Will Palmer: How to succeed with an IPO!

In this episode, we sit down with Will Palmer, a serial entrepreneur with a fascinating career that spans from door-to-door sales to leading successful tech ventures. Will shares his story of taking a business from inception to a public listing on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. Tune in as we explore pivotal moments, lessons learned, and the strategies that made his journey to multimillion-dollar exits possible.

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Speaker 1 (00:00:09): Welcome to Two Commas, the podcast where we explore how people exited their business for multimillions of dollars. Today I'm really excited to have a good personal friend of mine on the show. He's a serial entrepreneur, he's a raconteur and an all around good character to know. So William Palmer has been the founder of a number of different tech ventures. He's been active in the investment space for quite some years, and he's got a particularly interesting story to share with us amongst many. But this one's really around the listing journey as he took a business from inception all the way through to a public boss listing in the New Zealand stock market. So without further ado, please welcome along to the show. Will Palmer, thanks for

Speaker 2 (00:00:46): Joining us. Will Nice to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:00:48): Yeah. I always like to start off with a bit of a backstory. So I know that you're a Wellington boy born, I think br as well.

Speaker 3 (00:00:55): Close,

Speaker 1 (00:00:56): Close, close enough. So I'm curious about the way that you came into the commercial world, what your start was, the start of your entrepreneurial journey particularly.

Speaker 2 (00:01:06): Yeah, I mean, if you go right back the first time I knew that there might be some hope for me in sales, which I think is the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. We had to do a fundraiser at school for our first 15 trip to Australia, and we decided what we're going to do is make pizzas and sell them. And so most people sold to their aunties and their uncles and friends and neighbors, and somebody came in with 10 pizzas sold and another came in with 20. I didn't know that's what everybody did. So I decided to go knock on doors and I picked the wealthiest part of town I could find, and I sold 168 pizzas and came back and no one was really mentally prepared for this effort. We were going to have to go to making a freezing 168 pizzas. So that was the first time I thought maybe there's something to that skill. And then I was all about trying to work out what I could do with that skill. And then the second time I started recognizing an alternative path. When you are young, you think a successful job is going to come off the back of a degree, it's probably going to be something that's familiar. A lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, an engineer. And I was definitely heading down the engineering path was where I was physics and science and all these sort of things, but not because I liked them, but I thought that was the right career path for me. (00:02:20): And then my girlfriend's mom was a real estate agent and she started off as a part-time administrator with two kids and ended up becoming the top real estate agent in the country. And I got to watch it unfold in front of my eyes and I got to watch her net worth go from absolutely nothing, almost destitute to becoming exceedingly wealthy. And she did it entirely on work ethic, energy, attitude, and sales. And that was kind of those, I guess those two things together later a bit of a foundation for me. And then fast forward to my holiday break, at the end of my first year at university, I was looking for a job and I got a sales job in Wellington and it was door-to-door sales selling sky television, I think might've been the first thing that we were doing. And I immediately just started to transform my skillset on the back of this incredible job, which I mean, I'd encourage nearly anyone to do this job if they're wanting to learn sales. Because what happens in door to door sales in particular is that you're speaking to 80 to a hundred new people every day. And if you don't get the tone right, if you don't get the body language, if you don't get the messaging right, you're going to get the door slammed in your face. And so you start learning to adapt to every type of person that you're speaking to. And as you get better at it, you start being able to work out, I can almost sell anything if I get my story. (00:03:46): And so once you've sort of got that confidence, then it comes down to, okay, I know I can sell now, what is the right thing to apply that skill to? And it took me a while to work out that it shouldn't be someone else's business, it should be my own. Once I worked that bit out, then the pieces fell together and my career started.

Speaker 1 (00:04:02): I love it. So it's interesting. There's a often spoken about tension that sits in technology organizations of sales versus delivery, and you had super early exposure to that of overselling 168 pizzas and then the, oh shit, how are we going to go about delivering these things? Oh, it's a disaster. And manufacturing them. So I'm curious, I don't want to get diverted with this conversation, but has that gone about informing how you've gone about interacting with other parts of the organizations that you've built over time?

Speaker 2 (00:04:29): Yeah, definitely. I think what you get out of that process is the ability to interact with whatever kind of person's in front of you. So I mean, one of the businesses that I was involved with early was HRV, which was a ventilation home ventilation company. I was there right at the very early stages. I think the business was at about a million dollars. They hadn't quite worked out how they were going to grow the company. I was good friends with one of the founders, and I got involved at that point and we grew it from that point through to about 76 million by the time I'd left. So things really took off, but we had very different types of people in our teams. So our sales team were generally quite technical, soft spoken, clever type sales folk. Our call center were generally younger, more energetic, more female dominant, different energy. (00:05:20): And then we had an installer team. They were very tactile. They were electricians and installers and roofers, and they were a little bit more gruff and a little bit more rough. And then we had our accounts team and they were the bean counters and every one of them almost represented a different New Zealand demographic. And when you're managing those and you're working with those groups, you learn how to interact, talk their language. And I think that comes from sales because when you're out knocking on doors, you're meeting all these different people all the time. And so I definitely did apply it. And I think one of the things that probably really helped me with was being able to interact with anyone in the company at any time. And hopefully I've kept that.

Speaker 1 (00:05:56): Yeah, I think most people would describe you as being quite approachable. Will. Oh,

Speaker 2 (00:06:01): Thank

Speaker 1 (00:06:01): You. I'll take that one must. So I'm curious, so there's various facets and traits that denote someone likely to succeed or not succeed in the space of entrepreneurship. One of those is definitely hard work and the ability to go further for longer than other people are prepared to do quite often. Another one is growth. And so you mentioned that you had the door-to-door selling job at, there was the high school fundraising, but then there was the girlfriend's mom at that point as well. And so back in those days is, I don't want to age you, but this is definitely pre YouTube, right?

Speaker 3 (00:06:37): Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:06:38): So definitely pre YouTube. How did you go about developing that skillset in an age where, I mean, we are awash with information now and it's all freely available as to how to become an expert in almost anything that you apply yourself to. You can go to one of the massive open online courses, the MOOCs and spend 20 to $40 on something if you find that the YouTube stuff's not appropriate podcasts, there's white papers, there's just so much free information. But how did you as a late teens, early twenties guy

Speaker 3 (00:07:06): Go

Speaker 1 (00:07:06): About the business of becoming a super, super capable person in a space where you couldn't get access to that free insight?

Speaker 2 (00:07:13): I had some great mentors that was the starting point. And these people are still come to my closest friends today who took me under their wing and showed me how sales has done. And that made an enormous difference to how, I mean, if they hadn't been so electric in the way that they sort of showed me how things were working and so generous with their time, I don't think I would've been anything like what I've ended up doing. They just gave me that confidence that it was entirely possible. So yeah, I think that having really, really, really strong mentors is probably one of the keys. But the other thing in terms of education is very early in my career, I just stumbled upon a book by a guy by the name of Alan Pease, a body

Speaker 1 (00:07:52): Language book. Body language.

Speaker 2 (00:07:53): Yeah, it's a great book. And I've got the video set that's old name the box set. Yeah, the box set. And I watched this thing on loop, but the message that I remember that stuck through my mind the whole time was, if you break down a sale, and I might have these percentages wrong, but 10% of it came down to the product. And your knowledge of that product, IE how you sort of understood features and benefits. Yeah, features and benefits. 20% came down to the tone, your delivery, how you said what it is, how did you deliver these features and benefits in a way that was compelling. And then the balance, 70% came down to the body language. How did you interact with the cues that you were given by the customer along the way through that journey? How did you make them feel through that entire journey? When you recognize that 70% of sales comes down to the body language, that's the area that I double clicked on, and that's the part you can't learn online. (00:08:45): I think sales is one of those very few disciplines that is very unlikely to get taken over by AI or by any sort of digital medium. It'll be supported by sure. But the real art of connecting with human to human is quite special. And that's the piece I think I honed in on very, very early. I recognized that there was a talent in being able to read how people felt about the thing you just said, and being able to interpret whether that meant they were happy, sad, further down the buying path or further away and be able to adjust your story, your pattern, your body language, derail, diffuse, whatever you needed to do to try and make things work. And so I think an obsession with body language early was probably one of my clues.

Speaker 1 (00:09:30): Yeah, yeah, that's really helpful because it talks to being able to qualify a sale really effectively. I've long believed that that's probably one of the, if not the most important skill in a salesperson, not opening, not closing, not pitching, but rather being able to assess who's most likely to buy the thing that you have to offer a

Speaker 2 (00:09:49): Hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (00:09:50): And so looking at people's nonverbal cues, their body language is just such a super simple and effective superpower to have. So yeah, I really like that.

Speaker 2 (00:09:58): No, it is.

Speaker 1 (00:09:59): So you came through the sales track?

Speaker 2 (00:10:00): Yeah, I did.

Speaker 1 (00:10:01): And you went and lived and worked in the uk, in Australia, running ever growing sales teams. And then at what stage did you get into tech?

Speaker 2 (00:10:13): My first, I mean proper RO into tech, we got into a company called Connect Now in New Zealand. It was an Australian company that belonged to a guy that I'd befriended over there who had developed a sort of a back office for power companies and gas companies and water companies to run all their back office. So if you wanted to set up a retailer doing power, he had a back office that would manage that for you. And we'd met him through this process of setting up power companies. And one of the businesses that he'd had as a sort of a side hustle was this concept called Connect now, which was where if you were to move house, he'd get a referral from a real estate agent and then somebody from Connect now would contact that person and connect their phone, their power, their internet

Speaker 1 (00:11:01): Unified kind of approach.

Speaker 2 (00:11:03): And it was a real benefit to the purchaser because they were getting the acquisition rates, they were getting all the deals that they wouldn't have got if they'd rung themselves and connect. Now were getting paid a connection fee for every single thing that you connected. And because you were connecting everything when you first moved in, that menu was quite large and it was relatively technical product, albeit I wasn't heavily involved in the tech side. What I did get to see was how a tech business was built, how it was iterated, how features were captured, and eventually became product. That interaction between the sales and marketing and the product teams. It was something that was always a bit of attention. And I was on the sales and marketing side, product was all made out of Australia, and so I sort of got to observe how it all worked, but I also got to observe quite a lot of success. I ended up having a massive exit out of that business, and I sort of saw the multiples, I think it was over 50 million and I was sort of 50 million. That's a really big number. You can achieve that, you can achieve that. And he did it in a relatively quick process. So yeah, I think that for me was quite a big moment as to why I thought text the answer, (00:12:08): I need to know more about this space. I need to be able to build products myself and sell them myself. I think the evolution was first learning how to sell, then realizing I shouldn't be selling other people's products, I should be selling my own and then realizing I shouldn't be selling my own product that I've kind of bought. I should be building my own product and selling it. And I think that was the last bit, and that's where I sort of spent the rest of my career in that bucket.

Speaker 1 (00:12:30): Yeah, yeah. Personally, I think it's quite helpful to have that evolution because the true startup, which is I define it as being, solving a problem in a way that hasn't been solved before (00:12:42): And building a solution like a product or a platform or a marketplace to solve that problem. And so you have to educate the market and the world that they need that thing. They need to part with their money and continue to part with their money to allow you to achieve your dream and maybe alleviate some of their pain as well. And so you're really building everything from the ground up. And so personally, I think that if you've cut your teeth in selling someone else's thing, you make a fist in a success of that, then you sell your own thing. But it's the thing that you've gotten from a third party source and then you go about the building of the thing. So do you think that you could have circumvented that journey in any way, or do you also agree with that principle?

Speaker 2 (00:13:19): No, there were so many lessons along the way. It doesn't matter whether it was my product or otherwise. One of the things that I realized is that there was sort of two parts to a sale. One part was who the hell are you when you knock on that door or meet that person in business? And then what have you got for me? And now the two questions that somebody's asking themselves, who are you and what have you got for me? And when they already know who you are, when I knocked on the door with Sky tv, now I know you're Sky tv. What deal are you going to give me? And that's a very easy conversation. You're only having to deal with the second part of the story when you've got to deal with the who the hell are you? You've got to somehow make sure that you can build a brand and you've got to be able to build a reputation and you've got to do all these things that are kind of slightly more intangible and slightly longer and sort of time to execute than just that man that's coming in and closing a deal. (00:14:05): And so I think that that evolution sort of taught me that there is two parts, and that first part has a whole nother dynamic that I had to learn about, which was the connection between brand marketing and sales. And when you get that all together there beautiful things happen.

Speaker 1 (00:14:21): I understand and agree. So was it around about the nineties that was connect now or was it a little bit later than

Speaker 2 (00:14:26): That? No, it was later than that. It was sort of maybe around the GFC.

Speaker 1 (00:14:31): Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:14:31): We sold out just after the GFC,

Speaker 1 (00:14:33): Right?

Speaker 2 (00:14:33): Yep. 2009,

Speaker 1 (00:14:34): Yes. It's interesting. So I was just a little bit earlier than that Y 2K era, (00:14:41): And it's worthy to point it out because if you've been around for a while and of a similar kind of vintage, then what is that? Tech wasn't always the dominant industry that it is today. The biggest stocks that were listed in the world were Coca-Cola and General Electric and Boeing and those sorts of companies. It wasn't the FGA kind of stocks. And so Y 2K as a point in time and as a event and occurrence that happened, propelled it from being 1% of company spends to being 11% of the company spend. So it came from basically being this minnow of industry to being something that people were paying attention to. Then we had the tech wreck, of course, the.com crash era, and then gradually people started to turn across to this as the adventive fiber to the door and cloud computing, all those sorts of things came about. But it's interesting that the industry that people now gravitate towards as graduates and as even coming through high school is something that wasn't there 20, 25 years ago.

Speaker 2 (00:15:40): Yeah, there was an enormous cost barrier too, right? I mean, when we started our first tech company in earnest, that was sort of 2006 or 2007, we went to cloud computing because we couldn't afford the hardware, but cloud computing was probably 50 times more in cost than it's today. Everything that you needed in terms of tooling, you either built yourself or you paid someone to build for you. There was not these dozens and dozens of apps that you can buy for a very small license fee that can do bug detection or security or repository management or all these things that you can now just be done for you kind of take it for granted. So the barrier to entry at that point was extremely high. I mean both financially, but technically it was extremely high. The other thing that was different at that point as well is there was no ecosystem or stories of success to follow. So you didn't have all of these sort of zeros push pays, vans, these stories just weren't a thing yet. And so no one had made money in this space yet in this country, nor in Australia actually. And so it was kind of a crazy pursuit to go down this road. I don't think it was clear that this was the way to make money at that point.

Speaker 1 (00:16:46): No. Yeah, I remember, I think it was 2000, 2001, the first meaningful exit in New Zealand was Mail Al, and I know the founders quite well of that company then and now, and it was a $55 million exit.

Speaker 2 (00:17:00): Does that make you,

Speaker 1 (00:17:01): Which that's kind of a double that to get to today's dollars, people will take maybe even slightly more, maybe 150 million in today's money. So still a meaningful and a really good sum, but it was such an aberration for the time. It was people started to wake up and pay attention and go, wow, you can kind of really make a fist out of this kind of technology thing, I think in tech. But then it took another few years for it to bleed into the rest of the market and people to get perspective on it. So when did you get into, so we're here to talk about exits. So Movio was the big main thrust of our conversation

Speaker 3 (00:17:33): Today. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 (00:17:35): So talk me through the founding journey of Movio and what opportunities you saw in the marketplace and how you scaled the company.

Speaker 2 (00:17:42): Yeah, well, I mean, so that tech business we set up in 2006 was the genesis of Movio, really. It was a company called Virtual Concepts Kind, a funny name, really concept that's virtual. But anyway, Brandon is my strong point at that point. But so what we did is we kind of built Grab one before there was grab one. And so we had a whole bunch of promotions that we were doing for restaurants and video stores and pizza chains and cinemas, and we would go out and we'd have a door to door sales team go sell these loyalty cards and these loyalty cards to work across these different promotions that we had. And what became really apparent is that only one of the things that we were working on had real legs, and that was the cinema side. So there was definite customer interest in any promotion we did that involve cinema. So we knew that there was a need on that side, and we were sitting in a cinema myself and my business partner Peter, and we just sort of looked around and the film was fantastic. There was, I think it was taken, actually, it was the film (00:18:43): And we were sitting there and we're down on Queen Street, amazing movie peak Time, and it must've been 10% occupancy. And we said, this is crazy. We know that there's all these people out there that want to go to the movies and we know that there's a great film on in the cinema right now, and 90% of the seats are vacant and that they were sitting in here even paying half the price. It's better than zero because they'll buy some popcorn and they'll buy a Coke and they'll do some other things. Surely we can do something about this. And so we sort of repurposed our business focused everything on the cinema space. Pete had come out of an equivalent of Netflix. They created Movie Shack, which became Fatso, and they had an amazing product. What they did for those that didn't know is Netflix used to be a DVD delivery, home delivery business. (00:19:30): And these guys saw this business opportunity and thought, well, we should go get a license for the Netflix business in New Zealand. And Netflix wouldn't grant that. They were very early at this time. And so they thought, we'll build it ourselves. But they ran into a hurdle, and the hurdle they ran into was that the cost of new release content here was governed by Village Roadshow in Australia. And so when you bought A DVD, instead of it costing the $30 that we would remember buying it at the warehouse for, it was actually 130 if you got it as a new release. So they charged four times as much, which meant that only the DVD stores could really afford this sort of rental model. That's why that rental model was so prolific where you paid $10, got your DVD, returned it the next day, probably paid some lay fees, next person linked it. (00:20:13): They wanted to have a delivery model where basically you got your three DVDs, you returned them, you got another three DVDs, you returned them, but they wanted new releases. So here was the problem. The customers wanted new releases, they couldn't afford to buy the new releases, their entire model was broken. And one of the guys in the team decided to develop a recommendations engine that recommended films to people that they hadn't seen to try and get them to want to watch something other than the new releases. And it worked, and it's the first time I'd ever seen a recommendations engine. I mean, Amazon didn't have one at this moment in time. So I was like, oh my God, you are recommending content because you have inventory and because it's priced well you and it'll supposedly according to the customer's preferences help them as well. This is incredible. (00:20:52): So I knew that they had some real smarts and we were like, okay, you've got these smarts. We've got this insight about cinema goers and we've got this vacant cinema. How do we put these things together and make a business out of it? And Movio was born out of that, and the objective of Movio was to essentially increase box office and fill those seats up. That was really the earliest goal. And how we went about doing that was we built a platform that pulled through all of the loyalty data, all of, and eventually all the social data online ticket purchases, and built a profile of every person who goes to the movies. And then what we did was that is target those people with SMS or email or some form of targeted message to get them to go to another movie. And we started trialing all sorts of different things. (00:21:37): We did competitions and we did upgrades, and we did concession packages, and we did, if you like this director, you'll like this director, kind of collaborative filtering. And we eventually worked out a playbook, a playbook of campaigns that we could run that would fill a cinema almost instantaneously we could have it done. If you gave us an opportunity at five o'clock in the evening on a Tuesday by seven o'clock that night, we'd have the theater fill. So we had a very, very powerful playbook. We knew we had something really, really cool. Now, the question was how do we make this into a business? (00:22:09): We were trucking along really nicely. We're running the Barclay cinema chains campaigns over that time. They were pushing us to do more and more. They were getting more and more incremental box office. They were starting to rank higher on the list of performers for each of these films. So we were clearly making a big difference in their business. So much of a difference that they sold, Hoyts actually acquired them unbeknownst to us at that moment, Hoyts worked with another New Zealand company. We had not heard of it this time called Vista. And Vista was at that point and still is the global leader in cinema point of sale and many cinema ERP systems. And we looked at that and went, oh, well, we're out. They're going to go use Vista. And they did. A few months passed and we sat there with our software and no customers and went, what do we do? (00:22:56): And we get a call from Murray Holdaway, the CEO of Vista, and he said, look, we've had some words with Hoyts. Their sales aren't performing the way that they were prior to the acquisition. There's a belief that it might be your software. That's the difference. Well, let's talk And through a series of hilarious conversations, Murray and I reached a deal and we took an investment from Vista. And the condition of that investment was that we would continue to run completely independently. We would have access to their customer base. So they'd do introductions for us, they'd give us a small amount of capital, but most importantly, they'd give us a really clean integration into their software. So we did the integration, did all the work, got the introductions, everything played out, and we just went about our merry way starting to build our company up. And

Speaker 1 (00:23:46): I might just jump in and ask a question if that's okay. So were they treating that as a venture investment for them? So you're in the same space, you're related to us, or were they more going, you're becoming a part of our stable of brands kind of thing or something in the middle?

Speaker 2 (00:23:59): We were very much a venture investment at that time, a strategic venture investment. But at that time, we had gone down when we were cloud, they were on Preem, we were AWS, they were Azure slash Microsoft. Everything was different about our two businesses. Bringing the two together was not ever going to be particularly easy at that time.

Speaker 1 (00:24:18): What scale were you at that stage in terms of,

Speaker 2 (00:24:20): I mean, we were two people,

Speaker 1 (00:24:21): Right? Okay. So you core products, they relatively had a great customer success story, had story, then you got cut

Speaker 2 (00:24:26): Out. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:24:27): Got it.

Speaker 2 (00:24:28): We had one story. We had a lot of ip. We knew we had a playbook. And so we basically talked to them and said, look, we won't compete with you guys. You won't compete with us. We'll carve out the data analytics and the campaign management component. We'll let you keep the loyalty part and the ticketing. We'll get away from that part and we'll just go in our own directions.

Speaker 4 (00:24:46): We'll

Speaker 2 (00:24:47): Be selling to the marketing departments. You guys will be selling to it. We will just keep rolling along and whenever we need something off each other, we've always got a really friendly relationship and it worked beautifully. So we head up to the US a couple of years into our journey and we book a suite at Caesars Palace for CinemaCon, the biggest cinema convention in the US and Roland. And we couldn't afford to actually set up a trade booth, and we managed to get about 15 or 16 meetings. I think 12 or 13 of them decided to become customers of ours after those meetings. And we went, oh, wow, we've really got something. And so we instantaneously opened an office in the US that was 2012, and things started to expand rapidly. We kind of skipped the world. We'd gone New Zealand prototype straight to the us. All of a sudden we had the number one cinema chain in the world, the number one in Canada, the number one in Latin America. We were literally on fire a RR. We'd gone already up to five or 6 million by then and we were just flying. So we get to this point where things are going pretty well. We're feeling pretty bullish. I think it's 2013. We decide we're going to raise some capital.

Speaker 1 (00:26:04): And other than the Vista investment, that was the first time that you'd gone out to market to raise

Speaker 2 (00:26:09): And Vista's investment was a small six figure number,

Speaker 1 (00:26:13): Right? It's small percentage points.

Speaker 2 (00:26:14): Yeah, totally. And it was at a time, you've got to remember when we raised that money, it was 2009. It's

Speaker 1 (00:26:19): Pretty early days for cap raising on nz.

Speaker 2 (00:26:21): Well, and the GFC had just happened, of course. I mean, you couldn't beg people for money. No one had any money. I mean Vista, which are kind enough to give that much, which is a lot more than anyone else. So it was a very, very small sum, but very, very important. I don't think we would've gone any further without it. Anyway, so we go do capital raises, we head up to Silicon Valley, we go on this tour with NZTE, we see all the Sandhill Road, we do whole gambit. And then on the last day it was America's Cup. We go back to the Kiwi landing pad and the guys from Mova are there, and Stephen Ty's there and all the New Zealand, who's who, the

Speaker 1 (00:26:54): Luminaries,

Speaker 2 (00:26:54): The luminaries are all there. We start talking about what we're doing and most of 'em like, oh, we'd be really interested in investing. So there's us going all the way up to Silicon Valley and realizing, oh, actually I could have done this in my backyard. They're all in the market for this. It was the first time I realized there was actually an ecosystem in New Zealand that we could have gone to. It was small, but there was one and it was investing. And so we started moving down the road with Mova and talking to them and things were moving along really nicely, and we looked like we were going to put a deal together for a series A. And I took the deal, the draft of that deal to Vista, and I said, look, guys, just giving you the cursory note that we've very excited. We've managed to raise this large sum of money and it's all looking wonderful, and hopefully you guys are all happy about that. And they said, no, we're not. And I was like, what? No, we don't want you to do it. I'm like, what? Hang on. A few years ago you gave us a small six figure number. This is now a large seven figure number and you're not okay with this. So this was cause of a lot of heat as you can probably imagine.

Speaker 1 (00:28:03): Did they have any right to be able to do that or was it more like them flexing A little bit.

Speaker 2 (00:28:08): I don't entirely know whether they had rights to stop it. We never went legal on it, but it would've been difficult without them because we did have a tight integration with them. There was a good symbiotic relationship. We didn't really want to rust the feathers more than we needed to that point. It had been really productive for us. So

Speaker 1 (00:28:27): You would've been shedding the bed to go contrary to what their wishes were?

Speaker 2 (00:28:30): Exactly. And it's not like we really needed the money. We were actually profitable at that time. Wow. Yeah. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why they were probably like this is unnecessary. And it sort of came out over the next couple of months why it was unnecessary. They were considering going public. They hadn't really considered including us into the mix. We were minority holding that they had, but nevertheless, they didn't want to have it excluded. And having a venture partner as an investor makes it tricky, would've made it tricky. And so the conversation then started between us and the Vista guys around, could we do this together? We were the young, sexy cloud buzzword, big tech, big data, blah blah, blah, (00:29:12): Business that was growing at a rate of knots, winning awards, doing all the things they were really established globally, successful, profitable, and quite profitable company with a very long standing customer base. And for all intents and purposes, looked like they were on track to be the dominant player globally in that space. And so you looked at, and you've got this established but profitable, albeit growing relatively slowly, tech company. And then you've got this hot startup, put the two together and you've got the perfect investor story. And so NewCo was formed initially. Obviously they didn't have a name for it, but there was Vista Cinema and Movio were the two companies that formed Vista Group. And Vista Group was eventually the company or the organization that went public on the Australian and New Zealand exchanges in 2014.

Speaker 4 (00:30:03): So

Speaker 2 (00:30:03): We did a dual listing and we swapped out a good portion where our shares in both Movio and Vista four shares in NewCo.

Speaker 1 (00:30:13): Okay. So you didn't take cash off at the table at those stage? No, we did. We took, oh, great, great deal. So you flipped a proportion and you took some cash out?

Speaker 2 (00:30:20): Yeah, we took about a third as all of us. I took a third of the total value off the table straight away, and we raised a bunch of cash and that was sort of the first big exit for me really. I mean at that point I probably had enough to stop. It was pretty exciting times five years into the journey with Vista, that's where we'd ended up. They'd done extremely well out of it as well. But yeah, that was sort of the beginning of the listing journey.

Speaker 1 (00:30:46): So let's talk about the listing journey. So you got involved when it was a notion that was around at Vista Group, so you would've been party and contributing and driving a lot of those conversations to be able to make it happen.

Speaker 3 (00:30:59): So

Speaker 1 (00:30:59): What does a listing journey look like in NZ and in Australia from the inception of the conversations? And then what types of things do you have to do to both comply and then go through the journey? So that's a multi-part question.

Speaker 2 (00:31:12): There's a lot going on there.

Speaker 1 (00:31:13): So let's just break this down to its requisite elements. So talk me through the journey of building something which could be ready to go through listing. What does that need to look like?

Speaker 2 (00:31:24): Yeah, I mean I think you have to have a very solid financial backing in terms of obviously you've been audited, you've gone through the process, you're working with one of the big four to make sure that everything is t's across i's are dotted. From that standpoint, there's a massive amount of compliance that's done across the entire business so that people are able to sign off that you are suitable to be a public company. And that rigor and process is probably not too dissimilar to going through a SOC two type scenario for those tech companies out there that have gone through that.

Speaker 1 (00:31:59): For those that are unfamiliar with

Speaker 2 (00:32:00): SOC two, for those that are unfamiliar, there is a level of compliance that you can achieve called SOC two, which we've just done for our dev ramp business, which I think for us had about 95 different processes that you had to basically prove that you did to a very high standard and have that sort of signed off by an independent auditor. And I would say that going public has very similar attributes to that, but probably the part that is more interesting is going out there and doing the book build and being out there and having to drum up the interest in the business and go on a road show and get people to loosely commit. And that all just happens quite randomly with the merchant bank that underwrites what's going on and eventually you're ringing a bell and the whole thing feels like a blur. It's sort of a crazy old time. The big things to note about it is not so much the listing process. I think anyone could go through that if you've got money and time, you could get through it. It's what it means once you've done it. And I think that's the bit that is the most interesting about listing a company.

Speaker 1 (00:33:11): I'd love to delve into that conversation. Just a couple more questions about the pre-listing journey. So if there's any that you've missed, what were the key milestones for you in getting everything ready? You've talked about getting the financials, getting the compliance, getting the books audited, that sort of stuff. Is there a sequence of events that you have to run through and is there a playbook for it?

Speaker 2 (00:33:34): Yeah, there is. I mean, I think obviously you've got all your financials in order. You've got your business plan and check. You've got all of your legal sides contracts, employment contracts, all betted down. It's basically just making sure that you've crossed your Ts and dotted your i's you've provided all of your customer contracts. It's just that very deep level of audit that you've made sure that everything is set up to the nth degree. And I think as an organization, it's good practice to do all this already in this scenario, you're getting other people to sign off at a pretty high level before you've got the green light to move forward.

Speaker 1 (00:34:11): It's effectively akin to a deep DD process on a enterprise level company, but you need to get independent bodies to come in and sign all those things off on your behalf so that you've got certainty that there's some standards that have been applied to that work.

Speaker 2 (00:34:26): Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (00:34:26): Deep dd, standard based, independent third parties, would that be a fair?

Speaker 2 (00:34:30): Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:34:31): Yeah. Great. And so when you're going through the roadshows, you're talking to institutional investors, you're talking to funds, you're talking to a little bit of moms and dads maybe and at a big public event. So what's that experience?

Speaker 2 (00:34:44): Yeah, most of it was for us was funds. So we go, these roadshows continue by the way, which you not told at the time when you first go public. So we were doing at least two a year, generally three. So we'd do the Macquarie conference in Sydney and then we'd do one after our half year and one after our full year result. But also we did the roadshow leading up. And essentially what you're doing is it's an investor pitch. You're going in and you are selling a room full of fund managers on why your IPO is going to be success and where it's going to go. And then they are helping build the book as to a range that you've given them a quoted range, and then eventually you've got enough interest to go, we've got enough to go, and you're off to the races. And it happens like lightning from that point

Speaker 1 (00:35:30): With a private raising. And that kind of goes from angel through to VC raising. One of the notions is that investors are like sheep. And so once you land the whale, someone who takes 20, 30, 50% of that issued capital that's available, then people tend to fall over themselves to get there.

Speaker 2 (00:35:52): Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (00:35:53): Is the roadshow pretty similar or is there Yeah, it is a degree of,

Speaker 2 (00:35:55): Look, I dunno exactly how the merchant bank does it behind the scenes, but you've got a banker that has to sign off, basically underwrites the round, but the bank is only going to underwrite the round if they think the round's going to succeed. (00:36:05): So they've obviously already spoken to a number of different funds who have indicated that subject X, Y, and Z, that they will participate at whatever level that is. Once that merchant bank has that confidence, they essentially are like your lead investor in a private round, but they don't hold the stock. All they do is they hold it for that short period of time until such time as their listing is successful, of which case the funds are then going to take that underwritten stock off their hands. So that's what you've got to get the merchant banks up to is that point of confidence that they can underwrite the round. And that comes from you going on a roadshow, selling your wares, making sure the story is cohesive and exciting enough to get the funds on board and then boom, you are ringing a bell.

Speaker 1 (00:36:50): So that's sort of operations, so you're not underwritten until after you've gone through that roadshow event and you've got expressions

Speaker 2 (00:36:55): Of interest. I think it happens at different moments, but generally by the time you're on that road show, they're reasonably confident that things are going to happen to what level? So you've got a range and now you're trying to work out where in that range are you going to land and they're going to underwrite it at any point in that range.

Speaker 1 (00:37:09): Yeah. Great. So reasons for listing. So the often quoted reasons are liquidity and access to bigger capital markets potentially as well and the ability to potentially achieve a higher multiple for your business as well. I think there's a few others that I've missed off there. So what was the driver behind Vista doing it?

Speaker 2 (00:37:30): Yeah, so for Vista, I think what it did is it provided some liquidity for the founders. They'd worked a long time on the Vista side in particular, so it

Speaker 1 (00:37:38): Was like 20 years old by,

Speaker 2 (00:37:39): Is that right? Yeah, it probably was. And so they I think were in need or not need. I mean it was time to get some liquidity, but they didn't want to give up control of their business either. They still had lots they wanted to do. They had massive ambitions. They were thinking about a lot of acquisition and they needed capital to do the acquisition. And so this kind of ticked a lot of boxes. It allowed you to get some money off the table, allowed you to put some money into the company to be able to do acquisitions. And so it sort of worked. I think that was their main driver. What was your other question there, Josh?

Speaker 1 (00:38:12): It was confirmation of the liquidity access to bigger capital markets and the higher multiples as well.

Speaker 2 (00:38:21): Yeah, the higher multiples is a dangerous one. I think if you talk to a lot of publicly listed CEOs, there will have been a moment in time where they achieved a much higher multiple than what they might've achieved had they tried to do something privately. But the off side of that is that it can easily go down as well to horrible levels on the back of some bad press, bad news. Whereas in a private company that doesn't really circulate in the same way and it can't be acted upon when that information gets out there. And that has a really interesting effect, not just on you as the founder because you're under a lot of pressure from investors to go, what's just happened? Why is the stop falling? And it kind of clams on itself, (00:38:56): But from the staff, and that was one of the big revelations I had was that your staff who are on your employee incentive programs or have family members that have invested in the public's company are on this rollercoaster with you. And it's going up and down and when it goes up, everyone's feeling positive at work. And when it's going down, everyone's feeling negative and sometimes it goes down because of macro conditions that have absolutely nothing to do with you and the whole company's in a depression. So I think that's one of the sides that is often not spoken of that much is that your staff are on this rollercoaster with you, and it's an extremely public branding. When things go bad, when you go home and mom and dad are angry because they've lost 60% of their net worth in the last three days because your company stocks fallen and that happened, that's a tough pill to swallow. It's hard enough to handle it at work, but at home it can be quite difficult as well. So I think that was one thing that I found interesting. I've heard other people say that when they go public, it's the day that the founders should exit because that going through that rollercoaster is pretty hard. (00:39:58): But yeah, so you talked about liquidity. That's definitely, we've got instantaneous liquidity, and I think the really nice thing is you have ongoing liquidity. So when you have something you need money for, you generally can get it. But that also is a bit of a misnomer because you generally can't trade during blackout periods, and a blackout period happens either side of any significant announcement, so you are half year or full year result.

Speaker 1 (00:40:19): What's a blackout period,

Speaker 2 (00:40:20): A period where you can't trade? So you've got a

Speaker 1 (00:40:23): Period as an individual, you can't trade. The stocks still traded, but you can't

Speaker 2 (00:40:26): Trade. Oh, the stock's still trading, but you can't trade every time Vista hit peaks. We were in a blackout every single time. It was like Murphy's Law. So that's really hard. But also you can't trade if you have any information that the public doesn't have that's really hard. As a CEO, you've always got information the public doesn't have (00:40:42): In the middle of 20 deals at once. It's your business, you're hiring some people, you've got all sorts of stuff, you've got new features coming out, you've got so much going on that you could argue you only person who has all the pieces in your head. Then trading the stock becomes extremely difficult. So now it's not only the blackout period, it's the periods where you may have had information, material information that other people didn't have access to. And so that's quite challenging, and even if you can satisfy the clause, it does sometimes feel like it's going to come back. You know what I mean? You're always worried about it. So I think that's really interesting. But one of the real benefits of listing is the prestige that comes with it. And obviously other than the invites to things and the places that you get to go and things that you get to do, it does help you attract incredible talent to your organization. People like working with companies that are visible. And I think what makes a public company interesting is if you're a potential employee, you can see exactly what state that organization is in with a fairly high level of confidence. And so we were able to bring on a lot of very good talent during that period of time because we're able to demonstrate that we were a pretty robust

Speaker 4 (00:41:54): Company.

Speaker 2 (00:41:55): So I think that was definitely a huge benefit. Another benefit that I think is really fascinating, when the covid occurred, we went through Helen back at Vista. Yeah, everybody has a Covid story and all of 'em are probably pretty bad, and I'm sure there's many that had much worse than ours, but ours wasn't great. We got wind of it early. Our Chinese office had some really interesting things happen during box office sales over Chinese New Year, normally a really high point for movies, and it hadn't happened. And so we got wind that people over there knew of a virus that was causing lots of problems. By early March, we were pretty sure we could see the writing on the wall. And so we were sort of steps ahead of how this might play out, and we were scenario planning very soon after everything was shut down at that moment in time, we were due to pay a dividend out. (00:42:49): A few days later, we pulled back the dividend because we were like, we might need this cash to get through the next week period. All of our customers globally, like Domino's closed 100% of them. Then soon after that, all of the studios stopped committing to building or creating more content. They couldn't get onto sets. And then obviously downstream, lots of those people, lots of the talent ended up going to the streaming side versus the theatrical side. So the business was really in a really, really dark place. And had we been privately held, raising money at that moment in time would've been almost impossible. We were able and I think a period of nine days to raise sufficient money to get us through 18 months runway as a large organization with about 600 staff. You couldn't do that in a private market. So a public market gives you, albeit at a price access to capital pretty instantaneously. There's not the need for tons of DD every single time. You need to come back to the well. So I think if you've got scenarios where you're looking to acquire, you've got scenarios where there could be something in the pipeline that might change materially what happens in your business, having the ability to be able to access capital can be a pretty massive benefit.

Speaker 1 (00:43:59): Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So we've started to lead into the subject of what it's like to be a listed company. Sorry. No, no, no. That's perfect. It's perfect. So let's kind of extend that conversation out. So things like what is the reporting, what are the obligations to communicate with people? What's the level of visibility? So bring it to life for us a little bit in terms of what that experience as a CEO is

Speaker 2 (00:44:22): Like. Yeah, look, I think if you were a company that had built a product and that product was well established, albe evolve, but fundamentally is the same, and you're selling it successfully with a system and you need to supercharge that system, you need to put more money into marketing, you need to open up more territories, you need to translate it. Then going public makes complete sense because you're putting fuel on the fire. The fire is very well established. You're just trying to sort of supercharge it. You're not changing direction every week. Nothing's materially different about the business. And so in that scenario, going public makes complete sense. When you're a company like Movio, which was still a startup, it was at series A level, (00:45:04): You're still changing direction all the time. You're still trying to get the product to a point where it appeals to the studios or whoever else that we were trying to work with, and we hadn't landed that yet. It's a really, really difficult place to be because you are always having to go back to the market and tell them that you've pivoted or changed your plan and the market takes. It's like turning the Titanic. It takes a long time for everyone to get on board with your change that you've made, and that's generally viewed as quite flighty. They want consistency. They want you to say you're going to create a plan and to stick to that plan. They want to build their models to measure against that plan every quarter, every six months, every year when you are changing the goalposts on them continuously, as you will as a startup, they get frustrated

Speaker 1 (00:45:51): And probably punish you as a consequence

Speaker 2 (00:45:53): And they punish you. Yeah. And the punishment comes in generally a stock sell off, and that can happen quite frequently when you think the news that you've delivered is good, but in reality it was not what they were expecting. And I think what being public is all about is about meeting expectations. And so you set expectations and you meet those expectations, and that's the whole game. And if you change even for the better, that's not what I expected. And so there's a bit of a freak out. So I think that's one thing that is really hard as a CEO of a publicly traded company, is that you've got to be able to stay the course. You've got to be a master at pr. (00:46:37): You know what I mean about managing the narrative and making sure that your comms are very well considered. So one of the things we probably could have done a lot better is if we had a big initiative that we were working on, that once we'd made the decision to move forward with this initiative, and it was a high probability of moving forward that we had a very clear plan of what was the moments we were going to communicate the progress towards this initiative, and assuming we achieve those milestones, what will we say? So instead of going next idea, next idea, next idea, it was big idea, what are the steps we need to explain of how we're progressing towards that idea? And so there's lots of sort of, I think PR practice that you would want to be certainly have a very good person in your corner that can help you nail that because you are continuously trying to weave a narrative that people, much more so than a private company. A private company, you're emailing 10, 20, 30, 40 investors, and it's generally a far more informal play in public. It's just a different game. You've also got analysts to deal with, (00:47:43): So you want people to cover your stock. That's a really important thing because once you get coverage, you can get more

Speaker 1 (00:47:49): Your visibility,

Speaker 2 (00:47:50): Your visibility. Once you get more visibility, more people have confidence in buying your stock once more people have confidence buying your stock, you've created liquidity for the other people who own the stock. (00:47:59): And so you want to make sure that people are covering what you're doing, but that's also very difficult. You've got to manage those people particularly carefully, got to get all of the information. They're be effectively doing due diligence on you or whatever new idea you've got every time you come up with one. So you say, I'm going to start working in latam and cinema, and we think we can make 3 million in revenue there. They will literally look into the latam market and understand whether there is 3 million in revenue in there and how that plays out and what it looks like and what the adjacencies might be after that. They're thinking ahead of where you are in a lot of cases. So you are managing the general narrative. You are double clicking on the narrative with those that are covering your stock. And all of the time, as a new startup as we were, you're trying to make sure that you're staying on the same track or a narrative that people can handle. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 (00:48:51): Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:48:53): And I think it frustrated Vista too, right? Vista were far more established and far more the right company to go public. And so we were probably letting them down a lot too by going, Hey, we have to go way now. We've seen something that's a really big opportunity. We're going to have to turn the Titanic. And they'll be like, but we just told the market A, B, and C, how are we going to tell 'em D and F? So that's hard.

Speaker 1 (00:49:14): It's interesting because to be able to be very effective at predicting future revenue and keeping cost controls and all the other things that give you certainty out at least one quarter, maybe even a whole year in advance, you've got to be so rigid and disciplined about how you run the company. Effective systems, processes, forecasting, pipelines, great sales, leadership, et cetera. So many different things you've got to be great at. And so on the one hand, it forces great discipline into the company. It does. But on the other hand, you've got the downside of unfortunately, my understanding is that if you miss your earnings by say a couple of million bucks and you were supposed to make 10 and you make one, sorry, you make nine, for example, you get punished on a greater degree. So let's say you missed it by 10%, you get punished by a greater extent than if you overshoot by 10%. And so in other words, it's a very difficult experience to go through, to have a little bit of a shortfall, but to win by the same amount or win by three times as much, there's no real success in game (00:50:19): Behind that.

Speaker 2 (00:50:19): No, there's not. And it's a really, really difficult one because if you bank some of your success so that you can overshoot in your announcement, that'll work once because then they then factor that into the next announcement. So when you say, okay, I've overshot, I said I was going to do 10, I did 11, they'll give you a little reward. Stock will have a wee bounce, right? Next time round you're meant to do 15, right? And you do 15. They'll like, no, no, we were expecting 16, but I told you we're going to do 15 and I did 15. No, no, no. We now factor in that you miss your number by positive 10%. And so you've actually underplayed our expectations. And so you get a punishment and it's a very, very difficult thing to manage. And again, that's about that expectation thing. And you can imagine as a startup trying to tell an analyst or a fund exactly where you're going to land in a year's time, or at least give them the data points to help them come up with their own decision. It's extremely difficult to do. I mean, often we'd have them send their numbers through to us of what they build out and say, do you think we'll hit this? And it would be like, no way. We won't hit that at all. I can't say that I don't know, but that's not going to happen. (00:51:32): And so you're always just managing this narrative. And I think one of the things as a startup founder of a series A level company, you should be focused as much as you possibly can on the business, and you're always having to do investor relations, whether you've gone down the private or the public path. I think when you're going down the public path though, it never ends. It almost is your full-time job (00:51:54): Because there's so many more players involved. We had 40 funds I think invested in our stock. Those 40 funds all had their own models. We had a handful of analysts covering it. Those people all needed to be updated all the time. We had set in stone reporting dates that had to have roadshows with them. So there was always this preparation for the next announcement. We had to manage it obviously with the comms internally to make sure that the team knew enough that they could do their job, but not too much that they'd ever find themselves in a situation where they were insider trading. So there's a lot more to manage, but I think one of the things that probably really surprised me is this idea that as a founder of a company that's gone public, one of your jobs is to help investors achieve liquidity, not just yourself. (00:52:43): And so when you create this sort of pool of people that invest initially at the IPO, those people at some point are going to want to sell their stock and make a profit. Who do they sell that stock to? And this was something I only understood incredibly late into the game, maybe five years as a CEO and a public company, was that you actually have to continuously work to create a secondary market for people to offload to. And so we had a primary market, but it was funds and those funds wanted to sell, but when they did, they generally were only sold to each other. What they needed was a retail market of investors that could be sold to. So the role that we had to play to help with that was to go out to all the brokerages and talk to all of the groups, the sales houses, et cetera, that sell stocks to their client portfolio on the virtues of Vista. (00:53:35): And that was a really interesting process to have to go through as well, that you're sitting out there going, you're not even somebody who's investing in us by helping and explaining the narrative to your people, we're not actually directly benefiting from this, but it is going to help our stock because the first people who bought our stock has someone to sell it to, and they're all complaining about liquidity all the time. So we've got to help them get it. And so you end up having this project which runs for years trying to create liquidity in your stock.

Speaker 1 (00:54:02): So there's layers of liquidity in the market that you've got to be aware of as well.

Speaker 2 (00:54:05): Yeah, people have got to have places to put things. And so when you add all these complexities together, so you go, you've got to make sure you're reporting all the time. You've got to make sure you've got your analysts that are on side with you and providing the right information. You want to make sure you've got analysts covering you. That's really important. You've got to make sure that you've got a primary supported base of investors, but you want to make sure that those investors have liquidity if they ever need it. There's a lot going on. And none of that involves running a software company. It's all being a public

Speaker 1 (00:54:33): CEO. Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:54:34): Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:54:35): Would you do it again?

Speaker 2 (00:54:37): Probably I would.

Speaker 1 (00:54:39): It's a caveat.

Speaker 2 (00:54:40): There is a caveat to that. I would do it again. There is some beautiful things about it. We achieved a very large exit very early, and I don't think that would've happened on the private model. We might've raised a good amount of money around that time, but in terms of physically getting cash off the table, I don't think there would've been a better way than the way that we did it. Even better than that, we managed to get cash off the table and still maintain control of our company. So that was extremely exciting for us. So for those reasons, absolutely you would do it again, what would be different is that I'd walk into it with a very clear playbook of what my company needed to look like first and exactly how I would manage the things I didn't manage very well the first time. So the company would need to look like an organization that has got a very, very clear plan, has got a very well-defined product, a very well-defined go-to-market strategy. And what it needs is capital to grow that go-to-market strategy, but it's not really going to move far off the line towards the target. Got it. (00:55:38): It just needs fuel, right? Zero. If that was my business and I was running along and I was at 10 million a RR and it was looking pretty predictable and it really just needed fuel and I had a choice and my choice was either to go raise venture or go public and do the way I did before, I'd probably choose to go public.

Speaker 4 (00:55:57): Interesting.

Speaker 2 (00:55:58): And then the second part to that is that I would make sure that I had somebody that was managing the public part of the business and somebody that was managing the business

Speaker 1 (00:56:06): Kind of CECO kind of role split.

Speaker 2 (00:56:09): Yeah, definitely. And I would be making sure that there was a clear plan around what is our goal as a publicly listed company, what do we want to do? And obviously the goal is to increase the value for the shareholders, right? Of

Speaker 4 (00:56:19): Course. But

Speaker 2 (00:56:20): That takes some real thinking of how are you going to actually do that? And so, well, we need these five people to analyze our stock. How do we get that? We need to make sure that we attract the right people at the IPO from the beginning that are the right type of holders. We need to make sure that we're automatically thinking about liquidity from the start, which means that we need to have a very good PR strategy that's a lot wider than just a bunch of funds that has to go more out to the retail investor. I've even thought before that one of the great ways to be able to sort of build towards a public listing might be going down the crowdfunding road where you do a crowdfunding process earlier in your run. You get your awareness out there amongst a large proportion of people that are likely investors in things like public companies. And then as you progress along, you keep those people abreast of your progress, regardless of the fact they haven't invested, but you've created this big pool of potentially interested people that will talk about you, at which point, by the time you go public, there's more interest than just those in the financial markets. There's people who are mom and pop investors, and once you get layers, things can really happen for you. In terms of creating liquidity for your shareholders,

Speaker 1 (00:57:33): You're talking about the NZX and the A SX listing. We've got the secondary board in New Zealand as

Speaker 2 (00:57:39): Well.

Speaker 1 (00:57:39): Do you have much exposure or visibility to that force?

Speaker 2 (00:57:43): Not really. I haven't had a lot to do it. We were on the main board. We were at the NX 50 for a period there as well. I think one of the things I would say about being on the Australian board and actually the New Zealand board as well, is that you can easily get lost even in NZ if there's not enough knowledge of what you're doing. And there can be a scenario where just that lack of knowledge can make your stock price spiral down. And there has been some good companies with good results that haven't had a great stock appreciation because they've kind of got lost in the ether and they haven't been able to make anything happen. So I think you have to think about where do you want to be on those boards? There is a really interesting direct listing option that you could do as an alternative to venture if you're willing to spend the sort of few hundred thousand dollars it takes to do that. And that gives you a great way for people who do invest in your startup to be able to offload their stock. Secondary sales of privately held companies are still relatively difficult. (00:58:47): So there is a pathway, but the compliance is high. You know what I mean? When you're doing 10 million in revenue and you've spent three or $400,000 a year on compliance, I don't know that that really makes sense.

Speaker 1 (00:58:57): Is that the primary board NZX, the three or 400, or is that a

Speaker 2 (00:59:01): Significant, I don't know what the difference in costs are these days, but the number we always used to work towards, and I think it's pretty close to the mark now is around that number.

Speaker 1 (00:59:07): Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's quite significant.

Speaker 2 (00:59:09): It's significant

Speaker 1 (00:59:10): Because if you're doing 10 million bucks and let's say you're making a profit, then you might be making a million bucks a profit. And if you're spending close to half of that on stock market listing compliance costs, that's a please explain kind of thing potentially.

Speaker 2 (00:59:21): Yeah, it is. And in Australia it's more, again, you know what I mean? So back to my point, if you have to have a pretty clear path to the direction you're heading on, and this is creating rocket fuel for you to keep moving quickly and you're not moving off into a different direction, you're not changing your ideal customer profile, you've kind of got all that worked out and it's just going hard at something, I think that's a really great path to take.

Speaker 1 (00:59:43): Yeah, you're a reasonably private person. You haven't done a great deal of press related things that are outside of business. You haven't really done anything outside of business, and you're part of a couple lyricas, your wife and she's had a very successful business, and you've got a new startup venture together three or four years into coupler, you've got this next thing with ramp. So how did you deal with a very visible nature of being a CEO of a publicly listed company? So the fact that you are the person that's always kind of quoted and talked about, how is that?

Speaker 2 (01:00:15): Well, Murray was mainly quoted who was the group CEO through that period. And so that I think helped. I was put out there quite a lot because we were the hot growth story. And so I went on all the roadshows because the view at the time was that Movio could be bigger than Vista Cinema, and therefore we needed to keep that sort of promotion and hype going about what we were doing. And so that came with its benefits in that I got a really good profile amongst the Vesta community during that time, but it came with its negatives because I was under a lot of pressure to deliver a lot of things that were untested and unproven that probably shouldn't have been said to a public group of people. So yeah, it was a funny old time the way that we were structured because we had this sort of established successful but slow growing company in Vista, and we were kind of the cool story and sent out the front to wave the flag and tell an amazing growth story, which has its pros, but it definitely hit its cons.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18): Yeah, yeah. You ultimately parted ways with the Vista group. What was the catalyst, if we can talk about

Speaker 2 (01:01:24): That? I stayed a lot longer than I intended. So as part of a listing or as part of a sale of any business, you often have a lockup period or an earnout, whatever you want to call it. And I had one of those that ran for three years where I had basically had the potential to double the amount of I ended up with if I hung in there for three years and did a reasonable job, which we did. And I got out the other end of that and things were looking very good from a financial standpoint, but there was stuff that we still were trying to do that I was still really excited about. And so we were building a new platform at the time that was designed to help studios basically access user data in a really good compliant way. And we'd built this cool platform and I was really excited, and then I was going to sort of go off and my plan was to hand the CEO reins over to somebody else, and I was going to take this new feature and kind of run it like another startup under the group in some. (01:02:20): And the day that we went to go release that, we had a roadshow plan to sell that into all the big studios in Australia, and we were leaving that Thursday, and I think it was that Thursday that just in to close the orders tricky. So I hung around a little longer than I'd intended. I was literally on the precipice of moving on to doing the next venture, albeit as part of the group, but in a slightly adjacent area. But then when that happened, we knew we were going to have to do a restructure. There's no way I was going to hand the restructure to the next person coming and it would be the most evil thing we could have done.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53): That's a horrible a hospital pass.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55): No. And so we made the decision there, and then I sort of said to the guys, I am committed to this 100% until we get out the other side of this crisis. I'm there with you all and we're going to do this together. And so we all rallied massively. We went through, I think a couple of hundred staff total ended up being laid off between the time of the lockdown, and I think it was July the first, which was an incredibly difficult process. We always had to raise capital during that period, but part of the conditions of raising that capital was we'd reduce our costs, so we really had no choice but to do that. We had to manage the relationship with all of our clients who were all suffering enormously through the fact that most of 'em had invested massively in CapEx the previous years. (01:03:40): So they had no war chest to be able to withstand this amazing amount of time without any revenue. We had to deal with all the pessimism of all of the analysts saying that the cinema businesses over because not just because there was no revenue and half the cinemas were on the brink of bankruptcy, but because the studios had stopped making content. So even when they came back online, there was a very high chance there wasn't going to be anything to play. So everything looked pretty dire and pretty doom and gloom. And during this period of time, we sort of worked with our customers, and I'm extremely proud of that actually. We worked with our customers hand in hand to try and say, look, we've both got to stay in business together. We've both got to survive. How do we do this? What's got to happen? Forget what the agreement says. How do we get to the other side when we do? How do we look after each other?

Speaker 1 (01:04:25): I love this.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25): And I don't know that we lost a customer through that entire period. There were a couple that had closed down only a very, very small number though. And it was just an amazing survival story. And see the business rejuvenating now and Vista start to do really well again, it feels good. It feels really, really good that it got through that. And actually being public was the reason it probably did

Speaker 1 (01:04:46): Because

Speaker 2 (01:04:46): It was able to access money when there wasn't any around.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49): And

Speaker 2 (01:04:50): It was a big number.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51): Yes, that period, that Covid period sounds absolutely brutal.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54): It was

Speaker 1 (01:04:54): Awful. Speaking of brutal, a startup in and of themselves are quite brutal experiences to go through. Whether or not they succeed almost. The pain is the same. You get a little bit less of the satisfaction, the joy from a lack of success if that's the path that you end up ultimately on. In fact, often when I've spoken to founders post the Journey, they say that they probably wouldn't it again. And one of the reasons they did it in the first place is through naivety. They didn't know what they were going to be in store for. You've gone and started two additional companies.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25): I'd

Speaker 1 (01:05:25): Like to get to what they're in a second, but why have you waited back into the fray?

Speaker 2 (01:05:29): I felt like there was unfinished business. I really did. I regretted letting go of Movio as early as I did and not being able to set the path and having to deal with all of this sort of massaging and compliance with everybody that needed to know what was going on all the time and not being able to just go with my instinct. And so I think that was really, really hard for me. I regretted it. The formality that I'd ended up in and not the joy of being in a startup and inventing things and having fun and sort of flying by the seat of your pants, that whole part, I kind of felt like I missed quite dramatically. So I think that was probably part of it. I'm probably unemployable, so that's probably another part to it as well. So I really just thought my only option is either to wither away on the couch or start another business. (01:06:19): And Coupler had been running through our minds during the Covid era. My wife started Symphony, which is an obviously extremely successful business in her own, but just like the movie business, it was live events. And so her business went to zero as well. And so we had time and we were stuck at home, and it became really apparent that there was things that we could do to help our relationship. And we started talking about those things and we wanted to improve them. And this idea had been sort of circulating around of if we just went on more date nights, we'd be way happier. That was really where it came from. (01:06:59): Why don't we go on more date nights? Every time we do it, we come back and we're glowing and there's that. We feel great and we feel loved up and all the rest of it. Why don't we keep doing it? And the answer became, because we're just too busy. We've both got businesses, we've got kids, we've got all this stuff going on, we've got a busy social life. How do we ever find time for each other? And so we, I dunno why engaged a designer to go, why don't we try and build an app or at least a designer one that might do this? And I think you're one of the first people we interviewed about it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29): That's correct. Yeah. Love it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30): And so we've got this idea, we think that it can replace the calendar on the fridge. That would be really, really cool if everyone was in sync and they prioritized date night and could this be a thing? And we probably wouldn't have gone any further with it, had Covid not carried on and made our movie business and the symphony business so dire that we thought, well, we've got nothing else to do. We might as well keep pulling this thread for a bit longer. And then all of a sudden we kind of found that we were neck deep into a new startup. And I think when you get into a startup, you imagine what it takes to get it going, and you can't think of the thousand things that you haven't thought of yet.

Speaker 1 (01:08:07): No,

Speaker 2 (01:08:08): There is a thousand, right? Many. All I'm going to do is I'm going to pay an app builder to make this app look like this design, and then I'm going to put it on the app store, and then I'm going to pay for some AdWords. And that's the end of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19): Straightforward, easy,

Speaker 2 (01:08:20): Straightforward. That's the business done. It's not like that at all. It turns out, and I should have known better. Well,

Speaker 1 (01:08:25): You did. You did. But it was a logical conclusion thing. The only logical conclusion thing. There's a wonderful documentary about the modern space race. Wild, wild space. Have

Speaker 2 (01:08:34): You caught it? Yeah, I haven't once yet, but I have heard about it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37): Must see. Must see. Okay. So I've met Sir Peter Beck, but not in a detailed observation of the backstory. The way that this movie, this documentary goes into, he travels around the states as a basically credentialed, unqualified individual that had launched some rockets out of his

Speaker 3 (01:08:52): Backyard

Speaker 1 (01:08:53): To endeavor to get a job with one of the Boeing, nasa, Lockheed Martin, et cetera. And unsurprisingly, he didn't get a job from any of these people. And so he is flying back on the aircraft and he's clearly not expressing it as depression, but he was skirting around that. And so he kind of gets to the stage of going, well, I can't get a job and I've got this passion and enthusiasm and I have this quite rare set of skills. And so the only logical conclusion is, fuck it, let's start a company. And so that's the story that you've just told, but in a different guy, yeah, just

Speaker 2 (01:09:24): Start a company. Yeah, I guess that's what we did. And then I got the kind of, guess I got the bug again, but I also knew where I was good and where I wasn't.

Speaker 1 (01:09:33): Tell us about ramp, which is you've talked about couplers. So let's talk

Speaker 2 (01:09:36): About it's, I mean, couple is a consumer app for couples. So if we just wanted to put it into a bucket, it's an app, it's consumer. Consumer is a very unique beast that is difficult and different to doing B2B SaaS. I came from B2B SaaS. One of the businesses, one of the products or ideas that we had whilst we were at Movio that we used to do manually was map the code knowledge that we had inside our organization. And the reason we used to do that is because if we wanted to move one engineer from one team to another, we needed to see the effect that was going to have on the original team. If we wanted to hire somebody, we needed to know what they needed to pick up to be valuable to the organization. If we wanted to identify where the risk was in terms of key person risk, we needed to know who knew stuff exclusively. (01:10:19): If we wanted to go through a rewrite or a refactoring of some code, we needed to know where the areas were, where there was lost knowledge, where code had been written by people who had long left. And so we used to use this manual tool internally, and it was like a superpower for us as a company. Fast forward and we've found a way of being able to build this into a product that can be sold to anybody. And the whole premise behind dev ramp is to help software teams be able to transfer knowledge effectively between each other. And so how we do that is we map the knowledge of a code base from the very first commit that was ever created right through to today. And we put it into buckets and we go, what code is known by two or more people shared? That's what you want everything to be. (01:11:05): What code is exclusively nine by one person? And what code is lost? And what that enables you to do is kind of see exactly where your organization is at. And then from that we can set an objective or a target for each person, each team, and each organization as to what would be the optimum level of code knowledge for that team to have or that person to have to get the maximum benefits. And the initial benefits are a spread of knowledge, but the long-term benefits are a big uplift in productivity. And then the final part to it is augmenting their existing review process to make sure that the right people are reviewing the right pull requests to progress forward and increase the familiarity of the company. And so we played with this for AE while my former CTO at Movio, it was his brainchild, Nick ett, and then eventually came in and he sort of saw us last year and he says, look, I think I've worked out how to do this. (01:11:59): I think I know how to automate the whole process. He showed us a prototype, we sent him away and said, look, if you can do one more thing for us, we're going to be in. And what we wanted to be able to see him do was, can we get an AI to review some code and then create a tutorial in the context of the person reviewing it? So if the person was super knowledgeable of the code, they'd get a very simple tutorial. If they'd never seen it before, they'd get one that was more fully fledged. He showed us that and we went, we looked at each other and went, we've got to go. And so Pete hadn't actually worked in another startup since 2016. He'd been off investing. I'd obviously been off doing coupler and was ready to sort of hand that over fully to Erica. And so it became, let's do this. We looked at each other and we kind of backed ourselves into a corner of all the things we'd asked for had delivered. We better make this happen.

Speaker 1 (01:12:49): The only logical conclusion,

Speaker 2 (01:12:51): The only logical conclusion is to start a company. And so here we are one year into that journey, having just raised a reasonably good pre-seed round to take it to the next level. Great

Speaker 4 (01:13:03): Round.

Speaker 2 (01:13:04): So yeah, look, it's a crazy old process. And would I go public with either of those two companies? I think again, if the premise was right and we were wanting to put fuel on a very clear plan and we wanted to create some liquidity without handing over complete control, I think we probably would play that playbook again.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23): Yeah. Great. I'd like to step up a couple of levels and talk in general terms. So if there was a couple, maybe three principles or philosophies that guide you in business, what would those things be?

Speaker 2 (01:13:37): Philosophies that guide you in business? It's a tough question. That one there. I mean, I think one of my philosophies that I sort of live by personally is that you must work out how to sell whatever it is that you're creating and you as the founder or one of your founding group must be that person. So I think that's one of my first ones. So whenever I'm taking on any business or any project, I look at it and I go, right, how would I sell this? And often I have no idea. In fact, generally I have no idea. And I just keep literally thousands and thousands of iterations of the literally thousands until I finally feel like I've that down. And then I'm presenting that to as many test people as they possibly can until I feel like I get a yes, this is getting consistent results, we should run with this here. (01:14:25): Once I get it to that point, I then try and build a process that others could replicate. So it's always about trying to discover what is that narrative that is going to get people to be able to buy this product? And that's not just customers, that's staff potential staff hires, that's investors. So getting that right and working that out is really my number one thing and not outsourcing that. That's the one thing me as the founder has to do. And if I nail that one piece and I get it really, really right, and I'm good at handing over that so others can replicate how I do it, then I've probably done the most valuable thing that I can do at an organization. So that's one. (01:15:05): The second one is I strongly believe that you should have a clear pathway to profitability before you start. It's got to be very obvious when you could be profitable. And that has got to be the main purpose of business. And I know that we've had moments in time where it's about revenue growth and growth at all costs. But I think the problem when you create a business like that is that you create a culture or an ethos of waste. And when you create that and then you finally get some lean times, you have no ability to be able to turn on this new culture of efficiency. It's almost impossible that literally firing everybody, and I mean everybody, because the culture gets so widespread that it can't be changed. And the only way it survives is by more and more cash being fueling this pursuit of growth at all costs. (01:15:55): And this wastefulness and I have never subscribed to that. I think the guys at Vista for that, they were always about profitability, and we were profitable at Movio from the very first day. And we are breakeven now with Cutler and we will be profitable with Dev Ram within probably 18 months. And if we're not, we won't hire grow or do the things that force that unless it's extremely evident that it's going to be beneficial for us and our investors. So I think that idea of building a company from the get go that's got a profitable thought about it is really, really important. And then probably the final one for me is businesses are way easier to run with less people. You know what I mean? I always make this joke that businesses be great without staff or customers, (01:16:39): Not really a business. And I don't mean I don't love staff. I love working with people, but I hate managing people. I love the camaraderie. I love collaborating. I love working with talent. I just adore it, but I despise the process of management and I'm terrible manager. I've actually found that out from a 360. I'm truly awful, quite an aspiring leader, bloody awful manager. I used to try and learn and train and read every management book under the sun to change that. And now I've subscribed to a different thought, which is what if you didn't have to manage? What if you only hired people that didn't need management? And so now I think one of my philosophies is that whoever I work with does not need a manager. They don't need one. They might have one in two of a hierarchy chart might say that I manage you, but you completely so charge and that you drive off your own steam and your own motivation. And I think if you can do that, you're really going to enjoy work in the long term. You're probably going to answer my second point, which is you probably run a pretty profitable company and you eliminate an entire layer of a business, which is that whole management layer. (01:17:45): And I think it's not that I don't like managers, I just don't want to be one. (01:17:49): And so I think keeping that really lean and how you do that is interesting. You kind of have to go through a process of going, particularly as a startup, you've got 20 things you want to do, right? And five of them are desperately urgent. And you've got two ways to approach the five desperately urgent things you want to do. One is you hire five people to do each of the five things, and that's doing them in parallel, or you do them in series, you do one after the other in order. And the temptation when you just get a big check from a VC is to go do all of the things in parallel. And they'll probably push you to do that too actually. But you really have to question whether that is going to ultimately get you far enough ahead, how many more weeks further ahead will you be if you do it this way? And what will be the price you now have to pay for having this management layer that you had to create to support the five staff you hired? And I think having that question that you always ask yourself of, is there any other way I could do this more efficiently? Is AI a solution? Is outsourcing a solution is not doing it? A solution is creating a simpler skateboard version of this a solution, but anything but hiring another person is really how I kind of think about it.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54): Yeah, (01:18:56): I'm going to highlight these things for a second because there's some absolute gold in there for everyone. So you said tough question and you've crushed the answers. Oh, thank you. So the narrative piece, what I made that mean is that I think that so many people are so bad at explaining not just what their product is, but why people should care and why they should buy it. And so you being just absolutely laser focused on your ability to articulate that clearly and the going out and iterating on it many, many, many times over, I've been the recipient of multiple pitches from you in the past. And so I know that this is something which is just an ingrained habit of yours, and I didn't know that that's what you're doing the outset. But now I'm really clear that that's just a part of your process of going about road testing an idea and seeing if A, you can articulate it super clearly and in a compelling way, but B, it gets someone to be motivated to take some action. So I love that piece. The profitability bit is, I guess two years ago it would've been incredibly contrarian to any of the way that Silicon Valley has been funded for the last 15 to 20 years, (01:20:03): Which is growth at all costs and forget about profitability. And so I love that you are bringing that up and talking about it as just one of your absolute principles of business because I think it's so, so important and not being able to understand, it's a simple answer, but there's a lot of complexity that sits in behind it. Being able to get there. You have to be very clear about all of the key metrics inside your business, the acquisition costs, the retention of your customers, your churn, your ability to stay ahead of your competitors. There's so many things that sit in behind that, but being feverishly focused on, it's just such an important aspect. So thank you for a great,

Speaker 2 (01:20:39): Just to point on that for a second. I think that one thing that I probably didn't mention about that is that once you are profitable, you have choices. You no longer work for the potential investor, you no longer work for the bank. You're no longer at risk of having to make a decision in a time that doesn't work for you. You are back in control of your destiny the day that you are not profitable and generating cash, somebody else is in control. Now, they might not take advantage of that control yet, but they could. And I've been in that seat and that is a very uncomfortable place to be. And I swore I'd never ever, ever go there again. And so I think that choices is the final part that comes off that is that you get a choice to make the play when you're ready to make the play. And I think that's important.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26): I've got some battle scars and they've clearly factored into how you go about doing things in the future, which is a great attribute. The last one, it's kind of dual to me that the people management aspect, (01:21:37): On the one hand, I suspect you'd be familiar with the Ikigai approach. What are you great at? What do you love? What does the world need from you? And how do you deliver value with that kind of unique set of skills that you've got solve some big problems? And so you've clearly developed some self-awareness over time, which some people go through life and not getting it and going, I am not good at this and I do not like doing it. But then you've overlaid the well hole. Is this really necessary and are they the right people if we need to have that overhead of management that sits across it. So it's a very considered approach about going about team building. Yes, we do need to have some resources to do that, but automation offshoring sharing, not doing it, doing it later, all those things are options. You don't necessarily need to build a team of people. And one of the vanity metrics I think of early stage businesses is how many people do you

Speaker 2 (01:22:27): Have?

Speaker 1 (01:22:27): And so that's, I can

Speaker 2 (01:22:28): Say zero, I've nailed it

Speaker 1 (01:22:29): Even better. Yeah, occasionally you hear about exit stories of companies that have bootstrapped, that have four or five staff, and they sell for seven, eight figures. And it's remarkable that the discipline that the rigor that they've had to put in to get it to that stage, but the one pizza kind of team situation, five or six people group hug, we can all fit in the same place together. There's just so much value and benefit to doing things that way.

Speaker 2 (01:22:53): Yeah, and I think that your day, if you think about what you do during a day, you are spending most of your day working on the real problems, not working on managing people. Like I found a CEO at Movio. I had nine direct reports, and my role, and I understood it pretty clearly at that time was to remove obstacles out of their way so that they could hit their goals. And so all I did was find out what their problems were and help them remove them so they could keep moving forward with what they're doing. And when I had my 360 done by a big external consultancy firm to try and work out whether I was suitable to be group CEO or not turns that I'm not that half of the people that they must have interviewed, 30 or 40 people, half of them said, will is the worst manager ever. Great running a motivational speech, but absolutely terrible. One out of five manager terrible. Then the other half said, will is the best manager ever? Five out of five, he gives me all the space and autonomy to do whatever I want, never checks up on me, just trusts that I'm going to do the job. You're like, I'm the same person. I'm just as crap one side thinks I'm awful on the other side, thinks I'm great. (01:23:56): And I think what you've got to try and do is try and find people that you work with that fit your style. And I had found some people that didn't, some people that didn't and that wouldn't have been nice for them, and it wasn't particularly good for me either. So trying to find a match is a pretty important play. You are with these people for eight hours a day or more and you want to make sure that you get on well.

Speaker 1 (01:24:15): Was that anonymous? So what I'm asking that is were you aware of the half that really rated your style? Were they over

Speaker 2 (01:24:22): Performers? Not really. Not really. No. I think they were more senior. I could see the brackets they were in. So the more senior people definitely liked the way I approached C-level. The ones that were more middle management, wanted more guidance, wanted more direction, and I wasn't providing

Speaker 4 (01:24:37): That. And

Speaker 2 (01:24:38): They're totally right. I wasn't. And so I used to beat myself up about it, but I think I'm now a bit more circumspect about it and realize that that's not a skill I feel like I want to develop.

Speaker 1 (01:24:47): Yeah, I hear you. So we've covered a lot of ground. I have a parting question for you, and it's the alternative career question. So clearly now you're a founder, an entrepreneur, and an investor. So I'm guessing, is that how you identify as well as being husband and father?

Speaker 2 (01:25:04): Yes, I think, yep, that's

Speaker 1 (01:25:06): It. Okay,

Speaker 2 (01:25:06): Great. Founder first. Yep,

Speaker 1 (01:25:07): Founder first. Yep. Great. That's what I would've thought. So if you hadn't done this, what could your alternative career have been? The one that you believe may have brought you a bunch of joy and fulfillment and impacted the world in a positive way?

Speaker 2 (01:25:21): Yeah, I mean, I still think I will do this. So I have always loved the idea of identifying talent, working with that talent and mentoring them through investing in that talent and ultimately creating or helping create new role models. It's always been a thing in the back of my mind, and I've been doing it to some degree helping startups and helping entrepreneurs that gone on the journey where I can help. But I think there is something really incredible about getting some raw talent and working with it and showing them a different pathway. Like I talked earlier on about the path that most young people are on generally that they're told that being an accountant, a lawyer, a profession is the right direction to go. And going down the road of being an entrepreneur is madness. It's scary. We don't want to go down that road. (01:26:17): I'd love to be able to help those ambitious young people make that leap when there's not much to lose. You know what I mean? And if I imagine if you took people when they're at their highest point of energy, when they're the most motivated, with the most capable of learning the biggest sponges that it possibly be, and you wrap them up and you go, right, we're going to take you on a journey. Let's go. And they find a dream or find a vision, they go for it and help them get through that. The change that you could make on so many levels is incredible. Obviously you've taken them out of a profession and you've made them an entrepreneur, they've become a successful entrepreneur. They probably hired lots of people. Those people have also potentially become successful. They may have created a new category, a new ecosystem. They may have inspired a whole bunch of other kids that went to their school. They may have inspired their brothers, their sisters, their family. So I get really, really excited about taking somebody off this tried and true and putting them on this new far more exciting motivating path, (01:27:14): Not necessarily just the business. I also feel like if it was music or if it was sports or if it was anything, grabbing that talent and helping them get to being the best they could possibly be with that talent, I think could be the most fulfilling thing imaginable. And what I need to be able to do to get there is find the financial wherewithal and the time to devote everything to that, because I think that would be hugely beneficial for my soul, but probably pretty beneficial for society as well.

Speaker 1 (01:27:43): This is the impact piece. And so this is not platitudes. I know we're well enough to know that this is actually at his core. You are truly a person that believes in elevating, empowering, encouraging, and challenging other people. And so I'm really grateful for today's conversation. We've delved a lot deeper into some subjects about your history and your past that I didn't know, but also you've delivered a masterclass in how to take a company from inception through to product market fit and then to the stage of a listing. And that listing journey is such a rich kind of a piece of experience share because you've been through the cord and the fire of the excitement, the fun, the highs, the lows, the burns, and then exited your way elegantly out of that business along the way as well. And so there's so many other lessons in there around leadership, around self-awareness, around how to go about the business of being a better human being as well. So, well, I'm really grateful for the conversation today. Just one point of note, if people go to your LinkedIn profile, I know you're not super active on there. (01:28:43): It turns out what do women want is one of your highlighted articles. And so if you brush over your page, it seems as if Will knows what women want, different podcasts, different conversations.

Speaker 2 (01:28:55): Interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:28:56): Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:28:56): I actually did do a podcast on that topic.

Speaker 1 (01:28:58): Did you really?

Speaker 2 (01:28:58): Yeah, I did. It was What's a woman was extraordinary. It was with Gina Davis. Yeah, she has an institute and I did a podcast on that some time ago.

Speaker 1 (01:29:12): Fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:29:12): Yeah. Yeah. It was just to give the backdrop on that, in the movie business, the whole entire movie business for a very long time, it was built entirely for young males. Every bit of content, all the locations, the size of the screens, the size of the popcorn, the size of the drinks, the whole industry was built around young men. And in fact, what we discovered in Movio is that the vast majority of film purchasing decision were made by women, whether they be mothers, whether they be wives, whether they'd be partners, were they going to films themselves? And we weren't catering as industry for them at all. And so what this pulled out is really an expose on what kind of content the female market was looking for and how successful it could be commercially if we catered to it. And it actually started a bit of a movement where a whole bunch of people started following and going, actually, this is whole space in the market that we've traditionally not spent enough energy or time on. Look what we could do if we did.

Speaker 1 (01:30:03): Amazing. Yeah, okay. Transforming things in ways that we didn't even get to talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:30:07): Sorry about that.

Speaker 1 (01:30:08): No, no, no, you're all good. So thanks very much, will appreciate you being a guest today and people can look you up on LinkedIn. Go follow dev ramp, go follow coupler, and I look forward to our next conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:30:18): Thanks, Josh.