Latest / Second Nature / E165 Dimple Patel: Stop Waiting For Permission

Transcript

E165 Dimple Patel: Stop Waiting For Permission · Second Nature

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: I used to hate speaking anywhere.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: I was like terrified of it.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, we're gonna have a go, we're gonna make some notes and stuff.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the rest is just winging it a little bit.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: I um but it helps if it's a friendly audience where you can go back to the show.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I went to a load of accountants.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I went and did a keynote for an accountancy thing for a friend.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: And um so I was like, right, because everyone else was gonna be reading, so I'm like, let's try reading.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I kept wandering off because I just I want to interact with an audience, so I kept leaving my laptop and go, I'd better go back to that now.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like so what I realized afterwards, you have to do one of two things.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: You'd have to not read and just talk, or read everything, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then your monotone stood there, can't move.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: You sound like a robot, you do, yeah.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I hated it.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I told Matt, our investment manager, he's like, You're so much better winging it.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Why did you read us?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I tried something different, didn't work, won't do it again.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: It it was it was dreadful to the point where I was like, I'm not even entertained.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I did get two jokes out of the county audience, so that's I think already you might win the award for best hair on the podcast.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome hair or what?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, bravo, bravo.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think anyone's ever complimented my hair on the podcast.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Can't win either way, because I've got crap hair and you won't let me wear hats.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think you've got good hair.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I I was digging for the compliment.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: We should probably start by telling people who you are and what we do.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, what you do, who you are and what you do.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm Dimple, I'm the CEO at Nature Metrics.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: So Naturemetics, we're here to make biodiversity metable at scale.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So we're a nature data company and we help organisations from corporate to government actually monitor their impact on the ground in terms of species and and health of ecosystems.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: When we um when we first met and you told me a little about your backstory, I was immediately like, how quickly can we get you on the podcast?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because you have the most amazing story.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can you take people through almost your career contents page?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you reached up for a book of, in fact, not just career, life, what are those main defining chapters that you could take us through?
• 2:05
  unknown: Yeah.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So um, so I grew up in the north of England.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I am the daughter of immigrants.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my parents, and and this is very relevant for Natometric.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: My parents actually are farmers by background from a really rural part of India and moved to the UK when they were like 16.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, had to work incredibly hard for a living.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I grew up on a council estate.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd kind of come from a background where hard work was, you know, really ingrained into what you do and what was required to actually be able to progress in your life.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was very fortunate to go through school on scholarships, and that got me a place at Cambridge.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's where everything really started to change because it threw me into a world where I was out of place all the time.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So just pause there a sec.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: What what does hard work really mean in that context?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Bring that to life for people.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, what I saw my parents doing was, I mean, there was a lot of physical hard work, there was a lot of long hours.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think what's been really interesting is it was you keep pushing, you have those really hard days.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we grew up in a place where people were, I would say, at least on a monthly basis, putting bricks through our windows.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, at one point they burnt our house down.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like you pick yourself up, you carry on.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: How?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: How how sat literally in the ashes of that happening?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: How mentally and emotionally did they pick things up and keep going again?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's all they knew.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think they were so grateful to have the opportunity to build a new life for themselves.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they were also just very aware of how different they were.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we also have to remember that this was the 80s.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was, you know, the north of England, it was an ex coal mining estate.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a time place, was it?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I look back on it now in a very, very different way.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time, it's all we knew.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'd wake up in the morning and there'd be a sign on my bedroom door saying where shoes in the living room.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew that meant that there was glass everywhere.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: But my parents were like, Well, I've got to get the corner shop open.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And me and my sisters, when we were like six, seven, eight years old, would tweep up the glass and then carry on with your day or wait for someone to come fix the window.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: It just, you know, and I think when you're at that age and that's all you've ever known, you just find a way to carry on.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: You use the word fortunate about scholarships, but that but fortune in there hides a huge amount of hard work, a huge amount of commitment.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like you read everything as a kid, right?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: I loved books.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, for me, books were the escape from the world that I lived in.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, did you recognize that at the time that you needed to escape?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think I enjoyed the escape as opposed to the need to escape, but I knew that that was not a life that I wanted for myself.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really a case of actually, you know, I had an amazing imagination and being able to kind of build that through stories and fall in love with characters and that kind of imagine a future for yourself that was something other than where you're living today.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I learned a huge amount about the world through through books as well.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but for me, reading was also knowledge and information.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I would, I mean, I would literally read everything.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: We had newspapers in the shop.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I would read the newspapers every day, I would read the shampoo bottles.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was literally anything I could get my hands on, I would read and learn.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that really is a basis for then having, you know, access to the scholarships and being able to, you know, get an education in a way that I otherwise would have really struggled to get.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And were your parents pro that education side of things when you said, you know, you had these aspirations to go to the most incredible universities in the world, were they pro that as an idea?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't actually know any of these universities existed until I was probably about 13, 14 years old.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um my parents actually were very pro-educ.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what made them really different at the time.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I was growing up, you know, Indian girls learn how to cook.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you you grow up to be married off and then you raise a family.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that was very much kind of the confined within which people in that community operated.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad was very different.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: He really valued education, and he was like, we're going to put education first.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to learn how to cook.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: I refused to learn how to cook.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: For me, that was like my act of rebellion, which is not so useful now because I still can't cook.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but because I knew that I had, in some ways, his sponsorship, that really gave me the cover to be a little bit different.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, there was never really an aspiration of, oh, I want to go to Cambridge.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know what Cambridge was.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was just, I want to do the best that I can do.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And every time one door opens, you kind of see the next and you say, okay, that's my next goal.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then from there, the next one.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there was a lot of it that was just working it out as I went.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't even have the internet back then.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: I remember.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I remember.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, did you celebrate the wins along the way?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you don't get to where you went without amazing exam results.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, did you pause and celebrate the GCSEs and the A-levels, or was it just what next?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: What are you celebrating?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you haven't actually changed your life at that point.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a piece of paper with a few grades on it.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that looks very different now.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like when my kids get their GCSEs and A-levels, it will be, you know, the most amazing party.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, my life hadn't changed.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was still the same kid growing up in the same house with the same struggle.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: It just I had a piece of paper that would help me get the next piece of paper, which might help me get a job one day.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think I actually started celebrating anything until I got to Cambridge.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the point that you can kind of say, I feel safe celebrating this because I feel like this is now going to turn into something.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: But at GCSE's and A levels, it wasn't really anything at that point.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was still too easy to slip back into the world that I came from.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think some of that is at what point do you feel comfortable and safe enough to recognize the progress that you have made?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that came quite late.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So when you first put your feet on the ground in Cambridge, was that I'm excited to be here?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Was that pressure?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Was that I've made it?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Was it, oh God, I need to fight to stay here?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: How did you feel?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Terrified.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um but with a big smile.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I did not speak their language at all.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't understand any of the cultural references.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't read, I mean, I'd read loads of books.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: I just hadn't read the books that everyone else had read.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um I felt really out of place.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know how to use a cutlery at the massive, you know, massive tables that look like the the Grand Hall at Hogwarts.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it took me a real, like a long time to settle in and feel like I had earned my place being there.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what was really interesting is that my brain was just wired slightly differently to people that had been to St.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Paul's or Westminster or Dulit or Habs, because I'd had to work a lot of it out myself.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it meant that to some degree my foundations were slightly weaker.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: So when I'd gone into the interview, you know, a lot of the point of the interview to test raw potential.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so clearly they had detected raw potential in me, but it was really unrefined, right?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that first term meeting people that had been schooled a certain way, that had mental frameworks that they could draw on, they communicated a certain way, they put their argument forward much more articulately than I did, just made me realize how much work I had to do.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I would say probably the end of the first year that I settled in and realized that I absolutely loved it.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like I really thrived on, I guess, the intellectual challenge.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a real sense of like that was the first point at which I felt like there was opportunity in life.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like I could walk out of there and do things that I had never imagined before, that like I actually had enough autonomy to be able to shape my own future.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Cambridge was that turning point that that provided that for me.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you said you had a really active imagination from the reading.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: So can you remember at the end of that first year, what was the life you were imagining?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Where did you think you might be or go?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there was always a part of me that wanted to, I don't want to say change the world because it sounds really naive, but have an impact.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like it wasn't it was a point at which I realized it wasn't ever going to be a nine to five job.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like I turn up, I do a job, I go home, which actually was a life that I had imagined for myself when I was much younger.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was really this sense of I could build something meaningful, like I could do something that makes life better for other people.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I would say this is where I really developed that sense of purpose.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because up to that point, I'd just been running.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'd been running away from where I grew up, I'd been running towards some, at that point, fairly ambiguous future.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: But at that point, it was I can shape something that makes even this trajectory that I've been on at least more accessible for other people as well.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Statements like change the world or achieve something huge never sounds disingenuous from someone who means it.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: So when you said it, I wasn't like, oh, that sounds ridiculous.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, mm-hmm, yep, yep, just gonna do that.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: That makes sense.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Where does the sense of wanting to help other people and almost that sense of service and um positive impact?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Where does that come from?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think what was really interesting about growing up was my parents are not well off.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I had, I think I had a really meaningful upbringing.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had a lot of very strong and valuable relationships in my life with my family, with my friends.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that really taught me to look beyond money and finances.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, you know, financial security is important, and I know what it feels like to not have that.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but being able to provide that to somebody and it it being more than just money in their bank account, actually being able to see that this means that they can sleep better at night, they're able to celebrate occasions with their loved ones in a slightly different way.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or it takes the worries away, doesn't it?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it takes the worries away, and it doesn't take a lot.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you don't need to be a millionaire.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, a lot of millionaires are deeply unhappy.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: But for me, it was that sense of that you can give people something that really radically changes what they're able to get from their lives.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that having experienced some of that myself at that point made me realize that there were a lot of people out there that just didn't experience that.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to India a lot growing up.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: My parents would take us back every summer.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, I'm talking like proper rural village India, where all of their bathroom facilities are holding the ground outside, you don't have electricity for many hours of the day.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that was the first time I went, I was 13, and it was so jarring.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: I went there and realized that all of these values and norms within which I was kind of living my life and operating didn't actually exist there.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and at that point of time, okay, there's a whole set of kind of gender biases and stereotypes within which a lot of these women are living.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think at that point there was a sense of I don't know if they will escape that.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if their lives will change, I don't know whether they even had the opportunity to think or dream of anything different in 20 or 30 years.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was the point at which I realized that A, I've got the opportunity to dream of a different future, and that in itself is a privilege.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: But if I'm able to then give that to somebody else, that's actually an incredible gift.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it was, yeah, just kind of growing up across all of those different worlds and building a view of what is possible and what I can do to contribute towards some of those changes as well.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's really inspiring.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we're now settled, we're happy at Cambridge, we're finished year one, we're going into year two.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, take us through the rest of that experience and how it was a launch pad for the career that came.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I had lots of student debt.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Pertinent topic at the minute for people, right?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's really, really important to highlight because I think it's a reality for a lot of uh a lot of people today, but definitely people from my background.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I had to start thinking about what I wanted to do as a career.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I had not got that far yet in terms of uh exploring what was possible.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And to some degree, I just kind of wrote the conveyor belt of what everybody else doing my course, or you know, my friends were doing, and they were all starting to apply for internships.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: So typically what you found with anybody studying economics was at that point, they either wanted to go into investment banking or they wanted to go into accounting or consulting.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: That was one of the three.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I went through the whole application process of trying to get an internship, um, which was incredibly difficult.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: So no AI, obviously, at this stage.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like internet was there, but would have been not fast, high-speed stuff yet.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd never done this before.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: No one had ever told me how to write a CV, what to wear to an interview, how to answer any of the, you know, tell us about a time when questions, um, or even how to show up in those situations.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I faced rejection after rejection after rejection to the extent that actually there was one final stage interview I got to where I was being interviewed by a partner on my birthday, and they rejected me in the end because they didn't believe that I went to Cambridge.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: So they thought I had lied on my CV, which I think was a bit of a wake-up call for me.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't thought about this in 20 years.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: I once, when I was so I'd um I do not have the academic view hub by any stretch.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: So my experience was very different.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I just so I came out of unique first PhD, went to an interview, and they were like, Oh, well, we really want someone with a PhD, but who's in their early 20s.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, What how?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do you The maths no, and they were like, well, just because you can't do it doesn't mean someone else can't.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Okay, have a lovely day.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and it struck me they had no idea what they were asking for, and they yeah, and so they kind of similar, similar situations.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think, you know, I had been so optimistic at that point, and this was when the the work hard fallacy started to kick in because it's like, oh, it's not enough to work hard.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, there's a different game I've put here, and I don't know how to play this game.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um how on earth you managed to be optimistic with what, by any objective measure, was an incredibly challenging, hardworking, like difficult childhood.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, clearly loving and with some great parts of it, but you had to work really hard.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: You've worked hard for two decades to get to this point, yet so optimistic.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because lots of people would carry a chip on their shoulder at that point.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I have a lot of friends who went to Oxford or Cambridge and really hated it because of that sort of financial divide, that not understanding the language and things, but you came out of it with optimism.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: I had nothing to lose at this point.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like, genuinely, like when you've grown up on a counter estate, you've had the childhood that I've had, and you know that taking a step back is still not gonna put you there.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Then, you know, what's the worst that can happen?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there is something incredibly powerful in that because it's actually the reason why I started my first business as well.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, what's the worst that's gonna happen?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: It will fail.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'll take a job at St.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Please.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my answer is I'm not supposed to be here.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm supposed to be in a factory, like working 12-hour shifts making kitchen doors.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only employment where I'm from.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also why people like us are the people that should be building businesses.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because we rep we don't just represent that 1%, we're not just building for the 1%.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: We actually see the world for what it is, and we understand all of the nuances and complexities that you've got to navigate to do something meaningful.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so yeah, so it was just, you know, what's the worst that can happen?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: So where did the first opportunity come?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I got an internship at Goldman.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I got rejected from every other bank on the street that Goldman Sachs took me.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why did they say yes?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: I've do you know, I've reflected on that moment.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think by that point I was so fed up that I remember there was one interview question where they asked me something.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: We'd had a good conversation so far.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I just said, I don't know.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, but this is what I'm going to do to find out.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the most direct answer I had given in any of the interviews so far.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, I think that's why they were like, huh, okay, this is interesting.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like I push back a little bit more.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: You also became an equal at that point.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, when I joined, I realized that that is the culture.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a that they look for exceptional people, not because they are polished, but because of what they're able to deliver and become.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so me saying, I actually have no idea, but I will tell you how we're going to find out.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then I went away and I think I sent an email and said, by the way, I found out, and here it is.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was that initiative that probably made me stand out.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the beauty of that is I had that initiative all along.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't something that Cambridge had given me.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so that was really the that was the inflection point.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because I mean, if you've got an offer on the table from Goldman, you've got a pretty good starting point.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: How long did we spend there?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I so I did my internship, I then went off and did a master's, and then came back into a full time role.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I walked in in 2008 when uh things were colourful, I think is probably the best way to put it.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I uh spent just short of three years there.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but in a very, very chaotic period.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: What would you like the most about it?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: What I like most about it.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a real sense of, I mean, I was on the trading desk.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: There was a real sense of ownership from day one, right?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you make a trade, you own the risk, you hedge the risk, and you own the outcome.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And if that is your first job and those are the parameters within which you're operating, that is incredibly formative.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the other part was we'd had no idea what was going to happen day to day in that period.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you were just waiting for the next wild headline to hit.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: And there was something about operating in that environment where you had imperfect information, you had to piece things together, it was fairly high adrenaline, high stakes.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I loved that.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: I found that I really thrived in that environment and that I was able to piece together those data points in a way that other people couldn't.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that taught me a lot about myself in terms of what my, you know, what my potential superpower could be, but what I should be building on in the future as well.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, then it all calmed down.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you got bored.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but yes.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then it became, you know, steady stay.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was much more risk-verse.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there was much more regulation coming in, rightly so, given uh given the origins of the crisis that we've just been through.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it it needed a very different type of person, I think, to do well in that environment.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I realized that I wanted to do something that had a little bit more of that ambiguity that had intellectual challenge where I was doing something I didn't necessarily know what the outcome of that was going to be.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I started looking at building a business.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was a part of me that had always wanted to do that.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Did you um how have you slept at various chapters throughout your life?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Have you always slept like easily and well?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I always say, and I found out that there is, but I have always said that if there was an Olympic event for sleeping, I would get the gold medal.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: You're good at sleeping.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: I am so good at sleeping.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And have you always been?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, like a dead person.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's impressive.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Even when I had kids, I mean it was much harder when I had the kids.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it also meant that when my sleep was broken, I really, really struggled.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was at Goldman, um, I would sleep really well, but I wasn't getting enough of it.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: So how many hours a night in that period?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: On a good night, I would get maybe five and a half.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: On a bad night, I'd get three.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and over time, I mean, bearing in mind you don't really take your holidays either, that compound.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I really, really struggle when I'm not having enough sleep.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: The nature of the question is um, I didn't sleep until I had an intellectually challenging job.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'd try and sleep in my brain, it'd be like, nope, no, no, I'm still here.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: What can we talk about?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do something else.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just be occupied.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas as soon as I got into senior roles, people would be like, Oh, do you worry and struggle?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, nope, I'd never slept better.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: And now I'm gone within 30 seconds of like head hitting the pillow because I've tired my brain out that day.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: I can't, you you mentioned about you wanted the ambiguity and you crave the intellectual challenge.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Without it, I'm a nightmare.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I completely agree with that.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, there's there's a part of it where you do still have to have healthy boundaries.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: So even now, I find that if I'm working really late, I cannot sleep because I go to bed completely wired, exhausted, but wired.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm like that overtired baby.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, whereas, like you say, on the days when I'm on holiday, I'm the first person up, I'm the last person to get to sleep, my entire family will be asleep around me.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, do I read something?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what do I do?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to wake everyone up.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I agree with that.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's just something about even just physically, making sure you've exercised and all of that stuff, but mentally, when you are used to working in those situations where you have to spend a lot of time really stretching your brain, when you have a lazy day, it kind of just sits there twiddling its thumb when you're trying to go to sleep.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um so build that first business for us.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: So first business, um, this is a crazy stuff that you only do in your early 20s, right?
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I decided I was going to start business while I was still trading at Goldman.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I fully expected this business to fail.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Are you allowed to do that, by the way, in theory?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, but it was completely unrelated business.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it was in the hospitality space.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I'd done if I tried to start fintech or something, then yeah, there'd have been issues.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: But um, you know, bricks and mortar business, uh, took on a failed coffee chain and just thought simple business model.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's no algorithms.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'll do the algorithm for my Goldman.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but actually they're just real-world stuff.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: How did you even know it was available or a thing?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or how did you come?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: I spent a little bit of time looking around.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I didn't have a lot of capital or access to capital to build a new business from scratch as well.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, just being very aware of that rather than kind of trying to embark on an 18-month fundraising process um that inevitably would have failed.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we were also in a recession and the reality distressed assets.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, well, I've got a small amount that I've saved up, really tiny, like in startup world, it's basically nothing.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I'm gonna take on this distressed asset and I'm gonna see what I can do.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And if I can get this to profitability, that teaches me enough to then think about how I can scale this further.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that was it.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: That was the only goal.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was start with these two stores.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody else has shut them down because they couldn't get them to work.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you're able to get them to work, brilliant, because you've beaten what the last person did.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and if they actually really work, then there's a full, full company here to be built.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so Monday to Friday, I was uh working at Gorburn and then Saturday, Sunday, I was on the shop floor uh making coffees and um trying to work out how to hire people and run a team, build PLs, all of this kind of stuff.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um two wildly different worlds.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I did them both in parallel for about nine months.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then the the coffee shop became profitable.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point I thought, okay, we've got something that that can be replicated here.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um I also knew that I wanted a life that had a little bit more flexibility.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was in the um, I was at the trading desk from before 6:30 in the morning until eight, nine o'clock in the evening.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that is not sustainable.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's not sustainable if you want a family.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's not, you know, I knew that there was a ceiling that was going to hit very quickly at Gorman.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, whereas as an entrepreneur, you know, you have your own challenges, but one thing that you do have is much more autonomy over your time.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I then started to think about this as a company.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what is our brand?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: What are we trying to build?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: What's our USP?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and started pitching some large institutional landlords.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we got five sites lined up, one of which was Westfield London.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and at that point I was like, okay, I need to raise some proper funding for this.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's time to Who was anyone helping you through this process?
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're doing a lot of things there that you've never done before.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Information isn't as prevalent as it is now.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, did you have people around you that were helping you with this?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: How did you find your way through that complexity?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, my husband and I started this business together.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we didn't have a lot of mentors.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he had a very similar upbringing to me, you know, in the north of England.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he also was working in banking.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we reached this impasse largely because we knew that one of us would have to quit and we couldn't agree who quits.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: How many times did you ever go up that conversation?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like, well, you know, what are my prospects like compared to yours?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's like, if we want to have kids, what does that look like?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: And because we uh we couldn't we couldn't get to a point where one of us would step away, it was like, well, we need to build something where both of us can step away, and then we'll take it from there.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um the moral of that story um is people often think there's two choices in life, like an A and a B.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the beauty comes in in any scenario, what's the third option?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Unless one of them's perfect, find the other one because the other one in every scenario might be the best one.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we we look back on that so much now thinking, would we have made the same decision?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he's the CEO of a uh a coffee chain now.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, there are points now where our lives are chaos.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I don't think we would do it differently.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we we started a family shortly after starting that company.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there were babies being passed backwards and forwards while we were scaling that.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we learnt a huge amount in doing it, but actually we're in a position where we, you know, we scaled that change to 37 stores nationally and sold it to private equity.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was our first time.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: What's that time period over?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Seven years.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's incredibly quickly, right?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, in that point, we started family, had two kids, like, you know, there was a lot happening.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: We put everything into it.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I remember when we sold, we sold that company looking at what am I gonna do next?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we agreed that we we definitely shouldn't work together anymore.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um was that was that hard working together?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: It worked at that point in time because of the children.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't, I I took like two weeks of my leave after each child, right?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: We can your own business, who's gonna fill in?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it gave us the flexibility that we needed to be able to do everything.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: It is also really, really difficult to invest in your marriage when you are learning to co-parent and you're building your first business together.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we worked really, really well together.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're so opposites.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and actually that that really helped.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I think we became very, very good business partners and very, very good co-parents.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that, you know, we kind of got to the point after selling the business where it was like, actually, what is the right thing for us going forward?
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the girls were older, they were, I think about that point they were both in kind of nursery or preschool.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: So their routines were settled.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: They had seen me slash both of us every single day of the first three to five years of their lives.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: And to be able to do that is incredible.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was difficult, but it was amazing.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, I knew I wanted to move into technology.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: There was just something about the changes that we were seeing, the ability to accelerate scale, moving back into something that's technically a bit more challenging as well.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I missed, you know, um the system side of Goldman, but I had learned so much in terms of kind of practical business, how you raise money, how you build a brand, physical operations, that whole piece.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we yeah, we actively decided that we would go separate ways uh on a career from a career perspective.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: You choose, you chose marriage and family over being business partners, right?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really important.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really amazing self-awareness of you both to recognize that though, because so many people would have continued on that route because it's what you were doing, then would have looked around and gone, oh God, this has cost us our marriage here.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's yeah, impressive full stop.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, before we leave that chapter, a couple of other questions.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: If if early 20 person is listening to this right now, where should they be looking for a similar opportunity?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: So if they don't have capital at play, but they want to get into a business like you did, where would you look now if you were doing that again?
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good question.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there are a lot of people when they think about entrepreneurship, they just think about startups.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's actually a very, very narrow view of the world.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like some of the largest companies that we have in the world are not tech companies, and they are incredibly successful and they have longevity, which a lot of tech businesses do not have.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think, you know, we're in a world which is highly unpredictable, where there's a lot of change happening, but actually where you can get businesses off the ground in a much more cost-effective way.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, starting something new and thinking about it from a bootstrap first perspective is what I would always give an early 20, somebody in their early 20s looking at kind of starting that journey, largely because you're going to make loads of mistakes at the beginning as well.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: So create a safe space where you can make those mistakes without having an investor looking over your shoulder all the time.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, think about what exists in the market, which is 80% good enough.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: So when I started my business, I bought a lot of the equipment for the first door second hand.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, most people that go and want to, you know, start this new uh, you know, fancy chain, whatever, will go and buy brand new equipment.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: They will.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, there were pizza I picked up at auction for like nothing.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I knew that I was only going to get 18 months out of them.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: By the time they then, you know, completely depreciated an 18 month, I had the cash flow to invest in new ones.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: But in your mind, you were running an experiment anyway.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that 18 months was the perfect period to Exactly, exactly.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's, you know, go into businesses knowing that there is a very high probability that you will fail.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Get comfortable with failing and then look back at your business and think, how should I actually be building this?
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of people will go out and say, right, I need to raise 20 million, right?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you raise 20 million with blind optimism.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And all you can see is this business is going to scale and it's going to be infinitely successful, and your investors are going to love you, and they miss all of the reality of the fact that there is a downside.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a real world where they could be left in a very, very difficult situation if that doesn't quite work.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it sounds it's not glamorous.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's the key word.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: My my advice would be that find the businesses that aren't.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, as much as everyone's super excited about AI, look, my PhD is in data, I love it.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but everyone's trying to do that at the moment.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: So run towards the plumbers, the electricians, the bricklayers, the physical manual jobs that AI isn't going to replace and that no one wants to do at the moment.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we've just got part of the business that's effectively taking minority state venture positions in the um supply chain that we need to deliver the change on the ground.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we've just taken a minority in uh a herbivore manager who's controlling deer numbers.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna do that with fences and tree planters and all these things because without that supply chain, we can't deliver the change at scale we need.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's exactly finding those those type of businesses.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think just, you know, you'll learn along the way, and that will then help you understand how to crack those kind of more glamorous opportunities in a more sensible way.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I d I think those businesses are often overlooked, and I think there's a huge amount of value in them.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: You you mentioned the the learning lessons while building a business.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: What's the biggest one you made?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: What's the biggest mistake you made during your build-out?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have made so many.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh gosh, first business.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give you some examples.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, coffee business was built on uh real estate leases, 10-year leases.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can be on the hook for millions with no break clauses.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so if one of your stores isn't working and you've taken it in a very, very prime location that has the ability to sync your entire company.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: So think about business structure, think about all of the you know, the T's and C's and the tiny details in every legal document that you sign.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've so I'm inferring that you've signed one that with hindsight you probably shouldn't have done.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: When you realize that, how did you process the emotions of oh god and move into a how do I solve this scenario?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think I'm being really honest.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: When you're building a business, there are oh god moments almost every day.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Daily, multiple times a day.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it it's kind of okay, this is today's like this is today's issue.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um I jump straight into what are we doing to fix it?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: Just solve it.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like, who do we need to speak to?
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: What what is the case that we need to put forward?
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do we negotiate out of this, knowing that it's gonna take time?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Of course you did, because you learned that lesson at six years old when the window was broken and you just fixed the window.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Just swept it up and kept going.
• 40:35
  unknown: Yeah.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing, amazing story.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how long did the process of deciding you might exit and the deal actually happening take?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: Quite a long time.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: So with the coffee business, we actually had we had a failed acquisition first.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um so many people have that situation.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's like the dress rehearsal, right?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yes, exactly.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time, it can feel like the world has ended.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's such a huge disappointment.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, we we sold the company in 2018, the failed acquisition was um towards the end of 2016.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then resurrected talks in 2017.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the 2016 um failed acquisition partly was because there was a shift in the market.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at retail, that was when um BHS went under.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so that sent then ripples across the rest of the retail space.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: It made investors incredibly risk-verse.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: It meant that, you know, when you were down to that final IC decision, they decided that they were just going to wait and see.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think people realize how many other peripheral macro factors affect deals.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's the joke that America sneezes and the world catches a cold, but literally Trump gets out of bed and says something ridiculous.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: It can have knock-on effects of businesses across sectors people wouldn't even consider.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when you're in that world and you're building, you think everything is a reflection of you and your work.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say this is probably one of the biggest learnings that I've had across the different businesses that I've built and the exits that I've had is most of the time it's not about you.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the time it is because something has shifted on the other side, something's shifted in the macro space.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: There is some dysfunctional disagreement on their board, for example, that you know nothing about and you don't have any visibility of, but you still have to turn up with good intentions and not get into that point where you know you think everybody on the other side is an enemy.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's your your point about bootstrapping and building it out because if it's you and your investment, then you can have that coherent thing of look, we couldn't control this.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: This just happened.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a very aggressive group of investors, they're gonna tell you it's your fault, whether it is or not, and you're still gonna have to justify it.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's hard.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: That is very, very hard.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it is something that a lot of people are experiencing right now.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think particularly first-time founders get it the most.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even I've experienced it.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you're sitting here saying, I've built businesses before, I've edited businesses before, that gives you a certain amount of credibility and trust from your board that you don't get as a first-time founder.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so there is so much of, you know, the market moving slightly against you, or you might have lost that big deal because something happened on the client side that you don't know anything about, but it gets put down to they they messed up that deal, they didn't know what they were doing.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really, really difficult because there's there's only so much you can say, and that's not necessarily going to change their mind.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing that you can do is move on to the next deal and Make sure you nail that next deal.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now, obviously, in a difficult market, take longer for that next deal to come through.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's my coaching to young people.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you ever make a mistake or something negative happened, whether it's on you or not, just start stacking the wins the next day.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: The smallest win you can find, get it, and then get the next one, and get the next one.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think momentum powers you so far through this.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in in the coffee chain phase, did you have a board at that point?
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Or had you built it such that it was just you guys?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was us.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: We had um our funding provided.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was mostly debt that we had, um, and we had a small amount of equity.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it meant that the uh the bank that had given us the debt funding for the business had a huge impact on what decisions we were able to make and what directions we were able to take.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's I mean, one of our most difficult situations was we decided to go through a rebrand, and the bank didn't agree with that, and they pulled our funding.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the rebrand was the right thing to do because it's ultimately what led to our exit.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's where we saw the broader market going.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: We were leaning much more into being independent and boutique, which you look at the coffee market now, that makes a lot of sense.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is 10 years ago.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it just meant that they could, you know, with with debt, you're like, oh well, you know, actually we disagree on this thing.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: We're invoking the right of, you know, whatever is in the loan agreement, yeah, off it goes.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: People think the money is the difficult bit, it's always the terms.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like what what is the actual cost and not in terms of the interest rate?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: What's the control?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: What's the difficulty?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, always read your documents and have a good lawyer.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when you were thinking about exit, did you know what you were going to do after the exit?
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that I was going to leave as part of the exit.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know what I was going to do after.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: How did the exit impact you in terms of identity?
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because that had been your other than family, that'd been your focus for seven years.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: So how did it affect you on a personal level when you suddenly the next morning was like, oh, I don't have to do this anymore?
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to say I felt really great.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: The reality was I felt really lost.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself or my time.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I found that so much of my identity had been tied to the business that now belonged to somebody else.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, to the extent that after selling that business, I have never been back to a single one of my coffee shops.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think you ever will?
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: No, because I don't know whether it's your first business or whether it's just I grew as a person whilst that business was growing.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: That handing it over to somebody else and being able to have that separation of this doesn't belong to me anymore.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: And actually they have every right to do with it what they want to do with it, um, I just found very, very difficult at the time.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um so there was a real period where I struggled for quite a while to say, okay, what am I going to do now?
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was incredibly burnt out as well.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um realised that I love working, I love building.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um did you consider for a second you might not work again?
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, I knew I would work.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think my husband would have killed me if I tried not to, because I would have been a nightmare.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it would, should I do something different?
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, should I go back uh to academia or something?
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I loved my time when I was studying.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: Should I go back there?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, should I go into the investment side of things?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: And after a little bit of time, realize that I I wasn't operated through and through.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: So um I unsurprisingly, my identity is quite tied to what we do as you sit with one of our logos behind you.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I don't want to go anywhere anytime.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: We we had an approach recently, uh, someone wanted to buy the business at a ridiculous number.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a question about how long do you want to do this for?
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so many other things you talked about echo, because I'm like, I'm just happy to be here.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is brilliant.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: I get to do this every day.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is amazing.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: I can't imagine not doing it.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, having been through that process of the exit, if you were going to do another one, how would you prepare differently for it?
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: How might you, although I suppose maybe it'd be better just by being the second or the third because you've been through it before.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, truva was a really interesting one because truva was a business I moved into after the the coffee shops.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: How big was it when you went?
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it was pre-Series A.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it's still quite early stage.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think we might have been 30, 40, 30.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's still like that's not tiny.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's still a significant business that's there are things in place as finance, there's HR, this process.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're not building everything like you did before.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it was it was a technology company.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: And what was really interesting was I went into that feeling like such an imposter.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: I had scaled and exited a company.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was the only person in the room that had scaled and exited a company, and it was run by first-time founders.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: How on earth do you get imposter syndrome?
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like, but I did not have a tech background, and it was so interesting.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: I went in and was like, look, I want to learn, I know how to build.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they said, okay, we'll come be our ops director.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, fine, brilliant.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to worry about fundraising, paying the bills, any of that stuff for a little while.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to go back to actually being in the weeds and doing the work.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved it.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely loved it.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: I only got six months of it though, but it was brilliant.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, really seeing how much I could take from what I had done before and apply it in what a lot of people in tech are like, oh, boring businesses.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, they're completely different.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: They don't scale like we do.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, they do.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them scale incredibly quickly.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of transferable knowledge between the two.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of business principles still apply.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then within six months, I um was promoted to the COO and then eventually became the CEO.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, clearly anything that you learn in building a business helps you accelerate the next one that you go into.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the TUVE exit was really interesting because that came about in a very different way to the coffee chain.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we had um, we just had COVID.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: We uh were a homewares and lifestyle e-commerce marketplace platform.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: We worked with small businesses, so that was kind of the impact side of things for me of like, you know, we helped thousands of families stay liquid through COVID.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: We helped them get an income.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and our numbers were obviously fantastic.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: We were pretty close to break-even.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then post-COVID, things started to open up again.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what was really interesting in that situation was that there were certain signals coming from the customer acquisition space.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, true, but I had run almost every department by the engineering team and finance at that point.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: But marketing was something I'd spent a lot of time in.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: And marketing actually is very, very similar to being on a trading floor and getting your indicators in in terms of cost and pricing and you know, volumes and impressions and all of this data.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there was something in the market that I was like, oh, the consumer market's really starting to start to pinch and acquisition costs are going to go through the roof.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: We've got an incredible set of numbers.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we have two options at this stage.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: Do we exit on a high while we still have a very healthy growth trajectory ahead of us?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: Or do we go and raise a big Series C, knowing that organic growth is going to be much more difficult in six months' time?
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was a conversation to take to the board and say, look, these are our two options.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, this is why we think it's probably a good time to exit the business.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: And at least for the next three to five year window in the consumer space, this is probably the best valuation you're going to get.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was like trading desk 101.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we uh we actually then um agreed the terms for the exit to made um in the January of the year that the consumer market then crashed.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: So from give me that timeline from when you started thinking this might be the right answer.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: When did that happen?
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: So this was when we were starting to come out of lockdown.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: So 2021, like mid to late 2021.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: So then how long till the board said, yeah, we agree?
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: End of 21.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and then and we had we completed the sale to MAID in May 22.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's five months for that, or five, six months is quick still.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: Did you work with a corporate finance partner to do it?
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so this one actually came about because um our board, one of the investors on our board, knew the CFO there.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so actually, really using those partnerships and then those relationships to have the conversations and and also to have the airtime to map out what that acquisition scenario looks like.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: I find that corporate finance partners, like if you go down that route to sell your company, you've already devalued your company by 50%.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: You sell when you're not for sale.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as you say you're for sale, immediately people start thinking either distressed asset or I'm able to get it for whatever I want.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the corporate finance partner typically has some fixed B that they're going to get regardless.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so they win even if you don't win.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we didn't go down that route, and I think that was the right thing at the time.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think even now I'm still quite skeptical of them for an exit.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: Fascinating.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the emotional process of that exit presumably felt very different.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, exits are exhausting.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um they take a long longer than everyone thinks they will or hopes they do.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and the due diligence, and you know, as much as you want to delegate away the due diligence, nobody knows your business better than you do.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you have to stay incredibly close to it.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think Tuva was definitely less emotional as an exit.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think because we, you know, I stayed with the business, I intended to stay with the business, and we retained our independence within the made organization.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so for us, it was actually we're joining this much bigger group.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, it's a public company at that point.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: We're still going to retain our core identity.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: How long did they ask you personally to stay for afterwards?
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I was tied in for 18 months.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's quite short, relatively.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: Not too bad.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had a friend who was asked to do 10 years and agreed to seven and went a lot quicker than that, but was asked to do 10.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's quite painful.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's just not how is anything realistic for 10 years?
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just like almost that makes it fine to go shore because it's nothing's gonna last 10 years.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll figure it out.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, no, 18 months.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, it didn't end up being 18 months because obviously we had uh the maid collapse that happened four months later.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, that that turned into an interesting exercise because Truver was actually the company that aged twice um in six months.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them very, very different.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, the team were amazing.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: We really actually believed in the value to Truver of being part of MAID and the value to MAID of be of having Truver be part of the group.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so there was a lot of value creation in that acquisition that we could get on with.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that feels authentically correct.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's the beauty of a partnership.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: When you have to really flex the narrative around it, I just think you're struggling at that point.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, they're just for me, that was it could really step change to the scale at which we were operating.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: And because Truva was about supporting these small businesses, if we scale, they scale.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so there was a real kind of really clear linear um, you know, path in terms of that impact of benefits to made top line and benefits to small businesses that we're working with.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so from a mission perspective, that felt really it rang true for everyone in the business.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, we lost very, very few people on that journey, part of that acquisition.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, how on earth do we go from that eclectic business mix to nature metrics?
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I um after selling Trueva for the second time, um realized that it was time for me to move on at that point.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and kind of once again had this whole piece around, you know, what do I want to do next, et cetera.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I felt like I had kind of one operating gig left in me.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I knew that the impact at that point was really, really important.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like Truver had really confirmed that for me.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that, you know, we were getting emails from these, from these families saying, you've helped me pay my rent, or, you know, you've helped me buy Christmas present for my kids this Christmas.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like that meant so much more to me than the financial return that I was getting from from that company, and which, you know, the way it played out didn't come through.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I knew that I wanted to stay in the impact space.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: I've always at that point I'd started doing more social impact work outside of work as well.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: So doing much more work with underprivileged founders, um, supporting um female founders and entrepreneurs, but also working with um young, uh young, young people um in East London.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so people kind of from background like me, helping them navigate things like getting their first work experience, internships, access to universities, that kind of thing.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, all kind of free time, unpaid, but incredibly rewarding.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I still genuinely believe in the opportunity for technology to accelerate impact.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't done a lot of work in climate.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and at the time, Metrics was looking for a CEO.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I had a headhunter reach out to me and say, you know, I have this incredible business, um, they're in the biodiversity space, they're looking for a new CEO.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, let me send some information on them.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember the first thing I said to them was, you know, I'm not a scientist.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I haven't done science in GCSE.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they said, we have the most incredible scientists.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: We need a commercial leader to help us work out how to scale this business so that it has the impact that we know it can have.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I was like, okay, let's let kick off the process and have the conversation.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very early on, I fell head over heels in love with the product.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a piece for me where I was like, there is something here that I think can just not just change the way that we monitor biodiversity or we conduct ecological surveys, but we have something here that could actually have systemic change in the way that economies are operating.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so kind of going all the way back to like I did a master's in uh in development economics at Yale, going back to all of the things that I had learned theoretically there, combining it with a lot of the reality that I picked up on the trading floor and building businesses and being like, this feels really worthwhile.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, I think that this product could be the game-changing piece that we need to not just build a more sustainable future, but fundamentally change the way that businesses operate.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that for me was really, really interesting.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: So most of the focus around this sector has been carbon-based so far, because the markets are in place and things like that.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_00: How important do you think the measurement side of biodiversity nature is to uh to stimulating those markets like BNG and nature credits and things?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I think carbon's an interesting one because it's intangible, right?
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody says, oh, I'm looking at carbon.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um conceptually, it should be a harder market to start.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I think if they've got it the wrong way around, but we've simplified it, right?
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: We said we can measure it, it's transferable, and therefore we're able to build a market around it.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: The difficulty with it not being tangible is you see what has happened over the last 12 months, right?
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's invisible, it's very easy to then forget about.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: Nature is so different because it is tangible.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it's obviously quite difficult to measure because of its complexity, it's incredibly localized, but it is so visible.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the difference between carbon and nature is nature is fundamentally critical infrastructure in a way that carbon is not as obviously the case.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: Bring that to life, people.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: Bring bring how critical nature is into our everyday lives in a way that people could um comprehend.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I mean, you know, we're literally looking at things like the quality of our waterways, you know, the level of pollutants in an atmosphere.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking at, you know, our soil microbiome, which determines how healthy our soils are, which then obviously feeds through to um the level of yields that we're getting, which fundamentally as consumers plays out in food prices and all the inflation that we've been seeing over the last few years.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, all of the kind of the massive climate disasters that we've seen more recently around flooding, like what impact that does that then have in terms of our supply chain resilience?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's literally everywhere.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: But we have uh we have an economic system at the moment that because it can't price it, it overlooks it.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: And this means that we're always going to be in a remediation phase.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: We're always going to be having to pay recovery costs, restoration, when actually, if we just factored in the value of it in the first place, we'd end up with healthier ecosystems.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, your balance sheet would look a lot better because you wouldn't have this future restoration cost coming at you that you need, because otherwise your entire business model is going to collapse.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: So can you give us a almost a customer journey uh type experience whereby the information and the data you provide is impacting a business?
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like maybe go, you don't have to go company specific, but sector specific.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I mean, if we take the the consumer route, because I think that is the one that people are probably going to be the most familiar with.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some of the work that we're doing with one of our largest clients, very, very well-known household name, is we are working with their dairy division and you know, their kind of syndicate of farmers, um, and really helping them understand the quality of their soil.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what they want to do is they want to move towards regenerative outcomes.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: Part of that, though, is getting trust from the people on the ground that this is actually going to be good for them, because there are certain practices that are so deeply entrenched in the way that a lot of these systems operate, fertilizer usage, for example.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you're going saying, well, actually, I think this is gonna give you a better outcome in terms of yield, save you money, et cetera, you know, they're still raised eyebrows.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: Unless you have the hard data to back that up, they're gonna say, Well, actually, why are you asking me to change the way I operate?
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: I've been doing it this way for years.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you want to change those behaviors and those patches, this is where like actually objective data can go a long way.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: And these are farmers and landowners who have worked a certain way often for generations, are not now in an economic position where they can hedge this bet.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like if they get one bad year, that's gonna be the end of a farm.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you ask them to try something, jump out of a plane with no parachute and no backup plan of any kind.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, being really aware of how the economics of those different supply chains work, because the margins at the farm level are not great.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they can't be paying millions and millions of pounds for cutting-edge technologies and solutions without the support of those massive multinational buyers further up that supply chain.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's you know, it's connecting those stakeholders that is really, really important in making the economics of nature restoration viable as well.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so, you know, we've worked with them, we've been able to prove that there has been a biodiversity uplift and the changing practices that they've been encouraging, which is really fantastic.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it then helps them scale that with, you know, we've we've proven this out in these countries.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now let's extend that across other geographies.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: What we will then see in terms of impact on the consumer is a better quality product at a better price.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a win win situation.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Also, in the long term, a more resilient supply chain where they're not going to have to say, oh, my strawberries in this region have failed, and therefore I need to be importing them thousands and thousands of miles to meet the consumer demand at twice the price.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many aspects to your business, it's fascinating.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you're at the cutting edge of a technology in a market that is forming and doesn't really exist yet.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_00: You've then got to build a commercial model for the use of that technology into a market that doesn't fully exist yet.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: How do you balance your thinking and your time across the commercial, the marketing, the branding, the tech, the science side of it?
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's just beautifully complex.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_01: It is, it is.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's why you like it, because it's intellectually complex.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_01: I do, I know.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, sometimes I really ask myself what I'm doing, but there's beauty in that complexity because the hardest problems are often the most important to solve.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: And with this one, you know, we know that, you know, our product is grounded in a high level of scientific integrity, right?
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: That that the scientific rigour is central to everything that we do and everything that we put out.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_01: It is indisputable in the sense that, like, if it is not good enough, it does not go out.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: We have to be able to stand behind it.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: What that does mean, though, is when we think about the data that we've generated, we have high integrity data sets that we can then build everything else on top of.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_01: And to some degree, I mean, think about nature metrics, it's been around 10 years.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've been looking at biodiversity before it was even, you know, a thing.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it does mean that we've been able to put down those critical foundations on which we're now able to build in a way that somebody coming into the market today couldn't.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, the insights that we're giving our clients, they're not proxies.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually, they're based on real tangible data.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the benefit of that, though, is it's auditable, it's verifiable, it's traceable.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's all of the things that, you know, when you think about financial data, it's all the things that businesses need to drive change that they will put investment behind.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so for me, you know, in a scale-up, there'll be days where, like, let's put these fires out because, you know, something hasn't quite gone to plan.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there'll be other days where I will have the most fascinating conversations with other players in the space who are either picking up slightly different market signals or where we're finding opportunities to combine forces and actually tackle something for clients in a, you know, a more seamless way.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: How likely is it that with the amazing scientists you've got, you actually end up with developments and scientific breakthroughs that undermine things you've done in the past?
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think about, um, and we'll come on to AI, but think about the evolution of data centers.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_00: Daniel Priestley wrote this amazing thing yesterday.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, when we were building railroads and infrastructure assets, we thought these things had last a hundred years.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're about to invest trillions of dollars in data centers that we know will be obsolete in two years.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, with the amount of scientific progress you're making, there's a real chance you will end up undermining your own previous work because that's how science evolves.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_00: Do you guys talk about that and the risk associated with being really good at what you do?
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, innovation is kind of sits at the center of who we are as a business, right?
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the product's been so long in RD before it even reached the market, and we still have a lot of investment happening in RD.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: So last year we um we launched Air DNA, which is actually being able to use swabs to detect DNA that's been transferred by air, for example.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we know that you know the inevitability of innovation is that there will always be something new, something better.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: We have to stay at the forefront of that.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_01: Why I'm not worried though, is our data sets are a point in time.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it is impossible to take this new technology, go back five years, and apply it across a project that you have already monitored.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, all of our historic data, it might not be using, you know, the technology that we're going to see come in 10 years' time, but it is the most accurate snapshot we have of what five years ago looked like.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a huge amount of value in that because when we're thinking about nature, it's something that takes time to recover.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we need to be able to see those trends over a longer-term time frame.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, things absolutely will get more accurate, they'll get more detailed.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: We need to maintain the ability to be able to stitch together different technologies across different time periods so we're able to pick up those signals.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Love it.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how much is AI impacting the way the business works and you work personally?
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, AI for us is it's three things.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, one is how do you bring it into your product, which, you know, obviously we've had some amazing product releases over the last 12 months, which show that we are using a lot of AI modeling, particularly on the risk side of things.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: But for us as a business, it's got to be embedded in the way that we operate.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the third piece is really that culture of, you know, thinking about technology as an enabling factor in how we scale.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: We've had to spend a lot of time as a scale-up thinking about how we can use AI to drive efficiency.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, pockets are not as deep as they used to be uh two, three years ago.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you need to be thinking about your runway and your burn and the unit economics all the time, right?
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because particularly with the market being quite unpredictable, you'd have no idea what's going to hit you in 12 to 18 months.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so any incremental efficiencies that you're able to drive today actually just give you that added bit of buffer for any future shocks that you might you might hit.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_01: So when we've been thinking about AI, it's it's literally a cost everything.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_01: It can be a cost like admin.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how do we speed up some of that without having to massively increase our headcount?
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's also really thinking about how we can use AI to improve our service to our clients as well.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we can't be one and done with our clients.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: You can't take a snapshot of nature and say, great, I've nailed it.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_01: I know what it looks like today.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you need to be working with them over five, 10, 15-year horizons.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And these are clients who, many of whom are quite early on their journey, it would be incredibly labor-intensive for us to educate every client individually, explain every single data set individually.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_01: How do we use AI to do that handholding, give them what they need, whilst also building a scalable delivery model?
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think every organization that is going through a period of rapid scaling has got to be embedding AI into the way it works.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't thought about the fact that um because you have a scientific cutting-edge product, that almost the onboarding costs and the acquisition costs of a client inherently have to be quite high because you're you're having to explain what is possible with the science.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like you can't go, everyone knows what a kind of Coca Cola does.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to educate a client on that, right?
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And you also need to be able to explain it to them in their terms.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's sector specific and completely different each time.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, for us, yes, we have a single product that can serve multiple sectors, multiple different applications, and multiple different use cases.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we we fundamentally have a choice.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do we say, well, we're only working in this one sector for this specific use case?
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna narrow the focus, we're gonna nail that, and then we'll move on to the next sector and then the next sector, by which point the ship has sailed, um, and we've got nature Armageddon.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's incredibly high risk because which is the sector that's gonna go?
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Or we think about how we can build a product that is configurable, it has the flexibility to be able to communicate with those different sector needs, but do it in a way that we're also building retention and long-term relationships with our client.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's got to be meaningful to them as well.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I I think we need to get you in a studio with various different members of your team.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost like the way that OpenAI does its product launch videos, where it's like, right, we do this for this sector, it's this.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you almost have a five to ten minute short thing of this is how it could help your business and sector.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe that's the next distressed industry, the TV industry, and we'll just we'll collectively buy a recording studio and roll those out.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you mentioned the culture word in that last answer.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a two-part question on this.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one is you are working with such a diverse array of skill sets, backgrounds, experiences, and people.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_00: How do you unite those around a single culture at Nature Metrics?
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I was talking to my VP of people about this yesterday.
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we're in the process of redefining our values.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's one phrase that she said that really stood out to me.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was, we're individually diverse, but we're collectively brilliant.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's nice.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, I really believe that we are.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And when you look at the business, of course, we've had that slightly teenage growing pain where we went from being a team that was full of scientists to starting to bring in commercial people at the point at which the business has got to start commercially.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_00: How long have you been enrolled now?
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I am almost two years.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and um how has the business changing numbers over that period?
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_01: So when I joined, we were uh over 150 people.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're now at, so we went down uh to about 110 and we're now about 130.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the composition's different, right?
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_01: The composition has completely shifted, yeah.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when I joined, it was very science-heavy.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and people had a, they had sector expertise either because they knew the space.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_01: So they either knew energy really well or conservation really well, um, or they had deep ecological expertise.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_01: The business even today doesn't have a lot of generalists, you know, the the kind of hires that you might make in an early stage tech company where you don't need somebody that's brilliant at marketing, you just need some doers.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: What we had to do, I would say, about two years ago, is start to shift the business to get, I would say now we have an equal balance between um operational commercial people and scientists.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think looking from afar, it's definitely that that's visible from a market perspective from I would have said incredibly passionate and dedicated to the science side of things three and beyond years ago, whereas now looking much more like a fully rounded business with the functions and commercial appetite and ideas in place.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's definitely I I didn't I was surprised when you said it was three years, but I've completely losing track of time now.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it has changed definitely.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think, you know, we have to remember that your background does not determine what mission you believe in.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't need a PhD in ecology to really deeply care about the nature metrics mission.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that is the thing that you know brings the team together.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_01: We have a shared set of values and we have a shared mission and we're all pulling in the same direction.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And fundamentally, you know, if you have people in a business who are all well-intentioned and high integrity, which is very, very important, then you know that, you know, once you've got through that initial phase of working out how we all fit together and building trust as well, like making sure that, you know, the the science side of the business really trusts the commercial team's ability to take something to market to not make things up and sell things that don't exist.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the commercial team trusting that the science team isn't going to hold things back.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Once you had that, that really gives you a strong foundation to scale.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I think the absence of you having a PhD in ecology allows the business to talk to itself.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think if if you had, often the scientists end up running everything, which make it very difficult.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I quite like the fact people forget I've got a science slash data background and just think I do marketing.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite nice.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think also you have to get very used to saying you don't know.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you wouldn't have been as comfortable early in your career, right?
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because you mentioned about when you first went back into sort of the tech focus, you had that uh imposter sense of things.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas I loved when you went, I don't need a PhD in ecology to do this.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, it's definitely, you know, there's a there's a level of, I would say, self confidence that you can say, you know, I'm not the expert here.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm, you know, I would here to listen to the experts, tell me what you think, give me your opinion.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_01: What I can do is join all of those dots, understand our constraints, and build a plan.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and also coming into space knowing that I deeply understand how businesses operate.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, my economics background is so important when we're thinking about that complex stakeholder landscape within which we're trying to build and operate.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I bring to the table.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think with a lot of these science-first businesses, to find somebody that has a PhD in ecology, knows, you know, economics and deeply understands like regulatory landscapes, knows technology, all of these things.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a unicorn.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_01: They don't exist.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the team, to be fair, have been fantastic.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's never any point at which I've said, guys, I have no idea how this thing works, where someone turned around and been like, Well, you're an idiot.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, don't worry, I will explain.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_00: People love explaining their stuff.
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_00: They do.
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Especially when I'm doing it 50 times, but people love explaining it.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it gives them an opportunity to be proud of what they're doing.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So much from them.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and I continue to learn so much from them.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is so important because I think that is the part that, you know, wherever you go next, you will take with you all the things that you have learned from the people around you.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I think that's the story of your podcast.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there's a you can absolutely see the loops of where in one chapter you were picking up a skill and then you've applied it later and picking up the next one and applied it.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's such a clear connection of those.
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_00: You you almost set yourself up for a question when we started about figuring out what your superpower is.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think it is now?
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, wait, and I'll give you two answers.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_00: One is the one that you would say is the quick answer on stage, and then what's the real one that if you were sat at home by yourself, you know is your superpower?
• 1:21:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a very, very good dot connector.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very good at seeing lots of what look like quite disparate data points and understanding the link between them, but also then the quickest way to navigate them or turn them into uh a plan.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I would say that is probably A, why I really, really need data points.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like I struggle in businesses where they put CEOs in ivory towers and don't feed them all the information except on a need-to-know basis.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like I find that really So, how do you make sure you do get the information honestly?
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, the benefit is I'm very open with people in terms of how I work and what I need to do my best work.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's also a sense of for me to do my best work, you need to give me X.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_01: But if I'm doing my best work, I will help you unlock and achieve all of these other things.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I'm here to make you great.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_01: How do I help you?
• 1:22:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's why I'm insistent that I I lean into playing like people can take the mick out of me.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because my my thought process goes if if people can't joke and be honest around me, what else are they not being honest about?
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever something goes terrible, I overly welcome it.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, cool, no problem.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because as soon as you hit back and go, that's awful, you're not hearing about the next one.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_01: You lose them.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I guess the answer that I would tell you if I was sitting at home, I am really, really good in a crisis.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Not a personal crisis.
• 1:22:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm terrible in a personal crisis.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very, very good in a work crisis.
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_01: However, I deeply dislike it.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_01: I am feeling far too old to be dealing with work crises on a regular basis.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it is something that I have definitely learned over the course of my career is when they talk about wartime.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very, very good at wartime.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it is not what I want to define my career going forward, though.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_01: So that is definitely the one that I would hold back and only tell you if I was at home.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um you're amazing.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what's the one question that I haven't asked you?
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_00: You wish I had.
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think the one question that people do ask me quite a lot, actually, typically when I come down our speaking event, which I find really interesting, is what would you go back and tell a younger version of yourself?
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I find this a really, really interesting question.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna ask you that question as well.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have an outside feeling we might have the same answer, but go on.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_01: So and then it changes depending on the conversation that we've had.
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_01: But if I were to go back and I was going to speak to, I don't know, 14-year-old Dimple, I would say the one piece of advice I would have is to not believe in yourself, but it's to believe in your ability to work it out much more.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's a conviction.
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is partly a female thing, partly a, you know, uh tied to the background that I've come from.
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it is such a defining factor in whether you succeed or not later, and it is conviction, particularly when you are building something.
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it is not it's not blind conviction in the sense of I'm going to build this thing and it's definitely going to work.
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's conviction in I trust in myself to be able to work out a way.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if I do not work out a way, it's because a way does not exist.
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's great.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the answer's similar but expressed in a different way, and I've never seen it.
• 1:24:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was only with you talking that I visualized it in this way.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I would um I would walk up, I'd one, I'd see a younger rich.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I was a miserable child, I had a horrible childhood, I didn't enjoy any aspect of it, and I would walk up to myself with the intention of saying, It'll be fine, just keep going, you'll figure it out, it'll be fine.
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I'd stop myself telling me that because I I think I needed to be scared and needed to fight my way out of it to do it.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if someone had said to me, look, you're gonna achieve things you'd you're not even gonna dream about, like you're gonna have an amazing wife and healthy, happy kids, and you're gonna have a business that's beyond the one you could imagine.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_00: I might take my foot off the gas and not get there.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't, I would stop myself giving that advice, but the advice would be the the one you described that you'll figure it out.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and actually the other wrinkle of that is or if you put enough positivity into the world, you'll be able to surround yourself with people who, if you can't figure it out, they can.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when that's when it comes together.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, thank you so much for doing this.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: You are so, so busy.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's been an absolute treat to have you on the show.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for having me.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.