Founder Bottlenecks, Leadership Lessons, & Scaling Without Chaos | Steve Phillips

I do firmly believe that AI will change everything. Never underestimate how long human beings will take to adapt to the change, but the direction of travel I think is pretty clear. As an entrepreneur, you have to be good at delegating. Well, you don't have to be, but if you want to be more than a one-man band, you have to be good at delegating, right? So if you want to create a scale-up, you have to be great at going, I'll let go of this stuff. What we did do was create this amazing culture. And I mean, half the people were— ended up living together in houses near the office and working together all the time.

And that really propelled us.

business for the next probably 3, 4 years.

Does that mean that you are thinking, can AI do this? Do we need a human? Or are you looking to change particular work practices or departments?

What I would like to have is an— Hi, Dom. My name's Steve Phillips. I am the founder and chief innovation officer and chair at Zappi. Zappi is a consumer insights platform. So I started it About 12 years ago. And basically it was to try and do— everyone loves market research. When you get it, you get the report, it's really useful, but it takes too long, costs too much money. So the point of Zappi was to work for large companies who spend a lot of money on market research and do projects that typically took 4 weeks and cost $20,000 and turn them into 4 hours and $2,000. So that was the founding ambition of Zappi.

12 years ago, that was the founding ambition. That's I mean, if you said that today, that would sound like this was all generative AI-backed, but 12 years ago, what were you doing 12 years ago that made this even a thing?

Well, we were AI-first. So it was an automation system. So what I realized that I wanted to do was significantly speed up, make it much faster and much cheaper to do great consumer insight. That was the founding ambition. I knew, and some people would claim still know, very little about technology. And I needed to find a partner that would help me build it. I went through about 3 or 4 partners, eventually found a company that would do it with me. They were a small company out of South Africa, as it happens. And they had built some of the stuff that I wanted, which was really the automation of reporting. And they were using old-fashioned AI. So they were an AI-first company. It was like an if that, then this type model.

Okay.

So they built some of the stuff I wanted. We ended up merging the 2 companies. So the CEO of that company became the CTO of Zappy.

Okay, fab. Right. Well, look, before we dive into some other stuff, what are some of the things that you believe to be true that other people might question your sanity over?

So I had to think about this, Dom. And the first one I came up with was that Entrepreneurs can be lazy. Right.

Okay. We're not going to dig into these now. We're just, we're just, I'm just going to get you to give them to me and we'll dig into them once you've, once I've got them all on the table. Entrepreneurs can be lazy, right? Okay. Not, none of your 996 bullshit, right?

Fact. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. The second one, don't hire yourself.

Okay.

Okay. Third one, innovation is a mindset, not an age.

Okay.

I'm 56. I think I could still be innovative.

Okay.

And lastly, I do firmly believe that AI will change everything, which I know lots of other people believe, but lots of people don't too.

Well, it's funny.

I constantly find myself talking to people who, I don't know, because conversations with people, the people I spend my time with, the conversation is often dominated by AI or And AI is changing so much. And so that's at the forefront of my mind. And then I spend time with some other people where it's almost as if the iPhone hasn't been invented, let alone ChatGPT has been launched. And it's just, they're in a business that seems to be, or they think is impervious to technology. So it's fascinating. But what are your predictions for AI changes everything? Have you got sort of employment Armageddon? What are some of the things that you think in 5 years or 3 years, I don't know, it's hard, isn't it? It's hard to put a time on it.

It is hard to put a time. I think 3 to 5 years, everything will change. But what's that old quote about the future is here, but it's unevenly distributed, right? So some people will adopt it and be at the forefront, some people won't, and they will continue to survive for a while. Human beings take a while to change and some people really don't like changing. So some people will be buying old-fashioned services even when you can buy something significantly faster and cheaper somewhere else that's just as good, if not significantly better. That still happens with us. I get very frustrated by it. And you think about how long electricity took. I mean, there were still factories making stuff 30 years after the advent of electricity that did not require electricity. They hadn't transformed the way they work. So never underestimate how long human beings will take to adapt to the change, but the direction of travel I think is pretty clear.

Yeah. Well, look, I remember opening one of the first UK data centers in the late 1990s, having a web hosting business in the early 2000s when a million people were online in the UK and people were going, don't know why I would need a website. Don't know why I would bother. That took sort of 10 years and then SaaS took 10 years and then transformation to cloud took about 10 years. So you're right, we'll get there. Innovation, not an Is a mindset. Are you clinging on to that against all the evidence?

Yes. As I get older. And everyone keeps on going, oh no, innovation, the new companies, these 23-year-olds in a garage will do all of the innovating. And I don't think that's fair. Well, they will do a lot of it, but there'll be people of more advanced years like myself Continuously innovating, I believe. And that's because it's a mindset. It's a belief, I think, an optimism, a belief that you can make change and that you can impact things. And I think that's where innovation comes from.

Have you done any personality profiling? Is that Gallup Strengths or Working Genius or anything?

Are you— I've done some over the years. You can't avoid it. I was just wondering whether you were in You're in that box.

Certainly those people who have something like ideation Gallup strengths, they might have 1,000 ideas a day. It's just who they are. Is that your mindset or do you approach innovation in a more structured way?

No, no, that's definitely my mindset. One of the things, no one ever has a genuinely innovative idea either in a workshop or at their desk. So you're much more likely to get it in the shower, in the gym, having a walk in nature, sitting outside in my garden with a bottle of wine, which is when I came up with the idea of Zappi. So basically the first 5 years of the strategy of Zappi, I wrote in my head after about 2 or 3 glasses of wine in my garden one evening.

Uh-huh. Okay. Don't hire yourself.

It's actually one of the things my wife told me earlier, which was a really good point, which is I think it's very easy to be attracted to people who are very similar to you, right? I mean, people like us thing. So because you get them, they get you, and that becomes interesting. But you have to hire for your weaknesses, not your strengths. And so in some sense, the first few people you hire, particularly in a startup, should be almost polar opposites of you, right? So they should complement your weaknesses, and together as a team, you can attack more things that way. Whereas if you just hire yourself or people with the same strengths as you, then it makes you having a hyper skill in one particular area, but very weak in key things that probably need getting done in a startup.

And look, I think you're absolutely right. That's the essence of Gallup Strengths is hire spiky individuals and together you might get a team. But also there's a great book called How to Win the Premier League by the chief statistician at Liverpool Football Club. And he said, what people do is they say, we need a new midfield player. And they have a committee meeting. And so they end up with this list of 5 things, needs to be able to pass, needs to be able to tackle, da, da, da, right? And they go to the market and there's 95 of them. They hire one and it makes no difference. He said, what you need to do is not do that. You need to say, where is the weakness in the team? Who are the 5 people in Europe who are the best at that and not dickheads and buy one of them? And he said, when you do that, you end up with an amazing team. And so, And you get a shortlist of 5 and that's much better. So that, I think, I think that's fab. And is that, other than your wife pointing that out, is that, is this a mistake that you made that your wife then pointed it out to you or is it—

Yes. Yes. I made it. And she happens to be very good at that, pointing out my mistakes. Just broadly.

It's the, it's the, you know, that's how successful marriages are built, isn't it? Mutual respect and admiration.

Right.

And then the last one is you can be a lazy entrepreneur. That's probably the most contentious of them all given 996 or evidence about teams that work harder win more likely than—

Yeah. I think I just don't believe that. So, For a few reasons. I think it's really important to work smart.

Yeah.

If you create work, you can work, and sometimes you have to work hard because there's a lot to do. But a lot of the time, if you take a bit of time, take a bit of space, go for a walk, you'll come up with a smarter way of doing something than if you're just pounding on a keyboard in front of your laptop all day. And also, as an entrepreneur, you have to be good at delegating. Well, you don't have to be, but if you want to be more than a one-man band, you have to be good at delegating, right? So if you want to create a scale-up, you have to be great at going, I'll let go of this stuff. And actually, if you're really fundamentally lazy, which I think at the core, I'm fundamentally lazy, I don't want to do any of the work. So then I will hand it over to someone and I won't micromanage them and I won't get into the weeds with them all the time. I will trust them and they will do their job. And if you hand over the work, but also hand over the trust and the belief, they're much more likely to do a great job than if you are in the weeds with them all the time. So I think you are much better off backing away from the details and backing away from the work rather than piling in, which should give you more time in the day to go for a walk and come up with ideas and think about the business, not be doing work within the business.

It's interesting because I think there's actually, I think that you are saying you need to do the thing that only you can do and doing the work in inverted commas is not right. And so, whereas going for a walk is actually where you are adding the highest point of leverage to your business. If you have 10 ideas, then the business moves forward. And if you are doing expenses or in your H&R meeting or something, then, you know, you're not having ideas and you're going nowhere. It's just that it sounds like you feel, because it's easy for you to do, it feels like it's not work in inverted commas.

And that's probably fair. That is probably fair.

You know, I think, um, and I think that's what, I think that's a trap that people get, they, they get stuck in. They feel as though if my team don't, I, I work with the CEO a while ago and he had an ankle injury and his ankle wasn't healing. And I said, well, what have they said? And he said, they said I should go swimming. I said, well, why don't you go swimming every day then? Tell me about why you won't go swimming. And he said, well, I don't want to go during the day because my team will just see it as frivolity. And it's like, come on. It's like, just, you know, you are deliberately not going swimming because you think your team will think less of you. It's like, that's just ridiculous. I don't think it's true on any level other than somehow you've got it twisted in your head. So, um, mad madness. Um, okay. So you had, you sit in your back garden having a glass of wine and this idea strikes you 12 years ago that you are about to, you can change the world. I love that. And you have.

I think we have. I think we have changed the world of consumer insights, definitely. It has become much more technical. One of the things about consumer insights traditionally, it was really a sort of a craft industry. Every project would be created perfectly from scratch. There was no automation, there was no systematization, but it also meant that there was no— you would do a project to answer a business question and then throw away the report and the data because it didn't make any sense to keep it because your job was to answer that business question.

Yeah.

Whereas now we sit on a very large standardized data asset that we can apply AI to and answer many, many more questions than just the one question that you're asking. And that is the direction of travel for the industry. That's what other companies are doing. I do think we pioneered that direction, which was very exciting. And yeah, I think we've helped to move the industry along. I'm sure it would've happened anyway, but it was nice to be the pioneer.

And what's the scale of the organization now?

So we're just under 300 people. We were at about Sort of $80 million revenue.

Still growing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll grow like 15% maybe this year, something like that. We should be— our growth rate's actually increasing now that we've focused more and more on AI deliverables in the last year or so. And I've challenged the organization to Double in revenues and not increase headcount in the next 5 years. So that's the plan of what we're going to try and achieve.

Does that mean that you are thinking, can AI do this? Do we need a human? Or are you looking to change particular work practices or departments?

Disappearing? Work practices. Yeah, no, not departments. And actually what I would like to have is an AI agent paired with every single employee.

Okay.

That can do the annoying, time-consuming jobs that, particularly administrative jobs that they do. So we are doing sort of time and motion studies for most of the departments to find out where people are spending their time, what are the activities that we think we can automate, We can align different agents to do different projects sitting on different data streams. So yeah, we're actively trying to do, I called it AI everywhere, but try and both internally and transform externally the products and services we offer our clients.

And have you got agents in place already? Yeah.

Yeah.

What are they, have you got them doing today?

So So one example, so writing quarterly business reviews.

Right.

Okay. It used to be the job of a CSM. Increasingly, it is becoming the job of an agent to at least create the first draft. Creating the draft of a client proposal, looking at Salesforce data, looking at previous proposals, you know, coming up with a draft. All the way up to working with our clients, our customers, they're sitting on a great data asset. And using— so we do a lot of work around innovation and a lot around product innovation and a lot of work around advertising. So what these large companies make and what they sell and how they sell. And we can use AI agents within, on top of that data to help create new ideas for new products and services or new advertising campaigns.

Okay.

So we've extended the value of our of the data asset effectively to innovate in a new area.

And are you still basing it on human input? Are you actually able to generate synthetic feedback?

We are able to create synthetic feedback, or our synthetic is based on our real. So you can't get away from the need to continuously update your real data asset, because otherwise you're creating synthetic on stuff that's 6 months old or a year old or 2 years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't make any sense. So in the new world that I envisage in a year or 2, I would like— so there's a great Amazon shareholder letter. I'm a big fan of Amazon, Jeff Bezos shareholder letters. And they talk about, he talks about having a room in every meeting room at Amazon, there's a chair that you're not allowed to sit in. And that chair is supposed to represent the customer, right? So you are making a decision about what warehouse you want, or what product, or pricing positioning, or whatever it is that you're making a decision about, you're supposed to look at the chair and think, what would the customer think? My belief is our job is to be the customer and to give people real-time insight into any decision that would benefit from the views of the customer.

Yeah.

But in order to have that data, we need to create synthetic data because they may ask questions that we haven't actually got the data for, but can predict accurately. So there is a role absolutely for synthetic throughout an organization, but only based on great quality real response. Fab.

Let's dig into the Zappi journey then. I feel as though there's a sort of rule of 10 and 30. You've got 10 people, you can scale past the founder, If you get past that, then there's sort of the desert, 10 to 30. You get out the other side, culture starts to be a thing. And then there's a phase shift at about 100. So maybe we could have a chat about, you could sort of talk about how you went from sort of 30 through 100 and how you got through no man's land and freed up your time and started to systematize the business and build some leaders.

Yeah. So we built Sapi. When we merged with the technology provider, they were probably 15 people. We were probably 10. So they were probably a bit bigger. So we went sort of from 10 to 25 in one go. And close to that, we did a fundraising round. So we've done multiple fundraisings.

Okay.

And we raised, this is 2016, We raised from our first VC. The raise was probably $7 or $8 million, I think.

Okay.

That's a significant raise. Yeah.

At that point, we were probably $5 or $6 million in terms of revenue.

Okay.

So we raised a lot of money and it was a very interesting raise for multiple reasons. One of the things that we did with this money was think, right, okay, we have to massively increase the size of the organization. So by the time the raise came through, we were at about 40.

Okay.

And we went from 40, we looked at the organization, we were paranoid that other companies were going to catch up with us quickly. So we were like, we have to scale, scale, scale, scale. So we looked at the organization and what we were doing and all the things we wanted to do and said, right, let's create a team to do that and a team to do that and a team to do that. So we went from 40 people to probably 140 people within a 6-month period, which— 140 people in 6 months. It's bad stuff. Which in hindsight was utterly disastrous. I mean, it was completely stupid. So one of our senior guys lived in lives in the COTS world, and he didn't come in very often. He was sort of a strategy guy, but he was one of the founders of the other company. And he came into the office one day, hadn't been in for, I don't know, a month or so. And he wanted to chat to the new people who had arrived. And he saw somebody he didn't know, went up and introduced himself and said, oh, what do you do? And she turned around and said, well, I'm helping to train the new people. And he was like, how long have you been here? And she said, well, over a month. You can imagine what happened to productivity. I mean, it literally crashed to the floor. But on the good side of that, like a year later, we had 140 great people really committed to the company, who were then up to speed and we managed to move very quickly, but we had a year of really doing nothing useful.

Oh, and how many of the 100 people that you hired in 6 months didn't make it?

We hired a lot of very smart, relatively inexperienced young people. And actually a lot of them did really well.

Okay.

Really well. So of course some didn't make it, but our retention rate was very high and people were very, I mean, what we did do was create this amazing culture. And I mean, half the people were, you know, ended up living together in houses near the office and working together all the time and then socializing together all the time. It was a very tight unit after like 6 months, a year. And that gave us real, really propelled the business for the next probably 3, 4 years. So actually that, it was a very powerful thing in the long run. It's just in the short run, it was disastrous.

And what did you, what happened to your leadership team? I mean, you know, you go from 25, maybe 40, and you've got, I don't know, half a dozen and At 140, you've got an executive team and a management team, all of which were new, nearly.

Yeah. So we had some people with experience from the other company and Zappi, but really not many. And this was, I think the hardest thing to do when you are going through that transition, when you are growing rapidly, is when you are 5 people, you've got someone in sales, And so when you hire a new salesperson, they report to that person in sales. So sort of by default, 6 months later, they're running sales with 5 people reporting to them. And then you give them another 20. And at some point you've got to go, they've only got 2 years experience. What the fuck are they doing managing a sales organization?

Sometimes it works out.

Sometimes it works out, but quite often it doesn't. So one of the things that it was, and the regret I suspect everyone has in that situation is, I should have acted earlier. Earlier, I should have said, you've done a great job, you are really good. I need to hire someone in above you who will help train you because I need people with significant experience. But we were a very, other than me, a very young company and really excited and enthusiastic and didn't Somehow didn't want to sort of suppress that by bringing in too much sort of gray hair from corporate environments to make everything proper. And so probably waited too long to do that.

Yeah.

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In the hiring 100 people that you did in 6 months, if you look back, what would you, would you do 100 in 12 months or 118 months? What would've been, do you think the right thing to do?

I'd probably do it in cohorts more.

Okay.

Probably do, you know, 20, 30 people, wait until that was working. 20, 30 people, wait until that was working.

Okay.

And maybe we wouldn't say, so we, it was 2016, right? So you remember the time in 2016 you had Silicon Valley, the TV show, everyone was, so we thought we would do a raise and then another raise and then another raise. And actually we sort of did, but I would've probably kept, I would've probably spent less money that less, more so quickly.

Yeah.

And not got on that quite on that treadmill. Yeah. So I mean, not that I regret what we did, it's just that if I did it again, I'd probably do it slightly differently.

Yeah. So that got you, how did you then free up your time to do the things? Because hiring 100 people in 6 months and then ingesting that for the next 12, I can just see you're going to be in back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings talking about All the stuff that doesn't make—

What Zappi is, what we do, what our clients are.

Yeah.

Just the basic, what's consumer insights? Just the basics.

Yeah. So how did you build the team to free up your time?

Well, I mean, it happened slowly, right? And it happened with promoting people sometimes who just weren't ready for that promotion. And then we had to solve that problem. But, and it was a lot of hard work, but it was also a lot of fun as well. I mean, these people were really excited and enthusiastic and it was brilliant. So I wouldn't, in so many ways, I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I mean, it was a lot of fun.

And did you, over that time, did you significantly change your products or your customer offering or your ICP, or did that all stay? Was that the constant?

That was mostly the constant. And then, so When we started, we had one go-to-market mechanism, which we were going to automate the work of other research companies. So we worked with other research companies and automated it. So we wanted to be the app store.

Right.

We had a moment, which was like 2017, 2018, where we realized that wasn't the right way to go, partly because, yeah, one of our core partners decided they didn't want to go that way, and we realized it wasn't working for us either. So then we decided that we had to automate our own thing. So we've had what I would describe as one genuine pivot. I mean, we've had a lot of change along the way, but one core pivot, which was that, which was that we were going to build our own, effectively our own IP and our own one data asset rather than multiple data assets for different partners.

Okay. And What the leadership team you have now at sort of 300, same team that you had at 150? Or because you did say you'd brought in some senior—

No, we've, so we brought in a PE firm 3 years ago.

Okay. As sort of one of the raises to get the VC to replace the VCs.

Yeah. Yeah, to mostly replace the VCs, put some primary in. So that was a big raise.

Yeah.

And they came in with a lot of their— and we knew in advance that they were going to have strong opinions. Also, at this point, I had decided that I wasn't going to stay CEO until the next raise, which is in the PE world, like 5 years. So we knew we were going to change CEO, and we also knew that they had strong opinions about where our weakness was in senior leadership team. So subsequently to them coming in, we've probably had 2 or 3 new leaders coming in.

Okay.

And the leadership team looks very different than it was 4 or 5 years ago, and different in a good way. So, you know, Businesses change, right? So, you know, that sort of $0 to $1 million revenue is all founder, right? $1 to $5 becomes a bit, not just a founder, but you're still very founder. $5 to $20 is different. $20 to $50 is different. And certainly where we are, $50 to $200 in terms of revenue, feels a very different place. You've gotta have much stronger Thinking about structure, thinking about organization, thinking about systems, which is not where my head goes, right? So we ended up hiring a great guy, get on really well with him, but he's very different from me. He's got an MBA from MIT, right? I mean, he's just a different character, a different character to me. He's my boss at the company.

What was your thinking when you sort of said, I've decided I wasn't going to be the CEO in the next in the next raise. Why did you decide that?

So I had always said to the business, like, well, every year I would say it in my sort of annual roundup that I have 2 or 3 roles. One is founder, one is significant shareholder, and one is CEO. And I will not sacrifice the founder shareholder role in order to keep CEO role. And I was quite happy giving up the CEO role when I thought I wasn't the right person. So I also could see the change that AI was happening, and that was what was interesting to me, and that's what I wanted to spend my time on. And I would be pulled into these meetings about HR and systems and operations.

Very important, but just not very exciting for you.

It's just not. And actually, I'm just not good at them. Honestly, I'm not good at them. So it wasn't a hard decision.

Sometimes I think, or I see other people, they move to chairman and they hire a CEO, or They might've hired, you didn't think about keeping the CEO job title and hiring a COO and going, okay, I'm still the figurehead and I'll have somebody do all that operations stuff?

I didn't. And particularly when we brought in the PE company, the decision was made. They would always want their management person in as well. I think if I'd have done the COO role, like 4 years ago, proper strict, then maybe I'd have kept it. I can imagine that would have been, if anything changed the trajectory, that would've been it.

Okay.

But I'm, so I'm founder, chair, and chief innovation officer. The thing about being chief innovation officer is it, I can spend all of my time, all of my time thinking about the new things. And then as long as I've got high alignment with the new CEO and our CPO, which I do, I got on really well with both of them, and they're both aligned with my vision. I still, in many ways, own the vision of where we're going. And I'm not really responsible for the delivery because that's the CPO, and I'm not really responsible with the timing and the strategy because that's the CEO.

Yeah.

But they're better at both of those things than me, which is great. So I can say, we are going in this direction, this is how we should do it. I'll talk to clients about it. I'll talk to the product teams, help invent the product, and they're better at managing the teams against it. And I think when I was CEO, the truth is we've got $80 million of business. We can't upend everything tomorrow because Steve's had a great idea, right?

Mm-hmm.

That's how it works at the beginning of a business, but not when we are this size. So there is always a tension between the existing business base, which is significant, and lots of people are working on it, and it's really important, and the stuff Steve wants to do, which is over here and future-focused. And you need to balance the two. And me pushing very hard as Chief Innovation Officer is great, but there's a countervailing weight with the CEO, particularly, and the CPO. But if I was still CEO and pushing, Then we'd probably be more likely to mess up some of the core business, which is not good.

Or if the CEO was driving his own vision and his own agenda. I was just, you mentioned Jeff Bezos earlier and Bezos hired a COO and then fired him a bit later on because he said the guy had too many of his own ideas and that wasn't what he wanted.

Yeah.

So he replaced the COO with the chief of staff, who he said was hired deliberately not to have ideas of their own, but to make his ideas come true. So, I think that's where does the vision live? And I think if you've retained the vision, then I think, and that's clear, then you're not going to get out of sync. Along the way, where have you looked for inspiration for your business? Books, podcasts? What do you dip into?

So I listen to a lot of podcasts, a lot of AI deep tech work. Well, not quite deep tech, but tech application ones. A lot of sort of business AI that are looking at both simultaneously. So that's probably where I get a lot of inspiration from. So I cycle a lot, I cycle to work, so I'm always listening to podcasts. So whenever I go to the gym, if I'm cooking at home, I'm listening to podcasts. So that's probably where I get most of my inspiration.

And what are some of the things that you, that sort of, the future's here, it's just unevenly distributed. When you listen to some of these podcasts, what are some of the things that you go, That is really— you couldn't have done that 6 months ago. Very, very interesting. What are some of the things that are exciting you?

So I was reading something about Gemini the other day, and I think 3 years ago, Gemini, if you asked it to, would write you a poem. And you'd look at the poem and you'd go, my God, an AI has done that. That's incredible. I thought only human beings could be creative enough to write a poem. But now Gemini will build you a website that creates multiple poetry and writes a poetry book, right? That's just an enormous and amazing change that is sort of, that we are not surprised by. now. I mean, that's the weird thing about AI. It's only been around in an LLM world for 3 years, and we're not surprised by these updates of these models. And yeah, so I think where we are with AI is where the models are doing amazing things, but we are not utilizing them to do amazing things in the world of business. And partly because it's only 3 years in, right? I mean, that's really early. If you think of any other technological change, whether it's the internet. I remember in '93 or '94 knowing that the internet existed, knowing that people were doing things, but I didn't think a business I worked for had a website until, I don't know, '98, '99. So like 6 years later, right?

And you were still on dial-up.

Well, exactly. Exactly. And we didn't use it for consumer research until probably 2004, right, Matt? I mean, maybe a bit earlier. So It takes a long time for people to not just think, okay, this is a new technology, I can do new things for it, but then think, I can do the new things for it, I'm going to embed those new things into the existing workflows of my organization to genuinely change stuff. So whilst the tech is there and amazing, I don't think we as human beings and businesses have necessarily adapted to using it yet. And that is what will happen over the next couple of years.

And what are some of your favorite podcasts then? What are the titles of some of the shows?

So I'm a big fan of listening to a16z a lot, obviously Andreessen Horowitz's podcast. They're a great Silicon Valley tech VC. Hard Fork similarly, which is a tech-focused one.

Hard Fork?

Hard Fork. It's from the New York Times, a platformer. Um, and then there's another one, uh, which can get quite political but sometimes it's quite fun, which is called the All In Podcast. I don't know if, if you listen to that, but that's 4 sort of tech entrepreneurs, um, very successful ones, but they, they discuss business, technology, the intersection of the 2, markets, economies, politics, so that, um, their take on what is happening is always, uh, Very interesting.

And what's your, um, how are you feeling about the— when, when will you next need to go and raise the next round? How far are you into your 5-year PE journey?

So we're, we're about 3 years in now. So the assumption is a couple of years. It doesn't have to be. Their fund life is like 10 years and they're only 4 years in. We were one of the early investments.

You were an early investment.

Yeah. Yeah, but I think their sort of logic is 5 years. Yeah. So, and change is good. I embrace change. So probably 2 years, but I mean, maybe more, maybe more, maybe less.

And what are some of the— you said you wanted to double the revenue in the next 5 years, which implies somewhere between, it's about 17% growth. So 15, 20% growth, something like that. And not hire any more people. So is that revenue growth driven by new product innovation that you're bringing to market? What are you, which is sort of AI-driven?

Yeah. And significant productivity increases. Yeah.

So what are some of the things that you are able to do? What are the things that you can do in 2026 that you couldn't do even this year as a result of Changes internally? Yeah.

I mean, so one of the things, as I said, was we are very specifically trying to use AI agents, particularly to automate the tasks of the people internally as much as possible. You think about coding, right? Our coders are using Copilot or other forms of AI coding to make them more effective, more efficient. And that journey is only going to increase, in my view. So, One of the reasons for saying very specifically to the company, we want to double revenue without increasing headcount, is that people in like CS who are running, I don't know, $1 million worth of business will start thinking, oh God, I've gotta get to the point where I can run $2 million. How can I do that whilst retaining a good customer focus and still chatting to the clients on a day-to-day basis, whatever it might be? Oh, okay, I've got to get rid of the tasks that take me time that I'm not talking to the customer in. So how do I do that? So it sort of forces people to think about and engage with the AI process instead of thinking, I'm going to try and avoid it and carry on doing exactly what I've been doing right now.

Steve, and do you have a prediction for 2026? A year from now, what do you think might be true?

Well, I definitely don't think England will have won the Ashes. Other than that, I don't know. I mean, just change. Just change. It's so hard to predict. And everything's so— may you live in interesting times, right? I mean, there's good things and bad things about it, but they're definitely interesting times right now.

Steve?

So I would say the constant Steve, thank you very much indeed for coming on the show and giving us your time today.

It's been a pleasure, Dom. Thanks for having me on.

Next time.

I just think this concept of balance is pretty well bullshit. If I look at my life, like the phases that I think I'll remember on my deathbed are the times where I've had no balance. Well, as founders are always moaning about sales and fundraising, but I think they're hugely fun. In a minute, You always used to talk about the OODA loop— observe, orientate, decide, act. If you can cycle through that faster than your adversary, then you've got a decisive advantage.

It's fascinating. There's some great data because most people go, oh, when the economy's up, everybody's up. You know, rising tide floats all boats. The 2 companies I scaled were in 2 recessions. And you just got to stop listening to the noise because you've got to create your own sort of bubble of optimism and, and just make it work.

And I think a lot of leadership is about— it's a personal journey, you know, about learning about yourself. And I think as a near enough 50-year-old, I'm still only just learning like what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are, and how I can use them effectively. And I—