Tell me about your vision.
So it's actually over 30 years ago,
I worked for the largest company in South Africa
called Anglo American, which was a massive mining house.
And I was an engineer, I was a young engineer
and very impressionable.
And I got to fly on the corporate jet,
which you don't really get to do at 22 for most people.
And I was on the corporate jet, my very first trip
and I was in a T-shirt, I was an engineer,
I was flying to a mine site, T-shirt, jeans,
smart shoes, but boots in my bag.
All my fellow travelers arrived,
being dropped off by their chauffeurs
and they were all in suits, three-piece suits,
smart shoes and I thought, well, I was a bit out of it,
but got on the plane, I sat right at the back.
And I was sitting there contemplating this flight
because all these people were so much more senior
in the organization than I was,
but yet they greeted me like an equal
when we got on the plane,
wanted to know what I was doing there.
In the head office where I worked,
I was a certain level engineer,
which meant I parked at the third parking lot
away from the office.
If I was one level higher,
I would have parked in the second parking lot.
That's how hierarchical the business was.
So that's the backstory.
We get on the plane, plane takes off,
the pilot turns around and says,
okay, you can move around now.
And on the floor was an ice box on the plane.
There was no service on the plane.
So I figured I'm the youngest, most junior.
I got up, I opened the ice box
and I wanted to serve drinks to my fellow travelers.
I got a tap on the shoulder
and the joke I actually tell on stage
is that I'm glad it was from one of the directors
of the company, it wasn't from the hand of God
because I was at 40,000 feet.
Okay, so I didn't want to...
So the director turned around to me
and he said, please don't do that.
And I said, hey, I'm young and whatever,
I'm happy to do it.
He said, no, in our planes,
the most senior person serves the drinks.
Now you think about that from this hierarchical situation
where you were like literally,
you ate in this canteen, not that canteen
because of your status in the organization.
That's where my interest in culture started,
30 plus years ago,
because I said if a company that was that structured
could turn everything on its head
in the confines of its plane, there was hope.
And yes, over the years I built businesses.
Then I left Anglo-American, went to business school,
started my own businesses
and I listed my first business in 1996
on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in education business.
Went off to Inventure Capital for a number of years,
came to Australia, started another business in 2001.
But all through that, I've tried to create this culture,
this culture of togetherness,
of understanding the vision of where we're going.
It all came together 11 years ago
when I was training for a marathon
and I had two cardiac stents.
I almost didn't have a heart attack,
I just had two stents.
I had blockages.
But that really focused me on what I wanna do
and I wanted to share that vision with the world.
I wanted to share that vision of how do you create
these forward looking, amazing cultures
where everybody buys into the values and purpose.
And so that's what I'm driven by.
I'm driven by sharing the experiences
of listing companies on two stock exchanges.
Because when I was in Inventure Capital,
we listed a venture fund
on the Australian Stock Exchange as well.
And growing stuff from zero to,
one of my current businesses now has done
more than $3 billion of residential mortgages.
So it's that combination of entrepreneurship,
but also this deep, I guess, understanding of culture
from years ago that I really wanted to change
the world's culture.
And that's how the Culture Project came about.