Founder of Tide - George Bevis

00:00

I occasionally hear people who are younger than me banging on about growth mindset. And I think it's a terrifying concept because it seems to be rooted in the assumption that you're not good enough already and that you can't be. And the truth is, while it is accurate that age 17, I was not good enough at literally anything that would make me a useful, productive human, over time, I have got a bit better at some things, and I'm good enough at some things. And I could either spend the rest of my life stressing about that and trying to push even further, or I can just bank what I've got. And I think we'd all be happier if we were willing to bank what we got.

00:49

How did your parents' parents influence your choice of work?

00:57

I didn't know my parents' parents. So on my father's side, they were dead before I was born. On my mother's side, my grandfather and his wife died quite early in my life, when I was three or four or something. However, I think there is some influence there, more than zero. So on my father's side, our background, if you go back a few generations, is quite traditionally working class on that side and it was manual work. They were gas fitters and similar. And so there was a respect for what now I would call being an operator, doing real work, making real stuff happen, not just existing in the mandarin class being a lawyer or accountant or something. And on my mother's side... Also, my dad was... So my grandfather was the chief scientist in the Royal Navy, in the second world war, and was a smart guy so he absolutely was part of the mandarin eight. And so if you put those two influences together, there is a comfort with the intellectual side of what we do professionally and thinking through how the world is changing and all the rest of it, and that dexterity about being willing to contemplate a wide variety of possibilities but also with a deep respect for just doing stuff and making real things happen.

02:54

Did that filter down to your parents as well?

03:01

Maybe. I think it was certainly never explicit, but probably implicit. Yes.

03:09

And how has that motivated you at different parts of your journey? We may, at times, want to right the wrongs of our chartered or we may wish to do things that our parents wanted us to do or inherit the work that they did previously. Were any of those applicable to you?

03:38

So firstly, knowing that my grandad was a very senior guy in the Navy definitely gave me that confidence that it was achievable to achieve significant things. And also that invention was a plausible way to make things happen and what he did was to invent stuff in the Navy. I don't know what he invented, but I'm sure it was fairly fruity stuff given the context of what Britain was doing at that time versus it's enemies. But yeah, so there was that confidence that great stuff could be achieved and it could be achieved by invention. And my father, he ran his own business so you could argue he was an entrepreneur of sorts. So yeah, they're also a comfort going and setting my own thing up.

04:38

It's amazing that, I didn't know that your father run own business and then you build a company that helps small businesses get more time and money back.

04:48

Yeah. Actually, there's a strong traditional of entrepreneurism on both sides of the family. So my dad set up a three person personal financial advice business. My mother's side of the family, almost nobody on that side of the family has ever been able to hold down a proper job, and so there's all manner of... My uncle sold rocking horses for most of my childhood at fairs and his children have set up lots of different businesses. Yeah, so it was quite normal in my family to think about setting up your own thing, mainly because we're not a particularly employable bunch of people.

05:33

Besides from your family, did where you grew up and your place of childhood and coming of age affect your choice of work?

05:43

In one way, yes. So I didn't actually expect to create my own thing until I was in the start of my twenties. So as a kid, inexplicably, my father had become convinced that I would end up being what he called a merchant banker, which we would call an investment banker, which is an appalling thing to say to any child, but somehow he had it in his mind that that was what was going to happen and that was the personality he thought I had. And I didn't have strong views of that nature but it hadn't really occurred to me that I would set my own thing up. But then I got lucky that in 1999 I was a student and I had a bit of time on my hands in the summer so I went off to New York and that was obviously the height of the .com boom and the whole of New York was absolutely plastered in advertising for all the different internet businesses in a way that I'd never seen before. And I came back to London, told everyone, "Wow, this was an incredible thing taking place." And it alerted me to this opportunity to build your own thing in a way that wouldn't otherwise have happened.

07:02

And subsequently I spent my finals term at university, instead of revising, and as a result I got quite a bad degree result, setting up an online contact details directory for people at my own university and another similar university, that was a much more basic precursor to what Facebook ultimately ended up being four years later. Unfortunately, nobody had digital cameras when we did our things so actually there was no point in logging in, in the way that there was with Facebook because you couldn't check out if other students were hot which, as you remember, was the real reason why Facebook took off in the early days. So it inexplicably didn't turn me into a near trillionaire. But nevertheless, it was definitely I got lucky that as a youngster I got to observe that entrepreneurialism was a path. And maybe if I'd been a student at a different time, that just never would've happened.

08:04

Did you take any of that and use that luck in a proactive way of sorts, almost surround yourself with certain people or put yourself in circumstances later on where it wasn't quite so much about luck, but you're able to realize that your surroundings would have that kind of impact on your work?

08:26

To say something, I'm sure you've heard lots of people, lots of times, because it's such a cliche, but there is that whole thing about how you make your own luck. But I think how the connotation of that for me has been you can think of life as a conveyor belt of opportunity that passes by you. And those of us who make entrepreneurism work are more inclined than the average to leap on the opportunity when it comes past and to do something with it, even when we know that there are strong reasons not to. And so in that sense, there was a sense of the willingness to capture opportunity, which I started getting into the habit of it as an undergraduate and I didn't stop.

09:27

I'd love to dive into that phrase that you just used, even though there are strong reasons not to, because it gets to the heart of all of our decision making when it comes to work. You are constantly trying to work out what opportunities are large, but naturally those opportunities might come with a healthy amount of risk associated to it. Have you developed a way of working through those decisions and knowing which opportunities on the conveyor belt to jump onto and which ones not to?

10:03

I think I'm halfway there and I should be better than that by now, given that I now run an incubator that will launch several things a year, but we're not. And I know interestingly that other serial entrepreneurs will usually tell you that even though they are very experienced and have had big wins in the past and all the rest of it, their success rate is still less than 50% on any marginal activity. And mine certainly is. So I'm not that good at it. But in so far as I have developed a framework for commercial initiatives, it's about my confidence that I can do customer acquisition at an affordable price and my sense that margins will be high and pay for the customer acquisition. Those things require a bit of research.

11:03

And so what I have learned to do is when you first have what seems like a good idea, and we're all familiar with the experience that you have it and it's on a Saturday night and you're just beaming, you're so excited by this incredible idea that you think you've had, and learning to be quite skeptical about that. And I've observed repeatedly that ideas I've sat on for over a year and done nothing with have a tendency to get much better in the process, for reasons I can't easily explain, it just seeds to be the case that you spot, and in general quite thought of that are the constraints and then you iterate them more. Tide, as an example, I had the idea of Tide something like three years or four years before it kicked off. I actually couldn't launch Tide because it was clearly going to be very, very expensive and I wasn't credible to raise the amount of money necessary to do it. And I only had the chance to get back into it when I reconnected with a much more credible investor who was willing to be the early anchor and co-founder in it, and that gave me a chance. And then the interim of that had years in which this idea had been swimming around my brain, alongside lots of other ideas.

12:19

It's the blessing of time in some way.

12:21

Yeah, for sure.

12:24

Interestingly, anyone who knows anything about your story or know why you are interested in making sure that the CAC and the LTV work properly together, and that's very much a nurture state of learning where you've been through it so naturally you're going to be aware of it. Is there a part to your decision making when you decide to go with this opportunity in the conveyor belt or that one, that's not been learned through experience, but is actually just more about George and what you'd choose?

13:03

I will answer the question generally. I think there's things I choose not to do because I'm just not passionate about the space and that happens all the time. And actually right now, interestingly, one of our companies in my incubator does software that makes mobile phones easier for older people to use, and that was essentially an irresponsible passion project from me because I couldn't get a phone that my mother could make work. And she's now got a phone running our software and it works really well for her. And in fact, just last weekend, something had gone wrong with her landline in her home and so she phoned me in a bit of a state from the mobile that I'd given her that runs our software.

13:47

Oh, fantastic.

13:47

Now, that's wonderful, but none of it actually justifies going and the enormous investment in making all this software and the business that we're building around it. And when I started that business, I had been ill-disciplined about kicking it off without a particularly well thought through point of view on going to market because I was so keen that this thing just should exist. And it seemed to be such a big need broadly, surely that go-to market would emerge, and we've ended up with what now looks like it will be an effective go-to market, which is licensing that software to manufacturers internationally. But yeah, in that particular instance, I definitely launched a venture driven off of personal passion without so much certainty what would go to market was going to be, but you probably shouldn't do that.

14:42

When have you felt furthest away from doing your best work?

14:48

When I've not been an entrepreneur. I spent a fair amount of my career doing boring corporate jobs, mainly in and around retail banking, which I have no passion for. I just fell into it because I'd not done very well in my degree and I couldn't get a glam job and retail banks were willing to pay me so I needed to pay the rent and that just sort of happened. And yeah, I wasn't a great employee. Depending on which company or which set of people, managers I worked for, they would score me somewhere between two out 10 or seven out 10, but never higher than seven, any of them. I think because I was just not into it, just didn't really care very much.

15:37

Why was it that you didn't care so much about it? Why is it that your natural nature doesn't fit that?

15:46

I think the frustration of having to dance to someone else's tune is probably the core of it. I started my career selling credit cards. I was 22 or 23. I say I started. Actually I started my career by for six weeks being an accountant, I was sacked, quite rightly, for failing the same exam twice in six weeks. And then I went to go and work for Capital One in Nottingham selling credit cards and I'd never had a credit card before then. In fact, very few of my friends had credit cards because straight out uni, it's not normal to have a credit card. I really barely knew what a credit card was and I wasn't convinced it was something that people necessarily should have.

16:31

And indeed there are lots of aspects of the credit card industry that one wouldn't feel super comfortable about if they're not managed correctly. So it was very hard to have us in any mission driven sense that we were doing good for the world, which is not to say, by the way, that that was an evil company, it wasn't at all. What we did professionally was not evil, but it just wasn't something that one would feel particularly excited about. And in the way that all substantial corporates end up with it, had a fairly sort of anodyne culture where everyone was polite and a bit boring to each other. And it just lacked creativity. And yeah, so it was just hard to get energized by that.

17:16

It feels like there are two bits to it. One, naturally just don't want to be part of another company and dance to your own tune. But another part to it where you can see this through everything that you've done, there's a desire to do something that actually helps someone else. But it's to a different degree. Not many people start a social incubator where I'm going to actually tackle the problems that other people aren't tackling. And I wonder where that comes wrong. Because there are so many people that don't want to work for someone else and end up trying to be an entrepreneur, but most of those people will end up just trying to solve a problem rather than solve a key problem in society.

17:58

Yes, and it's worth noting, I set up this incubator only after I had gone and made money by creating Tide, not before. So you need the cash first and once you've made the cash, the cash is less interesting to you so then the question of what is interesting to you and actually I still find it mystifying there aren't more people in my situation doing things like this, having their own incubator to do socially responsible work. Because I definitely find that the affluent entrepreneurs that I know are typically... Maybe I observe a biased sample of this, but they're very willing, they're very keen to help the world out in whatever way they can think is useful. And they typically enjoy the earlier stages more than the later stages and if you put those things together, it seems to be obvious you would create an incubator because why not? And what could be more fun than that? So I don't really understand why other people don't do it and I can't easily therefore explain what it is that is special about me that meant I wanted to.

19:02

Throughout your journey, you've gone through so many moments of trauma and stress and difficulty, naturally, that's associated with an entrepreneurial journey and risk. How has that stress and difficulty positively informed your choice of work and has it done the opposite, has it also been negative?

19:32

So there definitely have been lots of moments of stress. The positive thing that comes out of entrepreneurial stress is that after everything's gone wrong so many times, you get better at anticipating the ways that it'll go wrong in the future. I find that paranoia is something that people who haven't been entrepreneurs don't have to the same degree, typically. Some people do, so people who've done 20 years in other jobs where they've just been beaten up constantly by their seniors in very high pressured environment, they also have it as well. But somebody needs to beat you up enough times that you know where to look for the punches that are coming in and so that's definitely something you develop as a result of stress. And also some ability to contextualize things going wrong and hopefully to be able to reassure your team that the things that they're getting terribly nervous about really are not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But yes, I don't really experience stress and I don't enjoy it. And I wouldn't... On its own, it's not on the event. There's nothing good about stress. It's only a negative. It just turns out that if you suffer enough of that negative, you get better at avoiding it in the future.

20:59

But if only the paranoid survived, like Annie Grove might say, then doesn't that make you unhappy?

21:09

No, I don't think those two things are connected. So a learning in life that lots of more sophisticated, more expert people than me talk about, as you know, is that irrespective of what you achieve, you will still potentially be dissatisfied. And that is still true. And when you achieve the things that you think will make you comprehensively elated, it turns out it doesn't work out that way. So the main thing is to enjoy the journey and not the destination, all of which you know. None of what I've just mentioned has anything to do with paranoia.

21:48

Paranoia might affect whether or not you achieve the thing you want to do, because it de-risks it. But I don't think... My life right now is I do my job at CanDo, we have lots of projects?,I'm not particularly stressed. If one of them goes down, I expect at any one point, most of them will end up not being a big win, and so I'm not stressed about that. There might be things in my personal life that I'm concerned about at any one time, but there's no reason for my work to cause me any great amount of stress. Yeah, as long as I don't bankrupt myself, which is always a risk because I'm not always as responsible as maybe I ought to be. As long as I don't bankrupt myself then, yeah, there's no reason why a level of professional paranoia would spill over into personal happiness.

22:46

And do you make a conscious effort to separate out your own identity from your work identity? Or is that a natural setting?

22:53

No, but I think I should. I'm sure I would be a lower risk leader if I did. As you may know, I tweet quite a bit and not everything I tweet is fully a workplace safe or at least... More to the point, I'll tweet opinions on things that I'm still developing, which would definitely trigger some people, a minority of people. Although if you read all of the thousands of tweets I've tweeted over the years, I hope you would end up with a perspective I'm actually quite a benign progressive sort an individual. There's no question that the level of risk I take with my tweets is more than zero and that probably means that the occasion would be people I might work with or who might work for me, who would be concerned by something I'd said in a tweet or indeed in the real world, that's a real possibility.

23:59

So I know I don't particularly separate. I tell fewer fart jokes when I'm in the office than I might in the pub. But beyond that, I don't particularly separate. And I don't want to. What's the point in running your own company, if you have to suppress a big part of your own identity? I think it would be a rubbish way to be. And in fact, one thing, a really wonderful example of something happened on Twitter a few weeks ago, they beautifully exemplified this, is watching, I think it was, Jeff Bezos sending an idea to Bill Gates... And not to Bill Gates. To Elon Musk and Elon Musk replying saying, "Yes, that's a really good idea," or something like that. I can't remember exactly what the scenario was, but I just thought, "When do you see non-founder CEOs on Twitter just authentically discussing an idea openly and agreeing that...?" It never happens because the rest of the world feels scared to be authentic in public. But I don't want to live that life

25:09

When you reflect on work, what do you think you are optimizing for? Is it happiness? Is it success? Is it legacy?

25:20

It's legacy. So now in the context where, thanks to Tide, my bank account is hopefully going to stay fine for the rest of my life, all I care about professionally is trying to make the world... To have the most impact on improving the world that I can do and fun. Actually, fun's in the mix too. So I enjoy these early-stage things and I enjoy hanging around with a cool little team where we get on with each other and we're extremely authentic, if you like, with each other and we can get away with that without worrying about offending anyone. So those are the things. But the key thing is impact, which you described as legacy and it's a good word for that.

26:15

We've touched on this a couple of times, which is that transition from a creative environment where you are sporting ideas and you're playing around with stuff and you're having loads of fun, and a slightly different environment where you're not building a product anymore but you are building a company. And your experience stepping down as CEO must have been an extraordinary decision. Where did it start and what parts of your own self were at play there talking to each other?

26:54

I knew from pretty early on in Tide that I wouldn't want to run it forever and my interests are broad. Although, I think very often entrepreneurs have broad interests. I know you have broad interests, not all entrepreneurs do, someone entrepreneurs just love... They want to build one business, they want it to be very big and they buy their Rolls Royce and they have a number plate that's the name of their company and the number one on, et cetera, et cetera. And good for them, but that's not me.

27:28

So I have a degree in social sciences and masters in economic development. I read books about the state of the world for fun. So if I were locked into just running one enterprise, it would come at the opportunity cost would be all of the other things that I would like to work on, which fortunately now thanks to CanDo, I'm able to do exactly that. So I was aware from relatively early on in Tide that it would be more attractive to me to be able to work on a wider variety of things and things like not having venture capitalists to answer to and all that sort of stuff and to be able to stay at the early stage.

28:16

I first discussed that with Tide's chairman in autumn of 2017 and early 2018, we decided to kick off the process of finding the long term scale up CEO. And I found most aspects of stepping away from the company straightforward. I was relieved that my successor followed exactly the same strategy that I wanted for the company, we'd had a lot of board resistance to that strategy. The board didn't understand why it was necessary to invest as heavily in both marketing and product development, as I had been doing. And my successor insisted on that and essentially faced down opposition from some of the idiots who didn't understand that, very effectively, which was a great relief to me. So that made it a lot easier to step aside.

29:16

But the one thing that I did miss and find very tough was I missed all the people I've been working with. So at the point that I finished running the company, I think we had about 85 staff of whom everyone I had personally done final round of the interview with, I had chosen to let them in. And I liked all of them, even one or two who occasionally were a bit difficult to work with. But I did, I personally liked them and I liked having a reason to turn up and hang around them and I missed that. But the rest of it, no, I was pretty happy to step away from and certainly there is no way on earth that I'd want to be running the company now. It's a huge, complicated behemoth and I'm delighted for somebody else to be doing all that.

30:05

Does the legacy part to it not tick at you occasionally? Where you look at it and think, "Oh, would my legacy be more evident?" And did you have that quiet but nagging ambitious tweet twerp at you occasionally?

30:25

So in that case, what it would look like would be, "Would I want Tide to be doing some different things to what it is doing? And do I think if I was in charge, that'd be the case?" To which the answer is yes, I can name some things. But they're not the big things. The big things, what Tide does, haven't changed. And no, the short answer is I'm working on other initiatives right now, which if they work will have more impact on the world than the slight tweaks to Tide's product roadmap that might happen if I were CEO rather than someone else. So I'm comfortable with that allocation and it's not something I worry about.

31:15

One of the things that strikes me is how much your definition of your own best work has changed. It almost feels like it's changing each... It's almost like it's got phases that you've been through, where you've been able to unlock that phase or that level, and then move through to the next one, that somehow has a different definition of what doing your best work is at that time.

31:37

Well, doing your best work is contextual, of course, in all cases. And in different stages of your life, you have to deliver different stuff, it's the necessary thing. I think I've always actually had a sense that, in the long run, I wanted to have a bigger impact. It was always for that purpose, but at different stages you've got to do different things. In my early career working for... Well, actually the phases basically worked out as far as follows. So in the first years of my career, I had to get credibility to try and be an entrepreneur. But I knew that I very likely, in the long-run, would want to be an entrepreneur and a successful one and then use that to do some good for the world. But first I had to get credibility before I could be an entrepreneur.

32:27

Then I did entrepreneurship, screwed it up, but learned a lot of stuff. Then I had to stop being broke and get paid for a bit. Then I had the opportunity to start something else with the credibility that I did have, and that something else was Tide. And then once Tide was successful, I could go on and try and do other things to change the world. Although actually, I think there was a reasonably clear sense of what the end game might look like, the short term specifics change. You just have to adapt to the situation you find yourself in.

33:05

It's a bit like, I would say, the stoics who had a view on your work life, where you would contribute more and more to society as you went through it. But for example, you could be an individual contributor, I can't remember what it is, but it's and then you become a teacher, then you become a politician, and then you become a philosopher. And it's almost like you're on that arc where you make different contributions to society at different points, depending on whereabouts you've got to and the influence that you can make.

33:39

Yes, and I think it's true of lots of people. It's definitely true of me. One thing I think is very interesting and not really talked about very much is professionals up to the age of 40, have a pretty good idea of what all the other professionals up to the age of 40 do because they work in the same workplaces and they see them doing it and whatever. I'm 43. There's a whole set of people who've went through that path were successful. And then from age 45 through until 75, 80 are close to invisible while doing remarkable things. And that I think is particularly undocumented and I've recently been reading about one or two of them, but often they choose to operate in reasonably anonymous ways. They're no longer interested in fame or public plaudits. Some are still very keen to get very rich, but others have other aspirations and they can exercise remarkable power and influence in changing the world that we operate in, but in a fairly invisible way.

34:53

What types of things?

34:54

So the book that I was recently reading on this was highlighting the case of former, well, I guess still current industrialists, but people who'd had big jobs, either CEOs or working private equity or whatever, who were behind those doors in Mayfair that have no name plate on them, just numbers, where the sheer expense of the office itself is evidence that something is up. But then if you can somehow get a meeting on the inside, you discover that they have enormous stakes in lots of significant ventures, some of which you've heard of, others, you haven't. They may well be controlling them, but they are entirely anonymous individuals.

35:47

Similar to that, related to it actually, is the... Also, it's interesting. If you ever look at the Sunday Times rich list, the surprising thing about names on there is how few of them you've heard of. They are very, very often people who are well over 40 who control one or several substantial organizations that are doing significant things which you just never hear about anywhere and you never hear about the individuals or what motivates them or anything else. I'm pretty sure that the same class of power would exist across other sectors, in not-for-profit sectors as well. There will be individuals who are powerful and make a difference who just are not talked about very much and we don't really understand the networks that they have, and the interest that they have, and what motivates them, and all the rest of it, and people from whom one could learn a lot.

36:56

Is there any part to it where up, until that age, we are going about our work because we are motivated by things external to us, but as we get slightly older, the things that we're motivated by are purely internal so we're not seeking that external validation and we're not more public? Or is it an intense desire to be private and not seen to be flaunting wealth? Why is it that we don't have exposure to those types of people?

37:32

Yeah, I don't know because I don't know enough of these people and I've not asked them. But I suspect, in my own experience, there is a point at which you have ticked a lot of the boxes you had earlier on in your life and you've learned from that what gives you satisfaction and what doesn't, and then you don't really bother with fame anymore. And also you may have even been stung by... With visibility comes a form of accountability, and you might just not be very interested in being very accountable.

38:03

When you project out yourself, what route do you want to go down?

38:07

I essentially plan on doing exactly the job that I do today in 15, 20 years time. I can't imagine a job that I would enjoy more than this. I hope by then one or a handful of our projects might have been big successes, but I will still choose to work in the laboratory environment and in a tiny team.

38:29

I don't know whether this is something that you've consciously done, George, it may not be, but at each point when you make a decision, it seems like you are able to touch upon what the true George actually wants to do in that moment and make the decision. And some people have this very naturally and they follow their inclinations almost by accident and others find it a lot harder to understand and listen to their own inclinations. What's it been for you?

39:05

Yeah, so that's right, I do have a pretty clear view of what I want to do at every stage and I'm aware that lots of people don't, to the same extent. I had a very revealing discussion a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine from university. Now, at university, I ran the debating society and there were three presidents and two vice presidents in the same year. And of, so that community of five of us, I've obviously had the outcomes I've had, Greg Marsh created OneFineStay and has been wildly successful in that company. And I was with the third guy who's one of the top guys of his generation in private equity in London and I was discussing with the third guy, "Why is it that, of five us, three of us have had these journeys since?" And we both came to the view that there were two things, two attributes we had that are not universal, that had helped.

40:10

One is that when an opportunity came past on the conveyor belt, we were willing to leap on it with knowledge that there were reasons not to but also knowledge that the harm we'd be doing ourselves if we were making a mistake wasn't that big and probably correctable. And if you just do enough leaps over the course of your career and they broadly seem like they're in the right direction, then in the end of the career, you're going to end up in the place you wanted to get to so that's number one.

40:44

And the second was interesting that we observed that all three of us have been more... We were just very interested in the world and we always had been, we were the sorts of teenagers who are reading the news. And my friend was saying that he used to read the FT, not because he was so financial, though he did end up working in finance, because he was just interested in how the world works. And I was never particularly interested in finance stuff, but I read the Economist and I was interested in that and I'm sure Greg would've been the same as well.

41:16

And from an early age, we had had influences on our lives who had sponsored that intellectual interest, who had introduced us to the fact that the grown up topics, like how the government is doing or why there's a war in this other part of the world that isn't very well known, the topics that adults talk about regularly at dinner parties, 40 year olds and 30 year olds talk about this stuff all time, but most teenagers think it's a bit foreign and distant from them. And actually we observe that we had, and that probably helped us be able to think more broadly about the opportunities that were available to us in the rest of our life so we could spot those opportunities coming along the conveyor belt. And then as I mentioned, leap on them with a level of conviction, even though we weren't certain that they were going to work.

42:08

Can you cultivate that curiosity, if you haven't had exposure to it at an early age?

42:16

If you haven't had somebody else around you encouraging you to be interested, I don't think you've got a chance, sadly. I think unless you're exposed to the fact that it's interesting, you're just not going to find out until you're a lot older and that's a great tragedy. And of course we need schools and other environments to compensate for that when it's not available in the home.

42:39

What role has courage played for you?

42:41

A lot, actually. It's always easier to have courage when you haven't got that many other great options and so-

42:49

Said a very wise man.

42:53

... all the courage that I have demonstrated, or a lot of it, can be seen in that light. Yeah, as an undergraduate, I did my social networking website because it was more interesting than studying for my exams. In retrospect, I probably should have studied for my exams. As a mid-thirties professional starting Tide, actually my day job career, up to that point, had been fine but by no means amazing, and taking a risk with other people's money where the payoff was potentially enormous and extreme, it was a courageous thing to do because the non-courageous thing to do would go and just take a regular job somewhere. But it wasn't that courageous, given that it was mainly going to be other people's money and the payoff could be so big.

43:45

Having said all of that, no, courage is involved. There was definitely courage involved when I was running Tide and we had a fairly toxic board who didn't understand the importance of continuing to invest heavily in marketing product, which I, and my successor, both believed in very strongly, to essentially ignore the opinions of some venture capitalists on that board because they were wrong and fools. That did take genuine courage. Having said all of that, if you can be forward thinking about what happens if you don't demonstrate the courage, the place you end up in if you don't utilize the courage is potentially a worse place in the medium to long term than if you do excise courage, then it's pretty easy to make decisions that would be branded as courageous by other people.

44:50

It's almost like you're taking something emotional there, but breaking it down into risk assessment, just, "Is it actually as risky as you think it is to make this decision in the moment?"

45:01

Yeah. I think a really helpful framework, as you know, is Bezos' one about reversible versus un-reversible decisions. Actually, he's got two that are helpful, it's that and there's the-

45:14

Regret minimization framework.

45:15

Regret minimization. Yes, absolutely. If you apply both of those frameworks, then I think any decision that might get badged as courageous actually can be made just on purely logical grounds.

45:29

Yeah, that's fascinating. It's almost a way of giving yourself courage if you don't have it. Do you think that's the case in your circumstance where there's times where you have wanted that inbuilt courage and perhaps lacked it but found the logic? It strikes me that that must have been the case otherwise you wouldn't have found the Bezos logical approach to it.

45:55

Actually, I read about Bezos after I started behaving this way. So [inaudible 00:48:02] so Bezos gives me useful language to talk to other people about it. But no, I was already operating that way. I think I've always been quite long term, quite forward looking and I have enough intellectual self confidence that if I'm really quite sure that doing a thing would be counterproductive, then I will not do that thing if it's going to be counterproductive in the long term, even if it means that I will suffer difficulty in the short term.

46:39

And I have had it said to me as well, and I think this is true, actually, it's been pointed out to me that I had a pretty stable family upbringing. Well, although actually my dad did struggle professionally, certainly in the later years of his life. There was never any risk that if I completely screwed up and I was broke and all the rest of it and homeless, I could always go back to my parents. They would always feed me. And not everyone has that privilege. When you do know that you've got that, when you're highly aware that however bad it is, it's not going to be that bad and it's solvable, it's easier to have courage than I think people for whom... Particularly who have got dependents as well. I never, during Tide, had any dependents that I had to worry about. So the worst case wasn't going to be that bad and that makes it a lot easier to demonstrate what would be called courage.

47:37

Can I share a confession with you and see what your observation is?

47:41

Of course.

47:43

I heard someone talking the other day about the ego and they said that there are two ways that your ego can get in the way. One is classic, it's too big and it becomes your enemy and your downfall. But the other is, if you don't have enough of it. Because if you focus so much on trying to self develop and be better and really squash your ego out of something, you begin to lose the sense of yourself and the confidence. And we all spend so much time trying to be productive and work on ourselves and constantly are self critical that at times it can border on a self sabotage where we maybe plonk that ego too far down.

48:28

That makes perfect sense to me. I agree. Actually, I feel quite strongly about this topic. That I occasionally hear people who are younger than me banging on about growth mindset. And I think it's a terrifying concept because it seems to be rooted in the assumption that you're not good enough already and that you can't be. And the truth is while it is accurate that age 17, I was not good enough at literally anything that would make me a useful, productive human, over time I have got a bit better at some things, and I'm good enough at some things. And I could either spend the rest of my life stressing about that and trying to push even further, or I can just bank what I've got. And I think we'd all be happier if we were willing to bank what we got.

49:20

The obvious example that's always talked about is the Instagram mindset of people endlessly exposing their vanity as they encourage others to feel inadequate. None of that is a valuable thing to do so. Yeah, I'm sure it's correct. I'm not sure ego is quite the word I would use for it, but certainly that level of comfort that you are already the... Well, actually maybe the right way to put it is just to accurately have a sense of your own capabilities and which ones do you really care about getting better at, and being comfortable that you are already good enough at the things you want to be good enough at, is a great comfort to have.

50:13

To finish, can I take some of that and apply it to your day to day work? When was the first time that you think you achieved some kind of mastery at work where you are at that point at which you've got that level of that confidence to apply?

50:34

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. The point at which I developed the mastery was quite different to the point when I knew that I had the mastery, and they were many years apart. So when I was building up Tide, much of the experience I was having, in all the different things that you have to do in building a company like that, everyone else wrongly assumed was new to me because I'd not done a major venture backed startup before. But the truth is actually, many years before, I had a very unsuccessful retail eCommerce business. And at that time I'd been reading all the blogs and all rest of it and absorbing information from the luminaries. And I had enough to chew on in that unsuccessful business to more deeply understand what made companies work, which meant that actually my execution in Tide was better than I realized and better than many other stakeholders in the company I think probably would've assumed would've been going on from a first time founder.

51:53

When our little group of the early team from Tide meet, we all sometimes talk about how we made very few major mistakes in those early years but it didn't feel like that at the time. We were all terrified that we were getting it really, really wrong. We all knew we were winging it and it's surprising what high proportion of the decisions we made were made in the right way. Even though often there were voices off telling us to do other things or even voices in the team telling us to do other things. So the truth is the point at which I learned the skills was when I was running the unsuccessful retail business five years previously. But the point at which I could look back and say, "No, I really do have these skills," was after I'd been running Tide for a few years and things had really come together.

53:50

Wow. And I'm assuming, and I think this is correct actually, that you didn't know that you had acquired that type of mastery until it was far down the line, and there may be people listening to this who have acquired it, but just don't realize that they have because in some way they haven't had the external validation or the course of time to be able to reflect and know that it was right.

53:13

I'm certain that's right. Also, and worth mentioning as well, that even the people who would seem, to an outsider's lens, to be the absolute masters in any context, when you work with them really, really close up, you realize they're still winging it too and they would disagree with each other on lots of questions. And they're not that good. So the curve of expertise seems incredibly steep, but at some point it levels off and with much, much more experience, you don't get that much better and you can be very, very celebrated without necessarily being that much better than you were with a lot less experience. Yeah, and any stages before that, you can feel like these people must be so much more remarkably capable and all rest of it than you, but actually, I don't think that is always true. By the way, I've met quite a lot of very successful entrepreneurs who've had one win and who I think are idiots. And that does in fact... And the fear would be that I might be one of them, hopefully I'm not, we'll see. I need to prove that I'm not. It's not proven yet. But it is definitely not the case that people who've had a big win in one sector one time have suddenly become omniscient on all other topics.

54:48

Ever since I sent you that cold email ages ago, you have been nothing but kind and generous. And I'm so grateful that you've taken the time out to share your story, George.

54:57

Not at all. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity. I also owed you a favor for the recent bit of hiring that we did. And it's been great to watch as your own activities have flowered so magnificently.