An entrepreneurial rollercoaster - Jeremy Hindle

00:00

After being burnt out after that for like a year-ish, nine months, I guess, I was just living in Cambridge, hanging out with my girlfriend at the time. Looking after her. Basically one day she was like, "Dude, you need to get another job. You're going crazy." I was just building loads of are crappy things in the house. Because I didn't stop doing stuff. I just didn't want to work with anyone. Eventually she was like, "Jeremy, you got to find a co-founder."

00:23

Nick, my co-founder for Head Start got in touch with me. Young kid at Oxford still, in his second year. Goes, "Hey, I want to build an app which helps students apply for graduate schemes. One application for all the grad schemes."

00:38

If your career can be arrived as a rollercoaster, what sticks out to you as the moment where you've reached the top, and you're going down, and you feel it.

00:52

I think I'm still climbing, at that point. I think I'm still on my way up. Maybe I've done the first downhill bit on the rollercoaster, but one's still probably coming. And therefore the steepest climb is still happening, is probably the way to put it. I think I've got better at managing the attrition required to get to your next momentum based fun part, I suppose, is the way to look at it. And so I can kind of balance it a little bit more effectively than I could when I was a younger entrepreneur.

01:23

It's always up. If I was going to describe the experience for an ambitious entrepreneur, and particularly, and this is why I don't think entrepreneur or being a startup founder is for everyone, is that the rollercoaster analogy doesn't really work unless the roller coaster doesn't end, and it has a net upwards trend. So basically, even though you have to do the really, really hard climb and then you do your dissent, the dissent never goes back to the same level as where you were before. And then you're just going to do another climb, and that baseline level just continues to increase. At least that's how it feels for me. I'm at a point in my career now where I could probably walk into just about any technical role and be paid bonkers salaries, and have options in large companies, and probably even do government level work and board work if I really wanted to. But as I said, I'm still an entrepreneur.

02:18

So as far as I'm concerned, I'm just going to climb the next hill. I imagine the only time that that really stops is when you're kind of ... And even then it doesn't really stop. If you look at somebody like Musk, who you would argue is basically, you could argue, the best entrepreneur ever. He's definitely done the broadest range of things and had the largest impact in the most resistive industries to change, whether that's oil and gas or banking with PayPal and X and all that kind of thing. Yet, he's definitely still climbing. He's still on an uphill battle.

02:48

There's definitely not a day where he goes in and he's like, "Yeah, things are just flowing." He's still fighting every day, whether it's trying to make it so that his rockets are cheaper to work, or so they don't explode, or whether it's fighting with legislation with the oil and gas industry or traditional motor companies, or Biden basically not giving Tesla any respect and saying that the US has done nothing for EVs in the last few days, and saying China's done everything. Which they do have 46% of all the EVs in the world. But that's definitely not Musk's fault. That's because they've taken a lot of the technology, which he open sourced. All the US car manufacturers just did nothing. The US car manufacturers have been slow to move, and China wasn't. They basically went, "Oh cool, thanks Tesla. We'll build almost half of all electric vehicles. Thanks." So it's still uphill.

03:45

What was that first downhill moment for you?

03:48

For me?

03:49

Yeah. And then you said ... I'd love to dig into the attrition part and what happened afterward.

03:55

The first downhill moment for me, the first free wheel on the bicycle for me was definitely after finding my first job. I've had a privileged background. I've had great education. My parents sacrificed a lot to put me through that education. And because of that, I've had opportunities which a lot of people are not afforded. I went to university, I went and did neuroscience at uni. That went great. I went to one of the best unis in the world for doing neuroscience, which is Nottingham, because they invented FMRI. Brain scanning. So they obviously have crazy funding, and therefore great lecturers because they want to do their research there.

04:31

After that I realized I didn't want to be a doctor. I wanted to be a brain surgeon. And I realized during that period of time, for a whole bunch of reasons, I didn't want to be a doctor anymore. And what happened was is that I came out and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I think that's super common for people who come out of university, particularly now. And I think that, as you said, no one really knows what a job entails. And what that means is everyone pretends to be ... We did a lot of work about this at Head Start, but that's skipping things a bit. Everyone looks very similar, not necessarily because they are similar, but it's because everyone's trying to be what they think the company wants them to be. And therefore, they take little bits of that tiny information and go, "Hey, this is me, and I want to get into this company. And this is how I get into that company."

05:17

Most of these companies use filtering mechanisms, which are pretty prescribed. And what that meant for me is, I've got my degree in neuroscience, nowadays you can walk into just about any job. But back then neuroscience wasn't cool. It wasn't like, "Oh you've got a neuroscience degree, you can do whatever job you want." Which you can now pretty much because of all happened with deep mind and all the high levels of publicity around great neuroscience founders being able to do whatever they want to do.

05:40

But I struggled. I couldn't get a job. I was under pressure from my parents who didn't really understand. They were like, "Just go back to uni. Why don't you actually still become a doctor? Be a lawyer?" My parents, obviously, at that time were very concerned for what I was doing. And for me, I saw that as them hassling me, and obviously that doesn't result in good conversations. I understand it now, but I didn't then. And I wanted to work in the computer games industry, and I also wanted to work in advertising.

06:13

Computer games industry, I didn't do a programming degree, so it wasn't super easy to get in. But I was running one of the world's largest Minecraft communities at that point, which I built while I was at uni. I had 36,000 weekly active users. People were playing, on average, more than nine hours a day. And it's called Let's Play Minecraft, and I run a bunch of servers for some of the biggest YouTubers in the world at that point, who did Let's Play series. We were one of the top rated servers in the world, and waiting list to get in was over a year. I probably got zero replies from companies. I applied to Accenture, Accenture didn't even reply. I applied to every single game studio in the UK. Didn't get replies. I got one reply from natural motion, and then eventually they didn't hire me. And in advertising, I didn't even get interviews. Just nothing. I applied to JWT, I applied to WPP. I applied to all of these companies. And I remember for my JWT application, I actually included a whole description of how Facebook social graph, which they used for all their targeted advertising, this was obviously before that existed. I'm an old guy now. And I wrote a basic version of how that would work conceptually, with nodes and influence patterns about who you would target advertising to, based on interactions online, and exactly how to implement it, and they didn't even reply. That was my write anything you want question at the end. I did a three page example of how the whole system would work and how you would record the information, and how you would get buy-in from third party sites so that you could collect the data. And good that I didn't create that, otherwise everyone would hate me like they hate Mark.

07:55

So I couldn't get a job, and eventually I got a job at a company called Language Lab. And I got it through Twitter. It was completely circumstantial. I got it through a guy who used to do wedding videos for people in Second Life, recording it in a 3D camera. And he said, "There's a company that I've done contract work for or looking for somebody to come and build some computers in their office. Physical hardware stuff. And they're looking to pay X for it. Not much. Is there anyone who wants to do it?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure. I'll do it." I was desperate for cash at that point. I really just wanted a job. Went in and did that work for them, and obviously made a really good impression and got offered an engineering job there. And that was my first ever engineering job.

08:44

And I ended up, there, becoming head of IT within one year, and I led development on their new platform. They're now called Immerse Learning and they're awesome. They've taken it much [inaudible 00:08:56] company now than it was back then, and built ... We were building VR stuff with the Oculus DK-1. The first development kit, building sort of things for Tenge, Chevron Oil, Donata, Air France. And what Language Lab did originally was is that they trained people to speak English. They had an English city, which they paid people full time to live in, and speak English to everyone. And so basically you would rent to live in the city. It was so ahead of its time. It was like Rosetta Stone, but you had a whole city. You wanted to go shopping? You actually went shopping. You have a real job. You go and do your job.

09:32

And I think for me, the first flywheel effect for me was probably there. Incredibly underpaid, given what I was contributing, but they were a starter in themselves and they had their own issues. And I understand that a lot better now than I did back then. But yeah, I think that was the first flywheel effect. I got to meet my mentor, David Helgason, when I was doing research on what game engine to use to move away from Second Life, because there were a whole bunch of issues with Second Life and all the adult content in it, when-

10:03

There were a whole bunch of issues with Second Life and all the adult content in it. When you're training like a professional corporation, you can't have that kind of content one click away from people when they're using the platform. And for me, I think that was probably the first flywheel was, "Hey, I actually finally got a real job which I'm being paid for in the thing which I love doing. And I'm really good at."

10:28

How did that transition to an entrepreneurial journey?

10:32

Complicated in that I've always loved just building stuff, whether it was my Minecraft community or whether it was big guilds for World of War Craft before that or whether it was sculpture or things like that, which I've been very lucky to have resources to be able to do when I was a bit younger. I don't see programming, for example, as a mathematical thing. I see it as a creative process. And yes, you need to be able to execute with the maths and the logic. But fundamentally the building a really great product, it's a creative process. It's an empathetic process. You need to understand people. And I think that's something which I've been lucky, I suppose, to have got. I was very ill when I was younger and I think that I was in hospital for multiple times with cancer, and I think that massively affect my ability to understand people, just because you're kind of forced to look at the world very differently when you have those type of experiences, especially when you're young.

11:27

How did the journey go into entrepreneurial stuff? I guess I was kind of entrepreneurial in my approach to things before I even started working. I never really prescribed to traditional syllabuses. I'm a huge advocate these days of personalized education because I just don't think that syllabuses work super effectively for a large number of people. I still think it works for the majority. I just don't think it works for a set number of people. And those people often have incredibly high value adds to society. Obviously I'm biased. So when did it come entrepreneurial? Weirdly I feel like I was probably entrepreneurial before I even thought about being an entrepreneur. And then after that, I became an entrepreneur because I got to work on a, through circumstance, pure, chance, I fixed a Dropbox sinking issue for a private equity firm, real estate equity firm called Round Hill Capital.

12:27

And how did you find that? How did you get involved in that?

12:30

I was sleeping on the sofa of a friend's house and he was a intern analyst there.

12:36

Right.

12:36

And he basically said, "Our files on Dropbox keep getting deleted." And he was like," I'll ask them and say like, 'Hey, Jeremy, I'll fix it. He's like really good with computers.'" And I went into their office and ... this is how circumstantial and lucky things are. I just say lucky and I do believe that there's a huge amount of luck involved, but you have to be ready for when that luck happens. And so what happened with this was they were having this syncing Dropbox issue. This is before Dropbox had a proper business offering. It was like right when they started implementing Teams, like backing up files, going back to previous versions and stuff wasn't implemented yet. If you deleted a file, it was gone and you had to phone them and be like, "Oh, can you restore it," kind of thing. So they were constantly trying to sort thing out.

13:19

And I walked in, and this is kind of where my privilege, I think, gave me luck. And that is that I was very confident. I didn't feel uncomfortable walking to the executive part of the building, where all of the partners of this firm were in their glass boxes with their own private offices. I was chatting with a partner of the firm very casually because I'm like, "Who the hell is this guy?" I'm arrogant, probably not a very nice person to be quite frank. And I walked in, so I felt very, very comfortable. And I just noticed when one of the partners was in their office and they were leaving ... I was brought in by one of the other partners, the technical one saying, "Hey, that Jeremy's going to have a look at these things and he wants to work out what's going wrong. Do you mind if he uses your office?" And the partner got up and unplugged his hard drives and picks his laptop off and walks out.

14:03

And I just went, "Excuse me, where are your Dropbox files saved?" And he was like, "Oh, they're on my hard drive." I was like, "You're deleting all the files. You're unplugging that drive and the Dropbox application is detecting that as being deleted every time. It might be that." And then that's literally what it was. What was happening is all of the staff were having all of their files saved on external drives. So whenever they didn't safely remove their hardware, they were just deleting all the files. And that was literally it. But the only reason why I felt comfortable enough to point that out, one, was because I wanted to go into the partner offices in the first place and I assumed that it was probably something there. And two, I had the gumption and also responded to me probably differently to somebody who felt comfortable just calling them out like that. Rather than being checking and doing a report and like submitting it, they just did it.

14:50

And yeah, I think that's ... and after that, they said the technical partner there was probably way too trusting, to be super honest. And this was again, and was like, "Yeah, we just did a 300 plus million investment in a real estate equity project called Needo Student Living." They had like a couple of skyscrapers and spittle fields and Kings Cross and Notting Hill. "And yeah, we want to make them the most technologically advanced and luxurious student accommodation in the world. It's for international students who can't get into university digs. And yeah, we're looking for a lead technical consultant," basically. And he's like, "You should apply for it." And I was like, "Okay." And I applied for it.

15:31

And again, this is stuff I've probably looked back and I've learned now is that I got into a six figure salary immediately with them working as a consultant. They helped me set up a company so that they could pay me properly. I started working on that project. What I realize now is that that project was sold for a massive profit, huge profit five years later, to Gray Star. It's now called Chapter, if you see it around the place. And they bought all of the infrastructure and the tech and stuff, which I obviously worked on. And I realize now that normally when you do a consulting deal of that scale, they're selling something for like a couple hundred million profit kind of thing in five years, you take a percentage cut of the profit with the return, and that's how you make a huge amount of money.

16:16

And what I think happened is the other consultant on the project, I don't know this, this is my guess, is that I think the reason they went with me was just I was cheap. I think it was because I was super excited to work incredibly hard for a six figure salary, whereas the people who they would otherwise be working with in Accenture or a Bain or any other large technical consultancy firm would be five times that base cost plus a percentage of any profits.

16:39

It's funny how you look back on it and on the one hand you think, "I could have done so much more."

16:44

Oh, I don't care.

16:44

But on the other, it's like, "Well, ... "

16:46

It changed my career, gave me so much credibility. I was in the FT. I still get messages on LinkedIn about people asking me to work on their real estate equity investments and I haven't done real estate since then. And Round Hill obviously did incredibly well and now is a very all know name and real estate equity. Back then, they were a lot smaller. This was, as far as I'm aware, one of their biggest ever deals at the beginning. I'm sure they're doing much bigger stuff now. I haven't stayed in touch.

17:11

And I'm pretty sure it's because the other technical consultant who, who is also a great mentor to me, unknowingly probably. But he taught me a lot about working with people who aren't self-motivated on what they're working on, so people who are doing jobs which they don't really like, or they have to do. And it's something that I'd never really done. I'd been stubborn and I'd always only done things that I really wanted to do. And he taught me a lot about working with people like that and making sure they're happy and making sure they're motivated. And even if their job's not exactly what they want to do, it's not their dream job, they're doing it because of other life circumstances. He also taught me a lot about things which I now know is building up retention and things. His policy was, we need to make sure that every student who stays has 10 best friends by the end of their first year so they can't move out and live together.

17:57

Like the real world version of 14 friends.

18:00

Exactly. He was like, "Jeremy, what can we build? I built matching algorithms. People shared rooms with people with some of their music tastes. This is when Last FM was the way to find that information out. We did personality tests. We did Tinder type matching and put people who were the most popular with the least popular people who they said they liked to minimize ghettoism. We ran cross events between people with similar interests like skating and different types of music and basketball and rap. And those are colabs and had leaderboards for social entertainment, things like table tennis leaderboards. And you could ask people in the building to come play with you. And checking in guests, because you're not allowed to have people stay with you for too many times because otherwise people get one room and two people stay there. And redoing the whole check-in system so it can be private because guys or girls go out to night clubs and they don't want to spend 20 minutes checking somebody in and getting all their IDs done and it's embarrassing because they want to go have fun. And we built a way for them to do that on their camera phone and stuff like that that it could be pre-approved. So all they had to do was go and show their ID and then walk in. And so they could do it in the cab on the way home.

19:07

Like stuff like that. We did some really cool stuff with PayPal and people being able to put anything on their bill at the end of the month with their parents would pay for it. It was a luxury student accommodation, would point that one out.

19:16

What happens around the next corner of the rollercoaster?

19:19

So this is why, so you're kind of starting to free wheel. In fact, it's kind of weird because I kind of, before the freewheeling actually happened, it was really fun. I just loved it and learned so much. Then I got what I thought was my dream, which was I got offered to start my own computer games company.

19:33

How do you get offered to start your own ... ?

19:35

Chairman of the board of Language Lab, and I had done a little bit of help work for him on the weekends, kind of helping him with a game that he was working on in his free time with an independent person in the Second Life community. And I was kind of checking the code and doing things like that. And he kind of came to me. And in hindsight, was a really crap offer. But at the time was incredibly exciting to me. I was such a naive idiot back in the day. It's kind of like equity split was almost opposite of what it should have been, basically, based on how ...

20:03

Equity split was almost opposite of what it should have been, basically, based on how investment would probably work these days. But from my standpoint, I was like, "Holy crap. I get to have my own computer games company, this is literally what I want. This is my dream." He put forward a little bit of money, put an office in space, did all the stuff which now I know is not actually that hard to do. Like creating the organization, setting up the policies, doing a bit of legal work. And I hired a bunch of students out of Goldsmith Uni and we trained them up and we started making a sandbox computer game called UemeU and the company was called Omnigon Games. And that was the next attrition, was building a computer games company and not knowing actually how to run a company properly and not knowing how to do legals at board level. Not knowing... Under hiring. Definitely should have hired more executive teams. I was the CEO, Lead Developer, CFO, CDO. I did all of the C-suite jobs.

20:51

I didn't have that type of mentorship at the point in time to teach me how to do it otherwise. And I was lucky, I'm very capable so I can do all of those jobs. But obviously if I'm doing all of those things, I'm not doing any of them to my best of ability. I should have probably just focused on leading and making the game, like Head of Game or Head of Product, and then hired somebody to do the executive related stuff or the marketing related stuff. Anyway, Jagex Games Studios invested in us. We moved into a building, which is big enough for 400 employees and there was only seven of us in the corner of this old building that Jagex wasn't using anymore because they'd moved to a new building in the same science park in Cambridge.

21:27

And that was the next attrition period, was trying to build that company up. Competing with Sony Online Entertainment at that point with EverQuest Next, Garry's Mod was the existing one. Roblox was in its infancy back then. And we were a direct competitor of that. Yeah, basically just making a whole bunch of mistakes as a founder. Yeah, mostly my biggest mistake was not hiring enough senior members of the team.

21:48

And what happened?

21:48

We got to launch and we got green lit. So the game was going to be released. We were in alpha... Well beta, it was actually a pretty stable game, very popular. We had a lot of early access players. And we got caught up because of a whole bunch of things. And again, this definitely wouldn't have happened if I understood what I know now. We got caught up in a whole bunch of board level politics at Jagex to be quite frank, to do with a transformer's MMO, which got released then canceled. And there were a whole bunch of things which went on there. And then in the-

22:26

What does that mean?

22:27

So basically Jagex raised a bunch of money... I'm going to leave out a lot of details because of a whole bunch of reasons, I don't want to name specific names. But Jagex raised a whole bunch of money, like a lot of money to buy the licensing rights to make a transformer's MMO from Hasbro. So they raised money specifically to do that. Jagex, by the way, for those who don't know, one of the largest independent private game studios in the UK ever, they made RuneScape. They're still incredibly powerful, great studio and they're under new leadership now and they're great, for the record. So if you are looking for jobs in the games industry, Jagex is still good. So don't let this affect your opinions on that.

23:04

Basically they were supposed to release the game in two to three years, I think. And they basically remade the game almost three times with three separate teams and it kept being too crap. And then eventually they made the final version with Unity 3d, which was one of the reasons why I think they invested in Omnigon games actually was because I was a very, very strong Unity 3d developer. So I think they wanted me to come in and help them with some of their networking issues. Because that was something that UemeU had incredibly good networking. We worked with Ericsson actually on partnership with that, we were using Erlang.

23:40

Yeah, basically the game was so bad, Hasbro told them to refund every single pre-order and told them that they couldn't release the game. And told them that they couldn't have the license anymore after seven years. So you've got to think about that. That's seven years worth of salaries, no game, licensing fee gone. And they took a bunch of money in in order to be able to do that. So bunch of politics at board level about whose fault it was, lots of finger pointing. Their games weren't performing... None of their games other than the RuneScape were performing particularly well at the time. In fact our game was actually one of the better performing and more exciting things in their portfolio at that time. And the interim management, one of the interim people on the board, tried to strong arm me, and basically made the business completely not worth me doing. And so I helped the existing team get other jobs in the industry as well as I possibly could. And shut down the company, unfortunately. Yeah, so there's that uphill battle for you.

24:42

Yeah, where does YC come into this?

24:45

After being burnt out after that for like a year ish, nine months I guess. I was just living in Cambridge, hanging out with my girlfriend at the time, looking after her, she was a vet. Basically one day she was like, "Dude, you need to get another job. You're going crazy." I was just building loads of crappy things in the house. Because I didn't stop doing stuff, I just didn't want to work with anyone. I didn't want to be put in a situation where I was being forced to do something which was outside of my control. And I had a load of trust issues, in business anyway. And eventually she was like, "Jeremy, you got to find a co-founder." And I was like, "Okay." And obviously it wasn't as easy as me just saying okay. But yeah, I went out to do it and posted on Facebook's London startups group and was like, " I'm a really good technical founder. I'm looking for my next thing."

25:35

And obviously, back then there was even less technical expertise at the founder level back then. And I think it would be unreasonable for me to say that I probably got hundreds of inbound messages from people and scammers, a lot of them to be entirely honest, and crap businesses. But eventually Nick, my co-founder for Headstart got in touch with me, young kid at Oxford still, in his second year. He goes, "Hey, I want to build an app which helps students apply for graduate schemes, like one application for all the grad schemes." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And I could sympathize with how difficult and annoying it was to get a job after uni. I could sympathize with all that. So I immediately understood the pain point. Yeah, after some negotiation we decided to create Headstart and Headstart was originally a career companion.

26:21

And what we would do is that we would teach people. We would learn basically who gets hired at companies over time. And then we would identify what traits those individuals had and what things they did. And then we would let people say what they wanted to do whilst they were going to university, whilst educating them on what those jobs actually entailed. And tell them what they needed to do in order to get jobs there, based on who actually got hired previously. And that was how Headstart started. Obviously Headstart eventually became an applicant matching system, which was a coin that we were phrasing when we came along. Which was like an ATS, but with advanced matching algorithms for roles. And giving you suitability scores for candidates. And now its being used by Accenture and the Ministry of Defense.

27:05

But yeah, that was how that started. Then you're just on the startup journey again, as I described, you're on that next vertical hill. And we did the career companion for... Gosh, a year and a half maybe, applied to YC, didn't get in. We were growing fast. We were growing faster than, I don't know if you remember Tilt? But we were growing just as fast as Tilt, month on month, organic growth. Didn't really know how to do digital marketing properly. We had an ambassador program which was incredibly successful. Didn't get into YC, they just said, no. We didn't really quite know why. But one day Nick and I were chatting and we were both thinking about why didn't we get in? We're doing so well. We're smashing market acquisition. We've got Vodafone, BP, L'Oreal, were all customers of ours, RBS, Smiths, which is like a space tech hardware company. We had all of these like really great customers, paying, how on earth can we not get in?

28:06

What we realized was is that, the only reason why we were being so successful was because we understood the UK pain point so much. We understood universities. Nick was still at uni, he was popular. He could get people to engage with us. But the part which didn't work, that wouldn't work in America. They have different schemes. We couldn't do that in Europe either. And so YC would've looked at us and just been like, "Yeah great, you've got the UK market. You can't scale your business. It's just not happening." And so we realized, well what happens, very naively for the record, incredibly naively. We were like, well why don't we just become the system that companies use to review candidates? Because then every single time somebody applies, they can create a Headstart account. And then if they get rejected, we can find them a job somewhere else and recommend them to other companies kind of like a clearing process. So like university clearing, but for graduate jobs.

28:53

So we ended up just deciding one day that we were going to build an applicant tracking system basically. And we called it an applicant matching system, because you want to differentiate yourself. And to be entirely honest at the time, and even now, very different process compared to traditional ATSs like Taleo or even Greenhouse and things like that. And it's much more proactive and also measures diversity and inclusion metrics for each part of your assessment process and gives you feedback so that you can hire more fairly.

29:21

And that's what we eventually became. We became a diverse, new inclusion, recruitment platform, applicant matching system. And yeah, we applied to, YC and we got in and it went really, really well. Got a really strong valuation coming out of demo day, probably valued too highly to be frank. In hindsight, we probably took too high a valuation than we should have done. And Headstart's plodding along. We definitely didn't enjoy the fact that most of our customers who use us use us for graduate schemes and most graduate schemes were shut down during the pandemic. So I'm kind of sitting here quietly on the board, watching the company not grow, which is making me feel very uncomfortable. Hopefully this year will be a bit different.

30:02

It's making me feel very uncomfortable. Hopefully this year will be a bit different, but we're most valuable when everyone looks the same and the companies are trying to differentiate between which students are a better complimentary fit for their org.

30:15

And you've gone on to do some more great things, like Integrity. I'd like to touch on some of the lessons that you've picked up along the way. There was one thing I think that really came out of what you've just ran through, was that you have lots of fingers in lots of different pies, and I wonder whether you do that on purpose.

30:40

Until Integrity, I didn't have fingers in lots of pies, definitely not. Now I do, but all the way through, whether it was getting a job at Language Lab, or working on my projects at Nido, Round Hill Capital, or then working on Headstart, I didn't really have fingers in lots of pies. I was wholly focused on those businesses. At Headstart I stayed in the office once for 13 days, 14 days without going home. I slept on the floor. Went down and showered in the morning, ordered probably this T-shirt, Amazon basics like black T-shirts every day, instead of going out during certain periods of time, particularly when we went live with Accenture, that was stressful. I don't think I did. I think I've always been a very curious person. I'm always interested in lots of things, so I've always learned about tech. I know a lot about quantum computing. I understand all of the problems with crypto and things like that.

31:36

But that doesn't mean I'm focused on it. It just means that I've got an inquisitive mind, which means at the end of something, I have a lot of opportunities to attack the next new thing, whether that's no-js in 2010, or whether that's Go lang-45, four years ago, when Go 1.0, came out or whether that's Rust in the last couple of years. It's mostly just because I read a lot. And a lot of people talk about all the books they read and they love all of the perfect guides written by famous founders. I don't read that. I read thousands of RSS feeds all the time. Google Reader massively affected my productivity.

32:20

I had to find an alternative and I never really found those good alternatives as Google Reader but back in those days, I was reading thousands of websites every day in a syndicated format. And it just gives you a really good feeling of what things there are. And then you apply that to the one goal that you're focusing on, whether that's your startup or your career or whatever that is at that point in time. After finishing Headstart, what I realized was I had a core understanding that my core motivation, I understood what makes me happiest a little bit better. So when I left school, I thought I just wanted to work in computer games, so Language Lab was really cool. I wanted to be an engineer. And I got to do all my computer games company and all that kind of thing. And then when I did Headstart, I was excited about doing that.

33:04

I loved building my team, but what I realized during Headstart was the thing which I care about the most is building an amazing team. It's when an engineer and your team turns around to you and they say like, "You changed my life because I've learned all of these things, which I never would have learned." And they say, thank you. And I can turn around and say, "Thank you very much. You've contributed to our company so much. You're an unbelievable asset to this organization. And we couldn't have done it without you." But to me, it's creating those teams, which is the thing which really makes me happy. So with Integrity, the reason why I ended up co-founding these three companies first inside of Integrity, which is our beta batch at the moment, I realized that the thing which I enjoy the most is building amazing technical teams.

33:45

It's what makes me tick. It's helping somebody who would otherwise not have that opportunity and then them becoming amazing and turning around saying, "Thank you. I couldn't have done it without you." I'm not altruistic. I need them to say thank you. If they don't say thank you, sucks. That's one of the reasons why I couldn't be a doctor by the way, because people don't say thank you to their doctors enough these days, particularly in the NHS.

34:06

I knew that I have not got enough intrinsic motivation to help people without them being grateful for it at a very young age. And Integrity was a way that I could do that. That's why the goals with Integrity is to have an entrepreneurial engineering institute attached to an incubator. And the idea is to be able to supply the best engineering talent free to all of the startups, which are going through that incubator, which also does all the other things. It's to get rid of that, we want to train the best first junior hire, the best first senior hire and teach them how to run in startups because it's very different to working in a big business.

34:44

Do you feel closer to your best work now than you did five years ago?

34:49

No. No. I'm proud of it. Don't get me wrong, I still look back at some of the code that we wrote for UemeU and the networking code back then and I was like, "Bloody hell, how did I do that?" I'm proud of it, but sentiment wise, no, I think I care about my teams. I feel way more attached with... At Headstart, we had an engineer called Luca Palmieri and he came in as a junior head of machine learning, a scrappier start, you're looking for a really talented person to take a senior year position and lots of responsibility and hope that they can handle it. He came straight out of university and very, very accomplished engineer. And I remember saying to him, "Yep, you're a great, super good python engineer. You can do incredible algorithms and you're doing super amounts value. But in the future, when we want to rewrite this, we're probably going to use Rust, not now, but in two, three years time, if we want to do the super well, we don't want to rewrite this in C++. We want to write it in Rust." And this is super early days for Rust. And I was like, "If you want to be the best in a few years time, you learn this." And the thing is that like Luca is now wrote one of the best Rust books called Zero to Production. And he's one of the most senior engineers at TrueLayer, which I don't know whether you're aware, but it's the open banking API infrastructure. And he's probably one of the best Rust developers in the world. When you ask me like, am I proud of my work?

36:12

I guess if you argue that that's my work, even though they did 99% of it, because it's their effort, it's their goal of what they want to become, I guess if you describe building the teams and seeing those people do really well in those careers as my work, yeah. But it doesn't have to be over time. It's purely to do with those individuals achieving things, which it sounds ridiculous, but it's like being proud, proud of them.

36:39

I don't think too many people pursue their best work through others. And I think the world's at a better place because you enable that. Thanks for running me through your story, Jeremy.