is my motivations have shifted and changed.
and change. And now I think about that. I think about the impact that the project, the
company that we’re working on has created or is having around the world. And that’s
very exciting. If you think about the sheer potential of, wow, we can actually change
this entertainment landscape. But anyway, you were going to change. You’re going to
take us back.
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s get to that. Because again, I think the impact part, the path right now
is just incredibly exciting. But let’s go back to the dark days. Let’s go back to I
I have this idea.
Finish this off really quickly, yes?
Yeah, I know.
I might crash over because I’m going to drive off.
Adrian, salut my man.
Salut Adrian.
Let’s go back to that.
So you finished, you must say you wanted to do this.
How did the idea of connecting consumers with creators happened?
We developed technology in the early days, in the beginning, that allowed us to see what
what people were streaming and downloading around the world.
And there was a lot of information,
there was a lot of information that we had in the early days.
And we knew there was a lot of value sitting there,
we just didn’t know how to apply it.
So we kind of developed something
and we understood the science and technology of how it works.
We didn’t understand the business implications.
And so one thing led to another.
And most things, the vast majority of companies now,
what you know them to be successful for
is not what they started to be.
And this was no difference.
When we first started, it’s not like we knew,
that’s the product that we were going to build.
It was going to look like that.
The first business intelligence dashboard,
I still have this.
I’ll show you to you one day.
But it’s not one that I’m proud of now.
But the first BI dashboard, 14 years ago, that was fancy.
– Yeah. – BI dashboard.
– Yeah, I know.
– That was like, holy shit,
you could see what’s happening around the world.
I could show you with my dashboard
what audiences were watching.
– Yeah, I mean, I can tell you, that was groundbreaking.
– No, it didn’t look like what it looks now,
but of course, but like the sketch,
that was like just envisioning, just picturing something,
like maybe we build something like this.
– But yeah, how do you get to that idea?
So go back to how do you realize that this is the value,
this is the application of the technology.
What is it that you have?
Well, what we had was access to information.
Information, data.
And even back then there was a lot of noise about big data
and big data, right?
There was a lot of analytics.
14 years ago is not that long ago.
And so there was still a lot of quite advanced analytics
in different industries.
Not a lot of media entertainment.
Media entertainment was still one of the least data-driven industries.
Still is.
To this day, still is.
That’s starting to change on one hand with a lot of technology companies that are tech at heart.
That are a lot of the streaming services platforms that apply technology and data.
On the other hand, for a lot of decisions that even they make is not very scientific at all.
So their industry still has a long way to go to get to a place of maximal efficiency from a data and analytics standpoint.
which is very unlike any other industry of a similar size
because this is one of the top 10 largest industries
on the planet.
And if you think any other industry,
pharma, oil, whatever other big industry, FMC,
well, any other big industry that is,
you’re looking at a quarter to a half a trillion dollar
value chain per year, and then you go,
okay, how efficient is this industry?
What analytics tools are used in it and so on?
And media entertainment is quite possibly up there.
I would not be surprised if some report came out and said
it was the least data-driven industry out of any other similarly sized industry on the planet.
And I am excited now, so I know that that much.
How did we get there?
So I’ll come back to your question.
So we knew we had information, data.
Didn’t know how and what it was going to be useful for.
We knew that there’s a lot of different types of information that we had access to.
We had access to people who were not just watching TV shows and movies, what games they
were downloading, what music they were listening to, and so on.
We ran experiments.
This is where the next phase started.
This is what I learned along the early academic years, which is what a lot of my scientific
backgrounds came in useful, experiments.
approach.
And the linear startup approach, in short,
basically says, “You have a hypothesis.
You design an experiment to validate or invalidate
the hypothesis, and you’re going to decide
before you do it what constitutes a validation
of the hypothesis, and what constitutes an invalidation
of that hypothesis, and then you pursue the experiment,
and then you see what results you get, and you may need
to refine the experiment.
You’re like, “Oh, results are inconclusive.
Let’s refine the experiment to get more conclusive results.”
So you just check, which is a basic scientific discovery process applied to business.
And Eric Riesen, the author of “A Lean Startup,”
Steve Blank, for people who are listening who are looking for some of the best,
to this day I still think some of the best resources to start with,
read the Lean Startup,
Steve Blank’s “Custom Development Manifesto,”
custom development methodology.
And all of it is just all rooted in experimentation
and hypothesis testing experimentation,
which is inherently a scientific approach.
So we just went out and did that and said,
hey, we don’t know who this is valuable for.
We don’t know how valuable it is.
We don’t know what we can do with it.
But let’s go out and find out in experiments.
And so we just designed a whole bunch of experimentations
and we’ll follow through probably about two years
of experimentation.
– Oh, wow.
Do you remember what the first experiment was?
Yeah, I remember.
I remember.
We did a lot of things.
We did a lot of things.
We went and validated.
Like what was the hypothesis and what was the…
One of our hypotheses was the data that we had about people listening or what music to
listen to was going to be valuable for music artists to help them figure out where they
should tour.
Oh, okay.
Of course.
Yeah, because you have IP…
Again, this is about like 14 years ago.
So this is before Spotify and YouTube gave you all the analytics that you wanted on the planet.
And down to who’s listening and which city and what else.
This is back when you consume albums and then there was the piracy.
Right, exactly.
And still touring was, and to this day touring is still where the majority of a lot of the profits are made from the music industry.
So we ran that experiment and I flew out to LA and went to London and I met with some very, very, very famous managers of popular artists and bands.
– Damn, can you say your names?
– Madonna.
– Episode two, episode two.
Some of which we’re working with now in other ways.
– Oh damn, okay.
– You would know.
And we ran that experiment and actually we validated
a lot of, not all the hypothesis,
we validated some of the hypothesis that data was very useful.
It was very impactful and we validated that actually knowing
when to tour and where precise location and time
was of tremendous value to these folks. Luckily for us though, we also validated the application
within the TV and movie industry. The TV and movie industry was much larger. It was just
much larger. We validated a lot more hypotheses there. We discovered that the utility had much
more value. The movie and TV industry was bigger than the next three industries that
we tested combined.
It was much bigger.
And unlike all the other industries,
it was going through well, not unlike,
but it was going through the fastest rate of flux.
It was changing in the fastest rate.
Again, 14 years ago, Netflix isn’t the household name
that it is now, but it’s starting to be.
Streaming is starting to be.
So the industry was starting to change
and people were starting to think about,
what does the future look like?
And then you come in with this new thing
And then you go, “Oh, I can tell you this, this and this.”
And before we came about, that was an unknown.
That was not a thing that the industry knew.
And so long story short, we ran up a whole bunch of,
about two years worth of hype.
We tested with the advertising industry.
We validated a lot of things, advertising industry,
music industry, publishing.
We spoke to a lot of authors and so on.
– And all these experiments actually help you down
the line as well when you did sort of focus
on your TV and movie industry, right?
because those hypotheses are still applied on the other segments.
And a lot of those hypotheses, we actually made a very conscious decision
that we were going to pursue it, just not now.
Right. Yeah, that’s what I mean.
And we’re coming back to it later.
Some of which are picking, we’re now, we’re literally picking up 12 years later.
Yes. Yeah.
Right. And so it was a fun, it was a fun time.
And now going through it, it was not fun.
In hindsight now, I look at it now with warmth.
I looked at it with like, “Aww, that was cute.”
Like, you know, going through all of that
and validating those things.
And being this little kid who went around
and was like, “Hey, can I ask you a bunch of questions, please?”
And just asking for people’s time to give you 15 minutes.
And sometimes you got told no.
Sometimes you pulled in a favor from someone
who knew that person who was like, “Listen, just like,
let this guy buy you a coffee.
He’s a smart kid.
He’s got something really cool to show you on iPad.”
And so a lot of what was just that was literally just going there being humble,
saying, “I don’t know, but you’re the expert,
and I have something to show you, and I just want to ask you a bunch of questions.”
And to validate something in business, a lot of times you ask,
“Does this solve this problem? Would you pay for this?
How much would you pay for this?”
And so anyway, so we had actually a list of hundreds of questions,
all up and to ask people.
And we must have interviewed hundreds of people,
hundreds of people around the world.
And who were all experts in the field,
very influential people in their field, on different fields.
And long story short, we decided about two years later
to focus on the TV and movie industry.
Because of a number of reasons.
One, it was the largest industry of all the rest,
almost combined.
Two, it was going through the fastest rate of flux,
was changing really rapidly.
And three, we had something really, really,
really freaking unique, really unique.
And we knew and understood that the power of what we had
was going to get amplified over time.
The more data we were going to capture,
the more the analytics tools were going to be developed.
The more that, Jesus, the more data warehousing was going to get.
When we first started, our biggest line item,
which we couldn’t afford, we didn’t have money,
was data storage.
– Yeah, I was gonna ask about that.
– Because data warehousing wasn’t like virtual,
you know, data stores were not as commonly accessible
and as cheap as they are today.
And so we literally couldn’t store all the data
that we were capturing from–
– Of course, ’cause even at that time,
the vast amount of data that you capture–
hundreds of millions of people around the world.
And so you’re looking at trillions and trillions of data points.
You’re looking at petabytes upon petabytes.
And back then, what are you going to do with all the awareness stories?
So we did at some point, we had a bunch of like, we did the math.
Just delete all the porn.
We did.
We did.
We deleted all the porn.
As soon as cold storage came out, and a lot of data centers were like,
cold storage, that shit.
I don’t know why we might use it later down the line, but there might be a connection.
Hey, you never know at some point.
So you could just like put it on the side.
Yeah, exactly. And nowadays you have a lot of that.
So nowadays you would find anything that we don’t think we have an immediate utility for, we put on cold storage.
So all that means is it doesn’t matter what you’re using as your AWS or whatever, you put something in cold storage and it is cheaper than putting something in a live environment.
access it to pull it back, you have to pay more. So that’s better for things that you
don’t have to regularly query. So if you’re querying something for a live product, you
know, you’ll have that in a live environment, but live environments is more expensive than
putting something in just cold. So this dumping is somewhere saying, you know what, just dump
it somewhere, put it in ice and I’m not going to need it for the next two years. Yeah. It’s
almost like a term deposit. You know, just leaving your money there, you get higher interest
rates. And so, so it’s very similar. Now again, rewind when it first started, none of that
was available. So like when we first started, all the show, well, we experimented, we had
physical, so I had a bunch of like server racks and stuff at home, like just like, but
then realized very quickly that that was going to run out. And now my whole house was going
to get filled like my parents house going to get filled with service. I was like, actually,
that shit doesn’t work. So we’re gonna have to find another way fast. And so yeah, you
just just learn, you pick up things along the way. Like I was not a, you know, a cloud
expert when we first started. I was a neuroscientist. Let’s get back to it.
Because yeah, I mean, the stuff that you have to then learn and pick up along the way is
also preposterous.
Like the amount of stuff that you have to learn along the way about engineering and
how to put products together.
It’s just crazy.
So let’s go back to, you narrowed down to TV and movies.
Yes.
And then what?
And from there we had to decide what is our first product that we’re going to build.
Yeah, that’s what I mean.
So the first experiment, what was it?
And the first product that we set out to build was on the back of us validating a whole bunch
of hypotheses that centered around the value of a term that we coined, that we came up
with, which was demand for content.
So we said that, well, the results of our experiments over the first two years showed
that the data that we had told us what demand there is for content,
how much demand there is for content around the world.
And demand was, obviously there’s economics, supply and demand.
We didn’t invent the word demand, but demand wasn’t a commonly accepted industry metric.
And a TV movie industry to measure audiences.
Audience measurement usually was in ratings, linear ratings.
– But as he’s moving to streaming, then what is it?
– Then it was like number of eyeballs, I guess.
Number of how many people watched this show?
How many minutes does it have?
And so on.
In Box Office, it was, well, that was rather easy.
It was how many tickets did you sell?
How much money did you make in Box Office?
And so we created a new metric.
And we said, “Hey, this is how much demand there is for content.”
And that was, in hindsight, a good decision
for a number of reasons, but also it was a hard decision to make,
and it was a hard pathway to follow because it was brand new.
And people didn’t know, “What does demand for content mean?”
What does that mean?
And so we created this whole new index system, this whole new measurement system
that told you demand for content.
And we learned along the way a lot of tricks and ways to make it accessible and easily actionable for people.
But at the beginning we didn’t know.
So to answer your question though, we came to that conclusion of the two years of experimentation.
We’re going to focus on TV and movie industry.
We’re going to build a product.
The first product was our TV demand product.
To this day, Paralletics is mostly known for measuring the demand for TV shows.
Even though we do so much more things now.
It’s just because relative to how much time we spend saying,
we measure demand for TV shows, everything else that we do is quite compressed
over the last couple of years.
Where we spent a lot of years building the industry knowledge that we measure demand for content.
That’s now something that you can do.
You can know exactly down in West Oakland on a Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening,
how much demand there is for this TV show.
Yeah.
In the past, that was impossible before we came about.
So for those who are listening, finally, we come to a question.
What does Parrot do?
Why is this guy here?
What are they talking about?
After one hour.
What are they talking about?
Don’t worry, I put it in the caption.
Can you put it in the captions here just to summarize?
Yes, so do they know.
Yeah, I get a shortcut to this point.
Parrot measures global audience demand for content.
TV content, movie content, sports content.
What Parr also does is measure the economic value of content.
Measure how much economic value, how many dollars a TV show is worth.
How will this movie do in the box office?
How many dollars will it bring in?
This TV show, if you put it on the streaming service,
How much money would it make?
How much revenue would it make for them?
And so ultimately that was the holy grail that we set out to achieve.
But when we first started, yeah, we said, “Hey, we’re going to build a product that’s going to measure the amount of content.”
It looked nowhere close to how our products look today,
but it allowed you to do something very cool.
It allowed you to type in a TV show, select a country,
and select any time period, and then just see a time series in real time of exactly how popular that show was in that part of the world.
show was in that part of the world,
and with audiences there in that place.
And that was groundbreaking, that was revolutionary.
So we then signed up, we went out,
and I went out to London, I went out to LA, in New York,
and we signed up, our first beta clients, studios,
anyone who would listen really in the very beginning.
But that was, again, that was the value of us
testing hypotheses at the very beginning.
Because we spoke to people and said, “Hey, would you pay for something like this?”
and people were like, “Yeah, we would pay.
We want to know if our show is popular in that place.”
We assumed it’s not because we couldn’t sell it to any buyer there.
But if we had the data that told us, “Hey, our show is really popular with audiences in your market,
and you’re wherever down in West Auckland and New Zealand and Auckland,
then I’ll go to a local broadcaster and say to them, “Hey, this show is really popular there.
Maybe you should buy it.”
So the studios and producers wanted to buy it.
And then the people who are the content buyers themselves,
the people who are programming content wanted to know what’s popular with their audiences here.
And in the past they didn’t know. In the past, the only thing they had was off the shows that we had previously bought
and aired on TV, how much ratings did they have? How many rating points did they get?
That they had access to.
But they didn’t have access to this Swedish TV show or this Colombian drama or this American sitcom
that had never aired in this market.
If it was never available here, they had no ratings for it.
And so they didn’t know how it would perform.
They only know, “Oh, we had something else similar to it.
That didn’t do too well.
This thing might not do too well either.”
So it was very, very like,
you know,
being up in the air,
we’re not very scientific.
And that’s what we validated throughout early experimentation.
So Long Story Shores, we rolled out a TV demand product
that told the TV industry how much demand they had.
there is for TV shows around the world. We signed up all the major studios, TV
networks, streaming services and then from there we said hey we can also do
that for movies. Yeah. And we can do that for talent. So now you can look up our
product and go hey I wonder how popular this actor is. Right. In these parts of
the world. Let’s go back to TV though. So when you first you basically
decide you’re gonna do TV demand product. Yes. When do you find your product market
it. Like, I want moment. And what did it take to actually sell it, start selling it? Do you
go to the States mainly? Because that’s mainly where the industry is, isn’t it?
Of course. I mean, that’s…
How did that process go?
Yeah, today our biggest… Like our commercial HQ is based in Los Angeles. Obviously, that’s
where Hollywood is based. And that’s where we are. Our R&D center is still down in New Zealand.
But in the early days, yeah, we had to, you had to go.
And I believe that, you know, people now talk about the age of Zoom and, you know,
video and there is nothing like going in someone in the eye and saying, hey,
SD, I want to show you something.
Yeah.
Like, let me show you this thing that I created.
And there’s something very unique about that.
You cannot recreate this.
Yeah.
I believe I’m a very attacked, you know, you know, attacked up for a second.
I need you to touch things and see things and…
I’m very proud of that dashboard.
Look at this beautiful thing.
Yeah, look at this.
Tell me why sure you want to type it.
Look at this.
Exactly, type it yourself.
What was the reaction?
Because I bet they never seen anything regarding money.
I remember, I don’t know if he wants me to say his name on a public podcast,
but someone who later ended up becoming quite involved with us,
invested in the company, became a shareholder, a supporter, an advocate,
Someone very, who was the president of a big, big, big studio network in Hollywood.
I went to meet him.
Well, I was actually in Cannes for a Cannes film market.
They usually have film markets like Cannes Film Festival, MIPTV, MIPCOM, and so on.
And I was there for one of those markets, just talking to people in the industry
and validating hypotheses and presenting our products
to the people.
And our company account had tweeted something about,
someone on the team had tweeted something about some TV show
that was produced by the studio of this executive
that I was, I’m talking about,
and that was trending somewhere in the world.
And he liked it.
– Okay. – Oh my God.
– Oh shit.
– The presidents of the studio liked our tweets.
We’re so excited.
We were like, “It’s just incredible.”
And so what did I do, of course, then?
As soon as I saw that, I was in Cannes right now, right?
And then we had some people in LA, we had some people in Oakland, New Zealand,
where we first started the company, we’re still R&D centers.
And I’m calling people, I’m like, “Hey, can someone reach out?”
I’m running into a meeting, but can someone reach out to him,
ping him on Twitter at the time, XNow, and say, “Hey, so that you liked our tweets,
“We’d love to meet you if you or any of your reps are, I’m going to just show you this live.”
And within minutes he responded on Twitter.
And the response was, “Oh, actually this is his publicist.”
It turned out it wasn’t him that liked it, it was his publicist.
Because of course, the studio Hollywood president, you don’t do it on Twitter.
Someone does that for you.
You have multiple publicists doing that for you.
So his publicist had liked their tweet.
And and so she responded saying, oh, he’s actually in Cannes right now.
No way for this conference right there.
He’s in Cannes for this conference.
And so my team, someone I think calls me and they’re like,
do this, this guy is in Cannes.
He’s where you are right now in the same conference that you’re in.
And he has a slot like a 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. tonight at one of the hotels in Cannes.
And he wants to meet you at the lobby on the bar of the hotel at like 6pm.
Oh my God, I take my, you know, exactly.
So I’m going, I’m taking my laptop, I’m going there.
And I sit down and he goes, OK, I’ve got like 10 or 15 minutes max.
And I’m going to take a business meeting here.
So I go, OK, thanks for your time.
I give him that 60 second view of like, here’s what we do.
We can measure global demand for content.
You can type in here anything and then it will show you in real time
everything about where it’s popular, how many people and who the people are,
whatever. And then he goes, can you punch in?
Can you type in this this this this show?
And I said, oh, you can do it yourself.
So I gave him the product and he typed it in and it showed that it was popular in a
specific market, a specific country around the world.
And then he just looks at it.
He he he he pushes back the laptop to my end of the table.
He grabs his drink.
Takes a sip and he goes.
I fucking knew it.
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
I literally have no idea what he’s talking about.
I’m just sitting there going, is this going to bad?
Is this like what is he knew was bad or he knew?
I don’t know what he’s talking about.
He goes, I fucking knew it.
I told him it was popular there.
I told him it was popular there.
And my salespeople told me we couldn’t sell it in the market.
We couldn’t sell the show.
in that country because the buyers in that country didn’t believe that there was any demand for it.
They didn’t believe that audiences wanted to see it.
And I told them, “No, no, I know people in that country like this show. They want it.”
And I knew it.
And so it just goes, “How do I get involved in this? How do I partay?”
So one thing led to another and as I said, he became quite involved with us.
But a lot of the times it was just things like that.
It was just, you start,
one thing leads to another and you take something of value.
You just keep validating hypotheses.
And every interaction that we had was something that was validating hypothesis.
That this was valuable.
This was solve a problem in the industry that had previously not been solved.
And the process never stops.
Fast forward to today, we are now solving new problems for the industry.
We’re spending a lot of time and effort and money on research and development and R&D
to solve new problems for the industry because industry is moving and is advancing and is
facing new challenges.
The fun thing is now we are in a position where we get to innovate and solve for the
industry.
So that’s how we arrived at launching a TV product, going to the stakeholders who were
producing and more buying and selling TV shows and showing them the value of the product.
And getting to the question about product market fit, it was really about…
And product market fit for me is relatively simple.
Is someone willing to pay for your products?
Yeah, that’s what I mean.
What was the first client that was like, “I’m willing to pray for this.”
And what was the problem that they wanted to solve?
The first client, if I remember correctly, that…
Well, the first client that truly, truly grasped it and used it every single day to drive, you know, tens of millions of dollars worth of decisions was a local streaming service.
Was a local streaming service that was buying content for a certain market and they just wanted to know what to buy.
They didn’t know what TV shows, what movies to buy for their markets and they had no idea.
They had linear ratings.
But linear arrays, again, as we just talked about,
are usually for things that have previously aired in the market.
But they wanted to buy new shit that didn’t exist,
they never aired in the market.
So it was always they wanted to be a step ahead.
So that was the first content-buying client.
The first studio client was a big studio,
a big British studio, content studio.
And for them, they had made a lot of content,
very, very, you know, household name content.
And they wanted to know, just like this
studio president that we’re talking about,
where it was popular, how to better monetize it,
which markets haven’t they sold it into,
or how to better negotiate for its price.
Once you land those and they start using it every day
and so on, then you get to product market fit,
which is usually about someone willing to pay
for your product, and how much do they value it,
How will their daily jobs change if you took it away from them?
And you got to ask your question as an entrepreneur
when you’re looking for product market fit.
If suddenly you’re using my product and I said,
that’s a product and I said, sorry, such a glass,
ST, I’m going to take this away from you.
This no longer exists.
– How much are you willing to pay for getting back?
– How much do you care?
– One much you care first.
– How much do you care, let alone pay for it.
You may not give a fuck.
You may just say, “I’m done with that loss.
It’s empty. I don’t care. Go take it.
My life is not going to be impacted one day.
I’m not going to pay a cent. I’m not even going to waste a minute on it.”
But if you say, “Please give it back.
I’ll pay a lot of money for it.
I can’t do my job with it anymore.
I need that product.”
Then you know you’ve got a product market fit.
You know you’ve solved a very particular problem that is worth solving for someone.
And that’s a relatively simple test
figure out whether we have product market fit or not.
Incredible. And how about like, because if I was in that position, I’d be like,
how much you’re fucking charged for it? How much? How do you figure that out?
Because again, it’s incredibly amount of value that you’re generating, but then you brand new.
It’s an art more than a science. And you see how much other people are charging.
So if I’m selling this glass or I’m selling this drink, okay, well, the first thing I do is I go…
How much is this other drink being sold for?
But in this case, isn’t it fair to say that there was nobody doing that?
Exactly. So then now it’s hard. Now you’re getting into harder territory.
Or like, well, no, there’s nothing. There’s no drink like it.
You can’t compare with that.
The only previous thing was a bottle, you know, and now I’m like selling you a can.
Yeah.
And so how much is the can worth? Well, can is better than a bottle for a lot of reasons.
Yeah, yeah.
as cheaper to make, whatever, but like it doesn’t have the same feeling, so then you don’t know.
There’s no precedent for it. And so there’s a couple of ways. Pricing strategies, a lot of
reasons I learned on pricing strategies. Long story short, there’s a couple things you can do. One,
you can go value-based pricing. And value-based pricing is how much is the problem that I’m
I’m solving for you worth to you.
So in our case, that show that I helped you figure out
as popular in a certain market,
how much is that information worth to you?
How much are you going to be able to sell your TV show for
in that market?
And I want a small percentage of that.
That’s value-based pricing, which is based on the value
that I create for you.
To the extent that you can quantify how much value
a product generates for someone to solve a problem, you can often, not always, be able
to charge a fee based on the value that you create.
This is value-based.
Then there is just benchmark-based pricing.
We can just go, “Hey, this is how many products this has cost, like a standard can or bottle,
and ours is actually cheaper.”
So you can compete on price.
You can compete on features in some cases.
You can go, “Oh, it’s the same bottle,
but my bottle is heat resistance.”
It just is in terms of heat.
Whatever, it doesn’t impact the underlying drink,
and so I charge more for it.
So you can charge on features.
In my experience, the best thing to do
is do value-based pricing.
It’s oftentimes the hottest,
but it’s oftentimes the most worthy of pursuing.
Because it forces you and your clients
to clearly articulate what problem are we solving and how much is it worth to us?
Are you going to be able to do all the time? No.
No, sometimes it’s very hard to do, very, very difficult to quantify certain things.
But, particularly, a lot of human decisions are involved because that requires complete and utter objectivity
when it comes to figuring out how did we achieve this outcome, how much of it was due to this product versus
my genius and a lot of people have ego and so you find it difficult to quantify that
value.
But to the extent that you can, you always try to go with value-based pricing.
Interesting.
It works well for both parties as well at the end of the day because you know that you’re
getting the best value out of this and then you know that you’re charging the right amount
of money as well.
It’s just harder to execute usually.
Because by far the easiest thing to execute is saying, “Ersi, you’re paying $5 for this
I give you the exact same one. It does everything that that thing does for $4.
I’m gonna save you a dollar. That’s by far the easiest thing.
Because for you it requires no thought, it requires no work, no energy.
You just go, “You’ll figure it out.” Oh yeah.
I’ll give you four bucks, I save a dollar. Here you go.
Versus like, “Hey, I’m gonna give you this new thing that doesn’t exist before.”
With it, you’re gonna be able to do all these cool things and you’re gonna generate a lot more value.
Let’s work together to quantify what that value is.
And I want a percentage of that.
It’s more valuable to do that process,
but it’s just harder.
I imagine that after that,
then you started to realize, “Holy shit,
there is so much more things you can do
other than just knowing when shows to buy.”
Because that’s where we’re sitting at right now.
There is a tremendous amount of applications.
And also let’s talk about, because there’s something that we skipped, by the way, I think,
is the fact that we’re not sitting in just data that’s just downloads.
You guys went and said, “Hey, that’s not good enough.”
We built on the initial data set that we had, which is what people are downloading and streaming,
what they’re watching.
And we had this, well, we used, we did not develop.
there was already a well-documented thesis around the internet creating what we,
well the authors of the time called the attention economy.
And we looked at that concept and we thought, “That’s very interesting.
We do live in an attention economy.
Your time is the most valuable resource that you have.”
And the more I thought about it logically, the more I was like, “Gee, that makes sense.
I’m capturing your time now. You’re capturing my time.
That’s value because at this point in time, I’m not doing something else.
I’m not watching a TV show.
I’m not watching a video, whatever.
And so attention is a currency then.
That’s all it means.
It just means attention is a currency.
How do we value that currency?
Well, first in order to value it, you have to capture it.
You have to capture it.
And so we realized that what we had wasn’t really capturing
all the attention.
And so we went out and said, “Hey, let’s capture all the different other buckets of attention.”
where people are expressing their demand for content or talent or video games or sports.
So we expanded the horizons of what we were measuring.
And the reason for that also, because we will probably get to it,
but it’s because as a consumer, as consumers,
we didn’t really differentiate between a TV show and a movie.
If I want to watch something, I’ll watch it.
It could be a TV show, it could be a movie.
It made no difference to me.
Or I could stream my favorite streamer,
playing a video game or something.
Again, consumers nowadays, the only thing that matters is
are you able to capture their attention?
And where are they spending their attention?
So in order to do that, we went out and started to capture
attention.
In order to do that, we said, where are people spending their
attention today, in this day and age?
And people are spending their attention in lots of different
places. They are there. They’re watching things online.
Certainly. That’s where we started by people who are watching streaming,
downloading. But of course, streaming now is like, you know, YouTube,
Twitch, whatever. But people also discuss.
They there’s a lot of social media, chatter, conversations,
a lot of creation and interaction between creators and consumers and fans.
Then people what about what if people just read about articles, read about
blogs, read about certain things while that’s capturing their attention as well.
and so on and so forth.
So we just went out and started plugging into any place where people were really,
where content was capturing people’s attention.
So when people are interacting with content online.
And we reached a point of diminishing marginal returns.
That is, once you have so much data
about where people are spending their time and was capturing their attention,
then the nth source of attention that you add doesn’t actually make that much difference
to the underlying data sets, to the underlying data.
So that’s when we started to go, “Okay, let’s plug into all the different sources of attention that we have.”
And that took us a few years.
years later, then we were suddenly sitting on a platform that was capturing a lot more
attention than we first started. Arguably the biggest, the single biggest audience behavior
data sets on the planet.
Yeah, incredible. Because I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to have the amount
data that you guys were sitting on and actually quantifying and making it into something you could
actually understand. Because I think that’s something I learned when I joined Parrot that
you know you see this platform you actually see the actual output of the
metric or whatever but it doesn’t actually collect in your mind when you go “oh shit wait that number
is calculated based on a whole bunch of shit” and it just makes it easier for me to understand it
but there’s a whole bunch of stuff. How do you guys like figure that out? Like “oh that’s like
this number that I’m looking at,
at any given point in time, maybe 384 million people
contributed to it.
Because that’s how many people interacted with that specific TV show,
globally, because it was a big hit.
And it may be a small number, maybe it’s 5 million people,
maybe it’s a billion people that interacted with it.
So it’s the sheer magnitude that was, one, the A,
the part of the difficulty,
Two was the different types of interactions because, you know,
attention now or content can capture attention in different ways. So…
It’s not the same weight. So weighting it out as well.
So we had to develop these complex systems that said, “Hey,
if this TV show captured ST’s attention for one second,
okay, it has some weight, some value,
but if it captures attention for four hours,
then that’s a lot more valuable.
Four hours of attention is worth more.
That’s a higher percentage of your lifetime than one second.
If you measure your lifetime in hours.
And so you spend more of your life on this thing.
So it’s worth more.
So our currency was attention.
And so we had to develop these systems that would assign a meaning
to how much attention you would spend with interacting with
or watching or consuming a piece of content
or interacting with your favorite talent
or sports club or league or player or whatever it may be
that is capturing your attention.
And once we build those systems,
then we had to surface them
and we had to educate the industry on them as well.
We had to educate the industry that that’s what that means.
– Right. – And that’s more valuable.
Now, ultimately, and I’ll get you all sort of like skip
past a lot of steps in the middle,
But ultimately, what really matters to people is their wallets.
Of course.
And so whenever you’re building a product and advice on entrepreneurs, you always follow the money.
Always follow the money.
How does what you have impact that person’s wallet?
True.
Yeah.
And if you can find the link, if you find the link, then you’re just that much closer to finding a product market firm.
Right.
And we found the link and we actually had a much bigger grand vision of a link in mind,
which was to ultimately assign a dollar value to every piece of content, to every TV show,
to every movie, to every sports league.
How much is the Spanish Football League, La Liga, how much is that worth?
In a certain market, in a certain country, how much money is that worth?
And no one knew that.
Again, what is known is historical deals.
Historically, here is the deal
between the Spanish league and this broadcaster.
Here’s what the deal was, is how much they paid for it.
$388 million a year.
How much is it actually worth?
And so that’s what we had to build a link for and develop.
So fast forward to 2024, that’s where we are now.
So it’s an exciting moment.
– Incredible, because I mean going from,
hey, we have this dashboard and this data
that helps you with a bunch of stuff,
such as knowing what shows to buy.
So I can tell you exactly how much money that show is worth
in a given market for a streaming platform.
It has to be also a great timing for this company
because you’re right in the middle
of the streaming wars, literally.
Where everybody’s just throwing so much more money
creating content and something we haven’t talked about, the ability to concept test,
whether or not, hey, show is successful, generates a proportion of amounts of value
for any streaming platform that wants to know. We were too early, actually.
Yeah, yeah, yes. But so, were you guys way too early or right in the middle?
I probably think we were a couple of years too early.
Okay. I think we were a couple of years too early.
Because I think we brought to the industry a bunch of things that a lot of people weren’t ready for.
Why weren’t they ready for?
For a lot of reasons.
And again, like this is to the extent that it helps anyone who’s listening, who’s trying to build a new
company or new products, doing a new thing in an industry, you are going to have to fight inertia.
You’re going to have to fight the status quo.
and the status quo and whatever industry that you’re pursuing is just, is always there.
It’s just what people have always done.
Yeah.
And you have to fight that.
And people don’t like, a lot of people, most people don’t like change.
Unless they have to change.
Especially this industry that doesn’t like change.
Especially in this industry.
People do not like change.
Because a lot of the people that we were targeting, they were comfortable where they are.
They had, this is Hollywood.
They were comfortable, they were successful, they were rich, they made successful movies and TV shows.
And you’re just coming and saying, “There’s a new way of doing things.”
And the natural reaction for someone in that position to say is, “F off.”
You know, like, “I don’t care.”
I don’t care.
I don’t care.
Do you want to pause it for that?
No, no, no, it’s all right.
So it’s all good.
It’s just I think that thing came out, but it’s fine.
the black team. That’s why I put it, see? Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, so fighting the
status quo is hard. And that takes a lot of energy takes a lot of energy because you have
to explain that, hey, like I hear you, this is what you’ve been doing, but things are
about to change. Things about to change because you know, there’s there’s now this thing called
the internet and, you know, streaming is taking over.
And historically how you’ve made money is going to be different than how you’re
going to make money going forward in the future.
But these were almost like predictions that we were making.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we were early.
And so a lot of people that later on came to us and said, can we chat?
Yeah.
Actually three years ago, we had gone to them.
Yeah, true.
I’ve heard these stories as well.
You know, many of them, there’s many, many people that three years earlier, four years
earlier we were in their office and, you know, they barely gave us 10 minutes and they’re
like, “Nah, whatever.
This is nothing.”
But actually four years later, you know, they have started their business models declining
and something else is starting to increase and they’re like, “Shit, how do we figure
this out?
What do we do next?”
And so they come like, “All right, let’s talk.
Now it’s time to talk.”
So all that to say is not actually their fault.
In a lot of ways, we were just too early.
And one learning that I’ve picked up along the way is,
you have to figure out when is the right time to communicate
the right message to the right audience.
And I didn’t know that when we first started.
So I was just, I was agnostic when it came to the message
that I was communicating to everyone,
saying the same thing to everyone,
but without realizing that actually different people
were different parts of the value chain.
And they were facing different problems and you had to speak to them in their language based on like, “Where are they today?”
Even if you knew that in two years from now, Essie is going to have a problem and he’s not aware of it.
Often times it’s not very helpful to say, “Hey, dude, you’re going to have a problem in two years. I can help you solve that problem.”
He’s going to be like, “Fuck off, man. I’m busy. I’ve got shit to do. I’ve got meetings to run to, picking up phone calls, whatever.”
So you have to be conscious of that.
That’s one of the things that you learn as you get in going.
You get that intuition for.
Right.
Let me ask you about something that’s slightly different in terms of the marketing strategy.
Because I think that was brilliant in terms of the way that,
again, like you said, you mentioned demand,
a term that you just coined, like just basically created.
And now everybody in the press is talking about this.
Was that part of the strategy?
Like you guys just said, look, let’s just talk about this until it becomes the
currency and let’s make sure every big newspaper in Hollywood is talking about
demand. There is a lot written because the designer is thinking, OK, how do you sell
this product, like marketing wise?
All of that. There is a lot.
There’s a lot written, a lot of resources online.
And the term is used.
I don’t know if it’s still used, but the term that was commonly used is
has been a category creation.
And the people who create very sticky products,
systems, ecosystems, typically create a category,
a brand new category.
So think HubSpot.
When HubSpot came about and they were talking about inbound marketing.
Now it’s a common term, everyone talks about inbound marketing.
Like, “Hey, how much inbound marketing do we have?”
And it means a certain thing.
But someone created that term.
Someone created that category of inbound marketing and they owned that category.
They owned all their SEO results and everything about it.
And so our strategy was to create a category and own a category.
And it’s really hard.
It’s a hard strategy to pull off because creating a category is oftentimes years.
Years worth of work.
It doesn’t happen overnight.
Regards how much money you have.
You can throw as much money as you have on it.
It just takes time.
Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk about.
Because you guys managed to do it relatively quick.
For a small company.
Yeah, for a small company.
Yeah, exactly.
With very little resources.
With very little resources.
Yeah, but it takes a lot of work.
It takes a lot of hustle.
It takes a lot of work.
And you have to be very…
Yes. So the answer to the question is yes.
We are very conscious about what we are trying to do.
which is create this category and how we were going to do that.
And my advice to people out there trying to create a category is to say,
just to map out your industry and map again, follow the money. You follow who pays who.
Yeah. And who influences who and the industry.
And once you figure out who pays who and who influences who in the industry, then you go,
oh, these are the people first and foremost that we have to get in front of. Right.
And these are the people here that first and foremost that we have to influence.
And these are people there that we have to be friends with.
And these are people here that we have to convince.
You know, and so once you figure out who, you know, from a from just a macro point of view,
from a top down point of view, then that sets your strategy.
And of course, you learn things as you go on, you iterate and so on.
But that sets your macro like multi-year strategy.
Right. And we did that in the early days.
We did that. We had to do that to figure out like, because otherwise your your time
and effort and energy is you could spend the whole year of your life and achieve very little.
You know, if you’re just randomly calling people, texting people without a strategy
in mind, like what am I trying to do? Which influencers are stakeholders?
That’s pretty strategic. That’s awesome.
You have to map that, yeah.
Yeah, because I’ve never worked in several campaigns before, but I’ve never seen that
before until I got to Paris. When I saw that marketing strategy, I was like, “Oh, wow,
this is very different to anything I’ve seen.” Because of what you said, it’s just like owning
and creating a brand new category that you’ve seen before.
And people sometimes misunderstand or miscalculate just one how hard that is to do.
But two, you know, it comes there are certain drawbacks that come with it also.
Certain for example, there’s a lot of confusion.
Not within our target segments, meaning the people that we want to truly understand what we do,
they understand what we do. Because we’ve been very focused on knowing who they are,
creating the persona, what do they read, what do they consume, how do they get their news,
who’s influencing them, who has their ear, and so on. So we know that we know that persona very well.
So the people who we want to understand what we do, they know what we do.
They understand what we do.
But there’s a lot of people that don’t know what we do.
They’re still confused.
There’s a lot of people out there who are like…
They’re like at the top of the adoption letters are really, really high.
They don’t have no idea.
They have no idea, but also there’s a lot of people who are just consumers.
Because now that we’re starting to get a…
And mind you, to this point, up to this point,
we have not really targeted consumers of content.
We have been very B2B focused.
We’re focused on the industry itself.
But there’s a lot of consumers out there who don’t know,
and a lot of listeners who listen to this,
hopefully as this gets popular,
who are like, “I don’t know, the fuck parrot.
What do they do?
Let me look them up,” and so on.
But because we talk about TV shows and movies
and we report on a lot of TV shows and movies,
we touch certain fandoms.
We evoke a reaction from people, from audiences.
And a lot of them don’t like what we have to say
about their favorite TV shows.
That’s true.
You don’t want to piece them off.
No, and sometimes you’re just like,
“Hey, we host an award show for the most popular TV show.”
And TV show A wins,
and then the fans of TV show B get pissed off,
and they go out of their way to try to pull you down,
try to destroy you.
And they go, “This is why Paris sucks as a company.
This is why they’re inaccurate.
It’s very fascinating and it’s actually quite inspiring to see how passionate people are about their favorite content.
And at some points we do actually have the gold at some point to help consumers globally.
Both parked that for the second episode.
Let me just do something really quickly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This Miss Cal, I don’t know if you poured me more than you poured yourself.
No, it’s good, isn’t it?
It trips you out.
I’m like, “Well, let’s get the conversation going,
because I don’t think I can drive right now.”
Yes, it’s good.
Let’s bring another one.
It’s good.
I’m liking that.
Call that Adrian.
Let’s go.
Adrian, I did not expect to get this many references on that post, Cal.
Adrian, primo.
This is good, bro.
This is good, man.
This is good, bro.
You want another piece of ice?
Yeah, let’s do it.
Alright.
We’ll keep this in the podcast anyway.
Alright.
This is an important part of the podcast.
This is an important part of the journey.
Listen, one thing that I learned actually, given this is going to be a part of the podcast,
is you have to learn to enjoy the journey.
Yes.
And I’m going to tell you something.
I am fucking horrible at that.
I really am.
I wish I was better at it.
I just, I’m not good at it.
– Bro, we finished this.
I just realized that.
– Actually, I’m telling you.
– Oh shit.
– I’m telling you, as we were talking,
I was like, wait a minute.
(laughing)
Adrian.
– God damn.
– Adrian’s like salutes right now.
He’s watching the salutes.
– Adrian, send us some for the next episode.
– Cheers, that’s a salute.
I’m not good at it.
Like that’s, I think that’s another part
that people don’t talk about.
When they talk about people creating companies, creating value, hundreds of employees, whatever,
it’s a lot of… And some people talk about that.
But the time flies. Days into weeks, into months, into years fly past.
And if you’re not present, then you’ll wake up one day going,
what happened to the last three years?
Yeah.
And I’m telling you, I’m horrible at it.
I am absolutely horrible at it.
What do you think you’re doing to improve on that?
Well, I’m now starting to be a lot more conscious about it.
Okay. I’m now starting to be a lot more
conscious about being present and the value of
making sure that it’s not always about the destination.
It’s also about the journey that you go through also.
And it’s easier said than done.
It’s really easy because in the day to day,
you get caught up in it.
You get caught up in it.
And the more successful you are, by the way,
the more you build things and the more impact you have,
the higher the stakes get.
And the higher the stakes get, the more stressful it is.
And then the more you’re like,
well, those other things in my life don’t matter
because this is such high stakes now.
So important.
But the reality is, it all comes and goes.
It all comes and goes and you only live once.
And so I had this mantra when I first started.
I codified it, I once went to give a presentation,
a bunch of MBA students.
And they asked me about what entrepreneurship means to me.
And I said to them, and you’ve heard this before, but I said to them for the people
here in the first time, I said to me, you’re born.
And I drew a line on the board and I said, you’re born.
Wait, pause there.
Because you literally walk into one thing I prepared, which is a question around that.
Yeah, OK, let’s go.
So I’m walking into it.
You’re literally walking into it.
All right.
Oh, damn, that’s what it is.
That’s exactly what I hear.
That’s what it is.
And yes, before you continue, because that’s perfect.
I put it up here because I remember seeing this for the first time.
And I was like, fuck.
Literally you spend all this time at work.
You spend all this time sleeping.
And then that’s it.
Then you’re dead.
Then what happened to your life?
That’s only your life.
And by the way, that assumes that work part assumes that you work eight hours a day.
– Yeah, true. – Five days a week.
Now, if you’re like me, that orange line,
that’s exactly where it is,
halfway through the life thing.
And so you end up with this tiny bit
and you’re like, “Wait a minute,
“what I’m left with is like 12 years only.”
And that 12 years is from when I’m like 70 to when I’m 82,
which is whatever my average life expectancy.
And I don’t wanna only live when I’m 72 to 82.
(laughs)
I wanna live now.
So I had to think about it.
Again, I had to think about it from a macro point of view.
And my approach to a lot of these things that I do in life
is now anything that’s worth thinking about is
just think about a top-down.
Because when you’re, anything,
you use any analogy.
If you’re going through a forest,
if you’re driving on the road,
if you’re building a company day in, day out,
it’s always easier to look at a top-down.
Look at the forest and you’re like,
“Oh, that’s the best pathway here.”
and look at the road and like, “Oh, that’s a long way here. Let me go through a shortcut
here.” So when I look at my life talk down, this is what I see. One on the left-hand side,
I’m seeing what I’m told. This is what I grew up being told. You need to strive for work-life
balance. So maybe let me explain this for people who have seen it the first time. So
But you’re born, and what this shows is you’re born and 700 hours later, you die.
That’s your average life expenses, more or less, you know, across OECD.
So you sleep for about 230,000 hours, assuming you sleep for seven to eight hours a day.
You work for 170,000 hours.
That’s assuming you work nine to five cents after you graduate until you retire.
And then the remaining is your life.
Why did I draw this? I drew this because I was like, okay, so people tell me about work-life balance and this is what that means.
I’m sleeping, so I can’t have work-life balance while I’m sleeping.
But in the remaining time, when I’m still sleeping, I have work-life balance.
So let me put my work into one bucket and put my life into the other bucket and then I have to have balance between them.
So I go to work, that’s what you’re told. You go to work, you go home, then it’s like your life.
And then I looked around and was like, wait a minute, that sucks.
First of all, I work more than that orange.
But even if you didn’t, that’s like a third of my life.
That green thing is only a third of my life.
But I want the whole thing that I’m not sleeping to be my life.
I want the whole thing to be my life.
And what does my life mean to me?
So I started mapping out what it means to me.
And that’s the right hand side.
My life means to me my family, because that’s
the most important thing to me.
Passion.
I’m passionate about a lot of things
that sometimes have nothing to do with my work.
Sometimes they intersect.
And it doesn’t have to do with my work.
For example, I’m passionate about a football club or football as in general, as sports.
And that might intersect because apparently we happen to also do sports, so that intersects.
But sometimes it doesn’t.
It’s about having fun.
It’s about working hard because I enjoy that.
I enjoy creating something.
And I know anything of value to create usually is we have to work hard.
It’s not easy.
It’s about making an impact.
And it’s about changing the world, which is how we started this conversation.
Yeah, about changing the world.
But for me, these are all different pieces that come together.
And all of those pieces, when they come together,
I wanted that to be my life.
Yeah.
So, I met this first for me,
and the first time that I presented it publicly was at this,
as I mentioned, this MBA program that I was teaching at.
And they asked me, “Explain what entrepreneurship means to you.”
And I said to them, “That’s what it means to me.
That’s why I choose to do what I do is because I want everything to…
I want everything that I do to fit within my life.”
And so the culture that we designed for people is the right-hand side, not the left-hand side.
That is, it’s intertwined.
So there’s a lot of workplaces and again, this is this is not to say there’s a right and wrong way of doing it
There’s a lot of places where you go to where there’s a very strict 9 to 5
Show up you clock in you swipe in your car. They look at your hours you go home and then you’re done
That’s just not the way that we are we operate why because I know that if something is important to me and it could be something
trivial in the grand scheme of things. What is trivial? Trivial is my favorite football,
to stick with that example, my favorite football team is playing. But for me it’s important.
Yeah. I like it’s, I have fun with it. It’s as passionate, I get like worked up, sometimes I
swear, like, you know, it’s just, it’s a part of life, but we’re both big football family.
So that for me is important. Maybe for you it’s taking your daughter to her swimming class.
Yeah.
And that her swimming class just happens to be 11 in the morning.
Wouldn’t it be nice if like you weren’t like, “Oh fuck, I can’t take my daughter to my like…”
and then you feel shit about that because you have to be at work.
That just sucks.
Well, can you work? Wait.
Can you just take your daughter, just go take your daughter to her, you know, class, drop her back,
and then whatever is going to take you two hours all up.
Can’t you do those two hours later in the evening?
Well, if you can, then why not?
Well, some places don’t let you do that.
And so I wanted to build a place that worked for me, first and foremost,
that reflected what I believed we should approach and how I wanted to approach my life.
And then I was really clear, I am really clear about it with people,
that says, “This is who we are, this is who we are not.”
And if you join, this is what it means you will join.
And if this is what you’re expecting, this is not what we are.
So this is not the place for you.
And it’s just level-setting expectations.
And that means that just like no one’s going to ask any questions.
If you, if you say, Hey, I’m going to take my daughter to her, uh,
swimming class at 11 AM.
Like, cool.
You know, at the same time, sometimes someone might be like, Hey,
I need your help tonight with this something that I’m working on for
tomorrow to present tomorrow.
And you have to have the flexibility to be able to like, yeah, I got you.
Like move things around at home.
And then like, well, I’ll help you out with it tonight.
And so it’s flexibility, that’s all it is.
It’s flexibility so that it’s all your life.
Now that means that what you do,
you have to enjoy what you do,
be passionate about it, make an impact.
And so that’s why for me, we’re always pushing,
we have to push the boundaries of what we’re doing
and the impact that it’s having,
because otherwise it’s not worth doing.
It’s not worth doing, I’d rather do something else.
And so one place that we will never become
is a place where we have a product and we sell it
and we just make money off it,
and everyone just shows up to work and so on.
No, we have to always push our ambitions higher
and have grander ambitions and want to achieve more
and have more impact and so on.
‘Cause our goal ultimately is to change the world
and make an impact.
– Yeah, first of all, I went again,
that graphic when I saw it,
I think it changed something in me
because I see life like that line that you see there
because I’m very passionate just like you are
about things and about work.
But I want to, first of all, before my idea goes away,
I want to give you kudos because a lot of people say
they do that, or companies, but they don’t do that.
There’s a lot of people that want to seem like they’re
keeping up with the times and they’re being flexible
and stuff, but the reality is, not really, you know?
You still gotta show up at 9.30,
otherwise people start looking at you funny.
And you actually do this.
And I can say it because I’m super honest,
but I work with you.
And I can definitely say that that’s the only company
I’ve ever worked with.
That is actually true.
You can actually say, “Hey, I’m taking my daughter to this thing.”
There is no questions asked.
There’s literally no questions.
So I want to give you…
– Yeah, show my doctor’s notes.
– Exactly.
It’s none of that bullshit.
So I want to give you kudos for keeping a culture.
– Not necessary, but yeah.
the way that you actually shown it.
We have to be intellectually honest about it.
That’s big for me.
I want to give you kudos for that.
The second thing I wanted to ask you is that
when I started working,
design has always been my passion.
Design loves music.
I always looked at my life and was like,
“Fuck, I get to do something I love.”
My mom didn’t tell me.
I was really concerned when I started.
Because you either have to be an engineer
to be an engineer or you have to be a doctor or you have to be a lawyer.
We all had to man.
And all my mom’s concern was please do not be a musician.
When I told her I wanted to be a football player.
I told my mom I wanted to be a football player.
You know what she said?
She’s like, okay, because my mom lost football and she’s a coach.
But she’s like, but you still gotta go to university.
And she pointed out to this legendary Colombian goalkeeper who is a dentist.
And he played for the national team as a legend in the sport.
Oh, damn.
So that’s what she always said.
She’s like, who was it?
Oscar Cordova.
Cordova was a dentist?
Cordova was a dentist.
Oh, damn.
So my mom would always bring him up.
He’s like, yeah, you can be a professional player.
Oh, wow.
But you got to study like Cordova did.
I didn’t know that.
I see.
I love that.
And kudos to ST’s mom, I respect him.
So my mom would never…
Yeah, because she…
My mom is a coach.
She loves football.
Yeah.
That’s why I think I have so much passion for it.
But when I told her I wanted to be a designer, I was a bit concerned.
I was like, “Yeah, man, I don’t know if she’s gonna be happy with that.”
But she always supported me.
I always supported the music I like, which is like metal and stuff.
Regardless of her religious beliefs, I always appreciated my mom through that.
So, all to say that I was actually going to study something I loved,
which I was very happy about.
Because I was like, “You know this thing where people say,
‘If you do what you love, you’re never gonna work a day in your life.'”
Yeah, that’s right.
Yeah.
Then you finish university and then you find yourself doing design but they’re not really
doing something you love on so many stages.
Like you’re doing design but you’re not really enjoying every single day.
And then that sort of intervenes with passion.
You always do things with passion but there’s a lot of things that, you know, I remember
one day I had to, I was working in an agency, for example, and every design that works in
agency knows this but sometimes there is jobs that you think hey fuck I don’t
want to be doing ads for 18 year olds about vaping. You know what I mean?
Yeah, it’s like I feel wrong about that. This is not what I want to be doing.
Right. Well I don’t want to be selling highly you know addictive things to kids.
It gets in the way of you enjoying your work and then at the end of the day you do have to make the best ad you can and you’re like
“God damn, I don’t think I want to do this.”
All that to say that only when I started doing this job
is where I actually found that could work.
That you could be very passionate about something,
you do something that you absolutely love every day.
And I talk to friends and I always feel like,
shit man, a lot of the people I talk to,
they don’t actually love their work.
They actually see it like the other graphic.
– And they don’t understand, they don’t understand.
I talk to, I have a lot of friends.
Like you’re saying, I could never work for the,
again, a lot of friends who smoke or whatever,
but like, I can’t work at a cigarettes company.
Like I just, I cannot wake up in the morning
and I’m like, I am going to do my best, my absolute best.
I’m gonna bust my ass today
so that I can cause more cancer.
Like, you know?
– Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.
Like the purpose part gets on the way.
– Let’s get past like a lot of like,
oh no, but we’re doing this,
of it all, like ultimately, that’s what I’m doing.
Yeah, exactly. That’s what I mean.
You know, that’s what I mean.
And it gets so that’s why I was saying like the guy graphic on the left,
despite of you doing the job that you love.
It gets on the way because you oftentimes you don’t find the job that you love.
Like it’s really hard to find a place where you fit.
Yeah, the culture fit, the product that you build in
makes a difference in the industry.
On top of that, your passion about TV.
I mean, who doesn’t love TV shows, movie sports, all that kind of stuff.
So I think in a very privileged position in that we are actually in an incredible industry.
We work with incredible people.
We are… It’s just the best.
And we enjoy the ultimate product of what we work on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We enjoy the movies and TV shows and we get to work on everything.
So what do you think people should do to…
Because I know how hard it is, you know?
And people sometimes ask me, you know, when you spend a company more than five years,
they’re like, “Oh, you’re gonna move on to the next role.”
And then you’re like, “Nah, man, fuck, nah, I mean, I don’t really thinking about that,
because I love this.”
And then there’s a lot of other, many designer friends that I have where, you know, they
just have to move on to the next thing, but the next thing is just the next best available
thing is not really something they’re passionate about.
So what I’m trying to say is that graphic is really hard to accomplish, because you
can’t, you really just have to divide it.
It’s not something I’m really passionate about.
And I want to put three hours extra at the end of the night.
– Yeah, sometimes, there’s also realities.
Let’s also be, because it might be a lot of listeners
who are like, look at these fucking privileged idiots.
I show up to work and I have to do this job
’cause it pays the rent.
– Yeah, correct.
That’s what I want to get to.
– And I’ve got to feed my kids.
And that’s what it is.
And these morons are like,
oh, they’re privileged.
Of course we’re privileged.
We have to be aware of that.
And I also remind myself every day of that
because I know what hardship looks like.
I have come from a place of hardship,
I have seen hardship.
And that also means you have to recognize
when you have privilege.
And that also puts sometimes in context,
because sometimes I get stressed about things that happen.
Even though you enjoy the mission
and what you’re trying to achieve and so on,
of course you’re going to have rough days.
That’s what it is.
If you don’t have rough days,
It means you’re not trying hard enough.
It means you’re not pushing the boundaries.
You’re not trying to create something new.
Because that almost by definition implies that you have to
fall on your knees and scratch your knees and then get back up.
So it’s going to be hard days.
And on those hard days, it helps when I remind myself that
I’m privileged, I’m fucking privileged.
The problems that I have are almost always like, first of all,
problems that I’m in place that I love working with,
mission that I love working on. And with people that we, you know, we have a very clear privilege
of working with people that share our culture, vision, and values, and I certainly get to
do and so that’s, get to have an influence on the people that we work with. And that’s
privilege again. So I think your question was like, what is the, what do you say to
people who like, what’s the advice to people who don’t have that privilege?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Right?
Yeah, that’s what you’re going with.
That’s what I was going with.
And the reason why I’m asking that, because recently I came about this thing in a book.
It’s called “Leave Like A Monk”.
But there was one thing that came out of that book that I was interested in, and it was
like a quake.
It was like a four quadrant.
Like the radical clover simulator.
Yeah.
And in one quadrant was like, what is something that you’re good at?
And then what’s something that you’re passionate about?
And then the other two quadrants I don’t remember.
The opposite, obviously.
But on the top left, what’s something that you’re good at?
Let’s say, for example, you’re an accountant.
This is like what you’re good at, what you like, where you can get paid for it.
Yeah, that’s the one.
And that one got me thinking when you go like, “Oh, well, you could be in a job that you
don’t really like.”
I mean, the one when you work in a job that just kills people, that one is a hard one.
I think it’s just fucking bounce.
But there’s tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people do.
Yeah, I know that.
So if you do that, then just find different purpose.
Like fucking to create an alternative.
podcast not for you. I do not content selling. Yeah, but but but one thing that
it did click is the fact that oftentimes you can bring and I apply these on my
job a lot as well. There are things that you might be passionate about that you
don’t get to do at your work because you might be good at accounting and you’re
passionate about public speaking. I don’t know whatever the fucking thing is. But
But the idea was that you could bring things from this quadrant and start trying them in
here.
And you could eventually evolve your role to become something that you are actually
very passionate about.
So bring something from this quadrant into here.
I have, yeah.
Yeah.
That’s exactly right.
I have two pieces of advice for people who are in that position.
And also I realized like just for people who are listening, you know, it is not to…
Yeah, obviously these are two people, two good, two two dudes who are privileged in
terms of what they do. But no, and you may be forced to work for, you know, you show
up to work, work in a cigarette company is like, we’re not, we’re not like punching down,
you know, people who do that. Now, I have to piece of advice to them. You do what you
got to do, first of all, like ultimately, you got to leave, you got to survive. So you
do what you have to do and you respect people’s efforts. Now, as we were talking about the
the start of this conversation, it’s the easiest it’s ever been.
It’s the easiest it’s ever been to create something, to build something.
Um, they have these like, like fully autonomous AI developers for you for
free that can like help you create a website, you know, help you create an app
or something.
And like you said, I think to the extent that you can bring some of that to your
job and maybe move something from one quadrant to another and maybe put it into like, “Can
I evolve what I do?” “Can I be entrepreneurial in my job?” If I’m working on it, stick with
that example. If I’m working on a cigarettes company, “Can I create something that’s…
If kids are using this, you know, vapes,
you know, because they’re using it,
but then I don’t really want them to,
like, cause it might like harm them.
Can I create something that gives them, you know,
this similar type of effect, but with less harm?
You know, like, can I, like, you know,
like you can always be entrepreneurial at your job.
– Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.
– That’s why you’ve like always, and now you can,
there’s a lot of help because you can bounce ideas.
– Yeah.
– Even if you don’t know anyone, talk to it.
AI to bounce an idea off or something.
You can do a lot.
I think that’s the one message.
It’s not to be literal people do that.
No, 100% not.
It’s just to evolve what you do.
One, if you want to stay there.
If you don’t, if you hate what you are,
you’re doing because you have to.
Well, that’s the second piece of advice,
which is it’s now easier than ever to pick up something new.
It’s easier than ever to pick up something new.
to pick up something new.
Yeah.
It’s easier than ever to pick up something new.
So it’s either never to learn a new skill again, because we have so much
resources and ability to practice a new skill, um, as a lot easier to create
something on the side, create a side hustle, but you knew you had ever been
in your, your dream to create a new drink or a new product or something.
And you, and you fruit bar, whatever it is that like, you know, it was my dream
to create like now, now in 2024.
Yeah. It’s easier than it’s ever been.
The entirety of our human civilization.
Yeah. To do something new.
Yeah. You know? And particularly if you’re in a place in a country that allows you to
the freedom to pursue those things on the side and the vast majority of places do,
then you have something within your control to be able to do something on the side that may
eventually say, hey, Warren’s gets in you enough traction that Warren’s you’re going,
I am going to leave the place that I hate to join this place that I like.
Now, that’s the second part.
If you kind of hate where you are, if you don’t mind where you are,
if you like where you are.
But you should always still push to reinvent yourself.
You should always push to reinvent yourself.
And we kind of do that where we try to do that anyway.
We’ll always push to push, try to push the boundary,
try to develop new things, come up with new ideas,
take the initiative, don’t just do like,
“Here’s my task list, I’m going to do that.”
We’re proactive.
Solve problems.
And so you’re always trying to reinvent yourself.
How can I get the historical ladder that you grow to be told to climb?
How do I just get at the top of the ladder?
What’s the shortcut?
Ultimately, what is something I’m going to do that is so impactful?
So let me go around it and let me be creative.
And so there’s a lot of tools that are now available, I think, for people who try to, who have the initiative.
So that’s all it is, is both of those things is just about having the initiative.
Having the initiative to apply yourself at your job, having the initiative to apply yourself outside of your job.
If you don’t like what you do.
And so we’re privileged, we like what we do, and so by the way, you still push the boundaries.
We’re always trying to do new things, sometimes uncomfortable because we have to learn new skills.
because you get to grow and you get to do new things.
Exactly.
I think the learning is always being in an uncomfortable position is good for you.
Yes.
I’m in an uncomfortable position right now.
I’ve never done anything like this.
Yes.
And yeah, that’s the next time you do it.
It’s going to be better.
Yeah, exactly.
And the third time.
That’s the reason why I’m doing it, actually.
The reason why I’m doing this is because I want to get better at this.
English is not my first language.
So I’m just a test subject just to help you.
Pretty much.
I get it.
But yeah, this is a test project.
This is a pilot.
This is an experiment.
Yeah.
to see what happens. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never imagined in a while that my dreams that I’ll
be speaking on the internet, you know, to a CEO of a company. But this is sort of what I’m trying
to do something different. So I’m pushing the boundaries. Let’s do it. And eventually, yeah,
we’ll learn from people I’m talking to. And eventually just keep growing, just in areas where
I know I’m not really good at. Keep going. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Let me go back to,
So you mentioned about enjoying the journey.
We didn’t finish that part.
No, I just said I sucked.
Yeah, so what are you actively doing to enjoy the journey more?
Yeah, ultimately boils down to applying the right-hand side of that slide that we showed earlier.
Because it’s easy, like I now have it up at home.
Okay.
I remind myself of it.
Because it’s easy to say, and especially if you’re someone like me who’s just like,
“Oh, that thing can wait. Let me just do this extra task tonight,” or something.
Then it’s easy for you to be engulfed and consumed by what you do.
And actively reminding yourself of that is important.
My family keeps me grounded. We were talking about that before they start, you know, the importance of that.
Because without it, you very quickly lose sight of who you are, where you are,
but your family doesn’t give a shit.
– Yeah, that’s so good. – They do not care.
You are who you are always, who you are always,
before you are whatever you are now.
So that’s important.
And it also realizes that it really is about the journey, not the destination.
And if there’s one common thread that we’ve been talking about since the start of this conversation,
it has been about when we first started, I said my goal was to learn,
which is not about the destination.
Because by definition, learning is about the journey.
It’s about living life to the fullest, which includes changing the world,
but also includes having fun and spending time with your family,
spending time with things that you’re passionate about.
Also by definition means it’s not about the destination.
It’s about the journey.
And so a lot of it is about that.
And you just gotta remind yourself
that it’s just about that.
So I try to do that.
Some weeks I succeed, some weeks I fail.
– Yeah, man, I don’t know.
Like one of the things I wanted to ask you is
how the fuck do you even do it?
Because I’ve seen you slack.
I’ve seen when we were sometimes going to meet
and I’ve seen you slack and your emails and shit.
I get anxious just seeing that.
Like literally, I’m not joking.
Sometimes when I have so much shit to do,
I literally have to like take a deep breath
and just kind of have one thing at a time.
And I’m doing a couple of things.
You know what I mean?
The other day I was telling someone,
I’m like, I think I’m doing about eight full-time jobs.
Yeah, you are.
I can tell you are.
From all the different things that we’re doing.
So how do you keep yourself,
First of all, how do you keep yourself sane?
Because for those listening, you are involved.
You know, like, I mean, I worked with many CEOs
around my journey, but you are involved in everything.
Design, data science, marketing.
– Yeah, engineering, yeah.
– Engineering.
– Yeah, yeah, yeah.
– Absolutely everything.
So it’s not like you’re, because many people will be thinking,
oh, he’s the CEO, he’s just there making calls.
Like, you’re not, like seriously.
– Some of them do, some of them do.
That’s what I’m saying, that’s what the expectation most people would say, that they just, you
know, you just make it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You do that, you do that, you do that.
But you’re not actually doing that.
You are actually literally writing an entire slide.
On the whiteboard.
Like a conversation about something for data science and then something for the partnerships
team and then something for marketing.
Even to the slight slide on a part of a presentation, you have input in it.
Design, yeah.
Sorry, dude.
So it’s nice.
What blows my mind is not that you are,
because you’re actually quite good at,
and you’re good on all these things,
which alone is crazy because my first two weeks of para
was a complete headache in terms of understanding data science.
– Just absorbing, yeah.
– Just absorbing everything, let alone talk about algorithms
and all these things that we talk about.
– Yeah.
– How do you manage that?
Is there anything you, is constantly in your mind?
‘Cause I could easily get anxious,
I just fucking disappear for a month.
If I was you.
What do you do to manage that?
– Sometimes I feel like that.
Sometimes I feel like disappearing for a month.
– Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How do you manage that?
– Hard, man.
Even just talking about it now, honestly, I don’t have my phone.
I checked it there, but I was like, “Let me look up what my aura ring says about my heart
rate.”
Because as you’re describing all those eight things that I’m doing, I’m pretty sure my
heart rate spiked up.
I’ll show you afterwards.
You know, might take a little screenshot.
Take a screenshot and then put it on your thing.
Put us by the conversation.
Um, and I noticed it, but like, I have these things.
He’s like, you know, I, I noticed sometimes when my stress levels go up, um, my
heart rate goes up, I, there’s a few things that I do that are for me are
fundamental, um, I stay fit and active physically.
And for me, that’s a non-negotiable because for me, that’s a reflection of.
just how well I’m doing, how fit I am.
And for, and I always say this at work,
but what we do is a sport.
And we’re trying to be the best in that sport.
We’re trying to be the best team on the planet.
And that requires you to be an elite athlete.
Now, our work is not physical.
It’s mental.
But we’re past the days where there was scientific debate about the link between physical health and mental health.
We’re past that now. Okay, we’re past that.
So now we know these two things are like this.
So I know if I wanted to be the best at what I do physically,
if my job was to stick with football, is to play football,
then as you know, a lot of footballers go through really down periods,
sometimes when their personal lives aren’t shatters.
They go through divorce, they go through whatever it takes on their mind.
They don’t express themselves as well physically, because they don’t play the same enjoyment.
They lose their way, they lose, you know, and vice versa.
Sometimes their troubles on the field impacts their personal lives as well, because their
lives are intertwined.
And so if you understand that, you go, “Okay, well, I’m going to try hard again.”
I want to say, by no means I’m an expert at it.
I think I’m actually quite bad at it.
But I try.
I try to stay physically fit.
That for me is non-negotiable because that allows me to look at myself in the mirror and go.
I’m doing okay.
Like I’ve got this today.
Got a big day today.
I’ve got a lot of things.
I’m going to do nine different things.
Uh, but I’ve got this and sometimes I’ve been places where I’ve looked at myself in the mirror.
I go, you’re not doing well, man.
Right.
I’ve looked at myself in the mirror sometimes.
And I go, you’re not doing well.
You know, just like I judge myself and I’m like, I’m, I’m, I’m myself’s
heart harshest critic.
So I look at myself and go, you’re not doing well.
Um, I always like to sometimes look at myself in third person.
Some, I try to do less of that now because I’m quite harsh.
Um, and people think I’m harsh with them sometimes at work, nowhere close
to how harsh I am with myself.
Cause sometimes look at myself and sometimes just at work, like, you know,
what output did I produce and what decisions did I make.
And I always try to review and go, was that a good decision?
Why did I make that decision?
Did I reflect on it enough to have enough information to make a data informed decisions?
And so on, a decision and so on.
And similarly, sometimes I look at myself physically and go, “How are you doing?”
And someone goes, “I’m doing pretty bad, dude.
You’ve got to pick it up.”
So that’s just that part of it, which is just maintaining a physical and mental well-being,
which are quite intertwined.
There’s a few things for me that are non-negotiable,
and there’s a bunch of nice to haves.
And the nice to haves, to be very honest,
because I want to be real with you and people,
the nice to haves, sometimes I put to the side.
Because sometimes we go through really tough weeks.
And anything that’s nice to have, I’m like, OK, that’s nice to have.
I’m not going to do it.
For example, for me, like I said,
staying physically fit and active is not a must have, that’s a must have.
Doesn’t matter what has happened.
Like that is my meditative process.
That is my unwinding process.
I have to do that.
And if I don’t, I’m going to feel even worse.
I’m going to feel even worse.
And there’s been many times when I haven’t done that for a week and I didn’t stick
to the routine that I have or the schedule that I had, the physical schedule that I had
for the week. And I feel really shit at the end of it, like really, really bad at the
end of it. And so I try to stick to that. Again, like it goes back to the slide, the
other side of the slide, like there’s all those things on there as for me are non-negotiable,
family non-negotiable. First, this is why I designed that in the first place, because
I want everyone that I work with to have a similar set of values to not one day wake
up and regrets where they are.
Yeah.
And how are you not going to do that?
Where are you going to throw a number?
There’s no one answer.
It’s a multitude of answers.
One, you have the flexibility to put your family first.
You have the flexibility to put your mental well-being first.
You have the flexibility to…
Some people are just work better in the evening than the morning.
I know people who just this is better.
They do the best work, the most creative work.
Quiet at night, headphones on, lights out.
And they just…
That’s the best.
I love that.
Right?
So you might be one of those people.
A lot of people do that.
And if that’s the case, why should we, if you and I are designing this place for the next
hundred designers to come and work on all the products that we’re building over the
next 10 years?
Why should we not create an environment that allows for that?
You know, if someone comes and says to you, “Hey, Esty, I’m going to have that for you
on Monday,” you know, and it’s Wednesday evening and they say to you, “I’m going to have to
do that following Monday,” you don’t give a shit when they do it.
They do it on Thursday, they do it on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, as long as by Monday they
do it.
And if by Monday they show up and they go, “Here’s what I made,” and it’s the best thing
you’ve ever seen, you’re going to be like, “Holy shit.
so cool. That’s amazing. I give them credit and kudos and so on. And next time they say,
hey, I’m going to have this for you on Tuesday. Again, if they don’t show up to work the next day,
you don’t care because you trust that on Tuesday, they’re going to have that ready. You don’t care
whether they’re online in the morning or you know what I mean? So all that to say back to your
question. I try to apply that to myself also. I go, okay, well, results driven. I’m trying to achieve
the results.
And I’m laser focused on that, on achieving the results.
Less on the hours, less on when it happens and so on.
And of course you work with on-premise,
because sometimes often, especially my job,
I have a lot of external facing, which is, again,
to be real with people, people think being a CEO is easy.
Because there’s a lot of external things
that you have to deal with that don’t work according to your schedule.
So the thing that we talked about about your daughter’s thing being, you know,
being 11 a.m., you know, swimming lesson, whatever the example was.
That might not be possible for me because just on it, I just haven’t happened
to need to be on an airplane.
Yeah.
Why does that have to go somewhere?
Because I have to go somewhere to be in person to present that
a conference when it’s 10,000 people like I just have to be on the airplane.
I’m sorry.
Like I can I, you know, so that’s a sacra, that’s a willing sacrifice.
Now, provided that I have to do that too many times.
That’s okay.
Because we all have to do that sometimes.
And by the way, we also do that on both ways.
You have to do that sometimes at work,
because you have to go on an airplane to get somewhere.
But at the same time, if your kid is sick
and you’re going to a hospital,
then you don’t even have to fuck what your boss says
or what your work is.
You’re going to take your kid to hospital again.
So as a provider, you have the flexibility
to do what’s important to you at any given point in time.
Back to your question,
it’s a base of fundamentals that I don’t negotiate on.
my mental and physical wellbeing, both of which sometimes go sideways, but I try to
keep under control.
So I have a bunch of things to help with that.
I try to stay fit, try to track all my vitals and whatever.
There’s this thing that tells you how well you sleep and try to measure and optimize
how well you sleep.
And then you go, “Oh, what if I did this?
And do I sleep better if I did this?”
And so on.
So for me, again, it’s like optimizing performance.
And by performance, it’s not just work performance, but work performance everywhere, just as a
a human being. You want to optimize. This is a machine. Yeah, that’s right. This make
no mistake of this is a biological machine. This is a machine. You put fuel into it, you
get calories energy out. And you can do things with the energy that you have. You can speak,
you can make things, you can break things, you can, you know, and so I’m trying to optimize
the performance of that machine. And so I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to like biohacking
and try to optimize everything about this machine, what it is that I do.
And so there’s a bunch of things included as part of the mental, physical well-being.
We can dig into that if you want.
But that’s kind of for me, that’s quite important.
The next thing is family, which for me is very, very important as well.
So that for me is no negotiable.
That keeps me grounded, like we were talking about.
It keeps you sane.
It keeps you from ever forgetting
what’s why you’re doing this.
What’s really important for you.
And I have a particular connection with my family.
I owe so much to my parents.
And for me, I was raised with this concept
that family is the most critical thing for you.
So that’s very important for me.
I have a bunch of friends that keep me saying
that again, don’t give a shit who I am
and what I do and so on.
And I think it’s important to be silly.
So I’m oftentimes very, very silly
when surrounded by people who I trust
and in a safe environment.
And those things keep me humble, grounded,
and despite all your best attempts,
despite everything that you do,
I catch myself sometimes.
I catch myself six hours into a work day
having done eight calls with eight different parties
and faced with so many different things
and making a lot of decisions,
negotiating a lot of things,
I catch myself sometimes losing balance.
And that comes out in different ways.
Sometimes I say things in a way that I look back on
that I’m not proud of and I go,
“Fuck that, you fucked up there.”
And so then I have to have the humility to go like I fucked up.
Which is really important.
And sometimes I notice myself just internally,
oftentimes now I’ve managed to not fuck up externally.
A lot of times that happens, it happens here, so it doesn’t come out.
And people will see me, they might notice that I’m tense,
but oftentimes I won’t do anything. I won’t say or do anything that is an expression of the state that I’m in.
But internally, things are like, it’s haywire.
There’s just fireworks, sparks everywhere.
So sometimes I catch myself.
So then I have a few coping mechanisms with that.
Like you said, there’s a lot of things now.
There’s a lot of science, things that you can do to apply.
The Halbern Podcast is quite good.
So you can reference that to your listeners
if people who are looking for a science-based source
for a well-being, mental and physical well-being.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re really good at it.
So there’s a bunch of things that he says, you know, like little tricks,
like take a deep breath and like and then a little breath at the end of it.
Yeah. And then breathe out really slowly and he was going to realize
how important breathing is.
Breathing is so important.
Like, again, is like exactly.
And so these little tricks.
So again, well-being for me is a science is actually less than art is more of a science.
And so that has a lot of different components in it.
And I probably missed a bunch of them, but those things are quite important pillars.
I mean, for me personally, same page man.
Yeah.
Being active physically.
If I don’t like last week, I was sick.
Didn’t you just feel shit at the end of it?
You feel so shit after and you can’t think properly.
So keeping yourself active is incredibly important.
I don’t know how you do it.
How do you catch yourself?
How do you like tell me how I’m curious?
Um, surely sometimes you catch yourself where you’re just not feeling good for whatever
reason. And you know, there’s a lot of reasons, personal life, work, whatever. And when you’re,
one thing I’m trying to get better at is resetting.
Yeah.
Tell me how, to the extent you want to share, how do you reset? Like how do you, when you
catch yourself sometimes at 3 p.m. and you’re just feeling shit. You don’t know why. You
don’t know why. It could be a bunch of reasons. You’re just not feeling good and you’re short
and the responses that you give to people, you’re giving one word answers, you catch
yourself being really short with your partner or your colleague, whoever. And you just catch
yourself and you’re like, “Oh, that’s like…” And you kind of notice it when you’re like,
“Ugh, how do you feel about yourself?”
– Yeah, you feel shitty.
– About yourself?
– Yeah.
– How do you reset? That’s something I’m actively working on.
Yeah, I hear.
Happens a lot.
I, I, you have to kind of reset.
And the way I do it, I do it two ways and it kind of goes back to what you said is
physical.
So one thing I do whenever I’m finding myself like that, I kill myself in the gym.
I go and punch the bag for a while.
Like my way of, of letting a lot of things go.
Releasing, releasing.
Yeah.
One on one with the bag.
I mean, football for me is the most therapeutic thing in the planet because when you go and
play football, the world just disappears.
It’s almost like everything goes away.
You’re not thinking about your phone, you’re not thinking about anything.
Or work or anything, no.
And when you finish playing, it’s like a reset to me.
So I do that with football, but when it’s a lot, when it’s not just something happened
at work and I’m stressed about this, when it’s full on, something happened in the family
or whatever, the way I do that is I basically let it all out in the bag.
And until I haven’t internalized, a lot of people kind of don’t think about those things.
They kind of go, I don’t want to think about that.
I do the opposite.
You actually dive in.
I think about it.
You dive into it.
I dive into why the fuck did I behave this way?
What caused that?
What triggered this behavior?
And I let it all out in the bag until I’m kind of go, fuck, I figured out why I did that.
What’s causing that? Then I come down. Then I go, “Oh shit, I know why.”
You reset, right.
And then, yeah, I do it too physically sometimes.
I do that combined with something that you do physically.
For example, jumping a fucking coal bath to the coal plunge.
That resets you so hard.
Because all you can think about is how you’re freezing your dick off.
And all you have to do is breathe and breathe and breathe.
and everything disappears for a moment.
And then again, the body goes through a whole bunch of things and it helps you
reset, combine that with hitting the bag, going to the gym, killing yourself.
The cold bath is so good, man.
Yeah.
One sense, sense, sense I’ve started doing it.
Yeah.
And then again, just try to, whenever I find myself in the same situation,
I acknowledge that’s what triggered that.
And then I was like, what can I do to…
So for you, you have a summarizing what you just said, you have a physical release.
Yeah, physical.
Mechanism.
Yeah, 100%.
So and I think I find that quite insightful.
You know, a lot of people have a mental release mechanism.
Like, oh, I reflect on what I for use a physical release.
Yes. Sometimes I combine it both.
Right. Sometimes this is also true.
Sometimes I just need to talk about it.
That’s when my wife comes into because sometimes I could be
hitting the bag and I cannot figure out what just happened.
And then right.
And then that’s when I go to my wife and I said, look,
this happened, blah, blah, blah.
What do you think?
And then she might give me an insight
that I’ve never thought about.
You know what I mean?
Sometimes I go, why do people overreact?
Like so personally, and I just don’t realize
I sometimes talk too front-on.
Like I don’t measure myself how I talk.
Sometimes I approach somebody at work and I go,
bro, this shit is really bad.
– And I don’t agree. – Hey, you’re radical candor.
I don’t realize that not everybody’s comfortable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If I tell the designer I work with,
bro, this is really shit.
He’s gonna be like, “Oh yeah, it is shit.”
Or, “Okay, yeah, let’s fix it.”
But that doesn’t apply to everybody.
No, no.
Like some people, you know,
you have that relationship with, yeah.
Some people, you know, take that really badly.
They don’t really understand your intentions behind.
Sometimes they don’t really wanna talk to that.
So anyway, all that to say that sometimes I,
The way I get to that, because I can’t figure it out, is sometimes I just talk about it.
So you have a physical release mechanism, and if that doesn’t work for you, then you
combine it.
You go, “Okay, well, I can’t figure it out.
I need to talk through this.”
And it’s having someone, a trusted partner, and it could be your wife, your girlfriend,
your friend, your sister, brother, someone that you trust, that you just bounce ideas
with and you go, “Hey, this is what I’m feeling.”
And I think that’s so important because my advice to a lot of people have been recently
like a lot of young entrepreneurs that come across and ask for tips or advice or whatever
is to talk about it.
Yeah, 100%.
Just talk about it because it’s not a taboo.
Everyone feels shit at some point.
That’s totally normal.
It’s okay to feel shit.
It’s fine.
You’re not the first and you’re not the last person in the world.
doesn’t know that it has a bad day, you know?
And everyone goes through it at some point.
And so, but that’s really insightful
is having like a knowing that, okay,
is my step one, this is what I’m doing,
I’m heading the bag and then I’m having a cold lunch.
And then after that, I’m gonna talk to my wife about it.
And maybe I don’t need to,
’cause maybe like in step one, I figured it out.
– I figured it out.
– And I feel good and I relax and yeah.
– And sometimes I share that with her.
I’m like, oh, I share this happened
and this is what I thought and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, just talk, I think talking about it is also very important.
Um, I mean, some people keep a lot of the things to themselves.
Sometimes what I do as well is I reflect on it, think about it.
And then I, I really do like to go ahead head on.
And if I have to address that with somebody, close it down.
You know what I mean?
Cause sometimes those things linger.
Yes.
Just have the uncomfortable conversation.
Just have the uncomfortable conversation.
Get it out of the way.
Clear the air.
After that you feel so much better.
So much lighter.
Way off the shoulders.
Lighter.
And it is hard. I know I’m not saying it is easy, but it’s definitely something that I worked on.
But yeah, finding physical release like you mentioned is the biggest thing in the world.
So I definitely have that. Yeah, so we share that in common because I have that.
That’s why I said I started with my physical mental well-being are so intertwined because they have to be…
This is what I’ve told myself they have to be and they are, scientifically.
The other thing that I’ve always been…
I don’t… because I don’t have a lot of time to disconnect.
Like sometimes I’m like, “Gosh, I don’t want to disappear for a month.”
Like you said, you know, like you just have like a week sometimes
of the crazy weeks that I have and you go,
“Oh, I just want to disappear for a month.”
And you just don’t have the luxury to disappear for a month, you know?
Not that I don’t actually want to, because I mean, you know…
But you just still want to disconnect.
So what I find helpful, and I’ve always find this even as a kid, is to immerse myself in
another world.
So I’ve always enjoyed as a kid growing up, reading fantasy books, watching fantasy movies
that are, they don’t have to be fantasy, they could be based on real world actions, but
as long as they’re vivid enough and good enough to take you on a journey.
Yeah, to disappear onto it.
Disappear into it.
Like, because you know, sometimes when you get so inside a movie,
or a TV show, or a book, whatever it is, a medium that you’re enjoying,
but you’re on this journey, you’re on a story.
Yeah.
And you get so immersed in it that you are inside that world.
It’s almost like a visual.
And by the way, near enough, like soon enough,
we’re going to be able to actually be visually immersed in the environment around us.
And in the absence of that so far, it’s been storytelling.
It’s just been the way the story is told.
And you know when sometimes you get so immersed in something
that you forget about everything else around you.
You forget about the thing that pissed you off earlier today.
You’re just…
And that for me is another type of tension release.
is because oftentimes all you need to do to figure out a problem is look away from it.
Yeah, that’s true. That’s also true. Yes.
And I learned that the hard way.
Sometimes all I need to do is literally all I need to do is look away from it fully.
And doesn’t have to be, I don’t even have to look at it long enough,
like away from it long enough.
Could be just one night, one evening.
Switch off from it for one evening.
And oftentimes, but if I’m successful in doing that,
not like half-assed it.
Not like, like, oh yeah, I’m reading this book, I’m watching this movie, but like,
you’re really thinking about it, you know, or I’m going to have dinner with my wife,
but you’re really thinking about it, you know, like not half-assing it, truly,
truly disconnecting yourself from it. Find a way. And again, sometimes successful,
sometimes unsuccessful in my attempts. But if you can find a way to disconnect yourself from it,
100%. Sometimes that’s all you need. And oftentimes I wake up in the morning and go,
“Oh, I found the solution.”
Yeah, yeah.
I know why.
100%.
I know why.
Sometimes it just…
It happens with design so much, man.
When you sometimes you stare at another thing
and you just can’t figure it out.
Look away.
Look away.
Do something else completely different.
And for me, and it could be different for different people,
but for me, it’s just anything that takes you on a journey
that is immersive.
Because for me, my mind is like I have a hyperactive brain.
I’m always thinking.
I’m always thinking about 12 things that I get any given point in time.
And something has to be super immersive.
Right.
Super immersive for me to be in the zone, present.
Yeah.
I struggle with being present because of my hyperactive brain.
Because you’re thinking about it.
I’m always thinking about 19 different things.
So I struggle to be present.
But sometimes just a great story.
So usually I go to like, in my younger days,
I used to like read a lot and I, but now I don’t have time for a lot of that.
So I’m like, okay, if there’s a movie made about this like thick ass book
to our movie. Let me just watch the movie.
You know, and then, you know, sometimes I have my go to movies.
Sometimes I don’t even want to watch something new.
Because I like I don’t have the mental capacity, you know, to go into a new journey
and learn about new world and new characters or something.
So I like I watch something that I’ve watched before or read something that I’ve read before.
But it’s so good that it’s still immersive.
And you go inside that world like, let me just go down that world again.
Whatever that world may be.
It is. It could be a biography about someone.
It could be Middle Earth.
If you’re reading a lot of the rings, it could be whatever it may be.
But something that just immerses you into something where you’re truly going to be captivated and you could it could be a documentary
About you know some some person that you look up to whatever something you immersed into that life
Just disconnects you from whatever is happening in your life
And then then back later go to sleep wake up in the morning once you re-plug in and you reconnect. Yeah, you’re like, oh, oh
That’s easy. Yep
So I don’t know if that helps people but that’s gone. That’s something else that I would add 100%
We are we don’t know if you realize we’ve done two hours and a half. Are we smashing through the hole?
I think we should cut it. This is you my friend
Yeah, because there’s so much more we want to talk about we went for part two
We serve it for part two and I appreciate your time
So I know you have to go again. You have like a million things to do
So I want to do it before we finish. Yeah, I want to ask you two things. Yeah, the first one. Yeah is
this let me just something real quick here the first one is and this is gonna
make you laugh if you were looking at this boy right here oh no oh no why are
you doing this Esteban why are you doing this if you were looking at this this
guy right here yeah which is this is 10 years ago I don’t know if this was
published and the time I was recorded. I don’t know. Probably around that time? I
don’t know. But if you were looking at this guy right here, yes, why would you
advise him? Some people love, I never understood it, some people love
looking at themselves. Like watching, I hate, I despise looking at any video. You’re not looking at this podcast. I’m sorry, I love you. You’re gonna put it on mute.
You’re gonna put it on Sorry No Mute.
You’re gonna basically just listen to it, but no.
No, I can’t even listen to myself.
You can’t even listen to yourself.
So, I want to give you the extra view on your podcast.
So what I’ll do is I’ll just load it,
like leave it in the background.
Like, I love you, but I don’t want to listen to it.
I actually have the same thing.
So, I have not seen this.
I’m gonna make it bigger just for impact.
Just for to make me extra uncomfortable.
What would I tell that guy?
10 years ago, I would tell him to, yes, if I could listen to this podcast.
Right.
Because I think this would have been very useful for him. I really, I really mean it.
What do you think?
I really mean it. Everything we just talked about, I think, if he listened to this 10 years ago, this two-hour conversation or not, if he listened to this to 10 years ago, I think it would have found it very useful.
useful. I think there’s a lot of things that he would have done different. I think he would
have many months where he didn’t have balance in his life. He would have introduced balance
out of decisions that I think he made quite hastily. He wouldn’t have a lot of doors that
he would have, he was scared to go through. He would have probably opened and realized
that, Oh, if you heard that part earlier in this chat, when I was like, just go through
the fucking door, you know, there’s an alligator, you’ll take a bite out of you and you’re like,
shit. Well, now I know. Yeah. Don’t be scared. Just go through the door. I think if you heard
that, hopefully he would have been got some encouragement to go. What’s the worst that
can happen? Yeah, you know, okay, I’m not gonna die. So maybe, but you know, hopefully
not. Yeah. So I’m gonna get a scar from this. It’s fine if there was the worst that can
happen. So I listened to this podcast. Right, right. What do you think was the biggest,
like at that point in time, if you can remember, what was the biggest concern in this guy’s
mind?
Ah, what was that guy’s biggest concern?
Because I bet you had heaps of things in your mind.
So many, man, so many concerns. I think for a lot of years,
I felt like, and this is not an uncommon problem with a lot of
entrepreneurs
When you first start out for the you know formative years of your love your entrepreneurial life
You feel like an imposter
Mmm, I’ll bribe always feel like I just feel like an imposter. Yeah. Yeah, especially when you haven’t done something before
And you’re doing it for the first time. I
Mean like
Here’s this kid who has to
interview someone
you know twice their age as all as their parents and
You know make a judgment determination about their capability and
have conviction in their judgment and
sometimes getting it wrong and
admitting getting it wrong having the humility to get it wrong and the ego to withstand that or like they’re off and
And I fix it, go to the hard drives of fixing it.
And that’s just one of a gazillion things that he had to do
that he felt an imposter at doing.
He had to be felt like he had no right to do.
And one thing I learned over the years,
and this is over many, many years,
I don’t think he learned this over night,
many years is,
that oftentimes,
He should not have felt like an imposter because he was actually the best.
And that particular moment in time with that particular decision that needed to be made, he was probably actually the best person to do that.
And I don’t think that he realized that for many, many, many years.
And that ate him away a lot of the time because feeling like an imposter drags you down and it weighs on you.
And at some point it’s healthy because it kind of pushes you to always get better and improve because you don’t want to be an imposter.
You actually want to improve. You want to be proved that you’re the best.
You’re good, you know, and it pushed it certainly pushed him, but I know he didn’t have a motivation problem
So I’m being as very specific to that guy right that kid did not have a motivation problem
So the imposter syndrome
I know didn’t like it pushes a lot of people it didn’t push him a lot harder because he would have pushed us as hard
He was motivated by a bunch of other things. Okay, but I know this thing weighed on him and without that weights
I think he would have been a lot freer to
to be more aggressive,
take riskier bets, open some of those doors
that we were talking about that were closed,
that he was just afraid, or he got told not to open that door,
don’t turn or open that door, you know?
And I think he would have probably saved
a couple of years of his life.
– Right.
– Of doubting himself.
And that’s one thing that I would tell him, honestly,
is just to back himself and, you know, be humble enough to when you don’t know, say,
I don’t know. Yeah. Just say, I don’t know. But in moments where he knew and he had conviction,
then also back himself in those moments. So that is not to say that like, Oh, like he
was about said everything. It’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is there are moments
when if he didn’t know, he didn’t have to pretend. And by the way, he struggled at that
as well. Right. When he didn’t know he struggled because he was like, Oh, shit, I have to pretend
I have to like people look to me. I have to have I have to have the answer. What if I don’t have the answer?
Yeah, I have to have the answer. What if what if I don’t what will they think no one will trust me anymore?
Yeah, no, you know, like it’s just the first time thing that you like and so does so my advice isn’t just like no
Like you know, it’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is like if you didn’t know
It’s okay to say just say I don’t fucking know. Yeah. I literally don’t know. Hey, listen, I’m never claimed to know everything. I don’t know
How should we find out what the answer is? What experiment should we design? Who should we ask?
Now, how do we get the information because I don’t know
Yeah, right just say I don’t know and that is that just would have relieved so much pressure on one side
but when he did know and
He can sell five when he did know and he had that conviction that this is the right thing to do and this is going
You know and especially when he had some that enough evidence or data to prove it just back back yourself
back yourself, you’re not being an imposter.
You know, you’re probably the best person at doing that thing that you think you’re the best person at doing and when you do know,
do it. – Right. Let me, this is the last one.
Because, and it’s around
confidence versus arrogance because a lot of people confuse those two. – Yes.
And… – Oof, that’s a fun line. – Yeah.
And I would say you are very confident person.
– Right.
Really? Do I come across as being very–
– You come across as confident.
I don’t know if that guy was, I didn’t met that guy,
but I know you.
– He felt like an imposter.
He was like, he was giving that interview,
feeling like, “Oh shit, am I sounding like an idiot?
Am I on the camera?”
– I think, I mean, right now, over the years, I’m sure,
talking to some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
By the way, yeah, something we didn’t even mention.
You’re talking to people who have some of the biggest egos in the world.
Yes.
And you’re talking to people who are, for the most part, twice your age.
Yeah.
Who think they know everything there is to know.
Yeah.
So you need to have a central level of confidence to even approach them.
Right?
And sometimes disagree with them.
Sometimes disagree with them.
like head them front on to even gain their respect, right?
A lot of people have heard,
and I’ve learned this a lot from fighting,
a lot of people mistake arrogance with confidence, right?
There’s a lot of fighters that go out there
and they just believe in their skillset
and they say, “I am going to demolish this guy.”
And I fucking love that bro,
it’s like you learn from that fighter mindset,
it’s not arrogance,
is simply believing in what your skills are
and what your output’s gonna be.
Now, if it doesn’t go your way,
for the most part, most grey fighters go,
“Shit, I thought I could beat him.”
Reset, come back, get better. That’s it.
But the confidence is so important for the mental game,
for the physical game, for the output.
And I think you’re very confident.
How do you manage so that that confidence
doesn’t become arrogance or even just from the perception point of view.
How do you manage that?
And like today, now that you’re talking to, again, we’re diving to some of the people
you’re talking to right now, but fuck man, I mean, going talking to these people,
how do you manage that confidence that doesn’t turn into arrogance?
Because it could happen, right?
Sometimes that confidence that you think you are showing might be arrogance.
Yeah. So how do you manage that?
Yeah, I don’t I don’t think about I don’t often think about is this coming across as
being confident or arrogant, to be honest. I am again now back in the day. Yes, I went
through many like uncertain moments and I used to doubt myself. And so how do you saw
that out now? Yeah. Nowadays, I don’t really think a lot about whether something is coming
across as being confident or arrogant. I have become very good at noticing it. I’m very
very good at noticing when someone is either being confident or they’re just being arrogant.
So I’ve become quite a good judge of that, I would say, arrogantly, if they die or anything.
And for me, it is less about whether I am sounding like, let me take you back to that
guy first.
I’m kind of remembering him.
And to your point about fighting, and there’s a certain wisdom in what you just said about
like visualizing an outcome and for happening.
For me it’s less about, yes, I’ve got to be confident.
And that typically applies when you’re giving a speech of a couple of thousand people, of
the who’s who in the entertainment industry in Hollywood and whatever, or a closed door
events and the who’s who’s who of like the most influential, you know, movie makers,
a director, whatever. And that when you’re just like you all like, you know, lights on
you stages dark, you don’t see anyone, you know, else you don’t even see the people’s
faces and you just know this and you got to perform. Yeah. Right. That’s different. That’s
you go like I’m going to perform and I’ll say something on that. A mentor of mine back
in the day once told me that he was president of Music Label and he said, “Ward, I’m going
to give you a piece of advice. I’m going to stay with you.” And it has stayed with me
to his credit. And he said, because we were at the time rewind like 13 years ago, we were
pitching for funding or some startup event or something. And I was on stage and I went
And I was like, dude, I am tired.
Like today’s been long.
I’ve done like three of these presentations.
And then afterwards, you know, you gotta shake the hand and people come up to you
and you give the business, you know, you’re exhausted.
You’re just, and you have to like be energized because you know, these, you’re
pitching to investors or something.
Like, ain’t no one want to go up to like, see, I’m a CEO of a startup.
And he’s like, oh, I’m tired.
I’m still, you know, you have to be like all energized and like, doesn’t, you know,
so you have to play.
And he said to me, Ward, I’m going to give you such an estate with you.
I work with a lot of arts. This is him talking.
He said I work with a lot of artists and over the years.
And you know what separates the good artists from the great ones
when they perform, I said what?
And he said the great ones, the great ones, when they go up on stage
and they sing a song for the six thousand seven hundred and thirty third time.
They sing it with the same passion
that they did the very first time.
Twenty five years ago.
Those are the great artists,
those are great performers.
So you got to think.
And you want to be.
And man, perform, do you want to be
a great performer?
Because that’s what you’re doing.
You’re going up on stage.
Yeah, you have to perform.
And those artists, the best, I mean,
the best of the best.
When they’re performing a song
for the 6733rd time.
Someone there has been saving money for months to buy a ticket to their concert
to get front row seats and they don’t give a shit that this artist sang this
song 25 years ago. They’ve toured the world a hundred times. They keep singing
it. They like whatever now they have a thing in their earpiece and telling
them what like they don’t give a shit. This is their life dream. They made it
happen, they front row seats to their favorite artists and they’d be saving for this moment
and you’re performing for them. Because they’re hearing it for the first time. They’re seeing
you for the first time in that position. And so for them, that is the first time you’re
ever performing this song to them. And so that’s like, that’s I want to park that because
I think that’s important. And for me, that’s less I don’t think about confidence and arrogance
when it comes to that, I think about performance and being at the top of your game.
Yeah.
And you have to be at the top of your game.
And you just have to understand that your job demands you to be at the top of your game.
And if you don’t want to be, then you’re in the wrong job.
That’s true.
You’re just on the wrong job.
You don’t want to perform, be an artist, then don’t sing.
But if you want to go on stage and you want people to buy your tickets
and go up to you and watch you perform live,
then you have to be a great performer.
If you want people to do that, save money for a year to buy.
So for me, it’s the same thing.
I play the same principles.
That advice really stuck with me.
He was right about that, as he often is about a lot of times.
He’ll know if he listens to this.
On the other side of it,
so that’s when I’m performing, when you have to perform.
And I think that you can probably apply that in a lot of jobs,
in a lot of places, when you just show up and you just have to perform.
No, you’re performing could be, it doesn’t have to be speaking.
You don’t have to speak on stage.
Your performing could be your programming or your designing or you’re writing something.
That’s your performing.
Yeah, that’s your performing.
You’ve got to be at the top of your game.
So that’s how I think about that.
But come back to your question about like confidence versus arrogance.
Um, well, if you, if you approach it from two different angles on one side, you know,
you have to perform whatever it is you have to play on the other side.
I am.
I want to take it back to what I said about, um, what you said, um, and, and I’m
conscious of your time as well. You don’t have to sub. You said fighters, some great
fighters go, I’m going to do this. And they do it. And there’s a certain wisdom about
visualizing something. Now, I’m not the first person who said this, you’re not the first
person who said this, you know, there’s this book called The Secret that you can buy that
It talks about visualizing things in the universe and this energy, you know.
But yes, you visualize something, thoughts,
turns into actions, actions turn to outcomes.
And to the extent that you can visualize
your outcomes and strive towards them, you can achieve them.
So if you visualize.
That.
I’m going to give a presentation on stage, or I’m going to write the perfect email.
all I’m going to design the best video of my life or whatever it is that you’re doing,
you visualize it and strive to bring that visualization to life as I’ll often do,
then I am approaching it with a confidence that acts sometimes borderlines arrogance.
Yes.
And in those moments, I actually think it’s hard to differentiate between confidence and arrogance
because I will be arrogantly confident that I’m gonna achieve it.
That happens with fighters, in fact.
Like I’m gonna be arrogantly confident.
Like they’ll come across being fucking arrogant.
Like yeah, I’ve seen a lot of these, like it’s this belief,
not like, oh, 99% of the time I’m gonna, no, 100%.
There’s no doubt about it.
This is gonna happen.
And I believe that with every fiber of my heart,
I believe that every fiber in my body.
And that is borderline arrogance.
Like that is the arrogance.
That is arrogant confidence.
You know, and and my advice to that kid is to be arrogantly
confident about approaching things that he thought must needed to
must must be achieved because if you’re half hearted, they’re like
if that fighter was like, maybe it might be this guy and I know
and you’re tentative in your in your in your throws and like, you know,
you’re kind of scared, like you’re just not going to perform as well as if you’re like,
I got this, I have a game plan, I’m going to stick to the game, I’m going to execute on it.
Right. And that game plan takes you could be a fighter in the ring. You could be again, anything
you could be a writer, a designer, a CEO, doesn’t matter what you are. If you have a game plan,
you visualize what you’re going to do tomorrow and you wake up in the morning. You also what I used
to do for many years is visualize at night, the day that I was going to happen next day,
whatever the next day entailed, I was going to wake up and then I’m going to I knew what
what am I did look like? I’m gonna do this, this, this, this, this, and this is how it’s
going to turn out. Each one of those years, the results are going to turn out. And then
when I go, I’m, I’m so in the zone, like I have a game plan, I’m going to execute on
that fighter in the ring. That’s my ring. That’s my football field. That’s what that
is my field. That’s my ring. And I’m going to perform. And oftentimes I can suspect I
I suspect to a lot of people that comes across as arrogance.
I’m 100% sure.
Yeah.
I think a lot of people see that and be like, that’s arrogance.
And perhaps it is.
I don’t think it is.
And I don’t know.
I really want to finish it with that.
I don’t know.
That was fucking awesome.
Yeah.
I 100% agree with you.
Sometimes when you really want to visualize yourself, your goals, you have
to be borderline arrogant.
Yeah.
And I like that.
You have to be when to create something new.
Like you have to be so…
Especially, and this is the last thing I’ll say.
If you’re trying to create something new.
You’re trying to build something new.
Create something new.
It means it’s never been done before.
And the odds are stacked against you.
It’s hard. Someone would have done it before.
You should create something new.
You almost have to be arrogant enough.
to believe that you can do it when no one else before you has done it before.
– That is true.
– To have the sheer arrogance of who are you to be able to achieve this,
to create this impact on the world that no one else before you has been able to do before.
And I think the best people who, one of the best people,
the people who have had the biggest impact on humanity,
I think they’re arrogant.
I think a lot of times you look at them and you’re like, fuck, they were arrogance.
But they had to be.
I think you have to be to do something like that.
So, you know, not to close this conversation with arrogance is good.
I think that’s a perfect fucking way to close it out.
Bro, thank you so much for your time.
Let’s do it again.
I reckon because we need another mezcal to go over.
There’s so much we didn’t talk about.
But I did like how we split it out.
First thing about Parrot, then we talked about life and a lot of other things.
But let’s do it again.
Follow those who listen to this three hour conversation.
We are five minutes away from three hours.
Wow, that’s what happens when you have fun.
Yeah, exactly.
And that’s what I mean.
We have conversations sometimes about meetings and then suddenly it’s like, oh shit, it’s
six o’clock.
Holy shit.
Exactly.
To all of those who listen to this, I hope you can take something out of it. And yeah,
get inspired. This guy here is a big inspiration. He has been for me. I’m pretty sure he’s for
everybody else who listened to this conversation. Stay sane, drink water, fucking exercise, and
peace.
Thank you.
Thank you.
(laughing)
I’ll tell you.
(upbeat music)
to the next level.
(upbeat music)
[MUSIC]
