Welcome to Two Commas, the podcast where we explore how people exited their business for
multi millions of dollars.
Today I'm really excited to have a good personal friend of mine on the show.
He's a serial entrepreneur.
He's a raconteur and an all-around good character to know.
So William Palmer has been the founder of a number of different tech ventures.
He's been active in the investment space for quite some years and he's got a particularly
interesting story to share with us amongst many.
But this one's really around the listing journey as he took a business from inception all the
way through to a public boss listing in the New Zealand stock market.
So without further ado, please welcome along to the show, Will Palmer.
Thanks for joining us, Will.
Thanks Josh.
Nice to be here.
Yeah.
I always like to start off with a bit of a backstory.
So I know that you're a Wellington boy.
Born, I think bred as well.
Close, yeah.
Close, close enough.
So I'm curious about kind of the way that you came into the commercial world, what your
start was, the start of your entrepreneurial journey particularly.
Yeah.
I mean, if you go right back, the first time I knew that there might be some hope for me
in sales, which I think is the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, we had to do a
fundraiser at school for our first 15 trip to Australia.
And we decided what we're going to do is make pizzas and sell them.
And so most people sold to their aunties and their uncles and friends and neighbours.
And somebody came in with 10 pizzas sold and another came in with 20.
I didn't know that's what everybody did.
So I decided to go knock on doors and I picked the wealthiest part of town I could find.
And I sold 168 pizzas and came back and sort of no one was really mentally prepared for
this effort we're going to have to go to making and freezing 168 pizzas.
So that was the first time I thought, you know, maybe there's something to that skill.
And then I was all about trying to work out what I could do with that skill.
And then the second time I sort of started recognising an alternative path, you know,
like when you're young, you are you think a successful job is going to come off the
back of a degree, it's probably going to be something that's familiar, a lawyer, an accountant,
a doctor, an engineer.
And I was definitely heading down the engineering path was where I was sort of, you know, physics
and science and all these sort of things, but not because I liked them, because I thought
that was the right career path for me.
And then I my girlfriend's mum was a real estate agent.
And she started off as a part time administrator with two kids, and ended up becoming the
top real estate agent in the country.
And I got to watch unfold in front of my eyes.
And I got to watch her net worth go from, you know, absolutely nothing, almost destitute
to becoming exceedingly wealthy.
And she did it entirely on work ethic, energy, attitude, and sales.
And I got was kind of the those I guess those two things together laid a bit of a foundation
for me.
And then fast forward to my holiday break at the end of my first year at university,
I was looking for a job and I got a sales job in Wellington.
And it was door to door sales selling Sky Television, I think might have been the first
thing that we were doing.
And I immediately just started to transform my skill set on the back of this incredible
job, which I mean, I'd encourage nearly anyone to do this job if they're wanting to learn
sales.
Because what happens in door to door sales in particular, is that you're speaking to
80 to 100 new people every day.
And if you don't get the tone right, if you don't get the body language right, if you
don't get the messaging right, you're going to get the door slammed in your face.
And so you start learning to adapt to every type of person that you're speaking to.
And as you get better at it, you start being able to work out I can almost sell anything
if I get my story right.
And so once you've sort of got that confidence, then it comes down to okay, I know I can sell
now, what is the right thing to apply that skill to?
And it took me a while to work out that it shouldn't be someone else's business, it should
be my own.
Once I worked that bit out, then the pieces fell together and you know, my career started.
I love it.
So it's interesting, there's a often spoken about tension that sits in technology organisations
of sales versus delivery.
And you had super early exposure to that of overselling 168 pieces.
And then the oh shit, how are we going to go about delivering those things and manufacturing
them.
So I'm curious, I don't want to get diverted with this conversation.
But did that has that gone about informing how you've gone about interacting with other
parts of the organisations that you've built over time?
Yeah, definitely.
I think what you get out of that process is the ability to interact with whatever kind
of persons in front of you.
So I mean, one of the businesses that I was involved with early was HRV, which is a ventilation
home ventilation company.
I was there right at the very early stages, I think the business was at about a million
dollars, they hadn't quite worked out how they were going to grow the company.
I was good friends with one of the founders.
And I got involved at that point.
We grew up from that point through to about 76 million by the time I'd left.
So things really took off.
But we had very different types of people in our teams.
So our sales team were generally quite technical, soft spoken, clever type sales folk.
Our core centre were generally younger, more energetic, more female dominant, different
energy.
And then we had an installer team, they were very tactile.
They were electricians and installers and roofers.
And they were a little bit more gruff and a little bit more rough.
And then we had our accounts team and they were the bean counters.
And every one of them almost represented a different New Zealand demographic.
And when you're managing those, you're working with those groups, you learn how to interact,
talk, speak their language.
And I think that comes from sales.
Because when you're out knocking on doors, you're meeting all these different people
all the time.
And so I definitely did apply it.
And one I think one of the things that probably really helped me with was being able to interact
with anyone in the company at any time.
And hopefully I've kept that.
Yeah, yeah, I think most people describe you as being quite approachable.
Well, so thank you.
Yeah, I'll take that.
One must.
So I'm curious.
So there's various facets and traits that denote someone likely to succeed or not succeed
in the space of entrepreneurship.
One of those is definitely hard work and the ability to go further for longer than other
people are prepared to do quite often.
Another one is growth.
And so you mentioned that you had the door to door selling job at there was the high
school fundraising.
But then there was the the girlfriend's mum at that point as well.
And so back in those days, this is I don't want to age you, but this is definitely pre
YouTube, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
So how did you go about developing that skill set and age where I mean, we are awash with
information now and it's all freely available as to how to become an expert and almost anything
that you apply yourself to.
You can go to one of the massive open online courses, the MOOCs and and spend 20 to $40
on something if you define that the YouTube stuff's not appropriate, you know, podcasts,
you know, there's these white papers, there's just so much free information.
So how did you as a late teens, early 20s guy go about the business of becoming a super,
super capable person in a space where you couldn't get access to that free free insight?
I had some great mentors.
That was the starting point.
I had some and these people are still coming to my closest friends today who took me under
their wing and showed me how sales is done.
And that made an enormous difference to how I mean, if they hadn't been so electric in
the way that they sort of showed me how things were working and to generous with their time.
I don't think I would have been anything like what I've been ended up doing.
They just gave me the confidence that it was entirely possible.
So yeah, I think that having really, really, really strong mentors is probably one of the
keys.
But the other thing in terms of education is very early in my career, I just stumbled
upon a book by a guy by the name of Alan Pease, a body language book.
Yeah.
And I got the video set.
The box set.
And I watched this thing on loop.
But the message that I remember that stuck through my mind the whole time was if you
break down a sale, and I might have these percentages wrong, but 10% of it came down
to the product and your knowledge of that product, i.e. how you sort of, you know, understood
the features and benefits, 20% came down to the tone, your delivery, how you said what
it is that you how did you deliver these features and benefits in a way that was compelling.
And then the balance 70% came down to the body language.
How did you interact with the cues that you were given by the customer along the way through
that journey?
How did you make them feel through that entire journey?
And when you recognize that 70% of sales comes down to the body language, that's the area
that I double double clicked on.
And that's the part you can't learn online.
You know, I think sales is one of those very few disciplines that is very unlikely to get
taken over by AI or by any sort of digital medium, it'll be supported by sure.
But the real art of connecting with human to human is quite special.
And that's the piece I think I honed in on very, very early.
I recognize that there was a talent and being able to read how people felt about the thing
you just said, and be able to interpret whether that we're meant that happy sad further down
the buying path or further away and be able to adjust your story, your pattern, your body
language, derail, diffuse, whatever you needed to do to try and make things work.
And so, you know, I think an obsession with body language early was probably one of my
clues.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really helpful because it talks to being able to qualify a sale really effectively.
I've long believed that that's probably one of the, if not the most important skill in
a salesperson, not opening, not closing, not pitching, but rather being able to assess
who's most likely to buy the thing that you have to offer 100%.
And so looking at people's nonverbal cues, or their body language is just such a super
simple and effective superpower to have.
So you know, really like that.
No, it is.
So you came through the sales track.
Yeah, I did.
And you live, went and lived and worked in the UK and Australia running kind of ever
growing sales teams.
And then at what stage did you get into tech?
My first sort of, I mean, proper fire into tech, we got into a company called Connect
Now in New Zealand.
It was an Australian company that belonged to a guy that I've befriended over there who
had developed a sort of back office for power companies and gas companies and water companies
to run all their back office.
So if you wanted to set up a retailer doing power, he had a back office that would manage
that for you.
And we'd meet him through this process of setting up our companies.
And one of the businesses that he'd had as sort of a side hustle was this concept called
Connect Now, which was where if you were to move house, he'd get a referral from a real
estate agent.
And then somebody from Connect Now would contact that person and connect their phone, their
power, their internet, you know, like unified kind of approach to.
Yeah, and it was a real benefit to the to the purchaser because they were getting the
acquisition rates.
So getting all the deals they wouldn't have got if they'd run themselves.
And Connect Now getting paid a connection fee for every single thing that you connected.
So and because you're connecting everything when you first moved in, that menu was quite
large.
So that was my like, and it was relatively technical product, albeit I wasn't heavily
involved in the tech side, what I did get to see was how a tech business was built,
how it was iterated, how features were captured and eventually became product.
That interaction between the sales and marketing and the product teams, it was something that
was always a bit of attention.
And I was on the sales and marketing side, product was all made out of Australia.
And so I sort of got to observe how it all worked.
But I also got to observe quite a lot of success.
He ended up having a massive exit out of that business.
And I sort of saw the sort of multiples, I think it was over 50 million.
And I was sort of 50 million.
Like that's a that's a really big number.
You can achieve that.
And he did it, you know, you know, in a relatively quick process.
So yeah, I think that for me was quite a quite a big moment as to why I thought text the
answer, I need to know more about the space, I need to be able to build products myself
and sell them myself.
I think the evolution was first learning how to sell, then realising I shouldn't be selling
other people's products, I should be selling my own.
And then realising I shouldn't be selling my own product that I've kind of bought, I
should be building my own product and selling it.
And I think that was the last bit, and that's why I sort of spent the rest of my, you know,
my career in that bucket.
Yeah, yeah.
But personally, I think it's quite helpful to have that evolution, because the the true
startup, which is I define it as being solving a problem in a way that hasn't been solved
before, and building a solution, like a product or a platform or a marketplace to solve that
problem.
And so you have to educate the market and the world that they need that thing.
They need to part with their money and continue to part with their money to allow you to achieve
your dream and maybe alleviate some of their pain as well.
And so you're really building everything from the from the ground up.
And so personally, I think that if you've cut your teeth in selling someone else's thing,
you make a fist in a success of that, then you sell your own thing.
But it's the thing that you've gotten from from a third party source.
And then you go about the building of the thing.
So do you think that you could have circumvented that journey in any way?
Or do you also kind of agree with that principle?
No, there's so many lessons along the way, like, you know, it doesn't matter whether
it was my product or otherwise.
One of the things that I realized is that there was sort of two parts to a sale.
One part was who the hell are you when you knock on that door or meet that person in
business?
And then what have you got for me?
And now the two questions that somebody's asking themselves, who are you and what have
you got for me?
And when they already know who you are, like when I knocked on the door with Sky TV, now
I know you're Sky TV, what deal are you going to give me?
And that's a very easy conversation, because you're only having to deal with the second
part of the story.
When you've got to deal with the who the hell are you, you've got to somehow make sure
that you can build a brand and you've got to be able to build a reputation.
And you've got to do all these things that are kind of slightly more intangible and slightly
longer in time, sort of time to execute than just that man that's coming in and closing
a deal.
And so I think that that evolution sort of taught me that there is two parts and that
first part has a whole nother dynamic that I had to learn about, which was the connection
between brand marketing and sales.
And when you get that all together, these beautiful things happen.
Yeah, yeah, I understand and agree.
So was it around about the 90s that was Connect now?
Was it a little bit later than that?
No, it was later than that.
We sort of maybe around the GFC.
Yeah, we sold out just after the GFC.
Right.
2009.
Yes, it's interesting.
So I was just a little bit earlier than that kind of Y2K era.
And it's worth it to point it out, because if you've been around for a while and we've
of a similar kind of vintage, then what you know is that tech wasn't always the dominant
industry that it is today.
You know, the biggest stocks that were listed in the world were Coca-Cola and General Electric
and Boeing and those sorts of companies.
It wasn't the the FAMG kind of stocks.
And so Y2K as a point in time and as a event and occurrence that happened, propelled it
from being 1% of company spends to being 11% of the company spend.
So it came from basically being this minnow of industry to being something that people
were paying attention to.
We had the tech wreck, of course, you know, the dot com crash era.
And then gradually people started to kind of turn across to this as the advent of fibre
to the door and cloud computing, all those sorts of things came about.
But it's interesting that the industry that people now gravitate towards is, you know,
graduates and is even kind of coming through high school is something that wasn't there
kind of 20, 25 years ago.
Yeah, there's an enormous cost barrier to write like this.
I mean, when we started our first tech company in earnest, that was sort of 2006 or 2007.
We went to cloud computing because we couldn't afford the hardware.
But cloud computing was, you know, probably 50 times more than costed as it is today.
Everything that you needed in terms of tooling, you either built yourself and or you paid
someone to build for you.
There was not these dozens and dozens of apps that you can buy, you know, for a very small
license fee that can do bug detection or security or repository management or all these things
that you can now just be done for you kind of take it for granted.
So the barrier to entry at that point was extremely high.
I mean, both financially, but technically, it was extremely high.
The other thing that was different at that point as well as there was no ecosystem or
stories of success to follow.
You know, so you didn't have all of these sort of, you know, zeros, pushpays, VINs,
these stories just weren't a thing yet.
Yeah.
And so no one had made money in the space yet in this country, nor in Australia, actually.
And so it was kind of a crazy pursuit to go down this road.
Like you kind of I don't think it was clear that this was the way to make money at that
point.
Yeah.
I remember in I think it was 2000, 2001, the first kind of meaningful exit in New Zealand
was Mail Marshall.
And I know the founders quite well of that company then and now.
And it was a $55 million exit.
So thank you, sir.
Which, you know, that's kind of double that to get to today's dollars, give or take, maybe
even slightly more, maybe $150 million in today's money.
So still a meaningful and a really good sum.
But it was such an aberration for the time.
It was people started to wake up and pay attention and go, you can kind of really make a fist
out of this kind of technology thing, I think, in tech.
But then it took another few years for it to kind of bleed into the rest of the market
and people to get perspective on it.
So when did you get into so we had to talk about exits.
So Movio was the kind of the big main thrust of our conversation.
Yeah, definitely.
So talk me through the founding journey of Movio and what opportunities you saw in the
marketplace and how you scaled the company.
Yeah, well, I mean, so that that tech business we set up in 2006 was the genesis of Movio,
really, it was a company called Virtual Concepts.
It's kind of funny name really concept that's virtual.
But anyway, they were my strong point at that point.
But so what we did is we kind of built Grab One before there was Grab One.
And so we had a whole bunch of promotions that we were doing for restaurants and video
stores and pizza chains and cinemas.
And we would go out and we'd have a door to sales team go sell these loyalty cards and
these loyalty cards to work across these different promotions that we had.
And what became really apparent is that only one of the things that we were working on
had real legs.
And that was the cinema side.
So there was definite customer interest in any promotion we did that involves cinema.
So we knew that there was a need on that side.
And we were sitting in a cinema myself and my business partner, Peter, and we just sort
of looked around and the film was fantastic.
It was I think it was taken actually was the film.
And we were sitting there and it was down on Queen Street.
Amazing movie, peak time, and it must have been 10% occupancy.
And we said, this is crazy.
We know that there's all these people out there that want to go to the movies.
And we know that there's a great film on in the cinema right now.
And 90% of the seats are vacant.
And if they were sitting in here even paying half the price, it's better than zero because
I'll buy some popcorn and I'll buy a Coke and I'll do some other things.
Surely we can do something about this.
And so we sort of repurposed our business, focused everything on the cinema space.
Pete had come out of an equivalent of Netflix.
They created Movie Shack, which became Fatso.
And they had an amazing product.
What they did for those that didn't know is that Netflix used to be a DVD home delivery
business.
And these guys saw the business opportunity and thought, well, we should go get a license
for the Netflix business in New Zealand.
And Netflix wouldn't grant that.
They were fairly early at this time.
And so they thought, we'll build it ourselves.
But they ran into a hurdle.
And the hurdle they ran into was that the cost of new release content here was governed
by Village Roadshow in Australia.
And so when you bought a DVD, instead of costing the $30 that we would remember buying it at
the warehouse for, it was actually $130 if you got it as a new release.
So they charged four times as much, which meant that only the DVD stores could really
afford this sort of rental model.
That's why that rental model was so prolific, where you paid $10, got your DVD, returned
it the next day, probably paid some lay fees, next person related it.
They wanted to have a delivery model where you basically got your three DVDs, you returned
them, you got another three DVDs, you returned them.
But they wanted new releases.
So here was the problem.
The customers wanted new releases.
They couldn't afford to buy the new releases.
Their entire model was broken.
And one of the guys in the team decided to develop a recommendations engine that recommended
films to people that they hadn't seen to try and get them to want to watch something other
than the new releases.
And it worked.
And it's the first time I'd ever seen a recommendations engine.
I mean, Amazon didn't have one at this moment in time.
So I was like, oh my god, you're recommending content because you have inventory and because
it's priced well for you.
And it'll supposedly, according to the customer's preferences, help them as well.
This is incredible.
So I knew that they had some real smarts.
And we were like, okay, you've got these smarts.
You've got this insight about cinema goers and we've got this vacant cinema.
How do we put these things together and make a business out of it?
And movie O was born out of that.
And the objective of movie O was to essentially increase box office and fill those seats up.
That was really the earliest goal.
And how we went about doing that was we built a platform that pulled through all of the
loyalty data, eventually all the social data, online ticket purchases, and built a profile
of every person who goes to the movies.
And then what we did was target those people with SMS or email or some form of targeted
message to get them to go to another movie.
And we started trialing all sorts of different things.
We did competitions and we did upgrades and we did concession packages.
And we did, if you like this director, you'll like this director, kind of collaborative
filtering.
And we eventually worked out a playbook, a playbook of campaigns that we could run that
would fill a cinema almost instantaneously.
We could have it done if you gave us an opportunity at five o'clock in the evening on a Tuesday,
by seven o'clock that night we'd have the theater filled.
So we had a very, very powerful playbook.
We knew we had something really, really cool.
Now the question was, how do we make this into a business?
And so we were trucking along really nicely.
We're running the Barclay Cinema Chains campaigns over that time.
They were pushing us to do more and more because they were getting more and more incremental
box office.
They were starting to rank higher on the sort of list of performers for each of these films.
So we were clearly making a big difference in their business.
So much of a difference that they sold.
Hoyt's actually acquired them, unbeknownst to us at that moment.
Hoyt's worked with another New Zealand company we had not heard of at this time called Vista.
And Vista was at that point, and still is, the global leader in cinema point of sale
and many sort of cinema ERP systems.
And we looked at that and went, oh well, we're out.
They're going to go use Vista, and they did.
A few months passed, and we sort of sat there with our software and no customers and went,
what do we do?
And we get a call from Murray Holdaway, the CEO of Vista.
And he said, look, we've had some words with Hoyt's.
Their sales aren't performing the way that they were prior to the acquisition.
There's a belief that it might be your software that's the difference.
Well, let's talk.
And through a series of hilarious conversations, Murray and I reached a deal and we took an
investment from Vista.
And the condition of that investment was that we would continue to run completely independently.
We would have access to their customer base.
They'd do introductions for us.
They'd give us a small amount of capital, but most importantly, they'd give us a really
clean integration into their software.
So we did the integration, did all the work, got the introductions, everything played out.
And we just went about our merry way, starting to build our company up.
And I might just jump in and ask a question if that's okay.
So were they treating that as like a venture investment for them?
So you're in the same space, you're related to us, or were they more kind of going, becoming
a part of our stable of brands kind of thing or something in the middle?
We were very much a venture investment at that time, a strategic venture investment.
But at that time, we had gone down when we were cloud, they were on prem.
We were AWS, they were Azure slash Microsoft.
Everything was different about our two businesses.
Bringing the two together was not ever going to be particularly easy at that time.
What scale were you at that stage in terms of?
I mean, we were two people.
Right.
Okay.
So you had a cool product, you had a great customer success story.
We had one story.
And then you got cut out.
Yeah, got it.
Yeah.
And we had one story, we had a lot of IP.
We knew we had a playbook.
And so we basically talked to them and said, look, we won't compete with you guys, you won't
compete with us.
We'll carve out the data analytics and the campaign management component.
We'll let you keep the loyalty part and the ticketing.
We'll get away from that part.
And we'll just go in our own directions.
We'll be selling to the marketing department, you guys will be selling to IT.
We'll just keep rolling along.
And whenever we need something off each other, we've always got a really cordial, friendly
relationship.
And it worked beautifully.
So we head up to the US a couple of years into our journey.
And we book a suite at Caesar's Palace for CinemaCon, the biggest cinema convention in
the US.
And we couldn't afford to actually set up a trade booth.
And so we managed to get about 15 or 16 meetings.
I think 12 or 13 of them decided to become customers of ours after those meetings.
And we went, oh, wow, we've really got something.
And so we instantaneously opened an office in the US.
That was 2012.
And things started to expand rapidly.
We kind of skipped the world.
We've gone New Zealand prototype straight to the US.
All of a sudden, we had the number one cinema chain in the world, the number one in Canada,
the number one in Latin America.
We were literally on fire.
ARR, we'd gone already up to $5 or $6 million by then.
And we were just flying.
So we get to this point where things are going pretty well.
We're feeling pretty bullish.
I think it's 2013.
We decide we're going to raise some capital.
Other than the Vista investment that was the first time that you'd gone out to market to
raise?
Yeah.
Vista's investment was a small six-figure number.
Right, small percentage points.
Yeah, totally.
And it was at a time, you've got to remember, when we raised that money, it was 2009.
It's pretty early days for cap raising on NZ.
Well, and the GFC had just happened.
I mean, you couldn't beg people for money.
No one had any money.
I mean, Vista, which are kind enough to give that much, which is a lot more than anyone
else would have.
So it was a very, very small sum, but very, very important because I don't think we would
have gone any further without it.
Anyway, so we go do a capital raise.
We head up to Silicon Valley.
We go on this tour with NZTE.
We see all the Sandhill Road.
We don't do the whole gambit.
And then on the last day, it was America's Cup.
We go back to the Kiwi landing pad.
And the guys from Movac are there.
Stephen Tindall's there.
And all the New Zealand who's who.
The luminaries.
The luminaries are all there.
We start talking about what we're doing.
And most of them are like, we'd be really interested in investing.
So there's us going all the way up to Silicon Valley and realizing, oh, actually, I could
have done this in my backyard.
They're all they're all in the market for this.
It was the first time I realized it was actually an ecosystem in New Zealand that we could
have gone to.
It was small, but there was one and it was investing.
And so we started moving down the road with Movac and talking to them.
And things were moving along really nicely.
And we looked like we were going to put a deal together for a Series A.
And I took the deal, the draft of that deal to Vista.
And I said, look, guys, just giving you the cursory note that we're very excited.
We've managed to raise this large sum of money.
And it's all looking wonderful.
And hopefully, you guys are all happy about that.
And they said, no, we're not.
I was like, what?
No, we don't want you to do it.
I'm like, what?
Hang on.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
A few years ago, you gave us a small six-figure number.
This is now a large seven-figure number.
And you're not OK with this.
And so this was a cause of a lot of heat, as you can probably imagine.
Did they have any right to be able to do that?
Or was it more like them flexing a little bit?
I don't entirely know whether they had rights to stop it.
We never went legal on it.
But it would have been difficult without them.
Because we did have a tight integration with them.
There was a good symbiotic relationship.
We didn't really want to rustle the feathers more than we needed to.
To that point, it had been really productive for us.
So it was sitting there to go contrary to what their wishes were.
Exactly.
And it's not like we really needed the money.
Yeah.
We were actually profitable at that time.
So it was like, yeah.
Yeah.
So there's a whole bunch of reasons why they were probably like, this is unnecessary.
And it sort of came out over the next couple of months why it was unnecessary.
They were considering going public.
They hadn't really considered including us into the mix because we were a minority holding
that they had.
But nevertheless, they didn't want to have it excluded and having a venture partner as
an investor.
Makes it tricky.
Would have made it tricky.
And so the conversation then started between us and the Vista guys around, could we do
this together?
We were the young, sexy, cloud, you know, buzzword, big tech, you know, big data, blah,
blah, blah.
Business that was growing at a rate of knots, winning awards, doing all the things.
They were really established, globally successful, profitable, quite profitable company with a
very long standing customer base.
And for all intents and purposes, looked like they were on track to be the dominant player
globally in that space.
And so you looked at when you got this established on prem, but profitable, albeit growing relatively
slowly, you know, tech company, and then you've got this hot startup, put the two together,
and you've got the perfect investor story.
And so NewCo was formed initially, obviously, and they didn't have a name for it.
But there was Vista Cinema and Movio were the two companies that formed Vista Group.
And Vista Group was eventually the company or the organization that went public on the
Australian and New Zealand exchanges in 2014.
So we did a dual listing.
And we swapped out a good portion where our shares in both Movio and Vista for shares
in NewCo.
Okay, so you didn't take cash off the table at that stage?
No, we did.
You took it?
Oh, great.
Great deal.
So you flipped a proportion and you took some cash out?
Yeah, we took about a third, all of us.
Took a third of the total value off the table straight away.
We raised a bunch of cash.
And that was sort of the first big exit for me, really.
I mean, at that point, you know, I probably had enough to stop.
It was pretty exciting times.
You know, five years into the journey with Vista, that's where we'd ended up.
They'd done extremely well out of it as well.
But yeah, that was sort of the beginning of the listing journey.
So let's talk about the listing journey.
So you got involved when it was a notion that was around Vista Group.
So you would have been partying and contributing and driving a lot of those conversations to
be able to make it happen.
So what does a listing journey look like in NZ and in Australia from the inception of
the conversations?
And then what types of things do you have to do to both comply and then go through the
journey?
So that's a multi-part question.
There's a lot going on there.
Yeah.
So let's just break this down to its requisite elements.
So talk me through the journey of building something which could be ready to go through
listing.
What does that need to look like?
Yeah, I mean, I think you have to have a very solid financial backing in terms of, you
know, obviously, you've been audited, you've gone through the process, you're working with
one of the big four to make sure that everything is, you know, T's across, I's are dotted.
From that standpoint, there's a massive amount of compliance that's done across the entire
business so that people are able to sign off that you are suitable to be a public company.
And that rigour and process is probably not too dissimilar to going through like a SOC
2 type scenario for those companies out there that have gone through that.
For those that are unfamiliar with SOC 2?
For those that are unfamiliar, there is a level of compliance that you can achieve called
SOC 2, which we've just done for our Debrant business, which I think for us had about 95
different processes that you had to basically prove that you did to a very high standard
and have that sort of signed off by an independent auditor.
And I would say that going public has very similar attributes to that.
But probably the part that is more interesting is going out there and doing the book build
and being out there and having to, you know, drum up the interest in the business and go
on a road show and get, you know, people to loosely commit.
And that all just sort of happens sort of quite randomly with the merchant bank that
sort of underwrites what's going on.
And eventually, you know, you're ringing a bell and the whole thing feels like a blur.
It's sort of a crazy old time.
The big things to note about it is not so much the listing process.
I think anyone could go through that if you've got money and time, you could get through
it.
It's what it means once you've done it.
And I think that's the bit that is the most interesting about listing a company.
I'd love to delve into that conversation.
Just a couple more questions about the pre-listing journey.
So if there's anything that you've missed, what were the key milestones for you in getting
everything ready, you know, you've talked about getting the financials, getting the
compliance, getting the books audited, that sort of stuff.
Is there a sequence of events that you have to run through?
And is there a like a is there a playbook for it?
Yeah, there is.
I mean, I think there's, you know, like, obviously, you've got you've got all your financials
in order.
You've got your business plan in check.
You've got all of your legal sides, contracts, employment contracts, all better down.
It's basically just making sure that you've crossed your t's and dotted your i's.
You've provided all of your customer contracts like it's just that very deep level of audit
that you've made sure that everything is set up to the, you know, to the nth degree.
And I think as an organisation, it's good practice to do all this already.
In this scenario, you're getting other people to sign off at a pretty high level before
you've got the green light to move forward.
It's effectively akin to a deep DD process.
Oh, yeah.
Enterprise level company.
But you need to get some independent bodies to come in and sign all those things off on
your behalf.
Yeah.
So that you've got some certainty that there's some some standards that have been applied
to that work.
Absolutely.
Big, standard based independent third parties.
Would that be a fair synopsis of it?
I think that's I think that's fair.
Yeah.
Great.
And so when you're going through the road shows, you're talking to institutional investors,
you're talking to funds, you're talking to a little bit of mums and dads, maybe in a
big public event.
So what's that experience like?
Yeah, most of it was for us was was funds.
So we go these road shows continue, by the way, which you don't not told at the time
when you first go public.
So we were doing at least two a year, generally three.
So we do the Macquarie Conference in Sydney, and then we do one after a half year and one
after a full year result.
But also we did the road show leading up.
And essentially what you're doing is it's a it's an investor pitch.
You're going in and you are selling a room full of fund managers on why your IPO is going
to be success and where it's going to go.
And then they are helping build the book as to a range that you've given them and a quoted
range.
And then eventually you've got enough interest to go right.
We've got enough to go.
And and you're off to the races.
And it happens like lightning from that point.
Yeah.
With a private raising and that that kind of goes from angel through to VC type raising.
Yeah.
One of the notions is that investors are like sheep.
And so once you land the whale, someone who takes, you know, 20, 30, 50 percent of that
issued capital that's available, then people tend to fall over themselves to get there.
Yeah, that's right.
Is the road so pretty similar?
Yeah, it is.
I don't know exactly how the Merchant Bank does it behind the scenes, but you've got
a bank that has to sign off basically underwrites the round.
But the bank is only going to underwrite the round if they think the round is going to
succeed.
Right.
So they've obviously already spoken to a number of different funds who have indicated
that, you know, subject X, Y and Z that they will participate at whatever level that is.
Once that Merchant Bank has that confidence, they essentially are like your lead investor
in a private round.
But they don't hold the stock.
All they do is they hold it and sort of for that short period of time until such time
as they're listing a successful of which case the funds are then going to take that underwritten
stock off their hands.
So that's that's what you've got to get the you know, the the the Merchant Banks up to
is that point of confidence that they can underwrite the round.
And that comes from you going on a roadshow, selling your wares, making sure the story
is cohesive and exciting enough to get the funds on board.
And then you know, you're ringing a bell.
So that's your operations.
So you're not underwritten until after you've gone through that roadshow event and you've
got expressions.
Yeah, I think it happens at different moments.
But generally, by the time you're on that roadshow, they're reasonably confident that
things are going to happen.
It's to what level?
So you've got a range and now you're trying to work out where in that range are you going
to land?
Yeah.
And and they're going to underwrite it at any point in that range.
Yeah, great.
So reasons for listing.
So you know, the often quoted reasons are liquidity and access to bigger capital markets
potentially as well.
And the ability to potentially achieve a higher multiple for your business as well.
I think there's a few others that I've missed off there.
So what are the what was the driver behind Vista doing it?
Yeah.
So for Vista, I think what it did is it provided some liquidity for the founders.
They'd worked a long time on the Vista side in particular.
It was like 20 years old.
Yeah, it probably was.
And so they I think were needed or not need that.
I mean, it was time to get some liquidity.
But they didn't want to give up control of their business either.
They still had lots they wanted to do.
They had massive ambitions.
They were thinking about a lot of acquisition and they needed capital to do the acquisition.
And so this kind of ticked a lot of boxes.
You know, it allowed you to get some money off the table.
It allowed you to put some money into the company to be able to do acquisitions.
And so it sort of worked.
So I think that was their main driver.
What was your other question there, Josh?
So it was confirmation of the liquidity, access to bigger capital markets and the higher multiples
as well.
Yeah, the higher multiples is a dangerous one.
Right.
I think if you talk to a lot of publicly listed CEOs, there will have been a moment in time
where they achieved a much higher multiple than what they might have achieved had they
tried to do something privately.
But the offside of that is that it can easily go down as well to horrible levels on the
back of some bad press, bad news, whereas in a private company, that doesn't really
circulate in the same way and it can't be acted upon when that information gets out
there.
Yeah.
And that has a really interesting effect, not just on you as the founder, because you're
under a lot of pressure from investors to go, what's just happened?
You know, why is the stock falling?
And it kind of clambers on itself, but from the staff.
And that was one of the big revelations I had was that your staff who are on your employee
incentive programs or have family members that have invested in the public's company
are on this roller coaster with you.
And it's going up and down.
And when it goes up, everyone's feeling positive at work.
And when it's going down, everyone's feeling negative.
And sometimes it goes down because of macro conditions that have absolutely nothing to
do with you.
And the whole company's in a depression.
So I think that's one of the sort of sides that is often not spoken of that much is that
your staff are on this roller coaster with you.
And it's an extremely public branding when things go bad.
You know, when you go home and mom and dad are angry because they've lost 60% of their
net worth in the last three days because your company stocks fallen.
And that happened.
Yeah.
You know, that's a tough pill to swallow.
It's hard enough to handle it at work.
But at home, it can be quite difficult as well.
So I think that was one thing that I found interesting.
I've heard other people say that when they go public, it's the day that the founders
should exit because that going through that roller coaster is pretty hard.
But yeah, so you talked about liquidity.
That's definitely we've got instantaneous liquidity.
And I think the really nice thing is you have ongoing liquidity.
So when you have something you need money for, you generally can get it.
But that also is a bit of a misnomer because you generally can't trade during blackout
periods.
And a blackout period happens either side of any significant announcement.
So you have half year or full year result.
What's a blackout period?
A period where you can't trade.
So you've got a period.
As an individual, you can't trade.
The stock still traded, but you can't trade.
The stock still trading, but you can't trade.
Every time Vista hit peaks, we were in a blackout.
Every single time.
It was like Murphy's Law.
So that's really hard.
But also you can't trade if you have any information that the public doesn't have.
That's really hard.
As a CEO, you've always got information the public doesn't have because you're in the
middle of 20 deals at once.
You're hiring some people.
You've got all sorts of stuff.
You've got new features coming out.
You've got so much going on that you could argue you're the only person who has all
the pieces in your head.
Then trading the stock becomes extremely difficult.
So now it's not only the blackout period.
It's the periods where you may have had information, material information, that other people didn't
have access to.
And so that's quite challenging.
And even if you can satisfy the clause, it does sometimes feel like it's going to come
back.
You know what I mean?
You're always worried about it.
So I think that's really interesting.
But one of the real benefits of listing is the prestige that comes with it.
And obviously, other than the invites to things and the places that you get to go and things
that you get to do, it does help you attract incredible talent to your organization.
People like working with companies that are visible.
And I think what makes a public company interesting is if you're a potential employee, you can
see exactly what state that organization is in with a fairly high level of confidence.
And so we were able to bring on a lot of very good talent during that period of time because
we were able to demonstrate that we were a pretty robust company.
So I think that was definitely a huge benefit.
Another benefit that I think is really fascinating, when the COVID occurred, we went through Hell
and back at Vista.
Everybody has a COVID story, right?
And all of them are probably pretty bad.
And I'm sure there's many that had much worse than ours.
But ours wasn't great.
We got wind of it early.
Our Chinese office had some really interesting things happen during box office sales over
Chinese New Year, normally a really high point for movies.
And it hadn't happened.
And so we got wind that people over there knew of a virus that was causing lots of problems.
By early March, we were pretty sure we could see the writing on the wall.
And so we were sort of steps ahead of how this might play out.
We were scenario planning very soon after everything was shut down.
At that moment in time, we were due to pay a dividend out a few days later.
We pulled back the dividend because we were like, we might need this cash to get through
the next week period.
All of our customers globally, like Domino's closed, 100% of them.
Then soon after that, all of the studios stopped committing to building or creating more content
because they couldn't get onto sets.
And then obviously downstream, lots of the talent ended up going to the streaming side
versus the theatrical side.
So the business was in really, really dark place.
And had we been privately held, raising money at that moment in time would have been almost
impossible.
We were able to think a period of nine days to raise sufficient money to get us through
18 months runway as a large organization with about 600 staff.
You couldn't do that in a private market.
So public market gives you, albeit at a price, access to capital pretty instantaneously.
There's not the need for tons of DD every single time.
You need to come back to the well.
So I think if you've got scenarios where you're looking to acquire, you've got scenarios where
there could be something in the pipeline that might change materially what happens in your
business, having the ability to be able to access capital can be a pretty massive benefit.
Yeah.
So we've started to lead into the subject of what it's like to be a listed company.
No, no, no, no, it's perfect.
So let's kind of extend that conversation out.
So things like, you know, what is the reporting like?
What are the obligations to communicate with people like, you know, what's the what's the
level of visibility like?
So bring it to life for us a little bit in terms of what that experience as a CEO is
like.
Yeah, look, I think if you were a company that had built a product and that product
was, you know, well established, albeit it's going to evolve, but fundamentally is the
same and you're selling it successfully with a system and you need to supercharge that
system, right?
You need to put more money into marketing, you need to open up more territories, you
need to translate it, then going public makes complete sense because you're putting fuel
on the fire.
The fire is very well established.
You're just trying to sort of supercharge it.
You're not changing direction every week.
Nothing's materially different about the business.
And so in that scenario, going public makes complete sense.
When you're a company like Movio, which was still a startup, you know, it was at series
A level, you're still changing direction all the time.
You're still trying to get the product to a point where it appeals to the studios or
whoever else that we were trying to work with.
And we hadn't landed that yet.
It's a really, really difficult place to be because you're you're always having to go
back to the market and tell them that you've pivoted or changed your plan.
And the market takes a lot turning the Titanic.
It takes a long time for everyone to get on board with your change that you've made.
And that's generally viewed as quite flighty.
They want consistency.
They want you to say you're going to create a plan and to stick to that plan.
They want to build their models to measure against that plan every quarter, every, you
know, every six months, every year.
When you are changing the goalposts on them continuously, as you will as a startup, they
get frustrated and punish you as a consequence.
And they punish you.
Yeah.
And the punishment comes in in generally, you know, a self a stock sell off.
And that can happen quite frequently when you think the news that you've delivered is
good, but in reality, it was not what they were expecting.
And I think what that what being public is all about is about meeting expectations.
And so you see the expectations and you meet those expectations.
And that's the whole game.
And if you change even food, even for the better, that's not what I expected.
And so, you know, there's a bit of a freak out.
Yeah.
So I think that's one thing that is really hard as a CEO of a publicly traded company
is that you've got to be able to stay the course.
You've got to be a master at PR.
You know, I mean about managing the narrative and making sure that your comms are very well
considered.
So one of the things we probably could have done a lot better is if we had a, you know,
a big initiative that we're working on that once we made the decision to move forward
to this initiative, and it was a high probability of moving forward, that we had a very clear
plan of what was the moments we were going to communicate the progress towards this initiative.
And assuming we achieve those milestones, what will we say?
So instead of going next idea, next idea, next idea, it was big idea.
What are the steps we need to explain of how we're progressing towards that idea?
And so there's lots of sort of, I think, PR practice that you would want to be, you know,
certainly have a very good person in your corner that can help you nail that, because
you are continuously trying to weave a narrative that people support.
Much more so than a private company.
A private company, you're emailing 10, 20, 30, 40 investors, and it's generally a far
more informal play.
Yeah.
In public, it's just a different game.
You've also got analysts to deal with.
So you've got, you want people to cover your stock.
That's a really important thing, because once you get coverage, you can get, you know, more
visibility.
Once you get more visibility, more people have confidence in buying your stock.
Once more people have confidence buying your stock, you've created liquidity for the other
people who own the stock.
And so you want to make sure that people are covering your, you know, what you're doing.
But that's also very difficult, because you've got to manage those people particularly carefully,
because they've got to get all of the information.
I mean, they're effectively doing due diligence on you, or whatever new idea you've got every
time you come up with one.
So you say, I'm going to start working in Latam and cinema, and we think we can make
$3 million in revenue there.
They will literally look into the Latam market and understand whether there is $3 million
in revenue in there and how that plays out and what it looks like, and what the adjacencies
might be after that.
Like they're thinking ahead of where you are in a lot of cases.
So you're managing the general narrative, you're double clicking on the narrative with
those that are covering your stock.
And all of the time as a new startup, as we were, you're trying to make sure that you're
staying on the same track, or a narrative that people can handle.
And so you're always just managing this narrative.
And I think one of the things as a startup founder of a Series A level company, you should
be focused as much as you possibly can on the business.
And you're always having to do investor relations, whether you've gone down the private or the
public path.
I think when you're going down the public path, though, it never ends, it almost is
your full time job.
Like, because there's so many more players involved.
You know, like we had 40 funds, I think, invested in our stock.
Those 40 funds all had their own models.
We had a handful of analysts covering it.
Those people all needed to be updated all the time.
We had set in stone reporting dates, they had to have road shows with them.
You know, so there was always this preparation for the next announcement.
We had to manage all the comms internally to make sure that the team knew enough that
they could do their job, but not too much that they ever find themselves in a situation
where they were inside of trading.
So there's a lot more to manage.
I think one of the things that probably really sort of surprised me is this idea that as
a founder of a company that's gone public, one of your jobs is to help investors achieve
liquidity, not just yourself.
And so when you create this sort of pool of people that invest initially at the IPO, those
people at some point are going to want to sell their stock and make a profit.
Who do they sell that stock to?
This was something I only understood incredibly late into the game, maybe five years as a
CEO in a public company, was that you actually have to continuously work to create a secondary
market for people to offload to.
And so we had a primary market, but it was funds.
And those funds wanted to sell, but when they did, they generally were only sold to each
other.
What they needed was a retail market of investors that could be sold to.
So the role that we had to play to help with that was to go out to all the brokerages and
talk to all of the groups, the sales houses, et cetera, that sell stocks to their client
portfolio on the virtues of Vista.
And that was a really interesting process to have to go through as well.
You're sitting out there going, you're not even somebody who's investing in us.
By helping and explaining the narrative to your people, we're not actually directly benefiting
from this, but it is going to help our stock because the first people who bought our stock
has someone to sell it to.
And they're all complaining about liquidity all the time.
So we've got to help them get it.
And so you end up having this project which runs for years, trying to create liquidity
in your stock.
So there's like layers of liquidity in the market that you've got to be aware of as well.
Yeah, people are going to have places to put things.
And so when you add all these complexities together, so you've got to make sure you're
reporting all the time.
You've got to make sure you've got your analysts that are on side with you and providing the
right information.
You want to make sure you've got analysts covering you.
That's really important.
You've got to make sure that you've got a primary supported base of investors, but you
want to make sure that those investors have liquidity if they ever need it.
There's a lot going on and none of that involves running a software company.
It's all being a public CEO.
Yes.
Would you do it again?
Probably I would.
Which is a caveat.
There is a caveat to that.
I would do it again.
There are some beautiful things about it, right?
Like we achieved a very large exit very early.
And I don't think that would have happened on the private model.
We might have raised a good amount of money around that time.
But in terms of physically getting cash off the table, I don't think it would have been
a better way than the way that we did it.
Even better than that, we managed to get cash off the table and still maintain control of
our company.
So that was extremely exciting for us.
So for those reasons, absolutely, you would do it again.
What would be different is that I'd walk into it with a very clear playbook of what my company
needed to look like first, and exactly how I'd manage the things I didn't manage very
well the first time.
So the company would need to look like an organization that has got a very, very clear
plan, has got a very well defined product, very well defined go to market strategy.
And what it needs is capital to grow that go to market strategy.
But it's not really going to move far off the line towards the target.
It just needs fuel, right?
Zero.
Right.
So I started my business and I was running along and I was at sort of 10 million ARR
and I was and it was looking pretty predictable and it really just needed fuel and I had a
choice and my choice was either to go raise venture or go public and do it the way I did
before.
I'd probably choose go public.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And then the second part of that is that I would make sure that I had somebody that was
managing the public part of the business and somebody that was managing the business.
Kind of CECO kind of kind of role split.
Yeah, definitely.
And I would be making sure that there was a clear plan around what is our goal as a
publicly listed company?
What do we want to do?
And obviously the goal is to increase the value for the shareholders.
But that takes some real thinking of how are you going to actually do that?
And so what we need these five people to analyze our stock.
How do we get that?
We need to make sure that we attract the right people at the IPO from the beginning that
are the right type of holders.
We need to make sure that we're automatically thinking about liquidity from the start, which
means that we need to have a very good PR strategy that's a lot wider than just a bunch
of funds that has to go more out to the retail investor.
You know, I've even thought before that one of the great ways to be able to sort of build
towards a public listing might be going down the crowdfunding road where you know, you
you do a crowdfunding process, you know, early on your run, you get your awareness out there
amongst a large proportion of people that are likely investors and things like public
companies.
And then as you progress along, you keep those people abreast of your progress, regardless
of the fact that they haven't invested.
But you've created this big pool of potentially interested people that will talk about you.
At which point, by the time you go public, there's more interest than just those in the
financial markets.
There's people who are, you know, mom and pop investors.
And once you get layers, things can really happen for you in terms of, you know, creating
liquidity for your shareholders.
You're talking about the NZX and the ASX listing.
We've got the secondary board in New Zealand as well.
Do you have much exposure or visibility to that sports?
Not really.
I haven't had a lot to do.
We were on the main board.
We were the NZX 50 for a period there as well.
I think one of the things I'd say about being on the Australian board, and actually the
New Zealand board as well, is that you can easily get lost, even in NZ, if there's not
enough knowledge of what you're doing.
And there can be a scenario where just that lack of knowledge can make your stock price
spiral down.
And there has been some good companies with good results that haven't had a great stock
appreciation because they've kind of got lost in the ether and they haven't been able to,
you know, making a thing happen.
So I think you have to think about where do you want to be on those boards?
There is a really interesting direct listing option that you could do as an alternative
to venture if you're willing to spend the sort of few hundred thousand dollars it takes
to do that.
And that gives you a great way for people who do invest in your startup to be able to
offload their stock.
Secondary sales of privately held companies are still relatively difficult.
So there is a pathway, but the compliance is high.
You know what I mean?
When you're doing 10 million in revenue and you've spent three or four hundred thousand
dollars a year on compliance, I don't know that that really makes sense.
Is that the primary board NZX, the three or four hundred or is that significantly more?
I don't know what the difference in costs are these days, but the number we always used
to work towards, and I think it's pretty close to the mark now, is around that number.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, that's quite significant.
It is significant.
Because if you're doing 10 million bucks and let's say you're making a profit, then you
might be making a million bucks of profit.
And if you spend close to half of that on stock market listing compliance costs, that's
a please explain kind of thing potentially.
Yeah, it is.
And in Australia, it's more again.
You know what I mean?
Back to my point, if you have to have a pretty clear path to the direction you're heading
on and this is creating rocket fuel for you to keep moving quickly and you're not moving
off into a different direction, you're not changing your ideal customer profile, you've
kind of got all that worked out and it's just going hard at something.
I think that's a really great path to take.
Yeah.
You're a reasonably private person.
You haven't done a great deal of kind of press related things that are outside of business.
You haven't really done anything outside of business.
And you're part of a couple, Erica's your wife and she's had a very successful business
and you've got a new startup venture together with three or four years into coupler.
You've got this next thing with DevRamp.
So how did you deal with the very visible nature of being a CEO of a public listed company?
So the fact that you're the person that's always kind of quoted and talked about?
How was that?
Well, Murray was mainly quoted who was the group CEO through that period.
And so that I think helped.
I was put out there quite a lot because we were the hot growth story.
And so I went on all the road shows because the view at the time was that movie could
be bigger than Vista Cinema.
And therefore we needed to keep that sort of promotion and hype going about what we
were doing.
And so that came with its benefits in that I got a really good profile amongst the Vista
community during that time.
But it came with its negatives because I was under a lot of pressure to deliver a lot of
things that were untested and unproven that probably shouldn't have been said to a public
group of people.
So yeah, it was a funny old time the way that we were structured because we had this sort
of established successful but slow growing company in Vista and we were kind of the cool
story and sort of sent out in front to sort of wave the flag and tell an amazing growth
story which has its pros but it definitely had its cons.
You ultimately parted ways with the Vista group.
What was the catalyst if we can talk about that?
I stayed a lot longer than I intended.
So as part of a listing or as part of a sale of any business you often have a lock up period
or an earn out, whatever you want to call it.
And I had one of those that ran for three years where I basically had the potential
to double the amount of I ended up with if I hung in there for three years and did a
reasonable job, which we did.
And I got out the other end of that and things were looking very good from a financial standpoint.
But there was stuff that we still were trying to do that I was still really excited about.
And so we were building a new platform at the time that was designed to help studios
basically access user data in a really good compliant way.
And we built this cool platform.
I was really excited.
And then I was going to sort of go off and my plan was to hand the sort of CEO reins
over to somebody else.
And I was going to take this new feature and kind of run it like another startup under
the group in some capacity.
And the day that we went to go release that we had a road trip plan to sell that into
all the big studios in Australia.
And we were leaving that Thursday.
And I think it was that Thursday that just under closed the borders.
So I hung around a little longer than I'd intended.
I was literally on the precipice of moving on to doing the next venture, albeit as part
of the group, but in a slightly adjacent area.
But then when that happened, we were new we were going to have to do a restructure.
There's no way I was going to hand the restructure to the next person coming and it would be
the most evil thing I could have done.
Yeah, that's a horrible hospital pass.
No.
And so we made the decision there.
And then I sort of said to the guys, I am committed to this 100% until we get out the
other side of this crisis.
I'm there with you all and we're going to do this together.
And so we all rallied massively.
We went through I think a couple of hundred staff total ended up being laid off between
the time of the lockdown and I think it was July the first, which was an incredibly difficult
process.
We always had to raise capital during that period.
But part of the conditions of raising that capital was we'd reduce our costs.
So we really had no choice to do but to do that.
We had to manage the relationship with all of our clients who were all suffering enormously
through the fact that most of them had invested massively in CapEx the previous years.
So they had no war chest to be able to withstand this amazing amount of time without any revenue.
We had to deal with all the pessimism of all of the analysts saying that the cinema business
is over because not just because there was no revenue and half the cinemas were on the
brink of bankruptcy, but because the studios have stopped making content.
So even when they came back online, it was a very high chance there wasn't going to be
anything to play.
So everything looked pretty dire and pretty doom and gloom.
And during this period of time, we'd sort of worked with our customers and I'm extremely
proud of that actually.
We worked with our customers hand in hand to try and say, look, we've both got to stay
in business together.
We've both got to survive.
How do we do this?
What's got to happen?
Forget what the agreement says.
How do we get to the other side?
When we do, how do we look after each other?
I love this.
And I don't know that we lost a customer through the entire period.
There were a couple that had closed down.
Only a very, very small number though.
And it was just an amazing sort of survival story and see the business sort of rejuvenating
now and Vista start to do really well again.
It feels good.
It feels really, really good that it got through that.
And actually being public was the reason it probably did because it was able to access
money when there wasn't any around.
Yes.
It was a big number.
Yes.
That period, that COVID period sounds absolutely brutal.
It was awful.
And speaking of brutal, a startup in and of themselves are quite brutal experiences to
go through, whether or not they succeed.
Almost the pain is the same.
You get a little bit less of the satisfaction, the joy from a lack of success if that's the
path that you end up ultimately on.
In fact, often when I've spoken to founders post the journey, they say that they probably
wouldn't do it again.
And one of the reasons they did it in the first place is through naivety.
They didn't know what they were going to be in store for.
You've gone and started two additional companies.
I'd like to get to what they are in a second, but why have you waited back into the fray?
I felt like there was unfinished business.
I really did.
I regretted letting go of Movio as early as I did and not being able to set the path and
having to deal with all of this sort of massaging and compliance with everybody that needed
to know what was going on all the time and not being able to just go with my instinct.
And so I think that was really, really hard for me.
I regretted the formality that I'd ended up in and not the joy of being in a startup and
inventing things and having fun and sort of flying by the seat of your pants.
That whole part, I kind of felt like I missed quite dramatically.
So I think that was probably part of it.
I'm probably unemployable.
So that's probably another part to it as well.
So I really just thought my only option is either to wither away on the couch or start
another business.
And a couple had been running through our minds during the COVID era.
We my wife started Synthony, which is obviously extremely successful business in her own right.
But just like the movie business, it was live events.
And so her business went to zero as well.
And so we had time.
And we had we were stuck at home.
And it became really apparent that there was things that we could do to help our relationship.
And we started talking about those things and we wanted to improve them.
And this idea had been sort of circulating around of, you know, if we just went on more
date nights, we'd be way happier.
It was really where it came from.
Why don't we go on more date nights?
Because every time we do it, we come back and we're glowing.
And there's that we feel great and feel loved up and all the rest of it.
Why don't we keep doing it?
And the answer became because we're just too busy.
You know, we've both got businesses, we've got kids, we've got all this stuff going on.
Got a busy social life.
How do you ever find time for each other?
And so we sort of, I don't know why, engaged a designer to go, you know, why don't we try
and build an app or at least a designer one that might do this?
And I think you're one of the first people we interviewed about it.
That's correct.
And so, you know, we've got this idea, you know, we think that it can replace the calendar
on the fridge, you know, that'd be really, really cool if everyone was in sync and they
prioritised date night and the whole, you know, could this be a thing?
And we probably wouldn't have gone any further with it had COVID not carried on and made
our movie business and the symphony business so dire that we thought, well, we've got nothing
else to do.
We might as well keep pulling this thread for a bit longer.
And then all of a sudden, like we kind of found that we were deep into a new startup.
And I think when you get into a startup, you imagine what it takes to get it going.
And you can't think of the thousand things that you haven't thought of yet.
There is a thousand.
All I'm going to do is I'm going to pay an app builder to make this app look like this
design.
And then I'm going to put it on the app store.
And I'm going to pay for some ad words.
And that's the end of it.
Straightforward, easy.
Straightforward.
That's the business done.
And I'm not sure that at all, it turns out.
No, and I should have known better.
You did.
But it was a logical conclusion thing.
The only logical conclusion thing is a wonderful documentary about the modern space race, Wild,
Wild Space.
Have you caught that?
I haven't watched it yet, but I have heard about it.
Must see.
So I've met Sir Peter Beck, but not in a detailed observation of the backstory, the way that
this movie documentary goes into.
He travels around the states as a basically uncredentialed, unqualified individual that
had launched some rockets out of his backyard to endeavor to get a job with one of the Boeing,
NASA, Lockheed Martin, et cetera.
And unsurprisingly, he didn't get a job from any of these people.
So he's flying back on the aircraft.
And he's clearly not expressing his depression, but he was skirting around that.
And so he kind of gets to the stage of going, well, I can't get a job.
And I've got this passion and enthusiasm.
I have this quite rare set of skills.
And so the only logical conclusion is, fuck it.
Let's start a company.
So kind of that's the story that you've just told.
But in a different company.
Yeah, I guess that's what we did.
And then I got the kind of I guess I kind of got the bug again, but I also knew where
I was good and where I wasn't.
Tell us about DevRamp, which is the you've talked about Couples.
So let's talk about DevRamp.
I mean, Couples is a consumer app for couples, right?
So if we just wanted to put it into a bucket, it's an app.
It's consumer.
Consumer is a very unique beast that is difficult and different to doing B2B SaaS.
I came from B2B SaaS.
One of the businesses that one of the products or ideas that we had whilst we were at Movio
that we used to do manually was map the code knowledge that we had inside our organization.
And the reason we used to do that is because if we wanted to move one engineer from one
team to another, we needed to see the effect that was going to have on the on the original
team.
If we wanted to hire somebody, we needed to know what they needed to pick up to be valuable
to the organization.
If we wanted to identify where the risk was in terms of key person risk, we needed to
know who knew stuff exclusively.
If we wanted to go through a rewrite or a refactoring of some code, we needed to know
where the areas where there was lost knowledge, where code had been written by people who
had long left.
And so we used to use this manual tool internally.
And it was like a superpower for us as a company.
Fast forward and we've found a way of being able to build this into a product that can
be sold to anybody.
And the whole premise behind behind dev ramp is to help software teams be able to transfer
knowledge effectively between each other.
And so how we do that is we map the knowledge of a code base from the very first commit
that was ever created right through to today.
And we put it into buckets, we go, what code is known by two or more people?
Shared, that's what you want everything to be.
What code is exclusively known by one person?
And what code is lost?
And what that enables you to do is kind of see exactly where your organization is at.
And then from that we can see that an objective or in a target for each person, each team
and each organization as to what would be the optimum level of code knowledge for that
team to have or that person to have to get the maximum benefits and the initial benefits
are a spread knowledge, but the long term benefits are a big uplift in productivity.
And then the final part to it is augmenting their existing review process to make sure
that the right people are reviewing the right pull requests to progress forward and increase
the familiarity of the company.
And so we played with this for a wee while.
My former CTO at Movio, it was his brainchild, Nick McKett.
And then eventually he came in and he sort of saw us last year and he says, look, I think
I've worked out how to do this.
I think I know how to automate the whole process.
He showed us a prototype.
We send him away and said, look, if you can do one more thing for us, we're going to be
in.
And what we wanted to be able to see him do was, can we get an AI to review some code
and then create a tutorial in the context of the person reviewing it?
So if the person was super knowledgeable of the code, they'd get a very simple tutorial.
If they'd never seen it before, they'd get one that was more fully fledged.
He showed us that and we went, we looked at each other and went, we've got to go.
And so Pete hadn't actually worked in another startup since 2016.
He'd been off investing.
I'd obviously been off doing coupler and was already to sort of hand that over fully to
Erica.
And so it became, let's do this.
It was kind of, we looked at each other and we kind of backed ourselves into a corner
of all the things we'd asked for, we'd delivered.
We better make this happen.
The only logical conclusion.
The only logical conclusion is to start a company.
And so here we are, one year into that journey, having just raised a reasonably good pre-seed
round to take it to the next level.
So yeah, look, it's a crazy old process.
And would I go public with either of those two companies?
I think again, if the premise was right and we were wanting to put fuel on a very clear
plan and we wanted to create some liquidity without handing over complete control, I think
we probably would play that playbook again.
Yeah, great.
I'd like to step up a couple of levels and talk in kind of general terms.
So if there was kind of a couple, maybe three principles or philosophies that guide you
in business, what would those things be?
Philosophies that guide you in business.
It's a tough question, that one there.
I mean, I think one of my philosophies that I sort of live by personally is that you must
work out how to sell whatever it is that you're creating.
And you as the founder or one of your founding group must be that person.
So I think that's one of my first ones.
So whenever I'm taking on any business or any project, I look at it and I go, right,
how would I sell this?
And often I have no idea.
In fact, generally, I have no idea.
And I just keep literally thousands and thousands of iterations of the story, literally thousands
until I finally feel like I've bedded that down.
And then I'm presenting that to as many test people as I possibly can until I feel like
I get a, yes, this is getting consistent results.
We should run with this here.
Once I get it to that point, I then try and build a process that others can replicate.
So it's always about trying to discover what is that narrative that is going to get people
to be able to buy this product.
And that's not just customers, that's staff, potential staff, hires, that's investors.
So getting that right and working that out is really my number one thing.
And not outsourcing that.
That's the one thing me as the founder has to do.
And if I nail that one piece and I get it really, really right and I'm good at handing
over that so others can replicate how I do it, then I've probably done the most valuable
thing that I can do at an organization.
So that's one.
The second one is I strongly believe that you should have a clear pathway to profitability
before you start.
Like, it's got to be very obvious when you could be profitable.
And that has got to be the main purpose of business.
And I know that we've had moments in time where it's about revenue growth and growth
at all costs.
But I think the problem when you create a business like that is that you create a culture
or an ethos of waste.
And when you create that and then you finally get some lean times, you have no ability to
be able to turn on this new culture of efficiency.
It's almost impossible without literally firing everybody.
And I mean everybody because the culture gets so widespread that it can't be changed.
And the only way it survives is by more and more cash being fuelling this pursuit of growth
at all costs and this wastefulness.
And I have never subscribed to that.
I think I thank the guys at Vista for that.
They were always about profitability.
And we were profitable at Movio from the very first day.
And we are breakeven now with Kapla and we will be profitable with DeerRamp within probably
18 months.
And if we're not, we won't hire, grow or do the things that force that unless it's extremely
evident that it's going to be beneficial for us and our investors.
So I think that idea of building a company from the get go that's got a profitable thought
about it is really, really important.
And then probably the final one for me is businesses are way easier to run with less
people.
You know what I mean?
I always make this joke that businesses would be great without staff or customers.
Not really a business.
And I don't mean I don't love staff.
I love working with people, but I hate managing people.
I love the camaraderie.
I love collaborating.
I love working with talent.
I just adore it.
But I despise the process of management.
And I'm a terrible manager.
I've actually found that out from a 360.
I'm truly awful.
Quite an aspiring leader, bloody awful manager.
I used to try and learn and train and read every management book under the sun to change
that.
And now I've subscribed to a different thought, which is what if you didn't have to manage?
What if you only hired people that were didn't need management?
And so now I think one of my philosophies is that whoever I work with does not need
a manager.
Right.
They don't need one.
They might have one in terms of like a hierarchy chart might say that I manage you, but you
completely sole charge and that you drive off your own steam and your own motivation.
And I think if you can do that, you're really going to enjoy work in the long term.
You're probably going to answer my second point, which is you probably run a pretty
profitable company and you eliminate an entire layer of a business, which is that whole management
layer.
And I think it's not that I don't like like, you know, managers, I just don't want to be
one.
And so I think you're keeping that really lean.
And how you do that is interesting.
Like you kind of have to go through a process of going particularly as a startup, you've
got 20 things you want to do.
Right.
And five of them are desperately urgent.
And you've got two ways to approach the five desperately urgent things you want to do.
One is you hire five people to do each of the five things.
And that's doing them in parallel.
Or you do them in series.
Right.
You do one after the other in order.
And the temptation when you just get a big check from a VC is to go do all of the things
in parallel.
And they'll probably push you to do that, too, actually.
But you really have to question whether that is going to ultimately get you far enough
ahead.
How many more weeks further ahead will you be if you do it this way?
And what will be the price you now have to pay for having this management layer that
you had to create to support the five staff you hired?
And I think having that question you always ask yourself of, you know, is there any other
way I could do this more efficiently?
Is AI a solution?
Is outsourcing a solution?
Is not doing it a solution?
Is creating a simpler skateboard version of this a solution?
But anything but hiring another person is really how I kind of think about it.
Yeah.
I'm going to highlight these things for a second because there's some absolute gold
in there for everyone.
So you said tough question and you've crushed the answers.
So the narrative piece, what I made that mean is that I think that so many people are so
bad at explaining not just what their product is, but why people should care and why they
should buy it.
And so you being just absolutely laser focused on your ability to articulate that clearly
and the going out and iterating on it many, many, many times over.
I've been the recipient of multiple pitches from you in the past.
And so I know that this is something which is just an ingrained habit of yours.
And I didn't know that that's what you're doing the outset, but now I'm really clear
that that's just a part of your process of going about road testing an idea and seeing
if A, you can articulate it super clearly and in a compelling way, but B, it gets someone
to be motivated to take some action.
So I love that piece.
The profitability bit is a, I guess two years ago, it would have been incredibly contrarian
to any of the way that Silicon Valley has been funded for the last 15 to 20 years, which
is growth at all costs and forget about profitability.
And so I love that you're bringing that up and talking about it as a, just one of your
absolute principles of business, because I think it's so, so important and not being
able to understand, you know, it's a simple answer, but there's a lot of complexity that
sits in behind it being able to get there.
You have to be very clear about all of the key metrics inside your business, the acquisition
costs, the retention of your customers, your churn, your ability to stay ahead of your
competitors.
There's so many things that sit in behind that.
And so, but being feverishly focused on it, it's just such an important aspect.
So thank you for a great term.
Just to put on that for a second.
I think that one thing that I probably didn't mention about that is that once you are profitable,
you have choices.
You're no longer, you no longer work for the potential investor.
You no longer work for the bank.
You know, you're no longer at risk of having to make a decision in a time that doesn't
work for you.
You're back in control of your destiny.
The day that you are not profitable and generating cash, somebody else is in control.
Now, they might not take advantage of that control yet, but they could.
And I've been in that seat.
And that is a very uncomfortable place to be.
And I swore I'd never, ever, ever go there again.
And so I think that choices is the final part that comes off that is that you get a choice
to make the play when you're ready to make the play.
Yeah, it's important.
I've got some battle scars and they've clearly affect how you go about doing things in the
future, which is a great attribute.
The last one, it's kind of dual to me that the people management aspect.
On the one hand, I suspect you'll be familiar with the icky guy approach.
You know, what are you great at?
What do you love?
What does the world need from you?
And how do you deliver value with that kind of unique set of skills that you've got, you
know, solve some big problems.
And so you've clearly developed a self-awareness over time, which some people go through life
and not getting it and going, I am not good at this and I do not like doing it.
But then you've overlaid the whole is this really necessary?
And are they the right people if we need to have that overhead of management that sits
across it?
So it's a very considered approach about going about team building.
Yes, we do need to have some resource to do that.
But automation, offshoring, sharing, not doing it, doing it later, all those things are options.
You don't necessarily need to build a team of people.
And one of the vanity metrics, I think of early stage businesses is how many people
do you have?
Yeah.
So I've nailed it.
Even better.
Yeah.
Occasionally you hear about exit stories of companies that have bootstrapped that have
four or five staff and they sell for seven, eight figures.
And it's remarkable that the discipline, the rigor that they've had to put in to get it
to that stage.
But the one pizza kind of team situation, five or six people, group hug, we can all
fit in the same place together.
There's just so much value and benefit to doing things that way.
Yeah.
And I think that your day, if you think about what you do during a day, you are spending
most of your day working on the real problems, not working on banishing people.
And that's, you know, like I found a CEO at Movio, we had nine direct reports and my role,
and I understood it pretty clearly at that time, was to remove obstacles out of their
way so they could hit their goals.
And so all I did was find out what their problems were and help them remove them so they could
keep moving forward with what they're doing.
And when I had my 360 done by a big external consultancy firm to try and work out, you
know, whether I'm suitable to be group CEO or not, I'm not, that half of the people
that must have interviewed 30 or 40 people, half of them said, well, is the worst manager
ever, you know, great running a motivational speech, but absolutely terrible.
You know, one out of five, you know, manager, terrible.
Then the other half said, well, is the best manager ever five out of five, he gives me
all the space and autonomy to do whatever I want, never checks up on me, just trust
that I'm going to do the job.
You know, you're like, I'm the same person, I'm just as crap.
Some side one side thinks I'm awful, the other side thinks I'm great.
And I think what you've got to try and do is try and find people that you work with
that fit your style.
Yeah, you know, and I found some people that did and some people that didn't.
And that wouldn't have been nice for them.
And it wasn't particularly good for me either.
So trying to find, you know, a match is a pretty important, you know, play, you know,
you're with these people for eight hours a day or more.
And you want to make sure that you get on well.
Was it anonymous?
And so what I'm asking that is, were you aware of the half that really rated your style?
Were they overperformers?
Not really, not really.
No, I think they were more senior, because I could see the brackets they were in.
So the more senior people definitely liked the way I approached C level.
The ones that were more middle management did wanted more guidance, wanted more direction.
And I wasn't providing that.
And they're totally right.
I wasn't so yeah.
And so I used to beat myself up about it.
But I think I'm now sort of a bit more circumspect about it and realize that there's not a skill
I feel like I want to develop.
Yeah, I hear you.
So we've covered a lot of ground.
I have a parting question for you, and it's the alternative career question.
So clearly now you're a founder, an entrepreneur and an investor.
So I'm guessing is that how you identify as well as being husband and father?
Yes, I think.
Yeah, that's it.
Okay, great.
Founder first.
Yeah, founder first.
Yeah, great.
That's what I thought.
So if you hadn't done this, what could your alternative career have been?
The one that you believe may have brought you a bunch of joy and fulfillment and impacted
the world in a positive way?
Yeah, I mean, I still think I will do this.
So I have always loved the idea of identifying talent, working with that talent and mentoring
them through investing in that talent, and ultimately creating sort of helping create
new role models.
It's always been a thing on the back of my mind.
And I've been doing it to some degree, helping startups and helping entrepreneurs that gone
on the journey where I can help.
But I think there is something really incredible about getting some raw talent and working
with it and showing them a different pathway.
You know, like I talked earlier on about the path that most young people are on.
Generally they're told that, you know, being an accountant, a lawyer, you know, a profession
is the right direction to go and going down the road of being an entrepreneur is madness.
You know, it's scary.
We don't want to go down that road.
I'd love to be able to help those ambitious young people make that leap when there's not
much to lose.
You know what I mean?
And if you imagine if you took people when they're at their highest point of energy,
when they're the most motivated, with the most capable of learning, the biggest sponges
that you possibly would be, and you wrap them up and you go, right, we're going to take
you on a journey.
You know, let's, you know, let's go.
And they find a dream, they find a vision, they go for it and help them get through that.
The change that you could make on so many levels is incredible.
And obviously you've taken them out of a profession and you've made them an entrepreneur.
They've become a successful entrepreneur.
They've probably hired lots of people.
Those people have also potentially become successful.
They may have created a new category, a new ecosystem.
They may have inspired a whole bunch of other kids that went to their school.
They've ever inspired their brothers, their sisters, their family.
So I get really, really excited about taking somebody off this, you know, tried and true
and putting them on this new, far more exciting, motivating path.
Not necessarily just a business.
Like I also feel like if it was music or if it was sports or if it was anything, grabbing
that talent and helping them get to being the best they could possibly be with that
talent I think could be the most fulfilling thing, you know, imaginable.
And what I need to be able to do to get there is find the financial wherewithal and the
time to devote everything to that.
Because I think that would be hugely beneficial for myself, but probably pretty beneficial
for society as well.
This is the impact piece.
And so this is not platitudes.
I know we're well enough to know that this is actually at its core.
You are truly a person that believes in elevating, empowering, encouraging and challenging other
people.
And so I'm really grateful for today's conversation.
You've delved a lot deeper into some subjects that about your history and your past that
I didn't know, but also you've delivered a masterclass in how to take a company from
inception through to product market fit and then to the stage of a listing.
And that listing journey is such a rich kind of a piece of experience there because you've
been through the cauldron, the fire of the excitement, the fun, the highs, the lows,
the burns and then exited your way out of that business along the way as well.
And so there's so many other lessons in there around leadership, around self-awareness,
around how to go about the business of being a better human being as well.
So I'm really grateful for the conversation today.
Just one point of note, if people go to your LinkedIn profile, I know you're not super
active on there.
It turns out What Do Women Want is one of your highlighted articles.
And so if you brush over your page, it seems as if the world knows what women want.
Different podcasts, different conversations.
That's interesting.
I actually did do a podcast on that topic.
Did you really?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah, it was extraordinary.
It was with Gina Davis.
Okay.
Yeah, she has an institute and I did a podcast on that some time ago.
Fascinating.
Yeah, yeah.
It was just to give the backdrop on that.
In the movie business, the whole entire movie business for a very long time was built entirely
for young males.
Everything, every bit of content, every all the locations, the size of the screens, the
size of popcorn, the size of the drinks, the whole industry was built around young men.
And in fact, what we discovered in movie is that the vast majority of film purchasing
decisions were made by women, whether they be mothers, whether they be wives, whether
they be partners, whether they're going to films themselves.
And we weren't catering as industry for them at all.
And so what this pulled out is really an expose on what kind of content the female market
was looking for and how successful it could be commercially if we if we cater to it.
And actually started a bit of a movement where where a whole bunch of people started following
and going actually, this is whole space in the market.
We've traditionally not spent enough energy or time on.
Look what we could do if we did.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Transforming things in ways that we didn't even get to talk about.
So no, no, no, you're all good.
So thanks very much.
We'll appreciate you being a guest today and people can look you up on LinkedIn.
Go follow DevRamp, go follow Kepler and look forward to our next conversation.
Thanks Josh.
Bye bye.
Do it again.
Okay.